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business Salary hike of 11-13% is all you can hope for in FY17 Fancy a foreign holiday this year? A new car? A diamond set? Don't count on it this year. According to Staffing Services firm TeamLease, salary hikes this year may not be something to write home about.
business Doha meet was driven by geo-politics, not economics: Fadel Gheit Calling this an act driven by geo-politics and not by economics, Oppenheimer senior analyst Fadel Gheit says it is not the US shale but Saudi Arabia, which is 'playing a game and using oil as a weapon' to austere supply in Asia from Iran and Russia.
current-affairs-trends Aircel-Maxis probe: ED searches Sequoia Capital's premises Sequoia Capital was allegedly roped in for misuse of the FDI policy, wherein they had bought 30,000 shares at Rs 7,500, violating foreign exchange norms, reports Ashish Mehrishi of CNN-News18, quoting sources.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP)  A Virginia high school discriminated against a transgender teen by forbidding him from using the boys' restroom, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a case that could have implications for a North Carolina law that critics say discriminates against LGBT people.

The case of Gavin Grimm has been especially closely watched since North Carolina enacted a law last month that bans transgender people from using public restrooms that correspond to their gender identity. It also bans cities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances, a response to an ordinance recently passed in Charlotte.

In the Virginia case, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals  which also covers North Carolina  ruled 2-1 to overturn the Gloucester County School Board's policy, saying it violated Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination in schools. A federal judge had previously rejected Grimm's sex discrimination claim, but the court said that judge ignored a U.S. Department of Education regulation that transgender students in public schools must be allowed to use the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity.

"We agree that it has indeed been commonplace and widely accepted to separate public restrooms, locker rooms, and shower facilities on the basis of sex," the court wrote in its opinion. "It is not apparent to us, however, that the truth of these propositions undermines the conclusion we reach regarding the level of deference due to the department's interpretation of its own regulations."

Maxine Eichner, a University of North Carolina law professor who is an expert on sexual orientation and the law, said the ruling  the first of its kind by a federal appeals court  means the provision of North Carolina's law pertaining to restroom use by transgender students in schools that receive federal funds also is invalid.

"The effects of this decision on North Carolina are clear," she said, adding that a judge in that state will have no choice but to apply the appeals court's ruling.

Other states in the 4th Circuit are Maryland, West Virginia and South Carolina. While those states are directly affected by the appeals court's ruling, Eichner said the impact will be broader.

"It is a long and well-considered opinion that sets out the issues," she said. "It will be influential in other circuits."

Appeals court Judge Paul V. Niemeyer wrote in a dissenting opinion that the majority's opinion "completely tramples on all universally accepted protections of privacy and safety that are based on the anatomical differences between the sexes."

The school board could appeal the decision to the full appeals court or the U.S. Supreme Court. David Patrick Corrigan, attorney for the school board, did not immediately respond to a telephone message.

On another issue, the appeals court ordered the trial judge to reconsider his refusal to issue an order that would allow Grimm to use the boys' restrooms immediately.

Grimm was born female but identifies as male. He was allowed to use the boys' restrooms at the school for several weeks in 2014. But after some parents complained, the school board adopted a policy requiring students to use either the restroom that corresponds with their biological gender or a private, single-stall restroom.

Grimm called the policy stigmatizing. School officials said the policy respects the privacy of all students.

"I feel so relieved and vindicated by the court's ruling," Grimm said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents him. "Today's decision gives me hope that my fight will help other kids avoid discriminatory treatment at school."

Grimm, 16, said he started refusing to wear girls' clothes by age 6 and told his parents he was transgender in April 2014.

Grimm's parents helped him legally change his name, and a psychologist diagnosed him with gender dysphoria, characterized by stress stemming from conflict between one's gender identity and assigned sex at birth. Grimm began hormone treatment to deepen his voice and give him a more masculine appearance.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)  Pearl Jam is canceling its concert in North Carolina later this month because of the state's new law on LGBT rights.

In a statement issued Monday on the band's website, Pearl Jam called the new law "a despicable piece of legislation that encourages discrimination against an entire group of American citizens."

The statement says the band has communicated with local groups and will give them money to oppose the law.

Pearl Jam was scheduled to perform April 20 at PNC Arena in Raleigh.

An anti-discrimination ordinance approved in February in Charlotte that, among other things, would have allowed transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity led to a special legislative session. Legislators overturned the ordinance and blocked all cities and counties from passing similar anti-discrimination rules.
The North Carolina School for the Deaf had many things to celebrate Wednesday as the school reached its 122 nd Founders Day and received an accreditation that ranks it as one of the best in the nation.

The accreditation by the Conference of Educational Administrators of the School for the Deaf ranks the school in the top third of all the schools for the deaf in the United States, according to NCSD Director Audrey Garvin.

They come in and evaluate not only the academic program, but also the residential program as well, said Garvin.

The process to go through the CEASD accreditation is very strenuous, she said.

Not every school does this but we did, she said. We had very good recommendations for us to do certain things.

The accreditation lasts for five years, she said.

The CEASD are verifying that the schools educational programs are meeting high standards in 12 different categories, she said.

Not everybody does it because it is very strenuous, Audrey said. At the same time, when you do it, you have that added assurance for parents to have their student to come to the school to know that as a deaf school we rank in the top third in that nation.

Sen. Warren Daniel (R-46) was present for the ceremony and applauded the school and students for their continued success.

NCSD graduates have achieved great success in their careers and in their community life, Daniel said. I want to congratulate you again on this historic event for your history and for achieving distinction today of receiving accreditation from the Conference of Educational Administrators of the School for the Deaf.

Jimmy Autrey, president of the Historical Rumisell Museum Society at NCSD and 1977 NCSD graduate, was the master of ceremony for the days celebration.

Autrey opened up the ceremony by ringing the NCSD bell, which was installed circa 1898.

Even here at NCSD we have a bell, Autrey said. This is a deaf school and our children cant hear, but we also have our bell.

The bell hung at the west hall school, which is now Hoey Hall, he said.

The West Hall burned down in 1938 and the bell was abandoned," he said They used this for changing classes or for athletic events. All over the town of Morganton, people heard our bell ringing throughout the countryside.

NCSD Student Body President Solimar Bonilla welcomed the crowd and shared her love for her school.

I am part of history in the making here at our school, she said. I am proud to be a part of NCSD and its historic 122 years of deaf education in North Carolina, Bonilla said. I am a current student at NCSD and my experience as part of the NCSD family has taught me to be proud to be deaf.

The following awards were given out during the ceremony.

 NCSD Imprint Award: 21st Century Deaf History in the Making was presented to Dr. June St. Clair Atkinson, state superintendent of the public school in North Carolina.

 NCSD Imprint Award: 21st Century Deaf Culture Achievement was presented to Georganne Crowe in memory of Charles Inky Crowe, a NCSD graduate of 1963,

 NCSD Imprint Award: 21st Century Extraordinary Volunteer was presented to Garret Walker, a NCSD graduate of 1964.

 NCSD Imprint Award: Historic Rusmisell Museum Society Volunteer was presented to Lawson McNally.

 NCSD Imprint Award: 21st Century Founders Day Organizer was presented to Gretchen Lowman

Jonelle Bobak can be reached at jbobak@morganton.com or 828-432-8907.
The recent rally in bulk commodity miners will end in tears. Iron ore has risen to $60 per tonne from a bottom of $37 in December, with leveraged mining stocks more than doubling from recent lows. We expect falling Chinese steel demand and rising Chinese steel scrap availability to cut iron ore prices by half. Shares of several heavily indebted producers are likely to fall by more than 50%. Our long-run forecasts are $30 per tonne for iron ore, versus the consensus of $55, and $75 per tonne for metallurgical coal, versus the consensus of $110.

Investors have finally embraced the reality of peak China steel demand, but most still underestimate how far demand will fall. Consensus sees Chinese steel use stabilising around 700 million tonnes, down modestly from a peak of 765 million tonnes. We expect demand to fall to 650 million tonnes by 2020 and 630 million by 2025 as faltering construction activity outweighs consumer-oriented growth. Rising scrap steel availability is a significant, but longer-term, threat.

Data scarcity and difficulty projecting scrap availability make it tough for investors to gauge the timing and magnitude of the risk. Leveraging academic work on the life cycle of steel products, we project China's domestic scrap supply to more than double by 2025, feeding greater electric arc furnace production and displacing iron ore and met coal demand.

In total, falling steel demand and rising scrap availability will reduce China's iron ore demand by 150 million tonnes over the next 10 years, more than the total consumption of Japan, the worlds second largest iron ore buyer. Iron ore and met coal miners look overvalued as a group. We see 50%-plus downside risk in shares of Anglo American, CSN, Fortescue, Teck Resources, and Vale, as large exposures and hefty debt burdens will magnify the impact of falling iron ore and metallurgical coal prices. Where Will the Iron Ore Price Go? Our long-term forecasts lie well below consensus. We expect mid-cycle iron ore prices of $30 per tonne, far below prevailing spot of $60 and consensus of $55. Similarly, we forecast long-term met coal prices of $75 per tonne, versus spot of $90 and consensus of $110. Lower Chinese steel consumption and rising EAF substitution drive our below-consensus demand outlook for iron ore and met coal. Together, these two factors drive a decline in Chinese iron ore demand of 150 million tonnes, greater than the total demand of Japan, the worlds number-two consumer, and nearly equal to output from the world's fourth-largest iron ore miner, Fortescue. We've long been bearish on Chinese steel demand, but not bearish enough. Our updated bottom-up forecast suggests consumption will decline to 650 million tonnes by 2020 and 630 million tonnes by 2025, led by weak construction demand. While demand from transportation and consumer durables should grow, their small contribution is far outweighed by construction declines. The machinery end market should see fairly anemic growth, owing to the drag from construction. A scrap age looms, with Chinese electric arc furnace substitution set to displace huge quantities of iron ore and metallurgical coal. Sector-level asset-life analysis suggests China's steel scrap supply will more than double by 2025. Scrap supply growth will accelerate beyond 2025 as buildings and other long-lived steel-containing assets approach end-of-life. Much of Chinas domestic iron ore and met coal supply is likely to prove resilient. The remaining highcost private producers exposed to seaborne competition should cease production, but we doubt seaborne volumes will displace domestic mine supply in China's interior. We estimate that "inland" mines, which have a transport cost advantage over foreign suppliers, comprise roughly half of China's iron ore production and more than three fourths of its coal production. State-owned mines propped up by supportive local governments and favorable credit access will be especially difficult to displace. Low-cost expansion will far outstrip demand growth, displacing higher-cost supply and pressuring prices. Additional supply chasing scarce demand will entrench the industrywide race to the bottom on costs. In iron ore, we expect the largest six miners to add 200 million tonnes of low-cost supply through 2025, equivalent to 13% of 2015 seaborne supply. This would force a similar amount of supply cuts, as it greatly outstrips the flat seaborne iron ore demand that we anticipate over the same interval. In met coal, Mozambique and Mongolia will add 29 million tonnes through 2025, over which time we expect seaborne demand to contract by 31 million tonnes. What Does this Mean for the Miners? The cost curves for iron ore and met coal have flattened and shifted lower, owing to cost cuts, producer currency depreciation, and lower freight rates. For the major producers on our coverage list, costs have fallen by an average of 38%, or $18 per tonne, since 2014. We expect further cost improvements as the biggest miners ramp up production of higher-quality assets and spread fixed costs across greater volumes. We see 50%-plus downside risk in shares of Anglo American (AAL), CSN, Fortescue, Teck Resources, and Vale, as large exposures and hefty debt burdens magnify the equity implications of lower long-term iron ore and metallurgical coal prices.
Morningstar analysis has found a number of ethical and social ETFs own the very stocks they claim to exclude  and conscientious investors could be in the dark about their holdings, amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds. This contradictory state of affairs is made possible by the use of synthetic replication.

To many ESG investors, this may feel like discovering meat in a vegetarian burger

Let us take the Amundi ETF MSCI World Low Carbon UCITS ETF (LWCU) as an example. The index it tracks screens all constituents of the MSCI World index and excludes those with the largest carbon footprint.

Yet, at the time of writing, the fund holds stocks like Belgian brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev or German pharma-giant Bayer, which have been specifically excluded from underlying index because of their relatively large carbon emissions.

A look at other providers reveals that Lyxors Finvex Sustainability Low Volatility Europe UCITS ETF (FINE) is also permitted to hold stocks which have been specifically screened out on ESG grounds.

How Can Ethical ETFs Hold Unethical Stocks?

In order to explain this paradoxical situation we need to pull back the curtain and take a closer look at how these ETFs are constructed.

The Amundi MSCI World Low Carbon ETF and the Lyxor Finvex Sustainability Low Volatility Europe ETF are both synthetically replicated. Under the synthetic model, a fund enters into a swap agreement with a counterparty, generally an investment bank, which commits to deliver the performance of the index. In exchange, the fund receives ownership of a basket of securities.

The securities held by the ETF are subject to strict UCITS rules and high quality screens, but they may bear little resemblance to the index constituents. And, as weve seen in the case of the two ETFs in question, they may be the very stocks that the index had actively excluded. For a more in-depth look at how synthetic ETFs are constructed I recommend a previous article we published on the topic.

This potential for conflict between the index and the funds actual holdings has been recognised by Morningstar and underpins the decision not to award synthetic ETFs a Morningstar Sustainability Rating.

Does it Matter?

Well, to many ESG investors, this may feel like discovering chunks of meat in a vegetarian burger.

Synthetic fund providers may argue that, as with any ETF, what really matters is the exposure, i.e. the index, that these funds provide access to, and that the funds actual holdings are only there to mitigate swap counterparty risk.

However, its hard to escape the feeling that in this circumstance, Amundi and Lyxor are failing to properly acknowledge the deep-seated set of beliefs held by ESG investors and which, logically, would call for the exclusion of non-compliant stocks at all levels of the replication process.

Can Synthetic ETFs Ever Be Ethical?

Synthetic ETF providers are certainly capable of tailoring their guidelines to suit the sensitivities of any given group of investors. And in fact, some are already doing so. For example, db X-trackers imposes fund-specific collateral requirements for its synthetically replicated Shariah-compliant DJ Islamic Market Titans 100 UCITS ETF.

The funds holdings are subjected to the same Shariah compliance as the underlying index. Hence, there is nothing theoretically stopping synthetic providers from including specific instructions, such as ESG filters, for their suite of ESG ETFs.

The good news for the ESG-conscious is that, as synthetic ETFs have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, the transparency offered by providers has improved markedly. All three of the providers mentioned above currently post the actual funds holdings on their respective websites on a regular basis. This allows investors to make their own decision regarding both the quality and nature of what they actually own.
Maintaining independence and editorial freedom is essential to our mission of empowering investor success. We provide a platform for our authors to report on investments fairly, accurately, and from the investors point of view. We also respect individual opinionsthey represent the unvarnished thinking of our people and exacting analysis of our research processes. Our authors can publish views that we may or may not agree with, but they show their work, distinguish facts from opinions, and make sure their analysis is clear and in no way misleading or deceptive.

To further protect the integrity of our editorial content, we keep a strict separation between our sales teams and authors to remove any pressure or influence on our analyses and research.

Read our editorial policy to learn more about our process.
The Canadian housing sector saw its strongest performance last month since March 2008, with property prices growing by 7 per cent on a year-by-year basis, according to a report released last week (April 15).The Teranet National Bank house price index added that the March prices represented a 0.8 per cent growth from February.These findings supported the latest figures from the Canadian Real Estate Association, which showed that March sales increased by 1.5 per cent over the previous month, and 12 per cent over the same time last year.Analysts pointed at exceptional activity in Vancouver and Toronto as the main driver for the seemingly inexorable growth in the countrys real estate segment, fuelled by a continuously recovering job market.[A notable] characteristic of those two cities is tight supply, National Bank officials Marc Pinsonneault and Krishen Rangasamy said, as quoted by The Globe and Mail. Note that sales growth has outpaced new listings growth in both cities lately.The Teranet-National Bank data found that Vancouver prices increased by 2.8 per cent month-over-month last March. Toronto posted a more modest 0.3 per cent gain, while other winners were Edmonton (0.9 per cent), Montreal (0.9 per cent), and Hamilton (0.6 per cent).Year-over-year, Vancouver grew by 17.3 per cent, Hamilton by 10.5 per cent, Toronto by 9 per cent, and Victoria by 8.5 per cent.For those living in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto and Hamilton, the housing boom continues, Pinsonneault and Rangasamy said.Elsewhere the long-awaited correction of the housing market has already arrived, as evidenced by the ninth consecutive month of declining prices [on a year-on-year basis] for the seven remaining regions covered by the Teranet-National Bank composite house price index, they added.
From a 3 per cent industry record high, EQ Bank lowered its savings rate for its newest savings account program to 2.25 per cent yesterday (April 18).The high-interest savings account, which offered a rate unmatched by both traditional and online banks, led to an influx of around 17,000 new clients as of the end of March, officials said.It has been very strong uptake Im a bit surprised by Canadians willingness to embrace a bank they had not heard of up until now! Equitable Bank chief executive Andrew Moor wrote in an email, as quoted by the Financial Post.The rate adjustment came in the wake of the banks imposition of a limit on the number of new account openings weekly as EQ had some difficulty addressing the enormous demand, bank officials said.Im always a bit nervous to make these kinds of rate changes, but our market survey shows this continues to be a great rate for our customers  and certainly the early acceptance is showing that people are embracing the approach of a pure play digital bank, Moor stated.EQ could afford to offer its above-average rates and still generate a margin as its operational costs (being a pure online venture) are far cheaper than traditional banks, according to industry observers. Brick-and-mortar banks usually offer less than 1 per cent interest on their savings accounts.
A big bank will have to pony up nearly $70 million to settle claims against it arising from its sale of residential mortgage-backed securities.



UBS will pay $69.8 million to the National Credit Union Administration, according to an NCUA release. The amount reflects damages and interest arising from losses to Members United and Southwest, two corporate credit unions that failed during the financial meltdown.



Part of NCUAs comprehensive strategy for resolving the corporate crisis has been an aggressive litigation effort to secure recoveries from the Wall Street firms whose sale of faulty securities precipitated the crisis, said NCUA board chair Debbie Matz. Because of our ongoing efforts to hold responsible parties accountable, we are minimizing net losses to credit unions an should ultimately be able to provide a future rebate to credit unions for their Temporary Corporate Credit Union Stabilization Fund assessments.



The NCUA board initiated the lawsuit against UBS as liquidating agent for Members United and Southwest. In February, the NCUA accepted UBSs offer of $33 million in damages. Added to that amount was prejudgment interest determined by the court  which brought UBSs total penalty to $69.8 million, according to the NCUA. The bank will also be liable for attorneys fees and expenses.



And UBSs troubles arent over. The NCUA still has litigation pending against the bank in Kansas for the sale of shoddy mortgage bonds to two other credit unions.



So far, the NCUA has obtained more than $3.1 billion in recoveries through litigation over the sale of faulty mortgage-backed securities to corporate credit unions. The proceeds from the settlements are used to repay the Temporary Corporate Credit Union Stabilization Funds loans from the U.S. Treasury, as well as to decrease the amount that surviving credit unions need to pay to recoup the losses the corporate credit union system endured during the meltdown.
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Two restaurants sought alcohol permits at Mondays Planning and Zoning meeting, and commissioners gave approval to both.

Taco stand Nemes Cocina Fresca, located at 4401 N. Big Spring St. near Loop 250, sought an alcohol permit as it plans to expand its operation.

When it starts warming up, we want to do a lot more than were doing, co-owner Neme Torres told the Reporter-Telegram before the meeting.

Nemes is currently open from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and has breakfast and lunch offerings. Torres and co-owner John Elphick want to expand those hours by reopening from 5 p.m. to about 9 p.m. and offer dinner and drinks. The permit allows Nemes to serve alcohol from 11 a.m. to midnight, and Elphick said evening operations would be from either Wednesday or Thursday through Saturday.

The timing for the permit request followed the improving weather. Nemes opened its outdoor eatery in November and has competed with cooler winter conditions.

Our thought was always to open up some nights, but only when it starts warming up, Torres said.

Elphick, who represented Nemes at the meeting, said alcohol will be served only on the north side of the restaurant, where a shaded and gated patio will be constructed. Elphick said gating the area is required for compliance with Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission rules.

Nemes leases the property from H-E-B, which owns the 14.016 acre site. Elphick said that when H-E-B decides to build on the property, Nemes will be converted from a stand to a permanent restaurant either on that property or elsewhere.

Commissioners approved the specific-use permit 7-0.

La Mision, 1008 S. Big Spring St., also was approved for a specific-use permit concerning the expansion of the length of time it can serve alcohol. A 6-1 vote approved the serving of alcohol until 2 a.m.

La Mision manager Stephanie Cooper said the restaurant sought the permit to expand its sports-bar feel. She said half of the facility operates as a restaurant from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. and the other half as a bar from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m.

When commissioners asked Cooper whether La Mision could keep its restaurant status in light of greater alcohol sales, she said it could because the kitchen would remain open to serve food to patrons.

In other action:

-- Permian Sign Co. received approval to slightly alter a Target sign on North Midland Drive and the addition of an Order Pickup sign on Targets facade. The changes were approved 7-0.

-- Jorge Villalobos received approval for a zoning change from Local Retail District 2 to Local Retail District 3 for his auto repair shop at the intersection of East Scharbauer Drive and North Lamesa Road. Villalobos purchased the former Lees Automotive and found the property wasnt zoned correctly for that type of business. The change was approved 7-0.

-- Bynum School received approval for expansion south of its property. A Bynum representative said an oil well currently on the property will be plugged and abandoned. Bynum also requested a variance for an extra 250 feet to build near an existing well on the southeast corner of the property. The expansion was approved 7-0.

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Pease Communication and Technology Academys Lindsey Sargent has seen the world. She was born across the pond in England and graduated from the International School Of Beijing in China.

That worldly experience fits into a philosophy she passes on to her students  to never give up or never judge a book by its cover, meaning do not judge people by how they are different.

I have lived all over the world and been immersed into different cultures, the first-grade teacher said. I have a lot of respect for other cultures and the way people live and want my students to find that same respect for others.

Being at the forefront of technology is expected teaching at Pease, the districts communication and technology academy. She says her first-graders benefit from their LearnPads and three mini iPads made possible from Donors Choose.

I am pretty lucky in that aspect. Pease is a technology school, and I have access to a variety of technology, Sargent said. I have classroom computers, Smart Board that I use daily and LearnPads for each of my students. I have made different lessons for the LearnPads that the students use at different times during the day.

How, and why, do you make a difference in Midlands educational landscape?

I try to do my best every day and by giving it my all. Making sure that my students are in a fun, happy, safe learning environment is my goal every day. I have tried to make science fun with more hands-on science lessons.

I have served five years of students, and I am happy that I was able to teach them so much in their first-grade year.

Why did you choose a career in education?

Ever since my senior year of high school, I have known that I wanted to work with children. In high school I had the choice to pick a class of my choosing. I chose to help out in a pre-K class. I loved being in their classroom helping out the teacher and students.

How have you moved beyond the basic curriculum and found innovative ways to reach your students?

I want my students to have real experiences that tie their learning to the real world, learning that they can use the minute they step outside my classroom. We do lots of hands-on experiments and labs.

What is the one lesson you want to impart on every student who enters your classroom?

To never give up or never judge a book by its cover -- meaning do not judge people by how they are different. I have lived all over the world and been immersed into different cultures. I have a lot of respect for other cultures and the way people live and want my students to find that same respect for others.

Has the role of being an educator changed since your first year as a teacher? If so, how?

My role of being an educator has always been to teach each child and care for them. To make sure that each child has a chance to learn and thrive in my classroom.

How have you implemented technology into your classroom and instruction model?

I am pretty lucky in that aspect. Pease is a technology school, and I have access to a variety of technology. I have classroom computers, Smart Board that I use daily and LearnPads for each of my students. I have made different lessons for the LearnPads that the students use at different times during the day. I also have three mini iPads that were made possible by Donors Choose.

What are your professional goals for the future?

I have considered my future options, and am still deciding which is the best path is for me. I really enjoy being in the classroom teaching and being able to help children learn and be successful.

What support can Midlanders provide you and other educators?

Parental support is always needed and valued. Another great way to get involved would be to volunteer in the classroom by being an extra pair of hands to help out.

If there is anything else you would like us to know, please share that information here:

I want to thank my boyfriend, Andrew Fertsch, and my Pease family for all the support they give me. I love being a member of the Pease family and have loved all the students that I have this year and in previous years. I look forward to many years to come.
Dickey's Barbecue Pit is getting a new neighbor.

After Burgers, Fries and Cherry Pies left its location on Wadley Avenue near Loop 250 last year, Dickeys expanded 10 feet into the space in mid-January, adding about 25 seats to its busy west Midland restaurant, according to manager Amanda Brooks.

The remaining space has been leased by Fresh Fit Meals, which plans to open its first Midland location by the end of summer, according to General Manager Derrick Jernigan.

Jernigan said the company signed its lease about two months ago but had planned for a Midland expansion since it opened in Odessa in January 2015.

Weve always looked at expanding, Jernigan said. At about the time we opened (the Odessa) store, we were looking to move to Midland.

Fresh Fit Meals offers chef-inspired cuisine on the go, according to the companys website. Customers can choose their meals from a refrigerated case, heat and serve at their leisure. Meals are nutritionally balanced and are fresh, never frozen.

The Midland store will have an additional feature not found in Odessa.

(In Midland), were going to have a hot service line, so youll be able to get hot sandwiches and wraps, Jernigan said. Well still have the same meals that we have here. Well have a cooler where people can go in and pick their meals. Pretty much the same process.

Jernigan said the new store wont be without an old favorite: Smoothies.

Everyone comes in for our smoothies, he said.

Fresh Fit Meals from Fresh Fit Meals on Vimeo.

Fresh Fit Meals is open to the public, but it also offers partnerships with corporate clients.

Companies can partake in the Corporate Wellness Program, a co-pay program that encourages healthier eating. Jernigan said the program helps keep employees happier, more energetic and cuts down on sick days because it gives them an opportunity to eat healthy, non-processed food.

Employees can come into the store or can have their food delivered by Basin Delivery, a third-party delivery service.

Fresh Fit Meals has about 50 corporate clients in Odessa, and its looking to more than double that tally when the store opens in Midland, Jernigan said.

All in all, We're really excited, about heading to Midland, Jernigan said.

As for Dickeys, expansion plans also are in the works. Brooks said the company will open two more locations: one at ClayDesta near Texas Burger and another on Rankin Highway near Interstate 20.

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Before televisions Modern Family, there was Broadways. And 33 years after its stage debut, the musical La Cage aux Folles may be more poignant and relevant today. With both heart and spectacle, Midland Community Theatres production, which opened Friday at the Yucca, was a winning mix.

Issues like civil rights and discrimination were apparent in the show and perhaps more so because of the current election season. But under Carl Beery Moores direction, the show was fearless. From its risque drag performers Les Cagelles to its innuendo-filled dialogue, the show held nothing back in its brazen storytelling.

The modern family here is Georges (Bill Kersh), the gay nightclub owner who is partnered to Albin (Mitchell Smith), who also stars as Zaza, the clubs most famous drag performer on the French Riviera. Georges son Jean-Michel (Aiden Bonacci) has returned home to tell of his engagement to Anne (Victoria Gonzales).

But Anne is daughter to local conservative politician M. Edouard Dindon (Andy Salcedo) intent on closing all venues he has classified immoral. The families are set to meet but at Jean-Michels request, the flamboyant Albin would have to make concessions.

There was a lovely chemistry between Kersh and Smith that genuinely reflected their characters 20-year relationship as well as with Jean-Michel. Kersh mixed a charming personality with a strong backbone that counterbalanced Smiths affability and humor. As their butler, Michael Fields queeny Jacob was a riot who has stage dreams of his own. In a role designed to be ostentatious, Fields ran far with the laughs and melodrama while in some pretty impressive heels.

Salcedo was properly self-righteous and sour-faced. As his oppressed wife Marie, Caroline Englestad played defeated well and grew into a blooming flower of self-realization all with a dash of elegance.

Of course, the big draw to La Cage are the musical performances and the drag.

Dressed by Micheal Wilhelm-Waid, the Cagelles were sparkly visions of color. With individual costumes that recalled operatic Vikings, Egyptian queens and whip-cracking mistresses, Wilhelm-Waids work was appropriately and wonderfully grand as was Jena Tumlins makeup. Ironically, Smiths Zaza costumes belied the characters star power and verged on the matronly side with some unflattering lines.

The shows five-piece orchestra led by Scott Aycock was solid. During more tender scenes, underlying music sometime drowned out dialogue, but for the big numbers, the orchestra matched the scenes with big sounds. Lauren Lusks set truly transformed the Yucca which was only enhanced by Edward Taylors lighting.

With humor and heart, MCTs La Cage was a glorious romp that allowed the audience to laugh, maybe cry a little and take away a deeper message of acceptance even under layers and layers of makeup and tulle.
When soldiers come home, the wars they try to leave behind often stay with them. The transition back into civilian life can be a rough one. Thats why Army veteran Gary Kennedy and Damon Kennedy, dean of Social/Behavioral Sciences and Business at Midland College, came together to create the Green Zone Speaker Series, which brings in speakers to educate MC professors on how to help their student veterans, particularly those with post traumatic stress disorder, better transition into college life.

The program has hosted three sessions so far. Gary Kennedy, who is also the coordinator of HEART (Healing Emotions Above Reason and Thoughts) -- a faith-based group for veterans and first responders with PTSD -- hopes the series will help MC do more for its recent influx of student veterans.

We went from 150 or 175 veteran students last semester to over 300 this semester, Kennedy said. So thats what were working with right now. Youve got ages from 19, just out of basic training to me and Im 50 years old. So theres a variety of experiences educators are going to be dealing with."

The most recent speaker event was Wednesday, when Jessica Saenz, an Army veteran who deployed to Afghanistan twice and is now an MC English professor, and John Rosales, a retired Marine in his first semester at MC, shared their stories.

Saenz returned to school when she was 29 to pursue a masters degree in English.

I didnt remember the whole process of going back to school, Saenz said. Youre just not comfortable with this new identity youre trying to create because, just like any job, you have some kind of identity shaped around what kind of occupation you have so when you change that occupation and all of a sudden you are a student you havent been one for five, six years or more."

Many student veterans have trouble getting used to the more casual student-professor relationship, as opposed to the hierarchical structure of the military, Saenz said. But the biggest challenges often stem from those war experiences that they cant shake when they come into the classroom.

There are certain memories, or anniversaries of deaths or certain experiences that we kind of bring to class, Saenz said. We dont mean to, but we bring it to class anyway. When youre deployed, theres never a medium. Things are either OK or really bad, so its hard to find that neutral space when youre on campus.

The self-reliance and never-show-weakness mentality that soldiers are trained in can often keep them from asking for help, particularly when it comes to PTSD symptoms, Saenz said.

Sometimes they have really bad dreams and they cant sleep for days so theyre not showing up for class, Saenz said. (Teachers) may want to kind of email them and see whats going on, because its a sense of not just weakness but like they dont wanna be viewed differently and they dont want to use it as an excuse. But if its negatively impacting their grade or attendance, they need to be able to let us know whats going on.

Rosales first went back to school after getting out of the military in August 2010. If the Green Zone had been in place when he first came back to school, maybe hed already have his degree, he said.

Rosales endured two deployments to Iraq, during which he lost more than 30 of his brothers.

When I got back, nothing felt the same anymore, nothing did, Rosales said. Eight months in (to his first deployment), my vehicle got hit by an RPG. That day, one of my best friends died, and man, Ill never forget that feeling. From that day I told myself, to be an affective Marine, you can never show this weakness again. In the rest of that deployment, I lost 13 of my brothers in combat. As time went on, the pain was less and less until it was no longer there.

When he returned stateside, he expected to be welcomed with open arms. But instead, an anti-war protester spit in his face.

So now Im home and Im looking at everybody different, Rosales said. I come home to Midland and I didnt wanna wear my uniform. My family wanted to parade me around, but I didnt wanna get spit on again. I knew this time I wasnt gonna be able to contain myself.

When he came home from his second deployment, when he lost 21 of his fellow Marines including a close friend, Rosales realized he needed a change.

He looked for jobs in Midland. He went to the VA in Big Spring and was diagnosed with PTSD and prescribed pills to keep him normal, as he described it. He enrolled at MC. Things were fine at first.

One of his classes was American history.

We get to the point where were talking about the Revolutionary War and one of my classmates says, Anybody who joins the military is stupid and cant think for themselves, Rosales said. I kept waiting for the interjection from the instructor -- at least say something.

The professor didnt say anything.

So I stand up and I tell him ... Im pretty sure you never felt any kind of struggle in your life, Rosales said. Im sure you graduated school last year, so youve got a brand new car parked in that parking lot. I said, You dont know what real struggle is. In other countries there is no health care. You either make it or you dont.

Rosales walked out of the classroom that day and didnt come back for five years.

Had we had this Green Zone program in place then and somebody had de-escalated that situation and the professor knew what to do, what to say, right now I could have been sitting in the office, pushing the pencil instead of swinging the hammer, Rosales said.

War in the classroom

Educators learn how to help veterans re-enter civilian life

By Erin Stone

estone@mrt.com

When soldiers come home, the wars they try to leave behind often stay with them. The transition back into civilian life can be a rough one. Thats why Army veteran Gary Kennedy and Damon Kennedy, dean of Social/Behavioral Sciences and Business at Midland College, came together to create the Green Zone Speaker Series, which brings in speakers to educate MC professors on how to help their student veterans, particularly those with post traumatic stress disorder, better transition into college life.

The program has hosted three sessions so far. Gary Kennedy, who is also the coordinator of HEART (Healing Emotions Above Reason and Thoughts) -- a faith-based group for veterans and first responders with PTSD -- hopes the series will help MC do more for its recent influx of student veterans.

We went from 150 or 175 veteran students last semester to over 300 this semester, Kennedy said. So thats what were working with right now. Youve got ages from 19, just out of basic training to me and Im 50 years old. So theres a variety of experiences educators are going to be dealing with."

The most recent speaker event was Wednesday, when Jessica Saenz, an Army veteran who deployed to Afghanistan twice and is now an MC English professor, and John Rosales, a retired Marine in his first semester at MC, shared their stories.

Saenz returned to school when she was 29 to pursue a masters degree in English.

I didnt remember the whole process of going back to school, Saenz said. Youre just not comfortable with this new identity youre trying to create because, just like any job, you have some kind of identity shaped around what kind of occupation you have so when you change that occupation and all of a sudden you are a student you havent been one for five, six years or more."

Many student veterans have trouble getting used to the more casual student-professor relationship, as opposed to the hierarchical structure of the military, Saenz said. But the biggest challenges often stem from those war experiences that they cant shake when they come into the classroom.

There are certain memories, or anniversaries of deaths or certain experiences that we kind of bring to class, Saenz said. We dont mean to, but we bring it to class anyway. When youre deployed, theres never a medium. Things are either OK or really bad, so its hard to find that neutral space when youre on campus.

The self-reliance and never-show-weakness mentality that soldiers are trained in can often keep them from asking for help, particularly when it comes to PTSD symptoms, Saenz said.

Sometimes they have really bad dreams and they cant sleep for days so theyre not showing up for class, Saenz said. (Teachers) may want to kind of email them and see whats going on, because its a sense of not just weakness but like they dont wanna be viewed differently and they dont want to use it as an excuse. But if its negatively impacting their grade or attendance, they need to be able to let us know whats going on.

Rosales first went back to school after getting out of the military in August 2010. If the Green Zone had been in place when he first came back to school, maybe hed already have his degree, he said.

Rosales endured two deployments to Iraq, during which he lost more than 30 of his brothers.

When I got back, nothing felt the same anymore, nothing did, Rosales said. Eight months in (to his first deployment), my vehicle got hit by an RPG. That day, one of my best friends died, and man, Ill never forget that feeling. From that day I told myself, to be an affective Marine, you can never show this weakness again. In the rest of that deployment, I lost 13 of my brothers in combat. As time went on, the pain was less and less until it was no longer there.

When he returned stateside, he expected to be welcomed with open arms. But instead, an anti-war protester spit in his face.

So now Im home and Im looking at everybody different, Rosales said. I come home to Midland and I didnt wanna wear my uniform. My family wanted to parade me around, but I didnt wanna get spit on again. I knew this time I wasnt gonna be able to contain myself.

When he came home from his second deployment, when he lost 21 of his fellow Marines including a close friend, Rosales realized he needed a change.

He looked for jobs in Midland. He went to the VA in Big Spring and was diagnosed with PTSD and prescribed pills to keep him normal, as he described it. He enrolled at MC. Things were fine at first.

One of his classes was American history.

We get to the point where were talking about the Revolutionary War and one of my classmates says, Anybody who joins the military is stupid and cant think for themselves, Rosales said. I kept waiting for the interjection from the instructor -- at least say something.

The professor didnt say anything.

So I stand up and I tell him ... Im pretty sure you never felt any kind of struggle in your life, Rosales said. Im sure you graduated school last year, so youve got a brand new car parked in that parking lot. I said, You dont know what real struggle is. In other countries there is no health care. You either make it or you dont.

Rosales walked out of the classroom that day and didnt come back for five years.

Had we had this Green Zone program in place then and somebody had de-escalated that situation and the professor knew what to do, what to say, right now I could have been sitting in the office, pushing the pencil instead of swinging the hammer, Rosales said.
Magnet school applications being accepted

Applications are being accepted for Washington Math & Science Academy, Pease Communications & Technology Academy and Bowie Fine Arts Academy. The applications are available at Midland ISDs website.

Acceptance into the districts three magnet schools is by lottery and the application must be submitted in order to be considered, according to a press release from MISD.

Current kindergarten through fifth-graders and students who are eligible to enroll in kindergarten for the 2016-2017 school year may apply for admission to a magnet program. Applications may be submitted to one, two or all three schools.

Application deadline is May 13. The lottery is May 20. Acceptance letters are due by June 6.

Kindergarten registration is set for next week

MISD Kindergarten Roundup -- registration of kindergarteners for 2016-17 school year -- is next week. Parents should visit the school with their childs birth certificate, shot record and Social Security card and proof of address.

Some schools have planned special events:

Monday through April 29

-- Burnet Elementary School, 900 Raymond, 8 a.m.-3:30 p.m., meet the teachers 4-6 p.m. April 28.

-- Bush Elementary School, 5001 Preston Drive, 8 a.m.-3:30 p.m.; parent meetings 8:30 a.m. Monday and April 28.

-- Long Elementary School, 4200 Cedar Springs, 8 a.m.-3:30 p.m., until 6 p.m. on April 26.

-- Milam Elementary School, 301 E. Dormard, 8 a.m.-3:30 p.m., until 6 p.m. on April 26.

-- Rusk Elementary School, 2601 Wedgewood, 8 a.m.-3:30 p.m., until 6 p.m. on April 26.

-- Yarbrough Elementary School, 6000 Riverfront Drive, 7:45 a.m.-4 p.m., until 6 p.m. on April 26.

April 26

-- Fannin Elementary School, 2400 Fannin, 5:30-7 p.m.

-- Greathouse Elementary School, 5107 Greathouse, 4-6 p.m.

MC plans study course to Italy for 2017

Midland College is planning a a travel/study course to Italy for May 29-June 7, 2017.

The Panorama Italiano trip includes visits to Venice, Tuscany, Florence, Rome, Pompeii, Sorrento and Capri. The guided trip is open to the public. To receive college credit for the trip, students should register for English 2332 or Speech 1311.

Trip cost is $5,568 and includes hotel accommodations (two per room), round-trip air transportation from Midland, all ground transportation, two meals a day and museum passes. Cost also includes $200 deposit and $95 registration fee.

The trip is being coordinated by MC Program Chair of English Pamela Howell and MC Department Chair of Modern Languages and Speech Katherine Allen. For more information, contact Howell at prhowell@midland.edu, 685-4628; or Allen at kallen@midland.edu, 685-6409.

Trinity yearbook earns honorable mention

Trinity Schools yearbook received honorable mention from Balfour Publishing in a critique of theme, layout design, photo content, secondary pages and cover design, according to a press release from the school.

Schools are not divided according to size, and high school yearbooks are judged against college and university publications.
Someone should sue the President for ...
The dean of students at a Polk County elementary school where two special needs students were allegedly abused has been arrested.

Horizons Elementary Dean Courtney Stanley arrested

Stanley charged with failure to report child abuse

Authorities say case started last week with arrest of bus driver



According to the Polk County Sheriff's Office, 34-year-old Courtney Stanley was taken into custody Tuesday and charged with two counts of failure to report child abuse.

"We are absolutely livid about this," Polk Sheriff Grady Judd said. "One child was abused three more times because Stanley did not report this."

Officials said the arrest stems from last week's case involving Carlos Ojeda, a 72-year-old bus driver in Haines City, taken into custody for allegedly abusing special needs students.

A student at Horizons Elementary School in Davenport told his school counselor that he saw Ojeda place his hands down two different female students' pants on several occasions on the school bus, according to an arrest affidavit.

A review of the school bus video surveillance system shows Ojeda on April 8, 11 and 12 motioning to a girl to approach him, according to the Polk County Sheriff's Office.

During each occasion, after the girl is within arm's length, Ojeda pulls her toward him, physically sexually batters her out of sight of other students in the stairwell by touching her under her clothing, then gives her candy and she goes back to her seat, deputies said.



According to Stanley's arrest affidavit, two students reported the sexual battery of the girls on the bus to Stanley on April 8 and 12. Stanley, who has been at the school since 2009, did not report the information to the Florida Department of Children and Families, school officials or law enforcement, the Sheriff's Office said.

"Stanley told the students, 'If he does it again, then let me know'," Judd said. "All you got to do is pick up the phone and start making calls. That's all he had to do. He knew it, he was trained for it and he didn't do it. That's why he went to jail."



The abuse was reported by the school counselor April 13 to DCF and school officials, when the school counselor was told about the abuse by the same two witnesses.



Polk County Superintendent Jacqueline Byrd said once notified, the school board acted immediately.

"I want everyone to know we are very saddened and very sorry," Byrd said, "and that we acted swiftly. Our first priority is the safety of our students."

Parents were dismayed by the news.

To be honest with you, its pretty disgusting, Jessica Wyman said. Its heart-wrenching. If you hear something, why wont you report it?

I want to know why he didnt report this, and if somebody else reported something else, did he not report that either? Eman Dillon said.

Judd said Stanley showed remorse after his arrest.

"He absolutely showed remorse," Judd said. "He recognized it was a major malfunction on his part."

The Polk County School District has suspended Stanley without pay. Byrd said said shell move to have him fired.
Detectives have released the identities of the victim and shooter in a murder-suicide Monday in which they say a wife shot dead her estranged husband, then killed herself in a Cocoa home while her two young daughters were inside.

Cocoa Police identify woman, estranged husband in murder-suicide

Woman shot estranged husband, then fled and shot herself, police say

Woman's 7- and 10-year-old daughters were in home where man was shot

Adrian Lamar Hudson, 37, was shot multiple times and found dead in his mother's home on the 700 block of South Georgia Avenue, where he also lived, detectives with the Criminal Investigations Division said.

Aurora Marie Hudson, 35, was later found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Early Monday evening, patrol officers were called to the home after receiving several 911 calls reporting a shooting. When they arrived, they found Adrian Hudson with multiple gunshot wounds; he was pronounced dead at the scene.

A short time later, Cocoa Police said, Officer George Menendez spotted a vehicle that police had been looking for near Washington Avenue and Pomolo Street. A man hopped out of the vehicle, which was being driven by a woman, and it sped off. Menendez tried to stop the vehicle, but it continued to flee, police said.

The driver continued on a route that ended at the northern river bank of Lee Wenner Park.

As Menendez tried to get the female driver, later identified as Aurora Hudson, out of the vehicle, he heard a gunshot. The vehicle then began to roll into the water. Police officerse, along with help from Brevard County Sheriffs deputies, pulled the driver out of the vehicle and determined she died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

An investigation into the shootings determined that Aurora Hudson had gone to the South Georgia Avenue home with her two daughters, ages 7 and 10. Witnesses told investigators that she argued with Adrian Hudson, her estranged husband, then shot him several times. The two girls ran across the street to a neighbor's home for help.

Hudson confronted the neighbor and demanded that she surrender the girls. When the neighbor refused, Hudson fled in her vehicle. She then went to Rockledge High School to pick up her oldest son, whom she later dropped off near the scene.

She was in tears telling her son what she had done, Det. Branda Marchica said. She dropped him off and told him she was not going to prison.


In January, a judge signed off on an injunction to keep Henry Brown from going near his wife, Chericia Brown, citing an immediate and present danger of domestic violence.

But now we know the injunction was not enough to stop Brown from killing Chericia and their children before taking his own life.

Henry Brown, 30, stabbed and ran over his estranged wife

Brown was pursued by deputies, who found him and his 2 children dead in their car on I-4



Chericia Brown, 31; Henry Brown, 4; Aleah Brown, 1; all killed

Back in December 2015, Chericia Brown took Henry Brown to family court and made an emotional plea to get the judge to sign off on an injunction prohibiting him from having any contact with her. The judge also decided to allow split custody of the children.



On January 8 of this year, they sat feet away from each other as they told the judge their sides of what happened during a December fight in front of their children. That's when Altamonte Springs police came to the Crescent Place Condo complex to investigate.



"We did have an altercation where he was pulling my hair and then back handing me a couple times," Chericia Brown said. "And then the next day he did the same thing again, pulling my hair and stuffing a sock in my mouth. That's when I decided to end this relationship."



Chericia told Judge Melanie Chase that her husband did things she never thought he would do.



In the Altamonte Springs Police report, Chericia said Henry threatened to kill her and harm their children.



"He said several times that he would find someone to kill me," she said.

But police and the state attorneys office ultimately decided not to press charges against Henry, citing a lack of evidence.



"This is one way I know she is getting back at me, by leaving," Henry Brown said.



Henry admitted to having an affair, but told the judge he still wanted to be with his wife and family.



"I am especially concerned about the fact that she was locked in a closet with a sock shoved in her mouth," Judge Melanie Chase said.

"I disagree, ma'am," Henry Brown said.

"OK you and I disagree," Judge Chase said. "We're going to disagree on that. That tells me that she could very easily be in danger of domestic violence."

In a matter of 20 minutes, Judge Chase determined that Chericia could be in "immediate and present danger of domestic violence" by her husband and signed the permanent injunction, which was supposed to be in effect until January of 2017.

The permanent injunction also meant Henry Brown's ability to see his children was up to Chericia's discretion.

The burden was put on law enforcement to make sure he complied with the terms.

This injunction also required Henry Brown to surrender all firearms to the Seminole County Sheriffs Office immediately.

We reached out to their office to find out if he ever did so, or if there was any follow up to be sure he did not have a gun in his possession.

The Seminole County Sheriff's Office has not gotten back to us about that, nor has it provided any information about a possible investigation into the family through its child protective services unit.

Statement from Chief Judge John D. Galluzzo

Certain news accounts involving the homicide of Chericia Brown and her two children may have inadvertently misrepresented the facts of this case by broadcasting an interview with a local advocate for abused women.

In a televised interview, the advocate alleged that the Judge granted 50/50 time-sharing of the children to the father. In fact, this Judge actually granted 100% of the time-sharing to the mother, giving her sole discretion to allow contact with the father as she saw fit.

In the aftermath of tragic events, it is human nature to want to assign blame. However, the Judge assigned to this case did exactly what she was authorized to do under current law. She ruled timely and appropriately for the victim.

The advocate who suggested something more could be done apparently did not read the order, watch the video, or attend the hearing. Perhaps if she had, she would not have suggested that the Court could somehow be at fault in this tragedy.

In this instance, the Judge did everything in her power to enjoin Mr. Brown from having contact with his spouse and yet he did. These deaths are tragedies that a piece of paper could not prevent. Increased public awareness and more funding for facilities, such as Safe House, would go a long way towards preventing the horrible fate that Ms. Brown and her children suffered. However, suggesting that judges are somehow to blame for the tragedy is unfortunate and misplaced.

If you or someone you know is the victim of domestic abuse:



Good Samaritan still at ORMC

One of the two people who tried to help Chericia Brown is still at Orlando Regional Medical Center, recovering from injuries after Henry Brown ran over her and her helpers.

Caroline Dorton, an Orange City firefighter and paramedic, just happened to be inside the Chili's restaurant when Brown was stabbed by her estranged husband. Dorton was off duty, but jumped into action to try to save Browns life.

Investigators say Dorton, and a nurse who also came out to help, were both hit by Henry Ramone Browns car when he came back to run over his wife.

Orange Citys fire chief says Dorton is now in the intensive care unit at ORMC with several broken bones.



When I spoke with her on the phone she had some short-term memory loss, doesnt really remember what happened," said Fire Chief Ronnie Long. "Its kind of bits and pieces  but in this case thats probably a good thing.



The fire chief says he considers Dorton a hero for her actions. The Orange City Fire Department is now collecting donations to help Dorton in her recovery.


Community leaders met Tuesday to share their grief and talk about the best way to honor slain co-worker Gino Nicolas: by continuing his work.

Gino Nicolas, 24, was killed in drive-by shooting Saturday

Nicholas was mentor with Parramore Kidz Zone, leader of My Brother's Keeper

City officials vow to continue his work

The 24-year-old community mentor killed in a drive-by shooting on Conley Street in Orlando on Saturday. Four other people suffered from non-life threatening wounds.

Its what happens in areas where poverty and under-education are problems, said Kevin Caldwell, a retired police detective and community advocate who worked closely with Nicolas. It was a needless loss of an incredible life.

Nicolas was a mentor with Parramore Kidz Zone, and he himself beat the odds: He was the first of the group to go to college, then go on to lead another program, My Brothers Keeper.

Nicolas ran the local chapter of the White House initiative that helps men of color succeed.

He was an amazing work in progress, and he was getting better every day, Caldwell said. [He] left a strong impression on a lot of people.

Other community members are still reeling.

Gino Nicolas was one of the good kids. One of the really good kids, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said. He was out doing what he does: interacting with the youth. And he was at a bad place at a bad time.

City Council members held a moment of silence for the young leader during their meeting Monday.

Gino was one of our bright, shining stars for PKZ, District 5 Commissioner Regina Hill said.

Last month, Nicolas traveled with others to the White House to talk about their work in Parramore.

We can preach to them, we cant connect with youth the way other youth can, said Caldwell, firmly reiterating they would honor Nicholass legacy. It means not allowing the My Brothers Keeper initiative to suffer, because he wouldnt want that. Were committed to it, not stopping.
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Plainview High School will host its second PHS GenTx Decision Day on May 4, when graduating seniors announce their post-secondary educational plans.

Its a very special event to celebrate the seniors of the Class of 2016 as they announce their decision to attend college, trade school, certification programs, the U.S. military or pursue other postsecondary education.

Amy Hagerman, GenTX Decision Day event site coordinator for PHS, expects more than 250 seniors to participate.

This celebration will continue to create a collegegoing culture within our school as well as

within the community, Hagerman explains. Last year we achieved a milestone of over 90 percent of the Class of 2015 being accepted into some postsecondary pathway. We expect even more success in 2016.

To date, we have 240 seniors accepted into their chosen postsecondary institution. We are extremely proud of our senior class for taking this next big step for their future. We invite the entire Plainview community to share in our celebration by wearing a college T-shirt on Wednesday, May 4, to show their support of the Class of 2016.

In both Texas and nationwide, May 1 traditionally is the date when high school seniors inform colleges of their plans to enroll. As a result, a number of Decision Day festivities are being held during that week for graduating seniors to announce and celebrate their postsecondary education plans. At PHS, the celebration will be held Wednesday, May 4.

The Plainview High School GenTX Decision Day 2016 program runs from about 1:30-4 p.m. First, seniors will have a Seniors Only assembly in the PHS Auditorium from 1:45-3 p.m. where former PHS Bulldog and 19th U.S. congressional candidate Jodey Arrington will serve as keynote speaker.

Next, the school-wide signing ceremony will take place in the PHS Main Gym from 3:15-4 p.m. Parents or family members of seniors being recognized are asked to meet in the East Gym between 2:50-3 p.m. if they would like to escort their senior student into the signing ceremony.

Every senior who has been accepted into a postsecondary program by April 28 will be recognized. Each senior will be given the opportunity to sign a letter of intent and receive a certificate announcing their postsecondary pathway.

Additionally, they are eligible for numerous prizes donated in large part by PHS faculty and staff, PHS Junior Class of 2016 and Plainview Retired Teachers Association. Students must attend the assembly to be eligible for prizes.

For more information about the Plainview High School GenTX Decision Day celebration, or for information on how you can help support this effort, please contact Amy Hagerman at 806-296-3380 or amy.hagerman@plainviewisd.org.
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H-E-B is joined the growing number of major U.S. grocery chains that are moving toward selling only cage-free eggs  eventually.

The San Antonio-based grocery chain quietly announced last week that it is working toward selling only cage-free eggs by 2025. Its following the lead of competitors such as Brookshires, Kroger and Walmart, which announced two weeks ago that it also plans to make the transition by 2025.

HEB will continue to work closely with suppliers to move toward 100% cagefree eggs by 2025, provided we have adequate supply, sufficient consumer demand and pricing is affordable for our customers, the San Antonio-based company said in a posting on its website Friday.

Animal rights groups such as Mercy for Animals and the Humane Society of the United States have been pressuring H-E-B to switch to cage-free eggs only. Cage-free eggs have also grown in popularity in recent years amid growing public concern over antibiotic use in commercial egg production as well as increasing distaste for the living conditions of hens highlighted in documentaries like the 2005 film Earthlings.

H-E-Bs policy on its egg suppliers has been under review for at least seven years as consumers increasingly demanded cage-free eggs, H-E-B spokeswoman Dya Campos said.

The movement of the industry toward cage free eggs has been a huge discussion among all retailers for years, Campos said. All of these changes have been the result of years of discussions.

Maintaining the affordability of eggs is a priority for the grocer, however, and cage-free eggs are generally more expensive than standard eggs, she said.

The lowest priced generic cage-free carton of eggs sells for about 70 cents more than H-E-Bs lowest-priced conventional eggs, she said. But the cost can vary widely depending on the brand. A carton of Hill Country Fare Grade A Medium eggs at the Olmos Park H-E-B cost $1.47 while a dozen Texas Chicken Ranch Pasture-Raised Cage Free Eggs go for $5.95, according to the companys web site.

We made the commitment to study this and move in this direction by 2025 as long as it doesnt impact the affordability of eggs for Texans, she said. Eggs are an important source of protein for many families, and some food assistance programs, like the Women, Infants and Children program, or WIC, dont cover the cost of cage-free eggs in Texas, she said.

RELATED: H-E-Bs Charles Butt and family still among the worlds wealthiest  but not on Forbes list

The Humane Society notified the company that it planned to run an ad today in H-E-Bs hometown newspaper, the Express-News, criticizing the companys practices, said Matthew Prescott, the organizations senior director of food policy. The ad, which didnt run, called the company one of the only major grocery chains in America thats allowing its egg suppliers to continue locking chickens in cages indefinitely.

Mercy for Animals, which is based in Los Angeles, also ran ads on Facebook criticizing H-E-Bs egg policy, handed out leaflets in front of the chains stores in the U.S. in Mexico and started a petition on Change.org.

Our hope is they are able to do this as soon as possible  and if they are able to beat that deadline, thats great, said Jaya Bhumitra, director of corporate outreach at Mercy for Animals.

Company executives never met with either group, Campos said, adding that the policy change wasnt a result of their campaigns.

The change of the wording on our web site has nothing to do with this group, she said. They probably took notice to that yesterday and are trying to take credit for it today.

SEE MORE: H-E-B Super Bowl Commercial: How To Make A Texas

On Tuesday, the Humane Society ran an ad in the Dallas Morning-News thanking H-E-B for its policy change.

I think H-E-B saw the writing on the wall that this is the direction of the grocery industry, Prescott said. H-E-B is certainly setting more caveats than their competitors are, but theyre making it clear that their policy is to move toward cage-free eggs.

Most major grocery chains have committed to selling cage-free eggs only at this point. One of the last major holdouts is the Florida-based Publix chain.

H-E-Bs web site says it is the largest seller of cage-free eggs in Texas.

We recognize that the transition costs for our egg farmers to migrate to cagefree systems are significant and will require time to implement, the company says on its website.

rwebner@express-news.net

@rwebner
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More than a dozen San Antonio high schools stand among the best in the United States, according to a new ranking released Tuesday.

RELATED: These are the best high schools in Texas, according to Newsweek

In its 2016 rankings of the nation's top high schools, U.S. News and World Report gave 16 high schools in the Alamo City high marks for graduation rates, student-teacher ratio and college readiness among other factors.

The report ranked Young Women's Leadership Academy the best school in San Antonio  and the 18th best school in Texas.

Scroll through the slideshow to see if your child's school is among the best in San Antonio.

RELATED: These are the top 100 high schools in the San Antonio area for 2016, according to Niche

The magazine analyzed data from roughly 19,000 public high schools and ranked them based on four criteria:

Students at the school performed higher than the average student in that state

Disadvantaged students at the school were outperforming disadvantaged students in the state

Schools met or surpassed a basic benchmark for graduation

Schools cleared the magazine's criteria for college readiness

RELATED: List ranks the top 100 elementary schools in San Antonio area

The School for the Talented and Gifted in Dallas was deemed the best high school in the country, according to the magazine.

Two other Texas high schools broke into the report's top ten: the School of Science and Engineering in Dallas and Carnegie Vanguard High School in Houston.

jfechter@mySA.com

Twitter: @JFreports
Swiftly rising water left at least five dead and damaged several homes in Houston and also closed a major road and caused delays in San Antonio Monday.

People driving around barricades into high water were the cause of or contributed to at least four of the deaths in the Houston area, according to a report on Chron.com.
Crime Stoppers is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a man they say stole a bicycle from another man at gunpoint, threatening him and later, a pedestrian.

According to a police report, the man walked up to the cyclist on South Zarzamora and Hearne Street on March 8 and asked if the bike belonged to him, then said, I want your bike, threatened him with a gun and punched him in the face. The assailant fled with the bicycle.
As intensely local businesses, convenience stores provide a safe place where runaways and at-risk youth can come in off the street and wait for a Safe Place volunteer to connect them with help.

ALEXANDRIA, Va.  National Safe Place Network President and CEO Laurie Jackson talks about how convenience stores and other community businesses are helping youth in distress in the latest NACS Convenience Matters podcast.

Jackson is featured in the episode Convenience Stores as Safe Places, which can be downloaded on iTunes by searching for Convenience Matters.

Convenience stores, such as QuikTrip that has been active with Safe Place since 1991, are literally changing lives, said podcast co-host Jeff Lenard, NACS vice president of strategic industry initiatives. These stores provide a safe place where runaways and at-risk youth can come in off the street, receive food and drink and wait for a volunteer from a Safe Place agency partner to connect them with professional help or a place to stay until their situation is resolved.

Convenience stores are a great fit for programs such as Safe Place because they are intensely local businesses: 90% of Americans say a convenience store is within 10 minutes of their home. Cumulatively, the U.S. convenience store industry serves 160 million customers per day, meaning that, on average, more than half of the U.S. population is at a convenience store every day.

Both QuikTrip and NACS serve on the National Safe Place Network Board of Directors.

Unfortunately, young people face troubling issues in todays world and its up to all of us to offer solutions, places where youth can go to connect to immediate help, Jackson said. Convenience stores are an essential thread in the national safety net for youth as each store has the opportunity to serve as a community leader providing compassion, support and attention to young people in need.

The NACS Convenience Matters podcasts debuted in February 2016. New episodes are released weekly, focusing on topics related to convenience retailing. Recent topics have included the future of fuels, how to sell more healthy options and c-store in the movies.
Yves here. Adam Davidson used to be a pet project of ours. Some examples from our archives:

Youll find Bill Black treats him with more deference than we would. But that has its uses, in that Black carefully picks through the serious misrepresentations, cherry-picking, and overstatements Adam Davidson makes in attacking Bernie Sanders economic plans.

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly posted with New Economic Perspectives

The journalist Adam Davidson has written an interesting article about economics and Bernie Sanders. As an economic adviser to Bernie I found his take on Keynesian and institutional economics of considerable interest. Institutional economics, contrary to Davidsons take on it, is thriving and the University of Missouri at Kansas City has long been a center of institutional economics. (I am one of the scholars at UMKC that works largely in this field.) Davidson treats institutional economics, which overwhelmingly studies microeconomics and the micro foundations of the economy as having been rendered obsolete by the transformation that Keynes insights sparked in the study of macroeconomics.

[Institutionalists] played significant roles in government and academia into the 1950s. John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the most (and last) prominent members of the school. By then, economics had been entirely transformed by the work of John Maynard Keynes and his 1936 masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The book more or less invented the field of macroeconomics  the study of how an economy works in the aggregate. And in the decades since, most academic economics and nearly all of government economic policy has revolved around Keyness insights.

Davidsons thesis is unsupportable as a matter of logic, history, and macroeconomic theory.

Logic

Logically, it is not possible that changes in macroeconomics introduced by Keynes made microeconomics irrelevant. Ecological studies are vital, but they do not make botany and zoology any less important.

History

Historically, Davidsons claim is incorrect. Institutional thought by classical economists began centuries before Veblen. Some of Adam Smiths most famous points are institutional. He warned against allowing corporations, emphasizing what he saw were severe agency problems inherent in the structure. He warned that the most innocent of institutions, by bringing the owners of competing firms together, were an aid to the creation of cartels  and warned that it was impossible and inappropriate to attempt to ban such meetings. Smith explained why a common institution of his day  small merchants making goods (bread and cuts of meat) whose quality the average consumer could determine  would create a strong incentive to build a reputation for good quality, particularly in a village or township.

Even if one ignores the classical economists institutional thoughts and begins with Veblen, Davidsons description is inaccurate. First, it ignores New Institutionalism (analogous to ignoring Post-Keynesian analysis by economists like N. Gregory Mankiw). Oliver Williamson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm. Williamson is a very conservative leader of the New Institutionalists and the award was for his theories of institutions.

Second, John Kenneth Galbraith was not the last prominent institutionalist. He played a significant role in economic thought for many decades after the 1950s.

Third, one of his sons, Jamie Galbraith, is a prominent institutionalist scholar. UMKC has multiple experts in institutional thought.

Fourth, large swaths of government economic policy are shaped by institutional thought. Many of this believe that this has proven disastrous because the proponents of institutional thought pushed policies that eviscerated vital institutions that had served this nation brilliantly and replaced them with ideological constructs that proved severely criminogenic. Prominent examples of these policies include the three des  deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization under the New Institutionalist claim that markets self-regulate. The changes in executive and professional compensation have also proven criminogenic. Indeed, they create the ability for the CEO to generate a Greshams dynamic and generate endemic fraud. The adoption and championing of subordinated debt as capital was a product of (failed) New Institutional policy recommendations. The repeal of Glass-Steagall, the adoption of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (which created the infamous black hole for many financial derivatives), the insane gutting of bank capital requirements in the Basel II accord, and the Reinventing Government mandate by the Clinton-Gore administration that financial regulators treat the banks and bankers as their customers are all (terrible) products of policy recommendations prompted by New Institutional theories.

Conversely, the reregulation and the resupervision of the savings and loan industry  and the creation of an effective criminal justice response to the elite frauds driving the second (and vastly more expensive) phase of the S&L debacle was the product of institutional economic policies. I led that effort at the staff level and drew on my training in institutional economics at the University of Michigan. Those actions took place in the 1980s and early 1990s. Similarly, Elizabeth Warrens promotion of the Consumer Finance Protection Agency was the product of her sophisticated understanding of institutional design.

Behavioral economics is frequently combined with institutional economics. Policy debates about whether and how to create systems to nudge customers typically represent a fusion of both fields of study.

Macroeconomic Theory

Davidson gets something important about macroeconomics partially correct, makes a false comparison, and then gets something far more critical about it profoundly incorrect.

[T]the so-called mainstream of economic thought, based on Keynesian models, is supported by decades of data, peer review and argument. Many noneconomists think of the fundamental economic divide between Democrats and Republicans as being between government-loving Keynesian Democrats on the one hand and, on the other, Republicans who extol the free-market principles. Over the last 75 years, the actual people designing Republican economic policies  figures like Martin Feldstein, Gregory Mankiw, Glenn Hubbard  have nearly all relied on Keynesian principles and models of the economy.

Well, no. First, the implied comparison is that the  mainstream of economic thought [is] based on Keynesian models. Again, this ignores the fact that there is, and can be, no Keynesian model of microeconomics. No one claims that microeconomics, which includes institutional analysis, lacks decades of data, peer review and argument. Davidsons implied comparison of macro with microeconomics is false.

Second, yes, there are decades of data, peer review and argument by mainstream economists. The obvious next question is whether the mainstream economic models and the micro theories accurately predict economic results. Recall that Davidson wrote his article on April 13, 2016. To put it gently, Davison has every reason to know that mainstream economic theories of micro and macro have failed repeatedly and to a degree that would be a scandal in any real science. Instead, his column seeks to convey the opposite impression that mainstream economics has reached a triumphal fusion supported by mountains of data and an exemplary peer review process.

The macroeconomic mainstream in academia demonstrated that its models are incapable of predicting or even recognizing the largest bubble in world history. Narayana Kocherlakota, a famous freshwater macro academic became President of the Minneapolis Fed, the most extreme regional bank adhering to the freshwater macroeconomics school, and described in 2010 the extent of the mainstreams failure.

I believe that during the last financial crisis, macroeconomists (and I include myself among them) failed the country, and indeed the world. In September 2008, central bankers were in desperate need of a playbook that offered a systematic plan of attack to deal with fast-evolving circumstances. Macroeconomics should have been able to provide that playbook. It could not. Of course, from a longer view, macroeconomists let policymakers down much earlier, because they did not provide policymakers with rules to avoid the circumstances that led to the global financial meltdown.

Third, the reasons the mainstream macro academics gives for the repeated, abject failure of their models is their failure to model accurately institutions. Dr. Athreya, the Richmond Feds Research Director, states that the models fail because of two central errors.

[A]symmetric information and limited commitment are economists two usual suspects in creating problems for decentralized trade.

By decentralized trade he means markets. Athreya asserts that the interaction of these twin scourges is minimal in spot markets, but can prove immensely destructive in IOU markets. The secondary mortgage market transactions and sales of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) demonstrates that even in the supposedly most ideal spot markets control fraud can become epidemic.

By limited commitment he means the inability of a party to a transaction to give credible, effectively enforceable commitments that will protect the counterparty from loss in the event that the first party breaches. That inability, of course, leads to increased defaults and greater losses upon default and increases the incentive to defraud and abuse counterparties. The ultimate form of abuse of asymmetric information and limited commitment is control fraud, which is one of the critical institutions in explaining hyper-inflated bubbles and financial crises. It turns out that mainstream economists now admit that their failure to understand the perverse incentives their institutional policies caused.

Similarly, Kocherlakota cited three underlying conceptual difficulties as producing the failure of mainstream macro models.

I highlight three particular weaknesses of current macro models. First, few, if any, models treat financial, pricing, and labor market frictions jointly. Second, even in macro models that contain financial market frictions, the treatment of banks and other financial institutions is quite crude. Finally, and most troubling, macro models are driven by patently unrealistic shocks.

Each of these weaknesses arises from a failure to understand institutions. Frictions are mainstream macro euphemisms for models that are predictive failures because they are poorly specified. A common example they use is that wages are sticky, and the explanation for that is institutional factors. Kocherlakota even uses the word institutions to describe the failure of the models to specify correctly how financial institutions operate. Third, the patently unrealistic [technological] shocks that mainstream macro uses as fudges to hide their models routine predictive failures depend on institutions (e.g., network analysis is all the rage in mainstream analyses of technology). The actual shocks that mainstream macro does not use in its models are also overwhelmingly institutional, particularly epidemics of control fraud.

Fourth, there are additional fatal model failures that mainstream macro does not admit. Mainstream macros dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models are based on the premise that mainstream micro general equilibrium (Arrow, Debreu, and McKenzie (ADM) models) are correct. ADM models are nonsense, so mainstream macro DSGE models are nonsense. Athreya admits that mainstream economists implicitly assume an ADM god (Athreya 2013: 103) (I am not making this up) because otherwise the standard economic assumptions would not produce equilibrium and would not maximize wealth or utility.

Those standard economic assumptions are explained by Athreya. Note how they implicitly predict massive control fraud unless governmental regulatory and law enforcement institutions are vigorous in constraining the CEOs perverse incentives.

[M]odern macroeconomics is almost, but not perfectly, dystopian. It remains maximally cynical about the behavior of people and the corporations they run. It presumes that large firms are aware that they are large, will monopolize if they are allowed to, and will exploit policymakers inability to commit to not bailing them out in bad eventualities. It implies that people will employ any means they know of to avoid taxes. And so on. [Therefore], there can be no presumption whatsoever about outcomes being efficient (Athreya 2013: 357).

Note that Athreya recognizes that the key is control fraud by focusing on the behavior of people and the corporations they run. He also admits that mainstream economic theory implies that people will employ any means they know of to avoid taxes and create illegal monopolies. It implies that CEOs will routinely use the firms they control as weapons to commit crimes that will enrich the CEO unless government institutions are so vigorous and effective that they counter the perverse incentives mainstream economists compensation policies have created for CEOs  and which CEOs in turn can employ to suborn internal and external controls and corrupt their employees. The reader can now see why mainstream economists are forced to postulate an ADM god that infallibly restrains the dystopian CEOs. Theoclassical economists, of course, do not actually believe there is an ADM god, which is why they make the assumption implicitly rather than explicitly. The alternative to assuming an ADM god is for mainstream economists to state that effective government institutions are the most essential requirement to protect us from dystopian CEOs who, under standard economic assumptions, will employ any means  including criminal  that increase their income. Theoclassical economists standard assumptions therefore, logically require that the only way to achieve a well-functioning economy is for the government to vigorously guard against (and prosecute) the crimes of the most powerful CEOs. Theoclassical economists intense anti-governmental ideology does not allow them to go there.

Fifth, mainstream macro proponents like Athreya (p. 340) strongly support Bernies policy that it is essential to get rid of the systemically dangerous banks, which he aptly describes as holding America for ransom. Again, Davidson is wrong to assume that the only economic policy economists have is macro policy.

Davidson is Wrong about Trade-Offs

Davidsons big point that he wants readers to believe is that mainstream economists have long reached a consensus on the inherent nature of trade-offs. Davidson wants the reader to believe that there is a consensus based on empirical data and that Bernie ignores the experts and the data and assumes out of existence reality  making his plan fanciful. The subtext is that Republican and Democratic macroeconomists share the same beliefs because the empirical data proves their similar models to be correct. Davidson wants you to believe that the supposed consensus is not a matter of anti-governmental dogma on the part of economists, but rather simply devotion to truth and the scientific method.

[W]hen they make their arguments, these economists are using similar models built around the same sets of empirical data. And one common assumption of those models is that government intervention in the market tends to come at some cost. Offering free health care and college to everybody will cost money that needs to be raised in other parts of the economy. Some might embrace those trade-offs, others might reject them, but economists agree that there are trade-offs, that the realistic possibilities of our economy have constraints.

None of these statements is accurate. First, it is not accurate to say that macroeconomists (notice Davidson again acts like only macroeconomists exist) are using similar models. Davidson leaves his readers with the impression that the financial world uses mainstream academics macro (DSGE) models. Financial firms macroeconomists, however, view DSGE models as failed and useless. They virtually never use DSGE models. Instead, they use variants of Keynesian models in which demand for goods and services is a paramount features. DSGE models generally ignore demand and are not similar to the models used in finance. Again, the models used in finance have far better predictive records than DSGE models, so if Davidson were correct that academic macroeconomists all believed in using the DSGE models that have been consistently falsified by reality then that would demonstrate that mainstream academic macroeconomists were wholly unscientific.

Second, DSGE models are not built on the basis of empirical data. They are weirdly theoretical and bear no resemblance to reality. Only the fudge factors (the patently unrealistic shocks) are empirical  and after the fact. The DSGE models predictions fail regularly and substantially. The DSGE model makers then go in and make new arbitrary changes to the (arbitrarily) assumed shocks to try to come closer to mimicking actual results. This is a mockery of the scientific method, which is why the DSGE models have failed for decades.

Third, freshwater DSGE models specify, contrary to the empirical data what is essentially a balanced budget requirement for nations like the U.S. that have freely floating sovereign currencies and borrow only in their own currency. This specification creates an artificial trade-off that typically does not exist in the real world. My UMKC colleagues and the experts they work with in finance such as Warren Mosler, are among the worlds leading experts in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Unlike DSGE modelers, MMT scholars begin with assumptions that are empirical and based on how sovereign currencies actually function.

I will leave the heavy lifting on MMT to my colleagues. Randy Wray has just done a column in New Economic Perspectives addressing the trade-off claim. To reprise two key points, any trade-off exists when real resources are so limited that they are fully employed. It does not apply to what Davidson asserts  money. He also thinks money must be raised (presumably through taxation), so he does not understand how sovereign money is created.

Fourth, the divisions among macroeconomists are typically ideological. Kocherlakota makes a sly admission.

Given the primitive state of computational tools, most researchers could only solve models of this kind. Butalmost coincidentallyin these models, all government interventions (including all forms of stabilization policy) are undesirable.

Yes, almost coincidentally.

Fifth, Davidson seems to be arguing that government action represents a net cost to the economy.

[G]overnment intervention in the market tends to come at some cost. Offering free health care and college to everybody will cost money that needs to be raised in other parts of the economy.

Davidsons examples are particularly poor exemplars of the point he seems to be trying to make. Most economists believe that government expenditures on education are one principal contributors to Americas becoming an economic superpower and helped produce very large political and social gains. Notice that Davidson assumes facts that are often incorrect when it comes to education and health. There was no market access for most Americans to education and only very limited access of most Americans to advanced medical care for much of our history. The governments provision of education and health for most Americans was not an intervention in an existing market so much as it represented the creation of a public market for education and health for the vast bulk of Americans.

Institutions, information, and infrastructure (I3) represent classic examples of government programs that produce widespread growth while bad institutions created by theoclassical microeconomists policies (such as the three des) are leading causes of massive losses of GDP and jobs and increasing inequality. Economists have estimated the U.S. loss of GDP through the course of the Great Recession and the long recovery at $24.3 trillion. A trillion is a thousand billions. The lost GDP in the eurozone is far larger because of the disastrous austerity dogma spread by theoclassical macroeconomists that dominate eurozone policy.

Athreya, a strong supporter of freshwater macro, agrees that creating effective institutions that restore the rule of law are vital to countering the negative externalities caused by elite fraud and global climate change.

A good deal of macroeconomic work on the crisis aims to clarify why privately optimal arrangements, particularly debt, can create ex-ante and ex-post inefficiency.

Hint to theoclassical economists: maybe the private arrangements are not remotely optimal because there is no ADM god in the real world to prevent bankers from ripping off and defrauding their customers.

Conclusion

Davidson has, perhaps unintentionally, helped illustrate why the ideological constraints of orthodox micro and macroeconomists have caused them their predictions and policies to fail. Two of the worst mistakes they made were related. The scientific study of institutional economics inherently requires scholars to take reality seriously and try to develop empirical methods that capture reality. Orthodox economists DSGE and ADM models are so embarrassing in terms of reality and predictive ability that they can be saved only by the implicit assumption of an ADM god invented by theoclassical economists to assume out of existence the frauds and abuses that make their ADM and DSGE models  under their own dystopian assumptions  fantasies. The ADM god is the only thing that can save the theoclassical economists dogmas. Note also that their ADM god implicitly acts infallibly and with zero trade-offs.
Public pension funds are going to get dinged when their private equity fund partners engage in the form of looting known as withdrawing from underfunded pension plans.

One thing that has always seemed astonishingly short-sighted is the way public pension funds have helped finance the elimination of private pension funds. Admittedly, there are not all that many defined benefit plans left standing, but the project has been underway for some time. Now that government employees are virtually the only people in the US who have defined benefit plans, the calls keep increasing to have them eliminated so as to put public workers on the same perilous footing as private sector workers. That of course ignores the fact that people in the private sector could have sought work in the public sector but didnt and that the pensions of government workers are part of a total compensation package, as in their wages are lower by virtue of having retirement goodies.

In a ruling last month, Judge Douglas Woodlock ruled that two Sun Capital funds that had jointly purchased a company, Scott Brass, that went bankrupt, were subject to withdrawal liability of their pension fund. Weve embedded a short memo by Wilkie Farr on the ruling as well as the decision itself at the end of the post.

The basis for the ruling. The short version is that if a controlled group that owns more than 80% of a company terminates an underfunded pension plan, it is responsible for withdrawal liability under ERISA. The Department of Labor did not want investors being able to close underfunded plans without incurring a serious cost; otherwise, it would be common for pension plans to be shut down any time they became underfunded, leaving beneficiaries in the lurch.

Sun Capital had sought to get around that by having two Sun Capital funds invest in a company that bought Scott Brass, with one owning 70% and the other 30% so as to fall below the 80% trigger. The Teamsters and Sun Capital sued each other, and the judges initial ruling in favor of Sun Capital was overruled in part and returned to Judge Woodlock to determine two issues key to deciding the case: whether the funds were engaged in a trade of business, and whether they were under common control.

The active nature of the investment as far as the general partners are concerned would seem to make them meet the trade or business test, but what about the passive limited partners?* Interestingly, they were hoist on the sharing of monitoring and transaction fees. The appeals court had already ruled that one of the two Sun funds, by virtue of the investors receiving management fee offsets, met the test. Woodlock was to determine whether the second fund, where no fee offsets had been paid but had been carried forward and were due and owing, was also in a trade or business. Woodlock concluded yes.

The second test was common control. Amusingly, Wilkie Farr sniffed that:

The District Court treated the private equity funds as if they were a partnership-in-fact for purposes of a specific investment, despite the fact that the funds had substantially different investors and portfolio companies, filed separate partnership tax returns, prepared separate financial statements and maintained separate bank accounts.

ERISA refers to a section of the tax code to define this issue, and former IRS resident scholar, now law professor at University of North Carolina Gregg Polsky advised the Teamsters on this case. And as you can see from this extract from the ruling, key precedents have taken a broader view of this question that formal niceties:

The agreement of the parties and their conduct in executing its terms; the contributions, if any, which each party has made to the venture; the parties control over income and capital and the right of each to make withdrawals; whether each party was a principal and coproprietor, sharing a mutual proprietary interest in the net profits and having an obligation to share losses, or whether one party was the agent or employee of the other, receiving for his services contingent compensation in the form of a percentage of income; whether business was conducted in the joint names of the parties; whether the parties filed Federal partnership returns or otherwise represented to respondent or to persons with whom they dealt that they were joint venturers; whether separate books of account were maintained for the venture; and whether the parties exercised mutual control over and assumed mutual responsibilities for the enterprise. Luna v. Commissioner, 42 T.C. 1067, 1077-78 (1964)

As the Judge Woodlock concluded:

The two Funds were organizationally separate  and this remains important under Culbertson and Luna  but the record shows no meaningful evidence of actual independence in their relevant co-investments.

The only case that addressed similar organizational issues was Bd. of Trs., Sheet Metal Workers Natl Pension Fund v. Palladium Equity Partners, LLC. Although the case was settled before fact-finding was completed. Here, three Palladium funds had together purchased over 80% of a group of industrial painting companies which went bankrupt and withdrew from a multi-employer pension plan. The judge noted:

The Palladium court was clear that as a matter of law, partnership-in-fact and common control can be found even across formally fully independent entities.

Implications. This ruling ought to wake up private equity investors, since the Sun Capital ruling will not only result in clawbacks to satisfy the withdrawal liability but presumably opens the door to other cases. The beneficiaries of pension plans terminated and were stiffed on withdrawal liability payments by Sun Capital-type structuring for controlling groups to keep the biggest individual owners share below 80% would have grounds to sue, or unions representing them might act on their behalf. Similarly, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which backstops private pension funds, it itself badly underfunded and should also lodge cases. I have yet to see any commentary on what the statute of limitations is in this area and therefore which plan terminations would be exposed, but you can expect that youll be hearing more about this issue.

Recent_Sun_Capital_Decision_Increases_Private_Equity_Funds_Exposure_to_Pension_Liabilities

Recent_Sun_Capital_Decision_Increases_Private_Equity_Funds_Exposure_to_Pension_Liabilities

MEMO-AND-ORDER-3-28-2016

MEMO AND ORDER 3-28-2016
Kathleen Passidomo and Matt Hudson

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By June Fletcher of the Naples Daily News

The two candidates vying for the state Senate seat for District 28 squared off Monday before members of the Naples Press Club.

Although both Republicans, Kathleen Passidomo and Matt Hudson revealed sharply different goals and agendas when it comes to hot-button issues affecting Southwest Florida, like business growth, health care and the environment.

The two are vying to replace Sen. Garrett Richter in the Senate in a redrawn district that includes all of Collier and Hendry counties and part of Lee County.

Passidomo, who represents House District 106 in the Florida House of Representatives, emphasized the need to promote the interests of small businesses by cutting down on regulations and fees.

"We've done a lot already, but we need to do more," Passidomo said to 35 active and retired journalists at the NPC's monthly luncheon at the Hilton Naples.

While Florida "kicks butt" when compared with other states like California, Illinois, New York and Texas, when it comes to private job creation and low taxes, it still needs tort reform and a legal climate that reduces frivolous lawsuits, she said.

Florida also needs to protect workers to stave off a repeat of the foreclosure crisis that wracked the region during the last economic downturn, she said.

She reminded the group that 14,000 construction workers lost their jobs during the Great Recession, which exacerbated the area's foreclosure problems.

Their plight was a big reason she decided to run for office, she said. Once elected in 2010, she worked with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to expedite the foreclosure process. The bill she sponsored was signed into law in 2013.

Passidomo also said she wanted to do more to protect the area's elderly population from financial abuse, citing a case from Marco Island where a caretaker managed to take over an elderly couple's credit and debit cards, sell their jewelry and silverware, and take over the couple's home.

"Elderly people should be cherished and protected," she said.

Passidomo also weighed in on the Florida Water and Land Conservation Initiative, Amendment 1, which was approved in 2014.

The measure was designed to designate a third of net revenue from the excise tax on documents to the Land Acquisition Trust Fund.

"I think we made a mistake in how we handled the application of the funds," Passidomo said.

She said the money was wrongly used for salaries and other purposes not associated with the purchase of land  though she added that more study needs to be done on which lands should be purchased to handle potential flooding, runoff and other problems stemming from how water is retained in Lake Okeechobee.

Passidomo said it was partly rectified by Legacy Florida, the last bill passed in the most recent session, that earmarks $200 million toward Everglades restoration.

Hudson, who represents House District 80, said more needs to be done about the aging Herbert Hoover Dike, a 143-mile earthen dam that has been holding back the waters of Lake Okeechobee for five decades.

"It's not a question of if it will fail but when," said Hudson, who has served in the House since 2007.

He proposed creating new safety valves for controlling high water levels in the lake, quicker restoration of the Kissimmee River, which feeds into it, and more pressure on the federal government to improve the dike.

On another controversial environmental issue  hydraulic fracturing and seismic testing  he advocated backing off, calling them "private property issues."

Oil drilling has been done "safely and soundly for 70 years," Hudson said.

"Before we make any rash decisions, we should develop some Florida-based science," he said.

Hudson, who has spent several years as chairman of the House health care appropriations subcommittee, said his experience has sensitized him to the disparate needs of Florida residents.

He said access to health care varies greatly. That makes it important to elect someone who understands how much problems facing someone needing care differs for people in rural and urban areas.

"Imagine waking up (after an accident) with no hospitals nearby," he said. "Now imagine not knowing which hospital the ambulance will take you to because there are so many."
The District School Board of Collier County unveiled a new logo at a news conference on Jan. 28, 2015. (Carolina Hidalgo/Staff)

Collier County teachers' union leaders may have been careless in their distribution of newsletters and other material with a political bent but they did nothing that amounts to a violation of policy or law.

So says school district attorney Jon Fishbane, who last week told board members he spent close to 30 hours looking into allegations that the union was engaging in politics during working hours.

His 90-minute presentation left two board members, those who feel they've been targeted by the union, unsatisfied.

"I think he's flat-out wrong," said Kelly Lichter, a frequent critic of the union's activities.

Erika Donalds said Fishbane's report left questions unanswered but says there's little she can do to force further action. "I don't have the resources to combat his findings," Donalds said.

Allegations that the leadership of the teachers' union has distributed politically charged newsletters, talked down candidates and encouraged members to recruit sympathetic voters  all during the work day  have circulated for months.

In March, a preliminary inquiry by Fishbane showed that the union routinely violated a provision of its contract with the district that requires leaders to provide school principals with copies of newsletters and other material to be placed in teachers' mailboxes.

He promised a more thorough investigation and on Tuesday he presented that report at the board meeting in Everglades City.

Fishbane cited several factors that weighed in the union's favor:

# Lichter and Donalds said teachers told them about what they considered improper politicking in the schools but the teachers wouldn't talk to Fishbane, fearing reprisal from the district. That reduced the information they provided to hearsay, he said.

# None of the material in question openly advocated for a particular candidate, instead reminding members about the importance of the upcoming elections and urging them to educate themselves about the candidates.

# Neither Lichter nor Donalds is up for election in 2016, so negative comments about them wouldn't be electioneering.

# There's a difference between a teacher's "work day" and the "student day." In the contract with the district, the union is allowed to have meetings and distribute information at school during teachers' work day, so long it is before or after the student day when classes are in session.

# Union Executive Director Jonathon Tuttle is not a school district employee, so is not subject to board policies.

In sum, Fishbane said, "I don't find that the union has violated statutory law or board policy."

Fishbane called the questions raised by Lichter and Donalds serious and complex. He compiled 29 pages of notes and documents to address them.

One document, school board policy 3231, states, "Employees shall not participate in any political campaign for an elective office while on duty."

State statute 110.233 says no state employee shall, "Take any part of a political campaign while on duty."

The district's contract with the Collier County Education Association says, "The association may be permitted to transact official association business before or after the official student day at each center."

Fishbane said placing a union newsletter in teacher mailboxes falls under association business and doesn't violate law or policy. The newsletter sometimes includes references to websites that take up political positions but nothing in the newsletter itself has amounted to electioneering, Fishbane said.

Likewise a form asking teachers to sign up voters with the phrase "I support traditional public schools  some current candidates do not," did not cross the line, Fishbane determined.

"These fall in my view very much in protected political speech," he said.

Fishbane said reports that Tuttle may have made disparaging remarks about Lichter and Donalds had "a ring of authenticity about them" but that he couldn't pin down any violations.

Lichter said she doesn't care if union members disparage her, as long as it's not on taxpayers' time. "If they do it outside school, that's OK. Talk all the smack you want. The issue here, this is happening  in school hours," she said.

Fishbane said the administration doesn't have the ability to attend union meetings held before or after student hours. "That would be surveillance," he said.

Doug Lewis, a parent who has long been critical of the union's role in school board elections, said the district shouldn't have approved a contract that lets the union hold meetings at school while teachers are being paid. "Why are we having union meetings on taxpayers' time?" he wondered.

In March, Lichter sent an email to the Florida Department of Education detailing her frustration. The DOE responded four days later saying it was a matter for the local board to address.

Board Chairwoman Julie Sprague read the DOE response at the outset of Fishbane's presentation and opined that Lichter reaching out to the DOE crossed a line of "boardmanship."

Lichter defended the letter, saying she has a First Amendment right to express a concern.

Board member Kathleen Curatolo said the board should act as a body, not as individuals.

Twice during the meeting, Lichter asked Curatolo to stop laughing while she asked questions and conversed with Fishbane.

Later, Lichter said the treatment she received at the meeting is an example of why teachers are reluctant to go public with concerns. "She (Sprague) tried to shame me for bringing something forward with the Department of Education. This is a prime-time display of why people won't come forward."

(Connect with Brent Batten at brent.batten@naplesnews.com, on Twitter@NDN_BrentBatten and at facebook.com/ndnbrentbatten.
A dredging barge pumps sand from Clam Pass on April 16, 2016, in Naples. (David Albers/Staff)

By Eric Staats of the Naples Daily News

A dredger has begun digging sand out of Clam Pass in North Naples in a slow-motion race against time to save a dying mangrove forest.

Heavy winter rains and poor tidal flushing at the mouth of the choked off pass have flooded patches of mangroves that grow below the Pelican Bay neighborhood's high-rise condos, causing an 8-acre die-off. More mangroves are showing signs of stress, biologist Tim Hall said. He said the die-off might not be over.

"We don't know yet," Hall said. "It's too early to tell whether we've hit the bottom of that downward slide."

Hall, representing a Pelican Bay taxing district, has been trying to get a Clam Pass dredging permit from the U.S. Corps of Engineers for almost two years. The review faced hurdles with endangered species like the smalltooth sawfish and red knot.

Besides that, dredging at Clam Pass has generated intense public scrutiny over its effect on sea grass beds and boating access between the Gulf of Mexico and the Seagate neighborhood and a county kayak and canoe launch.

Reviewers signed off on the 10-year permit  Hall called it a compromise over the extent of dredging and what estuary conditions would trigger new dredging  and Collier County commissioners declared an emergency to speed up the hiring of the dredger.

Work has been going on for about a week, and is on schedule to be completed by the end of the month and the official start of sea turtle nesting season.

"The weather's been good and he's made very good progress," said Neil Dorrill, director of the Pelican Bay Services Division, the arm of county government overseeing the dredging.

A mangrove die-off grew to 50 acres in the Clam Bay estuary before a 1998 dredging project restored flows to the forest. Crews were back at work at Clam Pass in 2002, 2007 and 2013  another emergency dredging to reopen the pass.

Collier County was working to get a new 10-year dredging permit at the time, but frustrated county commissioners put that on hold to focus on an emergency permit and transferred authority for Clam Pass to the Pelican Bay taxing district.

The emergency dredging in 2013, by design, did not remove all the sand from interior portions of the pass, accelerating shoaling that has caused the new emergency.

Both emergencies triggered impromptu volunteer brigades of beachgoers to take turns shoveling a path from the Gulf of Mexico to the back bays of Clam Pass.

Collier County plans to close its Clam Pass Park in North Naples on Wednesday and Thursday because of construction traffic related to a Clam Pass dredging project. The park's boardwalk will be open but access to the beach from the boardwalk will be closed. The park's canoe and kayak launch also will be closed.
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Catch up on local government, politics, sports, celeb sightings and Halloween fun.
North Collier Fire Control and Rescue District firefighters work the scene of a house fire that heavily damaged a home at 651 14th Ave. NE on Monday, Feb. 1, 2016, in Golden Gate Estates. Jerry Sanford, a spokesman for the fire district, said a man and woman moved into the home Sunday night as renters. (David Albers/Staff)

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By Greg Stanley of the Naples Daily News

Leaders of Collier County's three independent fire districts are talking about combining forces.

The potential merger of the three  Greater Naples, North Collier and Immokalee fire districts  would bring about the goal that consolidation proponents have sought for decades, the creation of a single unified fire district covering the entire unincorporated county.

The merger could prove tricky. But after voters once again showed overwhelming support for the idea in a March straw poll, the time is right to discuss it, said Jeff Page, a commissioner for Greater Naples fire.

Greater Naples commissioners have asked the leaders of the North Collier and Immokalee districts to hold a joint meeting on May 17 to talk about what it would take to merge.

"This will let us see who's interested and who's not," Page said. "We know that Immokalee hasn't been that excited about the idea in the past, but we'll get an idea where everyone is at and maybe come up with some short-term and future goals."

Immokalee residents may be hard pressed to give up the autonomy of their own district, said Anne Goodnight, Immokalee fire commissioner.

"Historically, when Immokalee has been merged or the county has taken over services Immokalee has gotten the shaft," Goodnight said. "There's no reason for us to believe that this is not going to continue. We would have to make sure that all of our new equipment and our firefighters aren't going to go to Naples."

Goodnight, a former county commissioner, is also wary about the potential for Immokalee losing its voice in a countywide district.

"The last time we had a school board representative who lived in Immokalee was in '86," she said. "I was the last county commissioner who lived here and I left office in 1992. I'm not saying that it's not going to happen, or even that I'm against it. But can you see why we might be hesitant?"

Immokalee fire commissioners will decide whether to attend the joint meeting at their regularly scheduled meeting Thursday.

After decades of talk and no action, the county's scattered fire districts have started to consolidate over the past few years. Seven districts have become five since 2014 and Greater Naples is in the process of merging with two county government-run fire districts, leaving just three.

The three districts all have different tax rates, which could complicate merger efforts. The North Collier district, which was created in 2014 by the merger of North Naples and Big Corkscrew Island fire districts, has two separate tax rates, itself, set by its former boundaries.

"That does make it a little trickier," said Norman Feder, North Collier fire commissioner. "We merged with two unions and two millage rates. That needs to be discussed and evaluated. We would have to make sure it's a good move that serves everybody's interest. We need to look at this. This will be a significant step given where we've been with merger talks over the last 20 to 30 years."

Combined, Greater Naples and North Collier serve the bulk of the county's population, nearly 300,000 people. If just the two were to merge, the new district's boundaries would cover the entirety of the county except for the Immokalee area and the cities of Naples and Marco Island, which run their own municipal fire departments.
By Maryann Batlle of the Naples Daily News

The lawyer asked former Lee County Commissioner Tammy Hall to say, under oath, how many times she has discussed VR Laboratories with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Hall, 55, was giving her sworn testimony as part of the lawsuit Lee County filed in circuit court to recoup the nearly $4.7 million paid to VR Labs for jobs the company promised but never created.

DOCUMENT: Read the transcript of Tammy Hall's deposition.

"I have been told by the FBI and the U.S. attorney not to discuss this issue, so I'm not comfortable having this conversation until I'm released by them to discuss it," Hall said, according to the transcript of her deposition, which took place Feb. 10 at the Knott, Ebelini Hart law firm in downtown Fort Myers.

Casey Weidenmiller  the lawyer, who represents VR Labs  pressed again: "And I don't want to put you in a position where you have to do something that you think would put you at odds with the U.S. Attorney and the FBI. I understand that that could be somewhat stressful; however, can you tell me who at the FBI told you that?"

Hall gave him nothing.

Five days later, Weidenmiller filed a motion that asks Lee Circuit Court Judge John E. Duryea to compel Hall to answer questions about her talks with the U.S. attorney's office and what information about VR Labs she gave federal investigators.

"There was no proper basis for Ms. Hall to refuse to answer the questions during the deposition," Weidenmiller's motion states.

But Hall spent six months in federal prison in 2014 under a plea deal she struck with the U.S. government. Hall pleaded guilty to one wire fraud charge for taking $33,756 from her 2010 re-election campaign to pay for personal expenses, such as her home mortgage and her credit card bills.

During Hall's sentencing hearing in January 2014, Eric C. Padron, her defense lawyer, asked the U.S. judge for leniency because of Hall's cooperation with an ongoing federal investigation.

"Except having a gun and a badge, everything that is expected of an agent, she has done," Padron said then.

What information Hall gave federal investigators is a mystery. The U.S. Department of Justice, by policy, will not acknowledge an investigation until it serves subpoenas.

The Daily News emailed questions to the Justice Department about the Hall case and the motion to compel filed by Weidenmiller. A spokesman for the department, based in Tampa, declined to comment.

Lee County declined to make anyone available for an interview about Hall's deposition.

When reached by phone, Hall also declined to comment because she wants to follow Lee County government policy.

"I would do anything to help Lee County," Hall said.

Once a rising star in Southwest Florida's political scene, Hall has stepped into a private life in Lee County since her prison term ended in August 2014.

As a felon who has not had her civil rights restored, Hall cannot hold elected office or vote. She works as marketing director for CFS Roofing Services in Fort Myers, which is owned by David Crowther, the husband of her longtime friend, Karen, according to Hall's deposition transcript.

Her link to Crowther is part of VR Labs' defense against Lee County in the pending lawsuit.

VR Labs claims in court documents that Hall pressured Lee County to punish the company because of payment disputes it had with contractors she knew, including David Crowther. VR Labs contends Hall contacted the federal government, which led to further troubles.

She denied those claims during her deposition.

Hall was a commissioner in 2011 when the county, trying to find ways to recover from the depths of a crippling recession, offered VR Labs $5 million from taxpayer funds in exchange for more than 200 new jobs. The startup, with an office in Bonita Springs, had committed to starting a bottling plant in south Lee County that would mass produce natural health drinks.

In July 2012, after Lee County had cut checks to VR Labs worth about $4.69 million, Crowther told Hall that his company's work as a subcontractor at the bottling plant had gone unpaid.

That's when she started digging and found VR Labs was being "vague" with the county, Hall said during her deposition.

Gaps in Lee County's safeguards became apparent to her as she started to review records on her own and ask questions, Hall said.

Lee County's Economic Development Office, under the leadership of then-Director Jim Moore, failed to vet VR Labs, and commissioners failed to ask enough questions before approving the contract, Hall said.

Moore "did not present to the county commission a full picture of what we were voting on," Hall is quoted in the transcript as having said. "I will take responsibility that it's my obligation as a county commissioner when these things come up to continue asking questions until I'm satisfied, but I made an assumption based on Mr. Moore's previous applications that all these things had been done."

Daily News attempts to reach Moore for comment were unsuccessful.

Lee County stopped payments to VR Labs that same summer. The county sued VR Labs for a refund in March 2014.

Since then, other prominent county leaders have been deposed, including current Lee Commissioners Frank Mann and John Manning. They were on the county board with Hall when the VR Labs contract went through. Mann and Manning have said they, too, have talked to the U.S. DOJ about the deal.
Registered nurse Kathy Moore, left, prepares Bill Hall, 75, before he donates his 438th pint at the NCH Community Blood Center in Naples on Monday, April 18, 2016. Hall has been donating blood since 1960. "You give a gift of good health to somebody that is hurting," Hall says. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff)

SHARE Bill Hall, 75, donates his 438th pint at the NCH Community Blood Center in Naples on Monday, April 18, 2016. Hall has been donating blood since 1960. "You give a gift of good health to somebody that is hurting," Hall says. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff) Bill Hall, 75, donates his 438th pint at the NCH Community Blood Center in Naples on Monday, April 18, 2016. Hall has been donating blood since 1960. "You give a gift of good health to somebody that is hurting," Hall says. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff) Bill Hall, 75, donates his 438th pint at the NCH Community Blood Center in Naples on Monday, April 18, 2016. Hall has been donating blood since 1960. "You give a gift of good health to somebody that is hurting," Hall says. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff)

By Alexi C. Cardona of the Naples Daily News

Bill Hall has helped save a lot of lives in the past 50-plus years.

He's not a first responder and he doesn't wear a cape, but staff members at the NCH Community Blood Center think he's a hero.

Monday marked Hall's 438th donation of blood products, which over his lifetime has included whole blood, plasma and platelets.

He spent about three hours at the NCH Community Blood Center in downtown Naples on Monday donating platelets, which he does every two weeks.

"By giving blood, you give the gift of good health to someone who's hurting," Hall, 75, said. "There's no downside to that."

In 1960, Hall's grandfather was diagnosed with a blood disorder and needed two transfusions.

"You could see after the transfusions that every day he was getting better," Hall said. "His color came back, he regained his strength and he got his pep back. I realized then the importance of blood in the human body."

He has been regularly donating blood ever since. His type is AB positive.

Hall used to donate blood every two months in Minneapolis, his hometown. As former president of a Minnesota company that offers building services, he recruited people from other corporations to donate blood, too.

He has shared his time between Minneapolis and Naples for about 20 years now. He has donated mostly platelets and plasma for that time.

"When I got here, I learned that the best use of my blood was to donate platelets," Hall said.

Laura Rosen, community relations manager for NCH Community Blood Center, said the amount of blood and platelets needed at the center varies, but on average the center needs 40 to 50 pints of blood and five to six platelet donations per day.

In February 2016, the American Red Cross issued a statement saying the organization was facing a blood and platelet shortage.

Rosen said blood shortages can be seen at the local level too, and that the Community Blood Center has seen a 1.5 percent increase in blood use from last year.

"We're trying to encourage people to give blood more regularly," Rosen said.

People can donate blood every 56 days, and donated blood has a shelf-life of 42 days, according to the American Red Cross.

For more information about donating blood, see givebloodcbc.org or call 239-624-4120.
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Several significant decisions are ahead for Southwest Florida in the coming week on important priorities for this year and beyond. In addition, issues that warrant public attention will be up for discussion. Here are some key ones:

Bonita Springs High School

Lee County School Board members are to be asked Tuesday to move ahead with a $70.9 million project to build a high school in Bonita Springs.

Superintendent Greg Adkins and his staff recommend buying the 76-acre Imperial Parkway site at Shangri-La Road from Tex Development Corp. for $11 million following two appraisals that came in at $12 million or more, district records show. Design and construction of the school is estimated at $54 million.

This is before the board at its 6 p.m. meeting. District offices are at 2855 Colonial Blvd. in Fort Myers.

We look forward to this overdue, historic day for Bonita Springs to get a high school. We've endorsed the Imperial Parkway site as preferable to the second choice, 67 acres on the north side of Bonita Beach Road at Bonita Grande Drive.

The Imperial Parkway location makes more sense to us because it is closer to more of the neighborhoods where students live, now and into the future if development is properly limited in the density reduction, water recharge area of Bonita Springs. We also see a concerning traffic problem by building a school at the Bonita Grande site so close to Interstate 75 at Bonita Beach Road. Transportation planners have described that interchange as in critical condition and needing $43 million of work that doesn't have a funding source identified.

Concerns about vehicles speeding along Imperial Parkway can be addressed by adding traffic signals, the school zone and law enforcement. Protesting neighbors could have objections alleviated with substantial buffers in the campus design; a high school needs about 40 acres and the district would buy 76 acres.

North Collier fire

Some North Collier Fire Control and Rescue District residents objected last year to a budgeting decision made by the elected board that oversees the district.

In November 2014, when voters agreed to combine the Big Corkscrew and North Naples fire districts into one, they were told operational expenses would be separated by "service area" because the tax rate in the two merged fire districts differs significantly.

Fire department officials say they tried one accounting method in the first budget year, but it created expense tracking complications because staff and equipment routinely cross the invisible "service area" line. So they came up with a calculation based on first-year expenses to split operational costs at about 86.5 percent in North Naples and 13.5 percent in Big Corkscrew.

That prompted concern one "service area" is subsidizing another, which voters were told wouldn't happen.

Fire commissioners have wisely set a meeting to publicly air the accounting breakdown. It's at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the fire station at 1885 Veterans Park Drive, off Immokalee Road in North Naples.

Bottleneck intersection

The congested intersection of U.S. 41 at Bonita Beach Road was a hot topic during the recent Bonita Springs city election.

At a meeting that begins at 9 a.m. Wednesday at City Hall, 9101 Bonita Beach Road, the newly configured City Council can take an important step forward by authorizing a $136,000 study of several ways roads in the area could be changed to bring relief to that bottleneck without building an overpass.

Collier in the future

Planning for Collier County's future is one of several key issues we highlighted at the outset of the year.

Collier planners take the next step on updates to four growth plans when the Golden Gate Area Master Plan, a 10-20 year vision for the community, is discussed at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the fire station at 100 13th Street SW.

Also, it's the last week to send in comments about the scope of a wildlife study of 152,000 acres in northeast Collier. The deadline is Monday, April 25, to send comments to U.S. Fish and Wildlife's South Florida Ecological Services Office, 1339 20th St., Vero Beach, Fla. 32960.
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If it seems like the same issue keeps getting dredged up in Collier County, that's because it does.

The clearing of clogged Clam Pass in North Naples is underway again, the latest chapter in an ongoing battle to keep the passageway clear of sand since it began to substantially close in 2012. Significantly, it's not the only Southwest Florida pass in trouble today.

Clam Pass shoaled twice in 2013, resulting in emergency dredging. By April 2015, two years later, an engineering report says the pass saw "sand accumulation at critical conditions." The lack of tropical storms last summer and strong tides got enough water through the pass in 2015, the report states.

By March, Collier commissioners again declared an emergency at the pass, authorizing a $460,000 project that county records show is coming primarily from tourist development dollars  the bed tax on hotel rooms and short-term rentals. That's the same source looked to in the 2013 emergency closure, documents given to commissioners in March show.

Project managers expect Clam Pass dredging to be completed by month's end, before the start of turtle nesting season. In the meantime, Clam Pass Park will close Wednesday and Thursday to make room for construction equipment. The park's boardwalk will be open, but can't be used to get to the beach.

Other passes

As Clam Pass work began last week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers coincidentally moved to solicit bids to dredge Gordon Pass in Naples, some nine miles to the south, connecting Naples Bay and the Gulf.

According to the Corps, bids are due by mid-May to dredge a channel 10- to 12-feet deep through the pass, last cleared in 2010. Project documents list the cost range at $1 million-$5 million, while an announcement of the project by two Southwest Florida congressmen said the Corps budgeted $2 million for it.

Credit goes to U.S. Rep. Curt Clawson, R-Bonita Springs, and Miami Republican U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, whose district includes part of Collier, for getting this expedited. The Corps initially said Gordon Pass dredging wouldn't be considered until 2017 because it didn't stack up against other shallow-port projects nationally. The congressmen shared reports of boats getting damaged by a shoal. A 2014 survey showed pass depths below 6 feet.

Elsewhere in Collier, Wiggins Pass in North Naples was targeted in 2015 with a $240,000 project. Some boaters already are suggesting the pass is too shallow.

In Lee, Clawson announced earlier this year the Corps will spend $900,000 to dredge the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway used by more than 155,000 boats a year and $3 million to dredge the channel at Fort Myers Beach, urgent with the Coast Guard Station there. Meanwhile, Lee officials are introducing plans this week on Sanibel Island for a Blind Pass study.

Adding up

$3 million here, $2 million there, $460,000 here, $900,000 there and soon you're talking serious money.

Pass dredging isn't just for the rich to get their boats to and from the Gulf.

"Gordon Pass is the main channel serving Collier County's commercial fishing industry, charter vessels, and recreational watercraft, and is one of the economic engines to our region's tourism economy," Clawson notably said in a statement.

Clawson also has said that for every direct marine-related job, more than three other jobs are generated and every $1 spent creates $2.21 in subsequent spending.

We recently heard a pitch in Collier that investing bed tax dollars for spring training multiplies into the economy several times. We'd echo that for beaches and passes.

While Clawson and Diaz-Balart secured many federal dollars for our projects, we're skeptical that a nation $19 trillion in debt can keep taking on regional concerns.

Meanwhile, Collier has one of coastal Florida's lowest bed tax rates at 4 percent. A 1 percent increase would raise $4 million yearly. Beaches and passes are in constant need of expensive fixes. We've been spared a major tropical event since 2005 but at some point our good fortune will run out.

To us, it all adds up  it's time to stop passing the buck and have a serious debate about increasing Collier's bed tax.
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David Griffith, Naples

Socialism defined

Many of you on the right fail to understand Bernie Sanders' socialism.

He said in an interview with The Associated Press in November 1990, "To me, socialism doesn't mean state ownership of everything, not by any means. It means creating a nation, and a world, in which all human beings have a decent living."

To Sanders, socialism doesn't mean the failed Russian model of the economy where only state ownership of the means of production and public services is allowed.

His model for our economic system is Scandinavia. He is quoted as saying in an interview with The Guardian in November 2006: "Twenty years ago, when people thought about socialism they were thinking about the Soviet Union, about Albania. Now they think about Scandinavia. People understand I'm talking about democratic socialism."

Merriam Webster defines democratic socialism as a form of government in which state regulation (without state ownership) would provide economic growth and a fair distribution of income. In the U.S., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA are examples of state ownership which benefit everyone.

But this is not a model for all U.S. companies. In Scandinavia, there is no movement toward government ownership of private companies (Volvo, Tuborg, Electrolux, Nokia and 52 other large companies are listed in Wikipedia), but there is regulation by the state to ensure that the interests of the people are served.

Recently, Science Alert's research of the world's happiest countries showed this year's winner is Denmark, followed closely by Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway. The U.S. ranked 13th. Notice that democratic socialism produces the happiest countries.

So whether you agree with Sanders or not, at least he is trying to support the interests of the majority of us, not just the top 1 percent.
SHARE Dr. James Hampton Retired Emergency Room physician

By Dr. James Hampton, Naples

Guest commentary

I am a retired emergency room physician who worked on Marco Island and at NCH Healthcare System's Downtown Naples Hospital.

I worked a total of 17 years. During that time I had direct and personal contact with Collier County Emergency Medical Services (EMS) personnel. I was pleasantly surprised at how competent and efficient they are.

While on Marco Island for several years, the EMS was stationed at our facility. They were all trained by Dr. Robert Tober and when they were "Toberized" they were very competent.

On March 15, we voters were asked to vote yes or no on a straw ballot for or against the consolidation of all fire departments along with EMS.

I feel the correct choice should be an independent county EMS department which is already consolidated and a consolidated fire department system that runs fire calls and medical response as dictated and requested by EMS.

At the present time, less than 3 percent of all fire department calls are for fires or fire-related  97 to 98 percent of fire department calls are EMS calls.

By doing this we can eliminate all of the fire chiefs except one who trains firefighters. The present fire stations can still support EMS ambulances and personnel, but there would be no necessity for a firefighter or fire truck to be dispatched unless there was a fire involved.

I strongly recommend that there be one EMS chief over medical response and one fire chief over fire response. The fire chiefs can appoint one from their ranks and EMS will have its own overall medical direction over all medical response.

Tober has been the director of EMS for almost 40 years, was voted twice as the EMS director of the year for the state of Florida and won the first physicians of the year award from NCH Healthcare System.

He is chairman of the sudden cardiac arrest committee in Florida. Under his supervision the EMS department has been voted the best in Florida and, two years later, the best in the United States.

At present, his salary is much less than any present fire chief.

Does anyone doubt for a moment or not recognize that the turmoil between fire districts and EMS is based on turf, unions and money?

I seriously doubt Tober knows anything about fighting major fires. I also seriously doubt firefighters in general know very much about emergency medical care. They certainly do not know all the intricacies involved in saving lives. I realize that most "emergencies" are not life-threatening, but the ones that are required very skilled care.

I would appreciate your opinions about my suggestions. I most appreciate opinions from those who have no connection with EMS or the fire departments.
Baby Basics of Collier County (www.BabyBasicsCollier.org), a volunteer organization that provides free diapers and kindness to over 378 infants and toddlers from low-income, working families in Collier County and Bonita Springs, is thrilled to announce that it raised enough money to provide diapers for 90 babies for a month at its recent Champagne for a Cause event on Saturday, April 9 at the Waterside Shops.

We are honored to once again collaborate with the generous community supporters at Waterside Shops to raise money for the most deserving families in Collier County and Bonita Springs. The money raised by just 40 attendees of this intimate gathering will have a ripple effect and change the lives of so many people, said Jean Ann Lynch, founder and board president of Baby Basics of Collier County.

Champagne for a Cause not only allowed attendees to welcome spring with champagne and a delicious breakfast, it also served as an opportunity to hear about the work that Baby Basics does for families in this community every day and raise much-needed funds for this 100% volunteer-driven organization. As a special thank you, Vineyard Vines offered special discounts to attendees and donated 10% of all purchases that day to Baby Basics of Collier County.

Baby Basics of Collier County also partnered with Waterside Shops for its Coins for a Cause program, which donates all of the coins in its fountains to one deserving organization each year, to raise $5,012.70 for Baby Basics earlier this year.

Set in the ultra-exclusive city of Naples, Florida, Waterside Shops is a collection of the finest luxury brand retailers from around the world and elegant dining options in a tranquil, outdoor environment. Anchored by Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom, the center is home to more than 60 stores including Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co., Burberry, Ralph Lauren and MaxMara. A truly sublime experience, visitors can wander past cascading waterfalls, lush flowering plants, and dramatic architecture all under the canopy of towering royal palm trees. For more information, please visit www.WatersideShops.com.

Baby Basics of Collier County was founded in 2004 and has impacted over 1,600 families in Collier County and Bonita Springs since it began. Families interested in the program are referred from local social service agencies and are screened for qualification. To participate in the program, families must meet certain criteria - which include at least one working parent or guardian, demonstrated financial need, and the family may not be receiving federal or state cash assistance. Those families who meet the criteria come to the closest distribution site to pick up a free supply of diapers. Volunteers greet the families, help them select the proper size, and provide information about the next distribution and other opportunities for supportive services. Baby Basics is a volunteer organization and all donations and sponsorship funds are used to purchase diapers. For more information about Baby Basics, please visit www.BabyBasicsCollier.org or contact Jean Ann Lynch at 239-352-4310 or via email at BabyBasicsNDC@hotmail.com.
Gulf Bay Group of Companies (Gulf Bay) has selected GradyMinor as the civil engineer for Mystique, the new ultra-luxury high-rise in the exclusive Pelican Bay community in Naples.



The 21-story Mystique will feature 68 estate and four penthouse residences on one of only two remaining developable land parcels in Naples between The Ritz-Carlton on the beach and Port Royal.



Under the direction of Aubrey J. Ferrao, who founded Gulf Bay Group of Companies in 1986, Gulf Bay has successfully completed 14 luxury properties along a 1.5-mile stretch of Gulf-front land within Pelican Bay.



We have been doing business with GradyMinor for over 30 years, and we are pleased to announce that they have been selected as the civil engineer for our ultra-luxury high-rise Mystique, said Ferrao.



GradyMinor has been participating in the growth of Southwest Florida since 1981, specializing in civil engineering, land surveying, land planning and landscape architecture. With a staff of more than 40, including experienced engineers, surveyors, mappers, certified land planners, a landscape architect, technicians, survey crews and administrative professionals, GradyMinor embraces a hands-on approach with an emphasis on problem solving, quality, customer service and efficiency. Consistently recognized for personal service and expertise, GradyMinors portfolio includes a wide variety of projects in Southwest Florida in the public and private sectors.



Reservations for Mystique are ongoing, with Naples-based Premier Sothebys International Realty serving as the exclusive listing agent. The sleek and contemporary onsite sales center, which opened in December 2015, reflects the modern architectural style of the ultra-luxury high-rise and showcases several features of Mystiques sophisticated and refined design, including luxury kitchen and bath vignettes.



The developer for Mystique is Pelican 1 Owner, LLC, an equal partnership between an affiliate of the global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) and an affiliate of the Gulf Bay Group of Companies.



In addition to its history in Pelican Bay, Gulf Bays other award-winning developments include The Brittany on Park Shore Beach; Marco Beach Ocean Resort on Marco Island; and the 4,000-acre award-winning, master-planned community of Fiddlers Creek.



The Gulf Bay Group of Companies completed and under development build-out market value of luxury residential properties is estimated in excess of $5 billion.



KKR is a leading global investment firm that manages investments across multiple asset classes. KKR had $120 billion in assets under management as of Dec. 31, 2015.



For more information about Mystique, call 239-598-9900, stop by the sales center at 6885 Pelican Bay Blvd., or visit www.MystiquePelicanBay.com.
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By Katherine Rosenberg-Douglas of the Naples Daily News

A 73-year-old man was killed in a traffic crash Tuesday morning near the intersection of Immokalee Road and Logan Boulevard, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.

Victor Bocskor of Naples was driving a Nissan Altima on Immokalee Road just before 6 a.m. Authorities said he was traveling east in westbound lanes, toward Logan Boulevard, when the car's left side sideswiped the guardrail then went toward the median and struck a curb and then a tree on the median, according to an FHP report.

The car came to rest in an outside lane, facing southwest.

Authorities said he was taken to NCH where he was pronounced dead.
Report Eamonn Lacey

Report Eamonn Lacey

Pictures by John D. Kelly and John Crowley

Its not often that the Minister of the Environment would attend a retirement function for a local authority official but in Ned OConnors case it was most appropriate.

Through his meteoric rise up the ranks of local government administration over a period of forty seven years spanning six decades, Ned OConnor was a legendary figure in local government and the presence of Minister Phil Hogan at a retirement function held in his honour reflected the esteem in which the popular Cahir man is held at a national level.

On a very proud occasion for Ned OConnor glowing tributes were paid to the out-going South Tipperary County Manager at a function attended by family, friends and colleagues at the Hotel Minella.

It was an emotional farewell to one of the great custodians of local government and his retirement from April 28 marks the end of an era in South Tipperary.The event was held on the night he officially retired from office with his last official function to sign off on the crucial agreement that secures the future of Tipperary Institute/LIT at the Ballingarrane Estate.

His illustrious local government career began when he joined South Tipperary County Council as a clerical officer in 1964 and he went on to serve in a number of administrative positions including County Secretary and Assistant Manager before being appointed county manager in July 2002 without ever leaving South Tipperary.

Leading the tributes the Minister for the Environment said it was a privilege for him to attend the function to honour a unique individual in local government. The Minister said that the presence of so many county managers from around the country at the function along with senior Department figures was testimony to the high esteem in which Ned OConnor was held.

To have forty seven years service in one local authority, to start as a clerk and end up as county manager was a phenomenal achievement, one that I doubt has happened before and one that will definitely not happen again, said the minister. He said that Ned OConnor excelled in the human dimension of his dealings with public representatives, staff, the general public and his ability to bring people with him was essential so his unique style. Minister Hogan described Ned OConnor as one of the great custodians of local government who had made an enormous contribution to service provision for the people of South Tipperary for an incredible forty seven years. County Council Chairman Sean McCarthy said the presence of the Minister epitomised the esteem in which Ned OConnor was held. He praised the out-going manager for his invaluable advice and opinion which were of tremendous value to elected representatives throughout South Tipperary over his long and distinguished service to local government.

Geraldine Tallon, Secretary General of the Department of the Environment said Mr. OConnor had given absolutely outstanding service to South Tipperary. He was held in very high regard in the Department by all officials who owed him a huge debt for the generosity of the manner in which he put his skills and knowledge at their disposal.

I salute Ned as the most collegiate of men, a man at the top of his game professionally, a true leader for the whole service and such an evening like this is most appropriate to celebrate a special gentleman. He was one of the finest county managers of his generation, she said.

Other speakers included former colleague Dick Grant who spoke on behalf of retired members, Ned Gleeson (former Tipp managers), Sinead Carr (South Tipperary management team), Eddie Breen (County Managers Association), Seaghan OLeannagain (retired CEO of the local government management services agency)

In response Ned OConnor said he enjoyed every day working with South Tipperary County Council and had no regrets. He was leaving with a lot of sadness and great memories such as starting out alongside his friend Dick Grant in the old garda barracks a long time ago.

He said he was very proud that since the county manager system was introduced that he was one of seven Tipperary people to be appointed county manager. He was very proud of the fact that the Minister for the Environment was able to attend the function.Ned OConnor told the large crowd that attended the function that one of the spin offs of his career was the great number of friends he had made over the years. He was particularly grateful for the tremendous commitment and loyalty shown to him by indoor and outdoor staff and he wanted to say a special thanks to all of the staff he had worked with since he started in 1964.

He praised the co-operation of officials in the Department of the Environment he had to work with over the years and acknowledged their acceptance of the fact that South Tipperary was the premier half of the Premier County.

Finally Mr. OConnor paid tribute to his own family for their support throughout his career. He thanked his sisters Sister Ann and Margaret and his brother in law Tom, nephew Tom and nieces Aine and Miriam.
A Cashel man who emigrated to the UK in the 1960s went on to become a successful businessman and develop resources for charities working with humanitarian disasters.

A Cashel man who emigrated to the UK in the 1960s went on to become a successful businessman and develop resources for charities working with humanitarian disasters.

Chris Murphy left Cashel in 1966, having been to secondary school at Rockwell College, and joined the British Army. Today he employs over 500 people across the UK and Europe as well as supporting non government organisations (NGOs).

Not wishing to go to University, Chris took some time out working in Ireland and London before going on to spend four years as a commissioned officer in the British Army during the early 1970s. He left the army in 1973 to develop his business career in Britain. Having worked for various home improvement companies and even building his own house in the early 90s, Chris used his knowledge and experience to start Dunster House Ltd in 1994.

Chris was better known to his school mates in Cashel as Dusty and he grew up living at Francis Row with his parents Paddy who was a plumber and Ina (Leahy), and siblings.

Over the years Chris has drawn on his education in Rockwell, where he enjoyed subjects such as History, Geography, Languages and Maths, as well as his experiences in the British Army to ensure that Dunster House Ltd is constantly moving forward, thinking positively and now employs over 290 staff on five sites in the UK

Chris is happily married to Pamela, who he met in Germany over 40 years ago. They have two sons who enjoy the benefits of working for a family company. They now run the British business whilst Chris is developing new products and the companys overseas development, exporting to Russia, the Gulf and as far afield as Africa and Sri Lanka as well as Europe. Over the last nine years he has also started and built overseas companies in Estonia, Hungary and Poland where a further 260 staff are employed.

One of his latest developments has been in the field of sanitation solutions for Humanitarian and Disaster relief products

Over 2.5 billion people  roughly 36 per cent of the worlds population  still lack what many of us take for granted: access to adequate sanitation. These people are often deprived of their dignity and privacy whilst being left vulnerable to the spread of disease and contaminated water.

In an effort to change that statistic, Chriss company Dunster House Ltd, has designed new sanitation solutions for humanitarian aid and international development.

The company supplies Oxfam and has launched its Raised Latrines and Latrine Superstructures to countries affected by conflict such as South Sudan where thousands of people are living in temporary camps or small villages without access to water and adequate sanitation facilities.

Angus McBride, Oxfam Roving Public Health Engineering Team Leader explains that humanitarian agencies have really struggled to construct latrines in South Sudan due to difficult soil conditions and difficulties in sourcing and transporting good quality materials. And in Africa latrines are worth their weight in gold. People who are living in camps are at increased risk of disease like diarrhoea or cholera.

The company has also recently got involved in a charity project with UNICEF. Thanks to this latest cooperation three container loads will go to Chad  a country with one of the lowest rates of access to safe drinking water and sanitation services in the world.

These latrines have been designed for built up urban areas and locations with rocky ground or high water table. They are ideal for domestic and communal use during the interim stage following an emergency situation. Chris says: We are continuing to work hard on our new humanitarian solutions to help to tackle the sanitation crisis.
Despite a tough public grilling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last week by two D.C. Circuit judges, several legal experts said a ruling against the agency and its director, Richard Cordray, may have a limited impact.

While there are important constitutional and legal issues at play, the most likely decision is that the court could strike down language in the Dodd-Frank Act that only allows the CFPB's director to be removed "for cause." As a result, a CFPB director  either Cordray or a successor  could be removed for any reason, most likely when a new administration takes office.

Other options, such as striking down the agency and every rule or enforcement action it has taken, are probably too draconian, experts said.

"It's not the end of the world if Cordray is removable without cause," said Jon Eisenberg, a partner at K&L Gates. "Courts are practical, and I can't see the court saying everything the CFPB has done to date is invalid because the agency is not constitutional. That could call into question its extensive rulemaking as well  I just can't picture that."

At issue is PHH Corp.'s lawsuit against the CFPB, which, among other things, claims the "for cause" provision violates the Constitution's separation of powers doctrine. During oral arguments last week, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh appeared receptive to removing the "for cause" provision as a possible remedy, citing a 2010 Supreme Court decision.

Several experts said the three-judge D.C. Circuit panel is unlikely to push further.

"Even if the government ultimately loses, I think the narrow decision is the likeliest outcome and that would be to strike the 'for cause' provision," said Peter Wilson, an associate at Katten Muchin Rosenman in Chicago and a former attorney at the CFPB. "Some of these constitutional challenges, if they are upheld, can really have profound consequences, so [courts have] found creative ways to give relief to the plaintiffs and vindicate the constitutional challenge while limiting the collateral damage."

But the case has raised other issues that could have a broader effect. Jenny Lee, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney and another former CFPB enforcement attorney, said the case combines several key issues surrounding the agency at present.

"This case is a manifestation of a larger policy debate that has been going on for the last four years on two issues: the longstanding commentary about the CFPB's decision to regulate by enforcement, and the idea of what predilections are guiding their policy and enforcement preferences as far as assumptions about the industry," Lee said. "They don't accept the assumption that if an industry standard has been followed for many years, then that is evidence to determine there was no violation."

Aside from the constitutional concerns, the biggest one may be whether the CFPB has to rely on previous interpretations of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act.

PHH claims that the CFPB's interpretation of RESPA in the administrative order against the firm was substantially different from previous interpretations made by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

"The aggressive interpretation of RESPA in this case fed into the broader challenges to the agency," said Ori Lev, a partner at Mayer Brown and a former deputy enforcement director at the CFPB. "Arguments about the constitutional structure and concentration of power resonate more strongly when coupled with an argument about alleged overreach."

In oral arguments, Ted Olson, the former solicitor general who represents PHH, said it was "exceedingly important" for the court to address the substantive RESPA issues.

Last year, PHH appealed a $109 million judgment by Cordray that overturned an administrative law judge's $6.4 million fine, alleging the New Jersey mortgage lender illegally accepted kickbacks for referrals on reinsurance. PHH claimed it relied on a 1997 HUD staff letter that allowed its practices even though the letter was not a formal rule.

Kavanaugh appeared sympathetic to the argument that CFPB changed the rules without first saying so.

"Correct me if I'm wrong. Everyone was doing this?...There was a widespread understanding, wasn't it, that this was legal?" Kavanaugh said. "It's as if the police officer says you can cross the street here, and then when you get to the other side the officer gives you a thousand-dollar ticket. That's what it seems like happened here. You had this blessing to go ahead and then it's $109 million [penalty]."

In addition, because RESPA can be criminally enforced, the judges suggested that ambiguities in the statute could not be used against PHH.

"It's a big deal for RESPA itself and for other agencies that they have to be careful about using enforcement to solve statutory ambiguity," said Eisenberg at K&L Gates. "What the D.C. Circuit seems to be saying is that if it's not clear, ambiguities don't get to be interpreted in the government's favor if you're talking about imposing a substantial penalty retroactively."

Agencies are allowed to choose whether to solve problems by rulemaking or enforcement, but the about-face on RESPA surprised the industry.

"The problem for the bureau is, there's no obvious reason to change the longstanding interpretation of RESPA," said Wilson. "This was a bolt from the blue, it was a radical departure in the interpretation of the statute. And that's where agencies can find themselves challenged by the courts."

In addition to its interpretation of the law, the CFPB's theory of the statute of limitations also is under fire. Lawrence Demille-Wagman, a senior litigation counsel for the CFPB, argued that because PHH's appeal went through an administrative law judge, and not a court proceeding, RESPA's three-year statute of limitations did not apply.

But both Kavanaugh and Judge A. Raymond Randolph rejected that argument. (Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, a 1990 appointee of President George H.W. Bush, did not attend the oral arguments.)

"Your theory would allow the agency, the single director, to go back decadesand impose major liability on someone for something that happened a long time ago," said Kavanaugh, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2003 and is a protege of former independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

Randolph cited cases dating back to the early 1800s in which courts borrow either a federal or state statute of limitations.

"The court says it would be an abomination to have the federal official not bound by a statute to be allowed to bring an action decades after an event," said Randolph, who was also appointed in 1990 by George H.W. Bush.

"The CFPB couldn't articulate the reason why there should be no statute of limitations," said Lev. "They had no bigger story to tell, and you want to be able to articulate why your bigger argument makes sense."

A ruling on the statute of limitations would have a ripple effect on other government agencies, Eisenberg said, particularly because agencies often use the disgorgement of profits to exact large settlements from companies. By contrast, there is a statute of limitations that applies broadly to the government on financial penalties, he said.

"They seemed completely offended at the concept that there would be no statute of limitations," Eisenberg said. "It would be a big deal if [the panel said] agencies couldn't simply could go back forever [on disgorgement.]"
Speaking ahead of the EU Defence Ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Tuesday (19 April) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed close cooperation between NATO and the EU to respond to the refugee and migrant crisis.

He said that NATO ships deployed in the Aegean Sea are doing surveillance and reconnaissance and providing real-time information to the Turkish coastguard, to the Greek coastguard and also the EU border agency Frontex.

The Secretary General said that the upcoming NATO Summit in Warsaw and the EU Summit in June will provide a very good platform for cooperation between NATO and the EU. We will look into how we can expand that cooperation, he said. He added that NATO stands ready to provide support to the new government of national accord in Libya.

Talking about the NATO-Russia Council, which will take place tomorrow (20 April), the Secretary General highlighted that it will be the first NRC meeting since 2014 and said that the crisis in and around Ukraine, military activity, transparency, risk reductions and Afghanistan will be among the issues discussed. And I think that the incidents we have seen in the Baltic Sea over the last week with the unprofessional and unsafe behavior of Russian planes close to an American ship and also close to an American plane just underlines the importance of open military lines of communication, of predictability and risk reduction, he said.

On Tuesday, the Secretary General was also meeting with the EU Commissioner for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and Small and Medium Enterprises, Elzbieta Bienkowska and with the Minister of Defence of Spain Pedro Morenes Eulate.
No reason for panic?

EPA remains silent

(NaturalNews) After the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, Greater Cincinnati Water Works customers are now being warned that a great portion of the city-owned service lines are made of lead which can leak into the city's drinking water.Last week, the Cincinnati City Council's Economic Growth and Infrastructure Committee voted to send letters to roughly 16,000 homeowners who could be in danger of lead poisoning . When lead enters the human bloodstream, it can cause health and developmental problems, which especially affect infants and young children.The motion is an action taken by Councilman Christopher Smitherman. He was alarmed after Michigan's story of countless people, including many children, being poisoned by lead-laced drinking water , and deaths caused by a bacterial infection known as Legionnaire's disease."I think this is a good first step to notify property owners of the risk no matter how small the risk," Smitherman said, as reported by Cincinnati.com. He further notes that the government and Water Works should act to protect the citizens and assist families who might not be able to afford replacement of their lead pipes, which costs roughly $5,000 per property.In the aftermath of what recently happened in Flint, and many years ago in Washington DC, many communities across America are now taking matters into their own hands by taking a look at their own drinking water systems.While Smitherman has started the motion to inform the citizens, he also stresses that the Cincinnati water supply is safe. Unlike Flint's water supply, Greater Cincinnati Water Works closely monitors the water through a lead corrosion control program to protect its customers.According to officials, a lead violation has never occurred, but they don't deny that the pipes may cause a threat to human health. Director of the Greater Cincinnati Water Works, Cathy Bailey, said there is what she calls an "ever present risk.""We know that we still have lead service lines in our system, that's something that is known," Bailey said. "We have a main replacement program that we've had in place 1971; and so as we go out and replace those water mains, we look at those lead service lines and we replace as much as we can there."If you live in the Cincinnati area and are concerned about your water pipes, Water Works has created an online searching tool here to check if they have a lead service pipe leading to your property, and will test your water on request, at no charge.While Cincinnati's drinking water may seem safe , since 2013, 21 other drinking-water systems in Ohio have shown lead levels higher than the limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) . Sadly, the EPA, which has set these norms and is there to protect us, keeps silent and refuses to comment in any way.According to Mike Adams, aka the Health Ranger and founder of, "the EPA is the single most corrupt, criminally-run regulator in the federal government who has poisoned the entire nation through legalizing the spread of industrial pollution, heavy metals, toxic chemical and cancer-causing substances which can be collected and spread on farms."The EPA has all the information about the lead-leaching pipes and their harmful effects, but chooses to sit on the information instead of warning the people, and keeps getting away with it. But that's all about to change, as we enter the "Age of Transparency", as Mike calls it in the Health Revolt radio show He is now teaming up with the non-profit, Consumer Wellness Center, and a former NASA contract scientist to conduct a nationwide scientific analysis of heavy metals  such as lead  in American tap water, and to expose the criminal practices being allowed to pollute the environment and put numerous lives at risk.If you are concerned about the quality of your water, and are a licensed practitioner of the healing arts, send a water sample to EPA Watch and help them bring transparency to the world. Click here to get instructions for acquiring and sending your water sample.
"This is critical"

1.7 million hygiene-related infections a year in the U.S.

(NaturalNews) Most people think of hospitals and clinics as being among of the cleanest places to be, but the reality is much different, especially in the United States.As reported by the, a disturbing number of medical staff at outpatient centers are routinely neglecting to follow standard hygiene policies that were adopted as a means of tamping down infections, according to experts.A new study has found that doctors, nurses and other medical staff do not follow guidelines for hand washing and cleansing more than 37 percent of the time, as well as established policies for safe injection practices more than one-third of the time. The researchers noted that following the recommended hygiene and preventive infection policies is vital to reducing incidences of hospital-caused infections A research team from the University of New Mexico and the New Mexico Department of Health examined practices at 15 different outpatient facilities during the summer of 2014. Medical students interviewed staffers who worked at the clinics and found that 93 percent of recommended policies were actively in place among the centers.But when researchers actually observed behavior of staff while on the job, they observed compliance with established hygiene rules only about 63 percent of the time. Also, researchers observed that clean injection policies were only followed about 66 percent of the time, thereported. And in 37 percent of cases, researchers said, they observed no hand washing or hand hygiene of any kind."'Despite high levels of report of hand hygiene education and observed supply availability, observations of hand hygiene and aseptic injection technique showed lack of similarly high behavior compliance,' the researchers commented, as noted in a press release."This project highlights the importance of assessing both the report of recommended infection prevention policies and practices, as well as behavior compliance through observational audits. This is critical because there have been outbreaks and infection transmission to patients reported in outpatient settings due to these types of infection prevention breaches, including transmission of hepatitis B and C," they said.The team examined prevention policies utilizing an outpatient infection prevention checklist which was developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The list includes 14 topics, including education and training, administrative policies, hand hygiene, injection safety, occupational health and environmental cleaning issues.Besides analyzing policies based on the checklist, the medical student research team also looked at injection safety and hand washing/hand hygiene practices at their assigned outpatient clinic. Each student was tasked with observing 10 injections and 20 instances where hand hygiene policies should be followed, such as before a medical provider performs a task or after patient contact. Of the 163 injection observations, only 66 percent, or roughly two-thirds of the time, were in compliance with established safety and anti-infection protocols  hand washing, disinfecting the rubber septum of the medication bottle prior to drawing up the injection, proper discarding of single-dose medication vials, and dating multiple-dose vials after they had been opened.During 330 hand washing and hygiene observations, students reported that supplies were present 100 percent of the time, meaning they were available for use all of the time."These findings highlight the need for ongoing quality improvement initiatives regarding infection prevention policies and practices in outpatient settings," the authors  whose study was published in the, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology  wrote.This latest study is hardly the first work demonstrating a lack of proper hygiene practices in U.S. healthcare facilities. As we reported in June 2012 , undercover surveillance cameras found that staff in New York City hospitals engaged in established hand washing procedures ranging from just over 30 percent of the time to around 91 percent.And, we noted, according to the World Health Organization, hygiene-related infections affect as some 1.7 million patients a year in the United States alone.
China: Serial food safety abuser

Freedom produces better food

[F]ood from China is frequently found to contain alarming levels of heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury) and other contaminants. Politically, China is a communist dictatorship where freedom of speech is completely outlawed. Environmental regulations are virtually never enforced.



(NaturalNews) The next time you hear someone praising the Chinese for their business practices, remember this story and let your China cheerleader know their enthusiasm is, to put it mildly, misplaced.As the United States battles a Big Pharma-induced opioid addition and overdose epidemic, theis reporting that as least 35 restaurants in China have been caught adding opiates to their food,IBT notes that the restaurants came under scrutiny after it was discovered they were illegally lacing their foods with morphine, codeine and other highly addictive opiates , according to the China Food and Drug Administration. Chinese authorities are now reportedly investigating how the illegal drugs were added to foods.The, citing information reported by China's official news agency, Xinhua, said that dishes that were spiked with opiates included noodles, hotpot and lobsters. Thus far, five of the 35 eateries are being prosecuted while investigators continue to look into possible illegal opiate addition at the remaining restaurants. The restaurants appear to all be located in the capital of Beijing.This isn't the first time Chinese eateries have been accused of spiking dishes. A similar incident occurred in 2004, when it was reported that nearly 215 restaurants in the Guizhou province were shuttered because owners were requiring kitchen staff to add poppy and morphine to soups and hotpot stews, which was discovered by narcotics police in southwestern China "Consuming soup or hot pots mixed with poppies for a long time will make you become addicted... and eventually lead you to drug abuse in serious cases," said Wei Tao, deputy chief of the Food Institute with Guizhou Provincial Centre for Disease Control, reportedIn an earlier case, a restaurant owner in Beijing was sentenced to 18 months in prison after he was convicted of adding poppy powder to a spicy fish dish. Poppy powder, when mixed with chili oil or Chinese salt, is difficult to detect, and is commonly used by hotspot eateries to fool food inspectors.Though the quantities of opiates being added to foods and dishes is relative low, long-term ingestion of the drug-spiked meals would lead to an opiate buildup in the body, a positive drug test and, likely, addiction.China is regularly in the news for gross violations of food safety standards:-- A Shanghai-based supplier was found supplying chicken meat to McDonald's and KFC franchises that had expired and gone bad.-- More than 300,000 children got sick in 2008 after drinking milk power tainted with melamine, a chemical that is used in plastic production.-- In 2013, we reported that Chinese authorities broke up a 900-person criminal ring that harvested meat from rats and other rodent animals to be modified and then sold as lamb meat. The rat meat showed up in markets in the Jiangsu province and Shanghai. Beyond the nastiness factor, it is quite obvious that the rat meat was never properly safety tested or inspected."Despite years of food scandals  from milk contaminated with an industrial chemical to the use of industrial dyes in eggs  China has been unable to clean up its food supply chain," The Associated Press reported. Natural News editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger , has conducted laboratory testing on foods, supplements and other compounds produced in China. In May 2013, he wrote In many ways, though, China's food safety standards are as poor as some here in the United States. If you're a regularreader, for instance, you know all about the bad health effects of MSG, a food flavor enhancer that is in many foods. But if you're trying to avoid it, you are going to have a difficult time because food companies in the U.S.. That report is here Mike Adams is also the director of the Consumer Wellness Labs, which is now running cutting-edge tests for heavy metals and other toxins in foods. You can read about Adams' journey and efforts to improve health by checking out his new book Food Forensics , on shelves July 26.
Meanwhile, in the United States...

From miscarriages to death, the HPV vaccine simply isn't worth getting

Some HPV statistics, plus healing foods that can help protect cervix

(NaturalNews) In response to vaccine injuries linked to the HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix , 12 plaintiffs in Japan plan to file a class action lawsuit against the Japanese government, Merck and GlaxoSmithKine after June 2016. The plaintiffs are seeking answers about why they were not told about the HPV vaccine risks before they received the vaccination.As it currently stands, Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has advised local governments not to actively promote HPV vaccine use. In fact, the health ministry reversed their HPV vaccination recommendation in 2013 after HPV vaccine recipients began experiencing horrible side effects including everything from paralysis to short-term memory loss.But despite the fact that Japan's health ministry withdrew their HPV vaccine recommendation and Japanese girls have experienced adverse reactions after receiving the vaccination, HPV vaccines are still on the market in the country. You read correctly  they're still available in Japan; girls can opt to receive the HPV vaccine if they are so inclined. However, vaccine providers and doctors must convey to these girls that getting this shot is not recommended by the health ministry.Enter the aforementioned lawsuit where plaintiffs are demanding to know why they weren't informed of the negative side effects of the HPV vaccine prior to getting it.While the pending class action lawsuit demonstrates that people are taking a stand against vaccine violence, the sad reality is that such legal action is unheard of in the United States. In short, current U.S. federal law mandates that no one is able to directly sue a vaccine manufacturer in civil court after a vaccine injures or leads to the death of an adult or minor child. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which allowed plaintiffs to sue drug companies in the event they were denied federal compensation for vaccine-related injuries, is a thing of the past for Americans today. Instead, they can only sue the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services by filing a vaccine injury claim through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.As you might imagine, it's a process filled with loopholes and heaps of paperwork that typically creates nothing but a giant headache for those impacted by the side effects  side effects which are linked to a variety of horrific health problems.For example, according to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, 28 miscarriages were once reported by pregnant women who received the Gardasil vaccine. However, the FDA thought that was normal, stating that such a miscarriage rate is representative of the general population. As such, the FDA didn't push for any further investigation into the HPV vaccine , which is made by Merck.There's also the instance several years back in which six young girls died after receiving shots of GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix vaccine as part of a trial in India. As a result, the government there immediately stopped all such trials. Again  this is unheard of in the United States, where the HPV vaccine has been linked to over 100 deaths and thousands of adverse reactions.Clearly, the wise choice is to not allow your children to receive the HPV vaccination. The risks simply aren't worth it. Remain educated about vaccines and don't allow the government to dictate your health decisions.In the event you or a family member develop the HPV virus  approximately eight in every ten women who have been sexually active are projected to contract HPV at some stage of their life  consider turning to healing foods that can protect cervical health. Most HPV cases clear up on their own anyway. Furthermore, it's been found that foods such as macadamia nuts, mung beans, curcumin and turkey tail mushrooms can help maintain good cervical health and improve immune function.
Mercola, 61, uses his website and books to back a number of discredited, fringe medical causes on topics that include vaccinations and fluoridated water. He stars in web videos for his company, Mercola Health Resources, and wrote articles in which he claimed cold winters in the Midwest meant Chicagoans, in particular, would benefit from his tanning beds, which he said could "reverse your wrinkles" and "slash your risk of cancer."



Feds getting to decide what is, and is not, 'scientific fact'

'Pharma-backed hit piece'

My nutritional views and advice regarding the benefits of vitamin D were distorted by the FTC as being equivalent to the promotion of tanning itself. But commercial sun beds actually fit into two separate categories: 1) Tanning, and 2) Nutrition.



The former addresses how you look, whereas the latter addresses optimization of health, reduction of chronic disease risk, and general well-being  without regard for the actual shade of your skin.



This is a paradigm shift in looking at UV lamp use; it needs to occur, and I predict it eventually will, but I was unfortunately too far ahead of the herd at the present time.



(NaturalNews) The federal government has put another notch in its regulatory belt as it forced a renowned physician who dared to push alternatives to traditional medicine to end a portion of his healthcare business and pay millions in fines to customers. And, of course, the mainstream media is parroting all of the government's (and Big Pharma's) talking points right on cue.As reported by the, Dr. Joseph Mercola was forced to settle a claim of false advertising with the Federal Trade Commission for selling tanning beds that were designed not to cause cancer.Following the settlement, Mercola will have to reimburse customers of the tanning beds, which he sold for between $1,200 and $4,000, some $5.3 million, while also promising never again to sell them.Thereported further:No condescension there, right?Not only the FTC not only accused him of false advertising, but regulators also claimed that he paid the non-profit Vitamin D Council."These types of false claims are especially troubling because of the serious health risks posed by indoor tanning," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC's bureau of consumer protection, in a news release. "The fact is, indoor tanning is not safe because it increases the risk of skin cancer, including melanoma."Themade sure to mention that Mercola has been targeted by federal regulators in the past, which, to the educated eye, prove his claims that the government  pressed by Big Pharma  has been on a witch hunt for him ever since he began making inroads into alternative health As for his "deal," if it is approved by a federal judge  and it likely will be  the Trib reported it "would also ban Mercola from making false claims about any other product he sells," meaning, of course, that the government continues to reserve for itself the right to decide which claims are real and which are "false," based in no small part on donors with ties to traditional medicine.On his website , Mercola explained why the FTC action was politically motivated, and that his advocacy of the use of UV light to boost vitamin D levels is both healthy and safe "For those who believe my controversial advocacy is unsupported, there are many considerations, and loads of research, that should be carefully evaluated," he said, adding that he was notified by the FTC of their intent to investigate him shortly after a Surgeon General "call to action" targeting tanning beds was released in July 2014.He also noted that before the FTC's actions and the Surgeon General's warning, the government classified tanning beds as Class 1 Medical Device, which are considered by the Food and Drug Administration "to be low risk and are therefore subject to the least regulatory controls.""My point of contention with the FTC, the surgeon general, and the [American Academy of Dermatology] is that the lack of flexibility in their stance is not based on the available science," Mercola wrote. "I am part of the scientific community convinced by extensive evidence that limited and controlled UV exposure, ideally from the sun but also if need-be from the limited and controlled use of a sun bed, is crucial to a healthy life."He also noted the government's version of UV "science" in this case is grossly outdated:You can read his entire explanation and rebuttal here Our own editor and founder was anything but shocked over Mercola's presentation in the mainstream media."No one is surprised these days to find another mainstream media article filled with outright lies, maliciously attacking a proponent of vitamin D," Mike Adams, editor of Natural News , science lab director and author of Food Forensics , said. "This pharma-backed hit piece on Dr. Mercola is so obviously false and trumped up that no informed person really believes it. The Chicago Tribune only discredits itself in printing these blatant lies while withholding the truth about vitamin D from its readers."
"Compelled" to write about the film

"This is seriously troubling"

I sent it to Huffington Post as I normally doI have an account thereand they published the article. About a half hour later as I was sending it out to my network I was alerted by some folks that when they went to access it it was not coming up. It turns out that they pulled down the original piece and when I tried to rewrite it I was alerted that permission was denied to my account. I have made at least a half dozen attempts to reach someone at HuffPo to alert them that there was a malfunction and over the course of the last two days have not received one response. I even went so far as to email Arianna herself.



It never crossed my mind that this might be some sort of censorship because it has never happened to me and the article, while provocative, is not beyond any bounds of journalistic or political propriety. ... This is seriously troubling.



(NaturalNews) It should be abundantly clear to anyone who is being honest with themselves that the mainstream media, which is mostly Left-wing, will stop at nothing to ridicule or silence those with whom it disagrees.The legacy media has its own, it's own, and anyone who colors outside of those narrow (minded) lines must be silenced at the very least, and outright destroyed if possible.That has been the case with global warming skeptics and climate change "deniers" who, using available scientific data and the climate change pushers' own failed predictions about the end of the world to disprove that SUVs, smokestacks, fire-burning homes and underarm deodorant sprays are destroying the planet.It is also the case with anyone who dares to question one of the mainstream media's sugar daddies  Big Pharma  when it comes to the dangers of vaccines.Case in point: As reported by Celia Farber, founder and editor ofwebsite, an author who is a whistleblower, political and fracking activist, Lance Simmens, went to see, at a screening in California recently. After watching the documentary, which details an admission by CDC scientist and whistleblower Dr. William Thompson who helped cover up an established link between vaccines and autism, was moved  and enraged  by what he had seen.So much so that he wrote a column about it for, a noted Left-wing news site where he has been a contributor for eight years, writing nearly 200 pieces. While the story went online as per normal procedure, it didn't stay very long. And what's more, Farber explains, Simmens' account was blocked.In an interview with Farber, Simmens gave some insight into what happened and why."I am a political writer and have written articles over the years about events as they unfold, which is the nice feature of blogging," he began, explaining his role at the news site. "I have a decidedly liberal bent to my politics but have striven to write thoughtful, provocative pieces that try to define a rationale and logic to the policy prescriptions being offered."He went on to explain that, after seeing, he was "compelled" to write a piece that urged at least a "serious national dialogue" on the allegations contained in the film, which of course also features a number of experts and other research. He said in the column he also drew attention to a number of other cases where the government appeared to have failed in its central role of protecting the safety and welfare of the American people.Continuing, he explained what had happened after he contributed his piece:You can read the entire interview here
'Birds of a feather flock together'

"Casual readers" code for industry henchman

(NaturalNews)seems like a good place to get fast information that's at least somewhat reliable, right? Wrong. The truth is thatis nothing more than a trove of disinformation and propaganda peddled by industry gatekeepers, intent on maintaining their ominous facades while upholding the lucrative empires that largely enslave us all, i.e. the pharmaceutical industry and its costly vaccine market.Most of you have probably heard about the firestorm caused by Andrew Wakefield's explosive documentary, which details decades of scientific fraud covering up the link between vaccines and the injuries they routinely cause.Well,has now learned from trusted sources that's incredibly biased entry onwas written by none other than pro-vaccine shill Dr. David Gorski , notorious for his relentless and callous attacks on vaccine skeptics, alternative medicine, and its supporters.Gorski is a surgical oncologist at the Karmanos Cancer Institute , the same health group where cancer fraudster Dr. Farid Fata leased office space to maim and kill cancer-free people through aggressive chemotherapy and radiation treatments.Fata, who received a 45-year prison sentence, also undertreated cancer patients, laundered money and defrauded the government out of $23 million in a scheme labeled the biggest case of health fraud ever to be observed in the U.S.It's reasonable to ask: What ties did Gorski and Fata have that haven't been disclosed yet? We do know that Gorski and his team of skeptics have administrative privileges onand have utilized those controls to attack the natural health field and its supporters.Our sources say Gorski is using the name "MastCell" to write entries on"Wikipedia's health topics have long been hijacked by vaccine sociopaths and paid pharmaceutical shills. Dr. David Gorski is the top disinfo coordinator for Wikipedia, giving him a platform to reflect his internal psychopathy and pathological hatred for all things holistic and natural," said' Adams, author of, science lab director of CWClabs.com and creator of Medicine.news Wikipedia's entry on VAXXED preferentially gives the floor to the documentary's attackers, listing five nasty and discrediting reviews calling the film a "hoax," while accusing it of relying "on tons of random factoids positioned out of context to drive home his [Wakefield] agenda."Another"review" featured by, Gorski and his team of skeptics, accuses the documentary of putting "the viewer through a well-trod gauntlet of emotional pleas, context-free statistics... and shadowy conspiracies."Clearly,'s entry was not written by "tens of thousands of regular editors," including "casual readers," as it so claims under its "Overview of editorial structure," which dishonestly insists it has "mechanisms" for weeding out "bad edits" and "problematic editors."If it were truly written by ordinary citizens, we would be willing to bet that a few not-so-biased (and not-so-hateful) reviews would have made their way onto'sentry, especially considering the film sold out 10 shows before theater doors even opened in California.Los Angeles alone sold out five shows in about 48 hours. The film is so successful that it's moving on to several other cities including San Diego and Phoenix; it's also scheduled to show in Louisiana  with more cities and states to be added soon 's bashing ofis yet another attempt by the pharmaceutical industry to censor the truth about vaccines "That Wikipedia still allows deranged people like this to vandalize its web page to destroy independent films only speaks to the total lack of credibility Wikipedia has earned for itself. On topics of health and medicine, Wikipedia isn't run by volunteers but by angry, anti-science fanatics who are ultimately funded by Big Pharma," said Adams.Gorski and his band of internet trolls have clearly taken overand are using it as a weapon to defame anyone and anything that opposes vaccines or calls for safer vaccines.The saddest, or most narcissistic, part about Gorski usingto deter people from seeingis that he uses the entries to quote himself in a bizarre third-party manner. He writes:"The filmmaker claims that it is a documentary 'that explores the journeys of parents whose autistic children were plausibly affected by a vaccine,' however critics consider it propaganda with surgical oncologist David Gorski labeling it a 'propaganda film by a known scientific fraud.'"Wakefield is NO fraud by the way. Soon,will publish a report clarifying in detail how he was falsely framed by the vaccine industry.So, what exactly does Gorski have to gain from discrediting the anti-vaxxer movement? Well, we have a few ideas. As reported Monday , Gorski's employer, Wayne State University, has a lot to gain from an ALS drug called riluzole that could be used to treat autism, according to epidemiologist Jake Crosby , who also said Gorski is experimenting with that same drug to treat breast cancer.In his Wayne State laboratory, Gorski focuses on the research and development of prescription drugs. However, he's working not to create new medications, but rather new uses for existing drugs, a process far more lucrative than creating new drugs from scratch."The potentially profitable drug Gorski is in the process of conducting a clinical trial for is the ALS drug Riluzole.... Amplifying the conflict further is that the same drug is also being studied for the treatment of autism," wrote Crosby.
Animals

Adult Swiss albino mice (8- to 10-week-old male or female) weighing 2025 g were obtained from the Central Animal House Facility, Department of Zoology, University of Mysore, Mysuru, India. New Zealand albino female rabbits (6-month-old) weighing 1.52 kg were obtained from the Department of Livestock Production and Management, Veterinary College, Bengaluru, India. The animal experiments were approved by the Institutional Animal Ethical Committee, University of Mysore, Mysuru (Approval numbers: UOM/IAEC/20/2012 and UOM/IAEC/09/2013). During all experiments, animal care and handling were in accordance with the guidelines of the Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA).

Humans

Human blood was drawn from the antecubital veins of healthy adult volunteers who provided written informed consent, as per the guidelines of the Institutional Human Ethical Committee, University of Mysore, Mysuru. All the experiments were approved by the Institutional Human Ethical Committee, University of Mysore, Mysuru (Approval number: IHEC-UOM No. 47Res/201415) and conducted in accordance with the ethical guidelines.

Reagents

The E. carinatus and N. naja venoms were purchased from Irula Co-operative Society Ltd., Chennai, India. The calf thymus DNA, DMEM, Histopaque-1077, Ponceau stain, actin from bovine muscle, protease inhibitor cocktail, protein A agarose, dextran (molecular weight100 kDa), PMA, bovine serum albumin, human serum albumin (HSA), calcium ionophore (A23187), 2,7-dichlorofluorescein diacetate (DCFDA), DPI, DNP, Cell Death Detection ELISAPLUS (Version 14, Roche Diagnostics), and Freunds complete and incomplete adjuvants were procured from Sigma Chemicals. DNase 1 was purchased from Boehringer Ingelheim. The anti-histone H3 antibody (Cat. no. SC-10809) was obtained from Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Inc. Hoechst 33342 (Cat. no. H3570) was obtained from Life Technologies. AlexaFluor 488-conjugated AffiniPure Goat Anti-Rabbit IgG (H+L) (Cat. no. 111-545-003), AlexaFluor 647-conjugated AffiniPure Goat Anti-mouse IgG (H+L) (Cat. no. 115-605-003) were purchased from Jackson Immuno Research Laboratories, Inc. The AlexaFluor 647-conjugated anti-mouse Ly 6G antibody (clone 1A8; Cat. no. 127609) was obtained from BioLegend. The rabbit polyclonal anti-histone H3 (citrulline R2+R8+R17; H3Cit; Cat. no. ab5103), mouse monoclonal anti-myeloperoxidase (anti-MPO; 2C7; Cat. no. ab25989), anti-lactoferrin antibody (2B8; Cat. no. ab10110) and anti-PAD4 (4H5; Cat. no. ab128086) antibodies were obtained from Abcam. The DreamTaq Green DNA Polymerase kit (Cat. no. EP0711) was obtained from Thermo Scientific. Endoxan-N-(cyclophosphamide injection) was obtained from Baxter Oncology Products. The mouse anti-GAPDH mAb (6C5; Cat. no. CB1001) was purchased from Calbiochem. The microwell plates were obtained from Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Human neutrophil isolation

The human neutrophils were isolated from the blood of healthy volunteers44. The blood was collected and mixed with acid citrate dextrose (citric acid/sodium citrate/dextrose, 3:6:4; w/w/w) in 5:1 volumetric ratio (blood/anticoagulant), followed by dextran sedimentation and hypotonic lysis to remove red blood cells. Then, the cell pellet was suspended in 2 ml of PBS and subjected to density gradient centrifugation using Histopaque-1077 for 30 min, 210g at 4 C, after which the neutrophils settled at the bottom as a cell pellet. This pellet was washed twice with PBS for 6 min, centrifuged at 210g, and re-suspended in HBSS buffer without cations containing 2% HSA or DMEM. The cells were counted using a Neubauer chamber and the required cell density was adjusted using HBSS/DMEM. Wright and Giemsa staining was used to determine the purity of the cells, which was >95%.

Quantification of NETosis by Hoechst stain and MPO-DNA ELISA

NETosis was quantified by Hoechst stain32. The neutrophils (2  105 cells per ml) were seeded on 13 mm round coverslips placed in 24-well culture plates in 500 l of DMEM with 2% HSA and allowed to adhere to the coverslips for 30 min at 37 C and 5% CO 2 . Then, the cells were independently stimulated with E. carinatus venom (550 g ml1) for 180 min to assess the dose-dependent response. To assess the time-dependent response, the E. carinatus venom (25 g ml1) was incubated for different time intervals from 0 to 180 min. PMA (50 nM) served as a positive control. The cells were then fixed with 4% paraformaldehyde, followed by Hoechst 33342 staining (1:10,000). For NET quantification, images were acquired on a BA410 fluorescence microscope (Motic) attached to a DS-Qi2 monochrome CMOS sensor camera (Nikon) using a CCIS EC-H Plan achromatic  40/0.65 objective lens and NIS-Elements D software (Version 4.3.00). The NET percentage was determined in 12 non-overlapping fields per coverslip. The images were analysed using ImageJ software. The average NET percentage was calculated from triplicate experiments. The experimenter was blinded to the treatment conditions during the analysis.

To quantify the NETs in the cell supernatant, we used a capture ELISA (Cell Death ELISAPLUS, Roche) method based on capture of the MPO-associated DNA53. NETosis was induced using either E. carinatus or N. naja venom (550 g ml1), as described above. PMA (50 nM) served as a positive control. Then, the reaction mixture was centrifuged at 20g for 5 min at room temperature and the supernatant was separated. The anti-MPO mAb (1:200, 50 l) was coated onto 96-well plates overnight at 4 C. After three washes (300 l each), 20 l of the reaction supernatant and 80 l of incubation buffer containing peroxidase-labelled anti-DNA mAb (1:25) were added to the wells and incubated by shaking at 300 r.p.m. for 2 h at room temperature. Then, the wells were washed three times (with PBS, 300 l each) and 100 l of ABTS was added. After 20 min of incubation at room temperature in the dark, the absorbance was measured at 405 nm. To calculate NET percentage, fluorescence obtained from cells lysed with 0.5% Triton X-100 was considered as 100% NET formation. To demonstrate venom-induced NOX-dependent and/or NOX-independent NETosis, neutrophils were independently pre-incubated with DPI (20 M) and/or DNP (750 M) for 60 min at 37 C and then incubated with E. carinatus venom (50 g) for 180 min at 37 C. PMA (50 nM) and A23187 (5 M) were used as a positive control for inhibition of the NOX-dependent and NOX-independent pathways, respectively.

Detection of ROS

E. carinatus venom-stimulated ROS in neutrophils was quantified using DCFDA29. The neutrophils (2  105 cells per ml) were incubated with increasing doses of E. carinatus venom (550 g ml1) for 30 min at 37 C. After incubation, DCFDA (10 M) was added to determine ROS. The fluorescence was measured at 530 nm after exciting at 480 nm by using Varioskan multimode plate reader (Thermo Scientific) and expressed as pmol DCF formed per mg protein. Further to demonstrate venom-induced NOX-dependent and/or NOX-independent ROS production, neutrophils were independently pre-incubated with DPI (20 M) and/or DNP (750 M) for 60 min at 37 C and then stimulated with E. carinatus venom (50 g) for 30 min at 37 C. PMA (50 nM) and A23187 (5 M) were used as a positive control.

Immunocytochemistry

Neutrophils (2  105 cells per ml) were seeded on 13 mm round coverslips placed in 24-well culture plates in 500 l of DMEM with 2% HSA and allowed to adhere to the coverslips for 30 min at 37 C and 5% CO 2 . Then, the cells were independently stimulated with PMA (50 nM) and the E. carinatus venom (25 and 50 g ml1) for 2.5 h, fixed using 4% paraformaldehyde, permeabilized using 1% Triton X-100 and blocked with 1% bovine serum albumin for 1 h at room temperature. The cells were incubated with a primary antibody against H3Cit (1:1,000) overnight at 4 C and then with AlexaFluor 488-conjugated goat anti-rabbit IgG (1:1,500) for 2 h at room temperature. Hoechst 33342 (1:10,000) was used to stain for DNA. The images were acquired on a BA410 fluorescence microscope (Motic) attached to a DS-Qi2 monochrome CMOS sensor camera (Nikon) using a CCIS EC-H Plan Achromatic  20 or  40/0.65 objective lens and NIS-Elements D software (Version 4.3.00 64-bit). Images were analysed using the ImageJ software.

Scanning electron microscopy

Neutrophils (2  105 cells per ml in 500 l DMEM with 2% HSA) were seeded on 13 mm round coverslips, placed in 24-well culture plates and allowed to attach to the coverslips for 30 min at 37 C. The neutrophils were then stimulated with E. carinatus venom (50 g ml1) for 2.5 h at 37 C, fixed in 2.5% glutaraldehyde and post-fixed in 0.5% osmium tetroxide for 30 min. Then, the coverslips were incubated in 1% tannic acid for 30 min, with 0.5% osmium tetroxide for 30 min and dehydrated with a graded series of alcohol (30100%) for 5 min each. The coverslips were dried in a desiccator for 24 h and the coverslips containing specimens were coated with a carbon layer using a thin layer evaporator. The samples were visualized using a Zeiss EVO LS15 scanning electron microscope.

Venom-induced mouse tail tissue destruction and lethality

E. carinatus or N. naja venom (LD 50 /LD dissolved in 50 l PBS) was subcutaneously administered to the groups of mice (n=10) 3 cm distal to the base of the tail. The lethal dose of venom was determined in a pilot study (E. carinatus venom LD 50 =1 mg per kg body weight and LD=1.5 mg per kg body weight and N. naja venom LD=0.75 mg per kg body weight). The time of death and tail injuries were recorded for each mouse. The severity of the tail injury was judged visually and scored according to a 10 point scale; 0=no injury, 1=oedema, 2=oedema with minor haemorrhage, 4=oedema with haemorrhage causing less than 25% tail discolouration, 6=oedema and major haemorrhage or wound causing 2550% tail discolouration, 8=oedema and major haemorrhage or wound causing 5075% tail discolouration, 10=oedema and major haemorrhage or wound causing more than 75% tail discolouration. The tail injury observations were recorded every day for 15 days after venom injection. To assess the effects of DNase 1 on tail haemorrhage, E. carinatus venom (LD 50 /LD) was co-injected independently with 25, 50 or 100 U DNase 1. In the challenge study, 100 U DNase 1 was administered 5 mm distal to the venom injection site 30, 60, 90, 120 or 180 min after the E. carinatus venom (LD 50 ) injection. To assess the effect of DNA on venom lethality, E. carinatus venom (LD 50 /LD) was incubated with calf thymus DNA in a 1:1 (w/w) ratio for 10 min at 37 C and injected subcutaneously into the tail. Appropriate controls were maintained according to the assay requirements.

Histopathological studies

The venom-induced tail tissue destruction and the presence of NETs in the venom-injected tail tissues were examined in H&E-stained tissue sections. The respective tissues were dissected from the venom injection site, fixed overnight in buffered formalin and subjected to dehydration with different grades of alcohol and chloroform mixture. The processed tissues were embedded in molten paraffin wax, and 10-m-thick sections were prepared using a microtome. The sections were stained with H&E, observed under an Axio Imager.A2 microscope (Zeiss) and photographed.

Immunohistochemistry

The localization of H3Cit, Ly6G/lactoferrin and DNA in mouse tail tissue was examined by immunofluorescence microscopy. The mouse tail tissue was dissected from the E. carinatus venom-injected normal and neutropenic mice, processed, embedded in solidifying paraffin wax and cut into 10-m-thick cross/longitudinal sections. The sections were deparaffinized by incubating the slides overnight at 55 C and subjected to xylene clearance for 5 min. Furthermore, the sections were rehydrated with different grades of alcohol (10050%). The antigens were retrieved by incubating the slides with Tris-EDTA buffer (pH 9.0) in a steamer for 45 min. The tissues were permeabilized using 1% Triton X-100 and incubated with primary antibodies against H3Cit (1:1,000) overnight at 4 C, followed by incubation with an AlexaFluor 488-conjugated goat anti-rabbit IgG antibody (1:500) for 2 h in the dark at room temperature. The sections were then incubated with an AlexaFluor 647-conjugated anti-mouse Ly6G antibody (1:200) for 3 h at room temperature or anti-mouse lactoferrin antibody (1:500) for overnight at 4 C, followed by incubation with an AlexaFluor 647-conjugated goat anti-mouse IgG antibody (1:500) for 2 h in the dark at room temperature. Hoechst 33342 (1:10,000, 1 g ml1) was used to stain DNA. Images were acquired with a BA410 fluorescence microscope (Motic) attached to a DS-Qi2 monochrome CMOS sensor camera (Nikon) using a CCIS EC-H plan achromatic  10/0.25 and  40/0.65 objective lens and NIS-Elements D software (Version 4.3.00), or using a confocal microscope (Zeiss LSM 510 Meta). The appropriate controls were maintained.

The accumulation of venom toxins in E. carinatus/N. naja venom-injected tail tissues after 8 h of venom injection in the presence and absence of DNase 1/actin were detected using the appropriate rabbit polyclonal antibodies (2 g ml1), followed by an AlexaFluor 488-conjugated goat anti-rabbit IgG secondary antibody (1:500). The appropriate controls were maintained.

Rabbit immunization and IgG purification

Rabbits were independently immunized against E. carinatus and N. naja venoms, and IgGs were purified54. E. carinatus (200 g) or N. naja (100 g) venoms were diluted in 100 l PBS, thoroughly mixed with an equal volume of Freunds complete adjuvant and intradermally injected into female rabbits at several sites. Three booster doses of venom were administered at the same concentration and an equal volume of Freunds incomplete adjuvant at weekly intervals. Blood was drawn from the marginal ear vein on the ninth day after the third booster dose and allowed to coagulate for 24 h at 810 C to obtain the antiserum. The antiserum was subjected to ammonium sulfate precipitation to obtain the crude IgG fraction, which was then subjected to Protein A-agarose column chromatography. The column was equilibrated with PBS and 5 mg of the crude IgG fraction in 2 ml of PBS was loaded and eluted using 0.2 M glycine-HCl buffer, pH 2.9. After reading the optical density at 280 nm, 1 ml aliquots were collected, pooled and then neutralized using 1 M Tris-HCl buffer, pH 8.0. The samples were subjected to dialysis against PBS. Aliquots of antibodies with 2 mg ml1 concentration were prepared and stored at 20 C and used for the study.

Neutropenic mouse model

Neutropenia was induced in mice using cyclophosphamide55. Briefly, female Swiss albino mice were intraperitoneally injected with cyclophosphamide in two doses totaling 250 mg kg1. Initially, 150 mg kg1 was administered in 500 l saline as the first dose on day 1, and the second dose of 100 mg kg1 was administered on day 4. Blood samples were drawn from the retro-orbital plexus on days 4 and 5, and subjected to total and differential cell counts using a Neubauer chamber and microscopic examination of Wright-stained smears. Then, the neutropenic mice were used on day 4, where complete neutrophil depletion was found (Supplementary Table 1), to determine the tail tissue destruction activity and lethality (n=10) of the E. carinatus venom (LD 50 ) in the presence and absence of DNase 1 (100 U) as described above.

Western blot analysis

In the ex vivo experiment, the levels of H3Cit, histone H3 and PAD4 in human neutrophils incubated with 5, 25 and 50 g ml1 of E. carinatus venom for 2.5 h at 37 C were observed by western blotting. In the in vivo studies, the levels of H3Cit/histone H3/MPO were determined in mice tail homogenates. The mice were divided into three different treatment groups: (i) E. carinatus venom (LD 50 ) was injected into the mice at different time intervals (2, 4, 8, 16 and 12 h; 3 and 10 days); (ii) E. carinatus venom (LD 50 ) was injected into normal and neutropenic mice for 8 h and (iii) E. carinatus venom (LD 50 ) was injected into mice in the presence or absence of DNase 1 (100 U) for 8 h. The accumulation of venom in tail tissue was observed using western blots of tail tissue homogenates from mice injected with E. carinatus venom (LD 50 ) in the presence or absence of DNase 1 (100 U) and mice injected with N. naja venom in the presence or absence of actin (50 M) 8 h after injection using rabbit raised polyclonal antibodies raised against respective snake. Briefly, the treated human neutrophils and mouse tail portions (3 cm length of tail, with the injection site at the centre, were collected after the mice were anaesthetized and killed at the indicated time intervals in the respective experiments) were snap frozen and homogenized in RIPA buffer with protease inhibitor cocktails on ice. The homogenates were centrifuged at 15,000g for 15 min at 4 C and equal amounts of protein were fractionated on SDSPAGE and electroblotted onto polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF) membranes. The blots were then incubated with primary antibodies (anti-H3Cit (1:750), anti-H3 (1:750), anti-PAD4 (1:2,000), anti-MPO (1:750), anti-E. carinatus (2 g ml1) and anti-N. naja (2 g ml1)) overnight at 4 C and subsequently with the appropriate horseradish peroxidase-conjugated secondary antibody (1:5,000) for 2 h at room temperature. The blots were developed with an enhanced chemiluminescence substrate and visualized (Alliance 2.7, Uvitec). To confirm equal loading, the glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) levels were observed by incubating the membrane with an anti-GAPDH antibody (1:1,000). For the venom accumulation study, the electroblotted membranes were stained with Ponceau to confirm equal protein loading. ImageJ software was used to quantify the blots. Images have been cropped for presentation. Uncropped images are presented in Supplementary Fig. 11.

Detection of DNase activity of the venom

The DNase activity of the venom was determined by agarose gel electrophoresis/DNase radial diffusion assay. Briefly, 750 ng of calf thymus DNA was independently incubated with the N. naja (550 g ml1) venom for 60 min, at 37 C in a final volume of 50 l PBS. The reaction mixture was subjected to electrophoresis on 0.8% agarose gels at 50 V in TAE buffer (40 mM Tris-base and 1 mM EDTA, pH 8.0) for 1 h. Calf thymus DNA that had been treated with DNase 1 (5 U) served as a positive control. After electrophoresis, the gel was visualized and photographed on a ultraviolet transilluminator (Alliance 2.7, Uvitec). The N. naja venom DNase activity was inhibited by incubating the sample with actin (525 M) for 10 min at 37 C. Image has been cropped for presentation. Uncropped image is presented in Supplementary Fig. 11.

For radial diffusion assay, molten agarose (5 ml, 2.1%) containing herring sperm DNA (1 mg ml1) and ethidium bromide (1 g ml1) was poured into wells of six-well culture plates and allowed to solidify. Seven-millimetre diameter wells were created at the centre of the dishes and loaded with E. carinatus venom (50500 g per well) for 24 h at 37 C. DNase 1 (10 U) served as the positive control. After incubation, the plates were visualized and photographed on a ultraviolet transilluminator (Alliance 2.7, Uvitec).

Effect of E. carinatus venom on serum DNase activity

Serum DNase activity was determined using the radial diffusion method. Molten agarose (5 ml, 2.1%) containing herring sperm DNA (1 mg ml1) and ethidium bromide (1 g ml1) was poured into 35 mm diameter Petri dishes and allowed to solidify. Seven-millimetre diameter wells were created at the centre of the dishes and loaded with human serum (200 l), which was independently pre-incubated with 250, 500 and 1,000 g of E. carinatus venom for 1 h at 37 C. DNase 1 (10 U) served as the positive control. After 24 h of incubation at 37 C, the plates were visualized and photographed on a ultraviolet transilluminator (Alliance 2.7, Uvitec).

DNA-venom capture ELISA

The interaction between DNA and E. carinatus venom was studied using DNAvenom capture ELISA with Cell Death ELISAPLUS, Roche. Neutrophils (1  105 cells per 500 l) were incubated with E. carinatus venom (25, 50 and 100 g) for 2.5 h to ensure NET formation and binding of the E. carinatus venom to NET DNA. Next, the DNAhistone complex provided in the assay kit (40 l) was incubated with E. carinatus venom (50 g) in a final volume of 500 l made up with incubation buffer for 2.5 h to serve as a positive control. The concentrations of the DNAhistone complex and E. carinatus were determined in our pilot study, where 40 l of the DNAhistone complex bound to a maximum of 50 g of E. carinatus venom. After incubation, the samples were centrifuged at 20g for 5 min at room temperature, and 20 l of the supernatant was added to streptavidin-coated 96-well plates, along with 80 l of an anti-histone-biotin antibody (1:20) for 2 h, followed by shaking at 300 r.p.m. at room temperature. The plate was washed (three times with incubation buffer, 300 l each) and incubated with a rabbit polyclonal antibody against E. carinatus venom (1:1,000) for 2 h, followed by shaking at 300 r.p.m. at room temperature. Then, the plate was washed (three times with incubation buffer, 300 l each) and incubated with an horseradish peroxidase-conjugated anti-rabbit secondary antibody (1:5,000) for 2 h by shaking at 300 r.p.m. at room temperature in the dark. The wells were again washed (three times with incubation buffer, 300 l each) and 100 l of the ABTS peroxidase substrate was added. After 20 min of incubation at room temperature in the dark, the absorbance was measured at 405 nm using Varioskan multimode plate reader (Thermo Scientific). The percent increase in the absorbance with respect to the control indicated the binding of E. carinatus venom toxins to the DNAhistone complex or NETs.

Detection of DNAvenom interaction by non-denaturing PAGE

The interaction between DNA and E. carinatus venom was also studied by electrophoresis. We used the amplified PCR product (160 bp) that was produced by multiplex PCR using the mecA P4 (5-TCCAGATTACAACTTCACCAGG-3) and mecA P7 (5-CCACTTCATATCTTGTAACG-3) primers as previously described56. The reaction was carried out with a DreamTaq Green DNA Polymerase kit consisting of 200 M dNTPs, 1.25 U DreamTaq DNA polymerase and 100 ng template DNA (Genomic source S. aureus). PCR amplification was performed in a Surecycler 8800 (Agilent Technologies) using the following conditions: initial denaturation for 15 min at 95 C; 35 cycles consisting of denaturation for 30 s at 95 C, annealing for 30 s at 53 C, elongation for 1 min at 72 C and post-extension for 5 min at 72 C. The amplified fragment/amplicon (250 ng) was incubated with increasing concentrations of E. carinatus venom (550 g) for 1 h at 37 C in a final reaction volume of 20 l. Then, the reaction mixture was separated on non-denaturing PAGE (7.5%) using 0.5  Tris-borate-EDTA buffer, pH 8.5, with a constant voltage of 50 V for 4 h. The gel was visualized on a ultraviolet transilluminator (Alliance 2.7 Uvitec) after staining with ethidium bromide (1 g ml1) for 30 min at room temperature.

The interaction between the DNA and the E. carinatus venom was disrupted by the addition of an equal amount of chloroform and isoamyl alcohol (24:1, v/v) followed by two volumes of pre-chilled isopropanol and incubation overnight at 20 C. The samples were then centrifuged at 18,000g for 10 min and the pellets were dissolved in sterile distilled water and resolved on a non-denaturing PAGE gel as described above. Images have been cropped for presentation. Uncropped images are presented in Supplementary Fig. 11.

Protein concentration measurement

The protein concentrations were determined using the method described by Lowry et al.57.

Statistics

The data are presented as the means.e.m. of at least three independent experiments and were analysed using a two-tailed Students t-test (unpaired), one-way analysis of variance, followed by Dunnetts post-hoc test or Bonferroni post hoc test for multiple comparisons as applicable. Lethality was analysed using the log-rank test after constructing KaplanMeier curves. All analyses were done using GraphPad Prism software (Version 5.0). The results were considered significant when P<0.05.
As the coming summer weather becomes more attractive to mosquitoes, Americans should prepare for possible local Zika outbreaks as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease said that it is very likely.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public officials from the National Institutes of Health said this weekend that many people might become infected by the virus when it spreads across the country, as per Newsweek. While the U.S. has reported 350 cases abroad and none within its borders, it is not unlikely that the Zika virus will have a local transmission as the warmer weather comes close.

The Zika virus carrier, the mosquito Aedes aegypti, is present in at least 30 states in the country.

This warning is only a few days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that the virus, which was first detected in Brazil last year, can cause microcephaly in infants, along other birth defects.

The Zika virus, which can also be transmitted through sexual contact, has also been linked to the Guillain-Barre syndrome that can cause paralysis.

The urgency of the matter cannot anymore be understated, as Fauci's statement also came just a week after the Congress was urged to pass a law that would allocate around $1.9 billion in emergency funding to fight the Zika virus.

"We have to act now," Fauci was quoted by The Guardian as saying, adding that he cannot wait to start the development of a vaccine to counter the rapidly spreading virus.

As the weather continues to heat up, several states might be hotspots for possible Zika outbreaks. According to a study published in the journal PLOS Current: Outbreaks, the Aedes aegypti mosquito may soon spread to the humid states, such as Georgia, Mississippi and California, as per a previous report.

Highly populated areas are also at high risk, such as areas in New York City, where the mosquito can easily breed in polluted areas.

While there should be no cause to panic as of the moment, Americans must do their best to prevent the breeding of the virus-carrying mosquito.

Female mosquitoes lay 250 eggs at one go in still water, which could hatch in a week or two, as per Mosquito Magnet. To prevent this breeding, water storage should be cleaned out so it would not be an ideal place to lay their eggs. Objects that can collect water, such as old tires and pots, must be also discarded. It is best to keep surrounding areas to clean so that water can drain properly and not accumulate.
The Stab-Lok circuit breaker and panel produced by Federal Pacific Electric (FPE) installed in hundreds of thousands of homes in the Bay Area may cause house fires, according decades of documentation and electrical experts interviewed by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit. Stab-Lok circuit breakers are most commonly found in houses built before 1990.

Click here to see how to determine if your home has a Federal Pacific Stab-Lok circuit breaker.

Information and lab tests uncovered by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit show many Federal Pacific Electric Stab-Lok breakers will not trip, continuously providing electricity to the short circuit, which can cause intense heat and in some cases fire. When working properly, circuit breakers are designed to prevent fires. They are designed to cut off the flow of electricity when charged with excessive electrical demand or short circuit, also known as arching.

There is no inconsistency and no dispute in the fact that they are defective, says Jesse Aronstein, an engineer, who has spent more than 20 years researching FPE Circuit Breakers.

Aronstein has testified in lawsuits against FPE and warned, The breaker is a safety device that is supposed to prevent fires, if it doesnt work as required, you get an increased risk of fire.

NBC Bay Area spoke with a Bay Area attorney representing Federal Pacific and she declined to comment on the information included in this investigation.

The Investigative Unit asked how did a defective product meant to provide safety, get into millions of homes? And how can a defective circuit breaker pass federal inspection plus get the UL stamp of approval? According to Aronstein, the answer is simple. He says the company cheated. FPE was cheating on the testing and applying the label to a product that was defective and did not meet the requirements, Aronstein claims.

His allegation is supported by this document obtained by NBC Bay Area. The 1982 Securities and Exchange Commission filing by Reliance Electric, the company that purchased FPE says, UL listings on circuit breakers made by Federal Pacific have previously been obtained through the use of deceptive and improper practices.

Aronstein told NBC Bay Area the deceptive and improper practices included tricking UL inspectors by using a hidden remote control to force the breaker to trip if it was not tripping properly.

After years of researching the issues with Federal Pacific circuit breakers, Aronstein believes they are responsible for approximately 2,000 fires nationwide each year.

Investigative Reporter Tony Kovaleski also interviewed Bay Area electrical contractors and engineers. Geoff Williams is a master electrician, who has replaced Stab-Lok electrical breaker panels in Bay Area homes and businesses for decades. Williams says his personal experience is consistent with Aronsteins testimony.

Williams says he has witnessed Federal Pacific Stab-Lok failures on multiple job sites. Ive seen so many places burned by these panels, said Williams. Its frightening to me every time I see it.

Williams recalled a morning in 1979, he says he nearly lost his life in a crawl space under a Bay Area house. Williams said that as he approached a circuit breaker panel, It lit up cherry red. It lit up that crawl space like the gates of hell. It could have killed me.

Williams says it was an FPE Stab-Lok panel. I had to role and approach that panel through a small opening through the crawl space and shut it off manually. He added, With the fire shooting flames at my face.

NBC Bay Area had FPE Stab-Lok circuit breakers tested at the Berkeley Research Company. Bernard Cuzzillo has a Ph. D. in electrical engineering, is a fire specialist and owns BRC. Cuzzillo tested a dual pole 60 amp breaker, similar to the ones tested by Underwriter Laboratories and to the ones found in homes in the Bay Area.

To test the circuit breaker, he forced double the electrical current its capable of handling and timed it. Cuzzillo says if working properly the Federal Pacific circuit breaker should have tripped in less than two minutes. At one minute ten seconds, Kovaleski noted smoke coming out of the breaker.

Kovaleski and Cuzzillo watched the circuit breaker smoke for more than four minutes. Its smoking and it hasnt tripped. Why not? asked Kovaleski. Because the mechanical mechanism that is supposed to be tripping the mechanism is stuck, replied Cuzzillo. The expert says, therein lies the problem with FPE Stab-Loks.

NBC Bay Area also uncovered documents reporting other FPE equipment that did not work properly. This internal document from Bay Area Rapid Transit from 2008 says BART had electrical equipment problems with Federal Pacific products.

It reads, "There have been two instances of failures with the old Federal Pacific Electric secondary distribution panel. Failure of this old equipment has caused delays to BART train service and created potentially unsafe conditions."

In the small town of El Sobrante just north of Berkeley, NBC Bay Area spoke with retired electrician and homeowner Daniel Schmidt. Schmidt decided to remove his Federal Pacific Stab-Lok panel. Years of electrical work taught him that if he ignores FPEs history, the inevitable might happen. Its a panel thats got quite a reputation, he said.

Schmidt lives in the home with his wife and two dogs. Theyve also raised two boys in El Sobrante.

A new electrical system removes a lingering issue from their lives, but more importantly, the investment also brings security. I know its going to be safer, he added.

The Federal Pacific Electric company no longer exists but experts estimate millions of defective circuit breakers it manufactured remain in homes all over the country. Published reports show not every Federal Pacific circuit breaker is defective. In the wake of the controversy, Underwriters Laboratories (UL) removed the U-L listing for the breakers, but not before millions were sold and installed in homes built from the 1950s to the 1980s.

In recent years, some of the breakers have been modified and did pass U-L inspection.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission did conduct additional testing of the Federal Pacific circuit breakers in the 1980s. Controversy and legal challenges followed the testing. Many called on the CPSC to recall the breakers, but they were never recalled. Some experts have said the CPSC did not recall the Federal Pacific circuit breakers because it did not have the budget to battle a possible legal fight from Federal Pacifics then-parent company.



If you have witnessed a problem with Federal Pacific circuit breakers, the Consumer Product Safety Commission asks that you file a report at www.saferproducts.gov

To view the video click here:
Just in time for 4/20, folks of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley will witness the nation's first all-encompassing marketing campaign for an actual brand of pot.

The ads that read: "Craft farmers, small-batch, sustainable. That's cannabis the California way" will appears in newspapers, on social media and on billboards.

And as Mother Jones reported, the ads are paid for by Flow Kana, a collaborative of small, organic marijuana farmers from Northern California's Emerald Triangle region. The collective states it embraces both "California values and the small farmer ecosystem." And that its mission is to represent communities through "great cannabis." Mother Jones reported Flow Kana is spending about $200,000 on the marketing effort, which also includes a series of videos and a sponsorship deal with San Francisco's Earth Day Film Festival.

Flow Kana spokesman Michael Steinmetz told NBC Bay Area on Tuesday that this is the "first time in history a cannabis brand has done a well-orchestrated, multi layer, omni channel marketing campaign." He said there have been "one off" ads to promote a particular dispensary, but no cannabis campaign on "multiple channels."

We applaude @flowKana CA Way campaign https://t.co/QVQEjry0DX & hope to see more unifying efforts in our industry. pic.twitter.com/opYiIgfmqm  Canna Ventures (@Canna_Ventures) April 18, 2016

All of the cannabis the collective represents "is nourished by the sun, moon and stars; the way nature intended."

Flow Kana products are sold at dispensaries including Harvest on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, Oakland Organics on Broadway, Marygold Delivery in Contra Costa County, Valley Essentials in Mountain View, Try Sunshine on the Peninsula, OrganiCann in Santa Rosa.
Marley Natural cannabis products, made from organic Humboldt County crops, have launched in Bay Area dispensaries.

Four strains of cannabis and four types of cannabis oils are now available for purchase to patients at Harborside Health Center in Oakland, CBCB in Berkeley and SPARC in San Francisco.

The products launched at three dispensaries in Los Angeles earlier this year, utilizing cannabis grown in Southern California. The Marley Natural cannabis stocked in Bay Area dispensaries comes from a collective in Humboldt County and is both sun-grown and organic. When the product line rolls out in places where marijuana is legal such as Washington and Colorado this summer, Marley Natural will work with local farmers in those areas.

Joshua Hoffman, SPARC's director of product, told NBC Bay Area that the way Marley Natural cannabis is sourced and priced makes it a good fit for the almost 40 strains that the dispensary typically carries, and that the brand name is likely to bridge future gaps between "medical and adult" as the product becomes available recreationally.

There are additional products in the Marley Natural collection, including a grinder, pipes and rolling trays, all made from sustainable black walnut. An oversized eponymous coffee table magazine features cannabis culture stories from around the world and will be published on a bi-annual schedule. And a Marley Natural bodycare line of non-psychoactive hemp seed oil products including hand cream, body wash, soap, lip balm and body lotion are also available online and at San Francisco clothing boutiques Welcome Stranger and Azalea.

Proceeds from the Marley Natural collection benefit a philanthropic initiative called Rise Up that begins with a mission to give back to Jamaica.
San Francisco International Airport officials sought to reassure anxious firefighters Friday that they are taking elaborate measures to clean the air at a new fire station under construction just feet from a busy runway.

The two-hour long meeting about the station came the day after city firefighters learned about the death of 49-year-old Denise Elarms, who had breast cancer she believed to be job-related. The sad news was one more reminder about the risk firefighters know they have endure.

"The San Francisco Fire Department has one of the highest rates of cancer throughout the nation," said Assistant Deputy Chief Ken Lombardi.

Crews housed at the airports three fire stations have long been identified as having a still greater risk. A survey of stations done in 2007 raised concerns, said retired SFFD Capt. Tony Stefani, who survived a rare, apparently job-related, form of cancer to found the citys firefighter cancer foundation.

"The airport had a cluster of about 12 cases," he said, "which at that time was among the highest levels of any station in San Francisco."

Stefani says one chemical of concern is benzene, which his in both jet and vehicle exhaust. Another is formaldehyde. Both have been found at elevated levels inside Station No. 3, which is slated to be relocated by November to within feet of a runway blast fence as part of an airport expansion project. The existing station is near the U.S. Highway 101 as well, Stefani said.

When airport firefighters learned about the planned relocation of Station No. 3, they started what one firefighter union official called a "grassroots" effort. The department did not authorize firefighters to speak to NBC Bay Area, but firefighter union director Adam Wood credited them for making a stink about the jet exhaust issue.

"It was a real grassroots movement that got this scrutiny going, which might not have been happening at this level if they hadnt done that," Wood said after a meeting Friday morning aimed at assuring the firefighters about the plan to preserve air quality at the new station.

"I think they did themselves a service by being active and calling everybodys attention to the issue."

Assistant Deputy Chief Ken Lombardi and officials with the architect on the project spent two hours detailing how the new ventilation system is expected to keep the air clean.

The system will employ scrubbers to clean out particulates from the air and multiple filters to capture toxins. The station builders hope they can also raise the air pressure inside the living quarters of the station to force polluted, lower pressure air from the outside from seeping in.

Wood said firefighters he represents still have questions how such a system will work, given that the door on the station will need to be raised regularly.

"Were gonna have to keep those doors closed," he said. "We are going to have to treat this like a hot zone."

He was referring to a zone where workers need to take extra precautions.

Assistant Deputy Chief Lombardi said the system being installed is the best available.

"Its a five stage filtration system," he said. "I personally asked the installer, is this the best system on the market  he said, 'Yes, this is the best system available.'"

Lombardi hopes the new station will have cleaner air than the old station, which is further from the runway. "This will be a state of the art system, it will be a much better building than they currently are in."

Wood, the union official, said the air quality testing when the station opens will be key to convincing firefighters that living and working next to the runway is safe.

"Is it giving the results we need to keep our members safe? Thats what were going to have to find out," he said.
BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - Three young women who left a balcony seconds before it collapsed, killing six college students, have sued the builders, owners and managers of the Berkeley building.

The East Bay Times reports Monday that Caroline Conlan, Cliodhna Maloney and Aisling Tallon filed their lawsuit last month in Alameda County Superior Court, alleging that the wooden balcony had poor workmanship and that warning signs of extensive water damage to the structure were ignored.

The three roommates say they could have been killed or injured.

Conlan, Maloney and Tallon had moved into the apartment two weeks before the tragedy with their fourth roommate, Aoife Beary, who was celebrating her 21st birthday the night of the collapse. Beary fell, and was seriously injured.

Five of the students killed were Irish citizens working in California for the summer. The sixth was a Rohnert Park woman.
A new optical illusion has set social media ablaze and it has nothing to do with the color of a dress.

A photo posted to Facebook last week has puzzled thousands after a Missouri woman asked her followers if they could see what was in the image.

I stared at this picture for an hour trying to figure out what it was, Savannah Root wrote. Once you figure it out comment below, please dont ruin it for anyone.

The post has since garnered more than 11,000 comments and more than 5,100 shares as confused users post their guesses and others claim victory.

One user wrote she could only see a penguin fishing, while some said they saw what was in the image right away.

Others offered advice like look at it..turn away.. then look back and its [sic] there.

Its not the first time social media has debated an optical illusion.

Many might remember the dress controversy last year that sent the Internet into a raging debate. A photo had thousands questioning the color of a dress after some thought it was black and blue while others saw white and gold.

Late last year, a comic artist also had thousands furiously searching through a Wheres Waldo?-style photo trying to find a panda in a sea of snowmen.

What do you see in the latest viral image?

Share your guesses in the comment section and scroll down to find out the answer.

Answer: A cowboy.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the expansion of the 1871 tech hub Tuesday and the addition of more than 700 jobs for the city.

1871 has grown from a 50,000 square foot space in 2012 to a bustling tech center taking up two floors and 115,000 square feet in the Merchandise Mart.

Today both 1871 and Chicagos tech scene are growing so I want to thank these companies for committing to adding jobs and supporting the incubator where some of them started out, Emanuel said. These tech companies are establishing the next generation of Chicagos economy- an economy that is thriving due to the citys central location, access to transportation, unmatched talent and business friendly environment.

The incubators latest expansion looks to house companies that have previously outgrown their space at 1871. In addition to this, the offices will house venture capital firms.

The expansion will also bring a variety of new tech companies and jobs to the Chicago area. Among them is CloserLook, Inc., a full service digital marketing agency that works with pharmaceutical marketers. They will add 50 jobs in the city, Emanuel said.

Aside from CloserLook, 15 other tech businesses will be moving into the incubator and adding jobs.

Chicago is fortunate to have such an engaged tech community, that works together to advance the city and its businesses, World Business Chicago President & CEO Jeff Malehorn said. Our efforts to attract talent, increase access to capital and facilitate connections to cultivate growth would not be possible without this supportive and nurturing community.

Chicagos tech industry is already growing with companies like Google and Motorola Solutions and other smaller tech businesses already investing in the city.
Mayor Rahm Emanuels new plan to demolish McCormick Place East and build George Lucas museum in its place would reportedly require $1.2 billion in borrowing.

The Chicago Tribune reports roughly $665 million would go towards the demolition of the above-ground portion of the existing lakefront convention center and to fund the construction of the new museum and a new walkway over Lake shore Drive, among other projects.

Another $500 million would go towards a bridge building over Martin Luther King Drive to further connect the sites remaining buildings, upgrades for those buildings and updated parking spaces for the Chicago Park District and Lucas Museum.

In order to fund the museums construction and a replacement convention space, the mayor is asking the state to carry on a 2 percent hotel tax, which is currently being used to fund U.S. Cellular Fields debt, the Tribune reports.

Emanuel is also reportedly asking the state to extend a handful of other taxes and to continue contributing subsidies amounting to as as much as $15 million a year.

The new plan, which calls for the demolition of McCormick Places Lakeside Center, would shore up 12 acres of prime lakefront real estate.

The current site for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is located between Soldier Field and McCormick Place. Emanuel originally planned to give Lucas 17 acres of lakefront land, but the construction of the museum on that site has been held up by a lawsuit filed by Friends of the Parks.

The groups main argument is that the museums 99-year lease wouldnt benefit the public and would promote private and commercial interests. The group also claims the museum would detract from the citys lakefront and add to traffic woes in the area.

Nevertheless, the group remained open to the prospect of a new location for the museum.

Friends of the Parks appreciates that the City of Chicago finally reached out to us yesterday with the mayors new idea for the Lucas Museum," Board Chair of Friends of the Parks Lauren Moltz said in a statement. "We will discuss and analyze this new information while we review the discovery materials we also just received from the City this week.

Fearing a potential move to Los Angeles or San Francisco, Emanuel is now pushing for the McCormick Place demolition as a means of keeping the museum in Chicago.

Lucas wife, Mellody Hobson, was supportive of the new site last week. Though she noted that it would be more costly.

"There are some tradeoffs we'd have to make," Hobson told NBC Chicago. "It's actually more expensive to build there than the other location, but we said we want this to work."

If Emanuels new plan pans out, Lucas would still give $743 million to fund the project.
Officials are warning Chicago-area residents as a very powerful drug, one that is 100 times more potent than morphine, is believed to be behind more than 100 deaths in the past seven months.

The Cook County Medical Examiners office reported Monday a spike in deaths attributed, at least in part, to an opoid known as fentanyl. But experts are concerned that new versions of the drug have appeared, making testing more challenging.

"Fentanyl and fentanyl analogues pose a great public health [risk] because people may not know they're using a very powerful drug," Dr. Peter Koin, deputy chief toxicologist for the Cook County Medical Examiner's office, said in a statement. "In addition, we're seeing new versions of fentanyl and testing for these substances is challenging because we've never seen them before. It's something brand new."

The latest numbers show at least seven deaths have been caused by the drug since December and 106 deaths since September. The medical examiners office believes the death toll will likely climb even higher as toxicology results can take up to three months to report.

"Fentanyl and fentanyl analogues are a huge concern because fentanyl is 20 to 100 times more potent than heroin, posing a much greater risk of overdose," Dr. Steven Aks, emergency medicine physician and toxicologist at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, said in a statement. "In many cases, one dose of naloxone, the heroin antidote, will revive a person who has overdosed on heroin. But we are seeing people in our emergency department who need as many as four doses [of] naloxone to be stabilized after ingesting fentanyl, or a heroin-fentanyl combination."

Law enforcement officials told NBC Chicago the opioid is being mixed with other drugs, mainly heroin, and being sold to unsuspecting users. According to the results so far, some who have died used the drug alone and others mixed it with heroin and other drugs like cocaine.

"They don't know from bag to bag to bag," said retired Chicago police officer John Roberts, who lost his son to a heroin overdose in 2009 and has since founded the Heroin Epidemic Relief Organization, a group that provides support to heroin addicts and grieving families. "It's Russian roulette."

Last October, 74 people overdosed in 72 hours and police recovered a sample of heroin they say was laced with the painkiller fentanyl.

The Medical Examiner's Office began routinely testing for fentanyl in June 2015 after national trends showed a spike in use. In 2014, 20 deaths were attributed to the drug.

The painkiller was thrust into the spotlight in the mid-2000s when dozens of people died from fentanyl-related overdoses.

The Drug Enforcement Administration said heroin has been the agency's number one priority for "the last several years." The agency said it has increased its outreach efforts in the Chicago area over the last year "to further help save lives."

Those seeking treatment for opioid dependence can find help through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's treatment locator by calling (800) 662-4357 or online.
A man has been arrested following the discovery of a Wisconsin man's body inside a box along a Kentucky road.

Clarence Michael Hicks, 61, was arrested in his Harrodsburg home on a charge of hiding a corpse that was filed in Wisconsin, the Mercer County Sheriff's Office said in a news release Monday.

Authorities say the body of 51-year-old Douglas Bailey was found in December in a large box on an embankment in Hazard. Bailey was a truck driver whose sister reported him missing after he didn't show up for a family Thanksgiving dinner in Peoria, Illinois.

Bailey's 45-year-old girlfriend, Rose Marie Kuehni, of Prescott, has been charged with first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reports Wisconsin's Pierce County Sheriff's Office conducted the investigation.
A popular morning radio host was found dead in her Michigan home along with her husband in what authorities believe was a murder-suicide.

Denise Bohn-Stewart and her husband Eric Stewart were both found dead inside their Berrien County, Michigan home early Tuesday morning, police said.

Investigators told NBC affiliate WNDU Bohn-Stewart was found shot multiple times in an upstairs bedroom. Eric Stewart was located in the basement of the home.

Police arrived at the scene just after 6:30 a.m. where they reportedly found the couples three children, ages 8, 9, and 10, waiting at the front door. One of the children had called 911.

Authorities said the children were not injured in the incident.

A preliminary investigation indicated Eric Stewart fatally shot his wife before he shot himself, police said.

Bohn-Stewart was a morning radio host for 98.3 The Coast. She was also previously a news reporter and anchor for WSBT-TV in South Bend.

The radio station said in a statement on Facebook Tuesday we have lost a member of our family at Mid-West Family Broadcasting.

Bohn-Stewart was a breast cancer survivor, wife, and mother of three, according to her bio on the Susan G. Komen Michigan website, where she was listed as development director.

Autopsties for the pair are scheduled to take place Wednesday.
Tickets sold out so quickly Friday for a table at Saved by the Max that the Saved by the Bell-themed pop-up bar and diner decided it will extend its Chicago stay an additional two months.

Saved by the Max aims to bring the iconic Bayside High hangout come to life in a way fans of the show have not been able to experience before, with a themed-events and a full kitchen and bar stocked with Bayside-inspired cocktails and menu items.

Originally planning to only be a one-month pop-up for June, the restaurant announced on their Facebook page Friday morning that it would be keeping its doors open until the end of August after an overwhelming response in ticket sales.

Here are the details:

Dates Open: June 1 to Aug. 31

Hours:

MONDAY  FRIDAY

5pm  11pm Dinner*

11pm  1am Late Night

SATURDAY  SUNDAY

10am  3pm Brunch

5pm  11pm Dinner*

11pm  1am (2am on Saturday) Late Night

* Reservations Highly Recommended For Dinner

Location: The Storefront Co. at 1941 W. North Ave. in Wicker Park

How to Buy Tickets: Bookings go on sale here at Friday, April 22 at 12 p.m.

Cost: Each ticket costs $35. There are two options to choose from: 'Dinner at The Max!' (2-8 guests) include a choice of one appetizer, one entree and one dessert per person. 'Solo Dinner at the Max!' allows you to join the communal table with one appetizer, one entree and one dessert per person.

Are Walk-Ins Accepted? "For all three months we will still have walk in's accepted for brunch and late night service on a first come first serve basis," the restaurant says.

What's on the Menu? Menu items include things like AC Sliders, Preppy BLT, Macaroni & Screech, Belding Fries and a Lisa Turtle Milkshake. See it here.

Events: Events over the course of the summer include live music from 'Zack Attack Cover Band!, trivia nights, cast and crew Q & As, costume contests and '90s nights.

Derek Berry, the "mind" behind "Saved by The Max" announced the official Wicker Park location Tuesday.

After just one meeting I knew that this space was perfect for us, Berry said. "We needed a place that would allow fans to feel as if theyve been transported back to Bayside and are fully immersed in the universe of the show. The final look of the space is going to be a dream come true and deliver the grand slam nostalgic experience everyone has been waiting for.

The pop-up opens its doors Wednesday, June 1 and will run through the end of August.

Offering nightly dinner service, weekend brunches and a late night menu, the diner also plans to have celebrity hosts, special events, DJs and live music.

For more information, visit savedbythemax.com.
A former NYPD officer who shot an unarmed man to death in a darkened stairwell was spared prison time Tuesday, and a judge reduced his manslaughter conviction to a lesser charge in a case that became a flashpoint for police accountability.

Peter Liang was sentenced to five years' probation and 800 hours of community service in the 2014 shooting of Akai Gurley, who was walking down a public housing stairway when Liang, a rookie officer, fired a bullet into the dark - by accident after being startled, he said. The bullet ricocheted and killed Gurley, 28.

Speaking softly, Liang told the court he never meant to fire and apologized to Gurley's family.

"My life is forever changed," he added. "I hope you give me a chance to rebuild it."

Liang, 28, is the first NYPD officer convicted in an on-duty shooting in 11 years. A jury found him guilty this winter of a manslaughter charge carrying up to 15 years in prison.

But Brooklyn state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun reduced the offense Tuesday to criminally negligent homicide, which carries up to four years in prison. He said prosecutors hadn't met the legal burden for the manslaughter charge: proving that Liang consciously disregarded a substantial, unjustifiable risk of death.

And, the judge said, "given the defendant's background and how remorseful he is, it would not be necessary to incarcerate the defendant to have a just sentence in this case."

Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson had recommended against prison for Liang, but the prosecutor said Tuesday he would appeal the judge's decision to reduce the conviction. Defense lawyer Paul Shechtman said Liang would also appeal his remaining conviction, though the day's developments marked "a very good chapter" for him.

The shooting happened in a year of debate nationwide about police killings of unarmed black men, and activists have looked to Liang's prosecution as a counterweight to cases in which grand juries have declined to indict officers, including those who killed Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York. Like Brown and Garner, Gurley was black. Liang is Chinese-American.

Gurley's family said Liang had been let off lightly.

"There's no justice. Akai Gurley's life does not matter. Black lives do not matter," said an aunt, Hertensia Petersen.

Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called Liang's sentence "a deeply troubling message that police officers convicted of killing unarmed African-Americans will be held to a different, and more lenient, standard of justice" than others.

Meanwhile, Liang's supporters say he has been made a scapegoat for past injustices. More than 10,000 of his backers rallied in New York and across the U.S. after the verdict, protesting his conviction.

Dozens of demonstrators representing both sides gathered Tuesday on opposite sides of the street outside the courthouse, separated by police barricades.

"Nobody really won here," Liang supporter Karlin Chan said. "We still feel this was a politically motivated prosecution."

On the Gurley side, demonstrator Daniel Sanchez said the no-prison sentence shows "the justice system doesn't work for all communities."

Inside, both prosecutors and Liang's lawyers cautioned against using the case to make a larger point about police conduct.

"This simply is not a case of police brutality. This case features a reckless shooting by a rookie police officer in a darkened stairwell," Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Joe Alexis said.

But Gurley's loved ones reminded the judge of the toll.

"Because of the recklessness of that night, I'm without my partner, our daughter is without her father, a mom is without her son," said Gurley's domestic partner, Kim Ballinger.

Gurley's girlfriend, Melissa Butler, who was with him when he died, told Liang: "When you stole Akai's life, you stole mine as well."

Liang's missteps after the shooting were detailed during the trial, including his failure to aid the bleeding Gurley as Butler frantically performed CPR. Liang and his partner, who wasn't charged and testified during the trial, said they didn't help and faulted their police training. Their admissions prompted Police Commissioner William Bratton to launch an investigation into training.

Liang and his partner were fired after the verdict.
A fitness instructor was found slain inside a North Texas church Monday morning, and Midlothian police are looking for a person seen on video wearing tactical clothing with police markings in connection with her death.

Midlothian Assistant Police Chief Kevin Johnson said Tuesday that contrary to initial reports, the detectives can no longer say they are looking for a man.

"We are backing off our statement that the suspect on video was a man. I know we said 'he' over and over again yesterday, and that was a mistake. There's a lot of speculation based on the gait and appearance that this person may be a woman. It's a legitimate question right now. We no longer will say the suspect is a man," Johnson said. "That does not mean I'm saying this suspect is a woman. It's just that at this point we cant rule it out. We don't know yet."

Fitness instructor Missy Bevers, a 45-year-old mother of three, arrived at the Creekside Church of Christ shortly after 4 a.m. to prepare for a Camp Gladiator class, police said Monday afternoon.

When her students arrived at 5 a.m., they found her unresponsive and called 911. EMS workers arrived minutes later and noticed broken glass and other indications of a struggle around the woman's body.

Police arrived soon after, searched the building and determined there were visible signs of forced entry. No one else was found in the building but a review of surveillance video recorded inside the building indicated a person entered the building shortly before Bevers and was using a tool to pry open doors.

Midlothian police said the person was dressed in tactical gear with police markings, including a heavy helmet, gloves and military-style battle-dress pants.

In a news conference Monday afternoon, Midlothian Chief of Police Carl Smith said the person was "designed to look like a police officer."

NBC 5 News

Police said the motion-activated surveillance cameras did not record any interaction between Bevers and the person, and while a motive has not been determined, police said it's possible Bevers interrupted a burglary.

"It's just an odd, random situation that they would they would actually happen to come into a building that was being burglarized on a Monday morning," Smith said. "But all scenarios are on the table right now."

Investigators said the first time the person appeared on camera was about 3:50 a.m., shortly before Bevers arrived. Since there are no working cameras outside the church, it is not clear when the person arrived.

The death of a woman whose body was found inside a Midlothian church Monday is being investigated as a homicide, police say.

It was not immediately known if anything was taken from the church and police were not sure if the person was carrying a weapon.

The woman was declared dead at the scene by Ellis County Justice of the Peace Bill Woody. Due to Bevers' injuries, police are investigating her death as a homicide.

"She was a loving mother of three. She loved her husband very much," said Chad Tucker, Bevers' brother in-law. "She was dedicated to taking care of herself, taking care of other people and being a good mother."

Several people gathered Monday evening at the Midlothian Conference Center for a private candlelight vigil in Bevers' memory.

Oak Farms Dairy is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case of Missy Bevers, who was found dead in a Midlothian church.

Oak Farms Dairy announced it was offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and successful grand jury indictment in this case.

Bevers' body was transported to the Dallas County medical examiner who will determine her cause of death.

A fitness instructor was found slain inside a North Texas church Monday morning, and Midlothian police are looking for a man seen on video wearing tactical clothing with police markings in connection with her death.

Anyone with information on the person's identity is asked to call the Midlothian Police Department at 972-775-3333.

NBC 5's Chris Jose and Kevin Cokely contributed to this report.
An 18-year-old Ohio high school student accused of livestreaming the rape of her 17-year-old friend on the social media app Periscope was trying to record the assault as evidence, the woman's attorney said Friday in a defense a prosecutor flatly dismissed.

Marina Lonina pleaded not guilty Friday to multiple charges, including rape, kidnapping, sexual battery and pandering sexual matter involving a minor. A judge set bond at $125,000 for Lonina, a student at New Albany High School, outside Columbus.

Her co-defendant, Raymond Gates, 29, also pleaded not guilty, with a judge setting his bond at $300,000. A public defender representing Gates did not comment on the allegations.

Lonina and her friend  who attends the same high school  met Gates the day before at a Columbus mall, where he bought them a bottle of vodka and encouraged them to meet him the following day, according to Lonina's lawyer, Sam Shamansky.

Shamansky acknowledged his client recorded the February assault of her intoxicated friend but said she was trying to get the girl out of the house where the attack happened.

Lonina is in the habit of livestreamming everything on Periscope, Shamansky said.

"She does everything possible to contain the situation, even to the point of asking while it's being filmed to these Periscope followers, 'What should I do now? What should I do now?'" Shamansky said.

Lonina and her friend are naturalized U.S. citizens from Russia, and Gates is also of Russian descent, said Franklin County prosecutor Ron O'Brien. The comments on the video are in Russian.

O'Brien said Lonina is seen trying to help only briefly during the 10-minute video. O'Brien said the victim was clearly screaming "stop" and "no" during the assault.

Although Lonina told police she was trying to record the assault as evidence, her behavior as people watching via Periscope "liked" the assault painted a different picture, O'Brien said.

"She got, I guess, taken up with all the 'likes' that her livestream was getting and therefore continued to do it, and did nothing to aid the victim," O'Brien said.

Lonina has been charged separately with livestreaming video of her friend nude the day before the assault, which is a felony, O'Brien said.
San Diego police announced the arrest of a man in the slaying of his stepson, Jahi Turner, a toddler whose disappearance "rocked the community to its core" almost 14 years ago.

Tieray Jones has been charged with killing 2-year-old Jahi, according to San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman. His mother was deployed aboard a Navy ship at the time.

Hundreds of volunteers and police officers spent weeks searching for traces of the 30-pound toddler when he was reported missing in 2002. Law enforcement officers raked through 5,000 tons of garbage at the Miramar Landfill but came up with nothing.

"Jahi's disappearance rocked the community to its core 14 years ago," DA Bonnie Dumanis said. "It's without a doubt one of the highest profile unsolved cases here in San Diego County."

Dumanis and Zimmerman explained that U.S. Marshals arrested the boy's stepfather on a fugitive complaint Monday in North Carolina without incident and took him into custody.

"I have no doubt that the announcement of today's arrest and subsequent charges will jolt the community again and may reopen emotional wounds, but it will finally start the process of bringing some closure to those who were so deeply affected by Jahi's disappearance, especially his mother and family," Dumanis said.

Though new evidence has been uncovered in the case, authorities have not found Jahi's body or remains, police said.

Jones is charged with one count of murder and one count of felony child abuse causing death, authorities said. Both carry a 25-years-to-life sentence. It wasn't immediately clear if Jones has an attorney. Prosecutors will work on his extradition at a hearing Tuesday.

The arrest comes one week before the 14th anniversary of Jahi's disappearance. On April 25, 2002, he allegedly disappeared from a playground at 28th Street and Cedar Street in San Diego's South Park neighborhood.

According to police, Jones told officers he was with the toddler at the park when he left to get a drink. Jones said he returned 15 minutes later and Jahi was gone.

However, officials were unable to locate Jahi's fingerprints on playground equipment, prompting speculation the child never visited the area, authorities announced Monday.

Officials say the last reported sighting of Jahi was April 22.

SDPD Asst. Chief of Police Terry Mcmanus said he still remembers taking the call that Jahi was reported missing.

"I personally remember the day of Jahi's disappearance vividly, as I was then assigned as the watch commander receiving the initial information from our field units that Jahi was missing from the small playground in the South Park area of our city," McManus said.

At the time of the childs disappearance, Jahis mother, Tameka Jones, was deployed aboard USS Rushmore.

A huge search for Jahi ensued, including a week-long police search of the Miramar Landfill, where authorities took the extreme measure of systematically raking through 5,000 tons of garbage.

Dumanis said officials could not file charges earlier because they didn't have enough proof, though they began uncovering new evidence in the case two years ago.

"We never gave up on finding justice for Jahi. In 2003, we assigned a prosecutor and full-time investigator to the case," Dumanis said. "Unfortunately at the time, we didnt have the evidence required: proof beyond a reasonable doubt, to proceed with criminal charges."

Jahis family eventually moved to Frederick, Maryland.

Residents from across San Diego reacted to news of the arrest on NBC 7 San Diego's Facebook page on Monday.

"This hit so close to home for me back then and now. Little Jahi shares a birthday with my son and they would both be 16 today if he wasn't so tragically taken from his family," San Diegan Michelle Keperling posted to NBC 7's Facebook page. "I can't imagine what his family has been going through the last 14 years."

RK Hunt posted that he was happy to learn of an arrest.

"I remember when that happened because my kids were young and we visited that park often," Hunt said on NBC 7's Facebook page.

Officials said because this is a criminal case, they are not able to discuss any of the facts or the criminal evidence, including any new evidence they uncovered since the case went cold.
What to Know Nicole Mittendorff, 31, was reported missing to police Friday.

A U.S. Park ranger found her 2009 Mini Cooper Saturday evening.

Mittendorff is a career firefighter and paramedic for the Fairfax County Fire Department. Her husband is a Virginia State Police employee.

Family and friends of a missing Fairfax County paramedic-firefighter held an emotional press conference Tuesday, asking the public for help bringing Nicole Mittendorff home.

Mittendorff, 31, was reported missing to police Friday. A U.S. Park ranger found her 2009 Mini Cooper shortly before 8 p.m. Saturday in a parking lot in Shenandoah National Park. State police said Mittendorff was last in touch with her family Wednesday. There is no indication of foul play, according to Virginia State Police.

"As you can imagine, the pain of not knowisng where a loved one is can be unbearable," Mittendorff's husband, Steve Mittendorff, said through tears.

Her family said she is an avid runner and triathlete who may have been training on a trail near where her car was found, the Associated Press reported.

Federal, state and volunteer search teams have spent days searching Shenandoah National Park for any signs of Mittendorff. About 100 search-and-rescue team members continued combing a steep, rocky and forested 10-square-mile section of the 300-square-mile national park Tuesday, park spokeswoman Sally Hurlbert said.

"I'm not sure where you are, but know that we are all looking for you," Steve Mittendorff said.

The search has focused on the area around the White Oak Canyon trail in Madison County. Trails were closed in the area Tuesday. So far, search parties on the ground and in the air have found nothing.

Fire officials urged the public to call Virginia State Police if they have any information on Mittendorff's whereabouts.

"This is our 911 call to the public," Fairfax County Fire Chief Richard Bowers Jr. said. "You never know. The smallest thing can help bring Nicole home."

Mittendorff is a career firefighter and paramedic for the Fairfax County Fire Department. Her husband is a Virginia State Police sergeant.

Her gear in a locker at Fairfax Station's fire station has not been touched for more than a week.

There is currently no evidence to suggest anything suspicious about Mittendorff's disappearance, state police said.

Her family created a Facebook page and a website to help find her.

A prayer vigil will be held Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. at Fairview Station 32, Mittendorff's station, located at 5600 Burke Centre Parkway in Fairfax Station, Virginia.

Mittendorff is described as a white woman with blonde hair and green eyes. She is 5-feet-6-inches tall and weighs about 125 pounds.

Anyone with information that can help police is asked to call Virginia State Police at 703-803-0026.
Stamford-based AmeriCares is preparing to send relief to the people of Ecuador after Saturdays devastating earthquake and the organization is airlifting medical supplies and other necessities to the South American nation.

The supplies are expected to reach Ecuador in the next few days.

The death toll of from the earthquake is in the hundreds, with thousands more injured and many still unaccounted for.

Two AmeriCares staffers are expected to arrive in Ecuador by Tuesday night and will work with existing non-governmental organizations to develop a plan for relief and rebuilding.

Its been very hard to reach the rural areas. So, until we have a full assessment on the ground, we dont know exactly what the extent of our supply will be. But thats also why were sending people, Jed Selkowitz, senior vice president of communications for AmeriCares, said.

As AmeriCares learns more about the full scope of this monumental tragedy, theyll send more supplies and possibly more manpower.

They said they will continue to lend a helping hand for as long as necessary.
An East Hampton man is dead after his motorcycle collided with a car in Eastford Monday afternoon.

State police say 63-year-old Torrence Botsford was killed after being ejected from his motorcycle during a crash on Pomfret Road.

Police responded to Pomfret Road in the area of Old Route 44 around 3:31 p.m. for the serious crash. According to police, a Toyota Corolla, driven by 58-year-old Debra Willard-Web of Hampden, Maine, was traveling east on Pomfret Road when it slowed and started to turn left into a driveway at 142 Pomfret Road.

At that point the motorcycle driven by Botsford, which police say was traveling at a high rate of speed in the same direction, smashed into the Corolla. Botsford was thrown from his vehicle and sustained fatal injuries.

Willard-Web sustained minor injuries and was transported to Windham Hospital for treatment. A passenger in her vehicle was not injured.

Both vehicles were severely damaged and had to be towed from the scene.

Pomfret Road was closed for several hours while police investigated but has since reopened.
The driver involved in a fatal Newtown crash has turned himself into police on Monday, police said.

Miguel Angel Barrangan-Santiago, 33, of Shelton, turned himself in to Newtown police on Monday.

On Sunday, police responded to a fatal accident on South Main Street just at 10 p.m.

Newtown Police obtained an arrest warrant for Barragan-Santiago accusing him of misconduct with a motor vehicle.

Barragan-Santiago bond was set to $450,000 and he is expected to appear in court on April 19.
The death toll continues to rise after a seven-point-eight magnitude earthquake rocked Ecuador Saturday night. The Justice Department confirms at least one American is among the 270 casualties. More than 2,500 were injured.

Roughly 20,000 Ecuadorians live in Connecticut. The majority, seven to eight thousand, live in Danbury. Danbury resident Milton Pauta said his family members are all accounted for but they felt the earthquake that hit Manabi Province, Saturday night.

"They cry a lot because they saw the news and they say that's something they never think that can happen something like that," said Pauta.

Though the quake hit in a sparsely populated region, its effects were far-reaching.

"They say they feel it all around the country," Pauta said.

Luis Bautista's family lives in Guayaquil. There, some 300 miles from the epicenter, an overpass collapsed on a car, killing one person .

"We all, Ecuadorians, worry about situation because it's many people lose families, lose houses," said Bautista.

Bautista, who owns Il Milenio restaurant in Danbury said tragedy has been on the minds of many of his customers.

"I'm worried about all these persons who has lost families, who has lost, lost a house, lost everything," said Bautista.

The owner of La Bahia Travel in Danbury is on vacation in Santo Domingo. Yoland Vega told Pauta that the badly damaged city, is still waiting for help to arrive.

"You know we want to give everything, everything what we can," said Pauta.

However, he explained that several months ago the Ecuadorian government began restricting donations into the country, making it difficult to send clothing or medicine. While they wait for those restrictions to be lifted, they've begun to collect monetary donations at the Ecuadorian Civic Center, which they plan to donate to the Red Cross. The center will hold a fundraiser on Sunday beginning at 8:000 a.m..

"Everybody here we are sad, worried about what's going on there," Pauta added.

The Ecuadorian Consulate planned to update residents on the emergency needs and conditions in Ecuador during a meeting in New Haven Monday night.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has made a campaign stop in Hartford, ahead of the April 26 primary, and she is discussing gun violence.

"I am determined that we will do whatever we can to save lives in America," Clinton said. "On average, 90 people a day die of gun violence. That is 33,000 people a year -- a year. If anything else were killing 33,000 Americans a year, you can bet we would be fully mobilized, doing anything we possibly could to save lives."

Clinton was at the YMCA on Albany Avenue, where she is accompanied by the families of victims killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting, along with other family members of gun violence victims.

Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat, attended the event, and Clinton put a focus on Connecticut's gun legislation and acknowledged him; Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman; and Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, who she said is a friend of Chelsea Clinton.

"I am really proud that your leaders here in Connecticut have shown the way," Clinton said.

"I know how hard it was to do what Connecticut's governor and Legislature did after Sandy Hook, so I am not here to make promises I can't keep. I am here to tell you I will use every single minute of every day, if I am so fortunate enough to be your president, looking for ways that we can save lives -- that we can change the gun culture," Clinton said. "It is just too easy for people to reach for a gun to solve their problems. It makes no sense."

Erica Smegielski, the daughter of Dawn Hochsprung, introduced Clinton during the event.

Hochsprung was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School and was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting and Smegielski has become an outspoken advocate for gun safety reforms.

Smegielski was also part of a panel to speak during the event and said she started her fight against gun violence because of her mom, but her fight is not soley about her mother anymore.

"The reality is, my mom was murdered and she is not coming back, no matter how hard I fight," she said. "There is nothing I can do to bring her back. What I can do is stand up and use my voice and use my story to motivate other people to get up and use their voice and share their stories and come together around this issue."

In the past, Clinton has proposed "commonsense" laws to tackle gun control in the United States, including enacting background checks, ending immunity protections and keeping guns away from domestic abusers, the Clinton campaign said in a statement.

"We can do this consistent with the Second Amendment. We can do this with support of responsible gun owners and that is exactly what we will do," Clinton said.

She said she is advocating for comprehensive background checks and getting rid of loopholes that allow people to get guns before background checks are completed.

She said no one is more powerful in Washington than the gun lobby and what Connecticut did needs to be a national model on this needs to be a voting issue.

Her rival Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, has not announced a visit to the Nutmeg State but his press secretary said the schedule is still being set.

"I'm certain that the voters of Connecticut will hear from Sanders one way or another," R. Warren Gill III, Sanders' press secretary told NBC Connecticut.

While no visit has been announced yet, Sanders' campaign has spent $765,000 on ads for Connecticut TV stations, according to FCC filings.

Clinton's daughter, Chelsea Clinton, was in the state on Wednesday for a campaign event in Hartford.

Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ohio governor John Kasich have both visited Connecticut. Trump was in Hartford on Friday and he will be back on Saturday.

Kasich visited Sacred Heart University in Fairfield earlier this month and is coming back on Friday, where he will be at Glastonbury High School.
The government in Ecuador raised the death toll in the wake of a massive weekend earthquake on the nations Pacific coast. As of Monday evening, 413 people were confirmed dead and at least 2,500 others had been injured, according to the government. The earthquake is having an emotional impact in Connecticut.

At the Ecuadorian Consulate in New Haven, the flag of Ecuador was at half-staff as officials also confirmed that several Connecticut families have already lost love ones in the tragedy. Other local families are still waiting for any word from relatives in Ecuador at all.

We dont know if theyre alive, said Priscilla Esposito of Meriden. We dont know if theyre dead. We dont know if theyre hurt.

Esposito and her sister Gina Bucchieri, also of Meriden, said they have already learned of relatives who were killed in the powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake. They also said that there are several loved ones on their mothers side of the family who they still had not been able to get in touch with.

She has nieces and nephews and we havent heard anything from them so those are our big concerns, said Bucchieri.

Learning that hundreds had been killed and thousands other injured, they said waiting for any information has been painful.

We just hope that somehow theyre just clinging on to life and that well be able to get in touch with them or theyll be able to get in touch with us, Bucchieri said.

Hope was the focus of the conversation at the Ecuadorian Consulate in New Haven on Monday night, even as officials confirmed that another local family, from Ansonia, had also learned that a relative had been killed.

With the help of God and all the national and international community, we will rise from this tragedy, Raul Erazo, Ecuadorian Consulate General.

Help from around the globe will soon be reaching the earthquake zone, and hopefully finding people who can still be saved. Some aid will be coming from Connecticut organizations, including AmeriCares, which expects it Emergency Response Team on the ground in Ecuador by Tuesday night.

We know theres been tragedy already in the family, said Esposito. Were just hoping that this isnt going to be another tragedy.

Officials at the Consulate said with thousands of Ecuadorians currently residing in Connecticut, it is expected that more difficult news will be coming in the days ahead.
An MDC worker from Connecticut is determined to help those in the midst of water crisis in Michigan, and his mission goes beyond collecting donations. He and a team of volunteers are making it their mission not just to collect the water, but also to deliver it.

Kenneth Hinson, of Torrington, visited Flint, Michigan after reading the headlines about their tainted water. The heartbreaking stories hit close to home partly because of what he does for work.

I work for a water company and thats more of a reason why I said we need to do something because we deal with water every day, Hinson said.

After seeing the water crisis up close, he began collecting water with the help of several organizations including the Capitol City Ryders. Since they got the idea to do it three months ago, their collection has grown to more than 3,000 cases of water.

You see the people in Flint and they really need the water, Hinson said. Theyre getting sores on their arms because the water is so messed up and its sad.

He and a team of volunteers are going to travel to Flint next week, because after taking pictures at distribution centers, Hinson saw a need.

People in poor areas were not able to come and get the water because they cant lift 40 pounds on a bus, Hinson said.

Hinson and his team are going to go house to house delivering the water they collected to the people who might not otherwise be able to get it. He plans on taking three truckloads worth of water and a charter bus of 50 volunteers to help a community almost 700 miles away.

This is Connecticut and thats Flint, Michigan, but people in Connecticut want to help people and we have to go wherever we have to go, Norm Leblanc, a volunteer said.

The team plans on leaving April 29. For those interested in donating water, there are several drop-off locations: Enfield Motorsports, Gengras Harley Davidson in East Hartford, TSI Harley Davidson in Ellington and the Mickey Finns Honda on the Berlin Turnpike.
Police are investigating a robbery at a Middletown bank on Monday evening and they are asking for help to identify the robber.

Police said the man entered the TD Bank at 911 Washington St. at 5:25 p.m., implied he had a gun hidden in his hooded sweatshirt, threatened the manager and asked for a large sum of cash.

He fled to a getaway car that was described as a white mid-1990s sedan that might have a vinyl roof. It was behind the bank, between a car wash and Home Depot, police said, and a man with dark short hair was driving.

The bank robber has slight facial hair, and a shaved head and some gray on the side. He is around 220 pounds and was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, dark pants, dark sneakers and dark sunglasses, according to police.

The Connecticut Bankers Reward Association is offering a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of the bank robber.

Anyone with information should call Middletown Police Department Detective Bureau at 860-638-4000.
A pursuit that started in New Britain on Monday night ended with a crash and gunfire at a busy intersection in Newington, according to police.

New Britain police were trying to stop a vehicle on East Street around 6:20 p.m., but the driver fled into Newington and the driver crashed at the corner of Main Street and Robbins Avenue in Newington, police said.

As officers were taking 35-year-old Rodney Kincaid, of New Britain, into custody, a New Britain police officer shot a service weapon, police said. Kincaid was not injured.

A few neighbors were outside and watched it unfold.

The cop came around the corner and they were chasing somebody, Michael Defurio said.

Defurio said some of the friends he was watching with ran for cover after hearing gunfire.

The cop hit him and then you heard a gunshot, Defurio said. We didnt know who was shooting, if it was police or if it was whoever they were chasing.

As police took Kincaid into custody, the vehicle he had been driving rolled right into Defurios yard and crashed into a van.

No one was in it. The car just must have been in drive and it was still going at a good speed, Defurio said.

An evidence marker was placed over a single shell casing and crime scene tape covered a New Britain Police cruiser with front end damage.

Its usually a quiet neighborhood, Sebastian Ciarcia said. You dont see much of this around, and hearing shots fired, its alarming. You got kids in the area all the time and people walking around.

Kincaid has been charged with operating a motor vehicle under suspension, reckless driving and engaging officers in pursuit and possession of narcotics.

Anyone who witnessed the incident should contact the Newington Police Department Detective Division at 860-666-8445.
Two Manchester sisters are accused of shoplifting at a Vernon Kmart and trying to hide the merchandise in a stroller.

Police said the incident happened on Thursday and they have arrested Jasmine Cabassa, 21, and Jessica Cabassa, 19, of Manchester. The sisters were out with children at the time, police said.

Both have been charged with risk of injury to a child and fifth-degree larceny. Bond was set at $10,000.
A Connecticut teenager who was forced by the courts to undergo chemotherapy for her cancer says a new mass has been found in her lungs.

Eighteen-year-old Cassandra Callender, of Windsor Locks, disclosed the news Saturday on her Facebook page and told The Associated Press that she is "moving forward with alternative treatments."

But this is why I fought so hard against chemotherapy. I am so sick of being treated like number and how everything is based off of statistics. I am a patient not a number, she posted on Facebook.

She had been in remission after undergoing five months of forced chemotherapy for Hodgkin lymphoma when she was 17. She had argued she didn't want to poison her body with chemotherapy.

Her case went to the state Supreme Court, which ruled in January 2015 that Connecticut's Department of Children and Families wasn't violating her rights.

She was released from the hospital last April.

She is now legally able to make her own treatment decisions.
A tractor-trailer rollover caused heavy delays on Interstate 91 North in Wallingford during the morning commute.

The truck flipped over near exit 15 around 4:30 a.m. and went up in flames.

People who had been passing by helped the truck driver, Dominique Phill Jenkins, 26, of Philadephia, Pennsylvania, out of the truck and an ambulance transported him to Yale-New Haven Hospital to be treated for minor injuries.

The right and center lanes were closed for hours and crews investigated and cleaned up fuel that spilled on the highway. That led to bumper-to-bumper traffic building up during the morning commute.

It was a heck of a trailer turned over over there. Lots of traffic. Ed Sagnella, of New Haven, said.

His commute, which typically takes 20 minutes, took an hour and 15 minutes.

(T)here was no chance to get off. I was past (exit) 14 and then that was it, he said.

Rob Maraday, of Wallingford, said he was able to avoid the highway, but the back roads were also congested because people were using them to get around the crash.

So being that I had to get to KinderCare here, I back-tracked through the back roads to get here, he said. It was horrendous. Everybody was turning around. Nobody was getting on the highway because it was totally jam packed.

The truck was towed from the scene. State police are investigating the cause of the crash.
The University of Connecticut has sent out a campus-wide alert to all students warning them of a sexual assault incident that happened last week.

On April 17, a student told a residential life staff member that she had been sexually assualted in a dorm room the night earlier.

The victim said she was in a familiar dorm room and was assaulted by as many as three people, the UConn alert said.

According to the university, the student has been offered "appropriate support" by being connected with a number of services and resources.

The notice sent out did not imple that there has been an increase of crime or any specific crime pattern on campus.
Tom Hanks has been to some far-flung places in the service of Hollywood and country.

There's no working actor who more embodies America, or at least its most idealized, virtuous image of itself. It's one reason why Hanks has five times topped the annual Harris Poll, including this year, as the nation's most popular actor.

More than that, Hanks ranked as America's most trusted person in a 2013 Reader's Digest poll.

Hanks has long played iconic Americans, both fictional (Forrest Gump) and real (Walt Disney in "Saving Mrs. Banks," Sully Sullenberger in the upcoming "Sully"). But many of his most indelible characters have been Americans abroad, including in his latest film, "A Hologram for the King."

The film, which premieres this week at the Tribeca Film Festival and opens in theaters Friday, is Tom Tykwer's adaptation of Dave Eggers' novel in which Hanks plays a struggling middle-aged American businessman who travels to the Saudi Arabian desert to pitch the king on an IT system for a new complex being built.

For Hanks, it's another stamp in a movie passport that includes Cold War-era Russia ("Bridge of Spies"), the dangerous waters off the coast of Somalia ("Captain Phillips") and a tiny South Pacific island ("Cast Away").

It's fitting that Hanks' all-American should be such an international one; his stardom coincides with decades of American imperialism in warfare and commercial expansion. With basic decency and good-humored candor, he has refracted American triumph ("Apollo 13") and tragedy (perishing in the Twin Towers in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close").

He's our funnier, less sure John Wayne for a more complicated time, a cowboy only as Sheriff Woody in "Toy Story." Who better to send on the country's behalf? Everybody loves Tom Hanks, movie-land ambassador to 20th Century America.

Here's a look at his many sojourns abroad:

BRIDGE OF SPIES: In Steven Spielberg's 2015 thriller, Hanks played the lawyer James B. Donovan for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). His idea of patriotism  including that all men, even national enemies, deserve their day in court  is at odds with the time and perhaps with today as well. When Donovan travels to Moscow, one feels Hanks could have, by himself, warmed away the Cold War.

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS: Paul Greengrass' docudrama of a Maersk cargo ship taken by Somali pirates may have taken some liberty with the details of the 2009 kidnapping and Navy Seal rescue. But few films have better captured America  this time a hardy New Englander  face-to-face with terrorism.

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR: Hard-drinking Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson was a more unlikely participant in a far-away battle in Mike Nichols' 2007 comic drama. The brash, can-do Wilson leads a program to support the Afghan mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan War, only to watch the U.S. fatefully withdraw once the Russians exited.

THE DA VINCI CODE: This and Ron Howard's sequel, "Angels and Demons," took Hanks to Paris' Louvre and the Vatican, seeking divine secrets in Old Europe in Dan Brown's best-sellers.

THE TERMINAL: Hanks didn't play an American in Spielberg's less-loved 2004 film but an Eastern European tourist forced to take up residency at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. It's a rare look at a country-less Hanks. But with all his traveling, it was inevitable he would at some point be waylaid.

CAST AWAY: The consummate Hanks abroad movie about just trying to make it home. What more does a humble FedEx employee need on a desert island than a friendly volley ball and an unbreakable spirit?

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: Hanks' first collaboration with Spielberg and his most heroic. On the timeline of Hanks' decorated Americans, none matches Captain John Miller  a small-town Pennsylvania schoolteacher who taught English composition before WWII  for courage. "Earn this," he tells Matt Damon's rescued soldier.

APOLLO 13: It's only fitting that the well-traveled Hanks would also make it to the final frontier and utter Jim Lovell's famous words: "Houston, we have a problem."
The battle that pitted the smallest Dr Pepper plant in the world against the powerful corporation that owns the soda is over.

After 121 years, the bottling plant in Dublin is no longer making the Texas original, or any other Dr Pepper products.

"It's a sad day," said Jeff Kloster, vice president of Dublin Bottling Works, Inc.

On Wednesday, Plano-based Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Inc., (DPS) said it had bought the Dublin plant that had been called Dr Pepper Bottling Co.

"The folks in town are probably wondering exactly what it means, but Dublin Dr Pepper is no longer here as of today," Kloster said.

The deal ends a legal battle that began last summer, when DPS sued the Dublin-based distributor for unauthorized use of its logo and for selling Dr Pepper made from a pure cane sugar recipe outside an agreed-upon territory.

The Dublin bottler had answered with its own lawsuit.

DPS said people can still find the sugar cane recipe in stores -- but not the famous Dublin bottles.

The Plano company now will distribute Dr Pepper sweetened with cane sugar throughout Dublin's former territory. DPS will also continue selling the recipe throughout Texas, including in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

A bottling plant in Temple will continue to bottle and can pure-cane-sugar Dr Pepper in distinct, nostalgic packaging, the company said.

On Wednesday, the last run of 75 cases of Dr Pepper to be made in Dublin came off the line just before 5 p.m.

"You know, it's disbelief, sadness," Kloster said. "It's just been a little bit hard today."

Fourteen of Dublin Bottling Works' 40 employees were laid off Wednesday.

More than 70,000 people visit Dublin every year to see the bottling plant, which was one of the few in the country to still use cane sugar to make Dr Pepper.

"It being gone, Dublin won't be known for anything, so it's tough, you know," resident Allen Martinez said. "[I] can't believe we're losing it."

Dublin Bottling Works will continue operate its museum and Old Doc's Soda Shop, which offers tours and sells soft drinks, food and officially licensed Dr Pepper merchandise.

"Dr Pepper is still a big part of Dublin," Kloster said in a news release Wednesday. "We hope customers will continue to visit our town, the W.P. Kloster Museum and Old Doc's Soda Shop, where they can still enjoy Dr Pepper sweetened with cane sugar."

Dublin Bottling Works will continue to produce other soft drinks, DPS spokesman Chris Barnes said.

DPS said in a news release Wednesday that it had "purchased all of the Dublin bottler's sales and distribution operations and related assets, as well as the rights to distribute Dr Pepper and other DPS brands in the six-county territory previously served by Dublin."

NBC 5's Kevin Cokely contributed to this report.

Previous Coverage:
The former head of a violent Mexican drug cartel is named as a potential witness in the trial of three men accused of stalking his alleged successor who was murdered in Southlake three years ago.

Osiel Cardenas, who led the Gulf Cartel until he was arrested in March 2003, would testify about "cartel activities/relationships" and the activities of the victim, Juan Guerrero Chapa, according to a document filed late Tuesday.

Cardenas is now being held at the "Supermax" federal prison in Colorado.

Meanwhile, one of the three defendants, a former Mexican police officer, has pleaded guilty, NBC 5 has learned.

Jesus Gerardo Ledezma-Campano entered a guilty plea last month in a secret hearing and will testify against his father and fathers cousin in a trial set to start in Fort Worth next week.

The three family members were accused of using high-tech remote cameras and GPS tracking devices to follow Chapa, an attorney who was living in a $1 million mansion in Southlake with his wife and children, before he was murdered on the town square in May 2013.

According to defense attorneys, Guerrero became the de facto head of the Gulf Cartel after Cardenas was arrested and transferred to the United States.

Prosecutors have not said publicly which drug cartel may have wanted Guerrero dead or why.

The Dallas Morning News reported last week that Guerrero had helped U.S. authorities round up $50 million in drug money that Cardenas had forfeited in a plea deal and also provided key information about cartel activities.

In the deal, Cardenas received just 25 years in prison  considered light for the head of a major cartel responsible for countless murders and tortures  and in exchange agreed to spill cartel secrets to the feds.

Guerrero, his longtime attorney, became a U.S. informant.

The Zetas, who had been the Gulf Cartels enforcers, felt so betrayed they declared independence, sparking a bloody drug war that raged for years, the newspaper said.

At 32, Ledezma-Campano is the youngest of the defendants and could get a significant reduction in his sentence for his testimony and cooperation.

Payroll records show in 2010, Ledezma-Campano earned about $400 per month as a police officer in San Pedro Garza, a wealthy suburb of Monterrey, Mexico.

His attorney, Steve Gordon of Fort Worth, declined to comment on the guilty plea.

Prosecutors also declined to talk.

THE CRIME

From the beginning, Southlake police said it was a professional hit.

Guerrero, 43, was gunned down in broad daylight as he was getting into his Land Rover at the Southlake Town Square after shopping with his wife. She was not injured.

According to police, surveillance video showed a gunman jumping out of the back seat of an SUV. The ambush lasted just six seconds. Guerrero was shot once in the chest and nine times in the back, according to his autopsy.

A little more than a year later, the FBI arrested the three suspects.

Ledezma-Campano and his father, Jesus Gerardo Ledezma-Cepeda, 59, were nabbed in September 2014 when they crossed a bridge from Mexico to McAllen, Texas. The fathers cousin, Jose Luis Cepeda-Cortes, 59, was arrested at a house in nearby Edinberg.

CASE CLOAKED IN SECRECY

In a case cloaked in unusual secrecy, records relating to Ledezma-Campanos guilty plea remain sealed.

But NBC 5 obtained an order from U.S. District Judge Terry Means setting Ledezma-Campanos sentencing hearing for Aug. 23. Sentencing dates are not set without guilty pleas or convictions.

The order was publicly posted on the federal courts website but was later removed.

Two people with knowledge of the case confirm the deal.

The three Mexican citizens were not the actual triggermen, prosecutors said. Instead, they are charged with the rarely-used federal crime of interstate stalking.

Three others, whose names are blacked out in a recently-unsealed indictment, are apparently accused of committing the actual murder. They have not been arrested.

In the stalking case, court documents portray the three suspects as running an elaborate intelligence operation, presumably for a cartel. Prosecutors have linked them to as many as 12 other drug-related murders around Monterrey, Mexicos third-largest city.
Investigators say a man shot and killed his wife, son and daughter before killing himself in a Houston-area home.

The Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office said the bodies were discovered Tuesday morning in the Katy area.

Sheriff's spokesman Bob Haenel said it appears the man shot his family, including two children under the age of 5.

Haenel said a relative of the victims had asked deputies to check on the family, and that's how their bodies were found.

Officials are trying to determine what prompted Tuesday's shootings. Names of the victims and further details weren't immediately released.
Brandon Bevers, the husband of a North Texas fitness instructor killed Monday before a class inside a Midlothian church, spoke publicly Tuesday for the first time since his wife's death.

Bevers greeted a group of reporters that had gathered outside of the family's home Tuesday for a one-time interview, after which he asked for privacy for his family.

His wife, 45-year-old Missy Bevers, was found slain inside the Creekside Church of Christ before dawn Monday. Police later released video showing a person walking through the church before Missy Bevers arrived at about 4 a.m. The unidentified person was wearing what appears to be police-style tactical gear, police said.

The father of three said Tuesday afternoon that the last day and a half were a whirlwind that didn't seem real and that he hasn't yet been able to slow down and begin dealing with the loss of his wife and best friend.

Brandon Bevers, the husband of a North Texas fitness instructor killed Monday before a class inside a Midlothian church, spoke publicly Tuesday for the first time since his wifes death.

"I haven't had a whole lot of time to get emotional about this yet. I've been dealing with the immediate needs of my children," Bevers said. "This morning I finally started thinking about the events that occurred yesterday morning and, so, I'm starting with that process today."

Bevers said before he and his wife of 20 years had children, she worked with special needs children. She stopped working to raise their daughters, now ages 15, 13 and 8, and, when they got old enough, she went back to work as a fitness instructor with Camp Gladiator.

"My wife was a godly woman. She was a very passionate about changing people's lives with fitness and in changing their mental attitude toward the body and their abilities in life," Bevers said.

NBC 5 News

Bevers said he hadn't been very involved in her fitness work, but that he was very proud of the relationships she'd built and the success she had in transforming people's bodies.

"Now that I'm seeing some of her campers, I've noticed a substantial impact that she's had on so many people's lives," Bevers said. "I would catch some her campers remarks on her Facebook page about how excited they were of the results that they'd seen through her efforts and I'm proud of her. We're very proud of her. I want to reach out to the Camp Gladiator campers that she mentored and I want to talk to those folks and express my appreciation for their admiration of my wife."

Bevers was in Biloxi, Mississippi Sunday night and said he last spoke with his wife by telephone. He recalled that Missy was very tired and that he told her he loved her and they said goodnight as she fell asleep. Thanks to her, Bevers said, they expressed their love for each other every day.

"She texted me every day and said, 'I love you honey, I hope you have a good day,'" Bevers recalled. "She has made it a point, every day, when I show up to work I receive a text about the same time, 'I love you honey, I hope you have a good day.' She was an exceptional wife."

NBC 5 News

Bevers said he couldn't imagine who would want to hurt his wife and said he wasn't privy to much information that hasn't been made publicly available.

"As far as the perpetrator -- we still don't know who he is," Bevers said, when asked about the person recorded on surveillance video. "I ask everybody out there to review the video. Look at the video. The person has a very distinct walk. There's just a very distinct mannerism about this person that should be very apparent to somebody."

After watching a loop of the video, Bevers said it didn't appear to him that the person in the video was wearing "tactical gear," but rather a "shoddy" outfit made up of motorcycle boots, a generic police jacket, "flimsy sweatpants" and a helmet of some kind.

Bevers said he can't tell if the person is a man or a woman, and Tuesday afternoon Midlothian police backed away from previous assertions about the person's gender.

"We are backing off our statement that the suspect on video was a man. I know we said he over and over again yesterday, and that was a mistake. Theres a lot of speculation based on the gait and appearance that this person may be a woman. Its a legitimate question right now," said Assistant Chief Kevin Johnson, with the Midlothian Police Department. "That does not mean Im saying this suspect is a woman. Its just that at this point we cant rule it out. We dont know yet.

A fitness instructor was found slain inside a North Texas church Monday morning, and Midlothian police are looking for a man seen on video wearing tactical clothing with police markings in connection with her death.

Police said Tuesday they believe a car seen in the distance in the video may have belonged to the person on video in the church, but that it's so far away they aren't comfortable speculating on a make or model.

"I want to definitely, publicize, that my wife -- she was a great woman, a great wife, a great mother, a great friend. She will be missed by many people," Bevers said. "But please, please be diligent as you can and review the video and report anything to the Midlothian Police Department.

Going forward Bevers said he's prepared to have deeper discussions with his children about the loss of their mother, but hopes in the meantime police are able to identify and track down her killer.

"It's very important for us to get some closure, with that," Bevers said. "I haven't had a lot of one-on-one time with my children ... Fortunately they've had a lot of friends coming by. They're in high spirits but I know this one-on-one situation is going to occur and I'm ready for it."

Meanwhile, Bevers said he'll rely on friends, family and members of the Cowboy Church where he and his wife and daughters have attended services for the last 15 years.

A private funeral service for Missy Bevers is currently being planned. Bevers said his wife will be buried close to their family home so that she can remain close to her daughters.

Midlothian police declined to release Bevers' autopsy results Tuesday citing the ongoing investigation by their department, county officials and the Texas Rangers.

NBC 5's Jeff Smith contributed to this report.
Have a home security system? How about two? One North Texas man found out his parents had monitoring contracts with two different security companies. When he couldn't get it resolved, he emailed NBC 5 Responds and asked for help.

Ben Swinford found out about the issue almost by accident when his father's bank called him, concerned about fraud on his father's account. Swinford looked at his parent's monthly bank statements and noticed something unusual.

"We got these monitoring systems," he said of the security system charges that showed up on the bill. He saw two monitoring systems, not one.

Swinford's father, 89-year-old Jim Swinford, knew nothing about the two separate monthly charges, which had been deducted from his bank account for months, and didn't know he had two separate contracts.

Jim Swinford had brain surgery around the time he signed up for the first system about a year ago. Four months later came security system number two.

"If you figure it out," said Ben, "That's $3,000 each contract."

Or a total of about $6,000 for both 5-year contracts. Jim Swinford has already paid a total of more than $1,000 to both companies.

Jim Swinford was able to make light of it when he talked to us. "I didn't realize that I was as far gone as I am," he said.

Ben Swinford contacted both companies, Alliance and Vivint, to stop the monthly payments.

"He really wasn't capable of understanding what was going on  so in that regard I thought that they should be able to get out of them (the contracts) and I tried to do that. So far no avail," said Ben Swinford.

Then he contacted the team at NBC 5 Responds.

"We're not asking for that back. We're just saying all right, our bad. They didn't understand. Just let them out," said Ben Swinford.

We contacted both companies and provided them proof that Ben Swinford has power of attorney for his father. That means he can make financial and other decisions for his father. Both companies agreed to let Jim Swinford out of both contracts.

Alliance did not comment.

Vivint sent us this statement:

"To our knowledge, Mr. Swinford did not know he had an existing, active contract .. when he agreed to an installation of a Vivint system. He signed a contract and completed a verbal, pre-install survey agreeing to the service terms. Once we were made aware of the dual contracts and received confirming documentation, we canceled his account."

If you're thinking about signing up for a home alarm system, get written estimates from several companies and ask questions like:

Who will install the system?

Who monitors it? Sometimes they're different companies.

What happens if you move?

You can search for information about companies here where you can look up their license.

Once you've picked a company, read the fine print before you sign. Look for the installation price, whether there are monthly or quarterly monitoring fees and the exact contract length. Also, find an explanation of your right to cancel the deal. Don't be rushed into any agreement.

More information can be found at the Federal Trade Commission website. The state of California also has some good information for consumers. So does the Texas Burglar and Fire Alarm Association.

Finally, you can file a complaint against companies with the Texas Department of Public Safety, which regulates security companies.
Midlothian police are examining several theories in the killing of a fitness instructor found slain in a North Texas church Monday morning, officials said Tuesday, as her husband and others mourned.

Nearly 200 people gathered for a candlelight vigil Tuesday evening in memory of Missy Bevers, a 45-year-old mother of three.

Bevers was at Creekside Church of Christ early Monday to prepare for a Camp Gladiator class. When her students began to arrive at about 5 a.m., they found her unresponsive and called 911, police said.

Bevers was declared dead Monday morning, but no cause of death was given. Tuesday afternoon, Midlothian police said the autopsy by the Dallas County medical examiner had been completed but that the results were being withheld pending the ongoing investigation by their department, county officials and the Texas Rangers.

Surveillance video recorded inside the church shows a person, dressed in black gear with police markings, using a tool to pry open doors to enter the building shortly before Bevers entered.

Midlothian Police Assistant Chief Kevin Johnson said Tuesday that contrary to initial reports, the detectives can no longer say they are looking for a man.

"We are backing off our statement that the suspect on video was a man. I know we said 'he' over and over again yesterday, and that was a mistake," Johnson said. "There's a lot of speculation based on the gait and appearance that this person may be a woman. It's a legitimate question right now. We no longer will say the suspect is a man."

Johnson said the public should not jump to conclusions that police are searching for a woman either.

"That does not mean I'm saying this suspect is a woman. It's just that at this point we cant rule it out. We don't know yet," Johnson said.

Midlothian police released new video Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in the investigation into the slaying of a woman inside a church early Monday. Police are still working to determine the identity of the person responsible for her death.

Police said they want the public to look closely at the video to see if anyone recognizes the walk and stature of the individual.

Many of those who came to the vigil Tuesday were close friends who hugged and prayed with Bevers' husband and daughters.

"I want to thank everybody for coming here. I know you only represent just a fraction of, a small fraction of all the people that Missy's life touched and I appreciate all of you all coming out here. Thank you very much," husband Brandon Bevers said.

Bevers' fitness students and fellow instructors were among those in attendance at Tuesday's vigil.

"Whenever I see these shirts, whenever I see 'Gladiator Camp' whatever it is, I'll know that Missy is there with me, and I'm very proud of you guys," said Brandon Bevers, Missy's husband.

Midlothian police said the person who may have killed Bevers was dressed in "tactical gear" with police markings, including a heavy helmet, gloves and military-style battle-dress pants. Midlothian Chief of Police Carl Smith said the person was "designed to look like a police officer."

EMS workers noted broken glass and other signs of a struggle near Bevers' body. Police searched the building and determined there were visible signs of forced entry.

Police said the motion-activated surveillance cameras did not record any interaction between Bevers and the person.

Brandon Bevers, the husband of a North Texas fitness instructor killed Monday before a class inside a Midlothian church, spoke publicly Tuesday for the first time since his wifes death.

So far, police have not settled on a motive, although police said Monday it was possible Bevers interrupted a burglary.

"Even amongst our investigators, there are a lot of theories," Johnson said Tuesday. "Were discussing all possibilities. And we'll go where the evidence leads us."

Johnson said a vehicle can be seen on the video may belong to the killer, but there's not enough information to give the public.

"Theres one surveillance camera where you can see the car in the far corner of the frame, parked in the distance. You can't make out a plate, and we're not even comfortable releasing anything about a possible make or model, Johnson said.

Oak Farms Dairy is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case of Missy Bevers, who was found dead in a Midlothian church.

It was not immediately known if anything was taken from the church and police were not sure if the person was carrying a weapon.

Midlothian police said Tuesday afternoon that the Texas Rangers have also joined the investigation.

Oak Farms Dairy announced it was offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and successful grand jury indictment in this case.

Anyone with information on the person's identity is asked to call the Midlothian Police Department at 972-775-3333.

The death of a woman whose body was found inside a Midlothian church Monday is being investigated as a homicide, police say.

Creekside Church of Christ released a statement Tuesday:

"The Creekside church family would like to offer our sincere condolences for the family of Missy Bevers. This tragedy has deeply affected all of us in the community that knew and loved her. While Missy was not a member of Creekside, she was a friend and we grieve for those affected by this.

We would like to thank the Midlothian Police Department for their hard work , and we pray that their efforts in finding the person responsible will be swift and successful."

[NATL] Top News Photos: Pope Visits Japan, and More

NBC 5's Jeff Smith, Chris Jose and Kevin Cokely contributed to this report.
I grew up in New York. In the SECOND biggest city in New York state -- Buffalo.

Let's do a quick Q and A of questions I often get.

Q- Did you go to New York City all of the time?

A- No, it's 8 hours away

Q- How did you deal with the snow?

A- Like you deal with extreme heat. You deal with it and stay inside.

The there is always this when I say I am cold.

Q- How can you be cold? You are from Buffalo.

A- Buffalonians are not born with a layer of Under Armor.

So what does this have to do with politics? Well, not only am I from Buffalo, I worked there, too. And I don't ever remember a presidential primary being this significant.

Rarely have candidates spent so much time in New York in a primary. Two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, live there. Oh, and it's delegate rich.

Trump is poised for a big night. He is way ahead in the polls. If he wins more than 50 percent of the vote he gets all the delegates -- all 95.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has some momentum heading into this. He swept the delegates in Wyoming, but Cruz is clearly thinking beyond New York spending part of Monday in Maryland.

There are 247 delegates for Democrats. Hillary Clinton is up in the polls while U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) has won primary contests leading up to this, so it's a big night for both candidates.

So Tuesday night, all eyes on New York -- including mine from North Texas. I'll be tweeting and we will wrap it up for you at 10 p.m. on NBC 5.
The toxicology report has been released for a University of North Texas student who was wielding a hatchet when he was shot and killed by police in December.

Ryan McMillan, 21, had a blood alcohol level of 0.21 percent at the time of his death, the report says.

That's about two-and-a-half times the legal limit.

McMillan, a sophomore at UNT, had been out celebrating his birthday that night, when he was shot by a UNT police officer in a confrontation captured on dash camera.

The shooting happened around 1:30 a.m. Dec. 13, 2015, when UNT Cpl. Stephen Bean, 27, responded to a call of a man knocking out car windows in a parking garage near campus.

Bean could be seen on dashcam video telling McMillan multiple times to "back away" as McMillan repeatedly said, "shoot me."

Investigators said McMillan moved toward Bean, who then shot him multiple times.

In the dashcam video, the officer can be seen retreating as McMillan advances; three shots can then be heard in the recording.

The entire incident  from when the officer parks his car to the moment he fires  happened in about 15 seconds.

Last month, a Denton County grand jury no-billed Bean when it determined there wasn't enough evidence to support an indictment against the officer.
In the 1960s, kids flicked on the TV to watch astronauts walk on the moon.

Fifty years later, kids click on YouTube to be whisked away on a virtual field trip to Mars.

On Friday, Lockheed Martin launched "Generation Beyond," a first-of-its-kind, free national educational program to bring space exploration into homes and classrooms.

The highlights? Easy-to-access online curriculum for elementary and middle school teachers to simply download and use for free, and the "Lockheed Martin Mars Experience Bus," a short video that shows students starting off their field trip in a yellow school bus on earth and being transported by "magic" to the red, sweeping rocks of Mars.

There's also a cool Mars app that shows users where Mars is in the sky based on the GPS technology and the current weather on the red planet.

"We have 60,000 scientists that are part of our employee base," Lockheed spokesman Bill Phelps told NBC Bay Area on Monday. "The whole point is to get kids interested in science, math and technology, and lead them on a career path to Mars. Traveling to Mars is a lot closer than they think."

It was unclear Monday just how many teachers signed on to the free curriculum. The Generation Beyond program was announced Friday in Washington, D.C, at the opening ceremony of the Lockheed Martin-sponsored USA Science & Engineering Festival, the largestand onlynational STEM event.

Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 126,000 people worldwide. Lockheed Martin has thousands of employees in Sunnyvale and Palo Alto. The Sunnyvale facility is part of the company's Space Systems division, which makes solar panels, including those that power the International Space Station.
Ecuadoreans fleeing a massive earthquake in their home country arrived on Monday at LAX shaken but OK as they reunited with family members in warm embraces.

Ecuador's government says the death toll from Saturday's 7.8-magnitude earthquake has climbed to 413. The government's latest bulletin on casualties lists some 2,500 people as injured. The quake hit the country's Pacific coastline in an area of beaches popular with American tourists and ex-pats.

Milenca Arreaga, 17, is relieved to finally be safe in the arms of relatives in Los Angeles. She was driving a car in Guayaquil where a freeway overpass collapsed.

"The car moved like a wave," she said. "I was afraid. I didn't know what's happening."

She was able to call family and tell them she was OK.

Nelly Jaramillo said in Spanish that she felt shaking, about three hours from the epicenter.

"Everything started shaking," said Jaramillo. "I was taking a shower. I didn't know what to do. And we had a big power outage. Not until the following day did I realize how big the damage was."

Maria Mora said she called relatives in Guayaquil to check on her elderly mother who has Alzheimer's disease. She was OK but frightened.

"Terrible, scary," she said. "They start to pray. That's the only thing they can do."

As rescue workers continue to dig through the rubble in search of survivors, help is pouring in from around the globe. Eddie Chavez arrived at Ecuador's Consulate in Los Angeles offering his assistance as a drone operator.

His family in Ecuador is safe, but their home was among more than 370 buildings that were destroyed.
Two atheist groups are suing a Southern California public school district for allegedly "censoring" scholarships offered to college-bound seniors who write essays about what it means to be a nonbeliever in the Antelope Valley.

The nonprofit Antelope Valley Freethinkers and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national secular group in Wisconsin, filed a federal lawsuit last week against the Antelope Valley Union High School District in Lancaster.

The groups allege that the district censored their scholarship ads while allowing ones from Christians, Catholics, Jews, Scientologists, the LGBT community and even one about "What the Second Amendment means to you."

The Freethinkers, who develop "opinions based on science and reason in contrast to faith and dogma," offer scholarships "Why I'm Good Without God: Challenges of being a young nonbeliever" and one for minority nonbelievers.

Every year the Freethinkers offer thousands of dollars in scholarship money to high school students who compete in its scholarship contests. Typically, about 10 to 20 high school students win money each year. Winners are also chosen at the college and graduate level, court documents said.

David Dionne, the president of the Antelope Valley Freethinkers, alleged that he was told that the district "couldn't approve the scholarship the way it was worded because it would upset some parents," the lawsuit said.

Neither Dionne nor officials from the Antelope Valley Union High School District responded to messages seeking comment.

The district allegedly singled out, "Perhaps you've been ridiculed, harassed, or punished for speaking up against religion in the classroom, at school events, in government, or within your family."

When Dionne offered to reword it, the official told him in an email, "We simply do not have the time to 'word smith' language that might be acceptable to the district and yet meet the intent of your organization. If you wish to consider a pursuit of this matter  I would invite this potential dialogue early next spring, when we would have time to consider alternate language."

The District's General Counsel Bridget L. Cook, responded to follow up letters saying "since the District is a limited public forum, we reserve the right to determine what information we allow to be disseminated in our schools."

Cook claimed that the Freethinkers proposed essay prompts "appear to promote anti-religious expression and contain argumentative undertones toward religion. Therefore, the District will not be distributing this scholarship information to students."
Nearly one week after a father was gunned down outside of a 7-Eleven in downtown Los Angeles, his family was seeking justice while the shooter remained at large.

Sergio Beltran's widow held a vigil Monday night in his memory moments after she spoke with the LAPD.

"I dont know anything! It's an ongoing investigation," April Beltran said.

The 37-year-old was shot in the convenience stores parking lot at Central and Washington.

"I don't hold hate in my heart for him, you know? I do forgive him. I know God is my savior, God is going to bring him to justice, April said. The people I feel sorry for is his family. They're the ones that are going to suffer when god brings him to justice."

April said Sergio prayed at Victory Outreach Church, but she admits he struggled with alcohol.

The night Beltran was killed, 7-Eleven store workers recall he may have been drinking and was annoying their customers.

Then outside in the parking lot, some sort of confrontation occurred.

"Back in the day, we used to be able to fight and get it over with," Jaquanna Graves, who lives nearby, said. "Now people are losing their dads, grandfathers, brothers. It's senseless!"

Store surveillance video was given to police of the event that the family says changed lives forever.

"He was a husband, a father, a brother, uncle, cousin. He was really loved. He's going to be so missed, April said.
Police were searching for a gunman who shot two people, one fatally, a block away from two schools in South Los Angeles on Tuesday morning.

Gunfire was reported about 8:25 a.m. at 87th Street and South McKinley Place, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. The location (map) is a block east of South ParK Elementary and Watts Learning Center Middle schools.

Police were searching for 47-year-old Juan Rodriguez. They say an argument with a neighbor in front of Rodriguez's home escalated to the shooting. When another neighbor arrived to the scene, Rodriguez allegedly opened fire a second time, wounding that neighbor.

Neither victims were immediately identified. The neighbor who was wounded was taken to a hospital in stable condition, police said.

The LAPD cordoned off an area around the location of the shooting as officers with police dogs searched for the gunman. Drivers and residents were asked to stay clear.

"We're not sure if he's necessarily holed up," LAPD Det. Meghan Aguilar said. "We believe we have him in the perimeter, in a back yard or he could have gone into a house."

Police said they were unsure if Rodriguez was armed.

Willian Avila and Nyree Arabian contributed to this report.
Southern Californians' lives brim with repeated movements, those brief actions that are performed again and again, actions that have become part of the hum of the city.

Catching a wave applies here, as does flipping your blinker to merge onto a freeway. The snap of a clapboard on a film set counts, as brandishing a phone to snap a selfie at a red-carpet premiere.

Let's also add lemonade hand-stomping to that hallowed list of small SoCal actions that are oft-repeated. Hot Dog on a Stick first opened next to the Santa Monica Pier in 1946, and its signature beverage is made by pushing down on a lever to mix all of that tart citrus-y goodness, with the end result being sunshine in a cup.

The old-school method of drink-making has its fans, and many of those lemonade lovers will be out at the original Hot Dog on a Stick stand at Muscle Beach on Thursday, April 21 to try their hand at hand-stomping lemonade.

The Lemonade Stomp-A-Thon is a day-long fundraiser for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and everyone from celebrities to former Hot Dog on a Stick employees to bigwigs to regulars will take a turn at the stomper from 11 a.m. to 6 o'clock.

That's seven hours of straight-up lemonade hand-stomping.

The "seven" is no randomly chosen number, of course. It's Hot Dog on a Stick's 70th anniversary, and the company, which sells its batter-dipped dogs at locations across the country, hopes to raise $70,000 for LLS via the seven-hour fundraiser.

Want to join in and do some hand-stomping for a very important cause? Pick a half-hour window and throw your name in.

And if you can't make it, but can donate online, you'll get a coupon for one dollar.

Seven hours, Santa Monica, and a whole bunch of stomping of the citrus-sunshiny sort, for a sweet reason. Nice. Also nice that it's a true Southern California classic, the Hot Dog on a Stick lemonade.

It's as local as catching a wave or merging onto the 405 or closing a clapboard on a film set or snapping a selfie in Hollywood.
Immigration advocates rallied in downtown Los Angeles on Monday in support of President Barack Obama's executive orders extending deportation protection to an estimated 4 million people, on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on the issue.

Anabel Cuevas is benefitting from the president's executive order, known as DACA, which allows people who were illegally brought into this country as children to apply for work permits.

Despite earning a college degree, Cuevas couldn't get a job because she was undocumented.

"I couldn't work for a few years, I had to do things other immigrants do, such as babysitting, tutoring," she said.

Cuevas says when DACA went into effect in 2012, it changed her life.

"I was able to go back to school, take out a loan and I went to a coding boot camp and learned how to do programming, and so now I'm in the tech industry being a developer," she said.

Now the expansion of DACA and another executive order protecting parents from deportation if they have children here legally are on hold while Texas and 25 other states challenge them in court. On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments.

"We've been waiting a year and a half for this decision to come through that's going to fundamentally change the lives of 5 million people," said Pablo Morales of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

It's estimated 1.4 million Californians will be affected, including half a million in Los Angeles, which is why Mayor Eric Garcetti joined more than 100 others in filing a brief in support of the policies.

Critics say those polices reward people who broke the law and encourage other immigrants to come here illegally, while supporters say the economy depends on immigrant labor and the policies allow immigrant families to stay together.

"My parents are homeowners, they pay their taxes and they work really hard, so in reality the rhetoric is saying we're criminals, but in reality, we're just families," Cuevas said.

They are families which are eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court's decision. However the court rules, the decision is sure to keep immigration as a hot topic in the presidential race. Hispanic voters could play a large role in several battleground states.
The driver and a passenger in a heavy-duty pickup involved in a police chase at speeds up to 100 mph along a Southern Cailfornia freeway on Tuesday eventually surrendered without incident.

The pursuit started at 1:12 p.m. in the Monrovia area after the driver failed to yield for a traffic stop, police said. An officer spotted the truck in a neighborhood after a resident called reporting the truck driving up and down the street, said Capt. Nels Ortlund.

He added that police thought the men in the truck may have been "casing" a home for a possible burglary. Arcadia police were also investigating a possible link to a jewelry store break-in nearby.

The chase ended about 2:20 p.m. in Ontario with the men being taken into custody.

The pursuit mainly centered along the Foothill (210) Freeway in the San Gabriel Valley and other areas east of Los Angeles.

Speeds topped 100 mph, with the driver swerving in between other vehicles and getting off and back onto the freeway.

At one point, Monrovia officers called off the ground pursuit "in the interest of public safety" after identifying the driver, said Capt. Ortlund.

The department opted to track the driver from above in a helicopter before the CHP took it over.

The pursuit ended when the pickup got off Interstate-10 at Archibald Avenue and pulled onto the dirt shoulder. Police said the driver faces felony evading and driving under the influence charges.

Patrick Healy contributed to this report.
A man and woman remained hospitalized a day after they were injured in a plane crash single-engine plane crash Sunday at Catalina Airport.

The pilot was in critical condition and his female passenger was in serious condition Monday, according to family members. One of the victims was thrown from the wreckage, another trapped inside after the crash on Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California.

Family members said the crash victims are expected to recover.

The FAA said the plane is a Cessna 172 that departed from Long Beach. A family member of the victims told NBC4 the pilot overshot the runway, which begins at the edge of a cliff and features an uphill slope, during the landing.

The plane went down around 4:40 p.m.

Fire crews hoisted the injured via helicopter to transport them to the hospital. A medic was hoisted down to the victims during a complex rescue operation on the mountainside.

"You're kind of limited on what your resources are on that type of terrain," said deputy paramedic Daniel Aleman, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. "

The FAA was handling the subsequent investigation.

NBC4's Jonathan Lloyd and Rick Montanez contributed to this report.
"Tim the turkey" reeked of beer and was missing some tail feathers after two college students allegedly "bird-napped" him from a high school in Southern California, the school said Monday.

Chapman University students Steven Koressel and Richard Melbye were booked into Orange County jail in connection with the theft and animal cruelty investigation, according to police, who announced their arrests Monday evening.

Tim, a 5-year-old American heritage slate turkey, disappeared around 5 p.m.

Saturday from the Panther Farm at Orange High School. The farm, which houses 60 animals, is considered a "living laboratory" where students learn veterinary skills.

When Tim vanished, Jake  another turkey at the school  was untouched.

"There's not a feather out of place. Of course, there are feathers  little feathers everywhere from both of them and the chickens  but not those feathers," said Patti Williams, an agriculture teacher at the school.

Tim can't fly, so teachers knew he hadn't escaped on his own. They came to the conclusion that he had been stolen.

None of the locks were broken. None of the fences were compromised. The remaining animals were all accounted for, Williams said.

School officials got a break in the case nearly 24 hours later.

A woman living on Center Street near Chapman University snapped a photo of the bird, saying she found him in her neighbor's backyard.

The 40-pound bird had broken tail feathers, trouble breathing and was reportedly having a tough time regaining his alpha position on the farm.

Williams said he also reeked of booze.

"He smelled like he had beer on him," Williams said.

Tim will visit a veterinarian for X-rays of his foot and chest.

"And he's not an 'eating' turkey  he's our pet. He's our mascot," Williams said.

It wasn't immediately clear if Koressel and Melbye have hired attorneys.

Chapman University said in a statement the school would "undertake the appropriate disciplinary actions" according to its student conduct code.

"Due to federal student privacy laws (FERPA), the University cannot identify the students or reveal details of the institutions disciplinary actions  however, the University will not tolerate any instances of theft, animal abuse or cruelty, is appalled by this behavior, and takes this issue extremely seriously," school officials said in the statement.
A survey has found that tens of thousands of voters, including Demi Moore and other celebrities, have mistakenly registered as members of a conservative minor political party in California in a mix-up over its name, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The Los Angeles Times said that a telephone survey of 500 members of the American Independent Party found nearly 3 of 4 people did not realize they had enrolled in a political party that opposes abortion rights and same-sex marriage and calls for building a fence along the U.S. border.

The newspaper said voters were confused by the use of the word "independent" in the party's name. In California, voters who do not want to register with any party must check a box on a registration form for "no party preference."

"I just blew it," Deborah Silva, 64, of Point Arena in Mendocino County, told the Times. "There were a number of choices. I just checked the box that said 'independent.'"

Of people surveyed in the Times poll, fewer than 4 percent could correctly identify their own registration as a member of the American Independent Party.

Moore was among Hollywood celebrities with known Democratic leanings listed as members. She has contributed money to and campaigned for President Barack Obama. Her registration as an AIP member is wrong, a representative said.

"Demi Moore is not, nor has ever been, a member of the American Independent Party," the representative told the Times.

When Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, registered to vote in 2013, he selected the American Independent Party. A family spokesman said Schwarzenegger, 22, plans to change his registration.

According to the Secretary of State's Office, the party has about 472,000 members, or 2.7 percent of the statewide total.

The Times reported that the mistaken registration could prevent people from casting votes in the June 7 presidential primary, which is considered California's most competitive in recent years. Voters affiliated with the American Independent Party will only be allowed to vote for candidates on the party's ballot, the Times reported. The Republicans will have a closed primary, while the Democrats will allow unaffiliated voters to participate.

The deadline to register or change voter registration status for the June 7 primary is May 23.

The American Independent Party's roots date to 1967 when George Wallace, a segregationist, launched his second run for the White House. Wallace, who had run as a Democrat in 1964, helped create the party and ran on its ticket. Today, that party exists only in California.

"We're not segregationist anymore," said Markham Robinson, who serves as chairman of the American Independent Party's executive committee. "What we are now is a conservative, constitutionalist party."

Some voters who mistakenly registered with the party said they found the state's official registration materials confusing.

The survey of members of the American Independent Party was conducted by telephone Feb. 9-11. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
An alleged serial burglar accused of breaking into at least 10 different South Florida Jimmy John's sandwich shops was caught red-handed with hats from the restaurants in his car, authorities said.

Devon Golding, 18, and a juvenile were arrested on multiple burglary charges after they confessed to 10 separate burglaries, Broward Sheriff's Office officials said.

Golding was booked into the Broward jail Sunday. It's unknown if he's hired an attorney.

Authorities said a deputy was on routine patrol when he spotted a white Mercedes in the 2400 block of West Commercial Boulevard. The vehicle had been in a flyer about the burglaries at Jimmy John's locations in Broward and Palm Beach counties.

The deputy decided to stop the car after noticing it had an unassigned tag. When the deputy searched the car, he found $320 in small bills and wrapped coins, gloves, a flashlight and Jimmy John's hats, authorities said.

Detectives from Coral Springs, Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale have added multiple charges for similar crimes, authorities said.
Spanish? Check. French? Check. Italian? Very few schools can check that box. Lawton Chiles Middle School is the exception. The eccezione, as they would say in Rome.

"They are learning not just the language but the culture. What is Europe, where is Italy, what is the population in Italy, the customs," explained Italian teacher Rud Abreu, who said she's taking her class on a trip to Italy next year.

"Our school is a hidden treasure," said Principal Nelson Izquierdo.

Tucked away in a neighborhood near I-75, north of Hialeah, Lawton Chiles Middle is a school on the rise. Despite the new, more restrictive state school grading system, LCMS moved up a notch, from a C to a B, one of the few middle schools in South Florida to do so.

Enrollment has also jumped by more than 300 students, which Izquierdo attributes to the school's new Cambridge magnet program. They focus now on an international curriculum and a concept the school calls "blended learning."

"Blended learning is, think about 21st Century, our students today don't necessarily learn the same way that we used to learn, there's a lot of technology involved so we want to infuse and incorporate that technology but still keep that basic, explicit instruction that our teachers are able to give our students in class," Izquierdo said.

Izquierdo also emphasizes a mindset that has become a mantra at the school: educating the whole child. That includes physical fitness, and the students take advantage of a gym comparable to a commercial fitness center.

"A lot of these kids don't have the opportunity to use this equipment so we're working on strengthening the mind as well as strengthening the body here at the school," said physical education teacher Gabriel Cabrera.

Sound mind, sound body. It's an ancient concept, still relevant today, and they're running with it at Lawton Chiles Middle School.
A judge is weighing whether a Broward deputy can claim self-defense using Florida's "Stand Your Ground Law."

Kevin McClernon is on suspension from the Broward Sheriff's Office and on trial, claiming self-defense when he shot Michael Hinsch in January 2014.

Hinsch remembers the incident vividly, "He turned around and when he was pointing at my groin and I said, 'That's a Glock. Is that the 9mm or the 40?' He said, 'The 9,' and then he pulled the trigger and shot me."

Investigators said McClernon was in uniform, but off-duty, and at a female friend's apartment in Hollywood when Hinsch walked in on them.

Hollywood Police Det. Steven Sparkman encountered Deputy McClernon outside the apartment with alcohol on his breath.

"I was in disbelief that the deputy had not mentioned anything about being involved in the shooting before we walked into the suspect's house," Det. Sparkman said.

When McClernon contacted his BSO supervisor well after the shooting, he said he didn't say that Hinsch had pulled a knife on him or that he was acting in self-defense.

But self-defense is what he's claiming now: Hinsch had a knife in his hand, the deputy feared for his life and shot in self-defense.

Prosecutor David Schulson doesn't believe it, telling the judge booze and bad decisions led to the shooting.

"This is poor judgment. Some alcohol, these personalities and this is tragically what happened but it is not Stand Your Ground. That defense does not apply in this case," Schulson said.

Tuesday's hearing was held to determine whether McClernon can use self-defense as a defense in this case and if the judge rules yes, the case will be over. If not, the trial is expected to move forward.

The deputy faces several criminal charges including battery with a deadly weapon.
The first air shipment of aid to help victims of the Ecuador earthquake is scheduled to leave South Florida on Tuesday.

Provex Inc., an Ecuadoran shipping company in northwest Miami-Dade, has been working with the consulate to ship donations to Ecuador following a 7.8-magnitude quake that struck the country's Pacific coast on Saturday.

The death toll in the quake has risen to 413, and includes at least one U.S. citizen, according to the State Department.

Consul General Eduardo Rivadeneira Baquerizo said the consulate will be staffed around the clock in part to work with South Floridians who are trying to connect with loved ones in Ecuador.

According to the consul general, there are about 90,000 Ecuadorian nationals living in South Florida. Many have been working tirelessly to collect much needed items.

A meeting was held Tuesday with consuls general from nine Central and South American countries who came together in Miami to express solidarity and pledge support for Ecuador.

"Everything you can send over there is going to help a lot, for all the people of Ecuador," Baquerizo said.

"We've seen tragedy in all the different Caribbean and South American countries, and we sort of band together when that happens. As a city, we embrace all these different Hispanic cultures. So we certainly want to do our part," said Miami City Commissioner Francis Suarez.

Tames Airlines will deliver the first air shipment of these supplies Tuesday.

To donate relief items, visit the Ecuadorian Consulate at 117 Northwest 42nd Avenue, or drop by 7061 Northwest 87th Avenue in Miami where there will be a large container for donations.

Anyone with a missing relative can check the web page of the Ecuadorian Red Cross.
The family of slain journalist Steven Sotloff is suing Syria in U.S. court, claiming the government of President Bashar Assad provided support to Islamic State militants who carried out the gruesome beheading.

The lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in Washington seeks $90 million in compensatory damages plus up to three times that in punitive damages from Syria for Sotloff's 2014 killing. It's far from certain, however, that Sotloff's South Florida-based family would be able to collect money from a foreign government if they win the case.

Sotloff was kidnapped in August 2013 after crossing into Syria from Turkey, according to the lawsuit. He was killed on Sept. 2, 2014, and a video was distributed around the world documenting his death. Another American journalist, James Foley, had been killed a month earlier by the Islamic State.

The Sotloff lawsuit contends that Syria, designated a state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S., is liable because it provided financial, material and military support to the Islamic State. It says Syria, even as a sovereign entity, can be sued in federal court as a provider of that support.

"Syria's material support for (the Islamic State) caused the abduction and murder of Steven Sotloff," the lawsuit says.

Sotloff, 31, was a Miami native who reported from a number of Middle Eastern countries for publications such as Time, the Christian Science Monitor and Foreign Policy magazine. Before his kidnapping, family and friends have said he was planning to go to Aleppo, Syria, to report on the city's humanitarian crisis.

"Steven covered the civil wars in Libya and Syria because he cared deeply about the people of those countries," the lawsuit says.

Syria has not yet answered the lawsuit. It has previously been sued for terrorism-related claims in U.S. courts, as have countries such as Iran and Cuba. Although sometimes these cases lead to huge damage awards, lawyers have often found it difficult to track down assets that can be seized to satisfy a U.S. judgment.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Sotloff's father, mother and sister. Their attorney declined Tuesday to discuss details of the lawsuit.
The National Transportation Safety Board is resuming its search for the data recorder of the sunken El Faro cargo ship.

The 790-foot freighter sank last October after losing engine power and getting caught in a major hurricane en route from Jacksonville to San Juan, Puerto Rico. All 33 aboard died.

In a statement Sunday, NTSB officials say their goal is to find the data recorder and "better document the wreckage to help determine exactly why and how the ship sank." The latest search effort will begin Monday when a "research vessel" departs from Charleston, S.C., and heads to the wreckage site near the Bahamas. The ship was found in 15,000 feet of water, its top two bridge decks detached.

Investigators will use an underwater vehicle to help locate the data recorder.
It may mean the end for Floatopia after attendees littered Miami Beach this weekend with enough trash to fill nine giant dumpsters, city officials said.

The annual event drew 100,000 people with rafts and inner tubes to South Florida on Saturday. According to its website, Floatopia was founded in 2012 "to provide something different to Miami and its amazing people."

What the people provided to Miami, however, were the remnants of their party. From South Point to 10th Street, the beach was cluttered with floats and debris. The city said it took hours to haul it all away, filling nine oversized dumpsters with trash.

"Particularly large floats. They were huge that people brought and they were all over the beach. So because they ran because of the rain, they didn't take the time to pick up after themselves," said City Manager Jimmy Morales.

Commissioner Michael Grieco expressed his frustration on Facebook.

"This is an absolute travesty and this is me making a commitment to everyone that is going to watch this. Floatopia will never happen in Miami Beach again," he wrote.

Mayor Philip Levine also took to social media, slamming Floatopia attendees who failed to clean up after themselves. The mayor said he planned to work with the commission to "STOP this event from happening on our beaches going forward."

Levine posted a photo of Floatopia on Facebook with the words "never again." [[376229011, C]]

Attendance at Floatopia has inflated over the years from 25,000 to 100,000. Trash wasn't the only problem this weekend; traffic and public safety were also impacted.

"You're talking about quality of life for the people who live south of 5th that were completely disrupted, fire trucks not being able to get to their rounds and all the traffic," Grieco said.

"It's not my job as a commissioner or as a human being to clean up after other human beings. It's not that complicated. Whatever you bring to the beach, you take it home with you or you consume it," he added.

On Facebook, the Floatopia organizer  who has remained anonymous  implied he or she will not enable the event in the future.

"We always believed in doing something beautiful for our community. ... Protect the beach is the only thing we ever asked. ... The level of disrespect was unimaginable. ... We refuse to be associated with this type of behavior," the organizer wrote. [[376228701, C]]

City leaders will give official recommendations about Floatopia at a meeting at the end of April.

[NATL] Top News Photos: Pope Visits Japan, and More
A Florida judicial panel is recommending that a Miami-Dade County judge be suspended from the bench because of evidence she was impaired at a restaurant and at work.

The Judicial Qualifications Commission panel made the recommendation Monday pending the outcome of Judge Jacqueline Schwartz's case. The Florida Supreme Court must decide whether to approve the recommendation.

An investigation found that Schwartz appeared to be impaired on March 18 at a Coconut Grove restaurant, where witnesses said she berated waiters and called police "pigs." The probe also found on March 28 Schwartz was impaired on the bench to the point where her bailiff had to drive her home.

Schwartz attributed her behavior to a new prescription medication, not alcohol.

Schwartz was previously suspended and fined $10,000 for swearing at store clerk.
Raul Castro will retain the Cuban Communist Party's highest post alongside his hardline second-in-command, the government announced Tuesday in a resounding message that the island's aging revolutionary leaders will remain in control in the face of detente with the United States and widespread popular dissatisfaction with the country's economic performance.

Government news sites said Castro, 84, would remain the party's first secretary and Jose Ramon Machado Ventura would hold the post of second secretary for a second term. Castro currently is both president and first secretary. The decision means he could hold a Communist Party position at least as powerful as the presidency even after stepping down from the government post in 2018.

Machado Ventura, 85, is known as an enforcer of Communist orthodoxy and voice against some of the country's biggest recent economic reforms who fought alongside Castro and his brother, revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, to overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Fidel Castro made a rare appearance at the congress to rousing shouts of "Fidel!" according to state media that showed a delayed, edited broadcast of the day's events.

Government-run television showed rare images of the 89-year-old leader seated at the dais in Havana's Convention Palace, dressed in a plaid shirt and sweat top and speaking to the crowd.

"I congratulate everyone, above all comrade Raul Castro, for his magnificent effort," Fidel Castro said.

Raul Castro's decision to remain in power alongside a man even he has criticized for rigidity capped a four-day meeting of the Communist Party notable for its secrecy and apparent lack of discussion about substantive new reforms to Cuba's stagnant centrally planned economy. Even high-ranking government officials had speculated in the weeks leading up the Seventy Party Congress that Machado Ventura could be replaced by a younger face associated with free-market reforms started by Castro himself.

The party congress also chose the powerful 15-member Political Bureau, mostly devoid of fresh faces associated with the party's younger generations. Five members were new but none are high-profile advocates for reform.

Esteban Morales, an intellectual and party member who had complained about the secrecy of the congress, said he was gratified by Raul Castro's decision to submit the guidelines approved by the 1,000 delegates to an ex-post-facto public discussion and approval. He said he expected the first and second secretaries to remain in their positions only until Castro leaves the presidency in 2018, after what Morales called a necessary transition period.

A physician by training, Machado Ventura organized a network of rebel field hospitals and clinics in the Sierra Maestra mountains in the 1950s, participating in combat as both a medic and a fighter under Castro in the revolution against Batista. After the revolution he became health minister and later assumed more political roles within the Communist Party. He also sat on the powerful Politburo starting in 1975.

Machado Ventura was vice president from Raul Castro's ascent in 2008 until 2013, when the post was taken by Miguel Diaz-Canel, widely seen as the country's likely next president. Machado Ventura was named second secretary in 2011 in a move seen as a way to placate and empower party hardliners.

Machado Ventura was often employed by Raul Castro and his brother Fidel to impose order in areas seen as lacking discipline, most recently touring the country to crack down on private sellers of fruits, vegetables and other agricultural goods. While Raul Castro opened Cuba's faltering agricultural economy to private enterprise, the government blames a new class of private farmers and produce merchants for a rise in prices.

Machado Ventura has been the public face of crackdown on what the government labels profiteering, but many outside economists say the problem is farms' inability to meet demand due to continued state control of supplies of machinery, fertilizers and other inputs.

"He's demanding! He's very demanding!" Castro said of his deputy in 2008. "To be sincere, sometimes I've said it personally, he doesn't use the best techniques in being demanding."
A South Florida mother is turning tragedy into action after her daughter drowned.

The YMCA of South Florida has partnered with Swim for Jenny, an organization devoted to teaching children how to swim after the death of 12-year-old Jenny Nguyen.

It was five years ago that Nguyen suffered an underwater tragedy. She was at a party in Homestead when she went into water that was too deep. She didn't know how to swim.

"I dropped her at her teacher's house for the birthday party. I really don't know. She took them to another party. Right after that happened I just know that she drowned over there and I really don't know like how that happened," mother Ana Nguyen said.

Nguyen is still hurting and confused after losing her daughter but she's taken action, starting the Swim for Jenny project with her family friend.

"We founded the swim for Jenny program in 2011 after the drowning death of Jenny Nguyen. She was 12 and a half at the time and did not know how to swim so what we thought of a way to memorialize her we couldn't think of a better way than to provide swim lessons for the community," friend Susie Vega said.

The YMCA has partnered with the program to educate kids with access to free swim lessons.

"We've provided 3,500 swim scholarships and we're very excited that the program is now going to be taken to an even bigger plateau since we have a much larger audience," Vega said.

Water safety awareness is always on their minds and they want parents to remember that swimming lessons can save lives.

"Give your child a lesson for swimming, you know that's very important because I go through my life, you know, what I lost and you know, what my mistake," Nguyen said. "I don't put her in this lesson for beginner, that's my mistake because I just worry about her, she so afraid with the water and stuff like that. That's why I never did it. That's my mistake."

It's a mistake she doesn't want anyone else to repeat.

"Especially in South Florida where there's water everywhere you go," Vega said. "Everywhere you turn there's a canal or a body of water so we find it important not just to learn how to swim in a pool but in other bodies of water."

Nguyen said she hopes her story of loss will help inspire others. She said educating one parent or even a child is a step in the right direction.

For information on Swim for Jenny Week and free swimming lessons, click here.

For more information on NBC 6's Swim Week, click here.
Zoo Miami received two new additions Tuesday. "Cita" and "Lisa" are African elephants that arrived from the Virginia Zoo as part of an Association of Zoos and Aquariums recommendation.

The recommendation is in line with an upcoming requirement by the AZA that accredited institutions exhibiting elephants maintain them in herds of three or more to support the complex and psychological health of the animals.

"We're very excited to be part of this partnership with Zoo Miami, delivering 18,000 pounds of African elephants to them," said Greg Bockheim, Executive Director of the Virginia Zoo.

Lisa is 42, was born in the wild, and arrived at the Virginia Zoo in 1976. Cita is almost 48 and arrived at the Virginia Zoo from the Indianapolis Zoo in 2005.

Following a quarantine period, they will be joining Zoo Miami's resident African females, Peggy and Mabel, both of whom are 40.

"It was a long drive, but it's pretty exciting to be here and see our girls meet our new friends," Bockheim said.

All of these females are beyond their reproductive ages and therefore will not be part of any breeding program.

Zoo Miami is the only zoo in the continental United States that is located in a sub-tropical climate where the elephants can remain outdoors year-round while enjoying the exhibits that have gone through recent renovations.

South Florida, with its mild climate and abundant sunshine, offers the ideal retirement location for these elephants, zoo officials said.

"Elephants are very sensitive to cold, especially as they get older. So having these large exhibits that we have at Zoo Miami, having these elephants come down here to live out their lives, is really best for everybody involved," said Ron Magill, Communications Director of Zoo Miami.

"They need more social opportunities, social choice to live with more elephants and their friends. As they age they need an environment that's a little bit warmer, the substrate softer to walk on just like humans," Bockheim said.

The elephants will be officially presented to the public on May 20, 2016.
A man who once lived on Long Island was among the hundreds of people who died in a powerful magnitude 7.8 earthquake that devastated Ecuador over the weekend, his family said.

Many other Ecuadoran families in New York expressed frustration with the Ecuadoran consulate, which they say has been slow to provide information about survivors and ways to donate money and clothing to the relief effort.

In the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, which has large a population of Ecuador natives, several residents were planning to make donations and clothing drives.

Officials in the South American country are working with U.S. agencies to help coordinate aid efforts. But New York City officials say communication has been a problem.

"They've been very slow in getting back to us on what they need," said Jackson Heights Assemblyman Francisco Moya, who is Ecuadorian.

The earthquake victims with ties to Long Island has been identified as former Patchogue resident Anibal Ulloa Espinoza and his wife Betty, who were both killed in the massive seismic event, which flattened buildings, ripped open roadways and left at least 413 dead and thousands more injured.

Ulloa Espinoza lived on Long Island for several years before moving back in the late 1990s.

His cousin, Jaime Hechtam-Ulloa, said she and her husband were devastated to learn about the 46-year-old's death.

"The plates of the earth were moving for the earthquake and they separated and he fell, him and his wife fell into the hole," she said. "When they were trying to get out, a wall fell on them and killed them."

Ulloa Espinoza's death was first reported by Newsday.

On Monday evening, hundreds of people eager to help crowded into the midtown Ecuadorian consulate offices. Several people had to be turned away because of overcrowding, and one emotional woman tried to force her away inside.

"Is your family without f------ slaughtered right now? Is your family without electricity?" she screamed.

The passionate turnout was no surprise to those in the Ecuadorian community. Karina Roman from the Bronx couldn't stay away.

"So many things that we can do from here," she said, crying. "Being in this country, we got a better chance to help."

The Ecuadorian consulate was telling New Yorkers Monday to visit its website to find ways to help, including a link to Red Cross to donate and a list of things they're looking for.

Any questions can be directed to cecunewyork@cancilleria.gob.ec.
UPDATE: Ex-NYPD Officer Sentenced to 5 Years Probation in Stairwell Shooting, No Jail Time

A rookie police officer will find out whether he will be spared prison time following his manslaughter conviction in the accidental shooting death of an unarmed man in a darkened stairwell.

Peter Liang was fired from the police force shortly after the February jury verdict in the death of Akai Gurley. He is scheduled for sentencing Tuesday. The 28-year-old was patrolling the inside of a public housing project when he opened the stairwell door and fired once. Gurley, also 28, was walking down to the lobby and was struck by the bullet that had ricocheted.

Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson recommended probation and home confinement, but not prison time.

"Because his incarceration is not necessary to protect the public, and due to the unique circumstances of this case, a prison sentence is not warranted," Thompson said in a statement. The decision angered some members of Gurley's family.

But Judge Danny Chun can choose to sentence Liang to up to 15 years behind bars on the manslaughter conviction.

Gurley's death came among a spate of killings by police around the country, and some Liang supporters felt he was scapegoated for the wrongs of other officers who escaped criminal punishment, including the officer involved in Eric Garner's death on Staten Island. Just a few weeks after Gurley was killed, a grand jury on Staten Island declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in Garner's death.

Liang testified in his own defense that he was terrified and never meant to shoot anyone. After the trial, he met privately with Gurley's domestic partner and apologized to her. Both he and his partner said they felt unqualified to help aid Gurley as he lay bleeding on the stairwell floor. Gurley's girlfriend gave him CPR as a neighbor yelled instructions from a 911 operator on the telephone.

Last week, Liang's attorneys sought to have the case thrown out based on juror misconduct, but a judge refused.

Liang's attorneys are hopeful the judge will go with the prosecution's recommendation, which is common.
Catherine Holm had bought a shimmering dress and a plane ticket to her son's wedding in Puerto Rico before doctors gave her the bad news: she couldn't travel from New York because she was suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Flying would be too much of a risk for her compromised immune system from the cancer, doctors told the 58-year-old woman from Long Island's North Babylon when she was diagnosed in March.

But nurses at the bone marrow transplant unit at Stony Brook University Hospital, where she'd spend weeks, decided the party would go on, so they organized a wedding in the hospital's chapel.

"I'm overwhelmed, that people would do things like this," Holm said in tears Monday. "I'll never forget what they've done for me and my family."

Christina Wood, a fellow patient, served as unofficial wedding planner.

"I think it's absolutely amazing that they got to have the wedding here because there was no other option," she said.

Mark Jr. and Joanna said their vows in a small ceremony.

There were no wedding gifts, only a request from the family: for people to get tested and join the bone-marrow registry, a simple process that could keep this family together in sickness and in health.

"Only 2 percent of our nation is on the registry right now, and it's incredibly for us to join in," said nurse Maggie Knight.

Each year, about 6,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with ALL, a fast-growing cancer of a type of white blood cells, according to Stony Brook University Hospital. It's the most common type of leukemia in children under 15, but it can affect people of any age. Only 3 in 10 patients get a bone marrow transplant that could save their lives.

Without a match, the Holm family knows the odds are not on her side.

"My mom means a lot," Mark said while overcome with emotion.

To find out more on how to be a bone marrow donor, visit deletebloodcancer.org.
An MS-13 gang member who participated in what federal prosecutors called a cold-blooded execution of a Long Island woman and her toddler son has been sentenced to 45 years in prison.

A judge sentenced Rene Mendez Mejia on Monday in U.S. District Court on Long Island.

Prosecutors say Mejia and other MS-13 members shot and killed 19-year-old Vanessa Argueta and her 2-year-old son, Diego Torres, in February 2010 after luring them into the woods in Central Islip.

Prosecutors say Argueta was killed because she had allegedly shown disrespect to the MS-13 gang. Her child was killed simply because he was with her.

Three co-conspirators, including MS-13 leader Heriberto Martinez, were previously sentenced. He is serving life plus 60 years for the Central Islip killings and two other murders.
A New York City man accused of harassing relatives of a teacher killed in the Newtown school massacre has been sentenced to two years of probation as part of a plea deal.

Matthew Mills pleaded guilty Monday under the Alford doctrine to interfering with police.

Under the plea, the 32-year-old Mills isn't admitting guilt but acknowledges the state probably has enough evidence to convict him.

Mills was accused of approaching a sister of slain Sandy Hook Elementary School teacher Victoria Soto during a charity road race in November and angrily claiming the shootings never took place.

Soto was among six educators and 20 first-graders killed Dec. 14, 2012, in Connecticut.

The judge suspended a one-year prison sentence, imposed probation and ordered Mills to stay away from the Soto family.
A federal judge has preliminarily approved an agreement requiring city transit officials to translate services for disabled riders who speak limited English, a civil rights advocacy group announced Monday.

Josefa Jorge, an emigrant from the Dominican Republic, said in a statement provided by her attorneys with the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest that she felt humiliated when transit employees told her she was supposed to speak English in America.

"It's satisfying to know that this won't happen to other people in the future," she said.

The lawsuit, brought in December 2014, sought translation services for tens of thousands of people who use the Access-A-Ride program, which provides vans as an alternative to subways and buses for people who qualify.

The deal approved Friday by Judge Ronnie Abrams in Manhattan federal court requires the New York Transit Authority to translate a host of services into various languages and post information about the program in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, French Creole and Korean in Access-A-Ride offices throughout the city.

Access-A-Ride must also provide real-time translation services in more than 100 languages by phone for riders who need it, according to the stipulation.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it was "fully committed to providing quality paratransit service."

"This settlement enhances measures that were already in place to assist customers with limited-English proficiency by bolstering Access-A-Ride's language interpretation and document translation services," MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said in a statement.

The New York Lawyers for the Public Interest will serve as a monitor to make sure transit authorities are providing appropriate language services for the estimated tens of thousands of riders who qualify for the program.

The lawsuit charged that riders missed appointments  even funerals  and couldn't schedule pickups by phone via Access-A-Ride. In less than two weeks, transit officials must post Access-A-Ride services in various languages online, according to the deal.
Police have arrested the roommate of a 58-year-old man who was stabbed to death early Tuesday in the Bronx.

Jose, Torres, 51, is wanted as a suspect in the fatal stabbing, police said. He has been charged with murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon.

Police responded to a 911 call for a possible assault at an apartment building on University Avenue near West 195th Street in Kingsbridge Heights at about 1 a.m. Tuesday.

In the apartment building, police found the victim with multiple stab wounds, authorities said. He was rushed to St. Barnabus Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The victims name is being withheld pending notification of his family.
"Do you have a Holocaust joke?"

That was director Ferne Pearlstein's first, ice-breaking question when she sat down to interview comedians for "The Last Laugh," her documentary about taboos and comedy, particularly in regard to the Holocaust.

Gilbert Gottfried, master of the over-the-top punchline, didn't miss a beat.

"There was a Holocaust?!" he replied. "Nobody told me!"

"The Last Laugh," which premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, pokes and prods at the question of "Where's the line?" in comedy, teasing out comedy's cathartic, healing role in even the worst tragedies. It's a debate with many differing perspectives, even in the comedy community where stand-ups are often taken to task for "going too far" or "too soon."

Pearlstein's film doesn't only examine the issue from those with a microphone, but through Holocaust survivors who add a deeper dimension to the film: humor as a necessary survival tool. Some, like 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor Renee Firestone, frankly confess that among themselves, survivors, too, tell jokes about life in the camps.

"Humor kept me going after the Holocaust," Firestone said in an interview alongside Pearlstein and her co-writer and husband Robert Edwards. "Without humor I don't think I would have lived this long."

By seeking humor in the darkest dark, "The Last Laugh" gets at the intrinsic nature of comedy.

"Comedy puts light onto darkness, and darkness can't live where there's light," Sarah Silverman says in the documentary. "So that's why it's important to talk about things that are taboo because otherwise they just stay in this dark place and they become dangerous."

But there is discord even within many of the comics in the film. (Among them are Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, Larry Charles and Susie Essman.) Brooks, creator of the Hitler-skewering "The Producers," acknowledges he can do Nazi jokes, but not Holocaust jokes. When he reflects on Silverman's introduction of him for a 2014 AFI lifetime award, he cringes at her joke: "What do the Jews hate most about the Holocaust? The cost."

"The film doesn't answer the question," says Pearlstein of what's off-limits. "We wanted to provoke discussion."

One thing everyone  comedians and survivors alike  seem to agree on: Roberto Benigni's 1997 Holocaust tragicomedy "Life Is Beautiful" is sentimental, implausible claptrap. Brooks calls it "the worst movie ever made."

Famously never released was Jerry Lewis' "The Day the Clown Cried," made in 1972, in which Lewis plays a German clown forced to entertain children before they were sent to the gas chambers. (Lewis has sworn no one will ever see it.)

For Pearlstein, a veteran filmmaker whose previous films include the 2003 Japanese wrestling documentary "Sumo East and West," it's a complex chemistry that goes into determining whether a joke is offensive or not: Who's telling it? When was it said? Was it funny or not?

"I don't have a philosophy about it," Carl Reiner says in the film. "I just know that it's much more fun to laugh than not to laugh."

In some scenes in the film, Pearlstein documented survivors watching YouTube clips from the likes of Larry David and Ricky Gervais. "Watching Renee's face during these jokes, it was not the same," said Pearlstein. "I was hearing them differently. It hit me differently."

The line may be ever-shifting, impossible to pinpoint and necessary for comedy to flirt with. But what's most important to both Pearlstein and Firestone, is not to censor discussion.

"I feel very strongly that in order to move beyond these horrible events, everybody has to know about everybody's pain," says Pearlstein.

Firestone, who travels tirelessly to speak about genocide as a threat to all people, vividly recalls the absurdity of Auschwitz. One doctor examined her and advised her to have her tonsils removed should she survive.

"Our treatment was so ridiculous that you either had to cry or laugh about it," says Firestone. "Wherever there are survivors, any kind of survivor, they must have some humor."
The body of a 30-year-old woman was found in her Yonkers apartment and police said Tuesday they are investigating her death as a homicide.

Police were called to an apartment at 2 Sunnyside Drive on Monday afternoon to check on the welfare of the resident. Once inside, officers found the body of a woman later identified as Christina Maniotis.

Detectives didn't released details about how Maniotis died

"Investigators believe at this time that the victim was targeted and this was not a random incident," the Yonkers Police Department said in a media release.

Anyone with information about her death is asked to contact detectives at 914-377-7724.
Some 2,000 illegally trafficked elephant tusks and hundreds of finished ivory products erupted in a ball of fire Tuesday as Cameroonian authorities conducted what was believed to be one of the largest burnings of poached wildlife goods in African history.

Setting the pyre aflame in a sandy square in Cameroon's capital, Samantha Power, America's U.N. ambassador, joined Cameroonian officials in hailing the ceremony as symbolic of their commitment to win the war against illegal smuggling of animal products.

Central Africa's forest elephants have declined in number by two-thirds between 2002 and 2012.

"All of our countries can and must do more," Power said. The burning sends a clear message, she added, that "the only place ivory belongs and the only value ivory has is on elephants."

The heap included ivory chess boards, beads, totem poles and even miniature elephant sculptures, all intermixed with the raw tusks. Cameroonian officials said the pile totaled 3.5 tons of tusk alone, though that figure couldn't be verified. What's certain is the merchandise was worth millions of dollars. The pyre will burn for three days.

Philip Ngole Ngwese, Cameroon's minister of forestry and wildlife, said the seized tusks and ivory, much of which originated abroad, were now "beyond reach." He also described the human costs of poaching, mourning several guides and park rangers who have been killed in recent years.

Cameroon's biggest city, Douala, is a port through which much of the region's trafficked goods transit overseas.

Power, on a weeklong trip to promote the battle against the Muslim extremist group Boko Haram, also met President Paul Biya and other senior Cameroonian officials. She announced $40 million in new U.S. humanitarian aid to the region.

The United States has some 200 special operations forces in Cameroon advising and assisting African troops in the fight. Power, making the first trip to the country by a U.S. Cabinet member in a quarter-century, stressed the need for Cameroonian soldiers to exercise restraint amid reports they've sometimes targeted civilians.

"Any fight against terrorism has to be comprehensive," she said, echoing remarks she made in Cameroon's embattled north on Monday. Political inclusiveness, good governance, economic development and combating extremism at the grassroots level, she said, "are every bit as critical as one's military campaign itself."

Smoke billowed from the pyre as the ivory tusks turned black and statuettes smoldered.

Ivory-burning ceremonies aren't a gesture universally appreciated - even in Cameroon. Some wonder why the valuable tusks aren't reused in some capacity, given the elephants are already dead.

Echoing such sentiments, one local journalist asked Power why the tusks aren't preserved in museums for future generations that may never see elephants.

"I don't want to think about contingency plans for if elephants are eliminated from the wild," Power said.

The event and Power's participation underscored the Obama administration's effort to prioritize the fight against wildlife trafficking. In doing so, it is trying to break a multibillion-dollar criminal industry that officials say sometimes interweaves with drug trafficking and even terrorist enterprises. The U.S. held its own ivory crushes in 2013 and 2015.

In March, a U.S. task force said a "turning point" had been reached in the global endeavor to strengthen enforcement, reduce demand and expand international cooperation. But much ultimately depends on China cracking down, because its citizens are driving global demand.

As a port of exit, Cameroon plays a major role in snuffing out ivory smuggling from Central Africa, where several countries are struggling to assert control over their own territory, and national parks are often poorly protected. Cameroon, too, has suffered from poaching.

Four years ago, armed poaching gangs from Sudan massacred more than half of the elephants in the Bouba Njida National Park in northern Cameroon. The raids highlighted the vulnerability of elephants even in stable African countries. Biya, who is 83, has ruled Cameroon for more than 30 years.
Flames tore through a former chicken factory in South Jersey overnight leaving a firefighter hurt in a fire being investigated as suspicious.



The fire broke out in an abandoned warehouse along Grove Street near Henry Street in Bridgeton, New Jersey around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday and quickly grew to three alarms, said Cumberland County dispatchers.



A firefighter was treated and released for minor injuries, said Bridgeton firefighters.



It took firefighters more than three and a half hours to get the blaze at the former Five Star processing plant under control, said authorities.



Bridgeton firefighters treated the fire as suspicious as they searched for a cause.






Doctors fought to save a womans life after Philadelphia Police found her bleeding profusely on a city street after being stabbed from ear-to-ear.

She has a very, very deep  and severe  slash to her throat, said Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small.

Officers found the woman along Frankford Avenue by Stella Street in the Kensington neighborhood around 3 a.m. Tuesday.

They found a female victim lying on the highway suffering from a severe stab wound to her neck, said Small. Police picked her up, rushed her to Temple (University) Hospital.

Doctors performed surgery on the critical woman for the 12-inch slash wound on her neck, said Small.

Witnesses led investigators to a blood trail that made it appear the woman  who didnt have an identification on her and appeared to be in her 40s  had staggered about 75 feet down Stella Street.

She had a piece of denim she was holding around her neck and she was bleeding profusely, said Small.

Witnesses wrapped a towel around her neck and applied pressure as they waited for help, said police.

Investigators spoke to witnesses and poured over surveillance video in an attempt to figure out what led to the stabbing.

We dont know who stabbed her, we dont know the circumstances, said Small.

Anyone with information about the incident can contact Philadelphia Police.
A man and woman were killed when a small plane operated by a flight school crashed near a runway of Bay Bridge Airport in Queen Anne's County, Maryland State Police said.

The single-engine plane crashed about 200 yards from the runway of the airport on Kent Island in Stevensville, Maryland, landing in a field and then catching fire.

"It exploded into flames once it made contact with the ground," Cpl. DaVaughn Parker said.

Witness Denny Proffitt said he was eating lunch in his truck nearby when he saw the plane fly low over the tree line.

"A couple seconds later, I saw the smoke," he said.

Proffitt ran through the field toward the wreckage to try to rescue the plane's passengers.

"I drove my truck over and grabbed my fire extinguisher and ran out to it and tried to put the flames out," he said. "They were both already gone."

The man and woman, who were not identified immediately, were pronounced dead at the scene of the crash, which occurred about 12:45 p.m.

The two-seat plane was operated by Chesapeake Sport Pilot, a flight school that operates from the airport. A man associated with the school said no student of the school was on board at the time of the crash.

The flight school said in a statement that the company will cooperate with the investigation.

"Chesapeake Sport Pilot is a close knit community of individuals who share a passion for aviation, and I know we will all grieve this loss for some time," the statement said. "We offer our help and support to all those affected."

The crash is under investigation. National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration investigators were notified. FAA offcials are at the scene.
Laurel Police say a teacher has pleaded guilty to stealing money from an elementary school and the teachers' union.

The department said in a news release that 49-year-old Kimberly Parker pleaded guilty last week to theft and forgery.

Officers say Parker, who was a teacher in the Laurel School District, stole more than $2,000 from the Laurel Elementary School. Authorities say she also stole more than $36,000 from the Laurel Education Association.

Police say Parker paid full restitution to the school, and made an initial payment of $20,000 to the teachers union.

Sentencing is set for June 10.
The collaboration between UC San Diego and creative musicians around the globe known as Telematics (or Translocational Concerts) may have reached a zenith on April 10, when a group featuring Mark Dresser on bass, Nicole Mitchell on flute, Stephanie Richards on trumpet and Michael Dessen on trombone gathered in San Diego to interact, in real time, with players from Stony Brook University in New York. Representing the East Coast was Marty Ehrlich on reeds, Min Xiao-Fen on pipa, Ray Anderson on trombone, Denman Maroney on hyper-piano and Satoshi Takeshi on drums, while Sarah Weaver conducted.

I somehow managed to head the wrong direction on the I-5, causing me to arrive late for Dressers opening composition, Tidings and Sediments, but from the other side of the door, it sounded decidedly gorgeous.

I made it inside to catch the rest of the show in its full sonic and visual glory. Over the years Ive seen at least a half dozen of these events -- and I have to say, this one really resonated with me.

Next up was a Nicole Mitchell piece, listed in the program as Untitled, although she may have decided on Lets Just Keep This Between Us. Like most of Mitchells efforts, it was quirky, sensual and open to massive input from everyone involved, including an unlikely quartet of pipa (a kind of Chinese lute), drums and trombones that grew into a feast of ecstatic dissonance and brilliant statements from the round robin of improvisers. The only thing that could have made it better would have been more Nicole Mitchell. Throughout the concert, Stephanie Richards left an indelible impression -- her tone limber and personal, and her ideas deftly executed.

Likewise, Takeishi demonstrated a singular approach to the drum kit, delineated by a laser focus on listening and honing the moment. Dresser was Dresser, which is to say, perhaps the finest bassist on the planet, and the raging trombone duo of Anderson and Dessen had me suppressing moans and screams -- but just barely. Maroney and Ehrlich seemed to surface at odd intervals, or maybe it was just impossible to track everything with equal attention, but each of them could have carried the concert individually.

Weavers Sustainable Balance began with Mitchell purring quavering multiphonics into her flute, joined by Ehrlichs piercing clarinet in hovering orbits before yielding to Fens audacious string scraping, which reminded me of John McLaughlin playing Derek Baileys banjo for a moment before changing again to a collage of slowly dissolving harmonies and joyful dissonances.

A feast for the ears and the eyes, this performance raised the bar on the continually evolving art of Telematics. Lets see if they can top this.

Robert Bush is a freelance jazz writer who has been exploring the San Diego improvised music scene for more than 30 years. Follow him on Twitter @robertbushjazz. Visit The World According to Rob.
Kids say the darndest things!

Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky have their hands full with daughter India, 4, and twin sons Sasha and Tristan, 2. When Hemsworth appeared on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" Monday to promote Universal Pictures' "The Huntsman: Winter's War" (in theaters Friday), Hemsworth said his three kids "get along, absolutely," although India is starting to pick up on their differences.

"Siblings kind of have their moments," he said. "My daughter is kind of envious of my boys at the moment.

"She came to me the other day and she was like, 'You know, papa, I want one of those things that Sasha and Tristan have.' I'm like, 'What do you mean?'" Hemsworth recalled. "She was like, 'You know, the things in between the legs that you have.' I was like 'Oh, um...Well, you see, girls...'"

The 32-year-old-actor was caught off-guard.

"My brain's like, 'How do we handle this?' I was like, 'Girls have breasts.' 'I don't want breasts!' I was like, 'OK. Um...' She goes, 'I really want one.' I was like, 'A penis?' She was like, 'I want a penis!'" he said. "I was like, 'Oh, OK. Um...'"

After some thought, he decided now wasn't the best time to have that talk.

"I was like, 'You know what? You can be whatever you want to be.' And she goes, 'Thanks, dad!' Runs off to the playground and that was it," he said. "I'll have to pick that conversation up in a few years time."

"You'll have to see if she brings it up again because she probably is just envious of it now," host Ellen DeGeneres said.

"There'll be a pill for it in a few years," Hemsworth joked. "She can probably have one. She can grow one."

DeGeneres fired back, "I think there is a pill for that, actually. I think a lot of men take that pill."

Cute kid stories aside, Hemsworth also told DeGeneres that he can't wait to show India his latest movie, which stars Emily Blunt, Jessica Chastain and Charlize Theron.

"It's a very modern take on the fairy tale world," he said. "It's not the damsel in distress being rescued by the princes. It's me being rescued most of the film by these very powerful women. I thought, 'Wow, this is something I want my daughter to see,' which is women [who are] in charge of their own destiny. They're not waiting for the prince to rescue them. They can take over the world or lead armies and so on. It was great, and I think there's not enough of it, and there should be more."

(E!, NBC and Universal Pictures are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)

PHOTOS: Chris Hemsworth's hottest moments

VIDEO: Chris Hemsworth and Jessica Chastain interview each other
The lost lanyard of a pin collector with autism was returned alongside a bag full of Disney goodies after she was located in Oregon following a social media campaign to find her.

Three weeks ago, at the Disneyland pin release in Anaheim, a Disney worker came upon a misplaced lanyard that had a couple of pins attached to it. It also had a note that read "Hello, I am autistic and I don't talk much but I would like to trade for Mickey pins."

Worker Emily Gibby posted a picture of the lanyard on Facebook and Instagram, hoping it would help her find the owner.

The story was shared tens of thousands of times on social media, as the Disney workers had filled up the lanyard with multiple pins as a gift and hoped to be able to give it to its rightful owner.

"We did what any Cast Member would naturally do," Gibby said in her post. "We filled up his lanyard with Mickey pins and got him a Mickey medallion as well!"

A big Disney fan named Susie received her loaded lanyard in Oregon with a bag of gifts that included a wizard hat, a Mickey Mouse plush toy and more.

Her family released photos of Susie with her Disney gifts, but asked for privacy beyond that.
A convicted child molester was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol (CBP) agents seven miles east of the Calexico Station Sunday.

The 28-year-old Mexican national had been deported in 2015 after being convicted of lewd acts with a child under 14 years old. He was sentenced to 270 days in jail.

Agents saw the man walking north of the International Border Fence just after 10 p.m.

Once they made contact with the man they realized he was in the U.S. illegally, and a records check revealed his convictions.

Whether its being good members of our community or arresting criminals who pose a threat to our nations youth I am grateful for the work our Border Patrol agents do every day to keep our communities safe, said Assistant Chief Patrol Agent David S. Kim.

The man will be criminally prosecuted and is being held at the Imperial County Jail.

El Centro Sector Border Patrol agents have arrested nine convicted sex offenders attempting to re-enter the United States after removal in fiscal year 2016.
San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis has declined to file charges against County Supervisor Dave Roberts, her office confirmed to NBC 7 San Diego Monday in a statement.

The news ends a months-long investigation into complaints alleging criminal misconduct by Roberts; the news comes amid an election year in which Roberts is running for re-election on June 7.

"Supervisor Dave Roberts violated county and civil workplace policies, which are civil matters where the burden of proof is a preponderance of the evidence, a lower threshold," the statement reads. "These violations have been addressed by the County and with the aggrieved parties, which resulted in a civil settlement."

In September 2015, the county agreed to pay over $300,000 to settle claims filed by former employees of the supervisor. A series of payments, which Roberts did not support.

Roberts' former Chief of Staff Glynnis Vaughan, ex-scheduler Diane Porter and ex-staffer Lindsey Masukawa received the settlements.

In their claims, the women said Roberts misused County funds, practiced favoritism and in one case, attempted to bribe one of the former employees with a higher position if she lied to County Human Resources.

He was also accused of instructing county employees to do his personal errands and for working on his campaign while they were on county time.

Roberts denies all of the accusations.

The three women were among eight staffers in Roberts' office who resigned last year.

Read our series of investigative reports here.

As he opened his re-election campaign, he told NBC 7 San Diego, Last year was a great lesson for me, in that we have to put the strictest ethical standards in place and thats really what weve done to make sure that everyone involved in my office follows those rules.

Roberts told NBC7 he created over 5,000 new jobs, preserved 1,200 acres of open space, and strengthened fire protection.

Robert's is being challenged by two Republicans, Escondido Mayor Sam Abed and Encinitas Mayor Kristin Gaspar.
Authorities on Wednesday revealed the details of the longest cross-border drug smuggling tunnel ever discovered in California.

The elaborate tunnel, found near the Otay Mesa Border Crossing, is one of the narrowest ever discovered and includes lighting, ventilation and an elevator that fits eight to 10 people, U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said at a news conference.

It is the 13th operational large scale border tunnel found along the state's border since 2006 and the second tunnel discovered in the Otay Mesa area in the past month.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees swarmed a facility on Marconi Drive Tuesday starting at 2:15 p.m. The building is about 1,000 feet from the U.S.-Mexico border.

The tunnel zig zags the length of eight football fields from Mexico to the U.S., Duffy said.

Duffy says people digging cross border tunnels typically try to make more of an effort to conceal them.

"This one as you can see it's literally a rabbit hole in the ground," Duffy said. "They had a plate over that they covered with gravel like this. So I think few, except the agents who work this area who are very attune to this area and what's going on, would even suspect this kind of business is taking place out in the open."

Agents discovered the tunnel when they noticed a dumpster being strategically placed in a pallet yard. A sign on the fence outside the business reads: "Otay Pallets - We buy pallets."

Officials say pallets were placed around it, and on top of drugs found inside it.

Duffy said the agency is fairly confident this was the first drug smuggling attempt at the tunnel location.

An estimated $1.2 million worth of marijuana and about $22 million worth of cocaine was seized Friday.

Six people were arrested and charged as a result of the discovery.

Martiniano Garcia-Sedano, Cruz Armando Parra Corrales and Alejandro Bravo were charged with conspiring to import cocaine and marijuana and conspiring to use a border tunnel, according to a complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney's office.

The men imported 2,242 pounds of a mixture and substance with detectable amounts of cocaine, according to the complaint. The complaint also alleged the men imported 14,098.96 pounds of a mixture with a detectable amount of marijuana. The complaint alleged the men used the border tunnel to transport those drugs.

Juan Carlos Chavez Fabian, Alejandro Gomez-Baez and Osmel Martinez were charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine and marijuana, according to a separate complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney's office.

According to the complaint, the men to distribute 2,242 pounds of a substance containing a detectable amount of cocaine and 11,030 pounds of a substance containing marijuana.

A nearby business owner told NBC 7 San Diego she didn't see anything odd or suspicious going on in the area.

"We just mind our own business because I don't care what others do, said Lupita Flores. I don't even knew what they were doing over there. I just saw the pallets but that was it. We never saw what they were doing. So I have no idea."

The tunnel marks the third similar discovery in recent weeks around Southern California.

Officials found a 142-foot cross-border tunnel east of Calexico during a routine patrol of the border Friday. Depression in the soil exposed an 18-inch hole, where the agent found lumber and electrical wiring that indicated it was an operational tunnel.

A month ago, authorities found a secret, cross-border tunnel hidden in a home built specifically for the purpose of concealing the tunnel's entrance, officials said. It's believed to be the first instance in California where smugglers built a home for the sole purpose of transporting drugs.
Tramane Sampson took the most shocking phone call of his life on April 25, 2002, when FBI Investigators told him of his 2-year-old son Jahi Turners disappearance.

After Jahi was reported missing from a park that day, last seen with his stepfather, hundreds of volunteers and police officers spent weeks searching for traces of the 30-pound toddler, even combing through 5,000 tons of garbage at the Miramar Landfill.

Turner's unsolved cold case haunted the community and the boy's family for more than a decade.

Nearly 14 years later, Sampson received another shocking call, this time from a family member, telling him that an arrest had been made in his sons high-profile cold case.

As far as I knew, the case was closed, Sampson told NBC 7 San Diego in an interview. So it was definitely shocking to get a phone call.

Tieray Jones, the boy's stepfather, has been charged with killing 2-year-old Jahi, according to San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman. His mother was deployed aboard a Navy ship at the time.

On Tuesday, he waived extradition and will return to San Diego in 60 days to face charges in the toddler's death. Jones is charged with one count of murder and one count of felony child abuse causing death, authorities said. Both carry a 25-years-to-life sentence. It wasn't immediately clear if Jones has an attorney.

Sampson, who lives just outside Baltimore, Maryland, said he suspected Jones was responsible for the crime from the start.

I knew from the beginning who was guilty of the whole thing, me personally, Sampson said. I actually thought theyd forgotten all about the case, because it had been 14 years.

On April 25, 2002, Jahi allegedly disappeared from a playground at 28th Street and Cedar Street in San Diego's South Park neighborhood.

According to police, Jones told officers he was with the toddler at the park when he left to get a drink. Jones said he returned 15 minutes later and Jahi was gone.

However, officials were unable to locate Jahi's fingerprints on playground equipment, prompting speculation the child never visited the area, authorities announced Monday.

Sampson says he and Jones were childhood friends, but their relationship immediately took a turn after Jahis disappearance.

Cause he was the last one to see him, the last one to be with him, so I held him accountable for everything, said Sampson.

Now a father of four, Sampson says Jahi would have been his second oldest child. The mystery of what happened still haunts him.

Sometimes I just sit home and think, what actually happened? Where could he be at?" said Sampson.

He now hopes the arrest and pending criminal charges somehow lead to answers, which he believes would bring him more closure.

Though new evidence has been uncovered in the case, authorities have not found Jahi's body or remains, police said.

To me it would be a little bit more closure to exactly find out what exactly happened, he said.
The family of a man shot and killed by San Diego Police Department (SDPD) officers last fall filed a claim Tuesday for damages against the City of San Diego and the police department, calling this a case of wrongful death.

Lamontez Jones, 39, of Virginia, died after being shot by two SDPD officers during a confrontation in downtown San Diegos Gaslamp Quarter on Oct. 20, 2015.

Two motorcycle officers on traffic patrol  Officer Scott Thompson, a 30-year veteran of the department and Officer Gregory Lindstrom, a 25-year veteran  saw Jones allegedly disrupting traffic at 6th Avenue and F Street. When they approached him, Jones allegedly ran into the middle of the street and pulled what appeared to be a handgun from his backpack and pointed it at the officers, the police department said.

The officers fired their service weapons at Jones, killing him. There was no radio call from Thompson or Lindstrom before the shots were fired.

Investigators later determined the item Jones grabbed from his backpack was not a real firearm, but a steel replica with the same markings of a real weapon.

Both officers who fired on Jones failed to activate their body-worn cameras in time to capture the shooting, and the case gained a lot of criticism.

SDPD police states an officer will activate the body-worn camera after a radio call or before an enforcement contact. However, neither Thompson nor Lindstrom activated a recording on their camera.

SDPD Chief Shelley Zimmerman defended the actions of the officers, saying the officers were facing a dangerous situation and had to protect themselves and the public first.

An attorney for Jones family argues his killing is a case of wrongful death.

To that end, members with a group called United Against Police Terror (UAPT) presented a claim for damages in this case to the SDPD and City Clerks office Tuesday on behalf of Jones mother and familys attorney.

The damages listed in the familys claim include emotional distress, medical expenses, attorney fees, loss of income and punitive damages against the City of San Diego, the police department and Thompson and Lindstrom.

Catherine Mendonca, a spokesperson for UAPT, said there needs to be closure for Jones family and justice and punishment for Jones wrongful death.

We believe police should really be educated and trained to not use lethal force first, use methods of less lethal force, Mendonca told NBC 7. In this case, theres more to the story and there really is no objective point of view to show the officers were in the right because their body cameras were not on.

An attorney for the UAPT said the group must file the claim with the city before it can take the next step in filing a lawsuit on a state level.

NBC 7 reached out to the San Diego County City Attorneys Office and a spokesperson said the claim was received. If the city denies the claim, the group can file a lawsuit.

NBC 7 also reached out to SDPD for comment on the claim, but we have not yet heard back from the police department.

As of October 2015, Zimmerman said the SDPD had distributed more than 950 body cameras to its force.

At that time, the Chief said there was a learning curve for officers when it came to activating the technology. She said the cameras are always on a 30-second buffer and officers must activate a button to record video. Storage limitations at the police department does not allow for continuous recording on officers body-worn cameras, Zimmerman said last fall.

According to investigators, Jones had arrived in San Diego the day before he was fatally shot. Police in Hampton, Virginia, had identified Jones as the suspect in a May 31, 2015, armed robbery of a pharmacy.

SDPD officials said Jones had a propensity for violence and served a prison sentence in June 2012 for a shooting. Court records from Norfolk, Virginia, showed Jones pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the 2009 shooting death of his roommate. He served three years in prison for that crime.
Two U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyers departed from Naval Base San Diego Tuesday for a 7-month deployment as tearful families waved goodbye to the 600 sailors on board.

The USS Spruance and USS Decatur are headed for the western Pacific Ocean, according to the U.S. Navy's Third Fleet. Theyll meet up with USS Momsen, a Washington-based destroyer, to form a Pacific Surface Action Group (PAC SAG) under Destroyer Squadron 31.

At Tuesday's sendoff, one sailor was leaving behind his pregnant wife who was due to give birth soon. With tearful farewells, others also left behind their families.

One Navy officer said he planned to record video messages of himself reading bedtime stories and send them home to his young boys.

"What Ill do with my boys is Im going to videotape myself, and just kind of send them home messages on memory cards. So thats the set up that were going to have for my boys and family," said Officer Lucas Riojas.

"We also have another program on the shift that Im going to be part of. Its called United Through Reading, so well read stories and the ship will set up a camera. And you can read and send that back home, so that way they can read and follow the story along with dad as Im gone," he added.

Although the Navy did not release details of the destroyers' mission, other ships in the fleet have been doing exercises in the South China Sea. Navy officials said tensions are growing in this region over territorial disputes for islands and fishing areas, with several countries involved.

Along with the destroyer ships, the Devil Fish and Warbirds detachments from the Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 49 will also be part of the PAC SAG.

The ships are under the Third Fleets command while they conduct security operations and missile defense, said Navy officials. The combined capabilities of the Third Fleet and Pacific Fleet complement each other, as two of the worlds most powerful numbered fleets. Their objective is to create more stability in the Asia Pacific.

The PAC SAG is also expected to participate in the Oceania Maritime Security Initiative (OMSI), according to the Navy. This Secretary of Defense program uses assets from the Department of Defense to support its maritime law enforcement operations in Oceania.

Two Navy missile destroyers will set sail today from San Diego: the USS Spruance and USS Decatur. The ships will be under the command of the Third Fleet as they conduct maritime security operations and missile defense. Chris Chan reports.

Each ship has its own special history with the Navy. Consider the 50-foot-long USS Spruance, which last returned from deployment in April 2014. According to the navy's website, its named after Admiral Raymond Spruance, a cruiser division commander who led an aircraft carrier task force at the Battle of Midway during World War II.

The Defense Media Network says Adm. Spruance stepped up to the task after the regular commander Adm. William Bull Halsey came down with a debilitating case of severe dermatitis. Soon after, Halsey and Spruance were splitting command of the Navys prime carrier strike force in later battles against the Japanese in the Pacific.

Meanwhile, the USS Decatur returned from its most recent deployment in April 2013. According to US Carriers, its named after Stephen Decatur, who was honored for his heroic actions in the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812. He was promoted to Captain at sixteen, making him the youngest man in the US Navy to reach this rank.

Despite the emotional parting, USS Spruance and USS Decatur Navy families remained optimistic.

Its not the best situation but were ready for it. Were prepared, said Jessica Riojas, the wife of officer Riojas. Theres always going to be a sacrifice and a price for freedom, and sometimes we sacrifice having our spouses gone. And thats okay. Thats part of it.
Police have arrested a suspect accused of setting a man on fire in San Diego's Oak Park neighborhood.

Monday morning at approximately 10:15 a.m., police arrested 26-year-old Jose Ricardo Garibay after they saw him in a car on the 6200 block of Estrella Avenue in San Diego.

Garibay, who had two outstanding misdemeanor warrants, was booked into San Diego County Jail at 6:46 p.m. on an attempted murder charge and his outstanding warrants, Acting Homicide Lieutenant Manny Del Toro said.

SDPD officers say Garibay lured 39-year-old Julio Caesar Edeza to his truck, doused him in a flammable liquid and lit him on fire. The incident happened at noon Sunday on Pentecost Way in San Diego's Oak Park neighborhood near a Rite Aid, just north of State Route 94, officers said.

The suspect fled the scene.

Details of the crime were released and, on Monday, Del Toro said a resident in Allied Gardens noticed a car matching a photo of the suspect's vehicle on Estrella Avenue. That resident called 911 and police were able to track down Garibay in the area.

Garibay was wanted on two misdemeanor warrants, possibly battery-related, and detectives arrested him on those warrants on the spot, Del Toro said.

Garibay was questioned by detectives who determined he was the suspect in the crime against Edeza. Del Toro said the suspect was very "matter of fact" and cooperative when asked about his involvement in the case.

Detectives believe the crime was random, as it doesn't appear Garibay and Edeza knew one another.

Edeza's family, including his two sisters, have been with him at the hospital. They said he is a loving, funny, generous man and although he didn't have much he shared what he could.

Edeza's cousin and niece said Edeza has a 14-year old son and family was the most important thing to him. He's a religious man and loves to cook and has a culinary certification.

Edeza's niece, Erika Jasso, told NBC 7 his family is devastated.

"For him to get treated like that -- it's not fair. No person deserves to get treated the way he did," Jasso said, sobbing. "It hurts me because he's a loving person."

Edeza suffered life-threatening injuries and was taken to UC San Diego's Burn Center, police said.

Edeza has third-degree burns to 85 percent of his body and is in a medically-induced coma according to his family. Police say he is not expected to survive.

Del Toro said the case, described as "horrific," is being forwarded to the San Diego County District Attorney's office. Police are recommending Garibay be charged with attempted murder.

Detectives have yet to identify what type of liquid the victim was doused with before he was lit on fire.

Anyone with any information on the location or possible owner of this vehicle can notify the San Diego Police Department (619) 531-2000, Homicide Team 5. Witnesses with information wishing to remain anonymous can also contact Crime Stoppers at (888) 580-8477.
Racially charged tagging on UC San Diego school grounds referencing GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump is sparking anger among students and faculty.

The scrawled messages have prompted an outpouring of students to call for the university to implement further non-discrimination standards on campus. Monday afternoon, nearly 1,400 people had signed an online petition and Tuesdays, dozens turned out for a rally.

The tagging first emerged the week of April 11 and is among a series of incidents occurring on college and university campuses across the United States have reflected our nation's current divisive political climate, a statement from the school read.

Photos have been posted on social media, showing the graffiti on sidewalks and school signs, including the universitys Raza Resource Centro, a resource center for Latino students.

The messages say "Build the wall" and "Deport them all," among other words.

Much of graffiti references undocumented immigrants, calling for deportation, while touting Trumps campaign.

The university issued a statement on April 11, saying: This graffiti runs counter to our campus values of equity and inclusion. We value diversity and respect for all cultures.

University officials stopped short of saying whether they were investigating the vandalism.

Mica Pollock, director of the Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment and Teaching Excellence, issued a statement that he was angered by the graffiti.

We are deeply angered by the actions of the unknown individuals who defaced our common property this weekend with messages that devalued Latino and immigrant members of the San Diego and UC San Diego community, he stated.
Almost 14 years after he was last seen, Jahi Turner still holds a special place in the hearts of San Diegans.

On Monday, when San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman announced the arrest of a suspect in Jahi's disappearance, San Diegans shared their feelings with each other and with NBC 7.

Here are some of the comments. Mobile users will want to click on this link.
More than 500 job seekers with an interest in San Diegos craft beer industry turned out Tuesday for a job fair hosted by the San Diego Brewers Guild.

The San Diego Craft Beer Job Fair went down between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. at SILO in Makers Quarter in downtown San Diego, located at 753 15th St.

In addition to the San Diego Brewers Guild, the job fair was also hosted by the San Diego State University (SDSU) Professional Certificate in the Business of Craft Beer program and UC San Diego Extensions Brewing Certificate program.

At the event, job seekers -- including new graduates of the SDSU and UC San Diego craft beer and brewing programs -- got a chance to meet with a variety of local breweries and related businesses in the craft beer field.

Organizers said employers were looking to hire for both full-time and part-time positions, plus internships, in various departments  from brewers and bartenders, to managers, sales positions and engineers.

Jill Davidson, Vice President of the San Diego Brewers Guild said more than 12 local breweries hosted hiring booths at the event.

She said there are approximately 90 brewer members in the Guild, so these job fairs are a great way to pair up companies with prospective employees.

Theres a lot of potential. Craft beer is a huge business here, Davidson told NBC 7.

Local breweries seeking candidates at the fair included: Stone Brewing; AleSmith Brewing Company; Karl Strauss Brewing Company; Tap Hunter; Green Flash Brewing Co.

Ryan Crisp, director of brewing operations at AleSmith Brewing, said his company was looking to hire between 10 to 15 people from the job fair.

Crisp said AleSmith was looking for qualified, enthusiastic candidates to fill out many open positions, from packaging, production, warehouse and brewing gigs to jobs in the company's marketing and sales departments.

"We're growing by 70 percent a year, so we're looking for a lot of people to fill out a lot of jobs," he told NBC 7.

Crisp said AleSmith Brewing Company also tries to host a job fair at its brewery once a year to find new team members.

The San Diego Brewers Guild says the thriving craft beer industry in San Diego shows no signs of slowing as a lucrative sector of the local economy.

Data recently released by National University System Institute for Policy Research shows that in 2015, San Diegos 114 breweries and brewpubs generated $851 million in sales and employed 4,512 workers locally. Last year, 17 new breweries opened in San Diego County.
The father of a man killed in a State Route 52 crash arrived to the scene and broke down as law enforcement officers investigated what caused the crash.

A 23-year-old man, identified as Tyler De Guide-Rickard, died when his Toyota 4Runner crashed into a big rig on Mast Boulevard near SR-52, according to San Diego Police.

The tractor trailer was traveling eastbound on Mast Boulevard when it approached the westbound ramps of State Route 52.

San Diego Police said a Toyota 4Runner was traveling at a high rate of speed on the exit ramp of SR-52.

De Guide-Rickard failed to stop for a red light, police said, and his vehicle struck the big rig.

At one point, firefighters tried to rescue the victim from the SUV but realized they could not save him.

The victim's father arrived to the intersection and broke down in tears after police informed him that his son died in the crash. According to the San Diego County Medical Examiner's office, the victim lived with his parents in their Spring Valley home.

SDPD investigators say they believe the driver of the Toyota may have been on his way to work at the time of the crash.

The driver of the semi truck was not hurt in the crash but was visibly shaken.

Investigators told NBC 7 San Diego there is video evidence of the collision from the semi truck's dash cam and they are working with the truck company to review the footage.
The man accused in the slaying of his stepson, Jahi Turner, waived extradition at a North Carolina hearing Tuesday and will return to San Diego to face charges in the toddler's death.

Tieray Jones has been charged with killing 2-year-old Jahi, according to San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman. His mother was deployed aboard a Navy ship at the time.

Hundreds of volunteers and police officers spent weeks searching for traces of the 30-pound toddler when he was reported missing in 2002. Law enforcement officers raked through 5,000 tons of garbage at the Miramar Landfill, but came up with nothing.

Jones is charged with one count of murder and one count of felony child abuse causing death, authorities said. Both carry a 25-years-to-life sentence. It wasn't immediately clear if Jones has an attorney.

Jones will now be transported to San Diego in the next 30 days to be arraigned in the two-year-old's death.

"Jahi's disappearance rocked the community to its core 14 years ago," DA Bonnie Dumanis said. "It's without a doubt one of the highest profile unsolved cases here in San Diego County."

Dumanis and Zimmerman explained that U.S. Marshals arrested the boy's stepfather on a fugitive complaint Monday in North Carolina without incident and took him into custody.

Though new evidence has been uncovered in the case, authorities have not found Jahi's body or remains, police said.

The arrest comes one week before the 14th anniversary of Jahi's disappearance. On April 25, 2002, he allegedly disappeared from a playground at 28th Street and Cedar Street in San Diego's South Park neighborhood.

According to police, Jones told officers he was with the toddler at the park when he left to get a drink. Jones said he returned 15 minutes later and Jahi was gone.

However, officials were unable to locate Jahi's fingerprints on playground equipment, prompting speculation the child never visited the area, authorities announced Monday.

Officials say the last reported sighting of Jahi was April 22.

At the time of the childs disappearance, Jahis mother, Tameka Jones, was deployed aboard USS Rushmore.

A huge search for Jahi ensued, including a week-long police search of the Miramar Landfill, where authorities took the extreme measure of systematically raking through 5,000 tons of garbage.

Domanis said authorities could not file charges earlier because they didn't have enough proof, though they began uncovering new evidence in the case two years ago.

"We never gave up on finding justice for Jahi. In 2003, we assigned a prosecutor and full-time investigator to the case," Dumanis said. "Unfortunately at the time we didnt have the evidence required: proof beyond a reasonable doubt, to proceed with criminal charges."

Jahis family eventually moved to Frederick, Maryland.

Officials said because this is a criminal case, they are not able to discuss any of the facts or the criminal evidence, including any new evidence they uncovered since the case went cold.

Check back for updates on this breaking news story.
Frederick, Maryland, City Police and the Frederick States Attorney are investigating compaints about Mount Olivet Cemetery, following a News4 I-Team investigation that exposed questionable spending by cemetery employees.

Mount Olivet is one of the most famous cemeteries in Maryland because there are some well-known names buried there  including Francis Scott Key, the author of the National Anthem.

But the I-Team investigation pieced together leaked receipts showing purchases made on the cemeterys tax-exempt credit cards, including a new roof, a new fence and multiple appliances, which the I-Team linked to the private homes of the cemeterys superintendent Ron Pearcey and his stepson Rick Reeder, who also serves as the cemeterys assistant superintendent.

After the investigation aired, the superintendents wife, Melanie Reeder-Pearcey, made a Facebook comment in response to the story, saying the purchases the I-Team profiled are at my sons house and the lake house at Lake Anna in Virginia.

Reeder-Pearcey continued, All of the money was paid to the cemetery and I have nothing to hide, but she later deleted the post.

When the News4 I-Team called Reeder-Pearcey, she confirmed she deleted the post but declined to explain her comments.

The I-Team also heard from angry lot owners  people who purchased burial plots at the cemetery  who said they feel like Pearcey and Reeder misused their money since the bulk of the cemeterys finances come from the sale of burial plots.

At least one lot owner said he filed a complaint for theft with the Frederick City Police Department after watching the I-Team story.

Frederick Countys prosecutor, Maryland States Attorney Charles O. Smith, also confirmed to the News4 I-Team his office is investigating the matter.

The I-Team reached out to the cemetery's attorney for a response. He declined to comment but previously told the I-Team the cemeterys board took prompt and appropriate action when it investigated the men but does not wish to discuss its actions publicly.

Reported by Tisha Thompson and produced by Rick Yarborough.
The co-founders of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream were arrested during a protest on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Monday, the company announced.

Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen were arrested along with hundreds of others during a widespread protest against money in politics and voting right infringements called Democracy Awakening, according to a statement from the company.

The company says its co-founders joined the protest because they believe that "if you care about something, you have to be willing to risk it all - your reputation, your values, your business - for the greater good."

Democracy Awakening and U.S. Capitol Police both announced Monday the arrests of about 300 people on the Capitol steps, though police didn't identify any of those who were arrested.

The people who were arrested were charged with crowding, obstructing or incommoding, and were released on-scene after being processed, police said.

Capitol Police didn't immediately respond to a message left seeking comment on the arrests of Greenfield and Cohen. Democracy Awakening said the pair from the Vermont-based ice cream company were among those in its group, along with NAACP President Cornell William Brooks and radio personality Jim Hightower.

This isn't the first time the brains behind one of the most popular ice cream brands in America have spoken out on politics: Cohen recently unveiled a limited-edition ice cream flavor supporting 2016 hopeful Bernie Sanders.
The slogan on the license plates issued by the District of Columbia has been Taxation without Representation for 15 years.

It was changed to highlight how District citizens pay federal taxes but have no voting representation in Congress. Eleanor Holmes Norton serves in the House of Representatives as a non-voting delegate but is not permitted to vote on the floor of Congress.

D.C. Council members believe the slogan isnt aggressive enough and doesnt reflect as the protest statement it is meant to be. Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen and 10 co-sponsors have introduced a bill to add one word to the slogan: End.

"What we want to say is 'End Taxation without Representation,'" Allen said. "It is something we are actively trying to end."

It is his hope the new slogan End Taxation without Representation will spur more conversation about D.C.s proper representation, or lack of it, in Congress.

"Even at the worst, it is symbolic," Allen said. "I think it is still meaningful."

Some visitors to Washington were surprised the District and its citizens arent better represented. One person from Rhode Island called it "ridiculous" and said, "I think the good people of D.C. ought to have their voice heard."

Eleven of 13 D.C. Council members support the new change, which could be available later this year.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has already indicated her desire to put the issue of statehood for the District on the ballot in November. The District's 672,000 residents pay federal taxes and fight in wars but lack voting representation in Congress.

Statehood advocates argue that making the nation's capital a state is the best solution.
What to Know The FTA inspection found a partially- or non-functioning lights on tunnel walls, discharged and expired fire extinguishers in tunnels.

The inspection found there was not compliance with roadway worker protection, including unsafe train speeds near workers.

The FTA directed WMATA to have a plan in place within 10 days to fix the safety features.

The Federal Transit Administration has highlighted more than 220 defects during a Metro inspection, according to a letter sent to Paul Wiedefeld, general manager of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

The letter, sent from Thomas Littleton, associate administrator for the FTA, identified critical concerns of the FTA regarding fire and safety equipment and worker protection that caused the agency to direct WMATA to take immediate action.

The FTA inspection found a high percentage of partially- or non-functioning lights on tunnel walls, discharged and expired fire extinguishers in the tunnels as well as material stored in emergency walkways and missing third rail safety coverboards.

Specifically, as a communicated to you Friday, April 15, the FTA is directing WMATA immediately to: (1) inspect and correct the degraded condition of fire/life safety equipment and features in the Metrorail tunnels, and (2) conduct a safety briefing for all employees who work along the right-of-way, operate trains, or authorize train movements to make sure they understand the rules in place to protect workers on the tracks, the letter stated.

Regarding worker safety, the inspection discovered speed restrictions by trains were not being followed as they approached work crews on the tracks, hand signals were not used correctly, and briefings did not alert crews when situations or protections changed.

The FTA directed WMATA to have a plan in place within 10 days to fix the safety features and conduct safety briefings for employees no later than Friday, April 22.

Metro spokeswoman Sherri Ly sent a response to News4s Adam Tuss.

Metro was briefed by FTA and all safety critical items are receiving priority attention. The employee safety briefings will be conducted this week and the items that require track outages are being incorporated into the General Managers track plan that is in development. The plan will lay out the work being performed, set clear timetables for completion and provide customers with the advance information they need to prepare for impacts to service.

First responders in D.C. were shocked when the list of safety concerns was released. Ed Smith, president of the D.C. Firefighters Association  IAFF Local 36, said on a good day, there was an extra level of anxiety when firefighters head into the Metro system, but it is ramped up more by the litany of safety issues.

All of these little safety issues end up building into one tragic moment is what happens, Smith said. And it is troubling.

Wiedefeld hired Patrick Lavin as Metros new chief safety officer. Lavin comes to Metro from New York City Transit (NYCT), where he is second in command of the agencys Office of System Safety.

Basically, he had spent two decades working in the tunnels so theres nothing, probably, he hasnt seen, Wiedefeld said. He brings that to the table, which I think is very valuable.

Wiedefeld believes Lavin will have an impact when he starts on May 9.
A police officer in Greenbelt, Maryland, fatally shot a man who police said fired at officers from a balcony Monday night.

Rico Don Rae Johnson, 28, was shot by an officer after he fired at officers, the Greenbelt Police Department said in a statement.

The officers were called to the 6200 block of Springhill Court just after 10:30 p.m. for a report of a person shooting in the area. When they arrived, they found Johnson firing from a third-floor balcony of an apartment building.

Police said Johnson fired at the officers, and an officer returned fire, striking him. Johnson was taken to a hospital, where he died.

No other injuries were reported.

The investigation into the shooting is ongoing.
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert signed a resolution Tuesday that calls for increased "education, prevention, research, and policy change at the community and societal level" to combat pornography  but sets aside no money for the fight.

The resolution is the brainchild of another Republican politician in Utah, State Sen. Todd Weiler. He had told NBC News that he was not trying to ban pornography, but would like to see default settings on the Internet changed to make access to pornography more difficult.

"If this moral plague could catch our imagination the way a medical epidemic does, we would be calling out every available member of the health care industry," Elder Jeffrey Holland of the the Mormon church-backed Utah Coalition Against Pornography wrote on the group's website last month.
You already do not have to go inside many CVS stores to pickup your prescriptions, and now, you may not have to go inside for anything.

The Woonsocket, Rhode Island-based pharmacy chain has announced its launching a curbside pickup program called CVS Express.

Shoppers will be able to buy products with an app and then pick them up about an hour later at a nearby store. An employee will deliver the items to your car.

The service will not cost any extra money.

CVS stores in California, North Carolina and Georgia will offer the service immediately, followed by most of the retailer's 7,900 stand-alone U.S. locations by the end of the year, according to USA Today.

CVS was founded on Merrimack St. in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1963.
Providence, Rhode Island, Mayor Jorge Elorza's Office has announced that 15 people were arrested this month in a sting operation targeting drug dealers working in the city's Kennedy Plaza.

Officials say among those taken in as a result of the bust include 52-year-old Steven Mondon, who died after collapsing in police custody on April 4. Police say Mondon was the 15th suspect arrested in the sting.

The investigation found that many of those arrested were involved in the sale of Klonopin, Xanax, amphetamines and cocaine in and around the area of the plaza.

Police say officers conducted a number of "controlled purchases" from dealers operating in the downtown park with the help of confidential informants.

Public Safety Commissioner Steven Pare says police are looking for other culprits and more arrests are expected.
After officials warned that the risk of fire was high this weekend, firefighters on Sunday battled five brush fires that burned through more than 100 acres of forest across New Hampshire.

Capt. John Dodge, of the State Forest Protection Bureau, said the fire danger was actually higher for Saturday. The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning due to high winds, low humidity and fuel conditions.

Despite winds being calmer on Sunday, wildfires tore through 46 acres in Stoddard and 44 acres in Brookfield. Fire crews also responded to brush fires in Hebron, Goshen and Salem.

Fire officials say each of the fires has been contained and no injuries were reported. Firefighters will remain on-location to monitor each blaze.
Police say a 69-year-old Waterville, Maine, man was injured after his car fell on top of him while he was working to fix the vehicle along the side of a road in Augusta.

The Kennebec Journal reports the incident occurred around 9:15 a.m. Monday on North Belfast Avenue.

Sgt. Christian Behr says Caroll Cummings was driving his 2008 Nissan when he stopped to fix something underneath the car. Cummings jacked the car up and the vehicle dropped on top of him when the jack flipped over as he was working.

Behr says the car was no longer on Cummings when authorities arrived, but he remained on the ground. He was taken to MaineGeneral Medical Center in Augusta. Details on Cummings' condition were not immediately available.
Jonathan Calvin, the 31-year-old suspect in Friday's crime spree in Nashua, New Hampshire, is still being held in Massachusetts as a fugitive from justice.

While he awaits his arraignment, his victims are dealing with insurance companies and doctors appointments.

For the first time since the crash, victim Adam Fontaine takes us through the horrific ordeal step by step.

"Oh my God, I can't beleive this happened, I can't believe I was involved in this," Fontaine said Monday afternoon.

He was running a few errands before the weekend Friday afternoon, when he says things took a terrifying turn.

"I just heard this loud bang and felt a jolt," Fontaine recalled. "There were pieces of cars flying all over the place and this horrific noise, it was just awful."

He showed us the photos he snapped of the scene and his badly damaged white BMW stuck on the highway. Fontaine was one of several innocent people who fell victim to Calvin's violent crime spree on Friday.

"I think I was the first or second car that got smashed into," Fontaine said.

Nashua Police say Calvin stabbed a woman and stole her car before taking them on a high speed chase and smashing through traffic on the Everett Turnpike.

Fontaine shows us what was left of the stolen vehicle after Calvin was ejected.

"You couldn't even tell it was a car anymore at that point," Fontaine said.

He says after the chaos, there was a quiet confusion.

"It was just dead silence and very strange and people were crying," Fontaine remembered.

Victims were shaken up as they looked at the dramatic aftermath of mangled cars and a debris covered highway.

"It was just all very surreal, very surreal," Fontaine said.

Fontaine says despite a sore back and some emotional distress, he feels lucky Calvin's crime spree didn't claim his life or someone else's.

"It was real and it was horrific," Fontaine said. "The best thing is that everyone was okay."

Fontaine says he has been to the doctor for a sore back and neck and now has anxiety every time he gets in the car.

Calvin will be arraigned later this week.
Officials in Vermont have arrested a Jericho man accused of sexually assaulting a child.

Claude Harrington, 68, was arrested following an investigation by the Chittenden Unit for Special Investigations in conjunction with the Vermont Department of Children and Families.

Harrington was charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault on a child and two counts of lewd and lascivious conduct with a child.

He was held on $100,000 bail and is expected to be arraigned Friday.

It was not immediately known if he has an attorney.
A Providence, Rhode Island, convenience store owner has pleaded guilty to $1.1 million in food stamp fraud.

Sami Almuhtaseb, of Smithfield, pleaded guilty on Friday in U.S. District Court in Providence to conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering.

Prosecutors say the Oasis Market redeemed more than $2.7 million in benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program between November 2009 and December 2015. More than 72 percent of the transactions were for more than $50, even though federal officials say legitimate food stamp transactions at a convenience store rarely exceed more than $50.

Federal authorities say at least $1.1 million were the result of fraudulent transactions.

His sentencing is scheduled for July.
A Massachusetts man is being credited with saving a stranded dolphin on a Dartmouth beach.

Nick LeBlanc and his girlfriend, Stephanie Paquette, were walking on Round Hill Beach over the weekend when they spotted the Atlantic white-sided dolphin on the shore.

"I was actually really nervous. It was kind of that adrenaline thing. I'm like, we need to get this dolphin back out there," Paquette tells necn affiliate WJAR. "This thing was huge. Thank God that Nick was there because it was really a Herculean task to get that thing out there."

After multiple attempts, the dolphin eventually swam away.

"I don't think I did anything particularly special. I think all I did was help an animal that was in distress, and that's something I wish happened more frequently," LeBlanc, of New Bedford, tells WJAR.

Bystander Jay Williams filmed the encounter with his cell phone.
A mother in Merrimack, New Hampshire, started a "Go Fund Me" page with pictures of her son's supposed injuries, informing donors the money would be used to hire an attorney and attempt to get full custody of the boy.

Taylor Tibbetts, age 20, of Merrimack, New Hampshire, informed the Merrimack Police Department on November 11, 2015, her 3-year-old son had been abused by his father.

According to the department, after filing the report, Tibbetts started a "Go Fund Me" page to raise money for the attorney.

During the course of the investigation Derry, New Hampshire police found the photos of her son were photo shopped.

Merrimack police arrested Tibbett for one count of False Report to a Law Enforcement Officer.

She was released on $2,000 Personal Recognizance bail and will be arraigned in the 9th Circuit District Court of Merrimack on May 24 at 8 a.m.
A New Hampshire priest has been granted parole on two charges dealing with the theft of $300,000 from a hospital, a dead priest's estate and the state's Roman Catholic bishop.

Monsignor Edward Arsenault pleaded guilty to three theft charges in 2014. He was sentenced to serve concurrent four-to-10 year sentences on two of them; two years were suspended from the minimum of each. He was paroled on those charges Tuesday.

He now starts his third sentence. He would be eligible for parole in two years.

Arsenault held several senior positions in the New Hampshire diocese from 1999 to 2009, when he became president and CEO of Saint Luke Institute in Maryland, resigning in 2013.

Prosecutors said Arsenault used the money for meals, travel, cellphones, computer equipment, and other expenses.
Police say they have captured an armed and dangerous suspect following a domestic disturbance on Monday night in Epping, New Hampshire.

Christopher Lemear, 25, had last been seen shortly before midnight wearing a black shirt with plaid pajama pants. Police were looking for him in connection with a domestic disturbance late Monday night on Old Nottingham Road where a gunshot was heard by a witness.

Lemear has a criminal history with convictions that include burglary and rape.

The area of Old Nottingham Road near Grassy Lane was closed for several hours on Tuesday as police searched the area. Lemear was captured around 12:30 p.m.

Residents who live nearby said they felt uneasy about the search.

Epping resident Robert Baillargeon said his wife heard some unusual noises around the time police said a witness called 911 reporting a domestic dispute and shots fired.

"She thought she heard a copule of gunshots and it was about midnight," he said.

Northwood resident Marge Daggett said the situation was scary.

"It's more safety-wise at least for the children, that's all I care about is the kids," she said.
Police in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, have arrested a Seekonk woman accused of being under the influence of drugs while driving with her 10-year-old child in the car.

Police say a caller reported Monday morning that a car was being driven in an erratic manner on Barney Avenue.

The caller provided a license plate registration, but police could not locate the vehicle.

A short time later the vehicle was spotted on Summer Street.

Tabitha Carter, 39, was pulled over and police performed a field sobriety test. Carter's son was also in the car at the time.

Carter was arrested and was eventually released on $1,040 bail.

She is due back in court Tuesday to be arraigned on charges of OUI Drugs with Child Endangerment and Negligent Operation of a motor vehicle.
A top New York City official announced an audit of New York City's Board of Elections Tuesday, just as hundreds of voters reported problems at polling locations and at least one instance of possible voter fraud.

New York City comptroller Scott Stringer said Tuesday his office would look into management and policies at the city's elections board after it was revealed this week that more than 125,000 Democratic voters were purged from the rolls in Brooklyn ahead of Tuesday's primaries and special elections.

"The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the BOE is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient," Stringer said in a statement.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said he supported the audit, and pointed to issues Tuesday  especially in Brooklyn  as evidence for the need of reform. He called on the Board of Elections to restore the voters who were removed from the rolls.

"It has been reported to us from voters and voting rights monitors that the voting lists in Brooklyn contain numerous errors, including the purging of entire buildings and blocks of voters from the voting lists," de Blasio said.

Meanwhile, the state Attorney General's office said its voter hotline received the most calls in its history Tuesday.

The hotline received 562 calls and about 140 emails from voters as of 5 p.m. The most common complaints were from voters who were told they weren't registered to vote or that they couldn't participate in a party's presidential primaries. Other complaints ranged from lack of privacy, unclear instructions and accessibility issues.

Among the most serious issues was a report of alleged voter fraud. NBC 4 New York received a tip from a voter who said that poll workers were attempting to "trick" Democrats into picking for Hillary Clinton over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

City Board of Elections Director Mike Ryan told NBC 4 New York that it is investigating the claim.

"All issues related to the voting process gives us concern," he said.

Other voters reported everything from confusion to long lines spurred by everything from broken polling machines to locked-up voter rolls.

At Bishop Ford High School in Brooklyn's Windsor Terrace neighborhood, voters were asked to vote by affidavit or come back later in the day because pollsters were unable to find a book with voters' names and party affiliations.

The book was eventually found, but several voters had to cast ballots via affidavit.

One woman said she and her husband were frustrated to find that they couldn't cast ballots normally.

This this was our first time voting in New York so it's a little frustrating," the woman said. "I just filled out an affidavit but it won't be counted for some time I guess."

Voters at other precincts reported similar problems. Pete Harris took to Twitter after his name didn't show up in the rolls at his Upper West Side, even though he registered with his party in 2014.

"My name wasn't on the list and I had to vote affidavit. Was told 'this is happening to tons of people today," he tweeted.

In Brownsville, Brooklyn, another voter tweeted that she got to her precinct location 10 minutes before polls open but couldn't cast a ballot for more than two hours because workers didn't have keys to the machines or ballots.

She eventually voted, but claimed that only Republicans were able to cast ballots for part of the morning.
HPE/Aruba is said to be planning to acquire the intellectual property of failing startup Rasa Networks within the next 2 to 4 weeks, according to sources close to the matter.

The transaction could see between $5 million and $10 million change hands, the sources added, noting that its not a full buyout of the company, but merely a deal for Rasas IP and, potentially, one or two of the companys data scientists.

+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Dont buy into hybrid cloud headache hype, GEs cloud guru says + Meet a handheld server with a 13-terabyte SSD

HPE/Aruba described the story as rumors and speculation, and declined to comment. Neither Rasa Networks nor the companys venture backers, Khosla Ventures, responded to inquiries before this storys time of publication.

Rasa is the brainchild of Partho Mishra, a Cisco veteran who founded the company in 2013. Mishra had been the head of Ciscos small cell efforts. Rasas intellectual property is primarily focused on hardware and noise cancellation, the product of a pivot from making access points to analytics when it became clear the former business wasnt going to work out, sources said.

Rasa has been trying to get itself sold off for some time, but Ruckus and Cisco are said to have given the deal a pass. The idea behind HPE/Arubas purported interest in the companys IP would be to help Aruba move towards a fully integrated cloud management platform for the network. The acquisition wouldnt get them there overnight, but the analytics piece would be bolstered by Rasas technology, moving a little bit closer to a cloud-based network management framework that could handle both wired and wireless data at the same time.

Such a system would be a boon to Arubas customers, and an important competitive differentiator in the industry, according to one source.

Thats kind of the big problem in the industry that people are trying to solve, the source said. What customers end up having to do is use the software systems that come with the infrastructure product that they buy, and those just arent designed for that kind of stuff.
Reporter

Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk).
Reporter/Columnist

Julie Wurth is a reporter covering the University of Illinois at The News-Gazette. Her email is jwurth@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@jawurth).
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BECOMES FIRST COMPANY IN EUROPE TO PASS CHALLENGING MEDACCRED AUDIT

Bodycote, the worlds largest heat treating services provider, is pleased to announce that its Derby, UK location is the first facility in Europe to earn the MedAccred accreditation underlining the high standards of quality achieved. The official approval was awarded on 7th of April 2016.

MedAccred, administered by Performance Review Institute (PRI), is an industry managed approach to ensuring critical manufacturing process quality throughout the medical device supply chain. It establishes stringent consensus audit criteria based on industry and specific OEM requirements that ensure compliance and quality. Adherence to these requirements leads to greater process discipline, operational efficiency and ongoing improvement which results in higher quality and performance.

Strategically located in the East Midlands, Bodycote Derby, which offers heat treatment and hot isostatic pressing (HIP) services, is fast becoming a centre of excellence serving the medical device and implants markets for the UK, Ireland and Europe. Bodycote continues to invest in new capacity and technology to support opportunities within the growing medical industry for classic heat treatment and HIP along with its Specialty Stainless Steel Processes (S3P) and Ion Implantation services in Europe. For Bodycote, the benefits of MedAccred to the supplier are evident. The process provides for consistent and standardised critical process audits which result in fewer redundant onsite audits by multiple OEMs and first tier customers. The MedAccred certification should reinforce customer confidence in Bodycote as a premier quality provider of heat treating.

Joe Pinto, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Performance Review Institute, the organisation which administers the MedAccred program on behalf of the medical device industry, sent his congratulations to the team at the Bodycote Derby facility:
Delaying radiation therapy too long after surgery significantly increases the risk of recurrent tumors in women treated for very early, or what is referred to as "stage 0," breast cancer, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Stage 0 breast cancer - or ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) - is diagnosed based on the presence of abnormal cells in the milk ducts of the breast. Every year, more than 60,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with DCIS, and experts often debate how best to treat it because the abnormal cells don't always develop into full-blown, or invasive, breast cancer. Standard therapies include lumpectomy, lumpectomy plus radiation, or total mastectomy.

The researchers found that women were much more likely to experience a recurrence of DCIS or higher-stage cancer in the same breast if they received radiation therapy eight or more weeks after a lumpectomy or did not receive radiation therapy after surgery. The data will be presented April 18 at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2016 in New Orleans.

"This study indicates not only that radiation therapy is an important component in the treatment of DCIS but also that it must be received in a timely manner," said Ying Liu, MD, PhD, the study's lead author. She is an instructor in surgery at the School of Medicine and a research member at Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine.

Delays in radiation therapy were more common among women who were black; unmarried; on Medicaid; diagnosed during the later years of the study; diagnosed with larger tumors; or whose cancer wasn't entirely removed during surgery. "These groups, especially, may benefit from undergoing radiation therapy sooner," Liu said.

The researchers studied data from 5,916 women in the Missouri Cancer Registry diagnosed with DCIS from 1996 to 2011 and treated with lumpectomy.

Of those women, 1,053 (17.8 percent) received radiation therapy more than eight weeks after surgery, and 1,702 (28.8 percent) did not receive any radiation therapy as part of their initial treatment. The other 53.4 percent of the patients all received radiation without delay, within the eight-week time frame.

During the average six years of follow-up, 3.1 percent of women developed a recurrence of DCIS or an invasive tumor in the same breast. For women who received radiation within eight weeks, the rate of recurrence was 2.5 percent. After adjusting for age, race, pathological factors, surgical margin status and hormone therapy, the risk of breast cancer recurrence was 26 percent higher for women who had delayed radiation therapy and 35 percent higher for women who did not initially receive radiation.

Liu is calling for more extensive research involving a larger group of patients.

"What we've found suggests the need for more studies," she said. "Our hope is to provide clear-cut guidelines that will help more women reduce their risk of recurrence."
The demand for radiotherapy across all European countries will increase by an average of 16% between 2012 and 2025, with the highest expected increase being for prostate cancer cases (24%), according to a new study published in Radiotherapy and Oncology.

These projections come from a new study by HERO, the Health Economics in Radiation Oncology project of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology. The results will also be presented at the ESTRO 35 conference, to be held in Turin, Italy, from Friday 29 April - Tuesday 3 May 2016.

"Because radiotherapy involves significant outlay in equipment costs as well as in staff, long-term planning is necessary in order to achieve the required results. We, therefore, decided to try to forecast the radiotherapy needs of new cancer patients in the short to medium term in order to gain sufficient time for the purchase of appropriate machinery and the personnel training that will be required to meet this need," said Professor Yolande Lievens, from the Radiation Oncology Department, Ghent University Hospital, Ghent, Belgium, who is a co-author of the paper and president elect of ESTRO.

The research group, made up of senior radiation oncologists and epidemiologists from Belgium, Denmark, Spain, France and Australia, analysed European cancer incidence for the year 2013 by country and by tumour site, using data from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) GLOBOCAN project on worldwide cancer incidence and mortality.

Using statistical modelling, the researchers applied the 2012 country, sex and site incidence rates to the population forecast for 2025 in order to obtain projections of new cancer cases for that year. "Although these projections take demographic changes into account, we are unable to estimate the potential impact of changes in risk factors," co-author Professor Josep M. Borras, of the University of Barcelona, Spain, will tell the ESTRO35 conference on Sunday 1 May.

The detailed estimates for many different tumour sites produced some major increases. In breast, rectum, head and neck, lung and prostate tumours, which account for the highest percentage of patients in a radiotherapy department, there were relative increases of more than 25% in rectal patients for whom radiotherapy would be indicated in Spain, The Netherlands, and the Czech Republic, while Belgium, the UK, and Denmark had estimated increases of more than 20%.

Prostate cancer showed the highest expected increase over the period, with a 24.4% rise, followed by bladder cancer (21%) and multiple myeloma (20.4%), whereas projected increases in female breast cancer, lymphomas, and head and neck cancer were below average.

About four million new cancer patients are expected in Europe in 2025. This estimate is based on demographic changes, and represents a 15.9% increase on the 3.4 million diagnosed in 2012, assuming that overall cancer rates remain unchanged. Of these four million, the number of patients who would benefit from radiotherapy treatment at least once during the course of their disease would rise from approximately 1.7 million patients in 2012 to two million in 2025, which represents an increase of 16.1%.

This increase in new cancer cases is largely because the European population is ageing due to increased longevity and lower fertility levels. Indeed, the very old (80 years and over) now make up the fastest-growing population age group in Europe. Although migration also has an impact on demographic change, its impact is usually seen in younger age groups with a relatively lower cancer risk, the researchers say.

"Being able to estimate the number of new cancer patients requiring radiotherapy is essential if we are to be able to plan for radiotherapy services," said co-author Professor Cai Grau, from Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark. "We have shown clearly that the need for radiotherapy across Europe will increase substantially by the year 2025."

Professor Lievens said: "We hope that our study will focus the minds of European policymakers on the need to invest in radiotherapy, particularly as we know that there are already important differences in equipment and staff between European countries. This, taken together with the expected increase in the number of new cases of cancer, means that planning for the best possible treatment of patients needs to start now.

"ESTRO now intends to build a global partnership of organisations to help close the gap between the actual and the projected uptake of radiotherapy worldwide. A meeting to take this project forward will be held on Monday May 2 during the conference in Turin. We hope that we will able to play a major role in planning for and achieving the best possible situation for radiation oncology, and hence for patients, in the context of multidisciplinary cancer care in the future."
Researchers from the University of Liverpool have conducted a study examining the effect ecstasy has on different parts of the brain.

Dr Carl Roberts and Dr Andrew Jones, from the University's Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, and Dr Cathy Montgomery from Liverpool John Moores University conducted an analysis of seven independent studies that used molecular imaging to examine the neuropsychological effect of ecstasy on people that use the drug regularly.

A number of studies have compared ecstasy users to control groups on various measures of neuropsychological function in order to determine whether ecstasy use results in lasting cognitive deficits. It is common, however, for ecstasy users to use other drugs alongside the substance, and therefore the Liverpool team aimed to discover whether this had any bearing on the impact of the drug.

The nerve pathway that is predominantly affected by ecstasy is called the serotonin pathway. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that is synthesized, stored, and released by specific neurons in this pathway. It is involved in the regulation of several processes within the brain, including mood, emotions, aggression, sleep, appetite, anxiety, memory, and perceptions.

They found that ecstasy users showed significant reductions in the way serotonin is transported in the brain. This can have a particular impact on regulating appropriate emotional reactions to situations.

Dr Roberts, said: "The research team conducted the analysis on seven papers that fitted our inclusion criteria which provided us with data from 157 ecstasy users and 148 controls. 11 out of the 14 brain regions included in analysis showed serotonin transporter (SERT) reductions in ecstasy users compared to those who took other drugs.

"We conclude that, in line with animal data, the nerve fibres, or axons, furthest away from where serotonin neurons are produced (in the raphe nuclei) are most susceptible to the effects of MDMA. That is to say that these areas show the greatest changes following MDMA use.

"The clinical significance of these findings is speculative, however it is conceivable that the observed effects on serotonin neurons contribute to mood changes associated with ecstasy/MDMA use, as well as other psychobiological changes. Furthermore the observed effects on the serotonin system inferred from the current analysis, may underpin the cognitive deficits observed in ecstasy users.

"The study provides us with a platform for further research into the effect long term chronic ecstasy use can have on brain function."
A news-style programme exploring how the doctors of the future are developing.

In a unique communications partnership, the Royal Society of Medicine and ITN Productions have launched a news and current affairs-style programme.

Doctors of the Future looks at the transformations in medical education as well as innovations in medical research and technologies that will shape the healthcare of tomorrow. The programme premiered at the 12th Medical Innovations Summit on Saturday 16th April 2016 at The Royal Society of Medicine. Watch the reaction to the programme here.

Introduced by national newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky, the programme features key industry interviews and news-style reports, along with sponsored editorial profiles of some of the leading organisations in the sector.

Widening access to medical careers is a key concern of the Royal Society of Medicine, which is currently working with schools on a pilot project designed to offer support and career guidance to students throughout their time at secondary school. A report from the Medical Schools Council found that 80 percent of all medical students in the UK stem from just 20 percent of schools. In an interview with Natasha Kaplinsky, Mr Babulal Sethia, President of the Royal Society of Medicine, and Dr Fiona Moss, Dean of the Royal Society of Medicine emphasise the importance of fostering a culture of aspiration to attract young people from different backgrounds into the healthcare professions. There is also a need for continuous professional development throughout doctors careers. The programme features a special report on the Societys Medical Careers Day with interviews from students considering their options for higher education.

Technological advances are also at the centre of Doctors of the Future. The Societys Developments in Digital Health 2016 event in February provided the opportunity to discuss the latest innovations in digital health, as well as the potential benefits and challenges to the health service of these developments.

A total of eleven sponsored news-style reports feature in Doctors of the Future, championing medical education, research and innovation:

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)  how their investments have contributed to more than 650 million in savings for healthcare services in the UK.

 how their investments have contributed to more than 650 million in savings for healthcare services in the UK. Hull Institute of Learning & Simulation  how healthcare professionals of any age and experience can benefit from simulation training and improve patient care.

 how healthcare professionals of any age and experience can benefit from simulation training and improve patient care. Hull York Medical School  training doctors with excellent clinical and communication skills to deliver high quality patient-centred care in all contemporary healthcare settings.

 training doctors with excellent clinical and communication skills to deliver high quality patient-centred care in all contemporary healthcare settings. Johnson & Johnson Innovation  how the team at the London Innovation Centre collaborates with entrepreneurs and medical professionals from across Europe, providing a robust exchange of ideas and resources, to positively impact human health through innovation.

 how the team at the London Innovation Centre collaborates with entrepreneurs and medical professionals from across Europe, providing a robust exchange of ideas and resources, to positively impact human health through innovation. Lancashire Teaching Hospitals  how investing in innovative learning tools prepares doctors for their future careers.

 how investing in innovative learning tools prepares doctors for their future careers. Leeds Institute of Medical Education  innovative solutions and curriculum to prepare the undergraduate medical students for the role of provider and leader in healthcare.

 innovative solutions and curriculum to prepare the undergraduate medical students for the role of provider and leader in healthcare. NHS Education for Scotland  the importance of investing in direct educational expenditure in hospital and community services that provide facilities to attract Britains best doctors.

 the importance of investing in direct educational expenditure in hospital and community services that provide facilities to attract Britains best doctors. Northern Ireland Medical and Dental Training Agency  best practices to improve doctors quality of care and quality of life.

 best practices to improve doctors quality of care and quality of life. Nottingham University Business School  introduction to the MBA at The Centre for Health, Innovation, Leadership & Learning  known as CHILL, which brings doctors and consultants together with business leaders and successful innovators from healthcare and beyond.

 introduction to the MBA at The Centre for Health, Innovation, Leadership & Learning  known as CHILL, which brings doctors and consultants together with business leaders and successful innovators from healthcare and beyond. The Wales Deanery  how the Welsh Government, the NHS, its partners and the public are working with health boards to introduce Education Contracts which will help enhance the quality of training for junior doctors to improve the quality of patient care.

 how the Welsh Government, the NHS, its partners and the public are working with health boards to introduce Education Contracts which will help enhance the quality of training for junior doctors to improve the quality of patient care. Cook Medical  how doctors are being trained to use Hemospray, a non-contact treatment, which can help take the stress out of haemostasis procedures.

Mr Babulal Sethia, President, Royal Society of Medicine, said:

Our collaboration with ITN Productions has provided us with an immensely valuable opportunity to showcase just some aspects of the RSMs work and will help us raise awareness of our charitable objectives, namely to improve patient care through postgraduate healthcare education. The programme will be of great support as we continue to be involved in the move to widen access to careers in healthcare and will be of great interest to our stakeholder groups  from patients and RSM members through to students and prospective members of the Society.

Simon Shelley, Head of Industry News, ITN Productions said:
Despite a shortage of corneas for transplant purposes, new research reveals that eyes are the one body part we are least likely to donate.

While more than a quarter of British adults (26 per cent) interviewed by www.optegra.com have registered for organ donation, almost two thirds (64 per cent) state they would not donate their eyes for transplant. They are far more likely to agree to donate their heart, kidney and lungs.

Which body parts would you donate for transplant or medical research?

51% would donate their kidney

49% would donate their liver

48% would donate their heart

47% would donate their lungs

36% would donate their eyes (cornea)

Base: Optegra.com research with 2,016 UK adults, aged 16 plus

Specialist eye hospital group, Optegra Eye Health Care, has joined forces with the UKs main eye research charity, Fight for Sight, to discover why people would not donate their corneal tissue - despite 86 per cent of people in the UK valuing their sight above any other sense.

The new study highlights that three in 10 adults say their eyes are unique to them; 29 per cent say eyes are the most personal part of their body and more than a quarter (27 per cent) say it would upset their family. Finally, one in six say it is for a spiritual reason.

Yet around 10 million people worldwide are blind due to damaged corneas  usually from scarring caused by injury or infection[iii], and currently the NHS performs around 4,000 corneal transplants a year, all of which rely on human organ donation.

Fight for Sight played a key role in helping to set up the UK Corneal Transplant Service in 1983. Since then, according to NHS Blood and Transplant:

Corneal transplants are successful sight-saving operations, with 93 per cent of transplants functioning after one year.

By five years, 74 per cent of transplants are still functioning and many will continue for many more years after that.

Rory Passmore, Managing Director for Optegra Eye Health Care, said:

This research has explored patterns of behaviour around organ donation, and offered some fascinating insights into how adults regard their eyes. There is such importance, and sensitivity connected to eyes, and sadly this is at the cost of not being able to help others to see. With more and more people suffering eye conditions, particularly with an ageing population, it is more important than ever that we help if we can. We would really encourage people to discuss this with their families and complete a donor registration if they feel they can.

Optegras corporate charity, Fight for Sight, funds research into early detection and prevention of many sight-threatening conditions. It is developing new treatments and ultimately trying to find a cure for many different eye conditions, such as keratoconus and Fuchs dystrophy, which can often lead to patients needing a corneal transplant.

Fight for Sight Director of Research, Dr Dolores Conroy, says:

There is a need for 70 corneas per week with the main indications being keratoconus in younger people and endothelial failure - Fuchs dystrophy - in older people. Fight for Sight is funding research into these conditions and we have a better understanding of the genetic cause of corneal dystrophies. With the lack of corneas available for transplants, its vital to have new treatments. We are developing stem cells therapies to repair the damage to the cornea, gene-replacement therapies and drugs that may be delivered as eye drops to repair faulty genes.

Kenilworth resident Elizabeth Keell, age 36, appreciates the need for people to join the organ donor register and donate their corneas, as she has been diagnosed with keratoconus and may one day need a transplant.

She says:

I was first diagnosed in 1995 and it came as a great shock as I did not know much about the condition. The vision in my left eye is particularly poor and I have been offered a corneal transplant but am worried about the procedure itself as well as the time off work, and not being able to drive as I have young children still at infant school. But I understand that if the deterioration continues I will have to take up the corneal transplant. I am grateful that corneal transplant is an option, and so truly value the donations which are given. But I am also eager to support Fight for Sights research to find less invasive treatment options  I worry that one of my daughters may inherit keratoconus and so it is a deeply personal issue for me.

Watch Elizabeth's story here:
VW has high hopes for its latest concept car, which will provide the foundation for next year's Touareg SUV, a vehicle the company is positioning as a serious challenger to the Volvo XC90 or Range Rover in terms of luxury, performance and style.



Volkswagen has been using each of this year's major auto shows to give the public a conceptual taste of its plans for an extended SUV range. It's already unveiled a compact and a sub-compact model, and at the Beijing show, which opens its doors to the press on April 25, it will complete the set with a full-size luxury off-roader.



Though officially a concept, the show car will be a clear indicator of what to expect from the next-generation Touareg due in 2017, the company's overall flagship and one that VW wants to look right at home when parked between a BMW X6 and a Range Rover.



VW is, understandably, being coy about the specifics, but describes the car as "one of the most advanced luxury SUVs in the world," and one that will push the envelope in terms of sportiness as well as elegance.



The cabin will boast a completely new infotainment and dashboard set-up that will start to make traditional switches and knobs redundant, replacing them with taps, swipes, gestures and voice commands, while a premium will also be placed on space. VW says that the car will demonstrate a lounge style' layout where each individual occupant's needs are served.



All of which is why the car is making its debut in Beijing, where SUVs, comfort and features that are packaged as standard are the biggest drivers when it comes to consumers choosing a new car.



Its brand may have taken a knock in the US and in Europe, as its latest sales figures, published Friday, show. However, between January and March, VW sold a remarkable 722,800 cars in China which, according to Jurgen Stackmann, Brand Board Member for Sales, is the company's "best quarterly performance ever in China."



The runaway demand for new cars is why the Chinese government is pushing through tougher legislation relating to pollution and emissions, so it comes as little surprise to learn that the VW is a plug-in hybrid, capable of 50km solely on electric power and of a combined cycle efficiency of 78mpg when the electric and gas engines are working in sync. The car also has a reported top speed of 224km/h (139mph), a 0-100km/h time of just 6.0 seconds and a total output of 376hp.
Conceding to the long standing demand of the locals, the Army has been ordered to remove a few its bunkers from Handwara town in Jammu and Kashmir. The decision comes even as tension prevails in the area after alleged molestation of a girl. Curfew has been in place in Handwara and several other parts of Kashmir for nearly a week following violent clashes between the local people and security forces in which five people have been killed.



Now three Army bunkers have been removed from the main Handwara Chowk. The park where a big Army post had been erected more than 20 years ago when militancy was at its peak has been handed over to Tourism Department to build a public park with a fountain. The municipal authorities also erected a board on the premises of the bunker, marking the place for conversion into a public park.



The locals had been demanding for the removal of Army bunker for nearly 20 years. But the Army had maintained that holding the post was strategically important for the troops. The clashes seeking removal of the bunker have led to several casualties over the years.







Meanwhile, curfew-like restrictions were relaxed in violence-hit Handwara town for four hours on Tuesday but remained in force in Kupwara and Trehgam towns of north Kashmir, police said.



"Restrictions have been relaxed for four hours in Handwara town from 8 to 12 noon. The relaxation period can be extended if the situation remains peaceful," a police official said. He said so far the situation in violence-hit town was peaceful.



However, there was no relaxation in the curbs on the movement of the people in Kupwara and Trehgam towns in view of apprehension of violence.



The restrictions were eased on Monday for three hours but had to be clamped again following violent protests.



Three persons including a woman were killed in firing by security forces on protestors last week. Two more persons were killed in a separate action by security forces against protestors on Wednesday in Drugmulla and on Friday at Natnusa.


As violent protests by garment workers continued in Bengaluru over the Centre's February notification restricting withdrawal of Employee Provident Fund, the Central government on Tuesday said that the notification will be kept in abeyance for three months till July 31, 2016. A call on the notification will be taken after July.



"The notification (tightening PF withdrawal norms) will be kept in abeyance for three months till July 31, 2016. We will discuss this issue with the stakeholders," Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya told reporters.



The announcement came in the midst of escalating protests by labour unions, especially the violent agitation in Bengaluru against the bar on withdrawing employer's contribution from the PF account till the age of 58 years.







Meanwhile, the police crackdown on protesters continued in many parts of Bengaluru as over 15,000 workers took to streets.



While the traffic in the city was held up, a three km long jam was reported on the national highway. The protestors are demanding a complete cancellation of the notification.



In a placatory move, the Labour Ministry also said it was contemplating permitting withdrawal of all accumulations by Employees' Provident Fund Organisation's (EPFO) subscribers on grounds like purchase of house, serious illness, marriage and professional education of children. The matter has been referred to Law Ministry for clearance.



People have also launched online campaign against the decision, which was to be implemented from February 10 but was later put on hold till April 30.



Protesters pelted stones at Hebbagodi Police Station in Bengaluru and torched seized vehicles parked there, as the spontaneous agitation with no trade union leading it spun out of control.



Police said they had to resort to lathicharge and fire teargas shells to disperse violent protesters.



At least two Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation buses and one of Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation have been set on fire, they said.



Incidents of stone-pelting on buses and other vehicles were reported from different parts of the city such as Bannerghatta and Jalahalli cross, as also near the Electronics City, the hub of IT firms.



(With PTI Inputs)
Bhopal: Rivalry between Union Human Resources Development (HRD) Minister Smriti Irani and Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi has come as a blessing for a Dalit student in Bhopal.



This was how it happened. 13-year-old Kaushal Shakya was being looked after by the Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) over the last three years on the instructions of Rahul Gandhi. Now, Irani has ordered that he should be admitted to the 6th standard in a Central School.



For this, her HRD ministry even issued a special order dated April 6, 2016 enabling Kaushal to get admission to the best Central School in Bhopal.



To know what is so special about Kaushal who lives in Gwal Mohalla slums in Bhopal's Rashanpura locality, cut back to April 25, 2013. That was when the young newspaper vendor met Rahul outside the Congress state office.



I met Rahul Gandhi while selling newspapers. I asked for one rupee, but he gave me a Rs 1000 note and asked me to keep that. I refused, and then he asked me about my schooling. I said I did not go to school as my father is a labourer, that was how Shakya described the meeting.



After the meeting, Congress leaders in Madhya Pradesh got a job for a member of the family with a monthly salary of Rs 4000, so that Kaushal's education could be taken care of. But due to some reasons, the boy dropped out from school.



It's still a mystery how Smriti Irani came to know of all this and got him admitted to the Central school. Congress accuse her of revenge politics, an allegation vehemently denied by the BJP.







K K Mishra, spokesperson of the state Congress said, This is because of her frustration of losing the Lok Sabha election to Rahul Gandhi in Amethi.



Countering this Dr Hitesh Bajpai, state spokesperson of the BJP said: Whether it is Kaushal or Kalavati, Rahul Gandhi has always mocked at Dalits and poor of this country. He should thank Smriti Irani for this welcome step, and he should also apologise."



Kaushal is grateful."I am thankful to Smriti Irani ji for my admission in a Central School, he said.



This politics seems to be beyond the understanding of Kaushal and his family.



The Congress did whatever they could do. I think the BJP is paying us attention to create an impact. One is trying to pull us this way, and another is pushing us that way. And we are stuck at the centre, his father Dulichand Shakya said.
The furore over MS Dhoni endorsing Amrapali Housing last week was just the beginning, as then came the videos of Gaursons MD and another builder threatening protesting residents. CNN-News18 dug deeper into the India's realty crisis, and more skeletons tumbled out.



It's not a fight for the houses that residents have paid for, but for their right. The Aam Aadmi is running from pillar to post to get his home.



It's the big middle class dream, perhaps the only one within their reach, to get a roof they can call their own. But in the Delhi suburbs of Noida, Faridabad and Gurgaon, the wait for a house is turning endless for more than one lakh fifty thousand buyers, of which many booked their flats in their early thirties are now into their forties.







A 33-year-old telecom professional, Yash Sinha, booked his flat with Ajnara Homes in 2010, and was promised possession three years later. But even in 2016, Sinha's flat looks nowhere near completion.



He has taken a loan of Rs 25 lakh, and pays Rs 22,000 as EMI in addition to a rent of Rs 15000 for his current accommodation. In addition to what's being lost in paying house rent, Sinha also lost out on income tax exemption on interest payment as the rebate is available only on property owned by the tax payer.



Another flat buyer, 46-year-old Indrish Gupta, is the only earning member of his family, which includes his mother, wife and two children. He booked a flat in Greater Noida in 2009 and has been waiting for possession since then.



"We booked the house because we were told that metro was coming there. Also because my workplace is near," said Gupta.



Talking about the response of the builder, he said, "There has been no response from builder. I even complained in the authority, but did not get any help there as well."



Gupta had paid Rs 4 lakh from his savings to book the flat with Today Homes. He then took a loan of Rs 11 lakh for down payment, and has been paying a monthly EMI of Rs 11,500.His son and daughter, who were in primary school at the time of booking, will be joining college in the next two years.



His wife said, "We were very happy when we booked the flat. Kids were small but are now in class 11 and 12. Still we haven't got out home. It seems our dream will remain a dream."



Similar is the plight of Raj Kishore Gaur, a senior citizen who spent his entire savings to book a flat in Gurgaon five years ago. The 67-year-old paid the entire amount of Rs 35 lakh from his savings, which included proceeds from a shop he owned.



A heart patient with two stents, Gaur is now forced to make trips to Chandigarh every month, where he and other buyers have moved court against the builder Adel Landmark Limited. Having shut his business, he is now struggling for a way to fund his son's post graduation.



With no help from any quarters, hope is what has kept thousands of home buyers going.
In what is seen as a knee-jerk reaction to the violence that took place in Jammu and Kashmir over the last few days, the state government has ordered all WhatsApp groups running "news" should be registered,



"The Divisional Commissioner, Kashmir, Dr Asgar Hassan Samoon, directed the operators of social media news agencies to obtain proper permission from the concerned Deputy Commissioners for posting news on social media news groups, along with sources," said a government press release on Monday.



It is not clear how the government would differentiate "news" groups from informal WhatsApp groups. If it manages to pull this off, Mehbooba Mufti's government would be be the first in the country to issue a registration certificate to run a WhatsApp group.



The statement warned the government will act against those who do not comply. The move comes after the Handwara incident in which five people were killed in clashes with security forces over the alleged molestation of a girl.



The decision to gag media platform is not new in the Valley. In 2010, Omar Abdullah's government banned content from local cable channels for "fomenting trouble" by running "unverified" news reports.



The news on close monitoring of social media activity took the netizens by surprise, with many ridiculing the move as "curfew on social media".
New Delhi: "The word suspended doesn't mean cancelled or given up," Pakistan Prime Minister's Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz said. Aziz claimed that though there has been a lull in the Indo-Pak bilateral talks, he is hopeful that a dialogue will begin soon.



The Pathankot attacks in January had led to the suspension of dialogue between India and Pakistan. Sources had claimed that the six terrorists who attacked Pathankot airbase in January, and held siege for over 60 hours, were acting at the behest of their handlers on the other side of the border.



While Pakistan's joint investigation team visited Pathankot to investigate the attack, a team of India's National Investigation Agency has not yet been given access to visit Pakistan to act on the leads it has received so far.



In an exclusive interview to CNN-NEWS18, Aziz claimed that "It depends on what it shows and how the linkage is establish and who is the suspect. So I think its again hypothetical. Once the stage is reached and India makes a request, then we will see".



Here is the full transcript of the interview:



CNN-NEWS18: Let me start off by asking you, It has been three months since the Pathankot attacks and three weeks since the JIT came from Pakistan. Can you tell our viewers here in India and around the world what is the status of investigation in the Pathankot attacks once the JIT has come back to Pakistan. Has there been any progress in the investigation?



Sartaj Aziz: Obviously they are analysing the data and things they have brought and then they would prepare a report which I hope would be shared with India. I am sure there are some additional information and so decision will be made on the basis of evidence that has been collected.



CNN-NEWS18: Will there be any action against Masood Azahar because the Indian government has made it clear that unless there is visible action against Masood Azhar and their leadership of the Jaish-e-Mohammad, which is the organization India believes was behind the Pathankot attacks, there will be no forward movement.



Sartaj Aziz: It depends what the evidence shows. No body should prejudge the outcome.



CNN-NEWS18: So far the evidence that has been collected, do you, in your opinion, is good enough to launch a prosecution against people..against suspects?



Sartaj Aziz: I am not aware of that so I don't want to volunteer an opinion on the basis of heresay. Let's wait for the JIT to complete the investigation.







CNN-NEWS18: Now the JIT has come here and got access to NIA, its records. And it also got access to the Pathankot airbase. Will the NIA here in India also get reciprocal access to potential suspects in Pakistan?



Sartaj Aziz: It depends again what its shows and how the linkage is establish and who is the suspect, so I think its again hypothetical. Once the stage is reached and India makes a request, then we will see.



CNN-NEWS18: So if India make a formal request you would not be closed against the option of allowing access to the NIA team?



Sartaj Aziz: Again you see one should not answer question hypothetically. I think once the investigation is complete, and on the basis of what additional information is required, then a decision will be made. So I dont want to volunteer one way or the other.



CNN-NEWS18: The reason it's not hypothetical is because just a few, meaning that the NIA will not get access. Are you saying something that is different?



Sartaj Aziz: : I dont think he used that word. He said right now cooperation is more important than reciprocity so that doesnt exclude the option. And he meant to say to say let's cooperate and then things will work out. So I dont think one should over interpret the statement, he just said cooperation is more important, which is true. Even in reciprocity, cooperation is important. So I think one should not pre-judge the answers.



CNN-NEWS18: So I am paraphrasing you, you said you are not excluding any options, including the option of reciprocity?



Sartaj Aziz: In case the evidence leads to some basis, and which people identified need to be investigated.



CNN-NEWS18: The JIT just after coming back to Pakistan had reportedly said that they were unhappy with the amount of access they got. They were unhappy with the fact that they were not allowed to question all the people that they wanted to get access to. Can you throw some light on that?



Sartaj Aziz: Well it is better that these things are shared with the concerned officials rather than with the media. I think some statements have come out and I have no doubt in my mind that once they complete their report they will share with them and probably with the NIH. But additional information they required, they were not able to obtain because they were not given full access. Have you been informed by anybody from the JIt about what kind of access they got. Whether they were happy about it? No, No. I have not seen their report. It is still under preparation.



CNN-NEWS18: Let me come to the second issue about the status of the bilateral dialogue itself. Now its called the comprehensive bilateral dialogue, Where does it stand, as you see it? Is it suspended? are you not foreclosing the option? where is it, as you see?



Sartaj Aziz: Well, as you know when we met on December 9 at the Heart of Asia - myself and the External Affairs Minister of India. We agreed that the comprehensive dialogue would resume soon and the two foreign secretaries will meet, and the same thing was then reiterated when Prime Minister Modi visited Nawaz sharif on December 25. But then, on January 1, the Pathankot attack happened. So then, pending the JIT and the follow-up, that thing is now, in a way, suspended or kept on hold. I'm hoping that in the coming days, as this progress is made, the process will start because the composite dialogue includes one group or one particular segment which deals with terrorism and extremism so that we have a proper forum to discuss these issues. We are expecting that in the coming days, there will be opportunities for the two foreign secretaries to meet and work out at least the time schedule on when the dialogue will start. Substantial dialogue of course will begin after that, But still we are hopeful that there will be some opportunities to the two foreign secretaries.



CNN-NEWS18: So I want to be absolutely clear about what you are saying Sartaj sahab that again contrary to what your high commissioner here had said few days ago that the dialogue according to you is not suspended in fact you are hoping that it will re-start in the next few days if not weeks?



Sartaj Aziz: See, suspended can be for one month, suspended can be for two months. So when dialogue is not taking place, the word suspended doesnt mean cancelled or given up. So I think there is no sort of difference here. For the time being it was suspended because obviously after January, three and a half months have passed, in fact four months. So to that extent, the dialogue is suspended, but we are hoping that it will resume soon.



CNN-NEWS18: Hasn't India said that FS will not meet to resume or restart the comprehensive bilateral dialogue unless there is visible and concrete action against perpetrators of Pathankot?



Sartaj Aziz: I haven't heard such a categorical statement. I think the two are not excluded. I mean that can take long time and obviously we are hoping that comprehensive dialogue itself betters cooperation. Some of these things take time. In the meanwhile other things should not be suspended.



CNN-NEWS18: Do you feel that India is linking the future of the dialogue to Pathankot probe and does that disappoint you?



Sartaj Aziz: Well it disappoints not just me but everyone else who wants better relations between the two countries.



CNN-NEWS18: But the easiest way to better that relationship would be to show substantial progress in the Pathankot probe?



Sartaj Aziz: Well, I think we have made very significant progress in the probe; I don't think it is something implied, which is not correct. I think our cooperation in Pathankot has been acknowledged by even by Indian, sort of, interlocutors.



CNN-NEWS18: And finally, in terms of Indo-Pak bilateral talks, from here on you are hoping that in next few days, if not weeks, the comprehensive bilateral dialogue can restart after this temporary suspension because of what happened in Pathankot. Whether or not is India on the same page, you want that?



Sartaj Aziz: Well, even if the dialogue does not start, some discussion will take place on the time schedule and modality of the dialogue. In other words, we will discuss what subject, at what level. And maybe some rough timeline for next six months-nine months of what can be discussed. This is the minimum which we accept in the coming days or weeks. Things which can be discussed. And then whenever the schedule comes up, the dialogue can begin.



CNN-NEWS18: I want to come to another issue. Again it was linked to the time JIT came here in the last week of March, There was an alleged Indian spy who was caught in Pakistan in the first week of March, and then 20 days later when the JIT was here, he was made public to the rest of the world. Do you think its a curious coincidence, that for three weeks there was no information about this man and just when JIT was here, details of this man were made public in a press conference by both Army officials as well as civilian officals in Pakistan.



Sartaj Aziz: I dont think there should be any surprise. We have been saying that, even last year in fact my visit to India to meet the NSA was cancelled in 2015. I said that India is blaming us for non-state actors acting across the border. In the case of India, it is the state actor which is operating in Baluchistan, in Fata and in Karachi and we had even shared some dossier with UN and US. So I think ,in that sense, we have now got more concrete evidence that also has been collected. I am sure once evidence is collected, we will share it with India and other interested countries. So I think this is something that just happened at that time so I dont think one should read too much into it.



CNN-NEWS18: If you believe that this man is an Indian spy than why hasnt India got consular access to him so far? It's been a month and a half since he has been formally detained.



Sartaj Aziz: I dont think that's a tradition. The issue, we have a bilateral agreement among us in which these kinds of issues have to be resolved. I dont think this even in terms of tradition, when somebodys spy accesses what applies to normal prisoners. I dont think it applies to spies. So I think we are examining this issue, and I think the reply would go according to our agreement.



CNN-NEWS18: But India has formally requested for consular access, I think multiple times, and so far there is no clarification whether that consular access is being given, permission has been given.



Sartaj Aziz: Its not the case of one individual. It is a network which is operating in Baluchistan, we have arrested some more people. We dont want consular access to affect our investigation in to this entire episode.



CNN-NEWS18: So the reason this alleged Indian spy is not getting consular access is because you believe he was not acting individually, there is a network and If you have to give consular access to this man, then that would jeopardise your investigation into this?



Sartaj Aziz: Wont jeopardise. First of all you see its a normal tradition that consular access is not given to spies. And secondly in our own bilateral agreement there is a clause that if it's in the interests of security, access may not be given. So, we will study those agreements, and accordingly give a response.



CNN-NEWS18: I want to move to another issue which India has been aggrieved about recently, again in the context of Pathankot. China at the security council used a technical hold to block action against Masood Azhar. Aren't you worried, that China and Pakistan are perceived in the eyes of international community as shielding a terrorist?



Sartaj Aziz: Absolutely not. In these, the important thing is that in all these listings Pakistan agencies are blamed. So we not going to be a party to anything which is prima facie without any concrete evidence. India's fingers are pointed toward Pakistan agencies, and so I think this is not something new that has happened. In the last one or two years, whenever India does something which is not justified in our point of view, China uses its membership and tries to put a technical hold on it. So it is not something that should be treated as unusual.



CNN-NEWS18: But it's not just the Indians who are saying this, even the US is saying this. Robert Blackwill, who is former US ambassador to India, had come here a few days ago, and he says that the US administration over the years, different administrations, have realized and I quote him: Pakistan and Pakistan leadership has been systematically lying to the US leadership. How do you react to that?



Sartaj Aziz: It's a totally unfounded allegation. I think we have cooperated wherever it was justified and not cooperated where it was not justified. CNN-NEWS18: What about the recently released US state department cables which seem to suggest that ISI paid money to the Haqqani network to orchestrate the attacks that happened in December 2009?



Sartaj Aziz: That is totally denied. We have said that it is an unverified statement which somebody may have planted. Somebody who wanted to act on behalf of India. We have denied it and it is totally wrong and I think these kind of unfair and unverified reports should not become the basis of speculation.



CNN-NEWS18: But it has come from a US cable. I has not come from ...



Sartaj Aziz: Well US cables, you know what kind of cables there are. the cables have been edited and doctored. there are authentic reports that these are unverified.



CNN-NEWS18: In the last couple of questions I want to talk about this big international stories that which has had huge impact in Pakistan as well -- the Panama papers which seems to implicate PM Nawaz Sharif who is right now in London. He had initially gone there saying he is going for a medical check-up. He was supposed to be back in three days and he is not back yet I understand.. Are we any closer to knowing if he will be back soon, or is there something more that we need to be worried about?



Sartaj Aziz: Well, first of all I dont think three days was correct. He left on 13 and it was indicated that he will get back on 18 and that tests are being carried out. So in the next one or two days doctors will determine when he can come back. We are all hoping that he will come back as soon as possible.



CNN-NEWS18: So you are assuring the people of Pakistan, as well as everybody else who is watching this programme, that PM Nawaz Sharif will be back on 18?



Sartaj Aziz: No, I am not saying that, I am saying that was the initial estimate which was published. Now, in the next day or two, the test will be completed and then an announcement will be made when he is likely to came back.



CNN-NEWS18: But there is no threat to the future stability of Mr Nawaz Sharif government?



Sartaj Aziz: No..No Insha Allah not. I think even on the Panama Papers, the government is in touch with all the opposition parties to set up a Commission of Inquiry with full powers and full authority and facilities. And Mr Nawaz Sharif's own name is not mentioned. His son has been living abroad for the last 20 years and doing his own business, so I think, I am quiet hopeful and confident, that there will be nothing against them when this investigation takes place in the coming days.



CNN-NEWS18: And finally, in terms of where Indo-Pak bilateral goes from here on. You are hoping that in the next few days, if not weeks, the comprehensive dialogue can restart after the temporary suspension because of what happened in Pathankot. Whether or not India is on the same page with you on that.



Sartaj Aziz: Well even if the dialogue does not start some discussion will take place on the time schedule and modalities of the dialogue. In other words, we will discuss what subject, what level and may be some timeline for next 6-9 months on what can be discussed. This is the minimum which we expect in coming days or weeks which can be discussed, and whenever the schedule comes up, the dialogue can begin.



CNN-NEWS18: And this discussion you would want at foreign secretary level or a level lower than that?



Sartaj Aziz: It depends on how India wants it, but the decision was that foreign secretaries will decide.



CNN-NEWS18: Okay, thank you very much Sartaj Sahab for speaking with us.
Mumbai: In more bad news for the drought-hit Marathwada region, only 3 per cent water is left in dams in the parched region, officials said on Tuesday.



Eight of the region's 11 major dams are at dead storage level, meaning water from these dams cannot flow out but has to be lifted.



"We will also use the groundwater stock and as the IMD forecast is good, we hope that we will be able to carry on till the monsoon arrives," Aurangabad Divisional Commissioner Umakant Dangat told PTI.



This is the fourth year of drought in Marathwada in the past five years. Each of its 8,522 villages has been affected for two consecutive years.



"We have already cut water supply to (the) industry. The collectors and divisional commissioner have been instructed that the use of water for drinking is the top priority," Maharashtra Water Resources Minister Girish Mahajan said.



As many as 2,745 water tankers are being used in the region compared to 939 this time last year.



Latur in Marathwada has been getting water by a special "water train" filled at Miraj in western Maharashtra.



The Aurangabad collector has already announced a 20 per cent water cut to local breweries and a 10 per cent overall cut to local industry.



Dams across the state have only 19 per cent water left compared to 32 per cent this time last year, an official of Maharashtra Irrigation Department said.
Delhi government on Tuesday pulled up cab service aggregators for over charging customers. 18 cabs belonging to Ola and Uber have been impounded by the Delhi Transport Department for charging more than the prescribed limit.



This development comes after cab aggregators deciding to suspend surge pricing on Monday. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had warning cab services- even going on to accuse them of fleecing Delhiites.



The Delhi government on Monday acted against Ola and Uber after some complaints were received that the cab service providers are over charging passengers during the odd and even scheme.







"Recd some complaints against Ola/Uber. Govt planning strong action against them. Will announce it soon," Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted on Monday.



Uber Technologies, had temporarily suspended 'surge pricing' Delhi after the state government threatened to cancel permits and impound vehicles of its drivers, it said on Monday.



Rival Ola, also suspended its 'peak pricing', the company said in a statement on Monday.



Demand for taxis has increased as the Delhi state government, trying to reduce pollution, introduced an 'odd-even' scheme to ration car usage based on their registration numbers.



Surge pricing is the term for when demand for taxis outstrips supply, resulting in Uber charging higher rates than normal to encourage more drivers to offer rides.


New Delhi: After several instances of Railways and External Affairs ministry using the social media to help people in distress, border guarding force SSB helped two Ahmedabad residents cross over to India with the aid of Twitter after they got stuck in Bhutan when the border was sealed for the Assembly polls in West Bengal.



The travails of Deep Shah and Parth Trivedi began in the wee hours of April 15 when they were told in Bhutan, while packing their luggage for the journey back home, that they cannot cross the Indo-Bhutan International Border as it has been "sealed" in view of the polls.



The duo said they checked with the Indian Embassy in Bhutan but the "phone operator was helpless" as to how to help them. They found the only way out by taking a flight was expensive.



Shah then took to Twitter and wrote about his problem and tagged numerous official handles of the government like those of Prime Ministers Office, the MEA and Sushma Swaraj, MoS Gen V K Singh, Railway Ministry and Rail Minister Suresh Prabhu and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee with the plea that he be allowed inside India as they had a train to catch from Hasimara in West Bengal the same evening.



"Mam, we are in Bhutan, we heard that border gate to India is sealed due to election. V have train to catch at @5pm. wouldn't we allowed to enter our own country? #stuckinbhutan," Shah tweeted to the WB CM's handle.



Getting restless after there was no response to his tweets in the early hours of April 15, Shah then tagged Congress leader Shashi Tharoor's handle seeking help.



"Sir, v r in Bhutan, border gate sealed due 2 election in WB, we need to get back to our country. Pls help," he wrote to Tharoor.



Tharoor, who was awake, responded: "Attn @SushmaSwaraj this young Indian says he's #stuckinBhutan bcos border gates closed due to elections in Bengal?" The tweet was soon noticed by Sahastra Seema Bal (SSB) Inspector General Renuka Mishra, at its headquarters here, on her personal Id and she acknowledged that it "Pays to stay up late Happy to help."



Mishra, who also manages the forces' Twitter handle @DGSSB, responded to Shah asking "Where exactly are you right now and what is your contact number. Saw your tweet to @ShashiTharoor #stuckinbhutan". Mishra told PTI that she soon got in touch with the forces' commanders on the Indo-Bhutan border on the eastern frontier.



She was told that the gates have been closed and additional vigil mounted in the wake of administration's instructions to "seal" the borders before the polling day on Sunday.



Soon after, the SSB area commander got in touch with his Bhutanese counterpart and Shah and his friend were asked to report at an official crossing point at the border. They were allowed to cross over after due verification of their documents at about 3 PM on Saturday.



"I along with my friend @parthlyright have safely crossed border. Thanks," Shah tweeted with photographs he took along with his friend and SSB company commander Ranjit Baidya. The SSB responded with a short tweet in response: "Glad to be of help"

SSB officials said they later facilitated many other



Indians cross over the border following this for their onward journey into India. The border sealing directions are in place till Sunday evening, they said. Later, Tharoor complimented the SSB and IG Mishra for ensuring prompt help to the youngsters.



"Well done @DGSSB! Such episodes reinforce my belief that social media can do good & in our Govt& securitry services," he tweeted.



Officials of the paramilitary force said the duo subsequently took their train to Kolkata from where they had to take a flight to Ahmedabad.



"All is well that ends well. The help through social media is enormous," a senior SSB officer said. Shah later admitted on his social media account that when he wrote the first few tweets it was "pretty late in night so not blaming any one!".
The US State Department for Human Rights in its report for 2015 has slammed India for its record on encounter killing and has observed that judicial corruption is widespread in the country.



The report also mentioned the Malegaon case the allegation is that the National Investigation Agency was "going soft" on Hindutva elements over the Malegaon blasts case.



The report said there were 555 encounter killings, by security forces and police between 2008 and 2013. The list includes: Uttar Pradesh (138), Jharkhand (50), Manipur (41), Assam (33), Chhattisgarh (29), Odisha (27), Jammu and Kashmir (26), Tamil Nadu (23), and Madhya Pradesh (20). It also mentions the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case.



Here are some other observations on India in the US report:



Prisons



# Prisons were often severely overcrowded, and food, medical care, sanitation, and environmental conditions often were inadequate. Potable water was only occasionally available. Prisons and detention centers remained underfunded, understaffed, and lacking sufficient infrastructure. Prisoners were physically mistreated.



# Persons awaiting trial accounted for more than two-thirds of the prison population.



Children Recruited by Maoists



#Expresses concern on the recruitment of children by Maoist armed groups. children as young as 12 were members of Maoist youth groups.



#Maoists reportedly held children against their will and threatened severe reprisals, including the killing of family members, if the children attempted to escape. Maoist armed groups used children as human shields in confrontations with security forces.



Defamation Cases



#critical of loose use of libel/defamation cases in the state of Tamil Nadu



# Report says that since Jayalalithaa came to power (in 2011) 110 cases of defamation were filed against various persons, including cases against media persons for speculating about the health of the CM.



# Critical of government move of curbing internet freedom, Cites government decision to ban mobile internet services during violent quota protests organised by the Patels.



# Criticises government central monitoring system (CMS) programme which allows governmental agencies to monitor electronic communications in real time without informing the subject or a judge.
Mumbai: Legendary actor Dilip Kumar, who was hospitalised after suffereing from high fever and nausea in the wee hours of Saturday, has thanked his fans for their love and prayers and says now he is feeling brighter and better.



Dilip Kumar was admitted to Lilavati hospital after he suffered high fever and vomiting.



Later his wife Saira Banu issued a statement stating that he is recovering well and is stable.



Dilip Kumar himself took to Twitter on Monday to share his health status with his fans.



By God's grace feeling brighter and better, he tweeted.



In another post, he shared a photograph of himself from the hospital.



Thank you all for your prayers, love and affection, he wrote alongside the image.



The 93-year-old actor's doctor had earlier said that he had infection in his lungs, fever and experienced a few bouts of vomiting, but was conscious and was having food.



He is likely to get discharged on Tuesday.



Saira Banu's manager Murshid Khan told IANS: Dilip sir is fine now and all his reports are also normal. Once doctors give a heads up, he will probably get discharged by tomorrow (Tuesday).



Born in Peshawar, now in Pakistan, Dilip Kumar, whose real name is Yusuf Khan, entered the Indian film industry in the black-and-white era and became a name to reckon with in the 1950s and 1960s.



Apart from films like Aan, Daag, Madhumati, Paigham, Leader and Ram Aur Shyam, his cinematic gems range from the tragic story of Devdas, the historical love saga Mughal-E-Azam to the dacoit drama Ganga Jamuna.



After working for about six decades, he stepped away from the arclights in 1998. His last movie was Qila.



Dilip Kumar was honoured with Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian honour, in 2015.


Mumbai: Proceedings into the ongoing legal battle between Bollywood actors Hrithik Roshan and Kangna Ranaut have been stalled as the latter has not yet recorded her statement to assist in the investigation, say the former's counsel.



Actress Kangana Ranaut is yet to record her statement following a complaint lodged by Hrithik which says that a fake email-ID has been created and an impostor has been operating it under his guise.



Hrithik's lawyers told IANS: Instead of giving so many media statements, they (Kangana) should record one official statement with the cyber crime cell which will really help the investigation. They are clearly more interested in media wars than anything else. The entire process of investigation is stalled because they haven't officially recorded their statement with the authorities.



Reportedly, Hrithik has already recorded his statement in the case. The cyber crime team has been trying to get Kangana's statement but she has so far not done so.



According to reports, the cyber crime team was to record Kangana's statement on Monday but the actress's counsel had a different take on the issue.



I have been receiving calls from media persons since last two hours. They have been told by Hrithik Roshan's PR team that police is coming to meet Kangna today (Monday). That's a blatant lie as no one is visiting Kangana, as has been communicated by Hrithik's team, the counsel said.



My client is not a coward to disappear suddenly. We have always been handling the matter legally and without any fear. Hrithik's PR team is just misleading media persons for obvious reasons.



He should rather concentrate on acting on my counter-notice or responding to it, as it has been more than 45 days since he received it. Such acts of misleading media persons shows acts of desperation. Hrithik never bothered about any imposter in the last about two years... how has it become so important now. Hrithik did what he had to do, now he should wait patiently as law will take its own course, the counsel added.



The controversy began earlier this year after Kangana hinted at Hrithik being her 'ex' when she said in an interview that she failed to understand why exes do silly things to get your attention.


Bengaluru: Karnataka Chief Minister D Siddaramaiah is under fire yet again. This time two tankers of water was being emptied to clean roads ahead of the Chief Minister's arrival in Bagalkot.



The two tankers containing about 5000 litres of water were emptied before Siddaramaiah was to garland the statue of saint Kanakadasa (15091609 AD) as the road where it is located was dusty.



This comes at a time when the state is suffering from severe drought and water shortage.



Bagalkot District Collector has ordered an inquiry and has rubbished the reports saying that the water was used to clean a statue and not the road.



Siddaramaiah was scheduled to visit Badagandi village in Bilagi taluk as part of his current state wide tour of the areas reeling under drought.







"I will ask the Deputy Commissioner to look into it," said Siddaramaiah when asked by reporters about the incident.



Local legislator JT Patil, however, maintained that there was no drinking water scarcity in Bilagi.



The incident drew criticism from state BJP President and former Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa.



He said when the state is facing drought situation and water shortage, "for the Chief Minister himself to do this for

his own purposes...people will mock at it".



(With additional information from PTI)
Kolkata: Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Monday said the Centre would consider sealing the India-Bangladesh border to stop the menace of fake currency and cattle smuggling.



"We will consider sealing the India-Bangladesh border so that the problem of fake currency and cow smuggling can be stopped," Singh said at a poll rally on Monday.



Singh also raised the issue of infiltration of Bangladeshis into India through the border with the state.



"Till date we have not taken up any step in connection with the Bangladeshi infiltrations. But we want that people of Bangladesh stay in Bangladesh and Indians stay in India.



Bangladesh is our neighbour and we have very good friendly relations with them and we must maintain that relation.



"But it must be ensured that the people of Bangladesh does not become a liability for us (India) and similarly India must not be the same on them... Both the countries be cautious on this matter," Singh said.



The Centre has already decided to "regularise" those Bangladeshis who entered India till December 2014, the Union Home minister said hitting out at the Trinamool Congress government for failing to stop infiltration.



After the 34-year long 'misrule' of the Left Front, Singh said, West Bengal has slipped into a darker phase during the past five years of TMC regime.



Wondering whether West Bengal has truly witnessed "a change" that was promised by the TMC before the party came to power, he said the "situation is very bad in the state".
Chandigarh: India's richest state Punjab, once known as the capital of agricultural invention, is now on the brink of backruptcy.



Banks do not want to give loans to the state for fear of non-payment and the Reserve Bank of India even blacklisted the state government. The state is also facing allegations that Rs 26,000 crore of grain was missing from its godowns.



This is what bankruptcy would mean to Punjab:



# Salaries and pensions worth Rs 1681 crore/month to 4.5 lakh staff could be put on hold.



# Small farmers may not get free crop loans of Rs 50,000 per crop.



# Likely cut in Punjab's health expenditure which is Rs 3295 crore in 2016.



# Rise in unemployment -- 3.65 lakh unemployed youth registered in 2015.



# Major cut likely in Rs 50 crore package for celebrating Guru Gobind Singh's anniversary.



It ultimately took a meeting from Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday to force RBI to offer Rs 10,000 crore loan to the state. It was just enough to escape a massive financial crisis.



The state borrowed Rs 18,000 crore to Rs 20,000 crore from the Centre to pay farmers to buy their crops. The Centre reimbursed that from the procurement from the central pool.



The payment is made against the state's bills, but bills have been pending for the last three years. So, the state took the money from banks which remains unpaid. Adding to this, is a decade's worth of unsettled bills.



Meanwhile, the Central Consumer Affairs Ministry is not satisfied with the amounts claimed by the state, both incidental and for transportation.



In an election-bound state, it was just a matter of time before the financial mess assumed political overtones. Both AAP and the Congress are at Badals throat.



Earlier, the state government had mortgaged properties to raise Rs 2100 crore loans to supplement its finances inviting criticism from the opposition.



Parkash Singh Badal in December wrote to Modi saying Punjab', once considered the nation's breadwinner, " has been reduced to the plight of a beggar". But the question is who is responsible for the current plight of Punjab.




Revolution suddenly seems an old-fashioned idea when students of Bengal's original revolutionary Subhash Chandra Bose's alma mater - The Scottish Church College - speak a language conscious of their exigencies.What happened to Rohit Vemula is wrong but why should we protest against it, and where and against whom? The incident happened in Hyderabad University, JNU happened in Delhi, what does it have to do with my college? If I am protesting against it, I am only hampering my own interests. We should look at our own academic interests, says Subhashulok, president of the student union who spearheaded the protest against a regressive dress code in 2015.Is this a stray voice, or is this the beginning of 'the great refusal' of political programmes and organisation in a state known to be the epicentre of student movements?The JNU protests attempting to redefine the contours of national vs anti-national and the student upsurge Dalit PHD scholar Rohit Vemula's suicide saw campuses across India stand up in solidarity with their comrades.Kolkatas colleges, too, werent behind. Deborshi Chakraborty, a student of the Presidency University sat on a hunger strike to show solidarity for Rohit Vemula. He says the incident was a tipping point, but his immediate concern is far more practical. "There are no jobs, no industries, farming sector is shrinking, and students have been compelled to move out to other cities. I too will have to do the same, but I dont want to migrate as I belong here."Bengal's universities celebrating their political heritage of movements inherited protests as their natural right to showcase. But today they are caught in a dilemma. Should they negotiate spaces in their own land, or reject it and move out for better opportunities? Its a sentiment that reflects itself in campuses and universities across West Bengal.Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee claims that 68 lakh jobs have been created in the last five years, a claim that is met at NIT Durgapur with a fair degree of incredulity. Udipto Ghosh, a final year student of civil engineering has a job offer in Mumbai. He says if he stays in Kolkata, his salary will be a dismal Rs 25,000 per month. No point ruining my career here, he says.Kalyani, one of the youngest townships in Bengal established in the 1950s by a Congress chief minister, is just 35 kms away from Kolkata. Rashidul Hasan, a MA in political science and a resident of Murshidabad, echoes what many from the 28% strong Muslim community are saying. Nationalism debate can wait. We are students, treat us like those from other communities, not as vote banks. We want jobs and better opportunities.His definition of revolution is the one against poverty and educational backwardness Muslims in Bengal face; not against any discourse around 'Bharat Mata ki Jai'. Kanhaiya Kumar, the JNU student union president, who was championed as the face of Left revival, isnt a hero for most students, as campuses are seeing a certain degree of disenchantment with student revolts.In the hills of Bengal the struggles are different, much like its weather and topography. In Darjeelings St Josephs College, Srijana is crystal clear, that only a separate state of Gorkhaland can solve issues of identity and employment. Why Delhi and Mumbai, even in Kolkata I am asked - are you a Nepali? Gorkhaland will define our identity. Once we have a government we can hold them responsible. But Mamata is your CM, we ask. Well Kolkata is far away," she says. "Our voice doesn't reach there.Down in the plains, across villages and towns, walls are plastered with the TMC flower. At Tagore's town Shantiniketan, a leafy, sleepy road leads us to Visva Bharati. "We already know who is winning," a student from the university's journalism school tells me. Will they vote? "Of course, but look at the choices we have. The Left that didn't do anything for 34 years, and the TMC that is mired in corruption."Perhaps, for the first time in an assembly election, corruption has become an issue in the state. Narada, Sharada and the recent flyover collapse has left Mamata's lily-white image tainted. Talk about it and risk being thrashed" says Anirban Roychoudhary, a second year student at Burdwan University. The campus was the scene of violent political clashes a few months ago. Now the TMC student union will not let him read Marx. SFI student leaders are banned from campus. They come to write exams under police protection.Personal is political has been the Leftist article of faith. Students in Bengal are looking at a new model for their future. The Revolution is dead. Long live the Revolution.(Marya Shakil is Associate Political Editor and Shreya Dhoundial is Senior Editor at CNN News18. Their show Reporters Project airs on May 23)
Dehradun: The Chief Justice of Uttarakhand High Court on Tuesday rapped the Centre over President's Rule in the state and said, "Your arguments are contradictory."



The Chief Justice asked the Centre, "Why fear Speaker's order which would disqualify 9 rebel MLAs? Why didn't the Central government wait for the floor test?"



The court had on Monday observed that the state Governor should have "stayed his hands" while dealing with the Speaker over proceedings in the Assembly saying he (Speaker) is also a Constitutional authority and "any intrusion" into his freedom should be guarded.



The division bench had said that this case was going to be an example where boundaries between Constitutional authorities like President and Governor were drawn to ensure that powers "are not trampled upon by one or the other authority."



The bench, comprising Chief Justice KM Joseph and Justice VK Bist, had observed that "ideally he (Governor) should have stayed his hands" while referring to the communication sent by the Governor to the Speaker regarding the MLAs memo for demand of division of votes.







The court was hearing a plea for ousted chief minister Harish Rawat challenging the imposition of President's rule in Uttarakhand on March 26 and related pleas.



It was commenting on the issue arising out of a letter of 35 MLAs, including nine rebel Congress MLAs, who had written to the Governor seeking a direction to the Speaker to allow their demand for a division of votes on the passage of the Appropriation Bill on March 18 and a communication from the Governor's secretariat on the subject.



(With additional information from PTI)
Minamiaso (Japan): The US military prepared to join relief efforts today in disaster-stricken areas of southern Japan as authorities struggled to feed and care for tens of thousands of people who sought shelter after two powerful earthquakes that killed at least 42 people.



Ten people remained missing, and rescuers were redoubling search efforts on the southern island of Kyushu, where many areas were cut off by landslides and road and bridge damage.



Forecasts for heavy rains, which would make land and collapsed buildings even more unstable, added to the urgency of the searches.



Toyota Motor Corp said it would shut down most of its vehicle production in Japan over the course of this week because of parts shortages stemming from the earthquakes.



Nissan Motor Co also halted production at some facilities. With 180,000 people seeking shelter, some evacuees said that food distribution was a meager two rice balls for dinner.



"We are doing our best," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told lawmakers when challenged by the opposition over the government's handling of the relief effort.



"This is the way it is. Today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, we will be working toward a full recovery," Abe said.



US Forces, Japan said troops were preparing to provide aerial support for Japan's relief efforts. The US has major Air Force, Navy and Marine bases in Japan, and stations about 50,000 troops in the country.



Many whose homes were not seriously damaged sought shelter as the area was rocked by more than 500 aftershocks from two big quakes that struck late Thursday night and in the early hours of Saturday.



"Without water and electricity, we can't do anything. Without the TV on, we can't even get information about disaster relief operations," said Megumi Kudo, 51, standing in a line for water outside a community center in Aso city. "We can't take a bath, not even a shower," he said.



Kudo came with his wife and a 12-year-old daughter, carrying several empty gallon-size plastic containers to get water while his 80-year-old mother waited at home. "It's better to be prepared than sorry, as we learned the hard way," he said.



His house survived, despite major roof damage, but like many, the family was sleeping in their cars.



A few blocks away, 75-year-old Tokio Miyamoto said he was wary of sleeping alone in his house, so he was lugging his futon bedding every evening to an evacuation center. "It's a hassle, but it's too scary to be alone," he said.



Miyamoto said the evacuation center was short of food, with only a couple of rice balls per meal for each person.



Japanese media said most of those missing were in Minamiaso, a mountain village southwest of 1,592-meter (5,223-foot) Mount Aso, the largest active volcano in Japan. There, dozens of troops, police and other rescue workers were shoveling debris and searching through places where they may have been buried.
Brussels: Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam and alleged accomplice Mohamed Abrini, who is also charged over the Brussels attacks, were moved to different jails in Belgium on Tuesday, prison officials said.



Abdeslam, arrested in Brussels on March 18 following a four-month manhunt, "is now in Beveren in a high-security cell" after he was transferred from a prison in Bruges, prison services spokeswoman Kathleen Van De Vijver said. Beveren is about 100 kilometres (60 miles) further east from Bruges in northern Belgium.



Abrini, arrested 10 days ago in Brussels in connection with both the Paris and Brussels attacks, was moved to "the high security section in Bruges" from a jail in the Forest district of Brussels, the spokeswoman said. Both transfers "are part of our dispersion plan," she said without elaborating.



Abrini, 31, has confessed to being "the man in the hat" caught on video with suicide bombers at Brussels airport on March 22. The airport attack and bombing an hour later at a metro station near EU headquarters killed 32 people.



Abrini was also linked to the November 13 Paris massacre after being caught on video at a motorway gas station with Abdeslam, who is awaiting extradition from Belgium to France.



However, the Belgian authorities want to question Abdeslam about a shootout in Forest that led to his arrest days afterwards in the capital's troubled Molenbeek district.



Abrini, who grew up with Abdeslam in Molenbeek, was charged with "participation in the activities of a terrorist group, terrorist murders and attempts to commit terrorist murders".



Abdeslam has also been charged with "terrorist murder" and being part of a terrorist group in connection with the shooting spree and suicide bomb attacks that killed 130 people in Paris.



Belgian investigators say the same cell carried out the attacks in both cities. The Belgian parliament's commission of inquiry into the attacks said it will visit Maalbeek metro station and Brussels airport on Friday, one month to the day after the attacks in the Belgian capital.



The committee is tasked with shedding light on the Brussels attacks by the end of the year, as well as the impact on French-Belgian relations of the Paris carnage.



The committee is also to report on the Jewish Museum gun attack in Brussels which left four people dead in May 2014, a gunman's botched attack last August on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris via Brussels, as well as on the dismantling of a jihadist cell in the Belgian city of Verviers in January 2015.
Brasilia: Brazilian legislators pushing to oust President Dilma Rousseff appeared to have the upper hand, with a wide margin voting to impeach her and cut short a term running through 2018.



More than two hours into voting, the pro-impeachment camp was leading 254 to 87. If 342 of the Chamber of Deputies' 513 members vote in favor, the proceedings move to the Senate for a possible trial.



If senators voted to hold a trial that would suspend Rousseff and hand over the top job to Vice President Michel Temer.



A close ally of the president lamented that many of her colleagues had "betrayed" Rousseff. "It was a herd effect, and many (legislators) betrayed us. It was a double defeat," said Brazilian Community Party legislator Orlando Silva, a close supporter of Rousseff.



After more than 40 hours of debate that began on Friday, legislators in Congress' lower house began voting one by one on Sunday evening, the culmination of months of political wrangling that exposed deep polarisation in Latin America's largest nation and most powerful economy.



Eduardo Cunha, the house speaker leading the impeachment push, called deputies individually, giving them time to speak before casting their vote. After each vote, both cheers and boos erupted while legislators looked up at a board keeping score.



Luiz Carlos Hauly, a deputy in the Social Democratic Party, the main opposition party, said Rousseff had to go. "In Europe they change their government when it doesn't have the majority," he said. "This administration has no majority. It doesn't have the means to govern."



Simone Morgado, a member of the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement, said impeachment proponents were trying to derail a democratically elected president. "Given that Dilma didn't commit any crime, like so many others in this chamber, which has no shame, I'm voting 'no!'," she said.



The extraordinary session came as the government is paralysed and the population sharply divided, with friends and foes of Rousseff dismissing each other as "putchists" and "thieves."



Outside the legislature, waves of pro- and anti-impeachment demonstrators flooded into the capital of Brasilia from across the huge nation. A metal wall more than a kilometre long was installed to keep the rival sides safely apart.



People on both sides watched the score on large movie screens, cheering or booing in accordance with their political leanings.
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Healing Hearts Vietnam will host its inaugural gala from 6 to 9 p.m. May 6 at Liberty Universitys Williams Stadium Club Level.

The Healing Hearts Vietnam gala will promote the work of the organization by raising funds to perform surgeries for Vietnamese children facing life-threatening heart conditions.

The evening will include a presentation from Healing Hearts Vietnams founders Dr. Tom Forsberg, Dr. Chad Hoyt and Pham Thi Minh Thu, executive chairwoman of Dong Nai International Hospital and a member of Hoan My Medical Corporation's management committee, who will fly in from Vietnam for the event. Displays of Vietnam culture, hors d'oeuvres and a gourmet dinner also are planned.

If you want to know what Healing Hearts Vietnam is all about you can see it in the smile on the children's faces, you can see it when the parents are relieved, and its why we do it, Hoyt said in a news release. It is a life that is changed forever.

Healing Hearts Vietnam Inaugural Gala tickets can be purchased at healingheartsvietnamgala.eventbrite.com. Individual tickets are $50, with numerous sponsorship op-portunities available ranging from $500 to $1,500.
Fans of El Palacio in Huntsville will have one last chance to take home a piece of the beloved Mexican restaurant before it's gone forever.
DRAINED OF BLOOD

What the pathologist who performed the autopsy did note however, was that the womans body was drained of blood.

Relatives of the victim, Felicia Persad, told Newsday that forensic pathologist Eslyn McDonald Burris confided in them this was this was most bizarre autopsy she had performed in her career.

Relatives said that the pathologist told them she could not find any blood in Persads body.

Cause of death could not be ascertained because of the advanced state of decomposition and further analysis of body tissue would now be done in an effort to have a conclusive finding on how Persads killer ended her life. Relatives told Newsday that Persads hands and feet were bound and there was a black piece of rope tied around her neck. She was also gagged with a piece of cloth. It is believed Persad was killed on April 2 - the day she was abducted.

Relatives left the centre with more questions than answers. Police sources said that Persad was killed shortly before she was to have visited the courts to petition for a restraining order against a man whom she was romantically involved with but ended the relationship after he became abusive to her. Police sources said this man is being kept under surveillance as investigations continue.

Yesterday, Persads brother who is a Constable assigned to the Sangre Grande police station positively identified her body Persad via her dentures, clothing and hair.

Contacted for comment, PC Persad struggled to keep his emotions in check as he spoke of the tragedy that had befallen his family. Asked to comment on the complete blood loss, he said, I am at a loss for words. I just dont know. I am in shock, he cried.

From a police officers perspective, I believe that my colleagues in Homicide (Investigations Bureau) will do their best to bring justice to my family. It is really hard for the family. My sister was a happy, humble person who always did her best to put a smile on peoples face, PC Persad said.

The officer said that although forensic tests are pending, the family will proceed with final rites with Persads funeral set for tomorrow at Allens Funeral Home in Sangre Grande.

Persads body was found wrapped in a body bag and dumped in the Mitan River on Friday last. The body was discovered by forestry workers who alerted the police.

Persad is the second female whose body was found in this river. A month ago  to the date Persads body was found  the dismembered, decapitated body of Eden Nekeisha Teesdale was found in a blue barrel floating on the river heading out to see.

Teesdales head has not yet been recovered.
Bahamas issues writs for Duprey, wife

Craig A Gomez, the liquidator of Clico Bahamas Ltd (CBL), disclosed the move in his latest official report, published last December .

On January 14 and 22, 2015, I met with General Counsel regarding the writ of summons to be served on the former directors of CBL and Sylvia Baldini, Gomez states. On April 20, 2015, I communicated with US counsel and the agent from the forensic firm to discuss their assistance in the serving of a writ on Mr Lawrence Duprey. The outcomes of these moves are unclear. Under rules governing the process, Gomez is unable to speak about matters under his purview .

However, in his 18th report, he states, I attended court with General Counsel seeking the courts approval to seek leave to issue a writ of summons against the former directors of CBL and Sylvia Baldini .

The order was granted. Further, I attended court with General Counsel seeking the courts approval to serve notice of the writ of summons, to be served out of the jurisdiction against the former directors of CBL and Sylvia Baldini. The order was granted. The liquidator says he obtained an opinion on the time limit required by a plaintiff anticipating to commence a lawsuit against a defendant .

The Government of the Bahamas has stated it will guarantee the operations of Clico (Bahamas) Ltd, to the tune of US$30 million (TT$189 million). CF Financial  parent company of Clico (Bahamas) Ltd  undertook a US$58 million (TT$365 million) guarantee of a loan issued by CBL .

Finance Minister Colm Imbert this month announced the States plan to dispose of CLF assets for $2 billion, as well as the traditional Clico insurance policies for $1 billion .

Last September, the State secured about 14 per cent of the shares of CLF through the settlement of a debt in relation to British American Insurance Company Ltds employees pension plan. A total 1,066,311 of the plans 1,066,312 shares were transferred to the Ministry of Finance .

This was as a condition of the Government making certain payments on behalf of British American, former Finance Minister Larry Howai said last week .

There has been no word on the final report of the commission of inquiry into Clico. There is no word on the status of a police probe of Clico, or the status of civil litigation initiated by the State .

Independent Senator David Small last week lamented that no one has been held responsible for a series of financial scandals, including Clico .
Mt Hope probes automatic appointments for patients

Chief Executive Officer of EW MSC, Kumar Boodram, said it exists and it must stop immediately. He has launched an investigation into who gave the instruction to generate such a notice.

An irate Medical Chief of Staff, Dr Andy Bhagwandass, told Newsday that he also is awaiting the probe.

However, he denied that such was the practice at EW MSC, in which a patient walks into the Mt Hope Hospital and, instead of seeing a doctor, is given a notice of appointment by the clerk.

The notice lists the patients name, the surgical clinic he or she should attend, and advises patients: You are required to wait a minimum of six weeks before receiving a call with your appointment date. Newsday obtained a copy of the computer- generated notice.

Many patients have complained that they have had little choice but to leave the North-Central Regional Health Authority catchment area, where they live, and journey down to the San Fernando General Hospital (SFGH) to see a doctor.

Yesterday, Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh told Newsday that it was an operational issue at EW MSC and certainly, it is a matter for the institutions management to deal with.

Bhagwandass told Newsday that he was indeed taken aback and the matter was being investigated. Bhagwandass said, That is not what obtains here at EW MSC. Im surprised that such a notice exists and the matter is being investigated as where it originated.

What I do know is that when a patient comes here, it is a consultant who gives the date for the patients depending on the seriousness of the ailment.

We will probe this and determine a way forward. Saying that he became aware of such a notice only yesterday, Boodram said he has commenced a probe as to who issued the instruction to have such a notice drafted up.
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Facebook's 'Messenger Chat' Bot Platform: Features

Facebook in their developer conference F8 announced that businesses would now be able to start using their messenger platform to buy and sell products along with offering customers support options. Messenger now wants you to chat with businesses and get updates from them directly.

That was what Facebook pitched to the future at their annual conference for software developers in San Francisco. "We think you should message a business just the way you would message a friend," Mark Zuckerberg said on stage at f8.

Zuckerberg laughed and said: "To order flowers on1-800-Flowers, you never have to call 1-800-Flowers again."

Facebook for more than 50 million businesses on Messenger provided the tools needed to build interactive experiences or simply "chat bots" that reach all their user base which the number is estimated to be around 900 million each month. It is now evident that Facebook will find more ways to make money if numerous businesses start using Messenger to chat with customers and sell goods and services. They estimate Messenger and Facebook's other messaging app, WhatsApp, could eventually generate billions in additional annual revenue.

David Marcus who heads Facebook messenger says Facebook is "not very focused on making money on Messenger yet. In the future, if we have enough really awesome experiences between businesses and people, I am sure we will figure out a way to monetize at some point," he said. Chat bots are just robots with the help of interactive software powered by artificial intelligence often secure assist from humans which are intended to simulate human conversation. They pop up on messaging services by using them to perform simple tasks

Starting Tuesday, there will be over a half dozen more bots on Messenger to try, with another dozen or more coming soon, says Marcus. While not yet commonly found in the American and Europe continents, chat bots have zoomed off in Asia with messaging services such as WeChat helping users schedule doctor's appointments, shop for the latest styles, play games or the lottery and send money to friends. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines recently began allowing passengers to check in, get flight updates, make travel changes and talk to customer service reps in its Messenger app. Messenger users can also get hold of a new weather forecast through chatting with an animated cat in a yellow raincoat.
Contrary to his much serious and quintessentail character Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill showed off his funny side to his 1.7 million-strong legion of followers who are enthused with his Star Wars tweets.

Posting funny stuff on Twitter was Hamill's newfound hobby since he was recently reprised for his role in the recent Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Taking a break from the film production, the actor seems to enjoy playing around the microblogging platform with jokes, behind-the-scenes snapshots, and adding fire to the hysteria over whether Rey is Luke's daughter or not.

Then just recently, he did again. He buzzed twitter with his usual trickery. He upped his Twitter followers' excitement when he posted a tweet that he'd been granted a 'special permission; from Star Wars director Rian Johnson to treat fans with a quick sneak of an Episode 8 trailer (literally).

"Brief glimpse of an EP8 TRAILER-Mine!" the Star Wars actor tweeted as quoted by Mirror UK. By that, what he actually he meant was a picture of his on-set trailer.

Putting aside Hamill's playful Twitter side, new reports surface that the original Skywalker character initially resisted about being signed-in as a cast to the Force Awakens set as first reported by IGN. Director JJ Abrams fended off criticisms that Episode 7 was a copycat of Episode 4 saying that putting Luke back was necessary to re-ignite interest back into the sci-fi franchise. And it did as Force Awakens now is a top grossing film.

"We knew that getting to Luke was the whole story, and I was desperate to do the next chunk that we knew would not fit into this one movie. We knew that we had that ending, but it was a frightening and tricky thing to do, but at first and in all honesty, Mark Hamill was a little resistant," remarked Director JJ Abrams as quoted by Digital Spy.
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Washington:

Democratic presidential front runner Hillary Clinton has condemned the terrorist attack in a bus in Jerusalem which left at least 21 people injured.

I strongly condemn the terrorist attack in Jerusalem - my thoughts and prayers are with the wounded and their families, and I pray for their recovery. This attack comes in the midst of a wave of violence that has rocked Israel for months, Clinton said in a statement.

Israelis have been living in fear of going about their daily lives - going to the store, to the boardwalk, riding the bus. All of us, including Palestinian leaders, must condemn such violence, she said.

I will always stand with Israels right and ability to defend itself - its security is non-negotiable. Israel must continue to know that it has no greater friend than the US, Clinton said.

Both the State Department and the White House said they have seen such news reports, but no condemnation came from them.

Obviously were aware of those reports, and law enforcement officials in Israel are taking a close look at this, as they should. And Im confident that theyll take a close look at this and that US officials will stay in touch with them on this matter, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.

We certainly have seen the reports of this explosion on a bus in Jerusalem. Were watching this as closely as we can, State Department Spokesman John Kirby said.

Israeli authorities are really a better source of information at this time. I dont have any more specific information about the exact cause or if it I know theyve said they re treating this as if it was an act of terrorism, he said. A bomb blast ripped through a bus and sparked a fire, in Jerusalem yesterday wounding at least 21 people.

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New Delhi:

Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh's mortal remains will be handed over by Pakistan to India today. Kirpal Singh died under mysterious circumstances in Pakistans Kot Lakhpat jail. Kirpal was a native of Mustfabad Saida village, which is close to the Indo-Pakistan border. He was imprisoned in the Kot Lakhpat for 24 years after being accused of playing a part in a bomb attack at the Faisalabad railway station.

Soon after Kirpals death, his kins asked for his mortal remains. They had also expressed concern over the gruesome treatment meted out to Indians languishing in Pakistani jails after they met Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

The Home Minister had also assured them of all concerns related to bringing the body of Kirpal Singh back from Pakistan will be addressed. Kirpal Singhs family has earlier rejected Pakistans claim that he died of heart attack.

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New Delhi:

A 12th standard girl who was injured during the celebratory firing at a wedding procession in Delhi's Mongolpuri area today succumbed to her injuries.

Anjali got injured last Saturday when she was watching a wedding procession passing by from her window.

Sooner she was rushed to the hospital. Anjali was severely hit on head by a stray bullet that had been fired by one of the celebrating wedding revellers.

A case has been registered against the cousin of the groom at the wedding who had allegedly fled from the scene after the incident, according to reports.
TUESDAY, April 19, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- A new two-step Ebola vaccine strategy has shown some promise in early clinical trials.

The trials involved two candidate Ebola vaccines that were given to volunteers in separate shots, the researchers said. One vaccine was provided first as a "primer" shot, and the second was given as a "booster."

The winning combo was a "primer" shot of a genetically engineered cold virus (AD-26), followed by a "booster" shot of a similarly altered smallpox virus (MVA), according to the report.

In both cases, the viruses had been altered to include genetic material from Ebola, so any immune response to the vaccine could theoretically promote immunity to Ebola, the study authors explained.

An immune response was observed after primary immunization with the AD-26 vaccine, and boosting with the MVA resulted in sustained elevation of specific immunity to Ebola, the researchers found.

Further, neither vaccine caused any serious adverse events in the 87 people, aged 18 to 50, who volunteered for the phase 1 clinical trial.

The findings were published April 19 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The recent West African outbreak of Ebola, the largest in history, killed more than 11,000 people and infected more than 28,000, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ebola expert Dr. Lee Norman, chief medical officer for the University of Kansas Hospital, said it's good that researchers are investigating different ways of delivering vaccines for the deadly virus.

"The delivery method, if it is successful, is really an important building block for a successful vaccine," Norman said. "We have to remind ourselves that phase 1 trials are typically more about safety than about effectiveness. It isn't typically the goal of a phase 1 trial to emphasize effectiveness."

Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior associate at the UPMC Center for Health Security in Baltimore, agreed.

"Since the West African Ebola outbreak, many different vaccine approaches have flourished, and with several promising candidate vaccines the manner in which future Ebola outbreaks will be managed will be dramatically improved," Adalja said.

"Future studies will be needed to compare approaches and determine which are the most effective, but each new vaccine approach is a welcome tool the world did not have when the West African outbreak began," he added.

However, another Ebola expert questioned how useful a two-step vaccine would prove during a rapidly spreading outbreak.

"In a real-world scenario, you don't really have time for a prime/boost," explained Thomas Geisbert, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. "You really need a single injection that's fast-acting and works quickly."

Geisbert also said that in this clinical trial, people were provided the needed "booster" shot either 28 or 56 days after receiving the "primer" vaccine.

"You don't have that kind of time in an outbreak," he said. "You need something that's works in a week or two."

Worse, 40 percent to 60 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa have low to moderate immunity against AD-26, according to the researchers. "That could definitely interfere with the effectiveness of the vaccine," Geisbert said.

Other vaccines are further along in the clinical trial process and have shown much more promise, particularly rival American and Canadian vaccines that were tested in Africa at the height of the Ebola outbreak, Geisbert said.

Despite these drawbacks, Norman said the results from this early trial will give Ebola vaccine hunters some valuable data.

"We have to remind ourselves that scientific discovery is not usually one study and an 'aha' moment where all questions are answered. Everything builds on everything else," Norman said. "We don't have anything now that's commercially available. The way I see it, let's keep working at it."

More information

For more on Ebola, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Katra:

India will rule the 21st century which is the era of knowledge and with 800 million youths below the age of 35 years, the dream of every young person can become a progress story of this country, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said.

Addressing the fifth convocation of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University here, he said this is a century of knowledge and whenever there has been an era of knowledge, India has shown the way.

India will lead the 21st century because the energy required for the 21st century, which is knowledge and that is with India. India has 800 million youth power which is below 35 years. Dream of every youth can become a progress story for the country, Modi said.

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the students that the question of what next will play on their minds but the person who knows what lies ahead wont need to depend on others.

Recall what your parents did for you. They sacrificed their own happiness for yours. You may have thought of so much in your childhood but it may not have worked out. Forget that and instead, think of what you have achieved, he said.

Narendra Modi said this university has been built with the contribution of millions of pilgrims, many of whom came from far away places.

Lets pledge that we will do something for the poor, because it was the poor pilgrim who contributed to build this university, he said. Our nation is scaling new heights of progress and with such a youthful population we can achieve so much. Dream to do something and not to become someone, he said.

Narendra Modi said a unique feature of this university is that while other varsities in the country are run by tax payers money given by parents, this one is being funded by millions of poor people who come to pay obeisance to Vaishno Devi shrine.

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New Delhi:

Energy waves travelled for over a billion years gently rattling space-time in the vicinity of Earth. They provided base and evidence to the Theory of General Relativity of Albert Einstein. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, captured the disturbance made by gravitational waves. This was the first ever detection of the gravitational waves.

The recent discovery, which gave birth to numerous scientific possibilities, could pave the way for scientists to know more in-depth about the working of our universe. The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted a brief flash of gamma rays. It occurred less than half a second following that gravitational wave signal which was discovered recently.



This looks to be strange because black holes merge cleanly and do not produce any sort of light and this is where the requirement of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope comes. The detection of light from a gravitational wave source will pave the way for a much deeper and clear understanding of the event, according to NASA.

Fermis GBM catches the view of the entire sky and is not block by the Earth. It is sensitive to X-rays and gamma rays that have energies between 8,000 and 40 million electron volts (eV). The energy of visible light ranges between about 2 and 3 eV. NASA has released a video that demonstrates the visualization of merging black holes and gravitational waves.



Explaining the visualization, NASA said, The yellow structures near the black holes illustrate the strong curvature of space-time in the region. Orange ripples represent distortions of space-time caused by the rapidly orbiting masses. These distortions spread out and weaken, ultimately becoming gravitational waves (purple). The merger timescale depends on the masses of the black holes. For a system containing black holes with about 30 times the suns mass, similar to the one detected by LIGO in 2015, the orbital period at the start of the movie is just 65 milliseconds, with the black holes moving at about 15 percent the speed of light.



Space-time distortions radiate away orbital energy and cause the binary to contract quickly. As the two black holes near each other, they merge into a single black hole that settles into its "ringdown" phase, where the final gravitational waves are emitted. For the 2015 LIGO detection, these events played out in little more than a quarter of a second. This simulation was performed on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Here is the video:

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Washington:

Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump has the support of a record 40 per cent Republican voters while his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton is engaged in a tough national contest with Senator Bernie Sanders, according to a latest poll.

Trump has the support of 40 per cent of the Republican primary voters and is followed closely by Senator Ted Cruz with 35 per cent and Ohio Governor John Kasich with 24 per cent, according to a latest opinion poll by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic party, Sanders (46. 3 per cent) has all but eliminated Clintons (47.7 per cent) primary polling lead, it said.

However given the advantage Clinton has in the delegate count, it would be a tough task for Sanders to prevent the former Secretary of State from becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.

As she is finishing this primary, she is not gaining strength. The cracks are showing, and she is losing strength, said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey with Democrat Fred Yang. However, in a hypothetical match-up Clinton defeats Trump with 50 per cent to 39 per cent.

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Los Angeles:

Five-time Emmy winner Doris Roberts, who delighted audiences as the meddling mother next door on Everybody Loves Raymond, has died.

Roberts died Sunday night in her sleep of natural causes in Los Angeles, her representative Janet Daily said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

In 1996, Roberts landed the part of Marie Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond, playing Rays mom and the wife of the cranky Frank (Peter Boyle).

She was with the hit CBS sitcom for every one of the shows nine seasons, covering 210 episodes. She was scheduled to appear at an Everybody Loves Raymond reunion in June in Austin.

Truly the end of an era, Patrica Heaton, who did battle with Roberts as daughter-in-law Debra on the show, wrote on Twitter.

My wonderful TV mother-in-law and ELR nemesis Doris Roberts was a consummate professional from whom I learned so much. She was funny and tough and loved life, living it to the fullest.

Roberts once said she based Marie on a combination of Romanos mother, an Italian, and series producer Phil Rosenthals mom, a German Jew.

Wrote Rosenthal on Twitter, We loved our mom, the great #DorisRoberts. A wonderful, funny, indelible actress and friend.

Doris Roberts had an energy and a spirit that amazed me, Romano said in a statement. She never stopped. Whether working professionally or with her many charities, or just nurturing and mentoring a green young comic trying to make it as an actor, she did everything with such a grand love for life and people. Roberts excelled in motherly roles throughout her career.

She played Donna Pescows mother on the 1979-80 ABC series Angie, created by Garry Marshall, and joined NBCs Remington Steele as Mildred Krebs, the receptionist for the detective agency run by Pierce

Brosnan and Stephanie Zimbalist, in 1983. She stayed with the show through 1987. Roberts also won another Emmy in 1983 for a stint on St Elsewhere.

She received 11 nods in all, three more for Everybody Loves Raymond, one for Remington Steele and one apiece for Perfect Strangers and American Playhouse.

Her big-screen resume included Something Wild (1961), Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Honeymoon Killers (1969), National Lampoons Christmas Vacation (1989) and Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star (2003).

Her marriage to novelist and short story writer William Goyen lasted 22 years until he died of leukemia in 1983 at age 68. Survivors include her son Michael, daughter-in-law Jane and grandchildren Kelsey, Andrew and Devon.

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New Delhi:

Tamil Nadu elections 2016: BJP today came out with the fourth list of candidates for 27 seats in the May 16 Tamil Nadu Assembly election. The party also declared the name of its candidate for one seat for Kerala Assembly polls, also to be held on May 16.



With allies in the Lok Sabha election deserting it, the saffron party is fighting in alliance with some small outfits in Tamil Nadu while in Kerala it has joined hands with Bharat Dharma Jana Sena, the political wing of Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, whose base is the influential Ezhava community.



While Tamil Nadu Assembly has a strenght of 235 members, including one nominated, the House in Kerala is 141-member strong, including one nominated. With this, BJP has announced names of over 160 candidates for Tamil Nadu polls.
New Delhi:

Pratyusha Banerjees autopsy report by JJ hospital on Monday confirmed that the TV actress was pregnant and had probably undergone an abortion not long before her alleged suicide on April 2.

Doctors came up with this conclusion after examining the dead stars uterus tissues which revealed that she had conceived.

Since her alleged suicide, her boyfriend Rahul Raj Singh has been under scanner. But after this revelation it becomes imperative for police to identify the paternal link of the unborn child.

According to experts, Since there are no tissues left or rather they were removed, it may be challenging to carry out a DNA test to establish the childs paternity.
Lahore:

The body of a 50-year-old Indian national, who died at a Pakistani jail under mysterious circumstances last week after languishing in the prison for nearly 25 years on spying charges, was handed over to Indian authorities today after a post-mortem.

Kirpal Singh had allegedly crossed Wagah border into Pakistan in 1992 and was arrested. He was subsequently sentenced to death in a serial bomb blasts case in Pakistans Punjab province. Kirpal was found dead in his cell last Monday at Kot Lakhpat Jail here.

Post-mortem on the body has been done. The mortal remains have been handed over to Indian authorities and Dr Piyush Singh, the First Secretary in the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, will escort the body, a source said.

Kirpal Singh from Gurdaspur had reportedly been acquitted of the bomb blast charges by the Lahore High Court but his death sentence could not be commuted because of unknown reasons.

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Kabul:

At least 28 people were killed and hundreds wounded when a Taliban truck bomb tore through central Kabul today, triggering a fierce firefight, a week after the insurgents launched their annual spring offensive.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a densely crowded neighbourhood, which sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing into the sky and rattled windows several kilometres away.

The brazen assault near the defence ministry marks the first major Taliban attack in the Afghan capital since the insurgents announced the start of this years fighting season.

One of the suicide attackers blew up an explosives-laden truck in a public parking lot next to a government building, Kabul police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi told reporters.

As a result 28 people were killed, most of them civilians. The second attacker engaged security forces in a gunbattle before being gunned down.

Rahimi said the attack also left 183 people wounded but the health ministry said that figure was almost 330, with many battling for their lives in hospital.

The gunfight appeared to die down several hours after the powerful explosion, but some security officials expressed concern that other bombers may still be on the loose.

The interior ministry denounced the attack as a war crime and pledged to track down the perpetrators.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed their fighters had managed to enter the offices of the National Directorate of Security, the main spy agency.

Afghan officials denied that, saying the target of the attack was a government office responsible for providing security to government VIPs.

The Taliban are generally known to exaggerate battlefield claims.

Pitched gunbattles were ongoing near the building, which was cordoned off by security officials as ambulances rushed to the scene.

(We) condemn in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Puli Mahmood Khan neighbourhood of Kabul, as a result of which many of our countrymen were martyred and wounded, President Ashraf Ghani said in a statement.

Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism.

The Taliban Tuesday last week announced the start of their spring offensive even as the government seeks to bring them back to the negotiating table to end the drawn-out conflict.

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New Delhi:

NIA has readied fresh Letters Rogatory (LRs) to be sent to Pakistan containing the addresses of four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists who attacked the strategic Pathankot IAF base in January. The LRs are being despatched notwithstanding indications from the Pakistani side that it was not yet ready to receive Indian investigators to carry forward the probe in the January two attack that left seven security personnel dead. Four terrorists were also killed in the 80-hour gunbattle.



The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had put the pictures of the four dead terrorists on its official website and asked general public for help in identifying them.



According to official sources, the central probe agency, set up in the aftermath of 26/11 Mumbai attacks, was flooded with many emails, some of which originated from Pakistan also, giving information about the terrorists.



NIA, during its interaction with the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) of Pakistan, had sought details about the place of residence of the terrorists whose names had been shared with the visiting probe team. However, there was no response from Pakistan on the Indias request.



The five-member JIT also comprising an ISI officer had visited India from March 27 to April one during which they visited the air base and recorded statements of 16 witnesses.



During the exercise of verification of the information gathered through emails, the NIA showed the pictures and addresses to some of the jailed terrorists of Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group lodged in jails here and got important inputs from them.

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New Delhi :

In a huge jolt to the Kolkata Knight Riders, Australian pacer John Hastings has been ruled out of the rest of the Indian Premier League with an ankle injury. The Aussie all-rounder has flown back after the injury.

Hastings got injured during a practice session as the team is going to play their fourth match against King XI Punjab. He has played two matches for his side and bowled economically.

Hastings has been named in the Australian one-day squad for the tri-series in West Indies in June.

The 30-year-old fast bowler and strong lower-order batsman has played just one Test for Australia, but he has slowly gained a footing in the limited-overs team since making his ODI debut in 2010.

He has played 20 ODIs and was also part of the Australian side in the recent World Twenty20 in India.
TUESDAY, April 19, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- Americans are living longer, but those extra years may include poor health or a disability, a new study finds.

Between 1970 and 2010, the average life span for men increased 9.2 years to 76.2 years of age, and for women it increased 6.4 years to 81 years of age, according to the report.

However, the number of years lived with a disability rose 4.7 years among men and 3.6 years among women, while the number of disability-free years increased by 4.5 years for men and 2.7 years for women, the findings showed.

"We could be increasing the length of poor-quality life more than good-quality life," said lead author Eileen Crimmins. She is a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California Davis School of Gerontology.

"There are a number of indications that the baby boomer generation that is now reaching old age is not seeing improvements in health similar to the older groups that went before them," she said in a university news release.

The investigators found that only those 65 and older experienced what they called a "compression of morbidity" -- a reduction in the proportion of years spent with disability.

The findings are important for policy proposals, such as raising the age for Social Security and Medicare eligibility, the researchers said.

"Clearly, there is a need to maintain health and reduce disability at younger ages to have meaningful compression of morbidity across the age range," Crimmins said. "The trends for the last 40 years do not support projections and policies that are based on assumptions of a reduced length of disabled life."

The study was published online April 14 in the American Journal of Public Health.

More information

The U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion outlines how to protect your health as your grow older.
Sydney:

Two pieces of debris recovered from beaches in Mozambique almost certainly belong to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Australian officials said today, signalling a possible breakthrough in the search for the plane that vanished mysteriously with 239 people in 2014.

Australia is leading the massive multi-nation search in the remote southern Indian Ocean, believed to be the final resting place of the Boeing 777.

Part No. 1 was a flap track fairing segment, almost certainly from the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft, registered 9M-MRO, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) report said of the piece found December 27.

The second piece of debris was found February 27, about 220 kilometres from the spot where the first item was discovered.

Part No. 2 was a horizontal stabilizer panel segment, almost certainly from the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft, registered 9M-MRO, the report said.

Its stencilling was also consistent with that used by Malaysia Airlines, the ATSB said.

MH370s disappearance is one of the worlds biggest aviation mysteries. The plane vanished from radar on March 8, 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, with 239 people, including five Indians, on board.

The ATSB said both pieces were also examined for marine ecology and remnants of biological material which could provide clues to their sea journey.

Visible marine ecology was present on both parts and these items were removed and preserved, the report said.

At the time of writing, ongoing work was being conducted with respect to the marine ecology identification as well as testing of material samples.

The results from these tests will be provided to the Malaysian investigation team once complete.

The ATSB said the pieces found in Mozambique would be returned to Malaysia this week.

Despite a two-year investigation costing millions of dollars, only one piece of debris has been confirmed as coming from the aircraft a 6-foot-long wing flap that washed up on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean.

Investigators said they would analyse another possible piece found on a Mauritian island in March.

The debris washing up on the East African coast is consistent with computer models showing how ocean drift would carry the wreckage across the seas, according to officials.

The relatives of several passengers aboard flight MH370 have filed suits against the airline amid doubts about the official explanation for the planes disappearance.

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Bengaluru:

A controversy has erupted over two water tankers being emptied to prevent dust from rising from a road ahead of Chief Minister Siddaramaiahs programme at Bilagi in the district during his ongoing visit of drought-hit areas.

The two tankers containing about 5000 litres of water were emptied before Siddaramaiah was to garland the statue of saint Kanakadasa (15091609 AD) as the road where it is located was dusty.

Siddaramaiah was scheduled to visit Badagandi village in Bilagi taluk as part of his current state wide tour of the areas reeling under drought.

I will ask the Deputy Commissioner to look into it, said Siddaramaiah when asked by reporters about the incident yesterday.

Local legislator J T Patil, however, maintained that there was no drinking water scarcity in Bilagi. The incident drew criticism from state BJP President and former Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa. He said when the state is facing drought situation and water shortage, for the Chief Minister himself to do this for his own purposespeople will mock at it.

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TUESDAY, April 19, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- The term "palliative care" triggers negative feelings among many cancer patients, and needs "rebranding," researchers say.

The stigma surrounding palliative care can mean patients wait too long to receive supportive care that improves their quality of life, said researchers at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center in Toronto.

This new study shows there's a "branding issue," said principal investigator Dr. Camilla Zimmermann, head of palliative care for the hospital and the University Health Network.

Palliative care "is not something to be afraid of or that is stigmatizing, but is helpful even while patients are receiving life-prolonging therapies," Zimmermann said in a network news release.

She and her colleagues analyzed interviews with 48 patients who had advanced cancer and an estimated survival of between six and 24 months. Half the patients received early palliative care in an outpatient clinic along with standard cancer care, while the other half received standard cancer care only.

Quality of life improved for those who received early palliative care, the study found.

At first, "both groups perceived palliative care as synonymous with death; as care at the end of life in a setting where they would die, and in general as a frightening, anxiety-provoking thing they wanted to avoid," said Zimmermann.

But that perception changed among those in the palliative care group, the researchers found.

"They began to see palliative care as relevant early in the course of their illness and as being beneficial to them by supporting them and improving their quality of life," Zimmermann said.

However, those patients still felt stigmatized by the term "palliative care."

"Patients told us if palliative care were called something else, they wouldn't feel so stigmatized," Zimmermann said.

"Importantly, the source of this stigma was mainly in the medical system because doctors and nurses had given the impression that palliative care was only end-of-life care," she said.

The media was another source of stigma, she said.

"I think those are two powerful institutions where we could affect change and give a different perception to families and caregivers about what palliative care really is," Zimmermann explained.

The study was published April 18 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Definitions of palliative care are inconsistent and confusing, Zimmermann added.

"Until there is a consistent definition of palliative care that is promoted by those referring patients and collaborating in their treatment, it is unreasonable to expect that patients and families will embrace a broadened conceptualization of palliative care," she said.

The goal of palliative care is to improve quality of life in many different ways, Zimmermann added. "Symptom control is an important domain; and this means managing pain, nausea, shortness of breath, sleep, depression and anxiety," she explained.

Also, palliative care provides support for the family at home as well as spiritual support, she said.

More information

The Center to Advance Palliative Care has more on this specialized form of medical support.
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Worth the cancer? Fracking dumps 15 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into the ground each year

The U.S. fracking revolution has created an economic boom in terms of natural gas prices. Nevertheless, the process contaminates a staggering 15 billion gallons worth of wastewaster with cancer causing chemicals each year, thereby calling into question whether the economic benefits of fracking outweigh the risks.

Concerns about the adverse effects of fracking are on the rise. A recent report released last Thursday highlights the amount of water contamination, air pollution, climate impacts and chemical use in fracking in the United States, reports Think Progress.

For the past decade, fracking has been a nightmare for our drinking water, our open spaces, and our climate, Rachel Richardson, a co-author of the paper from Environment America, told sources.

What is fracking

Hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as fracking, is a shale gas and oil mining technique that involves injecting a cocktail of water, sand and chemicals deep into the earth, which allows gas to flow out of the head of the well.

After the bedrock has been fractured, the injected water returns to the surface, bringing all the heavy metals and radioactive isotopates embedded within the bedrock back with it. This wastewater is usually injected in wastewater wells to be stored indefinitely.

The Environment America report found that a minimum of 239 billion gallons of water has been exhausted by fracking. In 2014, fracking was responsible for 15 billion gallons worth of wastewater. In most cases, the wastewater cannot be reused and is highly toxic. Whenever officials reinject the wastewater into the ground, it can bleed over into drinking water sources. Common chemicals in the wastewater include formaldehyde, benzene, and hydrochloric acid.

The dangers of fracking

Local residents have raised concerns about the impact the wastewater has on public health. Last summer, for instance, Texas scientists discovered that elevated levels of cancer-causing chemicals in the drinking water of one of the states most active fracking areas. Furthermore, wells have been shown to increase the pressure on seismic faults, which is increasing the frequency of earthquakes in states like Oklahoma.

Among other states, the LNG pipeline San Bruno, California exploded as a consequence of methane leaks, killing eight people and leaving dozens injured. And in Pennsylvania, two families were awarded $4 million in wake of a legal battle against a fracking company that they claim contaminated local drinking water.

I think the report paints a frightening picture of frackings harms, Richardson said. A lot of these harms are things that people living on frackings front lines are experiencing first hand.

Fracking is also detrimental to climate. Natural gas is 80 percent methane and locks in heat 86 times more successfully than CO2 over the course of twenty years. Wells fracked in 2014 released approximately 2.4 million metric tons of methane gas, according to Think Progress.

Addressing the problem

President Obama recently stated that the EPA will start a rule-making process that will restrict methane from existing oil and gas companies. Some states, like New York, have outright banned fracking altogether, whereas other states, like Maryland, have placed a temporary ban on fracking until future research sheds light on its risks.

The authors of the report say they hope their findings will help policy makers and communities recognize the risks posed by fracking, and to take active steps towards mitigating those risks.

The best way to protect our health from fracking is to ban this practice and keep these dirty fuels in the ground, Richardson concluded.

Sources include:

ThinkProgress

EnvironmentAmerica

NaturalNews

Brookings

MintPressNews

Science.NaturalNews.com

FoodForensics.com

Submit a correction >>
Has the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle been solved? Collossal underwater methane blowouts could be the cause

A team of scientists created a bit of a frenzy this week after purporting an alternative hypothesis that could explain the unusual number of missing ships, planes and people in the Bermuda Triangle.

Researchers at the Arctic University of Norway purport that craters on the seabed near the coast of Norway were created by pockets of methane gas that exploded. These gas blow-outs are rumored to be responsible for the disappearance of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle.

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devils Triangle, stretches between Puerto Rico, Miami and Bermuda, encompassing an area of 500,000 square miles.

We have discovered many large craters on the seabed in the central Barents Sea. Analyses suggest that blowout of methane gas once the ice retreated after the last Ice Age formed these craters. We have yet to publish these results, so these are preliminary. What I can say is that we are not making any links to the Bermuda Triangle, Professor Karin Andreassen at CAGE, told sources.

Craters are gigantic, up to one kilometer wide and 30 meters deep, and give evidence on blowouts of gas from the seabed. Blowouts can be linked to thawing of gas hydrates, which is methane in form of ice, beneath the seabed after the last Ice Age ended. But conditions during the last ice age can not be compared with what we see today, he added.

Shedding light on the abyss

The systematic review of methane gas explosions follows a year after Russian scientist Igor Yeltsov, head of the Trofimuk Institute, made a connection between gas hydrates and the Bermuda Triangle:

There is a version that the Bermuda Triangle is a consequence of gas hydrates reactions, he said. They start to actively decompose with methane ice turning into gas. It happens in an avalanche-like way, like a nuclear reaction, producing huge amounts of gas. That makes the ocean heat up and ships sink in its waters mixed with a huge proportion of gas.

Estimates about how many ships, planes and people have been swallowed by the Bermuda Triangle vary considerably. Some estimates purport that more than 100 ships and planes have vanished within this area over the decades.

Waterspouts are also common in the Bermuda Triangle, which are essentially tornadoes over bodies of water. Waterspouts can reach wind speeds more then 120 mph. The water vortexs occur frequently off the coast of Florida during the summer, when the air is humid and the water is warm.

The Bermuda Triangle myth?

The dividing line between scientific theories and pseudoscientific theories about the Bermuda Triangle has gotten fuzzier and fuzzier. Conspiracy theories circulating around aliens, extra dimensions and the lost city of Atlantis are a dime a dozen.

Although the idea of methane gas explosions gobbling up ships sounds good in theory, the natural occurrence of ocean craters off Norway has yet to be replicated. To make matters worse, according to the Journalist Larry Kusche, many of the purported ships and planes that sank in the Bermuda Triangle were found nowhere but in the imagination of writers. Many of the ships that mysteriously vanished actually sank in sea storms far outside the Bermuda Triangle.

Furthermore, the very concept of the triangle has been called into the question. In a 1975 book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved, Arizona State University research librarian Lawrence David Kusche explained that the number of missing ships and planes in the area was no more significant than other regions with similar weather cycles.

In other words, the Bermuda Triangle mystery may not actually be a mystery. Although scientists have documented methane gas explosions in other regions, debate wages on about how they could disrupt ships and planes.

Sources include:

ValueWalk.com

News.Yahoo.com

Cage.UIT

Copernicus.org

Science.NaturalNews.com

Submit a correction >>
Michael Duffy / Michael Duffy

Brookfield resident and Iraq War veteran Lt. Col. Michael Zacchea will talk about his experience as a combat Marine at the Brookfield Museum on May 2.

Zacchea deployed in Iraq in 2004 and served as a senior adviser to an Iraqi battalion. He was wounded in a second battle to overtake the rebel stronghold of Fallujah. He was awarded a purple heart and two bronze stars.
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BROOKFIELD  GOP Registrar Thomas Dunkerton ruled Tuesday that Jane Miller should remain off the Republican voter rolls until 2017.

The decision came a day after Miller, whose name was first erased from the Republican rolls a year ago, appeared at a hearing to contest charges made by Dunkerton regarding her support of Democrat Howard Lasser for state representative in 2015.

At Mondays hearing, Miller denied Dunkertons assertions that she handed out Democratic campaign literature at the polls in 2015 and was an active participant at Democratic campaign headquarters during the campaign and on Election Day.

But Miller did not dispute that she had supported Lasser, an old friend, with a $100 campaign contribution and support on social media. Nor did she deny that a Lasser campaign sign was posted on her lawn.

In his written decision, Dunkerton said he considered all these points in the light most favorable to Miller.

I have even examined the issue without considering the allegations you dispute, Dunkerton wrote. . . . This does not change my opinion that the decision to erase your name from the Republican Party enrollment list (is) in effect until February 2017.

Miller, who has unsuccessfully fought her banishment in the courts, said Tuesday that she didnt expect Dunkerton to change his mind, but she felt compelled to go through with the hearing anyway.

Im not surprised at all by what occurred, Miller said. I felt it was important that I take up Dunkertons offer to have a hearing. I think its important that I addressed his letter and accusations that he made about my behavior in 2015 that is actually not correct.

Millers original expulsion came in April 2015 after Dunkerton and then-Town Republican Chairman Matt Grimes ruled she was not a good-faith party member because of her unsuccessful run in 2013 for the Board of Finance on the Democratic ticket.

The News-Times erroneously reported Tuesday that the charges discussed Monday had not been previously mentioned in proceedings against her. They did come up in last years expulsion hearing, but Dunkerton said then that they do not, standing alone, provide basis for discretionary erasure of Mrs. Miller from the Republican enrollment list. However, the registrar referenced them as additional support of Mrs. Millers lack of good-faith Republican party affiliation.

The 2015 hearing also targeted Millers husband, Larry, who was allowed to remain in the party.

After that hearing, Miller sued Dunkerton in Connecticut Superior Court, but a judge ruled against her. She is appealing that decision to the Connecticut Supreme Court and has also sued Dunkerton, Grimes and two other party officials in federal court.

In the federal court case, a judge recently denied Millers request for temporary relief that would have forced Dunkerton to add her to the Republican rolls in time for the April 26 presidential primary.

Now, she said, she is resigned to the fact that she will not be casting a ballot next week.

I do not expect to vote on April 26, she said. Theyve kept that crazy Jane Miller off the rolls. Im probably the only person in Connecticut that will not be allowed to vote in the GOP primary because of this statute.

awolff@newstimes.com; 203-731-3333; @awolffster
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NEWTOWN  Moments before a head-on crash killed a 90-year-old man on Route 25 Sunday night, the driver who caused the accident had been asked to leave a nearby restaurant and was then seen driving erratically, police said.

Miguel Barragan-Santiago, 33, who was charged Tuesday with manslaughter, was drinking wine at Tazza Cucina & Bar, 266 S. Main St., about 7:30 p.m. when he began bothering two women, according to an arrest warrant. A manager asked him to leave the bar, but Barragan-Santiago at first refused, the warrant says. Minutes later, the man walked out on his own and got in his pickup truck. Shortly afterward, he crashed into a Honda Civic.

Police said the other driver, Brookfield resident Henry Petrucelli, was traveling north near Botsford Hill Road when the Barragan-Santiagos Mazda B3000 struck the front passenger side of his car. Petrucelli, who was trapped in the car, was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the report.

Barragan-Santiago, of Brookwood Lane, Shelton, was taken to Danbury Hospital with minor injuries. He was charged Monday with misconduct with a motor vehicle, but prosecutors on Tuesday also charged him with second-degree manslaughter.

Barragan-Santiago was arraigned in state Superior Court in Danbury, where he pleaded not guilty, and was being held in lieu of $450,000 bond. Hes scheduled to return to court May 19.

Witnesses told police they saw the mans pickup truck speed up, cross the double yellow line and turn right from a left lane at a red light, court records show. Witnesses also said the truck seemed to have mechanical problems, according to the warrant.

The manager of Tazza told police he followed the Barragan-Santiago outside the restaurant and asked him not to drive, police said. The manager then went back inside to get his keys to drive his patron home, but when he came back, the truck was gone, the warrant shows.

Police said Barragan-Santiago, who does not have a valid Connecticut drivers license, could face additional charges as the investigation continues. Blood-test results are still pending.

Police Sgt. Aaron Bahamonde said the bond was set at $450,000 because the suspect is a flight risk. The Mexican immigrant is not a legal U.S. resident and has been deported at least once before, according to the warrant.

Bahamonde said that the investigation is still very active. Anyone who witnessed the accident is asked to call the Newtown Police Department at 203-426-5841.

The drivers did not have any passengers.

Family members of Petrucelli, an Army veteran who lived in Whisconier Village in Brookfield, could not be reached for comment.

In an obituary, the family said he was born and raised in Bridgeport, where he graduated from Harding High School in 1943. Petrucelli then served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946. He had a long career as an accountant and worked as a tax preparer after his retirement, according to the obituary.

noliveira@newstimes.com, 203-731-3411, @olivnelson
DANBURY - Youve heard of Small Business Saturday - the shopping holiday on the first Saturday after Thanksgiving to promote local merchants.

In the same spirit, small business owners are invited to attend a Small Business Day conference on March 22 at City Hall.
Thumbs up to the Team 26 bicyclists who rode through snow and rain along the 400-mile journey from Newtown to Washington, D.C. to bring attention to the public health crisis of gun violence. Led by founder Monte Frank of Sandy Hook, the riders arrived at the nations capital last Tuesday and presented a petition signed by 39,000 people against policies in some states that allow students to carry firearms on college campuses. This was the fourth trip by the group, which was formed in response to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy.

Thumbs up to the push by federal prosecutors in Connecticut to counter the epidemic of heroin and opioid abuse by focusing on the drug dealers. U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly, the states top prosecutor, said Wednesday a new protocol will enable local police to preserve evidence that is critical to identifying and convicting dealers of the deadly drugs. The Justice Department and federal Drug Enforcement Administration initiative is welcome in the enforcement component of what needs to be a multipronged effort.
Contributed / Newtown Police Department

DANBURY  A Newtown teacher charged with bringing a loaded gun to school earlier this month is due in court this week.

Jason Adams, 46, of Currituck Road, Newtown, is expected to be arraigned Wednesday morning in state Superior Court in Danbury.
VANCOUVER, CANADA, April 19, 2016 /CNW/ - Avigilon Corporation ("Avigilon" or the "Company") (TSX: AVO), provider of trusted security solutions, today announced that it will hold a conference call to discuss its fiscal 2016 first quarter results on Tuesday, May 10, 2016 at 5:00 p.m. ET; 2:00 p.m. PT. The call will be hosted by Alexander Fernandes, Avigilon's Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board, and Ric Leong, Avigilon's Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President. All interested parties are invited to participate. The Company expects to report its financial results for the first quarter that same day after the close of markets.

CONFERENCE CALL DETAILS:

DATE: Tuesday, May 10, 2016



TIME: 5:00 p.m. ET; 2:00 p.m. PT



DIAL IN NUMBER: 647-427-7450 or 1-888-231-8191



TAPED REPLAY: 416-849-0833 or 1-855-859-2056

Available until 12:00 midnight (ET) Tuesday, May 17, 2016 Reference number: 89376851



LIVE WEBCAST: http://ir.avigilon.com or http://bit.ly/1XlAtxf Webcast will be archived for 90 days

About Avigilon

Avigilon Corporation, provider of trusted security solutions, develops, manufactures, and sells video analytics, network video management software and hardware, surveillance cameras, and access control solutions.

 2016, Avigilon Corporation. AVIGILON and the AVIGILON logo are trademarks of Avigilon Corporation.

For further information:

Dennis Fong, Vice President, Investor Relations

T: (604) 629-5182, Ext 2515

[email protected]

www.avigilon.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain information and statements in this news release contain and constitute forward-looking information or forward-looking statements as defined under applicable securities laws (collectively, "forward-looking statements"). Forward-looking statements normally contain words like 'believe', 'expect', 'anticipate', 'plan', 'intend', 'continue', 'estimate', 'may', 'will', 'should', 'ongoing' and similar expressions, and within this news release include any statements (express or implied) respecting Avigilon's planned timing for a conference call to discuss its fiscal 2016 first quarter results and associated financial statements (the "Financial Results"), its planned hosts for the call, and its planned timing for its reporting and disclosure of the Financial Results.

Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, actions, or developments and are based on expectations, assumptions and other factors that management currently believes are relevant, reasonable and appropriate in the circumstances, including, without limitation, assumptions that: Avigilon will be able to hold the conference call on the date and time set out in the news release, that Mr. Fernandes and Mr. Leong will be available to host the conference call, that the Financial Results will be completed in a timely fashion and released on the schedule set out in the news release, and that the associated requirements with respect to the completion of the Financial Results, including without limitation the auditor review, officer certification and Board of Directors' approval, will be completed in a timely fashion to facilitate the timeline set out herein.

Although management believes that the forward-looking statements are reasonable, actual results could be substantially different due to the risks and uncertainties associated with and inherent to Avigilon's business, as more particularly described in the "Risk Factors" section of Avigilon's Annual Information Form dated March 1, 2016, which is available under Avigilon's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Material risks and uncertainties applicable to the forward-looking statements set out herein include, but are not limited to, unforeseen events, developments or factors causing any of the aforesaid expectations, assumptions, and other factors ultimately being inaccurate or irrelevant. Although Avigilon has attempted to identify factors that may cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those disclosed in the forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, predicted, estimated or intended. Also, many of the factors are beyond the control of Avigilon. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Avigilon undertakes no obligation to reissue or update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information or events after the date hereof except as may be required by law. All forward-looking statements contained in this news release are qualified by this cautionary statement.

SOURCE Avigilon Corporation
OTTAWA, April 19, 2016 /CNW/ - Today, Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) hosted an event to highlight Canadian dairy farmers' long standing commitment to high standards of care on their farms, through the public launch of the farmers' sustainability initiative. Held at the Canadian Museum of Agriculture and Food, the event showcased the initiative's interconnected national standards on milk quality, food safety, animal care, traceability, biosecurity and environment.

"As dairy farmers, we are very proud to collectively demonstrate responsible stewardship of our animals and the environment, sustainably producing high-quality, safe, and nutritious food for consumers," said Wally Smith, president of DFC. "Today's event is a great opportunity for Canadians to see exactly how we are accomplishing this, what measurable standards currently exist, and how dedicated we are to continuing to improve in our responsibility to provide sustainable food."

The initiative, called proAction, is built on the strengths that have long existed in our industry and new standards that are based on research and practiced by farmer innovators. It will enable farmers to see how their farm compares to their peers on a national basis, which helps foster continuous improvement. Those in the food industry and interested Canadians can also check on overall progress in adhering to the standards, which are reported online at dairyfarmers.ca/proAction.

On-farm food safety is already independently audited on a regular basis. The development of these processes and programs for dairy and other sectors has been funded in part through the federal government over the years, with individual farmers absorbing compliance costs, such as testing water quality or annual equipment check-up.

"We have long been sustainable in our farming practices and are very passionate about what we do," said David Wiens, DFC vice-president. "Our respect for resources, animals and the environment are the reasons the industry is sustainable today. We intend to move forward, building on our strengths, to be sustainable tomorrow."

View the video here or download it at dairyfarmers.ca/news-centre.

About Dairy Farmers of Canada

Founded in 1934, Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) is the national organization defending the interests of Canadian dairy farmers and striving to create favourable conditions for the Canadian dairy industry. Working within supply management, DFC promotes safe, high quality, sustainable, and nutritious Canadian dairy products made from 100% Canadian milk through various marketing, nutrition, policy, and lobbying initiatives. Driven by a strong sense of community and pride, DFC and Canadian dairy farmers actively support a number of local and national initiatives. Visit dairyfarmers.ca for more information.

SOURCE Dairy Farmers of Canada (Corporate)

Video with caption: "Initiated by Dairy Farmers of Canada and its members in 2012, proAction shows that we stand by our values and abide by the best standards and practices the world has to offer. It gives us national metrics to measure and demonstrate farm sustainability performance over time. www.dairyfarmers.ca/proAction". Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70Q2-SN-t4U

For further information: Media contact: Isabelle Bouchard, Director, Communications and Government Relations, Office: 613-236-9997, cell: 613 513-8879, [email protected]; For more information on proAction: Therese Beaulieu, Assistant Director, Policy Communications, office: 613.236.9997 x 2751, [email protected]
Canada's Medical Laboratory Professionals on Parliament Hill to Discuss Urgency of Issue

OTTAWA, April 19, 2016 /CNW/ - The Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science (CSMLS) is on Parliament Hill today speaking with parliamentarians regarding the shortage of medical laboratory technologists (MLTs) in Canada. About half of all MLTs will be eligible to retire in the next ten years. These shortages are already being felt in Canada's rural and remote communities.

"The federal government can play a lead role in ensuring that ALL Canadians have access to essential medical services," said CSMLS President Chris Hirtle. "Possible strategies to address the shortage are increasing the number of new graduates, better integration of internationally educated lab professionals into the Canadian workforce, and incentive programs to recruit MLTs to rural and remote communities."

CSMLS is discussing with parliamentarians three simple solutions to proactively address the shortage.

1. All lab students have a clinical placement (internship) as part of their educational program. Programs cannot increase spots without corresponding clinical placements, making this a bottleneck in the system. These spots are scarce due to staffing shortages, crushing workloads and lack of dedicated education personnel. What is needed is targeted funding for dedicated clinical educators to support onsite clinical education and targeted funding for research into the value and effectiveness of clinical simulation.

2. Most internationally educated laboratory professionals require upgrading their education and experience to bring them up to Canadian standards. Internationally educated MLTs who complete a bridging program are more successful on the national certification examination. What is needed is long-term and sustainable funding for these programs to facilitate quicker entry into the workforce and funding for not-for-profit organizations, such as CSMLS, to offset costs associated with Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) and integration.

3. Lastly, recruiting new medical laboratory technologist graduates to rural and remote communities is a significant challenge for Canadian medical laboratories. Ensuring that these Canadians have access to the same high-quality health care as in the rest of the country means that qualified lab professionals are needed to service these areas. In order to combat the shortage of health care professionals in rural communities, the federal government has committed to forgive a portion of Canada Student Loans for new family physicians, nurse practitioners and nurses. What is needed is given the vital role medical laboratory technologists play as part of the patient care team, they should be included in such programs.

"Canadians health care decisions are built on the work of medical laboratory technologists across Canada," said Christine Nielsen, CEO of CSMLS. "Without access to quick and accurate diagnostic results, it's difficult or impossible for doctors to begin treatment regimes. There is a leadership role for the federal government to play in making sure that this critical part of the health care sector has the capacity it needs to provide the services that Canadians expect."

CSMLS looks forward to continuing to work with the federal government to ensure that patient safety remains the number one priority in Canada's health care system and that there is an adequate supply of MLTs to keep the healthcare system running at an optimal level.

The Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science is the national certifying body for medical laboratory technologists and medical laboratory assistants, and the national professional society for Canada's medical laboratory professionals. Incorporated in 1937 as the Canadian Society of Laboratory Technologists, the society has over 14,000 members in Canada and in countries around the world.

SOURCE Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science

For further information: about CSMLS interview requests, please contact: Michael Grant, Director, Marketing & Communications, Phone: 1.800.263.8277 x8687
TORONTO, April 18, 2016 /CNW/ - Mahdia Gold Corp (CSE:MGD), announced today changes in senior leadership as the Company moves towards a period of intensive project development. With the election of three new directors to the Board, a reorganized management team will focus on a business renewal strategy designed to ensure stakeholder expectations are met. All levels of management are committed to rapidly developing the potential of the Company's Omai property, growing the net asset value, and maximizing return on past capital invested.

APPOINTMENT OF MR. MICHAEL SMITH AS DIRECTOR AND CEO

Following the resignation of past interim CEO, Mr. Don Gordon, the company is very pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Michael Smith as the new CEO and Director. Mr. Smith will immediately take over all day to day operations of the company, both in Canada and in Guyana.

Mr. Smith is an experienced entrepreneur who has founded two investment funds, and technology and excavation companies, amongst others. Most recently he was the CFO for a technology company he cofounded in 2012. He has lived in and managed companies within Caricom for more than fifteen years. He has a Bachelor's degree in Economics, Finance and Investment.

Mr. Smith has been an investor in Mahdia since the company was founded and has participated in subsequent investment rounds.

THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

The Company is pleased to announce the following elections to the Board. This newly constituted Board, working as a team, is an essential first step towards addressing the Company's financial, listing and operational future.

Mr. Adam Szweras

Mr. Adam Szweras is a partner with the law firm Folger, Rubinoff LLP in Toronto, and is Chairman of the Merchant Bank, Foundation Markets Inc. Mr. Szweras has practiced securities law for 20 years focusing on public and private financing transactions, listings and corporate development and growth. He represents public companies seeking listings on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Toronto Venture Exchange and the Canadian Stock Exchange, and has a particular expertise in structuring cross border transactions. He has represented and assisted in the financing of numerous mineral exploration and development companies, and has previously sat on the board of directors of exploration companies active in South America. Mr. Szweras will work with the rest of the board to to assist the Company restructure, finance and develop a strong corporate governance regime.

Mr. Frederick Mraz

Mr. Frederick Mraz is the president of FPM Investments, LLC an investment fund that focuses on the mining of rare earth and precious metals in South America and emerging technologies. He is currently director of an emerging firm that mines and process tantalum for sale in Europe and Asia. He holds patents for processing of food based additives and oil refining for difficult to process feed streams. In addition to FPM Investments, Mr. Mraz represents a large international investment fund. Mr. Mraz's addition to the board of directors will provide the company access to funding sources with a proven track record.

Mr. David Bending and Mr. Robert Buckland

The Company is also pleased to announce that Mr. David Bending, MSc P.Geo., and Mr. Robert Buckland will remain as directors. Mr. Bending is a geologist with extensive knowledge of Guyana mining and the Omai property. Mr. Buckland acts for a British banking group specializing in project financing.

CORPORATE UPDATE

Michael Smith, CEO stated, "The challenges facing Mahdia are manageable. We know what work lies ahead, and we now have a very capable and motivated team prepared and able to do what is needed to regain our trading status. With a world class asset, our goal is to secure and manage our cash flow from on-site partnering operations, while rebuilding the confidence once invested in the Company by the government and people of Guyana -- as well as our valued shareholders.

"Historical debts are manageable; negotiations are already beginning and management will rebuild a strong and professional presence in Guyana in the coming days.

"The Company will work closely with the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission to insure that obligations are met for the future.

"I pledge to all of our stakeholders that Mahdia's new management will work to move the company forward, but also attend to stakeholder concerns of the past. We are working with Regulators and Government Authorities in Canada and Guyana to uncover actions that caused the Company, and the Omai, to fall into its current position. We continue to feel very encouraged by the prospects of bringing the Omai mine back to life again and are committed to ensuring the strongest team is working to represent our shareholders."

ABOUT MAHDIA

Mahdia is a Canadian based gold exploration and development company with active gold prospects at the Omai Mine in Guyana, South America.

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 the Corporation disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as 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. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities described herein and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such.

SOURCE Mahdia Gold Corporation

For further information: Please contact Michael Smith, CEO at [email protected]
LAKEWOOD, Ohio and LINZ, Austria, April 19, 2016 /CNW/ -- Onix is pleased to announce a new partnership with Mindbreeze to provide enterprise search solutions to customers. Mindbreeze is a leading provider of software products that make finding relevant information from corporate data and the Internet both fast and intuitive. Their products offer customers a consolidated overview of corporate intelligence, empowering decision-makers throughout all aspects of their business. Mindbreeze is well-established in Europe with more than 1,000 customers, serving governments, banks, health care, insurance, educational institutions and corporate customers.

Mindbreeze InSpire is delivered as a pre-installed enterprise search appliance box. Configuration is simple and crawling of data sources can begin quickly. Mindbreeze InSpire unites business facts from company-internal data sources and from the Internet in one semantic search index. The product's out-of-the-box connectors are an exceptional feature, intelligently uniting information from all data sources. Mindbreeze InSpire also ensures that each user will find only business facts which he or she is allowed to access by verifying access rights directly from indexed data sources.

"Enterprise search has been a pillar of Onix's product offerings since 2001," said Onix President and CEO Tim Needles. "We are excited to partner with Mindbreeze. They are an established leader in enterprise search, and we are confident that InSpire from Mindbreeze will deliver the performance our customers expect."

Mindbreeze founder and CEO Daniel Fallmann said, "Mindbreeze is delighted to count Onix among our selective and fast-growing international network of partners. We have the knowledge management products customers want, and we look forward to working with the Onix team and their customers in the United States and Canada."

To learn more about Onix's enterprise search services or to request a free consultation with an Onix search expert, visit the Onix website.

About Onix

Onix is a leading developer and provider of technology solutions and consulting services to a broad range of corporate and government customers. Onix partners with technology industry leaders and offers extensive expertise in the design and implementation of end-to-end comprehensive solutions.

About Mindbreeze

Mindbreeze, with headquarters in Linz/Austria, is a leading European provider of software products and search appliances for enterprise search, big data and knowledge management.

Contact:

Karen Masuga

216-529-3043

[email protected]

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SOURCE Onix
OTTAWA, April 19, 2016 /CNW/ - The Honourable Jim Carr, Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, the Honourable Catherine McKenna, Canada's Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, and the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, today acknowledged the release of Analytica Advisor's Canadian Clean Technology Industry Report. The report provides a snapshot of the global clean technology landscape and how the Canadian clean technology industry contributes to it, and recommends actions to help support the sector.

The Government of Canada is already addressing many of the report's recommendations. In Paris, alongside 194 other countries, Canada agreed to take steps to support the transition to a global low-carbon economy. In partnership with provinces and territories, the Government is now developing a pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change.

Canada has also joined Mission Innovation in which twenty governments have agreed to double their respective investments in transformative, clean energy research and development over five years, encourage private sector investment in clean energy technology, and increase collaboration among participating countries.

In Budget 2016, the Government is supporting these commitments with series of strategic investments that will help Canadian companies increase their competitiveness, excel in the production of clean technology and capture their share of this growing global market.

The Government of Canada will continue to support a clean growth economy that will help Canada take advantage of new global opportunities. Support for clean technology will diversify Canada's economy, open access to new markets, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and create good, well-paying jobs for Canadians.

Quote

"We plan to invest almost $200 million in clean technology research and development because we understand its important role in Canada's transition to a lower-carbon economy. Investments like these help bring clean energy technologies closer to commercialization, reducing the environmental impacts of energy and creating clean jobs."

The Honourable Jim Carr

Canada's Minister of Natural Resources

"Our government believes that protecting the environment and growing the economy go hand in hand. That is why we are committed in making Canada a leader in the changing economy by focusing on innovation and clean technologies as a central part of our plan to transition into the economy of tomorrow."

The Honourable Navdeep Bains

Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development

"We know the environment and the economy go hand in hand. That is why the federal government has committed to supporting clean economic growth: to tackle climate change while creating good, well-paying jobs. As the world moves towards a more sustainable, low-carbon economy, Canadian companies have a tremendous opportunity in front of them. I am confident that, through the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Canadian entrepreneurs, our investments will be a springboard for success."

The Honourable Catherine McKenna

Canada's Minister of the Environment and Climate Change

Related Links

Budget 2016  Support for an Innovative and Clean Economy

Follow us on Twitter: @NRCan (http://twitter.com/nrcan)

NRCan's news releases and backgrounders are available at www.news.gc.ca.

SOURCE Natural Resources Canada

For further information: Laurel Munroe, Director of Communications, Office of the Minister of Natural Resources, 343-292-6837; Media Relations, Natural Resources Canada, Ottawa, 343-292-6100
Resverlogix to chair and present at The New York Academy of Sciences' symposium "Epigenetics: Cancer & Beyond"

CALGARY, April 18, 2016 /CNW/ - Resverlogix Corp. ("Resverlogix" or the "Corporation") (TSX:RVX) is pleased to announce its participation in the upcoming symposium Epigenetics: Cancer and Beyond at The New York Academy of Sciences on Thursday, April 28, 2016, from 9am-5pm (EST) in New York City. An international assembly of biomedical investigators will convene to explore the therapeutic potential of pharmacologic modulation of the epigenome. Epigenetics  meaning 'above the genome' describes the mechanisms by which modifications are made to our biological building blocks that determine gene expression. Notably, abnormalities in the epigenome have been identified in many diseases, providing a promising new path for drug discovery.

Internationally renowned expert in the field of cancer research, Dr. Craig B Thompson, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, will deliver the keynote address at the symposium which will be chaired by Dr. Norman Wong, Chief Scientific Officer of Resverlogix and Dr. Dominique Verhelle of Third Rock Ventures.

Academia and industry come together to share cutting edge perspectives from the field of epigenetics, in which Dr. Ewelina Kulikowski, Senior Vice President of Research & Development will present on behalf of Resverlogix. Additional speakers include: Dr. Michael Elowitz, California Institute of Technology, Dr. Keiko Ozato, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Dr. Roberto Pili, Indiana University School of Medicine, Dr. Patrick Trojer, Constellation Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Christopher Vakoc, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Daniel Vitt, 4SC AG, and Dr. Eric Campeau, Zenith Epigenetics.

Please visit www.nyas.org to register for the symposium and/or webinar.

Resverlogix Senior Management Appointments

Resverlogix welcomes Mr. Clayton Paradis as Vice President of Investor Relations. With the addition of Mr. Paradis, Resverlogix will expand current investor relations efforts, including the enhancement of strategic relationships with market participants, along with proactive engagement of stakeholders to ensure the business and value proposition of Resverlogix is clearly defined.

Mr. Paradis brings 15 years of capital markets and investor relations experience to Resverlogix. Most recently, he led the investor relations function for one of Canada's largest energy companies with shareholders and joint venture partners geographically dispersed throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Prior to his career in investor relations, Mr. Paradis worked for two of Canada's largest financial institutions in equity research as an energy specialist, one of which was a number one ranked Royalty Trust Research Team (Brendan Wood Survey 2005). Mr. Paradis is a member of the Canadian Investor Relations Institute (CIRI) and holds an MBA  Finance from the University of Calgary and Bachelor of Management from the University of Lethbridge.

In addition, Resverlogix is pleased to announce the promotion of Dr. Ewelina Kulikowski to Senior Vice President of Research & Development. Dr. Kulikowski joined Resverlogix in 2005 and has been involved in the development of lead drug RVX-208/apabetalone from its discovery through to the IND and into clinical development. In her new role, Dr. Kulikowski will continue to build upon Resverlogix's strong scientific foundation characterizing the epigenetic mechanisms underlying disease pathology in cardiovascular disease and related indications with subsequent expansion into novel therapeutic areas.

About The New York Academy of Sciences

The New York Academy of Sciences is an independent, not-for-profit organization that since 1817 has been committed to advancing science, technology, and society worldwide. With 20,000+ Members in 100 countries around the world, the Academy is creating a global community of science for the benefit of humanity. The Academy's core mission is to advance scientific knowledge, positively impact the major global challenges of society with science-based solutions, and increase the number of scientifically informed individuals in society at large. For more information, please visit www.nyas.org.

About Resverlogix

Resverlogix is developing apabetalone (RVX-208), a first-in-class, small molecule that is a selective BET (bromodomain and extra-terminal) inhibitor. BET bromodomain inhibition is an epigenetic mechanism that can regulate disease-causing genes. Apabetalone is the first and only BET inhibitor selective for the second bromodomain (BD2) within the BET protein called BRD4. This selective inhibition of apabetalone on BD2 produces a specific set of biological effects with potentially important benefits for patients with diseases such as high-risk cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes mellitus (DM), chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer's disease, Orphan diseases, and peripheral artery disease, while maintaining a well described safety profile. Apabetalone is the only selective BET bromodomain inhibitor in human clinical trials, currently in a Phase 3 trial BETonMACE in high-risk CVD patients with type 2 DM and low high-density lipoprotein (HDL). Resverlogix's common shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RVX). For further information please visit www.resverlogix.com. We can be followed on our blog at http://www.resverlogix.com/blog and via Twitter @Resverlogix_RVX https://twitter.com/resverlogix_rvx.

For further information please contact:

Investor Relations

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 403-254-9252

SOURCE Resverlogix Corp.
The deputy President of the Senate, Senator Ike Ekweremadu said yesterday that if war against corruption must be achieved in all its ra...

The deputy President of the Senate, Senator Ike Ekweremadu said yesterday that if war against corruption must be achieved in all its ramifications, there was the urgent need for the establishment of Special Anti- Corruption Courts. Senator Ekweremadu who noted that the setting up of such courts would help reduce the burden on regular courts and fast-track trial of corruption cases, spoke Tuesday when he was decorated anti- corruption ambassador by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.According to him, setting up Special Courts was one of the surest ways to help in the fight against corruption, as that would also help ensure speedy adjudication of corruption cases. He was decorated Tuesday in his office by a team of EFCC led by the National Assembly Liaison Officer, Suleiman Bakari Ekweremadu said, I have been an advocate of special courts for the trial of corruption cases and I believe that other countries, who have enacted laws establishing such, are not fools because there are benefits to be derived therefrom. The idea is to expedite trial to make sure that those who are involved in corruption matters will have their day in court.When we have special courts, just as we have the National Industrial Court, such courts will do better than they are doing now.The establishment of special courts is not just something that will be done by an Act of the National Assembly. We have to amend the constitution to bring it about under section 6, for the purpose of trying corruption cases.While advocating for value reorientation of Nigerians at all levels, with a view to returning to values of the good old days, the Deputy President of the Senate also cautioned the EFCC to ensure that in fighting corruption, it must respect the rule of law and ensure that the provisions of the constitution regarding fair hearing and treatment of an accused are also respected. While thanking the EFCC for decorating him as an Anti-Corruption Ambassador, Senator Ekweremadu assured he would live up to the trust reposed in him, adding that the National Assembly would do everything within its powers to ensure that the Bills before it, aimed at strengthening the fight against corruption, got speedy attention.Earlier, leader of the EFCC delegation, Suleiman Bakari, appealed to the National Assembly to ensure adequate funding for the agency and advocated speedy passage of all the anti-corruption Bills before it.In decorating Ekweremadu as an Anti-Corruption Ambassador, Bakari stressed: It is therefore my Your Excellency, to on behalf of my Acting chairman, Mr. Ibrahim Mustafa Magu and the entire management and staff of the EFCC, decorate you as an Anti-Corruption Ambassador and formally present this frame, as a token of our appreciation to your person and office, and as a symbol of institutional partnership between the EFCC and the National Assembly.
...







Continued....

In Buharis first coming, he bamboozled Nigerians with a so-called War Against Indiscipline. This entailed treating Nigerians, young and old, like primary school children. We were forced to queue at bus-stops under the watchful eyes of soldiers wielding whips with orders to flog publicly those deemed unruly. Late-coming civil-servants were required to do frog-jumpsThe pathetic thing about this was that the government actually believed such charade constituted cogent public policy. Once Buhari left, Nigerians stopped queuing. So much for the War Against Indiscipline.The truth of the matter is that President Buhari is a retired military officer; he has little idea what constitutes effective public policy. As military strongman in the 1980s, he dealt with food shortages by sending soldiers to break into private warehouses and shops. He fought trade imbalances by taking Nigeria back to the stone age of trade by barter (counter-trade). He sought to extradite a Nigerian from Britain by drugging and crating him. These are the indices of a man bereft of modern and judicious policy ideas.The same goes today for Buharis newfangled war against corruption. The whole thing is one big farce. The president clearly does not know what corruption means and how to fight it. As a result, he ends up with the contradiction of attempting to fight corruption with corruption; an exercise in futility.As military head of state in the 1980s, Buhari failed to understand that imposing retroactive decrees and killing Nigerians under them was corruption. Putting the Igbo vice-president in Kirikiri prisons, while placing the Fulani president under palatial house arrest, was corruption. Detaining people like Michael Ajasin in jail, even after they were discharged and acquitted by kangaroo courts, was corruption. Jailing journalists for telling the truth was corruption. Shepherding 53 suitcases of contraband unchecked through customs during a currency change exercise was corruption.Today, Buhari still does not understand that corruption is not limited to stealing money. The government claims to be fighting corruption, but at the same time it has been corrupting the political system. Disregarding the rule of law under a democratic system is corruption. Flouting judicial verdicts is corruption. Trying politicians on the pages of newspapers instead of in law courts is corruption. Unlawfully killing hundreds of Shiites in Kaduna is corruption. Detaining Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky and his wife for over four months without trial is corruption.Corruption cannot not be fought with human rights abuses and violation of the rule of law. It is better for the guilty to go free than for the innocent to be wrongfully accused and convicted.If President Buhari were truly interested in fighting corruption, he would be faithful to the pledge he made to Nigerians in his acceptance speech as president in April 2015. He said then: I pledge myself and the government to the rule of law, in which none shall be so above the law that they are not subject to its dictates, and none shall be so below it that they are not availed of its protection. If he was true to his word, he would not have gone on national television to declare Dasuki and Kanu guilty without the benefit of trial in courts of law.Not surprisingly, the State Department of the United States came out recently to accuse the government of the following abuses: Vigilante killings; prolonged pretrial detention, often in facilities with poor conditions; denial of fair public trial; executive influence on the judiciary; infringement on citizens privacy rights; and restrictions on freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and movement. These are not the indices of a government engaged in a war, or even a fight, against corruption.The government claims to be fighting corruption but continues to create and sustain institutions that promote corruption. In its one-year in office, the government has not established a single institution or passed any legislation necessary to fight corruption. The much-ballyhooed Whistle-blower Act is still blowing in the wind. Instead the government has gone a long way to undermine anti-corruption institutions established under previous administrations.EFCC, ICPC, and DSS are all legacies of past administrations. Under Buhari, these organs of government have been converted into organs of the APC for the persecution of the political enemies of the president and his party. Under Obasanjo, the EFCC went after the members of the presidents party first and foremost. Under Buhari, the EFCC goes primarily after members of the opposition.Under Jonathan, INEC was a champion of free and fair elections. Under Buhari, INEC has become a champion of inconclusive elections. Under Jonathan, the privacy rights of Nigerians were respected. Under Buhari, the privacy rights of Nigerians are disrespected. Even the sanctity of the government house in Uyo, Akwa Ibom was violated by the DSS.Buharis anti-corruption double-standards are becoming legion. The president insists Abacha never stole any money, and then institutes the probe of the PDP for the mismanagement of the recovered non-existent Abacha loot. He accuses the PDP of using public funds to finance its 2015 election campaign, but fails to disclose where the APC obtained the money to finance its own very expensive election campaign. The APC commends INEC for running the ostensibly free and fair election that brought it to power in 2015; then it challenges in court every election conducted by the same INEC in the same election cycle that APC lost.The government fails to recognise that sustaining a wide margin between the official naira/dollar exchange-rate and the parallel market rate (currently 198 to 320) has created a major avenue for corruption in banking circles. It is corruption to employ the children, relatives and friends of members of the Nigerian political establishment into juicy positions in the Central Bank of Nigeria without the scantiest regard for professionalism. It is corruption to pad the 2016 budget with literally billions of naira of hidden fraudulent allocations; so much so that the budgetary process has become stalemated: the victim of a battle royal between a grasping presidency and a self-serving legislature.Surely, President Buhari knows he cannot fight corruption successfully while he is surrounded and sponsored by corrupt APC politicians. Like charity, an APC war against corruption must begin at home; in the APC. The president makes a song and dance about fighting corruption, yet his APC party is steeped in corruption.However, APC members are exempted from Buharis anti-corruption prosecution; except perhaps for Bukola Saraki who must be prosecuted for committing the same crime Bola Tinubu was absolved of. Saraki became Senate president by playing the same party-betrayal card Aminu Tambuwal played to the delight of the APC under Jonathan, which is now to the annoyance of the APC under Buhari.If Buhari were serious about fighting corruption, he would have fought against the dubious protocol within APC that all presidential aspirants must fork out a nomination fee of N27.5 million to the party. Costly elections lead to corrupt governments, because the excessive money spent is inevitably recouped from government coffers. But instead of fighting against this dubious protocol, Buhari claimed he was constrained to borrow the money from his bank. A few months later, the president declared he has N30 million in his bank account.The APC does not even pretend to be anti-corruption. Both the corrupt and the clean are welcome with open arms into the party. No politician with corruption allegations hanging over his head is ever denied membership of the APC. As a matter of fact, the party is a safe harbour for corrupt politicians seeking protection from APC persecution. A large chunk of APC membership is now made up of defunct PDP members; and the navigator of the APC is none other than Olusegun Obasanjo, PDP president for eight years.Apparently, if you are a member of the PDP, you are deemed by Buharis APC to be corrupt. But once you cross over to the APC, you automatically become squeaky clean.As military strongman, Buhari jailed Bisi Akande on corruption charges in the 1980s. But come 2014, the same Bisi Akande became the interim chairman of his anti-corruption APC. In 2015, Femi Gbajabiamila was the APC choice as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Today, he is the Majority Leader of the House. However, Gbajabiamila was convicted for professional misconduct by the Supreme Court of Georgia, U.S.A. in 2006 for defrauding a client of $25,000.While the government is busy grandstanding about anti-corruption in the press, its APC legislators are busy fighting over juicy committee positions in the House and Senate. Surely, juicy legislative committees are anathema to anti-corruption. What makes a committee juicy is precisely its scope for providing avenues for corrupt enrichment to legislators.APCs anti-corruption crusade has become so lopsided, it is clearly no more than an instrument for check-mating and decimating the opposition. The standard retort is to insist the singling out of PDP members is inevitable because the party had been in power for 16 years. However, some of the legacy parties of the APC, such as the ACN, have also been in power for long in the states. The EFCC has gone after PDP governors, such as Sule Lamido and Godswill Akpabio, but has ignored APC governors, such as Rotimi Amaechi and Babatunde Fashola.A judicial commission of enquiry set up by the Rivers State government maintained that, under former governor Rotimi Amaechi, a whopping N53 billion disappeared from the Rivers State Reserve Fund. However, the EFCC has not even invited Amaechi for questioning. Neither has he been excoriated in the governments media war on corruption. On the contrary, Amaechi has been awarded the juicy new super-ministry of Transport, which now includes road, rail, maritime and aviation.Similarly, Babatunde Fashola was accused of spending N78 million of government money upgrading his personal website. Among other allegations, he was said to have inflated the cost of the Lekki-Ikoyi link-bridge from N6 billion to N25 billion. However, the EFCC hears no evil and sees no evil in the Fashola case without even investigating it. Instead, Fashola was awarded the juicy new super-ministry of Power, Works and Housing.Abubakar Audu was under prosecution by the EFCC for misappropriating N11 billion of state funds when he was governor of Kogi between 1999 and 2003. Nevertheless, he was nominated as APC governorship candidate for Kogi in 2015. In spite of the fact that the EFCC had filed charges of corruption against Timipre Sylva for defrauding Bayelsa State of N19 billion between 2009 and 2012, he nevertheless became the governorship candidate of the APC for Bayelsa in 2016.How can the government expect Nigerians to believe it is sincere in fighting corruption under such hypocritical circumstances?Anti-corruption is good public relations, but it is no substitute for a viable programme for economic growth. In the final analysis, the governments anti-corruption campaign is all sound and fury signifying nothing. Making a difference means fulfilling the governments campaign promises. It means ending the petrol shortage. It means increasing electricity generation and distribution. It means providing jobs for unemployed youths. It means providing social security for the teeming poor. In these practical decibels of government, the APC is at sea. It simply has no idea what to do.
President Muhammadu Buhari has continued his foreign trips in a bid to repair Nigerias reputation which was severely damaged by the adm...

President Muhammadu Buhari has continued his foreign trips in a bid to repair Nigerias reputation which was severely damaged by the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan, the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, said on Monday.Fashola, in an article titled, PMBs foreign trips  My takeaway, also stated that Buharis intervention in the global oil and gas sector led to the recent stability in crude oil prices.The minister further stressed that Nigeria currently has the support of the worlds seven most powerful countries. He attributed this to the visit the President made during a meeting of the G7 countries in Germany, last year.On why he decided to make this public, Fashola stated that he sought to ensure that every Nigerian who cared about the country had some information about what the President was doing.He stated that barely two decades ago, Nigeria was ostracised from global events because of bad governance, adding that the country lost the respect accorded nations like ours.Explaining what transpired during the recent meeting with top government officials in China, the former Lagos State governor stated that six collaborative agreements were signed.He added, This last mentioned agreement was a legitimate coup by PMB, because the intelligence was that some West African countries were going to sign before us. PMB seized the moment. Of course, he had to apologise for our previous failures on our agreement made to part-fund four airport projects in Lagos, Kano, Abuja and Port Harcourt and the Abuja-Kaduna rail project.The Chinese had provided their agreed part of 85 per cent but the remaining 15 per cent Nigeria did not honour during the last administration. Some of the recent revelations about financial scandals estimated at $2.1bn in the Office of the National Security Adviser alone during the last administration suggest how impactful such funds would have been in delivering these critical infrastructures; but we all know what happened.This is why PMB is travelling. To repair our reputation severely damaged by the last government, and to assure our partners that Nigeria has changed. From there, to renegotiate an existing funding agreement to complete critical transport infrastructure.On the G7 meeting in Germany, the minister noted that the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, as host, had invited Buhari on his inauguration to be their guest, along with some three or four other African countries.The agenda of the meeting, he said, was global security, economy and health in the aftermath of Ebola, which was still raging in some African countries then.Fashola stated that apart from the personal aides of the President, other officials who accompanied Buhari on the trip were Governor Shettima of Borno State, General Abdulrahman Dambazau and himself.He noted that participants at the meeting highlighted the difficulty of time and the resources that it would take to develop new antibiotics and the risk to global health.The minister said, If we all appreciate how vulnerable we can be without effective antibiotics, especially our children, and if we remember how low life expectancy was and how poor global health was before the discovery of Penicillin after the World War, we will appreciate the seriousness of the platform to which Nigeria was invited. I was proud that our President was there.If the seven most powerful nations stand with you, who can stand against you? I need not say more except that I can attest that PMB has been following up on these matters, and the progress on security is visible while results in the economic front will manifest soon enough.
Audu Maikori, the founder and President of Chocolate City Entertainment Group, has released a disclaimer to clear the air about a recent post he made concerning the President Muhammadu Buhari government.







Maikori said he was wrongly quoted by some media houses who claimed that he was angry at the Nigerian president.The music executive made it known that he is not involved in any misunderstanding with the President Buhari led administration.Maikori mentioned in his statement that his untitled post on Facebook was an attempt to get the youths actively involved in politics and governance.He also stated that any attempt by the media to link him to a war with the government should be disregarded, also threatening legal action.Maikori said,
Embattled Senate President Bukola Saraki is at the moment presiding over todays Senate plenary session.

Embattled Senate President Bukola Saraki is at the moment presiding over todays Senate plenary session.Saraki came into the chambers at 10.48am and the session took off immediately with the opening prayer.The Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, Danladi Umar at the resumed trial of Senate President Saraki had directed yesterday that his trial would henceforth proceed day to day from yesterday until the conclusion of the case.According to Umar, his decision to conduct the trial day to day was in line with the provisions of section 396(6) of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, just as he said that the trial will begin 10am and end 6pm everyday.Saraki yesterday said that his trial would not disturb Senate proceedings.Senate President Bukola Saraki is currently facing trial at the Code of Conduct Tribunal, CCT following a 13- count charge levelled against him by the Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, bordering on alleged corruption and false declaration of assets.Nigerians are watching how the Senate President will handle the difficult situation of presiding over the senate and attending the daily CCT trial concomitantly.
Senator Shehu Sani (APC, Kaduna Central) who once brokered a meeting between former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Boko Haram leadership...

Senator Shehu Sani (APC, Kaduna Central) who once brokered a meeting between former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Boko Haram leadership in 2011, has said Nigeria may have to pay a very high price to secure the release of abducted Chibok girls, by releasing some captured Boko Haram members.Sani, made the suggestion while fielding questions from newsmen in Kaduna after donating assorted materials, equipment and machines to Hospitals, Schools, Women and Youths Centres valued at N42 million to the seven Local Government Areas in his constituency. He said: It is very unfortunate that we could not get this out on time. They have spent two years in captivity now. The good thing now is that the government of Muhammadu Buhari has degraded the capacity of the insurgents to hold unto any territory or to carry out their usual big scales attacks.But we may have to pay a very high price to get these girls out now. It is possible to free them. The best way to get them out is that we need to set up a special committee which has its mandates and responsibilities. It shall be tasked with the mandate to do everything possible including persuading and negotiating with Boko Haram with terms on how to get these girls out.There is the need to set up another committee to ensure that both sides abide by the rules set up for the negotiation. This committee should include international bodies like the United Nations.I think we may need to pay the highest price to get these girls out even if it means freeing some of their members in detention. I dont like this academic argument of saying, if this happens, then that thing will happen.I believe that why these girls have to continue to stay in the hands of these captives is simply because of class difference. This is the truth of the hostage situation in Nigeria. When the children of the high and mighty are abducted, or their wives and brothers are kidnapped it takes no time to secure their freedom.
Popular South African rapper, Cassper Nyovest today, Monday, April 19 has revealed he is set to launch his own phone line with top cellphone brand, AG Mobile.The act surprised fans when he took to Instagram to share a photo of his soon to be cellphone.I used to dream about days like these, the rapper said, before revealing the details. He wrote, Today I launch my cellphone with AG Mobile, then later on I fly out to Headline my first show in America. Just a lil African kid tryna get it.
Two young men, Augustine Victor, 28 and Richard Ejiofor, 20 have been sentenced to prison for stealing a Holy Bible by the Lagos Magistrat...





Two young men, Augustine Victor, 28 and Richard Ejiofor, 20 have been sentenced to prison for stealing a Holy Bible by the Lagos Magistrates court.According to reports, the presiding magistrate, Mrs J.O.E Adeyemi on Monday sentenced the duo to 60 days imprisonment without an option of fine. The suspects were charged before the court for conspiracy and stealing under the criminal code.They were sentenced and jailed after they were brought to court and they changed their plea to guilty before the court.The robbery incident took place at Igbo-Elerin junction along Badagary express in Ojo local government where the owner of the Bible was returning from a fellowship.The convicts allegedly attacked the owner, Mike John and snatched his black bag containing the Bible, thinking that the bag contained huge sums of money.They also forcefully took away the victims BlackBerry and wrist watch, unknown to them the bag only contained Johns Bible.
The Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), Umar Danladi yesterday barred Nigerian Senators from attending trial with the Senate p...





The Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), Umar Danladi yesterday barred Nigerian Senators from attending trial with the Senate president, Bukola Saraki.Danladi declared that the Senate was not on trial before the CCT, therefore the lawmakers had no reason being in court daily. Umar consequently asked them to stay back at the Senate and conduct their constitutional duties.Umar who spoke against the backdrop of the request by the counsel to the Senate President, Chief Kanu Agabi (SAN) for an adjournment to enable to senators sit, noted that it was the personality of the accused, who happened to be the Senate president who was on trial and not the entire Senate.Earlier, objecting to Agabis request, the prosecution counsel, Rotimi Jacobs (SAN) said it was shameful and disgraceful to the nation that the senators were in court as according to him, they were not parties and as such, not needed to be in court.The Senate is not on trial. The senators should sit down and do their work. They dont need to be here. It is shameful and disgrace to the nation.
WOOD-RIDGE - An officer with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is facing criminal charges for assaulting a juvenile, according to police reports obtained Tuesday by NJ Advance Media.

Thomas S. Greene (Wood-Ridge PD)

Thomas S. Greene, 48, was arrested in connection with a Feb. 17 altercation that sent the victim beaten and bloodied to Hackensack University Medical Center, according to police.

Greene is a staff director and an officer at the Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan, officials there have confirmed. NJ Advance Media is withholding the victim's name because he is a juvenile.

Police responded to a Wood-Ridge home shortly before 1 p.m. after receiving a 911 hang-up call, according to the reports.

When officers entered the house, they found the victim sitting on a couch in the living room.

The victim's "nose was bleeding and he was visibly upset and shaken," an officer wrote. The officer said he saw blood on the victim's "hands, clothes and the area of the couch where he was sitting."

The victim told officers that Greene had chased him, hit him in the back of the head, punched him in the face and slammed his head repeatedly on a floor.

When officers asked who called 911 and hung up, the victim stated that he had, according to the officer's report.

Greene denied the assault and said the injuries were the result of wrestling, according to police.

"Mr. Greene stated the wrestling stopped once (the victim) told him that his nose was bleeding," an officer wrote in his report.

Police said they took photos of the injuries before the victim was taken by ambulance to the Hackensack hospital where he was treated and released.

On Monday, Greene answered the door of his home but declined to answer a reporter's questions.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is one of 12 regional reserve banks that make up the Federal Reserve System, along with the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. The Fed is an independent governmental entity created by Congress in 1913 to serve as the central bank of the United States.

Andrea Priest, a spokeswoman for the New York Fed, said she had no knowledge of the arrest, adding she cannot not comment on personnel matters.

Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
HACKENSACK -- A Norwood woman must pay $1,500 after pleading guilty Tuesday to abandoning a dog found dead in her former home.

Jennifer Caruso pleaded guilty to abandoning a dog and two counts of failing to provide a dog with necessary care in Central Municipal Court in Hackensack.

Sully, a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog, was found dead inside Caruso's former home in Northvale on Feb. 18. Police said Sully may have eaten sofa cushions in the absence of food.

Firefighters and police found Sully after a neighbor reported that water was coming out from under a garage door and that a security alarm was sounding. Caruso had owned the home with Dustin Cook, 36, who was arrested in January after police said they seized knives, swords, guns, brass knuckles and high-capacity magazines from the home.

Caruso said she owned Sully, who was 11, for more than six years. She told Judge Louis Dinice that she was in the process of moving to a rented home in Norwood and shuttling back and forth between the two houses with her three children.

Her attorney, Dominick Succardi, said Caruso had arranged for someone to take the dog in, but that they never did. Caruso said she failed to follow up.

Dinice sentenced Caruso to the minimum fine for each of the three disorderly person charges she faced. She will enter the conditional dismissal program, under which she'll be placed on probation for six months. If she has a clean criminal history and pays the fines, the charges will be dismissed.

As the sentence was handed down, Kay Riviello, part of a group of activists who protested outside the courthouse before the hearing, shouted, "Do we realize the dog is dead? The dog is dead! She killed the dog!" Dinice ordered her removed from the building. The protesters sat next to Caruso while she waited for her case to be heard.

"I didn't know I would lose it so bad," Riviello said afterward. She is part of the New York Animal Rights Alliance America and nonprofit No Kill New York.

Christina Waller, a resident of Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y., and part of the Greater Swiss Mountain Dog Club, said Caruso should have been charged with a third-degree crime and faced jail time under Patrick's Law, an animal cruelty law signed by Gov. Chris Christie in 2013.

Caruso and Succardi declined to comment after the hearing, as did the Bergen County prosecutor who handled the case. Protesters shouted "Jennifer Caruso, animal killer!" as she left in the back of an SUV.

Myles Ma may be reached at mma@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MylesMaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
TABERNACLE -- Funeral arrangements have been set for the South Jersey farmer killed last week in a tractor accident.

Anthony Russo, 73, whose Burlington County farm marked its 75th anniversary last year, was run over by a tractor Thursday as he worked in the 500-acre Russo's Fruit & Vegetable Farm fields.

Anthony Russo III was 73 years old.

A viewing at the Church of the Holy Eucharist, in Tabernacle, is scheduled for 9 to 10 a.m. Tuesday. Burial is to be held at 11 a.m., according to Russo's obituary.

"Tony Russo was not only a pillar of our family and our farm, but also the community. Tony truly loved what he did. His passion for our farm has propelled our business to what it is today," Russo's Fruit and Vegetable Farm posted on its Facebook page the day after the accident.

"He was doing what he loved, second to only his family. Always ready with words of advice, solicited or not, Tony's words of wisdom were thoughtfully, graciously, and freely passed on to all who were willing to listen," his obituary reads.

As one the best-known farms in Burlington County, Russo's sold 100,000 cases of corn annually, according to previous media reports.

Russo had been married to his wife, Maryann, for 50 years and previously served as president or director of the Burlington County Board of Agriculture, the Tabernacle Co-Operative Growers, the Farm Credit Advisory Board, the Trenton Farmers' Market Cooperative Association and the New Jersey Farm Bureau.

He was also "instrumental" in the founding of Sun National Bank, according to the obituary, and served on its board of directors for 25 years.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Children's Home Society of New Jersey development office at 635 S. Clinton Ave. in Trenton; Tabernacle Rescue Squad No. 439 at 134 New Road in Tabernacle or the Church of the Holy Eucharist at 520 Medford Lakes Road.

Today, we mourn the loss of our husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle, friend and mentor. Tony Russo was not only... Posted by Russo's Fruit & Vegetable Farm, Inc. on Friday, April 15, 2016

Greg Adomaitis may be reached at gadomaitis@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @GregAdomaitis. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
A New Jersey man with a lengthy criminal record was convicted of raping two Las Vegas prostitutes and impersonating a police officer.

Mark Picozzi

Mark Picozzi, 50, who has ties to the Cherry Hill area, sexually assaulted one woman at The Cosmopolitan and one at the MGM Signature in January 2014, according to Review-Journal.com.

In one instance, Picozzi agreed to pay a woman $8,000 to be his companion for the day, the report said. He then told her he was a police officer and that she would not be arrested if she "did what he wanted," the Review-Journal quoted a prosecutor as saying.

The second woman came forward after seeing news reports about first. She alleged Picozzi arranged to meet her at an apartment at the MGM Signature. Picozzi sexually assaulted the woman and then stole $2,000 from her safe, the report said.

He was found guilty Monday of four counts of sexual assault, three counts of open or gross lewdness, two counts of impersonation of an officer and one count each of robbery and battery with intent to commit sexual assault.

Picozzi spent about 17 years in prison in New Jersey on charges of kidnapping, burglary, aggravated assault, robbery and parole violation, according to a 2009 Press of Atlantic City report. He has also been convicted of grand theft auto and other crimes in Florida.

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
FAIRFIELD TWP. -- A shooting on King Drive sent a man to the hospital early Tuesday, according to New Jersey State Police.

It is the second shooting reported on King Drive this month.

New Jersey State Police troopers were dispatched to King Drive Tuesday at 2 a.m., according to Trooper Lawrence Peele.

The wounded man was taken to Cooper University Hospital in Camden. The shooting is still under investigation and additional details about the man's injuries were not available

There was a previous shooting on King Drive on April 7 when 22-year-old Rickie Harris Jr. was killed.

Don E. Woods may be reached at dwoods@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @donewoods1. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
DOWNE TWP. -- A woman was killed when her vehicle struck a utility pole early Tuesday, state police said.

A woman died in a Downe Township crash, police say. (File Photo)

The accident was reported at 3:11 a.m. in the area of 842 Main St., according to New Jersey State Police Trooper I Lawrence Peele.

A woman was driving a maroon Chevrolet Monte Carlo when she apparently lost control, left the road and hit the pole.

The woman was pronounced dead at the scene.

The crash took place in the Dividing Creek section of the township. Her name was not released pending notification of her family.

Part of Main Street was closed until around 6:27 a.m. when the investigation was completed and the woman's vehicle removed from the scene, Peele said.

Troopers from the state police's Port Norris station are investigating. Per standard procedure, the county medical examiner and prosecutor's office were notified of the incident.

Bill Gallo Jr. may be reached at bgallo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow Bill Gallo Jr. on Twitter @bgallojr. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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Hakim Green, Kelvin Garnes, and Kevin Green. (Courtesy Essex County Corrections)

NEWARK -- Three city men were arraigned Tuesday on charges that they were operating an illicit drug business out of a deli, Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontoura announced.

Following a task force investigation into alleged drug trafficking on 16th Avenue, investigators executed a search warrant at the Fairmount Deli Monday morning, Fontoura said.

At the deli's front counter, detectives found 18 plastic bags filled with marijuana, and in the storage room, 138 heroin-filled glassine envelopes and 146 grams of marijuana hidden above tiles in the drop ceiling, authorities said.

Deli manager Kelvin Garnes, 52, and two cousins Kevin and Hakir Green, both 24, were arrested on various drug charges, authorities said. All three men, who are from Newark, are being held at the Essex County jail, officials said. Garnes is being held on $75,000 bail, and the Green cousins on $50,000 bail each, authorities said.

The findings of the investigation were forwarded to the Newark police, who will decide what, if any, sanctions will be placed against the deli, a sheriff's office spokesman said.

The drug task force was made up of detectives from the Essex County Sheriff's Office, and police officers from Bloomfield and Irvington.

Jessica Mazzola may be reached at jmazzola@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @JessMazzola. Find NJ.com on Facebook
NEWARK -- Two men were arrested in separate incidents over the weekend on gun charges, Acting Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose said.

Officers Jose A. Yunque, Angel Perez and Edwin Ramos responded around 1 p.m. Saturday, when a tipster told police a man armed with a gun was a passenger on an NJ Transit bus travelling west on South Orange Avenue. Ali Ivey, 21, of Newark, was arrested and charged with unlawful possession of a weapon.

On Sunday, Officer Daniel Mendez responded to a motor-vehicle accident and arrested one of the drivers, Raymond Leroy Pitts of Pennsylvania, who was dazed when police arrived, Ambrose said. Pitts was arrested on a charge of unlawful possession of a weapon after a gun was allegedly found in his car.

"I encourage those who want to get involved to use the tip-line. It is a valuable way to help in making our city safer under the cloak of anonymity. I applaud the tipster and the excellent job the

officers did in arresting both suspects," said Ambrose.

The investigation into these incidents is ongoing and the suspects' charges may be upgraded or amended. Authorities ask that anyone with information relevant to this or any other crimes contact the department's 24-hour Crime Stoppers' tip line at 877-NWK-TIPS (877-695-8477) or 877-NWK-GUNS (877-696-4867). All crime stopper tips are kept confidential.
NEWARK -- A Newark man pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to charges in a double shooting earlier this month that left a Rutgers-Newark student dead.

Marcus Feliz, 25, entered the plea through his attorney, Joseph Rotella, when he was arraigned on murder, felony murder and robbery charges in connection with the April 10 killing of 21-year-old Toms River native Shani Patel.

Another suspect, Fraynned Ramirez, 26, of Hartford, Conn., also has been charged with those offenses and he remains at large, authorities said. Neither Ramirez nor Feliz were Rutgers students, authorities said.

During Tuesday's hearing, Feliz appeared in a green prison uniform with black-rimmed eyeglasses.

Superior Court Judge Ronald Wigler said Feliz's bail amount would remain at $750,000 and he has been required to surrender his passport. Wigler said the matter would be referred to the grand jury.

Rotella said during the hearing that Feliz would cooperate with the state's request to obtain a DNA sample from him. Feliz remains in custody at the Essex County Correctional Facility.

The incident occurred at about 10 p.m. in Patel's off-campus Central Avenue apartment, authorities said. His roommate, a 23-year-old Rutgers-Newark alum, also was injured in the shooting.

Police sources have said the incident may have been a targeted, drug-related robbery.

Bill Wichert may be reached at bwichert@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillWichertNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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Bill to keep police body camera footage from public put off until next week
WASHINGTON (AP)  The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has issued a subpoena to Donald Trump. The nine-member panel sent a letter to the former president's lawyers on Friday, demanding his testimony under oath by mid-November and outlining a series of corresponding documents. The decision by lawmakers to exercise their subpoena power comes a week after the committee made its final case against the former president, who they say is the "central cause" of the multi-part effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It remains unclear how Trump and his legal team will respond to the subpoena, if at all.
The Shenandoah and Red Oak police departments have issued a warning about gas pump skimming in southwest Iowa.

The Red Oak department reports it found a card skimmer on a gas pump in the Montgomery County city. In a release, the Shenandoah department urged citizens to use caution when using your card at the pump.

The department said the skimmers are almost impossible to spot.

The safest way to use your card is to pay inside at the register, the Shenandoah police release said. Always be vigilant when checking your bank statements.

No skimmers have been reported in Shenandoah, the release noted.
SHERMANS DALEServices for Charles Roy Bones Harris, 79, of Shermans Dale who passed away on Monday, April 18, 2016 in his home will be held at 4:00 PM on Monday, April 25, 2016 in the New Life Assembly of God, 397 Bridgeport Road, Landisburg, Pa. 17040.Burial with military honors by the Perry County Honor Guard will be in the church cemetery. Fellowship will follow the service in the church fellowship room.
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Rita Matos knew when she saw the Middlesex Township home that she wanted it to be hers.

Even with full-time and part-time jobs, however, the single mother of three also knew there would be challenges in making sure she got that home.

It had been a process that she started more than two years ago  a process that didnt gain traction until she stumbled on a link on Google for help for first-time homebuyers in Cumberland County.

The link took her to the Cumberland County Housing and Redevelopment Authorities First-Time Homebuyers Down Payment and Closing Cost Assistance Program. After filling out the application, qualifying and attending the required two workshops, Matos found herself looking in earnest for a new home.

When she found that home and went through the motions to close on the house on March 29, she wasnt alone.

Attending the official closing was Pat Mrkobrad, authorities housing programs manager, who had what every homeowner is happy to seea check.

Everybodys happy to see me, Mrkobrad laughed.

The assistance from the county program helped pay for the closing cost for Matos new home.

Theres no way I could have afforded the down payment and the extra $5,000 that went to closing, Matos said. Without the program, I wouldnt be where I am now.

Program

In addition to its management of public housing and numerous other programs, the Cumberland County housing authority offers the first-time homebuyers program.

Mrkobrad said the program has been offered in the county since 1998, and she estimates that 619 households have been assisted since that time.

The program provides assistance to qualified first-time homebuyers who purchase homes in Cumberland County. The program can provide up to $3,000 for those who have a household income of 80 percent to 100 percent of the countys median income, and up to $5,000 for those who have a household income less than 80 percent of the countys median income.

The assistance is in the form of a five-year, no interest, forgivable loan that can be used toward the purchase price of the house and/or closing costs. If after five years the homebuyer still owns the home, the entire loan is forgiven.

For five years, the housing authority is listed on the mortgage, but after that 5-year timeframe, the countys lien is removed.

Mrkobrad noted that the program is for first-time homebuyers, but that definition can cover quite a few people. A first-time homebuyer is defined as someone who has never owned a house or has not owned a house in the last three years. This can include members of a recently divorced couple who had previously and jointly owned a home. Since neither owned the home solely on their own, they would also be considered a first-time homebuyer in the program. Also, someone who owns a mobile home but not the land would also fit the definition since mobile homes are not considered permanent housing, Mrkobrad explained.

Process

Those who fit the income requirements for the program can apply through the housing authority. Those who are accepted to the program must complete two workshops that are held every month.

Mrkobrad said the workshop is a Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency-certified first-time homebuyer program, so technically those who are looking for their first homes but are not in the housing authority program can still attend the workshops and get the certification that will last for two years.

Though there are short wait lists for attendance in the workshops, which has about 25 people a month, the wait list that is more of a concern is the one for the monetary assistance the county can provide.

We release funds on a quarterly basis, Mrkobrad explained, noting that the program was budgeted with $130,000 this year, which she estimates will help assist 30 to 35 people.

Given the assistance doled out earlier in the year, Mrkobrad said no funds will be released until July 1. The funds come from fees collected from the recording of mortgages and deeds.

We have about a dozen people on the wait list, she said. I do go to the wait list a lot. If theres a settlement and the person cant use all of the funding  we reserve the maximum amount  then we can help another person.

That happened with AnnMarie Espenshade who moved into a home in Lemoyne in February. Though she and her husband qualified for $3,000 in assistance, they only needed the $1,000 to help with the closing costs.

It definitely made a difference, she said. I was able to fix up some of the things in the house. The house is 104 years old, so there were some repairs. We just happened to get the last bit left at the end of the year.

Both Espenshade and Matos noted that the workshops provided vital advice that saved them money, and the program itself was relatively easy to navigate from the application process to closing.

Its very simple compared to the whole homebuying process, Espenshade laughed. It was probably the easiest part.

As a single mother with three kids, if Im able to do it, I want others to know they can do it, too, Matos said.
Multiple fire companies responded to a blaze at an unoccupied building in Carlisle Monday night which engulfed the surrounding neighborhood in smoke.

Around 7 p.m., the structure on the southwest corner of West Pomfret and South West streets caught fire. Most of the flames appeared to be coming from within the roof of the building, although fire officials were not available as of press time to confirm the fires origin.

Firefighters were seen chipping away at the roof trim and using circular saws to cut into the top of the structure. Heavy smoke forced a constant rotation of respirator equipment, and police had cordoned off the intersection from the public.

The building was unoccupied and had been undergoing renovations. It was previously a dance studio, according to neighbors.

The affected structure shares a wall with the building to the south, which contains five apartments, although the fire did not spread to the residences.

I actually didnt know what was happening until I looked outside and people were yelling at me to come down, said Becca Feldman, one of the residents.

Feldman, a Dickinson employee, and her roommate, Maureen Weidman, a law student, said the buildings shared a back exit. Firefighters were seen running hoses up through the womens apartment to access the adjacent building.
Thomas Butler once felt compelled to raise Cain over Abel in the pages of the Pennsylvania Gazette.

The Carlisle gunsmith took out an ad in the Philadelphia newspaper asking the public for leads on the whereabouts of the runaway black slave with the Biblical name.

In the Oct. 13, 1763 ad, Butler described the fugitive as being middle size, middle age and a smith by trade. Somehow Abel had managed to escape from the Butler family property at Lot #61 in Carlisle on or about Sept. 7, 1763.

The small stone building that sits today in Dickinson Avenue just west of North Pitt Street is known locally as the Butler Gun Shop. It was the subject of a July 5, 1975 newspaper column by Paul Hoch and a Pennsylvania Historic Resource Survey Form prepared by Nancy Van Dolsen in March 1986.

Hoch reported how the current building occupies the rear portion of the original Lot #61 drawn when the town was first laid out in 1751. This land was officially deeded to Butler in 1761  a year after the Irish immigrant moved with his wife and children from Lancaster to Carlisle.

It is said Butler lived elsewhere on the property while operating a gun shop from the small building. Hoch wrote how Butler had such a reputation for being a skilled gun repairman that he appeared on official lists as an armorer and had his services recommended to soldiers of the Cumberland County militia.

An active member of the Church of England, Butler was one of four men who in 1765 petition the Pennsylvania assembly for a grant to finish the construction of what became the St. Johns Episcopal Church on the Square.

But perhaps his most notable accomplishment was being father to five sons who distinguished themselves so much in the American Revolution that Gen. George Washington referred to them as The Five Butlers, a gallant band of patriot brothers, Van Dolsen wrote on the survey form.

Father and sons became more commonly known as the Fighting Butlers. As for the stone building, it is the subject of some debate among historians. Van Dolsen said there is evidence to suggest the current stone building did not exist until the 1830s  well after the Butler family had sold off the lot. Elsewhere in the survey she mentioned how the current stone building was supposedly the Butlers gun shop built in 1764.

Architecturally the stone building exhibits stylistic features more common in early 19th century structures than building from the colonial period, Van Dolsen wrote in the survey. Over the years it functioned first as a gun shop, then as a primitive dwelling and then as a rental property, Hoch said. But only relatively recently was even electricity installed Hoch wrote in 1975.

Regardless of whether the current building is the original gun shop, the structure has an association with an important Carlisle area tradesman and his warrior sons.
Beti Bachao Beti Padho Scheme extended to 61 more districts with low child sex ratio

Published: April 19, 2016

The Union Government has extended the Beti Bachao Beti Padho Scheme in additional 61 districts across 11 States and Union Territories with low Child Sex Ratio.

It was announced by the Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi while addressing the function in New Delhi.

About Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Scheme

The scheme is designed to address the issue of declining Child Sex Ratio and related issues of disempowerment of women through a life cycle continuum.

The main objective is to prevent gender biased sex selective elimination by strict enforcement of laws with stringent punishment to violators.

It was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January 2015 from Haryana in 100 districts of the country to address the issue of declining Child Sex Ratio.

The Union Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD), is the nodal agency for the implementation of the scheme.

Month: Current Affairs - April, 2016

Topics: Beti Bachao Beti Padhao Scheme  Government Schemes  sex ratio  Social Issues  Women Related Issues

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RIC Forum pitches to deepen cooperation in combating terrorism

Published: April 19, 2016

The 14th meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Russia, India and China (RIC) Forum have vowed to deepen cooperation in combating terrorism.

The meeting was held in Moscow, Russia and was attended Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Union Minister of Foreign Affairs Sushma Swaraj, and Minister of Foreign Affairs of China Wang Yi took.

Key highlights of 2016 RIC Forum

The Ministers discussed various aspects of trilateral cooperation on global and regional issues.

They pitched for progress in strengthening the international legal framework underlying the modern world order and neutralisation of common challenges.

They also have pitched for setting up of a broad counter-terrorist front with the UN playing a central role and stepping up efforts to combat global drug threat.

They also discussed on creating a new security and cooperation architecture in the Asia-Pacific region.

They also exchanged views to the situation in the North Africa, Middle East including Syria, and the situation in Afghanistan and Ukraine.

The Ministers have also decided to hold the next trilateral meeting in India.

RIC Forum: It is a trilateral grouping of Russia, India and China that has met annually since 2002. In recent years, the RIC has functioned as a complement to other frameworks involving three countries and including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Month: Current Affairs - April, 2016

Topics: China  India  RIC Forum  Russia  Terrorism  UPSC

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WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court turned away a challenge Monday to Googles online book library from authors who complained that the project makes it harder for them to market their work.

The justices let stand lower court rulings in favor of Mountain View, California-based Google and rejected the authors claim that the companys digitizing of millions of books amounts to copyright infringement on an epic scale.

Lower courts have said that Google can provide small portions of the books to the public without violating copyright laws.

The Authors Guild and individual authors first filed their challenge to Googles digital book project in 2005. Google Inc. has made digital copies of more than 20 million books from major research libraries and established a publicly available search function.

Writers involved in the lawsuit include Jim Bouton, author of the best-seller Ball Four, Betty Miles, author of The Trouble with Thirteen, and Joseph Goulden, author of The Superlawyers: The Small and Powerful World of Great Washington Law Firms.

In October, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York agreed with a judge who concluded that Google was not violating copyright laws when it showed customers small portions of the books. The authors said the project would spoil the market for their work.

The appeals court said that Googles snippet view, at best and after a large commitment of manpower, produces discontinuous, tiny fragments, amounting in the aggregate to no more than 16% of a book.

The case is The Authors Guild v. Google, 15-849.
Aldi is hiring throughout Northwest Indiana for jobs that start at $12 an hour or $54,900 for management trainees.

The German-based grocery chain is having a job fair from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Radisson Hotel at Star Plaza, 800 E. 81st Ave., in Merrillville. The company is looking to hire store associates at pay rates of $12 to $13 an hour, shift managers at $16.50 to $17.50 an hour, and manager trainees at a salary of $54,900 to $56,190 a year.

Aldi also will have warehouse job fairs between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. Friday and 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. Saturday at its warehouse at 197 E. Division Road in Valparaiso. Warehouse selector jobs pay $15 an hour.

Job seekers must be 18, have a high school diploma or GED, and be able to work between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. Monday through Saturday. The discount grocery store chain prefers applicants with retail experience.
Long-standing local businesses are a true testament to the relationship they have with the community in which theyre located. The Town of Munster is living proof, as it is home to many time-honored, iconic businesses. This year, several of them are celebrating milestones; while some moved to Munster after being established in a nearby city or town, some have called Munster home since day one.

What accounts for their longevity? Most say its due to reciprocity within the community; Munster residents support local businesses, which, in turn, support community initiatives. For example, printing shop Miss Print at 8244 Calumet Avenue has been located in Munster for 30 years, and owner Amanda Baltensberger showed her commitment to her customers and Munster residents when she organized a relief effort during the flood of 2008.

Adapting to Change

There are other Munster businesses that have endured the test of time, many of which give back to the community in a variety of ways. According to Brian McShane, president and CEO of McShanes Business Products and Solutions, 1844 45th Street, the business has resided in Munster for 40 years, and that is after spending 55 years in Hammond. Started by McShanes grandfather in 1921, the company was originally called the Northern Indiana Printing and Stationery Company, or as Brian quips, It was the original N.I.P.S.Co.!

McShane credits the companys success, longevity and long-standing clients (some as long as 80 years!) to adapting to change by updating product and service offerings, offering personal service, establishing relationships and providing community support. You name it, weve supported it over the years, he says. McShanes also employs to 45 to 50 employees, all of them local.

Commitment to Quality

In an era where restaurants come and go, Giovannis, 603 Ridge Road, has displayed its staying power. According to co-owner Mary Leary, Giovannis is celebrating 50 years of serving (literally!) the community in July. Started by Marys parents, Procopio and Nancy LoDuca, in 1966, Giovannis now has two dining rooms and a lounge area where a piano player still entertains weekends. Mary and Nancy took over running the restaurant after Procopios passing 20 years ago. A key to our longevity is that we still make everything from scratch and use fresh ingredients, Leary says. Though the menu has changed, the high quality of the food is still the same. Everything is baked fresh every day, including their famous garlic rolls that are also sold to-go by the dozen.

Leary also attributes Giovannis success to treating everyone like family and being involved in the community. The business supports the schools, fire department, parks and recreation, and more.

Giovannis 50th anniversary party is planned for Sunday, July 10, and will be open to the public, with the time to be announced at a later date.

Reputation for Service

Insurance, primarily commercial, has been offered at Don Powers Agency, Inc. in the same location at 911 Ridge Road since 1964. Don Powers started with a vision, selling insurance to builders and developers and eventually developed land himself. In fact, it was Powers who developed much of Munster.

The agency has been owned by Donna and Joe Williamson for the last eight years. According to vice president Dan Markovich, What makes us stand the test of time is that we have a reputation for service. Markovich emphasizes that the people are key. We bring experience and knowledge. Were a brand.

Agency president Donna Williamson is mindful of the past and credits relationship building with customers, the community and employees. Our success today is thanks to past employees, she says. Were passionate about what we do today and we are proud of our past.

Were in business to know peoples business, Markovich says. The agency serves clients ranging from a custom fedora maker who sells to Hollywood, to a patron who collects cars. We write policies in 15 states and much of our business comes from referrals, he says.

Williamson says the agency furthers the legacy of Don Powers, owing much of its longevity to community involvement. We give back to the community and we support other local businesses.

Giving Back to the Community

Giving back to the community has been an integral part of Gailmard Eye Centers business plan since they opened in 1976, says office manager Jill Harder. This past year, staff provided free vision screenings at the Munster public grade schools as well as at the October Trick or Treat event at Centennial Park. In addition, they run a booth at the National Night Out Against Crime in August and sponsor many school and local events.

In return, Dr. Neil Gailmard says the Munster community has shown remarkable support, because the practice was built around word-of-mouth and referrals from happy patients. The community is the reason we exist, Gailmard says.

Gailmard Eye Center, 630 Ridge Road, has always had a Munster location, and though the business has been in three different offices, theyve always been on Ridge Road. Neil Gailmard grew up in Munster, so thats the reason for the location, Harder explains.

Harder notes the optical department at Gailmard Eye Center has been a leader in providing fashion eyewear, bringing styles to Munster previously only available in Chicago. The practice has been featured in numerous national professional publications, Harder says. It is one of the largest and most successful independent optometry practices in the U.S.

On April 27, Gailmard Eye Center celebrates its 40th year in business at its annual trunk show. For the fourth consecutive year, eyeglass frame representatives will show their entire collection, in addition to the 2,000 frames currently in stock, and discounts will be offered. Harder says, It will be a big party and the public is welcome.

There are many other long-standing establishments in Munster, such as Peoples Bank, Gateway Business Systems, McMahon & Associates, Certified Public Accounting, Largus Printing, Burns-Kish Funeral Home and Cremations, and more, reinforcing what residents already know: that Munster is a great place to live, work . . . and stay.
Congress wants the power to review whether China will be recognized as a market economy, which would weaken steel tariffs that protect U.S. steelmakers.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., introduced legislation that would give Congress the authority to approve whether China has become a market economy, which the U.S. Department of Commerce currently decides.

China has been deemed a non-market economy since it first joined the World Trade Organization 15 years ago. Now each country can decide whether to treat it as a market economy or as a controlled economy thats subject to countervailing and anti-dumping duties.

Today, across our economy, American businesses are in crisis under the weight of billions of government-subsidized Chinese exports. Meanwhile, American companies attempting to do business in China have faced severely unfair treatment by the Chinese government, DeLauro said.

The congresswoman said passage of her proposed The China Market Economy Status Congressional Review Act would be a critical step in ensuring U.S. trading partners play by the rules.

Congressman Pete Visclosky and the Congressional Steel Caucus are urging the administration to deny China market economy status, which they say would be devastating and catastrophic to American steelmakers.

China has a proven record of cheating and not adhering to market based principles, Visclosky said. Chinese state-owned enterprises have unlimited financial resources from the Chinese government and have no environmental or labor standards.

The Congressional Steel Caucus argues China is not a market economy because of the extent to which government controls industrial production and prices, and the lack of free bargaining between labor and management, among other factors.

Congressional Steel Caucus Chairman Tim Murphy said the recent successful effort to impose tariffs on dumped steel imports has to be followed by keeping Chinas Non-market Economy status in full effect.
Region dog owners and their companions have found many reasons to fall in love with Munster.

They can visit the three-acre dog park, enjoy some extra special pet pampering, or walk around the beautiful parks in the dog-friendly town.

Helping Everyone

The Humane Society Calumet Area, located at 421 45th Ave. in Munster, provides opportunities for adoption and volunteering.

Jennifer Lesniak has lived in Munster 17 years and loves volunteering at the Humane Society. I walk the dogs as often as I can, so I get to play with and get to know each one, she says. It feels great to know that I'm giving them some time out of the kennel and helping them get used to leashes and socializing. The volunteers and staff at HSCA are amazing and truly care about the animals.

Lesniak also appreciates Munsters great walking trails and that people take pride in the town and clean up after their dogs. I love my town and all the dog lovers in it, she says.

Chris Marsh, of Munster, adopted his dog Bobo from the Humane Society. I think the Humane Society is awesome and does a lot of good. My Bobo came from there and he was a rescue from a dog fighting ring, so they are helping everyone.

Munsters many parks also make Bobo happy. We like to play ball. He will run forever if he can, Marsh says.

Welcome Almost Everywhere

One of those parksMunsters Centennial Park dog park, which opened in 2009attracts fans from around the Region. Its three acres and varied landscape, along with the human friendships forged while pets play, are what makes it popular, says Barb Holajter, superintendent of recreation at Munster Parks and Recreation. The dogs get along and its like a social activity for both the owners and the dogs, she says.

Holajter says that during its conception, many towns saw benefits to having a dog park. Munster was lucky to have a beautiful area for it with trees and hills, she explains. Dogs are important members of the family and its somewhere to treat your dog.

Dog park memberships can start any time and last for a year from registration day. Vaccination records, a membership form and proof of residency (for discounted rates) must be taken to Munster Town Hall, 1005 Ridge Road. Fees for residents are $40 for the first dog and $25 for each additional dog; nonresidents pay $115 for the first dog, $35 for the second and $25 for the third. Thanks to a new partnership with the Town of Highland, its residents now also receive the discounted rate.

Outside of the dog park, Holajter says dogs can walk in any of the towns parks and that it provides doggie mutt mitts along walking trails and in parks. Munster is very dog friendly, she says. Theyre invited almost everywhere.

Pampered Pets

Pet focused businesses in town provide pampering to pets and convenience to pet parents.

Suzie Smith owns Wags 2 Whiskers, a full-fledged grooming shop that opened in 2006 in Munster. She says the dog park and several other parks make Munster stand out for dog lovers, and felt that the town was so pet friendly, it would be a great place to offer her pet grooming services.

Pooches can have a regular groom and owners can opt for extra services such as tooth brushing, medicated baths, nail painting and hair dying. They have also done colored mohawks and other fashion-forward looks, says Smith, a Munster resident.

Play All Day

The abundance of dogs in Munster made Kaia McShane, co-owner of 4 Pawz Only, feel there was a need for dog boarding and daycare. She purchased a pet business at 1830 45th Street, formerly run as a Dogtopia franchise, and turned it into a locally and privately owned boarding, daycare, grooming and training facility.

4 Pawz Only opened about a year ago and has seen some major changes, making it popular, McShane says. I feel like the daycare is the most popularwe are full with daycare almost every day. People where both parents work full time dont like the idea of their dogs being home alone and locked in a laundry room or crate. They enjoy that they can drop their dogs off and let them play all day and pick them up after work.

Others like the socialization their dogs receive during the day. Its an open daycare environment, McShane says. Dogs have to pass an evaluation to play at the facility.

(4 Pawz Only) is so user friendly for our community . . . its your one-stop place, she says. While pets stay in daycare or boarding, they can have a grooming appointment. Each paw on the facilitys logo represents a facet of its care offered. McShanes goal of adding obedience training (the fourth paw) to the roster begins this month.

Well be able to offer some one-on-one training to break those habits that bother you, she says.

McShane, who lives in Munster, says the town and pets go well together. It has that community feel and its the American way. Everybody has kids, dogs. People also like the exercise and getting out and walking their dogs. It gives them a reason to get outside. We have such nice, safe neighborhoods to walk your dog.

The business also accepts donations for the Humane Society Calumet Area. We try to help each other within the community, she says.
Union Government releases commemorative coin to mark Tatya Tope martyrdom day

Published: April 19, 2016

The Union Government has leased a commemorative coin of 200 rupees and a circulation coin of 10 rupees on freedom fighter Tatya Tope.

It was released by the Union Culture Minister Dr. Mahesh on the occasion of the Martyrdom Day of Tatya Tope in New Delhi.

The Union Ministry of Culture has been celebrating the 200th Birth Anniversary of Tatya Tope during 2015-16 in association with State Government of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.

About Tatya Tope

Tatya Tope was one of the notable generals in Indias First War of Independence (1857-58) i.e. Revolt of 1857.

He was born as Ramachandra Pandurang Tope in Yeola in Nashik District of Maharashtra.

in Yeola in Nashik District of Maharashtra. He was most intimate friend of Nana Dhundu Pant (also known as Nana Saheb) of Bithur who was adopted son of Peshwa Baji Rao-II.

Tatya Tope had revolted against British after Nana Saheb was deprived of his fathers pension by then Governor General Lord Dalhousie under the Doctrine of Lapse in 1851.

In May 1857, after the rebellion political storm had gained momentum he had won over the Indian troops of the East India Company stationed at Kanpur.

During the revolt, he was able to establish Nana Sahebs authority in Kanpur and became the Commander-in-Chief of his revolutionary forces.

However after Kanpur was re-occupied by British, he had shifted his headquarters to Kalpi and joined hands with Rani Lakshmi Bai and led a revolt in Bundelkhand.

But he was not able to consolidate his position and was defeated by General Rose in a memorable battle in Gwalior in which Rani Lakshmi Bai suffered martyrdom.

Later, he had launched a successful guerrilla campaign for over a year in the Sagar and Narmada Khandesh regions and in Rajasthan after losing Gwalior to the British.

He was captured by the British Forces on 7th April, 1859 and after a hurried trial for waging war against the East India Company.

He was hanged to death on 18th April 1859 at Shivpuri, Madhya Pradesh.

Month: Current Affairs - April, 2016

Topics: History  Persons in News  Tatya Tope

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GARY  Morgan Johnson, a 15-year-old Thea Bowman Leadership Academy sophomore, said she is rethinking her career possibilities.

That's due to a newly implemented STEM program at the John Will Anderson Boys & Girls Club site in Gary where Johnson has been a member for four years.

"This program has been interesting," Johnson said. "As we go along it may change my mind about being a doctor and (I might) consider a career in engineering."

Johnson was just one of several club members and officials in attendance Monday at a ceremony in which Boeing company officially awarded the Boys & Girls Clubs of Northwest Indiana $62,000 to implement the STEM program.

STEM is an educational program developed to prepare primary and secondary students for college and graduate study in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In addition to subject-specific learning, STEM aims to foster inquiring minds, logical reasoning, and collaboration skills, officials said.

Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson said Boeing officials had approached her about a year ago about the possibility of awarding a grant and right away she thought of the John Will Anderson Boys & Girls Club site.

The John Will Anderson Boys & Girls Club, which opened in late 2013 at 2700 W. 19th Ave., is located at the former site of the abandoned Tolleston Middle/High School.

"It's a beautiful building and this was a community effort. We knew this was the right place for the initiative," Freeman-Wilson said.

Freeman-Wilson said that some 35 years ago there was a similar educational movement to encourage engineering.

"We want to see that movement again," Freeman-Wilson said.

Michael Cassel, director of global corporate citizenship for Boeing, said when he met with the mayor and then toured the John Will Anderson site he knew it was a good choice.

"Boeing is really excited about investing in the club and in the city of Gary," Cassel said.

Cassel said this year marks the 100th anniversary of Boeing and that Boeing employs about 100 people at the Gary Airport.

"We've been around a long time and we want to think about the next generation of engineers. We hope a lot are here today," Cassel said.

Regina Cavazos, program director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Northwest Indiana, said the STEM program was initiated at John Will Anderson three weeks ago for members ages 6-18.

There are 30 students enrolled now but eventually 65 young people will take part, Cavazos said.

The program, with a current topic of Mars, entails 90 minutes per week of education taught to those in cadet, junior and senior levels.

The two facilitators, Alicia DuBose and Gloria Sanders, attended informational classes at the Museum of Science and Industry prior to the start of the programming, Cavazos said.
GARY  A 40-year-old Black Oak man was punched in the face Sunday by someone looking to collect a debt from his son, and the man's house was damaged in a fire several hours later, police said.

Gary police said whether the two incidents are connected remained under investigation.

Police were dispatched about 8 p.m. to the man's home in the 2400 block of Hobart Street for a disturbance.

A man arrived at the house and said the 40-year-old resident's son owed him money, police Lt. Dawn Westerfield. When the 40-year-old replied he had no knowledge of the debt, the man punched the 40-year-old, she said. The man's injuries were not serious.

Police returned to the home about 11:30 p.m. after the 40-year-old man's son reported a fire there. Neither the man nor his 21-year-old son were in the home at the time of the fire, Westerfield said.

A 38-year-old family friend who also lives at the house was inside and escaped without injury, Westerfield said.

Anyone with information is asked to call Gary police detectives at (219) 881-1209. To remain anonymous, call (866) CRIME-GP.
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CROWN POINT  The city hopes to adopt a parks impact fee by the end of the year to keep up with the demand for park services from new home owners.

The council's ordinance committee endorsed the tax at a recent meeting. Like the wheel tax proposal, which the committee also endorsed, it would only affect those creating the problem and would be assessed as part of the building permit process.

Mayor David Uran said the city has about 150 new homes sold a year, which could generate about $300,000 for the parks, depending on the fee.

Chief of Staff Greg Falkowski said, "The parks are a large draw and a big reason people come here, and we need to think about the maintenance and making them better."

Uran said, "St. John has had an impact fee for several years, and it has not had a negative impact."

The mayor said some people argue they should not pay the school taxes when they don't have kids in the schools. It's tougher to make that claim when the Crown Point parks have trails and other features for people of all ages. Falkowski said the city has a master plan for a trail system that the impact fee can help implement.

City Attorney David Nicholls said he will try to get the ordinance to the council in time for the May meeting. In order to start collecting the money in 2017, the fee must be approved this year, but the fee can't be set until a parks master plan is done that includes an assessment of the future needs and the cost of those needs.

That study can take several months, but Falkowski said the city will start now to investigate what needs to be done to complete the impact fee process. Councilman Chris Retson asked what happens when the city is fully developed and no more fees are collected.

Uran said the city is working to make sure the existing parks, like the Sportsplex, are self-supporting or as close to it as possible. He said the parks also generate value for businesses through the people who come to the city to use things like the Sportsplex.

Nicholls said the parks also create a quality of life for the residents that you can't put a dollar value on.
EAST CHICAGO  An 18-year-old Gary man was arrested Saturday by NICTD Transit Police after he allegedly took a woman's cellphone.

Chief Robert Byrd said transit police initially were called to the East Chicago station of the South Shore commuter rail system about 6:30 p.m. Saturday concerning a man who was refusing to pay his fare. When Officer Charlie Mathewson arrived, the situation had escalated to robbery after the suspect grabbed a Terre Haute woman's phone and fled the train according to police.

The suspect, Devon Thomas, of 643 Harrison St., ran into the nearby Roxana neighborhood. Mathewson searched the area and found Thomas at Roxana Drive and Walsh Avenue. The owner of the cellphone identified both Thomas and the phone, and Thomas was charged with robbery and theft by the Lake County Prosecutor's Office.

Although Thomas had refused to pay his fare, Byrd said he had $47 with him at the time he was arrested.
GARY  The brush fire that burned a large area along the east side of Cline Avenue, halted traffic and sent smoke plumes that were visible on the National Weather Service's Chicago Doppler Radar apparently was caused by sparks from crews grinding the rails to smooth the burs.

Gary Fire Department Chief of Operations Mark Jones said the fire spread from the Canadian National tracks, where the crews were working, to the Indiana Toll Road plaza.

The sparks from the grinding ignited dry vegetation on the hottest day of the year so far in Northwest Indiana.

Jones said ponds and other wet areas between the tracks and the toll plaza helped stop the fire, which was under control by 2:30 p.m. and declared out by 6:30. No one was injured.

The Fire Department returned Tuesday afternoon and doused the area because it was smoldering, he said.

Monday's black plume of smoke was visible for miles, and drivers slowed or pulled over on Cline Avenue to see the fire.

An abandoned shed burned, but firefighters were able to protect train cars from damage. No roads had to be closed during the fire. East Chicago Fire Department assisted Gary in fighting the fire.
HOBART  The City Council has adopted an ordinance limiting fires for land management purposes.

According to the measure, controlled burns are permitted in areas with agricultural zoning classifications, and those burns must be at least 1,000 feet away from any residential area. There are no restrictions for prescribed fires performed by government entities, such as the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, U.S. Forest Service or Natural Park Service, the ordinance states.

The council's ordinance committee last year had examined a similar measure, but it decided to take no action on it at that time because there were no issues caused by fires for land management purposes.

The panel decided to examine the matter again this year following a prescribed burn that occurred in late February on private property near Lake George.

City officials said the controlled burn resulted in numerous calls and concerns about the activity and its proximity to homes.

Councilman Dave Vinzant said the new ordinance prevents unsafe situations that could occur if a prescribed burn wasn't handled properly in a dense area of the city.

Resident Jen Woronecki-Ellis said she encouraged the council to reject the burning ordinance. Woronecki-Ellis said the measure would affect land restoration efforts in many natural areas of the community.

She said the February controlled burn was handled appropriately, and the Hobart Fire Department was notified prior to it taking place.

Woronecki-Ellis said many residents living near the area of the February burn were contacted following the situation, and they expressed no concerns about the activity. Some indicated they are in favor of controlled burns, she said.

Resident Sandy O'Brien, who has done prescribed burns for more than 20 years in Hobart, was involved in the one that occurred in late February, Woronecki-Ellis said.

She said O'Brien is a highly skilled professional, and she has received state training for controlled burns.
MERRILLVILLE  Police said they found a missing 2-month-old girl Tuesday in Gary, but the search for the child's mother continued.

The baby, Morgan Williams, was placed into the custody of Child Protective Services, Merrillville police Detective Cmdr. Jeff Rice said.

Rice declined to disclose who the child was found with, but said the baby was not injured.

Morgan's 23-year-old mother, Diamond Lewis of Merrillville, and Lewis' 1999 four-door tan Buick Century remained missing, he said.

Lewis last spoke to her father on the phone April 11, and the father reported Lewis and her daughter missing Sunday, police said. Lewis talks to her father regularly and it's unusual for her to be out of contact with him for more than a day or two.

Lewis was described as black, about 5-foot-3 and 165 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes.

Lewis' vehicle has an Indiana license plate WTK341.

Anyone with information about Lewis, her whereabouts or where she was last seen is asked to call Detective Cpl. Nate Dillahunty at (219) 769-3531.
GARY  Dozens of motorists pulled over to watch Monday as flames tore through tall grass east of Cline Avenue near the ramp to the Indiana Toll Road.

The large brush fire in Gary sent up a plume of smoke that was visible from miles away and even showed up on the National Weather Service's Chicago Doppler Radar. A large swath of land appeared blackened from the flames, which could be seen from Cline Avenue.

Gary Fire Department Chief of Operations Mark Jones said he was leaving lunch when he noticed the smoke.

We saw it and responded to it, he said.

Jones said about 2:30 p.m. that firefighters had the blaze under control. He later said the fire was extinguished about 6:30 p.m.

The fire was not a controlled burn, he said.

There was some initial confusion about it possibly being a controlled burn, but he was told by officials at the scene that it was not, he said.

Jones said its suspected work being done near the railroad tracks may have sparked the fire, but its cause remained under investigation.

There are several sets of train tracks in the area. Jones said the fire started near the tracks and spread west toward Cline Avenue through dry, tall grass.

Once that wind hit it, it spread quickly, he said.

Firefighters had not yet determined Monday how many acres were affected, he said.

Matthew Marcum caught this footage with his drone from the Hammond Civic Center parking lot.

An abandoned shed caught fire, but firefighters were able to protect train cars in the area from the flames, Jones said.

Firefighters check on the contents of train cars, and if they contain anything flammable they become a high priority to protect, he said.

Gary firefighters responded to a separate fire involving a train car Monday afternoon near the Toll Road and Buchanan Street, but that blaze was not connected to the brush fire, he said.

The brush fire jammed traffic on northbound and southbound Cline Avenue about 2:30 p.m. as drivers slowed down. Motorists also were pulled over on the ramp from northbound Cline to the Indiana Toll Road.

Gary police said no roads in the area were closed, but onlookers were causing traffic delays.

Lake County sheriffs spokesman Mark Back said the departments helicopter assisted.

The East Chicago Fire Department also provided assistance at the brush fire, Jones said. No injuries were reported.
MICHIGAN CITY  Two high ranking correctional officers at the Indiana State Prison have been placed on emergency suspension pending the outcome of an investigation into a complaint filed by an inmate.

Indiana State Prison Superintendent Ron Neal opened the investigation of misconduct in connection with an incident March 30 in which inmate James K. Utley, 47, was accused of attacking and stabbing two corrections officers with an edged weapon. Neither officer was seriously hurt, and Utley was hospitalized with unknown injuries.

A police spokesman could not confirm if Utley is the one who filed the complaint or the reason he was hospitalized. Police would only say the state police are investigating in collaboration with the prison office of investigations and intelligence.

Utley is serving 170 years for the shooting deaths of a 26-year-old New Washington, Indiana, woman and her 3-year-old daughter.
 



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PORTER  An early morning fire on Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore property is under investigation.

National Park Service fire crews responded with local fire departments to a reported vegetation fire in the area of Porter Beach this morning, according to Micah Bell, IDNL fire information officer.

At approximately 5:25 a.m. Porter Fire Department requested the national lakeshore and other fire agencies for vegetation fire near Wabash Avenue and Johnson Beach Road in Porter.

The Porter Fire Department had already been in the area investigating a report of smoke in the Indiana Dunes State Park before the vegetation fire was discovered.

The fire area is approximately one acre in size and included a vacant home owned by the National Park Service, said Bell, and is currently under investigation by National Park Service Law Enforcement.

Other fire departments involved were Chesterton, Ogden Dunes, Burns Harbor and Beverly Shores.
VALPARAISO  Porter County Auditor Vicki Urbanik is hosting an upcoming workshop on tax abatements.

Porter County Means Business: Tax Abatements from A to Z will be held from 9 a.m. to noon on Friday in Room 205 of the Porter County Administration Building, 155 Indiana Ave. Sign-in begins at 8:30 a.m.

The workshop will explore various aspects of abatement deductions, including how abatements work, the process for establishing abatements and the filing requirements for businesses receiving the deductions. Guest speaker will be Steve McKinney, Field Examiner with the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance.

The workshop is open to the public and is geared toward local government officials, businesses, economic development officials and anyone else interested in tax abatements.

This workshop should be helpful for anyone interested in tax issues in general and economic development and abatements in particular," Urbanik said. "Tax abatements can be complex, with questions over the timing of the abatement schedule, compliance issues and the values that are eligible for the deduction. My office has also received calls from businesses about the deadlines and the details involved with the required forms."

Urbanik said the workshop will allow businesses and local officials to get an update on the abatement process, requirements and deadlines.

"This should help promote a better understanding of how tax abatements work, not just for companies already receiving abatements but also for any proposed abatements going forward," she said. One of my objectives in the Porter County auditors office is to enhance outreach efforts with local government units, taxpayers and other stakeholders, including our business community. Helping to promote an understanding of how abatements work is one way to help achieve this objective.

Urbanik said the last time a workshop of this type was offered by the auditor's office was in 2009 under former auditor Jim Kopp.

"Given the length of time that has gone by, changes in the law and new companies on board with abatements, I felt it was definitely time to have another workshop," she said.

To RSVP or for more information, email jvoelz@porterco.org or auditor@porterco.org.
Lake and Porter county commissioners perform the executive-branch roles of county government, essentially serving as the mayors for unincorporated areas of their districts.

County councils are the legislative and fiscal body of Indiana counties.

Here are our picks for these county offices heading into the May 3 primary races.

Lake County commissioner, 3rd District

The two Lake County candidates receiving our endorsement for Lake County commissioner exhibited a willingness to reach across popular or party lines for the good of their constituents  both in their answers to our formal endorsement questions and in their actions in previous local government and community roles.

In Lake County's 3rd District race, incumbent Mike Repay faces challenges from Lake County Councilwoman Christine Cid, Hammond resident and political first-timer Dan Reed, Highland resident Richard Alyea, and Griffith resident David Gonzalez.

Only Cid and Repay participated in our endorsement interviews.

We endorse Repay.

The incumbent went back on a campaign promise in his inaugural term when he chose not to veto the Lake County local option income tax.

Some see that as a shortcoming. However, Repay showed courage in allowing the tax to proceed after getting a clearer idea of the county's financial situation and need for the additional revenue.

We wish Repay were more open to consolidating the county's satellite offices and courthouses in Gary, East Chicago and Hammond with the main county facility in Crown Point. But we also feel Repay has handled his first term with professionalism and has worked for the good of his constituents.

His main challenger, Councilwoman Cid, has distinguished herself on the county's legislative panel as a fiscally responsible advocate for her constituents. We would like to see her continue in that role but feel Repay is better situated to continue as commissioner.

Lake County commissioner, 2nd District

In Lake County's 2nd District, three Republicans  Schererville Town Councilman Jerry Tippy, Lake County County Councilman Eldon Strong and perennial Schererville local government candidate David Langmesser  seek their party's nod to face incumbent Democratic Commissioner Gerry Scheub in the November general election.

Only Tippy and Strong participated in our endorsement interview.

We endorse Tippy for the GOP nomination.

Tippy, one of two Republicans on the Schererville Town Council, has shown an ability to reach across party lines for the benefit of his constituents. Among his accomplishments, Tippy recently joined a bipartisan move, putting the town's long-held garbage contract out to bid. It saved Schererville taxpayers thousands of dollars by lowering the per-household collection rate.

Tippy, a project manager for a steel fabricator, also would bring a business sense currently lacking in county government.

Among Tippy's professional duties are both writing and soliciting bids, a skill that would serve him well in evaluating county government business.

We wish Tippy had exhibited more cooperation with the county's long-running consolidation of E-911 services. Schererville and Cedar Lake held out from the process, instead forging their own dispatch service. Tippy was, in part, behind the holdout.

The political back-and-forth between the Schererville-Cedar Lake camp and the Lake County E-911 camp has been counterproductive to the goal of overall public safety.

But we believe Tippy's strengths outweigh his weaknesses.

Councilman Strong, a former police officer and longtime public servant, is an ardent advocate for south county constituents. But his uncompromising approach to government could get in the way of accomplishing positive outcomes in a commissioner's role.

Porter County commissioner

There's a contested race this spring for the Republican nomination for Porter County commissioner, North District. Democrat Jeff Chidester is unopposed and will face the Republican victor in November.

The three Republican candidates all have decent credentials. Jeff Trout is a Chesterton Town Council member, John Cannon is on the Portage City Council and Jim Biggs is on the Porter County Council. Biggs also is a former commissioner. He said he would serve only two consecutive terms, and then he left office as promised.

Each of the candidates talked about their five-year vision for the county. Biggs, however, has always been focused on long-term plans, even when he was a commissioner in the 1990s. For all the talk of running government like a businesses, having an operating plan, like Valparaiso Mayor Jon Costas, is essential.

Health insurance is, as Biggs put it, "the county's biggest albatross" when it comes to spending. Biggs said the commissioners should have audited the entire program before it was overhauled with the same players involved.

Cannon is focused on making county services more convenient to Portage residents. Trout leans more toward the Chesterton area. Biggs, however, seems more focused on the county as a whole.

We endorse Biggs for Porter County commissioner.

Porter County Council

There are five Republicans running for the three nominations for at-large seats on the Porter County Council. Those candidates are Travis Gearhart, Jeff Larson, Ralph Levi, Howard O'Connor and Rich Parks. We invited all five Republicans to meet with The Times Editorial Board; only Gearhart and Levi showed up. There are three Democratic candidates for three seats on the council, so that race isn't competitive.

We were especially impressed with Gearhart's attitude and aptitude. He has served on the Hebron Town Council. He now lives in Chesterton.

Gearhart wants to use a portion of the uninvested proceeds from the sale of Porter Hospital to improve the county's business climate and improve the quality of life. He wants to listen to people throughout the county for input on setting the direction for Porter County's future. Periodic public forums encourage people who might not attend council meetings to have a voice in their government.

Levi spoke to specifics in saying, "Occasionally you have to say no, and that's not happening now." Some expenses that should have been anticipated are being treated as additional appropriations, and that isn't right.

Levi is a retired county employee, having worked in both the sheriff's department and coroner's office. Gearhart offers a fresh perspective from a young, actively involved resident.

We realize this is a vote-for-three race, and we haven't met three of the five candidates. However, we're impressed by Gearhart. He earns our endorsement for the Republican nomination for an at-large seat on the Porter County Council.
VINCENNES, Ind.  Police have identified a Vincennes man who was killed when his car collided with an Indiana Department of Transportation dump truck.

Indiana State Police say 38-year-old Derek Kelly died at a hospital following the crash about 7 a.m. Tuesday along U.S. 41 in Knox County.

Police say the driver of the INDOT dump truck, 22-year-old Raigen Bailey of Farmersburg was on a local road approaching U.S. 41. After stopping at a stop sign, she began crossing the northbound lanes to turn south when she pulled in front of the northbound car.

Bailey was released after being treated at a hospital.
A Brooklyn man is facing bribery and conspiracy charges after officials say he used his connections in the NYPD to obtain more than 150 gun licenses.

Investigators say 44-year-old Alex Lichtenstein offered cops thousands of dollars to help him get gun licenses for customers, who wouldn't otherwise qualify for them.

As a result, three officers have been reassigned within the department.

Officials say Deputy Inspector Michael Endall, seen here, was transferred from the License Division and is being reassigned to an administrative job.

Sergeant David Villanueva and officer Richard Ochetal have also been transferred out of that division and are on modified duty.

Mayor de Blasio says his administration will consider further punishment as the investigation continues.

"The bottom line is we'll look at each situation as it emerges. I don't deal with hypotheticals. I believe anyone that does something wrong should suffer the consequences, as some of out police individual chiefs are at this point."

Lichtenstein faces up to 15 years in prison.

The arrest comes as four high ranking police officials were reassigned earlier this month.

The officers were moved amid allegations into whether or not they took gifts in return for favors.
More than 30 people are under arrest for their alleged role in a drug ring at several NYCHA complexes in East Harlem.

The sting was part of a joint effort between the NYPD and FBI.

Authorities say the busts occurred early Tuesday morning at the Washington Houses, East River Houses and Metro North Plaza.

Prosecutors say the suspects are part of two violent rival gangs that dealt drugs and carried guns.

They were arraigned before a federal judge in Lower Manhattan.

Residents and the police say the area will be a little safer now.

"There's a bunch of gang violence going out here in the community so just to get them off the streets is something to see," said one resident.

"Everybody's sick and tired of the violence," said another. "It's  come on. We have too many children."

"With narcotics comes violence and taking these 32 people out this morning's gonna go a long way to reducing the violence in this neighborhood," said James O'Neill, chief of department for the NYPD.

Police say the investigation intensified after NYPD Detective Randolph Holder was shot and killed last October near one of the housing complexes.

The defendants are being charged with conspiracy to distribute narcotics and possession of firearms.
Another year, another ridership record in the subway, but that level of success is also creating headaches for riders and a transit agency struggling to keep up with the crowds. NY1's Jose Martinez filed the following report.



Squeeze in, straphangers. Subway ridership is on the rise again.



"It's crowded, constantly," said one subway rider. "You just won't get a seat."



The MTA on Monday announced that 1.7 billion riders packed into the subway last year, an increase of 0.9 percent, the highest level since 1948.



Weekday ridership averaged 5.7 million, but on 49 days, more than 6 million people used the subway, compared to 29 days in 2014.



Officials said the additional riders are putting new stress on an already-strained system. Even a minor disruption can now trigger major delays, and maintenance work is getting ever tougher to schedule.

"Historically, we try to do work during the off-peak hours. But we're seeing a bump in off-peak hours as well," said MTA spokesperson Kevin Ortiz.

Ridership grew in every borough served by the subway, led by Brooklyn, where it increased 1.4 percent. Rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods contributed to the gains.



On the G line, ridership surged 8.9 percent weekdays, including a whopping 17-and-a-half-percent jump at the Greenpoint Avenue stop in Greenpoint.



After years of galloping growth, ridership on the L line ticked up by less than 1 percent, but the number of passengers using stations on the nearby J and M lines in Bushwick soared.



"It looks like those customers are slowly shifting over to the J, M and Z lines, using that line as an alternate to the L," Ortiz said.



Riders on the M say they've noticed.

"It's almost like a little bit claustrophobic, you know," said one M train rider.



In Lower Manhattan, ridership grew by nearly 4 percent. The new Fulton Center hub is now the city's eighth-busiest station.

In spite of the increased pressure on the subway system, MTA officials say they're confident that measures they're taking to increase capacity will lighten the load on riders in the future, like finishing the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway and upgrading signal technology on some lines so trains can run more frequently.

"You know, we're not going to stop growing. We'll continue to build and grow out as ridership increases," Ortiz said.


Tango, with the dramatic proximity it gives two dancers from brow to instep and its dramatically weighted walk, can be the most sexually charged of dance forms. Its romantic, smoldering and very often tragic  as if destiny were steering the couple. But Gabriel Misse, who has been coming regularly to New York since 2008, is all laughter and song. On Saturday night, he was chuckling boyishly around the Dardo Galleto Studios as he prepared the recordings to which he was to dance.

When Guillermina Quiroga (a queen of tango since the last century), wearing a long-sleeved, calf-length dress of emerald green, arrived to join him for their first number, her eyes sparkled with the same laughter as she looked at him from across the floor. For all the audience enthusiasm, no joy in the room could match the delight these two found in each other.

They danced four duets  one more than tango couples usually deliver (the fourth was a sweeping, rapid valse-tango)  all improvised, yet with feats that looked like formal choreography. In their first number, they suddenly knelt at the same moment (a wonderful touch that passed in an instant), and she ended another dance by arriving, in a flash, to sit on his hip.

These exemplary dancers are both Argentine, but their partnership, arranged by Karina Romero, of the Dardo Galletto Studios, is so far exclusive to New York, where they first appeared together in November. Theyre ideally matched in physique, temperament and style. Within the opening moments of their first dance, they both showed how many shades of footwork they have: the soft, slow semicircles she traced on the floor with an extended toe (he soon echoed them); the needle turn (one foot pointed into the floor) in which she revolved him; the whiplash strokes of his leg in the air at calf height. At one moment, she released him while he did a single pirouette, within inches of her, before quickly returning to the tango embrace.
Richard Smith, a British painter whose idiosyncratic explorations of form and color embraced both Pop Art and Color Field painting, making him one of the most distinctive, indefinable artists of the 1960s and 70s, died on Friday in Patchogue, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 84.

The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Betsy.

Mr. Smith was widely regarded as one of the most original and accomplished British artists of his generation, with a ravishing sense of color and formal restraint that stood in marked contrast to the more emphatic, polemical American style.

Like many young British artists in the 1950s, he became entranced by the visual clamor and aggressive packaging of American commercial culture while at the Royal College of Art, where his fellow students included the Pop pioneer Peter Blake.
Henry Threadgill, who on Monday was awarded this years Pulitzer Prize for music, is a composer and bandleader of intense, unyielding originality, nobodys idea of a compromise. An alto saxophonist and flutist with a distinguished career in the post-1960s American avant-garde, he has amassed a body of work with its own functional metabolism, perpetually humming in a state of flux. He has certain affinities with, but no particular allegiance to, the jazz tradition.

In for a Penny, in for a Pound, Mr. Threadgills award-winning album, is a suite-like composition released on two discs by Pi Recordings last year. Its an intricate and thoroughly enigmatic piece of music, but above all it stands as a showcase for his longtime flagship, Zooid. (The group takes its name from a biological term for a cell that is capable of movement independent of its parent organism.) From the first moments of the title track, which opens the album, you experience a distinctively slanted feeling, the byproduct of an unstable but carefully coordinated form of counterpoint. The music has formal rigor and forward pull, but it doesnt provide an orienting framework, or any clear distinctions between composition and improvisation.

When Mr. Threadgill got the call on Monday that he had been awarded a Pulitzer, he was beyond surprised.

I was speechless, Mr. Threadgill, 72, said in a telephone interview. I said, What for?

Asked how he categorized his music, or where it falls on the jazz-avant-garde continuum, he demurred.
Andre Comploi, a spokesman for the opera house, said in an email that it did not appear to be an intentional slight. He said that when Ms. Gheorghiu realized that Mr. Kaufmann would be repeating the aria, she returned to her dressing room. The confusion, he said, stemmed from the fact that there was no pause for applause after the encore, as there had been at the previous performance, and that apparently made Ms. Gheorghiu late for her entrance.

Representatives for Ms. Gheorghiu did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Ms. Gheorghiu has been accused of prima donna behavior in the past. She once balked at wearing a blond wig while singing the part of Micaela in Franco Zeffirellis production of Bizets Carmen during a Metropolitan Opera tour of Japan. That led Joseph Volpe, who was then the companys general manager, to tell her that the wig goes on, with or without you.

In the next performance the wig went on without her. But for the following performances, she and the wig both appeared.
One of the messiest mergers in recent memory reached new levels of messiness late Monday.

Energy Transfer Equity  after several attempts in the last few months to sever its pending deal to merge with the Williams Companies  said that its law firm, Latham & Watkins, would not render a certain tax opinion if the transaction were closed today. Williams, after consulting with its own legal advisers, disagreed with that position, according to Mondays filing.

That disclosure sent Energy Transfers stock 10 percent higher Monday, while Williamss shares declined 5 percent, a sign that investors have become more skeptical that the once-$38 billion deal to merge the two pipeline companies will be completed.
Theranos, the embattled blood-testing laboratory, said on Monday that federal officials were conducting a criminal investigation into the company, adding to a series of questions from officials about its inner workings.

In a note to outside partners, the company said that the Justice Department had requested documents and that the investigation was active. The note also said that the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating the company.

The note detailed a growing list of inquiries from federal and state officials, many of which have looked into the companys claims about its technology. The United States attorneys office in San Francisco, which Theranos said was conducting an investigation, declined to comment, as did the S.E.C. Theranos would not elaborate about the exact nature of its investigation.

The company said the investigations began after The Wall Street Journal published articles about Theranos.
But as the state churned toward its most competitive primary in years on Tuesday, both men continued to stump hard for Mrs. Clinton, though in distinct ways, with the governor taking advantage of the statewide scope of his office, and the mayor working the streets and airwaves of the city.

That upstate-downstate dynamic continued in last days of the campaign, as Mr. Cuomo barnstormed around two upstate cities on Monday with Mr. Clinton, while Mr. de Blasio went small, with a pair of local radio and television appearances in the city, after a Sunday afternoon spent speaking at churches in Brooklyn for Mrs. Clinton, and with the candidate at a get-out-the-vote event.

For me this is like the old days, Mr. Cuomo said in a phone interview between stops on Monday in Buffalo and Rochester, noting that he had worked and traveled extensively with the president and his wife during the 1990s. So now its just me and him, and its a lot of fun.

Mrs. Clintons campaign has not had occasion in the past primaries to lean so heavily on the combination of a Democratic governor and a big-city Democratic mayor. (Part of that is demographics: Mrs. Clinton has won only three states with Democratic governors, though one of those governors  Terry McAuliffe of Virginia  is an old friend.) And the power and peril of that one-two punch is evident: Both mens words and actions  especially the racially insensitive joke  continued to provide fodder for conservative groups that sought to tarnish Mrs. Clinton by linking her to perceived missteps by the governor and mayor.
As Jahmal Lightfoot tells it, Rikers Island correction officers pummeled him without any words  or any mercy  as he curled up into a fetal position inside a cell to shield himself from their repeated blows.

Basically it was open season for them to do what they wanted, Mr. Lightfoot testified on Monday in State Supreme Court in the Bronx.

Mr. Lightfoot, 31, returned to the witness stand for the second day and continued a harrowing, first-person account of the savage beating that he received in July 2012, when, Bronx prosecutors contend, the officers decided to teach him a lesson. He recalled that when he tried to cover his face with his hands, he was kicked in the groin and then officers pinned down his arms and legs.

Nine current and former correction officers are on trial in the beating of Mr. Lightfoot and an attempted cover-up. The most serious charge is attempted gang assault in the first degree, which carries a sentence of up to 15 years in prison. Other charges include attempted assault, tampering with physical evidence, falsifying business records and official misconduct.
Across New York Citys 520-mile shoreline, shimmering towers are replacing docklands and warehouses and factories. In barely a decade, On the Waterfront has given way to Miami Vice. But as these areas foster much-needed housing and a renewed connection to the water, much of their character, traditions and jobs are lost.

What if the city did not have to choose? Imagine a 21st-century factory floating above shops and promenades, with a tower of apartments for the working-class and well-off cascading dozens of stories above  vertical integration of a very different sort.

It used to be that people lived over the shop. Now, as more crowd into New York, the de Blasio administration wants to marry housing and manufacturing once again. And while developers are typically the ones tearing down old plants for new apartments, a number of the citys top builders are lining up for the chance to combine them, on an almost five-acre site on the waterfront in Long Island City, Queens.

If successful, these projects, along with a novel set of design guidelines created by the city, could shape new developments in old industrial neighborhoods from the South Bronx to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Staten Islands North Shore.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority outlined plans on Monday for a new fare payment system to replace the MetroCard. A look at what New York City subway and bus riders could expect from the proposed change:

Q. Why does the authority need a new system?

A. The MetroCard, introduced in 1993, is obsolete, and maintaining the old infrastructure is increasingly expensive. While other cities have embraced modern payment systems, the authority has encountered setbacks in its efforts to upgrade its system. Hillary Clintons difficulty swiping a MetroCard on the campaign trail this month illustrated the problems many commuters experience at subway turnstiles.

Q. How would the new fare payment system work?

A. The exact details are still being worked out, but subway and bus riders will be able to pay the fare by tapping a bank card or smartphone on an electronic reader. The authority has solicited bids from companies to install the system, and it plans to award the contract by the end of the year.

Q. When could riders start using it?

A. The authority hopes to start the new payment system during summer 2018, though an independent engineering consultant cautioned on Monday that the timeline might be overly optimistic.
Harold L. Wood, the first black member of the legislative body of Westchester County, N.Y., and later the first black State Supreme Court justice in the county, died on Thursday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 96.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Lavern Jill Wood.

A Republican lawyer, Justice Wood was elected to the countys 45-member Board of Supervisors in 1958, representing Mount Vernon, a city of about 75,000. At the time, the New Haven Railroad tracks were becoming a racial dividing line, with blacks, who had largely migrated from the South, living south of the tracks, and whites, many of whom had arrived from New York City, settling north of them.

We call this the wonderful world of Westchester, so lets make it so, Justice Wood exhorted the board in 1967 when he bluntly warned of racial turmoil and pleaded for better housing and job opportunities for blacks, who then accounted for 10 percent of the countys population.

Like many American cities that summer, Mount Vernon did become a scene of racial unrest. Mount Vernon has rows and rows of substandard tenements, Justice Wood said after touring a site of looting. This is the root of the disturbances.
After a three-day search, the police on Monday arrested a 53-year-old man who is suspected of fatally stabbing a fellow resident at a Manhattan homeless shelter and then slashing a cabdriver in the neck the next day.

Investigators found the man, William Smith, who has an arrest history stretching back to the 1980s, on the street in Astoria, Queens, around 11 a.m., the police said. Charges were pending.

The killing on Friday, at the 30th Street Mens Shelter in Kips Bay, reignited concerns about violence in New York Citys overcrowded shelter system, the site of a string of deadly attacks this year. The police said Mr. Smith stabbed Marcus Guerreiro, a 56-year-old shelter resident, in the right side of his neck and choked him with a wire.

Other residents saw Mr. Smith washing blood off his hands.

On Saturday around 12:30 a.m., Mr. Smith hailed a cab in Queens and asked to be taken to a Holiday Inn in the Corona neighborhood, the police said. When the cab arrived, Mr. Smith pulled out a sharp object, demanded money and, after the driver refused, slashed him in the neck before running away. Mr. Smith left behind a cellphone and wallet with his ID.
HILLARY BUSTED



This is a must-see, just-discovered clip from last week of Hillary condemning international tax havens ensnared by the Panama Papers leak. This is hypocrisy in its purest form, as detailed in this blockbuster story released over the weekend...

"Some of you may have just heard about these disclosures about outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere. We're going after all these scams and make sure that everyone pays their fair share here in America. I'm gonna hold them accountable and we're gonna have a special effort to track all these resources wherever they might lead."

And what if they lead back to your foundation?

---

CLINTON FOUNDATION EXPOSED BY PANAMA PAPERS

SPECIAL REPORT FROM MCCLATCHY DC

WASHINGTON -- Hillary Clinton recently blasted the hidden financial dealings exposed in the Panama Papers, but she and her husband have multiple connections with people who have used the besieged law firm Mossack Fonseca to establish offshore entities.

Among them are Gabrielle Fialkoff, finance director for Hillary Clintons first campaign for the U.S. Senate; Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining magnate who has traveled the globe with Bill Clinton; the Chagoury family, which pledged $1 billion in projects to the Clinton Global Initiative; and Chinese billionaire Ng Lap Seng, who was at the center of a Democratic fund-raising scandal when Bill Clinton was president and is now on his way to prison. Also using the Panamanian law firm was the company founded by the late billionaire investor Marc Rich, an international fugitive when Bill Clinton pardoned him in the final hours of his presidency.

Hillary Clinton condemned what she called "outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting."

Now, some of this behavior is clearly against the law, and everyone who violates the law anywhere should be held accountable, she said, speaking at the AFL-CIO convention recently. But its also scandalous how much is actually legal.

Continue reading at McClatchyDC...

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New York City announced plans on Monday to combat the spread of Zika virus, a largely mosquito-borne disease that has spread rapidly in the Western Hemisphere and raised concern that it may cause birth defects in infants if their mothers are infected during pregnancy.

The citys plans are based on a health department program to combat the spread of West Nile virus, a relative of Zika that is also spread by mosquitoes, the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement.

We will spare no effort to protect pregnant New Yorkers from the devastating consequences of Zika, and we ask New Yorkers to help us by taking simple steps to get rid of standing water where mosquitoes can breed, Mr. de Blasio said in the statement. We also ask pregnant women who may have been exposed to Zika to talk to their doctors about getting tested.

The citys plans include a campaign to spread testing and prevention information in the five boroughs, an expansion of mosquito surveillance programs to go after insects that may carry the disease, and testing services for pregnant New Yorkers and local mosquitoes.
Since the 2008 economic recession, the financial sector has attracted plenty of righteous scorn. Mr. Sanders has harnessed that disgust and resentment to great effect. The Occupy Wall Street movement has played a large role in making Mr. Sanderss message more broadly acceptable. Marina Sitrin, one of the early organizers of the movement, said it had normalized looking at the roots of the problem rather seeing them as individual.

Still, Democrats who work in finance have been frustrated by Mr. Sanderss broad anti-Wall Street rhetoric. The people I spoke to noted that the Wall Street Mr. Sanders rails against isnt just made up of plutocratic hedge-fund types and predatory lenders, but money managers trying to help middle-class workers retire comfortably, and bankers trying to help small-business owners get a loan.

Todd H. Baker, a lawyer and lifelong Democrat who has worked as an executive at three large banks, wrote recently in The New York Daily News that Mr. Sanderss campaign should not smear people like him as part of the problem, or call campaign contributions from the financial sector a sign of corruption.

This election cycle seems to be proving that Wall Street has lost some of its political influence. In the first half of 2015, securities and investment workers gave $30 million to try and elect Jeb Bush. But piles of Wall Street money couldnt save Mr. Bush, who proved to be a startlingly inept candidate ill suited for the Trump era.

Securities and investment employees have donated roughly $21 million to Mrs. Clintons campaign and the outside groups that support her, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. By comparison, that sector has given $12 million to Mr. Cruz and $3 million to Mr. Kasich; it doesnt even crack the top 20 list of industries that have donated to Mr. Sanders.

During her time representing New York in the United States Senate, Mrs. Clinton had a mixed record on financial regulation. She proposed several bills to crack down on Wall Street, but they died without garnering support from her colleagues. In October 2008, as the economy was mid-nosedive, Mrs. Clinton was one of 39 Democratic senators who voted for the $700 billion bailout of the financial system, a fact that Mr. Sanders wont let her live down.

Whatever happens today in New York, it does seem as though voters trust in large institutions on Wall Street  along with the news media, Congress and political parties writ large  has eroded to the point of invisibility.
Disaster. Incredible economic burden. The biggest job-killer in this country.

Central to the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz has been the claim that the Affordable Care Act has been a complete failure, and that the only way to save the country from this scourge is to replace it with something they design.

Its worth examining the big myths they are peddling about the Affordable Care Act and also their ill-conceived plans of what might replace it.

Millions of people have lost their insurance: In January, Mr. Cruz claimed that millions of Americans had lost their health insurance because of the health reform law. He even claimed to be one of them, saying our health care got canceled because Blue Cross Blue Shield left the individual market in Texas.

Insurers did stop offering some plans after the law took effect, including those that didnt provide required benefits like maternity care or that charged higher premiums to older or sicker people. But people with those plans had the opportunity to sign up for others. And over all, the law has drastically reduced the number of Americans who lack health insurance. According to the Census Bureau, the number of uninsured Americans dropped by 10 million between 2010, when the law passed, and 2014. While critics said employers might stop offering health insurance because of the law, three million people actually gained coverage through their employers between 2010 and 2014.
President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil is likely to be kicked out of office based on allegations that she used money from state banks to balance the budget. But that fundamental issue appeared almost an afterthought as lawmakers in the Chamber of Deputies cited a litany of grievances before resoundingly supporting a motion to impeach her by a vote of 367 to 137.

The case against Ms. Rousseff is about much more than taking liberties in balancing the budget, which other elected officials in Brazil have done without drawing much scrutiny. In essence, it is a referendum on the ruling Workers Party, which has been in power since 2003. Ms. Rousseff, who was re-elected in 2014 for a four-year term, is being blamed for the countrys economic crisis and the overlapping corruption investigations that have ensnarled much of Brazils political establishment.

The motion to impeach now moves to the Senate, which can approve or reject it with a simple majority. If the Senate votes to impeach Ms. Rousseff next month, she will be forced to step down temporarily while senators consider the allegations against her. If she is found guilty, Vice President Michel Temer, a former ally of Ms. Rousseff, who has turned against her, will take power.

The president faces two main choices. She can call for early elections, appeasing those who believe that the countrys political crisis is unlikely to be solved until a new leader is elected. Or she can fight the impeachment and hope to somehow regain the publics trust.
The choice Angela Merkel had when Turkeys imperious president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, demanded that Germany prosecute a comedian was a variation on the dilemma posed by a kidnapper: Paying the ransom solves the immediate problem but sets a dangerous precedent.

Chancellor Merkel had to decide between appeasing Mr. Erdogans outrageous demand or potentially losing a deal with Turkey that promised some relief from the refugee crisis. Under the agreement between the European Union and Turkey, Ankara has agreed to accept refugees turned back from Greece in exchange for more aid and reopening talks on Turkeys accession to the E.U.

Ms. Merkel allowed the case to proceed. Now the question is what Mr. Erdogan  or some other miffed potentate  will demand next.

Ms. Merkel can argue that she chose the lesser of two political evils, that the ceaseless flood of refugees was undermining the European Union and that all she did was to clear the way for German courts to determine whether to prosecute the satirist, Jan Bohmermann, under an archaic law against insulting foreign leaders. Mr. Bohmermann, a comedian and host of a late-night talk show, deliberately did just that on March 31 when he broadcast a poem that had Mr. Erdogan committing sex with animals and kicking Kurds and beating up Christians while watching child porn.
FRONT PAGE

An article on Saturday about a split on social issues between urban and rural parts of the South misstated the number of times that Houston has elected an openly gay mayor. It is three times, not two.

NATIONAL

An Associated Press report in the National Briefing column on Friday about a recommendation that Leslie Van Houten, a former Charles Manson follower, be paroled, omitted, in some editions, a step in the parole process and misstated the number of times she has appeared before a parole board. The recommendation goes to Gov. Jerry Brown if it is upheld after administrative review by the parole board; it does not immediately go to Mr. Brown. And Ms. Van Houten has had 20 parole hearings, not 21.



An article on Sunday about David Gowan, the speaker of the Arizona House, referred incorrectly in some editions to the location of Pinal County where Paul Babeu, a rival of Mr. Gowans for the United States House, is sheriff. It is near  not along  the Mexican border. The article also misstated the year in which Representative Ann Kirkpatrick, who is vacating her United States House seat, defeated Andy Tobin, a former Arizona House speaker. It was 2014, not 2012.

NEW YORK

An article in some editions on April 8 about a supporter of Mayor Bill de Blasio who began a 15-day jail sentence misstated the charges on which he was convicted. The supporter, Ari Noe, was found guilty of third degree sexual abuse and attempted forcible touching, not forcible touching.
In San Franciscos Chinatown, Brandon Jew, the former chef of SoMas hip, biodynamic tavern Bar Agricole, has just opened a contemporary Chinese restaurant called Mister Jius  in a two-story space that formerly housed one of the oldest and most opulent Chinese restaurants in the city. His organic and locally driven banquet menu, the first of its kind in the neighborhood, is rooted in memories of growing up as a Chinese-American boy in the mostly Asian suburb of Outer Sunset, and visiting Chinatown with his parents. We want to eat the way we believe in now, but we also want ties to our family and memories of grandma cooking, he says. Guests dine family-style, choosing between Northern California-ish versions of traditional Chinese fare, like cheong fun (a rice-noodle roll typically served as dim sum) dressed with plump fillets of Mendocino uni and organic sprouts, or a steamed-clam-and-ramp egg custard. The house specialty is a tea-smoked Peking duck shuttled in from a Sonoma County farm just an hour north of the city. And instead of fortune cookies, dessert options include frozen soy milk sprinkled with jasmine granita and rhubarb.

What kept me motivated was getting this space back to its glory days, Jew says. I really want this to be my home, and I wanted to make it nice. At the restaurants friends and family event earlier this month, Jews longtime friend, the celebrity chef Danny Bowien of Mission Chinese, showed up with Champagne, a pound of caviar and three buckets of Popeyes chicken. The guy knows how to party, Jew says, and then, after a beat: When it comes down to it, I just want people to come back to Chinatown and have fun again. In the same spirit, Mister Jius bar director Danny Louie shares below the recipe for the restaurants Happiness cocktail exclusively with T.

Mister Jius Happiness Cocktail
IBM took a $1 billion charge in the quarter for severance and other payments for workers who are being laid off. Analysts have estimated the number of affected workers at 14,000 or more worldwide.

For the last decade, IBM has taken yearly charges of $500 million to $1.5 billion for these cutback programs, which it calls work force rebalancing. As it is laying off workers in some parts of the business, it is typically hiring elsewhere. Yet in the last two years, IBMs total employment has declined 12 percent, to 377,757 workers at the end of last year.

Martin Schroeter, IBMs chief financial officer, characterized the big restructuring charge as a step to accelerate IBMs moves into new fields. He said there were many thousands of open positions at IBM, and that by the end of the year, the companys total employment could be as high as it was at the end of last year.

This is part of the shift into new growth areas that require different skills, said Mr. Schroeter, who added that 90 percent of the layoffs in this round were outside the United States.

IBM has also changed the way it reports its financial results. Starting with the first quarter, the company is breaking out its data analytics business  cognitive solutions, in IBMs phrase  as a separately reported division, and adding another group that includes its cloud computing business. Hardware and software are no longer reported as individual businesses, but are blended into the other divisions.

IBM says it made the reporting change to more accurately reflect its recast collection of businesses, like Watson, which is part of its cognitive unit.

But analysts say the new reporting structure complicates the task of tracking some effects of IBMs strategy. For example, it is not easy to tell if its overall software business  new products and old  is growing or shrinking.

The businesses IBM has targeted for growth and investment, like Watson and cloud, grew by 14 percent in the quarter. Still, these so-called strategic initiatives, while showing encouraging gains, are not yet large enough to turn around the fortunes of the company as a whole.
Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, facing persistent criticism of his handling of the water crisis in Flint, on Monday took home five jugs of filtered tap water from the city and said he planned to drink it and cook with it for at least the next month.

Mr. Snyder said he would restock on Flint water during regular trips to the city, which is reeling from elevated levels of lead and other contaminants after a state-approved switch of drinking water sources in 2014. He said he hoped his decision to drink tap water would alleviate some of the skepticism and mistrust that has left many residents scared to drink or even shower.

Flint residents made it clear that they would like to see me personally drink the water, so today I am fulfilling that request, Mr. Snyder said in a statement.

Mr. Snyder, a Republican, is following a familiar playbook for elected officials seeking to make a point. Gov. Hugh L. Carey of New York once offered to drink a glass of PCBs amid concern about pollution in Hudson River water. Mayor Jane M. Byrne of Chicago briefly moved into the Cabrini-Green public housing project in the 1980s during a wave of gun violence there. And more recently, according to The Denver Post, Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado boasted in 2013 of having once ingested fracking fluid as he argued for state regulation of natural gas production.
NORTHWEST

Washington: Changes in Leak of Nuclear Waste Draw Concerns

Fluctuations inside a huge tank of radioactive waste raised concerns on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and workers prepared Monday to pump out the area of the leak. A federal contractor said the amount of waste that has been leaking between the two walls of the underground tank for several years grew substantially over the weekend. None of the waste appears to have escaped into the environment, the contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, said. But workers were trying Monday to determine why the waste that leaked between the tank walls rose by about eight inches on Sunday, then dropped by half an inch. Hanford, near Richland, for decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons, including the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Workers are preparing to pump the waste back inside the tank. It is Hanfords oldest double-shell tank and since March was being emptied of its 750,000 gallons of radioactive waste because of the leak. Less than 100 gallons of waste was estimated to have leaked into the gap between the walls in recent years, drying in three separate patches. But Hanford officials said that on Sunday an alarm sounded after the waste level rose.

(AP)

SOUTH

Tennessee: Move to Restrict Bathroom Use Is Withdrawn

A bill that would have required students in public schools and universities to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their sex at birth has failed after a sponsor pulled the measure Monday until next year. The move came after intense opposition from businesses and gay, lesbian and transgender rights organizations that called the measure discriminatory and amid questions of whether the state would lose more than $1 billion in federal education funds. The proposal is part of a wave of such legislation across the country. Supporters maintained they were trying only to protect privacy.

(AP)

WEST

Nevada: Ex-Guard Is Charged

The Nevada attorney general on Monday charged a former prison guard trainee with manslaughter in the shooting death of a handcuffed inmate in 2015. The guard, Raynaldo-John Ramos, is accused of firing shotgun blasts that killed Carlos Perez Jr. while he and another inmate brawled in a hallway at High Desert State Prison outside Las Vegas. Two other guards, who have resigned, were not charged. A lawyer for Mr. Perezs family says the guards staged a gladiator-like scenario to let two handcuffed inmates fight before Mr. Ramos shot them. The second prisoner was wounded. Mr. Ramos was fired.

(AP)
It used to be that you couldn't get anyone who worked in an office in the city on the phone on Friday afternoons. All the bigwigs leave town early to go to their weekend homes. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the movers and shakers were all working four-and-a-half-day weeks.

In corporate America, there was a new unofficial holiday: Friday afternoons in the summer.

Then, a few years ago, it started getting difficult to get anyone on the phone all day Friday during the summer. "Why bother to come in Friday morning?" must be the thinking. "Why sit through traffic just to leave three hours later?"

Not long after that, it started getting hard to snag an exec on the phone on Thursday afternoon. If you're not going to work on Friday, you might as well beat the traffic and drive up to the weekend house Thursday night, am I right? So then, the people you couldn't get on the phone Friday afternoons, you also coudln't reach on Thursday afternoons.

They're at their weekend houses, relaxing. Relaxing from what? A three-and-a-half-day work week? And it's not like their life in the city is so harsh.

"Oh honey, it's so hard living on Park Avenue, telling the servants what to cook for dinner and what to clean," one can imagine them saying. "It's such a chore. I'm tired of going to plays and movies and fancy restaurants and museums. Let's get away for the weekend and just do nothing. Do you want to go to the beach house or the mountain house? Should you tell Jeeves to make the arrangements or should I? Will we need the downstairs maid?"

Since they're planning to leave the office at lunchtime on Thursday, the modern executive wonders if there is really any point in driving to the office at all on Thursday. The latest trend is to leave for the weekend house Wednesday night. Right after the board meeting. The board meeting that voted to raise the executives' salaries once again, to give them more stock options and an even more glittery golden parachute.

Now, almost anyone in a position of power is working, tops, three days a week. But really, does it take three days a week to drive a company into bankruptcy? No, of course it doesn't. That's why they've started to take Mondays off, too. Fight that awful Sunday night traffic back into the city? You've got to be kidding. So now they're not in the office Mondays, Thursdays or Fridays.

But they are putting in full workdays on Tuesdays, and half of Wednesdays. On those two days, they are totally committed to the company. Totally committed to laying off workers, approving pay cuts, cutting pension plans, replacing older workers, cutting health benefits, thinking up words like "downsizing" and "rightsizing" and redecorating their corner offices. It's on Tuesdays and Wednesdays that they buy the motivational posters for the company cafeteria that emphasize the value of cooperation and hard work like "There is no 'I' in 'Teamwork.'"

Maybe not, but there is a big fat "I" in "Laid Off."

Then came the Summer Paradox. If you do answer the phone on Friday, you must not be important enough to talk to. So some office workers who don't have summer homes, who don't make very much and who work five days a week have stopped answering their phones on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays so people will think they are executives. Which works out fine. They can actually get some work done because they're not on the phone, and the boss isn't around to interfere with the company business.

By the way, I'll be in the office Tuesday and Wednesday morning this week, if you need me.
You know, I never count any chickens before they hatch, Mrs. Clinton told reporters after stopping in for a bubble tea at Kung-Fu Tea at the Queens Crossings food court in Flushing, when asked if a big victory on Tuesday would mean that she had locked up the nomination. Im not taking anybody or anything for granted.

And Mr. Sanders showed no signs of easing up either. The Vermont senator spent most of the sunny Monday face-to-face campaigning, an unexpected shift for a candidate who has spent most of his days holding mega-rallies before thousands of supporters. Mr. Sanders shook hands on sidewalks across the city, visited a public housing complex in the Bronx, hosted a round table with local community leaders, and stopped to eat a B.L.T. sandwich in Queens. He also hit the streets, walking 14 blocks through Midtown and speaking to striking Verizon workers.

I just want to say a word to thank all of you for the courage to stand up for justice and against corporate greed, Mr. Sanders said through a megaphone as the strikers chanted his name. We will not tolerate large profitable corporations sending jobs to low-wage countries, throwing American workers out on the street, cutting back on health care benefits, and then paying their C.E.O. $18 million a year.

As Mr. Sanders courted union workers, Mr. Trump was across town trying to improve his standing with members of minority groups.
In past decades, when faced with plebiscites on whether to embrace further European integration, voters across the Continent had a habit of slamming on the brakes  though in several instances they later changed their minds.

So Britains vote on June 23 on whether to exit the European Union, a process often referred to as Brexit, could have huge ramifications.

Those who favor leaving say that Britain would have stronger control over its borders if it left the union, and that it could negotiate trade deals on its own. Their opponents warn that leaving the worlds largest trading bloc will have dire economic consequences.

Most economists say that leaving the European Union will have a negative impact in the short term, but that the longer-term consequences are less clear.
That debate comes at a time when countries large and small are rethinking their approaches to the drug issue, adopting policies that experts say breach current global conventions against drugs by legalizing some substances in some places  and lessening punishment for offenders in others.

We are on the cusp of the collapse of the regime, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, an analyst at the Brookings Institution.

The conflict pits two equally improbable alliances against each other. On one side are the insurgents, led largely by several countries in Latin America that have begun to challenge conventional antidrug strategies or to legalize some drugs in hopes of blunting the violence that the drug wars have wrought. Canadas health minister will make her countrys pitch to legalize marijuana, along with the presidents of Bolivia and Colombia, critics of the existing treaties.

On the other side are the staunch defenders of those conventions.

They are led by Russia and China, and they are joined by smaller countries with some of the strictest drug laws, including those that impose the death penalty, such as Singapore, Iran and Saudi Arabia. A push to prohibit the death penalty in drug cases is expected to be one of the most contentious items in the discussions this week.

The United States, once the worlds principal drug-law enforcer, is in the most awkward spot. It opposes overturning the relevant global treaties (there are three, the first dating to 1961). But it has also been put on notice for violating those treaties with initiatives that legalized recreational cannabis use in four states. That makes it hard for American officials to scold other countries for taking a less-than-prohibitionist stance against drugs.
President Obama will meet with leaders from the Gulf Cooperation Council this week in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The influence of the council, whose members are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, has grown across the Middle East since the Arab Spring, and these countries have tried to counter what they view as an increasingly assertive Iran.

Here are some of the issues likely to be on the agenda when Mr. Obama and the gulf leaders sit down together.

Countering Iran

The gulf monarchies have been concerned that the nuclear deal struck last year has empowered Iran, their main regional rival, and has frayed their relations with the Obama administration. Irans recent missile tests have further infuriated the gulf states. The United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba, recently said that Iran remained as dangerous as ever.
Since the kingdom has never had the military might to protect itself, its alliance with the United States has been essential, and hugely beneficial to both sides. Saudi Arabia knew that in exchange for a steady flow of oil and billions of dollars for the American arms industry, the United States would come to the rescue if its ally faced an external threat  and that it would never speak out too loudly about the kingdoms closed political system or its poor human rights record.

That relationship was unsettled by the Arab uprisings of 2011, when Saudi officials saw the United States cut loose another Arab ally, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, amid popular protests. Since then, frustration among Saudi officials has grown as Mr. Obama limited American engagement in later crises, in Libya, Syria and elsewhere, and as he made a deal with Iran to lift sanctions in exchange for the reining-in of its nuclear program.

In Syria, the Saudis saw the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad as an opportunity to replace an Iranian ally who was killing his own people. The hope was that a government more amenable to Riyadhs influence, and less to Irans, would come to power. But that hope dwindled when the United States backed away from military action after Mr. Assad crossed Mr. Obamas red line against the use of chemical weapons.

Over time, it became clear that Mr. Obama had prioritized combating the Islamic State over ousting Mr. Assad. This infuriated Riyadh, which wanted to marry the two causes. Privately, Saudi officials blame Mr. Obama for prolonging the war by barring Saudi Arabia and other countries from giving Syrian rebels more powerful arms, like antiaircraft missiles, which Mr. Obama feared could be used outside Syria by terrorists.

The mounting frustration has led Saudi Arabia, under a new monarch, King Salman, to abandon its quiet checkbook diplomacy and lash out. In January, it executed 47 men on terrorism charges, including Qaeda militants and the Shiite cleric  sending what it thought was a message to deter jihadists and Iran from trying to destabilize the kingdom.

Analysts have begun speaking of a Salman Doctrine, although it is mostly associated with the kings son Mohammed bin Salman, 30, who is the defense minister and is second in line to the throne. The doctrine calls for increased self-reliance and more assertiveness in regional affairs.
The Houthis said they did not attend the talks because of what they described as violations of a shaky truce that was supposed to begin last week but never fully took hold. Abdurahman Alahnomi, a spokesman for the Houthis, said that the delegation will travel after it ensures that the other party commits to the cease-fires.

Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the United Nations special envoy to Yemen, who has been shuttling between the combatants for months, said in a statement that the talks were delayed. He scolded the Houthis and their allies, saying he hoped they would not miss this opportunity that could save Yemen the loss of more lives.

There had been optimism about the talks. Both sides had made conciliatory statements, and there was a feeling that the combatants were beginning to see diminishing returns from the war. Yet no breakthrough was expected. The negotiations were designed to ease the violence and confront manageable issues, like prisoner exchanges, in hopes of creating a climate for a broader political dialogue.

Even that limited agenda was contested. A Houthi delegate said the group was opposed to a proposal that would allow the government, led by President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, to return to the capital, Sana. The Houthis favored a consensus government with a new prime minister, with Mr. Hadi remaining as a figurehead until a new president could be elected, according to the delegate, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on behalf of the rebels.

A sense of urgency surrounded the negotiations in Kuwait, because of the hair-trigger nature of the violence and because neither the Houthis nor the government fully controlled the constellation of armed groups on the ground.
The notion of authenticity in dance is a mares nest. It often turns out that what you thought were definitive versions of familiar classics (Giselle, Swan Lake, Apollo) are very far from the original. Of all the choreographers whose work keeps returning to the stage, Martha Graham is the one whose pieces raise the most questions. Can we see her in the dances performed in her name today?

Celebrations for this troupes 90th anniversary reached a climax on Monday with its closing-night gala at City Center, introduced by the companys artistic director, Janet Eilber. The gala fare, however, included an excerpt from Grahams 1934 Celebration, danced by men.

Sorry? What? If you know Graham history, you know that for the first 11 years her company was all-female. It was a big deal when she admitted her first male dancer in 1937 (yes, reader, she married him); and for some people it reduced her work rather than enhancing it. Were we seeing a new 2016 gender-reverse treatment of this originally female dance? Yes, we were, but nobody informed the gala audience.
Unlike professional athletes, actors (Gene Hackman) and some novelists (Philip Roth), visual artists dont usually retire. Or if they do, they dont announce it.

But in 2011, Maurizio Cattelan  one of the most expensive living artists, then at the peak of his career and the subject of an uproarious retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum  told the world that he was finished, fatigued both creatively and by the velocity of the money-fueled art world. During the last couple of years, though, Mr. Cattelan found himself itching to make things in three dimensions again. Actually, its even more of a torture not to work than to work, he said in an interview. And so he is coming out of retirement with a new sculpture that seems designed to proclaim his return with an exclamation point, though the piece is of modest size and will not be on view in a public gallery.

It will, instead, be installed in early May just off one of the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, in a small, humble room where visitors often feel the urge to spend some time alone. The room has tiles, a sink, a mirror and a lock on the door. And now, instead of its standard Kohler toilet, it will have a solid 18-karat-gold working replica of one, a preposterously scatological apotheosis of wealth whose form is completed in its function: You could go into the restroom just to bask in its glow, Mr. Cattelan said, but it becomes an artwork only with someone sitting on it or standing over it, answering natures call.

Theres the risk that people will think of it as a joke, maybe, but I dont see it as a joke, he added, on a recent trip from his home in Milan to New York, where he lived for many years. Mr. Cattelan, who grew up poor in Padua, Italy, the son of a truck driver and a cleaning woman, was asked if economic inequality figured into his thinking about the piece. I was born in a condition where I was  how do you say?  forced to think about that. Its not my job to tell people what a work means. But I think people might see meaning in this piece.
LONDON  A landmark Roman arch that was destroyed by Islamic State fighters in Palmyra, Syria, stood proudly once again on Tuesday, this time as a replica built from digital models that was installed in Trafalgar Square in London.

To create the roughly 20-foot-tall marble replica, which weighs around 11 tons, researchers built a 3-D computer model of the arch by compiling dozens of photographs taken by archaeologists and tourists in Palmyra before the Islamic State moved in. Robots in Italy then used the computer model to carve the marble replica.

Mayor Boris Johnson of London unveiled the piece on Tuesday, as crowds gathered in the square and on the steps leading to the National Gallery.
Having a popular, young-skewing television series comes with privileges. You appear on all the talk shows. Hillary Clinton does a cameo to reach the more than 500,000 18-to-34-year-old viewers you pull in every week. And you get to turn a two-minute online short you made when you were unknown sketch comics into a three-night mini-series on your current channel, Comedy Central.

Thats mostly what you need to know about Time Traveling Bong, a jeu dherbe created by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Ilana Glazer, who write, direct and produce the Comedy Central hit Broad City. (Ms. Glazer, of course, is also one of that shows stars, along with Abbi Jacobson, who wasnt involved in this mini-series.) Like the weed that fuels its time-travel plot, Bong, which begins on Wednesday (4/20, natch), provides a painless, quickly forgotten experience during which you may laugh for reasons that wont be entirely clear.

Ms. Glazer and Mr. Downs play Sharee and Jeff, New Jersey cousins and roommates  Sharee works at Hertz and dates a married loser (Call me after your wife goes to sleep); Jeff stays home and masturbates to pornography on Sharees laptop  whose lives are seemingly improved by the magical device of the title. Smoking it zaps them among eras that are unpredictable but movie-familiar  ancient Greece, the Salem of the witch trials, the plantation South, a dystopic future that looks like THX 1138 crossed with Wall-E.

The episodic structure is an easy way to expand on the short the creators made for the College Humor website back in 2012. For laughs and a light dusting of feminism, they demonstrate how male Jeff fares better in Salem (where Sharee is naturally assumed to be a witch), but female Sharee is a major hit with cave men. The cousins whiteness is mocked in an episode in which they kidnap the young Michael Jackson to give him a happier childhood. Among the regular features of the past, whether Cro-Magnon, American colonial or classical, are bad smells and orgies. (Ms. Glazer spends most of the cave sequence topless.)
He won a big victory in Wisconsin. He pierced the Donald Trump mystique. He even got some of the Capitol Hill lawmakers who regard him as a revolutionary and renegade to slink cautiously into his corner. By all logic, this should be a Ted Cruz moment -- if only the next primary weren't in New York.

But in two days New Yorkers go to their polling places, and though Cruz has been the beneficiary of the calendar before -- his performance on Super Tuesday helped force out of the race Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a demographically identical and philosophically similar rival -- his success still depends on another man to stumble.

Or -- just as frustrating to a man with a sense of destiny and a fast-forward vocabulary of ambition and determination -- his success requires another man to fail to stumble across the finish line represented by the figure 1,237, the number of delegates required to win the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland this July.

And even if that other man -- Manhattan businessman Donald Trump, as the whole world knows -- fails to clinch the nomination as the last primary votes are cast June 14, when the District of Columbia's tiny Republican minority goes to the polls, there is no guarantee that the remainder candidate, which is what Cruz is, would prevail in a contested or open convention.

All of which is why, though the cage fight between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is great sport, and perhaps precursor to an upset, the struggle between Trump and Cruz is more compelling.

"The focus of New York is on the Republicans, period," Richard Ravitch, former head of the New York City transit system and a former Democratic lieutenant governor, said in a recent telephone conversation. "Bernie and Hillary are going to campaign, and they are going to fight, but it's the Republican mash-up that's really worth watching."

That's because, for all unexpecteds in the Democratic race -- no one on New Year's Day thought a 74-year-old self-proclaimed Democratic socialist from a state with three electoral votes would defeat the mighty Clinton machine in Michigan and Wisconsin, states carried by Clinton's husband, Bill -- the Republican race is a symphony of surprises.

The first of those surprises was that a candidate such as Trump would be a serious threat to win the GOP nomination. The second was that voters would tolerate torrents of invective and insult from a candidate for a position that Franklin Roosevelt, the president against whom modern presidents are measured, described as being primarily an office of moral leadership.

Now, as some powerful Republicans seek to deny Trump the party's presidential nomination, some of the assumptions about Cruz are being challenged, especially the twin notions that the Texan could win no adherents among party leaders and that he has no ties to Republican thinkers and theorists.

In the event, Cruz has been Velcro to all manner of Republicans who agree with the notion that he is the only living soul who stands between Trump and the scene many Republicans dread the most: the real estate-and-casino tycoon standing with his arms raised high as balloons and confetti rain upon him in Cleveland.

Cruz, whose rhetorical repertoire includes the phrase "Washington cartel," now has the support of increasing numbers of important GOP fundraisers. He has the allegiance not only of perhaps the most conservative lawmaker on Capitol Hill, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, but also of, among others, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who once suggested that deciding between Cruz and Trump was a Hobbesian choice.

"Whether it's death by being shot or poisoning, does it really matter?" he asked.

In truth, Cruz has stronger relationships on the House side of the Capitol than he does on the Senate side, where he has toiled for about three years and, according to multiple accounts, set a Washington record for alienating his colleagues. But many of his Senate aides formerly worked in House offices and, in an example of how Washington works, they provide a bridge to their former bosses and their former colleagues.

Also, long before he formally entered the presidential race, or even before he mounted his 21-hour filibuster in 2013 against Obamacare, likely undertaken to attract attention from devout conservatives, Cruz began establishing himself as a moderator in forums designed to combat moderation in his party. These events, attended by Republican lawmakers and top staff, were convened to examine contemporary issues from a conservative viewpoint.

Now, those relationships -- in some ways more important than ties within the Senate chamber -- are bearing fruit. This is as former Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas launches a massive effort to pull in more senators, perhaps Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the first black to be elected to both the House and the Senate and a conservative avatar, or Sen. Steve Daines, whose principal political attribute is that he represents Montana, which votes June 7 and could be important in blunting Trump's drive to the nomination.

Of such things a convention majority might be built -- or at least a wall against Trump. But first there is the New York primary.

Trump holds many, if not all, the cards. He was born in the state, reared in Queens, and works and lives in a glittery Manhattan tower that bears his name. Not since early February has his advantage in New York State polls fallen below 26 points, flaring to 52 points a month ago but now cruising along at just over 30.

Yet Cruz is playing on a bigger field, trying to peel off first-ballot votes from delegates elected but not formally pledged, or strategizing to conduct guerrilla wars in state capitals, such as Bismarck, North Dakota, and Denver, where delegates are floating like uncharged molecules and might ultimately become, in the Cruz mold, free radicals.

So while the television cameras are on the outdoor game -- rallies, street encounters, visits to ethnic enclaves and upstate urban centers -- Cruz is playing the sort of indoor game where he has surprising strength. Ted Cruz might have his moment in Cleveland.
The journalist Michael Kinsley was 43 when he learned he had Parkinsons disease, and about 50 when he announced that fact to the world. Parkinsons is a slow sickness. (You still have to floss, his neurologist told him.) Mr. Kinsley is now 65, with body more or less intact, and wits entirely so, if his superb new book is any indication.

Old Age: A Beginners Guide isnt really about Parkinsons. Its about aging in general. More specifically, its about how the baby boomer generation, which is now rounding third base like a herd of buffalo and stampeding for home plate (which is a hole in the ground, as the novelist Jim Harrison liked to say), will choose to think and act in the face of it.

Sometimes I feel like a scout from my generation, sent out to experience in my 50s what even the healthiest boomers are going to experience in their 60s, 70s or 80s, Mr. Kinsley writes. There are far worse medical conditions than Parkinsons, and there are far worse cases of Parkinsons than mine. But what I have, at the level I have it, is an interesting foretaste of our shared future.

Mr. Kinsley put off telling people about his medical condition, partly out of denial. Also, he didnt want to tap too early into the vat of sympathy from friends and family. He was concerned that hed be written off professionally. He reports being offered the editorship of The New Yorker in 1998, five years after his diagnosis. The result, in terms of how others would view his condition, was dismaying.
Anheuser-Busch InBev said on Tuesday that it had accepted an offer by Asahi Group Holdings of Japan to buy the beer brands Peroni and Grolsch, as well as certain European operations of SABMiller, for 2.55 billion euros, or about $2.9 billion.

The companies first announced that Asahi had made a binding offer for the brands in February.

It is part of a push by Anheuser-Busch InBev to sell some assets as it seeks to ease regulatory concerns about its over $100 billion merger with SABMiller, which owns the Peroni and Grolsch brands. The combination of SABMiller and Anheuser-Busch would create a beer industry giant that would have annual revenue of about $64 billion and would account for about 30 percent of global beer sales.

In November, Anheuser-Busch agreed to sell SABMillers 59 percent stake in MillerCoors in the United States to SABMillers joint venture partner Molson Coors Brewing for about $12 billion. That deal includes the global rights to the Miller brand and would make Molson Coors the second-largest brewer in the United States, behind Anheuser-Busch.

In March, China Resources Beer, a state-owned brewer, agreed to buy SABMillers 49 percent stake in the maker of Snow, the worlds best-selling beer. The deal would value SABMillers stake in CR Snow at about $1.6 billion.
A group of Democratic senators, led by Chuck Schumer of New York, appears to be sacrificing its own regulators as it holds up confirmation of two nominees to the Securities and Exchange Commission over mandated political spending disclosures.

That senators would hold up a nomination is no surprise, but this time it is an act rich with irony. The two nominees, Hester Peirce and Lisa M. Fairfax, were cleared by these same Democratic senators after a revolt over the White Houses first proposed nominee, Keir D. Gumbs, a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling.

Mr. Gumbss previous experience included six years at the S.E.C., in part as counsel to an S.E.C. commissioner. Unfortunately, Mr. Gumbss sin was that he was from corporate America because he represented such clients as the American Petroleum Institute. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts reportedly quashed his appointment on those grounds, protesting that it was time to put more independent-minded regulators on the commission. Never mind that there is an important distinction between lawyers representing clients and lawyers representing causes and that a lawyer is ethically obligated to represent a client regardless of personal opinion.

Into this morass came Ms. Peirce and Ms. Fairfax. The S.E.C. has five commissioners, who are appointed by the president, but no more than three can belong to the same party. Ms. Peirce was a Republican nominee. She served on Senator Richard Shelbys staff at the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, which he heads and which oversees the S.E.C. For the last few years, Ms. Peirce has been an academic fellow at the Mercatus Center, a conservative-leaning institute at George Mason University. Needless to say, she is not from the corporate world.
Yoox Net-a-Porter, an e-commerce group that calls itself the worlds biggest luxury fashion store, is setting its sights on the Middle East, selling a 100 million-euro stake to Alabbar Enterprises, the Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based owner of Emaar Properties, which includes the Dubai Mall, the worlds most-visited luxury shopping mall.

The worlds biggest online retailer is joining forces with the worlds biggest brick-and-mortar retailer, Federico Marchetti, chief executive of Yoox Net-a-Porter, said in a call from Milan.

In a deal announced on Tuesday in Milan, Alabbar, which is controlled by Mohamed Alabbar, will pay 28 a share, a premium of 5.7 percent on the closing share price of Yoox Net-a-Porter on Monday. The deal values the company at 3.7 billion, or about $4.2 billion. Richemont, the former parent of Net-a-Porter, will remain the groups largest shareholder; Alabbar will have 4 percent of ordinary shares.

It is the biggest move Mr. Marchetti has made since Yoox merged with Net-a-Porter in March 2015. Natalie Massenet, the founder of Net-a-Porter, who was expected to be executive chairwoman, resigned from the group a few months later.
Are liberals impairing our ability to combat climate change?

That may sound like a strange question, particularly to readers of The New York Times. Today conservatives are the ones decidedly blocking any effort by the United States to curb its emissions of greenhouse gases.

And yet even as progressive environmentalists wring their hands at the G.O.P.s climate change denial, there are biases on the left that stray just as far from the scientific consensus.

The left is turning anti-science, Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape who as a venture capitalist has become one of the most prominent thinkers of Silicon Valley, told me not long ago.

He was reflecting broadly about science and technology. His concerns ranged from liberals fear of genetically modified organisms to their mistrust of technologys displacement of workers in some industries. San Francisco is an interesting case, he noted. The left has become reactionary.
Headliner

Olma Caviar Boutique & Lounge This company, which runs a plush little nook in the Plaza Food Hall, has added this dressy Upper West Side bar and restaurant. In front, a display case is chockablock with tins of caviar and serving accessories. Plates of fish roe start at $5 for salmon and climb from there. Salads, sandwiches, foie gras, fresh seafood and smoked fish are served with a nice choice of bubblies, still wines and cocktails: 420 Amsterdam Avenue (80th Street), 212-390-0708, olmacaviar.com.

Opening

Barano On the Brooklyn waterfront, steps from the Williamsburg Bridge, Albert Di Meglio, who has worked at Le Cirque, Osteria del Circo and Rubirosa, is set to turn out robust Italian fare, including wood-fired pizzas, meatballs, bucatini with rabbit ragu and spit-roasted lamb. Theres an open kitchen. Mozzarella is made in several styles at a station in the dining room. The chef named the place for his grandmothers village on Ischia: 26 Broadway (Kent Avenue), South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 347-987-4500, baranobk.com.

Emmy Squared Emily and Matt Hyland, who serve Neapolitan-style pizzas at Emily, offer Detroit-inspired square pizzas here, red or white, and some small-plate starters and sandwiches. (Opens Wednesday): 364 Grand Street (Marcy Avenue), Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718-360-4535, pizzalovesemily.com.
At the bottom of the rice pot were thin pieces of lavash that would, Ms. Deravian hoped, crisp into tahdig  the golden, crunchy and buttery crust prized at Persian meals. Getting a perfect tahdig, which can also be made from yogurt, thinly sliced onions or potatoes (or the rice itself), is one of the most challenging techniques in all of Persian cooking. Ms. Deravian was fretting over hers, worried that the flatbread would burn or the rice turn mushy.

Image The table is decorated for Nowruz. Credit... Amy Dickerson for The New York Times

Persian cuisine is one of the worlds great gastronomies, flourishing for centuries across an area that, at the height of the ancient Persian Empire (circa 550 to 330 B.C.), included modern-day Iran, along with parts of Iraq, Macedonia, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.

The repertoire of dishes is fragrant, diverse and highly refined, based on complex culinary techniques. They are imbued with fresh flowers and herbs like rose petals, fenugreek and mint; spices like saffron, sumac and cardamom; fruits like pomegranate and barberry; all kinds of citrus; and nuts, including pistachios and almonds.

If this roster of ingredients sounds familiar, its because Persian cooking influenced Middle Eastern, Moroccan, Northern Indian and Turkish cuisines yet itself remains somewhat below the radar.

Part of the recognition problem in the United States, Ms. Deravian said, is that even with a robust Iranian-American population (estimated to be one million to two million), theres a stunning lack of Persian restaurants. Southern California  home to the vast majority of Iranian-Americans and the groceries, bakeries and ice cream shops that cater to them  has a handful. But for the most part, theyre not making the exalted, intricate dishes for which the culture is famous.
Ever since Kate Middleton was married in a gown festooned with lace from Sophie Hallette, a traditional, family-run company in the north of France, and Amal Clooney followed suit with her Oscar de la Renta confection, the French lace industry has been having something of moment. Its on the runways  at brands like Valentino, Dior and Celine  and in the headlines.

Behind the scenes, however, a battle of sorts has been going on, as Desseilles and Codentel, two of the oldest lace companies in the French towns of Caudry and Calais, squeezed by competition from Asia and unable to comply with French labor laws, declared bankruptcy this year.

Holesco, the group that is the parent company of Sophie Hallette, bid to acquire Desseilles, but late last month, it lost out to the Chinese company Yongsheng Holdings. So when it came time to make an offer for Codentel, the group brought in backup.

Last week, Chanel, which has made a sort of a sideline out of identifying and preserving classic French artisanship for the future, took a minority stake in Holesco. And on Monday, the judge of the commercial court in Boulogne-sur-Mer named Holesco the new owner of Codentel. The company guaranteed the jobs of all 36 employees, and it will make a total strategic investment of 1.03 million euros, or $1.16 million.
The films title will use up many of the allotted words for this review, so its best to be terse when critiquing How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Cant Change. Hence, a one-word assessment of this documentary: Tough. As in, tough to watch. Tough to consider. Tough to ignore.

Josh Fox, the director, begins in a short-lived state of serenity, relaxing at his rural Pennsylvania home after his community won a battle against fracking companies that wanted to drill in the area. (The possibility of fracking there spurred him to make Gasland, an Oscar-nominated documentary from 2010.)

He soon discovered a beloved tree was being killed by woolly adelgids. Cold northern winters can confine these invasive insects to the South, but climate change is increasing their range.

That led him to talk to experts about rising global temperatures. The interviews detail nightmarish scenarios: stifling heat, relentless storms and mass extinctions are soon to arrive, were told. Even if we gave up fossil fuels tomorrow, its projected that the catastrophes are inevitable.
The F.A.A. could also fine or assess other penalties against the owner, the operator or both; Mr. Trump owns the plane through a limited liability company. Though it is unlikely that the agency would seek the maximum penalty, flying with no registration could result in a civil penalty of up to $27,500, a criminal fine of up to $250,000 and imprisonment for up to three years, it said.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, declined to answer several questions about the planes registration or use, saying only that the renewal process is just about complete. As of late Tuesday, the F.A.A. had not received a registration renewal application for the Cessna, according to Ms. Brown, the agency spokeswoman. She declined to comment on any action the F.A.A. might take.

Image Mr. Trumps Cessna jet could be grounded for several days, or even months, while the registration issue is sorted out. Credit... Mark L. Pollio

Although Mr. Trump has a sizable delegate lead in the Republican presidential primary race, his campaign has often had organizational issues, at times losing ground against better organized opponents, chiefly Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, as Mr. Trump has struggled to master the complicated rules governing the selection of delegates.

Mr. Trump can still fly; most candidates typically charter a private plane. He also has four other registered aircraft: a Boeing 757 and three Sikorsky helicopters, a fleet that has become a critical part of the billionaires image he has sought to project on the campaign trail. The Boeing, which has Mr. Trumps surname emblazoned in big letters on the outside and gold-plated fixtures inside, has been used as a backdrop at a number of his rallies.
Teachers in the Central R-3 School District have been ranked as some of the best teachers in the state, according to the website niche.com.

Niche compiles data from various sources and, according to the website, ranks more than 100,000 public and private schools and districts based on dozens of statistics and 27 million opinions from 300,000 students and parents.

Centrals teachers ranked 17th of the top 100 school districts in Missouri. Rankings are based on the academic performance of the school district; student and parent reviews of teachers and salaries; absenteeism and tenure of teachers; the student-teacher classroom ratio; and the Niche Academics Grade for each district.

I think weve got a lot of great teachers, said Dr. Desi Mayberry, Centrals superintendent. Ive got two kids in the school district myself and I see what theyre doing  Seeing the way theyre being prepared, Im extremely happy with what our teachers are doing to get our kids ready.

The opinions of parents and students about the teachers in the school district, along with factors related to academic performance, were given the most weight when calculating a districts rank. Among other factors, it was noted that, according to state standards, 58 percent of students in the Central school district are considered proficient in math and/or reading.

Also contributing to Centrals high ranking is an average teachers salary of $53,997 per year and a student-teacher ratio of 15:1.

Our starting salary is the highest in southeast Missouri, said Mayberry.

Most of the school districts in the top 20, Mayberry noted, were in more affluent areas of the state, including St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia.

Its a nice pat on the back for our teachers, he said.

Other regional school districts also made the list. Farmington R-7 ranked 31st, Ste. Genevieve R-2 ranked 38th, Arcadia Valley R-2 ranked 66th and Potosi R-3 ranked 94th.

Results of the rankings for Missouri school districts can be viewed at k12.niche.com/rankings/public-school-districts/best-teachers/s/missouri/
Citing concerns about potential voting irregularities during the most consequential presidential primary in years, the New York City comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, said on Tuesday that his office would audit the citys Board of Elections in part to determine if tens of thousands of Democratic voters were improperly removed from voter rolls.

Mr. Stringer said in a statement that the Board of Elections had confirmed that more than 125,000 Democratic voters in Brooklyn were dropped between November 2015 and this month. He said the decline occurred without any adequate explanation furnished by the Board of Elections.

There is nothing more sacred in our nation than the right to vote, yet election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get in to their polling site, Mr. Stringer, a Democrat, said.

On Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio, also a Democrat, echoed Mr. Stringer, noting that voters and voting rights monitors had reported the purging of entire buildings and blocks of voters from the voting lists.
Mr. Gurley died on Nov. 20, 2014, when his heart was pierced by a ricocheting bullet that Mr. Liang had fired while on a night patrol in a dark stairwell in the Louis H. Pink Houses in the East New York neighborhood. In February, a jury convicted him of manslaughter and official misconduct, rejecting his testimony that the gun had simply gone off in his hand and finding that he had failed to help Mr. Gurley as he lay dying on a fifth-floor landing.

Before the sentence was issued, Mr. Gurleys girlfriend, Melissa Butler, who was with him when he died, told Mr. Liang that even today, she was still in pain and needed the solace of justice. You took a piece of me, she said. You took a piece of my heart.

Moments later, Mr. Liang himself stood and turned toward Ms. Butler and the others, apologizing for having killed a man they loved. The shot was accidental, he said. My life has forever changed.

It was at that point that Justice Chun announced that he was going to reduce the manslaughter verdict, saying there was no evidence that Mr. Liang was even aware of Mr. Gurleys presence in the stairwell. This was not an intentional act, the judge said. This was a criminally negligent act. As such, I find incarceration not necessary.
To the Editor:

Re Bernies Israel Heresy, by Roger Cohen (column, April 19):

The issue is not whether the Israeli government is immune from criticism. Of course it isnt. The issue is not whether American Jews have differing views on this or that action of the Israeli government. Of course they do. The issue is not whether the Palestinian people should be treated with respect and dignity. Of course they should.

The issue is that Bernie Sanders is simply wrong that Israel used disproportionate force during the 2014 Gaza war. Proportionality is influenced by proximity. Where you sit determines where you stand.

If you sit on the Israeli side of the Gaza border, if the kindergartens of your children are targeted by Hamas rockets, if you are living three miles from a terrorist regime sworn to your destruction, your sense of proportionality may be different than that of someone who lives in the idyllic green state of Vermont.

Here is a better formula of proportionality for all those who care about the future of the Palestinian people and the reconstruction of Gaza  and I include myself among them: Dont attack Israel, and Israel will not attack you.
Why all the fuss then? Understandably infuriated by what he saw as an attack on his father, whom he revered, Mr. Cameron was slow to respond to the medias demands for information and inadvertently nurtured the impression that he had something to hide. By the time he disclosed the data, his reputation had already taken a hit. Although Mr. Cameron regained his composure in the House of Commons last week, this only limited, rather than repaired, the political damage.

In truth, this was never likely to become a scandal that exposed the prime minister as having breached the spirit, let alone the letter, of the rules. By temperament, Mr. Cameron is risk-averse. It was very much in character that he sold his shares before becoming prime minister because, as he put it, he didnt want anyone to say, You have other agendas or vested interests. 

There is, however, a deeper-seated problem. For centuries, the Conservative Party has been seen as a bastion of wealth, the friend of the powerful and the voice of the affluent. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher led a remarkable recruitment drive, spreading property ownership by enabling the tenants of public housing to buy their homes from the state and encouraging the mass ownership of shares. By the time she left Downing Street in 1990, millions more Britons had become stakeholders in free-market capitalism.

That was a social revolution. But it did not cleanse the Tory Party itself of its unappealing image as a club for the greedy. When Mr. Cameron ran for the leadership in 2005, he confronted this defect with urgency. If they were to win again, the Conservatives needed to detoxify their brand and persuade the electorate that they sought to represent the whole nation, including the disenfranchised and those who lived in poverty.

What made this crusade counterintuitive was Mr. Camerons own background. A former student at Eton and Oxford, the new Tory leader was a product of elite English institutions. This was scarcely his fault, but would anyone believe a word when he discussed public services and welfare benefits? The task grew even harder after 2010 when the primary task facing him and his similarly privileged chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, was to reduce the swollen deficit.
RIO DE JANEIRO  BRAZIL took a major step toward the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff on Sunday when the lower house of Congress voted to send her case to the Senate, which will almost certainly refer her for a trial. It now looks likely that the president will be removed from office and replaced by Michel Temer, her vice president. Ms. Rousseffs supporters are furious, her opponents are overjoyed, and Brazils corrupt politicians are breathing a sigh of relief.

In the hourslong televised session on Sunday, members of Congress explained their decisions as they voted for impeachment: They voted for peace in Jerusalem, for the truckers, for the Free Masons of Brazil and because of the Communism that threatens this country. Very few members of congress based their votes on the charges that have actually been brought against the president: that she violated regulations regarding public finances.

Those in the opposition claim that they want to send a message about good governance. But the real reason the president is being impeached is that the Brazilian political system is in ruins. Her impeachment will provide a convenient distraction while other politicians try to get their own houses in order.

An enormous corruption investigation, known as Operacao Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, has exploded in the political systems face. At first, when the investigation began in 2014, investigators accused members of Ms. Rousseffs left-wing Workers Party of using Petrobras, the state-run oil company, to trade kickbacks for political favors. There is more and more evidence that this kind of practice was common among Brazilian political parties. The investigation has expanded to include a host of figures across the political spectrum, including roughly 50 politicians and a handful of business leaders.
To the Editor:

Re Pregnancy and Prosperity, by Jack A. Markell (Op-Ed, April 12):

Thanks to Governor Markell of Delaware for addressing how negative outcomes arise from unintended pregnancies and poor access to effective contraception. But this information is not new; our government has simply failed to listen to the needs of women.

For thousands of years, women (and men, too) have tried to control the size of their families and the spacing of their children. Oral tribal histories and ancient papyri show that reproductive control is a human need.

The United Nations has declared that reproductive rights are human rights. Yet despite this history and the high rate of unintended pregnancies and maternal mortality, the federal and state governments have neglected to provide adequate funding for good reproductive health care and sex education. Without these safeguards, women cannot chart the course of their lives.

Now, would Governor Markell kindly pass this information on to the other 49 governors and their state legislators?
When President Obama visits Saudi Arabia this week for a meeting with representatives from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, he should avoid doing what he did at Camp David last May, the last time he met with them: promise more arms sales. Since Mr. Obama hosted that meeting, the United States has offered over $33 billion in weaponry to its Persian Gulf allies, with the bulk of it going to Saudi Arabia. The results have been deadly.

The Saudi-American arms deals are a continuation of a booming business that has developed between Washington and Riyadh during the Obama years. In the first six years of the Obama administration, the United States entered into agreements to transfer nearly $50 billion in weaponry to Saudi Arabia, with tens of billions of dollars of additional offers in the pipeline.

The Pentagon claims that these arms transfers to Saudi Arabia improve the security of an important partner which has been and continues to be an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East. Recent Saudi actions suggest otherwise.

A prime example of whats wrong with unbridled American weapons transfers to the Saudi government is the Saudi-led war in Yemen. According to the United Nations, more than 3,200 civilians have been killed since Saudi bombing began last March. A majority of these deaths have been a result of airstrikes, many of which have been carried out with aircraft, bombs and missiles supplied by the United States and Britain, including United States-supplied cluster bombs.
SAN FRANCISCO  Several years ago, I traveled to India as an official for the State Department. The United States government has stringent rules about gifts. The only item I was ever able to accept was a pink plastic alarm clock that wakes one to the loud wail of the Islamic call to prayer. Knowing this, foreign governments generally understand that no shady dealings with American officials are possible.

The midlevel official I met in Indias Ministry of Science and Technology had different ideas. I briefly visited his dilapidated office to discuss Indian-American cooperation on scientific research. After a few minutes, his face lit up.

The ministry has a large budget to host a conference for U.S. and Indian entrepreneurs working in the sciences, he said. You know lots of entrepreneurs, so why dont you organize the conference for us? I will pay you to do it, and you can give me 10 percent of the fee back.

I stared at him for a moment. He clearly felt not the slightest embarrassment at proposing a kickback likely larger than his annual salary. I mumbled something about not being the right person for this, and got out of his office as fast as I could. I chose not to report him because I couldnt be 100 percent sure I hadnt misunderstood, but the encounter stayed with me.
ARLINGTON, Va.  Next to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and directly across the Potomac River from Washington, the Crystal City neighborhood, which because of federal cuts had become a virtual ghost town, is quietly and persistently reinventing itself.

At first glance, there appears to be nothing new among the high-rise offices and apartments lining Crystal Drive and its bisecting streets in this Arlington County enclave. In fact, there is little new construction. Instead, buildings from the 1960s to 1980s are being retrofitted, some converted from offices to apartments, others welcoming new commercial tenants, including tech start-ups, co-working spaces and restaurants.

The area, which suffered with the departure of military agencies and contractors under the federal Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission process, is attracting residents and younger workers with competitive rents and convenient transportation options as well as with its proximity to the Pentagon, a fashion mall in neighboring Pentagon City and, of course, the nations capital.

Think Brooklyn and Manhattan, said Mitchell N. Schear, president of Vornado/Charles E. Smith, the dominant property owner and landlord here. Youre close enough, but youre not paying higher taxes and utilities. Here, we are a slightly geekier crowd, and we are embracing it.
People who use Airbnb previously had to leave the app to find local event and dining information using search engines, travel websites and local review services. But Airbnbs new feature means people can now eschew Yelp, Facebook, Google and other sites that have all longed to control the connection between consumers and local businesses.

Image A screenshot from Airbnbs Guidebook feature.

Guidebooks also helps Airbnb address one of its biggest puzzles  how best to match hosts and guests so that both want to continue using the home-sharing service. That puzzle is increasingly something Airbnb wants to solve, especially as it tries to appeal to business travelers and families who have vastly different needs from the younger travelers who slept on sofas and in spare rooms when the start-up began.

Personalization and matching are important because the Internet gives customers an overwhelming amount of information. The importance of matching is even more specific to the travel industry, where people traveling to an entirely new destination are making particularly uninformed choices, Mr. Chesky said.

The app clusters listings by neighborhood, and Guidebooks will characterize each area for people who may prefer a family-friendly neighborhood or one near a central business district to one that is filled with late-night revelers.

Airbnb, which is privately held, has been valued at more than $24 billion by investors. That valuation is predicated on the idea that many more people will use the service, which lists more than two million homes in more than 190 countries. More than 80 million people worldwide have stayed with an Airbnb host.
Apples general counsel, Bruce Sewell, said at the hearing that encryption did not prevent the authorities from solving crimes.

As you heard from our colleagues in law enforcement, they have the perception that encryption walls off information to them, Mr. Sewell said. But technologists and national security experts dont see the world that way. We see a data-rich world that seems to be full of information. Information that law enforcement can use to solve  and prevent  crimes.

Mr. Sewell also defended Apples security practices, saying the company always aimed to keep its devices safe from prying eyes. Within the last two years, he said, the Chinese government has requested Apples source code but the company has refused to hand it over. In a public report on Monday, the company said American law enforcement officials made 4,000 requests for customer data covering more than 16,000 devices in the second half of last year.

Law enforcement officials testifying before the committee on Tuesday expressed frustration over their inability to run a number of cases to ground  particularly sex abuse and child pornography cases  because of encrypted phones. They said the recent publicity over the issue could end up helping criminals.

Make no mistake  criminals are listening to this testimony and learning from it, said Charles Cohen, commander of the Indiana Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

The F.B.I. said there has been an increase in the number of devices it has acquired through investigations but was unable to gain access to because of encryption. Ms. Hess said that since October, 13 percent of the devices obtained by the F.B.I. were impenetrable by the agency. When asked at Tuesdays hearing if the relationship between the tech industry and law enforcement had become adversarial, Ms. Hess responded, I hope not.

The encryption debate is continuing in other quarters. Apple is fighting an order in a federal court in New York to provide access to a phone involved in a criminal drug investigation. And last week, Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Republican, and Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the committee, released a draft version of a bill that would require tech companies to decrypt data if requested by a court.
Googles antitrust problems in Europe are about to get a whole lot bigger.

The company is expected to be charged with breaking the European Unions competition rules by unfairly favoring Google services, like its search engine and Google Maps, on its Android smartphone operating system over those of rivals, according to three people. The three, who work in either government or the private sector, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The charges, known formally as a statement of objections, may be announced in Brussels as soon as Wednesday, though the announcement could still be postponed until later this month, according to one of the people.

The expected charges against Google are the latest in a raft of regulatory problems that American tech giants have faced as the European Union has cracked down on these companies perceived dominance over how people in the 28-member bloc get access to digital services.

That ranges from privacy complaints over how Facebook uses peoples online information to questions about Apples tax affairs from its headquarters in low-tax Ireland. These cases come after previous antitrust investigations into how the likes of Microsoft and Intel operated across regions.
SAN FRANCISCO  Intel, the worlds largest maker of semiconductors, said on Tuesday that it was laying off 12,000 people, about 11 percent of its work force, as it continues to reel from a long downturn in global demand for personal computers.

The companys chief executive, Brian Krzanich, announced the layoffs as part of a larger corporate restructuring, which will result in a $1.2 billion charge. Intel also reported lower-than-expected first-quarter earnings and reduced its projected revenue for the year.

Intel has been known as the PC company, Mr. Krzanich said in an earnings call with Wall Street analysts. Its time to make this transition and push the company all the way over to supplying chips for things like smartphones, cloud computing, sensors and other devices.

Intels restructuring is the latest evidence of how onetime tech bellwethers have had to navigate a rapid shift into the more flexible and dispersed tech world created by the combination of mobile computing devices connected to cloud computing systems. On Monday, for example, IBM reported lower profit and revenue, including a 22 percent drop in sales of computing hardware.
Yahoo said on Tuesday that its business continued to deteriorate in the first quarter, putting more pressure on the company to find a buyer quickly for its Internet operations.

Marissa Mayer, Yahoos chief executive, said during a webcast to discuss the financial results that a review of potential suitors was proceeding at the fastest responsible pace, but she declined to be more specific.

She also disputed news reports that the company was dragging its feet on a potential sale and refusing to share information with bidders.

Let me be unequivocal: Our board, our management team and I have made the strategic alternative process a top priority, Ms. Mayer said. Weve been responsive and engaging, having personally answered hundreds of questions and requests for information.
Bret Easton Ellis looked uneasy. He was sitting in the Schoenfeld Theater, waiting to see the Broadway musical based on his controversial novel American Psycho for the first time. He shifted in his seat and looked around at the crowd, then leaned back and sighed.

This is just another surreal aspect of my life, he said. It feels like the weirdest dream. I dont know, he continued wearily, his voice trailing off.

Mr. Ellis, who had recently flown in from Los Angeles, seemed to be having doubts about the whole endeavor. Before heading to the performance, he had a panicked conversation with his boyfriend. I said, God, what the hell are they going to do with this?

Its a fair question. How do you turn a wildly transgressive, experimental novel about a slick Wall Street investment banker-turned serial killer into a mainstream Broadway musical?
The intuition is that, in the phaseout region, rising income is offset by the decreasing credit, blunting the positive correlation between income and attendance. Statistical analysts call this method regression-kink design, because it relies on a change in the relationship between two variables.

Mr. Bulman and Ms. Hoxby found the predicted relationship between adjusted gross income and the receipt of tax credits in the phaseout region: Credits drop as income rises. But they found no corresponding relationship between income and college attendance. College attendance rises unabated with adjusted gross income, with no change when the credits phase out.

Why no effect? One explanation is that the credits primarily go to middle- and upper-income families, whose decision on whether to send their children to college is unlikely to be affected by $2,500. Another, compatible explanation is that the credits are delivered too late to affect enrollment. Families get them after tuition is due; a family that pays tuition in September wont get a tax credit until at least the following January. At that point the credit is a nice windfall, but has arrived too late to help pay the bursar.

The complexity of the tax benefits also most likely undermines their effect. I discuss this in greater detail in a recent paper I wrote with Judith Scott-Clayton, which provides a comprehensive overview of the tax benefits for education.

If the billions spent on the tax credits are to have any effect on college attendance, you would want them delivered when tuition bills are due. One proposal suggested by Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Bulman is to compute eligibility for the credits automatically, using income tax information when a dependent approaches college age. Families could then be notified of their eligibility. The authors also suggest that colleges file to receive the benefits directly from the Department of Education, so that a student need only present evidence of eligibility to have an account credited immediately.

An even more comprehensive approach would be to consolidate the tax credits with the Pell Grant, creating a single grant program that pays college costs at the time of enrollment. Eligibility could automatically be calculated using tax data, with money delivered by the Department of Education. Families could apply by checking off a box on their tax forms.

This approach would cut back substantially on paperwork, a relief for the millions of students who complete both the 1040 and the dreaded Free Application for Federal Student Aid in order to get federal grants, loans and tax credits for college. With a simplified application, and dollars delivered at the right time, the $30 billion now spent on tax credits could open college to many more students.
The North Carolina law has prompted the Obama administration to consider whether the state would be ineligible for billions of dollars in federal funding for schools, housing and highways.

Mr. McCrory, a Republican who is seeking re-election in November, and other supporters of the law have played down suggestions that the Obama administration would rescind those billions. Mr. McCrorys Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, the states attorney general, has said in the past that the law may put the federal funding at risk and has refused to defend the state in a lawsuit challenging it.

In a statement Tuesday, Mr. McCrory said he strongly disagreed with President Obama and Mr. Coopers objective to force our high schools to allow boys in girls restrooms, locker rooms or shower facilities, but would evaluate the effect of Tuesdays ruling on North Carolina law and policy.

The A.C.L.U. brought the case on behalf of Mr. Grimm, who was born female but identifies as a male, in June, seeking a preliminary injunction so that Mr. Grimm could use the boys restrooms at his school.

The school administration initially allowed him to do so, but the local school board later approved a policy that barred him from the boys restrooms; according to court documents, the policy also required students with gender identity issues to use an alternative private facility to go to the bathroom.

Judge Robert G. Doumar of Federal District Court ruled against Mr. Grimm in September, dismissing his claim that the school board had violated Title IX, although the judge did allow his case to go forward under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The ruling by a three-judge panel on Tuesday reversed the lower courts dismissal of the Title IX claim, stating that the District Court did not accord appropriate deference to regulations issued by the Department of Education. The departments current guidelines dictate that schools generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.
Goofing around at his home over the weekend in Philadelphia, Maurice Phillips committed an act of unimaginable carelessness with a gun, police officials said, accidentally killing his 4-year-old daughter with a shot to the head.

Mr. Phillipss reaction then set in motion a series of events that led to wild confusion, a desperate search and widespread news reports that the girl had been killed by her 5-year-old sister.

The shooting unfolded Saturday afternoon at a home that Mr. Phillips, 30, shared with his fiancee and seven children, the police said.

His daughter, Tahirah Phillips, had been watching television and playing with her siblings when her father entered the room and started waving a gun around like a toy, according to his eventual confession.
Kentuckys Republican governor on Tuesday ordered an investigation into what he described as wrongdoing under his Democratic predecessor, charging that state employees were coerced into contributing to political campaigns and that a contract was improperly steered to a politically connected company.

Gov. Matt Bevins allegation of greed and oftentimes corruption escalates the feud between the new governor, who took office in December, and the Beshear family: former Gov. Steven L. Beshear and his son Andy, the state attorney general. On April 11, Andy Beshear sued Mr. Bevin, saying the governor acted illegally in cutting higher education spending without approval by the Legislature. Steven Beshear is leading a public-relations campaign against his successors moves to roll back the states expansion of health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

A former state official close to the Beshears, Timothy M. Longmeyer, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a federal bribery charge, a case Mr. Bevin referred to in calling for a new investigation. As a member of Steve Beshears cabinet, Mr. Longmeyer steered contracts related to the health plan for state employees to a company that paid him kickbacks. Mr. Longmeyer briefly served this year as a deputy attorney general, under Andy Beshear, before resigning.

In a brief statement, Mr. Bevin said that in his months in office, his administration had found evidence that state workers were forced to contribute last year to the campaigns of Andy Beshear and Jack Conway, the previous attorney general, who was Mr. Bevins Democratic opponent in the race for governor. And he charged that the state had awarded a $3 million no-bid contract to a company with ties to Steve Beshears administration.
But the bill is hobbling through the House, where it was stripped this month of the parts that would allow legalization. As of Friday, it contains only a cautious provision to allow home-growing and legalized possession of small amounts of marijuana  well short of the regulated market that Mr. Shumlin has called for.

Lawmakers largest concerns are those that have emerged in state after state as the legalization movement has taken off: use and abuse by young people, impaired driving and commercialization.

But the opiate crisis, in which heroin, fentanyl and other drugs have killed more than 2,000 people in New England in the last year, is a substantial stumbling block, complicating efforts throughout the region and figuring into anti-legalization political alliances.

At a time when we are trying and working so desperately hard to get help to those who need it, telling young people to not do drugs, trying to eliminate some of the barriers to treatment and to promote recovery, this effort at legalization seems to be directly at odds with those efforts, said Maura Healey, the attorney general in Massachusetts and a Democrat, who opposes an initiative that is expected to land on the ballot in November. It would allow adults to possess up to 10 ounces of marijuana at home, permit edibles and create a regulated market.

Advocates are using the heroin crisis as an argument in favor of legalization, saying that it would move the substance out of the hands of traffickers and that it would reduce the amount of interaction with hard drug dealers, period, said Matt Simon, the New England political director of the Marijuana Policy Project, a national organization working on legalization.
Maggie Haberman, a New York Times political correspondent, has devoted her journalistic career to two irresistible subjects: politics and New York City. At age 7, she had her first byline in The Daily News; it has now appeared in all three New York dailies.

A native of the Upper West Side who lives in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, she has covered 10 election cycles, from mayoral contests to presidential campaigns, including the 2016 race, which turns to New York on Tuesday for its primary. Join us for live primary updates.

Hello from Crown Heights, where the trees are finally green enough to canopy over Eastern Parkway and where the New York primary has officially arrived.

Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton are the heavy favorites to win in their home state, where both have been known presences for many years. But there are some tantalizing subplots that could help direct the remaining acts of this political theater.
BOWLING GREEN, Ky.  Hurry Up!!! the online posting said. Spot Admissions to Western Kentucky University. Scholarships of up to $17,000 were available, it added. Letter in one day. The offer, by a college recruiter based in India, was part of a campaign so enticing that more than 300 students swiftly applied to a college that many had probably never heard of.

More than 8,000 miles away, at Western Kentucky, professors were taken by surprise when they learned last fall of the aggressive recruitment effort, sponsored by their international enrollment office. Word began to spread here on campus that a potential flood of graduate students would arrive in the spring 2016 semester.

The problem  or one of them  was that many of the students did not meet the universitys standards, faculty members said, and administrators acknowledged.

Western Kentuckys deal with the recruiting company, Global Tree Overseas Education Consultants, is a type of arrangement that is becoming more common as a thriving international educational consultancy industry casts a wide net in India and other countries, luring international students to United States colleges struggling to fill seats. The university agreed to pay Global Tree a commission of 15 percent of the first years tuition of students who enrolled, or about $2,000 per student.
SYDNEY, Australia  Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Tuesday that he would call for national elections to be held on July 2, meaning that he will test his popularity with the Australian public just seven months after taking office.

The announcement was not a surprise. The conservative prime minister had previously said that he planned to call a so-called double dissolution election, under which all seats in both houses of Parliament are open. In most national elections, all of the lower house, but only half the Senate, is up for election.

The result of the voting in July, analysts said, could be a more-cooperative Senate and a smoother path through Parliament for Mr. Turnbulls initiatives  assuming that he wins.

A double dissolution election is about giving the people their say, Mr. Turnbull said on Tuesday. It is an occasion when the House and Senate cant agree, persistently, and so then everyone goes to the polls and the Australian people have their say.
In his new book, Chinas Guaranteed Bubble, Ning Zhu, a professor at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, dissects the risks accumulating in Chinas economy, especially in its financial sector. In an interview, he explained his argument that the Chinese governments implicit guarantees to banks, state-owned corporations, local governments and investment areas such as the housing and stock markets have encouraged levels of leverage that are increasingly hazardous as the countrys economy slows.

Q. What do you mean by a guaranteed bubble?

A. There are two major messages in the title. First, that well-intended guarantees eventually lead to a bubble. Its conceivable that if investors believe their investment returns are guaranteed, they will use ways, such as increasing leverage or opaque financial innovations, to take greater risks, leading to overspeculation and a bubble in asset prices.

Second, without meaningful structural reform in the Chinese economy and financial sector, whats been going on in the past few years will eventually lead to a bubble. A bubble and subsequent bust are not a matter of whether, but when. Overspeculation leads to poor investments, and the debt overhang becomes so big that it eventually causes the bubble to burst. I hope this book will serve as a wake-up call, because the window for defusing this time bomb is closing, given how fast debt has increased in the past few years.

Image Prof. Ning Zhu Credit... Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance

Interestingly, some readers in China complained about the title. Some thought I meant that the bubble is guaranteed by the government and therefore will never burst. There are a lot of people scared of the bubble bursting, but just as many who believe were already in a bubble and are waiting for the bubble to burst to snap up assets.
HONG KONG  At first, the collision of the two front-end loaders on the dusty street in northern China seems like it could be a work-site accident. Then, as one witness murmurs in disbelief, the violent intent becomes clear. With their buckets held high like the horns of battling beetles, the two machines repeatedly slam into each other. Another joins the fray, toppling one of the first combatants. Yet another arrives, trying to right its fallen comrade. And then even more arrive to do battle.

Some participants in the Sunday street battle in Xingtang County, in the Hebei provincial capital of Shijiazhuang, carried knives and pellet guns, according to one report. But the most surprising weapon was the construction equipment. At least two people filmed the clash with cellphones, and the video was widely viewed on Chinese websites on Monday.

Some commenters on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform, called it a clash of homegrown Transformers. The actual explanation is far more prosaic. A dispute between two concrete plants escalated to the front-end loader fight, according a statement from the Xingtang County propaganda office.

Workers in front-end loaders and sport utility vehicles from one company, the Jianwen Concrete Plant, had shown up at the Xinghua Concrete Plant intending to take over the work on a new development project, one Xinghua worker told Beijing Youth Daily.
Cases of espionage have received wide attention in China recently. In January, officials announced that they were prosecuting a Canadian man who ran a cafe near the border with North Korea on charges of spying and stealing state secrets. Last year, China detained four Japanese citizens on suspicion of espionage.

As part of National Security Education Day on Friday, Beijing officials hung posters at government offices warning about the risks of romantic relationships with foreigners, according to The Associated Press. The posters, titled Dangerous Love, told the story of how a spy named David, posing as a visiting scholar, seduced a young propaganda worker and persuaded her to give him secret documents.

The details of Mr. Huangs case were revealed in a 15-minute special report on CCTV, which portrayed him as a disgruntled employee who contacted foreign spy agencies online in hopes of getting rich.

Mimicking the style of several recent televised confessions that the ruling Communist Party has used as a propaganda tool, the report showed Mr. Huang in shackles and an orange vest, shuffling down a dark hallway. In an interview with CCTV, he recounted how he arranged meetings in Southeast Asia with foreign spy agencies and stole materials from his wife and brother-in-law, who also handled classified information in their work.

If there are other people who see me and they are doing similar things  betraying their country  I hope theyll report themselves to the national security people, he said in the interview. Thats good for their family and themselves, and it will lead to a better outcome.

Mr. Huang was arrested in 2011, and it was unclear why the authorities waited until now to publicize the case. His wife was sentenced to five years in prison, and his brother-in-law was sentenced to three years in prison, the state media reports said. They were both accused of negligent disclosure of state secrets.
KABUL, Afghanistan  Even in a year when violence across Afghanistan did not relent over the winter months, the Taliban marked the official start of the spring fighting season with a huge truck bomb in the heart of Kabul on Tuesday.

Beyond the all-too-familiar carnage  at least 30 dead and more than 300 wounded  it also sent a message: The Taliban can attack the capital at will, and they have no intention of engaging in peace talks despite reports of internal rifts.

The location of the bombing, near the compound of an elite force that provides protection to senior Afghan officials, also demonstrated how vulnerable the government remains.

The Taliban have stretched Afghan security forces thin throughout the country, with fighting raging across multiple provinces. But complex urban attacks remain crucial to the insurgency because they bring what even major battlefield gains in remote areas of the country cannot: headlines, and a disruption of daily life that increases pressure on a coalition government already struggling with infighting and stagnation.
The climate of voter dissatisfaction has buoyed candidates like Mr. Duterte and Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., the leading candidate for vice president. (In the Philippines, the vice president is elected separately from the president, and often the two are political opponents.)

Mr. Marcoss father, the countrys former dictator, was accused of plundering billions from its coffers. The son speaks nostalgically on the campaign trail of his fathers era, when he says the Philippines was more successful and orderly. Both he and Mr. Duterte promise strong, decisive leadership that some say sounds like a return to dictatorship, according to Richard Heydarian, a political-science professor at De La Salle University in Manila.

What is at stake here, Mr. Heydarian said, isnt Aquinos legacy only, but the whole democratic system that supplanted the Marcos dictatorship.

Critics of Mr. Aquino note that ordinary people do not feel the benefit of a ratings upgrade or a steady growth in gross domestic product. Despite six years of relative prosperity, thousands of Filipinos still leave the country every month to work in often dangerous and degrading jobs in the Middle East because they cannot find jobs at home. Workers who do have jobs at home often find themselves commuting four or five hours a day because of the crippling traffic in Manila and other large cities.

Mr. Aquino has received accolades from the World Bank and others for increasing tax collections, but critics of his administration say the greater revenue has not translated into improved infrastructure.

The countrys main commuter train in Manila often breaks down, forcing people to exit on dangerous, elevated tracks, and it has been known to catch fire while moving or have its doors fly open. The countrys main airport, where sections of the roof have fallen on passengers and which has been rated one of the worlds worst, recently endured a nearly six-hour power outage that left travelers sweltering in the dark because officials had failed to maintain backup generators.

Running a close second to Mr. Duterte is Grace Poe, a senator, and the daughter of one of the countrys most popular movie stars, who had to renounce her United States citizenship in order to seek office. She has cast herself as a populist but also as a young, fresh face in politics not tainted by scandal.
THE RISE AND FALL OF PEGIDA - SCRIPT Sound up: Wir sind das volk! demonstration daytime Dresden See Tino in crowd. TINO JASCHKE: How many times I have marched with Pegida, I dont know. But it wasnt 13 times. I think it would be five times at least. MIRA JASCHKE: It was a shock that my dad walks with Pegida and, I have accepted that he is with Pegida, and we talked about it a lot, but it was difficult for me in the beginning, but now (CRIES AND TURNS TO MOTHER AT THE TABLE) ... when I know that normal people  oh, mom! Its ok Sweetie Sound up. Protests FROM THE BREAKFAST TABLE TO THE STREETS, DRESDEN HAS BEEN DIVIDED BY A RISING RIGHT-WING ANTI-IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT CALLED PEGIDA, OR PATRIOTIC EUROPEANS AGAINST THE ISLAMIZATION OF THE WEST. THE MONDAY MARCHES, WHICH HAVE ATTRACTED TENS OF THOUSANDS, REFLECT A GROWING, YET MINORITY. INTOLERANCE FOR MUSLIMS. Sound up Tino showing bike room: TINO: These are finishers medals. TINO JASCHKE LIVES WITH HIS WIFE AND TWO DAUGHTERS ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE CITY. IN MANY WAYS, MR. JASCHKE REPRESENTS THE SOFTER SIDE OF THE PEGIDA MOVEMENT, WHICH SEES IMMIGRATION AS A PROBLEM THAT IS POORLY ADDRESSED BY THE GOVERNMENT. TINO JASCHKE: It is important that we have qualified people, it is important that people enter the country who accept us as a country. But who dont later want to question that and want to completely change Germany, to make it like with the systems they left behind. (NAT POP) LUTZ BACHMANN: I would like to give a shoutout to all of our friends across Germany. I greet our branches in Kassel, Leipzig, Dusseldorf, East Friesland, Munich, Rostock, Magdeburg, Wurzburg, Braunschweig and Bonn! BUT ON THE STREET, MANY MARCHERS TAKE A HARDER LINE... RENATA FRIEDERHAUSER: They know already they will take over Europe and even the whole world. Thats the plan of all Muslim people. MARCUS BOTIG Theres too many of them here already. Thats the problem with Islam. We are becoming the minority. HANS VOLLANDER: nobody expected so many people would come together almost like a ritual each monday they come together and some of the observers and journalists thought it would be over after a couple of demonstrations, but it wasnt. (CUT OUT THE GUY YOU ADDED HERE) IN 2014 GERMANY RECEIVED OVER 200,000 ASYLUM APPLICATIONS, MORE THAN ANY OTHER NATION. EXPERTS SAY THE SURGE OF REFUGEES FLEEING SYRIAS CIVIL WAR HAS STIRRED FEAR AND ANGER TOWARDS IMMIGRANTS. NAME WITHHELD (guy with dog): One day we will have so many refugees that we cant defend ourselves. And we cant solve the problems of the world. Dilara Karabacak: Its not something where I am welcome. Home means you must welcome you must be safe. but here i am afraid to go outside on mondays i am afraid to go outside when its dark. Prof. Hajo Funke: The energy is indeed developed in a kind of classical right wing populism. We criticize the establishment, we are the people, but we project our aggressions to scapegoats. // OR: What we also have it an astonishing and dangerous extension of violence against foreigners. In the three months Pegida movement has taken place the amount of acts of violence against migrants and others has double compared to the three months before. LUTZ BACHMANN: Im talking about the gradual phasing-out of our Christian heritage from our society. Its already begun in Berlin and in other cities. Shot of Bachmann during protest. THE GROUPS FOUNDER IS 41-YEAR OLD LUTZ BACHMANN, A DRESDENER WITH A CRIMINAL PAST. BACHMANN RECENTLY RESIGNED FROM PEGIDA AFTER A PHOTO OF HIMSELF POSING AS ADOLF HITLER WAS POSTED ON THE INTERNET. Shot of bachmann during protests. THE FOLLOWING WEEK, SEVERAL MEMBERS OF THE GROUPS LEADERSHIP ALSO LEFT THE ORGANIZATION, CALLING ITS SURVIVAL INTO QUESTION. Some sound up: BUT WHETHER OR NOT PEGIDA DOES SURVIVE, THE GROUPS STARTLING RISE AND POPULARITY IN GERMANY HAS CAUSED MANY HERE TO QUESTION WHETHER GERMANYS DECADES OLD REPUTATION FOR TOLERANCE, IN THE WAKE OF ITS DIFFICULT HISTORY, IS BEING TARNISHED. DANILO STAROSTA, CULTURE BUREAU OF SAXONY: If you dont come from a migratory background, I dont really think you can know what its like if 15,000 people get together and start chanting racist things. Because those are 15,000 people who can pop up in 15,000 different places in a city like Dresden. Fettah Cetin, Kurdish business owner: In the past things were more relaxed, but its becoming worse. // my tenant, his daughter. For 14 years I have watched her grow up. She was like my own child. And every day I support her. And now I read that he is writing foreigners should disappear, they should go home, and such phrases. // the explanation is pegida Dilara Karabacak (born in Dresden, Kurdish descent): When I speak another language they cry in the supermarket loud: Dont speak another language, you are in Germany! Its not so good for us young people. Sound up: Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here! PEGIDAS RISE HAS HAS NOT BEEN UNCHECKED, WITH COUNTER DEMONSTRATIONS MASSIVELY OUTNUMBERING THOSE IN DRESDEN SPROUTING IN OTHER CITIES. Prof. Hajo Funke: Of course Pegida is not good for the reputation of Germany in the world. But on the other hand, its important to know and to hear that the big majority of Germans are eager to help and to support in a kind of liberal culture and accepting the migrants culture especially the asylum seekers out of Syria or Iraq. A RECURRING QUESTION ABOUT PEGIDA, IS WHAT TYPE OF GERMAN MAKE UP ITS RANKS. WHILE MANY REPORTS SAY THE GROUP IS COMPRISED OF NEO-NAZIS OR MEMBERS OF THE FAR RIGHT, RESEARCHERS HERE SAY THAT OVERALL THE NUMBERS OF SUCH PEOPLE ARE RELATIVELY SMALL. Professor Hans Vollander: We were stunned BY THE FACT that most of the people we talked to were middle of the road people. They earn decent money they have a good education. They are not unemployed they are not retired and most of them do not belong to neo-nazi and hooligan groups. Sound up Mira dancing in anti-protest group: HIS DAUGHTER MIRA HAS JOINED THE ANTI-PEGIDA MOVEMENT, AND THEIR SPLIT ON THE ISSUE HAS SOWED A DIVISION AT HOME. (Off camera Q:) But its also important to know that your Dad supports you being out there on the street? Mira JASCHKE: Yes, my dad always says both of opinions are right and that I should be there because that is what I think, and that is what I stand for, and so I should be out there, so ... Tino JASCHKE: Stop and catch your breath. WHAT HAPPENS TO PEGIDA NOW THAT ITS LEADERSHIP HAS CHANGED IS AN OPEN QUESTION. THE GROUPS DEMONSTRATION ON FEBRUARY 9 DREW ____ PEOPLE. ONE OF THE GROUPS DEPARTING LEADERS, Kathrin Oertel, STARTED ANOTHER GROUP THAT SHE SAYS WILL BE LESS RADICAL. COUNTER DEMONSTRATIONS WILL ALSO CONTINUE, FOSTERING DIVIDES BOTH PUBLIC AND PERSONAL: Show Mira at counter demonstration. MIRA JASCHKE: I go to the counter-demonstrations because I want to show that Dresden is diverse and I dont want to give the neo-Nazis and far-right extremists any platform.
BRUSSELS  Around the world, this city of great, if often ramshackle, charm has become Exhibit A in the case against immigration, particularly when it involves large numbers of Muslims.

Donald J. Trump called the Belgian capital a hellhole, while Lubomir Zaoralek, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic, recently cited the city to explain why his and other Eastern European countries had steadfastly resisted a plan by the European Union to spread Syrian and other Muslim refugees around the Continent under a quota system.

All the people in the Czech Republic and in other countries see what happened in Molenbeek, he told a security conference in Slovakia over the weekend, referring to the Brussels borough where many of those involved in the attacks in Paris on Nov. 13 and in Brussels on March 22 grew up.

A closer look at what has happened in Molenbeek and other heavily immigrant parts of Brussels, however, provides a far more nuanced picture than just a generation of badly integrated young Muslim immigrants running amok. In some ways, it debunks the view that Islam is a one-size-fits-all faith that fuels terrorism.
MOSCOW  Ukraines president, Petro O. Poroshenko, said Tuesday that he and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia seemed to have agreed on a high-profile prisoner exchange that would bring home a Ukrainian officer now in Russian custody.

At a news conference in Kiev, Mr. Poroshenko said he had called Mr. Putin to discuss the matter, and that it seemed to me that we succeeded in agreeing on the swap, which would repatriate two Russian soldiers that Ukraine recently convicted on terrorism charges.

Analysts cautioned that the deal could still hit a snag over perhaps the most critical issue of the war in Ukraine: Russias insistence that its regular army has never been involved in the fighting there.

Given that stance, the trade poses a dilemma for Mr. Putin: Accepting a swap for a Ukrainian officer would get the pair home, but might also amount to a tacit admission of the Russians status as soldiers.
JERUSALEM  An Israeli court convicted a 31-year-old man on Tuesday of abducting and murdering a Palestinian teenager in 2014, rejecting his late-hour insanity plea and bringing to a close a case that has convulsed Israelis and Palestinians.

The Jerusalem District Court ruled that the man, Yosef Haim Ben-David, had been fully responsible for his actions when he and two teenage nephews snatched Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, off a street near his East Jerusalem home, drove him to a forest on the outskirts of the city, choked him, beat him unconscious and burned him to death in the early hours of July 2, 2014.

Mr. Ben-David told investigators during a recorded re-enactment of the crime that he had urged his young relatives, who struggled with their captive in the back of the car, to finish him off. Prosecutors are demanding a life sentence.

One of the teenage defendants was sentenced in February to life in prison, and the other to 21 years, after the judges determined that he had played a lesser role in the murder. Their names have not been made public because they were 16 at the time of the crime.
BEIRUT, Lebanon  For 38 straight days, the streets of the northwestern Syrian town of Maarat al-Noaman had been the scene of protests against the government and the Islamic extremists of the Nusra Front. On Tuesday, they became a scene of carnage, as government warplanes attacked the towns marketplace, killing dozens of people, according to residents and rescue workers.

The attack confirmed the apparent unraveling of a fragile cease-fire agreement between Syrian government forces and some armed opposition groups. The attack in Maarat al-Noaman, and a similar one in the nearby town of Kafr Nabl, came several days after the start of a new insurgent offensive in a neighboring province, and a day after the main Syrian opposition group said it would no longer participate in diplomatic discussions in Geneva.

The opposition has accused the government of repeatedly violating the partial cease-fire, and Tuesdays attacks were seen as a violent end to the relative respite from airstrikes that had lasted nearly two months.

Some residents in Maarat al-Noaman, 68 miles north of Homs, and in other towns in Syria that had been afforded a modicum of free space, had resumed the street protests that began the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad more than five years ago. The recent protests have signaled residents opposition to the government that has been bombing them and their distaste for extremists fighting among the rebel groups.
There is a strange little cultural feedback loop thats playing out again and again on social media. It begins with, say, a white American man who becomes interested in taking an outspoken stand against racism or misogyny. Maybe he starts by attending a Black Lives Matter demonstration. Or by reading the novels of Elena Ferrante. At some point, he might be asked to check his privilege, to acknowledge the benefits that accrue to him as a white man. At first, its humiliating  theres no script for taking responsibility for advantages that he never asked for and that he cant actually revoke. But soon, his discomfort is followed by an urge to announce his newfound self-awareness to the world. He might even want some public recognition, a social affirmation of the work he has done on himself.

These days, it has become almost fashionable for people to telegraph just how aware they have become. And this uneasy performance has increasingly been advertised with one word: woke. Think of woke as the inverse of politically correct. If P.C. is a taunt from the right, a way of calling out hypersensitivity in political discourse, then woke is a back-pat from the left, a way of affirming the sensitive. It means wanting to be considered correct, and wanting everyone to know just how correct you are.

In the 70s, Americans who styled themselves as radical chic communicated their social commitments by going to cocktail parties with Black Panthers. Now they photograph themselves reading the right books and tweet well-tuned platitudes in an effort to cultivate an image of themselves as politically engaged. Matt McGorry, the actor who plays a sweetly doofy prison guard in Orange Is the New Black, is a helpful case study of this phenomenon. McGorrys Instagram presence was once blithely bro-ey  yacht shots, tank tops, a tribute to coconut water. Then he watched the actress Emma Watson brief the United Nations on the importance of mens involvement in the feminist movement, and he took it to heart. Now he presents his muscular selfies and butt jokes alongside iconography of feminism and anti-racism. In one snap, he holds a copy of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in bed, shirtless. In December, BuzzFeed nodded at McGorry with a listicle titled: Can We Talk About How Woke Matt McGorry Was in 2015?

Earning the woke badge is a particularly tantalizing prospect because it implies that youre down with the historical fight against prejudice. Its a word that arose from a specific context of black struggle and has recently assumed a new sense of urgency among activists fighting against racial injustices in Ferguson, Sanford, Baltimore and Flint. When Black Lives Matter activists started a website to help recruit volunteers to the cause, they called it StayWoke.org. Woke denotes awareness, but it also connotes blackness. It suggests to white allies that if they walk the walk, they get to talk the talk.
Sigurlaug Dagsdottir, a graduate student researching the pools, speculated that the sundlaugs social utility in Icelandic communities derives in part from the intimacy of the physical experience: In the pool, she said, you can take off the five layers of clothing that usually separate you from everyone else. As such, the pools are a great leveler: Council members in Reykjavik make a point to circulate among the citys sundlaugs, where they often take good-natured grief from their constituents. The filmmaker Jon Karl Helgason, who is shooting a documentary about Icelands pools, said, When people are in the swimming pool, it doesnt matter if you are a doctor or a taxi driver. His girlfriend, Fridgerdur Gudmundsdottir, added, Everyone is dressed the same.

On the way from Reykjavik to Keflavik airport is the Blue Lagoon, a luxurious hot-water spa that is one of Icelands most popular tourist destinations. There, for 40 euros, you can shower in private stalls and float in mineral-rich water  discharge from the nearby Svartsengi power plant, which uses turbines twice as tall as a man to generate 75 megawatts of electricity and 150 thermal megawatts of heat for the surrounding towns.

My final day in Iceland, I turned off the highway just after the Blue Lagoon and instead drove into one of those towns, the port Rekjanesbaer. The lobby of the towns pool is dotted, fittingly, by a series of porthole-like windows. The woman working at the desk charged me nine bucks and asked, Is this your first time in an Iceland swimming pool?

Nope, I said with some pleasure.

The familiar signs in the showers were supplemented by notices in Polish, targeting the new wave of immigrants who have found work in Rekjanesbaer. I snapped on my Speedo, steeled my courage and exited the warm lodge into the chill. The 36-to-38-degrees-Celsius hot pot was full of enormous men with Bluto-type physiques and also a small girl in a pink ruffled bathing suit. The largest of the Blutos rose from the water, picked up the girl and carried her, giggling, to the family pool. His biceps sported a tattoo of a roaring bear consumed by flames.

This time I didnt approach anyone, didnt ask any questions. I didnt speak at all. I concentrated on what I could feel: the water pressing lightly on my skin, the wind prickling my beard. All around me was the soft white noise of a community. The conversation; the connection; the freedom, within that flurry of sociability, to withdraw and simply be within yourself. It called to mind something a Ph.D. student named Katrin Gudmundsdottir told me on my first day in Iceland. She was describing a certain ineffable emotional state to me, a native Icelanders sense of comfort while immersed in her neighborhood sundlaug. When I thought of what she said, a perfect G chord strummed inside me. Its not exactly like youre happy, she had mused. Its that you know how to be in the swimming pool.

The sun was low on the horizon, bright but evanescent. The only other thing in the crystal-blue sky was the contrail of a jet, pointed to the west. I closed my eyes. I was in the pool.
On a rainy Tuesday morning, the actor John Gallagher Jr. settled into a chair in a lounge above the American Airlines Theater and described a bleary night off, which began with beers in a Park Slope bar and ended with margaritas in a Clinton Hill taqueria. I had a lot of real booze last night, he told his cast mates, which Im regretting now.

These days, Mr. Gallagher and his fellow actors are already drinking plenty of the fake stuff on the job, as part of the Roundabout Theater Companys revival of Eugene ONeills Long Days Journey Into Night, which opens on Wednesday, April 27. Written in the 1940s, with the stipulation (long since disregarded) that it should never be performed, the play is a singeing union of fiction and autobiography, recording a single bourbon-soaked day  from morning to past midnight  in the Connecticut summer house of the Tyrones, an Irish-American clan closely based on ONeills own family.

In Jonathan Kents production, Jessica Lange (American Horror Story) plays the mother, Mary Tyrone, a former convent girl now struggling with morphine addiction, a role Ms. Lange first took on in London 16 years ago. Gabriel Byrne (In Treatment) is her husband, James, a prosperous actor in melodrama, who fears he has sacrificed his art for material success. Michael Shannon (Boardwalk Empire) plays the older son, Jamie, an alcoholic Broadway loafer. Mr. Gallagher (The Newsroom) is the younger son, Edmund, the ONeill stand-in, whose burgeoning career as a writer is threatened by tuberculosis.

The production joins several recent high-profile revivals of ONeills late work  A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Williamstown Theater Festival, The Iceman Cometh at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and most recently, this seasons short-lived revival of Hughie on Broadway.
You want to be green. You recycle. You turn off the faucet when you brush your teeth. But youre not going to forgo a flight to a tropical paradise and top-notch accommodations, even though planes emit greenhouse gases and routine hotel practices, like washing the linens each day, hurt the environment. After all, you love to travel  and well.

Theres still hope. To help you sleep easier on those high-thread-count sheets, here are 10 small ways to travel a little more responsibly, even when taking that trip to Hawaii.

1. Offset Your Flight

Flying (especially on short flights) is among the least sustainable ways to travel, according to groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund. Some airlines allow you to try to compensate for the carbon footprint you create when flying, however, by buying what are known as carbon offsets, or various ways to reduce greenhouse gases. Passengers on airlines like Delta and United can calculate their carbon footprint on the airline websites, which equate the size of a trips carbon footprint with a dollar figure. They can then donate their money or miles to a carbon reduction project such as forest conservation or renewable energy. Airlines are not the only ones offering offsets, though. Amtrak, for instance, has a rail calculator and allows you to offset your train trip through Carbonfund.org.

Some environmental organizations have said that offset programs are problematic. And a number of them have suggested that the carbon calculators on airline sites are not precise enough because they do not take into consideration factors like whether youre flying first class (which results in a larger carbon footprint because youre taking up space that could otherwise have been used to transport more people). Still, contributing to such programs is better than flying and doing nothing. For a more precise calculator, check out carbonfootprint.com.
Fifteen minutes west of Medellin, we flew into a dense bank of clouds. When the clouds broke briefly, the deep green jungle appeared, extending miles in all directions, laced with brown rivers and the occasional riverside village. This is the wild, wet and mostly roadless Choco region of northwest Colombia. Not a high-rise or highway in sight. Before long, the 17-seat plane descended, and the small town of Nuqui came into view, sitting at the tip of a long beach on the Pacific coast.

Though it attracts far fewer tourists than the countrys Caribbean coast, this remote area is well known to vacationing Colombians, who visit on summer weekends to watch humpback whales breaching near shore. Ecologists come to study the unparalleled biodiversity. And the coast is starting to attract American tourists looking for exotic wildlife, uncrowded waves and a quiet patch of sand.

Nuqui is a friendly but impoverished community of about 3,000 people, mostly Afro-Colombians, living in houses clustered tightly along dirt roads next to a tidal river. Theres no bank or post office in Nuqui, which is accessible only by plane or boat. The transportation fleet includes three moto-taxis, a handful of motorcycles and plenty of bikes. Mostly, locals walk. Or they travel in dugout canoes, always standing  paddling when going to sea to fish, or poling when going upriver toward the villages of the indigenous Embera people.

Image Children walking home from school in the town of Nuqui. Credit... Juan Cristobal Cobo Sanz for The New York Times

From Nuqui, we took a motor launch down the coast, past brown-sand beaches and hills to El Cantil, which sits in a loose cluster of eco-lodges and hostels. El Cantil has seven rooms in a string of cabanas facing the sea, and an open-air pavilion that serves as the dining room. Its a family operation run by Guillermo Gomez, known as Memo, whose father designed and built the lodge. Mr. Gomez has an infectious enthusiasm for local wildlife, a passion for surfing and a commitment to low-impact tourism. (Guests are encouraged to pack out any packaging they bring, the cabins have kerosene lamps, and a small hydro plant provides power for a couple of hours in the evening, just enough to charge batteries.)
A Lee County judge issued an order Monday that indicted Speaker of the House Mike Hubbards pretrial conference will occur as scheduled this Wednesday.

Hubbards defense attorneys Monday filed a motion to continue the speakers pretrial conference. The Auburn Republicans defense team requested a two-day continuance due to a conflicting jury trial in which the attorneys are engaged in Marshall County, which was expected to conclude last week.

Lee County Circuit Court Judge Jacob A. Walker issued an order late Monday afternoon that the hearing will remain as scheduled.

The court has received a call indicating that the motion to continue filed by attorney William Baxley is hereby moot. The hearing remains set for April 20, 2016, Walker wrote.

Hubbards pretrial conference is slated to begin Wednesday at 9 a.m. at the T.K. Davis Justice Center in Opelika.

His trial, which has been delayed multiple times, is set to begin in May.

Hubbard was indicted on 23 felony ethics charges of using his political position for personal gain in October 2014. He has maintained his innocence, and has continued to serve as Speaker of the House during the 2016 Alabama legislative session.
The Chambers County Commission voted Monday to approve amendments to tax abatements for Hantal Alabama, Hyundai Motors Manufacturing Alabama and Ajin USA.

A tax abatement for Hantal Alabama had previously been issued in 2014, but a change needed to be made to the value of the purchase price of the property, according to Valerie Gray, executive director of the Chambers County Development Authority.

We, the staff of the development authority, inadvertently put the value of the purchase price of the land on item number eight for the tax abatement as opposed to putting the real value of the property, Gray said. Therefore, filing and reporting of the taxes for the company would not be possible to do it according to the abatement.

The resolution changed the value of the property from $300,000 to $768,000.

Hyundai Motors Manufacturing Alabamas tax abatement will be for an expansion to allow for additional parts is is adding to its plant in the county.

The company asked for the assistance, which is common practice amongst other development authorities and other counties where Hyundai has suppliers, Gray said. This is for three years only for property taxes only. Full sales and use tax is being paid on that equipment.

Gray said part of Hyundais expansion is due to Ajins expansion in the Cusseta Industrial Park.

(Ajin) will build an additional 150,000 square foot facility on site, so it is an expansion, Gray said. It is about a $6.8 million expansion that will add an additional 10 jobs. The placed in service date will be March 2017.

Ajin will have a 10 year abatement on property taxes for the construction of the building and the machinery and equipment that will be placed into the facility.

Gray said Ajins original capital investment to the county in 2006 was $45 million.

To date, with this project, (Ajin) has spent $178 million and they employ over 800 people, Gray said.

Commission members also approved amendments to the countys budget that include the following: Increase total revenues from $15,002 to $22,002 in the jail supplement fund; Increase expenditures and decrease fund balance by $53,200 in the road and bridge fund and increase expenditures and decrease fund balance by $18,500 in the IT Support division of the general fund.

In other agenda, the commission:

 Reappointed Sam Bradford to the Chambers County Development Authority Board of Directors for a four-year term.

 Approved the county alcohol license fees for all new license applications and renewed licenses as set by the county in column three of the type license and code form to be returned to the state of Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board.
For those who celebrate April 20 as weed day, and those who dont, heres a prediction to consider:

The newly appointed chief of the Bureau of Medical Marijuana Regulation predicts licensed pot businesses soon might rival or even outnumber sanctioned booze businesses in California.

I do think were going to have a big licensing population here in California as it relates to cannabis, Lori Ajax said.

There were 88,490 active alcohol licenses last year. That indicates Ajax  a.k.a. the pot czar  will have a big task before her and a lot of eyes on her, with California already estimated to account for half of the nations marijuana industry.

No pressure, right? said a laughing Ajax.

Both her position and her bureau were created in October when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act into law.

The new regulations are an attempt to rein in an industry thats operated largely in the shadows in the 20 years since Californians voted to legalize medical marijuana. Thats led to a mishmash of pot laws aimed at supporting legal use for patients while still attempting to stamp out recreational use and abuse.

I think theres a lot of ambiguity right now, Ajax said. My vision is that we put together a strong regulatory structure where medical marijuana patients can get access to safe medicine and that Californians can be proud of.

As if thats not a daunting enough task, Ajaxs mandate (and the number of pot licenses) might expand dramatically if Californians approve the recreational use of cannabis at the ballot box in November.

Either way, her bureau wont be doing it alone. The Department of Food and Agriculture will monitor cultivation and the Department of Public Health will supervise manufacturing and testing of cannabis products. Ajaxs bureau  which is under the Department of Consumer Affairs  will regulate transportation, distribution and sales.

But with 17 different licenses to establish, some leaders in Californias nearly $3 billion medical marijuana industry have quietly voiced concerns that clear rules might not be in place in time to start issuing permits by the target deadline of Jan. 1, 2018.

Ajax has no such doubts.

There is no room for failure here. Its going to happen.

FROM ABC TO 420

Ajax started at Sacramento State as a history major. It only took one criminal justice class to change her path, which led to a 21-year career with the Department of Alcohol and Beverage Control.

You can make a difference in a community by regulating alcohol and making sure people are doing what theyre supposed to be doing, and keeping alcohol out of the hands of kids, she said. I really liked that mission.

The Sacramento-area Republican rose through the ranks at the ABC, serving since January 2014 as the agencys chief deputy director.

Brown appointed Ajax chief of the Bureau of Medical Marijuana Regulation on Feb. 3, beating out stiff competition to take over the potentially powerful new state agency. She was sworn in three weeks later.

Ajax, who doesnt use cannabis, previously had little knowledge of Californias medical marijuana scene. But she found the idea of building a regulatory agency from the ground up fascinating.

I think that it was maybe a good thing that I came into this not knowing a lot about the cannabis industry, she said. I didnt come in with any preconceived notions.

To get to know the community, shes launching a series of meetings across the state, with one in the works for Orange County sometime in May.

Ms. Ajax appears to seriously engaged in working with stakeholders and the industry to make MMRSA a success, said Aaron Herzberg, who runs CalCann Holdings, a Costa Mesa company that invests in everything from real estate for marijuana cultivation to dispensaries.

Herzberg heard Ajax during her first public address at the California Cannabis Industry Associations conference last month in Sacramento. He said he was encouraged by her effort to understand industry needs, and her commitment to hit that Jan. 1, 2018 deadline.

If she manages to pull off that ambitious goal it would be an amazing accomplishment, he said.

BUILDING THE BUREAU

For her first month on the job, Ajax was the bureaus only employee.

Brown recently appointed An-Chi Tsou, a State Assembly Committee policy consultant who helped draft the marijuana bill, to be the bureaus senior policy adviser. And the state is advertising now for an assistant chief.

The proposed budget for the coming fiscal year calls for 126 new government jobs tied to the new marijuana regulations, including 25 who will work in Ajaxs bureau.

The next challenge, she said, will be to fill out details of the new law, incorporating public input and getting a final draft of all regulations approved.

A key part of that effort involves sorting out the rules for enforcement of marijuana laws. Generally, Ajax expects the bureau to work much like other industries regulated by the Department of Consumer Affairs, with complaints triggering investigations.

The state also will train local law enforcement to understand the new regulations, and Ajax said the agency will work closely with police once the rules are firmly established.

Building the bureau is in some ways a moving target, with clean-up legislation and related bills pending that could shift direction a bit.

And more change could be in the works if voters redraw the cannabis rules yet again. The Adult Use of Marijuana Act, which is expected to qualify for the November ballot, calls for Ajaxs agency to oversee the recreational use of cannabis in addition to the drugs medical uses.

Ajax insists she hasnt yet pondered how her job will change if recreational use becomes legal. For the time being, Ajax remains focused on the challenges already in place.

I want to be involved in just putting in a really strong, fair, consistent regulatory system that everyone can look at and say, Look what California did.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7963 or bstaggs@ocregister.com
SANTA ANA  Two Laguna Hills residents pleaded not guilty Monday to planting weapons and drugs in a womans truck in an effort to get her arrested.

Jennifer Michele Beale, 37, and Kevin Brown, 42, were arrested Thursday on a warrant charging them with conspiracy to commit a crime, false imprisonment and making a false report, all felonies, and misdemeanor counts of making a false report of an emergency and altering evidence.

Brown also faces a sentence-enhancement allegation for having a prior conviction for second-degree burglary in 2010 in Los Angeles County, according to the criminal complaint.

The two are accused of planting a BB gun, a 12-inch hunting knife and methamphetamine in the bed of a truck belonging to a 40-year-old woman they know on March 23, Senior Deputy District Attorney Cynthia Nichols said.

The next day, about 5:50 a.m., Beale sent an email to the Orange County Crime Stoppers organization to falsely report that she saw the woman waving a gun around during an argument, Nichols alleged.

Beale allegedly called 911 at 11:30 a.m. that same day and filed another bogus report alleging she saw the woman  whose name was withheld  waving a gun during an argument, the prosecutor said.

Orange County sheriffs investigators found the gun and drugs in the victims truck when they went to her home, but she recognized the sunglass case packed with methamphetamine as allegedly belonging to Beale and investigators turned their focus to the two defendants, according to Nichols.

Nichols declined to comment on what allegedly motivated Beale and Brown to try to get the woman arrested.

The defendants were next due in court April 26 for a pretrial hearing.
Way too much in store if grocery merger goes through
Tension filled the trauma room at Mission Hospital Medical Center as paramedics rushed in with an unconscious teenage boy covered in blood.

Doctors and nurses began compressing his chest, used a defibrillator and tried to stop the bleeding, to no avail. His heart beat and pulse never came back.

Guys, Im sorry, said Dr. Almaas Shaikh, the trauma medical director at Mission Hospital. Hes gone.

They stood still for a few seconds before covering the boys body with a white sheet and putting an ID tag on his toe. The boys family walked in with tears in their eyes. His mother, crying, stroked his hair and kissed him goodbye.

It was the final scene of a mock DUI crash organized by Friends Against Drinking and Driving that began Monday morning at El Toro High School and was intended to warn students about the consequences of drunken driving.

The mock crash was part of Every 15 Minutes, a two-day nationwide program put on by high schools throughout the country. The title comes from the frequency of traffic deaths attributed to alcohol and texting while driving.

Every day, 28 people in the United States die in motor vehicle crashes that involve a drunken driver, amounting to one death every 53 minutes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The mock crash, featuring 10 student actors, took place in front of El Toro High, where, according to the storyline, a car with a drunken teenage driver and three passengers on their way back from a party hit another vehicle. Two died at the scene because they werent wearing their seat belts, and another was taken to Mission Hospital by ambulance.

Alcohol is related to the vast majority of motor vehicle collisions, Shaikh said after the scene at the hospital. The vast majority (of patients) would survive but they will have lifelong impact and injuries to deal with. If your pelvis gets crushed, you may never walk straight again.

Red Ramos, a junior at El Toro High who played the role of the crash victim dying at the hospital, volunteers for the schools Every 15 Minutes program.

The 17-year-old said the drinking and driving issue is close to his heart because he has a family member who got into a DUI crash.

It shows the consequences of drinking and driving and how it could happen to anybody, Ramos said about Every 15 Minutes. It could happen to loved one, friends and family.

Once you step into a vehicle with a drunk driver, you risk losing your life. Thats the importance of this program. I hope it influences many people.

Shiela Ramos, Reds mother, said tears came naturally to her at the hospital even though she knew it was all fake.

I was scared and I was thinking I hope this will not become real, she said. I dont want this to happen to my son.

Mission Hospital, which has the only trauma center in south Orange County, has participated in Every 15 Minutes over the last 25 years.

Shaikh said teenagers are especially vulnerable to DUI crashes because they are not experienced drivers, adding that teens must think before taking the wheel or getting into a friends car.

Just take a moment and think about the decision you are going to make because it will affect you and your family for a lifetime, she said. Anything that you choose to do in any form of distracted driving, whether its drinking, whether its texting, whether its listening to loud music in the car, whatever it is, the decision you choose to make in that split second can alter your future.

Contact the writer: 949-445-6397 or tshimura@ocregister.com
SANTA ANA  A 38-year-old Redlands man, facing the death penalty for killing a Westminster couple, pleaded guilty Monday and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Pasqual Raul Loera, an unemployed U.S. Navy deserter, shot Julie Palasco, 48, and Dennis Koire, 49, on Valentines Day in 2010 after visiting the couples home under the false pretense of buying an Infiniti sedan that they had listed for sale with AutoTrader, prosecutors said.

Palasco died at the scene; Koire was in a coma for 13 months until dying from his injuries in March 2011.

Loera drove off in the stolen sedan and was later caught in Las Vegas.

The trial was pending, but in the courtroom of Judge Patrick Donahue on Monday, Loera opted to plead guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and was immediately sentenced.

The Orange County District Attorneys Office had originally sought the death penalty for Loera. But the office decided to change course last week after learning more from the defense about Loeras life, said Senior Deputy District Attorney Steve McGreevy.

Loera served four tours of duty with the Navy in the Middle East, had no prior criminal record and experienced a difficult childhood, McGreevy said, all factors that a jury would consider when deciding whether to sentence Loera to death.

He confessed to the crimes after his arrest and has shown remorse, McGreevy said, adding that the victims family members were satisfied with the outcome.

There is a sense of relief there in knowing that Mr. Loera will die in prison, he said.

After the shootings in Westminster, Loera drove to his home in Redlands and accidentally shot himself in the foot when his gun slipped from his waistband. He then drove to a casino near the Nevada border  security guards chased him off after they spotted him wandering around the parking lot and crying, prosecutors said.

Loera drove off and crashed into a nearby ditch. Las Vegas police responded to the scene and determined that the car was registered to the Westminster couple.

Westminster police found the victims when they did a welfare check in response to the call from Nevada authorities.

Contact the writer: 714-834-3773 or kpuente@ocregister.com
The Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for documenting the use of slave labor in Southeast Asia to supply seafood to American tables  an investigation that spurred the release of more than 2,000 captive workers.

The Los Angeles Times was awarded the breaking news prize for its coverage of the shooting rampage by husband-and-wife extremists that left 14 people dead in San Bernardino and The Washington Post received the national reporting award for an examination of killings by police in the U.S.

Besides recognizing some of the biggest national and international stories of the year, the awards also spotlighted deep dives into a chilling rape case, the long arc of school segregation, and the mistreatment of psychiatric patients. The New Yorker was honored in the criticism and feature writing categories, which only recently were opened to magazines.

The New York Times won the international reporting award for detailing the plight of Afghan women, and the breaking news photography prize for images of refugees. Thomson Reuters was also honored in the same photography category, for its pictures of migrants covering hundreds of miles.

The Boston Globe was likewise honored twice: It won in the feature photography category with pictures showing the life of a poor, 6-year-old boy who survived a horrific beating by his mothers boyfriend, while the newspapers Farah Stockman took the commentary prize for her work on the legacy of school busing in the city.

The Tampa Bay Times and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune received the investigative reporting prize for demonstrating that years of budget and staff cuts and overall neglect had resulted in a dramatic uptick of violence in Floridas mental hospitals.

The Tampa Bay Times also won in local reporting for detailing the harmful effects of ending school integration in Pinellas County, Fla., the most concentrated site of academic failure in Florida. Officials responded by increasing funding and teacher training in the mostly black school system.

ProPublica and The Marshall Project received the award for explanatory reporting for exploring a rape case in which authorities initially didnt believe the victim, prosecuted her for lying, and years later came to realize she was telling the truth.

The New Yorker was awarded the feature reporting prize for a story on the enormous Cascadia fault line under the Pacific Ocean, while the magazines Emily Nussbaum won in the criticism category for her TV reviews. Magazines became eligible for the criticism award this year and the feature writing prize last year.

In editorial writing, John Hackworth of Sun Newspapers of Charlotte Harbor, Fla., was honored for his pieces about a deadly assault on an inmate by guards. Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee took the editorial cartooning prize for what judges called work that conveys wry, rueful perspectives through sophisticated style.

The awards marked the centennial of the Pulitzers, American journalisms highest honors.

AP journalists Margie Mason, Robin McDowell, Martha Mendoza and Esther Htusan chronicled how men from Myanmar and other countries were being imprisoned, sometimes in cages, in an island village in Indonesia and forced to work on fishing vessels. The stories also detailed the use of slave labor in processing shrimp.

The 18-month project involved tracking slave-caught seafood to processing plants that supply supermarkets, restaurants and pet stores in the U.S.

If Americans and Europeans are eating this fish, they should remember us, Hlaing Min, 30, a runaway slave from the Indonesian island, told The AP. There must be a mountain of bones under the sea.

The stories, photos and videos led to freedom for thousands of fishermen and other laborers, numerous arrests, seizures of millions of dollars in goods and crackdowns on Thai shrimp peeling plants.

AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll commended all of APs journalists, saying they stand up for people who dont have a voice and use the tools of our craft to inform the world and, occasionally, right wrongs that need to be righted. The award marked the news cooperatives 52nd Pulitzer and its first for public service.

Htusan, a native of Myanmar, said: The best prize is that all the men from my country who were trafficked came back home.

The Post, meanwhile, explored an issue that has prompted protests and debate around the U.S. in recent years. The newspaper found that in 2015, on-duty police officers shot and killed 990 people nationwide  and that unarmed black men were seven times more likely to die at the hands of police officers than unarmed whites. More than 50 of the officers had killed someone before.

Established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, the prizes were first given out in 1917. Public service award winners receive a gold medal; the other awards carry a prize of $10,000 each.

Here is the full list of winners:

Public Service: The Associated Press

Breaking News Reporting: The Los Angeles Times

Investigative Reporting: Leonora LaPeter Anton and Anthony Cormier of The Tampa Bay Times, and Michael Braga of The Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Explanatory Reporting: T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project

Local Reporting: Michael LaForgia, Cara Fitzpatrick and Lisa Gartner of The Tampa Bay Times

National Reporting: The Washington Post

International Reporting: Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times

Feature Writing: Kathryn Schulz of The New Yorker

Commentary: Farah Stockman of The Boston Globe

Criticism: Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker

Editorial Writing: John Hackworth of Sun Newspapers, Charlotte Harbor, Florida

Editorial Cartooning: Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee

Breaking News Photography: Tyler Hicks, Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev and Daniel Etter of The New York Times

Photography: Staff of Thomson Reuters

Feature Photography: Jessica Rinaldi of The Boston Globe

Fiction: The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Drama: Hamilton, book, music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda

History: Custers Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, by T.J. Stiles

Biography: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan

Poetry: Ozone Journal by Peter Balakian

General Nonfiction: Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, by Joby Warrick

Music: In for a Penny, In for a Pound, by Henry Threadgill
Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump appear to be heading for home-turf wins in Tuesdays New York presidential primaries, while Brooklyn native Bernie Sanders hopes to build momentum against Clinton and GOP underdogs Ted Cruz and John Kasich look to deprive Trump of delegates. Here are six credible predictions on how the race might shake out.

PredictWise: Trump and Clinton

The research project led by David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research in New York City, aggregates betting-market data and has successfully predicted the winner in 55 of 65 nominating contests its covered so far this year. As of Sunday, PredictWise gave Trump a 98-percent chance of winning the state, as well as an 85-percent chance (up from 76 percent last week) of winning more than half of the Republican votes.

Winning 50 percent of the statewide vote would give Trump all of New Yorks 14 at-large delegates, while winning 50 percent or more of the vote in any of New Yorks 27 congressional districts would net him an additional three delegates each. While little polling exists at the congressional level, Rothschild said that Trumps 50-percent odds statewide mean he is likely to get the vast majority of the delegates. This would help curb Cruzs success the last few weeks at closing the delegate gap between himself and Trump through grassroots organization.

On the Democratic side, PredictWise gives Clinton a 91-percent chance of winning, up from as low as 72 percent earlier in the month.

RealClearPolitics: Trump and Clinton

As of Monday, the poll averaging and aggregating site has Trump receiving support from just over 52 percent of likely New York Republican voters  a number thats held more or less steady for about three weeks. He has garnered at least 50 percent support in all but one of the 13 polls conducted since the start of April and tracked by RealClearPolitics.

Kasich comes in second with support from almost 23 percent, a share that would allow him to receive delegates if Trump were to slip below the halfway mark. Cruz, who has criticized New York values, has less than 18 percent, meaning he would get no delegates even if Trump doesnt take the majority.

On the Democratic side, Clinton has support from more than 53 percent of likely Democratic voters. Sanders has closed much of the 30-point deficit he faced in March but still trails Clinton by about 13 points.

Bing: Trump and Clinton

With a roughly 79-percent accuracy rating so far this cycle, Bing predicts Trump will win with exactly 50 percent of the vote. Kasich is projected to come in second with nearly 28 percent, followed by Cruz with just over 22 percent. Those shares would mean that all three candidates split at-large delegates proportionally if Trump slips below the majority threshold.

On the Democratic side, Clinton is projected to take the state with nearly 55 percent of the vote, according to the machine-learned predictive model that the Microsoft search engine created. It parses data from polls, prediction markets, search engine queries, and social-media posts.

FiveThirtyEight: Trump and Clinton

On Sunday, FiveThirtyEight, which is run by former New York Times stats guru Nate Silver, gave Trump a greater-than-99-percent chance of winning New York, with his share of the vote projected to exceed 50 percent in both of its models. (The site uses weighted state poll averages in addition to a model that combines those averages with national poll numbers and the effect of endorsements.) The site projects Kasich will come in second with around 25 percent of the vote or more, with Cruz coming in third with under 20 percent.

Clinton, meanwhile, has a 98-percent chance of winning, according to both of the sites models.

Political Insiders: Trump (Barely) and Clinton

New Yorks Republican establishment has largely kept to the sidelines in the partys presidential primary, though Trump can at least claim the backing of two of the states congressmen: Tom Reed and Chris Collins.

Representative Peter King hasnt endorsed anyone since his favorite candidate, Marco Rubio, dropped out, but he has made crystal clear whom he will not be voting for. Any New Yorker who even thinks of voting for Ted Cruz should have their head examined, he said on a radio show earlier this month, adding, I just cant stand that guy.

Kasich, whom King called a good guy in that same interview, has the support of former New York Senator Al DAmato.

Endorsements from elected officials have historically been among the best available indicators of success in a party primary, although that pattern has been challenged by the 2016 Republican race.

On the Democratic side, the endorsement ledger is far more lopsided. Clinton has the loyalty of the states entire Democratic congressional delegation, plus Governor Andrew Cuomo, according to the latest tally compiled by FiveThirtyEight.com.

Ballotcraft: Trump and Toss-Up

This fantasy politics game, founded by two Stanford grads, has thousands of players who use fake money to buy shares in candidates. So far, it has correctly predicted 58 of the 70 nominating contests it has covered as of one day prior to voting.

And as of Sunday, shares of Trump were worth about $0.80, meaning he had about an 80-percent chance of winning. (The site doesnt look at vote share.) Clinton has a slight advantage, with a 50.2-percent chance of winning, down from 60 earlier in the week. Sanders is less than a point behind her and the two have exchanged the lead a few times since the beginning of April.
IRVINE  Mayoral candidate Gang Chen has threatened to mount a recall effort against four of the five Irvine City Council members after they rejected a proposal to change the site of a proposed veterans cemetery.

Chen has been a vocal backer of an offer by developer FivePoint Communities to swap the 125 Great Park acres the city set aside for a cemetery for property south of the park.

Politicians have to be held accountable for their actions, and their actions have consequences, he wrote in an email Thursday to Mayor Steven Choi and council members Beth Krom, Lynn Schott and Jeff Lalloway, who earlier in the week declined to take up the developers offer. If you continue to ignore the will of Irvine people, a recall of you as the city council or mayor is necessary.

Residents who live near the Great Park site have protested the establishment of a cemetery close to their homes, many saying the ancient Chinese philosophy of feng shui discourages burial grounds near living areas.

Chen has played a leadership role in the protests. He said recently he is is not bothered by the Great Park location, but is acting a liasion for residents for whom it is a serious concern.

After months of talks with FivePoint and a nonprofit organization formed by veterans who want a cemetery in Irvine, Councilwoman Christina Shea presented the proposal from the developer as a win-win for the feuding communities. The FivePoint site, used for agriculture, would not require demolition ahead of construction like the Great Park site would, she said, potentially accelerating the projects timeline.

But Shea found no backers at the April 12 council meeting. Her colleagues rejected the proposal over concerns it would endanger the work of the state Department of Veterans Affairs, or CalVet, which was allocated $500,000 last year to pull together an application for federal funding for the Great Park site. CalVet has said the application will be submitted by the July 1 deadline.

Krom said Chen has taken a simplistic approach to a complex issue.

Im not sure what weve done that would forge in anyones mind a basis for a legitimate recall effort, she said. I feel very comfortable with the decision I made. It was certainly not reflective of a lack of respect for any segment of this community.

Petitioners would need to get signatures from more than 14,000 of Irvine registered voters in 160 days to put a recall election on the ballot.

That would place any such recall election after Novembers council election. Choi is running for an Assembly seat, but has indicated he will seek another term as mayor if unsuccessful. Shea and Kroms terms expire this year; Shea has indicated she is running for re-election.

Lalloway said Chens talk of recall would not change his mind.

Im not giving in, he said. I still think its the right place to be. Why do we want to stop now and start over?

Contact the writer: sdecrescenzo@ocregister.com
The cheapest apartments in Orange County are, by another measure, the costliest, a new survey shows.

The average rent for a studio apartment in a big complex  averaging 532 square feet  was a relatively economical $1,486 a month during the first quarter of the year.

But rent one of these pint-sized puppies, and you run the risk of having the biggest rent hikes.

Apartment tracker Real Answers reported this week that the average asking rent for an Orange County studio jumped 10.7 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, the biggest percentage increase among apartment types tracked. In dollar terms, thats an increase of $144 a month, also the biggest.

In addition, the 6,636 studios included in Real Answers Orange County survey have had the fastest rising rent since at least 2010, increasing $436 a month  or 41.5 percent  in the past six years.

The most stable rents during the first quarter was for three-bedroom townhomes. Asking rent for these 1,305 house-sized apartments increased 2.9 percent year over year to $2,878. Thats an increase of just $81 a month over the first quarter of 2015. At $2.09, the price per square foot was third highest, just behind one-bedroom, one-bathroom units, which rent for $1,663 a month or $2.27 a foot.

In Los Angeles County, average rent for 15,748 studio apartments tracked increased 9.6 percent to $1,619 a month, or $3.26 per square foot.

In the Inland Empire, rent was up 5.1 percent to $923 a month  or $1.93 per square foot  for 2,285 studio apartments in that two-county region. Only one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartments there had bigger percentage gains: Up 8.4 percent to $1,193 a month.

For the lowest price per square foot, consider renting a two-bedroom, one-bathroom unit. The average asking rent in Orange County was $1,726 a month in the first quarter, but the cost was just $1.88 a foot, Real Answers reported.

Overall, Real Answers reported the average asking rent for all Orange County apartments increased 5.3 percent year over year to $1,903 a month, fifth highest among 26 California metro areas.

Thats significantly higher than Reis Inc.s reported asking rent of $1,753 a month cited Sunday in the Register.

Real Answers data is limited to larger complexes, which tend to have higher rents. Real Answers first-quarter survey included 138,930 units in 518 complexes of 90 or more units, representing about 32 percent of all Orange County rentals.

Reis, on the other hand, includes buildings with as few as 20 units in its survey. The data firm declined to say, however, how many buildings or units its survey includes.

Vacancies also were slightly higher in those bigger, pricier complexes. Real Answers reported a first-quarter vacancy rate of 4.6 percent. The vacancy rate was 3.3 percent in the Reis survey.

Meanwhile, the 13 Newport Beach complexes surveyed by Real Answers continued to have the countys highest rents, averaging $2,436 a month. By comparison, Orange Countys typical monthly mortgage payment was $2,962 for a home purchased in March.

Average rent for the 11 Buena Park complexes in the survey were the most economical at $1,501 a month. Buena Park has had the cheapest rent here for the past five quarters.

Rents were up in all 23 cities included in the Real Answers survey.

Rents were rising fastest at Lake Forests 13 apartment complexes, climbing 12.2 percent to $1,833 a month. The smallest percentage increase occurred in Cypress, were average asking rent at seven complexes there rose 0.4 percent to $1,621 a month.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7734 or jcollins@ocregister.com
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia  The images of the past year have been deeply unsettling for the people of Saudi Arabia, long accustomed to oil-fueled prosperity and regional clout: militants firing at communities along the countrys southern border; protesters storming the Saudi Embassy in Tehran; civil wars raging in three nearby states.

The view from Riyadh has become increasingly bleak as stubbornly low oil prices constrain the governments ability to respond to crises and as the kingdoms regional rival, Iran, moves aggressively to expand its influence at Saudi Arabias expense.

Under huge stress, the Saudis have responded in unpredictable ways, often at odds with Washingtons interests. They have launched a costly military offensive in neighboring Yemen that has failed to defeat the Houthi rebels and has empowered the al-Qaida affiliate there. They have executed dozens of men on terrorism charges, including a prominent dissident Shiite cleric. And they have largely walked away from Lebanon, suspending billions of dollars in promised aid as Iranian influence there grows.

This is the Saudi Arabia that will greet President Barack Obama, who is scheduled to arrive in Riyadh on Wednesday and who is the source of no small share of this nations anxiety. Policymakers across the kingdom have long said that they feel Obama does not share the countrys regional interests. And after he criticized the Saudis as free riders last month, those suspicions have hardened into fears that he may be actively undermining them.

Obama may try to use his visit to mend relations, but it remains unclear how badly the ties that have long bound the United States and the Saudi monarchy have weakened, and whether the damage can be repaired.

It is a concerning factor for us if America pulls back, said Prince Turki al-Faisal, an outspoken member of the Saudi royal family, a former head of intelligence and a former ambassador to the United States. America has changed, we have changed and definitely we need to realign and readjust our understandings of each other.

The moment is a perilous one for the Saudis as they face economic and demographic challenges as well as strategic and security concerns.

Domestically, a growing cohort of young Saudis is entering the job market as low oil prices constrain economic opportunities and undermine the welfare system. Regionally, Iran has outflanked and outmaneuvered Saudi Arabia in crucial countries as the Arab Spring and the war in Syria have upset the local order. Globally, the drift of the United States away from the monarchys side has made the Saudis realize how much they have relied on the worlds most powerful nation.

A large number of factors have come together, both in the region and at home, to create a very challenging threat environment for the Saudis, said Lori Plotkin Boghardt, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The Saudis feel under siege.

For decades, the kings and princes who rule Saudi Arabia wielded their oil wealth and religious clout as the controllers of Islams holiest sites to pull strings and fund proxies across the Arab world and beyond.

Since the kingdom has never had the military might to protect itself, its alliance with the United States has been essential, and hugely beneficial to both sides. Saudi Arabia knew that in exchange for a steady flow of oil and billions of dollars for the American arms industry, the U.S. would come to the rescue if its ally faced an external threat  and that it would never speak out too loudly about the kingdoms closed political system or its poor human rights record.

That relationship was unsettled by the Arab uprisings of 2011, when Saudi officials saw the U.S. cut loose another Arab ally, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, amid popular protests. Since then, frustration among Saudi officials has grown as Obama limited American engagement in later crises, in Libya, Syria and elsewhere, and as he made a deal with Iran to lift sanctions in exchange for the reining-in of its nuclear program.

In Syria, the Saudis saw the uprising against President Bashar Assad as an opportunity to replace an Iranian ally who was killing his own people. The hope was that a government more amenable to Riyadhs influence, and less to Irans, would come to power. But that hope dwindled when the U.S. backed away from military action after Assad crossed Obamas red line against the use of chemical weapons.

Over time, it became clear that Obama had prioritized combating the Islamic State over ousting Assad. This infuriated Riyadh, which wanted to marry the two causes. Privately, Saudi officials blame Obama for prolonging the war by barring Saudi Arabia and other countries from giving Syrian rebels more powerful arms, like anti-aircraft missiles, which Obama feared could be used outside Syria by terrorists.

The mounting frustration has led Saudi Arabia, under a new monarch, King Salman, to abandon its quiet checkbook diplomacy and lash out. In January, it executed 47 men on terrorism charges, including al-Qaida militants and the Shiite cleric  sending what it thought was a message to deter jihadis and Iran from trying to destabilize the kingdom.

Analysts have begun speaking of a Salman Doctrine, although it is mostly associated with the kings son Mohammed bin Salman, 30, who is the defense minister and is second in line to the throne. The doctrine calls for increased self-reliance and more assertiveness in regional affairs.

Saudi Arabia has also shown a growing willingness to use direct force. Last year, its military spending grew to $87.2 billion, as the country passed Russia to become the worlds third-highest military spender. Last month, it opened a new arms factory, and it has proposed building a military base in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, to project power abroad. Mohammed has also spearheaded the creation of an international alliance of Muslim countries to combat terrorism, although it is unclear when  if ever  it will begin operations.

Diplomats who track the kingdom question whether Saudi Arabia has the strategic capabilities to match its new ambitions.

One test case is Yemen, where the kingdom and its allies have carried out a bombing campaign for more than a year, trying to oust the Houthi Shiite militant group from the capital and restore the government  at tremendous cost to the people of Yemen. An estimated 6,400 people have been killed, more than half of them civilians; nearly half the countrys provinces are on the verge of famine; and al-Qaida has expanded its control in the south.

The Saudis defend the war as essential to their national security. It is a war of necessity, said Abdulaziz Sager, a Saudi political scientist and the chairman of the Gulf Research Center. You cant let a failing state with a violent nonstate actor be your neighbor.

Domestically, the fall in oil prices has echoed through the Saudi economy, forcing the government to run a large deficit, impose spending limits and ponder steps that were once unthinkable, like imposing taxes on citizens and privatizing parts of Saudi Aramco, the state oil giant.

It is not all dire news for the kingdom. Saudi Arabia still has the worlds largest reported reserves of oil, which remains essential to the global economy. The country also has low debt and large cash reserves.

And although Iran has increased its influence in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, it has done so at great cost, financially and militarily. The Saudis took the region for granted while Iran put a strategy in place back in the 80s, and has been implementing it year by year and dollar by dollar, said Randa Slim, an analyst at the Middle East Institute.

But the kingdom maintains strong ties with many other countries  including Egypt, Britain and Pakistan  and as a leading Sunni nation, it has the demographic upper hand against Shiite Iran. The score is still in their favor because it is a majority Sunni Arab region, Slim said.
GENEVA  Syrias top opposition leader vowed to fight even with stones to depose President Bashar Assad, shifting sharply to a tone of conflict over conciliation as peace talks in Geneva teetered near collapse Tuesday amid a new surge in fighting  including government airstrikes that left dozens dead.

Angry and defiant, Riad Hijab of the Western-backed Syrian High Negotiations Committee thundered home the opposition coalitions decision to walk back  if not entirely away  from U.N.-brokered peace talks in Geneva. He demanded more Security Council oversight of an increasingly wobbly cease-fire as Assads troops battled rebel fighters in various parts of the country.

The calculated gamble to jeopardize what diplomats have called the best chance in years to bring a diplomatic end to Syrias five-year war came amid the opposition groups growing frustration over unproductive peace talks and hundreds of government cease-fire violations in recent weeks.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that at least 44 people  mostly civilians  died in government airstrikes on opposition-held towns in northern Idlib province on Tuesday. Government warplanes also bombed areas in the central Homs and Hama provinces, activists said.

Salem Meslet, the High Negotiations Committee spokesman, said the deadly strikes validated the coalitions decision to suspend participation in the Geneva talks. Calling the strikes a massacre of innocents, Meslet said that Assad is telling the world he has no interest in diplomacy or peace.

The opposition coalition accuses the government of preparing an assault on the city of Aleppo, ignoring its demands for the release of thousands of detainees, and rejecting or avoiding requests for U.N.-led humanitarian aid shipments in recent weeks. The opposition says those are signs of bad faith by Assads side and accuses it of stalling for time in the Geneva talks.

We cannot continue to be in discussions in Geneva when our people are dying of hunger and bombardments, Hijab told a news conference. We will fight no matter the circumstances. We will fight even with stones, and will not surrender.

There cannot be a political process that prolongs the life of this regime, he said. For us, as of yesterday, we are out of the political process.

He demanded deployment of international monitors to inspect adherence to the cease-fire brokered by the U.S. and Russia in late February. While calling the United States a friend of the opposition, Hijab also put some blame on the U.S., saying it has responsibilities in upholding human rights that are being violated on a daily basis in Syria.

We demand that the United States shoulder its responsibility, he said. Words are not enough, and humanitarian support is not enough. We need action on the ground.

The opposition coalitions decision to suspend participation in the Geneva talks has strained the finely crafted mediation by the U.N. Syria envoy, Staffan de Mistura, whose office continued holding discussions with smaller opposition groups. De Mistura has said he would review the state of the talks on Friday.

De Misturas office declined to comment on Hijabs statement.

Mohammed Alloush, the opposition coalitions main negotiator, said its delegation would only return if Assads government implemented international agreements and halted airstrikes. In comments to The Associated Press, Alloush said he was leaving Geneva because he didnt want to be part of an absurd process that may not reach a viable political solution.

Hijab said he too was leaving, but that a High Negotiations Committee team will remain  even if its members wont go to the U.N. offices that have hosted the talks on-and-off since early February. In the talks, the two sides have met with de Mistura at separate times, but not face-to-face.

Russia, a key backer of Assad, lashed out at the pullback. Russias ambassador in Geneva, Alexei Borodavkin, told the Russian news agency TASS on Tuesday that the High Negotiations Committees suspended participation in the talks is proof that, unfortunately, extremists took control within the delegation.

In a conference call with journalists, Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, reaffirmed Moscows support for Assad and the talks. In a telephone call Monday with U.S. President Barack Obama, Putin stressed support for dialogue and the cease-fire, according to Peskov.

In Washington, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the U.S. would continue to push both sides to participate in the talks and called on Russia to use its influence with Assad to force the government to honor the cease-fire agreement.

While the indirect talks were to focus on political transition, the two sides got bogged down on Assads future. Aided by the Russian air power that entered Syrian skies in late September, the Syrian army and allied militiamen have reversed the tide of the war in recent months, making rapid advances against opposing forces, including the radical Islamic State group, which is not in the peace process.

Hijab accused the government of using the cease-fire to advance on rebel positions and said Assads biggest allies, Russia and Iran, continued to supply his forces with weapons and fighters. He complained that supplies and ammunition were denied to rebel forces, and said he hoped that the U.S would continue supplying weapons to some rebel groups.

On Tuesday, government troops restored control of most of the villages and hills it lost to rebels a day earlier in their offensive in the government-held coastal region of Latakia, according to the Local Coordination Committee, an activist-operated media forum, and al-Manar TV, which is affiliated with the pro-Assad Lebanese Hezbollah group.

The Local Coordination Committee reported government airstrikes, including barrel bombs, in multiple locations in Homs province. The group said there was intense fighting in Kafer-Laha in central Homs.
SACRAMENTO  The board overseeing the nations largest public-employee pension fund will consider reinvesting in tobacco stocks it sold off more than a decade ago.

The California Public Employees Retirement System investment committee decided Monday to review the tobacco divestment over the next two years and make a final decision in early 2018. The committee narrowly rejected a proposal to end the discussion now and continue the current tobacco policy.

Financial advisers found CalPERS has lost up to $3 billion since deciding in 2000 to sell off tobacco stocks.

Board members who want to continue the divestment debate say they need to ensure CalPERS is fulfilling its constitutional obligation to maximize investment returns and protect retirement benefits.
Its hard to believe, but there is such a thing as men who love doing the laundry. They are part of a unique community known as the Washing Machine Collectors Club currently numbers over 3,000 members worldwide. The guys meet several times a year, a few of them coming in from as far away as Madagascar and Australia, for three-day wash-ins, which is essentially male bonding over dirty laundry.

Laundry is a rather unusual interest for both men and women, given how boring most people find it. But within this eccentric group, the excitement over a wash-in is usually off the charts. Everybodys got their favorite part of the cycle, Jon Charles, one of the club founders and self-proclaimed washer collector enthusiast, explains. Weve got people who love the wash, they love the rinse or the spin, or the drain. Im a spin guy. I love the spin.

Now we have like 3,000 members from all over the world, he added. We get together for washes. We do laundry until like 4:00 in the morning. We do our margaritas and our laundry together. We cheers to laundry. Well watch the cycles. A lot of us  well sit there and watch the whole cycle go through. All 3,000 of us come in with a story, like I thought I was the only one. I thought I was the only person in the world that did this.

But its not just about the wash cycle with these guys. As the name of the group suggests, club members are obsessed with the washers too, and often compare notes on their private collections. Charles himself has got 59 washing machines, 22 of which are hooked up and running in his basement. I have a good representation of everything that was made from 1938 to today, he said. I take them all apart and I restore them, because I want to know how everything works inside the machine. The laundry is, for me, sort of the icing on the cake.

These machines represent ways of doing things in each decade that changed  that we no longer do  and I think its something that should be preserved for other people, if we can get them interested. I cant just go to a cocktail party and say hows your washer doing? They would look at me like I was crazy  but I can get together with these guys, and let my hair down. Its just so much fun to be able to have a conversation about it.

Laundry is a chore for everybody else  but for us its play.

Sources: Fox6, Great Big Story
Donna Rice Hughes, who campaigns for safe Wi-Fi for children, meaning blocking their access to internet porn, speaks at 1:30 p.m. today at Sheraton Tysons Corner, Va. Web health advocates say the Wi-Fi bombarding children in classrooms is anything but safe.

The health advocates dont like the term safe used in any context in connection with Wi-Fi. Nor do they like the term Friendly Wi-Fi which originated in the U.K. and is being brought here by Hughes. She has been working on blocking kids from web porn since 1994 via Enough is Enough.

Donna Rice Hughes

Hughes is speaking at Wi-Fi Now USA 2016 at the Sheraton.

Meeting chair Claus Hetting withdrew press registration for the ODwyer Co. after being told we want speakers to address health issues raised by Wi-Fi and other radiation.

We especially wanted to be able to cover the talk by Hughes today and the talk by Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel at 11 a.m. Thursday which is labeled Fireside Chat.



Christine O'Dwyer was turned away shortly after 9 a.m. today when she approached the registration desk for Wi-Fi Now that blocked entrance to the meeting rooms. Administrator Heidi Fredholm Jepsen said registration is closed and O'Dwyer would not be permitted to enter the meeting area. Asked if she could cover Donna Rice Hughes at 1:30, Fredholm Jepson replied that she could not. O'Dwyer then left the hotel.

Rosenworcel is noted for her interest in bringing the internet to children in after school hours. Children who use computers and cellphones must be made aware of the dangers of such instruments. They must never press a cellphone to their ears, avoid cordless phones, hold the cellphone away from the body, never carry one in a pocket, and stay at least three feet away from a computer screen and the computer. A wired keyboard and wired mouse should be used.

These and other health precautions should be part of the program today but Hetting said health issues will not be raised.

Hughes Was Media Figure

Hughes became part of a media firestorm in 1988 when the National Enquirer published a picture of her sitting on the lap of Senator Gary Hart who was the leading candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

That was the end of his Presidential bid. Hughes, 29 at the time, kept a low profile until 1994 when she got involved in Enough is Enough which focuses on trying to block children from accessing pornography on the internet. She authored in 1998 Kids Online: Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace.

Hughes has been emailed a request to meet with ODwyer senior editor Christine ODwyer who is at the hotel. No response has been received thus far.

Vision of Wi-Fi World on Todays Program

Todays program at Wi-Fi Now includes a presentation titled Wi-Fi Alliance: a Vision of a Wi-Fi World by Edgar Figueroa of the Wi-Fi Alliance.

Trond Wueliner of Google is discussing, Next Generation Home Wi-Fi with Google OnHub.

A panel of people from Cirrent, USA, Quantenna, Google, CableLabs and Air Ties will discuss The Wi-Fi Connected Home Today and in the Future.

John DAnnunzio of Samsung will discuss Samsung: a New Vision for the Wi-Fi Connected Enterprise.

Graham Cove, an independent, will talk about How Wi-Fi will revolutionize retail.

Ajay Patel of Google has the topic, Google & Indian Rail: Wi-Fi for ten million people a day.

Paul Garnett of Microsoft will discuss Using Wi-Fi to close the homework gap.

Rajat Ghai of Benu Networks will talk on Core networks for Carrier Wi-Fi everywhere."
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LINCOLN  A sort of digital-age Noahs Ark sits on the floor of an upstairs office in Joel Sartores garage.

Sartore loads his animals, two copies at a time, onto a humming and glowing server, tucked away among computer monitors almost out of view. Pretty nondescript, considering whats inside.

Stored in the server are photographs of 5,867 kinds of animals composed and uploaded by Sartore, a renowned National Geographic photographer, and his staff. As the flood of human influence threatens to sweep away more species into extinction, he hopes his ark might serve as a sort of life raft.

The world is on track to lose half of all species by 2100, maybe more, Sartore said. The goal of the Photo Ark isnt just to create the worlds largest obituary. Its to really get the public to stop and think about all the other animals we share the planet with while theres still time to save them.

For the past 10 years, the 53-year-old has worked with zookeepers, wildlife rehabbers, captive breeders and others around the world to catalog the planets captive animal population, which he estimates to total between 12,000 and 15,000. Together, those photos make up the Photo Ark, a sort of photographic preservation of those species.

This month, Sartores project is the cover story for National Geographic magazine. Ten animals from Sartores shoots  including a tiger from Omahas zoo and an armadillo and a peacock from Lincolns  grace various covers of the magazine.

His photos were projected onto the side of St. Peters Basilica in December and, earlier, the Empire State Building. The project has its own traveling museum exhibit and, next year, will have its own PBS documentary.

I did a lot of stories for National Geographic magazine that didnt move the needle, and the Photo Ark seems to be moving the needle, he said.

The project started in Lincoln about 10 years ago when Sartores wife, Kathy, was diagnosed with cancer.

Sartore  who grew up in Ralston and worked at the Wichita Eagle before National Geographic  could no longer afford to leave his wife and three kids at home while he flew to faraway countries on assignment. He stayed in Lincoln for about a year, and he thought about his career and what it might become.

I thought about the work of guys like John James Audubon, who spent his life not only painting the birds of North America but describing their behaviors, Sartore said. He gives us the only good records of several birds that occurred here in Nebraska that have gone extinct now. I thought thats pretty awesome, thats a noble thing.

And he thought of George Catlin and Edward Curtis, who documented Native American culture, racing against European assimilation. Sartore revered their lifelong devotion to one cause, one thing that could preserve a vanishing something for future generations.

So he called John Chapo, president and CEO of the Lincoln Childrens Zoo just a mile or so down the road from his house, and, together with zoo staff, they chose the first animal to load onto the Photo Ark: a naked mole rat.

For a plain backdrop, they grabbed a white kitchen cutting board that the zoo still uses for food preparation, and Sartore looked the naked mole rat straight on.

It was just very weird and interesting, and you cant normally see them like that, eye level with the buck teeth and tiny eyes, Sartore said. So that first picture helped convince me that isolating animals on black and white backgrounds is a good way to do it because you can really get to know them.

The Photo Ark isnt about lions. Its not about elephants, giraffes, gorillas and iconic species, though theyre included. Its about the little guy, Sartore said. The lesser known insect, odd rodent or obscure, unknown creature. The one that nobody has heard of and might never hear from again.

When he photographs these animals, he focuses on their eyes. Or, if they dont have any, some identifying characteristic that lets you make a spiritual connection.

He lays out fabric or paper on a table and hoists a white or black backdrop to isolate the animal. For larger creatures, he shoots through a fence and asks zookeepers to paint background walls black so he can maintain his distance.

All of the photos are shot and cropped to show the animals at about the same size. This is deliberate.

Its a great equalizer, he said. A mouse is every bit as important and magnificent as a polar bear; theyre the same size. Thats a really nice thing.

This year, Sartore will travel to France, Cameroon, China, Gabon, Singapore, Spain and Malaysia. In the States, hell visit Florida, Texas, West Virginia and Alaska, and thats just through early fall.

Ive been told not to book anything in November or December by my wife or else, he said.

The Lincoln Childrens Zoo is still one of his favorite destinations. Almost every single animal photo on its exhibit signs was taken by Sartore.

In late March, Sartore returned to the zoo to take improved photos of two species: the American alligator and the serval, a small cat.

The 2-foot-long gator  a 4-year-old named Calvin  was calm. Five, maybe 10 minutes, and Sartore was done. Most shoots go like that.

The serval was a different story.

Johnny, an 11-month-old cat, paced across the buffet table while Sartore snapped photos economically. The cats eyes remained affixed to the ceiling of the Rainforest Room.

I know what youre thinking, said Emma Hazel, Johnnys handler. Dont do it, kitten!

The cat sprung into the air and landed on a pole supporting the black backdrop, buckling the metal bar and sending two support structures tumbling down.

Holy cow, Sartore said as the tripods clanked to the floor. The cat shoot is done.

Sartore has been charged by animals. Theyve bitten and poked and scratched him. Theyve wrecked his equipment and shredded his backgrounds. But, remarkably, not a single animal has been injured during a shoot.

I wonder when that will happen  its got to happen eventually, he said.

The pictures in the Photo Ark dont make much money, Sartore said. He gives them away for free to the zoos that let him photograph their animals. The project is funded, instead, by speeches Sartore gives about the photographs and what they symbolize in the fight to save the planets endangered species.

He really cares, said Chapo, head of the Lincoln zoo. Hes doing a phenomenal thing, and I really believe that.

A decade into the project, Sartore is almost halfway done. But loading Earths captive species onto his ark one-by-one takes time. And he knows his is limited.

He reckons that in 10 or 15 years, he will have photographed every single captive species. But if he dies first, the modern day Noah has a backup: his son.

Cole Sartore  who beat cancer a few years after his mother did  travels with his father for shoots, when he can. If something happens to his father, hell take the mantle.

There may not be a literal flood threatening the planets species, but the wave of human influence is enough to propel Joel Sartore to act. For him, its a project worth devoting his life to.

Its the first and only time (some of these animals) will have been photographed well and, for some, the first and only time they will ever be photographed at all, Sartore said. Its a bit of a race now to get to all of these zoos before the animals are not there anymore. Its a big responsibility and an honor.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Should Andrew Jackson, Americas seventh president, be worried? Is it true that his days on the $20 bill may be numbered?

At the moment, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew is keeping details of his decision close to the vest while promising that were going to have an exciting set of announcements soon.

Treasury officials refused to comment Monday on a report from CNN that Lew has decided to keep Hamilton as the portrait on the $10 bill and instead replace Jacksons portrait on the $20 bill with a woman who represents the struggle for racial equality.

CNN, quoting a senior government source, said women also will be honored on the $10 bill, the denomination next up to for redesign, with a mural-style depiction of the suffrage movement, which will replace the current drawing of the Treasury building.

Lew did offer some hints about the decisions last week during an interview with CNBC. He stressed that the government would not be just redesigning the $10 bill but also the $5 bill and the $20 bill.

Were not just talking about one bill, Lew said. Were not just talking about one picture on one bill. Were talking about using the front and the back of the bill to tell an exciting set of stories.

Lew suggested that it wouldnt be a womans portrait on the $10 note.

Were going to have a representation of the contribution women have made to our democracy on the next bill thats issued, he said.

Last summer, Lew announced that the government was going to incorporate a woman on the $10 bill, which would be the first female portrait on U.S. paper currency in 100 years.

Treasury received a tide of protests from Hamilton supporters and more than 1.5 million responses to Lews request for suggestions. That prompted him to delay an announcement, originally planned for the end of 2015.

An online group, Women on 20s, has been campaigning to put a womans face on the $20 bill. Jacksons critics say he should not be on U.S. currency because of the part he played in the relocation of American Indians.

Susan Ades Stone, executive director of Women on 20s, said although her group has been campaigning for the change, it is concerned that the result will be delaying the introduction of a woman on the currency for more than a decade.

We think the projection of 2030 for issuing a new $20 bill is way too long, she said Monday. We dont understand why Secretary Lew cant fast-track production of the 20.

In a poll conducted last year by Women on 20s, Harriet Tubman, an African-American abolitionist and one of the leaders of the Underground Railroad, was the top vote-getter.

Lews initial announcement last year drew a storm of protests from fans of Hamilton. They argued that the Founding Father molded the nations financial architecture and should not be removed from his place on the currency.

Hamilton fans also got a boost from the hit Broadway musical Hamilton.

Earlier this year, Lew was personally lobbied by the shows author and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda. After their discussion, Miranda tweeted that Lew had assured him youre going to be very happy with the currency decision.
LINCOLN - A team from Alliance High School placed first in the state Saturday in the regional competitions of the Personal Finance Challenge, sponsored by the Nebraska Council on Economic Education, and will represent Nebraska in the national competition May 6 at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City, Missouri.

A total of 239 teams participated in this years high school Personal Finance Challenge competition. The regional face-to-face team competitions took place after students completed individual online tests in their home schools and their scores were averaged for a team score.

First-place winners were chosen at each of the three regional competition sites, and then each teams average online test score was used to determine first-, second-, and third-place winners statewide.

Alliance's team members are Anthony Hare, Lane Applegarth and Bailey OConner. Their teacher is Luke Shroyer.

Each member of the team will receive a $2,000 college savings scholarship from the Nebraska Educational Savings Trust, a division of the Nebraska State Treasurers Office. Competitions took place at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln East Campus Union, the University of Nebraska at Omaha College of Education, and the UNL College of Technical Agriculture in Curtis, Nebraska.

The second place team was from Lincoln Southeast High School. Team members are Madison Kraus, Taylor Hendricks and Sonny Wimmer. Their teacher is Lindsay Tillinghast. Each member of the second-place team will receive a $1,000 college savings scholarship from NEST.

The third place team was from Omaha Northwest Magnet High School. Team members are Zoe Thorson, Jeromie Wade, Adam Strasser and Brett Hillabrand. Their teacher is Susan Dimmitt. Each team member will receive a $500 NEST scholarship.

The teacher of each winning team will receive an iPad Air 2 tablet, courtesy NEST.

This marks the fourth year the Treasurers Office, through our NEST program, has provided scholarships for Finance Challenge winners. We are happy to reward these high school students for their efforts to learn about personal finance and apply what they have learned to real-life situations, said Treasurer Don Stenberg, who is trustee of NEST.

Stenberg, who was one of the judges at the Omaha competition, said he was impressed with the students preparation, professionalism, and thoughtful approach to problem solving. In the face-to-face regional competitions, teams were presented with real-life financial situations and given time to prepare and present their solutions.

The Personal Finance Challenge competition fits in well with my initiative to promote financial literacy education in Nebraska schools to help develop wise savers, consumers and investors and future leaders of our state, Stenberg said.

The Treasurers online financial literacy program is offered free through Nebraska NEST Financial Scholars to every high school in the state.

Jennifer Davidson, president of the Nebraska Council on Economic Education, said all the teams that participated in the regional competition should be proud of themselves for performing well under pressure.

The competition was fierce and the task was difficult. Each team had two hours to put together a financial plan for a fictitious family. This years scenario was particularly complicated, she said. I am exceptionally proud of the team from Alliance.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Vice President Joe Biden has acknowledged overwhelming frustration with Israels government, saying that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus administration has led Israel in the wrong direction.

Bidens speech to the advocacy group J Street on Monday was an unusually sharp rebuke of Americas closest ally in the Middle East.

The vice president offered a grim outlook for Mideast peace efforts, reflecting dim hopes for progress during the remainder of the Obama administration. Although he said Israelis and Palestinians shared blame for undermining trust and shirking responsibility, he was emphatic in his critique of Netanyahus government, suggesting his approach raised profound questions about how Israel could remain both Jewish and democratic.

I firmly believe that the actions that Israels government has taken over the past several years  the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures  theyre moving us and more importantly theyre moving Israel in the wrong direction, Biden said.

He said those policies were moving Israel toward a one-state reality  meaning a single state for Palestinians and Israelis in which, eventually, Israeli Jews will no longer be the majority.

That reality is dangerous, Biden added.

Biden, who met in March with both Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said he came away from that trip discouraged about prospects for peace anytime soon. Still, he said the U.S. is obliged to guarantee Israels security and to push them as hard as we can toward a two-state solution despite our sometimes overwhelming frustration with the Israeli government.

There is at the moment no political will that I observed from either Israelis or Palestinians to go forward with serious negotiations, Biden said.

The vice presidents remarks to J Street, a dovish Israel advocacy group that frequently criticizes Netanyahu, came at the height of a U.S. campaign season in which candidates have been scrutinized over their adherence to traditionally stalwart U.S. support for Israel. Ahead of Tuesdays primary in New York, Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders has sparked controversy by saying the U.S. should be even-handed and mustnt always say that Netanyahu is right.

Biden also singled out Palestinian leaders, including Abbas, for declining to condemn specific acts of terrorism carried out against Israelis, in a nod to the seven-month wave of Palestinian stabbings and other attacks. He said he didnt know whether Mondays bus explosion that wounded scores in Jerusalem was a terrorist attack, but added that the U.S. condemns misguided cowards who resort to violence.

No matter what legitimate disagreements the Palestinian people have with Israel, there is never justification for terrorism, Biden said. No leader should fail to condemn as terrorists those who commit such brutalities.

Bidens tough talk about a key U.S. partner reflected diminishing patience within the White House as President Barack Obamas term nears an end, compounded by deep disagreements over Iran and a strained relationship between leaders. In recent weeks, the Obama administration has left open the possibility that it could support or at least not block a U.N. resolution laying out parameters for a future peace deal, a possibility Israel has railed against.

In another dig at Netanyahu and his Likud party, Biden singled out for praise Stav Shaffir, a young member of Israels parliament and a Netanyahu critic from the left wing of Israeli politics.

May your views begin to once again become the majority opinion in the Knesset, Biden said.

Copyright 2016 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Karnataka to strengthen ATS and up the number of prisons

Amid drought, water sprinkled on roads in Bagalkot before Karnataka CM visit

Bengaluru

oi-Preeti

Bengaluru, April 19: Even though some parts of north Karnataka are reeling under drought and acute water shortage, but for the visit of state chief minister Siddaramaiah, the roads leading to Bagalkot district were sprinkled with water to make them "dust-free".

On Monday, April 18, water was being sprinkled on road before Siddaramaiah's visit to drought-hit area in Bagalkot district of north Karnataka.

According to reports, two tankers of water were allegedly emptied for Siddaramaiah's dust-free ride in the drought-hit-district. [Karnataka drought: Water mafia makes hay while the sun shines]

Siddaramaiah reportedly visited Badagandi village in Bilagi taluk in Bagalkot district to meet the drought hit people. [Mercury rises: Huge exodus of people from North Karnataka has begun]

The authorities move of wasting precious water led to an anger among villagers who are struggling to fetch even a bucket of water from far areas every day.

[K'taka: Yeddyurappa junks Prado to opt train to tour drought-hit places]

Villagers also showed their disappointment over the fact that CM spent more time with officials rather than interacting with villagers and knowing about their plight.

Meanwhile, opposition parties termed Siddaramaiah's visit as a 'mere photo-op'.

WATCH (18/04/16):Water being sprinkled on road in Bagalkot before K'taka CM Siddaramaiah's visit to drought-hit areahttps://t.co/7YyEwm9oaj  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

OneIndia News
Karnataka to strengthen ATS and up the number of prisons

In Pics: Garment factory workers bring traffic to a standstill in Bengaluru

Bengaluru

oi-Sandra

Bengaluru, Apr 19: For the second day in a row, garment factory workers brought traffic to a standstill on Hosur Road as thousands of them protested at the Bommanahalli junction on Tuesday.

Garment factory workers are protesting against the recent amendments to the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) Scheme. Police offcials were caught off guard when thousands of workers gathered below the Electronic City Expressway without any prior notice.

Low pay package, inhuman working condition: Garment factory worker narrates her woes

As a result, police resorted to lathicharge to disperse the crowd which also resulted in few workers as well as policemen being injured.

Massive traffic jam was reported in the early hours which lasted for close to five hours. According to latest reports, protestors set three buses on fire at Jalahalli Cross.

Police put up barricades in the area trying to restrict the crowd but protestors broke the barricades and barged onto the main road.

On Monday, Apr 18 hundreds of workers protested in and around the Silk Board junction causing immense trouble for office goers and commuters. On Monday, commuters faced a similar issue when they were completely caught off guard due to the protest near Silk Board junction.

Thousands of garment factory workers converged in B'luru to protest Thousands of garment factory workers gathered to protest against the recent amendments in the Employees Provident Fund Scheme. Garment workers protest chokes Bomanahalli Several garment factory workers were injured after police resorted to a mild lathicharge. Traffic comes at a standstill in Bomanahalli Traffic was thrown out of gear for several hours at Bomanahalli junction. Workers were seen raising slogans at the protest Workers were seen raising slogans at the protest at the Bomanahalli junction.

WATCH: Police use tear gas shells as protest by garment factory workers in Bengaluru turns violenthttps://t.co/mvTMWG5IyX  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

Rightful claim of garment workers and unorganised sector employees should be addressed: Ananth Kumar, Union Minister pic.twitter.com/YXIBPFjWuB  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

OneIndia News
Tamil Nadu polls 2016: DMK fields 19 women candidates

Chennai

oi-Shubham

Chennai, April 19: The DMK, which is eyeing to return to power in Tamil Nadu after a decade, has fielded jut 16 women candidates in the unreserved seats while three in reserved ones. The party, which will contest the May 16 election in alliance with the Congress and some other smaller parties, is fighting in 173 seats.

Assembly Polls 2016 Coverage; Interview: Women are sacrificial lambs in every election

Almost all the candidates are freshers eecept PA Aruna and Geetha Jeevan, who are contesting from Alangulam and Thoothukudi constituencies, respectively. The party has also fielded a new face in Simla Muthusolan against Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa from RK Nagar constituency. Simla is the daughter-in-law of former minister Sarguna Pandian.

The reserved seats in which the party has fielded candidates are Madurai, Sozhavandan and Sankarankoil. [DMDK's bizarre poll promises shock many]

The DMK's women candidate number, however, is better than what it was in 2011. In the previous election, it fielded 11 women candidates out of 124. In terms of percentage, it is 10.98 this year as against 8.87 last time.

The AIADMk, which is contesting in 227 seats, has fielded candidates in 31 seats (13.65 per cent).

None of the 16 unreserved seats are DMK strongholds

However, the DMK won none of the 16 seats from which it has fielded the women candidates. Even in 2006 when it came to power last, the DMK could win just five of the current seats allotted to the women.

Oneindia News
EPS, his supporters detained for trying to hold hunger strike in TN assembly

Tamil Nadu: Light to moderate rain in the next few days

Tamil Nadu: Check the list of special trains operating from Chennai this Diwali

TN Poll 2016: DMDK chief Vijayakanth to contest from Ulundurpet

Chennai

oi-Preeti

Chennai, April 19: DMDK Chief Vijayakanth is all set to contest from Ulundurpet constituency in Villupuram district in the upcoming assembly election on Monday, May 16.

Chief Ministerial candidate of the DMDK-PWF front, Vijayakanth will be fighting from a new constituency for the third time.

[Special Coverage: Assembly Elections 2016]

After founding the DMDK in 2005, the actor-turned-politician contested for the first time from Vridhachalam constituency in Cuddalore district in 2006. [DMDK's bizarre poll promises surprise many]

In 2011, he contested from Rishivandiyam constituency Viluppuram district. Both the time, he won in both elections. [Vijaykanth, Vaiko, Vasan---Will PWF's three 'V's make any impact?]

Under DMDK-PWF-TMC alliance, it is contesting on 104 seats and has named candidates for all seats, with Vijaykanth as the alliance's chief ministerial candidate.

The DMDK is contesting this year's election as part of an alliance with the People's Welfare front and Tamil Maanila Congress. Apart from DMDK'S 104 seats, the rest is shared by other constituents of PWF--MDMK, CPI(M), CPI, TMC and VCK. There are 234 assembly segments in Tamil Nadu.

OneIndia News
5/1333

Weightlifter Achinta Sheuli won Indias third gold medal at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games 2022. However, it would not have been possible without his brother Alok,, who gave up his own sports career and worked as a labour to support family and Achinta's dream.

Weightlifter Achinta Sheuli won Indias third gold medal at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games 2022. However, it would not have been possible without his brother Alok,, who gave up his own sports career and worked as a labour to...
Gap between rich and poor has widened, needs to be bridged: Gadkari

A Round Up - Maritime India Summit 2016

Feature

oi-Lisa

By Lisa

The first Maritime India Summit 2016 which was held in Mumbai, besides resulting in business agreements for Rs 82,905 crore investments, has played a key role in highlighting the role of port led development for faster and sustainable economic growth.

On this special day will attend programmes across India. First heading to Mumbai for the Maritime India Summit. pic.twitter.com/hiy6mEpO63  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 14, 2016

The National Perspective Plan of Sagarmala project, which was released by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 14, underlined Government's seriousness in boosting port led infrastructure development.

The summit provided a platform for participation, engagement and interaction from 42 countries. More than 5,000 delegates from around the globe participated in the Summit. The 3 day exhibition organised during the Summit also drew enthusiastic response from 197 exhibitors including 81 international companies, 80 Indian private sector companies and 36 Government owned entities.

HM addressing the valedictory function at Maritime India Summit-2016 in Mumbai pic.twitter.com/qhnm9rVQ8O  HMO India (@HMOIndia) April 16, 2016

13 thematic sessions and 3 special sessions on various aspects of maritime sector were organised in which more than 80 eminent speakers from across the globe deliberated and shared their vision and experience and interacted with the audience. The thematic session on Maritime Nations highlighted the global nature of the shipping industry and the importance of co-operation & collaboration between maritime nations.

Were going live in 10 minutes on #Periscope. Watch the exhibition at the first ever Maritime India Summit #Mis2016. pic.twitter.com/19WAR3IiCc  MaritimeIndiaSummit (@MISummit) April 16, 2016

The focus sessions on maritime States brought to fore the investment opportunities in various maritime States and Union Territories of India. In addition, there were sectoral seminars on shipbuilding and ship repair, skill development through maritime education, inland waterways development, cruise shipping and lighthouse tourism, fisheries development and maritime security, which saw serious deliberations.

An exclusive CEOs' Forum of select industry leaders was held to deliberate on the potential and growth opportunities of the Indian Maritime Sector. The enriching discussions, suggestions and learnings from various similar developments in many countries will help Ministry of Shipping in implementing a sustainable roadmap for the sector. Union Shipping Minister Mr. Nitin Gadkari, interacted with over 100 foreign delegates and ensured them the easy of doing business in India.

A memento of appreciation is presented to the esteemed guests at the end of Day 2 of the #MIS2016 pic.twitter.com/UZR6iR7MYI  MaritimeIndiaSummit (@MISummit) April 15, 2016

The session on the Partner Country Republic of Korea, highlighted the strengths of Korea as a Maritime Nation especially in Ship building, Maritime technology, Port led Development, Maritime Financing and Maritime Security. The Summit has also provided a unique platform to forge new partnerships with other countries. On the side-lines of this Summit, high level bilateral meetings were held with 12 participating countries.

"Today I truly feel we can become the world's biggest Economic Superpower" - @BJPRajnathSingh pic.twitter.com/veIWMNwBfJ  MaritimeIndiaSummit (@MISummit) April 15, 2016

The Summit showcased around 240 projects which present investment opportunities during the next five years. The investment potential of these projects is around $ 66 Billion (Rs. 4.34 lakh crores). The Ministry of Shipping has established an Investment Facilitation Cell in Indian Ports Association to follow up on these opportunities with potential investors and ensure that the announcements and intent expressed during the summit materialize into actual projects and investments.

"We don't require support from banks directly. We hope you can support the industrial stake holders." @nitin_gadkari pic.twitter.com/Akh8amMveH  MaritimeIndiaSummit (@MISummit) April 15, 2016

One of the top attractions at the Summit was the Maritime Heritage Museum, built in the form of a container ship with interiors resembling a Spanish Galleon.

The museum depicts the 5000 years rich maritime heritage of India, right from the earliest port at Lothal to the modern days of shipping in the form of artefacts, replicas, photographs, maps and navigation equipment.

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Story first published: Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 12:05 [IST]
Prashant Kishor claims Nitish Kumar in touch with BJP says don't be surprised if he joins hands with it again

Bengal polls 2016: 4 reasons why BJP will not want Mamata to lose

Feature

oi-Shubham

By Shubham

The BJP's top leadership has been launching fierce attacks on Trinamool Congress (TMC) Mamata Banerjee of late. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday targeted the TMC supremo on the Saradha and Narada issues while Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh said in another rally that nobody is safe under the TMC rule in West Bengal. BJP president Amit Shah also targeted Mamata Banerjee at other times on similar lines.

Assembly Polls 2016 Full Coverage; Seats going to polls on April 21

But no matter what the top BJP leaders say, the saffron party will certainly not hope for the TMC's loss in the ongoing election. It is making all the noise aiming to protect its 17 per cent vote share in Bengal which it had won in the 2014 general elections. For that, a strong anti-Mamata stand is required for public consumption, especially in the urban areas of Bengal where the BJP can expect to cash in on the corruption issues. [EC not okay with chief secy's reply on showcause to Mamata]

But in reality, the BJP has other plans to meet and a defeat of Mamata Banerjee doesn't fit its scheme of things.

Modi's BJP will never want Congress winning a state poll since it is working on Congress-Mukt Bharat

First, the BJP will never want the Congress to win a state since Congress-Mukt Bharat is the main plank of Modi's BJP. Hence, a defeat of Banerjee to the alliance between the Congress and Left---both political and ideological enemies to the saffron camp---is strategically not desirable for the BJP.

It is true that Modi said on Sunday that a TMC-Congress-Left alliance was working in the Rajya Sabha to protect Mamata's leaders accused in the Narada sting operation and the Bjp couldn't do anything since it doesn't have the numbers in the Upper House, but that is a remark meant more for, as we said, public consumption. [Amit Shah's press talks in Kolkata hinted at BJP's tilt towards Trinamool]

The BJP, which is desperately looking to expand its base in the East and South, will logically want the Congress to lose and that makes Mamata the obvious choice as a winner.

Mamata has Muslim votes with her; a tie-up with her will always help the saffron camp show its 'liberal' side

Secondly, the Muslim vote-bank in Bengal, which has a substantial chunk of minority voters, is with Mamata Banerjee and that assures the BJP. For the TMC is a party which the BJP can aspire to get as an ally (they were also formal allies once) and not the Congress and Left and the TMC's Muslim votes make the saffron party assured. As long as the possibility of Mamata Banerjee joining the BJP and the Muslim votes siding with the TMC remain, the former will be a natural choice for the BJP as a friend.

Though for Mamata Banerjee, the equation is a complete opposite.

Modi may need Mamata after 2019 Lok Sabha election

Thirdly, the 2019 Lok Sabha election. Modi knows well that the next general election will not be as smooth as the previous one as anti-incumbency will pose a challenge. In that case, the NDA might need the support of the regional parties to set up a government and the TMC is one of the biggest regional outfits in Indian politics at the moment. [Did Sushma Swaraj actually back Mamata by comparing her with Indira Gandhi of 1977?]

The BJP has a much bigger stake in the 2019 Lok Sabha election than the current Assembly election in Bengal and hence will never want to burn its bridges to return to power. Let Mamata Banerjee win Bengal, therefore. [Is the BJP at all interested in Bengal polls?]

Rajya Sabha numbers always a worry for BJP; it needs TMC's support

Finally but not the least, the BJP will hope to get the TMC's backing in the Upper House to give wings to Modi's dreams of economic reforms. It is not without a reason that the NDA government showed little urgency in sending the Narada issue to the ethics committee. Modi's putting the onus on the Left and Congress was more of a desperate effort to distance the BJP from an issue which is snowballing with each passing day but the saffron party is not eager to pursue the case since it needs the numbers.

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Story first published: Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 13:49 [IST]
If Nitish, Jaya can change candidates ahead of polls, why Mamata can't drop accused contestants?

Feature

oi-Shubham

By Shubham

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalithaa, who is also the supremo of the AIADMK, on Monday changed eight candidates for the May 16 Assembly election in the state. The latest reshuffle is the eighth in the list put up by the ruling party and a total of 21 candidates have been changed so far. The last date of filing nomination for the election is April 29.

Assembly Polls 2016 Full Coverage; List of 62 seats going to polls on April 21

In West Bengal, on the other hand, Mamata Banerjee, the chief of the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) said at a rally in Kolkata recently that if she had known about the Narada sting operation accusing a number of candidates in her party of corruption earlier, she could have given it a thought.

But since she had already finalised the names of her party's candidates (she announced the list on March 4, the day the Election Commission announced the election schedule), she could not do anything. [Why Murshidabad will be interesting to watch on April 21]

But if Jayalalithaa can reshuffle her candidate's list so often, why couldn't Mamata Banerjee?

Mamata had much time to replace tainted candidates but she didn't

The Narada sting operation issue was broken on March 14 while the last date of filing nomination for the third phase to be held on April 21, in which a number of accused TMC leaders are contesting, was April 4. Didn't Mamata Banerjee get time to replace those names all this while? The same goes with some of the remaining phases of the election as well. [What if Mamata loses this election?]

If Jayalalithaa or Nitish can change candidates, why can't Mamata Banerjee?

Banerjee certainly could have done it like Jayalalithaa or even Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of the neighbouring Bihar who asked an influential minister in his government to resign and also the party withdrew his candidature ahead of last year's Assembly election after a sting operation footage saw him allegedly receiving bribe. [As Kolkata polls approach, Mamata gets desperate to distance herself from tainted TMC leaders]

Two reasons why she cant: Reason 1: Mamata is too hasty in doing things

The TMC chief could not do this mainly because of two reasons. First, being mercurial in nature, Banerjee is known to take hasty steps in whatever issues she deals with. She, as always, was overconfident and arrogant when the charges surfaced against some of her party leaders, thinking the Opposition was too weak to take advantage of it.

But as the sting operation shows in the Opposition party camps went on for days, throwing pictures of one leader after another and a flyover came crashing down in Kolkata, revealing more about the syndicate---a vital cog in the machinery of party politics in West Bengal in all ages, Banerjee came under more pressure.

The TMC supremo should have taken things patiently and distance herself from the fiasco by ordering a probe at the very beginning and put a hold on the accused leaders' nomination. That would have sent a positive signal at least, no matter what the end result is. But the unpredictable and impatient TMC supremo burnt her own bridges to exit.

Reason 2: Mamata's party has very few leaders; party may collapse if she suspends so many candidates

The second reason why Banerjee couldn't do a Jayalalithaa is perhaps because her party has very few leaders and far too many opportunistic people. Cancelling the nomination of so many people at one go could spell disaster for her party noy just because she has no reserve faces to fall back on but also taking such a step would have validated the Opposition's claim that her leaders had indeed taken bribe two years ago when the sting operation was carried out. That could have seen the TMC implode just ahead of the elections.

Hence Mamata Banerjee continued to shield her party and its accused leaders, banking on her own image of honesty. But even that defence has a limited capacity and the long election in Bengal this year is seeing that slowly crumbling.
Can US veto bill that allows victims of 9/11 sue the Saudis?

Feature

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The United States of America has threatened to veto a bill that would allow the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks to sue the Saudis. The US said that it hoped that Saudi Arabia understands their shared interests in protecting the stability and security of the international financial system.

It would be a huge move on part of the US if this bill is vetoed. But the question is can it or will it be done by the US. The Saudis have already threatened to offload its 750 billion dollar investment if the Congress passes this legislation. The US has been back and forth on the 9/11 connection with the Saudis.

The US Congress report of 800 pages had 28 of them dedicated to the Saudis. However those 28 pages are yet to be declassified.

Can the US veto the bill?



In the existing scenario, it looks highly unlikely that the bill would be vetoed by the US. One may recall that the 28 classified pages of a Congress report on 9/11 which speaks about the alleged link between the hijackers and the Saudi Royal family.

There has been a push to declassify these pages which are currently lying in the basement room at Capitol. US president, Barack Obama is slated to visit Saudi Arabia on Wednesday and it is not clear if he would bring up issues relating to the 9/11 attacks.

The US has been back and forth where Saudi is concerned and hence it looks unlikely that this controversial issue would be taken up. The US had in fact said that since 9/11 they had seen a genuine focus on the part of the Saudis to counter those who seek to propagate extremist ideology.

We recognise and the Saudis now recognise just how dangerous that is, and the US and Saudi Arabia now work together to counter those who seek to advance these ideologies.

What do the classified files contain?

A CIA leak and the a reading of the 28 pages by two US senators had revealed that there was enough evidence to show the involvement of the Saudis in the attack. A CIA leaked memo had gone on to show that it was not the Al-Qaeda or the Taliban that carried out this attack, but it was Saudi Arabia.

Further the memo also went on to read that wealthy Saudis, diplomats and intelligence officials employed by the Saudi Royal family had helped the hijackers with both logistics and finances. The pages which had been blacked out by the Bush administration suggest that the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles had facilitated the arrival of two hijakers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in 2000.

A Saudi intelligence official named Osama Bassnan and a spy Omar Bayoumi established a base in San Diego which housed the hijackers. This was the same place where al Qaeda cleric Ankar Al-Awlaki met with the hijackers.

The financial trail Some of the pages even indicate that a huge amount of money had been sent to the hijackers. Specific information suggests the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar had sent $130,000 to Saudi intelligence agent Osama Bassnan.

Although Prince Bandar had claimed that this money was a donation made to Bassnan who had an ailing wife, the US had managed to track that this money had infact reached the hijackers.

There was also a trail that Prince Bandar had paid for the establishment of an Islamic Centre in Virgina which was incidentally close to the Pentagon. It was found that Awlakki had played a vital role and was seen several times with Prince Bandar.

After the 9/11 attack, Awlakki tried to slip out of the country, but was apprehended at the JFK airport. However he was handed over to a representative of the Saudi government stating that the US government had withdrawn a federal arrest warrant against him.

Awlakki who was handed over to the Saudi representative managed to get out of the US almost immediately after that. He spent a considerable amount of time in Yemen before he was killed.

The pages also speak about a meeting of Essam Ghazzawi and Mohammad Atta the ringleader of the attack while Ghazzawi was the personal advisor to King Fahad. A party hosted by Ghazzawi at his home for Atta and the other hijackers had come under the scrutiny of the FBI.

After the attacks this home was abandoned by Ghazzawi. They left behind all things including several luxury cars behind after the attack.

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Story first published: Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 12:12 [IST]
India can trust China on terrorism but not Pakistan

Feature

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

India while conveying a strong point to China about Maulana Masood Azhar, the Jaish-e-Mohammad Chief also sought help to fight against the ISIS.

There are two ways of looking at this scenario and officials with both the Intelligence Bureau and the National Investigating Agency tell OneIndia that from China we can expect help against the ISIS, but if there is an issue concerning Pakistan, then it is better not to be too optimistic.

China, India move step closer to set up military hotline

The NIA has already sent a letter rogatory to China seeking the chat details of Areeb Majeed who was arrested by the agency for his links with the ISIS. The NIA says it is confident that China would help with the chat details following which a supplementary chargesheet will be filed.

About Pakistan, India is not optimistic

China had blocked a move by India to have Azhar banned by the United Nations. Not only did China block this attempt but even lectured India on what being a good neighbour is.

"China will continue to block any attempt made by India where Pakistan is concerned, but we will continue to raise objections to the same," an Indian official said.

China has a lot at stake in Pakistan and normally tends to heed to their requests. Pakistan has used the terrorist vs terrorist theory. They have classified terrorists as good and bad and the Jaish-e-Mohammad or the Lashkar-e-Tayiba fall under the category of the former.

Even after India made the move in the UN to ban Azhar, Pakistan impressed upon China to block this move. This move by China was even reciprocated by the Jaish-e-Mohammad in its mouth piece.

There was a brazen article which went on to say it was God and China which saved Azhar from an Indian propaganda.

OneIndia News
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Ishrat Jahan case: Discharge plea of two ex-cops to be heard on Aug 7

Ishrat Jahan Case - Story Until Now

Feature

oi-Lisa

By Lisa

Ishrat Jahan Case is an ongoing criminal case in Gujarat. CBI had initially accused Ahmedabad Police Crime Branch of staging an encounter on 15th of June 2004 wherein four people were killed.

Those killed in the incident were Ishrat Jahan Raza, a 19-year-old woman from Mumbra, Maharashtra; and three men - Javed Ghulam Sheikh (born Pranesh Pillai) was the son of Gopinatha Pillai, a native of Noornad in Kerala and had been previously charged in fake currency racket; Amjad Ali Rana also known as Amjadali Akbarali Rana, Akbar or Salim, was from Haveli Deewan (Haveli Diwan) village in the Bhalwal Tehsil of Pakistan; and Zeeshan Johar also known as Abdul Ghani or Janbaaz, belonged to Gujranwala in Pakistan.

Claim of Ahmedabad Police Crime Branch:

Ahmedabad Police Crime Branch had claimed that Ishrat Jahan and her three accomplices were Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives involved in a plot to assassinate the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi.

Accused officers:

The police officers accused in the case were:

The Deputy Commissioner of Police Dhananjay G. Vanzara; and

Assistant Commissioner of the Police Crime Branch Girish Laxman Singhal

The SIB officers accused in the case were:

Special Director Rajinder Kumar;

Assistant Director M. K. Sinha;

Deputy Superintendent of Police Rajeev Wankhede; and

Officer T. Mittal.

How the case has progressed since June 2004:

2004:

The Lahore-based Ghazwa Times, mouthpiece of the Lashkar-e-Taiba" had acknowledged Ishrat Jahan as a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative. The Ghazwa Times had published an article on the "Jamat-ul-Dawa" website stating that, "The veil of Ishrat Jahan, a woman activist of LeT, was removed by Indian police and her body was kept with other mujahideens (terrorists) on the ground".

The mouthpiece had also added that, "Ishrat was with her husband, sitting on the front seat of the car".

2007:

On 2nd May 2007 global terror group LeT had apologised on the website, "for causing them problems due to an inadvertent mistake", with the article implying that mistake in question was the claim that "Ishrat Jehan Reza had been a Lashkar operative".

This was subsequently used by the Government of India in its 2009 affidavit as evidence of Ishrat Jahan's links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Mumbai police on investigation found no evidence against Ishrat Jahan to implicate her and there was no criminal background against her. As Ishrat Jahan's family also insisted that she was innocent a probe into the encounter was ordered.

S P Tamang Report:

The Metropolitan Magistrate S. P. Tamang submitted a report in the metropolitan court Ahmedabad on the 7th of September 2009. The report mentioned that the four people were killed in police custody.

The report implicated a number of top police officials for the deaths of the four people and it was alleged that these officers staged the encounter in order to win promotions and rewards.

The state government challenged the report saying the implicated police officers were not allowed to present their arguments and evidences.

Meanwhile, news reports that David Headley (LeT terrorist involved in 2008 Mumbai terror attack) was acknowledging that Ishrat Jahan was LeT operative were published and later these reports were also countered.

2013:

In 2013, media reported that indeed David Headley had told NIA that Ishrat Jahan was an LeT operative. Also media reports were published that the chief of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), had told the Prime Minister's Office and the Home Minister that the IB had "enough evidence" to prove that Ishrat Jahan belonged to an LeT module, the module had planned to kill the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani.

2014:

CBI reported that it did not have enough evidence to prosecute BJP leader Amit Shah in Ishrat Jahan encounter case.

2016:

In February 2016, former Intelligence Bureau Special Director Rajinder Kumar, said that he was pressured and offered "allurements" to implicate the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the Ishrat Jahan case in an attempt to defame Modi.

He also said that there was a conspiracy against Modi led by a senior Congress leader from Gujarat and that the entire conspiracy was hatched by a Gujarat based Congress leader.

Latest developments:

As per a TV news channel it obtained some files through a Right to Information query regarding Ishrat Jahan case and as per the files obtained the former home minister P Chidambaram had cleared an affidavit in 2009 which described college student Ishrat Jahan as a Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist involved in a plot to assassinate then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.

As per the TV news channel about a month later, a second affidavit was filed in court in which all references to Ishrat's alleged terror links were missing.

In defence of the changes, Mr. Chidambaram had said that he had made the changes in the second affidavit as it was his duty to correct the first affidavit which was drafted without his approval.

As per the files accessed by the TV news channel it shows that Mr. Chidambaram had cleared both affidavits.

BJP on top after recent revelations:

This new development has left Mr. Chidambaram and Congress party seek cover. BJP meanwhile has come out in full force to accuse the Congress party of underplaying "a terror plot" against the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi because the party was "mortified" of fighting him politically.

BJP is also targeting Congress party for pitching national security agencies against each other and for political gain compromising on national security.

Congress meanwhile said that BJP was planting news stories to dilute the main issue and which is that Ishrat Jahan was killed in a fake encounter.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 11:15 [IST]
No decision yet on joining BJP or AAP, says Hardik; hails saffron party over Ayodhya issue, Article 370

Is Hardik Patel joining BJP today? This is what he says

Jat Quota Stir Success revives Patel Quota Stir in Gujarat

Feature

oi-Lisa

By Lisa

Many believed that it was guaranteed that as soon as Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar gave in to the demands of Jats for reservation quota; Patels would revive their demand for quota in Gujarat.

The premonition came true as Patels in Gujarat began the demand for release of Hardik Patel who is in jail since October on sedition charges. Hardik Patel is the young leader of Patidar Samaj in Gujarat who has demanded reservation for Patels.

The demonstrators in Gujarat's Mehsana district turned violent and police had a tough time containing stone pelting demonstrators. Hundreds were detained by police to maintain calm in the state. Section 144 was lifted from Mehsana today once the region turned peaceful again.

#Gujarat: Elaborate security arrangements have been made to maintain law and order situation in view of today's Bandh call.  All India Radio News (@airnewsalerts) April 18, 2016

The state in parts again witnessed jamming of internet so that rumours are not spread. The state-wide bandh announced by two community bodies Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) and Sardar Patel Group (SPG) today saw partial observation.

Response of Gujarat Government:

The Gujarat government meanwhile is reaching out to the Patidar (Patel) community leaders to ensure that peace is maintained in the state and solution is arrived at. PAAS, along with SPG, has been spearheading the reservation stir for Patels in Gujarat since mid 2015.

Nitin Patel, spokesperson and minister of health, Government of Gujarat was quoted saying that, "We will be meeting with the community leaders to arrive at a consensus. The truce talks have not been suspended. We are hopeful of a positive outcome. In the meantime, community members should stay away from rumours and maintain peace".

Police had made elaborate arrangement in view of bandh called by the two Patel organisations. However, the bandh call did not affect schools, colleges, public transport and trains. As per the police bandh had little effect on big cities like Ahmedabad, Rajkot and Surat.

Areas with high Patel population only observed bandh and followed orders of their community leaders to surrender in jail in a protest against Hardik Patel's detention.

Meanwhile in the afternoon there was a news report that 27-year-old Bhavin Mansukh Khunt who belonged to Surat city committed suicide by consuming poison to show solidarity with Patel Reservation demand.

Shiv Sena targets PM over Gujarat unrest:

Shiv Sena through its mouthpiece Samana targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi for paying foreign visits at the cost of ignoring Gujarat. Sena said that this was not a good sign of governance.

Home Minister seeks response from Gujarat government:

Meanwhile, Home Minister Rajnath Singh has sought response from Gujarat government over the prevailing condition in Gujarat and the measures undertaken by the government to contain Patel agitation.

He has also sought the state government's response on how it plans to amicably resolve the issue.

Gujarat High Court rules against mob rioters:

Meanwhile in what could have a great bearing on the present condition in the state, Gujarat High Court in its ruling has mentioned that all are equally guilty in mob riot. This observation of the Court was in response of a 13 year old case in which rioters had committed acts of violence and dacoity resulting in a person's death.

A bench of Justice KS Jhaveri and Justice G B Shah observed that,

"Riots, resulting in serious injuries or even death, are of frequent occurrence in this state and cases relating to such riots require careful handling.

A large number of persons are involved and evidence is often entirely of partisan character. There is, moreover, great danger of innocent persons being implicated along with the guilty, owing to the tendency of parties to try to implicate falsely as many of their enemies as they can.

Law is very clear that if an offence is committed by any member of an unlawful assembly in furtherance of the common object of that assembly, every member of that unlawful assembly is guilty of that offence.

Specific overt act of each member needs not be proved when the accused are proved to be members of that assembly.".
"Kick us out if we don't do anything": How Modi's emotional appeal resembles that of Mamata

TMC says Shukla's resignation not to affect party; BJP welcomes him to join saffron camp

Congress would have gained had it fought Bengal polls alone: Abhijit Mukherjee

Mamata Banerjee accuses PM Modi of speaking at Matua temple with an eye on West Bengal polls

107 crorepatis in fray in next two phases of West Bengal polls

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Kolkata, April 18: As many as 107 candidates in the fray in the third and fourth phases of West Bengal assembly elections are crorepatis whereas 128 candidates have criminal cases against them.

West Bengal phase 3&4: 128 candidates have pending criminal cases

Affidavits filed by the candidates reveal that 61 of the 418 candidates in the third phase and 46 of the 345 candidates in the fourth phase are crorepatis -- multi-millionaires.

The West Bengal Election Watch on Monday said that 80 aspirants in the third phase and 48 candidates in the fourth phase have declared criminal cases, including serious offences like murder and rape, pending against them.

In the third phase, the Trinamool Congress heads the multi-millionaires' list with 27 candidates, followed by the Bharatiya Janata Party with 14 and the Congress with 11.

The BJP's Somabrta Mandal from Shyampukur constituency in Kolkata is the wealthiest candidate in the third phase with assets worth over Rs.28.65 crore.

The average worth of assets held by the 418 candidates in the third phase is Rs.74.76 lakh.

In the fourth phase, the Trinamool Congress has fielded 19 crorepati candidates, followed by the BJP with eight and the Congress with five.

Trinamool nominee and state Finance Minister Amit Kumar Mitra, contesting from Khardaha in North 24-Parganas, heads the multi-millionaire list in the fourth phase with assets worth over Rs.11.74 crore.

The average worth of assets held by 345 candidates in the fourth phase is Rs.50.02 lakh.

Of the 80 candidates in the third phase with criminal cases, 65 face serious charges of murder, rape, attempt to murder and kidnapping.

Trinamool has 20 candidates with criminal cases, followed by the Congress and the Communist Party of India-Marxist with 16 each and the BJP 15.

In the fourth phase, Trinamool has fielded 15 candidates with criminal cases, the BJP seven and the Congress and the CPI-M six each.

Sixty-two constituencies spread across Burdwan, Kolkata, Murshidabad and Nadia districts will go to polls on April 21 in the third phase.

Fortynine constituencies in Howrah and North 24-Parganas will go to polls on April 25 in the fourth phase.

IANS
Prisoner who tried to escape in female disguise found dead in his cell

LA Man wrongly convicted, jailed for 11 years for robberies he didn't do walks free

SC says no prisoner released during COVID-19 second wave will surrender until further orders

Body of Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh, who died in Pakistan to be brought back to India

India

oi-Jagriti

New Delhi, Apr 19: Body of Kirpal Singh, the Indian prisoner, who died in a jail in Pakistan on April 11, will be brought back to India today, media reported.

A team of doctors will perform postmortem of Kirpal Singh in Lahore on Tuesday. His body will be brought back to India by afternoon.

Refuting conspiracy in Kirpal Singh's death, Pakistan authority claimed that Kirpal complaint of chest pain after which he was rushed to a hospital where he died of heart attack.

However, his family members have denied Pakistan's claim that he died of a heart attack and have demanded that his post-mortem be conducted in India to ascertain the facts.

The Home Minister earlier assured the family members of Kirpal Singh of all possible help from the government, official sources said.

Kirpal Singh died of heart attack; Pak claims no conspiracy

Kirpal Singh's sister Jagir Kaur was accompanied by Dalbir Kaur, sister of another Indian, Sarabjit Singh who had also died in a Pakistani jail in May 2013. Fifty four-year-old Singh, who was serving a life term in Pakistan after being convicted in a 1992 bomb blast case in Faislabad.

Body of Kirpal Singh (who died in Pakistani jail) will be brought back to India tomorrow  ANI (@ANI_news) April 18, 2016

I still believe that Kirpal didn't die of heart attack, the reason is something else: Dalbir Kaur,Sarabjit's sister pic.twitter.com/HZDhJx5gq9  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

When I heard Kirpal's body is being brought to India, similar scenes flashed through my mind when Sarabjit's body was brought: Dalbir Kaur  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

OneIndia News
Former Congress minister backs Munde over 'drought selfie'

India

oi-PTI

Mumbai, April 19: Maharashtra minister Pankaja Munde, under fire for clicking a selfie during her visit to drought-hit Marathwada, has found support from an unlikely quarter today with a senior Congress leader saying the BJP leader snapped photo as she has done work in the region.

"She took the selfie as she has done work. She is young, energetic Minister," former minister Balasaheb Thorat said. Munde, who is Rural Development Minister, came under the line of fire from across the political spectrum for clicking selfie while she was at a village in drought-hit Latur on Sunday for reviewing the desilting work in Manjara river, which has nearly dried up.

"Those criticising her should first see what they have done. Nobody seems to have noticed Pankaja is walking in the scorching sun (while taking the selfie)," Thorat told reporters at Ahmednagar. "Have those flaying her switched off air conditioners in their homes?" Thorat asked.

Munde's act of clicking selfies had come under attack from ruling ally Shiv Sena as well as the Opposition. Criticising the Minister, the Opposition Congress and the NCP had said Munde has mocked the drought-affected farmers by such a "shameful act".

Munde has defended herself saying she took pictures out of elation on seeing water in a trench in the dried up river.

PTI
EPFO portal down for several users; Netizens take potshots at slow portal

Tax on PF account to payment method for mutual funds: 7 changes that impacts you from today

Good News! Govt allows entire PF withdrawal for housing, medical, education purposes

India

oi-Mukul

New Delhi, April 19: There is good news in the offing for crores of Employees' Provident Fund (EPF) members. Reportedly, Government has relaxed the planned restriction on withdrawal of PF money.

How to check PF account balance in less than 5 minutes: Here is your complete guide

The Labour Ministry has announced that people can withdraw entire Provident fund money for certain purposes. Ministry has said that PF subscribers can withdraw their retirement fund for the purpose of housing, medical emergencies, education of children and for their marriage.

Reportedly, the move which will come into effect from August 1, was taken after Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya received representations from trade unions regarding the same.

Earlier this month, retirement fund body EPFO deferred till April 30 implementation of new norms that restrict 100 per cent withdrawal of provident fund by members after unemployment of more than two months, among others.

The EPFO subscribers who are out of job for more than two months can file for full and final settlement of provident fund till month end.

In view of practical difficulties faced in implementation of the notifications, the new provisions will come into effect from May 1, 2016, a circular by the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) said.

"Accordingly, all the claims received up to April 30, 2016 are to settled as per the provisions existing prior to the issue of the notification dated February 10, 2016," it added.

Earlier in February, the EPFO amended the EPF Scheme 1952 to tighten the various norms for withdrawal of provident fund including increasing age limit for filing such claims by retiring employees to 58 years from 54 years.

Besides, the retirement fund body also restricted withdrawal of PF to own contribution of subscribers and interest earned on that, if the claimant has remained unemployed for more than two months. The member would be able to withdraw employers contribution on maturity.

It was stipulated that the requirement of two months unemployment will not apply in cases of women members resigning from the services for the purpose of getting married, on account of pregnancy or child birth.

According to the new norms, subscribers will not be able to claim withdrawal of PF after attaining 54 years of age. They would have to wait till attaining the age 57 years.

OneIndia News

(With inputs from PTI)

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 13:12 [IST]
Fact Check: Has an explosion rocked China and has Xi Jinping been assassinated

Old bridge razed through controlled explosion in Pune

News flash: Congress releases list of 33 candidates for upcoming TN polls

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Bengaluru, Apr 19: Internet services that were suspended due to Patidar agitation, have now been restored in Gujarat.

Get all the latest news updates of the day:

9.22 pm: Congress releases list of 33 candidates for upcoming Tamil Nadu Assembly election.

Congress releases list of 33 candidates for upcoming Tamil Nadu Assembly election. pic.twitter.com/P7DndZCs0n  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

9.15 pm: No change has been made in the chargesheet in Samjhauta express blast case,inquiry is going on smoothly: NIA DG Sharad Kumar to ANI.

No evidence has been found against Lt Colonel Purohit, he's not involved in case (Samjhauta express blast case): NIA DG Sharad Kumar to ANI  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

9.00 pm: EAM Sushma Swaraj returns from her two-nation visit.

8.50 pm: GoI further reiterates its resolve to make all possible efforts to bring back Kohinoor Diamond in an amicable manner: GoI Spokesperson Frank Noronha.

The factual position is that the matter is sub judice at present.PIL has

been filed in SC that is yet to be admitted:GoI Spox Frank Noronha  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

8.40 pm: RJD Chief Lalu Prasad Yadav & Bihar Deputy CM Tejaswi Yadav meet Union Minister Nitin Gadkari in Delhi.

8.25 pm: Curfew lifted from Kupwara district (J&K). all schools, colleges to reopen from tomorrow (April 20).

8.15 pm: Section 144 announced, also ordered preventive arrest if someone tries to create problem again tomorrow: Karnataka HM G Parameshwar on garment workers' protest.

Police showed more restraint as there were lot of women, If we had taken some serious steps, there would have been more injuries- K'taka HM  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

8.00 pm: Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Ghulam Ahmad arrested from Baramulla in J&K. Two live grenades and a satellite phone seized.

7.45 pm: How can 'Kohinoor' diamond be gifted? Does anyone give gifts to the enemy?: Akali Dal.

7.40 pm: India's economy could drive global economic growth bringing shared prosperity across World including to the US,that why Kerry has made economic diplomacy central pillar of our relationship: US Assistant Secy of State Nisha Biswal.

7.30 pm: I wish to state that I have not been formally approached for this position (Brand Ambassador for 'Atulya Bharat'.): Amitabh Bachchan.

The speculation of the media regarding its discontinuance is, therefore, not relevant as far as I am concerned: Amitabh Bachchan  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

7.15 pm: Maharashtra: Section 144 imposed around kukadi canal in Ahmednagar district due to drought.

7.09 pm: Madhya Pradesh: Acute water crisis in Tikamgarh(Bundelkhand), villagers walk kilometres for water drought.

6.59 pm: Old system will continue now.This decision will be ratified in Central board of trustees' meeting, says Bandaru Dattatreya.

6.46 pm: Hyderabad lady police constables helps a woman deliver a baby on the road,a makeshift labour room was setup.

6.45 pm: Kirpal body's post mortem ws already done.Some organs were missing as when postmortem is conducted certain organs are taken to test, says Dr.Ashok.

6.41 pm: Can say with more than 100% accuracy that wound marks which are inflicted during life can't be removed at all: Dr. Ashok Chawla.

6.36 pm: Don't find any kind of foul play in this case, says Dr. Ashok, Head of panel who conducted post mortem on Kirpal's body.

6.35 pm: No external or internal injury found on Kirpal Singh's body, SAYS Dr. Ashok Chawla,Head of panel who conducted post mortem.

6.34 pm: Central Consumer Protection Council feels celebrities should be held responsible for products they endorse, says Ramvilas Paswan,Union Minister.

6.18 pm: Bengaluru:Biocon office vandalized by garment workers protesting against Govt's decision of withdrawal of PF.

5.56 pm: Happy that accused's bail is rejected.This case should be a lesson for all parents-Shilpa Mittal,victim's sister.

5.55 pm: I will call Central Board of trustees' meet again & review entire scheme,necessary steps will be taken:B Dattatreya

4.35 pm: Division bench heard Central Govt and State Govt counsel today, our submissions will be made tomorrow, says AM Singhvi.

4.34 pm: Delhi Mercedes hit-and-run case: Juvenile Justice board rejects bail plea of Juvenile accused.

4.33 pm: President's rule matter: Hearing in Uttarakhand High Court to continue tomorrow.

4.24 pm: Body of Kirpal Singh (Indian prisoner who died in Pak jail) taken to a hospital in Amritsar for post mortem.

4.21 pm: CBI arrests a Superintendent of Service Tax Commissionerate New Delhi for demanding & accepting bribe of Rs.1,50,000/- from the complainant.

4.20 pm: Bengaluru: Vehicles damaged in clash between Police and garment factory workers.

4:01 pm: The Jayalalithaa DA case has been adjourned to Thursday.

3:57 pm: Fire caught in Sabarmati Express at Shivpur railway station in Varanasi, reports.

3:40 pm: SC raps Gujarat Govt for not filing proper affidavit on data and figures relating to rainfall,MNREGA and Food security act.

3:26 pm: Govt further extends by three months decision restricting full withdrawal of provident fund money.

3:11 pm: Garment factory workers protest against government's decision of withdrawal of provident fund, clash with police.

2:56 pm: Actor Akshay Kumar donates 50,00,000 (lakh) towards drought hit Maharashtra.

2:41 pm: The investigators have been proven completely wrong and that is why we were acquitted says Sasikala Natrajan's counsel in Supreme Court. The allegations that I was running a proxy government is not right.

2:35 pm: Arguments by Sekar Napte, counsel for Sasikala Natrajan, Ilavarasi and Sudhakaran indicates that he will conclude arguments by Thursday.

2:28 pm: Ishrat Jahan case: Congress compromised national security, says Sambit Patra, BJP.

2:10 pm: Delhi HC directs Delhi Govt to give salaries of MCD employees for the month of March within a week.

2:02 pm: 8 people sentenced to death by Barasat Court in West Bengal for whistle blower Sourav Choudhary's Murder.

1.40 pm: Body of Kirpal Singh (who died in Pakistani jail) brought to Wagah border.

1.25 pm: Centre tells SC that around 33 crore people in 256 districts of 10 states are affected due to drought on PIL over drought hit states.

1.15 pm: Prominent poet and film lyricist Rahat Indori says he has been denied a US visa.

1.05 pm: The entire prosecution is flawed. The prosecution had completely failed to prove before the High Court charges of abetment and possession of disproportionate assets.

There has been a clear finding given by the High Court and I wonder why this needs to be looked into again, Sasikala Natrajan's counsel tells Supreme Court.

1.03 pm: CBI questions former Madhya Pradesh education minister Laxmikant Sharma and ex OSD of MP governor Dhanraj Yadav in connection with Vyapam scam.

1.00 pm: Centre and State Government are working together for the infrastructure development in J&K, says PM Modi in Katra (J&K).

12.25 pm: Loud explosion near Excise and taxation office in Mardan(Pakistan).Several people reported to be injured in the blast, says Pakistan Media.

12.15 pm: Solution to all of our problems is development and only development, says PM Modi in Katra (J&K).

12.08 pm: Factory workers in the fringes of Bengaluru taken to the streets to protest over PF withdrawal norms.

11.37 am: Arguments in the J Jayalalithaa disproportionate assets case have resumed in the Supreme Court after a two week break. Senior counsel, Shekar Napte began arguments on behalf of the Sasikala Natrajan, Ilavarasi and Sudhakaran.



11.26 am: Three security force bunkers removed from Handwara town, say police officials.

11.06 am: Have courage to feel happy about what you are rather than regretting about what you could be: PM Narendra Modi.

11.02 am: PM Modi speaking at the Convocation ceremony of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University in Katra (J&K).

10.45 am: PM Modi at the Convocation ceremony of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University in Katra (J&K)

PM Modi at the Convocation ceremony of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University in Katra (J&K) pic.twitter.com/dM1AEeXgaY  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

10.22 am: Explosion heard in central Kabul, smoke seen near US embassy.

9.40 am: Pakistani troops violate ceasefire along IB in Samba sector of J&K, BSF retaliates.

9.15 am: Dead bodies of a boy and girl found at a railway track near Sarai Rohilla, Delhi. Probe underway

9.00 am: Body of Kirpal Singh, who died in Pakistan jail, to be brought back to India today.

8.37 am: Army Chief Gen Dalbir Singh visits Srinagar to assess the ground situation ahead of PM Narendra Modi's visit.

8.10 am: Bomb rips through Jerusalem bus on Monday, 21 wounded.

8.00 am: Death toll in the Ecudaor earthquake climbs to to 413.

OneIndia News
Mandya: Ashitha-Shakeel wedding sparks debate on crony religion-patriarchy nexus

India

oi-Shreyas

Mysuru/Bengaluru, Apr 19: Conceptualisation of so called 'Love Jihad' is no doubt an ugly affair of patriarchal right wing minds. It is a well known fact that the sane minds across the world stand unite to say love has no 'religious boundaries'.

But the question that arises amidst frantic maligning Love Jihad campaign by the right wing fundamentals backed by some section of conservative Hindus is, does 'conversion' necessary to get 'religious sanction' for the 'wedding' in the 21th century modern era.

A recent wedding of Hindu female Ashitha and Muslim male Shakeel Ahmed has sparked a debate on many dimensions on inter-faith weddings after their private affair became public. It has to be recalled that when a few members of a well known saffron brigade from Mandya district learnt that a Hindu girl was set to marry a Muslim boy, the activists of an outfit wasted no time to protest against the act, which they term as Love Jihad.

Activists were seen arguing that Shakeel in a bid to convert Ashitha, has opted for the marriage route and he enticed the girl to allegedly fall into the trap. But the left and the liberals came to the rescue of the couple in their own way and finally the wedding took place under tight police security in Mysuru.

But the harsh reality that remained unanswered was, in an apparent act of conversion, a Hindu girl embraced Islam and during the wedding 'Ashitha' changed her name to 'Shaistha'. Father of Ashitha aka Shaistha, Narendra Babu speaking to OneIndia said "I am happy to give my daughter to Shakeel and be a part of triumph of love."

Babu said he was shocked and happy at the same time when he got to know about the love affair through his daughter as Shakeel's father is good friend of him since 50 years. "Initially I tried a lot to stop my daughter from getting into wedlock with Shakeel considering his religion. We treated her in counseling centers and sent her to UK to try and erase Shakeel from her mind, but nothing worked."

The friendship between Ashitha-Shakeel is 12 years old and Babu says he realised that its true love thus resolving to get Ashitha married to Shakeel. On asking about Ashitha changing her name, Babu said its in the custom of Islam since male belongs to the Muslim community. He admitted that she will follow Islam customs and he has no problems with it.

Rigidity in Islam

Islam stresses on conversion to gain religious and community sanction of the marriage between believer and non-believer. It works the same for a man as well as a woman. "Even a male has to convert into Islam in order to marry," said a person working in one of the largest Islam conversion centers in Kerala, Maunathul Islam Association on the condition of anonymity.

Basically it is not conversion, it is re-conversion. Those who have gone astray from Islam are coming back to the fold to once again become a believer. Responding to whether if a boy or a girl does not convert into Islam what would happen to the wedding, he said wedding cannot be termed Islamic and it has no space in the religion.

Maulavi from Kondotty of Malappuram district in Kerala, Abid Musliyar opined that according to Quran one need not convert into Islam to get married to a Muslim boy or a Muslim girl. However the condition put on non believer is, he has to be a sympathiser of Islam and he should not oppose any practices of Islam religion. "One has to fit the definition of Ahul Kitab (nonbelievers named by Allah or sympathisers) to be eligible to marry a Muslim," he informed.

Liberals' take

Karnataka, Democratic Youth Federation of India, President Muneer Katipalla though say cheers to inter-faith wedding of Ashitha-Shakeel, is however averse to the idea of conversion for the sake of marriage. "But we can't help. It is not the fault of Ashitha and Shakeel, it is the fault of whole system," Muneer rued.

He argued ordinary people cannot think keeping away the prism of religion when it comes to marriage. On the other hand society demands religious identity. The religion and patriarchy goes hand in hand. Due to the patriarchal mindset, most of the time women embrace religion or the caste of their husbands in inter-faith marriages. Albeit there are instances of men coming into the fold of religion of women, the numbers are very less.

Author of a book, Njan Qutubuddin Ansari ( I am Qutubuddin Ansari ) Saheed Roomy said Islam is highly patriarchal religion and very rigid. In the marriages also 'P' (patriarchy) rears its ugly head. "In my opinion religion should be of zero significance in an inter-faith marriage. But it is not happening like that as people fail to see marriage beyond religion," Roomy observed.

OneIndia News
Truth has come out, says Sasikala in reaction to OPS's remark before panel

Jayalalithaa DA case: Last leg of arguments in Supreme Court

India

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, April 19: The arguments in the J Jayalalithaa disproportionate case continued before the Supreme Court today.The arguments today were advanced by the counsel for Sasikala Natrajan, Ilavarasi and Sudhakaran who were also acquitted in the same case by the Karnataka High Court.

Jayalalithaa DA case- Prosecution has failed to prove disproportionate assets

Arguments began with the counsel for Sasikala Natrajan stating that it was wrong to say that she was a proxy. Her advocate also argued that Sasikala Natrajan did not behave like a extra constitutional authority. The allegation that her proximity to Jayalalithaa was used by her is wrong.

The entire prosecution is flawed. The prosecution had completely failed to prove before the High Court charges of abetment and possession of disproportionate assets.

There has been a clear finding given by the High Court and I wonder why this needs to be looked into again, Sasikala Natrajan's counsel also told the Bench. The investigators have been proven completely wrong and that is why we were acquitted says Sasikala Natrajan's counsel in Supreme Court.

The allegations that I was running a proxy government is not right.

Karnataka to file counter:

During the course of the arguments the counsel indicated that he would conclude arguments by Thursday. Since the facts of the case and the appeal contents are identical, it would not be necessary to advance extensive arguments.

Moreover counsel for Jayalalithaa, L Nageshwar had made detailed submissions before the Supreme Court two weeks back in which the entire contentions in the appeal were covered.

Since Karnataka is the prosecuting agency and the appellant state, it would be given another chance to argue. Karnataka is likely to make a quick submission apart from handing over its written counter statements to the Bench comprising Justices P C Ghose and Amitava Roy.

Following this the Bench will take up a petition that had been filed by an advocate questioning the jurisdiction of the court in hearing an appeal by Karnataka. However advocates part of this case say that it may be a short hearing.

If the Supreme Court had to decide on jurisdiction it would have taken up the matter immediately and not after the conclusion of the arguments. Once this petition is heard the Bench will reserve its orders.

OneIndia News
Hollande in India: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan to have lunch with him

Had no money to raise a voice for Kirpal: Sister of dead Indian in Pak prison

Is it too early for India to celebrate ICJ verdict on Jadhav? Sarabjits lawyer thinks so

Its all Pak's dramebaazi , says Sarabjit's sister on Jadhav's meeting with family

Kirpal Singh meets same fate as that of Sarabjit Singh; Dalbir Kaur recalls tragic day

India

oi-Preeti

Amritsar, April 19: As Kirpal Singh's body is about to reach India today, late Sarabjit Singh's sister Dalbir Kaur asked, "Why Pakistani prisoners do not die in Lahore jails?"

Dalbir Kaur, the elder sister of Sarabjit, who languished in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat jailfor almost two decades, ran from pillar to post, to secure the release of her innocent brother, but all her efforts went in vain, as Sarbajit could never return to his country.

What returned was his lifeless body in April 2013. Today, Kirpal Singh's bereaved family is also going through the same pain what Sarabjit Singh's family went through. [A tell-all biopic coming soon on Sarabjit Singh's life]

While talking to a news agency, Dalbir said, "When I heard Kirpal's body is being brought to India, similar scenes flashed through my mind when Sarabjit's body was brought".

"I still believe that Kirpal didn't die of heart attack, the reason is something else", she further said, while adding "I have received information from somewhere, about direction given to Lahore jail directing to kill our 11 prisoners."

"Mainly our two prisoners in Pakistan jails are in danger- Kuldeep Kumar from Ahmedabad & Ansari from Maharashtra. It is suspicious why Pakistani prisoners do not die in Lahore jails", Dalbir told a news agency.

Meanwhile, Kirpal's anguished sister Jagir Kaur said, "Kirpal didn't die of heart attack. We received his letter two months back, everything was fine then." [Had no money to raise a voice for Kirpal: Sister of dead Indian in Pak prison]

"My brother was murdered just like Sarabjit earlier. The Pakistani jail authorities are responsible for his death," Jagir had earlier said.

Ashwini, the nephew of late Kirpal Singh said, "Just two months ago we received a letter from Kirpal saying that he is fine."

"Indian prisoners in Pak jails are in danger. We just want safety of our prisoners", he said.

54-year-old Kirpal Singh, a resident of Gurdaspur in Punjab, who was arrested in Pakistan on charges of spying in 1992 died under mysterious circumstances Lahore's Kot Lakhpat prison on Monday, April 11.

Kirpal had reportedly crossed the Wagah border into Pakistan in 1992 and was arrested immediately. He was subsequently given the death sentence in a serial bomb blast case in Pakistan's Punjab province.

OneIndia News
'We demand for RSS to be banned too', says Congress MP on PFI Ban

Kohinoor return: RSS contradicts Modi govt, says diamond is India's asset

India

oi-Mukul

New Delhi, April 19: A day after Government informed Supreme Court that the legendary Kohinoor diamond was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away by British, BJP's parent organisation, RSS has opposed Centre's stand over the same. Reportedly, RSS leader Indresh Kumar has said that Kohinoor diamond is India's property.

Kumar was quoted as saying, ''Koh-i-noor is India's property and it should be brought back".

Earlier on Monday, Modi government told the Supreme Court that Kohinoor diamond was neither "forcibly taken" nor "stolen" by British rulers but given to the East India Company by the rulers of Punjab.

"Kohinoor cannot said to be forcibly taken or stolen as it was given by the successors of Maharaja Ranjit Singh to East India Company in 1849 as compensation for helping them in the Sikh wars," Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar told a bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur.

The apex court then asked whether the government was willing to stake a claim to the Kohinoor, one of the most valuable diamonds in the world.

The Solicitor General told the apex court that the demand to get back Kohinoor have been raised time and again in Parliament.

"If we claim our treasures like Kohinoor from other countries, every other nation will start claiming their items from us. There will be nothing left in our museums," Solicitor General said.

He said this was the stand of Ministry of Culture while the response from Ministry of External Affairs, which is also a party, is awaited.

The bench, also comprising Justice U U Lalit, then asked the Solicitor General to file a detailed reply within six weeks.

"We would like to know if there is a claim the government wants to make? See, we are not inclined to dismiss this plea.

If we dismiss it, that country (United Kingdom) may say that your Supreme Court has rejected the plea and it may lead to denial of the government's legitimate claim.

"You cannot afford dismissal as it may be treated as an obstruction in your way. You formulate a response and file it in six weeks," the bench observed.

The apex court had asked the government to clarify its stand on a PIL seeking return of Kohinoor diamond to the country.

Kohinoor diamond

Kohinoor, which means Mountain of Light, is a large, colourless diamond that was found in Southern India in early 14th century. The 108-carat Kohinoor gem, which came into British hands during the colonial era, is the subject of a historic ownership dispute and claimed by at least four countries including India.

The court was hearing a PIL filed by All India Human Rights and Social Justice Front seeking directions to the Indian High Commissioner in United Kingdom for the return of the diamond, besides several other treasures.

The PIL has made Ministry of External Affairs and Ministry of Culture, High Commissioners of UK, Pakistan and Bangladesh as parties in the case.

It had also sought return of the "ring and talwar of Tipu Sultan and other treasures of Tipu Sultan, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Rani of Jhansi, Nawab Mir Ahmad Ali Banda and other rulers of India.

OneIndia News

(With inputs from PTI)

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Story first published: Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 15:54 [IST]
Low pay package, inhuman working condition: Garment factory worker narrates her woes

India

oi-Oneindia

By Maitreyee Boruah

Bengaluru, April 18: India's IT hub Bengaluru, came to a standstill as major thoroughfares of the city were blocked by thousands of protesting garment factory workers.

The factory workers, mostly women, protested against the Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government decision to amend rules governing withdrawal of Employees' Provident Fund contributions.

According to the new policy rules, to be applicable from May 1, workers with a job will not be able to withdraw the whole provident fund amount.

The full amount can only be withdrawn at the age of 57, a year before retirement.

The police faced a harrowing time to disperse the agitated crowd, who shouted slogans and even resorted to stone pelting. According to some media reports, the police beat the protesters and forced them to end their strike.

There is already no end to the troubles of the garment factory workers and the latest decision of the Modi government is almost like adding insult to injury. The thousands of garment factory workers in Bengaluru for decades have been fighting for decent pay package and better working condition.

OneIndia spoke to Savitri RM, who has been working in Sunita Impex Private Limited, Marathahalli-a clothing manufacturing unit-for the last 18 years.

Low pay package

As she gets a paltry sum of Rs 8,000, Savitri, in her mid-fifties, also works as a domestic help in a house close to her factory. "I also work as a housemaid. I have been forced to take up a second job because of the rising prices of essential commodities. Before going to the factory every morning, I first finish my job of cleaning and sweeping in the house. It helps me to earn Rs 1,500 extra every month. I spend that money to buy my bus pass."

Earlier, Savitri was working in a garment factory in Peenya, before it was closed. "I have been working for the last 30 years. My first pay package was Rs 300 per month. Now, I am earning Rs 8,000. My husband works as a security guard in an office in Indiranagar. He earns Rs 10,000. If I stop working, we won't be able to survive as prices of essential commodities are rising drastically."

Modi government's anti-poor stand

Talking about Monday's agitation by the garment factory workers in the city, Savitri says, "They are demanding their rights. The Modi government is taking anti-poor decisions.

We are poor people, if we can't withdraw our provident fund money in our time of need, how are we going to survive? With our meagre earnings, we can hardly save. We depend on the PF money for our children's education and weddings. I withdrew a large-sum of my PF money when my husband fell ill five years ago. Previously, I took money from my PF account during my daughter's wedding 12 years ago."

Bad working conditions

Savitri tells us that working conditions in most of the garment factories-both small and big-are very bad. "We work for eight hours every day. Sometimes we work more than eight hours also. We hardly get any break. We have to eat our food while sewing in the machines. Even to attend toilets, we have to take permission from our managers," she says.

"Our work stations are very small spaces, without any ventilation. They pack several women in these small rooms, as if we are some animals. We face a lot of trouble during summers," she adds.

OneIndia News
Minting money in time of drought: 6,887 illegal mineral water companies in Telangana

India

oi-Vicky

Hyderabad, Apr 19: With the the mercury soaring and the water resources going dry in Telangana, there have some who have found a way of making a quick buck.

Consider these statistics. There are around 7,000 mineral water plants in the state out of which only 113 are BIS certified.

This would mean that the remaining 6,887 are illegal companies. The reason for such a boom in the number of illegal mineral water companies shooting up is because more and more people are turning to packaged water in the wake of acute shortage of drinking water.

Rise in the number of illegal mineral water companies:

As opposed to the earlier years where the number of people dependant on mineral water was 30 per cent, this year the figure stands at 70 per cent. It only goes on to show the dearth of water in the state of Telangana. Like many other states, Telangana too is facing an acute water shortage thanks to this cruel drought which has hit most parts of the country.

Video: OMG! Woman cooks omelette on hot floor of her house in Telangana

There are only 113 BIS certified mineral water companies in Telangana. However this year the number has shot up to 7,000. 6,887 of these plants are illegal, but they seem to be selling their product at a cheaper price when compared to the BIS certified companies.

For instance a legal mineral water firm would sell a one litre bottle at Rs 12, but the illegal ones would market it at Rs 8. Obviously there is a beeline for these cheaper bottles of mineral water. However the problem is that this could well come with a health hazard as it has not been certified, officials say.

Water receding:

Here is a chart that would explain the depleting water levels in the state. It clearly shows that there is an acute shortage and how important a pre-monsoon shower is. If this scenario continues, then the situation would only worsen. All the levels are measured in tmc ft and the comparison is done for the months of April 2015 and 2016

The Lower Maniar reservoir has a capacity of 24.7 tmc ft. In 2015 the level in April was 4.82 and this year it is 2.73.

Jurala's capacity is 11.94. In 2015 it was 6.34 and this year it is 2.86

Srisailam- Capacity- 215. In 2015 it was 32.6 and this year it is 23.8

Sriramsagar- 90.3 is the capacity. 2015- 13.17. 2016- 4.97

Nizam Sagar- Capacity- 17.8. 2015- 1.05. 2015-0

Singur- Capacity- 29.9. 2015- 7. 2016- 0.5

Pulichintala- Capacity- 45.7. 2015- 0.98. 2016-0.4

Nagarjunasagar- Capacity- 312. 2015- 141. 2016- 126

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 9:14 [IST]
Golden intelligence rule: When your cover is blown, you are on your own

Spoke in Punjabi dialect, posed as Army men, the mystery behind the missing Innova

Pathankot attack: NIA writes to CBI for red corner alert against accused

India

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, Apr 19: There appears to be a ray of hope where the NIA's visit to Pakistan in connection with the Pathankot probe is concerned.

The NIA has now written to the Central Bureau of Investigation to get a red corner notice issued against the accused in the Pathankot attack.

The Director General of the National Investigation Agency, Sharad Kumar said that the team would visit Pakistan once the decks are cleared.

The team could visit Pakistan on a short notice. Pakistan had last month sent its Joint Investigation Team to India to probe the Pathankot attacks.

However once the team landed in Pakistan, there were reports that suggested that they were not entirely convinced with the evidence that the NIA had shared with them.

The NIA however made it clear that all the evidence had been gathered properly and shared and the JIT did not argue with them about it.

The NIA has already kept a team ready which would visit Pakistan once the decks are cleared. The team is armed with evidence, an FIR and also a non-bailable warrant against the accused persons issued by a court in India.

An NIA officer tells OneIndia that they will seek access to Maulana Masood Azhar and his brother Asghar Rauf when they visit Pakistan. However it depends on Pakistan whether that request would be heeded to or not.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 15:49 [IST]
Punjab polls 2017: Amarinder Singh on 3 week foreign trip to garner NRI support

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Apr 19: As part of the Congress campaign to woo Non Resident Indians ahead of 2017 Punjab assembly elections, state Congress President Amarinder Singh on Monday night left for US and Canada on a three week tour.

"I will be travelling to US and Canada to meet prominent NRIs and Sikh groups as part of Congress plan to engage with them on issues concerning them and the state and to garner their support for next year's assembly elections and tell them about the real face of Arvind Kejriwal led AAP and its politics of lies.

"After all AAP draws a lot of support from NRIs who should know Kejriwal's truth, " Amarinder told PTI.

He will first land in Chicago where he is slated to address Sikh groups. His other halts will include San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York in the US and Toronto and British Columbia in Canada.

Amarinder is expected to return on May 9.

PTI
Karnataka to strengthen ATS and up the number of prisons

Rights of garment workers will be restored: Ananth Kumar

India

oi-Shreyas

Bengaluru, Apr 19: After stir against amended withdrawal of Employment Provident Fund (EPF) by garment labourers turned violent, Union Minister Ananth Kumar convened a press to pacify agitators and said concerns of the protesters have been passed on to Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya.

The protesters spread across various places of Bengaluru are agitating against new EPF policy and particularity at Hosur road angry agitators took law into hands by setting vehicles ablaze.

The police resorted to Lathi charge and fired a few rounds of gas to shun away garment workers. It is reported that ASP Oblesh and other low rank officers have been injured during the clash between cops and protesting mass.

Sensing the danger, Union Minister Ananth Kumar held a press meet. "It is the right of the employees to get full EPF during the withdrawal," Kumar said. In the interest of garment and unorganized sector, Kumar said he has apprised about the concerns of labourers with Bandaru Dattatreya. He said at present status-quo on EPF will be maintained.

Request garment workers to stop agitation.Hv spoken to Union Labour Min B Dattatreya& rqstd him to review notification-Union Min Anant Kumar  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

However, Labour Minister deliberating the issue with all stake holders will take right decision in favour of workers. "Union Minister Bandaru Dattatreya assured us that he will call a meeting of Central Board of Trustees & review whole decision" Kumar conveyed.

Hope status quo will continue,the rights of garment workers will be restored,they need not fear anything-Anant Kumar pic.twitter.com/igHqSsmJit  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

Karnataka BJP President, B S Yeddyurappa said in a span of 2-3 hours, concerned Minister would take appropriate decision. Both Kumar and Yeddyurappa urged the agitators to maintain peace as government will fulfill their demands.

OneIndia News
China willing to properly handle disputes with India: Li Keqiang

International

oi-PTI

Beijing, Apr 19: China is willing to properly handle its disputes with India as cooperation between the two countries will be a "great engine" for Asia's development and send a "positive signal" for world peace, Premier Li Keqiang told Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar today.

Li made the remarks when Parrikar, who yesterday held extensive talks with top Chinese Generals and exchanged views on improving bilateral military to military relations, called on him.

The Chinese Premier expressed hope that defence departments and armed forces of China and India will strengthen exchanges, dialogue and communication to jointly maintain peace and stability in border areas and create a good condition for the development of bilateral ties.

Li said China and India are important neighbouring countries, whose peaceful co-existence and cooperation are conducive for both sides and the world.

China attaches high importance to its relations with India and is willing to keep close bilateral exchanges, strengthen strategic mutual trust, expand common interests and properly handle disputes so as to promote a sound and stable development of the China-India relations, Li said during his meeting with Parrikar.

Facing the sluggish world economy and unceasing regional conflicts, the cooperation and common development between the two countries will be a "great engine" for Asia's development and send a "positive signal" for world peace, Li was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency.

Speaking positively of the development of India-China relations in recent years, Parrikar said he hoped the two sides could make joint efforts to properly handle relevant issues and maintain the cooperation momentum in all areas.

He said a further progress of bilateral defence relations would also push forward the two countries' economic and trade cooperation.

Parrikar hoped the two countries could strengthen cooperation and friendship. Parrikar later left for Chengdu where he would visit the recently integrated western command military headquarters which has jurisdiction over entire borders with India before leaving for home.

The Defence Minister's meeting with Li came a day after he firmly conveyed India's reservations to Chinese leaders over Beijing blocking its efforts to get Pakistan-based JeM chief Masood Azhar banned by the UN.

PTI
From hijab to Kashmir, Zawahiri was Al-Qaeda's voice for everything anti-India

Zawahiri dead, but terror looms large as Taliban links with Al-Qaeda intact

More than 20 dead in massive explosion inside Kabul madrasa

For the dark rule in Afghanistan, blame is on the US

28 killed in Kabul explosion, Taliban claims responsibility for attack

International

oi-Sandra

Kabul, Apr 19: A loud explosion was heard in the central area of Kabul on Tuesday and black smoke could be seen rising from the vicinity of the US Embassy here.

Warning sirens went off in the US Embassy compund immediately after the explosion. 28 people have been killed and over 160 have been reportedly injured.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

Major explosion near ministry of defence in Kabul, near US embassy. Part of taliban spring offensive @ibnlive pic.twitter.com/HycePSduJT  Anchal Vohra (@anchalvohra) April 19, 2016

According to reports, the explosion reportedly occurred in PD2 in Pul-e-Mahmood Khan area of Kabul. Gunfire was also reported from the area. A suicide bomber is said to have detonated an explosive-laden vehicle in Kabul outside Secret Service unit responsible for protecting VIPs.

The US Embassy said that they were not affected by the blast.

Heavy security deployment was in place after the suicide bombing. Afghanistan President said that many people were killed, wounded in the attack.

Heavy security deployment in Kabul (Afghanistan) after suicide bombing that killed at least 24 ppl (Source: Reuters) pic.twitter.com/HPvnbpkRoX  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

OneIndia News
Philippines: Presidential candidates controversial remarks about rape: Here is what he said

International

oi-Jagriti

Manila, Apr 19: A highly controversial and offensive remark about an Australian missionary has been made by a leading Presidential frontrunner in Philippines, media reported.

Presidential frontrunner Rodrigo Digong Duterte, the mayor of Davao City on Mindanao created controversy when he recalled an Australian missionary who was abducted, gang-raped and later killed in 1989.

While addressing a rally in Quezon City on April 12 he recalled a 1989 prison riot in which an Australian missionary was gang-raped and later killed by the inmates who had lined up to rape her.

"I was angry because she was raped, that's one thing. But she was so beautiful, the mayor should have been first. What a waste," Duterte can be heard saying so in video on You Tube while referring to himself.

His statement has created uproar in Philippines.

Ex-Italian priest freed in Philippines

36-year-old Australian Jacqueline Hamill was among others dead after a gang of inmates took 15 church workers hostage in 1989. Hamill was raped and had her throat slashed in downtown Davao, 600 miles southeast of Manila.

His comments have evoked a sharp response from the Australian Embassy in the Philippines.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 12:11 [IST]
Russia prefers Donald Trump as next US president: Survey

International

oi-Shubham

Berlin, April 19: A lot of countries around the world are pitching for former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton as the successor to President Barack Obama, but Russia, known to be one of the USA's biggest rival in international politics, has backed Republican real-estate tycoon Donald Trump as the next occupant of the White House.



According to a new survey carried out by YouGov for the Handelsblatt Global Edition, Russia is the only major nation which prefers the 69-year-old controversial candidate to be the next American president. [Trump looks to win big in NY primary]

The survey, which covered more than 20,000 in every G20 nation, showed Trump leading by 21 points in Russia. Clinton, on the other hand, leads over Trump by over 21 points in 15 other nations.

Although, neither Trump nor Clinton have yet bagged the nomination for the presidential election from the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. Both parties will go to a high-profile primary in New York on Tuesday (April 19).

While Trump is fighting it out against Ted Cruz and John Kasich to get the nomination, Clinton is facing a stiff challenge from Bernie Sanders.

Mexico topped the list of nations that disapproved of Trump and backed Clinton as the next American president. Trump has had a serious face-off with Mexico as he has been constantly stressing building a wall at the US-Mexico border to prevent "illegal" immigration and also had a bitter exchange of words with former Mexican president Vincente Fox.

While Mexico gave Clinton a 54-point lead, the 14 others gave her a lead between 38 and 12 points. Besides the 15 nations, Indonesia, India and China also backed Clinton more but they were represented by online voters. The last three countries gave Clinton a lead by 32, 29 and 12 points, respectively.

The survey also said that 79 per cent of the Russians are not happy with their economic situation but yet 74 per cent voted for their president Vladimir Putin as the most trusted leader.

Oneindia News
Suicide blast in Pakistan: 12 injured and 3 in critical condition

International

oi-Shalini

Lahore, April 19: At least 12 people were injured on Tuesday, April 19, when a blast occurred at a Excise and Taxation Office building in Mardan, Pakistan.

Several officials besides a journalist and policemen were injured in the blast. However, security force and rescue team reached the spot immediately after the attack. All the injured were rushed to a nearby hospital.

According to media reports, three persons are said to be in critical condition.

District police officials said: " Gunshots where fired before the suicide bomber carried out the blast near the computer section of the building."

The Excise and Taxation office is located near the Mall Road where several other important government buildings are located and is one of the most densely populated areas of the city.

Loud explosion near Excise and taxation office in Mardan(Pakistan). Several people reported to be injured in the blast: Pakistan Media  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

OneIndia News
IRCTC: 109 trains cancelled on Oct 22 including some in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu; check complete list

Partial Solar Eclipse 2022: City-wise timings, when and where to watch

With AQI of 259, Delhi's air on day before Diwali least polluted in 7 years

Sushma Swaraj leaves for home after two-nation visit

International

oi-PTI

Moscow, Apr 19: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Tuesday left for home after winding up her four-day two-nation tour to Iran and Russia.

"Dasvidaniya Moscow! After a productive visit to Iran and Russia, EAM @SushmaSwaraj departs for Delhi," External Affair Ministry Spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted.

Sushma Swaraj's attire in Iran becomes buzz on Twitter

Dasvidaniya Moscow! After a productive visit to Iran and Russia, EAM @SushmaSwaraj departs for Delhi pic.twitter.com/BSIhmgj0fJ  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) April 19, 2016

In Iran, Swaraj called on President Hassan Rouhani and held talks with her Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif, besides meeting with Supreme Leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei's Advisor Ali Akbar Velayati and deliberated on a range of issues.

During the meeting, Rouhani assured Swaraj that his country can be a "reliable partner" for India's energy needs. The two nations also decided to significantly expand engagements in their overall ties, particularly in oil and gas sectors.

In Moscow, the Minister attended the Foreign Ministers meeting of RIC (Russia-India-China). During the meeting the three nations vowed to deepen cooperation in combating terrorism and pitched for setting up of a broad counter-terrorist front with the UN playing a central role.

She also held talks with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. She also had a meeting with Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Dmitryi Rogozin.

PTI
Top Donald Trump aide lobbied for ISI frontal outfit in US: report

International

oi-PTI

Washington, Apr 18: US Republican frontrunner Donald Trump's new top campaign aide Paul Manafort lobbied for a Washington-based group that has been charged for operating as a front for Pakistan's powerful spy agency ISI, a media report said on Tuesday.

The company of Paul Manafort, who was recently hired by Trump campaign as its convention manager allegedly received USD 700,000 from the Kashmiri American Council (KAC) between 1990 and 1995, the Yahoo News reported.

US presidential polls 2016: Trump looks to win big in home state primary

The money was received by Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, which was Manafort's lobbying firm. Ghulam Nabi Fai, the head of Kashmiri American Council, was sentenced by a US court for two years of imprisonment on charges of receiving money from ISI and working on its behalf.

The fund USD 700,000 was part of the USD 4 million given by ISI to Kashmiri American Council, as alleged by federal prosecutors during court proceeding. The ISI has denied the allegations.

The US Government never charged Manafort, who was registered as a lobbyist. Manafort during a trip to Islamabad in 1994 presented plans to influence members of Congress to back Pakistan's case for a plebiscite for Kashmir, the report said.

Ted Cruz blanks Donald Trump in Wyoming Republican Convention

The report quotes an unnamed former Pakistani official, who was part of that meeting. Internal budget documents obtained by the FBI show plans by the Kashmiri American Council to spend USD 80,000 to USD 100,000 a year on campaign contributions to members of Congress, it said.

"There is no way Manafort didn't know that Pakistan was involved with the KAC," the former official said was quoted as saying by the report. The Trump Campaign did not respond to questions sent on the allegations against Manafort.

PTI
US polls 2016: Why New York primary is important for Sanders, Hillary & Trump

International

oi-Shubham

New York, April 19: The primary polling New York on Tuesday (April 19) will be very very significant for each of the candidates in both the Democratic and Republican camps in their pursuit to grab that all-important presidential nomination.



It's not just the fact that the Big Apple state has a high number of delegates on the offing makes it important. It also has some other significance:

For Bernie Sanders:

The Vermont senator will go to the New York primary following a series of victories in primaries held in March and April. Sanders will look to eat into Hillary Clinton's lead by 244 delegates. New York has 247 delegates who will be allocated proportionally, which means the candidates will roughly get delegates as they perform in the popular vote. A near tie-up in New York will also help Sanders challenge the perception that his success is limited to highly white states. [Trump rakes up '7-Eleven' memory ahead of NY primary]

For Hillary Clinton:

Polls have shown the former US secretary of state with a steady lead among the lower teens. A win in New York is also important for Clinton despite her having an edge for that would strengthen the peception about her candidature. Losing her current home state where she had served as a senator between 2001 and 2009 could give a blow to the idea that Clinton is an inevitable candidate. [Russia prefers Trump as next US president]

For Donald Trump:

Though Trump has every reason to take the nomination race beyond his rivals' catch by registering a thumping victory in his home state, a slip here could also see the story going awfully wrong for the man. Polls predict Trump to get 54 per cent, much ahead of John Kasich at 22 per cent and Ted Cruz at 18 per cent, but the tricky law of delegate allocation could still see the Manhattan tycoon struggling.

As per rules, of a candidate gets over 50 per cent of the statewide votes, he gets 14 delegates straightaway. If one gets below 20 per cent, he will not get any. If none of the candidates win above 50 per cent, then the 14 delegates are allocated proportionally to the one who gets over 20 per cent.

The rest of the delegates are allocated based on who bags the congressional district contests. A candidate needs at least 20 per cent of the votes in a district to qualify for any of its three delegates. A candidate who gets more than 50 per cent, bags all three and if none gets more than 50 per cent, he who gets the most number of votes earns two delegates and the runner-up gets one delegate in the district.

Oneindia News
Bengal polls 2016: Former CM Buddhadeb does road show after 5 years

Kolkata

oi-Shubham

Kolkata, April 19: Former West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who is not contesting the state's Assembly election this year owing to health reasons, campaigned for Left candidates in South Kolkata on Tuesday evening.

Assembly Polls 2016 Full Coverage; List of seats going to polls on April 21

Bhattacharjee had taken part in an election road show five years ago in 2011, when he was the chief minister of the state. The road show will cover three constituencies in Kasba, Jadavpur and Tollygunj, all of which fall under the South 24 Parganas district which will go to the polls on April 30.

Bhattacharjee campaigned for Shatarup Ghosh, Madhuja Sen and Sujan Chakraborty---the three Left candidates contesting from Kasba, Tollygunj and Jadavpur constituencies, respectively.

Tuesday is the last day of campaigning for the third phase of polling in the ongoing Assembly election which started on April 4. Seven constituencies in Kolkata besides 55 in other parts of the state will go to polling on Thursday (April 21). [High-profile candidates of April 21 poll phase]

The former CM, who was in office between 2000-2011, was not ready to campaign although he played an instrumental role in forging the electoral tie-up between the Left and Congress to topple the Trinamool Congress government this time. He finally agreed to campaign in Kolkata and the Left supporters believed even a short presence of Bhattacharjee on the streets will boost the cadres' morale. [Top issues of Bengal polls 2016]

Bhattacharjee won from Jadavpur constituency for five times between 1987 and 2006 but lost the 2011 election to TMC's Manish Gupta, a former bureaucrat and the current power minister. Gupta is contesting on the TMC's ticket this year as well and his opponent is former MP from Jadavpur Lok Sabha seat Sujan Chakraborty.

Oneindia News
For the second day in a row, protests against recent amendments to the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) continued in Bengaluru. Traffic on the arterial Hosur Road was disrupted, as thousands of protesters gathered at the Bommanahalli Junction in the morning. As per the new amendments, employees will be able to withdraw only their contribution to their provident fund accounts. They will be able to withdraw the employers contribution only after they are 58-years-old.
A leading Presidential frontrunner in the Philippines jokes about an Australian missionary who was abducted, gang-raped and later killed in 1989. A video clip has appeared showed Rodrigo Digong Duterte, the mayor of Davao City saying, "I was angry because she was raped, that's one thing. But she was so beautiful, the mayor should have been first. What a waste." In 1989, the inmates of the jail had overpowered the guards and grabbed their weapons, taking 15 people, including 36-year-old Australian Jacqueline Hamill, hostage in 1989.
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Michigan Introduces Bill to Legalize Online Gambling

Published April 18, 2016 by Elana K

Last week, Michigan jumped into the discussion of legalizing online gambling when state senator Mike Kowall introduced a bill that would legalize and regulate online gambling in the Great Lakes State.

While New York, Pennsylvania and California have been the frontrunners for being the next state to legalize online gambling, Michigan has now become a likely candidate as well. Last week, state senator Mike Kowall introduced a bill that would legalize and regulate online gambling in the Great Lakes State.

About the Bill

SB 889 cites three valid reasons for regulating internet gambling: consumer protection, generating revenue and creating jobs. The three states that have thus far regulated internet gambling (Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey) have all found that their regulations have been successful in bringing these three things about.

Part of the consumer protection that the bill mentions includes prohibiting Michigan citizens below the age of 21 from participating in online gambling. Revenue would be generated from a $5 million licensing fee that operators would need to pay in order to be approved, plus a 10% revenue tax on gross gaming revenue.

Most of the states that have legalized or are considering legalizing online gambling have submitted multiple drafts of bills, so it wont be surprising if Michigans SB 899 undergoes some revisions of its own, which might include the amount of the licensing fee and taxes.

One interesting point in the bill is that it does not require wagering to take place within state borders, providing that the wagering is not inconsistent with federal laws. With this clause, Michigan has opened the door to interstate compacts. Of course, it still needs to be approved, and this might be one of the clauses that other lawmakers object to.

Online gambling seems to be a natural progression for the direction Michigan is headed; in January of 2015, the state legalized online sales of lottery tickets, one of the first states to do so. Michigan is also looking into regulating Daily Fantasy Sports, which makes it a great candidate for passing regulations for online casino games as well.
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Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State has raised the alarm that there are plans to arrest and detain him immediately after he hands over power on May 29, 2019.

He said National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Adams Oshiomhole, and other leaders of the party had instigated the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and other law enforcement agencies to effect the plan.

Okorocha detailed this in two separate fundamental rights enforcement suits marked FHC/ABJ/CS/474/19 and FHC/ABJ/CS/475/19 and filed before the Federal High Court in Abuja.

He said the anti-corruption agencies had been directed to arrest and keep him in detention as soon as he hands over as governor on May 29, adding that he had received no fewer than 25 invitations from the anti-corruption and law enforcement agencies in purported investigation of projects executed by the state government in a bid to find some materials to justify their conclusion that he is guilty of corrupt practices.

He alleged that the plan of the APC leaders had been expanded to include a reign of terror against the applicants political, business associates and family members including his wife and children.

According to him, his political and business associates, as well as family members, allegedly targeted by the said reign of terror are Uloma Rochas, Uju Rochas, Uchechi Rochas, Ahamefula Rochas, Amen Rochas, Amamchi Rochas, Uzoma Anwukah and Uche Nwosu.

Okorocha stated that he did not commit any offence to warrant the incessant threats of arrest, detention, the harassment and terror being unleashed upon him and his family.

He implored the court to restrain the EFCC and other agencies from harrassing, intimidating and arresting him and his family members.

The defendants whom the plaintiff is seeking an order to restrain are the Attorney General of the Federation, the Inspector-General of Police, the Department of State Services, the EFCC, the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission, and the Code of Conduct Bureau.

The plaintiff accused his adversaries within the party as waging a vendetta war against him by instigating the agencies to harass him on the premise of a belief that he played a role in the EFCCs alleged arrest of Oshiomhole last year.

He said Oshiomhole and the party leaders were behind the Independent National Electoral Commissions withholding of his certificate of return which ought to be issued to him following his victory at the February 23, 2019 Imo West Senatorial District poll.

According to him, his travails started because he supported another candidate for the office of the National Chairman of APC against Oshiomhole.

An affidavit filed in support of the suit read in part, The applicant had supported a candidate for the position of National Chairman of the APC other than the current incumbent, Mr Adams Oshiomhole and by reason of various events that occurred at the time, including the detention of Mr Adams Oshiomhole by the EFCC on allegations of corruption, it was assumed that the applicant was a party to that incident.

Some of the supporters of Adams Oshiomhole at the time are currently very influential in the Federal Government of Nigeria which is controlled by the APC.

These individuals, including the said current national chairman, have decided to carry out a vendetta and revenge against the applicant, including instigating the respondents against the applicant upon their spurious conclusion without evidence that the applicant is guilty of corrupt practices as the governor of Imo State.

The respondents, proceeding from this position that the applicant is guilty unless proved innocent, between 2017 and now, have expended not less than 25 invitations to the applicant in the purported investigation of projects executed by the state government in a bid to find some materials to justify their conclusion that he is guilty of corrupt practices.

This witch-hunt is clearly politically motivated, baseless, and has been designed only to discredit and humiliate the applicant in a bid to decimate him politically.

Responding to the suit, the DSS, through its counter- affidavits filed on its behalf by G. O. A. Agbadua, faulted Okorochas claims and denied planning to arrest either the governor or members of his family.

The DSS said it was not aware or part of any plan to arrest the Okorochas.

Its counter-affidavit read in part, The 3rd respondent (DSS) did not meet with the Independent National Electoral Commission concerning the applicant.

The 3rd respondent has not invited the applicant or any member of his family and/or staff for investigation.

The rest of the respondents have yet to file their defence.

The matter has been scheduled for hearing before Justice Taiwo Taiwo on May 22.
Many commuters are currently finding it difficult passing through the Lagos-Badagry expressway as a result of Wednesday nights heavy downpour.

The heavy-downpour coupled with a failed portion of the road, has led to many getting trapped on the expressway.

See more photos below:
Nwolisa

A Nigerian man has reacted to the recent increase in the number of people committing suicide in the country as he said they should be dumped in the evil forest.

The man identified as Nwolisa Onyeozi who mocked RCCG pastor, Michael Arowobaiye for killing himself said the act is a taboo in Igbo tradition.

While sharing photo of the RCCG Minister who recently took his own life, he wrote:

It is not right for you to type RIP for someone who commits suicide, in our tradition as an Igbo people we dont mourn them, we threw them away in an evil Forest, what they commit is an abomination it is a taboo you dont have right to take your life we consider it evil ,so be careful so as not to cause calamity in your family thank you all
Nollywood actress, Maureen Solomon recently welcomed her third child after 12 years.

The third-time mummy was overwhelmed with joy as she took to her Instagram page to introduce her newborn baby to her fans and followers alike.

Sharing a photo of the cute bundle of joy, she wrote:

And here she is!! Omalichachukwu Phoenix Okereke Lord I thank you. We are grateful

Share this:
Matthias Knab, Opalesque:

When Cape Town based Investment Data Services (IDS) commenced business fourteen years ago, the objective of the company was to provide the nascent South African hedge fund industry dedicated independent administration. IDS currently administers over R100bn in alternative assets.

The company was involved at the outset in moving the hedge fund industry into a regulated environment to provide extra protection to investors and to provide a broader product range to attract new investors into hedge and alternative investment funds. The promulgation of regulated investment structures under the Collective Investment Schemes Control Act (CISCA) in 2015 provided South African hedge funds the opportunity to convert the unregulated funds into either Retail Investment Hedge Funds (RIHFs) or Qualified Investor Hedge Funds (QIHFs).

IDS identified the need of hosting many hedge fund managers who prefer not to own or run their own CIS Management companies. Building on IDSs international experience of providing hosting solutions for international fund managers, IDS has now received approval of South Africa's Financial Services Board for its CISCA regulated RIHF and QIHF hosting platforms. IDS has appointed RMB Trustees as trustee to the two schemes.

Over the next six months, 83 funds will be converted from unregulated structures to CISCA governed funds, making the IDS hosting Scheme likely to be one of the biggest in the world in terms of hosted hedge......................

To view our full article Click here
Reprinted from Counterpunch

A couple weeks ago the Wall Street Journal confirmed our worst fears about the student loan program, that is, that it was going to blow up in the government's face just like all the other gigantic debt-bubbles that preceded it. For the sake of background, here's a brief excerpt from the article that will bring readers up-to-date:

"More than 40% of Americans who borrowed from the government's main student-loan program aren't making payments or are behind on more than $200 billion owed, raising worries that millions of them may never repay. "The new figures represent the fallout of a decade long borrowing boom as record numbers of students enrolled in trade schools, universities and graduate schools. "While most have since left school and joined the workforce, 43% of the roughly 22 million Americans with federal student loans weren't making payments as of Jan. 1, according to a quarterly snapshot of the Education Department's $1.2 trillion student-loan portfolio." (More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren't Making Payments, Wall Street Journal)

While it all sounds very shocking, the real eye-popper was buried deep in the text where it was most likely to be ignored. Here it is:

"Carlo Salerno, an economist who studies higher education and has consulted for the private student-lending industry, noted that the government imposes virtually no credit checks on borrowers, requires no cosigners and doesn't screen people for their preparedness for college-level course work. 'On what planet does a financing vehicle with those kinds of terms and those kinds of performance metrics make sense,' he said." (WSJ)

Let's see if I got this right: The Fed, government regulators and the entire political establishment looked the other way while the mortgage industry cranked out trillions of dollars of "toxic" subprime liar's loans that Wall Street bundled into garbage bonds that wound up blowing up the entire global financial system and plunging the world into a severe recession from which we still haven't recovered. Then, a couple years later, they start pumping up another lethal trillion-dollar credit bubble, this time comprised of equally toxic "student liar's loans"?

Is that what they're saying?

That's it, alright. This is why there should be blanket amnesty for all the student debt generated in the last decade. It's because the whole thing was another filthy credit-swindle from the get go.

And let's be honest; it's not the government lenders who were scammed in this deal, it's the students. They're the victims, in the same way that the applicants, who borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars for mortgages they could never repay, were the victims. The lender is ALWAYS responsible when a loan that goes belly up. ALWAYS. Because it's their freaking job to figure out who can pay and who can't. Period. That's all they do, lend money. And they're pretty damn good at it too, when they actually expect to get repaid, which in this case, they don't. That's why we know it's a scam.

So now we're supposed to believe that no one could have foreseen this trainwreck ahead of time. Is that it? Is that what Obama and the media and the rest of the crooked financial establishment want us to believe; that no one could have known that 40 percent of the borrowers were going to "stiff" the government?

Baloney. The handwriting was on the wall from the very beginning. Take a look at this interview I did with professor Alan Nasser in 2011.
Hooey -- silly talk/nonsense -- frequently has slimy characteristics and slime is slippery.

Former President Bill Clinton recently slipped on some silly talk when trying to dance around a slime trail oozing from his presidency during the 1990s.

This hooey moment came during Bill Clinton's finger-wagging attempted smack down of a Black Lives Matter activist who called-out Clinton during a campaign event for the destructive impact the 1994 federal anti-crime bill he sought and signed had on black communities nationwide.



Hey Bill and Hillary: When You Point A Finger, Three Point At You

(Image by Open Source) Details DMCA



And Bill Clinton shoveled such hooey as his assertion that BLM activists defend criminals and BLM activists are obstructionist in ways comparable to GOP members in Congress.

Bill Clinton's defense of his 1994 crime bill came during a recent political campaign appearance for his wife Hilary in Philadelphia, Pa. Philly is the same city where Bill Clinton in July 2015 had apologized for the damage done to blacks by that '94 bill during a speech before the NAACP, America's oldest civil rights organization.

During Bill Clinton's 2015 NAACP speech he said that 1994 bill "made the problem worse." Yet, eight months later Clinton is scolding BLM with the contention that his 1994 bill improved conditions in black communities.

Clinton's 2015 mea culpa to the NAACP and his indignant 2016 'mind your business kiddies' to BLM activists bristled with industrial strength hooey.

One significant reality that has fallen off the political radar screen is Bill Clinton badly muffed addressing the racism that infects law enforcement -- from police brutality to bigoted Drug War enforcement -- during his presidency.

Civil rights leaders had begged Bill Clinton to address policy brutality throughout his presidency. Had he responded to those calls, abusive policing would have abated, thus minimizing that volatile issue years later that gave birth to the Black Lives Matters moment over a dozen years after the Clintons left the White House.

Frustration with Bill Clinton's inaction on police brutality forced African-American, Asian, Jewish and Latino leaders to hold a March 1999 press conference in Washington, DC. Those leaders requested action from Clinton on the 'shameful epidemic' of abusive policing. One requested action was withholding federal funds from police departments with documented patterns of abuse.

Although Clinton called police brutality a "critical" issue, he failed to take strong action like withholding federal funding to abusive police departments.

The National Urban League, one of the organizations that participated in that 1999 press conference, had called on Clinton in December 1996 to convene a national summit on police misconduct. Clinton did not act on the NUL's request.

In 1998 the Human Rights Watch organization issued a massive report on police abuse in the United States that examined 14 of the nation's largest cities. According to that HRW report police brutality was "one of the most serious, enduring and divisive human rights violations" in America. That 1998 HRW report faulted top officials -- federal and state -- for their failures to hold abusive police accountable. Those failures, the HRW reported stated, guaranteed police "impunity" for abuse from false arrests to fatal shootings.

The failures of Bill Clinton to act against police brutality, while shocking, are not surprising from this conservative leaning politician seasoned in the practice of political calculus steeped in callousness.

Remember that Clinton, when a presidential candidate in 1992, had indicated support for addressing the then roiling issue of racial profiling. Yet as president Clinton did not take up the racial profiling issue until late in his second term and then only tepidly. Racial profiling was something Clinton clearly knew about, not just from protests and news accounts but also from his time as governor of Arkansas. While governor of Arkansas a federal judge fined that state's state police for violating a court order to stop profiling non-whites.

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Lee Camp, a budding Stewart-like journalist/comedian hits the nail on the head

Watch the entire segment with jokes here

Lee Camp used the story of his arrest at Democracy Spring and the lack of coverage by MSM to make an important point about the state of journalism. Camp in one sentence explained the basic tenet of Democracy Spring -- the movement going on this week demanding money out of politics and an end to voter suppression.

Lee Camp pointed out that hundreds of activists marched from Philadelphia to Washington DC. It culminated at the nation's capital, Washington DC. The largest number of people ever arrested occurred. Lee was one of those arrested. He said his act of civil disobedience was a personal act. That is why he did not take the cameras along with him.

Camp then went on a rant. First of all, he defended his journalistic integrity. "Of course, you might think, but Lee if you are taking part in acts of protest, how can you claim to be unbiased," Camp said. "What about your journalist integrity. And to that I say, what journalistic integrity. I am a comedian."

He went on to say that in a country where an event like Democracy Spring went virtually uncovered by the 'bastions of journalism,' the mainstream media, there is no journalistic integrity to aspire to. He pointed out that today's journalism is in bed with the political establishment and corporate establishment. Lee gave examples of donors to politicians from the media, substantive stories being quelled and more.

The reality is Americans will have to reinvent the media. It is no longer the watchdog for Americans to ensure their freedom. It is the watchdog of the plutocracy. Lee Camp hits the nail on the head.

It will take a movement. And the movement is growing. I discussed this with Lady Liberty, Kaja Rebane, a participant in the Democracy Spring event. As more young people realize they have been had, and more 'adults' join the movement, change will occur.



(Image by Screengrab/rt) Details DMCA



(r/t Redacted Tonight)
Hillary has a few talking points or memes that seem to stick better than others, for her followers and which her surrogates parrot on the mainstream media networks where Hillary is shilled for 24-7.

I've been debunking them with tweets. This article will go beyond 140 characters to demolish the claims.

Hillary is Tried and Tested

I've never bought Hillary's "tried and tested" claims. And from the way she and her surrogates have responded to Bernie Sanders' relatively mild messaging, you'd think the sky had fallen. They're attacking Bernie for destroying party unity, using irresponsible claims... This is nothing compared to what any GOP candidate will throw at her, with their decades of accumulating oppo research.

The truth is Hillary has huge negatives that prove that she has been tried and tested and she failed horribly, that all the trials have taken a devastating, massively damaging toll on her electability. And, like the scorpion in the tale of the frog and the scorpion, it is her nature to continue to behave in a way that makes such a huge percentage of the population hate and distrust her. She has failed miserably at her tried and tested efforts.

Hillary Gets Things Done

"I'm a progressive, but I'm a progressive that wants to get things done." During the first Democratic debate, Hillary said,

This is half of the meme, the other half being that Bernie believes in unicorns, ie., he is unrealistic and can't deliver on his promises. Hillary has been very, very effective at getting this message to stick. It's probably the strongest message cited by Hillary supporters, who even go so far as to say, "I like Bernie, but he's too idealistic. Hillary will get things done."

But does she get things done. The answer is yes. The problem is what she gets done. I've cited a number of her accomplishments:

HillaryCare-- a total failure that discourage others from trying healthcare reform for over 15 years. Yet she brags about it.

Iraq War. She supported it as a senator, backing George Bush, using bad judgement on the same WMD bad information that Bernie Sanders correctly made the call on

Bankruptcy rules that favored and protected Banks (Bernie didn't mention this when asked about how she was influenced)

Protecting and bailing out the too big to fail banks (the answer Bernie gave when asked about what she did to serve her donors)

Libya-- Barack Obama says the biggest mistake of his presidency was how Libya was handled. This was TOTALLY Hillary's responsibility



Hillary Clinton is given lately to describing herself as a Progressive who can get things done. But if you actually look at her record, it is difficult to confirm that she has any kind of ability at all to get things done for average Americans. Her failure to get universal health care for the American people in 1993-4 immediately comes to mind. Elizabeth Warren has told the story of how Hillary switched from opposing legislation that would hurt women to later supporting it. Hillary's response to the implicit accusation that she switched her support from a progressive position to a pro-banker position is informative: ...And it was Vice President Biden, who was the senator from Delaware,and the Republican co-sponsor that I was talking with, so I said I'd support it even though I'd opposed it before. This, my friends, is an example of how Hillary has gotten things done in the past. She meets with the Republican opposition---in this case the Republican co-sponsor of the bill that hurts women---and then decides to vote for the Republicans' proposals. You see, the problem with her claim that she gets things done, is that the only things she has been able to get done with her compromises is things that Republicans---and The Oligarchy---want. She has never demonstrated any ability to gets things done for average Americans over the stubborn opposition of Republicans. James Kroeger, in his Dailykos article, Hillary's Empty Claim That She Can Get Things Done , points out that what she gets done helps Republicans:

Next let's deal with the Bernie can't get things done Unicorn story.

First, as Kroeger has pointed out, Hillary has a terrible history dealing with a Republican congress. On the other hand, Bernie Sanders has a history of getting more amendments through committee than anyone. He's worked across the aisle with Republicans producing legislation that was truly bi-partisan.

But as president, Bernie will be able to do things that Hillary would never do. He can replace agency heads who Obama appointed who have deep ties to big corporations with genuine advocates for reform. For example, get rid of former big Pharma, Monsanto and other corporate lobbyists and executives with heads of organizations that seek to make the environment safer or who advocate for consumers. Hillary will not do this. She'll walk in Obama's footsteps.

Bernie can appoint finance advisors like Paul Sachs, who also advises Pope Francis and Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, or visionary economics thinkers like Gar Alperovitz and David Korten. He might even appoint public Banking advocates Ellen Brown or Mike Krause, who have been working to get states and cities to do what North Dakota has had for almost a century.

Bernie can do this very quickly, putting together a circle of advisors and appointing people who don't need confirmation right away. It is very likely that Bernie's coattails, with his strong youth, independent and even Republican support, will broadly carry down ticket candidates, far better than high-negative Hillary. He'll very likely have a Democrat controlled senate, so he'll be able to get his agency appointees quickly through congress. They'll be able to start cleaning up the agencies that have been lobbyist influenced for 16 years. Hillary will owe all those lobbyists. (If there's another debate, I'd like to see questions about appointing lobbyists and past corporate execs posed to both candidates.)

Can Bernie make a difference for Black Lives matter right away. Absolutely. He can appoint a DOJ Attorney General who sets policies that protect people from rogue police. He can pardon people from federal prisons. I don't know. Can he pardon anyone in jail? If so, he could pardon thousands in jail for Marijuana possession.

Can Bernie get Medicare for all? I doubt it will happen at once. But he can facilitate it. In Canada, it started with one province. In the US, it could start with one state, maybe Vermont, maybe California. Knowing that the president WANTS IT, some state legislatures and governors will be more motivated to try.

Can Bernie get free tuition for public colleges and universities? It might take two more years into his presidency for the Bernie revolution to win the House. Then, anything is possible.

When you're debunking these Hillary talking points, don't forget to remind your target (hopefully undecideds, don't bother with Hillbots) that Bernie, in just about every poll, beats the Republicans by a lot bigger margins than Hillary.
Reprinted from Campaign For America's Future

Below are remarks I delivered at The Vatican, on April 15, 2016.





I am honored to be with you today and was pleased to receive your invitation to speak to this conference of The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Today we celebrate the encyclical Centesimus Annus and reflect on its meaning for our world a quarter-century after it was presented by Pope John Paul II. With the fall of Communism, Pope John Paul II gave a clarion call for human freedom in its truest sense: freedom that defends the dignity of every person and that is always oriented towards the common good.

The Church's social teachings, stretching back to the first modern encyclical about the industrial economy, Rerum Novarum in 1891, to Centesimus Annus, to Pope Francis's inspiring encyclical Laudato Si' this past year, have grappled with the challenges of the market economy. There are few places in modern thought that rival the depth and insight of the Church's moral teachings on the market economy.

Over a century ago, Pope Leo XIII highlighted economic issues and challenges in Rerum Novarum that continue to haunt us today, such as what he called "the enormous wealth of a few as opposed to the poverty of the many."

And let us be clear. That situation is worse today. In the year 2016, the top one percent of the people on this planet own more wealth than the bottom 99 percent, while the wealthiest 60 people -- 60 people -- own more than the bottom half -- 3 1/2 billion people. At a time when so few have so much, and so many have so little, we must reject the foundations of this contemporary economy as immoral and unsustainable.

The words of Centesimus Annus likewise resonate with us today. One striking example:

Furthermore, society and the State must ensure wage levels adequate for the maintenance of the worker and his family, including a certain amount for savings. This requires a continuous effort to improve workers' training and capability so that their work will be more skilled and productive, as well as careful controls and adequate legislative measures to block shameful forms of exploitation, especially to the disadvantage of the most vulnerable workers, of immigrants and of those on the margins of society. The role of trade unions in negotiating minimum salaries and working conditions is decisive in this area. (Para15)

The essential wisdom of Centesimus Annus is this: A market economy is beneficial for productivity and economic freedom. But if we let the quest for profits dominate society; if workers become disposable cogs of the financial system; if vast inequalities of power and wealth lead to marginalization of the poor and the powerless; then the common good is squandered and the market economy fails us. Pope John Paul II puts it this way: profit that is the result of "illicit exploitation, speculation, or the breaking of solidarity among working people . . . has not justification, and represents an abuse in the sight of God and man." (Para43).

We are now 25 years after the fall of Communist rule in Eastern Europe. Yet we have to acknowledge that Pope John Paul's warnings about the excesses of untrammeled finance were deeply prescient. Twenty-five years after Centesimus Annus, speculation, illicit financial flows, environmental destruction, and the weakening of the rights of workers is far more severe than it was a quarter century ago. Financial excesses, indeed widespread financial criminality on Wall Street, played a direct role in causing the world's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

We need a political analysis as well as a moral and anthropological analysis to understand what has happened since 1991. We can say that with unregulated globalization, a world market economy built on speculative finance burst through the legal, political, and moral constraints that had once served to protect the common good. In my country, home of the world's largest financial markets, globalization was used as a pretext to deregulate the banks, ending decades of legal protections for working people and small businesses. Politicians joined hands with the leading bankers to allow the banks to become "too big to fail." The result: eight years ago the American economy and much of the world was plunged into the worst economic decline since the 1930s. Working people lost their jobs, their homes and their savings, while the government bailed out the banks.

Inexplicably, the United States political system doubled down on this reckless financial deregulation, when the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of deeply misguided decisions, unleashed an unprecedented flow of money into American politics. These decisions culminated in the infamous Citizen United case, which opened the financial spigots for huge campaign donations by billionaires and large corporations to turn the U.S. political system to their narrow and greedy advantage. It has established a system in which billionaires can buy elections. Rather than an economy aimed at the common good, we have been left with an economy operated for the top 1 percent, who get richer and richer as the working class, the young and the poor fall further and further behind. And the billionaires and banks have reaped the returns of their campaign investments, in the form of special tax privileges, imbalanced trade agreements that favor investors over workers, and that even give multinational companies extra-judicial power over governments that are trying to regulate them.

But as both Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis have warned us and the world, the consequences have been even direr than the disastrous effects of financial bubbles and falling living standards of working-class families. Our very soul as a nation has suffered as the public lost faith in political and social institutions. As Pope Francis has stated: "Man is not in charge today, money is in charge, money rules." And the Pope has also stated: "We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal."

And further: "While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good."

Pope Francis has called on the world to say: "No to a financial system that rules rather than serves" in Evangeli Gaudium. And he called upon financial executives and political leaders to pursue financial reform that is informed by ethical considerations. He stated plainly and powerfully that the role of wealth and resources in a moral economy must be that of servant, not master.
The Russia-India-China (RIC) meet of its foreign ministers in Moscow is unlikely to have thawed the freezing relations between two Asian giants, China and India.

The same is true of the simultaneous visit of India's defence minister Manohar Parrikar to China where he met his Chinese counterpart Gen. Chang Wanguan and stated India attaches highest priority to its relationship with China.

Both China and India suffer from a trust deficit though the niggling issue is simple enough: Both China and India need to look at each other's territorial claims on Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin plateau in a spirit of cooperation and resolve the long-standing dispute.

As a nation that stands to gain the most through India-China alliance, Russia could offer its own example: the Russian-Chinese borders were formalized in 2004 after 40 years of bad blood between the two nations.

The last fortnight has been particularly frosty: China blocked India's move in United Nations to have Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief and allegedly Pathankot terror attack mastermind, Masood Azhar be designated as terrorist,

India, on its part, went ahead and signed an agreement with the United States on sharing military logistics in Indian Ocean, the area that is strategically and economically lifeline to Beijing.

But the RIC meet is unlikely to have much influence. Despite it being a foreign ministers' conclave, it largely deals with the economic, and not security, issues.

The economic prospects of trade between India and China are mammoth. It's already worth $100 billion and given their market and areas of strength, it holds immense possibility.

India could offer its Information Services strength and avail China's expertise to build high-speed rail network in India. China's excess production could also be easily absorbed within India.

India is extremely tough on matters of terrorism and finds itself regularly frustrated by China on international forums. Last year, China had blocked India's bid to question Pakistan over the release of Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a commander in Lashkar-e-Taiba, which had carried out the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks that claimed 160 lives.

A leaked cable of US State Department in 2010 had revealed that China had in the past blocked UN sanctions against Lashkar-e-Taiba and the al-Akhtar Trust (a charity front for Jaish-e-Mohammad). It had also blocked India's request to list Syed Salahuddin, a terrorist wanted in relation to numerous Hizbul Mujahideen attacks.

Though China's moves were procedural within the UN-sanctions committee, it was in opposition to the stands of US, UK, France and Russia, all of whom were willing to back India on the issue.

China has a history of shielding Pakistan-based terror groups from sanctions under resolution 1267 even though it hardly ever uses a veto--exercising it only 10 times in its 70-year history of UNSC. It parrots the same line in defence that Pakistan does: "Pakistan is a terrible victim of terrorism itself."

Such acts hardly endear China to India. It also reveals the closeness between Pakistan and China in modern context. India feels hemmed in between its two nuclear-armed northern neighbours. All it is doing is to drive India into US's arms, which dread the prospects of close India-China relations.

It still is encouraging that RIC has shown its concern on terrorism and a willingness to use international forums, such as BRICS, SCO, East Asian summits and Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), to get the three nations closer.
By David Swanson, American Herald Tribune



President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry say that allowing family members of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia for its complicity in that crime would set a terrible precedent that would open the United States up to lawsuits from abroad.

Wonderful! Let the lawsuits rain down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream!

Suing Saudis over 9/11 will only set a precedent if it succeeds, which is to say if there is evidence of Saudi complicity. We know that there is, according to former Senator Bob Graham and others who have read 28 pages censored from a U.S. Senate report. Pressure is building in Congress both to reveal those 28 pages and to allow lawsuits. And yet another Senate bill gaining support would block further U.S. arming of Saudi Arabia.

The precedent of allowing international victims to sue those complicit in murder would not place you, dear reader, or I at risk of any lawsuits. It would, however, put numerous top U.S. officials and former officials at risk of suits from many corners of the globe, including from the seven nations that President Obama has bragged about bombing: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya. It's not as if any of these wars is legal under Kellogg-Briand or the U.N. Charter.

Combined with the possible precedent of allowing victims of U.S. domestic gun violence to sue gun manufacturers, the possibility could emerge for countless parents, children, and siblings of U.S. killings in countless countries to begin suing Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc.

Even just the precedent of allowing suits against Saudi Arabia could have far-reaching consequences before expanding it to other countries. Imagine if Yemenis could sue Saudis for the current slaughter from the air? If they could, then what about Boeing? And what about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who allowed Boeing to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia after Boeing gave her family foundation $900,000 and Saudi Arabia gave over $10 million?

In her last ditch effort at the presidency, Clinton has joined Senator Bernie Sanders in claiming that she supports allowing 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia -- something she is highly unlikely to take any other steps to advance.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is threatening to sell off $750 billion worth of U.S. properties. (No word on whether Hillary Clinton is listed among those properties.) I say let the sales commence! Let the U.S. government take three-quarter's of one-year's military spending, buy those properties, and give them to the public or use them to compensate the people of Yemen. Or freeze those assets now without buying them, and give them to the U.S. and Yemeni people.

Of course, Obama and Kerry may be raising the notion of a precedent for suing the U.S. mostly as cover for the fact that they are showing greater loyalty to the Saudi royalty than to 9/11 victims. The U.S. public needs only the slightest excuse to avoid recognizing where its rulers true loyalties lie. Italy has convicted CIA agents of kidnapping to torture, and never sought their extradition. Pakistani courts have already ruled against U.S. drone murders, and the U.S. has failed to so much as yawn in response. The U.S. has refused to join the International Criminal Court, and claims a unique status outside the rule of law -- a rogue status for which it would urge sanctions on any other nation claiming something similar while possessing too much oil or not enough U.S. weaponry.

Still, precedents can be set politically and legally, even against the will of one of the parties involved. For U.S. foreign policy to be compelled to treat 9/11 as the crime that it was, a crime committed by certain individuals, could mean a few important things: (1) a serious investigation of 9/11, (2) rejection of the idea that 9/11 was part of a war launched by the entire world, or the Muslim portion of the world, and in which the United States is entitled to seek revenge thousands of times over and without limits in time or space, (3) greater understanding that U.S. terrorism, just like 9/11 but on a larger scale, is criminal activity for which particular individuals can be held accountable.

What could answer the deepest needs of the 9/11 victims and family members could also answer many needs of U.S. victims in Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, etc., and that is a truth and reconciliation commission. Getting to that will be accomplished by precedents and changes in thinking in our culture, not by any particular legal development. Such a procedure would be a success if afterwards the U.S. and Saudi and other governments began paying reparations in the form of humanitarian aid, costing them far less than they are now putting into wars, but doing a world of good for people rather than the criminal harm being done right now and for years past.
Reprinted from Campaign For America's Future

I like Jonathan Cohn personally and have great respect for his work as a reporter and writer on health care issues. However, I think he actually told readers the opposite of what he intended in his Huffington Post piece headlined, "This one line sums up the big Clinton-Sanders policy argument."

The big line in Cohn's piece is that Senator Sanders' proposal for a single-payer system would cause a single mother with two children, earning $26,813 a year, to pay $2,314 in payroll taxes rather than getting health insurance for her family free through Medicaid, as would be the case now. Cohn sees this as a major hit to this family, which is a serious problem with Sanders' proposal.

There are several points here worth noting. First, as Cohn points out, Sanders is also proposing a $15 an hour minimum wage. This means that if this single mother were working a full-time job, she would see her pay increase by almost $3,200 a year, even if her pay was only at the new minimum. Of course, since she is earning substantially more than the minimum wage now, it is likely that her pay would increase enough to leave her still well above the minimum. This means that she would be substantially better off with Sanders's agenda. (There are serious questions about whether we can have a $15 an hour minimum wage without a considerable impact on employment, but we'll ignore those for the moment.)

The second point is that Cohn has to be very selective in finding his victim here. Let's suppose that this single mother was getting healthcare insurance through her employer, as most workers do. If we say the employer was paying $5,000 a year for healthcare insurance, under standard economics assumptions, this money will find its way into the worker's paycheck. This means that she will be paying an additional $2,314 in payroll taxes, but this will be deducted from the $5,000 a year that her employer used to pay in premiums that now going into her paycheck. (No, this will not happen immediately and not be the story with all workers, but this is what all good economists believe will eventually be the case.) This means that this worker will be $2,686 better off as a result of the Sanders plan.

But let's say that Cohn's single mother is a loser under the Sanders plan. Does this mean the plan is a failure? There were losers under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Let's take the case of a young African American woman just out of college, with $30,000 in debt. Let's suppose this woman has an income of $35,000 a year. Let's say she is in excellent health and from a family of people enjoying excellent health. In the pre-Obamacare days she might have opted to either buy one of the low-cost catastrophic plans that is no longer available under the ACA, or go without insurance altogether.

Under the ACA, this young woman will be expected to pay roughly 8 percent of her income, or $2,800 a year, for health insurance that she does not want. Should we feel bad about this young woman struggling to meet a large debt burden, while working at a low-paying job and now being forced to buy insurance?

Well, that is a bad story and there are many like them. But many of the same policy wonks who have endlessly highlighted the plight of the Medicaid mother under the Sanders plan (I have seen it featured as a news article in the Washington Post and also as a topic of numerous columns and editorials), have been content to largely ignore the plight of young people struggling to pay their ACA premiums. At least they don't see it as a basis for rejecting the Affordable Care Act.

Of course, that is the correct position. Any major policy change will have losers. Odds are that if you don't recognize the losers it's because you haven't thought about the impact of the plan closely enough. The goal should always be to minimize the number of losers, at least among people with low and moderate incomes, and to try to assist the hardest hit so that they end up in a decent situation.

I actually agree completely with Cohn that Sanders' proposal to move to single-payer would be all but impossible in a single step. Even if he somehow had the majority needed in Congress to get it through, the practicalities of such an enormous shift would almost certainly require that it be phased in. That is an entirely legitimate criticism that Clinton and her supporters have raised.

But the single Medicaid mother as victim is a silly scare story being passed off as serious policy expertise. It isn't, and the fact that serious policy wonks are trying to sell it as such is exposing more about them than Senator Sanders' proposal.

Originally posted at Beat The Press.
The recent success in beating back an anti-GMO labeling bill in Congress, coupled with the State of Vermont passing a mandatory labeling law, led Campbell's to announce its support for GMO labeling, the first big food company to do so.

To have, at one time, been a leader in health care, education, infrastructure, and technology, it is strange for Americans to wake up one morning and realize that they are no longer the leaders in life-giving technologies. The people of the US have instead, allowed their policy makers to hone skills in the technology of death. True to its neoliberal dedication, health statistics, like life expectancy are going backwards in the US. Education and infrastructure investment indices are in a similar condition. Only in technology - specifically, the technology of death has the US surpassed all others. Only the voters in the US can change this backward trend by voting and electing leaders with a different set of values.

A genetically-modified organism (GMO) is any living thing that has had its genetic material (DNA and RNA) altered. This has been done by farmers for millennia. What is different is that now corporations are exploiting the technology and rushing to use it to create the unthinkable. In fact, unlike genes are being placed where they would never be -- for example, remember the fish genes in our tomatoes news stories?

In 1982, the US Supreme Court ruled that GMOs could be patented and Monsanto quickly became the leader in GMO foods. The combination of commercialized agriculture and the commercialized GMO technology has yielded the current situation in the US: 94 percent of soy, 90 percent of cotton, 90 percent of canola, 95 percent of sugar beets, and more than 50 percent of Hawaiian papaya are GMO. That means the derivatives of these foods -- like high fructose corn syrup and soybean oil, or anything made with these inputs -- are also GMOs. And that's where the labeling struggle began in the United States.

In the article, "Why do the US media lie so much," we learned the US media has basically been given a license to lie about the contents of our food by US courts. This particular struggle was around Bovine Growth Hormone that had been added to milk and the journalists wanted to investigate its safety. The courts disagreed and ruled the media could knowingly lie by omission and commission to its believing public. That resounding defeat got activists busy. They struck back and began to organize state by state since the Congress was compromised by its close relationship with Monsanto lobbyists.

The first big fight was launched in California where its public initiative referendum laws allow citizens to place items on the ballot for a vote. After millions of dollars were spent by the pro-GMO corporations in an extremely bitter fight, California's Proposition 37 lost. One of the arguments used by the chemical food companies was that GMO labeling would increase the cost of food. The activists were outspent and learned a bitter lesson about the role of money in US campaigns -- even for food safety. The activists vowed to learn from the California fight. Soon, 20 states had GMO labeling bills in their legislatures.

In 2014, Vermont's labeling bill passed, becoming the first state to do so. Connecticut and Maine passed legislation mandating GMO labeling in the event that a neighboring state followed Vermont's lead. In response to this success, Congressman G.K. Butterfield, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, introduced a federal anti-labeling bill that, if passed, would pre-empt the state victories.

The actions of these corporations are amazing because if they have something that is good for you, you'd think they would shout it to the rafters and fill your television with their ads touting their claim. But when it comes to GMOs in their food products, mum is the word. The Congressional effort was beaten back after passing the House of Representatives, but will come back for sure while state action hangs in the balance. The interesting thing is that other countries have moved forward without US leadership. Again.

Monsanto took advantage of its lead in creating pesticides (and the infamous herbicide, Agent Orange, from which Vietnam still reels today) and began to create GMO foods that would not be killed by its key product, glyphosate, also known as "Roundup." Agent Orange is clearly a technology of death pioneered by Monsanto and the company has continued in that vein since. Monsanto's food seeds are known as Roundup Ready seeds. This means that the seeds can be sprayed with Roundup and survive. In this way, Monsanto has cornered the market on seeds, and farmer suicides in India can be traced directly to the deleterious effects of farmers not being able to save their seeds and instead having to purchase them annually from Monsanto. This has changed agriculture as we know it.

Monsanto's GMO food has also changed food as we know it.Currently, the European Union, China, Russia, and 60 other countries require GMO labeling. It is the US, caught in its neoliberal throes of death technologies that cannot seem to shake the habit. Because of its capture of the policy- and rule-making apparatuses of the federal government, Washington, D.C. can be considered Monsanto country -- even though polls indicate that 90 percent of Americans want to know what is in their food and they want the food to be labeled on the packaging and not in some obscure QR code that has to be deciphered to be understood.

A visit to Monsanto's website greets the viewer with Monsanto's commitment to climate change; the ubiquitous non-African feel-good palliative of impoverished smiling African children; a homily to the importance of honey bees, Asian women wearing saris, sustainable farming practices, and other shibboleths that betray the real Monsanto. And here, reacting to the March 2015 International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) decision that Roundup is "probably carcinogenic to humans," Monsanto reports that its glyphosate (Roundup) is in the same category as the common professions of barber and fry cook. No matter how Monsanto tries to diminish the importance of the finding, despite all of its money spent to blunt it, the bottom line is that Roundup is now deemed by the international scientific community to be a probably cause of cancer.

In March 2016, the Senate version of an anti-labeling bill failed. And with it, went the dreams of corporations to stall the inevitable. Vermont's law is now safe and Campbell's became the first of the really big food companies to capitulate and agree to label the GMO contents of its products.

Monsanto has reaped many profits since its introduction to the market of Roundup in the 1970s. But this is rather late for all of those who have used Roundup to learn that they have been exposed to a probable carcinogen.

To contemplate the staggering exposure, imagine this scenario of New York City regular spraying of Roundup -- which amounts to a handout to Monsanto by City Hall that puts its citizens at risk. Then, just imagine the entire food chain that has been contaminated with these GMO foods that are the Roundup offspring.
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

With only nine months to go, in the fashion of modern presidents, Barack Obama is already planning his post-presidential library, museum, and foundation complex. Such institutions only seem to grow more opulent and imperial as the years and administrations pass. Obama's will reportedly leave the $300 million raised for George W. Bush's version of the same in the dust. The aim is to create at least an $800 million and possibly billion-dollar institution. With his post-Oval Office future already in view and his presidency nearly history, his "legacy" has clearly been on his mind of late. And when it comes to foreign policy, he definitely has some accomplishments to brag about. The two most obvious are the Iran nuclear deal and the opening to Cuba. In their own ways, both could prove game changers, breaking with venomous relations that lasted, in the case of Iran, for more than three and a half decades, and in the case of Cuba, for more than half a century.

You can already imagine the exhibits celebrating them at the Barack Obama Presidential Center to be built on the south side of Chicago. But it's hard not to wonder how that institution will handle the three major foreign policy promises the new president made in the distant days of 2008-2009. After all, he was, in part, swept into the presidency on a blunt promise to end George W. Bush's catastrophic war in Iraq. ("So when I am Commander-in-Chief, I will set a new goal on Day One: I will end this war.") Nine years later, he's once again taken this country into the Big Muddy of an Iraq War, either the third or fourth of them in the last five presidencies (depending on whether you count the Reagan administration support for Saddam Hussein's war with Iran in the 1980s). At this moment, having just dispatched B-52s, the classic Vietnam-era carpet-bombing plane of choice (Ted Cruz must be thrilled!) to Qatar as part of that war effort, and being on a mission-creep path ever deeper into what can only be called the Iraq quagmire, we're likely to be talking about a future museum exhibit from hell.

But it won't begin to match the special exhibit that will someday undoubtedly explore the president's heartfelt promise to work to severely curtail the American and global nuclear arsenals and put the planet on a path to -- a word that had never previously hovered anywhere near the Oval Office -- nuclear abolition. The president's disarmament ambitions were, in fact, significantly responsible for his 2009 Nobel Prize, an honor that almost uniquely preceded any accomplishments. Now, the same man is presiding over a planned three-decade, trillion-dollar renovation and modernization of that same arsenal, including the development of an initial generation of "smart" nukes, potentially first-use weapons. It's certainly been a unique path for our first outright anti-nuclear president to take and deserves a special place of (dis)honor at the future Obama center.

Barring surprising developments in the coming months, however, no exhibit is likely to be more striking or convoluted than the one that will have to be dedicated to the "closing" of Guanta'namo, the notorious offshore, Bush-era prison camp. After all, as TomDispatchregular Karen Greenberg, author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, a striking soon-to-be-published anatomy of post-9/11 national security state mania, points out today, the closing of Guanta'namo within a year represented one of the president's first promises on entering the Oval Office. Unless somehow he succeeds in shutting Gitmo down over fierce Republican congressional opposition in these final months, it could prove the piece de resistance of his future museum. Tom

Still in the Bush Embrace

What Really Stands in the Way of Closing Guanta'namo

By Karen J. Greenberg Can you believe it? We're in the last year of the presidency of the man who, on his first day in the Oval Office, swore that he would close Guanta'namo, and yet it and everything it represents remains part of our all-American world. So many years later, you can still read news reports on the ongoing nightmares of that grim prison, ranging from detention without charge to hunger strikes and force feeding. Its name still echoes through the halls of Congress in bitter debate over what should or shouldn't be done with it. It remains a global symbol of the worst America has to offer. In case, despite the odds, it should be closed in this presidency, Donald Trump has already sworn to reopen it and "load it up with bad dudes," while Ted Cruz has warned against returning the naval base on which it's located to the Cubans. In short, that prison continues to haunt us like an evil spirit. While President Obama remains intent on closing it, he continues to make the most modest and belated headway in reducing its prisoner population, while a Republican Congress remains no less determined to keep it open. With nine months left until a new president is inaugurated, the question is: Can this country's signature War on Terror prison ever be closed? The "Forever Detainees" Here then is a little dismal history of a place most Americans would prefer not even to think about. In January 2002, President George W. Bush opened the Guanta'namo Bay Detention facility. It was to hold, in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's phrase, the "worst of the worst" in the War on Terror. Over time, its population rose to nearly 800 prisoners from 44 countries, some captured in Afghanistan, some traded for bounty payments by vindictive neighbors or hostile tribesmen, and some seized by CIA operatives in countries far from Taliban territory. The prison then held more al-Qaeda and Taliban followers than leaders, but many prisoners were neither: they had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Recognizing this, within a few years the Bush administration sent more than 500 of the detainees back to their countries of origin or to other countries willing to accept them. Then, in 2006, Bush made the lie of Guanta'namo a reality. His administration finally transferred "the worst of the worst" to the by-then-notorious island prison. Those 16 individuals included five who stood accused of participating in the 9/11 conspiracy, and others who were believed responsible for devastatingly lethal attacks against American targets in the 1990s, including the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000. All had been held for years in CIA custody in "black sites" in countries around the world. All had been subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques," which was, of course, the administration's (and, in those years, the media's) euphemism for some of the oldest torture practices known. That move would prove a game changer. Instead of Guanta'namo's population shrinking into irrelevance and dwindling into obscurity, as it should have, the prison for the first time became exactly what Rumsfeld had promised it would be: a place for the most notorious al-Qaeda "high value detainees" (HVDs) that the U.S. held. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the "mastermind" of 9/11, and four others allegedly involved in planning or carrying out the attacks on New York and Washington were among them. That same fall, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act aimed at assuring that Guanta'namo would be a site not only for offshore detention, but for offshore justice as well. At some future point, Mohammed and the others were to be tried by the U.S. military in Cuba, not in American civilian courts in the U.S. For the first time, the military commissions, like the high value detainees, seemed to give Guanta'namo definition (other than simply as a site of abuse, mistreatment, and injustice) and the possibility, in the context of the war on terror, of forward momentum. Those not released could now be tried. And yet by the end of the Bush years, only three prisoners, none of them HVDs, had been successfully convicted -- fewer, in other words, than the five who died in custody there in those years. That should have been revealing enough for conclusions to be drawn. It turned out that even a secretive, militarized, legally compromised system of "justice" couldn't successfully bring to trial individuals involved in the crime that launched the new century, when the major evidence against them often came from brutal forms of torture. As a result, most of the Guanta'namo detainees had settled into a familiar state of limbo by the time Barack Obama took office in January 2009. At the time, 242 detainees were still in custody there and those military trials were going nowhere fast. The new president arrived on a white horse, full of promises about ending the stasis at Guanta'namo and ready to make sense of things. He promptly promised to close the prison for good and suspended the military commissions. That left the problem of somehow resolving the unsettled status of the various detainees then in custody at Gitmo, individuals who essentially fell into three categories: those deemed not to pose a danger to the U.S. who were to be released; those considered too dangerous for release but -- thanks to tortured testimony -- not prosecutable even in military courts and were to be kept in indefinite detention (a group Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg aptly termed "forever prisoners"); and those who would someday be tried by some version of the suspended military commissions.

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The Glory of White-Wing Politics Americans -- not just Democrats -- must find the courage to shout "No! No! Hell No!" to the destruction planned for this republic. Unless we stand up, shake ourselves off, and dare to fight back, the evil glory of White-Wing Politics will devour us. We have no choice. Because this ship is going down. Sunday, July 4, 2010Americans -- not just Democrats -- must find the courage to shout "No! No! Hell No!" to the destruction planned for this republic. Unless we stand up, shake ourselves off, and dare to fight back, the evil glory of White-Wing Politics will devour us. We have no choice. Because this ship is going down.

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Even One of These Little Ones... these pedophile preachers have indelibly tarnished the image of the entire Church. It's time for the empty accusations, excuses and justifications to stop. I agree with Stephen King, who wrote on page 922 of his latest thriller -- Under the Dome -- "When the Devil got a preacher, he was apt to fall low -- low enough to put on a top hat and crawl under a rattlesnake." Sunday, May 2, 2010these pedophile preachers have indelibly tarnished the image of the entire Church. It's time for the empty accusations, excuses and justifications to stop. I agree with Stephen King, who wrote on page 922 of his latest thriller -- Under the Dome -- "When the Devil got a preacher, he was apt to fall low -- low enough to put on a top hat and crawl under a rattlesnake."

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Keep the Change... These guys aren't crazy -- okay, maybe they are -- but they know exactly what they're doing. They learned from eight years of K-K-Karl Rove and Dick Cheney that fear and hate are the two easiest emotions to work with. Monday, March 22, 2010These guys aren't crazy -- okay, maybe they are -- but they know exactly what they're doing. They learned from eight years of K-K-Karl Rove and Dick Cheney that fear and hate are the two easiest emotions to work with.

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Walk a Mile... It's time for Obama to put aside empty, soaring speeches and come to grips with who his enemies really are. It's time for him to step onto dry land and walk a mile in his own shoes -- while he still has a pair. Friday, February 5, 2010It's time for Obama to put aside empty, soaring speeches and come to grips with who his enemies really are. It's time for him to step onto dry land and walk a mile in his own shoes -- while he still has a pair.

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God Has Left the Building... The religious believe that God belongs to them. Christians know that they belong to God. It's that simple. Thus, CNN polls notwithstanding, America cannot become "less Christian" as a result of members of the flock jerking the tags from their ears -- and rejecting modern-day religion. Monday, November 23, 2009The religious believe that God belongs to them. Christians know that they belong to God. It's that simple. Thus, CNN polls notwithstanding, America cannot become "less Christian" as a result of members of the flock jerking the tags from their ears -- and rejecting modern-day religion.

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Rack 'em and Screw 'em, Boys! What is more frightening -- that the C.I.A. got its jollies by torturing, even murdering human beings in its secret sodomy frat-houses -- or that the F.B.I. took one look and fled the scene and remained silent for years? Sunday, November 1, 2009What is more frightening -- that the C.I.A. got its jollies by torturing, even murdering human beings in its secret sodomy frat-houses -- or that the F.B.I. took one look and fled the scene and remained silent for years?

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Fading Into Mist... Are not crimes against humanity just that, regardless of who is committing them? Sunday, July 19, 2009Are not crimes against humanity just that, regardless of who is committing them?

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Seeds of Truth This goes way beyond garnering profits for agriculture conglomerates such as Monsanto. It is about disrupting the natural order of life -- whether plant or animal. And, for those orchestrating this havoc, it is about control. Friday, May 8, 2009This goes way beyond garnering profits for agriculture conglomerates such as Monsanto. It is about disrupting the natural order of life -- whether plant or animal. And, for those orchestrating this havoc, it is about control.

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It's Time for the Madness to Stop The most ghastly experiment conducted was Operation Crossroads, a series of "Manhattan Project" tests in 1946 to study the effects of nuclear weapons on ships and equipment. US officials knew the effect of massive radiation on human beings. They had to know. So what else were the thousands of navy personnel positioned on ships from five to eight miles from the Bikini Atoll bomb site in the central Pacific if not guinea pigs? Monday, March 2, 2009The most ghastly experiment conducted was Operation Crossroads, a series of "Manhattan Project" tests in 1946 to study the effects of nuclear weapons on ships and equipment. US officials knew the effect of massive radiation on human beings. They had to know. So what else were the thousands of navy personnel positioned on ships from five to eight miles from the Bikini Atoll bomb site in the central Pacific if not guinea pigs?

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Through a Hole in the Air... The fascist lies and smears of Republicans and their doppleganger radio creeps should come as no surprise to those paying attention. However, the ripples of uneasiness and fear surging through Democratic ranks as a result of these assaults is a bit puzzling. Perhaps it's because after eight years of covering--and uncovering--deceit, lies, and monstrous war crimes of George Bush, they are hesitant to trust any president. Friday, November 28, 2008The fascist lies and smears of Republicans and their doppleganger radio creeps should come as no surprise to those paying attention. However, the ripples of uneasiness and fear surging through Democratic ranks as a result of these assaults is a bit puzzling. Perhaps it's because after eight years of covering--and uncovering--deceit, lies, and monstrous war crimes of George Bush, they are hesitant to trust any president.

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The Peter Principle Playoffs We need to get our minds around who is the aggressor here. Because if we continue to passively watch the evil unfold; if Dick Cheney wins the behind-the-scenes, off-court power struggle, the Peter Principle Playoffs will be over and the entire Middle East will explode in nuclear flames. Friday, September 26, 2008We need to get our minds around who is the aggressor here. Because if we continue to passively watch the evil unfold; if Dick Cheney wins the behind-the-scenes, off-court power struggle, the Peter Principle Playoffs will be over and the entire Middle East will explode in nuclear flames.

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EVERYBODY KNOWS... We are under the control of the criminally insane. Cheney has turned the greatest democratic republic ever conceived into a world corporation and anointed himself its Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He has supplanted two centuries of protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights with executive orders and secret laws. Thursday, May 15, 2008We are under the control of the criminally insane. Cheney has turned the greatest democratic republic ever conceived into a world corporation and anointed himself its Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He has supplanted two centuries of protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights with executive orders and secret laws.

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Falling Walls Lab New York Invites Talented Researchers and Professionals to Showcase their Most Innovative Ideas

www.falling-walls.com/lab

www.falling-walls.com

www.germaninnovation.org

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Outstanding researchers, entrepreneurs, and professionals can now apply for the Falling Walls Lab New York, which will take place on Tuesday, August 30, 2016. Applicants are expected to present their research and innovative ideas to a jury in three minutes. Applications are due by Wednesday, June 22, 2016.NEW YORK (April 18, 2016)  Throughout 2016, international Falling Walls Labs will take place all over the world. Who is eligible to compete? Bachelors and masters students, postdocs, young professionals, entrepreneurs, and junior professors whose most recent university degrees do not date back more than five years. Ground-breaking research projects, initiatives, ideas, and business models from all disciplines are welcomed.The winner of every international Falling Walls Lab will be awarded a slot for the Falling Walls Lab Finale in Berlin on November 8, 2016, and an A.T. Kearney Scholarship for the Falling Walls Conference on November 9, 2016. In total, 100 applicants will qualify for the Finale in Berlin. Each finalist will receive the opportunity to present his/her research, idea, initiative, or business model within three minutes in front of a high-caliber jury from academia, research, and business. The three winners will receive a cash prize and give their talks again on the grand stage of the Falling Walls Conference before 800 guests the next day.The aim of the Falling Walls Lab is to foster scientific and entrepreneurial innovations and to promote exchange between outstanding scholars and professionals emerging from different fields of expertise.The Falling Walls Lab New York will take place on Tuesday, August 30, 2016, at 6 p.m. at the German House (871 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY, 10017, USA). Applications can be submitted online until Wednesday, June 22, 2016. The Falling Walls Lab New York is hosted by the German Center for Research and Innovation (GCRI) New York and supported by the Falling Walls Foundation and A.T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm (Founding Partner) and Festo, worldwide supplier of pneumatic and electrical automation technology (Global Partner).For further information and access to the online application form, please visit:About the Falling Walls FoundationThe Falling Walls Foundation is a non-profit organization that fosters discussion on research and innovation and promotes the latest scientific findings among a broad audience from all parts of society. It organizes the Falling Walls Conference, an annual global gathering of forward-thinking individuals from over 75 countries. Each year on November 9th, twenty of the worlds leading scientists present their current breakthrough research in 15 minutes each. The Falling Walls Foundation is supported by the German Ministry for Education and Research, the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Helmholtz Association, and numerous other acclaimed academic institutions, foundations, and companies. More information at:About the German Center for Research and InnovationThe German Center for Research and Innovation provides information and support for the realization of cooperative and collaborative projects between North America and Germany. With the goal of enhancing communication on the critical challenges of the 21st century, GCRI hosts a wide range of events from lectures and exhibitions to workshops and science dinners. Opened in February 2010, GCRI was created as a cornerstone of the German governments initiative to internationalize science and research and is one of six centers worldwide. To learn more about the GCRI, visit:ContactJulia John-SchederProgram OfficerGerman Center for Research and Innovation871 United Nations PlazaNew York, NY 10017, USAEmail: events@germaninnovation.orgPhone: 1.212.339.8680 X303Falling Walls LabFalling Walls FoundationChausseestrasse 8E10115 Berlin, GermanyEmail: lab@falling-walls.comPhone: + 49 30 609 88 39 71
7th Annual Clinical Trials Summit 2016

7TH CLINICAL TRIALS

7th Annual Clinical Trials Summit 201624th May 2016, The Lalit Hotel, Mumbai, IndiaA critical guide for successfully conducting clinical trialsKEY THEMES DISCUSSED IN THIS CONFERENCE:--Insights, Implications, Impact and Implementation of risk management in trial conduct-Tracking returns, Reconciliation & Destruction to manage costs-Reduce significant costs through successful embedding of modulation and simulation in the clinical supply chain-Underlining the benefits and implications of drug pooling in the clinical supply chain-Marketing for your clinical research practice-Insurance coverage: How the ACA changed access to clinical trials-Regulatory updates and Good Clinical Practice (GCP) auditing techniques-Developing a standardized tool to improve patient comprehension during consent-Insight and practical tips on how to work with all payer types to obtain coverage of clinical trial routine costs.-ACA, Medicare, Medicaid and state requirements regarding coverage of clinical trials.-Update yourself with respect to terms of legislation, policies, systems, technology, communication strategies and best practices-Maintaining proper balance in relationships: Sponsor  Site  CRO & Patients-Overcoming challenges faced in regulatory approval processes  obtaining drug/ clinical supplies import and export licenses in Asia-Margin of safety: Identifying ideal clinical sites and strategizing patient recruitment and clinical sites management in India to develop appropriate clinical studies-Next generations of clinical trials  How big will the market be?-Be part of a major networking opportunityKEY SPEAKERS:- John Lambert,Chief Medical Officer Early Phase, PAREXEL International (UK) SumitMunjal, Medical Driector Lead- Global Medical Saftey, Head Of Mature Established Products, Takeda Pharmaceuticals(UK) Arun Bhatt, Consultant- Clinical research & Development BhaswatChakaraborthy, Senior VP & Chair, Research development Core Committee, Cadila Anish Desai, Director medical affairs, Clinical Operations Device safety, Jhonson&Jhonson Hema Bajaj, Head Of Clinical Quality & Medical Compliance, Affiliate Quality Officer, Safoni Aventis SambitPitnaik, CEO Medical Director, Clintech India KedarSuvarnapathaki, Head- Regulatory Affiars, BoehringerIngelheim Chandra Sekhar, Vice Peresident Quality (Pharma), Ralaiance Life Sciences NareshTondare, Head- India & Nepal Regulatory Affiars, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals MurtuzaBughediwala, Associate Director, Project Mabagement& Strategic Initiatives, Sanofi ShilpaRaut, Regional Training Head- Asia, Middle East& Africa Cluster, Novartis DeeptiShangavi, Assisstant Manager, Medical Writing, Tata Consultant Services. Amey Mane, General Manager- Medical Affiars, Janssen India (Pharmceuticals Companies Of Jhonson&Jhonson) SanketSawant, Strategy & Business Development Partner, SIRO Chinpharm AshwaniPandita, Dy. Generam Manager Quality Management & Training, Global Clinical Research Operations, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals MilindAntani, Partner in-Charge- Pharmalife Sciences, Nishith Desai AssiciatesPlus Many More..WHO SHOULD ATTEND:-CEO's, CTO's, CIO's, Presidents, Vice Presidents, Directors Heads & Managers of:-Clinical Research & Development-Clinical Research Services-Clinical Operations-Clinical Data Management-Clinical IT-Clinical Trials-Medical Affairs-Regulatory Affairs-Compliance-Quality control / Assurance/GCP-Clinical Study Design-Safety Surveillance-Subject Recruitment-E-Clinical SystemsWHY SHOULD YOU ATTEND?7th Annual Clinical Trials Summit 2016 - A critical guide for successfully conducting clinical trials - Get more from the event, with a broader scope bringing the whole communications value chain together. Enjoy and make the best out of our dedicated networking drinks time, meet the leading international vendors expand your knowledge of the latest business models and strategies in the high-level conference. Show casing the products of tomorrow in the co-located exhibition.CONFERENCE BOOKING DETAILS:--Early Bird Discounted Price - 1 Delegate Pass (INR 6,000 + Tax (14.5%) per delegate) - Book and Pay before 09th April 2016 to avail the early bird discounted price.-Standard Price (10th April 2016 Onwards):- 1 or 2 Delegates - (INR 7,000 + Tax (14.5%) per delegate) --Group Discounts  3 or 4 Delegates - (INR 6,500 + Tax (14.5%) per delegate)-Group Discounts  5 and above Delegates - (INR 5,500 + Tax (14.5%) per delegate)-Spot Registration on the day of the Conference  1 Day Conference - (INR 8,000 + Tax (14.5%) per delegate)-Conference Sponsor & Exhibition Stall  Should you wish to Sponsor, or purchase aExhibition Stall (Booth) or a paid Speaker Slot, you can simply email your interest and queries to usYou can simply email or call and book your conference delegate seats and sponsorships on  TEL: +91 44 64536444. Email  amar@virtueinsight.co.inWe also have some sponsorship opportunities available for the event, which gives you an opportunity to speak/exhibit, and create brand awareness. In addition, the networking opportunities in focused and relevant industry gathering provide the personal contact necessary for business development efforts.Virtue Insight equips business professionals around the world with the latest indepth industry knowledge and provides networking opportunities in the telecom, technology, oil and gas, social media, infrastructure and pharmaceutical industry. Our aim is to provide a platform to share knowledge and insights and provide our event attendees to network effectively and deliver maximum ROI by make new business alliances. We strive to produce high quality conferences which include the latest topics which are delivered by world class leaders of the industry.-Virtue Insight-Plot No - 07 - 2nd Floor Ekambaram Industrial Estate Alapakkam,Porur Chennai 600 116 India- +91 44 64536444
2nd Annual Pharma Pricing, Reimbrusement & Market Access 2016

Pharma Pricing, Reimbrusement & Market Access 2k16

2nd Annual Pharma Pricing, Reimbursement & Market Access 201608th and 09th June 2016, Pestana Chelsea Bridge Hotel, London UKCritical guide for successfully identifying your pricing, reimbursement and market access strategiesKEY THEMES DISCUSSED IN THIS CONFERENCE:--Preparing your best market access strategy-EU and US policy challenges for market access: Stepping ahead-Unrivalled opportunity to expose and address the market access challenges facing the industry-Current & future - Challenges & opportunities in pharma pricing, reimbursement & market access-Improving patient and market access through the development of targeted -value propositions, comprehensive contract assessment-Measurement strategies through to in-depth knowledge regarding payer formulary coverage trends-How can payers and industry work together to ensure that innovative and valuable treatments make it to the market?-Understanding - payers perspective-Advocating and collaborating with payers for value in a new era-Creating a robust patient services and reimbursement support program for biosimilar products-Prioritising Patients! - Adding value through an innovative patient-centered approach-Understand how price affects market access and learn on how to set prices for optimal access and returns.-New drugs are failing to gain reimbursement from payers/HTAs at an alarming rate, despite being approved by regulators-Evidence Generation - The strategic rigor and creativity applied to evidence generation-Impact of social media and digital analytics-Developing risk-sharing reimbursement models and value based pricing-Patient engagement and adherence within the environment-Explaining how to use the data sources and observational research for effective safety analysis-Dwell ahead of regulatory developments & improving your strategies in a cost effective way in EU, US-Accelerating new medicine introduction in developing world & overcoming challenges-Be part of a major networking opportunityKEY SPEAKERS:- MARCO PENSKE, Head of Market Access & Healthcare Affairs, Boehringer Ingelheim ANNA FORSYTHE, Sr. Director, Global Head, Global Value and Access Strategy, Eisai(USA) FRIEDHELM LEVERKUS, Director Health Technology Assessment & Outcomes Research, Pfizer OMAR ALI, Pharmacy Consultant, QIPP Advicer Player Network SIRIN SEYHOGLU, Market Access Director, Bristol-Myers Squibb(Turkey) DOMINIK DZIURDA, Market Access Director  Europe, GSK ARUN KRISHNA, Head of Market Access Oncology, Novartis CHETAK BUARIA, Head - Global Commercial Excellence, Merck OLIVER STAHIL, Sr. Director Corporate Affairs & PRA, Eli Lilly ANDREA MANTOVANI, Head of Value and Patient Access, Sanofi KEN WALSH, Senior Principal, Global Payer Strategy Consulting, Evidera PATRICK MOLLON, Director Health Economics and Outcomes Research, Novartis DUNCAN EMERTON, Senior Director, Syndicated Insights & Analysis, FirstWorld OYVIND MELIEN, Chair of Secretariat, Norwegian Directorate of Health SANDY EISEN, Chief Medical Officer, Frontline pharma consultingPlus Many More..WHO SHOULD ATTEND:-Senior Vice Presidents, Vice Presidents, Senior Executives, Global Heads, Heads, Directors, Senior Managers, Managers of:-Pricing-Reimbursement-Market Access-Commercial Pricing-Pricing Strategists-Health Economics-Outcomes Research-Regulatory Affairs-Governmental Affairs-Public Affairs-Public Policy Directors-Operations-Governmental bodies-Regulatory bodiesWHY SHOULD YOU ATTEND?2nd Annual Pharma Pricing, Reimbursement & Market Access 2016  Critical guide for successfully identifying your pricing, reimbursement and market access strategiesGet more from the event, with a broader scope bringing the whole communications value chain together. Enjoy and make the best out of our dedicated networking drinks time, meet the leading international vendors showcasing the products of tomorrow in the co-located exhibition. Expand your knowledge of the latest business models and strategies in the high-level conference. You cannot afford to miss this opportunity to benchmark your tactics and strategies against the industry leaders who will be the first to traverse the pathway. Devise an immediate action plan for your strategies in light of the barriers to entry, research and development costs, and regulatory hurdles, which are balanced against an enormous potential for increased profit margins.CONFERENCE BOOKING DETAILS:-Introductory Offer (3 delegate places for the price of 2):- A huge saving of  1000 - (Limited seats left) - You can simply email or call and book your conference delegate seats on  TEL: +44 208 6361668. Email  delegate.uk@virtueinsight.comSuper Early Discount (Till 08th April 2016):- Conference Delegate Pass ( 650 + VAT per delegate)  You can simply email or call and book your conference delegate seats on  TEL: +44 208 6361668. Email  delegate.uk@virtueinsight.comEarly Discount (09th April 2016 - 06th May 2016):- Conference Delegate Pass ( 850 + VAT per delegate)  You can simply email or call and book your conference delegate seats on  TEL: +44 208 6361668. Email  delegate.uk@virtueinsight.comStandard Registration (07th May 2016):- Conference Delegate Pass ( 1100 + VAT per delegate)  You can simply email or call and book your conference delegate seats on  TEL: +44 208 6361668. Email  delegate.uk@virtueinsight.comConference Sponsor & Exhibition Stall  Should you wish to Sponsor, or purchase a Exhibiton Stall (Booth) or a paid Speaker Slot, you can simply email your interest and queries to  TEL: +44 208 6361668. Email  sponsor.uk@virtueinsight.comYou can simply email or call and book your conference delegate seats and sponsorships on  TEL: +91 44 64536444. Email  amar@virtueinsight.co.inWe also have some sponsorship opportunities available for the event, which gives you an opportunity to speak/exhibit, and create brand awareness. In addition, the networking opportunities in focused and relevant industry gathering provide the personal contact necessary for business development efforts.irtue Insight equips business professionals around the world with the latest indepth industry knowledge and provides networking opportunities in the telecom, technology, oil and gas, social media, infrastructure and pharmaceutical industry. Our aim is to provide a platform to share knowledge and insights and provide our event attendees to network effectively and deliver maximum ROI by make new business alliances. We strive to produce high quality conferences which include the latest topics which are delivered by world class leaders of the industry.Our motto is to offer our customers the expertise and connections for a profitable business. Our events encompass an optimum chance to gain maximum ROI by making new business alliances.Plot No - 07 - 2nd Floor Ekambaram Industrial Estate Alapakkam,Porur Chennai - 600 116 India
Technology Progress Impacts Chinese Co2 Gas Shielded Welding Machine Industrys Next Decade Outlook

Co2 Gas Shielded Welding Machine

http://www.profresearchreports.com/co2-gas-shielded-welding-machine-industry-2016-global-and-chinese-analysis-market

http://www.profresearchreports.com

Prof Research Report has added a report titled Global and Chinese Co2 Gas Shielded Welding Machine Industry, 2011-2021 Market Research Report. Prepared with the intent to depict relevant facts, the overall market statistics help business owners assess the key drivers, restraints and opportunities of the sector. Furthermore, data on the market development empowers the companies make smarter and intelligent business decisions. The results that are furnished in both graphical as well as tabular format eventually leaves a good impression on marketing executives seeking relevant information to redefine their sales and marketing tactics. Furthermore, the study is capable enough when it comes to comparing related data on the development, analysis and trends in the manufacturing technology.The thorough study of the business imperatives such as global capacity, production and production value form an important part of the research. Apart from it the real -time evaluation of the company profile and product offerings by key market players plays a vital role in the successful execution of the business strategies that can generate profitability. The methodology of research also probes into cost and profit of the market. Moreover, the study develops an innovative medium to solve different problems associated with vendor landscape, market share and size.Extensive coverage of import and export status adds more depth to the research. Other than conventional methods, primary and secondary techniques applied during the research explores factors such as supply and consumption volume. The study acts a reliable marketing study that uses descriptive and exploratory methods to capture information on market competition by company, country and application. Regions included during the study are Europe, United States, China and Japan. In this research analysts ensure survey upstream raw material and downstream customer market to present information about the industry chain structure. Study recognizes new projects and assesses their investment feasibility.To empower new entrants, understand the relationship between the global and Chinese macroeconomics. The most common questions associated with macroeconomic development trends are also answered in this comprehensive market research report. Besides this, in order to steward resources efficiently research analysts further consider industry news, recent development and current business opportunities. Report would prove beneficial for business owners willing to act smartly on data associated with market entry strategies as well as countermeasures of economic impact. Stakeholders, product managers, marketing executives and other professionals seeking data on marketing channels would find the study worth their time and investment.Co2 Gas Shielded Welding Machine Market Related More Details @Prof Research Report is a high end market research & consulting firm that offers current and future market intelligence across 30 industrial verticals such as energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc through is quality database. Prof Research Report has successfully utilized technology to manage complex and massive market related database, which offers research reports of high analytical value. Prof Research Reports aim is to help our clients in achieving sustainable growth by providing insightful and qualitative research reports. Our research reports help our clients to achieve the competitive edge in the market.James Jordan5320 SW Macadam Avenue,Suite 100,Portland, OR 97239,United States.Toll Free: +1-800-910-6452Us: +1-971-202-1575Hong Kong : 852-301-84916E-mail - help@profresearchreports.comWebsite -
Global Industry Analysis on Multi-Service Business Gateways Market, 2015 - 2021

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/5207

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/5207

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com

A multi-service business gateway is a device that integrates multiple network data and voice communication tasks into a single device. The multi-service business gateway solution combines crucial functions such as VoIP (voice over internet protocol), routing and security of firewall, virtual private networking and intrusion prevention into a single fault tolerant platform. It also involves functionality related to filtering and email-server, storage and wireless networking. Multi-service business gateways enable OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and SMEs (small medium enterprises) to differentiate themselves in the market place by incorporating additional functionalities such as session border control and trans-coding and other call management capabilities in their organizations infrastructure. Multi-service business gateway security framework consists of various components such as access, routing, firewall, VPN (virtual private network), MGW (media gateway), SBC (session border controller) and IP (internet protocol) PBX (private branch exchange).In recent years, most of the small and mid-sized companies have increased the installations of new multi-service business gateway devices due to various benefits offered. Increasing demand for converged voice and data services among large and small to mid-sized enterprises is driving the growth of the market. Furthermore, rising popularity of hosted and managed services, and growing migration of enterprises to cost effective services to reduced total cost of ownership is expected to fuel the growth of multi-service business gateways market over the forecast period.The global multi-service business gateway market can be segmented based on its end-users and security threats. Depending on the type of end-users, the multi-service business gateway market can be segmented into three major categories as OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), large enterprises, and SMEs (small medium enterprises). The multi-service business gateway market can be segmented on the basis of security threats into four categories which include communication session threats, network level threats, media threats and application level threats. The global multi-service business gateway market can also be segmented based on major geographical regions into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World (Middle East, Latin America and Africa). Among all the regional markets, Europe is dominating the global multi-service business gateway market owing to the increased adoption of these devices in countries such as France, Germany, UK and Italy. Asia Pacific is expected to exhibit fastest growth due to increasing industrialization, international business expansion and rising enterprise mobility in emerging economies such as India and China. In addition, benefits such as low cost and reduced initial cost are increasing the demand for hosted multi-service business gateway services in this region.Request Brochure of this Report:Some of the key players in multi-service business gateways market include ADTRAN Inc., AudioCodes Ltd., Cisco Systems Inc., Fortinet Inc., LSI Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Freescale Semiconductor Inc., Allied Telesis Inc., Avaya Inc., Edgewater Networks Inc. and Nuera Communications Inc. among others. In order to outperform competitors, multi-service business gateway solution providers are emphasizing on offering advanced and cost effective solutions to solve security threats prevailing in enterprises. In addition, key players are focusing on acquisition and merger activities to increase their penetration into the market. For example, in 2011, Frontinet Inc. acquired TalkSwitch to further expand its product portfolio in existing multi-service business gateway market.Request to view TOC:About Us:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is an innovative provider of market research reports and consulting services. The three PMR pillars of strength that have helped us win clients for years are: Quality Research, Quick Research, and In-depth Research.PMRs team of seasoned analysts and consultants are experts in their domain. At PMR, we process complex, exhaustive primary and secondary research data into valuable insight. We Understand that each client has a unique problem statement, and address it with our strengths.Contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Global Industry Analysis on Next Generation Communication Technologies Market, 2015 - 2021

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/5885

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/5885

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com

Next generation communication technologies can also be termed as advanced communication technologies. Over the years communication technology has evolved drastically with increasing technological advancement in internet and other supporting communication technologies. Next generation communication technologies helps in minimizing communication gap and improve the quality of communication. In recent period, next generation communication technologies are expected to play key role in development of various verticals.Global next generation communication technologies market is expected to grow rapidly during the period of forecast. Factors which are driving the growth of next generation communication technology market are technological advancement such as Internet of Things (IoT), e-commerce and big data, which results into increasing demand of advanced communication technology. Mobile and wireless communication market is growing rapidly which further boost the growth of next generation communication technology market. Rapidly changing technology, growing consumer demands and frequent introduction of new products and services have fuelled the growth of global next generation communication technology market. On the other hand factors which are restraining the growth of next generation communication technology market are high infrastructural and development cost.Global next generation communication technology market is segmented on the basis of types of communication technologies and applications. On the basis of type of communication technology the market is segmented into Wired and wireless communication technology. Further, the wired communication technology market is sub segmented into twisted wire and optical fibre communications. Wireless communication technology is sub segmented into 5G, 4G LTE, WiMax, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, LiMAX, Bluetooth and others.On the basis of application, global next generation communication technology market can be segmented into telecommunication, consumer electronics, healthcare, security & surveillance, automotive, industrial and military application. Out of all these applications, present next generation communication technology market is dominated by consumer electronics applications. Aggressive consumer adoption of wireless devices and increasing demand of faster data speed have encourages the growth of consumer electronics application of next generation communication technology market.On the basis of region, the next generation communication technology market can be segmented into seven regions namely, North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Asia Pacific (excluding Japan), Japan as a separate region, Eastern Europe and Middle East & Africa. Out of all these regions present next generation communication technology market is dominated by developed regions such as North America and Western Europe. It is mainly because of high technological advancement and infrastructural investment in communication technologies in countries such as U.S., Canada, U.K. and Germany. However, during the period of forecast Asia Pacific region is expected to grow rapidly, growing technological developments, increasing consumer spendings and rising investment in communication infrastructures are some of the factors increasing the demand of next generation communication technologies in Asia Pacific region.Recently, global next generation communication technologies market have witnessed various technological developments which helps in fuelling the growth of market. In December 2014, Bluetooth Special Interest Group introduced a new standard for Bluetooth devices i.e. Bluetooth 4.2. This new standard provides speed and privacy features. In November 2014, ZigBee alliance released a new standard for ZigBee products. This standard provide features such as interoperability among extensive range of smart devices and consumer access to various innovative products as well as services that will work together flawlessly. These are few example of latest innovation and development into global next generation communication technology marketRequest Brochure of this Report:Next Generation Communication Technologies Market: Key PlayersKey players in global next generation communication technology market are AT&T Inc., Verizon, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Devicescape Software, Inc., Green Packet Berhad and others. These key players are focusing more on improving communication quality by eliminating communication gaps and improving user experience.Request to view TOC:About Us:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is an innovative provider of market research reports and consulting services. The three PMR pillars of strength that have helped us win clients for years are: Quality Research, Quick Research, and In-depth Research.PMRs team of seasoned analysts and consultants are experts in their domain. At PMR, we process complex, exhaustive primary and secondary research data into valuable insight. We Understand that each client has a unique problem statement, and address it with our strengths.Contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Global Industry Analysis on Green Information Technology (IT) Services Market, 2015 - 2021

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Green IT involves the practices related to information technology (IT) optimization and environmentally sustainable computing. It involves uses, manufacturing, design and disposing of servers, computers and associated subsystems such as communication system, networking systems, storage devices, printers and monitors effectively and efficiently with no impact or minimal impact on the environment. Major objectives of green IT involves reduction of hazardous materials, promote the recyclability and maximize energy efficiency. Software deployment and optimization is dependent of factors such as algorithmic efficiency, resource allocation, virtualization and terminal servers optimization. Many organizations are going green and they are finding vendors who can help them in providing green IT services which can help them reduce costs related to data centers and other IT services. Big organizations and business firms already have started deploying metrics or criteria such as power use, water use along with tracking their corporate carbon footprint. In addition to it, firms are focusing on optimized use of their assets by reusing their existing IT assets instead of buying new ones. The capital intensive approaches adopted by firms are driving the green IT services market.Corporate and IT sectors desire to improve efficiency and save money is driving the global green IT services market. Many corporate and other sectors are hiring information technology firms to implement and help green IT initiatives in their firms and businesses. Furthermore, government initiatives for green projects is also leading to the growth of green IT services market. However, currently green IT projects and green IT initiatives are primarily focused at data centers; thus, expanding the reach of green IT services into other IT functionalities holds major opportunity for the green IT services market. In 2006, Capgemini S.A. along with Cisco Systems Inc., SAP AG, Oracle Corp. and Intel Corp. formed Smart Energy Alliance (SEA) for the development of smart energy services (SES) and utilities.Global green IT services market is segmented on the basis of type of solution, services and geography. On the basis of solutions green IT services market is segmented into green IT solutions, purchasing solutions, equipment manufacturers solutions, real estate development solutions, green business solutions, workplace innovation solution, waste reduction solutions, energy reduction solution and sustainability compliance solutions. On the basis of service type the market for green IT services is segmented into IT system design services, IT infrastructure system designing services, integrated facilities designing services, business process and system design services, eco-footprint assessment, eco-innovation planning services, sustainability program and project management service, Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP) for IT system service and sustainable IT education program services. On the basis of end-use industry the market for green IT services is segmented into information technology industry, government industry, education industry and healthcare industry, among others. North America and Europe are the largest geographical markets for green IT services in terms of revenue. Government and administration in these regions have extensively focused on the green projects.Request Brochure of this Report:sustainableIT Inc., Accenture plc, GreenIT Inc., Cap Gemini S.A., BT Global Services plc, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, Hewlett-Packard Company, Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM Corp., Dell Inc. and Tata Consultancy Services Limited, among others are some of the major vendors in green information technology services market.Request to view TOC:About Us:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is an innovative provider of market research reports and consulting services. The three PMR pillars of strength that have helped us win clients for years are: Quality Research, Quick Research, and In-depth Research.PMRs team of seasoned analysts and consultants are experts in their domain. At PMR, we process complex, exhaustive primary and secondary research data into valuable insight. We Understand that each client has a unique problem statement, and address it with our strengths.Contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Global Industry Analysis on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Market, 2015 - 2021

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In computing terminology, virtual desktop is a term used for the interfaces for users. A virtual desktop is a desktop provided to an individual in a virtualized environment. Here the users desktop environment is expanded beyond the physical limits of desktops display area using the virtual desktop software. Various approaches such as switchable virtual desktops and size expansion of existing desktop are used for obtaining virtual desktops. The virtualized desktop offered using virtual desktop infrastructure is stored on a centralized server situated remotely rather than locally on the users system. Desktop virtualization software differentiates the software from the physical machine and presents it as an isolated operating system for users. Virtual desktop infrastructure is a concept where a desktop operating system is hosted within a virtual machine running on a remote server. Virtual desktop infrastructure is a deviation of client-server networking model also referred to as server based computing. In the last few years, some large organizations have turned to virtual desktop infrastructure as an alternative to the traditional server based computing model. This technology is replacing traditional server-client based computing models which were used by Microsoft Terminal and Citrix services.Enterprises are looking for solution which can provide more efficient and easier access to business data over their networks. Demand for accessing interfaces from remote locations is one of the major driving factors for global virtual desktop infrastructure market. Furthermore, the global virtual desktop infrastructure market is also witnessing the increasing acceptance of virtual desktop infrastructure applications and solutions using cloud technology. Factors such as increasing complexity of the network infrastructure and huge capital required for the setup of network infrastructure are leading to increased demand for cloud computing services. Along with it, the increasing adoption of handheld devices for enterprise computing and growing data bandwidth support from communication service providers are driving the demand for cloud based services and applications. With the use of cloud based virtual desktop infrastructure applications and enterprise data can be accessed irrespective of users location. As the internet costs are decreasing gradually and internet is emerging as a promising medium for enterprises for accessing data and applications, virtual desktop infrastructure services are provided over the internet. However, virtual desktop infrastructure market needs huge capital investment and this factor is posing a challenge for the growth of this market. Restructuring and redesigning of the enterprise infrastructure to match the demands of virtualization platform involves most of the capital cost.Virtual desktop infrastructure market is segmented on the basis of type of technology and geography. On the basis of technology the market is segmented into switchable virtual desktops and screen size expansion technology. In switchable virtual desktop method the user is offered with multiple virtual copies of their desktops which can be switched as per their need. Further, in screen size expansion technology size of virtual screen is expanded beyond the size of physical viewing device.Request Brochure of this Report:Citrix Systems, Inc., Microsoft Corp., Desktone Inc., LG CNS, Moka5 Inc., Oracle Corporation, Quest Software Inc., Red Hat, Inc., SK Telecom Co. Ltd., VMware, Inc., Korea Telecom Corp., and Unidesk Corporation are some of the major players in virtual desktop infrastructure market.Request to view TOC:About Us:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is an innovative provider of market research reports and consulting services. The three PMR pillars of strength that have helped us win clients for years are: Quality Research, Quick Research, and In-depth Research.PMRs team of seasoned analysts and consultants are experts in their domain. At PMR, we process complex, exhaustive primary and secondary research data into valuable insight. We Understand that each client has a unique problem statement, and address it with our strengths.Contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
rfid clear tag for rfid inventory (gyrfidstore)

RFID Disc Tags are widely used for inventory tracking system or Automatic production systems. The RFID Disc Tag can also work on metal surface with anti-metal layer on it, also can be attached to goods surface by adhesive layer. There are abundant size options from 12mm to 50mm. GYRFID presents several types with different material and size to suitable customers application.DIP Series- PVC Disc Tag, PVC Laminated, thickness of 1.0-1.2mmDIT Series- Clear PVC Disc Tag, clear PVC Laminated, thickness of 1.0-1.2mmFOT Series- Foil Tag, Clear PVC Sealed, Thickness of 0.45-0.7mm.STE series  Epoxy PVC Sticker, the surface covered by epoxy, thickness 2.0mmTKA series- ABS Token, ultrasonic welding ABS type, various size options.TKPPS series  PPS Token, ultrasonic welding, mini size 12mm.Features:Model number: DIP-FMaterial: PVC lamination + Anti-metal layer+ 3M adhesiveDimension: 13/ 14/ 15/ 17/ 18/ 20/ 22 / 25/ 30/ 35/ 40/ 50mm; thickness 1.0-1.2mmColor options: WhiteWater Proof: YesNotes: can be with anti-metal layer and 3M layerPersonalization Support: Silk-screen printing logo Thermal transfer printing Serial Number or UID Barcode printing and QR code printing, Photo printing Laser UID or Number Chip encodingApplication: NFC payments Patrol Guard Systems Logistic management Parcel tracking Inventory Control Automatic production management Asset tracking Device embeddedIC options:125KHz RFID: EM4200, EM4102, EM4100, GK4001; T5577; EM4305; Hitag1, Hitag2, Hitag S256  13.56Mhz ISO14443A: NXP MIFARE Classic 1K, MIFARE Classic 4K, MIFARE Ultralight, MIFARE Ultralight EV1, MIFARE Desfire 2K, MIFARE Desfire 4K, MIFARE Desfire 8K, MIFARE Plus, Fudan FM11RF08; NTAG203, NTAG213, NTAG215, NTAG216; LEGIC MIM256, LEGIC ATC1024, LEGIC ATC2048 13.56Mhz ISO15693: ICODE SLI; ICODE SLI-X; Tag-it 256, Tag-it 2048 840-960Mhz UHF: Alien Higgs, Monza 3, Monza 4D, Monza 4QT; NXP UCODE G2iLGYRFID STORE offers a wide range of products embedded with contact chip and contact-less chip (LF, HF, UHF), and there are some competitive products like ISO CARD, KEYFOB, WRISTBAND, DISC TAG, LAUNDRY TAG. The products are widely applied in access control, payment system, inventory control, asset tracking, and industrial managements.Should any of these items be of interest to you, please let us know. We will be happy to give you a quotation upon receipt of your detailed requirements.ADD:Rm1516, Qiangjin Building, QiXin Rd No.1318 ,Shanghai, 201100, China
Global Industry Analysis on Standard Based Communication Servers Market, 2015 - 2021

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Standard based communications servers are open computing systems that function as a carrier-grade universal platform for an extensive assortment of communications applications. These servers enable the equipment providers customize the system architecture as per the requirement by adding potential value to it. Irrespective of the differentiated features and specification, the standard based communications servers offer attributes such as open platform, carrier grade and flexible. The standard based communications are designed in accordance with the industry standards and provide interoperability with the architecture. Moreover, standard based communications servers offer carrier grade attributes as they provide extended lifecycle support, high availability, and longevity of supply. Additionally, these servers are upgradable without any disruption and offer high speed for real time communication applications to ensure high quality of service.The standard based communication servers offer an introductory platform for building a network infrastructure using the several equipment for applications such as IPTV, wireless broadband and other IP multimedia subsystems. These servers are based on managed industry standards such as Advanced Telecommunication Computing Architecture (ATCA), Advanced Mezzanine Card, Micro Telecommunication Computing Architecture, High Platform Interface (HPI), Carrier Grade Linux and Application Interface Specification (AIS). The Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) refers to string of specifications by Peripheral Component Interconnect Industrial Computers Manufacturers Group (PICMG), which is developed to meet essential necessities for carrier grade equipment. In addition to these standards, the standard based communication server is governed by different industry associations and vendor alliance programs. The industry associations include SCOPE Alliance and Communication Platforms Trade Associations. The vendor alliance programs include Intel Communications Alliance, Motorola Communications Server Alliance and Mobicents Open Source Communications Community.ATCA integrates the latest interconnect technologies, manageability and serviceability, improved reliability and next generation processors. The specifications provided by PICMG for Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) identify the base-level necessities for a variety of mezzanine cards that are optimized for ATCA Carriers. AMC enhances ATCAs flexibility by widening bandwidth and provides multi-protocol interface to individual servers. MicroTCA specification is basically a framework for directly combining AMC modules, instead of using an ATCA. Moreover, MicroTCA is designed for smaller equipment for application running on low entry cost, small physical size and high scalability. This framework is primarily used for Wi-Fi, wireless base stations, VoIP access gateways and WiMAX radios.Carrier Grade Linux is basically an enhanced version of Linux that is used by the communication servers to offer high security, high availability, scalability and easy maintenance. HPI and AIS are defined by Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) for telecommunication platform to maintain the availability of communication services. The HPI specifies the interface used between the middleware and the primary hardware and the operating system. The AIS specifies the interface between the application and middleware. Moreover, AIS enables applications to run over a variety of computing modules and provides easy migration between the platforms.The standard based communications servers market is primarily driven by the rising demand for high speed and compatible servers across the communication industry. The progressive and vigorous communication server ecosystem consists of several hardware and software providers, server vendors, standard bodies, vendor alliance programs, industry associations and the end-users.Request Brochure of this Report:Leading players in standard based communication servers market are NEC Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, AltiGen Communications, Inc., Emerson Network Power, Barrcuda Networks, Inc., Fenestrae B.V., Estech Systems, Inc., B Labs, Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc., Siemens Enterprise Communication GmbH, Cisco Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems, Avaya, Inc. and IBM Corporation.Request to view TOC:About Us:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is an innovative provider of market research reports and consulting services. The three PMR pillars of strength that have helped us win clients for years are: Quality Research, Quick Research, and In-depth Research.PMRs team of seasoned analysts and consultants are experts in their domain. At PMR, we process complex, exhaustive primary and secondary research data into valuable insight. We Understand that each client has a unique problem statement, and address it with our strengths.Contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Data Center UPS Market Size to reach $6.65 Billion by 2022: Global Markets Insights, Inc.

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https://www.gminsights.com/pressrelease/data-center-UPS-market-report

Data center UPS Market Size is estimated to reach USD 6.65 Billion by 2022, as per a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. Amplifying acceptance of cloud computing coupled with falling tolerance limits pertaining to data loss are likely to boost global demand over the forecast period.Small data center UPS market size led product sales and was valued at USD 2.1 Billion in 2014, with revenue expected to exceed USD 3.7 Billion by 2022. It is widely used in application areas such as server rooms, factory floors, enterprise data centers, industrial environments, localized & mid-tier data centers and medical imaging.Browse In-depth Research Report on Global Data Center UPS Market with detailed charts and figures:Increasing power outages causes installation of UPS in data centers to ensure smooth functioning of equipment. Use of ultra-miniature components in servers, storage systems and network devices make them vulnerable to falter and fail under power conditions. Deficiency of inventory supply owing to slowdown of the semiconductor industry is expected to pose a challenge to the industry growth.Request for sample of this Research Report:Key report insights suggest: Global data center UPS market size was valued USD 3.7 Billion in 2014, with estimates of USD 6.65 Billion by 2022, growing at 7.7% from 2015 to 2022. Medium data center UPS industry demand was USD 1.04 Billion in 2014, which is likely to reach USD 1.9 Billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 7.9% from 2015 to 2022. It is mainly used in hospitals, cable handling stations, government, commercial organizations and universities which in turn have spurred demand. Large data center UPS is expected to witness the fastest growth and reach USD 1 Billion by 2022. North America, on account of U.S. data center UPS market share, dominated regional demand with revenue share of 33% in 2014. Increasing need from end-use industries is likely to support growth over the forecast period. Europe industry revenue is expected to exceed 1.7 Billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 6.8% over the forecast period. Moderately competitive data center UPS market share consists of top three manufacturers which accounted for more than 50% of the industry in 2014. Key participants in this industry include Emerson, Ametek Inc., Eaton, ABB Ltd, Mitsubishi Electric, General Electric Co., Delta Electronics Inc, Siemens, and Schneider Electric S.A. among others.Browse Full Press Release:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.8, The Green Suite #4594 Dover, Delaware 19901
Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Market Size, Industry Analysis Report, 2016  2023: Global Market Insights Inc.

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Global building energy management systems (BEMS) market size is projected to surpass USD 6 billion by 2023. Increasing regulatory pressure due to increasing energy wastage in building is predicted to drive the industry over the coming years.Asia Pacific building energy management systems market size is forecast to experience significant growth. The surging demand for these systems can be attributed to increasing popularity of green building technologies across the region. Latin America is predicted to witness high growth prospects owing to increasing awareness regarding energy conservation over the forecast period.Rising awareness regarding efficient use of energy at corporate and government levels is anticipated to propel building energy management systems market demand in commercial, residential as well as industrial sectors. The building sector is primarily responsible for global greenhouse gas emission as well as energy consumption.Surging energy prices and managing energy costs for commercial as well as residential buildings is expected to boost building energy management systems market size over the next few years. These sectors have been adopting various appropriate technologies for controlling, conserving, and monitoring energy.Get sample pages from latest research report@:High energy consuming areas in buildings are office equipment, HVAC systems, catering, pumps, etc. Energy consumption in building amenities that mainly includes the use of fossil fuels adds to air pollution, which is likely to have adverse impact on the environment and also likely affect residents health.In order to manage the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and total energy consumption, numerous other energy management systems are being employed such as Facility Energy Management (FEMS), Industrial Energy Management (IEMS), Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS), and Cluster/Community Energy Management System (CEMS).BEMS involves effective integration of software, hardware, ICT technologies and services. It helps monitor, control and automate lighting as well as HVAC functions in order to manage energy efficiency of the buildings. It also helps in enhancing dwellers productivity and comfort. These systems also share functionalities with various building automation technologies such as Building Management Systems (BMS) and building automation systems (BAS).BMS and BEMS share numerous similarities apart from a unique distinction; BMS includes the energy management capabilities along with other functionalities that include alarm, fire, security, closed circuit television (CCTV), safety and mechanical building controls. The data gathered by BEMS is utilized by BMS and it is likely to become a vital component of BMS solution. This in turn is anticipated to positively impact building energy management systems market share over the forecast period.Advent of innovative technologies accompanied by maturing of existing technologies is predicted to drive applicability across various industry sectors. Rapid urban infrastructure development, particularly the swift growth of smart buildings is anticipated to be one of the major factors driving building energy management systems market share from 2015 to 2022.Key softwares include asset performance optimization, data management, application platform, lighting system, and HVAC system. Wireless and wired are the types of communication technologies involved in this model. Key industry verticals include telecom and IT, manufacturing, office and commercial buildings, government and MUSH (Municipal, University, School and Hospital) systems.U.S. BEMS market size is predicted to be the largest regional segment and is likely to maintain its dominance owing to rising interest in highly developed energy technologies as well as implementation of demand response programs over the coming years. These programs are likely to promote restricted energy usage and enable customers to tackle changing prices and handle the utility needs for saving peak loads.Participants constituting global building energy management systems share include Azbil, ABB Group, BuildingIQ, Carma Industries, C3 Energy, Cylon Active Energy, Daintree Networks, Daikin Industries, Echelon Corp., Elster EnergyICT, Ecova, Inc., EnerNOC, Inc., and FirstFuel Software. Notable players also include GridPoint, eSight Energy, Honeywell International, Ingersoll-Rand PLC, IBM, Johnson Controls, Jones Lang LaSalle, Schneider Electric, Optimum Energy LLC, Siemens AG, Toshiba, Verisae, and SkyFoundry.Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnologyJack DavisCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-257-2444Toll Free: 1-800-421-1507Email: sales@gminsights.com
Global Microwaveable Foods Market to Expand owing to Rising Number of Working Women

Microwaveable Foods Market

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A new market intelligence study by Transparency Market Research presents a detailed overview of the global microwaveable foods market. The report is titled Microwaveable Foods Market - Global Industry Size, Share, Trends, Analysis And Forecasts 2012 - 2018. The market research study provides a comprehensive analysis of the growth drivers, factors limiting growth, current trends, market structure, and projections of the market for the period from 2012 to 2018.Browse Full Report with TOC :Foods that can be cooked or heated up in a microwave oven are called microwaveable foods. Microwaveable foods are witnessing high demand from working women as they are convenient to cook and consume for women who spend a lot of time out of their home. The changing lifestyle habits are also contributing to the rising adoption of microwaveable foods. A change in shopping preferences and the easy availability of microwaveable foods have helped the global microwaveable foods market grow. Another factor promoting the growth of the market is the growing competition between major companies manufacturing microwaveable foods. The increased competition between the companies has ensured that there are frequent new product offerings to suit the changing preferences of consumers across the globe.Although the market for microwaveable foods is enormous, the rising awareness among people regarding the health-related dangers related to microwaveable foods is expected to restrain the growth of the market. Microwaveable foods are packed in plastic wraps or plastic containers, both of which pose a grave threat to the health of the consumer. The plasticizers used in the packaging, such as phthalates and BPA, are known to be endocrine disrupters and hence have a negative impact on the health of the consumers. These plasticizers mimic human hormones, which creates an adverse situation in the body. Thus, the U.S. FDA oversees and controls the plastic wraps and containers used in the packaging of microwaveable foods. Meeting the stringent standards of the FDA is thus one of the challenges faced by players in the global microwaveable foods market.Enquiry before Buying@For the purpose of clear understanding, the report segments the global microwaveable foods market on the basis of product type and geography. On the basis of product type, the microwaveable foods market is segmented into chilled food, frozen food, and shelf microwaveable food. Out of these, the frozen microwaveable foods market is currently exhibiting a high growth rate and is expected to dominate the market during the period from 2012 to 2018. The growth of the frozen microwaveable foods segment can be attributed to the convenience they offer.Geographically, the global microwaveable foods market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. Out of these regions, Europe and North America dominate the market, with the U.S. being the most profitable market for microwaveable foods in North America, owing to the innovation of new, attractive solutions to meals. The unwillingness among the regions population to cook food is also a driving force for the microwaveable foods market in the U.S.Some of the key players studied in the report are: McCain Foods, Pinnacle Food Group LLC, H.J. Heinz, Kellogg Company, Gunnar Dafgard AB, Windsor Frozen Foods, Campbell Soup Company, Birds Eye Foods Inc., and General Mills Inc.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze 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.ContactMr. Sudip S90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Future Electronics and Robert Miller Celebrate 20th Anniversary of Company's Finland Branch

www.FutureElectronics.com

www.FutureElectronics.com

www.FutureElectronics.com

Future Electronics, a worldwide leader in electronic components supply chain management and distribution and Solid State Lighting Solutions, is celebrating the 20th anniversary this year of the opening of the company's office in Finland.Future Electronics was founded in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in November of 1968 by Robert Miller, President. In 1972, the company opened its first American office in Boston, Massachusetts, and expanded into Europe with the opening of its Munich, Germany office in 1986.The Finland office, which opened in 1996, has a strong team, poised to further drive growth in this very interesting market, with outstanding local commercial and technical representatives committed to delighting suppliers and end-customers alike.In addition to its Finland location, the company has many branches throughout Europe, including Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, the Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.For more information about the company, visit:About Future ElectronicsFuture Electronics is a global leader in electronics distribution, ranking 3rd in component sales worldwide, with an impressive reputation for developing efficient, comprehensive global supply chain solutions. Founded in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1968 by Robert Miller, the company has established itself as one of the most innovative organizations in the industry today, with 5,000 employees in 169 offices in 44 countries around the world. Future Electronics is globally integrated, with one worldwide IT infrastructure providing real-time inventory availability and access, while enabling full integration of its operations, sales and marketing worldwide. Offering the highest level of service, the most advanced engineering capabilities and technical solutions through all stages of the design-production cycle, and the largest available-to-sell inventory in the world, Future's mission is always to Delight the Customer. For more information, visitMedia ContactMartin H. GordonDirector, Corporate CommunicationsFUTURE ELECTRONICS514-694-7710 (ext. 2236)Fax: 514-630-2671martin.gordon@FutureElectronics.com###Future Electronics is a global leader in electronics distribution, ranking 3rd in component sales worldwide, with an impressive reputation for developing efficient, comprehensive global supply chain solutions. Founded in 1968 by Robert Miller, President, Future Electronics has established itself as one of the most innovative organizations in the industry today, with 5,000 employees in 169 offices in 44 countries around the world.237 Hymus Boulevard, Pointe Claire, Quebec H9R 5C7, Canada
Market Research Report on Metered Dose Inhaler Devices - Medical Devices Pipeline Assessment, 2016

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Metered Dose Inhaler Devices - Medical Devices Pipeline Assessment, 2016" to its huge collection of research reports.GlobalData's Medical Devices sector report, Metered Dose Inhaler Devices - Medical Devices Pipeline Assessment, 2016" provides an overview of Metered Dose Inhaler Devices currently in pipeline stage.The report provides comprehensive information on the pipeline products with comparative analysis of the products at various stages of development. The report reviews major players involved in the pipeline product development. It also provides information about clinical trials in progress, which includes trial phase, trial status, trial start and end dates, and, the number of trials for the key Metered Dose Inhaler Devices pipeline products.This report is prepared using data sourced from in-house databases, secondary and primary research by GlobalData's team of industry experts.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Scope- Extensive coverage of the Metered Dose Inhaler Devices under development- The report reviews details of major pipeline products which includes, product description, licensing and collaboration details and other developmental activities- The report reviews the major players involved in the development of Metered Dose Inhaler Devices and list all their pipeline projects- The coverage of pipeline products based on various stages of development ranging from Early Development to Approved / Issued stage- The report provides key clinical trial data of ongoing trials specific to pipeline products- Recent developments in the segment / industryReasons to buyThe report enables you to -- Formulate significant competitor information, analysis, and insights to improve R&D strategies- Identify emerging players with potentially strong product portfolio and create effective counter-strategies to gain competitive advantage- Identify and understand important and diverse types of Metered Dose Inhaler Devices under development- Develop market-entry and market expansion strategies- Plan mergers and acquisitions effectively by identifying major players with the most promising pipeline- In-depth analysis of the products current stage of development, territory and estimated launch dateBrowse Detail Report With TOC @Table of Contents1 Table of Contents 21.1 List of Tables 31.2 List of Figures 42 Introduction 52.1 Metered Dose Inhaler Devices Overview 53 Products under Development 63.1 Metered Dose Inhaler Devices - Pipeline Products by Stage of Development 63.2 Metered Dose Inhaler Devices - Pipeline Products by Territory 73.3 Metered Dose Inhaler Devices - Pipeline Products by Regulatory Path 83.4 Metered Dose Inhaler Devices - Pipeline Products by Estimated Approval Date 94 Metered Dose Inhaler Devices - Pipeline Products under Development by Companies 104.1 Metered Dose Inhaler Devices Companies - Pipeline Products by Stage of Development 104.2 Metered Dose Inhaler Devices - Pipeline Products by Stage of Development 115 Metered Dose Inhaler Devices Companies and Product Overview 125.1 Aerophase Inc. Company Overview 125.1.1 Aerophase Inc. Pipeline Products & Ongoing Clinical Trials Overview 125.2 Bespak Europe Ltd. Company Overview 135.2.1 Bespak Europe Ltd. Pipeline Products & Ongoing Clinical Trials Overview 135.3 Globe Medical Tech, Inc. Company Overview 155.3.1 Globe Medical Tech, Inc. Pipeline Products & Ongoing Clinical Trials Overview 155.4 Lab Automate Technologies Inc. Company Overview 165.4.1 Lab Automate Technologies Inc. Pipeline Products & Ongoing Clinical Trials Overview 165.5 Medicom Innovation Partner a/s Company Overview 175.5.1 Medicom Innovation Partner a/s Pipeline Products & Ongoing Clinical Trials Overview 175.6 Min USA LLC Company Overview 185.6.1 Min USA LLC Pipeline Products & Ongoing Clinical Trials Overview 185.7 Mylan N.V. Company Overview 195.7.1 Mylan N.V. Pipeline Products & Ongoing Clinical Trials Overview 195.8 Novartis AG Company Overview 215.8.1 Novartis AG Pipeline Products & Ongoing Clinical Trials Overview 215.9 Propeller Health Company Overview 235.9.1 Propeller Health Pipeline Products & Ongoing Clinical Trials Overview 235.10 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Company Overview 245.10.1 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Pipeline Products & Ongoing Clinical Trials Overview 245.11 SkyePharma Plc Company Overview 265.11.1 SkyePharma Plc Pipeline Products & Ongoing Clinical Trials Overview 266 Metered Dose Inhaler Devices- Recent Developments 286.1 Feb 25, 2016: Propeller Health Enters into Agreement with Aptar Pharma 286.2 Jun 16, 2015: Consort Medical announces final results 287 Appendix 347.1 Methodology 347.2 About GlobalData 367.3 Contact Us 377.4 Disclaimer 37About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.us
Global RF Devices for Set-top Boxes Industry Overview by Trends, Developments, Market Opportunities, Analysis & 2016 Growth Structure

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http://www.qyresearchreports.com/report/global-rf-devices-for-settop-boxes-industry-2016-market-research-report.htm

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The most recent research report added to QYResearchReports.com provides its users with an in-depth, unbiased, and world-class insight into the global RF Devices for Set-top Boxes market. The research report is compiled in a way that can serve all its users as well as those involved in the global RF Devices for Set-top Boxes market, including but not limited to: market investors, advisory professionals, leaders in the supply chain, marketing providers, technologies planners, technical and market professionals, and business leaders. The report thus provides a regional perspective of the global RF Devices for Set-top Boxes market with the aid of the most precise and dedicated research methodologies. The report also provides an objective evaluation of the structure, dynamics, and scope of growth, all for the global RF Devices for Set-top Boxes market within a forecast period of 2016 to 2020.There are multiple functionalities provided by the study. It provides a holistic snapshot of the global RF Devices for Set-top Boxes market and also explains the current trends that affect the market and its workings on a domestic level. The report also discusses the various factors that drive the growth of the global RF Devices for Set-top Boxes market, the different obstacles it encounters, and the opportunities that will emerge in the coming years.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The global RF Devices for Set-top Boxes market is additionally examined on the basis of multiple key parameters, including applications, end users, technology, and state, while focusing on significant market values, market size, revenue, volume, and progress forecast. The report takes help of secondary and primary research methods to illuminate each segment and its sub-segment, providing key insights into what drives and hampers individual segments.The global RF Devices for Set-top Boxes market is elaborated on using an in-depth review of its competitive landscape. The report takes into consideration all the leading players that are operating in the global RF Devices for Set-top Boxes market and points out their strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and trends.Browse Complete Report with TOC @QYresearchreports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYReseachReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.QYResearchReports1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-618-1030Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
Development Trends of Augmented Reality Smartglasses | New Market Research Report

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Development Trends of Augmented Reality Smartglasses" to its huge collection of research reports.The launch of Google Glass at Google I/O 2012 has brought a fresh new outlook to the head-mounted display and wearables industry. Despite Google's decision to terminate production and sales later in 2015, the development of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays has continued uninterrupted. This is evidenced by the fact that there was an increase of IT companies and startups that showcased AR-related products at this year's CES and MWC. This report provides an overview of the latest development of AR and VR smartglasses and examines the potential of smartglasses in the future.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Table of ContentsDevelopment Trends of Augmented Reality Smartglasses1.Overview of the AR Market1.1 Product Positioning1.2 Market Development2. Development of the AR Industry2.1 Key Vendors in the AR Industry2.2 Development of Key Players2.2.1 Google2.2.2 MicrosoftBrowse Detail Report With TOC @3. Key Issues3.1 End User Market Segmentation3.2 Development of Product and TechnologyMIC PerspectiveEnterprise AR Market Shipments to Top One Million Units by 2018Taiwan to Find AR Opportunity in Key Components and End ProductsAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.us
Research Announces On Crude Oil Carriers Market by Vessel Type - VLCC/ULCC, Suezmax, Aframax, and Panamax

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This research study analyzes the market for crude oil carriers both in terms of volume (units) and revenue (US$ Bn). The crude oil carriers market has been segmented on the basis of vessel type and geography. In terms of region, the market has been divided into four segments that comprise 10 countries, which are the major players in the global crude oil carriers market. For the research, 2015 has been taken as the base year, while all forecasts have been given for the period from 2016 to 2024. Market data for all the segments has been provided at the regional as well as country-specific level from 2016 to 2024. The report provides a broad competitive analysis of companies engaged in the crude oil shipping business. The report also includes the key market dynamics such as drivers, restraints, and opportunities affecting the global crude oil shipping market. These market dynamics were analyzed in detail and are illustrated in the report with the help of supporting graphs and tables. The report also provides a comprehensive analysis of the global crude oil carriers market with the help of Porters Five Forces model. This analysis helps in understanding the five major forces that affect the market structure and market profitability. The forces analyzed are bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, and degree of competition.To Get Free Sample Copy Of Global Crude Oil Carriers MarketThe high-level analysis in the report provides detailed insights into the crude oil shipping business globally. There are currently numerous drivers of the market. Some of the most prominent drivers are declining crude oil prices proving to be beneficial for the crude oil carriers market and world economy influencing the demand for crude oil transportation. Market attractiveness analysis was carried out for the crude oil carriers market on the basis of geography. Market attractiveness was estimated on the basis of common parameters that directly impact the crude oil carriers market in different regions. The parameters include shipping costs, government policies, crude oil demand, and applications such as automobile.Shipping of petroleum liquids such as crude oil comprises many different operations, each of which signifies a potential source of evaporation loss. Crude oil is transported from production facilities to refineries by crude oil carriers, rail tank cars, barges, pipelines, and tank trucks. Coastal tank vessel trades are functioned by crude carriers, tank barges, and product tankers. Crude carriers serve the West Alaska coast crude oil trades. Crude oil carriers are generally referred to as oil tankers, which transport crude oil from one location to another.The crude oil carriers market was segmented on the basis of vessel type (VLCC/ULCC, Suezmax, Aframax, and Panamax). The crude oil carriers market was analyzed across four geographies: North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Rest of the World. Regional data has been provided for each sub-segment of the crude oil carriers market. Key players in the crude oil carriers market include AET Tanker Holdings Sdn Bhd, The National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia (Bahri), China Shipping Development Corp (CSDC), Dynacom Tankers Management Ltd., Euronav, Frontline Ltd., Maran Tankers Management Inc., National Iranian Tanker Company, NYK line, Ocean Tankers (pte) Ltd., OMAN SHIPPING COMPANY S.A.O.C., Overseas Shipholding Group (OSG), Sovcomflot Group, and Teekay Corporation. The report provides an overview of these companies, followed by their financial details, business strategies, and recent developments.MRRSE stands for Market Research Reports Search Engine, the largest online catalog of latest market research reports based on industries, companies, and countries. MRRSE sources thousands of industry reports, market statistics, and company profiles from trusted entities and makes them available at a click. Besides well-known private publishers, the reports featured on MRRSE typically come from national statistics agencies, investment agencies, leading media houses, trade unions, governments, and embassies.Mr.Nachiket GhumareCorporate OfficeState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030Email: sales@mrrse.com
New Delhi: A court on Monday issued a warrant for the arrest of tycoon and lawmaker Vijay Mallya, who has left the country with creditors stepping up pressure to recover about $1.4 billion owed by his defunct Kingfisher Airlines.

The latest court verdict came after the Enforcement Directorate, a government agency fighting financial crime, accused Mallya's UB Group of using 4.3 billion rupees ($65 million) of bank loans to Kingfisher Airlines to buy property overseas.

Mallya, a liquor baron and a lawmaker, has been at an unknown location after leaving India on March 2. Media reports have traced him to the Hertfordshire village of Tewin, north of London, where he owns a house.

The UB Group on Sunday denied the Enforcement Directorate's allegations, calling the basis of the warrant against Mallya "erroneous and unjustified".

The court issued the non-bailable warrant just days after the Indian government suspended the diplomatic passport of Mallya, once called the "King of Good Times" for his extravagant lifestyle. It said the passport would be revoked if he did not respond within a week.

Creditor banks this month rejected an offer of partial repayment by Mallya, who had given a personal guarantee for the Kingfisher loan, and have demanded that the former billionaire attend a hearing in India's Supreme Court.

Mallya, a member of the Rajya Sabha who co-owns Britain-based motor racing team Force India, has not revealed his whereabouts since his departure on March 2, but has said he has not absconded.
Global Coronary Stent Market Key Trends, Size, Growth, Shares And Forecast Research Report 2016

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Coronary Stent Market Report: 2016 Edition" to its huge collection of research reports.The stent market is an important segment of the coronary heart diseases. The stent is a small, elastic, mesh like tube made of a metal stainless steel or cobalt alloy that acts as support. Stents are attached onto small balloons and opened inside the artery to reinstate blood flow and support the vessel wall. Stenting does not involve any major incision and is performed with the help of local anesthesia and low sedation. Stenting is relatively more comfortable for patients in comparison to coronary artery bypass heart surgery.Stents help in avoiding the heart attacks which is caused by narrowing of the coronary arteries. Drug eluting stents which are coated with medication are the most commonly used stents. Many new stents like bio resorbabale stents are in the market and next generation stents like drug filled stent are under research and development. Stents become very necessary in the severe instances of atherosclerosis which is a state where medium and large arteries harden and start narrowing because their insides get filled with plaque. The most common method employed for the treatment of coronary heart disease includes pharmaceuticals, balloon angioplasty, stenting and coronary artery bypass grafting.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The stent market was affected by thrombosis scare in the year 2010. Later the market was also affected due to stent deformity issues and pricing pressures which led the stent market down.The key factors which are anticipated to drive stent market include aging population, improving utilization of hospital, enhancement in the volume of drug eluting stent, improvement in the global health care expenditure, accelerated economic growth, diabetic population, increased consumption of alcohol, rising obese population, increase in hypertension. Some of the significant developments of this industry include introduction of new products from competing companies, Next generation stents and testing of drug filled stent. However, the challenge to be faced ahead is pricing pressure, regulatory issues and complications associated with implantation of stents.This report offers a comprehensive analysis of the stent market. Furthermore, market dynamics such as key trends and development; and challenges are analyzed in depth. On the contention front, the global stent market is reined by few major players namely Boston Scientific, Abbott Laboratories, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic. The competitive landscape of the respective market, along with the company profiles of the leading players are also discussed in detail.Browse Detail Report With TOC @Table of Content1. Cardiology Market  An Introduction1.1 Interventional Cardiology1.1.1 Bypass Surgery (or CABG)1.1.2 Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) or Angioplasty1.2 Stenting and its Types1.2.1 Drug Eluting Stent and Bare Metal Stent1.2.2 Benefits of Stenting2. Coronary Stent Market Analysis2.1 Global Coronary Stent Market by Value2.1.1 Global Drug Eluting Stent Market by Value2.1.2 Global Bare Metal Stent Market by Value2.1.3 Global Drug Eluting Stent Market by Volume2.1.4 Global Drug Eluting Stent Market by Device3. The US DES Market3.1 The US DES Market by Value3.2 The US DES Market Share by Device4. Rest of World DES Market4.1 Rest of World DES Market by Value5. Indian Stent Market5.1 Total Stents Used in India5.1.1 Total Drug Eluting Stents (DES) Used6. Market Dynamics6.1 Growth Drivers6.1.1 Aging Population6.1.2 Global DES Volume6.1.3 Improving Global Health Care Expenditure6.1.4 Accelerated Economic Growth6.1.5 Global Diabetic Population6.1.6 Increased Consumption of Alcohol and Tobacco6.1.7 Rising Obese Population6.1.8 Increase in Hypertension Cases6.2 Trends and Development6.2.1 Introduction of New Products6.2.2 Next Generation Stent Technologies6.2.3 Testing of Drug Filled Stent6.3 Challenges6.3.1 Pricing Pressure6.3.2 Industry Risk6.3.3 Regulatory Issues6.3.4 Complications in Stent Implant7. Competitive Landscape7.1 Global Market7.1.1 Global Cardiovascular Market by Company7.1.2 Global Drug Eluting Stent Market by Company7.1.3 Global Balloon Angioplasty Market by Company7.1.4 Global Peripheral Stent Market by Company7.2 The US DES Market7.2.1 The US DES Market Share by Company7.3 Rest of World DES Market7.3.1 Rest of Word DES Market Share by Company7.4 Indian Coronary Stent Market7.4.1 Coronary Stent Market by Share in India8. Company Profiles8.1 Boston Scientific8.1.1 Business Overview8.1.2 Financial Overview8.1.3 Business Strategies8.2 Johnson & Johnson8.2.1 Business Overview8.2.2 Financial Overview8.2.3 Business Strategies8.3 Abbot Laboratories8.3.1 Business Overview8.3.2 Financial Overview8.3.3 Business Strategies8.4 Medtronic Inc.8.4.1 Business Overview8.4.2 Financial Overview8.4.3 Business StrategiesAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.us
Global Champagne Market Key Trends, Size, Growth, Shares And Forecast Research Report 2016

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Champagne Market Report: 2016 Edition" to its huge collection of research reports.Like perfumes or haute couture, champagne is one of the products that best embodies the luxury spirit. Champagne, a variant of sparkling wine, is associated with premium and luxury attributes. Champagne wines are produced by natural yeast fermentation in the bottle, in accordance with strict criteria laid down in the champagne regulatory framework covering every aspect of winemaking. Champagne types are classified as vintage, non-vintage, blanc-des-blancs, rose champagne, and demi-sec.The UK remains the largest export market of champagne. France despite being the ancient champagne producer saw a decline in the shipments. Emerging economies are changing the face of the champagne market. Increasing consumption trends in major countries, innovative branding, and increasing off-trade distribution channels are the factors supporting growth of the market. Asia pacific is the fastest growing region for premium spirits consumption both in terms of volume and value.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The report offers an in-depth analysis of the global champagne market segmented into global wine market, global champagne market and regional champagne market. The key factors driving the growth in the champagne market are increasing surface area of vineyard worldwide, improving economic conditions, growth of the luxury wine market, increased number of HNWI, and rise of champagne consumption in some parts of Europe. However, there are a number of factors which are hindering the growth of the champagne market like high import duty, decreased grape production and increased use of fake champagnes in the name of big brands.Competition in this market is rather concentrated with a few champagne houses dominating the market, through brand diversification. LVMH is leading the global champagne market in terms of both, revenue and volume. Other top champagne houses that have been covered in the report include Lanson-BCC, Vranken-Pommery Monopole, and Laurent Perrier.Browse Detail Report With TOC @Table of Content1. Introduction1.1 Champagne Types1.2 The Champagne Appellation1.3 Production Methods1.3.1 Traditional Method1.3.2 Charmat Method1.3.3 Transfer Method1.3.4 Injection Method1.4 Grape Varieties Used in the Production1.5 Production Process1.6 Champagne Producers2. Global Wine Market2.1 Global Wine Production2.2 Global Wine Production by Region2.3 Global Wine Consumption2.4 Global Wine Consumption by Region2.5 Global Wine Exports by Volume & Value2.6 Global Wine Exports Value by Types3. Global Champagne Market3.1 Global Champagne Market by Value3.2 Global Champagne Shipments Volume3.3 Global Champagne Shipment by Types3.4 Global Champagne Shipment by Top Countries4. Regional Champagne Market4.1 Europe4.1.1 France Champagne Shipment by Volume & Value4.1.2 The UK Champagne Shipment by Volume & Value4.1.3 Germany Champagne Shipment by Volume & Value4.2 The U.S.4.2.1 The US Champagne Shipment Volume & Value4.3 Japan4.3.1 Japan Champagne Shipment by Volume & Value5. Market Dynamics5.1 Industry Trends and Developments5.1.1 Increasing Consumption Trend in Major Countries5.1.2 Innovative Branding to Target Younger Generation5.1.3 Top Producers Shifting Attention to the US and Asia5.1.4 Demand from Emerging Markets5.1.5 Increasing Off-trade Distribution Channels5.1.6 Rise of Champagne Consumption in Europe5.2 Growth Drivers5.2.1 Rising Worldwide Surface Area of Vineyards5.2.2 Improving Economic Conditions5.2.3 Rising High Net worth Individuals5.2.4 Growth in Luxury Wine Market5.2.5 Rise in Online Sales5.3 Challenges and Issues5.3.1 Impact of Global Economic Conditions5.3.2 Fall in Global Grape Production5.3.3 Counterfeiting of Luxury Goods6. Competitive Landscape6.1 Top Champagne Houses by Revenue6.2 Revenue Growth Comparison6.3 Shipment Ownership by Volume7. Company Profiles7.1 LVMH (Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton)7.1.1 Business Overview7.1.2 Financial Overview7.1.3 Business Strategies7.2 Laurent Perrier7.2.1 Business Overview7.2.2 Financial Overview7.2.3 Business Strategies7.3 Lanson-BCC Group7.3.1 Business Overview7.3.2 Financial Overview7.3.3 Business Strategies7.4 Vranken-Pommery Monopole SA7.4.1 Business Overview7.4.2 Financial Overview7.4.3 Business StrategiesAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.us
Research Announces On Natural Gas Liquids Market - Ethane, Propane, Normal Butane, Isobutane, and Pentanes Plus

http://www.mrrse.com/sample/1659

The natural gas Liquids market report by Transparency Market Research provides in-depth analysis of the natural gas Liquids market globally. The report segments the market on the basis of type and geography. The report analyzes the global natural gas Liquids market in terms of production (Kilo barrels/day) for the 20162024 period. For this research study, the base year is 2015, whereas the forecast is from 2016 to 2024. The report provides a comprehensive competitive landscape and features companies producing and processing natural gas liquids. This report includes the key market dynamics affecting the natural gas Liquids market globally. The analysis in the report provides detailed insights into the global natural gas Liquids market. Major dynamics such as drivers, opportunities, and restraints of the market were analyzed in detail and are illustrated in the report through tables. The report also provides a detailed industry analysis of the global natural gas Liquids market with the help of Porters Five Forces model.To Get Free Sample Copy Of Global Natural Gas Liquids marketThe natural gas Liquids market has been segmented on the basis of type into ethane, propane, normal butane, isobutane, and pentanes plus. Ethane was the largest type segment of the natural gas Liquids market globally, accounting for more than 45% of the global share, in 2015. Sales of ethane increased due to its growing applications across the globe. Propane was the second-largest type segment accounting for more than 20% of the global share, and Isobutane was the smallest type segment of the natural gas Liquids market globally, accounting for less than 10%, in 2015. Isobutane was the smallest type segment owing to its limited applications and market value. The global natural gas Liquids market growth is anticipated to be hampered by increasing use of alternatives such as naphtha.The natural gas Liquids market was analyzed for North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. The Middle East had the largest production of natural gas liquids, followed by North America and Europe. The market for natural gas liquid in the Middle East accounted for more than 35% of global market share in 2015, whereas the market in North America stood at around 30%. The U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Canada, and he UAE were the leading countries in these regions with respect to natural gas liquids production. Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia Pacific also had significant natural gas liquids production in 2015. Europe held around 10% market share of the global natural gas Liquids market, while Asia Pacific, Africa, and Latin America accounted for less than 10% of the global market share in 2015. These regions are expected to increase natural gas liquids production during the forecast period owing to rising demand and growing investments in natural gas liquid production and processing infrastructure.Some of the key market participants in the natural gas Liquids market include BP Plc, Chesapeake Energy Corporation, ConocoPhillips Company, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Linn Energy LLC, Range Resources Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell Plc., SM Energy, Statoil ASA, and Swift Energy Company. The report provides an overview of these companies, followed by their financial details (if available), business strategies, and recent developments.MRRSE stands for Market Research Reports Search Engine, the largest online catalog of latest market research reports based on industries, companies, and countries. MRRSE sources thousands of industry reports, market statistics, and company profiles from trusted entities and makes them available at a click. Besides well-known private publishers, the reports featured on MRRSE typically come from national statistics agencies, investment agencies, leading media houses, trade unions, governments, and embassies.Mr.Nachiket GhumareCorporate OfficeState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030Email: sales@mrrse.com
Could you be making your pet's allergies worse?

www.HoundGatos.com

www.HoundGatos.com

Millions of people have pets around the country. Some of them may find that their dog or cat suffers from allergies, ranging from ingredients in their food to substances and materials found in their environment. What many people who have pets with allergies may not realize is that they could be doing things to make them worse, rather than bringing their pet relief.There are a lot of well-meaning pet parents out there who have cats and dogs with a variety of allergies, explains Will Post, founder and CEO, Hound & Gatos Pet Foods Corporation. They think they are doing things to help the pets, but in all reality they may be making things worse. If you have a pet with allergies it is important to pay close attention to both their food and things in their environment.Not knowing everything that should be looked for, it is easy to not notice ingredients or materials that may aggravate a pets allergies. Here are some more common things to look for to help bring pets relief from their allergy symptoms: Nutrition. Todays pet foods are often filled with ingredients that pets should not be eating. While they should be eating meat, they are usually getting products made with corn, wheat, fillers, gravies, preservatives, and a variety of other things that should be avoided. Pets, and especially those with allergies, should be eating wholesome foods that are made of just meat. It is also important to know the source of that meat, including what type of meat it is and where it was sourced. Treats. Feeding pets healthy treats is also important. Like their food, they should be completely sourced in the USA, wholesome, and should not include ingredients that pets should not be eating. Toys and bedding. Most people do not think about their pets toys or bedding, but there are materials that can be harmful to them and make allergies worse. Plastic should be avoided as much as possible. This includes with pet toys and watering/feeding bowls. Environmental items. There are other items in the environment that can make a pets allergies worse or be potentially harmful to their health, including fluoridated water, getting too many vaccinations, cat litter materials that contain too many chemicals, and shampoos.Its important to pay attention to the things we feed our pets, give to them to use, and surround them with, adds Post. Feeding them well is going to go a long way toward helping their allergies to improve. First we must heal the gut, then the body will tend to fix itself. Pets must maintain a consistent level of good vitamins and minerals, too.Many pet foods on the market today are unhealthy because they are filled with ingredients that cats and dogs shouldnt be consuming. Hound & Gatos Pet Foods Corporations mission is to combat that and offer consumers a healthy, wholesome line of foods for their pets. Their foods do not contain harmful ingredients or those that should be avoided. The company uses only the best sourced ingredients, uses 100 percent meat, makes their pet food right in South Dakota, and offers complete DNA disclosure to show the source of the meat used in their foods.Hound & Gatos Pet Foods Corporation is a leader in healthy pet foods, and three-time winner of the Most Trusted Pet Foods award by TruthAboutPetFood.com. Additionally, the company has won the Top Approved Pet Foods three years in a row by Whole Dog Journal. They never use things found in other popular pet foods, such as generic livers, carrageenan, chemicals, unidentifiable additives, and preservatives. They have also never had any of their food recalled. For more information, visit their site at:About Hound & Gatos Pet FoodsHound & Gatos Pet Foods is a result of one pet lovers vision of providing only the best for his beloved pets. Will Post, CEO and founder, began Hound & Gatos with the mission to deliver the nutrition his four pets (two Savannah cats and two bird dogs) needed and deserved to be healthy. Today, Hound & Gatos Pet Foods provides award winning 100 percent meat (DNA tested) dog and cat foods with no fillers for pet lovers and their special pets across the United States and Canada. The products are distributed through Animal Supply Co., Pet Food Experts and Canada's Global Pet Foods. The foods are also available in Canada, at PetOnly.CA and Trueman Dist.Customers can ask stores to carry the pet foods, which are supplied through distributors. For more information, visitKelly Morrisonkelly@chermurphypr.com
Heres a twist: celebrate National Pretzel Day Tuesday, April 26 at Bavarian Inn Restaurant

www.bavarianinn.com

www.bavarianinn.com

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www.bavarianinn.com

Dip them in mustard, stuff them with cheese, or enjoy them with a well-chilled pint of beer. Theres no denying that pretzels are one of Americas favorite snacks, with the average American consuming 1.5 pounds of these baked treats per year.In observance of National Pretzel Day, Tuesday, April 26, the Bavarian Inn Restaurant is offering a beer and pretzel special at its Michigan on Main Bar and Grill. That day, guests can enjoy a large pretzel along with one of the bar and grills extensive selection of Michigan craft beers for just $7. Cheesy pretzels are available for only 50 cents more.Last year the Bavarian Inn served more than 17,000 pretzels to its guests.Heres a twisted tale: National Pretzel Day originated in Pennsylvania when Governor Ed Rendell; whose state boasts an abundance of German family pretzel bakers; declared it an official observance in 2003.Michigan on Main Bar and Grill inside the Bavarian Inn Restaurant is a casual and contemporary dining space showcasing Michigan-sourced food along with Michigan craft-brewed beers, Michigan wines and specialty Michigan cocktails.For more information on National Pretzel Day at Bavarian Inn Restaurant, call 1-800-BAVARIA or 989-652-9941. You can also visitand click on special events.About Bavarian Inn RestaurantCelebrating 125 years of service in 2013, the Bavarian Inn Restaurant has become a Michigan landmark. Generations of diners, lodgers and tourists from around the globe have discovered true Bavarian hospitality thanks to Dorothy and her late husband William Tiny Zehnder. Guests experience the old-world European charm of the Bavarian Inn  whether its the famous chicken dinners, fresh baked goods or Michigans greatest selection of German beer. Bavarian Inn also prides itself on being one of the top consumers of Pure Michigan agricultural products. Nestled within a backdrop of authentic German architecture, a variety of shops and other fun activities, a trip to Frankenmuth would not be complete without a visit to the Bavarian Inn Restaurant. Learn more atBavarian Inn online press room:About Bavarian Inn RestaurantCelebrating 125 years of service in 2013, the Bavarian Inn Restaurant has become a Michigan landmark. Generations of diners, lodgers and tourists from around the globe have discovered true Bavarian hospitality thanks to Dorothy and her late husband William Tiny Zehnder. Guests experience the old-world European charm of the Bavarian Inn  whether its the famous chicken dinners, fresh baked goods or Michigans greatest selection of German beer. Bavarian Inn also prides itself on being one of the top consumers of Pure Michigan agricultural products. Nestled within a backdrop of authentic German architecture, a variety of shops and other fun activities, a trip to Frankenmuth would not be complete without a visit to the Bavarian Inn Restaurant. Learn more at713 S. Main StreetFrankenmuth, MI
BIC Days in Munich and Bochum  arvato Systems and GBTEC introduce the new functions of BIC and the BIC Platform in the cloud  For the first time, speed projecting and preview of the roadmap for 2015 (arvato Systems) Gutersloh  Financial institutions, companies, administrative offices, and universities: they all rely on the powerful BIC Platform to simplify their day-to-day work in process management. Customers will discuss their experiences using BIC and 
You know the feeling when you find yourself in a remote area of the country and the internet access isumm slow, is the nice word. You can access your email and perhaps see what is going on in the world of social media but, streaming a video, having a video conference or downloading large files is not going to reliably happen. Well, if this problem can be solved at a 
CeBIT, the world's most famous and largest trade fair which spotlights the emerging trends in field of Information and Communication technology, will be hosted in Hannover, Germany during 5th7th March 2013. Q3 technologies, a prominent name in technology consulting, has been participating in CeBIT for the last 6 years and will be there in 2013 also to showcase its expertise in different domains of the software service industry. The keynote 
Hyderabad: The King of Fruits could hurt your pockets this year. The bulk of mangoes coming into the Hyderabad markets faces a 50 per cent drop due to acute deficit in rain and loss of crop due to unseasonal rains.

The prime market for mangoes, the Gaddi Annaram Fruit Market receives 800 to 1,000 lorries of mangoes in April and the number increases to 1,500 to 2,000 loads during May. Each lorry carries two to three tonne of mangoes.

But now, only 200 to 300 truckloads are arriving at Gaddi Annaram Fruit Market. And out of 900 tonnes of stock that has arrived, nearly 30 per cent of fruits have been damaged.

Mostly, mangoes are being brought to this market from Mahabubnagar, Ranga Reddy, Khammam in Telangana and from Kurnool and Krishna districts in Andhra Pradesh. Nearly 15 per cent of mangoes are procured by city retail vendors and remaining fruits are exported to Delhi and Rajasthan.

Owner of Himalaya Fruit Company in the market Mr. Mohammad Ayub said this was the first time in the history of the fruit market, they were getting fewer truckloads. Only 70 per cent of arrivals are good quality. Shortage of rains is the main cause, he said.

K.Laxman Rao, a farmer from Nandigama said by the start of April, he used to export at least five loads of mangoes each day. But now only one or two loads are being exported. However, this time we are getting a good price as demand has increased.

Earlier, we used to get Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,000 per quintal. Now the price is up Rs 30 to Rs 55 per quintal, he said. Mangoes are also being sold in the retail market from Rs 60 to Rs 90 per kilogram. Traders are expecting the price to go up to Rs 120 or higher soon.
Aloha_Trailer_Fire_Photo.PNG.jpg

A 36-year-old Aloha woman faces a first-degree arson charge after allegedly setting her trailer on fire while she and her son were inside, according to the Washington County Sheriff's Office.

(WCSO )

An Aloha woman is accused of intentionally setting a fire inside her family's travel trailer early Tuesday morning while she and her son were inside, according to the Washington County Sheriff's Office.

Kimberly Clemens, 36, lived in the trailer with her teenage children, said Sgt. Bob Ray, a sheriff's office spokesman. She faces an accusation of first-degree arson and was taken to the Washington County Jail. Her bail is set at $250,000.

Kimberly Clemens

Deputies and firefighters responded to Clemens' residence in the 4400 block of Southwest 175th Avenue just after 3:15 a.m. Neighbors had called 911 reporting the fire. Flames engulfed the trailer, but fire crews quickly put them out, according to the sheriff's office.

Deputies found Clemens lying in some grass on the edge of the property, Ray said, and she was taken to the hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation. The trailer was part of a property that has a second trailer and a house, owned by someone else, Ray said.

A detective worked with a fire marshal to determine the fire's cause. Ray said the investigators believe Clemens intentionally lit some items on fire when she was inside with her son and then did not leave. After the fire started, Clemens' son forced his mother out of the trailer, Ray said, and then blocked her from going back inside.

Clemens' other child wasn't inside at the time, Ray said.

Deputies arrested Clemens Tuesday morning after she was released from the hospital. Ray said it's unclear exactly how and why Clemens started the fire.

-- Rebecca Woolington

503-294-4049; @rwoolington
A Kaiser Permanente nurse under criminal investigation for allegedly having inappropriate contact with a patient at a Beaverton clinic was allowed to work during the police inquiry and is accused of abusing another patient during that time, Beaverton police said Monday.

Alex Matthew Woolner, 37, of North Plains was indicted by a grand jury Friday on one count of first-degree criminal mistreatment, three counts of invasion of personal privacy, two counts of computer crime and four counts of third-degree sex abuse, police said. The charges relate to three alleged victims, but detectives have identified two more and are investigating their claims, said Officer Mike Rowe, a Beaverton police spokesman.

Woolner, who worked at the Kaiser Permanente clinic on Southwest Western Avenue in Beaverton, is accused of sexually abusing the three patients, Rowe said. He also is accused of contacting the patients on their personal cellphones after accessing their medical records. Woolner then called and texted them to recommend "additional medical procedures" and told the patients to call him directly, according to a police news release.

One patient, Rowe said, made an appointment at the clinic to see a doctor, but Woolner saw her instead, leading to the accusation of criminal mistreatment.

Woolner is scheduled to be arraigned April 27 in Washington County Circuit Court. Through his attorney, he has denied the allegations and said he eventually will be cleared of all wrongdoing.

He has been registered with the Oregon State Board of Nursing since 2009, most recently as a licensed practical nurse.

Police first started investigating Woolner on Jan. 28 after a woman reported that he made sexual statements to her and sexually touched her during a visit to the Beaverton clinic two days earlier, Rowe said. The woman, Rowe said, had already complained about Woolner to Kaiser.

Woolner had allegedly "subjected the victim to an unnecessary and intrusive exam," according to a police news release.

Rowe said a patrol officer took an initial report and contacted Kaiser staff at the time as part of his investigation. The case was then forwarded to detectives and police sent Kaiser a copy of the report at the company's request, Rowe said.

Kaiser initially released a statement over the weekend saying the company placed Woolner on administrative leave after learning of the allegations against him. But the company clarified that statement Monday after police raised questions about its accuracy.

Kaiser placed Woolner on leave Jan. 28, according to the new statement from Janet O'Hollaren, Kaiser Permanente's vice president of ambulatory care, regional quality and service. The company then conducted its own internal investigation, said Michael Foley, a Kaiser spokesman.

"Unfortunately, that investigation could not confirm that any misconduct had occurred, so Mr. Woolner was allowed to return to work for a brief time," O'Hollaren said.

Foley would not specify the date when Woolner returned to work. He also declined to say why the business allowed Woolner to resume his duties while he was being criminally investigated.

Woolner is accused of abusing another woman who visited the clinic twice on Feb. 17 and Feb. 26, Rowe said.

Woolner was again placed on administrative leave on Feb. 29 after Kaiser received "additional information," according to O'Hollaren's statement. Foley declined to comment on the information the business received.

The second woman reported the alleged abuse to police on March 6, Rowe said. It's unclear how far police were in their investigation at the time of the second report, Rowe said.

During their inquiry, police identified three other alleged victims, Rowe said.

The case was presented to a grand jury Friday and Woolner was indicted on the accusations. He was arrested that evening, booked into the Washington County Jail and released Saturday morning after posting bail, records say.

Woolner worked for Kaiser for two years, according to the business's statement. Police believe he had direct contact with patients at the Beaverton clinic since Jan. 1.

Foley wouldn't comment on Woolner's job responsibilities before that time.

O'Hollaren said Woolner had never had a complaint made against him.

Woolner resigned while under investigation, according to a statement from Kaiser. On March 14, Woolner voluntarily agreed to stop working as a nurse pending further action by the state Board of Nursing.

"The safety of our patients is our highest priority, and we have no tolerance for behavior that puts patients at risk," O'Hollaren said in her statement. "We are dedicated to ensuring that our care centers are safe and welcoming places of healing. We will be reviewing our operations and policies to identify any additional steps we can take to improve patient safety in the future."

Police ask anyone with more information to contact Beaverton police at 503-629-0111 and reference case number 16-740754.

Dana Tims and Andrew Theen of The Oregonian/OregonLive contributed to this report.

-- Rebecca Woolington

503-294-4049; @rwoolington
Missing Arlington Couple

These undated booking photos provided by the Snohomish County Sheriff Office shows Tony Reed, left and John Reed. Authorities are searching for the two brothers who were involved in a property dispute with a missing Washington state couple. Neighbors reported Patrick Shunn and his wife, Monique Patenaude, of Arlington missing on Tuesday when their livestock was left unattended, and detectives in Snohomish County now believe they were killed. (Snohomish County Sheriff Office via AP )

(AP)

SEATTLE -- Patrick Shunn and Monique Patenaude worried about getting on the wrong side of the man who lived a little ways up an old logging road from their 21-acre spread along the Stillaguamish River.



When they sued other neighbors over a property dispute more than two years ago, they avoided naming him as a defendant because they didn't want to irk him, their former lawyer said Monday.



But now Shunn, originally from Oregon City, and Patenaude are missing and presumed murdered, and investigators are trying to track down the man, John Blaine Reed, 53, along with his brother, Tony Clyde Reed, 49. Snohomish County Sheriff Ty Trenary said surveillance video linked them to the dumping of the victims' cars over an embankment in a remote, wooded area near Oso, about 50 miles north-northeast of Seattle.



Both brothers had previously been convicted of felonies, the sheriff's office said, though it did not release details about their backgrounds.



"They weren't looking forward to any kind of conflict with Mr. Reed," the couple's former lawyer, Thomas Adams, said Monday. "They didn't want to provoke any kind of an issue with him."





Patrick Shunn, 45, and Monique Patenaude, 46, have lived in Snohomish County, Washington, for at least three years, a neighbor says. They were last seen Monday, April 11, 2016. (Snohomish County Sheriff's Office)

Neighbors reported Shunn, 45, and Patenaude, 46, missing last Tuesday, after noticing that their animals had not been cared for. A crew in a Snohomish County Sheriff's Office helicopter found their vehicles two days later a few miles north of their home in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains.



After searching the vehicles and the home where John Reed recently lived, detectives concluded the couple had been murdered. Their bodies have not been found, but investigators continued searching Monday.



They were also looking for the Reeds, whom they described as armed and dangerous. John Reed's car was found in Ellensburg, in central Washington, on Saturday, and detectives said the brothers had taken their parents' red 2007 Volkswagen EOS Coupe, with Washington plates AXH5106.



The grim mystery played out on land abutting the nation's worst landslide disaster, the 2014 Oso landslide, which wiped out a rural neighborhood and killed 43 people. In an interview shortly afterward, John Reed told The Seattle Times he watched the slide as it roared past his front yard.



"This mountain of dirt taller than any trees near me cut off my view like a curtain," he said. "And it shot right in front of me, right by my house."



The county bought out Reed's house last month to ease any risks from future flooding, but investigators believe Reed had been returning to the home since then, the sheriff's office said.



Sheriff's spokeswoman Shari Ireton said she did not have information about any controversy between Shunn and Patenaude and John Reed, but that others had described it as a property dispute.



In 2013, Shunn and Patenaude joined two other property owners in suing neighbors David and Shelly Dick over the use of the old logging road, which crosses their property. They alleged that the Dicks had been allowing people to trespass on their land with recreational vehicles so that they could access an unoccupied riverfront parcel owned by the Dicks.



Last month, the Dicks filed a motion asking the court to dismiss the complaint.



John Reed's property was further along the logging road, and he too used it regularly, but the couple didn't want to sue him, Adams said. It's possible he had a right to use the road because of his historical practice of doing so, Adams said, but the couple was also concerned because of things they had heard about him -- though exactly what they had heard remains unclear.



John Reed has been cited for a number of mostly minor offenses, including driving without a license and collecting wood without a permit, for which he was fined $87. He served five years on Department of Corrections supervision in the late 1990s for attempting to elude police in Whatcom County.



Tony Reed has amassed dozens of arrests and twice was under state supervision -- from 1989 to 1991 on drug charges, and from 1994 to 2003 for three misdemeanors, one count of attempting to elude police and one count of third-degree assault.

-- The Associated Press
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An Oregon City couple is accused of failing to report more than $3.3 million in income to the Internal Revenue Service between 2008 and 2013, according to federal documents.

(The Oregonian/file)

Karl Brady, 54

On Tax Day, an Oregon City couple pleaded not guilty to a federal indictment charging them with evading federal taxes by shielding $3.3 million in income and assets from the government.

Karl R. Brady, 54, and his wife, Laura Brady, 55, are accused of creating and using a variety of trusts and financial accounts to conceal their earnings from the Internal Revenue Service.

Karl Brady, one of three owners of Gladstone-based treatment center Northwest Behavioral Healthcare Inc., is accused of concealing income between 2002 and 2015, according to court documents. He also worked as the company's treasurer and vice president of accounting.

Brady earned about $10,000 a week, or about $500,000 or more a year, Assistant U.S. Attorney Donna Maddux said in U.S. District Court in Portland. Just this year, through April 6, he made $96,959.58, Maddux told the court.

The other two owners of the business, which provides residential mental health and drug-and-alcohol treatment to adolescents, have already entered guilty pleas to conspiring to defraud the government and willfully filing a false federal income tax return.

According to federal prosecutors, co-defendants Daniel Mahler, president and chief executive officer, Lyndon Fischer, vice president of marketing, and Karl Brady began in 2002 to pay a promoter of an illegal tax scheme to help them hide their income from the IRS. They each paid the promoter about $20,000, according to a court statement of facts signed by Brady's co-defendants.

Laura Brady, 55

Each of the owners created other companies and accounts and funneled their money into them, according to the court document. They'd meet weekly to divide Northwest Behavioral Healthcare's funds and direct the company's bookkeeper to issue checks to the other companies to avoid reporting payments to the IRS, the court document states.

The bookkeeper reported the payments as "management and professional fees'' in the healthcare company's ledger, according to prosecutors.

Karl Brady and his wife are accused of filing no personal income tax returns between 2003 and 2015.

The two appeared in U.S. District Court in Portland briefly Monday. Each pleaded not guilty to federal indictments that charge each with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and six counts of evasion of income tax.

Maddux said the government will vigorously fight the assignment of a court-appointed attorney for Karl Brady.

"This individual has a level of income that is surprising to most individuals,'' Maddux argued, adding that the public would be outraged to have to support a lawyer for his defense.

She said the couple is living in an RV because they sold their primary home in September 2015, making a profit of $797,000. They also sold a rental property in March for $490,000 and in August sold a family vacation property in Hawaii that was listed for $625,000, the prosecutor told the court. She added that they own several luxury vehicles, including two Lexus cars and a Denali.

The two were released on their own recognizance but are due back in court Wednesday afternoon. They must provide financial affidavits to the court by Tuesday to determine whether they are eligible for a court-appointed attorney.

The maximum sentence for conspiring to defraud the federal government or tax evasions is five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Karl Brady's co-defendants have agreed to pay restitution to the government, as part of pending plea agreements. Mahler would pay $743,662, and Fischer would pay $565,788, according to court documents. Their sentencing hearings are scheduled in July.

IRS special agent Ryan Thompson said in a statement issued Monday in connection with the Bradys' indictment, "This being the close of the tax filing season, we here at the IRS would like to remind the public of their lawful obligation to file a timely and accurate tax return.''

-- Maxine Bernstein

mbernstein@oregonian.com

503-221-8212

@maxoregonian
Clear Creek Distillery makes bottles of brandy with pears in them! How do they do it?

Pears at McCurdy Farms in Parkdale, outside of Hood River, will be turned into pear brandy at Clear Creek Distillery in Portland.

(Stephanie Yao Long/staff)

It takes more than 20 pounds of fruit to make a bottle of Clear Creek's signature pear brandy, the product that launched the Portland distillery. About to celebrate its 30th birthday this month, Clear Creek still sells more of that brandy than anything else.

That's a lot of pears that make it each fall from the Hood River Valley to the Northwest Industrial District distillery, where the fruit is fermented into a mash and fed into a German-made pot still before it winds up in a bottle. If you want to splurge, you can get that bottle with a pear grown inside, as if by magic.

"Our pear brandy is still our best and most popular spirit," says brand steward Rachel Inman. "Nothing beats the nose of those perfectly ripe Bartlett pears that is captured during the distillation process."

That's true, but Clear Creek Distillery has significantly expanded its line of products to include other fruit brandies, spirits and liqueurs focused around Northwest produce. And pretty soon, those bottles will have a whole new look to celebrate 30 years.

History

Inspired by the bounty of his family's orchard and European-style liqueurs and brandies, Stephen McCarthy founded the company in 1986. He traveled to France to see how the best in the world made their eaux de vie, in particular Poire Williams. The natural similarity between the Williams pear and the Bartlett sparked his inaugural pear brandy. Over the years, the product line and acclaim has grown. In 2014, McCarthy decided to retire and sold the company to Oregon-based Hood River distillers. The team at Clear Creek has stayed largely in place since.

Definitions

An eau de vie is a clear brandy made from fermenting and distilling fruit. It takes a lot of fruit to make, is comparable in proof to spirits and has a dry finish. In addition to high-end cocktails, try sipping it neat or chilled as a digestif. By contrast, some cheap fruit-flavored versions you see on the bottom shelves of your local liquor store are basic grape brandy that's been flavored, sometimes artificially. Liqueurs can be made with a brandy or neutral spirit base then flavored and sweetened as desired.

Evolution

Consumer education and changing tastes have expanded the audience for Clear Creek's line. "Thirty years ago, most people had very little experience with pure fruit brandies made in the European tradition," Inman says. "Over the years, their popularity has grown, and the recent explosion of interest in artisan products has brought a new generation of enthusiasts."

Products

Eaux de vie are the heart of Clear Creek's lineup. The flavors include pear, apple, cherry (kirschwasser), framboise and mirabelle plum. If you like your liquor on the sweeter side, try the line of fruit liqueurs, among them cherry, cranberry, marionberry and cassis, the black currant liqueur. The distillery also offers its own single-malt whiskey and a handful of grappas. Perhaps most unusual among the products is the Douglas Fir eau de vie, developed over 10 years to capture complex, floral flavors of the Northwest. It's become a favorite of local bartenders. "People are often reluctant to try it, and it's great to see them pleasantly surprised by the spirit," Inman says.

Bartender praise

"Clear Creek Distillery was instrumental in putting Oregon's distilling scene on the map," says Daniel Osborne of Bull in China, a local drinkware maker and cocktail consultant company. "There is so much integrity in each bottle and barrel, not to mention the quality for mixing cocktails or sipping neat." For Becca June, bar manager at Altabira City Tavern, Clear Creek has always been her go-to for local distillers: "They produce outstanding products that are easy to mix and can also stand on their own. I like their flavor profiles and what they bring to cocktails. Their apple brandy is my favorite."

The new bottle design.

New look

For its 30th birthday, expect a new look on shelves, starting around May 1. "The new packaging and branding will tie all of our products together," Inman says. "Our line has grown so much over the years, with very different labels. With the new labels, there won't be any confusion that they're made by us. The new labels will still be in line with our historic look."

IF YOU GO

Clear Creek Distillery Open House: The distillery will host a birthday part Saturday, April 30, in which guests will be able to taste up to five spirits at no charge, with some extra treats thrown in. Guests must be 21 and over to taste, but children are welcome. Open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. with tours on the hour starting at noon and the last one at 4 p.m. 2389 N.W. Wilson St.

Anniversary dinner: Park Kitchen offers a Clear Creek spirits-paired dinner at 6 p.m. Saturday, May 7, at Park Kitchen, 422 N.W. Eighth Ave. The cost is $100 and includes five courses by Chef David Sapp and drink pairings by bar manager Curtis Day, including gratuity. For reservations, call 503-223-7275 or email info@parkkitchen.com

Free tasting: Punch Bowl Social, 340 S.W. Morrison St., will host this 21-and-over event 4-6 p.m. Wednesday. There will be samples of pear brandy, apple brandy and loganberry liqueur. There will also be specialty cocktail tastes featuring Clear Creek products, including Up Apple's Creek Punch and Loganberry Shake.

Recipes

Try Clear Creek products in these drinks from local bartenders:

Diamond Rush

Diamond Rush

From Daniel Osborne and Lucas Plant, co-owners of Bull in China

2 parts 2-year-old Clear Creek Apple Brandy

1 part lemon

1 part rich honey syrup (2 parts honey to 1 part water)

Shake everything with ice vigorously until shaker is frosty. Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice.

Pear Collins

From Jeffrey Morgenthaler, bar manager of Clyde Common (1014 S.W. Stark St.)

1 1/2 ounce Clear Creek pear brandy

3/4 ounce lemon juice

1/2 ounce simple syrup

2 ounces soda water

Shake brandy, lemon and syrup with cracked ice until chilled, top with sparkling water and strain over fresh ice in a chilled Collins glass. Garnish with a lemon peel.

Destined for the Sun

Destined for the Sun

From Becca June, bar manager of Altabira City Tavern (1021 N.E. Grand Ave.)

1 1/2 ounce Cocchi Americano aperitif wine

1/2 ounce Clear Creek apple brandy

1/2 ounce Creme Yvette liqueur

1 dropper of Bittered Sling Moondog bitters

Stir ingredients with ice and strain into rocks glass with ice. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Left Coast

From Portland-based cocktail expert Jim Meehan

3/4 ounce Clear Creek blue plum brandy

3/4 ounce Anchor Genevieve genever gin

1/2 ounce Luxardo maraschino liqueur

1/2 ounce lemon juice

1/2 ounce pineapple juice

1 barspoon Rothman & Winter Creme de Violette

Shake everything with ice and strain into chilled coupe. No garnish.

Forest Old Fashioned

Forest Old Fashioned

From Matt Mount, co-owner of Merit Badge, a local bar caterer

2 ounces Temperance Trader or other bourbon

1/4 ounce Clear Creek Douglas Fir eau de vie

1/4 ounce simple syrup

4 dashes of Bitter Housewife Aromatic Bitters

Stir with ice, strain over fresh ice in a double old-fashioned glass. Garnish with a pinch of Jacobsen Salt and orange peel.

Silver Spoon

From Daniel Shoemaker and Sean Hoard, co-owners of the Commissary, created for Renata (626 S.E. Main St.)

1 1/2 ounces Clear Creek Marc de Gewurtzraminer grappa

3/4 ounce nectarine shrub (a Commissary ingredient made with yellow nectarines, Champagne vinegar, honey and tarragon)

3 lemon wheels

1 orange wheel

1/8 teaspoon freshly grated cinnamon

Fresh, seasonal fruits

Combine all ingredients except the fruits in a shaker, and shake well. Strain over cracked ice in a wine glass, and top with 2 ounces prosecco. Garnish garishly with seasonal fruits.

Pear Brandy Sidecar

Pear Brandy Sidecar

From Kevin Ludwig, while working at Park Kitchen (422 N.W. Eighth Ave.)

1 1/2 ounce Clear Creek pear brandy

1 ounce Cointreau

One lemon wedge

Juice of one lime

Juice of one orange

1 tablespoon sugar

Splash of simple syrup (optional)

Wet the rim of a martini glass with lemon. Dip glass into plate of sugar. Shake brandy, Cointreau, lime, orange and sugar with ice, strain into glass.

-- Colin Powers
A new food cart just south of Bandon has drawn controversy for its name and logo, the Bandon Western World reports.

The nearly two-month-old cart, opened by Sandee Klein, 66, serves fry bread tacos and fruit pies from Pow Wow Fried, a cart with a logo depicting a child in Native American head dress.

According to the newspaper, controversy broke out after a Port Orford woman drove by the cart, saw the logo then posted on a Facebook group asking whether Native Americans found the food truck offensive.

Klein's daughter, Anne Klein-Jelinek, said she received threats of legal action via private Facebook message if the food truck's name remained unchanged. Some were offended because the Native American cartoon was wearing a headdress, Jelinek said.
Music legend Paul McCartney didn't just rock out Portland's Moda Center on Friday. He joined forces with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to honor Portland as 2016's Most Vegan-Friendly City in the United States.

Before his concert, McCartney and the animal rights organization's vice president, Dan Mathews, presented Mayor Charlie Hales with a certificate honoring the designation, which cited Portland's many vegan restaurants and businesses.

"The City of Roses is the city of the future," McCartney said, according to a press release from the organization.

McCartney, a longtime vegetarian, was given a bouquet of flowers carved out of vegetables, along with samples of vegan cheese from Vtopia Cheese Shop & Deli and cold cuts made out of seitan from Homegrown Smoker Vegan Barbecue.

Among the other businesses the organization recognized were Back to Eden Bakery, Portobello Vegan Trattoria, Petunia's Pies & Pastries, and Southeast Portland's vegan mini mall, which includes Sweetpea Baking Co., Herbivore Clothing Co., and Food Fight! Vegan Grocery.

The organization didn't just focus on restaurants. On its website, the organization noted that in Portland, you can find vegan doctors, counselors, and even vegan real-estate agents.

Rounding out the list of the top 10 vegan-friendly cities are Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Nashville, San Diego, Honolulu and Seattle, along with Austin, Texas, and Richmond, Virginia.

-- Grant Butler

503-221-8566; @grantbutler
The United States criticised China for its failure to bring down overcapacity and threatened to impose trade curbs.

Brussels/Beijing: China and other major steel-producing countries failed to agree measures to tackle a global steel crisis as the sides argued over the causes of overcapacity, prompting US criticism of Beijings approach and an angry response from Chinese officials.

A meeting of ministers and trade officials from over 30 countries, hosted by Belgium and the OECD on Monday, sought to tackle excess capacity, but concluded only that it had to be dealt with in a swift and structural way.

Washington pointed the finger at China over the failure of the talks, saying Beijing needed to act on overcapacity or face possible trade action from other countries. Unless China starts to take timely and concrete actions to reduce its excess production and capacity in industries including steel... the fundamental structural problems in the industry will remain and affected governments  including the United States  will have no alternatives other than trade action to avoid harm to their domestic industries and workers, US secretary of commerce Penny Pritzker said.

Asked what steps the Chinese government would take following the unsuccessful talks, China commerce ministry spokesman Shen Danyang told reporters on Tuesday: China has already done more than enough. What more do you want us to do?

Steel is the food of industry, the food of economic development. At present, the major problem is that countries that need food have a poor appetite so it looks like theres too much food.

The OECD said global steelmaking capacity was 2.37 billion tonnes in 2015, but declining production meant that only 67.5 per cent of that was being used, down from 70.9 per cent in 2014.

Britain in particular has felt the squeeze as its largest producer Tata Steel has announced plans to pull out of the country, threatening 15,000 jobs. Last week, more than 40,000 German steel workers took to the streets to protest against dumping from China.

China, the worlds top steel producer, has been ramping up exports of steel in recent years, as it battles to steer its economy into services-led growth and away from traditional manufacturing, while keeping employment levels high.

Chinas steel exports jumped 30 per cent from a year ago to 9.98 million tonnes in March despite a slew of anti-dumping measures globally. But blaming China for woes in the global steel industry is simply a lazy excuse for protectionism, and such finger-pointing will be counter-productive, Chinas official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary.

At a news conference following the meeting, deep divisions between China and other producers were clear. Cecelia Malmstrom, the EUs trade commissioner, insisted governments should not grant subsidies that keep unviable plants running and should subject state-controlled firms to the same rules as the private sector.

Tensions have erupted between other producers, with Japan leading criticism of Indian minimum prices for imported steel at a recent WTO meeting and Japan and South Korea coming under fire for exporting steel products cheaper than they sell them at home.
Volunteer Literacy Tutoring program

Portland Community College's Volunteer Literacy Tutoring program will end in the summer.

(Courtesy of Kathleen Holloway,PCC)

Andy Simon retired from Portland Community College in 2009 after more than three decades in the classroom, and last fall the former philosophy professor got connected with a volunteer tutoring program through his old employer.

Simon, 69, felt the program was perfectly suited to what he wanted in a volunteer opportunity.

He went through a training seminar, then started working one-on-one as a tutor twice a week with a 30-year-old refugee from Chad.

Several months in, Simon said, the program and his relationship are incredibly rewarding. "He can look at a sentence he's never seen before and read it," Simon said of the 30-year-old African immigrant he's working with. "That's really gratifying to him and to me,".

Starting in July, hundreds of immigrants and refugees with little or no literacy skills will lose one long-time option for free tutoring help through PCC.

The community college, Oregon's largest post-secondary institution, is eliminating its Volunteer Literacy Tutoring program effective June 30. The program has existed in some form since 1979, offering a place where immigrants and community volunteers connect and, supporters say, new Portlanders find one-on one help and a friendly face.

But the college said it is eliminating VLT this summer, in favor of a new "decentralized" approach, where tutoring assistance will depend on the specific campus. PCC said it will expand the number of courses for students' whose first language isn't English at its growing Southeast Campus on 82nd Avenue and Division Street.

A PCC spokeswoman said the long-servicing volunteer program, while "a product of tremendous commitment and skill" from the handful of part-time staffers and 200 volunteers, "did not produce outcomes" for low-skilled students.

"We're looking to the quality of the program," said Tanya Batazhan, PCC's adult basic skills director. In the 2015-16 school year, the literacy program cost $188,000 to operate. PCC paid more than half of the price tag, while a federal grant that expires this summer covered $79,000 of the program.

PCC has eight levels of courses for English language learners, ranging from illiterate or virtually illiterate to fluent. Supporters say the volunteer program fills a niche and offers more hands-on support for students who are in the bottom three levels and can't get into the higher-level courses because of lack of space.

"It's upsetting for the students and its upsetting for the tutors," said Kathleen Holloway, the senior literacy coordinator who has worked at PCC for 16 years. Holloway said she and five other part-time staffers will lose their jobs this summer.

Refugee advocates say the changes come at a time when that population, and the need for more programs, is only increasing.

"Any cuts to any program that provide space where English learners will get the skills that they need is going to be devastating," said Kayse Jama, executive director of the Center for Intercultural Organizing.

Jama said connecting community volunteers and immigrants has a "a social cohesion" aspect as well. "We should be thinking about increasing that," he said.

The tutoring program is offered at six locations across the metro area and has a presence at four different PCC campuses, Holloway said.

Holloway said the program produced about 30,000 volunteer hours last year, with an estimated 200 volunteers helping 700 low-income immigrants, refugees and others in remedial Adult Basic Education courses to both native and non-native English speakers.

PCC's English as second language program fields about 3,000 students across the district, Batazhan said.

PCC Board Meeting

When: April 21, 2016, Work Session begins at 6 p.m.

Where: PCC Cascades, Student Union, Rooms 203/204

705 N. Killingsworth St. Portland, OR 97217

More Info:

The clientele depends on the center. The Southeast Division Street campus has a large number of Chinese and Vietnamese students. There are also Arabic speakers from Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East. The Sylvania campus in Southeast draws a larger Farsi-speaking demographic, while Hillsboro and Beaverton's attendees are overwhelmingly Spanish speaking.

All the students are enrolled at PCC, but the courses don't offer credits or deliver certificates or degrees.

Batazhan said PCC does have a wait list of about 50 students, largely at the Southeast campus.

But the number of students taking classes at the Sylvania campus plummeted in recent years.

She said the school will also offer free literacy group trainings and other options that are still being explored. Beyond that, students who can't get into the more advanced classes can enroll in "Survival English" courses, she said. Those classes aren't free.

In an email, Holloway said those courses are "not a comparable substitute and general tutoring services at the college are not well set up to serve this population."

Without the center, Simon said he might not be able to continue tutoring the man. PCC's center offers resources, such as reading books, flash cards and a private meeting room at its Southeast Portland campus.

About 10 percent of the VLT program is designed for native English speakers who are illiterate or working on basic adult education.

"It's almost like the school is saying they have to already be literate enough to get access to any help," said Andrea Reust, a volunteer who is working on her masters in adult basic education through Colorado State University.

Batazhan agreed that the volunteers and students form a connection. "Many of them are amazing," she said of the volunteers, some who are education students or retired teachers.

But she said volunteers will still the opportunity to continue to share their time, just not through the VLT program, and free options will remain available.

Supporters plan to show up Thursday at the PCC's Board of Trustees meeting to oppose the decision.



-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen
FGPDcar.jpg

(Courtesy of Forest Grove Police Department)

The following is a list of calls, provided by the Forest Grove Police Department, that officers responded to during the past week.

April 10

- A woman called in a noise complaint on her neighbor who was doing roof work, stating she had asked him to stop repair but he was rude to her.

- An officer was informed that a park table had been recently damaged. Police found a man's name carved into the table; officers located the man who admitted to defacing property. He was issued a citation and released.

- A nurse reported seeing a car full of trash in a clinic parking lot, with suspicious individuals hanging around. Officers contacted and asked the two individuals, who were transient and living out of the car, to move along, which they did without incident.

April 11

- Police received a call that a man's sidewalk had been graffitied and white supremacist literature left on his lawn one day after having an African American friend visit his home.

- A caller reported a burglary that had occurred several days earlier in which two security cameras, a laptop, two cases of soda, and three rolls of toilet paper were taken. Police are still investigating.

- Officers assisted Forest Grove Fire & Rescue in dealing with a man who had passed out for an unknown reason at his place of work. It was learned the man had been drinking alcohol on the job and was heavily intoxicated. The man was promptly fired from his job and issued a trespass warning; he refused medical attention.

April 12

- Officers followed up on a report that a dog had been poisoned near a park on Elm. Investigation and consultation with veterinarians yielded no evidence that any poisoning had taken place. Police received more calls after the incident garnered media attention from numerous concerned sources but no other reports of possible poisonings were received.

- A concerned citizen called to report that residents of a neighboring apartment moved out last week but that the neighbor's son keeps returning and going inside the apartment. Officers arrived and learned the neighbors are still in the process of moving out.

- A disgruntled customer entered a local stored demanding a hand count of his bottles. Upset by the answer to his demands, he hit the manager in the head. The case is under investigation.

April 13

- A caller reported that they were flagged down by a man stating he was numb and in pain. The man further reported that his genitals had been damaged and that infection had set in. Police were cancelled by medical personnel on scene prior to arrival.

- Police received a tip that a "plastic grenade" was in a roadway. Officers found it to be a broken plastic toy and disposed of it.

- Officers found a vehicle they had been searching for at a local hotel. At the location, they found a registered sex offender recently released from prison along with his father. A consent search yielded a gun, morphine, and a heroin kit. The son was referred to his parole officer, while the father was lodged in jail. While being lodged at the jail, the father was reunited with his other son who had simultaneously been arrested for unrelated charges in another area of the county.

April 14

- A man driving near the Pacific campus crashed into four parked cars and was determined to be driving under the influence of drugs.

- A woman reported seeing an unknown vehicle driving in the area and that the driver was taking photos of her house. The driver was discovered to be a Realtor; police advised the caller that Realtors often take pictures of homes for their property comparisons.

- A caller reported that a man and woman were standing behind a shopping center with several backpacks full of items they were selling for half price. The couple told the caller that the items were stolen.

April 15

- Police received a report than a woman took several coffee creamers from a local convenience store. After being confronted by the convenience store manager, the woman pulled out a creamer from her pocket and paid for it. No other creamers were seen in her pockets.

- A caller reported seeing a suspicious vehicle parked in a residential area, possibly dumping trash in the road, and that the driver had gotten out of the car and moved to the back seat. Officers contacted the young couple in the back seat of the car who were talking and playing Candy Crush.

- Officers attended to a customer at a separate local convenience store, who was acting strange and trying to find a cab from the shop. The woman told officers she was brought to Forest Grove by Santa Claus, who had paid her $50 for sex. Police were unable to locate "Santa" or verify the story, but officers assisted her in calling her a cab to take her back to Hillsboro.

April 16

- A man walked into Safeway, retrieved a chair from an eating area, and passed out in it in front of Customer Service. Police transported the man to a detox center after they determined he was on heroin and marijuana.

- Police were called after a man got into a fight with his father and punched him several times. When officers arrive, the son obtained a knife and challenged officers to shoot him. A taser and pepper spray was deployed to subdue the man who was then taken into custody.

- While investigating a disturbance in a parking lot, officers were directed to an unconscious female covered in vomit. The woman was transported to the hospital by ambulance.
You've heard of home stagers, people with interior design and marketing skills who are hired to prepare a place for sale.

The best can make visitors feel instantly at home, whether they're seeing a dwelling in person or only through photographs.

Successful staging relies on the same principles as good interior design.

"Symmetry, repetition and rhythm exists throughout nature and humans find them to be aesthetically pleasing," says Justin Riordan, who combines his background as an architect, creative director and master image maker in his work at Spade and Archer Design Agency, a home staging company based in Portland with services in Seattle and Palm Springs.

"Symmetry can be found in most animals and insects. Repetition is why we think flowers are so pleasing. Rhythm is in the ripples of a sand dune," he explains. "A quick and easy way to make a space more aesthetically pleasing is to use these simple principles of good design."

Riordan is often referred to as the "stager to the stars" because of real estate agencies' eagerness to work with him and his clients' willingness to pass him name on to friends.

The Oregonian/Oregonlive tested Riordan last year by asking him to send us 10 tips to capture the best photos for a home sale, rental or just bragging. His home-selfie ideas were helpful, informed and exceeded our expectations. In fact, he gave us 12 great home portrait tips with photos to illustrate his points.

His suggestions for creating a good first impression included limiting the color scheme and not over decorating to easy ones like put down the toilet seat and get out of the mirror.

What questions do you have? You can meet Riordan at the free Ceilume+Portland Architecture Designer Spotlight starting at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 28 at Ceilume's showroom, 1225 S.E. Grand Ave.

Riordan will be interviewed by design writer Brian Libby, founder and editor of the Portland Architecture blog. Questions from the audience are invited, including ways to prepare a home for sale or just easier living.

Since we couldn't wait until April 28, we asked Riordan to tell us five things he knows for sure about interior design:

Good design cannot exist in the absence of good service. A person with good taste can be grown into a great designer, but good taste alone is not enough. It's not nearly as much fun as it appears to be. Not everybody will like what you do, and that is OK. Reputation is everything, you are only as good as your last project.

If you go: Doors to the Ceilume's ceiling panel and tile showroom open at 5 p.m. Riordan and Libby's talk will start at 6 p.m., with networking before and after. Beer, wine and other refreshments will be provided.

Ceilume has 35 different thermoplastic ceiling tiles and panels that look like wood or tin. They are used to resurface or replace existing ceilings. The showroom is open to the public 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

-- Janet Eastman



jeastman@oregonian.com

503-799-8739

@janeteastman



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The Oregon Court of Appeals has overturned the

who once considered her a trusted friend.

The Appeals Court

that the case against Kristina Kaino-Smith should return to Clackamas County Circuit Court for a new trial because recorded statements from her husband were "inadmissable hearsay" and shouldn't have been played for a jury.

A jury found Kaino-Smith guilty in February 2014 of first-degree aggravated theft, first-degree theft and first-degree forgery and she was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.

Kaino-Smith, 44, and her husband began working for Rick Jones Motor Co. in 2008. The owner, Rick Jones, had known the husband, Kevin Smith, for 25 years and he also became friends with Kaino-Smith over time. Smith worked as a salesman and Kaino-Smith worked part-time as the business manager.

Prosecutors said Kaino-Smith forged Jones' name on 111 checks to herself, which paid for vacations to Hawaii, spa visits, expensive make-up, shopping trips and other gifts. During her sentencing, Kaino-Smith denied stealing any money, claimed she and her husband were business partners with Jones and were entitled to the business' assets.

Smith, who was recorded during a conversation with Jones, claimed to know nothing of the thefts. Prosecutors claimed he effectively denied any partnership that his wife had claimed.

Kaino-Smith appealed her conviction and cited the audio recordings as a point of contention.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com

503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey
Mumbai: Anushka Sharma, who is currently in Delhi shooting the final schedule of her upcoming film Sultan, was in for a sweet surprise by her films director. Earlier this week, Sultans team went out for dinner in Delhi where they treated the actress with her favourite cuisine.

The team was celebrating as the actress wrapped up one of the most challenging films of her career. Not many know this but Anushka Sharma likes Japanese food and sushi happens to be one of her favourites. So the filmmaker, Ali Abbaz Zafar treated the actress with a boat full of sushi, which Anushka enjoyed fondly.

After a rigorous shoot session, this treat was a soothing moment for Anushka and the films team as they took some time off to enjoy. In the pictures from their dinner outing, which found its way on the internet, we see Anushka enjoying a mouth-watering boat full of sushi.
Mumbai: Ranveer Singh and Vaani Kapoor are having a blast shooting for their upcoming film Befikre in Paris. From exploring the city of love to letting her hair catch the wind, Vaani Kapoor is doing it all.

Going by the beautiful pictures of Vaani and Ranveer from Paris, its not wrong to say that the two are having the time of their lives. In between Befikre shoot, Vaani captured Eiffel Tower through her eyes and the picture will give you major wanderlust.

Aditya Chopra spotted on the sets of Befikre

Ranveer Singh poses with a few fans gathered on the sets of the film.

In another pictures, we see Vani posing on Paris Love Lock bridge with her hair loose and bright smile on her face.

Ranveer and Vaani gear up for their shot.

While we see Vaani posing along, her co-star Ranveer Singh was snapped with few fans while shooting for the film. The actor had also earlier released their films first look on Instagram.

Ranveer Singh poses with a fan in Paris.
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Reportedly, the cyber crime cops were to visit Kangana's house on Monday, April 18 to record her statement, but she postponed it to April 30.

Mumbai: Proceedings into the ongoing legal battle between Hrithik Roshan and Kangana Ranaut have been stalled as the latter is yet to record her statement.

According to reports, the cyber crime cops were to visit Kangana's house on Monday, April 18 to record her statement and inspect her computer and electronic devices, but it was postponed when her lawyer Rizwan Siddiquee informed that she is unavailable.

Read: Kangana's affair with Hrithik only happened in her head, claims a friend

Apparently, Hrithiks lawyer Dipesh Mehta has now submitted a bunch of 40 additional emails sent by Kangana to Hrithiks original email address as it could be vital in the ongoing probe.

On March 25, Hrithik had filed an FIR about impersonation under the Information Technology Act and an offence of cheating under Indian Penal Code against an unknown person.

Read: Hrithik never proposed to Kangana, passport reveals he didn't visit Paris

In his FIR, he mentioned that on May 24, 2014, at a party hosted by Karan Johar , Kangana thanked him for appreciating her work in 'Queen'. Later, it surfaced that Kangana was sending emails to the wrong account.

Read: Lawyer claims Hrithik circulating Kangana's objectionable photos in industry

For the uninitiated, this war started when Kangana was asked about being ousted from 'Aashiqui 3'. She had said, Yes, many lame rumours are doing the rounds, even a dumba** can tell where these rumours are coming from. I dont know why exes do silly things to get your attention. For me that chapter is over and I dont dig graves.

Soon after this comment, Hrithik tweeted, Ther r more chances of me having had an affair with d Pope dan any of d (Im sure wonderful) women d media hs ben naming. Thanks but no thanks.

Kangana gave a fitting reply to this sarcastic tweet in a television interview, she said, No. I am not hurt. I respect the other person's opinion also. It's very likely that a person can have a different perspective on the same situation or rather the past. But then, stick to your stand. Don't slyly pursue people and spy on them, and chase them. So, we sign and seal the deal and then move on."
Dilip Kumar thanked fans for their wishes, he wrote, "By Gods grace feeling brighter and better. Thank you all for your prayers, love and affection."

Mumbai: Veteran actor Dilip Kumar, who was hospitalised following respiratory problems, is doing fine and will be discharged in another three days, a doctor said today.

The 93-year-old thespian was admitted to Lilavati hospital in suburban Bandra on April 16. "There have been some rumours about Dilip Kumar's

condition, but they are not true at all. He is fully conscious and has shown remarkable improvement. He is not in ICU, not on ventilator but in his room. He will be discharged in another three days," Dr Jalil Parkar of Lilavati Hospital told reporters here.

The actor is stable and is also able to have his food properly, the doctor added. Doctors attending to the thespian had yesterday said the next two days will be crucial for him.

Meanwhile, the legendary star has thanked fans for their wishes. "By Gods grace feeling brighter and better. Thank you all for your prayers, love and affection," a post on the official Twitter handle of the actor read. A smiling picture of Dilip Kumar was shared along with the tweet.

By God's grace feeling brighter and better.  Dilip Kumar (@TheDilipKumar) April 18, 2016

Thank you all for your prayers, love and affection. pic.twitter.com/z3290IaBCh  Dilip Kumar (@TheDilipKumar) April 18, 2016

His wife actress Saira Banu had earlier said that the actor was hospitalised as he was suffering from high fever, chest infection and respiratory problems.

The Bollywood legend, whose real name is Mohammad Yusuf Khan, acted in many superhit films during his six-decade long career such as "Madhumati", "Devdas", "Mughal-e-Azam", "Ganga Jamuna", "Ram Aur Shyam" and "Karma".

He was last seen on screen in the film "Qila" in 1998.

He was honoured with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, the country's highest decoration in cinema, in 1994 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2015.
Todd McInturf

DETROIT (AP)  Authorities say a 6-month-old girl slain in Detroit over the weekend was shot in the back.

The Detroit News reports Monday that the Wayne County medical examiner's office says the infant's death has been ruled a homicide.
Midland County maintained its top 10 ranking, and even moved up two spots, as one of Michigans healthiest counties. The County Health Rankings (CHR) study, prepared by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, ranks nearly every county in the U.S. After being ranked 10th last year, Midland County moved up to eighth in health outcomes for 2016 out of the 83 counties in Michigan.

Our community is serious about a healthy community and a healthy lifestyle, said County Health Director Mike Krecek. The report showed a lot of good things going on in a lot of different areas.

The rankings help counties understand what influences how healthy residents are and how long they will live. Besides overall Health Outcomes, Michigan counties were ranked according to:

 Quality of life  physical health days, poor mental health days

 Health behaviors  adult smoking and obesity, exercise and alcohol consumption

 Clinical care  doctor/patient ratio, diabetic monitoring

 Social and economic factors  education, unemployment, violent crimes and children in poverty

 Physical environment  air pollution, housing and commute.

Counties are ranked relative to the health of other counties in the same state and against a state average. Each county is also ranked nationally against the top 10 percent (Top U.S. Performers).

The ranking started in 2010 and we were 23rd the first year, said Krecek of Health Outcomes. Weve improved every year since.

One of the community initiatives, Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP), measures and addresses the health needs in the community. The plan identified three areas: substance use disorder; healthy weight; and later life quality as areas that need addressing.

As a result of the last communication, CHIP is paving the way for additional focus on health behavior and activities, Krecek said. There are some good community leaders helping to lead the way.

The 2016 County Health Rankings showed the largest improvement for Midland County in Clinical Care as the county improved to fourth in 2016 from eighth in 2015.

Contributing to the improvement was the drop in the ratio of primary care physicians/patients from 1,075:1 in 2015 to 990:1. Over the same period, the ratio of dentists to patients decreased from 1,472:1 to 1,410:1 while mental health providers fell from 538:1 to 510:1.

It has been a concentrated effort by (MidMichigan Medical Health) to make that a priority, Krecek said. Affiliations with University of Michigan and Michigan State University have helped to bolster the ratio.

Even though Midland County ranks 10th overall, its mental health providers/patient ratio ranks 22nd in Michigan. Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor area) has the best ratio at 220:1 while Ontonagon County (western U.P.) is last at 6,172:1.

I know that CHIP picked the top three areas, but there is also another group on mental health issues. That will probably become a fourth priority. That group was spawned independently of the rankings, Krecek said.

Compared to the Top U.S. Performers, primary care physicians rank in the top 10 percent while the dentist/patient ratio is just outside of the top 10. As with the state ranking, the mental health provider ratio is well outside the top 10. The national number stands at 370:1.

The number of uninsured fell from 11 percent to 10 percent in 2016 while the teen birth rate, diabetic monitoring and mammography screening all qualified as one of the Top U.S. Performers.

The 2016 Health Outcomes overall state rankings saw Ottawa and Leelanau retain their hold on the top two spots. Other area counties included: Bay 45th, Gladwin 63rd, Isabella 65th, and Saginaw 76th.

For the complete report on Midland County, visit: http://bit.ly/1SUYh7q.
Midland Public Schools could have its largest surplus in several years, according to projections for the 2016-17 school year.

MPS Associate Superintendent Robert Cooper told the Board of Education Monday that the district is on track to have a surplus of $247,000 at the end of the current year, and could have a surplus of $1.85 million at the end of the 2016-17 school year.

Cooper based the projection on several factors, including a one-time savings of about $1 million due to a change from the districts former self-funded health insurance plan to its current premium-based plan. Other savings include lower staffing costs for many teachers who will be just starting their careers next year in the wake of this years retirement incentive.

Everyone has done a lot of very hard work to move from budget deficits to a possible surplus, said Board President Angela Brandstadt.

Board Treasurer Jerry Wasserman praised the huge sacrifice from employee groups as a major factor in moving toward budget stability.

It is incredible what weve come from, he said.

Cooper based prospective budget numbers for next year on an estimated loss of 55 students, but he cautioned that the effects of the Dow Chemical Co.-DuPont merger remain unknown.

Wasserman said the surplus could very well be needed depending on how the student population is affected by the merger and the eventual splitting of DowDuPont into three companies.

Also Monday, the board officially approved previously announced appointments of Steven Poole as principal of H.H. Dow High School and Ted Davis as principal of Jefferson Middle School. Poole is currently principal at Jefferson and Davis is assistant principal at Dow.

Its a new challenge. Its a fantastic building, Poole said at the meeting. Im also leaving a great building.

Im excited about the opportunity, Davis said. Its also a little bit bittersweet.

Poole and Davis will begin their new duties July 1.

MPS Superintendent Michael Sharrow said there are now four open assistant principal positions in the district, and some 150 people have applied for the jobs. He also said about 500 prospective teachers are coming to an MPS job fair on May 24.

The board also approved a meal price increase for next year. Breakfast and lunch prices will rise by 20 cents at the elementary level, to $1.60 for breakfast and $2.50 for lunch, and 25 cents at the secondary level, to $1.90 for breakfast and $2.75 for the base lunch price. Reduced lunch prices will remain at 40 cents as required by federal law, and free lunches will remain free. Milk prices are not affected by the increases.

The increases are due to the rising cost of food and new federal law requirements for more vegetables and fruits, Cooper said.

Also Monday, the board approved $197,000 for resurfacing the track at Midland Community Stadium. The contract was awarded to the low bidder, Star Trac Enterprises of Southfield. The funds come from the bond issue approved by voters last year. The project was to have been done later in the sequence of bond projects, but serious issues with the track prompted the change, said Sharrow.

The superintendent said other bond work continues to move ahead, with over 100 contractors at work at the site of the Central Park Elementary School. Sharrow said the current HVAC equipment at Central Auditorium is being evaluated to see if it can continue to be used. Bids for auditorium renovation are expected to be solicited in early summer.

Were now moving quite quickly, he said.

The Northeast Middle School FIRST Tech robotics team made a presentation to the board, demonstrating the robot the group built this year. Northeast moved up to FIRST Tech this year, having received a grant for the program which uses a kit of materials and Android-based controls. The school previously participated in the FIRST Lego League.

FIRST  For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology  was founded in the early 1990s by inventor/entrepreneur Dean Kamen to encourage hands-on, engaging science and technology education.

Finally, the superintendent presented his April Shining Star awards to Director of Facilities and Operations Mike Moeggenberg and Chestnut Hill Spanish teacher Jennifer Benes, also an elementary teacher leader.
Warning that it is vital to eliminate student debt for university graduates, Dr. Daniel Hurley visited Midland recently to share on the topic: College Affordability: Why it matters?

We can no longer have the next generation debt finance a college education, Hurley said. After graduation, for the next 10 years out of college, instead of buying refrigerators, cars, houses and spending all that money on services, they are going to be sending a check to Uncle Sam. That does not generate economic activity. That is a major generational economic tsunami that is going to hit us.

Hurley, CEO of the Michigan Association of State Universities (MASU), spoke at a Midland Area Chamber of Commerce Issues and Answers event at the Holiday Inn.

I think one of the strongest things we can do is to continue to strengthen the K-12 educational experience and especially those core courses in high school. ... I think support networks are key. A lot of (universities) are getting into advising and mentoring, said Hurley.

Before leading MASU, Hurley served as the associate vice president for government relations and state policy for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, in Washington, D.C.

MASU represents 15 public, four-year universities, as they advocate higher education as a public good and promote its collective value in serving the public interest and the State of Michigan.

Michigan is unique in its higher education. We are probably the most independent, autonomous, non system of public higher education in the country, Hurley said. We think that is very helpful. It allows the governing boards to have primary oversight of the revenues and expenditures and other key policy matters. It allows the universities to be much more nimble, market responsive and less bureaucratic.

The MASU board, which formerly was called the Presidents Council, is comprised of 13 university presidents and the two chancellors that head campuses at UM-Flint and UM-Dearborn.

CHALLENGES

Gov. Snyder has set a goal, by 2025, for 60 percent of adult residents to acquire a post secondary degree or credentials. Michigan is gaining on that goal. The Lumina Foundation, in its A Stronger Nation 2016 report, stated that in 2008, 35.7 percent of residents held an associates degree or higher. As of 2014, that number had risen to 39.3 percent. For the first time, the 2016 report included those that have obtained a high quality certificate, which increases the number to 43.3 percent. In Midland County, those holding an associates degree or higher, stands at 46.47 percent.

The data supports that the more you learn the more you earn, Hurley said. The value add increases for those with a 4-year degree or higher.

Even though the number of those holding a post secondary degree is on the rise, Michigan has lagged behind in its funding for higher education. Nationally, over the last five years, states have invested about 11.6 percent more in higher education. In Michigan, that amount is down 2.4 percent.

In the short term, the last five years, we have seen state reinvestment in education. But the longer term, which is not unique to Michigan, the primary theme in American higher public education has been state disinvestment. I dont think that has been on purpose. There has been a tremendous amount of pressure: Medicaid spending, corrections and K-12 education have all squeezed out higher education, Hurley said.

Universities receive funding from two sources: appropriations and tuition. Numbers for those two sources have gone in opposite directions. In 1979, tuition dollars stood at 30 percent while appropriation dollars were at 70 percent. 2015 saw those two numbers change to 77 percent for tuition and 23 percent appropriations. The national average is 52 percent state funded, 43 percent tuition. The State Higher Education Executive Officers reported that in 2015, the national average was 51.1 percent stated support, 42.7 percent tuition and 6.2 percent local funding.

Our own state legislature analysis says that 80 percent of the state tuition price increases are attributed to those state funding reductions, Hurley said.

STUDENT DEBT: An issue, not a crisis

In Michigan, about 40 percent leave school and graduate with no student debt. The national average for those who leave school with student debt is 60 percent. Michigan stands 61 percent.

Forty percent of all students owe less than $10,000 and it is just a very small minority that owe six figures and those people are fine. Theyre doctors, lawyers, Hurley said. The less you owe in student debt, the more likely you are to be able to pay it back. Nationally, the actual average student loan debt is about $29,000.

SOLUTIONS

Hurley proposed the following solutions to the student debt issue:

1. Student retention - There is a lot more sophistication taking place in terms of student retention.

2. Innovation in instructional delivery - Can we do a better job with programs and classes, online and in person, in a way that decreases costs and increases student success?

3. Pre college credit (AP courses/dual enrollment). That continues to grow.

4. Edupreneuralism (an entrepreneur in the education sector) - There are hundreds of millions of dollars being invested each year in terms of new ways of delivering higher education.

For more information on MASU visit: masu.org

For the A Strong Nation 2016 report, visit: luminafoundation.org/stronger_nation2016
Congressman Dan Kildee D- Flint Township, has announced that the 2016 Congressional Art Competition has begun, encouraging all high school students (grades 9-12) who live in the Fifth Congressional District to submit artwork for the competition.

The Congressional Art Competition is a great opportunity to showcase the talent and creativity of high schoolers throughout Michigan and the nation. I am pleased to sponsor the competition in Michigans Fifth District, and I encourage all students to participate, Kildee said. It is important to provide opportunities for students to be creative and expressive through the arts, and I am excited to see this years art work from students across the country.
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Three World War II veterans shared their wartime experiences with a packed house at the Midland County Historical Societys Fireside Chat, hosted at the Doan History Center. Maj. Gen. Erick Kyro, Lt. William Eyre and Petty Officer 1st Class Charles Campbell, all of whom served in the Pacific Theater, formed a panel to discuss their training, service, how they spent their free time and postwar lives.

The event was four months in planning, said moderator and local historian Floyd Andrick.

They are passing away at roughly 600 a day, he said of World War II veterans. I thought, we have quite a few (veterans) right here in Midland.

Andricks friend Charles Campbell, 94, had recently moved into Independence Village, where he met other veterans. He said, Floyd, weve got several World War II veterans out here with wonderful stories, Andrick recalled. So I went out and met with the veterans, and thats why we decided to do this presentation.

Campbell was drafted while working as an aircraft engine mechanic in Detroit; he was able to put his experience to work for the Navy.

In the Navy, we did work on planes and fuselages, he said, adding that he worked on a wide variety of parts.

Campbell served in some cities across the United States, and also served on an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific, where he helped service 37 airplanes.

When it got time to fly them off, I would take the oil out of the carburetor, that sort of thing, he said.

I enjoyed every minute of it until they started shooting, said Eyre, 95, who served as a Navy aviator on the USS Saratoga aircraft carrier.

As an aviation cadet, Eyre had the opportunity to visit many states, including Florida, Georgia, Texas, Michigan and New Jersey.

You went where airfields were and the training was, he said. Im glad I got through it all.

Eyre said all the pilots had to be specially certified to take off from and land on an aircraft carrier; they trained in the Great Lakes off the coast of Wisconsin.

You had to do five landings, and you were then an expert, he said as the audience laughed. I was very lucky I never got really damaged. I got hit once over Japan and it turned my plane upside down.

He recalled rolling the aircraft upright again, the joystick shaking. He radioed one of the squadron members, who asked him to fly in front of him so that he could inspect Eyres plane.

He went around and looked over me and said, Nothing wrong with you! Eyre said.

Kyro, 100, tried several times to join the Armed Forces. A Canadian-born, but naturalized citizen, who had suffered a bone infection as a child, he encountered several roadblocks before being accepted into the U.S. Army to train as a pilot. After the war, he kept flying and retired as a major general in the Michigan Air National Guard.

During his service in World War II, Kyro flew 215 missions with more than 1,000 hours in the air.

One of the missions that we had was to escort transport planes across the mountains on New Guinea, he said. While waiting for the transport, the weather turned foul, causing poor visibility. The squadron was separated as they tried to climb over the storm, but they were not able to get over the clouds. Forced to instead fly through the clouds, the pilots had to completely rely on their instruments.

It was the first time I had ever been alone under the hood, Kyro said. It was quite interesting. Fortunately, I got through.

Kyro said he was the first man in the squadron to return. Two men never did. The wreckage of their planes were discovered about 40 years later. That was one of the worst missions that I was on, and it was the third mission I was flying there, he said.

The stories were preserved on a tape recorder that Andrick used. It was great, he said. These three guys were very open.

I was amazed at the memories of these men! How they could think back to when they flew those planes, and what they did! said Phyllis Heber of Midland, who attended the Fireside Chat with her husband.

We can relate, she said, explaining her husband, Bill, served in World War II as well.

One special attendee was Campbells daughter, Sandra (Campbell) Rowe, a Midland native who now lives in Ohio. As part of Campbells service was stateside, his wife was able to live with him in Texas and was nine months pregnant when the war ended. She returned to Midland about a month before Campbell was discharged, and Sandra was born three days after his return.

It was great to see all the people who came to hear his story, she said. Its very important to learn about history and hear what people did to keep our country safe.
Pratyushas boyfriend Rahul Raj Singh, booked for abetting suicide, has been asked to appear before the Bangur Nagar police station on April 23.

Mumbai: Mumbai police, probing the death of 25-year-old actress Pratyusha Banerjee, who was found dead in her suburban home on April 1, is leaving no stone unturned to ascertain the facts in the case.

In yet another shocking twist, JJ Hospital doctors have confirmed that Pratyusha was pregnant and had probably undergone abortion not long before her demise.

Read: Ive never assaulted Pratyusha: Rahul Raj Singh

According to reports, the conclusion was made based on histopathological examination of tissues from the uterus. The findings show that she had conceived few days or a month before her death and there was a premature death of the foetal cell.

As the placental or foetal tissue in the uterus were infected and degenerated, it strongly hinted towards an infection probably occurred during an attempt to terminate the pregnancy. However, the doctors are finding it difficult to carry out a DNA test to establish the childs paternity.

Read: Pratyusha Banerjee's mom writes to CM, requests crime branch probe

Pratyushas boyfriend Rahul Raj Singh, booked for abetting suicide, has been asked to appear before the Bangur Nagar police station on April 23.

On Monday, Bombay High Court had adjourned his anticipatory bail plea till April 25.The court observed that Pratyusha was abused several times, adding it cannot be said that he neither abetted nor instigated her to commit suicide.

Read: Pratyusha suicide: Rahul Raj's former girlfriend Saloni Sharma breaks her silence

The sessions' court had earlier stated that the matter should be thoroughly investigated in the light of accusations against Rahul, adding that it was not possible in his absence as the police will find it difficult to collect the best possible evidence.

On April 7, a Mumbai sessions court had rejected Rahul's anticipatory bail application, following which he filed a plea in the High Court. Rahul was granted an interim relief from arrest for a week by the Bombay High Court on April 12.

24-year-old Pratyusha, who shot to fame for her role as Anandi in 'Balika Vadhu', committed suicide by hanging herself inside her flat in suburban Goregaon.

Two days later, a case under Sections 306 (abetment of suicide), 504, 506 (criminal intimidation), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) of the IPC was registered against Rahul following a complaint lodged by Pratyusha's parents.
U.S. Air Force, Army, Marine Corps and Navy personnel and aircraft will train with South Korean air force counterparts in the bilateral training exercise Max Thunder 16, at Kunsan Air Base April 15-29.



Max Thunder takes place annually and is the largest military flying exercise held on the Korean Peninsula. Max Thunder is part of a continuous exercise program designed to enhance interoperability between U.S. and South Korean forces, and is not tied to any specific real-world events or situations. The exercise highlights the long-standing military partnership, commitment and enduring friendship between the two nations to help ensure peace and security in Northeast Asia.



Every year, Max Thunder serves as an excellent opportunity for U.S. and (South Korean air force) fighter pilots to train side by side and gain valuable experience they will need if the Korea airpower team is required to go into aerial combat together, said Lt. Gen. Terrence J. OShaughnessy, the Seventh Air Force commander. The U.S.s commitment to the security of (South) Korea is ironclad. U.S. military aircraft come to Korea from across the Pacific to participate in this exercise, making a tremendous display of the capabilities the U.S. brings to this alliance.



Approximately 1,200 U.S. personnel will participate in Max Thunder 16, in support of F-16 Fighting Falcons from Seventh Air Force; F-18 Hornets from the 12th Marine Aircraft Group; and EA-18G Growlers from the Navys Electronic Attack Squadron 138.



Approximately 640 South Korean personnel will also participate in the exercise in support of various aircraft.
EVERETT, Wash. (NNS) -- Guided-missile destroyer USS Momsen (DDG 92) departed her homeport of Naval Station Everett for a scheduled deployment to the Western Pacific, April 15.

Momsen will join guided-missile destroyers USS Spruance (DDG 111) and USS Decatur (DDG 73), and the embarked "Devil Fish" and "Warbirds" detachments of Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM) 49 upon their departure from Naval Base San Diego, April 19. They will all deploy as part of Pacific Surface Action Group (PAC SAG) under Destroyer Squadron 31 (CDS-31).

U.S. 3rd Fleet ships, aircraft, and submarines regularly operate throughout the Western Pacific and this PAC SAG will operate under 3rd Fleet control during deployment. U.S. 3rd Fleet operating forward offers additional options to the Pacific Fleet commander by leveraging the capabilities of the world's two most powerful numbered fleets. This operational concept allows 3rd and 7th Fleet forces to complement one another and provide the foundation of stability in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region.

The PAC SAG will conduct maritime security operations and theater security efforts to enhance regional security and stability and is expected to also participate in the Oceania Maritime Security Initiative (OMSI). OMSI is a secretary of defense program utilizing Department of Defense assets transiting the region to increase the Coast Guard's maritime domain awareness, ultimately supporting its maritime law enforcement operations in Oceania.

U.S. 3rd Fleet leads naval forces in the Pacific and provides the realistic, relevant training necessary for an effective global Navy.
YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan -- The 374th Airlift Wing sent two C-130 Hercules aircraft and aircrew to the Kyushu region today, supporting the Government of Japan in their relief efforts for the series of earthquakes that took place in Kumamoto Prefecture and surrounding areas.

The Yokota aircraft are transporting heavy vehicles and personnel from Chitose Air Base, Hokkaido, to Kyushu, improving the capabilities of ground relief efforts in the area. Each C-130H can load up to 42,000 pounds of cargo.

"These missions are perfect examples of why we are located where we are and what we train for every day," said Lt Col John Kerr, 36th Airlift Squadron director of operations. "Our airlifters are eager to show their support for their friends and neighbors in Japan following this tragedy."

The 374 AW, as the primary airlift hub in the Indo-Asia Pacific Region, has experience responding to natural disasters. In March 2011, the 374 AW responded to the 9.0 earthquake near Sendai, Japan, providing humanitarian aid and disaster relief to stricken areas. In 2013, the wing sent five C-130Hs to the Philippines to offload cargo and airlift evacuees seeking safe haven in Manila. In 2015, the 374 AW also sent support to Nepal in response to the Gorkha Earthquake.

"I would like to express my deepest condolences on behalf of the men and women of the 374th Airlift Wing," said Col. Douglas DeLaMater, 374th Airlift Wing commander. "We will continue to support the relief efforts in Kumamoto in whatever way the Government of Japan requests. This is a tragic event, but I am confident in the resolve of the people of Japan."
Mumbai: With just few days to go for the films release, our superheroes are leaving no stone unturned at having an upper hand. Apart from our Avengers, who have picked a side and are geared up to go up against each other in Captain America: Civil War, others are also painting themselves with the colour of their favourite team; Team Cap or Team Iron Man.

And guess what? The new person to join Iron Mans team is none other than the Iron Lady herself. Tony Stark aka Robert Downey Jr., who was in Paris to attend Captain America: Civil Wars premiere, met the Iron Lady.

For those who dont know, Eiffel Tower is known as The Iron Lady. On his visit, Robert Downey Jr. thanked his fans for the constant support before hacking into Eiffel Tower. Yes, the actor was able to change the colours of the tower to yellow and gold, the colour Iron Man sports.

Isnt it just fabulous? Even the Iron Lady is supporting team Iron Man, now whats your move, Team Cap?

Watch the video below:
BLOOMINGTON  A successful school superintendent builds community relationships and supports fellow educators, according to Bloomington District 87 Superintendent Barry Reilly.

He would know.

Reilly was named superintendent of the year at a recent gala hosted by Illinois State Universitys educational administration and foundations department.

It was a total surprise. I was very humbled, said Reilly. Its a reflection of those around me and the great things that happen in this district.

Nominees were superintendents who graduated from ISU. Reilly said he enjoyed seeing some of his past professors also receive recognition at the event.

I was fortunate to attend ISU. The education program was great and has only gotten better, he said. I really owe a lot to Illinois State in terms of where I am in my career.

Reilly said he has benefited from having a supportive staff and strong school board at District 87. Involvement in local organizations such as United Way, Easter Seals and McLean County Community Compact has also affected his career, said Reilly.

By being involved I am able to relate with the community. People feel comfortable coming to me to share their concerns and joys, he said.

Reilly has served as superintendent of the Bloomington school district since 2009. Before becoming superintendent, he worked for the district for 19 years as a health and physical education teacher, principal and assistant superintendent of human resources.

He earned a bachelors degree in physical education (1989), a masters degree (1995) and doctorate in educational administration (2007), all at ISU.
BLOOMINGTON  A multimillion-dollar upgrade of U.S. Business 51 through the heart of the Twin Cities got a step closer to reality Tuesday.

The McLean County Board signed off on an Illinois Department of Transportation application for federal funding for the project that would include construction work from Olive Street in downtown Bloomington to College Avenue in Normal.

The board also approved an application for federal funding to continue offering Show Bus transit service in rural areas of the county. Show Bus operates scheduled routes and call-ahead bus service to rural DeWitt, Ford, Iroquois, Kankakee, Livingston, Macon and McLean counties.

U.S. Business 51 runs along Main, Center, Madison, East and Kingsley streets through both communities. The $20 million project would include widening and upgrading the roadway, as well as addressing IDOT's 2011 resurfacing project on North Center Street that failed because of a poor sub-base.

Westbound U.S. 150/Illinois 9 also would be realigned so that it merges with U.S. Business 51 rather than continuing on West Empire Street and then onto North Lee Street.

That would remove highway designation from a residential area that includes Bent Elementary School.

The TIGER (Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery) grant would provide 80 percent federal and 20 percent state funding for the Business 51 improvements. Normal and Bloomington would share in an undetermined cost for new traffic signals and related sidewalk improvements.

Without the TIGER grant, IDOT does not have available funding for the project.

Bloomington and Normal backed off their own TIGER applications this year to avoid competing with the Business 51 project. Bloomington is planning a $14.5 million-plus extension of Hamilton Road from Bunn Street to Commerce Parkway, and Normal a $10 million-plus railroad underpass at Uptown Station.

The board also honored McLean County Emergency Management Agency Director Curt Hawk, who will retire April 29.
My youngest son  a picky eater who has only a handful of foods he's willing to consume, much less enjoy  is the chief cookie consumer in our household, and his preferences are limited to Oreos and Chips Ahoys.

When I broke the news to him that our household was going to boycott Oreo cookies, his eyes bugged out in alarm. He asked, "Why?!"

I explained to him that last July, Mondelez International, the makers of Nabisco products, decided to move some of their Oreo cookie-making operations from the south side of Chicago to Salinas, Mexico. This was after the Chicago workers refused to take a 60 percent reduction in wages and benefits.

I further explained that recently, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and many of the 300 or so recently dismissed workers called for a boycott on Oreos and other Nabisco products made in Mexico to protest the Chicagoans who will be out of work. The lost jobs paid an average of $25 an hour while the Mexico workers will be lucky to make $60 per week for full-time work, according to estimates from the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union.

This 14-year-old who barely eats anything said, "Heck yeah, we'll boycott."

A beat later, he, who has seen firsthand the poverty that the Mexican people on the border live in, said, "Well, what about the Mexican workers?" I sighed and had no good reply to that very real concern.

It's a little thing to boycott one product of a company that pumps out billions of dollars' worth of cookies and crackers annually. Less than a drop in the bucket, really, and one that  unless every consumer in the country gives up Oreos  will do little to save the jobs in a Chicago neighborhood that usually makes headlines for its economic instability and violent crime.

But it's the principle of the thing.

The majority of the 600 workers who will be left out of a job once all the layoffs are complete are either black or brown, and Mondelez International's move has managed to do what few other issues in Chicago accomplish: Bring African-Americans and Hispanics together.

This south side community has had major tensions as its black and Hispanic residents started competing with each other for jobs. Yet in expressing his organization's support for the boycott, the Rev. Jesse Jackson articulated the matter succinctly: "These productive workers at Nabisco are losing their jobs not because of a lack of work ethic but because of exploitation and undercutting of workers on both sides of the border. ... Mexicans are not taking jobs from us ... Corporations are taking the jobs to them."

"And don't think they are doing the Mexicans any favors," said Laura Martinez, a Mexican immigrant who has worked at the Nabisco plant for eight years. "Sixty dollars per week is an abuse in Mexico, they are exploiting those workers. I go to Mexico every six months and everything is so expensive, they're not going to be able to live on that. (Mondelez International) isn't helping Mexico and they sure aren't going to pass the savings of making the cookies on to U.S. customers. They're just making themselves richer."

Martinez went on to say that, like her co-workers, she's made a life for herself in Chicago that includes family whose futures are bleaker because companies keep moving away.

"Something must be done," Martinez told me. "What are we going to do? And where are our kids and grandkids going to work? This has to stop. You can't keep taking these jobs away."

Not everyone agrees.

Regarding the Oreos, Bloomberg columnist Paula Dwyer wrote: "When U.S. companies expand foreign operations, the net effect is greater employment at home, according to a study released recently by the pro-free-trade Peterson Institute for International Economics. ... When that happens, companies increase earnings, which allows them to divert resources to R&D and create more higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs."

Sure. But people who insist on pointing to aggregate numbers that "prove" offshoring jobs is a net positive for America usually don't live in poor communities with low-skilled workers like the south side of Chicago, where every job counts.

For those of us who live closer to where real people are suffering from exported livelihoods, giving up our favorite cookies is the least we can do.
Most Illinois legislators are good people, trying to do the right thing.

With that premise, the 10-month long budget impasse is a bit of a mystery. Why would good legislators allow the state to sink into such a mess?

The reason, as least partially, rests with the voters.

Whether we like it or not, House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, and Gov. Bruce Rauner control a lot of what happens in Springfield. Thats because those two men control a lot of campaign dollars.

Both political leaders have massive war chests built up with plenty of money they can give to candidates they like, or use against candidates that dont support their positions.

The common belief is that makes legislators beholden to their party leaders. Either do what Madigan or Rauner want, or campaign money wont be there when you need it. Or worse, your political boss will finance a primary opponent.

That kind of blunt force happens, but there are some subtleties.

Neither Rauner nor Madigan want their legislative supporters to struggle. The best scenario for both parties is that most legislative races are non-competitive. That allows them to put most of their money, and campaign help, into a few key, contested races.

The leaders want as few of their candidates ``in trouble, as possible.

Thats where voters come in. If voters were making local legislators feel the heat over the lack of a budget  and the myriad problems that have come with it  those legislators would do more to encourage Rauner and Madigan to get the problem fixed.

If Rauner and Madigan thought that voters would punish local legislators for the lack of a budget in the November election, they would be much more focused on finding a solution.

There are some obstacles to that, of course. Because of the political gerrymandering allowed by Illinois, a lot of lawmakers from both parties are located in ``safe districts.

However, voters can still make their voices heard.

There are plenty of contested races in November and even if your local senator or representative isnt involved in a contested race, theyll listen if enough people tell them the lack of a budget is a problem.

But voters need to add that if the problem isnt resolved, they are ready to take out their frustration and disgust at the polls.

Simply stated, voters need to put some heat on their local legislators, who then will turn and put more pressure on Rauner and Madigan and other top legislative leaders.

Listed below are local legislators you can contact. Its time to make legislators, and our political leaders, understand that the budget impasse has to end. And end now.

Illinois House

Rep. Thomas Bennett, R-106: 222-N Stratton Office Building, Springfield, IL 62706; 217-558-1039; www.ilhousegop.org/contactbennett

Rep. Dan Brady, R-105: 200-8N Stratton Office Building, Springfield, IL 62706; 217-782-1118; www.ilhousegop.org/contactbrady

Rep. Keith P. Sommer, R-88: 216-N Stratton Office Building, Springfield, IL 62706; 217-782-0221; sommer@mtco.com

Illinois Senate

Sen. Jason A. Barickman, R-53; M103C Capitol Building, Springfield, IL 62706; 217-782-6597; jason@jasonbarickman.org

Sen. Bill Brady, R-44: 103A Capitol Building, Springfield, IL 62706; 217-782-6216; billbrady@senatorbillbrady.com

Sen. Chapin Rose, R-51: M103F Capitol Building, Springfield, IL 62706; 217-558-1006.
Superstar Suriya, who was in Hyderabad to promote his film 24, said that he had been thrilled to see the large crowds at the audio release function of the film recently.

Telugu audience are encouraging good films like Manam and Oopiri, and also mythological films. I believe any film with good content is always encouraged by the audiences. Money, promotion etc. all come second after the content, he said.

He added that he liked the negative character of Atreya in 24. Even my son likes it very much, he said. Praising director Vikram Kumar, Suriya said, He has his own team and though we worked continuously for one month in Poland, we always had loads of energy. Thats how his team works. The film will hit the screens on May 6.
Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric has been affecting kids as well. A recent study found that the GOP candidate's tirades are inspiring children to bully their immigrant classmates.

An online survey from the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center found that this year's U.S. presidential race spurned "an increase in the bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates." SPLC's survey on Donald Trump was titled, "The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on our Nation's Schools," and was conducted on 2,000 teachers in the United States.

Out of 5,000 comments, more than 1,000 commenters brought up Donald Trump's anti-immigrant comments even though the survey didn't mention any of the presidential candidates. In contrast, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz were only mentioned lower than 200 times altogether.

Immigrant Kids Being Bullied

According to the report, more than one-third of teachers noticed a surge of anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant outlook. Some Muslim students were being referred to by their classmates as "terrorists" or "ISIS." One student in the fifth grade even told a Muslim classmate that he likes Donald Trump because the Republican frontrunner will kill all Muslims if he wins the presidential seat.

Immigrant children, such as Latinos and blacks, are worried that they will be sent back to their home countries if Donald Trump wins. Educators also said that Trump is teaching students to be hateful towards low-income and impoverished residents. Religious bias is rising as well.

Teachers said kids heard Donald Trump's rhetoric not just from their peers, but also from social media, TV, radio, and newspapers, among others. More than 40 percent of the teachers who participated in SPLC's study said they were uncertain when it comes to teaching about the current campaign trail.

China, North Korea Fires Back At The Real Bully

Donald Trump was once again the center of controversies for his belief that South Korea and Japan will likely need their own nuclear arsenal for self-defense against North Korea. A North Korean official said Trump's plan will only inspire the country's nuclear ambitions.

"The U.S. tells us to give up our nuclear program, is preparing a nuclear attack against us," Ri Jong Ryul, deputy-director general of Pyongyang's Institute of International Studies, told CNN regarding Donald Trump's comments. "And, on the other hand, would tell its allies to have nuclear weapon. Isn't this (a) double standard?"

Donald Trump also said that if he gets elected as president he would put a 45 percent tariff on goods from China. Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei said Trump's idea is "irrational," adding that the U.S. and China are "mutually dependent on each other" and both countries' economies will experience downfalls if a trade war ensues, CNBC reported.
Health experts say women in the U.S. receive less postpartum care than women in other developed countries. The inadequacy is due to the country's disparate view on pregnancy and maternal health.

US Postpartum Care Isn't At Par With Other Countries

Stephanie Prendergast, the founder of The Pelvic Health and Rehabilitation Center in Los Angeles, told Fox News that American women undergo a 6-week postpartum check-up and not much else. Contrastingly, women in countries like France and the Netherlands are enrolled in postpartum physical therapy so they could properly recuperate from childbirth.

"Not only do we do nothing in the U.S., but also if a woman goes to her physician, particularly her obstetrician, with these complaints after delivery it's written off as 'Well, you just had a baby,'" Prendergast lamented. "In an ideal world, everybody should have an evaluation to identify what their particular issues are and get a specialized home program."

US Mothers Encouraged To Seek Physical Therapy

New York-based physical therapist Marianne Ryan is calling on U.S. health officials to look into the matter of postpartum rehabilitation. She said American mothers tend to belittle pelvic pain. Most are even unaware that there's actually treatment for it.

With guidance from a physical therapist, mothers can have bowel movement, sans the pelvic discomfort. They can also learn how to perform regular activities without straining their abdominal muscles.

According to Modern Mom, women who recently gave birth are prone to leaking. Physical therapy is needed to help mothers control their pelvic floor muscles to prevent such embarrassing episodes.

C-Section Deliveries At Higher Risk Of Pelvic Pain

Meanwhile, mothers who had C-section deliveries are more susceptible to pelvic pain than those who had vaginal deliveries. Scarring is common in C-section mothers.

However, it may cause severe and permanent pain when left to heal on its own. The long-term effects of scarring include painful intercourse, sexual dysfunction, frequent constipation and searing back pains.

Prendergast encourages women to go see a physical therapist if they start to feel discomfort in their pelvic region. She said gynecologists aren't as trained to identify and treat pelvic or abdominal pains as physical therapists. Once the problem is identified, mothers are provided with a postpartum program which caters to their specific needs.
A strong number of 5,000 students received an email from an upstate New York university, telling them they've been accepted into the university. While the students were still in a state of revelry, said university sent a subsequent email, hours after, to tell them it was a huge mistake!

Accidentally Generated Email List

New York's University at Buffalo mistakenly sent out 5,000 acceptance emails to prospective student applicants on Wednesday. ABC News said that the university accidentally generated an email list from the applicant database, causing the confusion to 5,000 hopefuls.

According to John Della Contrada, University at Buffalo's spokesman, the incorrect email list was the root of the miscommunication. One thing that the university can be commended for how quickly it sent subsequent emails informing the student applicants of the mistake. It also posted an official statement on its website.

"We know that this can be a stressful time for prospective students and their families," the statement said. NBC News reported that the statement added, "The University at Buffalo deeply regrets this unfortunate error in communication."

There's Still A Chance Of Acceptance

Although such was disheartening news for the student applicants, the good thing was that those who received the misfired email are not necessarily rejected. Their applications at the university will still be reviewed and processed. There's still a chance that they will be accepted at the university.

Though there were about 25,000 students who submitted their applications to the university, only one-fifth of them will have a chance of being accepted. Conrada said only about 5,400 will be accepted. University at Buffalo currently has 30,000 students enrolled.

When a university accidentally sends acceptance letters or emails, the hopes of students are crushed. In January, the York University, Toronto, Canada, also accidentally sent out acceptance letters to 500 students, reported The Star. York University was also quick to issue an apology for the mistake made.
Identical twins are common, but identical quadruplets? Now that's something you don't see every day. Science has it that the identical quadruplets' odds are 1:15,000,000. That's right! It's one in 15,000,000, yet this Canadian couple managed to beat it naturally!

Naturally-Conceived Identical Quadruplets

Parents reported that Bethani and Tim Webb are expecting identical quadruplets in spring. Bethani is carrying identical quadruplets and conceived them without any medical intervention. It may be surprising but she got pregnant without IVF or any other fertility treatment.

Some people might think that either Bethani or Tim may have relatives who are either twins or triplets. However, both of them don't have any history of having multiples. So when the couple learned of the quadruplets during a sonogram, they were so surprised, time almost fainted.

Four Times As Shocking

"I could not believe it, I was in such shock," Bethani told CBC News. Bethani thought that the sonogram technician was joking, however, he apparently was not.

"It was a good thing that my husband was sitting down because he almost fainted," Bethani said referring to how her husband reacted upon receiving the news of having identical quadruplets.

Birth And Family Plans In Place

Since Bethani is still on her 29th week of being pregnant with identical quadruplets, her doctors were closely monitoring her condition. Bethani's doctors were hoping that she will reach 32 weeks before she goes into labor. Having identical quadruplets can bring about complications and Bethani's doctors were trying to avoid it.

Bethani said that her husband "has gotten used to the idea" of having four babies. However, having four identical quadruplets might be a different story.

The couple is busy preparing for the birth of the identical quadruplets. They're thinking of naming their identical quadruplets - Abigail, Grace, McKayla and Emily. Since raising four babies will entail huge expenses, friends of the Bethani and Tim Webb have created a GoFundMe page to give assistance to their financial needs.
The mom of a five-year-old boy posted the video recording of her son being paddled by school administrators. She said that she was threatened by the school of being arrested for truancy if she will not allow her son to be paddled.

Parents Must Agree To Paddling

According to the mom, the two elementary school administrators said that she must allow her 5-year-old son to be paddled or end up being in jail. While she looked at her helpless boy crying for help, she pretended to text and secretly recorded the video.

The Washington Post said that Shana Marie Perez, mother of 5-year-old Thomas, wrote a post on Facebook, and posted the video. She captioned it with "They told me if he could not get a paddling he would have to be suspended and if he got suspended for even one day I WILL go to jail for truancy."

Imprisonment Could Lead To Greater Consequences

Perez feared that she would be sent to jail if she refused to give her consent on paddling her son. According to her, if she would be going to jail, then her kids would not have anything. She will not be able to take care of her kids if she'll be imprisoned.

She added that she couldn't do anything to stop the principal and the assistant principal from paddling Thomas. Perez has been arrested recently because Thomas missed 18 days of school.

Contradicting Opinions

KTLA said that the video posted by Perez sparked a new debate regarding the implementation of corporal punishment. Some social media users said that there was nothing illegal with what the Jasper County Primary School in Monticello, Georgia did. On the other hand, there were those who were totally against the act.

Reports have it that Thomas was being punished for spitting at another student. The principal and the assistant principal tried to bend over the boy on a chair, telling him that they would just spank him one time.

Perez is thinking of filing a lawsuit against the school administrators for abuse. On the other hand, it is unclear if she could get arrested again if Thomas gets suspended from the school.
There is quite a sad happening going on in India as news have been released that there are swaps and buying of infants happening in their country. The said happening was founded by the Indian police through a tip off they had.

According to the reports, infants born out of wedlock and rape are being delivered in a private hospital in India, which would sell the infants to childless couples for a 1,000 euros. The police also found out that not only are babies being sold, they are being swapped by parents who do not like the sex of their child.

Two of the babies who were supposedly going to be sold were recently rescued by the Indian police from the 30-bed Palash Hospital in the Gwalior district. Prateek Kumar of the ASP crime branch told Times of India that "Three others have been sold to childless couples in Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh."

The Indian police raided the hospital last Saturday after they had tip from someone about the child trafficking happening in the hospital. The hospital has also been formally charged after the staff could not provide the whereabouts of two babies found in the hospital.

Numerous hospital staff has also been charged including the hospital director TK Gupta, with buying or disposing of any person as slave, habitual, dealing in slaves and buying minor for the purpose of prostitution. Arun Bhadoria, the hospital's director, was also arrested by the police.

"When a girl or her parents approached them for termination of pregnancies, doctors at this hospital used to convince them assuring a safe and secret delivery.Once baby is delivered and mother gets discharged, hospital authorities start hunting for gullible couples who could buy them," a police officer commented on the situation.

Police are now looking for the couples who have swapped and or bought babies from the hospital. Leave comments below and tell us how you feel about this story!
In China, over 10 million children in elementary are diagnosed with dyslexia. Despite the staggering number of cases, schools still fail to provide timely intervention as symptoms are often neglected or mistreated.

Neglected and Misunderstood

Institute of Psychology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) conducted a study in 2014 suggesting that dyslexia may be caused by two factors: genetic and environmental. The researchers found that around the world, one in 10 students aged six to 12 years old is suffering from some form of dyslexia. Often, teachers and parents fail to recognize symptoms in these kids, reports Caixin.

In 2007, an Indian film titled "Taare Zameen Par" (Like Stars on Earth) has gained worldwide attention for tackling the issue of dyslexia in schools. The story follows a young boy who is ridiculed by his classmates and punished by his teachers for being different. Little did they know that the boy is struggling with language and communication. However, an art tutor recognizes the symptoms and helps him overcome his learning challenges.

Like the main character in the movie, these children often have hidden talents. Sadly, they face great obstacles in learning as education put too much emphasis on language skills. Teachers who are not trained to recognize the symptoms of dyslexia can misdiagnose the kids as having low-level intelligence or lazy.

What is Dyslexia?

Today Online reports that dyslexia is a learning disability affecting the brain's language processing areas that can result in having problems recognizing and understanding words. This does not affect the level of intelligence of the children. Children may suffer from dyslexia even with high levels of intelligence.

Aside from this, children may also show difficulty in motor skills, having a hard time coordinating their movements. When trying to write, they may find it difficult to hold a pen properly or if they do, they hand writing appears sloppy.

Traditional methods of teaching may not be suitable for dyslexia, especially putting emphasis on writing, reading and memorizing words. Predictably, dyslexic kids often have lower scores in written tests compared to other students, according to the CASS study. More so, they are also susceptible to physiological problems like depression as the condition affects their communication skills.

Timely Intervention

Despite these challenges of dyslexia, the condition can be treated with timely intervention. It is best if the condition is diagnosed during the first two years of elementary school or before age 12. It has been proven to resolve almost 90 percent of reading and writing problems due to early intervention. The chances of correcting the problem decrease as the child goes beyond 12.

Schools should also put importance to dyslexia and create a support system to help the students cope. There should also be available materials for these type of learning disabilities. "Helping dyslexic children is possibly helping future artists, scientists, and thinkers," said James Redford, an American filmmaker with a son suffering from dyslexia. To know more about dyslexia, check out the video below:
Some people believe that a circumcised penis can lessen men's sexual pleasure. A recent study, however, rejected this belief. Apparently, the sensitivity of a man's organ remains more or less the same, regardless of whether or not they were circumcised.

Canadian researchers discovered that having foreskin does not make penises more sensitive to touch, heat, and pressure. The study, published in the Journal of Urology, tested penis sensitivity of 62 adult men with ages 18 to 37. Half of them underwent circumcision at birth while others still had their penises' natural foreskins.

"The idea out there is that if you have a circumcised penis, the head of the penis, or the tip of the penis is exposed," Dr. Caroline Pukall, a professor at Queen's University, told Global News. "It's supposed to be covered by the foreskin if you have one but if you don't, the sensitive tissue becomes hardened over time... therefore pleasure is less during sexual situations."

Pressure Points

For the study, researchers used devices to touch multiple pressure points of the men's penises. The penile sensitivity tested by researchers focused on aspects like warmth detection, pain threshold, and tactile detection. They found that there is no difference between men's penile sensitivity regardless if they are circumcised or not circumcised.

Jennifer Bossio, the study's lead author, said the research's preliminary evidence proved that "the foreskin is not the most sensitive part of the penis," the Independent reported. For the study, the men's sexual capabilities and satisfaction were also tested for four weeks. No difference was found between the circumcised and uncircumcised men.

Benefits 'Outweigh The Risks'

An American Academy of Pediatrics task force published a statement in 2012 describing the benefit of circumcision against HIV. The statement indicated that "the health benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks," AAP News reported.

Newborn circumcision globally isn't chiefly done for medical purposes. Majority of newborns were circumcised to adhere to religious and cultural tradition, as well as familial identity and personal experience.

Parents didn't choose their babies to be circumcised just so they can prevent the risks of urinary tract infections or ulcerative sexually transmitted infections later on in the children's lives. Historically, circumcision was done to suppress boys' urges to masturbate. Muslim and Jewish people view circumcision as a vital part of their religious faith.

Rates Across Countries

In the United Kingdom, one in three men underwent the procedure, the Independent wrote. However, the National Health Service, or NHS, considered circumcision as medically unnecessary, and so boys' operation costs were not covered.

Because of this, the number of circumcised British boys decreased, with only 8.5 percent of them circumcised as of late. In the United States, on the other hand, 75 percent of adult males had their penises circumcised.
The Telugu Distributors Association has condemned the police case filed by director Puri Jagannadh. Its a false case; the distributors never demanded anything from the producer or director or anyone. We just requested them to compensate something as we incurred huge losses, said Sudhakar Reddy, president, Telugu Film Distributors Association.

He added that they usually request the producer first. And then we request the next big beneficiary of the film, which is the director or the lead actor.

The association also wondered whether Puri had filed the complaint on his own or somebody had asked him to do it. We distributed the film because of Puri and the word he gave us at the time of release, says Ramdas.

He adds, I read in the papers that we are absconding. So I called the police and I told them I would be in touch and was ready for any inquiry. We are planning to file a defamation case against Puri, says Kaali Sudheer.
The Duggar family has been getting several flak after Josh Duggar's cheating and molestation scandals. Now, new reports are claiming that Jill Duggar, Josh Duggar's sister, is currently carrying baby number two with husband Derick Dillard.

Derick Dillard, Jill Duggar pregnant with twins

Celeb Dirty Laundry reported that Jill Duggar and husband Derick Dillard have been constantly updating their million fans while they are on travel in El Salvador. As a matter of fact, the couple's updates has sparked rumors that Jill Duggar is currently pregnant with her second baby with Derick Dillard.

Several fans have noticed that Jill Duggar and Derick Dillard have been posting cryptic tweets and photos while they are on their trip. A photo of Jill Duggar and Derick Dillard's son, Israel, talking to his reflection in the mirror has created a buzz.

"This is how you entertain yourself when you don't have any siblings yet... #mirrorbaby #twins?" Derick Dillard wrote in the caption of the photo. The said post has left fans berserk as it was said to be hinting that Israel has upcoming siblings. With the hashtags "mirror baby" and "twins," fans have speculated that Jill Duggar is pregnant with twins.

Jill Duggar, Derick Dillard faces Zika Virus risk

While being pregnant is not an issue, several fans have slammed Jill Duggar and Derick Dillard for traveling to El Salvador, which is known to be a hub for the Zika Virus. If Jill Duggar is indeed pregnant, then she is certainly putting her baby at a serious danger.

Zika Virus is a serious disease that has been hitting headlines since late 2015. The mosquito-borne virus is said to cause bitch defects such as head deformation and miscarriages in thousand pregnant women.

Do you think Jill Duggar and Derick Dillard are expecting their second baby? If proven pregnant, what can you say about Jill Duggar and Derick Dillard traveling in El Salvador amid Zika Virus fears.
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Rosario Dawson has always been a politically active celebrity. From her continued work with Voto Latino and appearances year after year at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner to recently introducing Bernie Sanders at one of his political rallies, its not hard to argue that Dawson is easily one of Hollywoods most (unabashedly) politically prominent people.

Which is why its not entirely surprising that, along with several dozen other protesters, the actress was arrested during a demonstration on Capitol Hill last Friday.

Dawson, known for her recent role as Claire Temple in the Marvel and Netflix shows Daredevil, Jessica Jones and upcoming Luke Cage, was given a $50 fine for crowding and obstruction before being released from police custody. According to The Guardian, the protesters had been warned multiple times by the U.S. Capitol police before they were finally taken into custody. Dawson is not expected to appear before court.

I wanted personally to be in solidarity with the other folks who put themselves on the line and really just to bring attention to this because I think thats just vitally important, Dawson said of the event and following arrests.

The arrest followed the television and film actress participation in a week-long demonstration for Democracy Spring, a political activist group that demands Congress take immediate action to end the corruption of big money in our politics and ensure free and fair elections in which every American has an equal voice.

According to the Sin City star, the police and protestors remained polite and calm during the arrest process, something she acknowledges as a rare experience with todays strained police-protester relations.

The police were really great with us, really lovely, Dawson said. I have to say that is not the case for so many people: Dreamers, Black Lives Matter activists, so many people are not seeing this kind of courageousness. I hope that officers across the nation can take heed of that and recognize that the peaceful protests that are going around the nation should also be treated in the same way as we are being treated today.

The small run-in with Capitol Hill police didnt slow the politically impassioned starlet down though. The very next day she was participating in another public demonstration in New York City that once again saw her coming out in support of democratic candidate Bernie Sanders.
Due to the unexpected and runaway popularity of Broadway musical Hamilton, it appears that Alexander Hamilton may stay put on the front of the $10. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is expected to announce this week that the original plan for a woman to replace his visage have been changed. According to a senior government source who spoke with CNN, Hamilton will stay up front while a mural-style depiction of the womens suffrage movement will be be featured on the back.

This is sure to incite a lot of rightful backlash from women, who represent 50% of the countrys population but comprise 0% of the faces of its currency (notwithstanding the failed Susan B. Anthony silver dollars). Relegating women to the back of the bill is akin to sending them to the back of the bus, said the advocacy group Women on 20s. The Rosa Parks analogies are inevitable.

Theyre absolutely right in that regard; women such as Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony played crucial roles in American history and deserve to be recognized alongside Washington, Lincoln and the rest. But they never should have been replacing Hamiltonthey should be replacing Andrew Jackson. And now that Hamilton is staying on the $10, hopefully the Treasury will bow to the pressure and move forward its projected 2030 redesign for the $20.

Keeping Hamilton on the $10 makes a whole lot of sense. As anyone whos studied U.S. history or seen Lin-Manuel Mirandas Pulitzer Prize-winning musical knows, Alexander Hamilton was the first and most important champion of a national bank. Thanks to Americas fierce libertarian streak, it took until 1913 for the Federal Reserve to become a permanent institution, but since then, its been an important measure of control of the American economynot to mention that it literally controls how much American cash is out in the world. If anyone belongs on U.S. currency, its Hamilton.

Andrew Jackson, on the other hand  hes been a candidate for replacement on the $20 for a fair few years, and for good reason. The following are two of the major causes he pursued as the seventh President of the United States:

- A nearly decade-long war against the Second Bank of the United States and its chairman, the unfortunately-named Nicholas Biddle. Jackson, perhaps the most dominant president in our countrys history (he once shot a guys balls off, he defied the Supreme Court, he sent back a British generals severed head packaged in brine after the Battle of New Orleans), won that fight. Its the ultimate irony that hes now on the face of money thats distributed by the very institution he hated so much, a terrible mutual fit.

- Moving Native Americans en masse from their homes in the southeastern United States to the decidedly remote, infertile Indian Territory that would later become Oklahoma. Thousands of these people died along the way, indirectly rendering Jackson a mass murderer.

In fact, with his populist support, crass manner, and authoritarian bent, Jackson was essentially the early 1800s version of Donald Trump. Hes a very important figure in U.S. historybelieve it or not, the modern Democratic Party originated with him, albeit with totally different ideologybut he did far too many bad things to warrant being the face of the $20. Women on 20s is so named because Jackson was the groups initial target for replacement by a woman; the movement only shifted to the $10 because of the Treasurys schedule. Now, maybe, we can all have our cake and eat it too: Hamilton stays where he belongs, and Jackson is replaced by someone like Harriet Tubman (who has received the lions share of the support for a woman on currency).

While were at it, what the hell is Ulysses S. Grant doing on the $50? He was a great general, to be sure, but as president he was more or less ineffective, his administration was racked by corruption, and he and his party eventually allowed Reconstruction to fail in the South, ensuring the rise of Jim Crow.

Heres what we would do: Hamilton on the $10 (with suffragettes like Anthony and Stanton on the back), Tubman on the $20, Eleanor Roosevelt on the $50. Or, if time is of the utmost importance and the $20 really cant be changed until 2030, put Tubman on the $10 and then shift Hamilton over to the $20. Either way is fine with us. Make it happen, Treasury Department.
If the 2016 presidential primary is defined by one thing, it is media bias. From the Washington Post releasing 16 anti-Bernie Sanders articles in 16 hours (the backlash of which prompted them to release 16 pro-Bernie articles) to what I am about delve into, conspiracy theories about the mainstream media having an agenda have never seemed more credible.

Politifact, the fact checker, has been putting out some questionable material as of late. I first began to notice a problem a few months ago when I saw a fact check of a statement from Bill Clinton that repealing Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. Politifact gave this a mostly true rating.

The argument made by the author of the piece, Lauren Carrol, is that since Travelers and Citicorp were able to merge into Citigroup with Glass-Steagall still in place, the law had been rendered ineffective by the other deregulatory bills passed in the 90s. Additionally, the size of the banks did not cause the speculative trading that led directly to the meltdown. Therefore, all things considered, the actual repeal of Glass-Steagall did not play a significant role in the meltdown.

However, this narrative misses several important points which render the ruling flawed.

To begin with, while Citigroup did form, it did not do so legally, and would have been subject to fines and a break up by the federal government had Bill Clinton not signed Gramm-Leach-Blilely into law. In fact, legitimizing the merger was the primary motivating factor behind the law. It is true that another Clinton law, the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, helped the banks move towards consolidation by allowing banking across state lines, but Gramm-Leach-Bliley was the big kahuna  if you will  that really legalized megabanks.

Secondly, while repeal of Glass-Steagall was not what deregulated subprime derivatives trading, it did have an impact on how that trading was conducted. The size of the megabanks allowed them to set the standard for banking in America. They were able exert undue influence over the rating agencies like Standard & Poors (S&P) and Moodys. Because the market relies on ratings, when these agencies were compromised, it undermined the market, allowed for the subprime derivatives market to grow, and ensured that companies like AIG took on more risk than they should have.

When the mortgage delinquency rates began to skyrocket, nobody was sure of the value of the products they were holding. In response, lenders stopped lending, which hurt small and medium size businesses. Of course, all of these issues can be traced back to too-big-to-fail. This conclusion is consistent with the findings of the Senates Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which starts off its report on the Subprime Crisis, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, with a section titled Rise of Too Big To Fail U.S. Financial Institutions.

I reached out multiple times to the Politifact regarding these problems with their narrative, but did not receive a response. Well, it has been a few months since the article came out, and I assumed it was a one off. However, after Sanders win in Wisconsin, I began noticing problematic ratings from the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checker. I decided to do some research. What I found out led me to write this article:

Politifact is an arm of the Tampa Bay Times, which recently endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. This endorsement makes me question the fact checkers coverage and the choices of statements to be checked. Politifact has given Clinton more than double the attention it has given Sanders  183 statements from the former compared to 82 statements from the latter.

(It is worth mentioning that as the race has gone on, the coverage has evened out. In February, Politifact covered 14 statements from each candidate. However, it gave Bernie four Mostly False or False ratings, while only giving Clinton one.)

Going through those fact checks, I found several other suspect rulings.

On April 4th, Politifact checked a statement by Bernie Sanders made on March 30, whereby the Vermont Senator claimed this his free college tuition plan for public colleges and universities would be paid for by his tax on Wall Street speculation. Heres the exact quote: I think the idea is soundIt is paid forby a tax on Wall Streets speculation. When Wall Streets illegal behavior destroyed our economy, the middle class bailed them out. It is now time for them to help the middle class.

Even though Sanders never clarified if he meant exclusively or primarily, and even though Politifact acknowledged in the piece that two thirds of the cost would be covered by his Wall Street tax, the statement received a mostly false rating.

On March 7th, Politifact again gave Bernie Sanders a mostly false rating for quoting a number by the Economic Policy Institute that NAFTA had cost the U.S. 800,000 jobs. Politifact reasoned that since there were conflicting studies from other think tanks like the Brookings Institute (owned by a Clinton ally), the claim could not be true.

However, with especially complicated questions like this, Politifacts standard is not to rate true or false. Rather, the fact checker analyzes the issue without a rating. The existence of other numbers does not invalidate the fact that Sanders claim is supported by a study. This isnt even an example of cherry-picking. Giving a rating  especially mostly false  gives too much credence to one study over another.

Perhaps the most obvious display of Politifacts bias involves one of these statements that require more of an explanation than simply a rating on the Truth-O-Meter.

Recently, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders got into a dispute over the formers ties to the fossil fuels industry. Clinton denies that shes received money from the fossil fuels industry or lobbyists, and insists that all the contributions come from individuals. Bernie Sanders, citing Greenpeace, says otherwise. Politifact decided to weigh in with an article titled Sorting Out Hillary Clintons Fossil Fuel Contributions.

As an astute writer on the website Daily Kos, going by the name Alteredego, pointed out that for the most part, the article presents an accurate take on the matter, but then it takes a surprising leap by not counting donations to Clintons affiliated super PACs by fossil fuels and oil interests:

[I]ts a stretch to draw a direct line between those super PAC donations and Clintons campaign. Under federal law, the candidates have no control over super PAC spending.

Technically, coordination between a campaign and a super PAC is illegal, as Politifact points out. However, illegality doesnt necessarily mean strictly enforced. At least some of Politifacts journalists are aware of this fact, as evidenced by this statement from a past article by Linda Qiu:

Affiliated super PACs are often created or staffed by the candidates political allies and act as extensions of the official campaigns. Though these independent groups are not allowed to donate directly to or coordinate with campaigns, theyve have found ways to toe the line.

Hillary Clintons 2008 campaign manager Guy Cecil is at the helm of the pro-Clinton Priorities Action USA, while her current campaign manager has met with potential PAC donors.

The International Business Times points out that Clintons relationship to these independent groups is historic for a Democratic presidential candidate.

Last year the New York Times reported that Clinton would begin personally courting donors for a super PAC supporting her candidacy, the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has fully embraced these independent groups that can accept unlimited checks from big donors and are already playing a major role in the 2016 race. In November, the Times reported that former President Bill Clinton would be a special guest at a donor meeting for the group, called Priorities USA Action. The super PAC  which is run by Guy Cecil, a former top staffer in Hillary Clintons 2008 campaign  has raised more than $40 million to support her in 2016.

Politifacts statement that Clintons campaign does not coordinate with super PACs, is grossly misleading. Correct the Record and American Bridge 21st Century have both benefitted from fossil fuels and oil money  one notable donor being Lee Fikes, a Texas oil tycoon. Both of these super PACs are owned by David Brock, an ally of the Clinton campaign who also serves on the board of Priorities USA Action.

Every media outlet is subject to bias from owners, investors, and parent companies, then editors, and lastly journalists. We can detect it by analyzing the stories they run, the language they use, who they quote, and how those people are quoted. Politifact is no exception.

Bias is fine as long as it is openly admitted because it allows people to formulate their own opinions by taking the source into account. To this end, I admit to my readers that I am for Bernie Sanders for president. However, where bias becomes troublesome is where it isnt admitted  especially so when we see it from fact checkers.

This presidential primary has been eye-opening. We are seeing just how much influence the political establishment has in our media.
Lost in the furor surrounding North Carolinas now-infamous Bathroom Bill, the law that essentially legalizes anti-LGBTQ discrimination in the state, is the fact that Mississippi passed a similar law very recently. Maybe its because we expect Mississippi to pull this type of bullshit, whereas North Carolina has a much stronger history of progressivism. Regardless, the Mississippi law might be even worse that the one in North Carolinait even allows doctors to refuse medical care to patients if doing so would compromise their conscienceliterally the opposite of the Hippocratic oathand Tracy Morgan is making his opposition to it known by canceling his scheduled Apr. 29 show in Robinsonville, Miss.

Tracy did not make this decision lightly, a representative said via a press release. He very much looks forward to rescheduling his tour dates in the area after the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act is either repealed or heavily amended.

This is the second heartwarming act Morgan has performed this week, after performing for all the hospital workers who helped him recover from his life-threatening 2014 car accident in New Jersey over the weekend. Whether or not a boycott is the right call (versus performing the show anyways and turning it into a protest) is up for discussion, but the important thing is that Morgan is taking a stand.
Patna: Despite tepid response from the Congress that made it clear on Monday that it had no intention in hanging on to the coattail of Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal  U in other states, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, during a press conference in Patna on Monday, reiterated his desire for the obliteration of the Sangh Parivar by forming a national alliance bigger than the grand alliance in Bihar.

Kumar, who sees the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the biggest hurdle in his path to the Prime Minister's bungalow, on Monday, asked the Congress and various left parties to join hands in his effort to wipe off Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its offspring, including the BJP, that was spreading communalism to retain power at the Center.

"The Sangh Parivar is a growing threat that is not good for the nation. I urge all non-Sangh parties including the left and regional parties across the nation to form an all-powerful alliance that would take on the saffron party head on and put them out of business once and for all," the Janata Dal  U President said.

Kumar, who was a willing partner of the BJP for 17 long years that ultimately led him to the Chief Minister's office in Bihar, justified his relationship with the saffron party saying the alliance was on its own terms after leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani agreed to his condition of not raising controversial issues like Ram Temple and Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir.

"When the leadership in the BJP changed and its new leaders started to talk about Ram Temple, Uniform Civil Code, and Articles 370, I did not see any reason to continue our relationship with the NDA," he said.

The Chief Minister also came down heavily on his party MP Anil Sahni who is being investigated by the CBI for his involvement in what is now known as the LTC scam.

"He should resign and fight the charges in a court if he is innocent as he claims to be. If he is kicked out from the Parliament, I would not have any problem with the decision. Vice President of India and Rajya Sabha Chairperson Hamid Ansari gave the green signal for a CBI enquiry and I have no reason to doubt the integrity of the Vice President," he said.

Kumar once again defended his decision to impose prohibition in Bihar that also includes sale and consumption of 'toddy'  profession pursued mainly by the Pasi community.

"How long these people will be climbing up the tree and tap toddy. I want them to become educated and become professionals and the prohibition will help them go far in their lives instead of continuing to tap toddy," the Chief Minister said.
"We're not used to seeing growth in our check business," said Deluxe's Tracey Engelhardt, who reports a 6% to 7% increase in revenue for check orders from businesses and consumers in each of the last three quarters, driven by various factors originating from the pandemic.
Imprisoned Young Iranian Physicist Stricken with Cancer after Years of Denied Medical Care

04/19/16

Source: International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran

Prisoner of conscience Omid Kokabee, the young physicist who has been imprisoned in Iran for over five years for his refusal to work on military research for the Islamic Republic, has been diagnosed with kidney cancer after years in which prison authorities denied him treatment for his kidney illness.



Omid Kokabee



Kokabee should be released immediately and unconditionally for medical treatment, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said today.

The continued endangerment of Kokabees life is tantamount to torture, said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Campaign. The international outcry over the harsh and unjustified treatment of this gifted young scientist must be loud enough for Tehran to hear.

Kokabee has suffered from kidney stones and other serious illnesses throughout his imprisonment, none of which has been properly treated-a common experience for political prisoners in Iran. This lack of treatment has resulted in the life-threatening situation the 34-year-old scientist now faces.

An informed source told the Campaign that early diagnosis of Kokabees condition could have prevented the advanced state of his cancer. If he had been transferred out of the prison to receive a routine sonography in November 2011, when he first experienced bleeding and pain caused by kidney stones, [the issue] would have been noticed. Even a simple sonography would show a tumor. Omid had repeatedly gone to the prison infirmary, complaining of kidney and stomach pain.

The sonogram ordered for kidney stones accidentally revealed the large tumor. He had been waiting for a long time to be transferred to a hospital with a urology department, but the officials wouldnt agree to it. Prison doctors never even examined him, and kept prescribing painkillers for him. This is the second time he was transferred to a hospital. A week ago, Omid was diagnosed with cancer. His entire right kidney is affected by a cancerous tumor, said the source.

Kokabees lawyer, Saeed Khalili, told the Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA) on April 16, 2016, After several tests and check-ups in the hospital, it has become clear that Mr. Kokabee has a malignant tumor in his kidney and needs an immediate nephrectomy to remove all or part of his kidneys.

The lawyer added that any delay in Kokabees release could result in irreparable harm to this young man.

Kokabee has been in Evin Prison since he was arrested on January 30, 2011 at Tehrans Imam Khomeini Airport on his way back to the U.S. to continue his studies as a post-doctoral student in physics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Kokabee said he was imprisoned for refusing an offer from the Iranian intelligence establishment to collaborate on a military research project, writing in an April 2013 open letter from Evin Prison to Irans supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, that his punishment was for someone who refused to work in the security and military system despite financial and technical incentives.

He is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for contact with enemy states.

Thirty-one Nobel Physics laureates joined thousands of activists in calling for his release in October 2014, and the American Physical Society awarded their 2014 Andrei Sakharov Prize to Kokabee for his courage in refusing to use his physics knowledge to work on projects that he deemed harmful to humanity.

The Committee of Concerned Scientists published an open letter on January 30, 2016 to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani calling for Kokabees unconditional release.

My client has passed kidney stones and suffered internal bleeding many times during his five years and three months in prison, his lawyer Saeed Khalili told ILNA on April 16, 2016.

Enough evidence has been presented to prove his innocence...in addition to that, he has been eligible for parole for more than two years, he added, but the judicial authorities have opposed Kokabees release.

Even Mr. Javad Larijani [Head of the Iranian Judiciarys Human Rights Council] promised [Kokabees] release in an interview with Irans Channel 2 television, in March 2015, said Khalili. We are bewildered as to why some hands dont want him to go free.

The continuation of my clients imprisonment is not only dangerous to his health, but also without legal basis, said Khalili. For humanitarian reasons, we seek Islamic mercy to save this gifted scientist from danger and ask the honorable judicial authorities to pay special attention to this case and facilitate his freedom as soon as possible.

Article 502 of Irans Criminal Code states: If a prisoner is suffering from physical or mental illness and his imprisonment would make his illness worse or delay his recovery, the judge can postpone the sentence being served until the prisoner regains his health after consultation with his physician.

Kokabees mother detailed her sons severe health problems in a 2015 letter to Irans supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. [Omid] has passed kidney stones under great pain four times without any treatment. He has had serious stomach problems and lost four of his teeth...we appeal to Iran once again to release [him].... wrote Safar Bibi Haghnazari.

We would like this person to be pardoned, Larijani told the semi-official Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA) on March 16, 2015, adding that he had held meetings with officials to discuss Kokabees release.
The study is reported in The Journal of Urology.

Washington: Will removing a baby boy's foreskin leave him with reduced sensitivity later in life? No, suggests a recent study.

The research indicated that there are no differences in penile sensitivity for a variety of stimulus types and penile sites between circumcised and intact men.

Additionally, this study challenges past research suggesting that the foreskin is the most sensitive and, in turn, most sexually relevant, part of the adult penis.

When the American Academy of Pediatrics and Canadian Pediatric Society recently revised their policies concerning routine neonatal circumcision, public interest was reignited in this long-running debate.

Focusing on health outcomes, particularly protection against sexually transmitted infections, rather than penile sensitivity, the American policy statement supports routine circumcision of newborn males, while the Canadian policy does not.

"We directly tested whether circumcision is associated with a reduction in penile sensitivity by testing tactile detection, pain, warmth detection, and heat pain thresholds at multiple sites on the penis between groups of healthy (neonatally) circumcised and intact men," explained lead author Jennifer Bossio from the Queen's University.

She added that this study indicates that neonatal circumcision is not associated with changes in penile sensitivity and provides preliminary evidence to suggest that the foreskin is not the most sensitive part of the penis.

"Methodology and results from this study build on previous research and imply that if sexual functioning is related to circumcision status, this relationship is not likely the result of decreased penile sensitivity stemming from neonatal circumcision," observed Ms. Bossio.

The study is reported in The Journal of Urology.
Iranian Political Prisoner in Critical Condition Vows to Continue Hunger Strike

04/19/16

Source: International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran

Prisoner of conscience Hossein Ronaghi Maleki, who has been on dry and wet hunger strikes since March 26, 2016 to protest being denied crucial medical treatment, is in critical condition, but has vowed to continue until his situation changes.



Hossein Ronaghi Maleki



His mother, who visited Maleki in Evin Prison on April 10, said that the food and liquid deprivation has made her son, who is suffering from kidney disease, dangerously weak.

I swear to God, Hossein looked very thin, Zoleikha Mousavi told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. His skin looked yellow and pale. Im terrified that something might happen to him.

On Tuesday [April 12], they transferred him out of the prison to be checked by a specialist, she told the Campaign. The doctor said hes in critical condition and should end his hunger strike as soon as possible.

But Hossein says he wont stop until his situation changes, added Mousavi. If anything happens to my son, officials will be held accountable.

Mousavi said that she and her husband, Ahmad Ronaghi Maleki, had gone to the prosecutors office in Tehran every day for a week but the officials refused to provide a clear solution for resolving the situation.

After seven years in prison, I want my son to be free, said Mousavi. He has done enough time. He has lost one kidney and is in pain from new diseases.

He should be conditionally released. I beg the authorities to let my son go, she said. I swear to God, he is not well.

Political prisoners in Iran are singled out for particularly harsh treatment, which often includes denial of medical care, in direct violation of Irans own laws and prison regulations.

While in prison, Maleki has suffered digestive track, breathing and kidney problems. He has also undergone several surgeries.

He was granted medical furlough on June 14, 2015 upon posting bail in the amount of 4 billion rials (about $132,000 USD), but was returned to prison before his treatment was completed on January 20, 2016.

I knew he would get worse when he was taken back to prison, said Mousavi. Even the doctors in the prison clinic repeatedly said they dont have the necessary facilities to treat prisoners like Hossein.

Isnt seven years in prison enough for a young man? she said.

Malekis father began his own hunger strike in front of Evin Prison on April 9, 2016 to bring attention to his sons plight. But Mousavi urged her elderly husband to end his strike soon after.

After two days, I noticed my husband was in really bad shape, she said. It was hot outside and hes an old man. I begged him to end his hunger strike. I told him I would be helpless if something happened to our son in prison.

I gave him some water and he broke his hunger strike in front of Evin Prison, Mousavi told the Campaign. We dont know what else to do to make the authorities listen.

Hossein Ronaghi Maleki, 30, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2009 by Judge Yahya Pirabbasi for his peaceful activities following Irans widely disputed presidential election that year. He was charged with acting against national security and supporting and receiving money from foreign organizations.

Following the recent prisoner swap between Iran and the United States, which resulted in the release of four detained Iranian-Americans, Malekis father asked why Iranian political prisoners who dont hold dual citizenship remained unjustly incarcerated.

As a father I want my son to be free, too, Ahmad Ronaghi Maleki told the Campaign in January 2016.

All these years I have been running around shouting for my sons freedom so that someone might hear me, he said.
Iran, US at Odds Over Nuclear Sanctions Relief

04/19/16

By Pamela Dockins, VOA

STATE DEPARTMENT-Iran's concerns about its perceived lack of sanctions relief and Syria's faltering political talks will be focal points for Secretary of State John Kerry when he sits down for talks Tuesday with his Iranian counterpart.



FILE - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at United Nations headquarters, Sept. 26, 2015. (photo by

FILE - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at United Nations headquarters, Sept. 26, 2015. (photo by Islamic Republic News Agency

Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will meet in New York, at the start of a trip for Kerry that will include stops in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Iranian officials have complained that their country is not getting the sanctions relief specified in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the landmark nuclear agreement that was implemented in January.

"All of the countries should take necessary measures to remove the obstacles to the implementation of the nuclear deal," Zarif said at a Saturday news conference with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.

"We have seen the Americans' attitude, so we will put some pressure on them, so should the EU, to pave the way for cooperation between the non-U.S. banks and Iran," he added.

The U.S. has been "fulfilling" its commitment to the JCPOA, said White House spokesman John Earnest on Friday. He said giving Iran access to the U.S. financial system was "not part of the deal."

At the State Department on Monday, spokesman John Kirby acknowledged that he expects the sanctions issue to be on Tuesday's agenda for Kerry and Zarif.

"We are obviously aware of the concerns that they have expressed about the status of sanctions relief, and the secretary is very mindful that this topic will come up," he said.

Syrian setbacks

Their meeting also comes at a time when the U.N.-facilitated process for a political transition in Syria appears to be showing signs of fray.

The Syrian opposition announced that it has postponed its participation in the political talks because of what it says are the Syrian government's cease-fire violations.

The two sides have been holding indirect talks in Geneva.

Iran supports the Syrian government while the U.S. has supported the moderate opposition. But Tehran and Washington are part of the International Syria Support Group, which has been backing the process for a political transition.

After his meeting with Zarif, Kerry travels to Cairo, where he will discuss bilateral and regional issues with officials including President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

He then will join U.S. President Barack Obama in Riyadh for a Gulf Cooperation Council summit.
Iran Launches Undercover Morality Unit

04/19/16

By Golnaz Esfandiari, RFE/RL

Iranian authorities have launched a new undercover police unit that will be tasked with monitoring citizens' morality in the Iranian capital and reporting transgressions to authorities.





Tehran's police chief Hossein Sajedinia said that the male and female agents -- numbering around 7,000 -- will focus on issues such as "improper veiling and removal of veils inside cars," as well as noise pollution and reckless driving.

Sajedinia was quoted by the official news agency of Iran's judiciary, Mizan Online, as saying that the undercover agents will not have the right to directly confront people. Instead, agents will send police via text message the license plate numbers of the alleged violators and their crimes, for police to follow up.

The move is the latest initiative aimed at forcing Iranians to adhere to some of the strictures imposed after 1979 Islamic Revolution. Though not stated explicitly, the announcement appears aimed squarely at women, and enforcing laws that require wearing head veils and covering their bodies.

Iran's official news agency IRNA reported in recent days that a new campaign against immoral behavior and improper veiling had been launched in Tehran with morality police units stopping citizens at major highways and shopping centers.

Since the 1979 revolution, authorities have tried with varying degrees success to force Iranians to conform to conservative dress codes. Despite arrests, fines, and threats, though, many Iranian women, particularly in Tehran and other major cities, have pushed the boundaries, wearing small colorful scarfs, makeup, tight pants and short coats.

In June 2014, lawmakers in parliament held a public debate about what was perceived to the problem of excessively tight women's leggings.

The announcement by Sajedinia was met with criticism online and protest by many Iranians inside and outside the country who termed the new vice squad as yet another act of state interference in people's lives.

"Big Brother is watching you," one Twitter user said.



Big Brother is watching YOU! #_  HusseiN (@Hoo_Say_No) April 18, 2016

"Too much security can bring insecurity," another Iranian wrote on social media.

"If I decide to leave Iran for one reason that's the hijab," another woman from Tehran wrote on Twitter.

Mizan Online, the judiciary news agency, also posted online photographs of members of the new unit. That prompted some social media users to ridicule the authorities, saying that Iran was likely the only country in the world where photographs of its undercover agents were available online.

Some said that the move went against campaign promises of more freedom and less state interference in people's lives by President Hassan Rohani.

Copyright (c) 2016 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org
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After ten years of serving this country as a U.S. army 1-28 infantryman, PCC student Tomas Domingo has yet to stop doing everything in his power to help those in need. While working towards his degree in political science, he is also busy hashing out a plan to create a cost-free school for the children in his hometown in Guatemala, where families are stricken with poverty and the line between education and financial burden is non-existent.

Born in the United States but raised in Guatemala, Domingo returned to the states at seventeen years old with nothing and no one with him but his determination and what he could carry on his back. Since then, hes lived in a total of six states while pursuing his goal of getting a quality education and making a life for himself.

He joined the military as an infantryman at the age of 21, serving two tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

I just woke up one morning and said, Hey, Im gonna join the military, Domingo said .. That was it. There was nothing else to think about. Im very proud to serve. Its one of those things Im very honored to talk about.

After nearly a year out from service, Domingo has been focusing on his studies, determined to move forward with his education as quickly as possible. By taking classes throughout his military career, he will soon graduate with his Associate Degree in political science after spending only two semesters at PCC.

I feel like I have a responsibility to my community, Domingo said. Where I came from, its a very a difficult environment where poverty is around 24/7. I believe getting into political science will help me evolve in a field where I feel like I can make a difference in my community and other communities.

After graduation, Domingo plans to attend Pepperdine University, where he is currently on the waiting list for admission. He plans to use his major to help as many people as he can, and perhaps become an attorney one day.

Aside from being a full-time student and family man, Domingo has also been hard at work with his own project to provide aid to those living in poverty in his hometown Zacueleu Central Zona 9 in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. He created the organization Korazon Kakao in December 2015, through which he lifts some financial burden from children whose parents are often faced with the choice between school supplies and food.

Korazon Kakaos mission is to provide opportunity and knowledge, Domingo said. Its an opportunity to help others, mainly children, evolve and continue to pursue a way of living. Im aware that its a long process, however, I know its not impossible. Knowing the kind of determination that I have, its going to happen.

Domingos main goal for the organization is to create an entirely cost-free, quality school for the children in his hometown. Now he is focusing on doing what he can to provide them with school supplies for the beginning of the school year, a costly necessity that causes many families to go hungry.

What Im trying to accomplish every year is to take school supplies to a lot of these kids in this community, because they cannot afford it at the beginning of the school year, Domingo said. Its either they buy school supplies, or they eat. You buy supplies, you dont have money to put food on the table. This whole project is meant to take that weight off their shoulders for a while.

During this past December and January, Domingo traveled to Huehuetenango for three weeks to give students packs of school supplies, which he funded out of his own pocket. He was able to successfully help around 300 children, though his expectations of the need in his town were fairly low and many needs were unfortunately unmet.

Huehuetenango lies in a rural area of Guatemala, which would otherwise go unnoticed by the rest of the world if it wasnt for the ancient Mayan temples found there. The artifacts often attract tourists from all over, though the parts of the town littered with poverty are often out of sight and mind.

Growing up in that kind of poverty himself, Domingo left Guatemala to the United States with a vow to someday go back to help in any way he can.

I didnt get that much help when I was young, Domingo said. I know what its like. I feel that my purpose is to show people who dont have any help that there is actually someone out there to help them in any way.

When I left Guatemala, I knew I needed to go back to help in some way. I didnt know then how I would, but now I know. If Im able to open up a school at no cost, that will help a lot in a big way, Domingo continued.

This past trip of his to Guatemala was only the first of many. Domingo plans to go back at the start of every school year, hopefully with more resources and help from the Guatemalan community of Los Angeles.

I didnt think the community was going to react the way it did, Domingo said. I didnt think a lot of people were going to show up, but it happened. And now I know for sure that next year Im going to do it more organized, with more resources and support.

Domingo was welcomed with open arms in his childhood community, with many of the teachers at his old elementary school Escuela Rural Mixta Zaculeu Central remembering him and thanking him for coming back.

To see the community react with a sense of joy and happiness is very fulfilling, Domingo said. It motivates me to do even more.

His current focus is to help the students at Escuela Rural Mixta Zaculeu Central, but he hopes to soon have the means to spread the love to all of the schools in Huehuetenango, as well as open his dream school.

If were fortunate enough to have food on the table and a roof over our heads, we should be able to help out others, Domingo said. That is my legacy.
A while back we looked at several hacks for getting more out of your Gmail account. But as with all of Googles services, there are always more tricks and features to uncover. Here are five that will help you better manage your messages.

Hit the mute

Who hasnt wanted to run screaming from their monitor after the 13th Welcome aboard! message to the new hire? Gmail provides a means to tune out distracting email conversations like these: muting.

Muted conversations bypass your inbox and go straight to your archive. They only return to your inbox if a new message is addressed solely to you or youre added to the To or Cc line in a new message. To silence the noise, select the conversation and click the More button above your messages, then select Mute. You can also use the keyboard shortcut M.

Send messages from different addresses

Most of us have multiple email accounts: your work address and at least one, if not several, personal ones. Instead of logging in to each account individually, you can send messages from any of them through Gmail.

Gmail allows you to add other email aliases and accounts.

Youll first have to set up your alternate email addresses in Gmail. Google provides detailed steps for adding external addresses and domain and email aliases. Once theyre added, just click the From field when youre composing, forwarding, or replying to an email. Then click the drop-down menu to the right of the field and select the address from which you want to send the message.

Turn messages into tasks

There are dozens of third-party apps that let you turn email messages into action items. But you can do it with Gmail alone thanks to Google Tasks.

Select Add to Tasks from the More menu to turn messages into action items.

Open a message you want to add to your to-do list or just select the checkbox next to it in your inbox. Click More > Add to Tasks or press Shift + T. The item will be added to your task list in the lower-right corner of the Gmail window. Click on the task list to add a due date and notes, see related messages, or move it to another list.

Back up your messages

We all assume our most important Gmail messages will be there when we need them, but its best not to tempt fate. As with any other critical data, a backup is a must. Google lets you do it without the need for third-party software.

You can download your entire Gmail data set or just select labels.

Just go to Googles data download page and scroll down to Gmail. Click the drop-down menu on the right to download all your mail or just particular labels. Messages are saved in the widely used .MBOX format, so you can easily port them to another email service as well.

Reclaim space

Many of us will never bump against Drives 15GB of free storage. For those who do, theres an easy way to find the email attachments that are hogging the space.

In Gmails search bar, type size:xm, but replace x with a number (m stands for megabytes). This will pull up all messages with file attachments over the size threshold youve designated. Save them to your local drive or external storage and delete them from your inbox to free some space.
Personally, Im a big OneDrive user but I know a lot of people use Google Drive as their main cloud storage provider. If you live in Googles world with Gmail, Google Docs, and Photos, then Google Drive is a sensible choice. Recently, Google made Drive just a little bit better by finally adding selective sync to the desktop client.

What this means is that you can choose to have some of your folders synced to your PC while leaving others completely in the cloud.

Selecting your Drive folders

To get started, click on the Google Drive icon in your system tray (that upward facing arrow on the far right of the taskbar). When the Drive pop-up panel appears click the menu icon (three vertical dots) in the upper-right corner and select Preferences.

Google Drives preferences window.

A new window appears opened to the Sync options tab. What you want to do now is click the radio button labeled Sync only these folders.

Google Drives selective sync interface.

Now a two-panel window appears listing all the folders in the root of your Google Drive cloud storage. If you want to deselect an entire folder just uncheck the box next to it.

Another option is to stop syncing specific subfolders inside a parent folder. For example, if you have a Documents folder with subfolders for each month, you could choose to only keep the latest month and stop syncing the others. So Documents > April would still be on your PC but folders like Documents > January, Documents > February, etc. wouldnt. To stop syncing subfolders, click on the parent folder in the left-hand pane. The subfolders will show up on the right. Now deselect the subfolders that you dont want.

Once youve got Drive set up the way you like, click Apply, and a pop-up warning will ask you to confirm your selective sync choices. Once you confirm by clicking Continue Google Drive will automatically delete the nonsyncing folders from your PC. That will free up space on your local hard drive, while still leaving your folders in Googles cloud.

Those are the basics of Google Drives selective sync. A couple additional things to keep in mind: Selective sync only works for folders. You cannot selectively sync individual files. Also, if you delete files from your PC that are shared with others, Google warns that they may lose access to those files.
Microsoft has cited new European data protection rules in support of its claim that the U.S. government should use inter-governmental agreements rather than a warrant to force the technology company to provide emails stored in Ireland that are required for an investigation.

The General Data Protection Regulation was adopted last week by the European Parliament with an aim to provide an unified data protection regime across member states. It was earlier adopted by the Council of the EU, and is to come into effect in a little over two years after its publication in the EU Official Journal. The legislation will replace the EU Data Protection Directive, which dates back to 1995.

In a filing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Microsofts lawyer E. Joshua Rosenkranz referred to Article 48 of the regulation, which states that any judgment of a court or tribunal and any decision of an administrative authority of a third country requiring a controller or processor to transfer or disclose personal data may only be recognised or enforceable in any manner if based on an international agreement, such as a mutual legal assistance treaty..

This rule sits well with Microsofts own position in the dispute. It has favored an inter-governmental resolution to the U.S. demand for access to the emails in Ireland, through the use of mutual legal assistance treaties the U.S. has with other countries including Ireland. The government has argued that the procedure is time-consuming.

Although the government has a warrant for access to emails held by Microsoft of a person involved in an investigation, the company has argued that nowhere did the U.S. Congress say that the Electronics Communications Privacy Act should reach private emails stored on providers computers in foreign countries. Microsoft provided non-content information held on its U.S. servers in response to the search warrant, but tried to quash the warrant when it concluded that the account and the content of the mails were hosted in Dublin.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York had earlier ruled that the warrant under the Stored Communications Act, a part of the ECPA, was a hybrid: part search warrant and part subpoena. It is executed like a subpoena in that it is served on the Internet service provider, which is required to provide the information from its servers wherever located, but does not involve government officials entering the premises, Judge Francis ruled. Microsoft holds that Congress should be asked for a decision on whether warrants under the ECPA can be executed abroad.

Under the new EU regulation, fines can be levied for infringement of certain provisions such as Article 48 of up to 4 percent of the total worldwide annual turnover of an undertaking in the preceding financial year.

Article 48s enactment confirms that, absent a clear statement from Congress, the Stored Communications Act should not be read to extend to data stored abroad, Rosenkranz wrote in a letter to the clerk of the court. The presumption against extraterritoriality serves to guard against precisely the sort of international tension and intrusion on foreign sovereignty that the Governments reading of the Act would engender.

The proceedings in this high-profile lawsuit playing out in the appeals court have been rather slow in the last few months, with a decision by the court eagerly awaited because of its wide implications.
Not wanting to be left behind in the pursuit of enhanced user security, Viber is adding end-to-end encryption (E2EE) following WhatsApps E2EE roll out earlier in April. Viber announced on Tuesday that E2EE would roll out to its users globally over the next two weeks. The new encryption will cover text, voice, and group chats, and will work across mobile and PC versions of Viber.

Viber with end-to-end encryption.

The new feature will be made available to users automatically. Youll know you have it when you see a lock icon in the text entry box in chats. But Vibers implementation wont be as behind-the-scenes as WhatsApps is. Instead, the company has added a few extra features for those who want added protection.

When you see a gray lock icon, that means your communication is being protected using the services standard E2EE. In addition, each user also has a cryptographic key associated with their device that can be used to authenticate your identity to other Viber users. When this features in use the lock turns green. If it turns red instead, that can mean someone is trying to listen in on your conversation through a man-in-the-middle attack.

However, youll probably see a red lock more often when the person youre talking to switches to a new device. When that happens youll need to re-authenticate each other to get the lock icon back to green. We havent had a look at Vibers new encrypted app yet, so we cant comment on how easy it is to use the services new authentication feature.

In addition to E2EE, Viber also introduced a new hidden chats feature that removes chats from your regular logs and protects them behind a PIN lock.

Why this matters: Blame it on the Snowden revelations, the increasing secret demands for personal data by law enforcement, or just plain old hacking. Whatever the reason, more people are concerned about personal online security, and at least some messaging companies would rather not be involved in demands for user data. Apples iMessages also offers E2EE, as does Signal, while Line and Telegram offer it as an option. Many other services dont offer E2EE encryption at all, including major ones like Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Kik, and Snapchat. With so many holdouts were not quite at the tipping point for universal E2EE, but its getting there.
Asus didnt want to be left out of the wearable tech craze with its latest Republic of Gamers desktop.

The ROG GT51CA has all the trimmings youd expect from a high-end gaming rig, including up to a 6th-generation (Skylake) Intel Core i7-6700K processor, support for an Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X graphics card, dual 512GB M.2 PCIe RAID 0 solid state drives, up to 64GB of DDR4 memory overclocked to 2,800MHz, and a multi-zone thermal solution with liquid cooling. The case is pretty slick as well, looking vaguely like an evil robot, with a special lighting mode that activates while the system is overclocked.

But what really makes the ROG GT51CA stand outfor better or worseis the included ROG Band, which youre supposed to wear on your wrist. Waving the band in front of the desktop unlocks the Shadow Drive, a hidden partition where you can stash confidential data. The band can activate the systems overclocking as well.

Does the ROG Band serve any purpose while youre away from your desk? In theory, the NFC chip inside could be used for phone unlocking or home automation. But out of the box, its just another way to interact with the PC, with no fitness tracking, notifications, or any other features youd expect from a wrist-worn wearable in 2016.

Odder still, the NFC sensor the ROG GT51CA needs to communicate with the ROG Band is optional. The product information Asus provided for the ROG GT51CA doesnt say whether the ROG Band, too, is optional. Given that we dont have pricing or retail availability for the system or any accessories, youll have some time to think over your level of commitment to wearable gaming tech.

Why this matters: In all honesty, remembering to strap on a wristband is probably going to be less convenient than remembering a password, and push-button overclocking would be a far better solution than NFC-based hand-waving. Still, the underlying idea of a gamer-centric wearable has some potential. Maybe next time Asus can hook up with Razer or another wearable device maker on something thats a bit more versatile.
Recently, on my way home from work, I was horrified when I received four videos of very gory, graphic porn from an otherwise quiet carpenter I had been working with during my interior design projects. He had, till that day, used WhatsApp only to convey designs of table bases et al. I had to park on the side of the street to deal with my shock and outrage. My male friends said to me, you must have been nice to him. Whatever could that have meant? I mean, is being nice in a working relationship an invitation for an attack on my modesty?

When I look at womens issues at the workplace and their relationships with their colleagues, I feel that looking upon any woman as a sexual object is detrimental to the growth of an entire economy. After all, a female professional is no different from a male professional. Each might have her own method, practice, scope, dexterity and IQ  and none of these are gender issues. A change in the attitude of males is not only required, but absolutely necessary in the professional space along with a clear sense of boundaries.

An office is a space of open interaction, but certain invisible walls must exist that are not meant to be breached by men or women. And this must begin from the beginning. A change in male-oriented education that still contains covert signifiers of discrimination as well as objectification of women as sexual objects, can lead to much greater professional productivity among both genders. At a young age if both boys and girls are taught the right values and enabled to understand respect for all individuals, man and woman alike, it could go a long way. As for me personally  I do get taken seriously in relationships at work, by my male as well as female colleagues.

My observation is that a lot depends on how I approach a relationship at work, especially with a male employee. I believe that confidence, belief in my agenda and a degree of astuteness goes a long way. Society will take a while to really alter its patriarchal view of women at work, but Im optimistic and feel that women can do a great deal to help themselves in the professional space.

The most important need of the hour is for them to effectively deal with their sometimes tricky equations with men at work. It is extremely important that both be educated in mutual respect. In a more general sense, the business community in India is viewed as a very patriarchal setup, but this very community has some of the most successful professional women in the world  Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Anu Aga, Indira Nooyi and so many more. And their success stands testimony to the fact that women have as much potential for business acumen and professional skill as men do.

Actress Anushka Sharma was recently quoted as saying, If there is an actor of the same stature as me, who would be able to bring in only that much money to a movie, he would still be paid more than me because he is a guy. Nobody is even thinking about it. It is just ingrained. This needs to change, in the film industry and otherwise.

Besides the work space, a conducive attitude within the immediate family is also of the utmost importance. If a woman is blessed with an open-minded family, or if she can get them to open their minds by her own grit and determination to do something with her life, then nothing can stop her from finding her way in the world.

I am not a torch-bearing feminist but I do believe that a greater sense of fairness needs to pervade in society where women can tap into their potential for the professional space and not simply be reduced to objects of desire or domesticity.

The writer is a columnist, designer and brand consultant. Mail her at nishajamvwal@gmail.com
The FBI defended its hiring of a third-party company to break into an iPhone used by a gunman in last years San Bernardino, California, mass shooting, telling some skeptical lawmakers Tuesday that it needed to join with partners in the rarefied world of for-profit hackers as technology companies increasingly resist their demands for consumer information.

Amy Hess, the FBIs executive assistant director for science and technology, made the comments at a hearing by members of Congress who are debating potential legislation on encryption. The lawmakers gathered law enforcement and Silicon Valley company executives to discuss the issue, which has divided technology companies and authorities in recent months and spurred a debate over privacy and security.

The hearing follows a recent standoff between the FBI and Apple over a court order to force the company to help gain access to an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers. Apple refused to comply with the order, citing harm to the privacy of its users. The FBI later dropped its demand for Apples help when it found a third-party alternative to unlock the device.

In the hearing, Hess did not provide details on how the FBI gained access to the iPhone but said the agency has come to rely on private-sector partners to keep up with changes in technology.

We require services of specialized skills we can only get through third parties, Hess said.

Some lawmakers criticized the use of gray hat hackers and questioned the FBIs demands for Apples help to access encrypted information. I dont think relying on a third party is a good model, said Rep. Diana DeGette, a D-Colo.

Apples general counsel, Bruce Sewell, said in his opening remarks at the hearing that encryption did not prevent law enforcement from solving crimes.

Sewell also defended Apples security practices, saying the Silicon Valley company always aimed to keep its devices safe from prying eyes. Within the last two years, he said, the Chinese government has requested Apples source code but the company has refused to hand it over.

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Complete coverage of the San Bernardino shooting, aftermath
A judge says shes considering throwing out at least one conviction against a former Boeing manager and Lake Elsinore resident found guilty of receiving and possessing child pornography that was uncovered during an unrelated Chinese espionage investigation.

U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder said Monday that she needs more time to consider the facts of the case and postponed the sentencing of Keith Gartenlaub.

Gartenlaub, 47, said theres no evidence he was aware of the child pornography or had ever accessed the images found on his computer. He also argues that the warrant to search his computers was based on false allegations of a crime of which hes never been charged  espionage.

Snyder has previously ruled that the warrant was lawfully issued and the evidence properly gathered.

FBI agents say they found the child pornography images on Gartenlaubs computer two years ago as they were investigating a potential data leak at Boeing.

As part of that probe, they obtained a secret warrant from the nations secretive intelligence court to search Gartenlaubs home.

Gartenlaub has been unable to obtain any information the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court relied on to issue the warrant.

Courts have consistently found that disclosing material involving the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court could expose sensitive intelligence secrets.

In Gartenlaubs case, then-Attorney General Eric Holder advised against disclosure.

Gartenlaub was convicted of two federal child pornography charges in December.

In an interview with The Associated Press this month, Gartenlaub said he has a right to know and fight the government arguments that were used to obtain the warrant.

You cant base a search on lies, he said.

In a statement this month, the Justice Department said, When law enforcement lawfully obtains evidence of a serious crime, in this case a crime against children, we will pursue further investigation of that crime.

In its search of Gartenlaubs home, the FBI says. it found videos on multiple hard drives and evidence that Gartenlaub maintained a carefully curated and organized collection that was copied multiple times.

Jeff Fischbach, a forensic examiner who reviewed the evidence for the defense, said there was no evidence the videos were ever opened or accessed in the years since being downloaded and that other computer users may well have been responsible for the files.

Either Im this spy-slash-child pornographer, or Im one of them, or Im none of them, Gartenlaub said. Im telling you, Im none of them.

In a recent filing, prosecutors wrote that Gartenlaub continues to deny any personal responsibility for his crimes of conviction.

Snyder indicated Monday that she was planning to vacate one of the two child pornography convictions against him, saying they may be duplicative. She also said the governments request that Gartenlaub be sentenced to 10 years seemed too high.

Gartenlaubs attorney repeated his argument that the whole case should be dismissed because of the way the government searched Gartenlaubs home.

Snyder said she believes the government complied with the law, but she had some questions regarding the court process.

AP writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

Contact the writer: news@pressenterprise.com
SANTA ANA  A 38-year-old Redlands man, facing the death penalty for killing a Westminster couple, pleaded guilty on Monday and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Pasqual Raul Loera, an unemployed U.S. Navy deserter, shot Julie Palasco, 48, and Dennis Koire, 49, on Valentines Day in 2010 after visiting the couples home under the false pretense of buying an Infiniti sedan that they had listed for sale with AutoTrader, prosecutors said.

Palasco died at the scene; Kiore was in a coma for 13 months until dying from injuries in March 2011.

Loera drove off in the stolen sedan and was later caught in Las Vegas.

The trial was pending, but in the courtroom of Judge Patrick Donahue on Monday, Loera opted to plead guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and was immediately sentenced.

The Orange County District Attorneys Office had originally sought the death penalty for Loera. But the office decided to change course last week after learning more from the defense about Loeras life, said Senior Deputy District Attorney Steve McGreevy.

Loera served four tours of duty with the Navy in the Middle East, had no prior criminal record and experienced a difficult childhood, McGreevy said, all factors that a jury would consider when deciding whether to sentence Loera to death.

He confessed to the crimes after his arrest and has shown remorse, McGreevy said, adding that the victims family members were satisfied with the outcome.

There is a sense of relief there in knowing that Mr. Loera will die in prison, he said.

After the shootings in Westminster, Loera drove to his home in Redlands and accidentally shot himself in the foot when his gun slipped from his waistband. He then drove to a casino near the Nevada border  security guards chased him off after they spotted him wandering around the parking lot and crying, prosecutors said.

Loera drove off and crashed into a nearby ditch. Las Vegas police responded to the scene and determined that the car was registered to the Westminster couple.

Westminster police found the victims when they did a welfare check in response to the call from Nevada authorities.

Contact the writer: 714-834-3773 or kpuente@ocregister.com
The use of strong encryption is preventing state and local police across the U.S. from fully investigating murders, sex offenses against children, drug cases and child pornography, according to law enforcement officials who will testify before a House panel.

The officials plan to come to Tuesdays hearing armed with emotional pleas, evidence of stalled investigations and statistics to back up their arguments that companies including Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.s Google are making criminal investigations increasingly difficult by using encryption, which scrambles data with a code that can be unlocked only with a special key. They also warn of the consequences as companies such as Yahoo Inc. and Facebook Inc. move toward stronger encryption.

During my years as an investigator, I have not seen any impediment to rescuing child victims or identifying and prosecuting child sexual predators that even comes close to the impediment created by encryption, Captain Charles Cohen, commander of the office of intelligence and investigative technologies for the Indiana State Police said in testimony prepared for the hearing and posted on the congressional panels website. He cited specific investigations that he said are being blocked by encryption.

Investigations Versus Privacy

The hearing before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee comes as lawmakers, the Obama administration, companies and privacy advocates struggle with how to balance the needs of national security and criminal investigators against the value of encryption in protecting privacy rights and combating hackers. Also slated to testify at the hearing are Amy Hess, the FBIs executive assistant director for science and technology, and Bruce Sewell, Apples top lawyer.

The best way we, and the technology industry, know how to protect your information is through the use of strong encryption, Sewell said in his prepared testimony. To suggest that the American people must choose between privacy and security is to present a false choice. The issue is not about privacy at the expense of security.

Apple and the FBI are in a legal standoff in a case in Brooklyn, New York, over accessing encrypted data on a drug dealers phone. That case, coupled with the law enforcement testimony scheduled for tomorrow, expands the debate beyond the terrorist attack that the FBI has highlighted in its confrontation with Apple.

December Attack

The agency in February served Apple with a court order compelling the company to help break into an encrypted iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife carried out the deadly December attack in San Bernardino, California.

Apple resisted, bringing national attention to an issue that has simmered for years under the surface. The FBI dropped that case last month after saying it bought a tool from a private organization it hasnt identified to break into the phone. However the underlying issues remain far from resolved.

The statistics and examples cited by law enforcement officials demonstrate that most cases involving encrypted devices are criminal, not terrorism-related.

Locked Out

From October 2015 to March of this year, New York City police have been locked out of 67 Apple devices lawfully seized during investigations into 44 violent crimes, including murders, rapes and the shootings of two officers, according to testimony by Thomas Galati, chief of the New York City Police Departments intelligence bureau.

In Texas, 20 percent of devices presented to the the Greater Houston Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory cant be accessed due to encryption and thats likely to increase substantially, said Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman, who also sits on the FBIs national advisory board.

Investigators working for the Indiana State Police estimate that more than 40 percent of all mobile phones confiscated in relation to Internet crimes against children have encryption that prohibits forensic examination, Cohen said.

Put yourselves in the shoes of the parents of a child whom we have just discovered is being victimized online, Cohen said. The victimizer has thousands of photographs of your child in a digital vault that is impossible for law enforcement to open.

Creating a Backdoor

Technology and Internet companies have defended the use of encryption as essential to protect the data of their users and customers and have resisted calls to build new surveillance capabilities into their devices and services.

Yahoo is committed to protecting its users from a wide range of evolving cybersecurity threats, and a high standard of encryption has facilitated this, Chris Madsen, the companys legal director for U.S. law enforcement and security, said in an e-mail.

We also take seriously our responsibility to protect children online and fully cooperate with lawful requests for information and proactively partner with other industry leaders, law enforcement agencies and advocacy organizations to protect the most vulnerable among us, he said.

Representatives of Google and Facebook didnt immediately comment.

Companies that are part of the Reform Government Surveillance coalition, including Google and Facebook, want to keep people safe, stop crime and cooperate with law enforcement in ways that are consistent with the law, according to a statement last month in response to the FBIs fight with Apple in the San Bernardino case. But we do not believe that the law allows the government to demand that a company create new software that supplies a backdoor to a secure technology, the group said.

Developing a mechanism that would give only law enforcement agencies access to communications is effectively impossible given the state of technology, said Matthew Blaze, associate professor and cybersecurity expert at the University of Pennsylvania, who will also testify at the hearing.

Attempts to mandate one would do enormous harm to the security and reliability of our nations infrastructure, the future of our innovation economy, and our national security, Blaze said in prepared testimony.

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Murrieta police officers arrested a Menifee man who they say led them on a chase through two cities after they saw him tampering with a parked car.

The vehicle being chased ran red lights and at times crossed onto the wrong side of the road, police say. After the pursuit moved from surface streets onto the freeway, officers determined it was too dangerous and called it off. But police used the vehicles license plate to find a suspect later that day.

Jeremy Neives Phillips, 38, was arrested Thursday, April 14, and has been charged with attempted auto theft, evading arrest and vandalism over $400  all felonies. He pleaded not guilty Monday, and remained in jail at the Southwest Detention Center on Tuesday.

Police were patrolling the area of Bladen Avenue and California Oaks Road around midnight Thursday when they saw a car parked in the middle of the street with doors opened, and two men tampering with another parked vehicle, the news release said.

An officer tried to stop the two men, officials said, but they got into the vehicle that had been in the middle of the street and took off. Thats when the chase began.

Although the chase was eventually called off for public safety reasons, the vehicles license plate led officers to Phillips. Police identified him as one of the two men who was tampering with the parked vehicle. He was arrested at 1:30 p.m. at an address on Flagler Street, jail records show.

When asked if the second man who was thought to be with Phillips was being sought, Murrieta police officials said he was not, and that the case had been closed after Phillips arrest.

Police noted that Phillips has an extensive criminal history. Court records say he has convictions dating back to 1997 for crimes including vehicle theft, attempted carjacking, taking a vehicle without the owners consent, possession of a stolen vehicle, assault with a deadly weapon, battery, robbery and possession of a controlled substance.
Security researchers have taken note of the fact that Apple has stopped issuing security updates for QuickTime for Windows and strongly, strongly recommend that if youve got it on your PC you should delete it.

The U.S. Government agrees, with the US Department of Homeland Securitys Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) also suggesting that you should drop QuickTime as soon as possible. Without security updates, it could very quickly be compromised by hackers or viruses.

Pictured: what could happen to you.

Apple already removed the browser plugin for Quicktime on Windows, so theres one avenue of attack thats been closed, but this could still be a big vulnerability. If youre on a Mac youre fine. Windows users: download VLC or something, cmon, its 2016.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: QuickTime.
Here it is, folks. What little doubt is left has been erased.

Australia will head to the polls for a full Double Dissolution Federal Election.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull today formally announced the election  which has been suspected ever since the Government brought forward the date of the Federal Budget  in a press conference today.

With the Senate voting down the Governments proposed ABCC revival, Prime Minister Turnbull scored the second Double Dissolution trigger required to call for the election.

Turnbull confirmed that the trigger will be used to call a Double Dissolution election whilst fronting media at a construction site in Belconnen.

The ABCC will be a trigger for a Double Dissolution election. The Australian people will decide whether there will be an Australian Business & Construction Commission. A Double Dissolution is about giving the people of Australia their say.

When we win the election, as I believe we will, the reintroduction of the Australian Business & Construction Commission will be made law. It will protect jobs and drive economic growth.

The 74-day election campaign presents as an extremely interesting one, given that recent polls have put the two party preferred race at an even 50-50 between Turnbull and the Coalition and Labor with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

Turnbull, quite oddly, would not specifically confirm the July 2nd date for the election. Rather, he skirted the question and stated that he merely expected the election to be held on that date.

My intention is that after the budget, an appropriate amount of time after the budget is delivered, I will be asking the Governor-General to dissolve both houses of Parliament for an election that I expect to be held on the second of July. I have a very strong expectation [that the election will be on July 2], but I paying due respect to the office of the Governor-General. What Ive said is accurate and constitutionally correct.

So. Uh. Read into that what you will.

But hey. July 2nd election (more than bloody likely). STRAP YOURSELVES IN, GANG. ITS BLOODY WELL ON.

Photo: Mark Metcalfe/Getty.
This writer saw more than a few nudie runs when she was at uni, but some students at Melbourne University actually had a very good reason (that wasnt well, I am quite drunk) for getting naked on a roof today.

The student group Fossil Free MU staged a protest on the roof of the iconic Old Quad building on the uni grounds, and stripped off to reveal the message DROP YOUR ASSETS on their butts.

The protest, which protested the universitys investments in the fossil fuel industry, only lasted 10 minutes before the group were told to get down by security.

The group are calling for their uni to free investments in coal, oil and gas companies, as well as phase out all investments in fossil fuels over a period of five years.

Protestor Aoife Nicklason told The Age that previous formal conversations with uni administrators had proven fruitless, so the group had hoped that this protest would make the school heed their message.

Were trying to be really brave and hopefully the university will also be brave.

#ButtsAgainstFossilFuels? We love it.





You can see more images, and read about Fossil Free MUs campaign here: facebook.com/FossilFreeCampusMU

Source: Fossil Free MU / The Age.

All photos: Fossil Free MU / Facebook.
A Current Affair heavyweight Tracey Grimshaw has come out swinging on the 60 Minutes Beirut kidnapping case currently in the Lebanese courts, penning an editorial for The Australian in which she defended them against those who might question their judgement on the bungled operation.

Those colleagues are our friends in jail on the other side of the world, she wrote. And Im going to be totally straight with you: I want them home.

What follows is essentially a long defence of the four imprisoned crew members, who she exonerates with scattered personal and professional anecdotes. Interesting! Most compelling was this particular paragraph, about Tara Brown:

She could wear a white shirt in the Syrian desert and it would still be white and unwrinkled after three days. Id get coffee on mine before I left the airport. Her favourite place in the world is lying on the couch drinking milkshakes with her little boys. She would not spill the milkshake.

This is the kind of spirited defence we needed. I need Tracey Grimshaw to tell me exactly how well various journalists are accustomed to using drinking straws while sitting on couches. Not quite sure what this has to do with a disaster of a child rescue operation in Lebanon, though.

It kinda all reads a bit like an obituary, really. Theyre still here, even if theyre in a Lebanese prison. Cmon, Trace. Have a little bit of faith.

Some of her yarns about the journos, like Stephen Rice, are pretty wild:

Ricey is a meticulous dude. An old school journo who once rode a donkey through the Burmese jungle to track down and interview a heroin-running warlord. If the Burmese government troops had seen him theyd have shot him.

But they also read like stories you tell at someones bloody wake after theyre gone. Maybe they need less character references and more legal support.

Basically, her take is that shes providing a character witness to push back against recent coverage, which paints the crew as rabid ratings fiends who dont give a toss about local laws and would do anything for a yarn.

She reckons TV journos dont actually think about ratings at all, and theyre totally fixated instead on the logistics of pursuing a story. Well, lets see.

Karl Stefanovic also jumped into the fray today, defending the conduct of 60 Minutes in the context of journalists wanting to get to the bottom of a yarn.

The crew are expected to face a bail hearing today at 5pm, which will be a vital moment in the case.

Source: The Australian.

Photo: Getty Images / Lisa Maree Williams.
KOZHIKODE: A Malayali family travelled over 5,000 kilometres all the way to China 700 years ago and settled there. The familys 14th generation now lives in that country and some of the members still have the records of their forefathers and the connection between Kerala and China. These facts have been brought out in a 42-minute short film, Gulis Children, directed by Dr Joe Thomas, an IIT- Chennai assistant professor hailing from Kottayam.

He conducted a research spanning over two years and nearly 20,000 km of field work across India and China to explore the links between Kerala and China.

Gulis Children (Guli in China is Calicut) will be first screened in Malabar Christian College here at 11 a.m. on April 20 and later in KTDC Raindrops conference hall in Chennai on April 22 . The film is on the history of the relations between Kerala and China, and Calicut was an important node in the maritime links between China and India, says Dr Joe.

I got to see some of the members of the family, who still have the historical records of their forefathers and the connection between Kerala and China, he says. I have tried to bring out the cultural- historical ties from the time of the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties between Kerala and China and locates physical artefacts and also traces the human genealogy that survive to this day, he adds. He has portrayed Chinese commercial and social- cultural interaction with Southern India that peaked between the 12th and 15th centuries.

A number of Malabar ambassadors from Kozhikode went to China during the 14th and early 15th centuries. There are historical accounts in Chinese works that refer to connections with Kerala (chiefly Calicut, Cochin and Kollam), including works such as Yingyai Shenglan, Ming Shilu and Xingcha Shenglan, to name a few.

Calicut was an important nodal point in China's maritime outreach not only to South Asia but to West Asia and Africa as well. Not many people know that the famous Ming General, Zheng He, had erected a monument in Calicut in 1407 (presumed to be on the occasion of the king's coronation) during one of these voyages. The film is a work of non-fiction and is basically a visual representation of the research work. Dr Joe said that the real challenge of bringing out the film was to trace out the family who migrated to China long ago.
The girl was taken to different locations in Pune and forced into sexual activity.

Pune: A 16-year-old girl was allegedly raped by over 100 men for a period of two years after being brought to Pune from West Bengal with the promise of a job.

According to a report, the girl who lived with her parents near Indo-Nepal border, was brought to Pune in 2014 and forced into prostitution. The girl managed to escape to Delhi last month and filed a complaint with the police, alleging that she was raped by over 100 people including cops.

The case was transferred to Pune police on Saturday and an FIR was registered against 113 people.

Police said that the minor victim lived with her grandmother and mother in Siliguri. Her mother became mentally unstable after the father abandoned them and the household was run on her grandmothers income from a tea stall.

A man called Rohit Bhandari was a frequent visitor to the ladys tea-stall where he spotted the minor. He promised the girl a job at a beauty parlour in Pune and took her along in January 2014. While the initial few days in the new city were uneventful, one day, Bhandari drugged the girl and raped her. From there, her horrifying ordeal began, as Bhandari forced her into having sex with multiple men. She was taken to various locations in the city and made to engage in sexual activity with different men.

According to the police, another accused, identified as Swikriti Kharel, a 26-year-old woman, would take the minor victim to different cities and forced her into flesh trade. The young girl was taken to Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Bhopal, where she was forced into having sex with men.

The girl also experienced physical abuse at the hands of those running the sex racket and was made to undergo an abortion once.

"The minor girl's medical test was conducted in Delhi. She has also given a statement before a metropolitan magistrate. We have arrested one accused, who has been remanded in police custody till April 22. We will move an application for custody of the four accused earlier arrested by Chandan Nagar police," a senior Delhi police official was quoted in the report.

The other accused were soon nabbed by the Pune police, including main accused Rohit Bhandari and Swikriti.

The minors plight came to light after a 24-year-old model who was being sexually exploited by the same people was hospitalised for treatment in Delhi and the hospital authorities reported it to the police.

It was the model who helped the minor escape from Pune and took her to the national capital with her. The Delhi police transferred the case to Pune police who have taken charge and investigation is on.
Harrisburgh spelled with an extra Hjpg

A pennant hangs on the wall of the Little Amps on State Street in Harrisburg. The pennant features the antiquated spelling of the city, with a terminal letter "H," which is no longer in use.

(Sean Adams | sadams@pennlive.com)

Have you ever seen an old document the city name of "Harrisburg" spelled with a superfluous "H" at the end? It turns out that it isn't just a typo.

"Harrisburg evolved from a colloquial name, Harris' Ferry," said Ken Frew, research librarian with the Historical Society of Dauphin County. "[John Harris Sr.] had a ferry that transported settlers across the Susquehanna River. Eventually, it became the village of Harris' Ferry."

Under Harris' supervision, the ferry landing slowly grew into a town, which eventually became the county seat of the newly-formed Dauphin County in 1785. Harris' son, John Harris Jr., wanted the town to be renamed Harrisburg, in honor of his father. But the naming conventions of the nation at the time had a heavy French influence, due to France's support of the American Revolution against their mutual enemy, Great Britain.

"We were very beholden to them," Frew said, explaining that naming cities after France's King Louis XVI became en vogue. "We'd already named several cities, including Louisville, Kentucky. And the new county of Dauphin was actually named after the Dauphin of France, the heir apparent. They were really on a French kick."

When the county commissioners vetoed Harris Jr.'s plans, "he was furious," Frew said. Nevertheless, they went ahead with naming the town Louisburgh, in honor of the French king. But such was not to last.

"In 1791, John Harris Jr. died," Frew said. "Near as we can figure, on his deathbed, he was informed that the county commissioners had decided to change the name to Harrisburgh. So we think he died a happy man."

Perhaps coincidentally, 1791 was also the year that the borough of Harrisburgh was established, independent from county governance.

In the following decades, "Harrisburgh" was the spelling found on deeds and other official documents, according to Frew.

"That's the way Harris wanted it spelled, so that's how they spelled it," he said.

The "H" in "burgh" came from an English/Scottish spelling, which was a related to the word "borough." And while John Harris Jr. would have spelled it the English way, with the terminal "H," the region saw large amounts of German immigrants, which may have contributed to the gradual decrease in that spelling and a rise in the more common German "burg" suffix.

Over the years, the spelling of Harrisburg would alternate between those two similar suffixes. According to Frew, that sort of malleability wasn't uncommon to the era, and not just in spelling.

"If you look at tax records [in Harrisburg from the turn of the 19th century], they're still writing it out in English pounds and pence, which is baffling," he said.

Area newspapers were one place where the back-and-forth was particularly noticeable.

"The Oracle of Dauphin, which began in the 1790s, in their masthead they spelled it 'Harrisburgh,'" Frew said. "They carried it well into the 19th century - up to 1826, I believe. I don't know if that was a spelling in the original county records, or a county document, or if that was just a flourish of a pen, but eventually it just disappeared without any explanation."

Meanwhile, there were as many as three different German-language newspapers being printed in the area, catering to the large German-speaking community. They include the Harrisburg Morgenrote, a weekly paper printed from 1799-1840, and the Pennsylvanische Staates-zeitung, which began printing in 1846 and continued through 1916.

Despite the German spelling becoming more and more prevalent, the English spelling of Harrisburgh continued in some places well into the 19th century, and one newspaper, the Harrisburgh Telegraph, continued using the name until as late as 1935.

"Eventually," Frew said, "[the terminal 'H'] just disappeared with out any explanation or anything."

Oddly enough, the situation seems to have been reversed with Pittsburgh, the only prominent Pennsylvania city to retain the English suffix.

"Harrisburg started out with an 'H' and gave it up," Frew said. "Pittsburgh started without one and gained it."

Interestingly, both the change from 'Louisburgh' and sudden end of German-language newspapers in our area may be connected to international politics. King Louis XVI was deposed from power in the early 1790s during the French Revolution, and eventually beheaded, while America and its allies went to war with Germany during World War I.

"[German-speaking Americans] were hiding in the closet at that point," Frew said. Even though anti-German sentiment had grown by 1916, the spelling had already solidified.

However, though we no longer use the "Harrisburgh" spelling, even now, it has its proponents.

"It does look kinda neat," Frew admitted. "An 'H' on either end. It balances it out. Maybe we should go back to that."
Lin-Manuel Miranda

This image released by The Public Theater shows Lin-Manuel Miranda, foreground, with the cast during a performance of "Hamilton," in New York. "Hamilton," the hip-hop stage biography of Alexander Hamilton won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for drama on Monday, April 18, 2016. (Joan Marcus/The Public Theater via AP)

NEW YORK (AP) -- "

," the hip-hop stage biography of Alexander Hamilton, has won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for drama, honoring creator

for a dazzling musical that has captured popular consciousness like few Broadway shows.

The Columbia University's prize board on Monday cited "Hamilton" as "a landmark American musical about the gifted and self-destructive founding father whose story becomes both contemporary and irresistible." Other finalists were "Gloria," by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and "The Humans," by Stephen Karam.

"I feel really humbled and really overwhelmed," Miranda told The Associated Press. "Columbia is Hamilton's alma mater so I think that gave me a home-court advantage. But it's extraordinary to be recognized in this way."

Okay I'm in the studio recording Moana demos for the next couple hours. Don't do anything crazy without me, world.  Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) April 18, 2016

a debut novel set in the final days of the Vietnam War and narrated in flashback by a former Communist agent who infiltrated the South Vietnamese Army, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The 45-year-old author, currently in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to promote the paperback edition of his novel, told The Associated Press that he wrote "The Sympathizer" for himself but feels many can relate to it.

"I think most people in their inner selves are conscious of being an impostor, being an observer, not being the person everyone thinks they are," he said. "For the novel I took that to the extreme in using a spy and adding the dimensions of the thriller and historical fiction."

This book cover image released by Doubleday shows "Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS," by Joby Warrick, which won the Pulitzer Prize, Monday, April 18, 2016 in the general nonfiction category. (Doubleday via AP)

"Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS" by

won for general nonfiction. Warrick also won the Pulitzer in 1996, as part of a team reporting on the environmental and health risks of waste disposal systems used in North Carolina's growing hog industry.

"There's nothing like getting hit by lightning twice," Warrick said in a telephone interview.

Warrick said that if there was a chief lesson he sought to impart in his new book, which traces the origins and growth of ISIS, it was that "decisions have consequences" and the West, in many ways, helped propel the group. "We are not innocent in the rise of this organization," he said.

The history prize was won by "Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America," by T.J. Stiles, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two children.

He told The Associated Press that he had long been interested in the story of George Armstrong Custer, the butt of jokes for the disastrous Battle of the Little Big Horn.

"Custer is a difficult subject, because he's very familiar and someone who has been reduced to caricature, if not an effigy in American memory," he said. "Writing about him in an honest way, without apologizing for him, is an incredibly difficult thing to do."

The book "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life," by William Finnegan won in the biography or autobiography category, cited as a "memoir of a youthful obsession"

Finnegan, 63, is a longtime staff reporter for The New Yorker and his book tells of his childhood in California and Hawaii and his lifelong passion for surfing. He told The Associated Press that he was used to writing about other people, but eventually enjoyed taking on his own life.

"It's a strange genre for a reporter, reporting out your own past, when everything was your private life and not on the record," said Finnegan, whose previous books include "Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters" and "Crossing the Line."

"But in some ways it's a genre that suits me, too. I enjoyed it, almost guiltily."

"In for a Penny, In for a Pound," by Henry Threadgill was named the winner in the music category. The 72-year-old Chicago-born jazz artist said he wrote the composition for members of his band, Zooid.

"It was something to showcase each musician in the ensemble, that was the big thing," Threadgill said. "It was like a series of small concertos in a way, small solo pieces."



But it was the drama award that generated the most buzz. "Hamilton," about the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, becomes the ninth musical to win the drama award, joining such shows as "South Pacific," ''Sunday in the Park with George" and "Rent." The last musical to nab the award was "Next to Normal" in 2010.



It tells the story of how an orphan immigrant from the Caribbean rose to the highest ranks of American society, as told by a young African-American and Latino cast. Miranda leaned on Ron Chernow's biography of the Founding Father, but told the tale in common language and verse, transforming Hamilton into "the $10 Founding Father without a father."



Miranda, 36, who wrote the music and story, already has a Tony for creating the Broadway musical "In the Heights," a show which was nominated for a Pulitzer in 2009 and this month won three Olivier Awards in London. He also has an Emmy for writing the opening number for the 2013 Tony Awards.



In the past year, Miranda, whose family came from Puerto Rico to New York, has won a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, as well as the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, which came with $100,000.



The drama award was widely expected to go to Miranda this year. The album for "Hamilton" won a Grammy Award and became the highest-debuting cast recording on the Billboard Top 200 in over 50 years. The show is a leading favorite in this summer's Tony Awards. The libretto, published last week, immediately became a top seller on Amazon.com



"I'm just trying to stay as present and in the moment as possible because I'm fully aware that this speeds by in the highlight reel. I'm living in the highlight reel section of my life," Miranda said. "I want to slow the montage down."



"Hamilton" was a sold-out sensation this year when it debuted off-Broadway at New York's Public Theater and amassed a $60 million advance on Broadway. It has been cheered by politicians as diverse as Dick Cheney and President Barack Obama, and celebrities like British actress Helen Mirren, musician Questlove and many others.



The music is a mix of breezy pop, rap battles and slinky R&B. Lyrics are smart and playful, including Hamilton declaring: "In the face of ignorance and resistance/I wrote a financial system into existence."



The Pulitzer drama award, which includes a $10,000 prize, is "for a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life," according to the guidelines.



Previous playwrights honored include August Wilson, Edward Albee, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Recent winners include Annie Baker's "The Flick," Ayad Akhtar's "Disgraced" and Stephen Adly Guirgis's "Between Riverside and Crazy."

Full 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners list:

* Public Service: Associated Press

* Breaking News Reporting: Los Angeles Times Staff

* Investigative Reporting: Leonora LaPeter Anton and Anthony Cormier of the Tampa Bay Times and Michael Braga of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune

* Explanatory Reporting: T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project

* Local Reporting: Michael LaForgia, Cara Fitzpatrick and Lisa Gartner of the Tampa Bay Times

* National Reporting: The Washington Post Staff

* International Reporting: Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times

* Feature Writing: Kathryn Schulz of The New Yorker

* Commentary: Farah Stockman of The Boston Globe

* Criticism: Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker

* Editorial Writing: John Hackworth of Sun Newspapers, Charlotte Harbor, FL

* Editorial Cartooning: Jack Ohman The Sacramento Bee

* Breaking News Photography: Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev, Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter of The New York Times and Photography Staff of Thomson Reuters

* Feature Photography: Jessica Rinaldi of The Boston Globe

* Fiction: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press)

* Drama: Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda

* History: Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf)

* Biography: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (Penguin Press)

* Poetry: Ozone Journal by Peter Balakian (University of Chicago Press)

* Nonfiction: Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick (Doubleday)

* Music: In for a Penny, In for a Pound by Henry Threadgill (Pi Recordings)
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Eight pounds of marijuana seized in Warwick Township raid.

(Lancaster County)

Steven Steinberg.

Eight pounds of marijuana confiscated from a Lititz area home recently is the largest seizure in that area in recent years, the Lancaster district attorney's office said Tuesday.

Two suspected drug dealers accused of having 10 pounds of marijuana were charged in what authorities called a "major" drug bust in March and April in Warwick Township.

Charged were:

- Steven P. Steinberg, 30, 400 block of Cardinal Road; possession with intent to deliver, and drug paraphernalia.

- Brendan T. Reese, 20, first block of Laurie Lane; possession with intent to deliver, possession with intent to deliver Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC wax), drug paraphernalia.

They are accused of dealing primarily in the Lititz area, detectives said, and some of the marijuana was brought from Philadelphia. Investigators found no evidence they were in an enterprise together.

In an April 7 raid on Steinberg's home, Lancaster County Drug Task detectives said they found eight pounds of "high-grade" marijuana, packaging items and $514. The marijuana has a street value of about $28,000, or $3,500 per pound.

Steinberg is free on $150,000 bail.

In a March 10 raid at Reese's home, police said they found two pounds of "high-grade" marijuana, three grams of THC wax, packaging materials and $1,312 cash.

Reese is free on $25,000 bail and has a preliminary hearing Wednesday.

Lancaster County Drug Task Force detectives raided the homes on Cardinal Road and Laurie Lane after investigations, including surveillance operations, of suspected drug trafficking.

District Attorney Craig Stedman said illegal marijuana dealers won't be spared in drug investigations, despite the recent legalization of medical marijuana in Pennsylvania.

"The recent change in law regarding medical marijuana does not render the substance harmless, and changes nothing about our approach to dealers," Stedman said.
Heroin

Pennsylvania health officials are "concerned" about the potential for a heroin-fueled HIV crisis here after an outbreak in rural Indiana last year. (AP file photo)

(The Associated Press/file)

In rural Austin, Ind., home to some 4,000 residents, nearly 200 people have been diagnosed with HIV since the end of 2014.

It is a public health crisis fueled by widespread IV drug use and a lack of resources in the insulated and impoverished community roughly 40 minutes north of Louisville, Ky., experts say.

Health officials in Pennsylvania, which is experiencing the same epidemic of opiate and opioid abuse, were quick to take notice and now say they fear something similar could happen here.

Since 1980, IV drug use accounted for 15,000 HIV cases or roughly 26 percent of Pennsylvania's overall total, the second most prevalent cause in the state.

In 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, IV drug use accounted for 5 percent of Pennsylvania's 1,210 new HIV cases, the third biggest cause that year.

The number is down from 7 percent in 2012 and 6 percent in 2013.

But the continued growth of drug use and limited access to clean needles in the most rural corners of the state means related concerns have not diminished.

This as hepatitis C infections related to the rise in heroin and injection drug use grew by 150 percent from 2010 to 2013, nationwide.

"We definitely are concerned about the possibility of HIV transmission in the setting of increased heroin use," said Loren Robinson, deputy secretary for health promotion and disease prevention with the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

"I think a needle exchange is a public health practice that has been shown to reduce HIV and the Department of Health is in the process of looking at how we can approximate something like that in Pennsylvania."

The following map shows AIDS deaths per 100,000 population for Pennsylvania counties between 1990 and 2013. The darker a county, the higher the death rate. The chart below the map shows the total number of deaths in Pennsylvania each year. Use the slider at the bottom to change the year.

Source: Center for Rural Pennsylvania/Pennsylvania Department of Health | Map by Nick Malawskey

But under Pennsylvania law, distributing needles is still technically a crime, Robinson said, putting health officials in the awkward position of supporting similar programs in theory but not practice.

"Needles are still on the drug paraphernalia list so that makes it hard for us to fully support a program like that," Robinson added. "If they become reclassified or taken off the list then that's something we could look at, actually distributing syringes at needle exchange programs."

In Scott County, Indiana, the cradle of that state's HIV outbreak, officials eventually reversed their stance on needle exchanges, which were still illegal when Gov. Mike Pence declared a public health emergency in March of last year. The rules have since been relaxed and "limited and focused" needle exchange programs made operational under a temporary order.

It's something experts want to see replicated in all of Pennsylvania on the heels of success in states like New York, where health officials credit such programs with a 50 percentage point drop in the HIV rate among IV drug users, and even some Pennsylvania cities where state laws are being circumvented or reinterpreted in order to allow exchanges to open.

"I'd say we need them in every [Pennsylvania] county that has a significant number of injection drug users, though what the service would look like would vary depending on the size and characteristics of that population," said Scott Burris, director of Temple University's Center for Health Law, Policy and Practice.

And with the natural decline in new drug-related HIV cases in Pennsylvania, experts believe statewide needle exchange programs could eliminate them altogether.

'Weeks, months or even years'

For now, the handful of needle exchange programs offered in Pennsylvania occupy a legal grey area of sorts.

They exist in some of Pennsylvania's most populous counties, including Philadelphia, Allegheny and York, where distribution of needles remains against state law, but where local officials have agreed not to enforce those laws or agreed to grant exemptions, the DOH reports.

Operators of similar programs in Pennsylvania say they performed their role for years under fear of arrest.

Burris said the state's drug paraphernalia laws can be seen as applying to such programs, or not. In these cases, Burris said, power truly rests at the local level.

He points to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where needle exchange programs, sometimes referred to as NEPs, went forward with help from local authorities who concluded they had the "power to undertake the health intervention of NEP, and that the paraphernalia law did not apply."

"Any other local government in Pennsylvania could take the same approach," Burris added, as long as a local District Attorney "takes the position that the paraphernalia law does not apply to even non-government groups doing NEPs." That law has not been changed since the 1970s, he said.

But programs like them, while able to function locally, could certainly benefit from some level of state involvement or sanctioning, whether that means added funding and resources or simply a streamlining of what is now a complex and highly subjective local approval process.

Melinda Zipp is director of outreach with Harm Reduction Projects in Lancaster and Harrisburg which in 2014 alone served over 600 injection drug users and provided them more than 86,000 syringes along with other harm reduction materials.

She said it might take "weeks, months or even years" to access a new county and gain approval for a new program. Support is routinely sought from the medical community, the local government and law enforcement before a program is launched.

Zipp also pointed to the state's deregulation of syringe sales at pharmacies in 2008, but reports indicate some store owners have objected as a matter of conscience and that compliance is spotty, especially in the more rural corners of the state.

There is also the issue of rural users who resist buying needles at pharmacies because they fear judgment from salespeople or being outed as addicts.

This means clean needles often aren't reaching those who need them.

'Really a wake up call'

That stigma is one of the hurdles not only to the advent of rural needle exchange programs in Pennsylvania, but also in the treatment and prevention of HIV here, experts say.

"In other areas, especially when they're rural, there is a reluctance on the part of patients to seek care and the lack of anonymity within a rural community really can inhibit accessing that care, just because the sheer number of people makes it hard to slip below the radar," said Lisa Davis, director of the Pennsylvania Office of Rural Health at Penn State University.

Another issue is access to specialty medical services, Davis added: "Especially when you start looking at specialty services for HIV and AIDS, that becomes a challenge when looking at rural communities."

Despite this lack of resources, HIV diagnoses in rural Pennsylvania are holding steady.

In rural Pennsylvania counties, home to roughly 3.5 million people combined, there were 108 new cases in 2011, 128 in 2012, 113 in 2013 and 112 in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, The Center for Rural Pennsylvania reports.

In that same time, new HIV cases in urban counties, home to more than 9 million people combined, went from 1,286 in 2011 to 1,317 in 2012, and from 1,279 in 2013 to 1,098 in 2014.

Rural HIV deaths have also fallen, from a peak of 140 in 1994 to 15 in 2013, along with urban HIV deaths, down from a peak of 1,236 in 1995 to 229 in 2013.

But the overall downward trend in new cases, while an affirmation of state and national efforts to combat the disease, has proven fragile. This as Indiana's outbreak exposed a new vulnerability in the war on HIV, and possibly a new front: Rural America, which is no longer insulated from the scourge of drugs and enmeshed diseases like HIV and hepatitis C.

"I think Indiana was a surprise not only to Indiana but also the rest of the United States and was really a wake up call," said Robinson.

"It showed us really how big IV drug use probably is and that it's not limited to urban areas. It kind of opened our eyes to start looking in rural areas and what kind of help and information we can get to these areas so people are aware that IV drug use can be in these areas, too."

A critical report by the Trust For America's Health group said Pennsylvania lags behind its neighbors in preparedness for an outbreak. And while 43 states and Washington D.C. require reporting of the overall degree of infection, or HIV viral load, which helps track drug efficacy and treatment adherence, Pennsylvania is not one of them.

The report is also critical of Pennsylvania's needle exchange policies, or lack thereof.

The U.S. has one of the lowest rates of needle exchange availability in the developed world, according to the CGS Knowledge Center. The center says the use of federal funds for needle exchange programs has been banned since 1988, with a brief period of reversal between 2009 and 2011.

Currently there are just 16 states with laws explicitly authorizing needle exchange programs.

'Injectors at risk'

At Governor Tom Wolf's office in Harrisburg, spokesman Jeff Sheridan said the administration is taking a new look at the issue.

"Governor Wolf remains committed to finding ways to limit the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and hepatitis C including exploring regulatory and legislative changes," Sheridan said. "The administration is also actively reviewing the issues and logistics surrounding syringe or needle exchange programs and looking at what options would best suit the needs of the Commonwealth."

Dauphin County, meanwhile, continues to have one of the highest HIV rates in the state, with injection drug use among the more prevalent causes, local doctors say.

Wolf has already spearheaded efforts to equip police with Narcan and legalize over-the-counter sales of the overdose antidote.

But experts say there is still stigma to overcome and progress left to be made, particularly on the subject of HIV and heroin.

Experts such as Burris said those remnants will likely fade further as drugs continue their ravaging of rural America and real world solutions to related epidemics of death and disease are demanded instead of shunned. The drug problem, they argue, is no more a fad than it is passing.

"I hope these misconceptions about harm reduction are fading as people cope with the overdose epidemic and are realizing that drug use is a lot more complicated than poor moral choices," Burris said.

"There is no doubt that needle exchange programs can prevent and reverse HIV epidemics among injectors, that NEPs don't cause more drug use or crime, that small towns and rural areas across the country are seeing more injectors at risk, and that most places that need NEPs don't have them."
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Auditor General Eugene DePasquale

(PennLive.com file)

The state's auditor general is turning a critical eye toward York County's Office of Children, Youth and Families after the agency received a third downgraded license.

Auditor General Eugene DePasquale announced on Monday that he hopes his office, as part of a regular financial review of the agency set for mid-May, might be able to figure out why the agency hasn't been able to return to a full license.

"The news that the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services recently gave the York County child welfare agency its third, consecutive provisional license is troubling to me and to others concerned with the protection of children," DePasquale said in a news release. "Our audit results may help determine why York County's child protection agency is apparently failing in its mission, and identify recommendations to be considered -- both locally and in Harrisburg -- to ensure this agency has the resources to protect vulnerable children."

DePasquale, who is running for re-election this fall, made the announcement days after PennLive reported on the agency's third provisional license, which runs from March 15 through May 15.

The Office of the Auditor General scrutinizes the records of county-run children and youth services offices to determine how much state funding is being spent on behalf of the county's children, according to the auditor general's news release.

Such financial reviews are not an audit for the office's performance, but the release said they could uncover shortcomings that indicate larger concerns within an agency that could call for further review by the state Department of Human Services.
Ted Cruz in Camp Hill

Ted Cruz arrives at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in East Pennsboro Township to deliver a speech.

(Mark Pynes | mpynes@pennlive.com)

On the evening of the New York primary, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz will be setting his sights on Pennsylvania.

The Texas senator will be in Philadelphia at 7 p.m. for a viewing party, according to NBC News.

The free event will be held at National Constitution Center, 525 Arch St. in Philly.

Go here to register.

The Pennsylvania trip follows a four-day stretch with no public appearances in New York, according to NBC News.

"We're fully aware this is Donald Trump's home state -- he's going to do well in New York," Catherine Frazier, spokeswoman for the Cruz campaign, told the station. "But there are areas that we had an opportunity to expand and get voters, and we're hopeful we can pick off some delegates to add to our delegate count."
Facebook Automated Photo Description

U.S. health officials are linking a sharp rise in new STD cases to the advent of online and mobile dating apps.

(Karly Domb Sadof)

A new study says more than 60 percent of gay and bisexual men diagnosed with HIV reported meeting sexual partners online.

In Asia, the growing use of mobile dating apps by young gay men is a major factor in a new HIV epidemic among teenagers there.

And in Allegheny County, Pa., officials believe dating apps are contributing to a sharp increase in cases of STDs such as gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis which is up 150 percent since 2009.

Health officials fear these numbers are a result of the increased use of dating apps and greater access to casual sex, although there are skeptics.

In the U.S., cases of syphilis are up as much as 15 percent since 2013, the CDC reports, with more and more cases like them reported by patients on or actively engaged in the use of dating apps.

The young, women and gay men remain the most impacted groups.

A Pew Research Poll this year found that online dating had lost much of its stigma over time, and that a majority of Americans now believe it to be a good way to meet people.

That has changed since 2005, the organization reports, and so have the numbers of participants.

Pew found the share of 18 to 24-year-olds who use online dating services has roughly tripled from 10 percent in 2013 to 27 percent today. Additionally, participation among 55 to 64-year-olds has also risen with 12 percent reporting having ever used an online dating site or mobile dating app versus only 6 percent in 2013.

Much of the increase for younger adults is attributed specifically to the use of mobile apps like Tinder, OkCupid and Grindr, with Pew finding 22 percent of 18 to 24-year olds now report using such apps, up from just 5 percent in 2013.

And while great news for the companies behind these services, health officials are worried.

They fear this newfound openness to online dating, coupled with a waning fear of STDs and waning stigma around casual sex, could continue to fuel cases of STDs and maybe even a resurgence in HIV.

In response, there have been calls for STD warnings to be included in the apps, and after a protracted dispute with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in California, Tinder has added an STD testing site locator for users.

The apps themselves work by giving registered users access to large numbers of other users whose profiles they are able to quickly scan and contact if interested. It's the 21st century equivalent of speed dating, with the emphasis on speed and access to larger pools of people.

But there are fears that a younger generation, which came of age after the AIDS epidemic peaked in the 1980s and early-90s, fails to fully grasp the gravity or inherent risks of sexual activity.

And while new HIV cases continue to fall, new STD cases continue to rise. Critics who argue against linking them with dating app use point out that the rise started well before the advent of smart phones.

But others would argue that the technology's current ubiquity, and the growing popularity of dating apps, will only continue to grow that trend, making it harder to reverse over time.

The CDC, while acknowledging a lack of hard evidence linking dating apps with the spread of STDs, does admit that anonymous sexual partners can make it difficult to offer partner services, like expedited partner therapy, or track down people who may have been infected, but who may not know it, in order to prevent the further spread.

Doctor Harold C. Wiesenfeld, medical director of the STD program at the Allegheny County Health Department, acknowledges a lack of firm evidence linking STD trends and dating apps, so far. But he's convinced, or at least deeply concerned, based on the growing number of patients who are coming into his program reporting higher numbers of sexual partners and more anonymous sexual partners than is typical in his 20 years on the job.

He said while better testing could account for the growing number of new chlamydia cases seen in recent decades, it doesn't account for the explosive growth in syphilis seen in just the last three years.

"That cannot be explained by better testing and diagnosis," Wiesenfeld said, adding "but [it] certainly can correlate with the use of dating apps."

Somehow, despite all of the warnings, Wiesenfeld said, there are still people who fail to practice safe sex.

His patients are urged to always do so and to also limit their numbers of sexual partners while making sure to know each one's STD status and get tested themselves.

And while alarmed by the lack of sexual caution exhibited by some of his patients, Wiesenfeld is also unsure of whether the apps themselves could help change that through the introduction of programmed warnings.

"I think getting the word out about unsafe sexual practices is always a good thing. As for whether that would work or not, I do not know. It takes a lot to change an individual's behavior and part of my worry is that while awareness of STDs may be better than in the past, we are still not seeing a trend toward safer sexual behaviors."
Sarah Thomas found out from a stranger.

It was 1996, and after donating blood in Baltimore, a Red Cross worker called Thomas back into her office. It was there that the worker slid a drab folder across the table. Inside it was a paper flagged with the letters, "HIV."

"And that was it," Thomas recalls. "No hug. No, I'm sorry. Just here's your diagnosis, go deal with it."

This was two years after she believes she contracted the virus through sex with a man who later died from it. And while she had her suspicions before then, there was something about the proof staring back at her in big, dot matrix letters that no amount of worrying could have prepared her for.

'It shouldn't have happened to me'

The progress in medications means AIDS is no longer a "death sentence." But Thomas knows it's still deadly.

She lists the names of fellow Harrisburg patients who have lost their battles with the disease. Some of them she knew well.

And where she once kept her status a secret from loved ones, she's now committed to sharing her story with anyone who will listen -- for their sake as much as hers.

"Secrets keep you sick," she says again.

But Thomas is also worried about what they do to others, namely how refusing to talk about HIV and AIDS helps ensure their continuation.

As a white woman, Thomas is a minority in the AIDS community, and that's partly the point. There's still an "otherness" about HIV for much of white America. It's the same perceived distance that used to shroud the drug epidemic in their communities until rates of drug use and drug deaths began to skyrocket there, too.

Like Thomas, an estimated 84 percent of women with HIV and AIDS were infected through heterosexual sex, which remains the most common cause for women. Black and Latina women remain disproportionately impacted, though.

While white women make up 63 percent of the nation's female population, they account for only 18 percent of new HIV cases. This compared to Hispanic women who make up 16 percent of the female population and 15 percent of new HIV cases, and black women who make up 13 percent of the female population and 64 percent of new HIV cases.

The group most at risk remains gay African American men, and while transgender women are believed to be the fastest-growing HIV-positive population in the U.S., anyone having unprotected sex remains vulnerable.

Thomas wants more people from all backgrounds talking about the disease, which she hopes will lead to more people getting tested and more people taking precautions. She hopes that by talking openly about it she can spur those in the white and heterosexual communities to realize this affects them, too.

"I'm doing this because I need everyone to know that not everybody's gay or transsexual, or got it through gay contact. I was heterosexual and I was married and I was in denial," Thomas says.

"There is so much denial 'cause there's still so much stigma and there's even more stigma for the hetero WASP community. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I wasn't expected to get AIDS."

The realization burns today just as it did when she was seated in the Red Cross office or across from her sister in the car.

"Based on my upbringing it shouldn't have happened to me," she says.

She pauses, "But it did."
DarlaCarringtonMug.png

Darla M. Carrington

(Dauphin County Judicial Center)

Calling her a danger to society, a Dauphin County judge Tuesday imposed a 20- to 40-year state prison sentence on a Steelton woman who pleaded guilty to killing a man while her 8-year-old daughter watched.



Yet Darla Carrington's sentencing hearing almost was short-circuited.



The hitch arose when Judge Deborah E. Curcillo voiced concern about statements Carrington made during a presentence investigation that was conducted after she pleaded guilty to third-degree murder for the January 2014 slaying of Dennis Green.



As the judge noted, Carrington, 34, claimed she was "coerced" into pleading guilty to charges that she stabbed the 41-year-old Green, beat him with a hammer and strangled him. Curcillo cited a section of the statement in which Carrington said, "If I had Johnny Cochran money, I would not be in this situation."



"The statements you made were outrageous," Curcillo said, reminding Carrington that she could still withdraw her guilty plea and go to trial.



"I was very stressed. I was emotional," Carrington said, pleading with the judge to proceed with her sentencing. "I'm asking for this to be done and over with."



Investigators said Carrington killed Green, a cab driver, after inviting him to her Elm Street apartment. Her daughters, ages 4 and 8, were in the home at the time, and had the case gone to trial, the older girl would have been a prosecution witness, Chief Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Gettle said.



She said the 8-year-old told police that "Dennis Green was lying on his back and he was being strangled by Darla Carrington...She described that her mother was laughing."



An autopsy showed Green suffered six stab wounds and was hit more than 20 times with a hammer in addition to being strangled, Gettle said. She noted that Carrington, who initially claimed she killed Green in self defense, had no injuries.



The scenario was similar to another case in 2011 in which Carrington pleaded guilty to simple assault and making false reports after stabbing a man she at first claimed had tried to rape her, Gettle said. Carrington received probation in that case, records show.

http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/01/woman_killed_man_while_8-year-.html



Chief Deputy Public Defender Gregory Mills said Carrington, who was using crack cocaine at the time of Green's murder, is now clean and sober after spending 28 months in county prison.

"I do believe Darla's going to spend that (state prison) time bettering herself," he said.



Deputy Public Defender Petra Gross said Carrington has a background of domestic violence, depression and substance abuse. Her parental rights for her children have been terminated. However, Gross said, Carrington's efforts since her arrest to rehabilitate herself have "created a different kind of Darla," one deserving of mercy.



Carrington had no set sentencing agreement when she pleaded guilty in January. The only deal was that her minimum prison sentence had to be at least 13 years.



Carrington read a statement to Curcillo as she asked for leniency. She called Green's murder a "tragic misfortune" and said she hopes his family can forgive her.

"There are no words that can express the pain that I feel," she said. "I am utterly remorseful."



"The only way for me to make amends is to make changes," Carrington said. "I, too, will live with the pain of this for the rest of my life."



Green's relatives didn't seem inclined to forgive. His mother, Shirley Green Blanton, told Curcillo her son had multiple sclerosis. Though he dealt with persistent pain, "in many ways, he was an inspiration," she said.



"He wasn't strong enough to be a physical threat to anyone," she said. Carrington "chose to invite my son to her home and she chose to take his life... Keep the community safe from Darla Carrington as long as you possibly can."



Green's sister, Julie, looked straight at Carrington and told her, "I need you to live the worst possible life one can live in prison to let my brother's soul be free."



Kathryn Barber, Green's aunt, called Carrington an "evil woman" who "stole his life and his everlasting happiness." Gettle and Green's uncle, Ken Barber, asked Curcillo to impose the 20- to 40-year sentence, the maximum allowed for third-degree murder.



As the judge imposed that penalty "for the safety and well-being of society," several of Green's relatives and friends quietly said, "Yes!"




The court handed the death penalty to eight convicts few days after the victim's kin held protests demanding the same.

Kolkata: A Kolkata court on Tuesday handed death sentence to eight people and life term to one convicted for the murder of a college student, Sourav Chowdhury in 2014.

The 21-year-old student of Mrinalini Dutta College in Birati was brutally murdered following his abduction in the early hours of July 5, 2014 because he had organised a protest against illicit hooch dens run by Shyamal, a local miscreant, in the locality.

Later, the dismembered body of Sourav was found lying on railway tracks in between Bamangachhi and Duttapukur stations, triggering a statewide uproar.

Pronouncing the judgement, Seventh Additional District Judge, Barasat, Daman Prasad Biswas, also awarded five year jail terms to three persons, including a woman. Those sentenced to death are Shyamal Karmakar, Suman Sarkar, Suman Das, Amal Barui, Somnath Sardar, Tapas Biswas, Ratan Samaddar and Tarak Das.

Sourav's family had been demanding the death penalty for the accused and his kin, friends and neighbours had taken out a rally in the court premises last week. We want all the convicts be hanged, Souravs father had said.

Last week on Friday, the Barasat court had convicted 12 persons, including main accused Shyamal Karmakar in the case.

Probing the case, the police had arrested 14 accused out of 15 and chargesheeted them with the depositions of 41 witnesses in September of 2014.

"Nine accused  Shyamal Karmakar, Suman Sarkar, Suman Das, Somnath Sardar, Amal Barui, Tapas Biswas, Tarak Biswas, Rakesh Burman and Ratan Samaddar  were held guilty by seventh additional district judge Daman Prosad Biswas of Sections 364 (abduction for murder), 302 (murder), 201 (destruction of evidence) and 34 (common intention) the Indian Penal Code (IPC), the public prosecutor said.

Shyamal was also convicted of Sections 25 and 27 of the Arms Act. Three other accused  Shishir Mukherjee, Poly Maity, now on bail, and Ratan Das  were found guilty of Section 212 (harbouring the offenders). One accused, Anup Talukdar, was acquitted while another, Uttam Shikari, turned approver with one more accused still absconding, he had added.
Former Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson has created a new nonprofit in the form of a ministry.

Linda D. Thompson Ministries was incorporated as a nonprofit on Jan. 6, according to Pennsylvania Department of State records.

The ministry is based at 2320 N. Fifth St. in Harrisburg, which is the home Thompson grew up in.

She also ran a defunct nonprofit dubbed "Loveship Inc." (Self Help Improvement Program) at the same location. Loveship sought to help women and children and the underprivileged obtain job training skills, job placement, homebuyers counseling and foreclosure assistance.

Former Loveship Inc. headquarters in the 2300 block of North 5th Street in Harrisburg.

LDT Ministries mission, as posted on its website, is "To preach, teach, take and send the unadulterated Gospel of God's love letter (Jesus) in linen out to the World."

The nonprofit also intends to partner with mission groups to provide assistance to underprivileged women and children, while introducing them to Jesus, according to the website.

Thompson never shied away from publicly sharing her religious beliefs while she was a city councilwoman, or when she was mayor.

The American Civil Liberties Union even sent her a letter telling her to stop praying during staff meetings during her first year as mayor in 2010. She lost a re-election campaign to Eric Papenfuse at the end of her first four-year term.

After then losing a Congressional race to Scott Perry in 2014, Thompson became an ordained minister in May of 2015, according to the LDT Ministries website. And she is an associate minister at Goodwin Memorial Baptist Church in uptown Harrisburg.

LDT Ministries holds prayer meetings at 2447 Green St. from 7-8:30 p.m. each Tuesday.

Thompson could not immediately be reached for comment.
HARRISBURG- Harrisburg is seeking the public's help to name four swans that will be living at Italian Lake through this summer.

Two white swans were brought in last week from a farm in Halifax. Two black swans are set to arrive within two weeks. The neighborhood group, Friends of Italian Lake, are renting the swans to beautify the public park near Third and Green streets.

Several crafty residents have already submitted recommendations, including the topical, "Swanny McSwanface."

The suggestion was a nod to a recent public poll by the British government to name their largest and most advanced research vessel valued at nearly $300 million. The government was hoping for suggestions that would honor historical figures or landmarks. Instead, a BBC presenter offered up "Boaty McBoatface" in jest and the name took off in popularity. It's unclear if the nation's ministers will accept the internet's choice for the ship's name.

In Harrisburg, the mayor will review all submissions and select the final designations in its Name That Swan game.

Other suggestions received include Hansel and Gretel, from the well-known fairytale; and Ringo, John, George and Paul, in homage to the Beatles rock band.

"We've got loads of crazy names that have come in," said Joyce Davis, the city's spokeswoman. "People are getting a kick out of this."

Residents can add their entries to the contest by calling 311 or sending an email to the city's information system. Or add your suggestion to the PennLive comments section below so we can track popular names through "likes."
Johnny M. Collins

Johnny M. Collins

(Harrisburg police)

Johnny Collins' sister and cousin took the witness stand in a Dauphin County courtroom Tuesday afternoon and insisted he didn't kill a man in Harrisburg's Hall Manor public housing complex nearly two years ago.



They said they based that belief on conversations with Miccah Green, who was also a prosecution witness in the murder of 21-year-old Daylynn Smith of Steelton.



Hours earlier, Deputy District Attorney David Wilson presented testimony from Green implicating Collins, 25, in the June 3, 2014 slaying that occurred virtually on Collins' doorstep. Wilson is seeking a first-degree murder conviction and life prison sentence, claiming Collins killed Smith over a drug debt.

http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/04/i_heard_shots_and_i_ran_witnes.html#incart_river_home



Shatonia Lewis, Collins's cousin, was the first witness called by defense attorney Damian Destephano. She said she went to Hall Manor to question Green after Collins was arrested in July 2014.



Green told her Collins wasn't involved in the murder, and that Smith was killed by another man identified only as "Tone," Lewis said. "He said Tone pulled the gun out and started shooting and shooting," she said.



"Would you lie for Johnny Collins?" Destephano asked



"No, I would not. Not in a situation like this," Lewis replied.



"You were nowhere near the scene of the shooting?" Wilson asked on cross-examination. When Lewis said she wasn't, the prosecutor asked, "Would you agree with me it's tough to live in Hall Manor if you accuse somebody of murder?"



"Correct," Lewis said. She said she never told the police that Green blamed Tone for the killing.



Collins sister, Tieshay Zickey, also testified that Green told her Tone was the gunman. She said she didn't tell the cops. either.



Green wasn't called to the witness stand in person because he disappeared several months ago and authorities haven't been able to locate him, Wilson said. Instead, the prosecutor had Green's testimony from a September 2014 preliminary hearing read for the jury. In that transcript, Green said he saw Collins shoot Smith.





Daylynn Smith

Prosecutors took a similar tack with Satara Carter, a witness who testified Tuesday morning that she couldn't identify the man who killed Smith because she was intoxicated when the shooting occurred.



City Detective Ryan Neal said Carter told him "she was in fear for her safety and didn't want to cooperate (with police) any more." So Chief Deputy District Attorney Michael Sprow played a recording of a statement Carter gave police hours after the slaying.



On the recording, Carter said she saw Smith being followed by a group of men and being harassed by a man in dreadlocks moments before he was shot. "I turned the corner and I heard the gunshots go off," she said. The man with the dreadlocks "put the gun in his pocket and walked away casually as if nothing had happened."



"Daylynn just wanted to get away," she said. "I could see on his face he was scared."



Neal said he showed Carter a photo array and she immediately identified Collins as the gunman.



The detective said that when he interviewed Collins about the murder, Collins claimed he was in his apartment when Smith was killed. Detective Jason Paul said Collins insisted he was at home watching the movie, "Blow," about the rise and fall of a cocaine smuggler, during the murder.



The trial is to resume Wednesday in President Judge Richard A. Lewis's courtroom.
Dennis Earl Ishman Jr.

Dennis Earl Ishman Jr.

(Police photos)

State police in Delaware arrested a Lancaster man accused of assault, endangering the welfare of a child and intimidating a witness.

Dennis Earl Ishman Jr., 28, was arrested Monday in the Lewes, Delaware, area. He faces additional charges in Sussex County, Delaware, for resisting arrest and criminal impersonation, police said.

Authorities said Ishman will be extradited to Lancaster County on the assault, intimidation and endangerment charges at some point. In January, Ishman was charged after an incident in which he was accused of threatening police and releasing his pit bull on officers.

Ishman had been in Lancaster County Prison for most of March but was released March 29 after a bail bondsman posted bail. An arrest warrant was issued for the most recent charges April 4.
WILLIAM SPORT -- A Philadelphian has been found guilty of killing a construction worker from North Carolina outside the Lamphouse Hookah Bar and Lounge in Williamsport in 2014.

A Lycoming County jury Monday night found Rashawn Williams, 34, guilty first-degree murder, aggravated assault, possession of a firearm without license and terroristic threats.

Rashwan Jeffrey Williams

He remains jailed without bail pending sentencing. A first-degree murder conviction carries a mandatory life sentence without parole.

The issue in the more than week-long trial was whether Williams acted in self-defense because he admitted he shot Aaron Coty Lowry, 30, of Maxton, N.C., in the 400 block of West Third Street about 2:35 a.m. on June 1, 2014.

A prosecution witness had testified Lowry was attempting to stop Williams from assaulting his daughter's mother when the shooting occurred.

Williams testified he was attacked from behind while talking with that woman, heard someone say he was going to kill him, saw that individual reach for something and he fired.

Following the shooting Williams fled to High Point, N.C., where he was arrested following a brief foot pursuit after jumping from a window in his sister's apartment.

Lowry was working part of the crew building the YMCA in Williamsport when he was killed. Williams has family ties in Williamsport.

Awaiting trial on charges she helped Williams flee to North Carolina is Erica Nicole Lambert. Arrest documents list addresses in Williamsport and Chambersburg for her.

Both were seen in her car in surveillance video at a Sheetz along Routes 11-15 in the Selinsgrove area, they said.

Using the GPS location system in the car and cell phone data, police said they tracked the vehicle through Chambersburg to Danville, Va., where it was discovered abandoned June 2, 2014.

Two days later, according to the arrest affidavit, Lambert reported to Williamsport police her car had been stolen and she had not seen Williams since early on June 1.

She is charged with hindering prosecution, making false reports and tampering with evidence. The latter alleges she removed Williams' contact information from her cell phone knowing an investigation was under way.
SELINSGROVE -- Casey Haid describes herself as a social person. That's why the freshman from Greenwich, Conn., says she had the door to her Susquehanna University room open one day last fall.

That's when a uniformed male public safety officer walked in and asked her for her telephone number and Facebook information, she said. At first, she said, "I thought he was trying to be friendly."

But looking back, she now says the encounter "made me quite uncomfortable."

She reported the incident and later learned the officer was terminated, she said.

It may not have been an isolated incident.

A student last week began an on-line petition, which now has more than 600 signatures, that accuses the university's public safety officers of invading students' privacy by peering in windows, stalking and entering suites/apartments unannounced.

The petition alleges officers of barricading doors at parties so no can leave, pulling fire alarms as excuses to conduct unwarranted searches and stopping students on the street to insist they open their bags.

"The students at Susquehanna University are being terrorized and harassed by the public safety officers here, however, their authority and blatant disregard for the rules leaves the SU student community with limited options, and fearful that they will be targeted if they do speak up."

Sabrina Bush, a sophomore from New Jersey, who started the petition, accused Susquehanna of "making an incredible effort to catch students in the wrong and ruin their lives."

Public safety officers have let themselves into his apartment on several occasions unannounced, Josh Wertz, a senior from York, wrote when he signed the petition.

"On one occasion, I woke up at 12:30 at night to find two public safety officers letting themselves into my apartment to 'check' the fire equipment, when in reality they did nothing but walk into my apartment to make sure nothing was happening on a Saturday night.

"There's no reason that I should live with this type of harassment where they have unreasonable access to my residence."

"As a parent, I am very concerned by reports of girls changing in their rooms and having to duck because ps (public safety) officers are looking in windows," wrote Susan Major of Ramsey, N.J.

"I would also better like to understand the reason for certain conduct such as entering apartments to perform 'fire drills' in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep, which is dangerous and yes, harassing."

Jean DeBiasse of Chatham Twp., N.J., said she was at a gathering when a public safety officer barricaded the door so no one could leave, saying it was "an extreme abuse of power."

The petition on Change.org urges students who have been a victim or witnesses of such harassment to tell their story.

Lisa Scott, vice president for student engagement and success, said she is listening to what the students are saying.

"I take this situation very, very seriously," she said. She cannot say at this time if the allegations have credibility, she said.

Scott and university President L. Jay Lemons Monday responded to the petition by a campus email.

"Please know that we are committed to understanding and working through these issues, and that we plan to investigate," it stated.

"The university understands the importance of maintaining a safe campus for all law-abiding students, while simultaneously respecting the rights and privacy of all who work and learn here."

Students have accepted her invitation to meet with her to discuss their concerns and a forum is planned, Scott said.

Public safety officers on the campus of approximately 2,200 students are not police nor are they armed.
New Delhi: The 17-year-old Class 12 student, who was accused of killing a man in Delhi with his father's Mercedes Benz, was denied bail by the Juvenile Justice Board on Tuesday, stating that the accused juvenile is a 'repeat offender', who has been penalised before for breaking traffic rules.

Video: Speeding Mercedes, driven by 17-year-old, knocks down man in Delhi

The board also reprimanded the parents for giving the juvenile the car, saying that their 'bad parenting' had endangered lives of the people.

The Class 12 student had appealed before the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) after he surrendered to the police and sent to a remand home on Sunday.

Read: Delhi hit-and-run case: Teen charged with culpable homicide

The teen, who turned 18 four days after the accident, was said to be speeding at 80 km/hour when he hit marketing consultant Siddharth Sharma near Ludlow Castle School in North Delhis Civil Lines area.

Read: Delhi hit-and-run: Father of teen driving the Mercedes arrested

Earlier, the police stated that during investigation it emerged that it was not the first offence of rash and negligent driving by this accused juvenile. In the past too he was found driving in a rash and negligent way, thereby causing a road accident with another vehicle.

Read: Delhi hit-and-run: Teen Mercedes driver a repeat offender, says police

Last year, the minor was also challaned thrice  for overspeeding in April and June and wrong parking in February. The father of the juvenile, arrested under the charge of abetment to culpable homicide not amounting to murder, was on Saturday produced at the court which sent him to one-day police remand, DCP (North) Madhur Verma said.
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Afghans watch clashes between Afghan security forces and insurgents following a Taliban-claimed suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 19, 2016.Taliban insurgents have stepped up their attacks against the security forces since announcing the start of their spring offensive last week.(AP Photo/Massoud Hossaini)
Hassan: A housewife died after she was allegedly assaulted by her husband over cooking fish curry at home at Bettadalli village of Arkalgudu taluk in Hassan. The woman, who was hospitalised on Saturday, died on Sunday night. The deceased, Shobha (26), was married to Ganesh (31) for the last nine years, the police said.

Ganesh, who was a vegetarian for a long time, had recently got addicted to alcohol and stated consuming non-vegetarian food.

On Saturday evening, Ganesh brought fish home and asked Shobha to cook a curry for him, but she refused, saying she did not know how to prepare the dish. She also told Ganesh that she would never allow fish to be cooked at home, the police said. Ganesh beat her up with a stick.
Petoskey soccer pulls in third straight D2 district championship

PETOSKEY  The current group of Petoskey boys soccer players have been no strangers to winning at Northmen Stadium.
Bengaluru: With garment workers resorting to a flash strike for the second day on Tuesday, the commuters in the city bore the brunt again. Many said it was like a pressure cooker situation for them as they were locked inside their cars in long traffic jams under the sweltering heat as protesters went on the rampage. The IT hub was the worst affected again as hundreds of IT professionals could not reach their offices on time because of traffic jams across the city.

Mr Sahil Yadav, who had flown into the city from Mumbai only to attend a three-day business meeting in Electronic City Phase 2, cancelled his appointment because of the protest. I was stuck in a traffic jam for over three hours on Hosur Road. The protesters were throwing stones at the police right in front of my eyes. I got down from the car, but the driver advised me to remain seated as the mob was turning violent, he said.

Amitesh Raj was in the middle of action as he was caught in a traffic jam at Bellandur Gate. I was heading for a meeting around 11.30 am and was caught in the traffic pileup. I stepped out and saw the mob charging towards our vehicles. My driver screamed at me to run back to the car, but by the time I reached the vehicle the crowd was all around me. Fortunately, I managed to get inside the car, he said.

Hundreds of protesters gathered at major traffic junctions, like Bellandur Gate and Sarjapur Road, and resorted to vandalism around 11 am. Many office-goers had to take alternative routes to reach back their homes as the roads were completely blocked. It was a nightmare sitting locked inside the car, with the blazing sun overhead and the frenzied mob setting BMTC bus on fire right in front of me. While the city was witnessing the riots, it was a 'pressure cooker' situation for many motorists like me," said Sameer Jain, a resident of HSR Layout Sector 2.

While many IT professionals chose to work from home, others who stepped out were stuck in traffic jams for over four hours at Kanteerva Stadium, West of Chord Road, Iskcon Temple, Tumkauru Road, Madiwala, Silk Board Junction and BTM Layout.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday indicated that it will examine whether the ban on entry of women in the age group of 10-50 into the Sabarimala temple based on custom and tradition clashed with the Constitutional provisions.

A three-judge bench of Justices Dipak Misra, V. Gopala Gowda and Kurian Joseph hearing a petition filed by Indian Young Lawyers Association challenging the ban told senior counsel Indira Jaising that it would not go into the values of the custom or tradition that women are not allowed as the deity is a Naisthik Brahmachari.

Justice Misra told the counsel, They (temple) rely on custom and tradition. We see whether they clash with Constitutional provisions. Ms Jaising submitted that the denial of entry between the ages of 10 to 50 is based on the fact of menstruation during that period of 41-day vritham and is therefore based on biological factors of womanhood. It is, therefore, discrimination based on sex and not protected by Article 26 of the Constitution, which gives only a right to manage religious affairs and not a right to deny women's right of entry.

She argued that women constituted a class of Hindus, and they cannot be therefore be classified based on sex alone and treated differently from other Hindus and excluded from a place of public worship. The custom that restricts entry of women violates the right of women to equality and non-discrimination guaranteed under Article 14, 15 and 25 of the Constitution and is not protected by Article 26.

Article 14 of the Constitution mandates that the State shall not deny any person equality before the law or equal protection of the law. She pointed out that India is party to the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW mandates all State parties to overcome, dismantle and refrain from promoting gender stereotypes. Creating a stigma around menstruation and failure to prevent as well as prohibit any discrimination or stigmatisation based on menstruation is in direct contrast with the CEDAW mandate of achieving substantive equality by dismantling gender stereotypes. Senior counsel Ravi Prakash Gupta, in his submission, said Sabarimala temple is not a religious denomination as its rituals/rites or ceremonies do not bind its followers. Even if it is a religious denomination, after the temple was taken over in 1922 by Maharaja of Travancore, it did not retain the character of religious denomination, and hence women of a particular class cannot be denied entry, he said.
Jury selection continues for trial in two rapes and murders in '89

Nine jurors were selected Monday for the Philadelphia trial of a South Jersey man incriminated through DNA in the 1989 rapes and stranglings of two women in North Philadelphia.

Rudolph Churchill, 54, of Paulsboro, is charged with rape and murder in the March 17, 1989, death of Ruby Ellis, 19, who was found in an abandoned car in a lot at 15th and Thompson Streets, and in the April 23, 1989, slaying of Cheryl Hanible, 33, whose body was found inside an abandoned bar in the 1200 block of West Girard Avenue.

Churchill was arrested in 2014 after a DNA sample taken when he served a three-year sentence for burglary in DeKalb County, Ga., allegedly matched samples from the 1989 slayings.

Prosecution and defense lawyers return Tuesday to the courtroom of Common Pleas Court Judge Rose Marie DeFino-Nastasi to complete selection of a jury of 12 and four alternates for a trial estimated to run through next week. - Joseph A. Slobodzian

Phila. Pension Fund's chief investment officer to step down

The Philadelphia Pension Fund's chief investment officer, Brad Woolworth, has resigned. His last day is April 29.

Woolworth, who took the helm last year, is leaving "for family reasons," said Finance Director Rob Dubow, chairman of the pension board. The fund is searching for his replacement, and has not discussed having an interim chief, he added.

Woolworth, who has been with the city since 2009, assumed the post after Sumit Handa stepped down last year to take a private sector job.

The Pension Fund took a severe hit last year with its investments - landing a 0.3 percent return (the board had expected a 7.8 percent return) - and as of January, this fiscal year was looking even worse.

In recent months Woolworth had been cutting some underperforming hedge funds from the fund's portfolio. The fund has $4.6 billion in assets and nearly $11 billion in obligations. - Claudia Vargas

Suspect sought in deadly holdup in Vineland over the weekend

Authorities were searching Monday afternoon for a man who committed an armed robbery in Vineland, N.J., with an alleged accomplice, Richard Bard Jr., who was fatally shot by police after he shot at them.

Police were chasing Bard and the other suspect on foot, the Cumberland County Prosecutor's Office said.

Prosecutor Jennifer Webb-McRae declined to name the second suspect. Authorities said he was wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt.

The incident occurred about 1 a.m. Sunday near Seventh and Cherry Streets, where police responded to reports of gunfire. Officers found a robbery victim there, who was injured, but not from gunfire. As police then pursued the two suspects, Bard fired at them, and one officer returned fire, authorities said.

Bard was pronounced dead at Inspira Medical Center. The officer was placed on routine administrative leave. - Michael Boren
New Delhi: Union Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi on Tuesday said the government is mulling criminalising marital rape, a month after her statement in Parliament that the concept cannot be suitably applied in the Indian context created an uproar. Gandhi said there is an attempt by the government to move forward on the issue.

Replying to a question on whether there is an attempt to push for criminalisation of marital rape, Gandhi said, Now there is. She was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an event to launch Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign in 61 additional districts. Gandhi expressed hope that there will be a decision soon on the issue.

Earlier, the Home Ministry had sought the Law Commissions opinion on the matter during the course of its comprehensive review of the criminal justice system. The minister had come under fire last month over her reply in Parliament to a question on whether the government had plans to criminalise marital rape.

Gandhi had said, It is considered that the concept of marital rape, as understood internationally, cannot be suitably applied in the Indian context due to various factors e.g. level of education/illiteracy, poverty, myriad social customs and values, religious beliefs, mindset of the society to treat marriage as a sacrament, etc.

Gandhi had later said the ministry could consider taking steps to criminalise marital rape provided there is ample proof of enough number of such complaints.
Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar being received by his Chinese counterpart Gen. Chang Wanquan at the PLA headquarters in Beijing. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: India and China have moved a step closer in setting up a hotline between the two military headquarters as part of their efforts to improve border security.

China reacted positively toward setting up a military hotline with India on border security, Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan said after meeting Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar.

Parrikar later said that "the Chinese have returned the draft of the memorandum on establishing a hotline between the two military headquarters. The issue should be closed within one or two months."

The two sides were discussing the move to address tensions arising out of aggressive patrolling by both sides.

Chang spoke highly of the healthy and stable development of China-India relations in recent years, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

He called on the two sides to do a good job in implementing the consensus reached by leaders of the two countries, enhance strategic communication, so as to safeguard common interests.

He also suggested that the two sides strengthen defence exchanges and jointly safeguard peace and tranquillity of the border area.

Vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission Fan Changlong who also met Parrikar said China regards bilateral ties from a strategic and long-term perspective and is willing to strengthen military-to-military cooperation to contribute more to peace, stability and prosperity of two countries.
New Delhi: The Centre on Monday informed the Supreme Court that India cannot stake claim to the 105.602-carat Kohinoor diamond, one of the worlds largest diamonds which is now part of the British crown jewels and kept in the Tower of London, as it was not stolen by the British or forcibly taken out from India. It is set in the Queen Mothers Crown.

Solicitor-general Ranjit Kumar submitted this information before a bench comprising Chief Justice T.S. Thakur and Justice Uday Lalit which was hearing a PIL filed by the All-India Human Rights and Social Justice Front seeking a direction to the government of India to get back the Kohinoor diamond.

The Solicitor-general, quoting a note from the ministry of culture, said originally the diamond was taken from a mine in Masulipatnam in Andhra Pradesh, on the riverbed of the Godavari.

The CJI asked the SG whether the government of India wants to make a claim or it wants the petition to be dismissed. If we dismiss the PIL, then if the government wants to make a legitimate claim later, you will find it difficult.

Centre to take call on Kohinoor

The Centre on Monday informed the Supreme Court that India cannot stake claim to the 105.602-carat Kohinoor diamond, one of the worlds largest diamonds which is now part of the British crown jewels and kept in the Tower of London, (Until the year 1304 the diamond was in the possession of the Rajas of Malwa. In 1304, it belonged to the Sultan of Delhi, Allaudin Khilji. The diamond passed from the Sultans of Delhi to Babur, the first Mughal emperor.

Centuries later, Nader Shah of Persia invaded and took the Peacock Throne, in which it was set, back to Persia. His assassination led to the stone going to Ahmad Shah Durrani.]

[A descendant of Ahmad Shah, Shah Shuja Durrani, brought the Kohinoor back to Lahore in 1813 and gave it to Maharaja Ranjit Singh (the founder of the Sikh Empire). Ranjit Singh helped Shah Shuja get back the throne of Afghanistan.

Ranjit Singhs successor, Duleep Singh, gave it to the East India Company.

If a diplomatic call needs to be taken (to bring back the Kohinoor), it would be taken by the Indian government or external affairs ministry at the right time... The culture ministry will not take any initiative (to get back the diamond), culture minister Mahesh Sharma said.

Noting that the issue dates back to the pre-Independence period, he said, According to the guidelines, if any of our antiquities is found anywhere after Independence, the culture ministry takes initiatives to get it back. However, issues of antiquities before Inde-pendence do not come under the purview of the culture ministry, he said.

The CJI pointed out that the sword of Tipu Sultan, which was taken out, had come back to India. The SG replied that it was bought at auction in United King dom by a businessman (Vijay Mallya), who is now out of the country. The CJI, in a lighter vein, observed, Is the sword here or it has also gone out?
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Irish farming leaders have called for the setting up on all-industry pig forum to help the industry through one of the worst crises in decades.

This forum should comprise producers, processors, millers, banks and all other relevant players in the industry, said Irish Farmers Association pigs committee chairman, Pat OFlaherty, adding that the proposed body should be set up with immediate effect to address the current issues in the sector, and to set out a long term strategy for the future viability of this very valuable industry.

The Irish pig industry is experiencing one of the worst crises in decades and there are no signs of any real recovery in the near future, he said. The average pig unit (600 sows) is currently operating at a loss of almost 5,000 (4000) per week and these losses are simply not sustainable.

He also pointed out that the pig industry plays a very important role in the Irish economy; employing 8,000 people and being worth approximately 1bn (800m) per year to the economy.

While we appreciate the EU has made some efforts to try to improve the situation with the introduction of two separate APS Schemes, unfortunately these have failed to have any real lasting impact on the market and do not address the longer term viability of the industry, he said. Similarly, the allocation of 1m (800,000) to pig farmers from the EU Crisis Fund, which has yet to be received by producers, is completely insufficient to address current cash-flow problems on farm.

The formation of a pig industry forum must be a priority for the (Irish) farm minister with the main purpose of forming a clear strategy that is workable and delivers for all players in the industry going forward.

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An official posted at Attari border said the body would be handed over to the family for performing last rites after a postmortem examination, which is to be conducted at the earliest. (Photo: Twitter/ANI)

Attari: The body of Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh, who died under mysterious circumstances in a Pakistani jail, arrived here on Tuesday in the presence of tearful family members and handed over to Indian authorities who said it would be given to them after a fresh postmortem.

Kirpal's family members, including his sister Jagir Kaur, Punjab Cabinet Minister Gulzar Singh Ranike and Amritsar Deputy Commissioner Varun Roojam, besides other senior officials, were present at the Joint check post at the Wagah border to receive the body. Dalbir Kaur, sister of another Indian Sarabjit Singh, who too had died in a Pakistani jail in May 2013, was also present.

An official posted at Attari border said the body would be handed over to the family for performing last rites after a postmortem examination, which is to be conducted at the "earliest".

Struggling to hold back her tears, Jagir said the family would perform Kirpal's last rites in Gurdaspur once his body was handed over to them. Kirpal Singh had allegedly crossed Wagah border into Pakistan in 1992 and was arrested.

He was subsequently sentenced to death in a serial bomb blasts case in Pakistan's Punjab province. Kirpal was found dead in his cell last Monday at Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore. A postmortem examination had been done in Pakistan.

Kirpal, from Gurdaspur, had reportedly been acquitted in the case by the Lahore High Court but his death sentence could not be commuted because of unknown reasons.
Good News, Bad News for Portugal: Shared Liquidity Permitted, Shared Networks Prohibited

April 19, 2016 Jason Glatzer Editor

To the delight of Portuguese online poker players, the country's gaming regulator Regulacao Inspecao de Jogos (SRIJ) has stated that it would permit international liquidity for online poker as part of its new gaming regime.

According to Poker Industry Pro, the news broke last week during an online meeting organized by the Portuguese players association ANAon.

This is certainly good and welcomed news for Portuguese online poker players, as back in December 2015 SRIJ Head of Online Gambling Manuela Bandeira announced during a conference organized in Lisbon by Gambling Compliance that the online poker market would be ring-fenced away from international liquidity similar to the models currently operating in France, Italy, and Spain.

At the time, Bandeira did suggest that the country at some point would likely be open to international liquidity, however, the poker community was led to believe that this wouldn't happen soon.

"International liquidity is important for poker, as it allows small markets to be be more competitive," Bandeira explained. "It's not a simple issue and we need to work more closely with other regulatory bodies from different countries in order to understand how to make it work."

Online Poker Networks Prohibited

Along with some good news, some potentially bad news was also shared with the Portuguese online poker community as business-to-business licenses which allow for the sharing of liquidity between a variety of online poker operators on a single shared network will not be allowed.

While the reasons for this decision at this point are not known, it is potentially devastating news for online poker skins on some of the bigger networks including iPoker, 888poker, and the Microgaming Poker Network. SRIJ did seem receptive to changing their stance during their meeting with ANAon, according to Poker Industry Pro. However, the gaming regulator shared that any change would be at least two years away.

A little less clear is whether PokerStars might be affected by this change once it shares liquidity with its smaller sister site Full Tilt in the near future. It is possible this issue will not effect the world's largest real-money online poker room since technically this isn't a typical business-to-business situation with both companies being owned by Amaya Gaming.

Regulated Online Gaming Could Begin in June

If all goes to plan, the first Portuguese online gaming licenses under the new gaming regime could happen as soon as June. The SRIJ claims, according to Poker Industry Pro, that the delay in issuing licenses is due solely due to technical issues and once resolved licenses could be handed out 15 days thereafter. The soonest likely time for licenses to be awarded for online poker networks seeking international player liquidity would be a few months later in October.

*Lead image courtesy of deviantart.net.

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Miranda Blue over at People for the American Ways Right Wing Watch wrote yesterday that In an interview with conservative radio host Andrew Wilkow on Friday, Sen. Ted Cruz agreed with Wilkow when he said that there is link between public education and bad civics, namely the failure to agree with Cruzs constitutional conservatism.

Wilkow: You know whats amazing about constitutional conservatism, is it seems like so many are lost on it, not because they arent intelligent enough to understand it, many people are too busy to follow politics the way those of us in the political media and running for president where you are. It seems like the more the federal government gets involved in education, the further away from an understanding of the Constitution we get. And do you see that problem, do you see a link between public education and bad civics?

Cruz: Absolutely, and I would note that the Constitution is a way to unite all of us, to bring us together across divisive issues.

Listen courtesy of Right Wing Watch:

Whats funny about the idea of constitutional conservatism is that the constitution is a liberal document, so the term itself must remain suspect at the very least.

This is funny for other reasons too. Really. It is. Because Ted Cruz is right about something. But he thinks its a bad thing when really, its good. Because it shows that the educational system works by teaching kids history and geography  the old reading, writing and arithmetic. But it also teaches kids to think for themselves.

Ted Cruz and his type call being taught to think indoctrination, when in fact is an immunization against indoctrination. The indoctrination Cruz is pushing with his constitutional conservatism.

As Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to Charles Yancey in 1816, if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.

Which is why Republicans hate public education with a purple passion.

Well, that, and the governments roll in education eliminates the roll of the cronyism and corruption that drives the GOP machine.

Public education is why kids grow up, many of them, to dismiss crackpot theories like those expressed by Ted Cruz. Never mind that hes been demonstrated to be the most conservative presidential candidate in like, forever, but his ideas are just plain crazy in and of themselves. Kids who have some measure of education about the world and how it works, will not buy into these crackpot ideas.

He is entirely right to blame public schools, and we should thank the Founding Fathers for their support for the idea of publicly funded education so that our kids have had a chance to grow up reading out of more than just the Bible. Because the Bronze Age isnt with us anymore, Ted. Im sorry, but thats just the way it is. And no, calling it a commie plot just gives hyperbole a bad name.

A third reason this entire discussion is funny is that Cruz talks about bringing us together across divisive issues when he is speaking as a member of the most divisive party in American history, a party that thrives on an us vs. them mentality, a party that says only white Christian Americans are really Americans at all, a party that wants to deprive anyone who doesnt fit into a narrowly defined category of their constitutional rights.

This is the same Ted Cruz whose staff refused a meeting with a delegation of Texas Muslims. Because bringing us together across divisive issues doesnt mean talking to Muslims.

There is a whole lotta funny here mixed in with the scary, and Cruz being able to say any of this with a straight face is not least among them.

We owe our public schools, and all our public school educators out there, a debt of gratitude we can never repay. Thats not to say we shouldnt try.
Ganjam, the treasure trove of Srigangapatna, where the Tiger of Mysuru, Tipu Sultan, built his fort, is falling into ruin thanks to official apathy.

Bengaluru: Its an island home to over 80,000 ancient scripts and 35 historical monuments of Islamic, Hindu and Christian importance. But Ganjam, the treasure trove of Srigangapatna, where the Tiger of Mysuru, Tipu Sultan, built his fort, is falling into ruin thanks to official apathy.

Over 12,000 families had moved here from Tumakuru district in the time of Tipu, who manufactured weapons on this rocky island enclosed by the river Cauvery, and ideal for military operations. Diamonds, gold and other precious stones were traded here as well. Over 80,000 manuscripts speak about its fascinating history, as do the many monuments dating back to the period.

But sadly, not only have some of these monuments collapsed, others may soon join them too, seeing how dilapidated they are. In the past, the island was split into two, the fort area, Srirangapatana, where Tipu and his family lived, and the area outside, Ganjam, that was reserved for his subjects , including soldiers and labourers. The name Ganjam is derived from the Persian 'ganj' meaning treasure trove.

Its deplorable that the cemeteries, dungeons for armours and other monuments are in such a dilapidated condition. You can see cracks in several of the monuments and the historical scripts are not being maintained properly either. The place needs protection as there is a lot here for the younger generation to learn and research, said a local enthusiast of the islands history.

The archaeological department, which is to blame for much of the neglect, has also failed to protect a pigeon house close to the Gumbaz. Of the two pigeon houses built by Tipu Sultan, what remains in one today are only some broken pieces. It is believed that Tipu used pigeons to carry messages and housed them here.
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* The following is an opinion column by R Muse *

It comes as no surprise to most Americans that regardless how much they support public education and school teachers, Republicans and their religious cohorts have been waging war on Americas public school system. Overwhelmingly, the American people support public schools and the people teaching their children, and no doubt they want a strong leader in the White House to protect public education from Republicans. There has been a steady drive to privatize the public schools, and in most Republican states they blatantly shift public school funding to private and religious for-profit schools. President Obama has not been the champion for public schools one hoped he would be, but if Americans were paying attention they would be aware that a national union representing the people who teach endorsed a candidate for president early in the primary that they strongly believe will protect public education and their childrens teachers.

American public schools and teachers need a strong ally in the White House and even though it was early in the primary season, the executive council of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) voted overwhelmingly to endorse Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary for president. Apparently AFT was the first national union to endorse a candidate in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. It is certain that the AFT has watched in horror as Republicans have systematically ravaged public education, as well as joined many Democrats pushing under-performing charter schools that also rob public schools of what precious little funding they get.

As far as endorsements go, from a national union or not, the AFT one was a pretty big deal for public education and Americas students. And, it was one not made lightly or without a comprehensive investigation that took a fair amount of time and resources. According to the AFT, it conducted a long, deliberative process to assess which candidate would best champion the issues of importance to our members, their families and their communities.

In order to come to a conclusion that would satisfy its 1.6 million members and not just the unions executive leadership, AFT reached out to well over a million of its members through several telephone town halls, multiple surveys, and engaged online through a website, You Decide. If that wasnt enough, over several weeks AFT conducted its own scientific poll of the members on all the candidates in the nominating race and the major issues important to the respondents. Just to put some minds at ease, there was no Wall Street, corruption, banking, criminal, or corporate involvement in the AFTs decision-making process.

AFT reported that the top issues raised by the significant membership were jobs, the economy, and of course, public education. In fact, the union asked its members who would be voting in the various presidential primaries if AFT should even endorse a candidate so early during the primary; 79-percent of the membership said yes. By more than a three-to-one margin those same members said the AFT should endorse Mrs. Clinton.

As noted above, the decision-making process was as lengthy as it was comprehensive. The union memberships endorsement came almost one month after Hillary Clinton attended an AFT executive council meeting in Washington where she said, Its just dead wrong to make teachers the scapegoats for all of societys problems. Where I come from, teachers are the solution. And I strongly believe that unions are part of the solution, too. Now, before the EmoProg cult starts complaining that the union is biased, Wall Street shills, corrupt or criminals for not giving their hero the endorsement or a proper hearing, both Bernie Sanders and Martin OMalley attended and spoke with the exact same executive council that Mrs. Clinton attended and spoke with.

In fact, every potential and announced candidate from both parties were given an invitation questionnaire to complete and if they returned the questionnaire they earned a meeting with the AFT executive council. Every Republican was offered the opportunity to complete the questionnaire and meet with the council, but not one of the anti-public education crusaders even acknowledged, much less responded to, the AFT invitation.

Republicans are notorious for attacking unions, public education, and particularly teachers, so it is unsurprising they failed to respond to the important invitation. When their goal is exterminating unions and abolishing public schools for privatized religious institutions, the last organization they will meet with is the American Federation of Teachers. But they were extended an invitation like every other candidate.

It is unclear exactly what Mrs. Clinton and the AFT executive council discussed, but they did share a tidbit that certainly summarizes, in part, why a public school teachers union would endorse Clinton for president. According to AFT she said,

It is just dead wrong to make teachers the scapegoats for all of societys problems. Where I come from, teachers are the solution. And I strongly believe that unions are part of the solution, too.

As an educator for the past two decades, it is difficult to imagine that any public school teacher would disagree with Mrs. Clintons comment. In fact, for well over two decades Republicans and some Democrats have blamed public school teachers for low test scores and failing schools instead of the crushing poverty, low wages, poor healthcare, racial bias, income inequality and woefully underfunded classrooms that informs Republican policies.

The president of AFT, Randi Weingarten explained, in part, why the union membership endorsed Mrs. Clinton so early in the primary season.

In vision, in experience and in leadership, Hillary Clinton is the champion working families need in the White House. Hillary Clinton is a tested leader who shares our values, is supported by our members, and is prepared for a tough fight on behalf of students, families and communities. That fight defines her campaign and her career. In Arkansas, Hillary fought to expand access to early childhood education and care. As first lady, she fought for the right to affordable, high-quality healthcare and helped win that right for our youngest citizens. As senator, she fought for education funding and workers rights, and she defended public service workers who came to our nations defense on Sept. 11. And as secretary of state, she promoted democracy throughout the world, lifting up the worth and dignity of all peoplemen and women, gay and straight.

Hillary Clinton, a product of public schools herself, believes in the promise of public education. From early childhood learning through higher education, she sees how that promise can create real opportunity for kids, building a much-needed bridge to the middle class. Hillary understands that to reclaim the promise of public education, policymakers need to work with educators and their unions. Shes ready to work with us to confront the issues facing children and their families today, including poverty, wage stagnation, income inequality and lack of opportunity. Hillary is the leader we need to help us reclaim the promise of public education and, indeed, of America.

America desperately needs a strong dedicated advocate for the public school system in the White House. Although President Obama highly values education, he errantly surrounded himself with privatization advocates pushing charter schools as the be all, end all to improve public education. All the charter movement delivered is underperforming students and underfunded public schools. It is noteworthy to repeat again that several studies revealed that Americas public schools outperform and students are highest achievers in the world when they attend adequately funded schools and live in households with stable incomes.

Obviously, the education experts working with and for the American Federation of Teachers carefully considered which candidate would best serve public education and all that it encompasses. And after a lengthy investigation they overwhelmingly concluded that what public schools need most going forward is Hillary Clinton in the White House.

When Mrs. Clinton said Its just dead wrong to make teachers the scapegoats for all of societys problems, she put Republicans on notice that if she wins the nomination and is elected president, public schools and teachers will have a powerful ally on their side. And, that she will fight the Republican onslaught to abolish unions, privatize public education, and eliminate over 1.6 million, mainly womens, teaching jobs.
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Top Clinton adviser Joel Benenson criticized Bernie Sanders for not raising any money in 2016 to help Democrats take back the House and Senate.

Video and transcript via MSNBCs Andrea Mitchell Reports:

Transcript:

MITCHELL: Are you getting in-kind contributions from the DNC BENENSON: Andrea, a MITCHELL:  because  because of these joint fundraising BENENSON: I MITCHELL:  (INAUDIBLE)? BENENSON:  I dont know the ins and outs of the agreement. MITCHELL: OK. BENENSON: What I know is this is the same agreement that was signed by Senator Sanders, signed by President Barack Obama, signed by the nominee before President Barack Obama, John Kerry. These agreements to raise money to help the state parties and candidates up and down the Democratic ticket, something Hillary Clinton feels passionately about, is  has been done the same way for all these years. I believe that were doing everything the right way. I believe that were doing what candidates should be doing. Its interesting that Senator Sanders is not raising money right now to help Democrats. And the threat we face coming from the Republicans, whether its Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, is one that we have to fight hard against, not just to win the presidency, but to elect more senators and congressmen so that we can actually get things done.

There are some interesting potentially developing unintended consequences unfolding surrounding the Sanders allegations of Clinton/DNC campaign finance violations. The Sanders allegations have been debunked by fact-checkers and some experts are suggesting that the allegations are nothing more than sour grapes.

The unintended consequence is that by criticizing Clinton for the fundraisers, Sanders opened the door to an examination of how little he is doing to help Democratic candidates get elected in House and Senate races in 2016. By his own admission, Sen. Sanders has raised money for Democratic candidates in the past but has done nothing for the party that he wants to lead in 2016. Sanders isnt raising money to help Democrats take back the House and Senate this year, and the increased turnout that he has touted as responsible for his victories has been exposed by PolitFact as largely a myth.

The next five Democratic primaries are closed primaries, and sixth in Rhode Island is semi-closed. Bernie Sanders may have indirectly fueled the concerns of some Democrats that he is only in this primary for himself by not raising money for Democrats and accusing the DNC of campaign finance violations.

Sen. Sanders may by hurting himself with very voters that he has to win over to become the nominee. The Sanders campaign was trying to define Clinton, but they may have defined themselves for Democratic voters who are voting in closed primaries.
The Prime Minister's awards for excellence in public administration have been instituted to acknowledge, recognise and reward the extraordinary and innovative work done by officers of the central and state governments. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will on Thursday honour civil servants for excellence in implementing NDA government's initiatives like 'Clean India mission'.

The Prime Minister's awards for excellence in public administration have been instituted to acknowledge, recognise and reward the extraordinary and innovative work done by officers of the central and state governments for the welfare of common citizen. They are given away on civil services day.

A new category of excellence in implementing priority programmes which include 'Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna (PMJDY)', 'Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen)', 'Swachh Vidyalaya' and 'Soil Health Card Scheme' has been added to the Prime Minister's awards, a press release issued today by Personnel Ministry said.

The civil services day function will be organised on April 20 and 21 by the Ministry. Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu will be the chief guest at the inaugural function tomorrow. Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Jitendra Singh will preside over the function, it said.

The inaugural session will be followed by eight panel discussions on the replication of initiatives that received awards from PM last year and four priority programmes. These sessions will be chaired by Union ministers and persons of eminence.

Four sessions on subjects related to women empowerment, channelising the energies of youth for sports, time bound and efficient public service delivery system and the issues of clean and green energy for replication of PM awarded initiatives have been organised, the release said.

A total of ten districts will be conferred the Prime Minister's awards this year under the four priority programmes on Thursday. These awards will be given in three groups, the first group consists of eight north-eastern states and the three hill states of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.

The remaining 18 states constitute the second group, while the third group comprises the seven union territories, it said. Eight awards will be given to the first and second group under the four priority progammes and two awards will be given for programmes, PMJDY and Swachh Vidyalaya for the third group comprising seven union territories, the release said.
New Delhi: Most of the hitches in the multi-billion Euro deal for 36 Rafale fighter planes have been addressed and the remaining ones will be cleared in the next meeting of the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh said today.

The meeting of DAC, the apex body of the Defence Ministry for procurement, is likely to take place on April 21, a day after Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar arrives here from his visit to China.

Hoping that the Rafale deal would be inked soon, Indian Air Force Chief Arup Raha said, "It is at a very advanced stage."

Singh told reporters here, "I can only tell you this that most of the hitches that were there, have been addressed. A few (remaining) issues will be addressed, when possibly the matter comes up before DAC. They shall be addressed in the next DAC. And thereafter I think the road shall be clear."

He was asked as to when the deal is likely to be signed. When the same question was put to Air Chief Marshal Raha on the sidelines of an IAF seminar, he said, "We have seen so many years go past. How can I give an assurance? But it is in a very advanced stage."

The junior defence minister brushed aside a suggestion that at least six indigenously made Light Combat Aircraft Tejas can be bought for the price of one Rafale plane, saying both the aircraft were totally different in nature and that IAF needed both.

India and France could firm up the order for the purchase of 36 Rafale combat planes as both the countries have managed to narrow down their differences over pricing.

The development comes nearly four months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Francois Hollande signed a memorandum of agreement to purchase 36 Rafale aircraft.

The Indian side has been negotiating hard to bring down the price with Parrikar refusing to buckle under pressure even as questions were raised about the delay in signing of the contract.

Sources said the price for 36 Rafales, as per the UPA government's tender, keeping the cost escalation and dollar rate in mind, comes to a little over Rs 65,000 crore.

This includes the cost involved in making changes India has sought in the aircraft, including Israeli helmet-mounted display and some specific weaponry.

"The effort is to bring down the price to less than Euros 8 billion (Rs 59,000 crore)," the sources said.

The final deal may be clinched by May-end.
NIA, during its interaction with the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) of Pakistan, had sought details about the place of residence of the terrorists whose names had been shared with the visiting probe team. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: NIA has readied fresh Letters Rogatory (LRs) to be sent to Pakistan containing the addresses of four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists who attacked the strategic Pathankot IAF base in January.

The LRs are being despatched notwithstanding indications from the Pakistani side that it was not yet ready to receive Indian investigators to carry forward the probe in the January two attack that left seven security personnel dead. Four terrorists were also killed in the 80-hour gunbattle.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had put the pictures of the four dead terrorists on its official website and asked general public for help in identifying them.

According to official sources, the central probe agency, set up in the aftermath of 26/11 Mumbai attacks, was flooded with many emails, some of which originated from Pakistan also, giving information about the terrorists.

NIA, during its interaction with the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) of Pakistan, had sought details about the place of residence of the terrorists whose names had been shared with the visiting probe team. However, there was no response from Pakistan on the India's request.

The five-member JIT also comprising an ISI officer had visited India from March 27 to April one during which they visited the air base and recorded statements of 16 witnesses.

During the exercise of verification of the information gathered through emails, the NIA showed the pictures and addresses to some of the jailed terrorists of Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group lodged in jails here and got important inputs from them.

The address of Nasir Hussain, one of the terrorists, was located at Vehari, a town 100 kms from Multan in Punjab province of Pakistan. He is the son of Mohd Mansa and stays at House number WB-89, Mohalla Chak in the town.

Hussain was the Jaish terrorist who had called his mother Khayyam Babbar minutes before the terror group launched a suicide attack inside the IAF base on the intervening night of January one and two.

The other terrorist was identified as Hafiz Abu Bakar, son of Mohammed Fazil and resident of Gujranwala in Pakistan. While Umer Farooq was stated to be son of Abdul Samad who stays in Madni Road, Mohalla Madisah, Shahdadpur in Sindh province of Pakistan, the fourth terrorist Abdul Qayum was the son of Mohamed Amin, resident of Chachar, Tehsil Pano Akil in district Sukkur of the Sindh province of Pakistan.

India has already sent Letters Rogatory to Pakistan in which it had asked for voice samples of Jaish chief Maulana Masood Azhar, his brother Abdul Rauf and Khayyam Babbar, mother of Hussain.

In the meanwhile, NIA Director General Sharad Kumar on Tuesday said his team was ready to visit Pakistan as and when there was a clearance from Islamabad.

"We have handed over all the documents sought by the JIT and I believe that the evidence handed over to Pakistan can stand scrutiny in any court of law internationally," Kumar said.

After the JIT returned home, Pakistan High Commissioner to India Abdul Basit had poured cold water on India's expectations that a team of NIA investigators would be allowed to visit Pakistan in connection with the Pathankot terror strike probe on the basis of reciprocity.

"The whole investigation is not about the question of reciprocity in my view. It is more about extending cooperation or our two countries cooperating with each other to get to the bottom of the incident," Basit had said earlier this month.

In Islamabad, Pakistan Foreign office had issued a statement about JIT's visit and said, "The witnesses belonging to the Indian security forces were not produced before it."
A last-minute guilty plea Monday morning ended Jeffery Amundson's trial before it even began.

The former president of the Rochester Symphony Orchestra and Chorale, accused of stealing thousands of dollars from a vulnerable adult, entered an Alford plea of guilty to one of four felony counts against him.

Amundson was originally charged with four counts of financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult. As part of a plea agreement, one count was amended to theft; Amundson pleaded guilty to that. In exchange, the remaining counts are expected to be dismissed at sentencing, which is set for June 6.

With an Alford plea, the defendant maintains his innocence, but acknowledges that the evidence would be sufficient to convict him.

The charges against Amundson, 46, were filed in January 2015, after an employee at a licensed group home in Rochester told authorities that Amundson had been spending the victim's money on himself, and the victim was receiving only $20 per month.

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That prompted authorities to gather the victim's financial records from 2010-2013. An analysis of those records revealed numerous suspicious debit card purchases, including many restaurant and online purchases, as well as cash withdrawals by Amundson, court documents say.

When questioned by authorities, Amundson denied stealing the funds, claiming the victim owed him $20,000 because he had "paid for the victim's apartment and helped him get Social Security benefits and medical assistance," according to the complaint.

Amundson had once told staff with Olmsted County Adult Protective Services that the victim owed him $50,000.

Court documents itemize more than $18,500 spent by Amundson from January 2011 through December 2013.

He told investigators, however, that he'd been taking money for about a year, tracking the amount, but said a fire destroyed the paperwork that documented it.

The RSOC assured its members that its financial integrity hadn't been compromised. Amundson, who'd been with the organization since April 2011, was placed on unpaid status in April 2015.
Kozhikode: People will ensure continuation of UDF rule after the May 16 assembly elections due to the development works implemented by government, Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy claimed on Tuesday.

Addressing a meeting after inaugurating the Kozhikode north UDF poll committee office at Karaparamba, near here, he said, The opinion of the people is in favour of the UDF rule to continue because of the development programmes implemented by us."

"The high turnout of people here only shows that UDF candidates will win the assembly constituencies in all the six districts of Malabar region with good margin of victory," Chandy said.

Congress candidate for Kozhikode north, Advocate PM Suresh Babu and District Congress Committee President, K C Abu were also present. Later, Chandy left for Karanthur, about ten km from here, to meet Sunni Muslim leader Kanthapuram Aboobacker Musliyar at Markazu Ssaquafathi Ssunniyya.

Talking to reporters after the meeting, the Chief Minister said the visit did not have any political motive.

"Our meeting does not have any political significance. I usually meet him whenever I visit Kozhikode," Chandy said. Youth Congress leader T Siddique, also UDF candidate for Kunnamangalam rural constituency, accompanied the Chief Minister during the meeting.
EYOTA  Over three days, about 10 volunteers in the fields of urban planning, tourism, landscape architecture, architecture and economic development came to learn all they could about Eyota.

Now Eyota has learned a thing or two from them.

As one of two cities chosen to in 2016 for the Minnesota Design Team, a volunteer committee of the American Institute of Architects Minnesota, Eyota opened its doors in hopes of learning how to revitalize its downtown, connect local and regional bicycle networks, better use open spaces and coordinate city-owned land in the development of a community-event center.

In the end, nine AIA Minnesota volunteers each presented their piece of a vision for a future of Eyota that included a new lake, a repurposing of downtown, connected trails, an event center and plans for open spaces that currently dot the city.

"It's up to us to make a strategic plan to take advantage of what they give us," said Eyota Mayor Tyrel Clark.

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Some of the ideas looked simple. To draw families downtown, for example, the city could host movie nights projected on the side of the downtown grain elevator. Clark said the idea could and should be adopted quickly. Other ideas will certainly take a bit more work. And more investment than a quality projector and a popcorn popper.

For example, Richard Baker, a community development coordinator, suggested elements such as lighting and way-finding signage to tie together the city's three distinct commercial districts  downtown, the area surrounding the Kwik Trip at the corners of U.S. Highway 14 and Minnesota Highway 42, and the area farther south on Hwy. 42 near Eyota Market.

But Baker also had bigger plans for Eyota. "We suggest a frontage road for commercial development," he said, pointing to the curve of Highway 42 on the west side as it approaches U.S. 14 from the south.

That plan, he admitted, would take some city investment starting with a retail market analysis for the city.

The volunteer Minnesota Design Team members showed up Thursday night, met their host families  locals who invited team members to stay with them in Eyota  then met Friday morning with Eyota citizens ready to give their five-minute pitch on what they saw as important to Eyota's future. The rest of Friday consisted of a bus tour that covered nearly every street in the city, and a walking tour of downtown, before the group met informally for dinner with residents.

On Saturday, the team met at the media center at Dover-Eyota High School to develop a cohesive theme and their individual pitches. The Design Team members, one by one, showed a vision of Eyota's future from the perspective of their specific disciplines beginning at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Dover-Eyota High School auditorium in front of a crowd of roughly 90 residents.

"I think it was a superb perspective from people who came in and listened to the community," said Wes Bussell, who served as mayor for 16 years in Eyota.

Bussell was impressed by the turnout Saturday night. He also said he loved the idea called "Lake Eyota."

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Harold Skjelbostad, who worked on the flood control project for the Zumbro River in downtown Rochester, made the man-made lake the centerpiece of his presentation. The lake would be built on the 11 acres the city recently purchased for wetland use between Highwat 42, West Second Street on the south and the railroad on the north. The lake, he said, could be the new entry point for the city, meeting not only near the two highways but also where bike trails would enter the west side of Eyota.

The plans were careful to leave space for the Lincoln Brewery, a business idea the city is working on, at the east end of the tract. East of the lake could be a community center near the American Legion post and room for development.

Like the lake, many ideas presented would take careful planning, investment from both the city and private business, and support from Eyota's residents. Ideas for Eyota ranged from a swimming pool to infilling neighborhood development within the city, to encouraging hospitality and tourism to grow.



Mike Kvale, an Eyota resident for 16 years, said he saw things he'd never thought of before during the presentation. "You've got to dream big," Kvale said. "The more ideas the better, and you can sort through them later."

MDT member Deborah McLaren focused on tourism  specifically, something she referred to as medical tourism that would include healthy activities such as biking and environmental exploration  by getting local investment in bed-and-breakfast inns. With Eyota's history as a rail stop, she suggested train cars converted to rooms for a rail-themed inn.

Local ownership, she noted, would keep the profits invested in the city instead of leaving town for some distant corporate headquarters. Eyota's existing focus on bike trails and parks could be incorporated into her plan. "I think you're doing a good job investing in your history," McLaren said.

To help revitalize downtown, team member Todd Streeter said the city needed to attract a new kind of business to what once was the shopping center of the city. "Every community that's been around for 75 or 100 years or longer is looking to revitalize its Main Street," Streeter said. But changing shopping patterns mean downtowns need to look at a new type of business.

"What we look at is how do you make it a family-friendly downtown," Streeter said. The answer: food. "Everybody has to eat. That's the surest way to have local ownership and reclaim your downtown." A family bar and grill with outdoor seating, ice cream, pizza, deli sandwiches, coffee shops, all were part of the discussion with residents on Friday, he said.

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Paul Mogush, the Design Team leader, said the group polled citizens to ask what they wanted to see in Eyota, what would bring them downtown, what activities they would like at a community center, what they would like to see in Eyota in 20 years, and how they expected to help make it all happen.

"We're all going to leave, and you're still going to be here," Mogush said Saturday night. He commended Eyota's residents on their history of supporting the town, citing the new ambulance barn, upgrades to the schools, and the installation of the roundabout. "You've done it before and you'll do it again."
Prosecutor in police shooting to enter alcohol program

MINNEAPOLIS  The prosecutor whose office won a recent conviction in the high-profile case of a Minneapolis police officer who killed an unarmed woman says he will be entering a treatment program for alcohol issues.

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman issued a statement Friday saying he was evaluated for alcohol issues and agrees he needs treatment. Hell be entering a program Monday.

Freeman announced last week that he was taking a medical leave, but didnt say why.

His Friday statement says he has also worked to stabilize his "unacceptably high blood pressure." He says hes determined to reclaim his health and hopes to be back to work in mid-June.

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Last month, a jury convicted Mohamed Noor of murder in the 2017 fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Australia who called 911 to report a possible crime.

Minnesota seeks to add Purdue Pharma owners to opioid suit

ST. PAUL  Minnesotas attorney general is asking a state court for permission to add the owners of drugmaker Purdue Pharma to a lawsuit that seeks to hold the company responsible for the opioid addiction crisis.

Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma makes OxyContin and has been the subject of legal action in nearly every state.

Attorney General Keith Ellison wants to add eight members of the Sackler family to Minnesotas lawsuit. He says the Sacklers, who own and operate Purdue, were involved in deceptive marketing tactics and strategies to sell more opioids, despite knowing the risks.

If a judge approves, Minnesota would become at least the 11th state to take legal action against one or more members of the Sackler family.

A family spokeswoman issued a statement denying the allegations, calling the lawsuit a misguided attempt to place blame where it doesnt belong.

Man holed up in hotel surrenders to police

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BROOKLYN PARK  Authorities say a standoff at a Brooklyn Park hotel ended after more than six hours when a man suspected of assaulting his girlfriend surrendered to police.

SWAT officers and crisis negotiators were called to the La Quinta Inn early Friday after a woman reported she was being assaulted by her boyfriend and threatened with a gun. Police say the standoff began at 3:30 a.m. and ended when the man was arrested at about 9:50 a.m.

Authorities say the woman was taken to a hospital with minor injuries. Police say the 31-year-old suspect was not carry9ing a gun but it was unclear if there were any weapons in the room.

The suspect, who has not been formally charged, has previous convictions for drug possession, motor vehicle theft, aggravated robbery, making terroristic threats, drunken driving and burglary.

Jail inmate accused of running prostitution ring

MORA  An inmate at the Kanabec County Jail is charged with running a prostitution ring from his cell.

Thirty-eight-year-old Daniel Ellington is charged in Washington County District Court with two counts of sex trafficking and two counts of promotion of prostitution.

Prosecutors say Ellington communicated with a prostitute by text and "promoted and profited" from her activities in Woodbury last month.

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East Metro Sex Trafficking Task Force director Imran Ali says Ellington was 100 miles away and incarcerated, yet was promoting prostitution and profiting from it. The task force began investigating after a Woodbury detective found an online ad entitled "Blonde Bombshell."

The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports Kanabec County Sheriff Brian Smith says Ellington used a jail-issued iPod to text and paid a certain price for each message.

 Associated Press
Up to 30,000 motorcyclists took advantage of the beautiful spring weather Saturday to take part in the Spring Flood Run.

The 51st annual event backed up traffic along both side of the Mississippi River while pouring money into small river communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

This year's event started at Shiner's Bar and Grill in Lakeland, before riders headed south on their way to Winona, with many stopping in Red Wing, Lake City and Wabasha to eat, drink and mingle. Others went along the river on the Wisconsin side.

"Love the thunder in downtown Red Wing," tweeted Hanisch Bakery owner Bill Hanisch.

Across the river from Wabasha, J & J BBQ and Catering of Nelson, Wis., was swamped.

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"I had a record day here at my barbecue," said owner Jim Grandy. He did a few hundred racks of ribs and sold out, along with selling large amounts of other food. The local Lions Club, which had a tent next to his, also sold out, he said.

"I would say it was probably here in Nelson one of the biggest runs we have had," he said. "Everything was full."

The congestion slowed traffic into Nelson, he said. "It was a a really big day here," he said. "The weather was great; there was no room left here in town."

Some continued down the river on the Wisconsin side or crossed the river into Wabasha and rode down U.S. Highway 61, Grandy said.

The popular Flood Runs have become spring and fall traditions to commemorate the assistance 12 metro-based motorcyclists gave to the Winona community during the floods of 1965. It's been turned into a fundraising event where wristbands sold for $10 apiece have helped raise hundreds of thousands for the Gillette Children's Hospital.

The event has had some legal problems over the years, including DWIs, speeding tickets and brawls. In fact, the emcee was Sam Tilly, who once got a speeding ticket for going 205 mph during the Flood Run.

A Wabasha County Sheriff's Department dispatcher said this morning that there were a lot of bikers out but they didn't run into a lot of problems.
2006

 Tower Investments purchases 2,300 acres near Pine Island, setting the stage for Elk Run plans.

2008

 Minnesota's Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) provides $700,000 for Elk Run

 June:BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota files a state report saying it's assisting Elk Run to "secure key partners and relationships critical to the project's success."

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 June:Tower identifies an advisory board, says there is a "level of cooperation" with Mayo Clinic.

 June:Tower announces a 40,000-square-foot center, first Elk Run building, at Bio2008 International Convention in San Diego.

 July:Pine Island approves $1.8M project to extend water and sewer lines to Elk Run.

2009

 DEED provides an additional $1.2 million to Elk Run

 Tower Investments approaches Mayo Clinic about a formal partnership. Mayo Clinic declines after performing "due diligence."

 Gov. Pawlenty creates the new P-3 program, which funds Elk Run's $34 million interchange on 260 acres donated by Tower.

 February:Dale Wahlstrom, CEO of BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota, gives the keynote speech during the Rochester Area Economic Development Inc. annual meeting.

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 March:Steven Burrill is announced as an Elk Run partner, outlines plan to create $1 billion fund.

 May:Burrill speaks at the Mayo Clinic booth during the international biobusiness conference.

 December:BioBusiness Alliance files state report claiming it helped secure state funding for a project that's "now under construction."

2010

 Elk Run project manager Geoff Griffin fined by state for illegal land deal.

 February:Burrill gives the keynote speech during the RAEDI annual meeting in Rochester.

 April:A local landowner sues Griffin.

 May: Pine Island issues a building permit to Tower

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 August:Tower lays base of of 50,700-square-foot building, but then halts construction.

 September:Burrill announces "firm commitment" from a single overseas investor to cover the $1B project.

 December:BioBusiness Alliance files a state report noting that Elk Run has been "delayed" but it remains a strong supporter.

2011

 Tower announces it has the $1 billion investment for Elk Run.

 MnDOT breaks ground on anl Elk Run interchange with U.S. Highway 52.

 Recombinetics CEO Scott Fahrenkrug announces plans to move to Elk Run. Move never materialized.

2012

 Wahlstrom claims Burrill "backed away" from Elk Run after the project "sort of fell apart"

 February:Olmsted County says Tower owes $741,000 in unpaid taxes

2013

 January: Four new Pine Island City Council members sworn in. During their first meeting, they fire City Administrator Abraham Algadi, an Elk Run supporter.

 September:Burrill is sued for fraud in California.

 September:MnDOT opens Elk Run interchange, which some have called "the bridge to nowhere"

 October:MnDOT, Pine Island amend agreement on job creation requirements at Elk Run.

2014

 June:Burrill ousted from $283 million fund.

 October:Pine Island completes $3.3 million frontage road to Elk Run, which closes city's north access to U.S. 52

2015

 July:Burrill sued for embezzlement in California.

 August:Tower owes $1.2 million in unpaid taxes, Wahlstrom says he hasn't heard from Tower in four years.

 September:Pine Island to open $22 million new school near interchange on 40 acres donated by Tower.
CANTON  A grass fire Friday afternoon heavily damaged a rural Canton home and a nearby shed, according to the Fillmore County Sheriff Tom Kaase.

"I believe both are going to be considered a total loss," he said today.

It was at the same home that, on April 11, a search warrant was executed to look for a methamphetamine lab; two people were later arrested and have been charged, the sheriff said.

The fire was reported at 3:23 p.m. Friday at 10517 Fillmore 113 near Mabel in the unincorporated town of Prosper; it touches on U.S. 52 at the Minnesota-Iowa border.

"The initial report was that of a grass fire that was getting into the house and shed that are located on the property," he said. The Canton Fire Department responded and upon arriving on scene, requested mutual aid assistance from the Mabel Fire Department, he said.

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"It looks like the fire's origin was outside, in the open," Kaase said today. It will be up to the fire marshal to decide the precise cause, he said. He added there was a lot of trash and debris around the house.

A week ago, he said, Fillmore County narcotics investigator Jesse Grabau, members of the Southeast Minnesota Violent Crime Enforcement Team and others on the sheriff's department executed a narcotics search warrant at this same address, looking for evidence of suspected manufacturing of methamphetamine.

A second warrant allowed them to search an adjacent property of 10491 County Road 113. Because of this investigation, they found evidence of someone making meth.

Jeffrey George Torgerson, 48, and his wife, Joan Elizabeth Torgerson, 40, were arrested. Both lived at the house that was damaged by the fire. Both "have been arraigned in Fillmore County Court and are being held in the Fillmore County Detention Center," he said.

The fire remains under investigation by the Minnesota State Fire Marshal's Office and the Fillmore County Sheriff's Office.
RACINE  A Waterloo, Ill., man was injured Monday afternoon when the car he was driving was hit broadside by a semi tractor on U.S. 63 in Racine.

The State Patrol said Matthew D. Long, 21, was driving east on Mower County Road 1 and tried to cross the highway when his car was hit by the northbound truck driven by Brian M. Hoveland, 43, of Owatonna.

Long was taken to Mayo Clinic Hospital - Saint Marys Campus in Rochester; Hoveland was not injured, the patrol said. Long was not reported as a patient there today, according to a clinic spokeswoman.

The crash was reported at 1:40 p.m.
Earlier in the day, there were violent protests in Bengaluru against the government's decision to amend rules regarding withdrawal of EPF contributions on Tuesday. (Photo: Deccan Chronicle)

Hyderabad/Bengaluru: Buckling under protests, the government on Tuesday revoked the order tightening rules for withdrawal of Provident Fund money, within hours of keeping it in abeyance for three more months.

"The notification issued on 10th February, 2016 is cancelled. Now the old system will continue," Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya said. "I will take ratification from CBT (Central Board of Trustees of EPFO)," he said after violence rocked Bengaluru for the second day when garment industry workers torched several buses and attacked a police station protesting against the tightening of rules.

Garment factory workers protest against Government's decision on withdrawal of Provident Fund. (Photo: Deccan Chronicle)

Giving reasons for the rollback, Dattatreya said, "The reason is the request of trade unions. The earlier decision (to tighten the PF withdrawal norms) was also taken by the opinion of the trade unions. Now, when the trade unions are requesting, then we have rolled back the decision."

Earlier in the day in New Delhi, the Minister had said, "The notification (tightening PF withdrawal norms) will be kept in abeyance for three months till July 31, 2016. We will discuss this issue with the stakeholders."

Read: Government puts on hold new PF withdrawal norms till July 31

Dattatreya said employees and workers need not have any misconceptions in the wake of the cancellation of the notification.

The decision would have barred withdrawal of the employer's contribution from the PF money till the age of 58 years.

In a placatory move, the Labour Ministry also said it was contemplating permitting withdrawal of all accumulations by Employees' Provident Fund Organisation's (EPFO) subscribers on grounds like purchase of house, serious illness, marriage and professional education of children. The matter has been referred to Law Ministry for clearance.

People have also launched online campaign against the decision, which was to be implemented from February 10 but was later put on hold till April 30.

Meanwhile, protesters pelted stones at Hebbagodi Police Station in Bengaluru and torched seized vehicles parked there, as the spontaneous agitation with no trade union leading it spun out of control.

Read: Chaos in Bengaluru as workers protest new Provident Fund rules

Police said they had to resort to lathicharge and fire teargas shells to disperse violent protesters.

WATCH: Police use tear gas shells as protest by garment factory workers in Bengaluru turns violenthttps://t.co/mvTMWG5IyX  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

At least two Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation buses and one of Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation have been set on fire, they said.

Incidents of stone-pelting on buses and other vehicles were reported from different parts of the city such as Bannerghatta and Jalahalli cross, as also near the Electronics City, the hub of IT firms.

Read: Bengaluru: Garment workers lay siege to IT hub

Traffic jams were reported at various entry and exit points in the city like Hosur Road, which leads to Electronics City and Tumkur Road, which has a large concentration of garment units.

The BIOCON office was attacked in Electronics City. (Photo: DC)

In a bid to assure the agitating workers, Union Minister Ananth Kumar, an MP from Bengaluru, said the right of unorganised and garment workers would be restored and appealed to them to withdraw their protest.
The news that Rochester Catholic Schools was named as a party in several lawsuits related to sexual abuse at the hands of priests should come as no surprise, said Patrick Wall.

He was responding to the announcement Sunday from local officials that RCS is a defendant in at least 16 civil suits. The lawsuits are the result of the Child Victims Act of 2013, which lifted the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse cases, providing a three-year window for survivors to file a civil claim.

A former priest, Wall now advocates for victims of abuse by priests, working for Jeff Anderson and Associates, the law firm involved in most of the cases.

"When we released all those files a year and a half ago, I think it was pretty obvious what was going to happen," Wall said, referring to documents the Diocese of Winona was court-ordered to release in October 2014.

The files contained previously unseen records of 14 priests credibly accused of abuse, which included communication between church officials, parishioners and the priests of the area diocese.

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Eleven of the 14 had served at Rochester parishes; at least three worked in Rochester parochial schools, including Lourdes High School, St. Francis of Assisi School and St. Pius X School. Each is now operated by RCS.

Recurring names in lawsuits

One priest in particular  Thomas Adamson  is at the center of many of the lawsuits within the diocese.

He and Joseph Cashman are named in 15 of the suits involving RCS; Jack Krough is named in the remaining claim.

In a 2014 deposition, Adamson told attorneys that he sexually abused at least 10 boys.

Despite acknowledging that he had a 10-year relationship with one victim, had sexually abused several boys and had been caught at least once by law enforcement at a rendezvous with one victim, Adamson has never spent a day in jail, nor faced charges, because the criminal statute of limitations has expired.

He was removed from the priesthood in 2010 after voluntarily retiring from active priesthood in 1984.

Adamson was first assigned to Lourdes High School in 1962, where he was assistant principal and lived at the school's rectory. He admitted he continued sexual contact with a 14-year-old he met at a junior high school in Winona.

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In 1963, Adamson was sent to Caledonia, where he testified he molested "I think two" boys and was sent back to Lourdes in 1964.

He denied allegations that he abused two boys while at Lourdes the second time, and said he last engaged in sexual contact with a minor in "1981 or 1982, maybe."

Now 82, Adamson lives in Rochester. Cashman and Krough are dead.

Why now?

So why is RCS just now talking about the lawsuits?

In a word: the deadline.

That three-year window of opportunity provided by the Child Victim Act will close May 25.

"As that deadline gets closer, the diocese and a few parishes and schools are being named in these lawsuits," said Ben Frost, director of public relations for the Diocese of Winona.

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"They're trying to be transparent with their communities, both to let them know (the deadline) is coming up, but also to really encourage prayer for survivors and help move toward their healing," he said.

A letter to the members of the diocese from Bishop John Quinn emphasizes that none of the accused priests are currently in ministry; in fact, many are dead. None of the claims are new, Quinn wrote.

What next?

"The suits haven't been filed, but we've been named," Frost said. "There's still a month left, so it's an ongoing process as we receive information."

Though RCS is named in 16 lawsuits, the total number  both in Rochester and the diocese as a whole  may grow.

"We'll have the big picture in a month," Frost said. "We'll have a better understanding of the full scope of this by May 25. (The lawsuits) will have been filed, and we'll have all that information."

The diocese, which will undoubtedly face millions of dollars in settlements, is "not in bankruptcy right now," Frost said, "but obviously we need to approach these matters in steps.

"Right now, we're trying to address how many cases are there, and what kind of insurance coverage we have."

The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis filed for bankruptcy in January 2015. At the time of the filing for Chapter 11 reorganization, it estimated assets between $10 million and $50 million, liabilities between $50 million and $100 million, and listed between 200 and 1,000 creditors.
ALBERT LEA  Dozens of pickets attended Monday's protest outside Mayo Clinic Health System-Albert Lea in the ongoing contract dispute involving the facility's maintenance workers.

The two sides have engaged in 10 negotiating sessions over the past seven months, but Henry Tews, a 26-year maintenance veteran, says the second picket shows SEIU Healthcare Minnesota is "willing to fight" over what's been characterized as "proposed language that takes away the voice of longtime workers." The first picket was held in November and drew more than 100 people.

Others who showed up to support the SEIU union workers included some members of the Minnesota Nurses Association, AFSCME Council 65, Albert Lea Education Association, Southeast Area Labor Council and the Minnesota AFL-CIO, according to a news release. Albert Lea's maintenance workers are the first SEIU unit to engage in bargaining with Mayo Clinic this round.

"Like our last picket, we are here today to show that we are willing to fight for what is right for Albert Lea," Tews said. "Having a safe, well-run hospital is important to patients, and having decent jobs in our community is important to everyone in and around Albert Lea. That is why other hospital employees are out here and have been wearing stickers in support of our fight, because we know that our fight is just the first if we don't stop them from taking us backwards.

"We are ready to sit down at the bargaining table and reach an agreement with the hospital so we can continue to provide the service needed to make our hospital great." Tews said. "Unfortunately, Mayo executives won't budge on their offer."

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The sticking point, according to Mayo Clinic, is not the salary or benefits being offered at the bargaining table. Instead, it's proposed language that says Mayo retains the right to alter benefits.

Mayo contends that same the same language is "enjoyed by virtually all other allied health employees across Mayo Clinic Health System" and that the Albert Lea maintenance workers are seeking "special terms just for their group."

"Benefit changes are not something that the organization takes lightly as changes in benefits would impact all allied health employees across the Mayo Clinic enterprise," said Dr. Mark Ciota, CEO of Mayo Clinic Health SystemAlbert Lea and Austin. "Our Albert Lea maintenance engineers are valued employees and we'd like them to receive the same benefits that their co-workers receive.

"We continue to meet with the SEIU in good faith with hopes of reaching a contract agreement acceptable to all parties," Ciota said in an email statement. "We are committed to ensuring our patients receive the safest and highest quality health care."
MINNEAPOLIS  Veteran Twin Cities television anchor Diana Pierce is retiring.

Pierce announced her retirement from KARE-TV on Wednesday. Her last day will be April 22.

Pierce joined the NBC affiliate in 1983 as a news anchor. Most recently she has been co-anchoring the 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. news.

Pierce will graduate from Augsburg College later this month with a master's degree. She says she has been looking for new challenges.

She started her career in radio in New Hampshire before moving to television, working at stations in Durham, New Hampshire; Fresno, California; and Norfolk, Virginia.

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While at KARE, Pierce co-anchored with Paul Magers. The two worked together for 20 years until Magers left for Los Angeles in 2003.

Pierce was inducted into the Minnesota Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2009.
The Destination Medical Center initiative plans to attract more than $5 billion in private investments during a 20-year period, and to facilitate those investments, the city of Rochester and the DMC Economic Development Agency have collaborated to provide a clear process and guide for potential builders and developers.

The details of that process were laid out Monday during a meeting of the DMC Corporation board of directors.

Patrick Seeb, EDA director of economic development and placemaking, said he and city staff have worked since last fall "to create a developer resource guide and developer process that would help convey to the development community how to work with the DMC and the city for DMC projects."

The process identifies three basic phases for developers where EDA and city staff are involved: the concept phase to vet projects against the DMC vision; the project refinement and approval phase, including the city's development application process; and the final agreement and implementation phase.

The joint development process is already in place, but Terry Spaeth, city of Rochester director of redevelopment, said the process is not static and would be open to improvement at any opportunity. Staff members had discussed the process with a list of developers, Spaeth said.

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One DMCC board member, Michael Dougherty, did not feel local developers  including those who had had input in the process  held an adequate understanding of the procedure.

"Let me just say, the list of developers up there, many of them aren't quite clear what that process is," Dougherty said.

Dougherty also asked for more individual accountability from the EDA staff.

"Who's in charge?" Dougherty asked.

"I believe every successful project has somebody in charge that we as the board can go and get our hands around their neck if things are not going well  one person to answer."

Lt. Gov. Tina Smith, chairwoman of the DMCC board, supported Dougherty's comments, and EDA Executive Director Lisa Clarke said the EDA would take them under consideration.

Smith said after the meeting she was eager to have the joint process finalized. Private investments in DMC are set to reach a $200 million threshold this year, meaning state dollars could start coming back to Rochester next year and spur more public investment in projects.

About $20.5 million in non-Mayo Clinic private investment has taken place inside the DMC boundaries since 2013, according to a report shared at the meeting. While the joint development process could not be finished "too soon" for Smith, she did not think the process as it stands had hindered any development in DMC so far.

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"I don't think there's been anything that's been lost as a result of it not being ... finalized," she said.

Also at the meeting, the DMCC board approved a resolution formalizing its intent to follow recommendations from the Minnesota Center for Energy and Environment to create a sustainable energy zone.

"We continue to believe that Destination Medical Center can achieve carbon neutrality while implementing the most progressive, responsive and resilient district energy network in the country," said Jenny Edwards, CEE project lead, said in a written statement to the Post-Bulletin. "The board's action today represents another important step toward realizing those goals."

A technical committee consisting of the city of Rochester, Olmsted County, Mayo Clinic, the DMC EDA, Rochester Public Utilities and Minnesota Energy Resources Corp. will provide regular reports on energy action to the DMCC board.
New Delhi: A Chinese professor is among over 30 international and Indian scholars honoured by President Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday for their effort in promoting Hindi language.

The President presented the 'Hindi Sevi Samman awards' for the years 2012, 2013 and 2014 at a function at Rashtrapati Bhavan in presence of Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani and other dignitaries.

Those honoured included Ge Fuping, who was given George Grierson prize for his remarkable works done for the propagation of Hindi in foreign, a press release issued on Tuesday by Rashtrapati Bhavan said.

Ge has made commendable efforts for the promotion of Hindi language abroad. Besides him, Alka Dunputh (from Mauritius) and Shichiro Soma (from Japan) were also given the George Grierson award by the President.

These awards were instituted by Central Hindi Institute, Agra in 1989. 14 scholars receive this award in seven different categories every year for their contribution in the field of Hindi language and literature. Out of the 42 awardees for three years, three were not present during the function.
Swaraj wrote outfits in Iran which followed the Iranian tradition and went against our own traditions, alleges Swaroopanand. (Photo: PTI)

Haridwar: Shankaracharya of Dwarka Peeth Swaroopanand Saraswati on Tuesday waded into yet another controversy with comments that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj's choice of clothes during her Iran visit delivered a "blow" to India's prestige.

Swaroopanand said Swaraj chose to wear outfits that catered to Iranian sensibilities but neglected India's tradition.

"Swaraj wrote outfits in Iran which followed the Iranian tradition and went against our own traditions. She thus delivered a blow to India's prestige abroad," he said.

He compared Swaraj with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who always wore clothes that reflected her "Indianness" during foreign visits.

"Unlike her, Indira Gandhi on her foreign visits took great care to ensure that her Indianness reflects in her clothes and conduct," the Shankaracharya said.

Known to court controversies, Swami had recently said entry of women into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra would lead to increase in crimes like rape against them.
Hyderabad: Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Monday ordered a probe by the ACB into the forgery of signatures of tribal welfare and tourism minister Azmeera Chandu Lal.

The government had received complaints that some employees in ministers peshi and the tribal welfare department had forged the ministers signatures and issued recommendation letters seeking jobs, transfers, promotions besides referring land disputes, police cases etc., to officials concerned to favour certain individuals.

There were also complaints that several important files were cleared by staff without the knowledge of the minister. Official sources said these irregularities happened in 2015, when the minister was facing health problems.

The minister, who was shocked to know about the forgery in his own department, is said to have taken up the issue with the CM and requested him to order an inquiry into the issue.

The CM ordered an ACB probe and on Monday, ACB officials took two accused into custody and questioned them. The minister was not available for comment.
Hyderabad: The sharing of assets with Andhra Pradesh in the common capital of Hyderabad will prove costly for the Telangana government.

Following the recent Supreme Court directions on sharing of Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Educations assets and liabilities between Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in the ratio of their population of 52:48, the Telangana government has estimated that it needs to pay around Rs 25,000 crore to Andhra Pradesh, if it wants to stake claim over these assets.

Most of these assets are government offices in Hyderabad, which are jointly shared by Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The Andhra Pradesh government is making arrangements to shift its offices to Amaravati by June and is demanding 52 per cent of the buildings and lands worth from Telangana to hand these over after shifting.

APSCHE alone has fixed deposits worth Rs 115 crore and a bank balance of Rs 18 crore. The Andhra Pradesh government recently wrote to the Telangana government to come forward to share the FDs and bank balance of APSCHE in the ratio of 52:48 as directed by the Supreme Court. But there has been no response from the Telangana government so far as it has been scouting for legal options to file a review petition in the apex court.

There are 120 institutions listed under Schedule IX and X of the AP Reorganisation Act 2014, which are offering joint services to Telangana and Andhra Pradesh at present; most of these are located in Hyderabad.

The Andhra Pradesh government is seeking a 52 per cent share of the assets and liabilities of all these institutions. While the Andhra Pradesh government is claiming that the Telangana government will have to pay it nearly Rs 70,000 crore to take control of these institutions, the Telangana government has pegged the amount at Rs 25,000 crore, as per the worth of buildings and lands when they were provided to these institutions between 1956 and 2014.

"The Andhra Pradesh government is seeking a share based on the existing market rates, which is not correct. It arrived at a figure of Rs 70,000 crore based on that. But it should be based on the market value prevailing at that time when the building was constructed or land was allotted," said an official from the Finance department.

While the Andhra Pradesh government is claiming that the 120 institutions together had bank deposits of Rs 16,000 crore as on June 2, 2014, the Telangana government has dismissed this and put the figure at Rs 3,600 crore.
Bengaluru: Who triggered the violent protests by the garment factory workers that brought the city to a standstill for two consecutive days and caused huge amount of loss to public property, besides injuring 62 people including 24 policemen? While women led the protests, they were reportedly used as shields by the racketeers, who are yet to be identified, said an officer on condition of anonymity.

We were not behind mayhem: Union leaders

Neither the police know who led the violent protests nor did the factory garment workers union leaders know who was behind the mindless rioting in the IT hub. Our workers did not indulge in any kind violence. They were protesting against the unlawful amendment to the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) Act by the Central government. Some anti-social elements targeted policemen and destroyed public property. We have told the police to withdraw the cases against our workers because they are innocent, said president of the Garment & Textile Workers Union R. Pratibha.

Her colleague and garment workers leader Jayaram told Deccan Chronicle that he was shocked at the turn of events on Monday and Tuesday in the City. We had planned a silent protest from April 20 against the central governments decision to amend the PF withdrawal rules, but there are over six lakh garment factory workers in the city and they panicked because of the impending deadline of May 1 from when the new restrictions on PF withdrawal were to be implemented. Thousands of them came out much ahead of the planned protest. None of them, however, took part in any kind of vandalism, said Mr Jayaram.

Centre has deferred PF amendment: PF Commissioner

The protestors dispersed only after EPF Commissioner Raja Rajesjwari Nagar came out and addressed them at the Hosur Road junction and informed them that the Centre has decided to defer its decision on implementing the new PF rules, which were to come into force by May 1, by three months. The government will discuss the proposed amendment to PF before deciding on it, he said.

Home Minister warns protesters

An angry Home Minister Dr G. Parameshwar warned the protesters, during a public address, not to take law into their hands on an issue in which the state government has no role. He said that the state government is empathetic to their cause and will petition the central government to not hurt the workers right to their money, but no one should take law into their hands and provoke the police to take action against them. We are willing to talk to the leaders but there is no one to talk to. The police have become helpless, he said.

Police exercised utmost restraint: DG & IGP

Director General and Inspector General of Police Omprakash pointed out that the strikers had no leaders. In mob violence, the police normally broker peace by talking to the leaders. In this case there were no leaders. We do not know who triggered and fuelled the violence. We had to maintain utmost restraint even after policemen were targeted and public property was destroyed because we didnt want to harm the protestors. Most of them were women, said the police chief.

Centre robbing our money: Union leader

The panic has not settled and the anger is simmering in the over six lakh population of garment factory workers in Bengaluru against the central governments decision to put restrictions on the withdrawal of the Employees Provident Fund. After a two-day mayhem by the violent protesters that brought the city to a halt, the garment factory workers on Tuesday afternoon distributed fliers written in Kannada assailing the Centres decision to amend the EPF.

The central government is capitalist and is robbing the poor of their hard earned money. We will not allow them to amend the EPF rules and will protest again if they go ahead with any amendment, the flier stated.

We were getting Rs 272 every day as our daily wage till March 31. From April 1, we have got a daily increment of Rs 15.32. A small portion of our earnings goes to PF, which is our only saving. How will we survive if the government puts restrictions on our savings, asked Madina of the Garment and Textile Workers Union.

Mr Jayaram K.R., also from the same union, said that all the unions in the state will get together and hold a silent protest in the city on April 22 against the PF amendment. On Wednesday we are holding a protest in Mandya. Our aim is not to disrupt traffic and public life, he said.
A Rochester senator's bill allowing fundraising for a Minnesota Capitol re-opening celebration won Gov. Mark Dayton's signature on Monday.

Sen. Dave Senjem, R-Rochester, sponsored the bill that allows the Minnesota State Capitol Preservation Commission to begin working with a private committee whose goal would be to raise $400,000 for the Capitol bash. Senjem said he estimates the celebration will cost $400,000 and would be held in the summer or fall of 2017. The Capitol is closed to the public as it undergoes a $310 million renovation.

Senjem's bill is one of the few measures signed into law during this legislative session. He said the restoration of the 111-year-old Capitol has had broad bipartisan support since it began.

"Everybody came to realize that this is a building that transcends partisanship from the standpoint of what it symbolizes," he said.

Senjem said he is excited the bill has been signed and that the fundraising work can get started.

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"We're going to go out and work hard and raise a lot of private money and have a grand celebration," he said.
Some Rochester massage therapists are warning that a bill advancing in the Minnesota Legislature to establish a statewide registry could do serious harm to their businesses.

Healing Touch Spa owner Mary Jo Majerus has already traveled to St. Paul twice to testify against the legislation. She said the bill would be bad news for her massage therapy business.

"I already have a difficult time finding enough massage therapists to staff my business. This would be devastating to me as a small business owner. And it would be devastating to the people who have their own private practice," Majerus said.

The concern centers around a proposal sponsored by Elk River GOP Rep. Nick Zerwas to establish a voluntary, statewide registry for massage therapists. To register, individuals would have to undergo a criminal background check, have earned a high school diploma and completed at least 500 hours of post-secondary education in massage and bodywork. Individuals convicted of certain crimes, such as prostitution and human trafficking, would be prohibited from registering. The Minnesota Board of Nursing would oversee the registry, creating standards of practice, a code of ethics and a competency exam. It would cost an estimated $368,000 in fiscal year 2017. A similar bill has been introduced in the Senate by Sen. Chris Eaton, DFL-Brooklyn Center.

Backers of the bill said it would make it easier for massage therapists to practice in multiple cities. Most municipalities have massage therapy ordinances, requiring practitioners to get licensed in every city in which they hope to work. If this bill passed, massage therapists could join the registry and practice in every city in the state. Supporters say it would also benefit consumers by establishing set criteria for massage therapists.

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"I can think of so many scenarios where we are serving the greater good of our consuming public by giving them a standard to judge or at least have a minimum requirement walking through the door  not just leaving it up to fate that they walk through the right door," said Susan Tietjen, government relations chairwoman for the Minnesota chapter of the American Massage Therapy Association .

Minnesota is one of five states is the nation that does not license or have a registry for massage therapists, according to Tietjen. Current state statute requires "complementary and alternative health care" practitioners to disclose their education to consumers and adhere to a code of ethics. The Minnesota Department of Health is responsible for investigating complaints lodged against practitioners.

Critics of the bill say current state and municipal regulations are sufficient and the measure advancing in St. Paul goes way too far. For starters, Majerus said she fears that while the registry is being touted as voluntary, it will end up becoming mandatory because municipalities will decide to scrap their ordinances in favor of the state registry. She is concerned the strict education requirements would prevent some experienced massage therapists from practicing. She's also worried about the fees associated with the bill. Massage therapists would be required to pay an initial registration fee of $285 an annual registration fee up to $185. She also opposes a requirement that therapists obtain $1 million professional liability insurance from essentially one of two organizations that support the bill  the American Massage Therapy Association and Associated Bodywork & Massage Professionals.

Majerus said massage therapy has been one of the few businesses that women can successfully launch without needing substantial capital.

"A lot of these women (who work as massage therapists) are single moms or the sole providers for their own income. If they have to pay this litany of fees, they are going to choose a different profession to go into," Majerus said.

Rochester DFL Rep. Tina Liebling said she has heard from several Rochester massage therapists opposed to the measure. She said state law dictates that lawmakers should only regulate an occupation if it is required for the health and safety of citizens.

"I've heard from some legislators, 'We need to professionalize massage therapy,' and I just don't see that at all. I'm just not seeing that because nobody has shown me there has been any harm," she said.

During a recent committee hearing, Liebling attempted to amend the bill to prohibit cities from requiring massage therapists to register with the state. Her amendment failed.

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Zerwas could not be reached for comment.

The city of Rochester revamped its massage therapist ordinance in 2012 to help validate legitimate massage therapy businesses and crackdown on prostitution. Rochester's ordinance requires massage therapists to undergo a criminal background check and complete 500 hours of education. Currently, there are 131 massage therapists licensed in the city and 11 licensed massage therapy businesses, according to the city clerk's office.

Rochester Assistant City Administrator Gary Neumann said he is not aware of any discussion at the city level about requiring massage therapists to register with the state if the bill passes.

Tietjen said the push to create a statewide standard for massage therapy comes as the profession has evolved to become an adjunct to medical care. She did note that Zerwas' bill does include a grandfather provision for practicing massage therapists that would be valid for two years. In discussions with Rochester massage therapists opposed to the bill, Tietjen said she has told them they don't need to worry.

"They assure me they have a wonderful relationship with the police department and everything is working just fine down there," she said. "And I would say if that is the truth, then they shouldn't be worried about their local regulations changing because those are the local officials they are voting for and those local officials wouldn't go against their population."
The High Court bench was hearing arguments on the petition challenging imposition of President's rule filed by the ousted Chief Minister Harish Rawat and related pleas. (Photo: PTI)

Nainital: The Centre on Tuesday got a rap on its knuckles yet again in the Uttarakhand High Court which said by imposing President's rule it was taking away the powers of an elected government and introducing "chaos" and that floor test "cannot be deprived of its sanctity".

The division bench of the court repeatedly maintained that irrespective of allegations of horse-trading and corruption, the only Constitutional way to test majority was to hold a floor test, which "you still have to go for".

The Centre also faced searching questions from the court which observed that if the reasons for imposition of Article 356 in the instant case, where ruling parties are different at the Centre and in the state, are accepted then it may lead to the central government "watching with a magnifying glass where there is an opportunity for President's rule".

"It (President's rule) has to be applied in exceptional cases only," the bench of Chief Justice K M Joseph and Justice

V K Bist said adding that the President could have waited for events to unfold on March 28 when a floor test was to take place.

The bench was hearing arguments on the petition challenging imposition of President's rule filed by the ousted Chief Minister Harish Rawat and related pleas.

By imposing President's rule, "you (Centre) are taking away power of an elected government. You are introducing chaos", it said adding the Governor had not recommended imposing of Article 356.

The bench went on to say that the Governor's action of March 23 calling for a floor test "cannot be deprived of its sanctity".

"After (the decision on) March 23 what has happened for imposition of Article 356?" the court asked. It said that irrespective of allegations of horse-trading or a sting operation pointing towards corruption in the government, "the only Constitutional way to test majority was to hold the floor test. You still have to go for floor test".

"The sting operation and conclusions derived from it are totally irrelevant. The Union Cabinet could not have known that the Speaker would on March 26 disqualify the nine MLAs.

"Even if it (Cabinet) did know, it was irrelevant for the Centre to take it (disqualification) into consideration. If it (Centre) does take it into consideration, then it would stand accused of being partisan and playing politics in the state," the bench said.

The court then asked how can it be said that the 35 MLAs would have voted against the government unless and until it is actually done? To this, the AG replied that since 35 MLAs sought division of votes it was clear that they would vote against the government. "Else why would they demand for division of votes," he said.

The court also asked whether the Centre was aware that if it did not act urgently, the nine rebel MLAs would have been left in the lurch. It asked the Centre whether there was any "urgency" of this sort or whether any collateral purpose was sought to be achieved.

The bench said that from the "hasty manner" in which the Union Cabinet took a decision to impose President's rule in nthe state, it appeared that a "purpose foreign to provisions of Article 356" was sought to be achieved.

Salve said the President's rule was imposed without any collateral purpose in mind. He said the Centre was mainly concerned with the fact that the money bill had failed and horse-trading was going in the state.

The court also asked the Centre whether a letter of March 26 to the President by the BJP of Uttarakhand asking for imposition of article 356 in view of alleged instances of horse-trading, would have "tipped the scales"?

With regard to the March 26 letter of BJP to the President, Salve said it cannot be found out whether it would have tipped the scales.

Salve said that the President took a decision based on various factors like allegations of horse-trading, Governor's apprehension that some violence might occur on March 28 and allegations of corruptions on both sides.

To this the court said "hardly any government in India would last five minutes" if allegations of corruption against it are sufficient for dissolving it.

Towards the fag end of the day, Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said as per Constitutional conventions, if a government cannot pass a money bill it is obliged to resign. To this the court said, "Obliged to resign does not mean government has fallen".

"If they do not resign, then as per procedure either a motion of no-confidence is moved against them (state government) or the Governor asks them to show that they enjoy confidence," the bench said.

It also said that "all over the country, it is happening where governments, which are obliged to resign, are shamelessly continuing". Arguments will continue tomorrow.
Several buses were set on fire by protestors in Bengaluru on Tuesday. (Photo: DC)

Bengaluru: The ongoing protests in Bengaluru against the Centre's new norms on Provident Fund withdrawal escalated on Tuesday with widespread arson and violence in the peripheral areas of the city, mainly the highways that lead to the city.

Four buses were torched, several private vehicles damaged. An angry mob also vandalised Hebbagodi police station. Six women in different areas suffered injuries as police resorted to lathicharge and firing tear gas shells to disperse the protesting workers.

Read: Bengaluru: Garment workers lay siege to IT hub

The workers demanded the rollback of changes in rules governing their Provident Fund. Under the changed rules, people can withdraw only a part of their Provident Fund before retirement.

WATCH: Police use tear gas shells as protest by garment factory workers in Bengaluru turns violenthttps://t.co/mvTMWG5IyX  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

Garment factory workers were most vocal in their protests. They gathered in thousands on Hosur Road, Tumkur Road and Bannerghatta and Mysore roads leading to traffic pile up running into several kilometres. The situation ran out of control as police failed to reign in mobs who gathered in several places. The garment factory workforce run into lakhs.

Garment factory workers protest against Government's decision on withdrawal of Provident Fund. (Photo: Twitter)

The Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) suspended services in the Tumkur, Mysore and Hosur segments. Metro operations too have been suspended. Police resorted to canning in Kanteerva Stadium, Dasarahalli, Jalahalli, RMC Yard. Police used tear gas shells and lathicharge to disperse the protesters in Gottogere and Hebbagodi.

The BIOCON office was attacked in Electronics City. (Photo: DC) Protestors attacked the BIOCON office in Electronics City and vandalized several parts of the city like Gottigere, Electronics City, Singsandra, Boomanahalli, Goreguntapalya, Tumuru, HSR Layout, Bellandur Gate, Sarjapur, Hulimavu.

Read: Garment workers' protest: It was the IT hubs sheen that was torn asunder

In Bommanahalli, several vehicles were set on fire. Safety concerns mounted as goods vehicle carrying as many as 15 LPG domestic cylinder were among the vehicles that were set ablaze.
New Delhi: Congress on Tuesday mounted a sharp attack on West Bengal's ruling Trinamool Congress alleging Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi "are two sides of the same coin" and a vote for one is a vote for the other.

"A vote for Didi Is a vote for Modi and vice versa", party's chief spokesman Randeep Surjewala said in a joint statement with party leader Sharmishtha Mukherjee ahead of the third phase of assembly poll in the state on Thursday.

They alleged that 'Poribartan' (change), the plank on which TMC had won the previous assembly poll in 2011, has "become a defining word for '3 Cs' -- 'Corruption', 'Criminalisation' and 'Communalism' under the watch of Mamata Banerjee".

"No wonder, the electorate of West Bengal find no difference between 'Modi' and 'Didi', both being two sides of the same coin centered around 'phony marketing', 'spurious self-promotion' and 'falsehood of Achhe Din or Poribartan'", they said.

Citing several instances, they also claimed that 'Didi' and 'Modi' are on the same pedestal when it comes to curbing dissent and using the might of the state to run down opponents.

They alleged that law and order is the "biggest casualty in West Bengal with police having no authority to arrest even ordinary criminals under TMC protection and instead police are being assaulted regularly by TMC-supported goons and criminals."

"TMC finds itself at the centre of the whopping Rs 2460 crores 'Saradha scam' which sunk the deposits of nearly 17 lakh innocent investors, he said. Will Ms Mamata Banerjee answer why seniormost TMC leaders/MPs/Ministers have been arrested or questioned in the scam including TMC MPs", he said.
BENGALURU: The protest by garment factory workers, which had turned violent and shut down the IT hub on Monday, turned intense and spread to other parts of the city as over 25,000 workers came on to the streets on Tuesday, agitating against the Central governments amendments to the Employee Provident Fund (EPF) norms.

More than 60 policemen and 37 people were injured, while over 100 vehicles were damaged across the city by violent mobs. The police arrested 116 rioters.

Two people, including a 19-year-old girl student, sustained what is suspected to be bullet injuries in the violence.

Both are undergoing treatment at Sparsh Hospital on Hosur Road. The condition of one of them, 47-year-old Manjunathappa, is critical as a sharp object entered and exited his chest leaving his lungs and ribs damaged.

The BA student, Preethi, sustained injuries, as a pellet hit her thigh. She is out of danger. Both were injured when an angry mob stormed into the Hebbagodi police station and assaulted several policemen, including ACP Obalesh and a police inspector.

As the police fired several rounds in the air and lobbed over 100 teargas shells to take control of the situation, Preethi and Manjunathappa, who were passing by, were injured. Doctors confirmed that Preethi was hit by a pellet, but could not pinpoint the reason behind Manjunathappas life-threatening injury.

Rioters vandalised government and private properties and set vehicles on fire on Mysuru Road, Hosur Road, Tumakuru Road, Bannerghatta Road and other parts of the city, leading to traffic jams that stretched up to 10 km from morning till evening.

Traffic at Electronic City, Yeshwanthpur, Peenya, Naganathapura, Magadi Road, Madiwala, Rajagopalanagar, West of Chord Road, Bellandur Gate, Sarjapur Road, Koramangala, BTM Layout Sector 1 and surrounding areas was severely affected.

The motorists, who were stuck in traffic jams, watched in horror as violence unfolded right in front of their eyes. Around 12.30 pm, 200-250 protesters barged into the premises of Biocon on Hosur Road, set the security office on fire and damaged ambulances and vehicles of the employees. More than 3,000 employees were evacuated and escorted to safety. Police forces arrived at the spot one-and-a-half hours later.

The police, who were again caught unawares, said no leader or organisation claimed responsibility for the protest. If we could talk to the leaders of these protests, we could have controlled the situation better, said a police officer, requesting anonymity.

Stressful episode for commuters

With garment workers resorting to a flash strike for the second day on Tuesday, the commuters in the city bore the brunt again. Many said it was like a pressure cooker situation for them as they were locked inside their cars in long traffic jams under the sweltering heat as protesters went on the rampage.

The IT hub was the worst affected again as hundreds of IT professionals could not reach their offices on time because of traffic jams across the city.

Mr Sahil Yadav, who had flown into the city from Mumbai only to attend a three-day business meeting in Electronic City Phase 2, cancelled his appointment because of the protest.

I was stuck in a traffic jam for over three hours on Hosur Road. The protesters were throwing stones at the police right in front of my eyes. I got down from the car, but the driver advised me to remain seated as the mob was turning violent, he said.

Amitesh Raj was in the middle of action as he was caught in a traffic jam at Bellandur Gate. I was heading for a meeting around 11.30 am and was caught in the traffic pileup. I stepped out and saw the mob charging towards our vehicles. My driver screamed at me to run back to the car, but by the time I reached the vehicle the crowd was all around me. Fortunately, I managed to get inside the car, he said.

Hundreds of protesters gathered at major traffic junctions, like Bellandur Gate and Sarjapur Road, and resorted to vandalism around 11 am. Many office-goers had to take alternative routes to reach back their homes as the roads were completely blocked.

It was a nightmare sitting locked inside the car, with the blazing sun overhead and the frenzied mob setting BMTC bus on fire right in front of me. While the city was witnessing the riots, it was a 'pressure cooker' situation for many motorists like me," said Sameer Jain, a resident of HSR Layout Sector 2.

While many IT professionals chose to work from home, others who stepped out were stuck in traffic jams for over four hours at Kanteerva Stadium, West of Chord Road, Iskcon Temple, Tumkauru Road, Madiwala, Silk Board Junction and BTM Layout.
As they head to the fields, hopefully area farmers are abuzz with options for protecting the region's bee population.

The Minnesota Corn Growers Association and researchers from the University of Minnesota's Bee Lab have been encouraging the state's farmers to take steps to protect pollinators when planting their crops this year.

Pam Meyer, executive director of Quarry Hill Nature Center, noted honey bees typically forage 3 miles or more beyond their hives, meaning actions in nearby fields can have a significant impact on a local bee population.

During the planting season, suggested protective measures include:

 Minimizing dust when planting seed and using deflector equipment to direct exhaust toward the ground.

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 Considering using seed lubricants for corn and soybeans to help reduce potential risk to pollinators.

 Limiting application of pesticides near bee colonies to dawn and dusk, which is when the insects are not flying.

 Preventing drift when applying pesticides to ensure they don't end up on flowering plants visited by bees and other pollinators.

 Switching to pesticides with low toxicity when possible.

These are important steps to heed, but it's equally important to acknowledge the need to ensure quality crops are produced in the region, for the sake of individual farmers and the economy. These crops have traditionally fueled a variety of agriculture-related jobs, as well as other parts of our regional economy.

It's good to see many in the ag industry have shown the declining bee population and food production do not need to be in competition. They have demonstrated that both concerns can be addressed with mutual benefits.

The National Corn Growers Association's Production and Stewardship Action Team has reported a growing role of pollinators in agriculture. In the U.S., insect populations are valued at $16 billion annually, with three-quarters of that directly attributed to bees' pollination services.

"We learned a lot about the importance of honeybees to our industry," said Brent Hostetler, chairman of the action team. He added: "If we're affecting bees through our management practices, we need to know exactly how, so we can be active participants in the solutions."

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The benefits of pollinators, of course, don't stop in the fields. Yards, whether rural or urban, can be used benefit bee populations. "People's backyards are probably the most underutilized conservation tools we have," Meyer said.

Ways to help bee populations include:

 Planting abundant and diverse flowering plants to create desirable habitat away from the potential drift of pesticides.

 Making sure plants have a wide range of blooming periods, giving pollinators regular access to the nectar they collect.

 Grouping individual flowers to offer easier access for bees.

 Adding pollinator-friendly plants throughout the landscape, which includes in buffers, borders and wetlands.

 Building bee houses to offer shelter.

As concerns about the plight of bee populations continue to spread, it's important to remember bees and area farmers make up two crucial populations in this region. That's why we're encouraged to see one population being urged to help the other.
Bengaluru: The readymade garment industry in Bengaluru goes back over four decades and in the seventies was recognised as the readymade clothing hub of South India. Garment factories mushroomed all over the city due to the easy availability of lower middle class workers in both urban and rural Bengaluru. Until this time there was no concept of a garment industry as textile merchants delivered material to tailors in their houses to get them stitched.

But around 1975, they began to bring several tailors under the same roof, giving birth to the garment factories. Initially, the workforce was made up largely of men, but women were later increasingly recruited as they provided cheaper labour. In just a few years Bengalurus garment industry emerged as the clothing major of the whole of south India.

Today the city has around 2,000 garment factories employing around five lakh people, of whom 85 per cent are women. Industry insiders say 40 to 50 companies control the entire industry, with each running over 50 or 75 factories. Most of the readymade garments made are exported to Europe, the United States, UAE, South Africa, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and other countries. Even international brands are tailored here and exported, says a manager of a garment factory.

In fact, Bengaluru is the third largest readymade garment exporter of the country, next only to the National Capital Region (NCR) and Mumbai, which are in first and second place respectively. Now the industry is growing beyond the city, with hundreds of factories coming up in other districts as well. Though the official number of factories in the state is around 1,700, industry experts say there are over 2,500 in reality, and of them around 2,000 are located in Bengaluru alone.

Though the industry has empowered rural women by providing them jobs, they are not treated well, they reveal. Starting from gender bias to sexual harassment, women employees face several problems. Though they are supposed to work for only eight hours, they put in at least ten hours, complains Ms Pratibha R, president of the Garment and Textile Workers Union.
Heres another sign of the bankruptcy of both the climatistas and the liberals who fawn over democracy until the people dont do exactly what they want. Science authorities in Britain put the naming of a new Arctic research ship to an online vote of the public. And the public choseby a landslide marginBoaty McBoatface. Which I suppose is better than Big McLargehuge, for you MST3K fans out there.

Anyway, Her Majestys government is not amused:

After Internet users overwhelmingly voted to christen Britains new $300 million research ship Boaty McBoatface in an online naming poll, a government official suggested the name wouldnt be used. There is a process now for us to review all of the publics choices, Science Minister Jo Johnson told the BBC Monday, per Newsweek. Many of them were imaginative, some were more suitable than others. BBC host Nicky Campbell exclaimed that the government would ride roughshod over democracy if it did not go through with naming the ship Boaty McBoatface, which garnered 120,000 votes  four times that of the next closest choice. Britains National Environment Research Council, which sponsored the contest, noted that it retains authority to choose the final name. I think we were clear when launching the competition that we were looking for a name that would be in keeping with the mission, Johnson said. He noted the boats focus on polar research means it will aid the study of serious issues, such as climate change. So you want a name that fits the gravity and the importance of the subjects that this boat is going to be doing science into, he said, according to the magazine.

Maybe the people who voted online have correctly grasped the gravity and importance of what youre up to.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that so far in 2016, shootings in Minneapolis are up by an astounding 85% over 2015. Other violent crime is up as well:

As of April 11, 74 people had been shot in the city, an 85 percent increase over the 40 shot during the same period last year. Eleven neighborhoods spanning the city saw violent crimes such as rape, robbery or arson showing increases in 2015 compared to a five-year average.

The increased gun violence is centered on mostly-black North Minneapolis:

What could account for an 85% increase in shootings? Liberals predictably will blame guns, but there has been no change in the gun laws. The only plausible explanation is a combination of the Ferguson Effect and the racial hostility promoted by the Obama administration and the Black Lives Matter organization. The Star Tribunes report documents the Ferguson Effect:

Lt. Bob Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, blames the crime surge on a shrinking police force and greater scrutiny of police that has left some officers disengaged. The slowdown in policing has been noticeable. Through April 11, police in north Minneapolis Fourth Precinct made 3,706 proactive stops, compared with 7,732 in the same period last year. Citywide, there has also been a dramatic decline in traffic stops and arrests for serious crimes.

Barack Obama and his minions have promoted racial division and a relentless attack on police forces as a means to political power. The inevitable result is now being seen all around the country: the Obama crime wave.

UPDATE: Right on cue, we have this headline from the St. Paul Pioneer Press: St. Paul police grapple with a violent four days: 9 shot, 2 dead.
No fewer than 28 people were killed and more than 300 wounded after a suicide bomber blew up a bus packed with explosives close to a government building in Kabul, the Afghanistan capital.

The police said that more suicide bombers attacked the heavily-guarded compound after the first blast.

Witnesses fear that the casualty figure may rise because the blast happened during rush hour in a crowded area of the city.

Violent Islamist group, Taliban, has claimed responsibility for the attack, which is the first major attack to hit the Kabul since 2001.

US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) pushed the Taliban out of the capital in 2001.

But the group has not relented on its attacks at Afghan and foreign forces. It has repeatedly carried suicide and military style attack on major towns and cities in the country but Kabul has remained relatively safe.

Last Tuesday, the Taliban announced the start of spring attack codenamed Operation Omari, after its late leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

The group announced that it will carry out large-scale offensives against government strongholds backed by suicide and guerrilla attacks aimed at toppling the countrys Western-backed government from power.

Jihad against the aggressive and usurping infidel army is a holy obligation upon our necks and our only recourse for re-establishing an Islamic system and regaining our independence, the Taliban said in a statement.

Al Jazeera reports that a graduation ceremony for new recruits into the Afghan security forces was ongoing when the suicide bomber attacked.

The Taliban are still fighting with security forces, police spokesperson, Bashir Mujahid, told Al Jazeera.

The security agency attacked is responsible for protecting government ministers and VIPs.

The US embassy said it was not affected by the blast. The NATO military coalition also said it was unaffected.
The Senate Committee on Ethics, Privileges, and Public Petitions on Monday summoned Danladi Umar, the Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), who is presiding over Bukola Sarakis corruption trial.

Mr. Saraki, the Senate President, is facing 13 counts of false assets declaration and fraud before the CCT.

According to The Nation newspaper, Justice Umar was asked to appear before the Committee unfailingly by 2 p.m. on Thursday.

The invitation came hours after the judge ruled that Mr. Sarakis trial would sit daily between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., with a one hour break in between.

The Senate presidents lawyer had argued for the trial to hold only when the Upper Chamber is not in plenary, but Mr. Umar insisted that Mr. Saraki, and not the Senate, was on trial.

The letter of invitation requested Mr. Umar to come personally with 12 copies of any submission he wishes to present.

The Senate Committee said it was inviting the CCT chairman following allegation of bribery against him.

Your letter with reference number CCT/HT/126/S/111/515 dated 1st April, 2016, in which you requested for more time to enable you attend the hearing was received, read the invitation letter signed by Freedom Odolo, the Committees Clerk.

After due consideration of your request, the Committee rescheduled the hearing to give you at least two weeks from the 4th of April when you should have appeared.

The Senates invitation of the CCT judge is coming after repeated efforts by Mr. Saraki to halt his trial had failed.

Last Friday, a Federal High Court in Abuja dismissed his application asking the court to nullify his trial at the CCT.

The ruling followed an earlier decision by a Court of Appeal dismissing the same application by Mr. Saraki.

On February 5, the Supreme Court nullified Mr. Sarakis application challenging the jurisdiction of the CCT to try him.

On March 24, Mr. Umar struck out an application by Mr. Sarakis lawyer, Kanu Agabi, that the Code of Conduct Bureau ought to have invited the Senate president to clarify allegations against him before the commencement of trial.

The Senate is currently engaged in a hurried amendment of the Acts setting up the Code of Conduct Bureau and the Code of Conduct Tribunal, an action many Nigerians interpreted as legislative intimidation of the two agencies.
Twenty-eight civil society organisations in Nigeria have risen against the proposed amendment of the Code of Conduct Tribunal and Bureau Act by the Senate.

The organisations, at a press conference in Abuja on Monday, alleged that the amendment was aimed at helping the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, who is currently undergoing trial at the Code of Conduct Tribunal for corruption and false assets declaration, escape justice.



Some of the organisations are Partners for Electoral Reform, Transition Monitoring Network, Convener of Protest to Power Forum and Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre.

A bill for an amendment of the Code of Conduct Tribunal and Bureau Act scaled second reading at the Senate last Thursday, two days after it was first read.



It seeks to amend section 3 of the Act to give every public officer appearing before the Bureau fair hearing provided for under Section 36 (2)(a) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria1999.



The bill, sponsored by Peter Nwaoboshi (PDP-Delta State), passed second reading and was subsequently referred to the Committees on Judiciary and Ethics, Privileges and Public Petitions, for further legislative action. The committees were asked to report back in two weeks.



The Senior Programme Officer of the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Center, Kolawole Banwo, who spoke on behalf of the CSOs, said the events leading to Mr. Sarakis trial at the CCT, as well as the negative result of various reports against him, in recent times, were reason enough for the senate president to step down and allow the course of justice prevail, rather than sit tight and attempt to frustrate his trial.



The organisations said It is clear that these underhand moves in the Senate are aimed at whittling down the powers of the agencies with a view to helping the senate president escape Justice.

They said the attempts by the upper legislative chamber to amend the Act at a time its president was undergoing trial at the CCT amounted to abuse and misuse of power.

It is clear that these underhand moves in the Senate are aimed at whittling down the powers of the agencies with a view to helping the Senate President escape Justice, the organisations said.

It will be recalled that in the course of the ongoing trial of Mr. Saraki at the CCT, mind blowing revelations have emerged about how the Senate President had been receiving double salaries, long after he ceased to be governor of Kwara State.

He is also alleged to have breached the law by keeping secrete foreign accounts in offshore tax heavens, as confirmed in the leaked Panama papers.

These are weighty allegations which ordinarily should have compelled Mr. Saraki to step down and use the judicial process to clear his name.

The organisations noted that by taking a chunk of the senators with him to the tribunal anytime his trial was holding, Mr. Saraki had shown a sign of disdain and contempt for Nigerians.

They said, Mr. Saraki shows disdain and contempt to Nigerian and the rule of law by closing down the Senate and carrying a majority of Senators to the tribunal, whenever he is arraigned.

We condemn the irresponsibility of Senators who have abandoned work on so many critical bills to concentrate on the amendment of the CCT Act.



The CSOs said like every other public officer, the senate president should conform to the Code of Conduct, as stipulated by section 172 of the Constitution.

They described the attempt by the senate to strip the tribunal of its powers as an outright betrayal of public trust, total disregard for administration of justice and Utmost conflict of Interest.

The chairperson of the Partners for Electoral Reform, Ezenwa Nwagwu, who spoke to journalists after the conference, said the proposed amendment posed a threat to the current democratic dispensation.

We can say this is the greatest threat posed to the Fourth Republic, Mr. Nwagwu said.

If we get away with this, it means that every other law in the Fiscal Responsibility Act can also be amended in order to excuse the federal government.

Every other law can be amended to suit personal gains, and this we condemn. We stand against it and indicate that we will join Nigerians to resist the passage of this bill.

Mr. Nwagwu said the honourable thing for Mr. Saraki to do was to withdraw the bill and that it could be revisited after his tribunal.

Also speaking, the National Coordinator of the Transition Monitoring Network, Aaron Ogundiwin, said it was the legal responsibility of civil groups to collaborate with Nigerians to bring their leaders to accountability.



He said the fight against corruption was a fight for Nigerias survival.

The Legal Defence and Assistance Project (LEDAP) also condemned the move by the National Assembly to amend the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015 (ACJ Act),describing it as self-service and contrary to paragraph 1 of the Code of Conduct for Public Officers.

In a statement Monday by Chino Obiagwu, its National Coordinator, the group said the purpose of the amendment was to exclude the Code of Conduct Tribunal from the application of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015.

It is clearly a move by the leadership of the Senate to frustrate at all cost the trial of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, at the Tribunal, said Mr. Obiagwu, a lawyer.

The desperation with which the Senate President and his supporters are throwing tantrums and seeking to amend the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act and the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, simply for the purpose of seeking ways to frustrate his trial of the Tribunal, raises the impression that he is guilty of the offence charged and they are only working to stop his trial.

By amending the ACJ Act, the Senate will end up frustrating the good intentions of the Act simply because of the pursuit to stop Mr. Sarakis trial.

The bill to amend the ACJ Act, titled A Bill for an Act to amend the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015 and other related matters, 2016 (SB.249), sponsored by Isah Misau (APC, Bauchi Central) passed through second reading on Thursday April 14, 2016.

Also on the same day, the Senate adopted through second reading the Bill to amend the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act, all geared towards ensuring that the Senate Presidents trial for false declaration of his assets at the Tribunal is derailed at all cost, said Mr. Obiagwu.

Mr. Misau was stoned by his constituents last weekend for his support for the bill, an incident he vehemently denied.

The bill to amend the ACJ Act seeks to revise Section 2 (2) of the Act by substituting the subsection with the following: The provisions of this Act shall not apply to a Court Martial and such other Courts or Tribunal not being courts created and listed under section 6(5) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended.

The current provision of this Section 2 of the Act, which is sought to be amended, provides that: (1) Without prejudice to Section 86 of this Act, the provisions of this Act shall apply to criminal trials for offences established by an Act of the National Assembly and other offences punishable in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. (2) The provisions of this Act shall not apply to a Court Martial.

By removing the application of the ACJ Act from courts other than the Federal and State High Courts, Court of Appeal and the Supreme, which are the only courts with criminal jurisdiction listed under section 6(5) of the Constitution, the proposed amendment will narrow the application of this very laudable legislation, and restrict its application to many courts and tribunals, Mr. Obiagwu said.

LEDAP draws the attention of the National Assembly to their oath of office, and that they are elected by the people to make laws for order and good government of Nigeria and not for self-serving interests.

By pursing the amendment of the Acts in this manner, the legislators are simply abusing the privilege of law making. Furthermore, the amendments violate paragraph 1 of the Code of Conduct for Public Officers enshrined in Part 1 of the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution, which stipulates that A public officer shall not put himself in a position where his personal interest conflicts with his duties and responsibilities.

LEDAP called on the Senate to withdraw the bill to amend the ACJ Act 2015, and that of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act, and allow justice to take its course at the Tribunal.

The law presumes Mr. Saraki innocent until his guilt is proved beyond reasonable doubt by the prosecution, Mr. Obiagwu said.

By embarking on desperate actions to frustrate the trial and the Tribunal, Mr. Saraki is sending the message to Nigerians and the world that he is guilty and cannot stand to face justice.

Under our constitutional democracy, no person no matter how highly placed, is above the law, and the National Assembly cannot amend the law just to suit the whims and caprices of one man.
The Police Service Commission (PSC) says it received 705, 352 applications as at 7.30 a.m., Tuesday, April 19, from people seeking enlistment into the Nigeria Police Force.

This is contained in a statement issued on Tuesday in Abuja by Ikechukwu Ani, Head, Press and Public Relations of the commission.

It stated that 202, 427 applications were for the position of Cadet Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP), 169,446, for the position of Cadet Inspector and 333,479 for the position of Constables.

The statement said that the commission would recruit 500 Cadet ASPs, 500 Cadet Inspectors, 1,500 Specialist Officers and 7, 500 Constables to meet the approved 10,000 new entrants into the Force.

In the statement, the chairman of the commission, Mike Okiro, confirmed that the process of receiving the forms had been smooth and transparent.

Mr. Okiro assured of the commissions commitment at making the process transparent and the exercise a huge success.

President Muhammadu Buhari had approved the recruitment of 10,000 policemen into the nations Police Force to reinforce the Police for better service.

(NAN)
Bengaluru: Who triggered the violent protests by the garment factory workers that brought the city to a standstill for two consecutive days and caused huge amount of loss to public property, besides injuring 62 people including 24 policemen? While women led the protests, they were reportedly used as shields by the racketeers, who are yet to be identified, said an officer on condition of anonymity.

Not behind mayhem: Union leaders

Neither the police know who led the violent protests nor did the factory garment workers union leaders know who was behind the mindless rioting in the IT hub. Our workers did not indulge in any kind violence.

They were protesting against the unlawful amendment to the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) Act by the Central government. Some anti-social elements targeted policemen and destroyed public property. We have told the police to withdraw the cases against our workers because they are innocent, said president of the Garment & Textile Workers Union R. Pratibha.

Her colleague and garment workers leader Jayaram told Deccan Chronicle that he was shocked at the turn of events on Monday and Tuesday in the City. We had planned a silent protest from April 20 against the central governments decision to amend the PF withdrawal rules, but there are over six lakh garment factory workers in the city and they panicked because of the impending deadline of May 1 from when the new restrictions on PF withdrawal were to be implemented. Thousands of them came out much ahead of the planned protest. None of them, however, took part in any kind of vandalism, said Mr Jayaram.

Centre has deferred PF amendment: PF Commissioner

The protestors dispersed only after EPF Commissioner Raja Rajesjwari Nagar came out and addressed them at the Hosur Road junction and informed them that the Centre has decided to defer its decision on implementing the new PF rules, which were to come into force by May 1, by three months. The government will discuss the proposed amendment to PF before deciding on it, he said.

Home minister warns protesters

An angry Home Minister Dr G. Parameshwar warned the protesters, during a public address, not to take law into their hands on an issue in which the state government has no role. He said that the state government is empathetic to their cause and will petition the central government to not hurt the workers right to their money, but no one should take law into their hands and provoke the police to take action against them. We are willing to talk to the leaders but there is no one to talk to. The police have become helpless, he said.

Police exercised utmost restraint: DG&IGP

Director General and Inspector General of Police Omprakash pointed out that the strikers had no leaders. In mob violence, the police normally broker peace by talking to the leaders. In this case there were no leaders. We do not know who triggered and fuelled the violence. We had to maintain utmost restraint even after policemen were targeted and public property was destroyed because we didnt want to harm the protestors. Most of them were women, said the police chief.
The chairman of the Senate Committee on Services, Ibrahim Gobir, has defended the Senates decision to pay N36.5 million for each of dozens of Toyota Land Cruisers recently acquired for senators.

The senate has come under fire for apparently spending far more than the open market cost of each of the vehicles, and more importantly for spending the huge amount at a time of national economic crisis.

Mr. Gobir told journalists on Tuesday in Abuja that the specification of the acquired vehicles were higher than those reported in the media.

According to him, the specification of Land Cruisers was VXR V8 not V6.

The car we bought is Land Cruiser VXR V8, not V6, said Mr. Gobir.

The showroom price is about N31 million minimum and then when you add 10 per cent tax it becomes 36.5 million.

In fact you can go to the internet and download it; it is very simple, we can give you the website, and you can see them.

So, I think what we have purchased the car for is very reasonable.

He also said that the Senate purchased only 36 vehicles, contrary to media reports that it procured 108 cars.

A lot has been happening within the last two days concerning the issue of cars, car loan, appropriation and cost of the cars and we feel it necessary to come out and inform the public about it.

This is so, so that people can have a better understanding of the whole thing to avoid wrong perception as being created among Nigerians.

That we bought 108 cars is totally wrong; it is not correct. We bought 36 cars.

These 36 cars, each senator in each state is either a chairman or a vice chairman and we gave one car to each state to share as utility car. So, we dont have money to buy 108 cars.

We had a closed session and they agreed that we should give one car per state; we sat down and agreed who needs the car most and that was what happened, he said.

Mr. Gobir also denied allegations that the senate purchased the cars without appropriation.

According to him, on the issue of buying cars without appropriation, it is totally wrong because this has been appropriated in the 2015 budget.

So, we used what we have in the 2015 budget to buy the 36 cars so that it can go round to each state, he stated.

On reports that the lawmakers earlier accessed loans for the purchase of cars, Mr. Gobir said no lawmaker got any form of loan for the purchase of car.

He responded to massive criticisms from Nigerians about the Senates insensitivity in spending such money on cars given Nigerias present economic challenge, saying purchase of 36 cars as against 109 was informed by senates concern for state of the economy.

We are supposed to buy 109 cars but because of the paucity of funds, because of our sensitivity and concern for lack of funds, we bought only 36 to go round per state, Mr. Gobir said.

He decried the level of criticism on the National Assembly in spite of efforts to cut down cost to meet present economic reality.

Come to think of it, there is no minister that hasnt got about three, four cars  one Land Cruiser, maybe a back-up and two Hilux cars.

There is no director in the civil service that hasnt got a car. There is no permanent secretary that hasnt got a Land Cruiser.

In fact, every House of Assembly member has either a Prado or a Land Cruiser and here is a senator you say he cannot have one Land Cruiser, he added.

(NAN)
The Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth (ERA/FoEN) has urged Governor Akinwunmi Ambode to halt his ongoing concession of water infrastructure in the state.

Akinbode Oluwafemi, a deputy Director at ERA/FoEN, said the governor should declare his stance on the controversial Public Private Partnership of the water sector.

As we have said time and again, the failure of the Lagos State government to open up on the controversial water PPP gives room for us to suspect that something is in the offing and the people are deliberately being kept in the dark, said Mr. Oluwafemi.

We cannot stop demanding that the rights of Lagos citizens to a free gift of nature must not be subject to the dictates of privatizers whose only interest is profit.

Worse is the fact that the Lagos State government is toying with a failed model of PPP that the World Bank private arm  International Finance Corporation (IFC) advised it to embark upon even with documented failures in Manila and Nagpur, in the Philippines and India respectively.

The group also accused the Lagos State government of failing to take a clear stance on the controversy surrounding the PPP advisory contract that the World Bank was forced to cancel last year, following pressures by labour and civil society.

At a rally organised in March 17, 2016 by the Africa Water Hygiene and Sanitation Network (AWWWASHNET) in Lagos, Permanent Secretary, Mr Biodun Bamgboye debunked the PPP plans saying the Governor had no plans to privatise water, Mr. Oluwafemi said.

Suprisingly, Governor Ambode was quoted as saying PPP was the way to go just two days after.

We are disturbed at these conflicting statements. In all these, we see a lot of so-called reorganisation at the LSWC which is evidently paving way for a PPP. These activities are carried out without due process and unknown companies are springing up to grab slices of our water resources.

Mr. Oluwafemi also said his organization had observed a systematic non-release of funds meant for procurement of chemicals for water treatment by Mr. Ambodes administration.

For us, this happening has become regular in the last seven months and fits into our belief that there is a grand ploy to make Lagosians believe that indeed the public sector workers cannot manage water infrastructure, he said.

The ultimate aim of the brains behind this development is to goad Lagosians into believing the solution is in private hands.

Last week, a United States lawmaker, Gwen Moore, expressed worries over the World Banks role in funding and promoting water privatization across the world.

Ms. Moore said the Banks lending arm, the International Finance Corporation, had not adequately monitored the conflicts of interest created when it takes equity stake in water corporations.

The World Bank, in December 2015, opened up that it has withdrawn support for a PPPs in Lagos and Nigeria.

The PPP for the operation of the Lagos treatment works is not going to be possible under this project, the World Bank had stated.

Going by the Banks statement, Mr. Oluwafemi said, the Lagos State government should take a more proactive step in ensuring the management of water resources is democratically implemented.

We have said it time and again that all people have a fundamental human right to water and Lagos citizens are no exception, said Mr. Oluwafemi.
Abia State senator, Eyinnaya Abaribe, has called on the Committee on Rules and Business of the Senate to clarify issues on the existence of a Grazing Reserve Commission bill in the assembly.

Mr. Abaribe made the call at plenary on Thursday under a point of order.

He said he had sought clarification from the clerk of the Senate and confirmed that there was no such bill contrary to reports in the media.

Mr. Abaribe said he had received so many calls on the issue and had been accused by some of his constituents of being an absentee senator when the said the bill was not before the Senate.

I have gotten more than 1,000 calls and this has to do with something called the Grazing Reserve Commission Bill.

When I asked where is the information coming from, they said the information is coming from the social media.

Mr President the last time a Grazing Reserve Commission Bill came to this Senate was in the 7th Senate and was proposed by Sen. (Zainab) Kure who is no longer in the Senate.

So the reason why I am making this personal explanation is so that my constituents in Abia South will know that there is no such bill called Grazing Reserve Commission Bill before this Senate.

I have taken time to ask the clerk and every other person to say where is this bill that has passed second reading and they said they also are in confusion, they have never seen such thing, he said.

The President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki, who was presiding at the time, noted the observation of the senator.

Mr. Saraki later left for the Code of Conduct Tribunal for continuation of his trial and the Deputy President, Chief Ike Ekwerenmadu, took over proceedings.

The News Agency of Nigeria recalls that the online media have been awash with reports that a Grazing Reserve Bill is before the Senate and has passed second reading.

According to the reports, the bill seeks to establish a commission which will take land in any part of Nigeria for use as grazing reserve. (NAN)
The two engineers, who constructed the collapsed seven-storey guest house of the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), were on Tuesday remanded at Kirikiri Maximum Prisons, Lagos.

An Ikeja High Court which gave the ruling, said the men should be kept behind bars pending the determination of the charges against them.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the engineers  Oladele Ogundeji and Akinbela Fatiregun  had pleaded not guilty to a 111-count charge bordering on gross negligence and criminal manslaughter.

Justice Lateef Lawal-Akapo said: The defendants are remanded in Kirikiri Maximum Prisons pending the determination of the charge.

The prosecution, led by Idowu Alakija, the Director, Lagos State Directorate of Public Prosecutions (DPP), said the defendants committed the offences between Aug. 20 and September 2013.

According to her, the defendants constructed a seven-storey building at the church in Ikotun-Egbe in Ikotun area of Lagos with disregard for human lives.

The collapsed guest house on Sept. 12, 2014, led to the death of 116 persons, 85 of who were South Africans.

The Coroners Inquest instituted by the Lagos State Government had in its verdict on July 8, 2015 said the building collapse was caused by structural failure due to a combination of designs and detailing errors.

The inquest ordered that Synagogue church be investigated and prosecuted by the relevant authorities for not possessing necessary building permits, while the two engineers should be tried for criminal negligence.

The arraignment of the defendants by the Lagos State Government had been continuously stalled by the defence through several adjournments and filing of various applications before the court.

Earlier at Tuesdays proceedings, Justice Lateef Lawal-Akapo dismissed two separate applications of Titi Akinlawon (SAN) and E.L. Akpofure (SAN).

Mrs. Akinlawon had in an application dated March 3 asked for an order adjourning further hearing pending the determination of her application at the Court of Appeal.

Mr. Akpofure also in an application dated Feb. 17 objected to the inclusion of Jandy Trust Ltd as one of the defendants because there was nothing in the proof of evidence linking the company to the crimes.

Justice Lawal-Akapo, in his ruling, said: Section 273 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Law states that subject to the constitution, an application for a stay of proceedings in respect of a criminal matter before the High Court should not be entertained.

On the proposed exclusion of JandyTrust Ltd from the charge, the judge said: The court cannot delve into substantive issues at the interlocutory stage thereby outraging the sense of justice of an independent observer sitting in court.

I find no merit in the two applications, they are lacking in merit and substance.

This is a clear case of abuse of court processes to the irritation and annoyance of the court.

The judge immediately ordered the arraignment of Fatiregun, Ogundeji and the trustees of the church in spite of opposition from the Defence.

The case was adjourned to April 26 for hearing of the defendants bail applications.

(NAN)
A Federal High Court in Yenagoa, will on May 12 rule on whether or not the court will take the evidence of Ese Oruru in private.

Oruru is the Bayelsa girl who was allegedly abducted into forced marriage in Kano. Her abductor, Yunusa Dahiru, is standing trial on charges including illegally having carnal knowledge of the 15-year-old.

The prosecuting counsel, Kenneth Dike, had applied for Orurus evidence to be taken in private since she is a minor.

The judge, Aliya Nganjiwa, while adjourning the case for ruling, said the court would ensure that justice prevails on the matter.

We are sitting for the constitutional right of the victim, and for fair trial, Dike said.

For the interest of justice, we must protect her image and future.

We are seeking the leave of the court to take the evidence of the victim in private, excluding every other persons except the parties and their counsel, Dike said.

But Defence Counsel, Kayode Olaosebikan, opposed the application, saying there was no merit in taking evidence in private.

He said the pictures of the victim, Oruru, were already in the internet, print and electronic media.

On the bail condition, Olaosebikan said the defence could not meet the bail conditions.

We were unable to meet the condition that the sureties must be residents in Yenagoa, so, it has been difficult for us to bail Yunusa, he said.

NAN reports that the accused, Yunusa Dahiru, would remain in custody till May 12.

(NAN)
The Federal Operations Unit Zone A, Lagos, of the Nigeria Customs Service said it has seized smuggled and contraband goods worth N572 million between January 2016 and the first week of April.

The comptroller of the zone, Mohammed Dahiru, according to information released on Tuesday by the Customs, gave the details of the seizure as follows: 4,911 bags of 50kg parboiled rice, 1,5048 cartons of imported frozen products, 1,884 (25 litres) of Vegetable Oil, and 17 trucks of unprocessed teak woods.

Mr. Dahiru said he had resolved to deal ruthlessly with smugglers, as long as they are ready to circumvent the fiscal policies of the Federal Government in terms of trade.

We will continue to arrest and prosecute them as a deterrent to others, he added.
Suspected Boko Haram insurgents on Tuesday ambushed the convoy of the Acting General Officer Commanding, GOC, 7 Division, the Nigerian Army has said.

The Army spokesperson, Sani Usman, said in a statement that the leading elements of the Acting General Officer Commanding, GOC, 7 Division Nigerian Army, Brigadier General Victor Ezugwus leading convoy was about 8.30am on Tuesday morning ambushed by suspected Boko Haram terrorists enroute to visit troops in Bama, Borno state, north east Nigeria.

He said although 1 soldier lost his live and 2 others were injured, they were able to clear the ambush, killing some of the terrorists and recovered vehicle and weapons from them.

He said the recovered items include a Toyota Hilux vehicle, 2 AK-47 rifles and several ammunitions.

The Acting GOC has continued his operational visit to Bama, while the body of the late soldier and the wounded had been evacuated to Maiduguri, the statement added.

He added that Nigerias Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Yusuf Buratai, a lieutenant general, has also spoken with the GOC.

The Nigerian Army wish to reiterate its unalloyed commitment and determination to continue to clear the remnants of the Boko Haram terrorists wherever they might be hiding, he said.

The attack came a day after soldiers clashed with Boko Haram militants in Borno State.
Human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, has said the Senate lacks the power to summon Danladi Umar, the Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, to testify in respect of a criminal investigation.

In a statement Tuesday, Mr. Falana advised the Senate to withdraw the illegal summon which had been issued and served on Mr. Umar.

The Senate Committee on Ethics, Privileges, and Public Petitions had on Monday summoned Mr. Umar to appear before it on Thursday to answer questions on allegations of bribery against him.

Mr. Umar is presiding over the corruption trial of Bukola Saraki, the Senate president, who is facing a 13-count of false assets declaration and fraud before the CCT.

The summons came hours after the CCT judge had ruled that Mr. Sarakis trial would sit daily between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., with a one hour break in between, till the end of the trial.

In his statement, Mr. Falana noted that the allegation involving Mr. Umar was already a pending criminal case before the court.

Following the allegation that the Personal Assistant of the Tribunal Chairman allegedly received a bribe from a suspect on behalf of his master the matter was investigated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, said Mr. Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria.

At the end of the investigation the Tribunal Chairman was exonerated while his Personal Assistant was indicted.

Consequently, the suspect has since been charged to court. Since the case has not been concluded or terminated it is the height of contempt on the part of the Senate or any of its Committees to decide to conduct another trial on the same subject matter.

In July 2015, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission arraigned Mr. Umars personal assistant, Ali Gambo, before an FCT High Court on charges of conspiracy, bribery, and abuse of office.

Mr. Gambos arrest and subsequent arraignment followed a petition that he received N1.8 million bribe on behalf of Mr. Umar, ostensibly to quash a case before the CCT.

Mr. Falana said the Senate lacked the power to investigate allegations of corrupt practices and other criminal offences.

Instead of exposing the Nigerian people to further undeserved embarrassment over the Saraki case the Senate is enjoined to enhance the fight against corruption by passing the Whistle Blowers Bill, the Proceeds of Crime Bill and the Witness Protection Bill which were passed by the 7th National Assembly but were not signed into law by former President Goodluck Jonathan, said Mr. Falana.

For the Nigerian people to take the war against corruption seriously the members of the legislative and executive arms of Government ought to be prepared to demonstrate leadership by example.

In a country where the majority of the states are owing arrears of salaries the legislators should be prepared to make sacrifice by reducing their fat salaries and jumbo allowances.
Nigerian troops on Monday restored normalcy to Kareto town in northern Borno State, north east Nigeria, after repelling prolonged attack on the town by the extremist Boko Haram sect.

Army spokesperson, Sani Usman, had on Monday announced that the Nigerian troops were engaged in a heavy gun fight with members of the terror group.

After nearly 10 hours of fierce battle, the army said late on Monday that the troops successfully repelled the attack and killed quite a number of the terrorists.

The situation has since been brought under control and reinforcement sent, the statement added.

It also said that so far, the Nigerian troops had 2 officers and 22 soldiers wounded in action.

It said the wounded officers and men were evacuated to the military hospital in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital.

Kareto is 120 kilometres north of Maiduguri and Mondays attack by Boko Haram came at a time the Nigerian military was intensifying its onslaught on the terrorist group.

The Army recently recorded outstanding successes against the sect, which enabled a lot of people hitherto displaced from their communities in Borno and neighbouring Yobe state to return to their communities.

Army authorities also reopened many highways previously closed due to the activities of the terrorists.
Gunmen suspected to be kidnappers on Monday night abducted the two wives of a Kano politician, Garba Fammar, in Kibiya, the headquarters of Kibiya Local Government Area of the state.

Witness told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday in Kano that the suspects stormed the residence of the politician around 2:00a.m.

The witness said the suspects, numbering about 40, arrived at the town on motorcycles with dangerous weapons.

He said shortly after their arrival, the suspects fired several shots in air to scare people before whisking away with the two women to an unknown destination.

Two members of the vigilante group had lost their lives during an encounter with the hoodlums.

When contacted, the spokesman of police in the state, Magaji Majiya, confirmed the story.

Mr. Majiya, a deputy superintendent of police, said Police Commissioner Maigari Dikko and some top officers had already visited the town to assess the situation.

(NAN)
This was proven recently when the residents of some areas affected due to pollution from pharmaceutical industries (Photo: PTI)

Hyderabad: Telangana State Pollution Control Board (TSPCB) does not wield its power to control pollution in Hyderabad and usually tries to satisfy its critiques through empty rhetoric.

This was proven recently when the residents of some areas affected due to pollution from pharmaceutical industries like Nizampet, Bachupally, Kompally, Kukatpally and Miyapur, ensured in written a set of commitments from TSPCB officials who had visited some of the pollution affected areas after receiving complaints.

The residents also threatened to go on a hunger strike if their problem was not solved. This was followed by a meeting held at the TSPCB office a week ago in which all senior TSPCB officials participated along with some residents and representatives of the industry.

In the meeting the TSPCB promised to send closure notices to three pharma companies and send "notices" and "strict warnings" to other companies, which is what the TSPCB has been saying since many years, to no avail. However, there has been no concrete action taken by TSPCB since the meeting.

One of the residents from Bachupally said, Every time we complain, the TSPCB officials say that action will be taken and for a few days we do not face any problem. However, after that things go back to where they were and we are left helpless?
The police in Rivers State have foiled an armed robbery operation in the state.

The Commissioner of Police, Musa Kimo, at a news briefing in Port Harcourt on Tuesday displayed the body of an alleged armed robber, and the firearms and vehicles recovered.

On April 18, 2016 at about 10:30 am, following an information that a Toyota Venza snatched at gun point three days ago was sighted along Psychiatric road, Port Harcourt, teams of policemen quickly mobilized, trailed and engaged the vehicles occupants in a gun duel, Mr. Kimo said.

One of the hoodlums was fatally wounded while one AK 47 rifle, six magazines, 270 rounds of 7.62 live ammunition and thirteen pieces of objects suspected to be dynamite, and five different brands of vehicles were recovered.

The commissioner said the armed robbers were on their way to rob a bank in Port Harcourt.

He said the police was investigating the incident, and that it would arrest the fleeing member of the robbery gang.

The following vehicles were recovered by the police: Lexus Jeep RX 300, ash colour, with license plate number, Rivers KRK 957 BX; Toyota Highlander, ash colour, with license plate number, Rivers AHD 159 SJ; Toyota Venza, green colour, license plate number, Rivers NCH 262 ST; Toyota Lexus RX 300, grey colour, number, Lagos LSR 957 DU; Toyota Corolla, ash colour, license number, Abuja ABC 433 VH.

The commissioner said the police on April 17, 2016 raided a criminal hideout at Umoda Aluu, following a tip off, and recovered two AK 47 rifles, four magazines, 31 rounds of 7.62 live ammunitions and a Lexus jeep 300, with license plate number, Abuja SARS ABU 295 DW.

One man, Chima Nnorum, was arrested during the raid, the commissioner said.
Armed men, suspected to be robbers, on Tuesday shot and killed two policemen at Umuagwo in Ohaji/Egbema area of Imo.

The policemen, an inspector and a corporal, were attacked by the armed men while on duty at the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) office at Umuagwo.

A witness told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the police officers were overpowered by the armed men and shot after their rifles were seized.

The attackers later escaped with the rifles.

When contacted, the Police Public Relations Officer of the Imo Police Command, Andrew Enwerem, confirmed the incident, and explained that the two officers were shot while on duty.

Today, we got a report that two of our men were killed by armed hoodlums while on duty at the NDDC office at Umuagwo, he said.

The PPRO, who did not disclose the names of the deceased, said that two suspects had been arrested in connection with the incident while investigation was ongoing.

(NAN)
The Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayose, on Monday reacted to the comments by the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, Odigie Oyegun, his deputy, Segun Oni, and senior lawyer, Itse Sagay, describing their criticism of his letter to the Chinese government as a brazen display of political hypocrisy.

He also said the fact that President Muhammadu Buhari did not sign any direct loan agreement with the Chinese government during his visit to China vindicated his position that the country did not need a loan from that country but a collaboration that would ensure the transfer of technology from China to Nigeria.

Frontline lawyer, Itse Sagay, had rebuked Mr. Fayose for his action, saying he had no business interfering in the federal governments process of securing a foreign loan.

I think Fayose has a problem. The way I see it is that the man, who is on the brink of destruction, has no restraint about what he does, Mr. Sagay was quoted as saying.

 To start with, what is the business of a state governor about a loan that is being given to the federal government?

It was Mr. Sagays view that provided the government could secure the loan, the governor had no business attempting to truncate the effort of the federal government.

But Mr. Fayose, speaking through his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, insisted he had right as a Nigerian citizen and stakeholder to speak out against the proposed loan.

People like Oyegun, Oni and Prof Itse Sagay lack moral rights to complain even if President Mohammadu Buhari is called whatever names because they never complained when as a sitting president, Dr Goodluck Jonathan was called unprintable names by APC stalwarts and leaders, he said in a statement issued in Ado-Ekiti.

Where were the likes of Oyegun, Oni, Prof Itse Sagay and others when APC promoted crude politics and anti-Nigeria posturing to an unprecedented level when Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was in power?

It is on record that APC wrote to the United States of America not to sell arms to Nigeria, reported the country to the European Union, United Nations and went to the bizarre extent of reporting the then Chief of Army Staff, Azubuike Ihejirika, to the International Criminal Court (ICC), not for committing the kind of genocide committed against the Shiite Muslims in Zaria and Agatus in Benue, but for killing Boko Haram insurgents.

It is also on record that instead of lending his voice to the federal government efforts to dislodge Boko Haram insurgents, President Buhari opted to describe the clampdown on Boko Haram as injustice against the North. He went on to accuse the government of killing and destroying houses of Boko Haram insurgents while the Niger Delta militants were given special treatment by the government.

Even when Oni was the Ekiti State Governor as a PDP member, Action Congress (AC) as APC was then, wrote against his government move to obtain a N5 billion loan. Isnt it then funny that because he is now in APC, the same Oni is now against Governor Fayose doing the same thing done against him by the APC elements in Ekiti State?

Mr. governor since the federal government claimed it had recovered and still recovering trillions of Naira allegedly looted from the treasury, there was no need to borrow money from anywhere to finance the 2016 Budget.

With the $200 billion they claimed is coming from Dubai, they said $700 million raw cash was found in Diezani Alison Maduekes house, N3 trillion said to have been saved from the Treasury Single Account (TSA) and N4.5 trillion the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) said it will generate this year, what then is the rationale behind the federal government seeking any loan?, he said.
The Lagos State government has cleared the air over who is responsible for payment of Land Use Charge in the state.

Mustapha Akinkunmi, the Commissioner for Finance, said Monday that land owners and landlords, not tenants, are to pay the fee.

Payment of Land Use Charge is often a contentious issue between property owners and tenants in Lagos, with the former usually arguing that the latter are the ones using the property at any given time.

It is the landlords that are expected to pay the charge, Mr. Akinkunmi said during a press conference at the state government secretariat in Lagos.

They can have agreements with their tenants, but from the governments perspective, it is the landlord that the law recognizes in paying the charge.

Mr. Akinkunmi said the state government had put in place options to make the payment of Land Use Charge easy for residents.

The options include paying (using cash or POS) at the bank or the nearest Land Use Charge offices or online through credit or debit cards, he added.

Mr. Akinkunmi, who apologised for the delay in the distribution of the bills this year, attributed it to the need to clean up the data sets previously in operation, adding that clearer data sets were now in place.

He, however, said despite the delay in the delivery of the bills, tax payers are still entitled to the usual 15 percent discounted rate if payment is made within 15 days of bill delivery, while others who pay outside the 15 days grace not exceeding 30 calendar days would pay the actual due amount.

The commissioner said failure to do that would attract penalty from the 45th day after bill delivery and rise further afterwards, and that properties in such category would be sealed, while owners would be prosecuted in court in accordance with the law.

Payment of Land Use Charge is a requirement of law and property tax. Defaulters will have their properties sealed and are liable to be prosecuted in court, he added.

Mr. Akinkunmi also advised residents to desist from patronizing touts or any official in a bid to cut corners on the payment of Land Use Charge.

I would like to appeal to all property owners to stop encouraging such habit, he said.

The Land Use Charge is totally automated because we have records of all properties in the state.

I would encourage all property owners to go through normal procedure of payments to the government. If you go through any other means whether through back door or any other means, such is at your own risk.

He said percentage payable based on owner-occupied is 0.0394 percent of the value of the property, while the percentage for industrial, educational, residential properties occupied by owners and third parties is 0.132 percent.

Commercial and residential properties occupied by third parties, according to Akinkunmi would pay 0.394 percent of the value of the property.

While clarifying the methodology adopted in determining the value of a property, the Commissioner said the value of properties vary with location, hence the Ministry has a template for carrying out valuation process.

There is a Valuation Department in place at the Ministry of Finance and they have the methodology of how they do the calculation of the property. We now use the ratio as the percentage earlier mentioned.

He also warned against harassment of government officials by residents in the course of carrying out their lawful duties.

The full wrath of the law will be invoked on any resident who assaults a Lagos State official in this regard.

If a resident suspects that a person is impersonating a Lagos State official, please report them to the Office of Finance, Ministry of Finance in Alausa or to the Police, Mr. Akinkunmi said.
The Lagos State House of Assembly is proposing to amend the Local Government Law to allow the lawmakers sack any erring elected council chairperson in the state.

Mudashiru Obasa, the Speaker of the House, said Monday that the proposed amendment was not meant to victimise or work against elected officials at the local government level.

Mr. Obasa, who spoke at a one-day Stakeholders Meeting on the proposed amendment to the state Local Government Law of 2015, was reacting to a portion in the amendment which gave the Assembly the power to remove any erring council chairman.

The proposed amendment is not meant to victimise any council official rather it is meant to keep the officials on their toes all the time, said Mr. Obasa (Agege 1, APC).

Our aim is to achieve effective and efficient governance at the grassroots level. A local government system we will all be proud of.

We want the elected officials in our local governments to administer the councils in line with the provisions of the constitution.

The 20 local governments and 37 local council development areas in the state are currently headed by Executive Secretaries appointed by the All Progressives Congress-led state government, with the inability of successive governors to conduct local government elections.

The APC also maintains a majority in the House of Assembly with 32 out of the 40 lawmakers belonging to the party.

Mr. Obasa said the House had received lots of petitions in the past, and presently, against leaders of the local councils.

He insisted that investigations conducted by the Assembly over the years had shown that elected officials, particularly the chairmen, had been running the councils in a way that did not promote peace, order and development at that level of governance.

We are preparing the ground for election, we cannot continue witnessing the impunity of the past local government officials, Mr. Obasa added.

In his welcome address, Kazeem Alimi, the chairman of the House Committee on Local Government Administration and Community Affairs, said the bill sought the extension of the tenure of council elected officials from three to four years.

The proposed amendment intended to limit the number of terms the elected officials could be in office to two while also extending their tenure from three to four years, said Mr. Alimi (Eti Osa 1).

A former Speaker of the Assembly, Jokotola Pelumi, said the power to create and dissolve the local governments resided with the House of Assembly.

The life and death of the local governments rest with the state Assemblies, said Mr. Pelumi, who was impeached by his colleagues in 2005.

It is not by their making but a power given to them by the constitution of the country, so there is nothing wrong in residing the power to remove any erring chairman in the state Assembly.

However, Ademola Sadiq, the APCs Legal Adviser, argued that the power to remove council chairmen ought to be vested with the elected councillors in the local governments.

They (councillors) should be the ones to remove their chairmen from office instead of the House of Assembly, said Mr. Sadiq.
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Udaipur : As an extension of its philosophy of Naam Bante Hain Risk Se, Mountain Dews ultimate biking saga Day of Dares saw a grand culmination in Udaipur today. One of thebiggest consumer activations undertaken by any beverage brand, the Udaipur edition of the stunt-biking extravaganza saw a great consumer response. Day of Dares is not just an activation, but an experience to bring consumers closer tothe brand ideology by immersing them in an electrifying and an adrenaline-pumping roadshow and creating a memorable experience.Mountain Dew Days of Dares has been designed to give bike-stunt enthusiasts an opportunity to witness high-adrenaline and breathtaking performances by professional stunt bikers. Mountain Dews team of professional extreme bikers showcased their expertise and spectacular performances for the people of Udaipur. The event showcased some of the countrys finest bike stunt riders and BMX athletes in a never seen before Pop-Out Ring Of Dares  where two trucks pop out to be one big Ring. This yearMountain Dew Days of Dares is travelling to 250 locations in India covering the states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.Speaking about the campaign, Nitin Bhandari, Associate Director Brand Marketing- Mountain Dew, PepsiCo India said The name Day of Dares carries the essence of Indias love for stunt-biking and also sums up the life of every risk-taker. These events truly embody the brands philosophy and let our target consumers enjoy thrilling and exciting stunt-biking roadshow. The great turn-out at the Udaipur edition has been extremely encouraging. We hope to scale-up the activation as we go ahead and reach out to as many consumers as we can.After a showcase of amazing talent by professional riders and athletes, fans were invited to participate in Day of Dare to overcome their inner fears by looking at risk as an opportunity of adventure and to win some incredible prizes.Catch the action next on 20th April, in Banswara at 12 noon.Mountain Dew, the soft drink exhilarates like no other, encourages consumers to try something new, explore new boundaries and emerge victorious. The brand enjoys high salience in the Indian market via a deep and compelling consumer insight of Naam Bante hai Risk Se.
VINELAND  Authorities have arrested the second suspect wanted for a Sunday morning robbery that resulted in a fatal shootout with city police.

Meanwhile, the man who organized protests regarding two other deaths related to police actions in Cumberland County over the past several years wants a state investigation into the shooting of the man killed by a city police office during that shootout.

John Bain, 31, of West Landis Avenue here, was arrested after a search by authorities that began after the 1 a.m. Sunday robbery, according to Cumberland County Prosecutor Jennifer Webb-McRae.

Webb-McRae provided no information about when or where Bain was apprehended.

Bain is charged with robbery, possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, unlawful possession of a weapon and certain persons not to have a weapon, the prosecutor said. Bain is being held in the Cumberland County jail in Bridgeton on $200,000 bail, she said.

Bain has prior convictions on charges that include conspiracy, carjacking and robbery, according to the state Department of Corrections.

Authorities said Richard Bard Jr., 31, of Bridgeton died after police chased him and Bain following the robbery. Bard allegedly shot at the officers, one of whom returned fire and hit Bard near East Avenue and Almond Street. Bard was pronounced dead at Inspira Medical Center Vineland.

Webb-McRae said on Tuesday that she wasnt releasing the name of the police officer who shot Bard.

The investigation into Bards death should be transferred from the Cumberland County Prosecutors Office to the state Attorney Generals Office, said Walter Hudson.

There is a national cry for major police reforms, said Hudson, who heads the Salem County-based National Awareness Alliance. Vineland is not exempt from it.

Hudson has led protests into the deaths of Jerame C. Reid and Phillip White.

Reid, 36, of the Seabrook section of Upper Deerfield Township, was fatally shot by a Bridgeton police officer during what started as a routine traffic stop in Bridgeton in December 2014. The Prosecutors Office investigated that incident, and a jury opted not to indict the two officers who participated in the stop.

The 32-year-old White was arrested after local police responded to a service call about a disorderly person in the 100 block of West Grape Street here on March 31, 2015. That was followed by a call for medical assistance as White, who was handcuffed and restrained during the incident, appeared to be in distress, authorities said.

White at some point became unresponsive while being taken by ambulance to Inspira Medical Center Vineland, authorities said. Medical personnel in the ambulance performed CPR on White, who was pronounced dead at the medical center.

That incident also prompted an investigation by the Prosecutors Office. No charges have been filed against the officers involved in the incident.

Hudson said Tuesday that the Prosecutors Office is not going to turn against their own when investigating deaths linked to police actions in Cumberland County.

Thats problematic in cases like this, Hudson said. Unless people band together and demand change, its not going to change.

Hudson had requested that state officials, and not the Prosecutors Office, investigate the cases involving Reid and White.
A man arrested in 2009 for impersonating a police officer in Egg Harbor Township has been convicted of raping women in Las Vegas while pretending to be an officer there.

Mark Picozzi, 50, was found guilty this week of 10 counts, including four counts of sexual assault and two of impersonation of an officer.

He allegedly forced an escort to have sex with him after identifying himself as a police officer, the Las Vegas-Review Journal reported.

After his arrest in 2014, another woman came forward saying Picozzi claimed to be a police officer before forcing her to perform oral sex and taking $2,000 from her safe.

Man accused of impersonating cop in Egg Harbor Township caught in Florida Mark Picozzi, a New Jersey man who was wanted by Egg Harbor Township and Cherry Hill police 

Picozzi had been out of prison only about a year when he was charged in 2009, with pretending to be a police officer and then robbing women in Egg Harbor Township and Cherry Hill. He pleaded guilty and served a little more than a year in the Atlantic County jail, court records show.

Picozzi first went to state prison in 1987, on a seven-year sentence for sexual assault in Camden County, state Department of Corrections records show.

He was paroled Aug. 16, 1988, after serving about 18 months. He was back in jail in 1991, for a kidnapping. He was sent back to prison, where he maxed out of his sentence Jan. 27, 2008.

Picozzis latest conviction includes two counts of oppression under color of office, three counts of open or gross lewdness and a count each of robbery and battery with intent to commit sexual assault.

He is scheduled to be sentenced June 9.

Contact: 609-272-7257

Twitter @LyndaCohen
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Police lathicharge the garment workers who were protesting against the new EPF withdrawal norm, in Bengaluru on Tuesday (Photo:PTI)

BENGALURU: In a spurt of violence, garment workers, protesting the new Provident Fund rules, set several vehicles on fire and attacked a police station here on Tuesday. Over 25,000 workers came on to the streets on Tuesday, agitating against the Central governments amendments to the Employee Provident Fund (EPF) norms.

The spontaneous stir, with no trade union leading it, spun out of control on the second day as protesters went on rampage pelting stones at Hebbagodi police station and torching seized vehicles parked there.

More than 60 policemen and 37 people were injured, while over 100 vehicles were damaged across the city by violent mobs. The police arrested 116 rioters.

Two people, including a 19-year-old girl student, sustained what is suspected to be bullet injuries in the violence.

Both are undergoing treatment at Sparsh Hospital on Hosur Road. The condition of one of them, 47-year-old Manjunathappa, is critical as a sharp object entered and exited his chest leaving his lungs and ribs damaged.

Rioters vandalised government and private properties and set vehicles on fire on Mysuru Road, Hosur Road, Tumakuru Road, Bannerghatta Road and other parts of the city, leading to traffic jams that stretched up to 10 km from morning till evening.

Around 12.30 am, 200-250 protesters barged into the premises of Biocon on Hosur Road, set the security office on fire and damaged ambulances and vehicles of the employees. More than 3,000 employees were evacuated and escorted to safety. Police forces arrived at the spot one-and-a-half hours later.
For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.

Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest warscreating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire.

Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III.





to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever.





Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation.





View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union.

Never before has a documentary assembled all the pieces of the globalists' dark agenda. Endgame's compelling look at past atrocities committed by those attempting to steer the future delivers information that the controlling media has meticulously censored for over 60 years. It fully reveals the elite's program to dominate the earth and carry out the wicked plan in all of human history.

Endgame is not conspiracy theory, it is documented fact in the elite's own words.




Hyderabad: Swedish financial services group Nordea, in a report following its investigation on pharma pollution in Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam, severely criticised pharma companies and the Pollution Control Boards (PCB) of both states for wreaking environmental havoc in the two cities.

The report blamed the PCBs of both states as, highly corrupt and working in cahoots with the industries and raised concern over the Telangana governments plans of establishing the 11,000-acre Pharma City.

The report also raised serious concern over extreme lack of transparency regarding supplier-buyer relationships, which makes it difficult to ascertain which foreign-based companies are purchasing drugs from these Indian pharma companies that are bent upon destroying the environment in two major and fast growing cities of TS and AP.

An important issue, that of pharma companies not allowing scrutiny of effluent treatment units and hazardous waste processing units by journalists was also raised.

The team of Nordea inspected sites of some globally known pharma firms in Hyderabad and Vizag including Aurobindo, Dr Reddy's, Hetero Drugs Ltd, and Mylan Laboratories Ltd, and in its report stated: The pharmaceutical companies appear to act with more or less total impunity.

The investigators found that there was no supply of clean source of drinking water in many places. The report also raised concern over the poor efficiency and lack of strict scrutiny by PCB at Jeedimetla and Patancheru Common Effluent Treatment Plants (CETP) in Hyderabad, CETP at Jawaharlal Nehru Pharma City in Vizag and the hazardous waste disposal facility of Ramky at Dundigal.
KOCHI: Even as the weathermen forecast an excess monsoon this time, the city corporation is yet to begin cleaning of the canals and drains to prevent water-logging. The regular pre-monsoon cleaning drive has been slowed down and the city is sure to face flooding.

Though the civic body has submitted a letter to Kochi Metro Rail Limited seeking financial assistance to clean the drains along the Metro viaduct from Edappally to Vyttila, the agency has not offered any assistance so far. A decision is yet to be taken whether to provide funds to the corporation for drain cleaning, KMRL sources said. In the last two years, the agency had given funds for cleaning the drains clogged with concrete sludge from metro sites.

Mayor Soumini Jain told DC that cleaning of small canals and drains had started and the estimate for big canals had been taken. Since the Election Commission has exempted cleaning works from the code of conduct purview, we can go on with the drive. We are hopeful of completing the works before the onset of monsoon. she said.

The Mayor added that even if the KMRL turns down the request for financial assistance, the civic body would carry out cleaning along the Metro corridor using its own funds. The cleaning of drains along the Metro sites on the SA Road has already started, she said.

Though the metro civil works have been completed at many areas, the drains are damaged and clogged with debris and slush from work sites. If they are not repaired and cleaned, many city areas will be inundated during heavy rain.

During the recent council meeting, BJP councillor Syamala Prabhu had raised the delay in canal cleaning and sought immediate measures to start pre-monsoon cleaning drive in west Kochi.
New Delhi: Much to the discomfiture of the Congress, the issue of the leadership of Rahul Gandhi has come into sharp focus with Nitish Kumar taking the lead on the issue of a national alliance to take on the BJP.

The Congress Monday virtually ruled out an alliance with the anti-BJP parties at the national level in the next Lok Sabha polls.

AICC officials, who are openly backing Mr Kumar for his pledge to make India free of the RSS, do not want to give him space at the national level. In fact, the AICC is pointing out the regional partiess limitations in becoming key players at the national level against the BJP.

On Monday, AICC general secretary party Shakeel Ahmed said, I am 100 per cent (sure) there will be unity. National alliance... I dont think Nitish Kumar has said that... We had an alliance with him in the Bihar elections.

Some party is very strong in a particular state but is not in existence in the neighbouring state. Alliances take place according to the circumstances in a particular state, Mr Ahmed said.
AMSTERDAM, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Today Avantium, an innovative chemical technology company and leader in renewable chemistry, announced that it has closed a financing round of 20 million. The investments are made by PMV, an independent investment company for Flanders, FPIM, a Belgian Federal Holding and Investment Company, and Avantium's existing shareholders.

The funds will be used to commercialize the YXY technology for producing 100% biobased packaging material PEF (polyethylenefuranoate), a next generation plastic with superior performance. Avantium's roll-out plan includes the construction of a 'reference plant', the world's first commercial plant to produce FDCA (furandicarboxylic acid). This reference plant with a capacity of up to 50,000 metric tons per year is intended to be located in Antwerp, Belgium.

On March 15 this year, Avantium and BASF announced that they signed a letter of intent to establish a joint venture for the production and marketing of the renewable chemical building block FDCA, as well as marketing of PEF. The joint venture intends to use the YXY process technology developed by Avantium to solidify its world-leading positions in FDCA and PEF, and subsequently license the YXY technology for industrial scale applications.

Tom van Aken, CEO Avantium: "We are in an exciting period where all pieces of the strategy are coming together and major milestones are achieved. Today, we proudly announce the successful closing of our financing round, and we are honored that PMV and FPIM strengthen our shareholder base. Belgium is very important to us, since we plan to build the reference plant in Antwerp. Through the joint venture that we intend to set up with BASF, we aim to rapidly deploy of the YXY technology and be the technology and market leader in FDCA and PEF."

Roald Borre, Head of Equity Investments at PMV, commented: "Our team is very proud to be part of this great story. At PMV we are all about creating value for all stakeholders involved by building sustainable companies. Avantium made it in 2015 to the Global Cleantech List, a list of the top 100 private clean technology companies, and this for the sixth year in a row. Thereby joining other companies in our portfolio on the list like Kebony and FRX Polymers. FDCA and PEF are without any doubt innovations with an incredible impact on the environment and thus society. We are very committed to supporting companies that bring innovation, sustainability, a solid business plan and a great team together. For us Avantium clearly is one of these companies."

Philippe Muyters, Flemish minister for Work, Economy and Innovation: "As a government we are proud that Avantium has committed to Antwerp, which confirms Flanders as a leading region for investments in chemistry and innovation. The government has put everything in place to convince this promising company to invest in Flanders. We are glad that today Avantium announces this financial closing with PMV as its new investor."

Avantium plans to make the plant investment together with BASF and the reference plant is intended be based at BASF's Verbund-site in Antwerp. Such joint investment is subject to the successful conclusion of the exclusive negotiations to establish a joint venture and the subsequent decision to jointly invest in a 'reference' plant.

About PMV

PMV NV is a Flemish investment company, financing promising entrepreneurs from conception through to the internationalization of their business, investing in large infrastructure projects. To this end, PMV always works with market actors acting as consortium partners. PMV has a particular focus on the sustainable economic development of Flanders, with demonstrable added value for both economy and society. (http://www.pmv.eu)

The Flemish economic landscape is changing rapidly. Revolutions in production techniques, ICT, globalization, ecology and energy require new, adapted industrial policy. To maintain our competitive edge under these circumstances, the Flemish government and PMV have set up a unique investment fund: TINA. This acronym refers to the much needed 'Transformation, Innovation and Acceleration' of Flanders' industrial fabric. TINA is a market-driven investment fund managed by PMV, activating 200 million euros in risk capital. This funding reinforces innovation, unlocks its strategic potential and accelerates commercialization.

About Avantium

Avantium is a leading chemical technology company and a forerunner in renewable chemistry. Together with its partners around the world, Avantium develops efficient processes and sustainable products made from biobased materials. Avantium offers a breeding ground for revolutionary renewable chemistry solutions. From invention to commercially viable production processes. One of Avantium's many success stories is the YXY technology to produce PEF: a completely new, high-quality plastic made from plant-based industrial sugars. PEF is 100% recyclable. It therefore offers a cost-effective solution to make anything from a wide range of plastic bottles and packaging solutions to fibers. YXY is the most advanced technology, and Avantium is also working on a host of other ground-breaking projects and is providing advanced catalysis research services and systems to the leading chemical and petrochemical companies. Avantium's offices and headquarters are based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Further information at http://www.avantium.com/.

SOURCE Avantium
PARIS, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

New manufacturing plant in Misamis Oriental will serve construction customers in the high growth Mindanao and Visayas regions

Bostik, the specialty adhesives business line of Arkema, has expanded its cementitious powder production capacities, based on its world-class Polymer Modified Binder (PMB) technology, with the opening of a new plant in the Philippines. As a leading global adhesive specialist for construction, consumer and industrial markets, Bostik will be able to serve construction customers in the high growth Mindanao and Visayas regions with a new manufacturing plant in Misamis Oriental.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160415/355956 )



The facility is Bostik's latest plant opening in South East Asia and will manufacture products including tile adhesives, wall finishing products and other construction systems.

Production is based on Bostik's world-class Polymer Modified Binder (PMB) technology which remains a focus of its ongoing innovation, research and development activities.

Speaking at an official opening ceremony on 18 March, Bostik's Senior Vice President of Asia, Jeffrey Merkt, said, "We are pleased to continue Bostik's expansion in the Philippines with the opening of this new plant. Development in high growth geographic regions is one of the central components of our growth strategy and this new facility will enable us to significantly grow our construction business in this important market."

Bostik has been active in the Philippines since 2005. This new facility represents the latest development in its international expansion following recent plant openings in Mexico, the United States, India, Brazil and Malaysia.

About Bostik, an Arkema company

Bostik is a leading global adhesive specialist in construction, consumer and industrial markets. For more than a century, it has been developing innovative adhesive solutions that are smarter and more adaptive to the forces that shape daily lives. From cradle to grave, from home to office, Bostik's smart adhesives can be found everywhere. With annual sales of 1.6 billion, the company employs 4,800 people and has a presence in more than 50 countries. For the latest information, visit http://www.bostik.com

About Arkema

A designer of materials and innovative solutions, Arkema shapes materials and creates new uses that accelerate customer performance. Our balanced business portfolio spans high-performance materials, industrial specialties and coating solutions. Our globally recognized brands are ranked among the leaders in the markets we serve. Reporting annual sales of 7.7 billion in 2015, we employ approximately 19,000 people worldwide and operate in close to 50 countries. We are committed to active engagement with all our stakeholders. Our research centers in North America, France and Asia concentrate on advances in bio-based products, new energies, water management, electronic solutions, lightweight materials and design, home efficiency and insulation. For the latest, visit http://www.arkema.com

SOURCE Bostik
WALTHAM, Massachusetts, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EuroSite Power Inc., (OTCQX: EUSP) an On-Site Utility solutions provider, offering clean electricity, heat, hot water and cooling solutions to healthcare, hospitality, housing and leisure centres in the United Kingdom (UK) and Europe will release its financial results for the first quarter of 2016 on Monday, May 16, 2016. The earnings press release will be available in the "News & Information" section of the Company website at http://www.eurositepower.co.uk. Members of the Company's senior management team will hold a conference call and webcast on the same day at 9:00 AM Eastern Time to discuss the company's first quarter financial performance.

The conference call will be available live via telephone and webcast. To listen to the audio portion, dial toll free (844) 492-3726 within the U.S., toll free (855) 669-9657 from Canada, or +1 (412) 542-4187 from other international locations. Participants should ask to be joined to the EuroSite Power earnings call. Please begin dialing at least 10 minutes prior to the scheduled starting time. Alternately, to register for and listen to the live webcast, please go to http://investors.eurositepower.co.uk/events.

The earnings conference call will be recorded and available for playback one hour after the end of the call through Monday May 23, 2016. To listen to the playback, dial (877) 344-7529 within the U.S., (855) 669-9658 from Canada, or +1 (412) 317-0088 from other international locations and use Replay Access Code 10084858. Following the call, the webcast will be archived for 30 days.

On-Site Utility

EuroSite Power sells the energy produced from an onsite energy system to an individual property as an alternative to the outright sale of energy equipment. On-Site Utility solution customers only pay for the energy produced by the system and receive a guaranteed discount rate on the price of the energy. All system capital, installation, operating expenses and support are paid by EuroSite Power.

About EuroSite Power

EuroSite Power Limited is a subsidiary of American DG Energy Inc. (NYSE MKT: ADGE). The Company provides institutional, commercial and small industrial facilities with clean, reliable power, cooling, heat and hot water at lower costs than charged by conventional energy suppliers  without any capital or start-up costs to the energy user. More information can be found at www.eurositepower.co.uk.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release contains forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements, as disclosed on the Company's website and in Securities and Exchange Commission filings. This press release does not constitute an offer to buy or sell securities by the Company, its subsidiaries or any associated party and is meant purely for informational purposes. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, even if subsequently made available by the Company on its website or otherwise. The Company does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.

InvestorContact: Media Contact: Ariel F. Babcock, CFA Paul Hamblyn EuroSite Power Inc. EuroSite Power Inc. +1 781.466.6413 +44 792.085.9540 ariel.babcock@eurositepower.co.uk paul.hamblyn@eurositepower.co.uk





Related Links

http://www.eurositepower.co.uk



SOURCE EuroSite Power Inc.
DOVER, Delaware, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Eyewear Market Size is projected to reach USD 165 Billion by 2022, as per a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. Growing visual inaccuracies coupled with increased awareness regarding vision correction is expected to provide a fillip to eyewear market growth.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/801223 )

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/799556-a )



While spectacles remain the dominant mode of correction, contact lenses are expected to witness growth on account of benefits such as aesthetic appeal and growing availability of modalities.

Get sample pages from this latest research report @ https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/119

Increased corrective surgeries and prescription contact lenses demand is expected to favorably impact Plano sunglasses market growth. Spectacle lenses shipments and revenue is estimated to benefit from replacement demand as well as growing global preference for high quality lenses. Rising incidences of ophthalmic disorders as well as aging population are also considerable factors fueling eyewear market size.

High-end sunglasses are expected to be the key revenue contributor to the non-corrective segment, since these products retail at high prices. The plano sunglasses ecosystem is characterized with high focus on establishing a profitable distribution channel, with industry giant Luxottica practicing vertical integration along its supply chain.

Browse Eyewear Market Size by Product (Spectacles [Lens, Frame], Contact Lenses [RGP, Soft, Hybrid], Plano Sunglasses), Industry Outlook Report, Regional Analysis, Application Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2015 - 2022 report at: https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/eyewear-market

Key insights from the report include:

Global eyewear market size was 2.88 Billion units in 2014, which is expected to reach 3.77 Billion units by 2022, at a CAGR of 3.5% over the forecast period. Pricing varies widely on the basis of product, with spectacles and plano sunglasses dominating eyewear market share in term of revenue.

Polarized sunglasses market is expected to grow faster than the overall average, driven by increased awareness among consumers. CR-39 and polycarbonate are expected to continue accounting for majority of the overall volume and revenue over the forecast period.

Growing contact lenses market size can be attributed to high soft lenses demand. Additionally, growing preference for daily disposable lenses on account of ease-of-use and lower costs over the long term is a key contributor to forecasted consumption. In terms of revenue, RGP contact lenses market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5% from 2015 to 2022.

The eyewear industry is oligopolistic in nature, with high degree of brand loyalty witnessed in the contact lenses and plano sunglasses segments. Key contact lens manufacturers include Johnson & Johnson, Bausch & Lomb, CooperVision, etc. Luxottica and Safilo dominate plano sunglasses market share; other notable companies include De Rigo, Marcolin, etc.

Browse Full Press Release: https://www.gminsights.com/pressrelease/eyewear-market-report

Global Eyewear Product Analysis (Volume, Million Units & Revenue, USD Million; 2012 - 2022)

Spectacles Spectacle frames Spectacle lenses

Contact lenses RGP lenses Soft lenses Hybrid lenses

Plano sunglasses By product Polarized Non-polarized By material CR-39 Polycarbonate Polyurethane Others



Global Eyewear Regional Analysis (Volume, Million Units & Revenue, USD Million; 2012 - 2022)

North America

Europe

Asia Pacific

Latin America

MEA

Related Reports:

Gold Nanoparticles Market: https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/gold-nanoparticles-market

Aerospace Plastics Market: https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/aerospace-plastics-market

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SOURCE Global Market Insights Inc.
SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, California and ARNHEM, Netherlands, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Fluidmaster, Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of toilet tank components and trim, today announced details of its new European management team and organizational structure which independently aligns the commercial, operations and finance organizations respectively within Fluidmaster Europe. This new structure, effective immediately, follows the company's acquisition this week of WISA BV in the Netherlands and previous strategic additions of Key Teknik in Turkey, the Kolektor LIV and Schwab sanitaryware business based in Slovenia, and Opella, Limited and CMI Distribution LTD, both based in the United Kingdom.

Mark Grosfeld, current Managing Director of WISA BV, will take on additional responsibilities heading the company's Commercial team focused on Sales and Marketing efforts across the European continent and will report to Todd Talbot, Fluidmaster President. Mike Fuqua, previously Managing Director of Fluidmaster United Kingdom, will now lead Manufacturing Operations across Europe, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Chip Boyles, previously VP of Finance and Controller for Fluidmaster, will direct the Finance team in Europe, Turkey and the United Kingdom. All three will be based at the company's European headquarters in Arnhem, Netherlands.

"As we reach critical mass with our business in Europe, the right leadership team to enable further global growth is essential," said Talbot. "Our core values centering on customer service, innovation and operational excellence drive our business and I know this outstanding trio of executives will successfully focus and expand our efforts in this regard with our business in Europe."

About Fluidmaster

Established in 1957 and reaching across the world, Fluidmaster remains a family owned and operated company known for its superior engineering of efficient and reliable toilet components. The company has become an icon in the plumbing industry, with operations in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, China and Turkey as well as a worldwide distribution network across more than 80 countries selling more toilet tank replacement valves than any other manufacturer in the world. In addition to the original fill valve developed by founder Adolf Schoepe and enhanced through the years, Fluidmaster's complete line of toilet care parts include exposed and in-wall cisterns, standard and dual flush valves, flappers, activation systems, bowl wax and wax-free products, toilet repair kits, and supply line connectors.

The company's global headquarters is located in San Juan Capistrano, California. For more information visit www.fluidmaster.com.

Related Links

http://www.fluidmaster.com



SOURCE Fluidmaster, Inc.
TORONTO, April 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The Hazelton Hotel, Toronto, the city's leading luxury boutique hotel, announces the appointment of Hani Roustom as General Manager. A celebrated and passionate hotelier, and graduate of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, Roustom brings his sharp focus on refined product and service excellence to Toronto's only member of the Leading Hotels of the World, a worldwide alliance of independent luxury hotels.

"The Hazelton Hotel is a unique property located in the heart of Yorkville. I am thrilled to join the team and to work with Canadian culinary icon, chef Mark McEwan in creating memorable experiences for our guests and elevating what our world class city has to offer," said Roustom.

Roustom comes from the Shangri-La Hotel Toronto, where he joined in 2013 as part of the executive team in his capacity of Executive Assistant Manager Food and Beverage.

Prior to that, Roustom worked with Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, joining in 2006 at the Washington DC property as Director of Restaurants and Bars. In 2008 he transferred to their property in Toronto until the launch of the flagship Four Seasons Hotel on Yorkville Avenue in 2012, where he led the opening of the award-winning Cafe Boulud by Michelin starred chef Daniel Boulud.

Roustom's international and culinary exposure, experience launching and managing quality operations, and knowledge of cultures and five languages, makes him an asset to the Hazelton Hotel.

Regarding hospitality and his passion for service, Roustom refers to a quote by E.M. Statler engraved in the lobby of his hotel school at Cornell: "Life is service - the one who progresses is the one who gives his fellow men a little more - a little better service." Roustom graduated with a Masters degree from the Hotel School of Cornell University in 2006, where he was awarded the Rama Scholarship for the American Dream. Roustom's love for hospitality started in his early years in Lebanon, visiting the mountain summer resorts with his family. He went on to study Hotel and Restaurant Management in Cyprus and England. In 1997 he was presented with the Student of the Year award from the Cyprus Hotel Association and graduated first in his class with Honors Cum Laude and with a B.A. in Hospitality Management from Bournemouth University the year after.

About The Hazelton Hotel and One Restaurant

The Hazelton Hotel, Toronto's boutique luxury hotel in fashionable Yorkville, remains the city's iconic landmark for all that is chic and glamorous. The Hazelton Hotel offers 77 sumptuous hotel rooms and suites designed by internationally renowned design firm Yabu Pushelberg. The Hotel's ONE Restaurant is celebrity Chef Mark McEwan's signature dining experience delivered from a contemporary Yorkville hotspot that boasts one of Toronto's finest patio.

Contact:

Hani Roustom, hroustom@hazeltonhotel.com, +1-416-963-6310

SOURCE The Hazelton Hotel
- Overwhelming support for enhanced beneficial ownership transparency: 91% agree

- Corruption levels are persistent: 39% say its widespread in their country

- Pressure continues to bring out the worst in executives: 42% justify unethical behavior

- Data privacy issues are creating complexity for cyber threat management yet only 41% of CFOs concerned

LONDON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EY's 14th Global Fraud Survey 2016: Corporate misconduct  individual consequences finds a worldwide clamor for enhanced transparency at a time of increased geopolitical tensions and heightened volatility in financial markets. The escalating threats of cybercrime, terrorist financing and, more recently, the revelations regarding widespread possible misuse of offshore jurisdictions, have increased pressure on governments to act and companies to identify and mitigate fraud, bribery and corruption issues.

Conducted between October 2015 and January 2016, the survey of nearly 3,000 senior business leaders from 62 countries and territories highlights overwhelming corporate support for enhanced beneficial ownership transparency, with 91% of executives recognizing the importance of establishing the ultimate beneficial ownership of entities with which they do business.

David Stulb, EY Global Leader of Fraud Investigation & Dispute Services, says:

"With the continuing anti-corruption enforcement focus on third-party conduct, and the recent revelations on the possible misuse of offshore financial structures, business leaders are right to be focused on securing a deeper understanding of their clients, partners and suppliers. Enhanced transparency is clearly a focus of broad public interest."

Increased transparency is, however, only one facet of the solution to a problem that shows no sign of abating. In total, 39% of respondents believe that bribery and corrupt practices happen widely in their country, little changed from 38% in 2014 and 38% in 2012. In a question introduced in this year's survey, 32% of respondents report that they have had personal concerns about bribery and corruption in their workplace.

Coordinated efforts by regulators to root out corruption

Regulators recognize the threat that bribery and corruption pose to a financial system already under stress and are increasingly cooperating across borders to hold individuals accountable for illegal acts. Such enforcement efforts appear to be heavily supported by survey respondents, with 83% agreeing that prosecuting individuals will help deter future fraud, bribery and corruption.

However, with 42% of respondents admitting that they could justify unethical behavior to meet financial targets, and 16% of finance team members below the CFO ready to justify making a cash payment to win or retain business, those executives responsible for ethics and compliance appear to be facing a significant challenge if they are to keep their organizations clear from the scrutiny of prosecutors.

The survey also identified a perception in emerging markets1 that individuals responsible for corruption are not being held to account, with 70% of respondents in Brazil and 56% in both Africa and Eastern Europe believing that although governments are willing to prosecute, they are not effective in securing convictions.

Stulb says, "Increased levels of global cooperation between law enforcement agencies are making it harder for fraudsters and bribe-payers to evade prosecution. However, with respondents indicating that such misconduct is showing no sign of abating, companies continue to be exposed to major risks driven by the illegal actions of a small minority of employees. Better use of technology is certainly part of the answer. More can be done to leverage forensic data analytics to manage these risks and improve compliance and investigative outcomes."

There are some positive indicators in markets where governments and regulators have taken steps to crack down on impropriety. In India, for example, where steps to increase transparency and crackdown on corruption have been taken by the government, the proportion of respondents from this country believe that bribery and corruption happens widely in the country declined from 67% in 2014, to 58% this year. In China, 74% of local respondents report that enforcement is effective, indicating the apparent effectiveness of the Chinese Government's commitment to tackle corruption.

Robust compliance, robust growth?

Expanding into new markets is essential for most companies, yet such expansion brings new and less familiar risks. The research shows that companies are frequently failing to take appropriate steps to respond and reduce their risk exposure:

One in five do not identify third parties as part of their anti-corruption due diligence

One in three do not assess country or industry-specific corruption risks before making investments

Only half utilize technologies such as forensic data analytics to identify and mitigate risks

Innovation is critical to responding to emerging risks

Whistleblowers remain a critical source of information on alleged misconduct. According to this year's survey, 55% of companies have whistleblower hotlines in place. Regulators welcome such tips, and in some jurisdictions, including the US, whistleblowers are offered substantial monetary rewards. Yet such mechanisms are not always effective. Survey respondents report barriers to using such mechanisms: 18% cite that loyalty to colleagues would deter them from reporting an incident of fraud, bribery and corruption and 19% cite loyalty to their company as a deterrent.

Stulb says, "What we are seeing clearly is that some employees, with widely varying motivations, are prepared to misappropriate  or enable others outside the firm to have access to  the confidential data of their companies. The balance between data privacy and security creates further complications. Dealing with such cyber and insider threats should be a top priority for management and boards. Yet 59% of CFOs view cybercrime as a low risk  a perspective that deserves robust challenge."

View the report online at: www.ey.com/FIDS

Follow us on Twitter: @EY_Press

Notes to Editors

About EY

EY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. The insights and quality services we deliver help build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. We develop outstanding leaders who team to deliver on our promises to all of our stakeholders. In so doing, we play a critical role in building a better working world for our people, for our clients and for our communities.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

This news release has been issued by EYGM Limited, a member of the global EY organization that also does not provide any services to clients.

About EY's 14th Global Fraud Survey 2016: corporate misconduct  individual consequences

Between October 2015 and January 2016, our researcher  the global market research agency Ipsos MORI conducted 2,825 interviews in the local language with senior decision-makers in a sample of the largest companies in 62 countries and territories.

1 For the purposes of this report, "emerging" countries and territories include Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China (mainland), Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Oman, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Ukraine and Vietnam.

Yvonne Diaz EY Global Media Relations +44 (0)20 7980 0612 yvonne.diaz@uk.ey.com

Related Links

http://www.ey.com



SOURCE EY
PUNE, India, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new market research report "Industrial Centrifuges Market by Product (Sedimentation - Decanter/Disc Centrifuge, Filtering), Operation (Batch, Continuous), Design (Horizontal/Vertical), End User (Power, Food, Waste Water, Pharmaceutical, Metal, Paper) - Global Forecasts to 2020" published by MarketsandMarkets, The global market is expected to reach USD 10 Billion by 2020 from USD 7.5 Billion in 2015, at a CAGR of 5% during the forecast period.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 )



Browse 106 market data Tables and 47 Figures spread through 166 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Industrial Centrifuges Market"

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/industrial-centrifuges-market-59612221.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.

The report segments the Industrial Centrifuges Market based on type, mode of operation, design, end user, and region. On the basis of type, the market is segmented into sedimentation centrifuges and filtering centrifuges. The sedimentation centrifuges segment is expected to account for the largest share of the Industrial Centrifuges Market, by type, in 2015. Sedimentation centrifuges can achieve high speeds, process larger volumes, and provide continuous processing. Moreover, these centrifuges have major applications in the oil and gas industry and wastewater treatment plants, which are major end-user segments in the Industrial Centrifuges Market. These are the major factors responsible for the large share of sedimentation centrifuges in the market.

Among the modes of operation segments in the market, the batch centrifuges segment is expected to grow at the highest rate during the forecast period while the continuous centrifuges segment is estimated to account for the highest share. The demand and uptake of these centrifuges is high among end users owing to their advantages-high efficiency of separation, easy process standardization, and reduced cleaning time. These are some of the major factors responsible for driving market growth for continuous industrial centrifuges in the forecast period.

The increasing demand from process industries, rising need for wastewater management solutions, and technological advancements in industrial centrifuges are some factors propelling the growth of the Industrial Centrifuges Market. On the other hand, high installation, operating, and maintenance costs of industrial centrifuges may restrict market growth.

On the basis of region, the Industrial Centrifuges Market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia, and the Rest of the World (RoW). North America is expected to account for the largest share of this market in 2015 and will continue to dominate the market during the forecast period. The Asian market is poised to grow at the highest CAGR, mainly due to increasing population, growing disposable incomes, rising energy needs, growing demand for wastewater treatment, flourishing food-processing industry, expanding pharmaceutical industry, and significant growth in the chemical industry in the region.

Talk To Our Research Experts@ http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/speaktoanalyst.asp?id=59612221

The Industrial Centrifuges Market is highly fragmented and competitive, with several big as well as emerging market players. Key market players include Andritz AG (Austria), Alfa Laval AB (Sweden), GEA Westfalia Separator Group GmbH (Germany), Thomas Broadbent & Sons (U.K.), FLSmidth & Co. A/S (Denmark), MI Swaco (U.S.), Flottweg Separation Technology (Germany), Hiller GmbH (Germany), Ferrum AG (Switzerland), and TEMA Systems, Inc.

Browse Related Reports:

Cell Isolation/Cell Separation Market by Product (Reagent, Media, Serum, Bead, Centrifuge), Cell Type (Human, Stem Cell, Animal), Technique (Filtration, Surface Marker), Application (Research, IVD) & End user (Hospital, Biotechnology) - Forecast to 2020.

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cell-isolation-market-103931479.html

Laboratory Centrifuges Market By Product (equipment (Microcentrifuge/ultracentrifuge), Accessories), Rotor design, Intended use, Application (Diagnostic/Microbiology/Proteomics/Genomics), End User (Hospital/Biotech/Pharmaceutical) - Global Forecast To 2020.

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/laboratory-centrifuge-market-197749088.html

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Kancheepuram: Alleging that the DMK manifesto does not promise full prohibition, Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa, on Monday accused her archrival M. Karunanidhi of misleading people on the issue and hatching a conspiracy to allow private players in selling liquor in the state if his party comes to power.

Addressing an election rally on the towns outskirts, she launched a frontal attack on Karunanidhi accusing him of working only towards the welfare of his people, a reference to his family, rather than the people of Tamil Nadu. The DMK is not serious about implementing complete prohibition in Tamil Nadu. The DMK manifesto does not mention the word total prohibition. It just says the party would bring prohibition and that the state government would withdraw itself from the business (of selling liquor), she said.

He is hatching a conspiracy to allow private players in business of selling liquor and by launching pubs and bars where liquor will be sold. This seems to be the idea of Karunanidhi. This shows how committed the DMK is, the CM said.

Claiming that the DMK has repeated several promises it made in their 2006 manifesto this time as well, Jayalalithaa said the Opposition party was confused as its manifesto still mentions it would urge the Centre to take steps to increase the height of Mullaperiyar dam from 136 to 142 feet.

What is the use of exerting pressure on the Union Government to raise the water level to 142 feet when the Supreme Court itself had said the height of the dam can be increased to 152 feet? This shows the DMK and Karunanidhi are confused. That is why their manifesto has many repetitions. People should know who works for the people and who works for their people (family), she said.

Devoting a major portion of her election speech to attacking DMK and Karunanidhi, the Chief Minister accused them of indulging in a false campaign about power cuts in the State when such a scenario does not exist. She also asked why no action has been taken against people who burnt three people alive in an office of a Tamil newspaper and why the then State government did not go on appeal of a trial court order which acquitted all accused in the murder of former DMK Minister T. Kirutinan.

Karunanidhi works only for his people (his family). The then DMK Government in 2007 had launched Arasu Cable TV Corporation as a fallout of a family feud, but why did they put it on the backburner when the family feud was resolved, she asked.

Punching holes in DMKs pamphlets saying water from Chembarambakkam lake was opened at one go, she said her government had explained umpteen number of times that water was discharged only to permissible level.

Despite that, the DMK continues to latch on to that point. The DMK manifesto promises so many things about flood management in Chennai. This shows that whatever they say is part of their false campaign, she said.
PUNE, India, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Tardive Dyskinesia Global Clinical Trials Review, H1, 2016 market research report provides top line data and a snapshot of the global clinical trials landscape along with top level data related to the clinical trials by Region, Country (G7 & E7), Trial Status, Trial Phase, Sponsor Type and End point status and reviews top companies involved and enlists all trials (Trial title, Phase, and Status) pertaining to the company.

The report provides all the unaccomplished trials (Terminated, Suspended and Withdrawn) with reason for unaccomplishment, enrollment trends for the past five years and latest news for the past three months. Complete report on Tardive Dyskinesia Clinical Trials spread across 60 pages, supported with 23 tables and 22 figures is now available at http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/tardive-dyskinesia-global-clinical-trials-review-h1-2016-market-report.html .

Top Companies Participating in Radiculopathy Therapeutics Clinical Trials are Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc., Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Limited, UCB S.A., Synchroneuron Inc., Medicure Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Ipsen S.A., FutureSearch Trials, E. Merck KG and CNS Network, Inc.

This report provides top line data relating to the clinical trials on Tardive Dyskinesia. Report includes an overview of trial numbers and their average enrollment in top countries conducted across the globe. The report offers coverage of disease clinical trials by region, country phase, trial status, end points status and sponsor type. Report also provides prominent drugs for in-progress trials (based on number of ongoing trials). Clinical Trial Reports are generated using proprietary database - Pharma eTrack Clinical trials database. Clinical trials are collated from 80+ different clinical trial registries, conferences, journals, news etc across the globe. Clinical trials database undergoes periodic update by dynamic process.

Order a copy of Tardive Dyskinesia Global Clinical Trials Review, H1, 2016 market research report at http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/contacts/purchase?rname=529799 .

Reasons to buy

Assists in formulating key business strategies with regards to investment

Helps in identifying prominent locations for conducting clinical trials which saves time and cost

Provides top level analysis of Global Clinical Trials Market which helps in identifying key business opportunities

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Aids in interpreting the success rates of clinical trials by providing a comparative scenario of completed and uncompleted (terminated, suspended or withdrawn) trials

Facilitates clinical trial assessment of the indication on a global, regional and country level

Another newly published market research titled Radiculopathy Global Clinical Trials Review, H1, 2016 provides top line data relating to the clinical trials on Radiculopathy. Report includes an overview of trial numbers and their average enrollment in top countries conducted across the globe. The report offers coverage of disease clinical trials by region, country (G7 & E7), phase, trial status, end points status and sponsor type. Report also provides prominent drugs for in-progress trials (based on number of ongoing trials). Clinical Trial Reports are generated using proprietary database - Pharma eTrack Clinical trials database. Clinical trials are collated from 80+ different clinical trial registries, conferences, journals, news etc across the globe. Clinical trials database undergoes periodic update by dynamic process. Radiculopathy Global Clinical Trials Review Research report of 56 pages is available at http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/radiculopathy-global-clinical-trials-review-h1-2016-market-report.html .

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LONDON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Travel startup founded by former Group Head of Online Partnerships at lastminute.com looks to revolutionise holiday search

Vakay.co.uk has launched the first travel search engine to provide holiday destination results purely based on the customer's budget and travel dates.

Travellers are now able to search for their holiday without knowing their destination in advance, the website aggregates package holiday pricing from a number of partners including Thomson, First Choice, Thomas Cook and OnTheBeach. This eliminates the long search process involved in finding a holiday within budget, which has been estimated can involve as many as 17 different websites.

Currently the vast majority of package holiday websites only allow the customer to search knowing the destination, and more often the specific resort they wish to travel to. Those websites who do currently allow open destination searches deliver a vast mixture of package holidays, which have no context to the customer's requirements or preferences. Vakay.co.uk provides the customer with a clear list of destinations that match their budget and travel dates, before they then compare accommodation options.

"I saw a gap in the market for a search engine that simplified the holiday search process, it seemed to me that all of the current websites expected the customer to arrive having done all the hard work themselves." Said Tom Davies, Vakay.co.uk founder "I believe that Vakay.co.uk not only saves the customer a lot of research time, but also allows them to discover destinations they wouldn't have otherwise considered"

"The original concept came from my own holiday experiences where hours would be spent searching for destinations that matched my budget, often being bombarded with 'cheap deals' rather than displaying all of the options available. When I then saw this trend emerging through customer feedback within the industry, I decided there must be a better way to deliver holiday search"

In addition to their budget and travel dates, Vakay.co.uk allows the customer to pivot their destination results based on flight time and temperature preferences. There are plans in place to develop further pivot options, which will allow the customer to really discover the destination that is perfect for their individual holiday requirements.

For more information please visit http://www.vakay.co.uk

ABOUT VAKAY.CO.UK

Vakay Travel Group Ltd was founded in 2015 by Tom Davies, who previous to starting the business headed up all online partnership activity at online travel icon lastminute.com. The company trialed a content focused beta version of the website in early 2015, and subsequently after receiving strong customer feedback began work on the new destination search engine.

Based in London the company has spent the last three months building the new website in partnership with uCreate.it, who have been responsible for a number of high profile startup development projects. The website is supported by a bespoke backend system, to ensure accurate destination pricing.

The companies short term target is to secure investment which will allow them to scale the search features, and bring new partners onboard to improve availability. The long term ambition is to become the number one holiday search website in the UK, leading to a European expansion.

SOURCE Vakay Travel Group Ltd
MINNEAPOLIS, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On Saturday, April 16, more than 1,000 people gathered at the Historic Milwaukee Road Depot in Minneapolis to raise $2 million for the Diabetes and Endocrinology program at Children's Minnesota.

One in every 400 children and teens under age 20 has type 1 diabetes and more than 15,000 children in the United States are diagnosed each year. The Children's McNeely Pediatric Diabetes Center treats three-quarters of the pediatric patients living with type 1 diabetes in the region. While type 1 diabetes cannot be prevented and there currently isn't a cure, careful management can prevent long-term health issues and improve quality of life for patients today and into the future.

The team of experts at Children's Minnesota is working to develop a revolutionary program to create a 24/7 care model for this 24/7 disease, using technology to track patient data and deliver it in real time to the care team. This model aims to improve quality of life and access to care, reduce overall costs and lead to healthy habits.

"We are so proud of the diabetes research we are conducting, and fortunate to have such generous community support for this initiative," said Theresa Pesch, RN, president of Children's Health Care Foundation. "The money raised at this year's Gala will help revolutionize pediatric diabetes care in this country and contribute to better outcomes for all of the children with this disease."

The evening included inspiring stories from patients and doctors as well as a silent and live auction, dinner and dancing. This event has raised more than $20 million over the past 25 years.

KARE11 chief meteorologist Belinda Jensen served as event emcee for the seventeenth time. Returning as co-emcee was 14-year-old JJ Harrington, a Children's Minnesota heart patient. The featured patient at this year's gala was 16-year-old Abbie Nelson, who shared her story of living with type 1 diabetes and receiving treatment at Children's Minnesota.

A photo recap of the evening's festivities can be found here.

Target, Pediatric Home Service, Great Clips, Upsher-Smith, Greg & Jane Goven and BeEvents were among the major sponsors of the event.

About Children's Minnesota

Children's Minnesota is one of the largest pediatric health systems in the United States and the only health system in Minnesota to provide care exclusively to children, from before birth through young adulthood. An independent and not-for-profit system since 1924, Children's Minnesota serves kids throughout the Upper Midwest at two free-standing hospitals, 12 primary and specialty-care clinics and six rehabilitation sites. Children's Minnesota maintains its longstanding commitment to the community to improve children's health by providing high-quality, family-centered pediatric services and advancing those efforts through research and education. This work is made possible in large part by generous philanthropic and volunteer support from individuals and organizations throughout the state and region. An award-winning health system, Children's Minnesota is regularly ranked by U.S. News & World Report as a top children's hospital and by The Leapfrog Group for quality and efficiency. Please visit childrensMN.org.

Media Contact:

Madeline Riggs

Cell: 612-812-2539

[email protected]

SOURCE Childrens Minnesota

Related Links

http://www.childrensmn.org


WOOD DALE, Ill., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- AAR CORP. (NYSE: AIR) announced that its Board of Directors at its regularly scheduled meeting declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.075 per share to its stockholders. The dividend will be payable on May 10, 2016, to stockholders of record as of the close of business on April 29, 2016. Future cash dividends will be subject to the approval of the Board of Directors.

About AAR

AAR is a global aftermarket solutions company that employs more than 4,500 people in over 20 countries. Based in Wood Dale, Illinois, AAR supports commercial aviation and government customers through two operating segments: Aviation Services and Expeditionary Services. AAR's Aviation Services include inventory management; parts supply; OEM parts distribution; aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul; and component repair. AAR's Expeditionary Services include airlift operations; mobility systems; and command and control centers in support of military and humanitarian missions. More information can be found at www.aarcorp.com.

This press release contains certain statements relating to future results, which are forward-looking statements as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on beliefs of Company management, as well as assumptions and estimates based on information currently available to the Company, and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from historical results or those anticipated, including those factors discussed under Item 1A, entitled "Risk Factors", included in the Company's Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended May 31, 2015. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize adversely, or should underlying assumptions or estimates prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described. These events and uncertainties are difficult or impossible to predict accurately and many are beyond the Company's control. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of such statements or to reflect the occurrence of anticipated or unanticipated events. For additional information, see the comments included in AAR's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150319/183226LOGO

SOURCE AAR CORP.

Related Links

http://www.aarcorp.com


NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On April 20, 2016 Minority Venture Partners (MVP) Accelerator Inc., a not-for-profit startup program dedicated to the launch, scale, and exit of minority and women led-tech startups will host a casting call for ABC's Shark Tank at the New York Institute of Technology's School of Management (Manhattan Campus/ http://nyit.edu/management/). This event is the most recent stop in a nationwide casting tour organized by Values Partnerships; designed to support minority entrepreneurs and bring more diverse ideas and voices to the show. At the event, casting producers from ABC's Shark Tank will hear pitches from local entrepreneurs vying to pitch on Season 8 of the hit show.

Brandon Andrews, Senior Consultant at Values Partnerships shared, "With the support of Shark Tank's Executive Producer Mark Burnett, Values Partnerships has been working with local influencers and startup hubs such as the MVP Accelerator (http://mvpaccelerator.com) and Vanguarde Consulting Group (http://vanguardenyc.com) to support Shark Tank's mission to spread entrepreneurship around the country--especially in communities that need it most."

In addition, given the diversity of its student body and forward thinking of D. Bernard Webster, Executive Director at the School of Management's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies (http://nyit.edu/ces) is reflective of the mission at Values Partnerships--making it an ideal host partner to spread awareness of the need for diversity and inclusion within the technology industry.

In addition to casting for the show, pitch preparation, entrepreneurship resources, and access to capital discussions will be provided for entrepreneurs.

Values Partnerships is leading a nationwide casting tour supporting minority entrepreneurship and recruiting diverse ideas and voices to pitch on Season 8 of ABC's Shark Tank. Casting calls are planned in local communities in Miami, FL; Austin, TX; New York, NY; Washington, DC; Detroit, MI; San Francisco/Oakland, CA; New Orleans, LA; and Cincinnati, OH.

If selected for Season 8 of ABC's Shark Tank, entrepreneurs will fly to Los Angeles, CA to tape their pitch to the sharks. Season 8 will premiere in September 2016.

A diverse group of entrepreneurs are expected to pitch at the event supported by (OTHER EVENT PARTNERS). Visit www.valuespartnerships.com/sharktank for more information on the 2016 casting tour.

Minority Venture Partners, Inc.

Minority Venture Partners, Inc. (@MVPAccelerator) is a not-for-profit startup program whose mission is to increase and expand Minority and Women Business Enterprise participation in emerging technology sectors throughout the Tri-state Area. MVP achieves this goal by facilitating a world-class accelerator program that provides under-represented tech entrepreneurs with knowledge, mentors, networks, and access to startup capital to successfully bring their innovative products and services to market.

Vanguarde Consulting Group

Vanguarde Consulting Group (@vanguardenyc) is a leading provider of entrepreneurial training, events, and marketing solutions for small business innovation. We maintain an unwavering focus on continually identifying best business practices for growth and profits across industries. With University partnerships both in the US and abroad, Vanguarde's enhanced training and support programs are all designed to support the development of your small business for long-term sustainability.

Values Partnerships

Values Partnerships (@VPIConsulting) uses the power of faith-based, ethnic, and community partnerships to solve problems, and change the world. We take on causes and clients we believe in  and then we work to build grassroots partnerships and advocacy campaigns to advance goals, and mobilize customers, constituencies and audiences worldwide.

CONTACT

D. Bernard Webster

347-860-9657

[email protected]

SOURCE Vanguarde Consulting Group

Related Links

http://vanguardenyc.com


ORLANDO, Fla., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- SME's RAPID Conference & Exposition will be hosted at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida, from May 16-19. RAPID is known worldwide as the unrivaled authority on 3D knowledge and expertise. RAPID will feature keynotes from the industry's foremost additive manufacturing experts, who will speak on groundbreaking processes, applications, materials, and research in additive manufacturing. The conversations will focus on digital manufacturing, 4D printing in medical, and the future of additive manufacturing.

Transition to Production (Monday, May 16)

RAPID kicks off on Monday with a special keynote presentation about the opportunities and challenges in progressing additive manufacturing technology to full part production. The discussion will feature Kevin Creehan, director of technology transition, America Makes  National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII), National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM), Leo Christodoulou, PhD, director, engineering structures and materials technology, chief engineer, materials and manufacturing technology, The Boeing Company, and Barbara Negroe, advanced manufacturing initiatives  additive manufacturing, GE Corporate Supply Chain & Operations.

Participants will hear how manufacturers are working to facilitate their transition from prototypes and to larger production volumes. The presentation will help professionals understand how repeatable and reliable processes, standards development and a qualified workforce play a role.

Factory of the Future (Tuesday, May 17)

Stephen Nigro, president of 3D printing, HP Inc., will take part in Tuesday's presentation discussing additive manufacturing and how 3D technologies impact the "Factory of the Future." Joining him in the discussion will be John Vickers, principal technologist, space technology mission directorate, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and Dean Bartles, chief manufacturing officer and executive director, Digital Manufacturing & Design Innovation Institute (DMDI), UI LABS.

The discussion will delve deep into how 3D technologies and additive manufacturing are uniquely positioned for the digital factory. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) provides a new opportunity for devices to make their own decisions and to create digital twin parts that operate in the virtual realm.

4D Printing in Medicine (Wednesday, May 18)

Additive manufacturing is increasingly being used in the production of medical devices, particularly for static applications in orthopedics and orthodontics. On Wednesday, RAPID attendees can join Robert Morrison, MD, resident, otolaryngology - head & neck surgery, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Scott Hollister, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as they discuss how thoughtful device design and biomaterial selection allows production of medical devices that change with growing anatomy, also referred to as "4D printing". Morrison and Hollister will explore the usage of 4D printing to produce patient-specific additively manufactured implants for children with disorders of the windpipe.

What's next for additive manufacturing? (Thursday, May 19)

Another highlight this year is Thursday's keynote, "The Future of Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing" with Terry Wohlers, FSME, principal consultant and president, Wohlers Associates, Inc. Wohlers is a principal author of Wohlers Report, a yearly publication that provides data of critical importance to product developers, manufacturers, service providers, investors, researchers, and educators in the additive manufacturing industry. He will discuss astounding changes in the industry and share why current trends will help to expand the underdeveloped supply chain, resulting in many new jobs, opportunities, and challenges worldwide.

"Once again, I am thrilled to be a part of this year's RAPID event," said Wohlers. "As additive manufacturing continues to evolve and gain traction for production applications, RAPID gives us a great opportunity to explore ways of further advancing this exciting industry."

Registration is currently open for attendees and media. To register or learn more about the event and keynote presentations, please visit www.rapid3devent.com.

About RAPID

For over 25 years, the RAPID Conference & Exposition, produced by SME, has defined the crucial role of additive manufacturing and empowered the establishment of an industry that continues to conceive, test, improve and manufacture new products at a faster, more cost-efficient pace. As the leader and authority figure in additive manufacturing, RAPID attracts buyers, sellers and end-users of design, prototyping, tooling and direct digital technologies to a world-class event for discovery, innovation and networking. For more information, please visit rapid3devent.com.

About SME

SME connects all those who are passionate about making things that improve our world. As a nonprofit organization, SME has served practitioners, companies, educators, government and communities across the manufacturing spectrum for more than 80 years. Through its strategic areas of events, media, membership, training and development, and the SME Education Foundation, SME is uniquely dedicated to advancing manufacturing by addressing both knowledge and skill needs for industry. Follow @sme_mfg on Twitter or facebook.com/smemfg.

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SOURCE SME

Related Links

http://www.sme.org


DALLAS, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Ageless Authors, the first publishing project exclusively for writers and artists age 65 and older, is now accepting submissions for their first nationwide writing and art contest through August 15, 2016.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356449LOGO

Older writers and artists can submit short stories, essays, poetry, line drawings and cartoons for judging at www.agelessauthors.com. Each submission requires an entry fee of $15. Cash prizes will be awarded in each category; $100 for first place, $50 for second place, and $25 for third place.

Experienced judges from across the nation will judge the entries. The first Ageless Authors anthology, with all the winning entries, will be released this fall. Winning writers and artists will receive free copies of the book. Additional copies will be available on the website, at Amazon.com and from other booksellers.

"We want to showcase the talent of older writers and artists," says Dallas novelist and poet Ginnie Siena Bivona, one of the founders of Ageless Authors. "Now we are free to enjoy our creativity and a life full of the experiences that make good writing possible."

Ms. Bivona, 84, started writing when she was in her early 50s. She has written a novel adapted into a Hallmark TV movie, four other books, and the script for a TV series. She offers publishing services to writers of all ages, helping them publish their life story, as well as other works. Her most prolific client is 91 years old.

Co-founder Larry Upshaw, 68, is a Dallas-based writer and marketing executive who has published a dozen books in law, medicine and business. He has also written for many national and regional publications.

"Many of the people I grew up with wanted to become musicians, writers and artists, but their parents insisted that they make a living," Upshaw says. "Now at retirement they are returning to what gave them pleasure. There is a lot of talent out there among the Baby Boomers and The Greatest Generation."

Bivona and Upshaw created Ageless Authors to celebrate that talent, and for the delight of seeing gifted seniors' work printed in an Ageless Authors anthology. For more information, email [email protected] or call Ginnie Bivona at 972 671-0002 or Larry Upshaw at 214 405-5093.

SOURCE AgelessAuthors.com

Related Links

http://www.agelessauthors.com


AGOURA HILLS, Calif., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- American Homes 4 Rent (NYSE: AMH) announced today that the Company will release its first quarter 2016 financial and operating results on Thursday, May 5, 2016, after the market closes. The Company will host a conference call on Friday, May 6, 2016, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time to review first quarter results, discuss recent events and conduct a question-and-answer period.

Live conference call

Toll free number: (877) 705-6003 (for domestic callers) Direct dial number: (201) 493-6725 (for international callers) Passcode: Not required Simultaneous audio webcast link: www.americanhomes4rent.com, under "For Investors"



Conference call replay

Toll free number: (877) 870-5176 (for domestic callers) Direct dial number: (858) 384-5517 (for international callers) Passcode: 13635850# Webcast link: www.americanhomes4rent.com, under "For Investors" Date accessible through: May 20, 2016

About American Homes 4 Rent

American Homes 4 Rent (NYSE: AMH) is a leader in the single-family home rental industry and "American Homes 4 Rent" is fast becoming a nationally recognized brand for rental homes, known for high quality, good value and tenant satisfaction. We are an internally managed Maryland real estate investment trust, or REIT, focused on acquiring, renovating, leasing, and operating attractive, single-family homes as rental properties. As of February 29, 2016 we owned approximately 47,910 single-family properties, including the homes acquired as part of the merger with American Residential Properties, Inc., in selected submarkets in 22 states.

Additional information about American Homes 4 Rent is available on our website at www.americanhomes4rent.com.

Contact:

American Homes 4 Rent

Investor Relations

Phone: (855) 794-2447

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE American Homes 4 Rent

Related Links

https://www.americanhomes4rent.com


NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Vice Admiral Syring, USN, Director of the Missile Defense Agency will keynote at the Directed Energy and Next Generation Munitions Event this June 20-22 in Washington, D.C. His keynote will address the Future of Directed Energy and BMDS Architecture which will provide insight on the potential to revolutionize missile defense.

Vice Admiral Syring will be joined by the following speakers:



Brig Gen Julian D. Alford Vice Chief of Naval Research Commander, Marine Corps Warfighting Lab Office of Naval Research (ONR)

Chief of Naval Research Commander, Marine Corps Warfighting Lab Office of Naval Research (ONR) Dr. William Roper , Director Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD)

, Director Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) Dr. Robert E. Peterkin , Chief Scientist Directed Energy Directorate Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)

, Chief Scientist Directed Energy Directorate Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Dr. Tim D. Andreadis , Head of the High Power Microwave Section Tactical Electronic Warfare Division Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)

, Head of the High Power Microwave Section Tactical Electronic Warfare Division Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Dr. Kip Kendrick , Chief, Directed Energy Division Space and Missile Defense Technical Center (SMDC)

, Chief, Directed Energy Division Space and Missile Defense Technical Center (SMDC) Dr. Sean Ross , AFRL Directed Energy Liaison Science, Technology, & Engineering Directorate SAF/AQR

2016 Directed Energy topics to be addressed include the fields of Non-Lethal Weapons, Solid State Lasers (SSLs), High Powered Microwaves, Electromagnetic Railgun Technology (EMRG), Hypervelocity Projectiles (HVP), complex warfare environment, overcoming challenges on systems integration and more.

Join thought-leaders and colleagues from government, academia, and industry as we look at existing and future requirements to put this game-changing technology into the hands of the warfighter. As always Active Military and Government attend at no cost. Learn more here.

To access the full agenda or to register for the conference, visit http://www.DistributedLethality.com

The Institute for Defense & Government Advancement (IDGA): a division of IQPC is a nonpartisan informationbased organization dedicated to the promotion of innovative ideas in public service and defense through live conferences and events. We bring together speaker panels and events comprised of military and government professionals while attracting delegates with decisionmaking power from military, government and defense industries.

SOURCE Institute for Defense & Government Advancement

Related Links

http://www.distributedlethality.com


Max Spann Real Estate & Auction Co., the high-end auction house, has scheduled the auction for Sunday, May 1, 2016 at 11 a.m. at Harrah's Resort Atlantic City, 777 Harrah's Blvd. Property previews have been scheduled for noon to 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 23, 2016 and Sunday, April 24, 2016.

"The Bella offers the best amenities in South Jersey and is a block from the famed Atlantic City boardwalk and beach," said Bob Dann, executive vice president & chief operations officer for the firm. "With the neighboring Revel scheduled to re-open in June, now is actually the perfect time to invest in Atlantic City."

Located on 526 Pacific Avenue at the northern tip of Atlantic City, the Bella is the city's only luxury condominium complex, offering amenities such as European kitchens and Italian cabinetry, a fitness facility, a tiki bar, cabanas, a heated glass-enclosed pool, a massage room and spa, and indoor and outdoor parking.

"This is an absolute auction, which means there is no minimum bid so bidders will be able to offer whatever they think the homes are worth," Dann said. "We now have financing for all qualified buyers and all units have full Certificates of Occupancy and are ready to move right in."

The 26-story high-rise offers sweeping vistas of the Atlantic Ocean and the Absecon Inlet during the day and views of the city skyline at night.

Bella is a well-managed condominium with more than $500,000 of cash reserves for future repairs and replacement, a 10-year record of not raising condo fees, and has never had a special assessment.

Bella is the only residential building at the Jersey Shore offering NFC Amenity Management, which provides 24-hour concierge services as well as comprehensive fitness and spa offerings.

To take the next step, call 888-299-1438 for the property information package, to attend the auction and to bid. For more information about the auction of this magnificent property, visit maxspann.com.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/357266

SOURCE Max Spann Real Estate & Auction Co.

Related Links

http://www.maxspann.com


To defeat the nefarious ideology of RSS and BJP everybody has to unite, says RJD Chief Lalu Prasad Yadav. (Photo: PTI)

Patna: RJD president Lalu Prasad on Tuesday backed Nitish Kumar on his call for unity among all non-BJP outfits and said his party would support the JD(U) chief for the post of prime minister in future.

"He is speaking right," Prasad told reporters here when asked to comment on Kumar's appeal for a wider opposition unity to defeat the BJP and make a "Sangh-mukt" Bharat.

"To defeat the nefarious ideology of RSS and BJP everybody has to unite," he said before leaving for Delhi. RJD is a partner in Bihar's ruling alliance.

Kumar, who replaced Sharad Yadav as JD(U) president, had recently emphasised on coming together of Congress, Left, and regional parties to defeat BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Yesterday again he called for a "Sangh-mukt" Bharat appealing all parties opposed to RSS and BJP to unite. The Bihar Chief Minister had said the Sangh believes in dividing the country on caste and communal lines and it is "confusing people through rumours".

The RJD chief backing would provide strength to his appeal to cobble up a broader coalition against BJP. When asked if his party would back Kumar for the post of prime minister in future, Prasad answered in the affirmative.

Prasad came down heavily on BJP government at the centre saying the entire country is reeling under drought and shortage of water but the Union government is "doing nothing" concrete to improve the situation.
KARMIEL, Israel, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BioSight, Ltd, a pharmaceutical development company focused on the development of chemotherapy pro-drugs with reduced toxicity, today announced completion of patient treatment in its ongoing Phase I/IIa clinical study of Astarabine in acute leukemia patients. The company expects to report the final results in the coming months.

Astarabine is a non-toxic conjugate of the chemotherapy drug cytarabine (Ara-C) and the amino acid asparagine. Cytarabine is the first-line treatment for Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and relapsed/refractory Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), however it is highly toxic with severe side effects such as cerebellar toxicity and bone marrow suppression. While the average age AML patients is almost 70 years, cytarabine doses are significantly attenuated for older patients due to its severe toxicity, and administration of high-dose cytarabine is precluded in patients with hepatic or renal dysfunction. Hence, the toxicity significantly limits its use, especially for older patients.

Unlike cytarabine, the toxicity of Astarabine is mostly specific to leukemia cells, as it is preferentially taken up by leukemia cells where it triggers cellular mechanisms which lead to their death.

The Phase I/IIa study is an open-label study to evaluate the safety and efficacy of Astarabine as single agent in adults with AML or ALL. The results to date demonstrate safety in all patients, with no significant drug-related adverse events, including in 80 and 90 years old patients. Moreover, Astarabine treatment lead to high response rates in newly-diagnosed AML and ALL patients, as well as in secondary AML patients.

"We are very pleased and encouraged by the results obtained to date with Astarabine treatment for AML and ALL patients, especially in light of the unmet medical need for these patients today. We are looking forward to continuing the development of Astarabine to further evaluate and establish its safety and efficacy in a larger study. We truly believe that Astarabine can bring hope to many patients and their families and provide an answer to unmet needs in the treatment of both AML and ALL" said Dr. Ruth Ben Yakar, CEO of BioSight.

About Astarabine:

Astarabine is a new pharmaceutical composition pro-drug of cytarabine (Ara-C), the first line chemotherapy drug for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), also used for treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). Unlike cytarabine, Astarabine is non-toxic, hence addressing unmet medical needs and enabling treatment of patients who are unfit for conventional intensive chemotherapy, with minimal or no side effects. Astarabine is currently under clinical development for treatment of acute leukemia.

About BioSight:

BioSight is a private Israeli clinical-stage drug development company, founded by Dr. Stela Gengrinovitch.

BioSight focuses on development of chemotherapy pro-drugs with reduced toxicity, based on its proprietary technology S2DOT for chemotherapy pro-drug design and synthesis.

BioSight develops a pipeline of targeted chemotherapy pro-drugs with reduced toxicity, thus, aiming to revolutionize the treatment for cancer patients, to enable safe and effective treatment to cancer patients around the world. Its lead proprietary product Astarabine is in clinical stages for treatment of leukemia. Additional products are in pre-clinical stages, addressing unmet medical needs and multi-billion dollar markets.

Contact:

Dr. Ruth Ben Yakar, CEO

[email protected]

SOURCE BioSight Ltd.
BUCHAREST, Romania, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Over 400 participants from 35 countries attended Bitdefender's Enterprise Partner Summit in Bucharest, last week, to discuss the company's latest innovations in IT security technology and prepare for even faster advances into the enterprise space.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160405/351502LOGO )



The event featured technical and sales training sessions, including presentations on Bitdefender's innovative approaches to the changing world of online threats, customer needs, and working together to ensure customer satisfaction.

The meeting came as Bitdefender celebrates a series of successes in its enterprise business, including solid growth in sales and number of employees over the past two years, the recent hiring of new enterprise leaders and a doubling of its reseller network.

"Our main objective is to consolidate and grow our share among the world's large corporations and maintain expansion of our enterprise revenues," Bogdan Irina, Bitdefender's COO said. "Our accelerated growth in the enterprise space can only be achieved through our strong channel presence and solid partnerships with our distributors and resellers worldwide."

Customers and partners such as Honeywell and Citrix offered their insights on Bitdefender's latest research and technologies, which will keep the company at the forefront of innovation and meeting the ever-changing needs of businesses.

"Bitdefender is the leader in antimalware and remediation along with providing outstanding support for Channel Partners," said Jessica Allen, General Sales Manager of Versiant Corporation, one of Bitdefender's partners in the US. "The Enterprise Summit was a great opportunity to learn interesting technical details about the latest innovations in enterprise technologies."

"The new technology spearheads and the Gravity Zone roadmap will help us earn customers' trust and become a leader in enterprise security," Gerben Kloosterman, from the Dutch company FlexVirtual added. "I am proud to be part of the Bitdefender journey that's about to disrupt the market. Bitdefender keeps up the speed in development and is always ten steps ahead on data protection. Improvements on the technologies go beyond any imagination again and again."

Bitdefender doubled its enterprise sales in 2015, and was positioned as a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms, a recognition that attests to the company's success in the enterprise space.

Bitdefender's Enterprise endpoint protection offering consists of Bitdefender GravityZone, a leading security solution to secure even the most complex hybrid infrastructures. Whether physical or virtual, a combination of on premise and private or public cloud, GravityZone offers organizations dramatically faster and more efficient risk management.

About Bitdefender

Bitdefender is a global security technology company that delivers solutions in more than 100 countries through a network of value-added alliances, distributors and reseller partners. Since 2001, Bitdefender has consistently produced award-winning business and consumer security technology, and is a leading security provider in virtualization and cloud technologies. Through R&D, alliances and partnership teams, Bitdefender has elevated the highest standards of security excellence in both its number-one-ranked technology and its strategic alliances with the world's leading virtualization and cloud technology providers. More information is available at http://www.bitdefender.com/.

SOURCE BitDefender SRL
LOS ANGELES, April 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- There have been major developments in both treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. in recent years and one of the most promising ones is Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis or PrEP. However, as the persistently unacceptable high rates of new HIV infections underscore, PrEP and other biomedical interventions tools are not being applied effectively in Black communities. While new HIV diagnoses in the U.S. as a whole fell 19 percent between 2005 and 2014, new cases among Black gay and bisexual men, for example, increased by 87 percent.

When used correctly, PrEP has been shown to reduce the risk of acquiring HIV by over 90%; however, it is still being underutilized in Black communities.

According to "Black Lives MatterWhat's PrEP Got to Do With It?", the latest annual State of AIDS In Black America report recently released by the Black AIDS Institute (BAI), the response to PrEP in Black communities lags far behind that which is found in other communities. This report investigates why this is the case.

"The report examines where Black communities are in familiarity, understanding, knowledge, beliefs, access and utilization of PrEP. It also makes recommendations on how the community can maximize the potential benefits of PrEP and other biomedical interventions," says Phil Wilson, President and CEO of BAI. "But most importantly, this report provides resources to help educate communities about PrEP and help communities access and finance this new HIV prevention too. Finally, this report makes recommendations on how Black communities can maximize the potential benefits of PrEP and other biomedical interventions."

The report's key findings include the following:

PrEP works. Research studies and demonstration projects have shown that PrEP is extraordinarily effective when used as directed. Protection against HIV infection approaches 100 percent for people who take PrEP as prescribed.

PrEP can help end the AIDS epidemic in Black America. On its own, PrEP can prevent 1 in 5 new HIV infections through 2020. Combined with scaled-up HIV treatment, PrEP could avert 70 percent of all new infections over the next five years.

Black America needs PrEP the most. America's HIV epidemic is a Black epidemic. Black Americans make up 49 percent of all new HIV diagnoses. Black gay and bisexual men stand a 50 percent chance of acquiring HIV in their lifetimes, Black women are 18 times more likely than White women to be HIV positive, and Black transgender women are three times more likely to acquire HIV than their White or Latina counterparts.

When it comes to PrEP, Black America is being left behind. Every available measure indicates that while Black communities need PrEP the most, they are far less likely to receive PrEP than other racial or ethnic groups.

New scientific evidence suggests that robust PrEP uptake is achievable in Black America. New clinical trial findings indicate that programs that are tailored to the needs of Black gay and bisexual men and that proactively address barriers to uptake and adherence can promote strong PrEP utilization in Black communities.

An urgent national initiative is needed to expedite the uptake of PrEP in Black America. The ongoing AIDS crisis in Black America necessitates an urgent national initiativeone combining the efforts of policy-makers, funders, public health agencies, health-care providers, community organizations and Black communities.

The report's seven key recommendations for next steps include:

Investing in community education and awareness campaigns; Educate health-care providers about PrEP; Adapt delivery systems to facilitate PrEP uptake; Remove financial barriers to PrEP use; Undertake specific efforts to address the PrEP needs of women and transgender women; Strengthen the ability of PrEP programs to maximize STI control; and Continue to pursue a robust research agenda on PrEP.

"All of the biomedical interventions in the world will not end the AIDS epidemic in this country unless the people on the frontlines understand them, believe in them, and know how to use them," says Wilson. "This report provides a road map for the appropriate utilization of PrEP and other bio-medical tools needed to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in our communities."

The report is available online at www.blackprep.org, and www.BlackAIDS.org.

The Black AIDS Institute

Founded in 1999, the Black AIDS Institute is the only national HIV/AIDS think tank in the United States focused exclusively on Black people. The Institute's mission is to end the AIDS epidemic in Black communities by engaging and mobilizing Black institutions, leaders and individuals in efforts to confront HIV/AIDS. The institute disseminates information, offers training and capacity building, provides testing and linkage to care, influences both private and public HIV/AIDS policy, and conducts mobilization and advocacy from a uniquely and unapologetically Black point of view.

SOURCE Black AIDS Institute

Related Links

http://www.blackaids.org


NATCHEZ, Miss., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Callon Petroleum Company (NYSE: CPE) ("Callon" or the "Company") today announced it has entered into definitive agreements with three private entities to acquire certain assets operated by Big Star Oil and Gas, LLC ("Big Star") for total consideration of $220 million in cash and approximately 9.3 million shares of Callon common stock, subject to customary purchase price adjustments. In addition, Callon has signed definitive agreements that increase its exposure to an existing core operating area in a separate transaction.

Key attributes of the Big Star transaction include:

Approximately 17,298 gross (14,089 net) surface acres, primarily located in Howard County, Texas , with additional acreage in Martin , Borden and Dawson counties, Texas ;

, with additional acreage in , and counties, ; 178 gross (165 net) identified horizontal drilling locations targeting the Wolfcamp A, Lower Spraberry and Wolfcamp B zones which are currently producing on the Big Star acreage and directly offsetting fields, using an initial assumption of horizontal development with six to eight wells per section;

Largely contiguous lease positions allowing for average lateral lengths of over 8,300 feet;

Five currently producing horizontal wells, including three Wolfcamp A and two Lower Spraberry horizontal wells with average 30-day peak production rates of 1,165 barrels of oil equivalent per day ("Boe/d");

124 gross (112 net) additional potential horizontal drilling locations targeting the Wolfcamp D (Cline) and Middle Spraberry zones which are producing from surrounding fields in Howard County ;

; Estimated net daily production of 1,931 Boe/d (82% oil) for the first quarter of 2016; and

Approximately 4.1 million Boe (71% oil) of net proved developed producing reserves as of January 1, 2016 , based on our evaluation and interpretation of reserve and production information provided by the sellers, as well as our analysis of available geologic and other data. We cannot assure you that this estimate is accurate. Our estimate of proved reserves has not been reviewed by our independent reserve engineers, and we may revise our estimates following ownership and operation of these properties.

Upon closing of the Big Star transaction, Callon will assume operatorship of over 80% of the acquired acreage and own an estimated 81% average working interest (61% average net revenue interest).

Separately, on April 15, 2016, Callon entered into definitive purchase and sale and joint development agreements for the following transactions (collectively, the "AMI Transaction") comprising total net cash consideration of $33 million, subject to customary purchase price adjustments. Key elements of the AMI Transaction include:

Formation of an area of mutual interest with TRP Energy, LLC ("TRP") in western Reagan County, Texas , through the joint acquisition from a private party of 4,745 net acres (with a 55% share to Callon) north of the Garrison Draw field; and

, through the joint acquisition from a private party of 4,745 net acres (with a 55% share to Callon) north of the Garrison Draw field; and Callon's simultaneous sale of a 27.5% interest in the Garrison Draw field to TRP.

Upon closing of the AMI Transaction, our acreage position in western Reagan County will be increased by 1,759 net acres. Assuming the AMI Transaction was completed on January 1, 2016, the AMI Transaction would have contributed net daily production of approximately 953 Boe/d for the first quarter of 2016 primarily from existing horizontal wells targeting the Wolfcamp A and both the upper and lower benches of the Wolfcamp B.

On a pro forma basis assuming the closing of the pending Big Star and AMI transactions, Callon's operational base will include over 30,000 net surface acres in core areas of the Midland Basin that have been de-risked for multi-zone horizontal development within a total Midland Basin position of approximately 34,000 net surface acres. Estimated pro forma net production for the first quarter of 2016 (assuming the closing of the pending transactions on January 1, 2016) would have been approximately 15,300 Boe/d, including production of approximately 12,400 Boe/d (79% oil) from Callon's existing operations.

"These acquisitions are a significant step forward in Callon's continued evolution as a leading operator in the Permian Basin. Our team has proven its ability to consistently deliver capital efficient growth, and we are excited to leverage our capabilities across an expanded footprint in the coming years, including a new core operating area in Howard County. While we expect any near-term increase in operational activity following the acquisitions to be limited in 2016, we anticipate the horizontal development of the Big Star properties to be an important part of an expanded 2017 operational program incorporating a total of two to three horizontal drilling rigs," stated Fred Callon, Chairman and CEO. "Callon has found success in pursuing privately-negotiated transactions in the Midland Basin in recent years and these acquisitions are yet another example. Importantly, the transactions not only deliver high-quality, de-risked asset bases that compete favorably for capital in our combined portfolio, but also present the opportunity to add to our management team with Mr. Bradley Cross, a founding partner of Big Star, who has been offered a senior role in operations with Callon."

The pending Big Star and AMI transactions are expected to close in the second quarter of 2016, subject to the completion of customary due diligence and closing conditions. Neither transaction is contingent on the other. Callon intends to finance the cash purchase price of these acquisitions with cash on hand, borrowings under its revolving credit facility, which was reaffirmed in early April with a borrowing base of $300 million, including related commitments of $300 million, and the proceeds of capital markets transactions, depending on prevailing market conditions.

Jefferies LLC acted as financial advisor to Callon in connection with the pending Big Star transaction. Scotia Waterous acted as financial advisor to Big Star.

Full-Year 2016 Guidance Update

Callon estimates that production from the transactions (following the respective closing dates) will contribute approximately 2,500  3,000 Boe/d to full-year 2016 estimates, raising annual production guidance from a previous range of 11,500  12,000 Boe/d to 14,000  15,000 Boe/d. This increased estimate includes a production contribution from three drilled, uncompleted wells on the properties to be acquired in the pending transactions (one in Howard County and two in Reagan County) that are anticipated to be brought on-line in the second half 2016, in addition to currently producing wells on the acquired properties. Given the increased expenditures related to these incremental completions and infrastructure investment for future development of the acquired properties, the Company now expects operational capital expenditures (including facilities) of $95  $105 million in 2016.





Previous

Updated



2016

2016 Total production (Boe/d)

11,500 - 12,000

14,000 - 15,000 % oil

77% - 79%

76% - 80% Expenses (per Boe)







LOE, including workovers

$6.75 - $7.25

$6.75 - $7.25 Production taxes, including ad valorem

$2.00 - $2.50

$2.00 - $2.50 Adjusted G&A (a)

$3.80 - $4.20

$3.30 - $3.80 Adjusted G&A - cash component (b)

$3.30 - $3.70

$2.90 - $3.40 Operational capital expenditures







Accrual basis ($MM)

$75 - $80

$95 - $105





(a) Excludes certain non-recurring expenses and non-cash valuation adjustments. See the reconciliation provided within the Non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations section of this press release for a reconciliation of G&A expense on a GAAP basis to Adjusted G&A expense. (b) Excludes stock-based compensation and corporate depreciation and amortization.

About Callon Petroleum Company

Callon is an independent energy company focused on the acquisition, development, exploration, and operation of oil and gas properties in the Permian Basin in West Texas.

About TRP Energy

TRP is a Houston-based oil and gas company focused on identifying, acquiring and developing non-operated working interest positions across the United States. TRP is backed by Trilantic Capital Management L.P. ("Trilantic North America"), a private equity firm focused on control and significant minority investments in North America. To date, Trilantic North America's energy team has committed approximately $3.1 billion in capital across 22 platform energy investments.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements include all statements regarding the consummation of the pending acquisition and completion of related financings, reserve quantities, estimates of future drilling locations, the implementation of the Company's business plans and strategy, as well as statements including the words "believe," "expect," "plans" and words of similar meaning. These statements reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events and financial performance. No assurances can be given, however, that these events will occur or that these projections will be achieved, and actual results could differ materially from those projected as a result of certain factors. Some of the factors which could affect our future results and could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in our forward-looking statements include the Company's ability to realize the anticipated benefits of the pending acquisition, the forfeiture of our deposit under the acquisition agreement, the volatility of oil and gas prices, ability to drill and complete wells, operational, regulatory and environment risks, our ability to finance our activities and other risks more fully discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, available on our website or the SEC's website at www.sec.gov.

This news release is posted on the Company's website at www.callon.com and will be archived there for subsequent review. It can be accessed from the "News" link on the top of the homepage.

For further information contact:

Joe Gatto

Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President and Treasurer

1-800-451-1294

SOURCE Callon Petroleum Company

Related Links

http://www.callon.com


Participants can pre-register for the conference call by navigating to Celadon's Investor Relations website, http://investors.celadontrucking.com , under the Report Center menu option. Those without Internet access or unable to pre-register may join the conference by dialing 1-800-695-3244. A replay of the webcast will be available through June 1, 2016 at http://investors.celadontrucking.com .

Celadon Group, Inc. (www.celadongroup.com), through its subsidiaries, provides long-haul, regional, local, dedicated, intermodal, temperature-protect, flatbed and expedited freight service across the United States, Canada and Mexico. The company also owns Celadon Logistics Services, which provides freight brokerage services, freight management, as well as supply chain management solutions, including warehousing and distribution.

For more information:

Joe Weigel

Director of Marketing & Communications

(317) 972-7006 Direct

[email protected]

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SOURCE Celadon Group, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.celadongroup.com


LONDON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The cell lysis market is expected to reach USD 3.84 billion by 2021 from USD 2.35 billion in 2016, at a CAGR of 10.3%. The global cell lysis market is segmented based on product, type of cell, end-users, and regions. The consumables segment is expected to register the highest growth rate in the cell lysis market, by product, during the forecast period. The high growth in this segment is attributed to the increasing investments in research.



Based on end-users, the cell lysis market is segmented into research laboratories and institutes, biopharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and others. The research laboratories and institutes segment is expected to account for the largest share of the market in 2016. Increasing prevalence of diseases and the need for development of new therapies will drive the growth of this market.



Geographically, the cell lysis market is dominated by North America, followed by Europe, Asia, and the Rest of the World (RoW). Growth in the North American segment is primarily driven by increasing aging population, and rising government funding in the North American countries.



The major factors contributing to the growth of the cell lysis market include increasing government funding for research, high prevalence of diseases, expanding biotechnology and biopharmaceutical industries, and growing focus on personalized medicine. Furthermore, increasing R&D spending and new product development activities by companies is another major factor driving the growth of this market.



Apart from comprehensive geographic and product analysis and market sizing, the report also provides a competitive landscape that covers the growth strategies adopted by industry players over the last three years. In addition, the company profiles comprise the product portfolios, developments, and strategies adopted by the market players to maintain and increase their shares in the market. The above-mentioned market research data, current market size, and forecast of the future trends will help key market players and new entrants to make the necessary decisions regarding product offerings, geographic focus, change in strategic approach, and levels of output in order to remain successful in the market.



The major players in this market include Beckman Coulter, Inc. (U.S.), Becton, Dickinson and Company (U.S.), Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (U.S.), Cell Signaling Technology, Inc. (U.S.), F. Hoffman-La Roche AG (Switzerland), Merck KGaA (Germany), Miltenyi Biotec (Germany), QIAGEN N.V. (Netherlands), Qsonica, LLC. (U.S.), and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (U.S.).



Reasons to Buy the Report:



This report will enable both established firms as well as new entrants/smaller firms to gauge the pulse of the market, which in turn will help these firms garner greater market shares. Firms purchasing the report can use any one or a combination of the below-mentioned five strategies (market penetration, product development/innovation, market development, market diversification, and competitive assessment) for strengthening their market shares.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:



- Market Penetration: Comprehensive information on the product portfolios of the top players in the cell lysis market. The report analyses the cell lysis market by product, type of cell, end-users, and regions

- Product Development/Innovation: Detailed insights on the upcoming technologies, R&D activities, and new product launches in the cell lysis market

- Competitive Assessment: In-depth assessment of the market strategies, geographic and business segments, and product portfolios of the leading players in the cell lysis market

- Market Development: Comprehensive information about emerging markets. This report analyses the market for various cell lysis market products across geographies

- Market Diversification: Exhaustive information about new products, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments in the cell lysis market



Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/3765454/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com

For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

Related Links

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NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Growing demand for OLEDs in China can be attributed to increasing adoption in various end user applications such as smartphones, televisions, automotive, commercial, industrial, etc. In addition, rising investments in OLED research and development, coupled with increasing focus of manufacturers to boost production of various OLED display panels and lighting products is anticipated to boost China OLED market over the next five years. Moreover, increasing technological advancements and governmental support to OLED manufacturers is further contributing to the growth of the country's OLED market. During 2016 - 2021, rising integration of OLED displays in various consumer electronic devices is expected to significantly increase demand for OLEDs in China.



According to "China OLED Market By Type, By Application, Competition Forecast and Opportunities, 2011  2021", the OLED market in China is projected to grow at a CAGR over 38% during 2016 - 2021. OLED displays accounted for the majority share in China's OLED market, on account of their rising adoption in smartphones, tablets, MP3/MP4 players, automotive applications and defense sector. Light weight, better color performance, less power consumption, high brightness, etc., are few of the advantages driving increase in penetration of these OLED displays in China. In 2015, East China was the largest regional market for OLED in the country, due to presence of a large consumer base in the region. Few of the leading players operating in China OLED market include Samsung Display, LG Display, BOE Technology and Visionox, among others.



"China OLED Market By Type, By Application, Competition Forecast and Opportunities, 2011  2021" discusses the following aspects of OLED market in China:



- China OLED Market Size, Share & Forecast

- Segmental Analysis: By Type (Displays and Lighting), By End User (Smartphones, Tablets & Notebooks, Televisions Commercial, Residential, Automotive, Industrial and Others) & By Region

- Policy & Regulatory Landscape

- Changing Market Trends & Emerging Opportunities

- Competitive Landscape & Strategic Recommendations



Why You Should Buy This Report?



- To gain an in-depth understanding of China OLED market

- To identify the on-going trends, and anticipated growth over the next five years

- To help industry consultants, OLED manufacturers and distributors align their market-centric strategies

- To obtain research-based business decisions and add weight to presentations and marketing material

- To gain competitive knowledge of leading market players

- To avail 10% customization in the report without any extra charges and get research data or trends added in the report as per the buyer's specific needs



Report Methodology



The information contained in this report is based upon both primary and secondary sources. Primary research included interviews with the OLED manufacturers and suppliers in China. Secondary research included an exhaustive search of relevant publications like company annual reports, financial reports and other proprietary databases.



Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03703391-summary/view-report.html



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



http://www.reportlinker.com





__________________________

Contact Clare: [email protected]

US: (339)-368-6001

Intl: +1 339-368-6001

SOURCE Reportlinker

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WASHINGTON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- CityDance will present DREAMscape, directed by Rasta Thomas, on Saturday, May 7, 2016 at 8 pm at Washington, D.C.'s Historic Lincoln Theatre. This marks the fourth annual performance of DREAMscape at the Lincoln Theatre.

CityDance's DREAMscape will feature performances by some of the world's top ballet and contemporary companies including Matthew Golding of The Royal Ballet, Anna Tsygankova of the Dutch National Ballet, Rasta Thomas, Cartier Williams Dance Theatre, Gallim Dance, Pete Walker of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Anna Gerberich of The Joffrey Ballet and more. There will also be special appearances by CityDance students.

"DREAMscape is a one of a kind event in D.C. which brings extraordinary artists together onto one stage for a great cause. DREAMscape is a culmination of all that CityDance is about: presenting world-class dance, training young dancers for professional careers and providing free after school programs to hundreds of D.C. youth," according to Alexe Nowakowski, CityDance Executive Director.

The proceeds from the event will support CityDance's after-school DREAM program. DREAM uses dance as a pathway for youth from D.C.'s underserved neighborhoods to graduate from high school and pursue their dreams. In 2018, the DREAM program will anchor a new arts center in downtown D.C., The DREAM Center for Dance.

Rasta Thomas, DREAMscape Director said, "Growing up in the D.C. area I understand the importance of arts in our schools and I firmly believe dance can inspire and give a creative outlet for our community's youth. I look forward to bringing together a cast of professional dance superstars to provide Washington D.C. with a world-class performance for such an important cause."

For VIP guests, the performance will be followed by a dance party with the DREAMscape artists at Mulebone on U Street.

WHERE: DREAMscape: Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U St NW, Washington, DC 20009

DREAMscape VIP After Party: Mulebone, 2121 14th St NW, Washington, DC 20009



TICKETS: $25, $38 for general tickets

Sponsorships available $250 & up

Tickets: www.citydance.net



CONTACT: Megan Piluk, CityDance Public Relations Manager

[email protected]

443-223-3361

About CityDance

Founded in 1996, CityDance is a Washington, D.C. non-profit dance organization and a recognized arts and education leader. CityDance DREAM is an after-school program that provides dance classes and performance opportunities; mentoring and tutoring to students from D.C.'s most underserved communities. Established in 2005, the DREAM program serves youth in grades three to twelve at public schools and community sites across the nation's capital. DREAM is the recipient of the 2015 President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award. In 2018, the DREAM program will anchor a new arts center in downtown D.C., The DREAM Center for Dance.

SOURCE CityDance

Related Links

http://www.citydance.net


BOSTON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Claritas Genomics today announced the publication of a study demonstrating the superior sensitivity and speed of its proprietary orthogonal sequencing process compared to industry standard practice. The study, 'Orthogonal Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) for High Throughput Clinical Diagnostics' was published today in the online edition of Scientific Reports. Orthogonal sequencing is the practice of running two gene sequencing technologies in parallel to assist with the diagnosis of more complex genetic diseases. The report shows how the company's enhanced process provides high quality and more complete exome data, i.e.; data from the coding part of the genome; providing superior validated results to physicians and patients, much faster than with standard orthogonal sequencing processes. This is because the results from standard processes need to be verified in a second test.[1]

The enhanced speed and accuracy of the novel orthogonal sequencing process is due to the use of two separate NGS systems. Claritas developed an algorithm, the Combinator, to allow the output (DNA variant calls) from two NGS systems to be combined into a single set of calls in an automated manner. Because every sequencing platform provides variant calls in a slightly different way, it can be difficult to compare complex variation between them. Combinator allows a unified set of variant calls that can then be evaluated for disease impact.

"The benefits of broad genetic testing for patients with previously undiagnosed diseases are clear," said John Thompson, Chief Technology Officer for Claritas Genomics, "but the speed and diagnostic yield have been problems. By using two independent systems, we can detect more variants and confirm more than 90% of them immediately. This improves both speed and diagnostic yield so that patients and their families are more likely to get an answer and to get that answer faster."

Technologies Used

The novel orthogonal sequencing process was run using the Illumina and Ion Torrent NGS technologies. For Illumina-based sequencing, DNA was targeted using the Agilent Clinical Research Exome kit. DNA sequenced on the Ion Torrent Proton was targeted using the Life Technologies AmpliSeq Exome kit. Variant calls (DNA changes) from Illumina and Ion Torrent were combined using a custom algorithm, Combinator, developed by Claritas for integrating multi-platform Variant Call Files (VCFs). Combinator was necessary because each platform uses a slightly different VCF format. This made identifying equivalent data challenging and time consuming.

Accessible Clinical Use

In order to provide maximum flexibility for patients providing biological fluids for DNA extraction, multiple sample collection methods were examined. DNA collected from cell lines, from blood, and from saliva all performed identically. While the initial cost of sequencing two exomes is higher, the ultimate savings in confirmatory sequencing as well as the improved sensitivity makes up for that expense.

Availability

Orthogonal sequencing is available to patients (via their health care providers) in two forms, the Claritas Clinical Exome and Regions of Interest. The Claritas Clinical Exome examines all coding regions. The Regions of Interest (ROIs) focus on genes known to be involved in particular diseases. The advantage of the ROIs is the ability to incorporate newly discovered genes into gene lists in a rapid manner as well as the ability to expand to the whole exome if diagnostics findings are not identified in the initial gene list and those results are already confirmed. The orthogonal exome is also available for research use.

Report Authors

Orthogonal NGS for High Throughput Clinical Diagnostics

Niru Chennagiri1, Eric J. White1, Alexander Frieden1, Edgardo Lopez1, Daniel S. Lieber1, Anastasia Nikiforov1, Tristen Ross1, Rebecca Batorsky1, Sherry Hansen1, Va Lip1, Lovelace J. Luquette2, Evan Mauceli1, David Margulies1, 2, 3, Patrice M. Milos1, Nichole Napolitano1, Marcia M. Nizzari1, Timothy Yu1, John F. Thompson1

1 Claritas Genomics, Cambridge MA

2Harvard Medical School, Boston MA

3Boston Children's Hospital, Boston MA

About Claritas Genomics

Claritas Genomics serves children affected with complex genetic disorders by providing timely and accurate results, resolving families' long search for answers. By combining clinical expertise of the world's best pediatric specialists with innovative platform solutions, Claritas is working to improve patient care and enable new discoveries. For more information about Claritas Genomics, visit www.claritasgenomics.com

Contact:

Betsy Stevenson

Director of Corporate Communications

[email protected]

Tel: (860) 984-1424

[1] The American College of Medical Genetics recommends "that all disease-focused and/or diagnostic testing include confirmation of the final result using a companion technology." Most laboratories use the lower throughput Sanger sequencing method that is not well suited to whole genome scale.

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SOURCE Claritas Genomics

Related Links

http://www.claritasgenomics.com


CONTEXT:

The FBI estimates that more than $209 million in ransomware payments were made in the United States alone during the first three months of 2016, compared to only $24 million in all of 2015. With healthcare organizations becoming more frequent targets, Bowen will provide insights during this webinar into the five most important precautions healthcare providers should take. He will also discuss what steps should be followed in the event healthcare IT systems are compromised to minimize the impact on patient care and to restore IT systems as quickly as possible.

INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITY:

Post-event interviews can be arranged. Click here for Chris Bowen's photo.

QUOTABLE QUOTE:

"With a profitable business model and payment schemes ensuring anonymity for its perpetrators, we will be seeing more of ransomware in the coming years," said Chris Bowen, founder and chief privacy and security officer for ClearDATA. "It is crucial for users to know how ransomware works, how to best protect themselves from data kidnappers, and why they should never, ever pay a ransom."

REGISTER:

To register for the webinar, click here or go to http://bit.ly/20SeCj6.

CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDITS:

This webinar has been approved by HIMSS for up to one contact hour of continuing education credit toward renewal of the CPHIMS credential.

Tweet This: [email protected] webinar offers #ransomware safeguards for #Healthcare. | #CPHIM @HIMSS @HealthITNews: http://bit.ly/20SeCj6

About ClearDATA

ClearDATA is exclusive to healthcare and is the industry leader in healthcare cloud computing, platform and information security services. More than 320,000 healthcare practitioners rely on ClearDATA's secure, HIPAA-compliant, HITRUST CSF-certified cloud, HealthDATA infrastructure and SaaS HIT Cloud Management platform to store, manage, protect and share their patient health information and critical applications. For more information, call (888) 899-2066 or visit www.cleardata.com.

Media contact:

Amendola Communication for ClearDATA

Marcia Rhodes

(480) 664-8412, ext. 15

[email protected]

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SOURCE ClearDATA

Related Links

http://www.cleardata.com


In school, when the whole class was being detained for some mischief caused by a few, there would usually be that one boy who would snitch. It wasnt me, Sir, he would sniffle, they did it... And he would rattle off all the names and details of how they did what they did, who helped, and how, and please could he go home now? I was reminded of those detentions today, reading about the Gujarat high courts observation on rioting. All members of a mob involved in rioting would be held responsible for crimes committed by any one of them, said the court. It was hearing a 2003 case of rioting in Ahmedabad. Riots, resulting in serious injuries or even death, are of frequent occurrence in this state and cases relating to such riots require careful handling, said Justice K.S. Jhaveri and Justice G.B. Shah.

Of course, there is no comparison between school kids booby-trapping the teachers chair with ink and weapon-wielding rioters hacking to death innocent people. And the basic principle of innocent till proven guilty cannot be set aside. Nor can we justify randomly punishing people in the hope that someone will squeal. That is exactly what our police does, continuing a horrible tradition of custodial torture and custody deaths. No, school kids detained for silly pranks cannot be compared to mass murderers let off for lack of evidence and political will. Except for the anonymity factor.

The anonymity of the mob protects even mass murderers. It is difficult to establish culpability of every individual accused in a riot. So the guilty get away. But clearly, these two judges had had enough. And were determined to end this impunity. The law is clear, they said, That if an offence is committed by any member of an unlawful assembly in furtherance of the common object of that assembly, every member of that unlawful assembly is guilty of that offence.

There was no need to go into the individual role of each member of the mob. The common object is what binds the individuals together and makes it a mob. And makes them all responsible for the acts of that mob. But can we justify pronouncing someone guilty by association? Civil society has been opposing the dangerous tendency of the state to bring charges of sedition against inconvenient people like Binayak Sen or Kanhaiya Kumar based only on the crime of association. Never mind whether they themselves did anything seditious, they were seen with people who were acting against the interest of the nation. However, there is a fundamental difference between a riot mob and an association of people, even if unlawful: the common object and the resulting violence makes it a riot.

Riots fuel Indian politics. They create fear, polarise people, make vote banks and establish power. In our multicultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual, pluralistic country, politicians use sectarian riots as a potent tool and get away with it largely because of the impunity that a faceless mob has. Even when a mob is reported to have a face  like that of H.K.L. Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar or Jagdish Tytler in the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi  they get away with murder. And only partly because its so difficult to establish individual culpability in a chaotic riot situation. And even when the impossible happens  like putting away powerful political leaders like Maya Kodnani or Babu Bajrangi, responsible for the Naroda Patiya murders in Gujarat  they are soon out on bail.

And the judge who has the guts to deliver justice going against political pressure is hounded and threatened. Right now, as West Bengal goes to the polls, the Malda riots of January are being milked by all political parties. In preparation for next years state elections, in Uttar Pradesh the Bahujan Samaj Party has started accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Samajwadi Party of inciting more than 300 riots in the state for political gain. But we can be sure that once the elections are over, the new state government will not try to bring the accused to book in either West Bengal or Uttar Pradesh.

Just as the Congress, while in power in Maharashtra, never brought to book Shiv Sena leaders accused in the 1993 Bombay riots. Or the BJP while ruling Delhi did not seriously pursue the cases against Congress leaders accused in the 1984 Delhi massacre of Sikhs. Or nobody has been punished for the 1983 Nellie massacre in Assam where more than 2,200 Muslims were butchered. Riots are too precious a political tool to be sacrificed at the alter of justice.

But this observation of the Gujarat high court gives us hope. In the interest of justice, we need to target impunity. And we could take a careful look at the laws that the British left behind, and perhaps reinterpret or update some of them. Not just Section 377 or the sedition laws, but laws that control our everyday lives.

Laws that allow rioters to get away need a re-look. Because when we act as a herd, we act without individual accountability, we cast ethics to the wind and join the dance of the lawless. But every individual must be held responsible for his contribution to the bigger crime. Absolving all because you cannot prove who did what exactly in a crazy riot situation works against the principle of justice.

And we need to fix accountability on everyone responsible  not just the mobsters at the spot, but also the politicians who encourage or instigate the riots. Apart from Congress, Shiv Sena and BJP leaders responsible for the sectarian massacres of 1984, 1993 and 2002, senior BJP leaders photographed and televised encouraging the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 spring to mind as well.

The police who do not stop riots are guilty too. Just today we learnt from Jhajjar deputy commissioner Anita Yadav how the policemen and Army stood by as the Jat reservation riots raged in Haryana in February, killing 30 and wounding hundreds. The police accused in the Bombay, Gujarat or Delhi riots have not been punished either. Besides, there are bureaucrats. Those who make the politicians dreams come true, who hand over detailed lists of minority neighbourhoods to mobs readying for a rampage and who let riots happen and help protect the powerful. They need to be held accountable too. And finally we need to fix responsibility on those who instigate and incite from afar, through social media. For only when we have accountability for all can we have justice for all.
Colleges of Distinction goes beyond traditional rankings and statistical lists to find schools that may otherwise be overlooked. The guidebook, available online at Amazon ( http://amzn.com/B01DD1D2QQ ), features colleges and universities that consistently provide a remarkable undergraduate experience and produce successful graduates.

"I am pleased to recommend the 'Catholic Colleges of Distinction 2016,'" said Rev. Malachi Van Tassell, president of Saint Francis University, PA. "The book is a helpful tool for prospective college students and their parents. This handy resource provides succinct, informational synopses of Catholic schools nationwide, giving information from price range to programs offered. The guidebook also provides practical advice pertinent to the college search process. The reader will find it an essential tool to consult frequently during the quest to find a Catholic college."

Each college is subject to a rigorous research process before it is listed. This includes in-person campus visits, interviews with a cross-section of the campus community, school records research, discussions with admissions directors and more.

This research produces verifiable results across Four Distinctions  Engaged Students, Great Teaching, Vibrant Community and Successful Outcomes. It also highlights education practices such as internships, global learning, capstone courses and more.

"Every one of these colleges excels in the four areas we have defined as most important in the college experience: attracting and supporting engaged students, promoting and understanding teaching, encouraging a vibrant campus life, and producing successful graduates," said Executive Editor Tyson Schritter. "But every one of them does so in different ways."

Colleges in the guidebook are not ranked so each person can find the most personalized fit. See the following link http://collegesofdistinction.com/badge/catholic/ for more information and a list of the "Catholic Colleges of Distinction 2016."

About Colleges of Distinction

Colleges of Distinction has recognized and honored schools throughout the U.S. for excellence in undergraduate-focused higher education. The member schools in the Colleges of Distinction consortium distinguish themselves through their focus on the undergraduate experience. For more information visit CollegesofDistinction.com.

Direct media inquiries to: Tyson Schritter, Executive Editor, [email protected], 512-994-0203 x708

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SOURCE Colleges of Distinction

Related Links

http://collegesofdistinction.com


NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum will present "By the People: Designing a Better America," the third exhibition in its series on socially responsible design, from Sept. 30 through Feb. 26, 2017. The first exhibition in the series to focus on conditions in the U.S. and its bordering countries, "By the People" will explore the challenges faced by urban, suburban and rural communities. Organized by Cynthia E. Smith, Cooper Hewitt's curator of socially responsible design, the exhibition features 60 design projects from every region across the U.S.

On view in the third floor Barbara and Morton Mandel Design Gallery, the exhibition will be divided into six themes: act, save, share, live, learn and make. The exhibition will highlight design solutions that expand access to education, food, health care and affordable housing; increase social and economic inclusion; offer improved alternative transportation options; and provide a balanced approach to land use between the built and natural environment.

"As America's design museum, Cooper Hewitt empowers visitors to see themselves as designersnot just of objects, but also of ideas, strategies and solutions that improve our daily lives," said Director Caroline Baumann. "'By the People' will showcase the innovative and impactful actions generated through design, and inspire creative problem-solving at local, regional, national and even international levels."

The accompanying 256-page book, By the People: Designing a Better America, will be published by Cooper Hewitt and distributed in the U.S. by Artbook | D.A.P. and worldwide by Thames & Hudson. Retail: $29.95.

In fall 2016 and winter 2017, a series of public programs will inspire conversation about innovative and systemic approaches being developed through design.

"By the People: Designing a Better America" is made possible by the generous support of the Ford Foundation. Additional support provided by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.

About the Museum

As the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design, Cooper Hewitt educates, inspires and empowers people through design. The museum has recently undergone a transformative renovation resulting in an entirely new visitor experience and 60 percent more exhibition space to showcase one of the most diverse and comprehensive collections of design works in existence.

SOURCE Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Web Site: www.CuMtn.com

TSX: CUM

VANCOUVER, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Copper Mountain Mining Corporation (TSX: CUM) (the "Company" or "Copper Mountain") announces that, for the second consecutive year, the Provincial Government of British Columbia has awarded the Edward Prior Award for mine safety to the Copper Mountain Mine.

Established 50 years ago by the B.C. Minister of Mines and Petroleum Resources to recognize the safety record of mines in the province, the Edward Prior Award is presented annually to the mid-sized mining operation having worked between 200,000 and 1,000,000 hours during the year, with the lowest injury frequency rate (Loss Time Incident). Representatives from the Copper Mountain Mine attended the B.C. Mines Safety Awards Banquet in Victoria and accepted the award on behalf of all team members at the Copper Mountain Mine.

Mr. Jim O'Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer of Copper Mountain said, "We are extremely proud of our mine employees for their dedication to safety. The mine has continued to work loss time incident free and, as of the end of the first quarter of 2016, has achieved 966 days - the equivalent of over 2 million hours, worked loss time incident free. Once again, this award acknowledges the dedication and strength of our operating team and reinforces our ongoing commitment to safety while continuing to achieve new operational efficiencies and production records."

About Copper Mountain Mining Corporation:

Copper Mountain's flagship asset is the 75% owned Copper Mountain mine located in southern British Columbia near the town of Princeton. The Company has a strategic alliance with Mitsubishi Materials Corporation who owns the remaining 25%. The Copper Mountain mine commenced production in the latter half of 2011, and has continued to improve its operations since start-up. The 18,000 acre site has a large resource of copper that remains open laterally and at depth. The mine has significant exploration potential that will need to be explored over the next few years to fully appreciate the property's full development potential. Additional information is available on the Company's web page at www.CuMtn.com.

On behalf of the Board of

COPPER MOUNTAIN MINING CORPORATION

"Jim O'Rourke"

Jim O'Rourke, P.Eng.

Chief Executive Officer

Note: This release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements may differ materially from actual future events or results. Readers are referred to the documents, filed by the Company on SEDAR at www.sedar.com, specifically the most recent reports which identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to review or confirm analysts' expectations or estimates or to release publicly any revisions to any forward-looking statement.

SOURCE Copper Mountain Mining Corporation

Related Links

http://www.CuMtn.com


FAIRFAX, Va., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Salient Commercial Solutions (Salient), a leading provider of technology consulting services announces that Cynthia Walker will be co-presenting with Daniel Borges at the Insurance Technology Association's (ITA) April event, ITA LIVE, in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The topic is "Untapped Riches." The presentation will be on Thursday, April 21, 1:30 PM EDT.

Ms. Walker, an innovator and Vice President of Salient CRGT's Data Analytics Innovation Center, delivers game-changing, impactful advanced analytics and big data solutions. As a recognized industry leader and author of numerous articles, she has over 25 years of experience helping commercial and government entities better manage and exploit data assets to enhance business outcomes, reduce risks, and increase efficiencies.

"Insurers today are sitting on a goldmine of untapped riches in the form of their enterprise data assets and readily available public data," says Ms. Walker. "In the past, small- to mid-sized insurers may have hesitated to launch big data predictive analytics initiatives using those data assets because of concerns over specialized skills, complex technologies, or investment costs. Recent innovations and advancements in predictive analytics technologies, particularly the explosion of self-service features, have, in effect, democratized advanced analytics and reduced the costs."

Daniel Borges, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Tuscarora Wayne Insurance Company, has more than 20 years in practice with information systems in the insurance industry. As CIO, Mr. Borges is responsible for providing the digital business experience necessary to be competitive today. Previously employed by LexisNexis Insurance Software, his experience includes developing and deploying network infrastructure and software systems, and performing systems and business analysis to develop insurance software used by more than 70 insurance companies across the United States.

"Insurance companies are looking to make the most of their data," says Mr. Borges. "Today, we can unlock tremendous value from our data assets for higher profits and competitive advantage very quickly and with a relatively small investment. Technology has opened the doors for insurers to realize the true benefits of data  analyzing it to forecast the future trends of the market."

In the session, Ms. Walker and Mr. Borges will provide examples and a compelling business case for insurers on how to embrace predictive analytics now.

"I am very excited about the program put together for ITA LIVE," said Jim Daggett, Executive Director of the ITA. "Using predictive analytics is vital for companies that want to improve their products, increase their profits, and fulfill the needs of their customers."

The Insurance Technology Association (ITA) is a unique organization whose goal is to provide members with opportunities to collaborate, educate, network, share, and use knowledge related to insurance technology. The ITA serves the insurance technology community as a resource and is dedicated to serving this specialized sector of the industry. Publications and educational programs created by the ITA are geared to professionals interested in or charged with evaluating, implementing, and marketing insurance-specific technology systems or services. The event will be held at the Marriott Harbor Beach Resort, Ft. Lauderdale, FL April 20  22, 2016. https://www.itapro.org/Event/ShowEventDescription/2067 .

About Salient Commercial Solutions, Inc.

We are an IT consulting firm that is dedicated to equipping our customers with the competitive edge they need in today's commercial marketplace. Backed by our Innovation Centers in Agile, Data Analytics, Cyber Security and Mobility we are committed to building capabilities and delivering quality solutions to accelerate business results. Our Insurance Productivity Services Group is nationally recognized for its 24 years of experience in helping insurers successfully integrate best in class technologies and strategies. Our staff's combination of real world insurance experience, technical proficiency and business acumen uniquely positions us to provide exceptional, ongoing value to our customers. Salient Commercial Solutions, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Salient CRGT. More information is available at http://www.salientcommercial.com/.

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SOURCE Salient Commercial Solutions

Related Links

http://www.salientcommercial.com


PUNE, India, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new market research report, "Data Center Security Market by Application Solutions (Logical Security Solutions and Physical Security Solutions), Service (Consulting, Integration and Deployment, and Managed Services), Data Center Type, Vertical, and Region - Global Forecast to 2021", published by MarketsandMarkets, the market is expected to grow from USD 6.32 Billion in 2016 to USD 12.91 Billion by 2021, at a high Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 15.36%.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 )

Browse 66 market data Tables and 43 Figures spread through 140 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Data Center Security Market"

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/datacenter-security-market-920.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.

For the purpose of report, 2015 has been considered as the historical year and 2016 as the base year for performing market estimation and forecasting.

The Data Center Security Market size is estimated to grow at a high Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 15.36% from 2016 to 2021. The global Data Center Security Market is witnessing a rapid growth due to the growing need for network virtualization and cloud computing. Network virtualization and cloud computing bring out higher work efficiency levels within the organization. Data center security solutions help in securing big data transfers and securing a network from any risk. Additionally, the growing adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) calls for advanced secured network solutions.

"Data center security product by application solution (logical and physical) to gain market prominence by the next five years".

The data center logical security solution by application solution is expected to hold the largest market share during the forecast period. More than half of the total Data Center Security Market revenue is contributed by logical security solution type and the trend is expected to continue during the forecast period. The physical security solution is also projected to show great growth opportunities in the next five years.

"The APAC Data Center Security Market is expected to be the fastest-growing region"

Considering the regional trends of the Data Center Security Market, North America is projected to hold the largest market size. The market in APAC is in the growth phase and is the fastest growing regional Data Center Security Market. This is mainly attributed to the growing focus of the market players to the great opportunities in the Data Center Security Market due to the presence of many developing countries and infrastructure in this region. The Latin America and MEA regions also depict great potentials in terms of adoption of data center security solutions.

There are various companies that are coming up with innovative and efficient data center security solutions and services in this market due to the need for improved network security and business operations, globally. The major players offering data center security solutions and services are Hewlett Packard Enterprises, International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation, CISCO Systems, Fortinet, Honeywell International, Schneider Electric SE, and others. Moreover, there are various key innovators in the market that provide innovative data center security solutions.

Request for Sample @ http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestsample.asp?id=920

The market is segmented based on application solutions that include physical security and logical security, and services which consists of consulting, integration & deployment, and managed services. Further, the Data Center Security Market is also segmented based on data center types, industrial verticals, and regions. The scope of the report covers detailed information regarding the major factors influencing the growth of the Data Center Security Market, such as drivers, restraints, opportunities, and challenges. A detailed analysis of the key industry players has been done to provide insights into their business overview, products and services, key strategies, new product launches, partnerships, collaborations, expansions, and competitive landscape associated with the Data Center Security Market.

Browse Related Reports:-

Data Center Logical Security Market by Solutions Types (Threat and Application Security Solutions, Access Control and Compliance, Data Protection Solutions), by Services Type, by Data Center Type, by Vertical, and by Regions - Forecasts and Analysis 2014 - 2019

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/data-center-logical-security-market-169970115.html

Data Center Physical Security Market by Solution Types (Video Surveillance, Monitoring and Access Control), by Service Types (Consulting, System Integration and Professional Services) - Global Forecasts up to 2020

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/data-center-physical-security-market-160173733.html

About MarketsandMarkets

MarketsandMarkets is the world's No. 2 firm in terms of annually published premium market research reports. Serving 1700 global fortune enterprises with more than 1200 premium studies in a year, M&M is catering to a multitude of clients across 8 different industrial verticals. We specialize in consulting assignments and business research across high growth markets, cutting edge technologies and newer applications. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model - GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors.

M&M's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. The new included chapters on Methodology and Benchmarking presented with high quality analytical infographics in our reports gives complete visibility of how the numbers have been arrived and defend the accuracy of the numbers.

We at MarketsandMarkets are inspired to help our clients grow by providing apt business insight with our huge market intelligence repository.

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Markets and Markets

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Visit MarketsandMarkets Blog @ http://www.marketsandmarketsblog.com/market-reports/telecom-it

Connect with us on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarkets

SOURCE MarketsandMarkets
NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

DataTracks, a leading global XBRL company for XBRL tagging services and Disclosure Management Solutions, has its software certified by XBRL US Center for Data Quality for successfully running Data Quality Committee (DQC) rules to produce expected results. DataTracks' XBRL software 'Disclosure Management Solution' is one of the five applications to be certified by the DQC.

DataTracks - Logo (PRNewsFoto/)

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121204/580321 )

The Data Quality Committee releases periodically approved guidelines and validations' rules to help the public companies (under SEC mandate) submit quality XBRL data. These rules comprise other standards in addition to the SEC's Edgar Filer Manual (EFM). The DQC released seven broad rules on November 18, 2015 which enable verification of the valid usage of thousands of US-GAAP taxonomy elements as per the rule functions. For example, Rule ID DQC_0015 checks the "Negative Value" usage against 2,420 US-GAAP elements. Such tests enhance the usability of the data and increase data comparability and analysis.

XBRL US has facilitated free validation of XBRL data against these rules. These rules are framed and developed by Data Quality Committee members. The DQC members are software and service providers from the XBRL industry who are united in their goal of enhancing the quality of XBRL data. The draft version of these rules are open to the general public for review and comment before they are released in their final shape. DataTracks is a member of the Center for Data Quality and has been actively involved in the rule creation phase.

Campbell Pryde, President and CEO of XBRL US, remarked, "Applications that carry the XBRL US Center for Data Quality Certification are in conformance with DQC rules. Proper implementation of these rules helps issuers improve the quality of their XBRL financials."

Suresh Illath, COO of DataTracks, affirms, "DataTracks has always been focusing on 'quality' XBRL filing with regulators, worldwide. In the UK too, DataTracks' services have been accredited by the tax regulator 'HMRC' and by the Accounting body 'ICAEW'. The recent certification from XBRL US' DQC has added another feather to our cap and enhanced our credentials in the US market."

About DataTracks:

DataTracks US is part of DataTracks Services Limited, leaders worldwide in preparation of financial statements in XBRL and iXBRL formats for filing with regulators. DataTracks prepares more than 12,000 XBRL statements annually for filing with regulators such as SEC in the United States, HMRC in the United Kingdom, Revenue in Ireland, Euro filing compliance reports in Europe, ACRA in Singapore and MCA in India.

Website for US: http://www.datatracks.com

Media contact:

T R Santhanakrishnan

[email protected]

+1 (908).379.8788



SOURCE DataTracks Services Limited
NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Deloitte today announced that it has received a 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award as the SAP S/4HANA Adoption Partner of the Year, which recognizes its outstanding contributions as an SAP Partner. SAP presents these awards annually to the top collaborators that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP and helping customers run better. Winners and finalists in 19 categories were chosen based on recommendations from the SAP field, customer feedback and performance indicators in the following umbrella categories: Build, Service, and Sell with each category including a Customers' Choice award, which recognizes a customer-nominated SAP Partner.

"This Pinnacle Award recognizes the value that we place on collaborating with SAP to make SAP S/4HANA the premier solutions platform for transforming the enterprise today," said Jan Waals, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and global SAP practice leader. "As our customers continue to see big results from SAP S/4HANA, we look forward to helping more organizations adopt it for their evolving business needs."

Deloitte earned not only distinction as the SAP S/4HANA Adoption Partner of the Year but also a second 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award as the Workforce Partner of the Year. Deloitte also placed as a finalist in a third 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award category, Services Provider of the Year.

The 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award for SAP S/4HANA Adoption Partner of the Year recognizes Deloitte's strength in helping accelerate adoption of the platform, based on co-innovation efforts, market impact, and innovative solutions. For descriptions of the awards, visit: http://www.sap.com/partners/become/partner-program/benefits/pinnacle-awards.html.

"Winning the SAP Pinnacle Award is a tremendous accomplishment," said Rodolpho Cardenuto, president of SAP Global Channels & General Business. "Only 16 companies in our ecosystem of 13,000 partners received this recognition. Deloitte should be very proud of their success."

Kevin Ichhpurani, executive vice president of SAP Strategic Business Development & Global Ecosystem added, "The SAP Pinnacle Award winners represent the very best in our partner community, and we congratulate Deloitte for a well-deserved 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award."

Deloitte is an SAP global services partner and has received multiple awards from SAP. With more than 13,000 practitioners dedicated to SAP solutions in its global network, Deloitte has served more than 7,000 clients, assisting them in their efforts not only to efficiently implement SAP solutions, but equally as important, to realize business value from those investments.

SAP Pinnacle Awards shine a spotlight on SAP's partners' remarkable contributions, acknowledging their dedication to teamwork, innovative approach and capacity to challenge what is possible to help customers achieve their goals. Award winners will be formally recognized at the SAP Global Partner Summit to take place on May 16, in conjunction with SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP's international customer conference, May 17-19 in Orlando, Florida.

About Deloitte

Deloitte provides audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk management, tax, and related services to public and private clients spanning multiple industries. With a globally connected network of member firms in more than 150 countries and territories, Deloitte brings world-class capabilities and high-quality service to clients, delivering the insights they need to address their most complex business challenges. Deloitte's more than 225,000 professionals are committed to making an impact that matters.

SAP, SAPPHIRE and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. See http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx for additional trademark information and notices.

All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

SAP Forward-looking Statement

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

For more information, please visit www.deloitte.com/SAP, or contact [email protected].

As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.

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SOURCE Deloitte

Related Links

http://www.deloitte.com/us


NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Deloitte today announced that it has received a 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award as the Workforce Partner of the Year, which recognizes its outstanding contributions as an SAP SuccessFactors Partner. SAP presents these awards annually to the top collaborators that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP SuccessFactors and helping customers accelerate. Winners and finalists in 19 categories were chosen based on recommendations from the SAP field, customer feedback and performance indicators in the following umbrella categories: Build, Service and Sell with each category including a Customers' Choice award, which recognizes a customer-nominated SAP partner.

"This Pinnacle Award demonstrates our ongoing commitment to leveraging solutions such as SAP SuccessFactors to effectively address some of the greatest workforce challenges organizations face today," said Beth Thiebault, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and leader of the global practice for the SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite. "As the workforce evolves and as business needs evolve, we continue to see the value that SAP solutions can bring to our customers who are looking to run simple when it comes to human capital management."

Deloitte earned not only distinction as the Workforce Partner of the Year but also a second 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award as the SAP S/4HANA Adoption Partner of the Year. Deloitte also placed as a finalist in a third 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award category, Services Provider of the Year.

The 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award for Workforce Partner of the Year recognizes Deloitte's ability to drive continued customer success and market expansion efforts for SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Fiori, and SAP Fieldglass. For descriptions of the awards, visit: http://www.sap.com/partners/become/partner-program/benefits/pinnacle-awards.html.

"Winning the SAP Pinnacle Award is a tremendous accomplishment," said Rodolpho Cardenuto, president of SAP Global Channels & General Business. "Only 16 companies in our ecosystem of 13,000 partners received this recognition. Deloitte should be very proud of their success."

Kevin Ichhpurani, executive vice president of SAP Strategic Business Development & Global Ecosystem added, "The SAP Pinnacle Award winners represent the very best in our partner community, and we congratulate Deloitte for a well-deserved 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award."

Deloitte is an SAP global services partner and has received multiple awards from SAP SuccessFactors. With more than 13,000 practitioners dedicated to SAP solutions in its global network, Deloitte has served more than 7,000 clients, assisting them in their efforts not only to efficiently implement SAP solutions, but equally as important, to realize business value from those investments.

SAP Pinnacle Awards shine a spotlight on SAP's partners' remarkable contributions, acknowledging their dedication to teamwork, innovative approach and capacity to challenge what is possible to help customers achieve their goals. Award winners will be formally recognized at the SAP Global Partner Summit to take place on May 16, in conjunction with SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP's international customer conference May 1719 in Orlando, Florida.

About Deloitte

Deloitte provides audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk management, tax, and related services to public and private clients spanning multiple industries. With a globally connected network of member firms in more than 150 countries and territories, Deloitte brings world-class capabilities and high-quality service to clients, delivering the insights they need to address their most complex business challenges. Deloitte's more than 225,000 professionals are committed to making an impact that matters.

For more information, please visit www.deloitte.com/SAP, or contact [email protected].

SAP, SAPPHIRE and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. See http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx for additional trademark information and notices.

All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

SAP Forward-looking Statement

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120803/MM52028LOGO-a

SOURCE Deloitte

Related Links

http://www.deloitte.com


SAN FRANCISCO, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- DoorDash, the on-demand delivery service and technology company, today announced a partnership with CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc. ("CKE"), parent company of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's to deliver the chains' famous premium burgers, sandwiches, fries, shakes and more. The partnership will launch in Southern California at select Carl's Jr. locations, with plans to expand to additional Carl's Jr. and Hardee's restaurants across the country in the coming months. This announcement marks Carl's Jr.'s first official delivery partnership and DoorDash's first partnership with a national quick service restaurant ("QSR") burger chain.

Starting today, customers in the Southern California area, including Los Angeles, San Diego, and Orange County, will be able to order their favorite menu items from Carl's Jr. via the DoorDash Android or iOS app or online at DoorDash.com. Through DoorDash, customers can order delivery of Carl's Jr. classics including a variety of 100 percent Angus Beef Thickburgers, Hand-Scooped Ice Cream Shakes, CrissCut Fries, and Carl's Jr.'s latest menu item: the Midnight Moonshine Burger. To celebrate the partnership, for a limited time DoorDash will waive delivery fees on all Carl's Jr. orders. After the promotional period, delivery fees start at $3.99 and there are no minimum order sizes.

"We're thrilled to bring Carl's Jr. to our Southern California customers with DoorDash, making it easier and faster than ever for them to get the burgers they love," said Tony Xu, CEO and co-founder of DoorDash. "Whether an old favorite or a new taste, we're looking forward to giving customers a new and innovative way to get delicious, custom orders from Carl's Jr. right to their doorsteps."

"For nearly 75 years, we've been working to provide our customers with fast, fresh and delicious premium food," said Ryan Hanawalt, Vice President of Operations Support at CKE. "With today's launch of the DoorDash partnership, we're adding direct-to-home and direct-to-work convenience to that list as well. So whether you're craving a classic like our Double Bacon Western Cheeseburger, or a flavorful newcomer like the Midnight Moonshine Burger, with a few clicks on DoorDash, our delicious food can be on its way to you within minutes and without ever having to leave the comfort of your home or office."

To place your on-demand order from Carl's Jr., please visit doordash.com or download DoorDash for Android or iOS .

About DoorDash

DoorDash is a Silicon Valley technology company that brings the very best of the city to your doorstep by connecting customers with local businesses. Founded in the summer of 2013, DoorDash empowers business-owners to grow their businesses by offering on-demand delivery, data-driven insights, and better in-store efficiency. By building the on-demand delivery infrastructure for local cities, DoorDash is bringing communities closer, one doorstep at a time. Learn more in the DoorDash blog or at www.doordash.com

About CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc.

CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc. ("CKE") is a privately held company headquartered in Carpinteria, Calif. Through its subsidiaries, CKE owns and licenses Carl's Jr. and Hardee's quick-service restaurants. CKE operates Carl's Jr. and Hardee's as one brand under two names acknowledging the regional heritage of both banners. After opening its first restaurants in New York and New Jersey this spring and recent international openings in Canada, Colombia and Guatemala, CKE now has a total of 3,672 franchised or company-operated restaurants in 44 states and 38 foreign countries and U.S. territories. Known for its one-of-a-kind premium menu items such as 100 percent Black Angus Thickburgers, Made from Scratch Biscuits, Hand-Breaded Chicken Tenders and Fresh Baked Buns, as well as an award-winning marketing approach, the Carl's Jr./Hardee's brand continues to deliver substantial and consistent growth in the U.S. and overseas. The Carl's Jr./Hardee's system is now 92 percent franchised, with international restaurants representing 19 percent of the system. For more information about CKE, please visit www.ckr.com or its brand sites at www.carlsjr.com and www.hardees.com.

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SOURCE DoorDash
BISHOP'S STORTFORD, England and SAN DIEGO, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Dotmatics, a leading provider of scientific informatics solutions and services to the life sciences industry, and eMolecules announced today that they have formed a key partnership to offer eMolecules' comprehensive collection of chemicals within the powerful, fast and flexible Dotmatics Platform.

The result of the partnership will be a new Dotmatics eMolecules component that will enable users to select chemical compounds for sourcing, enhancing drug discovery, or chemistry research.

Users of Vortex, Browser and Studies Notebook will now be able to benefit from the full eMolecules collection of chemical compounds enhanced with additional chemistry property data provided by the Dotmatics chemistry platform.

In the last 10 years, eMolecules has become the most widely adopted chemical sourcing database used by the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and chemical industries. The wide coverage of building blocks and screening compounds collated from hundreds of vendors has led to it becoming a trusted source of chemistry information in the industry. The eMolecules database contains more than 7 million unique chemicals and more than 20 million products including different packaging and suppliers.

Dotmatics powerful chemically intelligent search engine enables users to query, search and retrieve results across the entire eMolecules database in seconds. Users will be able to rapidly search and identify compounds, available quantities, indicative pricing, and suppliers. In Browser they will be able to easily compare compounds and products from different vendors and make informed decisions about which compounds to purchase.

eMolecules' data has been enriched with additional properties including matched molecular pairs, protecting group information and predicted properties provided by the Dotmatics platform. These benefits, available exclusively in the new component, will enable scientists to make the most appropriate decisions when selecting compounds for a synthesis or screening.

In addition, using the results from the compound lists generated by the Dotmatics-eMolecules component, organisations can simplify their sourcing and procurement process by using eMolecules' fulfilment services directly.

"This partnership brings together a sophisticated database and our powerful search technology," said Mike Hartshorn, PhD, Chief Science Officer of Dotmatics. "The chemical industry provides most of the raw material and products we use today from reagents to screening compounds; together with eMolecules, we will help customers easily manage the huge amount of data available for compound procurement."

"Dotmatics is an ideal partner due to their extensive capabilities in knowledge management, data storage enterprise query and reporting, data analysis, and visualization," said Niko Gubernator, PhD, CEO of eMolecules. "Together our companies are uniquely poised to empower researchers to accelerate chemical discovery."

About eMolecules:

eMolecules is driven to remove the fear, hurt and heartbreak of health problems worldwide, by enabling scientists to accelerate their research to find the cures. To achieve this eMolecules provides business intelligence data and integrated ecommerce software for screening compound, chemical building blocks and primary antibody supply chains. These tools combined with their acquisition, aggregation and analytical services greatly empower drug discovery researchers working in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, academia, CRO and agrochemical industries. A privately owned company, eMolecules was founded in 2005 at its San Diego headquarters and has offices in Boston and London employing over 40 people across the three sites.

About Dotmatics:

Dotmatics is a leading global scientific informatics software and services provider, delivering solutions tailored to the modern, highly collaborative and mobile scientific environments. The company provides solutions to several vertical markets, including the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, academia, food and beverage, oil and gas and agrochemical industries. Dotmatics' enterprise solutions are flexible, scalable and configurable, providing effective scientific information management across entire organisations, from discovery research to development and early manufacturing. Dotmatics has significant expertise in scientific informatics, including database management for chemistry and biologics, electronic laboratory notebooks, chemical and biological registration, screening data management, SAR analysis, reporting, and visualisation. Dotmatics solutions are available for local or cloud deployment and they are supported on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. A privately owned company, Dotmatics was founded in 2005 and their headquarters is based south of Cambridge in the UK. Visit http://www.dotmatics.com.

For More Information Please Contact:

Marla Kertzman for Dotmatics

[email protected]

+1-209-852-9027

Dr. Haydn Boehm for eMolecules

[email protected]

+44(0)1438-791108

SOURCE Dotmatics
One consequence of the great error India may have committed in bowing to the demands of those who hijacked IC 814 to Kandahar back in 1999 was the release of Masood Azhar, who went on to build the deadly jihadi group Jaish-e-Mohammed. The group, with proven ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, operates with pan-national objectives in PoK, Pakistan and Afghanistan, even as the cause it most espouses is the liberation of Kashmir from India. Azhars freedom, after being arrested at least twice by Pakistan, including recently after the Pathankot airbase attack, allows him to be the motive force of a militant group that today threatens the free world.

The US has equated Jaish with other global threats from Pakistan like LeT, D-Company and the Haqqani network. Pakistans two-faced approach to terror has allowed organisations like Jaish to flourish. India has conveyed to China its strong disapproval of the country using its veto power to block a UN resolution against Jaishs ideologue-leader Masood Azhar. External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj used a meeting in Moscow to bring up the subject.

Its current relationship dynamics shaped by the ambitious connectivity project through the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, Chinas Pakistan tilt is too well known for India to believe China would see reason straightaway. Beijing has obviously been prompted by Pakistan to take such action in UNSC. What effect pleas on how terrorism needs to be fought with a commonality of purpose will have on the Chinese remains to be seen. India has at least been assured that a dialogue window is open on a terror mastermind.
LONDON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Angle has announced results from a metastatic breast cancer research study carried out by its KOL partner University of Southern California (USC) Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. Headline data potentially prove that circulating cancer cells (CTCs) captured using Parsortix have the same biology compared to invasive tissue biopsy and can be used to guide the treatment. While this will have to be replicated in larger-scale trials, it represents a potential third clinical application, in which Parsortix can establish a new standard of care.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130417/608168 )



Angle will now focus on implementing a clinical trial in partnership with USC and other centers. When there is more clarity about commercialization in terms of timelines and positioning, we will review our financial forecasts and the assumptions underlying our DCF-based valuation, which is unchanged at $136m or $23.0/share.

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SOURCE Edison Investment Research
LONDON, April 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- "The increasing use of electronics and need for highly reliable electronic devices would drive the conformal coating market"

The conformal coating market is expected to grow from USD 1.70 billion in 2014, and it is expected to reach USD 2.41 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 5.99% between 2015 and 2020. The increasing use of electronic components especially in automotive, and consumer electronics sector, and growing demand for highly reliable electronic devices/equipment are the major drivers for the conformal coating market.



"The market for Parylene conformal coating is expected to grow at the highest CAGR"

Parylene conformal coating in the conformal coating material market is estimated to grow at a high CAGR during the forecast period. This is because of its ability to provide excellent protection from moisture, vibration, abrasion, extreme temperature, and chemicals. Furthermore, this coating is mil-spec, and FDA approved coating; which is accelerating its growth in aerospace & defense and medical electronics sector.



"The market in APAC is expected to grow at the highest rate"

The market in APAC is expected to grow at a high CAGR between 2015 and 2020. The rapid growth of the automotive industry in this region, in addition to the growth of consumer electronics, and aerospace & defense sectors has contributed to the growth of the conformal coating material in the APAC region.



In the process of determining and verifying the market size for several segments and sub-segments gathered through secondary research, extensive primary interviews were conducted with key people.



Break-up of profile of primary participants is given below as:



- By Company Type: Tier 1  22 %, Tier 2  35% and Tier 3  43%

- By Designation: C level  29%, Director level  37%, Others  34%

- By Region: North America  39%, Europe  31%, APAC  21%, RoW  9%



Key players in the market include Chase Corporation (U.S.), MG Chemicals Ltd. (Canada), DOW Corning Corporation (U.S.), Chemtronics (U.S.), Dymax Corporation (U.S.), Electrolube (U.K.), Nordson Corporation (U.S.), Precision Valve & Automation, Inc. (U.S.), Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. Ltd. (Japan), Henkel AG & Co. KGaA (Germany), and Peters Group (Germany) among others.



The report would help the market leaders/new entrants in this market in the following ways:



1. This report segments the conformal coating market comprehensively and provides the closest approximations of the revenue numbers for the overall market and the subsegments across the different verticals and regions.

2. The report helps stakeholders to understand the pulse of the market and provides them information on key market drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities.

3. This report would help stakeholders to better understand the competitor and gain more insights to enhance their position in the business. The competitive landscape section includes competitor ecosystem, newproduct develpoments, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions.





Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/3773476/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

Related Links

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WALTHAM, Mass., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EuroSite Power Inc., (OTCQX: EUSP) an On-Site Utility solutions provider, offering clean electricity, heat, hot water and cooling solutions to healthcare, hospitality, housing and leisure centres in the United Kingdom (UK) and Europe will release its financial results for the first quarter of 2016 on Monday, May 16, 2016. The earnings press release will be available in the "News & Information" section of the Company website at http://www.eurositepower.co.uk. Members of the Company's senior management team will hold a conference call and webcast on the same day at 9:00 AM Eastern Time to discuss the company's first quarter financial performance.

The conference call will be available live via telephone and webcast. To listen to the audio portion, dial toll free (844) 492-3726 within the U.S., toll free (855) 669-9657 from Canada, or +1 (412) 542-4187 from other international locations. Participants should ask to be joined to the EuroSite Power earnings call. Please begin dialing at least 10 minutes prior to the scheduled starting time. Alternately, to register for and listen to the live webcast, please go to http://investors.eurositepower.co.uk/events.

The earnings conference call will be recorded and available for playback one hour after the end of the call through Monday May 23, 2016. To listen to the playback, dial (877) 344-7529 within the U.S., (855) 669-9658 from Canada, or +1 (412) 317-0088 from other international locations and use Replay Access Code 10084858. Following the call, the webcast will be archived for 30 days.

On-Site Utility

EuroSite Power sells the energy produced from an onsite energy system to an individual property as an alternative to the outright sale of energy equipment. On-Site Utility solution customers only pay for the energy produced by the system and receive a guaranteed discount rate on the price of the energy. All system capital, installation, operating expenses and support are paid by EuroSite Power.

About EuroSite Power

EuroSite Power Limited is a subsidiary of American DG Energy Inc. (NYSE MKT: ADGE). The Company provides institutional, commercial and small industrial facilities with clean, reliable power, cooling, heat and hot water at lower costs than charged by conventional energy suppliers  without any capital or start-up costs to the energy user. More information can be found at www.eurositepower.co.uk.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release contains forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements, as disclosed on the Company's website and in Securities and Exchange Commission filings. This press release does not constitute an offer to buy or sell securities by the Company, its subsidiaries or any associated party and is meant purely for informational purposes. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, even if subsequently made available by the Company on its website or otherwise. The Company does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.





Investor Contact: Media Contact: Ariel F. Babcock, CFA Paul Hamblyn EuroSite Power Inc. EuroSite Power Inc. +1 781.466.6413 +44 792.085.9540 [email protected] [email protected]





SOURCE EuroSite Power Inc.

Related Links

http://www.eurositepower.co.uk


CARROLLTON, Texas, March 22, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- FASTSIGNS International, Inc., the leader in signs, graphics and visual communications, has been selected as a finalist for the 2016 Secretary of Defense Employer Support Freedom Award (commonly referred to as the "Freedom Award").

The Freedom Award is the highest recognition presented by the Department of Defense to employers for their exemplary support of National Guard and Reserve members. FASTSIGNS International was nominated for the award by Business Consultant and Air Force Reservist Stephen MacKenzie from Indianapolis, Indiana after his recent deployment overseas. MacKenzie and his family received support from FASTSIGNS International to ensure he and his family would be cared for while he was away from home serving his country.

"It's an honor to be considered a top finalist for this national recognition on behalf of the Department of Defense and I believe that standing behind our active duty and veteran employees is part of our corporate responsibility," said Catherine Monson, CEO of FASTSIGNS International, Inc. "We are deeply touched that Stephen MacKenzie nominated us and will continue to stand by our values to offer support and incentives to veteran and active duty servicemen and women who are part of the FASTSIGNS family."

Overall, more than 2,420 nominations were received for the Freedom Award nationally. This year's finalists are comprised of 11 large employers, 10 small employers and nine public sector employers. Recipients of this award will be announced in late May and a formal ceremony at the Pentagon will follow. FASTSIGNS International is the only finalist located in the state of Texas who is in the running to receive this acknowledgement.

Leaders in the veteran community, over 10 percent of FASTSIGNS franchisees are comprised of current and former military veterans. Veterans possess a number of valued skills and a wealth of experience essential to successful franchise business ownership. Veterans are disciplined, driven, self-motivated and obtain leadership skills that make them ideal franchisees.

As part of the commitment to veterans, FASTSIGNS International is also a proud participant of the International Franchise Association's VetFran program (Veterans Transition Franchise Initiative), which assists military veterans by helping them access franchise opportunities through training, financial assistance and industry support. Veterans that join the FASTSIGNS U.S. network can take advantage of specific incentives including a reduced franchise fee of $22,250, a savings of 50 percent, in addition to reduced royalties and advertising fees for the first year. FASTSIGNS International has also been recognized as a top franchise for military veterans by leading publications, including USA Today, G.I. Jobs magazine and Military Times magazine, due to the recognition for the company's financial discounts for military veterans, corporate support and outstanding growth.

For information about the FASTSIGNS franchise opportunity and specific veterans incentives for veterans, contact Mark Jameson at [email protected] or 214-346-5679, or download an eBook that explores the FASTSIGNS franchise opportunity at http://amzn.to/1FrnDJu.

About FASTSIGNS

FASTSIGNS International, Inc. is the worldwide franchisor for the more than 600 FASTSIGNS sign, graphic and visual communications centers in nine countries including the US (and Puerto Rico), Canada, England, Mexico, the Caribbean, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Australia (where centers operate as SIGNWAVE). The largest sign franchise in North America, the independently owned and operated FASTSIGNS centers provide comprehensive visual communications solutions to help customers of all sizes  across all industries  meet their business objectives and increase their business visibility through the use of signs, graphics, printing, promotional products and related marketing services. The Franchise Research Institute has named FASTSIGNS a top sign and graphics franchise and has awarded the company certification as a 2015 World-Class Franchise for four consecutive years. FASTSIGNS was also recognized by USA Today, Military Times magazine, G.I. Jobs magazine and Franchise Business Review as one of the top franchises for military veterans. For more information about FASTSIGNS franchise programs, contact Mark Jameson ([email protected] or 214-346-5679) or visit http://www.fastsigns.com/.

CONTACT:

Sloane Fistel

Fish Consulting

(954) 893-9150

[email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160216/333668LOGO

SOURCE FASTSIGNS International, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.fastsigns.com


AUSTIN, Texas, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Vyze, a leading technology provider of financing solutions at point of purchase, has significantly expanded its capabilities and launched several new strategic partnerships to provide retailers and manufacturers with more ways to attract and retain customers. With the completion of this major phase in the company's evolution, Vyze also introduced their new corporate brand, logo and website today. Formerly NewComLink, Vyze's new technological advances and expanded lending partnerships bring true omni-channel support to businesses and help them offer more financing options to more customers.

This transformation represents the next major step in delivering the company's vision for the future: helping propel revenue growth for their clients by expanding and simplifying the financing experience.

"We've recognized a disconnect between consumers' financing desires and businesses' abilities to meet those needs," explained Vyze Chief Marketing Officer Doug Filak. "With our solutions we're committed to helping retailers and manufacturers drive revenue growth and satisfy their customers."

The Vyze team has broadened its capabilities to help businesses reach customers wherever they shop: from retail point of sale locations to online, from the comfort of their own connected devices. With these additional capabilities, now more customers can apply and be approved for financing.

"Our team has focused on simplifying the financing experience for businesses and their customers as much as possible," added Vyze Chief Technology Officer Terence Spielman. "We want customers to have the most positive purchase experience whenever and wherever they shop."

Vyze has established new lending partnerships to provide financing opportunities for consumers across the entire credit spectrum. While an individual lender serves only a single segment of customers, Vyze's full suite of lending options makes it possible for businesses to provide financing to even more of their customers.

"This is a very exciting time for the entire Vyze team," added Filak. "Though we're proud of our recent progress, we're also incredibly motivated to continue enhancing the financing experience for our partners and their customers."

To learn more about Vyze's financing solutions, access www.vyze.com.

About Vyze

Vyze is a leading financial technology company for businesses. By combining a comprehensive lending supply, technology, and support under one roof, Vyze is able to deliver businesses simpler, more satisfying financing experiences for their customers, wherever and whenever they shop.

For more information, contact:

Ian Toner- 720-726-5460, [email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356464LOGO

SOURCE Vyze

Related Links

http://www.vyze.com


Touro College of Dental Medicine at New York Medical College joins the Touro School of Health Sciences, Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine (with campuses in Harlem and Middletown, NY), Touro College of Pharmacy, and New York Medical College in New York State. These institutions collectively graduate more than 2,000 health care professionals every year.

"As New York State's first new dental school in nearly half a century and the only dental school in the Hudson Valley, the Touro College of Dental Medicine at NYMC will fill a void in dental education and improve access to oral health care, particularly in underserved rural and urban communities throughout the region," said Dr. Kadish. "The school will address the existing shortage of training options for dentists in New York State and create a pipeline for the next generation of dental professionals, while also seeing to the immediate needs of the community through its dental clinic. We look forward to welcoming our first class and the clinic's first patients thereafter, and to further strengthening the regional health care system for generations to come."

The school is intended to improve the oral health care delivery network in New York State, where the population has grown by 4.5 million people since 1968 when the last school of dentistry opened.

"With dental care as the foothold of good overall health care, it is important that this area of professional health care education continues to grow," continued Dr. Kadish. "Fortunately, the dental school's location on the New York Medical College campus will create invaluable opportunities for inter-disciplinary training."

With the goal of bolstering dental education and improving access to oral health care throughout New York's Hudson Valley region and beyond, the Touro College of Dental Medicine at NYMC will include a four-year pre-doctoral program for students, a continuing education program for practicing dentists, and a 132-chair community dental clinic focused on providing patients in underserved communities in the Hudson Valley and the Bronx with affordable and quality treatment.

In the school's inaugural year, set to begin in the fall of 2016, anticipated enrollment is 110 students. When at full capacity, the school will include approximately 440 students and offer basic science coursework taught by the medical school faculty as well as state-of- the-art digital dental clinical capabilities.

The Touro College of Dental Medicine at NYMC will also conduct a range of research efforts including: research focused on reducing the cost of effective care; population outcomes-based research concentrated on interventions; and translational research that harnesses scientific discoveries to produce new devices and treatment options for patients.

"The dental school's location within the NYMC campus gives the school and its students a competitive edge," said Edward C. Halperin, M.D., M.A., NYMC chancellor and CEO and Touro College and University System provost for Biomedical Affairs. "Students of the Touro College of Dental Medicine at NYMC will reap both the benefits of a new school, including state-of-the-art facilities and leading educational innovations, and those of an established institution, including NYMC's expert faculty, long-standing and celebrated research program, and strong network of affiliated hospitals."

Touro has appointed Jay P. Goldsmith, D.M.D., as the founding dean of the dental school. Dr. Goldsmith was formerly a professor, program director, and deputy chief in NYMC's Department of Dental Medicine. In addition to his experience in the academic world, Dr. Goldsmith is a leading dentist, oral and maxillofacial surgeon with more than 50 years of experience, a fellow of the American College of Dentists, and founding fellow of the American College of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons as well as past president of the New York Academy of Dentistry.

"Students of the Touro College of Dental Medicine at NYMC will enjoy the advantages of this extensive medical education network and enhanced inter-professional connections as they benefit from world-class faculty and facilities, as well as being part of an historic initiative in dental education," said Dr. Goldsmith, dean of Touro College of Dental Medicine at NYMC

Edward F. Farkas, D.D.S., has been named senior associate dean for clinical affairs and chairman of dentistry. Dr. Farkas, a 1985 graduate of NYU, has been practicing general dentistry in New York City for over 30 years, and has been involved with the founding of the dental school from the outset.

"The mission of the TCDM at NYMC is to graduate outstanding dental professionals who will utilize a complex knowledge base and sophisticated perceptual skills and deliver excellent health care service to their diverse communities with integrity, compassion, and empathy. The school is dedicated to conducting important educational and clinical research, while providing excellent dental health services to the public," said Farkas.

Ronnie Myers, D.D.S. has been named senior associate dean for academic and administrative affairs. Previously he served as vice dean for administration at Columbia University College of Dental Medicine. Salomon Amar, D.D.S., PhD, has been named provost for biomedical research at TCUS, professor of molecular biology at NYMC, and professor of dentistry at TCDM.

"As one who has been involved in dental education for thirty-four years, I was moved by Touro's charge to merge education with a compassionate approach to patient care and to view health care delivery as a responsibility. I envision the development of an educational program that will arm our diverse student body with the tools necessary to provide primary care to those most at risk. To that end, developing a program from the ground up is an opportunity of a life time," said Dr. Myers.

In addition to NYMC and the new dental school, Touro's medical programs include three schools of osteopathic medicine with campuses in Harlem and Middletown, New York; Vallejo, California; and Henderson, Nevada, a school of pharmacy in New York, New York, and a school of health sciences with campuses in New York and Bay Shore, New York.

The Touro College and University System

Touro is a system of non-profit institutions of higher and professional education. Touro College was chartered in 1970 primarily to enrich the Jewish heritage, and to serve the larger American and global community. Approximately 18,000 students are currently enrolled in its various schools and divisions. Touro College has 29 branch campuses, locations and instructional sites in the New York area, as well as branch campuses and programs in Berlin, Jerusalem and Moscow. New York Medical College; Touro University California and its Nevada branch campus; Touro University Worldwide and its Touro College Los Angeles division; as well as Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, Ill. are separately accredited institutions within the Touro College and University System. For further information on Touro College, please go to: http://www.touro.edu/news/ .

New York Medical College

Founded in 1860, New York Medical College (NYMC) is one of the oldest and largest health sciences colleges in the country with more than 1,400 students, 1,300 residents and clinical fellows, nearly 3,000 faculty members, and 16,000 living alumni. The College, which joined the Touro College and University System in 2011, is located in Westchester County, New York, and offers advanced degrees from the School of Medicine, the Graduate School of Basic Medical Sciences, and the School of Health Sciences and Practice. The College manages more than $32.6 million in research and other sponsored programs, notably in the areas of cancer, cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases, kidney disease, the neurosciences, disaster medicine, and vaccine development. With a network of affiliated hospitals that includes large urban medical centers, small suburban clinics and high-tech regional tertiary care facilities, NYMC provides a wide variety of clinical training opportunities throughout the tristate region for medical students, residents, and other health providers. For more information, visit www.nymc.edu.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/357057

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/357058

SOURCE Touro College & University System

Related Links

http://www.touro.edu


"First Protocol believes in providing the very best event delivery, strategy, creative solutions and innovative experiences to companies around the world," said Maureen Ryan-Fable, CEO Americas at First Protocol. "We have known Barry and worked with him for a number of years and are thrilled to be incorporating his skills and expertise to help us continue to deliver world-class solutions for our clients."

While based in the US, Mr. Richards will also lead account growth in the UK, overseeing the firm's managed services and expanding the agency's event resourcing capabilities and ability to seamlessly integrate with client teams onsite. These resourcing solutions allow clients to outsource a portion or all of their event functions directly to First Protocol to manage. The agency currently provides these services for three leading global financial institutions. This integrated approach, and the data and benchmarking that underpin it, are unique offerings of First Protocol.

"I am very excited to help drive First Protocol's growth trajectory, and in particular to help expand the existing managed services model to offer a range of services that seamlessly integrate into our clients' event lifecycles and support their changing meetings and event needs," said Mr. Richards. "As someone who is passionate about delivering exceptional event experiences, I also look forward to joining a team of people who share that vision."

Prior to joining First Protocol, Mr. Richards spent nearly 10 years with Grass Roots, a company he took from a start-up to a full service meeting and events agency in the US, which was on the 2014 and 2015 Inc. 5000 lists of fastest-growing privately held companies in America.

Mr. Richards is a finalist in the 2015 EANYC & SmartCEO Deals of Distinction awards, which honors innovative business leaders and deal-makers from the Greater New York City region who have a unique story to tell about a business transaction and/or partnership that made a significant impact on the company's success. He also sits on a number of executive advisory boards for major hotel brands, industry associations and the New York CEO community.

First Protocol, which celebrates its 20-year anniversary this year, specializes in the design and delivery of high-quality, live events for some of the world's most iconic companies, from financial services to technology to automotive. The hire of Mr. Richards further complements First Protocol's full-service offerings in strategy, content development, managed services and creative direction.

About First Protocol

Founded in 1996, First Protocol is an International Events Agency with offices in New York, London, Los Angeles and Singapore. First Protocol provides world-class event delivery, creative development and technical production for a wide range of clients and international brands. First Protocol clients span many industries including financial services, aerospace, technology, medical, automotive, media and the non-profit sector. For more information, please visit: www.firstprotocol.com.

Media Contact:

Jennifer Werdel

Allison+Partners

P: +1 (503) 290-7302

E: [email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356842

SOURCE First Protocol

Related Links

http://www.firstprotocol.com


PUNE, India, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The report "Flame Retardant Market by Type (ATH, Antimony Oxide, Brominated, Chlorinated, Phosphorous), Application (Epoxy, Polyolefins), and End-use Industry (Building & Construction, Electronics & Appliances, Wire & Cables, Automotive) - Global Forecast to 2021", published by MarketsandMarkets, The global market is projected to reach USD 12.81 Billion by 2021 at a CAGR of 6.4% between 2016 and 2021.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 )



Browse 143 market data Tables and 52 Figures spread through 172 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Flame Retardant Market"

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/flame-retardant-chemicals-market-686.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.

Building & construction end-use industry to continue dominating the market

Building & construction, electronics & appliances, and wires & cables are the major end-use industries of flame retardants. Building & construction is the largest end-use industry for flame retardants. Increased regulations pertaining to fire safety in the developed economies, such as Japan, the U.S., Germany, Australia, and Singapore are estimated to drive the flame retardants market considerably in future. Regulatory guidelines, such as NFPA 80A, NFPA 703, NFPA 255, NFPA 251, and NFPA 220 defines fire safety standards in the U.S. Similarly in Europe, CFPA lays out the fire safety standards for building construction.

Aluminum Trihydrate to dominate the flame retardant market

Aluminum Trihydrate dominated the Flame Retardant Market, with Asia-Pacific as the largest market in 2015, and the trend is estimated to remain same during the forecast period. Low cost and environmental-friendly properties in comparison to other flame retardants are the major factors driving the demand for aluminum trihydrate. Brominated flame retardants account for the second largest share with healthy growth in Asia-Pacific owing to extensive use in the electrical & electronics industry. It grows moderately in the markets in Europe and North America owing to stringent environment regulations restricting the use of toxic chemicals.

Increasing demand from Asia-Pacific accelerates growth of the flame retardants market

Asia-Pacific is the leading market for flame retardants, followed by North America and Western Europe. Asia-Pacific is projected to register the highest growth owing to vast potential that can be realized in near future because of increasing safety concerns and growth of various end-use industries in the developing economies in the region.

The leading players in the market include Albemarle (U.S.), ICL (Israel), Clariant (Switzerland), Lanxess (Germany), Nabaltec (Germany), The Dow Chemical Company (U.S.), BASF (Germany), Akzo Nobel (Netherlands), Italmatch (Italy), and Huber Engineered Materials (U.S.).

For More Info Make Inquiry @ http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=686

The report covers the flame retardants market and its trends in six major regions, namely, North America, Western Europe, Central & Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, and the Middle East & Africa. The market is also analyzed on the basis of type, namely, aluminum trihydrate, antimony oxide, brominated, chlorinated, phosphorous, and others (zinc sulfide, zinc oxide, boron compounds, magnesium hydroxide, and nitrogen containing compounds). Flame retardants are added with various resins such as epoxy, unsaturated polyester, polyolefins, PVC, polyamide, PS, PU, PET & PBT, and ABS to manufacture products used in various end-use industries. In addition, building & construction, electronics & appliances, wires & cables, automotive & transportation, textiles, and other end-use industries are studied and included in this report.

Browse Related Reports:

Fire Resistant Fabric Market Type (Apparel & Non-Apparel) and Application (Industrial Protective Clothing, Defense & Public Safety Services, Transport - Railways, Aircraft, Automotive, Marine) - Global Trends & Forecasts to 2020

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/fire-resistant-fabric-market-185633312.html

Halogen Free Flame Retardants Market Type (Aluminum Hydroxide, Organo-Phosphorous Chemicals and Others), By Application (Polyolefins, Epoxy Resins, Unsaturated Polyesters (UPE), Poly-Vinyl Chloride (PVC), Rubber and Styrenics), By End-use Industry (Electrical & Electronics, Construction, Transportation, and Others) - Global Trends & Forecasts to 2021

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/halogen-free-flame-retardants-market-32144405.html

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SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, Calif. and ARNHEM, Netherlands, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Fluidmaster, Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of toilet tank components and trim, today announced details of its new European management team and organizational structure which independently aligns the commercial, operations and finance organizations respectively within Fluidmaster Europe. This new structure, effective immediately, follows the company's acquisition this week of WISA BV in the Netherlands and previous strategic additions of Key Teknik in Turkey, the Kolektor LIV and Schwab sanitaryware business based in Slovenia, and Opella, Limited and CMI Distribution LTD, both based in the United Kingdom.

Mark Grosfeld, current Managing Director of WISA BV, will take on additional responsibilities heading the company's Commercial team focused on Sales and Marketing efforts across the European continent and will report to Todd Talbot, Fluidmaster President. Mike Fuqua, previously Managing Director of Fluidmaster United Kingdom, will now lead Manufacturing Operations across Europe, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Chip Boyles, previously VP of Finance and Controller for Fluidmaster, will direct the Finance team in Europe, Turkey and the United Kingdom. All three will be based at the company's European headquarters in Arnhem, Netherlands.

"As we reach critical mass with our business in Europe, the right leadership team to enable further global growth is essential," said Talbot. "Our core values centering on customer service, innovation and operational excellence drive our business and I know this outstanding trio of executives will successfully focus and expand our efforts in this regard with our business in Europe."

About Fluidmaster

Established in 1957 and reaching across the world, Fluidmaster remains a family owned and operated company known for its superior engineering of efficient and reliable toilet components. The company has become an icon in the plumbing industry, with operations in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, China and Turkey as well as a worldwide distribution network across more than 80 countries selling more toilet tank replacement valves than any other manufacturer in the world. In addition to the original fill valve developed by founder Adolf Schoepe and enhanced through the years, Fluidmaster's complete line of toilet care parts include exposed and in-wall cisterns, standard and dual flush valves, flappers, activation systems, bowl wax and wax-free products, toilet repair kits, and supply line connectors.

The company's global headquarters is located in San Juan Capistrano, California. For more information visit www.fluidmaster.com.

SOURCE Fluidmaster, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.fluidmaster.com


Whatever may eventually transpire on the emotional issue of the return of the famous Kohinoor diamond to India by Britain, it was thoughtless, impolitic, and short-sighted of the government to take the stand in the Supreme Court on Monday that the 105.602 carat stone was not stolen by the British or taken forcibly, but gifted by the then Sikh ruler, Maharaja Duleep Singh, to the East India Company. As such, India cannot stake a claim to the diamond, which had been mined in Masulipatnam on the riverbed of the Godavari centuries ago. It thankfully made a U-turn late on Tuesday, saying it would make every effort to bring back the diamond and that earlier news reports on the subject were not based on facts.

This statement should be welcomed as its earlier statement was not even legalistic, and the Chief Justice of India and Justice U.U. Lalit, hearing a petition from a voluntary organisation, were naturally not interested. They appropriately noted that if they were to dismiss the petition, as this government urges, any future attempt by the Indian government to retrieve the diamond, or even other antique items taken from India in the colonial era, may be compromised. The solicitor-general agreed to take instructions and return to the top court in six months.

The governments approach is surprising, not least because in the past Indian governments have made the effort to retrieve the Kohinoor, although these have not borne fruit. The first to try was the Nehru government, back in 1956. The Modi government now seems to be saying, in effect, that its predecessors had no case, and they were wrong in trying. The present regimes approach appears to be in disregard of the crucial consideration that in the colonial era, and prior, high-value gifts were extracted by the powerful from the vanquished, in certain cases, through stratagems deployed to make them look above board, although they were little more than arm-twisting.

This was the case with the transfer of the Kohinoor from the Sikh ruler to the East India Company as reparation for the Anglo-Sikh wars in which the Sikhs were defeated. Similarly, Nadir Shah of Persia had walked away with the Kohinoor by proposing an exchange of each others thrones with the helpless Mughal emperor in Delhi during whose reign the Persian invader had plundered Delhi.

The Modi government appears to have lost sight of the fact that the return of the Kohinoor is linked in peoples mind to national pride, as is the case with the return of the sword of Tipu Sultan or Shivaji. This is surprising for a government whose functionaries have lately taken to sharpening social cleavages by invoking false notions of nationalism. Incidentally, India is not alone in pressing the British to return items of antique value, as we know from the case of the Greeks asking for the return of the Elgin marbles.
DUBAI, UAE, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Flytxt, a leading mobile consumer analytics solution provider for enterprises, announced today that it has been named as a semi-finalist in 'Big Data and Analytics' category in Pipeline's 2016 innovation award program.

PR NEWSWIRE INDIA - Flytxt Logo (PRNewsFoto/Flytxt)

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140527/10098680 )



Pipeline recognizes companies that offer innovative solutions to the industry. The nominations are adjudged by key executives from top service providers, influential industry analysts and the editors of the world's leading communications and technology magazines. Flytxt was shortlisted along with 22 other vendors from an initial list of 60 contenders in different categories. The final winners will be announced at a red-carpet Innovation Awards Reception, which will be held on May 9th, 2016, at Le Negresco in Nice, France.

Flytxt was selected for its innovative mobile consumer analytics solutions that enable telcos to play a bigger role in digital economy by helping them leverage their fast growing data assets. The technology platform is designed to integrate big data, fast data and derive in-depth consumer insights using proprietary packaged analytical models. These actionable insights help telcos to deliver personalised digital experience to their customers as well as to launch new lifestyle products with other enterprise partners.

In addition, through self-service and integrated analytics capabilities of the platform, Flytxt aims to improve the speed of decisioning across the telco's business functions. The platform also eliminates silo based decisioning, allowing departments within the telco to have a single view of customers and the business for smarter strategic and operational decision making.

Flytxt has consistently delivered 2 to 7% economic impact to its customers with its comprehensive data monetisation solution stack, combining technology, packaged analytics, business applications, and enabling services.

About Pipeline:

Pipeline magazine provides communications service providers with critical industry information relevant to driving profitability and delivering the latest generation of communication services. Pipeline covers news and commentary on market demands, government mandates, technical advances, and industry trends.

About Flytxt:

Flytxt partners with enterprises in their digital transformation journey, enabling them to generate measurable economic value from data through mobile consumer analytics. Flytxt's comprehensive data monetisation solutions help enterprises to personalise customer experience across digital touch points as well as increase revenue, optimise margins, and enhance loyalty. The company has deployed its platforms at more than 50 customer locations across 30 countries, analysing data of more than 500 million mobile consumers. Flytxt has consistently delivered 2 to 7% economic impact to its customers with its full solution stack combining technology, packaged analytics, business applications, and enabling services. The company has its headquarters in The Netherlands, corporate office in Dubai and presence in Paris, London, Trivandrum, Mumbai, Singapore, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Mexico City.

For more information, please visit: http://www.flytxt.com.

SOURCE Flytxt
FAIRFAX, Va., March 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- General Dynamics Information Technology, a business unit of General Dynamics (NYSE: GD), was awarded a contract to develop, deploy and provide maintenance and support for a Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) solution for Fairfax County, Virginia. The solution supports the five primary and secondary answering points in the County and enables Fairfax County to accept and route emergency 9-1-1 information from a variety of sources and provides much improved capabilities for cooperative processing and resource sharing between the five locations as well.

General Dynamics

Under this contract, General Dynamics will replace the Fairfax County's legacy emergency call-handling system with a secure, IP-based NG9-1-1 system that permits emergency service requests from existing public networks through new and emerging modes of communication and devices. The system will provide additional mapping capabilities using Geographic Information Systems data for caller locations and integrate incoming 9-1-1 texts and 9-1-1 voice calls under one unified platform.

"General Dynamics Information Technology helps governments successfully deploy NG9-1-1 systems," said Ed Hudson, vice president of General Dynamics Information Technology's State and Local Solutions business area. "Our comprehensive approach to the migration from legacy systems to the most sophisticated 9-1-1 technologies for mission critical communications provides a solid platform for our customers' successes."

General Dynamics has launched more than 50 E911 systems into service, provided integration for new narrowband, wide area, trunked land mobile radio system and continues to deploy mission critical communications systems in the government market. The company also has deployed a similar solution for Morgan County, Ohio and has several advanced projects underway.

For more information about General Dynamics Information Technology, please visit www.gdit.com.

More information about General Dynamics is available at www.generaldynamics.com.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140428/81320

SOURCE General Dynamics Information Technology

Related Links

http://www.gdit.com


ALBANY, New York, April 14, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Transparency Market Research (http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com ) has released a new market report titled "Global Bioenergy Market, by Product Type (Bioethanol, Biodiesel, Biogas, and Others) and by Application Type (Cooking, Off-grid Electricity Supply, Transportation, and Others) - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth Trends, and Forecast, 2016-2024." According to this report, the global bioenergy market was valued at US$168.18 Bn in 2016 and is projected to reach US$ 246.52 Bn by 2024 at a CAGR of 4.90% from 2016 to 2024.

The global bioenergy market is undergoing constant evolution to provide its users some of the most dependable and advanced solutions. Bioenergy refers to renewable energy that is generated from materials derived from biological sources. For instance, biomass is a source of bioenergy that may include manure, wood, waste, straw, sugarcane, and many such byproducts.

Bioenergy is the single largest renewable energy source today, providing 10% of world's primary energy supply. It plays a significant role in several developing countries, where it provides basic energy for cooking and space heating. The deployment of advanced biomass cooking stoves, clean fuels, and additional off-grid biomass electricity supply in developing countries are key measures to improve the current situation and achieve universal access to clean energy.

Get free research PDF for more Professional and Technical insights: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=10352

The bioenergy market has been segmented on the basis of product type, application, and region. In terms of product type, bioethanol and biodiesel together held about 77% share in 2015; bioethanol is used in large quantities as compared to other biofuels.

High oil prices, constricted energy markets, and indications about climate change are among the reasons for policy makers around the world to support the production and use of alternative, renewable energy sources such as bioenergy. Agricultural commodities such as maize are now being used to produce biofuels, bio heat, and bio power which are the components of the bioenergy market. The bioenergy industry helps in the development of areas such as scientific developments, environmental effects, energy balances, and agricultural market economics.

The bioenergy market is broadly classified into biofuels and biogas. Biofuels consists of bioethanol and biodiesel. Biogas is produced by processing residual waste from livestock (dung, manure, and unconsumed food), food production (fruit and vegetable waste, residues from meat, fish and dairy processing, brewery waste, food waste), and effluents from industrial as well as municipal wastewater treatment plants. Bioethanol in the biofuel segment is mainly produced by the sugar fermentation process, although it can also be manufactured by the chemical process of reacting ethylene with steam. Biodiesel is a clean burning renewable fuel made using natural vegetable oils and fats. Biodiesel is made through a chemical process which converts oils and fats of natural origin into fatty acid methyl esters.

Browse Full Research Report with ToC & Free Analysis: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/global-bioenergy-market.html

Bioenergy market in North America is increasing due to the stringent emission norms in the region. U.S. in North America is anticipated to lead the production of bioethanol during the forecast period whereas Germany in Europe is expected to lead the biogas production from 2016 to 2024.The bioenergy market in Europe is anticipated to grow due to favorable subsidization schemes regulated by government in countries such as the Germany, France, the U.K., and Sweden related to bioenergy use and production. Major EU directives, commonly known as the Promotion of Renewable Electricity, Biofuels and Landfill Directives, along with the European Emissions Trading Scheme and parts of the Common Agricultural Policy, are some of the most important drivers behind the growth of bioenergy in the European Union.

Increase in demand for electricity due to high population growth has resulted in more efficient and clean energy solutions across the emerging economies in Asia Pacific. This has spurred investments in bioenergy industry. Countries such as India and China are focusing more on effective utilization of bioenergy in the application areas of manufacturing, off-grid electricity supply, and transportation. This would increase the demand for bioenergy market during the forecast period.

Energy authorities in the regions of Latin America and South Africa are focusing on clean energy projects. Through these projects, bioenergy production would integrate energy efficiency by the means of distribution and transmission process. Brazil accounts for the majority of global bioethanol production after U.S. International trade in ethanol is expected to grow rapidly over the next decade, mainly with exports from Brazil to the US and EU.

The bioenergy market has been segmented as follows:

Bioenergy Market: By Product Type

Bioethanol

Biodiesel

Biogas

Others

Bioenergy Market: By Application Type

Cooking

Off-grid Electricity Supply

Transportation

Others

Bioenergy Market: By Region

North America

U.S.

Canada

Mexico

Europe

Germany

U.K.

France

Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific

China

India

Japan

Rest of Asia Pacific

Rest of World

Brazil

Argentina

Mozambique

Others

Research Press Release: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/global-bioenergy-market.htm

Browse Other Research Reports:

Biopower Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/biopower-market.html

Blowout Preventer (BOP) Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/blowout-preventer-market.html

About TMR

Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The company's exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.

TMR's data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.

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SOURCE Transparency Market Research
BALTIMORE, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Henry Bath LLC today announces the appointment of Mr David Gast in the position of General Manager, Americas.

David joins the Henry Bath management team with extensive experience in metals and commodities logistics, having held previous senior positions at Pacorini Metals, Wise Metals and Hydro Aluminium in the USA.

David leads, and will further develop, Henry Bath's storage and distribution business across the Americas region, based at the Company's offices in Baltimore, Maryland USA.

Note to Editors

Established in 1794, Henry Bath is a specialist in global commodities Exchange warehousing and logistics. The Company is licensed by the world's premier commodity Exchanges to issue Exchange-traded Warrants and Warehouse Receipts for metals and commodities stored across its worldwide network of facilities. Henry Bath warehouse certificates are recognised as premium security documents for commodity financing by banks, insurers and institutional investors. Henry Bath is a founding member of the London Metal Exchange ("LME") and issued the first LME Warrant in 1883. Henry Bath is now part-owned by CMST Development Co. Ltd. ("CMST") who are a leading warehouse operator in China and who hold a significant position as a delivery warehouse for the Shanghai Futures Exchange ("SHFE").

SOURCE Henry Bath LLC
TROY, Mich., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Altair's High-Performance Computing (HPC) Cloud Challenge utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Intel technologies to demonstrate the benefits of leveraging the cloud for large-scale design exploration in the area of computer-aided engineering (CAE) has concluded successfully. Organizations of all sizes from manufacturing and academic fields participated in the Challenge, utilizing Altair technologies in structural, CFD and design studies, and expressed great satisfaction with the program overall.

Qualified participants were provided access to Altair's software, computing resources from AWS, and product support for the duration of the program. Participants could choose from among six different configurations, starting with 32 cores and going up to 128 cores or more on the Intel Xeon processor E5 product family, and Altair's HyperWorks Unlimited (HWUL) Virtual Appliance, a software solution for high-performance computing on the cloud. All participants accessed the solutions free of charge for seven or more days to complete the engineering tasks of each project. The free use of Altair's HWUL Virtual Appliance was supplemented through AWS credits. All together the customers submitted a total of 43,520 jobs, running 10,405 wall clock hours. The HyperWorks solvers most applied in the challenge were RADIOSS, OptiStruct and HyperStudy.

"For us the HPC Challenge was a very positive experience," said Dr. Jorg Buttner at ZF TRW. "We used the HPC Challenge for a project for which we applied the RADIOSS solver with 32 nodes, explicit. A solution such as HWUL Virtual Appliance enables parallel work, is very easy to use and provides a fast up- and download of data. With more resources available, and by using cloud and local resources in parallel, we received more results faster."

"We tried HyperWorks Unlimited Virtual Appliance for the first time via the HPC Challenge and I have to say we were extremely satisfied - it's pretty simple, robust, fast and reliable," said Fernando Mitsuyassu from Maxion Wheels. "We usually handle our simulation tasks on local workstations and this was much faster. The reduction of processing time we reached was around 50 percent and in some cases even up to 80 percent."

"Altair is very excited to see the results of the HPC challenge," said Robert Walsh, Altair's Vice President Business Development for Cloud Solutions. "Projects like this help validate this new HPC paradigm for everyone. This type of solution demonstrates the true value and power cloud based HPC for CAE. With the combined solutions of Altair Engineering, AWS and Intel now cutting-edge tools can truly be democratized by reducing barriers for highly complex engineering tasks, bringing performance, flexibility, scalability and affordability to CAE, triggering simulation-driven innovation."

Additional information about the Altair Cloud Solutions and a test drive access to HyperWorks Virtual Appliance are available at http://www.altair.com/cloud and altairhyperworks.com/hwultestdrive.

About Altair

Altair is focused on the development and broad application of simulation technology to synthesize and optimize designs, processes and decisions for improved business performance. Privately held with more than 2,000 employees, Altair is headquartered in Troy, Michigan, USA and operates more than 45 offices throughout 22 countries. Today, Altair serves more than 5,000 corporate clients across broad industry segments. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com.

Media Contacts:

Altair Corporate/North America

Biba A. Bedi

+1-757.224.0548 x 406

[email protected]

Altair Europe, the Middle East and Africa

Evelyn Gebhardt

+49 6421 9684351

[email protected]

SOURCE Altair

Related Links

http://www.altair.com


HOUSTON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Ten teams of high school students are competing to have their dishes selected as food for astronauts aboard the International Space Station. They'll meet in a nationwide Culinary Challenge at 10 a.m. EDT Thursday, April 21, at Space Center Houston.

The Culinary Challenge is a component of the NASA HUNCH, or High school students United with NASA to Create Hardware, program. The teams will prepare entrees for taste-testing and evaluation. The winning meal will be prepared and packaged for future delivery and consumption on the space station.

The challenge incorporates the arts with science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, engaging students as they learn about food science and processing by developing new, tasty recipes that are still able to meet the nutritional, textural and flavor standards needed to keep astronauts happy and healthy while on the space station. Food consumed by station astronauts also is a vital element in exercise and nutrition plans that help minimize bone and muscle density loss so that they can resume normal life on Earth after spending six months or a year without gravity.

News media who wish to attend should contact Hayley Fick at 281-483-5111, or by email at [email protected], no later than 4 p.m. April 20 for credentials.

Schools represented are:

Cy Woods High School , Cypress, Texas

, Galena Park High School , Galena Park, Texas

, Huntsville Center For Technology, Huntsville, Alabama

iSchool STEM Academy, Lewisville, Texas

New Horizons High School, Hampton, Virginia

Oakridge High School, Conroe, Texas

Passaic County Technical Institute, Wayne, New Jersey

Trussville City Schools, Trussville, Alabama

Schools, Windsor High School, Windsor, Connecticut

Warren Tech High School, Lakewood, Colorado

Space Center Houston is a nonprofit education foundation and the official visitor center for Johnson Space Center.

For more on the HUNCH Culinary Challenge, visit:

http://hunchculinary.weebly.com/

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO

SOURCE NASA

Related Links

http://www.nasa.gov


CINCINNATI, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

itelligence, Inc. today announced that it has received two 2016 SAP Pinnacle Awards as the SAP S/4HANA Adoption Partner of the Year and the Global Value-Added Reseller, recognizing the company's outstanding contributions as an SAP partner. SAP presents these awards annually to the top partners that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP and helping customers run better. Winners and finalists in 19 categories were chosen based on recommendations from the SAP field, customer feedback and performance indicators in the following umbrella categories: Build, Service, and Sell with each category including a Customers' Choice award, which recognizes a customer-nominated SAP partner.

"We are honored to receive this recognition from our longtime partner," said Herbert Vogel, chief executive officer and founder, itelligence AG. "After working together for more than twenty five years, we are proud to continue to partner with SAP as we help customers take on business challenges."

"In today's changing business environment, our customers need next-generation business tools like SAP S/4HANA to stay competitive," said Steve Niesman, president and chief executive officer, itelligence, Inc. "We're proud to work in tandem with SAP to help customers streamline business processes and run simple."

"Winning the SAP Pinnacle Award is a tremendous accomplishment," said Rodolpho Cardenuto, president of SAP Global Channels & General Business. "Only 16 companies in our ecosystem of 13,000 partners received this recognition. itelligence should be very proud of their success."

Kevin Ichhpurani, executive vice president of SAP Strategic Business Development & Global Ecosystem added, "The SAP Pinnacle Award winners represent the very best in our partner community, and we congratulate itelligence for two well-deserved 2016 SAP Pinnacle Awards."

itelligence, Inc. has been an SAP North America partner since 1993 and an SAP Global partner since 1989, and provides expertise on SAP's solutions to help its customers with implementation, application management and hosting through each stage of the process. itelligence is SAP-certified in cloud services, an SAP-certified provider of hosting services for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and an SAP Platinum Partner among other achievements.

SAP Pinnacle Awards shine a spotlight on SAP's partners' remarkable contributions, acknowledging their dedication to teamwork, innovative approach and capacity to challenge what is possible to help customers achieve their goals. Award winners will be formally recognized at the SAP Global Partner Summit on May 16, in conjunction with SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP's international customer conference in Orlando, Fla., May 17-19. For descriptions of the awards, visit: http://www.sap.com/partners/become/partner-program/benefits/pinnacle-awards.html.

About itelligence

itelligence, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of itelligence AG, an international full-service solution and consulting company with a global presence in 23 countries. itelligence provides a broad range of consulting and customer support services to further maximize SAP solutions, including implementations, application management services and hosting. itelligence also provides support for solutions including the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence suite, mobile solutions, the SAP HANA platform, SAP Human Capital Management and SAP SuccessFactors solutions, and office of CFO solutions including SAP Business Planning and Consolidation and SAP solutions for governance, risk and compliance (GRC). itelligence is an SAP gold partner authorized to resell SAP Business All-in-One and SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solutions, an SAP global services and SAP global hosting partner, and an SAP-certified global provider of application management services. itelligence also holds global quality accreditation by the SAP Active Quality Management organization for demonstrating clear quality standards and processes.

Learn more about itelligence at itelligencegroup.com/us/

Follow itelligence on Facebook: facebook.com/itelligenceUS

Follow itelligence on Twitter: twitter.com/itelligence_US

Read our blog: itelligencegroup.com/us/news-and-insights/local-blog/

SAP, SAPPHIRE and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. See http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx for additional trademark information and notices.

All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

SAP Forward-looking Statement

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

For media inquiries, contact:

Laure Poquette

itelligence, Inc.

+1-630-725-3346

[email protected]

Brent Curry

Hill+Knowlton Strategies

+1-312-255-3086

[email protected]

For international media inquiries, contact

Head of Corporate Public Relations itelligence AG

Silvia Dicke

[email protected]

+49-(0)521 / 9-14-48-107



SOURCE itelligence AG
TBILISI, Ga., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On 4 April 2016, JSC Georgian Oil and Gas Corporation (the "Issuer") launched an invitation to each holder (a "Holder") of its U.S.$250,000,000 6.875% Notes due 2017 issued on 16 May 2012 (the "Notes") (subject to certain offer and distribution restrictions set out in the Tender Offer Memorandum (as defined below)) to tender any and all Notes held by it for purchase by the Issuer for cash (the "Tender Offer"), on the terms and subject to the conditions contained in the Tender Offer Memorandum dated 4 April 2016 (the "Tender Offer Memorandum"). The Issuer further announced on 18 April 2016 that, as at 5:00 p.m. (New York time) on 15 April 2016, the aggregate principal amount of Notes validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) was U.S.$129,437,000.

The Issuer announces today that the Early Participation Deadline for the Tender Offer has been extended to 5:00 p.m. (New York time) on 22 April 2016 (the "Early Participation Deadline"). As a result of such extension, the Expiration Deadline has been extended to 11:59 p.m. (New York time) on 3 May 2016 (the "Expiration Deadline").

The Withdrawal Deadline (being 5:00 p.m. (New York time) on 15 April 2016) has not been extended. Accordingly, all Notes validly tendered as at the Withdrawal Deadline, as well as any Notes validly tendered at any time after the Withdrawal Deadline are and will be irrevocable. Capitalised terms used and not otherwise defined in this announcement have the meaning given to them in the Tender Offer Memorandum. The Tender Offer is made on the terms and subject to the conditions contained in the Tender Offer Memorandum.

Holders of Notes that are validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) at or prior to the Early Participation Deadline are eligible to receive consideration of U.S.$1,022.50 per U.S.$1,000 in principal amount of Notes (the "Total Consideration") for such Notes, which comprises consideration of U.S.$992.50 per U.S.$1,000 in principal amount of Notes (the "Tender Offer Consideration") plus consideration of U.S.$30.00 per U.S.$1,000 in principal amount of Notes (the "Early Tender Premium"). Holders of Notes that are validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) after the Early Participation Deadline but at or prior to the Expiration Deadline and accepted for purchase will be eligible to receive only the Tender Offer Consideration for their Notes. The Issuer expects to announce the results of the Tender Offer, including details of the Notes accepted for purchase (subject to satisfaction of the New Financing Condition (as defined below)) promptly following the Expiration Deadline (being 11:59 p.m. (New York time) on 3 May 2016), and the Total Consideration or the Tender Offer Consideration (as the case may be) payable to Holders of validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) Notes accepted for purchase is expected be paid, together with Accrued Interest, on or about 6 May 2016 (the "Settlement Date").

The Tender Offer will expire on the Expiration Deadline, unless the offer period is extended or earlier terminated. All Holders may tender Notes until the Expiration Deadline. Any tender of Notes received by D.F. King Ltd. (the "Information and Tender Agent") after the Expiration Deadline will not be accepted.

All documentation relating to the Tender Offer is available via http://sites.dfkingltd.com/gogc.

The Dealer Managers are Barclays (+44(0)20-3134-8515/+1(212)528-7581 (U.S. Collect)/+1(800)438-3242 (U.S. Toll Free), [email protected]) and J.P. Morgan (+44(0)20-7134-2468, [email protected]).

The Information and Tender Agent is DF King Ltd. (+44(0)20-7920-9700/ +1(212)269-5550/ +1(800)622-1569 (U.S. Toll Free)/ +852-3953-7230, [email protected]).

This announcement is for informational purposes only. The Tender Offer is being made only pursuant to the Tender Offer Memorandum and only in such jurisdictions as is permitted under applicable law. None of this announcement, the announcement dated 4 April 2016, the announcement dated 18 April 2016, or the Tender Offer Memorandum constitutes an offer to purchase or the solicitation of an offer to tender or sell Notes to or from any person located or resident in any jurisdiction where such offer or solicitation is unlawful.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION IN OR INTO OR TO ANY PERSON LOCATED OR RESIDENT IN ANY JURISDICTION WHERE IT IS UNLAWFUL TO DISTRIBUTE THIS DOCUMENT.

SOURCE JSC Georgian Oil and Gas Corporation
For the three-day health event, Konica Minolta will provide two SONIMAGE HS1 ultrasound systems and a Mobile DR System. In partnership with Radiographic Equipment Services, Inc., an authorized dealer for Shimadzu, a Shimadzu MobileArt Evolution EFX portable X-ray unit with a Konica Minolta AeroDR wireless digital flat panel detector will also be supplied.

"Without the support of companies such as Konica Minolta, Your Best Pathway to Health would be unable to provide the wide array of diagnostic and clinical services that we will offer at the event in Los Angeles," says Melody Pierson, Assistant Department Head of Radiology for the organization. "When we approached Konica Minolta to provide point-of-care solutions that would enable us to efficiently and confidently diagnose and triage 10,000 people at the Mega Clinic, they didn't hesitate to help."

"Across our country, there is a great need for the delivery of healthcare services to those living in poverty and without health insurance or the ability to pay for medical care," says David Widmann, President and CEO, Konica Minolta Medical Imaging. "While Konica Minolta is committed to providing high quality, reliable point-of-care solutions, our corporate values also include being passionate and accountable not just to our customers, but to society as a whole. We're delighted to assist Pathway to Health in its efforts to help those who are in need of healthcare services."

According to Your Best Pathway for Health, 4,200 volunteers from across the US will help care for an estimated 10,000 people at the LA Convention Center. Four local Adventist hospitals will further support the Mega Clinic: Loma Linda University Medical Center, Glendale Adventist Medical Center, White Memorial Medical Center, and Simi Valley Hospital. Prior Pathway to Health events, held in Spokane, WA, San Antonio, TX, Oakland and San Francisco, CA, have together cared for 12,400 people who received nearly $40 million in free health services.

About Konica Minolta Medical Imaging

Konica Minolta Medical Imaging is a world class provider and market leader in medical diagnostic Primary Imaging. With over 75 years of endless innovation, Konica Minolta is globally recognized as a leader providing cutting-edge technologies and comprehensive support aimed at providing real solutions to meet customer's needs. Konica Minolta Medical Imaging, headquartered in Wayne, NJ, is a unit of Konica Minolta, Inc. (TSE: 4902). For more information on Konica Minolta Primary Imaging Solutions, please visit www.konicaminolta.com/medicalusa.

Company name KONICA MINOLTA, INC. Headquarters JP TOWER, 2-7-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan Founded December 1936 FY 2014 Revenue $8.5 Billion Number of employees Approx. 41,600 (2015) Business Lines The Konica Minolta Group operates in sectors ranging from business technologies, where our products are typified by MFPs (multi-functional peripherals), and Industrial Business (former Optics Business), where our products include pickup lenses for optical disks, and TAC film, a key material used in LCD panels, to healthcare, where we make digital X-ray diagnostic imaging systems.

Contact:

Dennis Puccio

Konica Minolta Medical Imaging

973-633-1500

www.konicaminolta.com/medicalusa

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20141001/149767

SOURCE Konica Minolta Medical Imaging

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In the new primetime special, Laura gives a firsthand account of her explorations through Armenia, including destinations like the capital city of Yerevan , Tsitsernakaberd: The Genocide Museum and Memorial, the ancient Temple of Garni, and the Monastery of Tatev , featuring the longest gondola ride in the world. She also discovers local markets, learns to make ethnic cuisine, and tries her hand at the ancient art of carpet weaving. While there, she gets a personal account of the dismal conditions during the war years in Yerevan by the famed international conductor, Maestro George Pehlivanian.

"Armenia was a total surprise to me. I was not expecting it to be so incredibly fascinating, not only for ancient sites and natural beauty, but for the friendliness of the people," Laura said. "Armenians love Americans and their hospitality is genuine."

Laura McKenzie is the number one television travel expert in the country. She has received dozens of awards including two Emmy nominations and a Gracie Award for her syndicated television series, "Laura McKenzie's Traveler." She's written and produced 42 home videos on travel and appears on national talk shows as a travel expert. She co-hosted "World's Funniest Moments" and 10 seasons of "American Adventurer" with Erik Estrada and is the permanent co-host of the annual Hollywood Christmas Parade.

She is also a contributing writer for "USA Weekend Magazine" and won the "Video of the Decade" award from Billboard Magazine for "Laura McKenzie's Travel Tips-Hawaii," distributed by Republic Pictures, broadcast on the Travel Channel and Discovery.

"Laura McKenzie's Traveler," the number one travel show on broadcast television, will air the special locally in all major markets across the US, including: Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and more. Check local listings for more information!

Produced and distributed by

Associated Television International

Hollywood, California

Contact Information :





Chris Rossi Megan Trevino CORE PR GROUP CORE PR Group O: 323-934-7044 O: 323-934-7044 [email protected] [email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160415/356148

SOURCE Associated Television International
The United Nations has designated April 22 to be International Mother Earth Day. It is also the day when the Simhasth Kumbh Mahaparv commences in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh. Kumbh is Indias festival of creation, the biggest party on earth, for the earth. This mega festival attracts more than 30 million people and takes place in a cycle of 12 years at four sacred sites on our sacred rivers  Hardwar on the Ganga, Prayag in Allahabad which lies at the confluence of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, Ujjain on the Shipra, and Nashik on the Godavari. The Kumbh reminds us of our place in the order of things in the creation and our duty to take care of our rivers, mountains, soil and land.

We have violated our duty to protect our soil and water. Now the violence committed on nature is translating into an emergency for humans. And nowhere is this more evident than in Maharashtras Marathwada. This year, the Godavari river in Nashik went dry. There is no water in Ramkund  the sacred pond in Nashik devotees come to bathe in during the Kumbh. In the town of Latur in Marathwada, water scarcity is so severe that the district collector has imposed Section 144 of the CrPC (making assembly of more than 10 people unlawful) for two months to prevent law and order problems arising from the water crisis. The administration has taken over 150 wells and tubewells near the city because the dam that supplied water to Laturs population of 4.5 lakh and adjoining rural areas dried up in March 2016.

Water is being supplied by tankers after a water train brings water all the way from Kota. While the drinking water emergency will be addressed in the short run through these measures, rejuvenating our water systems needs a fundamental shift in the agriculture paradigm. In the 1980s, I was asked by the then Planning Commission to look at why Maharashtras requests for budgets to provide drinking water kept increasing, and yet the water crisis never gets solved. My research showed that the drought of 1972 was used by the World Bank to promote sugarcane cultivation, requiring intensive irrigation based on water mining through tubewells and borewells, just as the drought of 1965 was used to force the Green Revolution on India.

Marathwada lies in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats and receives an average of 600-700 mm of rainfall. Given the hard rock bed of the Deccan Trap, only 10 per cent of this water goes into the ground to recharge wells. Sugarcane requires 1,200 mm of water, which is 20 times more than the annual recharge. When 20 times more water is withdrawn from the ground than available, a water famine is inevitable, even when the rainfall is normal.

More than 300,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1995  most of them in the Bt cotton areas. Marathwada and Vidarbha account for 75 per cent of farmer suicides in Maharashtra. Between January and December 2015, 3,228 farmers committed suicide in Maharashtra, including 1,536 in Vidarbha and 1,454 in Marathwada. In 2001-2002, before Bt cotton was commercially approved, the area under cotton in Marathwada was 0.89 lakh hectares. Within one year, between 2003-2004 and 2004-2005, the area under Bt cotton in Marathwada jumped 11 times from 0.89 to 10 lakh ha. In the following decade, the area under Bt cotton has increased 18.386 lakh ha.

Bt cotton hybrids are not suited to regions like Vidarbha and Marathwada. They need more water and, therefore, fail more frequently when assured irrigation is not available  a fact that Monsanto, the company behind the spread of monocultures, does not tell farmers when selling the GMO seeds. Bt cotton is also killing beneficial soil organisms which degrade organic matter and turn it into humus. Soils are becoming sterile. Our studies show that more than 50 per cent beneficial soil organisms have been destroyed by Bt toxins in Bt cotton areas. Unlike the crops it displaces, such as jowar, it returns no organic matter to the soil.

The increase in Bt cotton came at the cost of jowar which holds the answer to drought in Maharashtra. Jowar requires only 250 mm water and would have survived the drought, giving farmers food and livelihood security even with a deficient monsoon. Between 2004-05 and 2011-12, while Bt cotton in Beed (in Marathwada) increased from 1.01 to 3.290 lakh ha, the area under rabi jowar decreased from 2.567 to 1.704 lakh ha. Bt cotton has displaced the mixed and rotational cropping of jowar, tur, mung, urad, wheat, chana. During the 1984 drought in northern Karnataka, an old farmer told us, Bring me the old seeds of the native jowar, and I will drive away the drought.

Not only do indigenous crops like jowar use less water, they increase the water-holding capacity of soil by producing large quantities of organic matter which, when returned to the soil, increase soils fertility and water-holding capacity.

Native seeds and organic farming are the answer to drought and climate change, to farmers suicides and to the agrarian distress. They are also the answer to hunger and malnutrition. Care for our seeds, our soil and our water are the real test of our love for our land and our commitment to our future, not slogans. The same processes that are killing our soil, water and climate balance are also killing our farmers. This is an emergency. Yet, the responses are not addressing the roots of the crises.

This Earth day, this Kumbh, we need to make a clear choice for the future of the planet and our survival  whether we want to step deeper into ecological and social emergencies as slaves of giant corporations, or we want to live as free and caring members of the earth family, Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam, following our dharma in the creation.
PHILADELPHIA, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- MT Services LLC, a Lawsuit Settlement News Reporting Company which operates lawsuitsettlementnews.com, reported today that Diane Berg, the first plaintiff to ever file a federal lawsuit in the U.S. against Johnson & Johnson over her ovarian cancer being linked the talcum-based powder, turned down a $1.3 million settlement. News sources state that she refused the payout because she didn't want to sign the confidentiality clause, and she wanted the world to know the potential dangers associated with the adult and baby talc-based power.

Diane Berg had first filed suit back in 2009, and her case was the first of its kind to go to trial against J&J in the United States. An article in The NY Post says she was offered a $1.3 million settlement out of court, but she had turned it down due to the confidentiality clause that would prevent her from warning others about the potential dangers associated with the talcum-based products.

Jurors had found that the Johnson & Johnson products had contributed to the ovarian cancer she was diagnosed with, however, they did not award her with any compensation.

Recently, however, in another plaintiff's case, a Missouri state jury ordered J&J to pay $72 million in damages to the family of a woman, Jacqueline Fox, whose death from ovarian cancer was linked to her continual use of J&J's talcum-based Baby Powder and Shower to Shower. This was the first verdict by a U.S. jury to award damages over the claims against J&J.

(The Shower to Shower brand is now owned by Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc., however, they were not a defendant in Fox's case.)

There are approximately 1,000 cases that have been filed in Missouri state court, with an additional 200 in New Jersey. The claims allege that Johnson & Johnson "failed for decades to warn consumers that its talc-based products could cause cancer." There are several other trials over talc lawsuits set to begin later this year.

Chris Janish, CEO of MTS, commented on the recent news, "While it is unfortunate that the first plaintiff was not awarded any compensation, it is a good sign that such a substantial award was given to the family of the next plaintiff. We encourage anyone with similar claims to seek legal counsel as well."

MTS can assist patients who need lawsuit help with finding a qualified Talc law firm or Talc lawyer to provide a free evaluation on their specific case. MTS can also help you with verdict on appeal cases, including funding on large hip verdicts with verdict or judgment on appeal.

To learn more about MTS' services involving litigations, as well as verdict on appeal funding, visit: http://www.lawsuitsettlementnews.com/defective-product-lawsuits

MT Services LLC provides up-to-date lawsuit news on all the major litigations, as well as various services to assist victims with getting the help they need during this difficult time. These services include: Lawsuit Pre-Settlement Funding Cash Advances, corrective or revision surgery procedure funding (or cash needs related to your surgery), and assistance with obtaining an attorney from a nationally recognized law firm. (Lawsuit funding or surgical funding products should not be considered to be a lawsuit loan, lawsuit loans, settlement loans, pre-settlement loans, or lawsuit settlement loans.)

To learn more about the lawsuit help services that MTS can provide involving the major hip litigations, visit: http://www.lawsuitsettlementnews.com/about-our-products-and-services

If you, or a loved one, have been injured by a talcum-based product and need lawsuit help, including finding a talc law firm, obtaining up to $30K in pre-settlement lawsuit funding, or obtaining surgical funding, call MTS to speak with a live agent about your case, at 877.571.0405.

You may also fill out a quick application online at: www.lawsuitsettlementnews.com and an agent will contact you shortly.

MT Services LLC is not a law firm and cannot provide legal advice on your case; however, MTS works with lawyers involved in mass tort litigations who are willing to provide a free legal consultation at the consumer's request. For a list of full disclosures please visit the company's website disclosure page at: http://www.lawsuitsettlementnews.com/terms-of-service

Contact: Chris Janish, CEO

Ph. 877.571.0405

SOURCE MT Services LLC

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DULUTH, Ga., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academies, a national early childhood education franchise with three decades of experience, announced today a groundbreaking ceremony for its first New Jersey center, located in Montville, N.J., on Saturday, April 23 at 1 p.m. at 217 Changebridge Road. Montville Township Mayor James Sandham and Deputy Mayor Richard Conklin will be in attendance along with Township Committeewomen Deborah Nielson. The new school represents Kids 'R' Kids' first center in the Tri-state Region of the country. To date, the company has nearly 160 schools located in 16 states nationwide.

The new Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academy will be owned and operated by husband-and-wife team Patricia and Fred Ferraro. Patricia, a mother of four, has worked with children for more than 35 years throughout her career as a kindergarten teacher. Mr. Ferraro brings more than 35 years of business experience to Kids 'R' Kids and most recently worked as a business consultant to companies in New Jersey and Indiana.

"We are excited to break ground on the first Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academy of New Jersey," said Patricia Ferraro. "We've found the perfect site for our school and look forward to sharing this special occasion with local residents and dignitaries. Both Fred and I are very proud to be part of a project bringing a state of the art Learning Academy to families of the community. We are enthusiastic about supporting the development of future generations in Morris County."

The Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academy of Montville will be environmentally efficient with features such as energy efficient windows, LED lighting and other energy saving strategies. The new building will also include a computer lab, cafeteria, library, gymnasium and 10 classrooms. The school is projected to open in January 2017.

For the last 30 years, Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academies has upheld its long-standing principle of strengthening and encouraging childhood development on an emotional, intellectual, social and physical level through a unique partnership between its child care providers and parents. The company's proprietary First Class CurriculumTM is designed specifically for every developmental stage of education with theme-based units, specific learning activities and teacher-friendly lesson plans. Last year, Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academies unveiled its new STEAM AHEAD curriculum, an integrated project-based curriculum for preschool students, ages three to five, which incorporates more science, technology, engineering, art, and math into everyday learning through play.

With a nationally awarded curriculum, Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academies provides early education and care for children from six weeks through 12 years of age at its nearly 160 schools located in 16 states across the country. Programs offered to children include infant care, toddler and preschool care, private pre-K and kindergarten, before-and-afterschool care and summer camp. In order to provide even more convenience for families with busy schedules, Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academies remain open during all major school breaks and holidays year-round.

Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academies has been accredited by AdvancED in America for more than six years, the world's largest education community. This accreditation ensures its schools are meeting and exceeding the highest accreditation standards and providing excellence in education beyond most daycare and childcare providers.

To learn more about ownership opportunities with Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academies, contact Rashid Khan at (844) KRK-FRAN (844-575-3726) or [email protected] or visit kidsrkidsfranchise.com.

About Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academies

Headquartered in the North Atlanta suburb of Duluth, Ga., Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academies provide a secure, nurturing, and educational environment for children ages six weeks - 12 years to bloom into responsible, considerate, and contributing members of society. With nearly 160 learning academies in 16 states, Kids 'R' Kids International is a family-owned and operated organization that ranks in the top three nationwide for franchised early childhood education centers (www.kidsrkids.com).

CONTACT: Tiffany Trilli

Fish Consulting

954-893-9150

[email protected]

Logo - https://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150707/232408LOGO

SOURCE Kids 'R' Kids Learning Academies

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NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Lighthouse Guild, the leading not-for-profit vision + healthcare organization, today announced that accomplished scientists Dr. Daniel Palanker and Dr. Pradeep Y. Ramulu are the 2016 recipients of its annual vision science awards.

Dr. Daniel Palanker is the prestigious 2016 Bressler Prize recipient and Dr. Pradeep Y. Ramulu is the 2016 Pisart Award honoree. Both are being recognized for their remarkable contributions to the field of vision science. Drs. Palanker and Ramulu were chosen by an independent panel of judges from various vision care disciplines for the important impact of their research.

"Improving the lives of people who are blind or visually impaired is a core tenet of Lighthouse Guild's mission. By recognizing leading clinicians and researchers, we bring new energy to our shared purpose and help lay the foundation for tomorrow's breakthroughs," said Alan R. Morse, JD, PhD, President and CEO of Lighthouse Guild. "We look forward to seeing their future work and to working with them to help people with vision loss."

2016 Bressler Prize Recipient Dr. Daniel Palanker

Dr. Daniel Palanker, a professor of the Department of Ophthalmology, School of Medicine, and Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory at Stanford University in Stanford, California, has a long history of leadership and service to vision research.

"I'm very pleased to be named the recipient of the 2016 Bressler Prize," said Dr. Palanker. "I am honored to be recognized for my research contributions. I believe there is great promise in the development of optical and electronic technologies for preservation and restoration of vision. The Bressler Prize will further energize our efforts to advance lasers and prosthetic technologies for preservation and restoration of central vision in various macular diseases."

A physicist by training, Dr. Palanker is working at the interface of physics in medicine, with a focus on ophthalmology. At Stanford, he directs one of the most sophisticated multi-disciplinary research programs on electro-neural interfaces, including photovoltaic retinal implants that are wireless, thin and modular, allowing for easier implantation and better vision. Besides his work on retinal prosthetics and neural stimulation for treatment of dry eye syndrome, Dr. Palanker's studies of the laser interactions with retinal cells revealed the tissue response mechanisms that lie at the root of the cellular repair following laser therapy, which led to development of the non-damaging retinal laser therapy for the macula.

Since 2003, the Bressler Prize has annually recognized a mid-career vision clinician or scientist whose leadership, research and service have led to important advancements in the understanding of vision loss, treatment of eye disease, or the rehabilitation of people with vision loss. As the 2016 Bressler Prize winner, Dr. Palanker will receive a prize of $50,000 thanks to the generosity of the late Alfred W. Bressler. He will also lead Lighthouse Guild's Annual Symposium in New York City, where he will be joined by other leading researchers and clinicians who will present their latest findings in vision research.

2016 Pisart Award Recipient Dr. Pradeep Y. Ramulu

Dr. Pradeep Ramulu is an Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. While Dr. Ramulu's clinical activity is as a glaucoma specialist, his research broadly looks at vision loss brought about by conditions such as age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, severe dry eye disease, cataract as well a glaucoma linking them to quality of life and developing innovative applications of technology to the problems that visual impairment produce for those affected.

"I am humbled to be named the 2016 Pisart Award honoree," said Dr. Ramulu. "Lighthouse Guild is an organization committed to meeting the needs of people who are blind or visually impaired, and I appreciate their recognition. I remain dedicated to our shared mission, and look forward to continuing with innovative vision science research."

The Pisart Award was established in 1981 and has annually recognized an early-career vision clinician or scientist whose noteworthy, innovative and scholarly contributions in vision science have the potential for substantial influence in the understanding of vision loss, treatment of eye disease or the rehabilitation of people with vision loss. As the 2016 Pisart Award winner, Dr. Ramulu will receive a prize in the amount of $30,000 at Lighthouse Guild's Annual Symposium.

About Lighthouse Guild

Lighthouse Guild is the leading not-for-profit vision and healthcare organization with a long history of addressing the needs of people who are blind or visually impaired, including those with multiple disabilities or chronic medical conditions. With more than 200 years of experience and service, Lighthouse Guild brings a level of understanding to vision care that is unmatched. By integrating vision and healthcare services and expanding access through its programs and education and awareness, we help people lead productive, dignified and fulfilling lives. For more information, visit lighthouseguild.org.

SOURCE Lighthouse Guild
LOS ANGELES, April 18, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- California home sales rose from both the previous month and year to post the highest sales pace in six months, while strained housing supplies continued to push home prices higher, the CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS (C.A.R.) said today.

Closed escrow sales of existing, single-family detached homes in California totaled a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 415,220 units in March, according to information collected by C.A.R. from more than 90 local REALTOR associations and MLSs statewide. The statewide sales figure represents what would be the total number of homes sold during 2016 if sales maintained the March pace throughout the year. It is adjusted to account for seasonal factors that typically influence home sales.

The March figure was up 5.5 percent from the revised 393,430 level in February and up 5.7 percent compared with home sales in March 2015 of a revised 392,660. March's sales level rose above the 400,000 level for the first time in three months.

"California's housing market is moving in the right direction as we enter the spring home-buying season, but sales growth will likely be isolated in areas where inventory is more abundant and housing affordability is less of an issue," said C.A.R. President Pat "Ziggy" Zicarelli. "For example, in the Bay Area, where inventory is extremely tight, annual sales are down in the double-digits in seven of the region's nine counties. Solano and Sonoma, two counties where homes are relatively more affordable, were the exceptions. Home sales in these two counties grew from last year by nearly 11 percent and 5 percent, respectively."

The median price of an existing, single-family detached California home rose 8.9 percent in March, reversing a two-month decline, to $483,280 from $443,950 in February. March's median price was 4 percent higher than the revised $464,640 recorded in March 2015. The median sales price is the point at which half of homes sold for more and half sold for less; it is influenced by the types of homes selling as well as a general change in values.

"The economic fundamentals continue to support overall home sales growth, but a lack of housing inventory also will fuel more market competition as housing demand remains on an upward trend," said C.A.R. Vice President and Chief Economist Leslie Appleton-Young. "Thin housing supplies appear to be the driving force behind the increase in sales-to-list price ratios, with the ratio rising in 28 of 40 reporting counties. On average, homes in the Bay Area and Sacramento sold for more than the list price, while homes in Southern California and the Central Valley sold below list price."

Other key points from C.A.R.'s March 2016 resale housing report include:

The number of active listings increased slightly for the third consecutive month after declining for five straight months, but was not enough to boost housing supplies. Active listings increased 3.9 percent from February on a statewide basis.

The increase in active listings was outpaced by the rate of home sales, causing C.A.R.'s Unsold Inventory Index to drop from 4.6 months in February to 3.6 months in March. The index stood at 3.8 months in March 2015 . The index indicates the number of months needed to sell the supply of homes on the market at the current sales rate. A six- to seven-month supply is considered typical in a normal market.

. The index indicates the number of months needed to sell the supply of homes on the market at the current sales rate. A six- to seven-month supply is considered typical in a normal market. The median number of days it took to sell a single-family home declined in March to 29.9 days, compared with 41.4 days in February and 34.2 days in March 2015 .

. According to C.A.R.'s sales-to-list price ratio*, tight inventories also appear to be driving closed prices closer to listing prices as sales-to-list price ratio increased in 28 of 40 counties for which data is available. Sales prices rose to 98.8 percent of listing prices statewide in March from 98.2 percent in February.

The average price per square foot** for an existing, single-family home statewide was $227 in March 2016 , up from $218 in February and unchanged from $227 in March 2015 .

in , up from in February and unchanged from in . San Francisco continued to have the highest price per square foot in March at $879 /sq. ft., followed by San Mateo ( $763 /sq. ft.), and Santa Clara ( $625 /sq. ft.). The three counties with the lowest price per square foot in March were Siskiyou ( $102 /sq. ft.), Madera ( $119 /sq. ft.), and Kings ( $123 /sq. ft.).

continued to have the highest price per square foot in March at /sq. ft., followed by ( /sq. ft.), and ( /sq. ft.). The three counties with the lowest price per square foot in March were ( /sq. ft.), ( /sq. ft.), and Kings ( /sq. ft.). Mortgage rates were essentially flat in March, with the 30-year, fixed-mortgage interest rate averaging 3.69 percent, compared with 3.66 percent in February and 3.77 percent in March 2015 , according to Freddie Mac. Adjustable-mortgage interest rates, however, edged up, averaging 2.90 percent in March, up from 2.83 percent in February and 2.74 percent in March 2015 .

Graphics (click links to open):

Note: The County MLS median price and sales data in the tables are generated from a survey of more than 90 associations of REALTORS throughout the state, and represent statistics of existing single-family detached homes only. County sales data are not adjusted to account for seasonal factors that can influence home sales. Movements in sales prices should not be interpreted as changes in the cost of a standard home. The median price is where half sold for more and half sold for less; medians are more typical than average prices, which are skewed by a relatively small share of transactions at either the lower-end or the upper-end. Median prices can be influenced by changes in cost, as well as changes in the characteristics and the size of homes sold. The change in median prices should not be construed as actual price changes in specific homes.

*Sales-to-list price ratio is an indicator that reflects the negotiation power of home buyers and home sellers under current market conditions. The ratio is calculated by dividing the final sales price of a property by its last list price and is expressed as a percentage. A sales-to-list ratio with 100 percent or above suggests that the property sold for more than the list price, and a ratio below 100 percent indicates that the price sold below the asking price.

**Price per square foot is a measure commonly used by real estate agents and brokers to determine how much a square foot of space a buyer will pay for a property. It is calculated as the sale price of the home divided by the number of finished square feet. C.A.R. currently tracks price-per-square foot statistics for 38 counties.

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Leading the way in California real estate for more than 110 years, the CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS (www.car.org) is one of the largest state trade organizations in the United States with 185,000 members dedicated to the advancement of professionalism in real estate. C.A.R. is headquartered in Los Angeles.

March 2016 County Sales and Price Activity (Regional and condo sales data not seasonally adjusted)

March 2016 Median Sold Price of Existing Single-Family Homes Sales State/Region/County March

2016 Feb. 2016

March 2015

MTM%

Chg YTY%

Chg MTM%

Chg YTY%

Chg Calif. Single-family (SAAR) $483,280 $443,950 r $464,640 r 8.9% 4.0% 5.5% 5.7% Calif. Condo/Townhomes $399,060 $387,370 r $381,250 r 3.0% 4.7% 40.5% 1.1% Los Angeles Metro Area $446,240 $428,090

$427,990 r 4.2% 4.3% 39.5% 1.7% Inland Empire $309,890 $290,270

$290,240

6.8% 6.8% 38.6% 5.3% San Francisco Bay Area $761,160 $696,430

$730,650

9.3% 4.2% 47.1% -8.1%



















San Francisco Bay Area

















Alameda $762,570 $712,990

$713,060 r 7.0% 6.9% 61.5% -7.6% Contra-Costa $572,620 $538,650

$491,780 r 6.3% 16.4% 47.5% -7.9% Marin $1,148,150 $1,113,640

$1,085,230

3.1% 5.8% 36.2% -30.1% Napa $666,670 $664,470

$562,500

0.3% 18.5% 70.9% -10.5% San Francisco $1,360,580 $1,437,500

$1,275,000

-5.4% 6.7% 52.5% -17.0% San Mateo $1,205,000 $1,200,000

$1,300,000

0.4% -7.3% 51.8% -13.5% Santa Clara $1,065,000 $942,500

$932,100

13.0% 14.3% 51.8% -12.4% Solano $376,420 $365,620

$345,100

3.0% 9.1% 20.0% 10.8% Sonoma $596,090 $554,610

$519,500

7.5% 14.7% 39.5% 5.0% Southern California

















Los Angeles $440,460 $445,030

$419,370 r -1.0% 5.0% 37.9% -0.4% Orange $721,140 $712,560

$696,060

1.2% 3.6% 38.5% -3.5% Riverside $355,590 $334,440

$331,710

6.3% 7.2% 36.3% 1.6% San Bernardino $237,350 $226,870

$215,640

4.6% 10.1% 42.5% 12.2% San Diego $573,580 $537,580

$530,650

6.7% 8.1% 40.5% 1.1% Ventura $620,020 $610,820

$596,890

1.5% 3.9% 61.3% 8.0% Central Coast

















Monterey $490,000 $497,980

$510,000

-1.6% -3.9% 6.5% -12.9% San Luis Obispo $561,010 $527,080

$507,440

6.4% 10.6% 52.2% -2.4% Santa Barbara $596,770 $729,170 r $797,410 r -18.2% -25.2% 63.8% -3.3% Santa Cruz $790,000 $794,500

$747,250

-0.6% 5.7% 41.5% -6.3% Central Valley

















Fresno $230,880 $210,370

$213,960

9.7% 7.9% 23.9% 7.4% Glenn $193,330 $200,000

$190,000

-3.3% 1.8% -33.3% -14.3% Kern (Bakersfield) $221,540 $221,670 r $208,550 r -0.1% 6.2% 24.6% 6.4% Kings $204,810 $202,500

$190,000

1.1% 7.8% 35.7% 50.8% Madera $215,000 $215,380

$198,750

-0.2% 8.2% 17.4% -1.8% Merced $189,500 $197,780

$190,000

-4.2% -0.3% 70.8% 30.9% Placer $407,760 $418,130

$383,330

-2.5% 6.4% 42.2% -11.0% Sacramento $309,860 $297,980

$282,080

4.0% 9.8% 32.4% 3.5% San Benito $495,000 $464,500

$474,900

6.6% 4.2% 52.6% 13.7% San Joaquin $297,370 $292,960

$272,500

1.5% 9.1% 40.8% 6.6% Stanislaus $262,390 $253,350

$242,170

3.6% 8.3% 36.0% 10.0% Tulare $197,220 $189,200

$182,630

4.2% 8.0% 20.0% 7.4% Other Calif. Counties

















Amador $307,890 $267,860

$250,000

14.9% 23.2% 77.4% 71.9% Butte $283,870 $270,830

$233,930

4.8% 21.3% 29.2% 13.5% Calaveras $271,870 $265,620

$258,330

2.4% 5.2% 9.1% 35.2% Del Norte $196,670 $180,000

$140,000 r 9.3% 40.5% -11.5% 27.8% El Dorado $432,140 $424,320

$393,400

1.8% 9.8% 54.3% 15.0% Humboldt $282,290 $269,440

$253,120

4.8% 11.5% 19.3% 1.9% Lake $242,310 $193,330

$225,000

25.3% 7.7% 53.6% 62.3% Mariposa $225,000 $275,000

$275,000

-18.2% -18.2% -33.3% 100.0% Mendocino $365,380 $371,430

$297,500

-1.6% 22.8% 41.7% 4.1% Nevada $361,430 $298,150

$330,360 r 21.2% 9.4% 25.0% 1.9% Plumas $231,250 $266,670

$241,670 r -13.3% -4.3% 75.0% 40.0% Shasta $218,750 $213,410

$223,750

2.5% -2.2% 45.5% 18.5% Siskiyou $153,330 $175,000

$176,670

-12.4% -13.2% -23.1% -18.9% Sutter $230,680 $232,890

$250,000

-0.9% -7.7% 31.4% 1.5% Tehama $193,330 $175,000

$163,330

10.5% 18.4% 81.8% -2.4% Tuolumne $239,710 $272,500

$232,140

-12.0% 3.3% 71.8% 1.5% Yolo $374,000 $387,930

$334,720

-3.6% 11.7% 59.6% 28.5% Yuba $232,500 $221,150

$198,890

5.1% 16.9% 29.2% 25.4% r = revised

March 2016 County Unsold Inventory and Time on Market (Regional and condo sales data not seasonally adjusted)

March 2016 Unsold Inventory Index Median Time on Market State/Region/County March

2016 Feb.

2016

March

2015

March

2016 Feb.

2016

March

2015 Calif. Single-family 3.6 4.6

3.8

29.9 41.4 r 34.2 Calif. Condo/Townhomes 2.9 3.9

3.1 r 27.3 32.4 r 31.9 Los Angeles Metro Area 4.0 5.4

4.2 r 48.7 55.8

51.3 Inland Empire 4.5 6.1

4.9

54.4 59.8

59.1 San Francisco Bay Area 2.6 3.2

2.1 r 21.2 25.5

21.6



















San Francisco Bay Area

















Alameda 2.2 3.0

2.1 r 18.0 20.3

18.6 Contra-Costa 2.4 3.0

1.3 r 18.9 23.6

20.5 Marin 3.8 3.8

2.6

25.1 58.2

27.0 Napa 4.6 6.5

4.1

48.8 65.8

49.9 San Francisco 2.7 3.3

1.6

20.4 22.4

20.7 San Mateo 2.2 2.7

1.6

18.6 19.7

17.9 Santa Clara 2.4 2.9

1.9

18.1 21.1

17.7 Solano 2.6 2.8

3.7

38.3 47.6

46.4 Sonoma 3.1 3.9

3.7

45.6 59.8

43.6 Southern California

















Los Angeles 3.6 4.9

3.8 r 43.2 49.5

45.0 Orange 3.9 4.9

3.7

49.0 59.0

51.3 Riverside 4.8 6.4

5.0

57.5 65.0

64.5 San Bernardino 4.0 5.5

4.8

48.7 54.0

52.3 San Diego 3.4 4.5

3.7

23.2 26.3

24.7 Ventura 4.0 5.9

4.5

53.8 66.8

55.1 Central Coast

















Monterey 4.4 4.3

3.6

29.7 38.0

36.7 San Luis Obispo 4.7 6.5

4.6

28.8 41.1

28.4 Santa Barbara 4.6 6.8 r 3.8

31.0 40.5 r 29.5 Santa Cruz 3.1 3.7

3.3

21.1 37.2

22.6 Central Valley

















Fresno 4.2 5.1

4.6

27.8 33.2

33.1 Glenn 5.3 3.1

5.5

100.7 61.0

105.5 Kern (Bakersfield) 3.8 4.7 r 3.9 r 29.1 36.9 r 28.3 Kings 2.9 4.0

5.4

37.8 42.6

48.6 Madera 6.9 8.0

7.2

80.3 95.1

88.2 Merced 3.4 5.8

4.6

41.2 67.8

46.1 Placer 3.2 3.8

3.1

23.0 27.8

25.2 Sacramento 2.4 2.9

2.9

21.1 24.1

23.7 San Benito 2.6 3.4

2.3

23.1 43.9

28.4 San Joaquin 2.6 3.5

3.2

24.2 28.7

29.4 Stanislaus 2.8 3.6

3.6

24.6 28.5

25.2 Tulare 4.6 5.5

4.8

33.5 37.6

41.5 Other Calif. Counties

















Amador 3.9 6.4

6.7

75.5 51.3

105.5 Butte 3.4 3.9

4.2

26.6 50.7

44.7 Calaveras 5.1 4.8

8.3 r 95.8 85.9

124.9 Del Norte 5.9 4.6

8.4 r 112.8 96.8

121.0 El Dorado 3.9 5.2

4.9

38.0 57.5

37.4 Humboldt 3.7 4.0

4.7

42.1 61.0

61.9 Lake 4.3 6.6

8.1

76.4 73.4

117.9 Mariposa 13.1 7.8

33.0

91.0 125.1

45.5 Mendocino 7.3 8.7

7.1

79.1 75.5

98.3 Nevada 4.3 4.7

5.8

29.7 61.0

50.8 Plumas 11.8 17.0

22.9 r 129.7 135.5

131.9 Shasta 4.4 6.3

5.4

47.7 47.0

42.7 Siskiyou 7.7 5.5

9.7

80.3 61.0

75.5 Sutter 3.3 4.1

3.5

48.6 28.4

43.1 Tehama 5.3 9.0

5.7

55.2 61.0

55.2 Tuolumne 5.3 8.2

5.4

80.9 75.5

77.6 Yolo 2.4 3.3

3.3

21.5 24.5

25.4 Yuba 2.7 3.0

3.6

25.4 39.5

27.3 r = revised

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150202/172996LOGO

SOURCE CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS

Related Links

http://www.car.org


DENVER and BETHESDA, Md., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- As part of its ongoing mission to reach as many patients as possible with its trusted cannabis products, Mary's Medicinals today announced that it has agreed to distribute products in Maryland through retail applicant Bethesda Biomedical.

"Having recently won Most Innovative Product at CannAwards 2015 and the 2015 Stevie American Business Award for Best Health & Pharmaceuticals Product, there was no doubt that I wanted to continue to partner with Mary's," said Brian Caldwell, President of Bethesda Biomedical. "Their commitment to quality, reliable, and locally sourced products is a tenet of what Bethesda Biomedical was founded on and I look forward to continuing my relationship with them on the East Coast."

Since September 2014, Brian Caldwell has carried Mary's Medicinals in his Washington State medical dispensary. Patients have long since come to rely on Mary's precisely dosed transdermal patches, capsules and compounds which are reported to bring relief to many ailments and chronic pains.

Mary's Medicinals has established itself as one of the most trusted and innovative producers of canna-based products in Colorado, and has since expanded into Arizona, Oregon, California, Vermont and Washington. Mary's was first to offer THCa and CBN products; discovered harvesting techniques for the isolation of CBC, and continues to develop cutting edge approaches for isolating, manufacturing and delivering medicinal cannabis.

Available in THC Indica, THC Sativa, THCa, CBN, CBD and CBD/THC, Mary's award-winning patches utilize the highest-quality, locally-sourced cannabis. The patches provide patients with up to 12 hours of reliable relief. With the knowledgeable leadership team of Bethesda Biomedical, patients will be well served with high quality products that Mary's has perfected.

Mary's also manufactures a line of complementary transdermal gels, compound, capsules and other products that will be available in Maryland.

About Bethesda Biomedical:

Bethesda Biomedical is a Public Benefit Corporation serving the state of Maryland by providing pharmaceutical grade cannabinoid therapies. Bethesda Biomedical will pursue socially responsible business practices, in addition to profits, by providing individuals and communities with beneficial products and services, creating economic opportunity for individuals and communities beyond the creation of jobs in the normal course of business, improving human health, and promoting science and the advancement of cannabis knowledge. More information is available at: http://www.bethesdabiomedical.com

About Mary's Medicinals:

Mary's Medicinals is a wellness company innovating at the intersection of engineering and horticulture. Mary's is focused on transforming how people view and utilize cannabis, developing products that isolate the benefits of cannabis and other vital plant extracts for optimum patient care. More information is available at: www.marysmedicinals.com

The statements made regarding these products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The efficiency of these products has not been confirmed by FDA-approved research. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. All information presented here is not meant as a substitute for or alternative to information from health care practitioners. If you are taking any medication or are under treatment for any disease, please consult your health care professional about potential interactions or other possible complications before using these products. The Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act requires this notice.

Supporting Resources:

Press Contact:

Graham Sorkin

[email protected]

855-420-6334

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356837LOGO

SOURCE Marys Medicinals

Related Links

http://www.marysmedicinals.com


TORONTO, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Mattamy Group Corporation ("Mattamy") today announced the date and time of Mattamy's quarterly bondholder conference call for the quarter ended February 29, 2016.

For Access to Conference Call and Financial Reports:

Mattamy will host its conference call, for qualified investors, to discuss its third-quarter financial results live on April 28, 2016, from 10:00 am EDT to 11:00 am EDT. Conference call dial-in details will be available on Intralinks, and the financial reports will be posted on Intralinks no later than April 26, 2016. An audio replay of the call will be available within 24 hours after the call ends and will be posted on Intralinks.

Access to Mattamy's Intralinks site is accessible to beneficial owners of notes, prospective investors and others upon certification to establish its identity as such to the reasonable satisfaction of Mattamy. To obtain information on how to access the site, email [email protected]. If you experience any difficulty you can contact Isma Hosein at [email protected]attamycorp.com

About Mattamy Homes

Mattamy Homes is the largest privately owned homebuilder in North America, with operations across the United States and Canada. Mattamy has sold more than 70,000 homes in 160 communities. In the United States, the company is represented in nine metropolitan areas  Minneapolis-St. Paul, Charlotte, Phoenix, Tucson, Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, Sarasota and Naples  and in Canada, those communities stretch across the Greater Toronto Area, as well as in Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton. Visit www.mattamyhomes.com for more information.

SOURCE Mattamy Homes Limited

Related Links

http://www.mattamyhomes.com/


SAN BRUNO, Calif., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- MediaMobz, a platform-as-a-service venture that is transforming the way brands convert video content to revenue, today announced it will sponsor Exhibit & Event Marketers Association's (E2MA) Red Diamond Congress 2016 (RDC 2016). The congress will be held April 25-27, 2016 at the Renaissance Orlando at Sea World. MediaMobz will exhibit in the Congress' exhibition hall.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356911

Throughout the entire conference MediaMobz platform led by VideoShare  a simple, easy and complete way to create and share video  will be helping E2MA and select exhibitors convert video to revenue. For a look at MediaMobz's Event Management Solution at the congress or to request an online demo, please visit Event Video to Revenue.

"We have successfully and repeatedly provided event video marketing solutions to Cisco, Deloitte, The Economist, Microdesk and The World Bank to name only a few. We've now productized all we've learned and are pleased to debut our Event Management solution at Red Diamond Congress 2016," said Dave Toole, CEO, MediaMobz.

"MediaMobz are excited to be at RDC 2016 to show sales and marketing executives how MediaMobz uniquely helps them convert video to revenue," commented Dan Gatto, Director of Global PaaS Sales, MediaMobz.

"Achieving enterprise-wide alignment to increase engagement around exhibits and events is a challenge and we're pleased to work with MediaMobz to provide real-time examples of how to successfully overcome such challenges," stated Jim Wurm, Executive Director, E2MA.

"Red Diamond Congress attendees will experience firsthand how working with MediaMobz and E2MA can serve diverse needs across their organization."

The E2MA Red Diamond Congress (RDC), by design, is a true congress of industry stakeholders that invites input from all points of view and values the collective experiences of all industry professionals, no matter what segment you represent or what role you play.

Register to meet us at RDC 2016 or schedule an online demo at http://goo.gl/pxCrj0

About MediaMobz

MediaMobz is a video technology platform that converts video to revenue. MediaMobz are a total solution enabling brands to create, leverage, manage, publish and measure video content to revenue.

You can also follow MediaMobz on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com

SOURCE MediaMobz, Inc.
MIAMI, March 22, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Asolo Repertory Theatre (Sarasota, FL.) kicked off its 2015-16 season with the Tony Award-winning musical West Side Story on November 13th. Two-time Tony Award nominee Joey McKneely (who reproduced the choreography for the celebrated 2009 Broadway revival) directed Robbins' timeless choreography for Asolo Rep's production.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160322/346704

Among a great line-up of actors was Miami's Marilyn Caserta, a recent graduate of the Atlantic Acting School in New York, who was cast as Rosalia. Marilyn was selected to perform the curtain singing of "Somewhere". The Herald Tribune loved the performance, stating "Tony and Maria take us into a heavenly dreamland during an ethereal singing of "Somewhere."

Marilyn was then cast to perform in a Broadway Royale New Years show at the Copacabana in New York, produced by Radio City musical director Ken Lundy and Broadway producer Dale Badway. On stage Marilyn clearly rocked the crowd.

To showcase this triple threat, Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre (Coral Gables) cast Marilyn for their debut of West Side Story directed by David Arisco. She is also about to open Sondheim on Sondheim at the Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre.

"She has the 'it' factor," said John Rodaz of Area Stage Companywho directed Marilyn in numerous shows. In 2012, director and winner of most industry awards, Arthur Whitelaw, cast Marilyn as Peppermint Patty in Snoopy, the Musical. At 16, this was her first professional show. Whitelaw said "I had the honor of introducing Liza Minnelli and Kristin Chenoweth to the stage and now I can say I discovered Marilyn Caserta." Michele Solomon, the Florida Theatre on Stage critic, stated "Standouts in the cast include Marilyn Caserta as Peppermint Patty, whose natural talent shines through in 'Hurry Up, Face' and 'Poor Sweet Baby.'" Miami Herald's Christine Dolen's review said "Patty's 'Poor Sweet Baby' is overflowing with tenderness, thanks to the impressive Caserta."

Tickets for Sondheim on Sondheim are available at the Actors' Playhouse website, http://www.actorsplayhouse.org/ or at (305) 444-9293.

ABOUT MARILYN CASERTA

Marilyn's been acting, singing, and dancing since childhoodher passion for performance turned Marilyn into a tour-de-force in South Florida and a growing voice in New York City theater. Her successes are on her website. For information visit the MarilynCaserta.com or contact Scott at one small studio at (954) 449-5798 / [email protected]

For information, contact

Scott Coventry

(954) 449-5798

Email

SOURCE Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre

Related Links

http://www.actorsplayhouse.org


NEW YORK, April 5, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Report Details

The latest report from business intelligence provider visiongain offers comprehensive analysis of the global military radar systems market. Visiongain assesses that this market will generate revenues of $9,737m in 2016.



Now: "Pratt & Whitney and BAE Systems PLC announced as being involved as contractors for the B-21 programme" - This is an example of the business critical headline that you need to know about - and more importantly, you need to read visiongain's objective analysis of how this will impact your company and the industry more broadly. How are you and your company reacting to this news? Are you sufficiently informed?



How this report will benefit you

Read on to discover how you can exploit the future business opportunities emerging in this sector. Visiongain's new study tells you and tells you NOW.



In this brand new report you will receive 312 in-depth tables, charts and graphs PLUS 3 EXCLUSIVE interviews  all unavailable elsewhere.



The 329 page report provides clear detailed insight into the global military radar systems market. It reveals the key drivers and challenges affecting the market.



By ordering and reading our brand new report today you will be better informed and ready to act.



Report Scope

- Global military radar systems market forecasts from 2016-2026

- Regional military radar systems market analysis covering Asia-Pacific, South America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Central Asia, and North America;

- Country military radar systems forecasts from 2016-2026 covering Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, The Netherlands, Poland, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UK, and the US, as well as the Rest of the World market



- Military radar systems submarket forecasts from 2016-2026 covering Airborne systems, Land-Based Systems, Naval Systems.

- Analysis of the key factors driving growth in the global, regional country level military radar systems markets from 2016-2026

- Detailed tables containing 211 contracts / projects and programmes in the military radar systems market by country



- Profiles of the leading 13 military radar systems companies in 2016 at a global level and for leading countries.

- Three Interviews with key opinion leaders Timothy Burbey, President of Blueshift Materials, Simon Collins, Senior Product Manager ECPS at ADLINK Technology, and Mark Radford, CEO of Blighter Surveillance Systems Ltd. informing and underpinning the analysis



How will you benefit from this report?

- This report will keep your military radar systems knowledge base up to speed. Don't get left behind

- This report will reinforce strategic decision decision-making based upon definitive and reliable market data

- You will learn how to exploit new technological trends

- You will be able to realise your company's full potential within the military radar systems market

- You will better understand the competitive landscape and identify potential new business opportunities & partnerships



Who should read this report?

- Anyone within the Military Radar market value chain.

- Director of research and development

- Technology developer

- Radar specialist

- Procurement specialist

- Radar technology consultant

- Marketing or competitive intelligence analyst, manager or director

- Strategic marketing, business intelligence

- Competitive intelligence analyst or consultant

- Marketing manager

- Business development manager

- strategy director

- Product development manager

- Commercial director, commercial manager

- Chief operating officer (COO)

- Sales manager

- Technologists

- Suppliers

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- Contractors

- Consultancy



Visiongain's study is intended for anyone requiring commercial analyses for the military radar systems market and leading companies. You will find data, trends and predictions.



Buy our report today Military Radar Systems Market Outlook 2016-2026: Country Forecasts, Contracts & Analysis of Leading Companies Developing Systems for Airborne, Naval & Land-Based Platforms. Avoid missing out by staying informed  order our report now.

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03752650-summary/view-report.html



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



http://www.reportlinker.com





__________________________

Contact Clare: [email protected]

US: (339)-368-6001

Intl: +1 339-368-6001

SOURCE Reportlinker

Related Links

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JACKSON, Mich., March 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- MiraMed Global Services, LLC (MiraMed), headquartered in Jackson, Michigan, is pleased to announce the release of the Spring issue of The Focus, MiraMed's healthcare journal.

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The MiraMed Focus, is a quarterly newsletter from MiraMed Global Services featuring items of interest to the healthcare industry. Tony Mira, MiraMed President and CEO explains, "I am very excited to share the Spring issue of The Focus with our clients and associates. At MiraMed we have some of the best and brightest subject matter experts in business processing outsourcing as well as experts in the healthcare industry sharing their thoughts. I hope this edition of The Focus provides you with insightful articles that address many of the challenges and opportunities facing today's healthcare leaders."

A previous author, David Johnson, has written a compelling article titled Healthcare's Productivity Paradox: Ferocious Exploitation of Payment Formulas. He addresses the exploitation of activity-based payment formulas and how they distort care delivery protocols and misuse care resources.

Dr. Alan M. Preston explains why buying a hospital these days is a risky and complicated matter in his article titled The Trails and Tribulations of Buying a Hospital. We have a unique opportunity to understand the challenges acquiring a hospital brings.

Please log on to MiraMed's website at www.miramedgs.com and to view the electronic version of The Focus online. To be put on the automated email notification list, please send your email address to [email protected]. We look forward to providing you with healthcare updates through The Focus.

About MiraMed

Headquartered in Jackson, Michigan, MiraMed Global Services stands as the premier global provider of business process outsourcing solutions to healthcare organizations nationwide. MiraMed partners with hospitals, health networks, physician practices and related industry service organizations to provide a broad portfolio of customizable solutions, uncover and capitalize on hidden financial opportunities, improve productivity and ultimately increase profits. MiraMed has offices in Jackson, Michigan, Chicago, Illinois, Portland, Oregon, Thousand Oaks, California, Dallas, Texas, Boston, Massachusetts, Greenville, South Carolina, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Chennai, India and Manila, Philippines.

MiraMed pairs healthcare industry experts with world-class processes, infrastructure and technology to deliver meaningful and measurable results. This proprietary model enables sustainable change by delivering a complete, customizable enhanced revenue cycle solutions devised to meet a client's own unique financial and organizational needs.

If you would like more information, please go to www.miramedgs.com or email [email protected].

Contact: Tony Mira

Tel: 517-787-7432

Email

Twitter

LinkedIn

Facebook

Google+

SOURCE MiraMed Global Services

Related Links

http://www.miramedgs.com


Washington: Google's massive book-scanning project cleared its final legal hurdle Monday as the US Supreme Court denied an appeal contending it violates copyright law.

The top US court denied without comment a petition from the Authors Guild to hear the appeal of a 2013 federal court ruling seen as a landmark copyright decision for the digital era.

In a decade-long case, authors and their backers claimed Google was illegally scanning and digitizing millions of books without compensation to the copyright holders.

But the ruling by federal judge Denny Chin, backed by an appellate court panel, said the colossal project in which Google allows users to search books and see snippets of text was "fair use" under copyright law.

Google said in a statement after Monday's decision, "We are grateful that the court has agreed to uphold the decision of the Second Circuit (appeals court) which concluded that Google Books is transformative and consistent with copyright law."

The statement added: "The product acts like a card catalog for the digital age by giving people a new way to find and buy books while at the same time advancing the interests of authors."

The appeals panel last October rejected the arguments of the Authors Guild, several prominent writers and leading publishers that the Google Books program and its Library Project would eat into their earnings potential by allowing readers free access to the books.

Backers of Google contended that digitization offers numerous public benefits for researchers and others.

Win for 'fair use

The decision "reflects what we have long said: that fair use is a powerful and flexible doctrine that enables not only new works, but also innovative uses of existing works," said Raza Panjwani of the consumer group Public Knowledge.

"Although we are glad to see this 12-year saga come to an end, the real shame is that we've had to wait so long to achieve legal certainty about something so beneficial to the public. This denial will hopefully lead to new efforts to expand our access to culture and knowledge through digital formats," he added.

Krista Cox of the Association of Research Libraries hailed the ruling, tweeting, "Win for #fairuse."

Nancy Sims, a University of Minnesota copyright librarian, said in a blog post, "This is a pretty great outcome for libraries and the public."

The Authors Guild said it was disappointed. "Blinded by the public benefit arguments, the Second Circuit ruling tells us that Google, not authors, deserves to profit from the digitization of their books," said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the authors group.

The ruling, she said, "misunderstood the importance of emerging online markets for books and book excerpts. It failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision. The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."

In the October appellate ruling, Judge Pierre Leval wrote that the longstanding interpretation of copyright law has for 300 years been that authors do not have "absolute control" over their works, and that there are important exemptions for "fair use," including news reporting, historical analysis, parody and other "transformative" purposes.

The court said that the snippets made available by Google were not a viable substitute for the works and that it was immaterial if Google made a profit from its search business using the books.

In the original ruling, New York judge Chin said what was originally called the "Library Project" preserves books, gives "new life" to forgotten editions, sustains "print-disabled" users and benefits authors and publishers by finding them new readers.

The case, which dates back to 2005, centers on a Google program started in 2004 to create an electronic database of books that could be searchable by keywords.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- "The NetJets Association of Shared Aircraft Pilots (NJASAP) was exceedingly disappointed to learn the U.S. Department of Transportation has tentatively approved the issuance of a foreign air carrier permit to Norwegian Air International (NAI). The Union views the move as one that undermines the foundation of the aviation industry and the men and women who work in its service."

"The DOT's decision creates a playing field that is grossly skewed in favor of foreign competition, forcing domestic carriers to now compete against foreign airlines that have been given unfair economic advantages by the very same department that is supposed to encourage fair wages and working conditions."

"NAI's scheme poses a very serious risk to the National Airspace System. Specifically, the flying public will be sharing the skies with contracted pilots who have no direct tie to airline management. Absent an ability to communicate, how can these pilots focus attention on operational safety concerns?"

About NJASAP Founded in 2008 as an independent labor advocate, the NetJets Association of Shared Aircraft Pilots (NJASAP) represents the professional interests of the 2,700-plus pilots who fly in the service of NetJets Aviation, Inc. For more information, visit our web site, www.njasap.com, Facebook page, www.facebook.com/njasap, or Twitter feed, @njasap.

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SOURCE NetJets Association of Shared Aircraft Pilots (NJASAP)

Related Links

http://www.njasap.com


SEATTLE, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Nominations are now open for the Heart of Seattle Awards to honor the best local, sustainable merchants in Seattle. The Awards will use a unique selection process: all nominees must take the rigorous Quick Impact Assessment produced by the non-profit organization B Lab, creator of the sustainability-minded B Corporation certification. Winners will be selected by public vote from a group of finalists in several categories. The awards are produced by Chinook Book and sponsored by Alaska Airlines and The Stranger.

"We think this is one of the most meaningful awards ever created for local business," says Aaron Richey, Vice President at Chinook Book. "Businesses must first take a test of their social and environmental performance, and the leading performers will be subject to a public vote. Whoever wins unquestionably represents the heart and soul of our community."

Nominations can be made at heartofseattleawards.com. Businesses can nominate themselves and must take the B Corporation Quick Impact Assessment in order to complete the nomination. The assessment requires some detailed knowledge of the business' practices. "How does your business stack up against others with respect to your employee, community and environmental impact?" says Stephanie Ryan with B Lab. "The 20 minutes you spend taking our assessment will provide you with valuable information to run your business." Completed nominations are due by August 1st and are open to businesses with stores, products or services used by Seattleites.

Finalists will be selected by August 15th in the following categories:

Food & Drink Establishments of all kinds Neighborhood Specialty Retailers Businesses Providing Amazing Experiences Providers of Awesome Services Makers of cool, sustainable items

Finalists will be selected based on a combination of enthusiastic nominations and their Quick Impact Assessment score. A public vote sponsored by The Stranger will take place in late summer, and winners will be recognized at an awards ceremony in January 2017.

"We're excited to support this awards program to honor some of Seattle's best businesses, which both help make Seattle such a special place and help encourage people to come visit the Emerald City," says Mark Bocchi from Alaska Airlines.

Visit heartofseattleawards.com for complete details.

SOURCE Chinook Book

Related Links

http://chinookbook.com


The Short-Term Outlook has quarterly price forecasts for the next 24-months that cover pricing, key drivers and market fundamentals for the entire energy value chain. The web-based interface combines sophisticated modeling techniques with decades of market experience. The latest update gives insights on global crude and regional petroleum products, global LNG, U.S. natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGLs), as well as global biofuels.

Some key findings include:

Stratas Advisors accurately predicted the price bottom for 1Q2016. Our forecast was less than $0.50 /bbl off from actuals, as shown in the attached image.

Global oil demand is expected to rise 900 mb/d in 2016, 800 mb/d lower than growth seen in 2015. Lagging demand combined with persistent supply will result in Brent crude prices at $50 /bbl by the end of 2017.

/bbl by the end of 2017. With Russia and Saudi Arabia operating at close to full capacity and production freezes or cuts not in the interest of supply growth markets like Iran and Iraq , Stratas Advisors holds firm that the April OPEC meeting in Doha is unlikely to yield any material change to short term supply.

and operating at close to full capacity and production freezes or cuts not in the interest of supply growth markets like and , Stratas Advisors holds firm that the April OPEC meeting in is unlikely to yield any material change to short term supply. Asian light/heavy product differentials will increase by $4 /bbl year-on-year due to lagging demand for residual fuel oil versus continued growth in gasoline and diesel. U.S. NGL markets are expected to remain weak in 2016, with Y-grade prices averaging $1 lower per barrel than prices seen in 2015.

/bbl year-on-year due to lagging demand for residual fuel oil versus continued growth in gasoline and diesel. U.S. NGL markets are expected to remain weak in 2016, with Y-grade prices averaging lower per barrel than prices seen in 2015. Henry Hub prices will also struggle to clear $3 per mmbtu throughout the forecast period due to continued oversupply in the U.S.

per mmbtu throughout the forecast period due to continued oversupply in the U.S. Asia's LNG prices will remain between $8 /mcf and $10 /mcf due to increased availability of global imports from the U.S. and Australia .

LNG prices will remain between /mcf and /mcf due to increased availability of global imports from the U.S. and . U.S. ethylene prices will drop by 6.1 percent by 2017 because of lagging global demand combined with continued access to low-cost feedstock.

Gasoline crack spreads in the U.S. are likely to decrease by roughly $4 /bbl by the end of 2016.

Available for Interviews

Stratas Advisors experts are available to answer questions and can offer insights on the impact to the energy industry. For interview opportunities, please contact [email protected].

Jeff Quigley, Director - Energy Markets

Jeff Quigley is responsible for market monitoring and forecasting across the entire value chain. Quigley manages Stratas Advisors' Short-Term Price Outlook Service. Prior to joining Stratas Advisors, Quigley was a senior associate with Energy Ventures Analysis, a strategic consultancy based in Arlington, Va. He led teams covering international energy markets, oil and gas and solid fuels (coal) serving major U.S. utilities, trade associations and global energy companies. Quigley holds an MBA from George Washington University and a B.S. in Business Administration from American University.

Dr. Sang Hyun (Sean) Lee, PhD, Director - Forecasting

Dr. Sang Hyun (Sean) Lee analyzes the energy data value chain (oil, natural gas, NGLs, biofuels, refined products and petrochemicals) to develop forecasts and quantitative/analytic models in Stratas Advisors' analytics group. He is developing and enhancing forecasting models for global and regional energy demand, supply and prices using an econometrics approach. He also performs various sensitivity and scenario analyses and high-level analytic or pricing modeling. He earned a bachelor degree from Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea and a masters and doctorate from Texas A&M University.

About Stratas Advisors

Stratas Advisors is a global consulting and advisory firm covering the full spectrum of the energy market  upstream, midstream and downstream  and related sectors, such as automotive, transportation, power, petrochemicals and heavy industries. The company also evaluates and assesses the impact of macro-level drivers including geopolitics, macro-economics and energy policies. Experienced Stratas analysts and consultants provide data, analysis and strategic insights to leading businesses, governments and institutions to identify, understand and monitor key drivers that shape future developments. This forward-looking perspective helps clients leverage opportunities, mitigate risks and implement strategies. Stratas Advisors, a Hart Energy company, is based in Houston, Texas and has offices in Brussels and Singapore. For information, visit StratasAdvisors.com.

Contact: Stephanie Palmer

tel +1.832.690.0842

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SOURCE Stratas Advisors

Related Links

http://www.stratasadvisors.com


WASHINGTON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Kingdom of Bahrain strongly condemns the murder of policeman Mohammed Tanweer on April 16, 2016 at the hands of violent extremists. The petrol bomb attack, which occurred in the village of Karbabad, also left two policemen critically injured. The Kingdom offers its condolences to the policeman's family, and wishes the injured policemen a fast recovery. At this time, several suspects have been arrested in connection with the attack, demonstrating the Kingdom's commitment to swiftly acting to carry out justice against terrorists.

In recent years, Bahrain has been faced with increased violence at the hands of extremists seeking to undermine the stability of the country. This attack brought the number of police fatalities in Bahrain up to 18 since 2011, and the number of police injuries now amount to over 3,200. The Minister of Interior stated that the most recent attack in Karbabad was a result of incitement that took place both inside and outside of Bahrain. The Kingdom affirms its commitment to combating domestic terrorism and protecting the safety of its citizens, and asserts that anyone who incites violence will be held accountable by the law.

The rise of terrorism in Bahrain follows the troubling trend throughout the region. At a time where global stability is threatened by senseless acts of violence fueled by extremist ideology, Bahrain's determination to stand resolute with its partners against terrorists remains strong. The Kingdom is committed to actively working with its partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council to counter the threat of terrorism that undermines the safety and stability of the region as a whole.

SOURCE Embassy of the Kingdom of Bahrain to the United States
NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Island Energy Services, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of One Rock Capital Partners, LP ("One Rock") announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire from Chevron U.S.A. Inc. ("Chevron") certain refining, distribution and retail assets located in Hawaii, including the 58,000 barrel-per-day refinery in Kapolei, Chevron's interests in a network of 58 retail service stations, four product distribution terminals on Oahu, Maui, Kauai and Hawaii Island, pipeline distribution systems and other related downstream assets statewide. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The agreement is subject to customary regulatory approvals and is expected to be completed during the second half of 2016.

"Chevron has an excellent industry reputation for the quality and reliability of its products and services," said One Rock Managing Partner Tony W. Lee. "We look forward to building upon the strong foundation that Chevron has established in Hawaii over the past several decades."

"The entire One Rock team is excited to be able to provide operating expertise to such a vital component of the Hawaii energy landscape, as these assets deliver important refined petroleum products to the Islands' utilities, airlines, and motorists," One Rock Managing Partner R. Scott Spielvogel added.

One Rock Operating Partners John Georges, Andrew Georges, and Mike Mayer have been deeply involved in the planning for the anticipated carve-out from Chevron. These Operating Partners have extensive expertise in the chemicals, process and energy industries.

ABOUT ONE ROCK CAPITAL PARTNERS, LLC

One Rock makes controlling investments in companies with potential for growth and operational improvement using a rigorous approach that utilizes highly experienced Operating Partners to identify, acquire and enhance businesses in select industries. One Rock also has a unique strategic relationship with Mitsubishi Corporation, which can provide strategic resources to One Rock and its portfolio companies, including access to potential new business partners, market intelligence, and low-cost sourcing through increased purchasing power globally. For more information, visit www.onerockcapital.com.

Contact

One Rock Capital Partners, LLC: 212-605-6000

Chevron: Lara Sweeney at 832-854-5717 or Albert Chee at 808-682-2313

For all media inquiries, please contact Russell Pang at 808-543-3591 or [email protected].

SOURCE One Rock Capital Partners, LLC

Related Links

http://www.onerockcapital.com


Mindbreeze InSpire is delivered as a pre-installed enterprise search appliance box. Configuration is simple and crawling of data sources can begin quickly. Mindbreeze InSpire unites business facts from company-internal data sources and from the Internet in one semantic search index. The product's out-of-the-box connectors are an exceptional feature, intelligently uniting information from all data sources. Mindbreeze InSpire also ensures that each user will find only business facts which he or she is allowed to access by verifying access rights directly from indexed data sources.

"Enterprise search has been a pillar of Onix's product offerings since 2001," said Onix President and CEO Tim Needles. "We are excited to partner with Mindbreeze. They are an established leader in enterprise search, and we are confident that InSpire from Mindbreeze will deliver the performance our customers expect."

Mindbreeze founder and CEO Daniel Fallmann said, "Mindbreeze is delighted to count Onix among our selective and fast-growing international network of partners. We have the knowledge management products customers want, and we look forward to working with the Onix team and their customers in the United States and Canada."

To learn more about Onix's enterprise search services or to request a free consultation with an Onix search expert, visit the Onix website.

About Onix

Onix is a leading developer and provider of technology solutions and consulting services to a broad range of corporate and government customers. Onix partners with technology industry leaders and offers extensive expertise in the design and implementation of end-to-end comprehensive solutions.

About Mindbreeze

Mindbreeze, with headquarters in Linz/Austria, is a leading European provider of software products and search appliances for enterprise search, big data and knowledge management.

Contact:

Karen Masuga

216-529-3043

[email protected]

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SOURCE Onix

Related Links

http://www.onixnet.com/onix


PARSIPPANY, N.J., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Onkos Surgical and Vivex Biomedical, Inc. have come together to provide a portfolio of tissue products to support the needs of musculoskeletal oncologists and their patients. This commitment strengthens Onkos Surgical's ability to enhance outcomes, decrease complications and improve recovery following musculoskeletal tumor and limb salvage surgery.

"The addition of this portfolio of hard and soft tissue biologics increases our ability to support the entire spectrum of surgical care for this patient population," said Patrick Treacy, Co-founder and CEO of Onkos Surgical. "We are excited about this partnership with Vivex. Their dedication to developing regenerative therapies is a wonderful complement to Onkos Surgical's focus on the needs of the surgeons and caregivers who dedicate their lives to the surgical treatment of cancer."

According to H. Thomas Temple, M.D., Professor and Senior Vice President for Translational Research and Economic Development at NOVA Southeastern University and Medical Director of the University of Miami Tissue Bank, "Having a biologic portfolio that contains traditional bone and soft tissue grafts as well as robust stem cells and unique tissue scaffolds will expand reconstructive outcomes and transform the way we think about complex reconstruction following tumor resection. This is especially true for children with malignant bone tumors. Onkos Surgical is bridging biologics and implants and filling an unmet need in orthopaedics for patients who need complex reconstructions that optimize function."

"Associations with innovative industry leaders like Onkos Surgical furthers our vision of enhancing the quality of patient care," added Tracy Anderson, President and CEO of Vivex Biomedical, Inc. "We look forward to growing our relationship with Onkos Surgical."

For more information or to order biologic solutions from Onkos Surgical call (973) 264-5400.

About Onkos Surgical

Onkos Surgical (www.onkossurgical.com) is a privately held surgical oncology company founded in 2015. Onkos Surgical believes surgical oncology deserves attention, focus and innovation. Through dedication and strategic partnerships, Onkos Surgical is advancing surgical oncology solutions and will advocate for and support the surgeons and caregivers who dedicate their lives to the surgical treatment of cancer.

About Vivex Biomedical, Inc.

Vivex Biomedical, Inc., (www.vivex.com) is a privately held company based out of Marietta, Georgia focused on cellular therapies that treat orthopaedic, spine, wound and soft tissue indications. Vivex Biomedical and its wholly owned subsidiary, UMTB Biomedical, Inc., own and hold exclusive rights to proprietary technologies in the field of biomedicine, stem cells, and orthopaedic implant surface modification. The Vivex Biomedical technology includes marrow isolated adult multilineage inducible (MIAMI) cell identification and processing, as well as, mimetic patterning technologies (MIME) which can improve the efficiency and efficacy of a patient's healing cascade and reduce the overall cost of healthcare.

CONTACT:

Anna Kroll

973-264-5420

[email protected]

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SOURCE Onkos Surgical

Related Links

http://www.onkossurgical.com


$50 off a booking that includes a 1 st class Swiss Travel Pass (paper and e-pass) and a complimentary mountaintop excursion

off a booking that includes a 1 class Swiss Travel Pass (paper and e-pass) and a complimentary mountaintop excursion Booking dates: April 19  May 17, 2016

 No travel date restrictions

Coupon code: SWISSPEAK50

The Swiss Travel Pass offers extensive travel and sightseeing options for travelers to create memorable adventures. Travelers with the pass will receive:

Extensive travel on the Swiss Travel System including rail, lake steamers, and postal buses

Access to Switzerland's scenic trains, including the Bernina Express, Glacier Express, GoldenPass Line and Wilhelm Tell Express

scenic trains, including the Bernina Express, Glacier Express, GoldenPass Line and Wilhelm Tell Express Free travel on public transportation in 75 towns and cities

Free access to over 490 Swiss museums

Up to 50% discount on mountain railways and cable cars

Families can enjoy even more savings, as children under the age of 16 travel free with a parent or legal guardian. When traveling with children 6 to 15 years of age, simply request a free Swiss Family Card when booking your Swiss Travel Pass. Children under 6 do not require a rail pass or family card.

Discounted with the Swiss Travel Pass, travelers are recommended to add-on one of many can't-miss mountaintop excursions in Switzerland. Peaks available to add onto one's itinerary include Gornergrat, Jungfraujoch, Mt. Stanserhorn, Mt. Pilatus, Mt. Titlis, and Schilthorn/Piz Gloria. On these excursions, travelers will experience stunning views, great heights, nostalgic trams and cable cars, and more that make Switzerland stand apart from the rest of Europe.

Prices begin at $351 USD** for the 3-day 1st class electronic Swiss Travel Pass, and mountaintop excursion prices begin at up to 50% discount with a pass. To book, visit raileurope.com or call Rail Europe's Contact Center.

*From April 19 through 5:00pm ET on May 17, 2016 or the first 250 bookings; whichever comes first, book one of the paper or electronic Swiss Travel Pass options in 1st class and any one of the eligible Swiss peaks (Gornergrat, Jungfraujoch Top of Europe, Mt Pilatus, Mt Stanserhorn, Mt Titlis, Schilthorn/Piz Gloria) in the same booking and enter coupon code SWISSPEAK50 during checkout on the delivery page to receive the $50 discount. The Swiss Travel Pass is pre-validated, therefore travellers are required to provide their first date of travel on the pass at time of purchase. The first date of validity must be within six months of date of issue. Offer excludes the Jungfrau Travel Pass. One coupon code per booking may be applied. No other coupon code discounts can be combined. Offer is subject to change or extension without notice. No adjustments can be made on prior purchases.

** Prices are subject to change.

About Switzerland Tourism

Switzerland Tourism is the official National Tourist Office of Switzerland and operates in 30 countries around the world with the goal of promoting Switzerland as a travel, vacation and convention destination. In North America, Switzerland Tourism operates offices in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto. http://www.myswitzerland.com/en-us/home.html

About Rail Europe

Rail Europe represents more than 50 European train companies and is a one-stop shop for European rail travel planning and booking. Rail Europe, Inc., is the largest distributor of European rail products in North America, offering a wide range of passes and train tickets to North American travellers. An essential part of the vacation planning process, the company's Web site offers a user-friendly booking engine, knowledgeable experts, online rail pass finder, virtual tours, interactive maps and much more. Rail Europe provides a worry-free, cost and time-effective and seamless travel experience by enabling customers to purchase tickets and plan travel details in advance.

For more information or to book a trip with Rail Europe, visit raileurope.com . Trips can also be reserved by speaking to a Rail Europe Travel Consultant at 1-800-438-7245 (U.S.), 1-800-361-7245 (Canada) or 1-888-337-8687 (Mexico). To book rail for groups of 10 or more, please contact the Group Department at https://www.raileurope.com/group-travel/group-travel.html.

For the latest Rail Europe news, downloadable videos and high-resolution photos of European trains, media can visit the newsroom at https://www.raileurope.com/about-us/about-us.html.

Connect with Rail Europe on:

Facebook

Twitter (@RailEurope)

Instagram

Youtube

Google+

Pinterest

Blog

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SOURCE Rail Europe

Related Links

http://www.raileurope.com


PHOENIX, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Today during his State of the City address, Mayor Greg Stanton announced that Phoenix would be the newest "Smart Gigabit Community."

Through a three-year private sector grant sponsored by Cox Communications, Phoenix joins 15 other communities nationwide participating in the "Smart Gigabit Communities" project. Initiated in 2015 by US Ignite in partnership with the National Science Foundation, these communities are building a living lab of testbeds for smart gigabit applications.

"Smart Gigabit Communities" represent coalitions of network operators, community anchor institutions like hospitals and universities, municipalities, and non-profit organizations. Together, these organizations are focused on developing smart gigabit applications that can address local community needs, such as education, workforce development, public safety and community health.

As a member of the "Smart Gigabit Communities," Phoenix will receive resources that will enable the development of multiple smart gigabit applications. Consistent with the innovation Cox already enables in its local communities, these apps are expected to deliver technology advancements and community benefits to the Phoenix Metropolitan area. In addition, Phoenix will have access to applications developed by the 15 initial project communities and 55 research universities also on the network.

US Ignite has organized local communities and assisted in building over 100 next-generation application profiles over the past three years. Each participating community receives access to a low-latency and ultra-fast network with local cloud computing and storage capabilities that will support highly interactive and visually immersive experiences not possible on today's commercial Internet.

"Phoenix is a center for innovation, but becoming a "Smart Gigabit Community" will help inspire our best and brightest entrepreneurs to take our economy in exciting new directions," said Mayor Greg Stanton. "This effort will lead to increased collaboration in our surging tech-innovation ecosystem, streamline city government and enhance the lives of people who live, work and play in our community."

"Cox Communications remains committed to deploying the latest gigabit infrastructure throughout our service areas, driving future innovations in education, healthcare and economic development that will benefit our communities," said John Wolfe, Senior Vice President and Region Manager for Cox Communications' Southwest Region. "We are proud to continue our leadership in gigabit infrastructure and excited to partner with the City of Phoenix and US Ignite to leverage our infrastructure to drive innovation."

Cox began rolling out residential gigabit internet speeds in Phoenix in 2014. Cox Business has been delivering multi-gig speeds in Phoenix for more than 10 years.

About US Ignite

US Ignite is a non-profit organization set up with inspiration from the National Science Foundation and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, both of which strongly believe that it is a 21st century competitive necessity for the US to take advantage of next-generation technologies. It operates with a team supported by corporate, foundation, and community partners. Its mission is to foster the creation of 60 next-generation Internet applications  across 200 communities  that provide transformative public benefit in six sectors of the economy: healthcare, education, public safety, energy, transportation, and advanced manufacturing.

About Cox Communications

Cox Communications is the third largest cable provider and a multi-service broadband communications company in the country, serving nearly 3 million residential and business product subscribers in Arizona (a product subscriber represents an individual service purchased by a customer). In metro Phoenix, Cox serves approximately 2.5 million product subscribers. In Southern Arizona, Cox serves approximately 400,000 product subscribers. Cox's 24,000-mile hybrid fiber coaxial cable network throughout Phoenix and Southern Arizona provides homes and businesses with digital television, high speed Internet, home networking, high-definition television and digital telephone service over its own nationwide IP network. Cox is the third largest private for-profit employer in Arizona. During the past ten years, Cox has topped numerous J.D. Power and Associates' studies of customer satisfaction, most recently receiving top honors for residential telephone & high speed Internet, and business data services and has received PC Magazine's "people's choice" award for the sixth time. Additionally, Cox High Speed Internet has been ranked #1 for the past eight years on the "Ranking Arizona-Best of Arizona Business" list. Cox Media is responsible for the sale of cable advertising throughout Arizona. Cox Communications is a wholly owned subsidiary of Cox Enterprises Inc and serves approximately 6 million customers nationwide. Additional information about Cox in Arizona is available at www.cox.com/arizona.

SOURCE Cox Communications

Related Links

http://www.cox.com


Cyber security is one of the most important, albeit ignored issue, among most modern-day small or large-scale enterprises in the country.

Mumbai: In the wake of increased online criminal activities, individuals are well-acquainted with terms such as cyber-security and hackers. Although hacking, in general, is negatively portrayed; there exists another large community of cyber-watchdogs who regularly track and prevent large numbers of looming cyber-threats.

While professional white hat hacking is a prominent profession in most western countries, individuals in India are still reluctant to take up cyber-security as a career.

Several white-hats and cyber-professionals pointed out that the cyber-security courses offered in India are shallow and dreadfully expensive.

In a conversation with Deccan Chronicle, Arnav Georgian, a nascent entrepreneur and a certified ethical hacker from Bangalore, explained that the cyber-security courses available in India provide an elementary outlook, ignoring the broader aspects related to cyber-security.

Arnav Georgian, co-founder at Top-in-Talk and a certified ethical hacker, desires to build security tools which can contribute towards the social security of the nation.

There are quite a few ethical hacking courses to my knowledge but those which I am aware of need to broaden the curriculum and get into the depth of practical aspects of security over just the basics being taught, said the 22-year old.

According to Symantecs India Managing Director Shrikant Shitole, cyber security is one of the most important, albeit ignored issue, among most modern-day small or large-scale enterprises in the country.

Agreeing that there is an acute deficiency of cyber professionals in India, he said, Taking into consideration the dearth of trained cyber security professionals in India, a report by NASSCOM states that the country needs at least one million skilled people by 2020.

Citing awareness as a major predicament for the countrys ethical hackers, Shitole said, The reason behind this lack of skilled professionals is largely the absence of awareness, effective training, and preparation.

Bangaluru-based angel investor and start-up mentor Om Thoke testified that government agencies lack good hackers; they heavily rely on external agencies to investigate complex cases unlike western countries who take cyber-security seriously.

Om Thoke is a serial entrepreneur, a startup mentor, and emerging angel investor who currently works with 17 startups in India.

Ethical hacking isn't really considered to be a booming field by IT professionals, due to lack of opportunities and only the brightest of those hackers get good opportunities, and more than half of them never make enough money to survive in this line of business, and eventually give up, he added.

Shallow and expensive courses

A 26-year-old degree student and an ethical hobby-hacker, Prashanth Bhola, explained that the country lacks good cyber-security professionals. The country isnt lacking hackers, it's lacking good hackers, he said.

He further pointed out that the ethical hacking courses available in India are shallow and expensive, as most institutes demand at least Rs 1.5 lakhs for a measly diploma.

However, the problem does not end there; majority of these institutes often breeze through the introductory concepts of hacking, ignoring the salient facets and practical experience required to be a good hacker.

There are very few universities in India which offer courses on cyber security and majority of them offer it on post-graduation level. In Bangalore Jain university offers a PG course in M.Sc. in cyber security and it would cost a whopping 3-4 lacs, Bhola added.

According to him, the only way to reduce the dearth of good cyber professionals in India is by though recognised and well-structured courses.

When asked if the government is doing enough to uphold cyber-security, Bhola said, The government does lack in approaching and creating a job market for cyber security professionals, and the country faces a shortage of cyber security professionals to the tune of 4-7 lacs and it would keep on growing with the user base of online market.

Founder at Limitinfinity Softwares and an active member of Microsofts bug bounty programme, Pratik Mohapatra, said that the main reason for the shortage of white hat hackers in the country is due to lack of concrete hacking courses.

Pratik Mohapatra has discovered almost found 15-20 bugs which have been published worldwide by Microsoft and Google.

He said, The ethical hacking courses are very expensive in India and they are not enough schools and even if there are schools, they charge a bomb. The government also doesnt do much in these cases as it does not even have a subsidised course where interested individuals could go and learn something.

A certified ethical hacker with 16 years of experience and co-founder at Indian School of Anti-Hacking (ISOAH) Sandeep Sengupta affirmed that there are very few universities in India, who are providing post-grad degree with a specialization in security.

Sandeep Sengupta, co-founder at ISOAH Data securities and an active member of NASSCOM, has been a certified ethical hacker for the past 16 years.

Hackers are not always criminals

After speaking with several ethical hackers in the country, it was also revealed that the general perception concerning hacking among most people in India is pessimisticoften hacking is conceived as an unlawful activity.

On the contrary, white-hat hackers help in discovering diverse security vulnerabilities faced by several private and government sector organisations, which goes unsung on most occasions.

There could be future to ethical hackers in India provided its institutionally encouraged and promoted. At the first place the negative perception of being a hacker in India should be eliminated, said Bangaluru-based Georgian.

Citing a mixed perception among the masses, he said, People need technology today, and also want to complain about the fear of using technology. Then who do you think will solve this problem of your fear?

Moonlighting on the issue, Bhola pointed out that initially he was tentative to report the bugs to a concerned authority in fear of legal prosecution.

He too agreed to the fact that people in India often deem ethical hackers as criminals as they do not understand the difference between white, grey, and black hat hackers.

When asked if there is lack of awareness regarding the subject among the masses, he said, There is also lack of awareness among masses or even the media regarding hacking.

Even Mohapatra agreed that the scope of ethical hacking is limited as there is a general lack of awareness regarding the role of a hacker in the country.

He said that currently in India, a lot of people do not clearly understand the meaning of the word white-hat hacking and end up fusing it with criminal activities.

Indian companies are ignorant

In comparison to foreign organisations, the bug bounty programmes offered in India are very less and most large enterprises turn a blind eye to all their security vulnerabilities.

Moreover, there is a tendency among all large Indian firms to term ethical/white hat hackers as criminals; something that is fuelled by the country's weak cyber laws.

Bhola said that the scope for bug hunting in India is very less and only companies like PayTM have started following the footsteps of foreign companies such as Facebook.

He further pointed out that even if hackers succeed in finding any security vulnerability on a particular Indian website, they hesitate to report it fearing 'legal prosecution'.

Highlighting the lack of interest among Indian firms to uphold online security, he said, Majority of Indian companies do not give much preference to online security, they often outsource that to a third party whose job would be to maintain the website." "The companies won't realise until they get hacked"

According to him, small companies simply ignore online security due to cost escalation and they feel its a waste of money. Regarding bigger companies, Bhola said that there are many legal barriers which prevent bug-hunters to approach them in the first place.

He said," If you are reporting a bug or loophole, there is a chance that you will be termed as a cyber-criminal. Many hackers simply do not report loopholes for just the fear of getting into legal troubles."

Commenting on the attitude of Indian businesses towards ethical hackers, young Mohapatra said that Indian businesses should be open to ethical hackers/ bug hunters who can help them spot serious issues in their security infrastructure.

Narrowing down on the subject, Georgian said, Western companies have realized the importance of security while most of the Indian companies still dont.

Enterprises are still coming to terms with the fact that a simple hack could cost them millions including their reputation, and most often they do not possess the expertise and resources to combat IT vulnerabilities, said Symantecs Shitole.

The outcome

A report by Symantec highlighted the fact that financial institutions in the India have the third most infections only to be preceded by USA and Germany.

While there has been an acute increase in the number of cyber-attacks on private Indian institutions, government websites in the country are also outdated and can be easily hacked, according to the hackers.

Read: Vigilance needed against online radicalisation, says Rajnath Singh

According to Intel Security Vice President and General Manager of the Network Security Business Shishir Singh, the level of cyber-attacks in the country has increased tremendously with more aimed at lucrative targets like financial services and IT organizations.

Shishir Singh,Vice President and General Manager of the network security business unit, Intel Security.

"On the business/enterprise front, I think attackers have already developed a level of sophistication that is well beyond the hobby-hacker of the past. Were clearly seeing a streak of organized and targeted crime as was also evident from some of the high-profile security incidents from 2015 in India and globally," he added.

Read: NASSCOM teams up with Symantec to uplift cyber-security standards in India

While organisations such as NASSCOM and Symantec try to meet the security requisites of the country, its high time the Government also steps up it's effort to uplift cyber-security standards in the country.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
DUBLIN, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Polypropylene (PP): 2016 World Market Outlook and Forecast up to 2020" report to their offering.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO )



The present report is an essential resource for a one looking for detailed information on the world polypropylene market. The report covers data on global, regional and national markets including present and future trends for supply and demand, prices, and downstream industries.

In addition to the analytical part, the report provides a range of tables and figures which all together give a true insight into the national, regional and global markets for polypropylene.



Report Scope:

The report covers global, regional and country markets of polypropylene

It describes present situation, historical background and future forecast

Comprehensive data showing polypropylene capacities, production, consumption, trade statistics, and prices in the recent years are provided (globally, regionally and by country)

The report indicates a wealth of information on polypropylene manufacturers and distributors

Region market overview covers the following: production of polypropylene in a region/country, consumption trends, price data, trade in the recent year and manufacturers

Polypropylene market forecast for next five years, including market volumes and prices is also provided

Key Topics Covered:



1. INTRODUCTION: POLYPROPYLENE PROPERTIES AND USES



2. POLYPROPYLENE MANUFACTURING PROCESSES



3. POLYPROPYLENE WORLD MARKET



3.1. World polypropylene capacity

- Capacity broken down by region

- Capacity divided by country

- Manufacturers and their capacity by plant



3.2. World polypropylene production

- Global output dynamics

- Production by region

- Production by country



3.3. Polypropylene consumption

- World consumption

- Consumption trends in Europe

- Consumption trends in Asia Pacific

- Consumption trends in North America



3.4. Polypropylene global trade

- World trade dynamics

- Export and import flows in regions



3.5. Polypropylene prices in the world market



4. POLYPROPYLENE REGIONAL MARKETS ANALYSIS



Each country section comprises the following parts:

- Total installed capacity in country

- Production in country

- Manufacturers in country

- Consumption of in country

- Suppliers in country

- Export and import in country

- Prices in country



4.1. Polypropylene European market analysis

Countries covered:

- Austria

- Belgium

- Bulgaria

- Czech Republic

- Finland

- France

- Germany

- Greece

- Hungary

- Italy

- Netherlands

- Poland

- Romania

- Russia

- Serbia

- Slovakia

- Spain

- Ukraine

- UK



4.2. Polypropylene Asia Pacific market analysis

Countries included:

- Australia

- Azerbaijan

- China

- India

- Indonesia

- Japan

- Kazakhstan

- Malaysia

- Philippines

- Singapore

- South Korea

- Taiwan

- Thailand

- Turkmenistan

- Vietnam



4.3. Polypropylene North American market analysis

Countries under consideration:

- USA



4.4. Polypropylene Latin American market analysis

Countries overviewed:

- Argentina

- Brazil

- Chile

- Colombia

- Mexico

- Venezuela



4.5. Polypropylene Africa & Middle East market analysis

Countries examined:

- Egypt

- Iran

- Israel

- Kuwait

- Nigeria

- Oman

- Saudi Arabia

- South Africa

- Sudan

- Turkey



- UAE



5. POLYPROPYLENE MARKET PROSPECTS



5.1. Polypropylene capacity and production forecast up to 2020

- Global production forecast

- On-going projects



5.2. Polypropylene consumption forecast up to 2020

- World consumption forecast

- Forecast of consumption in Europe

- Consumption forecast in Asia Pacific

- Consumption forecast in North America



5.3. Polypropylene market prices forecast up to 2020



6. KEY COMPANIES IN THE POLYPROPYLENE MARKET WORLDWIDE



7. POLYPROPYLENE FEEDSTOCK MARKET



8. POLYPROPYLENE END-USE SECTOR



8.1. Consumption by application



8.2. Downstream markets review and forecast



For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/57m7jp/polypropylene

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716



SOURCE Research and Markets
"Heidi is a successful attorney, businesswoman and an exemplary leader," said Mr. Bulson. "Because of her strong management skills and unwavering commitment to client service, we are looking forward to many years of growth and stability under her leadership."

"I am honored to have been selected for this role and look forward to leading expansion of the firm's national and international presence," said Ms. Boehlefeld. "We will build on the strong foundation that Don and previous leaders have established and will continue to expand our reach through both organic growth and strategic opportunities. Don will continue to be an important part of that as a member of the Management Committee. Together as a firm we will continue to focus on delivering the highest quality of client service and making Renner Otto a great place to work."

In addition to serving as Managing Partner, Ms. Boehlefeld co-chairs Renner Otto's Chemical Practice Group. Her practice focuses on patent prosecution and counseling including patent validity, infringement and due diligence opinions. Ms. Boehlefeld has been recognized as an Ohio Super Lawyer.

Prior to joining Renner Otto in 2000, Ms. Boehlefeld served as in-house patent and trademark counsel for The Sherwin-Williams Company. She began her career as a research engineer for B.P. America (The Standard Oil Co.) and later joined the Patent and Licensing Department as an attorney.

Ms. Boehlefeld received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering with honors, her M.B.A. and her J.D. from Case Western Reserve University. She and her husband, Rob, reside in Brecksville.

About Renner Otto

Renner Otto is an intellectual property law firm providing services for clients of various sizes throughout the world since the 1880's. Renner Otto assists multi-national entities, mid-sized companies, and universities as well as individual inventors and start-ups with a broad range of services relating to procurement, enforcement and strategic management of intellectual property assets domestically and abroad including patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets. You can find out more at www.rennerotto.com.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/357070

SOURCE Renner Otto

Related Links

http://www.rennerotto.com


DUBLIN, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Europe's antitrust regulators are looking to introduce new smartphone charges with the goal of making it more difficult to generate revenue from mobile ads. The new charges could be especially troublesome for Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Google, as it will require the tech giant to change how it implements smartphone tools like its Search feature. The charges look to redress issues caused by pre-installed Google applications on Android operating systems. Google may generate less revenue from mobile ads in addition to paying other companies to distribute its services in Europe as a result. The global mobile ad spending market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 38.12% by 2019, according to a report available from Research and Markets, but the new charges could have an unexpected effect on this figure.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO )



Regulators are concerned that Google's pre-installed applications are stifling competition and stopping new apps from reaching customers. Google gives Android away as part of its mobile strategy, providing phone makers like LG and Samsung with the software in exchange for pre-installed Google apps on the device. Phone makers benefit from the strategy as it allows them to concentrate on hardware and avoid operating system development costs. Alphabet made around USD 25 billion from Europe alone last year.

If approved, the new smartphone charges could have a knock-on effect on related markets. The global mobile analytics market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 20.82% by 2020, as noted in a recent report, but this figure could be higher as Google may require new means to utilize consumer data.

Similarly, the global in-app advertising market is predicted to grow at a CAGR of 39.97% by 2019, as forecast in an industry report, but this figure could be higher if newer applications are given the opportunity to succeed as it will likely lead to renewed ad interest in this area.

For further information on this topic, and a full list of all related documentation, please visit the Online Advertising section at http://www.researchandmarkets.com/rm/NPMJ.

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-19/google-s-mobile-model-threatened-by-eu-s-android-antitrust-probe

About Research and Markets

Research and Markets is the world's leading source for international market research reports and market data. We provide you with the latest data on international and regional markets, key industries, the top companies, new products and the latest trends.





Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716



SOURCE Research and Markets
DUBLIN, April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Sodium Chlorate: 2016 World Market Outlook and Forecast up to 2020" report to their offering.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO )





The present report is an essential resource for a one looking for detailed information on the world sodium chlorate market. The report covers data on global, regional and national markets including present and future trends for supply and demand, prices, and downstream industries.

In addition to the analytical part, the report provides a range of tables and figures which all together give a true insight into the national, regional and global markets for sodium chlorate.



Report Scope:

The report covers global, regional and country markets of sodium chlorate

It describes present situation, historical background and future forecast

Comprehensive data showing sodium chlorate capacities, production, consumption, trade statistics, and prices in the recent years are provided (globally, regionally and by country)

The report indicates a wealth of information on sodium chlorate manufacturers and distributors

Region market overview covers the following: production of sodium chlorate in a region/country, consumption trends, price data, trade in the recent year and manufacturers

Sodium chlorate market forecast for next five years, including market volumes and prices is also provided

Key Topics Covered:



1. INTRODUCTION: SODIUM CHLORATE PROPERTIES AND USES



2. SODIUM CHLORATE MANUFACTURING PROCESSES



3. SODIUM CHLORATE WORLD MARKET



3.1. World sodium chlorate capacity

- Capacity broken down by region

- Capacity divided by country

- Manufacturers and their capacity by plant



3.2. World sodium chlorate production

- Global output dynamics

- Production by region

- Production by country



3.3. Sodium chlorate consumption

- World consumption

- Consumption trends in Europe

- Consumption trends in Asia Pacific

- Consumption trends in North America



3.4. Sodium chlorate global trade

- World trade dynamics

- Export and import flows in regions



3.5. Sodium chlorate prices in the world market



4. SODIUM CHLORATE REGIONAL MARKETS ANALYSIS



Each country section comprises the following parts:

- Total installed capacity in country

- Production in country

- Manufacturers in country

- Consumption of in country

- Suppliers in country

- Export and import in country

- Prices in country



4.1. Sodium chlorate European market analysis

Countries covered:

- Finland

- France

- Italy

- Norway

- Portugal

- Romania

- Spain

- Sweden



4.2. Sodium chlorate Asia Pacific market analysis

Countries included:

- China

- Indonesia



4.3. Sodium chlorate North American market analysis

Countries under consideration:

- Canada

- USA



4.4. Sodium chlorate Latin American market analysis

Countries overviewed:

- Brazil

- Chile



4.5. Sodium chlorate Africa market analysis

Countries examined:

- Cameroon



5. SODIUM CHLORATE MARKET PROSPECTS



5.1. Sodium chlorate capacity and production forecast up to 2020

- Global production forecast

- On-going projects



5.2. Sodium chlorate consumption forecast up to 2020

- World consumption forecast

- Forecast of consumption in Europe

- Consumption forecast in Asia Pacific

- Consumption forecast in North America



5.3. Sodium chlorate market prices forecast up to 2020



6. KEY COMPANIES IN THE SODIUM CHLORATE MARKET WORLDWIDE



6. KEY COMPANIES IN THE SODIUM CHLORATE MARKET WORLDWIDE



7. SODIUM CHLORATE END-USE SECTOR



7.1. Consumption by application

7.2. Downstream markets review and forecast



For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/pw5q87/sodium_chlorate

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716



SOURCE Research and Markets
BATH, Wiltshire, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

BOMcheck is providing free webinars on Thursday 12 May to explain how enforcement actions and product withdrawals across Europe have increased significantly under the EU RoHS2 Directive 2011/65/EU on the Restriction of Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment. With leading international experts located in the UK, BOMcheck has unique access to information on enforcement and product withdrawals across Europe not only for RoHS2 but also for the EU Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) Regulation and the EU REACH Regulation.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160118/323011LOGO )

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160210/331718LOGO )



Did you know:

Enforcement actions by the UK RoHS2 regulator increased 350% in 2014, from 284 actions in 2013 to 991 actions in 2014

Product withdrawals for RoHS2 non-compliance started in Slovenia in 2015. Product withdrawals under the new POPs restriction of SCCP in articles also started in Sweden and Norway in 2015. Product withdrawals under the REACH restriction of asbestos in articles continued in 2015.

in 2015. Product withdrawals under the new POPs restriction of SCCP in articles also started in and in 2015. Product withdrawals under the REACH restriction of asbestos in articles continued in 2015. 40% of higher priced toys inspected in the UK in 2014 were non-compliant to RoHS2 and/or Batteries restrictions

The webinars on Thursday 12 May will explain how companies can use the EN 50581 standard to manage compliance across their supply chains. The EN 50581 standard is endorsed by the European Commission as an approved method for managing compliance with EU RoHS2. Regulatory authorities expect companies to adopt the EN 50581 standard or provide evidence that their compliance management system provides equivalent quality levels. The webinars will explain how the standardised, high quality declarations that suppliers create in BOMcheck comply with EN 50581. BOMcheck also provides free monthly training webinars to explain new regulatory requirements and how suppliers can use BOMcheck to reduce the cost of their REACH compliance efforts by 66%.

Registration for the first webinar at 9.00am in Central Europe, 8.00am UK time, 4.00pm in China, 5.00pm in Japan is available at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6666203033796449281

Registration for the second webinar at 11.00am US Eastern Time, 5.00pm Central European Time, 4.00pm UK time is available at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2519350949174612993

About BOMcheck (http://www.BOMcheck.net)

BOMcheck is an industry collaboration led by Philips, Siemens, GE, Osram, Sony Mobile, Schneider Electric, Toshiba, Agfa, Texas Instruments and TE Connectivity to share one web database system to manage supply chain compliance for RoHS, REACH and other substance regulations around the world. Thousands of companies use BOMcheck to create and share standardized high quality materials declarations for millions of parts. BOMcheck co-chairs the IPC 1752A materials declaration standard and serves as EMEA regional coordinator for the IEC 62474 materials declaration standard. BOMcheck was awarded 2014 Top Product of the Year and 2015 Top Product of the Year in Environmental Leader Product & Project Awards. For more information visit http://www.BOMcheck.net

Media Contact:

Dr Aidan Turnbull

Director, BOMcheck.net

thinkstep compliance limited

Overmoor, Neston, Corsham, Wiltshire, SN13 9TZ

Tel: +44 1225 637 129

Mobile: +44 77100 23461

Fax: +44 1225 738 548

[email protected]



SOURCE BOMcheck
COPENHAGEN, Denmark, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Saxo Bank announced today a tri-party agreement between Saxo Bank, Wallstreet CN and LeanWork which will significantly bolster Saxo Bank's presence in Greater China following its launch in the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone in September 2015.

The users of Wallstreet CN, one of the most popular financial content providers in Greater China, will be able to access global capital markets from WEEX, an online trading service platform created by Wallstreet CN, with trading system developed by LeanWork and Open API powered by Saxo Bank.

"This unique partnership underlines the strength of Saxo's Open API which with limitless customization options will increase the power of trading technology now and in the future. This truly is a win-win for all parties and at Saxo Bank we are excited to be working with two exceptionally successful start-ups which empower Chinese speaking investors," said Kim Fournais, co-founder and CEO of Saxo Bank.

Saxo Bank is one of the first financial institutions to give access to its trading infrastructure through the bank's REST based API called Open API. The move, which covers Saxo's multi-asset trading and back office infrastructure, will allow its partners, clients and external developers to access over 20 years of trading infrastructure innovation and enable them to customise their trading experience and create new revenue streams.

Wallstreet CN was founded by Wu Xiaopeng in 2013 and conceived in the form of a personal blog when he was stationed overseas in New York. Upon his return to China in May 2013, the company was registered in Shanghai and received venture capital investment from China Ping An and Hai Tong Securities' investment funds, along with several other well-known institutions in China.

During the past three years, Wallstreet CN has accumulated 15 million monthly unique visitors from scratch. Today it is the leading financial news source providing the most influential market news and economic data to Chinese speaking investors.

"I am honoured to partner with Saxo Bank and LeanWork. Saxo Bank is a leader in online trading technology. The global reach of Saxo Bank and the local touch of LeanWork & Wallstreet CN combined will make WEEX, the trading platform, a powerful value proposition for Chinese speaking investors," said Wu Xiaopeng, founder and CEO, Wallstreet CN.

LeanWork is a technology start-up based in Hong Kong which originally started with the creation of a multiple broker solution and has overtime gained significant market share amongst the Chinese speaking broker community. Today LeanWork has a sizable IT development team with over 30 IT developers in its offices across Greater China.

"No team is better than Saxo Bank, Wallstreet CN and LeanWork combined. As a leading financial institution in online trading, Saxo Bank provides access to over 30,000 financial instruments. LeanWork's local understanding and strength in IT development makes the best local user experience a reality." said Darren Qian, CEO and founder of LeanWork.

The partnership was sealed at an official ceremony at Danish Consulate in Shanghai on April 13th, 2016 with attendance of Nicolai Prytz, Danish Consul General of Shanghai.

About Saxo Bank

The Saxo Bank Group (Saxo) is an online multi-asset trading and investment specialist, offering a complete set of trading and investment technologies, tools and strategies.

A fully licensed and regulated bank, Saxo enables private and institutional clients to easily trade multiple assets from a single margin account on multiple devices seamlessly.

Saxo's award winning trading technology platforms are available in more than 20 languages and form the technology backbone of more than 100 financial institutions worldwide.

Saxo also offers traditional banking services through Saxo Privatbank in select markets.

Founded in 1992 and headquartered in Copenhagen, Saxo employs 1500 people in 25 offices across the five continents.

SOURCE Saxo Bank
NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Premier digital reputation management firm, Status Labs, has relocated its New York operation to a larger Manhattan office space in order to accommodate its rapidly growing team.

The move comes just one year after the company's expansion to New York. The new office, located at 1123 Broadway in Flatiron overlooking Madison Square Park, is five times larger than the company's previous office.

"This year, we've already added four talented account management and business development professionals to our New York team," explained Status Labs president, Darius Fisher. "Our expanded staff fits comfortably in the new space, but, best of all, there's plenty of room for us to continue growing the team."

Status Labs plans to hire at least five more professionals in New York for their account management, business development, and public relations departments by the end of the year.

"Not only are we happy with the team we have built, but really proud of all they have accomplished since joining Status Labs," Fisher added. "As we continue to take on larger and more challenging projects, having a strong and experienced body of talent in place is essential."

In addition to the New York office, Status Labs serves clients in 35 countries with offices in Austin and Sao Paulo. Status Labs' new New York office is located at 1123 Broadway New York, New York 10010.

About Status Labs

Status Labs is the premier digital reputation management, online marketing, and public relations firm, with offices in Austin, New York, and Sao Paulo. Our goal is to help our clients look their best in search results and build reputation via effective digital marketing and PR strategy. Status Labs serves over 1500 clients in 35 countries, including Fortune 500 brands. Status Labs has been profiled in publications such as the New York Times, New York Post, US News & World Report, The Daily Beast, Observer, DuJour Magazine, and more. PRWeek awarded Status Labs president, Darius Maxwell Fisher, with the Innovation 50 award in 2015.

Status Labs

www.StatusLabs.com

Media Contact

Courtney Fitzpatrick

Media Director

512-203-9368

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160415/355848LOGO

SOURCE Status Labs

Related Links

http://www.statuslabs.com


QUINCY, Mass., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company LLC celebrated the opening of its Green Energy Facility in Freetown, Mass. on April 15, just in time for Earth Day. The innovative facility will convert inedible food from its Stop & Shop New England stores into energy that will help power the company's distribution center in Freetown.

The Stop & Shop Green Energy Facility is expected to process an average of 95 tons of inedible food per day, an estimated 34,000 tons per year. As the food breaks down, it produces gas that fuels a generator that, in turn, generates electricity. The energy produced by the 12,000-square-foot facility will provide up to 40 percent of the 1.1 million square-foot Freetown distribution center's energy needs, enough power to operate the facility for four months out of the year. Once fully operational, the Facility will create approximately 1.25 megawatts of clean electricity.

"As a responsible retailer, one of our top priorities is reducing our environmental footprint, specifically through the conversion of food that would otherwise go into a landfill," said Mark McGowan, President, Stop & Shop New England Division. "As part of doing business, our stores generate inedible food that cannot be donated. This inedible food will now be sent to our Green Energy Facility where it will be converted into clean energy and used as a power source for our distribution facility."

212 Stop & Shop New England Stores Power the Green Energy Facility

The Green Energy Facility houses an anaerobic digester, which uses innovative technology to turn organic material into sustainable power. Inedible food products from all of Stop & Shop New England's 212 stores that cannot be sold or donated to regional food banks or local farms is transported to the Green Energy Facility. Then, by recreating the naturally-occurring process of anaerobic digestion, carbon in the organic material is converted into a biogas and used as a power source. The process is carried out in a contained, oxygen-free area, which does not produce any odors.

The Green Energy Facility was created and is operated by Divert, Inc., a Massachusetts-based technology company devoted to creating a waste-free retail industry. A $400,000 grant was provided by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center for the creation of the facility.

"Stop & Shop and its parent company, Ahold USA, are committed to energy efficiency and environmental stewardship, with a goal to achieve zero waste companywide by 2020, "said Marissa Nelson, Senior Vice President, Responsible Retailing and Healthy Living, Ahold USA. "The Stop & Shop Green Energy Facility is a perfect example of our ongoing efforts to be greener in our operations."

Stop & Shop Takes the Lead with Environmental Initiatives

In addition to the Stop & Shop Green Energy Facility, the company is proud to be an industry and community leader in responsible and sustainable retailing. Among many others, Stop & Shop is leading with the following environmental initiatives:

Stop & Shop diverts 88 percent of waste to someplace other than a landfill  through donations, recycling, composting and now the Green Energy Facility.

Stop & Shop recycles enough cardboard to save over 1.8 million trees yearly.

Stop & Shop's better bagging methods have saved enough plastic bags to circle the earth three times.

All Stop & Shop stores offer more than 200 sustainable seafood products.

Stop & Shop partnered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other organizations to improve energy efficiency, reduce greenhouse gases and decrease air pollution. Even our transportation systems limit fuel usage and carbon dioxide output.

New Stop & Shop stores have energy efficient day lighting, T5 fluorescent lighting and refrigeration systems with high-efficiency fan motors. The stores utilize automatic occupancy sensors, reflective roofs that reduce heat absorption during the summer and systems that curb electric power during peak demand times.

In 2015, Stop & Shop donated more than $12 million in product and cash to food banks and hunger relief organizations throughout New England.

To learn more about Stop & Shop's responsible retailing efforts, visit stopandshop.com/environment.

About Stop & Shop

The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company LLC employs over 61,000 associates and operates 419 stores throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey. The company helps support local communities fight hunger, combat childhood cancer and promote general health and wellness  with emphasis on children's educational and support programs. In its commitment to be a sustainable company, Stop & Shop is a member of the U.S. Green Building Council and EPA's SmartWay program and has been recognized by the EPA for the superior energy management of its stores. Stop & Shop is an Ahold company. To learn more about Stop & Shop, visit stopandshop.com or facebook.com/stopandshop.

About Divert, Inc.

Divert is a Massachusetts based company devoted to creating a zero-waste retail industry. Divert's innovative solutions leverage customers' existing transportation and distribution systems to provide greater visibility; simplify processes; generate clean, sustainable power; save millions of dollars on waste removal costs; and reduce the retailers' impact on the planet. More information is available at divertinc.com.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/357039LOGO

SOURCE Stop & Shop New England
TAMPA, Fla., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Teamsters Local 2011, which represents 17,000 Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) officers, is in the process of filing an unfair labor practice charge against the FDOC to preserve the rights of newly-promoted correctional and probation officers.

In Sept. 2015, the union began negotiating a successor contract to the existing July 1, 2015 - June 30, 2016 agreement with the state of Florida. By statute, the parties were later considered to be "at impasse" and in March 2016 the Florida Legislature got to choose which proposals would go into the contract  the state's or the union's. The legislature selected the state's proposal which unfairly allows the FDOC to fire an officer without reason, for up to one year after he or she has been promoted without any ability to challenge the termination through the grievance and arbitration process. As this developed, Les Cantrell, statewide coordinator for Local 2011 discussed, with the union's negotiation team, the idea of standing up against this injustice and of filing an unfair labor practice charge.

"The language that the state of Florida has forced into the contract penalizes correctional and probation officers by taking away their union protection should they be unable to perform new duties after a job promotion, and allows the FDOC to fire an officer without reason and without the ability to challenge the termination through the grievance and arbitration process," said Ken Wood, Teamsters International Vice President.

"This discourages officers from applying for a promotion  thinking that if they are promoted, they are at risk of losing their entire careers for up to one year without any reason," Wood said. "Our men and women, who work hard every day, deserve to maintain their union representation and protections. Therefore, it is essential for the Teamsters Local 2011 to consider filing an unfair labor practice with the Florida Public Employees Commission to protect officers and their rights under Chapter 447 of the Florida statutes."

Founded in 1903, the Teamsters Union represents 1.4 million hardworking men and women throughout the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, including more than 260,000 public service employees. For more information, go to www.teamster.org. "Like" us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @Teamsters.

Contact:

Ken Wood (813) 621-1391

Les Cantrell (813) 621-1391

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20100127/IBTLOGO

SOURCE Teamsters Joint Council 75
OMAHA, Neb., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading independent energy provider Tenaska closed approximately $780 million in commercial financing today for the Tenaska Westmoreland Generating Station, a 925-megawatt (MW) natural gas-fueled power plant project near Pittsburgh.

Since its founding in 1987, Tenaska has raised approximately $14.4 billion in capital through bank facilities, capital market transactions, corporate facilities and equity, supporting the successful development of approximately 10,000 MW of natural gas-fueled and renewable power projects. The company has approximately 2,500 MW in pre-financing development.

"Tenaska has a reputation for strong power projects that meet the needs of an evolving industry," said Dave Kirkwood, vice president and treasurer. "We have the expertise to advance projects from concept into operation, and we have long-standing relationships with financial institutions to support that."

MUFG Union Bank, N.A., BNP Paribas, Citigroup Global Markets, and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Limited led the bank group for the financing.

Kirkwood added that the forward capacity market in PJM Interconnection, which Tenaska Westmoreland will serve, and five-year revenue hedging were also key to the success of the financing. PJM coordinates the delivery of power in all or parts of 13 eastern states and the District of Columbia.

The Tenaska Westmoreland project is owned by Tenaska Pennsylvania Partners, LLC, which is comprised of affiliates of Tenaska and Diamond Generating Corporation (DGC), a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Corporation.

"DGC is pleased to be part of this important project in Pennsylvania and is committed to providing reliable, clean electricity for the region," said CEO Satoshi Hamada. "The project represents a significant investment alongside a valued partner."

The relationship with Tenaska includes investments in natural gas-fueled power generating facilities in Alabama, Georgia and Texas.

"Achieving financial closing for Tenaska Westmoreland illustrates our ability to develop and advance market-driven power projects," said Greg Kelly, president of Tenaska's Development Group. "We are pleased to reach this milestone and look forward to the next phase of the project."

Construction began earlier this year, with commercial operation targeted for 2018. Black & Veatch is the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor for the project.

"Black & Veatch's experience in power plant and infrastructure construction, combined with Tenaska's record of success in power plant development and operation, will help ensure that Tenaska Westmoreland is a safe, efficient and reliable power plant," said Nick Borman, Tenaska senior vice president of engineering and construction.

"Black & Veatch is leveraging its global knowledge and experience in delivering another advanced combined-cycle project," said Steve Edwards, chairman and CEO of Black & Veatch. "We are focused on optimizing the schedule and execution on the project to support Tenaska in safely delivering its customers clean, efficient and reliable energy supplies."

Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems will provide the two natural gas turbines for Tenaska Westmoreland.

About Tenaska

Tenaska, based in Omaha, Nebraska, is one of the leading independent power producers in the United States, with regional offices in Dallas, Denver, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston and Calgary, Alberta and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Forbes magazine ranks Tenaska among the 25 largest privately held U.S. companies. Tenaska and its affiliates have developed approximately 10,000 megawatts (MW) of natural gas-fueled and renewable power generation and manage operations for approximately 7,000 MW of power generation consisting of nine power plants.

Tenaska formed Tenaska Pennsylvania Partners, LLC to build, own and operate the Tenaska Westmoreland Generating Station. An affiliate of Tenaska serves as the managing partner.

Tenaska affiliates also market natural gas and electric power and provide energy risk management services. Tenaska is involved in asset acquisition, natural gas fuel supply and transportation systems, and electric transmission development. For more information about Tenaska, visit www.tenaska.com.

About Diamond Generating Company

As a wholly owned subsidiary of Mitsubishi Corporation, one of the world's most diverse enterprises, with over 600 subsidiaries and affiliates worldwide, Diamond Generating Corporation (DGC) has developed a reputation for financial strength and longterm stability. DGC's expertise in power development and generation, including greenfield development, acquisition, fuel procurement, financing, construction, operations services and asset management has resulted in a portfolio of efficient, stateoftheart, environmentally sound generating facilities. Headquartered in Los Angeles, DGC currently owns 11 operating power generating facilities and one facility under construction around the U.S. totaling about 6,500 megawatts (MW), with about 2,550 MW of net equity. Of these projects, two are wind projects and the remainder of the portfolio is natural gas-fueled.

SOURCE Tenaska

Related Links

http://www.tenaska.com


New Delhi: iPhone and iPad maker Apple has given a presentation to the DIPP Secretary-headed panel on why its products should be considered 'state-of-the-art', 'cutting edge' and thus exempted from mandatory local sourcing norms.

The US-based company has sought nod from the government on setting up single-brand retail stores in the country. As per the foreign direct investment (FDI) norms, the government may relax the mandatory local sourcing norms for entities undertaking single-brand retailing of products having state-of-the-art and cutting edge technology and where local sourcing is not possible.

"The DIPP would soon take a call on the company's application," sources said. The government had set up a committee to decide whether a product is state-of-the-art and can be eligible for exemption from the mandatory local sourcing applicable for FDI single brand retail trading.

The committee is headed by Secretary in the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) Ramesh Abhishek. At present, 100 per cent FDI is permitted in single brand retail sector but the companies are required to take FIPB permission if the limit exceeds 49 per cent.

The company sells its products through Apple-owned retail stores in countries including China, Germany, the US, the UK and France. Apple has no wholly-owned store in India and sells products through distributors such as Redington and Ingram Micro. Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi too has submitted an application to open stores in the country.

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WASHINGTON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Wood pulp in shredded Parmesan cheese. Melamine in baby formula and pet food. Asian catfish sold as grouper. Pomegranate juice cut with grape juice. Unfortunately, instances such as these, commonly called economically motivated adulteration (EMA) are but a few examples of frauds the industry must prevent each and every day.

To help combat this issue, GMA and Battelle have partnered to provide EMAlert, a secure and intuitive web-based software tool that allows food manufacturers to rapidly analyze and understand their individual, company-specific EMA vulnerabilities in the manufacturing process.

In today's globally distributed, dynamic food supply network there are inherent risks to the integrity of the supply chain. Some estimate that food fraud costs the world economy $49 billion annually and it has been estimated that about 10 percent of the food we buy is likely adulterated.

"The impact on any particular company can range from minor economic damage to the potential loss of economic viability of the organization," said Shannon Cooksey, vice president of science policy & regulatory affairs for GMA. "GMA joined with Battelle, the world's largest non-profit R&D organization, to develop a better way of prioritizing the actual risks to specific commodity supply chains at any time, so that decision makers can best apply their resources to the vulnerabilities of greatest importance."

Importantly, EMAlert also provides manufacturers with an effective resource to assist with meeting the requirements of the FDA's Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Preventive Controls for Human Food Rule. Compliance dates for some businesses begin in September 2016 and requires covered facilities to establish and implement a food safety system that includes an evaluation of hazards that may be introduced for economic gain.

"EMAlert works by providing quantitative estimates of an organization's vulnerability to EMA for each commodity included in the analysis based on a combination of characteristic attributes and subject matter expert-based weightings", said Ashley Kubatko, principal research scientist at Battelle. "The approach focuses on predicting fraudulent tendencies similar to approaches used by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to predict terrorist tendencies and preferences."

By analyzing the attributes that contribute strongly to existing vulnerabilities, food safety and defense professionals may also identify alternative strategies, such as identifying suppliers from a more favorable region of the world or investing in research to develop identity tests for targeted commodities.

"Food manufacturers place great value on the consumer's trust in their brands," said Joseph Scimeca, PhD, Vice President, Global Regulatory & Scientific Affairs at Cargill. "An issue that compromises the integrity of the food supply chain cannot only lose consumer trust and induce fear amongst the general public, it can represent a threat to public health. Being able to rapidly assess and understand EMA vulnerabilities so that mitigation actions can be prioritized and pursued is essential to protecting both public health and brand reputation."

About the Grocery Manufacturers Association

The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) is the trade organization representing the world's leading food, beverage and consumer products companies and associated partners. The U.S. food, beverage and consumer packaged goods industry has facilities in 30,000 communities, generates $1 trillion in sales annually, contributes $415 billion in added value to the economy every year and is the single largest U.S. manufacturing industry with 1.7 million manufacturing workers. Founded in 1908, GMA has a primary focus on product safety, science-based public policies and industry initiatives that seek to empower people with the tools and information they need to make informed choices and lead healthier lives. For more information, visit gmaonline.org.

About Battelle

Every day, the people of Battelle apply science and technology to solving what matters most. At major technology centers and national laboratories around the world, Battelle conducts research and development, designs and manufactures products, and delivers critical services for government and commercial customers. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio since its founding in 1929, Battelle serves the national security, health and life sciences, and energy and environmental industries. For more information, visit www.battelle.org.

SOURCE Grocery Manufacturers Association

Related Links

http://www.gmaonline.org


NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Vee Technologies has earned the highest possible score for Customer References in the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals' (IAOP) 2016 Global Outsourcing 100. A leading global services company, Vee Technologies holds their clients' Extraordinary Outcomes as top priority, and this acknowledgement affirms they are on the right track.

Vee Technologies Logo (PRNewsFoto/Vee Technologies)

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150828/762203 )



Such an achievement is a direct result of Vee Technologies' unrelenting focus on accuracy, competency, and teamwork. The company is recognized for its timely and well-executed work in specialized, outsourced services, including inpatient coding, insurance denial reduction, and analytical applications for accelerated revenue recovery and forecasting. Vee Technologies commits to deliver excellent solutions, guided by innovation and security, in order to achieve and render extraordinary outcomes.

The CEO and Founder of Vee Technologies, Chocko Valliappa, has played a key role in bringing the company to its prestigious position in the IAOP GO100 list with his strategic planning and in-depth knowledge of client preferences across European, Asian, and Pan American markets. It's with this vision he started Vee Technologies, Inc.

President Patrick L. O'Malley's outstanding leadership qualities is the driving force behind Vee Technologies' ranking. The company is proud and privileged to also be included in the 2016 Global Outsourcing 100 sublists: 'Employee Growth as Rising Star'; 'Number of Employees as Rising Star'; and 'Revenue Growth as Rising Star' categories.

The official lists will be premiered in a special section on outsourcing in the 2nd Quarter 2016 Fortune 500 issue of Fortune magazine, on newsstands June 2016.

About Vee Technologies:

Vee Technologies is a pioneer in outsourced healthcare, insurance, financial, and engineering services. The company has delivered secure HIPAA compliant, ISO-certified, quality work to its customers since 2001. One of Vee Technologies' biggest strengths is its very own Sona University, which educates its students to directly meet the ever-changing demands of today's global marketplace.

About IAOP:

International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) is the association that brings together customers, providers, and advisors in a collaborative, knowledge-based environment that promotes professional and organizational development, recognition, certification and excellence to improve business service models and outcomes. IAOP annually comes up with 'The Global Outsourcing 100' with the aim of enriching industry standards and recognizing organizations which stand at the top, based on their achievements, growth and quality of outcomes.



Media Contact:

Manoj Abraham

Head of Marketing and Strategic Alliance

US: 480-717-4995

Email: [email protected]



SOURCE Vee Technologies
PFLUGERVILLE, Texas, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- TrackingPoint announced today a focused advocacy initiative on behalf of the Infantry Soldier. The company's first whitepaper titled Beyond Snipers  Transforming Soldiers to Superwarriors postulates that the Squad-level Infantry Soldier and Infantry Squad Marine have been overlooked and suggests changes that could change the face of war. The whitepaper is available here. In a related announcement TrackingPoint revealed the squad-level M1400 Extreme Marksman Rifle.

"TrackingPoint is building extreme weapons for an extreme world," said John McHale, TrackingPoint CEO. "We are doing so on behalf of the Infantry Soldier and Marine who expects to face an enemy, the ones whose feet are in most of the boots on the ground," said McHale. "In our opinion, the regular Soldier and Marine have been overlooked in favor of the elite marksmen and snipers."

Redefining the Squad. Recharging the Soldier.

Infantry Squad structure has evolved slowly and the small-arms weapons they deploy are generally based on last-generation technology. While the Air Force has gone from propeller planes to jets and the Navy has gone from sailing ships to aircraft carriers, the Army and Marine Corps Infantry Soldiers have suffered from a paucity of true innovation. "The U.S. Army is starved of the things it needs the most, which is highly effective close combat units, which are the gold standard for future warfare," said retired Major General Robert H. Scales Jr.

Beyond Snipers  Transforming Soldiers to Superwarriors recommends a fundamental change in the way we structure and utilize the Infantry in defending our country on today's and future battlefields, including the war against radical Islamic terrorism. If implemented with Leveraging Precision-Guided Firearms, this new structure and strategy delivers powerful squad overmatch, dramatically extends battle standoff distances, networks the shooters and brings substantial force multiplication.

Thought Leadership

The company has become a thought leader through investment in tactical and technical research as they relate to the Infantry Soldier and Marine. Categories include unprecedented accuracy against stationary and moving targets, prevention of small arms proliferation, networked small arms, and remotely controlled small arms. The company is also examining the concept of the Squad Drone and the role drones can play at the squad and platoon level.

"TrackingPoint has thought long and hard about small arms and how they will be used in battle over the next decades. We hope to play a role in stimulating small arms discourse to the direct benefit of our Soldiers, Marines, Law Enforcement Officers and citizens.

About TrackingPoint

TrackingPoint, based in Austin, Texas, builds extreme weapons for an extreme world to supercharge the Infantry Soldier. Based on fighter jet technology, the company's Precision-Guided Firearms deliver mission dominance, force multiplication, and remarkable battle overmatch in the war on radical Islamic terrorism. To learn more, visit www.tracking-point.com.

SOURCE TrackingPoint

Related Links

http://www.tracking-point.com


MEMPHIS, Tenn., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change will honor West Tennessee native Marvin R. Ellison, CEO of JCPenney, at the Institute's annual "Join Hands for Change" gala on April 21. The gala's theme, "Empowering, Supporting and Celebrating African American Men: Triumph through Perseverance," highlights the contributions of men such as Ellison, a University of Memphis alumnus who has achieved significant personal and professional success. The gala will highlight the Hooks Institute's innovative programs that are intended to help eliminate racial, educational, economic and other disparities in the Mid-South, such as the Hooks African-American Male Initiative, a program that focuses on increasing the retention and graduation of African-American students at the UofM.

"As a University of Memphis alumnus, I couldn't be more proud of the mission that the Hooks Institute is leading, and I am truly humbled to be honored at this year's gala," said Ellison. "I believe hard work, strong faith in God and a commitment to education are keys to achieving the success one desires in life. I hope my story can serve as an inspiration to others and help shine a light on the important work the Institute is doing to increase the retention and graduation rates of African-American males attending the University of Memphis."

The gala will begin at 7 p.m. at the UofM Holiday Inn, 3700 Central Ave. For additional information about this event, contact the Hooks Institute or go to www.memphis.edu/benhooks.

The Hooks Institute for Social Change is the legacy of Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks, a lifelong advocate for civil rights and social justice recognized nationally for his efforts in this role. In 1996, University of Memphis officials received approval from the Tennessee Board of Regents to create the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change in the College of Arts & Sciences. The ongoing mission of the Institute is the teaching, studying and promotion of civil rights and social change. For 20 years, the Hooks Institute has played a pivotal role in framing and solving community problems through the wisdom and vision of pioneers like Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks, and through the ongoing work of scholars, students, community leaders and members.

SOURCE The Hooks Institute

Related Links

http://www.memphis.edu/benhooks


NEW YORK and SAN RAMON, Calif., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- U.S. institutional investors, such as pension funds, endowments and foundations, plan to reduce their new capital commitments to real estate by 19 percent in 2016. An annual investor survey conducted by Institutional Real Estate, Inc. and Kingsley Associates projects $51 billion of new capital will be directed to the asset class in 2016, down from commitments of $63 billion in 2015.

"The results of the 2016 survey show U.S. investors remain bullish on real estate, and for the sixth consecutive year they believe real estate is the most attractive asset class on a risk-adjusted basis," says Jim Woidat, a principal at Kingsley Associates. "Investors, however, are becoming somewhat more cautious as the real estate cycle advances and pricing on prime properties has become elevated."

"In addition, with the accelerated investment activity of the past few years, many investors are at or near their target allocations for real estate," notes Geoffrey Dohrmann, president and CEO of Institutional Real Estate, Inc. "The survey showed that uncalled capital  capital that has been committed but not yet invested  increased 34 percent year-over-year to $41 billion. For these reasons, a slowdown in new capital commitments makes sense."

The survey also revealed U.S. core properties and value-added properties would receive the majority of new real estate investment capital, 34 percent and 31 percent, respectively. U.S. investors also plan to allocate 18 percent of capital to opportunistic investments and 11 percent of capital to foreign investment opportunities.

Survey respondents also indicated they view most property types as less attractive relative to the prior year, reflecting the general consensus regarding the ability to find accretive property deals given current asset pricing. Industrial and medical office properties received the highest scores, followed by multifamily, self-storage, office and retail.

This is the 20th year that IREI and Kingsley have teamed up to conduct the survey. A report detailing the complete results of the survey is available at www.irei.com/institutional_investors_realestate_trends

ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL REAL ESTATE, INC.

Institutional Real Estate, Inc. is an information company that produces publications and conferences for institutional real estate and infrastructure investors around the globe.

ABOUT KINGSLEY ASSOCIATES

Kingsley Associates provides business intelligence for the real estate industry. The firm offers research services and customizable tools and benchmarks to help property owners and investors maximize their portfolio and organizational performance.

SOURCE Institutional Real Estate, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.irei.com


VALHALLA, N.Y., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- USI Insurance Services ("USI") honored Summit winners across the country during its 5th annual celebration on Friday, April 15, 2016. The Summit Awards are a recognition and celebration of USI's top performing employees who are located in more than 140 locations across the United States. USI applauded a record 529 Summit Award winners  this represents a more than 150 percent increase since the Summit program began in 2011. In addition to paying tribute to multiple year winners, this was the first time the Company honored 25 five-time Summit winners.

Michael J. Sicard, USI chairman, president & CEO, said: "USI has grown into one of the leading insurance brokerage and consulting firms in the United States. The Summit Awards were designed to recognize outstanding service associates who have played an integral part in helping us achieve our goals. All of our Summit winners across the country go above and beyond every day to build our brand, in their daily interactions with clients, prospects, carriers and other USI associates. It is about these great individuals coming together to make USI a special place  where uniting as ONE powerful force, we can make a positive and lasting difference at work, in the industry and in our local neighborhoods."

Kim Van Orman, USI senior vice president & CHRO, said: "This annual recognition program is the only one of its kind in our industry. The Summit Awards event is our way of honoring those individuals who exemplify the hard work, innovation, service and spirit of USI employees around the country. I am thrilled to be honoring these exceptional professionals who have contributed so much to USI, and I congratulate them on this wonderful achievement."

The USI Summit Awards were created in 2011 as reward and recognition for USI's associates nationwide who serve both internal and external clients. Each Summit winner receives the Summit Experience which includes: company-wide recognition; local office celebrations; a custom-designed trophy; and a "special" off-site day planned. For 2015, the honorees ranged from one to 45 years of service and were represented in USI offices from coast to coast.

About USI

USI is a leading local and national insurance brokerage and consulting firm, delivering property and casualty, employee benefits, personal risk and retirement solutions throughout the United States. Headquartered in Valhalla, New York, USI has over $1.0 billion in revenue, employs more than 4,400 professionals and operates out of 140 local offices serving every state. USI has become a premier insurance brokerage and consulting firm by leveraging the USI ONE Advantage, an interactive platform that integrates proprietary and innovative client solutions, networked local resources and enterprise-wide collaboration to deliver customized results with positive, bottom line impact. USI attracts best-in-class industry talent with a long history of deep and continuing investment in our local communities. For more information, visit usi.biz.

Contact:

Cecile M. Locurto

USI Insurance Services

914-747-6331

[email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151116/287853LOGO

SOURCE USI Insurance Services

Related Links

http://www.usi.biz


PITTSBURGH, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- United Steelworkers (USW) International President Leo W. Gerard released the following statement today after learning that the High Level Dialogue at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development was unable to advance a global framework to address steel overcapacity.

"Today the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) learned that China refused to join in developing a comprehensive multilateral framework to reign in overcapacity in the steel sector. China is the single largest contributor to overcapacity in the sector as it has fueled the rise of its domestic steel companies through a combination of subsidies and other support.

China's policies have decimated U.S. steel producers and led to the layoff of more than 13,500 workers. Last week, the USTR held two days of hearings on this topic and witness after witness gave testimony on the crisis in the sector.

"When China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), proponents argued that it would lead to that country's transformation to a more market-based approach. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. In fact, in recent years, China has backslid on some of the few reforms it had announced. China has repeatedly announced its intention to reduce overcapacity in the steel sector, but the facts speak louder than words. Its capacity has continued to grow.

"The Obama Administration made clear that effective action was needed. China's refusal to commit to specific and timely actions sets the stage for trade actions around the globe. The USW will work closely with the administration as plans are developed.

"The OECD meeting may have been the last-ditch opportunity to develop a framework for multilateral overcapacity disciplines. Now the time for talk has ended. Action is needed. Too many lives and livelihoods are at stake as well as the national security of the United States."

The USW represents 850,000 workers in North America employed in many industries that include metals, rubber, chemicals, paper, oil refining and the service and public sectors. For more information: http://www.usw.org/.

CONTACT: Holly Hart (202) 778-4384

[email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20080131/DC12982LOGO

SOURCE United Steelworkers (USW)

Related Links

http://www.usw.org


PUNE, India, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

RnRMarketResearch.com adds "Global and Chinese Vancomycin (CAS1404-90-6) Industry, 2016 Market Research Report" latest study of 150 pages, published in Apr 2016, to the Infectious Diseases Therapeutics intelligence collection of its store.

The Global Vancomycin Industry 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Vancomycin industry. Complete report on Vancomycin industry divided into 11 major chapters that offer an overview of current market scenario as well as 2021 forecasts is now available at http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/global-and-chinese-vancomycin-cas1404-90-6-industry-2016-market-research-report-market-report.html

The Global Vancomycin Industry 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Vancomycin industry. Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Vancomycin industry analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis, and major regions' development status.

Secondly, this report states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions (United States, EU, China and Japan), and other regions can be added.

Then, the report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials, equipment and downstream consumers analysis is also carried out. What's more, the Vancomycin industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed.

Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed, and overall research conclusions are offered. In a word, the report provides major statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.

Order a copy of this 2016 vancomycin market report at http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/contacts/purchase?rname=524903

The first chapter introduces the Vancomycin Industry by Brief Introduction, Development & Status of Vancomycin Industry. The second chapter focuses on Manufacturing Technology of Vancomycin, the third one gives Analysis of Global Key Manufacturers (Including Company Profile, Product Specification, 2011-2016 Production Information etc.) The forth chapter deals with 2011-2016 Global and China Market of Vancomycin. The chapter 5 summarizes Market Status of Vancomycin Industry.

Another research titled "United States Drugs for Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococcus Faecium Infections Industry 2016 Market Research Report" forecasts the market analysis provided for the United States markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status. With 262 tables and figures the report provides key statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.

The report states the United States Drugs for Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococcus Faecium Infections market size (volume and value), and the segment markets by regions, types, applications and companies are also discussed. Few key manufacturers included in this report are Alchemia Limited, Alvogen, Aphios Corporation, Cellceutix Corporation, Enanta Pharmaceuticals, Helix BioMedix, LegoChem Biosciences, Lytix Biopharma, MGB Biopharma Limited, Microbiotix, MicuRx Pharmaceuticals, Nabriva Therapeutics, NovaBay Pharmaceuticals, NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, Oragenics and Sealife PHARMA. Order a copy of United States Drugs for Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococcus Faecium Infections Industry 2016 Market Research Report at http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/contacts/purchase?rname=450029

Explore more reports on Infectious Diseases Therapeutics Industry at http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/reports/life-sciences/pharmaceuticals/therapeutics/infectious-diseases-therapeutics

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SOURCE RnR Market Research
SALT LAKE CITY, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- To honor the important role nurses play in the safety and health of their communities, and to commemorate National Nurses Week 2016 next month, Western Governors University (WGU) will offer up to $250,000 in scholarships for nurses across the nation. WGU will award up to 125 scholarships to nurses who wish to pursue a bachelor's or master's degree program in WGU's College of Health Professions.

Each WGU Loves Nurses Scholarship is valued at up to $2,000$500 per six-month term for up to four terms. New and enrolling students can apply for these scholarships now through July 31 at wgu.edu/wgulovesnurses. To be eligible, scholarship applicants must be officially admitted to WGU, complete the scholarship application, which includes an essay, and be interviewed by a WGU scholarship counselor. While WGU will award up to 125 scholarships, recipients will be selected based on their academic record, financial need, and readiness for online study at WGU.

WGU was recognized as A National League for Nursing 2015 Center of Excellence for Creating Environments that Enhance Student Learning and Professional Development and for being one of the top five producers of bachelor's and master's degrees in nursing awarded to minority students according to Diverse: Issues in Higher Education magazine.

Designed to fit into the lives of busy working nurses, WGU's BSN, MSN, and MBA programs provide the knowledge, skills, and credentials employers seek. All WGU programs are competency-based, a model that measures learning rather than time spent in class. This allows health professionals to advance their careers without disrupting work or other obligations. Students complete their programs by studying on their own time and, once they're ready, proving what they've learned. Prior work experience and academic knowledge may enable them to accelerate through subject matter they already know and focus on engaging WGU's high-quality learning resources and one-on-one faculty mentor support to learn what they still need to learn.

For more information about the WGU Loves Nurses Scholarship program, please visit wgu.edu/wgulovesnurses.

About WGU

Now with 70,000 students and 60,000 graduates nationwide, WGU offers more than 50 online, competency-based bachelor's and master's degree programs in the high-demand fields of business, K-12 teacher education, information technology, and health professions, including nursing. The online university is accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities and its nursing degree programs accredited by the Commission for Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE)*. WGU has been named one of Fast Company's "Most Innovative Companies" and featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" NBC Nightly News, CNN's "Schools of Thought," and in The New York Times.

WGU has earned the support of more than 20 leading corporations and foundations, including AT&T, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lilly Endowment, HCA, Hewlett-Packard, Lumina Foundation, Microsoft, Oracle, SunGard Higher Education, USA Funds, and Zions Bank. More information is available at wgu.edu or by calling 866.225.5948.

Follow WGU:

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http://twitter.com/wgu

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Aminata said that girls as young as 14 are left with no option other than prostitution to fund their schooling. (Photo: YouTube Screengrab)

Freetown, Sierra Leone: In a shocking revelation, a young girl in Sierra Leone confessed that she earns money by working as a prostitute, according to a report in the Daily Mail.

The girl, identified as Aminata, said that she had to sleep with clients at night to fund her schooling.

Schooling in Sierra Leone costs around 40 a year and many find it difficult to fund their education. Aminata said that girls as young as 14 are left with no option other than prostitution to fund their schooling.

In the poorest communities of the African country, some girls choose to sell their bodies in exchange for money while some are preyed on by men who force girls to indulge in sex and in return promise to pay their school fees.

Expressing her grief, Aminata also revealed that in some cases, these girls get pregnant and are abandoned. "I was on the street, I was engaged in child sex work. It was to raise funds to go to school," said Aminata.

Left with no choice, they unwillingly have to enter prostitution to fund themselves and their children.

Five-months pregnant, Aminata, was pushed into prostitution by a random man who promised to feed her and pay her school fees. But, despite having used protection, Aminata got pregnant and was forced to quit school.

Sleeping with one client would get Aminata 3 per day. On a good night, she earned about 9 to 10, but that meant seeing three clients that night.

"I was not feeling good about it, but I had no other option  there was nobody to support me," Aminata said.

Pregnancy as a result of sexual exploitation has forced many young girls out of school. Sierra Leone has witnessed a huge drop in women's education bringing the toll down to 9.5 per cent.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Sam Jane Brown's popular but highly controversial new book, "Forgotten Word," addresses one of today's most serious and frequently debated questions: "Which is more violent, religion or government." The book, a murder mystery predicting that the second coming of Jesus Christ will be in female form, prompts readers to rethink their positions on this contentious issue.

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Sam Jane Brown

Non-believers such as Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion, assert that only religious faith is strong enough to motivate violent behavior in otherwise sane and decent people. Religious advocates take a reciprocal stand, blaming secularism for violence. For example, according to the Los Angeles Times, "In the aftermath of the shooting at Umpqua Community College, for example, Fox host Bill O'Reilly cited weakening religion as the culprit. 'As the world becomes more secular,' he declared, 'civilized restraints to bad behavior drop.'"

According to Brown, both sides miss the point. "A lot of people, especially atheists, are super quick to condemn religion as the source of violence in the world, but that is at best an incomplete perspective on a serious problem," said Brown. "Both religion and government drive war and violence, but the reality is that violence from governments is far worse than anything we've ever seen from religion  at least in the modern era."

Brown pointed out that, when measured in deaths, secular violence has been exponentially worse than religious conflict in the last 200 years. "World Wars I and II  both secular conflicts, killed tens of millions of people. Mao Zedong killed over 60,000,000 people, and it had nothing to do with religion. Cambodia? Not religious... and on and on."

Brown book's sets the stage for this discussion. Taking place in a world of high intrigue in the church, Brown's novel starts with the murder of Catholic priests. These crimes provide the catalyst to tell the story of the impending Second Coming. Zena McGrath, an international detective, is assigned the duty of solving the murders. Her investigation leads her to the Vatican, where she meets a mysterious priest. In New York, she becomes aware of an evil presence following her. Ultimately, she goes to the Holy Land as the perpetrators of the crime are revealed. The book culminates in a climactic Second Coming, in which the "Christ" figure is a woman.

By questioning the most fundamental belief in Christianity  that Christ will return as a man  Brown throws open the door to questioning many popular beliefs and misconceptions about the religious world. "Is religion violent?" Brown asked. "Of course it is. Only a naive fool would deny this. You can see it with ISIS and all sorts of extremism that capture the world's attention today. You can even take a perspective that secular wars are actually driven by God's desire to influence history. For example, without World War I, you would not have the Arab-Israeli conflict, a war that features powerfully into the narrative of the coming rapture. Do you think that's a coincidence? I don't think so."

The book has raised angry denouncements from certain religious voices, who complain that it is sacrilegious to consider that Jesus will return to the world as a woman. "Forgotten Word" is being adapted into film by Atlanta based film company Lucky Film 13, who are also working alongside Neil Shulman creator Of Doc Hollywood for his new film.

http://www.samjanebrown.com/the_book.html.

Media contact:

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+ 44 787 8063263

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"This nation's military families deal with a variety of challenges, many of which are financial in nature. Last year, Wounded Warrior Project contributed more than $2.4 million to Operation Homefront which allowed us to fulfill over 5,000 individual requests and help nearly 2,400 deserving military families who were struggling to pay for basic necessities like their mortgage, rent, utilities, groceries, or car repair bills," said John I. Pray Jr., Operation Homefront CEO and President. "Wounded Warrior Project's expanded investment helps us accomplish our mission and generate meaningful outcomes -- strong, stable, and secure military families who thrive, not simply get by, in the communities they have worked so hard to protect."

Through partnerships with the American Red Cross, Association for Financial Counseling and Planning Education (AFCPE), Operation Homefront, SALUTE, INC., and USA Cares, WWP has shaped a financial assistance program that directly serves the needs of injured service members during their times of financial hardship.

"Wounded Warrior Project works hard to meet every need of the wounded veterans we serve. We are only one organization, and we know that we are stronger when working with other veteran service organizations that specialize in providing financial assistance," said Ned Breslin, executive vice president of Partnerships and Programmatic Investments at WWP. "We aim to provide a financial safety net for those Alumni, caregivers, and families who find themselves facing unexpected financial hardship."

These new partnerships will initially focus on four regions across the country, giving 18,000 WWP Alumni the opportunity to make use of the assistance. The program's goal is to provide wounded veterans and their families with short-term financial relief while empowering them to find long-term financial stability. WWP will continue funding Operation Homefront, thereby providing financial support nationwide to the over 100,000 warriors, caregivers, and families the organization serves.

"Sometimes, that gap between financial crisis and financial stability needs a bridge," said Breslin. "Wounded Warrior Project is humbled to help build that bridge to ensure this generation of wounded veterans can access the critical, life-saving support that will significantly impact their lives, free of charge."

WWP focuses on providing funding to exceptional organizations that operate in underserved areas or fulfill a need outside the scope of its 20 direct programs and services  all of which are offered at no cost to the population the nonprofit serves. All organizations that receive funding from WWP must serve injured veterans, caregivers, and families at no cost and are expected to provide regular, detailed reports of their programs' impact.

Between 2012 and 2015, WWP Programmatic Investments has invested nearly $11 million to over 90 organizations that share the WWP vision of fostering the most successful, well-adjusted generation of wounded service members in our nation's history. To learn more, visit: https://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/grants/grant-recipients.aspx. This support has enabled over 95,000 wounded veterans, 6,500 family support members, and 3,900 children across the country to access critically needed programs and services. Looking ahead to the next five years, WWP recently committed an additional $100+ million toward investments in programs and services that serve wounded service members, their caregivers, and families in communities across the United States.

About Wounded Warrior Project

The mission of Wounded Warrior Project (WWP) is to honor and empower Wounded Warriors. The WWP purpose is to raise awareness and to enlist the public's aid for the needs of injured service members, to help injured servicemen and women aid and assist each other, and to provide unique, direct programs and services to meet their needs. WWP is a national, nonpartisan organization headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida. To get involved and learn more, visit woundedwarriorproject.org.

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"Being green is such a large part of the Youfit DNA," says Youfit COO J.J. Creegan. "The passion for being a green company isn't just something that exists on our website. It's something we believe. We're excited to thank our members this Earth Day because by joining a green gym and keeping us going, they are helping our planet."

Youfit's corporate office is conducting a beach cleanup at Deerfield Beach on Earth Day, Friday, April 22, and is encouraging all other clubs to clean up their surrounding areas as well. Members of the South Florida community are encouraged to come to Deerfield Beach to help Youfit clean up, and everyone is encouraged to keep up with all the action from the beach cleanup by following Youfit on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Being an eco-friendly company, Youfit has consistently worked to make Earth Day a priority. Each health club uses recycled green materials in its construction.

"Our goal is to have the greenest clubs in America," says Rick Berks, founder of Youfit. "For example, when you walk in, you'll be walking on floors made of recycled tires or Nike (NKE) 'grind' (recycled sneakers). Our heating, cooling, water and power systems are also all energy-efficient."

About Youfit Health Clubs

Youfit Health Clubs was founded in 2008 by Rick Berks with the philosophy that fitness clubs should be welcoming, not intimidating. Youfit is one of the fastest-growing fitness companies in America, with an average of 34 clubs opening per month. The company's clubs cater to the average person who simply wants to be fit rather than to bodybuilders or "gym rats." Youfit is dedicated to using recycled materials in gym construction and aims to be the "greenest" gym in America.

Contact: Catherine Goergen

on behalf of Youfit Health Clubs

[email protected] / 336-774-9346

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SOURCE Youfit Health Clubs
In September 2015, a federal jury convicted Paramjit and his 57-year-old wife. His wife died on February 1, and the charges against her were dismissed. (Representational Image)

Houston: A 60-year-old Indian-American physician has been sentenced to 9 years in prison for a USD 3 million healthcare fraud scheme in the US in which he filed claims for procedures that were never performed.

Paramjit Singh Ajrawat, was ordered to forfeit and pay restitution of USD 3 million in federal court in Greenbelt. The US Attorney's Office said in a news release that Paramjit and his wife, Sukhveen Kaur Ajrawat, owned and operated Washington Pain Management Center in Greenbelt.

In September 2015, a federal jury convicted Paramjit and his 57-year-old wife. His wife died on February 1, and the charges against her were dismissed.

During trial, evidence was presented that showed how the couple defrauded federal health benefit programmes, including Medicare and Medicaid. The defrauding efforts happened from January 2011 to May 2014.

They were convicted in September of numerous offences, including health care and wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and aggravated identity theft.
In a rally earlier this year, Clinton had acknowledged that Indian-Americans were the nation's fastest growing racial minority. (Photo: AP)

Washington: Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton's Indian-American supporters have launched a nation-wide group to back her bid for winning the party's presidential nomination.

Describes itself as a nationwide grassroots volunteer organisation, the Indian-Americans for Hillary (IAFH) group said on Monday that it will hold its inaugural event in Gaithersburg, Maryland in Washington DC on April 24.

"It is important to mobilise support of millions of Indian Americans living here in the US for Secretary Hillary Clinton enable them to go out and vote (GOTV) for electing Hillary Clinton as our next President. This organisation has been created primarily to achieve this goal," the website said.

The inaugural event and rally by Indian-Americans for Hillary would be addressed by John Podesta national campaign chair for the Clinton Campaign and Neera Tandon, president and COO of Center for American Progress.

An eminent Indian American, Tandon is one of the close confidant of Clinton. Noting that Clinton has thousands of Indian-American friends across the US, IAFH said that she had been to India four times as first lady, senator, and Secretary of State.

"Hillary Clinton's connection with India goes back a long way. She visited India as First Lady in March 1995 with her daughter Chelsea and President Bill Clinton. Since then, popular lore has it that she was a friend of India in the White House," it said.

"Having traveled extensively in India, she has a much deeper level of familiarity with India than any other candidate in the race," it said.

The group was launched to network leaders and advocates who share Clinton's values, her vision for country, and a commitment to mobilising the resources and ideas needed to compete and win in partnership with the Indian-American community, it said on its website.

This also serves as a vehicle to demonstrate coalition support for Hillary and move the conversation forward on issues important to the Indian-American community, it said.

In a rally earlier this year, Clinton had acknowledged that Indian-Americans were the nation's fastest growing racial minority.

As Secretary of State her focus on rebalancing US foreign policy toward Asia contained a strong emphasis on expanding ties with India, the group said, adding that during her tenure the US and India worked to ensure closer cooperation in high technology areas, particularly in defense and space.

IAFH said Clinton had promised that she will fix the nation's broken immigration system, improve access to higher education and increase wages all issues are extremely important for the Indian-American electorate.

"Indian Americans need comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to full and equal citizenship. Only Hillary, as President, can act on these issues in a jiffy," it said.

IAFH is second such group after Indian Americans for Trump 2016, which was launched in New Jersey in January.
The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act would allow victims of the September 11, 2001, massacre and other attacks to sue nations supporting terrorism. (Photo: AP)

Washington: President Barack Obama on Tuesday opposed the Congressional legislation bill that would allow 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia, arguing that this would expose the US to similar lawsuits in other countries, hours after White House threatened to veto the proposal.

"I'm opposed, this is not just a bilateral US-Saudi issue. This is a matter of how generally the United States approaches our interactions with other countries," Obama told CBS News.

"If we open up the possibility that individuals in the United States can routinely start suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States to being continually sued by individuals in other countries," he said.

Authored by Senators John Cornyn and Charles Schumer, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act would allow victims of the September 11, 2001, massacre and other attacks to sue nations supporting terrorism. Obama said the 28-unreleased pages of the 9/11 report would be released soon.

"Hopefully that this process will come to a head fairly soon," he said.

"I have a sense of what's in there, but this has been a process which we generally deal with through the intelligence community and Jim Clapper, our director of national intelligence, has been going through to make sure that whatever it is that is released is not going to compromise some major national security interest in the United States," Obama said.

"There are just reams of intelligence that are coming through constantly. Some of them are raw and not tested. Some of that may be in the 28 pages. I don't know. But the point is that it's important for there to be an orderly process where we evaluate this because what can end up happening is if you just dump a whole bunch of stuff out there that nobody knows exactly how credible it is, was it verified or not, they could end up creating problems," the President emphasised.

Earlier, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that, "It's difficult to imagine a scenario in which the President would sign the bill as it's currently drafted."

"Our concerns about this law are not related to its impact on our relationship with one particular country. In fact, our concern is about an important principle of international law, the whole notion of sovereign immunity is at stake," he said.
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Imphal, April 14 : The earthquake that hit the Myanmar-India border region on Wednesday night damaged structures and left at least 30 people injured in Manipur, but there has been no report yet of any loss of life, officials here said.

At least 30 people, including women, were injured in the earthquake that measured 6.8 on the Richter scale, said the officials on Thursday.

Several houses, school buildings and markets in Manipur were damaged by the tremors, they said.

In neighbouring Assam, two persons were killed and over 70 others were injured in the quake.

One primary school building at Khekman in Thoubal district of Manipur collapsed completely, destroying the adjacent house of Jamir Khan.

Wednesday's earthquake exacerbated the damage caused to some structures -- such as the 150-year-old Ima Keithel or Mothers' Market complex here -- that had already been shaken by the January 4 earthquake.

Following the January quake, the government had declared the Mothers' Market complex unsafe for the vendors, who are exclusively women.

Officials told IANS on Thursday that the damage to the portions of the market complex has worsened. The district administration has barred women vendors from doing business in the complex.

Several houses in Nungba sub-division of Tamenglong district were also damaged by the tremors on Wednesday. There are reports that several persons have been injured. The district administration is collecting information on the number of people injured and houses damaged in the hill district.

Police officials told IANS in Imphal that so far there is no report of any death in the quake-related incidents.

Health officials said that medical teams, medicine supplies and equipment have been kept in readiness in case any report is received of injuries in the far-off hilly and rural areas of the state which lack in proper medicare facility.
Tokyo, April 15 : Japanese electronic device manufacturer Sharp Corporation has unveiled a unique robot-cum-smartphone that not only lets you communicate with your friends but also talks to you through simple verbal commands and also dances if in a good mood!

Named "Robohon", the humanoid smartphone is priced at 198,000 yen ($1,810) and offers a sneak peek into how mobile devices will look like in the coming years, media reports said.

Sharp announced that it will start shipping the device -- currently available only in Japan -- from May 26 with pre-orders now open, technology website venturebeat.com reported on Friday.

The 8-inch Robohon weighs little less than 450 grams, features a two-inch QVGA display on its back and runs on Android 5.0.

"Robohon" is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and has a 720p projector embedded in its head.

The 4G-enabled humanoid smartphone can talk in simple commands and the company is working on a companion fishing app and a simple taxi app that connects with the company's national taxi network just by telling the robot to call a taxi.

"I cannot think of any other consumer products that are as challenging as this, at least in the recent years," famed robot creator Tomotaka Takahashi, who collaborated on the Robohon, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, with such entry-level specifications for an Android phone, experts think that "Robohon" is a bit over-priced.

"I do not think this will be a major hit item. It is too big to carry around as a smartphone. Some hard-core robot fans would buy this at the launch, but that would be it," an analyst Hideki Yasuda, was quoted as saying in a Wall Street Journal report.

Other apps in development for the robot smartphone aim to help with recipes and discovering nearby restaurants, cafes and bars.
Tehran, April 17 : India and Iran on Sunday talked business and committed to boost bilateral economic ties in the Gulf nation that has just emerged from the crippling US-led Western sanctions after a landmark nuclear deal.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met in the Iranian capital to give fresh momentum to the bilateral ties between the two countries, particularly towards increasing Indian investments in the lucrative oil and gas sectors of Iran.

Sushma Swaraj arrived in Tehran on Saturday at the start of her two-day visit to boost overall ties between the two countries, particularly bidding to raise India's fuel imports after the trade embargoes against the oil-rich Gulf nation were lifted.

Vikas Swarup, the Indian external affairs ministry spokesperson, said the delegation level talks between the two leaders were "constructive and cordial".

The two sides discussed progress made on the strategic Chabahar port project that will give India sea-land access route to Afghanistan and Central Asia bypassing Pakistan.

"Both sides agreed that the commercial contract on Chabahar as well as the modalities for extending $150 million credit for Chabahar port should be signed in the very near future," Swarup said.

The talks also focused on Indian investment in areas of energy and connectivity in Iran. This comes after the Indian government has already approved a proposal to extend a $150 million credit for the development of the port located off Iran's south eastern coast.

"Both sides discussed the energy partnership. Iran said it would be happy to participate in the refinery sector in India," Swarup said.

The two sides also hailed the "constructive discussions" held during a visit to Iran by India's Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Prasad over Farzad-B gas field that is estimated to contain 12.8 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas reserves.

The gas field in the Persian Gulf was discovered by India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Videsh Ltd. (OVL) in 2008. There were apprehensions that the oil field was slipping out of hands of the the Indian company amid speculations that Iran may put it up for fresh bidding.

But the concern seemed to have been addressed as Iran has decided to keep the field "outside the auction basket", Swarup said.

"The concerned companies (from the two countries) have been directed to complete their contractual negotiations in a time bound manner."

He said that the Iranian side had earlier communicated their gas pricing formula to India.

In terms of connectivity, Swarup said Iran has also committed it full support India's desire to join the Ashgabat Agreement -- an international transport and transit corridor to facilitate transportation of goods between Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.

"The two ministers reviewed the progress made in the International North South Transport Corridor. IRCON from India would be visiting Iran for discussions on the Chabahar-Zahedan Railway link," he said They agreed that pending agreements such as Preferential Trade Agreement, Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement and Bilateral Investment Treaty should be concluded on a priority basis, he said.

Earlier, Sushma Swaraj met members of the Indian community in Iran and visited a Sikh gurudwara.

She visited an Indian school in the Iranian capital. Children in the school performed a show to depict the cultural blend of the two nations.

Sushma Swaraj's visit comes two weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Saudi Arabia -- a regional rival to largely Shia-populated Iran. India and Saudi Arabia have committed to scale up their strategic ties.
New Delhi, April 18 : As Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar tours China, Indian Navy chief R.K. Dhowan on Monday said the two neighbouring countries are cooperating with each other in the maritime domain.

"Both Indian and PLA (People's Liberation Army of China) navies cooperate with each other in maritime domain," Chief of the Naval Staff Dhowan told reporters on the sidelines of an event here that brought together investors in defence sector and top naval officers.

"Recently, when our agreements were renewed, two warships and official delegation of PLA had arrived in India and we carried out joint exercises," he said.

Together India and Chinese navies have been successful in tackling piracy as well, Dhowan said.

His comments came as Parrikar arrived in China on Saturday on a five-day official visit for talks with top PLA officials to consolidate ties between the armed forces of the two countries.

Dhowan said: "The two navies cooperate with each other even in the Gulf of Aden, where we undertake anti-piracy patrol. We exchange information, so that both the navies are aware what escorts are being undertaken by the other."

"We also have occasions where both of our ships visit each others' country. We visited China in 2014 to participate in multilateral exercises and their ship visited us after that."

Defence Minister Parrikar may raise with Chinese minister the issues about enhancement of cooperation and interaction between the two countries, Dhowan said.

The navy chief also said the LSA (Logistics Support Agreement) that India is about to sign with the US would help the Indian Navy in getting crucial logistical support in high seas.

"This (LSA) will be to our advantage. We will get support in logistic aspects, which will meet the requirements of the ships when they operate in different parts of the world," Dhowan said, insisting "the two navies will also look deeper into the other aspects of the agreement".

The navy chief refused to link the LSA with India-China relations. The agreement is being seen by some as part of America's 'China containment' measure.

Parrikar and US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter last week announced that the two countries have 'in principle' agreed to conclude a logistics support to each other.

India and the US will sign two more agreements: A Communication and Information Security Memorandum of Agreement (CISMOA), and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA) for assistance in geospatial intelligence.
Washington, April 19 : Kathy Chen, Twitter's first-ever managing director for China, once worked for a company that built internet filtering products along with Beijing's ministry of public security, the media reported on Tuesday.

The clients of CA-Jinchen included the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team, which operates China's Great Firewall.

According to Chen's LinkedIn profile, reports Financial Times, she was chief executive of CA-Jinchen, which she described as a "joint venture company formed by Computer Associates International and ministry of public security of China".

With CA-Jinchen from 1999 to 2005, her role was focused on the "information security industry, providing products, solutions, security applications, and comprehensive services," she wrote on her profile.

The micro-blogging site last week appointed Chen as its Greater China managing director, chief executive officer Jack Dorsey said in a tweet.

"A big welcome to Twitter, @KathyChen2016! She joins us as our MD for China!", Dorsey said.

Since her appointment, Chinese Twitter users have raised eyebrows over Chen's past links to the Chinese government.

Twitter has been blocked in China since 2009. The micro-blogging site currently has over 300 million users.
Washington, April 19 : While the world celebrated the detection of gravitational waves in September last year, less than half a second later, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope picked up a brief, weak burst of high-energy light consistent with the same part of the sky.

Analysis of this burst suggests just a 0.2-percent chance of simply being random coincidence.

Gamma-rays arising from a black hole merger would be a landmark finding because black holes are expected to merge "cleanly," without producing any sort of light, the researchers noted.

"This is a tantalising discovery with a low chance of being a false alarm but before we can start rewriting the textbooks, we will need to see more bursts associated with gravitational waves from black hole mergers," said Valerie Connaughton, a GBM team member at the National Space, Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

On September 14, waves of energy travelling for more than a billion years gently rattled space-time in the vicinity of Earth.

The disturbance, produced by a pair of merging black holes, was captured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana.

This event marked the first-ever detection of gravitational waves and opens a new scientific window on how the universe works.

As the two black holes near each other, they merge into a single black hole that settles into its "ringdown" phase where the final gravitational waves are emitted.

The GBM team calculates less than a 0.2-percent chance random fluctuations would have occurred in such close proximity to the merger.

"Detecting light from a gravitational wave source by Fermi will enable a much deeper understanding of the event," the authors stated.

Fermi's GBM sees the entire sky not blocked by Earth and is sensitive to X-rays and gamma rays with energies between 8,000 and 40 million electron volts (eV).

For comparison, the energy of visible light ranges between about 2 and 3 eV.

"With just one joint event, gamma rays and gravitational waves together will tell us exactly what causes a short GRB," added Lindy Blackburn, postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"There is an incredible synergy between the two observations, with gamma rays revealing details about the source's energetics and local environment and gravitational waves providing a unique probe of the dynamics leading up to the event," he explained in a paper under review by The Astrophysical Journal.

The LIGO event was produced by the merger of two relatively large black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the sun.

Binary systems with black holes this big were not expected to be common, and many questions remain about the nature and origin of the system.

Famous physicist Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his general theory of relativity a century ago and scientists have been attempting to detect them for 50 years.
Agartala, April 19 : As his family was at its wits end to obtain 50-year-old Ranjan Saha's death certificate, the banana seller startled one and all by returning home 16 years after he had been abducted by armed militants who held him captive at their hideout in Bangladesh. He was let off for "good behaviour" as he never tried to escape.

"Since my abduction, I had been pleading with the rebels to release me as I was the lone bread earner of my (four- member) poor family. But they always become furious and tortured me," the feeble-voiced Saha told IANS.

"They made me do various type of works in their camp deep in a jungle in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) (in southeast Bangladesh). I do not know the exact name of the place. There are at least 25 other people, mostly kidnapped by the extremists, also working in the same camp," he added.

Saha was kidnapped by the extremists of the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) from Jampuijala, 35 km south of Agartala, on April 18, 2000, along with two others. He had gone to Jampuijala to buy bananas, which he would sell in Agartala.

"The guerrillas also kidnapped at gunpoint two other traders along with me. They kept us blindfolded for more than a month as we had to trek through mountainous terrain before we reached the militant's camp in the CHT," he said.

"The abductors subsequently learnt that we would not be able to pay any ransom. Hence they made us do various types of work like cleaning and maintaining the camp, cooking and collecting water, besides other odd jobs. The two other captives who were kidnapped along with me were shifted to other unknown locations," Saha said.

"Despite my inability to do so due to ill health and hostile surroundings, I quietly continued with the hard work. The food was sometimes unpalatable. I was constantly praying to god to liberate me from this awful life for the sake of my wife, two sons and my beloved daughter," he said According to Saha, "the militants were pleased as I never tried to run away from their camp".

"Recently, god might have heard my prayers. The militants released me one month back after giving me some money. I then went to relatives' house at Madhabpur in Habiganj district of Bangladesh. From there, clandestinely I crossed the border with the help of a Bangladeshi middleman and reached my house at Shibnagar in Agartala (last week)," Saha said.

After Saha's abduction, his family lodged a case in the Jirania police station and met a number of people, including ministers, senior police officers and other influential people in a bid to locate him.

"In 2007, we filed a case in a court here to get my father's death certificate. The case is still pending with the court," Ranjan Saha's elder son, Abhijit Saha, told IANS.

Ranjan Saha, who is now being treated at the government-run Gobind Ballabh Pant Hospital and Medical college here, was upbeat about his future.

"I would re-start my business afresh after my health improves," he said.

Saha's 45-year-old wife Sumitra explained how she struggled during the past 16 years after her husband's abduction and brought up the children by working as a cook in a neighbour's house.

"I am indebted to god that my younger son Rajesh got a temporary job as a representative of a private company in Kolkata. I married off my daughter Sampa and she is happy. It is only due to the god's mercy my husband returned to us," Sumitra told IANS.

According to Tripura Police documents, during the peak years of terrorism in the state between 1997 and 2014, over 2,430 people, including legislators, political leaders, traders, government employees and civilians were kidnapped by extremists, of whom 1,705 were subsequently released.

"For many years, abduction for ransom became a trade by the militants. Many people were released by the extremists after taking ransom but many people were killed as the victims' families either could not pay the money sought or did not fulfil the rebels' other demands," security and terrorism expert Manas Paul told IANS.

Members of NLFT and the All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF) undergo arms training in hideouts and covert camps in various parts of Bangladesh, which shares an 856-km border with Tripura.

Banned in 1997 by the central government, the two outfits advocate Tripura's secession from India. However, ATTF has become almost defunct as most of its cadres have surrendered.

(Sujit Chakraborty can be contacted at sujit.c@ians.in)
Michelle is believed to have struck a close association with the British monarch since she ignored protocol to put her arm around the Queen during an official visit in 2009. (Photo: AP)

London: Britain's Royals will this week host US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle at two separate events, during which the Obamas will dine with the Queen and the younger royals Prince William and wife Kate.

Obama and Michelle will attend a private lunch hosted by Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle on Friday, a day after her 90th birthday on April 21, before joining William and Kate for an informal dinner at their home in London the same day.

"Their Royal Highnesses are very much looking forward to welcoming President and Mrs Obama to Kensington Palace," a Kensington Palace spokesperson said.

William, the Duke of Cambridge, last met Obama in the Oval Office in 2014 and extended a personal invitation to him. The Obamas had met the Queen and Prince Philip during their state visit to the UK in 2011.

Michelle is believed to have struck a close association with the British monarch since she ignored protocol to put her arm around the Queen during an official visit in 2009.

Obama will arrive in London on the evening of the Queen's birthday on Thursday and leave on Sunday. The US President will be in the UK as part of a tour of Saudi Arabia and Germany.

Obama is widely expected to deliver a strong anti-Brexit message during his stay. There is also speculation that the June 23 European Union (EU) referendum could come up during his conversations with the Queen. The referendum is to decide on Britain's possible exit from the European Union, dubbed 'Brexit.'

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the visit will allow President Obama to coordinate on today's most pressing international challenges with "one of our closest allies."
Hyderabad, April 19 : Techwave Consulting Inc., a US based global end-to-end IT services and solutions company, has crossed $50 million in revenues during 2015-16 and plans to double the same during current financial year.

Headquartered in Exton, Pennsylvania, Techwave has global delivery centre in Hyderabad.

The company recently acquired two global IT firms Tech Advaita, a Britain-based leader in digital services and solutions, and a Hungary-based SAP services major, Techwave, CEO Damodar Rao Gummadapu said on Tuesday.

Together on acquisition of these two companies, Techwave has invested $4 million. The investment was facilitated from internal accruals and the acquisition adds up to the company's revenues by about $8 million.

Techwave has also set up a base at Netherlands to expand its footprint in European markets.

The mid-tier IT services company also recently set up offices in South Africa and Australia.

It has increased head count to 1,500 from a little over 500 last year and also doubled its size of operations and office space.

"We have chalked out our roadmap for significant growth through expansion of our global client base and strategic acquisitions to achieve a revenue target of USD 100mn by the end of FY 2016-17," said Rao.

He stated that company is looking forward to continuing its growth trajectory by investing heavily in ISMAC (Internet of Things, Social Media, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) and digital solutions.

He further added that the company will soon be foraying into APAC region and other countries.
Rome, April 19 : Anti-mafia police said they impounded property from an Italian businessman worth 215 million euros including real estate, companies, bank accounts and a shopping centre.

The assets were seized from Alfonso Annunziata, who ran the financial affairs of the Calabrian mafia for 20 years, according to investigators.

Besides the 'L'Annunziata' shopping centre near the Calabrian port of Gioia Tauro, police impounded six companies, 85 items of real estate, 42 bank accounts and nearly 700,000 euros in cash.

Annunziata was arrested in March last year after a tax probe into his affairs and is currently on trial for mafia association.

Tax police alerted anti-mafia investigators after they became suspicious at the scale of business activities compared with the income he declared.

Drug trafficking, extortion and money-laundering rackets have in recent decades made the 'Ndrangheta Italy's wealthiest and most powerful international crime syndicate.
Bhubaneswar, April 19 : The Odisha government on Tuesday extended school holidays till April 26 due to the prevailing heat wave conditions in the state.

Earlier, the state government had announced closure of schools till April 20 in view of the intense heat sweeping the state.

"The state government has decided to close down the schools till April 26 due to heat wave in the state," said a release of the chief minister's office.

The decision was taken during a meeting chaired by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, who reviewed the drinking water supply situation to rural areas.

The state government has also decided to provide mid-day meal (MDM) to the school students in 27 drought affected districts during the holidays.

It would provide mid-day meal in about 36,000 schools and has made budgetary allocation of Rs.81 crore.

The heat wave continued in the state even as the coastal Odisha recorded a marginal fall in temperatures.

"Though there will be a slight dip in temperature in interior Odisha, the temperature will gradually rise in next 48 hours with severe heat wave condition in the next three days from April 21," said Bhubaneswar Met Office director Sarat Chandra Sahu.

Meanwhile, Special Relief Commissioner P.K. Mohapatra said the department has received reports of death of 45 people allegedly due to sunstroke.
Amritsar, April 19 : The body of Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh, who died under suspicious circumstances in a Lahore jail last week, arrived in India on Tuesday. His family members alleged that his body bore injury marks and foul play led to his death, but doctors who conducted an autopsy denied this.

Alleging foul play in his death, Kirpal's family members said the body bore injury and blood marks.

Contrary to the claims, the medical board which conducted the post-mortem examination here after his body was brought back to India on Tuesday, said there were no external or internal injury marks on the body.

Ashok Sharma, head of the three-member medical board, however, told the media after the post-mortem examination that the cause of death has not been established yet.

The doctor said some organs from his body were missing, as an autopsy has already been done (in Pakistan).

"In the post-mortem examination, it was found that there was no external or internal injury on the body. Post-mortem of this body has already been done (in Pakistan) because stitches were present on the body and the head.

"When we opened the body, we found that some of the organs were missing because when post-mortem is done, some organs are taken to test to find out whether there is any disease or not," Sharma said.

"... rest of the organs which were present, we took out portions of those organs and we sent them for testing (to know) about diseases as well as poisoning. I can say with 100 percent accuracy that the wound marks which are inflicted during life, they cannot be removed. The cause of death has not been established yet," the doctor added.

After being handed over to the Border Security Force at the Attari-Wagah joint check post, Kirpal's body was immediately taken for post-mortem examination in Amritsar after which it was taken to Gurdaspur district for cremation in his native village.

His family members alleged that he was murdered either by fellow prisoners or prison officials in Pakistan.

Close relatives and residents from Kirpal Singh's village were present at Attari, 30 km from here, when the body was brought back to India.

The body, in a coffin, was carried by porters on the Indian side even as family members showered flowers on the coffin.

Close family members were allowed to see the body to identify Kirpal Singh's mortal remains.

Pakistani authorities have attributed his death to heart attack, but his family has alleged he was murdered in prison.

"He has been murdered by the Pakistanis under a conspiracy. He was the sole witness to the murder of Sarabjit Singh in the Lahore prison. We want a thorough inquiry and post-mortem to know the truth of his death," Kirpal's nephew told the media outside the hospital mortuary.

Kirpal Singh, the family has maintained, had inadvertently crossed into Pakistan and was arrested and charged with spying by Pakistani authorities.

His family had met union home minister Rajnath Singh and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in New Delhi last week to seek immediate repatriation of his body to India.

The Punjab government has offered to extend all help and relief to Kirpal's family on the same lines as given to another Indian prisoner, Sarabjit Singh, who was murdered in the same prison in Lahore in April 2013.

Kirpal Singh, a former serviceman, was lodged in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat prison since 1992. He died on April 11.

Pakistani authorities had labelled him a spy and got him convicted for terror attacks inside Pakistan. He was initially sentenced to death which was later converted to 20 years' imprisonment.
New Delhi, April 19 : The central government will invest Rs.800 crore to rejuvenate lakes in Bengaluru, especially the Bellandur lake, the largest and most polluted water body in the Karnataka capital, union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said on Tuesday.

"Since many years, several Bengaluru lakes were getting polluted because of the untreated sewage flowing into them. The issue is serious and last year their was an incident of fire in the Bellandur lake. The central government has extended Rs.800 crore for cleaning up those lakes," the minister said here.

The funds would be released under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) scheme, that would include Rs.500 crore to construct a trunk sewage pipeline, to route the sewage of the city to the treatment plants and Rs.162 crore dedicated to Bellandur lake to construct four sewage treatment plants.

"About 1,280 million litres of sewage is generated in Bengaluru, while the city's infrastructure has capacity to handle only 721 mltr of sewage. However, since 137 out of 500 mltr of STPs are defunct, only 600 mltr sewage is treated," the minister said.

About 40 percent of the city's sewage flows in the Bellandur lake, which spreads over 891.9 acre of area.

Studies show there are around 262 lakes and tanks in the urban and rural areas of Bengaluru, as of 2009. In May 2015, froth over Bellandur lake caught fire due to formation of flammable methane gas.

Javadekar said the orders had been issued under Section 5 and 18 of Environment Protection Act on the polluted lakes of Bengaluru. These Acts have power to direct the closure, prohibition or regulation of any industry in the area of around the subject.

"We had a meeting with the officials of Bengaluru and soon another meeting will be held in the first week of May. I will also speak to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah in this regard," the union minister said.

He added that while the Centre would extend help, it is the responsibility of the local government to see the proper implementation of funds.
Mumbai, April 19 : Megastar Amitabh Bachchan says that he has never been approached to be Brand Ambassador for the 'Incredible India' campaign contrary to media reports that his name might be put on hold after the Panama Papers leak.

"There have been queries from the media regarding my being Brand Ambassador for 'Atulya Bharat' (Incredible India). I wish to state that I have not been formally approached for this position. The speculation of the media regarding its discontinuance is, therefore, not relevant as far as I am concerned," said a statement released on behalf of Amitabh Bachchan.

The "Panama Papers" -- based on an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and over 100 other news organisations around the world -- is a global list revealing offshore links of over 500 Indians, including Big B and his daughter-in-law Aishwarya.

In India, The Indian Express daily newspaper released pages of the investigation reports alleging, among other names, that Amitabh and Aishwarya were directors in companies in Panama.

The megastar says that those who are asking for his feedback on Panama Papers leak can send their queries to the Government of India (GOI) for clarification.

"On the Panama disclosures, I wish to state that queries continue to be sent to me by the media. I would humbly request them to kindly direct these to the GOI where I, as a law abiding citizen, have already sent, and shall continue to send, my responses.

"I stand by my earlier statement on the 'misuse of my name' in the matter and in any event the press reports do not disclose any illegal act committed by me," the statement said.
Lucknow, April 19 : Political strategist Prashant Kishor has called a meeting of the Congress and its various frontal organisations like Seva Dal, Women's Congress, NSUI and Youth Congress to discuss the party's revival in Uttar Pradesh.

The party's minority and SC/ST affairs wings will also take part in the meeting called on April 21-22, a party leader said on Tuesday.

Kishor is credited with devising the poll strategy for Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the 2014 general elections and the virtual electoral coup by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his Janta Dal-United in the Bihar assembly polls in November 2015. He has now been assigned by the Congress to devise a strategy for the Punjab assembly polls likely to be held in February next year.

Congress sources here Kishor has been assigned the task of the party's revival in Uttar Pradesh by its national leadership.

"So far, he has been trying to understand the internal structures of the party and doing his own SWOT analysis. This meeting is in line with this basic study," a party leader told IANS.

These meetings will be attended by Congress general secretary in-charge of Uttar Pradesh Madhusudan Mistry, and Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) president Nirmal Khatri among other leaders.
New Delhi, April 19 : Most roadblocks in the negotiations between France and India for the sale of 36 Rafale fighters have been addressed and the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) will soon take up the matter, Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh said on Tuesday.

"There are a few things which need to be addressed. The matter will possibly come up before the DAC in its next meeting. Thereafter, I think, the road will be clear," the minister said on the sidelines of a seminar on 'Make in India' for the Indian Air Force.

Asked about the cost issues that kept the deal from finalisation, the minister said: "The country can progress only if the country is safe and protected."

Singh said both the Rafale and the indigenous light combat aircraft Tejas are needed for the country's defence.

According to sources, India and France have come closer to finalising the deal for 36 Rafales that India wants to buy and an agreement on the price may be reached soon.

A major sticking point in the deal is the price of the jets, known to be one of the most expensive in the world. India has been trying to bring down the sale price of the jets.

While it has not been revealed if an agreement has been struck on how much India would pay, attempts had been on to bring the price down to under eight billion euros or Rs.6,000 crore for 36 Rafales.

In January, both sides signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the purchase during French President Francois Hollande's visit to India.

Meanwhile, Singh on Tuesday released a booklet on 'Indigenisation Roadmap for the Indian Air Force' and said it would provide useful inputs to the defence industry to map its potential with the IAF requirements.

The seminar was jointly organised by the IAF and Confederation of India Industry.

The IAF chief, Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha, meanwhile said there is a "huge potential" for indigenisation in manufacture of capital equipment and spares.

"The IAF is in the process of modernising and expanding its inventory to keep up with the changing geo-political scenario and emerging threat perception.

"There exists a huge potential for indigenisation in the manufacture of capital equipment and maintenance spares. Economical and optimal exploitation of such potential by the Indian industry would lead to greater self-reliance," Raha said.
Madrid, April 19 : Spanish police on Tuesday arrested a Moroccan on the Mediterranean island of Palma de Mallorca on charges of recruiting for the Islamic State and inciting attacks in Spain and other countries.

The arrest took place in Palma de Mallorca city on the resort island, where he lived, according to a police statement.

The interior ministry said the man posed "a clear threat to national security" as he used the Internet to recruit potential fighters for Syria and Iraq and sent them abroad.

The suspect also provided recruits with instructions and resources to unleash attacks in Spain and elsewhere in Europe and was in close contact with IS leaders in Syria, the ministry said.

The Moroccan's arrest came the same day that German tabloid Bild cited Italian intelligence chiefs as claiming IS was plotting a terror campaign against tourists at Mediterranean beach resorts in Spain, France and Italy this summer.

Spanish police have arrested dozens of suspected jihadist recruiters in recent years.
New Delhi : Rome, April 19 April (IANS/AKI) The Islamic State jihadist group is planning massacres of tourists vacationing on Europe's Mediterranean coast this summer, German tabloid Bild reported Tuesday, citing Italian and German intelligence chiefs.

IS will deploy suicide bombers and gunmen disguised as beach hawkers and plant bombs beneath sunbeds at Italian, Spanish and French resorts, taking advantage of lax security, according to Bild.

Germany's BND intelligence service learned of the terror plans from its Italian counterpart, which was informed of the plot by a "credible" source in Africa, the daily said.

The threat stems from the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram, whose leadership has allied itself with IS and plans to use sympathisers to carry out attacks on crowded, unguarded beachfronts, Bild said.

"It is understood that regular African travellers to Europe, who so far have disguised their loyalty to the fanatics will be activated for the murder campaign," the daily said.

"It could be a whole new dimension of terror. Holiday beaches cannot be protected," Bild cited an unnamed high-ranking official as saying.

African hawkers travel to Europe regularly to work selling ice creams, drinks and snacks and beach accessories at Spanish, French and Italian resorts in the Mediterranean and are issued with visas and documents.

Contacted by Adnkronos, Italian security sources denied concrete intelligence existed that IS was plotting attacks like those it claimed at the popular Tunisian beach resort of Sousse, where 38 tourists were shot dead last June.

"This report is baseless. It is a fanciful scenario and there is no evidence to indicate plots of this kind are being hatched," the sources said.
The Trump Camp did not respond to questions sent on the allegations against Manafort.

Washington: US Republican frontrunner Donald Trump's new top campaign aide Paul Manafort lobbied for a Washington-based group that has been charged for operating as a front for Pakistan's powerful spy agency ISI, a media report said today.

The company of Paul Manafort, who was recently hired by Trump campaign as its convention manager allegedly received USD 700,000 from the Kashmiri American Council (KAC) between 1990 and 1995, the Yahoo News reported.

The money was received by Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, which was Manafort's lobbying firm.

Ghulam Nabi Fai, the head of Kashmiri American Council, was sentenced by a US court for two years of imprisonment on charges of receiving money from ISI and working on its behalf.

The fund USD 700,000 was part of the USD 4 million given by ISI to Kashmiri American Council, as alleged by federal prosecutors during court proceeding.

The ISI has denied the allegations. The US Government never charged Manafort, who was registered as a lobbyist.

Manafort during a trip to Islamabad in 1994 presented plans to influence members of Congress to back Pakistan's case for a plebiscite for Kashmir, the report said.

The report quotes an unnamed former Pakistani official, who was part of that meeting.

Internal budget documents obtained by the FBI show plans by the Kashmiri American Council to spend USD 80,000 to USD 100,000 a year on campaign contributions to members of Congress, it said.

"There is no way Manafort didn't know that Pakistan was involved with the KAC," the former official said was quoted as saying by the report.

The Trump Camp did not respond to questions sent on the allegations against Manafort.
Amritsar, April 19 : Claiming that the Sikh community was the "legitimate" owner of the Kohinoor diamond, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) on Tuesday demanded that the priceless stone should be handed back to the Sikhs.

In a statement issued here, SGPC president Avtar Singh Makkar expressed surprise over the Centre's stand in the Supreme Court on Monday that the Kohinoor was "neither stolen nor forcibly taken away but was gifted" to the British East India Company by Maharaja Duleep Singh, who was aged only nine at that time.

"To say that the Kohinoor was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away by the British but was given as a present by Maharaja Duleep Singh to the East India Company is a gross misrepresentation of historical facts. This stand seems to support the deceitful ways and means of the British," Makkar said in the statement.

The SGPC said the Kohinoor was taken away through "deceitful means" by the British from a young Maharaja Duleep Singh, who was the last Sikh ruler of Punjab.

Makkar demanded that the ministry of culture, which put the Centre's stand before the Supreme Court, should review its stand on the issue.

"Even if the maharaja himself parted with the diamond, we cannot ignore the ways and means the British must have employed to secure it," he said, adding that not only the Kohinoor but other priceless treasures belonging to the Sikhs - like the Peacock throne - were taken away from Lahore after the fall of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's empire.

The Centre's stand on the matter was conveyed to a bench of Chief Justice T.S. Thakur and Justice Uday Umesh Lalit in response to a public interest litigation by an NGO, All India Human Rights and Social Justice Forum, seeking directions to the government to make efforts for getting the diamond back to India.

The court, while giving the government six more weeks, said that if it accepted the government position and dismissed the PIL, all future avenues for staking any legitimate claim over the diamond will be shut.

The apex court gave the time as Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar told it that the stand was that of the ministry of culture but the "ministry of external affairs is also a party but their response is yet to come".

The 108-carat diamond was presented to the then British monarch, Queen Victoria, in 1850 after the Anglo-Sikh wars, in which the Britain gained control over the Sikh empire in the then undivided Punjab.

The Kohinoor diamond, kept under tight security at the Tower of London, is claimed by India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.
New Delhi, April 19 : The Delhi High Court on Tuesday directed civic bodies to pay regular salaries to the sanitation workers on or before 7th of every month for smooth functioning of the corporations.

A division bench of Chief Justice G. Rohini and Justice Jayant Nath also asked municipal corporations to ensure that the salaries for the month of March be paid to all the sanitation workers within a week without fail.

The bench also said Delhi government shall ensure that the necessary funds are provided to the three civic bodies for payment of salaries to their employees.

Employees of the national capital's three civic bodies - the north, south and east - were on strike for few days in January-February over the non-payment of salaries for the past few months. However, after the court's intervention, unions agreed to call off the strike.
Moscow, April 19 : Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif is scheduled to visit Russia at the end of April to attend an international security conference.

Asif will discuss bilateral military technical cooperation with Russian officials as part of the visit, the Pakistani Ambassador to Russia Qazi Khalilullah said on Tuesday, reports Sputnik news agency.

"The defence minister will attend the security conference (in Moscow). He will discuss issues of military-technical cooperation with the Russian side," Khalilullah said.
Kolkata, April 19 : Nearly Rs.2.5 crore in cash and fake currency of face value Rs.9 lakh were seized from the districts in West Bengal where polling will be held in the third phase on April 21, a poll panel official said on Tuesday.

"Our expenditure monitoring committee's flying squad seized Rs.40.37 lakh, while its static surveillance team seized over Rs.1.16 crore. Police also seized Rs.93.67 lakh from the districts where the third phase of polls will be conducted on April 21," Additional Chief Electoral Officer Dibyendu Sarkar said.

"Fake currency of face value close to Rs.9 lakh was also seized," he said.

In the third phase, polling will be held in 62 constituencies -- 22 in Murshidabad, 17 in Nadia, seven in Kolkata (North) and 16 in Bardhaman -- in four districts.

Over 5.51 litres of illicit liquor, 985 arms and ammunition, 2,624 bombs, and about 356 kg of explosives were also seized, he said.

He said 16,925 new non-bailable warrants have been issued in addition to the pending 13,818. Of them, 28,715 warrants were executed and 2,028 remain pending.

In the third phase, there are 3,401 vulnerable hamlets and 6,095 vulnerable voters.

Altogether 4,094 trouble-mongers were indentified and of them, 4,084 are bound down and 10 are in custody, he said.

According to the official, over 700 companies of central forces and 25,000 state police personnel will be deployed for this phase.

There will be 274 model polling stations, while 436 polling stations will be entirely run by females.
Kolkata, April 19 : Alleging that the lion's share of the income of the Congress, BJP and CPI-M were from unknown sources, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday warned the opposition not to point fingers at her Trinamool Congress.

"The sources of 82.5 percent of the Congress's income, 73 percent of the BJP's income and 53 percent of the CPI-M's income are unknown. The opposition should not dare to point fingers at Trinamool," Banerjee said at an election meeting in Jagatballabhpur of Howrah district.

Attacking the opposition for its continued slander campaign, she said their only agenda was to "abuse" her and "insult" Bengal.

Banerjee said the Trinamool would win hands down when the assembly election results are announced on May 19.

"CPI(M)-Congress-BJP will be decimated democratically after the election results on May 19," she said.
Ankara, April 20 : Turkey's military killed 32 Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq's Mosul province on Tuesday in retaliation to their attack on a Turkish tank in the Bashiqa training camp.

Ten militants were killed during the operation and an additional 22 got killed as they escaped and hid in one of their buildings which was detonated, reported local NTV news citing anonymous Turkish military sources, according to Xinhua.

IS militants struck a Turkish Armed Forces tank with an anti-tank weaponry on Tuesday, according to NTV news.

No casualties were reported in the attack however.

IS militants launched their first attack against the military camp on December 16 right after Turkey deployed 150 troops into the camp to train an Iraqi Sunni militia to fight the IS.

During another assault on later, five Turkish soldiers were injured.

Turkish soldiers killed 17 IS militants on January 8 as IS militants tried to sneak into the camp.

Ankara also struck IS targets on March 22 as several IS militants attempted to attack the camp.

A Turkish soldier was killed on March 26 during an armed conflict between IS militants and Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces and Turkish military retaliated by attacking IS posts.

Turkey sent 600 troops to the Bashiqa camp on December 4, 2015, claiming they were sent to train Iraqi militia to fight IS militants.

However, Iraq argued that the presence of Turkish troops in the camp violates the country's sovereignty.

Turkey subsequently withdrew a significant number of its troops from the camp.
Los Angeles, April 20 : Robert Downey Jr. entered the realm of superheroes on the silver screen as Iron Man and the actor says he never gets tired of wearing the suit as he has "come to love it".

Downey Jr. was appreciated as the American superhero in the "Iron Man" trilogy. The trilogy might be over, but Iron Man still lives on the big screen through "The Avengers" series.

Downey Jr. will be making his comeback as the superhero with the release of "Captain America: Civil War". The film also features Chris Evans as Captain America.

When asked about wearing the suit again, he said that he has nothing to complain about and absolutely loves the suit.

"Well, what I realised is that there is safety, fun and relief in numbers. For instance I am sure Chris could tell you that he's in every shot of movie practically, now I am on the poster, but still whenever you put the suit on and they have improved it over time," Downey Jr. said in a statement.

"I thought rather than do that typical thing that most fortunate people complaining about their circumstances, I have come to love the suit," he added.

Downey Jr. revealed his inclination towards the suit in the video of the making of the Disney and Marvel film.

He also shared that he often sees things from a child's eye view given the immense popularity of the superheroes amongst the younger audience.

He said: "I do (look at thing from child's view) also now there are kids visiting the sets for a bunch of reasons and back on the second 'Avengers: Age of Ultron'. We did before this, my son Axen was visiting the sets and he was going bananas from the hawk eye stuff and he is kind of over it now because he knows dad's deeply invested in it so it's a little bit less luminous to him now."

The actor also asked fans of the superhero film to brace up as he said "expect the unexpected" from "Captain America: Civil War". The superhero team-up movie is scheduled to release in US and India on May 6.
Meredith Starkman, a student of University of Michigan, will travel to the three cities to work with groups that use music, dance, theatre and the visual arts to improve the lives of people living in the margins of society. (Representational Image)

Washington: A US student has been awarded a grant of USD 25,000 to travel to Mumbai, Kolkata and Bangalore to study how art is used as a tool for improving lives of people and achieving social justice.

Meredith Starkman, a student of University of Michigan, will travel to the three cities to work with groups that use music, dance, theatre and the visual arts to improve the lives of people living in the margins of society.

This is the first visit of Starkman to India. Starkman, a firm believer in "artistic activism" and a recipient of the prestigious Wallenberg Fellowship.

"I'm most scared of being lonely," said Starkman, who is graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theatre performance.

"I've never stayed in a place this long without knowing people in the country. I only know two people. But anyone I know who has ever been to India or has family in the country has given me names. It's just a matter of reaching out and finding my own way," she said.
a comprehensive setting to conduct clinical trials, translational medical research, and technology development regarding human and veterinary drugs, biologics, devices, nutritional products, and diagnostics.

The new Institute for Healthcare Innovation (IHI) at Midwestern University has recently initiated research and development services for veterinary pharmaceutical companies and biomedical collaborators seeking to enter the animal health market. The IHIs veterinary services consist of veterinary clinical trials, regulatory guidance, and commercial strategy for veterinary drugs, biologics, devices, diagnostics, and nutritional products.

The Institute for Healthcare Innovation was founded in 2014 to leverage the multi-disciplinary expertise found on the Universitys campuses located in Glendale, AZ, and Downers Grove, IL. The IHI has grown to accommodate the demand for clinical development and commercialization expertise for veterinary products. The Institutes team consists of professionals with industry, research, and academic backgrounds who work closely with Midwestern University College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) to conduct clinical trials in dogs, cats and horses. The Companion Animal Clinic at Midwestern University in Glendale is a state-of-the-art 111,800-square-foot, AAHA-accredited facility staffed by veterinarians in general practice, and veterinary specialists in orthopedics, soft tissue surgery, emergency and critical care, internal medicine, and other disciplines.

The Institute for Healthcare Innovation at Midwestern University provides human pharmaceutical and veterinary companies a comprehensive setting to conduct clinical trials, translational medical research, and technology development regarding human and veterinary drugs, biologics, devices, nutritional products, and diagnostics. The IHI also fosters the One Health Initiative by facilitating collaborations between the Universitys colleges of veterinary medicine, osteopathic medicine, dental medicine, optometry, pharmacy, and health sciences on both campuses.

For more information about the Midwestern University Institute for Healthcare Innovation, visit http://www.mwuihi.com.

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Midwestern University is a graduate degree-granting institution specializing in the health sciences with ten colleges and two campuses. The Illinois campus, located on a 105-acre site in Downers Grove, is home to over 2,900 students and four colleges: the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, the Chicago College of Pharmacy, the College of Health Sciences, and the College of Dental Medicine-Illinois. The Arizona campus, located on a 156-acre site in Glendale, is home to over 3,300 students and six colleges: the Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine, the College of Pharmacy-Glendale, the College of Health Sciences, the College of Dental Medicine-Arizona, the Arizona College of Optometry, and the College of Veterinary Medicine. The University is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission, a Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. For more information, visit http://www.midwestern.edu or call 623.572.3215.
Ultrasonic level sensors tough enough for the great outdoors. We have remote level sensors operating reliably in Alaska, the Australian Outback, and just about every climate in between. Doug Boehm, Founder and CTO of Senix.

Senix Corporation, manufacturer of ToughSonic ultrasonic level and distance sensors, has introduced two new remote liquid level sensors. The ToughSonic REMOTE 30 and REMOTE 50 are designed for larger remote tank applications or for installation on bridges or piers in water level monitoring applications.

The ToughSonic REMOTE 30 has a maximum range of 30 feet (9.1 meters) and the ToughSonic REMOTE 50 has a maximum range of 50 feet (15.2 meters). These new sensors join the previously released ToughSonic REMOTE 14 to complete the REMOTE sensor family.

Increasing droughts and floods around the world are driving investment in sophisticated water level monitoring systems. The ToughSonic REMOTE family of sensors are designed for those demanding applications. The technology behind these new sensors has been field-proven in all weather conditions since 2011. Says Doug Boehm, founder and CTO of Senix Corporation. We have remote level sensors operating reliably in Alaska, the Australian Outback, and just about every climate in between.

The ToughSonic REMOTE 30 and REMOTE 50 ultrasonic sensors are IP68/NEMA-6P immersion rated and include Senix Lightning Guard, a system that protects power and communications circuits from repeated 7 kilovolt electrical surges. Senix customers are installing remote water level sensors where thousands of lightning strikes a year are common. Nothing stops a direct strike, but 7kV surge protection allows sensors to survive transients from nearby strikes. Says Doug Boehm.

Serial data communications with Modbus or ASCII protocols allow ToughSonic REMOTE sensors to communicate directly with Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) and other data collection devices. They are ready to measure within one second of power-on and use up to 21% less energy than our general purpose products  important when sensors are powered by solar panels and batteries.

About Senix Corporation

Senix designs and manufactures advanced ultrasonic sensors for liquid level measurement, distance measurement and object detection. Senix ToughSonic sensors are used in a wide range of process automation, environmental, discrete manufacturing and research applications worldwide. The company transformed non-contact distance measurement in 1990 with the worlds first computer-configurable ultrasonic sensor, and has been pushing the boundaries of sensor intelligence and ruggedness ever since. Senix Corporation is a privately held company located in Hinesburg, VT, USA.
Digital Future has made its latest $200k investment in SoftCube, an e-commerce solution that gathers customer data across multiple communication channels to improve shopping experience. The round includes a $200k investment from Digital Future, a venture capital company, and $200k from undisclosed private investors. Under the terms of the new deal, the investment will be used for the marketing and business development activities on the US market.

SoftCube has several years of experience in the European market, servicing the leading companies including Metro Cash&Carry. Working with more than 25 customers from many European countries, Softcube targets the USA, where more than 40% of online retailers are already using personalization services.

Oleksii Vitchenko,  of Digital Future: I have been observing SoftCube throughout the past year and almost came up with the decision to invest last summer. But back then I considered that the risk is too high and decided to put the decision on for some time. However, the level of SoftCubes team involvement and effectiveness left its competitors far behind and I am very glad to work with SoftCube, as we both are dedicated to develop the emerging e-commerce ecosystems. I believe SoftCube will be enabling tremendous customer personalization to empower the next generation e-commerce world.

SoftCube, founded by Oleg Lesov in 2012, provides tailored product recommendations based on customers interests. Softcube helps increase sales for your e-commerce shops by 15-20% allow cross-selling and up-selling. SoftCube technology is based on unique mathematical model that can effectively use even small amount of customer data, generating recommendations for different products, including the niche products.

"I believe that our innovative e-commerce service will become the platform of choice for many North American companies to accurately gather customer data and track customer behavior. This investment will help us implement innovations to many new markets, including USA. Digital Future is one of the few companies that provide extensive expertise and visionary perspective on the development of e-commerce. That is why we very much looking forward to our cooperation, as we expect it will bring us the better understanding of the whole range of possibilities for our further development," says Oleg Lesov, CEO of SoftCube.

Investors emphasize that the main reason to participate in the round is because SoftCube offers several outstanding innovations to the e-commerce ecosystem. The startup team is enough mature to implements all its ideas in the most efficient way to hit the leader position on the global market.

The private investors, who joined the round, are now at the stage of closing the deal and will announce their participation when the deal is closed.

About SoftCube

SoftCube is ready-made solution for personalized merchandising and product recommendations for ecommerce. Now any online store can afford to gain more with technologies similar to Amazon and Netflix. We offer both simple integration and great possibilities for customization working on best user experience and personal touch for customers of our clientele from all over the world. For more information, visit: http://www.softcube.com

About Digital Future

Digital Future is an investment company that offers smart money to the startups, conquering the global market. Digital Future was founded in 2014 by Oleksii Vitchenko, an entrepreneur with over ten years of experience in e-commerce and digital. For more information, visit: http://www.digital-future.org
Sheraton Tysons Hotel  Brix & Ale

Located inside Sheraton Tysons Hotel, Brix And Alethe contemporary designed restaurant featuring Executive Chef Sam El-Sheikh offers a variety of specially crafted bites to celebrate Mom this Mothers Day.

Chef El-Sheikh has designed an unforgettable dining experience that is sure to make Mom feel special. The brunch features a bakery shop with an assortment of bread, an omelet station, complete with all your favorite toppings, a Chefs carving station featuring Slow Roasted Pork Loin and Roasted Prime Rib, and a variety of salad choices. For dessert, Chef El-Sheikh has prepared delectable spring sweets that are sure to entice Mom, such as Macaroons and a Mixed Fruit Cheesecake.

Join us in celebrating Mom on May 8th for a remarkable day of family fellowship that she will never forget!

Mothers Day Brunch at Sheraton Tysons Hotel

11:30 AM  3:00 PM | Adults: 46.00 | Children years 5-12: 22.00 | Children under 4 years: Free

(plus taxes and gratuity)

For reservations, please call 703.610.8201 or visit the Brix And Ale website at http://www.BrixAndAle.com.

Guests staying at Sheraton Tysons Hotel between now and May 27, 2016, will experience extra amenities and services with the purchase of the Sunset Lovers Package or Metro Package. To book a spring getaway, guests can call reservations at 888.627.8230 or go on-line to the Special Offers Website. Featured package promotions:

Sunset Lovers Package:



Room with a view facing the Blue Ridge Mountains, 10th floor or higher for a spectacular Sunset

Complimentary Champagne and Chocolate Covered Strawberries for two

Couples choice of a complimentary In Room Movie

Breakfast in Bed, with up to a $50.00 In-Room Dining Credit toward the breakfast menu

o Starting at $159.00 + tax of 12% (Thursday - Sunday)

Metrorail Exploration Package:



Comfortable and contemporary guest room with Sheraton Sweet Sleeper Beds

Winter Welcome Amenity & Activity Guide

Two All Day Metrorail Passes (closest station  Spring Hill, Silver Line, adjacent to hotel)

Breakfast Buffet for two in Brix And Ale

o Starting at $139.00 + tax of 12% (weekend rates, per night)

After a full day of exploring the nations capital or nearby wineries, guests can unwind with the hotels fitness center and indoor pool  or connect with free WiFi. Overnight parking is complimentary for both packages.

About the Sheraton Tysons Hotel

Each Guest will experience a fresh contemporary look, a warm relaxed environment and a friendly welcome, all within an urban retreat setting. Conveniently located to Washington, D.C. and the heart of Northern Virginia, Guests will find an abundance of activity to include dining, shopping, local business, historical sites, national parks, wineries and Virginias majestic countryside. Nestled in the newly developed and Metrorail accessible neighborhood called Tysons West, the Sheraton Tysons Hotel acts as a home for Business and Social travelers visiting the region. The Sheraton Tysons Hotel provides a place where colleagues, co-workers, friends and family may connect while creating meaningful memories and experiences. For more information, visit the hotel website, call (703) 448 1234, like on Facebook or follow on Twitter.

The Sheraton Tysons Hotel is under the management of Crescent Hotels & Resorts and owned by The JBG Companies.

About Crescent Hotels & Resorts

Crescent Hotels & Resorts is a nationally recognized, top-5 operator of hotels and resorts. Crescent currently operates over 100 hotels and resorts in 27 states in the US and 5 provinces in Canada. Crescent is one of the few elite management companies approved to operate upper-upscale and luxury hotels under the brand families of Marriott, Hilton, Starwood, Hyatt and IHG. Crescent also operates a collection of legendary independent hotels and resorts. Crescents clients are made up of hotel REITs, private equity firms and major developers. For more information, please visit http://www.chrco.com.

About The JBG Companies

Headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland, The JBG Companies is a private real estate investment firm that develops, owns and manages office, residential, hotel and retail properties. The company has more than $10 billion in assets under management and development in the Washington Metropolitan Area. Since 1960, JBG has been active in the communities where it invests, striving to make a positive impact. More information can be found by visiting the company's website: http://www.JBG.com, or by calling 240.333.3600.

About Sheraton Hotels & Resorts

Sheraton helps guests make connections at more than 400 hotels in 70 countries around the world and recently completed a $6 billion global revitalization and is now in the midst of a $6 billion global expansion over the next three years. Sheraton is owned by and is the largest and most global brand of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. is one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world with 1,090 properties in 100 countries and territories with 154,000 employees at its owned and managed properties. Starwood Hotels is a fully integrated owner, operator and franchisor of hotels, resorts and residences with the following internationally renowned brands: St. Regis, The Luxury Collection, W, Westin, Le Meridien, Sheraton, Four Points by Sheraton, Aloft, and ElementSM. The company boasts one of the industrys leading loyalty programs, Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG), allowing members to earn and redeem points for room stays, room upgrades and flights, with no blackout dates. Starwood Hotels also owns Starwood Vacation Ownership, Inc., one of the premier developers and operators of high quality vacation interval ownership resorts. For more information, please visit http://www.starwoodhotels.com

rw Stayinwashingtondc.com #stayinwashdc
Were dedicated to helping organizations of all sizes achieve success with our solutions, and were happy to have this chance to connect with small businesses in particular.

Converged Communication Systems (CCS), a Chicago-based provider of IP telephony solutions and support services, has announced that it will exhibit at Chicagos Small Business Expo on Thursday, April 21. The expo is located at the UIC Forum.

The day-long conference and trade show, which travels throughout the countrys top cities for small business, brings together industry thought leaders and experts in a hands-on environment that features more than 20 free workshops and programs along with 100+ interactive booths, demos and brand exhibits. Headlining the event is Bill Walsh, founder and CEO of Powerteam International, with his presentation Success By Design - The 7 Keys to Build a Mega-Successful Business on the Inspiration 2020 Showcase Theater stage.

Small Business Expo expects to have more than 4,000 registered attendees from across the Chicago metropolitan area shopping for business resources, developing business leads, gaining new insights, and networking with peers.

Experts tell us that more and more Chicago residents are wanting to take the entrepreneurial leap but that the biggest barrier to starting a new business is that people dont think they can, said event founder Zachary Lezberg. With the program weve put together, we believe our attendees will feel more empowered by the end of the day.

Start-ups and business owners can take advantage of free admission and educational workshops covering online/social media marketing, employee benefit plans, credit and financing, strategies for increasing revenue and team productivity, mentoring, cloud technologies, retirement plans, and more.

The CCS team is looking forward to participating in the Small Business Expo, said Kevin Rubin, president and chief operating officer of CCS. Were dedicated to helping organizations of all sizes achieve success with our solutions, and were happy to have this chance to connect with small businesses in particular.

The Expo will take place at the UIC Forum at 725 W Roosevelt Rd. from 9:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. For more information, and free registration, visit the Chicago event page.

About Converged Communication Systems

Converged Communication Systems (CCS) is a nationwide provider of best-in-class IP telephony solutions and support services for businesses of all sizes. Focusing on industry leading solutions, Converged Communication Systems provides complete telecommunication solutions to meet your simple or complex business needs. They specialize in a full range of solutions including on-premise, hosted / cloud (public or private), and hybrid cloud solutions. Their portfolio includes several brands which enable them to approach their client engagements in an unbiased manner, allowing CCS to be true consultants. In addition, their expertise allows multi-location and remote/home workers to operate more efficiently via VoIP/SIP. For more information, visit http://www.convergedsystems.com.

About Small Business Expo

SMALL BUSINESS EXPO is the nations largest small business networking and learning event, and an Inc. 5000 company. Every year, over 65,000 small business professionals and entrepreneurs across the country attend the SMALL BUSINESS EXPO in 14 MAJOR US Markets to take their business to the next level. The shows owner, Film, Stage & ShowBiz Expo LLC. was founded in 2008 by Zachary Lezberg. The companys headquarters are located at 555 8th AVE Suite 909 New York, NY 10018. For more information, visit http://www.thesmallbusinessexpo.com, call (212) 404-2345, or email info(at)thesmallbusinessexpo(dot)com.

For more information contact:

Lori Bernardino

847-440-8608

LoriB(at)convergedsystems(dot)com
William first joined forces with TORI last year, leading a mission-critical engagement for a key financial services clients. After the completion of this successful project, he has joined TORIs senior executive leadership team. William brings leadership experience from the banking industry, specifically in outsourcing and offshoring, at an executive management level. Most recently, he was Head of Group Operations at RBS for six years with initial P&L responsibility for 1.4 billion which he and his team reduced by 42% through service improvements, process rationalisation and automation. His headcount included 7,000 people in India and 1,500 in Poland. Prior to RBS William was Global Head of Operations at ABN Amro. His responsibilities covering Wholesale Banking, Transaction Banking and Wealth Management Operations, managing 40,000 staff. Before this, William was Managing Director of Investment Banking Operations at UBS.

William commented, Being on the other side of the fence as a consultant, rather than the client, gives me a new perspective  and many lessons learnt. I am deeply impressed by the experienced practioners and relationships that TORI have, which was demonstrated in the success of the first programme that I led. I am delighted to be joining a quality company to build the exciting Managed Services practice in partnership with our clients.

William is a senior addition to TORIs impressive team of practitioners, all of whom have solid experience in leadership roles in financial services companies.

About TORI Managed Services

Financial Service organisations are grappling with a host of challenges around customer expectations, cost containment and the complex regulatory environment. Managed Services helps to respond to these demands by maximising your benefits from expert outsourcing and smart use of captives through benchmarking; increasing use of smart analytics and real dashboards and the use of its Service Integration and Management (SIAM) approach and tools across Operations, Risk, Sourcing and Finance.

About TORI Global

TORI was formed by a team of practitioners with extensive experience working at a senior level for large firms across multiple regions. The founding partners sought the ideal consultancy when working as CIO, CTO and Executives. TORI was created to embody that ideal combines all the required components to digitise, run, control and change large complex technology and operational environments.

TORI was awarded 29th place in the Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 2015. The highly respected league table ranks Britains fastest growing technology businesses in the UK.

For more information at TORI, visit the website at https://www.toriglobal.com/ or contact 0207 025 5555.
Designed Living offers a number of patient care services for catastrophically injured patients in the Workers Compensation industry, and for Special Needs Trusts, Nurse Case Managers and Fiduciaries.

We are pleased to announce the creation of Designed Living, Inc., a spin-off of the Catastrophic Care Unit of Definiti Comp Solutions, said Miguel Guerrero, Founder of Definiti, located in Lake Forest, California. Definiti provides medical bill review cost containment programs, but has also been in the DME/Catastrophic Care services business for nearly 10 years.

"We believe the spin-off will unlock more value and even greater efficiencies for our clients, and increase our focus on quality care for our end-user patient community, said Fred Gladney, the new company President. "Designed Living offers assessment, and a number of patient care services for catastrophically injured patients in the Workers Compensation industry, and for Special Needs Trusts, Nurse Case Managers and Fiduciaries. Designed Living provides durable medical equipment, home/vehicle modifications, and other services crafted to meet each patients unique needs. The new company will retain assets, personnel, and operations from the former Definiti unit, enabling a seamless transition for its clients and patients. Our custom care model allows us to achieve very high patient satisfaction scores, while we continue to deliver service and cost savings to our client communities that go well beyond expectations, Gladney added.

For more information about news and events from Designed Living, visit their website at http://www.designedliving.net.

About Designed Living

Designed Living provides tailored DME and care solutions to victims of catastrophic or chronic illness or disability. Services include DME and POS equipment, home and vehicle modifications, and a host of personalized patient care services. The Company is located in Lake Forest, California.

Contact:

Linda Stellino, 949-353-5401

About Definiti Comp Solutions

Based in Lake Forest, California, Definiti is a National Workers Compensation Cost Containment provider that offers Best Net Value for medical Bill Review and Specialty Bill Review services.

Contact:

Cate Bernston, 949-716-1891
The right to "know one's lineage is not absolute but must be balanced with conflicting basic rights," the court said in a statement. (Photo: Pixabay, Representational image)

Karlsruhe, Germany: Children in Germany cannot force a man they believe to be their father to take a DNA test to prove their paternity, the country's highest court ruled on Tuesday.

The Federal Constitutional Court rejected the appeal of a 65-year-old woman who has tried for decades to prove that a man, now aged 88, is her biological parent.

The right to "know one's lineage is not absolute but must be balanced with conflicting basic rights," the court said in a statement.

It said these included the right of a purported father to resist a paternity test against his will, and the "right of a mother to have her personal privacy respected".

The court said the only time a paternity test can be imposed is within a "legal family", bound by marriage or living together, to ensure that the legal father is also the biological parent.

Throughout her life, the plaintiff's mother had always said the man was her biological father and the man himself registered her birth in 1950 although he never acknowledged being her father.

The daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that the plaintiff's mother married an abusive man after her birth who subjected his wife and stepchild to violence.

The plaintiff held the man she called her biological father responsible for the family's suffering.
Tarmin Inc., a global pioneer of Data Defined Storage solutions, announced today that it has launched Itakane ICT as a channel partner for the distribution of Tarmin GridBank Solutions.

Itakane ICT is a business support consulting service provider with diversified business interests in information and communications technology (ICT) solutions, systems, integration and business engineering for both the public and private sectors throughout South Africa. The ICT sector continues to demonstrate dynamic growth, particularly driven by the rapid expansion of machine generated data and a need for mobile data access technologies across the country, making it one of the fastest growing sectors in South Africa. As such, organizations are struggling to rapidly scale up legacy IT infrastructure to accommodate analytics across vast volumes of data. As a Tarmin value added reseller, Itakane ICT gains cutting edge data management and storage competencies which they can pass on to their customers.

Innovation in ICT is playing a key role in how South African businesses and governments operate said Jacqueline Govender, President and CEO at Itakane ICT. By partnering with Tarmin, we have increased our solution capabilities, knowledge and expertise to deliver our partners innovative solutions that strengthen ICT, transform connectivity and accelerate digitization across South Africa.

Tarmins strategic partnership with Itakane ICT and expansion into South Africa is by design, together we will provide our customers with the most cutting edge technology and support services to set us apart from the competition. said Shahbaz Ali, president and CEO of Tarmin. We are excited to see the strong collaboration between Tarmin and Itakane ICT, and we look forward to leading the change and revolutionizing the future of data storage.

Regarded as the next wave of data management, GridBank was developed to fulfill the unmet needs of data intensive organizations that experience challenges associated with massive amounts of unstructured data. GridBanks revolutionary data centric approach allows organizations to effortlessly meet the performance and scalability needs required to manage massive unstructured data growth, while significantly reducing corporate risk through a comprehensive information governance framework, deliver business value from metadata, and provide accelerated search, e-Discovery and analytics integration.

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About Tarmin

Tarmin Inc. is the leading pioneer of Data Defined Storage solutions, which unlock the value of data as a strategic business enabler, delivering a massively scalable, transparent and unified approach for consistent data management, storage, retention, security and search across cloud and traditional storage infrastructure. Tarmin GridBank empowers organizations to store, control and understand the value of data as a competitive business asset, no matter its size, location or cost by uniting application, information and storage tiers into a single, integrated data centric management architecture. Contact Tarmin for more information.

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Follow Tarmin

LinkedIn: http://Tarm.in/LinkedIn

Facebook: http://Tarm.in/Facebook

Twitter: http://Tarm.in/Twitter
This study proves that the Internet of Things is already influencing government policy at the highest levels

EpiSensors wireless monitoring technology has contributed to a first-of-its-kind project commissioned by the UK Governments Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) to measure the in-service performance of heat pumps installed under the non-domestic RHI (Renewable Heat Incentive) scheme.

First-year performance data revealed that 43 percent of the ground- and water- source heat pump systems did not qualify as renewable energy technologies under the guidelines of the EU Renewable Energy Directive. When compared to typical gas systems, only 10 percent of the installations would deliver fuel bill savings and cost less to run. However, 90 percent would have had lower operating CO2 emissions than the gas-fired equivalent. When compared to typical oil-fired heating systems, all installations would have lower operating CO2 emissions and 76% would deliver fuel bill savings.

The project involved deploying wireless sensors on a sample of the installed base to track heat pump performance. During the first year of the project, we collected over 500 million data points, which presented some challenges in terms of the data analysis, commented Dr. David Hughes, the lead consultant on the project.

EpiSensor wireless temperature sensors and electricity meters were used to accurately monitor key performance metrics on each system without disrupting normal operations. Data was sent from each of the wireless sensors to a central server on the Internet over an encrypted communications link.

This study proves that the Internet of Things is already influencing government policy at the highest levels. The insights we gain by collecting accurate, real-time data open up new opportunities to improve performance and efficiency in so many different industries, empowering people to make better decisions, said EpiSensor CEO Brendan Carroll.

DECC are an extremely forward-thinking organisation for utilising this technology. Our vision for the future is that every heating system will be connected to the Internet for real-time performance reporting, so we can solve efficiency problems early to protect our environment and keep costs down, he added.

Traditional control and automation systems have been used for many years to collect data from industrial environments, but the cost and complexity of installing them is often prohibitive. EpiSensor provides an industrial-grade wireless monitoring system that is extremely easy to deploy, maintain and connect to the Internet, making sensor data available to people where and when it is needed.

EpiSensors IoT platform has built-in data logging at each monitoring device, so data will never be lost, even if the wireless communications link is disrupted. ZigBee mesh networking technology is used for secure two-way communication between each sensor and the Gateway, where data is stored and transferred over the Internet to software applications for real-time analysis and reporting.

More information about EpiSensor is available here: http://episensor.com

More information on the DECC report is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/monitoring-of-non-domestic-renewable-heat-incentive-ground-source-and-water-source-heat-pumps-interim-report

About EpiSensor

Located in Limerick, Ireland, EpiSensor is one of the worlds leading designers and manufacturers of wireless monitoring systems that make it easier to collect data from industry so people can make better decisions. The companys enterprise-class monitoring systems are flexible, scalable, secure, reliable and easy to install and maintain. EpiSensors innovative Gateway, which interfaces with virtually any enterprise-level software system, simplifies system management and provides instant access to data. EpiSensors systems have improved efficiency and performance for Governments and Fortune 500 customers in Europe, Australia, Asia, and North America.
Weve leveraged our industry experience, knowledge and strategic successes to develop a platform that allows brands with a national presence to make more impactful business decisions at the local level. - Alex Porter, President & Chief Strategy Officer

For more than 16 years, Location3 has been at the forefront of managing local digital marketing programs for Fortune 500 clients. The digital agency has now announced the launch of its newest technological platform, LOCALACT, a suite of tools that allows brands and companies with a brick-and-mortar presence to scale marketing programs on a location-by-location basis to drive more in-store customer volume.

Helping our clients improve performance has always been our number one goal as an agency from the day we opened our doors in 1999. When Google Maps was launched in 2005, we saw an opportunity to become experts in helping our clients drive more in-store traffic by using a unique channel that was brand new to the masses. Since then, the entire local landscape has evolved tremendously and weve leveraged our experience, knowledge and strategic successes to develop a platform that allows brands with a national presence to make more impactful business decisions at the local level, said Location3 President & Chief Strategy Officer Alex Porter.

Location3s decade-plus experience in managing and optimizing more than 100,000 local business listings for brands like Dunkin Donuts, In-N-Out Burger and Scottrade has served as the genesis for developing LOCALACT. This suite of tools allows Location3 clients to ensure consistency in brand messaging while empowering individual business locations to reach more consumers and convert them into customers. The three primary applications available to clients as part of LOCALACT include:

Business Listings:

With powerful data validation, customized channel optimizations and best-in-class reporting technology, LOCALACT ensures your listings are not only accurate and visible, but also driving measurable action to your locations.

Paid Media:

LOCALACT allows clients to create localized paid media campaigns that target the right customers with the right message, in the right place. Campaigns run on channels including Google, Bing, Yelp, YP, xAd and Facebook to transform online interest into real foot traffic.

Local Pages:

LOCALACT offers a simple solution for multi-unit businesses to create landing pages for each store location. All local store pages are optimized for high organic ranking using technical SEO markup, and are also rich with local content to turn website visitors into brick-and-mortar customers.

While different technology vendors and automation tools seem to appear on the market weekly, LOCALACT combines the power of technology with the expertise of Location3s in-house digital marketing strategists to provide unparalleled performance for multi-location businesses. The biggest challenge for a national brand with a local presence is to maximize visibility and empower individual locations to produce increases in customer acquisition volume. LOCALACT gives Location3 a competitive advantage in providing improved performance and quantifiable results for clients seeking to effectively scale local digital programs in 2016 and beyond.

For more information, contact Josh Allen: jallen(at)location3(dot)com | 720.763.3151

Location3 is a digital marketing agency that delivers enterprise-level strategy with local market activation. Founded in 1999 and located in the heart of Denver, Location3 has a staff of 60 full-time employees who service global, national and local brands. More than half of Location3s client base has worked with the agency for at least three years, as Location3 improves digital performance for every client partner.
Historic Scottish Rite "The Vator team has done a tremendous job gathering leading innovators from around the world as well as local entrepreneurs and investors here in Oakland," said Mitch Kapor, partner at Kapor Capital.

Vator Splash Spring is back and bigger. On May 12, 1,000 blue-chip tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, media will gather at the third annual Vator Splash event held in Oakland. Splash is an one-day event that gathers tech innovators and financiers for a day of learning, inspiration, discussion and networking. Oakland mayor, Libby Schaaf will give welcome remarks.

Even though its belt-tightening times for many in the venture capital industry, VC funds raised $12 billion in the first quarter, their best three months in a decade, according to NVCA. At Splash Spring, hundreds of investors are expected, and the speakers alone represent $40-plus billion of assets under management.

Splash is proud to help bring that investment heft to Oakland and put a spotlight on the tech scene with Oaklands Rising Stars, hosted by City of Oakland, Visit Oakland and the Oakland Chamber of Commerce, showcasing top local startups that everyone should know.

Local sponsorship support has been tremendous, underscoring Oaklands appreciation for the Splash event. Sponsors include: Kapor Center for Social Impact, City of Oakland, Visit Oakland, Oakland Chamber of Commerce, The Port Workspaces, Wendel Rosen, Avison Young, Illuminate Ventures and Better Ventures. Mitch Kapor will be opening up the event with a Fireside Chat that will allot significant time for audience questions.

"The Vator team has done a tremendous job gathering leading innovators from around the world as well as local entrepreneurs and investors here in Oakland," said Mitch Kapor, partner at Kapor Capital. "We are pleased to have been supporters from the beginning."

Other longstanding Splash sponsors include KPMG, Javelin Venture Partners, Bread and Butter Wine, Scrubbed and Stratpoint.

At Splash, you can join in on the discussions about the hottest areas of innovation and where investors are placing their bets.

Highlights and topics include:

The sharing economy and on-demand revolution. Speakers include Oisin Oharan, Founder and CEO, Handy; Art Agrawal, Founder and CEO, YourMechanic; Julien Smith, Founder and CEO, Breather; Justas Janauska, Founder & CEO, Vinted; Sean Behr, Founder and CEO, Zirx; Ivan Tsybaev, Founder and CEO, Trucker Path; Jen O'Neal, Founder & CEO, Tripping.

Firesides, and Splash Talks. Breakouts. Speakers include Mitch Kapor, Founder, Kapor Center for Social Impact; Josh Stein, Partner, DFJ and Rolfe Winkler, Wall Street Journal Reporter; Andy Dunn, Founder and CEO, Bonobos; Sarah Leary, co-Founder, NextDoor; Nigel Eccles, Founder & CEO, FanDuel and Paul Martino, Partner, Bullpen Capital; Brett Wilson, Founder & CEO, TubeMogul.

Surviving an evolving venture business and the outlook for venture. Speakers include Eva Ho, Partner, Susa Ventures; Alex Rosen, Partner, IDG; Zach Ware, Parter, VTF Capital, Paul Willard, Partner, Subtraction Capital; Matt Oguz, Partner, Palo Alto Venture Science; TX Zhuo, Partner, Karlin Ventures; Erik Rannala, Founder, Mucker Capital; Jules Maltz, Partner, IVP.

Judging tomorrow's Facebook! Judges include Josh Elman, Partner, Greylock; Erik Moore, Partner, BaseVC; Jed Katz, Partner, Javelin Venture Partners; Cindy Padnos, Partner, Illuminate Ventures; Wes Selke, Managing Director, Better Ventures; Keval Desai, Partner, InterWest Partners; Ben Ling, Partner, Khosla Ventures.

Who's behind FinTech funding? Speakers include Jay Reinemann, Partner, Propel.VC; Alex Davidow, Partner, Core.VC; Ben Savage, Managing Director, Clocktower Ventures; Todd Kimmel, Partner, Montage Ventures.

Spring Sale tickets on REGISTER TODAY before they expire.

About Vator Splash:

Vator Splash, the international startup competition and event series, bringing together entrepreneurs, angel investors, VCs and high-tech influencers to discuss the current state of technology, innovation and investment. Vator Splash events have been held in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London and Oakland.

About Vator

Vator (short for innovator) is an awesome business network dedicated to high-tech entrepreneurs and investors. Vator consists of Vator.co, the online network with 150,000-plus members; VatorX - a platform to help filter for great startups; Vator Investment Club - made up of Vator investor members who invest in Vator-curated startups; Vator Media, which includes VatorNews, a provider of analysis, commentary, and news about innovation and venture capital.
RMACT Patients Jessica and Travis Thompson with their five year old daughter Jessica Thompson, an RMACT patient who moved in with her mother-in-law in order to afford fertility treatment says: ...we want other infertility patients to have better insurance to cover the costs of starting a family."

Reproductive Medicine Associates of Connecticut (RMACT), a leader in infertility patient care, is hosting a night for patients and others affected by infertility to tell the government about their infertility experience and their need for insurance coverage. During National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW), RMACT will host NIAW Friends and Family at RMACTs Norwalk location (761 Main Avenue, suite 200) on Thursday, April 28 from 6:00  8:00 p.m. Resolve: The National Infertility Association started NIAW in 1989 to raise awareness about infertility and to encourage the public to understand their reproductive health.

Our patients are thoughtful and passionate, says Lisa Rosenthal, the Patient Advocate at RMACT who co-facilitates Ladies Night In, a peer support group that is open to the public. No one wants to be in the infertility community, but as a member, the experience of infertility creates friendships and support that we need while were trying to conceive. This is our chance to join with Resolve and tell our government representatives about the emotional, financial and medical challenges we face trying to build our families.

NIAW Friends and Family event will take place during RMACTs regularly scheduled Ladies Night In, a peer support group led by Rosenthal and Carrie Van Steen, both of which have their own personal infertility stories in addition to being patient advocates at RMACT. While infertility can often be alienating and emotional, Ladies Night In is an opportunity for fertility patients to find friends, to share their frustrations and to learn from others experiences. During this special night, patients friends and family are also invited to join; this is for adults only, please. The group will write letters, stuff envelopes and enjoy a light dinner.

Rosenthal and Van Steen will deliver the letters to Senators Richard Blumenthal and Christopher Murphy, as well as House Representatives John Larson, Joe Courtney, Rosa DeLauro, James Himes and Elizabeth Esty during National Advocacy Day on May 11, 2016, in Washington, DC.

Infertility takes a toll on you personally and on a marriage, said Jessica Thompson, an RMACT patient who moved in with her mother-in-law in order to afford fertility treatment. This night is important to me and my husband because we want other infertility patients to have better insurance to cover the costs of starting a family.

About Reproductive Medicine Associates of Connecticut (RMACT)

RMACT specializes in the treatment of infertility, including assisted reproductive technologies (ART) such as intrauterine insemination (IUI), in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and Pre-implantation Genetic Screening (PGS). RMACT, Fairfield Countys largest fertility clinic and egg donation center, is one of 11 leading In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) centers nationwide chosen by In Vitro Sciences to participate in its Centers of Excellence program. RMACT has offices in Norwalk, Danbury, Stamford and Trumbull, and now in Poughkeepsie, NY. RMACT also offers infertility treatment financing and support services, such as nutrition counseling, massage therapy, psychological counseling, acupuncture and yoga, through RMACTs Integrated Fertility and Wellness Center.

The RMACT team includes lead physicians Drs. Mark P. Leondires, Spencer S. Richlin and Joshua M. Hurwitz, as well as fertility specialists Drs. Cynthia M. Murdock and Shaun C. Williams. All five physicians are Board-Certified Reproductive Endocrinologists and are members of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) and the Fairfield County and Connecticut Medical Societies. Each has received numerous awards, and all five are Castle Connolly "Top Doctors." RMACTs IVF laboratory is accredited by the College of American Pathologists (CAP), and CLIA; other accreditations include the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC) and the American Institute for Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM). For more information visit http://www.RMACT.com or find us on Facebook.

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www.symplr.com From the beginning stages of planning for technology change to the physical effort of implementation, numerous challenges exist, said Rick Pleczko, President and CEO of symplr.

symplr, a leading provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) based healthcare compliance and credentialing solutions, today announced their upcoming webcast Why is Technology Change So Hard?: Becoming an Effective Technology Change Leader. Part of the symplr Education Series focused on Payor Enrollment Operations, the webcast will air on Wednesday, April 20, 2016, at 12 p.m. CT/1 p.m. ET. To register, visit http://www.symplr.com/community/events/webcasts-payor-enrollment-upcoming.

Changing or updating technologies in the healthcare industry is resource intensive and challenging. In this one-hour webinar, speaker Julie Rennecker, PhD, BSN, and founder of The Management Doc, LLC, will explain that while all change is difficult, the additional challenges posed by technology change make it particularly challenging. She will educate attendees on seven evidence-based practices that address these challenges and help improve technology adoption.

From the beginning stages of planning for technology change to the physical effort of implementation, numerous challenges exist, said Rick Pleczko, President and CEO of symplr. Julie Renneckers inside experience as a nurse and now as a consultant both to technology developers and healthcare organizations on the impact of technology change make her a valuable resource for healthcare leaders considering the deployment of new technology.

To view archives of past webcasts in the symplr education webcast series, visit http://www.symplr.com/resources/webcasts.

About Julie Rennecker, PhD, BSN

Julie Rennecker, PhD, BSN, is the founder of The Management Doc, LLC, an Austin-based research and consulting firm committed to making technology work for healthcare. She works with technology companies to improve the design and implementation of new technologies and with healthcare managers to improve the technology adoption process. A former nurse with experience in ICU, ER, cardiac, and outpatient units, she worked as an internal process improvement consultant for Seton Medical Center before earning a PhD in Organization Behavior from MITs Sloan School of Management where she studied the impacts of technology change. She served on the Information Systems faculty at Case Western Reserve University for before returning to Austin and industry in 2006. Her research has been published in management and technology journals, books, and conference proceedings, and her Texas clients include hospitals, physician practices, and technology vendors.

About symplr

Founded in 2006, symplr is an industry leader in compliance and credentialing Software as a Service solutions that help healthcare organizations mitigate risk and ensure compliance. symplr, along with the Cactus Software brand of provider management solutions, has a single mission: to make healthcare compliance and credentialing simpler for all constituents of the healthcare community. For more information or to contact symplr, visit http://www.symplr.com/ or (866) 373-9725.
Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA) presented five prestigious awards this week at its 2016 Annual Conference, recognizing outstanding contributions to IMCA and the investment industry.

1. Don Phillips is the 2016 recipient of the Matthew R. McArthur Industry Pioneer Award for his outstanding contributions to the profession of investment management consulting. Phillips is a managing director for Morningstar. He joined the company in 1986 as its first mutual fund analyst and soon became editor of its flagship print publication, Morningstar Mutual Funds, establishing the editorial voice for which the company is best known. He helped develop the Morningstar Style Box, the Morningstar Rating, and other distinctive, proprietary Morningstar innovations that have become industry standards.

2. The J. Richard Joyner Wealth Management Impact Award honors individuals who have contributed exceptional advancements in the field of private wealth management, which is embodied by IMCAs Certified Private Wealth Advisor (CPWA) program. The award recognizes key innovations and thought leadership in any of the following CPWA knowledge domains: human dynamics (behavioral economics and family dynamics); wealth management strategies (tax, portfolio, risk management, and asset protection); client specialization (closely held business owners, executives, and retirement); and legacy planning (charitable and estate planning).

The 2016 recipient is Charlotte B. Beyer. Twenty-five years ago, Beyer founded the Institute for Private Investors, where she has used her Wall Street experience to help improve the relationships between wealthy investors and their financial advisors. She served as chief executive officer for 21 years until her retirement in 2012. She also collaborated with The Wharton School in 1999 to create the first private wealth management curriculum for ultra-high-net-worth families. Her book Wealth Management Unwrapped is modeled after her lectures inside that curriculum and includes the same lessons Beyer shares with her students, more than 800 investors with substantial assets from around the globe. Now, she devotes time to the Principle Quest Foundation, which she founded in 2012 to support innovative education and mentoring for girls and women.

3. IMCAs Richard J. Davis Ethics, Legal, Regulatory Insight Award honors the author of an article that has made a significant contribution to advancing the understanding and knowledge of investment consulting and/or private wealth management in the area of ethics, and/or the fiduciary, legal, or regulatory issues that affect these professional practices. The 2016 recipient is Andrew W. Lo, PhD, Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, who was recognized for his paper, The Gordon Gekko Effect: The Role of Culture in the Financial Industry.

4. Cheng Yan, PhD, a lecturer in finance at the Durham University Business School in the United Kingdom, earned the 2016 Edward D. Baker III Journal Research Award. The award honors the author of an original article that represents the best writing for the previous year and is germane to investment consulting and/or private wealth management and published in the Journal of Investment Consulting.

IMCA recognized Yan for his paper Foreign Investors in Emerging Equity Markets: Currency Effect Perspective, which appeared in the Journal of Investment Consulting in 2015.

5. The Stephen L. Kessler Writing Award honors IMCA members for their excellent editorial contributions during the previous year to IMCAs Investments & Wealth Monitor. IMCA honored Scott Welch, CIMA, with the Kessler Writing Award for his article Managing Client Relationships in a Goals-Based Framework, which appeared in the November/December 2015 issue. Welch is chief investment officer with Dynasty Financial Partners.

IMCA honored one additional author with a Kessler Honorable Distinction award. Brian Laible, CIMA, was recognized for his articles The Trinity of Asset Location: Taxes, Returns, and Time Horizon from the January/February 2015, and Bracketology: Lowering Client Taxes with Bracket Management from the May/June 2015 issue. Laible is managing partner with Landmark Wealth Management.

In addition to these awards, IMCA recognized longtime member and past president John Granzow, CIMA, with the honorary designation of IMCA Director Emeritus. Granzow is Managing Director  Investments with Wells Fargo Advisors in Charlotte, North Carolina. He served as IMCA Chair during 20102011.

John Granzow is an excellent example of the kind of quality professionals IMCA counts as its members, said IMCA Chair Scott Thayer, CIMA. Under his leadership, IMCA hired the current CEO, Sean Walters, experienced significant growth in membership, and earned accreditation for CIMA certification. We look forward to Johns ongoing counsel as Director Emeritus.

Click here to learn more about IMCAs awards and to read the award-winning articles.

Contact: Ryan Hoffman, Communications Director. P: 303.850.3079 E-mail: rhoffman(at)imca(dot)org. Twitter: @IMCA. Annual Conference hashtag: #IMCA16.

About IMCA

Established in 1985, Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA) is a nonprofit professional association and credentialing organization with more than 10,700 individual members and certificants worldwide. IMCAs mission is to deliver premier investment and wealth management credentials and world-class education. Since 1988, IMCA has offered the Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA) certification, which is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), to meet international standards (ISO 17024) for personnel certification. IMCAs Certified Private Wealth Advisor (CPWA) certification is suited for wealth management professionals working with high-net-worth clients. In 2015, IMCA conferences, online education and regional seminars hosted more than 4,500 attendees.

IMCA and Investment Management Consultants Association are registered trademarks of Investment Management Consultants Association Inc. CIMA, Certified Investment Management Analyst, CIMC, CPWA, and Certified Private Wealth Advisor are registered certification marks of Investment Management Consultants Association Inc. Investment Management Consultants Association Inc. does not discriminate in educational opportunities or practices on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, or any other characteristic protected by law.
"We are excited to host this event for our customers and friend of the club! It is great to get to know our customers and families." Ron Kennedy, General Manager

Scottsdale Gun Club, Arizonas premier indoor shooting range, firearms store and club will be hosting their 12th Annual Anniversary Sale & Celebration from April 22- May 1. Everyone is welcome from first-time buyers, novices, and enthusiasts to this week-long sale and celebration. The event is attended every year by thousands who gather to interact with special guests, receive special deals on showcased products, and best-price offers from vendors at their biggest sale of the year.

The event will be hosted and held at Scottsdale Gun Club and will offer special membership prices, huge discounts on products, and feature dozens of vendors on site. People will save big on ammo, firearms and accessories. Attendees will receive a free limited edition 12th anniversary t-shirt with purchases over $100. Guests will also enjoy parking lot events including a snow cone for the kids, specially featured food trucks, visits from the National Guard, and raffle supporting the Race for the Wounded. Scottsdale Gun Club will also have custom laser engraving on site.

On Friday and Saturday more than 20 vendors, such as Glockraft and Cannon Safes will be on-site showcasing new products and providing free demonstrations. Guests and attendees can also enter to win prizes from Glock, Springfield, Vortex and more.

Throughout the weekend there will also be exclusive book signings from 10 am  2pm all three days. On Friday Rocco Wachman the author of Cowboy: The Ultimate Guide to Living like a Great American Icon will be signing his book, and Saturday, April 23, author Tony Nester who wrote Practical Survival Series and The Post-Apocalyptic series will be at the event. In addition, Christopher Orr, author of The Lost Nation Series will be present on April 24.

Come out and enjoy this spring event at the Scottsdale Gun Club location on 14860 N. Northsight Blvd., Scottsdale, Arizona 85260. See you there.

**PHOTOS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST**

About Scottsdale Gun Club

The Scottsdale Gun Club, the premier indoor shooting range and firearm store located in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA and recognized by the National Association of Shooting Ranges as a Five Star Facility. Scottsdale Gun Club owns and operates SGC|USA and SGC|Tactical. Like us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter and Instagram For more information, visit Scottsdale Gun Club or call 480.222.4341.
We like to think of ourselves as everyday carry for the everyday guy, and that our tools are not only uniquely functional, but fun to use, said Jen Panattoni, Director of Business Development.

Along with launching a new website and social media pages for UrbanGear, LCI Brands has released a new line of UrbanGear tools and ROP Lights as well.

UrbanGear as a brand is still in its initial phase, but weve received a lot of retailer traction in the last year and a demand for expansion of our dry case line into other formats, said Jen Panattoni, Director of Business Development.

Greatly expanding its assortment of tools, UrbanGear now offers a CarabinerKnife, MiniPliers, SurvivalTool, LEDLight, and more. These lightweight, durable tools are ideal for the everyday and outdoor recreation alike. Each of the tools is accompanied by a water-resistant SplashCase, which can be used to hold the tools themselves along with money, IDs, credit cards, etc. The SplashCase is also sold separately with a lanyard.

The G10 MultiTools, available in both small and large sizes, are tools that utilize glass-reinforced resin and non-slip grips to provide a high quality option that is resistant to chemicals and extreme temperatures. Featuring pliers, screwdrivers, bottle openers, blades, and more, the large size also comes with a ballistic nylon storage case.

We like to think of ourselves as everyday carry for the everyday guy, and that our tools are not only uniquely functional, but fun to use, said Panattoni.

The new ROP Lights are unique in their ability to conform to the users individual needs. For example, they can wrap around the handlebar of a bike for better visibility at night, or they can provide light for reading or camping.

All of the lights include lithium cell batteries and feature a high setting, low setting, and strobe capabilities. Several of them include a red light to see in the dark without losing night vision. With either a flexible silicone strap or silicone-encased stainless steel wire, the various sizes of ROP Lights make them great for travel and outdoor adventures.

See the full lineup of tools and lights at urbangeartools.com.

About LCI Brands

LCI Brands (formerly known as L.C. Industries, Inc.) is located just outside Chicago and is home to brands such as Lewis N. Clark and UrbanGear. With the luggage caddy as its core offering, LCI Brands began operations in 1971, and since then has expanded to offer hundreds of products in categories such as security, comfort, organization, and health. For more information, visit http://www.lcibrands.com.
By sharing best practices and research-based solutions, we can increase engagement and inspire students to stay in school.

In an effort to help increase high school graduation rates, Edgenuity, a leading provider of online and blended learning solutions, today announced a partnership with the National Dropout Prevention Network (NDPN).

The partnership builds on Edgenuitys work over the last two decades with thousands of schools to keep at-risk students engaged and enable them to graduate on time with the use of technology. Together, Edgenuity and NDPN will promote a dialogue about effective dropout prevention strategies and provide stakeholders with resources, research and best practices. NDPN is the outreach arm of the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network (NDPC/N), the worlds leading resource on strategies to reduce school dropout.

Advances in education technology have created more options for a student to receive a quality education than ever before. However, nearly one in five students annually  over 700,000 children  are still leaving school without a diploma, said Sari Factor, CEO of Edgenuity and NDPN board member. By sharing best practices and research-based solutions, we can increase engagement and inspire students to stay in school. NDPC/N fosters collaboration among educators, and we are excited to offer our partner schools and districts the opportunity to join in that conversation.

Proactive Strategies to Address the Dropout Problem with Technology: An Example from Henrico County Public Schools

Henrico County Public Schools (HCPS), the sixth largest public school district in Virginia, works to identify students before they become susceptible to dropping out. After discovering that most students drop out after ninth grade, HCPS now offers an innovative program for students who are failing their first semester of ninth grade. By providing students targeted online courses coupled with face-to-face instruction and support for credit recovery, HCPS helps ensure students stay on track for the rest of freshman year, and ultimately for graduation.

We want to do everything we can to help our students believe in themselves and to understand that they have an opportunity to earn their high school diploma, said Justine Jordan, Extended Learning Specialist at Henrico County Public Schools. Edgenuity has enabled many of our students to come back into the fold, realize their potential and take control of their future.

Edgenuity and NDPC/N: Helping Educators Improve Graduation Rates

Through the partnership, Edgenuity customers are eligible for free one-year memberships to the National Dropout Prevention Network. NDPN members receive access to NDPC/Ns wide range of resources to assist educators and other practitioners concerned about at-risk youth. Through the Network, they can build relationships with other educators and organizations joined in dropout prevention efforts.

Edgenuity recognizes that educators must consider research, think strategically, and select the best solutions to significantly raise graduation rates, said Dr. Sandy Addis, Director of the NDPC/N. Solving the dropout crisis means educators, researchers, and private sector providers must work together to share information and strategies.



Edgenuity partners can register for NDPN membership here: http://www2.edgenuity.com/ndpcn

To learn more about the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network, go to http://www.dropoutprevention.org

About Edgenuity

Edgenuity is a leading provider of online curriculum and services with implementations in 8 of the top 10 school districts in the U.S. Our rigorous, standards-aligned digital content is fully flexible for use in any online or blended learning model to support a personalized learning environment, from NCAA-approved virtual courses to honors and Advanced Placement offerings to test preparation, credit recovery, and intervention. Edgenuitys Blended Learning Services, Instructional Services and Professional Development offerings, as well as supplemental programs such as Edgenuity MyPath, help students, educators and districts achieve success in their online learning programs. For more information, visit Edgenuity.com.

About the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network (NDPC/N)

Established in 1986 with a mission to reduce dropout rates, the NDPC/N shares solutions for student success and dropout prevention through its clearinghouse function, active research and evaluation projects, publications, and a variety of professional development activities and conferences. The organizations websitehttp://www.dropoutprevention.orgis the nations leading resource in providing effective, research-based solutions to engaging students and reducing dropout. The NDPC/N is housed in the Eugene T. Moore School of Education at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina.

Edgenuity Contacts:

Hayley Milbourn

Sloane & Company

212-446-1870

Hmilbourn@sloanepr.com

Leslie Sobon

Edgenuity

877-202-0338

Leslie.Sobon@edgenuity.com

NDPC/N Contact:

Lynn Dunlap

National Dropout Prevention Center/Network

864-656-2678

ldunlap@clemson.edu
Brussels, Belgium: Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam and alleged accomplice Mohamed Abrini, who is also charged over the Brussels attacks, were moved to different jails in Belgium on Monday, prison officials said.



Abdeslam, arrested in Brussels on March 18 following a four-month manhunt, "is now in Beveren in a high-security cell" after he was transferred from a prison in Bruges, prison services spokeswoman Kathleen Van De Vijver told AFP.



Beveren is about 100 kilometres (60 miles) further east from Bruges in northern Belgium.

Abrini, arrested 10 days ago in Brussels in connection with both the Paris and Brussels attacks, was moved to "the high security section in Bruges" from a jail in the Forest district of Brussels, the spokeswoman said.



Both transfers "are part of our dispersion plan," she said without elaborating.



Abrini, 31, has confessed to being "the man in the hat" caught on video with suicide bombers at Brussels airport on March 22. The airport attack and bombing an hour later at a metro station near EU headquarters killed 32 people.



Abrini was also linked to the November 13 Paris massacre after being caught on video at a motorway gas station with Abdeslam, who is awaiting extradition from Belgium to France.



However, the Belgian authorities want to question Abdeslam about a shootout in Forest that led to his arrest days afterwards in the capital's troubled Molenbeek district.



Abrini, who grew up with Abdeslam in Molenbeek, was charged with "participation in the activities of a terrorist group, terrorist murders and attempts to commit terrorist murders".



Abdeslam has also been charged with "terrorist murder" and being part of a terrorist group in connection with the shooting spree and suicide bomb attacks that killed 130 people in Paris.



Belgian investigators say the same cell carried out the attacks in both cities.



The Belgian parliament's commission of inquiry into the attacks said it will visit Maalbeek metro station and Brussels airport on Friday, one month to the day after the attacks in the Belgian capital.



The committee is tasked with shedding light on the Brussels attacks by the end of the year, as well as the impact on French-Belgian relations of the Paris carnage.



The committee is also to report on the Jewish Museum gun attack in Brussels which left four people dead in May 2014, a gunman's botched attack last August on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris via Brussels, as well as on the dismantling of a jihadist cell in the Belgian city of Verviers in January 2015.
Neighborhood Pay Services (NPS), the leader in payment assurance for the Rental Housing industry, today announced that its proprietary Rent From Payroll direct deposit platform, NPS Rent Assurance, has been recognized by the NACHA - The Electronic Payments Association with the 2016 Kevin OBrien ACH Network Award. The award recognizes NPS for innovation in leveraging the ACH Network with a simple solution that reduces credit and payment risk, resulting in a more financially inclusive option for improved access to quality rental housing for credit challenged consumers, and improved performance in key operating metrics for single-and multifamily property owners.

By building a SaaS platform that capitalizes on the ACH Network to establish timely rent delivery matched with forward-looking data on payment performance, were changing the dynamics between property companies and renters around credit assessment and payment predictability, with better outcomes for all parties, says Ellen S. Calmas, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of Neighborhood Pay Services. Were honored to be recognized by NACHA for our success in proving out a direct deposit solution through payroll that redefines credit and payment risk based on a consumers willingness to better manage their payment obligations.

Named in honor of the late Kevin OBrien, NACHAs 1999-2000 Chair, the award is part of NACHAs Payments System Awards, which recognize the highest degree of achievement in the development, implementation and advancement of electronic payments. These prestigious awards celebrate excellence, outstanding accomplishments and superior leadership in innovation to further the ACH Network and were presented at the PAYMENTS 2016 Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, the premier educational event for the payments industry.

NACHA is proud to recognize NPS Rent Assurance as the recipient of the Kevin OBrien ACH Network Award, said Janet O. Estep, president and CEO of NACHA. NPS Rent Assurance has found innovative ways to meet the needs of a changing payments industry while demonstrating just how important and integral electronic payments are to everyday life.

About NPS Rent Assurance / Neighborhood Pay Services (http://www.npsrentassurance.com/)

NPS Rent Assurance provides a significantly lower cost option for millions of credit challenged consumers to gain access to professionally managed rental housing without draining already fragile personal savings, while also ensuring on-time lease payments after move-in. The NPS platform works exclusively through the NACHA ACH Network with direct deposit form employers and special income sources. Enrollment in the NPS program is offered by leasing professionals to consumers whose credit is below qualifying standards in lieu of additional security deposits that average $500 - $1500 and/or the need to secure guarantors. The automated NPS payment assurance platform creates stability for both the NPS customer and their landlord, resulting in retention that is twice the industry average with a >75 percent decrease in early lease terminations. NPS reporting to a national credit bureau helps consumers build or improve credit scores as another means to better function in the financial mainstream.

About NACHA  The Electronic Payments Association (nacha.org)

Since 1974, NACHA  The Electronic Payments Association has served as trustee of the ACH Network, managing the development, administration and rules for the payment network that universally connects all 12,000 financial institutions in the U.S. The Network moves money and information directly from one bank account to another. Through its collaborative, self-governing model, education, and inclusive engagement of ACH Network participants, NACHA facilitates the expansion and diversification of electronic payments, supporting Direct Deposit and Direct Payment via ACH transactions, including ACH credit and debit payments, recurring and one-time payments; government, consumer and business transactions; international payments, and payments plus payment-related information. Through NACHAs expertise and leadership, the ACH Network is now one of the largest, safest, and most reliable systems in the world, creating value and enabling innovation for all participants.
Pristine rainforests filled with ancient Maya temples and exotic wildlife are just some of the attractions drawing visitors to Belize people around the world are discovering just how amazing Belize is

The Lodge at Chaa Creek said that recently published figures showing a rise in Belize tourism proves that the best marketing strategy begins with a simple proposition  have an excellent product.

Lucy Fleming, Chaa Creeks founding co-owner and marketing director, was responding to recently released Belize Tourism Board (BTB) figures showing an historic increase in tourist arrivals during the first quarter of 2016.

The new BTB figures show an increase of 16.9% in overnight tourism arrivals over last years first quarter, with January boasting an increase of 24%, February 18.5% and March by 10% over 2015, with March breaking records for a single month with over 43,000 overnight visitors in a rise that the BTB hailed as historic.

Its been another extraordinary quarter for the Belize tourism industry, Ms Fleming said, And while we acknowledge the excellent work that the BTB and all tourism industry stakeholders have done in marketing Belize, we like to remind the public and our colleagues that what really drives visitors to our shores is Belize itself.

No matter how well something is marketed, what attracts people at the end of the day is the product itself, and what were seeing is that people around the world are discovering just how amazing Belize is.

Ms Fleming, who is also a past president of the Belize Tourism Industry Association, explained that Belizes tourism industry was almost non-existent before the little Caribbean country achieved independence from Great Britain in 1981, the same year her small family farm at Chaa Creek opened its doors to guests as the areas first eco-resort.

With a miniscule marketing budget and no real name recognition or marketing experience, Belize depended upon positive word of mouth to attract visitors, she said.

Fortunately, Belizes combination of stunning scenery, diverse geography, beautiful weather and a friendly, multicultural English speaking populace struck a chord with travellers from around the world.

As travellers, and then the travel media and magazines like National Geographic discovered just how much Belize had to offer, from the Caribbean coast with the worlds second largest barrier reef sheltering over a hundred tiny islands, to the vast, pristine inland jungles containing a wealth of ancient Maya temples and abandoned cities, word got out and we saw the beginnings of a snowball effect.

You can understand why, when Belize finally began a global marketing campaign, the tagline was Mother Natures Best Kept Secret.

Fortunately, thats no longer the case, but what has remained is a national commitment towards protecting the environment and encouraging responsible tourism, she said.

Ms Fleming stressed that environmental sustainability was one of the main factors driving Belizes development as a tourist destination, and that this remains true today.

In the early days many of us were young and idealistic with interests in environmental awareness and social justice. The global green movement was rising, and as members of a nascent tourism industry in a newly independent country in the 1980s we were able to tap into that, learn from mistakes made in other developing nations, and help steer Belizes tourism industry towards protecting the land we all loved while ensuring it would bring benefits to communities.

And as a former British crown colony, Belize had a long tradition of and commitment towards democracy, the rule of law, education and health care.

All those things combined to create the sort of country people felt comfortable to visit. Add in stunning natural features fostering a huge range of activities and you have a recipe for success. Promotion, for us, began as an exercise in letting the rest of the world know that were here, Ms Fleming said.

Of course, in a competitive global industry, marketing and public relations are critical to success, and Belizes public and private sector stakeholders have quickly developed impressive skills in these areas as well, she said.

Now that Belize is on the map and has a reputation as one of the worlds most desirable travel destinations, the challenge, Ms Fleming said, is to ensure that future development continues along the path of environmental sustainability. Its a direction she said she feels confident that Belize will continue in.

As a nation, and as an eco-resort, weve proven that environmental sustainability can go hand in hand with providing high quality amenities and services, and that this adds to, rather than detracts from, the bottom line.

As these new tourism figures show, travellers worldwide appreciate that. Im confident that Belize will continue to attract new and repeat visitors and word will continue to spread.

No one in Belizean tourism is resting on their laurels, and its safe to say that many of us have good reason to feel optimistic about the future, Ms Fleming said.

The Lodge at Chaa Creek is a multi award winning eco resort set within a 400-acre private nature reserve along the banks of the Macal River in Belize.

ENDS
Our clients vary from global private investigators to private equity and venture capital groups who are looking to assess possible mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, vendor or client retention,  said Corra Group Co-Founder, Gordon Basichis.

Corra Group now offers a variety of background checks designed to enhance any Due Diligence Check or Investigative Research program. Corporate clients and global investigative agencies can choose from any category of a la carte background searches or order a more comprehensive due diligence package.

Our clients vary from global private investigators to private equity and venture capital groups who are looking to assess anything from possible mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, vendor or client retention, or co-ventures, said Corra Group Co-Founder, Gordon Basichis. We are addressing each client in in accordance with the levels of the searches they need, and we are packaging them specifically for each occasion.

Some clients require such data searches that include the background analysis of individuals, global compliance, regulatory, litigation background checks, said Basichis. Others are seeking reputational reports, actual interviews with sources who are familiar with the subjects as well as the business. Some just want from us pieces of a much larger puzzle.

Basichis pointed out that clients will often first request a business credit report to gain an overall view of the structure, financial health, and general condition of the business of interest. He indicated that sometimes the business credit report is sufficient and that the client believes it has enough initial information to either move forward or back away from any potential transaction.

On the domestic side, we have clients that can request any number of background searches, said Basichis. So we create packages for various strata in order to meet particular conditions. We have investigators and financial concerns who want us to conduct domestic criminal background checks and civil background checks on principles and corporate entities. Corra Group is capable of conducting extended year civil records and criminal records background searches. Or sometimes a client will request we pull file copies from any one of the 3,200 counties in the United States as well as Federal Courts.

Basichis noted that the vagaries of the global economic environment and the murky histories of certain emerging business entities are giving more clients pause, making them increasingly cautious as they proceed with their business ventures.

Before the Great Recession, many groups worked on faith and with what they believed at face value, said Basichis. Hey, credit was plentiful and money was loose. Since the end of the Recession and moving forward in a market of cyclic volatility, that is no longer the case. Everybody knows now what you can lose if you dont do your homework up front.

BACKGROUND: Corra operates as Corra Group and specializes in employment screening and corporate research and due diligence. It is one of the few companies that will answer the phone. You can review the website at http://www.corragroup.com.
AnywhereCommerce, a global payments solutions provider, announced a significant expansion to its family of mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) card devices, along with enhancements to its developer tools, and expanded features for its gateway and management platform. The company is showcasing its entire enhanced solutions portfolio at TRANSACT 16, being held this week in Las Vegas.

AnywhereCommerce has been a leader in mPOS since the nascent days of simple mag-stripe dongles for micro-merchants, said William Nichols, president and chief executive officer of AnywhereCommerce. Todays solutions must expand and evolve to meet merchants growing demand for enhanced card acceptance, robust security and comprehensive management tools. We are proud to be an integral part of this exciting transformation in the payments industry.

New devices from AnywhereCommerce include the following:



Walker BT  a compact Bluetooth device that supports mag-stripe and chip & signature

Walker C2X  an audio jack device that supports mag-stripe, chip & signature and contactless, including Apple Pay and Android Pay

Nomad CXR  a Bluetooth device that supports mag-stripe, chip & signature and contactless, including Apple Pay and Android Pay, and features remote over-the-air key injection and updates

The companys CorePay software developer toolkit has been enhanced to support CorePay Secure, which extends turn-key P2PE capabilities to merchants, developers, processors and ISOs looking to implement secure mPOS transactions that significantly reduce PCI scope in their environments.

About AnywhereCommerce

AnywhereCommerce is a global mCommerce technology provider and industry innovator with a portfolio of IP, including industry recognized audio-jack patents. AnywhereCommerce offers a suite of hardware, software, developer tools, retail mPOS platforms, and gateway solutions that deliver an end-to-end mobile payments experience supporting transactions initiated via mag-stripe, EMV chip and signature, EMV chip and PIN, and contactless. The solutions are backed by its aCommerce Management Platform, a robust cloud-based transaction and reporting engine. Our PCI and EMVCo certified ecosystem works on iOS, Android and Windows systems and provides optimal security, reliability, and convenience for merchants, networks, issuers, processors and acquirers. For more information, please visit http://www.AnywhereCommerce.com.
Chee Peng Lee, Managing Director of OTRS Sdn. Bhd. Businesses in Thailand who want to make customer and internal communications more efficient and transparent and need a cost-sensitive service management solution should not miss the opportunity to check out our presentation of OTRS Business Solution 5

OTRS Group, the worlds leading provider of open-source and cloud-based service management software solutions, today announces the new OTRS Simple Service Management Delivery event will take place on April 28, 2016, in Bangkok, Thailand. OTRS Sdn. Bhd., the Malaysian subsidiary of OTRS Group, will host the event with appointed business associate Proline.

Attendees will experience the new features of the service management solution OTRS Business Solution 5 in a software walkthrough with WK Tang, Regional Pre-Sale Manager at OTRS Sdn. Bhd. With a new responsive design and an SMS gateway, the new version improves service desk work in the field and provides automated, professionally designed reports to customer service team leaders and management. OTRS Business Solution 5 was released in November 2015.

The event is free of charge, but available seats are limited. Interested visitors can register here:

[https://www.otrs.com/meet-otrs-bangkok-event-otrs-simple-service-management-delivery/

Chee Peng Lee, Regional General Manager of OTRS Sdn. Bhd., explains Thailands strategic importance: Thailand is Malaysias neighbor and has an active, engaged community that recently translated OTRS into Thai. Businesses in Thailand who want to make customer and internal communications more efficient and transparent and need a cost-sensitive service management solution should not miss the opportunity to check out our presentation of OTRS Business Solution 5 at this event.

The event offers participants a walkthrough of OTRS Business Solution 5 and its new features as well as the opportunity to ask the OTRS experts questions on how to use the service management software to its full potential.

A detailed agenda can be found here: https://www.otrs.com/meet-otrs-bangkok-event-otrs-simple-service-management-delivery/

To find out more about OTRS Business Solution 5 and start your 30-day-free-trial please visit https://www.otrs.com/otrs-business-solution-managed/

About OTRS Group

OTRS Group is the vendor and worlds leading provider of the open-source OTRS Service Management Suite, including the on premise and cloud-based versions of the OTRS Business Solution, as well as the OTRS Help Desk software and the ITIL V3-compliant IT Service Management software OTRS::ITSM. With subsidiaries in the US, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico and Brazil, OTRS Group offers managed services as well as training seminars, service support, consulting and software development to businesses that wish to increase the efficiency of their service management while saving costs and resources. Key customers include industry leaders such as NASA, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Lufthansa, Boeing, Porsche as well as 150,000 other organizations worldwide. OTRS is available in 36 languages, offers a fully responsive design to be used on every mobile device , and is used by 60 percent of the DAX 30 companies. Find out more about OTRS and our services at http://www.otrs.com
Bayshore Solutions earns the Horizon Distinguished Agency Award for a second year. ...The best blend between top-notch creative imagery with clear, concise content, and well thought out user experiences.

Bayshore Solutions is announced as a 2016 Horizon Interactive Distinguished Agency upon winning nine awards in the 2016 Horizon Interactive Awards competition.

Silver Horizon Interactive Awards were earned by the Port Canaveral website in the government category, QC Energy Resources in corporation websites, Restaurant Magic in B2B websites, and USF Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation (CAMLS) in university websites. Bronze Horizon Awards were won by Columbia Restaurant in restaurant websites, Gardner-Gibson in consumer information websites, Morphogenesis in health and human services websites, Physicians Leadership Institute in training or e-learning websites, and the David A. Straz, Jr. Center for the Performing Arts in non-profit organization websites.

The Horizon Interactive Awards competition, now in its 14th year, was created to recognize excellence in interactive media production worldwide. This years Horizon Interactive competition judged over 1,100 entries from 21 countries around the world. Each year, those entries are scrutinized by an international panel of judges and narrowed down to the best of the best to be recognized and promoted on an international stage for their excellence. The winning entries showcase the industrys best interactive media solutions.

The competition raised the bar for immersive, interactive experiences both online and offline, said Mike Sauce, Founder of the Horizon Interactive Awards. This years competition again saw an emphasis on full screen, immersive user experiences coupled with fully responsive frameworks to allow consistency from desktop to tablet to mobile phones. Brands are finding new ways to connect with customers through multi-channel marketing while providing consistent messages. The stand-outs this year found a way to integrate the online interactive world with real-life scenarios and other offline traditional media. This highlights the power of digital communication and reflects that technology is a part of our lives at just about every turn. We continue to showcase digital media projects which strive for the best blend between top-notch creative imagery with clear, concise content, and well thought out user experiences.

Bayshore Solutions is excited to win nine Horizon Interactive Awards and to again be honored as a Horizon Distinguished Agency, said Kevin Hourigan, President and CEO of Bayshore Solutions. Such industry recognition validates our methodology and the consistent pursuit of excellence in not just aesthetic and functional elements, but in results-driving performance of the web properties we create for our clients.

Learn more about Bayshore Solutions Horizon Interactive Award winning websites here.

About Bayshore Solutions

Digital marketing agency, Bayshore Solutions, offers award-winning capabilities for custom web design, website development, e-commerce, and Internet advertising. Founded in 1996, the website design and digital marketing agency delivers custom web applications and marketing services throughout the USA and internationally. From offices in Denver, Colorado, Tampa and Miami, Florida, Bayshore Solutions integrates technology and marketing expertise to ensure measurable success for customers.

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Akkadian Collection - Garden of Eden I couldnt be prouder of the women who have produced beautiful, high-end candles despite the violence and uncertainty that surround them," said Zedan Mohamad, the Iraq Program Director.

Prosperity Catalyst, a Cambridge-based nonprofit, today launched online sales of its Akkadian Collection, which is entirely produced through its Iraqi-based social enterprise consisting of women entrepreneurs in Baghdad. The collection includes three product lines and is ready just in time for Mothers Day. The collection is sophisticated and modern but rooted in tradition. Several candles are produced in hand-hammered copper vessels bringing a modern aesthetic to a classic Mesopotamian craft, and others are inspired by rippled sand patterns of the desert landscape. All are now available online at http://www.akkadiancollection.com.

At a time when few other nonprofits are willing to engage with Iraqi civilians, this young start-up has successfully recruited and trained women for their local talent and begun exporting handmade products for sale online. The organization has overcome significant obstacles given its demographics and unique location, including increased security risks due to ISIS and the challenges of attempting global export from a nascent economic zone.

Zedan Mohamad, the Iraq Program Director, has seen what it takes to launch a business in such an unstable market. I couldnt be prouder of the women who have produced beautiful, high-end candles despite the violence and uncertainty that surround them. Because of ISIS, we have had to adapt at every turn, but the women continue to show resilience and determination in making this business work, Mohamad said.

Prosperity Catalyst has been training Iraqi wars widows since 2013 and recently adapted its candle enterprise model to allow for home-based product creation with centralized business administration taking place in an export hub. The hub provides access to the supply chain products and allows for greater flexibility for women to safely participate in the workforce.

To date, the organization has worked with 56 women to produce more than 1400 Akkadian Collection candles. Linda Strohmeyer, the chairman of the board of Prosperity Catalyst is eager to celebrate this milestone. We could not be more pleased with the launch of the Akkadian Collection produced by talented women artisans. Were thrilled to see major players engage including National Geographic who placed a large order for ceramic candles to be shown at their headquarters in Washington, D.C. The business is off to a great start despite so many challenges faced every day in the region.

For more information about Prosperity Catalyst please visit: http://www.prosperitycatalyst.org.

Prosperity Catalysts mission is to provide tools, training and community for women in distressed regions of the world to thrive as skilled entrepreneurs and leaders. Based in Cambridge, the organization incubates and launches women-led businesses, creating opportunities for women to achieve economic empowerment. Prosperity Catalyst currently focuses on developing businesses in Iraq and Haiti.

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Jeff Pate Joins PYA Jeff brings a tremendous background, both in healthcare and other business sectors, to the PYA Enterprise

Jeff Pate, a well-known Nashville business executive, has joined PYA as Chief Business Development Officer for the corporation and its affiliated companies. The appointment is effective today.

Jeff brings a tremendous background, both in healthcare and other business sectors, to the PYA Enterprise, said Marty Brown, PYA President. The 32-year-old Knoxville-based firm is ranked as the ninth largest privately held healthcare consulting company in the country. PYA has healthcare clients in all 50 states, but also offers tax, accounting, assurance, real estate, claims auditing, medical billing and collections, investment management, and advanced data analytics services.

In his new role, Pate will focus on helping to further grow PYAs core healthcare business as well as the offerings of three of its affiliated entities  Realty Trust Group (RTG), PYA Analytics (PYAA), and Healthcare Horizons Consulting Group.

Nashville is a perfect base to launch this enhanced business development strategy for the PYA Enterprise, Brown said. PYA expanded its office in Brentwood in January 2015 and is in the process of doubling that space to accommodate newly recruited talent.

We have always served clients in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, but offered many of those services through staff located in Atlanta or Knoxville, Brown explained. However, the demand for talent in the Nashville market, both in healthcare and other sectors, has motivated our owners to make an even stronger commitment to this community.

Pate, who is a native of Nashville, most recently served as Executive Vice President of Business Development for Aegis Health Group. Before that, he was Executive Vice President at W Squared.

We have been very impressed with Jeffs professional style, character, and numerous contacts, Brown said. He represents the type and level of talent that we are adding to the PYA family as we expand our market share, grow our business, and look for opportunities to offer new advisory services.

PYA was founded in December 1983. At the time, there were three employees. Today, the PYA enterprise totals about 375 individuals, with roughly two-thirds of them supporting the healthcare consulting, tax, accounting, or assurance service lines. The remaining one-third is based in one of the six affiliated companies. Besides RTG, PYAA, and Healthcare Horizons, the affiliates are Ascendant Advisory Group, Management Resource Group, and PYA Waltman Capital.

I have always heard so many great things about PYA, Pate said. I am excited by the Firms commitment to Nashville as a major base of operations and the opportunity to help grow the company and its affiliates even more.

PYAs Nashville office Managing Principal is Shannon Sumner, a former PYA consultant who returned to the Firm in 2014 after serving as Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer for CHAN HEALTHCARE. Another of the recent additions to PYAs Nashville team is Larry Felts, a Principal in Audit and Business Advisory Services who spent much of his career with Big Four accounting firms.

PYA recently signed on as a key sponsor of the Jumpstart Foundrys Health:Further Quarterly (H:FQ) series of workshops.

We believe the alignment with Vic Gattos innovative H:FQ programming further reflects our commitment to Nashville and, more importantly, our serving as a thought leader in healthcare innovation, Brown said.

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About PYA

For over three decades, PYA (Pershing Yoakley & Associates, P.C.), a national professional services firm providing management consulting and accounting, has helped its clients navigate and derive value amid complex challenges related to regulatory compliance, mergers and acquisitions, governance, business valuations and fair market value assessments, multi-unit business and clinical integrations, best practices, tax and assurance, business analysis, and operations optimization.

PYAs steadfast commitment to an unwavering client-centric culture has served the firms clients well. PYA is now ranked by Modern Healthcare as the 9th largest privately owned healthcare consulting firm in the US. PYA is also ranked 103rd by INSIDE Public Accountings Top 200 Largest Accounting Firms. PYA affiliate companies offer clients world-class data analytics, professional real estate development and advisory resources, comprehensive claims audits for self-insured Fortune 500 companies, wealth management and retirement plan administration, and business transitions consulting.

PYA is headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee. For more information, please visit http://www.pyapc.com.
Students Join for Joe at Loyola Blakefield in 2015. It is refreshing to see so many young people engaging in this important cause and committed to making a difference in the lives of patients.

Join for Joe began as a bone marrow drive in August 2010 at Loyola Blakefield with the hope of finding a match for Joe. Joes classmates honor his memory every year by running Join for Joe Senior Swab Day. Since then, Loyola Blakefield has hosted 6 drives, swabbed over 2,000 people and found 10 matches. Denis ODonovan, board member of There Goes My Hero, is excited that this year as more schools are getting behind the cause. With so many schools on board, we will be able to swab more people, and hopefully, save more lives. he said. Notre Dame Preparatory School, Institute of Notre Dame, Friends School of Baltimore, Maryvale Preparatory School, Bishop McNamara High School, Connolly School of the Holy Child, Elizabeth Seton High School, Holton-Arms School, and DeMatha Catholic High School have all committed to running drives this year. All of these drives are being run by high school students, says Stephanie McLoughlin, the Director of Marketing for the Friends School of Baltimore and an original Join for Joe organizer. It is refreshing to see so many young people engaging in this important cause and committed to making a difference in the lives of patients, she adds.

A bone marrow transplant is a vital treatment for thousands of blood cancer and blood disorder patients. A donor needs to be a perfect match for the patient, and while 30% of patients can find a matching family member, most have to rely on the bone marrow donor registry to find a life-saver. Six out of ten patients will not find the matching donor they need. Diversity is especially important, says bone marrow drive coordinator and leukemia survivor Kristina Gaddy. Patients and donors have to match, and are more likely to match if they come from the same racial or ethnic background. Unfortunately, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans are underrepresented on the registry. All it takes to join the registry is a simple cheek swab and being willing to donate to any patient in need. Join for Joe is a meaningful and concrete way to help blood cancer patients across the globe who are facing the need for a bone marrow or stem cell transplant.

Drives will be held at the Friends School of Baltimore on April 13th, IND on April 18th, McNamara on April 19th, NDP on April 26th, Loyola on April 28th, and Elizabeth Seton on April 29th. More dates are forthcoming.
The American Association for Physician Leadership has named Advocate Health Cares Resident Leadership Development Institute as the 2016 winner of the Leape Ahead Award. The award was presented at the associations Annual Meeting, April 15, 2016, in Washington, D.C.

When health care professionals work as a team, patient safety can be dramatically improved, said Peter Angood, MD, FRCS(C), FACS, FCCM, the associations president and CEO. The Advocate Health Care Resident Leadership Development Institute and development team should be commended for recognizing this need and for their role in taking the initiative to help shape the physician leaders of tomorrow.

Evaluators were impressed by the well-conceived pilot program focusing on leadership development for women residents. Its assessment and metrics as well as its mentoring of participants made the program stand out.

Now in its fifth year, the award named for Lucien Leape, MD, recognizes organizations devoted to patient safety and overall health care improvement and to developing the skills of the next generation of physician leaders. Previous winners include Northwestern Medicines Academy for Quality and Safety Improvement, Christiana Care Health System, Brigham and Womens Hospital and Helen DeVos Childrens Hospital.

About the American Association for Physician Leadership

The American Association for Physician Leadership is the preeminent U.S.-based organization for physician leaders worldwide. The association, formerly known as the American College of Physician Executives (ACPE), serves physicians at all stages of their careers through leadership education, career support and policy advocacy. Since its founding in 1975, it has grown to more than 11,000 members, including CEOs, chief medical officers and other top leaders. They hail from 47 nations worldwide. The association is known for its award-winning bi-monthly magazine, PLJ, and its other publications as well as for world-class leadership education, available to member and nonmember physicians. Its continuing medical education (CME) courses, offered online and at live conferences, can be applied to advanced degrees and certifications and are accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME). Learn more online at physicianleaders.org, by email at info(at)physicianleaders(dot)org, on Twitter at @physicianslead or call 800-562-8088.

Contact:

Brittany Hink

Membership Coordinator

bhink(at)physicianleaders(dot)org

American Association for Physician Leadership

400 North Ashley Drive

Tampa, Florida, 33602

800-562-8088

info(at)physicianleaders(dot)org
A court to investigate cases of child labour, child slavery and child marriage is urgently needed amid the current refugee crisis, Brown said at a media briefing ahead of a meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. (Representational Image)

New York: An international court should be set up to punish those responsible for child labour and other forms of abuse against children, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the United Nations on Monday.

A court to investigate cases of child labour, child slavery and child marriage is urgently needed amid the current refugee crisis, Brown said at a media briefing ahead of a meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The proposed children's court was among several recommendations Brown brought to the UN as head of the Global Citizenship Commission, a group of political leaders and academics focussed on human rights.

Such a court would have the power to oversee cases requested by children and issue legally binding rulings, the group said in a lengthy report.

"We need, in a sense, a civil rights struggle by and on behalf of children because their rights have been neglected in the international community," said Brown.

Children account for half of the world's displaced people, he said.

Some 168 million children - one in ten globally - can be classified as child labourers, according to the International Labour Organization.

The children's court would be similar to the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague in the Netherlands, that hears cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Last week, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) called for child refugees in Europe to be better protected from traffickers.

"When so many children are displaced, the first priority has to be to ensure that children's rights are protected," Brown said.

A million migrants, many fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations in conflict in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, have poured into Europe through Greece since last year.

The Global Citizenship Commission includes such members as Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei and Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum.

The group also recommended revisions to the veto process among nations that are permanent UN Security Council members and reform of the way UN refugee aid is funded.
Deputy Logo Deputy is redefining how businesses of all sizes manage and interact with employees by providing an all-in-one, highly mobile solution that replaces multiple employee management tools.

Leading global workforce management solution Deputy today announced that it will expand its international presence, establishing a North and South American corporate office in Atlanta, in addition to its sales office in Los Angeles. Fueling this expansion is Deputys 500 percent United States year-over-year revenue growth. Founded and headquartered in Sydney, Australia, Deputys new bi-coastal offices will better support its growing customer base in the Americas. Deputy is currently hiring marketing, strategic partnership, customer experience and sales positions in the U.S., aiming to increase its American workforce by 100 percent in 2016.

Atlanta has a high density of international companies and is home to some of the brightest minds in business. Were proud to join the growing group of global headquarters here in the Peach State, said Jason Walker, vice president of strategy and operations at Deputy who will lead the companys North American team.

The employment market in the U.S. is comprised of 77.2 million hourly workers over the age of 16, which is almost 60 percent of the total workforce. Further, this segment alone is growing at a rate of 1 million new workers per year.

Deputy is redefining how businesses of all sizes manage and interact with employees by providing an all-in-one, highly mobile solution that replaces multiple employee management tools. This has fueled our recent growth and will continue to drive our global go-to-market strategy. We look forward to supporting our customers located in North and South America via our new office in Atlanta, Walker continued.

Building a North American Team

Launched in 2008, Deputy is an all-in-one workforce management solution for companies looking to improve employee scheduling, time and attendance, team communication and performance management. Since launching in 2008, Deputy is used by 15,000 customers in 73 countries. More than 300 applications integrate with Deputy, including Intuit QuickBooks, ADP, Square and Xero.

This year, Deputy has also grown its U.S. employee base 10 times over, expanding its North America team in Atlanta by adding implementation, partnerships, marketing, sales and customer support positions. In addition, seasoned executive Jason Walker recently joined Deputy as vice president of strategy and operations. With 20 years of leadership experience, Walker came to Deputy from MarketSource, Inc., an industry leading provider of sales outsourcing solutions, where he led corporate innovation.

Unending Innovation

Deputy is transforming the way businesses operate and engage with their employees, and I am thrilled to be a part of this powerful transformation, said Walker. The rise of mobile cloud technology and an employee-first approach to management are aggressively changing the HR landscape, demanding more digital, intuitive and integrated ways to interact with todays workforce. Deputys mobile-first solutions are meeting these changing dynamics and I look forward to supporting our continued innovation.

In addition to growing its own workforce, Deputy recently released two new features for its employee scheduling tool: ShiftOffer and ShiftSwap. Both features, introduced for iOS and soon to be released for Android, allow employees to apply for time off, offer their shift to available colleagues or swap their shift with other workers instantly, ensuring that the best employee is qualified to fulfill the available shift. Managers are able to turn on Require Manager Approval so the appropriate manager can approve the changes, as well as foresee any impact on costs.

Deputys North American office address is 13010 Morris Rd Building 1, Suite 600 Alpharetta, Ga. 30004.

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About Deputy

Founded in 2008, Deputy is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and Atlanta, USA, with offices in Los Angeles, the United Kingdom and the Philippines. As the ultimate workforce manager, Deputy offers best-in-class technology in a cloud-based solution that simplifies scheduling, timesheets, tasking and other employee communication. This, coupled with brilliant mobile apps and one-click payroll integration, equips business managers with the tools they need to get out of the back office and into the action. More than 15,000 customers in 73 countries use Deputy to manage their employees. For more information, visit Deputy.com and follow @DeputyApp.
This year, with the GCN dig IT Awards, we are sharpening the focus to showcase what matters most: transformative tech that is truly reinventing government.

GCN and 1105 Public Sector Media Group are pleased to announce that nominations for the 2016 GCN dig IT Awards are now being accepted.

For 28 years, the GCN Awards have showcased general excellence in government IT. This year, with the GCN dig IT Awards, we are sharpening the focus to showcase what matters most: transformative tech that is truly reinventing government.

"Most people know that the government invented the Internet and developed GPS," GCN Editor-in-Chief Troy K. Schneider said. 'But there are so many more examples, each and every year, where public sector is sparking important innovations that don't get nearly the attention they deserve. And governments at all levels are taking new technologies developed elsewhere and using them in remarkably creative ways. That's what led us to the dig IT acronym  this discovery and innovation in government IT should really be put in the spotlight."

The 2016 awards will celebrate leading-edge technologies and the pioneering IT professionals who are driving them forward  a shift from celebrating the teams and project management to an emphasis on the tech that powers key government programs. Anyone may submit a nomination, and all projects developed, tested or deployed by a government agency are eligible.

For each category, a list of finalists will be announced in late July, with the winner named the night of the event by a tech visionary. 2016 Award categories include: Cybersecurity; Cloud & Infrastructure; Big Data, Analytics & Visualization; Mobile and Robotics & Unmanned Systems  plus an award for the disruptive technologies that are emerging so quickly they don't fit into any of these categories.

GCN Award winners will be featured in the October issue of GCN and at the GCN dig IT Awards Gala celebration October 13, 2016.

At the Gala, 1105 Media will also honor individual employees from the public and private sectors as FCWs 2016 Rising Stars. These individuals, who are in the first 10 years of their federal IT careers, have made significant impacts on the government technology community and appear poised for broader leadership roles in the years to come.

For more information on the GCN dig IT Awards and to submit a nomination, visit http://www.gcn.com/digIT.

About GCN

GCN delivers technology assessments, recommendations and case studies to support public sector IT managers who are responsible for the specification, evaluation and selection of technology solutions. http://www.gcn.com

About 1105 Public Sector Media Group

1105 Public Sector Media Group, a division of 1105 Media, Inc., provides information, insight and analysis to the Government IT and Education IT (FED/SLED) sectors. Our content platforms include print, digital, online, events and a broad spectrum of marketing services. http://1105publicsector.com

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Chef Alex Raij My BlueStar range is beautiful, but its also powerful, with high heat burners just right for achieving a rapid boil, high-heat sear or the perfect saute.

BlueStar, manufacturer of customizable, commercial-style appliances for the home, announces award-winning chef Alex Raij as its newest BlueStar All-Star. Raij today also celebrates the launch of her first cookbook, The Basque Book: A Love Letter in Recipes from the Kitchen of Txikito, co-authored with husband and partner, Chef Eder Montero.

Chef Raij and the other BlueStar All Stars desire to achieve restaurant quality results at home. That's why they choose to customize their home kitchens with high-performance BlueStar products. Handcrafted in the U.S. since 1880, BlueStar products are designed for discerning home chefs.

Chef Raij, a James Beard nominated chef, is the owner of El Quinto Pino, La Vara and Txikito restaurants in New York, renowned for revelatory preparations of simple ingredients. In this much-anticipated cookbook debut, Raij and Montero share more than one hundred recipes from Txikitoall inspired by the home cooking traditions of the Basque Countrythat promise to change the way many home chefs cook.

One item that Chef Raij knows will change the way she cooks in her own home is her new BlueStar commercial-style gas range.

As a professional cook, you are exposed to many pieces of equipment with special uses but we know that the best things really last and are versatile, said Raij. My BlueStar range is beautiful, but its also powerful, with high heat burners just right for achieving a rapid boil, high-heat sear or the perfect saute. It also can be turned down to a true low, gentle heat.

The chef customized her BlueStar equipment to match her cooking style as well as her design style. She chose a BlueStar 36 Platinum Range in Oyster White, a creamy, soft color that coordinates with the silky modernism of her home. She added painted knobs in Curry Yellow for a pop of color suggestive of the Basque regions colorful terrain. The coordinating BlueStar kitchen hood also is in Oyster White. The BlueStar Platinum Series offers unsurpassed power and performance, including 25,000 BTU burners, an interchangeable griddle and charbroiler and an extra-large oven with true European convection and 1850 infrared broiler.

One of Chef Raijs favorite recipes to make at home on her new BlueStar range is Lomo en Adobo, a recipe included in the new book. It's a paprika and garlic-cured pork loin that can feed an army or just one. You cure a whole boneless pork loin ahead, then roast it and slice it; or you can cut it into boneless pork chops and pan roast it or slice it thin and serve seared as you would Canadian bacon with two fried eggs. It's a recipe that keeps on giving, said Raij. It also takes you on a grand tour of the BlueStar, from cooktop to oven to griddle. The BlueStar is so precise. It needs you to be engaged with your food but it is incredibly responsive to what you might need from it.

BlueStar makes each product by hand after the customer orders it and customizes every little detail. Home chefs can order the ranges with any configuration of burners and other cooking surfaces like built-in griddles, grills and French Tops. The companys new built-in refrigerator is customizable as well; it is available in stainless steel and more than 750 color and finish combinations to match BlueStar cooking and ventilation products. To customize a dream BlueStar range, BlueStar offers an online interactive Build Your Own BlueStar tool.

For information, visit Bluestarcooking.com. To order The Basque Book, visit Amazon.com.

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CREDIT: Reprinted with permission from The Basque Book by Alexandra Raij with Eder Montero and Rebecca Flint Marx, copyright 2016, published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

Photographs copyright 2016 by Penny De Los Santos

BlueStar cooking and refrigeration products are designed for discerning home chefs who demand restaurant-quality results in their own kitchens. In business since 1880, the Pennsylvania-based manufacturer specializes in handcrafted gas ranges, cooktops, electric and gas wall ovens and complementary kitchen ventilation hoods. The companys spectrum of highly innovative appliances stays true to an authentic restaurant kitchen experience at home. Available in over 750+ colors and finishes, and with almost infinite configuration possibilities, BlueStar offers unmatched options for customization. For more information, please visit http://www.bluestarcooking.com.
The film explores Northwestern Engineering's innovative "whole-brain" approach. We wanted a film that was meaningful, authentic and didnt look like every other college promo video,

Mode Project, a Chicago-based design and production studio that has created brand films for clients that include Frontgate, United, LiveOne and Gogo, has released a new collaboration with Northwestern Universitys McCormick School of Engineering. The piece, titled 'A Different Way Of Thinking,' explores the schools unique whole-brain approach to engineering.

The 90-second film combines design, motion graphics and live action with audio sourced from 16 hours of interviews with McCormick faculty and students. It was designed to serve as a movie trailer that engages an audience of prospective students and faculty, alumni, donors, partners and more, enticing viewers to learn more about one of the worlds leading engineering institutions.

We wanted a film that was meaningful, authentic and didnt look like every other college promo video, said Kyle Delaney, Northwestern Engineerings Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives and Marketing. Engineering is complex, and rather than reduce and simplify our work, we wanted a film that embraced that complexity and spoke to the people that we actually want to attract: those who welcome hard challenges. Not only did Mode Project accomplish that with this film, but weve been seeing tremendous engagement on it, across a number of channels.

The Mode Project team worked closely with Delaney and McCormick dean Julio Ottino to create a film that would address the schools communications goals.

When you only have 90 seconds to tell such a big, intricate story, said Mode Project Principal and Creative Director Colin Carter, you have to get creative about how you approach things. We knew that the McCormick team wanted to show that theres a lot going on here, so we created a very active, immersive story that doesnt really slow down anywhere along the way. Were very proud of the final piece, and were even more proud to help the school achieve their brand goals with our work.

'A Different Way Of Thinking' is Mode Projects second recent engagement in the higher education industry, following a collaboration with another Chicago school, DePaul University.

Just like big corporate brands, Carter added, schools want to better control and share their story, and films, when approached the right way with an eye toward brand goals, can be a powerful way to do that.

In addition to its education work, Mode Project also collaborates with some of the worlds leading ad agencies to produce campaigns for brands such as Boeing, Ore-Ida, Illinois Office of Tourism, and CDW.

About Mode Project:

Mode Project creates meaningful content to help agencies and brands achieve their communications goals. The Mode team offers concept development and creative services for broadcast and digital media, including production, design, animation, editorial and finishing.

Visit http://www.modeproject.com for more info.
John Fitzpatrick, his wife Kristina, and Dean David Richardson My time at the University of Florida equipped me with the tools I needed to achieve success in a highly competitive, fast-paced global marketplace." -John Fitzpatrick

Force Marketing is proud to announce that CEO John Fitzpatrick was recently honored by the University of Florida Alumni Association through its Outstanding Young Alumni Awards.

The Outstanding Young Alumni Award program was created in 2006, and each year, recipients are honored during the University of Florida Alumni Associations Orange & Blue weekend. The individual honorees were selected by their college, and were required to be age 35 or younger, as well as to have distinguished themselves within their profession and community.

Fitzpatrick was selected by the University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, from which he graduated in 2006 with a degree in political science. His award was presented by Dean David Richardson on Friday, April 8, 2016 at an awards luncheon.

I really feel that graduating with a degree from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences gave me a more diversified foundation for a career in business than they typically get credit for, said Fitzpatrick. My time at the University of Florida equipped me with the tools I needed to achieve success in a highly competitive, fast-paced global marketplace. Im grateful for my education, and hope that I can pass on what Ive learned to the next generation of Liberal Arts and Sciences students.

Fitzpatrick was also recently appointed to the Deans Leadership Council, a group with experience in a diverse set of industries which advises the Dean. The Councils goal is to provide philanthropic leadership through feedback, ideas and support for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

"On behalf of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I was honored to have the opportunity to present John with this award," said Dean Richardson. "The success he's achieved throughout his career is impressive, and it's my hope that he can continue to help us to grow and guide the College for years to come."

Since graduating from the University of Florida, Fitzpatrick co-founded Force Marketing, now the automotive industrys leading provider of technology-enabled and data-driven marketing services. Under his leadership, the company has earned a number of accolades and honors. It was named one of the Best & Brightest Places to Work in the U.S. in 2015 and has earned a spot on the Inc. magazine 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. for seven consecutive years.

Fitzpatrick was also honored by the Gator 100 in 2015 and 2016, which recognizes the fastest-growing business in the U.S. that are led by University of Florida alumni.

To view the complete list of Outstanding Young Alumni Award honorees for 2016, visit [http://connect.ufalumni.ufl.edu/about/youngalumniawards. To learn more about Fitzpatrick or Force Marketing, please visit ForceMKTG.com.

ABOUT FORCE MARKETING

Force Marketing is an innovative automotive multi-channel marketing company headquartered in Atlanta, Ga. The agency offers technology-enabled marketing services to an expansive client base throughout the U.S. and Canada. The company made Inc. magazines Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. in 2015 for the seventh consecutive year. More information about Force Marketings auto dealership marketing services can be found online at http://www.ForceMKTG.com.
Continuous Electronic Monitoring System maybe ten years from now, we'll be seeing continuous monitoring on every bed in the hospital. It's industrys responsibility and ours as researchers to find the right technology to the right setting. Past News Releases RSS

The Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety (PPAHS) is pleased announce the release of an interview with Eyal Zimlichman, M.D., MSc.. Dr. Zimlichman holds dual appointments as Deputy Director General and Chief Quality Officer at Sheba Medical Center in Israel and at the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Womens Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

In an in-depth discussion with the Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety (PPAHS), Dr. Zimlichman discusses his research, experience, and thoughts on continuous electronic monitoring. He says that his research of a continuous electronic monitoring system has shown a 6-month break-even point for acquisition and implementation, and thereafter cost savings. To listen to the interview with Dr. Zimlichman on YouTube, please click here.

Research by Dr. Zimlichman and his colleagues has shown significant patient benefit, as well as a return on investment, when using continuous electronic monitoring:



In Continuous Monitoring in an Inpatient Medical-Surgical Unit: A Controlled Clinical Trial, continuous electronic monitoring on a medical-surgical unit was associated with a significant decrease in total length of stay in the hospital and in intensive care unit days for transferred patients, as well as lower code blue rates.

In The Return on Investment of Implementing a Continuous Monitoring System in General Medical-Surgical Units, implementation of a continuous electronic monitoring system was associated with a highly positive return on investment.

The continuous electronic monitoring system used by Dr. Zimlichman in his research tracked heart rate, respiratory rate, and patient motion.

In the interview, Dr. Zimlichman spoke about the need and benefit of early detection of patient deterioration. Dr Zimlichman:

 mostly in general floors, we have intermittent vital signs checks. These checks would go and somewhere between every six hours or even eight hours or sometimes four hours, but certainly not continuous 

So by the time of intervention between one vital sign check to the other, we actually would get to the patient bedside only when he goes into cardiac arrest, if that deterioration occurs. So being able to continuously monitor patients on general floors, much like we do on ICUs, could be something that would make a significant contribution to preventing these preventable deaths inside hospitals.

Dr. Zimlichman thinks that in the future every hospital bed will have continuous electronic monitoring. However, the same equipment may not be the same at every bed. He believes that clinicians need to choose the continuous electronic monitoring equipment that matches the particular medical unit:

I think it's my notion that maybe ten years from now, we'll be seeing continuous monitor ing on every bed in the hospital. It's industrys responsibility and ours as researchers to find the right technology to the right setting.

So, just taking ICU monitors and just putting them on every bed in hospital, of course, is not the right solution. We have to find the suitable monitors for the general floors, maybe other monitors for the emergency department or for a gastroenterology suite. So every kind of location needs to have the technology that fits that location.

And then beyond the hospital, of course, as we go through hall monitoring, and that's also one of the fields that's been progressing rapidly in the last few years. We need to figure out better how to do continuous monitoring at home, how to identify those trends and alerts with those trends and react early to signs of deterioration. So, I think we're entering a very exciting field and exciting time that would show us a lot of improvement in preventing preventable deaths which of course is something we're all aiming for.

To read a transcript of the interview with Dr. Zimlichman, please click here.

To listen to the interview with Dr. Zimlichman on YouTube, please click here.

About Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety

Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety is a non-profit 501(c)(3) whose mission is to promote safer clinical practices and standards for patients through collaboration among healthcare experts, professionals, scientific researchers, and others, in order to improve health care delivery. For more information, please go to http://www.ppahs.org
Greystone Hotels Each year we celebrate Earth Day on April 22nd, but remain committed to being environmental stewards and model citizens 365 days-a-year.

In its continued commitment to eco-friendly hospitality management and service, San Francisco based Greystone Hotels (http://www.greystonehotels.com) announces participation in the 46th annual celebration of Earth Day on April 22, 2016. All 11 of Greystones California and Oregon based properties will donate a portion of gross room revenues from Earth Day, April 22 to the Nature Conservancy, as well as an organized day of service for all employees. Day of Service local community partners include: SE Bend Park Site Cleanup (Bend, OR), Clean Pan Pacific Park (Los Angeles), La Comida de California (Palo Alto), 14th Annual Creek to Bay Cleanup (San Diego), Beckys House Hygiene Kit Assembly (San Diego), Save Our Shores Beach Cleanup (Santa Cruz), Adopt-a-Street Program (San Francisco), Glides Feed the Hungry Initiative (San Francisco).

Greystone Hotels has been a long-time supporter of eco-friendly organizations, including an annual donation to the Nature Conservancy and the National Arbor Day foundation (as part of their yearly Earth Hour Celebration), as well as actively partnering with the Clean the World organization (http://www.cleantheworld.org), who recycles unused hospitality industry hygiene products to combat disease and illness both domestically and internationally.

As a part of our company wide eco-friendly and service oriented commitment, we are always looking for ways to support Mother Earth, as well as our local communities through local partnerships and outreach efforts, said Eric Horodas, President of Greystone Hotels. Each year we celebrate Earth Day on April 22nd, but remain committed to being environmental stewards and model citizens 365 days-a-year.

On Earth Day 2016, over one billion people in 193 countries will take action to protect our shared environment. Celebrated on April 22 in big cities and small villages, people organize, demand climate action, clean up their local communities, meet with their elected officials, plant trees, and teach their children to protect our planet. First celebrated in 1970, the event is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network.

More Details on Greystone Hotels Earth Day Partner Organizations:

Bristol Hotel (San Diego)



Beckys House

Creeekside Inn (Palo Alto)



La Comida de California

Elan Hotel (Los Angeles)



Clean Pan Pacific Park

Empress Hotel/Best Western Seven Seas (La Jolla/San Diego)



14th Annual Creek to Bay Clean Up

Hotel Griffon/Inn at Union Square (San Francisco)



Adopt-A-Street Program

Hotel Los Gatos (Los Gatos)



Save our Shores

King George Hotel (San Francisco)



Glides Feed the Hungry Initiative

TownePlace Suites/Fairfield Inn and Suites (Bend, OR)


Petersons, an educational publisher, and Prometric, a test development and delivery provider, are excited to announce their partnership making Petersons the official provider of print and online solutions designed to prepare students for select DSST exams.

"Together through this partnership, we will be able to provide service members enhanced test preparation material and tools while continuing to deliver the highest-quality exam content that helps them advance their education while they serve," states Jana Von Bramer, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing, Prometric.

The DSST program provides students a cost-effective, time-saving way to use the knowledge they have acquired outside the classroom to accomplish their educational and professional goals; DSST exams are accepted or administered at over 1,900 colleges and universities nationwide. There are over 30 DSST exams that cover a diverse range of subject areas, such as social sciences, math, applied technology, business, physical sciences, and humanities.

Benefits of the DSST program:



Earn credit for previously learned knowledge

Advance your career and/or continue your education

Use your educational assistance money to enroll in more advanced courses

Make up missed courses

Graduate sooner

Last year, approximately 55,000 students took a DSST exam, with more than 52% funded by the military.

Our commitment to providing dependable tools to empower and accelerate military students and their families college success remains strong, says Dominic Rotondi, Executive Director, Petersons. Were excited about the opportunity to continue to provide outstanding DSST preparation to eligible military personnel and their families through our partnership with Prometric.

Petersons offers practice exams online for 21 DSST exam titles, featuring three full-length (100-question) practice tests and one printable practice test. Petersons Official Guide to Mastering DSST Exams (Part I and II) covers 16 exam titles. Each guide includes an initial diagnostic and post-test with detailed answer explanations for each of the featured DSST exams. The guides also include complete reviews of each subject area to help students score higher and provide tips and strategies to improve scores on the actual DSST exam.

For more information on DSST test preparation, please visit: GetCollegeCredit.com/TestPrep.

About Prometric

Prometric offers its clients the ability to test virtually anywhere in the world through its proprietary technology platform and best-in-class test centers in more than 160 countries and on behalf of more than 350 clients in the healthcare, academic, financial, government, professional, corporate, and information technology markets. Committed to a set of values that get the right test to the right location at the right time and to the right test taker, Prometric supports candidates worldwide who take more than nine million tests each year. Through innovation, workflow automation, and standardization, Prometric advances test development and delivery solutions that are better, faster, and less expense for its clients. Prometric is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ETS and a trusted, market-leading provider of technology-enabled testing and assessment. For more information, please visit Prometric.com.

About Petersons

Petersons, a Nelnet company, has been the trusted educational publisher for over 50 years. Its a milestone were quite proud of, as we continue to provide the most accurate, dependable, high-quality education content in the field, providing students with everything they need to succeed. No matter where they are on their academic or professional path, they can rely on Petersons publications and its online information at Petersons.com for the most up-to-date education exploration data, admissions resources, expert test prep and scholarship tools, and the highest-quality career success resourceseverything they need to achieve their goals.

 2016 DSST. All Rights Reserved. DSST is a registered trademark of Prometric.
"As one of our region's fastest growing and most dynamic technology companies, Nitro is helping shape Tampa's economic future."

Nitro Mobile Solutions, a leading mobile software technology, consulting and services provider that helps business streamline operations and access new revenue channels, announced today that it has invested in the Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corporation at the Executive Committee level.

Nitro invested in the Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corporation after the organization assisted the company with workforce recruiting and its recent move to a 9,000 square foot office at 501 East Kennedy Blvd. in downtown Tampa.

Weve had only positive experiences with the EDC and as our business has grown, we recognized what they could do for us, Tampa and Hillsborough County as a whole, said Pete Slade, founder and CEO of Nitro. Theyre working hard to bring talent to the area and build a stronger business landscape and we couldnt pass up the opportunity to participate in that.

The Tampa Hillsborough EDC, whose mission is to develop and sustain a thriving local economy by focusing on the attraction, expansion and retention of high-wage jobs and capital investment helps organizations grow by facilitating connections between business leaders and providing access to resources needed for local expansion.

Were excited to add Pete Slade to our Executive Committee leadership, said J.P. DuBuque, the EDCs Interim President and CEO. As one of our regions fastest growing and most dynamic technology companies, Nitro is helping to shape Tampas economic future. Their culture and ability to attract first-rate talent are putting Hillsborough County on the map as a preferred destination for highly skilled people and innovative companies.

Working with the EDC, Nitro plans to add up to 35 new high-wage jobs by 2018. Its goal is to expand locally, attract exceptional talent and work to position Tampa as a desired business destination  helping build a foundation for Hillsborough Countys economic success.

Interested candidates are encouraged to visit http://www.nitromobilesolutions.com/Careers for more information about available positions.

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About Nitro Mobile Solutions:

Nitro Mobile Solutions is a software development company that helps enterprises streamline and optimize business through technology. Nitros patent-pending tools, superior technology and unparalleled consulting expertise have been recognized by professional publications and organizations. Nitro has twice been named one of the top 100 small businesses in America by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, secured position #248 on the elite Inc. 500 for its exceptional growth and earned the titles Best Place to Work and Top Software Developers from the Tampa Bay Business Journal. Additionally, Nitro was named Technology Company of the Year by the Tampa Bay Technology Forum in 2015. Learn more at http://www.nitromobilesolutions.com.

About the Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corporation:

The Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development works to develop and sustain a thriving local economy through the attraction, retention and expansion of high-wage jobs and capital investment in Hillsborough County and the cities of Tampa, Plant City, and Temple Terrace. Our efforts are focused on growing locally established companies as well as recruiting corporate headquarters and regional operations in targeted industry sectors including Information Technology, Financial and Professional Services, Life Sciences, Defense and Security, Manufacturing, and Distribution and Logistics. The Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corporation exists because of the generous support of over 100 investors from the local community. For more information, visit http://www.tampaedc.com.
We will support food producers, retailers and traders to reduce transit times by using the Port of Savannah as a direct entry point to market

Nordic Logistics and Warehousing, a proud member of AGRO Merchants Group, has doubled the capacity of its Savannah location by adding a new 200,000 square-foot cold storage and blast freezing facility to its existing site. The added space will bring the company's total Savannah frozen and chilled storage capacity to 50,000 tons of cargo and double the current blast capacity. The expansion is part of AGROs commitment to invest in modern assets, industry-leading technologies and value-added service offerings to ensure the highest quality supply chain management standards in the industry.

The modern infrastructure will allow us to offer more comprehensive solutions, leveraging Savannah as a key U.S. port of entry/exit for our global customers in combination with other AGRO locations in Europe, North & South America, said Neal Rider, Chief Executive Officer of AGRO Merchants Group.

Nordic Logistics and Warehousing became part of AGRO Merchants Group in October 2015, adding significant scale and capabilities to AGROs expanding U.S. and global cold chain distribution network. The multi-region cold chain provider added more than 70 million cubic feet of flexible, temperature controlled storage to AGROs network. The Nordic network specializes in end-to-end services, including import/export product handling, transportation, temperature-controlled warehousing, blast freezing, and state-of-the-art warehouse management.

Don Schoenl, President of AGRO Merchants Group North America said, We will now have an opportunity to meet the demand of our clients, providing the necessary capacity to handle larger volumes of frozen products. We will support food producers, retailers and traders to reduce transit times by using the Port of Savannah as a direct entry point to market.

The Port of Savannah handles 40 percent of all frozen poultry sent overseas, more than any other port in the U.S., providing an outstanding service with fast turn times for trucks carrying refrigerated containers. AGRO Merchants Group is committed to growing in Savannah and expanding its North American footprint.

"Nordic's expansion here is a powerful endorsement of the Port of Savannah's expertise in handling refrigerated cargo, and its ability to meet the demands of producers as well as a growing consumer market across the U.S. Southeast," said Griff Lynch, incoming executive director at the Georgia Ports Authority. Private sector investment such as Nordic's supports American growers of produce and proteins, added Lynch.

About AGRO Merchants Group

AGRO Merchants Group owns and operates 53 facilities in 8 countries across North America, Latin America and Europe, with more than 700,000 square meters of cold storage. The company is focused on providing innovative cold chain solutions on a global basis by partnering with the highest quality family businesses and creating new, reliable, and integrated trade networks to help its customers grow. AGRO invests in modern assets, industry-leading technologies, and value-added service offerings to ensure the highest quality supply chain management standards in the industry.

For additional information, please visit AGROs website at http://www.agromerchants.com.
Kohinoor was neither stolen nor forcibly taken by British rulers but given to East India Company by erstwhile rulers of Punjab 167 years back, government told the court. (Photo: AFP)

London: The people should respect the Indian government's decision on 108-carat unique Kohinoor diamond and support it, Britain's longest serving MP of Asian origin in the House of Commons Keith Vaz said on Tuesday.

The Indian Government made a statement to the Supreme Court on Monday that India should not try to reclaim the Kohinoor diamond as it was given to Britain as a gift.

"The Indian Government has made its decision and we should respect and support it. This draws a line under this particular campaign. There may of course be other issues that need to be pursued. I am sure Her Majesty the Queen will be pleased as she celebrates her 90th birthday," Vaz said.

The diamond estimated to cost over USD 200 million was neither stolen nor "forcibly" taken by British rulers but given to East India Company by erstwhile rulers of Punjab 167 years back, government told the court.

Kohinoor, which means Mountain of Light, is a large, colourless diamond that was found in Southern India in early 14th century. The gem, which came into British hands during the colonial era, is the subject of a historic ownership dispute and claimed by at least four nations including India.
Subscribing to iconectivs Common Language Information Services, enables IFN to be more responsive to Carrier Wholesale customer requirements for interconnection.

Indiana Fiber Network, LLC (IFN), the leading Indiana statewide Network Service Provider, announced it has expanded its subscription to iconectivs Common Language Information Services to include CLCI  S/S Codes for circuit identification. IFN has already been using Common Language to identify locations using the CLONES global registry. Added to its current subscription, this new data will allow IFN to further streamline interconnection orders and billing and payment processes, while maintaining more accurate and detailed records for its customers and strengthening its Carrier Wholesale service offering.

"Our mission is to provide innovative, tailored technology solutions to our members, customers, and partners in the most effective, reliable, and economically sound method possible, said Kelly Dyer, IFN president and CEO. Subscribing to iconectivs Common Language Information Services enables IFN to be more responsive to Carrier Wholesale customer requirements for interconnection.

iconectivs Common Language Information Services are the telecommunications industrys standard data infrastructure for identifying network elements and have been used across the industry for more than 30 years. The suite of products includes CLLI Codes, CLFI Codes, CLCI Codes, NC/NCI Codes, CLEI Codes, General Codes, USOC Codes, and FID Codes, which are essential for identifying and defining locations, equipment, circuits, and other critical network components across a telecommunications network. Through iconectivs data information solutions, communications providers and telecom equipment manufacturers can overcome complex network management, asset management, and service activation challenges.

IFNs expansion of Common Language confirms its strong commitment to its Carrier Wholesale division. Common Language provides a unique combination of code sets, software tools, expertise, standards management, industry forum facilitation, and direction to achieve a level of data infrastructure management not possible in a single service provider, said George Cray, Head of Information Solutions, iconectiv.

With iconectivs services and tools, IFN is positioned to better serve its customers and partners by communicating interconnection locations more effectively. In addition, IFN can adhere to the standards used across the telecom industry. This alignment will also reduce errors and streamline internal processes because locations and circuits will be consistently named and referenced across the entire network.

Using Common Language, IFNs point-of-interface (POI) can be communicated in a clear, unambiguous form in a language that is globally recognized when interconnecting between service providers. Registering our information and having access to the global registry ourselves, IFN will significantly reduce the cost and time associated with interconnections for our carrier customers, Tom Bechtel, IFN Vice President of Network Planning and Operations, added.

About iconectiv

iconectiv's interconnection, data infrastructure, and messaging solutions help more than one billion people communicate daily, and are used by thousands of service providers, regulators, enterprises, and content providers. The company has more than 30 years of telecommunications innovation and policy experience which has been used to develop a range of solutions. iconectivs core product areas are common short codes, routing, portability, Common Language Information Services, and Mobile Messaging. Make the connection. For more information, visit http://www.iconectiv.com.

About Indiana Fiber Network, LLC

Indiana Fiber Network, LLC (IFN) was formed in March of 2002. IFNs ownership is comprised of 20 local exchange telephone companies throughout the state. IFN offers data center, Internet backbone, and data transport services over stateoftheart Ethernet, CWDM, DWDM, and SONET fiber networks, with service in the state of Indiana and throughout the U.S. via a network of national carrier partners. Follow IFN on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/indianafiber. For more information, please visit IFNs website at http://www.ifncom.net or call (317) 280-4636. IFNs iconectiv creator code is IIW.
BigHand With BigHand, the IT component of dictation is now centralized and we can easily make changes on the fly to reassign work to other support staff. - David Pietraszewski, Network Engineer

For over 50 years, the law firm of Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria has remained dedicated to ensuring the firms attorneys and staff have all the resources necessary to provide clients with the highest levels of service and the best results possible. The firm, which is headquartered in Buffalo, NY, continuously explores opportunities to integrate advancing technologies in to the daily operations of its attorneys and support staff to further Lipsitz Greens efforts to serve clients as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Prior to working with BigHand, Lipsitz Green was searching for a tool that elevated its attorneys frequent use of dictation devices. The firm sought to create a process that would be more convenient for on-the-go dictation needs and less demanding for IT support. BigHands state-of-the-art mobility application allowed Lipsitz Greens attorneys to use their smartphones for their dictation needs, no matter where they are. Also, the IT support requirements for BigHand are minimal, greatly reducing the burden on the IT staff.

David Pietraszewski, Network Engineer at Lipsitz Green said, With BigHand, the IT component of dictation is now centralized and we can easily make changes on the fly to reassign work to other support staff. The attorneys love that they can now work from wherever they are, and that they can efficiently submit their dictations to support staff regardless of whether they are in the office, at home, or in transit.

Aside from the traditional use of dictation for creating letters and documents, the firms attorneys also use dictation to accomplish countless other tasks such as booking travel, scheduling meetings and delegating tasks to support staff. BigHand has given the firms attorneys the freedom to work no matter where they are, as well as the ability of support staff to share work and reassign tasks as needed. In addition, it has relieved the IT staff from burdensome support of the firms previous system.

About Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria LLP

With nearly 50 attorneys, Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria is one of Buffalos largest law firms. The firm serves individuals, organizations, and corporations with practice areas that include Accidents and Personal Injury; Business and Corporate; Business Litigation; Criminal Defense Trials and Appeals; Estates, Wills, and Trusts; Labor and Employment; Matrimonial and Family; Medical Malpractice; Professional Licensing Defense; Real Estate; Social Security Disability; and Workers Compensation. In addition to its headquarters in Buffalo, Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria has offices in Amherst, Cheektowaga, Ithaca, and Los Angeles.

About BigHand

Established in 1996, BigHand supports over 280,000 professionals globally across 2,550 organizations and the number grows daily. BigHand is based in Chicago, Eindhoven, London, Sydney, Temecula and Toronto.

BigHand specializes in speech, task delegation, document creation and process improvement solutions that help our customers achieve more in less time. We have worked with our clients over many years with our highly successful digital dictation solutions, and have built on this deep customer knowledge to extend our offering further. We develop tools based on what our clients need, tools that are enabling, useful and intuitive  easy to use, in the office or on the move.

BigHands Voice, Delegation and Improvement product suites are HIPAA compliant to protect the privacy and security of protected health information (PHI) as defined in the HITECH Act. BigHand is also ISO27001 certified.

For more information, visit http://www.bighand.com or follow BigHand on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Scott Rohm With extensive experience at leading international hospitality brands, Scott will bring practiced acumen to Auberge. His impressive track record and his passion for organizational culture will make him a valuable leader as we continue to grow.

Auberge Resorts Collection, owner and operator of boutique luxury hotels, resorts, residences and private clubs, announced today that C. Scott Rohm will join the company as Chief Operating Officer. In his new role, Rohm will oversee global operations and ensure the performance of the collections existing resorts and residences continues to uphold best-in-class standards. Rohm also will play a key role in the curating of new hotels and resorts as the company expands.

With extensive experience at leading international hospitality brands, Scott will bring practiced acumen to our Auberge family, said Reid. His impressive track record of business and brand development and his passion for organizational culture will make him a valuable leader as we continue to grow."

Rohm joins Auberge Resorts Collection with more than 30 years of hospitality and development experience. He most recently served as President of SH Group, a start-up brand and management affiliate of Starwood Capital Group. While there, he led the launches of high-profile hotels such as Baccarat New York, 1 Hotel Central Park, 1 Hotel South Beach and the pre-opening development of four additional hotels. His responsibilities also included the recruitment of senior leadership at each hotel, employee development and public relations efforts.

Prior to joining SH Group, Rohm served as President of Turnberry Hotel Group in Florida, where he led the development of corporate culture and introduced strategic-planning and quality systems across the nine-hotel portfolio. He earlier served as Senior Vice President of Operations and Partner at West Paces Hotel Group (currently Capella Hotel Group).

Rohm holds a Bachelor of Science Hotel and Restaurant Management degree from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

About Auberge Resorts Collection

Auberge Resorts Collection owns and operates a portfolio of exceptional hotels, resorts, residences and private clubs under two distinct brands: Auberge Hotels and Resorts, timeless luxury properties acclaimed for their intimate, understated elegance, and VieVage Hotels and Resorts, a new lifestyle brand that brings together contemporary themes of design, community and wellness in a fresh, active and social environment. While Auberge nurtures the individuality of each property, all share a crafted approach to luxury that is expressed through captivating design, exceptional cuisine and spas, and gracious yet unobtrusive service. Properties in the Auberge Resorts Collection include: Auberge du Soleil and Calistoga Ranch, Napa Valley, Calif.; Esperanza, Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; Hotel Jerome, Aspen, Colo.; Malliouhana, Anguilla; Nanuku, Fiji; The Auberge Residences at Element 52, Telluride, Colo.; Hacienda AltaGracia, Perez Zeledon, Costa Rica; VieVage, Napa Valley; VieVage, Los Cabos; and Auberge Beach Residences and Spa Fort Lauderdale, with several others in development. For more information about Auberge Resorts Collection, please visit http://www.aubergeresorts.com/. Follow Auberge Resorts Collection on Facebook at facebook.com/AubergeResorts and on Twitter at @AubergeResorts.
CallTower Acquires ConnectSolutions' Skype4B Assets We are excited to extend our award winning Skype for Business offering to our newly acquired ConnectSolutions Skype for Business customer base

CallTower is proud to announce the acquisition of ConnectSolutions Skype for Business Assets.

CallTower is continuing its aggressive growth strategy with the key acquisition of ConnectSolutions Skype for Business assets. The acquisition marks the second transaction for CallTower in 2016. In January of 2016, CallTower merged with SoundConnect to create a global leading technology and innovation driven unified communications company.

We are excited to extend our award winning Skype for Business offering to our newly acquired ConnectSolutions Skype for Business customer base said Bret England, CallTowers CEO. Our Skype for Business solution delivers the Worlds most dynamic hosted communications solution. CallTower will integrate ConnectSolutions Skype for Business customers into its existing platform maximizing their ability to add Salesforce.com integration, call recording, contact center solutions and the additional benefit of 24/7/365 USA based support. CallTower is differentiated by its ability to delivery ground-breaking business communication solutions on a Microsoft Skye for Business and Cisco Hosted PBX platform. with exceptional technical and customer support, on a superior global network to operating efficiencies and economies of scale for its customers.

ConnectSolutions was originally founded to extend the Adobe Connect user experience for large enterprises and government agencies, said ConnectSolutions' CEO Glen D. Vondrick. We will continue focusing on our core strengths in private managed cloud services for virtual classroom and eLearning with Adobe Connect. Over 400 customers continue to depend on ConnectSolutions for the highest levels of security, reliability, and scalability in their business-critical use cases. With this transaction, we are happy that our CoSo Microsoft customers and Team Up customers will receive service and support from CallTower going forward.

About CallTower

CallTower exists to enable people to easily connect to transact business communications. CallTower is a leading provider of cloud-based, enterprise-class unified communications solutions for growing organizations worldwide. We provide, integrate and support industry-leading, cloud-based, Unified Communications and Collaboration services for business customers. We enhance our clients strategic and operational capabilities by integrating VoIP service, mobile applications, email hosting, unified messaging, instant messaging, audio, web and video conferencing, collaboration tools, contact center, cloud services and global networks solutions into one reliable platform.

About ConnectSolutions

ConnectSolutions (CoSo), an Adobe Gold Solution Partner, is the trusted private-cloud solutions provider for Adobe Connect, providing expert managed and professional services with custom integration support for business critical use cases. With more than 8 billion minutes of cloud collaboration delivered, CoSo products, services, and unrivaled expertise are relied upon by large distributed enterprises, US government agencies, and professional eLearning organizations to deliver a superior customer experience in the deployment and ongoing management of mission-critical collaboration, eLearning and virtual classroom solutions.
We deeply appreciate the participation of our benefactors, whose generous contributions make the NACDS Foundation Scholarship Program a reality.

Recognizing the important role of pharmacy education in helping to advance patient care, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (NACDS) Foundation announced $230,000 in scholarships and grants through its 2016 NACDS Foundation Scholarship Program. The recipients were presented with their awards tonight at an NACDS Foundation event during the NACDS Annual Meeting.

This years awardees were selected from more than 40 general and diversity scholarship applications submitted from deans of accredited colleges and schools of pharmacy across the country. Six grants were awarded to applicants for innovative education programs in the amount of $20,000 each, including two in the name of industry leaders: The Wayne Roberts Memorial Scholarship, provided by Apotex Corporation, and the Robert J. Bolger Scholarship, provided by Teva. Additionally, two one-time grants in the amount of $15,000 each were awarded for excellence in diversity programs.

The awardees of the 2016 NACDS Foundation Scholarships for excellence in education are:

1. Northeast Ohio Medical University College of Pharmacy will expand patient access to community pharmacist-driven medication management services by developing a new Innovation Center that will pilot cutting-edge telehealth technology and align professional development with new models of care.

2. Duquesne University, Mylan School of Pharmacy will help prevent opioid-related overdose deaths in collaboration with the Allegheny County Department of Health in Pennsylvania by improving access to naloxone, developing an education program for pharmacists, and promoting public awareness and community outreach.

3. University of Charleston School of Pharmacy will launch a rural outreach screening campaign in West Virginia in collaboration with public health entities in order to provide much-needed care in underserved communities and advance public health.

4. University of Colorado, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences will promote enhanced pharmacy services for underserved patients living in rural Colorado, strengthen inter-professional healthcare partnerships, and examine the health outcomes impact of improved data sharing among local healthcare entities.

5. University of New England College of Pharmacy will address the prescription drug abuse epidemic and its devastating health consequences for patients in Maine by creating a continuing education curriculum for prescribers and pharmacists that increases the appropriate use of the states Prescription Monitoring Program.

6. Midwestern University, Chicago College of Pharmacy will address the ongoing opioid crisis by infusing comprehensive educational programming into the student curriculum through the incorporation of a patient-centered education model and a state-of-the art Clinical Simulation Center (CSC) to promote better pain management, detection of opioid misuse and treatment of overdose.

Awardees of the 2016 NACDS Foundation Scholarships for excellence in diversity programs:

1. University of New Mexico College of Pharmacy will expand its current diversity program, which aims to increase access to healthcare providers whose cultural and ethnic background is similar to the populations they serve, by providing twelve (12) scholarships for tuition and culturally responsible professional development.

2. Texas Southern University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences will provide guided mentorship and intensive Pharmacy College Admission Test (PCAT) preparation to pre-pharmacy students from underrepresented African American and Hispanic minorities in order to prepare for pharmacy school admission.

The NACDS Foundation also awarded $2,000 scholarships to each of the colleges and schools of pharmacy whose deans were in attendance at the event.

The NACDS Foundation Scholarship Program is designed to fund prospective projects that hold promise to meaningfully improve patient care. Accredited colleges and schools of pharmacy were asked to submit applications for projects that may include community-based research projects and patient-centered coursework, or other innovative curriculum.

We deeply appreciate the participation of our benefactors, whose generous contributions make the NACDS Foundation Scholarship Program a reality, said NACDS Foundation President Kathleen Jaeger. Their continued support demonstrates the commitment of community pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry to advance public health by supporting innovative educational programs in patient care.

The NACDS Foundation Scholarship Program began in 1997. Since then, more than $3.75 million in scholarships has been provided for pharmacy education thanks to the generous support of the programs benefactors.
L to R: Barry Lucas (host dad), Justin Masciarelli, Meghan Masciarelli, Camden Masciarelli, Lorena Lucas (host mom), Kaoru (Ayusa exchange student), Jr-Rong (Melody) (friend/another Ayusa student). From the moment she walked through our door, [Ayusa exchange student] Kaoru loved my grandsons as if they were her family.

Ayusa International, a non-profit organization that has promoted global learning and leadership through high school student cultural exchanges for more than 35 years, is launching its annual search for families in Florida, with a special emphasis on the Hillsborough and Pasco County families interested in hosting international students for the 2016-2017 school year.

Ayusa is looking for host families throughout the entire state, specifically in and around:



Hillsborough County, Lakeland

Pasco County

Clearwater/St. Petersburg

Daytona Beach

Miami, Ft. Lauderdale

Ft. Meyers, Naples

Orlando

Pensacola

St. Augustine

West Palm Beach

Ayusa host families who volunteer to open their home to exchange students contribute to the global community as public diplomats for greater international understanding. Each host family and student creates a lasting relationship that spans the cultural differences between their two nations.

The Lucas family from Zephyrhills has been hosting Kaoru from Japan, who attends Zephyrhills High School. Host mom Lorena Lucas shares: When we selected our student for this year, we hoped to find someone who was great with children. From the moment she walked through our door, Kaoru loved my grandsons as if they were her family, she said. I think its worked out so well with the babies and her because they have no language barrier  a smile is universal, and they are all fluent! she exclaimed. Lorena added that from the moment Kaoru arrives home from school, the oldest grandson rushes to play with her, and that sometimes he prefers her to hold him instead of family members. I know he will miss her very much when she leaves! Lorena said.

Ayusa works with diverse families who are interested in hosting an international student of high school age. Families without children, empty nesters, military families, retirees, and single people are all welcome. Ayusa families come from all over the country and reside in rural, suburban and urban communities.

Says Ayusas Southeast regional manager Jess Hodge, Florida is such a beautiful state. The open hearts of the people who live there are seen in the way they welcome Ayusas exchange students into their homes and lives. Host families share their traditions and some of the many recreational opportunities available in the state, while students share their culture and lifestyle with their hosts. Travel the world without leaving Florida! Check out the opportunity for international friendship on our website  host a student!

Host families provide the exchange student with three meals a day and a bedroom (private or shared). A professionally trained Ayusa representative supports each host family, student, and local school throughout the program year. Ayusas exchange students are 15-18 years old and come from more than 60 countries around the world. Students are fully insured, bring their own spending money, and are proficient in English.

How to Host an International Student

Interested families can learn more about the program and available exchange students and request additional information by visiting http://www.ayusa.org or calling 1-888-552-9872.

The process to apply is simple. Families complete the online application, which includes questions about themselves and the local high school, references, and a background check. The local Ayusa Community Representative conducts an in-home interview. They can also help each family with any questions they may have about the application or process.

After families are fully approved, they can select the Ayusa student they would like to host.

About Ayusa

Ayusa International (http://www.ayusa.org) is a 501(c)3 non-profit student exchange organization founded in 1981 and an official U.S. Department of State designated Exchange Visitor Program Sponsor. In addition, Ayusa administers high profile grant programs funded by the U.S. Department of State and other organizations. Ayusa is a sister company of Intrax, a family of organizations that provides a lifetime of high-quality educational, work and volunteer programs that connect people and cultures. Intrax is headquartered in San Francisco with offices on four continents.
Plans are underway for the NEW & IMPROVED 6th Annual Naptown BarBAYq Contest & Music Festival The 2015 Festival was a huge success and we are looking forward to raising the bar even higher in 2016!

Mark your calendars for the 6th Annual new and improved Naptown barBAYq Contest & Music Festival, Friday, May 6th. and Saturday, May 7th, 2016, at the Anne Arundel County Fairgrounds, in Crownsville, MD. The Festival is a family affair and features a barbeque competition sanctioned by the Kansas City Barbeque Society, two Peoples Choice competitions, great food and adult libations, live music, plus, activities for all ages and arts and crafts vendors.

The Parole Rotary, Festival hosts, are mixing things up a little this year. The Festival is now Friday, May 6th, and Saturday, May 7th, 2016. And new this year, the KCBS Competitors have been moved into the Festival venue, creating the barBAYq Village. This gives festival-goers the chance to walk through and meet the competitors, but dont expect them to give up their secret recipe. The barBAYq Village will be open on Friday afternoon and evening and all day Saturday.

On Friday, its party time at the Fairgrounds, the gates open at 4:00pm with a Happy Hour - half price beer from 4-7pm, and a Peoples Choice Wing Competition in the barBAYq Village. Attendees are invited to taste as many wings as they wish and vote for their favorite. The barBAYq Village will be buzzing as the teams make their final preparations for the KCBS sanctioned BBQ contest. Live music kicks off with 9 Mile Roots and Weird Science will take the stage at 7pm. The arts n crafts vendors will be open and of course, plenty of great food from our select food vendors, and the beer will be flowing.

Saturday the gates open at Noon, kids 12 and under are free, and will enjoy the Kid Korral with free activities. Live music on two stages all day, and at 6pm Marshall Law will take the stage for the evening concert. Be sure to check out the Peoples Choice Pulled Pork Competition starting at 2pm (until the pork runs out). Its a great way to sample the teams BBQ and vote for a favorite.

Also new this year is a partnership with Union Jacks in Annapolis. On Friday and Saturday night, festival-goers wearing barBAYq wristbands can head over to Union Jacks for the barBAYq after party and cover charges will be waived.

The Naptown barBAYq Contest & Music Festival is a Kansas City Barbeque Society (KCBS) sanctioned event. 50 teams will compete this year for cash prizes and trophies in the categories of Chicken, Ribs, Pork, and Brisket. The overall winner of the 2016 Naptown barBAYq Contest will be named the Grand Champion of Maryland. The winner of the Peoples Choice will be announced on Saturday, May 7th, 2016, at 5pm.

Over the past five years, the Festival has generated over $250,000 and provided grants to Anne Arundel Medical Center Pediatrics Emergency Inpatient Unit, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Annapolis & Anne Arundel County, Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, The Phoenix Academy and numerous other local children's charities.

According to Henry Riser, Festival Director, The 2015 Festival was a huge success and we are looking forward to raising the bar even higher in 2016! We're all working hard to make this year's event even better...more delicious barbeque, more music, more kids activitiesjust more. We are a service club that significantly improves lives in our local community and around the world by meeting real needs. Through the work we do at the Festival and all year long, our club makes a positive difference for youth today, so they will make a difference tomorrow, thats our mantra summarizing our mission and goals, explains Henry Riser, 2016 Festival Director.

Tickets for the Festival are $15 per day, if purchased before May 1st, 2016, $20 after that. Kids 12 and under are admitted free. For more information about the Festival, to volunteer or become a sponsor, please visit the new website at http://www.barBAYq.com.

Please "LIKE" Naptown on Facebook by searching Naptown barBAYq, follow on Twitter @barBAYq, or search YouTube for Naptown barBAYq.

The Naptown barBAYq Contest & Music Festival is hosted by the Parole (Annapolis) Rotary Club Foundation, Inc., the 501(c)3 entity of the Parole (Annapolis) Rotary Club and staffed by members of the Parole (Annapolis) Rotary Club and volunteers from the community.

About Rotary

Rotary is a worldwide network of inspired individuals who translate their passions into relevant social causes to change lives in communities. Made up of over 34,000 Rotary clubs around the world, Rotary International forms a global network of business, professional, and community leaders who volunteer their time and talents to serve communities locally and around the world  and form strong, lasting friendships in the process. Rotary's motto, Service Above Self, exemplifies the humanitarian spirit of the 1.2 million Rotarians worldwide.
Now in its third year, Orange Fab, the US startup accelerator for European telecommunication carrier Orange, welcomes five new startups into their sixth season. These new startups feature the latest advancements in digital workforce, enterprise, mobile technology and consumer IoT platforms and include Midfin, SolePower, Tara, Verdigris, and Wonolo. These new additions join 40 startups that have graduated from the Orange Fab accelerator since its inception.

Orange Fab Season Six is made up of five companies set to having a profound impact on the markets in which they compete. They are:



Midfin Systems: edge cloud on open hardware

SolePower: insole technology for powering portable electronics

TARA: AI project manager that recruits contractors and manages your software projects

Verdigris: responsive energy intelligence platform for commercial facilities

Wonolo: on-demand platform that powers the frontline workforce

In just the last few weeks, Verdigris announced an impressive $9M in funding from notable investors such as Jabil Circuit, Stanford StartX Fund, Founder.org Capital, DCVC and private investors. Wonolo announced that they have raised $5.7M in Series A funding, bringing their total amount raised to $9.1 million.

In addition to raising capital, Orange Fab Season 6 startups have reached new levels of excellence. TARA grabbed headlines for their application of artificial intelligence, which helps small businesses recruit developers and more effectively manage software projects. Midfin joined an elite group of companies to be Operations Ready and HDP Certified by Hortonworks, an industry leader in Big Data. SolePower launched their first consumer focused product, the EnSole, an insole that generates power as you walk.

Over the next 12 weeks, the five selected startups will gain access to Orange Silicon Valleys vast network of resources and international partners such as Hilton, Visa, Moet Hennessy, and other top global brands via the Fab Force program. Each of the startups will participate in mentorship sessions with notable entrepreneurs, experienced designers, marketing experts and product specialists. Additionally, each startup team is provided with free workspace in the Orange Silicon Valley office, located in the heart of San Francisco.

Orange Fab US is currently considering applicants for Season 7. Early application period will close May 1st, 2016 and Season 7 will take place August-November 2016. Any startup company incorporated in the United States, with an existing product or an advanced beta version, can apply via the new open enrollment process on the Orange Fab website.

To learn more about Orange Fab US, please visit: http://www.orangefab.com

About Orange

Orange is one of the worlds leading telecommunications operators with sales of 39 billion euros in 2014 and 157,000 employees worldwide at 30 September 2015, including 98,000 employees in France. Present in 28 countries, the Group has a total customer base of 263 million customers worldwide at 30 September 2015, including 200 million mobile customers and 18 million fixed broadband customers. Orange is also a leading provider of global IT and telecommunication services to multinational companies, under the brand Orange Business Services. In March 2015, the Group presented its new strategic plan Essentials2020 which places customer experience at the heart of its strategy with the aim of allowing them to benefit fully from the digital universe and the power of its new generation networks.

Orange is listed on Euronext Paris (symbol ORA) and on the New York Stock Exchange (symbol ORAN).

For more information on the internet and on your mobile: http://www.orange.com, http://www.orange-business.com, http://www.livetv.orange.com or to follow us on Twitter: @orangegrouppr.

Orange and any other Orange product or service names included in this material are trademarks of Orange or Orange Brand Services Limited.
Autotalks is proud to offer a truly secure solution for the anticipated NPRM, pondering that security cannot be compromised. Any successful attack will irrevocably harm the market, and Autotalks cannot take that risk.

Autotalks announced today its security solution for addressing the anticipated USDOT V2X Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). To realize the vision of V2X, vehicles must be able to trust messages from their surroundings. A basic set of V2X parameters is specified to facilitate minimal security requirements.

Autotalks, an international expert in multi-layer protection for vehicular security, believes that a far better security solution is available today and should be offered for protecting the V2X entry-point to the vehicle.

The Autotalks multi-layer approach includes a crypto-agile embedded Hardware Security Module (eHSM) integrated within the Autotalks 2nd-generation chipset, eliminating the need for an external HSM. In addition to reducing system costs, the integrated eHSM provides enhanced side-channel protection for preventing key extraction by analyzing power and time-variation patterns. It completes signing operations with shorter latency than first generation solutions.

Autotalks solution minimizes the surface of attack by applying verify-all scheme whereby each received message is verified before reaching the application. This surpasses the basic verify-on-demand scheme, in which the application selects messages for verification. With verify-all, application development can be security-unaware, with the amount of code potentially exposed to unsecure data reduced by an order of magnitude and testable. A further benefit of verify-all includes the ability to process every safety event without making assumptions about maximal number of relevant messages, as those assumptions may become invalid in case of an accident.

The upper protection layer in Autotalks mutli-layer protection approach is a secure V2X gateway that assures that the entire operation is resilient to malware.

Mr. Hagai Zyss, Autotalks CEO, explained: "Autotalks is proud to offer a truly secure solution for the anticipated NPRM, pondering that security cannot be compromised. Any successful attack will irrevocably harm the market, and Autotalks cannot take that risk." Mr. Zyss continues: "We believe that OEMs and Tier1s cannot take this risk as well."

About Autotalks Ltd.

Autotalks enables the V2X communication revolution by providing an automotive qualified chipset that supports all functions required from a V2X ECU. The unique technology of Autotalks addresses all key V2X challenges: communication reliability, security, positioning accuracy and vehicle installation. Autotalks ready solution is used in series production units. Autotalks and STMicroelectronics have formed a strategic partnership for the V2X market, and are working to produce a mass market-optimized second-generation V2X chipset.

For more information, visit http://www.auto-talks.com or e-mail: info(at)auto-talks(dot)com
The contacts we made at Vinitaly were of a higher level, from Italy and abroad, visitors from the public were well- managed, and there was a great influx of specialized trade and press.

After a full agenda of wine tastings, seminars, competitions and courses in Verona, Vinitaly 2016 came to a close on Wednesday April 13; according to wine producers, the 50th anniversary of the worlds largest wine event saw a notable increase in the caliber of trade and press attendees over previous years.

This years edition of Vinitaly brought in 130,000 trade professionals from 140 countries, and the more than 4,100 exhibitors occupied a record 100,000 square meters of exhibition space. International attendance reached nearly 50,000, with 28,000 accredited buyers from abroad, a 23% increase over last year.

Attendance numbers may seem low compared to past years, but that was precisely our goal: to make Vinitaly more business-focused than ever, explains Stevie Kim, Managing Director of Vinitaly International. Vinitaly and the City was expanded to draw wine lovers away from the expo halls and into the center of Verona, with a program of wine, food, music and culture. Vinitaly and the City had 29,000 visitors this year, which allowed producers and trade at the fair to focus on sales.

Exhibiting producers  including many of those featured April 9 at OperaWine, the premier event of Vinitaly showcasing the 100 best Italian wines as chosen by Wine Spectator magazine - agreed that this year saw a marked increase in professional attendees.

This edition of OperaWine was fantastic, even aside from the surprise concert by Sting! says Michele Bernetti, of Umani Ronchi. OperaWine has grown in the past few years, with trade and press from all over the world. The contacts we made at Vinitaly were also of a higher level, from Italy and abroad, visitors from the public were well- managed, and there was a great influx of specialized trade and press.

This was definitely the best edition of Vinitaly in a long time, agrees Michele Gianazza of Lvnae Bosoni in Liguria. We received many positive comments from our clients  including limiting access to members of the trade. We hope for more years like this!

We were very satisfied to be again invited to participate in the tasting of the finest wines in Italy at OperaWine, says Raffaela Bologna of Braida in Piedmont. Enologist and owner Giuseppe Bologna was pleasantly surprised by the influx of so many members of the Italian and foreign press, sommeliers, and international buyers!

OperaWine was a fantastic opening for Vinitalys 50th edition  it continues to capture more attention from foreign and domestic trade and press, says Marco Caprai, of Arnaldo Caprai in Umbria. Vinitaly had the same mood  very busy but with a significant increase in important trade members.

Once again this year OperaWine proved to be a prestigious event for the Italian wine community, as was the 50th edition of Vinitaly, which included a greater presence of trade professionals, concurred Roberto Fellugia, of Marco Felluga and Russiz Superiore, Friuli Venezia Giulia.

For us, OperaWine is the best event of the year for Italian wine, agree Gianfranco and Simona Fino, of Gianfranco Fino estate in Puglia. And this was a special year for Vinitaly  with a greater number of national and international trade.

Being part of OperaWine for us meant being part of Italian wine excellence on the world stage, say Valter Fissore and Nadia Cogno of Elvio Cogno in Piedmont. The attendees at this edition of Vinitaly were more attentive, informed, and professional than ever, allowing for successful business meetings.

An incredible Vinitaly! For its 50th, Vinitaly demonstrated that its long history and years of experience have allowed this very important wine event to overcome some of the challenges it has faced in the past," says Raffaele Boscaini, representative of the Masi estate in Veneto.

The first thing that stood out was the increase in trade as well as a decrease in regular visitors, agrees Cristina Mariani-May, of the Banfi estate in Tuscany. This is fundamental for our job as exhibitors and for the success of the fair. The visitors were also quite international, with an increase in Americans, Europeans and Asians.

Not only the largest producers, but smaller wineries celebrated this years edition, including those present in the ViViT (Vigne Vignaioli Terroir) and FIVI (Federazione Italiana Vignaioli Indipendenti)areas. VIVIT proved to be a living and energetic space for natural wine within Vinitaly, says Nely Webber, representative of Elisabetta Foradori, in Trentino Alto-Adige. The presence of high numbers of visitors within the space demonstrated that the message were sending of wine tied to the territory has been received.

We are constantly striving to improve Vinitaly, so it is a tremendous honor to receive this feedback from winemakers. says Stevie Kim. We began this 50th edition of Vinitaly on April 1 with our international wine competition 5 Star Wines, and our new natural wine competition Wine Without Walls, followed by the second year of the Vinitaly International Academy Certification Course, Vinitaly and the City, OperaWine, and then Vinitaly. This year we enjoyed a surprise concert by Sting, one of our OperaWine producers; a visit by the President of the Republic, a discussion between Prime Minister Renzi and Alibaba founder Jack Ma; and VIA executive wine seminars with a number of prestigious winemakers: Zind Humbrecht, Jean-Claude Berrouet, and a tribute to the late Giacomo Tachis. Our offering continues to grow and diversify, but always in the service of the same goal: to help sell one more bottle of Italian wine.

About:

Veronafiere is the leading organizer of trade shows in Italy including Vinitaly (http://www.vinitaly.com), the largest wine and spirits fair in the world. The next edition of the fair will take place on 10 - 13 April 2016. Since 1998 Vinitaly International travels to several countries thanks to its strategic arm abroad, Vinitaly International. In February 2014 Vinitaly International launched an educational project, the Vinitaly International Academy (VIA) with the aim of divulging and broadcasting the excellence and diversity of Italian wine around the globe. VIA has now also organized a Certification Course with the aim of creating new Ambassadors of Italian Wine in the World.

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The six-meter (20-foot) Egyptian marble replica - about two-thirds the size of the original - was created by the Institute for Digital Archaeology from photographs of the original site using 3-D imaging technology. (Photo: AFP)

London: A replica of an 1,800-year-old iconic Palmyra Arch destroyed by dreaded Islamic State terrorists in Syria has been erected at Trafalgar Square in London on Tuesday as part of an initiative to raise awareness about the common universal heritage.

"Palmyra's Arch of Triumph" has been made by carving stone to the exact shape of the original working from a database of 3D photographs collected by the Institute of Digital Archaeology (IDA).

It will stand in London for four days to coincide with World Heritage Week.

The replica, which cost 100,000 pounds and weighs 12-tonnes, will then travel around the world, visiting New York's Times Square and Dubai, before being taken to Syria.

"It is a message of raising awareness in the world. We have common heritage. Our heritage is universal - it is not just for Syrian people," said Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria's director of antiquities.

The original arch was built by the Romans and destroyed as the world watched in May last year when ISIS captured Palmyra by using dynamite, bulldozers and pickaxes to destroy a series of monuments at the UNESCO World Heritage site.

In October last year, ISIS destroyed?the 20-foot 'Arch of Triumph', which had been described as the "jewel in the collection" at the Palmyra site.

Palmyra, and its complex of ancient ruins, was recaptured at the end of March this year.

At least 280 people were executed during the occupation of the city, according to UK-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The creation of the 18-foot scale replica model began as IDA executive director Roger Michel found that the institute's Million Images Database of 3D photographs taken by volunteers could be used to provide a blueprint for a replica arch.

"It is extraordinary to have a vision about something and see it come together in such a palpable way," Michel told the BBC.

He said he wanted London to be the first stop on the arch's itinerary because the city had itself been reconstructed after the Blitz of World War II.
Through creative thinking we were able to create an opportunity for Boxed to expand on a long term basis within a very tight sub-market.

Savills Studley announces that Boxed has signed a long-term, 12,912-square-foot lease at 451 Broadway in the Soho submarket. The company, which delivers groceries and household items in bulk at discounted prices, currently occupies approximately 3,000 square feet at 110 Greene Street. Boxed will occupy the entire 2nd floor of 451 Broadway in April, 2016; asking rents were in the $70s per square foot.

Savills Studley Corporate Managing Director Zev Holzman represented the tenant, Boxed, in the long-term transaction. The landlord, Crale Realty, was represented by Kevin Wang of KRW Realty Advisors.

According to Holzman, the full floor had been under lease by tech company Ideo, which had then subleased the floor to web development company, Square Space. Savills Studley was able to execute a 4 party transaction whereby Ideo and SquareSpace terminated their respective leases and negotiated a strategic long-term direct lease with the landlord, which allowed Boxed to move into the fully built, turn-key space. SquareSpace was represented by Rocco Laginestra, Senior Vice President of CBRE.

We love being in Soho and are thrilled that well be able to continue to grow our footprint in this exciting, dynamic area of Manhattan, said DJ Williams, Vice President of Partnerships for Boxed.

Through creative thinking we were able to create an opportunity for Boxed to expand on a long term basis within a very tight sub-market. The space itself is equally as exciting with a high end installation, large, home-like kitchen and open floor plan  all of which we acquired with minimal capital expense, said Holzman.

451 Broadway was originally constructed in 1865 with a cast-iron front, and was later modernized in 1920. Each floor offers large windows with views and an abundance of natural light that highlights the creative loft space.

About Boxed

Founded in 2013, Boxed has taken the best elements of the wholesale shopping experience and folded it into one innovative, cutting edge mobile app that allows consumers direct-to-their-door access to all of their favorite warehouse club products, without membership fees. Boxed brings convenience and savings to on-the-go consumers who dont have the time, means or patience to shop at a brick and mortar big box club. The elegantly-designed iPhone and Android app offers bulk-sized goods at pint-sized prices, and is completely free to download and use.

Boxed does all the heavy lifting, delivering a rich array of wholesale items directly to doorsteps across the continental United States in two days or less. The brands innovative discovery-based design recreates the fun of the treasure hunt experience with a curated selection of everyday essentials that consumers love including household staples, health and beauty supplies, office pantry items, groceries and a wide variety of organic and green products.

About Savills Studley

Savills Studley is the leading commercial real estate services firm specializing in tenant representation. Founded in 1954, the firm pioneered the conflict-free business model of representing only tenants in their commercial real estate transactions. Today, supported by high quality market research and in-depth analysis, Savills Studley provides strategic real estate solutions to organizations across all industries. The firms comprehensive commercial real estate platform includes brokerage, project management, capital markets, consulting and corporate services. With 27 offices in the U.S. and a heritage of innovation, Savills Studley is well known for tenacious client advocacy and exceptional service.

The firm is part of London-headquartered Savills plc, the premier global real estate service provider with over 30,000 professionals in over 700 locations around the world. Savills plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange (SVS.L).

For more information, please visit http://www.savills-studley.com and follow us on Twitter @SavillsStudley and LinkedIn.
Having a globally-focused company like POSCO select Indiana to grow its business is a strong endorsement of our states low-cost, low-tax business climate, robust transportation infrastructure and dynamic port system. - Gov. Mike Pence

POSCO, a multinational company headquartered in Pohang, South Korea, and the fifth-largest steel producer in the world, has announced plans to build a wire rod processing center at the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville, creating up to 60 high-wage jobs by 2018. POSCO is South Koreas fourth largest company, behind Samsung Electronics, SK Holdings and Hyundai Motors, and is ranked No. 162 in Fortunes Global 500.

Although we are located on different continents, South Korea and Indiana both share a reputation of excellence when it comes to advanced manufacturing, said Governor Mike Pence. Having a globally-focused company like POSCO select Indiana to grow its business is a strong endorsement of our states low-cost, low-tax business climate, robust transportation infrastructure and dynamic port system. This company could have established operations anywhere in the world, but has found exactly what it needed right here in Indiana. POSCO is a major supplier to the automotive industry which already supports more than 100,000 jobs in our state, and we look forward to the new jobs this state-of-the-art facility will create.

The $19 million project includes a 136,000-square-foot facility to be constructed on approximately 10 acres at the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville. POSCO plans to start construction this spring on the facility, which will be the companys second steel processing line and fourth production line in the U.S. POSCOs key drivers for locating at the port were the ability to ship steel into the Midwest by water, the close proximity to numerous steel and automotive-related companies and the attractive business environment in the Jeffersonville area.

We are very excited about the opportunity to develop our first Midwestern U.S. plant at the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville, said POSCO AAPC Finance Director Kyu Tae Kim. It is critical for our business to receive cargo by water and to be centrally located in the U.S. market. The Jeffersonvilles port location will allow us to connect with global markets and supply our U.S. automotive customers with just-in-time deliveries. We want to thank the State of Indiana, the City of Jeffersonville, the Ports of Indiana and One Southern Indiana for helping us to make this project a reality.

POSCO was established in South Korea in 1968 and was the first Korean firm to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994. It operates 312 facilities in 43 countries around the world. POSCOs Jeffersonville plant will process steel wire for fasteners, nuts and bolts used in the automotive industry and serve as a distribution center for other POSCO products. POSCO America, incorporated in 1984, maintains its U.S. headquarters in Fort Lee, N.J., with additional facilities in Houston, Texas, Troy, Mich., and McCalla, Ala. POSCO operates two integrated steel mills in South Korea and a joint venture facility with U.S. Steel, USS-POSCO Industries, located in California.

POSCOs planned facility is a good fit for our port and its operations will create new business for other port companies, said Rich Cooper, CEO for the Ports of Indiana. Steel processors at our port currently supply components for all six of the top U.S. automakers as well as to many Tier 1 suppliers and other participants in the automotive industrys supply chain. The ports multimodal transportation options, including year-round barge access to the Gulf of Mexico, offer significant logistics cost savings for POSCO.

The Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville is home to 28 businesses, including a steel campus of 12 metal-processing companies serving the Midwest auto and appliance industries. The port handled over one million tons of steel cargoes in 2015 and 2.8 million in total shipments.

The Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) offered POSCO up to $550,000 in conditional tax credits and up to $50,000 in training grants based on the companys job creation plans. These incentives are performance-based, meaning until Hoosiers are hired, the company is not eligible to claim incentives. Jeffersonvilles city council approved additional incentives at the request of the Jeffersonville Redevelopment Commission.

Having a global company of POSCOs caliber select Southern Indiana and, specifically, the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville, for this advanced manufacturing project, is certainly cause for celebration, said Jeffersonville Mayor Mike Moore. The opening of two new interstate bridges over the Ohio River and the continued development of our port are key drivers for attracting world-class companies like POSCO and helping them grow in our community. We are grateful to our partners in economic development, One Southern Indiana and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, for their efforts to ensure that investing in Jeffersonville is a seamless process.

About POSCO: POSCO is a multinational steel-making company headquartered in Pohang, South Korea. The company was established by the South Korean government on April 1, 1968, to manufacture and distribute steel rolled products and plates in the domestic and overseas markets. In 2000, the company was 100% privatized and since then, has extended production facilities in main overseas bases. In 2015, POSCO produced approximately 41 million tons of crude steel. Information: http://www.posco.com

About the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville: Opened in 1985, the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville handles Ohio River shipments of steel, agriculture and industrial cargoes, and provides 1,000 acres of industrial sites for multimodal businesses. The port is operated by Ports of Indiana, a statewide port authority managing three ports on the Ohio River and Lake Michigan. Established in 1961, the Ports of Indiana is a self-funded enterprise dedicated to growing Indianas economy by developing a world-class port system. Information: http://www.portsofindiana.com

About the Indiana Economic Development Corporation: IEDC leads the state of Indianas economic development efforts, focusing on helping companies grow in and locate to the state. Governed by a 12-member board chaired by Governor Mike Pence, the IEDC manages many initiatives, including performance-based tax credits, workforce training grants, public infrastructure assistance, and talent attraction and retention efforts. Information: http://www.iedc.in.gov

About One Southern Indiana: One Southern Indiana (1si) was formed in July of 2006 as the economic development organization and chamber of commerce serving Clark and Floyd counties. 1sis mission is to provide the connections, resources and services that help businesses innovate and thrive in the Southern Indiana/ Louisville metro area. Information: http://www.1si.org

For video and image downloads: http://www.portsofindiana.com/global-steelmaker-posco-establishing-operations-port-indiana-jeffersonville-60-high-wage-jobs/

Photo caption: The fifth largest steel producer in the world, South Koreas POSCO, announced it will build a wire rod processing center at the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville. Left to right: Woon Hyun Yeo, Sales Director, POSCO; Kyu Tae Kim, Finance Director, POSCO; Kenny Hwang (sitting), President, POSCO-AAPC; Rob Waiz, Economic and Re-development Director, City of Jeffersonville; Mike Moore, Mayor, City of Jeffersonville; Scott Stewart, Port Director, Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville; Wendy Dant Chesser, CEO, One Southern Indiana.
Bob Latshaw, Penn Community Banks Vice President of Commercial Lending Entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of todays economy; every successful company is built on an idea that meets a market need.

Starting a small business has never been easier, but succeeding in business over the long-term takes more than a website and an idea. Fortunately, the U.S. Small Business Administration has a wealth of experience nurturing business success  and Penn Community Bank is happy to join the SBA in sharing that expertise with Bucks County entrepreneurs.

Penn Community Bank, Bucks Countys leading independent, mutual financial organization, is participating in Business Smart workshops hosted by the U.S. Small Business Administrations Eastern Pennsylvania office. The first was held March 31 at Bucks County Community Colleges Upper Bucks Campus in Perkasie. The session was such a success that a second was held on April 14 and a third has been scheduled for April 28. The sessions are designed to help aspiring local entrepreneurs access the help they need to turn their ideas into viable businesses.

Bob Latshaw, Penn Community Banks Vice President of Commercial Lending, is presenting as part of the workshop, which is free to the public. Joining Latshaw on the panel are SBA economic development specialist Sonia Smith; Rob Mineo of Lehigh Universitys Small Business Development Center; CareerLink Bucks County facilitator Madaline Diane; Emily Stull, project coordinator with The Rising Tide community loan fund; and representatives from the business counseling agency SCORE Bucks County.

Entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of todays economy; every successful company is built on an idea that meets a market need, said Latshaw. Helping aspiring small business owners create their roadmap to success is a key part of what we do at Penn Community Bank. Our commercial lending experts help business owners with the funding they need and also offer the expert guidance that entrepreneurs need to keep that business open and thriving for years to come.

Participating in financial educational events such as the Business Smart workshop reflects the philosophy at the heart of Penn Community Banks mission, said President and CEO Jeane M. Coyle.

Penn Community Bank exists to help local residents, business owners and nonprofits achieve their financial goals, and to value people as much as we do profits, said Coyle. Supporting these types of business programs is an important part of our commitment to serving as an expert resource for local business owners.

Formed in 2015 by the unification of First Savings Bank of Perkasie and First Federal of Bucks County, Penn Community Bank is Bucks Countys leading independent, mutual financial organization. With more than $1.8 billion in assets, it offers expert financial advice and a complete range of banking, insurance and investment products and services to meet the needs of individuals, families and businesses throughout their lifetimes.

To register for the April 28 seminar, online pre-registration is requested at http://bizsmartworkshopapril14-2016.eventbrite.com to ensure a seat and adequate materials. Interested participants also may contact PA CareerLink Bucks County at 215-258-7757 for additional information.

About Penn Community Bank: Created in 2015 by the unification of long-standing community banks First Federal of Bucks County and First Savings Bank of Perkasie, Penn Community Bank holds more than $1.8 billion in assets and employs more than 300 people at 22 bank branches and two administrative centers throughout Bucks County. As an independent, mutual financial institution, Penn Community Bank is not publicly traded and operates with its long-term mission in mind: to help businesses grow and prosper, to support individuals and families throughout their lifetimes, to strengthen the local economy, and to partner with local organizations to act as a catalyst for positive growth in every market it serves.
Magnetom Aera 1.5 T Our imaging team is excited to offer the latest MRI technology to our community

Florida Hospital Zephyrhills is now offering enhanced patient comfort and power in MRI exams. It's the first to deliver Quiet Suite technology in this area. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive diagnostic imaging exam of the soft tissue, bone, and muscle. MRIs have become one of the fastest growing types of medical diagnostic tests in the United States. With Florida Hospital Zephyrhills recent installation of a MAGNETOM Aera 1.5 T MRI System from Siemens Healthcare, patients can now experience faster, more comfortable exams.

Our imaging team is excited to offer the latest MRI technology to our community, said Laurie Hitzel, Director of Imaging Services at Florida Hospital Zephyrhills. Our new MRI gives us the ability to deliver advanced technology, resulting in faster, high-quality images, with less stress for our patients.

There are many benefits of the MAGNETOM Aera 1.5T. The MAGNETOM Aera boasts a wide open bore, which is the tube-like structure of an MRI machine where the patient lies during the imaging process. This Open Bore design helps reduce the closed-in feeling of traditional MRIs and its short design allows for many exams to be performed with the patients head outside of the system. And whether youre big or small, short or tall, this system accommodates people of all sizes and weight up to 550 pounds.

Additional patient-friendly features include a mood lighting application which allows patients to set the mood for their exam through custom lighting to create a more relaxed environment. And unlike traditional MRI scanners, Florida Hospital Zephyrhills is the first in the area to deliver an MRI equipped with Quiet Suite to reduce the noise during an exam, resulting in a more comfortable experience for patients.

The MAGNETOM Aera offers doctors an array of diagnostic possibilities and provides patients with a more comfortable experience. Like all MRIs the MAGNETOM Aera uses magnets that are measured in Tesla (T) to acquire images. At 1.5T, the MAGETOM Aera offers superb image quality that may be used for a wide range of medical needs  from orthopedic and sports- related injuries to breast cancer testing.

This system is designed to help physicians make quicker, more accurate diagnoses. To schedule an MRI exam, patients should call (813) 783-TEST (8378).

About Florida Hospital Zephyrhills

Florida Hospital Zephyrhills is a 140-bed regional medical center located in East Pasco County. It is a member of the Florida Hospital network of Adventist Health System, one of the largest health care providers in the state of Florida. Florida Hospital Zephyrhills has been nationally recognized by the American Heart Association, the American Stroke Association, The Joint Commission, and HealthGrades for excellence in providing top quality patient care with special emphasis on safety and patient outcomes. The award-winning Heart Institute has received recognition in the treatment of coronary intervention, heart failure, chest pain, open heart surgery, and electrophysiology procedures. The hospital offers a full range of inpatient and outpatient surgical offerings, including orthopedic services such as hip and knee replacement and advanced MAKOplasty robotic partial knee replacement. The Womens Health Center offers comprehensive services for women including gynecology, urology and pelvic floor health, labor and delivery through The Baby Place, and breast care through the Simpson Breast Health Center. The hospital also offers 24/7 emergency services including a fast track option, imaging services, and the Center for Wound Healing. Visit FHZeph.org for more information.

About Siemens Healthcare

The Siemens Healthcare Sector is one of the world's largest suppliers to the healthcare industry and a trendsetter in medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, medical information technology and hearing aids. Siemens offers its customers products and solutions for the entire range of patient care from a single source  from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, and on to treatment and aftercare. By optimizing clinical workflows for the most common diseases, Siemens also makes healthcare faster, better and more cost-effective. Siemens Healthcare employs some 48,000 employees worldwide and operates around the world. In fiscal year 2010 (to September 30), the Sector posted revenue of 12.4 billion euros and profit of around 750 million euros. For further information please visit: http://www.siemens.com/healthcare.
Epicurean Mexican Cuisine from Mexico's Chef Jose Meza Epicurean Mexican Dining with Paired Premium Tequilas - the Ultimate Cinco de Mayo Celebration

The Fearings culinary event of the year will take place this May 5, as the Dallas restaurant hosts famed Chef Jose Meza Arroyave of AAA Five Diamond rated Restaurant Carolina at Mexicos St. Regis Punta Mita Resort. Chef Meza will present a multi-course Mexican fine dining menu, paired with premium tequilas from Patron, and offered in addition to Fearings regular dinner menu.

Jose Mezas contemporary approach to Mexican cuisine enhances traditional dishes with modern twists, while still maintaining the integrity and depth of his authentic flavors. He is celebrated throughout Mexico for his use of modern techniques and cultural purity as he pushes the boundaries of fine Mexican cuisine.

Patron Spirits will be on hand that evening as well, presenting optional tequila pairings to accompany each course of Jose Mezas dinner menu. Also on May 5, the restaurants Rattlesnake Bar will celebrate Cinco de Mayo with a seasonal new Meyer Lemon Margarita, created with Fearings rare Barrel Select anejo tequila -- a one-of-a-kind co-creation of Fearings Restaurant and Patron.

Fearings Cinco de Mayo dinner menu will be offered from 6 p.m. on Thursday, May 5. To ensure seating, please reserve early at 214-922-4848. The Cinco de Mayo menu may be viewed below.

What: Epicurean Mexican Dining & Tequila Experience with Mexicos Chef Jose Meza and Patron Spirits

Who: Chef Dean Fearing & Chef Jose Meza of Restaurant Carolina at the St. Regis Punta Mita Resort

When: Thursday, May 5, 2016, from 6 p.m.

Where: Fearings Restaurant, 2121 McKinney Avenue, Dallas, TX 75201

Price: $150 + tax/gratuity (add $45 for paired Patron tequilas)

Reserve: 214-922-4848

Menu

First Course

Botana- Quesadilla

These traditional bites are typically served prior to enjoying a Mexican feast. Jose Mezas quesadilla is composed of crunchy blue maize filled with artisan Oaxaca cheese, presenting a small yet full variation of flavors in one bite.

Second Course

Ceviche de Pozole Verde

Two traditional dishes are blended flawlessly, utilizing contemporary techniques and created with the catch of the day enhanced by cacahuazintle (heirloom white maize) and fresh avocado.

Third Course

Carne Asada

In homage to a typical Mexican barbecue, Chef Mezas Carne Asada features a delicious beef filet bathed in a fragrant black sauce and served with nopales, organic cheese and guacamole. Best enjoyed with handmade tortillas.

Dessert

Arroz con Leche

Not your grandmothers rice pudding! Chef Meza deconstructs this Mexican classic by playing with its unique textures. Served with cinnamon crisps and artisan vanilla bean ice cream, this decadent sweet is a true delight to the senses.
Denver Hotel offers Bike Tour Package This innovative bike tour package is packed with fun and humor, some of it frightful and all of it unique, promising to transport its participants to a different time, right at the very location where it all took place.

Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center is pleased to celebrate the Mile High Citys 300 days of sunshine with a new Urban Explorer Bike Tour Package. But, the hotel staff boasts that this is no ordinary bike tour. It not only guides its travelers through Denvers most renowned and interesting sites, it provides little known and interesting insights along the way. From ghost stories to the historic to the whimsical, Hyatt is pleased to air Denvers dirty laundry with a reveal of some of the citys best kept secrets.

Designed in conjunction with the Denver B-Cycle Program, which has a station just across the street from Hyatt Regency Denver, the Urban Explorer Bike Tour Package includes a B-Cycle Day Pass for two to go on a Denver journey. Guests are provided a map with options to take a route west of the hotel (15 sites) or east of the hotel (11 sites), all perfectly outlined and orchestrated. They can take a break at each of the sites along the self-guided tour and read the accompanying information, returning with a new insight into what makes Denver what it is today.

Hyatt General Manager Greg Leonard, an avid cyclist himself, said: Our guests tell us time and time again that when they visit a city, they are looking for more than the obvious. They want to delve into the destination and understand it better. This innovative bike tour package is packed with fun and humor, some of it frightful and all of it unique, promising to transport its participants to a different time, right at the very location where it all took place.

An example of a little known locale included on the tour is the Cheeseburger Monument. This is the site of Louis Ballasts Humpty Dumpty where he invented the first-ever popular sandwich in 1935. While he trademarked the term cheeseburger, he never sued anyone for using it. Guests can venture on to discover the most haunted buildings and the scary stories behind them, historic places where the Old West unfolded and much more.

The Urban Explorer Bike Tour Package starts at just $185 per night and is subject to availability. Enter or ask for offer code: BIKE. It is one of a variety of value-added packages offered at Hyatt Regency Denver. To make a reservation for this or any one of them, visit the Offers page of denverregency.hyatt.com or call toll free 800-233-1234.

About Hyatt Regency Denver

With 1,100 newly redesigned accommodations, Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center is one of the regions largest hotels. Standing 36 stories high, sleek and contemporary in design, it is adjacent to the Colorado Convention Center and just one block from the 16th Street Mall pedestrian promenade. The recently completed guest room refresh is designed with a decor that captures the essence of being where the mountains meet the plains. With special emphasis on state-of-the-art technology, each accommodation features the convenience of LCD Smart 46 inch televisions and free high-speed Internet along with comfortable work stations. A 6,700 square foot fitness center, with windows overlooking the 14th Street Theater District, includes Spa Universaire, an indoor lap-pool and outdoor sun deck and whirlpool. In addition to Altitude Restaurant, Hyatt Regency Denver provides two lounges: Strata Bar located in the lobby and the 27th floor Peaks Lounge which captures sweeping views of the Rocky Mountains. Peaks Lounge is also available for meetings during the day. The hotel features a total of over 60,600 square feet of recently revitalized versatile meeting and event space.

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Angela J. Reddock-Wright, Esq. Serving on the CEOP is a great honor for me. It is one of those rare opportunities which will allow me to combine my love of employment and labor law, along with my long history and commitment to civic and community service. - Reddock-Wright

Angela J. Reddock-Wright, a leading expert on workplace issues, and the Founding and Managing Partner of the Los Angeles boutique employment and labor law firm, the Reddock Law Group, has recently been appointed to serve on the County of Los Angeles Equity Oversight Panel (CEOP).

The CEOP is an independent oversight body made up of employment law professionals with the authority and responsibility for reviewing Los Angeles County equity investigations and making recommendations to Los Angeles County Department Heads concerning disposition and discipline. This is a big responsibility for the panel, since Los Angeles County has the largest and most multi-faceted county government in the United States.

For more information about Reddock-Wright, please visit, and connect with her here.

Often called the Workplace Guru, Reddock-Wright is passionate about working with employers and employees to assist in creating progressive, thriving and conflict-free 21st century work environments. A practicing employment and labor law attorney and litigator for 20 years, Reddock-Wright, now focuses her time working with employers and employees to resolve their disputes through the alternative dispute resolution process, including mediation, arbitration, facilitation and more. She provides such services through her private law practice and as a member of the American Arbitration Association panel of Mediators and Arbitrators, and as a panel mediator for the United States District Court, Central District.

Reddock-Wright also conducts independent workplace and Title IX investigations in instances where public, private, education, and non-profit sector industry organizations have received complaints of discrimination, harassment, sexual assault and other claims. She also provides expert witness services in these areas and conducts compliance training for employers and employees on various employment and labor law and human resources topics.

When asked about her appointment to the panel, Reddock-Wright said, Serving on the CEOP is a great honor for me. It is one of those rare opportunities which will allow me to combine my love of employment and labor law, along with my long history and commitment to civic and community service.

Throughout her professional career, Reddock-Wright has led a dual life or practicing law and contributing her time to civic and community service. Most recently, she served with distinction as an appointed Member of the Board of Trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District. She also has served on the State Board of Barbering & Cosmetology, the Los Angeles County Small Business and Local Government Oversight Commissions, and the City of Los Angeles Transportation Commission.

Reddock-Wright is a founding member and the past board chair of the Los Angeles African American Womens Public Policy Institute (LAAAWPPI) and a past board chair and board member of Ability First. Currently, she serves on the Board of Trustees of her high school alma mater the Brentwood School.

Reddock-Wright, a top rated instructor in the Human Resources & Law program at UCLA Extension, is a graduate of UCLA School of Law, Amherst College, the Pepperdine University School of Law Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution Mediating the Litigated Case Certification Program, and the Coro Foundation Fellowship in Public Policy and Public Affairs. She also has the distinct honor of having been a fellow of the German Marshall Memorial Fellowship to Europe.

Named a Southern California Super Lawyer from 2011-2015 and a Southern California Rising Star from 2004-2011 by the publishers of Los Angeles Magazine, Reddock-Wright is also a published author and much sought-after television and radio legal commentator. A few of her published works include: How to Survive Your First Job (Special Editor) and Inside the Minds: Labor & Employment Client Strategies. Reddock-Wright has served as a regular legal commentator for KCBS-2 News, KTLA-5 News, KCAL-9 News, KFWB radio's Turning Point Business Minute and more.

If you would like to learn more, or to speak with Reddock-Wright or her publicist, please use the following contact information:

Angela J. Reddock-Wright, Esq.

Reddock Law Group

Founding & Managing Attorney

Email: angela(at)reddocklaw(dot)com

Phone: (213) 996-8474

MEDIA:

Lisa T. Elkan

Lisa PR

Email: Lisa(at)LisaPR(dot)com
Brahman Cattle It is exciting to make another trip to Mexico to participate in the Mexico National Show, if even as 'people' and not by bringing all of our award-winning cattle.

Moreno Ranches, a top producer of Gray and Red Brahman cattle for sale in the United States and for export at http://www.morenoranches.com/, is pleased to announce their participation in the Mexico National Show in Villahermosa, Tabasco State, in late April. By participating in shows in Mexico and throughout Latin America, the company is building upon its reputation as a major participant in the growing internationalization of the Brahman breed.

It is exciting to make another trip to Mexico to participate in the Mexico National Show, if even as 'people' and not by bringing all of our award-winning cattle, explained Kelvin Moreno, head of Moreno Ranches. While it is always great to make Brahman cattle sales here in the States, making connections in Mexico as ambassadors of American breeding techniques and the American Brahman industry is doubly satisfying.

About the Mexican National Show

The Mexican National Show is sponsored and hosted by the Mexican Association of Cebu Breeders (AMCC). This organization was legally established in 1962 under the name of Livestock Breeders Association of Cebu in Mexico and is currently responsible for certifying and maintaining the genealogies of Zebu breeds in Mexico. (Zebu is a variant of the Brahman breed.) As such, the Mexican show plays a similar role to the major USA shows put on by the American Brahman Breeders Association (ABBA).

By participating in the show, Moreno Ranches builds upon a growing reputation as a leader in the global marketplace for Brahman cattle.

Brahman Cattle For Sale in Mexico Are Zebu Cattle

The reader is invited to note the slight shift in terminology: In Mexico, Brahman cattle are often termed 'Cebu' or 'Zebu' cattle. This dates back to the zebu cattle originally found in Africa, which are part of the initial cross that was the genesis of the Brahman breed. Like ABBA, the AMCC has a mission to promote cebu inside and outside the country, promoting and improving breeding, and retaining their genealogy, so that individual Brahman can be considered as a true representatives of each of the Cebu breeds. These goals closely mirror those of Moreno Ranches, so it is both an honor and a pleasure to be invited to showcase the high-quality genetics of Brahman cattle for sale that Moreno Ranches has spent decades fine-tuning.

To learn more about Moreno Ranches and their top-rated Brahman cattle for sale, please visit http://www.morenoranches.com/. Interested parties are referred particularly to the page on Red Brahman cattle at http://www.morenoranches.com/red-brahman-cattle-for-sale/ as the Ranch is experiencing high demand for its Red Brahman bulls and heifers.

About Moreno Ranches

Moreno Ranches is a top producer of Brahman cattle for sale. Customers come to the company for genetically superior Brahman bulls for sale and Brahman semen (seed stock) as well as Brahman embryos. The company produces both Brahman heifers and calves for sale, including for use as show cattle or to produce Brahman F1 hybrids. Visit the company's website to browse stock. The company is a trusted source of Brahman cattle whether a buyer is in Florida, Texas, or Louisiana - Latin America, or anywhere in the world.

Web. http://www.morenoranches.com/

Tel. 863-444-8745
OSCON is notorious for gathering open source industry leaders and were glad to be a part of it this year.

Broadleaf Commerce, the eCommerce platform solution provider for enterprise commerce brands, has announced it will sponsor and exhibit at this years OReilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Austin, TX. Taking place from May 17 to May 19, OSCON brings developers, innovators, businesspeople, and investors together to discover the latest in open source technology. Broadleaf, the enterprise software provider for leading Fortune 500 companies, will showcase at booth #537.

Drawing over 4,000 attendees, OSCON provides an environment ideal for sparking inspiration and forming new connections. When we heard OSCON was going to be in our home city of Austin this year, we were excited to get involved. Were looking forward to meeting and sharing knowledge with other open source enthusiasts, said Brian Polster, CEO of Broadleaf Commerce. OSCON is notorious for gathering open source industry leaders and were glad to be a part of it this year.

Trusted by premier brands, including The Container Store and Pep Boys, Broadleaf architecture experts will be on site, discussing technologies utilized by enterprise-level solution companies. As the team behind developing a platform that is open source, 100% customizable, and designed for streamlined integrations, Broadleaf developers work in depth with Java - utilizing Spring, Thymeleaf, and Hibernate. The end result of their efforts has netted an eCommerce platform solution that offers an administrative interface for streamlined website management processes, including CRM, Catalog Management, Price Lists, Product Management, Content Targeting, and Order Lifecycle Management. Additionally, the solution supports Fortune 500 brands, multi-channel business practices, and multi-tenant structures.

Developers and tech enthusiasts seeking career opportunities in either Austin or Dallas are encouraged to stop by to meet the Broadleaf team at booth #537. For further eCommerce news and updates follow Broadleaf on Twitter, handle @broadleaf, or visit http://www.BroadleafCommerce.com.

About Broadleaf Commerce, LLC

Broadleaf Commerce is the owner of an open-source eCommerce framework targeted at facilitating the development of enterprise-class, commerce-driven sites by providing a robust data and services model, a rich administration platform, and specialized tooling that takes care of core commerce functionality  providing the framework for companies such as The Container Store, Pep Boys, and Vology. For more information, visit: http://www.broadleafcommerce.com
Learning how to cook as a team is great practice for improving employee communication, time management, and problem solving skills.

An increasingly popular destination for corporate meetings and retreats, Park City, Utah is home to Park City Culinary Institute, which uses cuisine as a vehicle for facilitating team building for groups. This month, one of Utahs most impressive culinary talents, French Chef Clement Gelas joins Park City Culinary Institute to lead programs for corporate groups. A Park City resident since 2005, Gelas has served as Executive Chef at some of the resort towns most celebrated restaurants, including Wahso, Waldorf Astoria Park City, and Talisker on Main. He remains Club Director of Food and Beverage for Talisker, while adding his new role with Park City Culinary Institute.

Learning how to cook as a team is great practice for improving employee communication, time management, and problem solving skills, says Chef Clement Gelas. We create culinary programming that serves as a fun way to build rapport between colleagues, and develop leadership skills. Since just about everybody loves food, we use it as a way to inspire team work.

Gelas leads programs ranging from demonstrations to hands-on workshops, wine tastings, and cooking competitions. Cooking programs range from 90 minutes to four hours, depending on the groups schedule and needs. Shorter programs fit between meals, and can be hands-on cooking classes, or wine, whiskey and beer tastings. Four-hour programs include lunch or dinner.

Its rewarding for participants to compete against each other, working as teams to develop a menu or particular dish, organizing themselves and dividing the tasks between team members, Gelas explains. We also have a format that invites participants to cook their favorite childhood dishes to present to the others. Its a successful tool for colleagues to become better acquainted while honing their presentation skills.

Laurie Moldawer, the Institutes Founder and Director, adds, Companies often use the Institutes programs to build stronger relationships with clients, and reward sales teams and high performers. Corporate Boards and C-level Executives use our programs to relax and build rapport between meetings.

The programs are held at the exclusive Deer Valley Club, with ski in ski out access to Deer Valley Resort. As the sole provider of Food & Beverage for the Deer Valley Club, the school caters both on and off site. Private dining at the Deer Valley Club is a more intimate, relaxed and refined alternative to a traditional banquet room. The Institutes chefs are trained all over the world which gives them the ability to offer authentic, international cuisine from Italian and Spanish to Japanese, Indian, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Latin. The private dining room can be customized for smaller groups of 30 guests to up to 100-plus guests. Capacity can be extended to more than 150 guests with al fresco dining on the private patio. Accommodations at the Deer Valley Club are occasionally available for groups during Park Citys shoulder seasons.

For more info about Park City Culinary Institutes customized offerings for team building programs and private functions, and the faculty of award-winning chefs, visit http://www.pcculinary.com or call 435.659.5075.

ABOUT PARK CITY CULINARY INSTITUTE

Park City Culinary Institute features award-winning chefs to offer a distinctive culinary program that rivals some of the best culinary schools in the country. In addition to the schools two-month immersive hands-on program, the Institute hosts teambuilding events and caters for private and corporate groups. Park City Culinary Institute makes it Seamless, Wonderful, Fabulous! according to Maureen McDonald at Health Catalyst. The highlight of the trip I cant wait to bring another group and enjoy your amazing cuisine, wrote award-winning caterer Mary Crafts on behalf of International Caterers Association. For more information, visit http://www.pcculinary.com.
Chernobyl, Ukraine: What happens when the site of the worlds worst nuclear accident is left all but abandoned for nearly 30 years? In the case of Chernobyl, it becomes a unique chance to see how wildlife recovers in what is a giant nature reserve, bereft of humans but tainted by radiation. When the people left, nature returned, Denys Vyshnevskiy, a biologist in Chernobyls so-called exclusion zone, said during a visit, while nearby a herd of wild horses nosed around for food.

Some may wonder how the northern edge of the former Soviet nation, where a part of the station exploded on April 26, 1986, spewing toxic clouds that reached from Sweden to Greece, could host any life forms at all. About 30 courageous and atrociously under-protected rescuers died in the weeks it took to control the fourth reactor's meltdown and a 2,800-square-kilometre-wide (1,100-square-mile-wide) exclusion zone was set up.

The World Health Organisation estimated in 2005 that 4,000 people could eventually die from radiation-related illnesses, a figure that Greenpeace slammed as a gross underestimate.

The region and its 300 or so mostly elderly inhabitants remains far from safe, with radiation readings within 10 kilometres of the plant reaching 1,700 nanosieverts per hour  10 to 35 times the normal background levels observed in the United States. Todays animals in the exclusion may have shorter lifespans.
Red Rocks Amphitheatre, located just 10 miles from Denver Hotels like Hotel Teatro, celebrates 75 years of hosting concerts and other Denver events. Hotel Teatro has impressive special offers to welcome visitors who come to attend one of these Denver events at this beautiful venue.

Hotel Teatro and other Denver Hotels prepare to welcome the visitors who will come to attend a concert during the 75th anniversary season of Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Hotel Teatro has impressive special offers to welcome visitors who come to attend one of these Denver events at this beautiful venue. View offer details >

Just 10 miles from Denver is one of the most beautiful concert venues in the world: Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Those who attend evening concerts here can see stars when they look at the stage and heavenly stars when they look up. This open-air venue has been welcoming concert-goers for 75 years, and the 2016 lineup is sure to be memorable.

These Denver events begin in April. Some of the performers that will grace the stage at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in 2016 are Barenaked Ladies, Bad Company and Joe Walsh, The Flaming Lips, The Lumineers, Gramatik, and many more. A full schedule is available on the Red Rocks website.

The music is only one of the reasons that people attend concerts at this venue. The gorgeous scenery is another draw for both locals and visitors to attend Denver events that take place at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Not only is the spot beautiful and full of wildlife, but it is also, according the Red Rocks website, the only naturally-occurring, acoustically-perfect amphitheater in the entire world.

The Red Rocks Amphitheatre concert season typically runs through June. Some shows will sell out well in advance, so those whod like to attend one of these Denver events during the venues 75th anniversary season should reserve their tickets as soon as possible.

Hotel Teatro is located a short drive from the Red Rocks Amphitheatre. This ideally-located Denver Hotel is a great choice for those coming to the area for this or other top Denver events. Those planning a visit can visit make reservations on the hotels website or call 888.727.1200 for more information.

About Hotel Teatro - A Denver Hotel:

Located in Downtown Denver, Hotel Teatro - A Denver Hotel is located across from the Denver Center for Performing Arts. The luxury, Four-Diamond Boutique Denver Hotel features 109 exquisite guest rooms and suites. The Denver Hotels meticulously-restored historic facade and newly renovated lobby has been distinguished as one of the Top Hotels in the World by Expedia and one of the Worlds Best 50 City Hotels in the US by Travel + Leisure.

With its moniker derived from the Italian word for Theater, Hotel Teatro delivers a thoughtfully-curated collection of experiences, 24-hour Room Service and exemplary guest amenities including pet pampering and wellness programming.

Planning a visit? Check Rates, Make Reservations, or call 888.727.1200.
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche "Ponlop Rinpoche gives us here a down-to-earth guide to recognize, understand, transform and utilize the basic energy of even our negative emotions to live fresh and genuinely happy lives.  Richard Gere

"Ponlop Rinpoche gives us here a down-to-earth guide to recognize, understand, transform and utilize the basic energy of even our negative emotions to live fresh and genuinely happy lives.  Richard Gere

On April 19, the new book by acclaimed Buddhist teacher Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Emotional Rescue: How to Work with Your Emotions to Transform Hurt and Confusion into Energy that Empowers You (Tarcher Perigee / Penguin Random House) will be released to the public.

On May 6-8, the author will teach a workshop in New York City based on his new book, co-presented by Nalandabodhi New York and The Interdependence Project.

Many know Ponlop Rinpoche as the author of Rebel Buddha: A Guide to a Revolution of Mind (Shambhala), which presented Buddhist teachings with a fresh, and a contemporary voice in the context of an emerging North American Buddhism, free of religious trappings.

On Friday, May 6 Ponlop Rinpoche will give a keynote talk and be interviewed by Ethan Nichtern, a senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition. A book signing will also take place.

On Saturday, May 7, and Sunday, May 8, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche will teach his groundbreaking 3-Step Rescue Plan that shows how to free oneself from being a victim of emotions by gaining the awareness and understanding that helps one harness their power. He will be joined by meditation teachers from The Interdependence Project and Nalandabodhi.

Register for the workshop at Emotional Rescue NYC.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche is a widely celebrated Buddhist teacher and author who brings the essence of the Buddha's message to modern audiences with humor and practicality. Rinpoche is founder and president of Nalandabodhi, an international network of Buddhist centers.

CONTACT

PR/Media requests for Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche:

Contact Ceci Miller at ceci(at)dproffice(dot)com and 206.261.6900.

To invite Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche to present an Emotional Rescue workshop or other teaching event, contact Chris Stagg at chris(at)dproffice(dot)com.

To request reprints from Emotional Rescue, contact Cindy Shelton at cindy(at)dproffice(dot)com.

For volume orders of Emotional Rescue, booksellers contact Penguin Random House Customer Service at customerservice(at)penguinrandomhouse(dot)com.

Publishing rights requests: Contact William Clark Associates.
We love Miami residents and enjoy helping them with any of their window and door glass repair needs

April 19, 2016 -Miami, Florida

Express Glass and Board Up, Miamis leading glass repair service at http://www.expressglassfl.com/, has issued a clarification to local customers. With Spring travels causing numerous windshield damages due to loose gravel, the company gets bombarded with confused consumers seeking auto repairs. The company focuses solely on glass replacement and repair services for non-auto needs.

We love Miami residents and enjoy helping them with any of their window and door glass repair needs, explained Yaniet Santos, general manager of Express Glass. However, when locals call and ask us to repair car glass, we cant do it. Unfortunately, sometimes they call us out on a service call without indicating its an auto glass that needs the repair. If its a home or business, then we are ready to help 24-7!

For more details about Miami sliding door replacement and other glass repair services in Florida go to: http://www.expressglassfl.com/miami-glass-window-repair/. The company services home and business glass repair needs for doors and windows. Auto glass is not included, and of course the new 10% discount for April, does not apply to automobile glass needs.

Making it Clear in Miami: Yes to Glass Door Replacement and Windows, No to Auto Glass

Miami residents have a large list of local services to call when a glass repair emergency occurs. Although customers may prefer to contact one great business for all glass repair needs, not all glass emergencies are the same. Sliding door replacement in a home is not the same as fixing a car window. Each require specific skills and equipment to repair the glass properly. The best solution for a quick glass repair is understanding the difference between sliding door replacements vs. auto glass.

Miami residents pleased with prior service have called Express Glass to request auto glass repair only to hear it is not available. To help clear up the confusion, Express Glass has issued a clarification about the glass repair services the company offers. Home sliding door replacement, windows and storefront glass are the companys specialty. Auto glass service is not part of the Express Glass wheelhouse. Locals searching for the best in Miami sliding door replacement may call Express Glass 24/7 as long as the door is attached to a property, not a car.

About Express Glass and Board Up

Express Glass and Board Up Service Inc. is a family owned and operated glass repair business with more than 20 years of experience. Professional technicians and a large variety of inventory make Express Glass the top glass repair service. If customers are looking for sliding door replacement in Miami homes or West Palm Beach, please reach out to the company for a free estimate. If customers need sliding door replacement for businesses in Miami, Fort Lauderdale or Miramar emergency glass repair, technicians are standing by. The company specializes in sliding glass door repair and window glass repair; technicians will handle any glass replacement situation efficiently. Home or business glass repair is the company's main priority.

Express Glass Repair and Board Up

http://www.expressglassfl.com/
From L to R: Bob Meyer, Managing Director of Gorilla Group; Mark Zoske, CEO of SaltWorks, Inc.; Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce onstage at the Imagine Excellence Awards ceremony in April 2016. I love our new site and I think it is a perfect example of B2B and B2C e-commerce working in concert on the same platform.

SaltWorks, the leading wholesale all-natural sea salt supplier, was honored by Magento Commerce with an Imagine Excellence Award recognizing the companys recently launched wholesale B2B e-commerce website. SaltWorks and their digital solutions partner Gorilla Group received the Best B2B User Experience award.

SaltWorks and Gorilla Group were selected for their innovative e-commerce website that features a unique tab architecture to serve retail and wholesale customers via one online channel. Powered by the Magento digital commerce platform and dubbed the Salt Portal, SaltWorks brand new B2B website provides a unique brand experience and a wide range of self-service tools to make bulk sea salt buying easy and efficient.

The site combines the companys comprehensive selection of gourmet, smoked and naturally flavored sea salts and bath salts with straightforward navigation, a wealth of targeted and informational content and convenient product discovery. The site functionality provides B2B customers more control and visibility to manage accounts and purchases, from instantly accessing dynamic and accurate volume-based pricing, to acquiring technical documents, to requesting and tracking custom freight shipments.

The winners of the 2016 Imagine Excellence Awards embody our clients relentless commitment to creativity, innovation and success in taking commerce to the next level, said Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce.

Were honored and proud to receive this recognition from Magento, said SaltWorks CEO Mark Zoske. I love our new site and I think it is a perfect example of B2B and B2C e-commerce working in concert on the same platform. Were thrilled that our partnerships with Gorilla Group and Magento has brought our vision to fruition.

The award was presented to SaltWorks CEO Mark Zoske and Bob Meyer, Managing Director of Gorilla Group, onstage at the 2016 Imagine Excellence Awards ceremony during the annual Imagine conference hosted at the Wynn Las Vegas on April 11-13, 2016. The conference featured keynote speaker Ervin Magic Johnson. Companies honored alongside SaltWorks include Gallagher Europe, Rite Aid and Le Creuset. Read more about all of the 2016 Imagine Excellence Award winners in Magento Commerce's press release.

About SaltWorks, Inc.

Founded in 2001, SaltWorks offers the largest selection of bulk and wholesale all-natural sea salts and mineral salts for food service and manufacturers, gourmet retailers, co-packers, distributors, spa and wellness centers, and private label projects. SaltWorks offers some of the finest brands of sea salts in the world, including Artisan Salt Company, Fusion, Pure Ocean, and Bokek. No other company offers as many salt varieties, packaging configurations, or grain sizes. Proudly certified SQF Level 2 with an Excellent rating, SaltWorks is also fully HAACP and GMP accredited by NSF International. All SaltWorks products are all natural, kosher certified and guaranteed for purity and quality.
The overall winning team of the event will take home two BRM timepieces Were honored to continue our integral partnership with the organization and grateful for Brocks commitment to the motorsport community.

The Tire Rack One Lap of America Presented by Grassroots Motorsports magazine is pleased to announce that BRM will once again provide trophies for the top 10 finishers in this years event as well as two B.R.M timepieces for the overall winning team. The trophies and timepieces have quickly become a coveted items among the competitors over the past five years.

"Apart from the beautiful trophies, the BRM watches the overall winning team receives are a great reminder of the precision, flair and attention to detail it takes to win the One Lap." said Brock Yates Jr. Coordinator of the Tire Rack One Lap of America. "For BRM to return for a sixth year as a sponsor is fantastic and really shows their commitment to motorsports at all levels. From the One Lap to Formula One, BRM's commitment to motorsport is clear."

This year the overall winning team will take home a pair of V6-44-HB-BG timepieces. These timepieces are a reflection of the sprit of motorsport with every feature designed to evoke the sprit of performance. One Lap of America and BRM are united by a shared dedication to preserving and advancing the art of racing. Were honored to continue our integral partnership with the organization and grateful for Brocks commitment to the motorsport community. said Frederic Gasser, President, BRM Americas.

The One Lap family welcomes BRM watches back for another year.

* * * * * * *

ABOUT THE ONE LAP OF AMERICA:

The Tire Rack One Lap of America Presented by Grassroots Motorsports Magazine is the modern day version of the Cannonball Sea to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash of 1970. Created by Brock Yates and popularized by the movie Cannonball Run, todays One Lap of America challenges its participants to endure long transit drives of over 400 miles daily and to compete on 12 of Americas most challenging racetracks in 8 days. This years One Lap begins on April 30th, 2016 and runs through May 7th, 2016. The current event is headed by Brock Yates, Jr. and will be celebrating the 33rd running of the event. The full schedule is available online at http://www.onelapofamerica.com and on Facebook.

Media Contact:

Solomon A. Rosenthal

Media Director

215.703.7621

ABOUT BRM:

Inspired by motorsports, driven by craftsmanship and engineered for exclusivity, BRMs made-to-measure timepieces are defined by pure racing spirit. Founder Bernard Richards launched the labels inaugural collection in 2003, turning his mechanical expertise into an iconic company thats gone the distance as the only remaining watchmaking manufacture in France. Fully customizable, BRMs bespoke products are built for authenticity and performance, and the brands limited-edition collections have garnered elite global partnerships including Gulf Oil, Corvette Racing, the Pirelli World Challenge and many more. Website

ABOUT TIRE RACK

Tire Rack, family-owned and headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, is Americas largest independent tire tester and consumer-direct source for tires, wheels and performance accessories. Their team of over 100 test drivers (their sales team) tests tires from every major tire manufacturer on the companys state-of-the-art, 11.7-acre test facility. The findings are then posted on the companys website, http://www.tirerack.com, where consumers can make an educated decision on a tire, wheel or performance accessory purchase.

Tire Rack has also collected results from nearly 150,000 consumer surveys representing over 2.5 billion miles of real-world tire data, the largest known cache of such information anywhere. In addition, various testing and informational videos are available online in their Video Center at http://www.tirerack.com/videos. Since 1979, Tire Rack has grown from a single-point retail store in Indianapolis to encompass over 2.2 million square feet of space in seven distribution centers across the country. A diverse and broad in-stock inventory from 21 major tire and 62 wheel brands can be delivered anywhere in the country, most in one business day. A national network of over 8,000 independent Recommended Installers is available to assist customers with installation of their purchases.

ABOUT THE BROCK YATES TRIBUTE FUND:

The official charity of the Tire Rack One Lap of America. The Brock Yates Tribute Fund, was created in 2013 through the Alzheimer's Association, a 501(c)3 non-profit, to raise money and awareness about Alzheimers. Currently suffering from this disease, legendary automotive and racing veteran journalist Brock Sr. continues to dedicate his life to all the car enthusiasts around the country. Tribute Fund aims to honor him for all that he has given to the world of the automobile.

All funds raised by the Fund go directly toward supporting the Alzheimers Association mission. The Tribute fund, will once again be competing in the Tire Rack One Lap of America with the Tribute Funds heavily customized Ariel Atom piloted by Jack Beachem and Victor Leo.
If you are new to iQ you can schedule a demo and learn more about this opportunity.

PSFK iQ - Where Innovators Turn for Research. Our professional-grade research platform is designed specifically for Retail and CX leaders who want to know whats next. Whether youre staying current on trends or need a real-time research partner to help you get ahead, count on PSFK iQ to deliver the info you need to make your next move.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights described as a massacre the strikes on a vegetable market in Maaret al-Numan that killed at least 37 civilians and at least another seven at a market in nearby Kafranbel. (Photo: Representational Image)

Beirut: Suspected government air strikes killed at least 44 civilians at two markets in a part of northeastern Syria controlled by the war-torn country's Al-Qaeda affiliate, a monitoring group said Tuesday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights described as a "massacre" the strikes on a vegetable market in Maaret al-Numan that killed at least 37 civilians and at least another seven at a market in nearby Kafranbel.

Previously, the Britain-based monitor had put the toll in Maaret al-Numan at five dead and dozens wounded. The two locations, both in Idlib province, are only 10 kilometres (six miles) apart.
the special three-member tribunal hearing the case against Pervez Musharraf for suspending the constitution in 2007. (Photo: AFP)

Islamabad: Pakistan government relaxed the rules to allow former military dictator Pervez Musharraf to go abroad, a special court hearing the high treason case against him was told on Tuesday.

Musharraf, 72, was allowed in February to go to the UAE for medical treatment, angering the special three-member tribunal hearing the case against him for suspending the constitution in 2007.

If found guilty, he can be sent to the gallows. Maj Gen (retd.) Rashid Qureshi, who had given surety bonds for Musharraf's bail in the case, in an application said that the federal government failed to use powers to restrict the movement of the accused, the Dawn reported.

Qureshi insisted that he was not solely responsible for regulating the movement of his former boss, and the government was also involved in it.

"Exit from Pakistan (Control) Rules 2010 provide a complete mechanism for the situation, which needs to restrict movement of any person from going abroad," it said.

However, the federal government did not invoke the relevant provisions of the rules to stop Musharraf from leaving the country, the application claimed.

It noted that the superior judiciary "did not put any restriction on the movement of the accused in spite of having full and complete knowledge of the order of the special court".

In February, the court had summoned Musharraf to record his statement, but he left Pakistan the following month after the government removed his name from the exit control list.

Qurehi said that he is a retired army officer who stood surety in consideration of sympathy, kindness and fear of God and he has not gained any monetary benefit from the accused (Gen Musharraf) in any manner whatsoever. He has no other income but only limited resources including the property he rendered as the bond of the accused. He requested the court not to forfeit the property he had pledged as surety bond for the accused.

During proceedings on March 31, the special court had remarked that in case Musharraf did not appear, the court may order the surety bond as forfeit. The defence team also filed another application, asking it to dispense with the personal attendance of Musharraf, saying he would return after his recovery.
Doval, the designated Special Representative, along with top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi will hold the boundary talks which have become an annual feature between the two countries. (Photo: PTI)

Beijing: National Security Advisor Ajit Doval arrived here on Tuesday to take part in the 19th round of Sino-India border talks on Wednesday with the issue of China blocking India's bid to get JeM chief Masood Azhar banned by the UN casting a shadow on the deliberations.

Doval, the designated Special Representative, along with top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi will hold the boundary talks which have become an annual feature between the two countries.

While China says the boundary dispute is confined 2,000 km, mainly Arunachal Pradesh in eastern sector which it claims as part of southern Tibet, India asserts that the dispute covered the whole of 3,488 km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC) including the Aksai Chin area occupied by China during the 1962 war.

When the Special Representatives were appointed in 2003, the two sides set off a three stage process. The two countries first reached an agreement on the guiding principles and setting political parameters for the settlement in 2005.

Officials say the two sides are currently in the second stage which focusses on working out a framework of settlement to be followed by the final step of drawing the boundary line based on the framework agreement.

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying, while talking about the boundary talks, said, "We have been working to resolve territorial disputes through negotiations and consultation and we have completely settled territorial disputes with 12 of the 14 land neighbours."

Only the border dispute with India and Bhutan needed to resolved, she said.

"Both history and practice have proven that it is possible to resolve territorial disputes through negotiation and consolation," Hua said.

In tomorrow's talks the two sides will continue to work to strive to reach a settlement acceptable to both sides, she said.

While working for a solution "we would like to work together with the Indian side to maintain stability in the border areas and create favourable condition for the boundary question," Hua said.

On India's stand of delineation of the 3,488 km-long LAC to bring about a clarity in order to avert standoffs at the disputed boundary, she said the issue could be further discussed at the boundary talks tomorrow.

Last month, China had vetoed India's bid to get Azhar designated as terrorist by the UN Sanctions Committee, maintaining that the case "did not meet the requirements" of the Security Council. The Chinese action evoked a strong reaction in India which said that it was "incomprehensible" that while JeM was banned by the UN, its chief was not. The Azhar issue was expected to figure prominently in the talks on Wednesday.
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A cookie is a small text file that a website saves on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site. Cookies are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site.Website use Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. ("Google") to help analyse the use of this website. For this purpose, Google Analytics uses"cookies", which are text files placed on your computer.The information generated by the cookies about your use of this website - standard internet log information (including your IP address) and visitor behaviour information in an anonymous form - will be transmitted to and stored by Google including on servers in the United States. Google will anonymize the information sent by removing the last octet of your IP address prior to its storage.According to Google Analytics terms of service, Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website and compiling reports on website activity.We not use, and not allow any third party to use the statistical analytics tool to track or to collect any personally identifiable information of visitors to this site. Google may transfer the information collected by Google Analytics to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google`s behalf.According to Google Analytics terms of service, Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.You may refuse the use of Google Analytics cookies by downloading and installing Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. The add-on communicates with the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js) to indicate that information about the website visit should not be sent to Google Analytics.Cookies are also used to record if you have agreed (or not) to our use of cookies on this site, so that you are not asked the question every time you visit the site.You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish. You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed.Most browsers allow you to:If you chose to delete cookies, you should be aware that any preferences will be lost. Also, if you block cookies completely many websites (including ours) will not work properly and webcasts will not work at all. For these reasons, we do not recommend turning cookies off when using our webcasting services.
yes folks, truth is stranger than fiction and all i can say is, GOOD DOGGIE!!!they better not put that poor dog down either!doctor's tried to reattach his penis for 6 hours and finally gave up. i bet it looked like it had been through a meat grinder, lol..
Jeff Kinney, author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, was in Minneapolis last week for the Friday evening premiere of Wimpy Kid: The Musical, followed by a Saturday book signing at Wild Rumpus Books. See our photos of all the festivities.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Musical premiered on Friday evening at the Childrens Theatre Company in Minneapolis to a sold-out audience that was a mix of friends and family of the cast, young fans of the Wimpy Kid books by Jeff Kinney accompanied by their parents, and a group of indie booksellers. As people took their seats, few knew that Kinney himself was in the audience, as well as five executives from his publisher, Abrams, who had flown in from New York City for the occasion.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribunes theater critic, Rohan Preston called Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Musical spectacular, with electricity, charm, and heart to spare.

The staging was nonstop movement, Preston declared, describing Ricky Falbo, the actor who plays 12-year-old Greg Heffley, as a pocket-size star with solid theatrical chops and matching charisma, and his best friend Rowley (David Rosenthal) as a ball of goodness and awkward innocence.

An appreciative audience leapt to its feet as soon as the play ended, and gave a long standing ovation to the entire company, who danced in appreciation after all of the actors had taken their individual bows. By the way, this was no Minnesota O, which is what Minnesotans often do at the theater to be polite to perfomers this was the real deal. The show will have a six-week run, and there are rumors of a Broadway transfer.

The cast gathered for a group picture during the champagne and lemonade reception that followed the performance.

After congratulating the cast backstage, Kinney arrived at the reception, where he was immediately surrounded by children wanting him to sign books, which he graciously did.

The reception became a photo op, with family and friends snapping shots of a memorable evening with the obviously thrilled cast, who had sang and danced their hearts out on stage earlier. (From l.): Nate Turcotte (Ensemble/Chris Hosey), David Rosenthal (Rowley), Ricky Falbo (Greg), and Madison Neal (Ensemble).

Jeff Kinney and Ricky Falbo (Greg Heffley). Kinney admitted to the Star Tribunes Preston that Greg is his fictional alter-ego, explaining that at that age, I was petty, I could be untruthful and I was manipulative, even though I also had my good qualities.... Greg is an amplified version of the worst parts of me as a kid. Basically, if any of us had a camera following us around when were 12 or 13, the results wouldnt be good.

Kinneys star turn in the spotlight didnt end Friday night: on Saturday morning, he visited Wild Rumpus, which recently won the Womens National Book Associations 2016 Pannell Award for specialty childrens bookstore. On a warm and sunny morning, 300 children and their parents crowded the store for two hours, patiently waiting to exchange words with Kinney, get their photos taken, and have him sign their books. The event, Wild Rumpus reported, had sold out in 20 minutes of their announcement. Abrams childrens books publisher Andrew Smith kept a close eye on proceedings as Barb Aronson, a commission rep with Fuji Associates, who handles Midwest accounts for Abrams, assisted Kinney. Aronson, by the way, is going out with a bang: she is retiring in May.

Kinney is very committed to interacting with his young fans at bookstore signings, and was a big hit with his Twin Cities readers.

Children crowded about Kinneys table the entire two hours of the signing, and he proved to be quite adept at cracking jokes and signing books at the same time.

After the last children had their books signed, Kinney took a moment to have his photo taken with the Wild Rumpus booksellers. Abrams personnel all praised Wild Rumpus staff for excelling at crowd control. Bookseller Heather Albinson, who staffed the front entrance during the event, told PW that a recent visit to Disneyland had given her some excellent pointers about how to handle mobs of children. (From l.): Ellen Ouraba, Alec Shaw, events coordinator Drew Sieplinga, owner Colette Morgan, Albinson, and Colleen ONeill with Kinney.

An earlier version of this story misidentified two cast members, Nate Turcotte and Madison Neal, and has been corrected.
The winners of the 2016 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on April 18, in a ceremony marking the centennial of the awards.

In fiction, Viet Thanh Nguyen won for The Sympathizer (Grove Press), which the judges called "a layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a 'man of two minds'and two countries, Vietnam and the United States."

In drama, Lin-Manuel Miranda won for Hamilton, "a landmark American musical about the gifted and self-destructive founding father whose story becomes both contemporary and irresistible."

T.J. Stiles won in history for Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (Alfred A. Knopf), described by the committee as a "rich and surprising new telling of the journey of the iconic American soldier whose death turns out not to have been the main point of his life." Initially classified as biography, the book was moved to the history category by the judges.

In biography, William Finnegan won for Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (Penguin Press), "a finely crafted memoir of a youthful obsession that has propelled the author through a distinguished writing career."

In poetry, Peter Balakian won for Ozone Journal (University of Chicago Press), a collection of "poems that bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty."

In nonfiction, Joby Warrick won for Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS (Doubleday), "a deeply reported book of remarkable clarity showing how the flawed rationale for the Iraq War led to the explosive growth of the Islamic State."
Up until now, authors and entertainers have been showing their disapproval of North Carolina's "bathroom law," called HB2, by canceling events in the state. For local business owners, especially booksellers, it's been a tough pill to swallow. Now, in an effort to show that NC businesses need not suffer in order for public figures to show their opposition the law, bestselling author Sara Gruen has mounted a "Kill the Bill" event with local bookseller Malaprops Bookstore/Cafe.

The event grew out of Sherman Alexies decision to cancel his upcoming speaking engagement at Malaprops in Asheville, N.C., because of his opposition to HB2. Gruen, who is based in Asheville, decided to step in and fill the void.

Gruen, who has been outspoken in her support Malaprops, has put together a reading and fundraiser to support the LGBT community and to make up for Malaprops loss of income from Alexies cancellation. The event, which will be held on May 18, the day that Alexie was scheduled to speak, was mounted with the support of Malaprops staff, particularly Melanie McNair, the stores assistant manager and newly appointed events coordinator.

Within a day authors Joshilyn Jackson (The Opposite of Everyone), Jamie Mason (Mondays Lie), Kim Michele Richardson (GodPretty in the Tobacco Field) agreed to join Gruen on stage at the Asheville Community Theatre for a Kill the Bill reading. Gruen has also created the rough outline for an LGBT fundraiser at the event, which will include a pre-reading cocktail party where attendees can view the auction items, which will likely include a dinner with the authors as well as a stay at a local inn, signed books, and art work. Tickets will sell for $20.

Malaprops McNair has equally speedily put in place a framework for Kill the Bill, which will be the first in a new series the store is calling Authors for Action. The series is designed to support social, environmental, and other types of issues. Authors will be paired with a nonprofit group or groups with the goal of raising the profile of the cause. Its a way we can amplify the cause in the community, McNair said.

For Kill the Bill, Malaprops has already been in touch with four nonprofits working on behalf of the LGBT community and/or to roll back HB2: The Campaign for Southern Equality, Tranzmission, Equality North Carolina, and the ACLU of North Carolina. All four groups will have a prominent place at the event. Its too soon to know yet which one, or possibly all four, will be the beneficiaries of the auction and reading.

But even before Kill the Bill takes place, two other authors have agreed to make their event part of the Authors for Action series. Garrad Conley, author of Boy Erased: A Memoir, and Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You, who will be in conversation with Elizabeth Kostova a few days later on May 22 at the bookstore, will dedicate their event to fighting HB2.

We are so inspired by the support weve received, McNair told PW, particularly in the wake of store manger Linda-Marie Barretts op ed in the New York Times last week. In it Barrett wrote that "for 34 years weve had authors backs when their books were challenged or their events protested. We need authors to have our backs, too.

Gruen has shown that authors have heeded Barretts call. Others who would like to do so are encouraged to contact Gruen at authorsforaction@gmail.com.
Even in Springfield, where good-government reforms often go to die, it can be tough to keep an especially smart idea down.

Sometimes, too, timing is every thing. Take legislation recently resurrected that could make Evelyn Sanguinetti Illinois last lieutenant governor. A gold star, by the way, if you knew the name of Republican Gov. Bruce Rauners running-mate before reading it here. An extra bit of bling for each of the 46 other Illinois lieutenant governors you can tick off.

Were willing to bet, however, that a vast majority of Illinoisans dont know the identity of more than a scant handful who have held the post, let alone what they accomplished while in office.

No wonder. Though this constitutional office pays $120,000 a year and comes with a budget and staff, our so-called governor lite has no duties which are essential to the operation of Illinois government, save a single macabre one: To take over if the governor dies or cannot otherwise discharge the duties of the office. The jobs only other significant duty, presiding over the Illinois Senate, was taken away by the 1970 Constitution.

Now Rep. David McSweeney, R- Barrington, is once again sponsoring legislation to eliminate the post entirely, a move supporters estimate would save taxpayers $1.5 million a year. An earlier version of the same bill passed comfortably in the House but was never voted on by the Senate. This time around, Rep. McSweeney says hes confident the state fiscal crisis will provide the impetus needed to pass it.

Politics remain obstacle

Our fear, however, is that politics will again get in the way. Governor lite has been a stepping-stone for half a dozen Illinois governors. Some officeholders also have found electoral success elsewhere, for example, Paul Simon who went on to a U.S. Senate career, and made a serious, but unsuccessful, bid for president. Other office alums have received plum government appointments.

Most, however, ended their terms in the same political obscurity in which they began this largely do-nothing job. How boring is it? Some officeholders have resigned in disgust and many others eagerly counted the days until their sentence was completed. Even Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who succeeded Gov. Rod Blagojevich after his impeachment, left the post vacant for a year.

That doesnt mean our governor lites have all been lightweights. Some worked hard for their money, thanks in large part to serving with a governor who let them. For example, Sheila Simon, (who joined Gov. Quinn on the ticket in 2010) worked on such issues as promoting the Rock Island Arsenal and other Illinois military installations.

How it would work

At Gov. Rauners behest, current Lt. Gov. Sanguinetti has been busy advocating for government consolidation. Perhaps not surprisingly, shes a fan of House Joint Resolution Constitutional Amendment 5 to eliminate the office beginning with the expiration of her term in 2019. The amendment also provides that the attorney general and then the secretary of state would succeed the governor if succession were to be necessary. (The remaining handful of the jobs statutory duties can easily be transferred elsewhere.)

Its hard to argue against the cost-effectiveness of such a move, or the value -- largely symbolic though it may be -- in doing so.

With the state wallowing in billions of dollars worth of debt, such a move might seem too little to matter. But it cam, especially if it whets the appetite for reform among lawmakers who put taxpayers first. For example, if we can eliminate the lieutenant governors office, can a merger of the comptroller and treasurer offices -- estimated to save nearly $12 million -- be far behind?

Who knows, that could lead to a tsunami of government elimination and consolidation that will give taxpayers better and more efficient government. But it must start somewhere. Why not here?
Despite its economic growth in the late 1800s, Illinois on the whole, and Chicago in particular, was criticized for a perceived lack of arts and culture. But the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893 helped spark what one writer called an artistic renaissance.

Chicago soon would become a center of American architecture, due in part to the advent of the skyscraper. In 1885, William LeBaron Jenney, an engineer under William T. Sherman in the Civil War, designed the Home Insurance Building in Chicago with a steel skeleton, which evenly distributed the structures weight and allowed for extra height. The thinner steel also provided more space for the interior and larger windows for light.

The golden age of Chicago design ensued, sparking tremendous strides in both style and technology. Skyscrapers in New York would not rise higher than those in Chicago until 1914.

Jenney was a mentor to Louis Sullivan, who, along with Dankmar Adler, was at the forefront of the Chicago School of Architecture. Adler and Sullivan, in turn, influenced a young Frank Lloyd Wright, who was later headquartered in Oak Park.

Art was also burgeoning, including the Art Institute of Chicago, which was supported both by city funding and donations from some of Chicagos titans. Not everyone was impressed, however. One Chicago writer wondered if a major exhibition of Cubist, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art at the Institute in 1913 had originated in an insane asylum, and a state commission pondered the morality of the exhibit.

Fewer questioned the states greatest sculptor, Lorado Taft, who was born in Elmwood in 1860 and studied in Paris. In 1893, he opened a studio in Chicago, though his sculptures were not limited to the Windy City. Among his most famous is "The Eternal Indian," a striking 50-foot statue of Black Hawk overlooking the Rock River near Oregon, in Ogle County.

In 1898, Taft founded the Eagles Nest Art Colony, a summer retreat near Oregon for Chicago artists that operated until 1942. His "History of American Sculpture," published in 1903, was a standard work on the topic for years afterward.

Fine music was also on the scene, including the Chicago Grand Opera Company, which opened in 1910 and was renamed the Chicago Civic Opera in 1929. There was also the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which began with concerts in October 1891 under the renowned Theodore Thomas.

In Springfield, the Illinois State Library began to hit its stride with a move to the west wing of the capitol building in 1887. Two years later, the Illinois State Historical Library was founded. Following in 1903 was the establishment of the Illinois State Historical Society.

Gov. John M. Palmer signed the Public Library Act on March 7, 1872, allowing Illinois communities to create tax-supported reading sanctuaries. By 1906, there were 112 tax-supported libraries in Illinois. In areas without public libraries, traveling libraries provided by the Illinois Federation of Womens Clubs served the residents thirst for reading materials.

Library patrons could enjoy the works of an array of Illinois authors, including Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Floyd Del and Hamlin Garland, who became part of the Chicago literary scene along with Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry magazine. Other state writers of note included Carl Sandburg of Galesburg, Edgar Lee Masters of Petersburg and Vachel Lindsay of Springfield.

Newspapers were also voraciously read by Illinoisans, and the number of papers across the state jumped to 1,017 in 1880. Every one of the states 102 counties boasted at least one newspaper. By 1906, some 1,700 papers were in operation statewide.

Illinoisans could also look to a new medium -- motion pictures. In 1910, some 12,000 theaters were scattered across Chicago, which also became the unofficial filmmaking capital of the world, as local studios featured productions with stars like Tom Mix and Charlie Chaplin. In a few years, the studios left for the sun of Los Angeles -- but the artistic and cultural influence in Illinois was here to stay.

Tom Emery is a freelance writer and researcher who lives in Carlinville. He may be reached at 217-710-8392 or ilcivilwar@yahoo.com.
Against deployment of US ground troops overseas



Reportedly, the US department of defense improperly and unwisely suggested deployment of US ground troops in a number of foreign states, the strategy that if adopted will lead to US engagement in many foreign wars, loss of trillions of US dollars and millions of US lives, defeat and disorderly withdrawal of the US armed forces to the territory of the United States of America, bankruptcy of the United States of America and adoption of the constitutional amendments to the US constitution, prohibiting deployment of US armed forces outside the territory of the United States of America in times of peace and establishing that the US constitution and US laws apply exclusively in the territory of the United States of America.



In Afghanistan, a brave American general falsely claims that he needs 5,000 more US troops to defeat Taleban freedom fighters. In fact, presently there are hundreds of thousands of Taleban freedom fighters in Afghanistan, supported by 5/6 of the Afghan population, who do not desire the presence of US and NATO armed forces in Afghanistan. In the territory of Afghanistan no weapon formed against Taleban will prosper, and every tongue that raises in judgment against Taleban, Taleban will condemn, for Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit has loved Taleban with everlasting and unchangeable love: all Taleban freedom fighters are blessed by the Holy Name of Lord God Jehovah and Lord Jesus Christ with all blessings of Leviticus 26:3-13, all Afghan and foreign enemies of Taleban are accursed unto destruction by the Holy Name of Lord God Jehovah and Lord Jesus Christ with all curses of Leviticus 26:14-39, and will be overcome, killed and robbed whoever they are. In the territory of Afghanistan Taleban freedom fighters will overcome, defeat, kill and rob all of Afghan and foreign enemies of Taleban freedom fighters whoever they are. Taleban freedom fighters will fight to Victory or death, to the last man, woman and child, leaving the enemy scorched earth instead of plunder, and will overcome, defeat and kill all US and NATO armed forces in the territory of Afghanistan, drowning them in the rivers of US and NATO blood, for Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit will fight in the territory of Afghanistan for Taleban and against all Afghani and foreign enemies of Taleban whoever they are, so that Taleban freedom fighters may live in peace in their own Afghan land, under their tradition of islamic faith and sharia law, autonomy, self-government, the rights and authority of Afghani provinces, districts and tribes, customs and traditions of Pashtun Afghani tribes, natural rights, derivative-natural rights, civil rights and traditional rights of Afghani citizens and residents.



There is a reasonable settlement in Afghanistan: re-establishment of the legitimate government of Afghanistan, the islamic emirate of Afghanistan, in which Taleban freedom fighters and Pashtun tribes to which they belong will serve as defenders of all Afghani tribes, while non-Pashtun Afghani tribes will be allowed to reside under their tradition of islamic faith and sharia law, autonomy, self-government, the rights and authority of Afghani provinces, districts and tribes, customs and traditions of non-Pashtun Afghani tribes, natural rights, derivative-natural rights, civil rights and traditional rights of Afghani citizens and residents in non-Pashtun Afghani provinces. The everlasting and unchangeable condition for this reasonable settlement in Afghanistan, as well as for any ceasefire talks or any peace talks in Afghanistan, established by Taleban, is complete withdrawal of all US and NATO armed forces from the territory of Afghanistan. Therefore, if the United States of America desires peace in Afghanistan, the United States of America will swiftly and unconditionally withdraw all US and NATO armed forces from the territory of Afghanistan, and if the United States of America desires war in Afghanistan, all US and NATO armed forces will be overcome, defeated, killed to the last man and woman, and expelled from the territory of Afghanistan, drowned in the rivers of US and NATO blood by victorious Taleban freedom fighters



Reportedly, US and NATO soldiers and officers raped, tortured and killed tens of thousands of Afghani civilians, some of whom for sports. The same will be done unto US and NATO men, women and children, according to the everlasting and unchangeable principle, in force as long as the earth exists: thou shalt give earthly life for earthly life, burning for burning, stripe for stripe, hand for hand, foot for foot, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, wound for wound (Exodus 21:23-25).



It is important for US soldiers and officers not to deploy to Afghanistan, in order not to come back in body bags.



In Iraq, reportedly thousands of US ground forces are improperly and unwisely deployed to fight against the islamic state of Iraq and Syria. Presently, there are millions of Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians, Babylonians and Chaldeans of the islamic state of Itaq and Syria, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Syrians and islamic volunteers, supported by large majority of Iraqis still faithful to the baath party of Iraq, and tens of millions of Arabs and muslims in Arab and islamic states, nations and peoples of the world. As the result of improper and unwise US bombings in Iraq and deployment of US ground forces in Iraq, convergence between forces of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria and the baath party of Iraq took place, and the holy urban and rural war of national liberation of Iraq is waged by the Iraqi people against US and NATO forces and Iraqi democratic collaborators.



Historically established international law is clear: Assyrians and the descendants of Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria have blood-based settlement rights, being a part of the indigenous Assyrian people of Iraq and Syria, that traditionally resides in the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq and Deir Al Zour and Ar-Raqqah provinces of Syria. In fact, most of the warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, Assyria, are Assyrians and descendants of Assyrians forced to leave their land in the past and presently returning to reside in the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq and Deir Al Zour and Ar-Raqqah provinces of Syria under protection of God, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, following the Assyrian tradition of islamic faith and sharia law, customs and traditions of Assyrians and Babylonians, natural rights, derivative-natural rights, civil rights and traditional rights of citizens and residents of Iraq and Syria. Therefore, international law prohibits expulsion and eradication of Assyrians and the descendants of Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, a part of the indigenous Assyrian people of Iraq and Syria, that traditionally resides in the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq and Deir Al Zour and Ar-Raqqah provinces of Syria.



In his infinite wisdom Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit established the glorious future for Assyrians and the descendants of Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, making Assyrians and the descendants of Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria invincible in the territory of the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq and Deir Al Zour and Ar-Raqqah Assyrian provinces of Syria.



Of Assyrians and the descendants of Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit said:



Joel 2:1-10

Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain of Sinai: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand;

A day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains: a great people and a strong, the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria; there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more after it, even to the years of many generations.

A fire devoureth before the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria; and behind the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria.

The appearance of the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria is as the appearance of horses; and as horsemen, so shall the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria run.

Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth the stubble, as a strong people set in battle array.

Before the face of the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria the people shall be much pained: all faces shall gather blackness.

The Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall run like mighty men; the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall climb the wall like men of war; and the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall march every one on his ways, and the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall not break their ranks:

Neither shall one thrust another; the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall walk every one in his path: and when the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria fall upon the sword, the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall not be wounded.

The Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall run to and fro in the city; the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall run upon the wall, the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall climb up upon the houses; the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall enter in at the windows like a thief.

The earth shall quake before the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria; the heavens shall tremble: the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining



Jeremiah 37:7-10

Behold, the army of any and all states and all nations of earth, which is come forth to help Iraqis, shall return into their own land.

And the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall come again, and fight against the city of Baghdad, and take the city of Baghdad, and burn the city of Baghdad with fire.

Thus saith the Lord; Deceive not yourselves, saying, the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall surely depart from us: for they shall not depart.

For though ye had smitten the whole army of the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria that fight against you, and there remained but wounded men among them, yet should they rise up every man in his tent, and burn this city of Baghdad with fire.









Revelation 14:8

And there followed another angel saying Babylon [Baghdad] is fallen is fallen that great city of Baghdad because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication



Revelation 16:19

And the great city was divided into three parts and the cities of the nations fell and great Babylon [Baghdad] came in remembrance before God to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness [furiousness] of his wrath



The Word of God is clear: the islamic state of Iraq and Syria will not be defeated and will not be degraded in Iraq and Syria, but will go from strength to greater strength in Iraq and Syria, eventually taking the city of Baghdad (Babylon) and burning it with fire in one hour (Revelation 17-18 ) in awful punishment of God for heinous historical war crimes of Babylonians and Chaldeans against the state of Israel and the city of Jerusalem described in Jeremiah 50-51 and in awful punishment of God for heinous war crimes of US and NATO aggressors and Iraqi democratic collaborators against Iraqi muslims, initiating partition of Iraq into the free, sovereign and independent state of Kurdistan consisting of the autonomous region of Kurdistan and the province of Kirkuk of Iraq, the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq that will reunify with their Assyrian and Syrian brothers in the free Syrian state, the Syrian Arab federative islamic republic (SAFIR) after the fall of the bloody and blasphemous assad regime, and the rest of Iraqi territory (without the autonomous region of Kurdistan, the province of Kirkuk of Iraq, the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq), that will reunify with the islamic republic of Iran, thereby fulfilling the eternal and unchangeable decree of Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, finishing the history of Iraq and the city of Baghdad - mene, mene, tekel, upharsin (Daniel 5:25-28, Jeremiah 50-51, Revelation 14:8, 16:17-21, 17-18 ). And in vain do US and NATO armed forces fight against the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, for Creator God, God, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit will never change, as it is written:







Numbers 23:19

God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?



Daniel 4:35

And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and God doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?



All Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria are blessed by the Holy Name of Lord God Jehovah and Lord Jesus Christ with all blessings of Leviticus 26:3-13, all Iraqi, Syrian and foreign enemies of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria are accursed unto destruction by the Holy Name of Lord God Jehovah and Lord Jesus Christ with all curses of Leviticus 26:14-39, and will be overcome, killed and robbed whoever they are. Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria in the territory of Iraq and Syria will overcome, defeat, kill and rob all of Iraqi, Syrian and foreign enemies of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria whoever they are. Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria will fight to Victory or death, to the last man, woman and child, leaving the enemy scorched earth instead of plunder, and will overcome, defeat and kill all US and NATO armed forces in the territory of Iraq and Syria, drowning them in the rivers of US and NATO blood, for Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit will fight in the territory of Iraq and Syria for the islamic state of Iraq and Syria and against all Iraqi, Syrian and foreign enemies of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria whoever they are, so that Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria may live in peace in their own Syrian and Iraqi land, under the Assyrian tradition of islamic faith and sharia law, customs and traditions of Assyrians and Babylonians, natural rights, derivative-natural rights, civil rights and traditional rights of citizens and residents of Iraq and Syria.



After the terrorist attack in the United States of America in 2001 an emotional decision was made by boastful lying US and NATO generals to wage an aggressive war against Iraq and Afghanistan, the decision that was proven by subsequent events to be wrong. Against this decision a few reasonable men, including my humble person, spoke out at that time, only to be ignored by boastful lying US and NATO generals deceiving the American people with their false promises of victory in Iraq and Afghanistan and causing the American people thousands of lost precious lives of American soldiers and officers and trillions in wasted US federal government expenditures: in fact the civil war in Iraq and the civil war in Afghanistan is continuing to this day.



Therefore, if the United States of America does not desire to lose in vain the lives of US and NATO soldiers and officers and US federal government expenditure, the United States of America will swiftly and unconditionally withdraw all US and NATO ground forces from the territory of Iraq, and if the United States of America desires war in Iraq, all US and NATO armed forces will be overcome, defeated, killed to the last man and woman and expelled from the territory of Iraq, drowned in the rivers of US and NATO blood, by victorious Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, and victorious forces of the baath party of Iraq.



Reportedly, US and NATO soldiers and officers raped, tortured and killed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, some of whom for sports. The same will be done unto US and NATO men, women and children, according to the everlasting and unchangeable principle, in force as long as the earth exists: thou shalt give earthly life for earthly life, burning for burning, stripe for stripe, hand for hand, foot for foot, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, wound for wound (Exodus 21:23-25).



It is important for US soldiers and officers not to deploy to Iraq in order not to come back in body bags.



In Syria, reportedly hundreds of US ground forces are unlawfully and groundlessly deployed to fight against the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, in violation of the sacred and inalienable national sovereignty of Syria.



After the terrorist attack in the United States of America in 2001 an emotional decision war made by boastful lying US and NATO generals to wage aggressive was made against Iraq and Afghanistan, the decision that was proven by subsequent events to be wrong. Against this decision a few reasonable men, including my humble person, spoke out at that time, only to be ignored by boastful lying US and NATO generals deceiving the American people with their false promises of victory in Iraq and Afghanistan and causing the American people thousands of lost precious lives of American soldiers and officers and trillions in wasted US federal government expenditures: in fact the civil war in Iraq and the civil war in Afghanistan are continuing to this day. In fact, the fall of the bloody baathist regime of saddam hussein in Iraq made the Syrian civil war and the fall of the bloody and blasphemous bashar assad regime in Syria inevitable.



Presently, there are millions of Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians, Babylonians and Chaldeans of the islamic state of Itaq and Syria, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Syrians and islamic volunteers, supported by the majority of Syrian freedom fighters and tens of millions of Arabs and muslims in Arab and islamic states, nations and peoples of the world. As a result of unlawful and groundless US bombings in Syria and deployment of US ground forces in Syria convergence between Syrian freedom fighters and Assyrians, descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria took place, and the holy urban and rural war of national liberation of Syria is waged by the Syrian people against US and NATO invaders, Russian, Iranian and Turkish invaders, and assadites, in which Syrian freedom fighters will overcome, defeat and kill to the last man and woman US and NATO invaders, Russian, Iranian and Turkish invaders, drowning US and NATO invaders, Russian, Iranian and Turkish invaders in the rivers of US, NATO, Russian, Iranian and Turkish blood and expelling US and NATO invaders, Russian, Iranian and Turkish invaders from the territory of Syria.



It is lawful, feasible and reasonable for the United States of America to supply personal weapons and appropriate munitions to all brigades of Syrian freedom fighters, to provide military training to all brigades of Syrian freedom fighters and not to interfere with islamic volunteers who travel to Syria to join all brigades of Syrian freedom fighters. It is feasible and reasonable for Turkey, jointly with Syrian freedom fighters, to establish a no-flight zone in the Syrian province of Aleppo, wherein Syrian refugees can return and settle in refugee camps guarded by Syrian freedom fighters. In contrast, deployment of US and NATO ground troops to Syria will turn the whole Syrian people against US and NATO: all US and NATO armed forces will be overcome, defeated and killed to the last man and woman by victorious Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians, islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, by victorious islamic warriors of Jabhat Fatah Al Sham and islamic warriors of Ahrar Al Sham, by victorious Syrian freedom fighters, for Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit will fight in the territory of Syria for the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, for Jabhat Fatah Al Sham, for Syrian freedom fighters, and against US and NATO, against all Syrian and foreign enemies of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, Jabhat Fatah Al Sham, Syrian freedom fighters, whoever they are, so that Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria and Jabhat Fatah Al Sham may live in peace in their own Syrian land, under the Assyrian tradition of islamic faith and sharia law, customs and traditions of Assyrians and Syrians, natural rights, derivative-natural rights, civil rights and traditional rights of citizens and residents of Syria.



Some still advocate, improperly and unwisely, foreign military intervention and international military intervention in Syria. Indeed, there was time in 2012 when humanitarian international military intervention in Syria by 50,000 Egyptian peacekeepers and 50.000 Turkish peacekeepers, authorized by UN and the League of Arab states, advocated by reasonable men and women, including my humble person, would have removed the bloody and blasphemous assad regime from power in Syria, would have destroyed Syrian chemical weapons of mass destruction, would have saved hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilian lives and would have allowed millions of Syrians not to become refugees, yet the Egyptian army refused to undertake humanitarian international military intervention in Syria and the decision of the Egyptian army shall be respected. Furthermore, foreign military intervention and international military intervention in Syria is prohibited under the agreement with Syria with regard to destruction of chemical weapons of mass destruction.



Others improperly and unwisely disapprove of arming and training brigades of Syrian freedom fighters. The unchangeable principle of international law commands to provide personal weapons to the people against which genocide is committed if such a people desires to take up personal weapons to defend life, freedom from enslavement, dignity from rape and physical assault, movable property, land up to 100 hectares per citizen of the state/family and kin of the citizens of the state and real estate situated upon such land: there are no exceptions whatsoever from this unchangeable principle of international law, confirmed inter alias in the laws of Persians and the Iranians and Persian and Iranian kings, which are unchangeable and in force as long as the Persian and Iranian peoples and the earth exists, and all nations of the world, great and small, including superpowers, and all international organizations, including the UN, must comply with this unchangeable principle of international law.



The selfsame unchangeable principle of international law compels any state, neighboring a state that committed genocide, that is, within last seven years murdered more than 10,000 (wo)men who did not commit the abominable deeds of sexual perversions (homosexuality, lesbianism, bestiality, incest, ********** (sexual relations with girls below 12 years of age)), abominations (child murders (abortions), change of gender, cannibalism, human cloning), intentional murder, enslavement of men/women or selling of men/women to slavery, is forcefully abolished, and a new state established, respectful of the commandments of God and Lord Jesus Christ, customs and traditions of the state-forming people, and natural rights, derivative-natural rights, civil rights, traditional rights of the citizens and residents of the state (Exodus 17:14,16, I Samuel 15:3), to let pass through its territory volunteers armed with personal weapons: military knives, handguns, semi-automatic and automatic rifles, machine guns, grenades, portable grenade launchers, portable missile launchers, portable anti-aircraft missiles, portable anti-tank missiles, portable naval missiles and appropriate munitions, or unarmed, joining the lawful holy war on behalf of the people against which genocide or an aggressive war is committed. The state that refuses under any pretext whatsoever, including concerns of national sovereignty or national security, any international law and any law of mankind, to let pass through its territory volunteers armed with personal weapons: military knives, handguns, semi-automatic and automatic rifles, machine guns, grenades, portable grenade launchers, portable missile launchers, portable anti-aircraft missiles, portable anti-tank missiles, portable naval missiles and appropriate munitions, or unarmed, joining the lawful holy war on behalf of the people against which genocide or an aggressive war is committed, becomes co-responsible for genocide and an aggressive war committed against another people, thereby bringing destruction and desolation upon the state and the state-forming people that refuses under any pretext whatsoever, including concerns of national sovereignty or national security, to let pass through its territory volunteers armed with personal weapons: military knives, handguns, semi-automatic and automatic rifles, machine guns, grenades, portable grenade launchers, portable missile launchers, portable anti-aircraft missiles, portable anti-tank missiles, portable naval missiles and appropriate munitions, or unarmed, joining the lawful holy war on behalf of the people against which genocide or an aggressive war is committed.



Therefore, those who improperly and unwisely disapprove of arming and training brigades of Syrian freedom fighters must respect the above-mentioned unchangeable principle of international law, whether they like it or whether they dislike it, against their will, and shall address their complaints about words and deeds of any and all brigades of Syrian freedom fighters to the bloody and blasphemous assad regime that forced Alawites to worship bashar assad as a god and instead of God, that committed genocide against the Syrian people, murdering in cold blood tens of thousands of Syrian civilian men, women and children, used chemical weapons of mass destruction repeatedly against Syrian civilian men, women and children, and for more than one year after the beginning of the Syrian civil war refused the repeated proposals of Syrian freedom fighters and Syrian opposition for negotiated settlement.



Historically established international laws is clear: Assyrians and the descendants of Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria have blood-based settlement rights, being a part of the indigenous Assyrian people of Iraq and Syria, that traditionally resides in the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq and Deir Al Zour and Ar-Raqqah provinces of Syria. In fact, most of the warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, Assyria, are Assyrians and the descendants of Assyrians forced to leave their land in the past and presently returning to reside in the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq and Deir Al Zour and Ar-Raqqah provinces of Syria under protection of God, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, following the Assyrian tradition of islamic faith and sharia law, customs and traditions of Assyrians and Babylonians, natural rights, derivative-natural rights, civil rights and traditional rights of citizens and residents of Iraq and Syria. Therefore, international law prohibits expulsion and eradication of the Assyrians and the descendants of Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, a part of the indigenous Assyrian people of Iraq and Syria, that traditionally resides in the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq and Deir Al Zour and Ar-Raqqah provinces of Syria.



Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit in his infinite wisdom established the glorious future for Assyrians and the descendants of Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, making Assyrians and the descendants of Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria invincible in the territory of the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq and Deir Al Zour and Ar-Raqqah Assyrian provinces of Syria.



Of Assyrians and the descendants of Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit said:



Joel 2:1-10

Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain of Sinai: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand;

A day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains: a great people and a strong, the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria; there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more after it, even to the years of many generations.

A fire devoureth before the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria; and behind the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria.

The appearance of the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria is as the appearance of horses; and as horsemen, so shall the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria run.

Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth the stubble, as a strong people set in battle array.

Before the face of the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria the people shall be much pained: all faces shall gather blackness.

The Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall run like mighty men; the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall climb the wall like men of war; and the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall march every one on his ways, and the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall not break their ranks:

Neither shall one thrust another; the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall walk every one in his path: and when the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria fall upon the sword, the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall not be wounded.

The Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall run to and fro in the city; the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall run upon the wall, the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall climb up upon the houses; the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall enter in at the windows like a thief.

The earth shall quake before the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria; the heavens shall tremble: the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining



Jeremiah 37:7-10

Behold, the army of any and all states and all nations of earth, which is come forth to help Iraqis, shall return into their own land.

And the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall come again, and fight against the city of Baghdad, and take the city of Baghdad, and burn the city of Baghdad with fire.

Thus saith the Lord; Deceive not yourselves, saying, the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria shall surely depart from us: for they shall not depart.

For though ye had smitten the whole army of the Assyrians and the descendants of the Assyrians of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria that fight against you, and there remained but wounded men among them, yet should they rise up every man in his tent, and burn this city of Baghdad with fire.



Revelation 14:8

And there followed another angel saying Babylon [Baghdad] is fallen is fallen that great city of Baghdad because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication



Revelation 16:19

And the great city was divided into three parts and the cities of the nations fell and great Babylon [Baghdad] came in remembrance before God to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness [furiousness] of his wrath



The Word of God is clear: the islamic state of Iraq and Syria will not be defeated and will not be degraded in Iraq and Syria, but will go from strength to greater strength in Iraq and Syria, eventually taking the city of Baghdad (Babylon) and burning it with fire in one hour (Revelation 17-18 ) in awful punishment of God for heinous historical war crimes of Babylonians and Chaldeans against the state of Israel and the city of Jerusalem described in Jeremiah 50-51 and in awful punishment of God for heinous war crimes of US and NATO aggressors and Iraqi democratic collaborators against Iraqi muslims, initiating partition of Iraq into the free, sovereign and independent state of Kurdistan consisting of the autonomous region of Kurdistan and the province of Kirkuk of Iraq, the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq, which will reunify with their Assyrian and Syrian brothers in the free Syrian state, the Syrian Arab federative islamic republic (SAFIR) after the fall of the bloody and blasphemous assad regime, and the rest of Iraqi territory (without the autonomous region of Kurdistan, the province of Kirkuk of Iraq, the Assyrian provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Dulaim (Al-Anbar) of Iraq), which will reunify with the islamic republic of Iran, thereby fulfilling eternal and unchangeable decree of Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, finishing the history of Iraq and the city of Baghdad - mene, mene, tekel, upharsin (Daniel 5:25-28, Jeremiah 50-51, Revelation 14:8, 16:17-21, 17-18 ). And in vain do US and NATO armed forces fight against the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, for Creator God, God, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit will never change, as it is written:



Numbers 23:19

God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?



Daniel 4:35

And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and God doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?



All Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria are blessed by the Holy Name of Lord God Jehovah and Lord Jesus Christ with all blessings of Leviticus 26:3-13, all Iraqi, Syrian and foreign enemies of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria are accursed unto destruction by the Holy Name of Lord God Jehovah and Lord Jesus Christ with all curses of Leviticus 26:14-39, and will be overcome, killed and robbed whoever they are. Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria in the territory of Iraq and Syria will overcome, defeat, kill and rob all of Iraqi, Syrian and foreign enemies of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, whoever they are. Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria will fight to Victory or death, to the last man, woman and child, leaving the enemy scorched earth instead of plunder, and will overcome, defeat and kill all US and NATO armed forces in the territory of Iraq and Syria, drowning them in the rivers of US and NATO blood, for Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit will fight in the territory of Iraq and Syria for the islamic state of Iraq and Syria and against all Iraqi, Syrian and foreign enemies of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria whoever they are, so that Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria may live in peace in their own Syrian and Iraqi land, under the Assyrian tradition of islamic faith and sharia law, customs and traditions of Assyrians and Babylonians, natural rights, derivative-natural rights, civil rights and traditional rights of citizens and residents of Iraq and Syria.



In fact, in the territory of the Syrian province of Idlib no weapon formed against Jabhat Fatah Al Sham will prosper, and every tongue that raises in judgment against Jabhat Fatah Al Sham, Jabhat Fatah Al Sham will condemn, for Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit has loved Jabhat Fatah Al Sham with everlasting and unchangeable love: all islamic warriors of Jabhat Fatah Al Sham are blessed by the Holy Name of Lord God Jehovah and Lord Jesus Christ with all blessings of Leviticus 26:3-13, all Syrian and foreign enemies of Jabhat Fatah Al Sham are accursed unto destruction by the Holy Name of Lord God Jehovah and Lord Jesus Christ with all curses of Leviticus 26:14-39, and will be overcome, killed and robbed whoever they are. Islamic warriors of Jabhat Fatah Al Sham in the territory of the Syrian province of Idlib will overcome, defeat, kill and rob all of Afghan and foreign enemies of islamic warriors of Jabhat Fatah Al Sham whoever they are. Islamic warriors of Jabhat Fatah Al Sham will fight to Victory or death, to the last man, woman and child, leaving the enemy scorched earth instead of plunder, and will overcome, defeat and kill to the last man and woman all US and NATO armed forces in the territory of Syria, drowning them in the rivers of US and NATO blood, for Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit will fight in the territory of Syria for Jabhat Fatah Al Sham and against all Syrian and foreign enemies of Jabhat Fatah Al Sham whoever they are, so that islamic warriors of Jabhat Fatah Al Sham may live in peace in their own Syrian land, under their Syrian tradition of islamic faith and sharia law, customs and traditions of Assyrians and Syrians, natural rights, derivative-natural rights, civil rights and traditional rights of citizens and residents of Syria.



Some have improperly, unwisely and falsely claimed that the islamic state of Iraq and Syria is a greater problem for the United States of America than the bloody and blasphemous assad regime. In fact, the islamic state of Iraq and Syria is one of hundreds of brigades of Syrian freedom fighters that, despite its boastful Assyrian rhetoric, does not pose any threat to the United States of America or western countries outside Syria and Iraq, and since its establishment in 2011 the islamic state of Iraq and Syria has killed no more than two and a half thousand Syrian and Iraqi civilians without objective reason, while the bloody and blasphemous assad regime has killed in cold blood tens of thousands of Syrian civil men, women and children just since 2011. Therefore, it is the genocide of the Syrian people by the bloody and blasphemous assad regime that led to the establishment and strengthening of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, and those who reject the islamic state of Iraq and Syria should support the struggle of all brigades of Syrian freedom fighters against the bloody and blasphemous assad regime, as the free Syrian state will be able to establish true and lasting peace with the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, allowing Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians and islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria to live in peace in their own Assyrian provinces of Deir Al Zour and Ar-Raqqah, under the Assyrian tradition of islamic faith and sharia law, customs and traditions of Assyrians and Syrians, natural rights, derivative-natural rights, civil rights and traditional rights of citizens and residents of Syria



Creator God, Lord God Jehovah, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit  burning fire - clearly said: there is no peace to the bloody and blasphemous assad regime that committed the genocide of the Syrian people and the abominable deeds of intentional murder and enslavement of Syrian men and women, as there was no, there is no and there will be no peace to the wicked, to those who committed aggressive war (Exodus 17:14,16, I Samuel 15:3), genocide (Exodus 17:14,16, I Samuel 15:3), abominable deeds of the abominable deeds of sexual perversions (homosexuality (Leviticus 20:13), lesbianism (Leviticus 20:13), bestiality (Leviticus 20:15), incest (Leviticus 20:11-17), ********** (sexual relations with girls below 12 years of age) (Leviticus 20:2-3, Matthew 18:6)), abominations (child murders (abortions) (Leviticus 20:2-3, Exodus 21:22-25), change of gender (Book of Enoch, section XVII, chapter 86; section II, chapter 10), cannibalism (Book of Enoch, section II, chapter 7,10), human cloning (Book of Enoch, section XVII, chapter 86; section II, chapter 10)), intentional murder (Exodus 21:14), enslavement of men/women (Exodus 21:16) and selling men/women to slavery (Exodus 21:16) (Isaiah 48:22). And despite any statements of any and all states, nations and peoples, including all member-states of the UN Security Council, the whole humanity, Creator God, God, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit will never change, as it is written:



Numbers 23:19

God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?



Daniel 4:35

And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and God doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?



Thus, no peace and no ceasefire with the bloody and blasphemous assad regime is possible, and all peace negotiations and all ceasefire negotiations with the assad regime will fall: the future of Syria will be settled in the battlefields of the Syrian civil war.



Therefore, if the United States of America does not desire to lose in vain lives of US and NATO soldiers and officers and US federal government expenditure, the United States of America will swiftly and unconditionally withdraw all US and NATO ground forces from the territory of Syria, and if the United States of America desires war in Syria, all US and NATO armed forces will be overcome, defeated, killed to the last man and woman and expelled from the territory of Syria, drowned in the rivers of US and NATO blood, by victorious Assyrians, the descendants of Assyrians, islamic warriors of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria, by victorious islamic warriors of Jabhat Fatah Al Sham and islamic warriors of Ahrar Al Sham, by victorious Syrian freedom fighters.



Reportedly, US and NATO soldiers and officers raped, tortured and killed thousands of Syrian civilians, some of whom for sports. The same will be done unto US and NATO men, women and children, according to the everlasting and unchangeable principle, in force as long as the earth exists: thou shalt give earthly life for earthly life, burning for burning, stripe for stripe, hand for hand, foot for foot, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, wound for wound (Exodus 21:23-25).



It is important for US soldiers and officers not to deploy to Syria, in order not to come back in body bags.
The long-dormant mines also rear their heads at random intervals, causing cave-ins that have damaged dozens of homes and led to the demolition of a nearly new elementary school in 2009. The budget to repair city services after cave-ins, such as a municipal water line that burst when the sinking ground damaged foundations at 15 homes one year ago, in this 1,500-person town is slim.

So, when an environmental group came to town to pitch a severance tax on coal mined in Illinois that could potentially raise hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the cash-strapped state (and funnel some to Benld), Mayor Gloria Sidar and colleagues were eager to listen.

"I don't think it's a bad thing actually to ask somebody to pay a tax that would then go into a fund to help alleviate some of these problems," she said.

Illinois is one of just three coal-producing states that doesn't collect excise taxes on fossil fuels that are extracted, or severed, from the ground, including oil and natural gas. However, the proposal would need to overcome likely vociferous opposition from the struggling coal industry and also require legislative approval at a time Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democratic leaders haven't reached an agreement on a budget for the current fiscal year.

Organizers said they are working to line up legislative sponsors for 2017 rather than push lawmakers during an election year to support a 5 percent tax hike on the gross value of the nearly 58 million tons produced by coal companies in Illinois in 2014. They're also taking their message to former and current coal communities, like Benld in Macoupin County, about 50 miles northeast of St. Louis, Missouri; Canton, which is near Peoria; and West Frankfort near the southern tip of the state.

The tax could have raised $141 million last year alone, and eventually more than $200 million annually as the state's coal output is expected to increase, according to research conducted on behalf of the environmental nonprofit group, Community Futures Initiative.

The money would be funneled evenly to three sources: the state's general revenue fund; a permanent mineral trust fund to pay for future public services beyond the shelf life of mines  beneficial for places like Benld; and coal-producing communities.

"Coal companies that mine here in Illinois are extracting the state's wealth," said Champaign environmental activist Pam Richart, a leader of the initiative. Most of the energy generated in Prairie State relies upon coal shipped from elsewhere, according to federal statistics, while roughly 80 percent of the high-sulphur coal mined here is sent out of state, including overseas markets.

Illinois coal officials contend that any new tax could further weaken the already-reeling industry. Last week, St. Louis-based Peabody Energy, which is the nation's largest coal miner and operates three mines in southern Illinois, filed for bankruptcy protection.

"An increase in costs, such as a severance tax, will obviously make our companies less competitive, said Illinois Coal Association President Phil Gonet, who also dismissed the impact of a severance tax on state finances as minimal.

The conversation isn't a new one. A similar proposal failed to pass the state House by one vote in 1984, according to the (Carbondale) Southern Illinoisan. More recently, former Gov. Pat Quinn's administration considered the prospect.

The Benld City Council is on board with the tax proposal, voting unanimously Monday to endorse a symbolic resolution in favor of it. Sidar and her City Council colleagues have more modest, but no less pressing, budget concerns: emergency repairs due to cave-ins.

"As these mines age, and the tops and pillars start to give ... other communities are going to have these same problems," said Sidar, 65, a retired junior high teacher whose late husband worked at a coal mine in nearby Carlinville. Her home was among the damaged structures last year. "You're sitting on a bomb, waiting for the fuse (to go off)."

___

Online:

Community Futures Initiative, www.reinvestil.org
ROCK ISLAND  The final piece of the jigsaw in the city's plan to bring Wal-Mart to 11th Street is almost in place after Monday's city council meeting.

Aldermen agreed at the meeting to donate two parcels of property at 2101 and 2117 11th St. to the owners of Pawn King to allow them to relocate.

The company currently has store at 3940 11th St., which is where Wal-Mart wants to develop a gas station to complement the supercenter it's planning to build at the site of the former Watch Tower Plaza shopping center.

The council voted unanimously to donate the two parcels to Pawn King on top of $20,000 in tax-increment-financing funds to assist the relocation.

Pawn King is planning to develop a new store at 2125 11th St. in the former Salvation Army store but needs the additional space the two adjacent parcels will provide.

Bart Boling, Pawn King's CEO, said he has yet to close on a deal to sell the store but he has reached a tentative agreement with either Wal-Mart or a development company acting on their behalf.

The city bought up and demolished other properties at the Watch Tower site to prepare the ground for the supercenter and has an agreement to sell the site to Price Properties, which will transfer it to Wal-Mart. But the agreement also includes a 180-day feasibility period, during which Wal-Mart can cancel the deal for any reason, which ends early next month.

Also at Monday's council meeting, aldermen voted 5-2 in favor of hiring a consulting firm called Retail Attractions for a second year at a rate of $3,000 a month.

The council voted last year to hire the Oklahoma-based consultants for the same price, plus $7,500 for a market study, with the goal of luring big retailers to Rock Island.

Alds. Virgil Mayberry, 2nd Ward, and Steve Tollenaer, 4th Ward, voted against rehiring the firm at Monday's meeting.

Ald. Tollenaer said he didn't think the consultants had done anything to prove their worth.

"It's as big a waste of money as giving money to the Quad Cities Chamber," he added.

But Ald. Joshua Schipp, 6th Ward, noted that while he understood his colleague's concerns, "you have to bring the people who have connections to your town" and said he was willing to give the consultants another year.
Now one California congressman wants to change a law governing medical device makers to prevent future infections: He wants them to tell the Food and Drug Administration when they make a design change.

There are loopholes in the law that need to be closed, said Rep. Ted Lieu, a Los Angeles Democrat. Right now, its up to manufacturers to decide whether a change is significant enough to tell the regulator. I dont think its appropriate for device manufacturers to make the decision, Lieu said.

His plan may pit him against a powerful medical device lobby that has worked hand in hand with regulators and lawmakers to get favorable oversight rules. But with revelations of hundreds of infections in at least 40 hospitals worldwide since 2010  more than had previously been reported  the dynamic may have shifted.

AdvaMed, the lobby group for the industry, said its reviewing the legislation and shares Lieus commitment to ensuring the continued safety and effectiveness of medical devices marketed in the U.S.

Medical devices are regulated differently than drugs and in some ways less stringently. New drugs must undergo trials to show safety and effectiveness. For most new devices, manufacturers have to show only that theyre similar to existing products. The system, in place since 1976, is not intended to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of medical devices, according to a 2011 report by a committee of the Institute of Medicine.

The committee said it didnt believe there was a public health crisis related to unsafe or ineffective medical devices. But a string of high-profile safety problems with products ranging from vaginal mesh and artificial hips to power morcellators and endoscopes have harmed thousands of patients and prompted lawsuits costing companies billions of dollars. That has led to renewed calls for better oversight.

Medical device changes need to be thoroughly reviewed and approved by the FDA, said Sanket Dhruva, a cardiologist and research fellow at the Yale School of Medicine who has studied device regulation. A small modification can certainly lead to significant harm, and I think the endoscopes are one unfortunate example.

In recent years, endoscope manufacturers, including Olympus, Fujifilm and Pentax, changed the design of specialized instruments called duodenoscopes, used to probe tiny ducts in the small intestine. The companies sealed off a channel that could trap bacteria in the device, making it harder to clean. The dirty scopes spread superbugs among patients in the outbreaks that came to light last year.

Its hard to say for sure how much the design change contributed to the problem. Olympus made the alteration to its scope in 2010, according to a report from Senate Democrats published in January. Two years later, a hospital in the Netherlands told Olympus the change made the scope harder to clean.

After learning about the new design, the FDA privately told Olympus in 2014 the modification would require the company to seek a new clearance for the device. The agency, however, didnt recall the scope or alert the public that it wasn't cleared for use until it was tied to outbreaks making headlines almost a year later. Olympus obtained a new clearance in January.

Olympus spokesman Mark Miller said in an email that we do not agree with all of the conclusions leading to the proposals from Lieu but that manufacturers, hospitals and government all must contribute to improving safety. Olympuss situation wasnt unique. The FDA also told Fujifilm in 2015 that one of its scopes, on the market for a decade, was missing a clearance from the agency.

More than 200 companies or products have been the subject of similar letters from the FDA alerting them that their products, already on the market, may lack the proper regulatory permission to be sold, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg through a public records request.

Doctors and patients may not be aware that devices in use havent been vetted by regulators. Patients should at least have some information about the devices that they are receiving, said Dhruva, the Yale researcher. I think thats a part of the informed consent process.

But even Lieu's modest proposal could face a difficult road. The FDA has made efforts in the past to monitor changes to medical devices better, only to be shot down. In 2011, the agency proposed a new set of guidelines for manufacturers when they need to seek new clearances. The proposal was expected to increase the number of design changes that would prompt more paperwork. In the end, Congress took the extraordinary step of ordering the agency to withdraw the guidelines the following year.

Despite last year's outbreaks, the FDAs latest advice on when companies need to seek new clearances is expected to stay largely the same, a policy seen as a victory for the device industry. A representative from AdvaMed met with FDA officials on the subject last summer, but the agency has declined to provide details of the meeting to Bloomberg. The industry lobby has previously collaborated with the FDA to draft legislation that would ease regulation on device makers.

Lieus bill wouldnt go as far as earlier proposals  the paperwork burden for companies and the FDA would be less than the regulator's previous recommendations, he said. And he thinks he can convince his colleagues in Congress that the changes are needed.

I think the situation is different now, because we can point to a concrete example where a company did not notify the FDA of a design change, he said, and that design change resulted in hundreds of infections.
Whole Foods also released its security footage video from its North Lamar Boulevard flagship store that it says contradicts the mans claims.

Whole Foods on Tuesday said it has investigated and said the man, Jordan Brown, made fraudulent claims and that the company would take legal action.

After a deeper investigation of Mr. Browns claim, we believe his accusations are fraudulent and we intend to take legal action against both Mr. Brown and his attorney, the company said in the statement.

The retailer said Monday in response to Browns claims that their bakery team member wrote Love Wins at the top of the cake. This, the retailer recounted on Tuesday, was visible to Mr. Brown through the clear portion of the packaging.

Thats exactly how the cake was packaged and sold at the store, the company said. Whole Foods Market has a strict policy that prohibits team members from accepting or designing bakery orders that include language or images that are offensive.

The retailer went on to say Brown admitted that he was in sole possession and control of the cake until he posted his video, which showed the UPC label on the bottom and side of the box.

After reviewing their security footage of Mr. Brown, its clear that the UPC label was in fact on top of the cake box, not on the side of the package, Whole Foods said. This is evident as the cashier scans the UPC code on top of the box.

The company said it continues to stand behind its team member.

We stand behind our bakery team member, who is part of the LGBTQ community, and we appreciate the team members and shoppers who recognize that this claim is completely false and directly contradicts Whole Foods Markets inclusive culture, which celebrates diversity, the company said.

More than a half a dozen calls and emails to both Brown and his attorney Austin Kaplan seeking comment were not immediately returned Tuesday.

The two, along with several others, held a news conference at the attorneys office on Monday. At the event, the group shared pictures of a cake inside a box showing a UPC label on the bottom of the box.

Brown, who was emotional at Mondays news conference, said he went to the Whole Foods store and asked the bakery associate to write Love Wins on the cake.

He said he paid for the cake but didnt look inside the box until he was at a stop light later and later contacted a store associate but was told they did nothing wrong.

Brown said he is openly gay and said he was offended and humiliated.

Kaplan said a lawsuit was filed at Travis County District court on the matter Monday.

In the lawsuit, Brown said he was seeking damages and monetary relief for mental anguish, court costs and other expenses.
The attacker also fired gunshots as he approached the tax revenue office, the city police chief, Faisal Shahzad, told The Associated Press.

He said at least two of the wounded were in critical condition.

Hours after the attack, Ahsanullah Ahsan, a spokesman for the Jamat-ul-Ahrar militant group, claimed responsibility and warned that they will continue such attacks in the future. Pakistani militants have long attacked government offices and security forces in a bid to install their own harsh brand of Islamic law.

The Pakistani military has launched multiple offensives against militant hideouts, but the insurgents have proven resilient.

An Easter Sunday suicide bombing targeting Christians killed over 70 people in the eastern city of Lahore last month.

Mardan is about 50 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan.
Operating revenues grew by 194m or 2.3% to 8.6bn. The main increases were achieved in medium and long-distance rail services which saw a 77m growth in income, with FS' Freccia high-speed train services earning an additional 67m. FS' Netinera subsidiary, which operates regional passenger concessions in Germany, recorded a 153m increase in revenue while its Busitalia Sita-Nord subsidiary earned an additional 37m. FS also gained 18m from the sale of its electricity grid to Terna.

However, these increases in turnover were offset by the end of the freight public service contract which was worth around 106m.

Trenitalia, FS' passenger and freight train operating subsidiary, recorded an Ebitda of 1.55bn, Ebit of 417m and a net profit of 226m, while infrastructure manager Italian Rail Network (RFI) achieved an Ebitda of 271m, Ebit of 151m, and a net profit of 111m.

Overall FS ended 2015 with an Ebitda of 1.98bn, which was 139m lower than in 2014. This was due to changes in the normative framework, higher traction energy costs, and ending of the freight public service contract. However, these were offset by a reduction in high-speed line track access charges. Ebit was down 15m at 644m.

Capital investment increased by 29% in 2015 to 5.5bn of which 2.5bn was self-financed or through debt. 3.5bn was invested in infrastructure improvements while 1.5bn was for new trains and road transport.

"The noteworthy performance for FY 2015 proves the leading role of FS Group in the Italian economy as well as in the relevant growth expectations within the improving national economic context," says FS CEO Mr Renato Mazzoncini.
From July 2017, the fastest Paris Montparnasse - Rennes journey time will fall from 2h 4min to 1h 25min, with trains running at up to 320km/h on the new line from Le Mans to Rennes. Paris - St Malo will be reduced from 2h 56min to 2h14min, while the Paris - Brest journey time will be 3h 25min, compared with 4h 11min today.

Between Monday and Thursday the first TGV of the day will arrive in Paris at 07.47, 12 minutes earlier than at present, while the final service from Paris will depart from Montparnasse at 21.14. SNCF Voyages will operate 20 Paris - Rennes TGV services (currently 19 trains per day) and 21 Rennes - Paris services per day, representing an increase of one train per day in each direction between Monday and Thursday. There will be 12 non-stop services between Paris and Rennes and 11 non-stop Rennes - Paris trains, with two trains per hour at peak times.

Regional timetables in Pays-de-la-Loire and Brittany will be adjusted to optimise connections with TGV services.

The 182km high-speed line from Le Mans to Rennes is due to open on July 2 2017.
The deal is subject to a number of conditions being met, including the funding arrangements, government approvals, and the transfer of contracts. Greybull Capital will take on the assets and relevant liabilities.

The deal includes the Scunthorpe steelworks in northern England and the Hayange rail mill in northeast France, both of which produce rails, a design office in York and Immingham Bulk Terminal port.

Tata completed a 35m investment programme at Hayange in 2011 to enable the mill to produce 108m-long rails, increase capacity from 300,000 to 400,000 tonnes of rail per year, and improve rail quality.

"Under these current challenging market conditions in Europe with the soaring levels of imports from China, we are happy that Tata Steel UK and Greybull Capital have entered the final stage of completion of the sale of shareholding in Longs Steel UK," says Mr Hans Fischer, CEO of Tata Steel's European operations.
William Glenn, a 14-year rail industry veteran, has joined railcar and locomotive leasing company Wells Fargo Rail as Chief Commercial Officer. Glenn will be responsible for leading sales, structured sales, customer service and business intelligence. Based in Rosemont, Ill., he will report to Wells Fargo Rail President Barbara Wilson.

Prior to joining Wells Fargo Rail, Glenn spent 14 years at The Greenbrier Companies, most recently as Chief Commercial Officer, where he was responsible for sales, marketing and customer support. In addition, Glenn served as president of Greenbrier Europe. Before joining Greenbrier, he held a number of leadership positions at Louisiana Pacific Corp.

I have known William as a competitor and business partner for many years, said Wilson. He is a proven leader with the diverse set of skills necessary to lead our commercial group. Im confident that he will help advance our position as an industry leader and continue to improve efficiencies while providing the best possible service to our customers.

Serving customers in North America, Wells Fargo Rail, a subsidiary of Wells Fargo & Company, describes itself as offering a variety of customized finance and operating lease structures, as well as marketing and transportation management services with a wide selection of box cars, covered hoppers, gondolas, open-top hoppers, flat cars, tank cars, intermodal equipment and locomotives. With a fleet size of over 174,000 railcars diversified across 22 commodity groups and a locomotive fleet of 1,800 consisting of switchers, and 4 and 6 axle units, Wells Fargo Rail offers its customers a large asset base supported by a team of experienced professionals familiar with all types of rail equipment.
Wi-Tronix, the global provider of LDARS (Locomotive Data Acquisition Recording Systems), has been identified for many years by its iconic purple Wi-PU. The companys new technology, Violet, described as a revolutionary solution that will provide unprecedented monitoring for our clients high-value mobile assets . . . providing features that render all other LDARS obsolete, will be sporting a new identificationorange.

Violets new logo is pictured above.

Wi-Tronix will introduce Violet On May 17, 2016 at its annual conference, which will be held in Chicago. The conference, a cant-miss industry event, is attended by CEOs and operations, and information technology professionals as well as industry media, thought leaders and government policymakers. Company officials will detail Violets operational and technological advances, demonstrate the new system and answer questions.

Wi-Tronix says Violet is a game-changer, a new standard, and points out that LDARS is a major component of PTC (Positive Train Control), which new government regulations require that railways install by year-end 2018.

Throughout our company history, weve led the way in innovation, says Wi-Tronix Executive Vice President-Business Development Michael Heilmann. Violet is no exception. As an innovative leader in the transportation industry, Wi-Tronix monitors 10,000 locomotives worldwide, improving the safety, reliability, and efficiency of both passenger and freight railroad operations.

Orders for Violet will be accepted at the conference. Wi-Tronix is now accepting conference reservations for customers. For more information regarding the conference or Violet, contact Wi-Tronix at 1-888-WI-TRONIX.
Caitlin Devrouax didnt even know the girls name. But she knew she was pregnant, and from the conversation she heard in her West Albany classroom, she knew she needed help.

The girl was talking to a friend about all the things she knew her coming baby would need. How am I going to get all this stuff? Devrouax remembers hearing her agonize.

She was so overwhelmed, Devrouax, then a sophomore, recalled. And I was like, I could help.

Devrouax went home, did some research and dusted off her rusty sewing skills, unused since a one-time pillow project during her Girl Scout days.

Using a few scraps of fabric, she sewed a baby blanket, burp cloth, soft crib shoes and a few other small necessities. She also scoured the Internet for coupons and freebies and asked her mother for any items left over from her own babyhood or that of her three younger sisters.

The next week, I brought her a basket full of baby stuff, Devrouax remembered. She just kind of started crying.

That was the moment, Devrouax said, when everything just sort of clicked. And I realized I could do this for other people.

Now 18 and a senior studying nursing at Linn-Benton Community College through West Albany High Schools Extended Campus program, Devrouax does everything she can to help teen parents give their babies the best possible start in the world. And shes looking for others to help her in that mission.

Devrouax creates baby gift bags with hand-sewn items such as toys, blankets and washcloths. She encloses an information sheet  what to pack for the hospital, perhaps, or how to set up a nursery  and a handwritten card addressed To Mommy with lists of websites for free items or good information.

The bags are donated to the Albany branch of the FACT program, a family support organization that stands for Families and Communities Together. She also brings that office any other donations she might receive, such as baby clothes or toys. I pack it up and ship it off.

She keeps a notebook full of fact sheets to help young families: everything from the kinds of changes to expect in your body as pregnancy progresses to which baby companies will send you a freebie if you ask.

The notebook has a title: Go Brave Little One.

You can find so many pregnancy prevention programs. Dozens and dozens, Devrouax said. But what happens when they dont work?

Devrouax said she wants to be a part of that answer. This isnt just a mother and a father. This is a baby now, she said. They deserve the best chance they can get.

To that end, Devrouax is also working with West Albany to try to bring back a program not seen there for at least a decade: an in-school nursery. Shed call it Lil Pups, playing off the Bulldog mascot.

Nobody has told her no yet, she said, but it will likely be a long time before the logistics are worked out, such as where the high school might find room, who would staff it and where the money would be found to renovate, stock and run the program.

Devrouax said she remains committed to getting it going, however. Ideally, shed like to see nurseries at all the local high schools. Shed like to organize programs to be offered through them that would teach parenting skills or bring in nurses to give tips on breastfeeding.

In the meantime, shell continue working on the baby gift bags  when she isnt doing assignments for her college classes, working at one of her two part-time jobs or battling a persistent case of tendonitis, which she thinks the sewing probably caused.

Who needs sleep? I have coffee, she joked.

Seriously, however, If someone is interested in doing this themselves, she said, gesturing at her hand-sewn items, I could use another pair of hands or four.

Devrouax said she needs physical labor more than anything, but she also would love contributions of fabric, thread, yarn (shes now adding knitting to her repertoire) and other supplies. No money, please: All cash donations should go to FACT, she said.

FACT can be reached at 541-924-3720. Devrouax herself prefers email: caitlin.devrouax@gmail.com.

Devrouax said shes known since she was a child she wanted to somehow make a difference in the world. She was toying with the idea of medicine anyway, and when this project came along, everything solidified. She now plans to be a nurse midwife, working with births at home and at birth centers.

And no, in case youre wondering, Devrouax isnt pregnant herself. It wouldnt be the first time shes gotten the question from people.

They feel like in order to have such an interest, I must be pregnant. Thats not true, she said.

Someday, she said, she wants to have as many kids as I can possibly handle, but theres so much I want to do before I can devote myself to my own. Theres so many other people who need me right now.

In an ideal world, she added, they wouldnt. People wouldnt have children until they were absolutely ready and had all the resources they needed.

I love doing this stuff, she said, but it would be really good if I didnt have to.
Ever since Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine, NATO has focused on bolstering its defense and deterrence capabilities in central Europe. These efforts look set to pay off; at the alliance's July summit in Warsaw, NATO is expected to adopt significant new initiatives to protect its eastern flank.

But the alliance risks coming up dangerously short on the threats that matter most to most of Europe and thus to NATO: terrorism and the ongoing influx of migrants. Especially in the wake of the Brussels and Paris attacks, if NATO fails to define a strategy for its southern challenges, it could slip into strategic irrelevance. There is precious time left before the Warsaw Summit to outline such a strategy.

NATO's record in the Middle East and North Africa is mixed. Its approach has focused on building partnerships with regional powers. Its Mediterranean Dialoguea forum that brings together Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisiahas existed since 1994. Its Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, which includes four of the six Gulf Cooperation Council members, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, was created in 2004. Yet with the important exception of Arab participation in the 2011 air campaign against Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, both forums have lacked practical substance.

Part of the problem with NATO's efforts to strengthen its relationships in the region is that many of its potential partners are authoritarian states that are disinclined toward the political reform mandates that normally come with NATO partnerships. Moreover, some, such as Egypt, actively seek closer cooperation with Russia. And others are at least wary of drawing too close to NATO lest it exacerbate strains with a Kremlin now willing to intervene militarily in the region.

NATO's efforts to support intraregional defense cooperation have meanwhile run into the hard realities of geopoliticsfor example, the Algerian-Moroccan feud over the Western Sahara and the rifts within the Gulf Cooperation Council over policy toward Libya. Finally, Saudi Arabia, an essential partner for cooperation in the Middle East, has opted out of the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative altogether.

It would be a mistake to relegate the world's most capable alliance to the sidelines when it comes to such crucial threats.

To complicate matters further, NATO is itself conflicted when it comes to bolstering its southern defenses. Central European allies worry that doing so would sap attention and resources from the eastern flank. And the very allies that are most threatened from the southFrance, Italy, and Spainseem even more allergic to the idea, largely because they fear that NATO will push the European Union or other forms of productive cooperation out of the region.

But their concerns are misplaced. It is hard to take seriously the argument that NATO will end up doing too much in the Middle East and will crowd out others. The threat is the oppositeNATO is doing far too little, and in an area where there is far more left to do and where NATO is primed to do it. All of NATO's major post-Cold War operations, whether in the Balkans or Afghanistan, were geared toward the state-building and counterterrorism challenges now facing the Mediterranean and the Levant. Politics in the Balkans may be messy today, but the region is far better off after the violence of the 1990s thanks to NATO's efforts. NATO's experience in Afghanistan should, at a minimum, serve as a reminder of the risks of waiting too long after a conflict to begin stabilization and reconstruction efforts.

To begin with, NATO could redouble its work to enhance the effectiveness of regional states against terrorist groups. Earlier this month, NATO announced that it had restarted its training program for Iraqi military officers. Jordan and Tunisia are also recipients of NATO defense institution support, and other countries, such as Morocco, could benefit from such support as well. The alliance should also prepare to support the nascent Libyan government, which faces a difficult road ahead and is unlikely to escape the need for foreign military assistance of some kind. As it begins working with the regional powers, NATO should intensify its efforts to counter extremist narratives, especially those that misrepresent NATO's basic purposes and mission, by investing more heavily in public information efforts in these countries, for example by opening small public affairs offices, holding more conferences there, and sending NATO officials on visits more often.

Institutionally, NATO could begin to build closer and more formal relationships with the two key security institutions in the region, the African Union and the Gulf Cooperation Council. The Gulf Cooperation Council aspires to a more robust regional roleto succeed, it will need well-developed concepts of operation, command and control arrangements, and other structures that NATO has decades of experience with. The African Union could similarly benefit from deeper and more frequent engagement to expose it to NATO's operating procedures. Stronger institutional relationships between these organizations would set the stage for closer cooperation on counterterrorism and state-building, both inside and outside of the NATO framework.

In the Mediterranean, NATO could bolster its existing naval operations, specifically in terms of intelligence collection, which will help member countries identify criminal and terrorist-linked vessels. NATO might even establish a counterterrorism intelligence-sharing center for the Mediterranean, with links to European law-enforcement agencies such as EUROPOL and FRONTEX on the shore. In general, NATO will need to continue to seek to strengthen its working relationship with the EU, which remains politically blocked by the Turkey-Cyprus dispute, in order to be fully effective in the south.

NATO's role in the south will remain controversial. But if the alliance cannot define a meaningful southern strategy, it risks falling short of its potential to help Europe protect itself from the immense southern challenge it faces. NATO alone is not the solution to the region's problemsnot by a long shot. But it would be a mistake to relegate the world's most capable alliance to the sidelines when it comes to such crucial threats.

Christopher S. Chivvis is associate director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and author of Toppling Qaddafi and The French War on Al Qa'ida in Africa.

This commentary originally appeared on Foreign Affairs on April 17, 2016. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
Shelly Culbertson, a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, had a difficult time believing that the wave of demonstrations and protests known as the Arab Spring had led to relatively little constructive change in the Middle East. So she decided to investigate firsthand. The result is her new book, The Fires of Spring: A Post-Arab Spring Journey Through the Turbulent New Middle East (St. Martin's Press), which mixes travel memoir, reporting, and analysis as it explores six countries that represent different regions of the Middle East and presents diverse experiences of the Arab Spring.

When the uprisings first broke out more than five years ago, the Arab Spring captured the world's attention while placing a spotlight on the region's problems: high unemployment, poor education and, in some cases, autocratic governments. In the immediate aftermath of the protests, the hopes of citizens were largely dashed when massive change failed to occur and chaos ensued in some countries after governments were overthrown and civil wars broke out.

To research the book, Culbertson traveled through Tunisia, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, and Egypt, countries she chose because they each offered a unique window into the Arab Spring. Governments had been overthrown in some of the countries and protests had led to incremental changes in government structures in others. Those that did not experience significant protests were important to the story either in terms of the political and security context they provided, for their diplomacy, or for how they were portrayed in the media.

After talking with people across the Middle East, I concluded that the Arab Spring is just beginning.

After talking with people across the Middle East who had been central in some way to the Arab Spring events, I concluded that the Arab Spring is just beginning, Culbertson says. Arab Spring 'Phase I' was about objecting to the status quo. Arab Spring 'Phase II' will unfold over the coming decades, in gradual processes of the day-to-day work of building institutions and creating new societal values.

The Middle East is often viewed by the rest of the world through the media's reporting on the ongoing violence there, Culbertson observes. With her first book, Culbertson says she is trying to present a realistic portrayal of the region, examining the various Arab Spring events through the broader lens of history. She analyzes the deep changes underway in the Middle East while highlighting the many human stories and exploring the potential challenges that lie ahead: improving opportunities for youth, negotiating the role of religion in society, and increasing democratic participation.

The countries in the Middle East that are not mired in civil war are in a process of working out the future vision they have for themselves, Culbertson says. This will be a generational process that requires investments in education, public debates about societal values, new social contracts or constitutions, and development of institutions.

 Khorshied Samad
Under the Asociacion de Empresas de Electronica, Tecnologias de la Informacion, Telecomunicaciones y Contenidos Digitales (AMETIC) association, 24 Spanish companies showcasing their latest IP broadcasting and Ultra HD updates at NAB Show.



Both production environments and media assets management (MAM) services are heading towards IP technology, as it simplifies usage and improves connectivity. The latest solutions for content acquisition and distribution, archive, indexing or play-out will be presented by AEQ, Tedial, Vector 3, VSN, ISD and Estructure, coordinated by AMETIC.The growing 4K industry will be represented by Sapec, whose Ultra HD professional decoders under the HEVC standard are already on the market, and Ovide, which will present 4K production tools.The broadcasting infrastructure sector will see Hispasat and equipment providers such as Egatel, which will present low-power transmitters , Btesa, Itelsis, Mier Comunicaciones, OMB, Rymsa and Tredess.Brainstorm will showcase its solution for virtual 3D graphics in real time, and Quales will bring a new video quality control Azure-based tool.Ultra HD technology continues growing both in cinema and television, as the industry focuses in features like HFR, WCG, HDR and immersive audio, said Virginia Jimenez, head of international commerce, AMETIC . Besides, multi-platform distribution (DTT, satellite, IPTV, cable, HbbTV and LTE) is quickly evolving towards a new scenario in which non-linear content is key. And right in the middle, new solutions for managing work-flows and media are emerging.
World Link News is planning to launch a Goa-wide satellite news channel by the end of May, ahead of the launch of a sister channel for the whole of India later this year.





We will launch the Goa regional channel in a months time and the national one will take us three months more at least. The channel will focus on hardcore reporting on each and every aspect, editor-in-chief Sachin Borker told Indiantelevision.com The company is also hoping to reach Goan expatriates now living in the Gulf States with its channel, which will carry Konkani, Marathi and Hindi bulletins. At launch the service will be distributed on the major direct-to-home (DTH) satellite platforms and World Link News is also discussing carriage terms with cable operators, Borker said.The channel will be transmitted via the Intelsat 20 satellite located in geosynchronous orbit at 68.5 East.
Nokia Technologies has unveiled new solutions for its OZO virtual reality (VR) camera, including live VR broadcasting, 3D stitching and a VR player software development kit (SDK).





The launches are in keeping with what has been one of the theme of NAB 2016, and Nokia believes that its new solutions will enable the VR ecosystem to dramatically accelerate content creation and publishing.The live VR broadcasting solution for OZO will be available to selected partners in Q2 2016 and broadly in Q3 2016, and is designed to make the VR experience stronger through 360 audio and video, thus enabling viewers to experience events at the same time they are occurring, regardless of location.Further complementing the core technology will be OZO Creator which will ship in April with 3D VR stitching functionality, free of charge to OZO customers. With this new feature, Nokia Technologies claims to have removed the complexity from 3D 360 footage, making it simpler than ever for creators to produce seamless, immersive content.The company is also making a multi-platform VR player SDK available to OZO customers in Q2 2016. The SDK will support creation of immersive audiovisual applications and experiences during playback of OZO content, while also providing support for standard VR video and audio formats. Nokia plans to support all major VR platforms, and assures that it will not limit customers ability to distribute OZO content with any other technology.
Opposition-minded ex-mayor of Petrozavodsk appeals her dismissal

MOSCOW, April 19 (RAPSI)  Former opposition-minded mayor of Petrozavodsk, Galina Shirshina, has appealed her dismissal in the Presidium of the Supreme Court of Karelia, RIA Novosti reported on Tuesday.

On December 25 last year legislators of the Petrozavodsk City Council voted for resignation of Shirshina. Two weeks before her dismissal she received a note from a group of MPs listing alleged evidence that she did not fulfill her mayoral duties. Shirshina appealed her resignation in the Petrozavodsk City Court and the Supreme Court of Karelia but had no success.

We have filed an appeal with the Presidium of the Supreme Court of Karelia. We listed all those moments that we consider wrongfully conducted by the first instance court and second instance court, Shirshina said. She accentuated that the courts refused to review documents that could prove not fulfilling her duties.

In October 2013 Shirshina, with the help of opposition party Yabloko, was elected mayor of Petrozavodsk with 41.9% of votes in her favor.
Russian Constitutional Court grants ECHR claim over inmates voting right in part

ST. PETERSBURG, April 19 (RAPSI, Mikhail Telekhov)  The Constitutional Court ruled on Tuesday that the claim of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to grant voting rights to inmates may be partially satisfied in Russia, RAPSI learnt in the courts press office.

Earlier, the Judicial Ministry turned to the Constitutional Court because of the ECHR ruling in Anchugov and Gladkov vs. Russia case. ECHR ruled that prohibition to vote for prisoners is a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Constitutional Court stressed that Russia is a part of European legal framework which stipulates equitable dialog and willingness to compromise.

The Court granted the ECHR ruling in terms of general actions aimed to ensure justice, proportionality and differentiation in restriction of inmates voting rights, according to court records.

The Constitutional Court held that the legislature is entitled to change certain regimes of confinement, in particular imprisonment in a penal settlement, by alternative punishment which does not lead to restriction of voting rights.

However, the Constitutional Court declined to grant the ECHR demand to give voting rights to all convicts deprived of liberty. Russian nationals Sergey Anchugov and Vladimir Gladkov have been each sentenced to the death penalty, later changed to a 15-year imprisonment, for commission of particularly serious crimes. Anchugov has been convicted of murder, theft and fraud; Gladkov has been condemned for murder, robbery and participation in organized crime group. Therefore, the men a priori could not expect that they would gain voting rights, according to court records.

Russian Constitution is consistent in this matter with international legal acts including the European Convention on Human Rights, hairman of the Constitutional Court Valery Zorkin stated.
ECHR: rights of Shutovs Gang member violated

MOSCOW, April 19 (RAPSI, Vladimir Yaduta)  European Court on Human Rights (ECHR) based in Strasbourg made public its judgement on the case of five members of a gang allegedly led by Yuriy Shutov, a former St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly deputy, on Tuesday. The Court found that only one applicant suffered violation of his rights and ruled to pay him compensation in amount of about 8.5 thousand euros.

The applicants, Sergey Denisov, Ayrat Gimranov, Dmitriy Filimonov, Aleksey Dodonov and Yuriy Shutov (now deceased), lodged with the Court complaints with regard to violation of their rights guaranteed by Article 6 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (the Convention) on the grounds that their right to a fair trial had been violated in Russia.

All the applicants were arrested in 1999, except for Filimonov who was arrested in 2001, on suspicion of participating in a number of serious crimes as members of a criminal gang allegedly led by one of the applicants, Shutov. They were placed in pre-trial detention on the basis of the seriousness of the charges against them. The domestic authorities then repeatedly extended their detention on the same grounds. In February 2006 the applicants were convicted of multiple counts of organizing a criminal group, murder and assault, preparing explosive devices and unlawfully storing and carrying firearms. Denisov, Gimranov and Shutov were sentenced to life imprisonment and Filimonov and Dodonov received sentences of nine and 18 years, respectively. Their conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court of Russia in November 2006.

All five applicants complained in particular about the composition of the court that examined their cases and the excessive length  approximately seven years and nine months for four of the applicants and five years and eight months for Filimonov  of the proceedings against them. Although ECHR ruled that there were no violations as concerned this component of complaints, it held that Denisovs rights were violated under Article 5  3 of the Convention on account of unreasonable length of his pre-trial detention, whereas his complaint about the conditions  notably on account of overcrowding  was dismissed.

The Court ruled to pay Denisov compensation amounting to about 8.5 thousand euros.

Yuriy Shutov, a former deputy of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly and an adviser to Anatoly Sobchak, died in the Perm penal colony Belyi Lebed (White Swan) in December 2014. He was accused of orchestrating criminal gang activities and organizing the murder of Igor Dubovik, an adviser to St. Petersburg Governor; Dmitry Filippov, Chairman of the board of directors of ZAO Bank MENATEP St. Petersburg and Tobolsk fuel and petrochemical refinery; businessman Dmitry Timokhin; and a gang member. Courts dismissed a number of other high-profile cases allegedly involving gang members. After Shutovs death he was represented in ECHR by his wife.
Ex-detective to go on trial for alleged murder of man at police department

ST. PETERSBURG, April 14 (RAPSI, Mikhail Telekhov)  Investigators from St. Petersburg have transferred a criminal case against former detective, who is charged with murder of a local resident at police department, to a court, RAPSI learned on Tuesday in the Investigative Committees local department.

According to investigators, ex-head detective of the 26th police precinct for St. Petersburg Krasnogvardeisky District, Andrei Artemiev, murdered local resident, Dmitry Demidov, in his own cabinet at the police department on November 11 last year.

Allegedly Artemiev was in a state of alcoholic intoxication in his cabinet when Demidov was escorted to the detective for interrogation. Investigative expertise concluded that during the interrogation Artemievs gun was shot which resulted in Demidovs death. Investigators allege that head detective murdered a victim out of personal hatred while Artemiev claims that the shot was accidental.

This case is going to be reviewed by the St. Petersburg City Court.
JEFFERSON  Building a new library seems like it should be a simple task for a community, especially after residents have raised $750,000 for the structure, with another $100,000 promised, and the city has donated land for the project.

But tension has been simmering for years between the city of Jefferson and the Friends of the Jefferson Library, and things boiled over during a special City Council meeting Monday morning, with accusations of disrespect flying back and forth.

We have been bullied from day one, step-by-step, if we dont do what the library wants, said City Councilor Dave Beyerl.

I want a vote from the council (on) if you want us to stay at the meeting, replied Chris Giffin, a project manager for the Friends of the Library. She later said that councilors didnt care about the library and were essentially too lazy to do research about it, as they hadnt read the latest site plan review application.

Council member Tracy Vaughan stressed that she wanted a new library, but added that, after reviewing six years of council meeting minutes, she saw a pattern of the Friends of the Library threatening to withdraw and refusing to redesign the project if they didnt get an approval they wanted.

The meeting was held to clear up misconceptions and determine an acceptable distance between a 4,200-square-foot new library building and a planned public works facility that will be an extension of City Hall.

Both will sit on a lot north of City Hall that Jefferson purchased for $150,000 in 2014. The city wants to ensure there is space for both structures.

Earlier this month, city staff had asked for a 15-foot breezeway between the buildings and the Friends of the Library balked, saying that would require a costly redesign and downsizing of the library. The Friends of the Library initially turned in a design that had six or seven feet between the buildings, Giffin said.

Mayor Pat McKenzie said city staff had told him that 10-foot 5-inches was acceptable, as opposed to the 10-foot 2-inch minimum required by fire code.

To ask us to negotiate three inches isnt going to happen, Giffin said.

The City Council eventually voted 5-4 to recommend a 10-foot 2-inch distance between the two planned buildings.

Beyerl, Walt Perry and Michael Myers initially voted in favor of the distance, with David Jones, Judi Day and Tracy Vaughan in opposition. McKenzie broke the tie.

I dont want to lose this over 5 feet, he said before the vote, and added that the public works facility could be moved slightly west to compensate.

McKenzie clarified after the meeting that the 10-foot 2-inch distance was that of the overhangs between the buildings.

The library building still must be heard by the Jefferson Planning Commission on May 5, and its design also eventually needs to be approved by the City Council and by Marion County.

Because the city of Jefferson will eventually take ownership of the building, and also because it will be on city land, the City Council has tried to work with the Friends of the Library on the design and application before those make their way to the Planning Commission.

About 20 people were in the audience for the meeting.

Tension is likely to remain between the city and the Friends of the Library.

After the vote, Myers talked about the terms of a lease agreement that allow the city to overview the library building site during construction and to have a say in the selection of contractors. Giffin responded that the Friends of the Library had already selected a design and build firm.

We might as well tear this up as far as Im concerned, Myers said, regarding the lease agreement.

Regardless of the disagreements, however, the project is moving forward.

Everybody wants a library, and I hope people realize that this is the common goal for all parties, said Sarah Cook, city recorder.
Nadezhda Savchenko to suspend hunger strike  Ukrainian President Poroshenko

MOSCOW, April 19 (RAPSI)  Nadezhda Savchenko sentenced to 22 years in prison for involvement in the murder of Russian journalists and illegal border crossing has agreed to suspend her hunger strike after private conversation with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, RIA Novosti reported on Tuesday.

According to the official website of Ukrainian President, Poroshenko has informed Savchenko of moves towards her release and told her about details of his phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Savchenko was convicted by a court in Donetsk, a town in southern Russia, on March 22.

As the court has established, she was responsible for conducting concealed observation and directing mortar fire in an attack against a roadblock held by militias of the self-proclaimed Lugansk Peoples Republic and a group of civilians there, including three Russian journalists, near the village of Metallist, the Lugansk Region, on June 17, 2014. The attack killed two Russian television journalists, Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin. Savchenko, who at that time was on active duty in the Ukrainian Armed Forces as a navigator and systems operator of a Mi-24 attack helicopter, enlisted and served on the ground with a volunteer paramilitary unit, the Aidar Battalion, while being on leave. On the same day, she was captured by members of the Donbass Peoples Militia; however, she managed to escape.

Charges of firing at civilians in the city of Lugansk have been dropped against Savchenko because this issue is out of a Russian courts jurisdiction.
Russian MP proposes giving parents access to childrens social media accounts

MOSCOW, April 19 (RAPSI) - A member of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, Vitaly Milonov, has sent a letter to communications regulator Roskomnadzor and Russia's children's rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov containing a proposal to give parents full access to their childrens social media accounts, RIA Novosti reported on Tuesday.

The proposal is aimed to prevent children from possible contacts with terrorists and other ill-minded persons, according to the lawmakers press service.

Under the initiative, parents would gain total control over their childs social media page during his or her minority.

Moreover, parents would possess a right to blocking suspicious users who take overdue interest in minors accounts.
Residents of luxury complex in Moscow City Center allege attempted fraud

MOSCOW, April 19 (RAPSI)  Residents and owners of apartments in Gorod Stolits complex located in Moscow City Center have lodged a complaint with the Moscow Prosecutors Office alleging fraudulent takeover attempt.

They claim that there is a group of people trying to set up a company to provide them with facilities management services, according to the complaint which was obtained by RAPSI. This matter was discussed at a meeting with the residents and owners of apartments in Gorod Stolits complex held in the beginning of April.

Residents claim that violations of the procedure requirements were detected while the results of the meeting might have been forged. Notably, a notice of meeting was sent to selected residents in order to secure its outcome, the complaint reads. The residents further allege that the meeting agenda was not duly detailed in the notice as Arkady Kerner was nominated as chairman of board of a newly established company and Irina Kudryavtseva was nominated as chairman of its ballot committee.

One of the residents told RAPSI that the facilities management company which is being set up has nothing to do with their interests and it is just anotherfraudulent takeover attempt. He added that the residents are concerned with the situation as Gorod Stolits is a skyscraper complex, and its maintenance by a company from outside may lead to disastrous problems.

The complaint has been filed with the Moscow Prosecutors Office by Krosspoint Management that owns apartments in the complex. The meeting that discussed creation of the facilities management company was called by IBFS Group, reads the complaint.

RAPSI has yet to obtain comments from IBFS Group.
As we see a surge in inflation globally, it is now critical that everyone is aware of the implications this will have along every step of the insurance and reinsurance value chain.
U.S. Coal: Fallen and it Can't Get Up?

U.S. Coal: Fallen and it Can't Get Up?

It appears it may be finally coming to pass -- the long predicted death of American coal. For years now fossil fuel advocates have complained about the Obama administration's "War on Coal." Last week's Peabody Energy bankruptcy filing sent tremors through the industry and now new numbers from the Energy Information Agency show a very fast decline in U.S. coal production.

It's a decline that is, as Chris Mooney of the Washington Post puts it, happening fast, "faster than expected" even by the EIA, "and long before the U.S. Clean Power Plan, which was stayed by the Supreme Court, has come into effect."

Coal-hostile regulations are not solely to blame, however. An EIA analyst, for instance, says "The major contributor of lower coal production in the most recent [Short Term Energy Outlook] compared with a year ago is the increase in natural gas used in the electric power sector, mainly because of lower natural gas prices."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/04/19/these-striking-numbers-show-just-how-fast-were-switching-off-coal/
"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes," wrote Benjamin Franklin. That truism seems a bit less true after the Panama Papers exposed one of the biggest tax dodging scandals in history. The reveals from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca showed that yes, death is inevitable, but some of us can avoid taxes. It is time to bury what lies at the heart of the problem: tax competition.



"The problem is bad laws."

That is what U.S. President Barack Obama said in response to the Panama Papers revelations about companies and people engaging in tax evasion and avoidance. Obama perfectly encapsulated what lies at the heart of the problem: that it is made possible by laws drafted by politicians. Lawmakers are the enablers.

Many smaller countries in Europe such as the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Liechtenstein, to name but a few, have in the past decades made tax avoidance legal. Bigger countries carry the blame too -- countries such as Great Britain, with its Virgin Islands, or the United States, with Delaware and Connecticut, or China with its Hong Kong territory, or Singapore with, well, Singapore. This is without mentioning some African nations, which appear to be the next refuge for dark money.

The Panama Papers scandal sheds a bright light on something morally untenable in society, which is that if you have enough money, you can avoid paying taxes.

To make matters worse, if you as Joe Sixpack make a small mistake in your tax return, or if you fail to mention that you had some money underneath your mattress and the tax man finds out, you're in deep trouble. This is not the case for those able to hire the right firm.

The scandal proves to many that the system is rigged. It also shows that those who represent us not only made it all possible, but some of them even benefited themselves.

The prime minister of Iceland had to resign after mass protests following revelations in the Panama Papers that showed his ties to dubious fiscal constructs. British Prime Minister David Cameron had to come clean about his own tax shenanigans. Just five days after being elected, the Panama Papers allege, members of the newly ruling left-wing party in Malta set up fiscal constructs to avoid taxes for themselves and some of their buddies, leading to protests similar to those in Iceland.

Schizophrenic

One of the linchpins of legal tax avoidance schemes is The Netherlands. Thanks to tax rulings and dual tax prevention measures, organizations such as Oxfam and Tax Justice estimate that between 8 trillion and 10 trillion euros flow through the small country annually.

Leftist parties felt they had to do something following the revelations. And so a parliamentary inquiry is to start soon, and it will force people to testify under oath. Chances are that the conclusion will be that tax avoidance would be impossible had the members of parliament doing the questioning prevented it.

Yes, one could say that the Dutch body politic has been somewhat schizophrenic about its approach to tax avoidance. It is also emblematic for the discussion in many other European parliaments.

In 2013, the right-wing firebrands of the nationalist Party for Freedom tabled a motion that forbade anyone in government or parliament to dub the Netherlands a "tax paradise." The motion drew the support of a majority of parties, including the center-left Labor party.

When news leaked that the Dutch embassy in Ukraine extolled the advantages of the Dutch international taxation regime during a presentation for Ukrainian businessmen, the Dutch government's foreign minister -- now European Commissioner Frans Timmermans -- said there was nothing wrong with it.

And just several weeks, ago the Socialist SP party publicly called in the Dutch parliament for a new tax avoidance scheme for Dutch harbors. It turned out that the Dutch state for years had granted its harbors -- among them Rotterdam -- a special tax exemption that made them more attractive than, say, its French, Belgian, and German counterparts to sea transport companies.

In the preceding years several European governments, the Dutch among them, have pushed the European Commission to enforce a level tax regime across the European Union for harbors. So when the Commission finally came through, with a directive to normalize the tax regime for Dutch harbors, the first thing Dutch parliament -- including the left-wing SP -- did was publicly press the government to establish tax avoidance measures to safeguard employment.

Yes, that's correct: a party that is probably far to the left of Bernie Sanders publicly advocated tax avoidance measures for companies. Why? Because tax avoidance is legal. Tax evasion isn't. Or so the corrupted Dutch political mind argues.

This example shows the hypocrisy. European creditor nations are constantly pushing debt-ridden countries such as Greece to eradicate bad tax morals, yet the creditors themselves engage in similar practices whenever it suits them.

Do the right thing

If countries truly wish to stop companies and people hiding their taxable wealth, they have to plug the self-created holes. This will prove a tough challenge.

National leaders never tire of touting the strengths of their societies. International companies, they invariably ruminate, invest in their country because of the excellent infrastructure, fantastic education system, and available resources.

If only this were true.

Countries increasingly engage in tax competition to lure companies. When OECD or G20 members crack down on tax avoidance and push out tax avoiders, the latter immediately seek out other countries to service them. And it works.

So if limiting one market leads to another market opening up, eliminating markets seems to be the only way to solve the problem. As a worldwide tax crackdown revolution doesn't seem to be the in the cards, a pan-European corporate tax rate (one applicable to faraway European territories) could at least provide a start. A lot of wealth originates within the European Union, so many companies would be hard-pressed to flee the Continent.

Especially when they're publicly named and shamed if they do.

So this is what we can thank the Panama Papers scandal for: It pushes leaders to show their true colors. The coming months will tell how principled they really are.
If you live in Scio or Harrisburg, circle Monday, Oct. 24, on your calendar.

Thats the 150th anniversary of incorporation for both cities, and each community is planning a birthday party the weekend beforehand.

People are getting excited. We have signs that are up throughout town and in a couple of the outlying areas, said Michele Eldridge, Harrisburg city recorder/assistant city administrator.

May Garland, who is helping organize the celebrations in Scio, said that the Sesquicentennial events are galvanizing residents from a variety of organizations who want to honor the town, its culture and its history.

People are coming together to make sure it will be fun for everybody, she added.

Scio

The city of Scio has three events to celebrate the towns incorporation and the earliest natives and settlers who chose to build new lives on the land between the north and south forks of the Santiam.

Reenactment camps and demonstrations of daily life in 1866 are scheduled for May 13-15 at the Carol Bates Memorial Stage and Lamb Fair area, just off Main Street and Northeast First Avenue. Those will include demonstrations on making butter, spinning and weaving, crosscut sawing, blacksmithing and corn grinding.

Among Scios early settlers was a large group of Czechoslovakian (Bohemian) families, and a Czech-themed event with food and dance will be held at the ZCBJ Hall on Saturday, Aug. 13.

The official birthday party, with cake and more, will be at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 23, at the ZCBJ Hall. Sesquicentennial envelopes also will be available, which can be canceled by a specially designed stamp on Monday, Oct. 24.

For more information, or to volunteer for the events, call Stephanie Bates, president of the Scio Historical Society, 503-394-2471, or go to Scios 150th Birthday page on Facebook.

Harrisburg

The city of Harrisburg has 150th birthday activities planned on both Saturday Oct. 22 and Sunday Oct. 23, including a parade and demonstrations throughout town of pioneer-type activities by people in 1866 garb.

Were still in the process of planning the entire event, Eldridge said.

Thats being handled by the Harrisburg Sesquicentennial Committee, which meets the second Thursday of each month at City Hall.

The Harrisburg Fire Department will hold a barbecue lunch on both days and there also will be a time capsule ceremony.

The city also is planning on releasing a brochure featuring historic homes and other locales in Harrisburg, such as where the local ferry crossed the Willamette River, and that should be finished sometime in May, Eldridge said.
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Sometimes, the same old story is an amazing thing.

Oregons unemployment figures for March showed good news once again for the mid-Willamette Valley as the area continues to recover from the recession.

With such low unemployment rates right now, its certainly a job seekers market, said Patrick OConnor, a regional economist with the Oregon Employment Department.

Were definitely seeing overall wage growth in the economy at a broad level. Thats a sign that employers are having to compete to keep their workers, or are having to pay more to keep their workers, he added.

Across Oregon, the unemployment rate decreased in March to 4.5 percent, down from its revised February rate of 4.8 percent.

Thats been the lowest our states unemployment rate has been since 1976, when the state began keeping records, OConnor said.

Linn County

Linn Countys unemployment rate declined to 5.9 percent, down from its revised February rate of 6 percent. If that holds, its the lowest level for the area since 1990, when the state began tracking county-by-county data, OConnor said.

However, the countys employment level was 1,560 jobs, or 3.6 percent, below its pre-recession employment peak in February.

The largest gains have been in the private sector, where Linn County added 1,030 jobs in the past year for an increase of 3 percent. The fastest growing private-sector industry since March 2015 was leisure and hospitality, which grew by 340 jobs, or nearly 11 percent. Professional and business services also saw an increase of 260 jobs, for an 8 percent jump.

The public sector in Linn County shed 700 jobs and is down 9.1 percent.

Benton County

Benton Countys employment rate dropped to 3.5 percent in March, even lower than its revised 3.8 percent rate in February. That was good for the second lowest-mark in the state, behind Wheeler County.

And once again, Benton Countys employment level was far above its pre-recession employment peak in November 2007, surpassing that mark by 2,130 jobs, or 5.5 percent.

Benton Countys job gains in the past year have been thanks to the public sector, which added 280 jobs for a 1.9 percent increase.

Among the fastest-growing industries in Benton County was health care and social assistance, which jumped by 130 jobs for a 2.7 percent increase over the past year.

The public sector shed 30 jobs since March 2015, declining 0.1 percent. I wouldnt say its a huge alarm bell, but its something to keep an eye on in the coming months, OConnor said.

While Benton Countys unemployment rate is low, it isnt even close to a record. In 1995, during the heyday of Hewlett Packard, Benton Countys unemployment rate for the year was 2.2 percent.

If you couldnt find a job in that environment, then you just werent going to find a job, OConnor said.
Buying a house can sometimes be a long, tedious process, which requires a lot of time, effort, and patience. One of the things that make it hard for buyers is looking and applying for a mortgage. While finding the best mortgage for you can be done on your own, are you better of hiring a mortgage broker instead and save yourself from a lot of headaches?

Most homeowners are aware of the fact that they need to shop for the best mortgage rates and terms when applying for one. This means that you need to go from one lender to another in hopes of finding the best term for you. However, doing so can also be time-consuming and this is where a mortgage broker comes into the picture.

According to Investopedia, a mortgage broker is "an intermediary who brings mortgage borrowers and mortgage lenders together, but does not use its own funds to originate mortgages." The mortgage broker helps simplify your mortgage application by gathering your files, looking for the best terms and rates, and submitting your application to the lender.

Hiring a mortgage broker can help make the process easier and can save homeowners from a lot of headaches. However, hiring a mortgage broker doesn't go without any disadvantages. Realtor.com notes that mortgage brokers often charge a certain fee for their services, which can cost you up to 1 to 2 percent of the loan.

This means that you may need to allot a certain amount of your money towards the mortgage broker's fee should you decide to hire one. Certain lenders, however, may also pay the broker's fee, but you need to know all of this before deciding to hire one.

The publication also states that some brokers may also have biases when it looking for lenders. Some brokers may favor a certain lender over the other because of a good experience with them or they may also get additional fees from one lender.
Posted by Jay on at 11:01 AM CST

Marvel has sent out solicitations for their July 2016 titles, including 5comics, 4 collections and a Poster!CHARLES SOULE (W)  PHIL NOTO (A/C)VARIANT COVER BY DAVID AJA The next stop on Poes mission is Grakkus the Hutt But Grakkus has been in Republic Prison for years. You know what that means POE DIRECTLY TO JAIL!32 PGS./Rated T $3.99(of 5)MARJORIE LIU (W)  MARK BROOKS (A)Cover by LEE BERMEJOVARIANT COVER BY TBAMILLENIUM FALCON VARIANT COVER BY TBAMOVIE VARIANT COVER ALSO AVAILABLE Han Solo has entered the space race of his dreams  the DRAGON VOID! But hes on an undercover mission  to find a traitor within the Rebellion. Teamed with Wookiee warrior Chewbacca, will they be able to find the mole before trouble finds them?32 PGS./Rated T $3.99KIERON GILLEN (W)  SALVADOR LARROCA (A/C)ACTION FIGURE VARIANT COVER BY JOHN TYLER CHRISTOPHER Vader vs. Morit on the shell of the Executor! DO YOU NEED MORE THAN THAT??? Fine: Cylos secret revealed!32 PGS./Rated T $3.99JASON AARON (W)  JORGE MOLINA (A)Cover by DAVID AJABLACK & WHITE VARIANT COVER BY DAVID AJAACTION FIGURE VARIANT COVER BY JOHN TYLER CHRISTOPHERThe Last Flight of the Harbinger STARTS NOW! Sgt. Kreel is back with an all-new squad of stormtroopers! Go inside the minds of an elite group of Imperial soldiers! Join incoming artist Jorge Molina for a walk on the dark side!32 PGS./Rated T $3.99(of 5)CHUCK WENDIG (W)  LUKE ROSS (A)Cover by Mike MayhewSKETCH VARIANT COVER BY Mike MayhewVARIANT COVER BY TBAMOVIE POSTER VARIANT COVER ALSO AVAILABLE The saga continues! Desert scavenger Rey and ex-stormtrooper Finn are being pursued by the evil First Order! But can they escape Jakku in an old hunk of junk YT-1300 freighter? And what new threats will they find in a galaxy far, far away?32 PGS./Rated T $3.99Written by KIERON GILLENPenciled by LEINIL FRANCIS YU & SALVADOR LARROCACover by KAARE ANDREWSThe Dark Lord of the Siths unstoppable march continues! The natives of Shu-Torun are revolting, and theres no way the Empire will stand for that. When Darth Vader is tasked with leading a military assault against the planet, could it be that his rise to glory has begun? But who will follow Vader into war? Would you? Then again, its better to fight alongside Vader than against him. Thats a lesson that the ore barons are about to learn. Collecting DARTH VADER #16-19 and ANNUAL #1.120 PGS./Rated T $16.99ISBN: 978-0-7851-9977-9Written by KIERON GILLEN & JASON AARONPenciled by ANGEL UNZUETA, MIKE MAYHEW & LEINIL FRANCIS YUCover by TERRY DODSONWhat comes next for the rebels after the events of VADER DOWN? Find out as the adventures of Luke Skywalker and friends continue! The rebel crew is en route to a prison base with a very important captive. But unlucky for them, they arent the only ones with their eyes on this prize! Plus: Meet a rebel spy at the heart of the Empire, and join him on a mission of life and death! And in another tale from the journals of Obi-Wan Kenobi, journey back to the Jedis days of exile on Tatooine. Moisture farmer Owen Lars may have taken in young Luke, but he refused to let Ben be part of the boys life. Now, prepare to discover the reason why! Collecting STAR WARS (2015) #15-19 and ANNUAL #1.144 PGS./Rated T $19.99ISBN: 978-0-7851-9983-0Written by GREG RUCKA & JAMES ROBINSONPenciled by MARCO CHECCHETTO & TONY HARRISCover by MARCO CHECCHETTOFor the first time in the new Star Wars canon, journey with us into the time after the end of Star Wars Episode VI Return of the Jedi! Writer Greg Rucka (PUNISHER, WOLVERINE, Gotham Central) and artist Marco Checchetto (AVENGERS WORLD, PUNISHER) take us past the destruction of the second Death Star  and into the chaos of a Shattered Empire. Its the explosive lead-in to this winters blockbuster big-screen Star Wars revival, and everything you need to know is right here! Plus, follow everyones favorite protocol droid as he Journeys to Star Wars: The Force Awakens.144 PGS./Rated T+ $24.99ISBN: 978-1-302-90210-0Trim size: oversizedWritten by MARK WAID, CHARLES SOULE & GERRY DUGGANPenciled by TERRY DODSON, ALEX MALEEV & PHIL NOTOCover by TERRY DODSON, ALEX MALEEV & PHIL NOTOThree of the most beloved characters in the entire Star Wars saga in their own solo adventures! After Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, Leia Organa is a princess without a world! But she still feels a duty to her people. Can she save the remaining Alderaanians from the might of the Galactic Empire? Before master of charm Lando Calrissian joined the Rebellion, or even ran Cloud City, he and faithful ally Lobot got by with the odd swindle and plenty of swagger. But this time, has Lando bitten off more than he can chew? Speaking of things getting Chewy, everybodys favorite Wookiee warrior also faces some alone time after the battle of Yavin. Stranded on an Imperial-occupied planet, far away from Han Solo, will he make a new best friend? Collecting PRINCESS LEIA #1-5, LANDO #1-5 and CHEWBACCA #1-5.344 PGS./Rated T $50.00ISBN: 978-1-302-90223-0Trim size: oversized
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Through a fast-paced collections of solos, choral pieces and more, all are invited to experience death and chaos in a series of educational musical vignettes presented by the Athens Creative Theatre. The annual Live Art show will feature over 25 songs from Broadway and other productions, all surrounding this years theme of Murder & Mayhem.
Kanye West finally made the financially smart decision of putting The Life of Pablo on Spotify, and this leaves me conflicted. Im happy to finally be able to listen back through the albums few highlights again, but the ridiculous hype built up for a sub-par album, in my opinion  which can be read here  risks dominating this weeks new releases. And while Kanye does earn a spot on this playlist, he does not overshadow all of the other great music released this week and definitely shouldnt be the only thing you listen to this week.
SHARE This CD cover image released by Big Machine Records shows, "Bang Zoom CrazyHello,' a new release by Cheap Trick. (Big Machine Records via AP)

By WAYNE PARRY, Associated Press

Cheap Trick, "Bang Zoom Crazy... Hello" (Big Machine)

Some classic rock bands limp into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the basis of past reputation. On the other hand, Cheap Trick  the hard-charging, melodic rockers from Rockford, Illinois  is racing full speed ahead into the Rock Hall, fueled by its best album in decades.

"Bang Zoom Crazy... Hello" kicks off with a blast of feedback and a classic guitar-bass-and-drum roar on "Heart on the Line," which would make a great concert opener if they ever tire of the traditional "Hello There."

There are at least four potential hit singles on this album: A remake of the '60s Dobie Gray track "The In Crowd," ''Long Time No See Ya," the clap-happy "Blood Red Lips" and "No Direction Home."

As they have since the '70s, Cheap Trick infuses their songs with Beatle-esque harmonies, dramatic chord changes and progressions, and guitarist Rick Nielsen's quirky, minimalist solos, all atop a pounding beat that makes these songs easy to listen to and hard to forget. And Nielsen's son Daxx provides a shot of new energy replacing drummer Bun E. Carlos.

This band is a true American original that has thus far not surrendered to age, inertia or hip-hop. Here's hoping they never do.
SHARE This image released by Sony Pictures Classics shows Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in a scene from, "Miles Ahead." (Brian Douglas/Sony Pictures Classics via AP)

By LINDSEY BAHR, AP Film Writer

"Miles Ahead," an ambitious, experimental biopic about jazz legend Miles Davis, actually states its mission twice over the course of the movie.

Basically: "If you're going to tell a story, come with some attitude. Don't make it all corny."

The person saying it is Miles Davis, played by Don Cheadle, who also co-wrote and directed.

In the context of the film, he's speaking to a fictional music writer named Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor), who has conned, charmed and strong-armed his way into Miles' orbit for a few days in hopes of writing a comeback story that would end the eccentric musician's half decade of dormancy.

While a little on the nose to be repeated, it's a good line, and an even better goal in the murky and generally unrewarding territory of the dreaded biopic  especially for someone as elusive, multifaceted and just downright giant as Miles Davis was.

As Cheadle's Miles cheekily says to Dave in that whispered rasp, "I was born, I moved to New York, met some cats, made some music, did some dope, made some more music, then you showed up at my house."

Knowing well how a tell-it-all approach can be duller than a Wikipedia page, Cheadle eschews the cradle to grave approach and instead focuses in on two moments  a crazy few days in Davis' "Howard Hughes of jazz" phase and much earlier during the romantic beginnings and fraught endings of his relationship with the dancer Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi).

The story jumps from the past to the present very suddenly, employing an interesting visual technique that links the two moments in time through a character, let's say, falling in the present and another continuing the motion in the past. It's a unique take on the fluidity and imprecision of memory, but, more precisely it's indicative of Cheadle's ambitions to make the film feel as unpredictable and freestyle as Miles' jazz.

Cheadle as an actor is not afraid to show Miles Davis for all his contradictions  his genius, his charm, his ego and his mania. His bold, studied and fully lived-in portrayal has attitude to spare too.

The "present" part shows a hyper-active Davis, hopped up on painkillers and hobbling with a deteriorating hip trying to collect a payment from the record company that he's long since stopped producing for. It's sort of a kitchen sink approach to the escalating events story that takes Dave and Miles everywhere from a college dorm room to score some cocaine to a high-speed shoot out. It's particularly odd then that this portion is duller than the more traditional portrait of the past.

That section plays more like a languid, melancholy ballad as we peer into his courtship of Frances and the insanity, danger and obsessiveness that drove her away. Cheadle and Corinealdi's palpable chemistry is an undeniable force here, and is a striking contrast to the occasional awkwardness of many of Cheadle and McGregor's interactions in the present. In theory, it's probably meant to be another evocation of jazz stylings, but in execution, it feels more like dead air.

Cheadle has an interesting vision here and his ambitions pay off on a number of levels  especially in his performance  but it doesn't really come together as a coherent composition. Unlike in jazz, the disparate moments, sounds and styles struggle to coalesce in service of a whole that's bigger than its parts.

"Miles Ahead," a Sony Pictures Classic release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for "strong language throughout, drug use, some sexuality/nudity and brief violence." Running time: 100 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

___

MPAA Definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
Gabriela Condrea, a tango instructor and author, supports Tho Nguyen as he walks at Amber in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood. (Sy Bean/Seattle Times/TNS)

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By Nicole Brodeur, The Seattle Times

SEATTLE  The tango instructor was confused.

Theres a guy whos here for tango lessons, the bar manager told her. And hes in a wheelchair.

Gabriela Condrea walked to the front of Amber, a Belltown nightclub where she had been teaching a Happy Hour Tango since the fall of 2013, and found Tho Nguyen in a battery powered wheelchair, alone.

Are you here for the tango class? she asked him.

Yeah, he said, beaming.

OK, she thought to herself. Lets see how this goes.

She would learn that Nguyen had suffered a stroke on the morning of his 11th birthday. He could stand, but not walk without support.

I didnt know in what manner he would participate, Condrea recalled of that evening in July 2014. But he was welcome to join us.

I remember saying, Hold onto me. Ill be your human walker, your shopping cart.

Condrea, 34, knew the potential tango has. She knew the mechanics of two people standing and moving together, one leading and the other pushing through each step. She knew how to achieve balance and flow.

But Nguyen, 31, had to have the guts, and the faith, to show up at all.

I was feeling sad, he explained of the period when  urged on by his counselor  he started Googling meetup groups and saw there were tango lessons at Amber every Tuesday night. It seemed the answer to a lot of his problems.

He arranged a ride from his parents home in Renton, Wash., through King County Metros Paratransit program.

Im determined, he said. I wanted to be with people, socialize and relax and work on my mobility.

I was never able to walk without holding on, he continued. And when I started doing it with Gabriela, I felt confident. I wanted to force myself to do something more, physically. I wanted to be able to work on my walking and my depression at the same time.

But it was a risky venture. The floor at Amber is concrete. Nguyen was deathly afraid of falling, and rightly so: Its like being tied up with a rope and being pushed over, Condrea said of Nguyens fear.

And yet, the closeness of the tango worked.

Its a nonverbal conversation, Condrea said. You make eye contact, but you dont exchange any words.

That intimacy allows her to sense when Nguyens balance is failing, or if he is starting to fall away from her: I sense it right away because were so close.

After a few months of dancing in a close embrace, Condrea started to slowly pull away from Nguyen so he could stand for a little while on his own, his posture primed and his confidence up.

It took just over a year, but one day when Condrea pulled away, Nguyen looked at her and said, Watch this, then took three steps without support. It was the first time he had done so in 20 years.

I was overwhelmed, Condrea said. I didnt expect it, but he is so determined, and he works so hard.

Nguyen has since been able to walk 108 steps on his own.

What did his parents say about all this? Nguyen took a moment to think.

I dont know, he said. Its hard to say. They were complaining about me coming home too late.

(Hes tango dancing! Condrea said. Hes walking on his own!)

He has since moved out, and into low-income housing in Bellevue.

Condrea has captured their progress in a video called Thos Walking Journey.

In January, Condrea accompanied him to an evaluation with a new physical therapist at Valley Medical Center. They demonstrated how he holds onto her, and how he moves through each step.

As a result, Valley contracted Condrea to teach Neuro-Tango for Stroke Survivors on Wednesday afternoons, starting March 30 and ending April 20.

Condrea, a former Garfield High School cheerleader and eighth-grade teacher, first encountered the tango in 2008, when she went to South America to do volunteer work. On her first night in Buenos Aires, she went to a tango club on her own, took a class and fell in love with the dance.

People were hugging and moving around the dance floor in a circle, she recalled. They were floating. I was amazed at how graceful they looked and all the different ways they intertwined.

It wasnt the rigid, straight lines, the fishnets and red rose in the teeth, she said. It was a conversation, and it felt very organic to watch.

She stayed in Buenos Aires for two years, studying and writing about tango, and went on to write When 1+1=1: That Impossible Connection, a book about the impact of the tango. In 2010, she started leading workshops and classes like the one at Amber.

While Condrea works with other students, Nguyen parks his wheelchair under the bar and walks his way around it, holding onto the back of the bar stools.

Classmates have been patient and helpful, taking turns moving with him.

The core group is kind of like a little family, Condrea said.

The bar owner, Wade Peterson, even brought in a cake to mark Nguyens tango birthday.

Nguyen is determined to someday get out of his wheelchair for good, and depend only on a cane  or a dance partner.

I feel like Ive become more interactive and more confident about myself and more connected to others, he said. I feel like Im more normal.

Im determined. I wanted to be with people, socialize and relax and work on my mobility.Im determined. I wanted to be with people, socialize and relax and work on my mobility.



2016 The Seattle Times

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Jim Schultz/Record Searchlight Defense attorney Michael Borges, left, and Derek Martinez are shown Monday in Shasta County Superior Court as they wait for the judge to take the bench.

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By Jim Schultz of the Redding Record Searchlight

A 39-year-old Redding man convicted in 2007 of murdering a Mountain Gate man in 1997 hasn't given up on his effort to obtain a new trial through DNA tests.

But he may be getting close to the end of the road.

Derek Martinez, back Monday in Shasta County Superior Court, learned one more item, possibly a piece of plastic from a gun handle, needs to be tested by the Department of Justice for possible DNA evidence.

Martinez, who lost a bid for a new trial in 2011 and is serving 54 years to life in prison, hopes DNA evidence from items not previously tested might help prove he did not kill Christopher Joseph Kohn, 24.

Martinez says another man killed Kohn. That man has since died.

Martinez won a partial victory in February 2014 when a judge ordered DNA testing on some of the evidence that had not previously been tested in the murder case, including a rope and hair fibers.

But Senior Deputy District Attorney Ben Hanna said on Monday that the results returned so far from the DOJ have not been earth-shaking.

"No smoking gun," he said.

Martinez will return to prison as the final piece of evidence is tested. He's due back in Superior Court on June 20 for a possible status report on the tests.

Although retired Superior Court Judge William Gallagher said the test should be the final one, he said he would consider subsequent testing if Martinez is able to show good cause.

"If it has any merit, I'll grant it," he said.

Martinez, represented by defense attorney Michael Borges, was convicted along with co-defendant Michael Lee Johnson, then 34, of murdering Kohn at his Wonderland Boulevard apartment during an argument over a drug debt.

Johnson was sentenced to 26 years to life for the murder. He had been sentenced a year earlier to 15 years to life in prison in an unrelated case for raping and repeatedly sexually abusing the young daughter of an ex-girlfriend.

But the two men were not arrested on suspicion of Kohn's murder until 2004, when Martinez's ex-wife, Helana Martinez , saw a handbill posted outside the Shasta County Sheriff's Office by Kohn's parents advertising a $10,000 reward for information on their son's death.

Helana Martinez told Shasta County sheriff's deputies he'd admitted to the crime but recanted that statement in 2010.

Helana Martinez originally told investigators Derek Martinez told her in early 1997 that he and Johnson killed Kohn, striking him repeatedly on the back of his head with a handgun, which discharged during the attack. An autopsy determined that Kohn died from blows to the head.
Jim Schultz/Record Searchlight Jason Harsin sits Monday in a Shasta County courtroom as a judge upheld a ruling ordering his to stand trial for second-degree murder.

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By Jim Schultz of the Redding Record Searchlight

A Shasta County Superior Court judge upheld Monday a ruling ordering a 37-year-old Palo Cedro man to stand trial for second-degree murder in connection with a fatal 2014 traffic wreck on Highway 44.

Retired judge James Ruggiero ordered Jason Scott Harsin , 37, to stand trial for second-degree murder originally in February, siding with prosecutor Laura Smith that his decision to drive drunk warranted the felony count.

"It was reckless here," Ruggiero said.

On Monday, Superior Court judge Daniel Flynn upheld Ruggiero's ruling, citing Harsin's alleged driving pattern at the time of the crash.

Although defense attorney Joe Gazzigli has said there was no question that Harsin was impaired and caused the fatal crash, he believed Harsin's actions did not rise to the level of second-degree murder, noting.

For example, he said, there was no evidence of excessive speed or that Harsin drove with a conscious disregard for life.

Harsin, who remains in Shasta County Jail in lieu of $1 million bail and is now being represented by the Shasta County Public Defender's Office, is due back in court on Friday for the setting of his trial date.

According to the California Highway Patrol, Harsin was driving his pickup westbound on state Highway 44 around 10 p.m. on Oct. 24, 2014, when he crossed over the highway's center line near Millville Plains after first driving off the highway's shoulder and ran head-on into an eastbound 2011 Subaru Impreza driven by Richard Lee Bates, 68, of Shingletown who later died at Mercy Medical Center in Redding.

Harsin, who had a 2000 DUI-related conviction in Madera County, was also injured in the crash, according to the CHP.

According to a CHP investigative report, Harsin admitted to drinking five light beers at a family gathering before the crash, and his blood alcohol level registered at 0.166 and 0.146 percent after the crash. Smith, however, said Harsin's blood alcohol level registered at 0.21 percent. The legal driving limit is 0.08 percent.

The CHP report says Harsin was extremely intoxicated, belligerent and aggressive toward those trying to help him at the scene and verbally abusive to the medical personnel at Mercy Medical Center after he was transported there for the treatment of his injuries, which required surgery.
Larry Elliott of Jones Valley looks into the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Cypress Avenue in Redding after finding the door locked. Elliott said he was trying to get a to-go order for his wife. "She loves the coleslaw," he said.

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Chicken chain shutters 14 eateries in area

By George Winship/Anderson Valley Post

Fourteen Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Northern California and another 14 in Minnesota shut their doors for the final time Saturday, including two stores in Redding, and one each in Anderson, Chico, Oroville, Yuba City and Olinda.

Seven more stores owned by the franchise in the Bakersfield area also are closed.

A 29th store also was part of the deal, but will be closed.

The stores have been purchased by AFC Enterprises Inc. of Atlanta, a franchiser and operator of Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen restaurants. After remodeling and refurbishing, the stores will reopen in two to five months as Popeye's restaurants, company officials said.

The $13.8 million deal, roughly $475,862 per restaurant, was completed with Wagstaff Management Corp. after U.S. Bankruptcy Court Nancy Dreher in Minneapolis approved the sale Wednesday.

"We knew it was coming when we heard 18 months ago that Denny Wagstaff, our franchisee in Boise, Idaho, had filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 for reorganization. But it wasn't until we received an emergency conference call Friday that we learned he had lost all of the stores in a bankruptcy sale," Tasha Holland, 27, manager of the combination KFC/A&W root beer store in Anderson, said Saturday.

During lunch Monday, customers showed up at both KFC locations in Redding. Many had not heard the news, while others had showed up to see if the stores were still open.

"I don't know if that says anything about the economy in general or not," Red

ding resident Bill Tonkin said Monday outside the shuttered KFC/A&W on Lake Boulevard in Redding.

A sign on the drive-thru speaker told people the KFC/A&W on Lake closed Sunday and would reopen as a Popeye's. The notice did not say when the conversion would be made.

Skylor Finefrock and Daniel Eiffert of Evergreen Landscaping were getting lunch Monday.

"I guess it's not a big deal," Finefrock said after peeking inside the Lake Boulevard store. "But I do like their chicken. I like that you get mashed potatoes. It's like a family chicken meal."

Finefrock was happy to hear Popeye's was coming. He likes the one at the TA Truck Stop between Redding and Anderson.

Ashley Lalonde, however, is not a big fan of Popeye's.

"It's just a different flavor," said Lalonde, who recently moved to Redding from Nevada.

Approximately 20 employees at the Anderson store are affected by the closure as are unknown hundreds of employees throughout the north state, said Holland, who started working at the Anderson store when she was 15.

"It was my first job, and I really thought it would be my last job. I intended to work here until the owner's children and grandchildren had inherited the business," she said.

Holland and the other KFC employees will learn more about the new owners/operators of each franchise location today "when we find out more about the Popeye's brand," she said.

"We know the stores will be closed for approximately two months as they redecorate, refurbish and re-brand the locations. It is very possible that we will all be rehired since we already have the expertise and know the communities and our customers," Holland said.

Meanwhile, on Saturday a steady stream of customers Holland identified as regulars filled the Anderson restaurant's drive-thru lane or lined up at the order counter inside for one last bucket or box of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

"They are showing us a ton of support. We are going to take care of our customers, and I just hope the customers will continue to support us after the changeover takes place," Holland said.

On hand in Anderson to help Holland close up shop Saturday evening was Wen Wagstaff of Salt Lake City, division manager for the franchisee's California stores.

"We had 82 stores throughout the country at one time, but we sold off some of them," Wagstaff said.

Until Saturday, Wagstaff Management Corp., also operating as D&D Food Management, had 77 KFC stores in Alaska, Idaho, California, Minnesota and Texas.

However, the company owed more than $61 million to two lenders, GE Capital and Perella Weinberg Partners, plus additional unsecured debt, some of which came from a 2005 purchase of several KFC restaurants in Minnesota, according to court records cited by Jonathan Maze in a May 3, 2011, report published by Restaurant Finance Monitor.

The KFC in Anderson grabbed headlines four years ago when employees snapped photos of themselves bathing in swimsuits in an industrial-sized sink at the restaurant. The images then were posted on a Myspace page.

Maze mentioned the infamous incident in his Restaurant Finance Monitor piece.

"Wagstaff is known more for being the operator of the Anderson, Calif., KFC where, in 2008, a pair of female employees stripped down to their underwear, took a bath in one of the restaurant's sinks and then posted the pictures to Myspace. Those girls got fired, but the incident didn't lead to the company's bankruptcy. Debt, falling sales and too many capital requirements did," Maze wrote in 2011 when the bankruptcy was first announced.

Wagstaff's president, Denman Wagstaff, wrote in a bankruptcy court statement that "the company was operating profitably, but it was left with little cash" after Louisville, Ky.-based KFC Corp. required all of its franchisee operators to upgrade their restaurants to the latest corporate model, according to Maze.

"Those capital expenditures generated little increase in sales" and significantly affected the bottom line when sales and profits "began to fall significantly" in 2008, Maze concluded.

As the second-largest U.S. chicken chain, Popeye's is hoping to cash in big on its rapidly expanding footprints in both Northern California and Minnesota, reports Mike Hughlett of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in a story published Nov. 7.

In Northern California, the only Popeye's location listed along the Interstate 5 corridor between Sacramento and the Oregon state line is one shop inside the TA Truck Stop between Anderson and Redding.

An Oregon-based KFC franchiser stepped forward late in the process and bid nearly $17 million for Wagstaff's 28 locations, but the bankruptcy judge required both bidders to come up with the cash by today and only Popeye's could deliver according to Hughlett's story.

KFC Corp. was founded by Colonel Harland Sanders in 1952 and operates 15,000 KFC outlets in 105 countries and territories worldwide.

There has been a KFC restaurant in Anderson since October 1998.

The Lake Boulevard location in Redding opened in February 2001 as a KFC/A&W restaurant. It had been a Rosco's Chicken & Fixin's before that.

The other KFC in Redding was on East Cypress Avenue.
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By Joe Szydlowski of the Redding Record Searchlight

Anderson's City Council will consider whether to allow the city manager to reduce or waive impact fees for commercial and industrial developments Tuesday evening.

City Manager Jeff Kiser would cut impact fees if those developments meet certain conditions, he said in a report to the council.

The city would lose the revenue from the impact fees, which are one-time fees the city can use for a projects' non-labor costs or equipment.

The losses would vary with each project, but couldn't exceed $25,000, he said. But he said he hopes they will attract businesses to the area, which could bring in additional tax revenue to offset the lost impact fees.

Another issue could arise, Kiser said. If a developer accepts the fee reduction, it could make the project subject to prevailing wage laws, he said. However, the fee reductions would be optional, he said.

He listed several criteria that the business must meet:

The project must be built by the property's owner or an entity with a long-term lease.

It must bring in jobs "that are a good match for the available workforce in the city of Anderson," or increase sales tax revenue by $20,000 annually.

Its location must be in an area that has or is near sufficient infrastructure to support it.

Its location must be properly zoned.

It must improve the property's value, and thus property tax receipts.

The city wouldn't be eyeing any Redding businesses with the cuts in fees because, Kiser said, California law prohibits using such cuts to attract businesses from the same "market area."

The law defines a market area as a 25-mile radius for big-box stores and 40-mile radius for car dealerships.

Kiser said he would have to report to the council annually all fee reductions he granted. If passed, it would take effect in July.

If you go

What: Anderson City Council meeting

When: 6 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Anderson City Hall, 1887 Howard St., Anderson
Damon Arthur/Record Searchlight

During a meeting Monday at the Redding City Hall Community Room, visitors at a meeting to update the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Northwest California Integrated Resource Management Plan fill out workbooks describing how they would like to see BLM land used.

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By Damon Arthur of the Redding Record Searchlight

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management wanted to hear from people like Mike Ruffell, so he was glad to oblige them Monday.

Ruffell, an avid mountain bike rider, likes the trails the BLM has built over the past decade or so in the Redding area.

But he prefers the National Park Service trails around Whiskeytown Lake because they are more difficult. He would like to see the same types of trails on BLM land.

"I'd like to see more advanced trails," Ruffell said.

So like many of the other 60 or so people who turned out at the BLM's meeting Monday to update its Northwest California Integrated Resource Management Plan, Ruffell filled out a workbook that asks people about how they would like to see BLM lands used.

The workbook consists of a series of maps showing the BLM land in the Arcata and Redding field offices. On a page opposite detailed maps, people are asked to write down comments on their values in that portion of the planning area.

The plan covers the Arcata and Redding field offices, which includes 396,000 acres in eight counties, including Shasta, Tehama and Trinity counties.

Redding Field Office Manager Jennifer Mata said the meeting was the first time she had used that type of meeting format to gather public comment. The information collected will be used to direct decisions on updating the resource management plan, which was last completed in the early 1990s, she said.

The earlier management plan set in motion construction of what became miles of trails on the west side of Redding and in the Swasey Drive and Keswick areas, Mata said.

The BLM will hold "scoping meetings" in the fall to ask more specific questions of those who use BLM land, such as where they would like to see new trails built or whether the BLM should purchase certain pieces of property.

While many at Monday's meeting, held at the Redding City Hall Community Room, were there to pitch their interest in recreation, Mata said there was a wide range of interests represented at the meeting, including mining and grazing.

Cathy Scott, president of the Horsetown Clear Creek Preserve, said she had heard the BLM was considering allowing dredge mining on some streams on land it manages. So she was there to tell BLM officials she did not want any dredge mining on Clear Creek, where the preserve is located.

Scott said there is no dredge mining proposed on Clear Creek southwest of Redding, but she wanted to make sure the BLM knew her private nonprofit group would be against it.

She also wanted BLM officials to know that she and others with the organization that runs the preserve want to continue to promote environmental education in the Clear Creek area.

"We want to continue the preservation of the creek and continue to use it for nature-related education," Scott said.

For those who were unable to attend Monday's meeting, another meeting is planned at 4 p.m. Tuesday at the Veterans Memorial Hall, 101 Memorial Drive in Weaverville. The workbooks are also available at the Redding BLM Field Office, 355 Hemsted Drive in Redding.

For more information, contact Lisa Grudzinski, management plan project leader, at 224-2140 or by email at lgrudzinski@blm.gov.
Andreas Fuhrmann/Record Searchlight

Joy Craft picks up her children Ariana Craft, 4, center, and Kayla Craft 6, Monday after Meadow Lane School in Anderson cancelled classes due to a broken water main.

SHARE Andreas Fuhrmann/Record Searchlight Joy Craft picks up her children Ariana Craft, 4, center, and Kayla Craft, 6, Monday after Meadow Lane School in Anderson cancelled classes due to a broken water main. Andreas Fuhrmann/Record Searchlight Plumbers with Roto Rooter Jason Hart, left, and Chris Cummings fix a broken water main Monday at Meadow Lane School in Anderson. The school had to cancel classes for the day.

By Nathan Solis of the Redding Record Searchlight

UPDATE 7:30 a.m. Tuesday:

Meadow Lane Elementary School is open Tuesday after a burst water pipe forced the school's closure a day earlier, the school said.

ORIGINAL STORY:

A burst water pipe forced Meadow Lane Elementary School to send students home Monday morning.

Principal Rita Mitchell said about 380 students were sent home for the day as maintenance staff dug up the burst pipe on the west end of campus.

Staff noticed a pool of water Monday morning, but did not know the severity of the damage until students were at school.

The burst pipe sent water into a play area and buckled the ground. The drop in water pressure impacted toilets on campus, which is when staff made the decision to end the school day.

The school called parents and all but a handful of students were picked up within the first 30 minutes, according to Mitchell.

A number of school buses were on their way to school by the time staff became aware of the severity of the damages.

"We were hoping it was an isolated problem, but when we discovered the damages we notified parents," Mitchell said.

The burst pipe, about 3.5 inches in diameter, buckled the ground on the western side of the campus due to pressure and maintenance crews dug up the pipe. Tim Flanigan, supervisor of maintenance, said the pipe might be at least 30 years old.

The school plans to send out an automated call to parents this evening to let them know whether school will be in session tomorrow.
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By Jenny Espino of the Redding Record Searchlight

Redding police officers are poised to receive a pair of 3 percent increases this year and next under a tentative agreement reached between the city and Redding Peace Officers' Association.

The City Council on Tuesday will vote on the contract with 77 full-time sworn officers.

The raises would keep the Police Department's wages competitive with those of other law enforcement agencies in Northern California, where a market salary study showed the city's wages overall are about 2 percent above market.

However, the department has run into problems recruiting officers from other police departments and there is concern about retention, said Sheri DeMaagd, personnel director.

The study, sought for the labor negotiations between the city and police union, found pay for lateral positions was about 1 percentage point above the market median.

The 10 cities used for the study were Chico, Davis, Fairfield, Folsom, Lodi, Roseville, Tracy, Turlock, Vacaville and Woodland.

The two-year deal covers June 26, 2015, to June 30, 2017.

DeMaagd said the short-term contracts allow the city to respond more quickly at the bargaining table to changes to pensions and health care as they happen.

The officers would receive their first raise on June 19 and the second on Jan. 1, 2017.

Last year, officers earned a base salary between $51,000 and $90,000.

Besides the bump in pay, the contract raises sworn officers' and police recruits' contributions to the California Public Employees Retirement System.

Sworn officers, who currently cover the 9 percent employee contribution, would begin to pay an additional 1.5 percent on June 19 and another 1.5 percent on Jan. 1, 2017, to their pensions.

Police recruits, who cover the 7 percent employee contribution, would pay an additional 1 percent effective June 19.

Additionally, the contract sets a "2.7 percent at 57" retirement plan for officers hired after Jan. 1, 2013. Final compensation for an officer retiring at 57 is determined by averaging his or her highest pay over 36 consecutive months.

The city has nine officers whose pensions would be determined by that formula. The majority are longt-ime employees covered under different retirement formulas that allow them to retire either at 50 or 55.

According to a staff report, the net increase for salary and benefits is $148,000 over the two-year term of the contract. It then rises to $295,000 annually.

In other business, the council will consider a proposal to establish a reserve police officer program.

Chief Robert Paoletti said the program will start small with a doctor to volunteer with the SWAT team. That physician recently completed 300 hours of training and will be able to carry a badge and gun.

Paoletti said he and his officers will see how the program works before determining whether to expand.

"We've been looking at this since the Safe City Project," he said of the citizen panel that recommended the program in November 2014.

DeMaagd said any proposals would be subject to a meet-and-confer with the police officer and police management unions.

If you go

What: Redding City Council meeting

When: 6 p.m., Tuesday

Where: Redding City Hall, 777 Cypress Ave., Redding
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By Joe Szydlowski of the Redding Record Searchlight

Shasta Lake may ease restrictions on water use and eliminate its penalty for using too much water.

Its City Council will tackle that and a proposed ordinance that would prohibit camping throughout the city without the property owner's permission, according to the council's agenda.

After a wet winter, Shasta Lake will receive 100 percent of its allocation from the Central Valley Project, Tony Thomasy, the city's Water Department superintendent, said in his report to the council.

California lowered but didn't lift its mandatory restrictions for Shasta Lake, so residents still need to cut their usage by 25 percent, he said.

The state's Water Resources Control Board will hold a public meeting Wednesday on summer water needs, he said.

Based on the city's ad hoc committee discussions, he is recommending the city eliminate excess water use penalties.

Those penalties depended on how many cubic feet of water were used above 1,000. They ranged from 90 cents to $5 per 100 cubic feet.

Removing those penalties means cuts in the Water Department's budget, so Thomasy is asking for $35,000 from the general fund to help offset those losses.

The council will also consider relaxing certain water restrictions at the meeting.

Also on the agenda is an anti-camping ordinance that would prohibit overnight camping on public and private property without the owner's permission.

It arose after residents in Shasta Lake expressed concerns about homeless encampments and illegal activity they said took place in them. It would give Shasta County sheriff's deputies a tool to move campers along.

The council also will hold the second reading of two ordinances that allow a third and final medical marijuana collective to open and would transfer land to the city's electric utility to build a natural-gas power plant or a solar energy farm. Both items are on the consent agenda, which means the council will vote on them without discussion unless someone requests to comment on either project.

IF YOU GO

What: Shasta Lake City Council meeting

When: 6 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Shasta Lake Council Chambers, 4488 Red Bluff St., Shasta Lake
There will likely be fights this fall over taxes, marijuana, education, water and possibly campaign donations. But if Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to reduce prison populations even farther by easing parole standards reaches the ballot, the biggest battle might be over crime.

A major dispute already rages around the state over whether the combination of Brown's prison realignment program and the 2014 Proposition 47 easing of crime standards has produced a large increase in criminal conduct.

Realignment, forced on Brown by federal courts at the highest levels, put tens of thousands of former prisoners back on the streets, subject only to parole, in order to cut the prison populace to human levels. Proposition 47, passed by a 3-2 margin in 2014, reduced non-violent felonies like drug possession and thefts valued under $950 to misdemeanors, effectively leaving free almost anyone committing those crimes.

One result seen this spring in an affluent Los Angeles suburb: A squatter with two prior felony convictions lived for weeks in a van parked behind a temporarily vacant house while he was on parole for a third, lesser, offense. He was eventually evicted by five gun-toting policemen and arrested for a parole violation. This repeat felon was not even held overnight. He returned to the backyard early the next morning, not even subject to arraignment for his latest brush with the law.

"That's just the state of the justice system these days," said a detective on the eviction detail. "It's essentially a revolving door."

Chances are it will become an even faster one if Brown should succeed with his proposal to end the firm determinate sentencing system he helped set up place during his first turn as governor in the 1970s. Brown says he will spend a good chunk of the $24 million in campaign funds he has on hand to undo his earlier action.

The big question raised by his initiative campaign: Does the current revolving door for most crimes create increased danger? One corollary question: Do Californians pay for the many millions in prison cost savings with a reduction in citizen safety?

The claim is widespread around California that the combination of realignment and Proposition 47 has not led to increased crime. A report presented to Orange County supervisors the other day claimed that one-fourth of the 8,000 felons so far released into that county by realignment have been convicted of another crime in the year after their release. Just over one-third offended again within two years.

Those high rates, the report said, were just about identical to prior recidivism rates, meaning mass prisoner releases did not change much in that county.

"Is California more dangerous as a result of realignment?" asked UC-Irvine Prof. Charis Kubrin, co-editor of the study. "The answer is no."

But other statistics look different. Preliminary data released by the FBI about the same time as that study indicate crime increased in many California cities over the last four years.

Among the 25 largest U.S. cities, three in California  San Francisco, Long Beach and Los Angeles  had the three highest increases in per capita property crime rates during the first half of 2015, the most recent period for which numbers are available. In San Francisco, property crime rose by 667 cases per 100,000 population from the previous year. The increase in Long Beach was 146.5 property crimes per 100,000 and in Los Angeles just a hair less, at 144.9 more.

The increase in violent crimes was not quite as sharp. Sacramento led the nation with an uptick of 77 violent crimes per 100,000 population during those six months. Los Angeles was third with a rise of 54.1 per 100,000 and Long Beach fifth with 45.8 more violent crimes per 100,000.

Those numbers suggest to some in law enforcement that it makes no sense to ease sentencing further. The Public Policy Institute of California, which previously had issued a report saying crime in the state had not changed much, called the FBI numbers "discouraging."

Said Marc Debbaudt, immediate past president of the Association of Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorneys, "One thing is certain, the victimsrepresented by increasing crime rates will surely use a harsher word than (discouraging) to describe the soaring crime rate."

All of which foretells a ferocious fall battle over crime if Brown's measure reaches the ballot.

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com.
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It's not exactly news that some states, citing a largely imaginary threat of voter fraud, have imposed unnecessary burdens on those who want to participate in democracy's most important activity. Now we learn that the states trying to make voting harder have an ally at the federal agency designed to make voting easier.

Brian D. Newby, the executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, has agreed to requests by Kansas, Georgia and Alabama that the versions of a federal voter registration form used in their states be altered to require proof of U.S. citizenship. Such forms are available at state and local government offices, including DMVs  thus the term "motor voter"  and allow citizens to register to vote by mailing in the form.

As with demands that voters produce government-issued photo IDs on Election Day, the proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration is justified by its proponents on the grounds of preventing fraud. But it is extremely rare for non-citizens to seek to register, just as impersonation of voters at the polls is rare. Besides, the standard form requires registrants to affirm, under penalty of perjury, that they are U.S. citizens

Weighed against the virtually non-existent problem of fraudulent registration is the fact that a proof-of-citizenship requirement excludes potential voters who don't possess such documentation, a group in which poor Americans (and probably racial minorities) are overrepresented. It also discourages registration by others  such as college students seeking to vote where they attend school  who might find it time-consuming to lay hands on a birth certificate or passport. In Kansas, according to a study by the Wichita Eagle, more than 40 percent of people on a list of "suspended voters"  those who attempted to register but didn't meet all of the requirements  were under 30.

In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that Arizona on its own couldn't require proof of citizenship for voters in federal elections and had to "accept and use" the registration form issued by the EAC. The court left open the possibility that states could petition the agency to make changes. But here it was Newby, acting alone, who agreed to the requests from state officials to add the requirement for proof of citizenship, a proposal the commission rightly had rejected in the past.

The League of Women Voters and other groups are challenging Newby's action in court, arguing that he exceeded his authority and departed from long-standing commission policy that proof of citizenship wasn't necessary to determine the eligibility of a voter-registration application. We hope they prevail, but the move to require proof of citizenship also calls for action by Congress.

Under the Constitution, Congress can override state decisions about the "time, places and manner" of elections for the U.S. House and Senate and also can pass legislation to enforce the 15th Amendment's ban on racial discrimination in voting.

Even if the courts stymie this latest exercise in voter suppression, Congress should revisit the issue and make it clear that the promise of "motor voter"  that registering to vote would be no harder than necessary  remains the law of the land.

Los Angeles Times
The deposition was meant to secure more information on the 26/11 terror attacks that would make India's case against Pakistan stronger.

Instead, the internal conflicts within India's security establishment stood exposed, says N Suresh.

I fail to understand the purpose of David Coleman Headley's deposition, which wound up recently.

It was based on conditions set by the Americans, which benefitted Headley, one of the accused in the 26/11 attacks. His location was undisclosed and most importantly, what was the final goal?

Was it to prove Pakistan's role in sponsoring the deadly attacks and sending terrorists to India?

Was it so that then Headley's confessions, which are well known, are reiterated?

Or was it to rake up issues unconnected with the attacks and divert attention from the failure of Indian intelligence and security to prevent the attacks?

Here was a dreaded terrorist who came to India multiple times from Pakistan. He went around conducting recces of several target locations, not once, but several times. He was never suspected nor questioned by Indian immigration and intelligence agencies about why he was here.

Never once was his past checked. Headley had a criminal record in the United States and had been arrested twice.

About 80 per cent of the answers that Headley gave during his deposition were hearsay and mostly gossip that he heard in Pakistan's terror training camps. But since he is a white man he has become an approver even though he is a dreaded terrorist.

Headley claims to have to have conducted more than one recce of the Bhabha Atomic Research complex in Mumbai. Indians cannot walk around BARC without being picked up for questioning. Here is a man who went in there twice and claims to have video shot from the inside.

Disconcerting as it may sound, India's security comes across as easy to penetrate and easily compromised.

The scary truth is there is a likelihood of a 26/11 attack being repeated as a result of this compromised security. Headley's deposition revealed to the world how defunct our security checks are.

On the six days Headley was questioned by Special Public Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam, only his claims on his recces, discussions on the attacks on Mumbai and his proximity to Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Al Qaeda were important. These were interspersed with Headley's stories.

Nikam asked Headley specifically if he was aware or knew of a Lashkar women's cell. He denied it. At no point did he claim to know Ishrat Jahan, the alleged terrorist killed in an encounter in Gujarat, was working for Lashkar. He had 'heard' that a female operative was slain, but did not reveal Ishrat's name.

Nikam then asked Headley to select one name from three, like they do on television quiz shows. He replied that he thought it to be the second option. Whereupon Nikam squealed excitedly "Yes, Ishrat, yes." Headley then outright denied being aware or having heard of any female suicide bomber.

At the end of that day's proceedings, Nikam addressed the media to claim that Headley had named Ishrat as a suicide bomber.

The deposition was meant to secure more information and revelations on the 26/11 terror attacks that would make India's case against Pakistan stronger. Instead, the internal conflicts within India's security establishment stood exposed.
'As I am the first official transgender candidate of a political party and fighting against Jayalalithaa, I have got a lot of publicity.'

'Till now, nobody knew me. Now, the entire Tamil Nadu knows me.'

'The transgender community here wanted me to withdraw my candidature, saying Jayalalithaa had provided them with houses.'

'They feel Jayalalithaa would be angry with all transgender people because I am standing against her.'

Devi, 33, a transgender is one of the candidates of Naam Tamilar Katchi, a pro-Tamil outfit floated by film actor Seeman.

She says she is the first transgender who has been officially chosen as the candidate of a political party in Tamil Nadu.

She has been working as a social worker and running a trust Thai Madi (Mother's lap), a home for elderly people in her village near Salem.

It came as a surprise to her when Naam Tamilar Kachi traced her and asked her to contest the assembly election. When she was asked to stand as a candidate in the R K Nagar constituency in Chennai, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa had not announced her candidature in the constituency.

Devi relocated herself to R K Nagar in North Chennai, one of the most neglected areas in the state capital, to campaign for the election. She lives in a one-room apartment with her adopted mother in a very poor locality.

Devi spoke to Shobha Warrier/Rediff.com

I grew up near Salem as Vijayakumar. I was born when my mother was around 40 years old. My father passed away when I was less than a year old. After that, my mother and elder sister took care of me.

From the age of 7, I knew I was not a boy. I felt like a girl inside. By the time I became a teenager, I started getting attracted to boys. I was quite comfortable being friendly with girls. In fact, I had more girls as friends than boys.

Villagers used to tease me for the way I walked, spoke and conducted myself. Luckily, other boys in my class did not trouble me much as I was the top student in the class and all of them wanted my notes and copy from my answer paper. Being a very good student was a blessing for me, in a way.

As a teenager, I was a tormented soul though neither my mother nor sister troubled me. In fact, they didn't know what I was going through. Both pampered with so much love that if I am strong and successful today, it is all because of them.

Without them knowing, I used to dress up as a woman and look at myself in the mirror. When I was in a woman's clothes, I felt myself and happy. The moment I changed into a man's clothes, I felt as if I was trapped in somebody else's clothes.

I loved a boy in my class, but he used to abuse me for loving him, and asked, how can a boy love another boy? I used to cry a lot at his rejection, but I vowed then that I would see to it that one day he would chase me, and it happened.

After I became a woman, he pleaded with me to be his girlfriend. I rejected him as I had not forgotten the way he treated me when I expressed my love.

I had seen news of men becoming women which gave me hope that one day I would discover myself and live as the real me.

I read about the Koovagam festival where people like me assemble. Without telling my mother, I went to the festival. I can't tell you the happiness I felt among my own people. Till then nobody -- both men and women -- accepted me.

For the first time I felt I was with my family. I even thought of leaving home and being with them. Then I thought of my mother. She loved me unconditionally and still does.

It was there that an elderly lady called Sumathi told me where I could do the (sex change) operation. I was only 17.

The moment I finished my 12th standard exam, I ran away from home, stealing my mother's jewels and money. Sumathi had told me I needed Rs 60,000 for the operation.

I knew the operation was dangerous, but the desire to be a woman was so much that I was ready to undergo even the riskiest operation. It is the same with all transgender people.

I went to a hospital in Kadappa, spent the entire money and got myself operated. On the 3rd day, when the wound was very raw, Sumathi asked me to join the community. They wanted me to be a sex worker, but I had no plans to do such a thing. If I had taken money from them, they would not have let me go.

When I was in terrible pain, I thought of my mother and felt like being with her. I was only 17 and was very close to my mother.

I went back home on the third day. The moment my mother saw me, she knew I had done something with myself. She didn't ask me a single question, but cried a lot. Her tears didn't bother me as I was happy inside. I had become a woman and I was overflowing with happiness.

After that, both my mother and sister were very understanding. They took care of me very well, but it took me three months to start walking properly. Till then the wound was raw and bleeding.

When the news spread, our neighbours and many villagers turned against me. They said other youngsters would turn bad if they were friends with me.

In the meantime, I was taking hormone injections and it took more than a year for the breasts to appear.

It was Sumathi Amma who gave me the name Devi saying I looked divine like a Goddess (Devi) and I loved the name.

Many elders in our village ill-treated me thinking I had become a woman to have free sex. For them, I was a new specimen they had not seen before; they had only heard about transgenders working as sex workers.

They didn't know how to deal with me as I was the first transgender person in our village. All the young men were of great support to me as I was quite good looking.

Three years after I became Devi, I started doing a lot of social service. I knew I would not be able to give birth to a child, but I wanted my life to be of some use to society.

I started giving food to the hungry. I used to cook food myself and serve them.

I was so isolated in my village that I found it very difficult to live there. My mother was my pillar of support. She told everyone that I was her child and that I would live in her house, with her.

She told them that they had no right to discriminate against me as I was living with her and not with them.

I decided to go to Salem to work with an NGO. I have worked with many NGOs all over Tamil Nadu. Three years ago, after saving some money, I came back to my village and bought a piece of land, with help from donors whom I had met over the years.

I built a building and started the trust Thai Madi, which is a home for the elderly. The building can accommodate 100 people and today, we have around 25 members.

Now, my workplace is my village and the same villagers who once abhorred me now respect me for the work I am doing.

Though I pray to God daily, I never complained to him, but sometimes when I see pregnant women, women with small babies, I cry a lot thinking I will never be able to carry a baby inside me.

A woman gets so much respect from society when she becomes a mother which I will never get. I also would like to fall in love, marry a man, have a family and a child. But how long will a man remain with me? I had many lovers, but nobody ever asked me to marry him.

A few years ago, I participated in a rally organised by actor Seeman in support of Tamil refugees. I was with them for three months working for Sri Lankan Tamils.

When his political party decided to field candidates for the assembly election, his party men came in search of me and asked if I would stand as a candidate. I agreed, thinking it would help me spread the message of my social service all over Tamil Nadu.

When they allotted me the R K Nagar constituency at a meeting in Cuddalore two months ago, the chief minister had not declared that she would be fighting the election from here.

As I am the first official transgender candidate of a political party and the transgender person fighting against Jayalalithaa, I have got a lot of publicity. Till now, nobody knew me. Now, the entire Tamil Nadu knows me. I am sure it will help me spread my wings as a social worker in the future.

I tell the people of this constituency that I would take care of them like a mother if they elect me.

The transgender community here wanted me to withdraw my candidature, saying Jayalalithaa had provided them with houses and that I should not contest the election against her.

They feel Jayalalithaa would be angry with all transgender people because I am standing against her. What kind of an argument is that?

Does that mean if a man or a woman stood against her, she would turn against all men and women? They are angry with me because I refused to withdraw my candidature.

I am a fighter and my life, from the moment I was born, has been a battle. I have to fight for each and everything in my life and that includes even my own identity.

As a social worker, I am not working for just transgenders, but for the entire community.

I want society to accept me as a human being, a woman who is sincerely working for other human beings.

I knew I will never be a real woman. Many people say 'She is beautiful like a woman.' It is always 'like a woman,' and not 'a woman.' I will always be a third gender and not a woman. The thought hurts me a lot.

But when the people of my village felicitated me and respectfully addressed me as, 'Amma, vanakkam (welcome mother),' I felt my life is worth living.

Photograph: Sreeram Selvaraj
'Duleep Singh was not in a position to give it away because he was only a minor of about 3, 4 years old.'

'The Indian claim of the British having taken the Kohinoor from the Sikhs does not stand because the Sikhs too took it by force.'

IMAGE: Britain's Queen Elizabeth in the House of Lords. The Kohinoor has been with the British royal family since the 1850s. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

The row over the Kohinoor diamond seems to be getting more and more intense.

On Monday, April 18, the Government of India, in response to a PIL seeking the return of the Kohinoor from Britain, stated in the Supreme Court that the diamond was gifted by Sikh king Duleep Singh to the British and hence it could not seek its return.

'If we claim our treasures such as Kohinoor from other countries, every other nation will start claiming their items from us. There will be nothing left in our museums,' Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar told the Supreme Court.

"It is a diamond which has a very long competitive history," historian and author William Dalrymple, image, below, whose forthcoming book Kohinoor traces the diamond's history, tells Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff.com

There are many theories about the Kohinoor, of how it ended up with the British, one of them being that it was gifted away by Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh. How far is this true?

It is absolutely not true at all. It is a complete misunderstanding of history.

Ranjit Singh was certainly dead and he did not gift it away. The complicating factor is that Ranjit Singh himself probably seized the diamond by force.

Just like the British say that it was given to them as a gift, so Ranjit Singh claims it was given to him as a gift by Shah Shuja Durrani. But Afghan sources, including Shah Shuja's own autobiography, say that his son was tortured in front of him and therefore he handed over the Kohinoor to Ranjit Singh.

So you can argue that if it was illegitimately taken by force by the British, then it was illegitimately taken by force by Ranjit Singh too.

Before that it was taken by Ahmed Shah Abdali from (Persian king) Nadir Shah by force. Before that Nadir Shah took it by force from Mughal king Muhammad Shah Rangeela by force.

It is a diamond which has a very long competitive history, with India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, all claiming the Kohinoor diamond.

There is another theory that Ranjit Singh's son Duleep Singh gave the Kohinoor diamond as ransom for his safety to the British. How far is that true?

Duleep Singh was a child when he was taken by the British. He encountered Queen Victoria only when he was an adult. He was not in a position to give it away because he was only a minor of about 3, 4 years old (at the time).

Was it ransom, then, in exchange for Duleep Singh's safety?

The Sikhs were defeated in the Anglo-Sikh war. The British captured the treasury and it (the Kohinoor) became a part of the plunder. I don't believe the Kohinoor was gifted. It became a part of the booty taken by the victorious company.

Another point is the agency waging war was not the British government, but a private corporation, the East India Company, which is an additional complication.

One of the weird facts of Indian history is that India was not colonised by the British at all, but by a private corporation, the East India Company, whose shareholders were many Indians. For example, Marwaris heavily invested in East Indian company shares, just like many Dutch people did.

Is it true that Malik Kafur was the first to take the Kohinoor by force from the Kakatiya dynasty for the Delhi sultanate?

That is the supposition. I think it is not proven.

Where did the Kohinoor originate from?

The only diamond mine in the world at that time was the Golconda mine in Hyderabad state. Probably, the Kakatiya dynasty was there then, but there is no clear information about it, only supposition.

So we don't know for sure where this diamond originated?

We know that it came from the Golconda mine as it was the only one in the world which produced diamonds (at the time). It was the only source of diamonds until the discovery of the New World mines in the 19th century and the South African mines.

The Kohinoor's exact history before the arrival of the Mughals is unclear, but it is supposed to be Kakatiya, that is the supposition.

Historically, who was the first queen or king to own the Kohinoor?

Mughal Emperor Shahjahan is believed to be the first king. The Kohinoor, however, comes clearly in focus at the time of Mughal king Muhammad Shah Rangeela (c 1739) and Nadir Shah.

No records of its possession by Noor Jahan, Mughal Emperor Jehangir's wife?

I don't believe there is a record for that, but I might be wrong.

Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma says the diamond's case goes back before Independence, therefore they cannot do anything about it. Is that a legitimate stand to take?

My view is that it is much more complicated than most Indians realise.

The Indian claim of the British having taken it from the Sikhs does not stand because the Sikhs too took it by force (from Shah Shuja).

If you start talking about reparations from the British to India, does Sri Lanka then have the right to seek reparations from India because of the raids of Polonnaruwa?

The Cholas also raided Indonesia. Should Indonesia seek reparations then (from India)?

In history the strong preyed upon on the weak everywhere in the world, all the time. Should the British start claiming reparations from Italy because of what the Romans did? You open a can of worms if you start opening up these issues.

My personal view is that the correct solution in the face of these atrocities is that you got to educate people better. The British public does not know what their ancestors did and they are never taught that they committed a massacre on a large scale in 1857, for example.

My personal view is that once you start a digging operation, then there is eternal fire, so when did it start?

I think there is a problem of colonial violence and the fact that many European countries do not recognise it, they are in denial and they are largely ignorant.

Did the British sign any agreement with the Indian government that they will not return any of the wealth back to India?

I am not aware of that.

Has the British government ever returned any gold or jewels back to any former colony after it gained Independence?

There are individual reparations by individual institutions, but the British government as a whole, no.

For example, Oxford College returned the Benin Brown to Nigeria, but that was not a government decision. It was an individual institution, not the government.

Even Tipu Sultan's sword was auctioned if I am not mistaken?

Yes, that was bought by Vijay Mallya. He bought four to five canons, muskets and huge amount of armours and weaponry 10 years ago.

After he bought them, he found out that he could not bring it all into the country as Indian laws prevented him from doing so.

I believe he gave them on a long loan to a museum in Los Angeles.

Besides salvaging national pride, what will India achieve by regaining the Kohinoor?

As I said, so many other countries can claim it too. Why not Iran? Why not Afghanistan?

I think chasing reparations is not the way forward, the way forward is education and understanding.

There was another diamond called the Dariya Noor (Sea of Light) like the Kohinoor.

Yes, that is on display in Teheran. The great loot of Mughal jewels was not by the British, but Nadir Shah. In 1739, when he looted Delhi, he took away 10,000 items of gold, jewels and diamonds.

Most of the Mughal treasures you will find in Teheran. Nadir Shah used those Mughal treasures as much as he could and the leftovers he gave to the Ottoman palace in Istanbul and then to the czar (of Russia).

For Mughal jewels you don't need to look at London, but to Teheran, to Istanbul and St Petersburg.

The Kohinoor was not the only jewel, it was one among many. The Peacock Throne was also lost by the Mughal emperor to Nadir Shah.

Is the Dariya Noor linked to the Kohinoor?

They are different stones. It is like a sister jewel. The Dariya Noor was a great Mughal ruby, but no one talks about it. There is a huge quantity of Mughal loot scattered around the world in different museums. The main culprit behind the Mughal loot was Nadir Shah.

Why are we so obsessed with the Kohinoor, but not Dariya Noor?

Largely because of ignorance. People are familiar with Kohinoor because the British wrote the history books.

The Peacock Throne is in Iran and so is the Dariya Noor. Some of the greatest Mughal jewels are in St Petersburg. I think if we open up all these things, where do you stop?

As I said, the Sri Lankan government can sue India for what the Cholas did to them in the 11th century and so can the Indonesian government. The Cholas had a magnificent navy that ruled the Indian Ocean. They raided Indonesia and looted the great cities of Sri Lanka.

Is there any proof that the Cholas looted diamonds and gold from Indonesia and Sri Lanka?

Yes, there is clear proof. The Anuradhapura chronicle says the Cholas looted every temple in Anuradhapura and they took away the diamonds from the eyes of Buddha. They looted every stone and looted every idol. It is online, if you look at Anuradhapura chronicle, I even wrote about it (external link).

India was also looting other countries. It is not just a belief, it is a clear historical fact.

Is the 'loot' from other countries on display in any Indian museum?

I don't know for sure whether you can point to any individual objects. I am taking just one example, the fact that Chola king Rajaraja Chola looted Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and there were repeated regular raids on cities in Indonesia and Java.

What is the view in England among the public after British MP Keith Vaz said the Kohinoor must be returned to India?

The English people are mostly ignorant of the history of the British Empire. Very few people know what the British did.

The most appropriate response in my view is to educate the British people on the many terrible things the British did in the imperial period.

Meanwhile late on Tuesday, April 19, the Union culture ministry issued this clarification on the Kohinoor:

'The Government of India wishes to put on record that certain news items appearing in the press regarding the Kohinoor Diamond are not based on facts.'

'The Government of India further reiterates its resolve to make all possible efforts to bring back the Kohinoor Diamond in an amicable manner.'

The factual position is that the matter is sub judice at present. A PIL has been filed in the Honourable Supreme Court that is yet to be admitted.'

The Solicitor General of India was asked to seek the views of the Government of India, which have not yet been conveyed. The Solicitor General of India informed the Honourable Court about the history of the diamond and gave an oral statement on the basis of the existing references made available by the ASI.'

'Thus, it should be reaffirmed that the Government of India has not yet conveyed its views to the court, contrary to what is being misrepresented. The Court granted six weeks time on the prayer of the Solicitor General to take instructions for making his submission in the matter.'

'The status report on which the preliminary submission was made by the Solicitor General have references to the stand taken by Governments earlier that the Kohinoor was a gift and cannot be categorized as an object stolen.'

'The material further has references to the views of India's 1st Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru dating back to 1956. Pandit Nehru went on record saying that there is no ground to claim this art treasure back. He also added that efforts to get the Kohinoor back would lead to difficulties.'

'Pandit Nehru also said, "To exploit our good relations with some country to obtain free gifts from it of valuable articles does not seem to be desirable. On the other hand, it does seem to be desirable that foreign museums should have Indian objects of art".'

'It may be added that ever since he has taken over as PM, Shri Narendra Modi's efforts led to three significant pieces of India's history coming back home.'

'In October 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel returned a 10th century Indian statue of Goddess Durga that was stolen in 1990 and found in 2012 at a museum in Germany. In April 2015, then Canadian PM Stephen Harper returned a sculpture known as the 'Parrot Lady', which dates back to almost 900 years. Then Australian PM Tony Abbott, on his India visit in 2014 had returned antique statues of Hindu deities that were in Australian art galleries.'

'None of these gestures affected Indias relations with either Canada, Germany or Australia. It was Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who as the Chief Minister got back the ashes of Shyamji Krishna Varma almost 70 years after his death.'

'Thus, with regard to the Kohinoor Diamond too, Government of India remains hopeful for an amicable outcome whereby India gets back a valued piece of art with strong roots in our nations history.'
Issue should be closed within 1-2 months, Manohar Parrikar said.

India and China have moved a step closer in setting up a hotline between the two military headquarters as part of their efforts to improve border security.

China reacted positively toward setting up a military hotline with India on border security, Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan said after meeting his Indian counterpart Manohar Parrikar.

Parrikar later said that the Chinese have returned the draft of the memorandum on establishing a hotline between the two military headquarters. The issue should be closed within one or two months, he said.

The two sides were discussing the move to address tensions arising out of aggressive patrolling by both sides.

Chang spoke highly of the healthy and stable development of China-India relations in recent years, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

He called on the two sides to do a good job in implementing the consensus reached by leaders of the two countries, enhance strategic communication, so as to safeguard common interests.

He also suggested the two sides strengthen defence exchanges and jointly safeguard peace and tranquillity of the border area.

Vice chairman of Chinas Central Military Commission Fan Changlong who also met Parrikar said China regards bilateral ties from a strategic and long-term perspective and is willing to strengthen military-to-military cooperation to contribute more to peace, stability and prosperity of two countries.

Image: Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar being received by his Chinese counterpart Gen. Chang Wanquan at the PLA headquarters in Beijing. Photograph: PTI
IMAGE: Rescue team members and firefighters search for victims at a collapsed building on Monday after an earthquake struck off the Pacific coast, in Portoviejo, Ecuador. Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters

Rescue and relief operations in Ecuador continued in search of survivors two days after 7.8-magnitude quake devastated a tourist region of the South American country. On Tuesday, the government raised the death toll to 480.

Desperate families grabbed chunks of debris with their bare hands as they joined in the search for their loved ones along with stretched firefighting teams and mechanical diggers.

On Monday, at least five survivors -- including a girl -- were pulled out from the rubble.

Authorities reported that one person was found alive under the rubble of the El Gato hotel in Portoviejo.

Local media reported that a girl was rescued from the ruins of a building after being trapped for 20 hours in the hard-hit town of Pedernales, at the centre of the quake.

Firefighters tweeted that they pulled out three other survivors from rubble in the town of Manta.

Updating the death toll from 350, the countrys Security Ministry said, We are counting 480 people dead at present.

More than 2,000 people are believed to have been injured by the quake.

IMAGE: Men ride a motorcycle past damaged buildings in Pedernales, Ecuador. Photograph: Guillermo Granja/Reuters

Foreign countries and organisations dispatched rescue teams to help search and medical units treat the injured, saying tens of thousands would need aid.

Along the Pacific coast, in the towns of Pedernales, Manta and Portoviejo, the stench of rotting bodies filled the tropical air among heaps of rubble and twisted metal. Rescuers with sniffer dogs roamed the wreckage.

My husband is under there, said a 24-year-old survivor, tearing at a mound of debris that used to be a hotel in Manta. Her 25-year-old spouse, the father of their two young children, worked at the property as a painter.

In Pedernales, Mayor Gabriel Alcivar estimated there were hundreds of dead buried under the rubble of collapsed hotels.

Soldiers patrolled the beach town, and the Red Cross and the army opened a field hospital and a makeshift morgue at the local stadium.

Foreigners killed by the quake included seven Colombians, two Canadians and at least one United States national, officials said. Three Cuban doctors died in a collapsed building in Pedernales, Havanas Ministry of Public Health said on Monday.

Although Ecuador frequently suffers seismic shudders because of its position on the Pacific Rims Ring of Fire, Sundays quake -- which lasted a full minute -- was the worst in nearly 40 years.
The Maharashtra government on Tuesay banned digging of borewell below 200 feet in view of the acute water crisis in the state.

Water Supply and Sanitation Minister Babanrao Lonikar said that any violation will invite action under the 'Maharashtra Groundwater Development and Management Act' where violators may face fine or even imprisonment.

"The Maharashtra Groundwater Development and Management Act has to be implemented strictly due to the severe drought conditions prevalent and the depleting water stock. We have spoken to all senior officials and decided to ban the digging of borewells below 200 feet," Lonikar said.

He said that with the amount of water being drawn out from the ground, it's imperative to control the digging of borewells. It will eventually help in averting drought-related problems, he added.

"While the Act will be implemented strictly, we require participation of the people. Everyone needs to come forward and help us save ground water," he said.

Meanwhile, Lonikar said 4,356 tankers are currently being supplied by the state government, out of which, 52 are for Konkan, 831 for Nashik, 303 for Pune, 3,032 for Aurangabad, 131 for Amravati and 7 tankers for Nagpur divisions.

"The government has sanctioned Rs 750 crore for water distribution, out of which Rs 500 crore has already been provided to district collectors. This money will be used for 17 different works like providing water tankers, changing of old pipelines, changing of burnt pumps, fixing of leakages in water tanks etc," Lonikar said.

According to an official of the Maharashtra Irrigation department, dams across the state have only 19 per cent water left compared to 32 per cent at this time last year.

In Marathwada, eight of the region's 11 major dams are at dead storage level, which means water from the reservoirs cannot flow out but has to be lifted. "It is down to only three per cent," the official said.

This is a drastic decline in water storage as at this time last year, water level in Marathwada's dams was much higher at 11 per cent, Aurangabad Divisional Commissioner Umakant Dangat told PTI.

"We will also use the groundwater stock and as the IMD forecast is good, we hope that we will be able to carry on till the monsoon arrives," he said.

"We have already cut water supply to (the) industry. The collectors and divisional commissioners have been instructed that use of water for drinking is the top priority," Maharashtra Water Resources Minister Girish Mahajan said.

As many as 2,745 water tankers are being used in the parched region compared to 939 at this time last year. Lonikar said 4,356 tankers are currently being supplied by the state government, out of which, 52 are for Konkan, 831 for Nashik, 303 for Pune, 3,032 for Aurangabad, 131 for Amravati and 7 tankers for Nagpur divisions.

"The government has sanctioned Rs 750 crore for water distribution, out of which Rs 500 crore has already been provided to district collectors. This money will be used for 17 different works like providing water tankers, changing of old pipelines, changing of burnt pumps, fixing of leakages in water tanks etc," he said.

The worst-affected Latur in Marathwada has been getting supply by a special "water train" filled at Miraj in western Maharashtra. The Aurangabad Collector has already announced a 20 per cent water cut to local breweries and a 10 per cent overall cut to local industry.

This is the fourth year of drought in Marathwada in the past five years. Each of its 8,522 villages have been affected for two consecutive years.
In more bad news for the drought-hit Marathwada region, only 3 per cent water is left in dams in the parched region, officials said on Tuesday.

Eight of the regions 11 major dams are at dead storage level, meaning water from these dams cannot flow out but has to be lifted.

This is a drastic decline in water storage as at this time last year, the level in Marathwadas dams was much higher at 11 per cent, Aurangabad Divisional Commissioner Umakant Dangat said.

We will also use the groundwater stock and as the IMD (Indian Meteorological Department) forecast is good, we hope that we will be able to carry on till the monsoon arrives, he said.

This is the fourth year of drought in Marathwada in the past five years. Each of its 8,522 villages have been affected for two consecutive years.

We have already cut water supply to (the) industry. The collectors and divisional commissioner have been instructed that the use of water for drinking is the top priority, Maharashtra Water Resources Minister Girish Mahajan said.

As many as 2,745 water tankers are being used in the region compared to 939 this time last year.

Latur in Marathwada has been getting water by a special water train filled at Miraj in western Maharashtra.

The Aurangabad collector has already announced a 20 per cent water cut to local breweries and a 10 per cent overall cut to local industry.

Dams across the state have only 19 per cent water left compared to 32 per cent this time last year, an official of Maharashtra Irrigation Department said.

Image used for representational purposes only.
Sartaj Aziz, Pakistan Prime Minister's Adviser on Foreign Affairs has blamed India for allegedly "creating hurdles" in the way of process to normalise the relations between the two countries.

Addressing a event specially organised by the British think tank, Chatham House and supported by Pakistan high commission in London on Monday, he shed light on the challenges and problems being experienced by his country.

"Pakistan is suffering due to geopolitical developments in the region. India's policy towards Pakistan is not positive and that is the only reason that Line of Control could not be peaceful. Pakistan's relations with India and Afghanistan are in fact very complicated and despite Pakistan's earnest efforts, these could not be materialised and relations are still not normal", The Nation quoted him as saying.

Aziz asserted that New Delhi has not reciprocated positively to Pakistan's efforts towards resumption of comprehensive dialogue between the two countries and the issue of terrorism was a part of comprehensive dialogue.

"We want to resume talks with India, and the issue of RAW should be discussed in dialogues between Pakistan and India instead of on media", he stated.

Aziz also confirmed that Indo-Pak talks have been suspended due to certain factors and not be ended for good and also referred to Kashmir issue on various occasions.

Presenting his viewpoint on arrest of Kulbhushan Yadav which Pakistan alleged as Indian 'operative', he said that no definite comments could be made as investigations are underway.

Commenting on the situation in Afghanistan, he said that Pakistan has no favourites in the neighbouring country and that Taliban have been defeated but was still offensive.

Aziz is on three-day visit to United Kingdom for the third review of Pakistan-UK Enhanced Strategic Dialogue. According to the Foreign Office, the adviser will also participate in the meeting of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group.
The National Investigation Agency has readied fresh Letters Rogatory to be sent to Pakistan containing the addresses of four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists who attacked the strategic Pathankot Indian Air Force base in January.

The LRs are being despatched notwithstanding indications from the Pakistani side that it was not yet ready to receive Indian investigators to carry forward the probe in the January 2 attack that left seven security personnel dead. Four terrorists were also killed in the 80-hour gunbattle.

The NIA had put the pictures of the four dead terrorists on its official website and asked general public for help in identifying them.

According to official sources, the central probe agency, set up in the aftermath of 26/11 Mumbai attacks, was flooded with many emails, some of which originated from Pakistan also, giving information about the terrorists.

The NIA, during its interaction with the Joint Investigation Team of Pakistan, had sought details about the place of residence of the terrorists whose names had been shared with the visiting probe team. However, there was no response from Pakistan on the Indias request.

The five-member JIT, also comprising an Inter-Services Intelligence officer, had visited India from March 27 to April one during which they visited the air base and recorded statements of 16 witnesses.

During the exercise of verification of the information gathered through emails, the NIA showed the pictures and addresses to some of the jailed terrorists of Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group lodged in jails here and got important inputs from them.

The address of Nasir Hussain, one of the terrorists, was located at Vehari, a town 100 km from Multan in Punjab province of Pakistan. He is the son of Mohd Mansa and stays at House number WB-89, Mohalla Chak in the town.

Hussain was the Jaish terrorist who had called his mother Khayyam Babbar minutes before the terror group launched a suicide attack inside the IAF base on the intervening night of January 1 and 2.

The other terrorist was identified as Hafiz Abu Bakar, son of Mohammed Fazil and resident of Gujranwala in Pakistan.

While Umer Farooq was stated to be son of Abdul Samad who stays in Madni Road, Mohalla Madisah, Shahdadpur in Sindh province of Pakistan, the fourth terrorist Abdul Qayum was the son of Mohamed Amin, resident of Chachar, Tehsil Pano Akil in district Sukkur of the Sindh province of Pakistan.

India has already sent Letters Rogatory to Pakistan in which it had asked for voice samples of Jaish chief Maulana Masood Azhar, his brother Abdul Rauf and Khayyam Babbar, mother of Hussain.

In the meanwhile, NIA Director General Sharad Kumar said on Tuesday that his team was ready to visit Pakistan as and when there was a clearance from Islamabad.

We have handed over all the documents sought by the JIT and I believe that the evidence handed over to Pakistan can stand scrutiny in any court of law internationally, Kumar said.

After the JIT returned home, Pakistan High Commissioner to India Abdul Basit had poured cold water on Indias expectations that a team of NIA investigators would be allowed to visit Pakistan in connection with the Pathankot terror strike probe on the basis of reciprocity.

The whole investigation is not about the question of reciprocity in my view. It is more about extending cooperation or our two countries cooperating with each other to get to the bottom of the incident, Basit had said earlier this month.

In Islamabad, Pakistan Foreign office had issued a statement about JITs visit and said ...the witnesses belonging to the Indian security forces were not produced before it.
Often touted to as the 'world's biggest water fight', the Songkran marks the traditional Thai New Year and is celebrated from April 13 to 15.

IMAGE: A man plays a trumpet while people are splashed by elephants with water during the celebration of the Songkran water festival in Thailand's Ayutthaya province, north of Bangkok. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters



The celebration coupled with large amounts of water began as a way of pay tribute to family members, especially elders, as well as a potent symbol of spiritual cleansing and physical purification.

The name of the festival is a derivative of the Sanskrit word Sankranti, which is also the name of a Hindu harvest festival celebrated in India in January to mark the arrival of spring.

IMAGE: A reveller reacts during a water fight at Songkran Festival celebrations in Bangkok. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

Over the years though the ritual has evolved into the massive water fight that dominates streets all over the country.

IMAGE: People take part in a city-wide water fight during the Songkran water festival in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Photograph: Taylor Weidman/Getty Images

Even though the country faces its worst water crisis in nearly two decades, many places continued the water battles with traditional largess showing no signs of austerity.

IMAGE: Foreign revellers take part in a water fight during the Songkran water festival in Central World in Bangkok, Thailand. Photograph: Borja Sanchez-Trillo/Getty Images

One of the most popular locations to celebrate the Songkran Festival in the Thai northern region is Chiang Mai province, where the celebratory atmosphere is a sight to behold.

IMAGE: A Thai man pours a bucket of water on a foreigner riding a scooter during Songkran. Photograph: Taylor Weidman/Getty Images

This year, Chiang Mai not only celebrated the water festival but also its 720th anniversary of the establishment of Chiang Mai city.

IMAGE: The throwing of water was traditionally a sign of respect and well wishing during the festival. Photograph: Taylor Weidman/Getty Images



At Pratu Tha Pae, in the heart of Chiang Mai city, a large crowd of tourists already made their forts to start the water splashing fights.

IMAGE: Tourists employ water guns as they participate in the water festival. Photograph: Taylor Weidman/Getty Images

This year Chiang Mai made some changes to the celebrations keeping in sight the severe water crisis being faced by their fellow countrymen.

IMAGE: Several affluent foreigners travel to Thailand specifically during this season to take part in this massive water festival. Photograph: Taylor Weidman/Getty Images

The government had been promoting the use of water wisely during Songkran this year, prompting less tourists to stick around the water moats to join in the fun opting instead the use of water guns on the streetside.

IMAGE: The streets turn effervescent the morning after a foam party; a festivity that sees several thousand litres of water spilled across the streets of Bangkok. Photograph: Taylor Weidman/Getty Images

But in the far south, celebration of Songkran was even more active despite of security problem, particularly in Hat Yai.

IMAGE: Before taking part in the water fight people pay obeisance to the image of Lord Buddha as the Thai New Year commences. Photograph: Borja Sanchez-Trillo/Getty Images

Hat Yai held Midnight Songkran event which attracts many revelers to the region.

IMAGE: A boy and an elephant splash each other with water during the celebration of the Songkran water festival in Thailand's Ayutthaya province, north of Bangkok. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

The holiday atmosphere in Hat Yai went in full swing as locals and foreigners came together to take part in a water fight celebrating the festival.

IMAGE: A Bangkok firefighter squirts a Songkran partier with his fire hose during a community water fight on Silom Road as part of the Songkran water festival. Photograph: Jack Kurtz/Getty Images



They were also seen gyrating to musical numbers and enjoying foam parties during the 'Midnight Songkran'.

IMAGE: Thai people offer prayers at Wat Boworn during the Songkran water festival in Bangkok, Thailand. Photograph: Borja Sanchez-Trillo/Getty Images

Hat Yai celebrates the Songkran event by holding elaborate stage activities, as well being home to the biggest carnival parade in the country, providing visitors a glimpse of the caravan of beautifully decorated trailers, ballroom dancers, and a 'Miss Tourism' pageant contest that sees the winner take home a prize money of 30,000 baht.

IMAGE: A reveller reacts during a water fight at Songkran Festival celebrations in Bangkok. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

The event brings life and colours to the nation even as it faces a severe water crisis marked by economic troubles.
IMAGE: Police fires tear gas shells to control protesters in Bengaluru on Tuesday . Photograph: ANI

Several buses were set on fire and a police station was attacked as protest by garment factory workers against the new provident fund rules turned violent on the second day of their stir in Bengaluru on Tuesday.

Protesters pelted stones at Hebbagodi Police Station and torched seized vehicles parked there, as the spontaneous agitation with no trade union leading it spun out of control.

Police said they had to resort to lathi-charge and fire teargas shells to disperse violent protesters.

At least two Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation buses and one of Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation have been set on fire, they said.

Incidents of stone-pelting on buses and other vehicles were reported from different parts of the city such as Bannerghatta and Jalahalli cross, as also near the ElectronicsCity, the hub of IT firms.

Traffic jams were reported at various entry and exit points in the city like Hosur Road, which leads to ElectronicsCity and Tumkur Road, which has a large concentration of garment units.

City Police Commissioner N S Megharikh said the situation was under control, but there are some issues on the citys outskirts.

We are at work, our officers are at the spot, reinforcement has already gone there. The situation is being brought under control, he said.

Police said other workers too have joined garment workers in the protest on Tuesday.

There are approximately over 12 lakh garment factory workers in Bengaluru, the city police chief said.

State Director General of Police Om Prakash said the situation went out of control at Hebbagodi and Jalahalli, where reinforcements had been sent. The situation was being monitored by additional commissioner of police.

He said police did not expect the protest to take a violent turn.

Strict action will be taken against those damaging public property and pelting stones at public, he said, and appealed to the protesters to hold discussions with the department concerned to resolve the issue.

The situation is under control. It will come to normal shortly, he said.

Police had resorted to a mild lathi-charge on Monday to control a mob of garment workers who pelted stones injuring four police personnel during the protest, police said.

Workers opposing amendment to Employees Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 have expressed fear that the new rule would take away their right over employers contribution portion of provident fund till they attain 58 years.
Rape is no joking matter, but not for Rodrigo Duterte, a front-running candidate for president of the Philippines.

Dutere, 71, made a joke in reference to the brutal gang rape and murder of missionary Jacqueline Hamill at a Davao City jail back in 1989. They raped all of the women  There was this Australian lay minister  when they took them out  I saw her face and I thought: Son of a b****h. What a pity  they raped her, they all lined up. I was mad she was raped but she was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor should have been first.

In 1989, Australian national Jacqueline Hamill was raped and killed during a riot at the prison where she worked in the southern Philippines Davao City. Duterte, who has served as mayor of Davao for 22 years, was caught on tape referring to the incident during a campaign speech on Sunday.

However, he has refused to apologise after he was severely criticised, saying that it was not a joke but spoken due to his utter rage over the incident. I said it in the heat of anger.

Duterte has been widely condemned for the remarks. Fellow presidential candidate Sen. Grace Poe, who has dropped into second place in latest opinion polls, said the comments reflect his disrespect for women. Vice-President Jejomar Binay, who is also running for the top job, went so far as to release a statement describing Duterte as a crazy maniac.

Image: Rodrigo Duterte. Photograph: Reuters
A 26-year-old American woman will file a lawsuit against a Catholic Indian priest and his church in India for allegedly sexually abusing her during his posting in the United States between 2004 and 2005.

The move comes in protest against the recent Vatican decision which announced Diocese of Ootacamund located in Mylapore is reinstating Joseph Jeyapaul to ministry.

Minnesota attorney Jeff Anderson will file suit on behalf of the victim in federal court that claims the Diocese of Ootacamund endangered children by reinstating Jeyapaul.

Jeyapaul who served as a priest in Crookston township of Minnesota in 2004 and 2005 was arrested in India in 2012 and extradited to the US on charges of sexually abusing two girls in a congregation.

He was later deported to India last year, after serving his sentence of one year and one day.

In a statement, advocacy group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests announced that one of the sexual abuse survivors would sue the priest and the diocese.

It may be the most irresponsible Vatican move weve ever seen: Catholic officials in Rome have lifted the suspension of a recently convicted predator priest. We are stunned and saddened by such blatant recklessness and callousness, Barbara Dorris of St Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, said in a statement.

A letter sent to Anderson and Roseau County Attorney Lisa Hanson and signed by over 500 Jeyapaul supporters in India will also be released as evidence of the public danger (nuisance) permitted by Indian Bishop and Vatican, it said.

On January 16, 2016, with the permission of Pope Francis, Bishop Amalraj lifted the suspension of Father Joseph Jeyapaul, the firm said, adding that in 2015, after his

extradition from India, Jeyapaul plead guilty to criminal sexual conduct involving the sexual abuse of a minor girl while he worked in the Diocese of Crookston in 2005.

Catholic officials refuse to keep this admitted sex offender away from kids, so our only hope of stopping him is to get him charged and convicted again, Dorris said.

Over the weekend, Barbara and the victim were seen distributing leaflets outside the church in Crookston to find another sex abuse survivor.

Our goal is to find just one more victim who might be able to file criminal charges and get this proven predator behind bars, the victim told local Grand Forks Herald.

The lawsuit would charge Catholic officials with creating public nuisances by hiding and helping predator priests.

It was the first victims courage that brought forward a second victim of Fr Jeyapaul. It was the second victims courage that prodded Fr Jeyapaul to plead guilty. And we hope the courage of a third victim will get Fr Jeyapaul extradited, convicted and jailed again, so that no more innocent lives are shattered, SNAP said.

Until hes charged and convicted again, Jeyapaul should be put in a remote, secure, independently-run treatment center far from families who have learned to trust him, it said.

Image: The Vatican reinstated Catholic priest, Father Joseph Jeyapaul, in February 2016, less than a year after he pleaded guilty to sexual assault of a minor in Minnesota.
Scientists believe the unique geological locations where they are situated makes them worthy of veneration, says Pallav Bagla.

What makes the Kailash Parvat, the Ram Setu and the Kedarnath temple such hallowed places?

Scientists believe the unique geological locations where they are situated makes them stunning and worthy of veneration.

Kailash Parvat or Mount Kailash (according to Hindu scriptures, the place where Lord Shiva resides and meditates) is made of shale rocks and resembles a Shiva lingam; the Ram Setu (believed to the bridge built by Lord Ram's monkey army to reach the demon king Ravana's Lanka in the Ramayana), which is also visible from space, is a unique set of coral islands; while the Kedarnath temple (of Lord Shiva in Uttarakhand) that withstood the 2013 flash floods sits on an unstable glacial moraine, where usually nothing would survive.

Interestingly, scientists now also believe that pilgrimages to such diverse regions are a way of unification of the highly diverse cultures of India, which, they think, has 'brought about a cross-fertilisation of thoughts.'

Writing about these sites, Kharag Singh Valdiya, a highly regarded geologist and former vice- chancellor of Kumaun University, Nanital, says, 'Wandering sages and saints in ancient India were unable to unravel the mystery of their origin and, regarding them to be nature's singular rather fantastic handiwork, imparted to them an altogether new meaning by investing them with the aura of divinity.'

When it is difficult to explain certain natural phenomenon with the existing knowledge, humans often try to associate it with divinity.

The much venerated Om Parvat, situated on the tri-junction of India-Tibet and Nepal, when viewed from a distance, gives the perfect impression of the letter 'Om', including the rightly-placed dot.

Valdiya explains the Om Parvat is made up of 'rocks folded twice in manner that the depressions within the arms of the overturned folds are filled round the year with ice and snow,' giving rise to geological calligraphy depicting the venerated Hindu word 'Om.'

Incidentally, the 6,191 metres high peak, on whose face the letter 'Om' is etched, is made of rocks that bear lots of fossils, scientifically that means that millions of years ago the rocks were submerged under the sea, like most of the Himalayas were when the Indian plate was still drifting northwards.

The Amarnath cave in Jammu and Kashmir, another big pilgrimage spot, houses a Shiva lingam made of ice. It is, says Valdiya, a 'spectacular ice stalagmite.'

This is a very rare formation since water has to drip down from the roof and then freeze and the temperature has to be just right for a lingam-like structure to be formed. For most part of the year, the cave entrance is covered with snow.

'How can one not be impressed, if not awed, by this geological marvel?' Valdiya asks.

About 600,000 people visit this sacred site of the Hindus situated at an altitude of 3,888 metres, even though the trek is arduous.

In southern India, the Ram Setu and the associated Rameshwaram Temple, both are sacred sites. The presence of a Ram Setu suggests a unified geology of India and the island of Sri Lanka. It is a unique set of coral islands that connect the two neighbours.

Legend has it that Lord Ram used this coral formation to cross over with his army when he invaded Lanka in search of his wife Sita who was abducted by Ravana.

This region, Valdiya says, is geologically singular, as 'it is well known that corals grow in warm waters, shallow enough to be illuminated by sunlight. The sea level rise brought submergence of the coral islands that were once close to the surface of sea and exposed to the atmosphere.'

Mount Kailash, an imposing dome considered to be the abode of Lord Shiva, is situated just north of the point where the massive Indian continental plate collides into the Eurasian plate.

The home of Lord Shiva has been formed, it seems, because the Indian plate has buckled up, says Valdiya, who adds that the lingam in the centre surrounded by the circular depression with a ring of hills resembling a yoni.

This constant pulling and tugging through plate tectonics or the movement of continents over geological times give this region a unique geological past and may be that is why sages of ancient times gave it a venerated status. The scenic beauty here is also stunning especially on a full moon night.

Writing in the latest issue of the best known Indian science journal Current Science, Valdiya says, 'Perusing through the map showing the locations of the 12 jyotirlings (the radiant signs of Shiva) established in the times of the Puranas, two facts emerge: They are located in all parts of the Indian sub-continent, reaching out to all ethnic groups living in the country Bharatvarsh; and, their situations happen to be of great geodynamic significance, particularly related to the Indian landmass.'

The 'leading lights of society must have realised that only spectacular features, particularly located in picturesque places, can attract people, even those who are non-believers and agnostics,' says Valdiya.

'The geological marvels or wonders were thus chosen as seats (dham) of Lord Shiva, the most loved god of those times and even now.'

From Somnath (in Veeraval, Gujarat) in the west to Badrinath (in Uttarakhand) in the north to Rameshwaram (in Tamil Nadu) in the south, all are located at unique geological locations.

Unique floodplain geology is home to the Kumbh Mela that takes place in Allahabad at the Sangam. It is believed that the Kumbh Mela is the single largest congregation of human beings on earth to take place at a single location.

In 2013, it was estimated that 120 million people gathered on the sandy banks, where two mighty rivers -- the Ganga and Yamuna -- meet, while legend has it that the mythical river Saraswati also mingles here making the waters highly venerated.

The Kumbh Mela in times gone by offered people a specific venue at a time pre-decided 12 years ahead to plan their travel congregate, network and learn from each other. A modern day conference, one could say.

'One may dismiss the Puranas and the epics such as the Mahabharata as works of fiction,' says Valdiya, who now works at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru. 'But one cannot deny that geological marvels regarded or designated as shrines are indeed located precisely where these ancient texts describe, the narratives perfectly matching with the reality.'

The role of undertaking pilgrimages has also been given a modern scientific rational by Valdiya in his analysis.

'The idea behind the practice of visiting shrines was to persuade and spur pilgrims and travellers to know people who live in different terrains, have different lifestyles... who observed different socio-cultural practices. The pilgrims as they crisscrossed the country... presumably may have been a movement to promote the idea of one nation-one India.'
'When the cause of the leak is identified, is the AERB going to order a shutdown of all the other pressurised heavy water reactors in the country to fix the underlying problem?'

Rashme Sehgal reports.

The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board believes the Kakrapar Atomic Power Station's unit 1 in Gujarat, which had shut down in March due to a 'radioactive leak', will take another eight months or so to restart.

S Harikumar, secretary, AERB, has clarified that the leak has been arrested and investigations into the reason for the leak are ongoing.

Phase I of this operation comprised detecting the leak which is currently in a "cold shut-down," state, Harikumar pointed out, while all other systems are functioning normally. They are currently in phase II which looks at investigations behind the leak.

Following the isolation of the leaky channel, Harikumar elaborated, "The plant emergency has been terminated at KAPS. There has not been any report of abnormal radioactivity releases or of radiation exposures to any personnel following this leak which occurred on March 11, 2016."

These investigations are expected to continue for some more months.

"We are currently doing non-destructive testing, which involves going into the details. We cut the channels that have seen the leak and sent it to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre for testing," the AERB secretary added.

"At every stage of these investigations, we have to secure permission from the AERB. However, we are also using this as an opportunity to do plant maintenance, which was also due."

Nuclear physicist Dr M V Ramana from Princeton University is not satisfied with the AERB's explanation and questions how the AERB can make a blanket statement stating, 'There has not been any report of abnormal radioactivity releases/radiation exposures to any personnel during this incident.'

"There is little doubt that this leak would have exposed workers to tritiated water vapour and they would have had some radiation exposure," Dr Ramana said.

"There are two ways of interpreting this claim. One possibility is that the exposure levels were really not abnormal. That would imply that workers in general are exposed to the levels of radiation that are created during a large heavy water leak as happened earlier this year at Kakrapar," Dr Ramana added.

"This does not speak well of the levels of occupational safety at Kakrapar and, by extrapolation, at the other nuclear power plants operated by NPCIL (Nuclear Power Corporation India Limited)," he felt.

"The second possibility is that the workers involved in the Kakrapar clean-up did indeed get abnormally high levels of radiation. That possibility does not engender trust in the AERB. Neither of these possibilities are comforting," Dr Ramana said.

His concern is primarily with knowing the cause of the leak.

"When the cause of the leak is identified, is the AERB going to order a shutdown of all the other pressurised heavy water reactors in the country to fix the underlying problem?" Dr Ramana asked, adding, "Whether or not the AERB does that will reveal how much it prioritises safety over other goals."

Dr Rajendra Kumar, district magistrate, Surat district, who had come in for some criticism by farming communities for not speaking upfront on this leak, strongly denied the charge. "I was informed at 3.40 pm (on March 11) and I held a press conference on this subject the same day," the DM said.

"The government has a very strict protocol for nuclear emergencies," Dr Kumar said. "The plant is run by the NPCIL and onsite emergencies are handled by it and the AERB. We look at the offsite situation."

"Scientists from the Plasma Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad were informed immediately and they rushed here within three hours of being informed on the same day," the DM added. "They did offsite monitoring and did not find any radioactivity in the soil or in the water bodies."

On receiving the PRL team's findings, Dr Kumar said, "We felt there was no need to conduct any emergency drill," though he did concede, "It (KAPS) is a very strategic site and therefore great care was taken to ensure emergency protocols were observed."

Evaluating the current situation, Dr A Gopalakrishnan, the former AERB chairman, said, "The AERB has given the assurance that they have stopped the leak of heavy water. We have no way of verifying this. We have to take them at their word."

On the issue of workers being exposed to increased radiation within the plant when the accident occurred, Dr Gopalakrishnan said, "There may have been a very brief exposure -- the maximum it must have been there for a day or two."

"The AERB knows any misstep will see them in deep trouble," Dr Gopalakrishnan said. "That is why I do not believe they will mislead us. This is an imperfect system of communication, but this situation has been prevailing from 1983."

"f the fuel is intact and there is no indication otherwise," he added, "then the delay is basically because they (AERB) themselves are trying to figure out how the leak occurred."

"They need to get enough technical evidence on what happened. Is it confined or is it a characteristic problem in which case all the coolant pipes will need to be re-tubed?" Dr Gopalakrishnan said.

"We have to find out which end of spectrum this belongs to for which AERB will need to do more investigation," he added. "Rushing them will not help, the present slow and steady approach is the right approach."

The Kakrapar reactor belongs to the group of Canada deuterium uranium reactors which over the years have been known to face degradation of hundreds of pipes that hold the fuel and transport heavy water.

The Canadian government had informed AERB that the tubes were facing a problem and their metallurgists had added new alloy as part of this strengthening device. Kakrapar was the last reactor in this series to be re-tubed.

"This is Kakrapar's second re-tubing," Dr Gopalakrishnan said. "The life of a re-tubing is around 20 to 25 years, and the second re-tubing was done 2 to 3 years ago. The present ones are brand new tubes, which have only gone through 10 per cent of their life."

"It is perplexing why this has happened," he said. "We did not expect these new tubes to have ruptured."

Critical of AERB's handling, Dr Gopalakrishnan believes, "We are standing on false pride and by now should have got the Canadian government to assist us in handling this problem. Rather than beating our chests and saying 'I can solve it,' we should have got together with three to four countries which have these reactors."

"There is no harm in putting our heads together to resolve this problem. India is no longer a nuclear pariah. We need to work collectively. If you want to behave like a nuclear power, then we need to use the heads of everyone, especially when the Canadians are a friendly country."

Greenpeace, which works on nuclear issues, believes AERB failed in its handling of this issue. , "The primary and the most important responsibility of a nuclear regulator in the event of an accident is regular and continuous updates," Hofeza Merchant, a nuclear campaigner, said.

"These updates need to have usable information in them and not just empty assurances," Merchant added. "During the Kakrapar accident, the emergency lasted for 11 days and updates were only provided three times. These three updates contained assurances and no usable information."

"Just as important it is to investigate the cause of the leak," Merchant said, "it is equally important to investigate the handling of the accident. In case of the Kakrapar accident, the regulator clearly failed at providing usable information."

"Empty assurances provided by the regulator caused more stress than relief for those that reside close to the reactor."

Image published only for representational purposes.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Tajikistan

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Tajikistan, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/571611fd15.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Tajikistan is an authoritarian state dominated politically by President Emomali Rahmon and his supporters. The constitution provides for a multiparty political system, but the government has historically obstructed political pluralism and continued to do so during the year. The March parliamentary elections lacked pluralism and genuine choice, according to international observers, many of whom called the process deeply flawed. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over security forces.

The most significant human rights problems included citizens' inability to change their government through free and fair elections; torture and abuse of detainees and other persons by security forces; and repression of political activists and opposition groups.

Other human rights problems included restrictions on freedoms of expression, press, and the free flow of information, including the repeated blockage of several independent news and social networking websites; poor religious freedom conditions; violence and discrimination against women; torture in the military; arbitrary arrest; denial of the right to a fair trial; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; prohibition of international monitors' access to prisons; limitations on worker rights; and trafficking in persons, including sex and labor trafficking.

Officials in the security services and elsewhere in the government acted with impunity. There were very few prosecutions of government officials for human rights abuses, and no officials have been convicted of torture.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

While the law prohibits extrajudicial killings by government security forces, there were several reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

As an illustrative example, according to an August 28 article from Radio Free Europe, police detained 23-year-old Umar Bobojonov and a group of his friends while they were walking in Vahdat Park. At the police station, Bobojonov's friends witnessed police beat Bobojonov until he lost consciousness. Bobojonov died in the hospital on September 4 after a weeklong coma. Family and friends of Bobojonov insisted that police targeted him because of the perceived religious connotations of his beard. The Ministry of Interior announced on September 1 that it was setting up a special investigation, but the government had not reported the results of the investigation by year's end.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances during the year.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution prohibits the use of torture. Although the government amended the criminal code in 2012 to add a separate article that defines torture in accordance with international law, there were reports of beatings, torture, sexual assault, and other forms of coercion to extract confessions during interrogations. Officials did not grant sufficient access to information to allow human rights organizations to investigate claims of torture.

In March local police detained Ravshan Rakhmatov, an 18-year-old resident of Khujand, after an argument between two groups of teenagers turned violent. Despite the teenagers' testimonies, which insisted that Rakhmatov was not the perpetrator, Rakhmatov was charged with hooliganism and sentenced to three years' imprisonment. Rakhmatov's lawyer stated that police officers tortured Rakhmatov both in the police car on the way to the police station and during his detention. Allegedly, Rakhmatov, no longer able to withstand the torture, grabbed a knife and stabbed himself in the stomach. In the court appeal process, the Prosecutor's Office recognized Rakhmatov's self-mutilation but denied the allegations of torture.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Physical Conditions: The government operated 10 prisons, including one for women, and 12 pretrial detention facilities. Exact conditions in the prisons remained unknown, but detainees and inmates described harsh and life-threatening prison conditions, including extreme overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. Disease and hunger were serious problems. UN agencies reported that infection rates of tuberculosis and HIV in prisons were significant and the quality of medical treatment was poor Juvenile boys were often held with men.

Administration: A governmental Office of the Ombudsman exists, and its ombudsman visited prisons but resolved fewer than 2 percent of complaints filed. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) reported mistrust of the ombudsman mechanism due to its loyalty to President Rahmon and frequent dismissal of public human rights concerns. A special monitoring group with ombudsmen and NGO representatives conducted announced monitoring visits of prison conditions. No known complaints were filed regarding conditions specifically.

Independent Monitoring: The Ministry of Justice continued to restrict access to prisons or detention facilities for representatives of the international community. In 2013 an association of local NGOs, the Coalition against Torture, concluded a closed institution monitoring agreement with the ombudsman and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Throughout the year the Coalition against Torture and the ombudsman conducted planned visits of closed institutions, although officials denied Coalition against Torture monitors access when they attempted unannounced monitoring visits, private interviews with detainees, or access to internal correctional institution documents. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) continued to lack access due to the absence of a prison access agreement with the government. Negotiations stalled following the government's refusal to accept the ICRC's standard conditions for prison visits.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The law does not explicitly prohibit arbitrary arrests, which were common. The law states that police must inform the Prosecutor's Office of an arrest within 12 hours and file charges within 10 days. Few citizens were aware of their right to appeal an arrest, and there were few checks on the power of police and military officers to detain individuals.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The Ministry of Internal Affairs, Drug Control Agency (DCA), Agency on State Financial Control and the Fight against Corruption (Anticorruption Agency), State Committee for National Security (GKNB), State Tax Committee, and Customs Service share civilian law enforcement responsibilities. The Ministry of Internal Affairs is primarily responsible for public order and manages the police. The DCA, Anticorruption Agency, and State Tax Committee have mandates to investigate specific crimes and report to the president. The GKNB is responsible for intelligence gathering, controls the Border Service, and investigates cases linked to alleged extremist political or religious activity, trafficking in persons, and politically sensitive cases. The Customs Service reports directly to the president. The Prosecutor General's Office oversees the criminal investigations that these agencies conduct.

Agency responsibilities overlap significantly, and law enforcement organizations defer to the GKNB. Law enforcement agencies were not effective in investigating organized criminal gangs, because the gangs maintained high-level connections with government officials and security agencies. A tacit understanding among law enforcement that certain individuals were untouchable prevented investigations.

Official impunity continued to be a serious problem. While authorities took limited steps to hold perpetrators accountable, reports of torture and mistreatment of prisoners continued, and the culture of impunity and corruption weakened investigations and prosecutions. In some cases during pretrial detention hearings or trials, judges dismissed defendants' allegations of abuse and torture during detention. Victims of police abuse may submit a formal complaint in writing to the officer's superior or the Office of the Ombudsman. Most victims reportedly chose to remain silent rather than risk official retaliation. The Office of the Ombudsman made few efforts to respond to complaints about human rights violations and rarely intervened, claiming that the office did not have the power to make statements or recommendations regarding criminal cases.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

According to the law, police may detain an individual up to 12 hours before authorities must file criminal charges. If authorities do not file charges after 12 hours, the individual must be released, but police often did not inform detainees of the arrest charges. If police file criminal charges, they may detain an individual 72 hours before they must present their charges to a judge for an indictment hearing. The judge is empowered to order detention, house arrest, or bail pending trial.

According to the law, family members are allowed access to prisoners after indictment, but officials often denied access to attorneys and family members. The law states that a lawyer is entitled to be present at interrogations at the request of the detainee or lawyer, but in many cases, authorities did not permit lawyers timely access to their clients, and initial interrogations occurred without them. Detainees suspected of crimes related to national security or extremism were held for extended periods without being formally charged.

Arbitrary Arrest: The government generally provided a rationale for arrests, but detainees and civil society groups frequently reported that authorities falsified charges or inflated minor incidents to make politically motivated arrests.

On September 29, authorities arrested Buzurgmehr Yorov, a defense lawyer representing several Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) members detained in alleged connection to the September 4 violence, in which former deputy defense minister Nazarzoda and people loyal to him attacked and killed nine law enforcement officials. Authorities accused Yorov of committing large-scale fraud and forgery in business dealings from 2010. Colleagues and international observers claimed the authorities fabricated these accusations to block his defense of the IRPT and discourage other lawyers from taking the case. On October 15, the General Prosecutor's Office announced it was reclassifying Yorov's case as "secret," officially shutting off public information about the proceedings and raising further due process concerns. Numerous NGOs, including Amnesty International and the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, urged the immediate release of Yorov and access to a lawyer and his family. He remained in detention at year's end.

Some police and judicial officials regularly accepted bribes in exchange for lenient sentencing or release. Law enforcement officials must request an extension from a judge to detain an individual in pretrial detention after two, six, and 12 months.

Pretrial Detention: Defense advocates alleged that prosecutors often held suspects for lengthy periods and registered the initial arrest only when the suspect was ready to confess. In most cases pretrial detention lasted from one to three months, but it could extend as long as 15 months.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

Although the law provides for an independent judiciary, the executive branch exerted pressure on prosecutors and judges. Corruption and inefficiency were significant problems.

Trial Procedures

Defendants legally are afforded a presumption of innocence, but the presumption did not exist in practice. The courts found nearly all defendants guilty. During the first six months of the year, there were four acquittals in 5,981 cases, of which two were full acquittals, and the remaining two were partial acquittals with convictions on lesser charges. Authorities imposed one life sentence during the first half of the year.

There is no trial by jury. Courts generally allowed defendants to consult with an attorney in a timely manner during trials but often denied defendants the right to an attorney during the pretrial and investigatory periods, particularly in politically sensitive cases. For example, Manonov Qurbon, IRPT leader in Norak District, was denied visitation rights and legal representation both in pre-detention and during his 10-day imprisonment. Authorities leveled politically motivated criminal charges against some defense lawyers to obstruct detained political opposition figures' access to legal counsel.

The government provided attorneys at public expense when requested, but defendants and civil society complained that the government sometimes appointed attorneys as a means to deny defendants' access to the legal counsel of their choice. Defendants and private attorneys said government-appointed attorneys often provided a poor and counterproductive defense. A number of local and international NGOs provided free legal counsel to defendants.

Defendants may present witnesses and evidence at trial with the consent of the judge. Defendants and attorneys have the right to review all government evidence, confront and question witnesses, and present evidence and testimony, although some defense lawyers claimed the government denied them access to evidential materials collected against their clients. No groups are barred from testifying, and in principle all testimony receives equal consideration. Courts, however, generally gave prosecutorial testimony far greater consideration than defense testimony. The law extends the rights of defendants in trial procedures to all citizens, and it provides for the right to appeal.

Low wages for judges and prosecutors left them vulnerable to bribery, a common practice. Government officials subjected judges to political influence.

Although trials are public, the law provides also for secret trials when there is a national security concern. Civil society members faced difficulties in gaining access to high-profile public cases, which the government often declared secret. During the year the government conducted politically motivated court cases behind closed doors.

On February 9, Zaid Saidov, imprisoned former minister of industry, businessman, and leader of the unregistered political party New Tajikistan, asked that his trial on new charges be open to the public but the court refused his request. In 2013 authorities charged and convicted Saidov for fraud, bribery, rape, and polygamy in a trial human rights organizations claimed was politically motivated and rife with due process concerns. In July 2014 while Saidov was in prison serving a 26-year sentence, the anticorruption agency brought new charges against him, including embezzlement and forgery of documents. Anticipating an unfair trial, Saidov asked that journalists be present during the proceedings. The court approved Saidov's request and permitted an open trial; however, the court denied access to journalists, representatives of international organizations, and local NGOs, claiming that the courtroom was too small. On August 11, the court sentenced Saidov to an additional three years of imprisonment on the new charges. Human rights organizations continued to assess Saidov's case as politically motivated.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

While authorities claimed there were no political prisoners or politically motivated arrests, opposition parties and local and international observers reported the government selectively arrested and prosecuted political opponents. There was no reliable estimate of the number of political prisoners.

On July 20, a court in Hisor District sentenced Jaloliddin Mahmudov, a member of the political council of the IRPT and member of the Central Commission for Elections and Referenda, to five years in prison. The GKNB detained Mahmudov on suspicion of illegal possession of weapons. Authorities detained Mahmudov on February 10, less than three weeks before parliamentary elections, leading observers to believe his detention was politically motivated.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

Civil cases are heard in general civil courts, economic courts, and military courts. Judges may order monetary compensation for victims in criminal cases. No separate juvenile justice system exists, although there were some courts that provide a separate room for children linked to the courtroom by video camera.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution states that the home is inviolable. With certain exceptions, it is illegal to enter the home by force or deprive a person of a home. The law states that police may not enter and search a private home without the approval of a judge. Authorities may carry out searches without a prosecutor's authorization in exceptional cases, "where there is an actual risk that the object searched for and subject to seizure may cause a possible delay in discovering it, be lost, damaged, or used for criminal purposes, or a fugitive may escape." The law states that courts must be notified of such searches within 24 hours. Police frequently ignored these laws and infringed on citizens' right to privacy, including personal searches without a warrant.

On September 16, GKNB officers arrested Mahmadali Hayit, deputy head of the IRPT. Following that, six GKNB and prosecutor general officers visited his home and conducted a search of his house. Hayit's relatives said that the law enforcement officers conducting the search did not have a search warrant. The officers confiscated documents belonging to Hayit, including his passport, phone, military card, a computer, tablet, and party documentation.

According to the law, "when sufficient grounds exist to believe that information, documents, or objects that are relevant to the criminal case may be contained in letters, telegrams, radiograms, packages, parcels, or other mail and telegraph correspondence, they may be intercepted" with a warrant issued by a judge. The law states that only a judge may authorize monitoring of telephone or other communication. Security offices often monitored communications, such as social media and phone calls, without judicial authorization

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The law provides for freedom of speech and press, but the government restricted these rights.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: The authorities continued to curb freedom of speech through detentions, prosecutions, and the threat of heavy fines. By law a person may be imprisoned for as long as five years for insulting the president.

Press and Media Freedoms: Independent media faced significant and repeated government threats on media outlets. Although some print media published political commentary and investigatory material critical of the government, journalists observed that authorities considered certain topics off limits, including derogatory information about the president or his family or questions about financial improprieties of those close to the president.

Several independent television and radio stations were available in a small portion of the country, but the government controlled most broadcasting transmission facilities. The government allowed some international media to operate and permitted rebroadcasts of Russian television and radio programs.

On June 30, President Rahmon signed a protocol requiring all government bodies to provide official state news and statements to Khovar, the state news agency. The protocol required all other media outlets to reference or contact Khovar before publishing material regarding government sessions, presidential travel inside and outside the country, official meetings, and international events and statements. Independent media outlets reported they had difficulty accessing government officials and rarely received invitations to participate in government-sponsored events. Journalists reported there was a decrease in press conferences and interviews of government officials, who cited the protocol as an excuse. For example, in July, when independent news outlet Radio Ozodi asked a reliable source from within a government structure to answer questions about an upcoming presidential trip, the source referred the journalist to Khovar, citing the protocol for not answering the questions directly.

Violence and Harassment: Journalists continued to face harassment and intimidation by government officials. Although the government decriminalized libel in 2012, state officials regularly filed defamation complaints against news outlets in retaliation for publishing stories critical of the government.

In August authorities convicted independent journalist and former Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty reporter Amindzhon Gulmurodzoda of forging his own birth certificate in the year 1989, when he was six years old. He received a two-year prison sentence. Observers viewed the verdict as part of the government's broader efforts to neutralize independent and opposition voices from the media sphere.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: Journalists regularly practiced self-censorship to avoid retribution from officials. Opposition politicians had limited or no access to state-run television. The government gave opposition parties minimal broadcast time to express their political views, while the president's party had numerous opportunities to broadcast its messages. Access to information was particularly difficult for journalists during the parliamentary elections on March 1. Despite guarantees in legislation regarding election coverage, authorities denied journalists without state media badges entry to polling stations in several locations. Officials denied to other journalists on the pretext that the journalist had to have special permission for entry to the polling station.

Newspaper publishers reported that the government exercised restrictions on the distribution of materials, requiring all newspapers and magazines with circulations exceeding 99 recipients to register with the Ministry of Culture. The government continued to control all major printing presses and the supply of newsprint.

Independent community radio stations continued to experience registration and licensing delays that prevented them from broadcasting. The government restricted issuance of licenses to new stations, in part through an excessively complex application process. The National Committee on Television and Radio, a government organization that directly manages television and radio stations in the country, must approve and then provide licenses to new stations. The government continued to deny the BBC a renewal of its license to broadcast on FM radio.

Libel/Slander Laws: In 2012 the government repealed the law criminalizing libel and defamation and downgraded the offenses to civil violations, although the law retains controversial provisions that make publicly insulting the president an offense punishable by a fine or up to five years in jail. Nevertheless, libel judgments were common, particularly against newspapers critical of the government.

Internet Freedom

Individuals and groups faced extensive government surveillance of internet activity, including e-mails, and often self-censored their views while posting on the internet. According to a 2014 Open Society Institute report, internet penetration was approximately 3.8 million persons (approximately 40 percent).

There were new and continuing government restrictions on access to internet websites, such as Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Google services. The State Communications Service (SCS) routinely denied involvement in blocking these sites, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs admitted to foreign officials in June to periodically implementing a law that allows interruption of internet content and telecommunications "in the interest of national security."

On May 28, the SCS ordered the blockage of several news websites including Asia Plus, and both the Tajik and Russian versions of Radio Ozodi, and a number of social networks such as Russian owned Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki. SCS officials denied any involvement. The timing of the blockages suggested that the websites were blocked in connection with reports and coverage of Tajik police commander Gulmurod Halimov's defection to the Islamic State in Syria.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

The Ministry of Education maintained a dress code that bans wearing the hijab in schools and government institutions. Authorities allowed women to wear a traditional version of the head covering  a scarf that covers hair but not the neck  to schools and universities. Many female students wore the hijab to and from school but removed it upon entering the school building. Parents and school officials appeared to accept this arrangement. The ministry also maintained its ban on beards for all teachers. Students with beards reported being removed from class, questioned, and asked to shave.

A Ministry of Education directive requires school administrators to inform students of the Law on Parental Responsibility, which bans all persons under age 18 from participating in public religious activities, with the exception of funerals. The law provides that, with written parental consent, minors between the ages of seven and 18 may obtain a religious education during their free time from school and outside the state education curriculum and may worship as part of educational activities at religious institutions.

The government requires all persons studying religion abroad to register with the Committee on Religious Affairs (CRA), Ministry of Education, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The law provides criminal penalties for violating restrictions on sending citizens abroad for religious education, preaching and teaching religious doctrines, and establishing ties with religious groups abroad without CRA consent.

The Ministry of Education banned students from attending events sponsored by or conducted for foreign organizations during school hours.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Freedom of Assembly

The constitution provides the right to freedom of assembly, but the government required that individuals obtain permission from the government to stage public demonstrations. Individuals considering staging peaceful protests reportedly chose not to do so for fear of government reprisal.

Freedom of Association

The constitution protects freedom of association, but the government restricted this right. Civil society organizations reported a noticeable increase in the number and intensity of registration and tax inspections by authorities.

In June the State Tax Committee, the General Prosecutor's Office, the Department of Labor, and the Ministry of Justice, allegedly according to GKNB instructions, initiated inspections against key human rights NGOs and their donors. For example, the NGO Bureau on Human Rights and Rule of Law (BHR), a leading human rights organization in the country, received an official request by the Tax Inspection office of Dushanbe that required BHR to turn over all its financial documents from 2010 to 2015. Authorities fined the NGO 42,639 Tajikistani somoni (TJS) (approximately $6,000) to be paid in a 10-day period along with a notification stating the NGO violated undefined tax regulations.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

In-country Movement: The law provides for freedom of movement, but the government imposed some restrictions. The government prohibits foreigners, except diplomats and international aid workers, from traveling within a 15-mile zone along the borders with Afghanistan and China in the Khatlon Region and the Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) unless they obtain permission from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Officials did not always enforce the restrictions along the western border with Afghanistan, although the government continued to require travelers (including international workers and diplomats) to obtain special permits to visit the GBAO. During periods of unrest in the GBAO, authorities denied foreigners, including those holding permits, access to the region.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law provides for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has established a system for providing protection to refugees. Nevertheless, the process for making asylum status determinations remained uncertain, lacking transparency, and administrative and judicial procedures did not comply with international standards. Although not required by law, government officials required refugees and asylum seekers to obtain a visa and a valid travel document before entering the country. Government officials without due process detained and deported individuals not in possession of a visa.

The government processed asylum applications through the National Refugee Status Determination Commission and granted applicants documents to regularize their stay and prevent deportation. Formal notifications of administrative and legal decisions provide little insight into the rationale for adjudications. In some instances, when denying claimants refugee status, officials cited, in broad terms, a lack of evidence of persecution in the refugee's home country or "malpractice" on the part of refugees applying to renew their status, such as violation of the prohibition of living in Dushanbe. Unofficially, some refugees claimed authorities could deny cases if sufficiently high bribes were not paid.

The government continued to place significant restrictions on claimants, and officials continued to enforce a law decreed in 2000 prohibiting asylum seekers and refugees from residing in the capital and all major cities in the country. Security officials regularly monitored refugee populations. Asylum seekers and refugees regularly reported to UNHCR that security officials harassed them, often for allegedly lacking personal identification, and attempted to extort money. Police subjected them to raids if police believed they were residing in prohibited areas.

During the year the government deported 32 asylum seekers and refugees to Afghanistan. The deportees included rejected asylum seekers and refugees with revoked status based on violation of the law prohibiting such persons from residing in urban areas as well as cumbersome preconditions that preclude a claimant from registering as a refugee. Most of the cases of revoked status were under appeal in court with the support of UNHCR. The deportations took place despite the incomplete appeal processes. In some of these cases, there was risk of refoulement.

Although the law stipulates that refugee status be granted for as long as three years, the transfer of refugee processing to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 2009 resulted in much shorter periods of status being granted.

Employment: An increasing percentage of refugees entering the country did not possess professional backgrounds or job skills, and many faced discrimination by the local population. The requirement to live outside urban areas created additional problems for finding adequate work. While UNHCR assisted some female refugees by providing vocational job training in skills such as sewing, cooking, and hairdressing, most female refugees remained in the home in accordance with traditional cultures. Most male refugees worked for small enterprises.

Access to Basic Services: Refugees and asylum seekers are legally entitled to education and health services alongside local citizens. The Ministry of Education allowed Afghan parents to send their children to local schools without paying fees. UNHCR partners provided books, school uniforms, and some language classes to these children and assisted with their medical expenses. The law provides registered refugees with equal access to law enforcement, health care, and the judicial system, although refugees did not always have equal access. In practice refugees were subject to harassment, discrimination, and extortion.

Durable Solutions: Following the amended Law on Nationality adopted in August, refugees hold equal standing to nonrefugee foreigners when applying for citizenship. Although the government and UNHCR agreed on local integration of refugees into the general population as a more durable solution to the refugee situation, there was little progress in processing pending cases to completion.

Stateless Persons

As of February a reported 637 persons registered as stateless by the government. As of June UNHCR and its partners identified and registered as many as 10,000 individuals at risk of statelessness in three pilot cities, Shahritus, Tursunzade, and Istaravshan, highlighting the potential extent of statelessness as well as the challenges and opportunities of facilitating solutions. Holders of former Soviet Union passports constituted the bulk of those at risk of statelessness, although a number of people, predominantly women, holding expired foreign passports came forward and sought counselling.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The law provides citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, but the government restricted this right. The president and his supporters continued to dominate the government. The president's political party, the People's Democratic Party of Tajikistan (PDPT), dominated both houses of parliament. PDPT members held most government positions. The president had broad authority, which he exercised throughout the year, to appoint and dismiss officials.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: March parliamentary elections resulted in the ruling party winning 51 out of 63 seats in the lower house of parliament. Progovernment parties shared the remaining seats. The IRPT lost two seats, despite widespread public support, and was subsequently banned and designated a terrorist organization by the Supreme Court. Authorities arrested IRPT leaders along with their defense lawyer (see section 1.d.). Political opposition parties and international NGOs declared the elections unfair.

According to the monitoring report of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the elections "took place in a restricted political space and failed to provide a level playing field for candidates." The report noted that, while there were some improvements made to the electoral law, authorities did not administer elections in a fair manner, with undue restrictions on freedoms of expression and assembly during the election campaign and significant irregularities, including ballot box stuffing, on voting day.

In January media reported that local authorities in three cities refused the IRPT's applications to hold campaign conferences, and the Dushanbe Mayor's Office denied an IRPT application to post campaign materials throughout the city. Citing vague licensing reasons, authorities also blocked some IRPT candidates from campaigning via television or radio despite electoral law providing for that right.

Political Parties and Political Participation: Eight political parties, including the PDPT, were legally registered, but the Supreme Court banned IRPT on September 5. Following claims of its alleged connection to violent attacks against Ministry of Internal Affairs forces in Dushanbe and Vahdat in early September, the Supreme Court designated the IRPT as a terrorist organization. Observers considered only three of these parties to be independent of the government. Opposition political parties had moderate popular support and faced scrutiny by the government. All senior members of President Rahmon's government were PDPT members. Most members of the country's 97-seat parliament were members of the PDPT, belonging to progovernment parties, or PDPT-affiliates.

The government interfered in the attempts of political parties to organize and conduct their activities.

On July 6, Dushanbe authorities reportedly forced Qiyomiddin Avaz, the head of the IRPT in Dushanbe, to resign from the party. In a statement posted on the IRPT's website, Avaz said he withdrew from the party after Dushanbe authorities pressured his family and elderly parents. He said he was forced to sign a resignation form affirming his withdrawal from IRPT membership. Consequently, the IRPT board made a decision in mid-May to consider resignation applications, signed under pressure, invalid. In late June dozens of members and IRPT regional office heads announced their resignations from the IRPT in coordinated online videos. The IRPT claimed all those who withdrew their membership in such a manner did so under pressure from security offices in the regions. The IRPT reported 52 party members rescinded their membership after pressure from security officials.

On August 24, the Prosecutor General's Office closed the IRPT's headquarters. The Prosecutor General's Office claimed that the IRPT's central office in Dushanbe had been sealed because the building in which the office is located was illegally purchased. A source in the IRPT told the media that the party believed the closing of its offices was a deliberate action by the government to disrupt the party congress on September 15. On August 28, citing the notion that IRPT no longer had sufficient registered field offices to continue as a legitimate party, authorities announced the IRPT had 10 days to cease all activities.

On September 29, the Supreme Court declared the IRPT a terrorist group based on charges brought against them by the Prosecutor General's Office. The Supreme Court's ruling officially banned the party from any activities in the country, forced the closure of the IRPT's official newspaper, Najot, and prohibited the distribution of any video, audio, or printed materials related to the party's activities. In September and October, law enforcement officers arrested 27 high-ranking members of the IRPT. In an official statement, despite lack of evidence, the Office of the Prosecutor General accused them of involvement in "criminal groups" responsible for organizing attacks on September 4 that killed nine law enforcement officers.

Participation of Women and Minorities: Women were underrepresented in decision-making processes at all levels of political institutions. Female representation in all branches of government was less than 30 percent. There was one female minister but no ministers from minority groups. A deputy prime minister; the minister of labor, migration, and employment; and several deputy ministers were women. In the 63-member lower chamber of parliament, there were 12 female members and no minority group members. In the 33-member upper chamber of parliament, there were six women and two members of a minority group. Cultural practices discouraged participation by women in politics, although the government and political parties made efforts to promote their involvement, such as the 1999 presidential decree that mandated every ministry or government institution have a female deputy. Civil society criticized this decree as a barrier to women holding top government positions.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, but the government did not implement the law effectively. Officials frequently engaged in corrupt practices with impunity. Corruption, nepotism, and regional hiring bias were pervasive at all levels of government.

Corruption: Corruption in the Education Ministry was systemic. Prospective students were required to pay thousands of somoni (hundreds of dollars) in bribes to enter the country's most prestigious universities, and provincial colleges required several hundred somoni. Students often paid additional bribes to receive good examination grades.

Many traffic police retained fines they collected for violations. Traffic police posted at regular intervals along roads arbitrarily stopped drivers to ask for bribes. The problem was systemic in part due to the low official wages paid to traffic police. Many traffic police reportedly paid for their jobs, an expense they tried to recoup by extracting bribes from motorists.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs, Anticorruption Agency, and Prosecutor General's Office are responsible for investigating, arresting, and prosecuting suspected corrupt officials. The government acknowledged a problem with corruption and took some steps to combat it, including putting lower-level officials on trial for taking bribes.

Both the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Anticorruption Agency submit cases to the Prosecutor General's Office at the conclusion of their investigations. In some instances, the agency collaborated with the Prosecutor General's Office throughout the entire process.

The prosecutor general investigated some cases of suspected corruption by government employees, but the bulk of the cases involved mid- or lower-level officials, and none involved large-scale abuses. There were instances of the Prosecutor General's Office suddenly dropping cases submitted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the Anticorruption Agency.

Financial Disclosure: Public officials are not subject to financial disclosure laws.

Public Access to Information: Public budgets, particularly those involving major state-owned enterprises, lacked transparency. Although parliament has oversight of the state budget, it passed annual budgets almost without comment despite large, unexplained, and undefined expenses. Each year the government releases a report on budget performance for the previous year that contains numerous details about education, health, and other social sector spending. A considerable amount of government spending, including that for major buildings, parks, and other special projects such as summer residences for the president, occurred off budget.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

Domestic human rights groups encountered increased difficulty monitoring and reporting on the general human rights situation in the country, although international human rights groups encountered fewer difficulties. Domestic NGOs and journalists were careful to avoid public criticism of the president or other high-ranking officials. Human rights and civil society NGOs faced increasing pressure from the government. Authorities investigated a number of NGOs for alleged registration problems and administrative irregularities.

The United Nations or Other International Bodies: The government generally cooperated with international NGOs. It facilitated visits by high-ranking officials from the UN, the OSCE, and other international organizations but continued to deny the ICRC access to prison facilities.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman made little effort to respond to complaints from the public during the year, and its limited staff and budget further constrained its capacity to do so. The ombudsman's office met with NGOs to discuss specific human rights cases and general human rights problems in the country, but no government action resulted. In December 2014 the Ministry of Justice gave NGOs the opportunity to discuss amendments to the Law on Public Associations and incorporated some of their recommendations into the final draft, but human rights NGOs report continuing politically motivated government interference in their activities under the auspices of the law.

The government's Office for Constitutional Guarantees of Citizens' Rights continued to investigate and answer citizens' complaints, but staffing inadequacies and inconsistent cooperation from other governmental institutions hampered the office's effectiveness. The procedural code on administrative offenses provided procedural protections to those persons accused of minor offenses.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The law provides for the rights and freedoms of every person regardless of race, gender, disability, language, or social status, but there was discrimination against women and persons with disabilities. Trafficking in persons for sexual and labor exploitation remained a problem.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law prohibits rape, which is punishable by up to 20 years' imprisonment. There was no separate statute for spousal rape. The government did not provide statistics on the number of cases or convictions. Law enforcement officials usually advised women not to file charges but registered cases at the victim's insistence. Most observers believed the majority of cases were unreported because victims wished to avoid humiliation.

Violence against women, including spousal abuse, remained a widespread problem. According to a survey conducted by the National Statistic Committee during the year, 19 percent of women between ages 15 and 49 reported they experienced physical violence since age 15. The highest incidence of domestic violence was reported in Sughd, where 22 percent of women reported suffering domestic violence. The lowest reported level of domestic violence was in the Districts of Republican Subordination around Dushanbe, where 13 percent of women reported suffering domestic violence. Women underreported violence against them due to fear of reprisal or inadequate response by police and the judiciary, resulting in virtual impunity for the perpetrators. Authorities wishing to promote traditional gender roles widely dismissed domestic violence as a "family matter." Women and girls were more vulnerable to domestic violence because of early and unregistered marriages.

Five police stations were fully equipped and staffed with police officers trained, with OSCE support, to respond to family violence cases and address the needs of victims in a gender-sensitive manner. In rural areas the government and NGOs operated additional crisis centers and hotlines where women could seek guidance on domestic violence problems and legal assistance, but many centers lacked funding and resources. Local governments donated the premises of three of the shelters. The Committee for Women's Affairs (within the government) had limited resources to assist domestic violence victims, but local committee representatives referred women to the crisis shelters for assistance.

In 2012 the government adopted a law on domestic violence that is in line with internationally accepted standards; however, the implementing mechanism was inadequate. The Ministry of Internal Affairs lacked the capacity and training to implement the law, although it worked with the international community to increase capacity. In May 2014 the government adopted an action plan to implement domestic violence law. The plan calls for law enforcement, court officials, the prosecutor's office, and representatives of relevant government bodies to receive training on their responsibility to combat domestic violence. The plan also calls for greater cooperation between law enforcement officials and local leaders to change societal attitudes towards domestic violence. The government took some steps to collect information on domestic violence, but many cases of domestic abuse went unreported.

Authorities seldom investigated reported cases of domestic violence, and they prosecuted few alleged perpetrators. The Ministry of Internal Affairs is authorized to issue administrative restraining orders, but by law police cannot act without a written complaint from the victim, even if there were other witnesses. Consequently, police often gave only warnings, short-term detentions, or fines for committing "administrative offenses" in cases of domestic violence.

Physical and psychological abuse of wives by mothers-in-law was widespread. In some rural areas, officials observed a continued trend of female suicide in which independent observers considered such abuse to be a contributing cause.

Sexual Harassment: No specific statute banned sexual harassment in the workplace. Victims often did not report incidents because of fear of social stigma. Authorities often perceived sexual harassment as female fabrications. Women reporting sexual harassment faced retaliation from their employers as well as scrutiny from their families and communities.

Reproductive Rights: The government did not interfere with the rights of individuals and couples to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children; to manage their reproductive health; and to have the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, and violence. Traditional stereotypes prevented women and girls from obtaining information on reproductive health.

Discrimination: Although the law provides for women and women to receive equal pay for equal work, cultural barriers restricted women's professional opportunities (see section 7.d.). According to the World Bank report, Women, Business, and the Law 2014, women and men have equal ownership rights to property, although women owned significantly less property than men. The extensive number of male migrant workers to Russia and other parts of Central Asia, many of whom failed to send remittances or return home, exacerbated economic pressures on women, who had to provide for themselves and their children, and resulted in a significant gender imbalance in the population.

Due to family pressure, young women, especially adolescent girls, often dropped out of school to marry. The law protects women's rights in marriage and family matters, but families often pressured female minors to marry against their will. Religious marriages were common substitutes for civil marriages, due to the high marriage registration fees associated with civil marriages and the power afforded men under religious law. In cases of religious marriages not registered with the government, husbands simply repeated a phrase in front of two witnesses to divorce their wives. Husbands also used these officially unregistered religious marriages to prevent wives from accessing family assets and other rights in the event of divorce. The practice of men divorcing their wives by sending text messages declined after the 2011 Council of Ulema fatwa (religious edict) declared the practice unacceptable.

The 2004 Council of Ulema fatwa prohibiting Hanafi Sunni women  constituting the vast majority of the female population  from praying in mosques remained in effect. Religious ceremonies also made polygyny possible, despite the illegality of the practice. NGOs estimated that up to 10 percent of men practiced polygyny. Many of these polygynous marriages involved underage brides. Unofficial second and third marriages were increasingly common, with neither the wives nor their children having legal standing or rights.

Inheritance laws do not discriminate against women, although some inheritances passed disproportionately to sons. In addition, many men hid their assets with their parents or other family members, so that if divorce occurred, they could claim no wealth and become exempt from paying child support or other restitution to the former wife.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs supported programs to increase the representation of female officers in law enforcement.

Children

Birth Registration: Children derive citizenship by birth within the country's territory and from their parents. The government is required to register all births. Many parents waited to register a birth until a child was ready to enter school, since birth registration is required to receive public services such as education.

Education: Free and universal public education is compulsory until age 16 or completion of the ninth grade. The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported that school attendance generally was good through the primary grades, but girls faced disadvantages, especially in rural school systems where families elected to keep them home after primary grades to take care of siblings or work in agriculture. Families often invested money in their sons' education rather than that of their daughters so that the boys, with a better education, could provide for them and take care of their parents in old age.

A 2014 study revealed that dropout rates were higher among women. The analysis found that at the end of compulsory education, girls averaged 24 percent drop-out rates, while their male counterparts averaged 21 percent. Girls continued to drop out at rates higher in 10th and 11th grade at rates of 14 percent, compared with 5 percent for boys.

Child Abuse: The Committee on Women and Family Affairs and regional child rights protection departments are responsible for addressing problems of violence against children. Girls subjected to violence could receive support from several centers throughout the country. The Women of Science of Tajikistan Association, supported by UNICEF and the Dushanbe mayor's office, organized a hotline for free legal and psychological consultations for girls who were victims of violence. Funding for and the capacity of such programs were limited. A five-year program for a Girls Support Center ended in its second year due to lack of funding.

Early and Forced Marriage: The legal minimum age for marriage of men and women is 18 years. Under exceptional circumstances, which a judge must determine, such as in the case of pregnancy, a couple may also apply to a court to lower the marriageable age to 17. Underage religious marriage was more widespread in rural areas. Many parents told their daughters to quit school after ninth grade, at which point parents considered their daughters to have obtained sufficient professional skills, such as sewing or cooking, to have a source of income in the future.

The law expressly prohibits forced marriages of girls under age 18 or entering into a marriage contract with a girl under 18. Early marriage carries a prison sentence of up to six months, while forced marriage is punishable by up to five years' imprisonment. In most cases the law punishes underage marriage with a fine. Because couples may not register a marriage where one of the would-be spouses is under age 18, many simply have a local religious leader perform the wedding ceremony. Without a civil registration certificate, the bride has few legal rights.

NGOs claimed that during the year regional ministries of education and schoolteachers were very actively involved in persuading parents not to take their daughters out of school. The NGOs claimed the situation in some rural areas had improved, and the government partially addressed the problem by requiring mullahs to demand a certificate of civil marriage registration to conduct the religious ceremony; however, this regulation was not effectively enforced, and mullahs conducted religious marriages at unmonitored private ceremonies.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The law prohibits the commercial sexual exploitation of children and child pornography. Law enforcement bodies investigated cases of commercial sexual exploitation of children, but no statistics were available on the number of prosecutions or convictions. The minimum age of consensual sex is 16 years. According to an NGO working with victims of domestic violence, sexual exploitation, and sex trafficking, there were several cases in which family members or third parties forced children into sex work in nightclubs and in private homes.

International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

Anti-Semitism

There were no reports of anti-Semitic acts. The small Jewish community had a place of worship and faced no overt pressure from the government or other societal pressures. Emigration to other counties continued.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The law on social protection of persons with disabilities applies to individuals having physical or mental disabilities, including sensory and developmental disabilities. The law prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in employment, education, access to health care, and provision of other state services, but public and private institutions generally did not commit resources to implement the law. The law requires government buildings, schools, hospitals, and transportation, including air travel, to be accessible to persons with disabilities, but the government did not enforce these provisions.

Many children with disabilities were not able to attend school because doctors did not deem them "medically fit." Children deemed medically unfit could attend special state-run schools specifically for persons with physical and mental disabilities. Observers noted that the capacity of these institutions probably did not meet demand. Mainstream schools and state-run schools for persons with physical and mental disabilities used the same curriculum. Doctors decided which subjects students were capable of studying, and directors of state-run schools could change the requirements for students to pass to the next grade at their discretion. Some children with Down syndrome and autism were allowed to attend mainstream schools. Up to 10 percent of families kept children with disabilities at home and provided home education or tutors.

The government charges the Commission on Fulfillment of International Human Rights, the Society of Invalids, and local and regional governmental structures with protecting the rights of persons with disabilities. Although the government maintained group living and medical facilities for persons with disabilities, funding was limited, and facilities were in poor condition.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

There were occasional reports that some law enforcement officials harassed ethnic Afghans and Uzbeks.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

While same-sex sexual conduct is legal in the country, and the age of consent is the same as for heterosexual relationships, the law does not provide legal protection against discrimination. Homophobic attitudes and little societal tolerance toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) persons made it rare for individuals to disclose their sexual orientation or gender identity. Throughout the country there were reports that LGBTI individuals faced physical and psychological abuse, including from police.

There is no law against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and LGBTI persons were victims of police harassment and faced threats of public beatings by community members. Public activism on behalf of LGBTI persons was limited. LGBTI representatives claimed law enforcement officials extorted money from LGBTI persons by threatening to tell their employers or families of their activities and in some cases subjected LGBTI persons to sex trafficking. Hate crimes against members of the LGBTI community reportedly went unaddressed. LGBTI representatives claimed health-care providers discriminated against and harassed LGBTI persons. LGBTI advocacy and health groups reported harassment from government officials and clergy, to include violent threats.

In May the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria released a report stating that there were 30,000 LGBTI individuals in the country. The Ministry of Health refuted the data, saying that in reality the number was much lower but provided no statistic.

On April 30, a 55-year-old LGBTI resident of Dushanbe was killed in Shohmansur District. The Ministry of Interior reported that authorities detained two suspects in connection with the killing. The ministry did not make any other official statement about the investigation.

It was difficult for transgender persons to obtain new official documents from the government. The law allows for changing gender in identity papers if a medical organization provides an authorized document. Because a document of this form does not exist, it was difficult for transgender persons to change their legal identity to match their gender. This created internal problems involving any activity requiring government identification, including the acquisition of a passport for international travel.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

There was societal discrimination against individuals with HIV/AIDS. According to a 2014 demographic and health survey, 73 percent of individuals reported discriminatory attitudes towards those with HIV. In March 2014 President Rahmon signed amendments to the law on entry, stay, and residence for persons with HIV. The amendments remove mandatory HIV testing for foreigners, thereby eliminating all HIV-related restrictions on entry, stay, and residence.

The government offered HIV testing free of charge at 140 facilities, and partner notification was mandatory and anonymous. The World Health Organization noted officials systematically offered HIV testing to prisoners, military recruits, street children, refugees, and persons seeking visas, residence, or citizenship.

Women were increasingly vulnerable to HIV infection because of social taboos on discussion of sex education topics and popular sentiment against the use of condoms. Women remained a minority of those infected with HIV, although their incidence of infection was increasing. The government's National Center on HIV, under the Ministry of Health, detected 580 cases of HIV infection during the first half of the year, of which 370 were male and 214 were female. There were 7,142 officially registered cases of HIV in the country, 4,953 of which involved men and 2,189 involved women.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides for the right to form and join independent unions but requires registration for all NGOs, including trade unions. The law also provides that union activities, such as collective bargaining, be free from interference except "in cases specified by law," but the law does not define such cases. Workers have the right to strike, but the law requires that meetings and other mass actions have prior official authorization, limiting trade unions' ability to organize meetings or demonstrations. The law provides for the right to organize and bargain collectively, but it does not specifically prohibit antiunion discrimination.

Workers joined unions, but the government used informal means to exercise considerable influence over organized labor, including influencing the selection of labor union leaders. The government-controlled umbrella Federation of Trade Unions of Tajikistan did not effectively represent worker interests. There were reports that the government compelled some citizens to join state-endorsed trade unions and impeded formation of independent unions. According to International Labor Organization figures, 1.3 million persons belonged to unions. There were no reports of antiunion discrimination during the year.

Citizens were reluctant to strike due to fear of government retaliation. Collective bargaining contracts covered 90 percent of workers. In some cases foreign, specifically Chinese, workers received preferable treatment to local workers in labor disputes.

The government fully controlled trade unions and other labor unions. There were no reports of threats or violence by government entities towards trade unions; however, fearing government retaliation, unions made only limited demands regarding workers' rights. Most workers' grievances were resolved with union mediation between employee and employer.

Labor NGOs not designated as labor organizations played a minimal role in worker rights, as they were restricted from operating fully and freely.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor, including that of children, except in cases defined in law. Resources, inspections, and remediation were inadequate. The law prohibits both forced sexual exploitation and forced labor; it prescribes penalties of five to 15 years' imprisonment. These penalties were sufficiently stringent and commensurate with other serious crimes, such as rape, and sufficient to deter violations.

The government continued to make progress in reducing the use of forced labor in the annual cotton harvest. NGO representatives did not monitor the cotton harvest for forced labor in 2014 due to lack of funding; however, the Ministry of Labor conducted its own monitoring mission, and during the year NGOs again conducted a monitoring mission. The government appointed a Ministry of Labor official to accompany the International Organization for Migration (IOM) representatives during the fall cotton harvest to meet local officials in cotton-growing districts and to reinforce the prohibition on forced child labor.

In April the Khujand City Court convicted two local women of human trafficking, sentencing one to eight years' imprisonment and the other to 12 years' imprisonment. The two women transported four young women from Khujand to Dubai for the purpose of sexual exploitation. The women were subjected to trafficking in 2008 and returned to the country in 2014. Upon return, two of the four women turned to law enforcement authorities for assistance. The case remained pending at year's end.

See also the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The minimum age for children to work is 16 years, although children may work at age 15 with permission from the local trade union. By law children younger than age 18 may work no more than six hours a day and 36 hours per week. Children as young as age seven may participate in household labor and agricultural work, which is separately classified as family assistance. Many children younger than age 10 worked in bazaars or sold goods on the street. The highest incidences of child labor were in the domestic and agricultural sectors.

Enforcement of child labor laws is the responsibility of the Prosecutor General's Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Social Welfare, Ministry of Internal Affairs, and appropriate local and regional governmental offices. Unions also are responsible for reporting any violations in the employment of minors. Citizens can bring unresolved cases involving child labor between unions and employers before the prosecutor general for investigation. There were few reports of violations because most children worked under the family assistance exception. There were reports that military recruitment authorities kidnapped children under the age of 18 from public places and subjected them to compulsory military service to fulfill local recruitment quotas.

The government enforced labor laws and worked with the IOM to prevent the use of forced child labor in the autumn cotton harvest. Nevertheless, there were isolated reports that some children were exploited in agriculture. The overall instances of forced child labor in the cotton harvest decreased dramatically since 2013; the 2013 IOM annual assessment showed local or national government authorities responded to most cases. The government levied nine fines against employers using child labor and collected a total of TJS 7,200 ($1,470) from violators.

The Interministerial Commission to Combat Trafficking in Persons disseminated a directive to local officials reiterating existing prohibitions. The government accredited NGOs working through the IOM to monitor the cotton harvest. On September 1, NGOs working with the IOM started monitoring the 2015 cotton harvest for child labor. In total, 13 NGOs monitored the country's 25 cotton-growing districts. Additionally, government officials accompanying IOM representatives met with local officials to reiterate the law's prohibition against forced child labor. Site visits by foreign diplomats confirmed the monitors' observations that government efforts resulted in a significant reduction in the use of forced child labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

The law prohibits discrimination with respect to employment and occupation on the basis of race, sex, gender, disability, language, sexual orientation, gender identity, HIV-positive status, other communicable diseases, or social status. The law does not expressly prohibit worker discrimination on the basis of color, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, or age. There were no official complaints of such discrimination with respect to employment and occupation. Nevertheless, employers discriminated against individuals based on sexual orientation and HIV-positive status, and police generally did not enforce these laws. LGBTI persons and HIV-positive individuals opted not to file complaints due to fear of harassment from law enforcement and the belief that police would not take action.

The law provides that women receive equal pay as men for equal work, but cultural barriers continued to restrict the professional opportunities available to women. Employers forced women to work overtime without additional pay.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The minimum monthly wage was TJS 250 ($50), and the minimum monthly pension was TJS 130 ($26).

Some establishments compensated their employees with food commodities or enterprise-produced products, which employees either sold or bartered in local markets. As of August 2014, the government defined the minimum standard of living as a basket of goods equal to TJS 153.5 ($31) per month. The government did not have a formal poverty line.

There is no legal prohibition on excessive compulsory overtime. The law mandates overtime payment, with the first two hours paid at a time-and-a-half rate and the remainder at double the rate. Resources, inspections, and remediation to enforce the law were inadequate. Penalties for violations, including fines of TJS 800 to TJS 1,200 ($163 to $245) were adequate, but the regulation was not enforced, and the government did not pay its employees for overtime work. Overtime payment was inconsistent in all sectors of the labor force. The Ministry of Finance enforces financial aspects of the labor law, and the Agency of Financial Control of the presidential administration oversees other aspects of the law.

The law establishes occupational health and safety standards. It permits workers to remove themselves from hazardous conditions without risking loss of employment. The State Technical Supervision Committee under the Council of Ministers is responsible for enforcing health and safety standards. The government did not fully comply with these standards, partly because of corruption and the low salaries paid to inspectors. Few workers removed themselves from hazardous conditions.

Farmers and agricultural workers, accounting for more than 75 percent of employment in the country, continued to work under difficult circumstances. There was no system to monitor or regulate working conditions in the agricultural sector. Wages were low, and many workers received payment in kind. The government's failure to ensure and protect land tenure rights continued to limit its ability to protect agricultural workers' rights.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Sweden

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Sweden, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57161201fb.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Kingdom of Sweden is a constitutional monarchy with a freely elected multiparty parliamentary form of government. Legislative authority rests in the unicameral parliament (Riksdag). Observers considered the national elections in September 2014 to be free and fair. In October 2014 the king announced that the center-left coalition led by Stefan Lofven of the Social Democratic Party had taken office. The king is largely a symbolic head of state. The prime minister is the head of government and exercises executive authority. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the security forces.

The main human rights abuses included societal discrimination and incidents of violence against foreigners and members of ethnic and religious minorities, and domestic abuse of women and children. While the criminal justice system operated effectively in other respects, authorities subjected a high percentage of pretrial detainees to extended periods in isolation and limited their access to visitors, mail, and exercise.

Other reported problems included some unauthorized accessing of personal information by police; societal abuses and discrimination based on religious affiliation, belief, or practice; sexual harassment of women; displaced children's living on the streets; an increased number of anti-Semitic hate crimes; trafficking of men, women, and children; discrimination against persons with disabilities; and wage abuse of mainly foreign seasonal berry pickers.

Authorities generally prosecuted officials who committed abuses in the security services or elsewhere in the government.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution and law prohibit such practices, although there were sporadic reports of police using excessive force.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison and detention center conditions generally met international standards.

Physical Conditions: During 2014 there were three reports of suicide by prisoners.

Administration: Authorities investigated credible allegations of restrictive conditions for prisoners. There were no prison ombudsmen, but the justice ombudsman, who works independently from the government, received and handled prisoner complaints. In 2014 the justice ombudsman conducted seven prison inspections.

Restrictive conditions for prisoners held in pretrial custody remained a problem, although the law includes the possibility of appealing a decision to impose specific restrictions to the Court of Appeals and ultimately to the Supreme Court. According to the Swedish Prison and Probation Service, during the year authorities subjected approximately 49 percent of pretrial detainees to extended isolation or to restrictions on mail delivery or exercise. Authorities stated they took this step when detainees' contact with people outside the detention center could risk destroying evidence or changing witnesses' statements, thereby imperiling a continuing investigation.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted monitoring by certain independent, nongovernmental observers, including the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture. While the national Red Cross and church associations may visit prisoners, they may not monitor or inspect the prisons.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The constitution and law prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The national police and the national criminal police are responsible for law enforcement and general order within the country. The Security Service is responsible for national security related to terrorism, extremism, and espionage. The Ministry of Justice provides the funding and the letters of instruction for police activities, but it does not control how they are performed. According to the constitution, all branches of the police are independent authorities.

Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the national police, the national criminal police, and the Security Service, and the government had effective mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption. There were no reports of impunity involving the security forces during the year.

In 2014 the national prosecutor's office for police cases received 8,488 reports of alleged on- and off-duty misconduct by officers and civilian police employees, employees of the justice system, and parliamentarians: 94 percent of the incidents took place while the employee was on duty and usually related to an arrest or a traffic violation. Almost 3,000 of these cases stemmed from officials' being caught on speed cameras while exercising official duties or officials' filing reports of possible misconduct against themselves. During 2014 prosecutors took 145 cases to court. Authorities ultimately dropped charges in 21 cases.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

The law requires warrants based on evidence and issued by duly authorized officials for arrests, and the government generally respected this requirement. Police must file charges within six hours against persons detained for disturbing public order or considered dangerous and within 12 hours against those detained on other grounds. Police may hold a person six hours for questioning or as much as 12 hours, if deemed necessary for the investigation, without a court order. After questioning, authorities must either arrest or release an individual, based on the level of suspicion. If a suspect is arrested, the prosecutor has 24 hours (or three days in exceptional circumstances) to request continued detention. Authorities must arraign an arrested suspect within 48 hours and begin initial prosecution within two weeks unless there are extenuating circumstances. Authorities generally respected these requirements.

Although there is no system of bail, courts routinely released defendants pending trial unless authorities considered them dangerous or there was a risk the suspect would leave the country. Detainees may retain a lawyer of their choice. In criminal cases the government is obligated to provide an attorney, regardless of the defendant's financial situation. The law affords detainees prompt access to lawyers and to family members. A suspect has a right to legal representation when the prosecutor requests his detention beyond 24 hours (or three days in exceptional circumstances). The type of crime that authorities accused a suspect of committing influenced the suspect's access to family members. Authorities sometimes did not allow a suspect any contact with family members if police believed it could jeopardize an investigation.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary, and the government generally respected judicial independence.

Trial Procedures

The constitution provides for the right to a fair trial, and an independent judiciary generally enforced this right.

Defendants enjoy a presumption of innocence, have a right to be informed promptly and in detail of the charges against them (with free interpretation as necessary), and have a right to a fair, public trial without undue delay. Cases of a sensitive nature, including those involving children, rape, and national security, may be closed to the public. Juries are used only in cases involving freedom of the press or freedom of speech. In other cases judges or court-appointed civilian representatives decide guilt or innocence. Defendants have the right to be present at their trial and to consult an attorney in a timely manner. In criminal cases the government is obligated to provide a defense attorney. Defendants generally have adequate time and facilities to prepare their defense. Defendants can confront or question witnesses against them and present witnesses and evidence on their behalf. Defendants and their attorneys have access to government-held evidence relevant to their cases and cannot be compelled to testify or confess guilt. If convicted, defendants have the right of appeal. The law extends the above rights to all defendants.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

Individuals and organizations may seek civil remedies for human rights violations in the general court system. Citizens can appeal cases involving possible violations of the European Convention on Human Rights by the government to the European Court of Human Rights.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution and law prohibit such actions, and there were no reports that the government failed to respect these prohibitions.

The majority of the 145 cases involving police misconduct that went to court in 2014 related to officials' making illegal data searches in police databases. Authorities continued to investigate the gathering of personal information by police in Skane (see section 6, National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities).

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution provides for freedom of speech and the press, and the government generally respected these rights. An independent press, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of speech and press.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: The law criminalizes expression considered to be "hate speech" and prohibits threats or expressions of contempt for a group or member of a group based on race, color, national or ethnic origin, religious belief, or sexual orientation. Penalties for hate speech range from fines to a maximum of four years in prison. In addition, the country's courts have held that it is illegal to wear xenophobic symbols or racist paraphernalia or to display signs and banners with inflammatory symbols at rallies.

In 2014 there were reports of 690 cases of hate speech, equivalent to 11 percent of all hate crimes reported. Of all cases reported in 2013, the last year for which detailed information was available, 59 percent were investigated, 41 percent were dismissed without an investigation, and 5 percent led to prosecution.

In September the attorney general decided to prosecute Martin Saxlin, editor in chief of the neo-Nazi website Nordfront, for incitement to racial hatred. Saxlin was investigated after a complaint that he had published on the site a text honoring Adolf Hitler.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority. According to the Swedish Institute, 95 percent of the country's residents between the ages of nine and 55 used the internet on a daily basis. Some 88 percent of the population has broadband connectivity in their homes.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

The constitution provides for the freedoms of assembly and association, and the government generally respected these rights.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution and law provide for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights. The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, and other persons of concern.

Protection of Refugees

During the year many countries in the EU and Southeast Europe experienced an unprecedented wave of migration from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, consisting of a mix of asylum seekers/potential refugees, economic migrants, and trafficking victims, among others. For simplicity, this report will refer to these populations as "migrants and asylum seekers" if more specific information is not available.

Access to Asylum: The law provides for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has established a system for providing protection to refugees. Applicants may appeal against unfavorable asylum decisions.

From January to December 1, 149,028 persons applied for asylum. The Migration Agency granted asylum to 29,861 persons, of whom 1,900 were refugees resettled under the auspices of UNHCR, 9,782 received humanitarian protection, 17,833 received subsidiary protection, and 346 received temporary protection. In addition, the country received 39 asylum seekers relocated from Italy under EU auspices. Because of the pressure of numbers of persons arriving in the country under neither UNHCR nor EU auspices, on November 30, the EU Commission agreed to relocate an undecided number of persons from the country to other EU member states. Since the Migration Agency needed approximately one year to process an application for asylum, excluding appeals, many cases adjudicated during the year concerned persons who applied for asylum in previous years.

On November 24, to cope with the large inflow of refugees and migrants, the government tightened entry standards to the minimal international and EU levels.

Safe Country of Origin/Transit: In accordance with EU regulations, the government denied asylum to persons who had previously registered in other EU member states or in countries with which the country maintained reciprocal return agreements. During the year the Migration Agency decided to return 6,402 such persons to those countries, except to Greece. Many of those persons remained in the country during their appeals. By October 15, police deported approximately 1,000 persons.

Refugee Abuse: As of November 30, 25 cases of attempted arson against housing for asylum seekers were reported during the year. Police arrested two men for planning to burn down housing for asylum seekers in Borlange on September 9.

Although government policies mandate housing for asylum seekers, the Migration Agency occasionally was not able to provide adequate shelter due to overwhelming numbers of applicants. On November 5, the minister for migration announced that the government could no longer guarantee housing for newly arrived asylum seekers. On November 14, authorities began to house some persons applying for asylum in the city of Malmo in tents, and on November 19, some asylum seekers were forced to sleep outdoors in inclement weather due to the housing shortage. Authorities provided asylum seekers with food, clean water, medical care, and other amenities.

Durable Solutions: The government authorized financial support for the repatriation of asylum seekers denied residence in the country in the amount of 30,000 kronor ($3,500) per adult and 15,000 kronor ($1,750) per child, with a maximum of 75,000 kronor ($8,700) per family. In 2014 the government provided repatriation support to 2,016 persons, most of them of Iraqi origin.

Temporary Protection: See above, Access to Asylum.

Stateless Persons

Citizenship is derived from one's parents. According to UNHCR, there were 27,167 stateless persons in the country in December 2014. The large number related to the influx of migrants and refugees and the birth of children to stateless parents who remained stateless until either one parent acquired citizenship or a special application for citizenship for stateless children under the age of five was made. Most stateless persons came from the Middle East (the Occupied Territories, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq) and Somalia.

Stateless persons who are granted permanent residence can obtain citizenship through the same naturalization process as other permanent residents. Gaining citizenship generally requires four to eight years, depending on the individual's grounds for residency, ability to establish identity, and lack of a criminal record.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution provides citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and citizens exercised that ability.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: Observers considered the national elections held in September 2014 to be free and fair.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, and the government generally implemented these laws effectively. There were isolated reports of government corruption during the year.

Corruption: A special unit in the office of the Swedish Prosecution Authority prosecutes cases involving corruption. Fifteen investigations initiated by the unit over the past 12 years resulted in convictions during the year.

Financial Disclosure: The law requires public officials and political parties to disclose income and assets. The declarations are available to the public, and there are criminal and administrative sanctions for noncompliance.

Public Access to Information: The constitution and law provide for public access to government information, and the government generally granted such access to citizens and noncitizens, including foreign media.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A variety of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials were often cooperative and responsive to their views.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The country has seven national ombudsmen: four justice ombudsmen; the chancellor of justice; the children's ombudsman; and the discrimination ombudsman with responsibility for ethnicity, gender, transsexual identity, religion, age, sexual orientation, and disabilities. There are normally ombudsmen at the municipal level as well. The ombudsmen enjoyed the government's cooperation and operated without government or party interference. They had adequate resources, and observers considered them generally effective.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution and law prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, disability, sexual orientation and/or gender identity, age, language, HIV-positive status or other communicable diseases. The government generally enforced these prohibitions.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: Rape, including spousal rape, and domestic violence are illegal, and the government enforced the law effectively. The law stipulates more severe penalties for repeated crimes and for cases in which the perpetrator had a close relationship with the victim. Penalties range from two to 10 years in prison.

Authorities apprehended and prosecuted abusers in most cases of domestic violence. The majority of women exposed to domestic violence never pressed formal charges against the perpetrator.

The law provides for protection of survivors from contact with their abusers. When necessary, authorities helped survivors protect their identities or obtain new identities and homes. According to official statistics, approximately 13,100 persons, mostly women, were in these programs as of October 2014. Both national and local governments helped fund volunteer groups that provided shelter and other assistance for abused women, and both private and public organizations ran shelters and operated hotlines.

Other Harmful Traditional Practices: Honor-related violence often involved immigrants from the Middle East or South Asia. No information was available regarding the extent of honor-related violence. In June the Swedish Prison and Probation Services estimated that 73 persons were in prison for committing honor-related violence.

Sexual Harassment: The law prohibits sexual harassment, and the government generally enforced this law. Criminal penalties range from a fine to up to two years in prison.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children, manage their reproductive health, and have access to the information and means to do so free from discrimination, coercion, or violence.

Discrimination: Women have the same legal status and rights as men, including under family, labor, property, nationality, and inheritance law. The law requires equal pay for equal work. Women's salaries averaged approximately 88 percent of those of men. Women were underrepresented in high-ranking positions in both the public and the private sectors (see section 7.d.). Gender-based discrimination in access to credit, owning or managing a business, and access to education and housing is prohibited and not commonly reported.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship is derived from one's parents. Children born in the country, regardless of their parents' citizenship and status in the country, are registered immediately in the tax authority's population register.

Child Abuse: Child abuse was a problem. The law prohibits parents or other caretakers from abusing children mentally or physically. Parents, teachers, and other adults are subject to prosecution if they physically punish a child, including by slapping or spanking. The usual sentence for such an offense is a fine combined with counseling and monitoring by social workers. Authorities may remove abused children from their homes and place them in foster care.

The children's ombudsman published a number of reports and publications for children and those working to protect children from abuse.

Early and Forced Marriage: The minimum age of marriage is 18, and it is illegal for anyone under 18 to marry. The law allows no exceptions.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The law criminalizes "contact with children under 15 for sexual purposes," including internet contact intended to lead to sexual assault. Penalties range from fines to one year in prison. The law prohibits child pornography; penalties range from fines to six years in prison. Authorities enforced the law. The minimum age for consensual sex is 15.

Displaced Children: In September the Stockholm Police reported that underage children, mainly from Morocco, Algeria, and other countries in North Africa, were living on the streets. Police estimated that approximately 500-600 boys have been criminally active since 2012 and registered 1,839 cases in which the suspects were minors without residency and without a legal guardian in the country. Many children sought asylum in the country, but authorities considered only a much smaller number as qualifying for asylum. Social Services offered accommodation for children or foster families regardless of asylum status, but many were stuck in a criminal lifestyle. Because the juveniles' countries of origin were unwilling to accept them back due to their criminal record, they could not be deported.

International Child Abductions: The country is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For country-specific information, see the Department of State's report at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/country/sweden.html.

Anti-Semitism

Leaders of the Jewish community estimated there were 20,000 Jews in the country. The Swedish Commission for Government Support to Faith Communities estimated there were approximately 9,000 practicing members. The National Council for Crime Prevention registered 267 anti-Semitic crimes in 2014, compared with 193 in 2013, a 38-percent increase. This was the highest-ever number of anti-Semitic crimes and included threats, verbal abuse, vandalism, graffiti, and harassment in schools. Anti-Semitic incidents were often associated with events in the Middle East and actions of the Israeli government, and Swedish Jews were at times blamed for Israeli policies.

In 2014 the most common types of anti-Semitic crimes reported were hate speech (34 percent), unlawful threats and harassment (30 percent), and destruction or defacement of property (20 percent). The number of instances of destruction or defacement of property increased 10 percent from 2013. In 69 percent of the cases, the perpetrators were not previously known to the victim, and the crimes were committed mainly on the internet or in public places. Authorities initiated an investigation in 70 percent of the cases reported in 2013, the latest year for which detailed information was available, but brought formal charges in only 3 percent.

In January television reporter Petter Ljunggren wore a kippa (or yarmulke) on camera in the city of Malmo to test attitudes toward Jews. The reporter was cursed at and told to "get out." At one point, a dozen men shouting anti-Semitic slogans threatened the reporter, and residents in apartments overhead threw eggs at him. In a follow-up program, the reporter interviewed individuals who had appeared in the first program and asked why he was met with such hatred, to which they responded that it was due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After the February 14-15 attacks in Copenhagen in which two persons, including a volunteer guard at a synagogue, were killed, police increased protection of synagogues in the country. In August the County Administrative Board of Skane gave Malmo's Jewish congregation permission to place four video cameras outside the city's synagogue as a security measure.

A young civil society leader received numerous threats during the year because of his work to promote religious tolerance and combat anti-Semitism. A Malmo rabbi attacked in 2014 continued to be subjected to verbal and physical harassment during the year.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center left in place its travel warning first issued in 2010 for Jews traveling in southern Sweden, because Jews in Malmo could be "subject to anti-Semitic taunts and harassment."

The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency cooperated with religious communities on a national level to promote dialogue and prevent conflicts leading to anti-Semitic incidents. Representatives from the national unit trained police officers to detect hate crimes and visited high schools to raise awareness of such crimes and encourage more victims to report abuses. The government made available information in several languages for victims of hate crimes and provided interpreters to facilitate reporting. Police hate-crime units existed throughout the country.

During the year several prominent politicians participated in public demonstrations in support of the country's Jewish community, such as a human "ring of peace" around the great synagogue of Stockholm in February, and condemned anti-Semitic violence and sentiments.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The law prohibits employers from discriminating against persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities in hiring decisions (see section 7.d.) and prohibits universities from discriminating against students with disabilities in making admission decisions. The law protects, and the government effectively enforced, the right to access to healthcare and other public services for all citizens, including for persons with disabilities.

In 2014 the number of reports of discrimination against persons with disabilities in employment, education, access to health care, or the provision of government services increased to 461, compared with 403 in 2013. Those involved handled many complaints through mediation procedures rather than formal court hearings.

Observers reported cases of insufficient access to privately owned buildings used by the public, such as apartments, restaurants, and bars. Many buildings and some means of public transportation remained inaccessible. Government regulations require full accessibility for new buildings, and similar requirements exist for public facilities. As of January inadequate accessibility of all kinds for persons with disabilities legally constitutes a form of discrimination covered by the Discrimination Act.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

The law recognizes Sami (formerly known as Lapps), Swedish Finns, Tornedalers, Roma, and Jews as national minorities. The discrimination ombudsman received 601 complaints regarding ethnic discrimination in 2014, compared with 755 in 2013. Of the complaints, 180 related to the labor market (see section 7.d.).

Societal discrimination and violence against immigrants and Roma continued to be problems during the year.

Police registered reports of xenophobic crimes, some of which related to neo-Nazi or white-power ideology. Police investigated and the district attorney's office prosecuted race-related crimes. Official estimates placed the number of active neo-Nazis and white supremacists at 1,500. Neo-Nazi groups operated legally, but courts have held that it is illegal to wear xenophobic symbols or racist paraphernalia or to display signs and banners with inflammatory symbols at rallies, since the law prohibits incitement of hatred against ethnic groups.

Expo, a private foundation that researches and maps antidemocratic, right-wing extremists and racist tendencies in the country, reported more activity in the ultranationalist anti-Muslim movement than by neo-Nazis. The movement's dissemination of mainly online propaganda increased, but it was still a marginalized group, due to the violence of its activists.

The government estimated the Romani population at 50,000. A majority of the Roma lived as socially excluded outcasts. The unemployment rate among Roma was high, due in part to poor education and prejudices. In 2014 authorities identified 287 hate crimes directed against Roma, including several acts of violence, such as assault and attempted arson. Perpetrators of nonviolent hate crimes usually worked in the service sector, as civil servants, or were unknown to the victim. The number of Roma, mainly from Romania, engaged in street begging increased. As EU citizens, they are allowed to stay without permission for up to three months, and begging is legal in the country.

In 2013 the media reported that Skane County police had compiled a dedicated database of approximately 4,700 Roma in the country. The ethnocentric database tracked family ties between individuals. On March 17, the justice ombudsman released the results of an investigation into the database which concluded that police kept illegal records, that the purpose for this use of personal data was far too general, that its use had not been logged, that sufficient culling did not happen, and that there was no indication of who were suspects. In terms of management responsibility, the ombudsman determined that persons lacking the requisite authority made decisions, the lines of authority were so vague that lines of responsibility were unclear, and the lack of controls on the use of the database limited the possibility to detect misuse. Management knew about these problems but did nothing to rectify them. The ombudsman laid blame for this on the police authority and specifically the chief commissioner, the head of the criminal intelligence service in Lund, and the police officers who supplied the information for the database.

The government continued its 20-year strategy to equalize the opportunities available to young Roma and non-Roma by 2032. The strategy included a series of measures to improve the condition of Roma in six focus areas: education, work, housing, health and social care, culture and language, and civil society. During the year the government commissioned the Agency for Youth and Civil Matters to distribute grants to organizations within civil society to implement health promotion initiatives targeting Roma. The agency also conducted a project to facilitate exchange of experience between Romani and non-Romani organizations.

The Gothenburg City Museum's exhibition "We are Roma  Meet the People Behind the Myth" continued until March. The exhibition examined why Roma were not accepted into society. From August to December, the exhibition continued at the Forum for Living History in Stockholm. The Forum also arranged workshops and education on the subject for schoolchildren, companies, government authorities, and associations.

Indigenous People

The approximately 20,000 Sami in the country are full citizens with the right to vote in elections and participate in the government, including as members of the country's parliament. They are not, however, represented as a group in parliament. A 31-member elected administrative authority called the Sami parliament ("Sametinget") also represented Sami. The Sami parliament acted as an advisory body to the government and has limited decision-making powers in matters related to preserving the Sami culture, language, and schooling. The national parliament and government regulations govern the Sami parliament's operations.

Longstanding tensions between Sami and the government over land and natural resources persisted, as did tensions between Sami and private landowners over reindeer grazing rights. Certain Sami have grazing and fishing rights, depending on their tribal history. Sami continued to press the government for exclusive access to grazing and fishing.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Antidiscrimination laws exist, are enforced, and apply to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) individuals. There were isolated incidents of societal violence and discrimination against persons perceived to be LGBTI.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides for the right of workers to form and join independent unions, bargain collectively, and conduct legal strikes. The government respected these rights. The law prohibits antiunion discrimination, and a worker cannot be fired because of union activity.

The law provides for collective bargaining. Foreign companies may be exempt from collective bargaining provided they meet minimum working conditions and pay. Public-sector employees enjoy the right to strike, subject to limitations in the collective agreements protecting the public's immediate health and security. The government mediation service may also intervene to postpone a strike for up to 14 days for mediation. The International Trade Union Confederation claimed the law restricts the rights of the country's trade unions to take industrial action on behalf of foreign workers in foreign companies operating in the country. The law allows unions to conduct their activities largely without interference. The Labor Court settles any dispute that affects the relationship between employers and employees. An employer organization, an employee organization, or an employer who has entered into a collective agreement on an individual basis can lodge claims. The Labor Court may issue fines, although information regarding the sufficiency of such fines to deter violations was not available. Administrative and judicial procedures were not subject to lengthy delays and appeals.

Workers and employers exercised all legal collective bargaining rights, which the government protected. There were few reports of antiunion discrimination and violence toward union members.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor, including by children, and the government enforced these laws. Penalties ranged from two to 10 years in prison and were comparable with other serious violations. Forced labor involving trafficked men and women occurred in agriculture, construction, hospitality, domestic work, and forced begging and theft. There were reports of forced labor involving trafficked children (see section 7.c.). In some cases employers or contractors providing labor seized the passports of workers and withheld their pay. Resources and inspections were adequate.

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The law permits full-time employment from the age of 16 under the supervision of local authorities. Employees under the age of 18 may work only during the daytime and under supervision. Children as young as 13 may work part time or perform light work with parental permission. The government effectively implemented these laws and regulations. No cases of child labor were reported. Illegal employment of a child in the labor market is considered a civil rather than a criminal violation. According to law, forcing a child to work may be treated as coercion, deprivation of liberty, or child abuse, and carries a wide range of penalties, including fines and imprisonment. Resources for enforcement were adequate.

Children trafficked from outside the country were subjected to forced begging and forced petty theft. There were no reliable estimates of the number of children subjected to trafficking to the country. Police and social services acted promptly on trafficking cases. In July the government tasked the Stockholm County Council with conducting a new national survey of child victims and suspected victims of trafficking and presenting the results by December.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

Labor laws and regulations prohibit discrimination with respect to employment or occupation on the basis of race, color, gender, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, language, or HIV-positive or other communicable diseases status. The government generally enforced these laws effectively.

Discrimination in employment or occupation occurred. The discrimination ombudsman investigated complaints of gender discrimination in the labor market. The ombudsman received 660 complaints of discrimination in the labor market, of which 250 were related to gender discrimination. Complaints could also be filed with the courts or with the employer. Labor unions generally mediated in cases filed with the employer.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

There is no national minimum wage law. Annual collective bargaining agreements set wages. By regulation, both foreign and domestic employers must offer conditions of employment on par with the country's collective agreements. Nonunion establishments generally observed these contracts as well.

The legal standard workweek is 40 hours or less. The labor law and collective bargaining agreements regulate overtime and rest periods. The law allows a maximum of 200 hours overtime. Collective agreements determined compensation for overtime, which could take the form of money or time off. The law requires a minimum period of 36 consecutive hours of rest, preferably on weekends, during a period of seven days. The law also provides employees with a minimum of five weeks' paid annual leave.

The Swedish Work Environment Authority, a government agency, effectively enforced these standards. In 2014 the authority conducted 26,300 labor inspections. It employed an estimated 240 inspectors around the country, approximately 0.6 inspectors per 10,000 employees. This decrease in labor inspectors coincided with a 1.5-percent decrease in work accidents among all workers. Penalties for violations amounted to fines. Information regarding their sufficiency to deter violation was not available.

The Swedish Work Environment Authority issued occupational health and safety regulations, and trained union stewards and safety ombudsmen whom government inspectors monitored. Safety ombudsmen have the authority to stop unsafe activity immediately and to call in an inspector. The authority effectively enforced these rules. Workers can remove themselves from situations that endanger health and safety without jeopardizing their employment, and authorities effectively protected employees in this situation.

A foreign company providing berry pickers to Swedish companies must have a branch registered in the country to guarantee the conditions of employment. The foreign labor broker must also show how it expects to pay workers in case of limited work, such as, for example, a bad berry harvest.

Many foreign seasonal workers, including berry pickers from Asia and Bulgaria, faced harsh conditions of work, including the seizure of passports, withholding of pay, and poor living and working conditions. In July the Swedish Retail and Food Federation presented new guidelines to improve the situation of the pickers. The guidelines cover EU citizens who pick berries in the country, but not workers from outside of the EU. The berry pickers are to be informed that they have the right to sell their berries to all buyers and that nobody has the right to control their working hours. The guidelines task food and retail organizations with ensuring their implementation.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Swaziland

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Swaziland, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57161202b5.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Swaziland is an absolute monarchy. King Mswati III and Queen Mother Ntombi, the king's mother, who ruled as comonarchs, exercised ultimate authority over the cabinet, legislature, and judiciary. There is a parliament consisting of appointed and elected members and a prime minister, but political power remained largely with the king and his traditional advisors. International observers concluded the 2013 parliamentary elections did not meet international standards. Civilian authorities failed at times to maintain effective control over the security forces.

Citizens remained unable to change their government. The three main human rights abuses were police use of excessive force, including torture, beatings, and unlawful killings; restrictions on freedoms of association, assembly, and speech; and discrimination against and abuse of women and children.

Other human rights problems included arbitrary arrests and lengthy pretrial detention; arbitrary interference with privacy and home; prohibitions on political activity and harassment of political activists; trafficking in persons; societal discrimination against members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community and persons with albinism; mob violence; harassment of labor leaders; child labor; and restrictions on worker rights.

The government took few or no steps to prosecute or punish officials who committed abuses. In general perpetrators acted with impunity.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

During the year there were numerous reports the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings. Police investigated unlawful killings and referred cases to the Directorate of Public Prosecutions as appropriate, but there was no evidence suggesting the state prosecuted perpetrators.

On June 12, Luciano Reginaldo Zavale, a Mozambican national, allegedly died at the hands of the police while undergoing police interrogation at the Manzini Police Station. Due to the public outcry and Mozambican embassy concern about the circumstances of his death, the prime minister instituted an inquiry to establish the cause of his death.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution prohibits such practices. Security officials who engage in such practices may be punished, and some officers were brought to court on charges, but no convictions or punishments were reported during the year. Police stated that they investigated allegations of torture cited by Amnesty International, but their findings were not made public. Security officers used excessive force in carrying out their duties. These practices led to a death in at least one case.

According to the Royal Swaziland Police Service (RSPS), police investigate complaints of police abuse and unlawful killings and refer cases to the Directorate of Public Prosecutions as appropriate. At year's end the RSPS reported several cases of police abuse were under investigation but provided no details on the nature of the investigations. There were no reports of prosecution during the year.

There were credible reports of use of excessive force by community police and security forces during the year. For example, on May 6, the Times of Swaziland reported that Nhlanhla Sihlongonyane, suspected of committing rape, had difficulty walking during his first court appearance on May 5 due to injuries suffered from a police beating from which he alleged he lost an eye.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison conditions were harsh and life threatening due to food shortages, gross overcrowding, physical abuse, and inadequate sanitary conditions and medical care. Overcrowding in some prisons was a problem, exposing inmates and corrections officers to diseases and infections such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and hepatitis. Sexual violence, including rape, allegedly took place in prisons.

Physical Conditions: Statistics released by His Majesty's Correctional Services (HMCS) in March indicated there were 3,610 sentenced inmates, which exceeded the prison system's holding capacity by 772 inmates. There were 257 women incarcerated of whom 10 were with their babies. A majority of offenders were young persons. Women and men were detained together at police stations after arrest due to space constraints. Pretrial detainees and convicted prisoners were held separately. Juveniles were held separately from adults in pretrial detention. In prisons women were held separately from men.

Some prisoners died while incarcerated, both during police investigation and during pretrial detention. On May 27, Lucky Mciniseli Dlamini was found hanging in a police cell at the Lobamba Police Station.

Although authorities provided potable water and food to convicted prisoners, pretrial detainees depended on family members or friends to provide food. Facilities were of mixed quality. While some were old and dilapidated, others such as the women's prison were newer and well maintained.

The Swazi Observer and Save the Children reported juvenile prisoners faced inhuman and degrading treatment at the juvenile centers, including physical assault and strip searches of female juvenile prisoners.

Political prisoners were isolated from the general prison population and denied recreational opportunities.

Administration: There were no provisions for alternative sentencing of nonviolent offenders. The HMCS used a committee structure through its legal department to receive and process complaints from inmates, the public, and HMCS staff. Authorities claimed to have investigated allegations of inhuman conditions and documented results of such investigations, but the reports were not made public.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted very limited monitoring of prison conditions. Independent monitoring groups found it difficult to access prison facilities during the year, and none issued public reports. The government routinely denied prison access to local human rights organizations. On February 18, the HMCS denied visitation rights to two representatives of Africa Contact from Denmark, along with foreign diplomatic representatives who wanted to visit People's United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO) members Mario Masuku and Thulani Maseko. Authorities permitted international officials and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on programs to fight HIV to enter prisons and detention centers, although sometimes with difficulty.

Authorities generally did not allow journalists or other visitors inside prisons without permission from the commissioner general of correctional services. Several international NGOs attempted to obtain permission without response from the commissioner.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

Although the constitution and law prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, police arbitrarily arrested and detained numerous persons, primarily to prevent their participation in public protests.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The king is the commander in chief of the Umbutfo Swaziland Defense Force (USDF), holds the position of minister of defense, and is the commander of the RSPS and the HMCS. He presides over a civilian principal secretary of defense and a commanding general. Approximately 35 percent of the government workforce was assigned to security-related functions.

The RSPS is responsible for maintaining internal security as well as migration and border enforcement. The USDF is responsible for external security but also has domestic security responsibilities, including protecting members of the royal family. The prime minister oversees the RSPS, and the principal secretary of defense and the army commander are responsible for day-to-day USDF oversight. The HMCS is responsible for the protection, incarceration, and rehabilitation of convicted persons and keeping order within HMCS institutions. HMCS personnel, however, routinely worked alongside police during protests and demonstrations. While the conduct of the RSPS, USDF, and HMCS was generally professional, members of all three forces were susceptible to political pressure and corruption.

Traditional chiefs supervised volunteer rural "community police," who have the authority to arrest suspects of minor offense for trial by an inner council within the chiefdom. For serious offenses, suspects were handed over to the RSPS for further investigations.

Impunity was a problem. Although there were mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption, there were few prosecutions or disciplinary actions taken against security officers accused of abuses. The internal RSPS complaints and discipline unit investigated reports of police abuse and corruption but did not release its findings to the public. In most cases the RSPS transferred police officers found responsible for violations to other offices or departments within the police system. Police academy training for recruits included human rights components in line with regional standards. Some officers also attended additional training programs that included a human rights component.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

The law requires warrants for arrests, except when police observe a crime being committed, believe a person is about to commit a crime, or conclude evidence would be lost if arrest is delayed. The law requires authorities to charge detainees with the violation of a statute within a reasonable time, usually within 48 hours of arrest or, in remote areas, as soon as a judicial officer is present to assume responsibility. Authorities did not always charge detainees according to these norms. There is a bail system, and suspects may request bail at their first appearance in court, except in serious cases such as murder and rape. In politically motivated prosecutions, bail was often set at inordinately high levels. In general detainees could consult with lawyers of their choice, to whom they were generally allowed prompt access. Lawyers may be provided to indigent defendants at public expense in capital cases or if a crime is punishable by life imprisonment. There were reports of detainees held incommunicado. Human rights lawyer Thulani Maseko, who was imprisoned for writing articles critical of the judiciary and later released, was held in solitary confinement for 21 days in March.

Pretrial Detention: Lengthy pretrial detention was common, particularly in politically sensitive cases. Judicial inefficiency and staff shortages also contributed to the problem, as did the police practice of prolonging detention to collect evidence and prevent detainees from influencing witnesses if released. There were instances in which the length of detention equaled or exceeded the sentence for the alleged crime.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary, but the king's power to appoint the judiciary on recommendation of the Judicial Services Commission limits judicial independence. The judiciary was generally impartial in nonpolitical criminal and civil cases not involving the royal family or government officials. Some officials, including a former chief justice and a former minister of justice who were both later removed from office on corruption charges, colluded in determining the outcome of certain cases in their own business interests prior to trial. In cases involving high-level government officials or royal family members, outcomes in favor of these individuals were predetermined. High Court judges who exercised a degree of independence were sidelined and blocked from ruling on political cases, including human rights cases.

Judicial powers are based on two systems: Roman-Dutch law and a system of traditional courts that follows traditional law and custom. Neither the Supreme Court nor the High Court, which interprets the constitution, has jurisdiction in matters concerning the office of the king or queen mother, the regency, chieftaincies, the Swazi National Council, or the traditional regiments system. Traditional law and custom govern all of these institutions. Courts were unwilling to recognize many of the fundamental rights provided for in the constitution and instead relied on antiquated civil laws, which often reduce or disregard these rights. The chief justice, who is appointed by the king, must approve the short-term contracts of Supreme Court judges, all of whom were foreigners who hear appeals twice yearly.

Most citizens who encountered the legal system did so through the 13 traditional courts. Each has a president appointed by the king. These courts try citizens for minor offenses and violations of traditional law and custom. By law traditional courts are not to try cases involving non-Swazis but in fact did so. Authorities generally respected court rulings.

The director of public prosecutions has the legal authority to determine which court should hear a case. He delegated this responsibility to public prosecutors. Rather than refer a case to the director of public prosecutions, police often referred cases not properly investigated to one of the traditional courts because the standard of evidence required for conviction was not as high as in the western-style courts. Persons convicted in the traditional courts may appeal to the High Court. Prolonged delays during trials in the magistrate courts and High Court were common.

Military courts are not allowed to try civilians and do not provide the same rights as civil criminal courts. For example, military courts may use confessions obtained under duress as evidence and may convict defendants based on hearsay.

Trial Procedures

Defendants enjoy a presumption of innocence. A defendant enjoys the right to be informed of charges promptly, in detail, and with free interpretation if necessary. The constitution provides for the right to a fair public trial without undue delay, except when exclusion of the public is deemed necessary in the "interests of defense, public safety, public order, justice, public morality, the welfare of persons under age 18, or the protection of the private lives of the persons concerned in the proceedings." Aside from these exceptions and political cases, the judiciary generally enforced this right. There is no trial by jury. Court-appointed counsel is provided to indigent defendants at government expense in capital cases or if the crime is punishable by life imprisonment. Defendants and their attorneys have access to relevant government-held evidence, generally obtained during pretrial consultations from the Public Prosecutor's Office. Prosecutors have discretion to withhold information they deem privileged or not relevant to the case. Defense lawyers reported not having access to state evidence in politically sensitive cases. Defendants have the right to adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense. Defendants may question witnesses against them and present witnesses and evidence on their own behalf. Defendants may not be compelled to testify or confess guilt. Defendants and prosecutors have the right of appeal up to the Supreme Court. The law generally extends the foregoing rights to all citizens.

The traditional courts operate under traditional authorities, including local chiefs. In general chiefs preside over traditional courts as court presidents. Traditional courts hear both civil and minor criminal matters. Although the courts are authorized to impose fines up to 240 emalangeni ($15) and prison sentences of up to 12 months, there were reported cases in which traditional courts imposed sentences exceeding these limits.

Traditional courts are empowered to administer customary law only "insofar as it is not repugnant to natural justice or morality" or inconsistent with the provisions of any civil law in force, but some traditional laws and practices violate civil laws, particularly those involving women's and children's rights. Defendants in traditional courts are not permitted formal legal counsel but may speak on their own behalf, call witnesses, and be assisted by informal advisors. Traditional law and custom provide for an appeals process. Judicial commissioners within the traditional legal system may adjudicate appeals or refer appeals to a court within the civil judicial system on their own volition or if desired by plaintiffs or defendants.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

While there were political prisoners, no reliable comprehensive list existed. Politically motivated cases often involved lengthy pretrial detention and excessively high bail with stringent conditions. It was common practice in these cases to release prisoners on bail without setting a trial date, which involved travel restrictions and a time-consuming and sometimes costly requirement to report often to police stations. In some cases the government did not file charges or waited many years to do so.

For example, in March 2014 the government charged Thulani Maseko, a human rights lawyer, and Beki Makhubu, editor of the only independent magazine in the country, The Nation, with contempt of court for criticizing the judiciary. After a lengthy and irregular trial, they were convicted and sentenced to serve two years in prison. Maseko filed an appeal against the sentence and conviction. In June the Supreme Court ruled that Makhubu and Maseko were wrongfully convicted, and both were acquitted and released from custody. Maseko was also charged with sedition stemming from his previous statements criticizing the country's governance, and Makhubu was charged with "scandalizing the court" for a previous article he wrote. Maseko's sedition trial remained suspended at the request of the crown to await the pending resolution of a challenge to the constitutionality of the Suppression of Terrorism Act and the Subversive and Seditious Activities Act.

In May 2014 police arrested the president of the banned PUDEMO party Mario Masuku and the secretary general of the party's youth league, Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO), Maxwell Dlamini. They were charged with terrorism and sedition. On July 14, the Supreme Court granted bail and released them.

Access to political prisoners was restricted. Following the arrest of Mario Masuku and Maxwell Dlamini, the government denied domestic and international organizations and diplomatic representatives access to them. An International Trade Union Confederation delegation from Brussels was denied permission to visit several high-profile prisoners, including journalist Bhekie Makhubu, human rights lawyer Thulani Maseko, Mario Masuku, and Maxwell Dlamini.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

The judiciary tries civil as well as criminal cases, including suits for damages against government agents. Administrative remedies are available under civil service rules and regulations. The government respected domestic court decisions. Individuals and organizations may seek civil remedies for human rights violations, including appeal to international courts or bodies.

In 2014 there were 134 civil suits recorded for various infractions by police, including insolence and incivility to members of the public.

Property Restitution

Traditional authorities of KaMkweli evicted farmers who formed the Lunyangu Investment trading company. The farmers were evicted from their land after it emerged that they had collaborated in their farming business with the wife of a former deposed chief.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution and law prohibit such actions except "in the interest of defense, public safety, public order, public morality, public health, town and country planning, use of mineral resources, and development of land in the public benefit." The government did not always respect these prohibitions and broadly construed exceptions to the law. The law requires police to obtain a warrant from a magistrate before searching homes or other premises, but police officers with the rank of subinspector or higher have authority to conduct a search without a warrant if they believe delay might cause evidence to be lost.

During the year police conducted random checks for irregular immigrants, weapons, stolen vehicles, and evidence of other criminal activities through roadblocks and searches in homes. Police entered homes and businesses and conducted searches without judicial authorization. They conducted physical surveillance of members of labor unions, political groups, religious groups, and others. Members of civil society and prodemocracy groups reported the government monitored e-mail, Facebook, and internet chat rooms, and police monitored certain individuals' telephones. Individuals who criticized the monarchy risked exclusion from the patronage system of the traditional regiments (chiefdom-based groupings of men dedicated to serving the king) that distributed scholarships, land, and other benefits. Both undercover and uniformed police officers appeared at labor union, civil society, arts, and business functions. Police also monitored prodemocracy events in South Africa.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Expression

The constitution provides for freedom of speech and press, but the king may deny these rights at his discretion, and the government restricted these rights. Antiterrorism, sedition, and public order legislation also severely restricts constitutional rights. Officials impeded press freedom. Although no law bans criticism of the monarchy, the prime minister, chief justice, and other officials warned journalists the government could construe publishing such criticism as an act of sedition or treason, and authorities threatened media organizations with closure for criticizing the monarchy.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: The law severely restricts free speech and gives police wide discretion to detain persons for lengthy terms without trial or public hearing. Those convicted of sedition may be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.

The king may suspend the constitutional right to free expression at his discretion, and the government severely restricted freedom of expression, especially regarding political issues or the royal family. Individuals who criticized the monarchy risked exclusion from the patronage system of the traditional regiments (chiefdom-based groupings of men dedicated to serving the king) that distributed scholarships, land, and other benefits. This exclusion could also be applied to their family members.

On January 10, the RSPS prevented the Swaziland National Association of Teachers Gender Equality Campaign marchers from displaying banners and placards during a gender sensitization march.

Press and Media Freedoms: The law empowers the government to ban publications if it deems them "prejudicial or potentially prejudicial to the interests of defense, public safety, public order, public morality, or public health." Most journalists practiced self-censorship. Members of the press expressed fear of judicial reprisals for their reporting on some High Court cases.

Daily newspapers criticized government corruption and inefficiency but generally avoided criticizing the royal family.

The broadcast media remained firmly under state control. There were two state-owned radio stations and one private station owned by a Christian group. Most persons obtained their news from radio broadcasts. In response to a ministerial decree prohibiting them from speaking on the radio, members of parliament banned the minister of information, communication, and technology from attending parliament. The decree remained in effect at year's end, however. There were two television stations, one of which the state owned. Despite invitations issued by the media regulatory authority for parties to apply for licenses, no licenses were awarded. Stations practiced self-censorship and refused to broadcast anything perceived as critical of the government or the monarchy.

On August 27, the Times of Swaziland reported that enraged Limkokwing University students assaulted Channel S Television journalists, vandalized their car, and destroyed a video camera. The journalists were covering a student protest at the campus. There was no evidence authorities were involved in or intervened to protect the journalists. The students did not want the journalists to take pictures of the protest for fear of identification by authorities and retribution. Following the incident, the journalists filed an assault and property damage case at the magistrate court against the students involved in the protest. The case was pending at year's end.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: The media practiced self-censorship due to fear of reprisal if their reporting were to be perceived as critical of the government, particularly the judiciary or the monarchy.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content. There were credible reports that the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority. In the Private and Cabinet First Quarter Report of 2015, the government press office stated that authorities monitored internet blogs, the use of social networks such as email, Facebook, Twitter, and internet chat rooms. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 27 percent of the population used the internet in 2014.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

Restrictions on political gatherings and the practice of self-censorship affected academic freedom by limiting the content and frequency of academic meetings, writings, and discourse on political topics. At the University of Swaziland, political research documents may be obtained only upon special request. There were no government restrictions on cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Freedom of Assembly

Although the constitution provides for freedom of assembly, the government severely restricted this right. The law requires police consent and a permit from the municipal council to hold political meetings, marches, or demonstrations in a public place. These permits were rarely granted. In rural areas chiefs prohibited political rallies.

The government harassed and detained opposition members and conducted surveillance on members of labor unions, political groups, and groups considered potentially political. Authorities routinely attempted to prevent meetings and demonstrations by withholding consent or taking civil society leaders to court. When demonstrations took place, security officials were deployed in force, on occasion outnumbering protesters. Political activists alleged that authorities monitored their telephone calls.

On February 28, the RSPS stopped a mass meeting organized by the deregistered Trade Union Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA). Police deployed the paramilitary Operation Support Service Unit to prevent the meeting from being held. Police stated that it prevented the meeting because the agenda included discussion of a multiparty political system, and thus a change in the established system that could disturb the peace.

Freedom of Association

The constitution provides for freedom of association, but the government restricted this right. The constitution does not address the formation or role of political parties. It states that individual merit shall be the basis for election or appointment to public office. While officials argued the constitution replaced and superseded the 1973 decree that banned political parties, there were no legal mechanisms for parties to register or contest elections. In addition several prodemocracy NGOs were banned as terrorist organizations despite their pacific nature and absence of ties to international terrorist organizations.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution provides for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights. It also states provisions of law and custom that impose restrictions on the freedom of any person to reside in the country shall not contravene the freedom granted by the constitution.

The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to refugees, asylum seekers, and other persons of concern. By traditional law and custom, chiefs have the power to decide who may reside in their chiefdoms; evictions occurred due to internal conflicts, alleged criminal activity, or opposition to the chief.

Foreign Travel: Nonethnic citizens sometimes experienced lengthy processing delays when seeking passports and citizenship documents, in part due to the country's history of not treating mixed-race and white persons as "legitimate" citizens. In addition political activists and their families often had difficulty obtaining passports.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: Laws provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has established a system for providing protection to refugees. The government provided protection against the expulsion or return of refugees to countries where their lives or freedom would be threatened. The government cooperated with UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to refugees and asylum seekers. The country hosted an estimated 1,000 refugees, the majority from the African Great Lakes region and Somalia.

Durable Solutions: The government reported 862 refugees in the process of being permanently resettled. It allowed some refugees to compete for jobs and granted them work permits and temporary residence permits. The government also provided refugees with free transportation twice a week to buy and sell food in local markets. Refugees who lived in the country more than five years were eligible for citizenship, but many waited longer to acquire citizenship, sometimes more than 10 years, due to bureaucratic inefficiency and onerous requirements that delayed the process. During the year the government continued to implement a psychological support program that provided counseling to refugees. The Ministry of Home Affairs introduced machine-readable travel documents for refugees, replacing the UN Convention Travel Document. The travel document allows refugees to visit neighboring countries like Mozambique and South Africa with ease.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

Civil and political rights were severely restricted. Citizens could not change their government peacefully, and political parties remained unable to register, contest elections, or otherwise participate in the formation of a government. The king is an absolute monarch with ultimate decision-making authority. Some prodemocracy organizations were banned. There is no legal mechanism under which political parties may compete in elections. The Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC) did not permit candidates of political parties to register under the names of their parties. Legislation passed by parliament requires the king's consent to become law. Under the constitution the king selects the prime minister, the cabinet, two-thirds of the senate, 10 of 65 members of the house, many senior civil servants, the chief justice and other justices of the superior courts, members of commissions established by the constitution, and the heads of government offices. On the advice of the prime minister, the king appoints the cabinet from among members of parliament.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: In 2013 peaceful and generally well-managed parliamentary elections took place, the second time since the constitution went into effect in 2006, and the king appointed a government. International observers concluded the elections did not meet international standards. Political parties could not register or sponsor candidates of their choice.

Ballots were cast in secrecy but could be traced by registration number to individual voters, and some ballot boxes were not properly protected. There were accusations of bribery and widespread reports citizens were advised that if they did not register to vote, they would no longer receive government services.

Political Parties and Political Participation: The government harassed and detained opposition members and openly stated it did not want political parties in the country. The constitution provides for freedom of association but does not address how political parties may operate. While political parties existed, there was no legal mechanism for them to register or contest elections. The constitution also states that candidates for public office must compete on their individual merit, thereby effectively blocking competition based on political party affiliation. For example, the EBC denied participation in the 2013 parliamentary elections to two members of the Ngwane National Liberatory Congress party, who then filed an application with the High Court to compel the EBC to register them. The Registrar of the High Court refused to put the matter on the docket.

Participation in the traditional sphere of governance and politics takes place predominantly through chiefdoms. Chiefs are custodians of traditional law and custom, report directly to the king, and are responsible for the day-to-day running of their chiefdoms and maintenance of law and order. Although local custom mandates that chieftaincy is hereditary, the constitution, while recognizing that chieftaincy is "usually hereditary and is regulated by Swazi law and custom," also states the king "may appoint any person to be chief over any area." As a result many chieftaincies were nonhereditary appointments, a fact that provoked land disputes, especially at the time of burials.

Participation of Women and Minorities: The constitution provides for 55 of the 65 seats in the House of Assembly to be popularly contested and for the king to appoint the remaining 10 members. The constitution provides for five of the 10 to be women and for the other five to represent "interests, including marginalized groups not already adequately represented in the house." In addition the constitution stipulates that if less than 30 percent of assembly members are women, four additional women shall be selected on a regional basis. The king appointed only three women to the House of Assembly following the elections, in which only one woman was elected, and although less than 30 percent of its members were women, the assembly did not select four additional women. Civil society, members of parliament, and women's advocacy organizations urged the assembly to fulfill this constitutional requirement.

The king appoints 20 members of the 30-seat Senate, and the House of Assembly elects the other 10. The constitution provides that eight of the 20 members appointed by the king be women and that five of the 10 members elected by the assembly be women. Following the elections, the king filled five of the eight designated seats with women, while the assembly named five women to the Senate.

Widows in mourning (for periods that may vary from one to three years) were prevented from appearing in certain public places or being in close proximity to the king or a chief's official residence. As a result widows were excluded from voting or running for office or taking active public roles in their communities during those periods.

There were almost no ethnic minority members in the government. Many officials were from the royal family or connected with royalty.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, but the government did not implement the law effectively. Officials sometimes engaged in corrupt practices with impunity. There was a widespread public perception of corruption in the executive and legislative branches of government and a consensus that the government did little to combat it.

The Anticorruption Commission (ACC), funded by the Ministry of Justice, is charged with fighting corruption by carrying out education and prevention programs as well as by investigating cases. The ACC has the power to investigate cases, gather evidence, and arrest individuals for failure to respond to ACC requests. The ACC conceded it made little progress in curbing corruption. Citizens continued to refer to former minister of finance Majozi Sithole's 2011 statement that corruption resulted in a monthly loss of an estimated 80 million emalangeni ($5.1 million) in potential government revenue.

In prevention and education efforts, the ACC conducted dozens of sensitization workshops and meetings around the country, provided educational materials for schools, and made presentations on numerous radio and television shows. ACC representatives acknowledged a widespread public perception that the ACC was ineffective and asserted that the commission  established in 2008  remained in "startup" mode largely because of a lack of financial and human resources and the general backlog of cases in the court system.

Corruption: School principals and teachers routinely demanded bribes to admit students, and immigration and customs officials did so to issue government documents.

Credible reports continued that government road construction and other contracts; the appointment of officials, employment and promotions; military and police recruitment; and school admissions were determined based on a person's relationship with government officials. Authorities rarely took action on reported incidents of nepotism.

Financial Disclosure: The constitution prohibits government officials from assuming positions in which their personal interests are likely to conflict with their official duties. The constitution requires appointed and elected officials to declare their assets and liabilities to the Commission on Public Administration and Human Rights. The commission is mandated to monitor and verify disclosures. There are criminal and administrative sanctions for noncompliance. Sanctions for failure to disclose assets and conflicts of interests include removal from office, disqualification from holding a public office for a period determined by a court, and confiscation of any property illegitimately acquired during tenure in office. According to the commission, the majority of those required to declare assets and liabilities did so, but the commission suspected underreporting in some cases. The commission did not make this information public.

Public Access to Information: No law provides for public access to government documents. The Ministry of Finance, however, provided limited access to budget documents on its website.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A number of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials were rarely responsive to their views. The government monitored groups considered potentially political (see section 2.b.).

While the constitution provides for the independence of human rights NGOs, this provision falls within the "policy" section, which no court or tribunal enforces.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The Commission on Human Rights and Public Administration received complaints and referred them to the appropriate judicial or governmental body. The commission was nearly powerless due to lack of funding and enabling legislation. The commission consisted of one acting commissioner (who had been acting since 2010) and four deputy commissioners. It had no full-time staff or secretariat. Management and administration therefore fell to the deputy commissioners. The commission is precluded from investigating any matter "relating to the exercise of any royal prerogative by the Crown." Local NGOs expressed concern regarding the location of the commission's offices near royal residences, an area which custom and tradition prohibit women in mourning attire or wearing pants from entering.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution prohibits discrimination based on race, gender, disability, age, ethnicity, religion, political opinion, or social status, but the government did not consistently enforce the law.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law criminalizes rape, but no law specifically addresses spousal rape. Rape was common, and the government did not always enforce the law effectively. According to the Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse (SWAGAA), one in three girls and women between ages 13 and 24 had been the victim of sexual violence. Although rape is legally defined as a crime, many men regarded it as a minor offense. The number of reported cases was likely far lower than the actual number of cases, as many cases were dealt with at the family level. A sense of shame and helplessness often inhibited women from reporting such crimes, particularly when incest was involved. The maximum sentence for aggravated rape is 15 years in prison, but the acquittal rate for rape was high, and sentences were generally lenient. Prosecutors reported difficulty obtaining the evidence required to try rape and domestic violence cases because witnesses feared testifying against accused rapists. There were few social workers or other intermediaries to work with victims and witnesses in order to obtain evidence.

Domestic violence, if charged as assault, is illegal. No legislation or law deals specifically with domestic violence and sexual abuse. Domestic violence against women, particularly wife beating, was common and sometimes resulted in death. Police efforts to combat the crime were inadequate. Civil society organizations urged Senate approval and the king's assent of the Sexual Offenses and Domestic Violence Bill passed by the House of Assembly in 2014. In August the deputy prime minister tabled a revised version of the bill to the House of Assembly. At year's end the bill had yet to be submitted to the Senate for approval and royal assent.

Women have the right to charge their husbands with assault under both the Roman-Dutch and traditional legal systems, and urban women frequently did so, usually in extreme cases when intervention by extended family members failed to end such violence. Penalties for men found guilty of assault not involving rape against a woman depended on the court's discretion. Rural women often had no relief if family intervention did not succeed because traditional courts were unsympathetic to "unruly" or "disobedient" women and were less likely than courts using Roman-Dutch-based law to convict men of spousal abuse. The Roman-Dutch legal system often gave light sentences in cases of conviction for abuse against women. SWAGAA operated hotlines and worked with private shelters to assist victims of abuse.

Sexual Harassment: Legal provisions against sexual harassment were vague, and government enforcement was ineffective. No cases have ever been brought to trial. There were frequent reports of sexual harassment, most often of female students by teachers. During the year authorities either fired or suspended numerous teachers and some principals for inappropriate sexual conduct with students. Some teachers threatened female students with poor grades if they did not heed to the teachers' sexual advances.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children; manage their reproductive health; and have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence. There was wide access to contraception, including in public restrooms, clinics, and workplaces throughout the country.

The 2014 UN Trends in Maternal Mortality Report estimated the maternal mortality rate at 310 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2013; 19 percent of these deaths were AIDS related. The UN Population Division estimated 61 percent of girls and women of reproductive age used a modern method of contraception in 2014. According to the Swaziland Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey of 2010 (MICS), three-quarters of all maternal deaths occurred during delivery and in the immediate postpartum period. Access to care was lower in rural than in urban areas.

Discrimination: Women occupied a subordinate role in society. The dualistic nature of the legal system complicated the problem of women's rights. Since unwritten customary law and custom govern traditional marriage and matters of inheritance and family law, women's rights often were unclear and changed according to where and by whom they were interpreted. Couples often married in both civil and traditional ceremonies, creating problems in determining which set of rules applied to the marriage and to subsequent questions of child custody, property, and inheritance in the event of divorce or death.

Girls and women faced discrimination in rural areas by community elders and authority figures, who gave preference to boys in education. Women faced employment discrimination (see section 7.d.). While the constitution provides that women may open bank accounts, obtain passports, and take jobs without the permission of a male relative, these constitutional rights often conflicted with customary law, which classifies women as minors. Both traditional and Roman-Dutch civil law recognize women as dependents of their husbands or fathers. Although women routinely executed contracts and entered into a variety of transactions in their own names, banks often refused personal loans to married women without a male guarantor. The constitution provides for equal access to land. Civil law provides for women to register and administer property, but most persons were unaware of this right, and customary law forbids women from registering property in their own names.

Legal experts acknowledged that some civil law is inconsistent with the constitutional stipulation that "women have the right to equal treatment with men and that right shall include equal opportunities in political, economic, and social activities." For example, civil law defines married women as subordinate to their husbands.

Customary law allows a man to take more than one wife. A man who marries a woman under civil law may not legally have more than one wife, although this restriction was sometimes ignored. Traditional marriages consider children to belong to the father and his family if the couple divorce. Children born out of wedlock belong to the mother, unless the father claims paternity. Inheritances pass to and through male children only.

Although the constitution states that "a woman shall not be compelled to undergo or uphold any custom to which she is in conscience opposed," adherents of traditional family practices might treat a woman as an outcast if she refused to undergo the mourning rite, and a widow who did not participate might lose her home and inheritance. When the husband dies, tradition dictates that the widow must stay at her husband's family's residence in observance of a strict mourning period for one month, during which time she may not leave the house, and the husband's family may move into the homestead and take control of its operations. The media reported that widows heading households sometimes became homeless and were forced to seek public assistance when the husband's family took control of the homestead. Women in mourning attire are generally not allowed to participate in public events and are barred from interacting with royalty or entering royal premises. In some cases the mourning period lasted up to three years. Traditional authorities exercised the right to fine women for wearing trousers.

Children

The 2012 Children's Protection and Welfare Act sets the age of majority at 18. It defines child abuse and imposes penalties for abuse; details children's legal rights and the responsibility of the state, in particular with respect to orphans and other vulnerable children; establishes structures and guidelines for restorative justice; defines child labor and exploitative child labor; and sets minimum wages for various types of child labor. At year's end the government had not implemented most of the law's provisions.

Birth Registration: Under the constitution children derive citizenship from the father, unless the birth occurs outside marriage and the father does not claim paternity, in which case the child acquires the mother's citizenship. A foreign woman who marries a citizen may become a citizen by filing an application with the Citizen Board of the Ministry of Home Affairs. If a Swazi woman marries a foreign man, however, even if he is a naturalized Swazi citizen, their children carry the father's birth citizenship and have no legal claim to the mother's Swazi citizenship (see section 6, Women).

The law mandates compulsory registration of births. According to the MICS, 50 percent of children under age five were registered and 30 percent had birth certificates. Lack of birth registration may result in denial of public services. For example, a child needs a birth certificate to enter school or obtain a passport.

Education: The constitution does not state that education is compulsory, but regulations provide for fining parents who do not have their children attend school. During the year primary education became free of tuition through grade seven, but students' families continued to pay for uniforms and other supplies. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister received an annual budget allocation to pay school fees for orphans and other vulnerable children in primary and secondary school, but some schools expelled such children if the office did not provide funding. Schools sometimes raised supplemental private funding for building maintenance, including teachers' housing. Rural families favored boys over girls if they could not send all their children to school. Principals and teachers routinely demanded bribes to admit students.

Child Abuse: Child abuse, including rape of children and incest, was a serious problem, but the crime was rarely reported. If reported, perpetrators were seldom prosecuted, and when prosecuted and convicted, sentences seldom matched the maximum penalties allowable. According to UNICEF, approximately one in three young women experienced some form of sexual violence as a child and three in 10 experienced emotional abuse, and nearly one in four experienced physical violence. According to the MICS, 12 percent of children were subjected to "severe physical punishment." Children with disabilities, children not in school, and orphans were at particular risk.

On September 15, the Times of Swaziland newspaper reported that a father assaulted his 14-year-old daughter in rural Mambane to punish her for leaving their cattle out overnight in a field. He reportedly scalded her feet with boiling water, fractured her right arm, and injected her right hip with cattle medication.

Corporal punishment by teachers and principals is legal and routinely practiced. School rules and regulations allow a teacher to administer up to four strokes with a stick on the buttocks to a student under age 16, and up to six strokes to students age 16 and older. Teachers often exceeded these limits with impunity. During the year the Ministry of Education and Training introduced less severe disciplinary standards  the minister warned that teachers who beat pupils would be held accountable for abuses.

On July 21, the Times of Swaziland reported that on March 20, a teacher allegedly struck a nine-year-old pupil of Mqolo Primary with an open hand causing temporary deafness.

Early and Forced Marriage: The legal age of marriage is 18 years for both boys and girls, but with parental consent and approval from the minister of justice, girls may marry at 16. The government recognizes two types of marriage, civil marriage and marriage under traditional law and custom. Under traditional law marriages are permitted for girls as young as 13. Although the deputy prime minister spoke out against this practice, civil law was generally not enforced to prevent it. According to the Children's Protection and Welfare Act, however, "A child has the right to refuse to be compelled to undergo or uphold any custom or practices that are likely to negatively affect the child's life, health, welfare, dignity or physical, emotional, psychological, mental, and intellectual development."

Sexual Exploitation of Children: Girls were victims of sex trafficking. Orphans and other vulnerable children were victims of commercial sexual exploitation at truck stops and in bars and brothels. The Children's Protection and Welfare Act includes a specific provision criminalizing "mistreatment, neglect, abandonment, or exposure of children to abuse." Offenders convicted under these provisions are liable to imprisonment for a term of not less than five years, while persons convicted of violating the child labor provisions of the law are liable to a fine of not less than 15,000 emalangeni ($962), a prison term of not less than two years, or both. Provisions of older law address child prostitution as "defilement of a ward" or "unlawful carnal connection with a girl," and pornography under "obscene publications." Statutory law sets the age of sexual consent at 16, while under criminal law a girl under age 14 may not consent to sexual intercourse. The penalties for statutory rape and prostituting a girl are from six to 25 years' imprisonment, up to 24 lashes with a whip, and a fine of 1,000 emalangeni ($64). Penalties for child pornography are up to six months' imprisonment and a fine of 100 emalangeni ($6.41). The People Trafficking and People Smuggling (Prohibition) Act prescribes up to 25 years' imprisonment for the trafficking  including prostitution  of children.

International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

Anti-Semitism

The Jewish community is very small, and there were no known reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's annual Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The constitution provides for the rights of persons with disabilities but does not differentiate between physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities and requires parliament to enact relevant implementing legislation, which parliament has not done. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is responsible for upholding the law and for protecting the rights of persons with disabilities. No laws prohibit discrimination against persons with disabilities in employment. Persons with disabilities complained of government neglect. No laws mandate access to health care for persons with disabilities or accessibility to buildings, transportation (including air travel), information, communications, or public services. Government buildings under construction included some improvements for persons with disabilities, including access ramps, however. Public transportation was not easily accessible for persons with disabilities, and the government did not provide any means of alternative accessible transport.

There were minimal services provided for persons with disabilities, and there were no programs in place to promote the rights of persons with disabilities. There was one school for deaf students and one special-education school for children with physical or mental disabilities. The hospital for persons with mental disabilities, located in Manzini, was overcrowded and understaffed.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Governmental and societal discrimination was practiced against nonethnic Swazis, generally white persons and persons of mixed race. Although there were no official statistics, an estimated 2 percent of the population was nonethnic. Nonethnic Swazis experienced difficulty in obtaining official documents, including passports, and suffered from other forms of governmental and societal discrimination, such as needing special permits or stamps to buy a car or house, delays in receiving building permits for houses, and difficulties in applying for bank loans.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

While colonial-era legislation against sodomy remains on the books, no penalties are specified, and there were no arrests. On several occasions throughout the year, the government issued statements that same-sex relationships and acts were illegal but did not prosecute any cases. Societal discrimination against LGBTI persons was prevalent, and LGBTI persons generally concealed their sexual orientation and gender identity. For example, the director of the LGBTI NGO Rock of Hope confirmed a March 15 newspaper report that Kaylo Glover, a young lesbian, was axed to death in Nhlangano by a man who objected to her lesbianism. LGBTI persons who were open about their sexual orientation and relationships faced censure and exclusion from the chiefdom-based patronage system, which could result in eviction from one's home. Chiefs, pastors, and government officials criticized same-sex sexual conduct as neither morally Swazi nor Christian. LGBTI advocacy organizations had trouble registering with the government. One such organization, House of Pride, was under the umbrella of another organization dealing with HIV/AIDS. It was difficult to determine the extent of employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity because victims were not likely to come forward, and most LGBTI persons were not open about their sexual orientation or gender identity.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

A People Living with HIV Stigma Index (2011) for Swaziland indicated that, of a study sample of 1,233 persons, 18 percent believed their HIV-positive status caused persons to gossip about them; 7 percent were insulted or harassed; and 3 percent were assaulted. Experience of internal stigma included: 25 percent had low self-esteem; 24 percent felt shame; 17 percent felt guilt; 14 percent felt isolation; and 7 percent had suicidal thoughts.

Social stigma associated with being HIV positive discouraged persons from being tested. Nevertheless, there were often long lines, especially of young persons, waiting to be tested during prevention campaigns. The armed forces encouraged testing and did not discriminate against those testing positive.

Other Societal Violence or Discrimination

There was social stigma attached to albinism. Several persons with albinism stated they were discriminated against, called names, and at risk of being killed for ritual purposes. On September 21, the Times of Swaziland reported that a female teacher with albinism requested the government to transfer her to another school because she feared being targeted for ritual killing. The government condemned such acts but took no further action.

Belief in witchcraft was common, and those accused of witchcraft were at risk of being assaulted or killed. On July 11, residents of Piggs Peak attacked a woman whom they accused of casting spells on local youth. Community police intervened and removed her to a safe place.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The laws provide that workers, except for those in essential services, have the right to form and join independent unions, conduct legal strikes, and bargain collectively. These rights were not uniformly applied, however, since provisions of other laws restricting freedom of assembly and association often abrogate them. The laws provide for the registration of unions and federations but grant far-reaching powers to the labor commissioner with respect to determining eligibility for registration. Unions must represent at least 50 percent of employees in a workplace to be automatically recognized. Otherwise, recognition was left to the discretion of employers.

The constitution and law provide for the right to organize and bargain collectively, subject to various legal restrictions. The law gives employers discretion as to whether to recognize a labor organization as a collective employee representative if less than 50 percent of the employees are members of the organization. If an employer agrees to recognize the organization as the workers' representative, the law grants the employer the ability to set conditions for such recognition. The law provides for the registration of collective agreements by the Industrial Court, which is empowered to refuse registration if an agreement conflicts with the Industrial Relations Act (IRA) or any other law, provides terms and conditions of employment less favorable to employees than those provided by any law, discriminates against any person, or requires membership or non-membership in an organization as a condition for employment. The law also provides for the establishment of a conciliation, mediation, and arbitration commission for dispute resolution but confers on the commissioner of labor the power to "intervene" in labor disputes before they are reported to the commission, if there is reason to believe that a dispute could have serious consequences for the employers, workers, or the economy if not resolved promptly.

According to the IRA, as amended, employees not engaged in "essential services" have the right to undertake peaceful protest actions to "promote or defend socioeconomic interests" of workers. The act, however, defines "socioeconomic interest" as including "solutions to economic and social policy questions and problems that are of direct concern to the workers but shall not include matters of a purely political nature." Extensive provisions allow workers to seek redress for alleged wrongful dismissal. Although the law permits strikes, the right to strike is strictly regulated. Strikes and lockouts are prohibited in essential services, while the minister's power to modify the list of these essential services provides for broad prohibition of strikes in nonessential sectors, including postal services, telephone, telegraph, radio, and teaching. The procedure for announcing a protest action requires advance notice of at least 14 days. The law details the steps to be followed when disputes arise and provides penalties for employers who conduct unauthorized lockouts. When disputes arose with civil servant unions, the government often intervened to reduce the chances of a protest action, which may not be called legally until all avenues of negotiation are exhausted and a secret ballot of union members conducted. The law imposes disproportionately harsh sanctions on workers for damages caused by strike actions. For example, the trade union and its leadership face civil liability and criminal liability for any damage caused or other "unlawful behavior" during strikes.

While the laws allow unions to conduct their activities without government interference and prohibit antiunion discrimination, certain laws allow broad government discretion to intervene in and interfere with unions' activities.

The government did not effectively enforce these laws. Freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining were not consistently respected. The government perceived some unions as political opposition and therefore restricted their rights. In certain cases workers who attempted to exercise the rights to organize and bargain collectively faced difficulties or risks due to a harsh legal environment imposed by provisions in the labor and the security laws. HMCS staff continued to be denied the right to collective bargaining. While the government controlled no worker organizations, it may prohibit trade unions and other worker organizations from engaging in certain activities when those activities are deemed "political" in nature. In addition the logistical requirements involved in registering a legal strike made striking difficult.

Government interference in union affairs was consistently a problem under examination by the International Labor Organization (ILO), particularly concerning public service unions. At issue was continued government action to disrupt or repress trade unions' lawful and peaceful activities. The government continued to use certain laws, including the 2008 Suppression of Terrorism Act and the 1963 Public Order Act, to interfere in trade unions' affairs  in particular, gatherings or other activities that were viewed as "political."

The International Trade Union Confederation also reported trade union activities continued to be repressed and that arbitrary arrests and detentions, intimidation, and physical violence were used to silence activists.

The IRA was amended to allow for the registration of federations and became law in November 2014, after the king's assent. Federations must submit their constitutions to the government and apply for registration.

In 2012 the government deregistered the newly formed TUCOSWA labor federation. Just weeks after the labor commissioner signed TUCOSWA's certificate of registration and the minister of labor and social security recognized it, the attorney general declared that TUCOSWA had been "erroneously registered" under the IRA, which governs all labor-related activity. Despite the fact that labor federations have operated in the country for decades, the attorney general argued that the law provided only for the registration of "organizations" and not "federations." Government officials removed TUCOSWA from the list of registered organizations in the country but promised to amend the IRA to provide for the registration of federations. The deregistration occurred just days after TUCOSWA announced it would support a boycott of legislative elections. The Ministry of Labor drafted an amendment to the IRA allowing for the registration of federations, ostensibly to mollify the ILO and other international observers. In November 2014 the king assented to an amendment to the law, after its passage by parliament. TUCOSWA was registered on May 12, three weeks before the ILO conference in Geneva.

There were allegations that employers used labor brokers to hire individuals on contracts to avoid hiring those who would normally be entitled to collective bargaining rights. No laws govern the operation of labor brokers. Other concerns identified by unions were undefined hours of work and pay days; assaults on workers by supervisors; surveillance of trade union activity by hired security officers, both at the workplace and outside; and the use of workers' councils stacked with employer-picked representatives to prevent genuine worker representation.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits most forms of forced or compulsory labor, but the law also requires residents to perform uncompensated tasks for chiefs, who could penalize those who did not participate. Although the High Court declared that order null and void, the government did not officially repeal it as recommended by the ILO, stating the constitution automatically overrode the order. The government did not effectively enforce the applicable law.

The labor code punishes forced labor by a maximum of one year's imprisonment, a fine of 3,000 emalangeni ($192), or both. These penalties were considered sufficient to deter violations in cases when the law was enforced. Customary law has no stipulated sentences but provides for fines that range from a few hundred to several thousand emalangeni.

Forced or compulsory labor practices reportedly occurred. Victims of forced labor included women and children in domestic servitude, agricultural labor, herding livestock, portering, and market vending. Chiefs continued to coerce children and adults  through threats and intimidation  to work for the king.

Also see the Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The laws prohibit child labor. The minimum age for employment is 15, and the minimum age for employment in night work is 16. The law also prohibits children under 18 from engaging in hazardous work in industrial undertakings, including mining, manufacturing, and electrical work, but these prohibitions do not address hazardous work in the agriculture sector. The law limits the number of night hours children may work on school days to six and the overall hours per week to 33.

The Ministry of Labor, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister through the National Children's Coordination Unit and Department of Social Welfare, and the RSPS are responsible for enforcement of laws relating to child labor. In March 2014 the unit was dissolved, however, and although the government expressed its intention to establish another office to protect children, it had yet to do so by year's end. The government did not effectively enforce its laws combating child labor due to a lack of baseline information about the scope of the problem and a lack of dedicated resources for identifying and punishing violators.

Penalties for violations of the worst forms of child labor include a fine of 100,000 emalangeni ($6,410) or five years' imprisonment for a first offense, and 10 years' imprisonment with no option for a fine for repeated offenses. Authorities, however, did not enforce the law.

In the informal sector, children continued to be employed, particularly in agricultural pursuits. In agriculture children picked cotton, harvested sugarcane, and herded livestock. This work might involve activities that put at risk their health and safety, such as using dangerous machinery and tools, carrying heavy loads, applying harmful pesticides, and working alone in remote areas. Children also worked as porters, bus attendants, taxi conductors, and street vendors. Children working on the streets risked a variety of dangers, such as severe weather and automobile accidents. They also were vulnerable to exploitation by criminals.

Child domestic servitude was also believed to be prevalent. Such work could involve long hours of work and could expose children to physical and sexual exploitation by their employer. Children's exploitation in illicit activities was a problem. Children served alcohol in liquor outlets and grew, manufactured, and sold illegal drugs.

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

The labor law prohibits discrimination in employment and occupation based on race, gender, language, HIV-positive status or other communicable diseases, or social status, but the law is silent on discrimination in employment and occupation based on disability, age, and sexual orientation or gender identity, and the government, in general, did not effectively enforce the law. One officer allegedly reported that she was not promoted because she had albinism.

Gender-based discrimination in employment and occupation occurred (see section 6). While women have constitutional rights to equal treatment and may take jobs without the permission of a male relative, and the law requires equal pay for equal work, there were few measures in effect protecting women from discrimination in hiring, particularly in the private sector. Despite the law, the average wage rates for men by skill category usually exceeded those of women.

Migrant workers enjoy the same legal protections, wages, and working conditions as citizens.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

There is no national minimum wage. The Ministry of Labor and Social Security sets wage scales for each industry. There was a legally mandated sliding scale of minimum wages depending on the type of work performed. For example, the minimum monthly wage was 531 emalangeni ($34) for a domestic worker, 1,137 emalangeni ($73) for a preschool teacher, 768 emalangeni ($49) for a semiskilled worker in the forestry industry, and 1,060 emalangeni ($68) for a skilled worker in the forestry industry. All workers in the formal sector, including migrant workers, are covered by the wage laws. Approximately 63 percent of the population lived below the poverty line.

There was a standard 48-hour workweek for most workers and a 72-hour workweek for security guards spread over a period of six days. It was not clear whether there were specific exceptions for female workers. The law permits all workers at least one day of rest per week and provides for premium pay for overtime. Most workers received a minimum of 12 days of annual leave with full pay. Workers receive 14 days of sick leave with full pay and 14 days with half pay after three months of continuous service; these provisions apply only once per calendar year. No sick leave is granted if an injury results from an employee's own negligence or misconduct.

The law provides for some protection of workers' health and safety. The government set safety standards for industrial operations and encouraged private companies to develop accident prevention programs. In July the Ministry of Labor and Social Security reported that seven persons died within a period of three months at the workplace while carrying out their duties.

On August 15, 200 textile workers were rushed to the three major hospitals in Mbabane after a factory explosion, many suffering from inhalation of noxious fumes. The Ministry of Labor deployed an investigation team to find out what caused the explosion, but no results were made public.

The constitution calls on parliament to enact laws to protect a worker's right to satisfactory, safe, and healthy employment conditions, but parliament did not enact any such laws enduring the year. The Ministry of Labor and Social Security is responsible for enforcement of labor laws but faced significant resource challenges, including a lack of motor vehicles and inability to hire additional staff. There were only an estimated 20 labor inspectors serving the entire country, and while the labor commissioner's office conducted inspections in the formal sector, it did not have the resources to conduct inspections in the informal sector. The government also undertook an initial review of the status of labor brokers, in response to growing complaints that the lack of regulation of labor brokers facilitated the exploitation of workers. The government continued to enforce the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which lays out the rights and responsibilities of employers, employees, and the government with respect to occupational health and safety.

Wage arrears, particularly in the garment industry, were a problem. Working conditions in the industry generally were good, although workers complained that wages were low and that procedures for getting sick leave approved were cumbersome in some factories. The minimum monthly wage for a skilled employee in the industry  including sewing machinists and quality checkers  was 1,488 emalangeni ($95). Minimum wage laws did not apply to the informal sector, where many workers were employed.

The garment sector has a standard 48-hour workweek, but workers alleged that working overtime was compulsory because they had to meet unattainable daily and monthly production quotas.

Public transportation workers complained that they were required to work 12 hours a day or more without any overtime compensation and that they were not entitled to pensions and other benefits. The country's nurses engaged in strikes and work slowdowns during the year to advocate for higher wages and to protest what they considered unsafe working conditions in local hospitals and clinics. Some facilities lacked proper ventilation systems, water, and sanitation supplies.

Although policies existed regarding maternity leave, women often believed they were compelled to keep working from economic need, which sometimes resulted in giving birth in unsafe environments; for example, on the way to work. In the garment sector, which primarily employed women, female workers and their unions alleged that workers were not allowed to use their maternity leave with the certainty that their right to return to work would be respected.

Workers in the informal sector, particularly foreign migrant workers, children, and women, risked facing hazardous and exploitative conditions. Credible data on workplace fatalities and accidents were not available. A significant number of workers were in the informal sector, but credible data were not available.

Per the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 2001, workers may remove themselves from situations that endanger their health or safety without jeopardy to their employment. Additionally, authorities did not effectively make efforts to protect employees in this situation.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Democratic People's Republic of Korea

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Democratic People's Republic of Korea, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5716127b4.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) is an authoritarian state led by the Kim family for more than 60 years. Shortly after Kim Jong Il's death in late 2011, his son Kim Jong Un was named marshal of the DPRK and supreme commander of the Korean People's Army. Kim Jong Un's grandfather, the late Kim Il Sung, remains "eternal president." The most recent national elections, held in March 2014, were neither free nor fair. Authorities maintained effective control over the security forces.

Citizens did not have the ability to change their government. The government subjected citizens to rigid controls over many aspects of their lives, including denial of the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, movement, and worker rights. The government operated a network of political prison camps in which conditions were often harsh, life threatening, and included forced and compulsory labor.

Defectors continued to report extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary detention, arrests of political prisoners, and torture. The judiciary was not independent and did not provide fair trials. There were reports of female victims of trafficking among refugees and workers crossing the border into China. Forced labor was practiced domestically, through mass mobilizations and as a part of the re-education system. NGOs noted that DPRK foreign contract workers also faced conditions of forced labor.

The government made no known attempts to prosecute officials who committed human rights abuses. Impunity was a widespread problem.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were numerous reports that the government committed arbitrary and unlawful killings.

Defector and refugee reports noted instances in which the government executed political prisoners, opponents of the government, repatriated defectors, government officials, and others accused of crimes. The law prescribes the death penalty for the most "serious" or "grave" cases of "antistate" or "antination" crimes, which included: participation in a coup or plotting to overthrow the state; acts of terrorism for an antistate purpose; treason, which includes defection or handing over of state secrets, broadly interpreted to include providing information about economic, social, and political developments routinely published elsewhere; suppressing the people's movement for national liberation; and "treacherous destruction." Additionally, the law allows for capital punishment in less serious crimes such as theft, destruction of military facilities and national assets, fraud, kidnapping, distribution of pornography, and trafficking in persons.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and press reports indicated that border guards had orders to shoot to kill individuals leaving the country without permission, and prison guards were under orders to shoot to kill those attempting to escape from political prison camps.

During the year NGOs reported that high profile public executions continued, and in April, the press reported that 15 executions were carried out in the first four months of the year as part of an ongoing purge of senior government officials. The press widely reported that at least 70 officials had been executed for various reasons since Kim Jong Un took power in 2011. In May, Republic of Korea (South Korea or ROK) officials reported that North Korean Defense Minister Hyon Yong Chol was publicly executed by antiaircraft fire in front of an audience of hundreds. Other DPRK senior officials including Vice Premier Choe Yong Gon were reportedly executed around the same time. In April the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) published a report supported by satellite imagery of a public execution in the country using antiaircraft machine guns.

Private citizens were also subjected to public executions. For example, in April Radio Free Asia reported the execution of the director general of North Korea's Unhasu Orchestra along with three members of the troupe. Reports stated they were first forced to strip naked and then shot by firing squad wielding machine guns in front of 400-500 members of the Pyongyang artistic community.

b. Disappearance

NGO, think tank, and press reports indicated that the government was responsible for disappearances.

After bilateral talks between the DPRK and Japan in May 2014, the DPRK agreed to reopen the investigation into the whereabouts of 12 Japanese citizens believed to have been abducted by the DPRK. The DPRK suspended bilateral negotiations on the abductions issue in April, citing Japan's move to raise the issue in a UN Human Rights Council resolution. In September the DPRK announced it had completed its reinvestigation and had no new information to report.

ROK government and media reports noted that the DPRK also kidnapped other foreign nationals from locations abroad in the 1970s and 1980s. The DPRK continued to deny its involvement in the kidnappings. The ROK Ministry of Unification reported that an estimated 517 of its civilians, abducted or detained by DPRK authorities since the end of the Korean War, remained in the DPRK. South Korean NGOs estimated that during the Korean War the DPRK abducted 20,000 civilians who remained in the North or who have died.

HRNK's Hidden Gulag IV: Gender Repression & Prisoner Disappearances reported that the Sorimchon/Kumchon-ri zone within Yodok political penal-labor camp (Camp 15) in South Hamkyung Province was demolished in late 2014. The whereabouts of the former prisoners of this section of the camp remain unknown.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The penal code prohibits torture or inhuman treatment, but many sources reported these practices continued. Numerous defector accounts and NGO reports released during the year described the use of torture by authorities in detention facilities. Methods of torture and other abuse reportedly included severe beatings; electric shock; prolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small "punishment cells" in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; and being hung by the wrists or forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse. Mothers were in some cases reportedly forced to watch the infanticide of their newborn infants. Defectors continued to report many prisoners died from torture, disease, starvation, exposure to the elements, or a combination of these causes.

The 2015 White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, published by the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), a South Korean government-affiliated think tank, and the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) report stated that officials had in some cases prohibited live births in prison and ordered forced abortions as recently as 2013. The KINU white paper found that, in some cases of live birth, the prison guards killed the infant or left the baby to die, and reported cases of guards sexually abusing or exploiting female prisoners.

Detainees in re-education through labor camps reported they were forced to perform difficult physical labor under harsh conditions (see section 7.b.).

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

NGO, refugee, and press reports noted there were several types of prisons, detention centers, and camps, including forced labor camps and separate camps for political prisoners. NGO reports documented six types of detention facilities: kwanliso (political penal-labor camps), kyohwaso (correctional or re-education centers), kyoyangso (labor-reform centers), jipkyulso (collection centers for low-level criminals), rodong danryeondae (labor-training centers), and kuryujang or kamok (interrogation facilities or jails). According to the 2015 KINU white paper, the Ministry of State Security administered kwanliso camps, and either it or the Ministry of People's Security administered the other detention centers.

There were reportedly between 5,000 and 50,000 prisoners per kwanliso. Defectors claimed the kwanliso camps contained unmarked graves, barracks, worksites, and other prison facilities. NGOs reported the existence of five kwanliso facilities, including Kaecheon (Camp 14), Hwasung (Camp 16), Pukchang (Camp 18), and Chongjin (Camp 25). During the year reports continued to indicate that areas of Yodok (Camp 15) in South Hamkyung Province were closed or operating at a reduced capacity.

Kwanliso camps are comprised of total control zones, where incarceration is for life, and "rerevolutionizing zones," from which prisoners may be released. Reports indicated those sentenced to prison for nonpolitical crimes were typically sent to re-education prisons where authorities subjected prisoners to intense forced labor. Those who were considered hostile to the government or who committed political crimes reportedly were sentenced to indefinite terms in political prison camps. In many cases family members also were detained if one member was accused or arrested. The government continued to deny the existence of political prison camps.

According to the Hidden Gulag IV report, since late 2008, Jongo-ri (Camp 12) in North Hamkyung Province was expanded to include a women's annex. Camp 12's women's annex holds approximately 1,000 women, most of whom were imprisoned after being repatriated from China. The existence of this women's annex was corroborated by satellite imagery and defector testimony. Defector testimony cited food rations below subsistence levels, forced labor, and high rates of death due to starvation at Camp 12.

Reports indicated that conditions in the prison camp and detention system were harsh and life threatening, and that systematic and severe human rights abuses occurred. Many prisoners in political prison camps and the detention system were not expected to survive. Detainees and prisoners consistently reported violence and torture. Defectors described witnessing public executions in political prison camps. According to defectors, prisoners received little or no food and were denied medical care in some places of detention. Sanitation was poor, and former labor camp inmates reported they had no changes of clothing during their incarceration and were rarely able to bathe or wash their clothing. The South Korean and international press reported that kyohwaso held populations of up to thousands of political prisoners, economic criminals, and ordinary criminals.

Physical Conditions: Estimates of the total number of prisoners and detainees in the prison and detention system ranged between 80,000 and 120,000. The 2015 KINU white paper reported that the decrease in the number of inmates from previous years might be the result of natural reduction from harsh circumstances rather than any change in government policy. NGO and press reports estimated there were between 182 and 490 detention facilities in the country.

Anecdotal reports from the NGO Database Center for North Korean Human Rights and the UN 2014 COI report stated that in some prisons authorities held women in separate units from men and often subjected the women to sexual abuse. One NGO reported that male and female political prisoners sent to punishment facilities were tortured.

By law criminal cases against a person under age 14 are dismissed. Public education is applied in case of a crime committed by a person above age 14 and under age 17, but little information was available regarding how the law was actually applied. Authorities often detained juveniles along with their families and reportedly subjected them to torture and abuse in detention facilities.

Administration: No information on recordkeeping processes or alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders was publicly available. No information was available indicating whether prisoners and detainees had reasonable access to visitors. In past years defectors reported that authorities subjected Christian inmates to harsher punishment if their faith was made public, but no information was available regarding religious observance. No information was available on whether prisoners or detainees could submit complaints to judicial authorities without censorship or request investigation of credible allegations of inhuman conditions.

Independent Monitoring: There was no publicly available information on whether the government investigated or monitored prison and detention conditions. The government did not allow the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the DPRK or the UN COI access into the country to assess prison conditions. The government did not permit other human rights monitors to inspect prisons and detention facilities.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The law prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, but reports pointed out that the government did not observe these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The internal security apparatus includes the Ministries of People's Security and of State Security. The security forces do not have adequate mechanisms to investigate possible security force abuses. There was no information that the government took action to reform the security forces.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

Revisions to the criminal code and the criminal procedure code in 2004 and 2005 added shortened periods of detention during prosecution and trial, arrest by warrant, and prohibition of collecting evidence by forced confessions. There was no confirmation that these changes were applied.

Members of the security forces arrested and reportedly transported citizens suspected of committing political crimes to prison camps without trial. According to a South Korean NGO, beginning in 2008 the People's Safety Agency was authorized to handle criminal cases directly without the approval of prosecutors. The change was reportedly made because of prosecutorial corruption. An NGO reported that investigators could detain an individual for the purpose of investigation for up to two months.

There were no restrictions on the government's ability to detain and imprison persons at will or to hold them incommunicado. Family members and other concerned persons reportedly found it virtually impossible to obtain information on charges against detained persons or the lengths of their sentences. Judicial review or appeals of detentions did not exist in law or practice. According to an opinion adopted in April 2014 by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, family members have no recourse for petitioning for the release of detainees accused of political crimes, as any such advocacy for political prisoners may be deemed an act of treason against the state. There was no known bail system and no information on whether a lawyer was provided to detainees.

Arbitrary Arrest: Arbitrary arrests reportedly occurred. In August and September 2013, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention transmitted inquiries to the government requesting information about the current situations of 19 North Korean citizens arbitrarily arrested and detained by the government. Authorities replied in October 2013, categorically rejecting the cases as an alleged political plot against the DPRK.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The constitution states that courts are independent and that judicial proceedings are to be carried out in strict accordance with the law; however, an independent judiciary did not exist.

Trial Procedures

The Ministry of Public Security dispensed with trials in political cases and referred prisoners to the State Security Department (SSD) for punishment. Little information was available on formal criminal justice procedures and practices, and outside access to the legal system was limited to trials for traffic violations and other minor offenses.

The constitution contains elaborate procedural protections, providing that cases should be public, except under circumstances stipulated by law. The constitution also states that the accused has the right to a defense, and when trials were held, the government reportedly assigned lawyers. Some reports noted a distinction between those accused of political, as opposed to nonpolitical, crimes and claimed that the government offered trials and lawyers only to the latter. The KINU 2015 white paper reported that the SSD conducted "pretrials" or preliminary examinations in all political cases but the court system conducted the trial. Some defectors testified that the SSD also conducted trials. There was no indication that independent, nongovernmental defense lawyers existed. According to the 2013 Hidden Gulag report, most inmates in prison camps were sent there without trial, without knowing the charges against them, and without having legal counsel. The 2010 Witness to Transformation study reported that only 13 percent of the 102 respondents surveyed who had been incarcerated in the country received a trial. There were no indications authorities respected the presumption of innocence.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

While the total number of political prisoners and detainees remained unknown, the KINU 2015 white paper reported that between 80,000 and 120,000 were detained in the kwanliso. Political prisoners were held separately from other detainees. NGOs and the media reported that political prisoners were subject to harsher punishments and fewer protections than other prisoners and detainees. The government considered critics of the regime to be political criminals. The government did not permit access to persons by international humanitarian organizations. Reports from past years described political offenses as including attempting to defect to South Korea, sitting on newspapers bearing Kim Il Sung's or Kim Jong Il's picture, mentioning Kim Il Sung's limited formal education, or defacing photographs of the Kims.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

According to the constitution, " ... citizens are entitled to submit complaints and petitions. The state shall fairly investigate and deal with complaints and petitions as fixed by law." Under the Law on Complaint and Petition, citizens are entitled to submit complaints to stop encroachment upon their rights and interests or seek compensation for the encroached rights and interests. Reports noted that these rights were not respected.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution provides for the inviolability of person and residence and the privacy of correspondence; however, the government did not respect these provisions. The regime subjected its citizens to rigid controls. The government reportedly relied upon a massive, multilevel system of informants to identify critics and potential troublemakers. Entire communities sometimes were subjected to security checks. Authorities entered homes without judicial authorization.

The government appeared to monitor correspondence, telephone conversations, e-mail, text messages, and other digital communications. Private telephone lines operated on a system that precluded making or receiving international calls; international telephone lines were available only under restricted circumstances.

Egypt-based Orascom Telecom, the country's sole 3G cellular network service provider, estimated the number of persons with access to an internal mobile phone network was 3 million as of October 2015. Authorities strictly monitored mobile phone use. The system for citizens was segregated from systems used by foreigners and could not be used for international calls or to access the internet. In the border regions adjacent to China, unauthorized Chinese mobile phones reportedly were used for making international calls. Authorities arrested those caught using such cell phones and required violators to pay a fine or face charges of espionage or other crimes with harsh punishments, including lengthy prison terms. Press reports indicated that DPRK authorities jammed cellular phone signals along the China-DPRK border in order to block the use of Chinese mobile phones within the DPRK. In 2013 the media reported that the government began allowing foreign visitors to bring in their mobile phones and use the 3G network for mobile internet access and international calls from the DPRK. In August 2014 the DPRK State Radio Regulatory Department issued a decree banning foreign embassies and international organizations from using Wi-Fi in the country.

The Worker's Party of Korea (WPK) is the key governing body in the country; party membership is dictated by social and family background and is the key determinant of social mobility. The government divided citizens into strict loyalty-based classes known as "songbun," which determined access to employment, higher education, place of residence, medical facilities, certain stores, marriage prospects, and food rations.

In its 2012 report, Songbun: Marked for Life, North Korea's Social Classification System, HRNK reported that authorities placed citizens into one of 51 songbun categories based on the perceived loyalty of their family to the government. The HRNK estimated that 28 percent of citizens were classified as "loyal," 45 percent as "wavering," and 27 percent as "hostile" to the government.

Numerous reports noted that authorities practiced collective punishment. Entire families, including children, were imprisoned when one member of the family was accused of a crime. Collective punishment reportedly can extend to three generations.

NGOs reported the eviction of families from their places of residence without due process.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution provides for freedom of speech and press, although the government prohibited the exercise of these rights.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: There were numerous instances of persons interrogated or arrested for saying anything that could be construed as negative towards the government.

The constitution provides for the right to petition, but the government did not respect this right. For example, when individuals submitted anonymous petitions or complaints about state administration, the Ministries of People's Security and State Security sought to identify the authors, who could be subjected to investigation and punishment.

Press and Media Freedoms: The government sought to control virtually all information. The government tightly controlled print media, broadcast media, and book publishing. Independent media did not exist. The government carefully managed visits by foreigners, especially journalists. The Associated Press (AP) operated an all-format news bureau in Pyongyang. International AP reporters were not resident in country.

Violence and Harassment: Domestic journalists had little freedom to investigate stories or report freely. During visits by foreign leaders, authorities permitted groups of foreign journalists to accompany official delegations and file reports. In all cases journalists were monitored strictly. Journalists generally were not allowed to talk to officials or to persons on the street.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: Domestic media censorship continued to be strictly enforced, and no deviation from the official government line was tolerated. The government prohibited listening to foreign media broadcasts except by the political elite, and violators were subject to severe punishment. Radios and television sets, unless altered, are set to receive only domestic programming; radios obtained from abroad were similarly altered. Elite citizens and facilities for foreigners, such as hotels, had access to international television broadcasts via satellite. The government continued to attempt to jam all foreign radio broadcasts. Citizens were imprisoned and punished for listening to foreign radio or watching foreign television broadcasts, and in some cases for simply owning radio or television sets that were able to be tuned in order to listen to nongovernment broadcasts.

Internet Freedom

Internet access for citizens was limited to high-ranking officials and other designated elites, including select university students. A tightly controlled and regulated "intranet" was reportedly available to a slightly larger group of users, including an elite grade school; select research institutions, universities, and factories; and a few individuals. The Korea Computer Center, which acts as the gatekeeper to the internet, granted access only to information it deemed acceptable. The NGO Reporters Without Borders reported that some e-mail access existed through this internal network. Government employees sometimes had closely monitored access to the internet and had limited, closely monitored access to e-mail accounts.

In June the press reported that foreign visitors in Pyongyang began receiving mobile alerts when they attempted to access Instagram, a social media app. Some experts speculated the block was in response to leaked photos of a fire in a luxury hotel in Pyongyang that were shared online through the app.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

The government restricted academic freedom and controlled artistic works. Curriculum was highly controlled by the state. The government severely restricted academic travel. The primary function of plays, movies, operas, children's performances, and books was to buttress the cult of personality surrounding the Kim family and support the regime.

Indoctrination was carried out systematically through the mass media, schools, and worker and neighborhood associations. Indoctrination continued to involve mass marches, rallies, and staged performances, sometimes including hundreds of thousands of persons.

The government continued its attempt to limit foreign influence on its citizens. Listening to foreign radio and watching foreign films are illegal. Individuals accused of viewing or possessing foreign films were reportedly subject to imprisonment and possibly execution. According to the 2015 KINU white paper, in 2013, the government executed two men in Sunam District, Chongjin, North Hamkyung Province for a crime related to South Korean video recordings. Nonetheless, numerous NGOs reported that foreign DVDs, CDs, and USB drives continued to be available in the country.

Based on defector interviews, during the year the independent consulting firm InterMedia estimated that as many as 29 percent of defectors listened to foreign radio broadcasts while inside North Korea and that approximately 92 percent of defectors who were interviewed had seen foreign DVDs in North Korea.

The government intensified its focus on preventing the import of South Korean popular culture, especially television dramas. According to media and NGO reports, in enforcing restrictions on foreign films, authorities authorized police to search homes for contraband DVDs. The website Daily NK reported that Kim Jong Un created a special police unit to restrict and control the flow of outside information into the country.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Freedom of Assembly

While the constitution provides for freedom of assembly, the government did not respect this provision and continued to prohibit public meetings not previously authorized and not under government control.

Freedom of Association

The constitution provides for freedom of association, but the government failed to respect this provision. There were no known organizations other than those created by the government. Professional associations existed primarily to facilitate government monitoring and control over organization members.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The law provides for the "freedom to reside in or travel to any place"; however, the government did not respect this right. The government continued to control internal travel carefully. The government did not cooperate with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees or other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to internally displaced persons, refugees, returning refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, or other persons.

In-country Movement: The government continued to restrict freedom to move within the country. Only members of a very small elite class and those with access to remittances from overseas reportedly had access to personal vehicles. A lack of infrastructure hampered movement, as did security checkpoints on main roads at entry and exit points from every town.

The government strictly controlled permission to reside in, or even to enter, Pyongyang, where food availability, housing, health, and general living conditions were much better than in the rest of the country. Foreign officials visiting the country observed checkpoints on the highway leading into Pyongyang.

Foreign Travel: The government also restricted foreign travel. The government limited issuance of exit visas for foreign travel to officials and trusted businessmen, artists, athletes, academics, and workers. Short-term exit papers were available on a very limited basis for some residents to visit with relatives, for short-term work opportunities, or to engage in small-scale trade.

Exile: The government reportedly forced the internal exile of some citizens. In the past it forcibly resettled tens of thousands of persons from Pyongyang to the countryside. Sometimes this occurred as punishment for offenses and included those judged to be politically unreliable based on the social status of their family members.

Emigration and Repatriation: The government did not allow emigration, and reports stated that it continued severe, tight security on the border, dramatically limiting the flow of persons crossing into China without required permits. NGOs reported strict patrols and surveillance of residents of border areas and a crackdown on border guards who may have been aiding border crossers in return for bribes.

Reports suggested that the number of North Koreans living illegally in northeastern China declined in recent years. News reports in 2013 stated that Chinese authorities installed additional miles of barbed-wire fencing along the Tumen River that divides China from North Korea, making it more difficult for North Koreans to cross into China. News reports in May stated that the DPRK had erected additional barbed-wire fencing on the North Korean side of the Tumen River.

The South Korean press reported that the government issued orders for guards to shoot to kill those attempting to leave without official sanction. NGOs reported that Kim Jong Un called for stricter punishments for those suspected of illegal border crossing. The law criminalizes defection and attempted defection, including the attempt to gain entry to a foreign diplomatic facility for the purpose of seeking political asylum. Individuals who cross the border with the purpose of defecting or seeking asylum in a third country are subject to a minimum of five years of "labor correction." In "serious" cases defectors or asylum seekers are subjected to indefinite terms of imprisonment and forced labor, confiscation of property, or death. Many would-be refugees who were returned involuntarily were imprisoned under harsh conditions. Some sources indicated that authorities reserved particularly harsh treatment for those who had extensive contact with foreigners, including those with family members resettled in South Korea.

Past reports from defectors noted that the government differentiated between persons who crossed the border in search of food (who might be sentenced only to a few months of forced labor or in some cases merely issued a warning) and persons who crossed repeatedly or for political purposes (who were sometimes sentenced to harsh punishment, including death). The law stipulates a sentence of up to two years of "labor correction" for the crime of illegally crossing the border.

The government subjected repatriated refugees to harsh punishments, including imprisonment. The government reportedly continued to enforce the policy that all border crossers be sent to prison or re-education centers.

In November media reported that in October Vietnamese authorities transferred nine North Korean asylum seekers to Chinese authorities to be repatriated to the DPRK. The group had been detained while transiting through Vietnam on their way to a third country. As of December the nine remained in detention in China.

According to the ROK Ministry of Unification, the ROK resettled 1,277 DPRK defectors, compared with 1,396 in 2014  a decline of 8 percent. The media and NGOs attributed the continuing decline to strengthened DPRK border controls. While the overall number of defectors has been decreasing, the media reported an increase in the number of senior DPRK officials who have defected. According to South Korean media reports, the National Intelligence Service disclosed on October 20 to the Intelligence Committee of the National Assembly that 46 members of the North Korean elite fled from North Korea in the past three years.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law does not provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status, nor has the government established a system for providing protection for refugees. The government did not grant refugee status or asylum. The government had no known policy or provision for refugees or asylees and did not participate in international refugee fora.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

Citizens do not have the ability to choose their government peacefully.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: The most recent national elections to select representatives to the Supreme People's Assembly (SPA) occurred in March 2014. These elections were neither free nor fair. The government openly monitored voting, resulting in a reported 100 percent participation rate and 100 percent approval of the pre-selected government candidates. Local elections on July 19 were likewise neither free nor fair. The government reported a 99.97 percent turnout, with 100 percent approval for the government candidates.

Political Parties and Political Participation: The government has created several "minority parties." Lacking grassroots organizations, the parties existed only as rosters of officials with token representation in the SPA. The government regularly criticized the concept of free elections and competition among political parties as an "artifact of capitalist decay."

Participation of Women and Minorities: Women constituted approximately 4.5 percent of the membership of the Central Committee of the WPK but held few key WPK leadership positions.

The country is racially and ethnically homogenous. There are officially no minorities.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

It was not known whether the law provides criminal penalties for official corruption, whether the government implemented any such laws effectively, or how often officials engaged in corrupt practices with impunity. Corruption was reportedly widespread in all parts of the economy and society and endemic in the security forces.

Corruption: Reports of diversion of food to the military and government officials and bribery were indicative of corruption in the government and security forces. Multiple ministries and party offices were responsible for handling issues of corruption.

Financial Disclosure: It was not known whether public officials are subject to financial disclosure laws and whether a government agency is responsible for combating corruption.

Public Access to Information: There are no known laws that provide for public access to government information.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

There were no independent domestic organizations to monitor human rights conditions or comment on the status of such rights. The country reported that many organizations, including the Democratic Lawyers' Association, General Association of Trade Unions, Agricultural Workers Union, and Democratic Women's Union, engaged in human rights activities, but the activities of these organizations could not be verified.

The international NGO community and numerous international experts continued to testify to the grave human rights situation in the country. The government decried international statements about human rights abuses in the country as politically motivated interference in internal affairs. The government asserted that criticism of its human rights record was an attempt by some countries to cover up their own abuses and that such hypocrisy undermined human rights principles.

The United Nations or Other International Bodies: The government emphasized that it had ratified a number of UN human rights instruments, but it continued to refuse to cooperate with UN representatives. The government prevented the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the DPRK from visiting the country to carry out his mandate, which it continued to refuse to recognize.

On June 26, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights opened a field office in Seoul, South Korea to monitor and document human rights abuses in the DPRK. The DPRK state media issued a number of violent threats in advance of the office opening.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The government's DPRK Association for Human Rights Studies denied the existence of any human rights violations.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

While the constitution grants equal rights to all citizens, the government reportedly did not actually grant its citizens most fundamental human rights, and it continued pervasive discrimination based on social status.

Women

Despite an extensive legal framework providing for equality for women, such as equal employment opportunities and equal pay, societal and legal discrimination continued. A 2013 report on the Status of Women's Rights in the Context of Socio-Economic Changes in the DPRK, by the ROK-based NGO Citizens' Alliance for North Korea Human Rights, stated that it could not detect any major changes as a result of the 2010 Women's Rights Protection Act. The report noted the act was vague, lacked the designation of an administering agency, did not include punishments for noncompliance, and had no accompanying implementing legislation.

Rape and Domestic Violence: The government appeared to criminalize rape, but no information was available on details of the law or how effectively it was enforced. Prison guards reportedly raped women in prison camps and forced them to have abortions. Violence against women was reported as a significant problem both inside and outside the home. No information was available on government efforts to combat rape, domestic violence, and other societal violence directed against women. According to the KINU 2015 white paper, the 2012 revision of the country's criminal code indicated a sentence reduction for rape and domestic violence. The UN COI report found the subjugation of inmates and a general climate of impunity created an environment in which guards and other prisoners in privileged positions raped female inmates. When cases of rape came to light, the perpetrator often escaped with mere dismissal or no punishment.

Sexual Harassment: Women who left the country reported that although "sexual violation" was understood, the term "sexual harassment" was not defined in the country. Despite the 1946 "Law on Equality of the Sexes," defectors reported that sexual harassment of women was generally accepted due to patriarchal traditions. Defectors reported that there was little recourse for women who had been harassed.

Reproductive Rights: Obtaining accurate information regarding reproductive rights was difficult. The country's initial report to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, submitted in 2002, claimed "family planning is mapped out by individual families in view of their actual circumstances and in compliance with laws, regulations, morality, and customs ... women have the decision of the spacing of children in view of their own wish, health condition, and the like. But usually the spacing of children is determined by the discussion between the wife and the husband." Independent sources were not able to substantiate this claim.

According to UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) statistics, the maternal mortality rate in 2013 was 87 per 100,000 live births. Final results from the 2012 National Nutrition Survey  conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics, with technical assistance from the World Food Program, UNICEF, and World Health Organization  estimated that the maternal mortality rate from 2008 to 2010 decreased slightly, from 85 to 76 per 100,000 live births. UNICEF reported that the deteriorating health system, lack of medicine, and emergency referrals affected the high rate of maternal mortality. The World Food Program found that 31 percent of women surveyed suffered from anemia, which increases the likelihood of maternal mortality. The country reported in its 2009 National Human Rights Report submitted to the UN Universal Periodic Review that 98 percent of women received professional help during childbirth. The 2012 UN Overview of Needs and Assistance in the DPRK report found that 68 percent of monthly deliveries took place at county hospitals or clinics at the village level, but approximately 42 percent of these facilities did not have resuscitation equipment for mothers and 36 percent did not have resuscitation equipment for newborns. A KINU survey of defectors found that 86 percent of respondents stated the family doctor system was "useless."

The KINU 2015 white paper also cited very high levels of maternal and infant mortality. Pregnant women sentenced to detention centers following their repatriation to the country reportedly were subjected to forced abortions.

Discrimination: The constitution states that "women hold equal social status and rights with men"; however, few women reached high levels of the party or the government. KINU reported that discrimination against women emerged in the form of differentiated pay scales, promotions, and types of work assigned to women.

The press and think tanks reported that while women were less likely than men to be assigned full-time jobs, they had more opportunity to work outside the socialist economy.

According to the KINU 2015 white paper, divorces were not approved without bribes.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship is derived from one's parents and, in some cases, birth within the country's territory.

Education: The law provides for 12 years of free compulsory education for all children. Reports indicated that authorities denied some children educational opportunities and subjected them to punishments and disadvantages as a result of the loyalty classification system and the principle of "collective retribution" for the transgressions of family members. NGO reports also noted some children were unable to attend school regularly because of hidden fees or insufficient food. NGOs reported that children in the total control zones of political prisons did not receive the same curriculum or quality of education.

Foreign visitors and academic sources reported that from the fifth grade schools subjected children to several hours a week of mandatory military training and that all children received political indoctrination.

Medical Care: It was not known whether boys and girls had equal access to state-provided medical care. Access to health care largely depended on loyalty to the government.

Child Abuse: Information about societal or familial abuse of children remained unavailable. The law states that a man who has sexual intercourse with a girl under age 15 shall be "punished gravely." There was no reporting on whether the government upheld this law.

Early and Forced Marriage: The law provides that the minimum ages for marriage are 18 for men and 17 for women.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: There were reports of trafficking in young girls to destinations outside the country. Little information was available regarding the sexual exploitation of children.

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Displaced Children: According to NGO reports, there were numerous street children, many of them orphans, who were denied entrance to public schools.

Institutionalized Children: There were reports of children born into kwanliso political prison camps as a result of "reward marriages" between inmates. Reports noted that authorities subjected these children to forced labor for up to 12 hours per day and did not allow them to leave the camps. Children living in prison camps were subjected to torture if they or a family member violated the prison rules.

International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

Anti-Semitism

There was no known Jewish population, and there were no reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

In 2013 the country announced that it modified its Person with Disability Protection Law in order to meet the international standards of rights for persons with disabilities. In the national report it presented during the May Universal Periodic Review, the government estimated persons with disabilities constituted 5.8 percent of the population.

While a 2003 law mandates equal access to public services for persons with disabilities, implementing legislation has not been enacted. Traditional social norms condone discrimination against persons with disabilities, including in the workplace (also see section 7.d.). Although veterans with disabilities were treated well, other persons with physical and mental disabilities reportedly were sent from Pyongyang to internal exile, quarantined within camps, and forcibly sterilized. Persons with disabilities experienced discrimination in accessing public life.

The Korean Federation for the Protection of the Disabled coordinated work with persons with disabilities countrywide.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child repeatedly expressed concern about de facto discrimination against children with disabilities and insufficient measures taken by the state to ensure these children had effective access to health, education, and social services.

The Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights 2013 report on the Status of Women's Rights in the Context of Socio-Economic Changes in the DPRK found that the birth of a baby with disabilities  regardless of circumstances  was considered a "curse," and doctors were poorly trained to diagnose and treat such persons. The report stated there were no welfare centers with specialized protection systems for those born with disabilities. Citizens' Alliance also cited reports that the country maintained a center (Hospital 8.3) for abandoned individuals with disabilities, where residents were subjected to chemical and biological testing.

UNICEF noted that very high levels of malnutrition indicated serious problems for both the physical growth and psychosocial development of young children. Final results from the 2012 National Nutrition Survey estimated 475,868 children (28 percent) were stunted and 68,225 children (4 percent) acutely malnourished. The report concluded that the acute nutritional status of children had improved moderately since 2009 when the last nationwide survey including nutrition indicators was carried out.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

There are no laws against consensual same-sex activity, but no information was available on discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. In April 2014 the Korean Central News Agency, the state news agency, denied the existence of consensual same-sex activity in the country and reported, "The practice can never be found in the DPRK boasting of sound mentality and good morals."

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

No information was available regarding discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The constitution provides for freedom of association, but workers do not have the right to form or join independent unions, strike, or bargain collectively. Unlawful assembly may result in five years of correctional labor. Although the law stipulates that employees working for foreign companies may form trade unions and that foreign enterprises must guarantee conditions for union activities, the law does not protect workers who might attempt to engage in union activities from employer retaliation, nor does it provide penalties for employers who interfere in union activities.

There were no known labor organizations other than those created and controlled by the government. The WPK purportedly represents the interests of all labor. The Central Committee of the WPK directly controls several labor organizations in the country, including the General Federation of Trade Unions of Korea and the Union of Agricultural Workers of Korea. Operating under this umbrella, unions functioned according to a classic Stalinist model, with responsibility for mobilizing workers to support production goals and for providing health, education, cultural, and welfare facilities.

The government controlled all aspects of employment, including assigning jobs and determining wages. Joint ventures and foreign-owned companies were required to hire their employees from government-vetted lists. Factory and farm workers were organized into councils, which had an effect on management decisions. The first special economic zone (SEZ) was established in the Rajin-Sonbong area in 1991. The same labor laws that apply in the rest of the country apply in the Rajin-Sonbong SEZ. The government selected the workers permitted to work in the SEZ. The government announced the establishment of 13 new SEZs in 2013, six additional SEZs in 2014, and two more SEZs during the year.

Under a special law that created the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC), located close to the demilitarized zone between the ROK and the DPRK, special regulations covering labor issues negotiated with the ROK are in effect for the management of labor in the area. Those regulations do not contain provisions that stipulate freedom of association or the right to bargain collectively. The government reportedly selects worker representatives in KIC workplaces, subject to the approval of South Korean company management (also see sections 7.b. and 7.e.).

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits forced or compulsory labor. Nonetheless, the government mobilized the population for construction and other labor projects. "Reformatory labor" and "re-education through labor," sometimes of entire families, have traditionally been common punishments for political offenses. Forced and compulsory labor in such activities as logging, mining, tending crops, and manufacturing continued to be the common fate of political prisoners. Re-education involved memorizing speeches by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

The law requires all citizens of working age to work and "strictly observe labor discipline and working hours." There were numerous reports that farms and factories did not pay wages or provide food to their workers. Forced labor continued to take place in brick making, cement manufacturing, coal mining, gold mining, logging, iron production, agriculture, and textile industries. NGOs reported authorities ordered some university students to abandon their studies to work on campus beautification projects early in the year.

According to reports from an NGO, during the implementation of short-term economic plans, factories and farms increased workers' hours and asked workers for contributions of grain and money to purchase supplies for renovations and repairs. By law failure to meet economic plan goals may result in two years of "labor correction." There were reports that workers were required to work at enterprises to which the government assigned them and that many of these workers were not compensated or undercompensated for their work. In addition in the Kaesong Industrial Complex, wages for North Korean workers were paid directly from South Korean companies to DPRK authorities. Though workers were reportedly aware of their monthly earnings as companies require them to sign time records acknowledging salaries paid to North Korean managers on their behalf, it remained unclear how much of these earnings were transferred to individual workers (also see section 7.e.).

The NGO Human Rights Watch reported that the government operated regional, local, or sub-district level "labor training centers" and forced detainees to work for short periods doing hard labor, receiving little food, and subject to abuse, including regular beatings. Authorities reportedly sent individuals to such centers if they were suspected of engaging in simple trading schemes or were unemployed.

There were an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 North Korean citizens working as overseas laborers, primarily in Russia and China. The UN Special Rapporteur on the DPRK noted that, while most were sent to Russia and China to work, they were also reportedly found in Algeria, Angola, Cambodia, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Oman, Poland, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Numerous NGOs noted that these citizens were in conditions of forced labor. NGO reports indicated the laborers were managed by the government as a matter of state policy and were under constant and close surveillance by DPRK security agents. Laborers worked between 12 and 16 hours per day, and sometimes up to 20 hours per day, with only one or two rest days per month. The average wage was stated as $120 to 150 per month, but in most cases employing firms paid salaries directly to the DPRK government, and it was not known how much of that salary the workers received. The government reportedly received in the low $100s of millions from this system per year. Wages reportedly were withheld until the laborers returned home after the completion of their three-year contracts, making them vulnerable to deception and exploitation by authorities.

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

By law the state prohibits work by children under age 16. Neither the general labor law nor Kaesong Industrial Complex labor law prohibits hazardous child labor. The law criminalizes forced child labor, but there were reports that such practices occurred.

Schoolchildren occasionally were sent to work in factories or fields for short periods to assist in completing special projects, such as snow removal on major roads, or meeting production goals. The NGO Human Rights Watch reported that the government required students to work without pay on farms twice a year, for one month at a time, during ploughing and seeding and again at harvest time. The effects of such forced labor on students included physical and psychological injuries, malnutrition, exhaustion, and growth deficiencies. Thousands of children were reportedly held and forced to work in labor camps alongside their parents.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

Although the law provides that all citizens "may enjoy equal rights in all spheres of state and public activities" and all "able-bodied persons may choose occupations in accordance with their wishes and skills," neither the general labor law nor Kaesong Industrial Complex labor law prohibits discrimination with respect to employment or occupation on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, language, sexual orientation, gender identity, HIV-positive status, or other communicable diseases. Although there is no direct reference to employment discrimination in the law, classification based on the songbun system has a bearing on equal employment opportunities and equal pay.

Although the law accords women equal social status and rights, societal and legal discrimination against women continued. A 2014 UN COI report noted that, despite the economic advancement of women, the state continued to discriminate against them and imposed many restrictions on the woman-dominated market. Persons with disabilities also faced employment discrimination.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

No reliable data were available on the minimum wage in state-owned industries. Monthly wages in some enterprises in the heavy industrial sectors as well as in the textile and garment sector reportedly increased from 3,000-4,000 won ($0.30-0.40) to 300,000 won ($30) in 2013, with approximately one-third of the wage paid in cash and the remainder in kind.

The law stipulates an eight-hour workday; however, some sources reported that laborers worked longer hours, perhaps including additional time for mandatory study of the writings of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The law provides all citizens with a "right to rest," including one day's rest per week (Sunday), paid leave, holidays, and access to sanitariums and rest homes funded at public expense; however, the state's willingness and ability to provide these services were unknown. Foreign diplomats reported that workers had 15 days of paid leave plus paid national holidays.

The law recognizes the state's responsibility for providing modern and hygienic working conditions. The law criminalizes the failure to heed "labor safety orders" pertaining to worker safety and workplace conditions, but only if the conditions result in the loss of lives or other "grave loss." Workers themselves do not have a designated right to remove themselves from hazardous working conditions.

Mandatory participation in mass events on holidays and practice sessions for such events sometimes compromised leave or rest from work Workers were often required to "celebrate" at least some part of public holidays with their work units and were able to spend an entire day with their families only if the holiday lasted two days. Failures to pay wages were common and reportedly drove some workers to seek income-generating activity in the informal or underground economy.

Many worksites were hazardous, and the industrial accident rate was high. Citizens labored under harsh conditions while working abroad for state-owned firms and under arrangements between the government and foreign firms (see section 7.b.).

According to the ROK government, 124 South Korean firms were operational at the KIC and nearly 54,000 North Korean workers were employed there. The DPRK's Central Special Zone Development Guidance Bureau typically provided labor candidates for selection by South Korean companies. Workers at the KIC did not have the right to choose their employers. Under an inter-Korean agreement, North Korean workers at the KIC reportedly earned a monthly basic minimum wage of $70.35 plus overtime (wages are set in U.S. dollars per KIC labor law), in total approximately $140 to $145 per month. In December 2014 North Korean authorities announced changes to regulations governing wage payments increases at the KIC, and in February, unilaterally moved to increase monthly wages by 5.18 percent, which clashed with an inter-Korean agreement to limit wage increases to 5 percent each year. In August both sides agreed to a 5 percent wage increase (up to $73.87) to be followed by additional benefits.

The KIC Management Committee, an agency supervised by the North Korean Central Special District General Bureau for the KIC, is responsible for administrative enforcement of KIC labor law. The committee may impose a fine of between $100 and $2,000 for labor law violations or suspend that employer's operations, if the employer has failed to heed prior committee warnings to remedy labor law infractions and the unlawful activity has resulted in "serious consequence."

It was difficult to determine what proportion of their earned wages workers ultimately took home. Although laws governing the KIC require direct payment in cash to the workers, their wages were in fact deposited into accounts controlled by the government, which withheld a portion for social insurance and other benefits and then remitted the balance (reportedly approximately 70 percent) to the workers in an unknown combination of "commodity supply cards" that could be exchanged for staple goods and won converted at the official exchange rate, which highly overvalued the won. Nevertheless, the KIC remained a highly sought-after place of employment.

Endnote: Note on Sourcing

The United States does not have diplomatic relations with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The DPRK does not allow representatives of foreign governments, journalists, or other invited guests the freedom of movement that would enable them to assess fully human rights conditions or confirm reported abuses. While information is becoming more readily available, some reports that rely on defector testimony can be dated because of the time lapse between departure from North Korea and contact with NGOs or officials able to document human rights conditions.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Costa Rica

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Costa Rica, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5716128115.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Costa Rica is a constitutional republic governed by a president and a unicameral legislative assembly directly elected in multiparty elections every four years. In April 2014 voters elected Luis Guillermo Solis of the Citizen Action Party (PAC) during a second round of elections. In legislative elections the PAC, Broad Front, and Social Christian Unity Party gained seats and formed a coalition that gave them control of the legislature. The National Liberation Party gained the largest number of seats, although the party did not achieve the required majority. All elections were generally considered free and fair. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the security forces.

Principal human rights abuses included harsh prison conditions and treatment, discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and infringement on the rights of indigenous people.

Other human rights concerns included trafficking in persons, particularly sex trafficking of children. Domestic violence against women and children was also an area of societal concern.

The government investigated and prosecuted officials who committed abuses; however, the overall conviction rate remained low.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings. The chief justice of the Supreme Court ordered a comprehensive investigation after a judicial investigative police (OIJ) officer died during an unauthorized training on May 14. An OIJ internal affairs preliminary report showed a pattern of abuses against agents during training courses, and the judicial internal affairs tribunal ordered a three-month suspension of five officers involved in the incident.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Although the constitution prohibits such practices and the government generally respected this prohibition, there were media reports that some government officials employed them. The government investigated, prosecuted, and punished agents responsible for confirmed cases of abuse.

On July 13, the new minister of justice ordered a modification of the protocol on the use of electric shock barriers in prisons and prohibited use of electric shock on individuals. On August 19, the Supreme Court ruled against the use of electric shock barriers after an inmate filed a habeas corpus petition.

The Ombudsman's Office recorded 115 complaints of police abuse, arbitrary detention, torture, and other inhuman or degrading treatment during the first six months of the year. Abuse by prison police was a recurring complaint, according to the Ombudsman's Office, but very few of the accusers followed through and registered their complaints at police stations.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison conditions were harsh due to overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, difficulties obtaining medical care, and violence among prisoners. Security and administrative staffing were insufficient to care for the needs of prisoners, including ensuring their personal safety. The Ministry of Justice was responsible for the prison system, while the Immigration Office ran the facility holding illegal migrants until they were deported or regularized their immigration status.

Physical Conditions: The prison population increased and exceeded the designed capacity of prisons by 54 percent as of June. On February 17, the Constitutional Chamber ordered the Ministry of Justice to submit information on overcrowding, after the former justice minister refused to provide it to a daily newspaper. Prison overcrowding made security and control difficult and contributed to health problems. Poor conditions included inadequate space for resting, deteriorated mattresses on the floor, and inadequate access to health services. Illegal narcotics were readily available in the prisons, and drug abuse was common.

As of June 30, the San Sebastian, Buen Pastor, Gerardo Rodriguez, La Reforma, San Rafael, San Carlos, Limon, Pococi Puntarenas, Liberia, Perez Zeledon, Cartago, and Centro Adulto Joven (at La Reforma) prisons remained overcrowded, with the population in pretrial detention experiencing the most overcrowding. Authorities held pretrial detainees with convicted prisoners on occasion. In San Sebastian, where most prisoners in pretrial detention were held, 1,279 prisoners lived in unsanitary conditions in a facility with a planned capacity of 611. On June 17, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court ordered the Ministry of Justice to relocate 160 convicted prisoners from the Gerardo Rodriguez prison to other facilities for convicted prisoners. The Ministry of Justice freed 961 no-risk prisoners during the first five months of the year and included them in a "trust regime," where they are required to spend some nights in prison as part of measures to lower overcrowding.

The detention center for undocumented migrants in Hatillo, a suburb of San Jose, was poorly ventilated, overcrowded at times, and had no recreation area. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the government ombudsman monitored detention conditions, with UNHCR visiting monthly and the ombudsman preparing annual reports. UNHCR provided human rights training to detention center staff.

The Ministry of Justice's Social Adaptation Division reported 23 deaths in closed regime centers in the first six months of the calendar year. Three of these deaths were homicides; the remainder were from natural causes.

Administration: Authorities permitted prisoners and detainees to submit complaints to authorities without censorship and request investigation of credible allegations of inhumane conditions. If complaints were not processed, prisoners could submit them to the Ombudsman's Office, which investigated all complaints at an administrative level. The Ombudsman's Office, through the national prevention mechanism against torture, periodically inspected all detention centers.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted independent monitoring of prison conditions by international and local human rights observers, including representatives from the Ombudsman's Office. Human rights observers could speak to prisoners and prison employees in confidence and without the presence of prison staff or other third parties.

Improvements: In July and August, the Ministry of Justice reported maintenance and minor repairs in all of the country's prison centers, including repair of a water pump at La Reforma and the construction of 30 cell spaces at Puntarenas prison and 80 spaces for the young adult's prison at La Reforma. On June 26, the Ministry of Justice announced actions taken to address overcrowding including investments to design new prison facilities and a new video monitoring system for La Reforma prison.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The constitution prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The country has no military forces. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the 13 agencies that have law enforcement components, including the judicial branch's Judicial Investigative Organization. The Ministry of Public Security is responsible for the uniformed police force, drug control police, border police, air wing, and coast guard. The Immigration Office of the Ministry of Interior is responsible for the immigration police. The Ministry of Public Works and Transportation supervises the traffic police, the Ministry of Environment supervises park police, and the Ministry of Justice manages the penitentiary police. Several municipalities manage municipal police forces. The government has mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption. There were no reports of impunity involving the security forces during the year. The number of licensed private security services was significantly greater than the number of police. There were no reports of impunity involving the private security forces during the year.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

The law requires issuance of judicial warrants before making arrests, except where probable cause is evident to the arresting officer. The law entitles a detainee to a judicial determination of the legality of detention during arraignment before a judge within 24 hours of arrest. The law provides for the right to post bail and prompt access to an attorney and family members. Authorities generally observed these rights. Indigent persons have access to a public attorney at government expense. Those without sufficient personal funds are also able to use the services of a public defender. With judicial authorization, authorities may hold a suspect incommunicado for 48 hours after arrest or, under special circumstances, for up to 10 days. Special circumstances include cases in which pretrial detention previously was ordered and there is reason to believe a suspect may reach an agreement with accomplices or may obstruct the investigation. Suspects were allowed access to attorneys immediately before submitting statements before a judge. Authorities promptly informed suspects of any offenses under investigation. Habeas corpus provides legal protection for citizens against threats from police; it also requires judges to give a clear explanation of the legal basis for detention of and evidence against a suspect.

Pretrial Detention: A criminal court may hold suspects in pretrial detention for up to one year, and the court of appeals may extend this period to two years in especially complex cases. The law requires a court review every three months of cases of suspects in pretrial detention to determine the appropriateness of continued detention. If a judge declares a case is related to organized crime, special procedural rules require that the period of pretrial detention not exceed 24 months (although the court of appeals may grant one extension not to exceed an additional 12 months). According to the Ministry of Justice, as of June 30, there were 3,286 persons in pretrial detention, constituting approximately 20 percent of the prison population. In some cases delays were due to pending criminal investigations. In other cases the delays were a result of court backlogs. In addition to pretrial detainees, more than 700 convicted prisoners were in detention awaiting sentencing at the end of 2014. In these cases delays were most frequently attributed to a pending appeal process or a verdict subject to and awaiting confirmation.

Amnesty: On June 4, President Solis pardoned two protesters who were arrested and charged in 2014 for obstructing a road in front of the president's residence.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The constitution provides for an independent judiciary, and the government generally respected judicial independence. The legal system faced many challenges, including significant delays in the adjudication of criminal cases and civil disputes and a growing workload.

Trial Procedures

The constitution and law provide for the right to a fair trial, and an independent judiciary generally enforced this right.

All defendants have the right to the presumption of innocence, to be informed promptly and in detail of the charges against them (with free interpretation as necessary), and to a fair and public trial without undue delay. All trials, except those that include juvenile defendants, are public. There are no jury trials. A single judge or a three-judge panel presides over trials, depending on the potential penalties arising from the charges. Trials that involve victims or witnesses who are minors are closed during the portion of the trial in which the minor is called to testify. Defendants have the right to be present during trial and consult an attorney of choice in a timely manner, or to have one provided at public expense. Defendants enjoy the right to adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense. The law provides detainees and attorneys access to government-held evidence, and during the trial defendants can confront adverse witnesses and present witnesses and evidence on their own behalf. Defendants have the right not to be compelled to testify or confess guilt. Defendants, if convicted, have the right to appeal. The law extends these rights to citizens and noncitizens alike. Fast-track courts, which prosecute cases when suspects are arrested on the spot for alleged transgressions, provide the same protections and rights as other courts.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

An independent and impartial judiciary presides over lawsuits in civil matters, including human rights violations. Administrative and judicial remedies for alleged wrongs are available to the public.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution prohibits such actions, and there were no reports the government failed to respect these prohibitions.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution provides for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respected these rights. An independent press, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of speech and press.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: Individuals were generally free to criticize the government openly without reprisal. The law limits hate speech in publications with regard to ethnic origin, race, or color.

Press and Media Freedoms: Independent media were active and expressed a wide variety of views without restriction. On April 9, the president removed the minister and vice minister of science, technology, and telecommunications from their positions for their roles in supervising the drafting of a controversial bill that would have placed restrictions on broadcast and electronic media.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports the government monitored private communications without appropriate legal authority. The International Telecommunication Union reported that 48 percent of individuals used the internet (2012) and 55 percent of households had internet access (2014).

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

The constitution provides for the freedoms of assembly and association, and the government generally respected these rights in practice.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution and law provide for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights. The government cooperated with UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, or other persons of concern.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law provides for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has established a system for providing protection to refugees, without restrictions on emigration or return of citizens. The law requires the directorate to process the claims within three months of receipt, but decisions took an average of five to six months. According to UNHCR, 7,118 persons of interest, including refugees, asylum seekers, and persons at risk of statelessness, lived in the country. The majority of refugees were from Colombia (308) and El Salvador (293).

Employment: Refugee regulations provide asylum seekers an opportunity to obtain work permits if they have to wait beyond the three months the law allows for a decision on their asylum claim. Few asylum seekers were able to exercise this right effectively. The refugee unit failed to process claims in a timely manner or to educate employers about this right effectively. The Appeals Tribunal, which adjudicates all migration appeals, had a backlog of 700 cases that it estimated would take three to four years to complete. The refugee unit issued 281 temporary work authorizations for asylum seekers from January to June.

Access to Basic Services: By law asylum seekers and refugees have access to public services, but access was often hampered by lack of knowledge about their status in the country and feelings of xenophobia among some service providers in certain cases. For example, Colombian asylum seekers and refugees frequently faced discrimination when attempting to enroll children in local schools or open a bank account. The government required refugees to buy public health insurance once they receive refugee status, but refugees in some instances could not afford the fees.

Asylum seekers received documents legalizing their status after appearing for an interview with the General Directorate of Immigration. The sheets of paper with attached photographs they received did not resemble other Costa Rican identity documents, so while authorities generally accepted them, many Costa Rican citizens did not. Upon receiving status, refugees could obtain an identity document similar to those used by nationals at a cost of $68 every two years.

Durable Solutions: In accordance with the comprehensive 2013-23 migration policy, the Immigration Office's Integration Division continued to promote the integration of refugees, including their integration into the labor market and education and health systems, and also continued ad hoc resettlement programs and returns where necessary. There were no resettlement or repatriation programs during the year. UNHCR and the Immigration Office implemented a corporate social responsibility program, "Living Integration," which encouraged companies to help with integration of refugees and asylum seekers holding work permits.

Temporary Protection: There were no programs for temporary protection beyond refugee status. Due to low recognition rates (approximately 31 percent of applicants received asylum during the first six months of the year), UNHCR had to consider a number of rejected asylum seekers as "persons of concern" in need of international protection. UNHCR provided support and access to integration programs to individuals still pursuing adjudication and appeals. The individuals requesting refugee status were mainly from Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, and El Salvador, and the majority of them were male adults.

Stateless Persons

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs cooperated with UNHCR efforts on statelessness with indigenous populations and reported the recognition of one person's status as stateless during the first six months of the year. There were no reports of stateless persons who were also refugees. There continued to be problems of statelessness of indigenous children and children of seasonal workers in the border areas with Panama and Nicaragua derived from the difficulties linked to birth registrations. Members of the Ngobe-Bugle indigenous group from Panama often worked on Costa Rican plantations and occasionally gave birth there. In these cases parents did not register Ngobe-Bugle children as Costa Rican citizens at birth because they did not think it necessary, although the children lacked registration in Panama as well. Approximately 1,200 children were affected. Government authorities worked together with UNHCR on a program of birth registration and provision of identification documents to stateless persons known as "Chiriticos." Mobile teams went to more than 2,000 remote coffee farms for case identification and registration. As a result, in the first five months of the project, authorities confirmed the nationality of more than 300 indigenous children, including registering several dozen births. Authorities identified and registered 2,975 individuals.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution and laws provide citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and citizens exercised that right.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: In April 2014 voters elected PAC's Luis Guillermo Solis president during a second round of elections, after no candidate achieved 40 percent of the first-round vote. Presidential and legislative elections are simultaneous. In legislative elections the National Liberation Party gained the most seats, but three parties  the PAC, Broad Front, and Social Christian Unity Party  gained enough seats in the 57-member legislative assembly to form a coalition that gave them control of the legislature. Observers considered the elections generally free and fair. The Organization of American States team that observed the elections noted that for the first time the election process included citizens voting from abroad.

Participation of Women and Minorities: Women and persons of African descent were represented in government, but indigenous people were not. The electoral code requires that a minimum of 50 percent of candidates for elective office be women, with their names placed alternately with men on the ballots by party slate. A woman served as second vice president. There were no indigenous members in the legislative assembly. Two Afro-Caribbean women were elected as legislators. An Afro-Caribbean woman headed the Limon Port Authority, an autonomous government institution.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, and the government generally implemented the law effectively. There were numerous reports of government corruption during the year.

Corruption: During the first six months of the year, the Ministry of Public Security received 310 requests for review of discipline, suspended 11 officers, and dismissed 24 of a total of approximately 13,100 uniformed police officers. Most of the suspensions occurred due to investigations related to breach of duty, negligence in performing duties, and failing drug tests. During the first six months of the year, authorities arrested one uniformed police officer, and judicial authorities sentenced three other officers, for involvement in criminal activity.

On October 29, the Comptroller General's Office denounced cases of mismanagement in the use of public funds for infrastructure projects. Separately, on May 12, the president dismissed his minister of culture and two vice-ministers after an international arts festival failed amid canceled events and presentations, following a series of failures in coordination and logistics. In July 2014 the Attorney General's Office began an investigation of the ministry's expenses over concerns regarding increased prices for contracts for previous festivals.

The public ethics solicitor, attorney general, comptroller general, and ombudsman are responsible for combating government corruption. The Public Ethics Solicitor's Office is responsible for taking the necessary administrative steps to prevent, detect, and eradicate corruption and to raise ethical and transparency standards in the public service. The Attorney General's Office includes an anticorruption unit responsible for the investigation and prosecution of cases involving public officials. The Judicial Inspection Tribunal is the organ of the judiciary responsible for investigating and sanctioning judicial misconduct.

Financial Disclosure: Public officials are subject to financial disclosure laws that require senior officials to submit sworn declarations of income, assets, and liabilities. The law requires income and asset disclosure by appointed and elected officials. The Comptroller General's Office monitors and verifies disclosures. The content of the declarations is not made available to the public. The law stipulates administrative sanctions for noncompliance and identifies which assets, liabilities, and interests public officials must declare. Officials are required to file a declaration annually and upon entering and leaving office.

Public Access to Information: The law provides for public access to government information, and the government generally implemented the law effectively, providing access for citizens and noncitizens, including foreign media. Authorities have 10 days to disclose or respond to a request for access. There are no processing fees or sanctions for noncompliance, although requesters can file a petition if their request is denied. Government institutions published reports that detailed their activities during the year. The Public Ethics Solicitor's Office provided regular training to public employees on public access to information. The Ombudsman's Office operated a webpage dedicated to enhancing transparency by improving citizens' access to public information.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A number of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials were often cooperative and responsive to their views.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The Ombudsman's Office reviews government action or inaction that affects citizens' rights and interests. The ombudsman is accountable to the legislative assembly, which appoints the person to a four-year term and funds office operations. The ombudsman participates in the drafting and approval of legislation, promotes good administration and transparency, and reports annually to the legislative assembly with nonbinding recommendations. A special committee of the legislative assembly studies and reports on problems relating to the violation of human rights, and it also reviews bills relating to human rights and international humanitarian law. In June the Ombudsman's Office organized a coalition of domestic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). During the year the Ombudsman's Office participated in meetings with representatives from Afro-descendant population and in hearings at the human rights committee of the legislative assembly to discuss racial discrimination issues.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution prohibits discrimination based on race, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, age, language, and HIV-positive status or other communicable diseases, and the government mostly enforced these prohibitions.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law criminalizes rape, including spousal rape and domestic violence, and provides penalties from 10 to 18 years in prison for rape. The length of the sentence depends on the victim's age and other factors, such as the assailant's use of violence or position of influence over the victim. The judicial branch generally enforced the law. According to a local NGO, rape was underreported due to fear of retribution, further violence, social stigma, or lack of trust in the judicial system.

According to the National Institute of Women (INAMU), the rape law applies to spousal rape, although such cases were much more difficult to prove. The judicial branch and the social security system implemented a program for collecting physical evidence in cases of rape so that victims could receive immediate attention. The program also provided training to emergency services staff. Four locations in the country, besides the judicial forensic clinic, had rape kits to collect and analyze physical evidence for use in prosecutions.

The government continued to identify domestic violence against women and children as a serious and growing societal problem. According to a local NGO, interfamily and other violence remained at "pandemic levels." The judicial branch reported that 51 women died from gender-based violence (including 22 femicides) during 2014. The law prohibits domestic violence and provides measures for the protection of domestic violence victims. Criminal penalties range from 10 to 100 days in prison for aggravated threats and up to 35 years in prison for aggravated homicide, including a sentence of 20 to 35 years for persons who kill their partners. If a domestic violence offender has no violent criminal record and is sentenced to fewer than three years' imprisonment, the law also provides for alternative sanctions, such as weekend detentions and assistance, including referrals for social services and rehabilitation. In 2014, according to the judicial branch's statistics office, authorities opened 19,296 cases of domestic violence throughout the country, but only 861 cases were tried and 496 persons sentenced for crimes of violence against women, including eight homicides.

INAMU assisted women and their children who were victims of domestic violence in its regional office in San Jose and in three other specialized centers and temporary shelters. INAMU maintained a domestic abuse hotline connected to the 911 emergency telephone system and provided counseling to 5,507 women and protection to 78 women during the first six months of the year.

The public prosecutor, police, and ombudsman have offices dedicated to addressing domestic violence.

Sexual Harassment: The law prohibits sexual harassment in the workplace and educational institutions, and the Ministry of Labor and Social Security generally enforced this prohibition. The law imposes penalties ranging from a letter of reprimand to dismissal, with more serious incidents subject to criminal prosecution. The Ombudsman's Office received 151 complaints of sexual harassment in the workplace between January and June. INAMU reported and assisted in investigating 31 cases of sexual harassment. According to INAMU, their awareness-raising campaigns led to an increase in the number of reports, compared with previous years.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of children; to manage their reproductive health; and to have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence. On September 10, the president signed an executive order legalizing in-vitro fertilization to comply with the 2012 Inter-American Court of Human Rights order to reinstate women's right to undergo the procedure. On October 7, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court admitted for review a complaint challenging the constitutionality of the executive order.

Discrimination: Women enjoy the same legal status and rights as men under family, labor, property, nationality, and inheritance laws. The law prohibits discrimination against women and obligates the government to promote political, economic, social, and cultural equality. The government maintained offices for gender-related problems in most ministries. The Ministry of Labor is responsible for investigating allegations of gender discrimination. INAMU implemented programs that promoted gender equality and publicized the rights of women, including the creation of a technical standard certification to promote gender equality. The law requires women and men receive equal pay for equal work. In 2012 the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC) estimated earnings for women were 93.4 percent of earned income for men.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship is obtained from birth within the country's territory or can be derived if either parent is Costa Rican. There were occasional problems encountered in the registration at birth of children born of migrant parents (see section 2.d.). Birth registration was not always automatic, and migrant children were especially at risk of statelessness since they did not have access to legal documents to establish their identity if their parents did not seek birth registration for them.

Child Abuse: Abuse of children continued to be a problem. The autonomous National Institute for Children (PANI) reported violence against children and adolescents continued to be a concern  5,008 cases from January to June, compared with 7,245 during the same period in 2014. From January to June, PANI assisted in 1,500 cases of physical abuse, 593 cases of sexual abuse, and 2,915 cases of emotional/psychological abuse. PANI identified public awareness campaigns launched during the year and a change in the recordkeeping system unifying psychological and emotional cases as possible causes for the increase in the number of cases. Traditional attitudes and the inclination to treat sexual and psychological abuse as misdemeanors hampered legal proceedings against persons accused of committing crimes against children. During the year the government established an interagency coordinating commission addressing violence against children, which identified priority cantons in need of assistance and defined an action plan to fight child abuse. PANI implemented awareness campaigns to prevent abuse, neglect, and commercial sexual exploitation.

Early and Forced Marriage: The minimum legal age of marriage is 18, or 15 with parental consent. During the year INAMU continued implementing an awareness campaign to prevent adult-minor relationships and to inform about the legal consequences.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The minimum age of consensual sex is 15 years. The law criminalizes the commercial sexual exploitation of children and provides sentences of up to 16 years in prison for violations. The law provides for sentences of two to 10 years in prison for statutory rape and three to eight years in prison for child pornography. Sentences are lengthier in aggravated circumstances; for example, rape involving physical violence or a victim under the age of 13 is punishable by 10 to 16 years' imprisonment. The government, security officials, and child advocacy organizations acknowledged that commercial sexual exploitation of children was a serious problem. From January to June, PANI reported 32 cases of commercial sexual exploitation of minors. PANI belongs to the executive branch and works with a different database, which includes all complaints filed of alleged cases, than the one for the judicial branch, which includes prosecuted cases only. In 2014 the judicial branch's statistics office reported eight cases of sex with minors with payment involved and four convictions. The government identified child sex tourism as a serious problem.

International Child Abductions: The country is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For information see the Department of State's report on compliance at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/legal/compliance.html and country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/country/costa-rica.html.

Anti-Semitism

The Jewish Zionist Center estimated there were 3,000 Jews in the country. There were no reports of anti-Semitic acts. In September the Simon Wiesenthal Center called for an investigation into a shop in San Jose that was selling Nazi collectibles, including soldier uniforms, helmets, medals, Hitler hero pins, Holocaust denial books, and concentration camp prisoners' clothing. According to reports the government had no power to close the business since no specific laws ban the sale or purchase of Nazi or anti-Semitic merchandise. The shop owner reportedly removed all Nazi items from the store after receiving threats to his property.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The constitution and law prohibit discrimination against persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, or mental disabilities in employment, education, air travel and other transportation, access to health care, or the provision of other state services; however, the government did not effectively enforce the law. Discriminatory practices were reported in access to education, employment, information, public buildings, and transportation. On May 26, the president signed the law creating the National Council of Persons with Disabilities, the government entity, accountable to the Ministry of Labor, in which NGOs will have a more active role. The law establishes a clear right to employment for persons with disabilities and sets a hiring quota of 5 percent of vacant positions in the public sector, but the government did not implement it. Presidential orders restricted the creation of new job positions, but the executive order did not establish which positions were exclusively for persons with disabilities (see section 7.d.).

Although the law mandates access to buildings for persons with disabilities, the government did not enforce this provision, and many buildings remained inaccessible to persons with disabilities. Both the government policy on education and the national plan for higher education establish the right to education for students with special needs. The Ministry of Education operated a program for persons with disabilities that provided support services to students with special needs in both regular and special education systems.

A political party, Accessibility without Exclusion, represented the interests of persons with disabilities and held one seat in the legislative assembly. The Supreme Elections Tribunal took measures (voting procedures, facilities, materials, and trained personnel) to provide for fully accessible elections for all persons with disabilities.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

In 2014 INEC reported that 28 percent of inhabitants in the heavily Afro-descendant Atlantic region lived in poverty, compared with the national average of 22 percent. The Atlantic region had one of the country's highest rates of unemployment (11 percent in 2013) and crime (23 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2013, or more than double the national average of 10 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants). Lack of government investment in infrastructure resulted in Limon, a province with twice the national average of Afro-descendant population, being one of the least developed areas of the country.

According to the Ombudsman's Office, the country lacked an adequate legal framework to ensure the right mechanisms to combat discrimination, to facilitate the adoption of affirmative action for individuals who suffer discrimination, and to establish sanctions for those who commit discriminatory acts. On June 11, however, the legislative assembly approved a constitutional amendment, and the president signed it into law on August 26, declaring the country a multiethnic and multicultural nation. On January 21, the president appointed a presidential commissioner for Afro-descendant affairs.

There were sporadic reports of discrimination, including racial/ethnic discrimination, as well as labor discrimination, usually directed against Nicaraguans (see section 7.d.).

Indigenous People

Land ownership continued to be a problem in most indigenous territories. Violent incidents at the Bribri Salitre reservation over land disputes between indigenous inhabitants and nonindigenous reemerged during the year. The law protects reserve land as the collective, nontransferable property in 24 indigenous territories; however, 38 percent of that land was in nonindigenous hands. On April 30, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued precautionary measures in favor of the Teribe and Bribri of Salitre indigenous peoples; later that month the government announced improved security measures in the territories. On September 10, the president designated the minister of justice as the new spokesperson responsible for the dialogue process in the area.

The 2013 dialogue that the government established with indigenous groups to address land ownership, community public policies, and development; to discuss a bill for the autonomous development of indigenous peoples; and to conduct analysis of the right to consult with indigenous peoples was at an impasse during the year. On July 6, the head of the state power company, Carlos Obregon, met with representatives of the Terraba community, after which the government announced it would draft a protocol of procedures for consultation with the specific indigenous groups affected by the Diquis Hydroelectric Project. The government organized preparatory meetings, but as of October 30, it did not begin drafting a protocol. The Office of the UN Resident Coordinator continued to carry out training activities for government and indigenous leaders related to the indigenous peoples' right to consultation.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The constitution establishes that all persons are equal before the law and no discrimination contrary to human dignity shall be practiced. Discrimination against persons based on sexual orientation and gender identity is prohibited by a series of executive orders and workplace policies but not by national laws. Transgender persons were able to change their gender on their identity documents through an administrative law judge's decision and later registration in the Civil Registry Office.

There were cases of discrimination against persons based on sexual orientation, ranging from employment, police abuse, and education to access to health-care services (see section 7.d.). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) organizations operated freely and lobbied for legal reforms. In June a family court recognized the first "gay common-law marriage," basing the decision on a provision of the 2013 youth law that includes a provision legalizing domestic partnership benefits only for persons between 18 and 35 years of age. The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court was studying a constitutional challenge against that provision of the youth law but as of October 30 did not issue a ruling. A 2010 Supreme Court ruling stated that the decision on same-sex civil unions is a legislative one; at year's end, however, the legislative assembly had not passed legislation addressing that issue.

On May 15, the government issued an executive order to discipline public employees for discriminating against persons based on their sexual orientation or gender identity and establishing that government institutions must recognize same-sex couples and their family members in matters related to leave of absence.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

Although the law prohibits discrimination based on HIV/AIDS in health care, employment, and education, discrimination occurred. A local NGO reported unfriendliness of health-care professionals toward HIV-positive patients and lack of enforcement of labor regulations related to HIV-positive individuals. There were reports of some attitudes in health centers that were interpreted as discriminatory or stigmatizing against sex workers and transgender persons.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides for the right of workers to form and join independent unions, bargain collectively, and conduct legal strikes, and the government respected these rights. The law prohibits antiunion discrimination and provides for reinstatement of workers fired for union activity. Restrictions on the minimum number of employees (12) needed to form a union may have hampered freedom of association in small enterprises. The law permits foreign workers to join unions but prohibits them from holding positions of authority within the unions, except for foreign workers who are married to citizens of the country and have legally resided in the country for at least five years.

The legislative assembly had not established the minimum number of employees in an enterprise required to support a strike for it to be legal. A 2011 Constitutional Court decision requires that the assembly establish a percentage not to exceed 50 percent. The law restricts the right to strike of workers in services designated as essential by the government, including in sectors such as oil refineries and ports that are not recognized as essential services under international standards. President Solis in 2014 attempted to authorize legislation that would loosen these restrictions, but on August 7, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court annulled the executive action, thus upholding the restriction on strikes in essential services.

The law requires employers to initiate the bargaining process with a trade union if more than one-third of the total workforce, including union and nonunion members, requests collective bargaining, but the law also permits direct bargaining agreements with nonunionized workers. The law also permits the formation of "solidarity associations," which were often organized by employers and have legal status under the constitution. The law prohibits such associations from representing workers in collective bargaining negotiations or in any other way that assumes the functions or inhibits the formation of trade unions.

Although public-sector employees are permitted to bargain collectively, the Supreme Court held that some fringe benefits received by certain public employees were disproportionate and unreasonable, and it repealed sections of collective bargaining agreements between public-sector unions and government agencies, thus restricting this right in practice.

The government generally enforced applicable laws, although procedures were subject to lengthy delays and appeals. The law establishes administrative sanctions (fines and fees) for infractions. The amount of fines and fees is determined by the severity of the infraction and based on the minimum wage. Penalties were not sufficient to deter violations, since cases were resolved by a labor court through a lengthy process, not by the labor inspectorate. Labor inspectors are not allowed to impose fines directly because by law it is the exclusive competence of the judiciary. Concerns about slow proceedings in cases of antiunion discrimination continued to be a problem. The International Trade Union Confederation noted the reinstatement process for workers who were unfairly dismissed lasted approximately 2.5 years. Such delays in cases of antiunion discrimination were often due to numerous appeals.

Freedom of association and collective bargaining were generally respected. Labor unions asserted solidarity associations conducted negotiations, and employers sometimes required membership in a solidarity association as a condition for employment. Such associations, to the extent that they displaced trade unions, affected the independence of workers' organizations from employers' influence and infringed on the right to organize and bargain collectively. In recent years the International Labor Organization (ILO) reported an expansion of direct bargaining agreements between employers and nonunionized workers and noted its concern that the number of collective bargaining agreements in the private sector continued to be low when compared with a high number of direct agreements with nonunionized workers. The Labor Ministry reported not receiving any complaints related to collective bargaining during the first six months of the year.

There were some instances of employers firing employees who attempted to unionize. The Ministry of Labor reported three complaints of antiunion discrimination in the first six months of the year. There were reports some employers also preferred to use "flexible," or short-term, contracts, making it difficult for workers to organize and collectively bargain. Migrant workers in agriculture frequently were hired on short-term contracts (five months) through intermediaries, faced antiunion discrimination and challenges in organizing, and were often more vulnerable to labor exploitation.

The ILO noted there were no trade unions operating in the country's export-processing zones and identified the zones as a hostile environment for organizing. Labor unions asserted that efforts by workers in export-processing zones to organize were met with illegal employment termination, threats, and intimidation and that some employers maintained blacklists of workers identified as activists.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor. The law establishes criminal penalties for trafficking in persons, including forced labor, with sentences of between four and eight years in prison for forcing a person to perform work the law considers a "detriment to his/her fundamental human rights." The penalty is increased to between six and 12 years if the victim is a minor or a vulnerable person, including any individual who has no alternative but to be subjected to exploitation. As of May 28, the National Coalition Against Trafficking in Persons, created by a 2013 law and composed of technical representatives from government agencies and civil society organizations, approved the implementing regulations of the new law, but violators could nonetheless be punished per its provisions. Penalties were generally sufficient to deter violations. In some instances, however, the government failed to enforce the law effectively in responding to cases of forced labor, and there were reports that such practices occurred. The Prosecutor's Office reported six investigations of allegations involving trafficking in persons for purposes of labor and sexual exploitation opened during 2014. On October 20, the Judicial Investigative Police reported that two alleged cases of labor exploitation of adults were under investigation.

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The child and adolescence code prohibits labor of all children under the age of 15 without exceptions; it supersedes the minimum working age of 12 established in the labor code, which by year's end had not been amended to reflect this change. Adolescents between the ages of 15 and 18 may work a maximum of six hours daily and 36 hours weekly. The law prohibits night work and overtime for minors. The law prohibits children under the age of 18 from engaging in hazardous or unhealthy activities and specifies a list of hazardous occupations. The government generally enforced laws against child labor effectively in the formal sector but not in the informal sector.

Child labor occurred primarily in the informal economy, especially in the agricultural, commercial, and industrial sectors. The worst forms of child labor occurred in agriculture on small third-party farms in the formal sector and on family farms in the informal sector. Forced child labor reportedly occurred in some service sectors, such as construction, fishing, street vending, and domestic service, and some children were subject to commercial sexual exploitation (see section 6, Children).

While the Ministry of Labor is responsible for enforcing and taking administrative actions (fines and fees) against possible violations of, or lack of compliance with, child labor laws, the Prosecutor's Office intervenes in cases regarding the worst forms of child labor. The amount of fines and fees is determined by the severity of the infraction and based on an equation derived from the minimum wage. Penalties were generally sufficient to deter violations.

In 2014 the Office for the Eradication of Child Labor (OATIA) assisted 300 working minors, of whom 216 were referred to government agencies for inclusion in social programs. OATIA detected 109 minors in hazardous jobs in agriculture and fishing or working more than six hours a day in the commercial sector. The government continued to implement programming to eliminate illegal child labor and the worst forms of child labor by providing individual assistance through visits, interviews, and inspections to schools and workplaces.

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

The laws and regulations prohibit discrimination regarding race, color, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, disability, sexual orientation and/or gender identity, age, language, HIV-positive status, or other communicable diseases status. The government effectively enforced these laws and regulations and penalties were sufficient to deter violations. The Labor Ministry reported four cases of discrimination; as of June 30, two cases were under investigation.

Discrimination in employment and occupation occurred with respect to persons with disabilities and the LGBTI population (see section 6). Discrimination against migrant workers occurred (see section 7.e.). The Ombudsman's Office received no reports of discrimination against migrant workers at year's end; however, the permanent forum on migrant and refugee populations commented about situations of discrimination or violation of labor rights of migrant workers, but without providing any specific details.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The wage council of the Ministry of Labor sets the minimum wage scale for the public and private sectors twice a year. Monthly minimum wages for the private sector ranged from 170, 901 colones ($320) for domestic workers to 615,083 colones ($1,150) for university graduates since July 1. According to INEC in 2014 the poverty line was 105,976 colones ($199) in urban areas and 81,344 colones ($153) in rural areas. The national minimum wage applied for both Costa Rican and migrant workers. The law sets workday hours, overtime remuneration, days of rest, and annual vacation rights. Workers generally may work a maximum of eight hours a day or 48 hours weekly. All workers are entitled to one day of rest after six consecutive days of work and annual paid vacations. The law provides that workers be paid for overtime work at a rate 50 percent above their stipulated wage or salary. Although there is no statutory prohibition against compulsory overtime, the labor code stipulates the workday may not exceed 12 hours. Law 9095 covers labor exploitation as part of antitrafficking law and imposes penalties upon employers who exploit workers in conditions that are a "detriment to [a worker's] fundamental human rights" but that may not rise to the level of forced labor.

The Ministry of Labor's Inspection Directorate (DNI) was responsible for labor inspection, in collaboration with the Social Security Agency and the National Insurance Institute. The DNI employed 102 labor inspectors who investigated all types of labor violations. According to the Ministry of Labor, inspections occurred in response to complaints, per advanced scheduling, and at random in specific regions or activities.

The Labor Ministry generally addressed complaints by sending inspection teams to investigate and coordinate with each other on follow-up actions. Inspectors cannot fine or sanction employers who do not comply with labor laws; rather, they investigate and refer noncompliance results to labor courts. The process of fining companies or compelling employers to pay back wages or overtime could take years.

The Ministry of Labor generally enforced minimum wages effectively in the San Jose area but was not as effective in enforcing the minimum wage laws in rural areas, particularly where large numbers of migrants were employed. The ministry publicly recognized that many workers, including in the formal sector, received less than the minimum wage.

The government continued to implement the campaign for minimum wage compliance launched in 2010. According to the ministry, 31 percent of the economically active population in the nonagricultural sector was in the informal economy. In August 2014 the government launched a national strategy for employment and production that aimed at expanding decent work opportunities  particularly for working mothers and persons with disabilities  and creating 217,000 formal sector jobs in four years. In November 2014 the government relaunched the National Employment Program to assist the unemployed by providing them not only conditional cash transfers but also training, guidance, and support on entrepreneurial ideas.

The government maintains a dedicated authority to enforce occupational safety and health (OSH) standards. The national council of occupational health and safety of the Labor Ministry is a tripartite regulatory authority on OSH standards and includes government, employer, and employee representation. According to labor organizations, the government did not enforce these standards effectively in either the formal or the informal sectors.

Observers expressed concern about exploitative working conditions in fisheries, small businesses, and agricultural activities. Unions also reported systematic violations of labor rights and provisions concerning working conditions, overtime, and wages in the export-processing zones. Labor unions reported overtime pay violations, such as nonpayment of wages and mandatory overtime, were common in the private sector and particularly in export-processing zones. There were reports agricultural workers, particularly migrant laborers in the pineapple industry, worked in unsafe conditions, including exposure to hazardous chemicals without proper training. The national insurance company reported 58,003 cases of workplace-related illnesses and injuries and 180 workplace fatalities from January to June.

Workers seeking to remove themselves from situations that endangered their health or safety could not do so without jeopardy to their employment. According to the Labor Ministry, authorities would have no regulatory basis for protecting employees in this situation, since the law transfers the responsibility to the employer.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Chad

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Chad, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5716128a9.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Chad is a centralized republic in which the executive branch dominates the legislature and judiciary. In 2011 President Idriss Deby Itno, leader of the Patriotic Salvation Movement (MPS), was elected to a fourth term with 83.6 percent of valid votes. Major opposition figures boycotted the presidential election, which had a low voter turnout. In 2011 legislative elections, the ruling MPS party won 118 of the National Assembly's 188 seats. International observers deemed both elections legitimate and credible. Civilian authorities did not always maintain effective control of the security forces.

The most significant human rights problems were security force abuse, harsh prison conditions, and discrimination and violence against women and children.

Other human rights abuses included: arbitrary killings by security forces and use of torture; arbitrary arrest and detention, incommunicado detention, and lengthy pretrial detention; denial of fair public trial; and executive influence on the judiciary. The government restricted the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and movement. The MPS party dominated the political process, and government corruption remained a problem. Societal abuse of refugees was a problem. Child abuse, including female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) occurred, as did early and forced marriage and the sexual exploitation of children. Trafficking in persons, particularly children, was a problem. Interethnic discrimination occurred, as did discrimination against persons with disabilities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) individuals; and persons with HIV/AIDS. Forced labor, particularly forced child labor, occurred.

The government seldom took steps to prosecute or punish officials who committed abuses, whether in the security services or elsewhere in the government, and impunity was a problem.

Members of Boko Haram, the Nigerian militant terrorist group, killed numerous persons in the country, often using suicide bombers (see section 1.a.).

There were reports that Chadian troops operating with multinational forces in the Central African Republic (CAR) sexually abused boys in an IDP camp in 2013 and 2014.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary and unlawful killings, including by torture. Human rights groups credibly accused the security forces of killing and torturing with impunity, according to Freedom House.

On August 18, gendarmes at the Radina substation in the 5th district of N'Djamena detained Abakar Mahamat Nour and his friend during a routine search. The two were taken to a substation, where they were beaten and subsequently died. According to their parents, the two had refused to flee when a military vehicle approached, stating they had done nothing wrong. According to Le Progres newspaper, the hospital medical certificate attributed the death of one of the victims to "chest trauma caused by beating causing thoracic hemorrhage;" the certificate attributed the death of the second victim to "injuries caused by torture." Authorities arrested the gendarmes responsible for the beatings, and an investigation was reportedly underway at year's end.

Security forces used excessive force to disperse demonstrators, which resulted in deaths. For example, in November 2014 widespread demonstrations in N'Djamena, Moundou, and Sarh occurred to protest commodity shortages, increased fuel prices, and nonpayment of public workers' salaries. Protesters attacked state-owned vehicles and private gas stations and marched toward government buildings before being dispersed with live fire from police. According to Freedom House, between three and five persons were killed. Authorities arrested and briefly detained dozens of demonstrators.

Attacks by Boko Haram terrorists from Nigeria resulted in numerous civilian casualties during the year. In response government authorities executed at least 10 Boko Haram members after expedited trials (see section 1.e.).

On October 10, five suicide bombers  believed to be members of Boko Haram  killed 36 persons and injured approximately 50 others in the western village of Baga Sola in what appeared to be coordinated attacks on the market and the Kousseri camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs). According to government spokesperson Hassan Sylla Bakari, the five suicide bombers  including two women, two children, and a man  also were killed in the attacks.

In March 2014 Chadian troops operating as part of the International Support Mission to the Central African Republic (MISCA) in the CAR fired into a civilian crowd at a Bangui market, killing at least 28 persons and injuring numerous others. According to Amnesty International (AI), Chadian troops were involved in other incidents, including the killings of civilians in February 2014 in Bangui and the towns of Boali and Damra. In April 2014 the government announced the withdrawal of its forces from MISCA.

Interethnic violence resulted in deaths (see section 6).

b. Disappearance

While there were no reports of politically motivated disappearances, abductions, or kidnappings, there were allegations the government held detainees incommunicado.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution and law prohibit such practices, but there were reports government officials employed them (see section 1.a.). In its Annual Report 2013, AI noted that "cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishments, including beatings, continued to be widely practiced by security forces and prison guards with almost total impunity."

Security forces used excessive force against demonstrators (see section 2.b.).

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Conditions in the country's 45 prisons remained harsh and potentially life threatening due to food shortages, gross overcrowding, physical abuse, and inadequate sanitary conditions and medical care.

Physical Conditions: The government had incomplete statistics on the number of prisoners and detainees; no information from other sources was available. Authorities did not separate boys from adult male prisoners and sometimes held children with their inmate mothers. Authorities did not always separate male and female prisoners, and pretrial detainees were held with convicted prisoners.

Local NGOs reported that prisons were seriously overcrowded and that food, potable water, sanitation, and health services were inadequate. Prison guards were not regularly paid and sometimes released prisoners if bribed. Provisions for ventilation and temperature control, lighting, and access to potable water were inadequate or nonexistent. The law stipulates that a doctor must visit each prison three times a week, but this provision was not respected. Forced labor in prisons occurred.

No estimates of deaths in prisons were available.

Harsh conditions frequently resulted in prison escapes and revolts, according to AI. In November 2014, for example, a revolt erupted in Amsinene Prison after prison authorities prohibited some prisoners from staying in the prison courtyard and restricted them to their cells. In solidarity with the inmates, other prisoners protested in the main courtyard. Gendarmes guarding the prison fired on prisoners, resulting in at least one death and several injuries.

In response to such incidents and the absence of regular monitoring, from January 19 to February 6, a commission organized by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights conducted an inspection of judicial and prison administration as well as prison facilities. At the Amsinene Prison, designed to hold 300 inmates, the inspection team found 1,300 detainees. The commission discovered detainee cases that had been pending for years as well as cases in which persons were incarcerated without commitment orders. In its final report, the commission recommended the adoption of a number of measures, including: holding special hearings to reduce time-in-trial detention; releasing of prisoners whose remand time exceeded the penalty; and constructing a separate facility for juvenile detainees along with a social reintegration center. On September 21, following the publication of the commission's report, the minister of justice visited Amsinene Prison and ordered the release of 10 detainees whose pretrial detention period exceeded the legally prescribed 48 hours.

Regional prisons were crumbling, overcrowded, and without adequate protection for women and youths. They reportedly received insufficient funding to feed inmates.

Administration: Due to inadequate recordkeeping and management, some individuals remained in prison after completing their sentences or after courts ordered their release. Authorities did not use alternatives to sentencing for nonviolent offenders. There was no prison ombudsman, and there were only limited mechanisms by which prisoners could submit complaints about prison conditions to judicial authorities.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to visit prisons under the control of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, and the ICRC conducted such visits during the year. On October 26, the government granted prison access to a local human rights organization, Christian Action for the Abolition of Torture.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The constitution and law prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, but the government did not always observe these prohibitions. In its Annual Report 2013, AI stated, "People continued to be arrested and detained without charge." Police and gendarmes also detained individuals for civil matters, contrary to law. Unlike in previous years, there were no reports that detainees were held in police cells or in secret detention facilities.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The military (ANT), gendarmerie, national police, the Chadian National Nomadic Guard (GNNT), and the National Security Agency (ANS) are responsible for internal security. A specialized gendarmerie unit, the Detachment for the Protection of Humanitarian Workers and Refugees (DPHR), is responsible for security in refugee camps. The ANT reports to the Ministry of Defense. The national police, GNNT, and DPHR are part of the Ministry of Public Security and Immigration. The ANS reports to the national security advisor. The National Antipoaching and Environmental Protection Mobile Brigade is part of the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Customs Mobile Brigade is part of the Ministry of Finance and Budget.

Security forces were corrupt and involved in extortion. According to media reports, police also were involved in violence and arms trafficking. Impunity was a problem. Members of the Judicial Police, an office within the national police with arrest authority, did not always enforce domestic court orders against military personnel or members of their own ethnic groups. There were isolated reports of former soldiers posing as active-duty soldiers and committing crimes with government-issued weapons.

Two gendarmerie entities, the National Judiciary Investigations Section and the Special Intervention Squad of the Gendarmerie, investigate all gendarmerie, GNNT, and army killings to determine whether they occurred in the line of duty or were otherwise justifiable. The Judicial Police investigate police killings.

The government continued efforts to reform police forces and, in partnership with the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), trained police and gendarmes on child rights.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

Although the law requires a judge to sign and issue arrest warrants before arrests may take place, this did not always occur. By law detainees must be charged within 48 hours or released, unless the district attorney authorizes an extension of detention for investigative purposes. Nevertheless, authorities often did not make judicial determinations promptly. The law provides for bail and access to counsel, but there were cases in which authorities provided neither. In some cases authorities denied detainees visits from doctors. While the law provides for legal counsel for indigent defendants and prompt access to family members, this often did not occur. Authorities occasionally held detainees incommunicado.

Arbitrary Arrest: Security forces arbitrarily arrested journalists, demonstrators, critics of the government, and other individuals (see sections 1.a. and 2.a.).

Pretrial Detention: Lengthy pretrial detention remained a problem, despite government efforts to address it. Authorities sometimes held pretrial detainees without charge for years, particularly for felonies allegedly committed in the provinces. The length of detention sometimes equaled or exceeded the sentence for conviction of the alleged crime. Lengthy pretrial detention resulted from a weak judiciary.

On September 21, the justice minister ordered the release of 10 pretrial detainees in Amsinene Prison due to arbitrary and lengthy pretrial detention (see section 1.c.).

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

Although the constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary, the judiciary was underfunded, overburdened, and subject to executive interference and corruption. Members of the judiciary sometimes received death threats or were demoted for not acquiescing to pressure from officials. Government officials, particularly members of the military, often were able to avoid prosecution. Courts generally were weak and in some areas nonexistent. Judicial authorities did not always respect court orders.

A judicial oversight commission has the power to investigate judicial decisions and address suspected miscarriages of justice. The president appointed its members, increasing executive control of the judiciary.

The legal system is based on French civil law, but the constitution recognizes traditional law in locales where it is long established, provided local law does not interfere with public order or constitutional provisions for equality of citizens. Courts tended to blend the formal French-derived legal code with traditional practices. Customary law often superseded Napoleonic law. Residents of rural areas and refugee/internally displaced persons (IDPs) camps often lacked access to formal judicial institutions, and legal reference texts were not available outside the capital or in Arabic. In minor civil cases, the population often relied on traditional courts presided over by village chiefs, canton chiefs, or sultans. Penalties in traditional courts sometimes depended on the clan affiliations of the victim and perpetrator. Decisions of traditional courts may be appealed to a formal court.

A 2011 law provides that crimes committed by military members be tried by a military court, although as of year's end the government had not established military courts. In the absence of permanent military courts, military trials occurred on an ad hoc basis. Members of the military were generally tried in civilian courts.

Trial Procedures

The law provides for a presumption of innocence. Defendants have the right to be informed promptly and in detail of the charges against them and are provided free interpretation if needed. Trials are public. Only criminal trials used juries, but not in politically sensitive cases. While defendants have the right to consult an attorney in a timely manner, this did not always occur. By law indigent persons have the right to legal counsel at public expense in all cases, although this seldom occurred. Human rights groups sometimes provided free counsel to indigent clients. Defendants have the right to adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense. Defendants and their attorneys have the right to question witnesses and present witnesses and evidence. Defendants and their attorneys may obtain government-held evidence if their cases are not politically sensitive, but administrative delays were common, in part because documents often were handwritten. Defendants have the right not to be compelled to testify or confess guilt, but the government did not always respect this right. Defendants have the right to appeal court decisions. The law extends these rights to all citizens.

Boko Haram suicide bombings in N'Djamena on June 15 and July 12 resulted in 67 deaths and numerous injuries. On August 26, in an extraordinary session called by the president of the Appellate Court specifically to hear the case, the Supreme Court began the trial of 10 Boko Haram members suspected of planning and facilitating the bombings. On August 28, the trial was moved to an undisclosed location and closed to media and the public due to concerns that Boko Haram might attack the trial venue or attempt to free the defendants. The defendants, who were represented by government-appointed lawyers, were found guilty the same day under Articles 4, 5, 87, and 89 of the penal code. On August 29, the 10 were executed by firing squad.

Local leaders may apply the Islamic concept of "dia," which involves a payment to the family of a crime victim. The practice was common in Muslim areas. Non-Muslim groups challenged the practice, asserting that it was unconstitutional.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

Lawsuits for human rights violations may be brought before a penal court, but compensation is addressed by a civil court. Administrative and judicial remedies, such as mediation, are available. The judiciary was not always independent or impartial in civil matters.

Property Restitution

On September 19, the government signed an agreement regarding compensation with lawyers representing the victims of the government's 2013 urban renewal project, in which hundreds of families were left homeless after authorities appropriated private property and demolished homes. Critics alleged the government failed to give proper notification or follow the proper legal requirements to compensate evictees.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

Although the constitution provides for the right to privacy and inviolability of the home, the government did not always respect these rights. Authorities entered homes without judicial authorization and seized private property without due process. Security forces routinely stopped citizens to extort money or confiscate goods.

A government decree prohibits the possession and use of satellite telephones.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution provides for freedom of opinion, expression, and press, but the government severely restricted these rights, according to Freedom House. Authorities used threats and legal prosecutions to curb critical reporting.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: The law prohibits "inciting racial, ethnic, or religious hatred," which is punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine of one to three million Central African (CFA) francs ($1,730 to $5,200). Despite a 2010 media law that abolished prison sentences for defamation or insult, authorities arrested and detained persons for defamation.

On June 7, a local radio station in Moundou broadcast an interview with Djeralar Miankeol, who criticized corrupt practices in the judiciary. On June 15, security forces arrested Moundou for "contempt of court." He was subsequently sentenced to a two-year prison term and a fine of 100,000 CFA francs ($173). On July 28, the Appellate Court of Moundou overturned the earlier verdict and dropped all charges against Miankeol.

Press and Media Freedoms: The government subsidized the only daily newspaper and owned a biweekly newspaper. Government and opposition newspapers had limited readership outside the capital due to low literacy rates and lack of distribution in rural areas.

Radio remained the most important medium of mass communication. The government-owned Radiodiffusion Nationale Tchadienne had several stations. There were numerous private radio stations that broadcast throughout the country that paid an initial licensing fee of CFA 250,000 ($417). Many of them were owned by religious and community organizations. Radio call-in programs broadcast the views of callers that included open criticism of the government.

The country had three television stations.

Violence and Harassment: Authorities arrested and beat journalists. For example, on October 2, security forces arrested without warrant Stephane Mbairabe Ouaye, publisher of Haut Parleur, an independent newspaper published twice a month. While held in a detention center attached to the N'Djamena police headquarters, Mbairabe was handcuffed, blindfolded, and beaten by plainclothes police to make him reveal his sources for an article entitled "Salay Deby, national thief"; the article criticized the president and his brother, Director General of Customs Salay Deby. Mbairabe, who was released, was awaiting trial on libel charges at year's end. In a separate case in July, after publication of an article entitled "Itno Brothers Maintain the Dictatorship," Mbairabe received a court summons "in order to find him guilty of the charges against him and order him to pay Salay Deby such amount as will be fixed at the bar." Commenting on the July case, Reporters without Borders (RSF) stated, "It is a strange summons to a hearing that predicts the defendant's guilt in advance."

Foreign correspondents also were harassed and abused. Laurent Correau  a correspondent with Radio France International who was in the country to report on the trial of former president Hissene Habre  claimed police "brutalized" him before taking him to the airport in N'Djamena, from where he was deported on June 23. Correau was preparing a series of reports on the Habre trial.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: The government penalized those who published items counter to government guidelines, sometimes by closing media outlets. Some journalists and publishers practiced self-censorship.

On July 10, an N'Djamena judge ordered the closure of the weekly Abba Garde at the request of the High Council for Communication (HCC), which acted in response to a complaint by the President's Office, according to RSF. A separate court order issued the same day demanded the seizure of all copies of issue No. 109. Both orders, according to RSF, appeared to be in response to an article entitled "Idriss Deby, the Hitler of Modern Times," which was published in issue No. 108. Commenting on the closure, RSF noted, "Regardless of what the journalist wrote, the decision to close the newspaper contravenes Chad's 2010 press law, article 44 of which states that such a decision can only be taken by a court after a hearing in which the affected party is able to defend itself." RSF also noted that the seizure was clearly arbitrary, since it was the preceding issue that had the offending article. According to Moussaye Avenir de la Tchire, the publisher of Abba Garde, harassment of the newspaper began on July 5, when ANS members tried to arrest him in the southeastern town of Bongor. De la Tchire, who fled the country for one month and then returned, had been arrested and detained for four months in 2013.

The HCC occasionally warned journalists to practice "responsible" journalism or face fines. For example, on September 19, HCC president Moustafa Ali Alifei warned members of the Chadian Press Agency that the HCC would sanction any media organ "that does not respect ethics and professional conduct or calls for revolt."

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no reports the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority.

According to multiple sources, internet penetration was between 17 and 20 percent.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Freedom of Assembly

Although the constitution provides for freedom of assembly, the government did not always respect this right. The law requires organizers to notify the Ministry of Public Security and Immigration five days in advance of demonstrations, although groups that provided advance notice did not always receive permission. After the June and July Boko Haram attacks, the ministry often denied permission for large gatherings, including social events such as weddings and funerals.

In September police twice blocked scheduled press conferences by Nadjo Kaina, president of the National Union of Chadian Students. According to organizers, police provided no reason for the actions. There were violent student protests earlier in the year.

Security forces used excessive force to disperse demonstrators. For example, on May 9, in N'Djamena, members of the Mobile Police Intervention Group (GMIP) violently dispersed students demonstrating against a law requiring persons riding motorbikes to wear helmets. On May 13, the court began trying 14 GMIP officers charged with "illegitimate violence and intentional injury." On May 20, the court sentenced eight of the 14 officers to six-month prison terms and fines of 50,000 CFA ($87) each for "illegitimate violence and intentional injury;" the six other officers were released. No charges were filed against the GMIP commander who ordered the use of excessive force against the demonstrators, prompting a walkout by attorneys representing the students. Adoum Moussa, attorney for the GMIP, also complained that the GMIP commander was not charged, noting that the indicted officers claimed they were acting under his orders.

Freedom of Association

The constitution and law provide for freedom of association, and the government generally respected this right. While an ordinance requires the Ministry of Public Security and Immigration to provide prior authorization before an association, including a labor union, may be formed, there were no reports the ordinance was enforced. The ordinance also allows for the immediate administrative dissolution of an association and permits authorities to monitor association funds.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

Although the constitution and law provide for freedom of movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, the government imposed limits on these rights.

The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to internally displaced persons, refugees, and other persons of concern.

In-country Movement: Lack of security in the east, primarily due to armed banditry, occasionally hindered the ability of humanitarian organizations to provide services to refugees. Unlike in previous years, however, there were no reports of carjacking and armed robberies.

Emigration and Repatriation: Beginning in 2013 approximately 100,000 persons with claims to Chadian nationality fled violence in the CAR and returned to the country. Most had not resided in the country and had no clear ties to their families' areas of origin. Approximately 45,000 returnees remained in camps at year's end and were assisted by humanitarian organizations and the government.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law does not provide for asylum or refugee status. The government, however, has established a system for the protection of refugees.

In 2013 the government adopted the National Birth Registry Code, which provides for birth certificates for children born to refugees and requires the registration of all births and deaths of foreign persons in the country (see section 6). After a 12-month suspension due to administrative problems, the government in September resumed issuing birth certificates.

Approximately 300,000 Sudanese refugees from Darfur remained in the country, including a small number of refugees fleeing fighting during the year; most were located in 13 camps along the eastern border with Sudan. An estimated 66,000 refugees from the CAR lived primarily in five camps in the south.

Refugee Abuse: There were reports of rape, attempted rape, and sexual and gender-based violence in refugee camps. The perpetrators were either fellow refugees or unknown individuals living near the camps. Authorities only occasionally prosecuted perpetrators of sexual violence. The judicial system did not provide consistent and predictable recourse or legal protection, and traditional legal systems were subject to ethnic variations. To fill the void, UNHCR enlisted the support of a local NGO to support the cases of refugees throughout the judicial process. The DPHR was unable to consistently provide humanitarian escorts due to lack of resources but was generally effective in providing protection for refugee camps.

Due to the absence of rebel activity and the implementation of education campaigns in camps, there were no reports of recruitment in refugee camps, including by Central African militias.

There were reports that Chadian troops operating with multinational forces in the CAR sexually abused boys in an IDP camp in 2013 and 2014 (see section 6).

Access to Basic Services: Although local communities hosted tens of thousands of newly arrived refugees, antirefugee sentiment existed due to competition for local resources, such as wood, water, and grazing land. Refugees also received goods and services not available to the local population, and refugee children at times had better access to education and health services than those in the surrounding local populations. Many humanitarian organizations included host communities in their programming to mitigate this tension.

Durable Solutions: The government pledged to extend citizenship to tens of thousands of returnees, most of whom had resided in the CAR since birth, although only 3 percent of Chadian returnees from the CAR held Chadian nationality documents by year's end. The government allowed referral for resettlement in foreign countries of refugees from the CAR and Sudan.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution and law provide citizens with the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, but the government at times limited this right. The executive branch dominated the other branches of government.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: International observers, including the EU, African Union, Organization Internationale de la Francophonie, and government and opposition-affiliated civil society actors, deemed the 2011 legislative elections legitimate and credible. There was no election-related violence or evidence of a systematic effort to deny voters their right to choose freely. Security and government officials generally maintained a neutral posture during the election campaign. The presidential vote in 2011 occurred without violence or incident. Local groups, however, criticized the lack of participation by the three opposition candidates and low voter turnout.

In May the Coalition for the Defense of the Constitution, the main opposition coalition, joined the National Framework for Political Dialogue, responsible for overseeing preparations for the 2015 parliamentary and 2016 presidential elections. The government agreed to implement a biometric voter registration system in advance of the next election cycle and provided 500 million CFA francs ($947,000) in financing.

Following an August 12 pilot census, authorities on August 24 began registering Chadians abroad. For the biometric census of citizens living in the country, the Independent National Electoral Commission had 2,220 biometric enrollment kits to cover 8,000 census centers.

Political Parties and Political Participation: There were 139 registered political parties, of which more than 100 were associated with the dominant MPS party.

Opposition leaders accused the government of denying them funds and equal broadcast time on state-run media.

Participation of Women and Minorities: The law prohibits the government from discriminating on the basis of ethnicity, but ethnicity influenced government appointments and political alliances. Political parties and groups generally had readily identifiable regional or ethnic bases. Northerners, particularly members of the Zaghawa ethnic group, were overrepresented in key institutions, including the military officer corps, elite military units, and the presidential staff.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, but authorities did not implement the law effectively, and corruption was pervasive at all levels of government. Based on the World Bank's most recent Worldwide Governance Indicators, corruption remained a severe problem.

Corruption: In February the National Assembly convened an extraordinary session to review a request to impeach Atteib Doutoum, the former minister of finance and budget, and Baiwong Djibergui Rosine, the former minister of social action and current minister of agriculture and environment. The two ministers, who were under investigation by the Ministry of Good Governance, were suspected of corruption and embezzlement during their former tenures. The National Assembly created two ad hoc committees to investigate further, and both ministers were ultimately acquitted on recommendation of the committees.

Local human rights organizations reported police extorted and verbally abused motorists. Security forces arbitrarily arrested travelers on pretexts of minor traffic violations.

Judicial corruption was a problem and hindered effective law enforcement.

Financial Disclosure: Public officials are subject to financial disclosure laws, but the laws do not specify sanctions for noncompliance.

Public Access to Information: The law does not provide for public access to government information, although the government provided such access to government-employed journalists. Independent journalists stated they were not provided sufficient access to government information. The government's budget was publicly available in printed form upon request from the Ministry of Finance and Budget and included revenue and expenditure data. In 2014 the government also launched a website providing revenue and expenditure data.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A number of domestic and international human rights groups operated in the country, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials were sometimes cooperative and responsive to their views.

The United Nations or Other International Bodies: According to AI in June 2014 security forces arrested two members of the UN Panel of Experts on the CAR at a border post in the CAR. The UN panel reported that its experts, who were conducting investigations, identified themselves and explained their mandate, privileges, and immunities but that they were forcibly driven from the border post to the town of Gore, where they were detained for four hours before being escorted back to the border and released.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights coordinated efforts by local and international NGOs to protect human rights. Local NGOs reported the ministry functioned independently but was underfunded and had limited effectiveness.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

Although the constitution and law prohibit discrimination based on place of origin, race, gender, religion, political opinion, or social status, the government did not effectively enforce these provisions.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: Rape is prohibited and punishable by imprisonment. Nevertheless rape  including rape of female refugees  was a problem (see section 2.d.). No reliable data on the extent of rape were available. The law does not specifically address spousal rape. Police often detained alleged perpetrators, but rape cases usually were not tried. Authorities fined and released most suspects. Communities sometimes compelled rape victims to marry their attackers.

Although the law prohibits violence against women, domestic violence, including spousal abuse, was widely reported. Police rarely intervened, and women had limited legal recourse, although they could report cases of violence and abuse to local human rights organizations. The government did not provide psychosocial services for victims, although family or traditional authorities often provided assistance.

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: The law prohibits FGM/C for girls and women, but the practice remained widespread, particularly in rural areas. According to 2015 UNICEF statistics, 44 percent of girls and women had undergone excision, with rates as high as 90 to 100 percent in some regions. Practitioners performed all three types of FGM/C  clitoridectomy, excision, and infibulation. Infibulation  the least common but most severe and dangerous type  was confined largely to the Eastern Region, which borders Sudan. FGM/C was performed prior to puberty, usually around age six, as a rite of passage.

By law FGM/C may be prosecuted as a form of assault and charges may be brought against the parents of victims, medical practitioners, or others involved. Nevertheless, the lack of specific penalties hindered prosecution, and authorities prosecuted no cases during the year.

The Ministry of Women, Early Childhood Protection and National Solidarity is responsible for coordinating activities to combat FGM/C. The government, with assistance from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), conducted public awareness campaigns to discourage FGM/C and highlight its dangers. The campaign encouraged the public to speak out against FGM/C and other abuse of women and girls.

Sexual Harassment: The law does not prohibit sexual harassment, which occurred.

Reproductive Rights: The law provides for the right of couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children, manage their reproductive health, and have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence. Many persons, however, lacked access to reproductive information or care, particularly in rural areas. The UNFPA estimated only 3 percent of women used any form of contraception; according to 2014 statistics from the National Institute of Statistics, 5 percent of married women used modern contraceptive methods. According to UN estimates, skilled personnel attended only 17 percent of births, although the institute reported 22 percent of births occurred in a health center. The maternal mortality rate was 860 deaths per 100,000 live births. Factors contributing to maternal mortality included adolescent pregnancies, multiple closely spaced births, and lack of access to medical care. The country had a severe shortage of health-care providers (fewer than 400 physicians) and a significant shortage of nurses, midwives, hospital staff, and specialists, such as obstetricians. Prenatal care remained limited, particularly in rural areas. Low immunization rates and poor postnatal education were problems.

Discrimination: Although property and inheritance laws provide the same legal status and rights for women as for men, family law discriminates against women, and discrimination against and exploitation of women were widespread. Local leaders settled most inheritance disputes in favor of men, according to traditional practice. Women did not have equal opportunities for education and training, making it difficult for them to compete for formal sector jobs. Women suffered discrimination in access to employment, housing, credit, and pay equity for substantially similar work and in owning or managing businesses (see section 7.d.). The law does not address polygyny; men may opt at any time to marry additional wives under Islamic law. In such cases the first wife has the right to request that her marriage be dissolved but must repay her bride price.

On February 25, the government staffed the House of the Chadian Woman, established in 2014 for women to have a venue to discuss women's rights issues and participate in the national decision-making process. In August the Ministry of Women, Social Action, and National Solidarity was renamed the Ministry of Women, Early Childhood Protection, and National Solidarity. The ministry established a Directorate of Gender Issues to oversee the House of the Chadian Woman; the directorate also provided public outreach on gender issues.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship is derived from birth within the country's territory and from one's parents. The government did not register all births immediately; children without birth certificates were allowed to enroll in schools.

The government began to implement the 2013 National Registry Code, which requires all children, including refugees, to have a birth certificate issued in their place of birth (see section 2.d.). Prior to passage of the law, children born to refugees from the CAR were not considered citizens, although they were provided birth certificates. Children born to refugees from elsewhere were not considered citizens and generally were not provided birth certificates.

Education: Although primary education is tuition-free, universal, and compulsory between ages six and 11, parent-teacher associations often hired and paid community teachers, and parents also were required to pay for textbooks, except in some rural areas. Parents often were required to pay tuition for public secondary education. According to the most recent World Bank Development Indicators database, six girls attended primary school for every 10 boys. Most children did not attend secondary school.

Human rights organizations cited the problem of the "mouhadjirin," migrant children who attended certain Islamic schools and whose teachers forced them to beg for food and money. There was no reliable estimate of the number of mouhadjirin.

Child Abuse: Child abuse remained a problem, but no data were available on its extent. The Ministry of Women, Early Childhood Protection, and National Solidarity is responsible for the protection of children.

Early and Forced Marriage: On June 30, the National Assembly ratified a law that sets the minimum age for marriage at 18. The law precludes invoking the consent of the minor spouse to justify child marriage and prescribes sentences of five to 10 years' imprisonment and fines of 500,000 to 5,000,000 CFA ($867 to $8,670) for persons convicted of perpetrating child marriage. According to a study conducted by the Ministry of Women, Early Childhood Protection and National Solidarity in the regions of Mandou, Ouaddai, and Tandjile, 68 percent of girls were married before age 18; 29 percent were married before age 15.

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting : See information for girls under age 18 in the women's section above.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The law prohibits the prostitution of children, with punishments of five to 10 years' imprisonment and fines up to 970,000 CFA francs ($1,680) for conviction. The law prohibits sexual relations with girls under age 14, even if married, but authorities rarely enforced the ban. The law criminalizes the use, procuring, or offering of a child for the production of pornography.

Soldiers participating in the multinational force in the CAR were reported to have sexually exploited children. In April abuses committed between December 2013 and June 2014 by members of the French, Chadian, and Equatorial Guinean multinational forces were made public, implicating them in allegations of sexual abuse of boys in the IDP camp near the M'Poko airport in Bangui. Although the government of France reportedly opened an investigation, neither the governments of Chad nor Equatorial Guinea  both of which had committed to investigating those allegations  had issued progress reports, findings, or conclusions by year's end, and no soldiers had been held accountable. Djibrine Dopalto Oumar, the commander of the Chadian contingent in the CAR, formally denied the charges against his soldiers, saying, "So far it is only suspicion and this is not the first time that the Chadian army was falsely accused in this country."

Child Soldiers: In July 2014 the United Nations removed the country from the Secretary-General's Annual Report on Children and Armed Conflict, its list of countries with children in armed conflict. The delisting, which concerned both recruitment and use of children, followed joint government-UNICEF verification visits in 2013 to all eight ANT military zones and was based on the government's progress in implementing the 2011 Child Soldiers Action Plan signed with the United Nations.

International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For information see the Department of State's report on compliance at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/english/legal/compliance.html.

Anti-Semitism

There was no known Jewish community, and there were no reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The law prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities, although it does not specify the type of disability or whether the prohibition against discrimination extends to employment, education, air travel and other transportation, access to health care, or the provision of other state services. The government did not effectively enforce the law. There are no laws that provide for access to public buildings for persons with disabilities. The government operated education, employment, and therapy programs for persons with disabilities.

Children with physical disabilities may attend primary, secondary, and higher education institutions. The government supported schools for children with vision or mental disabilities.

In conjunction with NGOs, such as the Support Group for the Disabled in Chad, the government annually sponsored a day of activities to raise awareness of the rights of persons with disabilities. The Ministry of Women, Early Childhood Protection, and National Solidarity is responsible for protecting the rights of persons with disabilities.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

There were approximately 200 ethnic groups speaking more than 120 languages and dialects. Most ethnic groups were affiliated with one of two regional and cultural traditions: Arabs and Muslims in the north, center, and east; and Christian or traditional religious groups in the south. Internal migration resulted in the integration of these groups in some areas.

Interethnic violence occurred and often involved contesting scarce arable land. For example, on October 16, at Peni in the region of Mandoul, 17 persons were killed and six injured in a land dispute between farmers and herders.

Most ethnic groups practiced societal discrimination, which was evident in patterns of employment.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The law prohibits but does not define "unnatural acts." In September 2014 the Council of Ministers approved a draft revision of the penal code for debate in the National Assembly. One of the proposed amendments criminalized homosexual acts with 15-20 years' imprisonment and a fine of between 50,000 and 500,000 CFA francs ($87-$870) as punishment for violations. The government subsequently withdrew the draft penal code from National Assembly consideration for further review, but the revisions remained pending at year's end.

Unlike in the previous year there were no reports of violence toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community.

There were no LGBTI organizations in the country.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

The law provides individuals with HIV/AIDS the same rights as other persons and requires the government to provide information, education, and access to tests and treatment for HIV/AIDS. Persons with HIV/AIDS reported discrimination, and government officials did not always provide information on their rights and treatment options. According to the Chadian Women Lawyers' Association, women sometimes were accused of passing HIV to their husbands and were threatened by family members with judicial action or banishment. The first lady spoke openly on the issue of HIV/AIDS and criticized discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law allows all employees except members of the armed forces to form unions of their choice, if authorized by the Ministry of Public Security and Immigration, which may order the dissolution of a union. The law allows unions to organize and bargain collectively. The law recognizes the right to strike but restricts the right of civil servants and employees of state enterprises to do so. The law requires a 72-hour notification before a strike. Civil servants and employees of state enterprises, including civil servants and teachers, must complete a mediation process before initiating a strike. Employees of several public entities deemed essential must continue to provide a certain level of services during a strike. The law permits imprisonment with hard labor as punishment for participation in an illegal strike. While there are no restrictions on collective bargaining, the law authorizes the government to intervene under certain circumstances. The labor code prohibits antiunion discrimination and explicitly covers all workers, including foreign and irregular workers. Union members reported these protections were not always respected.

More than 90 percent of employees in the formal sector belonged to unions. The majority of workers were self-employed and nonunionized, working as cultivators or herders. State-owned enterprises dominated many sectors of the formal economy, and the government remained the largest employer. Unions were officially independent of both the government and political parties, although some unions were unofficially linked through members' affiliation with political parties.

The government effectively protected freedom of association and collective bargaining, although both were subject to delays, primarily due to administrative difficulties in convening key officials for negotiations. There were no reports of restrictions on collective bargaining or punishment of workers for participating in illegal strikes. The government protected the rights of Chadian employees of the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation, demanding the reinstatement of employees and union leaders terminated for striking.

There were no NGOs specifically dedicated to labor issues, but local human rights organizations often addressed labor concerns, particularly in lobbying against child labor.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The constitution provides for protection against all forms of slavery. The law prohibits forced or compulsory labor, including by children. The minimum age for military recruitment is 18; the minimum age for conscription is 20. The law prohibits the use of child soldiers.

Article 5 of the labor code prohibits forced labor and servitude. Penalties, which range from six days' to three months' imprisonment and a fine of 147,000 to 294,000 CFA francs ($255 to $510), or up to 882,000 CFA francs ($1, 530) for repeat offenders, were not sufficient to deter violations.

Forced labor, particularly forced child labor, occurred in the informal sector. Children and adults in rural areas were involved in forced agricultural labor and, in urban areas, forced domestic servitude.

There are no penalties for forced prison labor, which was common, according to human rights NGOs.

Resources, inspections, and remediation with regard to forced labor were inadequate.

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The labor code stipulates that the minimum age for employment is 14. The law provides exceptions for light work in agriculture and domestic service at age 12. The legal minimum age for employment, a lack of schooling opportunities in some areas, and tribal initiation practices contributed to a general acceptance of child labor for children who were 14 or older.

The Ministry of Labor deployed inspectors throughout the country. Labor inspectors may refer cases to the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights for prosecution. The ministry provided training to these inspectors on children's issues. Inadequate budget and staffing, lack of worker knowledge of their rights, and corruption impeded effective enforcement.

The Office of Labor Inspection is responsible for enforcement of child labor laws and policies, but authorities did not prosecute any cases during the year. Police sometimes took extrajudicial action against traffickers and child labor offenders. Traditional leaders also sometimes meted out traditional punishments, such as ostracism.

Labor laws only apply to work in formal enterprises; they do not protect children working in informal activities, such as domestic service. Penalties for breaking child labor laws were not sufficient to deter violations. Penalties range from six days' to three months' imprisonment and a fine of 147,000 to 294,000 CFA francs ($255 to $510), or up to 882,000 CFA francs ($1, 530) for repeat offenders. By law penalties are not incurred "if the breach was the result of an error as to a child's age, if the error was not the employer's fault."

While the government did not have a comprehensive plan to eliminate the worst forms of child labor it worked with UNICEF and NGOs to increase public awareness of child labor. In addition, efforts continued to educate parents and civil society on the dangers of child labor, particularly for child herders.

Child laborers were subjected to domestic servitude, forced begging, and forced labor in cattle herding, agriculture, fishing, and street vending. Chadian children were also found in forced cattle herding in Cameroon, the CAR, and Nigeria. Child herders often lived in substandard conditions without access to school or proper nutrition. Their parents and herders generally agreed on an informal contract for the child's labor that included a small monthly salary and a goat after six months or a cow at the end of a year. Local NGOs reported, however, that compensation often was not paid. According to the Chadian Women Lawyers' Association, girls sold or forced into child marriages were forced by their husbands into domestic servitude and agricultural labor.

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

The law and labor regulations prohibit employment or wage discrimination based on race, religion, gender, age, nationality, or membership in a union. There are no laws preventing employment discrimination based on disability, sexual orientation or gender identity, HIV-positive status or having other communicable diseases, or social status. Discrimination occurred based on the above categories with respect to employment or occupation.

Women generally were not permitted to work at night, more than 12 hours a day, or in jobs that could present moral or physical danger. Persons with disabilities frequently were victims of employment discrimination.

Workers may file discrimination complaints with the Office of the Labor Inspector, which conducts an investigation and subsequently may mediate between the worker and employer. If mediation fails, the case is forwarded to the labor court for a public hearing. The final decision and amount of any fine depend on the gravity of the case  147,000 to 294,000 CFA francs ($255 to $510) for an initial offense, and fines of 288,000 to 882,000 CFA francs ($500 to $1,530) or six to 10 days in prison for a subsequent offense. The penalties were not always sufficient to deter violations.

The government did not effectively enforce these laws and regulations. Although the law prohibits discrimination based on nationality, foreign nationals often had difficulty obtaining work permits, earned lower wages, and had poor working conditions.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The minimum wage was 60,000 CFA francs ($104) a month, but it was not effectively enforced. The law limits most employment to 39 hours per week, with overtime paid for additional hours. Agricultural work is limited to 2,400 hours per year, an average of 46 hours per week. All workers are entitled to uninterrupted rest periods of between 24 and 48 hours per week. The labor code mandates occupational health and safety standards and gives inspectors the authority to enforce them. The labor code explicitly covers all workers, including foreign and illegal workers.

Violations of safety and health standards may lead to penalties ranging from approximately 75,000 to 300,000 CFA francs ($130 to $520). Penalties for second offenses may include fines of more than 500,000 CFA francs ($867) and between one and 10 days' imprisonment. The Office of the General Inspectorate of the Ministry of Labor has responsibility for the enforcement of the minimum wage, work hour, and occupational health and safety standards.

Nearly all private sector and state-owned firms paid at least the minimum wage, but it was largely ignored in the informal sector. Salary arrears remained a problem for some private sector employees.

Workers did not always avail themselves of their rights concerning work hour limits, largely because they preferred the additional pay. The 20 labor inspectors in the Ministry of Public Works were insufficient to enforce the law.

Multinational companies generally met the government's acceptable occupational health safety standards. Workers have the right to remove themselves from dangerous working conditions, but they generally did not do so.

Public sector employees sometimes filed complaints of wage-related violations, such as arrears of salaries and bonuses or complaints of low wages.

The government did not effectively enforce the law, and authorities did not always respect legal protections for foreign and irregular workers. The civil service and local private companies occasionally disregarded occupational health and safety standards. Local private companies and public offices often had substandard conditions, including a lack of ventilation, fire protection, and health and safety protection.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Canada

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Canada, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5716128b12d.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Canada is a constitutional monarchy with a federal parliamentary government. In a free and fair multiparty federal election held in October, the Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau, won a majority of seats in the federal parliament and formed a government. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the security forces.

The principal human rights problems included violence against women, disparities in living conditions between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples, and trafficking in persons.

The government took steps to investigate, prosecute, and punish all officials who committed violations, whether in the security forces or elsewhere in the government.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were no reports the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The law prohibits such practices, and there were no reports that government officials employed them.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison and detention center conditions generally met international standards.

Physical Conditions: According to the governmental statistical agency's most recent figures, in 2013-14 there were approximately 37,800 inmates, pretrial detainees, and remand prisoners in federal and provincial correctional institutions, which had an official capacity of 38,604. The national double-bunking rate (the practice of confining two inmates in a cell designed for one) in federal facilities was 19.2 percent in 2013-14.

The federal correctional investigator's report for 2013-14 identified increasing recourse to "administrative segregation" or solitary confinement by federal correctional services to manage crowded institutions and high-needs inmates as a concern. The correctional investigator, an independent prison ombudsman, urged authorities to cap the time inmates spend in segregation and to develop a policy framework to guide the use of segregation. In January civil liberties and prisoners' rights groups filed separate constitutional challenges in the British Columbia Supreme Court and the Ontario Superior Court against the federal government for its practice of solitary confinement in federal institutions. The groups alleged that prolonged segregation violates constitutional rights to life, liberty, and security of the person; constitutes cruel and inhumane treatment; and discriminates against mentally ill and aboriginal inmates. In March the Ontario government announced it would review the use of solitary confinement in its provincial correctional system. In August a report by the Ontario advocate for children and youth stated Ontario's use of solitary confinement for periods of more than 24 hours in provincial youth detention facilities falls short of international standards and called for a ban on the practice.

The Correctional Investigator's Office reported 23 non-natural deaths (including suicide) in federal custody in 2013-14, the latest available figures. The report also cited that Aboriginals continued to be overrepresented in the prison system. The press reported three deaths in federal prisons in Nova Scotia during the year, the same number as in the previous five years combined.

Administration: Independent authorities investigated credible allegations of inhuman behavior and documented the results of such investigations in a publicly accessible manner.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted visits by independent nongovernmental human rights observers.

Improvements: In March the Ontario government released recommendations to reform screening and treatment protocols for female inmates with mental illness in provincial jails and improve training for staff. The recommendations formed part of a 2013 human rights settlement awarded to a female inmate who argued the province discriminated against her by failing to treat her mental illness and placing her in solitary confinement. Ontario's Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services had until September 2016 to implement the recommendations.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The law prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

National, provincial, and municipal police forces maintain internal security. The armed forces are responsible for external security but in exceptional cases may exercise some domestic security responsibility at the formal request of civilian provincial authorities. The federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) reports to the Department of Public Safety and the armed forces report to the Department of National Defense. Provincial and municipal police report to their respective provincial authorities. The Canada Border Services Agency reports to the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness and is responsible for enforcing immigration law. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the RCMP and provincial and municipal police forces, and the government has effective mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption. There were no reports of impunity involving the security forces during the year. Authorities investigated and publicly reported all fatalities that resulted from police action or in police custody.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

Authorities generally apprehended persons openly with warrants. A judge can issue a warrant after being satisfied a criminal offense might have been committed. A person arrested for a criminal offense has the right to a prompt, independent judicial determination of the legality of the detention. Authorities respected this right in practice. Authorities provided detainees with timely information of the reason for the arrest and ensured prompt access to a lawyer of the detainees' choice or, if the detainee was indigent, one provided by the state without restriction. Bail generally was available. Suspects were not detained incommunicado or held under house arrest, and they have the right to have the validity of the detention determined by habeas corpus and to be released if the detention was not lawful.

In July the government amended the law to permit judges to issue preemptive peace bonds and apprehend individuals who authorities reasonably believe may carry out terrorist activities. Judges may also issue recognizances to detain persons and impose bail conditions if authorities deem the restrictions likely to prevent terrorist activity. Authorities may hold persons under preventive detention under recognizance for up to seven days, subject to periodic judicial review. Restrictions may include limits on travel and surrender of passports. Use of peace bonds and recognizance for counterterrorism purposes is subject to annual reporting requirements to the federal parliament.

Pretrial Detention: Authorities released detainees immediately after they were charged, unless a judge deemed continued detention necessary to ensure the detainee's attendance in court, for the protection or safety of the public, or due to the gravity of the offense. Persons subject to continued detention have the right to judicial review of their status at regular intervals. According to reports by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Ontario ombudsman, overly strict conditions for bail and incarceration for breaches of bail conditions for minor, nonviolent offenses contributed to trial delays and overcrowding in provincial pretrial detention facilities.

The government may detain or deport noncitizens on national security grounds with an immigration security certificate. The government issues certificates on the basis of confidential evidence presented to two cabinet ministers by intelligence or police agencies and reviewed by a federal court judge who determines "reasonableness" and upholds or revokes the certificate. A judge may order an individual detained during the security-certificate determination process if the government considers that the individual presents a danger to national security or is unlikely to appear at the proceeding for removal. The judge may impose conditions on release into the community, including monitoring. Individuals subject to a security certificate may see a summary of confidential evidence against them. Authorities must provide full disclosure to court-appointed, security-cleared lawyers (special advocates), who can review and challenge the evidence on behalf of these individuals but not share or discuss the material with them. The law establishes strict rules on the disclosure and use of secret evidence, prohibits the use of evidence if there are reasonable grounds to believe authorities obtained the evidence as a result of torture, and provides mechanisms for review and appeal.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The law provides for an independent judiciary, and the government generally respected judicial independence.

Trial Procedures

The law provides for the right to a fair trial, and an independent judiciary generally enforced this right. Trials are public, and defendants have a right to have their case heard before a judge alone or, for more serious cases, before a judge and jury. Defendants have the right to be present and to consult with an attorney of their choice in a timely manner. The government provides an attorney at public expense if needed when defendants face serious criminal charges, and defendants may confront or question witnesses against them and present witnesses and evidence on their behalf. Defendants and their attorneys generally have access to government-held evidence relevant to their cases and adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense. Defendants also enjoy a presumption of innocence, a right to be informed promptly and in detail of the charges against them (with free interpretation as necessary), a right not to be compelled to testify or confess guilt, and a right of appeal. The law extends these rights to all citizens.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

There is an independent and impartial judiciary in civil matters and access to a court to bring a suit seeking damages for, or cessation of, a human rights violation. Remedies can be monetary, declaratory, or injunctive. Federal or provincial human rights commissions may also hear alleged human rights violations.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The law prohibits such actions, and there were no reports that the government failed to respect these prohibitions.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respected these rights. Independent media, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of speech and press.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: The Supreme Court has ruled that the government may limit free speech in the name of goals such as ending discrimination, ensuring social harmony, or promoting gender equality. The court has also ruled that the benefits of limiting hate speech and promoting equality are sufficient to outweigh the freedom of speech clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the country's constitutional bill of rights.

The criminal code prohibits public incitement and willful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group in any medium. Inciting hatred (in certain cases) or genocide is a criminal offense, but the Supreme Court sets a high threshold for such cases, specifying that these acts must be proven to be willful and public. Provincial-level film censorship, broadcast licensing procedures, broadcasters' voluntary codes curbing graphic violence, and laws against hate literature and pornography also impose some restrictions on the media.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports that the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority. A 2014 Supreme Court ruling requires police to seek a search warrant to obtain subscriber data from internet service providers to identify customers under investigation by law enforcement.

Approximately 99 percent of households could access broadband services. According to the World Bank, 87.1 percent of the population used the internet in 2014.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

The law provides for the freedoms of assembly and association, and the government generally respected these rights.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution and law provide for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights.

The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to internally displaced persons, refugees, returning refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, and other persons of concern.

Citizenship: The minister of citizenship and immigration may revoke the citizenship of native-born dual nationals who are convicted of terrorism, high treason, or espionage or who take up arms against the country. The law also denies citizenship to permanent residents who commit these acts.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The country's laws provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has established a system for providing protection to refugees. The government offered alternatives to refugee claimants whose cases the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) refused. The option for judicial review through the federal courts exists. Two other remedies of last resort are available through the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, including a "pre-removal risk assessment" as well as an appeal to the minister of citizenship and immigration for a waiver based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

The law authorizes the citizenship and immigration minister to identify designated countries of origin (DCOs) for the purpose of expedited asylum processing and to deter unfounded claims. Criteria for DCOs include countries that do not normally produce refugees but respect human rights and offer state protection, or whose countries' nationals have a high rate of rejection by the IRB and regularly abandon or withdraw asylum claims in Canada. Claimants from DCOs and persons the IRB ruled have manifestly unfounded claims or claims with no credible basis have restricted access to appeal and other remedies of last resort. On July 23, the Federal Court struck down the DCO process as unconstitutional on the basis that limited access to appeal discriminated against claimants from DCO countries. The government appealed the ruling and extended right of appeal to failed claimants from DCOs whose cases were rejected on or after July 23, pending a decision by a higher court. The government's appeal remained pending as of October.

Claimants who arrive in the country in a manner designated by the minister as a mass or irregular arrival (in cases of suspected human smuggling) may be subject to detention (subject to review at legislated intervals) pending verification of their identity and admissibility. They face restrictions on access to appeal and remedies of last resort if the IRB refuses their claims.

Durable Solutions: The government accepted refugees for resettlement from third countries and facilitated local integration (including naturalization), particularly of refugees in protracted situations. The government assisted the safe, voluntary return of refugees to their homes.

Temporary Protection: The government also provided temporary protection (in the form of temporary residence permits) to persons who may not qualify as refugees.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The law provides citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and citizens exercised that ability.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: In October the Liberal Party won a majority of seats in the federal parliament and formed a national government following a free and fair election.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, and the government generally implemented the law effectively. There were isolated reports of government corruption during the year.

Corruption: A Quebec law stipulates elected officials arrested for a crime and facing more than two years in prison must step down until the case is completed. The law also stipulates elected officials must cover their own legal fees.

On April 7, the trial of Senator Mike Duffy opened. The case addressed 31 criminal counts of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust related to his claims for housing and travel expenses, awarding of contracts, and his acceptance of a C$90,000 ($68,400) check from the prime minister's former chief of staff to repay allegedly improperly claimed expenses. The senator denied the charges, none of which had been proven in court. The trial continued as of November.

The court scheduled for 2016 the trials of Senator Patrick Brazeau and former senator Mac Harb, charged in 2014 with fraud and breach of trust.

The Charbonneau Commission, a public inquiry ordered by the Quebec government in 2012, has a mandate to investigate allegations of corruption, collusion, and the involvement of organized crime in the awarding of contracts for public infrastructure projects. The commission investigated alleged organized crime links to municipal and provincial political parties and was scheduled to deliver a final report in November.

In 2014 Montreal established an inspector general office to investigate public corruption. In May the inspector general reported that in 2014 the city's whistleblower hotline received nearly triple the number of complaints about wrongdoing in Montreal than in previous years.

Financial Disclosure: Conflict of interest and ethics commissioners administer conflict of interest codes for members of the federal elected House of Commons and the appointed Senate, as well as the law relating to public officeholders. Members of the legislative branch are not required to disclose financial holdings but must recuse themselves from voting or conducting hearings on matters in which they have a pecuniary interest. By law public officeholders, including elected members of the executive branch and their staff and designated senior nonelected officials, must disclose information about their personal financial assets. These declarations, as well as an annual report, are available to the public through regular reports from a commissioner for conflict of interest and ethics. The commissioner may impose an administrative monetary penalty for noncompliance, but the law does not provide for criminal sanctions. Provincial governments provide independent audits of government business and ombudsman services.

Public Access to Information: The law permits public access to government information, and the government granted access for citizens and noncitizens, including foreign media. Although the law was implemented effectively, in March the federal information commissioner recommended changes to modernize and strengthen the law, including extension of the law's scope to cover the Prime Minister's Office and other government institutions that are exempt. The commissioner also expressed concern that the number of cases in which the government exceeded the legal timeline for processing had increased. The law provides for the denial of legal requests for information on limited and specific grounds given and cited in law, a reasonably short timeline to disclose or respond, reasonable processing fees, and a mechanism to appeal denials, including to the federal courts. The law does not impose criminal or administrative sanctions for noncompliance. The government released quarterly information on the public expenditures of senior government officials and published expense information on individual ministerial websites and a centralized website.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A wide variety of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials were cooperative and responsive to their views.

Government Human Rights Bodies: Federal and provincial human rights commissions enjoyed government cooperation, operated without government or party interference, and had adequate resources. Observers considered the commissions effective. Parliamentary human rights committees operated in the House of Commons and the Senate. The committees acted independently of government, conducted public hearings, and issued reports and recommendations to which the government provided written, public, and timely responses. Most federal departments and some federal agencies employed ombudsmen. Nine provinces and one territory also employed ombudsmen.

In May the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into Indian Residential Schools, appointed in 2008 to document allegations of abuse of Aboriginal children in residential schools, presented a summary report and recommendations. It was to issue its full report later in the year and was scheduled to terminate operations by the end of the year, as specified in its mandate.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution and law prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, disability, sexual orientation, age, language, HIV-positive status, or other communicable diseases. Provincial or territorial statutes in seven provinces and one territory prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity. The government enforced these laws effectively.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law criminalizes rape, including spousal rape, as sexual assault, and the government enforced the law effectively. Penalties for sexual assault carry sentences of up to 10 years in prison, up to 14 years for sexual assault with a restricted or prohibited firearm, and between four years and life for aggravated sexual assault with a firearm or committed for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with, a criminal organization. According to the government's statistical agency, in 2014 police received approximately 20,735 reports of sexual assault, sexual assault with a weapon or causing bodily harm, and aggravated sexual assault (down from 21,300 in 2013). Most victims were women. Government studies indicated victims of sexual assault reported approximately one in 10 incidents to police. The federal government does not publish statistics on the number of abusers prosecuted, convicted, and punished.

The law prohibits domestic violence. Although the criminal code does not define specific domestic violence offenses, an abuser can be charged with an applicable offense, such as assault, aggravated assault, intimidation, mischief, or sexual assault. Persons convicted of assault receive up to five years in prison. Assaults involving weapons, threats, or injuries carry terms of up to 10 years. Aggravated assault or endangerment of life carry prison sentences of up to 14 years. The government enforced the law effectively. Studies indicated that victims of domestic violence and spousal abuse underreported incidents, likely due to social stigma, fear of further violence, or retribution.

According to the government's statistical agency, Aboriginal women were three times more likely than non-Aboriginal women to experience violent abuse and, according to the RCMP, were four times more likely to be victims of homicide. In June the RCMP reported that in 2013 and 2014, there were 32 Aboriginal female homicide cases and 11 missing females; Aboriginal women continued to be disproportionately represented among the country's homicide and missing persons cases. Following a 2014 report that the number of missing and allegedly murdered Aboriginal females exceeded previous estimates, the RCMP determined that there were 225 unresolved cases. As of September the RCMP resolved 21 cases by bringing charges (10 cases), confirming a suspect's death (two cases), locating missing Aboriginal females (six cases), or reclassifying homicides as death by another cause (three cases). The RCMP maintained the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains to support law enforcement investigations, and it established projects with some municipal police forces to review outstanding files of missing women, including Aboriginal women. The RCMP conducted two awareness-raising campaigns during the year to prevent violence against Aboriginal women and girls.

In February the country's premiers and territorial leaders, Aboriginal leaders, and the Status of Women and Aboriginal Affairs ministers participated in a national roundtable on missing and murdered Aboriginal women. In June the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women issued a report on local and international best practices to prevent violence against women. The report made 11 recommendations to the government based on expert testimony on local and international best practices. Aboriginal leaders called for a national inquiry into murdered and missing Aboriginal women and girls.

In October, 12 Aboriginal individuals, mostly women, in the northwestern Quebec community of Val d'Or, alleged that nine members of the provincial police sexually assaulted them, gave them money and drugs for sexual services, physically abused them, or drove them out of town in the winter and forced them to walk back to their homes in the cold. The provincial government placed eight members of the force on administrative leave pending an investigation. The ninth member died earlier in the year.

The government's statistical agency reported there were approximately 625 shelters and transition homes providing services to abused women. Shelters provided emergency care, transition housing, counseling, and referrals to legal and social service agencies. Some shelters were located on Aboriginal reserves and served an exclusively Aboriginal population. Shelters in rural and remote areas generally offered a narrower range of services than urban facilities, and a greater proportion focused on short-stay crisis intervention. Reports indicated shortages of shelter spaces, trained staff, counseling, and access to affordable second-stage housing. These shortages impeded women from leaving abusive relationships.

Police received training in treating domestic violence victims, and agencies provided abuse hotlines. The government's Family Violence Initiative involved 15 federal departments, agencies, and crown corporations, including Status of Women Canada, Health Canada, and Justice Canada. These entities worked to eliminate violence against women and advance women's human rights. Provincial and municipal governments also sought to address violence against women, often in partnership with civil society, including funding public education programs and services, hotlines, and shelters.

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C): The law prohibits FGM/C for women and girls and prosecutes the offense as aggravated assault with a maximum penalty of 14 years' imprisonment. Persons committing or aiding another person to commit the offense may be charged with criminal negligence causing bodily harm (maximum penalty of 10 years' imprisonment) or criminal negligence causing death (maximum penalty of life imprisonment). Persons convicted of removing or assisting the removal of a child who is ordinarily a resident in Canada for the purpose of having FGM/C performed on the child face a maximum penalty of five years' imprisonment. Refugee status may be granted on the grounds of threatened FGM/C that may be considered gender-related persecution. Provincial child protection authorities may intervene to remove children suspected at risk of FGM/C from their homes.

Although reliable statistics were not available, there were a few reports that FGM/C occurred, particularly among immigrant communities. Anecdotal evidence also suggested some families from immigrant communities in which FGM/C is culturally accepted send their daughters abroad to have the procedure performed.

Other Harmful Traditional Practices: The criminal code does not specifically refer to "honor" killings, but it prosecutes such cases as murder. Murder convictions in the first or second degree carry minimum penalties of life imprisonment with eligibility for parole. The government enforced the law effectively. The government's citizenship guide for new immigrants explicitly states that "honor" killings and gender-based violence carry severe legal penalties. The government trains law enforcement officials on issues of "honor"-based violence and maintains an interdepartmental working group focusing on forced marriage and "honor"-based violence. In June the government passed legislation that limited the defense of "provocation" so that it would not apply in cases of "honor" killings and many cases of spousal homicide.

An appeal of an extradition order from the British Columbia Supreme Court by a mother and uncle of a female family member on charges they ordered the alleged "honor" killing of the woman and her husband in India in 2000 remained pending as of October.

Sexual Harassment: The law does not contain a specific offense of "sexual harassment" but criminalizes harassment (defined as stalking), punishable by up to 10 years' imprisonment, and sexual assault, with penalties ranging from 10 years for non-aggravated sexual assault to life imprisonment for aggravated sexual assault. The government generally enforced these prohibitions. Federal and provincial labor standards laws provide some protection against harassment, and federal, provincial, and territorial human rights commissions have responsibility for investigating and resolving harassment complaints. Employers, companies, unions, educational facilities, professional bodies, and other institutions have internal policies against sexual harassment, and federal and provincial governments provide public education and advice.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals enjoy the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children; manage their reproductive health; and have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence.

Discrimination: Women have marriage, property, inheritance, and labor rights and enjoy the same legal status and rights in the judicial system as men. They were well represented in the labor force, including in business and the professions. Nevertheless, women experienced some economic discrimination in terms of employment, credit, or pay equity for substantially similar work, or in owning or managing businesses, education, and housing. According to reliable nongovernmental sources, women represented 37 percent of legislators, senior officials, and managers. Labor groups reported that women were underrepresented in executive positions in the private sector. Seven provinces and two territories require private sector companies to report annually on their efforts to increase the number of women appointed to executive corporate boards. The government's statistical agency reported that hourly wages for women were, on average, lower than for men but that the wage gap had narrowed over the past two decades.

Aboriginal women living on reserves (where land is held communally) have matrimonial property rights. First Nations may choose to follow federal law or enact their own rules related to matrimonial real property rights and interests that respect their customs. While these laws provide some legal protection, the Native Women's Association of Canada stated First Nations communities needed more resources for policing, shelters, increased family support, training, and capacity building to implement them more effectively and enable better access to the justice system to enforce them.

Aboriginal women and men living on reserves are subject to the Indian Act, which defines status for the purposes of determining entitlement to a range of legislated rights and eligibility for federal programs and services. Aboriginal women do not enjoy full equality rights with Aboriginal men to transmit officially recognized status to their descendants.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship is derived both by birth within the country's territory and from one's parents. Births are registered immediately, and there were no reports of the government denying public services, such as education or health care, to those who failed to register.

Child Abuse: In 2012 (the latest available figures), the government's statistical agency recorded that 65,677 children and youth were victims of police-reported violent crime. The law criminalizes violence and abuse against children, including assault, sexual exploitation, child pornography, abandonment, emotional maltreatment, and neglect. Provincial and territorial child welfare services investigate cases of suspected child abuse and may provide counseling and other support services to families, or place children in child welfare care, where warranted. The federal Family Violence Initiative promotes awareness of family violence; works with research and community organizations to strengthen the capacity of criminal justice, housing, and health systems to respond to family violence; and supports data collection and research. Provincial and territorial governments also provide public education and prevention services, often in partnership with civil society.

Early and Forced Marriage: In June the government passed legislation establishing 16 years as the legal minimum age of marriage. The rate of marriage for individuals under age 18 was unavailable, but early marriages were not known to be a major problem. In June the government criminalized the removal of a child from the country for the purpose of early and forced marriage and created a court-ordered peace bond, which may include surrendering of a passport, to disrupt an attempt to remove a child for that purpose.

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C): See Women above.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The law prohibits the commercial sexual exploitation of children, and authorities enforced the law effectively. The minimum age of consensual sex is 16 years. Persons convicted of living off the proceeds of prostitution of a child younger than 18 face between two and 14 years' imprisonment. Persons who aid, counsel, compel, use, or threaten to use violence, intimidation, or coercion in relation to a child younger than 18 engaging in prostitution face between five and 14 years' imprisonment. Persons who solicit or obtain the sexual services of a child younger than 18 face between six months' and five years' imprisonment. Children, principally teenage females, were exploited in sex trafficking.

The law prohibits accessing, producing, distributing, and possessing child pornography. Maximum penalties range from 18 months' imprisonment for summary offenses to 10 years' imprisonment for indictable offenses.

International Child Abductions: The country is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For information see the Department of State's report on compliance at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/legal/compliance.html, as well as country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/country/canada.html.

Anti-Semitism

Approximately 1 percent of the population is Jewish.

The B'nai Brith Canada League for Human Rights received 1,627 reports of anti-Semitic incidents in 2014, up 28 percent from 2013, the highest annual number of incidents the organization had ever recorded. More than half of the reports (961) came from the province of Ontario. Reports in 2014 included harassment (1,370 incidents, an increase), vandalism (238 incidents, a decline), and violence against persons (19 incidents, an increase), as well as attacks on synagogues, private homes and property, and community centers. For example, on February 23, unknown vandals in Montreal painted swastikas on four cars and left notes that included a bullet and a death threat. The vandals smashed the window of one of the cars with an axe. Authorities opened an investigation that continued as of October.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The constitution and law prohibit discrimination against persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities in employment, education, air travel and other transportation, access to health care, or the provision of other state services, and the government effectively enforced these prohibitions. Federal and provincial governments effectively implemented laws and programs mandating access to buildings, information, and communications for persons with disabilities, but regulation varies by jurisdiction, and there is no comprehensive federal legislation that protects the rights of persons with disabilities.

Children with disabilities attended primary, secondary, and higher education, and the majority attended classes with nondisabled peers or a combination of nondisabled and special education classes with parental consent. Disparities in educational access for students with disabilities existed between provinces and among school boards within provinces. Policy differences included types of services, criteria to determine eligibility, allocation of resources, access to inclusive versus segregated classes or facilities, and the number of teachers, teacher's aides, and therapists.

Disability rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) reported that persons with disabilities experienced higher rates of unemployment and underemployment, lower rates of job retention, and higher rates of poverty and economic marginalization than the broader population.

Federal and provincial human rights commissions protected and promoted respect for the rights of persons with disabilities. The government provided services and monetary benefits, but disability groups noted a lack of coordination among services. Facilities existed to provide support for persons with mental health disabilities, but mental health advocates asserted that the prison system was not sufficiently equipped or staffed to provide the care necessary for those in the criminal justice system, resulting in cases of segregation and self-harm.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

According to the government's statistical agency, 1,167 incidents of hate crimes were reported to police in 2013 (a decrease of 17 percent from 2012), of which 51 percent were motivated by race or ethnic bias. Blacks constituted the most commonly targeted racial group, accounting for 22 percent of the total. A detailed breakdown of victims of hate crime incidents by ethnic origin (except black) was not available. The proportion of hate crimes involving violence, including assault and uttering threats, rose to 40 percent (from 31 percent in 2012).

The law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race. Federal, provincial, and territorial human rights commissions investigate complaints and raise public awareness. The federal Canadian Race Relations Foundation coordinates and facilitates public education and research and develops recommendations to eliminate racism and promote harmonious race relations.

In October the province of Ontario announced rules under the provincial Police Act to regulate the practice of random street checks or "carding." Police had used "carding" to combat street crime, but visible minority communities alleged the practice disproportionately targeted black males. The regulations provide stronger guidelines for police, protect constitutional rights, and clarify how police can collect, use, and retain carding data.

Indigenous People

Indigenous people constituted approximately 4.3 percent of the national population and higher percentages in the country's three territories: Yukon, 23 percent; Northwest Territories, 52 percent; and Nunavut, 86 percent. Disputes over land claims, self-government, treaty rights, taxation, duty-free imports, fishing and hunting rights, and alleged police harassment were sources of tension. Indigenous people remained underrepresented in the workforce; overrepresented on welfare rolls and in prison populations; and more susceptible than other groups to suicide, poverty, chronic health conditions, and sexual violence. According to the government's statistical agency, Aboriginal children accounted for almost 50 percent of the approximately 30,000 children younger than 14 in foster care in 2011.

The law recognizes and specifically protects indigenous rights, including rights established by historical land claims settlements. Treaties with indigenous groups form the basis for the government's policies in the eastern part of the country, but there were legal challenges to the government's interpretation and implementation of treaty rights. Indigenous groups in the western part of the country who had never signed treaties continued to claim land and resources, and many continued to seek legal resolution of outstanding issues. As a result, the evolution of the government's policy toward indigenous rights, particularly land claims, depended on negotiation or legal challenges. As of February 2014, approximately 385 unresolved specific claims or grievances filed by indigenous people regarding the implementation of treaties remained under assessment or in negotiation (not including claims in litigation or before the Specific Claims Tribunal, which is a judicial panel), according to government reports. As of March 2014, the government reported that negotiations for 100 self-government and comprehensive land claims were active. Indigenous groups who cannot settle specific claims through negotiation within three years may refer the claim to the Specific Claims Tribunal or the courts for a decision.

The law imposes statutory, contractual, and common-law obligations to consult with Aboriginal peoples in the development and exploitation of natural resources on land covered by treaty or subject to land claims. According to a Supreme Court ruling, the federal government has the constitutional duty to consult and, where appropriate, accommodate indigenous peoples when the government contemplates actions that may adversely affect potential or established Aboriginal and treaty rights.

The Supreme Court has affirmed that Aboriginal title extends to territory used by Aboriginal peoples for hunting, fishing, and other activities prior to contact with Europeans, as well as to settlement sites. Provincial and federal governments may develop natural resources on land subject to Aboriginal title but are obliged to obtain consent of the Aboriginal titleholders in addition to existing constitutional duties to consult, and where necessary, accommodate Aboriginal peoples in matters that affect their rights. If governments cannot obtain consent, they may proceed with resource development only on the basis of a "compelling and substantial objective" in the public interest in which the public interest is proportionate to any adverse effect on the Aboriginal interest. The court has established that Aboriginal title is collective in nature.

In February almost 1,200 Aboriginals filed suit in Saskatchewan against the federal government because, as minors, white families adopted them during the so-called Sixties Scoop. The group requested damages for their loss of culture and emotional trauma. The "Sixties Scoop" involved an estimated 20,000 Aboriginal children whom child welfare services removed from their parents' custody to place them with non-Aboriginal families in Canada and the United States. The lawsuit was in addition to a separate case filed in Ontario in 2009 that was pending in the courts. In June Manitoba's premier issued a formal apology on behalf of the provincial government for its role in the "Sixties Scoop."

In May the government reached a settlement with the Nunavut Inuit and agreed to pay C$255 million ($194 million) for failure to fund Inuit education at appropriate levels since 2006.

In June the Aboriginal Economic Development Board  a body that provides policy and program advice to the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development  published a report on the progress of Aboriginal people on a variety of socioeconomic indicators. The report found that Aboriginal people on reserves had lost economic ground to non-Aboriginals on almost every indicator, including employment, reliance on government transfers, college and university completion rates, and housing.

On June 2, the government-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission into Indian Residential Schools issued a summary of its findings and 94 recommendations. The commission was scheduled to release its final report by year's end.

In July the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) told the UN Human Rights Committee that the situation of the Aboriginal people was one of the country's most urgent civil rights issues. The CHRC stated that Aboriginal people were significantly disadvantaged in terms of education, employment, and access to basic needs such as water, food, and housing.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The law prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, and the criminal code provides penalties for crimes motivated by bias, prejudice, or hate based on personal characteristics, including sexual orientation. Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Alberta, and Newfoundland and Labrador prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression. Birth certificates issued by provinces and territories provide the basis of identification for legal documents, and procedures vary for changing legal gender markers to match an individual's outward appearance or chosen gender expression. Ontario permits individuals to change their gender designation on Ontario birth certificates with written confirmation from a physician that the applicant's gender identity does not conform to his or her sex designation at birth.

In May, Nova Scotia revised its Vital Statistics Act, allowing residents to change the gender on their identification without undergoing gender reassignment surgery. To make the change residents must present a letter of support from their doctor or a social worker. The change is similar to a revision made by the government of British Columbia in 2014. Other provinces and territories require one or more physicians to certify that the applicant has completed gender reassignment surgery before an applicant may change the legal gender marker.

There were occasions of violence and abuse against individuals based on sexual orientation, but in general the government effectively implemented the law criminalizing such behavior. NGOs reported that stigma or intimidation was a known or likely factor in the underreporting of incidents of abuse. Some police forces employed liaison officers to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and intersex communities and Toronto police collaborated with community organizations to develop public awareness campaigns to encourage reporting of harassment and abuse. In 2013, the last year for which data is available, the government's statistical agency reported that 16 percent (186) of police-reported hate crime incidents nationally were motivated by sexual orientation.

In June Ontario's legislature passed a law banning so-called conversion therapy on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex children in the province. The law also prevents medical practitioners from billing the public health system for such therapy.

Other Societal Violence or Discrimination

There were reports of societal violence and discrimination against members of other minority, racial, and religious groups, but the government generally implemented the law criminalizing such behavior effectively.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

Federal and some provincial laws, including related regulations and statutory instruments, provide for the right of workers in both the public and the private sectors to form and join independent unions, conduct legal strikes, and bargain collectively. Workers in the public sector who provide essential services, including police and armed forces, do not have the right to strike but have mechanisms to provide for due process and to protect workers' rights. Workers in essential services had recourse to binding arbitration if labor negotiations failed. The law prohibits antiunion discrimination and provides for reinstatement of workers fired for union activity. There were no reports of antiunion discrimination or other forms of employer interference in union functions.

Federal labor law applies in federally regulated sectors, which include industries of extra-provincial or international character, transportation and transportation infrastructure that crosses provincial and international borders, marine shipping, port and ferry services, air transportation and airports, pipelines, telecommunications, banks, grain elevators, uranium mining and processing, works designated by the federal parliament affecting two or more provinces, protection of fisheries as a natural resource, many First Nation activities, and most crown corporations. These industries employed approximately 10 percent of workers.

The law grants the government exclusive authority to designate which federal employees provide an essential service and do not have the right to strike. They also make it illegal for an entire bargaining unit to strike if the government deems 80 percent or more of the employees of the unit essential.

Provincial and territorial governments regulate and are responsible for enforcing their own labor laws in all occupations and workplaces that are not federally regulated, leaving categories of workers excluded from statutory protection of freedom of association in several provinces. Some provinces restrict the right to strike. For example, agricultural workers in Alberta, Ontario, and New Brunswick do not have the right to organize or bargain collectively under provincial law.

In January the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a Saskatchewan labor law that prevented public servants from striking if the provincial government deemed them essential employees. In January the court also found the RCMP could engage in collective bargaining and could strike, overturning laws that required the RCMP to bargain via an employee relations association.

The government effectively enforced applicable laws and regulations in a timely fashion, including with effective remedies and penalties, and generally respected freedom of association and the right of collective bargaining, although labor rights organizations and unions raised concerns about federal and provincial government interference with collective bargaining rights. Administrative and judicial procedures were not subject to lengthy delays and appeals.

On May 18, federal unions, including the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), the country's largest public sector union, filed a coordinated suit with the International Labor Organization (ILO), alleging the federal government violated workers' rights when it revised the Public Service Labour Relations Act in 2013. The unions contended the revisions contravene ILO conventions the country has ratified that protect free collective bargaining and the right to strike.

In 2014 PSAC filed suit in a federal court and alleged the 2013 revision to the Public Service Labour Relations Act violates constitutionally protected rights to collective bargaining and freedom of association. PSAC claimed the law allows the government to prohibit more workers from striking than necessary to maintain essential operations and asked the court to overturn the law and reopen collective agreements negotiated while the amended law remained in force. As of September the case was with the Supreme Court, and a hearing date had not been set.

In May 2014 the government of Nova Scotia and the General Employees Union filed a statement of claim in the Nova Scotia Supreme Court against a provincial law passed in March that ended a strike by home-support workers. The law prohibits the workers from striking until the union and employer agree which workers should be designated essential. The union argued that the law's definition of essential services was overly broad and provided no time limit to negotiate an essential services agreement. The case was pending in Nova Scotia's Supreme Court at year's end.

In June 2014 PSAC filed a lawsuit in an Ontario court that claimed the government violated public service unions' rights to free and fair collective bargaining rights when it passed legislation authorizing the government to impose a sick leave policy for public employees without negotiation. Although the government was willing to negotiate sick leave policy, unions claimed the government's power to implement a change unilaterally compromises their ability to negotiate and eliminates the right to strike over the issue. PSAC requested the court issue an injunction limiting the government's ability to execute its legal authority until the issue is resolved in court. At year's end the court had not ruled on the injunction or the lawsuit.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor, and the government effectively enforced the law. The law prescribes penalties for violations of up to 14 years' imprisonment, or life imprisonment in the case of certain aggravating factors, such as kidnapping or sexual assault. Such penalties were sufficiently stringent. During the year the government investigated and prosecuted cases of forced labor and domestic servitude.

The federal government held employers of foreign workers accountable by verifying employers' ability to pay wages and provide accommodation and, through mandatory compliance reviews, ensuring that employers provided substantially the same wages, living conditions, and occupation specified in the employers' original job offer. The government could deny noncompliant employers permits to recruit foreign workers for two years, although it did not report on whether it had done so during the year. Some provincial governments imposed licensing and registration requirements on recruiters or employers of foreign workers and prohibited the charging of recruitment fees to workers.

In 2014 the federal government announced reforms to the federal temporary foreign worker program (TFWP). The reforms included hiring 20 additional federal labor inspectors, increasing inspections to one in four employers per year, raising the employer-payable application fee for each foreign worker, imposing fines of up to C$100,000 ($76,000) for employer abuses of the program, and providing additional funding for the federal border agency for criminal investigations. Additional penalties for employers deemed to have misused the TFWP or mistreated workers came into effect in July and December 2014. The measures replaced a two-year ban for employing foreign workers with a range of bans of up to 10 years, raised financial penalties, and tightened criteria for applications and compliance.

There were reports that employers subjected noncitizen or foreign-born men and women to forced labor in the agricultural sector, food processing, cleaning services, hospitality, and construction industries and in domestic service. NGOs reported that bonded labor, particularly in the construction industry, and domestic servitude constituted the majority of cases of forced labor.

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

There is no federal minimum age for employment. In federally regulated sectors, children younger than 17 may work only when they are not required to attend school under provincial legislation, provided the work does not fall under excluded categories (such as work underground in a mine, on a vessel, or in the vicinity of explosives), and the work does not endanger health and safety. Children may not work in any federally regulated sector between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. The provinces and territories have primary responsibility for regulation of child labor, and minimum age restrictions vary by province. Regulation occurs across a range of laws including employment standards, occupational health and safety, education laws, and in regulations for vocational training, child welfare, and licensing of establishments for the sale of alcohol. Most provinces restrict the number of hours of work to two or three hours on a school day and eight hours on a non-school day and prohibit children ages 12 to 16 from working without parental consent, after 11 p.m., or in any hazardous employment.

Authorities effectively enforced child labor laws and policies, and federal and provincial labor ministries carried out child labor inspections either proactively or in response to formal complaints. There were reports that limited resources hampered inspection and enforcement efforts. Penalties were pecuniary and varied according to the gravity of the offense.

There were reports that child labor occurred, particularly in the agricultural sector. There were also reports that children, principally teenage females, were subjected to sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation (see section 6, Children).

See the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor at www.dol.gov/ilab/reports/child-labor/findings/.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

The law and regulations prohibit discrimination with respect to employment or occupation on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, national origin or citizenship, disability, sexual orientation and/or gender identity, age, language, HIV-positive status, or other communicable diseases. Some provinces, including Quebec, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as the Northwest Territories, prohibit employment discrimination on the grounds of social origin, "social condition," or political opinion. Federal law requires equal pay for equal work for four designated groups in federally regulated industries enforced through the Canadian Human Rights Commission on a complaint basis: women, persons with disabilities, Aboriginal people, and visible minorities. Ontario and Quebec have pay equity laws that cover both the public and private sectors, and other provinces require pay equity only in the public sector.

Authorities encouraged individuals to resolve employment-related discrimination complaints through internal workplace dispute resolution processes as a first recourse, but federal and provincial human rights commissions investigated and mediated complaints and enforced the law and regulations. The government enforced the law effectively, but some critics complained that the process was complex and failed to issue rulings in a timely manner. Foreign migrant workers have the same labor rights as citizens and permanent residents, although NGOs alleged that discrimination occurred against migrant workers.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

Provincial and territorial minimum wage rates ranged from C$10.50 to C$12.50 ($7.98 to $9.50) per hour as of October. There is no official poverty income level. Some provinces exempt agricultural, hospitality, and other specific categories of workers from minimum wage rates. For example, Ontario has a minimum wage for persons younger than 18 who work less than 28 hours per week when school is in session, at a rate lower than the respective minimum for adult workers.

Standard work hours vary by province, but in each the limit is 40 or 48 hours per week, with at least 24 hours of rest. The law requires payment of a premium for work above the standard workweek. Entitlement to paid annual leave varies by province, but the law requires a minimum of 10 days' paid annual leave per year (or payment of 4 percent of wages in lieu) after one year of continuous employment. Some provinces mandate an additional week of paid leave to employees who have completed a specified length of service. There is no specific prohibition on excessive compulsory overtime, which is regulated by means of the required rest periods in the labor code that differ by industry. Some categories of workers have specific employment rights that differ from the standard, including commercial fishermen, oil field workers, loggers, home caregivers, professionals, managers, and some sales staff.

Federal law provides safety and health standards for employees under federal jurisdiction. Provincial and territorial legislation provides for all other employees, including foreign and migrant workers. Standards were current and appropriate for the industries they covered. Federal, provincial, and territorial laws protect the right of workers with "reasonable cause" to refuse dangerous work and remove themselves from hazardous work conditions, and authorities effectively enforced this right. The government also promoted safe working practices and provided training, education, and resources through the Canadian Center for Occupational Health and Safety, a federal agency composed of representatives of government, employers, and labor.

Federal and provincial labor departments monitored and effectively enforced labor standards by conducting inspections through scheduled and unscheduled visits, in direct response to reported complaints, and at random. Penalties were pecuniary and varied according to the gravity of the offense. Under the federal labor code, maximum penalties for criminal offenses, including criminal negligence causing death or bodily harm, or willful breach of labor standards in which the person in breach knew that serious injury or death was likely to occur, could include imprisonment. Enforcement measures include a graduated response, with a preference for resolution via voluntary compliance, negotiation, and education; prosecution and fines serve as a last resort. Some trade unions continued to note that limited resources hampered the government's inspection and enforcement efforts.

NGOs reported that migrants, new immigrants, young workers, and the unskilled were vulnerable to violations of the law on minimum wage, overtime pay, unpaid wages, and excessive hours of work. NGOs also alleged that restrictions on the types of labor complaints accepted for investigation and delays in processing cases discouraged the filing of complaints.

According to the Association of Workers Compensation Boards of Canada, during 2013, the most recent year for which data were available, there were 902 workplace fatalities. During the year there were some reports of workplace accidents.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Central African Republic

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Central African Republic, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5716128b6.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Central African Republic is a republic with a transitional government led by Catherine Samba Panza, who was elected president by the Transitional National Council (CNT) in January 2014. The president and prime minister share executive power. The CNT was established after the Seleka rebel alliance, led by Michel Djotodia, deposed former president Francois Bozize in March 2013. In April 2013 the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) adopted the Ndjamena Declaration, which provided for the establishment of a transitional government leading to elections 18 months after the swearing-in of the transitional president, or by February 2015. In August 2013 Djotodia was sworn in as transitional president under the terms of a transitional charter but resigned in January 2014 under pressure from ECCAS after state authority  already weak under Bozize  largely collapsed under his rule. In December 2014 ECCAS extended the transition for an additional six months and called for a constitutional referendum and presidential and legislative elections by August 2015. Despite financial, logistical, and security challenges that resulted in further delays, the first of two rounds of presidential and legislative elections was held on December 30. The second round of elections was slated to occur before the end of March 2016. The last general election occurred in 2011, when former president Francois Bozize was re-elected in what national and international observers considered flawed elections. Civilian authorities did not maintain effective control over the security forces, and state authority barely extended beyond the capital Bangui. Armed groups controlled significant swaths of territory throughout the country and acted as de facto governing institutions, taxing local populations, providing security services, and appointing members to leadership roles.

While the human rights situation continued to improve since the September 2014 deployment of the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA), the civilian population remained subject to killings, hostage-taking, mistreatment and torture, sexual and gender-based violence, and displacement. According to MINUSCA's Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Central African Republic, released on December 11, "serious violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law continued to be committed throughout the country by nonstate armed groups ... and, to a lesser extent, by state actors."

The most serious human rights problems included arbitrary and unlawful killings, especially those perpetrated by the ex-Seleka and groups known as the anti-Balaka. (Note: This report refers to the "ex-Seleka" for all abuses attributed to the Seleka that occurred after the Seleka was dissolved in September 2013). Since 2013 the violence has claimed thousands of lives, and more than 800,000 persons remained internally displaced or fled to neighboring countries. Enforced disappearances and torture; sexual violence, including rape; and the use of child soldiers continued.

Other human rights problems included: inability of citizens to change the government through free and fair elections; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions, including the use of illegal detention facilities; arbitrary arrest and detention; the complete break-down of the judicial system, resulting in prolonged pretrial detention and denial of fair public trial; arbitrary interference with privacy and the home; seizure and destruction of property without due process; and the use of excessive and indiscriminate force in internal conflict. There were restrictions on freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, and movement. Refugees lacked protection and access to basic services. Corruption was widespread. Domestic and international human rights groups faced harassment and threats. Discrimination and violence were experienced by women; children; persons with disabilities; ethnic minorities; indigenous people; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) persons; persons with HIV/AIDS; Christians; and Muslims. Forced labor and child labor, including forced child labor, were also problems.

The government did not take steps to investigate and prosecute officials who committed violations, whether in the security forces or elsewhere in the government, creating a climate of impunity.

On July 24, Marie-Therese Keita Bocoum, the UN independent expert on the situation of human rights in the Central African Republic, released a report on events from May 2014 to June. While noting improved security due to increased patrolling by MINUSCA, the report attributed most human rights violations to armed groups. Such groups included ex-Seleka factions, which controlled the northern and eastern areas; the anti-Balaka, which controlled the western part of the country; and other armed groups operating in the East, including the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Revolution and Justice, and the Democratic Front of the Central African People. MINUSCA peacekeeping troops reportedly were responsible for extrajudicial killings, and there were reports of sexual exploitation and the inappropriate use of force by international and MINUSCA peacekeeping forces during the year.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were several reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

Members of the Central Office for the Repression of Banditry (OCRB), a police anticrime unit, conducted extrajudicial killings near Bangui. According to international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), on October 24, OCRB members allegedly conducted extrajudicial killings of two persons accused of theft. Led by Colonel Robert Yekoua, the OCRB was largely comprised of soldiers of the Central African Armed Forces (FACA) who operated as police officers. The transitional government failed to investigate or punish suspected perpetrators.

Armed rebel groups, particularly members of the various factions of ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka, killed civilians, especially persons suspected of being members or sympathizers of opposing parties to the conflict (see section 1.g.). The killings, often reprisal in nature, included summary executions and deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population. The UN Panel of Experts on the Central African Republic, established pursuant to a 2013 UN Security Council resolution, documented 3,232 civilian killings throughout the country, including 22 aid workers, from December 2013 to mid-August (see section 1.g.). The panel reported an additional 79 civilians killed in Bangui between September 26 and October 16, including 12 children between six months and 17 years of age.

The LRA, a Ugandan rebel group that operated in eastern regions of the country, and other armed groups, including Revolution and Justice and the Democratic Front of the Central African People, were responsible for civilian killings (see section 1.g.).

Ethnic killings related to cattle theft occurred (see section 6).

MINUSCA peacekeeping troops reportedly were responsible for extrajudicial killings. For example, on June 10, a MINUSCA contingent from the Republic of Congo allegedly beat four civilians accused of criminal activity, resulting in two deaths and severe injuries to a third individual. The UN sent 20 peacekeepers home, urging investigation of the incident by the soldiers' home country. No investigation reportedly occurred by year's end.

b. Disappearance

There were reports that forces from the ex-Seleka, anti-Balaka, LRA, and other armed groups operating in the country were responsible for politically motivated disappearances. Those abducted included a UN employee, two priests, the mayor of a subprefecture, and numerous other civilians (see section 1.g.).

There were many reports of disappearances committed by the LRA for the purpose of recruitment and extortion (see section 1.g.).

In June MINUSCA issued a statement regretting the lack of progress by the Republic of Congo government in the investigation of the disappearance following the arrest of 11 persons from a private home in Boali in March 2014. According to Human Rights Watch, eyewitness accounts tied the disappearances to Congolese forces with the African Union's International Support Mission to the Central African Republic, the peacekeeping mission that preceded MINUSCA.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Although the law and the transitional charter prohibit torture and specify punishment for those found guilty of physical abuse, there were several reports that government officials employed them. In her July report, the UN independent expert noted MINUSCA documented four cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by government forces.

On January 27, at the gendarmerie in Bria, a town located northeast of Bangui, gendarmes forced a detainee to crawl until he confessed to crimes. Local authorities within the gendarmerie reported this was a common practice to obtain confessions.

The UN independent expert also reported allegations that security forces, particularly members of the OCRB, mistreated individuals in pretrial detention or during the arrest of suspected criminals (see section 1.g.).

According to the Human Rights Division of MINUSCA, which documented 775 cases of human rights violations between mid-September 2014 and May 31, serious violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law were committed throughout the country by nonstate armed groups, including anti-Balaka and ex-Seleka, and, to a lesser extent, government forces. Violations affected at least 785 victims, including 88 women and 43 children.

Forces from the ex-Seleka, anti-Balaka, LRA, and other armed groups operating in the country abused, raped, and tortured civilians with impunity. Deaths due to torture occurred (see section 1.g.).

There were reports of sexual exploitation and the inappropriate use of force by international and MINUSCA peacekeeping forces during the year.

In April international press sources reported non-UN troops from France, Equatorial Guinea, and Chad allegedly sexually abused boys in the M'Poko camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Bangui from December 2013 to June 2014. The government of France opened a judicial inquiry during the year, but results were not released by year's end. No other country announced an investigation.

Between 2014 and 2015, two European Union peacekeeping contingents allegedly raped two girls and paid two others for sex. The girls were 14 to 16 at the time of the alleged abuses.

UN officials reported 22 allegations of sexual abuse or exploitation by MINUSCA personnel in the Central African Republic in 2015, nine of which involved minors. In August a UN spokesperson announced MINUSCA peacekeepers belonging to a Democratic Republic of the Congo contingent in Bambari were accused of raping two women and a girl. Between October and December, HRW reported a 14-year-old girl and an 18-year-old woman were gang raped near the Bambari airport.

On December 30, according to reliable international press sources, UN peacekeeping troops were listed as allegedly using a prostitution ring in the M'Poko IDP camp, paying 289 to 1,731 CFA francs (50 cents and $3) for sex with young girls. While UN sources did not officially confirm participant nationalities, UN officials were cited in the press accounts as the source for the countries being implicated.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on all countries that contribute peacekeepers to increase predeployment education and human rights training, enhance vetting procedures, conduct rapid and effective investigations, ensure consistent repercussions for offenders, boost assistance to victims, and strengthen reporting of any cases of sexual exploitation and abuse.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

The transitional government operated two prisons in Bangui: Ngaragba Central Prison for men (with 89 inmates at year's end) and Bimbo Prison for women (with 20 inmates at year's end). A combination of international peacekeepers, FACA troops, and judicial police guarded the men's prison and its perimeter, while FACA troops guarded the women's prison. There were also prisons in Bouar, Mbaiki, and Berberati. Conditions in other prisons not emptied or destroyed by recent conflict were life threatening and substantially below international standards. Basic necessities, including food, clothing, and medicine, were inadequate and often confiscated by prison officials.

In parts of the country they controlled, ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka forces held an unknown number of persons in illegal prisons and detention centers, but neither the government nor humanitarian agencies visited these sites, and their conditions were unknown.

Physical Conditions: According to the UN independent expert who visited Ngaragba and Bimbo prisons in June, security, overcrowding, health, and nutrition at Ngaragba were "major challenges."

Authorities sometimes held pretrial detainees with convicted prisoners and juveniles with adults. In prisons outside of Bangui, men and women were held together.

Official prisons lacked basic sanitation and ventilation, electric lighting, basic and emergency medical care, and sufficient access to potable water. Prisoners seldom had access to health care, and disease was pervasive. In the women's prison, authorities divided inmates into three large rooms with no ventilation or electric lighting, and all, including pregnant women, slept on thin straw mats on cement floors.

On September 28, 677 detainees escaped from Ngaragba Central Prison.

Administration: There was no centralized recordkeeping system to track the number of prisoners in the country. Authorities did not use alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders. There was no ombudsman system. Prison detainees have the right to submit complaints of mistreatment, but victims rarely did due to lack of a functioning formal complaint submission mechanism and fear of retaliation by prison officials. Authorities seldom initiated investigations of abuse in the prison system. According to the UN independent expert, prisoners did not have reasonable access to visitors.

During the year the UN Development Programme (UNDP) conducted prison administration training for 25 correctional officials and wardens.

Independent Monitoring: The transitional government on occasion permitted monitoring by independent observers, including the UN independent expert in July and the MINUSCA Corrections Team, which in December visited Bimbo Prison to assess the need for facilities for women with infants. It also allowed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to visit 300 detainees in Bangui and distribute food daily where there were severe shortages. Destroyed or poorly kept records impeded access for observers.

Improvements: Foreign donors funded renovations to Ngaragba Prison, including a cover for a wastewater drainage system that ran as an open trench through the prison yard. MINUSCA and UNDP personnel rehabilitated a high-security prison at Camp de Roux.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The law provides protection against arbitrary arrest and detention and accords detainees the right to a judicial determination of the legality of their detention, but the transitional government did not observe these prohibitions. In the territories they controlled, the ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka also ignored such provisions, and arbitrary arrest and detention remained serious problems throughout the country.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The police and gendarmerie have responsibility for enforcing law and maintaining order; however, both largely were disbanded during the violence in 2013 and had limited or no presence in many areas of the country. While the police and gendarmerie increased the number of towns in which they were present during the year, they remained poorly trained and had few functioning arms and little ammunition.

Impunity was a problem. According to the July report of the UN independent expert, contributing factors included insufficient staffing and resources of the police, gendarmerie, and judiciary, along with an inadequate number of prisons. The independent expert noted, "Victims are reluctant to file complaints with police in situations where complainants are not of the same religious or ethnic group as the law enforcement personnel." She also reported cases in which national security forces were "reportedly reluctant to take action against human rights violators, particularly when the latter were anti-Balaka." Since the beginning of its mandate in September 2014, MINUSCA nevertheless reportedly supported the authorities in apprehending nearly 390 persons, most of whom were in investigative detention pending trial at year's end. The independent expert also noted that after more than five years without any trials taking place, criminal hearings resumed on June 29 and that the court heard nearly 60 cases.

From July 2014 to June, MINUSCA's Human Rights Division provided training in civilian protection to 50 FACA soldiers (including three women), 112 UN Police personnel, and 101 police and gendarmerie officers (including nine women). MINUSCA also provided human rights training to 690 FACA soldiers and 45 police officers (including nine women).

Approximately 40 judicial police officers received refresher training in basic criminal investigation skills in December.

MINUSCA had a total military-police force of 11,820, including 1,820 police officers. The role of MINUSCA's police force was to protect the civilian population from threat of physical violence within its capabilities and areas of deployment. MINUSCA police had the authority to make arrests and transfer persons to national authorities but not to investigate cases.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

Judicial warrants are not required for arrest. The law stipulates persons detained in cases other than those involving national security must be informed of the charges against them and brought before a magistrate within 72 hours. This period is renewable once, for a total of 144 hours, but authorities often did not respect these deadlines, in part due to inefficient judicial procedures and a lack of judges.

The bail system did not function. Authorities sometimes followed legal procedures in cases managed by gendarmes or local police. Lawyers continued to work and were sometimes accessible. For individuals detained by the ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka and placed in illegal detention centers, however, legal procedures were not followed, and access to lawyers was not provided.

Arbitrary Arrest: Arbitrary arrest was a serious problem. The NGO Human Rights Organization Network reported it had consistent and corroborated information that arrests based on ethnicity, suspected affiliation with an armed group, and/or the inability to pay bribes for release occurred.

In May FACA forces arrested five persons against whom evidence was "extremely weak," according to the UN Panel of Experts.

According to the Central African Human Rights League, some ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka groups arbitrarily arrested and detained individuals they suspected were affiliated with the former Bozize government or had committed acts counter to ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka interests. No statistics on the number of such individuals was available.

Pretrial Detention: Prolonged pretrial detention was a serious problem. In July the UN independent expert reported that two-thirds of inmates in Ngaragba Central Prison were in pretrial detention. Due to instability and insecurity, authorities did not deal with cases expeditiously, and pretrial detention could be six weeks to a year. In many cases the length of detention equaled or exceeded the sentence for the alleged crime.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The transitional charter provides for an independent judiciary, but the judiciary remained subject to the influence of the executive branch and was unable to fulfill its responsibilities. In 2013 the Seleka plundered the courts and destroyed records throughout the country, leaving the courts barely able to operate. Many magistrates and government workers who fled the violence in 2013 did not return to their places of residence during the year, especially outside the capital, due to fear for their safety. According to MINUSCA's December report, administration of justice was still "largely dysfunctional." Corruption was a serious problem. Courts suffered from inefficient administration, a shortage of trained personnel, salary arrears, and a lack of material resources. Authorities, particularly those of high rank, did not always respect court orders.

The Human Rights Organizations Network reported that ex-Seleka chiefs passed sentences on individuals in regions under their control, despite having no legal authority to exercise judicial power. Reported forms of punishment varied from imprisonment to fines.

Trial Procedures

The penal code presumes defendants are innocent until proven guilty. Trials are public, and defendants have the right to be present and consult a public defender. Criminal trials use juries. The law obliges the government to provide counsel for indigent defendants, although this process could be slow and delayed trial proceedings due to the state's limited resources. Defendants have the right to question witnesses, present witnesses and evidence on their own behalf, access government-held evidence, and file appeals. The law extends these rights to all citizens. The transitional government sometimes complied with these legal requirements. Defendants have the right to be informed promptly and in detail of the charges (with free interpretation as necessary), to adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense, and not to be compelled to testify or confess guilt. These rights seldom were respected.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reported cases of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

The transitional charter provides for an independent judiciary in civil matters, but citizens had limited access to courts to bring lawsuits seeking damages for, or cessation of, a human rights violation.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The law prohibits searches of homes without a warrant in civil and criminal cases, and there were no reports that the transitional government failed to respect these prohibitions. There were numerous reports, however, of ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka members entering homes without judicial authorization, seizing property without due process, and evicting persons from their place of residence both in Bangui and throughout the countryside.

According to local human rights organizations, the ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka engaged in organized and systematic looting of hundreds of private homes and shops. Ex-Seleka members looted, sacked, and sometimes destroyed houses in regions under their control, while anti-Balaka members continued to destroy houses of persons suspected to be close to the ex-Seleka in Bangui and in other parts of the country. The country's administrative and commercial infrastructure remained significantly damaged or destroyed due to Seleka looting and pillaging in 2013.

The ex-Seleka killed numerous individuals who resisted looting and extortion. Citizens sometimes killed ex-Seleka members when defending their property. Both types of killings provoked retaliatory violence and killings.

g. Use of Excessive Force and Other Abuses in Internal Conflicts

In January the ex-Seleka turned over Dominic Ongwen, the LRA's second-in-command, to foreign troops. He was subsequently turned over to government authorities and transferred to the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes.

According to the July report of the UN independent expert, in January Bria fell under the control of ex-Seleka fighters, who refused to allow the presence of any government representatives or the holding of local elections in areas under their control. On February 10, MINUSCA and Sangaris forces launched a joint operation to drive these armed groups out of all government buildings in Bria. The operation exposed nearby villages to reprisal attacks by the ex-Seleka, and many residents fled.

Killings: Attacks by armed groups resulted in numerous civilian casualties.

On January 5 and 6, ex-Seleka fighters of the Union for Peace in Central Africa shot and killed seven civilians, including a six-month-old infant and a 13-year-old child, near Ngakobo, according to the July report of the UN independent expert.

On August 20, alleged anti-Balaka forces killed a 19-year-old Muslim youth, triggering reprisal attacks by young Muslims and ex-Seleka rebels inside the Christian neighborhood of Bambari. At least 10 persons were killed and others injured. Many residents fled, increasing the number of IDPs by more than 3,000, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Youths from the Muslim and Christian communities erected barricades to protect themselves from gunfire, and the transitional government sent two ministers to calm tensions.

The LRA also killed civilians during the year.

Increased attacks near the border with Chad occurred. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that on July 28, at least 26 persons died as a result of clashes between two unidentified armed groups over control of Markounda. On March 14, in the Ngaoundaye area, unidentified gunmen, allegedly from Chad, killed 10 persons, including two students, and injured several others.

Abductions: The LRA, ex-Seleka, anti-Balaka, and other armed groups operating in the country abducted numerous persons during the year. According to MINUSCA, abductions and hostage taking were used to extort money from relatives, press authorities into releasing prisoners, and intimidate populations into allowing armed groups to impose authority.

Following MINUSCA's January 17 arrest of anti-Balaka leader Rodrigue Ngaibona (also known as "General Andjilo"), anti-Balaka groups kidnapped a French humanitarian employee and a MINUSCA staff member, according to a UN report. The French national was released after four days, and the UN employee was released the same day of capture.

Physical Abuse, Punishment, and Torture: According to the UN independent expert, several incidents involving security forces occurred, "including cases of ill-treatment in places of pretrial detention or during the arrest of suspected criminals." The independent expert also received reports that national security forces were reluctant to take action against human rights violators, particularly when the latter were anti-Balaka.

The ex-Seleka and forces associated with anti-Balaka groups reportedly tortured, beat, and raped civilians in the course of conflict.

According to the independent expert, on March 11, ex-Seleka fighters with the Union for Peace in Central Africa illegally detained two men accused of having ties with the anti-Balaka and subjected them to cruel and inhuman treatment.

In April MINUSCA reported 85 incidents of sexual violence against women and girls in the province of Nana-Gribrizi; most perpetrators were members of armed groups, including ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka.

An August 2014 report by the UN Security Council cited a transitional government estimate that 44.5 percent of the population suffered some form of sexual- or gender-based violence during the year. The transitional government estimated 20 percent of such cases involved rape, 90 percent of which cases involved gang rape by armed men.

There were reports that peacekeeping forces, including MINUSCA and international contingents, exploited women and children, although some of the reports referred to cases that occurred prior to 2015 (see section 1.c.).

Child Soldiers: The United Nations and human rights organizations reported the recruitment and use of child soldiers during the year. According to estimates by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), there were between 6,000 and 10,000 child soldiers in the country. Children recruited by armed groups were sent to fight, used for sexual purposes, and served as cooks, porters, or messengers. According to the UN independent expert, the LRA forced children to commit atrocities such as looting and burning villages, killing village residents, and abducting or killing other children.

In a major development, however, on the margins of the May 4-11 Bangui National Forum, political, community, and religious leaders reached an agreement with members of armed groups on the release of all children in the ranks of armed groups and the end of recruitment of minors. On May 15, following an agreement concluded with UNICEF, anti-Balaka and ex-Seleka forces jointly released 357 child soldiers ages eight to 18, including 21 girls, in three ceremonies held in Bambari. On August 28, anti-Balaka forces released another 163 child soldiers in a ceremony in the northwest town of Batangafo. During the year UNICEF and its partners secured the release of 1,866 children associated with armed forces.

Also see the Department of State's annual Trafficking in Persons Report.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

Although the transitional charter and law provide for freedom of speech and press, authorities did not always respect these rights.

Press and Media Freedoms: All print media in the country were privately owned, and radio was the most important medium of mass communication. There were a number of alternatives to the state-owned radio station, Radio Centrafrique. Independent radio stations operated freely and broadcast organized debates and call-in talk shows critical of the transitional government, ex-Seleka, and anti-Balaka. International broadcasters broadcast within the country.

The transitional government monopolized domestic television broadcasting (although this was available only in the capital and for limited hours), and television news coverage generally supported government positions.

Violence and Harassment: Journalists reported receiving threats and being targeted for violence by members of the transitional government.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: Unlike in the previous year, there were no reports the transitional government attempted to censor the media. Three journalists arrested in 2014 had not been tried by year's end.

Internet Freedom

The transitional government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority.

According to the International Telecommunication Union, approximately 4 percent of the population used the internet in 2014.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no reports the transitional government restricted academic freedom or cultural events, but the security situation prevented many universities and schools from operating during much of the year. The University of Bangui and some schools in urban areas resumed operations during the year, but schools in remote areas remained closed due to the security situation.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Freedom of Assembly

The transitional charter provides for the right of assembly, but the transitional government routinely restricted this right. Any association intending to hold a public political meeting is required to obtain the Ministry of Interior's approval, but the transitional government prevented all opposition groups from meeting by refusing permits for gatherings.

Freedom of Association

The transitional charter provides for freedom of association, but there was insufficient information on the transitional government's respect for this right. All associations, including political parties, must apply to the Ministry of Interior for registration.

A law prohibiting nonpolitical organizations from uniting for political purposes remained in place.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The transitional charter does not provide for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation. The transitional government restricted freedom of movement within the country and foreign travel, particularly for political leaders.

Police seized the passport of Abdou Karim Meckassoua, a presidential candidate, but returned it after Meckassoua filed suit. On August 15, police arrested, detained, and seized the passport of Bertin Bea, secretary general of former president Bozize's Kwa Na Kwa party. The government returned Bea's passport in September.

In-country Movement: After Djotodia's resignation, anti-Balaka groups attacked Muslims and prevented many Muslims from moving freely within the country. The anti-Balaka set up roadblocks and checkpoints in Bangui and in the interior, extracting bribes from travelers. They also reportedly abducted and killed many Muslims who tried to flee to neighboring countries. Muslims in some communities in the southwest continued to live in enclaves surrounded by non-Muslims.

Internally Displaced Persons

Ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka attacks on civilians and fighting between armed groups displaced at least 922,000 persons at the height of the conflict in January 2014. As the security situation improved during the year, hundreds of thousands returned to their homes. As of October, according to OCHA, approximately 417,000 persons remained internally displaced, including more than 65,000 persons in approximately 32 sites in Bangui. Outside the capital or other large towns, IDPs often settled in uninhabited bush areas.

The transitional government provided protection and assistance to IDPs and returnees. The transitional government generally allowed humanitarian organizations to provide services, although security concerns sometimes prevented organizations from operating in areas previously controlled by the Seleka, and targeted attacks on humanitarian operations impeded their ability to access some populations. According to the MINUSCA's December report, many IDPs were trapped in enclaves throughout the country and were "exposed to a dire humanitarian situation." Many reportedly feared for their lives due to violence and threats from armed elements.

According to the Association of Women Lawyers of Central Africa (AFJC), sexual and gender-based violence in IDP camps was widespread.

More than 36,000 persons, including the Peuhl (Fulani), remained trapped in enclaves in Boda, Carnot, Yaloke, Dekoa, Berberati, and the PK5 neighborhood of Bangui. Armed actors surrounding the sites restricted their movements. At year's end approximately 200 ethnic Peulhs who fled their homes to avoid revenge killings by anti-Balaka forces lived in dilapidated government buildings in Yaloke under the protection of UN peacekeepers and gendarmes. The transitional government initially denied the Peulhs freedom of movement and the right to leave the country but relented after pressure from the international community. With an improving security situation in the capital, a significant number of Muslims returned to Bangui.

There were reports of sexual exploitation of children and the inappropriate use of force by international and MINUSCA peacekeeping forces during the year (see section 1.c.).

According to UNHCR, as of September 30, an estimated 470,000 Central African refugees were living in neighboring countries, with the largest concentrations in Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The laws provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has established a system for providing protection to refugees. The Subcommission on Eligibility, however, has not held sessions since 2009, contributing to a growing backlog of asylum applications.

According to UNHCR, approximately 11,000 refugees from neighboring countries lived in the country; most refugees were of Congolese and Sudanese origin and lived in two camps in Zemio and Bambari. Violence during the year reduced access to basic services, such as education and health services, for refugees residing in Bambari.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The transitional charter provides citizens the ability to choose their government peacefully by participating in an election within 18 months of the date of adoption of the transitional charter, or by February 2015. The charter also gives the ECCAS mediator discretion to postpone elections by up to six months, if necessary, and provides authority to the heads of state from ECCAS countries to unanimously extend elections further if requested by the transitional president, transitional prime minister, and transitional head of parliament. As a result of continued instability and violence, as well as funding shortfalls within the government, ECCAS extended the transition twice during the year, in May and in November. The first of two rounds of presidential and legislative elections was held on December 30. The second round was slated to occur before the end of March 2016.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: In 2011 the country held three rounds of multiparty presidential and legislative elections that resulted in the re-election of former president Bozize. Bozize had seized power in a 2003 military coup, declared himself president, and headed a transitional government until winning election in 2005. Domestic and international election observers judged the 2011 elections to be flawed, citing fraud, intimidation, and lack of ballot secrecy, among other problems.

Political Parties and Political Participation: The transitional charter specifies that members of the transitional government and members of the CNT in certain leadership positions may not run for election.

Participation of Women and Minorities: In January 2014 the CNT elected Catherine Samba-Panza as president, the country's first female president. In August 2014 Mahamat Kamoun became the country's first Muslim prime minister. Eight of the 31 cabinet members were women. The legislature has one Fulani representative but no representatives who are Ba'aka (the earliest known inhabitants of the forests in the south) or albino.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

Corruption: Although the law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, the government did not implement the law effectively, and officials often engaged in corrupt practices with impunity. The World Bank's 2014 Worldwide Governance Indicators indicated corruption was a severe problem.

Financial Disclosure: The transitional charter requires senior members of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches at the beginning of their terms to declare publicly their personal assets and income for scrutiny by the transitional constitutional court. The Department of the Treasury, with the transitional constitutional court, is responsible for monitoring and verifying disclosures. The law specifies no sanctions for noncompliance. Declarations are public and posted on the transitional government's website. The transitional government, however, did not use the government website established under former president Bozize on which declarations had been publicly posted. The law does not require ministers to declare their assets upon departing government and is not explicit on what constitutes assets or income.

Public Access to Information: The transitional charter stipulates that every citizen has the right to access government information, which is posted on the government website and also published in the Official Gazette, the newspaper in which official decrees and laws are published.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

Instability, harassment, and threats by ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka groups restricted the operations of domestic and international human rights groups. In 2014 many international human rights and humanitarian groups either closed their offices or left the country due to violence and intimidation; some had returned by year's end. Renewed violence in September led to additional closures.

According to OCHA, between January 2014 and July, 19 humanitarian workers were killed and 272 incidents involving mistreatment of humanitarian workers occurred. On July 18, for example, unknown armed elements opened fire on a 20-vehicle World Food Program convoy escorted by MINUSCA; one driver was killed and several individuals injured.

According to local press reports, on August 20, intercommunal violence in Bambari resulted in the deaths of at least 10 civilians. The violence erupted after alleged anti-Balaka fighters killed a 19-year-old Muslim in the city. An ICRC staff member also was injured, and eight civilians were medically evacuated due to injuries.

Government Human Rights Bodies: A Joint Commission of Inquiry established in 2013 with a mandate to investigate human rights violations committed in the country since 2004 lacked resources and was not operational during the year.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The transitional charter stipulates that all persons are equal before the law without regard to race and gender. The government did not enforce the charter's provisions effectively, and significant discrimination existed.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law prohibits rape, although it does not specifically prohibit spousal rape. Rape is punishable by imprisonment with hard labor, but the law does not specify a minimum sentence. The government did not enforce the law effectively. In 2014 the International Rescue Committee reported more than two-thirds of 125 women surveyed in Bangui had been gang raped, primarily by armed groups (see section 1.g.).

Although the law does not specifically mention spousal abuse, it prohibits violence against any person and provides for penalties of up to 10 years in prison. Domestic violence against women was common. A legal aid center in Bimbo for sexual and gender-based crimes reported receiving approximately 10 cases a week. The law considers spousal abuse a civil matter unless the injury is severe. According to the AFJC, victims of domestic abuse seldom reported incidents to authorities.

The government took no known action to punish perpetrators or otherwise combat rape and domestic violence.

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C): The law prohibits FGM/C for women and girls, which is punishable by two to five years' imprisonment and a fine of 100,000 to one million CFA francs ($173 to $1,730), depending on the severity of the case. Approximately 24 percent of girls and women between ages 15 and 49 had been cut, according to multiple indicator cluster surveys reported by UNICEF in 2010; of that number 52 percent had undergone the procedure between ages 10 and 14. The government broadcast public awareness announcements about FGM/C on public radio.

Other Harmful Traditional Practices: Women, especially the very old and those without family, were accused of witchcraft (see section 6, Other Societal Violence or Discrimination).

Sexual Harassment: The law prohibits sexual harassment, but the government did not effectively enforce the law, and sexual harassment was common. The law prescribes no specific penalties for the crime.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of children; manage their reproductive health; and have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence. Nevertheless, most couples lacked access to contraception, skilled attendance during childbirth, prenatal care, and essential obstetric care and postpartum care. According to UN data collected between 1990 and 2011, approximately 9 percent of women and girls between ages 15 and 49 who were married or otherwise in union used a modern method of contraception, and skilled health personnel attended 41 percent of births. According to estimates from the UN Population Fund, the maternal mortality rate remained extremely high: 890 deaths for every 100,000 live births in 2010. With only 0.08 physicians per thousand residents, most births were unattended by qualified medical professionals, resulting in poor outcomes. UN sources estimated that in 2010 a woman's lifetime risk of maternal death was one in 26.

Discrimination: The law does not discriminate against women in inheritance and property rights, but a number of discriminatory customary laws often prevailed. Women's statutory inheritance rights often were not respected, particularly in rural areas. Women experienced economic and social discrimination. Customary law does not consider single, divorced, or widowed women, including those with children, to be heads of households. By law men and women are entitled to family subsidies from the government, but several women's groups complained about lack of access to these payments for women. Women's access to educational opportunities and to jobs, particularly at higher levels in their professions or in government service, remained limited (see section 7.d.). Some women reported economic discrimination in access to credit due to lack of collateral, but there were no reports of discrimination in pay equity or owning or managing a business.

The government did not take any steps during the year to combat discrimination against women. The AFJC advised women of their legal rights and how best to defend them. Because of widespread insecurity, the AFJC filed an increased number of complaints during the year.

Children

Birth Registration: Children derive citizenship by birth in the national territory or from one or both parents. Birth registration could be difficult and less likely to occur in regions of the country with little government presence. When births were registered, parents did not always register them immediately. Unregistered children faced restrictions on access to education and other social services.

Birth registration was spotty or impossible in conflict zones. Seleka members looted birth registration offices around the country and destroyed their records. The government closed the vital statistics office in Bangui through October.

Education: Education is compulsory from six to 15 years of age. Tuition is free, but students have to pay for items such as books and supplies, and for transportation. Girls did not have equal access to primary education: 65 percent of girls were enrolled in the first year of school, but only 23 percent of girls finished the six years of primary school, according to a 2007 UNESCO study. At the secondary level, a majority of girls dropped out at age 14 or 15 due to societal pressure to marry and bear children. Few Ba'aka, the earliest known inhabitants of the forests in the south, attended primary school. Some local and international NGOs made efforts, with little success, to increase Ba'aka enrollment in schools, but there was no significant government assistance for these efforts.

Public schools remained closed during the year due to instability in the country. In 2013 Seleka forces looted, ransacked, and burned numerous schools throughout the country, and only a very few private schools were open, according to UN reports. The closure of public schools affected approximately 800,000 children from elementary through secondary school. Due to the volatile security situation, many teachers and civil servants who sought refuge in Bangui at the outbreak of hostilities had not returned to the provinces for much of the year. A new school year began in November where security permitted.

Child Abuse: The law criminalizes parental abuse of children under age 15. Nevertheless, child abuse and neglect were widespread, although rarely acknowledged. The transitional government did not take steps to address child abuse.

Early and Forced Marriage: The law establishes 18 as the minimum age for civil marriage. Nonetheless, an estimated 68 percent of women between ages 20 and 24 were married before age 18 and 29 percent before age 15, according to UNICEF data collected between 2005 and 2013. UNICEF reported forced marriages were on the rise among young girls in rural areas where the transitional government lacked authority. The transitional government did not take steps to address forced marriage. The practice of early marriage was more common in the Muslim community. There were reports during the year of forced marriages of young girls to ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka members.

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: See information for girls under 18 in Women's section above.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: There are no statutory rape or child pornography laws to protect minors. The family code prescribes penalties for the commercial exploitation of children, including imprisonment and financial penalties. The minimum age of sexual consent is 18, but it was rarely observed (see Section 6, Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity). A legal aid center in Bimbo for sexual and gender-based crimes reported cases involving minor victims.

Armed groups committed sexual violence against children and used girls as sex slaves (see sections 1.g. and 2.d.).

There were reports of sexual exploitation of children and the inappropriate use of force by international and MINUSCA peacekeeping forces during the year (see section 1.c.).

Child Soldiers: Child soldiering was a problem (see section 1.g.).

Displaced Children: Prior to the Seleka takeover in 2013, there were more than 6,000 street children between ages five and 18, including an estimated 3,000 in Bangui, according to data collected by the Ministry of Family and Social Affairs. Observers believed that HIV/AIDS and societal belief in sorcery, particularly in rural areas, contributed to the large number of street children. An estimated 300,000 children had lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS, and children accused of sorcery (often reportedly in connection with HIV/AIDS-related deaths in their neighborhoods) frequently were expelled from their households and were sometimes subjected to societal violence.

The country's instability had a disproportionate effect on children, who accounted for 60 percent of IDPs. Access to government services was limited for all children, but displacement reduced it further.

International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

Anti-Semitism

There was no significant Jewish community, and there were no reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The law prohibits discrimination against persons with both mental and physical disabilities but does not specify other forms of disabilities. It also requires that in any company employing 25 or more persons, at least 5 percent of its staff must consist of sufficiently qualified persons with disabilities, if they are available. Additionally, the law states that at least 10 percent of the total number of newly recruited government civil service personnel should be persons with disabilities. There are no legislated or mandated accessibility provisions for persons with disabilities, and authorities did not provide such access.

The government did not enact programs to ensure access to buildings, information, and communications. No information was available on whether any children with disabilities attended school during the year. The Ministry of Labor's Labor Inspectorate has responsibility for protecting children with disabilities.

When persons with disabilities reached IDP camps, they faced difficulties accessing sanitation, food, and medical assistance.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Violence by unidentified persons, bandits, and other armed groups against the Mbororo, essentially nomadic pastoralists, was a problem. Their cattle wealth made them attractive targets, and they continued to suffer disproportionately from civil disorder in the north. Additionally, since many citizens viewed them as inherently foreign due to their transnational migratory patterns, the Mbororo faced occasional discrimination with regard to government services and protections. In recent years the Mbororo began arming themselves against attacks from farmers who objected to the presence of the Mbororo's grazing cattle. Several of these altercations resulted in deaths.

In May conflict between Mbororo herders and members of the local community in Kaga Bandoro resulted in nine deaths and the displacement of 1,460 persons.

Indigenous People

Discrimination against the Ba'aka, who constituted 1 to 2 percent of the population, was a problem. The Ba'aka continued to have little influence in decisions affecting their lands, culture, traditions, and the exploitation of natural resources. Forest-dwelling Ba'aka, in particular, experienced social and economic discrimination and exploitation, which the transitional government did little to prevent.

The Ba'aka, including children, often were coerced into agricultural, domestic, and other types of labor. They were considered slaves by members of other local ethnic groups, and even when they were remunerated for labor, their wages were far below those prescribed by the labor code and lower than wages paid to members of other groups.

Refugees International reported the Ba'aka were effectively "second-class citizens," perceived as barbaric and subhuman and excluded from mainstream society.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The penal code criminalizes consensual same-sex sexual activity. The penalty for "public expression of love" between persons of the same sex is imprisonment for six months to two years or a fine of between 150,000 and 600,000 CFA francs ($260 and $1,040). When one of the participants is a child, the adult may be sentenced to two to five years' imprisonment or a fine of 100,000 to 800,000 CFA francs ($173 and $1,390); however, there were no reports that police arrested or detained persons under these provisions.

While official discrimination based on sexual orientation occurred, there were no reports the government targeted gays and lesbians. Societal discrimination against LGBTI persons was entrenched due to a high degree of cultural stigmatization and social pressure to conform to a heterosexual lifestyle. Many citizens attributed the existence of homosexuality to undue Western influence. There were no reports that LGBTI persons were targeted for acts of violence, although the absence of reports could reflect cultural biases and stigma attached to being an LGBTI individual. There were no known organizations advocating or working on behalf of LGBTI persons.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

Persons with HIV/AIDS were subjected to discrimination and stigma, and many individuals with HIV/AIDS did not disclose their status due to social stigma.

Other Societal Violence or Discrimination

Violent conflict and instability in the country had a religious cast. Many but not all members of the ex-Seleka and its factions were Muslim, having originated in neighboring countries or in the remote Muslim north, a region the former Bozize government neglected.

During the worst of the crisis, some Christian communities formed anti-Seleka militias that targeted Muslim communities, presumably for their association with the Seleka. The Catholic archbishop of Bangui, local priests, and an imam worked with communities to defuse tensions by making radio broadcasts urging members of their religious communities to call for tolerance and restraint. Local leaders, including the bishop of Bossangoa, and internationally based academics warned against casting the conflict in religious terms and thus fueling its escalation along religious lines.

Ethnic killings related to cattle theft occurred. For example, on August 2, in the village of Malegbassa, anti-Balaka forces attacked Fulani herdsmen to steal their cattle, killing at least four persons and injuring others. Ex-Seleka forces, comprised mostly of ethnic Fulani, counterattacked and killed at least eight persons.

According to the UN independent expert, there were numerous credible reports that "persons accused of witchcraft have been detained, tortured, or killed by individuals or members of armed groups, particularly in the west of the country." Accusations of witchcraft were usually brought against members of the most vulnerable population groups, including women, the elderly, children, persons with disabilities, and persons with albinism. According to the independent expert, "Persons suspected of witchcraft also were victims of mob justice, often carried out by anti-Balaka militias with the complicity of local authorities."

In April anti-Balaka elements buried alive four women accused of practicing witchcraft in Zaorossoungu, Mambere-Kadi Province. On June 10, local residents beat to death a man accused of witchcraft.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides for the right of workers, except for senior-level state employees, all security force members, and foreign workers in residence for less than two years, to form or join unions without prior authorization. The labor code provides for the right of workers to organize and administer trade unions without employer interference and grants trade unions full legal status. The law requires that union officials be full-time, wage-earning employees in their occupation and allows them to conduct union business during working hours if the employer is informed 48 hours in advance and provides authorization. Substantial restrictions, including reciprocity, hampered noncitizens from holding leadership positions in a union, despite amendments to the labor code.

Workers have the right to strike in both the public and private sectors, but the law prohibits security forces, including the armed forces and gendarmes, from striking. Requirements for conducting a legal strike are lengthy and cumbersome. To be legal, strikes must be preceded by the union's presentation of demands, the employer's response to these demands, a conciliation meeting between labor and management, and a finding by an arbitration council that the union and the employer failed to reach agreement on valid demands. The union must provide eight days' advance written notification of a planned strike. The law states that if employers initiate a lockout that is not in accordance with the code, the employer is required to pay workers for all days of the lockout. The Ministry of Labor and Civil Service has the authority to determine a list of enterprises that are required by law to maintain a "compulsory minimum service" in the event of a strike. The government has the power of requisition or the authority to end strikes by invoking the public interest. The code makes no other provisions regarding sanctions on employers for acting against strikers.

The law expressly forbids antiunion discrimination. The labor code provides that unions may bargain collectively in the public and private sectors, and it provides workers protection from employer interference in the administration of a union. Unions representing public sector workers are effectively prevented from bargaining collectively.

Employees may have their cases heard in labor court. The law does not state whether employers found guilty of antiunion discrimination are required to reinstate workers fired for union activities, although the law requires employers found guilty of such discrimination to pay damages, including back pay and lost wages.

The transitional government generally enforced applicable laws and respected laws concerning labor actions. Workers exercised some of these rights, but only a relatively small part of the workforce, primarily civil servants, exercised the right to join a union. While worker organizations are officially outside government or political parties, the government exerted some influence over the leadership of some organizations.

Labor unions did not report any underlying patterns of discrimination or abuse. The president of the labor court stated the court did not hear any cases involving antiunion discrimination during the year.

Collective bargaining occurred in the private sector during the year, although the total number of collective agreements concluded was unknown. The transitional government generally was not involved if the two parties were able to reach an agreement. Information was unavailable on the effectiveness of collective bargaining in the private sector.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The labor code specifically prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor and prescribes a penalty of five to 10 years' imprisonment. The labor code's prohibition of forced or compulsory labor also applies to children, although the code does not mention them specifically. The government did not enforce the prohibition effectively, however, and there were reports that such practices occurred, especially in armed conflict zones. The failure of government enforcement was due to a lack of resources, a dysfunctional judicial system, and an inadequate inspection cadre. Employers subjected men, women, and children to forced domestic, agricultural, mining, sales, and restaurant labor, as well as sexual exploitation. Prisoners often worked on public projects without compensation. In Bangui and other large urban areas, however, the practice was rare, partly because of the presence of human rights NGOs or lawyers and because day labor was inexpensive. Ba'aka, including children, often were coerced into labor as day laborers, farm hands, or other unskilled labor and often treated as slaves (see section 6). No known victims were removed from forced labor during the year.

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The labor code forbids the employment of children younger than age 14 without specific authorization from the Ministry of Labor and Civil Service, but the law also provides that the minimum age for employment can be as young as age 12 for some types of light work in traditional agricultural activities or home services. The law prohibits children younger than age 18 from performing hazardous work or working at night. Although the law defines hazardous work as any employment that endangers children's physical and mental health, it does not define the worst forms of child labor. The mining code specifically prohibits child or underage labor.

The transitional government did not enforce child labor laws. The government trained police, military, and civilians on child rights and protection, but trainees lacked resources to conduct investigations. The government had numerous policies related to child labor, including programs to end the sexual exploitation and abuse of children and the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict, but there was no evidence of programs to eliminate or prevent child labor, including its worst forms. Penalties were not sufficient to deter violations.

Child labor was common in many sectors of the economy, especially in rural areas. Children continued to perform hazardous work and labored as child soldiers. No known victims were removed from the worst forms of child labor during the year.

Local and displaced children as young as age seven frequently performed agricultural work, including harvesting peanuts and cassava and helping gather items subsequently sold at markets, such as mushrooms, hay, firewood, and caterpillars. Children often worked as domestic workers, fishermen, and in mines, often in dangerous conditions. Children also worked in the diamond fields alongside adult relatives, transporting and washing gravel as well as mining gold, digging holes, and carrying heavy loads. Despite the law prohibiting child labor in mining, observers saw many children working in and around diamond-mining fields.

In Bangui many of the city's street children worked as street vendors.

Although there were no reports that ex-Seleka and anti-Balaka recruited child soldiers during the year, both groups continued using child soldiers (see section 1.g.).

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment and Occupation

It is illegal to discriminate in hiring or place of employment on the basis of race, national or social origin, gender, opinions, or beliefs. The law does not explicitly prohibit discrimination in employment and occupation based on disability, age, language, sexual orientation, gender identity, social status, and HIV-positive status or having other communicable diseases. There was no documentation as to whether the government effectively enforced the law.

Discrimination against women in employment and occupation occurred in all sectors of the economy and in rural areas, where traditional practices remained widespread (see section 6).

Migrant workers experienced discrimination in employment and pay.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The labor code states that the minister of labor and civil service must set minimum wages in the public sector by decree. The transitional government, the country's largest employer, set wages after consultation, but not negotiation, with government employee trade unions. The minimum wages in the private sector are established based on sector-specific collective conventions resulting from negotiations between employers and workers' representatives in each sector. Salary and pension arrears were problems for armed forces personnel and the country's 24,000 civil servants.

The minimum wage in the private sector varied by sector and type of work. While the average monthly minimum wage remained 28,000 CFA francs ($49), it was 26,000 CFA francs ($45) for government workers and 8,500 CFA francs ($15) for agricultural workers.

The minimum wage applies only to the formal sector, leaving most of the economy unregulated in terms of wages. The law applies to foreign and migrant workers as well. Most labor was performed outside the wage and social security system in the extensive informal sector, especially by farmers in the large subsistence agricultural sector. The official estimated poverty rate was 65 percent.

The law sets a standard workweek of 40 hours for government employees and most private sector employees. Household employees may work up to 52 hours per week. The law also requires a minimum rest period of 48 hours per week for citizen, foreign, and migrant workers. Overtime policy varied according to the workplace. Violations of overtime policy may be referred to the Ministry of Labor and Civil Service, although it was unknown whether this occurred during the year. There is no legal prohibition on excessive or compulsory overtime. The labor code, however, states that employers must provide for the health and security of employees who are engaged in overtime work.

There are general laws on health and safety standards in the workplace, but the Ministry of Labor and Civil Service did not precisely define them. The labor code states that a labor inspector may force an employer to correct unsafe or unhealthy work conditions.

The transitional government did not enforce labor standards, and violations were common in all sectors of the economy. Government reports indicated that only 18 of 53 labor inspectors were assigned to enforcement duties, which was insufficient to enforce compliance. Penalties were seldom enforced and were insufficient to deter violations. Employers commonly violated labor standards in agriculture and mining. Inspectors did not have the authority to determine or assess penalties when violations were detected.

Diamond mines, which employed an estimated 400,000 persons, are subject to standards imposed by the mining code and inspection by the Miners' Brigade. Nevertheless, monitoring efforts were underfunded and insufficient. Despite the law requiring those working in mines to be at least age 18, observers frequently saw underage diggers. Diggers often worked in open pits susceptible to collapse and generally earned a daily wage of 2,000 CFA francs ($3.47), often working seven days a week during the peak season. Diggers were employed by larger mine operators, worked in dangerous conditions at the bottom of open pits, and lacked safety equipment.

Miners, by contrast, have a share in ownership and participate in the proceeds of diamond sales. On average they earned 186,000 CFA francs ($322) per year via legal sales, but this figure varied considerably based on the scale of the mine. Often miners supplemented these earnings by either illegal diamond sales or wages from other sectors of the economy. No credible information was available regarding workplace injuries and deaths.

If information exists about dangerous working conditions, the law provides that workers may remove themselves without jeopardy to their employment. In such instances the labor inspector notifies the employer and requires that conditions be addressed within four working days. The high unemployment and poverty rates deterred workers from exercising this right.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Cameroon

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Cameroon, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5716128d4.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Cameroon is a republic dominated by a strong presidency. The country has a multiparty system of government, but the Cameroon People's Democratic Movement (CPDM) has remained in power since it was created in 1985. In practice the president retains the power to control legislation. In April 2013 the country conducted the first Senate elections in its history, which were peaceful and considered generally free and fair. In September 2013 simultaneous legislative and municipal elections occurred, and most observers considered them to be free and fair. In 2011 citizens re-elected CPDM leader Paul Biya president, a position he has held since 1982, in a flawed election marked by irregularities, but observers did not believe these had a significant impact on the outcome. Civilian authorities at times did not maintain effective control over the security forces.

During the year terrorist group Boko Haram's strategy in the country evolved to include using knives, sophisticated weapons, improvised explosive devises, and child soldiering. This had unprecedented consequences in affected regions as killings of civilians, abductions, looting, and destruction of property increased in frequency. In response the government increased security measures, but its efforts often failed to prevent excesses, which led to additional human rights abuses, including arbitrary arrests and detentions, and avoidable loss of life.

The most important human rights problems were Boko Haram killings and other abuses in the Far North Region, including child soldiering, abductions, beheadings, and immolations; security force (police and/or gendarmerie) torture and abuse, primarily of Boko Haram suspects; denial of fair and speedy public trial; and life-threatening prison conditions.

Other major human rights abuses included cases of arbitrary arrests and detention, prolonged and sometimes incommunicado pretrial detention, and infringement on privacy rights. The government in some cases harassed journalists, restricted freedoms of speech and press, and impeded freedom of movement. Security forces seized private property, including livestock and fishery products. The government conducted several secret trials of Boko Haram suspects. Corruption was pervasive at all levels of government. Gender-based violence occurred, including female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C). Trafficking in persons was a problem, and human rights activists were repeatedly harassed. Members of the minority Mbororo community faced some discrimination. Harassment of and discrimination against members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community continued, although less than in recent years. Child labor remained a problem, especially in the informal sector, and there were reports of traditional leaders illegally detaining and torturing accused citizens.

Although the government took steps to punish and prosecute officials who committed abuses in the security forces and in the public service, these actors often continued to act with impunity.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were several reports that members of defense and security forces committed arbitrary and unlawful killings, either in the execution of their official duties or as part of their private affairs. Two units within the army  the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) and the Motorized Infantry Battalion  the gendarmerie, and police were cited by civil society organizations and Amnesty International (AI) as being responsible for the violations.

Some abuses committed in late 2014 became public during the year. In December 2014, for example, members from BIR sealed off Magdeme and Double, two adjacent villages in the Mayo Sava division of the Far North Region, as part of a search operation. According to civil society organizations and AI's September report, at least nine individuals, including a young girl, were shot and killed during the operation. Government authorities investigated the incident; reportedly, all members of the BIR were found not culpable.

On January 29, in Dimako, East Region, Ngama Ndoke died as a result of heavy beating, reportedly by three gendarmes while in their custody. He was detained after being accused of stealing. The commander of the brigade attributed the death to an accident, but the result of the autopsy requested by the victim's relatives showed he died from severe internal bleeding caused by physical assault. When informed of the incident, the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Nouveaux Droits de l'Homme (NDH) reportedly informed the military court in the East Region and the subdepartment for human rights and international cooperation at the Ministry of Justice and was told that an investigation would be opened. The NDH stated at year's end it had no further information on the outcome of any investigation.

Boko Haram killed hundreds of civilians and members of defense and security staff in the Far North Region during the year. On September 3, for example, a double suicide attack occurred in the locality of Kerawa, six miles from Kolofata district, killing at least 40 individuals and injuring more than 150 others.

As of October 31, there were no reported developments in the case of the three suspects arrested in connection with the 2014 killing of Christiane Soppo Mbango, a close aide of former government minister Marafa Hamidou Yaya, who was serving a 25-year prison term.

There were no reported developments in the 2014 trial of the three members of the BIR who were being prosecuted by the Kribi High Court for beating a man to death in 2013. In 2014 government sources stated the case was being handled by the ordinary law court and not by the military tribunal, due to the seriousness of the case.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances. Nevertheless, there were several reports of the arrest and disappearance of hundreds of individuals by security forces (police and/or gendarmerie) in the Far North Region, including in Magdeme, Double, and Maroua, since December 2014. In its September report on incidents in the Far North Region, AI indicated that at least 130 individuals arrested in Magdeme and Double since December 2014 remained unaccounted for. In a February 3 letter to the governor of the Far North Region, the Movement for the Defense of Human Rights and Liberties called on the government to take action to safeguard the rights of the detainees and expedite their trials.

Boko Haram insurgents kidnapped hundreds of civilians during their multiple attacks in the Far North Region, including Double, Waza, Amchide, Tchakamari, and Blame, among other districts. According to civil society organizations and local residents, most of the persons kidnapped remained unaccounted for as of the end of October.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Although the constitution and law prohibit such practices, there were reports that security forces (police and/or gendarmerie) tortured, beat, harassed, or otherwise abused citizens.

According to credible NGOs, police and/or gendarmerie reportedly detained and tortured persons at specific sites, including temporary holding cells within police or gendarme facilities and cells located at the Directorate General for External Intelligence (DGRE). Traditional rulers and religious instructors also reportedly detained and tortured persons at various locations, according to NGO reporting.

According to NGOs security and defense forces used a variety of methods to extract information, especially from Boko Haram suspects. For example, members of the security and defense forces beat those arrested during the December 2014 sweep operation in Magdeme and Double, including hitting them with truncheons. Security and defense forces loaded detainees into trucks and initially took them to the military camp in Mora and thereafter to the Gendarmerie Headquarters in Maroua, where they were locked in makeshift cells. The following day it was discovered that many of the detainees had died, probably by suffocation. In a press release on January 15, the Network of Human Rights Defenders in Central Africa (REDHAC) estimated the death toll at 50 and stated the dead were buried in a mass grave.

On March 23, Minister of Communications Issa Tchiroma Bakary convened a press conference to refute REDHAC's allegations of torture and summary execution by defense and security forces. Bakary acknowledged that 25 individuals arrested and detained at the Far North Legion of the Gendarmerie were found dead the next day. In a report dated September 15, AI cited witnesses and survivors who reported a gas filled at least one of the two rooms where detainees were kept, leading detainees to vomit and bleed from the nose as they struggled to breathe. On September 17, Bakary denied responsibility for the deaths, instead claiming that an autopsy showed the 25 had died as a result of "a collective chemical intoxication after ingesting unidentified chemical and traditional products." He did not make the autopsy report public, nor did he identify the deceased or the location of their burial. In response to this incident, the gendarmerie commander for the 4th Region was placed on administrative duty in Yaounde, and the government opened a military tribunal to investigate the incident.

On June 26, in Bagante, West Region, a military tribunal delivered its verdict in the prosecution case against Franklin Mowha, president of the human rights organization Frontline Fighters for Citizens Interests, who had been detained since 2013 on charges of destroying public property and contempt of government while he was inquiring about the situation of detained civil society members. The court sentenced Mowha to an 18-month prison term and a fine of CFA francs 800,000 ($1,355). REDHAC claimed Mowha was arrested for his human rights activities.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison conditions remained harsh and life threatening due to gross overcrowding and inadequate food, poor sanitary conditions, and lack of medical care.

Physical Conditions: Overcrowding was pervasive in most prisons, especially in major urban centers. Officials held prisoners in dilapidated, colonial-era prisons, where the number of inmates was as much as four to five times the intended capacity. Sanitation, food, and medical care were wholly inadequate. Although authorities held that sick persons were detained separately from the general population, this was often not the case.

In August the country's prisons, which have an intended capacity of 17,000, had 26,702 inmates, according to the minister of justice speaking during a cabinet meeting on August 28. In an interview published in the Cameroon Tribune newspaper on September 2, the minister further indicated that the Yaounde Kondengui Central Prison, with an intended capacity of 1,500, had 4,234 inmates; the Douala New Bell prison with an initial capacity of 500 was upgraded to 960 through renovation and expansion over the years but held 3,150 prisoners as of August. The other prisons faced similar problems. The Maroua Central Prison, for instance, established in 1935 to accommodate up to 250 inmates, had 1,360, including approximately 50 women and 50 children. The Nkongsamba Prison, with an intended capacity of 200, had 432 inmates, while the Bertoua Central Prison, with an intended capacity of 120, held 680 inmates. As of March 3, the Garoua Central Prison, designed for 500, held 1,652 inmates.

There were two separate prisons and a few pretrial detention centers for women, but officials routinely held women in police and gendarmerie complexes with men. Occasionally, women were allowed to spend the night in an office or a corridor when there were men in the cells.

Deaths from illness, malnutrition, and lack of medical care occurred, and deficiencies in health care and sanitation remained significant problems. Physical abuse by prison guards, as well as prisoner-on-prisoner violence, was a problem, and "disciplinary cells" were often used to enforce discipline. Illustrative of overcrowded conditions, according to media outlets, on March 28, inmates of the Garoua Central Prison attempted a mass escape in protest against what they referred to as inhuman detention conditions. The incident began when 22 prisoners were locked into a 40-square-foot disciplinary cell as a punitive measure. One of the prisoners, who reportedly had asthma, suffocated and died overnight after prison guards on duty refused to open the door when alerted by other detainees. The following morning when prison guards attempted to take away the corpse, the other occupants of the discipline cell revolted. The news quickly spread throughout the prison, leading to a general riot.

Disease and illness were widespread, and sick inmates were not systematically and promptly separated from the general population, for lack of facilities. For instance, as of March 23, Garoua Central Prison, with a population of more than 1,600 inmates, had one single-patient room for both contagious and noncontagious diseases. The room was equipped with two observation beds, and the prison had access to four additional beds at the Garoua Central Hospital. The prison had one doctor, three nurses, two nursing assistants, and one laboratory technician, who, in addition to servicing the Garoua Central Prison, had to provide for the health needs of four other principal prisons in the North Region.

Malnutrition, tuberculosis, bronchitis, and numerous other untreated conditions, including infections, parasites, dehydration, and diarrhea, were rampant. Overall, doctors and medicine were inadequate. Many convicts spent their sentences moving between the prison yard and the hospital ward as they were infected and reinfected with illnesses, according to the Ministry of Justice Report on Human Rights in Cameroon for 2014 (released December 2015). The budget allocated for prisoner health in 2014 was CFA francs 157,740,000 ($255,000), the same total as in 2013, representing an average of CFA francs 6,572 per inmate ($10), according to the same report.

Potable water and food were inadequate, and officials expected prisoners' families to provide food for their family members. Prisoners generally had one meal a day. In 2014 the budget allocated for feeding prisoners throughout the country was CFA francs 2,313,799,000 ($3.8 million), amounting to an average daily food allocation of CFA francs 263 ($0.43).

Corruption among prison personnel was reportedly widespread. Prisoners bribed wardens for special favors or treatment, including temporary freedom, beds, and transfer to less crowded areas of the prisons. Due to their inability to pay fines, some prisoners remained imprisoned after completing their sentences or receiving court orders of release.

In temporary holding cells within police or gendarme facilities, officials held adult men, juveniles, and women together. Detainees usually received no food, water, or medical care. Detainees whose families knew of their incarceration relied on their relatives for food and medicine. Overcrowding was common. Detention center guards accepted bribes from detainees in return for access to better conditions, including permission to stay in an office instead of a cell.

Many citizens in the North and Far North regions turned to traditional chiefs for dispute resolution. The government claimed there were no private prisons in the country. There continued to be reports, however, of private detention facilities with reputations for serious abuse within the palaces of some traditional chiefdoms, including Tcheboa in the North Region. On August 26, the Garoua High Court sentenced Moussa Boubakari, the lamido of Tcheboa, to a two-year prison term plus a fine, following a lawsuit by a plaintiff, Gouma Damga, for "arbitrary arrest and detention." According to media reports, Moussa Boubakari was sentenced in 2002 for a similar offense but never served the prison term.

Administration: Although the National Commission on Human Rights and Freedoms (NCHRF) reported improvements in a few prisons in 2014, recordkeeping on prisoners was inadequate, especially in holding cells at police and gendarmerie premises, where detainees often were not registered. Independent authorities often investigated credible allegations of inhuman conditions.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted international humanitarian organizations access to prisoners. The NCHRF and other NGOs, including the Commission for Justice and Peace of the Catholic Archdiocese, made infrequent, unannounced prison visits during the year. The government continued to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit prisons, and the organization conducted visits during the year.

Unlike in previous years, there were no reports that human rights activists attempting to visit prisoners were required to pay bribes to prison officials. Some human rights activists, however, reported they were unable to obtain the necessary permits to visit prisoners. For example, NGOs reported they were denied access to Marafa Hamidou Yaya, including while he was at the Yaounde General Hospital receiving treatment. In response the government insisted that proper procedures requesting access were not followed.

Improvements: In May the National Program for Participatory Development donated 40 mattresses and 20 beds for inmates of the Douala New Bell Central Prison as a contribution to the improvement of detention conditions.

The registrar of Maroua Central Prison reported some improvements in prison conditions. Specifically, the prison constructed a separate wing for minors and women, and the number of doctors increased from one to two for the region.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The constitution and law prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention. The law states that, except in the case of an individual discovered in the act of committing a felony or misdemeanor, the person making the arrest shall disclose his identity and inform the person arrested of the reason. The law also provides that any person arrested shall be given reasonable facilities to be in contact with his family, obtain legal advice, and arrange for his defense. The government occasionally did not respect these provisions.

There were several reports the government arbitrarily arrested and detained innocent citizens, especially as part of the fight against terrorism. In December 2014 security forces (police and/or gendarmerie) arrested 129 children following raids on Quranic schools in Guirvidig, Far North Region. A total of 84 children were transferred to a government-sponsored juvenile center in Maroua. Local authorities reportedly accused the schools of recruiting children for Boko Haram, although no formal charges were made against the children. According to a June 19 AI press release, all but three of the children were under age 15; 47 were under 10, and some were as young as five. By year's end the children in the juvenile center had been returned to their families.

In early December the investigating magistrate at the Yaounde Military Court submitted his report on the criminal case against Aboubakar Sidiki and Abdoulaye Harissou, and hearings were scheduled to open on December 22. Sidiki and Harissou were arrested, respectively, in Douala and Maroua in August 2014 without having been informed of the reason for their arrests. Later they were charged with contempt for the president, hostility against "the fatherland and encouraging revolution," aiding and abetting murder, and illegal possession of weapons of war.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The national police, DGRE, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Territorial Administration, and, to a lesser extent, Presidential Guard, are responsible for internal security. The Ministry of Defense  which includes the gendarmerie, the army, the army's military security unit, and the DGRE  reports to an office of the Presidency, resulting in strong presidential control of security forces. While the army is responsible for external security, the national police and the gendarmerie have primary responsibility for law enforcement. The gendarmerie alone has responsibility in rural areas. The national police  which includes the public security force, judicial police, territorial security forces, and frontier police  report to the General Delegation of National Security (DGSN), which is under the direct authority of the presidency.

The government took some steps to hold police accountable for abuses of power. Police remained ineffective, poorly trained, and corrupt. Impunity continued to be a problem.

Civilian authorities maintained some control over police and gendarmerie, and the government had somewhat effective mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption. The DGSN and gendarmerie investigate reports of abuse and forward cases to the courts. Lesser sanctions are handled internally. The DGSN, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Justice claimed members of security and defense forces were sanctioned during the year for committing abuses but provided neither detail nor statistics on the cases. On April 6, however, the Mifi High Court in Bafoussam, West Region, sentenced Jean de Dieu Dimzon, a police officer working with the Bafoussam third district police station, to a three-year suspended sentence and a fine over charges stemming from excessive force. Also during the year, President Biya reportedly dismissed some security and defense officials for deliberately using the fight against Boko Haram to commit human rights abuses. This included the commander of the Darak gendarmerie brigade in the Logone and Chari division. Civil society organizations and some victims of human rights abuses reported that the president ordered an investigation into alleged abuses.

According to the Justice Ministry's 2014 human rights report, 29 police officers were sanctioned for misconduct relating to violation of the physical integrity of third parties and for offenses against their colleagues. Sanctions ranged from warnings to complete dismissal and included delay in promotion, drop in pay grade, demotion in rank, and suspension without pay. According to the same report, 15 gendarme officers were investigated for torture, violation of physical integrity or the right to life, and arbitrary arrest and detention. Military tribunals prosecuted soldiers and gendarmes for offenses relating to capital murder, murder, and torture. Sentences ranged from fines to life imprisonment.

The National Gendarmerie and the army also have special offices to investigate abuse. The secretary of state for defense and the minister-delegate at the Presidency in charge of defense sanctioned abusers. The minister-delegate of defense refers cases involving aggravated theft, criminal complicity, murder, and other major offenses to the military courts for trial.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

The law requires that police obtain a warrant for an arrest, except when a person is caught in the act of committing a crime, but police often did not respect this requirement. The law provides that detainees be brought promptly before a magistrate, although this often did not occur. Police may legally detain a person in connection with a common crime for up to 48 hours, renewable once. This period may, with the written approval of the state counsel, be exceptionally extended twice before charges are brought. Nevertheless, police reportedly often exceeded these detention periods. The law permits detention without charge for renewable periods of 15 days by administrative authorities such as governors and civilian government officials serving in territorial command. The law also provides for access to legal counsel and family members, although police frequently denied detainees access to both. The law prohibits incommunicado detention, but it occurred, especially as part of the fight against Boko Haram. The law permits bail, allows citizens the right to appeal, and provides the right to sue for unlawful arrest, but these rights were seldom respected.

Arbitrary Arrest: "Friday arrests," a practice whereby individuals arrested on a Friday typically remained in detention until at least Monday unless they paid a bribe to be released earlier, continued. Security forces (police and/or gendarmerie) and government authorities reportedly continued to arrest and detain persons arbitrarily, often holding them for prolonged periods without charge or trial and at times incommunicado.

There were several reports that security forces (police and/or gendarmerie) arbitrarily arrested persons during neighborhood sweeps for criminals and stolen goods or arrested persons without identification, as part of the fight against growing insecurity.

During the year the commander of the Mbouda gendarmerie brigade and the registrar of the Mbouda Principal Prison were called before an investigating judge, in connection with the 2014 incarceration of Theodore Wamba and his family, which included his wife, 10-month-old infant, nine-year-old son, and the pregnant widow of his brother. They were incarcerated for more than three months at the Mbouda Principal Prison, West Region, after Wamba requested information on the death of his elder brother, whom a private self-defense militia member shot and killed. A former local parliamentarian and members of the militia accused Wamba of highway robbery and drug trafficking. In 2014 the Bafoussam military tribunal released Wamba and his family for lack of evidence and ordered a new investigation into the case.

On October 7, the Tchollire Court of First Instance delivered its verdict on the prosecution case against 14 members of the Touboro Youth Association for Development, including Celestin Yandal, who were arrested and detained since November 2013 in connection with the September 2013 legislative and municipal elections. They were charged with making death threats and destroying property. After two years of pretrial detention, the court found the charges against eight of the 14 youths unsubstantiated. The remaining six were sentenced to time served and a fine.

As in the previous years, there continued to be reports that in the North and Far North regions, traditional chiefs temporarily detained persons outside the government penitentiary system.

Pretrial Detention: The law provides for a maximum of 18 months' detention before trial, but many detainees waited years for a date in court. Following visits to prisons and detention centers in January and May 2014, the NCHRF found the majority of inmates in Yaounde Central Prison were in pretrial detention. The NCHRF attributed the increase in prison population to administrative and judicial bottlenecks, including factors such as errors in drafting judicial documents, disappearance of documents from case files, and corruption.

As of September Aboubakar Sidiki and Abdoulaye Harissou, arrested August 9 and 26, 2014, respectively, remained in pretrial detention at Yaounde Kondengui Principal Prison. Hearings were scheduled to commence in January 2016.

During the year authorities released Donfack Yannick Romain, Noumbo Bertrand, Tsafack Eric, Kenfack Fomete William, and Tsafack Jean Pierre, who had been detained in Bafoussam, West Region, since their arrest in the aftermath of the 2008 riots.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary. While the judiciary often demonstrated impartiality and independence, it remained generally corrupt, inefficient, and subject to political influence. Individuals reportedly accused innocent persons of crimes as retribution or to solve personal disputes. Unlike in the previous year, there were no reliable reports that authorities did not respect court orders.

On July 16, the Supreme Court issued a ruling on procedural grounds releasing Paul Eric Kingue, who had been detained since he was arrested in 2008. Kingue, at the time mayor of Njombe-Penja, was arrested in the context of a protest over a possible constitutional amendment to eliminate presidential term limits and charged with multiple offenses.

The court system is subordinate to the Ministry of Justice. The constitution designates the president as "first magistrate," thus "chief" of the judiciary, making him the legal arbiter of any sanctions against the judiciary, although he has not played this role publicly. The constitution specifies that the president is the guarantor of the legal system's independence. He appoints all judges, with the advice of the Higher Judicial Council. While judges hearing a case should be governed only by the law and their conscience as provided for by the constitution, in some matters they are subordinate to the minister of justice. For example, the Special Criminal Court must have approval from the minister of justice before it may drop charges against a defendant who offers to pay back the money he was accused of having embezzled. Despite the judiciary's independence vis-a-vis the executive and legislative powers, the head of the executive branch appoints all members of the bench and legal department of the judicial branch, including the president of the Supreme Court, and may dismiss them at will. In December 2014, for instance, President Biya replaced important members of the judiciary, including Supreme Court President Alexis Dipanda Mouelle.

The legal system includes national and customary law, and many criminal and civil cases may be tried using either one. Criminal cases generally were tried in statutory courts.

Customary courts served as a primary means for settling domestic cases, such as succession, inheritance, and child custody. Customary courts may exercise jurisdiction in a civil case only with the consent of both parties. Either party has the right to have a case heard by a statutory court and to appeal an adverse decision by a customary court to the statutory courts.

Customary court convictions involving alleged witchcraft are automatically transferred to the statutory courts, which act as the courts of first instance. The law provides for sentences of between two and 10 years' imprisonment and fines of between CFA francs 5,000 ($9) and CFA francs 100,000 ($173). There were no arrests or trials for alleged witchcraft reported during the year.

Customary law is deemed valid only when it is not "repugnant to natural justice, equity, and good conscience," but many citizens in rural areas remained unaware of their rights under civil law and were taught they must abide by customary laws. Customary law ostensibly provides for equal rights and status, although men may limit women's rights regarding inheritance and employment. Customary law practiced in rural areas is based on the traditions of the predominant ethnic group and is adjudicated by traditional authorities of that group. Some traditional legal systems regard wives as the legal property of their husbands.

Military tribunals may exercise jurisdiction over civilians when the president declares martial law and in cases involving civil unrest or organized armed violence. Military tribunals also have jurisdiction over gang crimes, banditry, and highway robbery if such crimes are committed with firearms.

Trial Procedures

The constitution and law provide for the right to a fair public hearing, without undue delay, in which the defendant is presumed innocent, but authorities did not always respect the law. For instance, trials of Boko Haram suspects were not made public. Defendants have the right to be informed promptly and in detail of the charges, with free interpretation as necessary. They have the right to a presumption of innocence, but the government often did not respect that right, resulting in many pretrial suspects being treated as if they were convicted. Trial by jury system is effective, especially in criminal matters. Defendants have the right to be present and to consult with an attorney in a timely manner, and the government generally respected this right. Authorities generally allowed defendants to question witnesses and to present witnesses and evidence on their own behalf. Defendants have the right to adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense and not to be compelled to testify or confess guilt. Defendants have access to government-held evidence relevant to their cases, although in some cases the government did not make the evidence available in timely fashion. Defendants may appeal a conviction. The law extends these rights to all citizens.

Because appointed attorneys received little compensation, the quality of legal representation for indigent clients was often poor. Despite a law providing for attorneys for indigent defendants at public expense, lawyers often refused to defend such clients, claiming the government's compensation was inadequate. Human rights organizations such as REDHAC and voluntary organizations such as the Cameroonian Association of Female Jurists and Lawyers without Borders helped provide legal assistance in some cases, but defendants in courts of first instance and high courts were often prosecuted without being offered legal counsel. Generally, only defendants who run the risk of a life sentence or death penalty were systematically provided legal assistance. The law extends these rights to all citizens.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

No statistics were available on the number of political prisoners. Political prisoners were detained under heightened security, often within the Secretariat of State for Defense. Some detainees were held within the General Delegation of External Research under high security, and the government did not permit access to such persons on a regular basis, or at all, depending on the case.

Former minister of state for territorial administration Marafa Hamidou Yaya, convicted in 2012 on corruption charges and sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment, remained in detention. During the year the government reportedly refused regular access to him. On July 3, barrister Saskia Ditisheim, Marafa's Swiss lawyer, and her local colleague, barrister Alice Nkom, were expelled from the Yaounde General Hospital during a visit to their client, who had been receiving treatment in the hospital over the preceding few weeks. A police officer arrived at the hospital room with an order to usher the two visitors to the hospital director, who told them they could not continue their visit because they did not have a permit to communicate with Marafa.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

Citizens have the right to seek redress for alleged wrongs through administrative procedures or through the legal system, although both options involved lengthy delays. There were problems enforcing civil court orders due to bureaucratic inefficiency.

Property Restitution: Over the past few years, the government reportedly evicted thousands of squatters from their places of residence, including in the Douala neighborhood of Mebanda, but failed to resettle or compensate promptly those displaced. Many victims remained homeless during the year. No particular group was reported to have been intentionally targeted by officials for discriminatory treatment.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

Although the constitution and law prohibit arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence, these rights were subject to restriction for the "higher interests of the state," and there were credible reports that police and gendarmes harassed citizens, conducted searches without warrants, monitored private communications, and opened or seized mail with impunity. Unlike in the previous year, there were no reliable reports police detained family members and neighbors of criminal suspects.

The law permits a police officer to enter a private home during daylight hours without a warrant if he is pursuing a criminal suspect. A police officer may enter a private home at any time in pursuit of a person observed committing a crime. An administrative authority, including a governor or senior divisional officer, may authorize police to conduct neighborhood sweeps without warrants, and this occurred during the year.

Security forces (police and/or gendarmerie) sometimes sealed off a neighborhood, systematically searched homes, arrested persons, sometimes arbitrarily, and seized suspicious or illegal articles. Police detained citizens without identification cards until identity could be established. There were several complaints that police arbitrarily confiscated electronic devices, including cell phones.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The law provides for freedom of speech and press but also criminalizes media offenses, and the government restricted speech and press.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: Government officials constrained individuals or organizations that criticized government policies or expressed views at odds with government policy. Individuals who criticized the government publicly or privately sometimes faced reprisals. The government occasionally used the law requiring permits or government notification of public protests to stifle discourse. Such controls intensified after the December 2014 antiterrorism law, and many civil society and political organizations reported increased difficulty in obtaining approval to organize public gatherings. The government attempted to impede criticism by monitoring political meetings.

Press and Media Freedoms: The media was largely free, but there were sporadic instances of restrictions and self-censorship on matters of criticism against the state.

Approximately 650 newspapers published at least once during the year, according to government sources, but only an estimated 25 had sufficient funds to publish regularly. Among the publications that appeared regularly, some had not paid their journalists for up to 10 months at a time, deepening the vulnerability of "pay for coverage" activities and thus undermining the credibility of private media. Also, the unreliable road infrastructure and the monopoly of Messa Press in the printing and distribution of newspapers contributed to delayed newspaper circulation, placing the print media in a disadvantageous position when competing against electronic media. The government continued to disburse official funds to support private press outlets, although, unlike in previous years, there were no reports of disbursing funds selectively to outlets less critical of the government and with instructions to provide reporting favorable to the government. During the year some media professionals criticized the selecting and granting of public aid to private media. The amount disbursed to the media was not significant and barely covered a week's printing costs.

Government officials sometimes used expansive libel laws to arraign journalists who criticized them and to suspend some media outlets. Some criticism of government officials appeared in both private and public media outlets. The government claimed that all media had access to the presidency and were invited to take part in the head of state's official trips. Nevertheless, authorities did not accredit privately owned media with the president's or prime minister's offices and did not permit private media to accompany the president on official trips. During the official reception for presidents Hollande of France and Buhari of Nigeria, the private media complained they did not enjoy the same access privileges as the foreign media, although during these visits some private media outlets were invited. The Prime Minister's Office revived the "Credentialing Committee," a government mechanism meant to systematize, and potentially control, the issuance of press credentials. The decision was met with criticism as well as enthusiasm from the media. While the committee failed to meet its intent several years ago, it was finally implemented in 2011. Journalists complained that it was corrupt and handed out credentials to undeserving individuals while ignoring journalists with experience and credibility in the industry.

Approximately 200 radio stations officially operated, including 50 community radio stations and 150 commercial radio stations, three-fourths of them in Yaounde and Douala. Three private television and one radio stations were officially licensed to operate, in addition to the state-owned public television and radio. Overall, the government issued four licenses since 2007. All unlicensed private radio and television broadcasts operate under the government's policy of "administrative tolerance." A cable distributor also had an official license to transmit, and many others transmitted programs through cable networks without official authorization. The government required nonprofit rural radio stations to submit applications to broadcast, but they were exempt from licensing fees.

Commercial radio and television broadcasters must submit a licensing application and pay an application fee and thereafter pay a renewable five-year annual licensing fee. The high license cost as well as the slow process kept private radio and television from applying. It is the responsibility of the government to scrutinize and call on proprietors to pay. Some were prepared to pay for a license, but the government preferred to keep them operating under "administrative tolerance," which meant that media outlets were allowed to function but could face closure by local officials at any time due to lack of a license. Unlike in previous years, there were no reports the government prohibited rural community radio stations from discussing politics. Some managers of community radios, however, reported they avoided politics as a general rule.

The state-owned Cameroon Radio and Television (CRTV) broadcast on both television and radio. The government levied taxes to finance CRTV programming, which gave the station an advantage over independent broadcasters.

Violence and Harassment: Security forces (police and/or gendarmerie) arrested, detained, and abused journalists during the year. On July 30, in Maroua, Far North Region, authorities arrested Ahmed Abba, a Nigerian national and correspondent for Radio France International's Hausa service. He was reportedly arrested while in a meeting at the governor's office, taken to Yaounde, where he was held for questioning, and denied access to his lawyer for several weeks. In a statement issued on September 8, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) expressed concern over the detention and called on authorities to explain the reason for it and to allow Abba immediate access to his lawyer. Based on a report by Radio France International citing Charles Tchoungang, the journalist's lawyer, the CPJ suggested that Abba was being interrogated in connection with the activities of Boko Haram. On November 2, in an interview with the newspaper Cameroon Tribune, Minister of Communication Bakary denied that Abba had been arrested for exercising his profession as a journalist, claiming instead that Abba had been detained under the antiterrorism law and remained under investigation. Bakary stated Abba was presumed innocent but admitted Abba had not yet been granted access to a lawyer, citing the supposed sensitivity of the investigation under the antiterrorism law.

On August 28, a local journalist reporting in Nigeria, Simona Ateba, was detained and interrogated while he was allegedly accused of affiliation with Boko Haram and espionage. The journalist was arrested in the Minawao refugee camp in the Far North Region as he attempted to document the situation of the refugee situation. Ateba, who had been living and working as an independent reporter in Lagos (Nigeria) for more than 10 years, was reportedly given a grant by the Abuja-based International Center for Investigative Journalism to report on living conditions of refugees in Cameroon and Chad. Two major journalist unions, the National Syndicate of Cameroonian Journalists and the Cameroon Journalists' Union, promptly called for his immediate release because there is no law in the country prohibiting reporting from a refugee camp. Ateba was released after spending three nights in jail and credited the power of social media and public campaign for his release, after gendarmes gave him access to his smart phone and allowed posting of cell photographs on his social media account. Ateba admitted he entered the refugee camp without permission after unsuccessful attempts to obtain authorization from the Far North governor and the minister of communication.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: The National Communication Council (NCC) is empowered to ensure that all printed media comply with the legal requirement that editors in chief deposit two signed copies of each newspaper edition with the Prosecutor's Office for scrutiny within two hours after publication. Journalists and media outlets also practiced self-censorship, especially after NCC served them suspensions.

The NCC issued sanctions ranging from warnings to temporary suspensions for up to six months. In February the NCC permanently banned the periodical La Depeche du Cameroun and its publisher, Gilbert Avang, for "serious violation of professional ethics." The weekly La Nouvelle received a six-month suspension, while daily Le Soir and the weekly Le Courrier each received a one-month suspension. Martinez Zogo, anchor of the program Embouteillage broadcast over Amplitude FM radio also received a one-month suspension.

Libel/Slander Laws: Press freedom is constrained by strict libel laws that may suppress criticism. Any citizen may file lawsuits against media organs for defamation of character. These laws authorize the government, at its discretion and the request of the plaintiff, to criminalize a civil libel suit or to initiate a criminal libel suit in cases of alleged libel against the president and other high government officials. Such crimes are punishable by prison terms and heavy fines. The libel law places the burden of proof on the defendant. The government contended maintaining libel laws in the penal code is aimed at safeguarding the rights of other citizens, whose reputations can be permanently damaged by defamation. The government and individual public figures reportedly used laws against libel or slander to restrict public discussion. The NCC, however, took significant steps to improve the impartiality of its adjudications.

Government officials filed libel complaints against media outlets with the NCC, but the NCC declared some of the complaints baseless. This was the case with Paul Atanga Nji, minister in charge of special duties at the Presidency, who filed a complaint against L'Oeil du Sahel, The Post Guardian, Le Jour, and The Post; however, the NCC resolved that his case was baseless, noting the newspaper outlets showed proof of professionalism in their work, notably, that they used an investigative approach that verified and crosschecked information. Complaints filed by Emmanuel Djoumessi Nganou, minister of the economy, planning, and regional development, against the newspaper Integration and radio Amplitude FM, were similarly disqualified on procedural grounds.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports that the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority. According to the International Telecommunication Union, approximately 11 percent of the population used the internet in 2014.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

Although there were no legal restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events, state security informants reportedly operated on university campuses. Unlike in previous years, there were no reports from professors that participation in opposition political parties or public criticism of the government could affect their professional opportunities. In October, Thierry Batoum and Barthelemy Tchaleu, president and secretary of the Association for the Defense of Cameroon University Students' Rights, respectively, were allowed to resume classes after two years of exclusion. Their initial exclusion occurred because they signed a petition calling on Yaounde I University authorities to issue biometric identification cards to all students who paid their regular university fee so that they could access the full gamut of academic and other services provided by the university. On November 16, police arrested Batoum while he was distributing leaflets calling on university students to participate in a silent and peaceful march against the illegal sale of student identity cards. After five days of detention, the police referred him to the prosecutor for organizing an illegal demonstration with the purpose of encouraging students to revolt. A trial opened on November 24 and continued at year's end.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Freedom of Assembly

Although the law provides for freedom of assembly, the government restricted this right. The law requires organizers of public meetings, demonstrations, and processions to notify officials in advance but does not require prior government approval of public assemblies and does not authorize the government to suppress public assemblies that it has not approved in advance. Nevertheless, officials routinely asserted the law implicitly authorizes the government to grant or deny permission for public assembly. Consequently, the government often refused to grant permits for assemblies and used force to suppress public assemblies for which it had not issued permits. The government also prevented civil society organizations and political parties from holding press conferences.

Security forces (police and/or gendarmerie) forcibly disrupted meetings and demonstrations of citizens, trade unions, and political activists throughout the year.

In August, according to La Nouvelle Expression, the speaker of the National Assembly, Cavaye Yeguie Djibril, increased security measures at the chamber, notably implementing a ban on staff member gatherings. In a security note, he reportedly warned that "staff members who gather within the institution and for any reason whatsoever will be considered as potential terrorists." The independent daily claimed that this specific measure had no direct connection with the Boko Haram crisis but rather targeted sympathizers of Bouba Simala, Cavaye's bodyguard, whose employment had been terminated and was under investigation.

On September 15, the divisional officer for Yaounde II used security forces (police and/or gendarmerie) to disrupt a civil society workshop on electoral governance and democratic transition to mark World Democracy Day. Police arrested some organizers of the workshop, including Jean Marc Bikoko, Agnes Adelaide Metougou, Jessie Bikoko, and Yves Ndjalla Epangue. The activists arrested spent nine days in detention. Although they were released on September 23, they remained under investigation for alleged disobedience and resistance.

There were a few reports of security forces disrupting student activities during the year.

Freedom of Association

The constitution and law provide for freedom of association, but the law also places limits on this right. The minister of territorial administration may, on the proposal of the senior divisional officer, suspend the activities of an association for three months, on the grounds that the association is disrupting public order. The minister may also dissolve an association if its activities are deemed to constitute a threat to the security of the state. In January the divisional officer for Nguti in the Southwest Region restored the charter of the NGO Nature Cameroon that was revoked in 2013 for the repetitive holding of public meetings. The restoration followed a December 2014 decision by the senior divisional office for Koupe-Manengouba. According to local groups, the NGO's activities were initially suspended as a result of pressure from Herakles Farms, a firm with a planned palm oil project in the region.

While national associations may acquire legal status by declaring themselves in writing to the Ministry of Territorial Administration, the ministry must explicitly register foreign associations and religious groups, and the law imposes heavy fines for individuals who form and operate any such association without prior authorization. The law prohibits organizations that advocate a goal contrary to the constitution, laws, and morality, as well as those that aim to challenge the security, territorial integrity, national unity, national integration, or the republican form of the state.

The conditions for government recognition of political parties, NGOs, or associations were complicated, involved long delays, and were unevenly enforced. The process resulted in associations operating in legal uncertainty, their activities tolerated but not formally approved.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

Although the constitution and law provide for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, these rights sometimes were impeded. The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to internally displaced persons (IDPs), refugees, and asylum seekers.

In-country Movement: Security forces (police and/or gendarmerie) at roadblocks and checkpoints in cities and on most highways often extorted bribes and harassed travelers. Police frequently stopped travelers to check identification documents, vehicle registrations, and tax receipts as security and immigration control measures. There were credible reports that police arrested and harassed individuals who failed to carry their identification cards as required by law.

Exile: The law prohibits forced exile, and the government did not use it. Some human rights monitors and political opponents remained in self-imposed exile because they believed they were threatened by the government.

Internally Displaced Persons

Several thousand persons abandoned their homes in some villages on the Nigeria border and fled to cities in the Far North Region as a result of frequent attacks from Boko Haram. Most of them left from the Far North Region localities of Kerewa, Greya, and Kolofata and found refuge in classrooms or churches, or camped outdoors in the Mayo-Sava, Logone, and Chari divisions. According to reports released by UNHCR in August and September, there were approximately 81,700 IDPs in the Far North Region. According to government sources, the country had an estimated 100,000 IDPs as of September 10. The government generally provided protection and assistance to IDPs.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The laws provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has established a system of providing protection to refugees. UNHCR continued to play an important role in providing documentation and assistance to the refugee population.

The country hosted more than 319,000 refugees. More than 253,000 refugees fled the Central African Republic (CAR), including more than 150,000 who had been registered since December 2013. Refugees from the CAR lived in large refugee sites and approximately 300 villages in the Adamaoua and East regions, where they received humanitarian assistance from local communities and humanitarian agencies, including UNHCR. UNHCR registered more than 58,000 Nigerian refugees since May 2013, of whom more than 46,000 lived in Minawao Camp.

Refoulement: Following security measures taken by authorities in the Far North Region to counter Boko Haram, in July and August UNHCR noted cases of forced returns, including a convoy of more than 2,150 Nigerians who were escorted by the Cameroonian military. The convoy left Kousseri on July 29 for Nigeria. On August 3, a joint team of police and military officials also entered the Gourounguel transit center and reportedly expelled 50 of the 512 individuals who were undergoing the registration process to claim asylum. On August 14, UNHCR expressed concern over the method of recent government deportations of Nigerians without proper screening or due process for asylum application as required by international agreements. The statement praised Cameroon and neighboring countries for their "generosity and humanitarian spirit" but also expressed "fears that such deportations lead to shrinking of the protection and humanitarian space." Shortly thereafter UNHCR and the government arrived at an agreement to satisfy both the government's security concerns and obligations under the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. Despite this apparent agreement, media reports indicated that refoulements continued to occur.

Durable Solutions: Between January and September, six refugee families with a total of 15 members voluntarily returned to their respective countries with the facilitation of UNHCR. Countries of origin included Chad, Rwanda, South Sudan, Liberia, and the CAR.

Temporary Protection: The government provided temporary protection to individuals who may not qualify as refugees, extending this protection to approximately 100,000 individuals during the year.

Cameroon also temporarily hosted third-country nationals who fled violence in the CAR. Although these individuals did not meet the definition of "refugee" as they did not flee their country of origin, they received assistance from the International Organization for Migration.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The law provides citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage. President Biya and CPDM members, however, controlled key aspects of the political process, including the judiciary.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: In April 2013 the country held its first Senate elections. The ruling CPDM won 54 of the 70 elected seats; an additional 30 senators were appointed by the president, in accordance with the constitution. The elections were peaceful and generally free and fair. In June 2013 the Senate elected a president, Marcel Niat Njifenji, who is the designated successor to the president of the country in case of a vacancy.

In September 2013 the country held simultaneous legislative and municipal elections, with 29 parties participating in the legislative election and 35 in the municipal election. The CPDM won 148 of 180 parliamentary seats and 305 of 360 municipal council positions, representing gains for opposition parties compared with the parliament elected in 2007. In preparation Elections Cameroon (ELECAM), whose members were appointed by the president, recompiled voter rolls using biometric technology and issued biometric voter identification cards that were required at polling booths. Despite irregularities such as the inconsistent use of identification cards due to lack of expertise of local polling officials, opposition parties generally accepted the results. The high voter turnout (70 percent) and ELECAM's administration of the election were viewed as major improvements over previous elections.

In October 2011 President Biya was re-elected in a poll marked by irregularities, but one which most observers believed reflected popular sentiment.

On July 21, the president appointed Abdoulaye Babale to replace Sani Taminou as ELECAM's director general of elections. Observers considered the appointment an attempt to resolve a leadership crisis between the chairman of ELECAM's Electoral Board and its director general of elections. The crisis could have ultimately impaired ELECAM's capacity to implement its mandate and organize credible elections, and the replacement was seen as a positive step.

Political Parties and Political Participation: The country had 298 registered political parties. Membership in the ruling political party conferred significant advantages, including in the allocation of key jobs in state-owned entities and the civil service. The president appoints all ministers, including the prime minister, and also directly appoints the governors of each of the 10 regions, who generally represent CPDM interests in the regions. The president has the power to appoint important lower-level members of the 58 regional administrative structures as well. The government pays the salaries of (primarily nonelected) traditional leaders, which creates a system of patronage.

In the three elections held in 2013, the CPDM was the most popular party in most regions except in the Northwest, where it faced strong competition from the Social Democratic Front. Many residents of the Anglophone regions sought greater freedom, equality of opportunity, and better government by demanding regional autonomy rather than national political reform, and they formed several quasi-political organizations in pursuit of their goals.

Authorities sometimes refused to grant opposition parties permission to hold rallies and meetings.

Participation of Women and Minorities: There were cultural constraints on women's political participation and they were underrepresented at all levels of government.

The minority Baka people took part as candidates in the municipal and legislative elections but were not represented in the Senate, National Assembly, or the higher offices of government.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for official corruption, but the government did not implement the law effectively or uniformly, and corruption was pervasive at all levels of government. Officials frequently engaged in corrupt practices with impunity. The World Bank's most recent Worldwide Governance Indicators reflected that corruption was a severe problem. Although there was some improvement in efforts to combat it, institutionalized, endemic, and publicly accepted corruption was a major challenge facing the government. In the context of the fight against Boko Haram, corruption-related inefficiencies and diversion of resources from their intended purposes represented a fundamental national security vulnerability.

Corruption: During the year the government sanctioned government employees for corruption, embezzlement, and mismanagement. The Cameroon Tribune reported that as of June 12, 42 cases had been filed and 11 court decisions issued at the Special Criminal Court (in French, Tribunal Criminal Special, or TCS) since the beginning of the year. Operation Sparrow Hawk, which was launched in previous years to fight corruption, including embezzlement of public funds, continued.

On June 9, the Supreme Court delivered its verdict on the September 2014 ruling by the TCS to sentence Cameroon-born French lawyer Annette Lydienne Yen Eyoum and her coaccused to a 25-year prison term. Eyoum and Honore Ngwen, former heads of the legal affairs division at the Ministry of Finance, were further required jointly to pay CFA francs 1.153 billion ($2 million). Eyoum represented the government in litigation against Societe General des Banques au Cameroun (SGBC) in connection with the complicated 10-year liquidation of the government's National Commodity Marketing Authority. In the process of the liquidation, she and her codefendants diverted CFA francs 1.153 billion ($2 million) into their private accounts. Eyoum claimed the money represented damages brought against SGBC (the defendant) by court decision, while the government considered it embezzlement. In a September 2014 ruling, TCS sentenced Eyoum to 25 years in prison. Her lawyers challenged the decision before the Supreme Court in October 2014, and a decision was pending.

On June 18, TCS delivered its verdict in the prosecution case against Dieudonne Telesphore Ambassa Zang and his coaccused. Ambassa Zang, former minister of public works, and Felix Debeauplan Mekongo Abega, a senior official at the same ministry, were given life sentences. They had been prosecuted since 2009 for embezzlement of public funds totaling more than CFA francs six billion ($10.4 million), following an inspection mission by the Supreme State Audit Office. Because they were absent from the court from the opening of the case, the court issued an arrest warrant against them as part of the verdict. Ambassa Zang was also required to pay the ministry damages, including CFA francs 5.126 billion ($8.9 million), and also CFA francs 694.465 million ($1.2 million) jointly with his coaccused.

Although police were reportedly sanctioned for corruption, some officers convicted of corruption were relieved of their duties but retained their jobs due to weak accountability and enforcement mechanisms for internal disciplining. Individuals reportedly paid bribes to police and the judiciary to secure their freedom. Police demanded bribes at checkpoints, and influential citizens reportedly paid police to make arrests or abuse individuals with whom they had personal disputes. There were reports that some police associated with the issuance of emigration and identification documents collected additional fees from applicants.

Judicial corruption was a problem. According to press reports, judicial authorities accepted illegal payments from detainees' families in exchange for a reduced sentence or the outright release of their relatives. Judges were susceptible to executive influence and often delayed judicial proceedings in response to governmental pressure. Many powerful political or business interests had virtual immunity from prosecution, and politically sensitive cases occasionally were settled through bribery.

Corruption in the education sector was reported to be a major problem. Anecdotal reports suggested that in reviewing the files of applicants for most scholarships, including those offered by foreign partners, members of the relevant committees within government ministries rarely based their decisions on merit. They often selected their relatives or offered aid to some applicants in return for bribes. Officials of major national training schools providing direct access to the public service were also often cited for corruption. According to reports, some officials had established networks of intermediaries charged with seeking out prospects and collecting fees at the time of nationwide competitive examinations. Such networks reportedly were organized in a manner that had no direct contact between the school official and the candidate. The amounts collected reportedly ranged from CFA francs 500,000 ($867) to several million CFA francs, depending on the type of institution solicited.

The National Anti-Corruption Commission (CONAC) receives and investigates allegations of corruption, but it has no prosecutorial authority and must refer credible claims of corruption to the relevant ministry for administrative action or to the Ministry of Justice for judicial action. The vast majority of corruption allegations received and transmitted by CONAC resulted in administrative penalties including reprimand, suspension from 10 to 90 days, delays in promotions, removal from office, and outright dismissal. As of year's end, CONAC had not released its 2014 annual report.

The National Financial Investigations Unit is a separate financial intelligence unit that tracks money laundering and terrorist finance. Like CONAC it can carry out its own investigations but has no prosecutorial authority.

The Supreme State Audit Office audits public services, regional and local entities, public and semipublic enterprises and organizations, and associations that receive financial assistance from the state. The office also monitors the execution of the state budget and externally funded projects, and it contributes to sanctions against officers and managers of public funds in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. By direction of the president, the office may also perform audits on any companies or organizations deemed strategically important.

Financial Disclosure: The constitution and law require senior government officials, including members of the cabinet, to declare their assets, although the president had not issued the requisite decree to implement the law by year's end.

Public Access to Information: There are no laws providing citizens with access to government information, and such access was difficult to obtain. The National Institute of Statistics developed a website where some statistical data may be accessed. Most government documents, however, such as statistics, letters exchanged between administrations, draft legislation, and investigation reports, remained unavailable to the public and the media.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

Although a number of domestic and international human rights groups investigated and published findings on human rights cases, government officials impeded the effectiveness of many local human rights NGOs by harassing their members, limiting access to prisoners, refusing to share information, and threatening violence against NGO personnel. Human rights defenders and activists received anonymous threats by telephone, text message, and e-mail. The government took no action to investigate or prevent such occurrences.

Despite these restrictions, numerous independent domestic human rights NGOs continued operations.

On September 29 in Yaounde, the minister of justice invited state and nonstate actors for a discussion on human rights issues involving a dozen civil society organizations. Observers considered the initiative a significant development in the relationship between the government and nonstate human rights organizations.

There were several reports of government arrests of human rights activists.

Government intimidation of Maximilienne Ngo Mbe, leader of the REDHAC, continued. REDHAC issued several statements informing the public of threats and harassment against Ngo Mbe and Mey Ali, the president of partner organization OS Civile Droits de l'Homme, including tapped telephones and anonymous telephone threats. In February and March, human rights organizations, including REDHAC, Un Monde Avenir, Alternatives Cameroon, and the Cameroonian Foundation against AIDS (CAMFAIDS), were the subject of denigration campaigns through the media.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The NCHRF released its 2014 report on December 3. It was considered a dedicated and effective organization, albeit inadequately resourced. The National Assembly's Constitutional Laws, Human Rights and Freedoms, Justice, Legislation, Regulations, and Administration Committee was adequately resourced and effective in reviewing the constitutionality of proposed legislation, although it approved most ruling party legislation and was not an effective check on ruling party initiatives.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution prohibits all forms of discrimination. It states that a human being, without distinction as to race, religion, sex, or belief, possesses inalienable rights. Although the government made some efforts to enforce these principles, violence and discrimination against women and girls and vulnerable populations persisted.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law criminalizes rape and provides penalties of between five and 10 years' imprisonment for convicted rapists, but police and courts rarely investigated or prosecuted rape cases. The law does not address spousal rape. As in the previous year, NGOs reported cases of rape and sexual violence, some associated with Boko Haram insurgents. NGOs reported that law enforcement generally was not effective.

The Ministries of Social Affairs and of Women's Empowerment and the Family, in conjunction with local NGOs, continued their campaign to raise awareness of rape and educate citizens on penal provisions against rape.

The law does not specifically prohibit domestic violence, although assault is prohibited and punishable by imprisonment and fines.

In the National Gender Policy Document for the period 2011-20 adopted in 2014 and released during the year, the Ministries of Social Affairs and of Women's Empowerment and the Family asserted that 52 percent of women experienced domestic violence at least once, and that 53 percent of women experienced violence by the age of 15. The ministries further indicated, based on a 2008 study on rape and incest, that 5.2 percent of women were victims of sexual violence. Of those, 33 percent became pregnant while 16 percent contracted sexually transmitted infections. Furthermore, the report indicated that more than one million girls and women were reported to have suffered an attempted rape and that rape was becoming widespread in all regions of the country. Included in this figure was incest, which affected 18 percent of raped women.

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: The law protects physical and bodily integrity of persons but does not specifically address FGM/C for women and girls. Children under 18 years were reportedly subjected to FGM/C in isolated areas of the Far North, East, and Southwest regions, within the Choa and Ejagham tribes. The Ministries of Social Affairs and Women's Empowerment and the Family estimated the prevalence of FGM/C at 1.4 percent nationwide and 20 percent in the most affected communities. Excision was the most common type of FGM/C, and the age at which FGM/C was practiced varied depending on region and from a few days after birth up to age 15 or older. In general the procedure was performed before puberty, with one half of the girls five to nine years old, and one fifth 10 to 14 years old. The government took steps to combat the practice and reported it succeeded in reducing FGM/C prevalence. In 2011 the government adopted a national action plan, and the Ministries of Social Affairs and of Women's Empowerment and the Family established local FGM/C committees in areas where FGM/C was most prevalent, particularly in the Far North Region. The committees networked with former excision practitioners and traditional and religious leaders to reduce the practice. During the year the ministries and some civil society organizations, including the Cameroon Young Jurists Legal Resource Center, also conducted education programs against FGM/C.

Other Harmful Traditional Practices: The practice of widow rites remained a problem in some areas, especially in the southern region of the country. The practices varied from area to area but generally entailed families forcing new widows to remove all hair using a razor blade, spend the night sleeping on the floor, and forgo bathing and other hygiene practices for extended periods of time. Widows were also sometimes forcibly married to one of the deceased husband's relatives. In addition to efforts by government authorities, civil society organizations including the Martin Luther King Memorial Foundation (LUKEMEF), an organization based in Limbe, Southwest Region, implemented programs to address violence against women during the year. LUKEMEF engaged with traditional authorities and the department of women and gender studies at the University of Buea to train peer educators in targeted communities, as well as sponsor lawyers to work with communities.

Unlike in previous years, there were no credible reports of breast ironing, a procedure to flatten a girl's growing breasts with hot stones, cast-iron pans, or bricks. The procedure was considered a way to delay a girl's physical development, thus limiting the risk of sexual assault and teenage pregnancy. The procedure has harmful physical and psychological consequences, which include pain, cysts, abscesses, and physical and psychological scarring.

Sexual Harassment: The law does not prohibit sexual harassment, and observers believed it was widespread.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals generally have the right to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of children; manage their reproductive health; and have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence, but societal pressures continued to reinforce taboos on discussing contraception and all other sex-related issues, particularly in northern rural areas. Women's dependence on their husbands' consent was also a barrier to contraceptive decisions.

In a 2013 Statistical Yearbook, the Ministries of Social Affairs and of Women's Empowerment and the Family reported that in 2011, 84.7 percent of girls and women of reproductive age (15 to 49 years) received prenatal care from a qualified health worker and 65.8 percent delivered with assistance from qualified birth attendants. Prenatal care, skilled attendance during childbirth, and postpartum care remained unavailable to many women, particularly to those living in rural areas. According to UN Population Fund (UNFPA) data, the maternal mortality rate was estimated to be 590 per 100,000 in 2013, with a modern contraception rate of 17 percent. The Ministries of Social Affairs and of Women's Empowerment and the Family noted that contraceptive prevalence was higher in urban centers than in rural areas, with a rate of 4 percent of uneducated women living with a partner, as opposed to 25 percent of those with primary education and 48 percent of those with secondary or higher education. Furthermore, the contraceptive rate was 7 percent of women from very poor households as opposed to 46 percent of those from higher income households. UNFPA reported the adolescent birth rate as 128 per 1,000 girls and women ages 15 to 19 between 1999 and 2012.

Maternal mortality remained high due to lack of access to medical care, the lack of trained medical personnel, and the high cost of prenatal care, hospital deliveries, and postpartum care. The low rate of contraception use was largely due to the lack of available products. The Ministry of Public Health provided counseling services to women during prenatal visits, promoting the concept of responsible parenthood and encouraging couples to use contraception to space the timing of their children. The Ministry of Social Affairs also had an educational program on responsible parenthood, which was broadcast twice weekly. Additionally, couples were encouraged to get HIV/AIDS testing prior to conception, and efforts continued to increase HIV/AIDS testing for pregnant women at health clinics. Emergency health care was available in most health facilities, although patients' access to health care remained a problem for those who could not afford treatment. During the year a better-equipped urgent care center was opened in Yaounde to handle health emergencies, including services for complications arising from abortion.

Discrimination: The law provides for the same legal status and rights for women as for men, including in terms of family, labor, property, nationality, and inheritance. Despite constitutional and legal provisions recognizing women's rights, however, women in practice did not enjoy the same rights and privileges as men, and some provisions of civil law were prejudicial to women (see section 7.d.). For example, the law allows a husband to deny his wife the ability to work outside the home, and a husband may also forbid his wife to engage in commercial activity by notifying the clerk of the commerce tribunal. Also, while polygamy is authorized, polyandry is illegal. Customary law imposes further strictures on women, since in many regions a woman is regarded as the property of her husband. Because of custom and tradition, civil laws protecting women often were not respected. For example, in some ethnic groups women were precluded from inheriting from their husbands. Although local government officials including mayors claimed that women had access to land in their constituencies, the overall sociocultural practice of depriving women of land ownership, especially through inheritance, was prevalent in most regions of the country.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship is derived from parents, and it is the parents' responsibility to register births. Parents must obtain a birth declaration from the hospital or health facility in which the child was born and complete the application. The mayor's office issues the birth certificate once the file is completed and approved. Because many children were not born in formal health facilities and many parents were unable to reach local government offices, many births were unregistered.

Education: The law provides that primary education is compulsory but does not set an age limit. Children were generally expected to complete primary education at age 12, or at ages 13-14 if they had to repeat classes. Although parents did not pay tuition for primary school, they had to pay uniform, book, and sometimes fees for primary school students, and then tuition and other fees for secondary school students. This rendered education unaffordable for many children.

During the year Boko Haram destroyed classrooms and entire schools in the Far North Region, rendering the 2015-16 academic year largely lost for hundreds of children. The government set aside CFA francs five billion ($8.665 million) for construction of schools in the areas affected by the war against Boko Haram, but many building contractors were unwilling to work in the affected areas.

Child Abuse: Child abuse remained a problem. Children continued to suffer corporal punishment, both within families and in the school environment. According to a 2011 survey, 76 percent of children reported being hit frequently at home, and 10 percent of those between ages six and 15 reported sexual abuse. Newspaper reports often cited cases of children abandoned, thrown in the trash, or as victims of kidnapping and mutilation. Also, Boko Haram abducted children and, in some instances, used them as suicide bombers.

During the year local security officials uncovered two illegal and informal prisons at unregistered Quranic schools in the North and Adamawa regions. A total of 80 children and adults were found in the detention centers. Girls as young as 14 reported being raped in detention, while boys and men were chained in iron cuffs, starved, and tortured. Many of the detainees reportedly were left at the schools by parents or local religious leaders who wanted to rid themselves of children with behavioral problems or mental disabilities. On July 29, for example, media reported that in the home of Modibo Sani, a Quranic teacher in Garoua, 10 children were found chained by their feet, piled on top of each other, and locked in a 43-square-foot cell. Authorities released the detainees and arrested their captors. An investigation continued at year's end.

Early and Forced Marriage: The minimum legal age for marriage is 15 for girls and 18 for men, although many families reportedly tried to marry off their girls before the age of 12. According to the UN Children's Fund, 38 percent of women and girls age 20 to 24 were married or in union by the age of 18, and 13 percent by age 15. Early marriage was prevalent in the regions of Adamaoua, North, and particularly Far North, where many girls as young as nine faced severe health risks as a result of pregnancies. The government conducted education campaigns as a means to combat early marriages. With support from UNFPA and the Norwegian Hospital in Ngaoundere, the government also provided medical support and reintegration services to victims.

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: See information for girls under 18 in Women's section above.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: Penalties for the sexual exploitation of children include imprisonment of 10 to 20 years and a fine of CFA francs 100,000 to CFA francs 10 million ($173 to $17,320). Penalties are increased to 15 to 20 years' imprisonment if the victim is 15 years of age or younger, if a weapon is used, or if the victim sustains serious injuries as a result of trafficking. The law does not specifically provide a minimum age for consensual sex. The law prohibits the use of children for the production of pornography and provides for prison terms from five to 10 years and fines of CFA francs five million to 10 million ($8,665 to $17,320) for perpetrators who use any electronic system to forward child pornography or any document that could harm the dignity of a child. Children under age 18 were exploited in prostitution, and the problem was believed to be pervasive, although no statistics were available.

Child Soldiers: The government did not recruit or use child soldiers, but Boko Haram utilized child soldiers, including girls, in their attacks on civilian and military targets. Human rights organizations and some residents of the Far North Region reported that during attacks on their communities, children were often put in the first row of the fighting and killed before more experienced fighters came from behind. AI confirmed this practice in its September report. Also, between July 12 and October 12, at least 10 suicide attacks occurred in the Far North, including Fotokol, Maroua, Kedrawa, and Kangaleri. In some cases the suicide bombers were under age 15.

Infanticide or Infanticide of Children with Disabilities: There were credible reports of mothers (usually young, unemployed, and unmarried) abandoning their newborns in streets, latrines, or garbage cans. The law criminalizes infanticide and provides penalties ranging from five years' imprisonment to the death sentence. There were a few reports of infanticide committed during the year. For instance, La Nouvelle Expression reported on August 18 that two days previously in Manjo, Mungo Division of the Littoral Region, a 20-year-old woman deliberately killed her newborn baby by smothering him in a small bucket. During the year the government organized education campaigns on responsible parenthood, including through media campaigns by the Ministry of Social Affairs.

Displaced Children: As in previous years, many children lived on the streets of major urban centers, although their number apparently declined as a result of stringent preventive measures against Boko Haram. The Project to Fight the Phenomenon of Street Children, a governmental project in partnership with NGOs, continued to gather information on street children and offer health care, education, and psychological care. The country also hosted a large population of refugee children from the CAR and Nigeria and internally displaced children, the result of Boko Haram activity in the Far North.

International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For information see the Department of State's report on compliance at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/legal/compliance.html and country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/country/Cameroon.html.

Anti-Semitism

The Jewish community was very small, and there were no known reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The law does not specifically address discrimination against persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities, although the constitution explicitly forbids all forms of discrimination, providing that "everyone has equal rights and obligations." The government made efforts to enforce this effectively with regard to persons with disabilities. The law requires that new government and private buildings be designed to facilitate access by persons with disabilities and that existing buildings be modified to do so. Secondary public education is tuition free for persons with disabilities and children born of parents with disabilities, and initial vocational training, medical treatment, and employment must be provided "when possible," and public assistance "when needed."

The majority of children with disabilities attended schools, although most of these children attended mainstream schools, rather than specialized schools for children with disabilities. Some specialized schools existed for children with vision, hearing, or physical disabilities. During the year as many as 82 children with disabilities were reportedly granted free tuition to attend government secondary schools in the Fako Division of the Southwest Region, including three students with vision disabilities in the government bilingual high school, Molyko. At the government bilingual high school Nkol-Eton in Yaounde, two students with visual disabilities, three with hearing disabilities, and more than 30 students with physical disabilities started school in September.

A private training institution, SHILO Special Education and Inclusive Bilingual Teacher Training Institute, opened in September 2014. The school accepted students with vision and other disabilities. The students were trained as teachers for schools that catered to children with disabilities. The first group included approximately 30 trainees, of whom five had visual disabilities and two had hearing disabilities.

Societal discrimination continued against persons with disabilities. A study conducted in 2014 by the Groupe d'Action pour la Promotion des Personnes Handicappees in the Center Region revealed that 93.4 percent of respondents had experienced some form of violence. There was a report of a teacher in the Southwest Region who asked a student with albinism to leave the class whenever the teacher would deliver his lesson. The regional delegation of the Ministry of Social Affairs stopped the harassment. Societal discrimination against persons with disabilities occurred less frequently than in previous years (see section 7.d.).

There is no separate legal framework for the protection of persons with albinism. Due to the discrimination experienced by such persons, the government includes albinism under the legislative framework protecting persons with disabilities. The government stated persons with albinism benefitted from free medical consultations in dermatology, oncology, and ophthalmology.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

The population consists of an estimated 286 ethnic groups, among which there were frequent and credible allegations of discrimination. Ethnic groups commonly gave preferential treatment to fellow ethnic group members in business and social practices (see section 7.d.). Members of the president's Beti/Bulu ethnic group from the south held key positions and were disproportionately represented in the government, state-owned businesses, security forces, and the CPDM.

Northern areas continued to suffer from ethnic tensions between the Fulani (or Peuhl) and the Kirdi, who remained socially, educationally, and economically disadvantaged relative to the Fulani. Traditional Fulani rulers continued to wield great power over their subjects, who often included Kirdi, and sometimes subjected them to tithing and forced labor. Isolated cases of hereditary servitude were alleged, largely Fulani enslavement of Kirdi (see section 7.b.).

Indigenous People

An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Baka, including Bakola and Bagyeli, resided primarily in (and were the earliest known inhabitants of) the forested areas of the South and East regions. While no legal discrimination existed, other groups often treated the Baka as inferior and sometimes subjected them to unfair and exploitative labor practices (see section 7.d.). There were credible reports that the Mbororos, itinerant pastoralists mostly present in the North, East, Adamaoua, and Northwest regions, were subject to various forms of harassment, sometimes with the complicity of administrative or judicial authorities, and were involved in conflicts over ownership of land and access to water.

On September 1, Mbororo pastoralists in the Momo division of the Northwest Region addressed a petition to the Procurator General of the Northwest Court of Appeal, complaining that Mbarga Awounou, a state counsel for Momo division, extorted money through illegal detentions from late July to early August.

While the government did not effectively protect the civil or political rights of either group, it implemented a number of initiatives to promote the rights of the Baka people under the National Plan for the Empowerment of the Baka. Programs during the year included training Baka and Mbororo in agricultural and animal husbandry techniques, including follow-on support for projects initiated after training, and recruiting Baka and Mbororo to attend teacher-training colleges. Baka and Mbororo communities complained about being marginalized, forcibly removed from their ancestral lands, and denied access to water.

The Ministry of Social Affairs continued efforts begun in 2005 to provide birth certificates and national identity cards to Baka. Most Baka did not have these documents, and efforts to reach Baka were impeded by the difficulty in accessing their homes deep in the forest.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Consensual same-sex sexual activity is illegal and punishable by a prison sentence of six months to five years and a fine ranging from CFA francs 20,000 to 200,000 ($35 to $347). Most human rights organizations that advocate for decriminalization of sexual relations between consenting adults of the same sex consider the penal code invalid for procedural reasons and because it violates the principal of equality. Government officials defended the law by claiming the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the African Charter on Human and People's Rights state that countries may limit freedoms in the interest of preserving public order and that individuals have the duty to preserve African values and morals.

Although reports of arrests dropped dramatically, homophobia remained a major concern. LGBTI individuals continued to face social stigmatization, harassment, and discrimination. There were increasing reports that both police and civilians extorted money from presumed LGBTI individuals by threatening to expose them.

CAMFAIDS reported that on January 19, in Yaounde a mob attacked and severely beat a transvestite individual named "Dolores" (legal name, Singa Kimie Jonas). According to the victim, she was heckled by a young man about her appearance and he demanded to see her genitals. He attacked her physically and was joined by approximately 10 others, who used sticks and stones to beat her. A passing law enforcement officer rescued her.

Suspected members of the LGBTI community continued to receive anonymous threats by telephone, text message, and e-mail. Unlike in previous years, there were few reports that LGBTI individuals who sought protection from authorities were extorted or arrested.

Despite the cultural environment, various human rights and health organizations continued to advocate for the LGBTI community by defending LGBTI individuals being prosecuted, promoting HIV/AIDS initiatives, and working to change laws prohibiting consensual same-sex activity.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

Persons afflicted with HIV or AIDS often suffered social discrimination and were isolated from their families and society due to social stigma and lack of education about the disease. In the 2011 Demographic and Health Survey for Cameroon, 88 percent of women and 81.3 percent of men reported having discriminatory attitudes towards those living with HIV. There were no specific reports of discrimination in employment, housing, or access to education or health care.

Other Societal Violence or Discrimination

On October 21, elements of the navy clashed with residents in Maga, Mayo-Danay division, after the marines stationed in Maga to counter Boko Haram's incursion into the country reportedly solicited bribes that angered the local population. In response there was a small riot in which one civilian was killed and several others were injured. A larger crowd later that night responded by burning all army vehicles present.

Unlike in previous years, there were no reports that security forces failed to prevent or immediately respond to societal violence. A few cases of vigilante action were recorded. For example, local media and an NGO, Maison des Droits de l'Homme, reported that on October 1, an alleged thief was tortured to death by civilians in the Bonamoussadi neighborhood of Douala. The suspect was part of a gang of four who looted shops in the Zone A area. After committing their crime, the alleged criminals fled, abandoning a member of their group, who was attacked by neighborhood watch committee members. They beat him and burned him to death. Committee members claimed they decided to resort to vigilantism because on several previous occasions, other individuals suspected of theft who had been brought to the police were released without any apparent action by the police.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides for the rights of workers to form and join independent unions, conduct legal strikes, and bargain collectively. Statutory limitations substantially restricted these rights. The law does not permit the creation of a union that includes both public and private sector workers or the creation of a union that includes different or closely related sectors. The law requires that unions register with the government, permitting groups of no fewer than 20 workers to organize a union by submitting a constitution and bylaws, as well as nonconviction certifications for each founding member. The law provides for heavy fines for workers who form a union and carry out union activities without registration. Trade unions or associations of public servants may not join a foreign occupational or labor organization without prior authorization from the minister responsible for "supervising public freedoms."

During the year the minister of labor and social security suspended the activities of the Cameroon Musical Union (SYcamu) for six months. He accused the union of violating its internal regulations. Members of the union disputed this allegation and claimed the suspension was illegal.

The constitution and law provide for collective bargaining between workers and management as well as between labor federations and business associations in each sector of the economy. The law does not apply to the agricultural or other informal sectors, which included the majority of the workforce.

Legal strikes or lockouts may be called o
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Cabo Verde

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Cabo Verde, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5716128fe.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The government of Cabo Verde is a parliamentary representative democratic republic, largely modeled on the Portuguese system. Constitutional powers are shared between the head of state, President Jorge Carlos Fonseca, and Prime Minister Jose Maria Neves, who were elected to five-year terms in 2011. For the first time in the history of Cabo Verde, the prime minister and the president were supported by opposing political parties. President Fonseca was serving his first term, while Prime Minister Neves was serving a third. The Supreme Court and the National Electoral Commission declared the 2011 nationwide legislative and presidential elections generally free and fair. Civilian authorities at times did not maintain effective control over the security forces.

The most serious human rights problems occurred in the following areas: police violence toward prisoners and detainees, delayed trials, and violence and discrimination against women.

Other human rights problems included trafficking in persons, child abuse, some instances of child sexual exploitation, and child labor. Additionally, societal discrimination against women was common.

Although the government took steps to prosecute and punish public officials who committed human rights abuses, the process was lengthy. The National Police took disciplinary action against officials who acted outside the law, but lack of a single authority to monitor or oversee cases or complaints made it difficult to track cases. Government and other state institutions sometimes downplayed or disregarded police abuses.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution and law prohibit such practices. Media, however, continued to cite instances of physical violence. The most common types of abuses were excessive force and aggression against persons arrested and detained by police. In most cases the National Police Council took action against abusers.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison and detention center conditions generally met international standards.

Physical Conditions: Some prisoners complained about inadequate sanitation and ventilation. Conditions in general were inadequate for inmates with mental illness or substance addictions. There were too few corrections officers to deal with the growing number of such prisoners.

During 2014 there were three deaths reported in prisons, all linked to health issues. There are five prisons in the country, and all exceeded their maximum inmate capacity (indicated in parentheses). The Central Prison of Sao Vicente had 323 inmates (180), the regional prison of Santo Antao 60 (50), the prison on Sal Island 30 (16), Fogo 99 (50), and the Central Prison of Praia (CCP) 922 (880).

The government sent some prisoners to the CCP to separate inmates based on trial status, gender, and age, but there were cases of youths sharing cells with adults.

Administration: The Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Cabo Verdean Institute for Gender Equality and Equity  a government agency  and the National Statistics Institute (INE) worked together to establish uniform standards for data collection and recordkeeping.

The law allows for the suspension of prison sentences that do not exceed two years in nonviolent cases. If a judge agrees to a suspension, the prisoner enters a program for reintegration into society, and the offender completes work "beneficial to the community."

There were no prison ombudsmen.

Prisoners' relatives reported some complaints. Corrections officials claimed all had been investigated and disproven.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted formal visits by international human rights monitors to the prisons and individual prisoners. Local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and members of the press made frequent visits to prisons to record conditions.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The constitution and law prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The National Police, under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, is responsible for law enforcement. The Judiciary Police, under the Ministry of Justice, is responsible for major investigations. The armed forces, under the Ministry of Defense, are responsible for protecting the national territory (maritime and terrestrial) and sovereignty of the country. Logistical constraints, including a lack of vehicles, limited communications equipment, and poor forensic capacity continued to limit police effectiveness.

Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the armed forces and police (including the Coast Guard, National Guard, National Police, and Judiciary Police), and the government has somewhat effective mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption.

There were no reports of impunity involving the security forces during the year.

Authorities investigated abuses by police, and most investigations resulted in legal action against those responsible. During the first 10 months of the year, the National Police Council received 50 reports of police violence; most cases concerned physical abuse. After the National Police Disciplinary Board reviewed the cases, the National Police dismissed four police officers.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

The National Police may not make arrests without a warrant issued by the Attorney General's Office, unless the person is caught in the act of committing a felony. Neither the National Police nor Judiciary Police have the authority to conduct investigations unless they are mandated by the Attorney General's Office. Despite incriminating evidence, criminals are not arrested until a decision is made by the Attorney General's Office. The law stipulates a suspect must be brought before a judge within 48 hours of arrest. In most cases, however, detainees waited more than 48 hours for their hearings. The law provides a detainee the right to prompt judicial determination of the legality of the detention, and authorities respected this right. Attorneys inform detainees of the charges against them. There is a functioning bail system. Authorities allowed detainees prompt access to family members and to a lawyer of the detainee's choice if they could afford it. For a detainee or family unable to pay, the Cabo Verdean Bar Association appoints a lawyer.

The judicial system was overburdened and understaffed, and criminal cases frequently ended when charges were dropped before a determination of guilt or innocence was made.

Pretrial Detention: Prolonged pretrial detention remained a problem. Judicial inefficiencies and lengthy legal procedures were the main causes.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The law provides for an independent judiciary, and the government generally respected judicial independence. The judicial system, however, lacked sufficient staffing and was inefficient.

There is a military court, which cannot try civilians. The military court provides the same protections as civil criminal courts.

Trial Procedures

The constitution and law provide for the right to a fair trial, and an independent judiciary generally enforced this right. Defendants enjoy a presumption of innocence. They have the right to be informed promptly and in detail of the charges, with free interpretation as necessary. The law provides for the right to a fair and public nonjury trial without undue delay, but cases often continued for years. Defendants have the right to be present and to consult with an attorney in a timely manner. Free counsel is provided in all types of cases, but only for those who lack sufficient funds for a lawyer. Defendants have adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense. Defendants and their attorneys have access to government-held evidence relevant to their cases. Defendants have the right to confront or question witnesses against them and to present witnesses and evidence in their defense. Defendants have the right not to be compelled to testify or confess guilt. Defendants can appeal regional court decisions to the Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ). The law extends the above rights to all citizens.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

Courts are impartial and independent and handle civil matters including lawsuits seeking damages for, or an injunction ordering the cessation of, a human rights violation. Both administrative and judicial remedies are available.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution and law prohibit such actions, and there were no reports the government failed to respect these prohibitions.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respected these rights. An independent press, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of speech and press.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority.

According to the Cabo Verdean National Communications Authority's 2015 First Semester Report, 58.5 percent of the population used the internet.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

The constitution and law provide for the freedoms of assembly and association, and the government generally respected these rights.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution and law provide for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights.

The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in assisting refugees and asylum seekers.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law does not provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has not established a system for providing protection to refugees. The country has not established national legislation or an institutional body for granting asylum or refugee status. While very few asylum applications were registered (UNHCR reported only two cases in total in 2011 and 2012), the actual number of asylum seekers was unknown, since there is no systematic procedure in place to register and process asylum claims. Because UNHCR does not have an established presence in the country, asylum seekers who request protection and assistance are referred by the International Organization for Migration to UNHCR's regional representation for West Africa in Dakar, Senegal, which conducts refugee status determinations. Temporary protection mechanisms and access to basic services are in place for asylum seekers while they await a decision.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The law provides citizens the ability to change their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and citizens exercised that ability.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: In the 2011 legislative elections, individuals and parties were free to declare their candidacies and candidates for a total of 72 seats. The ruling African Party for the Independence of Cabo Verde (PAICV) won 38 seats in the National Assembly with approximately 52 percent of the vote. The main opposition party, the Movement for Democracy (MpD), won 32 seats with 42 percent, and the Union for a Democratic and Independent Cabo Verde won the remaining two seats with 4 percent. International observers characterized these elections as generally free and fair.

The presidential election also took place in 2011. Jorge Carlos Fonseca, the candidate supported by the MpD, won the election with approximately 54 percent of the vote, while Manuel Inocencio Sousa, the candidate supported by the PAICV, received 46 percent.

Election observers from the Economic Community of West African States and the African Union characterized these elections as free, transparent, and credible. The observers noted some irregularities, however, including cases of voters being pressured to vote for certain candidates near polling stations and also of vote buying.

Participation of Women and Minorities: Male dominance in positions of power continued despite efforts to promote women's advancement.

Women's participation was particularly high in positions within the central government, on the SCJ, and as prosecutors. At the local level, however, in community associations and on city councils, women had less representation.

Women held 19 of the 72 National Assembly seats and occupied 11 of the 20 cabinet-level positions in government ministries. Women filled three of eight seats on the SCJ, and there was one female mayor in the country, elected in the 2012 municipal elections.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides penalties of up to 15 years' imprisonment for corruption by officials, and the government implemented the law effectively. Officials sometimes engaged in corrupt practices with impunity, although there were no new reports of government corruption during the year.

Corruption: The central authority responsible for investigating and combating corruption is the Attorney General's Office (PGR), which is an independent body of government. The PGR oversees the entire judicial process and other legal matters, and gives directives to the Judiciary Police for conducting investigations related to corruption. The PGR operated effectively and independently to combat corruption, but it did not have a specialized corruption department or specific funds for this purpose.

Polling released by Afrobarometer in September showed citizens' perceptions of corruption had risen in the country in comparison with 2013. The study revealed this perception of increased corruption extended beyond the National Assembly and other elected bodies to the National Police, which 19 percent of citizens considered corrupt.

Financial Disclosure: The law sets parameters for public officials to submit declarations of interest, income, and family wealth, and regulates public discussion of this information. These declarations shall include any asset worth more than 500,000 escudos ($4,940). Failure to submit a declaration may prohibit public officials from holding office for a period of one to five years. The SCJ must approve public disclosure of the declarations. When involved in criminal cases of alleged corruption, public officials must declare or prove the source of their income or wealth. The SCJ is in charge of monitoring the law and enforcing compliance, but enforcement was poor.

Public Access to Information: The law provides for public access to government information without restriction, provided that privacy rights are respected. The government frequently granted access.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A number of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials were somewhat cooperative and responsive to their views.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution and law prohibit discrimination based on race, gender, religion, disability, language, or social status. The constitution stipulates the government should create conditions for the gradual removal of all obstacles to the full exercise of human rights and equality before the law.

The law also prohibits racism, xenophobia, and other forms of discrimination, but violence and discrimination against women and children remained significant problems.

The government enforced the above prohibitions somewhat effectively.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: Rape is a crime punishable by eight to 16 years in prison, and domestic violence is punishable by one to five years in prison. Spousal rape is implicitly covered by the gender-based violence law; penalties range from one to five years' imprisonment. The 2001 Special Law Project on Gender-Based Violence (GBV) focuses on increasing protection of victims, strengthening penalties for offenders, and raising awareness about gender-based violence. The law calls for establishing several care centers, with financial and management autonomy, but implementation lagged due to inadequate staffing and financial resources. Violence and discrimination against women remained significant problems.

Rede Sol (a network that connects civil society organizations, the National Police, health centers, hospitals, and community law centers) covered 56 percent of the national territory and had representation on seven islands and in 12 of the 22 municipalities. The Ministry of Justice created casas do direito (civil rights houses), which serve as public spaces that provide citizens with access to justice and promote civic participation. In 2014 they received reports of 253 cases of GBV nationwide. In 2015 (as of August) 122 cases of GBV were reported to the casas do direito. In 2014 the government inaugurated centers to provide support to victims of GBV in five of the 22 casas do direito. These five centers were located on the islands of Santiago (2), Boa Vista (1), Fogo (1), and Sao Nicolau (1).

The government enforced the law against rape and domestic violence effectively.

Sexual Harassment: The criminal code and the GBV law criminalize sexual harassment. Penalties include up to one year in prison and a fine equal to up to two years' salary. Although authorities generally enforced the GBV law, statistics on prosecutions, convictions, and punishments for sexual harassment were not available. There was no official data on the number of cases of sexual harassment during the reporting period. Sexual harassment was common and widely accepted in the country's culture.

Reproductive Rights: The civil code grants all citizens the freedom to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children; manage their reproductive health; and have access to the information and means to do so free from discrimination, coercion, or violence. All citizens had access to contraception. Family planning centers throughout the country distributed some contraceptives freely to the public. These centers provided skilled assistance and counseling, both before and after childbirth and in cases of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. Prenatal services included ultrasound screening, tetanus vaccines, and blood tests, including HIV screening. Postnatal services included family planning and free oral/injectable contraceptives. No government policies adversely affect emergency health care, including complications arising from abortion.

Discrimination: The law provides for the same legal status and rights for women as for men, including under family, labor, property, nationality, and inheritance laws. Cultural norms, traditions, and society, however, imposed gender roles that hindered the eradication of gender-based discrimination. Women had less representation in local politics, community associations, and in parliament. In the private sector, women held fewer management and leadership positions and often received lower salaries than men for equal work (see section 7.d.). Indicators showed educational achievement, life expectancy, and access to sexual and reproductive health services were greater among women.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship can be derived by birth within the country or from one's parents. The government has a network of services, such as notary and civil identification records offices in all municipalities, and the Birth Registration Project located in hospitals and health centers. Failure to register births did not result in denial of public services. The government attributed the nonregistration of births to uncertainty as to the identity of fathers, parental neglect, and a lack of information on registration in the poorest communities.

Education: The government provided tuition-free and universal education for all children between the ages of six and 12. Education remained compulsory until the age of 15. Secondary education was free only to children whose families had an annual income below 147,000 escudos ($1,450).

Child Abuse: Violence against children remained a problem. The government tried to combat it through a national network that included the Cabo Verdean Institute of Childhood and Adolescence (ICCA), various police forces, the Office of the Attorney General, hospitals, and health centers. The government attempted to reduce sexual abuse and violence against children through several programs such as Dial a Complaint, the Children's Emergency Program, Project Our House, Welcome Centers for Street Children, Project Safe Space, Project Substitute Family, and the creation during 2014 of five ICCA offices.

Data from the Children's Emergency Program and the Local Social Service programs indicated that, during the year's first six months, there were 153 reported cases of violence and aggression and 24 reported cases of sexual abuse of children. Actual prevalence was higher, since not every case was reported because perpetrators were often relatives of the child.

Early and Forced Marriage: The legal minimum age of marriage is 18 years. According to data from a 2012 study conducted by the INE and sponsored by UN Women, the average age of marriage for women was 34, while the average age for men was 38.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The law punishes those that foment, promote, or facilitate prostitution or sexual exploitation of children under age 14 with a penalty of two to eight years in prison. If the victim is age 14 to 15, the penalty is one to five years in prison. The penal code does not prohibit or punish those who subject children ages 16 and 17 to sex trafficking. The law punishes those that induce, transport, or provide housing or create the conditions for sexual exploitation and prostitution of children under 16 in a foreign country with a penalty of two to eight years in prison. The law prohibits the use of children under 14 in pornography, with penalties of up to three years in prison. The minimum age for consensual sex is 14. The law also prohibits pedophilia. During the year there were no reported cases of child pornography, but there were cases of children in prostitution. Sex tourism, at times involving children in prostitution, was a problem. Sexual abuse was more common in the poorest neighborhoods. For example, there were reported cases pending investigation of sexual exploitation of children in the Vila Nova and Calabaceira neighborhoods in Praia. The government also continued efforts to prevent the sexual exploitation of children through the creation of a national coordinating committee and the development of a code of ethics for the tourism industry.

International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

Anti-Semitism

There is no Jewish community in the country, and there were no reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The law prohibits discrimination against persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities in employment, education, access to health care, or in the provision of other state services (see section 7.d.). The law does not prohibit discrimination in air travel or other transportation services. The government generally enforced these provisions, with problems remaining in a number of areas. For example, persons with disabilities faced daily obstacles that hindered their integration. Physical accessibility, communication means, and public transport appropriate for persons with disabilities often were lacking. The government worked with civil society organizations to implement programs to provide access for wheelchair users including building ramps to enhance access to transportation and buildings.

According to the Ministry of Education and Sports, the ministry had enrolled 1,200 children and youth with special educational needs in primary, secondary, and higher education. There was no information available regarding abuse of persons with intellectual disabilities or mental disabilities in prisons or psychiatric hospitals. Persons with physical disabilities continued to experience difficulties in accessing prison facilities such as bathrooms and other services. Inmates with mental disabilities did not have access to psychiatric care or specific therapy. The government did not legally restrict the right of persons with physical disabilities to vote or otherwise participate in civic affairs and public life, unless the person was deemed not to have the mental capacity to exercise that right. According to the Electoral Code, blind persons or those with other physical disabilities that prevent them from voting on their own can be escorted by a citizen of their choice to cast their vote. Persons with intellectual or mental disabilities, as determined by the Ministry of Health, are not allowed to vote, according to the National Commission for Elections, which claimed such persons do not have the ability to make decisions on their own.

The government has a quota system for granting scholarships and tax benefits to companies that employ individuals with disabilities. NGOs recognized these measures as partially effective in better integrating these citizens into society but also noted nonenforcement and inadequate regulations continued to be obstacles (see section 7.d.).

Several NGOs worked to protect the interests of persons with disabilities. A 2012 Law on Mobility sets technical standards for accessibility for persons with disabilities for a variety of public facilities and services.

The Ministry of Employment, Human Resources, and Youth is the government organization responsible for protecting the rights of persons with disabilities. The National Council on the Status of Disabled Persons works in partnership with the ministry as a consultative body responsible for proposing, coordinating, and monitoring the implementation of a national policy.

The public television station, through a partnership with the National Commission for Human Rights and Citizenship, Handicap International, and the Cabo Verdean Federation of Associations of People with Disabilities, included in its nightly news a sign-language interpreter to facilitate access to the news for deaf persons who sign.

The law stipulates a quota of 5 percent of educational scholarships be allocated to persons with disabilities, but this percentage had not been reached.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Antidiscrimination laws exist and state employers may not discriminate based on sexual orientation. There was no information available on official or private discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) individuals in employment, occupation, housing, statelessness, or access to education or health care.

There were no reported incidents of violence against LGBTI persons during the year.

In June the Cabo Verdean Association of Gays Against Discrimination, in partnership with the Arco Iris Association and the Fundacion Triangulo of Spain, organized the country's third consecutive Cabo Verdean Gay Week, "Mindelo Pride," in June. The event occurred in the city of Mindelo, on Sao Vicente Island, to promote equality and respect for sexual diversity.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides for the rights of workers to form or join unions of their choice without previous authorization or excessive requirements, to engage in collective bargaining, and to conduct legal strikes. The labor code provides for protection against antiunion discrimination and for the reinstatement of workers. Although government enforcement generally was effective, cases can continue for years and can be appealed with the passage of more years before resolution. The Directorate General for Labor (DGT) has a conciliation mechanism to promote dialogue.

The labor code designates certain essential services and limits workers' ability to strike in those industries. Services provided by telecommunications, justice, meteorology, health, firefighting, postal service, funeral services, water and sanitation services, transportation, ports and airports, private security, and the banking and credit sectors are considered indispensable. The Civil Need law states the government can force the end of a strike when there is an emergency or "to ensure the smooth operation of businesses or essential services of public interest." The law allows unions to carry out their activities without interference.

Freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining were respected. The government protected the right to carry out union activities without interference. Worker organizations were independent of the government and political parties. There were no reports of violence, threats, or other abuses during the year by the government against union members or leaders. Penalties are adequate to deter violations of freedom of association. There was no reported evidence of antiunion discrimination. Nonetheless, public projects were contracted to private companies who hired workers directly. Workers who do not have a labor contract have no legal protection.

Labor unions complained the government sporadically restricted the right to strike for certain critical job categories. Other observers stated the government cooperated with the unions and did not discriminate against certain job categories. There were no reported violations related to collective bargaining. According to the local press, few companies had adopted collective bargaining, but the International Labor Organization worked with local unions and government bodies to provide guidance on conducting a dialogue between parties.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor, including by children. According to the Inspectorate General of Labor (IGT) 2014 Report, the IGT carried out 1,482 inspections and did not identify any forced labor violations. Article 14 of the labor code prohibits forced labor and Article 271 of the penal code outlaws slavery, both of which prescribe penalties of six to 12 years of imprisonment, which was sufficiently stringent to deter violations.

Nevertheless, there were reports such practices occurred during the year. Migrants from China, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Nigeria, and Guinea may receive low wages and work without contracts, creating vulnerabilities to forced labor in the construction sector. Children labored in domestic service, often working long hours and at times experiencing physical and sexual abuse, indicators of forced labor (see also section 7.c.).

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The legal minimum age for work is 15 years. The labor code does not allow children ages 15 to 18 to work more than 38 hours a week or more than seven hours a day. The constitution provides that underage children can work only on small household tasks, in apprenticeship or training programs, or to help support the family. Children 16 to 18 are allowed to work overtime in an emergency. In these cases, however, children cannot work more than two overtime hours a day, and these extra hours cannot exceed 30 hours a year. The law defines work to be abolished or the worst form of child labor as work engaged in by children under the age of 15 and/or dangerous work performed by children between the ages of 15 and 17.

Several laws prohibit child labor, and the penalties they impose are adequate, but enforcement was neither consistent nor effective. Barriers, mostly cultural, remained to the effective implementation of these laws. For example, not all citizens considered children working to help support their families as a negative thing, especially in small, remote communities.

The ICCA, DGT, and IGT worked on matters pertaining to child labor. The ICCA works on the promotion and defense of the rights of children and adolescents. The DGT creates labor market policy and drafts labor legislation to ensure the promotion of social dialogue and reconciliation between social partners. The IGT has the responsibility to monitor and enforce labor laws and enforces rules relating to labor relations. The agencies stated they had adequate resources. During the year the government (through the three agencies) continued to carry out training activities for local staff and awareness campaigns to combat child labor, particularly in its worst forms, and consulted with local businesses. The IGT did not identify any child labor violations in the first half of the year.

The first survey conducted by INE on child labor in the country, published in 2013, revealed that 7.1 percent of children were engaged in the worst forms of child labor (the study was conducted between October and December 2012). The worst forms of child labor were more common in rural areas (91 percent) than urban areas (84 percent). Child labor was also higher for boys (8.8 percent) than girls (5.3 percent).

Children engaged in street work, including in water and food sales, car washing, and begging, and were vulnerable to trafficking. The worst forms of child labor included street work, domestic service, agriculture, fishing, animal husbandry, trash picking, garbage and human waste transport, and peddling drugs for adults.

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment and Occupation

The labor law prohibits discrimination in employment and occupation based on race, color, sex, gender, disability, language, sexual orientation, gender identity, political opinion, ethnic origin, age, HIV-positive status or having other communicable diseases, or social status, and the government in general effectively enforced the law.

Gender-based discrimination in employment and occupation, however, occurred (see section 6). Women generally had lower economic status and less access to management positions in public- and private-sector organizations. Women experienced inequality in areas such as politics and the economy. For instance, housework is not officially recognized, since national statistics consider housewives inactive members of the labor force. Reportedly, in some sectors of the formal economy, women received lower salaries than men for equal work.

According to the study on the Socio-Demographic Profile of Immigrants in Cabo Verde conducted by the INE in 2010, more than eight in 10 immigrants were active in the local economy, with a rate of 91 percent among Africans. African immigrants worked mainly in retail, services, and construction. Immigrants generally had low education and professional qualifications and little work experience, and as a consequence their wages tended to be lower. Most of these immigrants did not have a legal contract with the employer, and thus they did not enjoy many legal protections and often worked in unacceptable conditions.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The law stipulates a minimum monthly wage of 11,000 escudos ($109). The government defines the poverty income level as 105 escudos ($1.04) a day. The law stipulates a maximum of eight hours of work per day and 44 hours per week. The law requires rest periods, the length depending on the work sector. The minimum rest period is 12 hours between workdays. The law also provides for daily and annual overtime hours granted in exceptional circumstances. The law states a worker is entitled to 22 business days of paid vacation. Overtime must be compensated with at least time and a half pay. The worker, however, can replace up to half of his/her holidays through an agreement with the employer.

The law sets minimum occupational and safety standards and gives workers the right to decline to work if working conditions pose serious risks to health or physical integrity. In specific high-risk sectors, such as fishing or construction, the government can and often does provide, in consultation with unions and employers, specific current and appropriate occupational safety and health rules. In general it is the employer's responsibility to ensure the workplace is secure, healthy, and hygienic. The employer must also develop a training program for workers. Workers can remove themselves from situations that endangered health or safety without jeopardy to their employment. Authorities effectively protected employees in these situations.

Standards were enforced in all sectors, including the informal sector, although no penalties for violations that included fines or imprisonment were imposed during the year. The government made efforts to reduce work accidents and illness at work by carrying out more inspections and awareness campaigns to promote a culture of prevention and safety at work. The DGT and IGT are charged with implementing labor laws. Seven technicians worked for the DGT and 14 worked for the IGT, covering three islands (Santiago, Sao Vicente, and Sal). Both agencies agreed with trade unions these numbers were inadequate, and there remained a need for tighter enforcement of labor standards, especially on the more sparsely populated islands where monitoring was more difficult. Even though companies tended to respect laws on working hours, many employees, such as domestic workers, health professionals, farmers, fishermen, and commercial workers, commonly worked for longer periods of time than the law allows. Penalties for labor violations depend on the number of workers employed; the minimum is 10,000 escudos ($99) going up to 180,000 escudos ($1,780). According to the IGT, there were no penalties for violations during the year.

According to the IGT 2014 report, most irregularities detected during labor inspections related to nonsubscription to Social Security, nonsubscription to Mandatory Insurance for Job Injury, and some irregularities in complying with health and safety standards. Inspections revealed the most common work violations concerned the right to vacation time and the right to rest periods between work periods. Specific data, however, on wages and hours of work was not available. Nonetheless, the report indicated the IGT made 1,482 inspections, and inspectors identified 624 irregularities across the nine islands in all sectors, 218 of which required intervention. Although there were no official studies available, some sources speculated foreign migrant workers were more likely to be exploited than others.

Between 17,000 and 22,000 immigrants, mostly from the Economic Community of West African States, were working in the country. Most were men, but the number of immigrant women recently increased. No official data existed, but most immigrants were between the ages of 20 and 40 and lacked higher job qualifications but played important roles in the economy. Generally they worked in civil construction, security services, hospitality, and tourism. It was common for companies not to honor migrant workers' rights regarding contracts, especially concerning deductions for social security.

According to the IGT, during 2013 there were 194 work-related accidents, compared to 288 in 2012. No official data was available on the number of workplace deaths. The restaurant business/food services, steel industry, and the construction sector had the most work accidents reported during the year.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Burundi

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Burundi, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57161290c.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Republic of Burundi is a constitutional, multiparty republic with an elected government. The 2005 constitution provides for an executive branch that reports to the president, a bicameral parliament, and an independent judiciary. During the year voters re-elected President Pierre Nkurunziza and chose a new national assembly (lower house) in elections boycotted by independent opposition parties. International and domestic observers characterized the elections as largely peaceful but deeply flawed and not free, fair, transparent, or credible. Restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly and unfair use by the ruling National Council for the Defense of Democracy-Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD-FDD) of government facilities and financial resources during campaigns contributed to an absence of competition. While observers considered the military generally professional and apolitical, the National Intelligence Service (SNR) and police tended to be influenced directly by, and responsive to, the CNDD-FDD. Civilian authorities experienced increasing difficulty maintaining control over the security forces as postelection violence increased, particularly during the latter months of the year.

Police and intelligence services responded with disproportionate use of force to peaceful protests against the president's bid for a third term. The security forces, widely believed to be heavily infiltrated by CNDD-FDD party youth, detained hundreds of protesters, and were accused of mistreating protesters in custody. As many as 100 persons died in the protests. Human rights observers alleged a campaign of intimidation and harassment intended to create an environment of self-censorship and minimal political debate. Government agents shut all independent media outlets in May, and only a few outlets reopened by year's end.

The principal human rights abuses included extrajudicial killings, including reports of victims disposed of in mass graves; arbitrary and politicized detention, often in inhuman and life-threatening conditions; and widespread government disregard for the freedoms of speech, press and media, assembly, and association.

Other common human rights abuses included disappearances; a highly politicized judicial system that lacked independence from the executive branch; and prolonged pretrial detention, often without formal charges. Authorities harassed and intimidated journalists and members of civil society and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who criticized the government and the CNDD-FDD. Government corruption was a serious problem. Security forces reportedly raped women and girls, and widespread sexual and gender-based violence and discrimination against women and girls was a serious problem. Human trafficking occurred. Discrimination against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community, persons with disabilities, and persons with albinism occurred. Authorities did not respect labor rights, and forced child labor existed.

The reluctance of police and public prosecutors to investigate and prosecute, and of judges to hear, cases of government corruption and human rights abuse in a timely manner resulted in widespread impunity for government and CNDD-FDD officials.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were numerous reports the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings. There were reports that the government or its agents disposed of some of the victims in mass graves.

Between April and the end of the year, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) documented more than 400 killings of individuals, many of them cases of extrajudicial killings committed by police, the SNR, military personnel, and local government officials. OHCHR documented four cases of arbitrary or unlawful killings in 2014.

On December 11 and 12, police responded to an early morning attack on three military installations by conducting house-to-house searches in several neighborhoods of Bujumbura perceived as opposed to the President Nkurunziza. Numerous civilian victims were found killed with their hands bound behind their backs and bullet holes to the head. The official death toll from the fighting was 87, but independent observers estimated that between 150 and 200 persons died. On January 15, 2016, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights released a statement calling for an immediate investigation into the events of December 11 and 12, citing reports, including eyewitness accounts, of mass graves containing the bodies of those killed on December 11 and 12. The High Commissioner stated that, "We've received numerous allegations that during the initial search operations on 11 and 12 December in the Musaga, Nyakabiga, Ngagara, Cibitoke, and Mutakura neighborhoods of Bujumbura, police and army forces arrested considerable numbers of young men, many of whom were later tortured, killed, or taken to unknown destinations." On January 28, 2016, Amnesty International (AI) released a report citing satellite imagery and eyewitness accounts as indicators that victims from December 11 and 12 were buried in mass graves.

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), on October 3, men in police uniforms shot and killed a camera operator for the state broadcaster in the Ngarara neighborhood of Bujumbura. Police then ordered the camera operator's wife, two children, a nephew, and a local guard to lie in the street before shooting them in the head and killing them.

On July 14, Benjamin Mbonimpa and Emmanuel Harimenshi, two brothers active in the Movement for Solidarity and Democracy (MSD) opposition party, were discovered dead with their arms bound in a canal in Buterere, Bujumbura. Mbonimpa and Haremenshi were active in anti-third-term political protests. Shortly before their deaths police allegedly discovered weapons at the brothers' residence and the SNR began a search for them.

From July to October 2014, a number of corpses appeared in Lake Rweru, which is bisected by the border between Rwanda and Burundi. In December 2014, Burundi's minister of foreign affairs accepted an offer of forensic assistance from a group of countries through an international NGO for an investigation led by the African Union (AU). Rwandan officials stated their government also supported a joint investigation, but no investigation occurred during the reporting period.

On October 13 in the Ngagara neighborhood of Bujumbura, a group of opposition members attacked three police officers in civilian clothing. The attackers bound the officers' arms and killed two of them with grenades. The third escaped.

b. Disappearance

According to OHCHR, no totals on cases of disappearance were available. On January 15, 2016, the UN High Commissioner reported an increase in enforced disappearances, including disappearances related to the events of December 11 and 12. Following the May 13 attempted coup against President Nkurunziza, several alleged coup plotters within the military went missing, and their whereabouts remained unknown at year's end. OHCHR received reports of unidentified bodies found by the road near the airport.

In July the government intercepted a large group of alleged rebels in Kayanza Province and detained them in an unknown location. In response to requests for access, the Ministry of External Relations and International Cooperation invited several UNICEF and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) workers to accompany its officials to a high school in Cibitoke Province to visit the detainees. Approximately one-third of the detainees were minors, including seven children under the age of 15. UNICEF requested that the children under age 15 be reintegrated with their families immediately, and the government released them to the National Independent Human Rights Commission (CNIDH). CNIDH detained the children under 15 in its facilities in Bujumbura for a few days and then sent them to their families without following procedures. UNICEF reported the anomalies have made follow-up with the children nearly impossible and considered them disappeared for a time. At the end of the year, UNICEF continued to work on identifying and locating the children, and ascertaining their welfare.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution and penal code prohibit such practices, but there were reports government officials employed them (see section 1.a). From April 26 through the end of the year, OHCHR documented 263 cases of torture and mistreatment by security personnel. No information on any arrest or conviction of the perpetrators was available. Most of the victims were members of opposition political parties and participants in anti-third-term protests.

Authorities arrested Dieudonne Ntiburumunsi on August 11, and his body was found in a distant town on August 18. Assailants had cut off three fingers of his left hand. The family filed a lawsuit, but as of late October, authorities had taken no action on the case.

In September Amnesty International (AI) published a report called "Just Tell Me What to Confess To" documenting the stories of young men who had been mistreated by SNR because of their participation in the anti-third-term protests. Survivors related experiences ranging from beatings and sleep and food deprivation to confinement in cramped spaces and burning with acid. The AI report identified SNR and armed members of the Imbonerakure, the youth wing of the governing party, as the primary perpetrators of abuses.

Cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment in detention remained a serious problem.

On June 5, SNR agents detained Egide Ndayikuriye and a neighborhood acquaintance. SNR agents took Ndayikuriye to SNR headquarters and beat him violently with pipes and chains on his hips, thighs, knees, and feet. The agents also robbed him, stealing his money and his national identity card. After approximately five hours of abuse, SNR agents determined that Ndayikuriye was not on their list of persons to detain and released him. Ndayikuriye reported he observed at least 10 other persons who SNR agents had beaten. Ndayikuriye's acquaintance disappeared after his detention, and his whereabouts remained unknown at year's end.

On January 15, 2016, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights released a statement citing rape by security forces during the events of December 11 and 12. The High Commissioner stated, "We have documented 13 cases of sexual violence against women, which began during the search and arrest that took place after the December events in the neighborhoods perceived as supportive of the opposition. The pattern was similar in all cases: security forces allegedly entered the victims' houses, separated the women from their families, and raped  in some cases gang raped  them."

From January through October, OHCHR registered cases of rape committed by government agents, including schoolteachers. Many survivors of rape requested that OHCHR not report or record the rape because of cultural pressures and due to fear of retaliation from state agents. No statistics were available. No prosecutions or convictions occurred.

Security forces responded with water cannons, live bullets, and tear gas during protests against the candidacy and eventual presidency of President Pierre Nkurunziza between April 26 and the end of the year.

On December 30, according to reliable international press sources, UN international peacekeeping troops, including from Burundi, were listed as using a prostitution ring in the M'Poko camp in the Central African Republic, paying CFA 289 to 1,731 (50 cents and $3) for sex with young girls. While UN sources have not officially confirmed participant nationalities, UN officials were cited in the press accounts as the source for the countries being implicated.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prisons were overcrowded, and conditions remained harsh and sometimes life threatening. Conditions in detention centers managed by the SNR and in local "lock-ups" managed by police generally were worse than in prisons. There were reports of physical abuse and prolonged solitary confinement.

Physical Conditions: The director of prison administration in the Office of Penitentiary Affairs reported that as of October 8, there were 8,746 inmates in the 11 prisons, which were built before 1965 to accommodate 4,050 inmates. Of the 8,746 inmates, 345 were women, 175 were convicted juveniles, 124 were juveniles awaiting trial, and 57 were children under age three (who were living with their incarcerated mothers). No information was available on the number of persons held in detention centers managed by the SNR or in communal lock-ups run by police. Detention of protesters, most eventually charged with insurrection, swelled the population of the already crowded prisons after May. The Association for the Protection of Human Rights and Prisoners (APRODH) estimated SNR and police detained 1,000 youth by midsummer, and OHCHR estimated that by mid-October 500 protesters remained in detention centers. Authorities released many youth after a short time in detention.

Juvenile prisoners occupied the same prisons as adults. Authorities rehabilitated 10 of the 11 prisons to provide separate areas for juvenile prisoners but often allowed adult prisoners in those areas due to overcrowding. Authorities generally held juveniles with adults in detention centers and communal lock-ups. Authorities commonly held pretrial detainees with convicted prisoners.

The government detained 53 minors, including seven children under age 15, in a cross-border incursion in Kayanza Province in July. As a condition of their release from Rumonge prison, the minors participated in a patriotic re-education course. As of October at least 13 other minors detained in Kayanza remained scattered in other prisons, while UNICEF had not completed confirming the whereabouts of the seven children under the age of 15 (see section 1.b).

According to government officials and international human rights observers, prisoners suffered from digestive illnesses and malaria. An unknown number died from disease. Each inmate received 12 ounces of manioc and 12 ounces of beans daily; rations also included oil and salt on some days. Authorities expected family and friends to provide funds for all other expenses. Each prison had at least one qualified nurse and received at least one weekly visit by a doctor, but prisoners did not always receive prompt access to medical care; inmates with serious medical conditions were sent to local hospitals. ICRC was the sole provider of medicines.

In late September officials transported 28 high-profile prisoners accused of participating in the failed May 13 coup attempt to the Central Prison in Gitega. On October 5, prison officials attempted to move the 28 prisoners into isolation cells, but other prisoners prevented the action. Prison officials cleared all civilian employees and human rights monitors from the prison and brought in reinforcements, but they failed to separate the prisoners. On October 6, the Antiriot Brigade, led by Desire Uwamahoro, failed as well. On October 7, reportedly up to 500 additional police arrived in Gitega to help subdue the prisoners. Police elements threatened to kill the director of Gitega Prison if he tried to intervene in police action. On October 8, one of the prisoners led a negotiation seeking agreement that the 28 alleged coup plotters would enter the isolation cells if police refrained from using violence against any prisoners. The standoff ended peacefully. At year's end, the alleged coup plotters reportedly were incarcerated four to a cell in isolation cells intended to hold a single individual. Human rights observers noted the cells did not have windows or toilet facilities.

Administration: Prison authorities allowed prisoners to submit complaints to judicial authorities without censorship, but judicial authorities rarely investigated prisoners' complaints.

Independent Monitoring: During the year the government permitted all visits requested by international and local human rights monitors, including monitors from OHCHR and the ICRC. Monitors visited all prisons, communal lock-ups, and SNR detention centers regularly. Monitoring groups had complete and unhindered access to those prisoners held in known detention facilities.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The constitution and law prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, but the government did not observe these prohibitions.

In mid-September provincial governors and security forces detained approximately 200 young men in three major population centers. In Gitega Province, Governor Venant Manirambona stated the youths were all heading to the south and might have been intending to join a rebel movement. Similar mass detentions occurred in Bujumbura and in Makamba provinces. Authorities released the youths after a few days.

Towards the end of the year, human rights observers and civilians reported instances in which security forces appeared to detain persons for money, mostly according to the individual's ability to pay bail. Security forces reportedly detained individuals and then sent an intermediary to the person's family to offer information on the person's whereabouts for a fee. Families of detainees reported negotiating bail sums with security forces to secure the release of detainees.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The National Police, under the Ministry of Public Security, are responsible for law enforcement and maintenance of order within the country. The armed forces, under the Ministry of Defense, are responsible for external security but also have some domestic security responsibilities. The SNR, which reports directly to the president, has arrest and detention authority. Police, the SNR, the armed forces, and local officials committed human rights abuses.

The constitution provides for equal numbers of Hutu and Tutsi in the military, police, and SNR to prevent either of these ethnic groups from having disproportionate power that might be used against the other group. The formal integration (with international oversight and assistance) of Hutu into the previously Tutsi-dominated army began in 2004 and was largely successful. Tutsis tend to be older than their Hutu counterparts, and some fear that the replacement rate does not respect the ethnic balance provided for by the constitution. The integration of police and SNR was less successful; SNR in particular never achieved ethnic equilibrium.

Police generally were poorly trained, underequipped, underpaid, and unprofessional. Local citizens widely perceived them as corrupt, including demanding bribes, and they were often implicated in criminal activity. The government's Anticorruption Brigade in the Office of the President is responsible for investigating police corruption.

Approximately 75 percent of police were former rebels; 85 percent received minimal entry-level training but no refresher training in the past five years; and 15 percent received no training. Due to low wages, petty corruption was widespread.

The public perceived police as heavily politicized and responsive to the CNDD-FDD. Police officials complained that militant youth loyal to the CNDD-FDD and President Nkurunziza infiltrated their ranks. Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) noted the weaponry carried by some supposed police officers was not in the official arsenal. Between April 26 and late July, police estimated 231 officers were wounded in responding to protests, 23 died, and 67 deserted their positions. Police did not provide numbers on their losses at year's end. Many Burundians believed police under-reported their losses to keep morale high and to mask the incorporation of political allies, often with no formal training, into the official government security forces. Police officials prevented citizens from exercising their civil rights and were implicated in torture, killing, and extrajudicial execution. During street protests in April and May, the military intervened to protect civilians from police brutality. The government's general reluctance and slowness to investigate and prosecute these cases resulted in a widespread perception of police impunity and politicization.

On July 1, police and SNR agents encircled the Bujumbura neighborhood of Mutakura and prevented residents from leaving and journalists and the ICRC from entering while they searched for weapons. At least 13 persons, including seven civilians, died by the end of the eight-hour operation. Eyewitnesses named police officers and other government officials responsible for the deaths of Pantaleon Hakizimana and his sons Fleury and Franck, but authorities launched no official inquiry.

The international community provided instruction at the police academy on human rights, the code of conduct, and community-oriented policing. Due to serious human rights abuses during the year, however, international donors suspended or canceled many of these programs.

The president, in collaboration with the cabinet, reactivated mixed security committees in towns and villages throughout the country. Authorities intended such committees, whose members came from local government, regular security services, and the citizenry, to play an advisory role for local policymakers and to flag new threats and incidents of criminality for local administration. NGOs expressed concern the committees allowed the Imbonerakure, the youth wing of the ruling CNDD-FDD, a strong role in local policing and put the governing party in a position to harass and intimidate opposition members on the local level. The mixed security councils remained controversial because lines increasingly blurred between Imbonerakure and police. Imbonerakure reportedly detained individuals for political or personal reasons.

The armed forces, which observers generally regarded as professional and politically neutral, have an Office of Inspector General to investigate allegations of military abuse.

In January an invading force of approximately 150 rebel soldiers crossed the border into Cibitoke Province from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Locals alerted security officials to their movements, and in the communes of Bukinanyana and Murwi security forces clashed with the rebels. Four days of fighting left approximately 90 rebels dead and 12 taken prisoner. There were reports the remaining rebels escaped into Kibira Forest. After considerable pressure to investigate such a high percentage of deaths, including some rumored to have taken place after the rebels were in custody, a government commission eventually produced a report promising to punish those determined guilty. Authorities determined three alleged rebels disappeared after being placed in the custody of police units, and authorities attributed all other deaths to active fighting. Authorities opened cases against police officials implicated, but there were no convictions by year's end.

The country has contributed peacekeepers to the AU Mission in Somalia since 2008 and to the United Nations' Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic since 2014. The international community was heavily engaged in training the armed forces and regularly provided courses in international humanitarian law and in countering sexual and gender-based violence to soldiers assigned to the Somalia mission (see section 1.c). In September 2014 Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report detailing systematic sexual exploitation of women and girls in Somalia including by Burundian soldiers. The government named a commission to investigate the allegations, and in January the commission released a report that found no proof of wrongdoing by Burundian peacekeepers but instead criticized HRW's methodology.

The SNR has mandates for both external and internal security. Observers believed SNR's ranks expanded during the year with youth loyal to the CNDD-FDD. It was reasonably effective at investigating what the government defined as terrorists, including certain opposition political party leaders and their supporters. Many citizens perceived the SNR as heavily politicized and responsive to the CNDD-FDD. NGOs, including AI and HRW, asserted SNR officials colluded with the Imbonerakure in torture and extrajudicial killings.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

Arrests require warrants issued by a presiding magistrate, although police may arrest a person without a warrant by notifying a supervisor in advance. Police have seven days to finish their investigation and transfer suspects to a magistrate but may request a seven-day extension if they require additional investigation time. Police rarely respected these provisions and routinely violated the requirement that detainees be charged and appear before a magistrate within seven days of arrest.

A magistrate may order the release of suspects or confirm the charges and continue detention, initially for 14 days, then for an additional seven days if necessary to prepare the case for trial. Magistrates routinely failed to convene preliminary hearings, often citing their heavy case backlog or improper documentation by police. Lack of transportation for suspects, police, and magistrates was the most frequently cited reason for the failure to convene preliminary hearings. This was a particular problem in the six provinces without prisons, where lack of transport prevented the transfer of suspects from the site of detention to the provincial court with jurisdiction over the case.

Police have authority to release suspects on bail, but they rarely used it. Suspects may hire lawyers at their own expense in criminal cases, but the law does not require, and the government did not provide, attorneys for indigents at government expense. The law prohibits incommunicado detention, but it reportedly occurred. Authorities on occasion denied family members prompt access to detainees, particularly those detainees accused of opposing the government.

Arbitrary Arrest: According to APRODH and OHCHR, police, SNR personnel, and local administrative authorities arbitrarily arrested more than 3,000 persons between April and the end of the year. Authorities released at least 2,000 detainees without charges and, of those, authorities released many within a day or two of their detention. OHCHR estimated more than 500 persons remained in detention in October across the country. Many of the detainees participated in the protests against the president's bid for a third term.

SNR agents detained Anatole Bararusanze near his home in Cibitoke, Bujumbura, on August 24. After torturing him SNR agents accused him of disturbing elections, supporting protesters, and possessing arms. Authorities transferred Bararusanze from the SNR lock-up to Mpimba prison without due process; he remained in prison  accused of posing a threat to internal security  at year's end.

Pretrial Detention: Prolonged pretrial detention remained a serious problem. The law specifies that authorities may not hold a person longer than 14 days without charge. As of October according to the director of prison administration, 56.7 percent of inmates in prisons and detention centers were pretrial detainees. The average time in pretrial detention was one year, and authorities held some without charge. Some persons remained in pretrial detention for nearly five years. In some cases the length of detention equaled or exceeded the sentence for the alleged crime. Inefficiency and corruption among police, prosecutors, and judicial officials contributed to the problem. For example, authorities deprived many persons of their legal right to be released on their personal recognizance because public prosecutors failed to open case files or because prosecutors and court officials could not find the files. Others remained incarcerated without proper arrest warrants, either because police failed to complete the initial investigation and transfer the case to the appropriate magistrate or because the magistrate failed to convene the required hearing to rule on the charges.

On September 25, authorities arrested Colonel Leonidas Hatungimana at army headquarters on charges that he had distributed weapons to protesters. Authorities transferred him to SNR facilities, where his family claimed authorities subjected him to cruel and inhuman treatment. He had little or no contact with family and legal support. On October 27, SNR moved Hatungimana to an unknown location.

Amnesty: In July 2014 the president issued a general pardon for good behavior to prisoners who had served more than 20 years of a life sentence or served part of a five-year sentence. As of November authorities released 1,480 prisoners, 421 had their sentences reduced from life to 20 years, 1,575 had their sentences reduced by half, and authorities released 349 on their own recognizance.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

Although the constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary, there were instances when authorities subjected members of the judiciary to political influence or bribery to drop investigations and prosecutions, predetermine the outcome of trials, or avoid enforcing court orders. Persons named in cases or their political supporters subjected judicial officials, including the president of the Supreme Court responsible for prosecuting and trying high-profile corruption and criminal cases, to direct and indirect threats.

There were allegations the public prosecutor willfully ignored calls to investigate senior figures within the security services and national police. Serious irregularities undermined the fairness and credibility of trials.

Trial Procedures

The law presumes defendants innocent. Panels of judges conduct all trials publicly. Defendants have the right to prompt and detailed information of the charges and free interpretation if necessary, although this right was not always respected. Defendants have the right to a fair trial without undue delay and to adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense, although this did not always occur. Defendants have a right to counsel but not at the government's expense, even in cases involving serious criminal charges. Few defendants had legal representation because few could afford the services of one of the 131 registered lawyers in the country. Some local and international NGOs provided legal assistance but could not assist in all cases. Defendants have a right to defend themselves, including questioning prosecution witnesses, calling their own witnesses, and examining evidence against them. Defendants also may present evidence on their own behalf and did so in the majority of cases. Defendants have the right not to be compelled to testify or confess guilt. The law extends the above rights to all citizens.

In October those detained during the April-June protests appeared for their first hearing. The hearing took place without advance notice in the not easily accessible Mpimba Prison.

All defendants, except those in military courts, have the right to appeal their cases to the Supreme Court. The inefficiency of the court system extended the appeals process for long periods, in many cases for more than a year.

Procedures for civilian and military courts are similar, but military courts typically reached decisions more quickly. The government does not provide military defendants with attorneys to assist in their defense, although NGOs provided some defendants with attorneys in cases involving serious charges. Military trials generally are open to the public but may be closed for reasons such as national security or when publicity might harm the victim or a third party; for example, cases involving rape or child abuse. Defendants in military courts are entitled to only one appeal.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

OHCHR estimated there were more than 500 political prisoners or detainees, not including the MSD youths arrested in March 2014. The government denied it held persons for political reasons, citing instead threats against the state, participation in a rebellion, and inciting insurrection.

In March 2014 a group of youths associated with the opposition MSD party engaged in a violent confrontation with police. After a dragnet operation and a trial that failed to meet the country's legal standards, 44 of the youths received long prison sentences. Their lawyers appealed the harshness of the sentences and the prosecution simultaneously appealed their leniency. The appeals hearings were delayed for months while the Ministry of Justice failed to release consolidated documents on the multiple cases to the lawyers for the defense. In 2014 five appeals hearings took place in the prison where authorities detained the youths. Each hearing ended inconclusively because authorities had not allowed the defense to prepare. The Ministry of Justice released the consolidated documents to the team of defense lawyers during the year, but the case saw no movement until late August, when judges called lawyers to a hearing with no advance notice. The court reached no decision, and the youths remained in preventive detention at year's end.

Prison authorities did not treat political prisoners differently from other prisoners, and international human rights and humanitarian organizations had access to them. Those detained for alleged participation in the failed May 14 coup received similar treatment, and authorities eventually granted monitors access to them.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

Individuals and organizations may seek civil remedies for human rights violations and may appeal decisions to an international or regional court. Independent journalists, for example, contested the 2013 media law in the East African Court of Justice and won their appeal. The decision obliged Burundi's parliament to review the law and make changes to it.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution and law provide for the right to privacy and require search warrants, but authorities did not always respect these rights. Police, SNR agents, and Imbonerakure  sometimes acting as mixed security councils  set up roadblocks and searched vehicles for weapons. They conducted search-and-seizure operations in the contested neighborhoods of Bujumbura. During these searches security agents seized a very small number of weapons and a considerable number of household items they claimed could be used to supply an insurgency, such as large cooking pots and mosquito nets.

Individuals often need membership in or perceived loyalty to a registered political party to obtain or retain employment in the civil service and the benefits that accrue from such positions, such as transportation allowances, free housing, electricity, water, exemption from personal income taxes, and interest-free loans.

g. Use of Excessive Force and Other Abuses in Internal Conflicts

Protests against a third term for the president rocked Bujumbura from April 26 through late October. Protesters, led by civil society groups and political opposition parties, announced peaceful protests. Police, SNR, and irregular security forces responded with live bullets, water cannons, and tear gas. The use of violence escalated on both sides. Opposition groups threatened residents who wanted to go to work and burned tires  and sometimes vehicles  to prevent them from leaving their neighborhoods and breaking solidarity. As the confrontation continued, security forces accused residents of certain neighborhoods of throwing grenades at them. The population generally feared police, SNR, and irregular security forces and looked to the military for support and protection. By year's end, slightly more than 225,000 persons had fled the violence and instability in the country for refugee camps in Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and the DRC.

Killings: OHCHR documented more than 400 killings between April 26 and the end of the year. There were reports that the government or its agents disposed of some victims in mass graves. There were numerous reports of such abuses similar to the following example: on October 15, security forces killed between nine and 11 persons in the Ngagara neighborhood of Bujumbura. Protesters died from wounds sustained while protesting, due in part to security forces' use of live bullets and in part to the poor medical infrastructure. In addition to deaths associated with the protests, the government reported at least two major cross-border incursions of unidentified rebel forces. In Cibitoke Province a government commission confirmed the deaths of three individuals accused of participating in a rebellion after they were in police custody.

Abductions: Security forces abducted individuals, particularly young men, from neighborhoods perceived as supportive of the opposition during the year. OHCHR observed that human rights defenders labeled many arbitrary detentions as abductions. Many abductions, particularly those for which the SNR was responsible, resulted in the death of the person detained. OHCHR did not have an estimate on how many persons authorities had abducted.

Physical Abuse, Punishment, and Torture: Protesters reported mistreatment at the hands of police and the SNR after their detention. HRW published a report entitled "Burundi: Spate of Arbitrary Arrests, Torture," relating the experiences of noncombatants whom SNR, police, and Imbonerakure perceived to be disloyal to the Nkurunziza administration. Security forces reportedly raped women during house-to-house searches in Bujumbura in December.

Child Soldiers: According to OHCHR, the structure of the military prevents the widespread use of child soldiers. In Kayanza Province in early July, however, more than 50 children ages 10 to 17, along with approximately 150 adults, were captured when they allegedly attempted a military invasion from Rwanda. The minors reported they were recruited for work in Rwanda but were implicated in the alleged rebel movement. They had no papers and no knowledge of crossing the border; moreover, many identified their captors as the same people who had recruited them. UNICEF reported it has no proof of child soldiers but that rumors and stories abound. On December 14, Refugees International released the report, "Asylum Betrayed: Recruitment of Burundian Refugees in Rwanda" which included information about the identification of at least six Burundian refugee children recruited into an armed group from refugee camps in Rwanda. The report also cited allegations that individuals, including some wearing military uniforms bearing Rwandan military flag patches, had trained Burundian refugee children in the use of weaponry in the Nyungwe Forest National Park in Rwanda.

Other Conflict-Related Abuses: According to OHCHR, on May 14 and 15, during fighting following the attempted coup, a group of nearly 50 police loyal to the Nkurunziza regime attacked Bumerec Hospital in an attempt to locate and kill three rebel soldiers receiving treatment for injuries. Police stormed the hospital and used hospital staff as human shields while looking for the soldiers. After a rebel soldier shot and killed a police officer, police called for reinforcements, and a group of approximately 150 soldiers loyal to the government arrived to clear the hospital of the injured rebel soldiers. Authorities took two rebel soldiers who were still alive to an unknown location; their whereabouts remained unknown at year's end.

Additionally, some detainees were denied health care or had treatment for injuries and illnesses interrupted. OHCHR reported some clinics have received instructions to deny medications to protesters; authorities deemed those who provided support guilty of supporting the insurgency.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and press, but the government did not always respect these rights, and restrictions on freedom of the speech and press increased significantly following President Nkurunziza's April announcement he would seek a third term in office.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: The law protects public servants and the president against "words, gestures, threats, or writing of any kind" that is "abusive or defamatory" or would "impair the dignity of or respect for their office." The law also prohibits racially or ethnically motivated hate speech. The law mandates a penalty of six months to five years in prison and a fine of approximately 10,000 to 50,000 Burundian francs ($6.25 to $32) for insulting the head of state. Some journalists, lawyers, NGO personnel, and leaders of political parties and civil society alleged the government used the law to intimidate and harass them (see sections 1.d. and 3).

Press and Media Freedoms: Government-owned and operated Le Renouveau, the only daily newspaper, and Burundi National Television and Radio (RTNB), the sole television and radio station with national coverage, were the only news media allowed to operate uninterrupted during the year. The law prohibits political parties, labor unions, and foreign NGOs from owning media outlets and forbids the media from spreading "hate" messages or from using abusive or defamatory language against public servants acting in their official capacity that could damage the dignity of or respect for the public office.

In 2013 the government passed a media law that required journalists to reveal sources in some circumstances and prohibits the publication of articles deemed to undermine national security. Penalties for failing to observe the law were severe. In 2014 parliament revised the law, stripping it of some of its more draconian elements; however, during the year the government invoked the law to intimidate and detain journalists. On January 20, authorities detained journalist and Director of African Public Radio (RPA) Bob Rugurika for his refusal to name a source who had confessed on air to his participation in the murder of three Italian nuns in Bujumbura in September 2014; the source also implicated senior members of the security forces in the murders. On February 19, authorities released Rugurika; however, the charges against him remained pending at year's end.

Violence and Harassment: The government detained or summoned for questioning several journalists investigating controversial subjects such as corruption and human rights violations or covering the anti-third-term movement. Journalists experienced violence and harassment, and a number fled the country by year's end.

In November the Prosecutor's Office twice summoned for questioning Antoine Kaburahe, director of the country's only independent newspaper, Iwacu; the government alleged Kaburahe participated in the failed May coup attempt. Following his second summons, Kaburahe fled the country.

On April 27, the day after political protests began against the president's decision to seek a third term, government officials, including Minister of Interior Edouard Nduwimana, attempted to shut RPA. Government officials scaled the walls of the RPA compound and accused the station of inciting insurrection for its coverage of the protests. Negotiators reached a compromise allowing RPA to continue broadcasting but prohibiting live coverage of the protest. On April 26, RTNB cut all independent radio stations' access to its broadcasting towers, effectively preventing the interior of the country from receiving independent radio outlet broadcasts. On May 14, during fighting following the failed coup, unidentified attackers burned the four primary independent radio stations in Bujumbura and destroyed their equipment. Independent radio stations remained off the air at year's end pending a Ministry of Justice investigation that barred journalists and owners from accessing the studios, which were considered crime scenes.

All original stringers and correspondents for a foreign official news service fled the country by year's end in response to harassment and threats from government operatives or sympathizers, including threats delivered in person, via telephone and text, and a grenade attack. On June 5, unidentified assailants threw a grenade at the house of the family of Diane Nininahazwe, a foreign official news service reporter. The attack injured no one; it occurred after she had received threatening messages over several days. By year's end the targeted foreign official news service engaged new stringers to continue reporting.

On August 2, a rocket attack killed former SNR chief Adolphe Nshimirimana. Journalist Esdras Ndikumana, covering the story for Radio France International (RFI) and Agence France Presse (AFP), was first on the scene. He photographed the damaged vehicles in the convoy until SNR made him stop. SNR detained Ndikumana for two hours, beating him with a variety of objects on the back, legs, ribs, soles of the feet, and hands. Ndikumana left the country for medical treatment. After more than a week, the government issued a statement promising to take internal measures to investigate, but at year's end, it had taken no steps. Ndikumana, AFP, and RFI sued the government for damages in October.

Reporters Without Borders and local media outlets estimated 75 to 80 percent of the independent journalists fled the country due to growing threats from pro-government groups. Between 50 and 60 percent of the country's journalists fled in May, and in October the outward flow resumed. Acts of intimidation and violence began to focus on the most influential journalists after the inauguration of the newly elected government in late August.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: The government censored the media and penalized journalists who published items critical of public servants and the president. Broadly construed laws against libel, hate speech, and treason caused a climate that fostered a high degree of self-censorship. Journalists working for the national broadcaster reported practicing self-censorship. Those who would not self-censor reportedly faced "reassignment" to jobs where they did not have access to the public.

Libel/Slander Laws: Libel laws prohibit the public distribution of information that exposes a person to "public contempt" and carry penalties of prison terms and fines. The crime of treason, which includes knowingly demoralizing the military or the country in a manner that endangers national defense during a time of war, carries a criminal penalty of life imprisonment. It is a crime for anyone knowingly to disseminate or publicize false rumors likely to alarm or excite the public against the government or to promote civil war. It is illegal for anyone to display drawings, posters, photographs, or other items that may disturb the public peace. Penalties range from two months' to three years' imprisonment and fines. Some journalists, lawyers, and leaders of political parties, civil society groups, and NGOs alleged the government used these laws to intimidate and harass them.

In 2014 Leonce Ngendakumana sent a letter to the UN secretary-general on behalf of the opposition coalition ADC-Ikibiri to alert the international community to concerns about violence during Burundi's election cycle during the year. Authorities charged Ngendakumana with libel, jeopardizing state interests, and inciting racial aversion. He defended himself in court by demonstrating that each point in his letter was factually true and, therefore, not slander. Authorities acquitted him of the first two charges but sentenced him to one year in prison and the payment of damages of one million Burundian francs ($625) each to the CNDD-FDD and Radio REMA FM. He appealed in December, but authorities set no date for his hearing. He remained at liberty pending his appeal hearing.

Nongovernmental Impact: The Imbonerakure, in spite of their links to a political party, collaborated closely with government security forces. In some cases, they were official members of Mixed Security Councils (comprised of police, local administration, and civilians), but at times they appeared to serve as irregular security forces carrying out the party's agenda with the government's resources. Journalists and human rights defenders accused Imbonerakure of acting as irregular security forces, following, threatening, and attacking individuals they perceived as opposition supporters.

On May 14, during the fighting associated with the coup, protesters burned the facilities of independent but progovernment Radio REMA FM. Like the other independent radios, authorities declared Radio REMA FM's facilities a crime scene under investigation by the Ministry of Justice. Unlike the others, however, authorities completed the investigation, and by mid-fall Radio REMA FM was operational.

Internet Freedom

The government blocked the use of two or three social media applications on mobile networks for several days following the May 13 attempted coup. There were no verifiable reports the government monitored e-mail or internet chat rooms. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 5 percent of individuals used the internet. In the absence of independent radio, citizens relied heavily on WhatsApp, Twitter, and Facebook on both internet and mobile telephone networks to get information about current events.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

During the demonstrations in April and May, the government closed the national university as well as several private universities, fearing protesters were using campuses to coordinate the protests. The government canceled music concerts for fear of insurrection.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Freedom of Assembly

The constitution and law provide for freedom of assembly, but the government restricted this right severely (see section 1.d). The law requires political parties and large groups to notify the government prior to a meeting, but even when notified, authorities denied permission for opposition members to meet and dispersed meetings already underway. Many opposition political parties decided to boycott elections in response to consistent denials of permission by authorities to hold campaign rallies.

In January, MSD attempted to hold its annual congress to select a presidential candidate. The first venue MSD rented became unavailable for unknown reasons shortly after MSD informed the Ministry of Interior about the event, in keeping with the law. Ministry officials sent a formal letter to MSD leadership expressing their concern that the approximately 6,000 persons involved in the congress would not fit comfortably in a room (as required by party statutes). MSD proposed, also by formal letter, to hold the event in a privately owned field, but the ministry objected, again by formal letter, because it was not a room and because it would be impossible to provide security. MSD eventually held the congress in the field with slightly fewer than its full cohort but only after a lengthy negotiation with the ministry.

The CSOs leading the anti-third-term protests informed the Ministry of Interior of their intention to march peacefully in advance of the scheduled protest date, but protesters encountered heavy police and SNR resistance to their planned marches from the outlying neighborhoods to the center of Bujumbura. Government security forces responded to unarmed civilian protesters with live bullets, tear gas, and water cannons. Violence on both sides, but primarily from the government, escalated quickly until the aborted coup attempt of May 13. After mid-May the government showed zero tolerance for any public group activities and prevented, often with violence, small groups of citizens from coming together in public, for any purpose.

Freedom of Association

The constitution provides for freedom of association within the confines of the law, but the government severely restricted this right.

On November 19, the prosecutor general froze the assets of 10 CSOs, many of which worked on governance, civil liberties, and human rights issues. The government accused the CSOs of participating in the May 13 coup attempt and of working to overthrow the government. On November 25, the Ministry of Interior formally suspended the operations of these CSOs.

In August a commission headed by the attorney general named the majority of the leaders of anti-third-term CSOs and all opposition parties as responsible for the 51 billion Burundian francs ($31.9 million) in damages and lost revenue caused by the protests. Most CSO leaders fled the country after receiving threats against themselves and their families; many reported being unable to work and live in peace for months before they fled.

In December 2014 several progovernment CSOs sent a letter requesting that the Ministry of External Relations and International Cooperation nullify the newly formed UN human rights defenders network because the United Nations had failed to observe the ethnic balance required by the 2000 Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi. On January 13, the ministry canceled the network, delaying funding and ongoing projects underway since the network's inception in 2014. After negotiations between the United Nations and the government, participants relaunched the network with language on inclusivity that satisfied the government's concerns.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution and law provide for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, but the government severely restricted these rights. The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, and other persons of concern.

In-country Movement: There were regular reports that government security forces or its agents tried to block individuals from fleeing the country both at the border and in transit to the border. When civilians began to flee the anticipated electoral violence, would-be refugees reported that in Kirundo and Makamba provinces, government and governing party personnel attempted to prevent them from moving towards the borders. In early May, UNICEF reported refugees blocked on a beach in southern Burundi; however, the government later allowed civilians to cross into Tanzania in UNICEF's presence. In October refugees left the country for Rwanda, the DRC, and Tanzania at the rate of 300 to 500 per day.

The government strongly encouraged citizens to participate in community-level work projects every Saturday morning and imposed travel restrictions on citizens from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. Authorities required permits for movement outside of one's community during those hours, and police enforced the restrictions through roadblocks. Persons could obtain waivers in advance. All foreign residents were exempt.

Foreign Travel: Many middle and upper class citizens fled the country during the political unrest, and, on a few occasions, the passport office failed to produce passports in a timely fashion. The price of passports fluctuated as well, from 50,000 francs to 235,000 francs ($31 to $147). Charles Nditije, leader of the opposition wing of the Union for National Progress (UPRONA) party, attempted to get a tourist passport (as a deputy he holds an official passport), but as of mid-October, the passport had been delayed without explanation for more than two months. Additionally, Interpol reported that 46 high-profile opposition figures, including several with official passports, found that authorities had canceled their passports when they attempted to travel on them while abroad. Authorities required exit visas for persons who held nonofficial, nonstate passports; these visas cost 48,000 Burundian francs ($30) per month to maintain.

Exile: The law does not provide for forced exile, and the government did not practice it. Many political opposition members, civil society leaders, and journalists went into voluntary exile to escape threats and violence.

Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)

Because of successive waves of civil war and unrest beginning in 1972, there were approximately 80,000 IDPs at 120 sites throughout the country, according to 2013 UNHCR estimates. Some IDPs reported feeling threatened because of their perceived political sympathies. Some IDPs attempted to return to their places of origin, but the majority returned to the sites or relocated to urban centers. The government generally permitted IDPs to be included in programs provided by UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations to benefit returning refugees, such as shelter and legal assistance programs.

During the political unrest that began in late April, many citizens sent family members out of contested neighborhoods in Bujumbura. On November 18, Refugees International released the report "You Are Either With Us Or Against Us: Persecution and Displacement in Burundi," which discussed the situation of IDPs, many of whom held jobs in civil society, independent media, education, or medical professions prior to the political unrest but fled into hiding due to threats and violence. The political unrest during the year created an unknown number of new IDPs.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law provides for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has a system for providing protection to refugees.

Approximately 56,000 Congolese refugees remained in the country, prevented from returning to the DRC because of continuing violence there. While the country offered the relative security of camps, the government did not offer local integration to the majority of refugees, citing the added strain on land and jobs that such an effort would produce. Efforts to resettle Congolese refugees in foreign countries began during the year.

Employment: Refugees have the right to work except in the army, police, and judiciary.

Stateless Persons

Citizenship generally derives from citizenship of parents. According to UNHCR an estimated 1,400 stateless persons lived in the country at the end of 2012. All were from Oman, were awaiting proof of citizenship from the government of Oman, and had lived in Burundi for decades. The government offered the stateless Omanis citizenship if they could not get Omani citizenship.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The law provides citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and citizens exercised that ability. Burundi held legislative, communal, and presidential elections during the year, but the international community and independent domestic organizations widely condemned the process as deeply flawed. Several progovernment CSOs observed and validated the elections. The UN Electoral Mission in Burundi was the sole international observer of the voting; the AU and the EU declined to legitimate the process. Intimidation, threats, and bureaucratic hurdles colored the campaigning and voting period, resulting in low voter turnout and a boycott by most political opposition parties.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: During the year the government held four separate elections: communal councils and national assembly (June), presidential (July), senate (July), and village councils (August). Citing their inability to campaign fairly and freely, most major opposition parties called on their adherents to boycott the elections. Voter turnout in Bujumbura was very low for all four elections. In the provinces voter turnout fluctuated, but little independent reporting on participation was available. President Nkurunziza announced April 25 he would seek a third term, a violation of the terms of the Arusha agreement. Security forces responded with violence to quell demonstrators opposed to Nkurunziza's third term candidacy. The CNDD-FDD won absolute majorities in the national assembly and senate.

The EU's Election Observation Mission departed in late May after determining that sufficient conditions for credible elections could not be met. The AU also declined to send observers. The National Independent Electoral Commission and the Ministry of Interior provided a series of bureaucratic obstacles to opposition parties, including failing to recognize party leadership, refusing to permit legal party meetings, and loading electoral decision making bodies with CNDD-FDD loyalists. Members of the youth wings of the CNDD-FDD and opposition political parties, police, and the SNR were the main perpetrators of intimidation and violence before, during, and after the elections.

Political Parties and Political Participation: According to law to qualify for public campaign funding and compete in the legislative and presidential elections, parties needed to be "nationally based" (ethnically and regionally diverse) and demonstrate in writing they organized and had membership in all provinces. The Ministry of Interior recognized 38 political parties. Two other parties  FNL (Forces for National Liberation)-Rwasa and UPRONA-Nditije  had members, but authorities did not officially recognize them. Only the Union for Peace and Development, previously split into recognized and unrecognized wings, successfully reunited and became a single party.

Ministry of Interior involvement in opposition party leadership and management kept opposition political parties weak and fractured. In 2013 the governing party and opposition met during a UN-backed workshop and agreed on a roadmap for the 2015 elections as well as the adoption of an electoral code. After the meetings ended, the government pulled back from its commitments. It stated the law and constitution allow only legally constituted political parties, coalitions of political parties, and independent candidates to run for office, and that unrecognized leaders of parties and political actors not associated with a party could play no role in the political process. This stance effectively disenfranchised opposition party wings and prevented their leaders from developing platforms and running campaigns in the months before this year's elections.

UPRONA-Nditije and FNL-Rwasa formed a government-recognized coalition of independents, Abigenga, Mizero Y'Abarundi (Independents, Hope for Burundi). The coalition faced administrative, bureaucratic, and security hurdles during the campaign season but fared well in legislative and presidential elections despite its calls for its adherents to boycott. In a major reversal, Rwasa and his followers took the seats they won in the national assembly, but Nditije and all but one of his followers continued to protest by not taking their seats in the national assembly. Those seats nominally were held by Nditije's followers in Abigenga, but at year's end they continued to protest the process by boycotting the government and refusing to occupy the seats. The coalition had limited power within the government.

Government security forces heavily targeted the MSD opposition party during the electoral cycle. As of July MSD confirmed that police or Imbonerakure had killed more than 100 of its members in the protests. MSD noted that authorities had forced 265 of its proposed candidates into exile and kept 179 in prison. Violence against MSD continued after the elections. On October 17, citizens found the body of MSD leader Charlotte Umugwaneza; it showed signs of torture.

Violence and arbitrary detention perpetrated by the Imbonerakure, police, and the SNR escalated as the electoral cycle advanced. According to HRW members of the Imbonerakure, sometimes outfitted with official police uniforms, detained and beat individuals perceived to be opponents of Nkurunziza seeking a third term. Between April and July, human rights defenders and CSOs accused the Imbonerakure, police, and the SNR of 148 arbitrary detentions or acts of political violence.

Participation of Women and Minorities: The constitution reserves 30 percent of seats in the national assembly, the senate, and the communal councils for women. After the August inauguration of the new government, 42 women held seats in the 121-seat national assembly and 18 women in the 41-seat senate. The constitution provides for 30 percent of seats in government for women, and government institutions absorbed persons after the elections in order to meet gender, as well as ethnic, quota requirements. Women held six of 20 ministerial positions. Additionally, there were 11 women on the 28-member Supreme Court and one woman and two vacancies designated for women on the seven-member Constitutional Court.

The constitution provides for representation in all elected and appointed government positions for the two main ethnic groups: the Hutu majority is entitled to no more than 60 percent and the Tutsi minority to no less than 40 percent. The law designates three seats in each chamber of parliament for the Twa ethnic group, which makes up less than 1 percent of the population.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for official corruption, but corruption remained a very serious problem. The government did not fully implement the law, and some high-level government officials engaged in corrupt practices with impunity. There were numerous reports of government corruption during the year. The 2005 constitution provides for the creation of a High Court of Justice to review accusations of corruption against high-ranking positions, including the president, the two vice presidents, ministers, the speakers of the parliament, members of parliament, and judges; however, the government had not established the court by year's end. The anticorruption law applies to the rest of its citizens, but no high-ranking person has stood trial for corruption.

Corruption: The public widely viewed police to be corrupt, and petty corruption involving police was commonplace.

RPA reported in September the CNDD-FDD transferred fuel tax income from the country's public coffers to the Imbonerakure, stating official rates for importing a tanker were 20 million Burundian francs ($12,500) but that in reality importers paid closer to 32 million Burundian francs ($20,000). The party allegedly shuffled the difference to party accounts for disbursement to irregular security forces, including the Imbonerakure.

There were allegations of corruption due to the government's fixed price of gasoline and fluctuations in the price of gasoline on the global market. The government fixed-price for gasoline was 1,880 francs ($1.18) per liter, and the government retained 660 francs ($0.41) as taxes. A consumption rate of 11 million liters per year brings in approximately 70 billion francs ($43.7 million) in revenue. The budget for the year estimated 21 billion francs ($13.1 million) in revenue, giving the government approximately 48 billion francs ($30 million) in untracked revenue. Low world oil prices drove up the revenue further.

Judicial corruption occurred. Authorities often punished judges who failed to follow politicized instructions.

The Tax and Customs Revenue Authority (OBR) has an internal antifraud unit, and observers have accused OBR officials of fraud.

The state inspector general and the Anticorruption Brigade of the Ministry of Good Governance and Privatization were responsible for investigating government corruption. Within the judiciary there is a designated anticorruption general prosecutor and an anticorruption court. The Anticorruption Brigade has the authority to investigate, arrest, and refer offenders to the anticorruption general prosecutor.

In 2014 the Anticorruption Brigade investigated 163 cases. The brigade claimed it recovered more than 292 million Burundian francs ($187,000) and prevented more than 1.5 billion Burundian francs ($900,000) in government losses.

In view of the lengthy backlog of cases in the anticorruption court and the difficulty of obtaining convictions, the Anticorruption Brigade often resorted to enforcing the law through out-of-court settlements, in which the government agreed not to prosecute if the offending official agreed to reimburse the money stolen. The government also exercised its power to freeze and seize property and bank assets of officials to compel reimbursement, although in most cases authorities permitted corrupt officials to retain their positions.

Financial Disclosure: The law requires financial disclosure by elected officials and senior appointed officials once every five years, but it does not require public disclosure. By law the president, two vice presidents, and cabinet ministers are obligated to disclose assets upon taking office, but the nonpublic nature of the disclosure means this provision cannot be confirmed. No other officials are required to disclose assets. There was no record of such disclosures, and the law provides no penalty for failure to disclose.

Public Access to Information: The law does not provide for public access to government information.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

Domestic and international human rights groups struggled to operate without government restriction. Many human rights defenders fled the country after receiving threats against themselves and their families. Many CSO workers who remained in Bujumbura reported they did not travel after dark and slept in different houses each night for safety.

In November the prosecutor general froze the bank accounts of 10 NGOs, including several prominent human rights NGOs such as APRODH. The minister of interior suspended the licenses of and all activities by the organizations later the same month, citing as justification the organizations' alleged role in the May failed coup attempt and other alleged antigovernment activities (see section 2.b). Human rights groups continued to operate and publish newsletters, often from another country.

On August 3, unknown assailants on a motorbike shot Pierre Claver Mbonimpa, President of human rights NGO APRODH, in the cheek and neck while he was returning home. Mbonimpa sought medical treatment and rehabilitation abroad and remained out of the country at year's end. The government did not make public efforts to identify his assailants. The attack followed months of threats against Mbonimpa and other human rights advocates. On October 9, unknown assailants shot and killed Mbonimpa's son-in-law, businessman Pascal Nshimirimana, in Bujumbura. On November 6, police detained Mbonimpa's son, Welly Nzitonda, as he was leaving his neighborhood in Bujumbura; authorities found him shot and killed later that day.

During the year progovernment local NGOs grew stronger and more vocal. They tailored their messages to confuse or dilute the objectives and work of independent organizations. The progovernment National Observatory of Elections and Organizations for Progress and the Integrated Platform for Civil Society fielded observers on the three voting days and reported turnout was high, all voters were peaceful, and the process was legitimate. While mostly true, their statements hid the fact that targeted threats drove independent observers from the country and that many citizens reported structural exclusion from the electoral process, due to problems with their identity documents and overt threats against those perceived to be sympathetic to the opposition.

The United Nations or Other International Bodies: The AU called upon the country to receive human rights monitors prior to the presidential election and to allow them to stay in country to monitor developments during the post-electoral period. The government accepted the monitors but then delayed issuing visas for the monitoring teams until late afternoon of the day of the presidential election. When the monitors arrived, the government requested a memorandum of understanding  an addition to the agreement already negotiated with the AU  before it would allow the monitors to begin work. On October 17, the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) released a communique calling for an increase to 100 human rights monitors and military experts and their rapid deployment to the country. At year's end, approximately 10 human rights monitors and military experts were in the country. The government's refusal to conclude the terms of reference for their work impeded the work of the 10 monitors and experts prevented the deployment of the additional monitors called for by the PSC.

In Kayanza Province in July, the government intercepted a large group of alleged rebels and detained them in an unknown location. After two days of requests for access to the detainees, the Ministry of External Relations and International Cooperation invited several UNICEF and International Committee of the Red Cross workers to accompany ministry representatives to a high school in Cibitoke Province to visit the prisoners. Approximately one-third of the detainees were minors, including seven children under the age of 15. UNICEF requested the government reintegrate children under 15 with their families immediately, and the government released them to CNIDH. CNIDH detained them in its garage in Bujumbura, and UNICEF could not locate them since mid-July. As of late October, UNICEF managed to obtain the names of four of the children, but it had no information on their welfare and whereabouts. UNICEF considered the children disappeared.

Government Human Rights Bodies: Both domestic NGOs and their international partners widely perceived the Office of the Ombudsman, which monitored prison conditions to be impartial and effective. The ombudsman left the country abruptly in September after speaking out against the president seeking a third term but continued to issue periodic statements from abroad.

The CNIDH, a quasi-governmental body charged with investigating human rights abuses, exercised its power to summon senior officials, demand information, and order corrective action. The CNIDH, which also monitored the government's progress on human rights investigations, did not always release its findings to the public. Local and international partners widely perceived the commission as independent and effective until April, when the terms of all national level commissioners ended and less experienced and more political actors replaced them.

Human rights committees in the national assembly and the senate worked on a range of issues including human rights, antitrafficking legislation, and administrative themes.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution provides for equal status and protection for all citizens, without distinction as to race, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, disability, sexual orientation and/or gender identity, age, language, HIV-positive status, or having other communicable disease. The government did not enforce the law in many cases.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law prohibits rape, including spousal rape, with penalties of up to 30 years' imprisonment. The law prohibits domestic abuse of a spouse, with punishment ranging from fines to three to five years' imprisonment. The government did not enforce the law uniformly, and rape and other domestic and sexual violence continued to be serious problems.

Center Seruka, a clinic for rape victims, received on average reports of 120 new rape cases per month until the crisis began in April; numbers from the crisis were impossible to obtain due to insecurity. The clinic treated 545 new cases of sexual assault, of which men in uniform committed 14 and armed men committed 24. Center Seruka noted that the number of rapes was likely higher but that, in addition to cultural hesitancy to report sexual violence, roadblocks and insecurity prevented many women and girls from seeking medical care.

The Brigade for the Protection of Women and Children in the Burundian National Police is responsible for investigating cases of sexual violence and rape, as well as trafficking of girls and women.

Many women were reluctant to report rape for cultural reasons, due to fear of reprisal. Husbands often abandoned their wives following acts of rape, and rape victims experienced ostracism by their families and communities. In some cases police and magistrates required rape victims to provide food for and pay the costs of incarceration of those they accused of rape.

The government, with financial support from international NGOs and the United Nations, continued civic awareness training on domestic and gender-based violence and the role of police assistance throughout the country. Those trained included police, local administrators, and grassroots community organizers. The government-operated Center Humura in Gitega provided a full range of services, including legal, medical, and psychosocial services to survivors of domestic and sexual violence. In 2014 the center received 596 cases of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). Between January and the end of September, it received 545 cases.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and UNHCR reported that in two refugee camps in Tanzania, home to more than 100,000 refugees, seven women reported surviving SGBV in Burundi; 19 reported attacks during their flight; and 82 reported attacks after arriving in Tanzania.

Civil society organizations worked to overcome the cultural stigma of rape to help victims reintegrate into families that rejected them. The organizations also encouraged rape victims to press charges and seek medical care. Center Seruka and Center Nturengaho provided shelter and counseling to victims of rape and domestic violence. Several international NGOs provided free medical care, mostly in urban areas.

Sexual Harassment: The law prohibits sexual harassment, including the use of threats of physical violence or psychological pressure to obtain sexual favors. Punishment for sexual harassment may range from a fine to a prison sentence of one month to two years. The sentence for sexual harassment doubles if the victim is under age 18. The government did not actively enforce the law. There were reports of sexual harassment but no data on its frequency or extent.

Reproductive Rights: The government recognized the right of couples and individuals to decide freely the number, spacing, and timing of their children, manage their reproductive health, and have access to the information and means to do so free from discrimination, coercion, and violence. For cultural reasons husbands often made the final decisions about family planning. Health clinics and local health NGOs disseminated freely information on family planning under the guidance of the Ministry of Public Health. The government provided free childbirth services, but the lack of doctors meant most women used nurses or midwives during childbirth and for prenatal and postnatal care, unless the mother or child suffered serious health complications. According to the 2010 Demographic and Health Survey, skilled attendants were present at 60 percent of births. According to the UN Population Fund, the 2013 maternal mortality rate was 740 per 100,000 live births. The main factor influencing maternal mortality was inadequate medical care.

There were no restrictions on access to contraceptives, but the contraceptive usage rate was estimated at only 22 percent. According to a 2009 survey, this low rate was due to male opposition or lack of involvement in family planning, lack of communication between partners on family planning, women's lack of decision-making authority on questions related to reproductive health, absence of contraceptives in faith-based health clinics, and societal suspicion of family planning and modern contraceptive methods. Men and women had equal access to diagnosis and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.

Discrimination: The law provides for equal status for women and men, including under family, labor, property, nationality, and inheritance laws. Despite constitutional protections, however, women continued to face legal, economic, and societal discrimination including with regard to inheritance and marital property laws. The Ministry of National Solidarity, Human Rights, and Gender is responsible for combating discrimination against women.

By law women must receive the same pay as men for the same work, but they did not (see section 7.d). Some employers suspended the salaries of women on maternity leave, and others refused medical coverage to married female employees. Women were less likely to hold mid- or high-level positions in the workforce, although they owned businesses, particularly in Bujumbura.

Children

Birth Registration: The constitution states that citizenship derives from the parents. The government registers, without charge, the births of all children if registered within a few days of birth. The government fines parents who do not register a birth within the time limit. An unregistered child may not have access to some public services, such as free public schooling and medical care for children under five years old.

Education: Education is free, compulsory, and universal through the secondary level, but students are responsible for paying for books and uniforms. Throughout the country, provincial officials charged parents fees for schooling. In Bubanza Province, for example, parents reported fees of 5,000 Burundian francs ($3.00) for "construction costs" to send their children to free public schools. Additionally, parents reported 500 Burundian franc ($0.30) fees in schools receiving support from the World Food Program.

Child Abuse: The law prohibits violence against or abuse of children, with punishment ranging from fines to three to five years' imprisonment, but child abuse was a widespread problem. The penalty for rape of a minor is 10 to 30 years' imprisonment. The UN Development Fund for Women reported that in many instances, rapists wrongly believed the rape of minors would prevent or cure sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS.

The traditional practice of removing a newborn child's uvula (the flesh that hangs down at the rear of the mouth) continued to cause numerous infections and deaths of infants.

Early and Forced Marriage: The legal age for marriage is 18 for girls and 21 for boys. No statistics were available on the rate of early marriage. Forced marriages are illegal and were rare, although they reportedly occurred in southern, more heavily Muslim, areas. The Ministry of Interior continued an effort to convince imams not to officiate over illegal marriages.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The minimum age for consensual sex is 18. The penalty for commercial sexual exploitation of children is five to 10 years in prison and a fine of between 20,000 ($12.80) and 50,000 Burundian francs ($32). The law punishes child pornography by fines and three to five years in prison. There were no prosecutions during the year.

While little evidence existed of large-scale child prostitution, older women offered vulnerable younger girls room and board within their homes under the guise of benevolence and in some cases forced them into prostitution to pay for living expenses. Brothels were located in poorer areas of Bujumbura, along the lake, and on trucking routes. Extended family members sometimes also financially profited from the prostitution of young relatives residing with them. Businesses recruited local girls for prostitution in Bujumbura and nearby countries.

The country was a destination for child sex tourism. Although authorities reported no cases during the year, there were reports in past years that male tourists from the Middle East exploited local girls for prostitution, mainly in newly constructed, high-end neighborhoods.

Displaced Children: Thousands of children lived on the streets throughout the country. Some of the children were HIV/AIDS orphans. The government provided street children with minimal educational support and relied on NGOs for basic services such as medical care and economic support. UNICEF reported some children living on the streets returned to their families during the months of civil unrest for safety. Family poverty and parents' inability to provide for them was a major factor in causing children to leave home. The number of children living on the streets in Bujumbura remained more or less static, but Ngozi Province saw a spike in child poverty. Children living on the streets faced brutality and theft from police officers, and UNICEF judged that police were more violent toward them during the political unrest than previously.

UNHCR and IOM reported as many as 6,000 children arrived in refugee camps without their parents between March and October. Some children arrived in camps in Rwanda, and their parents arrived in camps in Tanzania, and vice versa.

International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

Anti-Semitism

No estimate was available on the size of the Jewish community. There were no reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The constitution prohibits discrimination against persons with physical, mental, sensory, or intellectual disabilities. The government nevertheless did not promote or protect the rights of persons with disabilities with regard to employment, education, or access to health care (see section 7.d). Although persons with disabilities are eligible for free health care through social programs targeting vulnerable groups, authorities did not widely publicize or provide benefits. Employers often required health certification from the Ministry of Public Health, a practice that sometimes resulted in discrimination against persons with disabilities.

The Ministry of National Solidarity, Human Rights, and Gender coordinates assistance and protects the rights of persons with disabilities. The government did not enact legislation or otherwise mandate access to buildings, information, or government services for persons with disabilities. The government supported a center for physical therapy in Gitega and a center for social and professional reinsertion in Ngozi for persons with physical disabilities.

Indigenous People

The Twa, the original hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the country, numbered approximately 80,000 and constituted less than 1 percent of the population. They generally remained economically, politically, and socially marginalized. Lack of education, employment, and access to land were among their major problems. By law local administrations must provide free schoolbooks and health care for all Twa children and two acres of land per family (comparable to the countrywide average size of a farmstead). Local administrations largely fulfilled these requirements. The constitution provides for three appointed seats for Twa in each of the houses of parliament, and Twa took their seats in August.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The law criminalizes same-sex sexual acts with penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment of three months to two years. Since its passage in 2009, however, authorities have not applied it.

The Remuruka Center in Bujumbura offers urgent services to the LGBTI community. The government neither supported nor hindered the activities of local LGBTI organizations or the center.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

The constitution specifically outlaws discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS or other "incurable" illnesses; there were no reports of societal violence or discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS.

Other Societal Violence or Discrimination

Criminals sometimes targeted persons with albinism, particularly children, for their body parts, which they used for ritual purposes. Most perpetrators were citizens of other countries, who came to kill and then departed the country with the body parts, impeding government efforts to arrest perpetrators. According to Nathalie Muco, chairperson of Albino Women's Hope Association, society did not accept persons with albinism, and they were often unemployed and isolated. Women with albinism often were "chased out by their families because they are considered as evil beings." There were no government programs dedicated to helping persons with albinism.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides for the right of workers to form and join independent unions. A union must have at least 50 members. Most civil servants may unionize, but they must register with the Ministry of Civil Service, Labor, and Social Security, which has the authority to deny registration. Police, the armed forces, magistrates, and foreigners working in the public sector may not form or join unions. Workers under age 18 must have the consent of their parents or guardians to join a union.

The law provides workers with a conditional right to strike after meeting strict conditions. It bans solidarity strikes. The parties must exhaust all other means of resolution (dialogue, conciliation, arbitration) prior to a strike. Intending strikers must give six days' notice to the employer and the Labor Ministry, and negotiations mediated by a mutually agreed party or by the government must continue during the action. The ministry must determine whether the sides have met strike conditions, giving it, in effect, veto power over all strikes. The law permits requisition of essential employees in the event of strike action. The law prohibits retribution against workers participating in a legal strike.

The law also recognizes the right to collective bargaining, excluding measures regarding public sector wages, which are set according to fixed scales following consultation with unions. The law prohibits antiunion discrimination. The law does not specifically provide for reinstatement of workers dismissed for union activity.

The government did not effectively enforce applicable laws. Resources for inspection and remediation were inadequate, and penalties  which ranged from 5,000 to 20,000 Burundian francs ($3.20 to $12.80)  were insufficient to deter violations. Administrative and judicial procedures were subject to lengthy delays and appeals.

The government placed excessive restrictions on freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining and sometimes interfered in union activities.

Most unions were public-employee unions, and virtually no private-sector workers were unionized. Since most salaried workers were civil servants, government entities were involved in almost every phase of labor negotiations. The principal trade union centers represented labor interests in collective bargaining negotiations, in cooperation with individual labor unions. The minister of labor has the authority to designate the most representative trade union in each sector.

Most laborers worked in the unregulated informal economy and were unprotected by other than minimum wage labor laws. According to the Confederation of Burundian Labor Unions, virtually no informal sector workers had written employment contracts.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits most forms of forced or compulsory labor, including by children. The government did not effectively enforce applicable laws. Resources for inspections and remediation were inadequate, and the penal code did not specify penalties. Workplace inspectors had authority to impose fines at their own discretion.

Children and young adults were coerced into forced labor on plantations or small farms in the south, small-scale menial labor in gold mines in Cibitoke, carrying river stones for construction in Bujumbura, or engaging in informal commerce in the streets of larger cities (see section 7.c).

The government encouraged citizens to participate in community work each Saturday morning and imposed travel restrictions on citizens from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. While community work is traditionally voluntary in most of the country, the governor of Bubanza Province announced in September that those residents who fail to participate would face penalties of 2,000 Burundian francs ($1.25).

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The law states that enterprises may not employ children under age 16, with exceptions permitted by the Labor Ministry. These exceptions include light work or apprenticeships that do not damage children's health, interfere with their normal development, or prejudice their schooling. The minister of labor permitted children age 12 and above to be employed in "light labor," such as selling newspapers, herding cattle, or preparing food. The legal minimum age for most types of "nondangerous" labor varies from 16 to 18. The law prohibits children from working at night and limits them to 40 hours' work per week. The law makes no distinction between the formal and informal sectors.

The Labor Ministry is responsible for enforcing child labor laws, and it had multiple enforcement tools, including criminal penalties, civil fines, and court orders. Nevertheless, the government did not effectively enforce child labor laws. Due to a lack of inspectors and resources, including fuel for vehicles, the ministry enforced the law only when a complaint was filed. The penalties for violations ranged from 5,000 to 20,000 Burundian francs ($3.20 to $12.80). Penalties were not sufficient to deter violations. During the year the government acknowledged no cases of child labor in the formal sector of the economy and conducted no child labor investigations or prosecutions.

Because of extreme poverty, child labor was an economic necessity for many families and remained a problem. In rural areas children under age 16 regularly performed heavy manual labor in the daytime during the school year, primarily in the agricultural sector. Children as young as seven worked on tea plantations in some areas, and children frequently prepared food for fishermen. Children working in agriculture could be subject to carrying heavy loads and using potentially dangerous machinery and tools. They also herded cattle and goats, which exposed them to harsh weather conditions and forced them to work with large or dangerous animals. Many children worked in the informal sector, including family businesses, artisanal gold mining, street vending, and small brick-making enterprises.

In urban areas children working in domestic service often were isolated from the public, and some received in-kind remuneration, such as food and shelter in lieu of wages for their work. Some employers avoided paying their child domestics by accusing them of criminal activity, and at times authorities incarcerated children due to false accusations. Children in domestic service were vulnerable to long working hours and physical exploitation by their employers.

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment and Occupation

The constitution provides workers the right to dignified work and equal pay for equal work. The constitution does not specifically prohibit discrimination against any particular group but rather provides for equal rights. Authorities reported no discrimination violations. Most economic activity took place in the informal sector, where protection was not generally provided. Penalties ranged from 5,000 to 20,000 Burundian francs ($3.20 to $12.80) and were not sufficient to deter violations. Some individuals stated membership in the governing party was a prerequisite for formal public and private sector employment.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The market-based daily minimum wage in Bujumbura for unskilled laborers was 3,000 francs ($1.88) in Bujumbura. In the interior of the country, the daily minimum wage was 1,000 Burundian francs ($0.63) with lunch provided in addition. The government estimated 62 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, which the World Bank defined as a daily wage of $0.50 in urban areas and $0.38 in rural areas. More than 90 percent of the population participated in the informal economy. Daily wages in the informal sector averaged between 2,500 and 3,000 Burundian francs ($1.60 to $1.87) in Bujumbura and between 1,000 and 1,500 Burundian francs ($0.65 to $0.94) in the interior of the country. The labor code provides for an eight-hour workday and a 40-hour workweek, but there were many exceptions, such as for workers in national security, residential security, and transport drivers. Supplements must be paid for overtime work: 35 percent for the first two hours and 60 percent thereafter. Premium pay for weekends and holidays is 200 percent. There is no statute concerning compulsory overtime. Rest periods, although not legally required, typically included 30 minutes for lunch. There is no legal differentiation between foreign or migrant workers and citizen workers.

The labor code establishes occupational safety and health (OSH) standards that require safe workplaces. Many new buildings under construction in Bujumbura, however, employed workers without protective gear, such as closed-toe shoes, and used scaffolding built of wooden poles of irregular length and width.

The Department of Inspection within the Labor Ministry has responsibility for enforcing the law regarding minimum wage, work hours, and OSH standards. The penalties for violations ranged from 5,000 to 20,000 Burundian francs ($3.20 to $12.80), which was insufficient to deter violations. The government did not effectively enforce these laws. Due to a lack of inspectors and resources, including fuel for vehicles, the ministry investigated possible violations only when an employee filed a complaint.

Despite the fact that workplace environments often did not meet OSH standards, there were no reported examples of citing employers for violations of OSH standards or reports of OSH complaints filed with the ministry during the year. There were no data on workplace fatalities. Workers had the right to remove themselves from hazardous situations without jeopardizing their employment. Employees generally did not complain about violations to avoid jeopardizing their jobs.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Bosnia and Herzegovina

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Bosnia and Herzegovina, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5716129711.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is a democratic republic with a bicameral parliament. Many governmental functions are the responsibility of two entities within the state, the Federation and Republika Srpska (RS), as well as the Brcko District, an autonomous administrative unit under the sovereignty of BiH. The 1995 General Framework Agreement for Peace (the Dayton Accords), which ended the 1992-95 Bosnian war, provides the constitutional framework for governmental structures, while other parts of the agreement specify the government's obligations to protect human rights, such as the right of wartime refugees and displaced persons to return to their prewar homes. The Dayton Accords also provide for a high representative, who has the authority to impose legislation and remove officials. The country held general elections in October 2014. In its final report, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR) stated that the elections took place in a fair and democratic atmosphere but noted numerous reports of irregularities during the counting process. Civilian authorities failed at times to maintain effective coordination and clear division of jurisdictions and responsibilities between law enforcement agencies and security forces, notably during the 20th commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide on July 11, when protestors attacked the prime minister of Serbia.

Government corruption remained among the country's most serious problems, resulting in continued political and economic stagnation. Some political leaders manipulated deep-seated ethnic divisions, weakening democracy and governance, undermining the rule of law, fostering discrimination in most aspects of daily life, distorting public discourse in the media, and obstructing the return of persons displaced by the 1992-95 conflict. Harassment and intimidation of journalists and civil society limited the public's access to accurate information and the accountability of political leaders.

Other human rights problems included deaths from land mines; instances of police mistreatment of civilians, particularly suspects during questioning; harsh conditions in prisons and detention centers; physical abuse of prisoners and detainees; police failure to inform detainees of their rights or allow effective access to legal counsel prior to questioning; governmental failure to return properties to religious communities; societal religious hostility, including vandalism; underrepresentation of minorities in political life; denial of public access to governmental information; discrimination and violence against women and minorities; trafficking in persons for sex and forced labor; discrimination against persons with disabilities; discrimination and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) persons; and limits on employment rights.

Units in both entities and the Brcko District investigated allegations of police abuse, meted out administrative penalties, and referred cases of criminal misconduct to prosecutors. These units generally operated effectively, and there were no reports of impunity during the first nine months of the year.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

Despite local and international efforts to prosecute war crimes, many lower-ranking perpetrators remained unpunished, including those responsible for the approximately 8,000 persons killed in the Srebrenica genocide and those responsible for approximately 8,000 other persons who remained missing and presumed killed during the 1992-95 war. Authorities have not prosecuted or investigated numerous cases of wartime sexual violence.

According to the OSCE, there were significant delays prosecuting war crimes during the year caused primarily by internal political disagreements over prerequisite justice-sector reforms, delayed EU funding for operations and additional personnel, and general operational inefficiencies. These resulted in protracted and postponed trial proceedings, the unavailability of witnesses and suspects, and the closure of cases due to lack of evidence.

As of November 2015, a landmine accident killed one person compared with more than six deaths in 2014. The country has a demining strategy, but it remained largely unfunded. According to the country's Mine Action Center, as of August more than 9,185 active minefields (with an estimated 120,000 devices) remained, endangering an estimated 540,000 residents throughout the country. In many cases the presence of land mines slowed the return of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and the exhumation of mass graves.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The law prohibits such practices, and there were no reports of their occurrence in the first 10 months of the year. At the same time, there were no concrete indications that the severe mistreatment of detainees reported earlier had ended.

In a 2013 report on a 2012 visit to prisons and remand detention centers, the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) highlighted numerous, credible allegations of serious physical mistreatment, including the use during interrogations of electroshock devices that it stated were of such severity that they would amount to torture. The majority of alleged abuses occurred during efforts by RS police to obtain confessions from suspects during questioning. In its response to the CPT, the RS government stated that it investigated the allegations. There were no reports, however, that authorities had prosecuted or taken any disciplinary actions in connection with the alleged abuses identified by the CPT. In February 2014 Amnesty International reported that law enforcement officials mistreated at least 12 persons detained following clashes between police and demonstrators.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Conditions in the country's prisons and detention centers remained harsh and occasionally life threatening and included generally inadequate medical care and poor sanitation. While prisoners had adequate access to food, some individuals complained about its quality. There were no prison facilities suitable for prisoners with disabilities.

Physical Conditions: The government reported one overcrowded institution, representing an improvement that it ascribed to greater use of alternative sentencing. Only the Busovaca prison (in the Federation) continued to be overcrowded, housing 140 prisoners in an institution intended to hold 80. Authorities continued to hold prisoners with mental illnesses in a prison in Zenica under conditions international observers described as very poor. As of November there were no recorded prisoner deaths.

Administration: Authorities generally investigated credible allegations of inhuman conditions.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted independent human rights observers to visit and gave international community representatives widespread and unhindered access to detention facilities and prisoners. The International Committee of the Red Cross continued to have access to detention facilities under the jurisdiction of the ministries of justice at both the state and entity levels.

Improvements: For the first time, the government reported no egregious overcrowding, which they describe as the result of more frequent alternative sentencing, including community service, probation, increased fines in lieu of detention, and house arrest via electronic surveillance. Officials in the Brcko District, the Federation of BiH, and at the state level implemented community service as a form of disciplinary action. As of November the RS did not implement it. Authorities reported a decrease in violence in prisons throughout the country.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The law prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

By law state-level police agencies include the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA), the Border Police, the Foreigners Affairs Service (FAS) (partial police competencies), and the Directorate for Police Bodies Coordination of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The two entities (RS and the Federation), the Brcko District, and 10 cantonal interior ministries also exercise police powers. SIPA facilitates regional cooperation in combating organized crime, human trafficking, war crimes, and international terrorism. The Border Police are responsible for monitoring the borders and detaining illegal migrants until the FAS takes over their custody and for investigating other crimes related to the borders. The FAS is also responsible for tracking and monitoring legal and illegal migration. The Directorate for Police Bodies Coordination of Bosnia and Herzegovina provides physical security for government and diplomatic buildings and personal protection for state-level officials and visiting dignitaries. The laws outlining the mandates of respective law enforcement agencies of the state, entity, and district governments contain significant overlap.

An EU military force continued to support the country's government in maintaining a safe and secure environment for the population. The NATO headquarters in Sarajevo continued to assist the country's authorities in the implementation of defense reform and counterterrorism activities.

Civilian authorities maintained effective control over security forces, but the complex structure of security forces at times resulted in lack of effective coordination and no clear division of jurisdictions and responsibilities.

Impunity was a problem. Many lower-ranking perpetrators of crimes committed during the 1992-95 war remained unpunished, including those responsible for the approximately 8,000 persons killed in the Srebrenica genocide and those responsible for approximately 8,000 other persons who remained missing and presumed killed during the conflict. Authorities have not prosecuted or investigated numerous allegations of wartime sexual violence.

In its 2013 report on its visit to prisons and remand detention centers, the CPT reported interviewing many persons who complained they received no response from judges or prosecutors when they tried to bring their attention to mistreatment by law enforcement officials. The CPT noted that even when detainees displayed visible injuries or made a statement alleging mistreatment, there was usually no apparent follow-up by the prosecutor or judge other than, at times, to order a medical examination, often in the presence of a the law enforcement officer whom they had accused of mistreatment.

There were reports of police corruption (see section 4). The government has mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption, but political pressure often prevented the application of these mechanisms. While there were no reports of impunity during the year, there were continued reports of corruption within the state and entity security services. There are internal affairs investigative units within all police agencies. Throughout the year, mostly with assistance from the international community, the government provided training to police and security forces designed to combat abuse and corruption and promote respect for human rights. During 2014 police agencies in BiH reported 454 criminal cases of corruption and filed charges against 668 persons. Police conducted 12 major internal anticorruption operations between January and the end of November, including operations Gold, Koverta, and Tref dva, which resulted in the arrest of officers of the Indirect Tax Administration, Border Police, and police investigators.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

Police generally arrested persons based on court orders and sufficient evidence, or in conformity with rules prescribed by law. The law requires authorities to inform detainees of the charges against them immediately upon their arrest and obliges police to bring suspects before a prosecutor within 24 hours of detention (48 hours for terrorism charges). During this period police may detain individuals for investigative purposes and processing. The prosecutor has an additional 24 hours to release the person or to request a court order extending pretrial detention. The court has a subsequent 24 hours to make a decision. There is a functioning bail system.

The law allows detainees to request a lawyer of their own choosing, and if they are unable to afford a lawyer, the authorities are to provide one. In the report on its 2012 visit to RS detention facilities, the CPT noted that RS authorities frequently did not respect a suspect's right to counsel and that a suspect's first encounter with legal counsel generally occurred at the time of his or her first court appearance and after long periods of coercive interrogation. Many persons complained that lawyers provided by authorities remained silent throughout the initial court proceedings.

There were no reports that authorities detained suspects incommunicado or held them improperly under house arrest.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The state constitution provides for the right to a fair hearing in civil and criminal matters, but political parties and organized crime figures sometimes influenced the judiciary at both the state and entity levels in politically sensitive cases. Authorities at times failed to enforce court decisions.

Trial Procedures

The law provides that defendants enjoy a presumption of innocence, the right to be informed promptly and in detail of the charges against them, with free interpretation if necessary, and the right to a fair and public trial without undue delay. The law does not provide for trial by jury. The law provides for the right to counsel at public expense if the prosecutor charges the defendant with a serious crime. Courts did not always appoint defense attorneys where the maximum prison sentence was less than five years. Authorities generally gave defense attorneys adequate time and facilities to prepare their clients defense. The law provides defendants the right to confront witnesses, to present witnesses and evidence on their own behalf, to access government-held evidence relevant to their case, and to appeal verdicts. Authorities generally respected most of these rights. These rights extend to all defendants.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

The law provides for individuals and organizations to seek civil remedies for human rights violations and provides for the appeal of decisions to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The government failed to comply with many court decisions pertaining to human rights. The court system suffered from large backlogs of cases and the lack of an effective mechanism to enforce court orders. Inefficiency in the courts undermined the rule of law by making recourse to civil judgments less effective. The government's failure to comply with court decisions led plaintiffs to bring cases before the ECHR.

Property Restitution

The four "traditional" religious communities (Muslim, Serbian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Jewish) had extensive claims for restitution of property nationalized during and after World War II. In the absence of a state restitution law governing the return of nationalized properties, many government officials used such properties as tools for ethnic and political manipulation. In a few cases, government officials refused to return properties legally recognized as belonging to religious institutions. During the year the economics faculty of the University of Sarajevo and the Sarajevo Canton government continued to ignore requests from the Serbian Orthodox Church to return their building in the center of Sarajevo in full, or at least partially. The Sarajevo Canton government has similarly made no progress in the construction of a new building for the economics faculty.

Roma displaced during the 1992-95 conflict had difficulty repossessing their property because of discrimination and because they lacked documents proving ownership or had never registered their property with local authorities.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The law prohibits such actions, and there were no reports that the government failed to respect these prohibitions.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The law provides for freedom of speech and press, but governmental respect for these rights continued to deteriorate during the year. Intimidation and threats against journalists and media outlets increased, while media coverage reflected ethnic and political allegiances. During the year the RS parliament enacted legislation that could restrict internet speech critical of officials and other individuals.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: There were no new legal or administrative measures restricting freedom of speech during the first nine months of the year. Although the law prohibits acts, including "hate speech" and other forms of expression that provoke racial, ethnic, or other intolerance, authorities did not enforce these restrictions.

According to data from the BiH Journalists' Association covering 2006-15, authorities prosecuted only 15 percent of reported criminal acts committed against journalists. They also claimed that authorities conducted no investigation in 22 percent of cases involving alleged violations of journalists' rights and closed 23 percent of these cases without a police effort to find the perpetrators. In response to calls for independent investigation, the BiH parliament directed the Council of Ministers to submit a report on threats and pressure against journalists in BiH.

Independent analysts noted the continuing tendency of politicians and other leaders to label unwanted criticism as hate speech or national treason. As of November the official Communications Regulatory Agency (CRA) registered one complaint alleging hate speech, which it rejected. Through November the self-regulatory Press Council of BiH received 36 complaints related to hate speech. The council determined that in the first 11 months of the year, there were 21 cases of incitement and speech spreading hate. Most instances occurred in online media.

Press and Media Freedoms: The laws delegate responsibility for safeguarding freedom of the press in most instances to the cantons in the Federation and to the entity-level authorities in the RS. Numerous BiH outlets continued to express a wide variety of views, but coverage diverged along political and ethnic lines, and media outlets continued to be subject to excessive influence from governments, political parties, and private interest groups. A number of independent print media outlets continued to encounter financial problems that endangered their operations.

Authorities in the RS continued to exert pressure on media outlets to discourage some forms of expression, and party and governmental control over the major information outlets narrowed the range of opinion in both entities. Public broadcasters faced strong pressure from government and political forces both directly, through financial support, and indirectly, because the broadcasters' lack of long-term financial stability. These factors limited their independence and resulted in news that was consistently subjective and politically tainted. Both entity governments supported news agencies through funding from their respective budgets. As in the previous year, the RS government funded selected media outlets, while the Federation government continued to allot, but not deliver, funds to the Radio and Television of the Federation. Observers regarded both the delivery and the withholding of funds as politically motivated.

The law empowers the CRA to regulate all aspects of the country's audiovisual market, including broadcast media, but political parties' efforts to obstruct its oversight and management continued to diminish its authority. As of November BiH authorities failed to appoint a new CRA general manager, further diminishing the organization's regulatory powers.

The public broadcasters Radio and Television of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BHRT), Radio and Television of the Republika Srpska (RTRS), and Federation Radio and Television (FTV) faced continued financial instability due to the loss of dedicated tax revenue. Nationwide public broadcaster BHRT, whose content was assessed as being the most politically neutral, faced the most severe financial problems. Institutional instability within the governing structures of the FTV and the RTRS continued, leaving entity public broadcasters vulnerable to political pressure. While the FTV continued to demonstrate layers of political bias, the RS government directly controlled the RTRS and to use it as a mouthpiece for the RS political establishment. The entity governments further undercut the independence of their respective broadcasters by excluding the CRA from the process of appointing governing boards for the broadcasters. Instead they allowed their entity-level parliaments to administer the process. Remaining subject to competing political interests, the various authorities failed to establish a public broadcasting service corporation to oversee the operations of all public broadcasters in the country as the law requires.

Violence and Harassment: Intimidation and threats against journalists increased during the year. There were instances of intimidation and politically motivated litigation against journalists for unfavorable reporting on government leaders and authorities. As of November the Free Media Help Line recorded 55 cases involving violations of journalists' rights and freedoms or pressure from government and law enforcement officials.

In March the popular web portal Klix.ba announced that authorities dropped all charges against in a case that followed its publication of an audio recording alleging high-level political corruption in the RS. The charges were preceded by an eight-hour raid of Klix.ba's offices. After the Klix.ba staff refused to reveal their sources, the Sarajevo Municipal Court issued a warrant allowing law enforcement authorities to seize computers and other equipment thought to hold information related to the ensuing vote-buying scandal in the RS. In early July the BiH Journalists' Association and its affiliated club of journalists from Banja Luka responded with organized protests in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Mostar, Banja Luka, and Brcko. The protesters demonstrated solidarity with Klix.ba, as well as their dissatisfaction with authorities' failure to prosecute violations of press freedom and the rights of journalists. Eventually the court ordered the equipment returned to Klix.ba, but reverberations from the incident continued during the year, including a subsequent ruling by the Sarajevo Municipal Court that the initial raid had been conducted illegally.

In March officials from SIPA allegedly exceeded their legal authority when they demanded that the editors of the daily newspaper Dnevni Avaz produce copies of an interview the newspaper published several years earlier. The BiH Journalists' Association claimed the incident was an act of intimidation. Similarly, following a July 11 attack on Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, SIPA demanded coverage of the incident from local media without securing prerequisite court orders.

In March, RS President Milorad Dodik verbally insulted a Banja Luka stringer for the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje. Instead of answering an "unpleasant" question during a press conference, Dodik made derogatory comments about the journalist's physical appearance and ethnic background. The RS president's press office also continued the practice of refusing press credentials to journalists and news crews associated with the pro-opposition television station BN TV from Bijeljina.

In October the deputy director for the BiH Audit Office called a reporter for Glas Srpske and accused her using a report she was writing on nepotism in the government to engage in blackmail. The BiH Journalists Association described the Audit Office's intervention as attempted intimidation and abuse of position and reported the case to the Sarajevo Canton Police for investigation.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: Some political parties attempted to influence editorial policies and media content through legal and financial measures. As a result some media outlets practiced self-censorship.

In some instances media sources reported that officials threatened outlets with loss of advertising or limited their access to official information. Prevailing practices indicated that close connections between major advertisers and political circles allowed for biased distribution of advertising time. Public companies, most of which were under the control of political parties, remained the key advertisers. Outlets critical of ruling parties claimed they faced difficulties in obtaining advertising.

Internet Freedom

The state government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports that it monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority. Although the law prohibits acts, including "hate speech" and other forms of expression, that provoke racial, ethnic, or other intolerance, authorities did not enforce these prohibitions in regard to on-line media during the year.

During the year the RS adopted legislation declaring that internet-based social networks were part of the public domain and prescribing fines for "insulting or disturbing" content, not clearly defined, on the internet. After strong reactions from journalists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), opposition political parties, and the international community in BiH, the parliament amended the law to exclude content critical of public institutions, but the restrictions remained in effect for material criticizing individual persons, including political figures. There were no reports that authorities applied the law during the first 10 months of the year. Transparency International, the BiH Journalists' Association, and the Banja Luka Club of Journalists jointly submitted an appeal to the RS Constitutional Court challenging the legality and constitutionality of the legislation.

According to an estimate in the 2014 CRA's annual report, 58 percent of the population used the internet in 2014.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no major government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

The country's eight public universities remained segregated along ethnic lines, including their curriculums, diplomas, and relevant school activities. Professors sometimes used prejudicial language in their lectures. The selection of textbooks and school materials reinforced discrimination and prejudice.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Freedom of Assembly

The law provides for freedom of assembly, and the government generally respected this right.

Freedom of Association

The law provides for freedom of association, and the government generally respected this right, although some NGOs reported difficulties registering as official entities with the government. Several NGOs expressed frustration over the lengthy bureaucratic procedures required for registration at the state level.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The law provides for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation and includes measures to avoid statelessness. The government generally respected these rights, but some restrictions remained. The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance for IDPs, refugees, returning refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, and other persons of concern.

Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)

During the 1992-95 conflict, approximately one million individuals became IDPs. The majority of Bosniaks and Croats fled the RS, while Serbs fled the Federation. At the beginning of the year, UNHCR was providing protection and/or assistance to 84,500 IDPs. According to UNHCR, 20 years after the war, an estimated 7,000 persons, including IDPs, continued to live in collective accommodations meant to be temporary. Collective accommodations were located throughout the country. A substantial number of IDPs and returnees lived in substandard conditions that affected their livelihoods.

The Dayton Peace Accords provide for the right of persons displaced by the war to return to their homes. The country's constitution and laws provide for the voluntary return or resettlement of IDPs consistent with the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.

While the rate of physical violence against returnees subsided significantly after the war, isolated attacks have continued. During the year, for example, there were reports of two incidents in RS municipalities, one in Kotor Varos and the other in Bijeljina.

There were no formal restrictions on IDP access to humanitarian organizations and assistance, but procedures for applying were complicated, and IDPs often could not afford to pay the associated costs.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law provides for the granting of asylum, refugee, or subsidiary protection status, and the government has established a system for providing protection to refugees. Asylum seekers with pending claims have a right to accommodation at the asylum center until the Ministry of Security adjudicates their claims, a process that normally took three months or longer. Asylum seekers have the right to appeal a negative decision within 60 days in regular procedure cases and within eight days in urgent cases. In urgent cases a court must render a decision within 30 days. The system for providing protection to refugees continued to suffer from a lack of transparency. According to UNHCR, refugee applicants did not have legal assistance, there were no clear standards of proof or methods of assessing the credibility of claims, and guidelines for determining that there was a risk of persecution were unduly strict.

Safe Country of Origin/Transit: The law provides for the application of the concept of "safe country of origin or safe third country." Under this provision authorities may deny asylum to any applicants who cannot prove they could not return to their country of origin or any country of transit without risking refoulement.

Refugee Abuse: Authorities routinely placed asylum seekers in the immigration detention center without documenting their asylum requests and frequently issued expulsion and detention orders to would-be asylum seekers without giving them an opportunity to present asylum applications. In such a case, according to UNHCR, authorities held six Afghan asylum seekers at the immigration detention center during the first six months of the year. UNHCR expressed concern that foreigners in detention may not have access to asylum procedures and that authorities may prematurely return some potential asylum seekers under readmission agreements.

UNHCR reported that in three cases BiH authorities continued to subject asylum seekers to indefinite detention. Authorities cited national security concerns in two of the cases; in the third the individual crossed the border illegally and without identification.

Durable Solutions: The laws provide a program for integration, resettlement, and return. The country was party to a regional housing program facilitated by UNHCR and the OSCE to provide durable solutions for up to 74,000 refugees and displaced persons from four countries in the region, including 14,000 of the most vulnerable refugees, returnees, and IDPs from BiH. A protracted process of selecting beneficiaries due to capacity and management problems resulted in extended delays in the reconstruction of homes for the beneficiaries. As of September the first group of 20 families received housing assistance, with an additional 150 families slated for assistance by the end of the year. One continuing problem was the fragmented institutional set up that added layers of administrative delays in implementing durable solutions. Another was a political imperative in BiH to select beneficiaries proportionally among its constituent peoples for a program that that was designed to select beneficiaries based on vulnerability criteria. Amendments to the BiH Citizenship Law enacted in 2013 and adopted by the RS in July allow for naturalization of refugees after five years' residence. Authorities postponed implementation of the provision pending harmonization of laws between the state and entity levels.

Temporary Protection: The government also provided temporary protection to individuals who may not qualify as refugees. In the first six months of the year, authorities provided temporary protection to one individual and extended existing protection to another 10 individuals.

Stateless Persons

UNHCR reported 101 stateless persons, and an additional 75 persons were at risk of statelessness. Most of the latter were Roma and included persons in need of birth and/or citizenship registration. The Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees reported similar figures from its Roma registration database. Persons in need of documentation, and consequently at risk of statelessness, faced bureaucratic obstacles to completing birth and civil registration as well as inefficient registration procedures.

The law provides that a child with one parent who is a citizen parent is also citizen regardless of the child's place of birth. A child born on the territory of the country to stateless parents or parents whose citizenship is unknown is entitled to citizenship.

Authorities may grant stateless persons temporary residence for one year on humanitarian grounds with the possibility of an extension. Stateless persons have a right to employment as foreigners and a right to primary education as BiH nationals. The law provides for naturalization of a person who has resided in the country for five years as an officially recognized stateless person. There are no special provisions to expedite the naturalization process, but the law gives stateless persons the opportunity to gain nationality through the same procedures as other foreigners. While there were no reports that persons at risk of statelessness faced discrimination on that basis, such persons overwhelmingly were members of the Romani minority and faced discrimination on ethnic grounds (see section 6).

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution and the law provide citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage. Citizens generally exercised this right, but observers noted a number of shortcomings.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: The general elections held in October 2014 took place in a competitive environment with candidates and political parties freely campaigning and presenting their programs. According to ODIHR the Central Election Commission administered the elections efficiently, but other international observers provided numerous, credible descriptions of political parties manipulating the makeup of the polling station committees, which endangered the integrity of the election process. There were also reports of problems with the counting process due to inadequate knowledge of appropriate procedures among polling-station committee members. According to ODIHR the campaign finance regulatory system was not adequate to assure the transparency, integrity, and accountability of election processes.

Political Parties and Political Participation: Some leaders of smaller political parties complained that the larger parties enjoyed a virtual monopoly over government ministries, public services, and media outlets, where membership in a dominant party was a prerequisite for advancement.

Participation of Women and Minorities: The country's patriarchal culture tended to limit active women's participation in political affairs. While the law requires that at least 40 percent of a political party's candidates be women, women won election to 13 percent (two out of 15) of the positions in the BiH House of Peoples. Women held two of the nine ministerial positions in the BiH Council of Ministers.

The law provides that Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks, whom the constitution considers the "constituent peoples" of the country, as well as undefined "others," must be adequately represented at all levels. The government did not respect this requirement. Apart from the three constituent peoples, the country's 16 recognized national minority groups remained significantly underrepresented in government. There were no members of a minority group in the state-level parliament. The government made little effort to implement changes required by rulings of the ECHR, the first of which was issued in 2009, that the country's constitution discriminates against "others," such as Jews and Roma, by preventing them from running for the presidency and seats in the parliament's upper house. In December 2014 the court found that the government violated the European Convention on Human Rights when it ruled Azra Zornic ineligible to run for election to the BiH Presidency and House of Peoples because she refused to declare affiliation with any particular ethnic group.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, but the government did not implement the law effectively. Officials frequently engaged in corrupt practices with impunity, and corruption remained prevalent in many political and economic institutions.

Corruption: The public viewed corruption as endemic in the public sphere. The multitude of state, entity, cantonal, and municipal administrations, each with the power to establish laws and regulations affecting business, created a system that lacked transparency and provided opportunities for corruption. The multilevel government structure gave corrupt officials multiple opportunities to demand "service fees." According to professors and students, corruption continued at all levels of the higher education system. Professors at a number of universities reported that bribery was common and that they experienced pressure from colleagues and superiors to give higher grades to students with family or political connections.

Financial Disclosure: Candidates for high-level public office, including for parliament at the state and entity levels and for the Council of Ministers and entity government positions, are subject to financial disclosure laws, although observers noted the laws fell short of standards established by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and other international organizations. The Central Election Commission is responsible for overseeing compliance with the laws. Authorities generally failed to make financial disclosure declarations public, ostensibly because of conflicts between the laws on financial disclosure and protection of personal information. Financial disclosure laws do not provide adequate investigative authority and enforcement mechanisms. As a result public officials and their relatives often declared only a fraction of their total assets and liabilities.

The law provides criminal sanctions for failure to comply with financial disclosure requirements, but authorities did not apply those sanctions during the first 10 months of the year.

Public Access to Information: Although the law provides for citizen access to government records, many government agencies did not comply. The government sometimes failed to provide the required explanation for denial of access but generally did so when citizens appealed denials through the ombudsman, courts, or legal aid.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A variety of human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials in both the Federation and RS attempted at times to limit NGO activities. Many NGOs complained that the NGO registration process, which lasted up to a year, remained overly complex and protracted.

NGO participation in government decision making varied by issue. Neither the government nor the NGO sector had sufficient knowledge of the mechanisms by which NGOs could participate in such processes. While the Council of Ministers can return draft legislation that has not undergone consultation with NGOs, it did not employ this mechanism. The Council of Ministers largely excluded NGOs from politically important or sensitive decisions. NGOs nevertheless continued to expand cooperation with the government at lower levels.

Due to inefficiency, procedures to register an NGO or change its organizational statute took significantly longer than prescribed by law. The most difficult problem for civil society organizations, however, was lack of adequate funding. Most were dependent on either governmental or international assistance. Local governments generally extended support to NGOs, provided the governing parties did not consider them threats. No mechanisms insulated NGOs from the political, religious, and ethnic considerations that affected the support they received from governments.

The United Nations or Other International Bodies: The RS government was less responsive and cooperative than the state and Federation governments in dealing with the Office of the High Representative, which was created by the Dayton Accords and given special executive powers in BiH.

In July the National Assembly of the RS passed a law that called for a referendum in the RS on the competencies of the BiH Court and state-level Prosecutors Office. As of September the law was under review by the RS Constitutional Court.

Government Human Rights Bodies: A state-level ombudsman institution has authority to investigate violations of the country's human rights laws on behalf of individual citizens and to submit legally nonbinding recommendations to the government for remedy. The Office of the Ombudsman reported that it issued approximately 300 recommendations as of November, and relevant institutions implemented 50-60 percent of them. Members of the international community noted that the ombudsman's effectiveness was in question because of the unanimity required between representatives of BiH's three constituent peoples over what constitutes a human rights violation. A Bosniak, a Croat, and a Serb shared leadership of the ombudsman institution.

The state-level parliament has a Joint Commission for Human Rights. The 12-member commission participated in human rights-related activities with governmental and nongovernmental organizations.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution and law prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity, age, language, HIV-positive status, or other communicable diseases. The government did not enforce these prohibitions effectively. Government and civil society advocates cited a lack of specificity regarding protections for persons with disabilities, and members of the LGBTI community and actively sought relevant amendments to the BiH Law on Discrimination.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The maximum penalty for rape and spousal rape is 15 years in prison. A sense of shame among rape victims and the failure of police to treat spousal rape as a serious offense inhibited the effective enforcement of the law. Rape, particularly spousal rape, was often unreported by victims and underreported by authorities. In 2013 the state-level Agency for Gender Equality, in cooperation with gender centers in the RS and the Federation, published research on the prevalence of abuse against women. In a survey of women 15 years of age or older, almost half indicated they had experienced psychological or physical abuse. Psychological abuse was the most common form, followed by physical violence and sexual violence (6 percent of respondents).

The country undertook several initiatives to combat rape and domestic violence, but the Agency for Gender Equality reported that only 17 percent of women who experienced domestic violence sought help. Women did not fully use the protections available under the law because they lacked knowledge of the protections or because of concern about the consequences of revealing such violence.

Violence against women, including sexual assault and domestic violence, remained widespread and underreported. While laws in both entities empower authorities to remove the perpetrator from the home, officials rarely, if ever, made use of these provisions. Law enforcement officials were often under the mistaken impression that they needed to concern themselves with where the perpetrator would live. As a result women in danger were compelled to go to safe houses. NGOs reported that authorities, especially in the RS, where domestic violence is a misdemeanor, often returned offenders to their family homes less than 24 hours after a violent event. In the Federation, authorities had discretion to prosecute domestic violence as either a felony or a misdemeanor. Experts estimated that only 10 percent of domestic violence victims reported the crime.

Although police received specialized training in handling cases of domestic violence, NGOs reported widespread reluctance among police officers in both entities to break up families by arresting offenders.

Social service agencies experienced inadequate funding, staff, and training in helping victims effectively. A multitude of NGOs dedicated to assisting victims of domestic violence sought to fill this void. Eight of them formed a strong cooperative arrangement called Safe Network. The network developed two hotlines  one for each entity  that women could call when they needed services but were reluctant to contact police. The hotlines received an estimated 6,000 calls annually. Domestic NGOs ran nine shelters for female victims of domestic violence throughout the country with a total capacity of 173 persons. Some of these doubled as shelters for trafficking victims. NGO representatives asserted there was a need for double the existing capacity.

Sexual Harassment: The law prohibits sexual harassment, but it was a serious problem. NGOs reported that victims almost never filed complaints because they did not know the treatment they experienced was illegal or that they had a right to legal protection against it.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children, to manage their reproductive health, and to have the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, and violence.

Discrimination: The law provides for the same legal status and rights for women as for men, including under family, labor, property, nationality, and inheritance laws, and authorities generally treated women equally. The law does not explicitly require equal pay for equal work, but it forbids gender discrimination. Women and men generally received equal pay for equal work at government-owned enterprises but not at all private businesses. Women had problems with nonpayment of allowances for maternity leave and unwarranted dismissal because they were pregnant or new mothers. Many job announcements openly advertised discriminatory criteria, such as age and physical appearance, for employment of female applicants. Women remained underrepresented in law enforcement agencies, although progress in their recruitment continued (also see section 7.d.).

Children

Birth registration: By law a child born to at least one citizen parent is a citizen regardless of the child's place of birth. A child born on the territory of the country to parents who are unknown or stateless is entitled to BiH citizenship. Parents generally registered their children immediately after they were born, but there were exceptions, particularly in the Romani community.

The NGO Vasa Prava estimated there were slightly fewer than 400 unregistered children in the country. UNHCR, with the legal assistance of a domestic NGO, registered the births of children, mainly Roma, whose parents failed to register them. Unregistered children experienced significant obstacles in accessing government social, educational, and health benefits.

Education: Education was free through the secondary level, but compulsory only from age six through 15.

Child Abuse: Family violence against children was a problem. Police investigated and prosecuted individual cases of child abuse. The country's Agency for Gender Equality estimated that one in five families experienced domestic violence. Municipal centers for social work are responsible for protecting children's rights but lacked resources and the ability to provide housing for children who fled abuse or who required removal from abusive homes.

Early and Forced Marriage: The legal minimum age for marriage is 18, or 16 with parental consent. In certain Romani communities, girls married between the ages of 12 and 14. Children's rights and antitrafficking activists noted that prosecutors were reluctant to investigate and prosecute arranged marriages involving Romani minors on the grounds that such marriages were "their way." The government did not have any programs specifically designed to reduce the incidence of child marriage.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The state-level penalty for sexual exploitation of children is imprisonment for up to 10 years but may rise to 20 years under certain aggravating circumstances. At the entity level, penalties range from three to 15 years' imprisonment. The RS adopted a trafficking law, but the Federation's parliament did not and continued to apply its law on "enticement to prostitution" to prosecute recognized trafficking cases. As a result police in the Federation often categorized minors 14 and older as "juvenile prostitutes" rather than victims of rape or trafficking in persons. Women's and children's rights NGOs complained that the law allows police to subject children between the ages of 14 and 17 to interrogation and criminal proceedings, although no such prosecutions were documented during the first eight months of the year. Under entity criminal codes, the abuse of a child or juvenile for pornography is a crime that carries a sentence of one to five years in prison. Authorities generally enforced these laws. The law prohibits sexual acts with a child and defines a child as a person younger than the age of 18.

Girls were subjected to commercial sexual exploitation, and there were reports that Romani girls as young as 12 endured early and forced marriage and domestic servitude. Children were also used in the production of pornography.

International Child Abductions: The country is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For information see the Department of State's report on compliance at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/legal/compliance.html and country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/country/bosnia-and-herzegovina.html.

Anti-Semitism

There were no reports of anti-Semitic violence against members of the Jewish community, which authorities estimated to number fewer than 1,000 persons.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The law in both entities and at the state level prohibits discrimination against persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities in employment; education; access to health care; air travel, and other transportation; and the provision of other state services. Nevertheless, discrimination in these areas continued (also see section 7.d.).

The laws of both entities require increased accessibility to buildings for persons with disabilities, but authorities rarely enforced the requirement. Human rights NGOs complained that the construction of public buildings without access for persons with disabilities continued.

The law enables children with disabilities to attend regular classes when feasible, but schools often reported that they were unable to accommodate them. Children with disabilities either attended classes using regular curricula in regular schools or attended special schools. Parents of children with disabilities, especially of those with extensive disabilities, faced many obstacles, and authorities generally left them on their own to provide education for their children, although a growing number of programs for children with disabilities were available in schools and through NGOs.

The NGOs also complained that the government did not effectively implement laws and programs to help persons with disabilities (also see section 7.d.).

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Minorities experienced discrimination in employment and education in both the government and private sectors. While the law prohibits discrimination, human rights activists frequently complained that authorities did not adequately enforce the law.

Harassment and discrimination against minorities continued throughout the country. Examples included desecration of graves, graffiti, arson, and vandalism of houses of worship and other religious sites, verbal harassment, dismissal from work, threats, and physical assaults. Incidents were often related to property disputes.

Violence and acts of intimidation against ethnic minorities often focused on symbols and buildings of that minority's predominant religion. For more information, see the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

In the RS parents of more than 500 Bosniak children in returnee communities throughout the entity boycotted public schools and instead sent their children to attend alternative classes organized by the Islamic Community and financed by the Federation Ministry of Education. Parents took the measures because of a dispute with the RS Ministry of Education, which refused to approve a group of national subjects and insisted on formally calling the language children learn in their respective public schools the "language of Bosniak people" instead of the "Bosnian language," as described in the country's national constitution. Parents accused RS authorities of denying them their constitutional right to study their language, provided for under their country's international obligations, while RS authorities continued to insist they were abiding by the RS constitution. With no compromise in sight, several hundred students in these communities began a third school year separated from the rest of their classmates. In the 2015-16 school year, the number of students in alternative classes increased by 76, when communities near Zvornik joined the boycott.

Human rights activists noted that many textbooks reinforced stereotypes of the country's ethnic groups and others missed opportunities to dispel stereotypes by excluding any mention of some ethnic groups, particularly Jews and Roma. State and entity officials generally did not act to prevent such discrimination. Human Rights Watch asserted that ethnic quotas used by the Federation and RS to allocate civil service jobs disproportionately excluded Roma and other minorities. The quotas were based on the 1991 census, which undercounted these minorities.

Although BiH officials did not release results of 2013 census, observers estimated the Romani population to be 60-80,000. Roma experienced discrimination in access to housing, health care, education, and employment opportunities. Several Romani leaders reported that discrimination in access to social benefits and employment led to a significant increase in the number of Roma who emigrated and sought asylum broad. There were no official internal statistics to document this trend.

Roma continued to experience more discrimination than any other segment of the population. Almost 95 percent of them remained unemployed. A significant percentage were homeless or without water or electricity in their homes. Many dwellings were overcrowded, and residents lacked proof of property ownership. Approximately three-fourths lived in openly segregated neighborhoods. Roma had significantly less access to health insurance than other groups, and infant mortality among Roma was four times greater than among the rest of the population. Authorities frequent discriminated against Roma, which contributed to their exclusion by society.

Many human rights NGOs criticized law enforcement authorities for widespread indifference toward Romani victims of domestic violence and human trafficking.

In September the BiH marked the end of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, an initiative involving 12 European countries, which sought end discrimination against Roma and close gaps between Roma and the rest of society. The BiH government reported that the initiative resulted in allocation of more than 12 million euros ($13.2 million) to housing, employment, education, and health care for the Romani population over the decade. Authorities built or repaired more than 700 housing units and improved communal infrastructure for more than 1,000 Romani families. Some 475 Roma reportedly benefited from temporary employment, with some persons managing to keep their jobs past the project's lifecycle. The greatest area of improvement was in the number or Romani children receiving primary education. Approximately 40 percent of Romani children attended elementary school and 80 students attended high school. Romani activists credited the initiative with fostering successful relationships between Romani community leaders and the government. Other NGO leaders, however, asserted that the impact of the initiative was exaggerated, adding that the majority of Romani communities across BiH were unaware of it.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

While law at the state level prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, authorities did not fully enforce it. Moreover the absence of explicit protections in entity-level laws left room for discrimination based on assumptions by subnational law enforcement authorities that state-level authorities were preventing it. There was also frequent societal discrimination against LGBTI persons.

LGBTI persons faced frequent harassment and discrimination, including termination of employment (see section 7.d.). In some cases dismissal letters explicitly stated that sexual orientation was the cause of termination, making it extremely difficult for those dismissed to find another job. In the face of such risks, LGBTI persons rarely reported discrimination to police. In its 2014 report on the rights and freedoms of LGBTI persons, the Sarajevo Open Center noted that most state-level institutions assumed that the prohibition of discrimination in state-level law was sufficient to protect LGBTI persons. The entities regulated many daily activities, however, and entity-level law does not provide explicit protections to LGBTI persons.

In January, a year after an attack that injured several organizers and participants in the Merlinka LGBTI Film Festival in downtown Sarajevo, the Sarajevo Canton Prosecutor's Office launched criminal proceedings against those allegedly responsible.

In July 2014 a Sarajevo court delivered BiH's first verdict in a case involving crimes targeting the LGBTI community, convicting two men for using a dating website to contact and rob LGBTI individuals. The court sentenced one of those charged to five and one-half years in prison and the other to four years and two months. In 2014 the Sarajevo Open Center documented 42 cases of hate speech and 20 cases of crimes and incidents motivated by prejudices based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity.

On May 17, the BiH parliament's Joint Commission for Human Rights held its first session dedicated to the rights of LGBTI individuals. The commission tasked the ombudsman with preparation of the country's first official report on the status the LGBTI community.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

The incidence of HIV and AIDS among the general population was less than 0.1 percent. Significant social stigma and employment discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS remained among members of the public as well as health workers, due to a lack of public understanding of the nature of the infection. In one case an employee of a Sarajevo-based advocacy NGO reported being refused treatment in a public dental clinic because of his HIV-positive status. After the patient persisted, a doctor on staff agreed to meet the patient after hours, but the remaining staff continued to refuse service.

Other Societal Violence or Discrimination

Societal discrimination and occasional violence against ethnic minorities at times took the form of attacks on places symbolic of those minorities, including on religious buildings. According to the Interreligious Council, an NGO that mediates among the four "traditional" religious communities (Muslim, Serbian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Jewish), attacks against religious symbols, clerics, and property in the first 11 months of the year decreased nearly 50 percent compared with the previous year.

Promotion of Acts of Discrimination

There were widespread instances of media coverage and public discourse designed to portray members of other ethnic groups in negative terms, usually in relation to the 1992-95 war. During the year the RS president and senior officials in his political party, as well as other officials and leaders in the RS, repeatedly denied that Serb forces committed genocide at Srebrenica in 1995, despite the opposite findings of multiple local and international courts.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

On August 20, a new labor law entered into force in the Federation. It annulled existing collective labor agreements with the government and employers, which regulated matters such as minimum wages and various allowances and gave Federation trade unions 120 days to negotiate new ones.

Both the new Federation labor law and the existing RS labor law provide for the right of workers in both entities to form and join independent unions, bargain collectively, and conduct legal strikes. The employers in private sector did not always respect these rights. The law prohibits antiunion discrimination but does not provide adequately for enforcement of these protections. The labor inspectorates and courts did not deal effectively with employees' complaints of antiunion discrimination. The law prescribes reinstatement of dismissed workers in cases where there is evidence of discrimination, whether for union activity or other reasons. Entity-level laws in the Federation and RS prohibit the firing of union leaders without prior approval of their respective labor ministries.

The law in both entities and in the Brcko District provides for the right to strike. The law in the Federation contains burdensome requirements for workers who wish to conduct a strike. Trade unions may not officially announce a strike without first reaching an agreement with the employer on which "essential" personnel would remain at work. Authorities may declare the strike illegal if no agreement is reached. This provision effectively allowed employers to prevent legitimate strikes. Laws governing the registration of unions give the minister of justice powers to accept or reject trade union registration on ambiguous grounds. According to informal estimates, approximately 40 percent of the work force was unregistered and working in the informal economy. Approximately 20 percent of the labor force in the informal economy worked without legal protections.

The government did not effectively enforce all applicable laws. Authorities did not impose sanctions against employers who prevented workers from organizing. Inspections related to worker rights were limited. Ministry inspectors gave low priority to violations of worker rights; state officials focused instead on bolstering state revenues by cracking down on unregistered employees and employers who did not pay taxes. Some unions reported that employers threatened employees with dismissal if they joined a union and in some cases fired union leaders for their activities. Entity-level penalties for violations included monetary fines that were not sufficient to deter violations. The Federation penalty was 1,000-3,000 convertible marks ($636-$1,910), and 5,000-10,000 ($3,200-$6,360) for repeated violations, while the RS penalty was 1,000-10,000 convertible marks ($636-$6,360). Judicial procedures were subject to lengthy delays and appeals.

Authorities and employers sometimes failed to respect freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining. While governments and organizations of employers and workers in both entities negotiated general collective agreements establishing conditions of work, a number of private employers refused to recognize these agreements. Labor authorities in the Federation reported that employers and workers often did not fully consider whether such agreements were financially sustainable. Trade union representatives alleged that antiunion discrimination was widespread in all districts.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor. Federation laws do not criminalize trafficking activities, but adequate legislation exists at the state level and in the RS and Brcko District. The government did not enforce these laws effectively, and forced labor occurred. Penalties for violations range from three to 10 years' in prison and were generally sufficient to deter violations, but resources, inspections, and remediation were inadequate.

In June the state prosecutor indicted 13 BiH nationals for collusion in forced labor related to 672 victims of forced labor who were trafficked to Azerbaijan. There were reports that individuals and organized crime syndicates trafficked men, women, and children for begging and forced labor (see section 7.c.).

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The minimum age for employment of children in both entities is 15; minors between the ages of 15 and 18 must provide a valid health certificate to work. The RS and Brcko District laws penalize employers for hiring persons younger than 15. The labor codes of the Federation, the RS, and the Brcko District also prohibit minors between the ages of 15 and 18 from working at night or performing hazardous labor, although the Federation's labor code does not define hazardous labor. Entity governments are responsible for enforcing child labor laws, and both entities and the Brcko District enforced them. Boys and girls were subjected to forced begging and involuntary domestic servitude in forced marriages. Sometimes the forced begging was linked to other forms of human trafficking. In the case of Romani children, family members or organized criminal groups were responsible for both subjecting girls and boys to forced begging and domestic servitude in forced marriages. Several of worst forms of child labor occurring in the country included use of children for illicit activities, commercial sexual exploitation of children, and use of children for the production of pornography (see section 6, Children).

During the year the government did not receive reports of child labor at places of employment and did not undertake any investigations on its own initiative. Neither entity had inspectors dedicated to child labor inspections; authorities investigated violations of child labor laws as part of a general labor inspection. The labor inspectorates of both entities reported that they found no violations of child labor laws, although they did not conduct reviews of children working on family farms. The government did not collect data on child labor. The general perception among officials was that exploitation of child labor was rare. RS law imposes fines for employing children younger than 16, but the law does not specify the exact monetary amount. Penalties were usually sufficient to deter violations.

During 2014 NGOs running day centers in Banja Luka, Sarajevo, Tuzla, and Zenica in cooperation with the country's antitrafficking coordinator provided services to 725 at-risk children, many of whom were involved in forced begging on the streets.

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment and Occupation

Labor laws and regulations related to employment or occupation prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, gender, disability, language, sexual orientation or gender identity, HIV-positive status, other communicable diseases, or social status. The government generally enforced these laws and regulations effectively.

Discrimination in employment and occupation occurred with respect to race, gender, disability, language, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity, HIV-positive status, and social status (see section 6).

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The monthly minimum wage in the Federation was 350 convertible marks ($224). In the RS the monthly minimum wage was 370 convertible marks ($237), except in the textile and footwear sectors, where it was 320 convertible marks ($205). The Brcko District did not have a separate minimum wage or an independent pension fund, and employers typically used the minimum wage rate of the entity to which its workers decided to direct their pension funds.

The legal workweek in both entities and the Brcko District is 40 hours, although seasonal workers may work up to 60 hours. The law limits overtime to 10 hours per week in both entities. An employee in the RS may legally volunteer for an additional 10 hours of overtime in exceptional circumstances. The Federation has no provision for premium pay, while the RS requires a 30 percent premium. Laws in both entities require a minimum rest period of 30 minutes during the workday.

Employers in each entity and the Brcko District must provide a minimum of nine paid annual holidays. Employees may choose which holidays to observe depending on ethnic or religious affiliation. Entity labor laws prohibit excessive compulsory overtime. RS law holds employers responsible for improving working conditions. Entity labor laws set mandatory occupational health and safety standards, especially for those industry sectors in which there were working conditions were hazardous. Worker rights extended to all official (i.e., registered) workers, including migrant and temporary workers.

The entities and the Brcko District did little to enforce regulations on working hours, daily and weekly rest, or annual leave.

The Federation Market Inspectorate, the RS Inspectorate, and the Brcko District Inspectorate are responsible for enforcement related to work conditions. There were 79 market inspectors in the Federation, 41 in the RS, and 11 in the Brcko District. Authorities in the two entities and the Brcko District did not adequately enforce regulations related to work conditions. While labor inspectorates made some effort to enforce employee registration requirements, they limited most inspections to conditions affecting the officially registered workforce. Penalties for violations of the law are 1,000-7,000 convertible marks ($636-$4,480) in the Federation and 1,000-10,000 convertible marks ($636-$6,360) in the RS. The penalties were generally sufficient to deter violations.

Governments in both entities made only limited efforts to improve working conditions at government-owned coalmines, but such efforts were inadequate for the safety and security of workers. Workers in certain industries, particularly metal and steel processing and coal mining, often worked in hazardous conditions. A collapse at Zenica coalmine in September 2014 resulted in five deaths and 29 injuries to coalmine workers. There were no official social protections for workers in the informal economy.

Workers could not remove themselves from situations that endanger their health or safety without jeopardizing their employment. Authorities provided no protection to employees in this situation.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Bhutan

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Bhutan, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57161299e.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Bhutan is a democratic, constitutional monarchy. King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck is the head of state, with executive power vested in the cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay. In July 2013 the country held its second general elections, in which the former opposition People's Democratic Party gained a majority of the seats in the National Assembly, resulting in the country's first democratic transfer of power to the opposition. International election observers reported the elections were generally free and fair. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the security forces.

Principal human rights problems included discriminatory treatment of religious and ethnic minorities and the refusal by the government to readmit certain refugees with legitimate Bhutanese citizenship claims.

Other human rights problems included continued incarceration of Nepali-speaking political prisoners arrested for alleged participation in antigovernment protests in the early 1990s, domestic violence, restrictions on freedom of assembly and association, social stigma against persons with disabilities, laws prohibiting consensual same-sex sexual activity, and reports of abuse of domestic workers.

There were no reports of impunity by government security forces.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution prohibits such practices, and there were no reports that government officials employed them.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison and detention center conditions generally met international standards.

Physical Conditions: According to police, there were no separate prisons designated for women and children.

Administration: Police administer the prison system; there was no available information regarding recordkeeping on prisoners.

Independent Monitoring: No international human rights groups sought access to monitor prisons during the year.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The law prohibits arbitrary arrest or detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The Royal Bhutan Police (RBP) is responsible for internal security. The Royal Bhutan Army (RBA) is responsible for defending against external threats but also has responsibility for some internal security functions, including counterinsurgency operations, guarding forests, and providing security for prominent persons. The RBP reports to the Ministry of Home and Cultural Affairs, and the king is the supreme commander in chief of the RBA.

Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the army and police, and the government has effective mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption. There were no reports of impunity involving security forces during the year. The army and police have procedures to conduct internal investigations of alleged personnel misconduct. Official courts of inquiry adjudicate the allegations. The king or a senior official makes the final determination on the outcome of a case.

By law the Police Service Board, made up of senior police personnel and a Ministry of Home and Cultural Affairs representative, investigates cases of abuse. Police officers can face criminal prosecution for human rights violations. The RBP has institutional reviews, human rights training, and accountability procedures for its personnel. The Civil and Criminal Procedure Code (CCPC) also provides an avenue to check on any abuse of power in criminal investigations by an investigating officer of the RBP.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

Under the law police may only arrest a person with a court-issued warrant or probable cause. Police generally respected the law. Police may perform "stop and frisk" searches only with a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. Authorities must issue an immediate statement of charges and engage in reasonable efforts to inform the family of the accused. The law requires authorities to bring an arrested person before a court within 24 hours, exclusive of travel time from the place of arrest. The law provides for prompt access to a lawyer and government provision of an attorney for indigent clients. Bail is available depending on the severity of charges and the suspect's criminal record, flight risk, and potential threat to the public. Remanded suspects can be held in police custody for 10 days pending investigation, which the court can extend to 49 days, and then again to 108 days in cases involving "heinous" crimes, should the investigating officer show adequate grounds. The law expressly prohibits pretrial detention beyond 108 days. Detainees may pursue a writ of habeas corpus to obtain a court-ordered release.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The law provides for an independent judiciary, and the government generally respected judicial independence.

Trial Procedures

The law stipulates that defendants must receive fair and speedy trials, and the government generally respected this right. A preliminary hearing must be convened within 10 days of registration of a criminal matter with the appropriate court. Before registering any plea, courts must determine whether the accused is mentally sound and understands the consequences of entering a plea. Defendants enjoy a presumption of innocence, have the right to confront witnesses, and cannot be compelled to testify; cases must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt to obtain convictions. The government has prescribed a standing rule for all courts to clear all cases within a year of the case filing. The country has an inquisitorial judicial system, and there is no trial by jury.

Punishments include imprisonment, probation, fines, or a requirement for restitution of loss. Defendants have the right to appeal to the High Court and may make a final appeal to the king, who traditionally delegates the decision to the Royal Advisory Council. Trials are conducted publicly, although a court can order that press and the public be removed from the courtroom for part or all of the trial should limiting publicity be in the interest of justice. The law grants defendants and their attorneys access to state evidence. The court must provide the opportunity for the parties to present relevant evidence, including witness testimony. Prosecutors and defendants are allowed to conduct direct and cross-examination.

Cases are tried pursuant to the CCPC. State-appointed prosecutors for the attorney general generally are responsible for filing charges and prosecuting cases for offenses against the state. In some cases other government departments, such as the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), file charges and conduct prosecutions.

The law provides for the right to representation. Although this occurred in practice in criminal cases, in civil cases most defendants and plaintiffs represented themselves. The law states that criminal defendants may choose legal representation from a list of licensed advocates. The government promoted the use of judiciary websites for legal information as a means of self-help for defendants. There were no reports that the courts denied any groups the right to trial.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) claimed that there were at least 63 political prisoners in Chamgang Central Jail in Thimphu, out of a total prison population of 537. Most political prisoners were Nepali-speaking persons associated with protests in the early 1990s against government actions revoking their citizenship. The government reported that as of December 2014, there were 55 prisoners serving sentences resulting from convictions under the National Security Act or its related penal code provisions. No international monitors sought access to these prisoners. Since 2010 the government has released 14 political prisoners, including one granted amnesty by the king.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

The CCPC governs the resolution of criminal trials and civil litigation and states that a suit may be initiated by a litigant or a member of the litigant's family. The CCPC also provides for compensation to those detained or subjected to unlawful detention but later acquitted. Often local or community leaders assisted in resolving minor disputes. As plaintiffs and defendants often represented themselves in civil matters, judges typically took an active role in investigating and mediating civil disputes.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution states that a person "shall not be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home, or correspondence, or to unlawful attacks on the person's honor and reputation." The government generally respected these prohibitions.

As part of the government's policy and constitutional mandate to maintain Bhutanese culture, the law requires citizens to wear traditional Bhutanese dress in government facilities during daylight hours, but there are otherwise no public dress codes.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The law provides for freedom of speech and press. Citizens could publicly and privately criticize the government without reprisal.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: The constitution provides for freedom of speech including for members of the press. Defamation can carry criminal penalties, and citizens were cautious in their expression, especially as it related to criticism of the royal family or government practices.

Press and Media Freedoms: The media law does not provide specific protections for journalists or guarantee freedom of information. The media law also prohibits media outlets from supporting political parties. Media sources suggested that while there was commitment to media freedom at the highest levels, some media professionals continued to find bureaucrats unwilling to share information, especially on issues of corruption and violations of the law. Independent media outlets relied heavily on government advertisements for revenue, and most news outlets struggled to generate sufficient revenue to operate.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: In its Freedom in the World 2015 report, Freedom House reported that journalists practiced self-censorship especially related to coverage of the Nepali minority and certain aspects of the country's foreign policy. There were no reports of official intimidation or threats directed at journalists.

Internet Freedom

The government generally permitted individuals and groups to engage in peaceful expression of views via the internet. Government officials stated the government did not block access, restrict content, or censor websites. Freedom House reported the government occasionally blocked access to websites containing pornography or information deemed offensive to the state. Such blocked information typically did not extend to political content. According to the Ministry of Information and Communication, in March approximately 47 percent of the population had internet access through home subscriptions or mobile devices.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom and cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Freedom of Assembly

While the constitution provides for the right to assemble peacefully, the government restricted this right. The 1992 National Security Act permits the government to control the public's right to assembly "to avoid breaches of the peace" by requiring licenses, prohibiting assembly in designated areas, and declaring curfew. The penal code prohibits "promotion of civil unrest" as an act that is prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony among different nationalities, racial groups, castes, or religious groups.

Freedom of Association

The constitution provides for freedom of association, and the government permitted the registration of some political parties and organizations that were deemed "not harmful to the peace and unity of the country." Many of the NGOs in the country maintained formal or informal connections to members of the royal family. In its Freedom in the World 2015 report, Freedom House stated that the government did not permit the operation of NGOs working on the status of Nepali-speaking refugees.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The law provides for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, but the government limited freedom of movement and repatriation. Freedom of movement often was restricted along ethnic lines. Rules established differences in citizenship categories and determined whether a person may be granted a "route permit" to travel internally, obtain a passport for international travel, and obtain a security clearance certificate authorizing departure from the country.

Foreign Travel: The law establishes different categories of citizenship under which foreign travel is restricted. NGOs reported these restrictions primarily affected ethnic Nepalis, although children of single mothers who could not establish citizenship through a Bhutanese father were also affected.

Exile: The law does not address forced exile, and there were no reported cases of forced exile during the year. In the early 1990s, the government forced approximately 90,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese persons to leave the country, following a series of steps taken during the 1970s and 1980s to deprive the Nepali-speaking population of citizenship. As of September after years of international resettlement efforts, approximately 10,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees remained in two refugee camps in Nepal administered by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The government continued to criticize UNHCR for its failure to screen individuals who originally entered these camps to determine whether they had genuine claims to Bhutanese citizenship. The government maintained that individuals who entered the camps before the establishment of screening and registration mechanisms were not citizens and that some were using the camps as a base for terrorist activities against the state.

Emigration and Repatriation: There continued to be delays in government implementation of a process to identify and repatriate Bhutanese refugees in Nepal.

Citizenship: The law provides for revocation of the citizenship of any naturalized citizen who "has shown by act or speech to be disloyal in any manner whatsoever to the king, country, and people." The law permits reapplication for citizenship after a two-year probationary period. The government can restore citizenship after successful completion of the probation and a finding that the individual was not responsible for any act against the government. No data was available on how many Nepali-speaking Bhutanese persons who remained in the country after the early 1990s applied for reinstatement of their citizenship. NGOs reported that approximately 6,000 applicants regained citizenship during the year.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law does not provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has not established a system for providing protection to refugees.

The Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) reported that since the 1960s the country had sheltered Tibetan refugees who were initially located in seven settlements. The government reported that the Tibetans were integrated into Bhutanese society and that approximately 1,600 had applied for and received Bhutanese citizenship. The National Statistics Bureau reported that in 2012 there were 2,648 non-Bhutanese Tibetans residing in the country, of whom 993 held work permits. The CTA did not have an official presence in the country and did not provide social and economic assistance to Tibetans in Bhutan. Bhutan's border with China was closed, and Tibetans generally did not transit Bhutan en route to India. The Tibetan population in Bhutan was not increasing.

Employment: There were unconfirmed reports that some Tibetan refugees and some Nepali-speaking Bhutanese citizens could not obtain security clearances for government jobs, enroll in higher education, or obtain licenses to run private businesses.

Access to Basic Services: The government stated that Tibetan refugees have the same access to government-provided health care and education as citizens, and access was given in practice. According to the CTA, 13 Tibetan refugees have received licenses to run businesses. The CTA also said that while Tibetan refugees are not eligible for jobs with the government, a few Tibetan refugees were teachers and health-care workers under temporary government contracts.

Durable Solutions: Tibetan refugees could travel to India, although many faced obstacles in obtaining travel permits. There were also reports the government did not provide travel documents to enable some Tibetan refugees to travel beyond India. The government continued to delay implementing a process to identify and repatriate Bhutanese refugees in Nepal.

Stateless Persons

Implementation of a nationwide census in 1985 resulted in the denaturalization of many Nepali-speaking Bhutanese individuals because they lacked land-ownership documents predating 1958, which were required to retain citizenship. The census was repeated in 1988-89 in the southern districts. During the second round of the census, those who lost citizenship in 1985 could reapply for citizenship provided they met certain conditions. Those who could not meet the new criteria were categorized by the government as illegal immigrants and expelled to refugee camps in Nepal. According to NGOs, an unknown number of Nepali-speaking stateless persons remained in the country, mainly in the south. NGOs and media sources also highlighted the existence of children rendered stateless when they were born to unwed mothers who were unable to prove the identity of the father of the child. According to 2014 NGO reports, more than 700 children born in the country were not recognized as Bhutanese citizens because the nationality of their fathers was undocumented. Stateless persons cannot obtain "no objection certificates" and security clearance certificates, which, according to reports, were often necessary for access to public healthcare, employment, access to primary and secondary education, enrollment at institutions of higher education, travel documents, and business ownership.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution provides citizens the right to choose their government peacefully, and citizens exercised this right through periodic, free, and fair elections based on universal and equal suffrage.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: The government successfully held national elections in July 2013. Voters elected the country's second National Assembly, the lower house of parliament. The opposition People's Democratic Party won 32 of 47 seats, ousting the former ruling party, the Druk Phensum Tshogpa. International observers generally considered the elections free and fair; there were no reports of significant irregularities during the election process.

Political Parties and Political Participation: The constitution states that political parties shall promote national unity and shall not resort to regionalism, ethnicity, or religion to incite voters for electoral gain. Political parties are required to be broad based, have a national membership, not be limited to a particular regional or other demographic constituency, and not receive money or other assistance from foreign sources. To run for office, party candidates must possess a university degree and resign from a civil service job if held. Individuals who resign from the civil service cannot re-enter the service. While only two political parties contested the 2008 national elections, five parties contested the 2013 elections. The government provided funding only for general elections and maintained rigid guidelines on party financing.

The Druk National Congress (DNC), established in 1994 by Bhutanese refugees in exile, continued to claim the government did not allow independent parties to operate freely. The DNC was unable to conduct activities inside the country.

As part of the country's strict separation of religion from politics, the law barred ordained members of the clergy, including Buddhist monks and nuns, from participating in politics, including voting and running for office.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, and the government generally implemented these laws effectively. There were isolated reports of government corruption during the year. The 2011 Anti-Corruption Act, which is based on the UN Convention against Corruption, expands the mandate of the ACC to cover the private sector and enhances the ACC's investigatory powers and functions.

Corruption: The government took an active role in addressing official corruption through the Public Accounts Committee in the National Assembly and the Royal Audit Authority, which monitored the use of government funds. The ACC is authorized to investigate cases of official corruption and allows citizens to post information on its website regarding corrupt practices. The ACC reportedly faced resource constraints. The constitution enables the ACC to act as an independent body, although its investigative staff was primarily civil servants answerable to the Royal Civil Service Commission. In July the prime minister removed the foreign minister from his post due to a corruption scandal related to a charge of embezzlement of public property during the foreign minister's past tenure as governor of Haa Province.

Financial Disclosure: The law requires public servants, and persons working for NGOs using public resources, their spouses, and dependents to declare their income, assets, and liabilities.

Public Access to Information: The constitution mandates a right to information; however, no law provides for public access to government information. Several ministries publish laws, regulations, budgets, and other relevant information on websites to enhance transparency.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

According to international NGOs, local civil society organizations practiced self-censorship to avoid issues perceived as sensitive by the government. Sensitive issues included women's rights and environmental issues. The government reportedly did not permit human rights groups established by the Nepali-speaking community to operate, categorizing them as political organizations that did not promote national unity.

The United Nations or Other International Bodies: An agreement between the government and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) allowing the ICRC to make prison visits to persons detained for crimes against the security of the state expired in 2013. The ICRC continued to engage with the government to facilitate prison visits for Bhutanese refugees living in Nepal. The UN has a resident coordinator in Bhutan, and UN organizations, including the UN Development Program and UN Children's Fund, have a strong presence.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The National Assembly Human Rights Committee conducts human rights research on behalf of the National Assembly. The Civil Society Organization (CSO) Authority has the legal authority to regulate civil society operations. Since 2010 the CSO Authority has registered 47 civil society organizations in the country.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, language, religion, politics, or other status. The government generally respected these prohibitions in practice, although societal discrimination existed.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law defines criminal sexual assault and specifies penalties. In cases of rape involving minors, sentences range from five to 15 years in prison. In extreme cases a person convicted of rape may be imprisoned for life. According to NGOs, cultural taboos and the fact that survivors were unaware of their rights resulted in underreporting of rapes. Spousal rape is illegal. A harmful traditional practice enabling rape was the practice of "night hunting" (bomena) practiced mainly in the eastern parts of country. In night hunting a man climbs into a single woman's window to have sex with her; in some cases the woman does not know the man, and in some cases she does not consent.

The law prohibits domestic violence. Penalties for perpetrators of domestic violence range from a prison sentence of one month to three years. Offenders are also fined the daily national minimum wage for 90 days. Police stated that they encouraged women to reconcile with their allegedly abusive husbands and couples to pursue mediation before they file criminal charges for domestic violence. Three police stations across the country housed women and child protection units to address crimes involving women and children and eight police stations housed desks with officers specifically devoted to women and children's issues. The government passed rules and regulations clarifying the Domestic Violence Act, trained police on gender issues, and allowed civil society groups to undertake further efforts, including operation of a crisis and rehabilitation center. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) expressed concern about reports of violence against women by their spouses or other family members and at work. According to the 2010 Bhutan Multiple Indicator Survey (BMIS), 68 percent of women believed certain behavior justified domestic violence. The NGO Respect, Educate, Nurture, and Empower Women (RENEW) operated a domestic violence center in the capital. The Domestic Violence Prevention Act authorized the National Commission for Women and Children (NCWC) to develop and implement programs to prevent domestic violence, rehabilitate survivors, and conduct studies.

Sexual Harassment: The Labor Employment Act has specific provisions to address sexual harassment in the workplace. NGOs reported that these provisions were generally enforced.

Reproductive Rights: The country has no legal restrictions regarding the number, spacing, or timing of children, and there were no reports of coercion regarding reproduction. Modern contraception was available and legal.

Women's rights NGOs noted that there were generally no prohibitions against women accessing sexual and reproductive healthcare. The World Bank reported that access and equity to medical care for pregnant women was a challenge because of difficult terrain, leading to disparities in access to skilled birth attendants linked to geography and wealth. According to the World Bank, the maternal mortality ratio in 2013 was 120 deaths per 100,000 live births. The 2014 Annual Health Bulletin noted there were significant improvements in infant mortality because of increased access to skilled personnel and a greater prevalence of institutional deliveries.

Discrimination: The law provides for equal inheritance for sons and daughters. Traditional inheritance laws stipulate that inheritance is matrilineal and that daughters inherit family land and daughters do not assume their father's name at birth or their husband's name upon marriage. According to NGO and government sources, within the household, men and women enjoyed relatively equal status.

The law mandates the government take appropriate measures to eliminate all forms of discrimination and exploitation of women, including trafficking, abuse, violence, harassment, and intimidation, at work and at home, and the government generally enforced the law. CEDAW expressed concern that the constitution does not include prohibitions on both "direct and indirect" forms of discrimination. CEDAW also noted that the government failed to adopt implementing legislation for its international treaty obligations related to women's rights.

The NGO National Women's Association worked to improve women's living standards and socioeconomic status. RENEW, another NGO, also promoted and advocated for women's rights and political participation. The NCWC actively defended the rights of women and children during the year, working closely with the Ministry of Home Affairs, the judiciary, and the police.

Children

Birth Registration: Under the constitution, only children whose parents can both be proven to be citizens of Bhutan acquire Bhutanese citizenship at birth. According to the Bhutanese Refugee Support Group, existing citizenship laws caused certain children to be categorized as "nonnationals," essentially rendering them stateless (see section 2.d.). Births in remote areas were less likely to be registered.

Education: The government provides 11 years of universal free education to children, although education is not compulsory. While gender parity at the primary level has been achieved, distances to the country's secondary and tertiary schools, lack of adequate sanitation, and transportation difficulties contributed to girls' unequal access to secondary and higher education. The law requires proof of birth registration for children to attend school. Children of non-Bhutanese residents may enroll with a copy of a parent's work permit, employer letter, and documentation from the Department of Immigration. Because of documentation requirements, children of unregistered residents did not have adequate access to education.

Child Abuse: The law prohibits child abuse and provides for a minimum penalty of one year's imprisonment for perpetrators. Corporal punishment is banned in schools, and there were no reported incidents in monasteries. Reports of child abuse were rare.

Early and Forced Marriage: The statutory minimum age of marriage for both men and women is 18. Statistics from the 2010 BMIS indicated that 31 percent of marriages occurred before age 18, and 7 percent before age 15. In 2010, 15 percent of girls and young women ages 15-19 were either married or in a civil union. While child marriage has become less common in urban areas, in remote villages there were reports of secret marriage ceremonies involving girls younger than 15. Child marriage took place in all regions, but the incidence was higher in the western and central areas of the country.

The government initiative Youth Friendly Health Services sought to prevent child marriage. It conducted community outreach and awareness campaigns to alert communities to the dangers of child marriage.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The law prohibits sexual exploitation, including child pornography, child prostitution, the sale of children, and child trafficking. The legal age of consent is 16 for both boys and girls.

International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

Anti-Semitism

The country does not have a Jewish population, and there were no reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The constitution specifically protects the rights of citizens with disabilities. Legislation directs the government to attend to the security of all citizens in the "event of sickness and disability." The law stipulates that new buildings be constructed to allow access for persons with disabilities, but the government did not enforce this legislation consistently. There were reports that hospitals were generally accessible to persons with disabilities, but residential and office buildings were not.

Under the Disability Prevention and Rehabilitation Program, the government seeks to provide medical and vocational rehabilitation for persons with all types of disabilities, promote integration of children with disabilities in schools, and foster community awareness and social integration. There was no government agency specifically responsible for protecting the rights of persons with disabilities.

There were special-education institutes for students with disabilities, including the National Institute for the Disabled in Khaling, which educates children with vision disabilities, and an education resource unit in Paro for persons with hearing disabilities. Children with disabilities often attended mainstream schools, although the resources needed to accommodate them varied among school districts. There also were special education facilities in Thimphu designed to meet the needs of children with physical and mental disabilities. Although there were no government-sponsored social welfare services available for persons with disabilities, the National Pension and Provident Fund granted benefits to such persons. Two NGOs, the Disabled Persons' Association of Bhutan and Ability Bhutan Society, seek to change the public perception of disability and assisting persons with disabilities and their families.

According to the Bhutan Observer, in rural areas there was widespread discrimination against persons with disabilities, and some parents did not send children with disabilities to school.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Organizations representing exiled Nepali-speaking Bhutanese claimed that employers showed discrimination and prejudice toward Nepali-speaking Bhutanese seeking employment (see section 7.d.). The government claimed Nepali speakers were proportionally represented in civil service and government jobs.

English was the medium of instruction in all government schools. Dzongkha, the national language, was taught as an additional subject. Sharchopkha, Bumpthapkha, Khenkha, Nepali, and Tibetan were also spoken in the country. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed concern about the ability of minority children, specifically the Nepali-speaking minority, to maintain their cultural practices, observe their religion, or use their language.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The constitution guarantees equal protection of the laws and application of rights but does not explicitly protect individuals from discrimination for sexual orientation or gender identity. Laws against "sodomy or any other sexual conduct that is against the order of nature" exist. Under the penal code, the government can imprison a person for as long as one year for engaging in prohibited sexual conduct. In response to recommendations to decriminalize same-sex sexual conduct during the country's Universal Periodic Review, the government stated the law "has never been evoked since its enactment for same-sex acts between two consenting adults. These provisions can be reviewed when there is a felt need for it by the general population."

Homosexuality is a traditionally taboo subject, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) population has historically remained out of public view without an organized advocacy community. During 2014 several LGBTI groups established a public presence via social media. There were no NGOs in the country explicitly associated with LGBTI issues. There were no reports of violence directed against members of the LGBTI community, although social bias was present.

A small transgender community existed, and transgender individuals faced social stigma. The law does not provide any distinct legal status to transgender individuals, nor does it provide explicit protections.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

While NGOs claimed that there was no widespread HIV/AIDS-related stigma, observers noted that persons with HIV/AIDS did suffer from self-stigmatization and feared being open about their condition. One NGO, Lhak-Sam, was formed in 2010 and provides a network for persons with HIV/AIDS while working to reduce societal stigma.

Persons with HIV/AIDS received free medical and counseling services, and the government maintained programs meant to prevent discrimination.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides for the right of workers to form and join independent unions. Workers can form a union with the participation of at least 12 employees from a single workplace. There is no national trade union. The law does not mention the right to conduct legal strikes.

The law provides for the right of workers to bargain collectively with employers. The law prohibits antiunion discrimination and requires reinstatement of workers fired for union activity. Violators may face misdemeanor charges and be compelled to pay damages.

The government effectively enforced applicable laws. Resources, inspections, and remediation were adequate, and penalties for violations were sufficient to deter violations. The law grants workers the right to pursue litigation.

Freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively were respected, although there were few employee unions. No unions were formed during the year.

The Ministry of Labor and Human Resources encouraged employee organization by conducting awareness-raising activities about employee rights during routine labor inspections. The government stated that associations of professional taxi drivers, truck drivers, tour guides existed.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits most forms of forced or compulsory labor, and the government effectively enforced applicable laws. The law makes exceptions with regard to prison labor, work that might be required during an emergency, and work required for "important local and public" celebrations. The penal code criminalizes trafficking for illegal, but not exploitative, purposes. Violations of the labor law are felonies subject to three to five years' imprisonment. Resources, inspections, and remediation were adequate, and penalties were sufficient to deter violations.

Government officials acknowledged there may be forced labor among domestic servants working in private homes where the Ministry of Labor and Human Resources has no jurisdiction. Officials relied on citizens to report forced labor of domestics directly to the police.

Migrant workers from India who worked in the country's construction and hydropower sectors and Indian women and girls who worked in domestic service or as caregivers were vulnerable to forced labor. Young, rural citizens were transported to urban areas, generally by relatives, for domestic work, and some of these individuals were subjected to domestic servitude. There were unconfirmed reports that girls who worked as domestic servants and entertainers in "drayungs" (karaoke bars), were subjected to labor trafficking through debt and threats of physical abuse. The National Assembly Human Rights Committee (NAHRC) conducted an investigation into "drayungs" and found no evidence of trafficking or forced labor.

Also see the Department of State's annual Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The minimum age for employment is 18, although the law permits employment of children between the ages of 13 and 17 in occupations not considered dangerous to their safety, health, and moral well-being. Children under the age of 18 cannot work in dangerous occupations, such as mining, construction, sanitary services, carpet weaving, and work in bars.

Labor inspectors operating under the Ministry of Labor and Human Resources generally enforced child labor laws effectively. Resources, inspections, and remediation were adequate, and penalties were sufficient to deter violations.

Children performed agricultural and construction work, completed chores on family farms, or worked in shops and restaurants after school and during holidays. Child labor also occurred in hotels and automobile workshops. Girls were employed primarily as domestic workers, where they were vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. An estimated 19.6 percent of children between ages five and 14 were engaged in some form of child labor in 2011, which are the most current statistics. The BMIS established that 18.4 percent of the labor force in 2010 consisted of children under 18.

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

The law prohibits employment discrimination for employees and job applicants with respect to recruitment, dismissal, transfer, training, and demotion, but there were no distinctions of protected classes. The law also prescribes equal pay for equal work. In general the government enforced these provisions. Employers who are convicted of discrimination are liable to pay a fine ranging from 360 to 1080 times the daily national minimum wage (approximately $568 to $2,138). These penalties were generally sufficient to deter violations. Organizations representing exiled Nepali-speaking Bhutanese, however, claimed that Nepali-speaking Bhutanese were subject to discrimination with respect to employment and occupation (see section 6).

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The national minimum wage ranged from Nu 100 to Nu 125 ($1.58 to $1.98) per day. According to the government, all workers were above the minimum wage. The law defined the workday as eight hours per day with a one-hour lunch break, and employers were required to grant regular rest days. Work in excess of the legal workday must be paid at 1.5 times the normal rate. The official national poverty level was Nu 1,705 ($28) per month.

Occupational safety and health (OSH) standards are current and appropriate. Labor regulations grant workers the right to leave work situations that endanger their health and safety. All citizens are entitled to free medical care. At its expense the government transported persons who could not receive adequate care in the country to other countries (usually India) for treatment. Workers are eligible for compensation in the case of partial or total disability. Upon the death of a citizen, family members are entitled to compensation.

The government generally enforced minimum wage, work hours, and occupational health and safety standards effectively across all sectors except subsistence agriculture. The law states that employers who fail to pay employees the correct amount of wages will be fined 90 times the national minimum wage for each contravention (approximately $157). Employers who do not comply with work hours regulations will be fined 30 times the national minimum wage for the first violation (approximately $52), 90 times for the second violation (approximately $157), and 360 times for the third and each subsequent violation (approximately $630). Noncompliance with OSH standards is a felony of the fourth degree and punishable by three to five years' imprisonment. These penalties were generally sufficient to deter violations. The lack of sufficient labor inspectors was a problem. The government employed 25 labor inspectors appointed to posts in Thimphu and four permanent regional offices, who were assisted by technical experts. The government also posted labor inspectors to field offices located at major construction sites such as hydropower plant projects. According to a 2012 Ministry of Labor and Human Resources report compiled with the assistance of the World Health Organization, there were insufficient labor inspectors to cover the country's industries. In August, five workers were buried in a landslide at the Mangdechu hydropower project when one side of the construction pit for the dam collapsed.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Belize

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Belize, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5716129bc.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Belize is a constitutional parliamentary democracy. In November the United Democratic Party (UDP) won 19 of 31 seats in the House of Representatives following generally free and fair multiparty elections. Civilian authorities at times did not maintain effective control over the security forces.

The most important human rights abuses included the use of excessive force by security forces (especially the police), lengthy pretrial detention, and harassment and threats based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Other human rights problems included corruption by officials, domestic violence, discrimination against women, sexual abuse of children, trafficking in persons, and child labor.

In some cases the government took steps to prosecute public officers who committed abuses, both administratively and through the courts, but there were few successful prosecutions. While many lower-ranking officials faced disciplinary action and/or criminal charges for alleged abuses, higher-ranking officials were less likely to face punishment, resulting in a perception of impunity.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There was one allegation that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

In July, Hilberto Sotz died while in custody at the Caye Caulker police station after being detained pending the investigation of a series of burglaries. According to a person who claimed to have been a witness, two police officers tortured Sotz and put a plastic bag over his head. An investigation by the Belize Police Department's (BPD) Professional Standards Branch (PSB) led to the arrest of the two interrogating officers for murder. Three other officers who were on duty at the time of the incident were suspended. An autopsy concluded that Sotz died from major internal bleeding and trauma caused by excessive force. Investigation of the case continued as of November.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

In August, three Belize City fishermen went missing while at sea. Family members claimed members of the Belize Coast Guard were involved in the disappearance of the men because of antagonistic previous encounters. The coast guard commander stated an investigation was underway.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution prohibits torture or other inhuman punishment, but there were reports that police used excessive force, and there were other allegations of abuse by security force personnel.

The government occasionally ignored reports of abuses, delayed action, failed to take disciplinary action, or transferred accused officers to other areas within their department.

The Ombudsman's Office stated that it received complaints of police abuse and that the public complained in particular about members of the Gang Suppression Unit. The PSB received complaints against that unit and patrol units from all parts of the country, but the majority were from Belize City.

In June a resident claimed a police special constable beat him while detaining him. The victim sustained several injuries, including two large cuts to the head. Police arrested and charged the constable, who was suspended pending the outcome of an investigation. The police officer who was with the constable at the time of the incident faced disciplinary action within the department for failure to stop the beating. The case against the constable was pending as of November.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison conditions did not meet all international standards. The Kolbe Foundation, a local nonprofit organization, administered the country's only central prison; however, the government retained oversight and monitoring responsibility.

Physical Conditions: Prison officials held women and men in separate facilities. Conditions in the women's area were significantly better than in the men's compound. Officials used isolation in a small, unlit, unventilated punishment cell, called a "reflection room," to discipline inmates in the youth section.

As of September there were four cases of officers who had been investigated for abuse of power. Authorities dismissed two officers and suspended the other two.

Through September authorities recorded three major cases of inmate-on-inmate assaults in the men's wing, including two stabbings. Authorities charged the attackers in two incidents with criminal offenses, disciplined them, and were investigating the third incident.

Administration: Despite the fact that the law authorizes inmates to make complaints to the Ombudsman's Office only through prison authorities, inmates (and sometimes their family members) continued to make complaints directly to the ombudsman, who cannot investigate complaints. The prison administrator's chief of security initially investigates allegations of using excessive force. If the investigation discovers incriminating evidence, the accused officer is disciplined. If there is evidence of officer corruption, the investigation is passed to the administrator's intelligence officer, who then further investigates the matter.

Independent Monitoring: The prison administrator permitted visits from independent human rights observers, and while the prison generally operated free from government interference, the Ministry of National Security monitored it through the Office of Controller of Prisons on site. Observers had access to the prison grounds and could visit inmates.

Improvements: In February an inmate advisory committee was created as part of the grievance process implemented in 2014. The committee had representation from inmates from each section of the prison, and it was tasked with presenting to prison administration officials matters affecting prisoners.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

While the constitution and law prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, there were several allegations made through the media and to the PSB that the government failed to observe these prohibitions. In addition, due to substantial delays and a backlog of cases in the justice system, the courts in some cases did not bring minors to trial until they turned 18 years even if criminal charges preceded their reaching adulthood; in such cases, however, the defendants were tried as minors.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The BPD maintains internal security, including migration and border enforcement. The Ministry of National Security supervises the Belize Defense Force (BDF), the Belize Coast Guard, and the BPD. Although primarily charged with external security, the BDF also provides limited domestic security support to civilian authorities, particularly in Belize City. BDF personnel assisting police have limited powers of arrest.

Police brutality and corruption (extortion cases primarily) remained major problems among police officers despite salary increases during the year. The PSB investigates complaints against police, including regular officers, civilian police, and special constables. An assistant commissioner of police, supported by seven officers, heads the PSB. The law authorizes the police commissioner to place police personnel on suspension or interdiction (which is suspension, in some cases receiving half wage). As of June the PSB had received 58 formal complaints of alleged police misconduct. The PSB reported 55 officers on interdiction and 55 on suspension. Additionally, authorities use police investigations, coroner inquests, and the director of the Public Prosecutions Office to evaluate all allegations against the police.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

Police must obtain search or arrest warrants issued by a magistrate, except in cases of hot pursuit, when there is probable cause, when the presence of a firearm is suspected, or in cases covered by the Crime Control and Criminal Justice Act. Generally, police must inform a detainee of his rights at the time of arrest and of the cause of his detention within 48 hours of arrest. Police must also bring a detainee before a magistrate to be charged officially within a reasonable time (no more than 48 hours). The BPD faced allegations that its members arbitrarily detained persons beyond 48 hours without charge, did not take detainees to a police station in the required manner, and used detention as a means of intimidation.

The law requires police to follow the Judges' Rules, a code of conduct governing police interaction with arrested persons. Although judges sometimes dismissed cases that involved violations of these rules, they more commonly deemed confessions obtained through violation of the rules to be invalid. Police usually granted detainees timely access to family members and lawyers, although there were occasional complaints from detainees that authorities denied a telephone call after arrest.

By law a police officer in charge of a station may grant bail to persons charged with minor offenses, but those charged with more serious crimes  including murder, gang activity, possession of an unlicensed firearm, and specified drug trafficking or sexual offenses  must apply to the Supreme Court for bail. The Supreme Court reviews the application within 10 working days.

Pretrial Detention: Lengthy trial backlogs remained, particularly for serious crimes such as murder. Problems included police delays in completing their investigations, investigative follow-up, court delays in preparing depositions, and adjournments in the courts. Additionally, the police department did not have access to a forensic laboratory for the proper investigation of human specimens and ballistic analysis that would make stronger cases in court.

Judges occasionally were slow to issue rulings, in some cases taking a year or longer. The time lag between arrests, trials, and convictions ranged from six months to four years and in some cases up to seven years. Pretrial detention for persons accused of murder averaged three to four years.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The constitution provides for an independent judiciary, and the government generally respected judicial independence.

Trial Procedures

The law provides for the right to a fair trial, and an independent judiciary generally enforced these rights. A magistrate generally issued decisions and judgments for lesser crimes after deliberating on the arguments presented by the prosecution and defense.

The law stipulates that nonjury trials be mandatory in cases involving charges of murder, attempted murder, abetment of murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. Government officials stated that this law protects jurors from retribution. A single Supreme Court judge hears these cases.

Defendants enjoy a presumption of innocence and have the right to defense by counsel, a public trial, and appeal. The court has the authority to exclude defendants from the courtroom if it determines that the opposing party has a substantiated fear for his/her safety, in which case the court can grant interim provisions that both parties be addressed individually.

The Legal Advice and Services Center, staffed by three attorneys, can provide legal services and representation for a range of civil and criminal cases, including cases of domestic violence and criminal cases up to attempted murder. There is no requirement for defendants to have legal representation except in cases involving murder. The Supreme Court's registrar has the responsibility of appointing an attorney to act on behalf of indigent defendants charged with murder. In lesser cases the court does not provide defendants an attorney, and defendants sometimes represented themselves rather than hire an attorney. Defendants are entitled to adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense or request an adjournment, often used by the defense as a delaying tactic. Defendants may not be compelled to testify against themselves or confess guilt. Defendants have the right to appeal their sentences to a higher court.

The law allows defendants to confront and question witnesses against them and present witnesses on their behalf, but a 2010 law allows written statements by witnesses to be admitted into evidence in place of court appearances. Judges generally admitted a statement if it was complemented by other evidence pointing to the defendant's guilt, but they were sometimes reluctant to admit witness statements without the presence of the witness at the trial if it was the sole or main evidence suggesting guilt. A 2012 law allows the prosecution to submit the content of previous testimony as official statements when the witness is a hostile witness, rather than allow the statement to be used only as proof that the witness provided different testimony earlier. Judges remained reluctant, however, to allow the prosecution to submit into evidence previous testimony as official statements in instances of hostile witnesses. Judges and juries were less likely to convict solely on statements. Defendants have the right to produce evidence in their defense and examine evidence held by the opposing party or the court.

The rate of acquittals and cases withdrawn by the prosecution due to insufficient evidence continued to be high, particularly for sexual offenses, murder, and gang-related cases. These actions were often due to failure of witnesses to testify because of fear for life and personal safety.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

Citizens may seek civil remedies for human rights violations. Persons have the right to bring legal actions for alleged violations of rights protected under the constitution regardless of whether there is also implementing legislation. The Supreme Court hears most civil suits, but the magistrates' courts have jurisdiction over civil cases involving sums of less than 5,000 Belize dollars (BZ$) ($2,500). In addition to civil cases, the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over cases involving human rights issues. The backlog of civil cases in the Supreme Court continued to be significant.

Litigants may appeal their cases to the Caribbean Court of Justice, the country's highest appellate court.

Property Restitution

During the year the government settled compensation with two foreign-owned, major utility companies that it forcibly nationalized: Belize Telecommunication Limited in 2009 and Belize Electricity Limited in 2011. In August the government announced that it had reached a compensation agreement with the previous owner of the national telecommunication company. The final decision of the compensation amount was to be decided by an arbitration panel. In September the government also announced that it had reached an agreement with the former majority owners of the electricity firm.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution prohibits such actions, and government authorities generally respected these prohibitions.

Law enforcement agencies may, with judicial oversight, intercept communications to obtain information in the interest of "national security, public order, public morals, and public safety." The law defines communication broadly to encompass the possible interception of communication by post, telephone, facsimile, e-mail, chat, or text messages, whether encrypted or unencrypted, and whether via public or private providers.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The law provides for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respected these rights. An independent press, an effective judicial system, and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of speech and press.

Libel/Slander Laws: Independent groups noted some concerns with defamation suits.

In July, House of Representative member Edmund Castro withdrew his case against a whistle-blower and a national television station. He filed the case in 2014 after the station broadcast an interview in which the whistle-blower identified Castro as being involved in the sale of visas. The court ordered Castro to cover the legal costs of the defendants, approximately BZ$30,000 ($15,000).

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports that the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 32 percent of the population had access to the internet in 2014.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

The law provides for freedom of assembly and association, and the government generally respected these rights.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution provides for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights.

The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to internally displaced persons, refugees, returning refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, or other persons of concern.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law provides for the granting of asylum or refugee status, but the government has not established a system for providing protection to refugees. The nongovernmental organization (NGO) Help for Progress, UNHCR's implementing partner in the country, assisted with refugee and asylum cases. The Immigration and Nationality Department handled individual cases but has not issued refugee permits in almost 15 years. In November the reactivated Refugee Eligibility Committee, responsible for reviewing refugee applications, met for the first time in 18 years.

Temporary Protection: The Immigration Department worked with Help for Progress to determine the eligibility of persons claiming refugee status or asylum. Help for Progress continued to report an increase in asylum seekers who claimed to be victims of, or threatened by, gangs and organized crime, primarily from El Salvador and Guatemala. Help for Progress also operated a government-subsidized shelter for asylum applicants and refugees. The Immigration Department generally offered renewable special residency permits for periods of 60 to 90 days to asylum seekers, with the possibility of permanent residency and citizenship after extensive stays.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution provides citizens the ability to choose their government through free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and citizens exercised that ability.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: In the November 4 general elections, the UDP maintained its 19-12 majority in the National Assembly. The Organization of American States observation team reported generally free and fair elections. The elected candidates in general represented a cross-section of the races and cultures present in the country.

Participation of Women and Minorities: Observers suggested cultural and societal constraints limited the number of women participating in government. While women remained a clear minority in government, both major parties declared they were taking steps to increase female participation. During the November 4 general elections, 11 women ran for office two of whom were elected to the 31-member House of Representatives. The UDP further appointed two women to the 12-person Senate, and the opposition People's United Party appointed one. For the first time, a woman was appointed to the position of attorney general.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, but the government did not implement the law effectively, and officials sometimes engaged in corrupt practices. The World Bank's worldwide governance indicators reflected that corruption continued to be a problem.

Corruption: Allegations of corruption in government among public officers, including ministers and chief executive officers, were numerous; however, no substantial proof was presented in the majority of the cases, with the exception of the sale of visas involving the case of Representative Edmund Castro (see section 2.a.). Through September the Office of the Ombudsman had received two reports of corrupt acts against two government ministers (members of cabinet).

Corruption within the Lands Department continued during the year. Citizens made most allegations against the department through the news media, which some believed was a more effective way to achieve justice than through the Ombudsman's Office or other watchdog organizations. There were several reports of department employees canceling leases without giving due notice to the leaseholders and fraudulently transferring land titles without consent. Despite accusations of political cronyism, the government insisted that it maintained transparency in the distribution of land.

In April the prime minister (minister of finance) announced that BZ$500,000 ($250,000) was missing from the Treasury Department. A joint investigation by police and the Ministry of Finance led to the arrest and charge of two government employees.

Financial Disclosure: The law requires public officials to submit annual financial disclosure statements, which the Integrity Commission reviews. At the same time, the constitution allows authorities to prohibit citizens from questioning the validity of such statements. Anyone who does so, either orally or in writing, outside a rigidly prescribed procedure is subject to a fine of up to BZ$5,000 ($2,500), three years' imprisonment, or both.

The body governing financial disclosure did not function, and with the exception of one member of parliament, no elected official submitted financial statements to the committee.

Public Access to Information: The law provides for public access to documents of a ministry or prescribed authority upon written request, although it protects a number of categories, such as documents from the courts or those related to national security, defense, or foreign relations. The government must supply to the Office of the Ombudsman a written reason for any denial of access, the name of the person making the decision, and information on the right to appeal. There was no training relating to public access to information during the year.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A variety of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials often were cooperative and responsive to their views.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The ombudsman, although appointed by the government, acts as an independent check on governmental abuses. The Office of the Ombudsman holds a range of procedural and investigative powers, including the right to enter any premise to gather documentation and the right to summon persons. The office operated under significant staffing and financial constraints. The law requires the ombudsman to submit annual reports, and the office also created a midyear report to address problem trends. The office does not have the power to investigate allegations against the judiciary.

While the Ombudsman's Office technically has wide investigative powers, in practice its effectiveness was severely limited by noncompliance from the offices it investigates. From 2012 to the end of the year, only 5 percent of complaints had received proper attention from the respective government offices indicated in the complaint. Ninety-five percent of the cases remained unresolved, and the backlog continued to grow.

The Human Rights Commission, an independent, volunteer-based government agency, continued to operate, but only on an ad hoc basis, constrained by funding and staffing limitations. Nevertheless, NGOs and other organizations stated the Human Rights Commission was more active and vocal than in previous years. The commission provided human rights training for police recruits, prison officers, and the BDF.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution prohibits discrimination based on race, gender, disability, language, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, sexual orientation, and age, and the government generally enforced these prohibitions.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The criminal code criminalizes rape, including spousal rape. The code states that a person convicted of rape or marital rape shall be sentenced to imprisonment of eight years to life, although in practice sentences were sometimes much lighter. Challenges to the wider justice system generally resulted in poor conviction rates for rape offenses. A number of cases resulted in acquittals or discontinuance because the accusing party dropped the charges or refused to testify at trial. In many instances the failure to proceed with a case was due to the victim's fear for personal safety. Perceived inefficiencies in the police and judicial systems as well as fear of further violence, retribution, and social stigma contributed to the underreporting of rapes.

Domestic violence is frequently prosecuted with charges such as "harm," "wounding," "grievous harm," rape, and marital rape. Police, prosecutors, and judges recognize both physical violence and mental injury. Penalties include fines or imprisonment for violations; the level of fine or length of sentence depends on the severity of the crime. The law empowers the Family Court to issue protection orders against accused offenders. Persons who may apply for protection orders against domestic violence include de facto spouses or persons in "visiting relations" (couples in a relationship but not living together). Protection orders may remain in place for up to three years and may include a requirement for child maintenance (support) where applicable.

The Women's Department under the Ministry of Human Development and Social Transformation continued its campaign against gender-based and domestic violence. It received referrals from both the criminal and civil courts. The BPD operated a toll-free domestic violence hotline, and most of the major police stations in the country had designated domestic abuse areas (offices) administered by a woman police officer where victims could make their complaints. A lack of resources and coordination among the response agencies, however, inhibited the provision of viable alternatives for victims.

There were two women's shelters in the country that offered short-term housing but lacked resources and staff to provide basic services to victims of domestic violence. There were no transitional or medium-term shelters to assist victims to move toward independent living.

Sexual Harassment: The law provides protection from sexual harassment in the workplace, including provisions against unfair dismissal of a victim of sexual harassment in the workplace. The Women's Department recognizes sexual harassment as a subset of sexual violence.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children; manage their reproductive health; and have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence.

Discrimination: The law provides for the same legal status and rights for women as for men, including under family, labor, property, and inheritance laws. The law also mandates equal pay for equal work and was generally respected. The law provides generally for the continuity of employment and protection against unfair dismissal, including for sexual harassment in the work place, pregnancy, or HIV status.

Despite legal provisions for gender equality and government programs aimed at empowering women, NGOs and other observers believed that women faced social and economic discrimination. Although participating in all spheres of national life and outnumbering men in university classrooms and in high school graduation rates, women held relatively few top managerial positions. The labor commissioner verified that men traditionally earned more  on average BZ$90 ($45) more per month than women  because they held higher managerial positions.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship is derived by birth within the country's territory, regardless of the nationality of the parents. Citizenship may also be acquired by descent if at least one parent is a citizen of the country. The law requires the registration of the birth of children within 42 days of birth. The Vital Statistical Office and the Ministry of Health have an agreement to offer bedside registration in hospitals shortly after birth.

Education: Primary education is free, and education is compulsory between the ages of six and 14; however, primary schools may incorporate other fees, and parents may be required to pay for textbooks, uniforms, and meals.

Through monthly payments the government assisted families of needy children at the primary school level and, to a limited extent, the secondary school level. The Ministry of Education continued to assist secondary schools students in the two southern districts with a BZ$300 ($150) grant for two years of high school. Students in other parts of the country had to apply to qualify for the subsidy.

Child Abuse: No data was available regarding the number of cases of domestic violence and of sexual abuse against children under age 14 reported during the year. Unlawful sexual intercourse (previously termed "carnal knowledge") of a girl under the age of 14, with or without her consent, is an offense punishable by 12 years' to life imprisonment. Unlawful sexual intercourse of a girl 14-16 years of age is an offense punishable by five to 10 years' imprisonment.

The law allows authorities to remove a child from an abusive home environment and requires parents to maintain and support children until the age of 18. There were publicized cases of underage young women being victims of sexual abuse and mistreatment, in most cases in their own home or in the home of a relative.

The Family Services Division in the Ministry of Human Development and Social Transformation is the government office with the lead responsibility for children's issues. The division coordinated programs for children who were victims of domestic violence, advocated remedies in specific cases before the Family Court, conducted public education campaigns, investigated cases of trafficking in children, and worked with local and international NGOs and the UN Children's Fund to promote children's welfare.

Early and Forced Marriage: The legal minimum age to marry is 18, but persons between ages 16 and 18 may marry with the consent of parents, legal guardians, or judicial authority.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The law establishes penalties related to child prostitution, child pornography, child sexual exploitation, and indecent exhibition of a child, defining "child" as anyone under 18 years of age. The law includes a provision stipulating that the offense of child prostitution does not apply to 16- and 17-year-old children in a consensual sexual relationship with a person promising remuneration, gifts, goods, food, or other benefits. NGOs expressed concern that this specific clause in the law could render children vulnerable to commercial sexual exploitation, due to the common practice of parents' pushing their children to provide sexual favors to older men in exchange for remuneration. The legal age for consensual sex is 16.

There were anecdotal reports that boys and girls were involved in child prostitution, including the "sugar daddy" syndrome whereby older men provided money to young women and/or their families for sexual relations. Similarly, there were reports of increasing use of minors involved in prostitution and sex tourism in tourist-populated areas, or where there were transient and seasonal workers, including in the south among oil truckers and citrus workers. The law criminalizes the procurement or attempted procurement of "a person" under the age of 18 to engage in prostitution; an offender is liable to eight years' imprisonment. Sexual activity with anyone age 16 or under is a criminal offense.

The law establishes a penalty of two years' imprisonment for persons convicted of publishing or offering for sale any obscene book, writing, or representation.

International Child Abductions: The country is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For information see the Department of State's report on compliance at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/legal/compliance.html, as well as country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/country/belize.html.

Anti-Semitism

The Jewish population was small, and there were no reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The law does not expressly prohibit discrimination against persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities in employment, education, air or other transportation, access to health care, or the provision of other state services. The constitution provides for the protection of all citizens from any type of discrimination. The law does not provide for accessibility to persons with disabilities, and most public and private buildings and transportation were not accessible to them. Certain businesses, such as banks and government departments (social security offices), had designated clerks to attend to the elderly and persons with disabilities. There were no policies to encourage hiring of persons with disabilities in the private or public sectors.

Mental health provisions and protections generally were poor. Informal government-organized committees for persons with disabilities were tasked with public education and advocating for protections against discrimination. Private companies and NGOs provided services to persons with disabilities. The Ministry of Education maintained an educational unit offering limited special education programs within the regular school system. There were two schools and four special education centers for children with disabilities.

The special envoy for women and children, First Lady Kim Simplis Barrow, continued advocacy campaigns on behalf of persons with disabilities and supported efforts to promote schools that made efforts to create inclusive environments for persons with disabilities.

Indigenous People

No separate legal system or laws cover indigenous persons, since the government maintains that it treats all citizens the same. Employers, public and private, generally treated indigenous people equally with other ethnic groups for employment and other purposes.

The Maya Leaders' Alliance, composed of the Toledo Maya Council, Q'eche Council of Belize, Toledo Alcaldes Association, the Julian Cho Society, and the Tumul K'in Center of Learning, monitored development in the Toledo District with the goal of protecting Maya land and culture. While the government noted the need to respect and consult the Maya communities when issuing oil exploration licenses in the south, the alliance believed it was not consulted properly before decisions were taken. According to an alliance representative, the government, without consulting the Maya community, renewed petroleum exploration concessions in 2014 in territories over which the Supreme Court gave the Maya community some jurisdiction in a 2010 decision.

In June residents of the Maya community of Santa Cruz detained a creole man after they alleged he had defied community rules and destroyed part of a Mayan archeological site (Uxbenka). A Maya leader explained the community acted as a last resort after they had notified the proper authorities. The prime minister stated that the Maya broke the law when they falsely imprisoned and assaulted the individual. Police subsequently arrested 12 men and one woman and charged them with unlawful imprisonment. According to the Maya Leaders' Alliance, police abused the suspects while detaining them.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The criminal code states that "carnal intercourse" with any person "against the order of nature" shall receive a punishment of 10 years' imprisonment. The government interpreted this law as including sex only between men. Additionally, the Immigration Act prohibits "homosexual" persons from entering the country, but immigration authorities did not enforce the law.

The legal challenge by a member of the local NGO United Belize Advocacy Movement (UniBAM) against the "carnal intercourse" law continued during the year. As of November the Supreme Court had not issued a decision.

The extent of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity was difficult to ascertain due to lack of official reporting. As of November UniBAM had registered 12 cases of violence as a result of sexual orientation and gender identity, including nine cases involving homicide, violent attacks, (political) hate speech, medical service discrimination during pregnancy, denial of education to a minor due to his sexual orientation and gender identity, and family-based violence.

In January an openly gay man was stabbed several times, shot in the face, and thrown into a nearby river, where he drowned. The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community classified the killing as a hate crime, but the police did not declare it as such. As of November police had made no arrest.

Local LGBTI rights advocates noted that LGBTI persons feared police and were harassed while reporting crimes. They also noted that police at times refused to accept reports of crime from LGBTI persons. UniBAM reported that continuing harassment and insults by the public affected its activities and that its members were reluctant to file complaints.

A private hotel and resort announced a gay pride event to be held in September and advertised it as a tourism activity. The announcement drew criticism from certain churches, after which the organizer cancelled the event.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

There was some societal discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS, and the government worked to combat it through public education efforts of the National AIDS Commission under the Ministry of Human Development. NGOs such as the Pan American Social Marketing Organization also actively countered discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS. The law provides for protection of workers against unfair dismissal, including for HIV status.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law, including related regulations and statutes, generally provides for the right to establish and join independent trade unions, conduct legal strikes, and bargain collectively. The law also prohibits antiunion discrimination, dissolution, or suspension of unions by administrative authority, and it requires reinstatement of workers fired for union activity. The Ministry of Labor, Local Government, and Rural Development (Ministry of Labor) recognizes unions and employers associations after they are registered, and the law establishes procedures for the registration and status of trade unions and employers organizations and for collective bargaining.

The law allows authorities to refer disputes involving public and private sector employees who provide "essential services" to compulsory arbitration, prohibit strikes, and terminate actions. The national fire service, postal service, monetary and financial services, civil aviation and airport security services, and port authority pilots and security services are deemed essential services beyond the International Labor Organization definition of essential services.

Workers can file complaints with the Ministry of Labor's Labor Department or seek redress from the courts, although it remained difficult to prove that terminations were due to union activity. The department generally handled labor cases without lengthy delays and dealt with appeals via arbitration outside of the court system. The courts, however, did not apply the law requiring reinstatement of workers fired for union activity and provided monetary compensation instead.

There was a lack of resources to carry out the mandate of the Labor Department, including a shortage of vehicles and fuel to ensure compliance, particularly in rural areas. There were no complaints of administrative or judicial delays relating to labor complaints and disputes, although in the past labor disputes took an extended time to resolve through the court system. Information on penalties for violations of freedom of association or collective bargaining was not provided.

Freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining were not always respected. Antiunion discrimination and other forms of employer interference in union functions sometimes occurred, and on several occasions employee unions threatened strikes. Workers' unions such as telecommunication, Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital, the governmental Social Security Board, and stevedores carried out "go-slows" in protest.

In 2014 Help for Progress petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to highlight among other things concerns with measures used by employers that do not allow migrant workers to unionize, and that require migrants to undertake HIV testing in certain industries. The NGO said that in certain industries, particularly the banana, citrus, and construction industries, employers often did not respect due process, did not pay minimum wages, and classified workers as contract and nonpermanent employees to avoid providing certain benefits. The NGO noted that both national and migrant workers were denied rights and that the Labor Department was inadequately staffed and underresourced.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The constitution prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor, and the government effectively enforced these provisions in some industries. Penalties for forced or compulsory labor were covered under antitrafficking laws that carry sentences of one to 12 years, which were comparable to penalties for other major offenses and sufficient to deter violations. Resources and inspections to deter violations were limited. The government did not provide information on the number of victims removed from forced labor during the year.

Forced labor of both Belizean and foreign women occurred in bars and nightclubs. Migrant men and women were at risk for forced labor in agriculture, fishing, and in the service sector, including restaurants and shops, particularly among the South Asian and Chinese communities. Children confronted forced labor and while there are no statistics to indicate the prevalence of children involved in sexual exploitation, local authorities believe the activity is present in the country especially among the indigent population (see section 7.c.).

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The law prohibits the employment of children under age 14 for industrial undertakings and shop work, but not for all sectors. Light work is allowed for children ages 12 to 13. Persons ages 14 to 18 may be employed only in an occupation that a labor officer has determined is "not injurious to the moral or physical development of nonadults." Children under age 16 are excluded from work in factories, and those under age 18 are excluded from working at night or in certain kinds of employment deemed dangerous. For guidance the Labor Department used a list of dangerous occupations for young workers, but the list had not been adopted as law.

The law permits children to work on family farms and in family-run businesses. National legislation does not address a situation in which child labor is contracted between a parent and the employer. The National Child Labor Policy distinguishes between children engaged in work that is beneficial to their development and those engaged in the worst forms of child labor. The policy identifies children involved in the worst forms of child labor as those engaged in hazardous work, trafficking and child slavery, commercial sexual activities, and illicit activities.

The Labor Department has primary responsibility for implementing labor policies and enforcing labor laws, but it had limited dedicated resources to investigate complaints. Inspectors from the Labor and Education Departments are responsible for enforcing these regulations. The penalty for employing a child below minimum age is a fine not exceeding BZ$20 ($10) or imprisonment not exceeding two months. On a second offense, the law stipulates a fine not exceeding BZ$50 ($25) or imprisonment not exceeding four months. There was not enough information provided to determine if the penalties, remediation, and inspections were sufficient to deter violations. There was no information on whether child labor laws were well enforced. There is also a National Child Labor Committee under the National Committee for Families and Children, a statutory interagency group, that advocates for policies and legislation to protect children and eliminate child labor.

Some children were vulnerable to forced labor, particularly in the agriculture, fishing, and service sectors. Commercial sexual exploitation of children occurred (see section 6, Children). In 2013 the Labor Department conducted a survey on child labor that concluded most child labor happened between ages 14 to 17 (4,408) and was most prevalent in the rural areas, with 74 percent of them being males.

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

The law and regulations prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender, language, HIV-positive status or other communicable diseases, or social status. The government did not effectively enforce those laws and regulations. The law does not explicitly prohibit discrimination in employment with respect to disability or to sexual or orientation and/or gender identity. Nevertheless, there were reports that discrimination in employment and occupation occurred with respect to sexual orientation and/or gender identity as well as language. One NGO reported that members of the LGBTI community often had problems gaining and retaining employment due to discrimination in the workplace, but these claims could not be verified. Up to November there were no officially reported cases of discrimination at work based on ethnicity, culture, or skin color, although anecdotal evidence suggested that such cases occurred.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The national minimum wage was BZ$3.30 ($1.65) per hour. A full-time worker receiving the minimum wage earned between one-and-one-half to two times the poverty limit income, depending on the district. The law sets the workweek at no more than six days or 45 hours and requires premium payment for overtime work. Workers are entitled to two working weeks' paid annual holiday. Additionally, there are 13 days designated as public and bank holidays. Employees who work on public and bank holidays are entitled to pay at time-and-a-half, except for Good Friday and Christmas, which are paid at twice the normal rate.

Several different health and safety regulations cover numerous industries. The law, which applies to all sectors, prescribes that the employer must take "reasonable care" for the safety of employees in the course of their employment. The law further states that every employer who provides or arranges accommodation for workers to reside at or in the vicinity of a place of employment shall provide and maintain sufficient and hygienic housing accommodations, a sufficient supply of wholesome water, and sufficient and proper sanitary arrangements.

The Ministry of Labor did not always effectively enforce minimum wage and health and safety regulations. The ministry's Labor Department had 25 labor officers in 10 offices throughout the country. Inspections were not sufficient to secure compliance, especially in the more remote areas. Fines varied according to the infraction but generally were not very high and thus not sufficient to deter violations. The 2011 Labor Act broadens the definition of unfair dismissal to protect employees and gives broader authority to labor officers to investigate issues of unfair dismissal in addition to earlier powers to ensure employer's compliance with fair compensation. Although several cases were pending, the labor tribunal had not been established since being created in 2011.

The minimum wage generally was respected. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence from NGOs and employers suggested that undocumented Central American workers, particularly young service workers and agricultural laborers, were regularly paid below the minimum wage.

While no known reports were made to the Labor Department, several individuals appeared in the media alleging that in certain industries  particularly in agriculture  employers often did not respect due process, did not pay minimum wages, and classified workers as contract and nonpermanent employees to avoid certain benefits.

Information on workplace fatalities was not available. There were no officially reported complaints of major industrial factory fires or mine disasters. It was unclear if workers could remove themselves from situations that endangered health or safety without jeopardy to their employment or if authorities effectively protected employees in this situation.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Belarus

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Belarus, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5716129d6.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Belarus is an authoritarian state. The country's constitution provides for a directly elected president who is head of state, and a bicameral parliament, the national assembly. A prime minister appointed by the president is the nominal head of government, but power is concentrated in the presidency, both in fact and in law. Since his election as president in 1994, Aliaksandr Lukashenka has consolidated his rule over all institutions and undermined the rule of law through authoritarian means, including manipulated elections and arbitrary decrees. All subsequent presidential elections, including the one held in 2015, were neither free nor fair and fell well short of international standards. The 2012 parliamentary elections also failed to meet international standards. Civilian authorities, Lukashenka in particular, maintained effective control over security forces.

The most significant human rights problems continued to be: citizens were unable to change their government through elections; in a system bereft of checks and balances, authorities committed abuses; and former political prisoners' political rights remained restricted while the government failed to account for longstanding cases of politically motivated disappearances. On August 22, President Lukashenka released six individuals considered political prisoners by human rights organizations, including 2010 presidential candidate Mikalai Statkevich.

Other human rights problems included abuses by the security forces, which reportedly mistreated suspects during investigations and in prisons. Prison conditions remained poor. Authorities arbitrarily arrested, detained, and imprisoned citizens for criticizing officials, participating in demonstrations, and other political reasons. The judiciary experienced political interference and a lack of independence; trial outcomes often appeared predetermined, and trials occurred behind closed doors or in the absence of the accused. Authorities infringed on the right of privacy. The government restricted civil liberties, including freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, and religion. The government seized printed materials from civil society activists and prevented independent media from disseminating information and materials. The government continued to hinder or prevent the activities of some religious groups, at times fining them or restricting their services. Official corruption in all branches of government remained a problem. Authorities harassed human rights groups, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and political parties, refusing to register many and then threatening them with criminal prosecution for operating without registration. Violence and discrimination against women were problems, as was violence against children. Trafficking in persons remained a problem, although prosecution and victim identification slightly improved. There was discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) persons; those with disabilities; Roma and other ethnic minorities; persons with HIV/AIDS; and those who sought to use the Belarusian language. Authorities harassed and at times dismissed from their jobs members of independent unions in state-owned enterprises, severely limiting the ability of workers to form and join independent trade unions and to organize and bargain collectively. Authorities also employed various means of forced labor.

Authorities at all levels operated with impunity and failed to take steps to prosecute or punish officials in the government or security forces who committed human rights abuses.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

During the year there were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings and no reports of deaths from torture.

b. Disappearance

There were no developments in the reportedly continuing investigations into the 2000 disappearance of journalist Zmitser Zavadski and the 1999 disappearances of former deputy prime minister Viktar Hanchar, former interior minister Yuri Zakharanka, and businessman Anatol Krasouski. There was evidence of government involvement in the disappearances, but authorities continued to deny any connection with them. In October 2014 a senior Investigations Committee officer informed Zakharanka's mother that by law it was impossible to apply the statute of limitations unless a suspect was identified and charged, and thus the case of her son could not be closed as she had requested. The committee refused Zakharanka's mother's request to study case materials, citing that it was only possible upon completion of the preliminary investigation. Human rights advocates argued that the law does not criminalize enforced disappearances by state agents or by those acting with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of the state.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The law prohibits such practices. Nevertheless, the Committee for State Security (KGB), riot police, and other security forces, often unidentified and in plain clothes, continued to beat detainees occasionally. Security forces also reportedly mistreated individuals during investigations. During arrests police occasionally beat criminal suspects and citizens.

Human rights advocates, opposition leaders, and activists released from detention facilities continued to report maltreatment and other forms of physical and psychological abuse of suspects during criminal and administrative investigations.

On October 13, security forces in Minsk detained and beat blogger Viktar Nikitsenka. The reported reason for the detention was his taking a photo outside the Government House building with a homemade poster that read, "Lukashenka On Trial." Police refused to open a criminal investigation into Nikitsenka's beating, and authorities fined the blogger for holding an unsanctioned demonstration and resisting police.

On August 31, Yury Liashenka filed a complaint with the UN Human Rights Committee stemming from a November 2014 protest in which medics detained him, took him to a hospital against his will, and injected him unwillingly with unknown substances. Liashenka, who utilizes a wheelchair, had organized the protest to raise awareness about the rights of persons with disabilities. Liashenka also received a fine for organizing the unsanctioned protest.

Observers reported a few isolated cases of hazing of new army recruits, including beatings and other forms of physical and psychological abuse, although fewer than in previous years due to the government's increased prosecution of offenders.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison and detention center conditions remained poor and in many cases posed threats to life and health.

Physical Conditions: According to local activists and human rights lawyers, there were shortages of food, medicine, warm clothing, and bedding as well as inadequate access to basic or emergency medical care and clean drinking water. Ventilation in cells and overall sanitation were poor, and authorities failed to provide conditions necessary for maintaining proper personal hygiene. Prisoners frequently complained of malnutrition and low-quality uniforms and bedding. Some former political prisoners reported psychological abuse and being forced to share a cell with violent criminals. The law permits family and friends to bring detainees food and hygiene products and to send them parcels by mail, but authorities did not always allow this.

Overcrowding of holding facilities and prisons continued to be a problem, although an amnesty, which began in June 2015, reduced the number of inmates. Ministry of Internal Affairs officials dismissed reports of overcrowding. Persons sentenced to a form of internal exile (khimiya) were allowed to work outside detention facilities but were required to return to prison barracks, where they lived under strict conditions and supervision.

There were isolated reports that police placed underage suspects in pretrial detention facility cells together with adult suspects and former convicts. Authorities held juvenile prisoners separately from adults at juvenile penal colonies, arrest houses, and pretrial holding facilities. In general, conditions for female and juvenile prisoners were slightly better than for male prisoners.

According to human rights NGOs and former prisoners, authorities routinely abused prisoners.

In April the Office of the Prosecutor General stated it would reopen the criminal investigation into the 2013 death from heart attack, following an alleged beating, of 21-year-old prisoner Ihar Ptichkin.

Authorities denied efforts by prisoner Pyotr Kuchura and his wife to obtain an investigation into his mistreatment in the Mahilyou prison in 2013. In 2013 prison authorities reportedly began pressuring Kuchura and limiting his family visits because they believed Kuchura and his wife were trying to publicize violations of inmates' rights. Kuchura was moved to a punishment cell where excessive chlorine in the toilet and sink poisoned him. He remained in jail at year's end.

Credible sources maintained that prison administrators employed inmates to intimidate political prisoners and compel confessions. They also reported that authorities neither explained nor protected political prisoners' legal rights and excessively penalized them for minor violations of the prison rules. For example, on April 30, the Mahilyou region court turned down an appeal filed by Mikalai Dziadok, a political prisoner, to challenge his additional one-year prison term on charges of allegedly violating prison regulations. He was due to be released in March upon completion of his 4.5-year term; however, his term was extended for one additional year on February 26. The judge denied motions from Dziadok to be present at the appeals hearing. In May, Dziadok cut his wrists and stomach to protest his placement in a cold and poorly ventilated solitary confinement penalty cell for refusing to work overtime, among other alleged violations, at the jail in the town of Horki, where he was moved after his appeals hearing. Prison administration officials transferred him to a medical unit in jail on May 20 but moved him back to the penalty ward shortly after for allegedly violating prison officers' orders. Dziadok spent more than 40 days in solitary confinement in May-June, and the prison administration moved him to a solitary confinement cell for the remainder of his term. His lawyer's visits were also either limited to 15 minutes or denied in June-July, and he continuously faced further penalties for allegedly violating prison regulations. President Lukashenka released Dziadok and five other persons considered political prisoners on August 22.

On January 16, authorities placed 2010 presidential candidate Mikalai Statkevich in solitary confinement and in a prison-type cell for failure to participate in "community work" and "amateur art activities." During the year, citing various infractions, the prison administration also denied Statkevich a three-day meeting with his family and a three-hour meeting with his spouse; they limited his correspondence and transferred him to a higher security jail until December 2016, the end of his six-year sentence. Authorities asserted that Statkevich was "treated fairly leniently" since the court did not extend his six-year term. Statkevich was one of the six political prisoners released on August 22.

Given the poor medical care, observers believed tuberculosis, pneumonia, HIV/AIDS, and other communicable diseases were widespread in prisons. In March 2014 a senior tuberculosis control officer reported that tuberculosis infection in prisons exceeded the national average by four times but claimed that only up to 4 percent of the 7,400 tuberculosis patients across the country were in prisons. The officer also reported that the number of tuberculosis cases in 2014 dropped by 10 percent from 2013.

In September human rights NGOs reported that approximately 80 individuals in internal exile at a facility in Mazyr signed a petition to the Corrections Department of the Interior Ministry protesting maltreatment, dehumanizing conditions, and lack of employment opportunities. The inmates complained they had to wait for the administration to offer employment for as long as eight months, although regulations require employing inmates within a month of their arrival at the facility. Unemployed inmates had no income and complained that they often had nothing to eat. Officials dismissed these reports.

Administration: Authorities claimed to have conducted annual or more frequent investigations and monitoring of prison and detention center conditions. Human rights groups, however, asserted that such inspections, even if they did occur, lacked any credibility given the absence of an ombudsman and the inability of reliable independent human rights advocates to visit prisons or provide consultations to prisoners.

Prisoners and detainees had limited access to visitors, and denial of meetings with families was a common punishment for disciplinary violations. Authorities often denied or delayed political prisoners meetings with family as a means of pressure and intimidation.

Although the law provides for freedom of religion, and there were no reports of egregious infringements, authorities generally prevented prisoners from holding religious services and performing ceremonies that did not comply with prison regulations.

Former prisoners reported that prison officials often censored or did not forward their complaints to higher authorities, and that prison administrators either ignored or selectively considered requests for investigation of alleged abuses. Prisoners also reported that prison administration frequently refused to provide them with copies of responses to their complaints, which further complicated their defense. Complaints could result in retaliation against prisoners who spoke out, including humiliation, death threats, or other forms of punishment and harassment.

Corruption in prisons was a serious problem, and observers noted that parole often depended on bribes to prison personnel or a prisoner's political affiliation.

Independent Monitoring: Despite numerous requests to the Ministries of Internal Affairs and Justice, government officials continued to refuse to meet with human rights advocates or approve requests from NGOs to visit detention and prison facilities. In its July 29 response to Paval Sapelka, of the human rights NGO Vyasna, the Interior Ministry's Corrections Department claimed that it would be "inexpedient" for him to visit detention facilities and monitor their conditions.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The law limits arbitrary detention, but the government did not respect these limits. Authorities continued to arrest or detain individuals for political reasons and to use administrative measures to detain political activists before, during, and after protests and other major public events. The Investigations Committee is charged with examining killings and other abuses committed by security forces.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The Ministry of Internal Affairs exercises authority over police, but other bodies outside of its control, for example, the KGB, the Financial Investigations Department of the State Control Committee, the Investigation Committee, and presidential security services also exercise police functions. The president also has the authority to subordinate all security bodies to his personal command. Impunity among law enforcement personnel remained a serious problem. Individuals have the right to report police abuse to a prosecutor, although the government often did not investigate reported abuses or hold perpetrators accountable.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

By law police must request permission from a prosecutor to detain a person for more than three hours, but police usually ignored this procedure and routinely detained and arrested individuals without warrants. Authorities may hold a criminal suspect for up to 10 days without filing formal charges and for up to 18 months after filing charges. Under the law prosecutors, investigators, and security service agencies have the authority to extend detention without consulting a judge. Detainees have the right to petition the court system regarding the legality of their detention, but authorities frequently suppressed or ignored such appeals.

Arbitrary Arrest: During the year authorities routinely detained or arrested dozens of individuals, including opposition figures, members of the independent media, and civil society activists for reasons widely considered politically motivated. Authorities used administrative measures to detain political activists before, during, and after planned demonstrations and protests, as well as other public events.

On January 22, police detained nine democratic activists gathered at a park near the Ukrainian Embassy to commemorate those killed at the Maidan Square in Kyiv in 2014. Although three were released without charge, a Minsk district court sentenced activists Maksim Vinyarski and Ales Makayeu to serve 15 days, Yauhen Batura and Mikalai Kolas 10 days, and Volha Mikalaichyk five days on charges of holding an unsanctioned demonstration. A 67-year-old opposition activist received a fine of 3.6 million rubles ($226) for the same demonstration and complained of physical and verbal police abuse during detention.

On February 3, authorities detained Siarhei Shtoda, an owner of a hauling company, to prevent a demonstration, which he planned to hold the next day in protest of heavy fines levied against a number of hauling companies for allegedly violating toll road regulations across the country. Shtoda was charged with holding an unauthorized protest and served 15 days in jail.

On June 22, a Minsk district court sentenced Maksim Vinyarski and Siarhei Matskoyts, activists from the European Belarus opposition group, for 10 and five days, respectively, for demonstrating for the release of political prisoners. Leanid Kulakou, their associate, was sentenced to 10 days in jail on June 23. Police detained these three European Belarus activists on June 19 and kept them in detention until their trials.

Pretrial Detention: Authorities may hold a criminal suspect for up to 10 days without filing formal charges. Prior to being charged, the law provides detainees with no access to their families or to outside food and medical supplies, both of which are vital given poor conditions in detention facilities. Police routinely held persons for the full 10-day period before charging them.

Police often detained individuals for several hours, ostensibly to confirm their identity; fingerprinted them; and then released them without charge. Police and security forces frequently used this tactic to detain members of the democratic opposition and demonstrators, to prevent the distribution of leaflets and newspapers, or to break up civil society meetings and events.

On September 9, police officers in Yelsk, Homyel region, detained Aliaksandr Rybachenka, a European Belarus activist, for attempting to photograph flyers calling for an election boycott. After being held in the police station for more than three hours, he was released without charges.

Amnesty: An amnesty, which aimed to reduce the prison population, began in June. As of November, 1,725 convicts, including 66 individuals under age 18, were released, and 1,938 individuals had their prison sentences reduced by one year. The Interior Ministry reported that the amnesty was expected to affect more than 8,000 prisoners, including an estimated 2,200 who would be released.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The constitution provides for an independent judiciary, but authorities did not respect judicial independence. Observers believed corruption, inefficiency, and political interference with judicial decisions were widespread. Courts convicted individuals on false and politically motivated charges brought by prosecutors, and observers believed that senior government leaders and local authorities dictated the outcomes of trials.

According to human rights groups, prosecutors wielded excessive and imbalanced authority because they may extend detention periods without the permission of judges. They also noted a power imbalance between the prosecution and the defense. Defense lawyers were unable to examine investigation files, be present during investigations and interrogations, or examine evidence against defendants until a prosecutor formally brought the case to court. Lawyers found it difficult to challenge some evidence because the Prosecutor's Office controlled all technical expertise. According to many defense attorneys, this power imbalance persisted throughout the year, especially in politically motivated criminal and administrative cases. Criminal defendants were exonerated in very few cases during the year.

By law, bar associations are independent, and licensed lawyers are permitted to establish private practices or bureaus. All lawyers, however, must be licensed by the Ministry of Justice and must renew their licenses every five years.

In the past the justice ministry used disbarment as a tool in political cases; the ministry accused the disbarred lawyers of distorting information about the investigations of their clients, their state of health, and their conditions of detention. During the year there were no new disbarments, but no disbarred lawyers had their licenses restored.

Trial Procedures

The law provides for the presumption of innocence. Nevertheless, the lack of judicial independence, state media practice of reporting on high-profile cases as if guilt were already certain, and widespread limits on defense rights frequently placed the burden of proving innocence on the defendant.

The law also provides for public trials, but authorities occasionally closed trials and frequently held them in judges' offices, where attendance was severely limited. Judges adjudicate all trials; there is no system of trial by jury. For the most serious cases, two civilian advisers assist the judge.

The law provides defendants the right to attend proceedings, confront witnesses, and present evidence on their own behalf, but authorities did not always respect these rights.

The law provides for access to legal counsel for detainees and requires that courts appoint a lawyer for those who cannot afford one. Most judges and prosecutors were not fluent in Belarusian and rejected motions for interpreters. The law provides for the right to choose legal representation freely; however, a presidential decree prohibits NGO members who are lawyers from representing individuals other than members of their organizations in court. The government's disbarment of attorneys who represented political opponents of the regime further limited defendants' choice of counsel. The government also required defense attorneys to sign non-disclosure statements that limited their ability to release any information about the case to the public, media, and even defendants' family members.

Courts often allowed statements obtained by force and threats of bodily harm during interrogations to be used against defendants.

Defendants have the right to appeal convictions, and most defendants did so. Nevertheless, appeals courts upheld the verdicts of the lower courts in the vast majority of cases, including in all criminal cases connected with post-election demonstrations.

Defendants have the right to appeal convictions, and most defendants did so. Nevertheless, appeals courts upheld the verdicts of the lower courts in the vast majority of cases, including in all criminal cases connected with post-election demonstrations.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

Local and international human rights organizations reported several different lists of political prisoners in the country. These included individuals who were not incarcerated but were facing criminal charges or with restrictive parole conditions at year's end. Many of those pardoned reported mistreatment in jail and pressure to sign pardon requests, and most were subsequently unable to exercise some civil and political rights.

On August 22, President Lukashenka pardoned six individuals recognized by local human rights organizations as political prisoners, including 2010 presidential candidate Mikalai Statkevich and two activists in the so-called anarchists case, Ihar Alinevich and Mikalai Dziadok. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and international and local human rights groups welcomed their release. The government did not restore the political rights of the released prisoners, and maintained police surveillance over them.

On August 11, authorities arrested four young men, Maksim Pekarski, Vadzim Zheromski, Viachaslau Kasinerau, and Yaraslau Ulyanenkau, on charges of malicious hooliganism for reportedly painting graffiti with patriotic slogans, such as, "Belarus should be Belarusian," that police deemed to be "promoting violence in society and disregard of universally accepted rules of conduct." One of two suspects told the press in September that during his detention, police bundled him into a bus, and an officer hit him in the face, fracturing his jaw. When they arrived at the police precinct, investigators pressured him to plead guilty and showed him records of his private phone conversations with his spouse, which were reportedly wiretapped months before the arrest. On August 31, police released Pekarski and Zheromski from custody after they admitted their participation in the acts and reimbursed damages. As of December 11, authorities dropped all charges against Ulyanenkau, charged Pekarski with property damage, Kasinerau with malicious hooliganism, and Zheromski (despite his earlier release) with malicious hooliganism and vandalizing property. The three were banned from leaving the country.

Several prominent political prisoners, who had completed their sentences in 2014, including anticorruption activist Mikalai Autukhovich, remained unable to exercise their full civil and political rights and subject to restrictions on their freedom of movement and police supervision. Autukhovich, for example, was not permitted to travel outside the city without official permission, and on August 7, a Vaukavysk district court extended preventive supervision of him for another six months.

On September 8, authorities detained Ales Mikhalevich, a former presidential candidate, when he sought to return to the country. Mikhalevich was released later in the day but remained under investigation and was banned from leaving the country without police permission. Mikhalevich had been arrested in 2010 in connection with postelection demonstrations, and he alleged that he had been tortured at KGB holding facilities. He had fled after being released on his own recognizance in 2011. Investigators refused Mikhalevich's two appeals in October and December to drop criminal charges against him.

During their court hearings, defendants in politically motivated cases reported threats against associates and family members to compel testimony against the defendants, as well as pressure to sign confessions. Leading local human rights groups, including Vyasna and the Belarusian Helsinki Committee, either recognized these individuals as prisoners of conscience or noted serious due process violations that required at the very least a retrial.

Prison authorities often confiscated and censored mail of political prisoners, reportedly to exert pressure by further isolating prisoners and limiting their contacts with families and associates. Former political prisoner Ihar Alinevich's mother reported that authorities blocked political prisoners' correspondence and told them, "no one cares about them outside of the prison walls."

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

The law provides that individuals can file lawsuits seeking damages for a human rights violation, but the civil judiciary was not independent and was rarely impartial in such matters.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The law prohibits such actions, but the government did not respect these prohibitions. Authorities used wiretapping, video surveillance, and a network of informers that deprived persons of privacy.

By law persons who obstruct law enforcement personnel in the performance of their duties can be penalized or charged with an administrative offense, even if the "duties" are inconsistent with the law. "Obstruction" could include any effort to prevent KGB or law enforcement officers from entering the premises of a company, establishment, or organization; refusing to allow KGB audits; or denying or restricting KGB access to information systems and databases.

The law requires a warrant before, or immediately after, conducting a search. Nevertheless, some democratic activists believed the KGB entered their homes unannounced. The KGB has the authority to enter any building at any time, as long as it applies for a warrant within 24 hours after the entry.

Security forces continued to target prominent opposition and civil society leaders with arbitrary searches and interrogations at border crossings and airports. For example, on January 16, border officials detained Viktar Sazonau, a Hrodna-based human rights advocate, and his two associates for four hours upon re-entering the country from Poland. Officers thoroughly searched their vehicle and personal belongings but did not confiscate anything.

While the law prohibits authorities from intercepting telephone and other communications without a prosecutor's order, authorities routinely monitored residences, telephones, and computers. Nearly all opposition political figures and many prominent members of civil society groups claimed that authorities monitored their conversations and activities. The government continued to collect and obtain personally identifiable information on independent journalists and democratic activists during raids and by confiscating computer equipment.

The law allows the KGB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, special security services, financial intelligence personnel, and certain border guard detachments to use wiretaps. Wiretaps require the permission of a prosecutor, but the lack of prosecutorial independence rendered this requirement meaningless.

The Ministry of Communications has the authority to terminate the telephone service of persons who violate their telephone contracts, which prohibit the use of telephone services for purposes contrary to state interests and public order. Cell phone providers are banned from selling cell phone cards to customers who do not produce their passports or to foreigners who are not registered with local immigration services.

Authorities continued to harass family members of NGO leaders and civil society and opposition activists through selective application of the law.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution provides for freedom of speech and the press. The government did not respect these rights and enforced numerous laws to control and censor the public and the media. Moreover, the state press propagated views in support of President Lukashenka and official policies, without giving room for critical voices.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: Individuals could not criticize Lukashenka and the government publicly or discuss matters of general public interest without fear of reprisal. Authorities videotaped political meetings, conducted frequent identity checks, and used other forms of intimidation. Authorities also prohibited wearing facemasks, displaying unregistered or opposition flags and symbols, and displaying placards bearing messages deemed threatening to the government or public order.

For example, on May 11, a district court in Smalyavichy sentenced Leanid Kulakou, a European Belarus activist, to seven days in jail for displaying an opposition white-red-white flag and a banner, with the legend, "Invaders, Go Away!" in protest of pro-Putin Russian bikers touring the country.

On August 22, Lukashenka pardoned political prisoner Yury Rubtsou, a member of the Independent Union of Electronic Industry Workers, who police had arrested on multiple occasions for wearing T-shirts bearing anti-Lukashenka slogans.

The law also limits free speech by criminalizing actions such as giving information to a foreigner about the political, economic, social, military, or international situation of the country that authorities deem false or derogatory.

Press and Media Freedoms: Government restrictions limited access to information and often resulted in media self-censorship. State-controlled media did not provide balanced coverage and overwhelmingly presented the official version of events. Appearances by opposition politicians on state media were limited, primarily to those required by law during election campaigns. Authorities warned, fined, detained, and interrogated members of media.

For example, on March 12, police in Mahilyou searched the apartment of Ihar Barysau, the Nash Mahilyou web portal editor and an opposition activist, and confiscated three computers, a modem, and his private notebooks based on allegations that Barysau insulted a local businessman in online publications in January. Authorities returned most of his belongings following the closure of the libel investigation and the dropping of administrative charges related to running the website.

Under the law the government may close a publication, printed or online, after two warnings in one year for violating a range of restrictions on the press. Additionally, regulations give authorities arbitrary power to prohibit or censor reporting. The Information Ministry can suspend periodicals or newspapers for three months without a court ruling. The law also prohibits the media from disseminating information on behalf of unregistered political parties, trade unions, and NGOs.

Limited information was available in the state-run press about the October presidential election, including about independent candidates. Authorities did not censor the publication of candidates' programs in print media. State media otherwise provided only limited coverage of the three candidates running against Lukashenka, who did not participate in a live television debate held before the election.

On May 5, Information Minister Liliya Ananich warned the media about criticizing the government and stated that the law required reporting to "accurately" reflect reality, "facilitate the development of society, and not harm national interests." Ananich also repeated her warning to owners of websites, who may be punished for abusive or "incorrect" comments on their message and forum boards.

The Information Ministry continued to deny registration to independent media outlets. In spite of the lack of registration, independent media, including newspapers, magazines, and internet news websites, sought to provide coverage of events. They operated, however, under repressive media laws, and most faced discriminatory publishing and distribution policies, including limiting access to government officials and press briefings, controlling the size of press runs of papers, and raising the cost of printing.

The government confiscated independent and opposition newspapers and seized leaflets and other materials deemed to have been printed illegally or which they labeled "extremist." For example, on October 8, authorities at a customs checkpoint in Hrodna briefly detained freelance journalist Aliaksei Trubkin and confiscated his copy of a 2010 human rights report by the "Vyasna" Human Rights Center and a book by Andrzej Poczobut, System Bialorus, with a photo of Lukashenka on the cover.

Authorities also often fined distributors of independent press publications. On April 27, a Mahilyou district court fined United Civic Party activist Mikalai Hladyshau 4.5 million rubles ($282) for distributing copies of the independent newspaper Novy Chas and the party's anticorruption platform at a local railway station.

On January 23, the Supreme Court turned down an appeal from the Narodnaya Volya newspaper challenging a November 2014 warning by the Information Ministry about publishing materials deemed detrimental to public and national interests in an op-ed, which featured an analytical piece on the establishment of the Eurasian Economic Union.

On March 2, the Information Ministry issued warnings to three local private newspapers, Gazeta Slonimskaya, Intex-Press, and Hantsavichski Chas, for minor errors. The two latter newspapers were accused of using a two-letter abbreviation "RB" instead of spelling out "Republic of Belarus." On March 5, the independent Borisovskie Novosti and a commercial supplement received two similar warnings from the ministry. On March 20, the ministry issued the same warning to the private weekly Novy Chas. After a complaint from the Belarusian Association of Journalists, the ministry also warned two state publications, the satirical magazine Vozhyk, and Nash Krai newspaper, on the same grounds as the independent papers.

State-owned media, which were biased and served largely as a propaganda arm of the regime, dominated the information field and maintained the highest circulation through generous subsidies and preferences. There was no countrywide private television. The state-owned postal system, Belposhta, and the state-owned kiosk system, Belsayuzdruk, continued to refuse to deliver or sell numerous independent newspapers that covered politics.

Although authorities continued to allow the circulation of Narodnaya Volya and Nasha Niva, two independent national newspapers, through state distribution systems, they remained subject to restrictions on the number of copies allowed to circulate and to financial penalties.

Several independent newspapers, including Vitsyebski Kuryer, Salidarnasc, BDG, and Bobruysky Kuryer, disseminated internet-only versions due to printing and distribution restrictions.

International media continued to operate in the country but not without interference and prior censorship. Euronews and the Russian channels First Channel, NTV, and RTR were generally available, although only through paid cable services in many parts of the country and then with a lag time that allowed the removal of news deemed undesirable by authorities. At times authorities blocked, censored, or replaced their international news programs with local programming.

Violence and Harassment: Authorities continued to harass and detain local and foreign journalists routinely.

Security forces continually hampered efforts of independent journalists to cover demonstrations and protests in Minsk and across the country. The independent Belarusian Association of Journalists reported that, as of December 20, police detained 14 journalists while performing their professional duties. For example, on February 26, police detained a journalist of the Belarusian edition of the popular Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda for taking photos of the building of the Academy of Sciences. He was released four hours later after an identification check. The newspaper responded by running an article identifying buildings that were "too sensitive" to photograph.

The government routinely denied accreditation to journalists who work with foreign media. As of December 20, at least 15 journalists had been fined in 28 cases for not having government accreditation or cooperating with a foreign media outlet. On May 19, the Minsk city court upheld earlier decisions by the Foreign Ministry to refuse official accreditation to Viktar Parfianenka, a Hrodna-based freelance journalist writing for various foreign media broadcasting in the country. This was his seventh accreditation denial.

Independent journalist and military expert Aliaksandr Alesin was detained on November 25 and faced charges of cooperating with foreign intelligence sources, which carry a maximum penalty of two years' imprisonment. He was released on December 10 but was banned from leaving the country, and at year's end no trial date had been set.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: The government exerted pressure on the vast majority of independent publications to exercise self-censorship, warning them not to report on certain topics or criticize the government. The government tightly and directly controlled the content of state broadcast and print media. Local independent television stations operated in some areas and reported local news, although most were under government pressure to forgo reporting on national and sensitive issues or risk censorship.

Authorities allowed only state-run radio and television networks to broadcast nationwide. The government used this national monopoly to disseminate its version of events and minimize alternative or opposing viewpoints. Authorities banned state media from citing works and broadcasting music by independent local and well-known foreign musicians, artists, writers, and painters who were named on an alleged, unofficial nationwide "blacklist" for speaking in support of political prisoners and opposition or democratic activists.

Authorities warned businesses not to advertise in newspapers that criticized the government. As a result independent media outlets operated under severe budgetary constraints.

Journalists reporting for international media that gave extensive coverage to the country, such as the Warsaw-based independent satellite channel Belsat TV and Radio Racyja, were denied press accreditation and received warnings from the Prosecutor's Office and heavy fines.

Libel/Slander Laws: Libel is a criminal offense. There are large fines and prison sentences of up to four years for defaming or insulting the president. Penalties for defamation of character make no distinction between private and public persons. A public figure who is criticized for poor performance while in office may sue both the journalist and the media outlet that disseminated the critical report.

On August 6, police in Slonim opened an investigation, based on interviews by local residents, into a July 29 story in the local private newspaper Slonimskaya Hazeta that purportedly defamed Lukashenka.

Authorities frequently cited national security as grounds for censorship of media.

Internet Freedom

The government interfered with internet freedom by reportedly monitoring e-mail and internet chat rooms. While individuals, groups, and publications were generally able to engage in the peaceful expression of views via the internet, including by e-mail, all who did so risked possible legal and personal repercussions and at times were believed to practice self-censorship. Opposition activists' e-mails and other web-based communications were likely to be monitored.

On January 1, media law amendments making news websites and any internet information sources subject to the same regulations as print media came into effect. Under the amended law, online news providers must remove content and publish corrections if ordered by the authorities and must adhere to a prohibition against "extremist" information. Amendments also restricted access to websites whose content includes promotion of violence, wars, "extremist activities"; materials related to illicit weapons, explosives, and drugs; trafficking in persons; pornography; and information that can harm the national interests of the country. Authorities may block access to sites that fail to obey government orders, including because of a single violation of distributing prohibited information, without a prosecutor or court's mandate. In addition, owners of internet sites may be held liable for users' comments that carry any prohibited information, and these sites may be blocked. The amended law also mandates the creation of a database of news websites. If a news website receives two or more formal warnings from the authorities, it may be removed from the database and lose its right to distribute information. Amendments also prohibit foreign states and foreign individuals from holding more than a 20 percent stake in local media companies.

In January various state agencies, including the General Prosecutor's Office, the Interior Ministry's cybersecurity department, and the Information and Analytical Center of the Presidential Administration refused to investigate cases of websites being blocked in December 2014, as requested by the Belarusian Association of Journalists. In December 2014, after a sharp devaluation of the Belarusian currency, access to several independent news websites, including onliner.by, belapan.com, belapan.by, naviny.by, charter97.org, gazetaby.com, zautra.by, belaruspartisan.org, udf.by, and 21.by, was blocked. With the exception of onliner.by, authorities did not publicly claim responsibility for the blockage. Information Minister Liliya Ananich warned independent media outlets against "inciting panic" during the currency devaluation.

While the list of blocked internet resources remained unavailable to the public, from January to November the Ministry of Information reportedly blocked access to 40 internet sites, including 18 for drug trafficking, 11 (with a court mandate) for distributing extremist materials, five for illicit promotion of medications, one for child pornography and other content violations. Access to four of these sites was later restored.

The authorities reportedly monitored internet traffic. By law the telecommunications monopoly, Beltelekam, and other organizations authorized by the government have the exclusive right to maintain internet domains.

A 2010 presidential edict requires registration of service providers and internet websites, and requires the collection of information on users at internet cafes. It requires service providers to store data on individuals' internet use for a year and provide that information to law enforcement agencies upon request. Violations of the edict are punishable by prison sentences.

State companies and organizations, which included the workplaces of up to 80 percent of the country's workers, reportedly had internet filters.

In response to the government's interference and internet restrictions, many opposition groups and independent newspapers switched to internet domains operating outside the country. Observers said the few remaining independent media sites with domestic ".BY" (Belarus) domain suffixes practiced self-censorship at times.

On May 15, the Information Ministry issued a warning to the website of the Polish-based Radio Racyja and requested information about its owner for reportedly violating media laws. The website of the United Civic Party, the opposition news website www.freeregion.info, and music website tuzin.fm received similar notifications of violating media laws and allegedly spreading "false information that may cause harm to state or public interests."

On June 18, the Ministry of Information blocked access to art and life-style portal kyky.org, after having previously issued a warning to the site. The ministry stated that the website was blocked in accordance with the media law, as its opinion pieces contained content that was judged to be harmful to the national interests, including derogatory remarks about Victory Day and "taboo language." According to the site's editor, kyky.org received a letter on May 15 from the ministry with a warning but did not receive subsequent communication before it was shut down. On June 24, Deputy Information Minister Ihar Lutski ordered access to the site restored after the editor removed the opinion pieces.

On several occasions cyberattacks of unknown origin temporarily disabled independent news portals and social networking sites. For example, on October 5, the popular independent news agency BelaPAN issued an official statement regarding Distributed Denial of Service attacks, which began on October 3, after BelaPAN's sister site, naviny.by, posted a critical article about a high-level event on October 2, in which Lukashenka participated. The news agency described its coverage, which included an interview with students sent to the event, as objective.

According to various media sources, the number of internet users reached approximately 6.5 million persons or approximately 70 percent of the population who used the internet daily or numerous times a month. Internet penetration was approximately 83 percent among users 15 to 50 years of age.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

The government restricted academic freedom and cultural events.

Educational institutions were required to teach an official state ideology that combined reverence for the achievements of the former Soviet Union and of Belarus under the leadership of Lukashenka. Government-mandated textbooks contained a heavily propagandized version of history and other subjects. Authorities obligated all schools, including private institutions, to follow state directives to inculcate the official ideology and prohibited schools from being led by opposition members. The education minister has the right to appoint and dismiss the heads of private educational institutions.

Use of the word "academic" was restricted, and NGOs were prohibited from including the word "academy" in their titles. Opportunities to receive a higher education in the Belarusian language (vice Russian) in the majority of fields of study were scarce. The administrations of higher educational institutions made no effort to accommodate students wishing to study in Belarusian-language classes.

The Belarusian Republican Youth Union (BRYU), an official organization modeled on the Soviet-era KOMSOMOL, urged university students to join the BRYU to receive benefits and dormitory rooms. Local authorities also pressured BRYU members to campaign on behalf of government candidates. On October 10, the last date of early voting in the presidential election, students from the Belarusian State University of Computer Science and Radio electronics reported to an independent election monitoring group that university faculty were pressuring students into early voting by threatening them with eviction from the dormitories. Additionally, authorities at times reportedly pressured students to act as informants for the country's security services.

According to an Education Ministry directive, educational institutions may expel students who engage in anti-government or unsanctioned political activity and must ensure the proper ideological education of students. School officials, however, cited poor academic performance or absence from classes as the official reason for expulsions. On October 10, the last date of early voting in the presidential election, students from the Belarusian State University of Computer Science and Radioelectronics reported to an independent election monitoring group that university faculty were pressuring students into early voting by threatening them with eviction from the dormitories.

The government continued to discourage and prevent teachers and activists from advancing the wider use of the Belarusian language and the preservation of Belarusian culture. A number of universities across the country continued not to enroll students in their undergraduate Belarusian linguistic programs for teachers of the Belarusian language and literature, citing low demand and a low number of applications in recent years.

The government also restricted cultural events, selectively approving performances of what they deemed opposition music groups at small concert halls. Approvals required groups to go through cumbersome and time-consuming procedures to receive permissions. The procedures continued to force some opposition theater and music groups out of public venues and into bars and private apartments by banning their performances.

According to the Belarusian State University (BSU) student association, the BSU administration banned the school's theater group from showing a play based on the life of prominent Belarusian language advocate and linguist Branislau Tarashkevich (1892-1938), who standardized the modern Belarusian language. The play premiered on November 14 and was shown again two days later, after which the administration cancelled subsequent scheduled performances. Authorities also suppressed unofficial commemorations of historical events. In his interview with independent press outlets on August 4, Lukashenka acknowledged that some musicians could be banned unofficially because they could be "some thugs, who have insulted or are against the government."

Authorities in Hrodna banned a July 26 concert by the popular Polish rock band Lombard, although concert organizers were granted prior permission to hold it on the condition that Russian and Belarusian bands would also perform. The organizers, associated with the independent and unregistered Union of Poles in Belarus (UPB), attributed the ban to Lombard's promotion of Polish Solidarity movement ideas and their plans to participate in events related to the 10th anniversary of the UPB. Lombard performed in Hrodna in 1988 and 2008.

The government also restricted the activities of a nonofficial writers union, the independent Union of Belarusian Writers, and extensively supported the pro-government Union of Writers of Belarus. Authorities harassed distributors of books authored by critical and independent writers or written in the Belarusian language. Although sold at bookstores and online across the country, authorities did not allow printing houses and publishers to print copies of books by Sviatlana Aleksievich, winner of the Nobel prize for literature.

In December 2014 the tax ministry imposed a fine of one billion rubles ($62,700) on Ihar Lohvinau's publishing house for "unlicensed retailing." Lohvinau had applied eight times for a license since authorities ordered him to obtain one in January 2014; each application was rejected. Lohvinau's original license was revoked in 2013, after authorities determined that his 2011 Belarus Press Photo book was "extremist material." In January a Minsk court dismissed Lohvinau's appeal of the fine, which the publisher paid after a fundraising campaign. Authorities subsequently licensed the business.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Freedom of Assembly

The constitution provides for freedom of peaceful assembly; however, the government severely restricted this right. Authorities employed a variety of means to discourage demonstrations, disperse them, minimize their effect, and punish the participants.

Only registered political parties, trade unions, and NGOs could request permission to hold a demonstration of more than 1,000 persons. Authorities usually denied requests by independent and opposition groups. A general atmosphere of repression and the threat of imprisonment exercised a chilling effect on potential protest organizers. This appeared to have resulted in fewer and smaller demonstrations.

The law criminalizes participation in the activities of unregistered NGOs, training persons to demonstrate, financing public demonstrations, or soliciting foreign assistance "to the detriment" of the country. In 2011 the law was amended to prohibit announcing demonstrations, including via the internet or social networks, before authorities approved them. Violations are punishable by up to three years in prison.

Organizers must apply at least 15 days in advance for permission to conduct a public demonstration, rally, or meeting, and government officials are required to respond no later than five days prior to the scheduled event. Authorities, however, generally granted permits only for opposition demonstrations if held far from city centers. Authorities used intimidation and threats to discourage persons from participating in demonstrations, openly videotaped participants, and imposed heavy fines or jail sentences on participants in unsanctioned demonstrations. In addition authorities required organizers to conclude contracts with police, fire department, health, and sanitary authorities for their services during and after a mass event. In some localities, local officials told permit applicants that they must first secure these contracts before a permit can be issued. When the applicants asked the police, fire department, health, and sanitary authorities to sign contracts, however, they were told that they first must have an approved permit. Any individual found guilty of violating the law on mass events may not apply for another permit for a year following the conviction. In January authorities rejected more than 70 applications for permission for the United Civic party to stage small demonstrations calling for Lukashenka's resignation.

On many occasions police and other security officials detained demonstrators before, during, and after unsanctioned peaceful demonstrations and major public events (see section 1.d.). Numerous protest participants were detained, fined, and sentenced up to 25 days in administrative detention. Authorities fined opposition activists and members of NGOs for participating in unauthorized protests, including during the presidential election campaign.

Opposition activists held several unsanctioned rallies during the year and faced administrative charges and fines. For example, on September 22, a Minsk district Court fined 2010 presidential candidate and former political prisoner Mikalai Statkevich in absentia 7.2 million rubles ($451) for holding an unsanctioned rally in downtown Minsk on September 10.

On November 20, authorities fined United Civic Party leader Lyabedzka nine million rubles ($564) and opposition activist Viachaslau Siuchyk 10.8 million rubles ($677) for participating in the October 29 candlelight vigil in front of the KGB building.

A Minsk district court on December 7 fined Stanislau Pavlinkovich, a democratic activist, and Anton Zhylko, a member of the United Civic Party, 4.5 million ($282) and 3.6 million rubles ($226), respectively, for participating in a November 24 unsanctioned demonstration to mark the 1996 referendum that stripped the powers of the parliament and expanded the powers of the president, and for carrying an opposition white-red-white flag.

Human rights activists, independent Belarus Free Theater (BFT) members, individuals in wheelchairs, and their supporters held a number of flash mobs on December 23-27 to raise awareness about the human rights of persons with disabilities and to speak out about official and societal discrimination against them. On December 30, a court in Minsk fined BFT member Mikhail Kauko 3.6 million rubles ($226) for participating in an unsanctioned demonstration.

Police occasionally used preemptive arrest and detention to prevent democratic activists' participation in protests and activities.

Authorities took various measures to deter prodemocracy activists from celebrating the March 25 anniversary of the country's 1918 declaration of independence (an event the government does not recognize), although Minsk city authorities authorized the demonstration but forced organizers to reschedule it from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m. to ensure a smaller attendance.

Freedom of Association

The law provides for freedom of association, but the government restricted it and selectively enforced laws and registration regulations to restrict the operation of independent associations that might criticize the government. Particularly since 2010, authorities have sought to close any legal loopholes they considered beneficial to NGOs.

All NGOs, political parties, and trade unions must receive Ministry of Justice approval to become registered. A government commission reviews and approves all registration applications; it based its decisions largely on political and ideological compatibility with official views and practices.

Actual registration procedures required applicants to provide the number and names of founders, along with a physical address in a nonresidential building for an office, an extraordinary burden in view of the tight financial straits of most NGOs, and individual property owners' fears of renting space to independent groups. Individuals listed as members were vulnerable to reprisal. The government's refusal to rent office space to unregistered organizations and the expense of renting private space reportedly forced most organizations to use residential addresses, which authorities could use as a reason for deregistration. The law criminalizes activities conducted on behalf of unregistered groups and subjects group members to penalties ranging from heavy fines to two years in prison (also see section 7.a.).

Following the 2010 repression, authorities sought to close any "legal loopholes" they considered beneficial to NGOs. For example, the law on public associations prohibits NGOs from keeping funds for local activities at foreign financial institutions. The law also prohibits NGOs from facilitating provision of any support or benefits from foreign states to civil servants based on their political or religious views or ethnicity, a provision widely believed to be aimed at the Polish minority.

Only registered NGOs can legally accept foreign grants and technical aid and only for a limited set of approved activities. NGOs must receive approval from the Department for Humanitarian Affairs of the Presidential Administration and the Ministry of the Economy for technical aid before they can accept such funds or register the grants.

The government continued to deny registration to NGOs and political parties, which Lukashenka frequently labeled as "the fifth column," on a variety of pretexts, including "technical" problems with applications. Authorities frequently harassed and intimidated individuals who identified themselves as founding members of organizations in an effort to induce them to abandon their membership and thus deprive groups of the number of petitioners necessary for registration. Many of the rejected groups previously had been denied registration on multiple occasions.

In September 14, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the Belarusian Christian Democracy Party of the Justice Ministry's August decision to deny its fifth registration request. According to party officials, local authorities across the country had also pressured members of the party to withdraw their signatures from the registration application.

The Justice Ministry denied the fourth registration application of the NGO Tell the Truth NGO on December 21 on the grounds that some documents were not signed by the NGO's leader Tatsiana Karatkevich, a 2015 presidential candidate. Karatkevich described the refusal as politically motivated. In addition to the burdensome registration process, the law prohibits NGOs from keeping funds for local activities at foreign financial institutions and from facilitating provision of any support or benefits from foreign states to civil servants based on their political or religious views or ethnicity, a provision widely believed to be aimed at the Polish minority.

Harassment in the form of arbitrary inspections by security officials continued. In April authorities demanded that the Independent Trade Union of the Radio Electronic Industry provide information about the income of one of its leaders, Leanid Sudalenka, who had already submitted financial reports for the period in question. In August, border guards removed Sudalenka from a train by force, detained him for several hours, and inspected his belongings.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The law provides for freedom of movement, including the right to emigrate, but the government at times restricted the right of citizens, former political prisoners in particular to foreign travel. The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations to provide protection and assistance to internally displaced persons, refugees, returning refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, and other persons of concern.

In-country Movement: Passports serve as a form of identity and authorities required them for permanent housing, work, and hotel registration. Police continued to harass selectively individuals who lived at a location other than their legal place of residence indicated in mandatory stamps in their passports.

The law also requires persons who travel to areas within 15 miles of the border (aside from authorized crossing points) to obtain an entrance pass.

Foreign Travel: The government's database of persons banned from traveling abroad contained the names of at least 130,000 persons according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Those prohibited from foreign travel include individuals who possessed state secrets, faced criminal prosecution or civil suits, or had outstanding financial obligations in 2014. Authorities informed some persons by letter that their names were in the database; others learned only at border crossings. The Internal Affairs Ministry and security agencies, border and customs services, and financial investigation departments have a right to place persons on "preventive" surveillance lists.

Students required permission from the head of their educational institution to study abroad. Ostensibly intended to counter trafficking in persons, the Ministry of Internal Affairs is also required to track citizens working abroad, and employment agencies must report individuals who do not return from abroad as scheduled.

Exile: The law does not allow forced exile, but sources asserted that security forces continued to threaten some opposition members with bodily harm or prosecution if they did not leave the country, and many were in self-imposed exile.

Many university students who had been expelled or believed they were under threat of expulsion for their political activities opted for self-imposed exile and continued their studies abroad.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law provides for granting asylum or refugee status, complementary and temporary protection to foreign citizens and stateless persons. The government has established a refugee status determination procedure and a system for providing protection to refugees. Additionally, the law provides for protection against refoulement, which is granted to foreigners who are denied refugee status or temporary protection, but cannot be returned to their countries of origin.

All foreigners except Russians have the right to apply for asylum. Under the terms of the Union Treaty with Russia, Russians can legally settle and obtain residence permits in the country based on their Russian citizenship and therefore do not need asylum. Overall, as of November 1, immigration authorities accepted 1,067 applications for asylum compared with 867 in 2014, including from 818 Ukrainians, 96 Syrians, and 36 Afghans.

In addition to refugee status, the country's asylum law provides for complementary protection and protection against refoulement (in the form of temporary residence for a one-year term). In the period January-October, 730 foreigners were granted complementary protection (664 Ukrainians, 49 Syrians, eight Libyans, seven Yemenis, one Iraqi, and one Palestinian from Lebanon); one national of Libya was granted protection against refoulement.

Refugee Abuse: Asylum seekers have freedom of movement within the country but must reside in the region where they filed their applications for refugee status and in a place known to authorities while their applications are being considered, including during appeals. Authorities reportedly often encouraged asylum seekers to settle in rural areas; however, the majority settled in cities and towns. Change of residence was possible with a notification to authorities. Authorities issue registered asylum seekers certificates that serve as documents to confirm their status of asylum-seekers and identity and protect them from expulsion. In accordance with the law, they also must register with local authorities at their place of residence.

Temporary Protection: Although the government in the past provided temporary protection (for up to one year) to individuals who may not qualify as refugees, it did not do so during the year.

Stateless Persons

As of July 1, UNHCR listed 6,302 stateless persons in the country; all had permanent residence according to authorities.

Permanently resident stateless persons held residence permits and were treated comparably to citizens in terms of access to employment, with the exception of a limited number of positions in the public sector and law enforcement that were available only to citizens. There were reports that stateless persons occasionally faced discrimination in employment, since authorities often encouraged them to settle in rural areas where the range of employment opportunities was limited. According to UNHCR, stateless persons could freely change their region of residence.

There is a path towards nationality or citizenship for this stateless population. The main requirement is at least seven years' permanent residence. Authorities have a procedure for expedited naturalization procedures but mostly for individuals born or permanently residing in the country prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, ethnic Belarusians, their spouses, and descendants. If a child is born into a family of stateless persons permanently residing in the country, the child is entitled to Belarusian citizenship. The decrease of the number of stateless individuals in the country was attributed to their naturalization.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The law provides citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, but the government consistently denied citizens this ability by not conducting elections according to international standards.

Since his election in 1994 to a four-year term as the country's first president, Lukashenka steadily consolidated power in the executive branch to dominate all branches of government, effectively ending any separation of powers among the branches. Flawed referenda in 1996 and 2004 amended the constitution to broaden his powers, extend his term in office, and remove presidential term limits. Subsequent presidential elections, including the one held in 2015, continued to deny citizens the right to express their will in an honest and transparent process including fair access to independent media and to resources.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: The October 11 presidential election was marred by significant problems and failed to meet international standards, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe international election observation mission intermediate report. According to the Central Election Commission, President Lukashenka won re-election with 83.47 percent of the vote and 86.75 percent voter turnout. The closest opposition candidate, Tatsiana Karatkevich, officially won 4.42 percent of the vote. While the observer mission and the international community welcomed the peaceful conduct of the poll, particularly in contrast to the violent crackdown that followed the 2010 election, the mission nevertheless noted that the country "still has a considerable way to go in meeting its OSCE commitments for democratic elections."

The report found major flaws in the campaign period, electoral framework, and election-day procedures. A presidential candidate must be nominated by a registered initiative group of no less than 100 voters; in July the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) registered eight initiative groups out of 15 applicants. Of the eight registered initiative groups, three initiative groups failed to collect the signatures of 100,000 voters required to register a candidate, and the CEC determined that one candidate failed to collect enough valid signatures. As the OSCE report noted, ultimately only one of the three candidates running against Lukashenka, Tatsiana Karatkevich, was critical of the incumbent, which gave voters limited choice.

Although candidates were able to campaign in an unhindered manner, high-ranking public servants and officials reportedly campaigned during working hours on behalf of the incumbent, which created an uneven playing field for campaigning and blurred the line between partisan interest and the state. The OSCE observer mission assessed that, despite the restrictive media environment, candidates were provided with a platform to convey their messages and were afforded time on state-run television, including through a televised debate in which the incumbent did not participate. Nevertheless, the incumbent was the most visible candidate due to extensive coverage in his institutional capacity.

The observer mission regretted that key OSCE recommendations from the 2010 and 2012 elections remain unaddressed, especially those concerning the composition of electoral commissions, early voting procedures, safeguards for counting and tabulation, prevention of the misuse of state resources, and the rights of election observers. According to the report, there were no clear and transparent legal criteria for the selection of members of territorial and precinct election commissions, and authorities continued to exclude opposition representatives from election commissions at all levels.

The majority of observers at local polling places appeared to be from government-sponsored NGOs. Many of them reportedly received instructions in advance to report to foreign observers that the proceedings were "in order" and/or to harass independent observers. The OSCE observation mission reported that during the five-day early voting period "in 50 percent of cases observers were denied access to check voter lists, and in some cases observers were prevented from seeing procedures." They also noted complaints in a number of polling stations alleging discrepancies between reported turnout and the number of signatures in the voter lists, and inconsistent completion of daily protocols.

In many instances international observers reported that authorities conducted vote counting silently and at a distance from observers, which prevented evaluation of the count. There were a number of reports that vote totals changed as authorities transported the ballot boxes between local precincts and territorial election commission offices. The government did not permit independent organizations to conduct exit polls.

Local human rights groups Vyasna and the Belarusian Helsinki Committee stated at a post-election press conference that based on their observation, the election fell short of international standards and did not fully abide by Belarusian legislation. They especially noted their concern with early voting procedures, the lack of transparency in the vote-count process, and the domination of election commissions by progovernment organizations.

Amendments in 2013 to the electoral code introduced a simple majority system in the first round of elections for the National Assembly and ended government funding of campaigns while increasing allowable private funding. Some members of the democratic opposition alleged that the amendments disproportionately targeted the opposition, which had little access to private funds given Lukashenka's public statements that businesses should not finance the opposition or they would face punishment. Additionally, the amendments prohibit citizens from campaigning to disrupt elections and referenda or to have them cancelled, postponed, or boycotted. Other changes include regulations on who can appeal for a vote recount and what type of questions can be put to public referendum.

Political Parties and Political Participation: Authorities routinely harassed and impeded the activities of opposition political parties and activists. Some opposition parties lacked legal status because authorities refused to register them, and the government routinely interfered with the right to organize, run for election, seek votes, and publicize views. The government allowed approximately half a dozen largely inactive, but officially registered pro-Lukashenka political parties to operate freely, although they appeared to be little more than fig leaves for a system that sought, in effect, to exclude multiparty politics.

The law allows authorities to suspend parties for six months after one warning and close them after two. During the year political parties did not receive any formal warnings, but members of parties that authorities refused to register, such as the Belarus Christian Democracy Party, continued to be subjected to harassment and arbitrary checks. The law also prohibits political parties from receiving support from abroad and requires all political groups and coalitions to register with the Ministry of Justice.

Authorities continued to harass the unrecognized Union of Poles of Belarus and its members. On March 12, authorities issued a formal warning to Anzhalika Borys, one of the UPB leaders, that she could be charged with acting on behalf of an unregistered organization. No criminal charges followed.

Ongoing restrictions on civil society organizations' ability to associate and advocate impeded their ability to monitor and comment on the elections process and restrictions on voter registration.

Participation of Women and Minorities: No laws prevent women or minorities from voting or participating in political life on the same basis as men or nonminority citizens. Tatsiana Karatkevich was the first woman to run for president, and on election day President Lukashenka told the press that "our president has numerous functions, from security to the economy. A person in a skirt is unlikely to be able to cope with them now." He added that even if this were not the case, society was not ready for a female president.

In the lower house of the National Assembly, women held 30 of the 110 seats, and in the upper house, they held 19 of the 58 seats. Women led two of the 24 government ministries, the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection, a woman headed the National Statistics Committee, and a woman was a deputy prime minister. A woman also headed the Central Election Committee. Data on the participation of members of minorities in government was not available.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for official corruption, and the government regularly jailed officials alleged to be corrupt, but reports indicated that officials continued to engage in corrupt practices. The World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators reflected that corruption was a serious problem in the country.

On July 17, President Lukashenka signed into law anticorruption legislation, which reportedly strengthened existing anticorruption regulations. Under the amended law, individuals dismissed for lower-level corruption face a five-year ban on public service employment, while those found to have committed more serious abuses are banned indefinitely from government employment. The law also allows seizure of property worth more than 25 percent of a public servant's yearly income. The amendments also introduced provisions for public monitoring of the government's anticorruption efforts.

Corruption: According to official sources, most corruption cases involved soliciting and accepting bribes, fraud, and abuse of power, although anecdotal evidence indicated such corruption usually did not occur as part of day-to-day interaction between citizens and minor state officials.

The absence of an independent judicial system and law enforcement, the lack of separation of powers, and a harried independent press largely barred from interaction with a nontransparent state bureaucracy made it virtually impossible to gauge the scale of corruption or combat it effectively.

The Prosecutor General's Office is responsible for organizing and coordinating activities to combat corruption, including monitoring law enforcement operations, analyzing the efficacy of implemented measures, supervising engaged parties, and drafting further legislation.

The Prosecutor General's Office reported that from January to May courts heard 533 corruption cases compared with 406 cases in the same period in 2014, citing law enforcement's proactive investigation of corruption-related charges. The most corrupt sectors were state administration and procurement, the industrial sector, the construction industry, health-care, and education.

Prosecutor General Aliaksandr Kanyuk reported on February 20 that authorities investigated 1,326 corruption-related crimes in 2014. Of those, 494 were cases of bribery, 411 of embezzlement, and 256 of abuse of powers.

There were numerous corruption prosecutions during the year, but prosecutions remained selective, nontransparent, and appeared (in some cases) politically motivated. On April 15, a Minsk district court sentenced two former senior officials of the Justice Ministry's Bar and Legal Profession Licensing Department to eight and four years, respectively, in jail with property forfeiture on charges of abuse of power and multiple bribery accounts following their arrest in August 2013 upon receiving a $1,000 bribe. The court also banned the two from serving in any governmental position for a period of five years upon release. The two officers were responsible for the 2011 politically motivated debarment of defense lawyers in the December 2010 postelection demonstration cases.

On June 18, a court in the Minsk region sentenced former Deputy Minister of Forestry Fyodar Lisitsa to five years on charges of corruption. The court also ruled to seize his property and forbade him to serve in governmental positions for five years upon release. Police arrested the official in April 2014.

On December 4, state media reported that President Lukashenka pardoned and exempted from prosecution a former senior official of the education department in Mahilyou, who was charged with corruption-related crimes and faced up to seven years in jail. Prosecutors claimed that the official reimbursed "double or triple" the amount of damages and was released from investigation.

Financial Disclosure: Anticorruption laws require income and asset disclosure by appointed and elected officials, their spouses, and members of households who have reached legal age and continue to live with them in the same household. According to the law, specialized anticorruption departments within the Prosecutor General's Office, the KGB, and the Internal Affairs Ministry monitor and verify anticorruption practices, and the Prosecutor General and all other prosecutors are mandated to oversee the enforcement of anticorruption law. These declarations were not made available to the public. An exception applies to candidates running in presidential, parliamentary, and municipal elections. There are administrative sanctions and disciplinary penalties for noncompliance.

Public Access to Information: The law, government policies, and a presidential decree severely restricted public access to government information. Citizens had some access to certain categories of information on government databases and websites, but much of the information was neither current nor complete.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

There were a number of active domestic human rights NGOs, although authorities were often hostile to their efforts, did not cooperate with them, and were not responsive to their views.

Two prominent human rights NGOs  the Belarusian Helsinki Committee and the Center for Legal Transformations  were registered. The government refused to register others, placing them at risk under the criminal code, which criminalizes organizing, or participating in any activity by, an unregistered organization. The law also prohibits persons from acting on behalf of unregistered NGOs. Nonetheless, a variety of unregistered NGOs, including Vyasna, the Solidarity Committee for the Protection of the Repressed, and Legal Assistance to the Population, continued to operate.

Authorities harassed both registered and unregistered human rights organizations, subjected them to frequent inspections and threats of deregistration, reportedly monitored their correspondence and telephone conversations, and harassed family members of group leaders and activists. The government ignored reports issued by human rights NGOs and rarely met with them. State-run media did not report on human rights NGOs and their actions.

On February 21, authorities expelled Alena Tankachova, a Russian citizen, from the country and stated she would not be permitted to return for three years. Tankachova, the chair of the Legal Transformation Center (also called Lawtrend), had been a permanent resident for 30 years. Authorities accused her of traffic violations and stated she posed a threat to national security. Local human rights organizations asserted the case was politically motivated and that she was expelled for her human rights work.

During the year the Belarusian Helsinki Committee's bank accounts remained blocked due to longstanding tax arrears related to foreign funding in the early 2000s, but the government allowed the committee to operate without other interference.

Authorities were reluctant to engage on human rights problems with international human rights NGOs or other human rights officials, and international NGO representatives often had difficulty gaining admission to the country.

Authorities routinely ignored local and international groups' recommendations on improving human rights in the country and requests to stop harassing the human rights community.

Authorities can close an NGO after issuing only one warning that it violated the law. The most common pretexts prompting a warning or closure were failure to obtain a legal address and technical discrepancies in application documents. The law allows authorities to close an NGO for accepting what it considered illegal forms of foreign assistance and permits the Ministry of Justice to participate in any NGO activity and to review all NGO documents. NGOs also must submit detailed reports annually to the ministry about their activities, office locations, officers, and total number of members.

The United Nations or Other International Bodies: In July the UN Human Rights Council extended the mandate of Miklos Haraszti as the special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Belarus. During the year Haraszti released two reports on the situation of human rights in the country. Senior foreign ministry officials continued to assert Haraszti's mandate was "politically motivated" and that his appointment was made "without consultations and approval from Belarusian authorities." The government continued to refuse any cooperation with his mission, and he was not permitted to travel to the country.

Government Human Rights Bodies: A standing commission on human rights in the lower chamber of parliament was ineffective.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The law prohibits discrimination based on race, gender, language, or social status, but the government did not always enforce these prohibitions.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law criminalizes rape in general but does not include separate provisions on marital rape. Rape was a problem, but most women did not report it due to shame or fear that police would blame the victim. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there were 141 registered cases of rape or attempted rape in 2014.

Domestic violence was a significant problem, and the government took measures to prevent it during the year, although it yet again postponed adoption of a comprehensive law on domestic violence.

Government efforts to combat gender-based violence mainly were directed at preventing such crimes and not at protecting or assisting victims, although crisis rooms provided limited psychological and medical assistance to victims.

As of October, the state operated 108 shelter-type crisis rooms for victims, including domestic violence victims; NGOs operated at least four more shelters for victims of domestic violence. Authorities reported that from January to October crisis rooms assisted 190 individuals, not citing how many of these were domestic violence victims; however, observers noted a lack of adequate staff training, short-term sheltering, limited working hours, and unsafe locations.

A 2014 law on preventing crimes establishes a separate definition of domestic violence and provided for implementation of protective orders. Such orders, ranging from three to 30 days' duration, are issued to abusers who have been charged with two counts of violence within one year. The law requires authorities to provide victims and abusers with temporary accommodation until the protection orders expire. In addition to the newly adopted law, the code on administrative offenses, amended in August 2013, prescribes a heavy fine or detention for up to 15 days for battery, intended infliction of pain, and psychological or physical suffering committed against a close family member. The criminal code does not contain a separate article dealing with domestic violence.

In November police reported that from January to October police identified 1,984 victims of domestic violence, of those 1,509 were female, 475 were male, and 120 were older than age 70. Ninety-six victims of domestic violence cases died, and 169 suffered severe bodily injuries. In the majority of these cases, women said they had been previously threatened with violence. Additionally, police investigated more than 42,000 allegations of domestic violence from January to October. The police official reported that women were the aggressors in at least 10 percent of all domestic violence cases and were responsible for approximately 35 percent of all murders and incidents of severe bodily harm connected to domestic violence.

Authorities issued 1,128 protective orders, including 919 orders to abusers, who had to move out of residences shared with victims for up to 30 days. In addition the code on administrative offenses prescribes a heavy fine or detention for up to 15 days for battery, intentional infliction of pain, psychological, or physical suffering committed against a close family member.

According to a 2014 UN Population Fund study, three out of four women and men between the ages of 18 and 60 claimed they were subjected to some form of domestic violence. Of this number, 76 percent of women and 76 percent of men were subjected to psychological violence, and 37 percent of women and 28 percent of men to economic pressures. More than 31 percent of women and 24.8 percent of men suffered from physical violence, and 18 percent of women and 12 percent of men reported their partners sexually abused them. Women remained reluctant to report domestic violence due to fear of escalating the violence, reprisal, social stigma, and a lack of confidence that they would be rendered appropriate and timely assistance. Moreover, they feared that if the aggressor were fined, the financial burden would fall on the family. Male victims of domestic violence did not report their cases due to their own feelings of guilt, feeling pity for their abuser, and fear of family disruptions. According to the study, 12 percent of male and 29 percent of female victims of domestic violence sought professional assistance.

Government efforts to combat gender-based violence mainly were directed at preventing such crimes and not at protecting or assisting victims, although crisis rooms provided limited psychological and medical assistance to victims. Authorities did not tackle the root causes of violence, including alcoholism, social stigma, and gender-based stereotypes.

Sexual Harassment: Sexual harassment reportedly was widespread, but no specific laws, other than those against physical assault, address the problem.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of children; manage their reproductive health; and have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence. Access to information on contraception and skilled attendance at delivery and in postpartum care were widely available.

Discrimination: The law provides for equal treatment of women with regard to property ownership and inheritance, family law, and in the judicial system, and the law was generally respected.

Women's groups voiced concerns about the increasing percentage of women in poverty of poverty, particularly among women with more than two children, female-headed households, women taking care of family members with disabilities or older family members, rural women, and older women.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship is derived either by birth within the country's territory or from one's parents. A child of a citizen is a citizen regardless of place of birth, even if one of the parents is not a citizen. In general births were registered immediately.

Education: Education is free, compulsory, and universal through the secondary level. There was no significant difference in the treatment and attendance of boys and girls.

Child Abuse: The government continued to implement a 2012-16 comprehensive national plan to improve childcare and the protection of children's rights, including for victims of child abuse, domestic violence, and commercial sexual exploitation, and acknowledged a lack of funding and inefficiency in executing certain protective measures. With assistance from NGOs that promote children's rights, authorities extensively employed procedures for on-the-record, one-time interviewing of child abuse victims in the framework of investigations or criminal cases at specialized facilities under the direct supervision of psychologists. Courts used recorded testimony to avoid repeatedly summoning child abuse victims for hearings. Cases that affected the rights and legitimate interests of minors were generally heard by more experienced judges with expertise in developmental psychology, psychiatry, and education. The government continued to run an intermittent national hotline for assisting children, and independent observers noted that at least one-third of 2,500 calls to it in 2014-2015 went unanswered.

As of January the Ministry of Education ran 138 social-educational centers nationwide for minor victims of any type of violence or minors finding themselves in vulnerable and dangerous conditions. Centers could provide short-term shelter, food, clothing, personal hygiene products, and medical and psychological aid to victims. No data on the number of assisted child abuse victims at these centers was available. General healthcare institutions provided a wide range of medical aid to child abuse victims free of charge.

Authorities intervened to prevent child abuse stemming from domestic violence and identified families in vulnerable conditions, providing foster care to children who could not be kept with their immediate families while preventive work was under way. Although the government increased prosecution of child abusers, its efforts to address the causes of child abuse were inadequate.

Rape or sexual assault of a person known to be a minor is punishable by up to 15 years in jail. Sexual acts between a person older than 18 and a person known to be younger than 16 carry penalties of up to five years in jail.

From January to October, authorities registered 193 pedophilia crimes, including 18 cases of rape, 74 cases of coercive actions of a sexual nature, 87 cases of sexual intercourse with a minor, and 14 cases of sexual abuse. Police identified 135 victims of pedophilia, including 58 children under 14, mostly female.

Early and Forced Marriage: The legal minimum age of marriage for both boys and girls is 18 years old, although girls as young as 14 can be married legally with parental consent. There were reports of early marriage in which girls as young as 14 and boys as young as 16 married with parental consent.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The minimum age for consensual sex is 16. Prostitution of children was a problem. From January to October, the Internal Affairs Ministry investigated 506 crimes involving the commercial sexual exploitation of children, including 25 cases of the production and distribution of child pornography and six cases in which minors became victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation. The law provides penalties of up to 13 years in prison for production or distribution of pornographic materials depicting a minor. The law generally was enforced.

Institutionalized Children: There was no system for monitoring child abuse in orphanages or other specialized institutions. Authorities did not publicly report on any child abuse incidents in institutions. During the year there were allegations of abuse in foster families. The government opened or continued investigations into some of these cases.

International Child Abductions: The country is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For information see the Department of State's report on compliance at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/legal/compliance.html and country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/english/country/Belarus.html.

Anti-Semitism

Jewish groups estimated that between 30,000 and 40,000 persons identified themselves as Jews. Most were not active religiously.

Anti-Semitic incidents continued but were on the decline; authorities sporadically investigated reports of such acts. Jewish community and civil society activists expressed concern over the concept of a "greater Slavic union" that was popular among nationalist organizations, including the neo-Nazi group Russian National Unity, which remained active despite its official dissolution in 2000. Neo-Nazis were widely believed to be behind anti-Semitic incidents across the country. Anti-Semitic and Russian ultranationalist newspapers, literature, DVDs, and videotapes imported from Russia were widely available. The government did not promote antibias and tolerance education.

On March 26, Svetlahorsk city authorities opened a criminal case to investigate vandalism of a number of public buildings, including a hospita
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Barbados

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Barbados, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5716129e6.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Barbados is a multiparty, parliamentary democracy. In the 2013 national elections, voters re-elected Prime Minister Freundel Stuart of the Democratic Labor Party. Observers considered the vote generally in accordance with international standards, despite allegations of small-scale vote buying. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the security forces.

The most serious human rights problems were unprofessional conduct by police; violence against women; and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) individuals.

Other human rights problems included child abuse and discrimination against persons with disabilities.

The government took steps to punish officials who committed abuses, and impunity for security force members did not appear to be a problem.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There was one report that the government or its agents allegedly committed an arbitrary or unlawful killing. In May, Constable Everton Gittens was charged with the murder of Selwyn Knight and the wounding of Knight's son, Junior. The case was scheduled for trial in December.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution prohibits such practices, but there were complaints against the police alleging unprofessional conduct, intimidation, and assault. Suspects occasionally accused police of beating them to obtain confessions, and suspects often recanted their confessions during trial. In many cases the only evidence against the accused was a confession. Suspects and their family members continued to allege coercion by police, but there was no evidence of systematic police abuse. Anecdotal reports indicated crimes often went unreported and police officers pressured victims not to formally report crimes. There were also reports some witnesses refused to testify in court against police officers.

As of November police reported that the case of alleged police torture in March 2014 of Adrian Mottley and Jamar Headley was in an advanced stage of investigation and would be forwarded to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison and detention center conditions generally met international standards, although prisoners occasionally complained about the quality of the food. There were no separate facilities for asylum seekers.

Administration: Two agencies  the Office of the Ombudsman and the Prison Advisory Board  are responsible for investigating credible allegations of inhuman conditions. There were no such allegations during the year.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted monitoring by independent nongovernmental observers.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The constitution prohibits arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The Royal Barbados Police Force (RBPF) is responsible for internal law enforcement, including migration and border enforcement. The Barbados Defense Force (BDF) protects national security and may be called upon to maintain public order in times of crisis, emergency, or other specific needs. The RBPF reports to the attorney general, and the BDF reports to the minister of defense and security. Although the police were largely unarmed, special RBPF foot patrols in high-crime areas carried firearms. An armed special rapid response unit continued to operate. The law provides that police may request BDF assistance with special joint patrols.

A 10 percent increase in crime in the first seven months of the year, specifically related to gun violence and illegal drugs, created concerns about the ability of the RBPF to respond to societal violence.

Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the RBPF and BDF, and the government has effective mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption. Allegations against police were investigated and brought to the Police Complaints Authority, a civilian body in the Office of Professional Responsibility. In the first six months of the year, 70 complaints were filed by the public against the police force, five of which were dismissed as being unsubstantiated.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

The law authorizes police to arrest persons suspected of criminal activity; a warrant is typically required. Police procedure permits authorities to hold detainees without charge for up to five days, but once persons are charged, police must bring them before a court without unnecessary delay. There is a functioning bail system. Criminal detainees received prompt access to counsel and were advised of that right immediately after arrest. Authorities generally permitted family members access to detainees.

Police procedures provide for police to question suspects and other persons only at a police station, except when expressly permitted by a senior divisional officer to do otherwise. An officer must visit detainees at least once every three hours to inquire about their condition. After 24 hours the detaining authority must submit a written report to the deputy commissioner. The authorities must approve and record all movements of detainees between stations.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The constitution provides for an independent judiciary, and the government generally respected judicial independence.

Trial Procedures

The constitution provides that persons charged with criminal offenses receive a fair public hearing without unnecessary delay by an independent, impartial court and a trial by jury. The government generally respected these rights. Defendants have the right to be present and to consult with an attorney of their choice in a timely manner. The government provided free legal aid to the indigent in family matters (excluding divorce), child support cases, serious criminal cases such as rape or murder, and all cases involving minors. The constitution prescribes that defendants have adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense. These timelines may be set by the court on arraignment. In court defendants may confront and question witnesses and present witnesses and evidence on their own behalf. Defendants and their attorneys have access to government-held evidence relevant to their case. Defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty, have the right of appeal, and cannot be compelled to testify or confess guilt.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

Magistrates' courts have civil and criminal jurisdiction, but the civil judicial system experienced heavy backlogs. Citizens primarily sought redress for human rights or other abuses through the civil system, although human rights cases were sometimes decided in the criminal court.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution prohibits such actions, and the government generally respected these prohibitions.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Expression

The constitution provides for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respected these rights. An independent press, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of speech and press.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports that the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 66.7 percent of households had internet access, and the World Bank reported 76.7 percent of citizens used the internet in 2014.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

The constitution provides for freedom of assembly and association, and the government generally respected these rights.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution and the law provide for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights.

The government was prepared to cooperate with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and other humanitarian organizations in assisting refugees, asylum seekers, or other persons of concern.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law does not provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has not established a system for providing protection to refugees.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution provides citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and citizens exercised that right.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: In the 2013 general elections, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) won 16 of the 30 seats in the Parliament's House of Assembly, and DLP leader Freundel Stuart retained his post as prime minister. After a voter took a picture of his ballot with a cell phone, authorities investigated allegations of small-scale vote buying by supporters of both parties but did not levy charges. Observers considered the elections to be in accordance with international standards.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for official corruption, and the government generally implemented these laws effectively.

Corruption: There were no reports of government corruption during the year.

Financial Disclosure: No law requires public officials to disclose income or assets.

Public Access to Information: No law provides citizens access to government-held information. While government websites provided access to information, responses often were slow to requests for specific government information by citizens, the media, and other interested parties.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A number of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials often were cooperative and responsive to their views.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The Ombudsman's Office hears complaints against government offices for alleged injuries or injustices resulting from administrative conduct. The governor general appoints the ombudsman on the recommendation of the prime minister and in consultation with the opposition. Parliament must approve the appointment. The ombudsman submits to the Parliament annual reports, which contain recommendations on changes to laws and descriptions of actions taken by the Ombudsman's Office.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution provides for equal treatment regardless of race, sex, religion, political opinion, and national or social origin, and the government effectively enforced these provisions. The constitution permits the deprivation of personal liberty for preventing the spread of communicable diseases.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law criminalizes rape, and the maximum penalty is life imprisonment. There were legal protections against spousal rape for women holding a court-issued divorce decree, separation order, or nonmolestation order. Rape was underreported due to fear of further violence, retribution, and societal stigma. There were no forensic nursing services offered to assist rape investigations. There were reports perpetrators paid off survivors of rape or sexual assault in exchange for not pressing charges, especially in cases involving minors. In addition, sources reported survivors were at times reluctant to report crimes to police because of their perceived ineffectiveness.

Violence and abuse against women continued to be significant social problems. The law prohibits domestic violence and provides protection to all members of the family, including men and children. The law applies equally to marriages and to common-law relationships but does not protect those in informal relationships. Penalties depend on the severity of the charges and range from a fine for first-time offenders (unless the injury is serious) up to the death penalty for cases resulting in death of a victim. Victims may request restraining orders, which the courts often issued. The courts may sentence an offender to jail for breaching such an order. The police have a Victim Support Unit, consisting of civilian volunteers, that offers assistance primarily to female victims of violent crimes, but reports indicated services provided were inadequate. There is also a Family Conflict Unit. Victims reporting a sexual assault were subject to lengthy waits at the police station and for examinations at the hospital staffed primarily by male doctors. There were also several reports police did not respond promptly or adequately to complaints of sexual assault and domestic violence.

There were public and private counseling services for victims of domestic violence, rape, and child abuse. There were programs to sensitize clergy who counsel abuse victims; to encourage salon professionals, masseuses, and masseurs to identify domestic violence and direct women to seek expert assistance; to offer domestic violence awareness training for high school students; and to prevent elder abuse by workers in geriatric hospitals.

The Ministry of Social Care, Constituency Empowerment, and Community Development maintained a Partnership for Peace program, a psychosocial rehabilitation program for perpetrators of domestic abuse. The nongovernmental organization (NGO) Business and Professional Women's Club of Barbados (BPW Barbados) operated a crisis center staffed by trained counselors and provided advocacy, crisis and police intervention, and referral services to community resources including legal, medical, addiction, and substance abuse. The BPW also operated a walk-in crisis center designed to provide psychological, social, and legal services, and to serve as a conduit for other responders to gender-based violence. The government provided funding for a shelter for battered women, also operated by the BPW. The shelter offered the services of trained psychological counselors to survivors of domestic violence and other crisis intervention services. The shelter also served victims of human trafficking and others forms of gender-based violence.

The Bureau of Gender Affairs cited a lack of specific information and inadequate mechanisms for collecting and evaluating data on incidents of domestic violence as major impediments to tackling gender-based violence.

Sexual Harassment: No law contains penalties specifically for sexual harassment. Common law, however, can be used to provide remedies to persons who are victims of sexual harassment in the workplace by reliance on the relevant law of torts. Media reports often indicated women avoided reporting sexual harassment because they feared retribution in the workplace.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children; manage their reproductive health; and have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence.

Discrimination: The law provides for the same legal status and rights for women as for men, including under family, labor, property, and inheritance laws. Women actively participated in all aspects of national life and were well represented at all levels of the public and private sectors, although some discrimination persisted. The law does not mandate equal pay for equal work (see section 7.d.), and reports indicated that women earned significantly less than men for comparable work. Under nationality laws (naturalized) Barbadian women not born in Barbados do not transfer citizenship to their children.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship is obtained by birth in the country or from one citizen parent if at least one of the parents is a Barbadian citizen born in Barbados. There was universal birth registration.

Child Abuse: Violence and abuse against children remained serious problems. The Child Care Board reported 823 referrals of abuse in 2014, compared with 648 cases in 2013. NGOs cited an increased social awareness of child abuse and encouragement to report cases as reasons for the increase, rather than a rise in the incidence of child abuse.

The Child Care Board (CCB) has a mandate for the care and protection of children, which involved investigating daycare centers and allegations of child abuse or child labor, as well as providing counseling services, residential placement, and foster care. The Welfare Department also offered counseling on a broad range of family-related issues. The CCB vocally advocated stricter regulations to protect children; however, a grave shortfall of staffing and finances impeded the board's efforts to respond appropriately to each report.

In June six-year-old Jahan King died in the hospital. The press reported that he had suffered a number of injuries, including broken fingers, an eye injury, bruising, and an injured mouth. King's grandmother told the press that she had reported to the CCB on several occasions that her grandson was being physically abused but that the board had taken no action. In July the board stated that it had received the reports and that an investigation was underway at the time of King's death.

Early and Forced Marriage: The legal minimum age for marriage is 18 years.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The government does not have a policy framework to combat the sexual exploitation of children. The minimum age for consensual sex is 16 years. The Ministry of Family, Culture, Sports, and Youth acknowledged child prostitution occurred; however, there were no official statistics to document the problem. Pornography, including child pornography, is illegal.

International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

Anti-Semitism

The Jewish community was very small. There were no reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

No laws specifically prohibit discrimination against persons with disabilities in employment, education, or the provision of other state services, other than constitutional provisions asserting equality for all. Legislation to implement obligations arising from 2013 ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities had yet to be enacted.

Persons with disabilities experienced discrimination. The Ministry of Social Care, Constituency Empowerment, and Community Development operated a unit to address the concerns of persons with disabilities, but parents complained of added fees and transport difficulties at public schools for children with disabilities. Although persons with disabilities continued to face social stigma that prevented them from fully participating in society, attitudes were slowly evolving. Persons with disabilities generally experienced hiring discrimination as well as difficulty in achieving economic independence (see section 7.d.).

The Barbados Council for the Disabled (BCD), the Barbados National Organization for the Disabled, and other NGOs indicated that access and transportation remained the primary challenges facing persons with disabilities. Many public areas lacked the necessary ramps, railings, parking, and bathroom adjustments to accommodate persons with disabilities, and affordable, reliable transportation for them remained elusive. Private transportation providers addressed some transportation concerns.

While no legislation mandates provision of accessibility to public thoroughfares or public or private buildings, the Town and Country Planning Department set provisions for all public buildings to include accessibility for persons with disabilities. As a result most new buildings had ramps, reserved parking, and accessible bathrooms for persons with disabilities. The BCD and other NGOs conducted sensitization and accessibility programs designed to improve inclusion and services for persons with disabilities.

The disabilities unit and NGOs continued numerous programs for persons with disabilities, including Call-a-Ride and Dial-a-Ride public transportation programs, sensitization workshops for public transportation operators, inspections of public transportation vehicles, sign language education programs, integrated summer camps, and accessibility programs.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The law criminalizes consensual same-sex sexual activity between adults, with penalties up to life imprisonment, but there were no reports of the law being enforced during the year. The law does not prohibit discrimination against a person based on real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity in employment, housing, education, or health care (see section 7.d.). Activists reported that stigma against LGBTI persons persisted.

Activists reported few violent incidents based on sexual orientation or gender identity but suggested that social stigma and fear of retribution or reprisal led LGBTI persons to underreport the problem. Anecdotal evidence suggested that LGBTI persons faced discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education and health care. Activists claimed that while many individuals lived open LGBTI lifestyles, disapprobation by police officers and societal discrimination against LGBTI persons occurred. Anecdotal evidence indicated that LGBTI persons were vulnerable to crime, specifically destruction of property, and that LGBTI persons received threats.

Activists reported that many LGBTI persons were homeless, as families often were not accepting of LGBTI children, some of whom became involved in the commercial sex trade.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

During the year the government completed a countrywide media campaign to discourage discrimination against HIV/AIDS-infected persons and others living with them, and it reported that the campaign had decreased social stigma against HIV/AIDS. While there was no systematic discrimination, HIV/AIDS-infected persons did not commonly disclose the condition due to lack of social acceptance.

The Caribbean HIV-AIDS Alliance, a regional NGO that had been active in the region, closed abruptly in 2014, after which civil society reported difficulty in coordinating HIV/AIDS efforts within the region.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law, including related regulations and statutes, provides for the right of workers to form and join unions and conduct legal strikes but does not specifically recognize the right to bargain collectively. Moreover, the law does not obligate companies to recognize unions or to accept collective bargaining, and no specific law prohibits antiunion discrimination or requires reinstatement of workers fired for union activity. A tribunal may order re-instatement, re-engagement, or compensation under the Employment Rights Act, although no cases of antiunion discrimination were reported during the year. All private sector employees are permitted to strike, but the law prohibits workers in essential services, such as police, firefighters, and electricity and water company employees, from engaging in strikes.

In general the government effectively enforced the law in the formal sector, but there was no information as to the adequacy of resources or inspections. Penalties for violations include fines up to $1,000 Barbados dollars (BBD) ($500), imprisonment up to six months, or both. The penalties were sufficient to deter violations. The Employment Rights Act of 2013 gives persons the right to have unfair dismissals tried before the Employment Rights Tribunal, although as of September it had not concluded any cases. The process was often subject to lengthy delays. A tripartite group of labor, management, and government representatives met monthly. The group dealt with social and economic issues as they arose, worked to formulate legislative policy, and played a significant role in setting and maintaining harmonious workplace relations.

Workers faced some challenges in exercising freedom of association or bargaining collectively. The Barbados Light & Power (BL&P) restructured its operations and offered redundancy packages to workers. When representatives of the Barbados Workers Union were notified, they requested talks with BL&P, but the company declined to engage with the union on the matter. With a few exceptions, workers' rights generally were respected.

Although employers were under no legal obligation to recognize unions, most major employers did so when more than 50 percent of the employees made a request. Some unions noted employers often refused to negotiate collective bargaining agreements with them, even if the company recognized the union. Smaller companies often were not unionized.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The constitution prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor. The government generally enforced such laws.

Although there were no official reports of forced labor during the year, foreigners remained at risk for forced labor, especially in the domestic service, agriculture, and construction sectors. The Transnational Organized Crime Prevention and Control Act of 2011 provides maximum penalties for forced labor, including life imprisonment if the victim was under 18 years old and a fine of $1.5 million BBD ($750,000), 15 years in prison, or both if the victim was over 18 years old. There have been no prosecutions in recent years.

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The law provides for a minimum working age of 16 years for certain sectors but does not cover sectors such as agriculture. The law prohibits children under the age of 18 years from engaging in work likely to harm their health, safety, or morals, but it does not specify which occupations fall under this prohibition. The law prohibits the employment of children of compulsory school age (through age 16 years) during school hours. The law also prohibits young persons from night work (after 6 p.m.). The law was effectively enforced, and child labor laws were generally observed. Parents are culpable under the law if they have children under 16 years old who are not in school. Under the Recruiting of Workers Act, children between the ages of 14 and 16 years could engage in light work with parental consent. There was no list of occupations constituting light work.

The Ministry of Labor's Labor Department had a small cadre of labor inspectors who conducted spot investigations of enterprises and checked records to verify compliance with the law. These inspectors may initiate legal action against an employer found employing underage workers. Employers found guilty of violating the Employment Act may be fined or imprisoned for up to 12 months. It was unclear whether these penalties were sufficient to deter violations. According to the chief labor inspector, no underage employment cases were filed during the past few years. Although documentation was not available, some children may be engaged in the worst forms of child labor, namely in drug trafficking and as victims of commercial sexual exploitation (see section 6, Children).

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

Labor laws do not prohibit discrimination on grounds of race, sex, gender, or sexual orientation. The Employment Rights Act prohibits discrimination on grounds of known or perceived HIV/AIDS status or on account of disability. Nevertheless, employment discrimination against HIV/AIDS patients persisted. Occasional press reports alleged that migrant workers received less than the minimum wage. Foreign workers in high-risk sectors, such as domestic service, agriculture, or construction, were sometimes not aware of their rights and protections under the law, and unions expressed concern that domestic workers were occasionally forced to work in unacceptable conditions. Persons with disabilities generally experienced hiring discrimination, as well as difficulty in achieving economic independence (see section 6, Persons with Disabilities).

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

While there is no national minimum wage, there is a minimum wage for "Shop Assistants" of $6.25 BBD ($3.10) per hour. While there is no official poverty income level, the most recent country assessment (2012) estimated that 19 percent of the population lived in poverty.

The standard legal workweek is 40 hours in five days, and the law provides employees with three weeks of paid holiday for persons with less than five years of service and four weeks' holiday after five years of service. The law requires overtime payment of time and a half for hours worked in excess and prescribes all overtime must be voluntary. The law does not provide a maximum number of overtime hours. The government set occupational safety and health standards that were current and appropriate for its industries.

The Department of Labor is charged with enforcing the minimum wage as well as work hours and did so effectively. It also enforced health and safety standards and, in most cases, followed up to ensure management corrected problems cited. A group of 10 safety and health inspectors helped enforce regulations, and nine labor officers handled labor law violations. The ministry used routine inspections, accident investigations, and union membership surveys to prevent labor violations and verify that wages and working conditions met national standards. Penalties used by the Ministry of Labor include fines of up to $500 BBD ($250) per offense, imprisonment of up to three months, or a combination of the two. The ministry reported it historically relied on education, consensus building, and moral persuasion rather than penalties to correct labor law violations. The ministry delivered presentations to workers to inform them of their rights and provided education and awareness workshops for employers.

The Labor Department's Health and Safety Inspection Unit conducted several routine annual inspections of government-operated corporations and manufacturing plants, with no serious problems noted. The inspections mentioned construction, industrial, and hospitality sectors as problem areas due to the frequency and severity of worksite accidents.

Office environments received additional attention from the ministry due to indoor air quality concerns. Trade union monitors identified safety problems for government health and safety inspectors to ensure the enforcement of safety and health regulations and effective correction by management. The Ministry of Labor reported two occupational fatalities as of June, both of which were investigated.

The law provides for the right of workers to refuse dangerous work without jeopardy to their employment, and authorities generally protected employees in this situation.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Bahamas

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Bahamas, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/571612a16.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Commonwealth of the Bahamas is a constitutional, parliamentary democracy. Prime Minister Perry Christie's Progressive Liberal Party won control of the government in May 2012 elections that international observers found generally free and fair. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the security forces.

The most serious human rights problems were mistreatment of irregular migrants (compounded by problems in processing them); an inefficient judicial system, resulting in trial delays and an increase in retaliatory crime against both witnesses and alleged perpetrators; and the perception of impunity on the part of law enforcement and immigration officials accused of using excessive force.

Other human rights problems included substandard detention conditions; corruption; violence and discrimination against women; sexual abuse of children; and discrimination based on ethnic descent, sexual orientation, or HIV status.

The government took action in some cases against police officers and other officials accused of abuse of power.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, although there were occasional reports of fatal shootings and questionable deaths of suspects in police custody. Bystanders at some shootings claimed that police were too quick to use their firearms and declared that, in some instances, police officers acted unprofessionally.

Authorities reported seven fatalities in police operations during the year; the government reported that in each case the suspect was armed.

In August family members and some other witnesses reported that police officers shot and killed a suspect who was lying on the ground with his hands in the air. Police officials promised a full investigation of the allegations but stated they did not believe the allegations were credible. The case remained pending as of October 20.

A police officer accused of involvement in an April 2014 wrongful death continued on administrative leave while his case remained pending.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. At times citizens and visitors alleged instances of police abuse of criminal suspects.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison and detention center conditions failed to meet international standards in some areas, and conditions at the government's only prison remained harsh due to overcrowding.

Physical Conditions: Overcrowding, poor sanitation, and inadequate access to medical care remained problems in the men's maximum-security block. In October the commissioner of corrections reported the maximum-security wing of the prison held 625 inmates in spaces designed to hold approximately 375 inmates when constructed in 1953.

Food supplies were adequate, but meals were often served in unsanitary buckets. A few cells lacked running water, and in those cells, inmates removed human waste by bucket.

Prison guards complained about the lack of a full-time dentist and a failure to appoint a staff psychiatrist.

There were four inmate deaths through October, reportedly due to HIV infection, natural causes, an apparent suicide, and injuries resulting from fighting. Reports from the coroner's court were pending on the latter two deaths.

In January two-thirds of immigration officers working at the Carmichael Road Detention Center (CRDC) staged a sick-out to protest working conditions that included mold- and rat-infested conditions, no running water in many areas, and structurally unsound buildings. A February resolution of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights stated that inmates at the CRDC "appear to be in a serious and urgent situation that places their lives and physical integrity at risk."

The government made little progress in its case against five Royal Bahamas Defense Force (BDF) marines who in 2013 allegedly beat five Cuban detainees with batons and pipes at the CRDC. The government reported only that the case was still "before the courts."

Administration: The Department of Correctional Service (DCS) stated that prisoner complaints generally related to pretrial detention duration, heat in cells, request for change in housing unit, timely medical care, food quality, and timely cleaning of bedding materials and/or clothing. Through October 1, authorities reported 717 preliminary inquiries and investigations of staff and inmates. An independent authority does not exist to investigate credible allegations of inhumane conditions.

Alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders was available for juveniles and substance abusers.

Migrant detainees did not have access to an ombudsman or other means of submitting uncensored complaints, except through their national embassy or consulate.

Independent Monitoring: Human rights organizations complained that the government did not consistently grant requests by independent human rights observers for access to the DCS, the CRDC, and the two juvenile centers. The government maintained additional bureaucratic procedures for some civil society organizations to gain access to the detention center, making it difficult to visit detainees on a regular basis. The government denied multiple official requests for consular access to the CRDC to assess conditions. The government reported that it approved all three requests it received from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to visit the DCS during the year.

Improvements: Through October the DCS commissioner reported extensive renovations to the Eastern Block of Maximum Security, with the cells outfitted with flushing toilets, bedding, and televisions. Additionally, the DCS implemented 120 hours of mandatory staff training and established a Health and Safety Unit and a Compliance Unit within the prison.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The constitution prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions, with the exception of immigration raids.

Civil society organizations reported incidents of arbitrary detention by immigration officers and alleged that these officers solicited bribes to secure the release of detainees.

Government officials reported that immigrant detainees who presented a security risk were held at Bahamas Correctional Services. NGOs and media sources reported that at least two persons detained for immigration violations had been held for nearly two years without criminal charges. The government stated that release of the individuals posed a potential security risk and that it had been actively seeking a third country for resettlement, as their country of origin refused to accept their return.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The Royal Bahamas Police Force (RBPF) maintains internal security. The small RBDF is primarily responsible for external security but also provides security at the CRDC and performs some domestic security functions such as guarding foreign embassies. The Ministry of National Security oversees both the RBPF and the RBDF. The RBDF augments the RBPF in administrative and support roles.

Authorities automatically placed police officers under investigation if they were involved in shooting or killing a suspect. Police investigated all cases of police shootings and deaths in police custody and referred them to a coroner's court for further evaluation. The Police Complaints and Corruption Branch, which reports directly to the deputy commissioner, is responsible for investigating allegations of police brutality or other abuse. This unit determines if enough evidence of abuse or misconduct exists in a particular case to warrant disciplinary action within the police system or, in some cases, criminal prosecution by the attorney general.

In addition to the Complaints and Corruption Branch, the independent Police Complaints Inspectorate Office investigated complaints against police, but as of October it had not met.

From January to October, 157 complaints were lodged with the Complaints and Corruption Branch, with assault, damage, and unlawful arrest the most frequent categories of grievance. According to the Ministry of National Security, authorities resolved 103 of these through investigation "that may result in internal discipline; counseling with complainant and accused; compensation or advisement." The ministry reported referring no cases to the Magistrate's Court for prosecution.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

In general authorities conducted arrests openly and, when required, obtained judicially issued warrants. Serious cases, including suspected narcotics or firearms offenses, do not require warrants where probable cause exists. The law provides that authorities must charge a suspect within 48 hours of arrest. Arrested persons must appear before a magistrate within 48 hours (or by the next business day for cases arising on weekends and holidays) to hear the charges against them, although some persons on remand claimed they were not brought before a magistrate within the 48-hour period. Police may apply for a 48-hour extension upon simple request to the court and for longer extensions with sufficient showing of need. The government generally respected the right to a judicial determination of the legality of arrests. The constitution provides the right for those arrested or detained to retain an attorney at their own expense; volunteer legal aides were sometimes available. Minors under age 18 are provided legal assistance and have the right to communicate with a parent or guardian.

There was a functioning bail system. Individuals who could not post bail were held on remand until they faced trial. Judges sometimes authorized cash bail for foreigners arrested on minor charges; however, foreign suspects generally preferred to plead guilty and pay a fine rather than pursue their right to defend themselves, in view of possible delays in court cases and harsh conditions in prison.

Pretrial Detention: Attorneys and other prisoner advocates continued to complain of excessive pretrial detention due to the failure of the criminal justice system to try even the most serious cases in a timely manner. The constitution provides that authorities may hold suspects in pretrial detention for a "reasonable period of time," which was defined as two years. As of October, 411 prisoners, including 27 non-Bahamian citizens, were awaiting trial. Authorities used an electronic ankle-bracelet surveillance system in which they released selected suspects awaiting trial with an ankle bracelet on the understanding that the person would adhere to strict and person-specific guidelines defining allowable movement within the country.

Authorities detained irregular immigrants, primarily Haitians, until arrangements could be made for them to leave the country or they obtained legal status. The average length of detention varied significantly by nationality, willingness of governments to accept their nationals back in a timely manner, and availability of funds to pay for repatriation. Authorities usually repatriated Haitians within one to two weeks. In a June 2014 bilateral agreement between the governments of the Bahamas and Haiti, the Haitian government agreed to accept the return of its nationals without undue delay, and both governments agreed that Haitian migrants found on vessels illegally in Bahamian territorial waters would be subject to immediate repatriation. In return the Bahamian government agreed to continue reviewing the status of Haitian nationals with no legal status and without criminal records who either had arrived in the Bahamas before January 1985, or had resided continuously in the Bahamas since that time. Authorities held irregular immigrants convicted of crimes other than immigration violations at the DCS where, after serving their sentences, they often remained for weeks or months pending deportation. In October a Jamaican national was freed after being held for nine years on both criminal charges and alleged immigration violations, alternately in prison and the CRDC, without ever seeing trial.

In November 2014 the government began enforcing new immigration policies that clarified existing requirements for non-Bahamian citizens to carry the passport of their nationality and proof of legal status in the country. Some international organizations alleged that enforcement focused primarily on individuals of Haitian origin, that rights of children were not respected, and that expedited deportations did not allow time for due process. There were also reports that immigration officials physically abused persons as they were being detained and that officials solicited and accepted bribes to avoid detention or secure release.

Activists for the Haitian community acknowledged that few formal complaints were filed with government authorities because of these allegations, which they attributed to a widespread perception of impunity for police and immigration authorities and fear of reprisal among minority communities. The government denied these allegations and publicly committed to ensuring that immigration operations be carried out with due respect for internationally accepted human rights standards, including the involvement of the Ministry of Social Services, where warranted, in cases involving children, scaled enforcement based on the ability to provide adequate housing for detainees, and full investigations of any allegations of abuse.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

Although the constitution provides for an independent judiciary, sitting judges are not granted tenure, and some law professionals asserted that judges were incapable of rendering completely independent decisions due to lack of job security. Procedural shortcomings and trial delays were a problem. The courts were unable to keep pace with the rise in criminal cases, and there was a growing backlog.

Trial Procedures

Defendants enjoy a presumption of innocence until proven guilty and are permitted to question witnesses at trial and view government evidence. Defendants have a right to appeal. Defendants can elect to use a jury in criminal cases; serious offenses, such as murder and fraud, automatically go to a jury. Defendants have the right to present their own witnesses and evidence. Although defendants generally have the right to access government-held evidence and confront adverse witnesses, in some cases the law allows witnesses to testify anonymously against accused perpetrators in order to protect themselves from intimidation or retribution. Authorities frequently dismissed serious charges because witnesses either refused to testify or could not be located.

Defendants may hire an attorney of their choice. The government provided legal representation only to destitute suspects charged with capital crimes, leaving large numbers of defendants without adequate legal representation. Lack of representation contributed to excessive pretrial detention, as some accused lacked the means to pursue their cases toward trial.

A significant backlog of cases awaiting trial remained a problem. Delays reportedly lasted five years or more. Once cases went to trial, they were often further delayed due to poor case and court management, such as inaccurate handling or presentation of evidence and inaccurate scheduling of witnesses, jury members, and accused criminals for testimony.

Local legal professionals attributed delays to a variety of longstanding systemic problems, such as slow and limited police investigations, inefficient prosecution strategies, limited forensic capacity, lengthy legal procedures, and staff shortages in the Prosecutor's Office and the courts.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

There is an independent and impartial judiciary in civil matters, and there is access to a court to bring lawsuits seeking damages for, or cessation of, human rights violations.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution prohibits such actions, and the government generally respected these prohibitions.

While the law usually requires a court order for entry into or search of a private residence, a police inspector or more senior police official may authorize a search without a court order where probable cause to suspect a weapons violation or drug possession exists.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution provides for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respected these rights. An independent press; a relatively effective  albeit extremely backlogged  judiciary; and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of speech and press. The independent media were active and expressed a wide variety of views without significant restriction.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: In response to criticism of the government's new immigration policy that took effect in November 2014, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reminded citizens that the Bahamas Nationality Act allows the minister for nationality to revoke citizenship from a person who "has shown himself by act or speech to be disloyal or disaffected towards the Bahamas." In August the ministry publicly threatened to revoke the permanent residency status of a critic of the government.

Libel/Slander Laws: The government did not use libel or slander laws to silence critics but employed threats of prosecution in a way that civil rights groups reported had a chilling effect on free speech. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, responding to criticism of the CRDC conditions by a civil rights organization, called on the police commissioner to investigate the group for criminal libel.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports that the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authorization. The internet was widely available on New Providence and Grand Bahama islands, and the International Telecommunication Union estimated that 72 percent of the population used the internet in 2013.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events. The Plays and Films Control Board rated and censored plays and films for public viewing.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

The constitution provides for freedom of assembly and association, and the government generally respected these rights. Civil rights organizations protesting the government's immigration enforcement policy credibly alleged that some government officials sought to constrain their freedom of speech and association rights by publicly labeling the groups as traitors and then refusing to conduct adequate investigations or provide police protection from threats.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution provides for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights. The government generally cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in assisting refugees and asylum seekers. The government did not systematically share its prescreening notes with UNHCR, but it sought UNHCR advice on specific cases of concern.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: According to the government, trained individuals screened applicants and referred them to the Immigration Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration (MFA). Applications approved were forwarded to the cabinet for a final decision. As of October the MFA reported nine pending asylum requests, including five Cubans and one Chinese citizen. Authorities did not consistently seek advisory assistance from UNHCR, but they did seek advice on specific cases during the year. Nevertheless, international organizations reported that those requesting asylum often lacked access to legal counsel and that some persons had limited access to screening procedures. There were credible reports of individuals at the CRDC from refugee-producing countries who had not been screened for asylum, particularly migrants from Haiti. As of October authorities reported they had repatriated 2,934 irregular immigrants to their home countries: 2,286 Haitians, 251 Jamaicans, 143 Cubans, and 254 from other countries.

Refoulement: In 2013 the government signed an agreement with the government of Cuba to expedite removal of detainees. The announced intent of this agreement was to reduce the amount of time Cuban migrants spent in detention; however, concerns persisted that it also allowed for information sharing that heightened the risk of persecution of detainees and their families. In some cases civil society groups claimed the agreement resulted in the repatriation of migrants to Cuba without a sufficient review of pending refugee/asylum claims, creating the potential for persons in need of international protection to be returned to a situation of danger.

Stateless Persons

The government did not effectively implement laws and policies to provide certain habitual residents the opportunity to gain nationality in a timely manner and on a nondiscriminatory basis. Children born in the country to non-Bahamian parents, to an unwed Bahamian father and a non-Bahamian mother, or outside the country to a Bahamian mother and a non-Bahamian father do not acquire citizenship at birth.

Bahamian-born persons of foreign heritage must apply for citizenship during a 12-month window following their 18th birthday, sometimes waiting many years for a government response. The narrow window for application, difficult documentary requirements, and long waiting times left multiple generations without a confirmed nationality. Some commentators reported that these restrictions primarily affected those of Haitian descent. According to Immigration Department figures, 436 persons obtained Bahamian citizenship as of October, including 303 Haitians and 71 Jamaicans.

There were no reliable estimates of the number of persons without a confirmed nationality. The government asserted that a number of "stateless" individuals had a legitimate claim to Haitian citizenship but refused to pursue it due to fear of deportation or loss of future claim to Bahamian citizenship. Such persons often faced waiting periods of several years for the government to decide on their nationality applications and, as a result, lacked proper documentation to secure employment, housing, access to health services, and other public facilities during this period.

Individuals born in the country to non-Bahamian parents were eligible to apply for "Belonger" status that entitled them to work, access to public high school-level education, and a fee-for-service health-care insurance program. Human rights advocates criticized the health insurance program as having unrealistic payment requirements that limited widespread access. Authorities allowed individuals born in the country to non-Bahamian parents to pay the tuition rate for Bahamian students when enrolled in college and while waiting for their request for citizenship to be processed. In August the MFA announced that on December 31, all non-Bahamian students would be required to have a student permit or a passport with a residency stamp to attend school, a requirement some civil rights activists warned many students could not meet. As of October the government claimed it had approved 60 Belonger permits but was unable to verify whether any had been issued; civil society groups reported that none had yet been issued.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution and laws provide citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and citizens exercised that ability.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: Prime Minister Perry Christie took office after his opposition Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) defeated the Free National Movement (FNM) in a general election in May 2012. The PLP won 29 of the 38 parliamentary seats, with 48 percent of the popular vote. The FNM won the remaining nine seats. Election observers from the Organization of American States and foreign embassies found the elections to be generally free and fair.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials; however, the government did not implement the law effectively, and officials engaged in corrupt practices with impunity. There were frequent reports of government corruption during the year.

Corruption: The procurement process was particularly susceptible to corruption, as it is opaque, contains no requirement to engage in open public tenders, and does not allow award decisions to be reviewed. In October the government charged a former state energy-company board member under the Prevention of Bribery Act, the first significant case brought under the act since 1989.

Financial Disclosure: The Public Disclosure Act requires senior public officials, including senators and members of parliament, to declare their assets, income, and liabilities on an annual basis. The government publishes a summary of the individual declarations. There is no independent verification of the submitted data, and the rate of annual submission was weak, except in election years.

Public Access to Information: As of October the government had not issued implementing regulations or taken other steps to bring the 2012 Freedom of Information Act into force. The act provides access to government information upon request from citizens and permanent residents  unless one of several exceptions related to national security, diplomatic exchanges, or the security of a prison or cabinet papers applies  and stipulates a fine of 10,000 Bahamian dollars (B$) ($10,000) for anyone who contravenes the legislation.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A number of international human rights organizations operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases, although the government was less cooperative with domestic organizations.

Government Human Rights Bodies: A governmental commissioner with ombudsman-like duties enjoyed the government's cooperation and was considered effective.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution prohibits discrimination based on race, place of origin, political opinion, or creed, and the law prohibits discrimination based on disability or HIV status. The government did not always effectively enforce these prohibitions, and the constitution and the law contain provisions that discriminate based on gender.

Information in this report reflects the situation in the highly populated areas on New Providence and Grand Bahama. Limited information was available from other less-populated islands.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: Rape is illegal, but the law does not protect against spousal rape, except if the couple is separating, in the process of divorce, or if there is a restraining order in place. The maximum penalty for an initial rape conviction is seven years; the maximum for subsequent rape convictions is life imprisonment. In practice, however, the maximum sentence was 14 years' imprisonment.

Violence against women continued to be a serious, widespread problem. The Bahamas Crisis Center (BCC) estimated that there were more than 1,200 cases of domestic violence annually; the director of social services concurred but stated that less than one case in 10 resulted in police involvement.

The law recognizes domestic violence as a crime separate from assault and battery, and the government generally enforced the law, although women's rights groups cited some reluctance on the part of law enforcement authorities to intervene in domestic disputes. The BCC worked with police by providing them with a counselor referral service when encountering rape victims. The BCC operated a toll-free hotline in New Providence and Grand Bahama, run by trained volunteers to respond to emergency calls 24 hours a day. Governmental and private women's organizations continued public awareness campaigns, highlighting the problems of abuse and domestic violence. The Ministry of Social Services and Community Development's Department of Social Services, in partnership with a private organization, operated a safe house to assist female survivors. The ministry's Bureau of Women's Affairs is responsible for promoting and protecting women's rights.

Sexual Harassment: The law prohibits criminal "quid pro quo" sexual harassment and authorizes penalties of up to B$5,000 ($5,000) and a maximum of two years' imprisonment. There were no official reports of workplace sexual harassment during the year. Civil rights advocates complained that criminal prohibitions were not enforced effectively and asserted that civil remedies were needed, including a prohibition on "hostile environment" sexual harassment.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals generally have the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children; manage their reproductive health; and have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence.

Discrimination: The law does not prohibit discrimination based on gender, and discrimination against women occurred. Women were generally free of economic discrimination, however, and the law provides for equal pay for equal work. The law also provides for the same legal status and rights for women as for men under family, property, and inheritance laws. The law does not provide women with the same right as men to transmit citizenship to their foreign-born spouses. The law also makes it easier for men with foreign spouses than for women with foreign spouses to transmit citizenship to their children.

Children

Birth Registration: Children born in the Bahamas to married parents, one of whom is Bahamian, acquire citizenship at birth. Those born to non-Bahamian parents, to an unwed Bahamian father and a non-Bahamian mother, or outside the country to a Bahamian mother and a non-Bahamian father do not automatically acquire citizenship. In the case of unwed parents, the child takes the citizenship of the mother. All children born in the country may apply for citizenship upon reaching their 18th birthday. There is universal birth registration, and all births must be registered within 21 days of delivery.

Child Abuse: Child abuse and neglect remained serious problems. The RBPF operated a hotline regarding missing or exploited children. The law provides severe penalties for child abuse and requires all persons having contact with a child they believe has been physically or sexually abused to report their suspicions to the police. During the year the government, through the National Child Protection Council, launched a series of public service announcements addressing child abuse.

The penalties for rape of a minor are the same as those for rape of an adult. While a victim's consent is insufficient defense against allegations of statutory rape, it is sufficient defense if an individual can demonstrate that the accused had "reasonable cause to believe that the victim was above 16 years of age," provided the accused was under age 18.

Sexual exploitation of children through incestuous relationships occasionally occurred, and anecdotal reports continued to suggest that this was a particular problem outside Nassau. The Ministry of Social Services may remove children from abusive situations if a court deems it necessary. The ministry provided services to abused and neglected children through a public-private center for children, the public hospital family-violence program, and the Bahamas Crisis Center.

Early and Forced Marriage: The legal minimum age for marriage is 18, although minors may marry at 15 with parental permission.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The minimum age for consensual sex is 16 years. The law considers any association or exposure of a child to prostitution or a prostitution house as cruelty, neglect, or mistreatment of a child. Additionally, the offense of having sex with a minor carries a penalty of life imprisonment. Child pornography is against the law. A person who produces it is liable to life imprisonment; dissemination or possession of it calls for a penalty of 20 years' imprisonment.

International Child Abductions: The country is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For information see the Department of State's report on compliance at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/legal/compliance.html and country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/country/bahamas.html.

Anti-Semitism

The local Jewish community numbered approximately 300 persons. There were no reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

During the year the government passed the implementing legislation for the 2014 Persons with Disabilities Act. The law addresses issues of employment, education, and access, and it gives businesses and public buildings two years to make needed access improvements. Although the previous law mandated access for persons with physical disabilities in new public buildings, authorities rarely enforced this requirement, and very few buildings and public facilities were accessible to persons with disabilities. The Education Act affords equal access for students, but only as resources permit, with this decision made by individual schools. On less-populated islands, children with learning disabilities often sat disengaged in the back of classrooms because resources were not available. Other legislation prohibits discrimination based on disability.

A mix of government and private residential and nonresidential institutions provided education, training, counseling, and job placement services for adults and children with disabilities.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

The country's racial and ethnic groups generally coexisted peacefully, but anti-Haitian prejudice and resentment regarding Haitian immigration was widespread. According to unofficial estimates, between 40,000 and 80,000 residents were Haitians or persons of Haitian descent, making them the largest ethnic minority. Many persons of Haitian origin lived in shantytowns with limited sewage and garbage services, law enforcement, or other infrastructure. For example, a number of shantytowns on New Providence and other islands consisted of houses built from trash and discarded building materials, with few organizational, infrastructure, or sanitation measures in place. The government occasionally evicted residents and demolished some settlements due to health and safety concerns. Fires frequently broke out in Haitian shantytowns in Nassau, at least some of which were deliberately set, according to human rights organizations. Authorities generally granted Haitian children access to education and social services, but interethnic tensions and inequities persisted. Haitians generally had difficulty in securing citizenship, residence, or work permits.

In November 2014 the government began conducting large-scale immigration raids in Haitian neighborhoods and increased deportations of Haitian immigrants. Members of the community, as well as human rights NGOs, argued that the raids were conducted without probable cause and marred by verbal and physical abuse.

Members of the Haitian community complained of discrimination in the job market, specifically that identity and work-permit documents were controlled by employers seeking advantage by threat of deportation. Some also complained of tactics used by immigration officials in raids of Haitian or suspected Haitian communities. Government actions to address these communities often met political resistance, as many Bahamians employed Haitians as cheap labor.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Activists reported that societal discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) individuals occurred, with some persons claiming job and housing discrimination based upon sexual orientation. Victims had no legal recourse, as the law provides no protection from such discrimination (see section 7.d.). Although sexual activity between same-sex consenting adults is legal, the law defines the age of consent for same-sex couples as 18, compared with 16 for heterosexual couples.

The country has no LGBTI hate-crime legislation. Activists reported that LGBTI individuals rarely reported abuse to authorities, often because of reluctance to reveal their sexual orientation rather from fear of police harassment.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

Stigma and employment discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS were high, but there were no reports of violence against persons with HIV/AIDS. The law prohibits discrimination in employment based on HIV/AIDS status. Children with HIV/AIDS also faced discrimination, and authorities often did not tell teachers that a child was HIV positive for fear of verbal abuse from both educators and peers. The government maintained a home for orphaned children infected with HIV/AIDS.

An independent facility known as the All Saints Camp, which received some government funding, operated as a hospice for approximately 40 HIV-infected individuals. Those in contact with the camp alleged extreme neglect of the HIV-infected individuals living at the camp, including nonnutritious and irregular meals and improper or inadequate basic medical care. The camp administrator reported that it did not employ nurses or other medical staff and that sick individuals living there took care of themselves or employed their own visiting nurses. During the year several religious organizations provided physical improvements to the facility, adding some individualized bathrooms and greater electrical options for fans and refrigerators, but living conditions remained generally unsanitary.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides for the right of workers to form and join independent unions, participate in collective bargaining, and conduct legal strikes. The law prohibits antiunion discrimination. By law employers can be compelled to reinstate workers illegally fired for union activity. Members of the police force, defense force, fire brigade, and prison guards may not organize or join unions.

Enforcement of labor laws was weak. There was no information on the adequacy of enforcement resources. Fines varied widely by case and were not sufficient to deter violations. Administrative and judicial procedures were subject to lengthy delays and appeals. In 2014 the Ministry of Labor and National Insurance reported 712 labor violation complaints from January to October and stated that it had 16 officers who resolved the majority of these cases in a timely manner. The government did not provide updated statistics during the year. By law labor disputes must first be filed with the ministry, and if not resolved, they are transferred to an industrial tribunal, which determines penalties (fines) and remedies, up to a maximum of 26 weeks of an employee's pay. The tribunal's decision is final and can be appealed in court only on a strict question of law. Authorities reported a case backlog of up to three years at the tribunal.

Freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining were generally respected. There were reports that some employers utilized individual contracts instead of collective bargaining. An experienced trade unionist assisted the ministry to streamline the collective bargaining process. Workers occasionally filed disputes with the authorities involving "union-busting" charges, specifically in the financial services sector, although none had been filed as of October.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor, although there were reports that forced labor occurred.

The government did not always effectively enforce applicable law. Although the Ministry of Labor and National Insurance received no reports of forced labor during the year, local NGOs noted that exploited workers often did not report their circumstances to government officials for fear of deportation and lack of education about available resources. There was no information on the adequacy of resources, inspections, and remediation. Penalties for forced labor ranged from three to 10 years' imprisonment and were sufficiently stringent to deter violations.

Undocumented migrants were vulnerable to forced labor, especially in domestic servitude and in the agriculture sector. There were reports that noncitizen laborers, often of Haitian origin, were vulnerable to forced labor and suffered abuses at the hands of their employers, who were responsible for endorsing their work permits on an annual basis. Specifically, local sources indicated that employers reportedly obtained B$1,000 ($1,000) work permits for noncitizen employees and then required them to "work off" the permit fee over the course of their employment or otherwise risk losing the permit and their ability to work legally within the country.

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The law prohibits the employment of children under age 14 for industrial work or work during school hours. Children under age 16 may not work at night. Children between the ages 14 and 18 may work outside of school hours under the following conditions: in a school day, for not more than three hours; in a school week, for not more than 24 hours; in a nonschool day, for not more than eight hours; in a nonschool week, for not more than 40 hours. (Note: An exception existed for "packaging boys" at grocery stores, who were as young as age 12 and could work no more than three hours after school, but this expired early in the year. The government did not enforce this change during the year.) The law prohibits persons younger than age 18 from engaging in dangerous work including construction, mining, and road building. There was no legal minimum age for employment in other sectors. Occupational health and safety restrictions apply to all younger workers.

The government made efforts to enforce the law, with labor inspectors proactively sent to stores and businesses on a regular basis, but resource constraints limited their effectiveness. The Ministry of Labor and National Insurance reported no severe violations of child labor laws, although inspectors reported several instances of children working in small merchant businesses or excess hours in grocery stores. The penalty for violations of child labor law is a fine between B$1,000 ($1,000) and B$1,500 ($1,500). This punitive action was sufficient to deter violations.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

The law prohibits discrimination in employment based on race, creed, sex, marital status, political opinion, age, HIV status, or disability, but not in regard to language, sexual orientation and/or gender identity, or social status. The government did not effectively enforce the law. One individual reported being fired from a school security position due to his orientation. Discrimination in employment and occupation occurred with respect to persons with HIV/AIDS (see section 6). Foreign migrant workers were not consistently afforded legal protections.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

In July the Ministry of Labor and National Insurance raised the minimum wage from B$4.00 ($4.00) to B$5.25 ($5.25) per hour. In 2013 the official poverty level was adjusted to B$4,247 ($4,247) a year. In June the government appointed a National Tripartite Council to implement the statutory provisions of International Labor Organization Convention 144 and ensure effective consultation among employers, government, and workers.

The law provides for a 40-hour workweek, a 24-hour rest period, and time-and-a-half payment for hours worked beyond the standard workweek. The law stipulates paid annual holidays and prohibits compulsory overtime. The law does not place a cap on overtime. The government set health and safety standards appropriate to the industries. According to the Ministry of Labor and National Insurance, the law protects all workers, including migrant workers, in areas including wages, working hours, working conditions, and occupational and safety standards. Workers did not have the right to refuse to work under hazardous conditions, and legal standards did not cover undocumented and informal economy workers.

The ministry was responsible for enforcing labor laws, including the minimum wage, and fielded a team of 16 inspectors that conducted onsite visits to enforce occupational health and safety standards and investigate employee concerns and complaints, although inspections occurred infrequently. The ministry generally announced inspection visits in advance, and employers generally cooperated with inspectors to implement safety standards. It was uncertain whether these inspections were effective in enforcing health and safety standards. The government did not levy fines for noncompliance but occasionally forced a work stoppage. Such penalties were not sufficiently stringent to deter violations. Working conditions varied, and mold was a problem in schools and government facilities.

Authorities reported one workplace fatality during the year, a construction worker who fell from scaffolding and died as a result of his injuries.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Austria

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Austria, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/571612a2c5.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Republic of Austria is a parliamentary democracy with constitutional power shared between a popularly elected president and a bicameral parliament (federal assembly). The multiparty parliament and the coalition government it elects exercise most day-to-day governmental powers. National parliamentary elections in September 2013 and presidential elections in 2010 were free and fair. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the security forces.

There continued to be reports that police at times used excessive force, particularly against members of minority groups. Societal discrimination persisted against ethnic minorities, including Muslims, immigrants, Roma, Jews, and foreigners of African origin.

Other reported problems included laws restricting freedom of speech by forbidding denial of Nazi genocide as well as hate speech based on race, nationality, religion, or ethnicity. At times overcrowded and difficult conditions emerged at facilities for the thousands of refugees and asylum seekers who arrived in the country during the year. There were some anti-Semitic incidents, including physical attacks, taunting, property damage, and vilifying or threatening letters and telephone calls. Laws mandating access for persons with disabilities were not fully enforced.

The government investigated public officials for suspected wrongdoing and punished those who committed abuses.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The law prohibits such practices, but there were some reports that police used excessive force with detainees and psychiatric patients.

On November 9, the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) released a report on its September-October 2014 visit to police establishments, prisons, and a psychiatric establishment in the country. While the vast majority of detained persons interviewed by the CPT had been treated correctly in police custody, the CPT received several allegations of excessive use of force at time of apprehension. These included kicks and punches after police brought the concerned person under control and allegations that police used excessive force while transferring psychiatric patients to the Otto Wagner Psychiatric Hospital. The CPT also received a few allegations that police subjected detainees to physical mistreatment during questioning.

The government investigated allegations of such practices and prosecuted cases in which credible evidence existed. The Human Rights Advisory Council and the federal ombudsmen monitored police respect for human rights and made recommendations to the Minister of the Interior.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prisons and detention center conditions generally met international standards and the government permitted visits by independent human rights observers.

Physical Conditions: The reported incidence of death in prisons and pretrial detention centers was low, although specific numbers were not available. In its November 9 report, the CPT expressed "serious concern" about the almost total lack of medical confidentiality in all the establishments visited and the fact that prison officers with only basic health care training performed health-related tasks normally reserved for qualified nurses.

In reaction to a case that became public in 2014 involving the neglect of a prison inmate with mental disabilities, there was a restructuring of the prison system administration during the year, with a unit in the justice ministry taking over the overall management and supervision.

Administration: The government investigated and monitored prison and detention center conditions. The federal ombudsman's office may investigate allegations of inhuman conditions on behalf of prisoners and detainees.

Independent Monitoring: Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) monitored detainees on a regular basis. Human rights groups continued to criticize the incarceration of nonviolent offenders, including persons awaiting deportation, for long periods in single cells or inadequate facilities designed for temporary detention. The CPT conducted periodic visits to the country, most recently in September-October 2014 to examine the treatment of persons in police custody and prison as well as detention center conditions for migrants. The CPT also visited a psychiatric hospital to examine the use of physical restraints.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The law prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the police and army, and the government had effective mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption. The national police maintains internal security and reports to the Ministry of the Interior. The army is responsible for external security but also has some domestic security responsibilities and reports to the Defense Ministry. The criminal courts are responsible for investigating police violations of the law.

NGOs continued to criticize the police for allegedly targeting minorities for frequent identity checks. Racial sensitivity training for police and other officials continued with NGO assistance.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

Authorities base arrests on sufficient evidence and legal warrants issued by a duly authorized official. Authorities bring the arrested person before an independent judiciary. In criminal cases the law allows investigative or pretrial detention for no more than 48 hours, during which time a judge may decide to grant a prosecution request for extended detention. The law specifies the grounds for investigative detention and conditions for bail. There were strict checks on the enforcement of pretrial detention restrictions and bail provisions, and a judge is required to evaluate investigative detention cases periodically. The maximum duration for investigative detention is two years. There is a functioning bail system. Police and judicial authorities generally respected these laws and procedures. There were isolated reports of police abuse, which authorities investigated.

Detainees have the right to a lawyer. Although indigent criminal suspects have the right to an attorney at government expense, the law requires appointment of an attorney only after a court decision to remand such suspects into custody (96 hours after apprehension). Criminal suspects are not legally required to answer questions without an attorney present. Laws providing for compensation for persons unlawfully detained were enforced.

In its November 9 report the CPT found it unacceptable that authorities were continuing the practice of subjecting juveniles, some as young as 14, to police questioning and asking them to sign statements without having a lawyer or a trusted person present. The report also noted that indigent persons could not usually benefit from the presence of a lawyer during police questioning.

Protracted Detention of Rejected Asylum Seekers or Stateless Persons: In rare cases authorities detained unsuccessful applicants for asylum pending deportation. Some NGOs criticized the government for protracted detention in such cases. The government provided free legal counsel for persons awaiting deportation.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The law provides for an independent judiciary, and the government generally respected judicial independence.

Trial Procedures

The law provides for the right to a fair trial, and an independent judiciary generally enforced this right.

The law presumes persons charged with criminal offenses are innocent until proven guilty; authorities inform them promptly and in detail of the charges with free interpretation if required. Trials must be public and conducted orally; juries are used in trials for major offenses. Attorneys are not mandatory in cases of minor offenses, but legal counsel is available at no charge for needy persons in cases where attorneys are mandatory. The law grants defendants and their attorneys adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense and have access to government-held evidence relevant to their cases. Defendants can confront or question witnesses against them and present witnesses and evidence on their own behalf. They cannot be compelled to testify or confess guilt. A system of judicial review provides multiple opportunities for appeal.

The law extends the above rights to all citizens regardless of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or mental or physical disability.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

There is an independent and impartial judiciary in civil matters, including an appellate system. These institutions are accessible to plaintiffs seeking damages for human rights violations. Administrative and judicial remedies were available for redressing alleged wrongs.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The law prohibits such actions, and there were no reports the government failed to respect these prohibitions.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution provides for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respected these rights. An independent press, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of speech and the press.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: The law prohibits incitement, insult, or contempt against a group because of its members' race, nationality, religion, or ethnicity if the statement violates human dignity. The government strictly enforced these laws (see section 6, Anti-Semitism).

Press and Media Freedoms: The law prohibits public denial, belittlement, approval, or justification of the Nazi genocide or other Nazi crimes against humanity in print publication, broadcast, or other media. The government strictly enforced these laws (see section 6, Anti-Semitism).

Libel/Slander Laws: Strict libel and slander laws created conditions that discouraged reporting of governmental abuse. For example, many observers believed the ability and willingness of the police to sue for libel or slander discouraged individuals from reporting police abuses.

Internet Freedom

With limited exceptions the government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority. Authorities continued to restrict access to websites containing information that violated the law, such as neo-Nazi sites. The law barring neo-Nazi activity provides for one- to 10-year prison sentences for public denial, belittlement, approval, or justification of National Socialist crimes. The criminal code provision on incitement provides for prison sentences of up to five years. Authorities restricted access to prohibited websites by trying to shut them and forbidding the country's internet service providers from carrying them.

The neo-Nazi website "Alpen-Donau.info," whose members received prison sentences on charges of neo-Nazi activity in 2013, went online again in 2014. The website opposed the country's laws prohibiting neo-Nazi information and activities. The Interior Ministry reportedly monitored the website.

In August a Graz court convicted a man on charges of incitement and neo-Nazi activity after he denied the Holocaust and made derogatory statements against Muslims on a neo-Nazi website that he also helped to finance (see section 6, Anti-Semitism).

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

The law provides for the freedoms of assembly and association, and the government generally respected these rights.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The law provides for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights. The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, or other persons of concern.

In-country Movement: Asylum seekers' freedom of movement is restricted to the district of the reception center where authorities assigned them for the duration of their initial application process until the country's responsibility for examining the application is determined. Under the law asylum seekers must be physically present in the centers of first reception for up to 120 hours during the initial application process. Authorities have 20 days in which to determine the country's responsibility and jurisdiction and whether they have purview.

Protection of Refugees

During the year many countries in the EU and Southeast Europe experienced an unprecedented wave of migration from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, consisting of a mix of asylum seekers/potential refugees, economic migrants, and trafficking victims, among others. For simplicity, this report will refer to these populations as 'migrants and asylum seekers' if more specific information is not available.

Access to Asylum: The law provides for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government established a system for providing protection to refugees.

The law gives the Federal Office for Immigration and Asylum (BFA) responsibility for handling asylum applications. Established on January 1, the BFA operated nine regional directorates (one in each federal state) and three reception centers. In addition to processing asylum applications, the BFA is responsible for alien police matters (return decisions and custody pending deportation) and certain decisions on humanitarian stays. The Federal Administrative Court in Vienna is the appeals body for decisions of the BFA and has branches in Linz, Graz, and Innsbruck. Access to the administrative high court is limited to cases involving principal legal policy questions.

As of December 10, approximately 81,900 persons had applied for asylum in the country during the year, compared with 28,000 in 2014. Administrative proceedings were often lengthy, particularly as the country became a major destination for migrants and asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries. During the year the government started to decentralize admission procedures and, with a law that entered into force in October, distribute asylum seekers more fairly among the country's states and municipalities.

The sharp increase in asylum seekers led to significant overcrowding of the private contractor operated Federal Reception Center East at Traiskirchen, Lower Austria. In August, Amnesty International criticized conditions there, in particular deficiencies in shelter, medical care, hygiene, and services for minors. During an August visit a UNHCR representative also characterized conditions in the camp as "inhumane" and appealed to authorities to stop accepting new arrivals as hundreds were sleeping outside without shelter due to overcrowding. On August 5, the government temporarily stopped accepting new arrivals there, with the Interior Minister calling the situation "no longer tolerable for the asylum-seekers," and authorities took measures to improve conditions. In September after the numbers of asylum seekers in the center decreased, a visiting EU commissioner gave a positive assessment of conditions at the center.

From October to November, the number of asylum seekers arriving daily at Traiskirchen decreased from to 600 to 80. As the center could provide heated accommodation for a maximum of 1,700-1,800 asylum seekers, additional persons, with the exception of minors, women, families with small children, and persons with special needs, were referred to emergency shelters or NGOs after their registration as asylum seekers. In December the Traiskirchen center set up a heated tent with a capacity for approximately 150 persons as an additional facility for arriving asylum seekers to register. Capacity at the Traiskirchen center was insufficient due to the difficulty of relocating record numbers of asylum seekers to housing across the country's nine provinces. The establishment of additional, smaller initial reception centers in other parts of the country in the course of the year provided some relief for Traiskirchen. Implementation of a federal law that went into effect in October, allowing the government to enforce distribution of asylum seekers in municipalities across the country, resulted in accommodation for additional 3,000 asylum seekers. As of December the Traiskirchen center housed 1,685 asylum seekers.

Durable Solutions: There are provisions for integration, resettlement, and returns, which the country is cooperating with UNHCR and other organizations to improve. The integration section in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Integration, together with the Integration Fund and provincial and local integration offices, coordinate measures for integration of refugees. In addition to the high number of asylum seekers, the country initiated a resettlement program for Syrian refugees. The country has bilateral agreements with several countries on implementing the return of rejected asylum seekers.

Safe Country of Origin/Transit: EU regulations provide that asylum seekers who transited a country determined to be "safe" on their way to Austria be returned to that country to apply for refugee status. Authorities considered signatories to the 1951 refugee convention and its 1967 protocol to be safe countries of transit. In response to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights and recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, the government in 2011 effectively halted the return of asylum seekers to Greece. This practice remained in effect during the year.

Starting at the end of August, during a major wave of migrants and asylum seekers arriving in the country from Hungary and destined for Germany, authorities performed random checks and allowed refugees to transit to Germany. In August authorities increased vehicle checks along the border with Hungary after the discovery of 71 migrant bodies in a truck on an Austrian highway where the migrants were presumably en route to Germany from Hungary.

Employment: While asylum seekers and refugees are legally restricted from seeking regular employment, they are eligible for seasonal employment, low-paying community service jobs, or professional training in sectors that require additional apprentices. A work permit is required for seasonal employment but not for professional training. An employer must request the work permit for the employee.

Temporary Protection: According to the Interior Ministry, in 2014 the government provided subsidiary protection to 3,609 individuals who might not qualify as refugees.

Stateless Persons

According to UNHCR there were 570 persons in the country under its statelessness mandate at the end of 2014. Stateless persons in the country are largely Austrian-born children of foreign nationals who are unable to acquire citizenship through their parents due to the laws in their parents' country of origin. Authorities do not deport them because of their lack of a home country. There are laws to remediate statelessness partially. A stateless person born in the country may be granted citizenship within two years of reaching age 18 if he or she has lived in the country for a total of 10 years, including five years continuously before application, and are able to demonstrate sufficient income. Stateless persons can receive temporary residence and work permits that must be renewed annually.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The law provides citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and citizens exercised that ability.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: The country held national parliamentary elections in 2013 and presidential elections in 2010. There were no reports of serious abuse or irregularities in either election, and credible observers considered them free and fair.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, and anticorruption laws and regulations extend to civil servants, public officials, governors, members of parliament, and employees or representatives of state-owned companies. The government generally implemented the law effectively, but a number of high-profile cases have dragged on for years during lengthy investigations without authorities filing charges. The law criminalizes corrupt practices by citizens outside the country. The penalty for bribery is up to 10 years in prison.

Corruption: In February parliament established an ad hoc investigative panel to clarify political responsibilities for multi-billion-euro losses accrued since 2000 by the then regional lender Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank, owned by the Austrian province of Carinthia. In 2009 the federal government bought the bank for a token amount and nationalized it; covering the bank's losses was estimated to have cost the government more than five billion euros ($5.5 billion).

Financial Disclosure: Public officials are subject to financial disclosure laws, and there were no reports officials failed to comply with disclosure requirements. Politicians must and do publicly disclose biannually when they earn more than 1,142 euros ($1,260) for certain activities, but they are not required to disclose the amounts earned. The law does not require public officials to file disclosure reports upon leaving office. There are no sanctions for noncompliance.

Public Access to Information: The law provides for full public access to government information, and the government generally respected this provision. Authorities may only deny access to information that would violate personal data protection rights by disclosing sensitive personal data on racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical reliefs, trade union membership, health, or sex life or would involve national security information. Petitioners could challenge denials of access to information before the administrative court.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A number of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials generally were cooperative and responsive to their views.

Government Human Rights Bodies: A human rights ombudsman's office consisting of three independent commissioners examines complaints against the government. There is a parliamentary human rights committee.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The law provides for protection against discrimination based on race, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, age, language, and HIV-positive status or other communicable diseases, and the government generally enforced these protections.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: Rape, including spousal rape, is punishable by up to 15 years' imprisonment. The government generally enforced the law. Law enforcement response to rape and domestic violence was effective. Women's NGOs estimated charges were filed in 10 percent of rape cases and only 13 percent of those led to convictions, due to lack of credible evidence.

Domestic violence is punishable under the criminal code provisions for murder, rape, sexual abuse, and bodily injury. There were reports of violence against women, including spousal abuse. Police can issue a two-week order barring abusive family members from contact with survivors. The order can be extended to four weeks, and a court may further extend the order.

Under the law the government provided psychosocial care in addition to legal aid and support throughout the judicial process to survivors of gender-based violence. Police training programs addressed sexual or gender-based violence and domestic abuse.

The government funded privately operated intervention centers and hotlines for victims of domestic abuse. The centers provided for victims' safety, assessed the threat posed by perpetrators, helped victims develop plans to stop the abuse, and provided legal counseling and other social services. NGOs observing these centers were generally effective in providing shelter for victims of abuse.

Sexual Harassment: The law prohibits sexual harassment, and the government generally enforced the law. Labor courts may order employers to compensate victims of sexual harassment based on the Federal Equality Commission's finding in a case. The law entitles a victim to a minimum of 1,000 euros ($1,100) in compensation.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children; manage their reproductive health; and have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, and violence.

Discrimination: Women enjoy the same legal rights as men, including under family, labor, property, nationality, and inheritance laws. Discrimination in employment and occupation occurred with respect to women (see section 7.d.).

Children

Birth Registration: By law children derive citizenship from one or both parents. Officials register births immediately.

Child Abuse: According to Interior Ministry statistics, authorities received 1,623 reports of child abuse in 2014, most involving intercourse with a minor. Child abuse is punishable by up to five years' imprisonment, which may be extended to 10 years if the victim dies because of negligence. Severe sexual abuse or rape of a minor is punishable by up to 20 years' imprisonment, which may be increased to life imprisonment if the victim dies because of the abuse.

The government continued its efforts to monitor child abuse and prosecute offenders. The Ministry for Economics, Family, and Youth estimated close family members or family friends committed 90 percent of child abuse. Officials noted a growing readiness to report cases of such abuse.

Early and Forced Marriage: The minimum legal age for marriage is 18 years. Adolescents between 16 and 18 years may legally contract a marriage if they obtain a special permit for this purpose. NGOs estimated there were approximately 200 cases of early marriage annually, primarily in the Muslim and Romani communities.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The law provides up to 10 years' imprisonment for an adult convicted of sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 14, the minimum age for consensual sex. If the victim becomes pregnant, the sentence may be extended to 15 years. According to government statistics, there were 615 cases of sexual abuse or severe sexual abuse of minors reported to authorities in 2014.

It is a crime to possess, trade, or privately view child pornography. Exchanging pornographic videos of children is illegal. Possession of child pornography is punishable by up to two years' imprisonment, while trading in child pornography is punishable by up to 10 years' imprisonment. According to government statistics, authorities received 465 reports of abuses in 2014.

International Child Abductions: The country is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For information see the Department of State's report on compliance at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/legal/compliance.html and country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/country/austria.html.

Anti-Semitism

According to the Vienna Jewish Community's figures, the Jewish community in the country numbered approximately 7,300 persons.

The NGO Forum against Anti-Semitism reported 255 anti-Semitic incidents during 2014. These included nine physical assaults in addition to name calling, graffiti and defacement, threatening letters, dissemination of anti-Semitic writings, property damage, and vilifying letters and telephone calls. The government provided extra protection to the Vienna Jewish Community's offices and other Jewish community institutions in the country, such as schools and museums, following the January terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen, after Jewish officials reported a rise in anti-Semitic attacks by Muslims and increased fears of terrorist attacks within the community.

In September a Linz court convicted a Turkish man of neo-Nazi activity for posting pictures of Adolf Hitler on Facebook along with a statement praising the death of Jews and sentenced the man to a two-year suspended prison sentence. The case was initially closed because the prosecutor argued that the postings were a legitimate expression criticizing Israel at the time of the Israeli military operation against Hamas in 2014. In February the Linz chief prosecutor ordered the resumption of the investigation.

There were several cases of neo-Nazi-related vandalism and hate speech, including death threats, "hate speech" on the internet, and the hacking of the website of the Mauthausen Memorial, a former concentration camp.

School curricula included discussion of the Holocaust, the tenets of different religions, and advocacy of religious tolerance. The Education Ministry offered special teacher training seminars on Holocaust education and conducted training projects with the Anti-Defamation League.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The law prohibits discrimination against persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities in housing, employment, education, air travel and other transportation, access to health care, and other government services. The government did not effectively enforce these provisions. Employment discrimination against persons with disabilities occurred (see section 7.d.).

While federal law mandates access to public buildings for persons with physical disabilities, NGOs complained many public buildings lacked such access due to insufficient enforcement of the law and low penalties for noncompliance. The Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs, and Consumer Protection handled disability-related problems. The government funded a wide range of programs for persons with disabilities, including transportation and other assistance to help integrate schoolchildren with disabilities into regular classes and employees with disabilities into the workplace.

In 2013 the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities released a report that criticized the fragmentation of disability policy between federal and state governments, the lack of employment opportunities for persons with disabilities, and authorities' failure to integrate children with disabilities into the educational system.

The UN Periodic Review of Austria on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, published in 2013, criticized aspects of the country's laws and institutional settings. Criticized practices included the use of net beds and other forms of nonconsensual practices in psychiatric hospitals and institutions. The law allows involuntary confinement in a psychiatric institution when a person has a psychosocial disability and is at risk of endangering themselves or others. The UN review also expressed concern that the population of persons with disabilities who were institutionalized had increased over the previous 20 years. During the year the ombudsman for persons with disabilities and the Minister of Social Affairs urged businesses to comply with quotas for employment of persons with disabilities.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Interior Ministry statistics released in March cited 357 neo-Nazi, right-wing extremist, xenophobic, or anti-Semitic incidents in 2014. The government continued to express concern over the activities of extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi groups, many with links to organizations in other countries.

An NGO operating a hotline for victims of racist incidents reported 794 complaints in 2014. It reported a number of cases involving racial discrimination in housing, shops, or banks and pointed to problems involving discrimination by police and justice authorities. It noted that hate speech was most commonly directed against Jews, Muslims, and Roma, as well as asylum seekers, and displayed a suspicion of Muslims, who were increasingly victims of prejudice.

After attacks in Paris and Copenhagen by apparent Islamic extremists in January, there were several reported incidents of Islamophobic graffiti at mosques. A documentation center set up by the Islamic Faith Community for reporting Islamophobic incidents in 2014 noted that after mid-2014, Islamophobic incidents markedly increased.

Federal law recognizes Croats, Czechs, Hungarians, Roma, Slovaks, and Slovenes as national minorities. Human rights groups continued to report that Roma faced discrimination in employment and housing. The Austrian Romani Cultural Association estimated the Romani community consisted of more than 6,200 indigenous and between 15,000 and 20,000 nonindigenous individuals. The head of the association reported the situation of Roma continued to improve. Government programs, including financing for tutors, helped school-age Romani children move out of "special needs" and into mainstream classes.

NGOs reported Africans living in the country experienced verbal harassment or were subject to violence in public. In some cases citizens stigmatized black Africans for perceived involvement in the drug trade or other illegal activities.

The government continued training programs to combat racism and educate police in cultural sensitivity. The Interior Ministry renewed an annual agreement with a Jewish group to teach police officers cultural sensitivity, religious tolerance, and the acceptance of minorities.

Poor German-language skills were a major factor preventing members of minorities from entering the workforce. The Labor Ministry continued efforts to improve the situation by providing German-language instruction and skilled-labor training to young persons with immigrant backgrounds. Compulsory preschool programs, including some one- and two-year pilot programs, sought to remedy language deficiencies for nonnative German speakers.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Antidiscrimination laws apply to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) persons. There was some societal prejudice against LGBTI persons but no reports of violence or discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Hate crime laws prohibit incitement, including incitement based on sexual orientation. LGBTI organizations generally operated freely. Civil society groups, however, criticized the lack of a mechanism to prevent service providers from discriminating against LGBTI individuals.

According to a 2013 EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) study, the situation of LGBTI rights in the country was "mediocre." The study found that 89 percent of openly LGBTI persons under age 18 claimed to have been bullied in school or in apprenticeships because of their sexual orientation. The study also found discrimination in employment against LGBTI persons (see section 7.d.). According to the FRA study, the situation was different in Vienna, which was "at the vanguard" of LGBTI rights.

In January the Constitutional Court ruled that the ban on adoption by same-sex couples in the adoption law was illegal and was to be lifted as of January 2016.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides the right of workers to form and join independent unions, conduct legal strikes, and bargain collectively. It prohibits antiunion discrimination or retaliation against strikers and provides for the reinstatement of workers fired for union activity. It allows unions to conduct their activities without interference. The Austrian Trade Union Federation was the exclusive entity representing workers in collective bargaining. Unions were technically independent of government and political parties, although some sectors had unions closely associated with parties.

The government effectively enforced applicable laws. Resources, inspections, and remediation were adequate. The penalties required by law for violations were not available. Administrative and judicial procedures were not overly lengthy.

There were few reports of antiunion discrimination or other forms of employer interference in union functions. The government recognized the right to strike. Authorities enforced laws providing for collective bargaining and protecting unions from interference and workers from retaliation for union activities.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor. Forced labor occurred in several sectors.

The government effectively enforced the law, and resources, inspections, and remediation were adequate. Labor inspectors and revenue authorities conducted routine site visits to identify forced labor. Depending on the specific offense, penalties ranged from three to 20 years' imprisonment and were sufficient to deter violations.

There were some trafficked men and women working in the agriculture, construction, and catering sectors. There were also some traffickers who subjected Romani children and physically and mentally disabled persons to forced begging.

In addition to government-initiated forced labor awareness campaigns and workshops, labor inspectors and revenue authorities conducted routine site visits to identify forced labor.

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The minimum legal working age is 15, with the exception that children who are at least age 12 may engage in certain forms of light work on family farms or businesses. Children who are age 15 and older are subject to the same regulations on hours, rest periods, overtime wages, and occupational health and safety restrictions as adults but are subject to additional restrictions on hazardous forms of work or for ethical reasons.

Laws and policies protect children from exploitation in the workplace and prohibit forced or compulsory labor, and the government generally enforced these laws and policies effectively.

The labor inspectorate of the Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs, and Consumer Protection is responsible for enforcing child labor laws and policies in the workplace, and the inspectorate enforced the laws effectively. Penalties in the form of fines ranged from 70 to 1,090 euros ($77 to $1,200), or twice those amounts in cases of repeated violations of the child labor code, and were sufficient to deter violations.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

Labor laws and regulations related to employment or occupation prohibit discrimination regarding race, sex, gender, disability, language, sexual orientation or gender identity, HIV-positive (or other communicable disease) status, or social status. The government effectively enforced these laws and regulations.

Discrimination in employment and occupation occurred with respect to women, persons with disabilities, and members of certain minorities.

The law requires equal pay for equal work. To establish greater transparency and reduce the pay gap between men and women, the government required reporting on salaries by position and gender for companies with more than 250 employees. The participation rate for women between the ages of 15 and 64 in the labor force was 67 percent, compared with 75 percent for men. Approximately 47 percent of employed women worked part time, compared with 32 percent in 2000.

Female employees in the private sector may invoke laws prohibiting discrimination against women. Depending on the Federal Equality Commission's findings, labor courts may award the equivalent of up to four months' salary to women found to have experienced gender discrimination in promotion. The courts may also order compensation for women denied a post despite having equal qualifications.

According to a 2013 EU Fundamental Rights Agency study, 20 percent of openly homosexual employed persons reported labor discrimination based on their sexual orientation.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

There is no legislated national minimum wage. Instead, nationwide collective bargaining agreements covered between 98 and 99 percent of the workforce and set minimum wages by job classification for each industry. All collective bargaining agreements provided for a de facto minimum wage of 1,200 euros ($1,320) per month for full-time jobs. Where no such collective agreements existed, such as for domestic workers, custodial staff, and au pairs, wages were generally lower than those covered by collective bargaining agreements. The official poverty risk level was 1,161 euros ($1,280) per month.

The law provides for a maximum workweek of 40 hours, although collective bargaining agreements established 38- or 38.5-hour workweeks for more than half of all employees. Regulations to increase work-hour flexibility allowed companies to increase the maximum regular time from 40 hours to 50 hours per week with overtime. In special cases work hours may be increased to a maximum of 60 hours per week, including overtime, for a maximum of 24 weeks annually. These 24 weeks, however, can only be in eight-week segments, with at least a two-week break between each eight-week period.

Overtime is officially limited to five hours per week and 60 hours per year. Authorities did not enforce these laws and regulations effectively, and some employers exceeded legal limits on compulsory overtime. Collective bargaining agreements can specify higher limits. The law stipulates premium pay of 50 percent for overtime and requires time off for work on weekends and official holidays. An employee must have at least 11 hours off between workdays. Authorities enforced wage and hour standards equitably for all groups.

Foreign workers in both the formal and informal sectors made up approximately 13 percent of the country's workforce. Authorities did not enforce wage and hour regulations effectively in the informal sector.

The labor inspectorate regularly enforced mandatory occupational health and safety standards. Its approximately 300 inspectors routinely checked the country's nearly 210,000 worksites. Resources and remediation remained adequate. Penalties for violators range from 166 to 16,648 euros ($183 to $18,300). In the case of violations resulting in serious injury or death, the employer faces prosecution under the penal code. The government extended its Occupational Safety and Health Strategy 2007-12 initiative until 2020. The initiative focused on educational and preventive measures, including strengthening public awareness of danger and risk assessment (plus evaluation); preventing work-related illnesses and occupational diseases; training as well as information on occupational safety and health; and improving the training of prevention experts.

Workers could file complaints anonymously with the labor inspectorate, which could sue the employer on behalf of the employee. Workers rarely exercised this option and normally relied instead on the nongovernmental workers' advocacy group and the Chamber of Labor, which filed suits on their behalf. Workers in the informal economy generally did not benefit from social protections. To receive health-care benefits, unemployment insurance, and pensions, workers generally had to pay into the system, although nonworkers could qualify for coverage in certain cases.

Workers can remove themselves from situations that endanger health or safety without jeopardy to their employment. The Employment and Labor Relations Federal Public Service protected employees in this situation.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Australia

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Australia, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/571612a315.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Australia is a constitutional democracy with a freely elected federal parliamentary government. In free and fair federal parliamentary elections held in September 2013, the Liberal Party and National Party coalition won a majority in the 150-seat House of Representatives and formed a government with Tony Abbott as prime minister. In September a leadership challenge within the Liberal Party resulted in a change of the prime minister from Tony Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the security forces.

The main human rights problems were domestic violence against women and children, particularly in indigenous communities; indigenous disadvantage; and policies affecting asylum seekers, including detention and detention center conditions for some attempting to reach the country by sea.

The government took steps to prosecute officials accused of abuses, and ombudsmen, human rights bodies, and internal government mechanisms responded effectively to complaints.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were no reports the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The law prohibits such practices, and the government generally respected these provisions. There were occasional claims police and prison officials mistreated suspects in custody.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison and detention center conditions generally met international standards.

Physical Conditions: In June the Australian Institute of Criminology reported 53 deaths in prison between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2013. Of the 53 deaths, 32 were from natural causes, nine from hanging, five from external/multiple trauma, one from head injury, one from drugs, and one from other/multiple causes. The report excluded four cases due to missing data.

According to the Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services 2014, in 2012-13 prison utilization was 96 percent of prison design capacity. In August the Western Australian Inspector of Custodial Services reported Bunbury Regional Prison was "operating well" although there had been cases of overcrowding that were "inappropriate and inhumane."

As of July 31, there were 2,015 persons in immigration detention facilities in the country, including 173 on Christmas Island. As part of the government's Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB), a multi-agency initiative launched in 2013 aimed at preventing the arrival of asylum seekers by boat, the governments of Papua New Guinea and Nauru operated immigration detention centers on behalf of the Australian government, at which intercepted asylum seekers had their applications processed by the Nauruan government. As of July 31, there were 942 asylum seekers on Nauru and 637 on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island. In February an Immigration Department-commissioned inquiry reported on allegations relating to the detention center on Nauru. The immigration minister said, "It outlines some very disturbing matters including drug dealing, sexual assault, and rape." He said many of the cases were under investigation by the Nauruan Police, the Immigration Department, service providers at the detention center, and the Australian Federal Police (AFP). The minister said the department accepted and responded to the inquiry's 19 recommendations. In May the minister said, "The department and the government are committed to supporting the Nauru government in providing a safe environment for all asylum seekers and refugees in Nauru, and particularly women and children." He added that the department had established a Child Protection Panel to provide independent advice on child protection in immigration detention and that four additional AFP officers travelled to Nauru to advise local police.

In October, Australian media reported that authorities transferred a female detainee from Nauru to Sydney for medical treatment. She was reportedly one of two Somali women who alleged they were raped at the Nauru detention center. Media claimed she came to Sydney for an abortion, a procedure that is illegal in Nauru. Authorities returned her to Nauru on October 16 after she decided not to have an abortion, according to the government. The immigration minister told media on October 28, however, that the woman would return to Australia for treatment. In July media reported an Afghan man died of a suspected heart attack at an immigration detention center in Western Australia. On November 8, an Iranian man was found dead on Christmas Island after escaping from the Australian-run immigration detention center. The immigration department said the coroner was investigating the matter.

Administration: Authorities investigated allegations of inhuman conditions and documented the results of such investigations in a publicly accessible manner. The government investigated and monitored prison and detention center conditions.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted visits by independent human rights observers. There were no reports of intimidation by authorities. A number of domestic and international human rights groups expressed concerns about conditions at immigration detention centers (see section 2.d.).

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The law prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The armed forces, under the minister for defense, are responsible for external security. The AFP  under the minister for justice  and state and territorial police forces are responsible for internal security. The AFP enforces national laws, and state and territorial police forces enforce state and territorial laws. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection and the Australian Border Force are responsible for migration and border enforcement. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the armed forces and police, and the government had effective mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption. There were no reports of impunity involving the security forces during the year.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

Police officers may seek an arrest warrant from a magistrate when a suspect cannot be located or fails to appear, but they also may arrest a person without a warrant if there are reasonable grounds to believe the person committed an offense. Police must inform arrested persons immediately of their legal rights and the grounds for their arrest, and arrested persons must be brought before a magistrate for a bail hearing at the next session of the court. The law permits police to hold individuals in preventive detention without charge for up to 48 hours under federal law and up to 14 days under state and territory laws if a senior police official finds it is "reasonably necessary to prevent a terrorist act or preserve evidence of such an act." Police may detain individuals for an additional 24 hours under court order. Authorities detained 15 persons during September 2014 counterterrorism raids in Sydney and used preventive detention orders for the first time to hold three suspects for approximately 36 hours. Following an April counterterrorism raid in Melbourne, police charged a man and held him in custody under a preventive detention order. Authorities released him in August.

The law states that 24 hours is the maximum investigation period police may hold and question a person without charge, unless extended by court order. In the case of a terrorism suspect, however, a person can be detained for up to seven continuous days and can be questioned for a maximum period of 24 hours, or 48 hours if an interpreter is needed.

A separate provision of law permits the attorney general to grant the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) authority to detain a person for a continuous period of up to 168 hours (seven days) in special circumstances, such as "reasonable grounds for believing that issuing the warrant to be requested will substantially assist the collection of intelligence that is important in relation to a terrorism offense." The ASIO, however, has not used this authority.

The law permits a judge to authorize "control orders" on individuals suspected of involvement with terrorism-related activities. These orders may include a range of measures, such as monitoring of suspects and house arrest, and may be in effect for up to one year without filing criminal charges. If a control order remains warranted after one year, a new court order must be sought.

By law the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor helps provide that counterterrorism laws strike an appropriate balance between protecting the community and protecting human rights. The AFP, the Australian Crime Commission, and intelligence agencies are subject to parliamentary oversight. The inspector-general of intelligence and security is an independent statutory officer who provides oversight of the country's six intelligence agencies.

Bail generally is available to persons facing criminal charges unless the person is considered a flight risk or charged with an offense carrying a penalty of 12 months' imprisonment or more. Authorities granted attorneys and families prompt access to detainees. Government-provided attorneys are available to give legal advice to detainees who cannot afford counsel. Arrested persons enjoy additional legal protections, such as the ability to challenge the lawfulness of their detention and to apply for compensation if unlawfully detained.

Some individuals in the state of South Australia found not guilty of crimes by reason of mental impairment were imprisoned, rather than confined in mental health facilities in compliance with court orders. South Australia's public advocate criticized in the media the state government for not providing adequate facilities and care for forensic mental health patients, resulting in mental health patients being held in prisons. The South Australia principal community visitor, who is part of an independent statutory organization responsible for visiting and inspecting mental health facilities, stated that some forensic patients were held for years in correctional facilities in the absence of guilty findings. In one case in South Australia, an individual who was tried and found not guilty by reason of mental impairment was imprisoned for more than six years in a maximum security prison, with the majority of the time spent in isolation. In this instance, there was insufficient access to appropriate mental health care and extensive use of solitary confinement.

Protracted Detention of Rejected Asylum Seekers or Stateless Persons: A small number of asylum seekers remained in long-term detention despite having exhausted the appeal process. They could not be returned to their home country because they lacked travel documents or could not obtain necessary transit visas.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The law provides for an independent judiciary, and the government respected judicial independence.

Trial Procedures

The law provides for the right to a fair trial, and an independent judiciary generally enforced this right. In state district and county courts, and in state and territorial supreme courts, a judge and jury try serious offenses. Defendants enjoy a presumption of innocence and cannot be compelled to testify or confess guilt. They have the right to be informed promptly and in detail of the charges, with free interpretation as necessary, the right to an attorney, and adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense. Government-funded attorneys are available to low-income persons. The defendant's attorney can question witnesses, present witnesses and evidence, access relevant government-held evidence, and appeal the court's decision or the sentence imposed.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

There is an independent and impartial judiciary in civil matters, and individuals or organizations may seek civil judicial remedies for human rights violations. There is also an administrative process at the state and federal levels to seek redress for alleged wrongs by government departments. Administrative tribunals may review a government decision only if the decision is in a category specified under a law, regulation, or other legislative instrument as subject to a tribunal's review.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The law prohibits such actions, and there were no reports the government failed to respect these prohibitions. Police have authority to enter premises without a warrant in emergency circumstances.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

Although the constitution does not explicitly provide for freedom of speech or press, the High Court has held that a right to freedom of expression is implied in the constitution, and the government generally respected these rights. An independent press, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of speech and press.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority. The internet was widely available to and used by citizens. In February 2014 the Australia Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reported that 83 percent of households had access to the internet at home. In addition, 96 percent of households with children younger than 15 years had access to the internet at home.

Law enforcement agencies require a warrant to intercept telecommunications, including internet communications. In emergency situations the director general of the ASIO may issue a warrant for this purpose without prior judicial authorization, but the attorney general must be informed.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) maintained a list of "refused classification" website content, primarily pertaining to child pornography, sexual violence, and other activities illegal in the country, compiled as a result of a consumer complaints process. The ACMA may issue a notice to the internet service provider to remove domestically hosted "refused classification" material, or links to such material, that is the subject of a complaint if an investigation concludes the complaint is justified. The list is available to providers of filtering software. An owner or operator of such a website can appeal an ACMA decision to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), an executive body that reviews administrative decisions by government entities. Since 2010 three major telecommunications providers voluntarily blocked websites on Interpol's list of child-abuse links.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

While the freedoms of peaceful assembly and association are not codified in law, the government generally respected these rights.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The law provides for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights. The government cooperated with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to internally displaced persons, refugees, returning refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, or other persons of concern.

Protection of Refugees

The government maintains a humanitarian refugee program that includes several types of visas available to refugees for resettlement in the country. UNHCR identifies and refers the majority of applicants considered under the program. For the fiscal year that began on July 1, the intake remained at 13,750. In 2015-16 at least 1,000 places were reserved for women at risk and at least 1,500 for Syrians. On September 10, the government announced it would accept an additional 12,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq for permanent resettlement, in addition to the annual refugee intake of 13,750.

Access to Asylum: The law provides for granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has a system for providing protection to refugees.

The number of asylum seekers arriving by sea significantly increased between 2008 and 2013, putting pressure on detention center capacity, processing times, and the capacity of the humanitarian refugee program. In the 2012-13 fiscal year, the government recorded 25,750 such arrivals. According to the government, 28,890 persons resided in the community while authorities assessed their visa applications, as of July 31. The country retained third-party processing of asylum seekers in Nauru or in Papua New Guinea for asylum seekers that arrived after July 19, 2013. Authorities continued their policy of not settling those arrivals in the country and forced intercepted boats carrying smuggled persons back into the territorial waters of their country of embarkation when safe to do so. Since OSB's inception, there were 2,125 transfers to Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island as of June 30. In August the immigration minister reported that authorities had turned back 20 boats transporting asylum seekers since OSB commenced operation.

The law authorizes the immigration minister to designate a country as a regional offshore processing center, if the minister determines it is in the national interest to do so, and requires the minister to notify parliament, which may then disapprove the proposed designation within five working days of notification. The law states that such a designation "need not be limited by reference to the international obligations or domestic law of that country." Under the government's policy on asylum processing for unauthorized maritime arrivals, asylum seekers transferred to third countries for regional processing have their asylum claims assessed by the country in which the claim is processed.

In 2013 the previous Labor government entered into a Regional Resettlement Arrangement with Papua New Guinea to send all unauthorized maritime arrivals to Papua New Guinea for assessment and to resettle those found to be refugees in Papua New Guinea. In 2013 Nauru became part of the arrangement. The government then began transferring all unauthorized maritime asylum seeker arrivals to Papua New Guinea and Nauru for processing. As of August Papua New Guinea had not approved any permanent resettlement arrangements but had granted refugee status to at least 50 individuals for release into the local community to receive support services at an open facility, including language training, cultural orientation, and case support. In September 2014 the government reached agreement with Cambodia to resettle refugees on a voluntary basis from the processing center in Nauru. In June, four refugees from the Nauru processing center arrived in Cambodia. In early October the Nauruan government announced that processing for the 600 outstanding refugee claims would be expedited and claimants would be able to move freely around the island, while maintaining access to assistance from the regional processing center.

In July 2014 a Customs Department vessel detained for four weeks a group of 157 Tamil asylum seekers from a boat smuggling persons that originated in India at sea while the government discussed their status with Indian government officials. Authorities eventually transferred the asylum seekers to an onshore processing facility in Western Australia. After the asylum seekers refused to meet with Indian consular officials to determine their nationality and claims, authorities sent them to the offshore processing facility in Nauru. In January the High Court ruled this was legal under the Commonwealth Maritime Powers Act. On March 20, authorities intercepted a vessel carrying 46 Vietnamese and transferred its occupants to an Australian ship. After assessment, authorities returned them to Vietnam on April 18.

In December 2014 parliament passed the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014, which the government stated "fundamentally changes Australia's approach to managing asylum seekers" and was partly aimed at addressing the "backlog" of approximately 30,000 applications for asylum. The legislation provided additional clarity and consistency in the powers to detain and move vessels and persons, including in relation to the Maritime Powers Act; introduced three-year temporary protection visas (TPV) for those who arrived between August 13, 2012 and December 31, 2013; and introduced a "fast-track" assessment process for those who arrived between August 13, 2012 and December 31, 2013. It also established a Safe Haven Enterprise Visa (SHEV) that enabled TPV holders to apply for a five-year visa to work in non-metropolitan areas. After holding a SHEV for three and a half years, an applicant would be eligible to apply for other onshore visas, such as a permanent skilled visa.

There is a statutory obligation for the government to facilitate access to legal representation for persons in immigration detention. In March 2014 the federal government tightened access to government-funded legal assistance to only those that arrived through authorized channels.

In August 2014 there were 194 people who had been in immigration detention for two or more years compared with 399 in 2013.

The number of children (younger than 18 years) in immigration detention in country fell from 1,392 in 2013 to 118 in July. There were 87 children on Nauru and none on Manus Island. In August 2014 the government announced arrangements to enable more minors to reside in the community while authorities processed their applications.

In March the UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment criticized the government's asylum seeker policies based on allegations made in 2014 of indefinite detention of asylum seekers, poor detention conditions, alleged detention of children, and escalating violence and tension at the Manus Island detention center. The immigration minister rejected the claim of the rapporteur that the treatment of asylum seekers in detention breached international conventions. He said, "Australia is meeting all its international obligations and with other regional nations provides a range of services to people who have attempted to enter Australia illegally." The prime minister said, "The most humanitarian, the most decent, the most compassionate thing you can do is stop these boats because hundreds, we think about 1,200 in fact, drowned at sea during the flourishing of the people smuggling trade under the former government."

In September the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants postponed a visit, at the invitation of the Australian government, to immigration detention centers in the country and on Nauru and Papua New Guinea. He said, "The 2015 Border Force Act, which sanctions detention center service providers who disclose 'protected information' with a two-year court sentence, would have an impact on my visit as it serves to discourage people from fully disclosing information relevant to my mandate." In response the government stated that access to offshore processing centers was the responsibility of host countries and the government had "accommodated to the fullest extent possible the requests of the office of the special rapporteur as it has with past visits."

Durable Solutions: The government accepted refugees for resettlement from third countries and funded refugee resettlement services. The Humanitarian Settlement Services program provided case-specific assistance that included finding accommodation, employment programs, language training, registering for income support and health care, and connecting with community and recreational programs.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution and law provide citizens the ability to change their government through free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and mandatory voting, and citizens exercised this ability.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: The country held free and fair federal parliamentary elections in September 2013. The Liberal-National Party Coalition defeated the Labor government, and Tony Abbott replaced Kevin Rudd as prime minister. The coalition won 90 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, the Labor Party 55, and others five. In September a leadership challenge within the Liberal Party resulted in a change of the prime minister from Tony Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull. Prime Minister Turnbull reshuffled ministerial portfolios and named a new cabinet following the leadership change.

Participation of Women and Minorities: There are no legal impediments to voting or holding public office for women or minorities.

Indigenous persons and other minorities generally were underrepresented among the political leadership relative to their share of the population. In 2010 voters elected an indigenous person to the federal House of Representatives for the first time; voters elected the first indigenous woman to the Senate in 2013. With an indigenous woman sworn into the Senate in June, there were three indigenous persons serving in the federal parliament. In September the prime minister named an indigenous member of parliament as the assistant minister for health, making him the first indigenous person on the parliamentary front bench. There were two indigenous persons in the Western Australia state parliament and six in the Northern Territory legislative assembly, which included the Northern Territory's chief minister and the first indigenous state-level head of government. The Tasmania and New South Wales state parliaments and the Australian Capital Territory legislative assembly each had one indigenous member.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, and the government generally implemented these laws effectively.

Corruption: Queensland, Western Australia, Victoria, South Australia, and New South Wales states have anticorruption bodies that investigate alleged government corruption, and every jurisdiction has an ombudsperson who investigates and makes recommendations in response to complaints about government decisions. These bodies actively collaborated with civil society, operated independently and effectively, and had adequate resources.

Northern Territory Police Commissioner John McRoberts resigned in January following allegations he interfered in a criminal investigation of a travel agent who had allegedly committed fraud in handling a government travel program. The Northern Territory Public Interest Disclosure Commission recommended the AFP investigate McRoberts' actions as a criminal matter, and the AFP was investigating as of November.

Financial Disclosure: The law requires all federal, state, and territory elected officials to report their financial interests. Failure to do so could result in a finding of contempt of parliament and a possible fine or jail sentence. Federal officeholders must report their financial interests to a Register of Pecuniary Interests, and the report made public within 28 days of the individual's assumption of office. In August federal house speaker Bronwyn Bishop resigned following controversy over taxpayer-funded travel to attend political party fundraising events.

Public Access to Information: Federal, state, and territorial governments have freedom-of-information (FOI) laws that provide the public access to government information. The federal government does not charge application fees, but some state and territorial governments charge application and processing fees.

Government information may be exempted from disclosure to protect essential public interests or the private or business affairs of others. An applicant, including foreign media, may appeal a government decision to deny a request for information to the quasi-legal AAT. An adverse AAT decision may be appealed to the Federal Court. FOI laws, including appeal mechanisms, generally functioned effectively. A FOI commissioner is responsible for promoting and protecting information rights.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A variety of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials often were cooperative and responsive to their views.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The Human Rights Commission (HRC), an independent organization established by parliament and adequately funded by the federal government, investigates complaints of discrimination or breaches of human rights under the federal laws that implement the country's human rights treaty obligations. The HRC reports to parliament through the attorney general. The media and nongovernmental organizations deemed its reports accurate and reported them widely. Parliament has a Joint Committee on Human Rights, and federal law requires that a statement of compatibility with international human rights obligations accompany each new bill.

In addition to the HRC at the federal level, each state and territory has a human rights ombudsperson.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

Federal laws prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, disability, sexual orientation and/or gender identity, age, language, HIV-positive status, or other communicable diseases. An independent judiciary and a network of federal, state, and territorial equal opportunity offices effectively enforced antidiscrimination laws.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law criminalizes rape, including spousal rape, and the government enforced the law effectively. The laws of individual states and territories provide the penalties for rape. Maximum penalties range from 12 years' to life imprisonment, depending on the jurisdiction and aggravating factors.

The law prohibits violence against women, including domestic abuse, and the government enforced the law. Violence against women remained a problem, particularly in indigenous communities.

According to the 2012 ABS Personal Safety Survey (the latest available), an estimated 41 percent of women 18 years and older had experienced some form of violence after attaining 15 years, and 19 percent had experienced sexual violence after attaining 15 years. The ABS reported that during 2014 police recorded 20,677 cases of sexual assault, of which 80 percent of the victims were women. Two-thirds of sexual assaults occurred in a residential location.

As of mid-September, 63 women and children died as a result of domestic violence. In its first major policy initiative, the new government under Prime Minister Turnbull on September 24 announced a policy package of A$100 million ($71 million) to address the threat of domestic violence, particularly against women. Federal and state governments funded programs to combat domestic violence and provide support for victims, including funding for numerous women's shelters. Police received training in responding to domestic violence. Federal, state, and territorial governments collaborated on the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children 2010-22, the first effort to coordinate action at all levels of government to reduce violence against women.

Following the highly publicized murder of an 11-year-old boy by his father, the state government of Victoria announced a Royal Commission into Family Violence in February.

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C): FGM/C is a criminal act in all states and territories of the country, and these laws apply extraterritorially to protect citizens or residents from being subjected to FGM/C overseas. On November 13, media reported that a jury had found a mother guilty of FGM/C of her two daughters during ceremonies in Wollongong and Sydney between 2009 and 2012. Another woman was also found guilty and a sheikh was found guilty after the fact. Sentencing was scheduled for February 5, 2016. It was the country's first FGM/C trial. In 2013 the government held a national summit on FGM/C and subsequently announced a National Compact on Female Genital Mutilation. In 2013 the government announced it would provide A$1 million ($710,000) for 15 new projects aimed at ending FGM/C among Australians whether they lived domestically or abroad.

Sexual Harassment: The law prohibits sexual harassment. Complaints of sexual harassment can lead to criminal proceedings or disciplinary action against the defendant and compensation claims by the plaintiff. Complaints of sexual harassment as well as sex discrimination may be submitted to the HRC. The HRC received 222 complaints of sexual harassment from July 2013 to June 2014; separate statistics on resolution of harassment complaints were not available.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide freely the number, spacing, and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence. State and territorial governments provided comprehensive sex education and sexual health and family planning services. Women had access to contraception and skilled medical care, including essential prenatal, obstetric, and postpartum care. Indigenous persons in isolated communities had more difficulty accessing such services than the population in general. Cultural factors and language barriers also inhibited use of sexual health and family planning services by indigenous persons, and rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy among the indigenous population were higher than among the general population.

Discrimination: The law provided for the same legal status and rights for women as for men, including under laws related to family, labor, property, nationality, and inheritance, as well as employment, credit, pay, owning and/or managing businesses, education, and housing. Employment discrimination against women occurred, and there was a much-publicized "gender pay gap" (see section 7.d.). The HRC received 474 complaints under the Sex Discrimination Act from July 2013 to June 2014, including 382 from women. Of the 451 finalized complaints, 251 were resolved through conciliation, 88 were discontinued or withdrawn, 82 were terminated, and 30 were administratively closed. Of the 499 complaints received by area (some complaints had multiple areas), 80 percent related to employment and 15 percent to goods, services, and facilities.

There were highly organized and effective public and private women's rights organizations at the federal, state, and local levels. The federal sex discrimination commissioner of the HRC undertakes research, formulates policy, and conducts educational work designed to eliminate gender discrimination. The Office for Women, under the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, focuses on reducing violence against women, promoting women's economic security, and enhancing the status of women.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship is not derived by birth in the country. Children are citizens if at least one parent is a citizen or permanent resident at the time of the child's birth. Children born in the country to parents who are not citizens or permanent residents acquire citizenship on their 10th birthday if they lived most of their life in the country. Births generally were registered promptly.

Child Abuse: State and territorial child protection agencies investigate and initiate prosecutions of persons for child neglect or abuse. All states and territories have laws or guidelines that require members of certain designated professions to report suspected child abuse or neglect. The federal government's role in the prevention of child abuse includes funding for research, carrying out education campaigns, developing action plans against commercial exploitation of children, and funding community-based parenting programs. The federal government's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse released an interim report in June 2014 that included the personal stories of 150 abused people, and on August 17, the commission released recommendations on what institutions and governments should do to protect children better against sexual abuse. It continued to conduct hearings during the year. In January the National Australia Day Council, a government-owned social enterprise, named a campaigner against family violence the "2015 Australian of the Year."

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a national agency that maintains health statistics and information, there were 40,844 children in substantiated abuse or neglect cases during the 2013-14 fiscal year. This represented 7.8 per 1,000 children younger than 18 years, the same as in 2012-13. The rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children on care and protection orders was nine times greater than the nonindigenous rate.

Early and Forced Marriage: The legal minimum age of marriage is 18 for both boys and girls. A person between 16 and 18 years may apply to a judge or magistrate in a state or territory for an order authorizing marriage to a person who has attained 18 years, but the marriage of the minor still requires parental or guardian consent. Two persons younger than 18 years may not marry each other. While no statistics were available, reports of marriages involving a person younger than 18 years were rare.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The law provides for a maximum penalty of 25 years' imprisonment for commercial sexual exploitation of children. There were documented cases of children younger than 18 years engaged in prostitution.

The law prohibits citizens and residents from engaging in, facilitating, or benefiting from sexual activity with children overseas who are younger than 16 years and provides for a maximum sentence of 17 years' imprisonment for violations. The government continued its awareness campaign to deter child sex tourism through distribution of pamphlets to citizens and residents traveling overseas.

The legal age for consensual sex is 16 years in the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Victoria, and Western Australia and 17 years in Tasmania and South Australia. In Queensland the age of consent for anal sex is 18 years, while the age of consent for all other sexual acts is 16 years. Maximum penalties for violations vary across jurisdictions. Defenses include reasonable grounds for believing the alleged victim was older than the legal age of consent and situations in which the two persons are close in age.

All states and territories criminalize the possession, production, and distribution of child pornography. In New South Wales, however, the law prohibiting child abuse material, including child pornography applies only to children younger than 16 years, and in South Australia the law prohibiting child exploitation material, including child pornography, only applies to children younger than 17 years. Maximum penalties for these offenses range from four to 21 years' imprisonment. Federal laws criminalize using a "carriage service" (for example, the internet) for the purpose of possessing, producing, and supplying child pornography. The maximum penalty for these offenses is 10 years' imprisonment, a fine of A$275,000 ($240,400), or both. Federal law allows suspected pedophiles to be tried in the country regardless of where the crime was committed. The AFP worked with its international partners to identify and charge persons involved in online exploitation of children.

The government largely continued federal emergency intervention measures initiated in 2007 to combat child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. These measures included emergency bans on sales of alcohol and pornography, restrictions on the payment of welfare benefits in cash, linkage of support payments to school attendance, and medical examinations for all indigenous children younger than 16 years in the Northern Territory. In 2012 parliament extended most of these interventions through 2022.

While public reaction to the interventions remained generally positive, some Aboriginal activists asserted there was inadequate consultation and the measures were racially discriminatory, since nonindigenous persons in the Northern Territory were not initially subject to such restrictions.

International Child Abductions: The country is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For information see the Department of State's report on compliance at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/legal/compliance.html, as well as country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/australia.html.

Anti-Semitism

According to the 2011 census, the country's Jewish community numbered 97,300 persons. During the 12-month period ending in September 2014, the nongovernmental Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported 312 anti-Semitic incidents logged by the council, Jewish community umbrella groups in each state and the Australian Capital Territory, and community security groups. These incidents included vandalism, harassment, and physical and verbal assaults, such as pelting Jewish persons walking to and from synagogues with eggs.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The law prohibits discrimination against persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities in employment; education; access to premises; access to air travel and other forms of transport; provision of goods, services (including health services), and facilities; accommodation; purchase of land; activities of clubs and associations; sport; and the administration of federal laws and programs. The government effectively enforced the law.

The disability discrimination commissioner of the HRC promotes compliance with federal laws that prohibit discrimination against persons with disabilities. The commissioner also promotes implementation and enforcement of state laws that require equal access to buildings and otherwise protect the rights of persons with disabilities, including ensuring equal access to communications and information. The law also provides for mediation by the HRC of discrimination complaints, authorizes fines against violators, and awards damages to victims of discrimination.

Schools are required to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act, and children with disabilities generally attended school. The federal government's Better Start for Children with Disability initiative provided up to A$12,000 ($10,490) per person for early intervention services and treatment for eligible children with disabilities. The government also cooperated with state and territorial governments that ran programs to assist students with disabilities. The 2015 budget increased federal funding for students with a disability to a record A$1.3 billion ($923 million) for 2015-16 and more than A$5 billion ($3.55 billion) over 2014-17. The government announced a National Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability so that all students with disability would be funded on the same basis.

The HRC's annual report stated that 830 complaints, citing 973 alleged grounds of discrimination, were filed under the Disability Discrimination Act from July 2013 to June 2014. Of these, 33 percent related to employment, and 39 percent involved the provision of goods and services (also see Section 7.d.). The HRC resolved 796 complaints during the period, including 404 through conciliation.

In 2013 the government launched the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), a national disability insurance program and allocated A$14.3 billion ($12.5 billion) more than seven years to the program. As of June there were eight NDIS trial sites and almost 20,000 insured persons.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

According to its annual report, the HRC received 500 complaints under the Racial Discrimination Act from July 2013 to June 2014, citing 956 alleged grounds of discrimination. Of these, 37 percent involved employment, 29 percent involved provision of goods and services, and 24 percent alleged "racial hatred." The HRC reported resolution of 443 complaints, including 209 through conciliation (see section 7.d.).

Indigenous People

According to the 2011 census, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders constituted 2.5 percent of the total population.

Indigenous ownership of land was predominantly in nonurban areas. Indigenous-owned or -controlled land constituted approximately 20 percent of the country's area (excluding native title lands) and nearly 50 percent of the land in the Northern Territory. The National Native Title Tribunal resolves native land title applications through mediation and acts as an arbitrator in cases where the parties cannot reach agreement about proposed mining or other development of land. Under a 2002 High Court ruling, native title rights do not extend to mineral or petroleum resources and, in cases where leaseholder rights and native title rights are in conflict, leaseholder rights prevail but do not extinguish native title rights.

The Indigenous Land Corporation has a special account of A$1 billion ($710 million) that provides a continuing source of funds for indigenous persons to acquire or manage land for the benefit of indigenous persons. It receives a minimum annual payment of A$45 million ($32 million) from the federal government. It is separate from the National Native Title Tribunal and is not for payment of compensation to indigenous persons for loss of land or to titleholders for return of land to indigenous persons.

As part of the intervention to address child sexual abuse in Northern Territory indigenous communities (see section 6, Children), in 2007 the government took control of 64 indigenous communities through five-year land leases. The federal government's Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory plan begun in 2012 repealed the emergency response and provided for negotiation of voluntary long-term leases. The Indigenous Advancement Strategy administered by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, which began in July 2014, allocated indigenous-specific federal funding of A$4.9 billion ($3.48 billion) for a period of four years. Additionally, authorities allocated A$3.7 billion ($2.63 billion) through National Partnership Agreements, Special Accounts, and Special Appropriations. Funding was also available through indigenous-specific and mainstream programs delivered by other agencies.

In 2013 parliament unanimously passed an act of recognition intended to build momentum for a future referendum for constitutional recognition of indigenous people. The new government supported constitutional recognition of indigenous people and was working toward a referendum to achieve this aim. The portfolio of indigenous affairs had cabinet-level status, and indigenous policy coordination shifted to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. The prime minister maintained his commitment to spend time each year living in an indigenous community and spent a week in several remote indigenous communities in northern Queensland in September.

Since 2008 the prime minister has reported to parliament the government's progress on eliminating indigenous inequalities at the beginning of each year. In February the prime minister said, "We are not on track to achieve most of the targets," notwithstanding some improvements in education, health and mortality outcomes.

According to the ABS, as of March the rate of imprisonment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals was 12 times higher than the overall imprisonment rate, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners represented 28 percent of the full-time adult prisoner population. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, life expectancy for indigenous men was an estimated 69.1 years, compared with 79.7 years for nonindigenous men; life expectancy for indigenous women was an estimated 73.7 years, compared with 83.1 years for nonindigenous women; and the indigenous unemployment rate was 16 percent, compared with approximately 5 percent for the nonindigenous population.

The Productivity Commission's 2012 Indigenous Expenditure Report estimated that total direct indigenous expenditure in 2010-11 was A$25.4 billion ($18 billion). This resulted in expenditures of A$44,128 ($31,330) per indigenous citizen, compared with A$19,589 ($13,900) for other citizens. The report found the difference was due to "greater intensity of service use" and "additional costs of providing services."

The National Congress of Australia's First Peoples, established in 2012, is the national representative body for Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. Government funding for it ceased in 2014. The HRC has an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner.

In November 2014 the Western Australia government announced a plan to stop providing government services to between 100 and 150 remote indigenous communities. This led to protests in several cities in other states and commitment by the state government to reconsider its plan.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

There are no laws criminalizing consensual same-sex sexual conduct between adults. Discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is prohibited by law in a wide range of areas, including in employment, housing, family law, taxes, child support, immigration, pensions, care of elderly persons, and social security.

The HRC received 35 complaints of discrimination based on sexual orientation from July 2013 through June 2014. Information on resolution of the complaints was not available.

The law provides protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and intersex status.

In September 2014 Victoria and New South Wales passed laws to expunge convictions related to consensual sex between men.

Other Societal Violence or Discrimination

In February media reported that vandals sprayed graffiti on the walls of a Perth mosque.

In June 2014 construction approval for a mosque in the regional Victorian town of Bendigo caused multiple demonstrations targeting the local council. Opposing political activist groups also demonstrated at several Melbourne rallies during the year, requiring a significant police presence.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides for the right of workers to form and join unions and associate freely domestically and internationally, to bargain collectively and to conduct legal strikes. The law prohibits antiunion discrimination and provides for reinstatement of workers fired for union activity.

A union may represent an employee only if the employee is eligible to become a member of that union. Union officials have the right to enter workplaces if they hold right-of-entry permits granted by the Fair Work Commission (FWC). Written notice is generally required to enter a workplace and should be provided no less than 24 hours and no more than 14 days before the proposed visit. Eligibility to enter premises is dependent on whether a union covers the work of a particular employee.

The law requires that employers act in "good faith" when a majority of employees want a collective agreement, although it places some restrictions on the scope of collective bargaining. Prohibited terms include requiring payment of a bargaining services fee, enabling an employee or employer to "opt out" of coverage of the agreement, and anything that breaches the law. In addition, multi-enterprise agreements or "pattern bargaining" is outlawed, although low-paid workers can apply for a "low-paid bargaining stream" to conduct multi-enterprise bargaining. When deciding whether to grant a low-paid authorization, the FWC looks at factors including the current terms and conditions of employment, the bargaining strength of employees, and whether employers and employees are bargaining for the first time. There is no definition of low-paid worker in the law; however, the explanatory memorandum to the Act suggests that workers in the cleaning and childcare sectors are eligible. A bargaining agent may represent either side in the process. Under law collective agreements are designated as being between employers and employees directly; trade unions are the default representatives of their members but, with some exceptions, are not official parties to collective agreements. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) raised concerns that these provisions were a barrier to the recognition of collective bargaining agents.

The law restricts strikes to the period when unions are negotiating a new enterprise agreement and specifies that strikes must concern matters under negotiation. This is known as "protected action." Protected action provides employers, employees, and unions with legal immunity from claims of losses incurred by industrial action. The deadline to file an unfair dismissal claim is 21 days, and the time to file a general protections claim is 21 days. Industrial action must be authorized by a secret ballot of employees; unions continued to raise concerns this requirement was unduly time consuming and expensive to implement. The law subjects strikers to penalties for taking industrial action during the life of an agreement and prohibits secondary action (e.g., a sympathy strike). The law permits the government to stop strikes judged to have "significant economic harm" to the employer or third parties. Some provinces have further restrictions. For example, in New South Wales, registration of a union may be canceled if the government makes a proclamation or calls a state of emergency concerning an essential service and the "industrial organization whose members are engaged in providing the essential service has, by its executive, members, or otherwise, engaged in activities which are contrary to the public interest."

The government effectively enforced applicable laws, including federal, state, and territorial laws, regulations, and statutory instruments. Under the Fair Work Act, penalties for violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining protections include fines of up to A$10,800 ($7,670) for an individual and A$54,000 ($38,340) for a corporation and were generally sufficient to deter violations. The FWC is the national independent industrial relations management institution. Its functions include facilitating dispute resolution. If there is a dispute, the FWC convenes a conference between parties to facilitate a resolution. If the conference is unsuccessful, the parties may elect the FWC to arbitrate the dispute, or the applicant may pursue a ruling by a federal court. An applicant may also pursue a court ruling if one or both parties do not agree to participate in the FWC conference. There were no reports such processes were subject to lengthy delays or appeals.

Freedom of association and collective bargaining were generally respected. The ITUC reported some instances of employers refusing to bargain with the representative union as well as of an employer failing to meet its obligations to negotiate in good faith. In March, for instance, the FWC found that a company's refusal to meet with a union to continue negotiations was a breach of the company's good-faith obligations and ordered the company to meet with the union and provide a "genuine proposal."

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor.

The government effectively enforced applicable laws. The law provides for sufficiently stringent penalties against forced labor commensurate with those prescribed for other serious crimes. Federal law includes specific prohibitions of forced labor and prescribed a maximum penalty of nine years' imprisonment for the offense. The law prohibits exploiting migrant employees through forced labor, sexual servitude, or slavery, and prescribes a maximum penalty of five years' imprisonment and various fines. In May, following a media report of labor exploitation in the agricultural sector, the assistant immigration minister announced that the department was investigating the employment of 417 visa holders by on-hire labor firms. The investigation continued as of December.

There were reports some foreign nationals who came to the country for temporary work were subjected to forced labor in such sectors as agriculture, cleaning, construction, hospitality, and domestic service.

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

There is no federally mandated minimum age of employment. The Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, and Western Australia established 15 years as the minimum age for work. Queensland established the minimum age as 13 years, and New South Wales, the Northern Territory, South Australia, and Tasmania have no established minimum age for work. With the exception of Victoria, all states and territories have established 18 years as the minimum age for hazardous work. There are laws and regulations pertaining to hazardous work across sectors. For example, under the 1994 Western Australia Mines Safety and Inspection Act an underground employee must not be younger than 18 years unless he or she is an apprentice or a cadet who is working underground to gain required experience in the course of training for a profession or trade; a person handling, charging or firing explosives must not be younger than 18 years; a person must be at least age 21 years to obtain a winding engine driver's certificate.

Federal, state, and territorial governments effectively monitored and enforced laws, which varied among jurisdictions, governing the minimum age for leaving school and engaging in specified occupations. The Australian Council of Trade Unions also monitored adherence to these laws. Penalties for violations of related laws included fines, and were sufficient to deter violations. For example, in Western Australia penalties can be imposed on the employer and parent if they allow a child to: perform work that is not allowed or work outside the allowed hours for their age (maximum fine of A$24,000 ($17,040), or a maximum of A$120,000 ($85,200) for an incorporated employer); perform in an indecent or pornographic manner (maximum of 10 years' imprisonment); continue to work after the Department for Child Protection and Family Support has issued a notice for the employment to cease because the work is harmful to the child (maximum imprisonment of three years and a maximum fine of A$36,000 ($25,560), or A$180,000 ($127,800) for an incorporated employer). The Office of the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) actively sought to educate young workers about their rights and responsibilities.

State-imposed compulsory educational requirements, enforced by state educational authorities, effectively prevented most children from joining the workforce full time until they reached seven years. Although some violations of these laws occurred, there was no indication of a child labor problem in any specific sector. There were some reports of commercial sexual exploitation of children (see section 6, Children).

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor for information on the Australian territories of Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and Norfolk Island.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

Federal and state and territory laws provide protections against employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, disability, sexual orientation and/or gender identity, age, language, HIV-positive status, or other communicable diseases. The HRC reviews complaints of discrimination on the ground of HIV/AIDS status under the category of disability-related complaints.

The law requires organizations with 100 or more employees to establish a workplace program to remove barriers to women entering and advancing in their organization. The law also prohibits discrimination against employees on the basis of family responsibilities, including breastfeeding, and requires equal pay for equal work. In 2014 the government instituted changes to the Disability Support Pension to encourage persons with disabilities to enter the workforce when they have a capacity to do so, including compulsory workforce activities for individuals younger than five years who can work for more than eight hours per week.

The government effectively enforced laws prohibiting employment discrimination, and penalties are sufficient to deter violations. Under the law the maximum penalty for contravention of the unlawful discrimination protections is A$54,000 ($38,340) per contravention for a corporation and A$10,800 ($7,670) per contravention for an individual.

Employment discrimination against women occurred, particularly with regard to pay. According to the government's Workplace Gender Equality Agency, the full-time gender pay gap was 17.9 percent in May.

Persons with disabilities also faced employment discrimination. In August a court awarded A$170,000 ($120,700) compensation to a woman diagnosed with Crohn's Disease after finding Corrective Services New South Wales failed to make "reasonable adjustments" to her work duties. During the year the government established the Business Services Wage Assessment Tool (BSWAT) Payment Scheme in response to a 2012 finding by the Federal Court that the BSWAT itself indirectly discriminated against employees with an intellectual disability. The government established the scheme to provide additional payment to eligible employees in certain circumstances for their previous work.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

Effective July 1, the FWC increased the national minimum wage for adults working full time (38 hours per week) by 2.5 percent, to A$656.90 ($466.40), based on a minimum hourly rate of A$17.29 ($12.28). There was no official poverty-level income figure, but the minimum wage, combined with welfare payments, was intended to provide a decent standard of living for a worker and family. Above-minimum-wage classifications apply to certain trades and professions.

By law maximum weekly hours are 38 plus "reasonable" additional hours (determined according to the law, taking into account factors such as an employee's health, family responsibilities, ability to claim overtime, pattern of hours in the industry, and amount of notice given). The law provides for paid annual holidays and premium pay for overtime. Industry standards or awards mandate rest periods and overtime pay. An employee may refuse to work overtime if the request is "unreasonable" considering the aforementioned factors.

Federal or state occupational health and safety laws apply to every workplace, including in the informal sector. New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory, and the federal government have "harmonized" occupational health and safety laws with an aim to make it easier for workers and businesses to understand requirements across different states and territories. Workers can remove themselves from situations that endangered health or safety without jeopardy to their employment, and authorities effectively protected employees in this situation. The law includes an antibullying provision that enables workers who are bullied at work to apply to the FWC for an order to stop the bullying. The law also enables workers who are pregnant to transfer to a safe job regardless of their time in employment.

The government effectively enforced laws related to minimum wage, hours of work, and occupational safety and health. The FWO provides employers and employees advice on their rights and has authority to investigate employers alleged to have exploited employees unlawfully. The ombudsperson also has authority to prosecute employers who do not meet their obligations to workers. FWO inspectors may enter work sites if they reasonably believe it is necessary to ensure compliance with the Fair Work Act. The number of FWO inspectors, 300, was sufficient to enforce compliance. Employers can be ordered to compensate employees and are sometimes assessed fines. Between July 2013 and June 2014, the FWO recovered more than A$23 million ($16.3 million) on behalf of 15,483 employees. In June FWO stated that workers in restaurants, cafes, and catering companies were underpaid A$1.2 million ($852,000) following spot checks of 1,066 employers. Only 42 percent were fully compliant with their workplace obligations; the majority of violations related to wage entitlements.

Workers exercised their right to a safe workplace and had recourse to state health and safety commissions, which investigate complaints and order remedial action. Each state and territory effectively enforced its occupational health and safety laws through dedicated bodies that have powers to obtain and initiate prosecutions, and unions used right-of-entry permits to investigate concerns. In New South Wales, for example, an individual can be sentenced a maximum of five years' imprisonment and/or receive a maximum fine of A$300,000 ($213,200), and a business can be fined up to A$3 million ($2.13 million) for exposing an individual to serious injury or illness. On March 25, following a New South Wales investigation, a company was convicted and fined $A250,000 ($177,500) following the February 2013 death of a worker run over by a front-end loader inside a grain-storage bunker.

Although a formal minimum wage exists, most workers received higher wages through enterprise agreements or individual contracts. As of July the ABS reported approximately 3.64 million persons (31 percent of the workforce) were employed as part-time workers, of whom 69 percent were women. Temporary workers include both part-time and casual employees. Part-time employees have set hours and the same entitlements as full-time employees. Casual employees are employed on a daily or hourly wage basis. They do not receive paid annual or sick leave, but the law mandates they receive additional pay to compensate for this, which employers generally respected. Migrant worker visas require that employers respect employer contributions to retirement funds and provide bonds to cover health insurance, worker's compensation insurance, unemployment insurance, and other benefits.

There were reports some individuals under "457" employer-sponsored, skilled-worker visas were paid less than the market rate and used as less expensive substitutes for citizen workers. In March the government stated it would increase monitoring of "457" sponsors, increase flexibility for the English language requirement, and increase information sharing among government agencies, particularly the Australian Tax Office. As part of these efforts, for example, authorities ordered a Darwin company to pay a total of A$335,017 ($237,860) in fines and reimbursements in relation to the breaching of sponsorship obligations and underpayment of Filipino workers. Employers must undertake "labor market testing" before attempting to sponsor "457" visas; government policy prohibits positions from being nominated under the "457" program when the market rate annual salary is less than A$53,900 ($38,270).

According to Safe Work Australia, the government agency responsible to develop and coordinate national workplace health and safety policy, 97 workers died while working, as of August 12. Of these, 31 fatalities were in the transport, postal, and warehousing sector; 24 in the agriculture, forestry, and fishing sector; and 11 in construction.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Angola

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Angola, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/571612a715.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Angola is a constitutional republic. The ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) has been in power since independence in 1975. In August 2012 the government held the first fully constituted presidential and legislative elections in the country's history. The MPLA won 71.8 percent of the vote, and in September 2012 President Jose Eduardo dos Santos began a five-year term as president under the new constitution. Civilian authorities generally maintained effective control over the security forces.

The three most important human rights abuses were cruel, excessive, and degrading punishment, including reported cases of torture and beatings; limits on freedoms of assembly, association, speech, and press; and official corruption and impunity.

Other human rights abuses included arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life, harsh and potentially life-threatening prison conditions, arbitrary arrest and detention, lengthy pretrial detention, impunity for human rights abusers, lack of due process and judicial inefficiency, forced evictions without compensation, restrictions on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), trafficking in persons, limits on workers' rights, and forced labor.

The government took some steps to prosecute or punish officials who committed abuses; however, accountability was weak due to a lack of checks and balances, lack of institutional capacity, a culture of impunity, and widespread government corruption.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

In carrying out law enforcement activities, the government or its agents used excessive and sometimes deadly force.

On April 14, a police operation to disband what the government determined was a dangerous religious sect left 13 civilians and nine police officers dead, according to official figures. Light of the World Church, a religious sect in Huambo Province, had allegedly asked its members to sell their worldly possessions, stop sending their children to school, and disregard government authority. The national police moved to disband the group and arrest its leader, Jose Kalupeteka. According to the government, the group's members attacked the initial police force sent to apprehend Kalupeteka, killing nine officers, and the retaliatory police action resulted in 13 members of the group being killed in a reported firefight. Opposition parties, however, argued the police operation against a congregation of between 1,000 and 2,000 individuals must have resulted in a higher casualty count. The government denied the allegation, arguing that police acted in a measured and professional manner and viewed the group members as victims to be protected and not targets.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution and law prohibit all forms of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, but the government did not always enforce these prohibitions. Periodic reports of beatings and other abuses of persons on the way to and in police stations during interrogations continued. The government acknowledged that at times members of the security forces used excessive force when apprehending individuals and stated it was working to reduce such incidents. Police leaders openly condemned some acts of violence or excessive force against individuals and asked that victims report abuses to the national police or the Office of the Public Defender (Ombudsman).

Security forces reacted harshly and sometimes violently to public demonstrations against government policies. Several media and NGO accounts reported police forces around the country beat protesters. The visible presence of security forces was enough to significantly deter what were deemed by the government to be unlawful demonstrations. Authorities claimed many public demonstrations were organized by known agitators who sought only to create social instability.

On September 15, during a demonstration against incarceration policies, youth activist Raul Mandela was severely beaten by members of the Luanda Province police. Mandela said police agents targeted him because of his participation in a September 12 radio debate in which he criticized police violence against peaceful demonstrators. Police claimed the demonstration did not have the necessary permits and that they were called to restore order. There was no official comment by the national police on allegations of use of force against demonstrators.

Unlike in previous years, there were no confirmed reports of abuses by private security companies in diamond producing regions.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison conditions were harsh and potentially life threatening. Domestic NGOs and the media continued to highlight corruption, overcrowding, and generally poor conditions.

Physical Conditions: Prisons were overcrowded. For example, as of August there were 24,165 inmates in 40 prisons designed to hold 21,800 inmates. There were seven official detention centers for irregular migrants.

Authorities frequently held pretrial detainees with sentenced inmates, and short-term detainees with those serving long-term sentences for violent crimes, especially in provincial prisons.

Prison conditions varied widely between urban and rural areas. Prisons in rural areas were less crowded and reportedly had better rehabilitation, training, and reintegration services. Prisons generally provided some medical care, sanitation, potable water, and food, although it was customary for families to bring food to prisoners. Local NGOs alleged prison services were insufficient.

On August 14, Viana prison inmate Mariana Antonio Joaquim was beaten by three prison guards in the presence and under direct instructions of prison Director Judith Ambrosio Ginge. On August 20, Minister of Interior Angelo Tavares (who was responsible for supervising correctional facilities) dismissed Ginge and three prison guards following graphic media reports of the beating. The Ministry of Interior launched an internal investigation into the incident and recommended that the attorney general start an independent criminal investigation, which was underway at year's end.

Administration: The Ministry of Interior claimed that adequate statistics were available in each facility and that authorities were able to locate every prisoner.

The government investigated and monitored prison and detention center conditions. An independent office of the ombudsman existed to mediate between an aggrieved public, including prisoners, and an offending public office or institution. The office had no decision-making or adjudicative powers, but it helped citizens obtain access to justice and advised government entities on citizen rights. The office also published reports and educated the public about human rights and the role of the ombudsman.

Some offenders, including violent offenders, reported paying fines and bribes to secure their freedom but it was unclear how prevalent this practice was. Nonviolent offenders were often fined or paroled as alternatives to incarceration.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted visits to prisons by independent local and international human rights observers and foreign diplomats. Nevertheless, civil society organizations faced difficulties in contacting detainees, and prison authorities undermined civil society work in the prisons.

Members of opposition parties visited prisons around the country on a regular basis and reported uneven improvements in living conditions and rehabilitation programs. A local NGO that provides pro bono legal services to inmates said prison officials were trying to improve conditions but overcrowding limited results. According to the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, the ministry made monthly visits to detention centers with representatives of the Office of the Public Defender, the Office of the Attorney General (PGR), and members of the National Assembly to assess prisoners' living conditions.

In June the Ministry of Interior announced it was suspending the construction of 11 prisons across the country because of lack of funds. The new prisons were part of the government's plan to ease inmate overcrowding.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The law prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention; however, security forces often did not respect these prohibitions.

On September 18, the government published the Law on Precautionary Measures in Criminal Proceedings (law 25/2015), which limits the ability of security forces to place suspects in preventive detention and reinforces protections of due process and expedient legal decisions for the accused. Most notably the law gives the PGR 48 hours to charge a detainee of the suspected crime. According to the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, the law addresses concerns over the detention periods of suspected criminals and clearly defines and limits police authority to detain any individual.

According to several NGO and civil society sources, police arbitrarily arrested individuals without due process and routinely detained individuals who participated, or were about to participate, in antigovernment protests, despite this right being protected by the constitution. Police used preemptive detention to prevent protests from taking place. They often released the detainees after a few hours. For example, on August 8, a group of young activists attempted to hold a demonstration against the detention of 15 political activists arrested in June. Security forces detained three journalists covering the demonstration, confiscated their equipment, and held them for several hours without charge or an explanation. The national police denied the allegation.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The national police, controlled by the Ministry of Interior, are responsible for internal security and law enforcement. The Expatriate and Migration Services (SME), also within the Ministry of Interior, is responsible for migration law enforcement. The state intelligence and security service reports to the presidency and investigates sensitive state security matters. The Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) are responsible for external security but also had domestic security responsibilities, including border security, expulsion of irregular migrants, and small-scale actions against the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda separatists in Cabinda.

Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the FAA and the national police, and the government has mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption. The security forces generally were effective, although sometimes brutal, at maintaining stability. The national police and FAA have internal mechanisms to investigate security force abuses, and the government provided some training to reform the security forces.

Police presence in neighborhoods and on streets was generally welcomed by the population as enhancing general safety and security. Police officers, however, were believed to routinely extort civilians to supplement their income. Corruption and impunity remained serious problems. The national police handled most complaints internally through opaque disciplinary procedures, which sometimes led to formal punishment including dismissal. During the year the national police participated in a television series designed to show a gamut of interactions between police and civilians. The goal of the show was to encourage the population to collaborate with police while discouraging security force members' procurement of bribes or their payment. The PGR has an anticorruption unit and is charged with oversight of police wrongdoing. The government disclosed publicly the results of some investigations that led to disciplinary action.

Police participated in professional training with law enforcement officials from several countries in the region.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

The law requires a judge or magistrate to issue a warrant prior to arrest, although a person caught committing a crime may be arrested immediately without a warrant. Security force personnel, however, did not always procure warrants before arresting persons.

Police can legally detain an individual under reasonable suspicion for six hours without evidence of a crime.

The constitution provides the right to prompt judicial determination of the detention's legality, but authorities often did not respect this right.

The law mandates that detainees be informed of charges against them within five days of detention. This provision was generally observed. In certain cases the prosecutor may permit the suspect to return home, in which case the prosecutor may provide a warrant of surveillance to local police.

For misdemeanors the suspect may be detained for 30 days before trial. For felonies the prosecutor may prolong pretrial detention up to 45 days. Pretrial detention may also be prolonged by court order while officials build their case. Requests to prolong pretrial detention are not made public, which made it difficult to determine whether authorities exceeded the limits. The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights explained that, under certain circumstances involving national security, the PGR could extend pretrial detention up to 215 days. Additional time may be authorized by the PGR if it deems the circumstances of the case warrant an extension.

A functioning but ineffective bail system, widely used for minor crimes, existed. Prisoners and their families reported that prison officials demanded bribes to release prisoners. Detainees have the right to have access to a lawyer, although this did not always happen. The law states indigent detainees should be provided a lawyer by the state. The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights reported all municipal courts were staffed with licensed lawyers. The ministry recognized access to a lawyer, especially in rural areas, remained a problem and was working with universities to increase the number of qualified lawyers. The law allows family members prompt access to detainees, but prison officials occasionally ignored this right or made it conditional upon payment of a bribe. Detainees may be held incommunicado for up to 48 hours by request of the public prosecutor and the approval of a judge. The law provides provisions for house arrest, but this option was seldom used.

Arbitrary Arrest: Unlawful arrest and detention remained serious problems. In March the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and the Association for Justice, Peace, and Democracy published a report listing the detention and arrest of several NGO leaders over the past nine years. According to the PGR, allegations of government wrongdoing on arrest practices made by local and international NGOs were due to a lack of understanding of national laws.

Pretrial Detention: Excessively long pretrial detention continued to be a serious problem. An inadequate number of judges and poor communication among authorities contributed to the problem. Police beat and then released detainees rather than prepare a formal court case. In some cases authorities held inmates in prison for up to two years before their trials began. The Ministry of Interior reported during the year that 10,500 inmates were pretrial detainees, which represented approximately 45 percent of the total inmate population. The government often did not release detainees who had been held beyond the legal time limit, claiming previous releases of pretrial detainees had resulted in an increase in crime.

On June 20-21, security forces arrested 15 activists in Luanda. On September 30, after 102 days of pretrial detention, they and an additional two individuals (not imprisoned as of December) were charged with engaging in "preparatory acts to incite rebellion and for planning the overthrow of the president and other institutions of the state." The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights and the PGR claimed the legal process had been conducted within the law.

Amnesty: On September 15, President dos Santos approved amnesty for inmates who had either served at least half of a 12-year sentence or who were convicted women with children younger than 12 years old. The government also reduced by a quarter the sentences of inmates sentenced to more than 12 years in prison. The amnesty excluded inmates convicted of murder, sex offenses, armed robbery, or military crimes.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The constitution and law provide for an independent and impartial judiciary. Institutional weaknesses in the judicial system, however, such as political influence in the judicial decision-making process, were problems. The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights and the PGR worked to improve the independence of prosecutors and judges. The National Institute for Judicial Studies conducted capacity-building programs on the importance of an independent judicial system.

There were long trial delays at the Supreme Court. Criminal courts also had a large backlog of cases, which resulted in major delays in hearings. There were only 22 municipal courts for 163 municipalities. To increase access to justice, the PGR established offices of legal counsel in most municipalities.

Informal courts remained the principal institutions through which citizens resolved civil conflicts in rural areas, such as disputes over a bartering deal. Each community in which informal courts were located established local rules, creating disparities in how similar cases would be resolved from one community to the next. Traditional leaders (known as "sobas") also heard and decided local civil cases. Sobas do not have the authority to resolve criminal cases; only municipal courts can hear criminal cases.

Most municipalities did not have prosecutors or judges. Local police often served as investigator, prosecutor, and judge. Both the national police and the FAA have internal court systems that generally remained closed to outside scrutiny. Although members of these organizations can be tried under their internal regulations, cases that include violations of criminal or civil laws can also fall under the jurisdiction of provincial courts. Both the PGR and the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights have civilian oversight responsibilities over military courts.

On November 19, the judge presiding over the case of the 17 activists charged with "preparatory acts to incite rebellion and for planning the overthrow of the president and other institutions of the state" ordered closure of the public trial to independent observers such as members of the diplomatic corps and local NGOs due to the high level of interest in the proceedings and space constraints. Attendance by the public was limited to two family members per defendant. Special accommodations were made for members of the press to follow the trial in a separate room via closed circuit television. The activists were allowed to leave prison for house arrest during the holiday break on December 18 per a new law on trial detention lengths. Independent observers were present in other high-profile and sensitive trials such as the libel and defamation case of Rafael Marques and the rebellion case against Marcos Mavungo.

Trial Procedures

Although the law provides for the right to a fair trial, the government did not always respect this right. Suspects must be in the presence of a judge and defense attorney when charged. Defendants have the right to be informed of the charges levied against them in detail within five days, although this right was not always respected. It was not known if defendants had the right to language interpretation during legal proceedings. Defendants are presumed innocent until convicted; however, the reverse is true in cases involving accusations of defamation (see section 2.a.). By law trials are usually public, although each court has the right to close proceedings. Juries are not used. Defendants have the right to be present and consult with an attorney in a timely manner. The law requires that an attorney be provided at public expense if an indigent defendant faces serious criminal charges. According to the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, all public defenders are licensed lawyers. Defendants do not have the right to confront their accusers. They may question witnesses against them and present witnesses and evidence on their own behalf. In general defendants had enough time and facilities to prepare a defense. The government did not always respect all of these rights. The law protects defendants from providing self-incriminating testimony.

Defendants and their attorneys have the right to access government-held evidence relevant to their cases, but authorities did not always uphold this right. For example, on March 14, political activist Marcos Mavungo was arrested on suspicion of plotting an act of violence against the provincial government of Cabinda. On September 14, more than 200 days after his arrest, Mavungo was convicted of charges of rebellion against the state and sentenced to six years in prison. His lawyers complained publicly they did not have access to the evidence the government claimed it had to prove guilt. The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights and the PGR stated that Mavungo's case was conducted within appropriate parameters for a case involving national security and that the sentence reflected the seriousness of the crime. Defendants have the right to appeal, and Mavungo was appealing his sentence.

The law extends to all citizens. A separate court under the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights is designated for children's affairs. It functions as part of Luanda's provincial court system. The juvenile court also hears cases of minors between the ages of 12 and 16 accused of committing a criminal offense. Minors over age 16 accused of committing a criminal offense are tried in regular courts. In many rural provinces, there is no provision for juvenile courts, so offenders as young as 12 can be tried as adults. In many cases traditional leaders have state authority to resolve disputes and determine punishments for civil offenses, including offenses committed by juveniles. Traditional authorities are defined in the constitution as ad hoc units of the state.

The president appoints Supreme Court justices for life terms without confirmation by the National Assembly. The Supreme Court generally hears cases concerning alleged political and security crimes.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights denied there were political prisoners in the country. Opposition political parties, however, often claimed their members were detained because of their political affiliations. Media reports of opposition parties' members being harassed and detained for up to 48 hours were common but difficult to confirm.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

Damages for human rights violations may be sought in municipal or provincial courts and appealed to the Supreme Court.

Property Restitution

The constitution recognizes the right to housing and quality of life, and the law states that persons relocated should receive fair compensation. Under the constitution all untitled land belongs to the state. Throughout the year the government used eminent domain laws to raze housing settlements and other buildings to carry out urban redevelopment projects. Some persons forced to move did not receive fair compensation, at times due to lack of clear title or permits for the destroyed property. Relocated persons who received new housing units often complained their units were located inconveniently far from their jobs or places of business, or were of substandard quality. Media reports suggested that the distribution and compensation mechanisms were improving. SOS Habitat, an NGO dealing with land rights, reported some of its activists were harassed by security forces. The NGO submitted a formal complaint to police and authorities were investigating the case.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution and law prohibit such actions, but the government did not always respect these prohibitions. Civil organizations and politically active individuals, including government critics, members of opposition parties, and journalists, complained the government maintained surveillance of their activities and membership. These groups also frequently complained of threats and harassment based on their affiliations to groups that were nominally or explicitly antigovernment.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and press; however, state dominance of most media outlets and self-censorship by journalists limited the practical application of these rights. Most private media organizations were located in the capital.

Freedom of Speech and Expression: Individuals reported practicing self-censorship but generally were able to criticize government policies without fear of direct reprisal. The government engaged in economic coercion and subtle repression, often in the form of offering bribes or withdrawing business or job opportunities, to discourage criticism. Multiple sources reported citizens often curtailed their support of an opposition political party because they would suffer both direct and indirect reprisals from MPLA supporters. Social media was widely used in the larger cities and provided an open forum for discussion. There are no laws restricting the use or content of social media.

Private radio and print media criticized the government openly and harshly but sometimes faced repercussions for doing so. Authorities occasionally threatened journalists and publishers with harassment and arrest for printing critical stories, especially those that centered on the president or his family. Journalists routinely complained of lack of transparency and communication from government press offices and other government officials. This often led to one-sided reporting, with opposition and civil society figures frequently voicing their opinions in privately owned media outlets while government officials kept silent even on noncontroversial issues.

Official news outlets, including Angolan Public Television, Radio Nacional, and the Jornal de Angola newspaper, favored the ruling party and gave only limited coverage to opposition political parties. During the year, however, official news outlets made a noticeable effort to include opposition party members and other commentators in nationally televised debates on issues such as the rule of law and the economy.

Violence and Harassment: Authorities arrested, harassed, and intimidated journalists. For example, a journalist on his way to cover an August demonstration for an opposition radio station was detained by police and, for several hours, his whereabouts were unknown. On the same day, the radio station was encircled by police in uniform and presumed security service personnel in civilian clothing. The journalist was released 24 hours later, and the radio station resumed normal operations after two days.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: Journalists practiced self-censorship, and government security forces did not allow journalists to digitally record police violence against civilians. Journalists reported receiving anonymous threats related to particular reporting they were conducting or had published.

The minister of social communication, spokesperson of the presidency, and the national director of information maintained significant decision-making authority over the media. It was commonly understood these individuals actively vetted news stories in the state-controlled print, television, and radio media and exercised considerable authority over some privately owned outlets. State-controlled media and private media outlets owned by those close to the government rarely published or broadcast stories critical of the ruling party, government officials, or government policies.

Libel Laws/Slander: Defamation is a crime punishable by imprisonment or a fine, and unlike in most cases in which defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty (see section 1.e.), defendants in defamation cases have the burden of proving their innocence by providing evidence of the validity of the allegedly damaging material.

Several journalists in print media, radio, and political blogs faced libel and defamation lawsuits. Journalists complained the government used libel laws to limit their ability to report on corruption and nepotistic practices. According to the PGR, some journalists abused their positions and published inaccurate stories about government officials without verifying the facts or providing the accused the right of reply.

On March 23, the trial of journalist and human rights activists Rafael Marques went forward with two separate but concurrent legal charges of criminal libel and defamation. The criminal libel case was brought by the state because of accusations of human rights violations Marques made in 2011 against members of the Angolan Armed Forces and private security companies in the diamond mining regions. The defamation charges against Marques were dropped on May 21 when the private security companies at issue reached an agreement with Marques. The criminal libel charges, however, were still in effect, and the public prosecutor continued the trial.

On May 25, the judge found Marques guilty of criminal libel and gave him a six-month suspended sentence. The main argument behind the suspended sentence was a statement Marques made on May 21 wherein he acknowledged he had not communicated directly to some of the members of the Angolan Armed Forces or private companies allegedly involved in human rights abuses for comment on his research. Marques' May 21 statement was received by the court as an admission of culpability. Observers from the diplomatic corps and the American Bar Association (ABA) were allowed to attend the trial in its entirety. The ABA published a report on Marques' trial in June, calling into question the judge's decision as well as several other procedural irregularities. The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights stated the majority of cases mentioned in Marques' 2011 accusation had already been tried and sentences imposed on the private citizens and members of the security forces found guilty of human rights violations before Marques published his accusations. Details on the prosecutions and convictions of those cases were not available.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal oversight. According to the International Telecommunication Union, in 2014 approximately 21 percent of residents had access to the internet. In 2014 the government started the program Angola On-line, a free Wi-Fi service.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Freedom of Assembly

The constitution and law provide for the right of assembly, but the government regularly restricted this right.

The law requires written notification to the local administrator and police three days before public assemblies are to be held. For public assemblies during a workday, the law requires the events to start after 7 p.m. The law, however, does not require government permission for such events. The government at times prohibited events based on perceived or claimed security considerations. Police and administrators did not interfere with progovernment gatherings. Nonpartisan groups intending to criticize the government or government leaders, however, often met a heavy police presence and government excuses preventing them from carrying out the event. Usually authorities claimed the timing or venue requested was problematic or that the proper authorities had not received notification.

Activists suffered intimidation, including anonymous death threats, because of their involvement in public demonstrations. For example, on August 8, approximately 35 individuals representing friends and family members of 15 detained activists attempted to hold a public demonstration requesting the detainees' release. The demonstrators submitted documents informing the provincial government of Luanda of their intention to march to the Justice Palace and submit a formal letter to the attorney general requesting the release of the activists. The provincial government denied the request to demonstrate as the proposed route of the march would pass within 100 meters (328 feet) of a government building which, according to the law, is not permitted. The demonstrators attempted to march without the consent of the provincial government but were violently dispersed by police one-half mile from their point of departure.

Freedom of Association

The constitution and law provide for the right of association, but the government did not always respect this right (see also section 7.a.). Extensive delays in the NGO registration process continued to be a problem. NGOs that had not yet received registration were nevertheless allowed to operate.

The government published a new NGO regulation in March that civil society criticized as potentially restrictive and intrusive. For example, the new regulation requires NGOs to obtain approval from the government before the implementation of any project, imposes local authorities as the supervisors of NGO projects within their municipalities, and requires frequent financial reports of NGO activities to the government. The government stated this new regulation is part of its strategy to combat money-laundering and terrorist financing.

The government at times arbitrarily restricted the activities of associations it considered subversive by refusing to grant permits for organized activities. Opposition parties generally were permitted to organize and hold meetings; nevertheless, opposition officials continued to report obstructions to the free exercise of their parties' right to meet.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution and law provide for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation; however, the government at times restricted these rights. The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration, and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to internally displaced persons, refugees, asylum seekers, or other persons of concern. Nonetheless, several sources claimed security forces frequently abused irregular migrants in the border region shared with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

In-country Movement: Police maintained roadside checkpoints throughout the country. Reports by credible local NGOs suggested some police officers extorted money from civilians at checkpoints and during regular traffic stops. Reports from the diamond mining provinces of Lunda Norte and Lunda Sul indicated some government agents restricted the movements of local communities.

The government continued to conduct operations to identify, detain, and expel irregular immigrants. In Luanda border control agents focused on irregular migrants from West Africa and certain Asian countries, including China and Vietnam. They also emphasized operations in the provinces bordering the DRC.

In 2013 the Angolan and DRC governments agreed on a special laissez-passer program for their nationals that allows for increased legal movement of persons and products between Lunda Norte and the DRC province then known as Katanga.

Emigration and Repatriation: In 2009 the government and UNHCR resumed joint efforts to repatriate thousands of Angolan refugees who had remained outside the country since the civil war. These efforts continued even after June 2012, when UNHCR and regional governments agreed to a cessation of prima facie refugee status for Angolans on the grounds that asylum and protection for most Angolans was no longer required. During the year Angolan former refugees returned voluntarily from Zambia and the DRC. The government cooperated with UNHCR on voluntary repatriation and reintegration programs, but operations were significantly delayed due to funding constraints and a lack of reintegration support to returnees. From January to September, an estimated 3,900 Angolan former refugees returned to the country. Government officials and returning Angolan refugees reported that returnees received some assistance from the Ministry of Social Assistance and Reintegration and international organizations. The government had programs to help returnees regularize their legal status. NGOs funded by the government helped returnees with education and language training, agricultural supplies, and housing materials. The government declared an end to assisted repatriation in October. Angolans returning after October were still permitted to do so but did not benefit from UNHCR or government support.

Protection of Refugees

The Committee for the Recognition of the Right of Asylum has the lead on identifying, verifying, and legalizing asylum seekers in the country. The committee works with UNHCR and civil society partners in providing support for the asylum population.

Access to Asylum: The Asylum Law (law 10/2015) entered into force on June 17. The law provides specific procedures for the submission of an asylum application and guidance on the determination of asylum cases. The law also establishes the creation of reception centers for refugees and asylum seekers where they are supposed to receive assistance until the government makes a decision on their case. There were three reception centers: in Luanda, Lunda Norte, and Zaire provinces.

Refugee Abuse: In diamond-rich Lunda Norte Province, NGOs and the media reported several acts of violence and degrading treatment, including rape and sexual abuse of Congolese migrants. In response to the allegations of sexual violence, President dos Santos created a commission that included UN representatives to improve the situation around the borders. The commission performed regular verification missions to assess progress at the border crossing points.

Employment: There were no formal restrictions on a refugee's ability to seek employment. Refugees sometimes faced difficulty obtaining employment due to a lack of legal documents required to work in the formal sector and difficulty in obtaining such documents. These difficulties were compounded by a general lack of acceptance of the refugee card and a lack of knowledge about the rights it was intended to safeguard.

Access to Basic Services: Persons with recognized refugee status could take advantage of public services, but refugees at times faced difficulty obtaining access to public services such as health care and education due to a lack of legal documents issued by the government. Corruption by officials compounded these difficulties.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution and law provide citizens the ability to choose their government through free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and citizens exercised this ability.

According to the 2010 constitution, presidential and legislative elections should be held every five years. In 2012 citizens elected legislative representatives and the president. The constitution calls for the first-ever elections at the municipal and provincial levels to happen according to the principle of "gradualism," whereby local elections are to be held in provinces and municipalities based on a variable timeline. The right to elect local leaders remained restricted, and elections did not occur at the provincial or municipal levels.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: In 2012 the government held legislative elections and the country's first postwar presidential election. The ruling MPLA won 71.8 percent of the vote in the legislative elections. Domestic and international observers reported polling throughout the country was peaceful and generally credible, although the ruling party enjoyed advantages due to state control of major media and other resources. Opposition parties contested aspects of the electoral process and the results but accepted their seats in the National Assembly. In 2012 the constitutional court rejected opposition appeals and certified the election results as free and fair.

The country has never elected provincial or local government leaders, and the constitution does not specify a timeline for implementing municipal-level elections. By year's end the government and ruling party officials had not announced a target date for municipal elections but stated they were creating the conditions necessary for successful local elections, including holding a national population census in 2014 and incrementally decentralizing administrative and budgetary authorities to local municipalities. Opposition parties and some members of civil society were dissatisfied with the slow pace and claimed the ruling party lacked the political will to organize municipal elections.

Political Parties and Political Participation: The ruling MPLA party dominated all political institutions. Political power was concentrated in the presidency and the Council of Ministers, through which the president exercised executive power. The council can enact laws, decrees, and resolutions, assuming most functions normally associated with the legislative branch. The National Assembly consists of 220 deputies elected under a party list proportional representation system. This body has the authority to draft, debate, and pass legislation, but the executive branch often proposed and drafted legislation for the assembly's approval. After the 2012 legislative elections, opposition deputies held 20 percent of parliamentary seats, up from just 13 percent in 2008.

Opposition parties stated their members were subject to harassment, intimidation, and assault by MPLA supporters. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) continued to argue that the MPLA had not complied with the terms of the 2002 peace accord, and former combatants lacked the social services and assistance needed to reintegrate into society. UNITA, the MPLA's primary military and political opponent during the civil war, is now the largest opposition political party. Former combatants also reported difficulties obtaining pensions due to bureaucratic delays or discrimination. The country has three dominant linguistic groups: the Ovimbundu, Mbundu, and Bakongo, which together constitute approximately 77 percent of the population. All were represented in government, as were other groups. Political parties must be represented in all 18 provinces, but only the MPLA, UNITA, and the Broad Convergence for the Salvation of Angola, Electoral Coalition (CASA-CE), to a lesser extent, had truly national constituencies. By law no political party could limit party membership based on ethnicity, race, or gender.

Several reports of altercations between MPLA and opposition parties' supporters were published by social and conventional media as well as through opposition party press releases. The main concern by opposition politicians was the apparent lack of interest by the national police, especially in the provinces, to investigate alleged violence against opposition political parties. The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights stated many of the complaints by opposition parties were under investigation.

Participation of Women and Minorities: Of the 220 deputies in the national assembly, 79 were women. Two women served as governors (out of 18 nationwide), and eight women were cabinet ministers (out of 34). In 2013 President dos Santos signed a decree on gender equality in the national police, instructing the national police commander to encourage the enlistment of more women in the police force.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

Although the law provides criminal penalties for official corruption, the government did not implement these laws effectively, and local and international NGOs and media sources reported officials engaged in corrupt practices with impunity.

Corruption: Government corruption existed at all levels, although there were some institutions working to improve transparency and accountability within the government. Public prosecutions of corruption cases were rare.

Government corruption was widespread, and accountability was limited due to a lack of checks and balances, lack of institutional capacity, and a culture of impunity. The judiciary was subject to political influence and conflict of interest.

The Ministry of Finance published the national budget on its website. Information on national expenditures and debt obligations was also available on its website. During the year the Ministry of Finance and the International Monetary Fund collaborated on financial transparency initiatives.

In June the National Assembly passed the Mutual Legal Assistance Law, which allows government agencies and private companies to share information with international law enforcement agencies to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism. In 2012 the government decided to pursue structural anti-money-laundering (AML) reforms. In support of this strategy, the country joined the International Co-operation Review Group (ICRG) established by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). The government worked with ICRG as well as the regional FATF group to which it belongs, the Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money Laundering Group, to conform its laws, regulations, and organizations to FATF's recommendations.

In contrast with previous years the Central Bank (BNA) took a more aggressive role in combating corruption. The BNA had a trained team to identify and investigate money laundering and terrorist financing.

As in previous years there were credible reports government officials used their political positions to profit from business deals. The business environment continued to favor those connected to the government, including members of the president's family.

Government ministers and other high-level officials commonly and openly owned interests in companies regulated by, or doing business with, their respective ministries. There are laws and regulations regarding conflict of interest, but they were not enforced. Petty corruption among police, teachers, and other government employees was widespread. Police extorted money from citizens and refugees, and prison officials extorted money from family members of inmates.

Financial Disclosure: The law on public probity requires senior government officials to declare their assets to the attorney general. According to the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, the financial information of government officials was provided to the appropriate government office. The law treats financial information reports of government officials as confidential. The president, vice president, and president of the National Assembly are exempt from these public probity requirements. Nonexempt government officials are to make a new declaration within 30 days of assuming a new post and every two years thereafter. The law does not stipulate a new declaration be made upon leaving office but states that officials must return all government property within 60 days.

Penalties for noncompliance vary depending on which section of the law was violated but include removal from office, a bar from government employment for three to five years, a ban on contracting with the government for three years, repayment of the illicitly gained assets, and a fine of up to 100 times the value of the accepted bribe. The National Office of Economic Police is responsible for investigating violations of this law, as well as other financial and economic crimes, and then referring them to the Financial Court for prosecution. There were no known cases related to this law during the year.

Transparency problems remained in the diamond industry, particularly regarding allocations of exploration, production, and purchasing rights. The country was the chair of the Kimberley Process for the 2014-15 cycle and made considerable efforts to improve the conditions and legal status of artisanal miners in Angola and other diamond producing countries.

Public Access to Information: The law provides for public access to government information. While the amount of information posted on government websites gradually increased, it remained limited. Laws are made public by being published in the official gazette. The gazette can be purchased for a small fee but was not available online in its entirety. In general the government was not responsive to routine requests for information, and it was sometimes unclear what information the government considered public versus private.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A variety of domestic and international human rights groups operated throughout the country. Some of those investigating government corruption and human rights abuses alleged government interference in their activities. Civil society organizations faced difficulties in contacting detainees, and prison authorities undermined civil society work in the prisons.

The Law of Associations requires NGOs to specify their mandate and areas of activity. The government used this provision to prevent or discourage established NGOs from engaging in certain activities, especially those that the government deemed politically sensitive. In March a presidential decree meant to regulate NGO operations formalized many of the unenforced requirements of the Law of Associations and restructured the government agency in charge of implementing the law. NGOs cited concern regarding new reporting requirements concerning their activities, financial accounts, and foreign and domestic employees. They also expressed concern about the burden of proving to the government their activities have a tangible "public benefit." NGOs doing work on political rights, and human rights defenders (as compared to social service providers), argued the new regulation, and particularly the "public benefit" clause, is specifically meant to limit their work. The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights stated the new regulation was necessary to comply with international financial transparency and anti-money-laundering standards, and that the regulation was not meant to restrict NGO activities.

Even before the new regulation, the government allowed local NGOs to carry out human rights-related work, but many NGOs reported they were forced to limit the scope of their work because they faced problems registering, were subject to subtle forms of intimidation, and risked more serious forms of harassment and closure.

The government arrested and harassed NGO workers. Several NGO leaders reported being followed by security forces and being detained for several hours by police officers without justification.

The government criticized domestic and international NGOs, and there were reports of police or military presence at community meetings with international NGOs, especially in Cabinda.

The United Nations or Other International Bodies: The government cooperated with international governmental organizations and permitted visits by UN representatives.

On May 12, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a press release urging the government to ensure "a truly meaningful, independent, thorough investigation" into reports of an alleged massacre in the central province of Huambo with "wildly differing" casualty figures being reported by media sources. The government rejected the UN's suggestion, claiming allegations by NGOs and opposition parties were defamatory and not based on any evidence (see also section 1.a.).

On September 9, the European Parliament passed a resolution that recommended the immediate release of "all human rights defenders ... prisoners of conscience, and political opponents" in the country. The resolution was the result of a report written by Parliamentarian Ana Gomes, based on her July visit to the country. The government "vehemently repudiated" the resolution as biased and based on misinformation.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The state-funded Inter-Ministerial Commission for the Writing of Human Rights Reports includes only representatives from various government ministries. Leading civil society members decided not to participate on the commission because they did not believe it was independent or effective.

The 10th Commission on Human Rights of the National Assembly is charged with investigating citizen complaints of alleged human rights violations.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution and law prohibit discrimination based on race, gender, religion, disability, language, or social status, but the government did not effectively enforce these prohibitions. The constitution does not specifically address sexual orientation or gender identity. Violence and discrimination against women, child abuse, child prostitution, trafficking in persons, and discrimination against persons with disabilities were problems.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: Rape, including spousal rape, is illegal and punishable by up to eight years' imprisonment. Limited investigative resources, poor forensic capabilities, and an ineffective judicial system prevented prosecution of most cases. The government launched a public media campaign highlighting violence against women. The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights worked with the Ministry of Interior to increase the number of female police officers and to improve police response to rape allegations.

A joint report published in August by the Ministries of Family and Protection of Women, Interior, and Social Assistance and Reintegration stated that in 2014 there were 16,237 reported cases of domestic violence.

The Zero Tolerance for Gender and Sexual Based Violence campaign continued. The campaign increased awareness of sexual violence and encouraged women to file police reports. The Ministry of Family and Protection of Women held a seminar in October with NGOs and provincial government authorities to discuss sexual violence and preventive best practices.

The law criminalizes domestic violence and penalizes offenders with prison sentences and fines depending on the severity of their crime. The government reported it had 27 domestic violence counseling centers, seven other shelters, and various treatment centers throughout the country. It called for more studies into the causes of domestic violence as well as more shelters to help victims. The ministry maintained a program with the Angolan Bar Association to give free legal assistance to abused women and established counseling centers to help families cope with domestic abuse. Statistics on prosecutions for violence against women were not available.

The Organization of Angolan Women (OMA), a political association affiliated with the ruling MPLA, held a series of seminars across the country to increase awareness of the dangers of domestic violence. For example, during an OMA seminar in May, the OMA compared domestic violence cases that were reported in Cuando Cubango Province in the first trimesters of 2014 and 2015. The OMA found that in 2014 citizens reported eight incidences of domestic violence, compared with only three in 2015. OMA argued the decrease was not a sign that domestic violence was declining but a sign of disinterest by society and urged provincial authorities to educate communities against domestic violence.

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C): Although the law does not specifically ban FGM/C, it protects the integrity of women and children against bodily harm, and there are special provisions against mutilation. According to local health experts, FGM/C was not a problem. In October, however, one local newspaper featured a story on FGM/C that alleged the practice existed in some African migrant communities.

Other Harmful Traditional Practices: During the year sporadic news reports of children being accused of witchcraft were published. The National Institute for Religious Affairs acknowledged that belief in, and accusations of, witchcraft continued to exist, particularly in Zaire and Uige provinces, but stated that cases of abusive practices diminished significantly due to campaigns and government directives aimed at reducing indigenous religious practices such as shamanism, animal sacrifices, and witchcraft. There were anecdotal reports of women and children being abused by their communities because of accusations they practiced witchcraft. The Ministry of Culture and the National Institute for Children (INAC) had educational initiatives and emergency programs to assist children accused of witchcraft.

Sexual Harassment: Sexual harassment was common and not illegal. Such cases may be prosecuted under assault and battery and defamation statutes.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children; manage their reproductive health; have access to the information and means to do so free from discrimination, coercion, or violence. According to the UN Population Division, 12 percent of married women used a modern method of contraception. During the year the government issued its first-ever national family planning strategy. According to the most recent UN reporting, the maternal mortality ratio was 460 deaths per 100,000 live births. High maternal mortality was likely due to inadequate access to health facilities before, during, and after giving birth, and early pregnancy. The government continued to work on reducing the high maternal mortality rate by increasing public access to reproductive and skilled obstetric care.

According to UN sources, 55 percent of women were 18 or younger when they gave birth to their first child. There were no legal barriers that limit access to reproductive health services, but some cultural views, such as the responsibility of women to have children, and religious objections to using contraception, limited access. Comprehensive information on government provisions for reproductive health services or diagnosis and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS, improved with the assistance of international partners.

Discrimination: Under the constitution and law, women enjoy the same rights and legal status as men, but societal discrimination against women remained a problem, particularly in rural areas (see also section 7.d.). There were no effective mechanisms to enforce child support laws, and women generally bore the major responsibility for raising children. There were no known cases of official or private sector discrimination in employment or occupation, credit, pay, owning and/or managing a business, or housing. Gender discrimination was more prevalent in terms of household responsibilities than in access to goods or services.

The law provides for equal pay for equal work (see section 7.d.), although women generally held low-level positions.

In an interministerial effort led by the Ministry of Family and Protection of Women, the government undertook multiple information campaigns on women's rights and domestic abuse and hosted national, provincial, and municipal workshops and training sessions.

Children

Birth Registration: Citizenship is derived by birth within the country or from one's parents. The government does not register all births immediately, and activists reported many urban and rural children remained undocumented. According to the UN Children's Fund, as of mid-2013, as many as 69 percent of children under the age of five did not have birth certificates. The government permitted undocumented children to attend school but only up to the fourth grade. Pursuant to a 2013 plan, the government waived birth registration fees for all persons, including adults, through the end of 2016. In previous years parents could register their children under five for no fee, but parents with older children found the registration costs prohibitive.

Education: Education is tuition-free and compulsory for documented children through the sixth grade, but students often faced significant additional expenses such as books or fees paid to education officials. These fees sometimes were payments to help with school operation and maintenance costs that were not covered by the national budget. At other times, however, the fees were bribes paid by families to ensure their child got a place in a classroom. When parents were unable to pay the fees, their children were often unable to attend school.

Children of any age in an urban area were more likely to attend school than children in a rural area. Children in rural areas generally lacked access to secondary education. Even in provincial capitals, there were not enough classroom spaces for all children. There were reports that parents, especially in more rural areas, were more likely to send boys to school than girls. According to UNESCO, enrollment rates were higher for boys than for girls, especially at the secondary level.

Child Abuse: Child abuse was widespread. Reports of physical abuse within the family were commonplace, and local officials largely tolerated abuse. Vulnerable children, such as orphans or those without access to health care or education, were more likely to be abused by their caretakers. A 2012 law significantly improved the legal framework protecting children, but problems remained in its implementation and enforcement.

Early and Forced Marriage: The legal age for marriage with parental consent is 15 years. The government did not enforce this restriction effectively, and the traditional age of marriage in lower income groups coincided with the onset of puberty. Data on the rate of marriage for boys and girls under age 18 was not available. Common-law marriage was widely practiced.

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: See information on girls under 18 in women's section above.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: All forms of prostitution, including child prostitution, are illegal. Police did not actively enforce laws against prostitution, and local NGOs expressed concern over child prostitution, especially in Luanda, Benguela, and Cunene provinces. Penalties for sexual exploitation of children are defined in a 2014 antitrafficking law that includes protections against child pornography, prostitution, and sexual and labor abuse.

Sexual relations between an adult and a child under the age of 12 are considered rape and carry a potential legal penalty of eight to 12 years' imprisonment. Sexual relations with a child between the ages of 12 and 17 is considered sexual abuse, and convicted offenders may receive sentences from two to eight years in prison. Limited investigative resources and an inadequate judicial system prevented prosecution of most cases. There were no known prosecutions during the year. The legal age for consensual sex is 18 years. The law prohibits child pornography.

A 2012 law codified the "11 Commitments to Children" campaign. The law defines priorities and coordinates the government's policies to combat all forms of abuse against children, including unlawful child labor, trafficking, and sexual exploitation.

International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

Anti-Semitism

There is a Jewish community of approximately 350 persons, primarily expatriate Israelis. There were no reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The law prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities, including persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities, in employment (see also section 7.d.), education, and access to health care or other state services, but the government did not effectively enforce these prohibitions. The constitution grants persons with disabilities full rights without restriction and calls on the government to adopt national policies to prevent, treat, rehabilitate, and integrate persons with disabilities to support their families; remove obstacles to their mobility; educate society about disability; and encourage special learning and training opportunities for the disabled. It does not specifically mention the rights of persons with disabilities with regard to transportation, including air travel.

Persons with disabilities included more than 80,000 victims of land mines and other explosive remnants of war. The NGO Handicap International estimated that as many as 500,000 persons had disabilities. Because of limited government resources and uneven availability, only 30 percent of such persons were able to take advantage of state-provided services such as physical rehabilitation, schooling, training, or counseling.

The National Council for Persons with Disabilities is responsible for verifying that all such persons are protected from discrimination and have access to the same rights and privileges as citizens without disabilities. Persons with disabilities, nevertheless, found it difficult to access public or private facilities, and it was difficult for such persons to find employment or participate in the education system (see also section 7.d.). Women with disabilities were reported to be vulnerable to sexual abuse and abandonment when pregnant. The antitrafficking law specifically punishes sexual abuse of vulnerable populations, including persons with disabilities. The Ministry of Assistance and Social Reintegration sought to address problems facing persons with disabilities, including veterans with disabilities, and several government entities supported programs to assist individuals disabled by landmine incidents. During the 2012 election, the government provided voting assistance to persons with disabilities. Persons with disabilities were allowed to select someone of their own choosing to accompany them into the voting booth to fill out the ballot and were allowed to move ahead of others waiting in line to vote.

Indigenous People

An estimated 8,000 San persons lived in small dispersed communities in Huila, Cunene, and Cuando Cubango provinces. The San are traditional hunter-gatherers who are linguistically and ethnically distinct from their Bantu fellow citizens. The constitution does not make specific reference to the rights of indigenous persons. The San's limited participation in political life increased slightly, and Mbakita, a local NGO advocate for the San, worked with provincial governments to increase services to San communities and improve communication between these communities and the government. The government reportedly permitted businesses and well-connected elites to take traditional land from the San, and some San were working as farmers for urban Bantus to earn a living. Those who borrowed land from Bantus lacked equipment to cultivate it, and borrowed lands can be taken back at any time. Many San reportedly turned to begging because other options were not available.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The constitution prohibits all forms of discrimination but does not specifically address sexual orientation or gender identity. According to the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, the law does not criminalize sexual relationships between persons of the same sex. Sections of the 1886 penal code could be viewed as criminalizing homosexual activity, but they are no longer used by the judicial system. The constitution defines marriage as between a man and a woman, however. Local and international NGOs reported that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) individuals faced discrimination and harassment, but reports of violence against the LGBTI community based on sexual orientation were rare. The government, through its health agencies, instituted a series of initiatives to decrease discrimination against LGBTI individuals. For example, the National Institute to Fight HIV/AIDS worked with local NGOs and LGBTI activists to promote antidiscriminatory practices by health practitioners and communities across the country.

Discrimination against LGBTI individuals often went unreported. LGBTI individuals asserted that sometimes police refused to register their grievances. A police commander in Luanda stated police have the obligation to record all reports of discrimination and recommended LGBTI persons report improper behavior by police officers to the national police headquarters. In 2014 a group of LGBTI individuals formed the first openly gay association in civil society. The association was created to help LGBTI youth facing harassment or social alienation. During the year the association partnered with the Ministry of Health and the National Institute to Fight HIV/AIDS to improve access to health services and sexual education for the LGBTI community.

On February 2, soap opera Jikulumesso showed the first same-sex kiss on national television between two men. The kiss was seen as controversial and elicited discussion in mainstream and social media outlets on homosexuality in the country. No reports of violence against LGBTI individuals were reported as a result of the broadcast or subsequent social debate.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

Discrimination against those with HIV/AIDS is illegal, but lack of enforcement allowed employers to discriminate against persons with the condition or disease. There were no news reports of violence against persons with HIV/AIDS. Reports from local and international health NGOs suggested discrimination against individuals with HIV/AIDS was common. The government's National Institute to Fight HIV/AIDS includes sensitivity and antidiscrimination training for its employees when they are testing and counseling HIV patients. Local NGOs worked with the government to combat stigmatization and discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law provides for the right of workers, except members of the armed forces and police, to form and join independent unions. To establish a trade union, at least 30 percent of workers in an economic sector in a province must follow a registration process and obtain authorization from government officials. The law provides for the right to collective bargaining except in the civil service. The law prohibits strikes conducted by members of the armed forces, police, prosecutors and magistrates of the PGR, prison staff, fire fighters, public sector employees providing "essential services," and oil workers.

While the law allows unions to conduct their activities without government interference, it also places some restrictions on their ability to strike. Before engaging in a strike, workers must make a good-faith effort to negotiate their grievances with their employer. Should they fail to negotiate, the government can deny the right to strike. The government may intervene in labor disputes that affect national security and the oil and energy production sectors. Essential services are broadly defined, including the transport sector, communications, waste management and treatment, and fuel distribution. In exceptional circumstances involving national interests, authorities have the power to requisition workers in the essential services sector. Collective labor disputes are to be settled through compulsory arbitration by the Ministry of Public Administration, Employment, and Social Security. The law does not prohibit employer retribution against strikers, and it permits the government to force workers back to work for "breaches of worker discipline" or participation in unauthorized strikes. Nonetheless, the law prohibits antiunion discrimination and stipulates that worker complaints should be adjudicated in the labor court. Under the law employers are required to reinstate workers who have been dismissed for union activities.

The government generally did not effectively enforce applicable laws. The Ministry of Public Administration, Employment, and Social Security had a hotline for workers who believed their rights had been violated, and the leader of the Confederation of Free and Independent Labor Unions of Angola, an independent labor confederation, explained in 2014 that the labor courts functioned, albeit slowly. Enforcement efforts were hampered by an insufficient number of adequately trained labor inspectors. Some companies were reportedly warned prior to labor inspections, making government efforts ineffective.

Freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining were not generally respected. Government approval is required to form and join unions, which were hampered by membership and legalization issues. Labor unions, independent of those run by the government, worked to increase their influence, but the ruling MPLA continued to dominate the labor movement due to historical connections between the party and labor, and also the superior financial base of the country's largest labor union (which also constitutes the labor wing of the MPLA). The government is the country's largest employer, and the Ministry of Public Administration, Employment, and Social Security mandated government worker wages with no negotiation with the unions.

Worker strikes were rare and received limited media coverage. The most visible exception occurred on October 5, when a sizable number of taxi drivers organized a strike in some areas of Luanda Province. Some taxi drivers opted for a peaceful strike to protest their dissatisfaction with a decision by the national police to strictly enforce pick-up and drop-off points throughout the city as a necessary safety measure. An undetermined number of taxi drivers engaged in violent protest, attacking drivers who decided to work and burning tires to impede traffic. At least 200 taxi drivers were arrested. The taxi driver strike was deemed illegal by government authorities, since the drivers' bargaining units had not first tried to negotiate with the government.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor.

The government did not effectively enforce the law due in part to an insufficient number of inspectors. Penalties for violations are the same as those for trafficking in persons, ranging from eight to 12 years in prison, and may be insufficient to deter violations.

Forced labor occurred among men and women in agriculture, construction, domestic service, and artisanal diamond-mining sectors, particularly in Lunda Norte and Lunda Sul. Migrant workers were subject to seizure of passports, threats, denial of food, and confinement. The government produced a training video for law enforcement and immigration officials that included a short segment on how to identify victims of trafficking, although this was not the sole objective of the film. INAC continued working to reduce the number of children traveling to agricultural areas in the country's southern regions to work on farms, mostly through community outreach about the importance of an education. A reported 24 women from Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Namibia were identified by authorities as being forced into prostitution. Forced child labor also occurred.

See also the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The law prohibits children under 14 from working. To obtain an employment contract, the law requires youth to submit evidence they are 14 years of age or older. Children could work from age 14 to 16 with parental permission or without parental consent if they are married and the work did not interfere with schooling. The law also allows orphan children that want to work to get official permission in the form of a letter from "an appropriate institution" but does not specify the type of institution. The Ministries of Public Administration, Employment, and Social Security; Social Assistance and Reintegration; Interior; INAC, and the national police are the entities responsible for enforcement of child labor laws. A new interministerial commission to combat trafficking in persons was created in November 2014 to coordinate enforcement actions. The commission generally effectively enforced child labor standards in the formal sector, but the government had difficulty monitoring the large informal sector, where most children worked. Reports also indicated employers were often warned before the arrival of labor inspectors, which allowed them to circumvent child labor laws.

Inspectors are authorized to conduct surprise inspections whenever they see fit. Penalties for violations were generally sufficient to deter violations. Penalties for not signing a written contract for children ages 14 and over is a fine of two to five times the median monthly salary offered by the company. Children over age 14 who are employed as part of an apprenticeship are also required to have a written contract. The penalty for not having this contract is three to six times the average monthly salary of the company. For children found to be working in jobs categorized as hazardous (which is illegal under the law), the fines are five to 10 times the average monthly salary of the company. Nonpayment of any of these fines results in the accrual of additional fines.

Child labor, especially in the informal sector, remained a problem. The Ministry of Public Administration, Employment, and Social Security had oversight of formal work sites in all 18 provinces, but it was unknown if inspectors checked on the age of workers or conditions of work sites. If the ministry determined a business was using child labor, it transferred the case to the Ministry of Interior to investigate and possibly press charges. It was not known if the government fined any businesses for using child labor. The Ministry of Public Administration, Employment, and Social Security, other government agencies, and labor unions developed a national plan to limit child labor. During the year authorities interdicted two different buses of children allegedly destined for farm work. The cases were pending at year's end.

Generally, work done by children was in the informal sector. Children engaged in economic activities such as agricultural labor on family farms and commercial plantations, fishing, brick making, charcoal production, domestic labor, and street vending. Exploitive labor practices included activity and involvement in the sale or transport of illegal drugs and the offloading and transport of goods in ports and across border posts. Children were reportedly forced to act as couriers in the illegal cross-border trade with Namibia. Adult criminals sometimes used children for forced criminal activity, since the justice system prohibits youths under 12 from being tried in court. There were no credible reports of the use of child labor and forced child labor in informal diamond mining.

Street work among children was common, especially in the provinces of Luanda, Benguela, Huambo, Huila, and Kwanza Sul. Investigators found children working in the streets of Luanda, but many returned to some form of dwelling during the evening. Most of these children shined shoes, washed cars, carried water and other goods, or engaged in other informal labor, but some resorted to petty crime and begging. Commercial sexual exploitation of children occurred as well.

The government, through INAC, worked to create, train, and strengthen child protection networks at the provincial and municipal levels in all 18 provinces. No central mechanism existed to track cases or provide statistics. In Benguela, Lunda Sul, and Benge provinces, a total of 68 cases of child labor were uncovered by local authorities, but there were no reports that the government prosecuted the cases. The government also dedicated resources to the expansion of educational and livelihood opportunities for children and their families.

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment and Occupation

The labor law prohibits discrimination in employment and occupation based on race, sex, religion, disability, or language, and the government in general effectively enforced the law in the formal sector. The constitution prohibits all forms of discrimination, although it does not specifically address political opinion, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity (see section 6). The law provides for equal pay for equal work, and many women held high-level positions in state-run industries and in the private sector or worked in the informal sector. There were no known cases of official or private sector gender-based discrimination in employment or occupation. For example, the country sends a team from the Ministry of Finance to Washington every year for meetings at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and ensures that the delegation includes both men and women. Women have held and continued to hold ministerial posts.

Despite the law, persons with disabilities found it difficult to gain access to public or private facilities, and it was difficult for such persons to participate in the education system and thus find employment. There were no known reports of discrimination in employment or occupation.

Discrimination against migrant workers also occurred.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The minimum wage is 22,495 kwanza ($155) per month. Workers in informal sectors, such as street vendors, subsistence farmers, and domestic servants, are not covered by the minimum wage law. The country had not established a poverty income level; however, the UN Development Program estimated the poverty level to be 165 kwanzas ($1.13) per day, or 4,950 kwanzas ($34) per month.

The standard work week is 44 hours with at least one unbroken period of 24 hours of rest per week. When employees engage in shift work or a variable weekly schedule, they may work up to 54 hours per week before the employer must pay overtime. In the formal sector, there is a prohibition on excessive compulsory overtime, defined as more than two hours a day, 40 hours a month, or 200 hours a year. The law also provides for paid annual holidays. The government sets occupational health and safety standards.

By law employers must provide, at a minimum, a 50 percent of monthly salary bonus to employees in December and an annual vacation.

Most wage earners held second jobs or depended on the agricultural or other informal sectors to augment their incomes. Foreign workers with permanent legal status or a temporary work visa were protected under the labor law.

The minimum wage law was effectively enforced only in the formal sector. An estimated 60 percent of the economy derives from the informal sector, where most workers were not covered by wage or occupational safety standards. The workweek standards were not enforced unless employees lodged a formal complaint with the Ministry of Public Administration, Employment, and Social Security.

The labor law guarantees a safe work environment in all sectors of the economy. Employees have the right to remove themselves from hazardous working conditions and may file a formal complaint with the Ministry of Public Administration, Employment, and Social Security if employers insist they perform hazardous tasks. The government enforced occupational safety and health standards and investigated private company operations based on complaints made by NGOs.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Andorra

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Andorra, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/571612a815.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Principality of Andorra is a constitutional parliamentary democracy. Two co-princes  the president of France and the Spanish bishop of Urgell  serve with joint authority as heads of state. On March 1, the country held free and fair multiparty elections for the 28 seats in parliament (the General Council of the Valleys), which selects the head of government. Having won a majority in parliament, the Democrats for Andorra re-elected Antoni Marti Petit head of government. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the security forces.

The country's main human rights problem was the lack of legal protection for the constitutional rights of workers to bargain collectively or strike. The law did not protect workers from antiunion discrimination.

Other problems included the lack of a mechanism to monitor and investigate police misconduct. There were isolated instances of domestic violence, including spousal abuse and child abuse. Gender discrimination persisted, especially related to unequal salaries for comparable work. Although the law prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities, discrimination existed in the form of physical, social, and cultural barriers.

There were no reports that government officials or the national police committed violations.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

The constitution and law prohibit such practices, and there were no reports that government officials employed them.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Prison and detention center conditions generally met international standards.

Physical Conditions: There were no reports of deaths in prison or in the pretrial detention center.

Administration: The government investigated credible allegations of inhuman conditions.

Independent Monitoring: The government permitted visits by independent human rights observers.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The constitution and law prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The country's only security forces are the police, prison officers, traffic police, and forestry officials. The Ministry of Justice and Interior maintained effective civilian control over the security forces, and the government has effective mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption. There were no reports of impunity involving police.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

The law requires warrants for arrest. Police legally may detain persons for 48 hours without a hearing, and police generally observed this time limit. The judge has up to 24 hours to charge the detainee with a crime or to release him or her. Police promptly informed detainees of charges against them. A bail system exists. The law provides detainees the right to legal counsel from the moment of arrest. Persons charged with a crime may choose their own lawyers or accept one designated by the government. Detainees generally had prompt access to family members.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

The constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary, and the government generally respected judicial independence.

Trial Procedures

The constitution and law provide for the right to a fair trial, and an independent judiciary generally enforced this right. Defendants enjoy a presumption of innocence and receive prompt, detailed notification of the charges against them. The government provides an interpreter, if needed. Trials are fair, public, and usually held before a judge or tribunal of judges, depending on the penal offense or in cases of civil law depending on the amount asked for in damages. Defendants have the right to be present and consult in a timely manner with an attorney of their choice. If a defendant cannot afford an attorney, the government must appoint a public attorney. Defendants and their attorneys have adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense. Defendants and attorneys have access to government-held evidence in their cases. Defendants can confront or question witnesses against them and present witnesses and evidence on their behalf. Defendants cannot be compelled to testify or confess guilt, and they have the right to appeal.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

The judiciary is independent and impartial in all jurisdictions, including civil matters. Plaintiffs can bring lawsuits seeking damages for, or cessation of, a human rights violation. The national ombudsman also serves to protect and defend basic rights and public freedom on behalf of citizens.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The constitution and law prohibit such actions, and there were no reports that the government failed to respect these prohibitions.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respected these rights. An independent press, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of speech and press.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports that the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 96 percent of the population used the internet in 2014.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

The constitution and law provide for the freedoms of assembly and association, and the government generally respected these rights.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution and law provide for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights.

Protection of Refugees

Access to Asylum: The law does not provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has declined to establish a system for providing protection to refugees, preferring to deal with them on an ad hoc basis. According to the Ministry of Justice and Interior, there were no requests received during the year. There is a lack of domestic legislation on asylum seekers and refugees, and in particular at the absence of measures to protect unaccompanied and refugee children. The country has cooperated with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and other international refugee relief organizations.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution and the law provide citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: Observers considered parliamentary elections held on March 1 to be free and fair.

Participation of Women and Minorities: Women participated in government. Citizens were ethnically and linguistically homogeneous but, as of 2014, represented only 45 percent of the country's population. The majority of the population consisted of immigrants, largely from Spain, Portugal, and France. Because only citizens have the right to hold official positions, there were no members of minorities in government.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, and the government generally implemented these laws effectively.

Corruption: In July a court sentenced a police officer to two years in prison and four years' ban from public office for disclosure of sensitive information.

Financial Disclosure: The constitution and the law do not require disclosure of income or assets by elected or appointed officials, except for the declaration of earned income to the social security agency required of all employees. The government does not publish the declarations.

Public Access to Information: No specific law provides for public access to government information. The government publishes a weekly compilation of laws, dispositions, and administrative acts in its official bulletin, which is available online or via email.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A variety of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials were cooperative and responsive to their views.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The ombudsman's main function is to defend and oversee the fulfillment and application of the rights and liberties included in the constitution and to ensure the public sector adheres to constitutional principles. The ombudsman is independent from other institutions and provides its functions free of charge for interested persons. The ombudsman enjoyed the government's cooperation and operated without government interference. The ombudsman had adequate resources, published an annual report to parliament with recommendations, and was considered effective.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The constitution and law declare all persons equal before the law and prohibit discrimination on grounds of birth, race, gender, origin, religion, opinions, or any other personal or social condition. Although the government effectively enforced these provisions for the most part, in its latest report June 9, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance noted that the country's laws do not apply the principle of the sharing of the burden of proof. The law relating to hearing complaints on the grounds of race, color, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or language in civil and administrative courts does not provide that, when persons establish before the court facts of alleged direct or indirect discrimination, the respondent should prove that there has been no discrimination, racism, or intolerance.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: The law prohibits rape, including spousal rape, both of which are punishable by up to 15 years' imprisonment. The law penalizes domestic physical or psychological violence with a prison sentence of up to three years. Authorities enforced the law effectively. The first law on the Elimination of Gender-Based and Domestic Violence entered into effect on February 11. The law envisages the establishment of a national commission for the prevention of domestic and gender-based violence.

As of the end of June, the Prosecutor's Office initiated 44 criminal proceedings related to gender violence and 12 related to domestic violence. As of the end of June, the Prosecutor's Office concluded 10 cases of gender violence and one case of domestic violence. Almost all the cases involved elements of psychological abuse and mistreatment. Some cases also involved injuries, sexual aggression, and threats.

The government's Interdisciplinary Team on Gender Violence (EAID) provided medical and psychological services (including a hotline) as well as legal assistance to victims of domestic violence. In addition the government placed abused women and their children in a shelter, in a hotel, or with foster families who agreed to provide shelter. As of August, EAID had assisted 102 female victims of domestic violence. These cases involved psychological, physical, and sexual violence, as well as social and economic mistreatment. Caritas, a religious nongovernmental organization (NGO), worked closely with the government and with other NGOs in providing support to the victims in their integration into society.

Victims of domestic violence could also request help from the NGO Andorran Women's Association (ADA), which works for women's rights. According to the ADA, victims were reluctant to file a complaint with police due to fear of reprisal.

Sexual Harassment: The law prohibits sexual harassment under the provisions for other sexual aggressions, punishable by three months' to three years' imprisonment. As of June two cases of sexual harassment were reported.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide freely the number, spacing, and timing of children; to have the information and means to do so; and to attain the highest standard of reproductive health free from discrimination, coercion, or violence.

Discrimination: The law prohibits discrimination against women privately or professionally with fines up to 24,000 euros ($26,000). The law does not require equal pay for equal work. Although no cases were filed during the year, the ADA and trade union representatives from the Andorran Trade Union reported cases of gender discrimination especially related to unequal salaries for the same work and workplace bullying (see section 7.d.).

Children

Birth Registration: According to the law, citizenship is acquired at birth in the following circumstances: a child is born in the country to an Andorran parent or born abroad to an Andorran parent born in the country; a child is born in the country if either parent was born in the country and is living there at the time of birth, or if both parents are stateless or of unknown identity. A child of foreign parents may acquire Andorran nationality by birth in the country if at the time of birth one of the parents has completed 10 years' permanent residence in the country. Otherwise, the child may become a citizen before attaining the age of majority or a year after reaching the age of majority if his/her parents have been permanently resident in the country for 10 years or if the person can prove that he/she has lived in the country permanently and uninterruptedly for the last five years. In the meantime, the child has a provisional passport.

Children are registered at birth.

Child Abuse: Through the end of June, the Prosecutor's Office initiated 51 criminal proceedings related to child abuse, of which 17 related to domestic violence against children and 34 related to violence against children. As of the end of June, the Prosecutor's Office concluded one case of violence against children.

The government's Specialized Child Protection Team consisted of three social workers, two social educators, and two psychologists. The team, which intervened in situations where children and young persons were at risk or lacked protection, collected data on cases of child abuse. As of June 30, authorities assisted 156 minors at risk, of which 30 were new cases. As of the end of June, 10 minors lived in a shelter designated for them.

Early and Forced Marriage: The minimum legal age of marriage is 16 years for both women and men and as early as 14 years with judicial authority. In 2014, the most recent year for available data, authorities did not record any marriages below the age of 18 years.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: The law against rape also covers statutory rape. Child pornography is illegal and carries a prison sentence of up to four years. The minimum age of sexual consent is 14 years. The penalty for statutory rape is 15 years' imprisonment, the same as for rape in general.

Through the end of June, the Prosecutor's Office concluded one case of forced prostitution of a child with mental impairment.

International Child Abductions: The country is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abductions. For information see the Department of State's country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/country/Andorra.html.

Anti-Semitism

Unofficial estimates placed the size of the Jewish community at approximately 100 persons. In April 2014 two men assaulted and severely beat a 21-year-old Jewish Andorran outside of a discotheque in the city of La Massana. The victim maintained that the assault was motivated by anti-Semitism, a charge the single assailant in custody denied. The case remained under review.

Trafficking in Persons

There were no confirmed reports during the year that the country was a source, destination, or transit country for victims of human trafficking.

Persons with Disabilities

The law prohibits discrimination against persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities in employment, education, air travel and other transportation, access to health care, and the provision of other government services. Discrimination against persons with disabilities nevertheless existed in the form of social and cultural barriers. In 2013 the European Committee of Social Rights expressed concern that persons with disabilities also faced disadvantages in the labor market (see also section 7.d.). During his visit to the country in 2013, the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner observed a gap between the law and the actual conditions facing persons with disabilities. The commissioner emphasized a need to increase awareness about the rights of persons with disabilities and the need to remove physical and cultural barriers impeding persons with disabilities from living in dignity.

The law mandates access to public buildings, information, and communications for persons with disabilities, and the government generally enforced this provision.

According to the National Commission of Assessment, schools continued to implement the law requiring them to adapt their infrastructure to the needs of children with disabilities. The majority of children with disabilities attended regular schools. Additionally, one separate school for children with disabilities existed in the country.

The Andorran Federation of Associations for Persons with Disabilities represented the organizations in the country that worked with persons with disabilities. The federation's priorities are accessibility for persons with disabilities and their entry into the workforce, two areas in which the country was not fully compliant with international standards. The lack of sufficient adapted public transportation remained a concern.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The constitution and law provide for workers to form and join trade unions. The law does not provide for collective bargaining or the right to strike. Alternate dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration exist. The law does not prohibit antiunion discrimination. Unions continued to criticize the lack of laws effectively protecting workers. No laws require the reinstatement of workers fired for union activity.

The government did not provide the necessary mechanisms, including laws, resources, investigations, remediation, or penalties to protect worker rights. Neither collective bargaining nor strikes occurred during the year. There were no official reports of or investigations into any antiunion discrimination. Workers continued to be reluctant to admit to union membership due to fear of retaliation by their employers and arbitrary dismissal.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits slavery and the trafficking in persons for the exploitation of their work.

Resources were limited and no formal structure for action against forced labor existed. There were no reports of such practices.

Slavery and trafficking for labor exploitation are punishable by a minimum of four years and a maximum of 12 years in prison.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The law prohibits children younger than 14 years of age from working. Children 14 or 15 years of age may work up to two months per year during school holidays following strict regulations contained in the law. The law limits work by children 14 or 15 years old to no more than six hours per day and by children 16 or 17 years old to eight hours per day, provides for safety restrictions, restricts the types of work children may perform, and outlines other conditions.

The law protects children from exploitation in the workplace, and the Labor Inspection Office in the Ministry of Justice and Interior effectively enforced child labor laws and regulations.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

Labor laws and regulations prohibit discrimination regarding race, color, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin or citizenship, social origin, disability, sexual orientation and/or gender identity, age, language, or HIV-positive status or other communicable diseases. The government effectively enforced these laws and regulations.

The Advisory Council on Health and Well-being established and supervised a "National Plan for Equality." Its recommendations are taken into account by the Council of Ministers.

The law does not require equal pay for equal work. Although no cases were filed during the year, the ADA and trade union representatives from the Andorran Trade Union reported cases of gender discrimination especially related to unequal salaries for the same work and workplace bullying. The Department of Statistics estimated that women earned 34 percent less than men for comparable work. The government made an effort to combat pay discrimination in general, and it applied pay equality within the government. There were no limitations on women's participation in the labor market, and the government encouraged women to participate in politics. Employment rates among men and women were equal, although women held fewer senior management positions than men.

Some cases of discrimination with respect to employment or occupation occurred against women, persons with disabilities, and persons based on sexual orientation (see section 6).

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The national minimum wage is 5.55 euros ($6.11) per hour and 962 euros ($1,058) per month. This wage did not provide a decent standard of living for a worker and family. The Labor Inspection Office enforced the minimum wage effectively. The law limits the standard workweek to five eight-hour days for a total of 40 hours per week. Workers may work up to two overtime hours per day or 15 hours per week, 50 hours per month, and 426 hours per year. The law provides for premium pay of time plus 25 percent for the first four hours per week and time plus 50 percent for the following four hours. There is a required rest period of 12 hours between work shifts.

The Labor Inspection Office sets occupational health and safety standards and has the authority to levy sanctions and fines against companies violating them. The law covers agricultural, domestic, and migrant workers. Penalties were sufficient to deter violations.

The majority of reported cases came from the hotel and construction sectors.

The majority of reported accidents came from the hotel, construction, motor, and machinery sectors.

Workers had the right to remove themselves without jeopardy to their employment from situations that endangered health or safety. Authorities effectively protected such employees.
2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Albania

Publisher United States Department of State Publication Date 13 April 2016 Cite as United States Department of State, 2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Albania, 13 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/571612aae.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Republic of Albania is a parliamentary democracy. The constitution vests legislative authority in the unicameral parliament (the Assembly), which elects both the prime minister and the president. The prime minister heads the government, while the president has limited executive power. In June the country held local elections for mayors and municipal councils. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) assessed election day positively overall but observed some important procedural irregularities. It noted that, while the legal framework "could have provided the basis for democratic elections," the main parties "misused their extensive powers and responsibilities within the election administration and lacked the political will to implement the legal framework effectively." In 2013 the country held parliamentary elections that OSCE reported were competitive and respected fundamental freedoms but were conducted in an atmosphere of distrust that tainted the electoral environment. Civilian authorities maintained effective control over the security forces.

The most significant human rights problems were pervasive corruption in all branches of government, particularly within the judicial and health-care systems, and domestic violence and discrimination against women.

Other human rights problems included police beating and otherwise mistreating suspects during detention and interrogation; occasionally prolonged police detention without charge; and substandard prison conditions. The government made little progress in addressing the many claims for the return or restitution of property seized during the communist era. There continued to be indications of widespread child abuse. Forced and early marriage was a problem in some parts of the country. There were many displaced children and street children, particularly within the Romani community. The country continued to be a source and destination for men, women, and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor. Marginalization and abuse of the Romani and Balkan-Egyptian communities were serious problems, as was discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Government enforcement of labor laws remained weak and rarely protected domestic and migrant workers. Large numbers of children were engaged in forced labor. There were reports of employment discrimination based on gender, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity, nationality, and ethnicity.

Impunity remained a problem. Prosecution, and especially conviction, of officials who committed abuses remained sporadic and inconsistent. Officials, politicians, judges, and those with powerful business interests often were able to avoid prosecution. Authorities took some administrative measures to improve police accountability and punished some lower-level officials for abuses. The government initiated investigations of some high-level officials, but the prosecution later dropped the cases.

Section 1. Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom from:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.

The government continued to cooperate with the EU's Special Investigative Task Force (SITF) established following a Council of Europe (CoE) report on alleged crimes committed by former Kosovo Liberation Army leaders during and just after the Kosovo war. The mandate of the SITF is to investigate and, if warranted, prepare cases for prosecution involving serious crimes alleged in the CoE report, including allegations of crimes against civilians who were allegedly held at locations in Albania between 1999 and 2000.

b. Disappearance

There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.

There was no indication that authorities intended to investigate the disappearance of Remzi Hoxha, who was allegedly abducted in 1995 by security forces, or that they would comply with Amnesty International's long-standing appeal that his body be returned to his family or that his family would be informed of his fate.

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

While the constitution and law prohibit such actions, police and prison guards sometimes beat and abused suspects and detainees. Through September the police internal control service received 50 complaints of police abuse and corruption.

Through September the ombudsman received 150 complaints from detainees alleging that police officers physically abused, unlawfully detained, illegally searched, or unlawfully fined them; violated their privacy; or failed to give them needed information. Nearly one-third alleged physical abuse. The ombudsman's investigation of a number of the allegations found more than half were justified. The Albanian Helsinki Committee (AHC) also reported that police sometimes used excessive force.

Prison and Detention Center Conditions

Overcrowded facilities and denial of medical treatment were serious problems. The AHC reported that conditions in certain detention facilities were so poor as to constitute inhuman treatment. AHC research conducted among inmates through July showed the majority of complaints were of police abuse, poor living conditions, psychological abuse by prison staff or other inmates, interference with private correspondence with family members, unresponsiveness to prisoner complaints and requests, and delayed transfer of detainees from police stations to detention facilities.

Physical Conditions: The prison population overall averaged 24 percent large than the design capacity of prison facilities. Overcrowding was especially serious in pretrial detention centers. Conditions in prison and detention centers for women were generally better than those for men.

Guards and other prisoners mistreated prisoners and detainees, threatening their lives and health. The ombudsman and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) reported that authorities detained convicted persons suffering from mental health problems in ordinary prisons, where access to mental health care was wholly inadequate. The government reported seven deaths in prison through September; five were from natural causes and two from suicide.

Prison and detention center conditions varied significantly by age and type of facility. The AHC identified problems in both new and old constructions, however, such as dampness in cells, lack of bedding materials, and inconsistent water supply. Conditions in facilities operated by the Ministry of Interior, such as police stations and temporary detention facilities, were completely inadequate, except for regional facilities in Tirana, Durres, Gjirokaster, and Korca, which the government reconstructed in 2014. In some cases detention facilities were unheated during the winter. Some lacked basic hygienic amenities, such as showers or sinks, were cramped, afforded limited access to toilets, and had little or no ventilation, natural light, or beds and benches. The government did not make a sufficient capital investment in police infrastructure, including detention facilities, over the previous decade. The Ministry of Justice managed the prisons.

The ombudsman reported poor living conditions in many facilities. Conditions in both older facilities and some new ones were unhygienic and often lacked many basic amenities, including access to potable water, sanitation, ventilation, lighting, and health care. The ombudsman and the AHC reported detainees and prisoners did not have adequate access to medical examinations and other services. Unhygienic facilities posed a particular danger for those with mental health needs.

Administration: NGOs and the ombudsman noted inadequate recordkeeping in some institutions, particularly in small or rural police stations. The ombudsman reported prison officials generally cooperated with investigations but did not fully implement ombudsman recommendations. NGOs reported that, although the government took their suggestions more seriously than in the past, it continued to refuse to investigate some cases. The ombudsman found corruption to be a serious problem in detention centers, particularly in connection with access to special release programs.

Independent Monitoring: The government allowed local and international human rights groups, the media, as well as international bodies such as the CoE's Committee for the Prevention of Torture, to monitor prison conditions. The ombudsman reported, however, that in two cases prison staff refused to allow monitors to enter detention centers without prior approval from the police. On some occasions governmental agencies did not make available the information experts needed for their administrative investigations.

Improvements: During the year the ombudsman and NGOs reported conditions in most prisons and detention centers improved. NGOs reported fewer complaints from juvenile detainees about physical abuse or violence within detention centers and prisons, although reports continued that authorities at times failed to take such problems seriously. NGOs reported police and prison authorities demonstrated greater sensitivity toward the rights of juvenile and female detainees. The ombudsman reported that authorities were more flexible in allowing juveniles in predetention centers to meet with relatives. With the opening of the new prison at Fier, authorities transferred prisoners there from Tirana's Jordan Misja facility, which the ombudsman had evaluated as unsuitable in 2014. Police, in response to criticism of inadequate recordkeeping, improved their record management through continued implementation of an electronic system. New regulations for prisons were adopted in May that include tighter rules governing visitation and leave policies, which prison officials previously manipulated to favor inmates willing to pay bribes.

d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention

The law and constitution prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.

Role of the Police and Security Apparatus

The Ministry of Interior oversees the State Police, the Guard of the Republic, and the Border and Migration Police. The State Police are the main organization responsible for internal security. The Guard of the Republic protects senior state officials, foreign dignitaries, and certain state properties. The Ministry of Defense oversees the armed forces, which also assist the population in times of humanitarian need. The State Intelligence Service gathers information, carries out foreign intelligence and counterintelligence activities, and is responsible to the prime minister.

Civilian authorities generally maintained effective control over the police, Guard of the Republic, armed forces, and State Intelligence Service, although officials periodically used state resources for personal gain and members of the security forces committed abuses.

Police did not always enforce the law equally. Personal associations, political or criminal connections, poor infrastructure, lack of equipment, or inadequate supervision often influenced enforcement of laws. Low salaries, poor motivation and leadership, and a lack of diversity in the workforce contributed to continued corruption and unprofessional behavior.

Impunity remained a serious problem, although the government made greater efforts to address it, in particular by increasing the use of camera evidence to document and prosecute police misconduct. In June the Tirana Prosecution Office cleared the former general police director, Hysni Burgaj and his deputy of abuse of office charges, brought in 2014. The charges resulted from the refusal of police under their command to execute arrest orders for Guard of the Republic officers wanted in connection with killing of protesters in 2011. As of September the cases of Guards of the Republic Ndrea Prendi and Agim Llupo, charged in the 2011 killings of four protesters, remained before the Supreme Court. The court was considering prosecution appeals of the one- and three-year sentences handed down against the two defendants in 2013 by an appeals court, which acquitted a third suspect.

Police corruption was a problem (see section 4).

The government has mechanisms to investigate and punish abuse and corruption. The government's Service for Internal Affairs and Complaints conducted audits, responded to complaints, and carried out investigations with increased emphasis on human rights, prison conditions, and adherence to standard operating procedures. This office fielded 472 complaints and forwarded 110 cases of alleged police misconduct to prosecutors during the first six months of the year. During the year the ombudsman also processed complaints against police officers, mainly relating to problems with arrests and detention. The ombudsman, through the national mechanism for the prevention of torture, reported increased implementation of his recommendations related to mistreatment.

The government has increased police salaries and instituted an open competition for new recruits since 2014, although the Albanian Police Academy reportedly exerted inappropriate influence over police hiring, firing, and promotions. Recruitment of women improved.

Arrest Procedures and Treatment of Detainees

The law requires that, other than those arrested during the commission of a crime, police may arrest a suspect only with a warrant issued by a judge and based on sufficient evidence. There were no reports of secret arrests. By law police must immediately inform the prosecutor of an arrest. The prosecutor may release the suspect or petition the court within 48 hours to hold the individual further. A court must decide within 48 hours whether to place a suspect in detention, require bail, prohibit travel, or require the defendant to report regularly to the police. Prosecutors requested, and courts ordered, detention in many criminal cases. Nevertheless, courts routinely denied prosecutors' requests for detention of well-connected, high-profile defendants.

The constitution requires that authorities inform detained persons immediately of the charges against them and their rights. Law enforcement authorities did not always respect this requirement. There was no effective system for handling the monetary aspect of bail. Instead, courts often ordered suspects to report to police or prosecutors on a weekly basis. While the law gives detainees the right to prompt access to an attorney, at public expense if necessary, NGOs reported interrogations often took place without the presence of a lawyer. Authorities placed many suspects under house arrest, often at their own request, because if convicted they received credit for time served under house arrest. Officials did not effectively monitor house arrest, and suspects could move outside freely without detection.

By law police should transfer detainees to the custody of the Ministry of Justice, which has facilities more adequate for long-term detention, if their custody will exceed 10 hours. Due to poor communication between the ministries, this seldom happened, and it was common for detainees, including juveniles, to remain in police detention centers for long periods.

Arbitrary Arrest: The constitution and law prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention. Although the government generally observed these prohibitions, there were occasional instances when police detained persons for questioning for inordinate lengths of time without formally arresting them.

Pretrial Detention: While the law requires completion of most pretrial investigations within three months, a prosecutor may extend this period to two years or longer. The law provides that pretrial detention should not exceed three years; there were no reports that authorities violated this limit during the year. Extended pretrial detention often occurred due to delayed investigations, defense mistakes, or the intentional failure of defense counsel to appear. By law a judge cannot prevent such delaying actions by holding the offending attorney in contempt of court. Limited material resources, lack of space, poor court calendar management, insufficient staff, and failure of attorneys and witnesses to appear prevented the court system from adjudicating cases in a timely fashion. As of September, approximately half of the prison and detention center population was in pretrial detention.

Protracted Detention of Rejected Asylum Seekers or Stateless Persons: Authorities often detained irregular migrants who entered the country without documents. Police refused to allow representatives of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to monitor the processing, detention, and deportation of some migrants. It was not possible to determine how many of those detained were refugees seeking asylum (see section 2.d.). UNHCR reported that irregular migrants in detention have been unable to exercise the right to appeal police deportation orders.

Amnesty: On December 21, the parliament approved an amnesty law, pardoning 720 citizens charged with minor crimes.

e. Denial of Fair Public Trial

Although the constitution provides for an independent judiciary, political pressure, intimidation, widespread corruption, and limited resources sometimes prevented the judiciary from functioning independently and efficiently. Court hearings were often not open to the public. Court security officers frequently refused to admit observers to hearings and routinely telephoned the presiding judge to ask whether to admit an individual seeking to attend a particular hearing. Some agencies exhibited a pattern of disregard for court orders. The politicization of appointments to the Supreme Court and Constitutional Court threatened to undermine the independence and integrity of these institutions. As of September, two vacancies in the Supreme Court remained unfilled after nearly two years despite a considerable backlog of cases facing the court.

Generally, the Ministry of Justice did not vigorously pursue disciplinary measures against judges; however, when it did, the High Council of Justice was reluctant to enact those measures. By September the ministry had initiated disciplinary proceedings against eight judges. Authorities dismissed two judges, warned two others of possible dismissal, and suspended four.

Trial Procedures

The law presumes defendants to be innocent until convicted. It provides for defendants to be informed promptly and in detail of the charges against them, with free interpretation as necessary, and to have a fair and public trial without undue delay. The court system does not provide for jury trials. Defendants have the right to consult an attorney and to have one provided at public expense if they cannot afford one. The law provides defendants adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense and the right to access government-held evidence. Defendants have the right to confront witnesses against them and to present witnesses and evidence in their defense. Defendants may not be compelled to testify or confess guilt. Defendants have the right to appeal. The government generally respected these rights, although trials were not always public and access to a lawyer was at times problematic. Despite the statutory right to free legal aid, NGOs reported that very few individuals benefitted from the law during the year.

In a number of decisions against the state, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) was critical of trial procedures. In particular the ECHR noted authorities at times failed to secure or properly record witness evidence, used evidence obtained by torture, and failed to give detainees access to a lawyer.

Political Prisoners and Detainees

There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.

Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies

While individuals and organizations may seek civil remedies for human rights violations, courts were susceptible to corruption, inefficiency, intimidation, and political tampering. Judges held many court hearings in their offices, demonstrating a lack of professionalism and providing opportunities for corruption. These factors undermined the judiciary's authority, contributed to controversial court decisions, and led to an inconsistent application of civil law. Persons who have exhausted remedies in domestic courts could appeal to the ECHR, and by September the AHC had assisted one inmate in appealing to the ECHR. In many instances, however, authorities did not enforce ECHR rulings. A 2013 study by the Open Society Foundation for Albania  Soros Foundation found that lawyers, prosecutors, and judges had limited knowledge of ECHR jurisprudence.

Persons who were political prisoners under the former communist regime continued to petition the government for compensation. On several occasions, groups of former political prisoners protested, including by hunger strikes, the government's failure to pay them legally mandated compensation. The law gives priority to compensating women, the elderly, those with serious illnesses, and those who had never received a payment. The government made progress on disbursing compensation during the year, but the ombudsman stated the law failed to set a proper deadline for completing payments.

Property Restitution

Thousands of claims for private and religious property confiscated during the communist era remained unresolved with the government's Agency for Property Restitution. Claimants may appeal cases to the ECHR and during the year hundreds of cases  many of them related to property  were pending review there. In September the ECHR rejected authorities' request for postponement of its December deadline for putting into place an effective mechanism to compensate former owners of property. The ECHR issued decisions in several high-profile cases that required the government to pay plaintiffs tens of millions of dollars in compensation for confiscated property.

f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence

The government demolished some homes without due legal process as part of a wider campaign to demolish illegally constructed buildings. Citizens also submitted complaints that the government, through its National Inspectorate on Protection of Territory, ignored citizens' requests to demolish some illegal buildings but chose to demolish others without having received a complaint.

In October the Tirana municipality evicted 48 Roma families from a settlement along Tirana's artificial lake. The authorities made efforts to offset this measure by providing rent subsidies, transportation to communities of origin, and temporary lodging in an emergency shelter. Execution of these plans was slow and incomplete, resulting in a number of evicted families returning to settlements elsewhere in the city. The ombudsman claimed the municipality failed to follow legal eviction procedures and faulted the city for not involving civil society groups in their plans.

In August the central government demolished the homes of 30 families residing along the planned route of Tirana's new ring road. The majority of the homes belonged to Roma. Evictees claimed they received only 24 hours verbal notice of eviction, a violation of established legal procedures. The government promised to pay two years' rent but made no effort to assist with the families' relocation to new homes. Most families complained the rental reimbursement was insufficient for large families. The ombudsman investigated the actions of the government and issued a report outlining legal violations. By November the government had not taken any corrective action.

Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:

a. Freedom of Speech and Press

The constitution provides for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respected these rights. There were reports that the government, business, and criminal groups sought to influence the media in inappropriate ways.

Press and Media Freedoms: Independent media were active and expressed a wide variety of viewpoints, although there were some efforts to exert direct and indirect political and economic pressure on the media, including threats and violence by criminal groups against journalists who tried to investigate their activities. Political pressure, corruption, and lack of funding constrained the independent print media, and journalists reportedly practiced self-censorship. A small number of online outlets provided a more independent point of view.

In its annual Media Sustainability Index, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) indicated that the economic crisis had dried up funding for organizations that pushed for a more independent press, and the press was vulnerable to misuse under growing political tensions.

The majority of citizens received their news from television and radio. The independence of the Audiovisual Media Authority, the regulator of the broadcast media market, remained questionable. In November 2014, after a very long delay, a chairperson was elected to lead the authority. The regulator's role remained limited, however.

While private stations generally operated free of direct government influence, most owners used the content of their broadcasts to influence government action toward their other businesses. Business owners also freely used media outlets to gain favor and promote their interests with political parties. Some media outlets continued to produce investigative stories and expose cases of corruption that sometimes led to dismissals and criminal cases against corrupt public officials.

Violence and Harassment: There were incidents of violence and intimidation against members of the media during the year, and political and business interests subjected journalists to pressure. Several incidents involved threats texted to journalists from outside the country or sent via Facebook over the internet.

Censorship or Content Restrictions: Journalists often practiced self-censorship to avoid the danger of violence and harassment, and as a response to pressures from publishers and editors seeking to tailor content to advance their political and economic interests. Lack of economic security reduced reporters' independence and may have contributed to bias in reporting. The Union of Albanian Journalists stated in September that 90 percent of the country's media outlets experienced delays of two to four months in paying reporters' salaries. Financial problems led some journalists to rely more heavily on outside sources of income.

Libel/Slander Laws: The law permits private parties to file criminal charges and obtain financial compensation for insult or deliberate publication of defamatory information. NGOs reported that the fines, which could be as much as three million leks ($24,000), were excessive and, together with the entry of a conviction into the defendant's criminal record, violated the right to freedom of expression.

As of September the case of Ylli Pango awaited its second hearing before the Supreme Court. Pango, formerly minister of culture, youth, and sports, sued the Top Channel television station after it broadcast hidden camera footage of him making illicit sexual overtures to a prospective employee. The broadcast led to the minister's dismissal. A trial court fined Top Channel 51 million leks ($408,000) for broadcasting the footage, but the Court of Appeals overturned the decision. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the district court. The district appeals courts ruled against Pango, who in January again appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

Internet Freedom

The government did not restrict or disrupt access to the internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports the government monitored private online communications without appropriate legal authority. According to data compiled by the International Telecommunication Union, approximately 60 percent of the population used the internet in 2013. Approximately 35 percent of the population subscribed to mobile broadband internet, while 5.8 percent subscribed to fixed broadband internet. Fixed broadband was concentrated mostly in urban areas.

Academic Freedom and Cultural Events

There were no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events.

b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association

The constitution and law provide for the freedoms of assembly and association, and the government generally respected these rights.

c. Freedom of Religion

See the Department of State's Report on International Religious Freedom.

d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons

The constitution and law provide for freedom of internal movement, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights. The government improved its cooperation with UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to refugees, returning refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons, and other persons of concern. Police allowed UNHCR to monitor the processing, detention, and deportation of some migrants.

In-country Movement: In order to receive government services, individuals moving within the country must transfer their civil registration to their new community of residence and prove their new domicile is legal through property ownership, a property rental agreement, or utility bills. Many persons could not provide this proof and thus lacked access to public services. Other citizens, particularly Roma and Balkan-Egyptians, lacked formal registration in the communities where they resided. The law does not prohibit their registration, but it was often difficult to complete. Many Roma and Balkan-Egyptians lacked the financial means to register, and many lacked the motivation to go through the process. In 2014 the government reduced some requirements for registration in order to reduce the burden on marginalized populations.

Protection of Refugees

During the year many countries in the EU and Southeast Europe experienced an unprecedented wave of migration from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, consisting of a mix of asylum seekers/potential refugees, economic migrants, and trafficking victims, among others. For simplicity this report will refer to these populations as 'migrants and asylum seekers' if more specific information is not available.

Access to Asylum: The law provides for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and the government has established a system for providing protection to refugees.

There were credible reports from NGOs and migrants and asylum seekers that authorities did not follow due process obligations for some asylum seekers and that in other cases those seeking asylum did not have access to the system. During the first half of the year, nearly 2,000 migrants and asylum seekers  mostly Syrian  entered the country. Authorities returned most of them to Greece  some immediately, others after months of detention in inadequate facilities. UNHCR was critical of the government's migrant screening and detention procedures, and some would-be asylum seekers complained of coercion by border authorities not to seek asylum.

The law on asylum requires authorities to grant or deny asylum within 51 days of an applicant's initial request. Asylum seekers cannot face criminal charges of illegal entry if they contact authorities within 10 days of their arrival in the country. UNHCR reported that the asylum system lacked effective monitoring.

Safe Country of Origin/Transit: The law prohibits individuals from safe countries of origin or transit from applying for asylum or refugee status.

Access to Basic Services: The law provides migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees access to public services, including education, health care, housing, law enforcement, courts/judicial procedures, and legal assistance. Migrants and asylum seekers often required the intervention of UNHCR or local NGOs to secure these services.

Durable Solutions: The government continued to facilitate the local integration of Iranian Mujahedin-e Khalq refugees who had earlier fled to Iraq.

Temporary Protection: The government also provided temporary protection to individuals who may not qualify as refugees and provided it to three persons as of October.

Stateless Persons

In 2011, the last year for which statistics were available, UNHCR reported 7,443 stateless persons in the country. According to UNHCR most stateless persons were Romani children. Reasons for statelessness included cross-border migration and failure of parents to register their children at birth. The government made efforts to improve registration of children's births in hospitals and instructed its embassies in neighboring countries to assist in registering them abroad.

Section 3. Freedom to Participate in the Political Process

The constitution and law provide citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections based on universal and equal suffrage, and citizens exercised that ability.

Elections and Political Participation

Recent Elections: The most recent national parliamentary elections took place in 2013. The OSCE observation mission to the elections reported that they "were competitive with active citizen participation throughout the campaign and genuine respect for fundamental freedoms." The OSCE noted, "The atmosphere of distrust between the two main political forces tainted the electoral environment and challenged the administration of the entire electoral process."

In June the country held local elections for mayors and municipal councils, the first elections since an administrative reform reduced the number of local government units from 373 to 61. The OSCE assessed Election Day positively overall, but noted that, while the legal framework "could have provided the basis for democratic elections," the main parties misused their extensive powers and responsibilities within the election administration and lacked the political will to implement the legal framework effectively. This, combined with the politicization of institutions involved, undermined the election process. The observer mission also reported that the campaign environment was peaceful, except for isolated incidents, and fundamental freedoms of expression and assembly were respected.

Participation of Women and Minorities: The law governing the 2013 parliamentary election required that 30 percent of candidates be women and that they occupy 30 percent of appointed and elected positions. Women constituted 18 percent of members elected to parliament in 2013. According to the OSCE report on the elections, many parties placed women at the bottom of their electoral lists (all seats in parliament are filled using closed party lists) and the three largest parties failed to meet the mandated 30 percent female quota. The Central Election Commission fined the Democratic Party, the Socialist Party, and the Socialist Movement for Integration for this infraction but accepted their lists nonetheless. NGOs criticized political parties for not appointing more women to the Assembly from party candidate lists, particularly in cases where Assembly seats became vacant, despite laws designed to encourage female appointments. The June local elections were held under revisions of the electoral code that require parties to alternate male and female candidates on their lists. According to the OSCE final election observation report, women gained election to a greater proportion of places, approximately one-third, on local councils.

Civil registration requirements and lack of identification made it difficult for many Roma to vote in the June local elections. The 1,200 leks ($9.60) fee for an identification card was prohibitive for some Roma who wanted to register. Some observers claimed that political parties offered to pay the fee in exchange for a vote. As of October there were no Romani ministers or members of parliament.

Section 4. Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government

The law provides criminal penalties for corruption by officials, but the government did not implement the law effectively, and officials frequently engaged in corrupt practices with impunity.

Corruption: Corruption was pervasive in all branches of government. Trials involving 25 cases concluded in the first six months of the year, resulting in guilty verdicts for 28 defendants and one dismissal. As of June court proceedings involving 48 defendants continued.

During the year judges in two courts refused to extend the investigation time and closed the case of a court of appeals judge and member of the High Council of Justice whom prosecutors charged in 2014 with hiding assets, making a false declaration, falsification of documents, money laundering, and corruption. While authorities were investigating the charges, the defendant scheduled performance reviews for the two trial judges presiding over the case. The prosecution had requested further time to receive evidence from foreign countries.

Corruption was also a problem among police and in educational institutions, including public universities. In addition to judges and public officials, many students complained that instructors demanded bribes for passing grades in courses.

During the year authorities took a number of measures to deal with corruption and made some progress. Prosecutors made significant progress in pursuing low-level public corruption, but prosecution of higher-level crimes remained elusive due to investigators' fear of retribution, a general lack of resources, and corruption within the judiciary itself. Police installed camera systems in police patrol vehicles with the result that officers refused bribes more often, citing the increased surveillance. The government expanded its automated system to manage traffic citations to include traffic commissions responsible for resolving traffic citation disputes, further reducing opportunities for corrupt practices.

Although the Service for Internal Affairs and Complaints investigated and referred for prosecution a significantly higher number of police officers during the year than in 2014, courts convicted few of them. In March authorities established a web portal that allows citizens to report corruption by public officials. As of September the web portal had received 8,749 reports, and the coordinator referred 52 of those for prosecution.

A number of government agencies investigated corruption cases, but limited resources, investigative leaks, real and perceived political pressure, and a haphazard reassignment system hampered the investigations. The Ministry of Justice reported that convictions at district courts decreased by 36.8 percent during the year compared to 2014. No data was available with regard to the convictions at appeals courts. In selective instances involving international actors, anticorruption agencies cooperated with civil society.

Financial Disclosure: The law requires public officials to disclose their assets to the High Inspectorate for the Declaration and Audit of Assets and Conflict of Interest (HIDAACI), which monitored and verified such disclosures. The inspectorate made these disclosures available to the public. During the year the parliament authorized an increase to the number of HIDAACI inspectors to investigate declarations of assets and conflicts of interest from 12 to 15. The legislation strengthened the institution's capacities and increased public transparency. The law authorizes HIDAACI to fine officials who fail to comply with disclosure requirements or refer them to the prosecutor. As of September, HIDAACI had fined 420 individuals, including ministers, members of parliament, ambassadors, and judges, for not disclosing their assets, for delaying their submissions, or for conflicts of interest. HIDAACI reported that by September it had referred 82 new cases for prosecution. These cases involved 12 judges, two prosecutors, seven members of parliament, as well as ambassadors, and local government officials on charges including refusing to declare, hiding, or falsifying asset declarations, money laundering, falsification of documents, and corruption.

Public Access to Information: The law provides for public access to government information, but the government did not effectively implement the law. The process for making information public often was not clear, and officials were sometimes reluctant to release information. The law stipulates that the right to access information can be restricted when information is categorized as classified or when such a release would violate the protection of personal data.

Most government ministries and agencies posted public information directly on their websites. Businesses and citizens complained that the process lacked transparency and that authorities failed to publish some regulations and legislation that should be basic public information. Citizens often faced serious problems obtaining such information. Individuals could generally access government information free of charge, but there were cases in which processing fees were required to cover the cost of service for the institution providing the information. Noncompliance is punishable as an administrative rather than a criminal offense. Citizens may appeal denials of disclosure to the authority with which they filed the original request or in a civil court.

Section 5. Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights

A number of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials generally were cooperative and responsive to their views.

Government Human Rights Bodies: The Office of the Ombudsman is the main institution for promoting and enforcing human rights. The ombudsman institution has the authority and is required by law to monitor and report on prisons and detention centers. It may initiate an investigation in some cases where a victim is unable to come forward to do so. Although the ombudsman lacked the power to enforce decisions, he acted as a monitor for human rights violations. The Office of the Ombudsman was underfunded and understaffed. The ombudsman reported to the parliament annually, but although the parliament distributed copies of some of the ombudsman's annual and special reports or posted them online, it rarely discussed the reports in plenary or committee sessions. The parliament consulted the ombudsman institution on draft laws directly affecting or involving it but generally did so at the last minute.

There is a parliamentary committee on legal issues, public administration, and human rights. The parliament approved a few laws aimed at addressing human rights problems and resolutions addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) issues and blood feuds.

Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons

The law prohibits discrimination based on race, gender, age, disability, language, religion, gender identity and/or sexual orientation, health, and family economic or social status. The government did not effectively enforce these prohibitions.

Cases of discrimination on any of these grounds may be brought to the commissioner for protection from discrimination; the commissioner has the authority to issue sanctions and did so in several cases during the year. The law allows the commissioner to testify in court as an expert witness, even in appeals on cases the commissioner's office initially rejected. Through September the commissioner participated in 20 judicial proceedings.

Women

Rape and Domestic Violence: Rape, including spousal rape, is a crime. Penalties for rape and assault depend on the age of the victim. For rape of an adult, the prison term is three to 10 years; for rape of an adolescent between the ages of 14 and 18, the term is five to 15 years; and for rape of a child under 14, the term is seven to 15 years. The law includes provisions on sexual assault and sexual harassment and makes the criminalization of spousal rape explicit. The government did not enforce the law effectively. Victims rarely reported spousal abuse, and officials did not prosecute spousal rape. The concept of spousal rape was not well established, and authorities and the public often did not consider it a crime.

Domestic violence against women, including spousal abuse, remained a serious problem. Police often did not have the training or capacity to deal effectively with domestic violence cases.

A government shelter for domestic violence victims in Tirana assisted 28 women and 47 children through 2015 but could not accept victims without a court order. NGOs operated three shelters to protect victim of domestic violence as well as trafficking, one in Tirana and two outside the capital.

Sexual Harassment: The law prohibits sexual harassment, although officials rarely enforced it. NGOs believed sexual harassment was severely underreported. The commissioner for protection against discrimination generally handled cases of sexual harassment. The commissioner may impose fines of up to 80,000 leks ($640) against individuals or 600,000 leks ($4,800) against enterprises.

Reproductive Rights: Couples and individuals have the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children, manage their reproductive health, and have access to the information and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, or violence. The quality of and access to government-provided health care, however, including obstetric and postpartum care, was not satisfactory, especially in remote rural areas.

Discrimination: The law provides for the same legal status and rights for women as for men, including under family, labor, property, nationality, and inheritance laws. Women were not excluded from any occupation in either law or practice, but they were underrepresented at the highest levels of their fields. Although the law mandates equal pay for equal work, the government and private employers did not fully implement this provision. In many communities women experienced societal discrimination based on traditional social norms depicting women as subordinate to men. There were reports of discrimination in employment (see section 7.d.).

Gender-biased Sex Selection: According to the government's statistical agency, the ratio of boys to girls at birth in 2014 was 109 to 100, which indicated that gender-biased sex selection may be occurring. The government did not support efforts to address the gender imbalance.

Children

Birth Registration: An individual acquires citizenship by birth within the country's territory or from a citizen parent. Parents were encouraged to register the birth of a child in a timely manner, and the law provides for a monetary reward for parents who register their children within 60 days of birth. Often, however, authorities did not disburse the reward. There were no reports of discrimination in birth registration, but residency requirements for registration made it more difficult for the many Romani and Balkan-Egyptian parents who were without legally documented places of residence to register their children and to access government services that were dependent on registration.

According to the domestic branch of the NGO Association for the Social Support of Youth (ARSIS), children born to internal migrants or those returning from abroad, especially from Greece, frequently had no birth certificates or other legal documentation and as a result were unable to attend school or have access to services. This was particularly a problem for Romani families, where couples often married young and failed to register the births of their children.

Education: School attendance is mandatory through the ninth grade or until age 16, whichever occurs first, but many children, particularly in rural areas, left school earlier to work with their families. Parents must purchase supplies, books, uniforms, and space heaters for some classrooms; these were prohibitively expensive for many families, particularly Roma and other minorities. Many families also cited these costs as a reason for not sending girls to school. Although the government had a program to reimburse low-income families for the cost of textbooks, many families and NGOs reported they were unable to receive reimbursement after purchasing the books.

Child Abuse: Observers believed that child abuse was widespread, although victims rarely reported it. In 2013 the Children's Human Rights Center reported that 58 percent of children were victims of physical abuse, 11 percent were victims of sexual harassment, and almost 5 percent said they had been victims of sexual abuse. Almost 70 percent of children reported psychological abuse from family members, according to the center. ARSIS reported that through September it assisted 50 cases of children who were victims of psychological and physical abuse. Through November the NGO Terre des Hommes handled 65 cases involving children victims of abuse.

Early and Forced Marriage: Although the legal minimum age for marriage is 18, authorities did not enforce the law. Underage marriages occurred mostly in rural areas and within Romani communities. According to 2009 statistics from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), 9.6 percent of women between the ages of 20 and 24 were married before they were 18. The UNFPA reported that in 2011, approximately 31 percent of female Romani children between the ages of 13 and 17 were married. ARSIS reported that, in certain Romani communities, girls as young as seven or boys as young as nine were considered married. Through September ARSIS assisted 12 underage girls who ran away because their families were forcing them into marriage and two who were fleeing existing 'spouses'. Some NGOs reported that early and forced marriages occurred in rural communities as part of human trafficking schemes, when parents consented for their underage girls to marry older foreign men, who subsequently trafficked them to other countries.

Sexual Exploitation of Children: Some children under the age of 18 were exploited for prostitution. The penalties for the commercial sexual exploitation of a child range from eight to 15 years' imprisonment. The country has a statutory rape law, and the minimum age for consensual sex is 14. The penalty for statutory rape is a prison term of five to 15 years. In aggravated circumstances, the penalty may increase to life imprisonment. The law prohibits making or distributing child pornography; penalties are a prison sentence of three to 10 years. Possession of child pornography is illegal. The law explicitly includes minors in provisions that cover sexual abuse, harassment, exploitation for prostitution, benefiting from services offered by trafficked persons, facilitating trafficking, and domestic violence. Authorities generally enforced laws against the rape and sexual exploitation of minors effectively, but NGOs reported that laws prohibiting child pornography were rarely enforced.

Displaced Children: There continued to be numerous displaced and street children, particularly in the Romani community. Street children begged or did petty work; some migrated to neighboring countries, particularly during the summer. These children were at highest risk of trafficking, and some became trafficking victims. Since the law prohibits the prosecution of children under 14 for burglary, criminal gangs at times used displaced children to burglarize homes. There were few prosecutions of child trafficking cases.

A study issued in May 2014, conducted by the UN Children's Fund and Save the Children with the support of the Ministry of Social Welfare and Youth, found that more than 2,500 children, nearly 75 percent of them from Romani or Balkan-Egyptian communities, begged or worked informally on the streets. The majority lived in homes with two parents. Most children reported that earning money for their family was the principal reason for their begging or work, and nearly one-third of them said their parents forced them to work. According to the report, a third of children working or on the streets ran the risk of being trafficked. In response to the study, the government implemented a pilot program in Tirana to remove children from the street and provide them with social care. The government also began a pilot program providing financial incentives to parents to send their children to school and have them vaccinated. The State Agency for the Protection of Children's Rights, which monitored the program, reported that authorities had moved 242 out of 485 identified children from the streets during 2015. The employment of more than 300 children to harvest cannabis in fields in the southern municipality of Lazarat presumably declined or ended with the reported near-total destruction by police of the cannabis fields during the year.

Institutionalized Children: There were reports that orphans leaving the custody of the state at the legal age of adulthood (18) faced significant problems finding adequate housing and services.

International Child Abductions: The country is a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. For information see the Department of State's report on compliance at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/en/legal/compliance.html and country-specific information at travel.state.gov/content/childabduction/english/country/Albania.html.

Anti-Semitism

There were reportedly only a few hundred Jews living in the country. There were no reports of anti-Semitic acts.

Trafficking in Persons

See the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

Persons with Disabilities

The constitution and laws prohibit discrimination against persons with physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental disabilities in employment, education, transportation, access to health care, and the provision of other state services. Nevertheless, employers, schools, health-care providers, and providers of other state services at times engaged in discrimination. The law mandates that new public buildings be accessible to persons with disabilities, but the government only sporadically enforced the law. According to the 2011 census, 24 percent of persons with disabilities had never attended school. Widespread poverty, unregulated working conditions, and poor medical care posed significant problems for many persons with disabilities (see section 7.d.).

In February the government created a National Disability Council, which includes disabled persons and members of civil society, to provide advice on disability matters. The government has social services agencies to protect the rights of persons with disabilities, but the agencies often lacked funding to implement their programs. Resource constraints and lack of infrastructure made it difficult for persons with disabilities to participate fully in civic affairs. Voting centers often were located in facilities lacking accommodations for such persons.

The ombudsman regularly inspected mental health institutions. Both the admission and release of patients at mental health institutions were problems due to lack of sufficient financial resources to provide adequate psychiatric evaluations. There was societal discrimination and stigmatization of persons with mental and other forms of disability.

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

There were reports of significant discrimination against members of the Romani and Balkan-Egyptian communities, including in housing, employment, health care, and education. Some schools resisted accepting Romani and Balkan-Egyptian students, particularly if they appeared to be poor. A few cities provided free meals and transportation to Roma students, but local NGOs reported that this often led to segregation by grouping Roma children together in one school, and that educational levels, discipline, and infrastructure at such schools were substandard. Many mixed schools that accepted Romani students marginalized them in the classroom, sometimes by physically setting them apart from other students.

Roma rights NGOs criticized the lack of legal safeguards against eviction and demolition of Roma camps included in the law on property legalization. Evictions and demolitions continued during the year and disproportionately affected Romani families. Financial support promised by the government was generally insufficient. High housing prices and a general reluctance to rent to Romani families made it difficult for them to find alternative housing, and many decided to seek asylum in Germany.

The law provides official minority status for national groups and separately for ethnolinguistic groups. The government defined Greeks, Macedonians, and Montenegrins as national groups; Greeks constituted the largest of these. The law defined Aromanians (Vlachs) and Roma as ethnolinguistic minority groups.

The ethnic Greek minority complained about the government's unwillingness to recognize ethnic Greek towns outside communist-era "minority zones," to utilize Greek in official documents and on public signs in ethnic Greek areas, or to include more ethnic Greeks in public administration. Public education was not available in the Romani, Serbo-Montenegrin, or Vlach languages.

Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, including in employment (see section 7.d.). During the year the government's Commissioner for the Protection against Discrimination received several complaints from LGBTI individuals and organizations. Enforcement of the law was generally weak.

Sexual orientation and gender identity are among the classes protected by the country's hate-crime law. Despite the law and the government's formal support for LGBTI rights, homophobic attitudes persisted in private and public life. Public officials sometimes made homophobic statements. NGOs reported an increase in families evicting LGBTI persons from their homes during the year. Since 2014 the first shelter for evicted LGBTI person accommodated eight individuals. The NGOs Aleanca and ProLGBT opened it in 2014.

On May 17, activists participated in the fourth Tirana Gay Ride against Homophobia, a short bicycle ride on Tirana's main boulevard, as well as a diversity fair, both of which proceeded without incident, unlike in previous years. On June 11, a second pride event took place in Tirana as part of a "diversity festival." Police ensured activists' safety during the events.

HIV and AIDS Social Stigma

The law prohibits discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS. In the most recent demographic and health survey (2008-09), however, 71 percent of women and 69.3 percent of HIV-positive men reported discriminatory attitudes towards persons with HIV. Such persons experienced general social stigma, although there were no reports of violence against such individuals during the year.

Other Societal Violence or Discrimination

Incidents of societal killings, including both "blood feud" and revenge killings, occurred during the year. Media portrayed some gang-related killings as blood feud killings, and criminals at times used the term to justify their crimes. There were no cases of minors or women falling victim to blood feud killings. The ombudsman reported that authorities' efforts to protect families or prevent blood feud killings were insufficient, although the government increased efforts to prosecute such crimes.

Section 7. Worker Rights

a. Freedom of Association and the Right to Collective Bargaining

The law and related regulations and statutes provide the right for most workers to form independent unions, conduct legal strikes, and bargain collectively. The government effectively enforced these laws. The law prohibits antiunion discrimination and provides for the reinstatement of workers fired for union activity. The law prohibits members of the military and senior government officials from joining unions and requires that a trade union have at least 20 members to be registered. The law provides the right to strike for all workers except uniformed military personnel, police personnel, indispensable medical and hospital personnel, persons providing air traffic control and prison services, and both essential and nonessential workers in water and electrical utilities. Workers not excluded by their positions exercised their right to strike. These laws rarely protected domestic and migrant workers. Transparency International reported that labor unions were weak, and both the authorities and private companies were typically hostile to organizing and collective bargaining efforts.

Government enforcement of these laws remained largely ineffective. Resources for conducting inspections and remedying violations were not adequate. Penalties, including fines of up to fifty times the minimum wage, were not sufficient to deter violations. Administrative and judicial procedures were subject to lengthy delays and appeals. Arbitration procedures allowed for significant delays that limited worker protections against antiunion activity.

Civilian workers in all fields have the constitutional right to organize and bargain collectively, and the law establishes procedures for the protection of workers' rights through collective bargaining agreements. Unions representing public sector employees negotiated directly with the government. Effective collective bargaining remained difficult with employers opposed to union organizing and activities. In this environment, collective agreements, once reached, were difficult to enforce.

b. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor

The law prohibits all forms of forced or compulsory labor, but the government did not always effectively enforce the law. Lack of coordination among ministries and the sporadic nature of implementation of standard operating procedures hampered enforcement. Penalties of eight to 15 years in prison were sufficiently stringent to deter violations. Law enforcement organizations provided training to their officers in a victim-centered approach to human trafficking. The government continued to identify trafficking victims but prosecuted and convicted a small number of traffickers. The Office of the National Antitrafficking Coordinator was effective in sustaining the government's efforts against trafficking.

There were instances of forced labor during the year. Children were subjected to forced begging and criminal activity (see section 7.c.).

Also see the Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report.

c. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment

The law sets the minimum age of employment at 16 and regulates the amount and type of labor that children under the age of 18 may perform. Children between 16 and 18 may work in certain specified jobs. According to law the State Labor Inspectorate, under the Ministry of Youth and Social Welfare, is responsible for enforcing minimum age requirements through the courts, but the State Labor Inspectorate did not adequately enforce the law. Labor inspectors investigated the formal labor sector, whereas most child labor occurred in the informal sector. Most labor inspections occurred in shoe and textile factories, call centers, and in retail enterprises; officials found some instances of child labor in the course of their inspections. Penalties for violations of the law include fines up to 50 times the minimum wage; they were not sufficient to deter violations.

In 2013 the government's statistical agency and the International Labor Organization estimated that 54,000 children were engaged in forced labor domestically. An estimated 43,000 children worked in farms and fishing, 4,400 in the services sector, and 2,200 in hotels and restaurants. Nearly 7 percent of children were child laborers.

The State Labor Inspectorate monitors for cases of child labor and other labor malpractices, but insufficient human resources limited its activities. In 2015 the inspectorate reported it had 110 inspectors, up from 98 in 2014.

The law criminalizes exploitation of children for labor or forced services, but the government did not enforce the law effectively. Reports noted that a majority of child laborers worked as street or shop vendors, beggars, farmers, shepherds, drug runners, vehicle washers, textile factory workers, miners, or shoeshine boys. Some of the children begging on the street were second- or third-generation beggars. Research suggested begging started as early as the age of four or five years. While the criminal code prohibits the exploitation of children for begging, police generally did not enforce the law, although they made greater efforts to do so during the year (see section 6, Displaced Children).

Also see the Department of Labor's Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

d. Discrimination with Respect to Employment or Occupation

Labor laws prohibit employment discrimination because of race, skin color, gender, age, physical or mental disability, political beliefs, nationality, religion, family, and social origin. Discrimination in employment and occupation occurred with respect to gender, presence of a disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, nationality, and ethnicity.

e. Acceptable Conditions of Work

The national minimum wage was 22,000 leks ($176) per month. By comparison the national poverty threshold in 2013 was 6,665 leks ($53) per month. The law requires equal pay for equal work. The State Labor Inspectorate is responsible for enforcing the minimum wage.

While the law establishes a 40-hour workweek, individual or collective agreements typically set the actual workweek. The law establishes paid annual holidays, but only employees in the formal labor market had rights to paid holidays. Many persons in the private sector worked six days a week. The law requires payment of overtime and rest periods, but employers did not always observe these provisions. The law limits the maximum hours of work to 40 per week and provides for premium pay for overtime. The government had no standards for a minimum number of rest periods per week and rarely enforced laws related to maximum work hours, limits on overtime, or premium pay for overtime, especially in the private sector. These laws did not apply to workers in the informal sector, such as domestic employees and migrant workers.

The State Labor Inspectorate is responsible for enforcing occupational health and safety standards and regulations. Enforcement was lacking overall. Workplace conditions in the manufacturing, construction, and mining sectors frequently were poor and, in some cases, dangerous. Resources and inspections were not adequate, and penalties of up to 50 times the minimum wage ($10,000) often did not deter violations, as law enforcement agencies lacked the tools to enforce collection and consequently rarely charged violators. There were no government programs to provide social protection for workers in the informal economy.

Violations of wage and occupational-safety standards occurred most frequently in the textile, footwear, construction, and mining industries. Workers often could not remove themselves from situations that endangered their health or safety without jeopardizing their employment. Employers did not effectively protect employees in this situation.
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TUESDAY

Taste of Abilene

The annual Taste of Abilene showcase will be presented from 6-8 p.m. at the Abilene Civic Center, 1100 N. Sixth St. Food from more than 40 restaurants and caterers will be featured. Tickets are $35. Proceeds will go to local nonprofit organizations. To register, go to www.tasteofabilene.com.

Business workshop

Texas Tech Small Business Development Center Abilene will conduct a workshop, "Managing Business Reports and Recordkeeping," from 6-8 p.m. in the Texas Tech Training Center, 749 Gateway St., Suite 301. To make a reservation, call 325-670-0300.

Square dance workshop

TYE  The Wagon Wheel Squares will conduct a square dancing workshop at 6:30 p.m. at the Wagon Wheel.

Trumpet recital

Dr. Karl Sievers will present a trumpet recital at 8 p.m. in Ryan Recital Hall at McMurry University.

Other ...

Mission on the Move Soup Kitchen, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Southwest Drive Community United Methodist Church, 3025 Southwest Dr.

Abilene Southwest Rotary Club, noon, Beehive Restaurant, 442 Cedar St.

High Noon Al-Anon, noon, Southern Hills Church of Christ, 3666 Buffalo Gap Road (south end; follow the yellow signs).

Blood drive, 1-6 p.m., Brookshires, Cisco.

Stroke/Aphasia Recovery Program support group, 1:30-2:30 p.m. West Texas Rehabilitation Center boardroom, 4601 Hartford St. 325-793-3535.

Dystonia Support Group, 5:15-6:15 p.m., Not Without Us, 3301 N. First St. Suite 117.

Take Off Pounds Sensibly (TOPS), 5:30 p.m., Brook Hollow Christian Church, 2310 S. Willis St. 325-232-7444.

Legacies Al-Anon Family Group, 5:30-6:30 p.m., Open Door Building, 3157 Russell Ave. 325-280-7584.

Family (of Mental Health Consumers) Support Group, 6-7 p.m., Mental Health Association in Abilene, 333 Orange St. 325-673-2300.

MHAA Bipolar/Depression Peer Support Group, 6-8 p.m., Ministry of Counseling & Enrichment, 1502 N. First St. 325-673-2300.

Free certified nurturing parent class (pregnancy to toddler), 6-8 p.m., Mission Church, North Third and Mockingbird streets. 325-672-9398.

Abilene Star Chorus, 6:15 p.m., First Baptist Church, 1333 N. Third St. 325-829-1470.

Overeaters Anonymous, 6:30-7:30 p.m., Exodus Metropolitan Community Church, 1933 S. 27th St.

Family Support Group for parents with special needs children, 6:30-7:30 p.m., West Texas Rehabilitation Center boardroom, 4601 Hartford St. 325-793-3500.

Alzheimer's Association  North Central Texas Chapter, 6:30-7:30 p.m., Chisholm Place, 1450 E. N. 10th St. 325-672-2907.

Al-Anon Parents Group, 7 p.m., Hillcrest Church of Christ, 650 E. Ambler Ave. Use Church Street entrance.

Al-Anon, 7 p.m., Doug Meinzer Activity Center, Knox City. 940-658-3926.

Brigadier General John Sayles Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp 366, 7 p.m., American Legion Building, 302 E.S. 11th St.

Abilene Society of Model Railroaders, 7-8:30 p.m., 2043 N. Second St.

Unity Group of Alcoholics Anonymous, 8 p.m., Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, 602 Meander St.

WEDNESDAY

Art film

A showing of the film "Chuck Close: A Portrait in Progress" will begin at noon at the Center for Contemporary Arts, 220 Cypress St. A discussion will follow.

Other ...

Overeaters Anonymous, 8 a.m., Hinds Square Building, Room 112, 100 Chestnut St.

Blood drive, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Hawley High School.

Abilene Cactus Lions Club, 11:45 a.m., Cotton Patch Cafe, 3302 S. Clack St.

Abilene Wednesday Rotary Club, noon, Abilene Country Club, 4039 S. Treadaway. $12 for lunch. Jo Ann Wilson, 325-677-6815.

Kiwanis Club of Abilene, noon, Abilene Country Club, 4039 S. Treadaway Blvd.

Clearly Speaking Toastmaster Club, noon, Westgate Church of Christ, 402 S. Pioneer Drive. 325-795-5570.

Alzheimer's Association Caregiver Support Group, 2-3 p.m., Western Hills Healthcare Residence, Comanche.

Alzheimer's disease support group, 5:15 p.m., Cedar Crest Care Center, 1901 W. Elliott, Breckenridge. Assists those who have a family member with symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. 1-800-272-3900 or 254-559-3302.

Free swim class for people with multiple sclerosis, 5:30 p.m., YMCA, 3250 State St.

Veterans Peer Support Group, 6 p.m., 765 Orange St. 325-670-4818.

Mid-week Al-Anon Family Group, 6-7 p.m., Open Door Building, 3157 Russell Ave. 325-698-4995.

Advanced Square Dancing, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Wagon Wheel.

Al-Anon, 7 p.m., First United Methodist Church, 1501 N. Broadway, Ballinger. 817-689-2810 or 325-977-1007.

DivorceCare support group, 7 p.m., Hillcrest Church of Christ, 650 E. Ambler Ave. 325-691-4200.

THURSDAY

Garage sale

DESDEMONA  An annual garage sale will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Desdemona Activity Center.

Writer speaks

As a part of the Knox-Bennett Writers Series, novelist Maggie Mitchell will speak about writing at 2:30 p.m. in the Jay-Rollins Library at McMurry University. She will read selections of her fiction at 7:30 p.m. in the Old Main Matthews Auditorium. Admission to both events is free.

Documentary showing

A free showing of a part of the PBS documentary series "Latino Americans" will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the Mockingbird Branch of the Abilene Public Library, 1326 N. Mockingbird Lane.

Jazz concert

A jazz ensemble concert will be presented at 7:30 p.m. in Bynum Band Hall at McMurry University.

Other ...

Chronic Pain and Depression Group, 11 a.m. to noon, Mental Health Association of Abilene, 333 Orange St., 325-673-2300.

Abilene Founder Lions Club, 11:30 a.m., Al's Mesquite Grill, 4801 Buffalo Gap Road.

Kiwanis Club of Greater Abilene, noon, Beehive Restaurant, 442 Cedar St. 325-695-0092.

Retired Military Wives Club social meeting, 1 p.m., Rose Park Senior Activity Center, 2625 South Seventh St. 325-677-9656 or 325-793-1490.

Mental Illness Open Support Group, 1-2 p.m., Mental Health Association of Abilene, 333 Orange St. 325-673-2300.

Abilene 42 Club, 6 p.m., Rose Park Senior Center.

Teen Recovery Group, 6-7 p.m., Mission Abilene, 3001 N. Third St.

Free certified nurturing parent class (all ages), 6-8 p.m., Mission Church, North Third and Mockingbird streets. 325-672-9398.

Take Off Pounds Sensibly, 6:30 p.m. Brook Hollow Christian Church. Weigh-in begins at 5:30 p.m. 325-665-5052.

Free swim class for people with multiple sclerosis, 6:30 p.m., YMCA, 3250 State St.

Gambler's Anonymous, 6:30 p.m., Unity Spiritual Living Center, 2842 Barrow St. 325-338-2575.

Round Dancing, 7 p.m., Wagon Wheel. 325-829-1517.

South Pioneer Al-Anon Group, 8 p.m., 3157 Russell Ave.

Unity Group of Alcoholics Anonymous, 8 p.m., Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, 602 Meander St.

FRIDAY

Garage sale

DESDEMONA  An annual garage sale will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Desdemona Activity Center.

Musical

COTTONWOOD  The Cottonwood Country Musical will begin at 5:30 p.m. at the Cottonwood Community Center. A supper will be served from 5-7 p.m.

'Hands on a Hardbody'

A production of the musical 'Hands on a Hardbody' will be presented at 7:30 p.m. in Fulks Theatre at Abilene Christian University. Tickets are $15. For more information, go to www.acu.edu/academics/cas/music.

Bands concert

A bands concert will be presented at 7:30 p.m. in Cullen Auditorium at Abilene Christian University.

Other ...

Blood drive, 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Holland Medical High School, 2442 Cedar St.

Overeaters Anonymous, noon, Hinds Square Building, 100 Chestnut St., Room 112.

Abilene Chinese Corner, 5:30-6:30 p.m., Abilene Christian University library. lld09a@acu.edu.

Mid-City Al-Anon, 7 p.m., First Christian Church. 325-670-4304.
If anyone would like to see a sample of what Boy Scouts offer, this weekend gives you that opportunity.

Boy Scout Troop 232, sponsored by Highland Church of Christ, will rededicate its meeting house at South Third Street and Sayles Boulevard Sunday afternoon. The public is invited to an open house from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m., with the official dedication scheduled for 12:30 p.m.

Troop members will have a typical campsite set up and will be demonstrating cooking and give presentations on the troop's history and some of their past and future high adventure trips. In scouting, high adventure trips can include anything from backpacking trips lasting several days, white-water rafting or cave exploration, as well as trips to established bases such as Philmont Scout Ranch, New Mexico, a canoe base in Minnesota and a sea base in Florida.

A court of honor, where boys receive awards and advancement they have earned, will be held Saturday evening.

Come by, see what these young men can do on their own and learn more about how you can get involved, either as a youth or adult. Additional note: Boy Scouts has a Venture program especially for youths ages 14 to 21  and it is open to girls, too.

CAMP WORKDAY AND OA FELLOWSHIP

The Order of the Arrow will have its spring fellowship at Camp Billy Gibbons April 29-May 1. That Saturday will also be the annual workday to prepare the camp for summer. The camp has been closed for long-term camping for several years while needed renovations were done. Texas Trails Council will hold two one-week camp sessions there this year.

Cost for the fellowship is $30 per member. Those wishing to complete their ordeal membership will be charged $60, and brotherhood candidates are charged $55. Deadline to register is noon April 27; registration form can be found at www.texastrailsbsa.com.

Ordeal candidates need to go to the site for a list of items to bring, and all attendees must download, fill out and bring a current health form, also available at the site.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Mountain Man Boy Scout Camporee, Friday-Sunday, San Saba River Nature Park and Mill Pond Park, San Saba. $15 per Scout, $10 per adult (add $5 late fee per person after April 18). Lance Anderson, 325-320-6996.

Cub-O-Ree, Friday-Sunday, Camp Tonkawa. $15 per person; $60 for family of five or more. 325-673-3552 Tot Spot, for children ages 3-5 (and an adult), 9:30 or 11 a.m. first Thursday and Friday of each month, The Grace Museum, 102 Cypress St. (Check at www.thegracemuseum.org under "Upcoming events" for holiday scheduling.) Free for museum members, $5 for nonmembers. Reservations required; 325-673-4587 or online.

National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature, 102 Cedar St., Abilene (325-673-4586), offers art activities each Saturday from 1-4 p.m. at no charge.

DEADLINE

Thursday for genealogy workshop for Junior and Cadette Girl Scouts April 30, Abilene Public Library, 202 Cedar St. $3 per girl. 888-670-0432 Ext. 2703 or mlawson@gs-top.org.

Contact Carl Kieke at 325-673-3552; kiekec@suddenlink.net; or mail to Carl Kieke, 1417 N. 7th St. No. 2, Abilene TX 79601-4948. Deadline is Tuesday for publication the following Monday.
In Gage Hoskins' world, it was as if everyone speaking to him was distorting their voices.

"Everybody was like wearing a mask," said the 15-year-old high school freshman from Sweetwater.

Hoskins is reported to be the first patient to receive a bone-anchored hearing aid in Abilene. Dr. Jason Acevedo, an otolaryngologist at Abilene Regional Medical Center, performed the procedure. The surgery marked the first time Acevedo has performed the procedure in Abilene, although he has done it elsewhere.

With the most recent surgery, Hoskins' hearing in his right ear has gone from extremely limited to nearly normal.

The teen had suffered chronic ear infections all of his life until a previous surgery by Acevedo. That surgery stopped the infections and his hearing improved somewhat, which at the time was victory enough for Gage and his parents, Dusty and Tracy Hoskins.

"We thought that was the best we could hope for," Dusty Hoskins said.

Years of infections had left Gage Hoskins' outer and middle ear so damaged that although a traditional hearing aid would help some, it wouldn't give him anywhere near normal hearing, Acevedo said. A hearing aid that directs sound through the tiny bones in the ear instead of through the outer and middle ear, however, could give the teen normal hearing, Acevedo said.

"Most hearing loss is sensory," Acevedo said. "That's what happens when we get older. Conductive hearing loss is more rare, but it's still relatively common. It can happen with chronic ear infections and with perforated ear drums."

In many cases, doctors were trying to treat conductive hearing loss with hearing aids designed for sensory hearing problems, he said.

"That was just the technology that was available," Acevedo said.

In the BAHA procedure, a patient receives a titanium implant, a procedure considered day surgery, Acevedo said. In a couple of weeks, the sound processor is attached to the implant through a magnet.

The bone-anchored hearing aid, which Acevedo said is covered by insurance, can be used with people with conductive hearing loss or single-ear deafness.

The results can be startling, medical professionals said.

"It's truly a remarkable device," said Connie Stephens, an audiologist with the West Texas Rehabilitation Center. "It specifically targets a patient's hearing loss. It has a huge 'wow' effect."

Gage Hoskins' family would agree, and said the changes in his hearing are apparent in things small and large.

His father said that on the ride home after receiving the hearing aid, his son asked him about a strange noise.

"I didn't know what he was talking about," Dusty Hoskins said. "I finally figured out he was talking about road noise. He hadn't heard it before."

Tracy Hoskins said her son's academic performance has improved, as has his behavior, since many of his problems were brought on by his frustration about not being able to hear.

"He would just shut down sometimes," Dusty Hoskins said.

Tracy Hoskins said her son is a normal teenager, although he doesn't accept that tag.

"Normal is boring," he said.

The "new normal," however, has required some getting used to, Tracy Hoskins said.

"It is an adjustment," she said. "We don't have to repeat things over and over, we don't have to tell our other son he needs to be quiet so Gage can hear us. He doesn't have to play his music so loud."

Well, scratch that last one.

"I still play my music loud," Gage Hoskins said.

Gage Hoskins also is adjusting to a life in which he doesn't have to sit near the teacher, he can keep up with conversations going on around him and his ear doesn't bother him as often.

The improvement in his hearing may have a few minor drawbacks, however.

"Now, he doesn't have an excuse when I tell him to clean his room or take out the trash," his father said.

Acevedo jumped to his patient's defense.

"I have to offer this disclaimer," he said. "It does nothing for selective hearing."
Halloween events, fall festivals pack October in Abilene, Big Country

From family-friendly to frightful, there are plenty of opportunities to don the costumes and scare up some treats.
For safety and security within the Abilene Independent School District, police Chief Stan Standridge has a few ideas. And a few concepts to avoid.

Presenting to the school district's board Monday, Standridge championed the school marshal program, created by a June 2013 state law in response to the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Connecticut.

It's a program the school district already participates in, with one marshal already on record. But Standridge said he'd like to see more, because he's not going to be able to dedicate any more of his personnel to the role of school resource officer.

"Even if I had all 216 officers I'm permitted to have, I'll tell you I'm probably going to be selfish and not give you any more," Standridge said. "I need those officers on the streets, responding to 911 emergencies. You're going to be stuck with the seven you have."

Abilene ISD named its first marshal, which is a district employee who has a handgun license and undergoes extensive training and certification schooling, in February 2015. The identity of the marshal is kept confidential, Standridge said.

The law creating the marshals also stipulates that marshals serving in direct contact with students  for example, a teacher  must keep their firearm in a locked box at all times. Individuals without direct contact, like an administrator on campus, would be permitted to carry.

The marshal program, Standridge said, trains individuals to be able to respond in the most dire of circumstances, including blatant threats to cause deadly action on school property.

To serve as marshals, the individual must pass a psychological examination and attend 80 hours of training. He or she must also pass a test and then recertify in two years with more schooling and a new exam.

Standridge would like to see more marshals because there are more than 25 campuses within the district and only a finite number of officers patrolling them.

In Abilene, he said, response time to campus incidents would be about three to five minutes, meaning there would be plenty of time for negative scenarios to worsen. More trained individuals would increase the likelihood of a qualified individual being in place to stop a scenario from escalating.

With marshals, Standridge also said he'd make sure whoever is selected would be able to train with police for continuing education purposes to prepare for real-life events.

"My commitment to you is that if you consider more school marshals, I'll take them under my wing and make sure they're getting the training they need," Standridge said.

Beyond training more marshals, Standridge said the police department also offers a free program to civilians designed to prepare them for active shooter situations.

Called CRASE  Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events  the program informs participants of best practices when a shooter is on campus, he said.

He said training would make a difference if a scenario ever developed on an Abilene campus where a shooter began firing.

One idea he said he did not support was using what are termed "guardians."

These individuals, he said, would be concealed handgun license carriers who receive limited training and take one test before being permitted to carry a firearm on school grounds.

Guardians never need to recertify, which he said poses a problem for police if called to the scene of an incident. Marshal training, however, covers how to properly identify one's self to police responding to a situation should the need arise, he said.

In other school board news, bids on a pair of construction projects relating to the district's $87.7 million bond were approved Monday.

Abilene's The Crowe Group Inc. was recognized as low bidder for both, including a project at Abilene High finishing all restroom renovations to make the school Americans with Disabilities Act compliant.

That project also provides security measures like fencing and access control, a new roof for the south academic wings and the field house, a plaza for lunching and new window shades.

The other project performs ADA compliance and minor work at Ortiz, Reagan, Dyess, Thomas, Bassetti, Austin, Ward and Jackson elementary schools.

In addition, Ortiz and Bassetti elementary schools will receive canopies from their front doors to the bus loading and parent pickup area.

Work at Abilene High is expected to cost $746,000, while the elementary projects would cost $3.5 million, according to bid documents released by the district at Monday's meeting.

Twitter: @TimothyChippARN
President Obama will have plenty of sticky issues to deal with on his visit this week to Saudi Arabia for a meeting with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Turmoil in Syria, the fight against the Islamic State, the Iran nuclear deal, regional politics  all of these are important. But there's another, equally important piece of business Obama should put on the agenda: He should urge Saudi King Salman to free imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi.

Badawi, 32, has been jailed since 2012 after he appealed online for a more liberal and secular society, a call that infuriated the kingdom's conservative clerics and religious establishment. His sentence was set at 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes. After he was flogged 50 times, the remainder have been held in abeyance, but the sentence stands and was upheld by the Saudi supreme court in June, and the whipping could be resumed at any time.

What was it that Badawi said? Shortly before his 2012 arrest, he wrote about the nature of liberalism. 'For me,' he said, 'liberalism simply means, live and let live.' But the clerics, he said, 'controlling and claiming exclusive monopoly of the truth,' have discredited it. 'They have succeeded in planting hostility to liberalism in the minds of the public and turning people against it, lest the carpet be pulled out from under their feet. But their hold over people's minds and society shall vanish like dust carried off in the wind.' Badawi was honored with the 2015 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament.

Ensaf Haidar, Badawi's wife, who accepted the prize for him in December, was in Washington recently and told us, 'Raif is not a criminal, not a terrorist. He is a peaceful man who expressed his opinion' and believes it was his natural right to do so. Haidar, who now lives in Canada with their three young children, pressed State Department and White House officials for an appeal by the president on her husband's behalf. She told us she hopes that King Salman, who took office in January 2015, after Badawi was incarcerated, might be persuaded to release him, and she suggested his influential son, Mohammed bin Salman, is open-minded and could be an important factor in winning freedom for Badawi.

Obama ought to tell the unvarnished truth to the monarch: Bloggers may be sharp-tongued, but it is barbaric to subject them to flogging and jail.

The Washington Post
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Students' parents rally outside the Changzhou Foreign Languages School in Changzhou, eastern China's Jiangsu province, in this screenshot from a CCTV 13 report that aired on April 17, 2016.

Nearly 500 students at a prestigious high school in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu have fallen ill, some with cancer and other rare diseases, with environmental experts blaming "dangerously lax" management of environmental waste.

The high rate of sickness at the Changzhou Foreign Languages School, according to an expose run on Sunday by state broadcaster CCTV, is likely due to extremely high levels of groundwater and soil pollution from toxic chemicals dumped nearby by a chemical factory.

Parents at the school said they have been campaigning for weeks to bring public attention to their children's illnesses.

"We have been trying to stand up for our rights for a while now, and we have been in contact with the school about it, but they want nothing to do with us," the mother of one of the students, surnamed Zhang, told RFA.

"We have had no response from the school, other than their view that the site meets [environmental] standards," she said.

"Now, we are just thinking of moving away from this place as soon as possible, so our kid doesn't have to be exposed to this poisoned soil and continue to get sick from it," Zhang said.

At least 493 students had tested positive for abnormal blood parameters or diseases ranging from dermatitis, eczema, bronchitis to leukemia and lymphoma, the CCTV report said.

Poisonous pesticides

The school moved to its newly commissioned campus last September, but the CCTV report said poisonous pesticides had been manufactured at three chemical plants near the site in the past, and pupils began to develop chronic coughs, headaches, rashes, vomiting and other symptoms soon after arrival.

Students at the school were still in class on Tuesday, with the exception of four or five from her children's class, Zhang said.

"[My kid] was diagnosed with a facial rash and thyroid nodules, but the doctor didn't say anything about the cause, because the government has already implemented measures in the hospitals," she said.

"Some hospitals refused to see us at all," Zhang said.

According to the environmental group Greenpeace, the Changzhou Foreign Languages School is located next to the site of a former chemicals plant.

"The environmental evaluation conducted before the construction of the school suggested that pollution was serious and advised that schools, housing or other public facilities should not be constructed in the area," the group said in a statement on its website.

It said the chemicals reportedly found in groundwater and soil at the site include chloroform and benzene, both of which are listed on Chinas list of hazardous chemicals, and are known to have serious health, including carcinogenic properties, and environmental impacts.

"The school was also reportedly using groundwater that was deemed unfit for human use by the environmental evaluation," it said, saying that a more comprehensive environmental assessment is needed.

"The tragedy that has occurred in Changzhou shows just how dangerously lax Chinas hazardous chemical management is," Greenpeace East Asia toxics campaign manager Ada Kong said.

A vow to investigate

Changzhou municipal government issued a statement on Monday vowing to investigate the problem, but saying the number of students sickened at the school was "far fewer" than reported by CCTV.

An official who answered the phone at the Changzhou government offices on Tuesday declined to comment.

"You will have to speak to the press office to get a unified statement on this matter," the official said.

An official who answered the phone at the municipal education bureau also referred queries to the municipal press office.

But calls to the number supplied for the press office resulted in a fax tone during office hours on Tuesday.

Media reports said the state environmental protection agency and the Jiangsu provincial government have sent a task-force to the site to investigate further.

Environmental activist Wu Lihong said China is no stranger to massive pollution scandals.

"In China, the environmental protection department is nicknamed the pollution protection department, because it's actually responsible for allowing a lot of the pollution by protecting polluting enterprises," Wu said.

"This case in Changzhou is certainly not a one-off," he said.

Lack of checks and balances

Jiangsu rights activist Wu Shiming said the problems stem from a lack of checks and balances on the power of ruling Chinese Communist Party officials.

"There are strong links between government and business in many locations, because of a lack of scrutiny of state power," Wu Shiming said. "In the end, its the ordinary people who suffer."

"The pollution at this school is a tremendous cause for concern, but it happened because the channels for ordinary people to report such things aren't effective," he said.

"That's why disasters like this happen," he said.

China's Ministry of Water Resources reported last week that more than 80 percent of groundwater in China is unfit for human consumption, based on its monitoring of major river systems and thousands of artesian wells.



Reported by Wen Yuqing for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Qiao Long for the Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
The Ubungo Clinic is one of the North Korean hospitals operating in Tanzania.

The Tanzanian government has ordered the immediate closure of two North Korean medical clinics operating in the major port city of Dar es Salaam because the facilities used fake medicine, unqualified doctors and ineffective treatments that could actually harm patients.

Hamisi Kigwangalla, Tanzanias deputy minister of health, ordered the immediate closure of the two North Korean clinics located in the citys Kariakoo and Magomeni wards, after a personal visit to check the clinics medical operating conditions on April 15.

April 15 also marked the end of a grace period the Tanzanian government issued in January to give the clinics time to correct the problems, many of which were highlighted in a set of investigative reports (click here to read) by RFAs Korean Service earlier this year.

The medical facilities had no business licenses but were accepting patients, while most of the North Korean doctors at the clinic had no work permits, The Guardian, Tanzanias leading newspaper, reported on April 17th.

North Korean personnel initially tried to preempt Kigwangallas visit, arguing that their business was a joint operation with Tanzanias governing party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM).)

The deputy minister wasnt buying that argument.

We have already checked with the ruling party, who then denied this claim, Kigwangalla told the media. We must take immediate action to this obvious illegal act by shutting it down.

A long list

There is a long list of reasons Tanzania wants to shutter the clinics that include: operating without a business license, or work permits, lack of qualifications for the North Korean doctors, unverified treatments, unverified therapeutic apparatus, and the hospitals failure to label their drugs and the use of fake or improperly labeled medicine.

The Guardian also reported that the North Koreans couldnt speak the national language, Swahili, and lacked a command of English.

A Closed for Business sign hung in front of the clinics locked doors following Kigwangallas visit, a local source in Tanzania told RFA on April 18.

The North Korean medical issue was brought to the forefront after reporting by RFAs Korean service and local media outlets uncovered the conditions at the North Korean clinics in Tanzania.

While the RFA stories pointed out the poor conditions under which patients are treated at the North Korean clinics, it also exposed the facilities as a source of hard currency for the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Kims cash-strapped government is feeling the pinch of United Nations economic and trade sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council in response to North Koreas four nuclear tests since 2006. Pyongyang has responded by sending its citizens abroad to work for hard currency, in jobs ranging from medical workers in Africa to loggers in Russia to construction laborers in the Middle East.

Before the shuttering of the two clinics, 13 such facilities in Tanzania, including four in Dar es Salaam, were remitting about $1 million a year to Pyongyang, which takes the lions share of North Korean workers overseas earnings.

Kigwangalla told reporters that the Tanzanian government intended to investigate the other 11 North Korean clinics in the country.

Reported by Albert Hong for RFA's Korean Service. Translated by Jackie Yoo. Written in English by Brooks Boliek.
A battalion commander and 20 soldiers from the government army were killed during fresh fighting with an armed ethnic army in western Myanmars Rakhine state during hostilities that erupted three days ago, a spokesman for the rebel army said Tuesday.

The national army engaged in two ambush attacks against the Arakan Army (AA) in Ponnagyun township and an AA base near Lawmara Hill in Rathedaung township during the countrys New Year celebrations, said AA spokesman Khine Thukha.

We have been fighting because Infantry 232 led by Commander Myo Min Tun came into the AAs area, he told RFAs Myanmar Service.

Commander Myo Min Tun and 20 soldiers were killed in the fighting in Ponnagyun township, he said. Some [soldiers] from the AA are injured, but no one was killed.

The Myanmar military, which rarely discusses battle casualties, was not available for comment.

Following the attacks, additional government troops have arrived in Ponnagyun and Kyauktaw townships, according to a report by the Democratic Voice of Burma.

People living in the area where the clashes occurred are having difficulty getting to work or to their farms, according to a local state media report.

Were finding it difficult to get food because the fighting is going on, said a local resident who declined to give his name. We are still hearing the sound of heavy weapons.

The government army, which has occupied the AAs camps and other buildings, has found handmade mines in the area, the report said.

Residents of the state told the online journal The Irrawaddy that tension has been growing between the ethnic Myanmar and Rakhine communities because of inflammatory posts on social media and unverified photos depicting violent acts.

Removing the insurgents

The new Myanmar government led by State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy (NLD) party said on April 13 that the national army would try to remove AA insurgencies from the states Kyauktaw township, where fighting broke out at the end of last year and the beginning of 2016, the report said.

In January, Myanmars army under the previous government administration of Thein Sein vowed to eliminate the AA, accusing it of creating instability in the region.

Aung San Suu Kyi, who is also NLD chairwoman and minister of foreign affairs and the Presidents Office, has made national peace and reconciliation the cornerstone of the new government that came into power at the beginning of the month.

She has pledged to hold peace talks with armed ethnic groups who were excluded from or opted not to sign a nationwide peace agreement last October under the previous administration.

Eight of the countrys more than 20 armed ethnic groups signed the pact, but the AA was one of a few rebel groups that were excluded because of ongoing hostilities with the government army.

Khine Thukka expressed skepticism that the continuation of such discussions would end the fighting in Rakhine.

We think all problems we have now are political problems, he said. We have been asking for a long time to solve political problems in political ways, but the government army is eradicating us. If we cant solve political problems with dialogue, we will never have peace and ethnic unity.

Now that we have the first civilian government in many years, which has said its priority is national reconciliation and peace, we have been expecting the best during the new governments term, but we are getting ready to face the worst situation at the same time, he said.

Nevertheless, he told The Irrawaddy that the AA would participate in talks with the government only if the other excluded groups were also invited.

Natural resource-sharing rights

Meanwhile, environmental activists in Rakhine began a campaign on Tuesday to collect signatures supporting natural resource-sharing rights in 17 townships, according to a resident of the coastal township Kyautphyu.

Organizers will send the lists of signatures to the national government during June, said Kyautphyu resident Tun Kyi.

We have been asking for the issuance of laws on resource-sharing rights for five years, but the government hasnt effectively done anything about it, he told RFA. Thats why we are collecting the signatures now.

The other thing we are asking for is to amend an article in the constitution that says the state owns all resources in the country, he said.

Rakhine citizens called for the passage of laws on resource-sharing rights during the five-day Rakhine National Conference in April 2014 in Kyaukphyu to discuss peace, security and development in the impoverished, conflict-torn state.

Violence erupted between Rakhine Buddhists Muslim Rohingya in the state in 2012, leaving more than 200 dead and tens of thousands homeless. The Rohingya, who bore the brunt of the attacks, were later forced to live in squalid displacement camps.

About 120,000 Rohingya remain in the camps, while thousands of others have fled persecution in the Buddhist-dominated country on rickety boats to other Southeast Asian countries in recent years.

Myanmars ethnic minority groups advocate natural-resource sharing and greater autonomy through a federal political system.

The NLD government has pledged to work to ensure a fair distribution across the country of the profits from natural resource extraction, in accordance with the principles of a federal union, according to a recent report issued by the Natural Resource Governance Institute.

Regional and state leaders and several armed ethnic groups advocate the distribution of revenues from natural resources, such as copper, jade and other gemstones, as a key feature of fiscal decentralization and the peace process, the report said.

Reported by Min Thein Aung for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Afghan officials say Taliban militants have attacked an office of the country's main security agency in Kabul, killing at least 28 people and wounding more than 300.

Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told RFE/RL that the April 19 attack began with a suicide car bomb during the morning rush hour, followed by an assault by armed militants.

The attack -- near the Defense Ministry in the capital's central first district -- targeted an office that houses a National Directorate of Security unit responsible for protecting government officials.

Kabul police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi said most of the 28 people confirmed dead were civilians.

He said an explosives-laden truck detonated in a public parking lot next to the security-agency building.

Rahimi said at least one gunmen was killed by security forces after the explosion.

Casualties included both civilians and members of Afghan security forces.

Just hours after the first blast, a second explosion hit the city in the evening but no serious casualties were reported.

The blast was caused by an improvised device, according to Sediqqi.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the first attack, which comes a week after the militant group announced the start of its annual spring offensive.

PHOTO GALLERY: Death, Chaos In Kabul

Photo Gallery: More Than 300 Casualties In Massive Kabul Attack Afghan officials say Taliban militants have attacked an office of the country's main security agency in Kabul, killing at least 28 people and wounding about 300. Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told RFE/RL that the April 19 attack began with a suicide car bomb during the morning rush hour, followed by an assault by armed militants. The attack -- near the Defense Ministry in the capital's central first district -- targeted an office that houses a National Directorate of Security unit responsible for protecting government officials. Mohammad Ismail Kawusi, the Health Ministry's public-relations director, told RFE/RL that at least 20 people were killed in the attack and 198 people were taken by ambulance to various hospitals. Numerous others were wounded, he said. Casualties included both civilians and members of Afghan security forces. Share on Facebook

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A police commander, Obaidullah Tarakhail, said the blast was "one of the most powerful explosions I have ever heard in my life."

He added that he couldn't see or hear anything for 20 minutes after the initial explosion. "All around was dark and covered with thick smoke and dust," he said.

The explosion also severely damaged dozens of apartment buildings, shops, and government buildings in the area.

The presidential palace, located about 2 kilometers from the blast, condemned the "cowardly terrorist attack," saying it "will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism."

President Ashraf Ghani condemned the attack in a statement and said it was the result of the Taliban suffering losses in fighting against security forces in other parts of the country following the declaration of its annual spring offensive.

The attack "clearly shows the enemy's defeat in face-to-face battle with Afghan security forces," Ghani statement.

Sediqqi told RFE/RL that "the suicide attack by the Taliban, in which a vehicle was used, is a clear sign of [the Taliban's] failure."

He said the Islamic extremist group had recently suffered defeats in confrontations with Afghan security forces in the northern provinces of Kunduz, Takhar, Badakhshan, and Jowzjan.

"The Taliban [suffered] huge casualties in the last 24 hours and now they carry out a suicide attack in Kabul," Sediqqi said. "It is a clear sign of their defeat."

Sediqqi said several gunmen fought with security forces after the blast. Afghan officials said those gunbattles had ended.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, however, said several of its fighters were still inside the security agency's compound and fighting.

In a statement isued on April 19, White House spokesman John Kirby said the "United States condemns in the strongest terms the attack today in Kabul."

"This incident underscores the harm the Taliban and other violent extremists continue to inflict on the Afghan people," he added.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned the attack and said "there is no justification whatsoever for attacking civilian people as well as security people."

Ban also urged the international community to cooperate in tackling extremism, saying, "We must fight against these terrorist attacks."

"This attack shows the devastation caused by the use of explosive devices in urban areas and once more demonstrates complete disregard for the lives of Afghan civilians," said Tadamichi Yamamoto, the secretary-general's deputy special representative for Afghanistan.

"The use of high explosives in civilian populated areas, in circumstances almost certain to cause immense suffering to civilians, may amount to war crimes," Yamamoto added.

"Today's attack shows the insurgents are unable to meet Afghan forces on the battlefield and must resort to these terrorist attacks," said General John W. Nicholson, the new commander of the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan. "We strongly condemn the actions of Afghanistan's enemies and remain firmly committed to supporting our Afghan partners and the National Unity Government."

The Taliban began its spring offensive last week by targeting the northern city of Kunduz, which the militants briefly captured last year.

But after three days of intense fighting, Afghan officials said security forces had repelled the attack and claimed to have killed dozens of Taliban fighters.

With reporting by AP, AFP, Reuters, and dpa
MOSCOW -- Russia's Constitutional Court has ruled that Moscow may ignore part of a European court judgment in a dispute on prisoner voting rights, marking the first time Russia has used a controversial law asserting its right to reject international court rulings.



The leadership of the Council of Europe responded by saying the Russian verdict left room for compromise, although an international rights watchdog called it a "devastating blow" to victims of Russian injustice.



Legislation signed by President Vladimir Putin in December created a mechanism for Russia to disregard international rulings, including by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), if they are believed to contravene the Russian Constitution.



The December move came months after the same Strasbourg court ordered Russia to pay $2 billion to the shareholders of Yukos, the dismantled oil giant once controlled by tycoon-turned-Kremlin-critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.



The Constitutional Court verdict on April 19 stems from a request by the Russian Justice Ministry in February to consider the constitutionality of another ECHR judgment from 2013 calling on Russia to reform its blanket ban on prisoner voting rights.



The Constitutional Court said it was "prepared to compromise" with Strasbourg but that it was "impossible" to change the law to give prisoners the right to vote.



The court, however, said that some facilities for prisoners serving sentences for less serious crimes could be labeled differently under the law in order to preserve their right to vote.



"Russia was and remains a composite part of the European legal space, which supposes dialogue on an equal footing and a preparedness to compromise," the court wrote on its website.



The secretary-general of the Council of Europe, Thorbjorn Jagland, reacted cautiously to the Russian verdict.



"Today's judgment of the Constitutional Court suggests that there is a way to resolve the issue through a change of legislation which would alleviate the existing restrictions on the right to vote," he said in a statement. "I now call on the Russian parliament to draw on the Constitutional Court's judgment and consider appropriate solutions in order to implement the judgment of the Strasbourg Court."



Prisoners in many Western countries are banned from voting, and the Russian Constitutional Court judgment is being watched less for the details of the particular case than for the precedent it sets.



International watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) decried the ruling.



"It's very simple: Russia is violating its legal obligation to enforce rulings of the European Court of Human Rights," said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at HRW. "The Constitutional Court's decision, while predictable, deals a devastating blow for people in Russia who turn to the European Court because they can't find justice in the Russian courts."



The ECHR is a key platform for victims of perceived human rights abuses seeking recourse beyond courts in their own countries.



The court in Strasbourg issues binding judgments in response to individual or state applications alleging violations of rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights, which Russia signed in 1998.



Every year, it is flooded with cases from Russia.



The April 19 judgment was welcomed by some human rights activists who had feared a less conciliatory move by Russian authorities, or even that Russia might reject the jurisdiction of the ECHR outright.



"I think this is not a bad decision, and, generally, in some ways maybe it is positive from the point of view of maintaining relations with the Russian Federation and the ECHR," Ilya Shablinsky, a member of the Russian president's Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, told RFE/RL's Russian Service.



"Russia recognized the jurisdiction of the ECHR," Shablinsky said. "Many had expected a decision that would point to a breakdown of these relations and Russia's attempts -- attempts, at the least -- to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR."
Two of Azerbaijan's most prominent human rights defenders, who supporters say have been persecuted and jailed at home for their activist work, have arrived in the Netherlands after the authorities in Baku granted them permission to leave.

Leyla Yunus and her husband, Arif, were greeted by their daughter, Dinara Yunus, who lives in the Netherlands, upon landing at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport on April 19, according to Dutch media reports.

Welcoming the two, Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders said Leyla and Arif Yunus, who are seeking asylum in the Netherlands, "had put their own safety and happiness at stake in the struggle for democracy and human rights," according to local reports.

No further details were immediately available.

Leyla Yunus and Arif Yunus were sentenced to 8 1/2 and 7 years in prison, respectively, in August 2015 for "fraud" and other purported crimes related to their NGO work.

Supporters said the charged were trumped up. Amnesty International recognized the couple as prisoners of conscience.

WATCH: The reunion in Amsterdam (video courtesy of Amnesty International)

International rights groups, the United States, and the European Union routinely criticize Azerbaijan's poor record on human rights and freedom of speech under President Ilham Aliyev, who critics say has cracked down on independent media since succeeding his long-ruling father in 2003.

The decision by authorities in Azerbaijan to let them travel comes as something of a surprise.

Last month, an appeals court in Baku ruled the two could not travel to Europe because of their suspended prison terms.

Toward the end of 2015, the Yunuses were released from jail and their sentences were suspended due to their poor health.

Leyla Yunus, 59, suffers from a number of ailments including diabetes and hepatitis C.

She had complained of being beaten several times by prison guards since being detained in July 2014.

She appeared frail as she left the courtroom on December 9, walking with difficulty and leaning on her husband.

Arif Yunus was released in November, also on health grounds.

The prosecution of Leyla and Arif Yunus has been condemned by the international community as part of a deepening crackdown on dissent in Azerbaijan.

Numerous other activists, journalists, and government critics -- including investigative journalist and RFE/RL contributor Khadija Ismayilova -- remain imprisoned in Azerbaijan on charges that Western officials and international rights groups have called politically motivated.

Baku has repeatedly rejected the accusations, insisting that the cases in question are strictly criminal in nature.

The Yunuses, who had worked for the unregistered Peace and Democracy Institute in Baku, were still facing treason charges in a separate case stemming from allegations of spying for Baku's archrival, Armenia.

With reporting by Nu.nl and Nieuwsmeldingen.nl
KYIV -- Ukrainian officials said vile Russian missile strikes on civilian energy sites have caused power outages nationwide, leaving more than a million households without electricity, while Russian authorities ordered residents to leave Kherson "immediately" ahead of an expected effort by Kyivs forces to retake the crucial southern city.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's ongoing invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, Russian protests, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Telegram on October 22 that Russia carried out a "massive attack" on Ukraine overnight and that "the aggressor continues to terrorize our country."



"At night, the enemy launched a massive attack: 36 rockets, most of which were shot down...These are vile strikes on critical objects. Typical tactics of terrorists," he wrote. "The world can and must stop this terror."



Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Zelenskiys office, said Ukrainian air defense forces had shot down 18 of the missiles.



Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a number of missiles had been shot down on the approach to the capital.



"Several rockets flying toward Kyiv were shot down in the region by air defense forces. Thanks to our defenders!" Klitschko said.



There was no immediate word on deaths related to the missile attacks, but officials said several people had been injured.



It was not possible to verify the reports on either side.



In the face of continued Russian strikes, Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba again urged Ukraine's Western allies to speed up the delivery of modern air defense systems.



"We intercepted some, others hit the targets. Air defense saves lives. In [Western] capitals, there should not be a single minute of delay in the decision regarding air defense systems for Ukraine," Kuleba said.



Local officials said power stations were hit in the regions of Odesa, Kirovohrad, and Lutsk, while other regions reported problems with electricity.



"Another rocket attack from terrorists who are fighting against civilian infrastructure and people," the Ukrainian president's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, wrote on the Telegram app.



Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told a government meeting that from October 10 to October 20, Russian strikes damaged more than 400 facilities in 16 regions of Ukraine, including dozens of energy facilities.



"The Russian Army has identified our energy sector as one of the key targets for its attacks," Shmyhal said on October 21.



"Russian propagandists and officials speak openly about the purpose of all these attacks: Ukraine, according to them, should be left without water, without light, without heat," he said.



Meanwhile, Russian-appointed authorities in the occupied and illegally seized southern Kherson region on October 22 ordered the estimated 60,000 residents of the region's eponymous main city to leave "immediately" in the face of Kyiv's advancing counteroffensive.



"Due to the tense situation on the front, the increased danger of mass shelling of the city and the threat of terrorist attacks, all civilians must immediately leave the city and cross to the left bank of the Dnieper River," the region's Russia-backed authorities said on social media.

Russina-installed officials are moving people out of the strategic city in what they are calling an evacuation but which Ukrainian officials label as deportations.



The order came in spite of a claim by Russia's Defense Ministry on October 22 that its forces had prevented an attempt by Ukraine to break through its line of control in Kherson.



"All attacks were repulsed, the enemy was pushed back to their initial positions," the Defense Ministry said, adding that Ukraine's offensive was launched toward the settlements of Piatykhatky, Suhanove, Sablukivka and Bezvodne, on the west side of the Dnieper River.



The ministry's statement said Russian forces had also repelled attacks in the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.



Kherson city, which had a prewar population of 280,000, is one of the first urban areas occupied by Russia at the start of the invasion.



Zelenskiys office said 88 settlements in the southern Kherson region and 551 settlements in the northeastern Kharkiv region have been de-occupied, while the Ukrainian forces' counteroffensive in the Kherson region moves ahead.



Ukraine is trying to drive Russian forces in Kherson back east across the Dnieper. Russian soldiers on the western bank, where the city of Kherson is located, are reportedly close to being cut off from supply lines and reinforcements.



Natalya Humenyuk, a spokeswoman for Ukraines southern operational command, said the Ukrainian military struck the Antonivskiy Bridge over the Dnieper in the city of Kherson during an overnight curfew Russia-installed officials put in place to avoid civilian casualties.



We do not attack civilians and settlements," Humenyuk told Ukrainian television.



Ukrainian strikes made the Antonivskiy Bridge inoperable, prompting Russian authorities to set up ferry crossings and pontoon bridges to relocate civilians and transport supplies.



Russia has sent in thousands of recently mobilized troops to reinforce the defense of Kherson, the General Staff of Ukraine's armed forces said on October 21.



Zelenskiy again on October 21 urged the West to warn Russia not to blow up a dam at the Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant on the Dnieper River as this could flood settlements toward Kherson.



Zelenskiy said Russian forces had planted explosives inside the dam, which holds back an enormous reservoir, and were planning to blow it up.



"Now everyone in the world must act powerfully and quickly to prevent a new Russian terrorist attack. Destroying the dam would mean a large-scale disaster," he said in his nightly address.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, AP, and the BBC
Coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Syria, the refugee crisis in Europe, and the rise of the Islamic State extremist group won a number of Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious awards in American journalism.

The winners in all 21 categories -- including awards for journalism, music, drama, and letters -- were announced at New York's Columbia University, which administers the awards, now in their 100th year.

The Pulitzers began in 1917 after a bequest from newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer.

Photographers from The New York Times and Thomson Reuters shared the breaking-news photography award for their coverage of the refugee crisis.

Alissa Rubin of The New York Times won the international reporting prize for her coverage of Afghan women.

The Los Angeles Times won the breaking-news category for the coverage of the killings in San Bernardino.

The prize for nonfiction was won by Joby Warrick for his book Black Flags: The Rise Of ISIS and its assessment of what the Pulitzer Board said was the "flawed rationale" of the Iraq war and the rise of the IS extremist group.

The U.S. Associated Press news agency won the coveted award for public-service journalism for investigating labor abuses tied to the supply of seafood in the United States, reporting that freed 2,000 slaves.

Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters
Aleksandr Bastrykin doesn't think Russia's criminal justice system is tough enough.

The head of the Investigative Committee doesn't think Russian law enforcement is arbitrary enough.

Vladimir Putin's top cop doesn't think surveillance and censorship have gone far enough.

And the man who has spearheaded the Kremlin's crackdown on the opposition for the past four years, doesn't think the suppression of dissent has been extensive enough.

No, in an widely discussed article in Kommersant Vlast yesterday, Bastrykin argued that it is time for the Kremlin to stop pussy-footing around and get serious about repression.

According to Bastrykin, it's time to "stop playing false democracy." It's time to abandon "pseudo-liberal values."

It's time to block all foreign media. It's time for all-out Chinese-style censorship of the Internet.

It's time to expand the definition of extremism to include things like questioning Russia's annexation of Crimea.

It's time for a formal national ideology and for the institutionalized political indoctrination of the youth.

Bastrykin's article is causing a lot of noise in Russia and abroad. In an editorial, Gazeta.ru argued that it would effectively place the entire country under investigation.

And in an article for BNE Intellinews, security expert Mark Galeotti called it a "manifesto for the North Koreanization of Russia."

It could be just a trial balloon. It could be the product of political infighting among the security services.

But coming on the heels of the creation of a new National Guard that answers to Putin alone, I think it's something more ominous.

I think it's a harbinger.

Keep telling me what you think on The Power Vertical's Twitter feed and on our Facebook page.
The European Union has invited Macedonian leaders to talks on April 22 with the goal of ending a political crisis in the small Balkan country.

European Commission spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic suggested leaders from Macedonia's squabbling political parties meet in Vienna with European commissioner Johannes Hahn.

"The aim of the meeting will be to discuss ways to solve the crisis, and to ensure that leaders will continue with the implementation of the Przino agreement," Kocijancic told AFP on April 18, referring to an accord among Macedonian leaders brokered by the EU last year.

The meeting with Hahn, who is in charge of EU enlargement, would also discuss "reform priorities," she said.

In Skopje, the ruling VMRO-DPMNE conservative party said it would accept the invitation.

The main opposition party, the Social Democrats, said a decision on whether to attend would be made "in the coming days."

The country has been politically gridlocked for two years, but the crisis intensified on April 12 when President Gjorge Ivanov halted a probe into dozens of public figures suspected of involvement in corruption and a wiretapping scandal.

The move triggered street protests against Ivanov and the ruling party's leader, Nikola Gruevski. The demonstrations entered a second week on April 18, drawing several thousand, mostly young people who demanded Ivanov's resignation.

The protesters moved through Skopje streets chanting "No justice, no peace!" and threw paint at the Culture Ministry building. Protests were held also in five other cities, including the second-largest city of Bitola.

Macedonia announced snap elections on June 5, but the opposition vowed to boycott the vote on grounds that the conditions for free and fair polls had not been met -- a contention backed by the EU and the United States.

Macedonia has been a candidate for EU membership since 2005, but has yet to open accession talks.

With reporting by AFP and AP
In Iran, which hosts at least 1 million Afghan refugees and seasonal laborers, the fate of an Afghan migrant doesn't normally make media headlines.

The slaying of a 6-year-old girl outside Tehran is a tragic exception.

Setayesh Qoreishi was allegedly killed by her teenage Iranian neighbor in Varamin, prompting an outpouring of angry responses from ordinary Iranians, prominent figures, and officials alike.

Reports have circulated on social media that the girl was sexually assaulted prior to her killing, adding to the outrage. But while police say a 17-year-old teenager confessed to murder during interrogation, they have not confirmed whether a sexual assault occurred.

The investigation reportedly continues into the April 10 killing, and autopsy results are expected to be released this week.

Many Iranians took to social media to condemn the crime, while dozens joined Afghan nationals in an unauthorized but peaceful protest outside the Afghan Embassy in Tehran before it was dispersed by police.

WATCH: Police Break Up A Protest For Setayesh Qoreishi Tehran.

Vice President Shahindokht Mowlaverdi condemned the killing as a "despicable murder" and said there would be a "punishment appropriate to the magnitude of the horrific crime."

"The shocking news of the murder of a 6-year-old Afghan girl in Varamin has made my heart ache," Mowlaverdi wrote on her Facebook page.

Mowlaverdi added that the family of the murderer should "bear the shame and the guilt of such an inhumane act on their conscience for the rest of their lives."



Mowlaverdi said "the vast media coverage and huge public reaction to this news a week on reflect the depth of the tragedy."



The father of the victim, Sher Agha Qoreishi, told Iranian media that his daughter left home at midday on April 10 to buy sweets from a nearby shop, and never returned.



Qoreishi, a migrant laborer who left his native Afghanistan 16 years ago, said he was at work when his wife called to say she was worried.



After checking relatives' homes and searching the neighborhood throughout the night, the family contacted the police the following morning. Soon, police found the body.

The devastated family has asked for the death penalty for their daughter's killer.



Qoreishi says the family is receiving many messages of sympathy and condolence both from Iranians and the Afghan community.



However, he pointed out that Iranian media was initially slow to report on the crime.



"If the victim had been an Iranian and the murderer had been an Afghan would the media have remained indifferent to it?" IranWire.com quoted him as saying.

Prominent Iranian poet and songwriter Yaghma Golrouee was among those who took to social media to express his alarm. Posting a photo of himself on Instagram donning an Afghan hat, he wrote: "I am a friend of the Afghan people."



He went on to criticize what he described as a prejudice against Afghan migrants in Iran: "Admit it or not, we are racist people, proud of our history and old civilizations and ancient kings," he wrote.

Hassan Khomeini, a reformist cleric and grandson of Islamic republic founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, wrote: "In this era of information explosions, it's quite strange that we heard about this bitter news so late."



Khomeini said "there is no difference between an Afghan girl and Iranian girl" in such tragedies. The cleric added that "it's much more difficult and painful for those who deal with such grief in the loneliness of a foreign land."



Eastern Tehran police chief Abdol Reza Naziri, meanwhile, has vowed that law-enforcement officers take the "utmost seriousness in dealing with the murder case."

"We promised the family of Setayesh that we consider their little daughter as our own," Naziri was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.



"The police want the maximum penalty for the murderer," he said.

A local lawmaker in Varamin, Hussain Naghavi Hussaini, said that the victim's nationality doesn't make any difference in the eyes of Iran's justice system, saying that Setayesh's killer would be dealt with "according to the laws of the Islamic republic."

Meanwhile, I Am Setayesh, a Facebook page created in honor of the young victim, attracted more than 10,000 likes within days and hundreds of comments by Iranians and Afghans.

Written by Farangis Najibullah with contributions by RFE/RL Radio Farda correspondent Niusha Boghrati


An Iranian official has said the country's oil production will reach pre-sanctions levels within two months, raising hopes that Tehran could join efforts by leading oil producers to introduce a production freeze in a bid to increase petroleum prices.

Talks between top oil producers to freeze production broke down in Qatar on April 17 when Saudi Arabia insisted that all members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), including Iran, should join the deal.

Iran is keen to reclaim its market share after the lifting of international sanctions in January and has said it would not change its stance until output reaches pre-sanctions levels.

Irans state news agency IRNA quoted Deputy Oil Minister Rokneddin Javadi as saying on April 19 that pre-sanctions levels would be attained by the end of the June.

OPEC members will meet in Vienna on June 2 in a renewed effort to agree to a production freeze.

Based on reporting by Reuters and ISNA
Villagers in southwestern Kyrgyzstan are demanding that a local council expel a family that they claim poses a threat after at least one of its male members ran off to join Islamic militants in Syria.

Two efforts in recent months have failed to get the Makhmudov family forcibly relocated from the village of Kazhar, in Jalal-Abad Province, a local community leader told RFE/RL.

But more than 150 villagers signed a new petition last week in a fresh campaign targeting the Makhmudovs, saying they are a danger to others after what the local leader suggested was militant "training" abroad.



The local council is expected to review the villagers' demand on April 23, although some officials have already signaled that any forced relocation is unlikely without a court order.

Jalal-Abad police say one of the Makhmudovs, a former madrasah student in his early 20s, left to join Islamic militants in Syria in 2015. An unconfirmed Russian report suggested he has since died.

The young man's mother, Mavlyuda Sharipova, said his father, 52-year-old Khairulla Makhmudov, then left for Turkey in May in an attempt to track down his son and get a job in Turkey.

Much of the neighbors' animosity stems from confusion around the family's efforts to retrieve the son, she said.

A few months after the elder Makhmudov left Kyrgyzstan, Sharipova said, she and two daughters and two grandchildren left the village to join the elder Makhmudov but were detained by Kyrgyz police at Osh's international airport before they could board a plane for Turkey.



She and other family members reportedly reached Turkey via Moscow in a second attempt, but Turkish authorities deported them back to Kyrgyzstan.



"My husband went to Turkey with his friend, Ruslan. Three months later, Ruslan contacted me and said my husband wants me to visit him," Sharipova told RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service after her return from Turkey last year. "Ruslan said it might be my last chance to see my husband, so I got scared and took all my daughters and grandchildren with me."



Sharipova said that after returning home from Turkey she received a letter from her husband saying that "everything is fine" and in which he "asked us not to go out a lot."

Some neighbors, meanwhile,, had apparently concluded that the Makhmudovs were collaborating with dangerous elements during their absence.



"There are fears that the family -- after their six-month training in Turkey -- would try to brainwash our youth," the local community leader, Atakhan Danikulov, told RFE/RL.

No charges have been filed against the family.



But in December, residents of Kazhar and two neighboring villages held two gatherings, a week apart, demanding that local authorities move the Makhmudov family elsewhere.



At the time, Sharipova told RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service that the villagers were threatening that if the family didn't leave the village, they would make their lives unbearable. Sharipova insisted that the family wanted to maintain good relations with the community.



Danikulov said all was peaceful until an "incident" in early April -- reportedly a physical altercation among women within the extended family -- stirred emotions against the family once again.

Officials on the Baltagulov village council that represent residents of Kazhar and several other rural settlements are wary of the villagers' demand.



Local councilors have no right to forcibly relocate anyone without a decision by a court, Mamadaly Parpiev, the head of Baltagulov area council, said on April 18. He suggested the "matter should be resolved through negotiations with the villagers."



Kyrgyz authorities said at least 500 Kyrgyz nationals, including more than 120 women, have joined Islamic militants in Syria and Iraq in recent years.

Written by Farangis Najibullah in Prague based on reporting by RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev says the government should not rush to implement rapid structural reforms, saying this may weigh heavily on Russia's recession-battered economy and population.

"We will not conduct reforms at the expense of people," Medvedev told the lower chamber of parliament, the State Duma, on April 19. "Both people and the economy can bear only a certain speed and depth of reforms."

Russia's economy has been hit hard by the collapse in global oil prices and from Western economic sanctions imposed on Moscow over its role in the Ukraine conflict.

But Medvedev said the government had no plans to resort to printing money to help bridge the countrys budget shortfall.

He added that there would be no amendments to the state budget during the spring session of the parliament.

Based on reporting by Reuters and Interfax


NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says the Western military alliance and Moscow will discuss the "unsafe behavior" of Russian jets that flew close to a U.S. reconnaissance plane and a guided-missile destroyer when the two sides convene this week for their first formal meeting in nearly two years.

The planned April 20 meeting of the NATO-Russia Council follows two Baltic Sea incidents last week in which Russian warplanes buzzed the USS Donald Cook destroyer and performed what Washington called "erratic and aggressive maneuvers" near an American plane during a flight in international airspace.

"The unprofessional and unsafe behavior of Russian planes...underlines the importance of open military lines of communication, of predictability and risk reduction," Stoltenberg said on April 19 in Luxembourg.

The ambassadorial-level meeting in Brussels will be the first such consultation since NATO suspended all practical cooperation with Moscow in April 2014 following Russia's military seizure of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula the previous month.

Since then the NATO-Russia Council has only met once, in June 2014, though Stoltenberg has met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on several occasions in recent years.

Speaking April 19 ahead of an EU Defense Ministers meeting, Stoltenberg said the two sides would discuss Afghanistan and "the crisis in and around Ukraine," where fighting between Kyiv's forces and Russia-backed separatists in the east of the country has killed more than 9,100 since April 2014.

The meeting comes amid rising concerns about violations of a fragile cease-fire that has been in place since a February 2015 peace deal brokered in Minsk.

Stoltenberg stressed, however, that that the planned meeting of the council "does not mean that we are back to business as normal."

"We decided back in 2014 to suspend practical cooperation, and we have also implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War," he said.

"But we have decided to keep the chance for political dialogue open, and the NATO-Russia Council is one way of making sure that we have political dialogue with Russia, Stoltenberg added.

'Preparation For Aggressive Action'

The bedrock of the NATO-Russia Council is a historic cooperation deal signed by the alliance and Moscow in 1997. Officials at the time hailed the accord as a "definitive" end to the Cold War, and the dawn of collaboration in "a new Europe of unlimited possibility."

But NATO has accused Russia of jettisoning the accord by backing separatists in Ukraine and responded by boosting its presence in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, Moscow's Soviet-era domain, where fears of potential Russian expansion run deep.

Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz told the Rzeczpospolita daily in an interview published on April 19 that Russia continues to pose a serious threat to NATO and that Moscow's behavior "attests to systematic preparation for aggressive action."

"It's time to talk about it openly," said Macierewicz, whose government will push for a greater presence of the alliance's forces on its eastern flank at a summit of NATO heads of state to be held in Warsaw in July.

Moscow has reacted angrily to NATO troop deployments in the alliance's eastern member states, calling these moves a violation of the 1997 partnership act that is stoking tension between the former Cold War foes.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on April 19 criticized what he called "extremely unfriendly actions" by NATO with a "buildup of its potential on our borders."

"We believe the alliance's actions present a threat to Russia's national interest and national security," Peskov was quoted as saying by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.

Stoltenberg said he expects the Russians "to say and to present their view at the April 20 meeting.

"We are not afraid of dialogue. Actually, we think dialogue is more important when times are difficult, when tensions are high," Stoltenberg said.

He added that NATO "does not seek a new Cold War" or a "new arms race."

"What NATO has done when it comes to reinforcement of our collective defense is defensive; it is proportionate and it is a direct response to what we have seen of Russian aggressive behavior in Ukraine," Stoltenberg said.

With reporting by Reuters


A Pakistani antiterrorism court has sentenced two men to life imprisonment for their role in a pedophile ring accused of abusing dozens of children in Pakistan's Punjab Province.

Discovery of the ring shocked Pakistan last year and led to a rare sanctioning of police officers for negligence after dozens of families came forward to say their children had been abused and then blackmailed by members of a wealthy family.

Residents accused a prominent family in the village of Husain Khan Wala of forcing children as young as 5 years old to perform sex acts on video, which they sold or used to extort money from victims' families.

The scandal led to passage of a law last month criminalizing child sexual abuse.

Haseem Amir, a member of a prominent family, and his friend Faizan Majeed were the first to be convicted and imprisoned in the scandal, their lawyer told Reuters.

Seventeen other people have been charged with sodomy and other abuses and are in jail awaiting trial.

Pakistani officials sometimes use antiterrorism courts to prosecute important cases because regular courts are perceived to be open to taking bribes from wealthy suspects.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP
Pakistani officials say a suicide blast targeting a government office in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has killed one person and wounded 17 others.

Police said the April 19 attack took place at the Excise and Taxation Department in the town of Mardan, some 50 kilometers northeast of the region's main city of Peshawar.

District police chief Faisal Shahzad said the bomber arrived at the scene on foot and opened fire with a gun before detonating his explosives vest.

He said three of the wounded were in critical condition.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which comes a day after the military announced the successful completion of a large-scale operation against militants in the neighboring North Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

With reporting byDawn, AFP, AP, and dpa
Theres been much talk on the campaign trail about helping students pay for college and not enough about exactly what theyre buying. Its ludicrous that student debt has passed $1 trillion and that nearly 20 percent of the undergraduates who borrowed for college are in default on their student loans.

Where is the money going? Its going to multimillion-dollar pay packages for college presidents, country-club campus amenities and, increasingly, an expanding army of administrators tasked with micromanaging the drinking habits, sex lives and sensitivities of people who in any other American context would be considered adults.

Happily, there exists an alternative to four bankrupting years on campus. Theres almost no learning, be it liberal arts or STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), that cant be had free  or close to it  online. MOOCs (massive open online courses) are perfectly suited to disrupt the campus model.

As suggested above, expense isnt the only thing powering this revolution. Its the sense that the people running the universities have lost their minds. Either that or theyll say almost anything to get protesting students off their backs. (In doing so, theyre also softly egging the students on to say absurd things that could haunt them when prospective employers Google their names.)

Last month, some Emory students complained about feeling unsafe after espying Trump 2016 graffiti on campus. Rather than explain the right to free speech and impermanence of chalk, Emorys president met with several protesters and announced, I cannot dismiss their expression of feelings and concern as motivated only by political preference or over-sensitivity.

A year at Emory University costs an undergraduate about $63,000, including board and other necessities. Parents paying the full freight at Emory may be entitled to feel a bit queasy about the high cost of post-adolescent day care.

At venerable Yale University, administrators produced  without apparent embarrassment  long instructions on what not to wear on Halloween. Sombreros, for example, were deemed culturally offensive.

Erika Christakis, a faculty member and residence administrator, got into trouble when she wrote an email expressing the obvious: This year, we seem afraid that college students are unable to decide how to dress themselves on Halloween.

What followed was the predictable firestorm of outrage alongside the usual demands for an apology. Christakis chose to resign from the university.

A Latino friend of mine likes to wear a sombrero to parties. Is he allowed? That might merit a five-page addendum.

What are Yales administrators afraid of? That student activists will go wild on the streets of Reddit? And to think the institution has a $25 billion endowment.

The strongest hold universities maintain over students is the power to bestow a diploma attesting to a job applicants intellectual or technical abilities. MOOCs are beginning to also award certificates indicating mastery of a subject.

It happens that the CEO of one of the larger MOOCs, Coursera, is a former president of Yale. The teachers there and at the other MOOC giants, Udacity and edX, are mostly university professors.

The convenience of online learning opens higher education to poor or low-income students with day jobs. It helps those wanting to pursue work or travel after high school rather than immediately jump on the college conveyor belt.

Online education lets those not prepared for college-level work catch up on what they missed. It lets older workers go back for the skills they need or the intellectual growth they want.

The time has come to shift higher education toward an infrastructure for grown-ups, be they age 19, 45 or 60. Students should be able to pursue the studies they want at whatever pace suits them. And imagine what they could do with the 60 grand.
ON MY MIND

In a landmark ruling today, the Constitutional Court decided for the first time that Russia can ignore parts of decisions by the European Court of Human Rights in contradiction of Moscow's treaty obligations. Speaking at a conference of parliamentary chairs in Moscow today, State Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin called for Eurasianism to become an alternative to what he called the Western-dominated international order. And in a widely discussed article yesterday, Investigative Committee head Aleksandr Bastrykin suggested cutting the Russian Internet off from the rest of the world with Chinese-style censorship and tightening controls on financial flows across Russia's borders. It appears that Russia is in the process of declaring its independence from the world. Vladimir Putin's regime wants the benefits of globalization, without its costs -- and without its rules. Let's see how that works out.

IN THE NEWS

Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko have spoken by telephone about the case of Ukrainian military pilot Nadia Savchenko. The call came after a Ukrainian court sentenced two Russian soldiers to 14 years in prison, and has heightened speculation that a prisoner exchange might be in the works.

The Russian Constitutional Court has decided for the first time that Russia can choose not to implement parts of rulings by the European Court of Human Rights.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is scheduled to address the State Duma today on the work of the Russian government.

A poll by the independent Levada Center shows that 56 percent of Russians would like the restoration of the Soviet Union.

Russia is planning to double its list of "undesirable" organizations.

The Moscow subway will have a new face-scanning system in place by the end of the year.

The construction worker who was arrested on the eve of Vladimir Putin's live call-in program -- and who last year asked him a question about unpaid wages -- has gone on a hunger strike.

WHAT I'M READING

Corruption and National Security

I've been arguing that corruption is a national security issue for years. So it's nice to see the idea gaining some traction, like in this Foreign Affairs piece, The Geopolitics Of Corruption.

In a new piece for the Carnegie Center, Thomas de Waal argues that Ukraine's problem isn't so much corruption in the classical sense, but "state capture."

"'Corruption' is an inadequate word to describe the condition of Ukraine," de Waal writes. "Since the country achieved independence in 1991, the problem is not that a well-functioning state has been corrupted by certain illegal practices; rather, those corrupt practices have constituted the rules by which the state has been run."

Dispatches from the Information Wars

Stefan Meister has a new report for The Transatlantic Academy, Isolation And Propaganda: The Roots And Instruments Of Russias Disinformation Campaign.

"The possibilities for directly influencing developments in Russia from outside are limited. Europeans, on the other hand, are vulnerable to Russian influence with their open societies, and Russian efforts can help fuel self-doubt in increasingly fragile and fragmented Western societies. The EU can protect itself by reinforcing its own soft power and improving governance within Europe, standing firm on sanctions, improving its knowledge base on Russia and the other post-Soviet states, and taking steps to improve pluralism in the Russian-language media space. It should also come up with a serious offer for its eastern neighbors including an EU membership prospect."

The Center for European Policy Initiatives, meanwhile, has launched a spiffy new portal tracking Russian information warfare in the Baltic states and Poland.

Hybrid Government

Writing in Intersection magazine, Stephen Blank of the American Foreign Policy Council, picks apart one of the most overused phrases of our time: hybrid warfare.

"What we have come to call Russian hybrid war is not a military strategy," Blank writes."Rather, to use a Western term, it is a whole of government strategy that includes the armed forces as one major component of the Russian states overall national security strategy."

Russia's Oil-Deal Disaster

The Open Wall on why the failure of the Doha oil talks is "nothing short of a disaster" for Russia.

"Russia needed a deal in Doha as much as anybody there, because, after 16 years in power, the Putin government is not only still dependent on the price of a barrel of oil for its survival, but is facing elections to the State Duma in September. With an economy in recession, a tight budget, and now no hope of rescue from a rebound in oil prices, for the first time, the Kremlin has very little scope for its usual pre-election maneuvers  repairing the roads, doling out money left, right and center."

Bastrykin Fallout

Investigative Committee head Aleksandr Bastrykin's article yesterday calling for more repressive measures to combat what he calls "extremism" and the West's "hybrid war against Russia" is making a lot of waves.

An editorial in Gazeta.ru critiques Bastrykin's proposals, claiming they would effectively place the entire country under investigation.

Writing in Slon.ru, meanwhile, political scientist Yekaterina Shulman calls Bastrykin's article "a sign of weakness."

A Security Architecture for Eastern Europe

It's pretty much a given that Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova won't be joining NATO anytime soon. So how to provide for their security? Writing on the European Council on Foreign Relations website, Andreas Umland of the Kyiv-based Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation floats the novel idea of reviving the interwar concept of the "Intermarium."

"A modern day Intermarium...could take the form of a limited and single-purpose defense treaty signed by a group of countries that agree to assist each other in combating hybrid warfare activities conducted by foreign powers against them," Umland writes. "It would be a mutual aid pact among those Council of Europe member countries who are ready to commit to some degree of military and other cooperation in confronting Moscow."

Foreign Affairs 'Putin's Russia'

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs has a package titled Putin's Russia: Down But Not Out.

It features a forum of experts responding to the question: Will Putin still be in power in five years?

It also includes articles by Stephen Kotkinon Russia's Perpetual Geopolitics; Gleb Pavlovsky on Russian Politics Under Putin; Sergei Guriev Russia's Constrained Economy; Dmitry Trenin on The Revival Of Russia's Military; Fyodor Lukyanov on Putin's Foreign Policy; Masha LIpman on How Putin Silences Dissent; and Daniel Treisman on Why Putin Took Crimea.



Germany's Putinophiles

Ivan Samolovov has a piece in Intersection magazine "explaining the German left's love for Putin."

Poland's Putin

In a piece in Vedomosti, political analyst Ivan Preobrazhensky compares Poland's Jaroslaw Kaczynski to Vladimir Putin.

The Future of Russian Foreign Policy

The latest installment of Sean Guillory's SRB Podcast features Andrei Tsygankov of San Francisco State University talking about Russia's Foreign Policy Trajectories.
Scores of Turkish columnists and folks on Facebook and Twitter went into celebration mode when they heard that the European Parliament had voted for Turkish to become the European Union's 25th "official language."

Actually, they heard it from a report in the London-based tabloid Daily Express that harshly criticized the vote: "Fury As Turkish Made 'An Official EU Language' Before ANY Voters Support Membership," the Express headline read.

MEPs voted 375-133 in support of the initiative.

The first thing to guess was that it was all thanks to Turkey and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to get this prominence for the Turkish language. Wrong. The credit goes to the president of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, who initiated the vote on the eve of reunification talks between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Reportedly, the talks are "very serious" this time around and Turkish Cypriots are eager to distance themselves from Turkey for the price of becoming part of a united, European Cyprus.

That's not all. In their excitement, many people forgot that this is not a decision but just a "call" by the European Parliament on the EU's 28 member states to recognize Turkish as an official language of the EU.

Cyprus broke up in 1974 following a Turkish invasion that followed a coup by nationalist Greek officers. Since then, Cyprus has been divided between the Republic of Cyprus that later joined the EU and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized only by Turkey.

The European Parliament cannot make a binding decision on this issue. The member states can adopt the initiative, individually, or the European Commission can apply any decision of this kind at the EU level -- but that would need unanimity among all member states.

In short: a nice gesture for Turkish Cypriots and even for Turkey herself.

But it needs time, if it succeeds at all.
The Dutch parliament has defeated a motion calling for the country to pull out of a treaty establishing closer European Union ties with Ukraine.

The EU-Ukraine deal was rejected by a majority of voters in a nonbinding referendum earlier this month.

Seventy-five Dutch lawmakers voted against the motion -- brought by the Euroskeptic Socialist Party -- with 71 in favor in the 150-seat lower house.

On April 6, more than four million people, accounting for about 32 percent of some 12.8 million eligible voters, cast their ballots in a nonbinding referendum with 61 percent rejecting the pact with Kyiv.

The deal has already been ratified by 27 other EU states, and was being provisionally implemented even in the Netherlands after being approved last year by both houses of Parliament.

Based on reporting by AFP and Interfax
Ukrainian military pilot Nadia Savchenko, who Russia has imprisoned on murder charges, has stopped her hunger strike.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko wrote on Twitter on April 19 that Savchenko "had agreed" to stop the hunger strike after talking to her by phone.

Savchenko, 34, has refused to consume water and food since April 6, demanding her immediate release.

Earlier on April 19, Poroshenko said Kyiv and Moscow had agreed on a possible framework to free Savchenko.

Poroshenko said that "it seemed" he and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, had agreed in a telephone call the day before on a formula that will allow Savchenko to be returned.

The comments came a day after a Ukrainian court sentenced two Russian citizens to 14 years in prison each on charges of fighting alongside Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Shortly after the sentencing of Aleksandr Aleksandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev, the Kremlin said Poroshenko and Putin discussed by phone the "fate" of the two Russians and Savchenko.

Poroshenko said on April 19 that the sentencings open up "certain opportunities for using the exchange mechanism."

Savchenko was sentenced to 22 years in prison in Russia last month for her alleged role in the deaths of two Russian journalists in Ukraine's east.



The two men, who pleaded not guilty, retracted video confessions made earlier in which they admitted they were active-duty Russian military personnel when they were captured in Ukraine's Luhansk region in May 2015. Both said the statements were made under duress.



Russia has said neither Yerofeyev nor Aleksandrov were employed by the military when they were captured by a volunteer Ukrainian militia.



Moscow has repeatedly denied that it has provided weapons, training, and personnel to support separatists fighting government forces in eastern Ukraine. Independent observers, journalists, and official monitors, however, have gathered a substantial body of evidence to the contrary.

Based on reporting by AP, TASS, and Interfax
The office for Crimea's de facto prosecutor-general has said that journalist Mykola Semena has been ordered not to leave the peninsula while he is being investigated by the Russia-backed authorities.

In a statement on April 19, the Moscow-backed Prosecutor-General's Office said Semena, who was an outside contributor to RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, is being investigated for alleged "calls for undermining the Russian territorial integrity via mass media."

"Police conducted forced searches at the homes of seven people across Crimea, including some RFE/RL correspondents," said RFE/RL Editor in Chief Nenad Pejic in a statement on April 19. "One of those journalists is now facing up to five years in prison on criminal charges related to his work."

The Prosecutor-General's Office said earlier on April 19 that police searched the homes of several local journalists and confiscated computers and data "proving that materials of an extremist character had been under preparation."

Crimea's Prosecutor-General Natalya Poklonskaya has called for the closure of RFE/RL's Crimea website.

After Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, the Russian parliament passed a law making it a criminal offense to question Russia's territorial integrity, which also means opposing the occupation.

"RFE/RL's Crimea website is one of the last remaining sources of independent news in Russian-occupied Crimea," Pejic added. "RFE/RL will not stop providing professional coverage to its audiences in need. We will not stop defending our colleagues."

The Committee to Protect Journalists decried Russia's targeting of journalists covering Crimea.

"We call on Russian security forces to stop harassing journalists in Crimea for their reporting and expressed opinions," said Nina Ognianova, the committee's Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. "Russia has a record of equating criticism with extremism, and of using its broad laws to intimidate and silence the press."

With reporting by Interfax, TASS, and AP


Iran has recovered only around $3 billion of frozen assets so far since signing its nuclear deal with world powers, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said.

U.S. Republicans and other opponents of the deal often warned that Tehran would reap a huge "windfall" from the return of money long frozen under U.S. sanctions.

"Remember the debate over how much money Iran was going to get?" Kerry said at a dinner hosted by the J Street group.

"You heard some of the presidential candidates putting out a mistaken figure of $155 billion. I never thought it would be that. Others thought it would be about $100 billion."

Kerry said the State Department came up with an estimate of about $55 billion "when you really take a hard look at the economy and what is happening," but "guess what folks. You know how much they have received to date?... About $3 billion."

Kerry made his remarks on the eve of a meeting with his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, In New York to address Iranian complaints that it has not received the relief expected from the lifting of economic sanctions.

Based on reporting by AFP and The Times Of Israel
"Don't be afraid to dream of justice and freedom," Macedonian activist and author Xhabir Deralla wrote in a recent blog post.

Deralla is the head and co-founder of Skopje-based CIVIL -- Center for Freedom, an NGO focused on peace and reconciliation. Getting through to his office has not been easy in recent days, due to the chaos engulfing the city and the country for the second time in less than a year.

The most recent demonstrations in the Macedonian capital were triggered by a blanket amnesty issued by President Gjorge Ivanov for more than 56 officials accused of wide-ranging fraud and corruption -- including election violations, illegal wiretapping, and backroom business deals. The investigation of the corruption allegations was one of the key measures agreed to as a way out of last year's political crisis, when Macedonians took to the streets to demand the resignation of the government in the wake of the wiretapping scandal.

However, five months into the independent probe, the president concluded that the time was right to pull the plug and hold elections in June as if nothing had happened.

I have long envied the Macedonians because they managed to gain their independence without a war, unlike virtually every other constituent republic of the old federal state of Yugoslavia. Just 10 years ago, Macedonia was poised to become a member of NATO and EU accession talks were progressing well. The official view in Brussels was that Macedonia was the most promising of the EU's otherwise mostly unruly Balkan proteges.

So what went wrong?

Zana Trajkoska, director of the Skopje-based School of Journalism and Public Relations, said in a telephone interview that people have had enough of corruption and are horrified at the prospect of a brazen suspension of the rule of law, which is the upshot of President Ivanov's amnesty. The most recent U.S. State Department report highlighted that political interference, inefficiency, cronyism, and nepotism, violations of the right to public trial, and corruption characterized the judicial system.

Among those under investigation, in the now-suspended probe, were members of the president's security detail and powerful businessmen. Such "persons of interest" were not publicly known -- until now -- which raises the question of how the president was able to know about -- and pardon -- individuals under secret investigation by an independent body.

I met Trajkoska last summer in Skopje and we discussed the state of the media in the country. At the time, I remember thinking that her opinion of the extent of government control over the media may have been exaggerated. My impression was that Macedonia was in slightly better shape than some other parts of the former Yugoslavia.

In hindsight, Trajkoska might have been right. Experts have reported an environment of fear surrounding the media, and one that encourages self-censorship. The country's political crisis has also highlighted serious concerns over selective reporting and the lack of editorial independence on the part of the public-service broadcaster, Macedonian Radio Television. According to the 2016 Freedom House Nations in Transit report on democratic progress, the largest decline was Macedonia's, where its scores dropped in six of the seven categories.

For now, Macedonia's integrationist dream appears to be on hold. The main stumbling block to Macedonia's Euro-Atlantic integration is the dispute with Greece over the country's official name, which is also the name of a region of northern Greece. At the NATO Bucharest summit in 2008, Macedonia was meant to receive its invitation to join the alliance. It never arrived, thanks to Greek opposition. That dispute continues to have a serious impact on regional stability at a time when Europe needs the Balkans, or at least the cooperation of Balkan states -- and Macedonia in particular -- over a number of issues, notably the influx of refugees.

The Greek objection seems petty. There are almost a dozen "Macedonias" -- from Alabama to Virginia in the United States, which no one seems to object to -- but ethnic nationalism is still a winning ticket in the wider Balkans. The "Macedonian question" has been used by Greek politicians to whip up domestic support ever since the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

Historically, the wider region of Macedonia has been a sphere of influence for Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece, and each has tried to imprint its own language, culture, and identity on all or part of it. After World War II, numerous villages in northern Greece with a Slavic Macedonian population were resettled, the names of places were changed, and the people who stayed behind declared themselves Greeks. Perhaps this past still haunts Greek political leaders. Or perhaps history -- and names -- have unusual power in this part of the world. Regardless of which party is in power in Athens, Macedonia continues to be denied its own name and has to live with a clumsy substitute: "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (sometimes unofficially abbreviated as FYROM).

Itself not averse to using ancient history to play modern politics, the Macedonian ruling party has responded to the Athens veto by vowing to build an "older and more beautiful" Skopje, with more ancient gods depicted in the center of the city than one can see in some parts of Greece. Macedonia has also declared itself a cradle of ancient Greek civilization, and the first person one encounters at Skopje airport is none other than Alexander the Great -- otherwise known as Alexander of Macedon. The Macedonian government has used the name issue to position itself as the defender of the nation's honor and patriotism. People who have criticized the government on any account have been declared traitors, a convenient -- and time honored -- way of silencing those who cried out against corruption.

In the latest twist, the parliamentary speaker has announced that elections will go ahead on June 5 as planned, although the opposition and NGOs insist that conditions have not been met for a free and fair vote.

In a telephone interview, Deralla from CIVIL -- Center For Freedom said that he's not sure if the ruling coalition was, in fact, ever elected. "The voter list is a major issue of concern for the Macedonian public. The election commission initially announced that around 500,000 names on the register were suspected of not being eligible voters. The figure was later reduced to 300,000, then 200,000, and finally 89,000," Deralla said.

"Two years ago, my organization conducted its own investigation and concluded that 120,000 to 150,000 of those on the register were 'phantom voters,' as we referred to them. The figure initially reported by the election commission exceeded even our estimate of the extent of [electoral] fraud."

To put this into perspective, the total number of eligible voters in the 2014 Macedonian parliamentary elections was 1,779,572, with a turnout of 54 percent in the second round of voting. The initial figure cited by the election commission would mean almost one-third of all voters were not eligible.

The opposition and NGOs say that in order for free and fair elections to take place, voter lists have to be reviewed and adjusted, individuals suspected of fraud and corruption must stand trial, and the media must adhere to the basic standards of impartiality and objectivity during the upcoming election campaign. That may seem like a forlorn hope today, but the protesters in the streets of Skopje are undaunted, just as they were last year when they eventually forced the government to concede.

I managed to again get in touch with Trajkoska, the director of the journalism school. She sounded indignant but determined as she set off on her daily protest march from the special prosecutor's office to the Macedonian parliament: "We meet every day at 6 [p.m.] and our slogan is: 'No Justice, No Peace!'"

Perhaps once again Macedonians are actually ahead of the rest of the region. We may be witnessing the dawn of another dark age in Balkan politics, a time of authoritarianism, extreme nationalism, and corrupt governments everywhere, from Zagreb to Skopje to Belgrade.

But no one has drawn a line in the sand with quite the determination of the Macedonian protesters, who have made it clear to their leaders: "This far, and no further!"
Afghan officials say Taliban militants have attacked an office of the country's main security agency in Kabul, killing at least 28 people and wounding about 300. Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told RFE/RL that the April 19 attack began with a suicide car bomb during the morning rush hour, followed by an assault by armed militants.



The attack -- near the Defense Ministry in the capital's central first district -- targeted an office that houses a National Directorate of Security unit responsible for protecting government officials.



Mohammad Ismail Kawusi, the Health Ministry's public-relations director, told RFE/RL that at least 20 people were killed in the attack and 198 people were taken by ambulance to various hospitals. Numerous others were wounded, he said.



Casualties included both civilians and members of Afghan security forces.
Having taught history for some years, and loving books as I do, I tend to relish the work of Pulitzer Prize winner David McCulloch. He writes history that breathes life like a novel you can't put down. Consider "John Adams," "1776," and "Truman" for starters.

You may imagine my astonishment when I picked up "A time for Truth," by Ted Cruz, expecting to find nothing more than a "Position Paper" reflecting his current political goals. I instead found a magnificent autobiography of not only his family, but a scholarly look at Batista's, and then Castro's, Cuba through the eyes of his father, who had been imprisoned by both of them.

There is also a fascinating description of his preparations and arguments before the Supreme Court regarding the Second Amendment, "In God We Trust" on currency, memorial crosses on public lands, and Ten Commandment statements on public buildings. His private discussions with justices formed or confirmed many of his convictions he holds today.

His scholarship is as riveting and to the historical point of view as one would expect from McCullough, and his vivid description of early work as a Supreme Court clerk is an eye-opener to the inner workings of the court.

I would hope that every student in America would carry the thoughts of this man away with them no later than the 9th or 10th grade. These were the years we tried as teachers to inculcate the truth of the liberty offered by the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and the price that was paid to secure them.

Charlie Stoakes

Brownsville (April 4)
Passionate arguments were on display in a room crowded with Charlottesville residents and other Virginians disagreeing on how one of the states most historic citizens should be remembered.

Undoubtedly the most attended City Council meeting of the year, more than 30 people signed up to speak at two public hearings at the councils meeting Monday night, burning the ears of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, whose monuments in Charlottesville and elsewhere in the South have been the subject of countless discussions regarding race and American history in recent years.

A city measure to create a blue ribbon commission that would engage the public and provide the council with options to remove or contextualize the citys Confederate monuments was on the councils agenda Monday, but a vote had not been taken by press time.

Lees place in a public park again became the subject of debate after several community members, including Councilors Wes Bellamy and Kathy Galvin, spoke at news conference last month, sharing their desire to see the statue removed and the park renamed.

Prior to council meeting Monday, the Virginia Flaggers, a Confederate heritage group, held a news conference in Lee Park to denounce efforts to remove the statues.

Youre dealing with a typical way politicians use to get themselves out of hot water, said Barry Isenhour, Virginia Flaggers spokesman.

The fact is this monument isnt going anywhere. We have Virginia law that protects it. And if you get through that, there are local laws that protect this monument, Isenhour said.

Theyll be going through several layers of lawsuits to move a monument you cant move, he said, alleging that city philanthropist Paul Goodloe McIntires gift of the park to the city  for the purpose of erecting the Lee statue  means removing the statue could lead to legal challenges.

A blue ribbon commission would provide the council options, including possibly:

 removing, or adding context to, existing Confederate statues;

 augmenting the slave auction block at Court Square;

 designing a new memorial to an African-American civil rights leader; and

 providing a further narrative for the Vinegar Hill community.

According to the requests, one of the ultimate goals of the commission is to identify additional opportunities within the city to enhance a holistic reflection of our history.

Many of the people who attended the news conference in Lee Park on Monday evening made their way to the council meeting, crowding the chambers well before the start of the meeting.

During the councils regular public hearing at the start of the meeting, all but two of the 12 speakers addressed the Lee statue.

Many of the speakers chided efforts to remove the statue, while some expressed an interest in seeing changes to the park.

Teresa Kay Lam, who says she is a descendent of Confederate veterans, noted that an online petition she drafted has garnered more than 7,000 signatures.

When I heard about the petition to remove the statue from the park, I knew I had to make my voice heard, Lam said.

Those who say he chose to fight for slavery and not against it  lose sight of the sacrifice he made, she said. If the City Council were to change or remove the statue, itll be the first step in dividing our nation once again.

Other speakers were just as quick to defend Lee, but offered to advance the discussion about the memorials and offer potential solutions that could be accepted by a broad-enough swath of the community.

Elliott Harding, who is a member of the new Friends of Charlottesville Monuments historic-preservation group, volunteered to participate in those conversations.

Were advocating for stark contrasts and strong comparisons, Harding said, alluding to a petition he wrote asking that the city consider creating a monument to former University of Virginia professor and civil rights leader Julian Bond.

Harding said the Friends of Charlottesville Monuments group could possibly engage in fundraising for a new statue.

The mission of our trust is twofold: to serve as a private partner if the city joins us in our goal  but if the council chooses to seek a path of destruction, well be there each step of the way, offering legitimate alternatives while contesting these measures.

Some speakers and others in the crowd offered a less rosy impression of Lee and the Confederacy. Noting the historical context of when the statue was built in the early 20th century, John Edwin Mason said much of the citys history remains largely invisible.

One of the ways [monuments] work is by hiding history rather than making it visible, Mason said. Some of the history thats simply not visible in Confederate memorials, as they exist today, is the history of slavery and what the Confederacy fought for.

A public hearing on the resolution for the blue ribbon commission that was scheduled for the end of the meeting had yet to begin before press time.
Advocates who oppose Gov. Terry McAuliffe's plan for a new juvenile corrections center in Chesapeake will urge legislators Wednesday to reject the governor's proposed amendment to the $2.1 billion bond package.

McAuliffe and General Assembly budget leaders have reached an agreement that would allow pending capital projects to proceed, along with a longstanding plan to replace the General Assembly Building.

The deal gives McAuliffe the green light on constructing a new juvenile correctional center in Chesapeake to replace one of Virginia's two youth prisons. The amendments also would allow the state to begin planning for replacing the second one, pending a study of how best to transform the juvenile justice system.

On Wednesday, legislators return to Richmond to take up the governor's vetoes and proposed amendments to legislation.

At 10 a.m. Wednesday, a coalition of advocates, families and formerly incarcerated youth from across the state will urge legislators to reject McAuliffe's proposal to fund the Chesapeake facility.

The protesters say are using the hashtag #prisonsdon'twork.

"Virginia's juvenile prisons are failing all of us," said Da'Quon Beaver, one of the organizers. "The young people coming out of these prisons are worse off for the time they spent there.

"Their families are stressed and broken by the separation from their children and the financial burden of having to pay child support to the state for their incarcerated child. The communities to which these youth return are less safe."

Protesters will carry "hundreds of signed petition postcards, as well as art and advocacy materials made by incarcerated youth from Richmond," according to the Legal Aid Justice Center.

"The governor has made transforming Virginias juvenile justice system a centerpiece of his administrations agenda," said Brian J. Moran, McAuliffe's secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security.

"The construction of the two facilities in question is just one part of the effort to reform the system away from housing youth offenders in large, old, prison-style facilities toward more community-based rehabilitative services.

"By replacing these old, large, adult-style with a range of smaller therapeutic alternatives, Virginia will offer the support and resources these young people need to live productive lives.

"The governors budget invests the anticipated savings from this action into to a range of evidenced-based and effective services and alternative placement options. It is misguided to consider these new, smaller, more modern facilities outside of the context of the historic transformation of Virginias juvenile justice system that will save taxpayers money and improve outcomes for offenders and their families."

The Department of Juvenile Justice has proposed building the two correctional facilities to house a declining population of juvenile offenders who commit serious, violent crimes.
In the last two sessions of the Oregon Legislature, a study has been authorized and funded to investigate the best way to fund universal health care for the residents of Oregon. Applications to do this study have been requested and a contract will be awarded soon. A recommendation is to be presented to the 2017 Oregon Legislature.

The study is to examine 4 different ways of funding such a health care program: the current system of private insurance funded by premiums and co-pays; an improved Medicare for all single-payer system funded by a progressive tax in lieu of premiums and co-pays; a plan which allows the consumer to choose between a publicly funded system which includes Basic health and private insurance with competitive costs; and finally another option meeting criteria listed in HB3260.

We need to recognize that Oregon is not unique in examining these possibilities  there have been eight national studies from 1991 to 2005 investigating this same issue; there have been 18 separate state studies investigating this issue, all of which found that a single-payer system would save money and provide health care to everyone.

Why is is taking us so long to accept this message and adopt single payer health care so that all Oregonians will have health care, not just health insurance which they cant afford to use because the deductibles are too high  but actual health care! Everybody in  nobody out!

Edie Orner

Albany (April 17)
How are the twins Maria and Teresa Tapia doing? They are the little girls from the Dominican Republic who were born connected at the chest and abdomen and who were surgically separated by doctors at Childrens Hospital of Richmond at VCU.

The girls, now 4 years old, are doing very well, said their mother, Lisandra Sanatis, speaking by telephone recently. Rocio Watson of Henrico County-based World Pediatric Project provided English-Spanish translation. World Pediatric Project, a philanthropic medical organization, arranged for the girls to come to Richmond for the surgery.

Other than the occasional cold or respiratory illness, they are healthy, the girls mother said.

They are in preschool now, getting ready to go to kindergarten, Sanatis said.

They love dolls, and because they both eat a lot, they love to cook, she said.

Breakfast is often mashed potatoes and eggs. They like rice, chicken soup and other kinds of soups, their mother said.

Sanatis said the girls are able to eat pretty much whatever they like. After the surgery, Maria was supposed to be on supplements to boost digestive enzymes but that was tapered off after a few months.

Theyve been great, and they can eat anything and everything, and they do.

Sanatis said Maria does seem to have a bit of gas in her tummy, more than usual after eating, that she wants doctors to evaluate.

Sanatis used to have a small business out of her home selling plates of food. She now sells ice. (Watson said Sanatis told her previously that she is the only one in her neighborhood with a refrigerator.)

Sanatis said the girls are still local celebrities, but she wants them to have a normal life so she sometimes refuses requests for people to take the girls photos.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Pearl Jam is canceling its concert in North Carolina later this month because of the state's new law on LGBT rights.

In a statement issued Monday on the band's website, Pearl Jam called the new law "a despicable piece of legislation that encourages discrimination against an entire group of American citizens."

The statement says the band has communicated with local groups and will give them money to oppose the law.

Pearl Jam was scheduled to perform April 20 at PNC Arena in Raleigh.
ALBANY POLICE

Graffiti  12:01 p.m., Sunday, North Albany Middle School and North Albany Elementary School. Graffiti was reported on the two schools, including on the sign for North Albany Middle School. In both instances, the vandalism was done in red spray paint.

SWEET HOME POLICE

Burglary arrest  2:07 p.m. Saturday, 4000 block Long Street. During a traffic stop, an officer located a subject wanted in regards to an incident the previous month. James Vernie Seiber, 53, of Sweet Home, was arrested on charges of second-degree burglary, second-degree criminal mischief and third-degree theft. His initial bail was set at $9,500.

LINN COUNTY SHERIFF

Weapon arrest  6:04 p.m. Friday, Linn County Jail. Christopher Earl Esman, 19, of Lyons, was arrested on charges of unlawful use of a weapon and menacing. His initial bail was set at $9,000.

Stolen vehicle arrest  5:47 a.m. Monday, 29700 block Harvest Drive. A caller reported that someone was stealing his delivery truck. Michael James Stanley, 46, of Corvallis, was arrested on charges of unauthorized use of a vehicle, unlawful entry of a motor vehicle, second-degree criminal trespass and second-degree criminal mischief. His initial bail was set at $12,500.

LEBANON POLICE

DUII arrest  6:53 p.m. Friday, 3300 block Burdell Boulevard. Multiple police agencies received multiple calls about a Pacific Power utility truck driving the wrong way on roadways. Several subjects were trying to pull the driver out of the car. Wayne Gilbert Martinez, 59, was arrested on a charge of driving under the influence of intoxicants.
Plans for a memorial to commemorate Maggie L. Walker slogged forward on Monday after the Richmond Planning Commission allowed one component of the project to proceed, but held back a second part.

The planners voted 7-0 to approve plans for the 9- to 10-foot statue of Walker on a 40-inch pedestal on a triangular parcel on Brook Road, Broad Street and Adams Street downtown. But the panel voted 4-3 to continue a vote on the pedestrian plaza that would encompass the sculpture until the design team more sufficiently responds to suggestions from a city advisory committee.

Members that voted for continuance to the May 16 Planning Commission meeting were: Melvin Law, Ellen F. Robertson, Max Hepp-Buchanan and Keith Rogers Jr., who voted by proxy for Selena Cuffee-Glenn.

Jeffrey W. Sadler, David Johannas and Vik Murthy wanted a longer and more extensive review of the plaza design before it returned to the Planning Commission but were ultimately outnumbered.

We should have a better public consensus before we make such a strong change to the city, Sadler said. This is a wonderful, wonderful project ... I just dont think its ready.

Delaying the vote on the plaza gives more time for the design team to further address recommendations handed to them by the Urban Design Committee earlier this month.

A civil engineer with VHB, the landscape architecture firm, told the Planning Commission that it agreed with the Urban Design Committees suggestions to expand hardscape in the plaza and reorient more seating toward the memorial.

But the design team pushed back against many of the committees recommendations including a suggestion about lighting; removing or relocating a memorial wall in the plaza; limiting materials used for the plaza to resources that can be found locally and introducing another paving material for Brook Road.

Johannas chided the design team for what he viewed as a lackluster response to the committees input.

Im really disappointed in the reaction from the landscape design team and VHB, he said. They basically listed 60 to 70 percent of the recommendations from the city and said we wont do these.

Falling in line with the two committees that have already vetted plans for the memorial, the planners did not dispute the location for the memorial or object to cutting down a live oak on the site. The panel in December agreed to close a portion of Brook Road at its intersection with Broad Street to vehicle traffic for the memorial, which has also been a point of contention for some of the projects critics.

About 10 people spoke during the public hearing to challenge different aspects of the memorial, height of the sculpture and the live oak.

I dont know anybody who doesnt want a monument to Maggie Walker. But instead of this, this project should be incredibly unifying for our city. Its become horrifically decisive. I think we ought to wait until we can pull together something we all like, said Jennie Dotts, a Jackson Ward business owner.

J. Maurice Hopkins, an alumnus of Maggie Walker High School, urged the committee to forge ahead with plans for the site.

The intent is to memorialize and commemorate Maggie Walker, and we should be focusing on the statue memorial than were doing with the trivialities of the plaza. Theyre one in the same, he said. We cant prolong it. Its got to exist.

The statue design of Walker  a business trailblazer who was the first African-American woman to charter a bank in the United States  approved by the planning commission will undergo a second review by the Public Art Commission before returning for final approval in front of the Planning Commission.
Police are investigating an incident at a Chesterfield apartment complex in which two men were seen taking photos or videos of girls there.

Residents of the Enclave Apartments in the 13300 block of Enclave Drive called police about 8 p.m. Sunday to reported that two men in a black GMC Denali were seen following two girls. As the vehicle followed the girls, one of the men in the vehicle appeared to be filming or taking photos of the girls, police said.
Richmond Public Schools appear to be in line for a cash infusion under a slew of proposed changes to Mayor Dwight C. Jones spending plan that City Council released Monday.

What remains unclear is whether the influx will fulfill a scenario Jones envisioned in his 2016 State of the City address  where an image of mostly city teachers holding aloft signs that said SUPPORT OUR SCHOOLS had been modified to read CUT OUR SERVICES and RAISE OUR TAXES.

Jones on Friday pressed council members to release their proposals for school funding so his administration could begin assessing the potential impact of resultant cuts to city services such as trash pickup and public safety.

All nine council members proposed finding more operating money for schools with proposals ranging from $5 million for teacher pay-scale decompression to the full $18 million that would bridge the gap between the School Boards proposed budget and Jones.

Few offered plans for how to fund the increases.

One who did, Councilman Chris A. Hilbert, 3rd District, was criticized by 8th District Councilwoman Reva M. Trammell for considering cuts to public safety in an across-the-board reduction that would yield about $6.4 million for schools.

Hilbert, who has flirted publicly with the idea of running for mayor in Novembers election, was the only official to acknowledge the cuts he proposed. Although members names appear alongside the combined $41 million in potential increases to the general fund and capital plan released Monday, $7.1 million in reductions were offered anonymously.

I did feel obligated to submit a balanced budget, Hilbert said. This is the starting point, and thats the way I look at it.

Council delayed action and deferred substantive discussion on the amendments until next Monday to allow time for members to lobby one another.

Were still here at our budget gap. The same one we walked in the door with at 12, said Council President and mayoral hopeful Michelle R. Mosby, 9th District, about two hours into the meeting.

Several members said they hoped to hear the recommendations of a task force Jones convened to study sustainable funding for schools; the recommendations are due Monday. The council is expected to vote on the budget in May.

The School Board has said it will consider closing four elementary schools and Armstrong High School and consolidating three specialty schools to help save money next year. Jones has proposed level funding for the district.

Officials in his administration repeatedly have decried a $9 million cut the council made from this years $689 million spending plan to partially fill last years School Board request, which was $24 million above what Jones offered.

Those issues didnt go away, school Superintendent Dana T. Bedden said Monday of the elements of the School Boards request that were not funded last year.

Several council members wondered whether they could exert any control over additional dollars they find for schools in this budget cycle. If they find the $3 million needed to keep schools from closing, they asked, would the money go toward that, or to the teacher pay scale?

The School Board ultimately decides how to spend money allocated for schools. But members recalled providing funding in categories, with some strings attached, under the administration of then-Mayor L. Douglas Wilder.

Obviously were having conversations about layoffs or raising taxes, and we need to make sure the money is going to good uses, 5th District Councilman Parker C. Agelasto said. Categorical funding could provide that oversight.

Agelasto, Councilman Charles R. Samuels, 2nd District, and Councilman Jonathan T. Baliles, 1st District, all supported providing schools with an additional $18 million in operating funds.

None specified on Monday the source of the money, but Agelasto proposed boosting revenue by applying a service fee for nonprofit organizations and political subdivisions of the city such as the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

We dont have any unicorns in this budget. Its all hard, ugly numbers, Hilbert said. When we put our names on the ballot, we put ourselves in harms way of having to make these choices.

Talk of schools dominated the budget conversation Monday, but council members also forwarded proposals to boost funding for dozens of other items.

Among the proposed additions are: $100,000 for roof work at the West End Library; $515,000 for curb and gutter work on Westbrook Avenue between Hermitage Avenue and Brook Road; $1 million for improvements to the intersection of Hull Street and Cowardin Avenue; and boosts for Venture Richmond, The Healing Place and Richmond Sports Backers.

Cuts proposed to Jones $709 million spending plan include: a $1.7 million reduction for the Richmond Ambulance Authority; an $180,000 decrease in funding for the CenterStage Foundation; a 25 percent reduction in the budget for the Office of the Press Secretary; and the $4.7 million in across-the-board cuts Hilbert proposed to boost school funding.

Capital projects council members targeted for reduction or elimination include a proposed $8 million community center in Highland Grove; $5 million less for street lighting; and about $1 million less each for fleet replacement, city building renovations, and fixes to the John Marshall Courts Building.
Chesterfield had the most teacher resignations in the Richmond area, with 538 in the past five Junes, followed by 363 in Henrico, 333 in Richmond and 131 in Hanover.
Police are trying to piece together what caused the death of a man in Henrico County on Tuesday afternoon.

Police responded to a firearm violation near the intersection of East Laburnum Avenue and Pilots Lane at 2:03 p.m., said Henrico police spokesman Lt. C.J. Eley.

Officers found a man suffering from obvious signs of trauma in the backyard of a home that Eley said police do not believe belongs to the victim. The man was pronounced dead at the scene, Eley said.

The cause of death and motive are unknown, and the victims identity is being withheld pending positive identification and notification of next of kin.

About 100 onlookers, including many who said they were members of the deceased mans family, watched as police collected evidence from behind the home on Laburnum Avenue.

Crime scene tape stretched from Pilots Lane to the 7-Eleven on Alma Avenue and across the thoroughfare to the Laburnum Shopping Center.

The eastbound lanes remained closed most of Tuesday evening, while the westbound lanes, which cross into the city of Richmond less than a mile past the scene, reopened about 4 p.m.
Henrico police are asking the public for help to identify a robbery suspect who left a suspicious package behind only to return to the same business days later.

Police were first called shortly before 3:30 p.m. Friday to a business in the 4700 block of Finlay Street, where a man claiming to have a gun and an explosive device approached the counter and demanded money.

The suspect left after an employee complied with the request, but the man left behind a suspicious package. As a precaution, nearby businesses were evacuated until the Henrico Explosive Ordinance Unit determined the item was harmless.

The suspect returned to the business about 4:15 Monday but was unable to enter because the doors were locked. He then left in a tan Chevrolet Impala.

The suspect is a white male, about 6 feet tall and weighing about 160 pounds. He was wearing a tan jacket and a painters mask.
One man is dead and another has life-threatening injuries, including a severed foot, after being hit by a train in Emporia on Tuesday, according to police.

Police were called about 1:30 p.m. to the train tracks near Low Ground Road and Clay Street, where they found a deceased 26-year-old man and a severely injured 28-year-old man, Emporia Police Chief Ricky Pinksaw said.

The survivor was taken to VCU Medical Center. The deceased mans name is not being released, pending the notification of next of kin.

Witnesses told police that the railroad crossing warning arms were working properly and that the men were walking across the tracks when they were struck by the train, Pinksaw said.

Police were investigating.
Lawmakers grilled Virginias state inspector general and one of her deputies Tuesday about the death of a mentally ill man in a Portsmouth jail last year, but afterward, legislators and advocates said the public is still no closer to knowing why Jamycheal Mitchell was allowed to starve to death behind bars.

Mitchell, 24, was arrested in April 2015 after allegedly stealing $5 worth of junk food from a convenience store in Portsmouth. He was supposed to be sent to Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg for treatment, but he died in August waiting for a transfer.

Seven months after his death, details began to trickle out that partly explained Mitchells circumstances: He was never added to a waiting list at the hospital despite two court orders, and mental health professionals who were supposed to evaluate him for emergency treatment never did.

But the other half of the equation remained murky: Did the staff of the Hampton Roads Regional Jail or NaphCare, the company charged with providing medical and mental health care to inmates at the jail, raise any flags about his deteriorating condition? If they did, why wasnt he helped?

Two weeks ago, the Office of State Inspector General released a report about Mitchells death, but it did not fill in many of the gaps. Lawmakers seemed to be trying to mine for details Tuesday as they grilled State Inspector General June W. Jennings and Priscilla Smith, the Office of State Inspector Generals director of behavioral health and developmental services.

Jennings and Smith addressed the Joint Subcommittee to Study Mental Health Services in the Commonwealth in the 21st Century, which is chaired by state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath.

They were asked if they had reviewed a copy of Hampton Roads Regional Jails internal investigation into Mitchells death, which jail officials have declined to release to the media. The jail has said the internal review cleared its employees of wrongdoing.

Jennings and Smith said they did not request a copy of the internal investigation because their office does not have jurisdiction over local jails and officials there had declined to release it to others.

They (jail officials) had previously denied that to people that had asked, Julie Grimes, spokeswoman for the inspector generals office, said after the meeting. The media had asked for it and had been denied.

The inspector generals office visited the jail in November 2015, Grimes said. It also examined records from NaphCare and the Portsmouth Department of Behavioral Healthcare Services, which was asked by the jail to complete an emergency mental health evaluation for Mitchell on July 31 but never did.

Smith said she did not interview anyone at the Portsmouth General District Court, which claimed to have sent a court order for Mitchells transfer to Eastern State Hospital in May 2015. The hospital did not have any record of receiving the order.

Jennings said Mitchells death will not be revisited by her office, unless members of the General Assembly expand the inspector generals authority. She acknowledged that the investigation by her office left questions unanswered.

I think the whole aspect as far as what happened in Hampton Roads raises a level of question there that Hampton Roads will have to respond to, Jennings said.

Deeds asked Smith if NaphCare had conducted an audit of its performance, but Smith said she was unsure. She said the medical records she received from the company indicated that Mitchell was not provided with adequate care.

NaphCares contract with the Hampton Roads Regional Jail expired in December and a different company was selected to provide medical care, jail officials have said.

Smith likened the states bureaucratic systems to a block of Swiss cheese.

If every single process has a hole, when Jamycheal Mitchell went into our system this time, he fell through every hole, Smith said. The odds of that happening are not high, but the results are devastating.

Mitchell was supposed to be sent to Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg for treatment, but the hospital said it did not receive the first court order a judge sent mandating his transfer.

The second order from the judge, sent July 31, was stuffed in a desk drawer by an overwhelmed employee at Eastern State Hospital.

Mitchell died Aug. 19 of probable cardiac arrhythmia accompanying wasting syndrome of unknown etiology, according to the Medical Examiners Office in Norfolk. Wasting syndrome is defined as extreme weight loss.

He weighed 190 pounds when he arrived, a jail official has said. He died weighing 144 pounds.

Smith told the committee that Eastern State Hospital had not fundamentally changed the way it generates the list of jail inmates waiting for a bed, and she said her investigation suggested Mitchell wasnt the only inmate suffering from neglect.

Del. Peter F. Farrell, R-Henrico, asked Smith if anyone had been fired over Mitchells death.

I have no idea, she said.

I dont think anyone has been fired anywhere, Deeds interjected.

After the meeting, Deeds added: What I read in the paper just infuriates me, when the jailer there takes no responsibility for anything. It infuriates me that nobody has lost their job over this. One man lost his life but nobody lost their job. Thats outrageous.

Deeds said he was also frustrated by the inspector generals claims that it lacked authority to fully investigate what happened at the jail.

Mark Krudys, an attorney representing Mitchells family, attended the hearing Tuesday. He said afterward he planned to comment on the issue in a lawsuit he expects to file in the coming weeks.

Mira Signer, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Virginia, expressed disappointment to the members of the committee.

We were really hoping the report would answer the ultimate question in our mind of who or what is ultimately responsible, Signer said. Its clear that part of the problem is that the responsibility is so diffuse and therefore it leads to no accountability, no responsibility and no ownership of the problem.

Until the state fully understands how Mitchell died, thousands of mentally ill inmates in Virginias jails are at risk of meeting the same fate, former inspector general G. Douglas Bevelacqua said after the meeting.
Amid growing concern over Chinas plans for the seven artificial islands it has built atop reefs and islets in the South China Sea, the United States has been busily strengthening relationships with old friends and reaching out to new partners in the region.

Last week Secretary of Defense Ash Carter traveled to India and the Philippines to discuss new military investments and regional American bases.

During his visit to India, Carter announced that New Delhi and Washington have agreed in principle to share military logistics and use each others military bases for resupplies and repairs.

On Friday, Carter visited the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis in the South China Sea. The ship was located about 60 miles west of the Philippines main island of Luzon. The U.S. defense secretary was accompanied by Manilas defense minister, Voltaire Gazmin. The Pentagon has stationed war planes in the area as the two nations begin joint patrols across the region. The island nation has granted the U.S. access to five of its military bases in the area.

China claims sovereignty over more than 90 percent of the islands and waters in the South China Sea. Much of the area it considers sovereign territory is also claimed by Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan. And despite its claims that it has no intention to militarize the artificial islands, U.S. officials say China has already deployed missiles and fighter jets to at least one.

Concerns have continued to increase since the U.S. Navy announced it has been monitoring Chinese activity on Scarborough Shoal, a group of reefs and sandbars within 120 miles of Luzons west coast.

The Philippines has taken the territorial dispute to an international arbitration court at The Hague. China, however, has refused to participate in court proceedings and says the court has no jurisdiction in the region. A decision is expected by June.
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COVID-19 drove a dramatic increase in the number of women who died from pregnancy or childbirth complications in the U.S. last year, a crisis that has disproportionately claimed Black and Hispanic women as victims. A government report released Wednesday lays out grim trends across the country for expectant mothers and their newborn babies. It finds that pregnancy-related deaths have spiked nearly 80 percent since 2018, with COVID-19 being a factor in a quarter of the 1,178 deaths reported last year. The percentage of preterm and low birthweight babies also went up last year, after holding steady for years. And more pregnant or postpartum women are reporting symptoms of depression.
RICHMOND  Harold Wilson stood in front of TV cameras Monday at the state Capitol with a simple question for those who want to preserve the death penalty in Virginia.

Was it worth killing me? asked Wilson, who in 1989 was convicted of a triple murder in Philadelphia. DNA evidence introduced at a new trial 16 years later exonerated Wilson, freeing him up to speak out as a death penalty opponent.

Wilson, who called himself living proof that the system is broken beyond repair, joined a group of about a dozen religious leaders at a news conference Tuesday to urge the General Assembly to reject the death penalty when the body reconvenes Wednesday to take up Gov. Terry McAuliffes vetoes and amendments.

When you have to resort to secrecy or brutality to keep the machinery of death going, its a sure sign that what were doing is not right, said Bishop Carroll Baltimore, a past president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention.

A bill the General Assembly passed this year would allow the state to use the electric chair even when a prisoner has chosen to die via lethal injection. McAuliffe rejected the electric chair proposal, instead making a series of amendments that would allow the Department of Corrections to more easily obtain lethal drugs through contracts with pharmacies and outsourcing facilities that would be shielded from public view.

McAuliffe has warned that hell veto the electric chair bill if his proposals are rejected, which he said would effectively mean the end of the death penalty in Virginia.

Speakers at Mondays event, organized by D.C.-based nonprofit Faith in Public Life, said thats exactly what they want to see, citing the prospect of innocent people being put to death and racial disparities in the justice system.

Rich Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, said the governors compromise is no compromise.

This is a sleight of hand that should please neither conservatives nor liberals, said Cizik, of Fredericksburg.

Several participants said questions of life, death and vengeance should be left to God. Imprisonment without parole, they said, leaves room for hope and redemption.

Recently Pope Francis reminded us that the commandment you must not kill has absolute value and pertains to the innocent as well as the guilty, said Sister Ilaria Buonriposi of Richmonds Comboni Missionary Sisters.

McAuliffe, a Catholic who personally opposes the death penalty but has said he will carry out Virginias policy of capital punishment, characterized his proposal as a reasonable solution to a difficult issue.

Virginia gives death row inmates a choice between lethal injection and the electric chair, with lethal injection serving as the default if no choice is made. Since 1995, when prisoners were first given the choice, 80 inmates have been executed by injection. Seven picked the chair.

Several capital punishment states have had difficulty obtaining lethal drugs in recent years because of their controversial purpose. The governor has said the secrecy provision is necessary to enable the state to find willing partners to compound drugs.

Del. Jackson Miller, R-Manassas, the sponsor of the original bill, has said he will encourage colleagues to support the governors amendments to preserve the death penalty as a punishment for heinous crimes.

Some supporters of the governors proposal say opponents should not view the pending legislative action as a way to bring the death penalty to a halt.

You get a governor in there who can sign that bill, and were going back to the electric chair, Senate Minority Leader Richard Saslaw, D-Fairfax, said in an interview last week. Thats the gamble that theyre taking.
Every year is an election year in Virginia  which means, of course, that every year somebody, who wants some office, is asking you for some money.

This year, Virginia will elect its 11 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, in addition to casting votes for president. The campaign finance reports for candidates and political action committees through the first quarter of 2016 show that some aspirants are in better fiscal shape than others.

In the race for the redrawn, Democrat-friendly 4th Congressional District, state Sen. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico, raised $104,802 between Jan. 1 and March 31, though legislators were not allowed to raise money during the 59-day General Assembly session that ended March 12.

Ella Ward, a city councilwoman from Chesapeake, who also is seeking the Democratic nomination in the 4th, raised $9,850, according to her report filed with the Federal Election Commission.

On the Republican side, 4th District candidate and Henrico Sheriff Mike Wade reported $32,150, with $17,150 in contributions and a $15,000 personal loan to his campaign. A financial report was not filed by Republican hopeful Jackee Gonzalez.

The 4th District congressional primary will be June 14. The seat is open because Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Chesapeake, decided to run in the reliably Republican 2nd District, based in Virginia Beach, for the seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Scott Rigell, R-Virginia Beach.

The new congressional map that a three-judge panel imposed in January alters five of Virginias 11 congressional districts, causing a number of changes in greater Richmond. When the new congress convenes in January, the 4th District will include Richmond and Petersburg.

In the 1st District, which picks up Hanover and New Kent counties, Rep. Robert Wittman, R-Westmoreland, is seeking re-election to Congress this year before his run for governor in 2017.

Wittman had more than $1 million in cash on hand as of March 31. Democrat Matt Rowe, a member of the town council in Bowling Green, is challenging Wittman in the GOP-heavy district and has raised $400.

The 3rd District, represented by Rep. Robert Bobby Scott, currently meanders from Richmond to Newport News. As a result of the new map, it will be confined to Hampton Roads as of January.

Scott, D-Newport News, raised $75,370 in the first quarter of 2016, according to filings. Republican Martin Williams, chairman of the planning commission in the city of Chesapeake, reported raising $7,500 to challenge in the Democrat-dominated district.

Rep. Dave Brat, R-Henrico, is unchallenged for the Republican nomination in the district, which picks up Powhatan, Amelia and Nottoway counties from the old 4th.

Brat raised $188,648 in the first quarter, while Democrat Eileen Bedell, a lawyer from Chesterfield County, reported $10,154, including a $5,883 personal loan.

The sprawling 5th District that extends from the North Carolina border through Southside and the Virginia Piedmont, north to Fauquier County, does not change as a result of the new map.

Four candidates are vying for the GOP nomination in the GOP-leaning district to replace retiring Rep. Robert Hurt, R-Pittsylvania.

Technology executive Michael Del Rosso reported raising $73,668 in the first quarter, while state Sen. Tom Garrett, R-Buckingham, reported raising $46,821.

Military intelligence adviser Joe Whited reported $41,520, while construction business owner Jim McKelvey reported $254,500  $250,000 of which came from a personal loan to his campaign.

Fifth District Republicans will choose their party nominee for the general election at a district convention scheduled for May 14.

Democrats, meanwhile, have a well-funded candidate to run in the 5th District in Jane Dittmar, former chairwoman of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors who reported raising $102,577 last quarter.

Even candidates with sights on statewide elections in 2017 are busy gathering cash to fund their runs.

Lets Grow Virginia, the political action committee for GOP gubernatorial hopeful Ed Gillespie, raised $266,127 in the first quarter, according to state campaign filings compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project.

Gillespie  a communications consultant and former Republican National Committee chairman who came close to defeating U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., in 2014  reported $615,918 on hand.

Revitalize Virginia, the PAC of state Sen. Bryce Reeves, R-Spotsylvania, who is seeking the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor in 2017, reported raising $201,728 in the first quarter, with $298,870 on hand.

Other potential 2017 Republican challengers for statewide office did not file reports for the first quarter of 2016, but notably, Del. Rob Bell, R-Charlottesville, who is running for attorney general in 2017, had $634,916 on hand at the end of 2015.

Republicans will choose their statewide slate for 2017 at a state convention rather than a primary.

Stronger Together, the PAC of Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the presumptive Democratic gubernatorial candidate, reported a modest $10,333 raised in the quarter, with $36,604 on hand.

Northams job presiding over the Virginia Senate prevented him from raising money during the General Assembly session. But the pediatric neurologists Northam for Governor campaign account had $616,844 on hand at the end of 2015.

Attorney General Mark Herring, a Democrat who plans to seek re-election in 2017, reported raising $76,963 in the first quarter and having $250,993 on hand, according to the filings compiled by VPAP.

Gov. Terry McAuliffes Common Good Virginia PAC raised $132,942 in the quarter, while the Dominion Leadership Trust PAC of House Speaker Bill Howell, R-Stafford, reported $255,350 in contributions and $490,435 on hand.
RICHMOND  The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of a transgender student fighting to use a boys bathroom at his Gloucester County school.

The court issued its ruling Tuesday overturning a district courts denial of a preliminary injunction saying the judge in the case was guided by erroneous legal principles.

The injunction would have allowed 16-year-old Gavin Grimm, who was assigned female at birth but identifies as male, to use the boys restroom at Gloucester High School as his lawsuit against the countys school board works its way through the court system.

We therefore conclude that the district court abused its discretion when it denied [Grimms] request for a preliminary injunction without considering [Grimms] proffered evidence, the court said in its ruling.

We vacate the district courts denial of [Grimms] motion for a preliminary injunction and remand the case to the district court for consideration of [Grimms] evidence in light of the evidentiary standards set forth herein.

The court allowed lawyers to reinstate a claim that the school boards bathroom policy violates federal sex discrimination law.

Grimm will not be allowed to use the boys bathroom at the school until the district court hears the case again, unless the school system changes its policy.

No comment at this time. Have a great day! Walter Clemons, Gloucesters school superintendent said in an email.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Grimm, the courts ruling marks the first time that a federal appeals court has determined that Title IX protects the rights of transgender students to use sex segregated facilities that are consistent with their gender identity.

The case stems from the school boards 2014 policy that designates bathrooms to a students specific biological gender and allows for unisex bathrooms.

Grimm, according to court records, refused to wear girls clothes as a child and at 12 years old acknowledged his male gender identity to himself.

By the time he got to his freshman year in high school, Grimms friends were aware of his identity. He told his family in April 2014.

That August, his mother notified Gloucester High School that Grimm is transgender and had legally changed his name. Grimm, who has a twin brother, and his mother then met with the schools principal and guidance counselor to talk about his transition. Teachers were notified about the name change and his desire to be referred to by male pronouns.

Grimm, at first, feared how other students might react to his transition and agreed to use the bathroom in the nurses office.

When the 2014-15 school year began, Grimm asked for permission to use the boys bathroom. The schools principal agreed, and for seven weeks Grimm used it without issue.

However, court records show that some community members disapproved and asked the school board to prohibit him from using the boys bathroom.

The issue came to a head when it came up during a school board meeting on Nov. 11, 2014.

According to court papers, 27 people spoke in favor of the proposal to limit bathrooms to the corresponding biological genders.

Speakers worried that allowing transgender students to use a bathroom not of their birth-assigned sexes would violate other students privacy and could lead to sexual assault in the bathrooms.

It was suggested that a non-transgender boy could come to school in a dress and use the girls restroom, according to court filings.

The school board approved the resolution 6-1 on Dec. 9, 2014. Grimm was told the next day that he could no longer use the boys restroom and would be disciplined if he did, according to court filings.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union asked a three-judge panel in January to overturn the district courts denial of the preliminary injunction.

The ACLU argued that forcing Grimm to use the girls bathroom was a violation of Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

I feel so relieved and vindicated by the courts ruling. Grimm said in a statement. Todays decision gives me hope that my fight will help other kids avoid discriminatory treatment at school.

The appeals courts ruling establishes legal precedent in every state in the 4th Circuit, including North Carolina, which faces a lawsuit challenging a new state law requiring transgender people to use the public bathroom that corresponds to the sex listed on their birth certificate.

The sweeping law, which also barred cities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances like one recently passed in Charlotte, has prompted a national backlash. Businesses and politicians have announced boycotts of North Carolina, and legal challenges ensure that the wedge issue will dominate Republican Gov. Pat McCrorys re-election campaign.
Search and rescue teams continued to scour the rough terrain of Shenandoah National Park in Madison County Monday looking for the wife of a Virginia State Police employee who went missing last week even as a 500-acre fire kept burning on the parks southern section, closing 14 miles of Skyline Drive.

A U.S. Park Ranger found the abandoned vehicle  a 2009 Mini Cooper  belonging to 31-year-old Nicole Mittendorff, of Woodbridge, shortly before 8 p.m. Saturday in the parking area at the entrance of Whiteoak Canyon Trail, according to Virginia State Police.

Mondays search by 100 federal, state and volunteer teams has focused on several miles of federal park land surrounding the trail. Police said late Monday that there is still no evidence to indicate anything suspicious about the disappearance of Mittendorff, a career paramedic and firefighter with Fairfax County, according to reports. According to the Web site set up by her family, find-nicole.com, she likes to complete in multi-sport events like triathlons and may have been training on the trail.

Due to the steep and challenging terrain of the area, search efforts concluded at sundown Monday and will resume again early Tuesday morning, according to state police.

Mittendorff is described as a white female with blonde hair and green eyes. She is 56 and weighs about 125 pounds. Her family last had contact with her on Wednesday, April 13. Anyone with information about the whereabouts of Mittendorff is asked to call the state police at (703) 803-0026, #77 on a cell phone or questions@vsp.virginia.gov . As the search continues the trails are closed at Limberlost, Cedar Run, Cedar Run Link, and Crescent Rocks as well as The Whiteoak Canyon Trail.

A 14-mile stretch of Skyline Drive  from Swift Run, mile 65, to Loft Mountain, mile 79  was also closed Monday as firefighters continued to battle a wildfire in the southern section of the Shenandoah at Rocky Mountain in Rockingham County, south of Elkton. In addition, the Appalachian Trail is closed from Ivy Creek, mile 77, to Simmons Gap, mile 73, according to the national park.

As of Monday night, the fire had grown to 2,094 acres. About 40 miles east in Gordonsville, residents woke up to a heavy smoke haze over the foothills, prompting Orange County 911 to issue automatic calls attributing the situation to the park fire. The haze and burning smell was also evident in Barboursville and the town of Orange.

The Rocky Mount Fire was first reported Saturday. Park officials said it was likely sparked by people, but that no structures were threatened as of Monday. The fire is located with the parks Fire Ecology Zone, where fire is allowed to occur to achieve natural resource benefits commensurate with the parks responsibility to protect life and property and keep the fire within park boundaries, according to officials.

We are carefully monitoring and actively managing this fire to make sure it is meeting our resource objectives, and will stay in the park, said Shenandoah National Park Superintendent Jim Northup. I have great confidence in our fire professionals and appreciate all the assistance we are receiving.

The area where the fire is occurring is closed to the public until further notice with additional closures possible as needed for safety. Park officials urged caution when traveling along Skyline Drive related to potential smoke impacts.

This week is National Park Week, ending April 24, during which time admission is free, including to the Shenandoah. Visitors should be advised that the ongoing emergencies in the park will mean limited access.
Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong at the conference. Photo by VGP/Nhat Bac

Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong led a national conference today to discuss the 12th National Party Congress Resolution and stressed its importance to preventing the degradation of ideology, politics, ethics and lifestyle.

The study of the resolution must contribute to strengthening the party both politically and ideologically, preventing self evolution within the party, correcting misguided perceptions and effectively countering wrong and hostile viewpoints.

Trong called on attendees to study, implement and promote the 12th Party Congress Resolution, as well as closely follow the Politburos directives and Central Committees guidelines.

The conference was organized by the Secretariat of the Party Central Committee to help key officials understand new points in the resolution geared towards a common political understanding.

Three key presentations will be presented at the two-day conference: a political report on the 12th Party Congress; a review of socio-economic results from 2011-2015 and orientation and responsibilities for 2016-2020; and a review of the implementation of Central Resolution 4 (11th term) themed: A Number of Urgent Issues in Current Party Development.

Trong said party members need to study in depth six key responsibilities listed in the resolution in order to implement them effectively during the 2016-2021 term.

The six key responsibilities are:

1. Strengthen the party and prevent degradation in ideology, politics, ethics, lifestyle and signs of self-transformation within the party; focus on developing party members that are capable, ethical and respectful.

2. Develop a simple and effective political structure; strengthen anti-corruption and anti-waste measures.

3. Improve competitiveness and productivity; complete the socialist oriented market economy; reform education and training; develop human resources, especially skilled workers; develop infrastructure; restructure the economy towards industrialization; restructure state owned enterprises; restructure state budget; resolve bad debt; and ensure public debt security.

4. Protect Vietnams sovereignty; maintain peace and national security; strengthen and expand external relations as well as improve Vietnams position internationally.

5. Improve living standards and spiritual life; ensure social welfare and security; sustainable poverty reduction; and promote ethnic unity.



6. Promote humanity in all walks of life; focus on building peoples ethics, personalities, lifestyles, knowledge and working capacity; develop a healthy cultural environment.

The conference will conclude on April 20.
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc plans to hold his first meeting with private businesses later this month as part of his agenda to clear barriers facing enterprises and improve business environment, according to a government statement on Monday.

Restoring business confidence is one of the priorities Phuc laid out at his first working meeting with his new cabinet earlier this month, where he stated the government is determined to support enterprises that are struggling to survive in the current climate.

Data from the General Statistics Office shows that 20,044 companies temporarily suspended operations in the first quarter of this year due to business difficulties, rising 23.9 percent year on year. GDP growth in Q1 stood at 5.46 percent, lower than the 6.12 percent recorded in Q1 last year. The number of dissolved enterprises rose to 80,858 in 2015 from 60,737 in 2013.

The PM has asked Ministry of Planning and Investment and the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry to invite 300 private enterprises, 50 foreign-owned companies and 20 business associations including the American, European, Japan and Korea chambers of commerce.

Ministers of public security, planning and investment and finance, along with chairs of Hanoi and HCM City peoples committees, will attend the meeting.

Government agencies are working on outlines of current bottlenecks the private sector is facing and its proposed solutions.

In the statement about the upcoming meeting, the government promises "to remove hurdles" for the private sector.

"When it comes to economic development, enterprises have to come first. Therefore, we need to provide the most favorable conditions for investors and enterprises to strive. In the coming time, we will try our best to be in the top 4 countries with best business environment in ASEAN," said Phuc last Sunday in Quang Tri central province.
A state official borrowed a middle school certificate from a friend with the same name 20 years ago in order to get into university and eventually work for party agencies.

The Inspection Commission of the Mekong Delta province of Hau Giang has announced the findings of its investigation into Le Thanh Nhan, 44, head of the Organization Department of the Vi Thanh municipal committee, commonly known as the "human resources" department.

The results showed that Nhan did not receive a degree from his secondary school, the mid-level in Vietnams education system. He borrowed the degree from a classmate in 1996 when he was a communal official to attend a course at a political institution.

Five years later, Nhan used the degree to finish his supplementary education. He also completed higher education from 2005-2010.

Before working as the head of the Organization Department, Nhan was a member of Vi Thanh's Peoples Council and Peoples Committee.

Nguyen Van Y, vice chairman of the inspection commission, said: The commission has to consider a lot of elements before deciding how to punish him.
(Finmarket.ru)  The Government of Russia will privatize a 10.9-percent stake in ALROSA, but will not consider selling 18.9 percent of the diamond company's shares, said Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, who heads the supervisory board of the company. "There is no dispute  (the sale will consist of) 10.9 percent stake. The controlling stake in the company belongs to the state - the Russian Federation and Yakutia", - he said.

Now the Russian Federal Property Management Agency owns a 43.9 percent stake of ALROSA, while the Yakutia Republic owns 25 percent plus one share, a package it doesn't intend to sell.

Ministry of Economic Development originally proposed the privatization of 18.9 percent of the shares. The head of the Ministry of Economic Development Alexei Ulyukayev reported that in the first stage of sale 10.9 percent of ALROSA's shares can be sold, while the rest 8 percent may be sold later. He specified that these two phases do not necessarily need to take place in 2016. The draft decree submitted by the Ministry to reduce the share of the Federal Property Agency in ALROSA to 25 percent plus one share met the disapproval of the Ministry of Finance.Ministry of Economic Development announced Sberbank CIB was chosen as the organizer of privatization of ALROSA.

ALROSA held its IPO on the Moscow Stock Exchange in 2013.




The Indian government has decided to make hallmarking of gold jewellery mandatory which will be implemented by Diwali, according to media reports.

The Bill to amend Bureau of Indian Standard (BIS) Act has been passed and amendments have been notified in the Gazette late last month after president's assent. This gives powers to the government to decide the date from which these will be implemented.

According to information from the BIS, there are 375 hallmarking centres in the country and at present those jewellers who are getting their jewellery hallmarked have to take the each piece of jewellery to the Centre.

From this perspective, number of centres in many states are only one or in single digit. Official sources said that at present the government is reviewing several issues including whether industry is well equipped to handle additional business when the hallmarking is made mandatory, making rules, whether there is a need for relaxing norms with a view to allow more players including jewellers for setting up such centers and other procedural aspects. The whole process is expected to be completed within six months and before Diwali.



Aruna Gaitonde, Editor-in- Chief of Asian Bureau, Rough&Polished




Vietnamese police have busted a telephone scam led by a group of five Taiwanese men who allegedly pretended to be police officers to swindle victims out of billions of Vietnamese dong.

Police in Ho Chi Minh City in charge of investigating economic crimes (PC46) arrested 11 people on Monday, including five men from Taiwan and six Vietnamese, for their involvement in the fraud.

The group, led by five Taiwanese men, was arrested on an alleged telephone scam. Photo by QT

The Taiwanese group, led by Liu En Hsiang, are said to have entered Vietnam in early February on tourist visas and started operating by persuading Vietnamese people to help them open local bank accounts.

Their accomplices in Taiwan are believed to have called randomly-selected numbers in Vietnam and pretended to be police officers, coercing victims into wiring money into the local bank accounts.

At first, they called the victims and claimed VND10 million ($450) for outstanding telephone bills. Then they transferred the victims who were caught off guard to their fake police accomplices. The "officers" accused the victims of being involved in drug smuggling and money laundering and tricked them into wiring money into a safe bank account with the promise that the money would be returned once the victims were cleared of the accusations.

The Vietnamese suspects, including 31-year-old Giap Thanh Dat from the southern province of Dong Nai, were accused of co-operation by opening accounts at local commercial banks and withdrawing money from the accounts that they had access to.

Police confirmed that the Taiwanese group, who all had a string of previous convictions in their homeland, were arrested for having fraudulently appropriated about VND3 billion.
Luvenus Jewellery Pte Ltd., a Singapore-based diamond and gold jewellery retailer, and the World Diamond Mark Foundation (WDM), a non-for-profit organisation established in 2012 by the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB), have signed an accreditation agreement that secures the status of Luvenus Jewellery as the island's first retail jeweller to join the WDM Authorised Diamond Dealer (ADD) programme.According to Parthiban Murugaiyan, Managing Director of Luvenus Jewellery Pte Ltd., "Singapore is a phenomenal place for jewellers, a micro-cosmos where many millions of people from all over the world - locals, expats and countless tourists - and from all walks of life make up a unique consumer profile,"."That being said, it also means that our consumers are well informed, critical and demanding. By joining the WDM ADD programme and by displaying the WDM ADD seal in four of our retail shops, we enhance consumer confidence in our diamonds and diamond jewellery products and offer yet another impetus for better service and higher sales of diamonds and diamond jewellery to our target audiences," - Murugaiyan added.Alex Popov, Chairman of the World Diamond Mark Foundation, said: "For the WDM, the Luvenus Jewellery shops will be flagship operations that will carry the WDM ADD seal and banner with pride and with the knowledge that the Luvenus Jewellery brand was the first to join and implement our programmes in their market."Suresh Hathiramani, former president of the Diamond Exchange of Singapore (DES) said, "DES President Reuben Khafi and the board are very pleased to welcome Luvenus Jewelery to the WDM Add programme. We look forward to show that by being part of the WDM, retail jewellers can tap into the vertically integrated network of WFDB-affiliated diamond bourses."
The second edition of VICENZAORO Dubai has established itself as a new strategic platform for global jewellery, says a press note from the organizer.

The event, organized by DV Global Link - a joint venture between Fiera di Vicenza and the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) - ran on April 14-17.

According to the organizer, VICENZAORO Dubai has been a strategic platform enabling key players in the jewellery trade the opportunity to enter new markets and make business contacts. It also showcases detailed studies of new industry trends. The success is attributed to the geographical position of Dubai and also the gateway to strategic areas for the industry (Middle East, Africa, India, the CSI countries, Central and Southern Asia).

The second edition of VICENZAORO Dubai has involved 21 partners and key dealers from the Dubai Jewellery Community. The show also had the support of important strategic partners, such as the Dubai Multi Commodity Center (DMCC), Dubai Gold & Jewellery Group (DGJG), L'Azurde, and the Gem Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) from India.

VICENZAORO Dubai 2016 attracted 10,142 international operators, buyers and visitors from 107 countries. More than 400 brands presented their latest exclusive collections, divided across four easily identifiable communities, which made the event even more efficient and easy to navigate.

Corrado Facco, Managing Director of Fiera di Vicenza and Vice Chairman of DV Global Link commented, We are very pleased with the results of this second edition, above all because at a time when there are such fluctuations on the global market, the show has allowed us to connect some of the industry's most prestigious players to buyers from areas with high potential, whose businesses do not have the chance to meet up with at other world jewellery trade shows.

Fiera di Vicenza's President, Matteo Marzotto commented: "VICENZAORO Dubai 2016 has confirmed the great potential and effectiveness of this new business hub dedicated to world jewellery, thanks to the network of unique relations and know how that Fiera di Vicenza and the Dubai World Trade Centre have put in place, together with other expert partners.



Aruna Gaitonde, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Bureau, Rough&Polished




Israels polished-diamond exports dived 17 percent to $1.44 billion in the first quarter as shipments to key trade partners such as the U.S. slumped, according to Rapaport.

Exports of cut diamonds to the U.S. after returns slid 21 percent to $499.2 million over January to March.

In volume terms, polished exports dropped 15 percent to 528,310 carats, resulting in a 2.1-percent decline in the average price to $2,720 per carat.

Polished imports retreated 11 percent to $800.6 million. Net polished exports, representing exports minus imports, plummeted 22 percent to $636.2 million.

Rough imports fell 8.3 percent to $758 million and rough exports slipped 1.7 percent to $684.5 million. Consequently, net rough imports, representing imports minus exports, plunged 44 percent to $73.5 million.

Israels net diamond account, the difference between net imports of rough and net exports of polished, dropped 18 percent to $562.6 million.




The Swiss stock market ended the first session of the new trading week in the green. The market was under pressure during the first hour of trade, after the meeting of major oil producing nations in Doha failed to result in an agreement on a production freeze over the weekend. Crude oil prices were weak in early trade, but recouped their losses over the course of the session.

The market returned to profitability in the afternoon, thanks in part to the gains in the United States. The SMI also managed to rise back above the psychologically important 8,000 point level. Investors have begun to shift their focus to the U.S. earnings reporting season, which will see a significant increase this week over last.

The Swiss Market Index increased 0.37 percent Monday and finished at 8,044.60. The Swiss Leader Index climbed 0.39 percent and the Swiss Performance Index rose 0.34 percent.

Index heavyweight Roche gained 0.6 percent ahead of its earnings report tomorrow. Novartis climbed 0.9 percent and Actelion advanced 2.5 percent. Both companies are expected to report results on Thursday.

Kuehne + Nagel decreased 0.7 percent. The logistics group is scheduled to report first quarter results on Tuesday. ABB ended the session unchanged. The company will report quarterly results for the first time since the newly created structure with four divisions. Syngenta rose 0.3 percent, ahead of its report on Wednesday.

Schindler weakened by 0.6 percent. The insurance stocks also turned in a weak performance Monday. Swiss Life dropped 0.7 percent, Baloise lost 0.3 percent and Swiss Re dipped 0.2 percent. However, Zurich Insurance managed a gain of 0.1 percent.

The big banks finished in the green, despite a weak start to the session. UBS rose 0.5 percent and Credit Suisse advanced 0.8 percent. The stocks received support from the better than expected results reported by U.S. rival Morgan Stanley. However, Julius Baer slipped 0.3 percent.

The cyclicals also fared well at the start of the new trading week. Dufry increased 1.5 percent, LafargeHolcim advanced 1.2 percent and Adecco gained 1.1 percent.

In the broad market, the volatile Accu Holding declined over 10 percent, following its gain of 13 percent Friday. Friday evening, the company announced that Marco Marchetti resigned as Chairman of the Board and head due to a criminal investigation.

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Market Analysis
Equity LifeStyle Properties, Inc. (ELS) reported first-quarter normalized FFO available for stockholders of $84.8 million, or $0.92 per share, compared to $76.5 million, or $0.83 per share, for the same period in 2015. On average, six analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report profit per share of $0.90 for the quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.

FFO available for stockholders increased to $84.6 million or $0.92 per share, compared to $59.1 million, or $0.64 per share, for the same period in 2015. Net income available for stockholders increased to $50.6 million, or $0.60 per share, compared to $27.2 million, or $0.32 per share, for the same period in 2015.

Total revenues were $220.1 million compared to $208.4 million, a year ago. Analysts expected revenue of $207.25 million for the quarter.

Looking forward, the company expects its normalized FFO per share to be between $0.69 - $0.75 for its second-quarter, and to be between $3.19 - $3.29 for fiscal 2016.

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Business News
Pfizer Inc. (PFE) announced positive top-line results from the Phase 3 PALOMA-2 trial for IBRANCE (palbociclib), an oral inhibitor of cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6. The study met its primary endpoint by demonstrating an improvement in progression-free survival for the combination of IBRANCE plus letrozole compared with letrozole plus placebo in post-menopausal women with estrogen receptor-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-negative advanced or metastatic breast cancer who had not received previous systemic treatment for their advanced disease.

The company said the PALOMA-2 trial provides confirmatory evidence for IBRANCE in combination with letrozole in the first-line setting, which was first studied in the Phase 2 PALOMA-1 trial. The data will support additional planned global regulatory submissions and a request for conversion of the accelerated approval for IBRANCE to regular approval in the U.S.

Based on the results of PALOMA-1, IBRANCE first was approved by the U.S. FDA in February 2015 for the treatment of postmenopausal women with ER+, HER2- advanced breast cancer in combination with letrozole as initial endocrine-based therapy for their metastatic disease.

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Business News
An increasing number of Americans want the Senate to vote on President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, according to the results of a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll.

The poll found that 52 percent of Americans want the Senate to vote this year, up from 48 percent in March and 43 percent in February.

Just 30 percent said the Supreme Court seat should be left vacant until the next president takes office, while 18 percent have no opinion.

The increase in support for holding a vote this year comes after Obama officially nominated federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland to fill the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

However, most Senate Republicans remain steadfastly opposed to considering Garland's nomination, arguing that it would further politicize the court to hold hearings during an election year.

The poll found that 76 percent of Democrats want the Senate to vote on the nomination this year compared to 43 percent of independents.

Just 24 percent of Republicans support holding a vote this year, although that number is up from 16 percent in March.

With Scalia's seat currently vacant, the Supreme Court is expect to be deadlocked 4 to 4 in a number of important cases.

Reports suggest the Justices are likely to reach a split decision in a recent case regarding Obama's use of executive actions to protect 4 million undocumented immigrants from deportation.

A split decision by the Supreme Court would maintain a lower court decision that blocked Obama's actions.

The NBC/WSJ survey of 1,000 registered voters was conducted April 10th through 14th and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

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Business News
The U.K. Prime Minister's Office said Tuesday that Garuda Indonesia, Indonesia's national carrier, has signed agreements with Airbus (EADSF.PK) and Rolls-Royce for a 4 billion pounds deal to upgrade the airline's 14 A330s to the newer A330neo, which will be worth nearly 1 billion pounds to the UK .

Rolls-Royce has signed an agreement for the provision and aftercare of Rolls-Royce engines.

The deal was signed on the first day of a 2-day visit to the UK by Indonesian President Jokowi, who met Prime Minister David Cameron this morning to discuss the strengthening of economic and security ties between the 2 nations.

The U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said, "This deal underlines the increasing importance of our ties with Indonesia - a fast growing economy and set to become the seventh largest in the world by 2030."

Airbus Chief Operating Officer Tom Williams said, "We are delighted to welcome Garuda Indonesia as a new customer for the A330neo."

Rolls-Royce President of Civil Aerospace Eric Schulz said, "Indonesia has great economic prospects and we are committed to supporting its future growth in air travel. This year marks the 20th anniversary since we first provided Trent engines to Garuda Indonesia and we are proud to power this latest expansion to their fleet with the very latest member of our Trent engine family."

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Business News
NATO and Russian officials have much to discuss during the NATO-Russia Council meeting in Brussels Wednesday.

"We will address  the crisis in and around Ukraine, military activity, transparency, risk reductions and Afghanistan" NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday.

The alliance kept open lines of communication at the ambassadorial level, but this will be the first meeting of the NATO-Russia Council since April 2014.

"I think that the incidents we have seen in the Baltic Sea over the last week with the unprofessional and unsafe behavior of Russian planes close to an American ship and also close to an American plane just underlines the importance of open military lines of communications, of predictability and risk reduction," Stoltenberg said.

The secretary general stressed the need for a political dialogue with the Russians, especially during difficult times. "When the tensions are high, I think the need for  for political dialogue, for predictability, for transparency is even more important," he said.

The main purpose of the council meeting is to exchange views and to contribute to predictability. The council will discuss Ukraine, the implementation if the Minsk agreements and also to address how to enhance the mechanisms of risk reduction related to military activities.

Russian jets buzzed the USS Donald Cook April 11 and 12 as it sailed in international waters in the Baltic Sea. Also last week, Russian aircraft did a barrel roll over an Air Force RC-135U reconnaissance aircraft operating in international airspace.

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Political News
Local residents wrap themselves in blankets as they sit on the road in front of the town office building after an earthquake in Mashiki town, Kumamoto prefecture, southern Japan, photo by REUTERS/Kyodo

Facing food and water shortages, a Vietnamese student is collecting rain water to cook rice after a deadly earthquake hit the southern Japanese city of Kumamoto.

Do Van Giap lives near Kumamoto Castle, which was breached by the quake last week. Since then he has been sleeping in a local primary school.

The school is a shelter for about 2000 people, both Vietnamese and Japanese. We are all squashed together to make enough room for everyone.

In Kumamoto, more than 250,000 households are without water, 100,000 families lack gas and 39,000 have no power. Giap said that his neighborhood still has electricity but the water was cut off. The 25-year-old student only has enough water to drink.

Unbelievable. I havent showered for three days. Yesterday I even took advantage of rainfall to cook.

Giap collects rain water to cook. Photo by Do Van Giap.

Do Thao Linh, 27, another Vietnamese student, shared her experience of the earthquake: It was so strong that it was difficult to stand up.

At 1:25am on April 16, Linh suddenly woke up due to fierce vibrations. She immediately hid under a table and grabbed some basic necessities.

The girl said that many Vietnamese as well as Japanese people were caught off guard. Some of my friends ran away without wearing shoes.

A series of tremors soon after drove Linh and her neighbors to evacuate their homes and seek shelter at a local middle school. She added that people stayed calm as they made their way to the school.

"Everyone was silent; the only sound came from helicopters, fire trucks, car engines and police forces.

Linh and Giap are two of more than 1,600 Vietnamese people living in Kumamoto. After the quakes, their schools allowed students to stay at home.

A typical day for an overseas student will be going to school in the morning and working in the evening, but all that has been cancelled for now, Linh said.

The Japanese government estimates at least 42 people died in the twin earthquakes that hit the southern Japanese island of Kyushu on Thursday and Saturday. About 190 of the injured were in serious conditions, and some 110,000 people have been displaced.
Editors Pick

Pfizer Inc. expects to increase the price of its COVID-19 vaccine after the United States government's current purchase program expires, Reuters reported citing Pfizer executive Angela Lukin. The drug major is likely to quadruple the price of its COVID-19 vaccine to about $110 to $130 per dose.

Integrated payments company American Express reported on Friday the net profit for the third quarter grew three percent from last year, driven by double-digit revenue growth across all its operating segments, partially offset by higher provisions for credit losses. Earnings per share topped analysts' estimates, while quarterly revenues missed it by a whisker.

Department store chain TJX Companies Inc. is recalling 108,000 units of Mittal International Baby Blankets citing risks to children, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said. According to the agency, the threads in the recalled woven baby blankets can come loose and detach posing choking, entrapment and strangulation hazards.
Senator Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., is seen as one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the current election cycle, and she is now the subject of Planned Parenthood's first Senate ad of the year.

Planned Parenthood Votes, the political arm of the women's group, is reportedly spending $400,000 to run the 30-second ad.

The spot attacks Ayotte for refusing to fill the current Supreme Court vacancy and seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade.

"For New Hampshire women, the consequences of letting Kelly Ayotte play with the Constitution could last a lifetime," the ad's narrator says.

The Ayotte campaign responded with a statement accusing Democratic opponent and New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan of utilizing dark money to support her negative campaign.

Ayotte campaign manager Jon Kohan said, "Kelly's long record of standing up for New Hampshire women and families is clear and she cares deeply about ensuring all women have access to health services."

The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Ayotte with a 45.8 percent to 41.3 percent lead over Hassan, although polling in the race has been somewhat limited.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Political News
Saudi aggression continues to breaching ceasefire





SANA'A, April 19 (Saba) - The Saudi aggression and its hirelings continued on Tuesday to breach the ceasefire, deploy reinforcements and target army and popular committees' military sites.



The Saudi aggression's warplanes continued to fly intensively in the skies of Sana'a, Jawf, Amran, Hodeida, Sa'ada, Mahweet, Taiz and Mareb provinces, a security official said.



The aggression violated the ceasefire and dropped sound bombs in Munbah district in Sa'ada province.



The official said the Riyadh's hirelings sent reinforcements and create a new military entrenchments in the west of Dhubab district in Taiz, and bombed the mountainous chain in Dhubab with medium weapons.



The hirelings also attacked al-Muntazah, Han Mount in Beer Basha, Sala and al-Jahmalya, targeting the western hills in al-Waze'yah with several shells, the official said.



In Mareb province, the mercenaries attacked with medium and light weapons the army and popular committees sites in Hailan Mount, Souk Serwah and al-Mashjah trying to advance on Hailan Mount.



Meanwhile, the Saudi aggression waged three air raids on al-Madarej area and raids on Bani Bareq area in the province.



In Jawf province, the Saudi aggression waged two air raids on al-Maslub district and a house in al-Ghail district. The army and popular committees repulsed an advance of the mercenaries towards al-Moton district.



In Lahj province, the Saudi hirelings targeted the army and popular committees sites in al-Huwaimi area in Karesh district, al-Sanaeb area in Muraish district and Yaees area in Damt district of Dhalea province.



The hirelings also pounded al-Abdeyh area in Baidha with medium weapons.



HA/AF

Saba

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[19/April/2016]
A Chinese man has been sentenced to death for leaking more than 150,000 classified documents to an unidentified foreign power, state television said on Tuesday, offering unusual details of a kind of case rarely mentioned in public.

The man, a computer technician from Sichuan named as Huang Yu, worked for a government department which handled state secrets, but he was a bad employee and was sacked, the report said.

Filled with anger, he messaged a "foreign spy organisation" on the internet and offered to sell documents he had obtained while working for his former employer, who gladly took him up on his offer and so began their relationship, it added.

Meeting in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, Huang eventually handed over 150,000 documents, covering secrets ranging from everything from the ruling Communist Party to military and financial issues, the report said.

But as he was no longer employed, he began to run out of documents to provide, and so targeted his wife and brother-in-law who also worked for government departments handling state secrets, state television said.

In the end, his frequent travel and sudden unexplained wealth caught up with him and in 2011 he was arrested, and then sentenced to death, it added.

The report did not say when or if the execution had happened, or where he was tried.
Millennial Moms Review: 2022 Acura MDX is pretty close to the perfect family car

I dont know if perfect is attainable, especially considering weve got the world of options when it comes to modern vehicles. Were spoiled and, as such, we have very specific needs and wants. Driving-wise, the 2022 Acura MDX is one of my favourite ...
One in five children in Myanmar aged 10-17 go to work instead of school, according to figures from a census report on employment published last month, and the opening up of the economy since 2011 has triggered a spike on demand for labour.

A child uses a fishing net as he and others work at a fish farm in Htantapin township, outside Yangon, Myanmar February 18, 2016. Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun.

Nay Htet Lin, a 15-year-old worker, shows a heart-shaped tattoo on his chest of his mother's name at San Pya fish market in Yangon, Myanmar February 19, 2016. Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun.

Kyaw Khine Soe, 16, rests on a dock after finishing his shift at San Pya fish market, in Yangon, Myanmar February 16, 2016. Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun.

Kyaw Khine Soe, 16, rests on a dock after finishing his shift at San Pya fish market, in Yangon, Myanmar February 16, 2016. Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun.

When a boat stacked with gravel moors at a jetty in Yangon, 14-year-old Aung Htet Myat fills a basket he then carries on his back to trucks that whisk the load to construction sites springing up across Myanmar's booming biggest city.

For each basket a labour broker rewards the boy with a stick he puts in a plastic bottle tied to his belt. At the end of the shift, which at the busiest times can last up to 24 hours, he exchanges the sticks for cash - 100 baskets earns him about $2.50.

"I carry baskets with stones the whole day," said Aung Htet Myat, who has worked at the jetty for the last two years. "If there is no gravel boat to unload, I help bus drivers as an assistant."

One in five children in Myanmar aged 10-17 go to work instead of school, according to figures from a census report on employment published last month, and the opening up of the economy since 2011 has triggered a spike on demand for labour.

As the former Burma emerges from nearly 50 years of neglect under military rule, Yangon has been transformed into a vast construction site.

Than Than Win and her two teenage sons began working at the same jetty as Aung Htet Myat after her husband died. The family now rely on a labour broker who lends her money in return for on-demand, non-stop work when a boat arrives.

"He gives us a place to stay and we can also take money from him when we have no job," said Than Than Win, as nearby her sons carried another load of gravel on their backs. "We have no way to pay it back, so whenever he asks us to work we can't refuse."

Her story is common in Yangon's slums, filled with people who have flocked from the countryside as the economy has boomed, says Michael Slingsby, an urban poverty expert based in the city.

"People borrow money from lenders and in order to repay their debts children are being sent out to work," he said.

LAWS RARELY ENFORCED

May Win Myint, a senior member of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) which took power this month, said tackling child labour was one of the party's goals.

"If we cannot solve this problem, there will not be any development in our country because they will be the people serving the country in the future," she said. "They need to be educated to do that."

To do that the first freely elected government since the early 1960s will need to address labour laws that experts say are fragmented and rarely enforced.

Myanmar law bars children under 13 from working in shops or factories, and says teenagers aged 13-15 should not work more than four hours a day, or at night.

"Nobody under 18 should be carrying heavy cargoes," said Vicky Bowman, a former British ambassador who now runs the Yangon-based Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business.

Outside of construction, child labour is most visible in hospitality, with even small children serving food in Myanmar's ubiquitous tea shops. Many children also work in fish farming and processing.

At Yangon's San Pya fish market, the country's largest, over two days in February Reuters found girls and boys as young as nine cleaning and processing fish and unloading boats and trucks during 12-hour overnight shifts.

"I don't want my son to do this kind of hard labour," said Hla Myint, 56, whose 15-year-old son works in San Pya.

Speaking from their home in a dilapidated bamboo hut close to the river bank, Hla Myint did not share many of his fellow citizens' high hopes for Suu Kyi's government.

"Whatever they say they would do, or give us, it will never reach here," he said. "I don't believe in any change."
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Last Friday was a busy day for Suefai Siaki. First, she attended the college graduation ceremony of L.D.S. church college Pesega in which she took over the part of the graduation classes president.

After that, she had organized a celebration for a fundraiser that is part of the Latter Day Saints church own initial program P.E.F.  Perpetual Education Fund.

If we cannot do this fundraiser now, we cannot move on, she told Samoa Observer at the celebration.

I took a stand for this fundraiser which aims to help the students in our business class. The money that we collect will be used for the important things we need, for instance new uniforms.

Potentially new uniforms the students could wear on a long wished trip to neighbouring country American Samoa, which hopefully will also be financed by the fundraiser.

The trip, scheduled for May and would include all the students of the colleges business class, is planned as an intercultural exchange.

We try to engage our students to be more self-reliant and more confident in themselves, said Fesouaina Matalavea, a Technician and Computer teacher at the College.

By doing so, we also try to push kids that are less fortunate, for instance those without the ability to finish high school or college. Their roles in society are not at all fixed ones. They can be an asset for the community and we want to help them to achieve that.
(Facebook/MadamSecretary)"Madam Secretary" season 2

President Dalton sends the "Murphy Station" to eliminate the most-wanted terrorist in the upcoming episode 21, titled "Connection Lost," of the second season of the political drama "Madam Secretary."

US President Dalton learns that Jibral Disah, the world's most-wanted terrorist, is lying low in Islamabad. He decides to send the Murphy Station, which includes Henry, Jane, and Jose. They get on a dangerous mission to get rid of the international threat. Elizabeth and Henry, on the other hand, try to work out their relationship so they enlist in a couples therapy.

The promo trailer for "Connection Lost" reveals Henry confirming if Pakistan gave the US access to track its nuclear weapons. President Dalton tells Elizabeth that agreement is the key to global nuclear security. Elizabeth talks about securing a hundred nuclear warheads of a falling regime, as a Pakistan leader betrays his own country.

In other related news, Tim Daly explains why his character Henry, who is a religion teacher, is more involved in the intelligence community. "Unfortunately, being a scholar of religion is also being a scholar of war, because religious conflict and war go hand-in-hand," Daly told TV Line. "So I thought it was great that Henry might have some insight into what was going on globally."

Daly also did not expect to be the newest addition in the intelligence circle. He added, "After the debacle Henry goes through with his Russian operative, I didn't know what would happen. It kind of came at me out of the blue."

Meanwhile, the previous episode, titled "Ghost Detainee," saw Elizabeth deliver her first-ever speech to the United Nations General Assembly. She talked about condemning the terrorist group Hizb-al Shahid and creating an alliance together with the Russian Foreign Minister.

"Madam Secretary" season 2 airs every Sunday at 8 p.m. on CBS.
The President of the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist (S.D.A) Church, Ted N. C. Wilson, is visiting Samoa this week.

As part of the visit, he is scheduled to meet with a host of local officials, including a courtesy call to the Head of State, His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi tomorrow.

The visit was confirmed by the President of Samoa and Tokelau Mission, Kenneth Fuliese, who said this is the first time after thirty years that a leader of the General Conference is visiting Samoa.

The purpose of his visit is to come see the churches and to see if the congregation has grown. He also wants to look at the development of the church, he said.

The Presidents visit will boost the morale of the church members in sense of ownership and the sense of belonging somewhere and for this case its the sense that we belong to a worldwide church, not only in Samoa but other parts of the world.

The President is scheduled to front a press conference this afternoon at Lalovaea.

This is Mr. Wilsons second term as President. Prior to this appointment, he served as General Vice President of the church since July 2000.

Mr. Wilson was nominated by the church's 246-member Nominating Committee and elected by the General Conference Session delegation, the highest governing body in the church consisting of an international body of 2,410 appointed members.

He succeeded Jan Paulsen, who had served as president since 1999.

On July 3rd, 2015 at the 60th session of the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in San Antonio, Wilson was re-elected for a second five-year term.

He holds a Doctorate in religious education from New York University, a Master of Divinity degree from Andrews University and a Master of Science degree in Public Health from Loma Linda University's School of Public Health.

His nomination and subsequent election had been expected. In the 2010 General Conference session, President Wilson emphasized the need to turn to the scriptures and affirmed the church's strong belief in the writings of Ellen White.
Lets face it. The Police Commissioners two-paragraph response to the Ombudsmans report about an incident involving an innocent member of the public at the Fugalei market could be interpreted in two ways (see story titled Top cop responds on the front page of the Samoa Observer yesterday).

One is that Commissioner Fuiava Egon Keil is so ashamed by the report he does not have much to say about it at all except to sit down with his team, rethink, regroup and change their ways.

The other way to look at it is that he really doesnt care what Ombudsman Maiava Iulai Toma and his Office thinks so he pulls out that card we so often see. Its called ignore it, pray and hope that this incident somehow magically disappears from memory.

All things considered, we do not and we must not condone the behaviour of the Police as the report highlights. No decent human being deserves to be treated in such a manner in Samoa or anywhere else for that matter.

Besides, the failure at so many levels identified by the report is simply mind-blowing. Someone could have been killed. It scares me to think what could have happened if Misa Suitupe had somehow reacted any differently than putting his hands in the air. Would they have shot an innocent man point blank for members of the public to see? Is that the new normal for Samoa?

Keep in mind that this is not the first shocking incident involving Police brutality weve seen in the not too distant past. Remember the Toamua incident where Police officers beat, rocked and abused a member of the public in broad daylight in front a church?

Indeed, the latest incident is a real indictment on the Police and the Commissioner. Its an embarrassment, its disgraceful and everyone involved in the raid  including the Cabinet Minister who authorised it - should hang their heads in shame.

In his two-paragraph response yesterday, Commissioner Fuiava said:

The Samoa Police has great respect and reverence for the laws of Samoa and sensitive to every persons Constitutional Rights.

The Samoa Police will continue to do whatever it takes within the law to keep our country and our people safe.

Well thats hard to believe, isnt it?

Looking at the Ombudsmans report, there is no respect in the way that man was treated. Reverence? Constitutional rights? Youve got to be kidding me.

And lastly, the idea that the Police will continue to do whatever it takes within the law to keep our country and our people safe is chilling and threatening.

Are we safe to assume then that this sort of behaviour from the Police is what we will continue to see? Is this the beginning of a new era in Samoas law enforcement?

To be fair, there are times when such force is required and the Police should be prepared for it. Such instances include raids on criminals who harbour hard drugs. These people ultimately have powerful guns and other forms of weaponry where our Samoan ideology of mutual respect and dialogue will not work.

But in most cases in Samoa  including this particular case  our people are quite civil. Thats why its easy to agree with the Ombudsman here that the Police have definitely gone overboard.

But should we be upset with the Commissioner and his men?

Shouldnt this spark a nationwide outrage against the Police and perhaps a march down Beach Road calling for blood?

Shouldnt we have those angry Samoans demanding justice and fairness for all from the government and the Police?

Shouldnt we be calling for heads to roll over this issue?

Yes. Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

Now take a deep breath, hold your fire and hear us out for a second.

The failure in this sorry affair as highlighted by the Ombudsman started from the Cabinet Minister who granted a so-called Ministerial approval when clearly he shouldnt have.

Then there is the Commissioner whose knowledge of local laws  and perhaps cultural norms  have again been brought under scrutiny. Remember the matai and military debacle not so long ago?

And of course the Police officers who can argue that they were merely following orders. Fair enough.

If our opinion was sought, we believe that if we are to identify the real culprit in this situation, we have to look deeper. If the issue here is the lack of understanding of local laws and culture, then the Commissioner should not entirely take the blame. Who appointed the Police Commissioner in the first place? Who appointed the Cabinet Minister?

That brings us back to that two-paragraph response from the Police.

We say its pathetic.

Its arrogant.

But it doesnt surprise us one bit.

Is that not the typical attitude we are seeing from our political leaders today?

Is it not accurate to say that the attitude of the Police merely reflects that of the people above them?

Isnt this the very same thing we are seeing from our political leaders when it comes to issues involving abuse of power, positions and blatant wrongdoing?

Why then should we crucify Commissioner Fuiava and his men when you could easily say the same thing about corrupt practices, the blatant abuse of power, positions, government properties and collusion that continues to go unpunished?

The point is this. When standards, morals and ethics in anything in this life are constantly compromised, there is no ending to the slope because it just becomes a downward spiral. Which is precisely what we are seeing in Samoa today.

We cannot isolate a single incident and draw a conclusion. We have to look at the system, decency and the values that have been compromised by legitimizing wrongdoing and wrong behavior.

It is from that we will find answers.

What we are seeing  including this latest incident with the Police - is merely a reflection of a system that is failing. It has been compromised and the standards have been lowered so much to the point where anything goes.

We commend the Ombudsman and his Office for a job well done in compiling such a thorough and well-written report about their investigation. It must be said that Maiava and his office are a ray of hope for Samoa. We encourage them not to give up. From the medias standpoint, we especially appreciate their transparency and their willingness to share their reports  unlike so many other taxpayer funded reports that are kept far, far away from the public.

But like the Chief Auditors report and the O.P.C report, whats the point if nothing is done about them?

Getting back to the Police, if you want to hold the Commissioner accountable, what about instances where Cabinet Ministers have been implicated in far more serious cases of wrong doing and yet they are allowed to get away scot free? Didnt we just allow certain Members of Parliament to waltz into our lawmaking institution knowing that they blatantly broke the law? So who are we kidding here? Think about it.
Sogi residents who accepted the offer from the government to relocate to Falelauniu have nothing but praise for the decision.

Made in 2011, the decision saw several families from the swampy part of the Apia township relocate to higher land. Whats more, the land they are occupying  once they finish paying it off  becomes their asset.

Speaking to the Samoa Observer yesterday, a mother of eight, Meleane Perenise, said its the best decision they made.

Its been six years since we moved here and its a life changing experience for us, she said.

Here, we finally built our own house, plant taro and banana as much as we can and we have no worries about natural disasters and so forth.

Back in Sogi, she said the swampy conditions made life very difficult.

It was hard because we didnt have much land to work, she said.

But here at Falelauniu, the land is enough for us, we have good neighbors and the water supply is 24/7 everydaywe have everything here with us,

At Sogi during the rainy season, we experienced what you could refer to as living in a slum. The air was bad and polluted and we put up with that for many years.

Now the government has stepped in and helped  were grateful for the offer because it has been a wonderful new beginning for us.

Mrs. Perenise said that the location makes it easier for some members of her family to find jobs with nearby companies.

When we were called to relocate here at the very first time, I thought, it would be too hard for my children to find a job, but looking at the increasing number of companies that have been set up in this area now, it makes everything much easier.

I am hoping that soon or later, the government will build a school in this area.

The decision by the government to relocate residents of Sogi was initially announced in 2011.

The government then offered families a quarter acre of land at Falelauniu which they will lease to own at just over $30,000 and $3,000 cash to relocate.

Many families at Sogi have taken up the offer.

But many others have refused.

Last Sunday, a 68-year-old-mother and grandmother, Tala Leiataua made a heartfelt plea to Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi.

Please let us stay on this land, she said. This is where we belong. Our ancestors have worked so hard to level this swamp during the German colonial times for us. We want to stay.

Should the government insist to evict them, Tala said: I ask the government to dig a hole and throw us all in there. Id rather die and be buried on the land my ancestors passed down to us.

The family of the elderly mother is among more than thirty families at Sogi who face eviction by the government, years after they were told to relocate to Falelauniu.

The families have been warned for the last time to relocate on their own, without being forcefully removed. They have been given 30 days to move.

Everything that they (government) offered doesnt mean anything. Nothing can compensate for the sweat and tears of our ancestors who helped to raise this swamp to what it is today.

Were ready to die on our land. If the government wants to still evict us from here soon, they can do whatever they want to do. But before they evict us, Im asking them to dig a hole so we can all be thrown in there with our children.

Speaking about the issue during a Parliament session years ago, Tuilaepa said the standard of living for residents of Sogi will improve if they relocate.

There is not enough land to grow crops for families to rely on, Tuilaepa said at the time. The only importance of land located inside town (like Sogi) is that it is convenient for transport.

More than 10 acres have been allocated to the 33 Sogi families to shift to, each getting a quarter acre to buy, Tuilaepa said at the time.

This will benefit them, said the Prime Minister. There is now bigger land to grow food in.
The Member of Parliament for Safata West, Leaana Ronnie Posini will remain in the seat of Safata West for the next five years.

This follows a decision by the former leader of the Tautua Samoa Party and Member of Parliament for Safata, Palusalue Faapo II to withdraw his electoral petition yesterday.

The presiding judges were His Honour the Chief Justice Patu Tiavaasue Falefatu Sapolu and Justice Lesatele Rapi Vaai.

The petitioner Palusalue Faapo II was represented by his lawyer Tima Leavai while Pau Tafaogalupe Mulitalo represented the respondent, Leaana Ronnie Posini.

Palusalue had accused the new Member of Parliament of bribery during the General Election on the 4th March 2016.

While Ms Leavai informed the court that they were ready to proceed with the hearing, unfortunately she had just been informed by the petitioner that the petitioner had reconciled with the respondent and the constituency.

In the interests of peace and harmony of the constituency, Ms Leavai said the petitioner wished to withdraw his petition against the respondent.

Chief Justice Patu asked the counsel for the respondent whether he would be seeking any costs. Mr Mulitalo informed the court that in the spirit of the petition being withdrawn, he would not be seeking any costs from the petitioner.

His Honour the Chief Justice said that with the advice from both counsels, withdrawal of the petition was noted.

He informed both counsels that the official process to withdraw the petition will take about two weeks.

An order was made by Chief Justice Patu that the notice of motion to withdraw the petition should be published in the newspaper tomorrow (today).

This matter will be re-mentioned on Tuesday 3rd May 2016 to give time for both parties to complete the withdrawal process set out in the petition rules.

Chief Justice acknowledged both counsels in their parts as lawyers in this matter.

He also thanked the Safata West constituency for their support and their word of advice that changed the heart of the petitioner to withdraw his claim.

Speaking to the Samoa Observer yesterday Palusalue thanked God because this was from God.

Theres no use praying to God to forgive if we dont forgive others, said Palusalue.

Despite the law that has already been set out, it seems like our law is of no use because of our culture, he added.

He also said hes been in the seat for so long and he feels for the constituency and he believes that everything will be resolved.

Palusalue said he is happy to see his constituency leave with excitement

Most of the constituency who have supported him for many years, are the same people who asked him to forgive and forget.

Outside the court house yesterday the new Member of Parliament Leaana said he is very humble and thankful that Palusalue withdrew his petition.

Leaana also said he believed that our culture is more important to others.

He thanked the two Members of Parliament Palusalue and Manulesagalala for the good work and the developments in the constituency.

He is also hoping that he will continue the good work that theyve started and look at other ways to develop not only his constituency, but Samoa as well.
Delays continue to plague the construction and completion of the Congregational Christian Church of Samoas (C.C.C.S.) Jubilee Church.

The project, which started in 2014, was initially estimated to cost $7m.

At that time, the building was scheduled to be opened in 2015, last year.

But that did not happen.

Today, the cost of the project has ballooned to $13million  almost double the original cost.

Project Manager of Shanghai Construction, Mr Jerry Shi has confirmed that theyre still finalizing the costs of material.

Shanghai is just a constructor for labor and the installation but not for materials and designbut yes. were working on calculating the cost of materials for the Jubilee Church and the final say will come from the church. he said.

This will be done soon,

The church awarded us for the structural contract and weve finished with that and I think the next step is about the roofing and how to finish it off.

Shi said that they were told (by designers) that there are some difficulties at the construction site of the Jubilee Church.

The building is very tall as is the roof, he added. For now, weve just finished the first phase and well continue on to the second one.

During the groundbreaking in 2014, Shanghai Construction was awarded the contract for foundation and fill, Fletcher Construction carried out most of the framework, while the exterior was to be installed and maintained by South Pacific Cladding.

In a previous report, the General Secretary of the Reverend Dr. Afereti Uili assured the public that the construction of the $13million tala Jubilee Church at Malua would be completed some time this year.

He dismissed claims that the progress of the project has been stifled by issues of finance.

And Dr. Uili said the project is continuing.

Were awaiting the final costs of materials from the construction company, he said.

These materials include the roofing, ground floor, windows, steps and others and hopefully we can get this done in the next few days.

In the meantime, Dr. Uili said construction engineers are working to ensure the building meets all the building requirements and safety standards.

The Samoa Observer understands that work on the project ceased towards the end of last year.
The electoral rights of voters in the Faleata West constituency was at the heart of a petition yesterday.

A former Member of Parliament, Ale Vena Ale yesterday questioned the kinship of hundreds of voters from the constituency of Faleta West claiming they do not have a blood relationship in the constituency.

This was despite some of the constituents being residents.

Ale was amongst five witnesses who took the stand in the Supreme Court to give evidence in relation to a petition he filed against the sitting M.P. of Faleata West, Lealailepule Rimoni Aiafi.

The election candidate is also taking the Office of the Electoral Commissioner to Court on their part in accepting the registration of the more than 400 voters who Ale alleges, are not eligible to be registered in Faleata West.

On the other side, Leala is counter-suing Ale alleging several counts of bribery and treating during the general election.

In his evidence, Ale told the Court that people who are not direct descendants of Faleata, should not have the right to vote for an M.P. in the constituency.

I believe that a person who is a resident of Vaitele should have a connection (piitaga) to Faleata, said Ale.

If not, there is an urban seat to register in rather than voting for our constituency where they have no blood relationship. Kinship as I interpret it as an heir (suli).

In my own belief everyone that resides in Vaitele and other parts of Faleata who has no blood relationship or is a direct descendant, should register in an urban area.

Ale pointed out that the roll for Vaitele continues to grow over the years.

He recalled that in the recent elections, from the 5400 people registered in the Faleata West about 2000 of them did not cast their votes.

They never bothered to vote, said Ale.

What Im trying to bring to Court is to let the true Faleata people vote for their own M.P.

The matai from Toamua also argued that while everyone in Faleata has the right to decide but such decisions should be based on kinship to the constituency of Faleata.

He added his case has been extremely difficult in servicing the more than 400 voters to take the stand and to give evidence.

Supreme Court Judges, Justice Vui Clarence Nelson and Justice Mata Tuatagaloa are presiding over the matter.

Maiava Visekota Peteru is the lawyer for Ale. Sarona Ponifasio is representing Lealailepule.

Lawyers of the Attorney Generals office, Muriel Lui and Sefo Junior Ainuu are standing for the Office of the Electoral Commissioner.

In the absence of the voters who were summoned but did not appear in Court, Maiava made an application to allow Ale to comment on the voters and why they should not be registered in Faleata.

However, Vui raised an issue of civil rights.

I dont know if its the best way to do it and if its the lawful way to do this, said Vui.

Under the Constitution of this country in Article 9 its guarantees to every person the determination of their civil rights and you seek to impeach their civil rights in their absence.

Vui pointed out perhaps the question should be put to Ale but its a matter that counsel will handle.

One of the voters who was served, had her affidavit examined by Ale including a letter of confirmation of residents and another letter from Lealailepule as a matai of the family.

After reading the documents, Ale was asked by lawyer Sarona Ponifasio if he would accept that the voter is a resident of Vaitele.

Mrs. Ponifasio is representing Lealailepule.

In response, Ale said he accepted that the voter resides in Vaitele but said they should not have registered in the constituency.

He explained the voters parents are from rural villages and therefore should register in those villages and that everyone has kinship from other villages but in this particular case, they should have kinship in Faleata.

I do not accept it because they are not true Faleata people and not blood related, said Ale.

Justice Vui cut in asking Ale if he knew the voter.

Ale said no.

Vui then told Ale if that was the case, he would not know then if the voter was related to Leala or not.

But Ale insisted that he has no doubt that the voter is not blood related.

But you just said you did not know the person, said the Judge.

If they are related then they have some piitaga (kinship).

In cross examination, Ms. Lui asked Ale if he agreed that the voter had satisfied the requirements needed under the law considering the supporting confirmation letters.

Ale said no, explaining that under the requirements, there should be a letter from the village mayor and paramount chief (sao ole aiga) and Leala is not that matai and does not satisfy that requirement.

Ms. Lui said that the requirement is in fact a letter from one of the family matai.

Unhappy with this, Ale accused the Electoral Office of misinforming him claiming that the information he was given was that there should be a letter from the paramount chief not just any matai.

In my belief it was the letter from paramount chief; but Leala is a candidate, he can write any letter to satisfy requirements.

Before the petitioner could move on to the next voters documents, Mrs. Ponifasio objected.

She told the Court that unless the petitioner knew them personally then he was just going by the papers making up his own opinion.

Justice Tuatagaloa agreed.

She said the petitioner was going to state his opinion about the voters and some of them he did not even know.

Who is going to prove his case for him if voters dont turn up? asked Tuatagaloa.

Justice Vui was in support.

He reminded that the standard of a petitioners case is to prove beyond reasonable doubt.

In this case, Vui pointed out there are documents from Electoral Commissioner that have established that these people do have kinship and are very strong evidence that they are eligible.

Unless you can come up with evidence that shows reasonable doubt you are wasting a lot of time and a lot of money.

Vui told Ale he understood his concerns completely, but this is not parliament we are not here to change the law, we are here to follow it.

Ale said for the past few days it had been hard to serve people who didnt want to turn up in Court and refused to be witnesses for him.

With the people that we served what they said to us was not going to be what they would stand up here and say to you.

Justice Vui adjourned the matter for the day for the petitioner to see how the case should continue.

Prior to evidence from the witnesses, Maiava had made an application for extension of time for three weeks to serve 418 voters as some are avoiding service.

The lawyer suggested that the second option was for the Court to give direction on what to do.

In delivering the ruling for the application, Justice Vui denied the extension of a further three weeks to serve the voters.

However he said the remaining 300 voters who were not served are to be served by publication in media in following manner to be published in newspapers that are circulated in Samoa starting today until Sunday 24th April.

Also the notice should be broadcast on radio 2AP, FM and television once in the morning and once in the evening.
Empowered by a curriculum developed by the U.S. Agency for International Development Lowering Emissions in Asias Forests (USAID LEAF) program, 700 professors at 63 universities in the Asia-Pacific region are rolling out education to a new generation of climate change professionals in Southeast Asia.

Working with university professors mainly from the Lower Mekong region, USAID LEAF and the United States Forest Service designed the curriculum to cover basic climate change, social and environmental soundness, low emission land use planning and carbon measurement and monitoring. The curriculum is adapted to specific country contexts, and is already being used in classrooms to teach more than 30,000 undergraduate and 700 graduate students.

Its easier for me to prepare lessons because the material is ready to use, said Mrs. Somvilay Chanthalounnavong, who teaches at the National University of Laos. There are examples, case studies and guides for the instructor about how to explain the concepts and how to use the material, including role plays, questions and answers and quizzes.

The curriculum also works well at Thai universities. If you show scientific evidence for climate change, students really get it, said Dr. Pimonrat Tiansawat [pee-moan-RAHT tee-AN-swaht] from Chiang Mai University. They get excited when I talk about ice cores and tree rings. They see the evidence and are more engaged."

Forests cover about 26 percent of the Asia-Pacific region providing livelihoods for local communities and environmental benefits such as reducing carbon and conserving biodiversity. Forests help reduce the negative effects of climate change by storing carbon and greenhouse gas emissions, but the region is experiencing a high rate of forest degradation and deforestation from agricultural expansion, unsustainable logging, urbanization and other factors.

Taking climate change to classrooms in the region today is a powerful way to ensure that tomorrows leaders are already thinking about forests and the environment, said Beth Paige, director for USAIDs Regional Development Mission in Asia, on the occasion of the International Day of Forests. We need the energy and drive of intelligent, innovative youth to lock in climate change on national and regional agendas. Thats our collective hope for the future of our planet.
Speaking at a seminar in Botswanas Ghanzi April 5 and 6, U.S. Ambassador to Botswana Earl Miller called Botswana a laudable example for other countries to follow. Now, Botswana could be among the first countries to actually control the HIV epidemic.

The seminar was organized by an interagency team from the U.S. government in partnership with the District Multi-Sectoral AIDS Committee. The U.S. also partnered with the Media Institute of Southern Africa.

This program was sponsored by the U.S. Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which is the countrys global health initiative to assist countries in responding effectively and sustainably to the HIV epidemic.

Over the last decade, PEPFAR has committed more than $780 million to Botswana in its response to HIV.

Together, with the Government of Botswana, civil society and other development partners, we have come a long way, Ambassador Miller noted.

Ambassador Miller lauded Botswanas progress towards meeting UNAIDS global 90-90-90 targets -- referring to the HIV testing, treatment and viral suppression targets  90% of those infected with HIV should be aware of their status; 90% of those aware of their status should have received treatment; and, for 90% of those being treated, the drugs will have had the intended effect of suppressing the patients viral load.

A study sponsored by PEPFAR found that out of the 3,500 individuals from 30 communities who tested HIV positive, 83% of them knew their HIV status; among people who knew their HIV-positive status, 87% of them had initiated treatment; and 96% of those on ART had achieved viral suppression. This was only a relatively small sample size in just 30 communities, but it is encouraging.

Ambassador Miller commended the Government of Botswana for considering the adoption of the Test and Treat policy. Moving towards earlier initiation of treatment is strongly supported by a recent international randomized clinical trial, he said.Treatment also acts as prevention by lowering the risk of transmission to uninfected sexual partners.

Now is the time to redouble our efforts and, together, run to and through the finish line.
This month marks the second anniversary of the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian girls from their school in Chibok by the terrorist group Boko Haram. These girls, between the ages of 16 and 18, were captured while at their boarding school. The United States again calls for the immediate release, without preconditions, of all hostages held by Boko Haram.

Nigerias military has succeeded in driving Boko Haram out of its strongholds, leaving it seriously weakened. Nevertheless, across northeastern Nigeria and in neighboring countries such a Cameroon and southern Niger, Boko Haram continues to wreak havoc. They relentlessly attack villages, murder countless individuals, and kidnap civilians, including women and girls, some of whom are subjected to forced labor and sex slavery through forced marriages to Boko Haram terrorists. Amnesty International reported that Boko Haram in 2015 and 2016 had abducted at least 2,000 women.

According to a recently released UNICEF report, Boko Haram uses children to detonate bombs. Indeed, nearly one of every five such attacks carried out by the terrorist group last year used a child, and more than two-thirds of those were girls.

The United States continues to assist the Nigerian government with intelligence and advisory support in an effort to locate and bring home all those who have been kidnapped by Boko Haram. In the last two years, the United States has provided nearly $198 million in humanitarian assistance to the region to deliver conflict-affected populations with transitional assistance, counseling services, health programs, and emergency education for children displaced by violence.

The United States continues to stand with the people of the Lake Chad Basin to combat the deadly scourge of Boko Haram.
Bristol, PA -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/19/2016 -- 1SEO.com Digital Agency, an organization that offers PPC, SMO, SEO, and many other internet marketing services in the Philadelphia, PA area, is excited to announce that their founder and CEO, Lance Bachmann, is slated to speak at the 2016 PPC Hero Conference in Philadelphia. What's more, not only is Bachmann speaking, but 1SEO.com Digital Agency is also proud to be one of the main sponsors of this year's event.



The PPC Hero Conference is the world's largest all PPC conference that brings together the brightest and biggest minds in the industry to learn, share innovative ideas, and network. This year's event will be held April 25-27, 2016, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, located at 1101 Arch St., in Philadelphia. Every year, the conference features over 50 speakers and 35 breakout sessions, has 4 keynotes and sees over 700 PPC enthusiasts.



On Tuesday, April 26, Bachmann will join Purna Virji, Microsoft's Sr. Bing Ads Client Development & Training Manager, to give a presentation on "The Best PPC Mistakes & How to Avoid Them." During this session, attendees will learn about the mistakes they might be making during the setup and targeting of remarketing campaigns, how improper code placement can damage a PPC campaign, why importing and copying campaigns across search engines does not work, and much more. In all, attendees will leave the session with a better understanding of the importance of taking the time to develop a PPC campaign carefully and thoughtfully. To learn more about the PPC Hero Conference, Bachmann and Virji's session, or to register for the event, please click here.



Bachmann founded his award-winning Bucks County-based digital marketing agency back in April 2009. In just over seven years, the company has grown to become one of the biggest digital marketing agencies across the globe. Bachmann has frequently been called upon to speak at many major events and conferences, with some of the most recent being the 2016 Drone Dealer Expo in Orlando, FL, and the LA Build Expo. To learn more about Lance Bachmann and 1SEO.com Digital Agency, please visit http://www.1seo.com/.



About 1SEO.com Digital Agency

1SEO.com is a digital marketing agency located in Bucks County, PA. Recently surpassing their 7-year anniversary, the 1SEO.com Digital Agency team has proven itself to be a leader in their industry. They offer search engine optimization, pay per click, social media optimization and website design and development services to international, national and local clients. They pride themselves on working closely with their clients to ensure that their business relationships with them are long-lasting, and that they are also able get the most out of their Internet marketing campaigns.



To hear more about the company, please visit http://www.1seo.com/.
Pune, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/19/2016 -- The report "Genetically Modified Food Safety Testing Market by Trait (Stacked, Herbicide Tolerance, Insect Resistance), Technology (Polymerase Chain Reaction, Immunoassay), Crop & Processed Food Tested & by Region - Global Trend & Forecast to 2020", The GM food safety testing market is projected to reach a value of USD 1.99 Billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 7.9% from 2015 to 2020. The market is driven by factors such as evolution in farming technologies, diverse GM processed food production, labeling mandates in several countries, and proper nutrient sufficiency.



Browse 77 market data Tables and 52 Figures spread through 145 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Genetically Modified Food Safety Testing Market - Global Trend & Forecast to 2020"



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The stacked trait segment is projected to be the fastest-growing market during the period 20152020



Stacked traits are a combination of more than one transgene in a single crop. Biofortified crops which are modified for the production of high nutritional content, HT with IR and disease-resistant traits are popular examples of stacked traits. The increased investments and growth in the R&D activities are responsible for the growth of this market.



Soy, corn, and bakery & confectionery products are largely tested for GMO in the food safety testing market



Among the crops and processed foods tested for GMO, crops accounted for the largest market share in 2014, dominated by corn and soy. The bakery & confectionery items are largely tested for GMO testing which include baking flours, breads, cakes, muffins, and other confectionery & baked goods. The market in breakfast cereals & snacks among processed foods is projected to grow at the highest CAGR due to the presence of a large amount of cereal grains and corn flakes. Food additives such as lecithin, vitamin E (tocopherol), and proteins from GM soybean are also largely tested for GMOs.



Request Sample Copy of this Report



North America and EU regions to dominate the GM food safety testing market in 2015



The European region was the largest market for GM testing for safety in 2014. Countries such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the U.K, and other EU countries are major importers of soy, corn, canola, and other crops and processed foods. The countries in EU are stringent in GMO regulations which in turn results in vigorous testing of GMO for safety. North America is the major exporter of soy, corn & canola to the world which requires the conduction of tests for GMO labeling according to the importing country mandates. Brazil and Argentina are also the active countries for GM food testing for safety. Asia-Pacific countries are at the growth stage in this market. China is the major country followed by Japan, Korea, and Rest of Asia-Pacific.



This report includes a study of marketing and development strategies, along with the product portfolio of leading companies. It includes the profiles of leading companies such SGS S.A. (Switzerland), Intertek Group plc (U.K.), Eurofins Scientific SE (Luxembourg), Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (U.S.) Silliker, Inc. (U.S.), Romer Labs Division Holding GmbH (Austria), EMSL Analytical Inc. (U.S.), Genetic ID NA, Inc. (U.S.), OMIC USA Inc. (U.S.), and IFP (Institut fur Produktqualitat GmbH) (Germany).



In terms of insights, this research report has focused on various levels of analyses industry analysis, market share analysis of top players, and company profiles, which together comprise and discuss the basic views on the competitive landscape, emerging & high-growth segments of the global GM food safety testing market, high-growth regions, countries, and their respective regulatory policies, government initiatives, drivers, restraints, and opportunities.



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Deerfield Beach, FL -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/19/2016 -- Global and China Mobile Cone Crusher Market 2016-2021 Market Research Report



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The report on the Global and China Mobile Cone Crusher Market 2016 Industry meticulously addresses the various drivers, restraints, and opportunities that exist in this space. Compiled by a team of expert analysts, the report offers an overview of the all the key performance indicators of the Global and China Mobile Cone Crusher Market 2016 Industry.



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The study analyzes the Global and China Mobile Cone Crusher Market 2016 Industry in terms of revenue and volume, where applicable. By doing so, the team of authors working on this report have been able to offer a complete and realistic picture of the future course that the Global and China Mobile Cone Crusher Market 2016 is expected to adopt.



All internal and external factors influencing the growth trajectory of the Global and China Mobile Cone Crusher Market 2016 Industry are taken into account. With a firm focus on the companies that compete for a share of revenues within the Global and China Mobile Cone Crusher Market 2016 Industry, the report is a valuable resource that supports competition mapping and strategy development.



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Boston, MA -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/19/2016 -- Slovakia's food and drink industry will experience modest growth over 2016. Our view is underpinned by a positive consumer outlook: an improved labour market and rising disposable incomes will drive food expenditure growth. However, we do note that structurally high unemployment will continue to weigh on growth in the industry.



Key Trends & Industry Developments



Food sales (local currency) growth y-o-y in 2016: +3.3%; compound annual growth rate (CAGR) 2015-2020: +4.5%.



Rising disposable incomes will bode well for food consumption; however, strong growth will be largely seen in economically priced categories.



Non-alcoholic drinks sales (local currency) growth y-o-y in 2016: +3.8%; CAGR 2015-2020: +5.0%.



The spirits and wine categories will show good growth over our forecast period



Discount and convenience stores will experience steady growth throughout our forecast period.



Get More Details on this Report and a Full Table of Contents at Slovakia Food & Drink Report Q2 2016



The Slovakia Food & Drink Report features BMI Research's market assessment and independent forecasts for food and drink expenditure, consumption, sales, and imports/exports and forecasts for the mass grocery retail sector. The report also includes analyses of major regulatory developments, the background macroeconomic outlook and competitive landscape comparing national and multinational companies by leading products and services, sales, investments, partners and expansion strategies.



BMI'sSlovakia Food & Drink Report provides industry professionals and strategists, sector analysts, business investors, trade associations and regulatory bodies with independent forecasts and competitive intelligence on the food and drink industry and the mass grocery retail market in Slovakia.



Key Benefits

Benchmark BMI's independent food and drink industry forecasts for Slovakia to test other views - a key input for successful budgeting and strategic business planning in the Slovak food and drink market.

Target business opportunities and risks in Slovakia through our reviews of latest industry trends, regulatory changes and major deals, projects and investments.

Exploit latest competitive intelligence on your competitors, partners and clients via our Company Profiles (inc. SWOTs, KPIs and latest activity) and Competitive Landscape Tables.



Coverage



BMI Industry View



Summary of BMI?s key industry forecasts and views, covering food and drink manufacturing and consumption and the mass grocery retail market.



Industry SWOT Analysis



Analysis of the major strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats within the food, drink and mass grocery retail sectors and within the broader political, economic and business environment.



BMI?s Food and Drink Risk Reward Index



BMI?s Risk Reward Index provides investors (food and drink manufacturers and mass grocery retailers) looking for opportunities in the region with a clear country-comparative assessment of a market?s risks and potential rewards. Each of the country markets are scored using a sophisticated model that includes more than 40 industry, economic and demographic points. These provide indices of highest to lowest appeal to investors, with each position explained.



Food Forecasts



BMI?s food chapter is divided into sections such as meat, fish, confectionary, dairy and canned foods, and provides insight into each market?s food industry, centred on a forecast to end-2019 for the sector. The chapter includes the following elements:

Industry Forecast Scenario: Historical data series and a forecast to end-2019 for growth of key indicators within a market?s food industry. Indicators include food consumption, food consumption as % of GDP, canned food sales, confectionery sales and food and drink imports and exports, among others.

Industry Developments: A summary of corporate developments, including news on M&As, FDI, expansions, closures and financial results, in addition to analysis and explanation of the latest industry events and how these could influence further investment.

Market Overview: An overview of the structure of the market, introducing the key players and discussing underlying trends.



Drink Forecasts



Segmented the same way as BMI?s food chapter, the drink section provides insight into each market?s drink industry, centred on a forecast to end-2019 for the sector. Forecast indicators include alcoholic and soft drink sales by value, volume and sub-sector and tea and coffee sales, among others.



Mass Grocery Retail Forecasts



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Browse all Food research reports at Fast Market Research



You may also be interested in these related reports:



-Slovenia Food & Drink Report Q2 2016

-Croatia Food & Drink Report Q2 2016

-Thailand Food & Drink Report Q2 2016

-Serbia Food & Drink Report Q2 2016

-Romania Food & Drink Report Q2 2016
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/18/2016 -- The news that the Vietnam government has announced unilateral Vietnam visa exemption for those who hold passports of countries like Belarus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italia, Japan, Korea, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden and UK may excite those from these countries and who wish to visit Vietnam. Visa-Vietnam.org points out that this exemption comes with a condition and that is their entry date should be at least 30 days from their previous exit from Vietnam. Otherwise, they have to produce appropriate visas for entering Vietnam.



Visa-Vietnam.org further points out that according to the recent resolution of the Vietnam government, visitors from ASEAN Citizens of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia and Laos who are holding valid ordinary passports are also exempt from visa requirements and this means these visitors will have free entrance visa to enter Vietnam. But they will be allowed to stay in Vietnam for a period not exceeding 30 days. Philippines can stay for a maximum duration of 21 days and Brunei and Myanmar citizens can stay for a period up to 14 days.



Visa-Vietnam.org proudly says that they have been offering Visa On Arrival services since 2007. Not only that, their services come at very reasonable costs. Further, they ensure to provide their customers with quick services as well, says the company. In short, visa on arrival services are available for their customers absolutely without any hassles. Those who decide to get visa for Vietnam and opt to utilize their services need not undergo the ordeal of chasing down embassies nor do they need to send their passports for getting Vietnam visas. They can just apply on line and after the processing is done, they will get a confirmation mail from them, says Visa-Vietnam.org. They have to just board the plane and once they land at a Vietnam airport, they can produce the copy of the email confirmation and collect their visas on arrival.



Additionally, they offer unique packages also, says Visa-Vietnam.org. For example, their "frequently member" program will be highly beneficial to those who travel to Vietnam quite often. These travelers will get a good discount on the service charges. Likewise, corporate members will also get good discounts based on another offer. Students, agents and teachers can use this offer and get very attractive discounts on service charges, points out the company.



Visa-Vietnam.org says they are very much dissimilar to several other companies that may be boasting of providing the same visa to Vietnam services because they have an impeccable track-record of having served thousands of customers since their inception. In short, they have put in place hassle-free systems for making the whole process of getting Vietnam Visas on Arrival easy and simple.



About Visa-Vietnam.org

Visa-Vietnam.org that has been offering highly efficient and cost effective Vietnam Visa on Arrival services since 2007 points out at the recent unilateral announcement of the Vietnam government that allows visa exemption for those who hold passports of countries like Belarus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italia, Japan, Korea, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden and UK and who wish to visit Vietnam. They also point out that according to the recent resolution of the Vietnam government, visitors from ASEAN Citizens of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia and Laos who are holding valid ordinary passports are also exempt from visa requirements and they will be allowed to stay in Vietnam for a period not exceeding 30 days. Philippines can stay for a maximum duration of 21 days and Brunei and Myanmar citizens can stay for a period up to 14 days.



For Media Contact:

Address: Room A2, 64 Nguyen Dinh Chieu street, Dakao ward, district 1, Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam.

Phone: +848 54043118

Url: http://visa-vietnam.org/
New research published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment documents animal species prevalent in the human-free Chernobyl Exclusion Zone  a 1,620-square-mile area of contamination around the Chernobyl nuclear plant  and supports the findings of a 2015 study that animal distribution is not influenced by radiation levels.

Following the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine, more than a hundred thousand people were permanently evacuated from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

There is continuing scientific debate surrounding the fate of wildlife that remained in the abandoned area.

The previous study, published in October 2015, determined populations were thriving in the area by counting animal tracks.

Dr. James Beasley from the University of Georgia and his colleagues used a more contemporary research method  remote camera stations  to substantiate previous findings.

The earlier study shed light on the status of wildlife populations in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, but we still needed to back that up, Dr. Beasley said.

For this study we deployed cameras in a systematic way across the entire Belarus section of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and captured photographic evidence because these are pictures that everyone can see.

The study was conducted over a five-week period at 94 sites using 30 cameras. A remote camera was set up on a tree or tree-like structure for seven days at each location. Each station was equipped with a fatty acid scent to attract the animals.

The team documented every species captured on the cameras and the frequency of their visits, specifically focusing on carnivores, because of their hierarchy on the food chain, said study first author Sarah Webster, also from the University of Georgia.

The scientists observed individuals of 14 mammalian species in total.

The most frequently seen were the gray wolf (Canis lupus), raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), Eurasian boar (Sus scrofa), and red fox (Vulpes vulpes).

All of these species were sighted at stations close to or within the most highly contaminated areas.

We didnt find any evidence to support the idea that populations are suppressed in highly contaminated areas, Dr. Beasley said.

What we did find was these animals were more likely to be found in areas of preferred habitat that have the things they need  food and water.

The study provides much needed verification, but further studies are needed to determine the density of wildlife and provide quantitative survival rates.

_____

Sarah C. Webster et al. Where the wild things are: influence of radiation on the distribution of four mammalian species within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, published online April 18, 2016; doi: 10.1002/fee.1227
The UNs climate science body will produce a special research report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius  an aspirational temperature target agreed by 195 countries last December.

The promise came about because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has never focused on this target in any of its periodic assessments of the latest climate science.

After a meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, last week (11-13 April), the IPCC agreed to a request made at the December 2015 Paris Conference of the Parties to provide such a report. The panel will review scientific evidence and literature around the aspirational limit on temperature rise, and deliver a comprehensive analysis of existing science and potential emission reduction pathways in 2018.

The report on 1.5 degrees of warming would be framed in the context of the Paris agreement, especially in the light of sustainable development and poverty eradication. Ramon Pichs-Madruga, IPCC

In 2010, the UN agreed to cap global warming at two degrees. But the additional aspirational goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels has now been agreed as the only safe level of warming for some of the worlds most vulnerable communities  in particular small island nations.

Ramon Pichs-Madruga, a vice-chair involved in the panels Sixth Assessment Report scheduled to be published in 2022, told SciDev.Net that the report on 1.5 degrees of warming would be framed in the context of the Paris agreement, especially in the light of sustainable development and poverty eradication.

Panel members said the report will include information to improve decision-making in political negotiations on climate change.

The decision to produce the report should invite and stimulate scientists worldwide to develop solutions to stop warming at 1.5 degrees, says Manfred Treber, senior advisor for climate and transport at sustainable development NGO Germanwatch.

Since the Fifth Assessment Report in 2014, there has been new science on 1.5 degree scenarios, says Treber, who attended the Nairobi meeting.

The proposed report comes in the wake of another report on the target, prepared by a scientific body within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which India and Saudi Arabia rejected during the Paris negotiations last December.

Along with the new 1.5 degree Celsius report, the IPCC agreed to prepare two other special reports on climate changes impacts: one largely dealing with oceans and the other mainly focusing on food security.

Furthermore, the panel signed an agreement with the UN Environment Programme to develop a library facility for IPCC authors, giving them access to relevant journals and publications at no cost to them, said IPCC chairman Hoesung Lee.

This will be particularly useful for authors from developing countries, he told a press conference.
[CAPE TOWN] Plans are under way to establish national and regional centres of excellence to perform essential heart surgery and train heart-related specialists in Africa.

Doctors with special training in heart diseases met last month (4-6 March) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to discuss how to implement the plan, which includes priority areas to control rheumatic heart disease (RHD), an acquired heart disease that commonly affect young women.

If African countries could consider coming together regionally, it will help us build these centres of excellence. Bongani Mayosi, Pan-African Society of Cardiology (PASCAR)

The experts hope to enhance access to reproductive health services to women with the disease and forge international partnerships to help roll out interventions.

Bongani Mayosi, a cardiology professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the head of Pan-African Society of Cardiology (PASCAR), said the plan was developed by PASCAR in consultation with the World Health Organisation and approved by the African Union.

According to Mayosi, RHD accounts for 1.4 million deaths worldwide a year, with most deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries.

Mayosi adds that establishment of the centres of excellence for cardiologists in Africa has become necessary after an assessment of patients with RHD in 12 African countries 

including Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mozambique and South Africa  found the neglect of the disease.

The centres aim to eliminate acute rheumatic fever (ARF) and rheumatic heart disease (RHD) on the continent.

Mayosi says funding needed to implement the plan are still being worked out.

In a study published in the Cardiovascular Journal of Africa on 12 January, PASCAR identified the need to create prospective disease registers at surveillance sites in Africa, measuring the disease burden and tracking of progress towards reducing RHD deaths by 25 per cent by the year 2025.

Mayosi, a co-author of the study, explains that there is need for decentralising technical expertise and technology for diagnosing and managing the condition.

If African countries could consider coming together regionally, it will help us build these centres of excellence, which will carry out research on diseases and find new vaccines, Mayosi tells SciDev.Net, adding that the centres could be set up along regional economic blocs to aid funding such institutions.

Liesl Zuhlke, a paediatric cardiologist at the South Africa-based Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital and president of the Paediatric Cardiac Society of South Africa, says the selected priority areas reflect the major care gaps in the diagnosis and treatment of rheumatic heart disease, while addressing the most important scientific and technical concerns.

This initiative is one which helps clinicians dealing with this disease on a daily basis and gives a real sense of hope that RHD could be eradicated in Africa, Zuhlke tells SciDev.Net.

This piece was produced by SciDev.Nets Sub-Saharan Africa English desk.
Global climate models today signify that 50 percent of small islands will become drier and the other 50 percent wetter by mid-century. However, the new study that was published recently argued that a more accurate estimate is at 73 percent.

Lead author Kris Karnauskas said in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor that the basic issue is that people need water wherever they live, whether in the middle of continental Australia or in the open ocean. However, he found out that several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports contained no data out in the ocean.

Rainfall data was accounted for but that is only one side of the coin and the other is evaporation, Dr. Karnauskas explains. The researches addressed the problem by using GCMs and applied a technique from civil engineering. The technique allows them to calculate the evaporation on an island without having other information inherent to the land.

Models provide myriad of atmospheric data that would affect the evaporation from the surface of the land such as temperature, wind and solar radiation. Scientists can learn from these figures and indirectly assess the rates of evaporation on small islands in varying climatic scenarios within the decades to come. These island areas are already facing considerable pressures, some of which are their own fault, others due to climate change.

The study has left aside population growth which can place more strain on natural resources, especially when it is expected to explode in some of these areas. Karnauskas said that small island nations cannot be held responsible for climate change because their contribution is negligible.

Researchers are hoping that this information will help out on the ground as the islands plan for their future needs, according to a feature by the Perf Science.
A new discovery will give hope for those who are suffering from spinal cord injuries. They have found a way to implant specialized embryonic stem cells into the affected spinal cord to let it develop new spinal cord tissues.

The researchers from Hokkaido University in Japan along with scientists from other countries may have discovered a way to help those with spinal cord injury. They first implanted specialized embryonic stem cells out on rats with severed spinal cord. Science Daily reported that the stem cells known as neural progenitor cells were extracted from rat embryos and directed to grow as spinal cord tissue.

The grafts promote extensive regeneration of the dissected nerve fibers which helped the rat improve their ability to move their forelimbs. The research team also used grafts of human neural stem cells with injured rats and had the same results, proving that there is a great chance that this method can work in every species.

The most important structure for the motor function in humans is known as the corticospinal tract (CST). It is a band of nerve fibers that moves from the brain through the brain stems and into the spinal cord. Injury to the CST can bring about paralysis. According to MedicalXpress, there have been a lot of researches that have shown the progress of using stem cells to rejuvenate other bands of nerve fibers in the spinal cord. However, injuries only cause include small gaps between the nerve in the bands of the bridging tissue. Lesions to nerve fibers in the CST involve larger gaps and no bands of bridging tissue have shown a huge resistant to regeneration.

The success of the trial is very promising for the treatment of humans with severe injury to the spinal cord. However, there is still a lot of work to be done before it can be interpreted into clinical treatments. More research is needed to decide the best cell type to be used for grafting and for setting up safe grafting methods.
Between China and North Korea is a 9,000-foot volcano that, like most of the Changbai mountains along the border, remains a mystery.

However, in the early 2000s, the Mount Paektu (also known as Baekdu) started rumbling, and with its previous eruption being one of the biggest in the last 1,000 years, the North Korean government took an unprecedented step to keep its people safe: it asked for help from the modern world.

The volcano's last eruption, said to have occurred somewhere around 946 AD, was one of the largest-known volcanic eruptions in the world. The Washington Post noted that the plumes of volcanic material blanketed the nearby landscape with snow-white ash for hundreds of miles.

Even though North Korea is finally opening its borders for scientists to study the massive volcano, it will still take years -- and intense scientific diplomacy -- to get them to the top of Mount Paektu and map up the layers of rock and magma underneath the surface. An international team of researchers from four countries -- North Korea, China, United States, and Britain -- have studied parts of the volcano and published their first ever survey in Science Advances.

Their findings include the lack of magma near the surface, which means that a catastrophic eruption is not yet near. However, they did find a layer of partially melted rock that they say needs to be studied more.

The mystery of Mount Paektu doesn't lie only in the seclusion of North Korea -- the geological forces that created it are as elusive, considerig that unlike other volcanoes, it is parked far from a tectonic plates -- where most of them tend to spring up due to collisions.

Paektu, on the other hand, may have formed due to a hot spot in the mantle, where a thick layer of hot rock churns below the surface. While that is a workable theory, it can also be formed by forces that need to be further investigated. If the volcano will erupt the same way it did in the past, James Gill, a professor from the University of California in Santa Cruz noted that Chinese, South Korean, and Japanese economies will all suffer.
Hannah Herbst, a 15-year-old and poised-beyond-her-years ninth-grader from Boca Raton, was able to catch the eye of President Obama during the White House Science Fair with her invention, the ocean energy probe. This technology can harness ocean currents to power a generator.

In a news flash on ABC News, President Barrack Obama stopped by Herbst's exhibit and even pulled a string which demonstrated electrical generation by a device with the use of sea water. This brilliant design was inspired by Herbst's Ethiopian pen pal as a means of providing aid to developing nations in finding an alternative stable power source with the use of untapped energy from ocean currents.

This young scientist intends to mass produce her one-in-a-million invention and give it away to needy communities in developing nations to power lights and even small medical devices as cited on Tech Insider. People are noticing this.

Moreover, Herbst said that she was not really interested in science until the seventh grade. That is the time when Herbst's father, the College of Education's Dean at Florida Atlantic University, signed her up for a summer engineering and technology camp. She was nevertheless far more interested in the performing arts.

"I got there, and I was the only girl," Herbst recalls. During the first day, the participants were told that they would create a robot. "I was so intimidated," she remembers. However, by the end of the summer, she was confident how to put it together all by herself.

In October last year, Hannah Herbst won $25,000 in a contest sponsored by 3M and Discovery. Named America's 2015 Top Young Scientist, she was mentored by Jeffrey Emslander who is a 3M scientist. His inventions have tremendously helped in the reduction of emissions to the environment and promoted less use of energy in the making of products. Herbst attends at the Alexander D. Henderson University School.
Kyushu Island in Japan was struck by a strong 7.3 magnitude earthquake last late Thursday. This was followed by the biggest hit near the Kumamoto City on Saturday. There were about 42 people who were killed, and major companies were forced to close their factories. Survivors queued for food as they were unable to return home yet.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that they were still people who were missing, and they would make efforts to rescue and save the people. He further said that they prioritized human lives and declared the region a disaster zone at the moment.

According to News Daily, the Japanese market fell over 3 percent on Monday. The Nikkei stock index had 3.4 percent lower. Major companies such as Honda, Sony and Toyota were closed, disrupting the supply chains across the nation.

There are food shortages as some roads remained closed due to landslides. "Yesterday, I ate just one piece of tofu and a rice ball," said the mayor of one of the places affected by the quake. He further said that they were worried about food.

The Kumamoto airport was damaged, and all commercial flights were cancelled. The bullet train service of the region was also suspended.

According to CBC News, the Japanese media reported that about almost 200,000 homes were without electricity. The water system also failed. As seen in the news footage, the people were nestled in blankets on the floor of evacuation centers.

Japan's only operating nuclear station is located in Kumamoto region. It is declared safe. The region is also known as the manufacturing hub. The Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga explained that the government will take necessary measures to support the companies that were affected by the calamity. This includes collecting $3.24 billion into the reserve funds.

The Kumamoto officials declared 42 people dead and 9 still missing. There were also 190 people who are in serious condition while 110,000 people have been evacuated.
DARLINGTON, S.C. -- Darlington County Coroner Todd Hardee has identified the driver killed when his vehicle crashed into the side of the Darlington County courthouse building Monday morning.

Hardee said the driver was Richard Ryan Cowick, 42, of Darlington.

The crash occurred around 4 a.m. on Monday when Cowick's pickup truck hit the side of the Darlington County courthouse. Cowick was found dead when firefighters arrived.

When the truck crashed into the building, it ignited, causing smoke and fire damage to the courthouse. An engineer was brought on the scene Monday to determine whether the building was structurally sound and safe enough for employees to enter.

The building was closed Monday but reopened Tuesday with normal operation hours. Investigators from the Darlington County Sheriff's Office, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division and South Carolina Highway Patrol are working to determine the cause and nature of the crash.
BENNETTSVILLE, S.C. -- The Marlboro County Sheriff's Office is asking the public for help to identify a suspect involved in a tractor theft on Monday morning.

Deputies were called to the area of Powerline Rd. near Marlboro County High School where a person witnessed a tractor being driven by an unknown person around 5 a.m.

According to a release from the Marlboro County Sheriff's Office, the witness asked the suspect a few questions about the tractor and who he worked for. The suspect could not answer the questions and he fled on foot.

The suspect was described to investigators by the witness as an American Indian male who was about six feet tall, 160 pounds and wearing a Carhartt jacket and dark work pants. A forensic artist from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division met with the witness to create a composite drawing of the suspect.

According to the release, the tractor had recently been stolen from a farm company on Fayetteville Ave. Sheriff's investigators collected DNA evidence from the tractor that will be analyzed by SLED.

Deputies said this person may be a suspect in similar crimes within Marlboro County and surrounding counties. Anyone with information about the suspect or the case is asked to call the Marlboro County Sheriff's Office at 843-479-5605 and ask to speak to an investigator. Caller information will be kept confidential.
LAKE CITY, S.C.  A new organization in Lake City is focusing on marketing the downtown area to draw more visitors to the city and expand the opportunities to promote tourism.

The downtown merchants association held its inaugural meeting in late January at The Inn at the Crossroads and its second meeting March 3 at Table 118.

Spearheaded by Rob Bockman and Hannah Davis, the association is set to be a nonprofit with a specific focus: marketing.

We want to make sure that the businesses have access and know about the opportunities available to them, Davis said. We want to make sure that they are aware of literally everything that they can do to help facilitate people coming to their businesses, and were here to help connect businesses to resources.

Part of the goal is to help train people how to be more effective marketers of businesses, Bockman said.

More than a dozen local and area business owners attended the two meetings; the next is tentatively scheduled for April 7 at a to-be-determined location.

To help develop what will become the mission and goals of the organization with its founding members, Bockman said, they already reached out to the community with a short online survey.

In addition, Gregg Alexander has joined the organization as the downtown Lake City business liaison.

Im going to be a voice for Main Street, Alexander said. I am going to find out the needs and complaints, whatever the businesses need, and get it to the proper places whether it be the city, the (Lake City Partnership Council) or other resource.

The association has set up an office in the recently renovated Whitehead Infirmary on East Main Street, where Alexander can meet with business owners. He can be reached at 843-374-0266, ext. 105.

Alexander said that although Brockman, Davis, and he are working on the associations development, ultimately it will be the members who decide its by-laws and direction.

We want this organization to govern itself, Alexander said. We want (the business owners) to elect their officers and them to make the decisions, set the goals.

That process will begin with the next meeting, he said.

The organization also has established a separate entity  a destination marketing organization or DMO  that will be able to take advantage of hospitality tax dollars that can only be used for marketing and will be the organization that can apply for DMO grants and help funnel those dollars down to the merchants association and be able to help them market, Davis said. The DMO has to have an organization like the downtown merchants association to help funnel those dollars.

Davis also said that the accommodations tax dollars available to Lake City in the past have been nonexistent, because the city has passed the threshold to receive funds just once  a single year in the 1980s or 90s. Davis expects more money to filter down to the city as tourism takes hold and establishments such as The Inn at the Crossroads continue to develop.

Now that we have this new hotel, we will be able to significantly boost that up, Davis said. She added that she expects that the city will meet the threshold to received accommodation tax dollars in 2016.

And thats where the city would then have the opportunity to deliver funding to the destination marketing organization to help with bringing tourism to the area, Davis said. Things are in place right now to really help bolster the tourism economy here in Lake City, and we just want to be able to make sure that we are prepared for that.

Davis said the association will also be working side-by-side with the Greater Lake City Chamber of Commerce to promote tourism in the city and noted that the two organizations have two different and distinct missions.

Their job is to encourage new business and keep businesses open, Davis said. Our job is to do something from the tourism side. We are more focused on the consumer end of things versus the actual business end.

Gregg Moore, president of the chamber, said the 100-year-old organization looks to support other organizations that have the citys best interests as their mission.

The struggles of a small business are not exclusive to Lake City, Moore said. As a whole, (Lake City) business has increased. There have been some businesses that have failed, and there have been some that have flourished.

Moore said the chambers membership is currently seeing a dramatic upswing in numbers with 20 additional paid members over this time last year.

We are at a four-year high at this point, said Moore, who added that membership stands at 179. He expects to break the 200-member mark in coming weeks.
FLORENCE, S.C.  React. That is part of a hospitals mantra.

Juggling new demands that are part of the Affordable Care Act with a desire to meet changing patient needs, the infrastructure, staff and programming at the Pee Dees three main hospitals are rarely static.

Carolina Pines CEO Tim Browne has made it a point to expand the hospitals offerings since being named to the post in 2011. In the past two years, the hospital has hired two new pulmonologists, two new cardiologists and a new ortho/sports medicine doctor.

What we have focused on is building up the specialties in our hospital to support our primary care base, he said. We have purposely charted a pathway to have more specialists here.

But Carolina Pines isnt immune to the physician shortages seen across the country  a trend compounded by the aging of America.

To fill the gap, youre going to see more and more mid-level providers  nurse practitioners, physicians assistants  working in the health care arena, Browne said.

At Carolinas Hospital System in Florence, CEO Darcy Craven echoed concerns about staffing.

The biggest challenge for every hospital in America going forward is physician recruitment, he said.

In particular, Craven points to the need to improve physician retention by expanding residency opportunities.

We need to improve the offerings in South Carolina, he said.

This year, Carolinas and McLeod Regional Medical Center are taking steps to address the problem by partnering with the University of South Carolina School of Medicine.

Third- and fourth-year medical students from the University of South Carolina will be starting at both hospitals in July, Craven said.

Other factors play into recruitment, too. Outside of the hospital walls, quality of life is a large factor in attracting physicians.

In Florence, the downtown revitalization is key to us recruiting top-notch physicians to this area, Craven said.

McLeod Administrator Marie Segars said the area is starting to sell itself.

I used to, when Id recruit, we did a lot of talking about what were close to: were close to the beach, were close to Charleston, were close to Columbia.

I find it less and less necessary to do that. I find that we have opportunities right here in town, she said.

But with concrete progress made on the ground in the Florence community, the near future still contains question marks.

If you look at the way theyre going to roll out the ACA from 2014 through 2017 and 18, theres a lot of things that you know its on the horizon, but the mechanics of it and the sheer logistics of it are still unknown at this time about how its going to affect your organization, Browne said.

Changes, though, are not limited to government-mandated ones.

Last year, Carolinas opened a center for joint and spine care, with a focus on hip and knee replacements. Thats something new in this community. Craven said.

Conway was the closest place people could get a real, true destination center for joint replacements, Craven said.

Carolinas instituted a 45-minute ER wait-time pledge and reduced hospital infection rates. McLeod utilized principles from Toyotas manufacturing operations when it sought to improve efficiency in its emergency department.

We did a year-long project in the ER, and we were able to trim about 40 percent off the wait time, and we were able to cut the treatment time in about half, Segars said.

Carolinas is upgrading its CT scanners and MRI machine.

Its really bringing some cutting-edge technology to Florence, Craven said.

McLeod points to a state-of-the-art Da Vinci robot that allows for minimally invasive surgeries.

Carolinas started offering long-term drug rehab care and opened a diabetes education center. Facility upgrades at Carolinas totaled about $14 million last year. In the near future, Craven hopes to renovate the emergency room and womens center. McLeod, too, is eyeing improvements to these hospital spaces.

McLeod has put an emphasis on improving the flow of patients and visitors into the hospital. In the past year and a half, the hospital opened two parking garages and moved away from having a single hospital entrance to having multiple entryways.

Over the next year or so, youll see us continue to make entry into facilities much easier, Segars said.

At Carolina Pines, Browne remains focused on improvement.

Weve made a lot of strides in raising the bar on the level of services, raising the bar on customer experience, raising the bar on our clinical outcomes in preparation for all the mandates from the government, he said. Ive been really pleased with the progress of our health care system over the past 2 1/2 years.
ELKO  At the end of this month two local ladies will head to the Salt Lake City International Airport, board a plane to Paris, and then travel to St. Jean, France, where they will walk over 500 miles along the Camino de Santiago.

The Camino de Santiago, or the Way of Frances as it is sometimes known, began as a pilgrimage route in the 10th century. The remains of St. James are thought to be located near the end of the trail.

This was seen as an alternative to walking to Rome. Pilgrims start at the village of St. Jean, and culminate the experience in Santiago, Spain.

These days the pilgrim experience is undertaken for more than just spiritual reasons. The history and culture of the region attracts many. Others strive for a sense of great accomplishment along a route that is visually spectacular. The Camino de Santiago was designated a World UNESCO Heritage Site in 1993.

The spiritual aspect touched me, said soon to be walker Sue Craft. But, I am really interested in the adventure.

Craft heard about the trail from Natural Nutrition owner Debbie Pawelek. Pawelek recommended the book Walking Home by Sonia Choquette. After reading it Craft felt called to make the pilgrimage.

She later discovered that her friend Jamie Metz felt the same way.

One of the main reasons I am doing this is so I can be a better traveler, said Metz.

Approximately 250,000 pilgrims walk the trail or a portion of it each year. They stay in hostels in convents and monasteries for $10 a night.

People love the pilgrims and really help them, explained Metz. They become engaged with the pilgrims.

This journey is not taken lightly as both women have been physically preparing themselves for the last year for a 15- to 20-mile walk each day for 35 days. They may take a rest and spend a couple nights in one place but, for the most part, this trek is a straightforward goal. Metz said she has totally given up using a car unless she has to go out of town.

In order to approximate the experience of the travelers of old the women are taking packs that weigh only about 15 pounds as suggested in the guidebooks. Most of this will be taken up by a sleeping bag and a change of clothing.

This traveling by faith was the original pilgrim way. They relied on the help of others along the path to enlightenment.

Metz and Craft will enjoy a full dinner with their convent and monastery stays and they will purchase other food along the way as needed.

Two extra things they will be carrying are cellphones and their pilgrim passports that all travelers carry. At the end of the trail they will receive a stamp in the passport that verifies their endeavor.

Metz and Craft plan to walk an extra 60 miles to the Atlantic Ocean where they will relax and enjoy the sea.

This is a reason to be spontaneous, Craft smiled.

Buen Camino, I said as they left the interview. It literally means good path, but figuratively translates to recognition of the personal journey to perfection of both mind and soul.
Elko native Grant Gerber spent his life serving his community and nation. He held a great appreciation for the country that we live in and the freedoms that we enjoy, noted longtime friend Demar Dahl.

Aaron Grant Gerber was born in Elko, June 11, 1942, to Elko County natives Claude and Laura Gerber. He lived in Metropolis and Starr Valley, graduating from Wells High School in 1960. Gerber enlisted in August 1967, serving two years as an intelligence officer in Vietnam. He was honorably discharged and rose to the rank of captain in the Utah National Guard.

Grant met and married Lenore Clawson Feb. 2, 1969. They had six children: Boyd, Sharli, Travis, Dallas, Josiah and Zachary. In 1972, he graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in political science and earned his law degree from Tulsa University in 1978.

In Elko, Gerber practiced law and became an activist against federal land management, fighting on behalf of ranchers and others.

Grant was a strong advocate for private property rights related to resource management of our rangelands, stated the Nevada Cattlemens Association. Beginning with the Kelly Springs dispute, Gerber organized campaigns such as the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade, the Klamath Bucket Brigade, and most recently Smoked Bear, drawing attention to the public land controversies.

Gerber was also involved in several Elko organizations. He was on the board of directors of the Northeastern Nevada Museum, participated in the Great Basin College Foundation, and was a member of Veterans of Foreign Wars Honor Guard. In 2006, he and wife Lenore served a two-year humanitarian mission to Egypt that helped improve medical conditions in the nation.

In 2012, Gerber was elected Elko County Commissioner. Continuing to bring awareness to land and water rights issues, he began the Grass March Cowboy Express, riding on horseback, to deliver petitions from concerned ranchers and farmers about increasing regulation of land by the government. Riding from from Bodega Bay, California, to Washington, D.C, he sustained head injuries from a fall, yet he completed the journey and called it a success as the issue gained national attention.

During his return home, persistent headaches prompted Gerber to seek treatment. He died in Salt Lake City on Oct. 25, 2014. Many paid tribute for his dedication to the land dispute and his fighting spirit.
ELKO  Opportunistic weeds pose major challenges to those managing public lands, ranches, farms and other landscapes. University of Nevada Cooperative Extension, in collaboration with other partners, will present the annual Weed Extravaganza April 26-28 to help Nevadans deal with this years weed challenges with the latest information available.

Invasive weeds can out-compete native vegetation, crops and livestock forage, said Natural Resources Extension Specialist Kent McAdoo, the event coordinator. They can also pose fire hazards, lead to erosion and water quality issues, and impact wildlife habitat. Its important that everyone has the latest information to identify and control these weeds to minimize damage to our lands, wildlife, crops and economy.

The workshop will be offered April 26-28 at the California Trail Interpretive Center, eight miles west of Elko. The workshop will include a wide range of topics aimed at giving land managers, ranchers and agricultural producers the latest information on controlling invasive weeds.

The event begins with the Elko County Weed Summit on April 26, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. This years featured speaker is Dave Stewart, with BioWest Ag Solutions, who will discuss Bacterial Treatment for Cheatgrass Control. There will be information on weed regulations, weed-free certification and understanding root systems, from the Nevada Department of Agriculture, Nevada Weed Management Association, Bureau of Land Management and University of Nevada Cooperative Extension. McAdoo will host an afternoon field trip demonstrating how to identify weeds during their vulnerable growth stages.

As part of the Weed Extravaganza, the Pesticide Applicator Training/Weed Identification and Management Workshop will be offered the next day, April 27, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. This workshop is tailored for those seeking restricted-use pesticide certification. Topics will include weed identification and management, vertebrate pest management, pesticide regulations, pollinator protection, recordkeeping and equipment calibration, and worker protection.

The April 26 and 27 workshops are free, and participants can earn up to 14 Continuing Education Units. Attendees are encouraged to RSVP to Candie Kevan at kevanc@unce.unr.edu or 738-7291 by Thursday so that complimentary lunches can be provided for all participants on April 26.

Certification exams will be conducted by the Nevada Department of Agriculture at 7:15 a.m., April 28. The exam fee is $50 at the door. Nevada Pesticide Applicator Training Manual sets may be obtained free online at http://www.unce.unr.edu/programs/sites/pesticide/.

The California Trail Interpretive Center is located just off I-80, at Hunter Exit 292. The Weed Extravaganza is sponsored by the Humboldt Watershed Cooperative Weed Management Area, Northeastern Nevada Stewardship Group, Nevada Department of Agriculture and University of Nevada Cooperative Extension. Persons in need of special accommodations or assistance should call at least three days prior to the event.

For more information, call 738-7291.
Houston: The first ice-class floating storage and offloading system (FSO) to be completed at a Caspian Sea shipyard and deployed for service in the Caspian Sea is to be issued ABS classification. The Yuri Korchagin is set to be towed out of Baku for installation, hook-up and commissioning this week. It is destined for the Yuri Korchagin Field in the Russian sector of the Caspian where it will operate for Lukoil.



The FSO hull was constructed in two longitudinal halves by Keppel Singmarine in Singapore and was towed through the Volga-Don River Canal and assembled at Keppel Fels' Caspian Shipyard Company (CSC) in Baku, Azerbaijan. According to ABS District Manager Simon Jones, the size limitation of the Canal dictated that the unit be constructed in two modules for import into the region. The two hull sections were aligned and joined in drydock at the Caspian shipyard. The helideck and accommodation quarters, as well as other equipment, were loaded alongside the hull sections and also assembled at CSC.



ABS was involved in the project from the outset, continuing through initial construction to assembly and final delivery, working closely with the Russian Maritime Register of Shipping (RS).



The unit has been built to the ABS class notation A1, Floating Storage and Offloading System, Ice Class C0, AMCCU, FL(20). The unit is 132.8m in length, 32m in width has a depth of 15.7m. It has a fatigue life of 20 years and is dual classed with RS. The FSO can withstand ice conditions of minus 20 degrees Celsius and ice thickness of 0.6 meters.



Russia's Lukoil is targeting December to start commercial oil production. When in operation it will be the largest FSO in the Caspian Sea. ABS Senior Surveyor Donald Dunlop, the project surveyor from Azerbaijan, reports ABS will be in attendance during the installation of the unit and will also class the mooring system once completed.



ABS has helped other operators meet the challenges of Caspian operating requirements, most notably Maersk's first semi-submersible rig, DSS-20-CAS-M and the ABS-classed Parker Rig 257, the world's first arctic-class drill barge, operating in the shallow waters of the Northern third of the Caspian. The classification society has a robust ice program within its Corporate Research and Product Development Department, which aims to develop state-of-the-art methodologies and tools for assessment of ships and offshore structures operating in ice. [02/09/09]

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Manila: A rescue operation is under way in the Philippines after a ferry belonging to Aboitiz Transport System sank with more than 960 people on board, reports the BBC. Latest reports say 900 people have now been rescued from the SuperFerry 9 but five people have died and more than 60 are still unaccounted for.



The passenger ferry was sailing off the southern Zamboanga peninsula some 860km south of the Philippine capital, Manila, when it began listing. It issued a distress call, prompting the coastguard, the navy, the air force and private boats to help.



The Philippine Defence Minister, Gilberto Teodoro, told the BBC that the rescue operation had been helped by good weather and the presence of other vessels close to the site.



The SuperFerry 9 was said to be carrying 847 passengers and 117 crew plus four sea marshals on its journey from General Santos to Iloilo.



A statement issued on the SuperFerry website said that the ship began listing to the right at 0230 on Sunday (1830 GMT Saturday). Passengers were told to don life jackets while the captain tried to correct the list, the statement said.



When the captain determined that the list was irreversible, he gave the order to abandon ship, and life rafts were launched. The statement said that the crew were the last to leave the ship at 0842 local time, when the ferry tilted and sank. Those rescued were transferred to navy ships, two nearby civilian vessels and other smaller boats which had responded to the Mayday call.



The Philippine air force and army have sent helicopters to help in the search for those still missing. Admiral Wilfredo Tamayo, of the Philippine coastguard, said he hoped those unaccounted for had been rescued by a fleet of fishing vessels and small boats.



The cause of the list is as yet unknown. The weather was reported to be fair at the time of the incident. [06/09/09]

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London: The Baltic Exchange has called on the European Commission (EC) not to lose sight of the benefits of over-the-counter (OTC) trading in the freight derivatives market and warns that over-zealous regulation could drive business away from Europe.



In a response to the EC's consultation paper Enhancing the Resilience of OTC Derivatives Markets, the Baltic Exchange argued that the freight derivatives market has evolved successfully and in the direction desired by regulators thanks to an evolutionary rather than prescriptive approach. The freight derivatives market already sees around 90% of all trades cleared and is provided with independent forward pricing and volume data by the Baltic Exchange.



The Baltic warned against a move towards the imposition of exchange traded contracts by regulators, noting that market forces should be allowed to judge when the benefits of exchange or other electronic trading outweigh the benefits of OTC trading.



"OTC markets allow brokers and traders together to evolve contracts which meet their needs. There is considerable natural pressure for standardisation because using a standard instrument reduces liquidity risks and opens up access for example to clearing. It also offers the likelihood of finer pricing in a brokered market since the pricing of a standard contract is more likely to be subject to market-place competition."

Responding to calls for greater transparency in derivatives markets, the Baltic Exchange wrote: "It is unclear why more transparency of trading activity could help instil better due diligence and more efficiency in the markets."



It added: "In the commodity markets and specifically the freight market, private unregulated companies transact business with other private companies and often choose to keep this business confidential. Not only are the benefits of greater transparency [of this nature] unclear, they are probably unattainable as other jurisdictions, Switzerland, Singapore etc are attractive alternative locations for market participants. Over-zealous regulatory intervention could easily drive business away from the EU." [05/09/09]

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Dhaka: Import of scrap-ships in Bangladesh doubled in the last fiscal year due to sharp fall in its prices in the international market boosting the supply of raw materials to the country's steel sector, writes The Financial Times. Local importers purchased 2.2m tonnes of old ships mostly big sized in 2008-09 fiscal against 0.97m tonnes over the same period in 2007-08, according to statisitics.



"We've imported ships of over 2.2m tonnes last year. This is a record in the history of Bangladesh's ship-breaking industry," Enamul Hoque, a senior consultant of Bangladesh Ship Breakers Association (BSBA) told the FE. The number of ships imported during the last fiscal year was 193 against 120 in 2007-08, he said.



Currently, an old ship costs around US$300 a tonne in the international market, which was $750 before the recession hit the globe in 2008.



Enamul said local importers have added 19 more shipyards taking the number to 69 to cope with the increased number of old ships being imported in the country.



"Our importers are beaching four to five ships each week and are finishing cutting the same number a week," Zafar Ahmed, president of the BSBA told the FE.



Earlier, there were only 36 active ship breaking yards in Sitakundu, 20 kilometres north of the port city Chittagong, which dismantled 110 ships on an average every year. "We now dismantle nearly 60% of the ships sent to scrap-yards across the globe," said Ahmed.



India breaks around 1.5m tonnes a year followed by China 1.3m tonnes, Pakistan 1.0m tonnes and Turkey around 0.60m tonnes. [14/09/09]





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Buenos Aires: NYK Line's Asia to East Coast of South America (ECSA) service is being diverted from Buenos Aires to Montevideo due to a stevedores strike in Argentina's main container port.



The dispute clocked up a tenth day of strike action today as two rival dockers' unions battle it out over crane drivers' responsibilities. They are also seeking better pay and conditions but in the meantime carriers - including NYK Line, Hyundai, K Line and PIL - are having to leave behind export cargo and are diverting Argentine imports to the port of Montevideo, across the River Plate, in Uruguay.



It is understood around 30 vessel calls have been affected so far and around 4,000 extra export containers are piling up in the Buenos Aires Puerto Nuevo port area.

Workers at Puerto Nuevo - which includes the Hutchsion-operated BACTSA facility, DP World-operated TRP and also Terminal Four, run by APM Terminals - downed tools and stopped work, or began working to rule, initially over a dispute between the stevedores SUPA union and the Guinchelos union, that represents crane drivers.



And, according to a senior manager at Multimar, the shipping agency that is wholly owned by NYK Lines, the dispute - which started in the TRP terminal but then spread to Bactsa and T4 - has brought Puerto Nuevo to its knees.



"It has been going on for over a week now and we have cancelled two of our weekly calls and just unloaded the containers in Montevideo," the Multimar manager told Seatrade Asia Online. "I think many other carriers are doing the same."



NYK Line is in a joint ECSA to Asia service with Hyundai, K Line and PIL.

Argentine carrier Maruba - which also calls at TRP - and Maersk Line, which uses T4, have also been badly affected but German carrier Hamburg Sud has not been affected at all as its ships call at the Exolgan terminal which is 20 km away on the outskirts of BA and does not have the same unions operating there.



The Multimar manager added that the Argentine Labour Ministry seems about to make a ruling that crane drivers must belong to the Guinchelos union, and that should help bring the dispute to a close. [28/08/09]





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Shanghai: Ship deliveries from China exceeded those from Japan in the first six months of the year for the first time. According to figures from Clarkson Research, China's share climbed to 23% in the first half, compared with Japan's 22%.



The year as a whole will go down in shipbuilding's stormy history as a year of change, according to Clarkson analysts. At the start of the year, the world's shipyards had an all-time record book totalling 595m dwt although it is not clear, as yet, how much will actually be built.



Clarkson's analysis shows that Japanese builders have adopted a different strategy to shipyards in Europe. Deploying so-called "improvement engineering", Japanese yards have radically reduced building costs of standard ships by building to a strict specification, says Clarkson, and bulk carriers now represent two thirds of Japan's orderbook. In contrast, European yards have opted to build "hi-tech" ships such as cruise vessels, chemical tankers, LNG carriers and other specialised vessels including dredgers.



Now the race is on between China and South Korea. In the second quarter, China's output hit a peak of 2.48m compensated gross tons, more than 10% ahead of Japan's 2.2m cgt. But 2010 could see Chinese production reaching 4m cgt per quarter, lagging not far begind South Korea's 5m cgt.



Market sources point out that more new tonnage is being delayed than previously thought, though actual volumes are not clear. The volume of cancellations, which actually mean contract defaults, is also a closely guarded secret between shipyards and their customers. The key issue is the global trend in deliveries.



"During the last economic downturn in 2002," Clarkson says in its most recent weekly report, "world shipbuilding deliveries average 4.5m cgt per quarter. But currently production is 11m cgt per quarter, a 244% increase."





However, some financiers are warning that the worst of the ship finance crisis is still to come. As much as half of the world's orderbook could as yet not be financed, some believe, leaving a strong possibility that there could be many more contract defaults to come. "As much as 30% of the orderbook may be cancelled or defaulted upon," says one source. [07/09/09]









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Have you noticed something different about the Trump campaign? It's been more than two weeks since the last really outrageous thing the Republican front-runner has said or done. In the old days -- say, a month ago -- Trump would have set off multiple hair-burning controversies in the same period. But now -- nothing.

It's not an accident. When it comes to outrageousness, Donald Trump has dialed it back, on purpose. And indications from Trump world are that the new pattern will continue. (An obvious warning: It might not; by the time this article appears, it's always possible Trump could do or say something so shocking that the campaign is rocked for days.)

Why the change? Ask people knowledgeable about the campaign, and they'll say the addition of new staff has had a quick effect. Pushed by his children, Trump has expanded his super-tight circle of advisers with the addition of Paul Manafort, and now others, too. The sense is that Trump actually can listen, both to advice on what to say and not to say. The message has evolved; he is a better candidate than the man who messed up right and left just a few weeks ago.

With his latest crusade against "voterless victory," Trump is scoring points again, not so much against Ted Cruz directly, but against the Republican establishment -- always Trump's most comfortable target. For Trump, Cruz's vulnerability is not that he is part of the establishment, but that he has gotten in bed with the establishment as the only way to win. So the belief is that Trump's fight against the Republican National Committee and insider campaign rules pays off everywhere -- especially if Trump is not making critical unforced errors at the same time.

To see the changes in the Trump campaign, look at the four-week period between March 22, when Trump began to blow up his own campaign, and now. On the night of March 22, Trump saw a low-budget, anti-Trump Super PAC ad featuring a photo of his wife. He went straight to Twitter. "Lyin' Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad," Trump tweeted. "Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!" Not content to stop there, Trump made things infinitely worse the next night, March 23, when he retweeted a meme from one of his followers that featured a glamour shot of Mrs. Trump next to an unflattering photo of Mrs. Cruz.

It's a simple rule of politics that you don't attack your opponent's wife -- or husband, for that matter, unless his name is Bill Clinton. Trump had trampled all over the rule, and the blowback was intense. In the days before the April 5 Wisconsin primary, Trump's rivals -- not just the Cruz campaign but Wisconsin's formidable conservative talk-radio lineup -- used it over and over against Trump.

But Trump was about to make things even worse. During a March 30 interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Trump said that, were abortion to be banned, there should be "some form of punishment" for women who have abortions. Angering both pro-lifers and pro-choicers, Trump then issued multiple clarifications of his position. The controversy dragged on for days.

Add to that Trump's attack on Gov. Scott Walker, and the Trump campaign was done in Wisconsin; Cruz beat Trump 48 percent to 35 percent. The newly energized #NeverTrump forces saw the state as a turning point which gave them a real shot at keeping Trump short of the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the GOP nomination.

And then something changed. On March 29, as things were falling apart in Wisconsin, Trump announced the hiring of Manafort, the veteran Republican operative. Manafort ostensibly joined to serve as Trump's convention manager, but his role quickly expanded, in part at the expense of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who at the time was facing possible criminal prosecution for a March 8 incident in which he grabbed a female reporter's arm after a press conference in Florida. (Authorities in Florida announced on Thursday that the matter would be dropped.)

It took Manafort a few days to get up to speed. But since his arrival, Trump has been remarkably outrage-free. He's still giving the same basic performance in his rallies, but he has been a little more discriminating in his press appearances -- two straight weeks without appearing on a Sunday chat show -- and has stayed away from doing obviously dumb things, like attacking his opponent's wife. The campaign hopes the bad period is over.

Now the question is whether Trump has the discipline to stay on a relatively error-free course. He had some very good luck when the GOP primary schedule took him from his disastrous performance in Wisconsin to his best state of all, New York, and then to other friendly northeastern states. But Trump will need more than luck to suppress the impulses that have gotten him into trouble in the past. He'll need to be a better candidate.
Shanghai: Northeast China port operator Dalian Port (PDA) Co Ltd said its operations had improved in recent months as the global economy starts to recover and trade picks up, writes Reuters.



The company's total port handling throughput rose 12 percent in January-August, after a 5 percent drop in January alone, Chairman Sun Hong told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Dalian.



But container throughput was flat in the year through August, he added.



As both container and port handling throughput improve month to month, Dalian Port expects its second-half revenue to improve on the first-half's 4 percent drop.



The company is also moving ahead with investment in a number of infrastructure-related projects, as China's 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus program drives demand for such new work.



Dalian Port is building a 1.25 million cubic metre oil tank with CNPC, the state-owned parent of PetroChina, and expects to complete construction this year and start filling the tank with oil in 2010, Sun said.



Dalian Port is also investing more in iron ore and oil handling infrastructure, though it is cutting its spending in containers, he added. [11/09/09]





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Dubai: DP World, the world's fourth biggest container terminal operator, is to operate Brazil's largest private multi-modal seaport after joining hands with Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht to invest in the project.

DP World and Odebrecht together acquired a majority stake in Embraport. Phase one development of the project is valued at around $500 million (Dh1.83 billion).

When asked by Gulf News how much DP World has invested towards the $500 million, officials said that information is not being released.

Embraport (Brazilian Port Terminal Company) is being built next to Porto de Santos, an existing port facility in Santos, near Sao Paulo. Porto de Santos is Brazil's largest container port, with 90 per cent of its cargo destined for the local Sao Paulo market.

There are already rail and road connections to the project site.

The $500 million first phase of the terminal development is scheduled to be finished in 2012, with a capacity of around 1m teu and will be operated by DP World - its first project in Brazil.

Once complete, the project will be able to ship more than 1.5m teu and about two billion litres of ethanol. [31/08/09]

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Milford Haven: A new liquefied natural gas receiving terminal in the UK that is jointly owned by Malaysia's Petronas, BG and site owner 4Gas, has successfully completed its commissioning phase and has now begun commercial operation.



Dragon LNG's reception and regasifiication plant is located at Waterston, Milford Haven in South West Wales and can supply up to 5% of current UK demand with the ability to send out 6 billion cubic metres of natural gas per annum to the UK's National Transmission System. It forms part of the country's long-term strategy to reduce dependence on dwindling North Sea gas supplies without becoming wholly reliant on imports from Russia.



BG and Petronas between them have contracted for the full capacity at the site over the next 20 years. During its commissioning phase Dragon LNG received trail cargoes off both MOSS-type and membrane LNG carriers, allowing BG and Petronas to bring in LNG using either type of vessel.



A larger South Hook terminal designed to receive LNG cargoes from Qatar aboard Q-flex and Q-max (membrane) LND carriers is located nearby in Milford Haven, able to supply nearer 20% of the current UK requirement. [03/09/09]

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Speaking at the Singapore Maritime Institute (SMI) Seminar 2016: Smart Ships Poulsson said that with the impact we have seen from smart phones, and the upcoming trend of smart houses and cars, it was time for the maritime community to start embracing the concept of smart ships.

He noted that the industry had in general focused on optimising existing technologies and short-term measures, something which was understandable came against a background of mere survival as is the case for many at present.

What we need is a game changing approach for a new era of shipping and sustainability.

There was a similar message from Brijesh Tewarim, principal specialist, marine and consultancy services for Lloyds Register Asia who said, Shipping has till today remained traditional but that has to change. Smart ships would see fundamental changes in vessel design and building.

With shipping facing a shortage in skilled manpower with seafaring knowledge and experience smart ships could help address this issue

We should view this situation as a driver for automation andautonomy in the form of intelligent and smart ships. With the removal of people from tasks that are of lower value and dangerous in nature, we can better optimise manpower resource while enhancing productivity and safety, Poulsson said.

But the human element will remain an important one. Our vision for autonomous smart ships should not be one that is fully mechanised but one with a human heart. The human element should never be removed entirely from the equation. Instead, it must remain at the core of smart ship technologies and operations, he added.
Singapore: Cardiff-based Graig Ship Management has established a new company in

Singapore. Graig Services (Singapore) Pte Ltd will provide ship

management, crewing and other services across Asia. Geoff Hutcheon has

been appointed General Manager.



"Singapore is one of the world's leading maritime hubs and the ideal

place for the Graig Group to expand its Asian footprint," says Hutcheon.

"We will be building a significant presence here to provide technical

and commercial ship management and other innovative services to clients

from the Middle East and across Asia, in addition to expanding the

global network which Graig Ship Management puts at the service of its

global clients."



Geoff Hutcheon has extensive experience as an engineer at sea and as a

project manager, surveyor and newbuilding supervisor ashore. Qualified

with both a First Class Engineer's certificate and an MBA, he has been

most recently been supervising the building of Diamond bulk carriers in

Vietnam for Graig China.



The Graig Group is a broad-based international shipowning and shipping

services group delivering technical and commercial ship management,

newbuilding supervision, lay-up services, ship design, ship owning and

ship finance to global clients who appreciate personal service.



Graig has been building, managing and owning ships since 1919. Today it

provides technical management and crewing for a mixed fleet of vessels

on behalf of a number of owners. It has supervised over 120 newbuildings

for itself and major shipowners. It develops innovative designs such as

the Diamond bulk carriers and it can source yards and finance and

provide newbuilding supervision and follow up with in service

management. [01/09/09]

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Seoul: Hanjin Shipping has stridently denied claims it plans to sell its local terminals. Multiple sources within the Korean firm have told the media that the speculation that the cash strapped company would offload its terminals, including those it operates in a jv with Macquarie Korea Opportunities Fund, is completely false. However, the company has confirmed that it intends to free up some of its liquidity through the sale and lease back of approximately 30,000 container units.



The company operates a global network of 12 dedicated container terminals as well as off-dock terminal yards and 3PL services including US domestic services.





Hanjin Shipping recently signed 20-year Consecutive Voyage Contracts with POSCO for the transportation of 2.4 million tons of iron ore from Brazil to Korea on annual basis. The total transport volume is estimated to be 48.46 million tons until year 2031 creating revenue of approximately KRW 1.38 trillion, which is nearly 15% of the company's total sales. [15/09/09]











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Mumbai: JSW Jaigarh Port, a wholly owned subsidiary of JSW Infrastructure & Logistics, plans to double cargo handling capacity to 20 million tonnes after completion of the second phase of expansion, writes DNA India. Phase II will involve mechanisation of the berth at an investment of Rs 150 crore. Another Rs 300 crore will be spent on dredging to 18.5 metres from the current 14 meters.



The port, which was inaugurated on August 22, has been designed to handle Capesize vessels, with berths which will accommodate seven ships. It will mainly cater to the coal requirements of JSW's Energy's 1200 mw power plant. Apart from coal, it plans to handle fertilisers, bauxite and raw sugar as well.



B V J K Sharma, joint managing director and chief executive officer, JSW Infrastructure, said, "The current berth can accommodate two Capesize vessels and half of berth I is being mechanised."



The company has also proposed a 47 km railway line from Jaigarh to Bokhe, which the Konkan Railway is currently considering. The total cost of the project, including development of the port and railway line, is around Rs 2,500 crore.



The port has a capacity to handle 10 million tonnes of cargo after completion of Phase I. Of the Rs 677 crore spent in this phase, Rs 177 crore was raised through equity and the rest was debt.



As far as JSW Energy's power plant is concerned, the first unit (300 MW) will be commissioned in January 2010, and three units (of 300 MW each) will be commissioned after a gap of three months each. [26/08/09]





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Shanghai: Indonesia is to team up with Chinese investors in building shipyard industry in Indonesia in 2010 with initial feasibility study starting this year, writes the Business Week bulletin. I Nyoman Sudiana, director of Shipyard industry, Indonesia Offshore Industry and Shipping Association (Iperindo) said that the would-be established joint shipyard industry would take raw materials from Indonesia. The plan to set up the joint shipyard industry resulted from an Indonesian delegation's visit to China last month.



Sudiana said that feasibility study would consist of consideration to produce the type of ships and the number of ships to be built in the shipyard. According to Iperindo's analyses, the Indonesian shipyard industry needs an additional investment of 28.5 trillion rupiah (about $2.85 billion) to increase its production capacity up to 2.5 million gt in the next five years.



Citing the initial study carried out by Iperindo and the Industrial ministry, to cope with domestic needs Indonesian shipyard industry needs to improve production capacity by 500,000gt with total investment of 5.7 trillion rupiah ($573.8 million) a year.



Currently, national installed capacity for construction of new ships was only at 225,000gt. [11/09/09]





Copyright  2022. All rights reserved. Seatrade, a trading name of Informa Markets (UK) Limited.
The MOU was signed by the institutes Sean Walsh and the IMUs vice chancellor K Ashok Vardhan Shetty.

Julie Lithgow, director of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers, said: The market for potential maritime educational growth in India is enormous with over 150 maritime sector projects currently committed to be developed by the Indian government. This co-operation among educational leaders will make significant and powerful impact on young people in India wanting to build their careers in the shipping sector.

The IMU is the only central university of its kind in India dealing with exclusively maritime disciplines. It was founded in 2008 to act as a leader in the development of training and human resources in the Indian maritime sector.

The Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers has continued to expand its international links and resource base to meet growing demand for its examination programme. Earlier this year, the institute signed agreements that will see its London-based exams hosted by the UK Chamber of Shipping and has also been recognised as strategic partner by Chinas ministry of transport and the Shanghai International Shipping Centre.
Tehran: More Iranian warships are to be sent to the Gulf of Aden, to protect the fifth-largest crude exporter's oil tankers from pirate attacks. ?The naval units are to be sent to the waterway linking the Red and the Arabian Seas 8:00am local time (12:40 GMT), Monday, the semiofficial Iranian Students News Agency reported on Sunday. ?The warships are to join the existing two unites stationed at the Gulf where international forces from a number of countries including the United States, India, Britain, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Korea have been fighting pirates preying on commercial vessels. [31/08/09]

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Parents follow a lot of schedules: feeding, work, school, bus and more! Did you know there is also a schedule to help keep your child healthy?

The recommended immunization schedule is designed to protect babies early in life, when they are vulnerable and before its likely that they will be exposed to diseases, said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, deputy director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Vaccinating children on time is the best way to protect them against serious and potentially deadly diseases.

Public health and medical experts base their vaccine recommendations on many factors. They study information about diseases and vaccines very carefully to decide which vaccines kids should get and when they should get them for best protection.

Although the number of vaccines a child needs in the first two years may seem like a lot, doctors know a great deal about the human immune system, and they know that a healthy babys immune system can handle getting all vaccines when they are recommended.

Dr. Messonnier cautions against parents delaying vaccination. There is no known benefit to delaying vaccination. In fact, it puts babies at risk of getting sick because they are left vulnerable to catch serious diseases during the time they are not protected by vaccines.

When parents choose not to vaccinate or to follow a delayed schedule, children are left unprotected against diseases that still circulate in this country, like measles and whooping cough. Since 2010, we have seen between 10,000 and 50,000 cases of whooping cough each year in the United States. And, up to 20 babies die from whooping cough each year in the United States; most are among babies who are too young to be vaccinated.

The United States experienced a record number of measles cases during 2014, with 667 cases from 27 states. This was the greatest number of cases in the U.S. since measles was eliminated in 2000. In 2015, the U.S. experienced a large, multi-state measles outbreak linked to an amusement park in California. The majority of these cases were in those who were unvaccinated. Staying on track with the immunization schedule ensures that children have the best protection against diseases like these by age 2.

I always remind new parents to immunize on time, every time, said Heidi Parker, Executive Director of Immunize Nevada. Getting children all the vaccines they need by age two is one of the best things parents can do to help keep their children safe and healthy.

If you have questions about the childhood immunization schedule, talk with your childs healthcare provider. National Infant Immunization Week, April 16-23, 2016, is an annual observance to highlight the importance of protecting infants from vaccine-preventable diseases and is a great time for parents to check their childs immunization records. If you do not have insurance or have concerns about the cost of vaccines, you may qualify for Nevadas Vaccines for Children program.
Tehran: During the 154th OPEC meeting, Iran's Oil Minister Masoud Mir-Kazemi has been elected as President of the organization's Conference for 2011, writes PressTV. "The president and the alternate president of OPEC Conference are usually elected on an alphabetical basis annually and hence, Iran's Oil Minister will be the President of the OPEC Conference for 2011, while Iraq's Oil Minister will be the Alternate President," Alternate President Mohammad Ali Khatibi told Mehr News on Friday.



Respectively, Iran's minister will be the Conference Alternate President for 2010, while Ecuador's Oil Minister will hold the Presidency title, he noted following the meeting that was held in Vienna, Austria, on the 9th and 10th of September.



This is while OPEC ministers agreed earlier this week to stick with their output target of 24.845 million barrels a day. OPEC had set the production level last December for its 11 members.



It's the third time this year OPEC has agreed to leave its members' production quotas unchanged, highlighting the group's relative confidence that its output policies over the past year have turned the world oil market in its favor.



"Based on expectations for higher global demand in the next few months, maintaining the output ceiling unchanged seems to be effective in increasing the oil storage capacity of the exporting countries," Khatibi added. [14/09/09]





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Tokyo: Shipbuilders may be drawn into a global price war next year triggered by South Korean discounting, an executive at Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding Co., Japan's second-largest builder of vessels, told Bloomberg.

"A risk of some new Korean yards setting very low prices is our biggest concern," Norio Nagata, the head of the company's ship and ocean project division, said in an interview in Tokyo. The possible price cuts to fill idle docks could lead to global discounting, he said.

Shipping lines have postponed or canceled vessels as demand dropped amid the recession. Bulk carrier prices have declined as much as 30 percent from levels before the economic slump and a global fleet oversupply may continue for six years, boosted by the expansion of Korean and Chinese yard capacity and weak demand, Nagata said.

"Things will be extremely tough until 2015," he said. "The most important thing is how quickly we will respond to a rapid change in the business environment."

Japan lost its title as the world's largest shipbuilding nation to South Korea in 2000. Six years later, China overtook Japan as the second-largest shipbuilder by new orders.

Excess shipping capacity across the world will peak in 2012 before returning to growth as early as 2015, Nagata said. [31/08/09]





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Hong Kong: Demand for good lay-up locations in Asia is likely to tighten as finance sources predict more container vessel deliveries sailing straight for lay-up. Late August figures indicated close to 600 container ships idling or laid up. With the largest vessel the recently delivered 11400 TEU CMA CGM Libra reportedly idling off Mipo in South Korea.



Charter owners are coming under increasing pressure as leading lines hand back unwanted tonnage. Yet it is these owners who account for around 60% of the orderbook, almost exclusively under construction at yards in Asia. As new ships deliver, a ballast voyage for colder north European waters will be an expensive option although colder water and less humidity is certainly beneficial for long-term lay-up, according to technical personnel. Maersk, for example, is currently initiating a lay-up programme on Loch Striven in Scotland.



However, finance sources are also warning that an effective lay-up programme doesn't come cheap. And apart from the direct costs, many owners will still be expected to pay debt interest even if there is a holiday on principal repayments. A full moratorium on debt service will be unlikely except for ultra-secure customers where full repayment over time is as certain as can be. [02/09/09]

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Tokyo: Nippon Yusen K.K., Japan's largest shipping line, raised rates on container services to the U.S. from Asia after slashing its supply of ships, writes Bloomberg. The carrier reduced service on the routes by about 25% in the past year and is now filling about 90% of capacity on North America routes, Mikitoshi Kai, head of investor relations at the company, said in an interview in Tokyo. NYK started boosting rates last month, he said.



"We've been able to raise rates by a certain amount," he said, declining to give detailed figures. "We currently have about the right amount of ships. Still, we need to increase rates by a lot more to make a profit."



NYK is forecasting its first loss in 23 years as the global recession cuts demand for containers carrying construction materials, furniture, electronics and other goods to the U.S. and Europe. The Tokyo-based shipping line, along with Evergreen Marine Corp.,Neptune Orient Lines Ltd.'s APL Ltd. and 11 others, agreed to try to raise Asia-U.S. container rates by $500 per 40-foot box from last month.



NYK is also trying to raise rates on containers to Asia from North America, Kai said on Sept. 11.



The company has dropped 29% this year on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, compared with an 18% gain in the Nikkei 225 Stock Average. Rival Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd., which forecasts a profit this year, has gained 9% while Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha Ltd. has declined 3.6%.



NYK predicts a loss of 5bn yen ($55m) for the year ending March 31, including a pretax loss of 34bn yen at its container shipping business.



The shipping line is cutting costs to compensate for a drop in demand. NYK will reduce 100bn yen in costs this fiscal year, with 80bn yen in reductions in the container business, Kai said.



"It's our biggest cost-cutting plan ever," he said. "We're negotiating lower loading fees, cheaper rates for transporting cargo inland by train, and reducing costs by mooring ships."



The Transpacific Stabilization Agreement, a group of 14 shipping lines which operate half the world's container vessels, issued a "voluntary guideline" in July to raise rates on Asia- U.S. services by $500 per 40-foot container. Even that increase would leave rates at unprofitable levels and 30% lower than a year earlier, according to CMA CGM SA, one of the members and the world's third-biggest container carrier.



A similar attempt in April failed as lines competed for volume to avoid costly ship lay-ups amid a roughly 20% drop in Asia-U.S. volumes.



Container shipments to the U.S. from Asia fell for a 21st month in June, tumbling 18% to 900,600 boxes, according to the Japan Maritime Center. Shipments are down 20% this year. [15/09/09]







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Doha: Qatar Shipping Company (Q-Ship) is establishing Pacific Marine Services, a limited liability company with a seed capital of QR200,000, writes Gulf Times. The proposed company's activities include loading, unloading and handling of goods by land, sea and maritime transport activities. Q-Ship will hold 99% stake in the company and the remaining will be held by Gulf Investment in Navy Ships Company, a Q-Ship spokesman said in a communique to the Qatar Exchange. No further details were disclosed. [26/08/09]





Copyright  2022. All rights reserved. Seatrade, a trading name of Informa Markets (UK) Limited.
Cairo: The Government of Egypt's two Austal-built high speed vehicle ferries have officially commenced operations between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, introducing a new standard of ferry service across the Red Sea. Austal has been awarded a three-year technical management and maintenance contract for the two catamaran ferries.



Each 88-metre vessel now performs six return trips per week, operating on 100 nautical mile route between Dibba in Saudi Arabia and Safaga in Egypt.



The service has already proven popular with Pilgrims travelling on to Mecca, Egyptian workers travelling to and from Saudi Arabia as well as business and leisure travellers. So far more than 69700 people have utilised the service, which has also facilitated the transport of 3514 vehicles and 730 trucks.



To perform planned and preventative maintenance support, Austal has established a dedicated, fully staffed service office in the Egyptian port city of Safaga, where it will utilise the region's existing maintenance docking facilities where required. [01/09/09]

Copyright  2022. All rights reserved. Seatrade, a trading name of Informa Markets (UK) Limited.
On Tuesday evening Seatrade and the Singapore Maritime Foundation (SMF) officially launched the Sea Asia 2017 Exhibition and Conference to a packed reception of top industry executives at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

To be held from 25  27 April 2017 at Marina Bay Sands Sea Asia 2017 will address the leading concerns of the industry with new innovative themes and formats.

Speaking at the event SMF chairman Andreas Sohmen-Pao said: Sea Asia serves as a platform the global maritime community to share views, develop ideas and debate issues.

It helps to connect us with other key leaders and professionals in the industry. It helps to ensure Asia has a voice, and it cements Singapores standing as a thought leader and an international maritime centre.

Ahead of the bi-annual event, and its sixth edition in 2017, a survey was undertaken of regional industry leaders on their top concerns. Despite the current difficult times all those concerned expressed a long-term confidence in the maritime and offshore industries.

We intend to ensure conference programme reflects the real pre-occupations of this industry and its leadership, said Chris Hayman chairman of Seatrade.

Much of this focuses on the technological revolution that the maritime industries are undergoing. The survey found that 94% of leaders thought it was time for the industry to fully embrace Smart Shipping, 88% believe that it is important to provide high bandwith and secure broadband on ships today given the role of online communications in modern business, and 81% said that big data is crucial.

Ensuring that the maritime industries have the skilled staff to meet these challenges is of critical importance.

While focusing on new areas Sea Asia 2017 will continue to address traditional areas such as shipping markets, finance and offshore, but with new and exciting formats. One such innovation will be a parliamentary style debate with industry leaders debating a motion on a key industry issue on which the audience will then vote.

The traditional, and highly popular Sea Asia keynote session on the first day will be retained and chaired by hard talking broadcaster Stephen Sackur.
Santos: Shanghai Dredging Company (SDC) may end up losing out on a Reais199 ($106m) contract to dredge the port of Santos in Brazil from 13 metres down to 15 metres. SDC is part of the Draga Brasil consortium which won the prestigious contract - part of a Reais 1.4bn spend on dredging from President Lula's government in Brasilia - back in April of this year.



But now Brazil's Ports Minister Pedro Brito is threatening to tear up the contract and start the tender process all over again as Draga Brasil has not provided all the sufficient documentation to satisfy federal, state and municipal governments.

He said: "We are right at the limit of our patience. If we don't receive the documents very soon we will have to start the tender process all over again. I really don't want to do that."



However, a Seatrade Asia Online source in Santos said today that "efforts were being made to resolve the impasse" - which has been ongoing for more than a month - and that SDC and Draga Brasil may still be given the opportunity to continue with the contract, as long as they provide the necessary documentation within the next week.



Once completed Santos will be able to host vessels of up to 9,000 TEU capacity, as opposed to the 5,000 TEU maximum it can accommodate today and this will be a tremendous boost to carriers like NYK Line, K Line, Mitsui OSK Line, Evergreen and China Shipping Company who all have a strong presence in the Brazilian international trades.



SDC is also interested in bidding for the Rio de Janeiro contract and two or three others in the Brazilian government's Reais 1.4bn National Dredging Plan. [07/09/09]

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Shanghai: The strong growth in container shipments last month at Shenzhen port has led some analysts to believe that a solid recovery of the mainland's international trade is under way, although others remain cautious, writes CargonewsAsia. Container throughput at Shenzhen grew to 1.8m teu last month, up 19% from July, according to a JP Morgan report by Karen Li and Edmond Lee, reported the South China Morning Post.



Shenzhen's throughput of laden containers - those carrying goods - rose 13% last month from July, Ally Ma wrote in a Citi report. The daily run rate at Shenzhen was 59,000teu, higher than the 47,000teu from May to July and 44,000teu in March and April, JP Morgan said.



"Shenzhen's performance in August is quite eye-catching. The improvement is real," said Li. She said in Shenzhen East, container throughput rose 18% month-on-month, more than the seven% rise in Shenzhen West.



Given that Shenzhen East serves mainly the United States, while Shenzhen West serves mainly Europe, "the recovery in China's trade is probably driven by the US", Li added.



At the end of last month, US rail traffic, an indicator of the country's economy, had been rising over the past several weeks to its highest level since mid-December, according to the Association of American Railroads.



"China's purchasing managers' index has stayed above the 50 threshold [indicating increasing factory production] for four months in a row [to August], suggesting a decent recovery in export growth," the JP Morgan report said.



Mainland sectors where manufacturing increased, with the PMI above 50, included computers and telecommunication equipment, according to JP Morgan.



However, output of textiles, garments, shoes and leather goods - the major export items made in the Pearl River Delta served by the Shenzhen port - declined, with the PMI below 50 last month, the report said. "Is Shenzhen's recovery real?" said Sunny Ho Lap-kee, an executive director of the Hong Kong Shippers' Council. "Who can tell? But it seems confidence is coming back."



The improvement in throughput could be partly explained in that traditionally August's shipments were higher than July's, Ho said. As for Shanghai, China's busiest port, container throughput was 2.17m teu last month, down 15% year-on-year, which was bigger than the nine% decline in July, Ma wrote.



Shanghai and Shenzhen, China's two biggest ports, account for half the country's international container shipping trade.



The difference in performance between Shanghai and Shenzhen was partly due to a typhoon in the first 10 days of the month that affected Shanghai's shipping, Credit Suisse analyst Ingrid Wei said.

"If there was no typhoon, Shanghai's performance would have been better in August," she said.



In another sign of improvement, rising shipments have enabled shipping lines to charge more.



The freight rate for China-Europe trade had quadrupled to more than US$1,000 per teu from as low as US$250 three months ago, Ho said.



Most major shipping lines imposed a US$500 increase per 40-foot equivalent unit container on transpacific routes since August 13, he said.





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Mumbai: A cargo ship carrying around 25,000 tonnes of iron ore capsized off Orissa's coast on Wednesday evening and a crew member is missing, Reuters writes quoting a senior port official.



The vessel, operating under a Mongolian flag, capsized 5-6 km (3-4 miles) off the harbour area after it had loaded iron ore at Paradip port, the port's Deputy Chairman Biplav Kumar said.



"Of the total 27 crew members, 26 have been rescued," he said, adding the accident had not disrupted shipping traffic. Kumar did not say why the ship sank.



Rescuers are currently trying to find the missing crew member. [10/09/09]





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Washington: The United States plans to formalise its commitment to have US-flagged ships conduct "internationally-recognised best management practices" against piracy, AFP writes quoting the State Department.



Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro said Washington will sign the so-called New York Declaration, a non-binding political document.



The US signature will commit the United States "to implement measures that it has already encouraged and followed through compliance with US Coast Guard directives on ship security," the department said in statement.



"US shipping companies have been instrumental in creating and implementing these best practices," it added.



"Examples of the best practices developed and implemented by all of the major international shipping industry organisations include increasing lookouts, ensuring that ladders are raised, and readying fire pumps to repel boarders," it said.



Panama, the Bahamas, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands -- which make up four of the world's largest ship registries -- first proposed the declaration that will also be signed by China, France, Britain and other countries.



The event will take place on the eve of the fourth plenary session of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia.



The contact group was established under a UN Security Council resolution on January 14 to coordinate actions among states and organisations to suppress piracy off the coast of Somalia.



The signing announcement comes on the day US maritime officials warned that the end of the monsoon season will likely bring an increase in piracy off the Horn of Africa and urged shipping companies to remain vigilant.



More than 130 merchant ships were attacked last year, a rise of more than 200% on 2007, according to the International Maritime Bureau.



So far this year, there have been 114 attempted attacks on merchant vessels in the region, 29 of them successful, according to the US Navy. [10/09/09]





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Shanghai: Authorities in Hubei have announced ambitious plans to build new docks, railways and roads around the provincial capital of Wuhan, a development they said would make the city the biggest river port in Asia by 2030, writes CargonewsAsia. The move is part of a plan to speed up the industrialisation of the Yangtze Economic Zone to benefit from effective river transportation.



"Hubei's Yangtze Economic Zone, with an area of more than 70,000 sq km, will become a convenient logistics hub of the Yangtze River and Central China, a modern base for a variety of industries and an ecologically friendly home for urban dwellers by 2020," said Zhang Chang'er, a member of the provincial standing committee of the Communist Party of China.



The proposed new Wuhan port comprises 22 districts, covering 173 km.



However, the proposal does not go far enough, according to one observer. "It should be extended as far as Huangshi, a downstream port district only 70 km from Wuhan, so we can have a greater Wuhan port that smoothly connects with railways and highways," said Wu Xinmu, an economics professor at Wuhan University.

Wu said another challenge is overlapping administrations.



"The new Wuhan port will integrate docks that used to be owned and managed by different enterprises or local administrations. Only through integration can we improve efficiency," Wu said.



The docks are being designed to take advantage of river transportation and also develop local industry with the facilitation of advanced logistics systems.



"We manufacture heavyweight power transformers, and the most important transportation means is by river or sea," said Hakan Karadogan, unit managing director of SEC AREVA in Wuhan.

"With the further construction of the Yangtze River transportation infrastructure, we will achieve faster and more reliable shipments of our products," Karadogan said.



SEC AREVA is a leading power transformer provider. The company opened a new factory in Wuhan in May. "We believe that the plan will be a positive influence for the local economy and for businesses here," Karadogan added.



There are three major docks at the new Wuhan port: an iron and steel dock built for Wuhan Iron and Steel (Group) Corp (WISCO), one of the country's biggest steel makers; a grain dock for the National Rice Trade Center, which is located in Wuhan, and the container dock.



"Hubei has a good foundation of heavy and light industries, but it has lagged behind the development of the Yangtze Delta and the Pearl River Delta in recent years," said Gong Liutang, an economics professor at Peking University.



"Hubei should seize the opportunity for an industrial upgrade and strive to develop industrial connectivity," Gong said.



For example, Gong said, the abundance of rice and fish in the region can become the basis for famous brands in food processing.

"Planting, fishing, sideline production and food processing all have room for improvement, " Gong said.



Wu of Wuhan University said the government should also improve the investment environment and encourage private enterprises to catch up with development.



While striving to develop industrial clusters and extend industrial connectivity, the implementation of the green economy is also high on the agenda.



Yang Mingxing, an official with the Hubei Finance and Economics Office, said the plan would guide and support the green economy and industrial development.





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Ningbo: The first of four platform supply vessels, built for Bourbon Offshore Norway to Ulstein design at Zhejiang Shipbuilding here in Ningbo is the first Asia-built vessel to incorporate the Norwegian builder's distinctive X-Bow (pictured).



The Bourbon Front, a PX105 platform supply vessel, boasts a range of innovative design features. These include more flexible cargo tank arrangements, latest fire-fighting and cargo handling safety arrangements and a number of environmental benefits aimed at improving quality of life on board and improving eco-efficiency



Bourbon newbuilding project manager. BJorn Bergsnes, who praised the quality of work at the Chinese yard, explained more details of the vessel. Exhaust gas is released through the ship's side, just above the waterline. As a result more space is available in the accommodation, which is also noticeably quieter and more comfortable. Views from the 360 degree bridge are also improved. Catalysts help to minimise emissions by mixing exhaust gas with sea water whilst service conditions alongside are improved as a result of reduced noise in the engine room - the harbour generator is located in a separate engine room compartment.



The Bourbon project is another key step in Ulstein's global diversification. The Norwegian firm is marketing its innovative designs to international customers and partner yards in Asia and recently opened an office in Dubai where it hopes to take advantage of the thriving offshore sector. A number of vessels are now being built to Ulstein design at Drydocks World Dubai. [03/03/09]

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Tel Aviv: Israel Corp the parent of troubled Israeli shipping company Zim, said it would call a shareholders' meeting for Oct. 14 to approve a restructuring programme that includes seeking to delay paying the principal on Zim's bonds, writes Reuters.



Israel Corp said on Thursday Zim had been hard hit by a crisis in global trade, which hurt the shipping industry just as Zim was expanding and ordering new ships.



Zim has said it expects a cash flow deficit of $1 billion from 2009-2013 and therefore decided to implement a recovery programme. Zim posted a loss of $186 million in the second quarter.



"The recovery programme is based on the assumption that the problematic situation in the shipping market will continue in 2009 and 2010 and only in 2011 will there begin a gradual recovery in the shipping market," Israel Corp said in a statement.



Zim already has a standstill agreement in place with its creditors by which it only pays interest on its debt, and not the principal, until approval of the restructuring.



As part of the recovery programme, it is seeking to delay payment of the principal for a few years -- until it pays off its secured debt, which Zim said took priority over bondholders, or until there is a sharp decline in its debt level.



During this period, it will pay a certain amount of interest and grant bondholders the right to partake in profits.



Zim, which is already negotiating with representatives of the bondholders, will also offer them the right to convert their bonds into shares.



Israel Corp, which is controlled by the billionaire Ofer family, has said it will inject $60 million into Zim while reducing by $150 million the payment Zim owes for leasing ships owned by the Ofers in exchange for convertible bonds.



The $60 million is part of a plan to infuse $350 million into Zim. Last month a plan to inject $100 million into the company ran into resistance from Israel Corp shareholders who are not considered interested parties.



The Ofer Group owns 55 percent of Israel Corp while Bank Leumi, the country's largest bank, holds 18 percent.



Zim Chief Executive Rafi Danieli said the recovery programme included efficiency measures such as closing unprofitable lines, delay in delivery of new ships, returning leased ships to their owners and a reduction in workers. "The recovery programme is aimed at adjusting the labour force to the level of activity and bringing the company to stability," he said. [10/09/09]





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Parag Jain will retain his position as ceo. Buamims remit will be to increase GulfNavs assets under management and service-based revenue. Buamim will restructure the company and lead its expansion plans to achieve new levels of growth and development, it said.

Buamim refused to discuss growth projections, or if GulfNav would get back into VLCC ownership, but said it would not refinance debt, instead servicing it from existing company resources. We will not refinance. We are creating a different funding structure within the group itself, he said.

GulfNavs fleet today consists of eight chemical tankers and four crew boats. Historically, the lucrative chemical shipping services have provided remarkable returns for the firm, GulfNav said.

Two GulfNav VLCCs were arrested in 2013 after the company defaulted on debt repayments and were later sold. Norway's DNB Bank won an appeal in the DIFC Courts in March over its financing of VLCC Gulf Eyadah and hopes to see its judgement enforced in Dubai's onshore courts.

Hazza Al Qahtani, GulfNav's Saudi founder and chairman, resigned from the board in January, prompting the departure of five other board members, all of whom are now said to have been replaced. New board chairman is Abdullah Al Hemeiri, appointed 20 March.

GulfNavs IPO took place in 2006 and it was listed on the Dubai Financial Market the following year.

Its 2015 annual report said accumulated losses under equity had fallen slightly to AED242.3m ($66m) as the chemical tanker market improved. The balance sheet lists liabilities of AED685m ($187m).

Gulf Stolt Ship Management, formerly a 50-50 jv of GulfNav and Stolt-Nielsen, which performs the commercial management of the GulfNav fleet, was taken over 100% by GulfNav, the company announced in a DFM regulatory filing Monday.

Last year, GulfNav issued Mandatory Convertible Bonds (MCBs) valued at AED37m ($10.2m) to settle its case with creditor Bermudas Nordic American Tankers Limited. Jain refused to comment on the likely issuance of new MCBs.

Buamim was previously executive chairman of Drydocks World and Maritime World from 2010-15 and successfully led it through restructuring after the global financial crisis.

He also served with Conoco and ConocoPhillips for 26 years in various management positions, including vp, Dubai Petroleum Company, a ConocoPhillips UAE affiliate.
Weary tourists will now be able to take the weight of their feet in the Puerta del Sol. Carlos Rosillo

More information Madrid plans fines of 751 and up for leaving dog droppings on street

In a move that will allow tourists and locals to take the weight off their feet while watching the world go by in the capitals landmark Puerta del Sol, Madrid City Hall has removed a low-level wrought iron railing installed round a fountain there in the mid-nineties.

According to Ahora Madrid City Hall councilor Jorge Garcia, the railing was removed at the request of residents, as well as Madrids School of Architects (COAM).

Were getting rid of the spikes around the fountain in the Puerta del Sol so people can sit there

It didnt make much sense to keep the spikes, said Garcia, adding: So many tourists and locals in the Puerta del Sol already have to sit on the ground.

The railing was installed in 1995 by the Popular Party administration of the time in a bid to dissuade homeless people from hanging out in the square.

But with progressive former judge Manuela Carmena in the driving seat, this policy is being reversed and the fountain returned to what Madrids mayor describes as its original purpose.

Built in 1860 as a provisional feature, the fountain has traditionally provided the only place to sit in the Puerta del Sol. The COAM experimented with benches in the plaza very briefly in 2014, but their permanent introduction has since been ruled out.

Its details like this that make Madrid a more people friendly place for those who live here

Also under consideration is the removal of the fencing around the Daoiz and Velarde statue in the capitals Plaza Dos de Mayo.

Her views were shared by senior councilor Mauricio Valiente, who described the gesture as a token of the kind of openness and friendliness that our local government wants to see in the capital.

Symbolically, it says a lot about our aim to open up public spaces and make them more accessible, he added. It brings us closer to the kind of city we all dream of.

English version by Heather Galloway.
Police officers during the detention of the suspect in Palma de Mallorca. CATI CLADERA (EFE)

Spanish police have arrested a Moroccan national in Palma de Mallorca accused of recruiting volunteers for the so-called Islamic State.

Interior Ministry sources say the man, aged 26, mostly targeted vulnerable minors.

Police sources say documentation found in the mans apartment indicates specific targets in Europe, including Spain.

They add that he used the social networks to find potential recruits, and after establishing contact and convincing them to join the Jihadist fight, helped them travel to conflict zones. Investigators do not yet know whether he managed to send anybody to territory under Islamic State control.

The suspect is also accused of attempting to organize smaller groups meant to carry out terrorist attacks in Europe. Police say the man had close contact with known terrorists based in Syria.

English version by Nick Lyne
While government spying programs are nothing new, the world has seen a major expansion of surveillance in the years since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

As explained in the video below, the post-9/11 age has been defined by fear of more terrorist attacks. This fear has driven governments to broaden their surveillance programs and crack down on freedom of expression.

Just last month, the FBI announced that it was able to successfully break into an iPhone used by one of the assailants in the San Bernardino attack. Here, Kurzgesagt  In a Nutshell makes the case that news stories like that should be very concerning to all people who value living in a free society.

Regardless of what you think of the FBI unlocking an iPhone used by a terrorist, the long-term implications of such developments have very serious consequences.
Spanish economy minister Luis de Guindos and EU economic commissioner Pierre Moscovici in January. FRANCOIS LENOIR (REUTERS)

Spains acting economy minister, Luis de Guindos, has negotiated a new deadline for bringing the countrys public deficit down within the European Unions target range.

At last weekends International Monetary Fund summit in Washington DC, De Guindos spoke with Economic and Financial Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici about giving Spain another year to balance its accounts, according to sources in La Moncloa, the seat of government.

The decision still has to be cleared at the highest level in Brussels, where the EU executive is waiting to see Spains final 2015 deficit figures and for a new government to take power in Madrid following the inconclusive elections of December 20.

Spain is in an atypical situation, in a political vacuum with no government

EU source

Brussels could even consider giving Spain a second year to reduce the deficit from around 5% of GDP to under 3%, depending on the IMFs next economic forecast, due for release in May.

In the meantime, the Spanish government has already announced a 2 billion budget adjustment, reduced its own growth forecast in view of the upcoming global slowdown, and is now seeking ways to rein in spending by its regional governments without sparking a row.

Spanish acting Finance Minister Cristobal Montoro has blamed regional spending for Spains significant deviation from its 2015 target of 4.2%. On Thursday, Eurostat is expected to release final figures that will help the European Commission reach a decision regarding Spains deadlines.

A high-ranking EU source said that the technical analysis and the negotiations are both at an advanced stage, but that the high-level political debate has yet to start.

European officials know that Spain cannot possibly meet its targets the way things stand now. Bringing the deficit down from 5% to under 3% in one year would be a tremendous challenge for any economy, even in the middle of a boom, said one source.

And Spain is not in the middle of a boom, even if its economy has been growing faster than its neighbors, at more than 3% of GDP last year. But De Guindos is now forecasting 2.7% in 2016 and 2.4% in 2017. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate continues to be much higher than before the crisis hit.

Even the most orthodox thinkers in Brussels feel that Madrid will need at least one extra year to contain the deficit. It could be two, depending on the new forecasts, because the adjustment has to be reasonable, said one EU source.

But there are no free lunches, and in exchange for the extra time, Brussels will reinforce its oversight of Spains efforts, with quarterly reports and the threat of sanctions if results do not meet expectations.

Spain is in an atypical situation, in a political vacuum with no government, said an EU source. In other cases weve waited, and in this case it may also make sense to wait to see how political unknowns are cleared up.

English version by Susana Urra.
SOUTHEASTERN BULACAN NEXT ON GRACE POE'S CAMPAIGN TRAIL

Sen. Grace Poe will be reaching out to local leaders and residents of several towns in Southeastern Bulacan tomorrow, April 19, and secure their support for her bid to win the highest post in the land come May 9.

Poe has launched a presidential campaign chiefly premised on waging an "all-out war" against poverty, which she described as the root of almost all major problems pummelling the country today.

Her first stop is the town of Sta. Maria, where she is expected to arrive at around 4 p.m.

Poe will be going intimate with Bulakenos as she will be doing a "palengke tour" after a brief courtesy call on the municipality's mayor.

She will then proceed to Norzagaray, via motorcade, through Sta. Clara and Pulong Buhangin.

Then, Poe is expected to campaign in San Jose Del Monte also via motorcade and ask for support for her Gobyernong May Puso.

Prior to campaigning in Bulacan, the presidential frontrunner will be in Manila to attend the gathering for the birthday of Mayor Joseph "Erap" Estrada.

Estrada has recently thrown his support to Poe, the leading contender for the next president of the Philippines.

She has topped the most recent SWS survey, besting four other contenders to the highest post of the land.
Press Release

April 19, 2016 CHIZ: 'WE SHOULD GIVE BACK MORE TO OUR OFWS' Citing the contribution of the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in keeping the Philippine economy afloat for many years through the remittances they send, Sen. Francis "Chiz" Escudero said the "Gobyernong may Puso" plans to embark on a multibillion-peso spending for programs that will take care of their needs. Speaking in a forum organized by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP) on Monday, Escudero said the comprehensive program will include the creation of a separate department that will cater to concerns of the OFWs and beefing up of embassy staff to assist them. "We have to give back more to our OFWs. They deserve it," said Escudero, an independent vice-presidential candidate. In the ABS-CBN's "Harapan ng Bise" debate last Sunday, Escudero bared for the first time the plan of "Gobyernong may Puso" of leading presidential candidate Sen. Grace Poe to allocate P100 billion for OFW services, the biggest budget to be provided by any administration to migrant workers. The proposed P100-billion fund, he said, is just a small token of gratitude for the invaluable contribution of OFWs to the economy. "The OFWs are the reason why we're here. For the first time, our OFW remittances equal our debt which is why we are allowed to borrow (from international financial institutions). But what have we done for them? On VAT (value-added tax) alone, we're getting money from the ones they sent. But what's our program for them?" Escudero asked. If elected into office, Escudero said, he and Poe will put in place a clear policy to help the OFWs, who have long been shortchanged by the government despite the billions of dollars they pour into the economy, by previous administrations. One major program the "Gobyernong may Puso" plans to implement is the portability of government health insurance to allow overseas migrant workers Filipinos to use their card from the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) even in health facilities abroad. "We'd like to focus on PhilHealth, so that they (OFWs) can use it wherever they are (in the world)," Escudero said. According to Escudero, part of the expanded services to the OFWs is the setting up of a pension fund for them. He said they will also work toward legitimizing all undocumented OFWs, the most vulnerable sector among the estimated 10 million Filipinos working abroad, because they are not covered by certain legal protections. "We need to make all illegal OFWs legal. Isn't the role of the government to provide them legal assistance instead of them doing everything alone?" Escudero said. According to Escudero, they plan to increase the P100-million legal assistance fund for OFWs facing criminal charges or convicted. There are some 2.3 million OFWs around the world, according to data from the Philippine Statistics Authority as of 2014 . Although the total migrant population is estimated to be around 10 million or 10 percent of the country's population. The official Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas figures show that OFWs remit about $28.5 billion, or roughly P1.3 billion, a year.
Press Release

April 19, 2016 CHIZ VOWS STRICT ENFORCEMENT OF MINIMUM WAGE LAW GENERAL SANTOS CITY--If "Gobyernong may Puso" wins, independent vice-presidential candidate Sen. Francis "Chiz" Escudero said it will impose a strict and general implementation of the minimum wage for workers in the private sector. Escudero said he and his presidential running mate, Sen. Grace Poe, will make sure that all workers are paid in accordance with the minimum wage set by government and employers are fined or imprisoned if found shortchanging their employees. "Titiyakin namin na minimum wage at least ang ibinabayad ng bawat kumpanya sa kanilang mga empleyado," Escudero said during a radio interview in the country's "tuna capital" where he shared the Gobyernong may Puso's vision of "a country where every Filipino is treated equally, where no one is left behind." Minimum wage rates in the country vary from region to region, with boards established for each region to monitor the economic activity and adjust minimum wages based on growth and unemployment rates, and other factors. The minimum wage for non-agriculture employees in the National Capital Region is P481 a day, which is the highest daily nominal wage rate in the country. The lowest rate for non-agricultural workers is P217, which is in Region 4B, also known as Mimaropa. Failure to pay the required minimum wage entails serious penalties. Under Republic Act No. 6727 or the Wage Rationalization Act, as amended by RA 8188, the employer may be punished with a fine of at least P25,000 to P100,000 and/or imprisonment of at least two years to four years. If the violating employer is a corporation, partnership, or other type of entity, the responsible officers, such as the president, vice-president, chief executive officer or general manager, may be imprisoned. Minimum wage earners in the private and public sectors are exempt from payment of income tax under RA 9504, which was sponsored by Escudero in 2008 when he was chairman of the Senate Committee on Ways and Means. The law covers not only the basic pay, but also holiday pay, overtime pay, night shift differential and hazard pay received by minimum wage earners. Meanwhile, Escudero reiterated that they will put a stop to the prevalent practice of labor contractualization to provide workers with regular employment and security of tenure. "Unang araw pa lang ng administrasyon sa ilalim ni Sen. Grace, ie-end namin ang 'endo' (end of contract)," Escudero said. During the ABS-CBN's "Harapan ng Bise" debate over the weekend, Escudero said they plan to repeal an order by the Department of Labor and Employment, which he said is being exploited by businessmen to avoid payment of perks and benefits accorded to regular employees.
Press Release

April 19, 2016 GUINGONA GRILLS PHILREM 'PHANTOM' MESSENGER, FINDS MORE INCONSISTENCIES WITH the PhilRem messenger finally surfacing at the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee's sixth public hearing on the $81-M money laundering case, Chairman and reelectionist Senator Teofisto "TG" Guingona III observed yet more inconsistencies in the foreign exchange dealer's narrative. "May discrepancy na naman. In every delivery andun si Mark Palmares, yung delivery man. Pero ngayon lumalabas kay Mr. Palmares na hindi siya kasama, dun lang siya sa umpisa tapos after that wala na siya. So may discrepancy na naman yung sinasabi ng Philrem from what they said nung una, ngayon iba na naman," Guingona told reporters after the hearing. Palmares, the "phantom messenger," related that he indeed accompanied Salud and Michael Bautista, PhilRem president and treasurer respectively, to Solaire casino on February 5. He supposedly carried P90 million and $500,000 in cash in a suitcase, a traveling bag, and a shoulder bag, which he turned over to the Bautista couple at the ground floor VIP room. But Kam Sin Wong, a.k.a. Kim Wong, denied knowing or seeing Palmares in the number of times that he has allegedly received money from the Bautistas. In the Solaire drop-off, Wong averred that the money came in one big carton case and a hand-carry bag, unlike the ones described by Palmares. "Hindi ko siya [Palmares] kilala. . . Dalawang lalaki, malaki, hindi siya," Wong attested. Palmares also claimed to have subsequently delivered tranches worth multi-millions in local and dollar denominations from PhilRem's Makati office to the Bautistas' home between February 9 and 14. Palmares' statement belies earlier claims of his employers that all cash deliveries were made in Solaire. "Lies and conflicting statements in fact make it easier for us to pin down the guilty ones," Guingona stated. First to cast doubt on Palmares' statement was Atty. Renato de Jesus, the lawyer who allegedly notarized the messenger's affidavit presented by PhilRem president Salud Bautista in the April 12 hearing. The notary public denied knowing Palmares whom he called "a liar." "Nagsisinungaling siya [Palmares], kahit kailan 'di ko pa siya nakikita," de Jesus claimed. In previous hearings, Guingona has already warned Salud about false testimonies and that her "credibility is running very, very low." In today's hearing, Michael Bautista also said that all instructions to remit money to an alleged Weikang Xu have emanated from Maia Deguito. "All the instructions came from Maia, for the cash portion, pick-up. . . sa amin po, so whatever cash we can raise to complete the transaction, whatever the amount for the day would be raised, so just tell the amount and then somebody comes to pick up," Michael testified. The former RCBC Jupiter branch manager countered that after February 5, no one called her and she called no one about subsequent cash deliveries. "February 5, 'yung instruction lang sa akin was 'yung kay Eastern Hawaii and kay Bloomberry, for the cash deliveries po wala. Wala akong instruction, walang anything, I would like to believe po derecho na sila [PhilRem and Wong] nag-uusap," Deguito claimed. The Bautistas, Wong, and Dequito have given consent to the committee to look into their phone conversations during the transaction dates in question.
Press Release

April 19, 2016 BONGBONG MARCOS PUSHES FOR GREEN PHILIPPINES Vice presidential candidate Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" R. Marcos, Jr. today extended his call for national unity to the movement for the protection of our environment and the march towards a greener Philippines. "As we celebrate the Earth Day tomorrow (April 22) , let us all join hands as one nation and contribute in our own way in the global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emission and other activities that harm our environment," said Marcos. However, Marcos said the government should spearhead the effort in the protection of environment through consistent implementation of regulations to ensure compliance with green regulations. "Our effort to protect the environment should be a sustained campaign and consistent throughout the year, not just during Earth Day celebrations, so that protection of environment should become second-nature for all of us," said Marcos. With the Philippines tagged as among the countries that to be hardest hit by effects of climate change, Marcos said protection of our environment become has gained more significance for us. Marcos has filed various bills in the Senate to advance his pro-environment advocacy, including Senate Bill No. 2885 or the Climate Change Education Act, seeking to include discussion of climate change as part of curricula for all college and universities. Likewise, Marcos has proposed the Green Building Act to encourage construction of ecological-friendly and energy-efficient buildings; a bill to encourage use of bicycles, and a bill to ban the use of plastic bags. During his stint as three-term governor of Ilocos Norte, Marcos pioneered the use of renewable sources of energy, including the wind farm in Bangui town--considered as the first in Southeast Asia--to produce adequate supply of clean electricity not only for the province but for nearby areas as well.
Press Release

April 19, 2016 POE: WE CANNOT RISK ECONOMY WITH WRONG KIND OF LEADER With the Philippine economy experiencing a steady growth, independent presidential candidate Sen. Grace Poe said the right kind of leader is crucial to making that growth truly inclusive. "Alam niyo po ang ating ekonomiya ay tumataas na. Totoo po 'yon. Pero ang sinasabi ng mga eksperto ay ito: kailangan ang growth ng ating bansa ay maging consistently above 6 to 7 percent in at least two more administrations before we will feel the difference all the way to the ground," Poe said during a recent meeting with around 600 barangay officials in Quezon City. The May 9 elections, Poe said, will determine the country's economic direction in the next six years. "We cannot afford to risk having another six years with the wrong kind of leader. It is up to you to judge that. So 'yon po dapat ang iisipin ninyo," she reminded voters. The Philippine economy has bucked the international downward trend and has rallied in the last six years. In 2010, the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by an average 7.7 percent; in 2011, 3.7 percent; in 2012, 6.8 percent; in 2013, 7.2 percent; in 2014, 6.1 percent; and in 2015, 5.8 percent. Poe, who is running on a platform of inclusive growth, global competitiveness and transparency in government, said this economic growth can be sustained by creating more jobs and investing in the country's young workforce. If they win, Poe and running mate Sen. Francis Escudero have promised to allocate the equivalent of at least seven percent of the country's GDP to infrastructure development. This would not only bridge the gap in rural infrastructure needs but also provide employment, Poe said. The senator also said she would push for an institutionalized feeding program for public daycare and elementary students nationwide, if she wins. This would cost around P30-40 billion, but she said this was a worthwhile investment in the Filipino youth. "Tayo ang kaiingitan ng buong mundo sapagkat ang ating workforce ay bata. Pero hindi po lalaking matatalino ang mga bata na 'yan kung hindi po natin bibigyan ng tamang edukasyon, tamang pagkain at kaligtasan," Poe said. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, there are 20 million Filipinos aged 15-24, who comprise the youth sector as per the United Nations definition. There are 29 million Filipinos aged 15-30 years old. "Hindi malayo sa pangarap na ngayon pa lang--di ba 'yung voters natin 'yung majority puro bata na--kaya ang ekonomiya natin ay talagang mas tataas, kailangan lang i-manage ng tama," Poe said.
Survivors of Saturday's earthquake stand amid the ruins of their homes. Edu Leon (EL PAIS)

More information Pedernales, rescates llenos de promesas

Three days after a powerful earthquake killed more than 400 people and left at least 3,000 injured in Ecuador, a quiet seaside town close to the epicenter in the north of the Andean country is still struggling to cope.

Government promises of tents for the homeless, medical equipment, body bags, portable toilets, lighting, food and water have yet to materialize, says the mayor of Pedernales, Gabriel Alcivar.

Vice-President Jorge Glas had promised to send a mobile hospital with its own operating room, but in the end it was dispatched to Chone, a larger community some 90 kilometers to the south.

Many hotels along the sea front have yet to be inspected

The lack of equipment and material is in contrast with the hundreds of people who have volunteered to help in Pedernales following the 7.8 magnitude quake felt on Saturday.

Firefighters are putting in long hours, searching for survivors while bulldozers alongside them remove the huge piles of twisted metal and rubble. Miguel Egas of the National Directorate of Missing People admits to the dangers of the methods being used, but notes that time is running out: Its risky, but necessary. Thats why the rescue teams are there, to reduce the risk.

On Monday, rescuers were focusing on the main tourist hotels in downtown Pedernales, although many more are located along the sea front and have yet to be inspected. There is a transient population there, and nobody is looking for them, said Egas, explaining that most of the hotels lost their lobbies while the rest of the floors collapsed in a stack.

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Rescue teams are now trying to reach rural areas around Pedernales, where they say hundreds of people are still waiting to be rescued and where there is a shortage of food and water.

Meanwhile, around 320 overseas volunteers have arrived in the area, but there is no information as to how many will be sent to Pedernales. The Education Ministry has sent a team of psychologists to the town to work at the four makeshift shelters, as well as with people still living in the open for fear of further tremors.

Volunteers are sleeping out in the main square, ready to lend a hand. So far their main task has been to keep firefighters supplied with drinking water and food. One family of six said they had traveled three hours from the central mountain town of Santo Domingo to help.

The rescue teams also need help, said the father, carrying a large container of water toward a group of firefighters.

English version by Nick Lyne.
Press Release

April 19, 2016 POE WANTS QUICK RESPONSE FUND GIVEN TO DISASTER-PRONE REGIONS With the country suffering the impacts of extreme weather events, independent presidential candidate Sen. Grace Poe said the government's Quick Response Fund (QRF) must already be prepositioned in disaster-prone regions. Poe, who condemned the death of three farmers seeking rice support during a protest in Kidapawan City, said the government must not wait for people to beg before aid is given. "Matagal na naming sinasabi 'yung epekto ng El Nino na marami talagang magugutom. Iyon talaga ang problema lalo na sa agrikultura," she said during one of her campaign sorties following the April 1 incident in North Cotabato. To facilitate the release of government aid during calamities such as the prevailing El Nino, the senator proposed that the QRF be held by the regional offices, instead of the central offices of national agencies. QRF pertains to the "built-in budgetary allocations that represent pre-disaster or standby funds for agencies in order to immediately assist areas stricken by catastrophes and crises." Unlike the Calamity Fund, the QRF may be released without the recommendation of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council or the approval of the Office of the President. "We are hit by super typhoons and dry spells every year. By this time, we already know which areas are most vulnerable. It only makes sense to already preposition the Quick Response Fund in concerned regional offices. A slow response time is unacceptable with a QRF," Poe said. Five national agencies have built-in QRFs in their budgets: Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), Department of National Defense (DND), Department of Education (DepEd), Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) and the Department of Agriculture (DA). According to the Senate Finance Committee, the DA still has a P508.5-million balance in its 2015 and 2016 QRF. This, even as the country's farmers lost thousands of hectares' worth of harvest due to the El Nino. To access the QRF, a disaster-affected community must assess damages and seek assistance from the local government unit (LGU). The LGU then submits a request to the national implementing agency's region office, which will forward the request to the central office, which will release the QRF. "Malaki ang responsibilidad ng gobyerno na i-organisa ang sarili para naman matugunan ang pangangailangan ng mga nasalanta sa lalong madaling panahon. Kinakailangan ay mabilis kumilos, mapagkakatiwalaan, tapat at may tunay na malasakit" Poe said in an earlier visit to Capiz, one of the areas hardest hit by Super Typhoon Yolanda in 2013. Alongside conducting a policy review of intervention measures in the past years, the next administration should ensure that relief is given immediately post-calamities, she said. "Food and building materials should be stored in regional depots so that these can be quickly sent to victims and we won't have to airlift food all the way from Manila during emergencies," the senator said. According to the Natural Hazards Risk Atlas done by Verisk Maplecroft, a London-based company specializing in risk assessment, the Philippines has 21 of the 100 cities with the greatest exposure to natural hazards. The global Top 10 list of cities most exposed to natural hazards include Tuguegarao (2nd), Lucena (3rd), Manila (4th), San Fernando (5th) and Cabantuan (6th).
Press Release

April 19, 2016 POE CAMP VOWS RETURN OF COCO LEVY FUND TO COCO FARMERS The spokesman of Sen. Grace Poe has assured that the coco levy funds, which have been the subject of four decades of legal battle, would be returned to the country's 3.5 million coconut farmers. Valenzuela Mayor Rex Gatchalian said Poe's "Gobyernong may Puso" will ensure that the funds will be used for and by the coconut industry in a manner that is fast, fair, responsible and transparent. "Under a Poe administration, the coconut industry will be given priority attention. Coco levy funds, or interest income from the trust fund, will be co-managed by the farmers themselves and augmented by regular appropriations," Gatchalian said. Based on a report by the Philippine Commission on Good Governance, the coco levy funds have a total asset value of P93 billion. Some 1,195 municipalities in the Philippines rely on coconut for their livelihood. However, the coconut industry contributes only 1.14 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product. Gatchalian criticized the Liberal Party-led administration for failing to address the needs of the coconut industry and slashing the budget of the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) from P4.1 billion last year to P1.27 billion this year. "Ang pagmamahal sa isang sektor ay napapakita sa pondong inilaan dito. Paano mo ipagmamayabang na mahal mo ang mga magniniyog kung kinaltasan mo naman ang pondo para sa ikababangon ng industriya nila?" he said. Gatchalian blamed agriculture officials for proposing the budget cut when coconut farmers have yet to recover from the devastation caused by Super Typhoon Yolanda. A government report showed Yolanda shredded 34 million coconut trees in 41,662 hectares in Regions 6, 7 and 8, which account for one-sixth of the national coconut output. He said Poe will increase the government allocation for the PCA to boost their capacity to help coconut farmers. "Dadagdagan namin ang budget para sa coconut projects, hindi namin babawasan," he said. "We will also fund the establishment of processing centers that will add value to coconut products and by-products." In her first 100 days, Poe would also order a massive replanting and intercropping program in the country's poorest coconut producing provinces, Gatchalian said. There are 95 million senile trees--those that are over 60 years old--in the Philippines. About 44 million of these need to be replanted soon.
Press Release

April 19, 2016 Pres'l, VP aspirants told: Issue pledge to pass 4Ps,

coco levy bills in June In as much as they all support the Coco Levy Bill and the 4Ps Institutionalization Bill, presidential and vice presidential candidates should sign a covenant pledging they would work for the passage of the measures before Congress ends its session in June. This was proposed today by Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph Recto who said that legislative members who are gunning for the top two positions in government can be co-sponsors of the two landmark pieces of social legislation. "Lahat sila, pareho naman ang sinasabi sa sorties, debates and interviews. Na dapat isabatas ang pagsasauli ng coconut levy at gawing permanente ang Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program, o yung Programang Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino (4Ps). They're reading from the same page," Recto said. Recto said "there is still time to pass the two bills before the curtains fall on this Congress." "And all the actors in the presidential and VP race are either members of the Senate or the House, or have kin in the Senate, or have a senator as running mate," Recto said. Presidential candidates Grace Poe and Miriam Defensor Santiago are incumbent senators while Vice President Jojo Binay's daughter, Nancy is a sitting senator like Alan Peter Cayetano, running mate of Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte. In addition to Cayetano, four other vice presidential aspirants are members of the Senate club: Gregorio Honasan, of Binay's UNA party; Chiz Escudero, who teamed up with Poe; Bongbong Marcos, running mate of Santiago; and independent candidate Antonio Trillanes IV, who is supporting Poe. The sole member of the House in the VP field is Leni Robredo of the Liberal Party. "Si Leni representative ni Mar. Si Binay dalawa kinatawan, si Gringo at si Nancy, while Digong can be ably represented by Alan Peter, who is our Majority Floor Leader," Recto said. "Kung sino man manalo sa kanila, pag-upo pa lang, may batas na," the senator added. Recto said the two measures can be approved during the three-week post-election window. Both houses of Congress will reconvene on May 23 for a three-week session that will end in June 10, or 20 days before the new president is sworn into office. Though dismissed as a lameduck session, Recto would rather call it "a time to create a legacy." While work in the three weeks include canvassing the returns and proclaiming the presidential and vice presidential winners, there is time to cinch approval for the measures, Recto insists. "Pagkatapos ng eleksyon sa Mayo, balik trabaho sa Senado at House. Kaya ang pwede pagpuyatan ay ang CCT at coco levy bills. We have three weeks to do it and in lawmaking, that's enough time to finalize a bill," he said. Two bills by Recto institutionalizing the CCT "are on the final stretch of committee deliberation," the senator explained, "Tapos na, report na lang ang kulang." The committee to which it was referred--Social Justice, Welfare and Rural Development--is chaired by Sen. Nancy Binay. Recto said the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Secretary Corazon Juliano Soliman has requested Malacanang to officially back the measure, a move that will speed up its approval. In her Aug. 11, 2015 letter to President Aquino, Soliman said CCT's institutionalization will guarantee "that poor households shall continue to enjoy better education and health outcomes for an improved quality of life." Recto said the bills would provide a "lasting legal framework" to CCT's operation and protect it from "any shift in political winds." Recto filed Senate Bills 1152 and 2954 in July 2013 and September 2015 to define the 4Ps' scope, objectives, program grants and conditionalities, monitoring and evaluation. As to the coco levy measure, Recto explained that the consolidated bill he and Sen. Cynthia Villar authored was about to be approved on second reading when Malacanang suddenly issued twin orders governing its use in March last year. "Parang ang nangyari, Malacanang pulled the rug underneath it. It jumped the gun on the legislature as a whole," Recto said. Executive Order 179 provided for the inventory, privatization and transfer of coco levy assets in favor of government while Executive Order 180 mandated the transfer of the funds to government for an "Integrated Coconut Industry Roadmap Program." However, in May last year, the SC, acting on a farmers' group plea, issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) stopping their implementation. "Thirty years have passed and the farmers are still waiting for the money, the fund is still frozen, and the implementation of the executive orders mandating its use has been stopped by the courts," Recto said. Birthed by Republic Act 6260, and expanded by four Marcos decrees, the coco levy was imposed on copra sales purportedly to raise capital investment for the coconut industry. By 1986, the total amount collected from the various coconut levies from 1971 to 1982 amounted to P9.7 billion. In the aftermath of EDSA I, the amount was sequestered by the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), which also triggered a long legal struggle for its ownership. On May 7, 2004, the Sandiganbayan rendered a partial summary judgment declaring that the six Coconut Industry Investment Fund - Oil Mills Group (CIIF-OMG) companies, their 14 holding firms, and the CIIF-OMG block of San Miguel Corporation (SMC) shares as "owned by the Government in trust for all the coconut farmers." The Supreme Court (SC), in its decision dated Jan. 24 2012, upheld the Sandiganbayan ruling. On the same year, the SMC shares amounting to P57.6 billion were paid for by San Miguel. The total amount of coco levy fund released for public dispensation was estimated to be worth P71 billion including interest when the SC issued the ruling. Following the SC order, bills were filed in the House and the Senate on how to judiciously and transparently dispose the levy for the benefit of coconut farmers.
Opponents celebrate Congress's decision to approve impeachment of Rousseff. I. Andrade (EFE)

More information La derrota de Rousseff aboca a Brasil a una complicada transicion politica

The decision of Brazils Congress on Sunday to approve a motion to begin impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff has deepened the power struggle between the two-times leader and her bitterest rival, Vice President Michel Temer, who has reportedly already met leading politicians with a view to forming a new government.

But Rousseff is not out of the frame just yet. If anybody thinks that Dilma will go along with this, they are very much mistaken, said former Justice Minister Eduardo Cardozo on Sunday, following the vote in Congress when more than two-thirds of deputies backed impeaching Rousseff, delivering her a humiliating blow.

If the Senate votes by a simple majority to accept the case next month, as is expected, Rousseff would become the first Brazilian leader to be impeached for more than 20 years.

If anybody thinks that Dilma will go along with this, they are very much mistaken

Former Justice Minister Eduardo Cardozo

Rousseff stands accused of delaying payments to state lenders in order to artificially lower the budget deficit to boost her reelection bid in 2014.

Opinion polls show more than 60% of Brazilians support impeaching Rousseff, less than two years after the leftist leader narrowly won reelection. Her popularity has been crushed by the recession and a vast graft scandal at state oil company Petrobras

A Rousseff aide said the government would focus on trying to win support in the 81-seat Senate, where it lacks the simple majority needed to prevent the case being accepted for trial. Given that it currently has the support of only 31 senators, the aide said the situation looked very difficult.

The government has been looking to Senate Speaker Renan Calheiros, a crucial but fickle ally of Rousseffs and no friend of Temer, to delay the Senate vote as long as possible to give it time to negotiate.

Temer is not popular with Brazilians, even those who want to see Rousseff ousted, and is seen by many voters as having stabbed the president in the back.

He was appointed vice president in 2011 after an alliance was created between Rousseffs Workers Party and his centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement party. The 75-year-old constitutional lawyer, with his grey, slicked-back hair and stately bearing, has been described by one pundit as a horror movie butler from central casting.

Temers loyalty has increasingly been called into question by vague public statements and leaked emails.

If the Senate votes by a simple majority to accept the case next month, as is expected, Rousseff would become the first Brazilian leader to be impeached for more than 20 years

But the business sector likes his plans for fiscal austerity and privatization, and business leaders and academics say he will provide the economic stability Brazil needs.

If Rousseff is impeached, she will have to stand down for 180 days while the case against her is brought. During that time, Temer will have to work hard to implement policies that would make it impossible for Rousseff to return to office, assuming she survives the impeachment process. He has already begun talking to economic advisors with a view to formulating a plan to turn the Brazilian economy round, which has shrunk by 3% since last year. Among the men Temer is talking to are former central bank presidents Henrique Meirelles and Arminio Fraga, as well as former president Henrique Cardoso. Sacrifices will have to be made, he has said in recent days.

The Brazilian stock exchange rose briefly on Monday, with analysts saying this was in response to the news of Rousseffs likely impeachment, and that all that is required for full market confidence to return is the announcement that Temer is taking over the presidency, albeit temporarily.

But Temer will face huge opposition from the Workers Party, which will doubtless mobilize supporters to stage street protests throughout the country should Rousseff be toppled. The vice president has denied accusations made by Rousseff that he would cut the Workers Partys welfare programs. Brazilians can expect much more of this kind of politicking in the coming months between a vice president on the rise, a president on the wane, and a Senate president who remains a mystery.

English version by Nick Lyne.
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A group of mostly African American women, who were kicked off the Napa Valley Wine Train for allegedly being loud and boisterous, have settled their race-discrimination lawsuit for a confidential sum, their lawyer said Monday.

The settlement still needs to be approved by the Wine Trains governing board. But the womens attorney, Waukeen McCoy, described the agreement as amicable and said he hopes the case serves as a learning experience for all businesses in the need for diversity and sensitivity training.

Representatives of the Wine Train did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

How trip derailed

The 11 women, members of an East Bay book club called Sistahs on the Reading Edge, boarded the train in Napa on Aug. 22 for their first trip through Wine Country. They said they were laughing and having a good time, occasionally chatting with other passengers, when a train manager, Anna Marquinn, approached and asked them to lower their voices.

The women said they told Marquinn they werent behaving any differently than other passengers. But they said she repeated the warning later, and they were then ordered off the train at St. Helena, halfway through the trip, and were made to march past passengers in all six cars, some of whom snickered at them.

Police met them and led them to a van that took them back to Napa. The Wine Train refunded their $62 fares and later apologized and offered them a free trip in the future, which they rejected.

Their lawsuit, filed in federal court in October, said they were singled out because of their race  10 of the 11 are black. They also said they were libeled in an online message, posted by a company employee on a Facebook account, that accused them of verbal and physical abuse toward other guests and staff.

The company quickly deleted the posting. But McCoy said at a news conference after filing the suit that the allegations were widely circulated and generated many hostile comments on social media. As a result, he said, two of the plaintiffs, a bank manager and a hospital nurse, lost their jobs.

Discrimination denied

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Wine Train owners denied discrimination and said the train evicts guests for their conduct about once a month.

The book club is still going strong, said plaintiff Lisa Johnson, 48, a writer who lives in Antioch.

Were just looking forward to moving on and getting back to reading books, she said Monday.

The Wine Train, founded 26 years ago by the late Rice-a-Roni executive Vincent DeDomenico, was sold in September to Noble House Hotels & Resorts of Seattle and Brooks Street, a real estate development and investment company with an office in Walnut Creek.
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When I said I was going to write about the open-air pissoir in Dolores Park, everybody had the same question: Did you try it out?

Lets put it this way: I assumed the position, but I didnt free Willy.

In the continuing, endearing saga that is life in San Francisco, we now have a lawsuit filed against the city in Superior Court by two groups that really dont like the free-range public urinal installed at the top of the park.

This should not be confused with complaints that there are not enough places at Dolores Park to drain the dragon. In that case, neighborhood groups were upset that party-hearty Dolores Parkers were peeing willy-nilly on walls, trees and sidewalks.

The issue the neighbors had was that several of the park users would relieve themselves on bushes, houses and sidewalks, said Recreation and Parks spokesman Elton Pon.

In response, the Recreation and Parks Department tried a little outside-the-box thinking and went with a European-style pissoir. (By the way, and this was news to me, it is pronounced piss-WAH, not piss-SOIR.)

Gabrielle Lurie/Special to The Chronicle

The pissoir was installed in February as part of the significant and long-planned update of Dolores Park. Supervisor Scott Wiener (and Im leaving that one alone) says there were at least 50 community meetings and lots and lots of free-flowing ideas. Among them was the idea of putting an open-air pee station at the top of the park, an area known as Gay Beach.

One thing we heard was we needed significantly expanded restroom facilities, Wiener said. The rationale for that particular corner was that it was disproportionally male, and a pissoir would take some of the pressure off the restroom buildings.

Or as Pon put it: It had to do with the flow, excuse the pun, of people there.

The pissoir peeved a couple of right-wing legal groups. The legal counsel for the Pacific Justice Institute sent a 12-page letter  headlined re: outdoor urination hole  to Rec and Park General Manager Phil Ginsburg detailing the groups concerns.

Among them was that Because of the unique way in which females urinate they would be exposed to extreme embarrassment if they used the facility.

Of course, given that Dolores Park ranks No. 1 on the Yelp list of Best Nude Parks in San Francisco, youd think that the embarrassment question has pretty much been asked and answered. Actually, given the consumption of pot brownies and the widespread beer, wine and booze tippling on weekends, youd have to wonder if anyone would even notice.

As city attorney spokesman Matt Dorsey responded in a droll press release titled, Aint that a pissoir?: If I had to predict the top 100 things in Dolores Park likely to offend these plaintiffs, I wouldnt have guessed this would make the cut.

The lawsuit was filed late Friday, although the groups have been threatening to do it since the letter to Ginsburg in February. Technically, the plaintiff is the San Francisco Chinese Christian Union, but the attorneys include Kevin Snider of the Pacific Justice Institute.

The institute has been active in the effort to deny gender-appropriate bathroom facilities to transgender individuals. It has been labeled an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

So this may be more about getting a splash of publicity. And theres a section of the lawsuit alleging unlawful sex-based discrimination.

But thats only part of it. Theres a whole long stream of complaints. The plaintiffs say the pissoir emanates odors which are offensive to the senses, because urine is nauseating and offensive when excreted in public places.

Oh, and they also complain it isnt accessible to people with disabilities. So, to review, its a vile, disgusting place ... but we want everyone to have the opportunity to go there.

Now, it should be said, the location has some problems. Its in plain view and is just off the Muni rail line, so some critics have suggested that passengers might look out the window and see some pissoir-ers in action. Of course, if they look out the window on the other side they might see the same thing, except with no connection to a sewer line.

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Thats why they put the facility where it is. It was already a pee hot spot, according to park officials.

Admittedly, the screening is clearly not large enough. Rec and Park didnt want an enclosed facility because that brings a whole set of problems in, from drug use to sexual activity  none of which I understand has ever happened at Dolores Park.

It is not screened as well as it should be, Wiener said. I agree there needs to be more. And there will be.

But for now, indications are that the pissoir is both popular and useful. Wiener says there are often lines of men waiting to use the facility.

And Pon says Rec and Park hasnt gotten many complaints.

Just a handful, he said.

So to speak.

C.W. Nevius is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns appear Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: cwnevius@sfchronicle.com
Its the same old story: too many street trees and not enough money to take care of them all.

The city couldnt afford the maintenance and upkeep for its 105,000 trees, so in 2011 it began transferring ownership to homeowners. Residents often didnt have the cash for costly pruning and associated sidewalk repairs either. But a new piece of legislation could soon bring relief to those neighbors and infuse about $18 million into the citys tree maintenance budget.

At Tuesdays Board of Supervisors meeting, Supervisor Scott Wiener will introduce a November ballot measure that would mandate that the city take back ownership, maintenance and liability of all street trees. It would be funded by a combination of a progressive parcel tax  one that increases with the propertys size  and an $8 million annual budget set-aside, the average of what has been spent on urban forestry over the past 10 years.

This has been a festering problem for decades, Wiener said. Trees are getting dumped on adjacent property owners who dont want them, and thats an unfair burden. For most property owners, they are going to save money. They will pay a $30 or $40 tax, and they will no longer have to hire an arborist or a contractor or insurance.

All properties must pay the property tax. Properties with less than 25 feet of street frontage would pay $29.50, while those between 25 to 150 feet would pay $1.42 per frontage foot, and properties with more than 150 feet would pay $2 per frontage foot. The average resident or business would pay about $35 annually.

Other parcel taxes

Homeowners in San Francisco already pay about $300 in parcel taxes to fund teacher salaries, the City College of San Francisco and the San Francisco Unified School District. And, if a nine-county June ballot measure, Proposition AA, to protect the bay from climate change passes, another $12 would be added.

The parcel tax is a good option for leveling the playing field, said Noni Richen, president of the Small Property Owners of San Francisco Institute.

Now everyone is responsible for the trees, just like everyone enjoys the benefits of them, she said. For one property owner to be responsible for something and not another within a foot is not fair. A lot of these trees were planted without ever being requested by the owners.

So far, about 7,600 street trees have been transferred to property owners through the tree relinquishment program. Public Works will transfer 14,000 more trees within the next few years. Under Wieners legislation, the city would have to take back ownership of those trees on July 1, 2017. If a similar transfer system is ever adopted, it would cancel the parcel tax.

Public Works cares for 32,000 of the citys trees  the other 73,000 are privately owned. But the agency only has 11 arborists on staff, down from 18 in 2005, which means trees get pruned only once every 10 to 12 years. It would take $20 million  10 times the Public Works current tree maintenance budget  to shear the citys trees every three to five years, the recommended service schedule.

Its a question of good government, said Dan Flanagan, executive director of Friends of the Urban Forest. We are an outlier in California and the United States in terms of how we treat street trees. Most well-run municipalities take care of their urban forestry because its a benefit to the whole city. If we dont do anything over time, we will lose our urban forest.

San Francisco now has a 13.7 percent canopy cover and ranks 17th among the 20 most populous cities in the nation, Flanagan said, just behind San Jose. Memphis came in first.

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Funding struggles

There has been a longtime lack of funding for trees, Wiener said. During the 2008 financial crisis, funding for tree maintenance was cut. Urban forestry could not compete against health, senior programs, public safety and other services.

The parcel tax, which would appear on the ballot in November and require a two-thirds majority to pass, would take away the liability and upkeep from homeowners and make it a priority for the city.

Weve got a modest parcel tax and support for the general fund, Wiener said. Its a smart way of doing it. We have a shrinking urban forest and are at the low end of canopy coverage for major cities. We need to fix this problem and learn from our years and years and years of neglect.

Lizzie Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ljohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LizzieJohnsonnn
For the first time, San Francisco is going to require the 37,000 Lyft and Uber drivers who work in the city seven or more days a year to obtain a business license.

City Treasurer Jose Cisneros wouldnt fully explain why he is now requiring the license, which will cost drivers $91 annually, when the companies started operations years ago. But one reason, he said, is that the city launched its online business registration system in March  before, registrants had to go to City Hall to apply in person.

The move ups the political tension between the city and Uber and Lyft. When faced with class-action lawsuits from drivers seeking status as employees, the companies have vigorously maintained that the drivers are independent contractors. Cisneros is in essence turning that argument back on them and saying: If thats the case, the drivers have to register as independent contractors for a business license.

Another reason the treasurer is taking action now may be that he finally has the names of the drivers. Uber and Lyft have long refused to provide drivers names and addresses to the city. Cisneros would not say how he obtained them.

The license will cost drivers $91 a year if they earn $100,000 or less in gross receipts. If they have been driving for multiple years, they will have to pay a registration fee for the years in which they didnt register.

Cisneros letter, which will be sent in three batches  on Friday, Monday and Tuesday  states that the recipient has been identified as a driver for a transportation network company and therefore must obtain a business registration certificate within 30 days.

Failure to respond to this letter may result in penalties and payment obligations, the letter states.

We have a very broad and comprehensive business registration requirement, Ciseneros said. This has been a law that has been around for many years. Its very clearly spelled out on our website  the law here in San Francisco requires you to register your business with the city. If they missed that requirement, they are still obligated to do that.

In response to the news, Uber struck a conciliatory tone and indicated it would not challenge the city.

Uber partners with entrepreneurial drivers and as independent contractors, they are responsible for following appropriate local requirements, Uber spokeswoman Laura Zapata wrote in an email.

Lyft spokeswoman Chelsea Wilson said the company is opposed to the plan.

We have serious concerns with the citys plan to collect and display Lyft drivers personal information in a publicly available database, she said in an email. People in San Francisco, who are choosing to drive with Lyft to help make ends meet, shouldnt have to compromise their privacy in order to share a ride.

Cisneros has aggressively gone after companies that profit from the gig economy, sometimes clashing with Mayor Ed Lee in the process.

In 2012, over Lees objections, Cisneros ruled that Airbnb owed back taxes, which city officials estimated at $25 million. The mayor wanted Cisneros to hold off on the decision until a broader tax overhaul could be rolled out. Airbnb acquiesced last year and paid the taxes.

Lee was not involved in Cisneros decision to require the Uber and Lyft drivers to register with the city.

Christine Falvey, Lees spokeswoman, neither endorsed nor opposed the move. The mayor defers questions about the definition of independent contractor and interpretation of requirements under city law to the treasurer, Falvey said.

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Cisneros said he doesnt expect that all 37,018 drivers who receive the letter are still drivers. But if they are and they register, it will generate $3.37 million a year for the city. An unknown number of drivers already have the license.

It is also unclear to what extent Cisneros will be able to enforce the business registration requirement. He said San Francisco law requires firms to display a registration certificate in their place of business  including their car  and drivers could be cited for failing to do so.

Both Lyft and Uber have faced class-action lawsuits over the past year over whether its drivers are employees or independent contractors. Plaintiffs say they should be classified as employees and entitled to reimbursement for expenses as well as the rights and benefits of employees.

Lyft attempted to settle such a lawsuit in January, agreeing to pay $12.25 million to drivers, although not classifying them as employees. A San Francisco federal judge rejected that proposed settlement this month, saying the $12.25 million shortchanged the drivers. A similar lawsuit against Uber is still in the courts.

Its incredibly important to Lyft and Ubers business model that the drivers be independent contractors, said UC Hastings law Professor Reuel Schiller. They are not really interested in compromise. This sounds to me like the city of San Francisco is attempting to play hardball in return.

Emily Green is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: egreen@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @emilytgreen
The high-stakes fight over which San Francisco housing developers will be required to increase affordable-housing levels significantly if Proposition C passes in the June 7 election spilled into public view Monday, with some developers claiming a raw deal.

The Board of Supervisors Land Use and Transportation Committee hammered out details of trailing legislation for Prop. C, a ballot initiative that would double the citys affordable housing requirements to 25 percent on-site or 33 percent off-site.

While Prop. C would apply to any project filed after Jan. 12, the trailing legislation deals with the hundreds of projects in the development pipeline that have not started construction.

Under the legislation, developments proposed in 2013 would be required to add 1 percent affordable units, 2014 projects would add 1.5 percent and 2015 projects would add 2.5 percent. Those figures are on top of the 12 percent the developers were required to include under current city law.

The 2013-15 projects represent about 12,000 planned housing units, and the bumps would add about 200 units to the citys permanently affordable housing stock.

Striking a balance

Prop. C sponsors Jane Kim and Aaron Peskin, a committee member, emphasized that the goal is to get developers to include as many affordable units as possible, without squeezing a projects bottom line so much that it doesnt make economic sense.

We know that market-rate developers can do far more than 12 percent given the market and the value that we, as a city, confer on land, Kim said during the meeting.

Among the big losers were projects that either filed their initial paperwork after Jan. 12, 2016, or would rise more than 120 feet. They include 3333 California St., the UCSF property where San Francisco development firms SKS Investments and the Prado Group want to build 558 units near Laurel Village, a part of town where new housing is a rarity.

Supervisor Mark Farrell warned that the legislation could kill that housing proposal in favor of an office use. The project application was submitted in March, although the developers have been talking to the community for well over two years.

We want to do everything we can to encourage residential building, said Farrell, who represents the area. In many cases, its easier to do commercial.

About a dozen proposed projects of more than 120 feet would also be subject to the 25 percent requirement. This includes 1001 Van Ness Ave., where Oryx Partners wants to put 240 units in a 130-foot building. Juan Carlos Wallace, a partner in Oryx, said that doubling the number of affordable units there would take away $11 million from the bottom line.

We are not a high-rise product, we are a mid-rise and one that is at risk, along with 200 union jobs, he said.

In a letter to the board, Wallace said the legislation needlessly penalizes the Van Ness corridor and would jeopardize years of work.

Our project is not a high-rise tower on the top of a hill, nor does it have waterfront views, he said. Many of the units are thus priced at more moderate levels relative to high-rises in other parts of the city.

Process criticized

Supervisor Scott Wiener, a committee member, said the trailing legislation was the result of backroom deal-making, with some builders treated differently than others. He also objected to the short timeline committee members had to digest several amendments, which continued to be introduced well into the meeting.

This is the most significant piece of housing legislation we will vote on during our tenure on board, Wiener said. We owe it to the public to have a fair and transparent process, and that has not happened here.

Over two months of meetings since the Board of Supervisors voted to put Prop. C on the June ballot, Kim and Peskin managed to appease major developers, enough so that they are unlikely to campaign against the June ballot measure.

Eric Tao, the developers de facto lead negotiator, whose company, AGI, has built more than 1,000 units in SoMa and the Mission, said ideally the entire pipeline would have been grandfathered at the 12 percent level, but given the politics and the affordable housing crisis, the deal was the best the developers could expect.

Its not perfect  there are still people being left out, still projects being hurt, Tao said.

That meant usual alliances were frayed, with most developers supporting Peskin and Kim, and the moderate supervisors and the trade unions left complaining about backroom dealing. The carpenters union posted a tombstone and a massive hooded skeleton outside City Hall to protest the legislation.

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Peskin denied backroom deals were made: Everyone who is in the pipeline should be treated in the same way. And that is precisely what this legislation does.

The question of whether entire neighborhoods would be included in the grandfathering was undecided until Mondays meeting. Initially developers with projects in parts of SoMa and the Mission were out of luck. SoMa projects were eventually included in the grandfathering, and Mission projects were added at the meeting.

On Monday, the committees third member, Chairwoman Malia Cohen, proposed a motion that the legislation be delayed a week  it passed 2-1, with Peskin opposed and Wiener in favor.

A national model

Peter Cohen, who heads the Council of Community Housing Organizations, said the legislation is groundbreaking.

You are talking about legislation that every city and state in the country would be jealous of, Cohen said. This is how we get things done in San Francisco  its why we are a national model of solutions around affordable housing.

Developer Oz Ericson of the Emerald Fund said the grandfathering legislation means that the vast majority of projects in the pipeline will get built, but he worries about the future.

I personally cant make 25 percent affordable work  the costs are simply too high, Ericson said.

J.K. Dineen and Emily Green are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jkdineen@sfchronicle.com, egreen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SFjkdineen @emilytgreen
Eighteen months after an accident claimed the life of a 24-year-old Sacramento man taking a Lyft ride home on a rainy night, his mother and boyfriend are suing the San Francisco ride company. They claim that Lyft is dragging its heels on taking financial responsibility for a crash that the California Highway Patrol says was the Lyft drivers fault.

Losing my son is a black hole I live with all the time, said Donna Dinapoli, 55, a Folsom resident. And Im angry because it was so senseless and didnt have to happen if the driver had been more careful.

Lyft, despite its vaunted $1 million insurance liability policy, has not offered her compensation or even condolences, she said. I think its a disgrace for a company as large as Lyft to try to duck responsibility, Dinapoli sa id.

Our hearts go out to the victims of this tragic accident, Lyft wrote in a statement. Lyfts $1 million liability policy, which includes uninsured/underinsured liability coverage, is designed to provide coverage for Lyft drivers to protect passengers and third partie s.

A source familiar with Lyfts position on the case said the company has not disclaimed responsibility for the accident, which was the young companys first fatality. The delays stemmed from the investigation of the crash by Lyfts insurance carrier  James River Insurance Co., which also insures Uber rides  a process that is still ongoing, the source said. The legal case, which is still in the discovery process, also is likely to have a lengthy timeline. Dinapolis attorney said he hopes to go to trial by the end of the year .

In the early hours of Nov. 1, 2014, Dinapolis son, Shane Holland, 24, and his boyfriend, Brady Lawrence, 27, summoned a Lyft car to take them home from a Halloween party. Holland had promised his mother that the couple would be safe and not get behind the wheel.

Heading westbound on I-80 near Citrus Heights in Sacramento County, Lyft driver Shanti Adhikari, then 31, abruptly swerved to avoid a disabled vehicle up ahead, lost control of his Toyota Camry and spun out onto the shoulder, where the car smashed into two trees, killing Holland and injuring Lawrence and the driver, according to the CHP report on the incident.

(Adhikari) caused this collision by making an unsafe turning motion, said the CHP report, adding that the Lyft drivers actions were the proximate cause of Hollands fatal injuries and amounted to involuntary manslaughter without gross negligence. Moreover, the Lyft driver had no proof of insurance, the CHP said. Adhikari said he was struck from behind, rather than having swerved, the report said. After inspecting (the Lyft car) on scene, I was unable to locate damage which would substantiate (that) claim, the investigating officer wrote. Adhikari, who could not be reached for comment, has not been charged.

Over speed limit

Kevin Morrison, the attorney for Dinapoli and Lawrence, said data from the Camry showed it was going at 75 mph at the time of the crash, over the legal speed limit and particularly unsafe in rainy conditions.

Morrison said Adhikari, who had been driving for Lyft for about a month at the time, had a speeding conviction from a year before the accident. That wouldnt have disqualified him from driving for Lyft. Its website states that a driver can have up to three moving violations in the past three years and up to one major moving violation.

To a layperson, Lyfts legal responses to the lawsuit may seem harsh. Its affirmative defense appears to blame the victims. Injuries or damages to decedent, if any, were proximately caused by negligence, recklessness or intentional conduct of decedent in that he failed to exercise ordinary care under the circumstances, says its answer to the case filed in San Francisco Superior Court.

While heartless-sounding, such wording is commonplace, said Andrew Bradt, assistant professor at UC Berkeley School of Law. They have to put that language into their early filings in order to avoid waiving the possibility of contributory negligence on the part of the plaintiffs, he said. For instance, if the passengers were found not to have been wearing seat belts, Lyfts and its insurers liability could be reduced, he said. Failure to assert a possible defense can result in losing it forever.

Still, he said, Lyfts responses are unlikely to play well in the court of public opinion  and could hurt the companys reputation. It seems like misdirection if one of their main selling points is protection by an insurance policy, but the realities of recovering under that policy are extremely onerous, Bradt said.

Lyfts response also uses the drivers status as an independent contractor as a defense, another commonplace legal placeholder for a possible future defense. The driver was an independent contractor responsible for their own means and methods, making the doctrine of respondeat superior inapplicable, Lyfts response said. That doctrine holds that an employer is responsible for wrongful actions an employee performs within the scope of his or her work.

At the time of the accident, both Lyft and outside experts said its insurance would cover any claims.

While the lawsuit doesnt seek a specific amount, Im sure its more than a million-dollar case, by a lot, said Bradt, the Berkeley Law professor.

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Ubers similar battle

Lyfts arch-rival Uber notoriously prolonged a battle over a fatal accident. After an Uber driver struck and killed a 6-year-old girl in San Francisco on New Years Eve in 2013, Uber allegedly disclaimed responsibility because the driver was in between ride assignments. That case was finally settled in July 2015 for an undisclosed amount before it was to go to trial.

The other passenger in the Lyft accident, Lawrence, who spent three days in a hospital intensive care unit after the accident, said he racked up $92,000 in medical bills. A massage therapist, Lawrence said he was unable to work for almost a year after the accident as he healed from internal injuries and multiple contusions. Hes still emotionally traumatized from losing the man he expected to spend his life with.

I grew up in a fundamental Christian family and had issues with accepting my sexuality, Lawrence said. Shane was the first person who made me feel loved, accepted and understood.

Holland, who had struggled with Tourette syndrome, was attending Sierra College, a community college in Rocklin, full time as a physics major with the goal of transferring to UC Davis, then pursuing medical school to be a radiologist, his mother said.

Both Lawrence and Dinapoli said it adds to their pain to have to pursue a legal battle.

Its hard to keep having to relive and replay everything I went through that night, Lawrence said. It makes me sad and it makes me angry.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @csaid
Lyfts proposal to pay its California drivers an average of $53 each to drop claims that they should be treated like employees was rejected by a judge as glaringly inadequate.

A federal judge ruled Thursday that a proposed payout of $12.25 million for the 100,000 drivers in the case represents only about one-10th of the amount of mileage reimbursement they were seeking under their own attorneys methodology for valuing claims. Adding in other uncompensated claims, the drivers may have been shortchanged even more, San Francisco U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria wrote.
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Since scientists launched the first components for the International Space Station in 1998, the continuing challenge has been how to efficiently send cargo and structures into space to keep it going.

The objects sent must fit inside or on a rocket, survive conditions during takeoff with three to nine times the gravity of Earth and hold up against harsh environments outside the Earths atmosphere.

To survive the rocky ride, they are often built much stronger  and at a much higher cost  than needed to survive once they reach the vacuum of space.

But one Bay Area company is working to overcome those obstacles.

Made in Space, at Moffett Field in Mountain View, made history in 2014 when company officials remotely printed small, 3-D objects  such as ratchets and containers  in zero-gravity conditions using its machine aboard the International Space Station.

Now the company has embarked on a mission to do away with the need to send structures from Earth at all. Within five years, its aim is to advance its 3-D printing technology enough to build structures in space.

Michael Macor/The Chronicle

Made in Space has teamed up with NASA for a project called Archinaut. If successful, the result will be a manufacturing system capable of producing large reflector satellites or trusses similar to those that already make up large parts of the space station.

A rocket is like a meat grinder and everything in space has to survive it, said Andrew Rush, president of Made in Space. We are forced to over-engineer. By building things in space we can eliminate that design concern.

Raw materials will still need to be sent from Earth to make the structures, but thats much easier to do than the current method of building finished goods and then launching them, Rush said.

Quicker moves

In addition to overcoming the design limitations and high costs of current practice, the project will open the door for quicker space development, Rush said. And an intriguing long-term possibility is the use of space junk or natural space resources.

We are very interested in how we could use space materials that are discarded or old, Rush said. We have recyclers that can reconstitute those into feedstock to create new things. We can scale that up and take old satellites, for example, and use those to create new systems.

To align with NASAs plan to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s, the company is also looking for ways to use resources that naturally exist outside of Earths sphere  on Mars and on asteroids for example  for its manufacturing needs.

The initial prototype for the companys in-space manufacturing system, with its three robotic arms and a 4-foot-wide octagonal-prism-shaped body, looks more like a strange science-fiction depiction of the future than a large-scale manufacturing machine.

Yet that future is not far off. Full use of the system is said to be just five years away, with the ultimate goal to be able to manufacture items much larger than the machine itself.

The first thing were focused on are basic structures of a spacecraft, said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for NASAs Space Technology Mission Directorate. That is the hardest thing to get to survive the launch environment.

Early tests

Scientists within the Archinaut project will begin their work by testing early parts of the technologies, Rush said.

The first 24 months are focused on doing some very strong technical demos, he said. Thereafter we will actually build and do a flight demo of the system.

Though the company has mastered printing small, three dimensional objects in zero gravity on board the International Space Station, officials said manufacturing larger items in space poses unique impediments.

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Some of the challenges we have to overcome are the absence of air, the widely varying temperature environment and atomic oxygen and radiation, said Mike Snyder, Made in Space chief engineer. We have to be very methodical in our material selection  in order to make sure the structures survive.

The Archinaut project is possible through a partnership with NASAs Space Technology Mission Directorate, which gave Made in Space a $20-million, two-year contract to get its technology into the space station for demonstrations.

Made in Space also brought in companies Northrop Grumman, to provide expertise in electronic interfaces and heat analysis, and Oceaneering Space Systems, to design and build the machines arms.

Officials will take what they learn from first round of technical demonstrations and work to refine the technology and move forward from there.

Last month, Made in Space sent an advanced commercial version of its 3-D printer to the space station. Once set up and put online, the printer would allow anyone  businesses or individuals  to print objects in the International Space Station from a computer on Earth.

In addition to manufacturing parts for the International Space Station, Made in Spaces manufacturing machine would also allow public or private companies to build items such as satellites outside of Earths atmosphere.

The overall idea for the project is to slowly open up the possibilities of what humans can produce and do in space.

If we are going into the final frontier, we need the things to settle that frontier, Rush said. Archinaut is one of those tools.

Kevin Schultz is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kschultz@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinEdSchultz
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When Shandel Story welcomed a new daughter three months ago, his boss let him take three weeks off and reduce his hours to bond with his baby girl. Story got to see Stellena Raes first smile. He was there the first time she rolled over.

You never get back those firsts, Story said.

On April 5, San Francisco passed a paid family leave ordinance meant to alleviate the financial concerns of new parents like Story. At the same time, it will put new strains on some business owners  like Storys boss, Pete Sittnick.

Californias disability insurance program paid 55 percent of Storys salary while he was on leave. Meanwhile, Sittnick paid a new employee to take on Storys duties as the restaurant manager at Waterbar. Had the new ordinance already been in place, Waterbar would have covered the rest of Storys salary, too.

Story said Sittnick readily accommodated his need for time off, and Story took less than he could have under state law. But the arrangement put financial strain on both of them. Story had hospital bills to pay off while drawing only partial pay. And Sittnick still had a restaurant to run.

The municipalitys new ordinance requires San Francisco businesses to offer new parents  men or women  six weeks of fully paid time off to bond with their kids. Californias disability insurance program currently pays new parents 55 percent of their wages for six weeks of leave. The local ordinance will require employers to pay the remaining 45 percent.

Leah Millis/The Chronicle

The fact that its supportive of the employee is a positive, Sittnick said. The concern I have is that it is an additional expense.

The ordinance will take effect on a rolling basis  starting in January 2017 for businesses with 50 or more employees, July 2017 for those with 35 or more employees and January 2018 for those with 20 or more employees.

By that point, businesses will only have to pay workers 30 to 40 percent of their salary. On April 11, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new bill that will expand the states paid family leave coverage in 2018. The program will pay minimum wage earners 70 percent of their salary while on leave, while those who earn up to $108,000 annually will receive 60 percent of their salary during leave.

U.S. lags others

Scott Wiener, the San Francisco supervisor who introduced the local bill, said he hopes to ultimately have a federal social insurance program where all workers in the United States are legally entitled to fully paid family leave.

The United States is one of two countries out of 185 listed by the International Labor Organization that lack national paid parental leave.

Until we get there, San Francisco should play the role weve always played as a spark where we take on the issue and push the envelope on progressive public policy, Wiener said.

Implementation of the policy at the local level puts significant strain on business owners, said Christin Evans, a director at the Haight-Ashbury Merchants Association.

New York recently introduced a paid family leave policy that requires employees to offer new parents 12 weeks of paid leave, but the state will fund the effort through a weekly payroll tax.

I think there was an expectation that it would be handled at the state or federal level, Evans said. We were surprised that it was implemented at the local level.

Writing local policy that sets the tone for the rest of the state and country puts an extra responsibility on the local government to be thoughtful, said Andrea Leonard, human resources manager at Guss Community Market.

I wish they had thought a little bit more about the means, Leonard said.

Leonard manages more than 200 employees at three grocery stores owned by the family-run business. The local chains employees are its greatest assets, Leonard said. They interact with the community and build relationships.

From our perspective, anything thats going to help them is great, Leonard said. Wed always like to see a little most support from the decision makers as far as the economic impact its going to have for us.

Impact on small companies

Paid family leave is the latest addition to a growing heap of city mandates for employers, which includes sick leave, health care coverage and minimum compensation requirements. Most recently, the city passed a new ordinance that will raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2018, three years before Californias rises to that level.

Its this piling on effect that is squeezing businesses, said Tom Scott, the California state director of the National Federation of Independent Business. San Francisco wants to be a trendsetter on so many different levels. Ultimately whether its the customer, whether its reduction in employment (of) staff, somebody pays for this.

Scott says the policy will strain small businesses the most because they operate within a tighter margin.

I dont know where San Francisco thinks small business comes up with this money, Scott said. Policy makers seem tone deaf to the struggles small business owners face every day.

The employers share of paid family leave will amount to an average of $3,344 per claim before California rates are adjusted, according to an impact report issued by the San Francisco Controllers Office. The new policy could cost employers as much as $32.3 million annually if all eligible employees take advantage of the option, the report said.

Little impact on big firms

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Waterbars Sittnick says only one to two of his 250 employees take family leave each year. That makes him less concerned with the ordinances financial impact on his business than he is with the bigger picture of how the city imposes new costs on business owners.

There seems to be ... thinking (that) its OK for the business to absorb expenses as it relates to employees, Sittnick said. Ultimately, it forces the businesses to raise prices, which is always a concern for how the public will respond.

Where the new policy will mean financial strain for small businesses, it will have little impact on the areas big tech companies, many of which already have generous paid-leave policies and compete for employees in part on the generosity of their perks.

Auditing and consulting firm Ernst & Young announced Thursday that employees will be eligible for up to 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave.

Twitter announced a new paid parental leave policy the same day the city voted in its new law. Starting May 1, the company will offer new parents up to 20 fully-paid weeks of leave.

Netflix promised last August to offer new parents unlimited paid time off within the first year they bring a child home. And in November, Facebook announced that their parental leave policy would offer four months of paid family leave to new parents regardless of gender.

More work-life balance

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a point of taking two full months off for the birth of his first daughter, Max.

These firms are in a very competitive labor market, and they want to retain and attract the best employees, Stanford economics professor Kathryn Shaw said. What their employees are telling them is they want more work-life balance. I think its genuine, and I think it reflects the competitive labor market they face.

Large firms typically have more resources, which enable them to offer higher wages and generous benefits. This firm-size effect puts small organizations at a competitive disadvantage, Shaw said.

The small businesses will have a more difficult time of it, Shaw said.

Mandating a costly benefit will give small organizations even less flexibility on how they pay employees, Shaw said.

If they didnt (offer) this benefit, then small firms might be able to pay higher wages.

Jessica Floum is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jfloum@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfloum
San Franciscos Shuddle, a pioneering ride service for kids, is going out of business this week after it failed to raise more venture backing.

We ran out of money, said CEO Doug Aley, 37, who took the reins in November from founder Nick Allen. This is a capital-intensive business, from driver recruitment to customer acquisition.

Shuddle had raised $12.2 million, including $9.6 million a year ago. That last infusion, originally tabbed for expansion outside the Bay Area, instead has fueled its operations for the past year, Aley said. Shuddle lost money on every ride until this year, when it started making money on individual rides.

The 32-person company sought unsuccessfully to raise an additional $10 million to $15 million to pull us through to profitability, he said.

Venture capital tight

The news underscores how tight venture capital has become, especially for younger startups that havent grown quickly enough. The on-demand sector, once a darling of investors, is particularly challenging for fundraising, Aley said.

Amy Graff

My world has been colored by on-demand apocalypse headlines that littered the news over the past six to eight weeks when we were trying to raise rounds, he said.

The recent fates of two San Francisco on-demand valet parking services demonstrate the markets fickle nature. Zirx, which had raised $36 million, shut its consumer service in February, choosing to sell parking and other services to companies. But rival Luxe in April scored $50 million, led by car-rental company Hertz, in a deal that values it at more than $100 million before the investment.

Often dubbed an Uber for kids, Shuddle began in fall 2014 as the first service offering on-demand paid rides for unaccompanied children (and some seniors) provided by drivers in their personal cars. Its 350 independent-contractor drivers are almost exclusively women, many of them teachers or child care providers.

Shuddle has given some 65,000 rides throughout the Bay Area, with an emphasis on the East Bay, and was up to 7,000 rides a month. It had about 2,600 customers, with about half of them booking more than four rides a month, Aley said.

A useful service

The service is needed, Aley said. Parents tell us over and over again that we are heroes and saved their marriages, stuff like that.

Shuddles rides were more expensive than those of Uber and Lyft, as it had higher expenses for more-extensive driver background checks and additional insurance. Trips averaged about $24 each, with a quarter of that going to the company and the rest to the driver.

Several other services offer rides for unaccompanied kids. The most developed is Los Angeles HopSkipDrive with more than $14 million in venture backing and plans to expand outside Southern California. San Mateos Zum and San Franciscos Kango, more-recent startups with seed funding, offer services in the Bay Area.

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Drivers, riders needed

All the kid shuttles suffer from the chicken-and-egg syndrome of needing more drivers and more riders so they can better balance supply and demand, according to venture capitalist Mike Walsh, an early investor in Uber who also invested in Kangos seed round, speaking in January.

Im hopeful that the companies that remain in the space will stick around and continue to do great work, Aley said.

The original ride-hailing company, San Franciscos Sidecar, shut down its ride and delivery service in December after being outgunned by bigger, better-funded Lyft and Uber. Shuddle founder Allen had co-founded Sidecar and served as its chief financial officer and head of operations. In January, General Motors bought Sidecars technology and hired about 20 of its former employees as part of its push into new-vehicle technology.

Aley said Shuddle likewise will hope to sell some of its intellectual property.

We kept our focus on safe and reliable rides for families, he said. It was an honor to be trusted with that responsibility.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
Luis de Guindos, hoy durante la Comision de Economia en el Congreso Jaime Villanueva

Spains acting government has increased its forecast for the countrys public deficit for 2016 from 2.8% to 3.6% of gross domestic product (GDP), setting the figure for 2017 at 2.9%, up from 1.4%.

The new figures were announced on Tuesday by acting Economy Minister Luis de Guindos ahead of an appearance before Congress to outline a Stability Program that will be sent to Brussels detailing these forecasts.

If the forecasts prove to be correct, Spain will miss EU objectives for deficit reduction

The new data from the government also expects unemployment figures to worsen toward the end of this year, rising 0.2 percentage points to 19.9% of the active population, and public debt to rise by several tenths of a point to 99.1% of GDP.

De Guindos blamed this gloomier outlook on a slowdown of the global economy.

If the forecasts prove to be correct, Spain will miss EU objectives for deficit reduction, which had been set for 2.8% for this year. But on Tuesday, it was also announced that De Guindos has cut a deal with Brussels giving Spain an extra year to bring its deficit down  with the possibility of another year of margin.

Meeting the goal [of 2.8%] would require very severe budget cuts, De Guindos explained on Tuesday. We started with a public deficit of 5% of GDP, and therefore, the adjustment required to reach that goal would be around two percentage points of GDP, excluding unforeseen, non-recurring costs. Such an effort would have a negative impact on our growth.

De Guindos said on Tuesday that spending for next year would be cut by 2 billion in a bid to meet EU targets

With regional, local and general elections last year, the Popular Party government decided to cut taxes and raise its costs, granting civil servants an extra payment they had been denied in 2012. Spains regions also upped spending, all of which contributed to Spains missed deficit target, which came in at 5% in 2015 instead of 4.2%.

De Guindos said on Tuesday that spending for next year would be cut by 2 billion in a bid to meet EU targets.

The acting economy minister also warned of the effects of a slowdown in the global economy: The data so far points to a gradual slowdown compared to the preceding quarter. This is mainly due to a slowdown in internal demand and the worsening performance of external markets.

English version by Nick Lyne & Simon Hunter.
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Uber agreed Thursday to pay up to $25 million to settle a 2014 lawsuit filed by city officials in San Francisco and Los Angeles who argued that the ride service gave customers a false sense of security by touting its background checks as the toughest in the industry.

The suit, brought by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon and Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey, alleged that Uber misled consumers by suggesting its driver-screening process was superior to the ones used by taxi companies. Taxi drivers are vetted with fingerprint checks, whereas Uber drivers are not.

The suit also questioned Ubers compliance with California laws regarding airport rides and fare calculation.

Under the terms of the settlement, Uber will pay $10 million within 60 days, according to Gascons office. The remaining $15 million penalty will be waived in two years if Uber complies with all of the settlements terms.

The result we achieved today goes well beyond its impact on Uber, Gascon said. It sends a clear message to all businesses, and to startups in particular, that in the quest to quickly obtain market share, laws designed to protect consumers cannot be ignored. If a business acts like it is above the law, it will pay a heavy price.

The settlement averts a courtroom fight that could have proved embarrassing for San Franciscos Uber, which has a history of tangling with government regulators at home and abroad. The money will be split between the two district attorneys offices.

Were glad to put this case behind us and excited to redouble our efforts serving riders and drivers across the state of California, an Uber representative said.

Ubers ride-hailing rival Lyft paid $500,000 in 2014 to settle similar allegations from the two district attorneys.

Uber took a hit to its public image when Gascon discovered 25 instances in which San Francisco and Los Angeles Uber drivers had serious criminal backgrounds. The drivers included sex offenders, identity thieves, burglars, kidnappers and a murderer.

Gascon also questioned Ubers compliance with a California law allowing regulators to check the apps fare calculations for accuracy. The state has since found Ubers fare calculations accurate in initial testing. It issued a temporary use permit for the company in August so the company could legally operate while working toward full state certification.

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As part of Thursdays settlement, Uber promised to operate only in airports where the company has permission. When the suit was filed in December 2014, Uber had just reached an agreement with San Francisco International Airport to pick up and drop off passengers there. But the company had not yet received approval from any other airports, even though it encouraged its drivers to work at other airports, according to the suit.

Uber now has permission to operate at all three major Bay Area airports as well as Los Angeles International Airport and others in southern California.

Uber has raised $9.01 billion from more than 50 investors and is valued at more than $60 billion. But it continues to rile regulators.

The company paid $28.5 million in February to settle two class-action lawsuits filed on behalf of customers challenging Ubers representation of its background checks. As a result, the company agreed to rename its safe ride fee to a booking fee.

Jessica Floum is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jfloum@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfloum
When Sue Ann Calmeyer of Sebastopol got a recall notice about the defective airbag inflator in her Honda Fit last month, she was tempted to toss it aside. Until she read the warning.

It said if the airbag deployed, the inflator could rupture and metal fragments could pass through the airbag cushion material, possibly causing serious injury or fatality to you or others in the vehicle.

So Calmeyer decided to take Honda up on its offer of a free rental car until her Fit can be repaired  which could be in July or later, due to a parts shortage. Her Fit cannot be driven while she has the rental. Although shed rather be driving her Fit, which gets better gas mileage than her rented Nissan Sentra, I dont want to be driving in a car if the thing that is supposed to save my life kills me, she said.

Of the 14 automakers forced to recall cars with airbag inflators manufactured by the Japanese company Takata, Honda has the most generous rental-car policy. It also has the most cars subject to the recall  8.5 million  and the most deaths blamed on the faulty inflators.

On April 7, a 17-year-old Texas girl became the 10th American thought to be killed by exploding shrapnel when her airbag, equipped with a Takata inflator, deployed. Her car, a 2002 Civic, was subject to the recall. Nine of the 10 deaths were in Hondas, one was in a 2006 Ford Ranger. About 100 people have been injured in Takata-related incidents.

In May, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ordered 11 automakers to recall 24 million Takata airbag inflators installed in about 19 million cars sold in the United States. The first deaths were reported in 2009.

In January, it added three automakers and more cars to the list, which now totals 28.8 million inflators in 24 million cars, making it the biggest recall in U.S. automotive history.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Drivers can find a list of recalled cars at http://1.usa.gov/1gnVNCL. They can also enter their vehicle identification number at https://vinrcl.safercar.gov/vin to see whether it has been recalled. Most of the affected automakers have websites dedicated to the recall.

Only 7.5 million of the cars subject to recall have been repaired so far, because the replacement parts are in short supply and designed specially for each model. Its not like Lego blocks you can fit together, safety agency spokesman Bryan Thomas said.

The agency has issued a coordinated remedy order to make sure the highest-risk cars get fixed first, Thomas said.

The administration believes that the highest-risk inflators are on the drivers side, in older cars (generally 2008 or earlier) and in hot, humid places. Its order puts recalled cars into four priority groups, based on their combination of risk factors. California is not a high-humidity state.

The agency required automakers to send out an initial notice telling customers their cars are subject to recall and a second notice when their cars are ready to be repaired, based on the priority list.

The administration is encouraging automakers to use other means to reach vehicle owners, such as mass advertising and social media. Some are even hiring private investigators, Thomas said. The agency cannot require automakers to provide rental cars, and their practices vary.

Hondas website says, If an owner requests alternative transportation while awaiting repair, while the repair is in progress, or if there is a delay in repairing an affected vehicle, Honda and Acura dealers are authorized to provide a free loaner or rental vehicle. It says dealers may now loan vehicles to teenage drivers, who are generally prohibited from renting or borrowing vehicles due to insurance policies.

U.S. Honda and Acura dealers have provided over 232,000 loaner and rental vehicles to people affected by the Takata recall since May 2014, Honda spokesman Chris Martin said.

Mazdas website said that when parts are ready, the repair takes about one hour. If you have received the recall notice, but not the letter to bring in your vehicle to have the inflator replaced, yes, you can request a loaner vehicle, Mazda spokeswoman Tamara Mlynarczyk said. Mazda has provided 1,234 rental cars under the program.

Toyotas website doesnt mention free rentals. Its recall is mainly for passenger-side airbags, spokeswoman Cindy Knight said. If a customer doesnt feel safe ... they can not seat someone in the front passenger seat. We also have the option of loaning a car until they can get the repair part.

At Nissan, we have generally been able to fix anyone who comes in without a delay. If we dont have the part, if they request a loaner car, we can provide that, spokesman Steve Yaeger said. A spokesman for Infiniti, owned by Nissan, said essentially the same thing.

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BMW spokesman Hector Arellano-Belloc said,  Subject to availability, alternate transportation is provided when requested by a customer.

However, at Ford, We are not offering loaner vehicles, spokesman John Cangany said.

And at Volkswagen, We are not offering alternate transportation at this time, spokesman Mark Gillies said.

General Motors spokesman Tom Wilkinson said that for priority group 1 Pontiac Vibes, the company offers to pick up vehicles that needed repairing. If customers need alternative transportation, It would be covered by us.

However, for the Silverado and Sierra HD pickups, Saab 9-3 and 9-5 and Saturn Astra models, we believe customers can continue to drive their vehicles as normal, as neither GM nor Takata has any field reports of ruptures, injuries or deaths in the U.S. or Canada from inflators in the vehicles involved in these recalls, Wilkinson said.

When the safety agency announced the initial recall in May, it gave Takata until 2019 to prove that tens of millions of inflators not subject to the recall were safe. Last week, the administration put out a more specific number, saying Takata still needs to prove that 85 million inflators not already recalled are safe.

Todd Walburg, an attorney with Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein in San Francisco who has sued many car companies on behalf of consumers, said he would advise owners of recalled cars to stop driving the car immediately. Take it to a dealership and demand a rental car, because the safety of the owner and their families are at risk. If they dont provide a rental car, look into legal options such as small claims court.

Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: kpender@sfchronicle.com Blog: http://blog.sfgate.com/pender Twitter: @kathpender
It was the dead of night, but I rolled back the covers, doffed my pajamas, donned my jeans and hurried down to the ceremonies at Lottas Fountain on Monday, April 18. The Bloody Marys of past years are gone; no Sees lollipops, either. The only precious thing that anyone who participates can have is a downtown parking place. Theres not a lot of competition for them at 4:45 a.m.

The best thing about these annual ceremonies is that they just are; its a coming together of citizens for no purpose other than celebrating the historical coming together, and looking ahead with hopes that San Franciscans will come together again in the event of the big quake that every seismologist forecasts.

Emcee Bob Sarlatte, Donna Huggins dressed as Lillie Coit, Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White and Police Chief Greg Suhr (greeted with applause and nary a protester) lifted a memorial wreath  to victims of earthquakes in Japan and Ecuador, it was said  and placed it in a corner of the four-sided fountain. When onlookers alerted them to the presence of another wreath, this one from the California Historical Society, they placed it in the same corner, squishing the roses in the first. It was inexplicable, because there were three other empty corners ... unless it was a metaphor for the crowded state of the city.

In front of me, one gent in vintage tweed admired the pocket watch of another. On my left, a man apparently used to using the wee hours for personal grooming took out a comb and ran it through his beard repeatedly. On my right stood a man in a natty hobo costume: bedroll on his back, raggedy suitcase at his feet, perfectly brushed derby on his head. Your vagrantism is in my way, said someone on the other side of him, stepping over the suitcase to get closer to the speakers. Miss Manners couldnt have suggested a more polite message to a man of the streets.

The problems of teenage delinquents, members of the San Franciscos so-called jacket clubs in the late 1950s, are explored in the 1961 documentary Ask Me, Dont Tell Me, posted by Alfonso Montuori on Facebook. The 20-minute-long movie, shot by David Myers, is about Youth for Service, a project of the American Friends Service Committee.

It begins with a preamble by Stanley Mosk , who was attorney general of California at the time. Describing the conditions that lead to juvenile delinquency, such as lack of a loving and supportive upbringing, he said it was up to a civilized community to make up for those conditions.

In Youth for Service, the young students participated in work projects for which they volunteered. There was no adult supervision, and sometimes they made mistakes. But supervision, says the narration, would mean the imposition of authority, which is exactly what organizers realized would ruin the project.

Watching it  at http://bit.ly/1NdAdAc  today, you cant help thinking that fear over those troubled boys was akin to todays public fear of the homeless.

P.S. The Tenderloin Museum features a showing of Robert Zagones The Lost Footage of Cecil Williams, a 1975 TV program, on Wednesday, April 27 at Glide Church. After the showing of the movie, Williams; his wife; Janice Mirikitani; and Willie Brown will participate in an onstage conversation.

How popular is Mayor Ed Lee? I left Dogfest about a half hour before the end of the all-day outdoor fundraiser for McKinley School. The silent auction items included a Meet and Greet with Mayor Ed Lee, who would give the winners party of eight a tour of City Hall. Perhaps someone jumped in near the end, but by about 3:30 p.m., no one had bid.

Eileen Alexander tells the tale of a pal who tried to get help jump-starting her car, but nothing worked. Even though the cables were attached, they couldnt get the motor going. The lights were functioning and the radio was on, but the engine wouldnt turn over. Then they realized that the Prius had been on the whole time.

A Macys ad in The Chronicle on Friday, April 15, for the Deal of the Day, Buy One, Get One Free, featured a picture of a single shoe. Is Macys no longer selling shoes by the pair? asks Anna-Maria Hertzer.

Open for business in San Francisco, (415) 777-8426. Email: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @leahgarchik

Public eavesdropping

Hes the only person I know who can humblebrag about his humblebrags.

Woman to woman, near the start of Trumer Pils Brewery tour in Berkeley, overheard by Roger Thornhill
San Franciscos greatest disaster shook the city to its core, but ultimately it made our foundation stronger.

The front page from April 19, 1906, is a combined edition of The Call-Chronicle-Examiner printed on Oakland Tribune presses. It was an alliance of the Bay Areas leading newspapers, whose journalists covered the magnitude 7.8 earthquake as buildings crumbled and flames tore through the city.

Like thousands of San Francisco residents, many of the papers reporters and editors had their lives torn apart at 5:12 a.m. April 18, 1906. The shaking lasted less than a minute, but it took years to recover.

The pages of The Call-Chronicle-Examiner were filled with stories of terror. At the time, details were hazy and the disaster was still unfolding. Days later, more than 3,000 people would be dead and 80 percent of the city would lie in ruins.

This is The Call-Chronicle-Examiners main front-page story in its entirety:

Death and destruction have been the fate of San Francisco. Shaken by a temblor at 5:13 oclock yesterday morning, the shock lasting 48 seconds, and scourged by flames that raged diametrically in all directions, the city is a mass of smoldering ruins. At six oclock last evening the flames, seemingly playing with increased vigor, threatened to destroy such sections as their fury had spared during the earlier portion of the day. Building their path in a triangular circuit from the start in the early morning, they jockeyed as the day waned, left the business section, which they had entirely devastated, and skipped in a dozen directions to the residence portions. As night fell they had made their way over into the North Beach section and springing anew to the south they reached out along the shipping section down the bay shore, over the hills and across toward Third and Townsend streets. Warehouses, wholesale houses and manufacturing concerns fell in their path. This completed the destruction of the entire district known as the South of Market Street. How far they are reaching to the south across the channel cannot be told as this part of the city is shut off from San Francisco papers.

After darkness, thousands of the homeless were making their way with their blankets and scant provisions to Golden Gate Park and the beach to find shelter. Those in the homes on the hills just north of the Hayes Valley wrecked section piled their belongings in the street and express wagons and automobiles were hauling the things away to the sparsely settled regions. Everybody is San Francisco is prepared to leave the city, for the belief is firm that San Francisco will be totally destroyed.

Downtown everything is ruin. Not a business house stands. Theatres are crumbled into heaps. Factories and commission houses lie smouldering on their former sites. All of the newspaper plants have been rendered useless, the Call and the Examiner buildings, excluding the Calls editorial rooms on Stevenson Street, being entirely destroyed.

It is estimated that the loss in San Francisco will reach from $150,000,000 to $200,000,000. These figures are in the rough and nothing can be told until partial accounting is taken.

On every side there was death and suffering yesterday. Hundreds were injured, either burned, crushed or struck by falling pieces from the buildings, and one of ten died while on the operating table at Mechanics Pavilion, improvised as a hospital for the comfort and care of 300 of the injured. The number of dead is not known but it is estimated that at least 500 met their deaths in the horror.

At nine oclock, under a special message from President Roosevelt, the city was placed under martial law. Hundreds of troops patrolled the streets and drove the crowds back, while hundreds more were set at work assisting the fire and police departments. The strictest orders were issued, and in true military spirit the soldiers obeyed. During the afternoon three thieves met their death by rifle bullets while at work in the ruins. The curious were driven back at the breasts of the horses that the calvarymen rode and all the crowds were forced from the level district to the hilly section beyond to the north.

The water supply was entirely cut off, and may be it was just as well, for the lines of the fire department would have been absolutely useless at any stage. Assistant Chief Dougherty supervised the work of his men and early in the morning it was seen that the only possible chance to save the city lay in effort to check the flames by the use of dynamite. During the day a blast could be heard in any section at intervals of only a few minutes, and buildings not destroyed by fire were blown to atoms. But through the gaps made the flames jumped and although the failures of the heroic efforts of the police, firemen and soldiers were at times sickening, the work was continued with a desperation that will live as one of the features of the terrible disaster. Men worked like fiends to combat the laughing, roaring, on-rushing fire demon.

More from the Archive The Vault Home of the San Francisco Chronicle's archive and more than 150 years of journalism covering the Bay Area and beyond.

See more front pages: Go to SFChronicle.com/covers to search a database of hundreds of Chronicle Covers articles that showcase the newspaper's history.

Chronicle Covers is a yearlong project highlighting one classic Chronicle newspaper page from our archive every day for 366 days. Library director Bill Van Niekerken, art director Danielle Mollette-Parks, producer Michelle Devera and editorial assistant Jillian Sullivan contributed to the project. Tim ORourke is the executive producer and editor of SFChronicle.com. Email: torourke@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TimothyORourke

(Click to enlarge)




An Eden water dispenser, with a warning in Catalan not to drink. carles ribas

A bout of gastroenteritis caused by bottled water has affected 3,166 people in Catalonia, according to the regional health department.

The origin of the intoxication is a norovirus that was discovered in bottles distributed throughout Barcelona and Tarragona on April 7, 8, 11, 12 and 13.

The water was drawn from a natural spring called Arinsal, in the principality of Andorra between Spain and France. It was distributed in Catalonia by a company named Eden.

Eden notes that it receives the sealed bottles from Andorra and merely distributes them

Health authorities are calling all businesses that sold the product in a bid to tally a final number of affected customers. Because the gastroenteritis had mild effects, not all patients went to the doctor, department sources said.

The first tests conducted on patient samples show the presence of a norovirus, a microorganism that is responsible for half of all common gastroenteritis. It is present in animal droppings, which can contaminate the water.

Investigators are trying to determine how the virus ended up in that particular water source.

A recidivist spring J.M.Q. This is not the first time that Arinsal spring, in Andorra, has been the target of public health officials. In 2003, the company that managed the spring at the time was sentenced to pay damages to a man who had sustained esophagus lesions after drinking from one of its bottles. Microbiology tests found remains of caustic soda in the water.

Public health officials and the distributing firm  which pulled six suspicious shipments off the market  suspect the problem may lie at the water bottling plant in Andorra. The distributor, Eden, notes that it receives the sealed bottles from Andorra and merely distributes them.

The government of Andorra, which is carrying out the bulk of the investigation, insists that microbiology analyses at the source, which are conducted daily according to regulatory parameters, are correct.

But Andorran authorities are now taking samples at all levels of the production line in search of the norovirus. Samples will be sent for testing to a lab in the Catalan city of Girona.

English version by Susana Urra.
Southwest Airlines has some apologies to make. A UC Berkeley student, Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, says he was taken off of his April 6 flight from Los Angeles to Oakland because a fellow passenger heard him speaking in Arabic.

Makhzoomi is a 26-year-old Berkeley senior who came to the U.S. as an Iraqi refugee in 2010. He lives with his mother and brother in Oakland. His father, Khalid Makhzoomi, was a former diplomat who was killed by Saddam Husseins regime.

Youd think hes already dealt with enough hardship. Now he has the pleasure of learning about American racism.

Makhzoomi had just heard United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speak at a dinner, and he called his uncle to express excitement about the event.

But another passenger  and heres where I get really mad  decided that she felt Makhzoomis non-English language was potentially threatening, so she got up and asked the crew to remove him. Disgustingly, they complied.

Lets rewind that.

The Transportation Security Administration had decided that Makhzoomi was allowed to fly. Hed made it past security with no problems. Hed made it through the notoriously grueling refugee resettlement process, a process that requires security checks and interviews with the Department of Homeland Security.

Multiple U.S. security institutions had cleared Makhzoomi to be on that airplane. Many, many officials with the experience and training to decipher what terrorism is and how terrorists behave had decided that he was a safe bet.

And some nitwit passenger gets to decide that he doesnt belong on her flight?

When did we start letting passengers decide who was safe and who wasnt?

Because if thats the case, I have a long list of fellow passengers who I believe may be potentially threatening.

Young men who own guns and spend a lot of time alone. Antiabortion activists. Evangelical Christian zealots. Antigovernment ranchers.

Am I allowed to start pointing these people out when they get on my flight and reporting them to the crew?

I have a pretty good idea of what they look like.

Its not a perfect idea, of course, but that didnt stop the passenger who got Makhzoomi booted.

Southwest has an ugly history of tossing passengers for no reason other than customer racism. In November 2015, it removed Bilal Rana, president of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USAs Youth Association, from a Newark-to-Houston flight after another passenger didnt like the look of his shalwar kameez clothing. Just last week  in an incident that outraged civil rights organizations  Southwest removed a Somali American woman who was wearing a hijab from her flight without adequate explanation.

To which I say  if Southwest is going to allow passengers to decide their own safety, I have a few nominations. But Id rather the airline let security officials do their job, and ignore its passengers ignorance and bigotry.

Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle editorial writer. E-mail: cmillner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @caillemillner
San Francisco has become the first city to mandate full pay for parents who take leave on the birth or adoption of a child.

According to the legislation, lost pay is the primary reason workers fail to take advantage of existing California law that enables them to receive 55 percent of their wages (and up to 70 percent beginning in 2018) while on leave to care for a new child or ill family member.

The San Francisco legislation, which Mayor Ed Lee has not yet signed into law, seeks to remedy this by requiring companies with 20 or more employees to make up the difference between what employees receive through a special state fund and their full pay.

Many have applauded the new law and a similar one set to take effect in New York in 2021. But before we hail these changes as a win for families, we should consider the economic implications.

First, leave is not free. Someone foots the bill. Under existing California law, workers, regardless of age or whether they have or will have children, must pay into the state program that provides the 55 percent of wages.

Second, this legislation places new costs on employers. Consider a firm with 25 employees. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly wage for the San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City region is $33.34. At 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, thats $69,347 per employee.

When a worker takes leave to care for a new child or a family member, owners and managers not only must pay 45 percent of that workers wages, but also must make up for the lost labor by hiring a temporary worker or paying overtime to other employees. Both options mean paying more in gross wages and additional costs in Social Security and Medicare taxes. Even a small increase in costs would have a significant impact.

Even large, profitable firms may operate on razor-thin margins. Walmarts profit margin is only 3 percent. Its costs are so large that in a 31-day month, the first 30 days sales go to expenses. Only on day 31 does the company turn a profit, assuming nothing unexpected happens  like a new family-leave law.

Some people still find the citys policy acceptable. As long as families arent paying the price, they say, the costs are worth it. But in reality, families do pay.

Firms will be less likely to hire people apt to take leave. Women, who are more likely than men to take family leave (both at the birth of a child and as the child gets older), particularly will suffer.

Its not difficult to see how mandates like the paid leave affect the employment prospects of certain groups  married women of reproductive age, young women generally, and even married men. If a firm knows that an employee in a particular category is likely to cost more, it will be less inclined to hire him or her.

Put yourself in a business owners shoes. You can choose between two job candidates. One is a 27-year-old female with an engagement ring. The other is a 45-year-old man. They are equally qualified  or maybe the woman is even slightly better qualified. But you know there is a good chance that within the next few years shell have baby. That baby is going to cost you. So you choose the older man. In other words, you discriminate. Its not because youre a misogynist or hate families. Its because youre trying to run a business.

Helping families is admirable, but we should be cautious before suggesting that the government mandate how employers handle their businesses. Youre liable to make them and the families suffer.

Abigail R. Hall Blanco is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and assistant professor of economics at the University of Tampa.
Chronicle Eats is our new, semi-regular series wherein we share our favorite recent meals from across the Bay Area  and hopefully, provide some guidance on where you, too, should be eating right now. Have suggestions or revelations of your own? The tipline is always open for business: food@sfchronicle.com

Oakland

Aztecali

303A Oakland Ave. (at Frisbie), Oakland

The menu at Juana Ojeda and Claudia Mercados tiny, pale-blue taqueria has even more focus than the average taco trucks: three or four daily changing guisados (stews), spooned into tacos, tortas, tostadas and burritos. I ordered tacos with chile verde, the pork braised lush and soft in a vivid tomatillo sauce, but the meat was even better in torta form. An Acme roll, all crust, framed the chile verde like a pair of parentheses, barely containing the avocados, lettuce, black beans and meat. The flavors are bright and precise, but not precious, as the stack of crumpled napkins we left on the table testified.

 Jonathan Kauffman

Outer Richmond

Ton Kiang

5821 Geary Blvd, (at 22nd), San Francisco

There are times when you and a mass of friends want that full-contact, banquet-hall dim sum experience. And then there are times you wake up on a Saturday and you just dont want to work that hard. Thats when you go to Ton Kiang. Before the crowds press in around noon, the relatively small main dining room is sleepy; the front window lets in lots of weekend morning light. The food is particularly fresh and bright, especially the vegetable- or seafood-based dumplings and the sauteed greens, particularly the pea shoots. You can get similarly good food in a dozen other places, but sometimes the best meal is the hassle-free one.

 Kitty Morgan

Inner Richmond

Grinders Pizzeria

448 Balboa St. (at Sixth), San Francisco

Having a husband who grew up in Chicago means we usually have our finger on the pulse of deep-dish pizza in the Bay Area. So we were surprised to see that Grinders has practically been in our backyard for two years and we didnt know it. The pie cant compete with Dues in Chicago, but its a totally respectable option for a deep-dish fix. We liked the sausage, and were also all about the BLT salad.

 Amanda Gold

The Presidio

Arguello

50 Moraga Ave (in the Officers Club), San Francisco

Arguello belongs on the short list of the best places to be during warm weather. Not only does Traci Des Jardins casual joint in the Presidio have spacious, sunny patio, but the creative Cal-Mex food is just as enjoyable: just-fried tortilla chips, a lamb mole tostada or spicy, lime-kissed rainbow cauliflower. Best of all, its off-the-radar location in the Presidio ensures that you wont have to elbow half of San Francisco for a seat, especially during the week.

 Paolo Lucchesi

The Mission

Shizen

370 14th St. (at Valencia), San Francisco

Vegan sushi might be a concept some diners cant wrap their heads around, let alone their appetites. But for a vegetarian, its deliciously liberating  anything goes! The gently lit izakaya offers ramen and inari, but foray into uncharted territory with the specialty rolls: Open Invitation combines pumpkin tempura, spiced burdock and shredded tofu crowned by a crispy lotus-root chip; Hidden Agenda offers tempura eggplant, zucchini, bell pepper and fried garlic. Its a popular spot, so vegetarian or not, expect a wait.

 Bernadette Fay

Hayes Valley

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

Souvla

517 Hayes St. (at Octavia), San Francisco

Every neighborhood should be as lucky as Hayes Valley to have a quick-service restaurant like Souvla. Little wonder this Greek-inspired restaurant is always packed and diners are willing to wait for a roasted lamb, pork or chicken sandwich ($11), wrapped in fat, puffy pita. The same juicy meat can also top a salad ($14); one bite and you understand why lamb and feta cheese is a classic pairing. Yet unlike most places where you order at the counter, theres a certain refinement in the surroundings and you can enjoy a glass of rose ($10 for 250 ml) or other wine.

 Michael Bauer

SoMa

Rich Tables Ballpark Kiosk

24 Willie Mays Plaza (in AT&T Park), San Francisco

Im a huge fan of Evan and Sarah Richs Hayes Valley restaurant, so when I went to a Giants game, my very first stop was to check out their brand new Promenade Level kiosk in Section 114. Theres only one food item on the menu: Rich Tables signature porcini doughnuts served with a side of raclette foam, which translate nicely to high-volume ballpark food production. The doughnuts are so good, you might just forget all about the garlic fries.

 Sarah Fritsche

Late Night

ABV

3174 16th St. (at Valencia), San Francisco

The Mission on a Tuesday after 10 p.m. can sometimes resemble a food wasteland - which became a problem for me and Annna Roth last week, until we remembered the amazing burger at ABV. It might be my ideal late night snack: a fluffy, sweet bun; a patty more on the medium side of medium-rare; thin, briny pickles; and a crisp sliver of melty pimento cheese. I was sad to have to split it.

 Esther Mobley
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Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders

PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces

There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan

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Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair

Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan

I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General

I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox

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There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur

EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol  Armenia and Azerbaijan  to do so without delay

An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".

UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT

The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022

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This criminal act is another proof that the Armenophobia policy. Tatoyan

Nikol Pashinyan, Nancy Pelosi discuss a number of issues related to the Armenian-American agenda and regional developments

Delegation by Nancy Pelosi Accompanied by Alen Simonyan Visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex

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Armenian Revytech, global technology leader SAP and financial services software specialist SAP Fioneer sign a cooperation agreement

With 120 million drams donated by Mikael Vardanyan, the defenders of the homeland will be treated in a new building

OSCE Chairman-in-Office and OSCE Secretary General call for immediate cessation of hostilities along Armenia-Azerbaijan border

Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh

USA Embassy Message for U.S. Citizens

ANCA Issues National Call to Action to Stop Taxpayer Funding of Aliyevs Aggression
Jurors in the criminal trial of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. can hear evidence about the San Bruno gas pipeline explosion  clearly relevant to the charges that PG&E violated pipeline-safety standards and obstructed justice  but wont hear some of the most graphic details, like the death and devastation it caused to a neighborhood, or view the wrecked pipe itself, a federal judge has ruled.

Avoiding accidents like the San Bruno explosion is the very purpose of the Pipeline Safety Act that PG&E is charged with violating, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson said in a decision late Monday over evidence at the upcoming trial. He said the blast also provides necessary context for the National Transportation Safety Boards subsequent investigation of the utility and PG&Es potential motives for obstructing it.

Avoiding prejudice

But Henderson said allowing federal prosecutors to focus on the explosion and its aftermath could prejudice the jury.

This is not a trial about the San Bruno explosion, the judge said.

He barred evidence about the deaths, injuries and houses damaged or destroyed by the blast, photos and videos of the scene, and proposed testimony by a firefighter. Henderson also rejected prosecutors request to haul the 28-foot-long, 3,000-pound pipe to the front of the courthouse for juror viewing  an exhibit he said would prove little about the facts of the case  but said prosecutors could present photos of the pipe if PG&E disputed the impact of the explosion.

In addition, he granted PG&Es request to exclude evidence of investigations by both the federal safety board and the California Public Utilities Commission that found the utility at fault for the explosion. The specific cause of the explosion is irrelevant to the federal charges, Henderson said, and if jurors heard that the state commission had ordered PG&E to change its practices, they might assume that PG&E is deserving of punishment.

The September 2010 explosion killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes in the Crestmoor neighborhood of San Bruno. It triggered a federal investigation that led to a grand jury indictment last April charging PG&E with 12 violations of the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, which requires operators of gas pipes to maintain accurate records, identify risks to lines, and inspect or test when pipe pressures exceed the legal maximum.

The obstruction charge involves an internal PG&E document that said the company would test older lines for welding problems only if pipe pressure exceeded the federal maximum by 10 percent, leeway that federal law does not allow. PG&E told the federal safety board in March 2011 that the document was only a draft that had never been implemented, but prosecutors said the utility had actually carried out its 10 percent policy to avoid testing lines, and obstructed justice by falsely denying it.

The state Public Utilities Commission has fined PG&E $1.6 billion, a penalty prosecutors are not allowed to mention to the jury. The utility faces fines of up to $500 million if convicted of all criminal charges. No company executives have been indicted. The trial is scheduled to begin April 26 and last six weeks, but PG&E has asked for a postponement to review evidence it says it recently received from the prosecution.

Tentatively allowed

On other issues, Henderson tentatively allowed prosecutors to offer evidence that PG&E cut costs on pipeline safety to enhance its profits, if a government witness can draw connections between PG&Es expenses and its lack of safety measures.

He also said prosecutors could introduce evidence that PG&E, under orders from the state Public Utilities Commission, upgraded more than 200 miles of pipeline so that it would be easier to inspect and conducted pressure tests on more than 650 miles of pipes after the explosion.

But Henderson rejected a prosecution request to admit evidence that PG&E officials had publicly apologized for the explosion, saying the statements might be taken as admissions of pipeline safety violations.

In another split ruling, Henderson said Leslie McNiece, hired by PG&E in 2012 to improve the companys flawed record-keeping, could testify for the prosecution about the problems she saw and the resistance she said she encountered from top officials. But he said she wouldnt be allowed to testify that she was told to destroy documents and found a company map of the San Bruno pipeline in a Dumpster outside her office. The destroyed documents had little apparent connection to the case, and PG&E has copies of the documents McNiece found in the Dumpster, Henderson said.

PG&E on Tuesday did not comment directly on the ruling, but denied intentionally violating safety laws and said it is focusing on re-earning the trust of the communities we serve.

San Bruno City Manager Connie Jackson said city officials would have preferred the admission of more evidence and the indictment of one or more PG&E officials, but were pleased that Henderson had rejected the utilitys attempt to exclude the explosion from the trial.

But for the tragedy of San Bruno, there wouldnt be a trial, she said.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko
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A 99-year-old San Francisco widow threatened with eviction will get to live out her life in her Hayes Valley flat after a judge issued a tentative ruling in her favor on Tuesday.

Eviction proceedings against Iris Canada, who has lived in her flat at 670 Page St. since the 1940s, will be put on hold under the terms of the ruling, which would uphold her 11-year-old agreement entitling her to remain in the unit for the rest of her life for $700 a month.

Its a good day, Canada said after yet another day in court that was attended by four lawyers, three clergymen, one niece and a dozen housing rights advocates.

Hearing drags on

Canadas case has become something of a cause celebre in the housing rights movement. Outside the courthouse, two dozen elderly renters locked arms, held signs and stood side by side in support. Inside courtroom 502, Canada sat patiently, her walker adorned with gold ribbons by her side.

In his tentative ruling, Superior Court Judge A. James Robertson II granted Canadas request to stay under the terms of her 2005 deal with the owners of her six-unit building, providing she promise to occupy the unit herself and agree to maintain it. But San Francisco real estate law is such a tricky thing, and lawyers are such a loquacious bunch, that nothing happens quickly or easily.

The hearing, which was supposed to last a few minutes, dragged on for an hour and a half. During that time, lawyers for both sides tried to figure out how they would be paid for their work.

The tentative ruling ordered Canada to pay legal fees in the 2-year-old case, estimated at $150,000. The lawyers, sensing that was unlikely to happen, agreed to drop that request if Canada would agree that the buildings other residents can go ahead with their condo conversion plan  a deal estimated to be worth considerably more than $150,000.

The deal also called for Canada to apologize to Peter Owens of Burlington, Vt., the principal owner of her unit, because her lawyers had made him look bad. Owens had been seeking her eviction after the condo conversion stalled.

Refuses to apologize

But Canada, seated behind her lawyers, wouldnt do it  even after her two lawyers urged her to.

All you have to do is trust me on this, attorney Steven MacDonald whispered to her, while the judge, the clerk, three other lawyers and a courtroom of spectators waited. Just say yes.

But Canada, seated in her walker with her arms folded, refused. When Robertson asked her if she understood the agreement, Canada replied, Im trying to.

With that, the judge put the lawyers settlement, the eviction and his tentative ruling on hold, and ordered everyone to return to court April 27 to finish hammering out the deal.

Consent is necessary

Under the terms of the tenant-in-common agreement in place since 2005, Canada owns a share of the six-unit building. A proposed conversion to condominium status, which would greatly increase the value of the building, cannot be approved without her consent, which until now she has been unwilling to give.

Owens, who owns the major portion of Canadas unit, said that the case has been a tragedy and that he and his family were longtime friends of Canada.

Shes a kind, generous woman, and I loved her, Owens told The Chronicle in a phone interview. But after Canada refused to agree to the condo conversion plan, Owens said he was forced by other owners of the building to seek her eviction.

Owens argued that Canada had abandoned the Page Street unit to live with a niece in Oakland, and visited the flat only occasionally. In the meantime, Owens said, Canada had failed to maintain the unit as agreed and it had become overrun with vermin.

It was like a nerve gas bomb had gone off in that apartment, Owens said, recalling one visit. It was horrible. Rat traps. Roach traps. Awful.

Canada denied that and said she had left the unit only for brief periods, including a trip to the hospital after a stroke.

Bad press costs job

Publicity in the case forced Owens to resign over the weekend from his job in Vermont with the Burlington Community Economic Development Office. He said he was seeking an apology for being portrayed negatively by Canadas lawyers.

I just want something that says Im not a vile character for throwing old ladies out of their homes, he said. Im trying to restore my reputation. I want something that says this is just a big misunderstanding and that Im happy she can stay and Im happy the owners can convert to condominiums.

Local tenants rights advocates scoffed at the notion that Owens could claim to be Canadas friend while seeking her eviction.

Theyre best friends so hes evicting her? said Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee. Does that make sense? Are you kidding me?

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com
We're all aware of endangered animals, but historic places can be endangered too.

Much like the dodo, once a historic place is gone, it's gone forever. The ravages of time and war (see modern-day Syria for an ongoing example) have destroyed some of the world's great cultural sites. And since 1988, the National Trust has been released its list of endangered places to help bring attention to disappearing historic places.
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Airbnb continues to think locally even as it expands globally. The vacation-rental site, which now lists 2.25 million homes in 191 countries, rolled out a new brand campaign with the slogan Live There at a splashy event Tuesday for about 200 hosts and guests at its South of Market headquarters.

The companys goal is to persuade travelers that its far-flung network of homes provide experiences more intimate and more local than brands like Hilton or Sheraton. Its research shows that people use Airbnb because they want to live like a local, the company said.

You stay in a hotel, but you live in a home, CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky told an enthusiastic crowd at Airbnb headquarters. You tour a city center but you live in a neighborhood. We want to change the way you live through travel.

The new slogan tells a story immediately, said Andrew Fay, president and chief operating officer of the Gettys Group, a hospitality branding and consulting firm. It says youre living somewhere connected to the environment, the community, your location, as opposed to just staying there.

Jeff Goodby, a partner in San Francisco ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, had a similar take: It captures whats great about Airbnb and avoids a lot of the political issues people have about it. Its smart to elevate the discussion to a higher plane.

Those issues include opposition in San Francisco and other cities by housing activists and neighborhood groups who fear that lucrative vacation rentals drain housing for permanent residents and change the feel of local areas.

Airbnb says that its the antithesis of mass tourism, which Chesky called safe, controlled, predetermined. He showed humorous images of his parents recent trip to Paris where they battled lines at the Louvre, took photos of the Eiffel Tower, chowed down at Subway, and cruised on a big boat on the Seine.

Instead of bland experiences, Airbnb will offer a taste of real life, he said. This is the difference between seeing a city like a tourist and seeing a city like a local, Chesky said.

Theres a certain irony in Airbnb emphasizing one-on-one connections. When Marriott International and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide complete their $13.6 billion merger, creating the worlds largest hotel chain, it will have 1.1 million rooms, half of Airbnbs offerings. The companys $25.5 billion private valuation dwarfs those of many chains.

Since its beginning, Airbnb has cultivated being the anti-hotel, said Armin Vit, editor of Brand New, a blog on corporate and brand identity. Even though they have more rooms than any major hotel chain, theyve managed to keep it feeling small, as if wherever you stay will be special for you.

Airbnb redesigned its app to fine-tune host-guest matching using machine learning; let guests search on neighborhood traits such as family-friendly, near transit, walkable or hip; and include guidebooks with insider tips from locals. Users can also select their preferred type of accommodation: not just houses or rooms, but castles, igloos, tents, treehouses, lighthouses or chalets.

We fundamentally rethought the experience as if we had invented Airbnb for the mobile generation, said Alex Schleifer, vice president of design, in an interview. In 2008 when Airbnb started, the Web was its main platform. Now, two-thirds of all people making reservations use the mobile app at some point.

Two years ago Airbnb launched another two-word campaign, Belong Anywhere, along with a new logo called a belo that many people saw as a sexual Rorschach test. This years rollout drew less controversy.

For traditional hotels, making changes is like trying to turn the Queen Mary around; you cant do it overnight," said Robert Passikoff, founder of the Brand Keys, a brand loyalty research firm. Airbnb is more nimble. Theyre creating an emotional engagement with their brand.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
Theranos Inc. said its under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of California, after the Palo Alto blood-testing startup has come under scrutiny by federal and state health regulators.

The investigations are among several described in a company memo provided to Bloomberg on Monday by closely held Theranos. The memo was sent to Theranos partners, which include Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. and others. Theranos said some of the regulatory probes came after news reports published by the Wall Street Journal. The probes are focused on asking for documents and are ongoing, the company said.

The company continues to work closely with regulators and is cooperating fully with all investigations, Theranos said. It has also been probed by the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and state health departments in Pennsylvania and California. Theranos said the FDA and state inquiries are closed.

A redacted inspection report released in March by CMS detailed a long list of shortcomings at the companys Newark laboratory, including failures to meet quality-control standards, such as not keeping freezers at the temperatures required by manufacturers; lack of proper documentation and missing signatures on paperwork; and unqualified personnel. CMS said in late January that faults at the lab were so severe that they jeopardized patients health.

Earnings

Pepsi goes

a little flat

PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi said Monday the company is reshaping its product lineup to better reflect the growing interest in healthy eating and noted it has reduced its reliance on colas.

The maker of Frito-Lay snacks, Mountain Dew, Naked juices and Quaker Oats now gets less than 25 percent of its global sales from soda, Nooyi said. And she said just 12 percent of global sales comes from its namesake soda.

Nooyis remarks came Monday after PepsiCo said its sales and profit slipped in its first quarter, weighed down by an impairment charge and unfavorable currency exchange rates.

IBM change

going slowly

IBM delivered a quarterly performance that shows the steady headway it is making in new businesses led by cloud computing and data-analysis software, like its Watson artificial intelligence technology.

But the companys transformation remains very much a work in progress. The erosion of some of its hardware and software products continues to be a drag on growth and profits, overshadowing the gains in the new fields.

IBM on Monday reported a 21 percent decline in net profit from continuing operations, to $2.3 billion in the first quarter that ended March 31. The companys first-quarter revenue declined 5 percent, to $18.7 billion.

Venture capital

Facebook exec

goes to Sequoia

Facebooks Mike Vernal, the executive who oversaw search and developer products, has left to join venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. Vernal, who worked at Facebook for eight years, joins as a partner at Sequoia, where he will invest in early stage startups.

Chronicle News Services
This article was originally published on the web site of San Francisco Magazine. To read more, go to sanfranmag.com.

Before he became the sixth-richest person in the world and Silicon Valley's own Gwyneth, Mark Zuckerberg was just another postcollegiate guy. In gym shorts. With a beer. In a recently unearthed video from 2005, Zuck explains "The Facebook" to a possibly even younger interviewer who looks fresh from hawking henleys at the Palo Alto A&F. "For the unititiated, or those without a computer," per our narrator, Zuckerberg rattles off some of The Facebook's important features: "I think the Facebook is an online directory for colleges, and it's kind of interactive," he says, holding a red solo cup. ("Should I put the beer down?" he asked at the start of the interview. Nah, brah!)

The video reveals a still-partly-grown Zuck, one who hasn't yet formed into the philanthropic money cannon or aspirational lifestyle guru we now knowlet alone committed to a single hue of T-shirt. Sometime between the making of this video and Facebook's loss of that clunky "The," the young CEO hammered the vaguely nasal, bro-y vowels (browels?) and occasional vocal fry out of his speaking manner.

As unrefined and frankly juvenile as Zuckerberg sounds in this video, it's abundantly clear (in hindsight!) that here we have a person who sees a chance to define and own a niche that the rest of the world is failing to quite see the point of yet. When the interviewer asks what's next for The Facebook, Zuck gives what sounds like a shrug but what any VC can see is a commitment to dominate a market:

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"There doesn't necessarily have to be more. A lot of people are focused on, like, taking over the world or doing, like, the biggest thing, getting the most users. I think, like, part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely. There was a level of service we could provide when we were just at Harvard? that we can't provide for all the colleges. And there's a level of service we could provide when we were a college network that we wouldn't be able to provide if we went to other types of things. So, I mean, I really just want to see everyone focus on college and create, like, a really cool college directory product that is just, like, very relevant for students and has a lot of, like, information people care about when they're in college."

Said like a future power broker or...also like someone who is trying to talk while a guy is doing a kegstand right there.

Click here to read more from San Francisco Magazine.
Yahoo reported Tuesday that its revenue plunged 11 percent in the first quarter to $1.09 billion, while executives defended their process for exploring a sale of the troubled search pioneer.

Yahoo reported a net loss of $99 million (10 cents per share).

The Sunnyvale company is under mounting pressure from activist investors to sell its core businesses and change its management team. New York hedge fund Starboard Value is even waging a proxy battle to overthrow Yahoos entire board.

Sources close to the process have complained that Yahoos board has been dragging its feet on a potential sale, not offering as much information as it should and not giving enough access to CEO Marissa Mayer and Chief Financial Officer Ken Goldman. But during a conference call with Wall Street analysts Tuesday, Mayer insisted the board is serious about exploring a sale.

Our board, our management team and I made the strategic alternative process a top priority, she said. They are leading a well-run process to achieve the best possible outcome to our shareholders.

The Yahoo team, Mayer said, has answered hundreds of questions during the sale process and provided in-person meetings to some potential buyers.

Weve been very thoughtful about running a quality process designed to keep interested parties engaged by highlighting the tremendous value in Yahoo, Mayer said.

Analysts said the potential sale could create a distraction for Yahoos management and board, who are also trying to turn around the companys sagging fortunes. The quarterly results Yahoo posted Tuesday were slightly better than many analysts predicted, but their expectations were already low.

Potential low employee morale and people more worried about self-preservation than about whether the next product is going to launch could potentially create negative sentiment within the firm that can ultimately show in the results, said Neil Doshi, an analyst with Mizuho Securities USA Inc.

Goldman said that first quarter results were at the high end or above our guidance ranges. Yahoos revenue, minus fees paid to search partners, was $859 million in the first quarter, down about 18 percent from a year earlier.

Search revenue declined 9 percent to $492 million in the first quarter. Meanwhile, Yahoos display ads were flat at $463 million.

Yahoo reduced its workforce during the quarter, closing offices and canceling several products. Yahoo had 9,400 employees in the quarter, 21 percent fewer than a year ago.

The changes we instituted this quarter were necessary, but they were not easy, Mayer said. Despite these changes, along with the external noise, the company rallied to deliver a productive quarter.

Yahoo is trying to revive its business by investing heavily in mobile, video, native and social advertising. This category continued to show growth in the first quarter, generating $390 million in sales, an increase of 7 percent.

But analysts are concerned that the core business continues to decline.

We continue to believe that one of the greatest risks in the stock is the core being a melting ice cube, as a prolonged sale process draws on, creating questions for employees, advertisers, and partners, wrote Robert Peck, an analyst with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, in a note to investors last week.

Wendy Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: wlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thewendylee
A man who broke into at least five cars in San Francisco  a city that has been plagued by the crime  was arrested and charged with auto burglary, authorities said.

Jacquar McHenry, 25, was taken into custody last week by city police officers with a special patrol bureau task force that was formed last year after a dramatic uptick in car break-ins.

Investigators chasing a number of leads tied McHenry to at least five burglaries committed in the Marina District, Russian Hill, the Financial District and the South of Market area, officials said.

Police arrested McHenry in Oakland last Wednesday. After executing a search warrant at his home in Vallejo, investigators found evidence connecting him to the break-ins, as well as tools commonly used in auto burglaries, police said.

At the time of his arrest, McHenry was out on bail after being charged with breaking into three other cars on Russian Hill, police said. McHenry was also wanted for drug-related offenses in Napa County and was on felony probation in San Francisco and Alameda County.

McHenry had numerous prior arrests for burglary, possession of burglary tools, and auto burglary, police said.

In the most recent case, prosecutors charged McHenry with five felony counts of auto burglary, three felony counts of receiving or buying stolen property and two misdemeanor counts of possession of burglary tools, according to the district attorneys office.

McHenry pleaded not guilty to all of the charges on Friday, and is being held in lieu of $100,000 bail. The public defenders office, which is representing him, did not respond to calls for comment.

Car break-ins increased by 31 percent in 2015, according to police data, driving a 17 percent increase in overall property crime. The task force was formed in August, a month after 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle was fatally shot on Pier 14, allegedly by a man using a gun that had been stolen from a federal agents car.

The officers, who primarily dress in plain clothes, saturate known break-in hot spots. Since the formation of the bureau, car burglaries have dropped by 33 percent, officials said.

Vivian Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @VivianHo
Investigative Committee: Drove to the main entrance and threw a training grenade

In the framework of the criminal case investigated in General Department of Investigation of Particularly Important Cases of the RA Investigative Committee on throwing a training grenade towards the entrance of the yard of the RA second President Robert Qocharyans detached house on April 18 the resident of Yerevan, 32 year-old Hovhannes Muradyan was arrested, the car was found. On April 15, 2016 at about 18:25 the person having committed the apparent crime drove to the main entrance of the yard of the RA second President Robert Qocharyans detached house and threw a training grenade towards the security post. In the result of joint measures taken by the relevant subdivisions of National Security Service and the Police in the framework of the criminal case on April 18 H. Muradyan, born in 1984, was apprehended then arrested. The latter was interrogated and gave testimony on what had happened. The car the suspect was driving while carrying out the abovementioned action was found. Searches were conducted in the order defined by law. Examinations were commissioned to find circumstances significant for the criminal case. Additional information on the investigation results will be provided. Note; Everyone charged with alleged crime offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law. Information and Public Relations Department of the RA Investigative Committee
A licensed Concord chiropractor was arrested and charged with one felony count of sexual battery on a patient during a massage session, police said.

Steven Moon, whose Optimized Chiropractic office is on Clayton Road, allegedly touched the patient inappropriately during an appointment March 9.

The patient, a woman in her 30s who had been going to Moons office for several years, told police that he billed the session as a muscle reconditioning deep tissue massage but ended up touching her buttocks and breasts, said Cpl. Christopher Blakely, a Concord police spokesman.

The Contra Costa County district attorneys office filed the sexual battery charge, and Moon was arrested Friday. He did not return calls to his office seeking comment.

The Board of Chiropractors assured our investigators this isnt something they teach, Blakely said. I dont know if he thought hed get away with it.

Moon received his license in 1983 and its set to expire Nov. 30, according to records from the California Board of Chiropractic Examiners.

Investigators are trying to determine whether there are additional victims in addition to the one patient who contacted police.

During the illicit massage session, police said, Moon recommended that the woman try the new therapy technique, which she told detectives was awkward and uncomfortable.

He started touching her buttocks, and he told her to turn over, Blakely said. He pulled down her gown and started touching her breasts.

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov
Lacy Atkins/The Chronicle

Longtime Raiders offensive lineman Khalif Barnes, now a free agent, was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving in the East Bay, authorities said Monday.

Barnes, 33, was arrested on the Eden Canyon Road off-ramp of eastbound Interstate 580 in Castro Valley about 4 p.m. Sunday, said Officer Derek Reed, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol. He was taken to Santa Rita Jail after failing a series of field sobriety tests and was cited and released after sobering up, officials said.
A homeless man was acquitted by a San Francisco jury of attacking a Mission District store clerk with a machete, a decision defense attorneys said came after the defendant spent four months in jail because he couldnt raise the $90,000 bail.

The Superior Court jury deliberated one day before finding Sergio Ribeiro, 48, not guilty on Thursday of felony assault with a deadly weapon. He was immediately freed from jail.

The jury rejected the prosecutions case after two key witnesses gave conflicting statements and failed to produce a security video of the alleged incident, said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi.

Mr. Ribeiro is an honest man with no criminal record, but his account of the incident was not seen as credible because he is homeless, said Adachi.

Ribeiro faced four years in prison if he had been convicted.

He then languished in jail for four months, not because he is a danger to society but because he couldnt afford bail, Adachi said. Fortunately, he had a public defender who listened to him and a jury that looked at the evidence.

The incident dates back to Dec. 2, when Ribeiro had a run-in with one of the clerks at Fidas Market, a store near the 16th Street BART Station. Ribeiro had been known to the stores workers for years, but he and a new clerk, who was hired a few months before the incident, didnt seem to get along, Adachi said.

The night of the alleged attack, Ribeiro went to the store around 8 p.m., but was told to leave because the clerk believed the homeless man was going to cause problems, according to testimony given by police officers who investigated the incident.

Ribeiro argued a bit before heading outside, and the clerk told him to take his shopping cart and go away, the police officers testified. They said the clerk initially told them that Ribeiro tried to kill him, taking a machete out of his cart and swinging it at him. The employee told officers that Ribeiro missed him but struck the door with the machete.

Another employee had a slightly different story, telling the officers that Ribeiro swung the machete three times, hitting the door with each attempt.

But police noticed the door was not damaged after the incident. And when they asked for security video, the clerk said the confrontation happened outside where security cameras would not have recorded it.

An investigator for the public defender also asked for the video and the clerk still would not turn it over.

In court, the employee who claimed Ribeiro tried to kill him denied having any conversations with police about the video and changed his account of the attack on the witness stand, saying Ribeiro had only raised the weapon in a threatening manner.

The second employee also changed his story on the stand, saying Ribeiro banged the machete against the door not three times but once to challenge the other clerk to a fight.

Deputy Public Defender Hien Ngoc Nguyen, Ribeiros attorney, said it was apparent the clerks were hiding the surveillance video from police and changing their stories on the fly.

Not only were their stories different from each other, they were different from their original accounts and different from the police officers recollections, Nguyen said.

Jenna Lyons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JennaJourno
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The expansive new exhibition Altered State: Marijuana in California, opening Saturday, April 16, at the Oakland Museum of California, is loaded with hands-on displays, like the bulb-and-tube contraption that lets you sample the scent of various strains of cannabis, and a custom-made wooden box that allows visitors to fondle pot leaves and buds while wearing lab-strength rubber gloves.

Its a glove box, like youd use in a biohazard facility, says Sarah Seiter, the museums delightful associate curator of natural sciences, a biologist who used such boxes when she worked in labs.

Normally youd have a deadly bacteria in there. In this case, its just marijuana leaves. We cant let visitors touch a Schedule I drug.

Seiter and her colleagues have done their homework and then some researching and creating this provocative, fun and scrupulously evenhanded show, which looks at marijuana from many perspectives in thematic sections with titles like Cannabis Science, Evil Weed, Politically Loaded, Profitable Pot, Criminal Dope and Sacred Ganja.

Billed as the first major museum show to deal with the ancient and controversial weed  which could be made legal for adult recreational use in California if voters approve the pot initiative on the June ballot  Altered State tells its story with a rich mix of voices, images, objects and data.

There are hookahs, bongs and roach clips in labeled cases; film clips from Reefer Madness and Cheech & Chong; dueling pot quotes from cosmologists Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Nancy Reagan and Allen Ginsberg; a Willie Nelson pot holder, and handwritten confessional comments about grass from anonymous museum visitors.

There are selfies of workers in Californias multibillion-dollar marijuana industry and descriptions of their jobs, crime stats showing who gets busted for weed (people of color are twice as likely to be arrested in California for it, Seiter says, and four times more likely nationally) and a display about the environmental impact of large-scale illegal pot farming and another dealing with scientific research on the health effects of marijuana, which some people claim can cure epilepsy and others claim causes schizophrenia.

A museum-made documentary about marijuana and spirituality features local Rastafarians and the Sisters of the Valley, a group of faux nuns in Merced County who make and sell medicinal cannabis tinctures and salves from plants that lack THC, the chemical compound that gets people high, but are rich in the non-psychoactive CBD.

The show was already in the pipeline when Seiter was hired 18 months ago and given the lead role in organizing it. It focuses primarily on California, with a nod to Oakland, which has a long history of indoor pot growing and whose city government was among the first to grant licenses to medical marijuana dispensaries rather than shutting them down.

One of the reasons I was excited to work here is that weve really been pushing toward more socially relevant, contemporary exhibitions that engage the community, says Seiter, whose team worked with about 100 collaborators, among them local pot growers and dispensaries, who loaned material, and East Bay adults and teenagers whose focus-group input informed the exhibition (a youth-oriented section provides a place for parents to talk to kids about the subject).

A big live pot plant is growing in a case in the first gallery. It comes from Dark Heart Nursery of East Oakland, which breeds and cultivates starter plants. This one resides temporarily at the museum but wont be handled by its staff.

We cant possess marijuana. Its illegal, Seiter says. Nursery staff come and take care of it, but we dont actually deal with it, adds the curator, who notes that the museum received no funding from the marijuana industry or from any pro- or anti-marijuana groups.

The Creative Cannabis section features a room-like installation by Oakland artist Cybele Lyle meant to alter ones perception of space and time. She does it by shifting scale, merging blown-up (and previously painted on) photos of trees and night skies with videos of crashing waves and tinted clouds (shot from a plane), projecting them on various planes and corners in a space with some slightly angled walls.

The piece isnt meant to mirror the experience of being high, Lyle says, but to alter your state of mind a little so you might notice things you didnt notice before, and slow down time a little.

Its a little disorienting, but I want people to walk into a welcoming space, let their thoughts go and be present.

Sister Kate of the marijuana-growing Merced order that sells its medicinal oils and salves online, plans to wear a purple habit to the shows opening Friday night, accompanied by Sister Darcy, Brother Zane and maybe a few associates from Mendocino.

Kate Meeusen is not really a nun, although she did grow up Catholic in Milwaukee. She worked as a corporate consultant in Europe, she says, and later moved back home, eventually getting into the cannabis business and starting a collective with her brother in the Central Valley.

A progressive activist, Meeusen noticed that she never saw clergy anymore at protests  at least not in religious garb, as was common during the civil rights and Vietnam War era. So she decided to wear a nuns headpiece to an Occupy rally in 2010. People started calling her Sister Occupy and seeking her guidance, even though she told them she wasnt really a nun.

She started calling herself Sister Kate and formed an order of like-minded folk, taking their vows of service and wrapping them around our medicine making, Meeusen says.

I enjoyed ganja my whole life, its my medication of choice, but I never knew until I ran a collective dealing with dying patients and people with Parkinsons disease how powerful the medicine was, she says.

We believe in growing the plant and creating the tinctures and teas that provide people healthful, pain-relieving solutions. Its a calling.

Jesse Hamlin is a Bay Area arts writer.

Altered State: Marijuana in California: Saturday, April 16, through Sept. 25. $6.95-$15.95. Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St. (510) 318-8400. www.museumca.org.

To view a trailer of Reefer Madness: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sbjHOBJzhb0

To view a trailer of Up in Smoke: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=k2pXxHW1DHs
RICHMOND, Va.  A Virginia high school discriminated against a transgender teen by forbidding him from using the boys restroom, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a case that could have implications for a North Carolina law that critics say discriminates against LGBT people.

The case of Gavin Grimm has been especially closely watched since North Carolina enacted a law last month that bans transgender people from using public restrooms that correspond to their gender identity. That law also bans cities from passing antidiscrimination ordinances, a response to an ordinance recently passed in Charlotte.
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Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders

PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces

There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan

Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair

Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan

I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General

I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox

UCOMS SPECIAL OFFER OF THE UNLIMITED INTERNET IS NOW TERMLESS

There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur

EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol  Armenia and Azerbaijan  to do so without delay

An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".

UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT

The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022

Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully

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The statement of the Defender on the video of the execution of Armenian PoWs by the Azerbaijani armed forces

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STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN

This criminal act is another proof that the Armenophobia policy. Tatoyan

Nikol Pashinyan, Nancy Pelosi discuss a number of issues related to the Armenian-American agenda and regional developments

Delegation by Nancy Pelosi Accompanied by Alen Simonyan Visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi Arrives in Yerevan

Armenian Revytech, global technology leader SAP and financial services software specialist SAP Fioneer sign a cooperation agreement

With 120 million drams donated by Mikael Vardanyan, the defenders of the homeland will be treated in a new building

OSCE Chairman-in-Office and OSCE Secretary General call for immediate cessation of hostilities along Armenia-Azerbaijan border

Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh

USA Embassy Message for U.S. Citizens

ANCA Issues National Call to Action to Stop Taxpayer Funding of Aliyevs Aggression
SACRAMENTO  A tense scene was unfolding outside of the state Capitol on Monday where a man barricaded himself in a car in the middle of a busy road after writing messages denouncing police on the outside of his vehicle.

Police evacuated businesses across the street from where lawmakers were in the middle of session before a suspect eventually exited the car and surrendered without incident. Police have not yet searched the suspects car.

Sacramento Police Sgt. Bryce Heinlein said it was too early to speculate why the man chose to block the intersection outside the state Capitol. The entrance to the Capitol closest to the incident was closed during the standoff.

Heinlein said the bomb squad was at the scene and streets and buildings were remaining closed until the car is determined to be safe.

We are going to methodically make sure the vehicle is safe before we approach it, Heinlein said. We arent going to rush this. We want to make sure the community and officers are safe.

The windows of the four-door Mazda were shielded with what appear to be brown paper that had messages scribbled on them, such as Cops or Criminals. A photo taken by one onlooker appeared to show something attached to the vehicles gas tank.

This was scarier than normal, said Anthony Wright, a health advocate whose second floor office overlooks the Capitol, where protests are common, including some that disrupt traffic.

It looks like someone took a Sharpie and wrote on the car. Its hard to read, but one says Im not a criminal, cops are criminals, Wright said.

Melody Gutierrez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez
Coastal Californians battling pervasive Cape ivy have been waiting years for a helpful fly with a regal name.

Now, Agriculture Department officials are finally getting ready to pull the trigger, turning the fly loose on the vine that has infested shady parts of the Pacific Coast. The fly deposits its eggs on the Cape ivy, causing a huge boil-like growth known as a gall to form on the plants stem and stunt its growth.

For San Luis Obispo County resident David Chipping, its about time.

Invasion of both upland and riparian habitat by Cape ivy long ago reached crisis proportions in our county, Chipping told the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Chipping, a Los Osos resident and member of the California Native Plant Societys San Luis Obispo Chapter, this month added his voice to others supporting a federal proposal to release of the fly, known as Parafreutreta regalis.

The fly would target Cape ivy, which can climb up to 30 feet, crowding out other coastal plants and requiring frequent herbicide treatments along roadways and in places like parts of Morro Bay State Park.

Cape ivy is a major problem in coastal riparian areas in California, smothering native vegetation, said Gerald Meral, former deputy director of the California Natural Resources Agency. An effective biocontrol agent would make a big difference in protecting these areas.

Meral, who is now with the private Natural Heritage Institute, and Chipping were among only a dozen or so people to offer public comments about the Agriculture Departments proposal as of Friday. All support the proposed release of the flies to control whats also been called German ivy.

But the comment period, which lasts through Monday, did not come easy. Some studies that supported the proposal began so long ago that the lead scientist has since retired. Research funding has sometimes been hard to get. Lab priorities have sometimes shifted.

Several stakeholders

Cost-effectiveness has not been the only consideration. Under several executive orders, Agriculture Department officials also had to consult with Indian tribes and examine potential specific effects on children and any minority populations and low-income populations.

In brief, the wheels have turned methodically. Approval could still be months away.

Biocontrol of weeds is always a long process, said Joe Balciunas, a retired Agricultural Research Service entomologist. I thought this one would go faster, but I was wrong.

Balciunas and colleagues began testing at an Agricultural Research Service lab based in Albany in 2001. Balciunas retired six years ago. A technical advisory panel recommended approval three years ago. An environmental assessment found that the biocontrol program would be safe and effective. It was completed more than 14 months ago.

It grinds exceedingly slow, Balciunas said.

Cape ivy is a native of South Africa and was brought into the United States as an ornamental ground cover. Then it spread, including into areas where herbicide use may be limited. In places like the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, managers resort to hand tools.

Other methods such as goat grazing and prescribed fire are being used, the environmental assessment noted.

Dominant species

If left uncontrolled, the ivy becomes a bully. A study at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area found that sites infested by Cape ivy for five to 10 years had 78 percent fewer annual plant species than uninfested plots.

Enter the Cape ivy gall fly, which is also a native of South Africa. After mating, the females insert eggs into part of the ivys stem. When the eggs hatch, growths known as galls form on the plant and stunt its growth.

Initial plans call for pairs of flies to be placed in field cages over Cape ivy patches in several locations along the California coast, Alameda and Contra Costa counties. In time, the cages would be removed and the flies would disperse naturally.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Courtesy KTVU / Family of Carlos Ojeda Soto Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Show More Show Less 3 of 3





Police are trying to track down a killer who gunned down a 25-year-old man late Monday night in a residential San Jose neighborhood, officials said.

Family members at the scene told reporters the victim was a father with a 6-year-old daughter, KNTV reported.
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A Christian university that requires freshmen to wear a FitBit to keep track of their aerobic activity is coming under fire from the National Eating Disorders Association for promoting unhealthy expectations of fitness.

While the program at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma was launched last year, NEDA recently came out in support of a Change.org petition that calls for the university to drop the FitBit requirement. By Tuesday afternoon, there were close to 1,500 signatures.

"ORU's FitBit requirement has the potential to trigger compulsive exercise or disordered eating in students," the petition reads.

Kaitlin Irwin, who started the petition, tells Proud2bme "I wrote this petition because I believe it is ridiculous and unfair to grade people on their bodies. Every body is different, with a range of abilities, strengths and weaknesses. Putting a grade or value on that is not right."

Students and health advocates took to Twitter shortly after NEDA voiced their concern for the policy.

University officials say the school "has maintained a fitness component as a part of their unique Whole Person Education since the University opened in 1965."

All students are required to take a physical education class each semester and tracking their daily exercise makes up a portion of their grade. Before integrating the FitBit requirement, students were forced to log aerobic points in a fitness journal as part of the program.

The FitBit is only required for freshmen, although older students are encouraged to take part, officials say.

Earlier this year, the school said the campus bookstore had sold more then 550 of the watches, which retail from $99 and up.

While Oral Roberts says its the first school to track students' fitness through a FitBit, it's not the first organization to do so.

FitBit offers a company wellness app to companies that buy employees the wearable. Many companies have been implementing the wearable technology into their wellness program.
No pasaran: Artsakhs response to Azerbaijan: Eduard Sharmazanovs speech in Moscow

On April 19, the RA NA Deputy Speaker Eduard Sharmazanov being in the Russian Federation on a working visit in Moscow took part in the first conference of the heads of the parliaments of the Eurasian countries titled The Inter-Parliamentary Cooperation for the Benefit of the Joint Welfare of the Eurasian Regional Countries in the 21stCentury. The NA Deputy Speaker delivered a speech, particularly noting: Distinguished attendees, our meeting takes place in the hard conditions of finding ends over a number of fundamental problems. I would like to draw your attention to the NK conflict, where during the night of April 1-2 the Azerbaijani side carried out large-scale provoking military operations along the whole Line of Contact, using the whole complex of armaments, including the banned military equipment, which resulted in numerous casualties also among the civilians. The large-scale attack unleashed by Azerbaijan on Nagorno Karabakh violates the trilateral unlimited-term agreement of 1994 on the ceasefire and termination of military operations signed by Azerbaijan, Nagorno Karabakh, as well as the agreement on strengthening ceasefire regime of 1995. Such criminal provocation shows that Azerbaijan puts itself out of international law, rejects the calls of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair countries, as well as the international community on non-use of force and confidence-building measures. Azerbaijan, as an initiator of the growth of this tension and bears the whole responsibility of the escalation of the situation. Here Turkeys one-sided, criminal position, which evidently defends and encourages such inhuman actions is extremely dangerous. All this shows that Turkey continues remaining one of the threats for the regional stability. Dear Colleagues, The Republic of Armenia is based on the universal principles and norms of international law, giving priority to the diplomatic methods of conflict settlement and the principles of peaceful settlement of crisis situations. We suppose that our colleagues will raise their voice of protest against the military settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. We shall realize that the Nagorno Karabakh people have the right to live peacefully, freely and independently like the citizens of the states of the Eurasian region. Thus, the Artsakh people responded No pasaranto Azerbaijans aggression. We call on everybody to fight unitedly against darkness, barbarism, and hatred. The international community shall consolidate efforts for eradicating terrorism and the circumstances borne from that.
Ahmet Davutoglu: It is impossible to maintain status quo in Artsakh

It is impossible to maintain status quo in Artsakh, today we can see that, Turkeys Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu today announced at the plenary sitting at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). He announced that the Armenians must be warned to stop the aggressive operations, as not only soldiers are killed as a result of it, but also civilians. While speaking about the border tension, Davutoglu also touched upon Nakhijevan. He also touched upon Crimea, calling it an occupied territory, As a result of annexation many Tatars living in Crimea had to leave that territory. It is unacceptable, noted Davutoglu. A question was addressed to Turkeys Prime Minister that how his country is going to join the EU, when human rights are often violated in Turkey. The question met with applause. Davutoglu didnt agree opposing, Elections were held in our country, everybody was able to speak, express himself. Lets take the most read and sold newspapers in Turkey; they belong to the opposition, they criticize the President, Prime Minister, no one points at them. Davutoglu also touched upon the Kurds and said that there is no discrimination towards them in his country, Even in the chamber headed by me there are ethnic Kurds, he added. He urged everybody not to give in to negative propaganda, but visit Turkey. To remind, during this speech outside the CoE building the Kurds were staging a protest action, a part of whom had come from Germany. They blame the Turkish authorities for fascist ambitions.
Levon Zurabyan: Turkeys Prime Minister has prepared very well

Member of the Armenian delegation Levon Zurabyan thinks that Turkeys Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu came to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) well-prepared. In this case, though, he doesnt mean his speech, but the way of representation. Ahmet Davutoglu spoke so long and gave so lengthy answers that the time expired. Many MPs didnt get a chance to address him a question, even when their names came first in the list of those, who were going to ask questions. Levon Zurabyan also didnt get a chance to ask a question. He was going to address such a question to Davutoglu, One decade ago Turkey began zero problems with neighbors project. Since that time, Turkey has refused to sign reconciliation protocols with Armenia, the relations with Egypt, Israel and Russia have deteriorated, has interfered in Iraq, has started military operations against Kurds in Syria and Iraq. The journalists of Jumhurriet were imprisoned for having written that the Turkish government secretly supports the Islamic State. Do you think that all this is consistent with the standards of the Council of Europe (CoE)? Mr Zurabyan told A1+ journalist that Davutoglus format of making his speech and answering the questions in that way has become a topic of discussion among the MPs. By the way, when Turkeys Prime Minister was in the CoE building, several elevators didnt operate. After his departure they started operating.
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) went off on Ted Cruz the morning of the New York primary. The brash Congressman with a tendency to rage said hed choose death over the Texas senator.

I hate Ted Cruz, and I think Ill take cyanide if he ever got the nomination, King said on MSNBCs Morning Joe.
The left is masterful at rewriting history. Witness HBOs TV movie Confirmation, which aired Saturday, about Anita Hills accusations of sexual harassment 25 years ago that almost derailed Clarence Thomas from becoming a Supreme Court justice. The dramas makers claim that they didnt take sides in depicting Thomas Senate confirmation hearings, even as a trailer punctuates close-ups of actress Kerry Washington, who plays Hill, with stentorian capital letters: It only takes one voice ... to change history. Another trailer proclaims, One woman made a choice ... to take a stand.

Apparently because HBO didnt expressly label Thomas as guilty, producers feel they can get away with saying they were even-handed. One man (Thomas) made a choice and took a stand; where are his plaudits?

The movie only has credibility if its not espousing one point of view or presenting only one side, Confirmation screenwriter Susannah Grant said in the Washington Post. OK, then it has no credibility. Confirmation airbrushed out events that do not confirm the lefts revisionist view on the Thomas hearings.

A number of former female staffers who worked for Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission  J.C. Alvarez, Phyllis Berry, Nancy Fitch and Diane Holt  testified that they did not believe Hills charge that Thomas sexually harassed her and discussed pornographic films at work. Their spirited defense of Thomas was the stuff of drama. But rather than build momentum to a peak of their riveting testimony, Confirmation showed a quickie montage of former colleagues defending Thomas. That choice undercut the forcefulness of the womens spirited defense of Thomas.

Stuart Taylor Jr., who covered the 1991 hearings, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Confirmation also left out Hills hard-to-believe story that she followed Thomas from the Department of Education to EEOC because she feared losing her job. (As an attorney, she had to know she had civil service protection.) The movie also focused on an accuser who chose not to testify.

Then theres Ted Kennedy, the living embodiment of the lefts double standards. A member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the late senator had a reputation for hitting on women in the workplace liberally. In Confirmation, Kennedy aide Ricki Seidman acknowledges her boss might have a problem leading the fight on sexual impropriety.

There was no scene in which Seidman pressed Kennedy about his opportunistic treatment of women. Likewise there was no recognition that when Bill Clinton entered the Oval Office a year later, sexual harassment lost its potency as a political weapon. Female aides willingness to prop up errant male Democrats  that phenomenon did not interest the Confirmation team, which stuck to a script that confirmed liberalisms need to be heroic, especially when liberals are anything but.

Real life didnt work that way. After the hearings and what Thomas described as a high-tech lynching, a New York Times/CBS poll found that Americans who lived through the controversy believed Thomas over Hill by a 2-to-1 margin. So HBO did a rewrite  and produced a movie that left the women who stood up for Thomas on the cutting room floor. In Hollywood, thats a happy ending.

Debra J. Saunders is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: dsaunders@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @DebraJSaunders
Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS  The first U.N. special session to address global drug policy in nearly 20 years bristled with tension Tuesday over the use of the death penalty for drug-related offenses, as countries wrestled over whether to emphasize criminalization and punishment or health and human rights.

The outcome document adopted by member states included no criticism of the death penalty, saying only that countries should ensure that punishments are proportionate with the crimes.
KABUL  A week after proclaiming their spring offensive, Taliban militants stormed an Afghan government security agency with a suicide car bomb and gunfire Tuesday, killing 28 people and wounding hundreds in a sign of the insurgencys continued strength  even in the capital.

The coordinated attack in central Kabul appeared to have targeted an agency that provides an elite security force for high-ranking government officials, similar to the U.S. Secret Service.

The blast was one of the most powerful explosions I have ever heard in my life, said police Cmdr. Obaidullah Tarakhail, who was nearby and couldnt see or hear anything for 20 minutes afterward.

All around was dark and covered with thick smoke and dust, he said.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack. On April 12, the insurgents announced the start of their warm-weather fighting season, vowing to carry out large-scale attacks in the 15th year of their war against the U.S.-backed government.

The Taliban has remained resilient as the government struggles to confront the violence amid a bitter feud between President Ashraf Ghani and the countrys chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah.

Two militants carried out the assault, said Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi. One attacker drove the small truck packed with explosives that caused the initial blast, and he was followed by the second assailant who entered the compound in the chaotic aftermath and opened fire before being killed by security forces, the spokesman added.

With no doubt, there was a security vacuum, and that needs to be investigated, Sediqqi said, refusing to comment further.

The bomb heavily damaged buildings and vehicles, he said, noting that the death toll of 28 could rise. At least 327 wounded were brought to hospitals, said Ismail Kawasi, a spokesman for the Public Health Ministry.

Abdullah went to the scene and strongly condemned this act of brutality.

In the Talibans announcement about its spring offensive, the militant group said it would use different tactics to put added pressure on the government, said political analyst Haroun Mir.

The bloodshed came four days after another Taliban attack in northern Kunduz province that was beaten back by Afghan security forces.

Officials said that security has improved in the city of Kunduz and that the Taliban were defeated in other parts of the province, but operations were still under way to clear militant fighters from the rest of the region.

The Taliban held Kunduz for three days last year before being driven out by a two-week counteroffensive aided by U.S. air strikes. It was their biggest foray into an urban area since 2001.

U.S. and NATO forces formally ended their combat mission at the end of 2014, shifting instead to a training and advisory role while continuing to carry out counterterrorism operations.

There are 9,800 U.S. forces on the ground in Afghanistan, and that number is set to fall to 5,500 next year.
RECIFE, Brazil  In the 1940s and 1950s, Brazilian authorities made such a ferocious assault on Aedes aegypti  the mosquito that spreads the Zika virus  that it was eradicated from Latin Americas largest country by 1958.

But Aedes aegypti returned, and now Brazil has launched another offensive against the pest, employing hundreds of thousands of troops to fumigate and educate people about how to eliminate its habitats. The assault is part of President Dilma Rousseffs war on the Zika virus, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says can cause devastating birth defects.
STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images

GENEVA  Syrias top opposition leader vowed to fight even with stones to depose President Bashar Assad, shifting sharply to a tone of conflict over conciliation as peace talks in Geneva teetered near collapse Tuesday amid a new surge in fighting  including government air strikes that left dozens dead.

Angry and defiant, Riad Hijab of the Western-backed Syrian High Negotiations Committee thundered home the opposition coalitions decision to walk back  if not entirely away  from U.N.-brokered peace talks in Geneva. He demanded more Security Council oversight of an increasingly wobbly cease-fire as Assads troops battled rebel fighters in various parts of the country.
The New Zealand dollar touched its highest level in more than two weeks after oil prices recovered ground following a slump yesterday when oil producers failed to reach agreement on freezing production to bolster prices.

The kiwi hit 69.57 US cents and was trading at 69.46 cents at 8am in Wellington, from 69.21 cents at 5pm yesterday. The trade-weighted index was little changed at 73.08 from 73.06 yesterday.

Currencies linked to commodities, such as the kiwi, Aussie and Canadian dollars, advanced after oil recovered ground, boosting investor appetite for higher risk assets. Oil prices slumped almost 7 percent yesterday after major oil producers couldn't agree at a meeting in Doha on limiting output, disappointing traders who had bet on a deal being reached.

"Oil recovered - you got this big overshoot and then it regathered," said Imre Speizer, Westpac Banking Corp senior market strategist in New Zealand. "The post-Doha oil reaction was a very short-term thing and the signal of don't panic from oil filtered over into equities and currencies."

In New Zealand today, the BNZ-BusinessNZ Performance of Services Index is scheduled for release at 10:30am.

Tonight, the focus will be on the GlobalDairyTrade auction. Westpac's Speizer said he expects prices for whole milk powder, New Zealand's key product, will advance 3.5 percent.

Elsewhere, Australia's Reserve Bank releases the minutes of its last meeting and RBA governor Glenn Stevens is scheduled to speak at a Credit Suisse conference in New York.

The New Zealand dollar fell to 89.61 Australian cents from 90.18 cents yesterday, and slipped to 48.67 British pence from 48.83 pence. It advanced to 61.41 euro cents from 61.31 cents, gained to 75.57 yen from 74.76 yen, and rose to 4.4952 yuan from 4.4838 yuan.

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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Labour Party leader Andrew Little has promoted Wellington MP and former broadcaster Kris Faafoi to the tourism portfolio to fill a gap left by departing MP Clayton Cosgrove, who nonetheless keeps the commerce portfolio and a new 'business outreach' role for as long as he remains in parliament.

The minor reshuffle also sees Cosgrove's consumer affairs portfolio allocated to former leader David Shearer.

Cosgrove announced his retirement from politics just over a week ago and will leave parliament before the 2017 election if his search for a new role in the private sector is successful.

As a strong advocate for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Cosgrove appears to have decided he was out of step with the party's policy direction, despite being assured there was a place for him in a Labour Cabinet.

However, Little said Cosgrove had "excellent links with business and will lead the push in working with industry," which suited him to a new business outreach role. He will also retain the commerce, veterans affairs and associate finance portfolios.

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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Specialty milk marketer A2 Milk has bolstered its push to sell more products in China through a recently completed human clinical trial comparing the gastrointestinal and cognitive effects of consuming milk containing the A1 beta casein with that of the A2 variant on people with self-reported lactose intolerance.

The results of the Chinese study were published this month in the Nutrition Journal and are due to be released at a Beijing press conference late tomorrow by the company.

Its part of a bid by A2 to get more credible scientific validation of its marketing claims, that have been in contention since the late 1990s, that its products might be better for people intolerant to standard cow milk.

Cows naturally produce more than 200 different proteins with beta-casein comprising about 30 percent or 2.5 grams per glass. The A2 beta-casein was originally in cattle when first domesticated and the A1 beta-casein arose from a later genetic mutation in European cattle.

A2 Milks marketing material claims A1s BCM-7 can trigger inflammation in the body that could potentially lead to medical problems such as irritable bowel syndrome, autism and schizophrenia but until now its had no hard scientific evidence from human clinical trials to back that up.

The Chinese study of 45 Han Chinese people compared the impact of consuming milk with the A1 beta-casein with that of milk containing only the A2 variant over a three-month period.

It found milk containing the A1 beta-casein worsened gastrointestinal symptoms and slowed cognitive processing speed whereas the milk with A2 beta-casein had no adverse effect.

The studys authors conclude that because elimination of the A1 B-casein attenuated these effects, some symptoms of lactose intolerance may stem from inflammation it triggers, and can be avoided by consuming milk containing only the A2 type of beta-casein.

A second clinical trial is now underway on 600 people in China, including adults and infants.

In New Zealand the government is contributing around $1 million to human clinical trials under the High-Value Nutrition Challenge in partnership with A2, AgResearch and the University of Auckland.

The A1 and A2 beta-caseins are different in structure, and subsequently, the way they are digested. AgResearch scientist Matthew Barnett told a High-Value Nutrition Challenge conference last week that human beta-caseins are more like A2 than the A1 variant.

He said it was important to be able to demonstrate health benefits from A2 Milk to support charging a premium for the product. While the rest of the dairy industry has faced low global prices, A2 Milk has been able to charge more than double the price of standard milk and gained just under 10 percent of the fresh milk market in Australia.

A2's profit for the half-year was up almost 800 percent to $10.1 million on the back of booming demand for its infant formula powder in China and Australia while revenue from China alone rose 680 percent to $8.4 million.

Barnett said despite the success of the Chinese study, the effects of the A1 beta-casein needs to be further demonstrated in other human clinical trials.

He said the double-blind cross-over Auckland studies hope to produce ethically significant evidence on comparisons between the two milks and better understand why that occurs to back up A2 Milks health claims. MRI imaging will be used to show changes within a short timeframe as the milk moves through the gut alongside analysis of compounds in patient's breath.

The first trial involving 12 people will begin this year and if the results are positive, a second study of a larger cohort of around 40 people will then be conducted based on what data will best tell the story, he said.

A2 Milk is also in the final stages of implementing human clinical trials on the same digestive impact of the milk with a leading US biomedical research centre and in the UK.

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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Davutoglus speech seems funny to Istanbul Armenian journalist (video)

About two hours before the arrival of Turkeys Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), the security officers are checking the territory with the help of dogs. For security reasons even the elevators of the Council of Europe (CoE) building stop operating. Prime Minister arrives. The PACE President Pedro Agramunt, who is known to have pro-Azerbaijani reputation, personally meets him. At the same time Kurds are staging a protest action outside the CoE building. Most of them have come to Strasbourg from Germany. They blame Turkey for fascist attitude toward Kurds and demand the resignation of Turkeys President Erdogan. We are protesting against Turkish policy towards Kurds and Armenians. I think that Erdogan is a murderer, as he kills Kurds in Turkey, says a Kurd student. Already making his speech at the plenary sitting of the PACE, Turkeys Prime Minister touches upon Karabakh issue. He says it is impossible to maintain status quo in Artsakh: Armenia unleashed aggression against Azerbaijan. The escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh once again showed that it is impossible to maintain status quo in the NK, that violation of ceasefire agreement happened, and at present there is tension also in Nakhijevan, says Turkeys Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. There was almost no time to address questions to Davutoglu, as his speech was lengthy. He also said that Turkey is an integral part of Europe, but there are values, which arent acceptable for that country pretending to the membership of the European Union. It seems to be funny to an Istanbul Armenian journalist Raffi Hermon Araks: You must accept and you must come to senses and you must work for fixing the shortcomings. By the way, the Istanbul Armenian journalist officially announced, that for already 6 years Turkey has commemorated the Armenian Genocide officially on its streets: And the Turkish police officers defend the protesters, so that nationalists cannot do any harm to them, says Raffi Hermon Araks.
KOLKATA: Ridiculing West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjeefor her rant against the Election Commission (EC), Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday accused her of misusing the state machinery.

On his third round of electioneering for the state assembly polls, Modi alleged a nexus between the Left, the Congress and the Trinamool Congress in parliament to save "leaders of Didi's (elder sister, as Banerjee is affectionately called) party seen accepting money" in the footage released by the Narada news portal.

Charging the three -- Congress, Left Front and Trinamool -- with misgovernance during their respective periods of rule in the state, Modi said that due to lack of jobs, Bengal has now become an "old age home" with the youths going elsewhere to earn a living, leaving behind their parents.

"In Bengal, the Left and the Congress are in alliance. In Kerala, they are taking on each other. But in Delhi, the Congress and the Left are together. The happenings in parliament over the past two years prove this," Modi said in Kolkata.

He said the Narada issue was handed to the Lok Sabha ethics committee as the BJP had majority there.

"But that did not happen in the Rajya Sabha, because we are not in majority there. Didi, Left and the Congress call the shots there."

"The issue was not handed over to the Rajya Sabha ethics committee to save those involved in the Narada scam."

Earlier, in Krishnanagar of Nadia district, Modi said the Trinamool was on the brink of defeat in the polls.

"On the brink of defeat, the Trinamool has lost its senses. Mamata and her party have accepted defeat and that is why she is not fighting with political parties, but rather with the EC," Modi said.

"Polls will come and go, but if these institutions are destroyed, the country will not be able to be run. The EC gave notice to you (Mamata) and it was your responsibility to put forth your stand, your views but instead you are saying, you will see the EC after May 19 (the day of counting)," he said.

He was referring to Banerjee's April 14 outburst against the poll panel after getting a show-cause notice for violation of the model code of conduct.

Slamming Banerjee for "trying to destroy" an independent institution like the EC, Modi said: "The country runs on laws and rules and if you want disobey them, then clarify before the people whether you have faith in democracy or not, whether you have faith in the country's constitution or nor not."

Pointing to the state chief secretary replying to the EC notice slapped on Banerjee, Modi charged her with misusing the state machinery.

"I read somewhere that the reply to Banerjee's notice has been given by the chief secretary. If this is true, then this is the biggest flouting of poll rules. The EC notice was sent to the Trinamool chief and not the chef minister. It was the responsibility of Didi or her party or her party's lawyer to reply," he said.

"It is blatant misuse of the government. Didi, Indira Gandhi lost her membership for six years for misusing the government," said Modi, referring to the Allahabad High Court decision barring then prime minister Gandhi from holding elected office for six years in 1975.

He also attacked the Trinamool over corruption issues and ridiculed the Congress-Left Front tie-up.

Speaking at the Shahid Minar in Kolkata, Modi said the same set of people were involved in the Narada sting footage, the multi-billion-rupee Saradha scam and the collapse of the Vivekananda Road flyover in Kolkata.

Modi urged the people to punish those ruining the state.

"Punish them once, and every five years they will be accountable, and they will be forced to do some good work."

He said the Congress, Left and the Trinamool have made Bengal, especially Kolkata "an old age home".

"Youths go elsewhere to earn their living. The old parents are left behind."

He said there was a time when people across India used to come to Kolkata. "Today, the situation is completely opposite.

"But there is a solution. Even as a sinking ship can be taken to the shore if the pilot has the calibre, development is the only solution",a the prime minister claimed, urging the people to vote the BJP to power.

Read Also: To Double Farm Income, Narendra Modi Pitches For Scientific Farming

U.S. For Powerful Quadrilateral Partnership With India, Others
WASHINGTON: The U.S. has told India it is bound by legislation on the recent visa fee hike - which has badly hit Indian IT companies, an issue that was strongly raised by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his bilateral meeting.

"There are always two issues, one of course is the recent one, visa fee hike and the other is the old issue of totalisation charges for the IT professionals. The U.S. response really is that we have a legislation which so states it," Jaitley told Indian reporters ..

"So unless that legislation is changed (it is likely to remain)," he said.

Jaitley was responding to a question on the kind of response he received from the U.S. Trade Representative, Mike Froman, when he strongly raised the issue during a meeting early this week.

Noting that such a visa fee is impacting only Indian companies, Jaitley had described it as a "discriminatory" practice.

Last year, the U.S. Congress imposed a special fee of up to $4,500 on H-1B and L-1 visas - popular among Indian IT companies - to fund a 9/11 healthcare Act and biometric tracking system.

While agreeing on the $1.1 trillion spending Bill, Congressional leaders decided to impose a special fee of $4,000 on certain categories of H-1B visas and $4,500 on L-1 visas.

Read Also:

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Ted Cruz Blanks Trump In Wyoming Republican Convention

Source: PTI
WASHINGTON: U.S. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump's new top campaign aide Paul Manafort lobbied for a group charged for operating as a front for Pakistan's powerful spy agency ISI and received $700,000 from it, a media report has said.



The company of Paul Manafort, who was recently hired by Trump campaign as its convention manager allegedly received $700,000 from the Kashmiri American Council (KAC) between 1990 and 1995, Yahoo News reported.

The money was received by Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, which was Manafort's lobbying firm.



Ghulam Nabi Fai, the head of Kashmiri American Council, was sentenced by a U.S. court for two years of imprisonment on charges of receiving money from ISI and working on its behalf.



The fund $700,000 was part of the $4 million given by ISI to Kashmiri American Council, as alleged by federal prosecutors during court proceeding.



The ISI has denied the allegations. The U.S. Government never charged Manafort, who was registered as a lobbyist.



Manafort during a trip to Islamabad in 1994 presented plans to influence members of Congress to back Pakistan's case for a plebiscite for Kashmir, the report said.



The report quotes an unnamed former Pakistani official, who was part of that meeting.



Internal budget documents obtained by the FBI show plans by the Kashmiri American Council to spend $80,000 to $100,000 a year on campaign contributions to members of Congress, it said.



"There is no way Manafort didn't know that Pakistan was involved with the KAC," the former official said was quoted as saying by the report.



The Trump Campaign did not respond to questions sent on the allegations against Manafort.

Read Also:

U.S. Student Awarded USD 25,000 To Work With Art Groups In India

U.S. Presidential Primaries: Bernie Sanders Campaign Claims Huge Crowd At New York Rally

Source: PTI
NEW YORK: Democrat candidate and vermont Senator Bernie Sanders drew a record-breaking crowd to a park in Brooklyn as he looks to build momentum ahead of the New York primaries on Tuesday.

Sanders attracted over 28,300 people on Sunday afternoon, according to the campaign and a production company helping to plan the event.

This total was higher than the campaign's previous record of 28,000 in Portland, Oregon, in August 2015, NBC News reported.

"In case you haven't noticed, there are a lot of people here this afternoon!" Sanders bellowed to cheers as he took the stage after veteran actor Danny DeVito glowingly introduced him.

Mega-rallies have been a staple of Sanders campaign since last summer, but only in the past few weeks has he brought show-of-strength events to New York City.

By March end, Sanders drew about 18,000 people to the South Bronx, according to the campaign.

Last week, more than 27,000 people showed up to hear him at Washington Square Park.

On Monday - the night before the all-important New York primary - another large crowd is expected in Long Island city.

Read Also: Sanders Supporters Shower Clinton Motorcade with $1 Bills

Bound By Legislation On Visa Fee Hike: U.S.

Source: IANS
MOSCOW: The U.S. and Russian officials will hold cybersecurity consultations in Geneva this week, the media on Monday cited senior US officials as saying.

The consultations will take place with the participation of representatives of the White House, the U.S. State Department and the FBI.

The sides are due to discuss the bilateral cybersecurity agreements signed in 2013, Sputnik reported.

"This meeting is not a restart of the bilateral presidential commission working group (suspended in 2014 after Ukraine events) but it is in our interest to discuss cybersecurity issues with Russia, including to review the 2013 bilateral U.S.-Russia cyber (confidence-building) measures," a U.S .official said.

In late March, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested during US State Secretary John Kerry's visit that Moscow and Washington could hold expert-level talks on issues related to cybercrime in the near future.

Read Also: To Double Farm Income, Narendra Modi Pitches For Scientific Farming

U.S. For Powerful Quadrilateral Partnership With India, Others

Source: IANS
WASHINGTON: A U.S. student has been awarded a grant of USD 25,000 to travel to Mumbai, Kolkata and Bangalore to study how art is used as a tool for improving lives of people and achieving social justice.



Meredith Starkman, a student of University of Michigan, will travel to the three cities to work with groups that use music, dance, theatre and the visual arts to improve the lives of people living in the margins of society.



This is the first visit of Starkman to India. Starkman, a firm believer in "artistic activism" and a recipient of the prestigious Wallenberg Fellowship.



"I'm most scared of being lonely," said Starkman, who is graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theatre performance.



"I've never stayed in a place this long without knowing people in the country. I only know two people. But anyone I know who has ever been to India or has family in the country has given me names. It's just a matter of reaching out and finding my own way," she said.

Read Also:

U.S. Presidential Primaries: Bernie Sanders Campaign Claims Huge Crowd At New York Rally

Ted Cruz Blanks Trump In Wyoming Republican Convention

Source: PTI
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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- In case you missed it: Nyle DiMarco spoke on Monday's episode of "Dancing with the Stars."

His words: "I can actually hear."

OK, relax, it was just a joke. But a well-played one in our opinion. (Full disclosure: It was actually his translator's voice as part of a tongue-in-cheek "reveal a secret" segment.)

Damn. And he flatout killed it in his waltz performance. That was some precision stuff right there, folks.

Maybe Nyle got an extra motivational boost from that surprise rehearsal appearance by his proud realty TV "mama" (her teary-eyed words, not mine), Tyra "You Wanna Be on Top" Banks. (She was sporting chic camo and dreads, folks, very laid back Tyra.)

Either way, guest judge Maksim Chmerkovskiy declared Nyle's sharp performance the "best dance of the night."

Oh, and if there was any question, Nyle made it clear to viewers that he "feels it." He scored three 9s and a 10 from the judges, landing him in the lead.

Nyle nuts rejoice: No elimination this week because this very special episode forced all the dancers to switch partners, so your guy lives to pelvic-thrust his way through another paso doble.

Now: Catch up with our recent rundown of 10 things you need to know about Staten Island's latest (and least embarrassing) reality TV star:

If we rated the least embarrassing Staten Island reality TV stars ever, Nyle DiMarco would rank right up there with Food Network Star's chef Dom Tesoriero.

And that's saying something considering Nyle donned a loincloth this week on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars." Hey, banging around like a caveman in a buckskin panty sure beats spouting racial epithets like that infamous gal on "Big Brother," amiright?!

Anyway, looks like this dashing deaf dancer might be around a while: Nyle and his pro parter, Peta Murgatroyd, scored an impressive 34 out of 40 this week for their Stone Age samba.

Here are 10 things you don't know about Staten Island's new reality TV star:

1. AT 27 YEARS OLD, HE IS ALREAD REALITY TV TRAILBLAZER

Before "DWTS," Nyle was the first deaf contestant -- and winner -- on Tyra Banks' long-running "America's Next Top Model."

When approached by "AMTM" producers, the then 26-year-old never thought he could be a full-time model or actor, but now, "I want to see how far I can go with this" reality TV career opportunity, he said.

On the "DWTS" set, Nyle told E! News: "I'm looking forward to changing the world's perspective on deaf people -- that we actually can dance, too. You don't have to be able to hear the music."

2. HE'S A STATEN ISLAND MAMA'S BOY

Nyle and his mom, Donna, moved to Staten Island from Washington so Nyle could capitalize on the modeling opportunities available in New York City. "She's a certified deaf interpreter and works all over the city," he told The Times of London. "It's great to have her with me just to talk things over and to have her home-cooking."

3. HE KNOWS HE IS BEAUTIFUL

Jet black hair. Ice blue eyes. Facial symmetry for days. Yeah, he looks like a successful model -- but you don't have to tell that to this 6-foot 2-inch hunk:

"I know I'm beautiful," he said. "It's not difficult being out in the world with hearing people. I'm used to it. I'm fortunate because I make friends wherever I go -- gyms, bars and clubs."

4. HE'S FROM A MULTIGENERATIONAL DEAF FAMILY

"My grandparents, parents and two brothers -- one of them is my fraternal twin -- are all deaf. I'm the fourth generation of deafness," Nyle said. He's told reporters it's "something to do with the c-26 gene," but added he's never felt the need to dig deeper.

5. HE'S GOT THE SUPPORT OF THE STATEN ISLAND DEAF CLUB

Check out this video of members congregating to watch him on "ANTM."

6. HE'S THE STRONG SILENT TYPE

Born in Queens and raised in Maryland, he learned lip-reading and sign language at deaf school but became non-verbal after quitting speech classes as a 7-year-old: "I could talk a little when I was a boy but I stopped because I didn't really see the point in it. All my friends were deaf and I went to a deaf school. I still don't regret it ... Lip-reading helps and really, with technology today, there's no barrier. In my grandparents' and my parents' time, it was a whole lot harder."

7. HE'S GOOD WITH NUMBERS

Nyle graduated with a degree in mathematics from Gallaudet University in Washington D.C., aka "the world's only university for the deaf and hard of hearing."

8. STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE: HE'S TOO BUSY FOR A GIRLFRIEND

At the moment, he's flying solo (well, except for mom) but he reportedly had a girlfriend for 10 years, through school and college, who also was deaf: "Our paths split; it's only normal. I'm enjoying my single life and I don't think it would be fair if I dated someone while I'm travelling a lot. Maybe later."

9. HE'S WANTS TO BE AN ADVOCATE FOR DEAF PEOPLE

"I hope my ('ANTM') win helped shatter misconceptions about deaf people," Nyle told MTV last year. "I hope my win will make people realize that we're as normal as can be. I also hope my win will inspire deaf people to do whatever they want to do in life!"

The possibilities are endless. Nyle wants to be his generation's Marlee Matlin (the "Children of a Lesser God" star is still the only deaf actor to win an Oscar): "Hearing people shouldn't be shocked that deaf people are confident and talented."

BTW: Marlee was the first deaf contestant on "DWTS."

10. HE'S NOT INTERESTED IN LIFE-CHANGING SURGERY

If offered the chance of cochlear implants, he would decline: "I was born in a deaf family where deaf culture is deep and beautiful and I would never want to change that."
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - Amid reports of irregularities at polling places as New Yorkers vote in Tuesday's primary elections, city Comptroller Scott Stringer said he will audit the city Board of Elections.

Recently, more than 125,000 Democratic voters in Brooklyn were removed from voter rolls, BOE Executive Director Michael Ryan told WNYC, because the city agency was behind in maintaining its voting records.

Removing ineligible voters from the rolls over the course of a long period is typical, but with it being done all at once, people take notice.

Ryan explained that 12,000 people moved out of the borough, 44,000 people were moved from active to inactive voter status and 70,000 voters were removed from the inactive voter list.

With reports that voters all over the city on Tuesday were having trouble at the polls, Stringer announced he would audit the city agency.

"There is nothing more sacred in our nation than the right to vote, yet election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get in to their polling site," Stringer said.

STATEN ISLANDERS FEEL DISENFRANCHISED

When JR and Brooke Butler of Prince's Bay went to Paulo Intermediate School (I.S. 75) in Huguenot to vote Tuesday, the two Republicans were surprised when Brooke was handed a ballot for the Democratic primary.

JR Butler said his wife was looking for Donald Trump's name and didn't find it, only then realizing she had the wrong ballot.

Bringing it to the attention of the poll worker, Brooke Butler was told she's a registered Democrat, something she said isn't correct.

Insisting she's a registered Republican, Brooke called the Board of Elections office, was told she's a registered Republican and that she should fill out an affidavit ballot that will be counted.

She went back to the school and voted via affidavit.

JR Butler said his mother-in-law complained the same was happening on Todt Hill.

"When we got home, we were kind of annoyed," he said.

Nichole Lee lives in Port Richmond and went to vote at PS 19 in West Brighton.

Knowing her signature now looks different from when she signed it about 15 years ago, she always brings her ID with her, she said.

But New York voting laws don't permit poll workers to check IDs, something that Lee didn't know. She said once in the past when she offered the ID, a poll worker looked at it.

This time, the poll worker challenged her signatures and said she can't vote the regular way.

"I started getting upset because I don't want my vote to be denied, or ignored," Lee said.

Offered what's called a "challenge oath," Lee filled it out and proceeded to vote.

But she said she thought her vote wouldn't be counted and was unhappy with the way poll workers treated her.

"I was just irate," she said.

Ryan told the Advance that in a case where a signature looks different from what's on the voter rolls, it's up to the discretion of the poll worker to challenge it to prevent voter fraud.

"People object to taking the challenge oath and just want to show their ID and think we can ignore the law, and we can't," he said.

Asked about the numerous incidents reported by Staten Islanders of mixed-up party registrations at the polls -- people being denied ballots because the rolls show they're not registered with that party, it's not unusual, Ryan said.

"People are registered as blanks and thinking they can vote," he said, referring to independent voters who are not registered with a specific party.

He said it's also common to find voters think they're registered, say as a Republican, when in fact, they're not.

Another local election law expert said it is common that voters mix up party registration with how they usually vote. Years of voting for Republicans may make someone think he's a registered Republican, when in fact he's a registered Democrat or an independent, he said.

For those unsure of their registration, check here.

As for widespread issues at polling places "we're not hearing those issues being corroborated," Ryan said. "We're getting specific information and we're not finding the issues that people are alleging are occurring."

"We're not corroborating any of that anecdotal information."

There is also confusion among some voters about who is eligible to vote in the presidential primaries. The answer? Registered Republicans and registered Democrats.

Regarding the comptroller's planned audit, Ryan said he has not yet spoken to Stringer's office and had no comment.

"We have seen some spotty issues on Election Day, just like we always do, a machine breaks down, a manager is late," he said. But "we're not seeing mass, widespread problems. We're just not seeing what people are saying."

With it being a presidential primary, more people are voting and more people are wanting to vote -- but with it limited to those registered with the two parties, it leaves out many people.

"It's a president primary and because it's a presidential primary, normal routine issues are being magnified, but that doesn't mean we're not taking them seriously," Ryan said.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- An Annadale man is accused of making racist remarks against a Muslim woman and her husband and spitting at them during a road rage incident in Huguenot.

Paul Sellitti, 47, was arrested and charged with second-degree harassment following the March 17 incident, according to court documents.

Paul Sellitti, 47, was arrested and charged with second-degree harassment following the March 17 incident, according to court documents.

It happened at Huguenot Avenue and Amboy Road at around 3:50 p.m. when Sellitti approached the 38-year-old victim and her husband in their car, court papers allege.

He then spit in the woman's face and said, "f--- you mother f------, get out of my country, you sand n----," court documents allege.

Minutes later, he drove up to the victim while she was calling police and spit in her face again, this time also spitting on her husband, according to court papers.

The victim is a practicing Muslim, according to court documents.

Police arrested Sellitti and issued him a desk appearance ticket, court papers state.

Sellitti said he was remorseful when contacted by the Advance on Monday, and blamed the incident on the victim's driving.

"I'm driving behind her on Amboy Road, and she's doing like 5 mph -- it was a traffic thing. She stopped in the middle of the street, and I cursed her out. I'm not a racist person," Sellitti told the Advance.

The unemployed diesel mechanic says he had just woken up and was going out to buy a cup of coffee before the incident.

"I was just stressed that morning. I get a little cranky when I don't have my coffee," he said.

Adding, "I was having a bad day...I do apologize. I'm just an idiot."

Sellitti was released on his own recognizance and a temporary order of protection was issued in favor of the victim during his arraignment Monday in Criminal Court in St. George, court records show.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- It was one of the most notorious crime sprees in Staten Island history.



And its bizarre ending eight years ago is about to get re-written -- big time.

Authorities believe they have captured the suspect behind the infamous "Ninja Burglar" pattern of break-ins, a wave which left residents on edge on Todt Hill and other wealthy communities nearly 10 years ago.

The suspect is currently in the custody of the Richmond County District Attorney detective squad, District Attorney Michael E. McMahon revealed in a bombshell announcement Tuesday afternoon.



He is expected to be arraigned in Criminal Court on Wednesday.



McMahon is scheduled to hold a press conference at 1 p.m. to discuss the case.

The Ninja Burglar in the custody of RCDA NYPD Detective Squad. 10-year crime spree over. Arraignment tomorrow morn. Press conference at 1pm.  Michael E. McMahon (@StatenIslandDA) April 19, 2016

At its height, police attributed 19 separate break-ins to the pattern, mainly in the Todt Hill and Grymes Hill neighborhoods between May 2007 and January of 2008.

The "Ninja Burglar" moniker was born on Sept. 6, 2007, when Dongan Hills resident Phil Chiolo claimed he had a nunchucks-vs.-knife battle with an intruder dressed like a ninja. Chiolo told the Advance that day he stabbed the prowler with a steak knife.

"I see this guy dressed in a Halloween-like ninja outfit, with just his eyes peering out," said Chiolo in 2007. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing."

Chiolo said he grabbed a knife after the burglar attacked him with the nunchucks, and plunged the blade into the intruders chest.

"The remarkable thing was that he did not display any physical pain," Chiolo said.

The prowler fled.

However, the nickname stuck, and when the next victim walked in on a burglar, she screamed, "The Ninja is here! The Ninja! The Ninja!"

At the time, NYPD brass had been loath to acknowledge the serial burglar's "ninja" nickname, instead referring to the spree simply as "Pattern 16."

The wave had residents of those communities on edge.

Each time a new break-in was reported, law enforcement would descend on those communities, closing off all access roads and calling in helicopters, flood flights, canine units and heavily armed officers to search the area.

There were no arrests and no trials.

In April of 2008, police sources told the Advance detectives had quietly closed the book on the string of break-ins after authorities started deportation proceedings against at least one Albanian man they believed to be connected with the spree.

Police were tight-lipped and would say only that the burglaries attributed to the "Ninja Burglar" were actually the work of up to three Albanian nationals facing deportation because of their illegal status in this country.

Although residents who were victimized remained skeptical, the three were deported to their native land without being charged with the crimes.

The last reported strike in the pattern occurred during the first week of January 2008, when cops say a burglar or burglars absconded with $225,000 in diamonds and jewelry from a house on Melhorn Road in Castleton Corners.
By EDDIE D'ANNA and NICHOLAS WOODMAN

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A Brooklyn man has been arrested in a scheme to bribe police officers in an attempt to secure and sell gun permits to his customers for thousands of dollars, authorities announced on Monday.

In addition, the head of the NYPD's Licensing Bureau -- a former Staten Islander -- has been re-assigned to an administrative position.

The developments are the latest in connection with a growing federal corruption investigation into the NYPD.

Alex (Shaya) Lichtenstein, 44, was arrested and charged in Manhattan federal court with bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery for his alleged efforts to pay bribes to obtain gun permits through the Police Department's Licensing Division, Preet Bahara, the U.S. Attorney for the South District of New York, announced in a joint statement with NYPD Commissioner William Bratton.



Lichtenstein, a member of the Borough Park Shomrim volunteer security force, approached an officer just days ago and offered the officer cash bribes in order to help obtain gun licenses for his customers, authorities allege. Lichtenstein told the officer he charged customers thousands of dollars to secure the licenses and his previous connections with the Licensing Department had recently cut him out, authorities say.

The officer notified the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau and, with investigators, set up and recorded a meeting where Lichtenstein offered him $6,000 per license application he could get through the License Division, according to a release from the U.S. Attorney's office.

Further investigation revealed Lichtenstein had substantial connections to a sergeant who had worked at the License Division for more than a decade.

His arrest would mark the first in connection to the ongoing probe into corruption in the Police Department.



On Monday, the NYPD announced additional administrative changes in connection with the ongoing joint investigation with the FBI, Police Department and U.S. Attorney's Office.



Deputy Inspector Michael Endall, a former Annadale resident who heads the License Division, has been transferred and is being re-assigned to an administrative position "pending further review," the NYPD announced.

Sgt. David Villanueva and Police Officer Richard Ochetal have been placed on modified assignment and have been transferred from the License Division.

"Corruption in any part of government cuts at the very fabric of our society," said Bharara. "But it is particularly damaging when it undermines public safety."

Several other high-ranking police officers, several who live on Staten Island, have been transferred in connection with the federal investigation into whether cops were accepting gifts from businessmen in exchange or favors.

Deputy Inspector James Grant, who lives on Staten Island, and Deputy Chief Michael Harrington, of Westerleigh, had already been stripped of their badges and guns and reassigned. Also, Deputy Chief Eric Rodriguez, second in command of Patrol Borough Brooklyn South, was transferred to desk duty. Public records indicate he lives in New Dorp.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A steady stream of voters on Staten Island took to polling sites across the borough Tuesday to cast their ballot for the presidential candidate they hope will win the New York primary.

The polls opened at 6 a.m. and will close at 9 p.m. Only registered Republicans and Democrats are able to vote in the state's closed primary.

Democrats will choose between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Republicans will choose between businessman Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

The Advance visited various polling sites Tuesday, including PS 56 in Rossville; Summerfield United Methodist Church in Mariners Harbor; PS 32 in Great Kills, and PS 19 in West Brighton.

Some sites were less crowded than others.

"We need to make a difference in our society, and hopefully have a hand in our government," said Scott Weisberg, who cast his vote at PS 32. "To tell politicians that we're happy or unhappy with the policies they put forward. It's our God-given right, it's in our Constitution."

Weisberg said that it didn't take him very long to make a decision on which candidate would get his vote.

He then gave advice to any new voters: "Go out there and vote."

Michael Basta, a 19-year-old student at the College of Staten Island, was voting for the first time today when he went to cast his vote at PS 56.

"I feel like it's really important to vote so that way you can have your voice heard and choose the right candidate for the job," Basta said.

He added that it wasn't hard for him to make a choice. "I was a huge supporter from the beginning so it did not take me long at all," he said.

Who will you be voting for today? Tell us in the comments below or on Facebook or Twitter with the hashtag #IVOTEDFOR.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A Port Richmond woman who was arrested for attacking and injuring a court officer Friday in St. George is facing separate charges for also assaulting a police officer and spitting in the cop's face the next day in the 120th Police Precinct stationhouse, prosecutors allege.

Jessica Graham, 34, of Orange Avenue, was re-arrested on charges of felony assault, harassment and obstructing governmental administration stemming from the Saturday incident, according to court documents.

A female officer was placing Graham back in a holding cell at the St. George police station at around 9:30 a.m. when she twisted the cops right wrist, causing it to strike the cell, court papers allege.

She's also accused of spitting in the officer's face, according to court documents.

The injured officer, who had a sprained wrist, was transported to Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton for treatment, court papers state.

Graham had originally been arrested Friday morning after she attacked a female court officer in the Family Court annex in St. George, according to court documents.

In that incident, the court officer told Graham to leave the building and she became irate and said, "I'm not going anywhere," court papers allege.

She then hit the officer on the head with her cell phone, cutting her, court papers state.

Graham was arrested on charges of felony assault and misdemeanor criminal weapon possession, according to court documents.

The officer, who was bleeding and complained of head pain, was taken to Richmond University Medical Center for treatment, according to court documents.

Graham was remanded without bail during her arraignment Sunday in Criminal Court in St. George. A judge has ordered a psychiatric examination, court records show.
Candidate composite.jpg

Clockwise from top left: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, John Kasich and Ted Cruz. New York voters will select the GOP and Democratic candidates they want to see as their party's nominee for the November election. (Advance composite photo)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Election Day is upon us, and if you've been hiding under a rock, hoping all the inter- and intra-party bickering would sort itself you, you'll be sorely disappointed to know it's just as bad as it ever was.

Democratic front-runner former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and GOP front-runner businessman Donald Trump both visited Staten Island on Sunday, two days ahead of the important New York primary. Read the coverage by clicking the link below.

Here are few helpful pointers to keep in mind going into Tuesday's election.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- DNA or no DNA?

A justice may rule Tuesday whether or not accused child-killer Michael Sykes must give prosecutors a DNA sample.

State Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Rooney might also decide at a scheduled conference if he'll grant a defense request to impose a gag order on the district attorney's office.

Prosecutors allege Sykes, 25, fatally stabbed his daughter, Maliyah Sykes, 4 months; his girlfriend, Rebecca Cutler, 26, and Cutler's daughter, Ziana Cutler, 1, in the Ramada Inn on Feb. 10.

Sykes also badly stabbed Miracle Cutler, 2, who was released from Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton on Feb. 19 after recovering from multiple stab wounds.

All three girls are Rebecca Cutler's children. Maliyah Sykes is the daughter of Rebecca Cutler and Michael Sykes.

Prosecutors said Sykes stabbed Rebecca Cutler 40 times about the body and stabbed Ziana Cutler and Maliyah Sykes nine times each.

Miracle Cutler was stabbed 11 times, prosecutors said.

Police said Sykes was jealous over Rebecca Cutler's relationship with the father of her two older daughters.

Sykes fled the scene afterward and discarded the knife, said prosecutors.

The victims had been living at the Ramada since Dec. 6, when the city Department of Homeless Services placed them there.

The defendant, who is being held without bail, is charged with first- and second-degree murder, attempted first- and second-degree murder, first-degree assault, robbery, criminal weapon possession and endangering a child's welfare.

At the most recent court conference on March 29, Sykes' lawyer, Mark J. Fonte, said he would oppose a prosecution motion to obtain a DNA sample from his client for comparative purposes.

Fonte also said then he had filed a written motion to prevent the district attorney's office from discussing the case in the media.

Statements made by District Attorney Michael E. McMahon in connection with Sykes' case and other high-profile matters are "unbecoming of a prosecutorial agency and serve to prejudice the defendant's right to a fair trial," Fonte wrote.

In a statement released in late February announcing Sykes' indictment, McMahon called the slayings "cold-blooded," "barbaric" and "shocking."

Wrote Fonte, "The allegations, herein in and of themselves, will produce great difficulty in obtaining a fair trial for the defendant. The statements made by the district attorney clearly enhance the risk of a biased jury, unwilling to hear the evidence presented by the court in favor of their previous views on the matter."

Prosecutors were expected to oppose Fonte's motion.
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07:21 Small businesses need to work on their cyber security initiatives COSBOA CEO Alexi Boyd says the Optus data breach shows Australia that every company is vulnerable, and all companies need to improve their cyber...

00:37 Australia to nationally ban single-use plastics Australia is moving towards implementing nationally consistent rules on single-use plastics as New South Wales imposes a ban on a range of products...

10:37 History set to repeat itself with major floods in Victoria Business reporter Ingrid Willinge says in late February the biggest flood recorded hit the northern rivers in NSW now we are seeing history...

00:30 Netball Australia loses $15 million-dollar sponsorship Netball Australia has lost its $15 million-dollar sponsorship deal with Hancock Prospecting after Indigenous netballer Donnell Wallam refused...

00:37 David Elliott to quit politics NSW Transport Minister David Elliott has become the 11th government MP to announce retirement before the next election.

Flood crisis: Life-threatening floods, wild storms batter NSW, VIC, QLD Life-threatening flash flooding, heavy rain and wild thunderstorms are battering communities in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland on Sunday as the flood crisis ramps up; with evacuation orders issued as rivers break their banks.

15:46 We cant have a spending spree in upcoming budget: Dutton Opposition leader Peter Dutton says Treasurer Jim Chalmers does talk a lot, but he doesnt say much, as Labor prepares to unveil its...

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03:42 Australia draws Group B for FIFA Womens World Cup Australia drew Group B and will go head-to-head with the Republic of Ireland for their first match in the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup.

Victorian Coalition launches plan to address states ballooning debt The Opposition in Victoria has vowed to address the states eye-watering debt which is forecasted to surpass New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania combined.

01:27 Murray River approaches 100 year peak Several evacuation orders in Victoria have been issued along the engorged Murray and Loddon Rivers as water levels increase.

Angus Taylor rules out gender quotas within the Liberals The Oppositions Angus Taylor has stood firm against gender-based quotas within the Liberal Party amid a renewed push to boost female representation.

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01:03 Andrew Clennell looks ahead to the coming week in politics Sky News Political Editor Andrew Clennell has assessed what is set to be seen in the coming week in politics.

Shes not fit to serve: Dutton calls for Thorpe to leave Parliament The Opposition leader has joined calls for Ms Thorpe to have her portfolio stripped after details of a relationship with an ex-bikie member while on a law enforcement committee emerged.

14:05 Budget will try to bring people together around economic challenges Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the upcoming federal budget will be about trying to bring people together around big economic challenges.
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Serafina Salucci was just seven when she helped her dad build a garage in their Sydney backyard using the common building material of bonded asbestos sheeting.

But in 2007, at the age of 37, a persistent cough sent her to the doctors where a scan of her lung confirmed the deadly cancer mesothelioma.

Asbestos victim Serafina Salucci has been living with mesothelioma for nine years. Credit:Elesa Kurtz

Given her lack of exposure to any other form of asbestos, the most likely explanation is a tiny fibre entered her young lung during the backyard renovation, where it lay dormant for 30 years.

But Ms Salucci considers herself one of the lucky ones. The average time between diagnosis of mesothelioma and death is just two years. She has survived nine. And she has watched her four children  the youngest was three when she was diagnosed - reach milestones she never thought possible.
Want to keep your kids active and entertained over the school holidays in a safe environment? The Australian Institute of Sport's school holiday program is on until April 22.

Using the National Museum of Australia's architecture for inspiration, children can design, make or draw their very own museum these school holidays. Until April 22.

Gather round the telly and bask in the glow of vintage ABC. From Play School to raunchy romps, see Australian life reflected on screen in Tuning IN: ABC TV 1964-76 at the National Archives of Australia. Free. Until May 15.

Celestial Empire: Life in China 1644-1911 is on at the National Library of Australia brings together culture and tradition from two of the world's great libraries. Until May 22. Free.

See 2015's best political cartoons at the Behind the Lines exhibition at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House.

Bush Capital: The natural history of the ACT at the Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG) shows the natural history of the Territory with specimens, illustrations, photographs, works of art and sound. From March 12 to June 26. Free.

Touch or click through for more David Pope

Today: Patchy fog in the early morning. Mostly sunny day. Light winds. Min 6, max 24.

Tomorrow: Partly cloudy. Slight (20%) chance of a shower at night. Light winds. Min 8, max 26.

Friday: Cloudy. Medium (60%) chance of showers, most likely in the morning and afternoon. Light winds becoming southerly 15 to 20 km/h during the day. Min 11, max 21.
An 18-year-old Watson student has been stranded in South Africa since last September when the Immigration Department revoked his family's right to live in Australia.

Brett Ingram, a former student at Brindabella Christian College, is struggling to find work to support himself in the country he has not lived in for five years.

Clive and Jacqui Ingram and their daughter Caitlin are from South Africa and have been living in Australia since 2011. Credit:Jay Cronan

His parents and sister, meanwhile, are still in Watson waiting on the outcome of their request for a "Ministerial Intervention".

Brett was on a gap year visit to family in South Africa when his mother, Jacqui, had her application for a permanent Australian visa refused on September 12, 2014, because of a recently acquired kidney condition.
Average superannuation balances tanked 1.1 per cent over the March quarter, pulling down average returns for the 2016 financial year so far to a flat 0.1 per cent.

A quarterly survey by independent research house Chant West also found that, as at March 31, QSuper was ahead nearly 3.7 per cent over the previous nine months, putting it on track to rank as the top-performing growth fund for the second consecutive financial year. Meanwhile, its worst-performing rivals lost more than 2 per cent over the same period.

Growth funds, defined by Chant West as those with 61 per cent to 80 per cent invested in riskier assets such as shares, are the type of super fund option most working age Australians have their compulsory retirement savings invested in.

"We made a strategic decision some time ago to focus on long-term returns designed to meet our members' objectives over a 10-year horizon via a diversified portfolio with less equity exposure," QSuper chief executive Michael Pennisi said.
Embattled listed law firm Slater & Gordon has filed its UK accounts which, unlike its Australian filings, include a note the company is rated as a going concern only until the end of March 2017.

April 30 this year looms as the deadline Slater & Gordon has to convince its bankers to hold off on calling in its debts in March next year. Slater & Gordon owed its banking syndicate, which includes Westpac and National Australia Bank, $783 million as at December 31.

The law firm is in a fight for survival following a horror 2015 that saw its market capitalisation plummet following an accounting scandal in its UK arm and weaker than expected growth in both its British business and its Australian arm.



The urgency for a debt restructure was increased after the company booked an $876.4 million write-down in February, which saw its debt-to-equity ratio blow out and is believed to have led to the company breaching its covenants.

If a deal is not reached by the end of the month Slater & Gordon's lenders have the right to ask the company to repay its debts in March 2017  a move that could spark a massive capital raising by the company.
A Chinese-led group agreed to buy Australia's most iconic cattle company in a deal valued at more than $300 million after partnering with local investors.

The venture, headed by a company controlled by Shanghai Pengxin Group, will purchase 80 per cent of S. Kidman & Co., according to a statement Tuesday to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Australian Rural Capital Ltd. will take a 20 per cent stake.

Some of S Kidman & Co's cattle stations are within the Woomera weapons testing range. Credit:Andrew Meares

The deal needs approval from the board and shareholders of Shenzhen-listed Hunan Dakang Pasture Farming Co., controlled by Shanghai Pengxin.

here was no immediate comment from the federal government, whose approval is also required for the deal.
It is never too late to bone up on good investment advice, especially if you thought that John McGrath's recent property play was as safe as houses.

So we are much obliged to our friends at livewiremarkets who dug up an interview with Investors Mutual boss Anton Tagliaferro from December when he talked about the perils of initial public offerings and trying to sort the cabbages from the golden turnips.

"Every IPO is risky, by the way," said Tagliaferro.

"You've just got to be aware of who the seller is, what's their motivation for selling ... what's the history of the firm pre IPO."
The Panama Papers, Lux Leaks and Swiss Leaks have done more to increase tax transparency, than the actions of most governments.

Secret tax deals will continue to happen, and go unnoticed, if they are allowed to. So why don't we just stop them being a secret?

Look what happens when we do: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) release of the Panama Papers  more than 11.5 million documents that were hacked from a Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca  have prompted a global hunt for criminals.

The papers, dating back to 1977 until as recently as last December, include information on about 214,000 offshore entities. They allege that companies domiciled in tax havens were also being used for money laundering and arms and drug deals. And 143 politicians, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, have been linked to the leaks.
Leaders from major church denominations have signed an open letter pleading with Treasurer Scott Morrison to stop Australia's foreign aid from falling to the least generous level in history.

One of the signatories, Australian Christian Churches president Pastor Wayne Alcorn, heads the denomination of the Shirelive church that Mr Morrison attends in Sydney's Sutherland Shire.

Churches have urged Treasurer Scott Morrison to reverse cuts to foreign aid. Credit:Andrew Meares

The Coalition government has stripped $11 billion from the aid budget since coming to office and another $224 million is scheduled to be cut next financial year.

"We believe it is time to reverse course," the letter said. "These cuts damage and undermine programs which have a direct impact on the lives, livelihoods, security and opportunity of many of our region's poorest and most vulnerable people."
The Turnbull government's proposed changes to media ownership regulation will be shelved until after the federal election as Australia prepares for the first double dissolution since 1987.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull made it clear he intended to pull the trigger on a double dissolution following the budget on May 3, after the Senate voted down the government's Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) legislation on Monday, for a July 2 election.

Parliament was recalled on Monday for a special sitting and the Senate was given three weeks to pass the government's two industrial relations bills, including the re-establishment of the ABCC, which had been voted down before. It was once again rejected, giving the prime minister the trigger for the double dissolution.

After finishing on Tuesday, Parliament will probably not sit again until May 2, the day before the budget. Mr Turnbull has until May 11 to visit the Governor-General to formally issue the writs and announce an election.
Netflix's stunning growth phase in Australia appears to be over.

Now it has entered a period of mere "steady" growth, and for investors, it's a problem.

The streaming video company reported its quarterly results in the US this morning. Shares have tanked by as much as 10 per cent in after hours trading, after it forecast weaker than expected growth in subscribers in the current quarter - and it turns out Australia is a key part of that.

Netflix said it expects to add 2.5 million subscribers globally in the June quarter - 500,000 of them in the US, which is in line with previous quarters; but just 2 million in "international" markets - down from 2.4 million a year earlier.
Prices for Australia's most lucrative export commodity could be stronger for longer, amid signs the nation's two biggest exporters of iron ore are not growing output as fast as expected.

Confirmation that Rio Tinto's iron ore expansion program in the Pilbara will be further delayed comes as analysts warn BHP Billiton's Western Australian division will fall short of its iron ore export target for the year to June 30.

BHP has already downgraded the iron ore export guidance for its global operations in the wake of the Samarco disaster, and the WA division's failure to meet its target could be announced as early as Wednesday morning.

Like Rio, BHP is expected to reveal that turbulent weather hampered its exports during the March quarter.
The Australian Taxation Office has made inaccurate statements to parliament, according to the Inspector-General of Taxation Ali Noroozi, and its alleged bullying of small business has made taxpayers lose confidence in the system.

A federal inquiry is examining whether the Australian Taxation Office suffers from too much scrutiny.

The Inspector-General of Taxation, Ali Noroozi, has announced his terms of reference for the review into the ATO following the $144 million tax fraud case. Credit:Nic Walker

A host of submissions to the inquiry have argued that the tax office, like the big banks, is 'too big to fail', and thereby should not be subject to less scrutiny.

But one of the agencies that Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan has said he wants to face less oversight from is Mr Noroozi's office.
The selection of election dates being the sole prerogative of prime ministers, more than a few Coalition frontbenchers were unaware on Tuesday morning that Malcolm Turnbull had settled on July 2 as the date for his double dissolution election. Some even ventured to inquisitive reporters that early July was not set in stone and that although obstructionist senators had handed the prime minister the election trigger he needed, no one ought to jump to conclusions. Their apparent lack of enthusiasm was revealing  and justified  because the course Mr Turnbull has set himself and his government is fraught with risk.

The imperative to re-establish of the Australian Building and Construction Commission is not an election issue to make ordinary voters' hearts beat faster, and the long campaign duration (75 days) coupled with a mid-winter polling day could well contribute to voter ennui or a larger-than-normal protest vote. Many voters will recall Mr Turnbull's commitment last September (after assuming the prime ministership) to see out a full term and conclude that his justification for going early is particularly compelling.

History, too, suggests Mr Turnbull is playing with fire. Of the six double dissolution elections called to break political deadlocks between the Senate and House of Representatives, only two and perhaps three could be said to have been clear, unambiguous successes. On two occasions, the hoped-for Senate majorities failed to materialise, and on another two occasions, the prime ministers who used the double dissolution provision paid for their impetuosity with their jobs.

The polls, and indeed most commentators, suggest Mr Turnbull's chances of being returned as prime minister are reasonably good. However, forecasts that a double dissolution election will lead to a Senate that's more amenable to the Coalition's legislative agenda  even taking into account recently enacted voting changes designed to eliminate micro party representatives and low-profile independents  are hard to come by. Indeed, four of the eight cross-bench senators were confident enough about winning re-election that they called Mr Turnbull's bluff on ABCC legislation.
Controversial artist Paul Yore returns with his first solo show in Melbourne since 2013.

A subsequent scandal and court case, related to one of Yore's installations at Linden Contemporary, saw the artist accused of producing child pornography. The charges were eventually dismissed by magistrate Amanda Chambers.

IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD by Paul Yore.

Now Yore is taking over Neon Parc's large Brunswick space to reveal the results of two years' research, studio work and travel, including an immersion in outsider art during a recent sojourn in Europe.

Yore is using the full scale of the Tinning Street gallery to show an ambitious series of collage-like textile hangings and new work in video and sound installation.
Australian taxpayers fork out $1458 a night for each person held at the Christmas Island detention centre  equal to luxury hotel rooms in Sydney and Melbourne boasting glittering city views and Steinway grand pianos.

Some 167 men were held at the facility at the end of February, costing the public purse a staggering $243,000 a day.

The figures have emerged a fortnight before the federal budget, in which Turnbull government has warned of restrained spending as it seeks to return to surplus.

The expense is on top of spending on mainland detention centres, and the $1.2 billion cost of running offshore detention centres last financial year.
The 60-page report, to be released by NSW Skills Minister John Barilaro on Wednesday, was commissioned to look at how to make public vocational education provider TAFE more efficient.

A NSW government minister has promoted a report highlighting the business results of a collapsed private college network whose headquarters were raided last week during a fraud investigation by the Australian Federal Police. 

Instead it has highlighted the difficulty the collapse of the scandal-plagued private vocational training sector is causing for the state government's privatisation agenda.

John Barilaro, NSW Minister for Skills, will release the 60-page vocational education report on Wednesday. Credit:Louise Kennerley

Commissioned by the NSW government through TAFE NSW and completed by the Boston Consulting Group, the report labels TAFE NSW as "inefficient" and "uncompetitive" compared to private providers. It names only the private education operator NAVITAS and Australian Careers Network as comparators to the public network.

More than 20 federal police officers raided Australian Careers Network last week after 16,000 students were left in limbo and hundreds of jobs were lost at the company. The action came after the ACCC launched action in the Federal Court in November against one of ACN's colleges to recover $106 million in taxpayer funding,

The ACCC has alleged the college acted unconscionably in enrolling students with intellectual disabilities and preying on people in Aboriginal communities while enrolling them in up to $18,000 in public debt. It also allegedly signed them up to online courses despite not having access to the internet.
ANSTO workers are not members of the Australian Public Service but are subject to the government's public sector bargaining policy and unions say it is the policy's attack on workplace conditions and entitlements that have been decisively rejected in the 67 per cent no vote.

Unions representing the 1100 workers at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) are "exploring" options for taking industrial action safely. Credit:Andrew Quilty

Unions representing the 1100 workers at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) say that striking at a safety-critical nuclear installation that operates around the clock presents problems but they are "exploring" options for taking industrial action safely.

The workplace unrest sweeping the federal public service has spread to Australia's nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney after workers there rejected a new pay and conditions deal developed under the Coalition's hardline industrial relations policy.

The organisation's chief executive said it wanted to get back to the bargaining table as early as possible but said the 80 per cent turnout was significant in the result, noting that 230 ANSTO employees had not cast ballots.

A coalition of four unions representing ANSTO workers campaigned against the pay increase of 2 per cent a year for a three-year deal, arguing that the ban on back pay mandated by the government's policy, meant the offer was only worth 1.4 per cent per year in real terms.

Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) official Daniel White said the real issue was the attempt to "streamline" the workplace deal by moving much of its provisions into "policy" which workers fear could be changed by management at any time.

"People were very concerned about the rostering arrangements and that under the new agreement they could just be ordered onto any shift that management wanted them to do, so that could have been a split shift or any sort of shift," Mr White said.

"In fact, one manager in one of the areas had been hinting that that's what he wanted to do.
A parliamentary inquiry into Lyme disease is being urged to "put a stake in the ground" before its work is disrupted by the federal election.

The committee's hearing at Parliament House on Wednesday could be the final chance for people suffering Lyme disease to plead for help.

Lyme disease sufferers in Australia are struggling to convince medical experts the disease exists in this country.

The driving force behind the inquiry, independent Senator John Madigan, is now calling for an interim report to be written as soon as possible.

He is likely to lose his seat under the recent changes made to voting.
Two former detectives charged with murder were together in jail when one allegedly came up with a plan that would get them out.

Glen McNamara and Roger Rogerson had been charged with the shooting death of university student Jamie Gao, 20, and taking the the 2.78 kilograms of the drug ice he had brought to a meeting.

Mr McNamara has told a court his co-accused, Mr Rogerson proposed to concoct a story that involved self defence.

"[Rogerson] said, 'I reckon it should be that Jamie Gao attacked you and you defended yourself,'" McNamara told a jury during his NSW Supreme Court murder trial on Tuesday.
The driver of an ADFA bus which crashed and rolled near Goulburn last year, putting 12 people in hospital, has been charged.

At about 10am on November 21, a bus carrying 57 passengers rolled on Sandy Point Road, Windellama, about 50km south-east of Goulburn.

The bus was carrying 57 passengers. Credit:Goulburn Post

The bus, carrying mostly cadets and midshipmen from ADFA, were returning to the college after a training exercise.

Three passengers were seriously injured. Two passengers were airlifted to Canberra Hospital, another was airlifted to Liverpool Hospital, and nine passengers were taken by road to Goulburn Base Hospital.
The consumer watchdog is set to zone in on petrol prices in the far north Queensland city of Cairns.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says Cairns' petrol prices are among the highest in Queensland.

The consumer watchdog is set to zone in on petrol prices in the far north Queensland city of Cairns. Credit:Glenn Hunt

The average unleaded petrol price was 146.4 cents per litre (cpl) in 2014-15, which was 12.3 cpl higher than prices in major cities including Sydney and Brisbane, ACCC chairman Rod Sims said on Tuesday.

"Understanding why petrol prices in Cairns are so high will help us identify the steps that could be taken to increase transparency and promote competition in the Cairns' fuel market," Mr Sims said.
That video alone may have been reason enough to light up.

But Johnny Depp's attempt at stress relief while the Southport Magistrates Court heard the Pistol and Boo case against his wife Amber Heard has sparked an issue in itself, continuing the grand tradition of Queensland's tough smoking laws catching international celebrities out.

In 2006, Peter Beattie personally paid a $150 fine UK entertainer Robbie Williams received for lighting up during his Brisbane concert.

A decade later and Depp has been caught - albeit in "good faith".
Police are calling for help from the public to find a 13-year-old girl who went missing from the Gold Coast on Monday evening.

The young girl was last seen at a residence in Robina about 9.40pm.

Police and family are concerned for her welfare. Credit:Queensland Police Service

She is described as Pacific Islander in appearance, about 155cm tall with long, dark hair.

Her family and police hold concerns for her welfare as she has an intellectual disability.
Queensland doctors have a poor understanding of their legal obligations when it comes to end of life care, a study has found.

Futility and the law: Knowledge, Practice and attitudes of Doctors in End of Life Care was published in the QUT Law Review in a bid to explore Queensland doctors' understanding of the law relating to futile treatment, defined as treatment that brings no benefit to a dying patient.

More than three quarters of Queensland doctors are unaware of their legal obligations in relation to futile treatment. Credit:Jessica Shapiro

The study noted that supplying futile treatment had no benefit to the patient, could cause harm, could prevent a 'good death' and could cause distress to the family.

QUT's Faculty of Law professor and co-author Lindy Willmott said laws relating to the withholding or withdrawal of futile treatment are complex in Queensland and differ with regards to whether a patient has the capacity for decision making or not.
We finish with a whimper.

It's been a tough morning. No one seems to be happy to be here - and we still have the whole sitting to go.

The federal election should be fun.

Theme of the day - federal government bad.

MVP - Kate Jones. Her defence of Safe Schools came from an actual real place. It probably should have happened months ago. Victoria took a strong stance, where Queensland has been more wishy washy on it but still better late than never.

Coming up - the LNP is attempting (for the third time) to increase the number of electorates in Queensland. Will the cross bench holding the power now make a difference this time round?

We have the LNP motion and a couple of debates.

First up is making strangulation a crime in its own right under the Criminal Code, following the recommendations from the 'Not Now, Not Ever' report into domestic and family violence.

Then both casino bills - paving the way for Queen's Wharf - will be debated.

That should make for a fairly calm afternoon session.
Uber in Queensland is on the chopping block, with the Katters set to learn if their bid to have the service banned through severe penalties for drivers will succeed.

The Katters put through a private member's bill which aims to have Uber drivers lose points each time they are caught driving for the service, with three fines equating to a loss of licence.

It has received wide spread support from the taxi industry, which has responded by promoting Katter's Australian Party on their vehicles.

But a parliamentary review committee could not agree to let the legislation pass and instead called for increased vigilance on using the current regulations which police ride sharing services such as Uber.
More than 28,000 businesses compete in Australia's $8 billion commercial cleaning industry, IBISWorld data shows. Steamatic, which has an annual turnover of $40 million and employs 300 staff, is among a small group specialising in meth lab clean ups. A typical restoration job involves thorough cleaning, proper disposal of hazardous substances and hygiene testing. Properties used to cook meth for lengthy periods may take several rounds of cleaning to pass strict hygiene examinations. A typical restoration job for Steamatic involves cleaning, proper disposal of hazardous substances and hygiene testing. Employees undergo training to prepare them for any distressing scenes or risky situations. "With the crime scenes and meth labs we put them through psychological training for a start," Silveira says.

"We also put them through accredited chemicals and dangerous substance courses and then we run our own what to do in this event type training." Recognising a gap in the market for training, Jenny Boymal started meth lab clean up courses and conferences in 2010. Every year, the managing director of cleaning company Jena Dyco, trains up to 100 people in how to properly restore properties used as clandestine meth labs. The costs are business costs due to loss of income of not being able to receive their fees from the rental property while the property is not able to be lived in and getting the necessary decontamination. Stacey Holt, Real Estate Excellence. "We realised no one knew anything about it," she says. "Our aim was to educate different groups  from local government to police."

Real estate agents Real estate agents are often the first to discover suburban meth labs. Stacey Holt, director at Real Estate Excellence, runs awareness programs to help agents identify the dangers. "The main issue for agencies is staff safety," she says. "Many drug users are unpredictable and can be volatile. I know of a property manager who only last week was assaulted by an ice-using tenant. Thankfully she is OK physically, but emotionally is traumatised." Avoiding physical danger is the top priority, but Holt says agents also need to know how to spot drug labs to minimise financial losses.

"The costs are business costs due to loss of income of not being able to receive their fees from the rental property while the property is not able to be lived in and getting the necessary decontamination," she says. The ice epidemic costs an estimated $8 billion each year in crime, productivity losses and health-care expenses, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Further data from the AIHW shows there has been a surge in ice usage among those who take methamphetamine  up from 12.4 per cent to 25 per cent between 2010 and 2013. Devastating effects Greg Doney, co-founder of private rehabilitation centre Noosa Confidential, witnesses the devastating effects of ice all too often. "We see clients from all walks of life who have become addicted to ice and certainly some people you wouldn't expect," he says.
"In 2007 a government was elected that undertook to build a modern broadband network delivering cable all the way to more than 90 per cent of the nation's premises," Internet Australia CEO Laurie Patton observed, making the call for a bipartisan NBN rethink. "A subsequent government adopted a different strategy, using existing copper phone lines, in the expectation that this would deliver the network to more homes sooner and at less expense upfront."

According to Internet Australia, there is currently a rising level of debate about the NBN, partly due to the impending election, which follows ongoing claims of slowed deployments, installation problems and switchover issues.

This comes with the availability of new, lower cost, optical fibre used in FTTdp trials and survey results that show 80 per cent of Internet Australia members are dissatisfied with the current mixed-technology method (MTM).

Lobby group Internet Australia is calling for a rethink and urging the government and the opposition to "put politics aside and agree on a bipartisan NBN strategy".

"Putting aside the relative merits of each strategy, and the success or otherwise of their respective implementations, time has provided the opportunity for a reassessment of how we build the most appropriate broadband network fit for the 21st Century. New technology has provided a viable alternative to the copper-based fibre to the node (FTTN) model."

A recent hearing of the Senate NBN Select Committee was shown so-called "skinny fibre" that NBN is now using. This technology was not available when the decision was made to adopt FTTN, which underpins the MTM.

As predicted by qualified observers, the overall costs of construction have come down over time as NBN has refined its operating practices and achieved economies of scale, irrespective of the technology chosen. "This will likely be the case for the lifetime of this project," predicts Internet Australia.

"At the same time as we've seen the technology change, internet speeds delivered to consumers in other countries have been steadily rising and causing Australia to fall behind quite dramatically", Mr Patton noted. "We have slipped to 60th on global rankings from 30th just a few years ago, according to the widely-quoted 'State of the Internet' report from content delivery network Akamai. This slide relative to our peers will continue even as the NBN is being built so long as we rely on an ageing copper network".

Internet Australia says it is keen to see FTTN abandoned in favour of "fibre to the driveway" (technically known as fibre to the distribution point, or FTTdp). This would see fibre cabling run all the way to a point at or near the boundary to homes and commercial buildings.
A young autistic man who felt manipulated into taking part in an armed robbery after initially thinking he was being asked to mow lawns has been spared jail.

Lucas Ashley Dosser, 19, thought he was being asked to help cut grass when a housemate offered a "cash in hand" job to help pay his rent, the County Court heard on Tuesday.

Lucas Ashley Dosser was spared jail after being recruited to take part in an armed robbery. Credit:Scott Barbour

But then Arthur Outsikas explained what the job really involved - holding up a cigarette store in Ferntree Gully - and told Dosser he had to help, as Outsikas would go after anyone who told the police.

When the pair drove to the store, on October 15 last year, Outsikas gave Dosser tape, a small axe and gloves and told him the robbery was an "easy job and no one would be hurt", judge Wendy Wilmoth said.
Australia's largest port operator has threatened to lock out its entire workforce nationwide for the first time since the infamous 1998 waterfront dispute and just months before a federal election.

Hundreds of wharf workers at Patrick Stevedores terminals have gone on strike in recent weeks, with a potentially damaging 48-hour staff walkout imminent at the country's busiest container port in Melbourne.

Security guards at Port Botany Patrick terminal 1998 Credit:Dean Sewell

Escalating a year-long battle over pay and conditions, the strike is expected to land a heavy blow to the company's operations at East Swanson Dock between 7am on Thursday and 7am on Saturday.

Patrick has announced it will put a proposed workplace agreement directly to a vote of employees, but warns it could move to lock out the heavily unionised 850-person workforce if the ballot does not succeed.
A man is in hospital with serious burns to his chest after an explosion rocked the Albion Hotel in South Melbourne.

It is believed the man was working on a gas pipe or tank at a worksite connected with the back of the hotel when the explosion occurred about 12.30pm on Tuesday.

He was taken by ambulance to The Alfred hospital in a serious condition.

Police and WorkSafe investigators were at the scene on Tuesday afternoon.
Police need more time to gather evidence over the alleged stabbing murder of a woman on a suburban Melbourne street, a court has heard.

Eva Whitecross, 53, is charged with murdering Rachel Tyquin, whose body was found on a Sunbury nature strip on the weekend.

Personal trainer Rachel Tyquin was allegedly murdered by her neighbour. Credit:Facebook

The 44-year-old had been fatally stabbed in the neck, police have said.

Ms Whitecross did not apply for bail and was remanded in custody when she appeared briefly in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court on Tuesday.
Police are appealing for information from the public to find an intruder who broke into a southern suburbs home more than a month ago and assaulted the resident when confronted.

Senior Detective Constable Shelly Burgess said the offender, believed to be between 28 to 32-years-old, broke into a property on Chapman Road in Bentley around 11.30pm on Sunday, March 13.

The victim, 22-year-old Ashley, was house sitting his elderly grandmother's house at the time and was woken by the sound of someone jumping the back fence.

"I've seen someone walk through the back door and started going through stuff around the house," he said.
60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown, producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and soundman David Ballment remain detained in Beirut prisons over the failed child recovery on April 7. 60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown escorted from court in Beirut on Monday. Credit:Getty Images Jailed with the four are Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner, whose children were the target of the snatch, and child recovery agent Adam Whittington and his companion Cyprus-based tattoo artist Craig Michael. Fairfax understands that if Nine declines to pay for the travel to Lebanon, rival media organisations are considering stumping up the funds. Sally Faulkner with her estranged husband Ali Elamine and their daughter Lahala at birth.

Exactly who has expressed the concerns and wants to go is not clear, but it was alleged that an angry meeting took place between Nine executives and relatives last week. During the meeting it was reported one distressed relative said: "Since when is Channel Nine in the business of child stealing? Is that what we do now?" 'I don't care about the money': Ali Elamine. Credit:Getty Images Nine is reported to have denied those allegations. However at least two relatives, not happy about the progress Nine has been making in Lebanon, contacted Chapman.

Sally Faulkner with her children Lahala and Noah. Credit:Facebook Going against Nine's advice could be awkward for some of the relatives as two of the partners of the detained crew work for Nine or have businesses contracted to Nine. Ms Brown's husband John McAvoy is a former 60 Minutes producer and a former Executive Producer of A Current Affair. He has since left the network and established a production company which produces content for Nine and other channels. The pair have two sons, aged seven and five. Mr Ballment's partner, Laura Battistel has been reported as being a long-term editor at ACA.

A Nine spokeswoman would not confirm or deny whether relatives were asking to travel to Lebanon or who might have made the inquiries from the four families. She would only say that: "We are in regular contact each and every day with the families of our team currently in detention and they are also totally aware of the legal and diplomatic advice we are all receiving on the matter before a judge in Lebanon." "They (the families) have had written communication with those in detention on how they are coping and feeling which has been valuable for the well-being of those here in Australia." The spokeswoman lashed out at Chapman saying the partners of the crew were concerned at his statements. "His accusations and self-promotion have exacerbated the circumstances the crew are in and we reject these claims he is making absolutely," she said.

She said Nine had faith that the Lebanese justice system would deal with the matter appropriately and that the crew were being "well looked after" and treated with "compassion". She referred Fairfax to a statement attributed to the partners of the four crew that was released over the weekend. The statement canvassed the suffering of the families back in Australia, and also pointed out that "very few of the facts are clear at this stage".



Nine's head of news and current affairs Darren Wick is on the ground in Lebanon. Chapman, who has worked for both Channel Seven and Nine as a private investigator especially for their current affairs programs, has been highly critical of Nine's handling of the incident. He has confirmed he was approached initially by Ms Faulkner to do the recovery, but claimed Nine baulked at his price and went instead with one of his rivals, former Australian soldier Adam Whittington.
Beirut: In the two days leading up to the botched abduction involving 60 Minutes presenter Tara Brown, a suspicious car was spotted tracking the school walking route the children of Ali Elamine and Sally Faulkner took through Beirut, Fairfax Media has learned.

So tight-knit is the Shiite community in southern Beirut where Mr Elamine lives that his phone was bombarded with calls in the minutes after the child abduction took place on a busy shopping strip in the heart of the district of Hadath.

Intriguingly, none of the calls were from his mother, whom Mr Elamine says suffered three internal bleeds in her head after being manhandled during the abduction. The calls were from his associates, who phoned him sooner than his own mother could to tell him that his children had been plucked from her care and smuggled away into a car.
"I do not want anybody controlling my mouth. I say what I say and I've said it and if it does not sit well with you, that's your problem." Mr Duterte claimed he was so angry at the inmates who killed Ms Hamill and other hostages, including a three year-old boy, he took his Uzi submachine gun and fired at them, emptying the magazine. Philippines presidential frontrunner Rodrigo Duterte. Credit:AP "I was the first to firethat was recorded history," he said. Mr Duterte, a long-time crime-fighting mayor of the city, said he saw Ms Hamill's body after he ordered security forces to storm the jail, killing 16 hostage-takers.

Mayor Rodrigo Duterte of Davao City in the southern Philippines talks to supporters prior to addressing the crowd on his proclamation as the presidential candidate of the PDP-Laban political party in November last year. Credit:AP "I looked at her face  son of a bitch  what a waste. What came to mind was, they raped her, they lined up," he said. "I was angry because she was raped, that's one thing  but she was so beautiful, the mayor should have been first. What a waste." Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, right, is officially declared the presidential candidate of the PDP-Laban political party by its president, senator Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel, in November last year. Credit:AP Mr Duterte, who has pledged to shoot criminals, hang them using fishing line or drown them in Manila Bay if elected at elections on May 9, is leading opinion polls on a wave of discontent about violence and lawlessness in the nation.

"It's going to be bloody," he said of his putative presidency. After a barrage of criticism over three days, Mr Duterte on Tuesday issued a statement saying: "I apologise to the Filipino people for my recent remarks in a rally". "There was no intention of disrespecting our women and those who have been the victims of this horrible crime," he said. "Sometimes, my mouth can get the better of me." The remarks about Ms Hamill prompted widespread condemnation in the majority-Catholic nation of 100 million, including from the Philippine government, rival candidates and four Catholic bishops, who asked voters to judge if Mr Duterte is fit for office.

Robin Haines Merill, another Australian missionary who was in Manila in 1989, said Ms Hamill was assaulted and murdered while ministering in the jail. "Don't vote for people who speak vile things against women. We are all made in the image of God," she said. But Mr Duterte's remarks also stirred some of his huge body of supporters to his defence. "Duterte is a brute, but he has done his job well," one Facebook user posted, an apparent reference to Davao, where his ruthless approach to crime is credited with turning a murder capital into one of the safest cities in the country. "I'd rather choose a bad joke than a bad government," posted another supporter.

University of the Philippines political science professor Aries Arugay said the remarks are serious and show that Mr Duterte "is not a perfect candidate", but said he doubts the controversy will damage his campaign. Professor Arugay said many of Mr Duterte's supporters are "true believers" who will not be swayed. "If you take a look at a strength of support for Duterte you could see that he really has a constituency," he said. The comments by Ms Gorely, a career diplomat who was sworn in as Australia's ambassador in January, clearly angered Mr Duterte, who if elected has pledged to wipe out crime within six months. The Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra issued a similar statement.

"We note there has been widespread condemnation of the comments in the Philippines, including from President Benigno Aquino," the department's statement said. Analysts say Mr Duterte's surprise popularity is similar to Donald Trump's in the United States. He once told criminals they had two choices about how they left Davao: vertically or horizontally. "When I say leave Davao, you leave Davao. If you do not do that, you are dead," he said during a recent heated political debate. "If you do not know how to kill people and you're afraid to die, that's the problem, you cannot be president."
Beirut: An unprecedented diplomatic effort to end Syria's civil war has suffered a blow as the main opposition body said it would halt its participation in recently restarted peace talks in Geneva.

The umbrella High Negotiations Committee informed the UN envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, of its decision to withdraw from the negotiations, which he is mediating. The opposition delegation would stay in the Swiss city, its member said, but only for "informal" discussions.

A Syrian man walks through a devastated part of the town of Palmyra in central Homs province earlier this month. Credit:AP

The move is a setback after months of intensified diplomacy - particularly between the US and Russia - to get the warring Syrian parties to negotiate in earnest to halt a war that has killed 250,000 people, displaced millions and empowered extremist groups.
A US teenager accused of livestreaming the alleged rape of her 17-year-old friend has pleaded not guilty to multiple charges stemming from the incident in February.

Eighteen-year-old Marina Lonina  a student at New Albany High School, outside Columbus, Ohio  was attempting to record the assault as evidence, the woman's attorney, Sam Shamansky said during a court appearance on Friday.

"She's in the habit of filming everything with this app called Periscope  does, in fact, film this encounter," Mr Shamansky said. "She does everything possible to contain the situation even to the point of asking while it's being filmed to these Periscope followers, 'What should I do now? What should I do now?'"

A judge set Lonina's bond at $US125,000 ($159,000).
2. Donald Trump and, to a lesser extent, Ted Cruz, are the exact wrong candidates to take advantage of Clinton's weaknesses.

Take two minutes to flip through the new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll and you are left with two very clear takeaways:

That is the reality that faces Republicans as they look down the road at the general election. A totally winnable race after eight years out of the White House that may be unwinnable - or close to it - because of a primary process that has put forward two of their least appealing general election candidates.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at a Women for Hillary event in New York on Monday. Credit:AP

Start with this: Just one in three (32 per cent) of general election voters see Clinton in a positive light while 56 per cent regard her negatively. That's Clinton's worst score since NBC-WSJ started asking about Clinton's image in early 2001.

And, the NBC-WSJ numbers are far from an outlier. Her numbers - particularly when it comes to the number of people who view her as "honest" and "trustworthy" have long been in net negative territory - and the ongoing questions surrounding her private email server while serving as secretary of state doesn't help matters. The simple fact is that Clinton is totally known by the general electorate and somewhere between mildly and strongly disliked by a majority of them.

That's a problem. In a "normal" election year it's a really BIG problem.
PHILIPSBURG:---- On Monday April 18th 2016, a letter was sent to the President of Parliament from Independent Member of Parliament (MP) Leona Marlin Romeo concerning Visa requirements for persons from the former Netherlands Antilles entering the USA.

Several concerned citizens contacted the Member of Parliament about the issue and it was therefore brought to the attention of the responsible minister on April 14th 2016.

On the US Homeland Security website https://www.dhs.gov/visa-waiver-program-requirements it states that, The citizens of the new countries of Curacao, Bonaire, St Eustatius, Saba and St Maarten (the former Netherlands Antilles) are not eligible to travel to the United States under the Visa Waiver Program if they are applying for admission with passports from these countries.

Whether this is an error or an oversight by the Homeland Security, clarification is still needed as citizens from Sint Maarten frequent American territory regularly, notwithstanding that the information came from the official website of the US Government, the MP pointed out.

The Member of Parliament also took note of articles written on possible requirements for US citizens wanting to visit Europe. If approved, this would indeed affect Sint Maarten. The Member of Parliament is requesting that the Minister of General Affairs answer the following questions:

1. Since the issue visa issue was brought to the Ministers attention in a meeting on April 4th 2016 has contact been made with the US Embassy in Curacao to bring clarity to the matter on visas for the former Netherlands Antilles citizens?

2. Will the Minister inform the general public of the findings?

3. Should the European Union decide to place a visa requirement on US citizens what are the repercussions for Sint Maarten as a tourist dependent destination.

4. Will the Minister responsible for Foreign Affairs address these issues with the Kingdom?

The Member of Parliament Leona Marlin- Romeo noted that matters concerning foreign affairs fall under the responsibility of the Minister of General Affairs and therefore the Member of Parliament finds it pertinent that clarity be given to the public on matters that directly affect them.
PHILIPSBURG:--- On behalf of the Coalition members of Parliament, a request has been sent to Parliament for an urgent meeting on the topic of the financial status of the country. In their request, the members Pantophlet, F. Richardson and Wescot-Williams submitted the following agenda point:

Short, medium and long term financial outlook of St. Maarten.

"There is much public discussion regarding the international rating of St. Maarten, public and private investments, the fiscal policies and intentions, etc.", the MPs said in their request.

The members of parliament also requested that the Minister of Finance be present at this meeting.

The individual members could have asked the Minister the questions they have and as members of the Coalition of Eight, they have queried these issues.

"However, we believe that as members of Parliament it is also our duty to allow the people of St. Maarten to hear for themselves what members of government have to say regarding matters that affect our people. Furthermore, our people are entitled to hear their representatives debate these issues in a mature and informed way."

We also want the minister to be clear about some ideas he has floated with respect to taxes and changes to our tax system. The members of the coalitions wish to make it clear that there are many proposals for changes to our tax system, and while there seems to be a general consensus that we must change our tax system or at least some taxes which are currently part of this system, this exercise is surely not one this government and its coalition partners intend to rush into without due consideration and consultation.
Slyce Inc. Announces Issuance of Common Shares in Satisfaction of Final Employment Obligations to Former CEO

TORONTO, ONTARIO  (Marketwired)  04/18/16  Visual search and image recognition company Slyce Inc. (TSX VENTURE: SLC) (Slyce or the Corporation) today announced that in connection with the resignation of Mark Elfenbein as previously announced on April 4, 2016, the Corporation intends to issue common shares in the capital of the Corporation (Common Shares) to Mr. Elfenbein on April 18, 2016 in satisfaction of an employment obligation, subject to approval by the TSX Venture Exchange.

The number of common shares to be issued to Mr. Elfenbein on April 18, 2016 is based upon the 5-day volume-weighted average price prior to April 18, 2016 with a value equal to US$137,500.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy the securities in the United States, in any province or territory of Canada or in any other jurisdiction. The securities offered have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the U.S. Securities Act) or any U.S. state securities laws and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable U.S. state securities laws. There shall be no sale of the securities in any jurisdiction in which an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy or sale would be unlawful.

About .

Slyce, based in Toronto, ON, delivers sophisticated visual search technologies and is currently focused on enabling a powerful sales channel for major retailers and their customers. Consumers, wherever they are, can conveniently engage with retailers by taking pictures of desired products using their mobile devices, thereby initiating the visual search service with near-instant product recognition capability. The Company delivers its technology both as a white-label visual search platform and as a suite of consumer mobile apps. Slyces technology is used by large retail brands such as Neiman Marcus, Urban Outfitters, JCPenney and Home Depot.

Slyces business model features multiple revenue streams arising from its visual search platform, consumer apps and corresponding data services. The revenue streams include fees for software licensing, integration, purchase transactions, program promotions and data analytics.

Slyce is also listed on the Frankfurt exchange trading under (FRANKFURT: 06O1).

For image download and further company information, please click for the .

READER ADVISORY

Neither the TSX-V nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX-V) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Statements in this press release contain forward-looking information, including the issuance of Common Shares on April 18, 2016 and the approval from the TSX Venture Exchange. The words will, anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, intent, may, project, should, and similar expressions are intended to be among the statements that identify forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements are founded on the basis of expectations and assumptions made by Slyce.

Readers are cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of such information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of Slyce.

Slyce does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements except as expressly required by applicable securities laws.

None of the information contained on, or connected to, Slyces website is incorporated by reference herein.

Contacts:

Slyce

Ted Mann, President

Slyce

Roy Roman

(647) 464-6200
Language-Learning Platform Lingohop Delivers Only Solution Utilizing Authentic Dialogue Designed for Your Goals so You Can Converse From Day 1

CINCINNATI, OH  (Marketwired)  04/19/16  Language-learning tools may have evolved from books to apps, but the science and theory behind them are mostly stuck in the mid-20th century. Until now. Launching today, the language-learning platform Lingohop brings the most advanced linguistic theories into practice with its new app for international travelers of all ages and backgrounds. By combining contextual learning with relevant dialogue and personalization for your specific goals  business travel, study abroad, everyday tourist travel  Lingohop empowers you to begin conversing in your new language from day one.

Utilizing breakthrough linguistic research  language for a specific purpose and discourse structure  the new Lingohop app places conversation at the heart of the platform, unlike other language programs which employ tedious translation and repetition methods that have been proven inefficient. Lingohop allows users to receive a completely personalized experience constructed around the relevant situations they will experience abroad, from office conversations to booking train tickets to ordering food to finding lodging.

Our mission is to provide a powerful solution that empowers international travelers and language lovers alike to learn a foreign language in a fun, immersive environment  regardless of time or place. Almost all traditional study options are unreasonably regimented and leave the users unable to actually speak the language, said co-founder and CEO Michael Ashley about the origins of the startup. Our idea is to combine the latest linguistic research with authentic, everyday dialogue, so what users learn can quickly be applied outside of Lingohop. Each lesson is framed for the users specific needs and goals. We have completely ditched the one-size-fits-all mentality of other language-learning platforms.

The Lingohop solution groups each of its 4-5 minute lessons around relevant categories based on specific situations such as restaurants (ordering food, paying the bill), getting around (asking for directions, using the metro), navigating the airport and visiting tourist attractions. By the end of the first lesson, a user can confidently begin conversing in the target language.

By placing the users specific needs within an immersive, conversational platform, Lingohop sets itself apart from the competitors whose approach was first introduced 70 years ago. Weve designed a solution that recognizes the cognitive processes and abilities behind language learning to allow users to be prepared for any situation abroad. The needs of a traveling businessperson are completely different from those of a group of students. Weve designed Lingohop to not only recognize those differences, but to make them the foundation of your experience, said co-founder and Chief Research Officer Ramon Padilla-Reyes.

Lingohop courses will be optimized for the onthego user. Initial offerings include Spanish, French, and English (for Spanish speakers). Pre-order through the Kickstarter campaign for $25 with a goal of $25,000 through May 29, 2016. Availability is November or earlier.

Erica Zeidenberg

925-631-0553
Alphinat Announces a Profit for Quarter Ended February 29, 2016

MONTREAL, QUEBEC  (Marketwired)  04/19/16  Alphinat Inc. (TSX VENTURE: NPA) announces a profit for the quarter ended February 29, 2016.

For the 3-month period ended February 29, 2016, the Company recorded total revenue of $473,381 compared to $355,818 (restated) for the same period in 2015. For the 3-month period ended February 29, 2016, operating expenses amounted to $350,909 compared to $425,398 in 2015. The earnings for the period ended February 29, 2016 amounted to $46,970 or $0.001 per outstanding common share compared to net loss (restated) of $(133,330) or $(0.003) per outstanding common share for the 3-month period ended February 28, 2015.

Alphinats financial statements and Managements Discussion and Analysis for the quarter ending February 29, 2016 can be found on SEDAR, at .

About Alphinat

Alphinat is the creator of SmartGuide, a next generation application development and deployment productivity toolset providing agility to leverage existing IT assets and lower costs for a one-stop delivery tool of Web and mobile enterprise applications from any back-end system.

Alphinat has been appointed by technology company peers to associate member at the Smart Cities Council ().

Alphinat technology is also used in the healthcare, banking, insurance, telecommunications and other sectors, in modernising, automating and rendering cost-effective a number of business processes at a fraction of the cost associated with conventional customized solutions. For more details about Alphinat or its software suite, please visit .

Forward-looking statements

Certain statements in this document, including those which express managements expectations or estimations with regard to the Companys future performance, constitute forward-looking statements as understood by applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are, of necessity, based on a certain number of estimates and hypotheses; while management considers these to be accurate at the time they are expressed, they are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and risks on the commercial, economic and competitive levels. We advise readers that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other known and unknown factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied in these forward-looking statements. A number of factors could cause significant differences between actual results and those described in forward-looking statements. These include, but are not limited to, the Companys capacity to increase acceptance of its products on the market, and to penetrate new markets; the potential existence of defects or undetected problems in the Companys products; the Companys ability to manage its growth; the Companys ability to compete with others; potential commitments; maintaining the Companys intellectual property rights and defending against litigation putting those rights in question; the Companys reliance on the knowledge of its key personnel; and the Companys access to sufficient capital to finance its future needs. This is a partial and non-exhaustive list of factors that could bear on any of our forward-looking statements. Investors are advised to not rely unduly on the forward-looking statements. This advisory applies to all forward-looking statements, whether expressed orally or in writing, attributed to Alphinat or to any individual expressing them in the name of the Company. The Company is under no obligation to publicly update these forward-looking statements, whether to reflect new information, future events, or other circumstances. Risks and uncertainties that bear on the Company are described in greater detail in the Companys Annual Report.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contacts:

Alphinat Inc.

Mr. Philippe Lecoq

Chief Executive Officer

(514) 398-9799 ext 222
LUXE Travel Flies High With Intranet CMS Platform From Primero Systems

SAN DIEGO, CA  (Marketwired)  04/19/16  In the highly competitive travel industry, travel companies are continuously seeking a competitive advantage. Looking to streamline operations and improve agent productivity, turned to and its customizable Intranet platform, , to create a centralized portal that allowed employees and third-party vendors to securely access and manage airline, hotel, car rental reservations and other important information.

A member of the respected Signature Travel Network, LUXE Travel offers a complete range of travel services, from corporate programs to worldwide leisure packages to meetings, groups and events. With eight offices located in California, Florida, Texas and Illinois  plus an expansive network of home-based agents throughout the U.S.  LUXE Travel employs more than 100 highly experienced travel agents with an average of 25 years in the industry.

LUXE Travel was in need of a user-friendly content management solution that would enable their agents to easily access, search and update information in an efficient manner, according to any number of predetermined specifications. In evaluating solutions, LUXE Travel selected Primero to deliver a robust content management system equipped with roles and permissions features to enable the viewing and editing of content by various predefined groups. With a long history in providing content management systems to the travel industry, Primero designed a solution that would improve LUXE Travels employee productivity and ultimately the companys bottom line.

In addition to the product itself, Primero offers a full suite of professional services, including design, project management, implementation, training and customer service that allows Webtreepro to be fully customized and configurable. During implementation, Primero worked in step with LUXE Travel to ensure employees were comfortable with the Intranet and could make a smooth transition to the new solution.

One of our most successful internal projects has been the redesign and launch of our company Intranet, said Sandee Leatherby, GM, LUXE Travel. Primero provided us with the platform and tools needed for our internal project team to supply content and edit their areas of responsibility easily and quickly. We ended up with a better product than we even anticipated. Our employees and internal content editors love the site, and it has become a core piece of our internal operations.

With Webtreepro, LUXE Travel not only improved employee productivity but also enhanced communication between agents and third-party vendors. While LUXE Travel primarily uses Webtreepro as a repository to manage information, in the future the company plans to take advantage of other features, such as Webtreepros one-to-many capabilities in which marketing can publish unique mobile digital assets or advertising to many sites simultaneously.

As a software provider, its important that the solution we provide is flexible to meet the needs of our customers, said Rick Diviesti, senior vice president sales and marketing, Primero. LUXE Travel is a perfect example of how a company Intranet can be implemented with great success now and have the flexibility and scalability for the future.

To learn more about Primero Systems, please visit .

An outgrowth of Primeros custom software business, Webtreepro is an elegantly simple and powerful Intranet platform that includes a powerful content management solution for marketers seeking to maximize brand presence throughout a network of websites. Designed to publish content across one or thousands of sites instantly, Webtreepro addresses the needs of franchises, associations or any multi-location business. It is a scalable, highly flexible, mobile-friendly platform for Web content management and is distinguished by its ability to deliver relevant content based upon a nearly unlimited set of criteria. As an Intranet/Extranet solution, Webtreepro provides a central site for content that can be accessed according to any number of specifications.

Primero Systems Inc. brings people, processes, content and ideas together to produce better business experiences. For more than 20 years, Primero has been helping businesses achieve their goals and their potential through the infinite capabilities of software. From their award-winning Webtreepro content management system to their mission-critical, enterprise-grade custom software, Primero solutions improve efficiency, accuracy and contribute to the bottom line. Headquartered in San Diego, California, Primero serves a broad array of markets from healthcare to franchise, travel and countless others. Follow Primero on and , like them on or connect with them on .

Stephanie Olsen

Lages & Associates

(949) 453-8080
Allocadia Welcomes Jocelyn Brown as VP Customer Success

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA  (Marketwired)  04/19/16  Editors Note: There is a photo associated with this press release.

today announced it has appointed Jocelyn Brown to the role of Vice President, Customer Success.

Jocelyn brings more than 17 years experience helping enterprise customers maximize the business value of their technologies and investments. Most recently she spent 9 years at Eloqua where she proved her aptitude and talent for building and managing high-performing customer success teams and guiding customers along their journey to success.

At Allocadia, weve been customer-obsessed from day one when we conceptualized a product that would solve a pain point that we already knew marketers had, said Kristine Steuart, CEO and co-founder, Allocadia. We help marketers run marketing smarter and this dedication flows through every team at Allocadia. With Jocelyn joining the company, were better equipped than ever to support customers through their continued growth and guide them as they progress through the stages of excellence in Marketing Performance Management.

As an integral part of the marketing organization at Allocadia, the customer experience team complements the revenue generation team in ensuring customers stay engaged throughout the entire customer journey, and enjoy a consistent and thoughtfully guided experience.

Allocadia is a mature product with a strong customer base. Having worked with marketers in the same market for years, Im looking forward to continuing many existing customer relationships, said Jocelyn Brown, VP Customer Success, Allocadia. But more than anything, Im excited to enable our customers to run their marketing more efficiently. Allocadia truly changes the way marketers strategically run marketing, and Im excited to help our customers make some really big bets that will drive their companies forward.

and Allocadias dedication to customer experience.

About Allocadia

At Allocadia, we help marketers run marketing so they can do more marketing, by providing them with planning, budgeting and performance software to optimize marketing investments and drive real business results. The recognized leader in Marketing Performance Management (MPM), Allocadia serves more than 150 customers and thousands of users, and manages billions of marketing dollars. Our customers include Juniper Networks, VMware, Arcteryx, and Charles Schwab, and we partner with market leaders including IBM, Oracle, Workfront and Marketo. For more information visit , follow us or stop by our headquarters in Vancouver, Canada.

To view the photo associated with this press release, please visit the following link:

Contacts:

Allocadia

Kasia Finkelstein

604.305.0362
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2016 Sonoma County Animal Rescue Organizations

Below is a list of Sonoma County Animal Rescue organizations of which we are aware - but it could be incomplete! So if you want us to list another - please send it along to vesta@sonic.net. These organizations are all run by people who sincerely care about animals - of all kinds. Follow the links to learn more - volunteer, find a pet for yourself, etc.

BrightHaven

P.O. Box 1743, Sebastopol, CA 95473-1743

707-578-4800

www.brighthaven.org

A Holistic Animal Sanctuary Hospice Rescue and Education Center

California Animal Rescue

P.O. Box 2179, Healdsburg, CA 95448

707-293-4470

www.facebook.com/CaliforniaAnimalRescue

California Animal Rescue is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rescue group. We are dedicated to the rescue of homeless animals from county shelters, and out on the streets.

Countryside Rescue

3410 Guerneville Road, Santa Rosa

707-542-5582

www.countrysiderescue.com

Our mission is to rescue abandoned, homeless animals and place them into permanent, stable, loving forever homes.

Rescue Hours: Sat & Sun 11-4; Weds - Friday by appointment

Dogma Animal Rescue

PO 151 Monte Rio 95462

dogmaanimalrescue@gmail.com

www.dogmaanimalrescue.org

We especially focus on pregnant dogs that are in danger of abuse, neglect, or euthanasia. Dogma Animal Rescue places dogs into temporary foster homes where they are socialized, spayed/neutered, vaccinated, and treated for any medical or behavioral conditions limiting their adoptability. We actively search for permanent homes for foster dogs by producing and hosting mobile adoption events and other special events that provide exposure to potential adopters.

Faire (Friends of the Animals in the Redwood Empire)

P.O. Box 2001, Rohnert Park, CA 94927

707-228-0256

webmaster@faireonline.org

www.faireonline.org

Provide programs to help pets and pet owners. FAIRE currently offers a reduced cost pet spay/neuter program to the residents of Cotati, Penngrove, Rohnert Park, and the Sebastopol area.

Fawn Rescue

P.O Box 1622, Sonoma CA 95476

707-931-4550

www.fawnrescue.org

Deer and Fawn rehab. FAQ regarding what to do when you find a fawn is on the web site. All Wildlife Fawn Rescue's fawns come to us due to human interference. Therefore, we feel a deep obligation to restore them to health and return them to their natural habitat where they belong.

Feline Rescue of Northern California Inc.

P.O. Box 215, Cloverdale, CA 95425

707-494-5544

Email: rescuefelines@gmail.com

Adoption/spay/neuter strays and semi-ferals. We are a shelter without walls and animal control with a heart, operating with a tiny budget and no paid staff or administrative overhead.

Forgotten Felines

1814 Empire Industrial Court Unit F, Santa Rosa 95403

707-576-7999

www.forgottenfelines.com

Spay/neuter adoption and cat colony care. We are expanding our spay/neuter efforts to include tame and stray cats for low-income individuals; these cats will have the opportunity to go through our clinics for a nominal fee.

Healdsburg Animal Center

14242 Bacchus Landing Way, Healdsburg Ca 95448

707-280-9632

Adoption Hours: Monday - Saturday, 9 AM  5 PM

humanesocietysoco.org

Currently we have 1 dog and up to 4 cats available for adoption. Go to website for more information.

Native Songbird Care & Conservation

8050 Elphick Road, Sebastopol, CA 95472 707-484-6502

Email: volunteer@nativesongbirdcare.org

www.nativesongbirdcare.org

Our facility is set up exclusively to support the needs of injured, ill and orphaned songbirds.

No Boundaries Animal Rescue

noboundariesanimalrescue@yahoo.com

No Boundaries Animal Rescue, Inc. is a small; all volunteer 501(c)(3) non-profit rescue organization run by Barbara Ziskin Gray and Meagan Nelson. Our main area of service is Sonoma and Marin Counties, although we often help animals outside our immediate area. Our mission is simple - to rescue, rehabilitate and re-home homeless animals that have been abandoned, forgotten or are running out of time at local shelters.

Pacific Wildlife Project

PO Box 7673, Laguna Niguel, CA 92607

949-831-1178

Pelicans, sea birds

All volunteer - treats more than 2,000 animals a year. Our goal is to give back some of what we take from the environment and to respect the natural balance between all living things.

www.pacificwildlife.org

Petaluma Animal Services

840 Hopper Street, Petaluma CA 94952

Tues - Fri 1 ~ 6pm; Sat 12 ~ 6pm

707-778-7387

www.petalumaanimalshelter.org

Cat/dog/rabbit - even a mouse! Rescue and adoption; numerous programs for schools on animal education. Foster programs. Handles animal care and control issues for Petaluma, Cloverdale Calistoga and Healdsburg. Open admission, no kill shelter.

Pets Lifeline

19686 8th Street East, Sonoma 954746

707-996-4577
Letters: My teachers mean a lot to me. Why are they paid so little?
Marquette springs upset, Slinger survives in football playoffs

The nine Milwaukee-area top-seeded football teams all won Friday night. The results across Level 1 set up some interesting games for the week ahead.
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Photos don't do the northern lights justice.

To fully appreciate the glory and grandeur of this celestial display, which is also known as the aurora borealis , you have to settle beneath the ever-changing lights and watch them curve and curl, slither and flicker. Here's how to see the northern lights.

Amazing auroras: Stunning northern lights photos

The first thing to appreciate is the glowing sky lights can be spectacular  or they can be a fleeting event. Robert Steenburgh, the acting lead of the Space Weather Forecast Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has never seen the northern lights despite having studied them and related phenomena for more than 20 years. That's not for lack of trying, as he once went on an aurora-focused trip to Yukon territory in Canada.

"It wasn't really very visible to the naked eye, although people with adequate cameras could see it," Steenburgh told Space.com, referring to cameras that can take long exposures to see faint things in the sky. "There was no geomagnetic storm going on [on the sun] at the time, so it was pretty low-key."

But for those who are lucky enough to catch a strong display, the shimmering lights can appear like curtains, like pulses of jets or like other light-show phenomena  all available above your head, for free.

For best results, you can blaze your own trail somewhere along the "auroral zone" that encircles Earth's northern reaches. But you need to know when and where to go. For example, the summer may be a good time for a vacation, but a better time to see auroras is actually between winter and spring.

Read on to find out when and where to see the northern lights, and what powers this dazzling display.

When to go

The northern lights are more formally known as the aurora borealis, and are caused by interactions between the solar wind , which is the stream of charged particles emanating from the sun , and the Earth's magnetic field .

If you're planning an aurora-viewing trip, try not to schedule it in the middle of summer. You need darkness to see the northern lights, and places in the auroral zone have precious little of it during the summer months.

The good news is that the sun's 11-year cycle of activity has just picked up and we will see more sun spots, flares and coronal mass ejections going forward than in the previous years. Coronal mass ejections are the most powerful source of charged particles emitted from the corona, the sun's upper atmosphere. When the sun shoots these geysers of plasma in the direction of Earth, wonderful auroras can be expected.

"There will continue to be aurora viewing opportunities in 2022," Steenburgh said. "The solar cycle is indeed ramping up and as solar activity increases, so do the chances for Earth-directed blobs of plasma, the coronal mass ejections, which drive the geomagnetic storms and aurora."

But it's not just the solar weather forecast you need to monitor to have the aurora experience of a lifetime. You also need clear, dark skies, emphasizes Charles Deehr, a professor emeritus and aurora forecaster at the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute, whose guide to aurora viewing (opens in new tab) has lots of great information. Winter and springtime are generally less cloudy than autumn in and around the northern auroral zone, so planning a trip between December and April makes sense. Ideally, time your trip to coincide with the new moon , and make sure to get away from city lights when it's time to look up, he added.

"Dress warmly, plan to watch the sky between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. local time, although an active period can occur anytime during the dark hours," Deehr wrote in the guide. "Active periods are typically about 30 minutes long and occur every two hours, if the activity is high. The aurora is a sporadic phenomenon, occurring randomly for short periods or perhaps not at all."

You can get an idea of how active the northern lights are likely to be in your area by keeping tabs on a short-term aurora forecast, such as the one provided by the Geophysical Institute (opens in new tab). One predicting only the next half hour is available on NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Website (opens in new tab). Also, a citizen science website called Aurorasaurus (opens in new tab) gives on-the-ground instant information from aurora enthusiasts wanting to alert the community to new sky shows.

And you can have an aurora experience without even leaving your house if you so choose. The Canadian Space Agency offers a l ive feed of the skies above Yellowknife (opens in new tab), in Canada's Northwest Territories, during the fall, winter and spring when the sun goes below the horizon.

Where to go in Europe

So where should you go? If you live in Europe, the easiest thing to do is head to the far northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland. Many local people speak English in those regions and there are lots of tours available.

Iceland is also a good choice, although cloudy skies may make it difficult to catch auroras on any one particular night. If possible, leave yourself extra time to accommodate inclement weather.

Russia does have a decent swath of the auroral zone in the northern regions, but such areas are relatively hard to get to and lack the tourism infrastructure most travelers want. You might get lucky and spot auroras while being in a more well-trodden area such as Moscow or St. Petersburg, given those cities' relatively high latitudes. But make sure to stay as far away from light pollution as feasible.

Here is a list of European provider of aurora-watching trips

Visit Tromso's 2022 northern lights info (opens in new tab)

Visit Troms sells aurora-watching trips around the city of Troms in Norway. The largest urban area in Northern Norway and the world's third largest city above the Arctic Circle, Troms lies just within the Northern Lights Oval, the region above Earth's geomagnetic North Pole where aurora displays are most likely to occur.

Visit Troms sells 'aurora chases,' dynamic night hunts for aurora displays in the aurora season between September and April, and slower-paced 'experiences' such as dog-sled and boat trips and overnight stays at aurora hotspots. Troms can be accessed by plane from Norway's capital Oslo; adventure seekers are sometimes rewarded by an aurora display during their incoming flight.

Lights over Lapland's 2022 Abisko aurora tours (opens in new tab)

Lights over Lapland sells a range of aurora-watching packages that take skywatchers to Sweden's northernmost region, Lapland. Lapland straddles the border between Sweden and Finland, with both sides offering excellent aurora viewing opportunities in winter months and the midnight sun experience in summer. The Finnish part of Lapland is famously the home of Santa Claus.

Lights over Lapland operates on the Swedish side of the border with most of its tours aiming for Abisko National Park (opens in new tab) (not far from the Esrange Space Center where the European Space Agency runs rocket tests and operates satellite-tracking antennas).

"Abisko has developed a reputation for being the No. 1 aurora-watching destination on the planet, due to the fact that it is located in a very special microclimate with less precipitation than any other location on Earth that is located within the aurora zone," photographer Chad Blakley, who is a co-founder of Lights over Lapland, told Space.com via email.

In 2018, the company released footage from a spectacular all-sky aurora during a geomagnetic storm that occurred on March 14 of that year.

Guide to Iceland (opens in new tab)

Guide to Iceland sells a range of aurora-watching packages on the North Atlantic island, including bus tours, boat tours and hunting trips. Situated just below the Arctic Circle, Iceland provides a decent chance of catching the Northern Lights during winter months. If that doesn't work out, you can instead relax in the island's powerful natural hot springs and outdoor pools.

Viatour northern lights night tour from Reykjavik (opens in new tab)

Viatour operates evening aurora-watching trips from Iceland's capital Reykjavik. The bus tour takes tourists across the island to its most popular aurora spots. The operator says that those who don't get to see the northern lights during their trip can join again at no additional cost.

Where to go in North America

The northern lights dance above a radar facility at top of Murphy Dome mountain on April 12, 2012. (Image credit: Luke Kilpatrick)

There are also plenty of options for good aurora viewing in North America. While far-eastern Canada tends to be cloudy, the shore of the Hudson Bay, the northern Canadian towns of Yellowknife or Whitehorse, or the west coast of Alaska are usually good bets. (The city of Fairbanks itself can be a great choice for seeing northern lights without needing to go too far in the wilderness.)

Alaska Tours (opens in new tab) offers a range of packages from one-day trips to week-long tours that take visitors past the Arctic Circle to the heart of Alaska's wilderness, where the chance of catching the glowing auroras is among the best in the world.

Aurora Borealis Yukon (opens in new tab) runs one-day to five-day aurora-watching trips in the Yukon territory in northwestern Canada. A direct neighbor of Alaska, Yukon offers pretty much the same aurora-observing conditions during the winter months.

Northern Lights Tours (opens in new tab) provides similar services in the Northwestern Territory, focusing on areas around the territory's capital, Yellowknife.

In the east, Churchill Arctic Adventures (opens in new tab) offers trips to Churchill, Manitoba, on the western shores of Hudson Bay. The company operates dedicated 'aurora domes,' heated cabins and other outposts in the boreal forest that allow visitors to observe the magnificent lights in perfect comfort. If the aurora doesn't show up, then perhaps some of the polar bears residing in this region may.

Can you see aurora from your home?

The "standard" aurora, observable in the Arctic regions, is generated by the solar wind, which flows toward Earth constantly. But geomagnetic storms, caused by coronal mass ejections (CME), can ramp up the northern lights considerably and make them visible over much wider areas. In late October 2021, for example, a powerful CME allowed skywatchers at much more southern latitudes, including Nevada, South Dakota, upper Michigan and New Hampshire, to enjoy spectacular aurora displays . In the U.K., photographers snapped stunning images in Scotland and northern England.

As the solar cycle intensifies, such occurrences might become more common (or rather, slightly less rare).

"There is a relationship between the strength of a geomagnetic storm and the extent of the aurora toward the equator," Steenburgh said. "Stronger storms produce stronger auroras, and drive them further toward the equator."

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center has some advice for catching auroras outside the regular aurora zones on its web site, in addition, it provides information about the relationship between the strength of the geomagnetic storm and how far toward the equator it might spread, Steenburgh noted.

Yet even the most powerful geomagnetic storm will fail to deliver the experience unless other factors cooperate  a cloud-free sky, not too much moonlight, nighttime hours and absence of light pollution. (City-dwellers have to get out into the countryside for an aurora experience no matter how strong the geomagnetic storm supercharging the sky might be.)

What drives auroras

This composite image shows STEVE alongside the Milky Way over Childs Lake, Manitoba, Canada. (Image credit: Krista Trinder/NASA)

The northern lights result when charged particles streaming from the sun collide with molecules high up in Earth's atmosphere , exciting these molecules and causing them to glow.

"The key is you get energetic particles  things like electrons and protons  injected into Earth's atmosphere along magnetic field lines, that are part of Earth's magnetic field," Steenburgh said. "They impact our atmosphere, and those interactions determine the colors."

The different colors of the northern lights come from different molecules: Oxygen emits yellow, green and red light; while nitrogen is responsible for blue and purplish-red hues.

Earth's magnetic-field lines channel these solar particles toward the planet's north and south magnetic poles, which explains why auroras  the aurora borealis and its southern counterpart, the aurora australis  are high-latitude phenomena.

Indeed, the aurora borealis is visible most nights, weather permitting, within a band several hundred miles wide that's centered at about 66 degrees north  about the same latitude as the Arctic Circle.

The southern auroral ring lies above Antarctica and is very difficult for skywatchers, or anyone else, to get to. That's why this article focuses on the northern lights  for reasons of practicality, not antipodean antipathy. But during the recent powerful geomagnetic storm that delivered northern lights to the U.K, and parts of the U.Sskywatchers in Australia and New Zealand got treated to a very rare southern lights display.

There is also a mysterious, aurora-like brightening phenomenon in Earth's atmosphere called " Steve" that isn't attributable to aurora, although scientists aren't sure of its cause. Finnish researchers have also been tracking dune-like shimmering lights that appear to be linked to gravity waves and oxygen atoms.

Extraterrestrial auroras

Earth isn't unique in hosting auroras.

The huge gas giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) each produce their own auroras, due to their magnetic fields and thick atmospheres. However, the colors of the gases change because of differences in each planet's atmospheres and magnetospheres.

Venus and Mars also have auroras, of a sort. The Venus Express mission found that solar wind interactions with the planet's ionosphere form a "magnetotail" that generates an aurora when the accelerated particles hit the atmosphere. Mars has local auroras over magnetic fields in its crust, as well as a larger, northern hemisphere aurora generated from solar energetic particles hitting the atmosphere.

Editor's note: If you capture an amazing photo of the northern lights and would like to share it with Space.com and our news partners for a story or gallery, send images to spacephotos@space.com.

This story, originally posted in April 2016, has been updated for 2021.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
SALT LAKE CITY  When black holes collide, do they hide in the dark or emit flashes of light?

That question is up the air after an Earth-based detector spotted gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time, created by two black holes merging together. Previous work suggested that for black holes of this size  about 30 times the mass of the sun  there would be no bright flash, no hazy glow, no light to speak of.

But in September 2015, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope saw a faint burst of high-energy light less than 1 second after the black holes had collided, and in the same region of the sky. Researchers with the Fermi collaboration discussed the finding yesterday (April 18) at the American Physical Society April Meeting. The chances are good that the gamma-ray light did indeed come from the black-hole merger, but more evidence is needed to nail that conclusion down, scientists said. [Ride the Gravitational Waves of a Black Hole Merger (Video)]

"This is a tantalizing discovery with a low chance of being a false alarm, but before we can start rewriting the textbooks, we'll need to see more bursts associated with gravitational waves from black hole mergers," study lead author Valerie Connaughton, of the National Space, Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said in a statement.

A historic discovery

Moving masses generate waves of gravitational radiation that stretch and squeeze space-time. See how gravitational waves work in this Space.com infographic (Image credit: By Karl Tate, Infographics Artist)

In February, a collaboration of scientists working at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) made history when they announced the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves, which were first predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago. Up until that detection, scientists had obtained only indirect evidence of these ripples' existence.

The LIGO team determined the waves it had detected came from two black holes, 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, merging together. Researchers generally didn't expect to see any light coming from this event.

Black holes themselves don't radiate light, but the fast-moving material spiraling into black holes often does. (In fact, monster black holes at the centers of galaxies can cause matter around them to radiate so much light that they become some of the brightest objects in the universe.) However, merging black holes circle each other for millions of years, so scientists had expected that any gas or other nearby light-generating debris would be cleared away long before the duo actually collided.

Despite this prediction, researchers combed through the data archives of various telescopes (including Fermi) to hunt for any signs of light emissions from the region to which LIGO traced the two black holes. [Images: Black Holes of the Universe]

"We weren't actually expecting to see anything," said Fermi team member Adam Goldstein, a gamma-ray astrophysicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Goldstein spoke at a press conference here today at the American Physical Society's April meeting.

But the team did see something: a very faint signal that came from the same region of sky where LIGO made its detection, and that occurred only 0.4 seconds later.

Judy Racusin, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said during today's press conference that the Fermi team is "cautiously saying [the gamma-ray signal] is potentially associated with the black hole merger" detected by LIGO.

The researchers are extremely cautious in their assessment, for many reasons. First, the signal wasn't ideal. It came from a region of sky that was underneath the Fermi satellite, so the spacecraft's detectors were essentially seeing the signal in their peripheral vision. The signal is very weak, and Goldstein said it's unclear how much of that is because the detectors weren't looking directly at it, or if it was a weak signal to begin with.

But the LIGO detection makes this otherwise unremarkable gamma-ray burst of great interest to the scientific community, Goldstein and others said.

Based on everything the Fermi team knows about the gamma-ray sky, Goldstein said there is about a "one in 500 chance" that the gamma-ray signal is not associated with the gravitational wave signal, and just happened to appear in the same region of sky at about the same time.

LIGO was able to determine the location of the black hole collision only to within an area spanning 600 square degrees of the sky. (Your clenched fist held at arm's length covers about 10 degrees.) Fermi's detection could reduce that region by two-thirds, but that still leaves a wide range of places where either signal could have come from, reseachers said.

Questions remain

Goldstein and Racusin also discussed a paper released by the INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) collaboration, which showed that the instrument did not detect a signal similar to the one picked up by Fermi. The two scientists said the instrument on INTEGRAL that would have potentially spotted the gamma-ray burst was not built primarily as a gamma-ray burst detector. So it is not possible to directly compare what Fermi sees with what INTEGRAL sees, the scientists said.

Based on what Fermi knows about the signal it detected, Goldstein said, it is "actually not very clear if [INTEGRAL] would have seen it or not."

The new paper about Fermi's gamma-ray detection has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal and is currently undergoing peer review.

"It is important to note we would not have reported this event just by itself," Goldstein said. "The reason we are publishing is because our data is public, obviously, and the most appropriate people to do this analysis [are in] the instrument team. And so there was particular pressure on us putting out a paper for this."

In the days and weeks following the September LIGO announcement, a handful of papers appeared on the open-access science paper website arXiv.org, throwing out possible physical scenarios in which two midsize colliding black holes could produce a gamma-ray burst. One hypothesis, by astrophysicist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Massachusetts, suggested that the two black holes had formed in the belly of a single star.

"There [are] a lot of interesting ideas out there, and it was amazing how quickly those ideas were thrown together," Racusin said. "The main idea is that you need to get some sort of matter outside those black holes, some sort of gas to accelerate.  I think it's great how much theoretical speculation this has caused, and we'll see, maybe, in the future [if any of them pan out] with better observations."

"The question that everyone has is, 'Are our observations and LIGO's observations coming from the same object?'" Goldstein said. "And we cannot say definitely right now."

But Goldstein and Racusin said that LIGO is expected to detect more merging black holes in the coming years, as many as 100 such mergers per year at the instrument's peak design sensitivity, Goldstein said.

"So we'll have plenty of opportunities in the next few years to see if other binary black holes have coincident gamma-ray signals," he said.

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield.Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
The Kickstarter-funded documentary "For the Love of Spock" premiered at New York City's Tribeca Film Festival April 16. The film explores Spock actor Leonard Nimoy's legacy and his relationship with his son, Adam (right).

NEW YORK  As the credits rolled in "For the Love of Spock"  a new documentary honoring Leonard Nimoy and the beloved "Star Trek" character he portrayed  a long, long list of names scrolled by to the tune of David Bowie's "Starman," sung by Nimoy's grandson.

But unlike in the credits of most films, the names were not just those of actors and production crew, but of the nearly 10,000 backers who funded the movie through Kickstarter. Indeed, the documentary was always made for the character's many fans, said Nimoy's son, Adam Nimoy. After a screening last night (April 18), Adam Nimoy took the stage to describe the documentary's evolution and the tricky balance between exploring Leonard Nimoy as an actor and as a father, and talked about the world's fascination with his father's most famous character, the logical alien Mr. Spock.

"That's really what the film is about," Adam Nimoy told the audience here at the Tribeca Film Festival screening. "It's my gift to the fans to celebrate and to process the loss of my dad." [Vulcan Salute: Astronauts Honor Leonard Nimoy from Space (Photos)]

For The Love Of Spock Teaser (opens in new tab) from 455 Films (opens in new tab) on Vimeo (opens in new tab).

Adam Nimoy was joined on the stage by actor Zachary Quinto, who portrayed Spock in the recent reboot series of the "Star Trek" films (starting in 2009). Quinto worked closely with Nimoy to develop his character for the film. Also on stage were the documentary's producer, David Zappone and Scott Mantz, a film critic and "Trek" fan. Gordon Cox, an editor at Variety, moderated the panel.

The film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 16, follows Leonard Nimoy's path to "Star Trek" and the depiction of his character chronologically. Throughout the film, the narrative is diverted to talk about the pop-culture impact of Spock at different moments in time and the personal history of Nimoy's interactions with his family and son. The exposition was interspersed with clips from the show  whether to illustrate an aspect of Nimoy's acting or the show's makeup, or just to give a humorous reaction to the events on screen.

Leonard Nimoy's son Adam visited him on set during the filming of the original "Star Trek." (Image credit: For the Love of Spock)

The documentary started out as a collaboration between Leonard Nimoy and Adam Nimoy, and was initially intended only as an exploration of Spock's character. But after the elder Nimoy's death in 2015, the film's focus changed.

"I was overwhelmed by the response of emotion from fans all over the world  not only about the loss of this pop-culture icon but about the loss of Leonard Nimoy the artist, the humanitarian. And it was clear to me, at that point, that I had to expand the film to include his life and his legacy," Adam Nimoy said. And with that, he said, came a need to impart his own perspective as Nimoy's son. By describing their relationship in the documentary, he was able to illustrate the impact playing Spock had on his father's life.

Leonard Nimoy forms the Vulcan Salute at 2011 Phoenix Comicon. (Image credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

Mantz, a "Star Trek" fan since age 6, was particularly moved by the deep connection he saw between Nimoy and the character he portrayed. "It was not just a job for him," Mantz said. "This was something that was very, very personal  that was why he created the Vulcan salute." (In the movie, Nimoy discusses inventing the gesture on set, based on a gesture he saw at religious services in his childhood.)

The panelists discussed the inspiration Spock offers to outsiders and the logical-minded among "Star Trek" fans. For example, one scene in the movie explores the character's impact on engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They panelists also mused about whether individuals are fundamentally Spock or Kirk fans, and how that can change with the shifting priorities of adolescence.

Leonard Nimoy (left, Spock on "Star Trek") and daughter Julie in Malibu, California. (Image credit: Nimoy Family)

They also probed the differences between Nimoy's Spock, who had a very tight hold on his emotions in the original series, and the new Spock portrayed by Quinto. (Quinto, by the way, sheepishly admitted to being mostly a "Star Wars" fan in his youth  but is a burgeoning "Trek" fan now.)

"I think that the humanity in my version of [Spock] is a little bit more bubbling to the surface," Quinto said. "That was a choice, and we really talked about that  this idea of the duality of the character internally. Leonard and I would talk about that."

That balance changes over the course of the films, including in the upcoming "Star Trek Beyond," Quinto said. Nonetheless, the fundamental appeal of the character is the same for both Spock incarnations. "I think that part of what makes Spock so compelling is his humanity," Quinto said, "even though it's sublimated in certain ways."

Actor Leonard Nimoy (center) posed with his fellow 'Star Trek' cast members in front of NASA's space shuttle Enterprise during the spacecraft prototype's unveiling in 1976. Nimoy died at age 83 on Feb. 27, 2015. (Image credit: NASA)

Adam Nimoy said he was a fan right from the show's start, even though he avoided "Trek" conventions for a long time. To him, the mass adoration of his father's character was moving, but it was also disconcerting. The documentary explores the fans' love both as a destabilizing force in Adam Nimoy's life and as a powerful statement of the character's universality. Indeed, besides Spock and Nimoy himself, the fans are the third main character in the film.

Zappone, the film's producer, created several films with William Shatner as well (who played Capt. Kirk in "Star Trek"). In one film, about "Star Trek" conventions, "Shatner comes to the conclusion that it's religion," Zappone said. "It's really a modern mythology." And for fans engrossed in all aspects of that mythology's creation, "For the Love of Spock" offers a rare opportunity to dive deep.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
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SPIEGEL: PKK leader Cemil Bayik has announced a military offensive in the spring. That doesn't sound like a readiness to negotiate.

Demirtas: The HDP supports those PKK voices calling for a cease-fire.

SPIEGEL: The EU classifies the PKK as a terrorist organization. Is that justified?

Demirtas: We, the HDP, view the PKK as an armed popular movement. That doesn't mean that we condone violence.

SPIEGEL: The PKK's attacks are focusing increasingly on civilians. Why are you so reluctant to call these acts terrorism?

Demirtas: I have condemned the attacks in Ankara as exactly that. But the Kurdish Freedom Falcons (TAK) claimed responsibility for the attacks. The government has thus far been unable to establish a connection between PKK and TAK.
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All who love a charming fairy tale about good triumphing over evil probably know about Cinderella, a sweet young woman (who is treated miserably by her stepmother and two stepsisters) who falls in love with a kind prince.

Gioacchino Rossinis rags-to-riches opera, La Cenerentola (Cinderella) was first performed about 200 years ago and in the ensuing years has become the inspiration for countless books, movies and Disney productions.

Its a classical ballet (created for adult audiences) that also has huge appeal for children because of its familiar subject matter, explains Brett Raphael, artistic director of the Connecticut Ballet, with offices in Hartford and Stamford. Opulent costumes and sets also make this engaging for children, he added.

The professional company is presenting Raphaels full-length re-working of Cinderella on Saturday and Sunday, April 23-24. The production will be repeated Saturday, May 7, at The Bushnell, Hartford. All performances will be at 2 p.m.

People are saying to me: Why arent there any evening performances? Why only in the afternoon? 

The answer, he says, is rather simple: We are committed to the future of this art form and committed to carrying out our mission to expand and develop audiences for the future. Children today are the audiences of tomorrow.

More Information Palace Theatre, 61 Atlantic St., Stamford. Saturday and Sunday, April 23-24, 2 p.m. $60, $50, $40, plus theater surcharges. 203-325-4466, www.palacestamford.org. The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. Saturday, May 7, 2 p.m. $63, $48. 860-987-5900, www.bushnell.org, connecticutballet.org. See More Collapse

Raphael believes Cinderella is destined to become a family staple in the United States, where ballet companies routinely present Tchaikovskys Nutcracker every December as an afternoon family outing because of its Christmas theme.

Raphael said the first Connecticut Ballet production of Cinderella took place 10 years ago, and was revived to great success in 2013. Raphael announced that Brazilian ballerina Ana Paulo Oioli will make her company debut in the lead role; Georgian dancer Otar Khelashvili will be her prince.

Oioli is a principal dancer with Coastal City Ballet in Vancouver, British Columbia; she previously danced with Bayerisches Staatsballett and Magdeburg Ballet in Germany. Khelashvili was previously a principal dancer with the National Ballet of Georgia in Tbilisi; he made his Connecticut Ballet debut last season as Oberon in A Midsummer Nights Dream.

Raphael said the cast includes 22 professional dancers, eight character dancers and more than 30 children in small parts.

The artistic director said the companys tradition of offering free meet-and-greet events in the Palace lobby with the cast following a performance is extremely popular with children.

For kids, its a big deal to meet the dancers, get autographs or just talk to them. And the dancers love it too and find it inspirational that they are considered role models.

Connecticut Ballet is celebrating its 34th anniversary season. Founded by Raphael in 1981, the company regularly performs throughout the state. In addition to its professional dance company, it also operates the Connecticut Ballets Center for Dance Education, providing educational programs including school assemblies, outreach classes at juvenile detention facilities, schools and community centers, professional development workshops for classroom teachers and a trainee program for serious ballet students, Raphael said.

pasboros@ctpost.com; Twitter: @PhyllisASBoros
GREENWICH  After months of speculation, Greenwich Democrat John Blankley officially threw his hat into the ring Monday to challenge Republican state Sen. L. Scott Frantzs re-election bid in November.

Frantz is running for his fifth term representing the 36th District, which includes Greenwich and portions of Stamford and New Canaan.

Connecticut faces unprecedented budget challenges and our district is being asked yet again to bear new burdens, Blankley, a member of the Greenwich Board of Estimate and Taxation, said Monday. Quite simply the 36th needs new representation in Hartford. I will focus on solutions drawn from my years of handling large budgets for major corporations and my job creation record as a small business owner and entrepreneur.

Blankley is not new to local politics. He ran unsuccessfully against Greenwich First Selectman Peter Tesei in 2011 and against state Rep. Livvy Floren, R-149th, in 2012. He is a former executive at BP North America and currently is CEO of Flagship Networks, Inc., a computer consulting and systems integration company he founded.

Democrats did not challenge Frantz, who runs a private equity firm in Greenwich, in his last re-election bid in 2014.

Voters deserve a choice, Blankley said. We didnt put up a candidate the past elections and its something we should be doing. Its an obligation and a duty.

Frantz, who was first elected in 2008, said he felt Blankley would help energize the race and bring needed debate to the issues facing the state.

I welcome John to the race with open arms, Frantz said. John is a gentleman. He is someone who is very issue oriented and I know he will keep the debate on the high road as everyone should in this game of politics.

Blankley faces a formidable task. It has been almost 90 years since a Democrat has held this seat, and Republicans continue to enjoy a sizable voter advantage in the district.

Theres no point in not being realistic, Blankley said. Scott is a nice man. He and I get on very well and he is a popular incumbent. But his ideas and what hes been able to accomplish havent helped this district. We need big ideas and someone who can work from the inside.

Those thoughts were echoed by Greenwich Democratic Town Committee Chairman Jeff Ramer, a colleague of Blankleys on the BET. He said Greenwich voters will see the value in choosing a Democrat who will be able to work within the majority in the General Assembly. He cited the recent proposed cut to the state educational cost sharing formula that would erase $3 million in funding for Greenwich public schools.

We need someone who is going to be able to work with the majority in the legislature to address that, not someone who is going to whine about the politics of it, Ramer said. The people here do not want to hear that. They want results.

The lack of Greenwich representation in the Democratic majority in Hartford has been a theme pushed by local Democrats for years. Blankley said the party has to keep hammering on.

What have Republican representatives gotten us in all that time? Not very much, Blankley said. We are a major contributor to the states coffers. Look at the latest budget. Its not new taxes but its cuts that will directly impact Greenwich like the educational cost sharing. We need a Democrat in Hartford who can push for this town.

Frantz said he and the rest of Greenwichs Republican delegation have built valuable bridges to the Executive Branch in Hartford. He said the challenges posed by the fiscal quagmire the state is in are enormous and simply having a Democrat in the room with the majority would not in itself change things.

Thats absolutely not true, Frantz said. There is an antagonistic feeling in Hartford toward towns like Greenwich and New Canaan and other parts of Fairfield County. No one would be able to overcome that.

Greenwich Republican Town Committee Chairman Stephen Walko said voters would stick with Frantz, especially given the states economic problems.

Scott Frantz is an exceptional legislator, Walko said. He understands the issues plaguing Connecticut and brings a sense of financial acumen to the table.

Among his proposals, Blankley said he would support working with state employee unions in a grand bargain that would involve moving new hires into defined contribution retirement plans, transfers from the state pension fund for existing employees and a bond offering to address the states $26 million unfunded pension liability.

Blankley also promised to push for money to cover the cost of building a new New Lebanon School, a project that is eligible for state reimbursement.

All you ever heard from the other side is that the state is going to hell in a handbasket and that were on the verge of becoming like Detroit or like Greece, Blankley said. But thats ridiculous rhetoric. Our state has the sixth largest economy in the United States. We have the largest per capita income in the country. We have a lot going on for us and were going to talk about that during this campaign.

Blankley is not the official candidate yet. There is time for others to join the race if they wish. Democrats will hold a nominating convention May 23 at Greenwich Town Hall.

Blankleys decision to run was hailed by fellow Democrats.

Selectman Drew Marzullo, who was Blankleys running mate during his 2011 run for first selectman, said he was glad to see him on the ballot again.

John is an accomplished business man well regarded both nationally and locally, Marzullo said. He remains committed not only in Greenwich but well beyond and lends his voice and past experiences assisting wherever he can to whoever he can. Both John and Scott are two respected, well-liked people who I have no doubt will provide voters this election cycle not only choice but beneficial issue-oriented debate.

U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4th, a Cos Cob resident, added, Having been active in Greenwich town government for the past several years, John knows the issues that concern the taxpayers in the 36th Senate District. He will bring a much needed change to the way we are represented in Hartford.

As he launches his campaign, Blankley is focusing on making use of the states Citizens Election Program. In order to qualify for the state financing grant, Blankley will have to find 300 individual donations of no greater than $100 each and totaling at least $15,000.

In the meantime, Democrats are looking to find candidates to run against Greenwichs three Republican state representatives: Floren, Fred Camillo and Michael Bocchino. Ramer said the party has had discussions with potential candidates for those races, but nothing has been set. Greenwich has not sent a Democrat to the state House of Representatives in more than 100 years.

It is not an easy thing to field candidates, Ramer said.

kborsuk@scni.com
More than 60 medical experts, state health directors and advocacy groups have asked federal Medicare officials to remove questions related to pain treatment from hospital patient surveys used to rate hospital quality, saying such questions have had the unintended consequence of encouraging aggressive opioid use in hospitalized patients and upon discharge.

In a letter to Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the group said aggressive management of pain should not be equated with quality health care, as it can result in unhelpful and unsafe treatment, the end point of which is often the inappropriate provision of opioids. The coalition asked CMS survey questions such as During this hospital stay, how often was your pain well controlled? be removed.

The group sent a similar letter to the Joint Commission, which accredits U.S. hospitals, asking it to revise its pain management standards  specifically, guidelines directing doctors to ask patients to assess their pain, as they assess other vital signs.

Mandating routine pain assessments for all patients in all settings is unwarranted and can lead to overtreatment and overuse of opioid analgesics, they wrote.

The letters come as Connecticut and other states grapple with a surge in opioid-related overdoses. Last week, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., joined several other senators to support a bill that would factor out the pain-related questions on patient surveys from hospitals Medicare reimbursement determinations.

Meanwhile, at the state Legislature, the Public Health Committee has proposed a bill to cap initial prescriptions of opioids to seven days for acute pain. The legislation would allow a prescriber to exceed the seven-day limit if a patient needed the medication to treat chronic pain, but the condition triggering the opioid prescription would have to be documented in the medical record, and the practitioner would have to attest there was no other alternative to address the pain.

The letters to Medicare and the Joint Commission were signed by physicians, addiction specialists and health directors from across the country, including the commissioners of the Vermont and Pennsylvania health departments.

The only signatory from Connecticut was Gary Mendell, founder and CEO of the Norwalk- and New York City-based nonprofit Shatterproof, which focuses on addiction.

Mendell said Thursday he believes because hospitals want good CMS survey results, doctors and nurses may be paying too much attention to managing patients pain, when it may not be necessary.

If youre rated in terms of how you handle (patients) pain, then you as a doctor or nurse are probably more likely to ask about pain and offer medication, he said.

Mendell noted in the last 15 years, sales of prescription opioids in the U.S. nearly quadrupled  but there has not been an overall change in the amount of pain Americans report. In 2012, health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for opioid pain medications, enough for every adult in the U.S. to have a bottle of pills.

Prescription opioid overdose deaths have similarly climbed over the last 15 years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 165,000 people died from overdoses related to opioid medications from 1999 to 2014.

Opioid-related deaths have surged in Connecticut. In 2015, more than 60 percent of the states 723 overdose deaths involved opioids, according to statistics from the state Medical Examiners office. An estimated four out of five heroin addicts started on prescription drugs, research has shown.

Last month, the CDC released guidelines recommending, among other things, when opioids are used for acute pain, clinicians should prescribe the lowest effective dose of immediate-release opioids and should prescribe no greater quantity than needed for the expected duration of pain severe enough to require opioids.

This story was reported under a partnership with the Connecticut Health I-Team (www.c-hit.org).
HARTFORD  The budget-setting Appropriations Committee on Monday abruptly killed nine bills after the governors budget office said they would create excessive fiscal impact.

Among the bills was legislation that would have provided Workers Compensation coverage for first responders diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. A similar bill, inspired by police and firefighters who responded to the murder scene at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, failed to pass last year.
WASHINGTON  It is not exactly the Boston Tea Party, but Connecticut lawmakers banded together Monday to introduce a bill that would bring a measure of tax relief to telecommuters, who under current law are taxed twice for work they do at home.

The Multi-State Worker Tax Fairness Act, introduced in the Senate by Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both Democrats, would rework the tax code so telecommuters pay tax to their employers state only for the proportion of days they are physically present in the office.

So a telecommuter who, for instance, spends 40 percent of her time working at home in New Canaan and 60 percent working at her Manhattan employers office, would pay state tax to N.Y. on 60 percent of salary earnings. Under current law, that worker pays both Connecticut and New York state taxes on days worked at home.

Workers I talk to in Connecticut see the need for a simpler, more streamlined tax code, said Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., who along with Reps. Elizabeth Esty, Rosa DeLauro, both D-Conn., and Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, introduced the bill in the House. Tax fairness for telecommuting workers is a good place to start.

Metro-North moves about 97,800 people each weekday on the New Haven line to and from New Yorks Grand Central terminal, a spokeswoman for the railroad said. Regular Connecticut Metro-North commuters who work in New York generally pay New York state income taxes, but not those levied by Connecticut.

In Fairfield County, there are close to 19,000 people who work from home. Not all of those are telecommuters, but the number is at least some indication of how large this population is.

While lower taxes are generally considered a Republican issue, Democrats also have proven willing to get into it, especially when a fairness question arises and it impacts a wide swath of constituents.

Teleworking offers flexible schedules to workers who need to care for family members or who have difficulty traveling, saves energy, and reduces congestion, said Blumenthal. As more and more people are teleworking, this commonsense bill would ensure that they arent penalized for finding a solution that works for them and for their employer.

The bill may go nowhere in the near term because the Republican-controlled Congress is slow-walking most legislation as the countdown to the 2016 election continues. And since the sponsors are all Democrats, Republicans who control the legislative production line may not be in any hurry to jumpstart it.

It just makes no sense that our outdated tax system punishes and overtaxes Connecticut workers who telework from home for companies based in other states, said Murphy. Our bill will make workers lives easier by establishing one, simple standard and avoiding the conflicting patchwork of state tax rules.

dan@hearstdc.com
Its easy for all of us to grasp the urgency of the need to help Ecuador. Its much harder to process that the country will also need years of support from global neighbors.

Ecuador is almost exactly the same distance as a flight to Los Angeles, yet it seems like another world. That world was broken Saturday by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake that slammed Ecuadors northern Pacific Coast and left a death toll estimated at about 500 - and rising - with more than 4,000 people suffering injuries. As one survivor told CNN, We thought it was the end of the world.

Many people here in Connecticut moved quickly to try to close the gap  to make the world smaller.

Less than 48 hours after the quake, the Ecuadorian Civic Committee in Stamford (the Comite Civico Ecuatoriano de Stamford) established a bank account named Todos por Ecuador to collect relief funds. The donations will be forwarded to the Red Cross in Ecuador or to AmeriCares, which is based in Stamford.

The Ecuadorian Civic Center of Greater Danbury mobilized to plan a fundraiser that is to take place from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday, with proceeds earmarked for the International Red Cross.

Fairfield-based Save the Children was assessing need in Ecuador using existing networks across the country, and distributing emergency supplies.

Norwalks large Ecuadorian community was trying to figure out ways to provide aid.

Its always heartening to hear that residents want to find a way to help when they hear about a tragedy involving strangers.

The heart, though, can respond illogically. Even residents with the best intentions must resist instincts to send goods or clothing, as they are unlikely to reach the people who need them. Aside from the transportation challenges, some items may be inappropriate to the weather or to the culture.

Agencies such as AmeriCares and Save the Children are designed to respond to and operate in disaster zones. Cash donations are translated into relief packages. For Ecuador, those packages include pain medicine, bandages and antibiotics.

AmeriCares does not accept products from individual donors, instead relying on pharmaceutical companies and distributors. After emergency health care providers create a list of needs, they are approved by local government officials and forwarded to agencies that can meet the demand.

The AmeriCares and Kids in Crisis response teams are on the ground this week to get supplies to the victims. Help is on the way, but that doesnt mean we should retreat from offering more assistance.

Once the dead are counted and survivors are treated, relief agencies will shift aid to focus on the restoration of health care services. Primary care facilities must be maintained, the areas health centers repaired and rebuilt and mental health programs established for survivors.

As we mark Earth Day this week, this disaster is a reminder of the planets vulnerability. It requires our constant attention to remain protected. In times like this, it also demands our help so it can heal.

For more information on sending aid, visit americares.org and savethechildren.org.
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STAMFORD  Uber cars function as taxi cabs, but continue to follow none of the cab rules.

Thats the beef of cab owners in Stamford and other cities as the tech-savvy, car-for-hire service expands around the world.
G 4S shareholders havent been happy for a long time. Constant disappointments on contract wins, repeated scandals and a mountain of debt at the sprawling giant have put the shares in the sort of chokehold that is occasionally deployed on guests at its young offenders facilities.

Now I hear chairman John Connolly may be facing a Tasering from his shareholders, hoping to shock him into some major action. Connolly joined in 2012 in the thick of the London Olympics security guards fiasco.

He promoted Ashley Almanza to take over from floppy-haired Nick Buckles as chief executive and investors were prepared to give the duo a chance to fix the companys reputational and debt crisis. But theyre running out of patience as shares have fallen from 304p last year to just 189p today.

That plunge must feel familiar to Connolly. His other beat is chairing Amec Foster Wheeler, where shares also tanked last year. In that case, chief executive Samir Brikho paid the price, leaving in January.

Investors arent at the point of demanding he fire Almanza. Yet.

But the pressure is on to do something major to break the shares death spiral. That could be offloading a big part of the business, possibly its cash handling operation, or a total break-up. The small disposals announced so far arent enough, they say.

In his defence, Almanza has been working flat out to rein in the unruly beast of a business he inherited. Perhaps he should have made it clearer at the start what a mess the place was in.

Thats in the past, though. Investors want to see actions that will change the future. Fast.

Stamp duty on property is better politics than economics

The Duke of Westminsters land agents at Grosvenor blame the Brexit referendum for flat demand for Belgravia mansions, but Im not convinced.

Surely the worlds millionaires are more concerned by the massive hike on stamp duty for properties above the 1.5 million mark. That 2014 tax grab constitutes 1.2 million more to the cost of buying, say, Margaret Thatchers old place in the Dukes Chester Square  for sale at 30 million.

So extreme has the new dutys impact been in damping demand for premium properties that its surely raising less tax for the Exchequer than the old system. Research from Savills shows the Office for Budget Responsibility cut its forecasts for property stamp duty income in the financial year just ended by 3.7 billion since the new regime came in. Not all will be because of a fall in luxury property deals, but Id wager much is.

Extra stamp duty on the super-rich is clever politics for a Downing Street accused of being too posh. But its not such good economics.
B rexit holds no fears for Primark owner Associated British Foods, it declared today despite the fact almost half the fashion chains sales are now in Europe.

We wouldnt be greatly affected by Brexit, said chief executive George Weston who, however, declined to give his personal view on the question. Its the nature of the business that Primark is as close to its local markets  here, in Europe and in the US  as we can make it with separate supply chains in each region.

We have relatively little cross-border trading between the UK and the rest of the EU. The same is true for our grocery businesses which depend on high volume, low margin goods delivered to local markets.

ABFs first-half profits topped analysts forecasts with a 4% rise to 466 million despite a 1% fall in Primarks same-store sales thanks to warm weather the run-up to Christmas. Sugar showed the first growth in profits for three years.

The first two Primark stores in the US have gone down very well but Weston admits it has had to learn some lessons. They will only buy mens boxer shorts in black or white and nothing else, he said. Flannel pyjamas dont sell but cotton ones do. And we are selling so many candles that youd almost think they didnt have electricity over there.

ABF shares rose 94p, or 3%, to 3441p.
I n the 25 years Ive known him, George Osborne has always supported deeper integration with the EU. For many of those years, George wanted Britain to join the euro. Nothing wrong with that. Though we obviously disagree, I admire his consistency. But please, lets not pretend that the latest Treasury report is anything other than one-sided propaganda.

Do Government ministers truly believe that leaving the EU would be prohibitively costly? Of course not. If they did theyd hardly have been threatening to walk out over an unbelievably trivial welfare tweak as recently as two months ago.

But in the heat of the campaign they have decided to forget all nuance, all balance, and threaten us with the terrors of the Earth.

The Treasury tract is based on the preposterous idea that, if we left the EUs political structures, wed also leave the common market. But no one in Brussels thinks this would happen. Every non-EU country in Europe is part of the continental free trade area: Macedonia, Monaco, Montenegro, the Isle of Man. You can travel from non-EU Turkey to non-EU Iceland without encountering a single tariff. When the EUs association agreements with Moldova and Ukraine came into effect last year only two geographically European states were left outside the common market: Russia and Belarus.

No two non-EU states have identical deals with Brussels: all reflect their own conditions and needs. So its silly to ask whether Britain would copy, say, Norway or Switzerland or Guernsey. Wed have our own deal, just as all of them do. And wed be in a very strong position to negotiate it. We are a country of 65 million people, compared with Switzerlands eight million, Norways five million and Guernseys 65,000. We represent a vastly more important market for EU exporters.

Its worth noting that all these places thrive while having relations with the EU based on market access rather than political integration. Norway and Switzerland are, indeed, the two wealthiest countries on the planet. Britain has nothing to fear from taking back control of its own laws while continuing to trade with allies around the world, including in Europe.

I can already hear Remain campaigners taking fright. But Switzerland accepts free movement of labour! It pays into the Brussels budget! Its free-trade deal only partly covers services!

Its true that EU nationals are free to work in Switzerland  although without all the entitlements they have in the UK under EU citizenship rules. But the Swiss recently voted to cap their numbers: you can do that as a sovereign country. Swiss payments to the EU are less than 20 per cent of ours per capita  not bad when their exports to the EU are, per capita, more than 400 per cent of ours. And neither Switzerland nor the UK participates fully in a single market in services, because there isnt one.

The financial services sector matters immensely to London. But heres a largely unremarked fact. The EU is becoming proportionately less important as a market. In 2005, according to the Office for National Statistics, other EU countries accounted for 39 per cent of our exports in financial services, pensions and insurance. But by 2014 that figure had fallen to 33 per cent. To put that number in context, the United States alone accounted for 31 per cent of our exports in these sectors.

The long-term growth opportunities, in short, lie further afield. Over the past decade the economies of countries such as China, India and Ethiopia have doubled. But the eurozone, incredibly, is no larger today than it was in 2006.

Yet, in a competitive world, the UK as a whole, and the City in particular, remain shackled by EU regulations. In the case of Londons financial services the regulation is often downright malicious. The Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive hurts UK equity funds. The Solvency II rules hurt UK insurance firms, prompting Prudential to announce that it might move to Asia in consequence. The short-selling ban and the proposed financial transactions tax are squarely aimed at the City.

These are not putative future dangers. They are some of the hard, quantifiable costs that the UK in general and London in particular suffer now as a direct consequence of EU membership.

'The choice that faces us on June 23 is, in one sense, very simple: do we want to make the EUs problems our problems?'

If we stay, things will only get worse. While the rest of the world powers ahead, the EU will remain convulsed for at least another decade in its twin disasters: the euro crisis and the Schengen crisis. Britain, having kept its currency and its passport checks, has other options. The choice that faces us on June 23 is, in one sense, very simple: do we want to make the EUs problems our problems?

Dont imagine that a vote to stay in is a vote to stay put. Eurocrats are responding to the euro and Schengen crises as they respond to everything else: with deeper integration. If we vote to remain we are acquiescing in the economic, political and military amalgamation that is now being openly pursued in Brussels.

Consider the paltry terms offered by the EU to David Cameron in February, and ask yourself one question. If this is how Brussels treats its second largest financial contributor now, before the referendum, how would we be treated after voting to remain?

There are risks involved in remaining and in leaving. But it surely makes sense to take back control of our own democracy, so as to be able to mitigate those risks ourselves. In a necessarily uncertain world it must be safer to run our own affairs than to contract out our government to people and institutions whose interests differ from ours.

There are 193 states in the world; 165 of them are not in the European Union. Are we truly unable to manage our own affairs in the same way that, say, New Zealand does? Have we lost our global vision, our confidence in ourselves? Are we so diminished?

Daniel Hannan is Conservative MEP for South-East England and the author of Why Vote Leave, published by Head of Zeus.
T he good news is that most London parents looking for a primary school place for their child have been lucky: 84 per cent have been given a place at their first choice of school; 97 per cent got one at one of the six schools they asked for. That means three per cent of applicants, or more than 3,500 children, have missed out on places at the schools their parents want. In Kensington and Chelsea and Hammersmith and Fulham, boroughs with popular schools, the proportion of parents getting their first choice was 68 per cent and 72 per cent respectively. .

The problem is in large part one of increasing demand, which has not been matched by an increase in school place supply. London, notwithstanding high population mobility and a plethora of pupils languages, is in fact blessed with more very good or outstanding schools than most other parts of the UK  far more than in the north of England  but it also has the challenge of far greater numbers coming here, with all that this implies for public services. And because migrants, particularly non-EU migrants, tend to have larger families, this means local authorities must plan to provide more school places. Its a real challenge but one London has to rise to.

But when it comes to the contest for places at the best schools, the obvious solution is to increase the supply. The Government is committed to expanding the best schools and encouraging them to adopt struggling schools; it is also doing its best to retain and attract the best teachers as heads: that is crucial to school success. London has fine schools; we just need more of them.

Triumphal arch

The creation of a replica of the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra that was deliberately destroyed by Islamic State forces after they took the city, and its erection in Trafalgar Square, is a powerful gesture. Not only was the arch created by the most ingenious contemporary methods  carved by machines from 3D photographs of the original  it will, after appearing here and in other cities, find a home near the site of the original arch, so visitors can re-imagine its scale and impact. The arch also highlights the wilful efforts of IS to obliterate from the areas under its control any trace of the Roman and Assyrian civilisations that predated Islam, as well as historic Christian sites. This wilful destruction, tantamount to cultural genocide, is insufficiently recognised in international law. The UN Hague convention of 1954 prohibits the destruction of artefacts but that convention badly needs updating.

Meanwhile we can only be grateful for the collections in our national museums, which preserve objects that, in their home countries in the Middle East, would be targeted by IS: the Assyrian winged bulls in the British Museum are a case in point. And temporary exhibitions too usefully remind us that we all have a stake in preserving our common culture: the British Museums Sicily exhibition, the first under its new di rector, Hartwig Fischer, offers an insight into the rich history of the island. Londons museums are centres of civilisation in a world threatened by barbarism.

Saving childrens lives

Little Elliott Livingstone, whose story we followed throughout our Give to GOSH campaign, has left intensive care following his heart transplant  it is wonderful news. That he promptly asked for an ice cream is even better. It is a testament to the remarkable developments in medical care, and the dedication of the staff, that Elliott was able to survive for over a year with a mechanical heart while waiting for a suitable donor organ. We hope there are many ice creams ahead for this brave boy.
T he unveiling of a replica of Palmyras Arch of Triumph in Trafalgar Square months after it was destroyed by Islamic State militants in Syria sends a powerful message, according to the team behind the rebuilding.

Project director Dr Alexy Karenowska said it had been an emotional moment seeing the 20ft tall marble structure, which weighs nearly 11 tons and was built with 3D printing technology, being put into place.

She said: London was the perfect place to put this. It is a neo-classical city, all its major buildings and museums and galleries are in that style. When you see the arch next to the columns of the National Gallery and Nelsons Column itself you cant help but see the clear links between the Middle East and the West and that sends a powerful message.

Perfect place: the copy of Palmyras Arch of Triumph is assembled in Trafalgar Square / Leon Neal/AFP/Getty

The reconstruction, by the Institute of Digital Archaeology, is in place in London until Thursday before moving on to Dubai, New York and finally a site close to where the original was destroyed. Dr Karenowska said more monuments could be restored using the technology and shown in the capital before finding permanent homes.

Professor Dr Maamoun Abdulkarim, director-general of antiquities and museums in Syria, said the arch was a message of peace and that plans to rebuild Palmyra  which was part of the Roman Empire  should be treated as a global mission.

Mayor Boris Johnson said bringing the monument to the capital was a stand against the terror groups violence.

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T he English national day rolls around again on April 23, and there's plenty to do in London  whether you're a patriotic flag-waver or an honourable onlooker.

Browse our gallery above to find the best of the city's goings-on, whether you want to join a parade or go to the pub.

We have details of the annual St Georges feast which is returning to Trafalgar Square once again, as well as a special gala at the Royal Albert Hall. But that's not your lot. Perhaps you'd like to enjoy some theatre, or go a bit Shakespeare  or maybe just tuck into an excellent afternoon tea.

Browse our gallery for all the options you could need.

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Review at a glance









S icily: Culture and Conquest is the first exhibition at the British Museum under its new director, Hartwig Fischer, who has given up leadership of the magnificent State Art Collections in Dresden to take over from Neil MacGregor. Initially the brainchild of MacGregor, working in collaboration with the Sicilian Ministry of Culture, this show is a great start to Hartwigs reign. The attraction is half a mysterious bit of history, particularly the period of Norman rule in the 11th and 12th centuries, and half purely visual, the beautiful and curious art objects that Sicilian culture produced over 4,000 years.

The title refers to the shaping of the islands cultural identity. The show concentrates on two eras, Greeks and Romans on the one hand and Normans on the other, but you learn  with great pleasure  about a much broader historical context.

Deities in charge of whether the crops succeed or fail, and who its vital to get on the right side of if youre someone from the Classical period, appear at various stages of the show. They were made in different eras but have fundamentally the same meaning. Little female figurines from Greek religious sanctuaries in the eighth century BC transmute into a Roman marble bust of the Emperor Augustuss wife from 30 AD representing Ceres  the Roman version of the fertility goddess Demeter.

Greek Sicilians fought for years against invading Carthaginians and Romans, and Rome finally took over the island in 241 BC. After the fall of Rome in the west in the fourth century AD the new Rome was set up in Constantinople and Sicily was ruled by Goths until Byzantines reclaimed it in 535. The attraction for all these invaders was Sicilys grain supplies. It has a rich soil fed by the volcanic activities of Mount Etna, which dominates the islands eastern landscape. Every invading culture left its mark.

Eternal beauty: Virgin and Child by Antonello da Messina c.1460-9 (National Gallery) / The National Gallery

Three centuries after the Byzantines landed, North African Arabs turned up. They established a rule during which they lived mostly peacefully with Christian and Jewish neighbours.

Co-operation and tolerance was also the norm after the Normans took over. Norman mercenaries first arrived from bases on the Italian mainland in 1091. A Norman kingdom gradually grew up, lasting 150 years. The main player culturally was Roger II, who built cathedrals and palaces in several cities. The island became a military superpower rivalling the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic caliphate.

'The show makes you think of profound cultural undercurrents carrying on for immense periods'

Sicily was multilingual, multicultural and (if you like) multi-spiritual. The messages on public monuments were often in two or three languages. You can see a beautifully carved inscription in the exhibition on a funerary monument set up by a Christian for his mother in 1149, with the meaning repeated in Judeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew script), Latin, Greek and Arabic.

The show will make you itch to visit the island. One of the worlds greatest surviving historic mosaic sites is the Norman cathedral founded by Roger II in the town of Monreale, which is about two hours drive from Palermo. Be sure you go there. The beauty and curiosity of the exhibition is encapsulated in this perfectly preserved, enormous 12th-century interior, with its 4,000 square metres of decoration. Seemingly pure abstract patterns  derived from foliage shapes, Arabic script and geometry  are intermixed with animated representations of Biblical scenes, which are no less intensely patterned than the abstract designs. Byzantine craftsmen were shipped over from Constantinople to execute the work alongside local Muslim artists.

Thrilling: a stele from a tomb, c. 2000 BC

Mosaic architectural fragments  awesomely beautiful  from the same period in which the Monreale Cathedral was built are included among the 200 objects displayed. A mid-12th century mosaic pattern in green and red, curving across a white marble throne fragment from Roger IIs cathedral in Palermo, is a perfectly balanced hybrid of Byzantine and Islamic design principles.

Other highlights of this small but intensely layered and rewarding exhibition include the oldest paper document in Europe (a letter written by Roger IIs mother); a 10th-century Koran with dancing and flowing horizontal strokes whose play of positive and negative space (black shapes and white shapes) rivals Jackson Pollock; and Arabic maps (with North at the bottom) that indicate Sicily in relation to the world. One of these maps bears an inscription praising Sicily as the greatest of Muslim kingdoms bathed by the sea because of its abundance of slave labour among other merchandise.

The show makes you think of profound cultural undercurrents carrying on for immense periods. Art and artefacts in the show from the two centuries of Norman rule tend not to feature direct visual representation of the land, of the all-important corn crops and farming generally. It is certainly there, though, symbolised in design formulas and patterns whose basic units partly come from observation of nature. In these winding and curving lines something ancient comes across, mixing with the big, conquering Judeo-Christian cosmic idea  God, Christ, angels and saints  that replaced all those old nature gods.

Sicily was never as powerful after the Normans. It was never again its own master. The end point of the show is marked by an oil painting of a Madonna and Child by Messina, an Italian Renaissance painter who left the poor town in Sicily that he is named after to train in Naples and then became a success on the mainland. Hes credited by the art historian Vasari with introducing oil painting to Italy. The little painting by him here couldnt be more serene with its gentle curves, beautiful faces and hovering angels.

Its rather thrilling to return after soaking in all that delicate picturing and composing, to the shows earliest object. This is a tombstone about three feet high that was already on Sicily 1,300 years before even the Greeks arrived. A ferociously primitive and marvellous carving covers the entire surface and shows what is thought to be some kind of cosmic sex act, with spirals symbolising the eternal soul  or breasts, eyes or ovaries. Maybe its everything altogether.

In any case, whoever the prehistoric inhabitants of Sicily were, this object confronted whichever tribe of them created it with the origin of life at the point of its termination. Most of the time it was covered over, to be revealed only when a body or bodies were ritualistically interred in the tomb.

Sicily: Culture and Conquest is at the British Museum, WC1 (020 7323 8000, britishmuseum.org) from Thursday until August 14

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W hy on earth has My Mother Said not been revived in London since its 1989 Royal Court debut? Charlotte Keatleys drama is, after all, no small matter: its the most performed play ever by a female playwright. Whisper it softly so the patriarchy doesnt hear, but could it be that this witty and moving examination of four generations of women in one family is somehow considered less resonant and universal than would be the same piece about four generations of men?

Whatever the reason, lets celebrate Paul Robinsons fine revival, which has assembled a cracking quartet of actresses, not least a never-better Maureen Lipman putting her dry humour to superb use. Lipmans Doris morphs gradually from an emotionally distant mother of the Forties to a much more amenable great-grandmother to Rosie (a lovely performance of wide-eyed enthusiasm from Serena Manteghi). Livewire Katie Brayben, as Doriss granddaughter Jackie, confirms the tremendous promise of her work in the musical Beautiful last year.

The script initially skips playfully about through the decades, underscoring the repeated tug of dreams versus reality, career versus motherhood down the generations. Keatley notes with rueful tenderness how the best of intentions arent always enough, as maternal lines of communication get so easily tangled with deep-seated consequences for all parties. A real treat.

Until May 21, St James (0844 264 2140)

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D o you swear by sleeping in your underwear?

Many of us forgo our thick pyjamas for boxers or briefs during hot summer nights, but it turns out that wearing your undies in bed may be doing you more harm than good, or so say the experts.

They believe that it is much better to sleep naked at night to let your skin breathe and to avoid infection.

Dr Alyssa Dweck, who works in the field of gynaecology for several hospitals and health centres in New York state, has recently spoken about her concerns.

I often tell my patients to sleep without underwear the co-author of V is for Vagina, told Shape.

"If [the area] is constantly covered - especially by a fabric thats not moisture-wicking or absorbent - moisture collects, creating the perfect breeding ground for bacteria or yeast."

She believes that sleeping in your underwear could lead to severe chafing, irritation and skin infections, without you even releasing that your sleepwear may be the cause.

The problem can become particularly acute for women suffering hot flushes at night during the menopause.

Dr Dweck said that those who say they must wear their briefs at night should opt for a loose-fitting cotton pair.

She added: If theres ever a time to break out the granny panties, this would be it,

The problem, however, can have more serious consequences for men.

Dr Brian Steixner, Director of the Institute for Mens Health at Jersey Urology Group in the US, says that men who choose to sleep in boxers can compromise the quality of their sperm as their genitals become too warm during the night.

He said: "Your nether regions need to be just the right temperature in order to optimise sperm production."

He added: "More bacteria makes for a higher likelihood that any chafed or irritated skin down there becomes infected."

Fertility aside, there are added benefits to sleeping in the nude too as cooling down the body can help lower blood pressure.

As well as avoiding nasty skin ailments, sleeping naked with a partner is also thought to improve your sex life.

According to a recent survey which polled 1,000 people, 57 per cent of nude sleepers reported being happier with their relationship, compared to just 48 per cent of clothed snoozers.

The key is believed to be in the skin-on-skin contact, which triggers the release of the hormone oxytocin - the neurotransmitter that helps you feel those good feelings about your significant other.

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This can help you to feel better connected to your partner, and - yes - more interested in sex.

But If that doesn't swing it for you? Just think of all the time and money youll save on a reduced washing pile.

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A growing number of young professional women are putting their health at risk by drinking excessively at home, a top doctor warned today.

Professor John OGrady, consultant hepatologist at Kings College Hospital, said women in their twenties and thirties were being diagnosed with liver cirrhosis  a condition more typically found in men a decade older.

He spoke out ahead of a BBC2 documentary by Louis Theroux, Drinking To Oblivion, which shows the battle at the hospital, in Denmark Hill, to help some of the capitals most chaotic drinkers.

Mr OGrady said the women had typically drunk about 50 units of alcohol a week  equivalent to around five bottles of wine. The recommended maximum is 14 units.

Health warning: Louis Theroux with Aurelie who has struggled to reduce her dependency on alcohol / BBC

He said: The kind of story you get is, I get home from work and share a bottle of wine with my partner. I do that every single day. Then at the weekends I party and drink a bit more.

That is a commonly recurring story from young women who didnt expect to be at risk of liver disease. It becomes part of the routine. Twenty or 30 years ago, if you were going to drink youd probably make a decision to go to the pub.

Better screening and check-ups for medical insurance had led to more people being diagnosed with the illness, he added: I am seeing more and more young women, and by young I mean under the age of 40. Women in their twenties and thirties present with liver disease that is more typically related to men about 10 years older.

He warned that there was no strict correlation between the amount a person drinks and the risk of cirrhosis: For every person who gets cirrhosis, there will be about five who have drunk the same amount who get no liver disease.

People think because theyre not drinking any more or less than their friends or peers they dont have a problem. About one in three Britons drinks excessively. Professor OGrady called for people to pro-actively undergo blood tests every couple of years to check on the health of their liver.

Andrew Langford, chief executive of the British Liver Trust, said: Both young and middle-aged women are the big growth area in terms of alcohol-related liver disease.

Its bad enough when a young woman is at home sharing a bottle of wine with her partner. But there are an awful lot of women who dont have a partner, so they drink the bottle of wine themselves.

The other group is mums who get into the habit of getting the kids to bed and opening a bottle of wine. Its become a social norm and a joke: that its wine oclock.

Its that shift where alcohol is very much a commodity for a lot of us. Within a couple of generations we have allowed alcohol to become something we buy alongside our eggs, milk and bread.

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T he rustic look and ethereal texture of Neapolitan pizza is partly a function of its being cooked in a 900F (482C) wood-fired oven. The crust chars and blisters before the interior crumb has dried out and crisped. But the dough itself is built to be elastic and the crust baked from it pliable, reflecting pizzas humble origins as a Naples street food. To be eaten on the go pizza had to be soft enough to be folded twice a portafoglio (like a wallet), gathering and protecting its tomato sauce in the folds.

I was born selling pizzas on the banco [street counter], says maestro pizzaiolo Enzo Coccia of Pizzaria La Notizia in Naples. It has to be soft and light. There is no other way.

In no particular order, here are eight of Naples' best.

50 KALO

The excitement and glamor permeating 50 Kalo reflects the freshly elevated status of pizza in Naples. A message taped to the banco (bench), as the bakers work counter is known, tells its own story: ingredienti: acqua, farina, lievito, sale (ingredients: water, flour, yeast, salt). In an obscure dialect, 50 means dough and kalo means good. When hes not pressed into posing for selfies, pizzaiolo Ciro Salvo can be seen at the banco, stretching the dough and pushing its invisible bubbles outward. He leaves the business of dressing and cooking pizzas to colleagues.

Originals like the Pizza dellAlleanza, with mozzarella, Cipolla di Montoro (a sweet, fragrant onion), Lardo di Colonnata (cured fatback from Tuscan pigs), and Conciato Romano cheese, show off 50 Kalos sophistication and sourcing but, as Salvo concedes, they can dominate the dough. To best appreciate his incomparably light crust with deep pockets of air around the cornicione (rim or cornice), he recommends the simpler Margherita or Marinara.

Pizza at 50 Kalo / Luciano Furia

What to order: Calzone; Margherita; Marinara; Nduja di Spilinga; Pizza dellAlleanza; Pizza Fritta

Find it: Piazza Sannazaro 201B Mergellina, Naples Campania 80122 , Italy. Open 7 days a week. Credit cards accepted but not AMEX. Call on +39 08119204667 or visit 50kalo.it

PIZZARIA LA NOTIZIA, 53

Revered at home and around the world for his scholarly command of Neapolitan pizza, maestro pizzaiolo Enzo Coccia was trained on the streets of Naples. He worked at his familys pizza stand near the central train station and retains the glee of a boy clasping a folded, paper-wrapped, hot pizza. He can lecture on dough hydration or rhapsodize over the stretchy, stringy mozzarella clinging to a pizza as a slice of it is pulled away. It is this delicious paradox that makes Pizzaria La Notizia remarkable: you can order an inventive pizza with stunning ingredients and know the recipe was conceived by a learned pizzaiolo or choose a classic Margherita and appreciate it was designed for, and by, a kid. The one Coccia constant is the peerless dough. A second location is at Via Caravaggio 94.

What to order: Ciropedia; Del Contadino; Margherita DOP; Marinara; Napoletana

Find it: Via Michelangelo da Caravaggio 53A Mergellina, Naples Campania 80126, Italy. Closed Monday. Credit cards accepted but not AMEX. Call +39 0817142155 or visit pizzarialanotizia.com

LANTICA PIZZERIA DA MICHELE

Da Michele is part pizza temple and part pizza time-machine. Free-form pizzas with more black spots than a Dalmatian are perfect in their rustic imperfection. The smells and sounds can transport you back to 1870, the year Salvatore Condurro received his license to make pizza, or to 1906, the year his son Michele opened the familys first pizzeria.

The Da Michele mystique rests on the resolve of the succeeding generations of Condurros to limit their selection of food to two classic pizzas, the Marinara and the Margherita. They dont count the Margherita Doppio Mozzarella, which has repercussions: this double-cheese Margherita arouses envy in those who only learn of its existence by spotting one on a nearby table.

Margherita at Da Michele / Daniel Young

What to order: Margherita; Marinara

Find it: Via Cesare Sersale 13 Forcella , Naples Campania 80139 , Italy. Open seven days. Credit cards not accepted. Call +39 0815539204 or visit damichele.net

PIZZERIA GINO SORBILLO

When the city is Naples, the district is Spaccanapoli, the street is Via dei Tribunali, and the pizzeria and the pizzaiolo share the name Gino Sorbillo, youve hit the epicenter of the Neapolitan pizza earthquake shaking the world. Those invariably waiting outside for their first Sorbillo pizza may be in for a few surprises: first, when Sorbillo is in the kitchen he is not grinning, as he always seems to be on Italian television or Facebook. He works with intensity, speed, and purpose. Second, this is a paper-cup establishment with low prices, its fame notwithstanding. Lastly, the beautifully balanced Margherita ceases to be the customary red, white, and green: when the red sea of tomato commingles with the clustered white dots of molten mozzarella a pink perfection is achieved.

Pizza at the ready at Gino Sorbillo / Luciano Furia

What to order: Bufalina; Margherita; Margherita Gialla; Marinara; Napoletana; Nduja

Find it: Via dei Tribunali 32 San Lorenzo, Naples Campania 80138, Italy. Open 7 days a week. Credit cards accepted. Call on +39 081446643 or visit sorbillo.it .

DA ATTILIO

The old-school warmth of this pizzeria is preserved by Maria Francesca Mariniello, the daughter-in-law of the Attilio Bachetti who opened it and the mother of the Attilio Bachetti who runs it now. Every inch of wall space is covered with celebrity photos, press clippings, and napkin doodles preserved in picture frames. The homespun authenticity hasnt made Da Attilio famous but it does keep it on the shortlists of some very respected pizza people. The airy crusts Attilio Bachetti the younger tailors to each pizza are superbly thin and digestible, none more so than the one supporting the pizza cosacca, a cross between a Marinara and a Margherita with mozzarella out and grated cheese in. The sun-shaped Carnevale pizza, the eight points around its cornicione filled with ricotta, is a Da Attilio trademark and a Naples landmark.

Feel the heat at Da Attilio / Luciano Furia

What to order: Broccoli Raab and Sausage; Carnevale; Endive; Sole nel Piatto

Find it: Via Pignasecca 17 Pignasecca, Naples Campania 80134, Italy. Closed Sunday. Credit cards accepted but not AMEX. Call +39 0815520479 or visit facebook.com/pizzeriadaattilio/

PIZZERIA FRATELLI SALVO

To serve truly great Neapolitan pizza to 200 people at a time brothers Francesco and Salvatore Salvo procure the best information and ingredients available. When the third-generation pizzaioli are not analyzing how flour, yeast, temperature, and maybe 20 other variables affect the dough, theyre nurturing lasting relationships with the best suppliers. But sometimes folklore does play a role, too.

According to legend, the cosacca pizza (cossacks pizza) was created some 180 years ago to honor the visit of Tsar Nicholas I to the Kingdom of Naples. At Pizzeria Salvo, the exquisitely simple cosacca is distinguished by the nobility of Corbari cherry tomatoes from I Sapori di Corbara, Pecorino cheese from the Cooperativa Agricola Pecorino Bagnolese, and organic extra virgin olive oil from Colline Salernitane delle San Salvatore.

Simple is best at Fratelli Salvo / Luciano Furia

What to order: Cosacca; Margherita del Vesuvio; Marinara; Montanara Classica; Montanara alla Genovese; Nduja and Verzin Cheese; Papacelle e Conciato; Ripieno Fritto

Find it: Largo Arso 1016 San Giorgio a Cremano, Naples Campania 80046, Italy. Closed Sunday. Credit cards accepted. Call on +39 081275306 or visit salvopizzaioli.it

The best pizza in London 1 /18 The best pizza in London 50 Kalo di Ciro Salvo Don't be fooled by the red and black Dennis the Menace-style decor  this place does seriously good pizza. Ingredients are rich and authentic (the mozzarella is flown in from Campania) and the pizzas come with generous helpings of lip-smacking tomato sauce (that you be mopping up with leftover crust afterwards). Luciano Furia Sodo Pizza Cafe In case you were wondering about the name, Sodo stands for sourdough. And thats something they take pretty seriously here. All the pizza dough is fermented for 48 hours and then baked at over 450 so that its light and airy with plenty of that sourdough tang. With such great bases it makes sense to keep toppings simple, but special kudos must go to the brilliantly named Jon Bon Chovy topped with anchovies, olives, capers, chilli and fresh parsley. Pizza Pilgrims With restaurants in different corners of London, brothers James and Thom Eliot have come a long way since their days as street food traders. The Neapolitan-style pizzas here are soft and doughy with a plumped-up crust and a rich tomato base  try the nudja variety if youre feeling spicy. L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele Flying in to Baker Street from Naples, this pizzeria  which incidentally was featured in Eat, Pray, Love  has been described as the best in the world, never mind London. The London branch is less scruffy (and a little more expensive) than the Naples original, and the pizzas are slightly different, too  the bases are thicker for a start. That said, the full-flavoured tomato base which is a signature is present and correct and theres no doubting this is among the finest pizza in the capital. Be prepared to queue. Santore A hefty proportion of the clientele always seems to be Italian at this old-school Clerkenwell local, and thats got to be a good sign. The signature order is pizza by the metre, made with varying toppings along the stretch  you might want to bring a couple of friends to help polish it off though. For something different try the i panuozzi, a pizza sandwich that has the same toppings but double the dough. Crate Brewery No two items could be more perfectly suited to each other than beer and pizza  and few places are as geared up for the pair of them as Crate is. As well as making its own beer on-site it serves crispy, thin-base pizzas that are worthy of much more than just soaking up your drinks. Try the Middle Eastern lamb variety, topped with spicy mince, alongside more traditional numbers. Franco Manca There's a staggering number of Franco Manca branches throughout the capital, from Soho to Southfields and Covent Garden to Chiswick. Despite its size, the slightly sour, salty chewy Neapolitan base which made such an impression at the original Brixton Market branch remains, as do the simple but well-sourced toppings. The original Brixton branch is still the best. Homeslice There are now six buzzy Homeslice sites across London serving up impressive 20-inch pizzas. Some off-the-wall toppings may put off purists, but clever combos and a blistering hot oven ensure the end results really do work  even a goat shoulder and savoy cabbage number. Devour them whole or by the slice. Pizza Union This casual pizzeria with sites in Spitalfields and Kings Cross is buzzy, fast and impressively cheap  plus the pizzas are the real deal. Theyre made in the Roman style, with bases that are thin and crispy rather than chewy, and come in an abundance of varieties. Good news for coeliacs  just ask for gluten free bases. Yard Sale Pizza Yard Sale Pizza started out how you might expect  in a yard. Founder Johnnie Tate began his dough spinning journey cooking pies in a pizza oven in his Hackney back garden, but now the brand boasts five sites across London and has collaborated with the likes of foodie rapper Loyle Carner and, err, Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin. The proof of their success is in the pie  its Holy Pepperoni is topped with two types of pepperoni and nduja sausage, while more contemporary options include the TSB, topped with tenderstem broccoli, manchego and pine nuts. Voodoo Rays Crust-leavers, get yourself to Voodoo Rays. This Dalston-originating pizza joint serves its pizza by-the-slice from massive 22-inch New York-style pies  do the maths and that means less crust, more topping. And what toppings they are: fior di latte mozzarella and San Marzano tomatoes are used across the board and varieties include both Italian classic and the likes of the very English Porkys, made with Cumberland sausage, Stilton, red onion and parsley. Zia Lucia Zia Lucia really knows its dough. The growing pizza group has four different doughs on its menu  a traditional, a wholemeal, a vegetable charcoal and one made with gluten-free flour. Toppings are Italian in essence, with a few tantalisingly unusual variations along the way: the Andrea Pirlo is topped with gorgonzola, apple, truffle and olive sauce, while the Green Vegana is spread with spicy broccoli cream and sundried tomatoes. Circolo Popolare The pizzas here are as luxurious as the restaurants famously flamboyant surroundings. Delicious metre-long 'zas arrive from the open kitchens twin rotary oven, placed on tables under floral ceilings and surrounded by walls stacked with 20,000 bottles. The crusts are chewy and light, the toppings are liberally applied and the sauces are perfect. ES Magazines critic Jimi Famurewa was full of praise for the doughy dishes, calling the peach-topped Orlando Blue pie a balanced blast of sunshine. The pizzas at Gloria, Circolos sister restaurant, are just as good too. Lateef Okunnu @lateef.photography Made of Dough At Made of Dough, its all about that crust  generously charred and tangy as heck, its arguably the star of the show. Heading into the centre, be sure that the Truffle is somewhere on your order  a white pizza, both mozzarella and parmesan are topped with white alba truffle oil and portobello mushrooms, with the option to add a mind-boggling portion of burratina on top. Starting life as a residency at Pop Brixton, the Made of Dough team now have a permanent spot in Peckham, as well as popular stalls in Market Hall Fulham and the West End location of crazy golf bar Swingers.

STARITA

The legend of Starita will be forever linked with two idols: Sophia Loren, who portrayed a pizzaiola selling fried pizza in the 1954 film classic The Gold of Naples, and Antonio Starita, the third-generation pizzaiolo venerated by the many hes mentored, inspired, or fed. Don Antonios signature pizza is the Montanara Starita, a street food classic made by deep-frying a small disk of dough, topping it with tomato, smoked scamorza cheese, Pecorino Romano cheese, and fresh basil and finishing it off in the oven. His Porta a Porta, a rectangular pizza pouch stuffed with ricotta cheese, broccoli raab, cherry tomatoes, and mozzarella di bufala, is baked both on the Via Materdei, a Naples street long synonymous with Loren and Starita, and at Don Antonio by Starita, the New York outpost he opened with protege Roberto Caporuscio.

What to order: Angioletti; Diavola; Margherita; Marinara; Montanara

Find it: Via Materdei 2728 Materdei, Naples Campania 80136, Italy. Closed Sunday morning. Credit cards accepted. Call on +39 0815441485 or visit pizzeriestarita.it

PIZZERIA DI MATTEO

At Di Matteo, on the Via dei Tribunali in the old historic center of Naples, the dining rooms are upstairs but the action is on the street. Pizza fritta (fried pizza) and pizza a portafoglia (folded wallet style) are sold from the takeout counter, befitting a pizzeria that doubles as a friggatoria (fried-food shop). The baked pizzas are prepared in rapid succession by the two pizzaioli who shape them and a third who works the turquoise-tiled, wood-fired oven. The fried pizzas are often assembled by Salvatore Di Matteo himself. He seals cheese, tomato, ham, and other fillings between two flattened rounds of pizza dough and lowers the package into a vat of hot oil. Out comes pizza fritta ripieno (fried stuffed pizza)a fluffy, delicately crisp saucer of golden goodness.

The queues at Di Matteo / Luciano Furia

What to order: Bufalina DOP; Pizza Fritta

Find it: Via dei Tribunali 94 San Lorenzo , Naples Campania 80139 , Italy. Open 7 days a week. Credit cards accepted. Call on +39 081455262 or pizzeriadimatteo.com

Where to Eat Pizza by Daniel Young is published by Phaidon at 16.95. Buy it here
 In recent years, Mallorca has quietly been shrugging off its 'all-inclusive' reputation and redefining itself as a boutique destination for the discerning traveller.

And now, the hype is set to continue thanks to Love Island. The hit ITV dating reality show is currently being filmed at a swanky villa on the Balearic island - and a recent study has shown that the Bafta-winning TV show has increased Brits flying to Mallorca by 23 per cent.

If you're planning a trip, here's our edit of the island's best spots to add to your tick list, from the subterranean Lake Martel to the hillside town of Valldemossa.

1. Deia

 Pep Roig / Alamy Stock Photo

This tiny village might seem quaint with its uniform green-shuttered houses, but its actually been home to everyone from poet and novelist Robert Graves to the super rich looking for a coastal hideaway. Head to the towns small shingle beach, Cala Deia, for (optional) naked swimming and probably some of the freshest seafood youll ever taste.

Love Island 2018 Series 4: Villa - In pictures 1 /41 Love Island 2018 Series 4: Villa - In pictures The new look blue bedroom ITV The all-important fire pit ITV The Hideaway ITV The pool area ITV The gym ITV The hot tub ITV Outside sofa ITV The kitchen ITV Outside beds ITV Outside ITV Cosy chair ITV A bed ITV The garden ITV New look walls ITV Outside chat area ITV Interior ITV The villa ITV A motivational message ITV The Beach Hut ITV The lounge ITV Crack On. ITV The bathroom ITV The kitchen ITV The bathroom ITV The salon area ITV The bathtub ITV The two-tone stairs ITV The lounge ITV The villa ITV Date night? ITV The grass wall ITV

2. Lake Martel

It doesnt get much more magical than a boat tour of Lake Martels stalactite and stalagmite-filled caves, while a quartet serenades you with classical music. All thats left for you to do is gaze in wonder at the 10 million year old caves and one of the largest subterranean lakes in the world.

3. Valldemossa Town

 Prisma Bildagentur AG / Alamy Stock Photo

Valldemossa is a sleepy town surrounded by the forest-covered hills of the Tramuntana range and vast expanses of countryside, making it a great spot for hiking. Dont leave without trying one of the local delicacies from its traditional family bakeries  coca de patata is a sweet cake made with boiled potatoes and served with a mug of hot chocolate.

4. Es Ponta

Mallorca is well noted for its rock climbing spots  the most famous being this giant natural arch formation that rock climber Chris Sharma free-climbed a few years back. Es Ponta is located on the southeastern side of the island, within easy reach of nearby town Santanyi.

Serra Tramuntara /  imageBROKER / Alamy Stock Photo

5. Serra Tramuntara

The islands northwest coast couldnt be more different to the built-up resorts youll find in other parts of the island. The UNESCO World Heritage site is a haven for pine forests, olive groves, wild spring flowers and dramatic cliff tops. It's very popular with cyclists in the cooler months of the year.

6. Pollensa Bay & Town

Pollensa, which sits at the eastern end of the Serra de Tramuntana, is a place where Spanish cafe culture continues to thrive. Visit the market filled stalls of the Placa Major, which is usually where locals flock to on a Sunday, or head to the port and beach area a few kilometres north.

Pollensa Bay /  Marcos Molina / Alamy Stock Photo

7. Palma

Mallorcas capital is fast becoming one of Europe's most desirable weekend destinations with plenty of boutique hotel options to explore. It's worth visitng along if only to see the cobbled lanes and Gothic Cathedral in the old quarter. There are also plenty of market stalls, boutiques and foodie spots to explore while youre there. Check out 13th-century church Iglesia de Santa Eulalia, which you may recognise as being one of the spots where The Night Manager was shot.

8. Port de Soller

Another prime filming location for The Night Manager (Carrer de la Marina is the street where Pine and Burr have one of their clandestine meetings), the pretty port town of Port de Soller is home to the only decent beach on the north west coast of the island. Chances are youll also get to do a bit of celeb spotting  rumour has it Roman Abramovichs yacht is moored just off the coast.

Pictures from alamy.com

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E nglish summer is the perfect time to escape to Europe. It's inevitably raining in London while the Med basks in sunshine.

But while the azure shores and romantic clifftops of Capri might be calling you, it's worth knowing that Jersey has been named ahead of the glitzy Italian island in a list of the best European islands - and it's just a few hours away from London.

The southernmost Channel Island, which has long been a favourite 'staycation' spot for British holidaymakers, was ranked ninth based by a recent poll of Tripadvisor reviews.

Sounds surprising? It shouldn't: Jersey has been praised by reviewers for its spectacular scenery, stunning beaches and unrivalled fish and chips.

Elizabeth Castle, the Jersey War Tunnels and St.Brelade's Beach are just a few of the sights and landmarks that make this cosmopolitan harbour so attractive to sun worshipers and history lovers alike.

Popular Santorini in Greece took the the top spot as Europe's best island - thanks to its sky-high towns, eclectic cuisine and black volcanic beaches.

But if you're adamant to escape the continent this summer, TripAdvisor has separately announced Hawaiian island Maui - a surfing destination as famous for its white sand beaches - as it's definitive global island destination.

Click through the gallery above to discover the best islands in Europe

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A new interactive "murder map" of London gives an insight into the history of killings in the capital.

The project was set up by Peter Stubley, a former court reporter at the Old Bailey, who said he hoped the map could be of use to students, academics, friends and relatives of victims or the police.

The database has gathered information from the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and media coverage and court records to show where murders where committed and what methods the killer - or killers - used.

The data spans from the time of Jack the Ripper in the 19th Century to the present day, although only killings from 2008 onwards are recorded on the map.

The murders are colour-coded by the cause of death, which normally relates to the weapon used, although the 'none category usually refers to murders committed by way of unarmed violence such as punches or kicks.

Mr Stubley told Metro.co.uk: "It wasnt a particularly new idea but nobody had done it for London and I always thought that murder cases could tell us a lot about the state of society at that particular moment, whether it is teenage knife crime, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse or domestic violence.

"There was a mixed reaction at the start, but our intention is to report each case in the same way."
T hree activists who blocked a tunnel at Heathrow Airport by chaining themselves to a van have each been fined 200.

Esme Waldron, 23, Alistair Cannell, 26, and William Pettifer, 27, admitted wilful obstruction of a public highway after causing more than four hours of disruption in November.

The activists were sentenced on Tuesday at Uxbridge Magistrates Court.

The defendants originally pleaded not guilty but later changed their plea which resulted in a lesser fine although they must pay prosecution costs.

District judge Deborah Wright said the protesters had shown a "spectacular lack of consideration" for those undertaking journeys, Get Surrey reported.

The Plane Stupid trio were protesting against a third runway when they blocked the road into terminals 2 and 3.

The court heard 75 people missed their flights as a result of the disruption, which lasted four hours and 29 minutes.

The tunnel blockade took place on the same day as a parliamentary debate on the proposed third runway.

A Heathrow spokesman said: "Anyone who breaks the law, puts safety at risk and disrupts our passengers and colleagues will face prosecution."

Members of the Plane Stupid group were among dozens of campaigners outside court during the hearing.
A gang of thieves who ransacked dozens of homes during a prolific spree across west London have been sentenced at court.

The group of five men and two women made off with stolen vehicles and high value property during a six week crime wave in Ruislip and surrounding areas.

In total, 30 homes were raided between September 29 and December 15 in 2014.

Police in Hillingdon snared the gang in an intelligence led operation after responding to the spike of burglaries.

At Isleworth Crown Court, John Flynn, 49, was sentenced to eight years in prison in his absence after he was found guilty of conspiracy to commit burglary. A warrant has been issued for his address.

A warrant was issued for Gracie McCarthys arrest after she failed to appear at court / Metropolitan Police

John James Feehan-Flynn, 21, James Connors, 31, Johnnie Liam Flynn, 27 and Timmy Connors all pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit burglary and were given prison sentences.

Feehan-Flynn was sentenced to five years and four months, James Connors was given a six-year sentence while Flynn was handed a punishment of six years and nine months in jail.

Timmy Connors will serve four years and six months and was also sentenced to two years and three months for further burglary offences carried out in February and March last year.

The sentences will run consecutively.

Gracie McCarthy, 21, and Maisie Neumann, 25, both admitted to acquisition, use and possession of stolen property at an earlier hearing.

Neumann was sentenced to nine months imprisonment while a warrant was issued for McCarthys arrest after she failed to appear at court.

The punishments were handed down on Friday.

The defendants were also granted a Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO) ranging in length from five to seven years on their release.

DC Emma Butcher of the Hillingdon police Proactive Crime Squad said: "These are organised criminals who destroy people's lives, causing both emotional distress and financial loss to all their victims.

"Losing items of sentimental value which can never be replaced is often a cause of great distress. I hope that this result can at least bring some peace of mind to the victims.

"Additionally, they will be subject to Criminal Behaviour Orders from the minute they are released from custody, a strategy we will be taking with all offenders who commit burglary on our borough."
A serving Metropolitan Police officer who sexually assaulted a colleague while on duty has been jailed.

PC Rytis Gilys, 33, was sentenced to six months in prison at Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday after being found guilty of sexual assault against a female colleague in 2013.

Gilys, who worked in Newham borough, called a junior colleague to invite her to attend a vehicle seizure with him and while parked in a quiet street, he began speaking inappropriately about sex.

Gilys touched his colleagues leg twice, with the victim pushing his hands away on both occasions, before he moved his hand towards her belt.

The victim complained to her supervisor and Gilys was suspended while the Directorate of Professional Standards investigated.

He later stood trial for five counts of sexual assault against three female colleagues after pleading not guilty to all charges.

He was cleared of four counts but found guilty of one charge and jailed for six months.

Judge Gledhill GC said as a serving police officer, behaving in such a way could only be dealt with by an immediate custodial sentence.

Chief Superintendent Matt Gardner, from the Mets Directorate of Professional Standards, said: "PC Gilys abused the trust placed in him as a police officer and used his seniority in service to abuse a junior colleague.

No one should have to suffer such behaviour in any circumstances but for a police officer to behave in this way is even more disgraceful."

A misconduct review is now scheduled to take place.
D istraught parents comfort their three-year-old son on the pavement after he was knocked down on a notorious stretch of road in north London.

The toddler was struck by a white car after he reportedly let go of his fathers hand and stepped out onto busy Bullsmoor Lane in Enfield.

David Soorya, 33, who works in near-by a petrol station, heard a horn like a klaxon and the screeching of car brakes at just before 6pm yesterday.

He said: A guy came rushing in all in a panic. He begged me for a drink of water to give to the poor kid who was lying on the floor.

It was awful, that road is so dangerous its only a matter of time before someone is killed.

Rosemary Mehmet, who lives yards from the scene, rushed to the boy after hearing the crash from her home.

The 58-year-old said: It looked like his head was bleeding and he was under a silver blanket to prevent him going into shock.

The mother ran over and collapsed to her knees on the pavement by her boy. She was weeping, panicking and begging to know what happened.

The police had to calm her down to get her to speak. But she was on the other side of the road at the time, she was absolutely distraught.

The poor boy was screaming and crying but I took that as a good sign, its always worse if they go quiet. It was heart-breaking to watch.

The lady driver he ran out in front of was also in shock. We offered her a cup of tea but she declined - she was still shaking.

The toddler was rushed to hospital, after an air ambulance landed in a near-by park, where he was treated for serious leg injuries that police described as non-life threatening.

Mrs Mehmet is part of the campaign group Help Save Bullsmoor Lane who are trying to limit lorries coming off the nearby M25 and are fighting to introduce traffic calming measures to prevent further accidents.

She added: This traffic is too bad there are two schools, retirement homes, and a special needs care home with basically a motorway running through.

We need to get it stop because people are going to die here. Its not fair, this road wasnt built for all the heavy traffic and without it there wouldnt be so many accidents.

The driver stopped at the scene and was not arrested by attending officers.

A 68-year-old man was dragged under a lorry and killed as he waited for a bus yards from the same crossing in December.

Police are appealing for witnesses to the collision to contact them urgently on 101.
T he mother of a student stabbed to death yards from the home of London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan spoke of her devastation today, saying that she was told of his death just an hour after dropping him off in the street.

Lewis Elwin, 20, who was training at Merton College to become an electrician, was knifed in the back by a gang who ambushed him as he walked alone in Tooting at 3.30pm yesterday as parents were collecting children from a nearby primary school.

He staggered a short distance before collapsing in the street. Members of the public tried to save his life before paramedics arrived, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

A friend of Mr Elwin said: It was an ambush. These guys pulled up in a car and stabbed him. He tried to run away and he collapsed in the street.

Victim: Lewis Elwin was stabbed in the back on a street in broad daylight / Facebook

London Ambulance Service said paramedics arrived within six minutes.

Mechanic Hugh Roy, 46, said he tried to help Mr Elwin. He said: He was lying on the ground, I took off his jacket and saw he had been stabbed in the back.

There was blood everywhere. He was already unconscious.

Today, Mr Elwins mother Sandra Elwin, 52, a receptionist at Wandsworth council, said: I dropped him off and as he was walking away I beeped him to pull up his trousers and he laughed and did it. I went to a doctors appointment and he must have gone to hang out with friends. Then about an hour later, I got a call from a friend of his, saying he was in the road dead. I was not allowed to see him because it was a crime scene.

We are devastated. He was trying to turn his life around, he was training, he was trying so hard. He was a quiet, lovely, polite boy.

She said Lewis was no angel, but a good person. He had been stabbed four years ago just after his father died.

Scene: A police cordon at Thrale Road, Tooting, on Monday afternoon / Candida Jones

Today, Mr Khan called for tougher action to tackle people carrying knives in London. He said: The stabbing happened a stones throw from my home. Obviously, as a dad thats very worrying, but my thoughts are with the mum and the family of the victim.

Relatives today paid tribute to a gentle, kind soul who had turned his life around after falling in with the wrong crowd after the sudden death of his father.

Simon Elwin, his half-brother, said: He was a good person. He was gentle, quiet, polite. He had been in some trouble in the past and was turning his life around. He didnt deserve this.

Anyone with information should call Crimestoppers on 0800 55 111.
M ore than 3,500 London children are today left without a confirmed primary school.

Thousands of youngsters were either not given a school place or offered one not on their list of six choices.

New figures reveal that 97 per cent of London children were given a place at one of their six preferred primary schools, with 84 per cent allocated their first choice. Both figures have improved compared with last year.

But three per cent  or 3,533 children  missed out entirely and have been left without an offer or with a place at a school they do not want to go to.

In Kensington and Chelsea, just 68 per cent of children were given their first choice and 10 per cent did not get any of their top six. This is the lowest rate in London, followed by Hammersmith and Fulham, where 72 per cent of children got their first choice, and five per cent were left with none on their list.

A spokesman for the Pan-London Admissions Scheme, which allocates places, said: Parents who have not been allocated a place at one of their chosen schools have either been offered an alternative or will shortly be advised of their options.

"Unsuccessful applicants can be placed on a waiting list in the order of the schools oversubscription criteria. Places will be filled from the list as vacancies arise.

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Anne-Marie OLeary, editor in chief of Netmums, said: The whole process is a nightmare for parents. She found out last night that her four-year-old son got a place at the familys first-choice school in Balham. She said: Its a bit like survivors guilt. My friends are all having to put their names on waiting lists.

Sue Macmillan, cabinet member for children and education at Hammersmith and Fulham, said: We have some very popular schools which many residents choose. She added: All our children are offered a place in a local school.

Helen Jenner, chairwoman of the Pan-London Admissions Board, said the fact three per cent more pupils got their first choice this year reflects how proficient the London system is.

But she added: Increases in Londons primary population are feeding through to secondary, creating a school places challenge across the education system.
A London cafe where all items cost 1 has closed its doors after trading for less than a year.

Caffix in Fitzrovia offered city workers a cheaper lunch option with smaller portions of cakes, coffee, salads, sandwiches and drinks, all for 1.

Last year, the cafe owners even spoke of plans to launch Caffix as a chain across London and the UK.

But despite enjoying a healthy start, owner Joe Kaye, 32, revealed on the companys website that they were closing the shop and reviewing the business.

A statement on the cafes website reads: 12 months ago Caffix set itself a mission to enable the people of London to eat fresh, pay less.

"Freshly made, quality, tasty food, and premium Italian espresso coffee were the founding principles.

We are proud to say we never wavered from this, and were so delighted to be making a difference and putting a smile on the faces of so many people.

Mr Kaye told The Standard he still had big plans for Caffix and was planning new concepts to bring to the high street.

He said: "It's quite simple, we reviewed the business plan and at the moment, we don't think it's sustainable enough for what we want to achieve.

"It's not gone bust and I've not gone bankrupt, we had week-on-week, month-on-month growth until we closed.

"We still have huge plans for Caffix, it just wasn't moving in the right direction that we felt we need to achieve our future plans."

Mr Kaye also said that he never intended for Caffix to be known as the 'Pound Cafe'.

He added: "The whole point about Caffix was a fixed price, not necessarily a pound, so we're looking at the possibility of having two fixed prices but we're not 100 percent sure we're going forward with that.

"I'm not going to rush into something, as a small business owner and entrepeneur I don't have some of the resources of the conglomerates on the high street so we're having to take our time."

Mr Kaye is also busy working on new developments foir his other establishment, Bites Coffee House, in Finchley.

Popular sandwich chains dominated the high street lunchtime market last year, with Pret a Manger posting record sales of 676.2million.
A video has been posted online of the moment a 'mass brawl' erupted outside a busy south London shopping centre.

The footage, uploaded onto live streaming app Periscope, shows dozens of young people gathering outside Centrale shopping centre in Croydon on Tuesday before a fight breaks out.

During the eight-minute long video, a person can be heard saying: Dont worry, the fights starting, the fights starting before another says: Some dude is trying to fight some girl.

Shortly after, two youths can be seen shouting at each other before a young man shouts: She told me to keep it in Croydon.

Brawl: The fight was broadcast on a live streaming app / Periscope

As the shocking footage continues, the groups of youths can be seen confronting each other again before the fight appears to turn violent, with one person shouting: He spat in her face.

The group moves further along the busy shopping street, with two people left lying on the ground as a huge crowd gathers around them.

Two people are pulled up from the ground and pushed to go in separate directions while the crowd remains outside the shopping centre.

A Metropolitan Police Service spokesman said: Police were called to North End Road, Croydon, at 5:25pm on Tuesday, 19 April, to reports of a fight involving a large group of people.

Officers were called to the scene and dispersed the fight.

There has been one arrest.
A row has erupted over horrifying plans to double the size of the former London home of prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn by excavating a huge basement and adding an extra storey on its rooftop.

Fonteyn, one of the greatest classical ballet dancers of all time, lived in Amberwood House, opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, with Roberto Arias. Fonteyn moved in in the Forties after she married Arias, a Panamanian diplomat. Before that it had been the Panamanian embassy.

Rudolf Nureyev, Fonteyns most famous dance partner, stayed there with Fonteyn while his contract with the Royal Ballet was negotiated after he defected to the West in 1961.

The 6,167 sq ft home was sold in 2011 to developer Prime London Holdings, which is thought to have paid 12.5 million for the then run-down house.

The developer already has planning permission to excavate a basement in the Twenties building and has now unveiled plans to add a level on the roof. The works would increase the size to 14,000 sq ft and could increase its value to more than 50 million.

Margot Fonteyn (Rex)

Jackie and David Russell, who live nearby, are among those who have objected to the plans. This project will undermine the historical charm of Thurloe Square, they said. It is a high visibility intrusion and not at all in keeping with its immediate community. To approve such an extension will directly affect our views, privacy and enjoyment.

Amanda Jenkins, who also lives nearby, said she was horrified by the plans, describing it as an eyesore.

She said: This ugly structure will be in the heart of one of the most beautiful areas in London.

Neighbour Karen Kalaris said: The project is too large for the footprint of the property and not in keeping with the neighbourhood. She said local residents were already suffering from the basement works. The current construction is disruptive with unending drilling, dirt and noise unlikely to end anytime soon, she said.

Despite the concerns, Kensington and Chelsea councils planning committee is expected to approve the roof extension at a meeting tonight.

A report by Jonathan Bore, executive director for planning, concluded that it would not spoil the look of the building because it would be set back from the roof parapet.

A brochure for the property prepared by the K10 Group, which is overseeing the refurbishment and extension, describes it as a palatial and unique home with five bedrooms, measuring 13,713 sq ft and featuring a club room with bar and wine cellar, health spa and a 12-metre swimming pool with waterfall features and a 105in plasma television screen on a wall over it.

Other highlights include its safe room tailor-made to house vast art collections and a giant master bedroom suite featuring opal, onyx, and other exotic stones embedded into the walls of the bathroom.

No one from developers K10 or its planning advisers DP9 was available for comment.
A cyclist who witnessed a teenager drown in a east London canal today claimed police showed no "sense of urgency" in their efforts to save him.

Ailish Tynan said hesitation on the part of officers to rescue Jack Susianta, 17, from Hackney, made her think he must have been a violent person.

The youth died after getting into the canal at Walthamstow Marshes in July last year.

Officers were initially called to a property in Clapton after the teenager smashed a window, but he fled before he was spotted an hour later on Hackney Marshes.

He ran from police again and jumped into the canal while being pursued by officers on July 29.

Ms Tynan told an inquest at St Pancras Coroners Court that another onlooker told her the police have chased that fella into the water.

She said she did not see Jack go into the canal but saw him "treading water like he was trying to stay in one spot" as police looked on from the grassy bank.

Ms Tynan told the inquest: "There did not seem to be any sense of urgency, which made me think 'Gosh, maybe he has got a knife' and 'Why is nobody doing anything?"'

The Metropolitan Police has denied claims that they refused to go in to save the teenager.

Ms Tynan told the court: "We made the assumption ... The first thing I said to the guy was 'Why is nobody going in?' and he said 'I do not know - it is only 5ft deep'.

"Everyone seemed very hesitant. I thought 'Gosh, this might be some kind of dangerous individual' because they had no-one going after him.

She added she saw police throw a rescue line "about 20 times" to Jack and a female officer shouted grab it, grab it as it got to within 5ft of him.

Ms Tynan said she felt "relief" when she spotted a single sculler on the water and thought "there is a hero coming".

The sculler started looking for Jack, she said, but he went under the water and did not come back up.

Ms Tynan added: "I could not really say if he [Jack] got too tired, tried to get away or pushed himself under - except that it was so close. If he had waited two more seconds, he could have got it."

Her husband, Keith McNicoll, said an officer waded into the water making very careful steps, giving him the impression that he "was not entirely comfortable".

Mr McNicoll said he could not see if the officer was sweeping the canal bed with his feet for obstacles and that he did not hear police tell anyone not to go into the water.

The inquest continues.

Additional reporting by Press Association.
A n Australian-style points system should be brought in to curb immigration from the European Union after a British exit, Michael Gove said today.

The Justice Secretary said would-be migrants from poorer countries in eastern Europe would have to show they had the skills and talents that Britain needs before being allowed in.

At the same time he announced the UK would be freed to attract top doctors and scientists from countries such as India to boost the NHS and industry. Instead of a European open-door migration policy we could  if a future Government wanted it  have an Australian points-based migration policy, he said.

We could emulate that countrys admirable record of taking in genuine refugees, giving a welcome to hard-working new citizens and building a successful multi-racial society without giving in to people-smugglers, illegal migration or subversion of borders.

It put immigration at the heart of Leave campaign arguments for an independence vote on June 23. It comes a day after George Osborne published a bombshell Treasury analysis that tacitly conceded migration from the EU would continue to run over 100,000 each year if the UK remains in the EU.

Mr Gove said five more countries  Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey  were in the queue to join the EU and citizens of them all would have complete freedom to work in the UK if they were successful.

He took up the campaign waged by London MEP Syed Kamall to allow more migrants from non-EU countries with close links to Britain. He also attacked Remain warnings that Britain would be ganged-up on by the EU if it left or that the EU would fall apart, saying: An EU without the UK cannot simultaneously be a super-charged leviathan bent on revenge and a crumbling Tower of Babel riven by conflict.

Michael Gove: UK will be better off outside EU

Mr Gove agreed there would be contagion if Britain quit, but argued that would be good for the EU.

Former attorney general Dominic Grieve accused Mr Gove of a sort of single-issue obsession, so he is no longer seeing the wood for the trees.

Labour MP Chuka Umunna, a Remain campaigner, accused Leave campaigners of talking garbage. He told Good Morning Britain: Those who want us to leave cant answer the question: Will we be able to have all the benefits we have in the EU, being part of that big, free trade, single market trading zone if we come out, can you guarantee that? They dont have an answer to that.

He mocked the idea of a big conspiracy theory that union leaders were in cahoots with those well-known socialists at the Confederation of British Industry against Brexit.
C huka Umunna has launched a blistering attack on Zac Goldsmith for a campaign that would make Donald Trump proud.

He accused the Tory candidate of attacking Sadiq Khan for the crime of being a Muslim and branded it base politics of the worst kind.

His intervention comes a week after Yvette Cooper, the former Labour leadership contender, claimed that Conservative campaigning had become a full blown racist scream.

Labour is furious that Mr Goldsmith criticised Mr Khans judgment for sharing platforms with Islamist extremists, including individuals accused of backing terrorism.

Scathing: Chuka Umunna / Anthony Devlin/PA Wire

The Khan campaign say attack words such as divisive and radical used in Goldsmith leaflets amount to dog-whistle racism.

At a Labour in the City event, Mr Umunna said: The Tories have resorted to running a nasty and openly Islamophobic election campaign against Sadiq Khan that would make Donald Trump proud.

Donald Trump's most controversial comments

He said the aim was to stop Londoners talking about housing and transport  issues where Mr Khan is ahead  and to punish Sadiq for committing the crime of being a Muslim and having been a human rights lawyer. It is base politics of the worst kind and Londoners should have no truck with it.

A Goldsmith campaign spokesman said it was a false accusation designed to deflect from questions about Mr Khans judgment in sharing platforms with extremists. This attempt to shut down questions about Khans judgment with false claims of racism is disrespectful to Londoners who deserve answers about how a potential Mayor will keep our city safe, he said.
A farmer has outlined plans to save a Navy helicopter from the scrapheap by turning it into a family holiday home.

Martyn Steedman, from Stirling, bought the Sea King search-and-rescue helicopter in an online MoD auction for 7,000 after it completed its final mission.

Mr Steedman said he will convert the military vehicle into a family glamping accommodation equipped with a dining area in the cockpit.

The idea for the conversion came as he watched the Sea Kings final fly past over Stirling earlier this year.

Inspired: The couple formed the idea after watching the helicopter on its final fly past over Stirling / Andrew Milligan/PA

He said: We couldn't bear to see these much-loved helicopters go on the scrapheap and thought 'why not give one a new life in the country?'

"Our plan is to adapt it into 'glamping' accommodation for a family of five with a quirky cockpit dining area, a mini kitchen, en-suite shower room and 'flight' deck.

"We like to think we offer customers something special to keep them coming back year after year and staying in a Sea King will certainly be a unique experience."

Family accommodation: Mr Steedman said he wants to allow families to enjoy 'glamping' holidays in the military vehicle

The couple's two sons Josh, 13, and Harry, nine, hope to be the first to test out the accommodation.

Harry said: "When Dad told us what he had bought, we thought he was joking. We were totally gob-smacked, but now we can't wait for our first night on board."

The 17m long Sea King ZA127 aircraft was driven 320 miles by road from Grantham, Lincolnshire, to Mains Farm Wigwams, Thornhill, Stirlingshire, on Tuesday before being craned into position at the camp site.

The helicopter retired from active service in 1994 and was used in naval training until 2002.
A frustrated headteacher has quit the profession over claims schools are factory farming children and failing to prepare them for a successful future.

Kit Messenger, of Manor Field Primary School, in Burgess Hill, West Sussex, wrote an impassioned resignation letter in which she hit out at the Government over a fragmented educational system.

Ms Messenger, 45, who has been a teacher for 23 years, said her work had become beset with completing bureaucratic tasks which had become a strain on her physical and emotional health.

In the letter, she said: Unfortunately, despite all of your support, in the current educational climate I no longer feel it will be possible to achieve my vision for children at Manor Field School.

"The narrowing of the curriculum, to the detriment of all other subject areas, has increased significantly over the past two years.

Ms Messenger has spent the last 16 years of her teaching career at Manor Field School in West Sussex / Google Maps

"Judgments made of schools are now so restricted to a small set of measures that the pressure to focus only on reading, writing and mathematics has become untenable and I have increasingly felt that we are 'factory farming' our children and failing to prepare them adequately for a successful future in this changing world.

"The recent announcement that all schools should become academies has further strengthened my belief that now is the time to leave a career that has been central to my life for 23 years.

"I strongly believe in a state system in which all children have access to a good, rounded education and where staff are treated with respect and enjoy fair working conditions.

I do not believe this will be possible under our progressively fragmented educational system.

"I have been passionate about my career for more than 20 years, putting it ahead of everything else in my life.

My love for teaching and school improvement has run like blood through my veins and I have constantly sacrificed friendships and family life in order to secure better provision for children.

"I now find that much of my work is spent completing bureaucratic tasks which have no or little positive impact on our pupils and this has left me feeling increasingly frustrated and unhappy. It has now begun to have a detrimental impact on my physical and emotional health.

The school's board of governors said they "fully understand and support" her reasons for stepping down, which will happen in August.

They said in a statement: "Ms Messenger clearly explained that recent plans by the government for education are contrary to her own beliefs that all children should have access to a wholly rounded education.

"Ms Messenger has spent the last 16 years of her teaching career at Manor Field School and has worked tirelessly to create a caring and effective learning environment."

West Sussex County Council said it was "saddened" to learn of Ms Messenger's resignation.

In a statement, the council said: "The decision to resign is a personal matter and, whilst it is not appropriate for us to comment on her resignation, we respect her right to express her reasons.

"We are writing to the minister to express our concerns regarding the recent government white paper. In particular we feel there is not a strong enough voice for the parent and child in the approach.

"We believe families are entitled to a choice - whether that be academies, free schools or local authority schools - and that one-size does not fit all. Above all we think educational matters should be decided on locally and not nationally."
M uslim prison chaplains have routinely distributed Islamist hate literature, according to a leaked report.

A review commissioned by Michael Gove found extremist pamphlets and CDs in more than 10 jails last November, according to The Times.

The material included homophobic and misogynistic sentiments and encouraged the murder of apostates - Muslims who leave or reject the religion.

It is said to have concluded that many Muslim prison chaplains were under-equipped for counter-radicalisation work, "sometimes because they lacked the capability but often because they didn't have the will".

The review, which started in September, also found that prisoners at more than one jail were encouraged by chaplains to fund-raise for Islamic charities that had links to terrorism.

It warned lax controls and senior level failings had allowed the problems to occur.

The report is a draft and has not yet been cleared for publication.

According to the Times, jails in England and Wales held 12,328 Muslim inmates at the start of 2016.

Convicted terrorists numbered 131 and a further 1,000 were deemed vulnerable to radicalisation.

About 100 Muslim chaplains are employed full time in jails on salaries of up to 40,000.

The Ministry of Justice has been contacted for comment.

Additional reporting by PA
S he once confided that, had she not become Queen, she would have liked simply to be a lady living in the country with lots of horses and dogs.

Indeed, whenever her busy schedule allows, the Queen is out in Windsor Great Park on her favourite black fell pony, Carltonlima Emma, with head groom Terry Pendry by her side.

It is her private escape from a demanding public world.

She starts her day at about 8.30am, sipping a cup of Darjeeling tea, eating her toast and marmalade  and surveying the pages of the Racing Post.

Her eyes light up when horses are mentioned. Her passion for them has not dimmed over the years, whether it be riding or racing.

Queen Elizabeth II: 90 years in pictures

It is perhaps why she loves spending the weekends at Windsor Castle. A royal fortress for more than 900 years, it is a sanctuary.

It is where she will greet the crowds on her birthday on Thursday, and where she will receive President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle for lunch on Friday.

The Queens home life is surprisingly low-profile, revolving around her family and her faith. She may be a monarch but she is also a wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, and friend to a very select group.

At the heart of her private life is her unshakeable marriage to Prince Philip, which at 68 years is the longest of any sovereign and consort. It has been the bedrock of every aspect of her life, along with her Christian faith.

Elizabeth was only eight when she first met Prince Philip, her third cousin, at her uncle the Duke of Kents wedding in 1934. Five years later she met Philip again, this time on a visit to Dartmouth Naval College on the royal yacht.

Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were assigned the dashing naval cadet Philip Mountbatten  the nephew of Lord Dickie Mountbatten  to look after them. The impressionable Elizabeth was smitten.

They wrote to each other while Philip, five years Elizabeths senior, was serving in the Royal Navy during the war. He did not return home until January 1946, when their courtship began in earnest.

Buckingham Palace announced their engagement in July 1947 and they married on November 20 the same year.

All these years later, she still loves and adores him. At home, she lets Philip, 94, wear the trousers  running the estates, making the big decisions. He is, perhaps, the only person who would dare tell her what to do.

She has also learned to live with his outbursts. When he is ranting about not being able to get the television to work in a hotel suite, she merely shrugs her shoulders.

Neither shows their emotions openly. But for their Golden Wedding, the Queen put her feelings on record, saying: He is someone who doesnt take easily to compliments but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim or we shall ever know.

TODO: define component type apester

As a mother, her life has been more difficult. Her four children have been through three divorces and two re-marriages, and the Queen has had to steer a careful path with family relations.

She is an intensely private person and to see her childrens marital differences making newspaper headlines was painful. She rarely intervened, instead leaving Philip to mediate. She stepped in only with Charles and Diana, when the situation was damaging the institution of which she is custodian.

She is an important figure in the lives of all her grandchildren too, from Peter Phillips, the eldest at 38, to the youngest, eight-year-old James, Viscount Severn.

Prince George and Princess Charlotte, who are among her five great grandchildren, see plenty of her, and are expected to join her on the balcony for Trooping the Colour this year. As Georges mother, the Duchess of Cambridge, revealed, he calls his great-grandmother Gan Gan.

Perhaps none of them depend on her wisdom as much as Prince William, whose marriage to Kate has emphasised that, after the dramas of the Nineties, the royal family at last seems to be in calmer waters privately.

William has described the Queen as a dedicated guiding force to the royal family, and she has clearly helped him in his preparations for the top job. She is always keen for him to ask questions  and he says there is nothing that she will not already know, nor have a better opinion about.

The Queen - her family in pictures 1 /24 The Queen - her family in pictures Camilla Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Charles, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince George, Prince William, Princess Charlotte, Prince Louis, and Kate Duchess of Cambridge appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace during the Platinum Jubilee Pageant outside Buckingham Palace in London, Sunday June 5, 2022 AP (Left to right) The Duke of Gloucester, Duchess of Gloucester, Princess Alexandra, Duke of Kent, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence , the Princess Royal, the Duchess of Cornwall, the Prince of Wales , Queen Elizabeth II , Prince Louis, the Duchess of Cambridge, Princess Charlotte, Prince George, the Duke of Cambridge, the Countess of Wessex, James Viscount Severn, Lady Louise Windsor, and the Earl of Wessex on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, to view the Platinum Jubilee flypast, on day one of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations. Picture date: Thursday June 2, 2022. PA Photo. See PA story ROYAL Jubilee. Photo credit should read: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire PA In this photo released by Kensington Palace on Monday May 21, 2018, shows an official wedding photo of Britains Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, center, in Windsor Castle, Windsor, England, Saturday May 19, 2018. Others in photo from left, back row, Jasper Dyer, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Charles, Doria Ragland, Prince William; center row, Brian Mulroney, Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II, Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, Princess Charlotte, Prince George, Rylan Litt, John Mulroney; front row, Ivy Mulroney, Florence van Cutsem, Zalie Warren, Remi Litt. (Alexi Lubomirski/Kensington Palace via AP) AP Royal move to Windsor Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Louis, the Duchess of Cambridge, Princess Charlotte, Prince George, and the Duke of Cambridge, on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, to view the Platinum Jubilee flypast. PA The new generation Prince William holds George as The Queen waves during the Trooping of the Colour this year, flanked by the Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry Chris Jackson/Getty Images Looking upwards Lord Elphinstone (left) speaks to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, along with Princess Margaret, Princess Elizabeth and King George VI (far right), at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh in July 1937 Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Daddy's girl Princess Anne reaches up to her father as he holds Prince Charles OFF/AFP/Getty Images Fledgling family The Queen and Prince Philip with a young Charles and Anne at Balmoral AFP/Getty Images Changing times And with later generations at Balmoral with Sarah, the Duchess of York holding Princess Beatrice, Princess Diana, Pince Philip, Peter Phillips and Prince Charles. Seated are Prince Harry, Zara Phillips and Prince William Rex Features Trooping of the Colour The Queen holds Prince Andrew in 1961 at Buckingham Palace AFP/Getty Images In training Queen Elizabeth with Princess Margaret, Prince Charles and Prince Andrew in the royal train en route for Christmas at Sandringham Reginald Davis/REX United royals The crowned heads of Norway, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Monaco surround the Princely Couple and Great Britain's Royal Family after Charles and Diana's wedding OFF/AFP/Getty Images A new era Prince William's christening in August 1982 PA Wire Strength of the Crown The Queen, Prince Charles and Princess Diana share a joke with Geoff Capes during a break in the field events at the Braemar Games REXMAILPIX All smiles Diana, the Princess of Wales, and The Queen smile to well-wishers in London on August 4, 1987. AP Photo/Martin Cleaver A happy start Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, wave to crowds on July 23, 1986 from the balcony of Buckingham Palace in London while Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Mother look on AFP/Getty Images Familiar face Prince Harry smiles during the Sovereign's Parade at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, in April 2006 Dylan Martinez/AFP/Getty Images She's a Great-grandmother The Queen stoops to talk to Prince George at the christening of Princess Charlotte on July 5, this year in King's Lynn Chris Jackson/Getty Images

The Queen has earned the respect of the people of the United Kingdom and of the Commonwealth.

And, in this birthday year, they will be out in their thousands to pay tribute to her dedication. She will acknowledge them with her public face.

But that smile will only truly light up when she is at the dining table at Windsor, surrounded by her close family  who will all raise a glass to her.
H annah Woods - whose arch eyebrow, print knitwear and encyclopaedic IQ captivated University Challenge viewers as she led her team to victory - has the potential to earn millions if she capitalises on her new-found fame, a leading PR expert said today.

History PhD student Ms Woods last night led Cambridges Peterhouse College in a comprehensive 215 to 30 points demolition of St Johns, Oxford, in what host Jeremy Paxman called another storming performance.

The feat marked a third consecutive win for Cambridge over Oxford.

Following the historic victory, three of team posed for a picture after raiding the college bar. Ms Woods tweeted the snap with the caption: "We found the store room for the college bar."

As well as the coveted trophy, Ms Woodss withering stare and naturally arched left eyebrow has won her a cult following on social media, a marriage proposal and the amazing support of former James Bond actor Sir Roger Moore.

As the only female remaining in the highbrow BBC2 quiz show she is now in position to convert her sudden celebrity into a lucrative career.

PR guru Mark Borkowski, who has worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to Mikhail Gorbachev, told the Standard that with the right team behind her she could make millions.

He said: It just shows in the age of visual messages and the gif generation just how iconic something like a raised eyebrow can be. You can become an internet sensation overnight.

If she has a good licensing lawyer, who can grasp the opportunity, she could certainly make enough money to pay for her university education.

You could see her turning up on quiz shows and chat shows. American late night chat shows love that sort of person.

University Challenge funny face

She could make a lot of money through personal appearances. Shes got such a distinct look - its all down to licensing an image.

If someone came along and did the right deals to have that image nailed for rights she could never have to work again.

However, her university supervisor Professor Peter Mandler said he expects she will pursue a career in academia.

Oscar Powell's facial expressions on University Challenge 1 /6 Oscar Powell's facial expressions on University Challenge Grin and bear it: Oscar Powell BBC Having a think: Oscar Powell BBC Tough one: Oscar Powell BBC Brain-teaser: Oscar Powell BBC Knew it! Oscar Powell BBC

He told the Standard: Im very proud of Hannah.

Shes just a very educated and outward person. She has a real poker face most of the time  as cool as a cucumber, but there are little betrayals made by the curvature of her eyebrows.

Every episode I write to her and say how did you know that? Shes got character  shes way older than her chronological age and has real maturity of mind.

Woods, who is concentrating on completing her PhD, Woods has replied to fans suggestions she should consider presenting TV documentaries, appear in Game Of Thrones or playing the next Bond villain by saying: Id just like to make it clear to anyone in charge of casting how very available I am.

Despite her newfound celebrity status Miss Woods apparently had more traditional concerns on her mind in the wake of last nights triumph.

Peterhouse-Cambridge wins University Challenge

Minutes after millions of viewers watched her collect the trophy in the pre-recorded final, she posted a photograph of herself alongside geology student Oscar Powell and fellow historian Julian Sutcliffe arms filled with bottles of spirits.

She wrote: Update: we found the store room for the college bar.
D oris Roberts, best known for her role on Everybody Loves Raymond, has died at the age of 90.

The US actress, who won four Emmy Awards for playing meddling mother Marie Barone on the show, passed away in her sleep, a family spokesperson has confirmed.

Show producer Phil Rosenthal paid tribute to the actress on Twitter following the news, writing:

Robert Voets/CBS

We loved our mom, the great #DorisRoberts. A wonderful, funny, indelible actress and friend."

Co-star Patricia Heaton wrote: She was funny and tough and loved life, living it to the fullest. To my beloved Marie - RIP.

Star: Doris Roberts gets her star on the Holywood Walk of Fame / Nick Ut/AP

Roberts, born in Missouri in 1925, became a household name thanks to her role on the sitcom, which aired from 1996 to 2005.

She was also well known for playing Mildred Krebs in 1980s TV detective show Remington Steele and appeared in films including National Lampoons Christmas Vacation and The Honeymoon Killers.

In the last two weeks Roberts had been out and about in Hollywood and even attended a SAG-AFTRA Actors Guild discussion and Hollywood and gender.
E d Sheeran will go up against the first ever artist he signed to his record label after they were both nominated for a prestigious Ivor Novello award today.

Sheerans song Bloodstream, which he recorded with Rudimental, and Wasnt Expecting That by Jamie Lawson are both shortlisted for the best song musically and lyrically of 2015.

They will face competition from London rockers Wolf Alice, who complete the category with their song Bros.

Lawson, 40, was the first act to be signed by Sheeran after he set up Gingerbread Man Records last year.

In the best contemporary song category, Cargo by Roots Manuva and Shutdown by Skepta are nominated alongside All My Friends by Snakehips ft Tinashe & Chance The Rapper.

The album award will be contested between former Supergrass frontman Gaz Coombes for his second solo record Matador, Jamie xx for the acclaimed In Colour and Irish folk bands Darling Arithmetic.

TODO: define component type brightcove

The nominees were announced at The Arts Club in Mayfair today by Paul Gambaccini.

The other main prize at the ceremony, which takes place next month, is the PRS for music most performed work, which honours the song which received the most radio airplay in 2015.

The nominees are Hold Back The River by James Bay, Hold My Hand by Jess Glynne and King by Years & Years.

Best original film score will go to either Ex Machina, Pan or Duke Of Burgundy, while the best television soundtrack winner will be from And Then There Were None, From Darkness and London Spy.

Stephen McNeff, chairman of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors which present the awards, said: The Ivors were created to celebrate the best in British and Irish songwriting and composing.

As we move into our 61st year, BASCA is delighted that these nominations reflect the health and diversity of UK music and include a raft of first-time nominees alongside past winners.


P earl Jam are the latest band to cancel a concert in North Carolina over their anti-LGBT law.

The American rockers have followed in the footsteps of Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr, who pulled out of gigs earlier this month in protest.

In a public statement, the band said that they were taking a stand against prejudice over the states controversial HB2 bill and wouldnt be playing their concert on April 20 at the PNC Arena in Raleigh.

It read: The practical implications are expansive and its negative impact upon basic human rights is profound.

We want America to be a place where no one can be turned away from a business because of who they love or fired from their job for who they are.

It is for this reason that we must take a stand against prejudice."

The band also announced that they would be making a dinaltion to a local LGBT rights group.

A number of artists have cancelled concerts in the state after an anti LGBT legislation was passed which requires individuals to use bathrooms corresponding to their biological sex.

Many have seen the law as being discriminatory towards transgender people.

Mumford and Sons played their scheduled concert last week but pledged to donate all the proceeds to a LGBT charity.


I nspirational women

This week I hosted a Young Female Entrepreneurs lunch at Eight Over Eight. I invited a selection of friends with brands and young inspirational women who I have met in the industry and those who inspire me.

I was such a fantastic way for us all to network and celebrate the hard work of women around us. Eight Over Eight showcased their new summer food menu, which was utterly delicious and we had a fantastic talk by the Step Up Club.

I wore a top and shirt by Zimmerman from Baar and Bass and boots from Russell and Bromley.

Inspirational: Rosie organised a dinner to celebrate the hard work of women / Rosie Fortescue/ Instagram

Shoe shopping

I went to Bicester Village this week to be inspired by their fantastic selection of shoes. It had been a while since I last went and it truly amazing me how it has developed over the years. The stores are unbelievable!

Shopping selfie: Rosie headed to Bicester Village / Rosie Fortescue/ Instagram

Q&A

I am so excited to share with you all an interview I did with one of my favourite boutiques Donna Ida. Donna is my total jean queen and you can read the full interview here.

Dream interview: Rosie in jeans from Donna Ida / Rosie Fortescue/ Instagram

Juicing

After a very hectic couple of months its time to re-charge and re-set my system so I am doing a Fruveju juice cleanse for a few days. The juices are delicious and after day 1 I am feeling energized and ready for the week ahead!

Juicing: Our columnist is on a detox / Rosie Fortescue/ Instagram

Fresh faced

I also had a facial this weekend by my skin hero Emma Hardie. My skin is glowing and I now feel fresh and ready to start the week ahead!

Summer scents

This week I discovered Marc Jacobs fragrances. Cotton and Cucumber smell absolutely amazing and are the perfect summer scents!

My beauty products of the week this week are Decleor Aromessence Sculpt Firming Body Concentrate. It is unbelievable at improving tone and elasticity to the skin. Bikini season is around the corner so its time to get ready! Bumble and Bumbles hair products I am also obsessed with. Whether you want to de-frizz or thicken your hair theres something for everyone.
T om Cullen is trying to persuade me that he isn't a heart-throb. "Oh, I doubt it," he says when I suggest he must have legions of female fans.

The star of Downton Abbey and Sky 1's new drama The Five then attempts deflection: "I think OT [Fagbenle, his co-star in The Five] is more likely to get the female fans. I have such a crush on him and Lee [Ingleby, another The Five actor]. God: sexy guys." He may protest but the internet thinks the same of Cullen. Stick his name into Twitter and you'll find proclamations of love and perving. I reel off a couple. "Oh God, don't read them! Twitter's wild!" He turns a fetching shade of puce.

I've met the 30-year-old at Aqua Nueva on Regent Street. He's Welsh but there's little trace of an accent. "I'm originally from Mid-Wales, and a lot of people sound like me. I moved to Cardiff when I was 12 and it's quite an aggressive accent, quite twangy. I remember my first day at school and this girl saying to me 'Arh, so you'a te nu boy, a' you?' I couldn't understand her."

He looks embarrassed again. "I was obsessed with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and wanted to be Nick Moran, so I adopted this Cockney accent and it stuck... but when I'm drunk or angry I get Cardiff." Given the recent outcry about acting becoming the preserve of the privileged, Cullen seems a welcome anomaly. The son of two former actors (they performed in "small, regional stuff") who separated before he was born, Cullen went to a "rough" school in Cardiff: Llanishen High. When he was cast in Downton, Julian Fellowes took him for lunch at the House of Lords to prepare him for playing Lord Gillingham (Cullen copied Fellowes on which cutlery to use when).

So does he think acting is too posh? "Yeah. It's becoming harder for people from poorer communities to have access to the arts. Our Arts Council funding has been cut, and in the area I grew up there isn't a theatre for us any more. It isn't part of the vocabulary." Nor was acting seen as "a viable career choice" at his school. "No one was ever told they would amount to anything, let alone become an actor. We were lucky if anyone was thinking about going to Oxbridge. So it's as much about education as it is about money."

Cullen did go to drama school, though. While there he was cast in Hot Fuzz  as a black-cloaked figure. The third assistant director was such a bully, she made him wear a stocking over his face, even when not filming. "I was basically bodydoubling Timothy Dalton. I was sitting next to him and David Threlfall, and they were talking about Wales. I was so starstruck I couldn't move. And I had this stocking over my face, and I was like ergh- he pretends to suffocate. I couldnt even pull it up to breathe.

Harlan Cobens The Five - Trailer - Sky 1

A decade later, he's the lead. In The Five, Cullen plays Mark, whose younger brother disappeared when they were children. "It's fascinating what that does to somebody's life. In school, you're constantly that kid, and everyone's whispering behind your back. Not only did he lose his brother, he lost his normality... For Mark, the grief is mixed in with the fact that maybe he hates his brother  for the fact that he ruined his life. Does he even want to find him?"

The series  best-selling novelist Harlan Coben's TV debut  is a thriller with countless twists. I've seen the first five episodes and tell Cullen I have some theories. "They're wrong! Mine were." I name one. "Maybe. Maybe not." I propose another. "I can't remember," he grins, wickedly. He has the perfect poker face; this is not a game to play with an actor.

The series will be shown in two episode blocks and was shot the same way but over eight months, so the cast were desperate to know the ending too. "It was excruciating. We were all theorising. You start to doubt everyone: yourself, your friends, your parents."

Sky / Ben Blackall

Every morning, Mark runs the route where he lost his brother. Cullen could relate to this: "I actually lost somebody [his friend James] the week before we started filming, and I decided I was going to run a lot. It's meditative. Everything else stops and you're able to think... For Mark, the running is a way of coping with guilt and grief." Whether there'll be a second series will depend on how The Five performs, but if there is, it could have different characters, True Detective-style.

Not that that means Cullen will have any gaps in his work schedule. He recently finished shooting Mine, a two-hander with Armie Hammer about marines lost in the desert ("I'm 6ft 2in and I looked like a midget next to him"). There's also Desert Dancers, in which he plays an Iranian dancer, and an improvised comedy, Black Mountain Poets: "It's about funny, talented women, a film that passes the Bechdel test by miles. It's a riot."

Cullen is also promoting The Other Half, made with his other half, Tatiana Maslany. The film's budget was so small that Cullen wrote the score, including parts on a ukulele that Maslany had bought him. She is best known as the star of Orphan Black, in which she plays a series of clones: "Every one is its own fully rounded person. It's a tour de force of acting. How she hasn't won all the awards, I don't know."

Best TV dramas 2016 1 /38 Best TV dramas 2016 The Missing The addictive and twisty second series of the BBC's crime anthology series BBC/New Pictures/Robert Viglasky Dark Angel Joanne Froggatt stared as Victorian mass murderer Mary Ann Cotton in this ITV drama ITV Close to the Enemy Stephen Poliakoff's post-war drama thriller BBC/Little Island Pictures Ordinary Lies The BBC anthology drama returns with more twisted tales BBC/Red Productions/Adrian Rogers The Night Of Riz Ahmed stars in HBO's critically acclaimed crime mini-series HBO Cold Feet The classic ITV comedy-drama returns - and it's just as good as it ever was ITV Victoria ITV have given Poldark some stiff competition with this period drama about a young Queen Victoria ITV Poldark The BBC's hit drama returns with more brooding, and less naked scything BBC/Robert Viglasky One of Us The BBC kept everyone guessing with this claustrophobic four-part whodunit Ripper Street The fan-favourite Victorian police drama returned for Series 4 BBC/Tiger Aspect 2016/Bernard Walsh The Secret Agent Toby Jones led the cast in the BBC's Joseph Conrad adaptation BBC/World Productions/Mark Mainz/Matt Burlem The Living and the Dead The BBC's gothic romance debuted in full on iPlayer BBC Preacher AMC's adaptation of Garth Ennis' cult comic book is available week-by-week on Amazon Prime Amazon / AMC Versailles A raunchy royal romp around the court of King Louis XIV, spicing up Wednesdays on BBC Two Canal +/ BBC Locked Up The Spanish prison drama came to the UK thanks to Channel 4's Walter Presents series Channel 4 / Global Series Peaky Blinders The Birmingham-set gangster thriller was more popular than ever in its third series BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd/Tiger Aspect/Robert Viglasky The A Word The BBC gave us a nuanced and emotional take on autism BBC/Fifty Fathoms Marcella Anna Friel stars in ITV's British take on the Scandi-noir thriller ITV Grantchester James Norton is back as the crime-solving vicar ITV / Lovely Day Stag The comedy-thriller from the team behind The Wrong Mans is both hilarious and chilling BBC/Des Willie/Hal Shinnie/Matt Burlem Vinyl Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger present a glossy drama about the Seventies music industry HBO American Crime Story: The People vs OJ Simpson Cuba Gooding Jr leads an all-star cast in a dramatic re-telling of the 'trial of century' BBC/Fox Happy Valley Sarah Lancashire returned as Sgt Catherine Cawood for a second series of the gritty crime thriller BBC/Red Productions/Ben Blackall The X Files Mulder and Scully return for a brand new set of mysteries War and Peace The BBC's epic adaptation of the Russian literary classic BBC/Mitch Jenkins Call the Midwife The BBC period drama moved into the Sixties for Series 5 BBC/Neal Street Productions/Sophie Mutevelian Dickensian Charles Dickens' most famous characters collide in this historical soap BBC Jericho ITV's British western set in the wilds of Yorkshire Silent Witness The hugely popular detective drama returns for a 19th series

They've been together for four-and-a-half years, although Cullen lives in Brixton and Maslany in Toronto  after meeting on the set of The World Without End. "We were in Budapest for six months. It was an ensemble so we had loads of time off and ended up riding bikes around Budapest together. It was sick."

In The Other Half they play a couple. Did he feel vulnerable doing that? He nods: "At the premiere we're in this theatre with about 700 people. It was the most horrifying experience of watching myself ever, because it was so exposing."

He loved working with Maslany, though. "To work with someone like Tat, who I think is one of the best actors of her generation, was so thrilling... Working with someone you are in a relationship with, you get to bypass all the niceties. We have a shorthand and a trust with each other that meant we could go in deep and really hard " He breaks off, blushing again. "Oh, that sounded bad."

Sky / Ben Blackall

Would he like to work with her again? "I'd love to work with her just because she's so good. It's fun to work with people who are better than you. She's also my best mate so I get to hang out with her. Maybe that's the only way we get to spend time together." They're a pretty political couple too, and recently, Maslany met Bernie Sanders. "I'm so envious." Does he feel the Bern too, then? "I'm more Bernie than Hillary  he's more socially conscious."

Cullen is also a proud feminist and a supporter of marriage equality. The first film he made after drama school was Weekend, which was banned by the Vatican for its depiction of homosexuality and drugs. Even now, do straight actors sometimes hesitate before playing gay characters? "It wasn't anything I really thought about. It's about two normal people who collide. They could be male or female. It was a beautiful love story. I love stories that are about the normal man because I believe we're all..." he trails off, not wanting to say "just people" or "the same". "Oh, it's such a f***ing wanky cliche, isn't it?"

He goes on: "Isn't someone's sexuality the least interesting thing about them? The character I played was fascinating. He and I were both in our mid-twenties, and I think we all go through some turmoil at that stage, trying to work out where we fit into the world."

Sky / Ben Blackall

He was certainly a good fit for Downton. He adored the cast and would mess around on the app Vine with Maggie Smith. Lord Gillingham was one of Mary's suitors and When he was cast fans tweeted to him: "Please look after Mary, she's really fragile right now." "Give me a f***ing break!" He was seen as the "Matthew replacement" but revelled in playing a character some loved, others hated. "I'd get tweets ranging from 'I want to have your babies' to 'You are the devil incarnate, I want you to die'."

Cullen has previously said he'd like to see a Downton film. But wouldn't Smith's character be around 120? "She must be about 120 now! You couldn't have Downton without Maggie  it wouldn't be worth watching." Perhaps she's immortal? "That's the twist of the film. It's actually a vampire movie. That's why none of them ages."

Next, he's shooting an action film, Henry. "I've never done action before. I have to get really buff and run around shooting." That would be good preparation for another film needing a new actor: Bond.

How about it? "I don't think I'll be getting the call, but they know where to find me. Maybe Idris Elba will decide he only wants to do one, and then I can take over." He laughs: "That works for me."

Follow Rosamund Urwin on Twitter: @RosamundUrwin

The Five continues on Sky 1 this Friday at 9pm
HM King Mohammed VI to Participate in the Morocco-Gulf Summit

Contact: K. Drawi, 240-994-2476

ROCKVILLE, Md., April 19, 2016 /Standard Newswire/ -- According to a statement issued on Monday by the Ministry of the Royal Household, Protocol and Chancellery, HM King Mohammed VI will participate in the April 20th Gulf-Morocco Summit which will be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.



This summit, the first of its kind, will give new impetus to the multidimensional strategic partnership between Morocco and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, the ministry underlined in a statement.



It will also be an opportunity for consultation and coordination of positions to take up the challenges and threats facing the Arab region, exchange views on regional and international issues of common interest and develop common positions on this subject, especially within this delicate regional and international context.



At the end of the summit, HM the King will pay fraternity and working visits to several countries of the region.
A Scottsbluff man faces charges in connection with the counterfeiting of money that circulated in the Scottsbluff area last month.

A charge of first-degree forgery, a Class III felony, was filed April 13 against Shawn McDermott, 30, of Scottsbluff. McDermott was arrested on a warrant Friday in Laramie County, Wyoming.

According to an affidavit, McDermott was identified as one of two men police had identified as possible suspects after they allegedly passed counterfeit bills at the Scottsbluff Wal-Mart on March 21. Police had issued a still photo of video footage to the store and sought information from citizens. A citizen contacted police and identified McDermott as one of the men in the photo.

Police made contact with McDermott and interviewed him at the police station. McDermott allegedly identified other suspects, Andrew Nuss and Billy Day, and said he had seen the men attempt to use the money to purchase drugs. However, the dealer allegedly wouldnt accept the money so McDermott said he and one of the other men, Andrew Nuss, went inside Wal-Mart to attempt to get real money. The men purchased items at Wal-Mart, then went to the return counter and returned the item.

Police obtained video footage of McDermott and Nuss making purchases at the store and returning the items they purchased for cash.

Nuss and Day were arrested and arraigned on charges on March 25 and their cases are pending trial.
LINCOLN  Gov. Pete Ricketts on Monday issued his second veto this year, sending back a bill that would create an independent commission of citizens to redraw the states political maps.

In a letter to lawmakers, Ricketts called Legislative Bill 580 a major policy shift thats unconstitutional because elected lawmakers, not members of a commission, are required to redistrict every 10 years. He argued that the commission could amount to a hyper-partisan body composed of former political party activists and elected officials.

At stake are the voting rights of all Nebraskans, Ricketts said.

State Sen. John Murante of Gretna, who introduced the bill, responded by saying he had not yet made a decision on whether to pursue an override. I want to fully understand the governors veto message and then discuss his constitutional concerns with some legal experts before I make my decision, he said.

Last week, the bill overcame a final-round stalling tactic in the Nebraska Legislature and passed on a 29-15 vote.

The bill represents a compromise between Murante and Sen. Heath Mello of Omaha, two senators politically active in their respective parties. Murante is a Republican; Mello is a Democrat.

Under their proposal, redistricting would start with the Legislative Research Office, which would draw base redistricting maps and submit those to the Independent Redistricting Citizens Advisory Commission.

The states three legislative caucuses, which are based on geographic areas, would pick the commissions nine members. No more than five could be from a single political party. They could not be lobbyists or elected officials or anyone related to or employed by an individual who is an elected constitutional officer.

The commission would redraw the states maps for six bodies: U.S. House, the Legislature, Public Service Commission, University of Nebraska Board of Regents, State Board of Education and Nebraska Supreme Court.

After at least four public hearings to gauge public opinion, the maps would be introduced as separate legislative bills and placed on first-round consideration. While the commission would draw the maps, the Legislature would still have final approval.

The commission would be a change from the special committee of lawmakers who handled redistricting in 2011, when senators fought over redrawing the states 2nd Congressional District. Lawmakers who served during that time have described the process as divisive and partisan.

Ricketts said while redistricting can be tough, handing the authority over to a board appointed by legislative caucuses is outside the spirit and tradition of the nonpartisan Legislature. The governor also said the bill presents an improper delegation of legislative power.

LB580 unnecessarily grows government by creating an unelected and unaccountable board and opens up our redistricting process to political cronyism, he said. I am vetoing this bill today to keep the voices of Nebraskans in the redistricting process.

The governor announced the veto just hours after both Mello and Murante stood next to him at a bill signing ceremony for the Transportation Innovation Act, which creates a transportation infrastructure bank.

Gavin Geis, executive director of Common Cause Nebraska, said an independent redistricting commission was upheld in Arizona by the U.S. Supreme Court, making congressional maps drawn by a commission in Nebraska constitutional. He also said the Nebraska Constitution doesnt bar redistricting authority from being delegated.

Murante said that with redistricting not happening until 2021, his top priority is to establish a process that serves the people best and conforms to the constitution. I want to get it right, he said, and Im not willing to settle for anything less than that.
The Government Affairs Committee will host a candidate forum on Tuesday, April 19. The candidates for Scotts Bluff County Commissioner will go first, from 6 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., with the candidates for Gering City Council to follow at 6:45 p.m. and run approximately 30 minutes.

A media panel will formulate questions regarding the position for which the candidate is running. No one will know what the questions are prior to the forum. Lots will be drawn to determine the order in which the candidates will speak. All of the candidates will have an opening and a closing statement in addition to the question. Answers to questions will be 1-1/2 minutes with an optional 30-second rebuttal.
The Instrumental Music Program at Western Nebraska Community College will host its annual community dinner and dance, Jump, Jive & Swing, Sunday, May 1 at the Gering Civic Center.

Jump, Jive & Swing has been an annual event since 2009 after Dr. Nathaniel Johnson, Instrumental Music Director at WNCC, received numerous requests for a community dance.

There will be a cash bar and dancing throughout the evening. Doors open at 5:15 p.m. for cocktails with music provided by the WNCC Jazz Combo under the direction of WNCC saxophone instructor Austin Sailors.

Dinner and the show will begin at 6 p.m. featuring the sounds of the Monumental Rock Combo and the Fire in the Pan Swingers under the direction of Johnson. The evening will conclude with a dance accompanied by the Fire in the Pan Swingers.

Tickets are $20, and can be purchased in the WNCC Business Office or by calling 308.635.6020 during normal business hours. Seating is reserved and tickets are available through April 29.

For more information, contact Dr. Johnson at johnsonn@wncc.edu or 308.635.6046.
For creative types, one of the scariest things in the world is to release your creation to the public. What you are doing when you let someone read that story you wrote, or look at the picture you took, or a painting you did, what you are actually doing is letting a little piece of yourself show. You are pulling back the veil and saying this is a piece of my heart, enjoy.

While that may sound a bit melodramatic, I think anyone else who enjoys creative hobbies would agree, putting your work out is terrifying. I have been with the Star-Herald six months now as a journalist, and while I enjoy many aspects of my job, one part that is still a little scary is writing a column every week. Writing news articles is fun, and I love chatting with people and hearing their stories and learning about the great things in the community. The best part of news stories is that when I put them out there its just the facts. Its not really putting me out there. Sure, my name is on the byline but really people are reading about other interesting people, businesses and activities in the community.

Unfortunately, thats not the case with my column every Tuesday. With my column I am putting out an opinion, or talking about something that is personal to me. It is taking a small piece of what makes me me and sharing it with you all. You could love it, reject it or feel completely indifferent about it. Thats scary, and its also really healthy.

2016 has been my year of doing for me. For the longest time I was just a talker. I talked about all my ideas for writing movies, and making movies. I had grand ideas of fiction films and documentaries and the stories I could tell. Yet I never put pen to paper, I never actually did it. They were just ideas. Part of that was probably because I was too afraid to put myself out there. The idea of someone not liking what I do would keep me paralyzed. Now, however, through writing a weekly column, and through being able to write about who I am every week, has helped me grow as a person. Sure, the idea is still scary, but its not crippling. Ive come to understand that I have a voice, some people enjoy it and others dont. Thats OK.

Im almost finished with my first feature length screenplay, roughly 120 pages of something that I thought was a good enough idea to turn into a movie. It was a daunting task, but I simply pressed forward and made sure to write five pages every day. Like the old Finding Nemo motto, I just kept swimming. While its felt like a big undertaking, finishing it isnt the scary thing. Its what comes next.

My writing partner and best friend Rob and I have registered ourselves for The Great American Pitch Fest in Los Angeles in May. We will be pitching this script Ive written as well as three other stories that we believe are movie-worthy ideas. Over the course of three days we will have a possibility of meeting with roughly 125 executives, producers and agents. I get five minutes to pitch with each of them. That is a possibility of 125 face-to-face rejections. My editor referred to it as writers speed dating, an apt description. Suddenly, this column seems less scary.

Yet what pushes me past the fear of rejection is the possibility of a single yes. The idea that someone would actually say they believe in our ideas for a movie as much as we did. Validating the time spent at night, mornings and in the car on road trips writing away. The idea that a dream could actually come true.

For those who maybe dont know much about the film industry, let me explain one thing. The possibility of me going out there and coming back with a million dollar deal, and a complete change in my life, is borderline zero. The days of paying a writer a cool million before the movie is even made just doesnt happen. Going to this conference is more about networking with like-minded individuals who also want to do one thing; tell a good story on screen.

Even if that yes never comes, this will be worth the experience, and if a yes doesnt come then Ill go again next year. I know now that if I keep pushing the way I have with my writing Im bound to improve. Ive also come to realize its time to put my money where my mouth is and really make a run at it. This might be the craziest and scariest thing Ive ever done, but for the first time ever I feel its worth placing a bet on myself.
This set of statistics has been discontinued. Statistical data on this topic are published in connection with another set of statistics. Data published after 5 April 2022 can be found on the renewed website.

This page is archived.

Published: 19 April 2016

Numbers of polytechnic students and degrees are rising

According to Statistics Finland's Education Statistics, nearly 130,000 students attended education leading to a polytechnic degree and around 10,000 students education leading to a higher polytechnic degree in 2015. The number of polytechnic degrees completed was 23,800 and that of higher polytechnic degrees 2,400. The numbers of both students and degrees rose slightly from the year before.

Students and completed degrees in polytechnics in 2002 to 2015

Polytechnic studies in daytime and multiform programmes

A polytechnic degree can be studied in education arranged as daytime or multiform studies from 2015 onwards. A total of 106,300 students studied in daytime programmes and 23,300 in multiform programmes. Before this, polytechnic education was arranged for young people and as adult education.

Fifty-three per cent of the students attending education leading to a polytechnic degree and 64 per cent of the students attending education leading to a higher polytechnic degree were women.

At 30 per cent of all students, there were most students in education leading to a polytechnic degree in the field of technology and transport. Of them, 86 per cent were men. The second largest field was the female-dominated field of health, welfare and sports, which 29 per cent of polytechnic students attended. Twenty-one per cent of the students were studying in the third largest field of social sciences, business and administration.

The number of students was highest in education leading to a higher polytechnic degree in the field of health, welfare and sports, 32 per cent. Altogether, 27 per cent of students were studying in the field of social sciences, business economics and administration and 24 per cent in the field of technology and transport.

The number of students was highest at Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, 16,300, and the second highest at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, 10,200. The next most students were studying at Tampere and Turku Universities of Applied Sciences, around 9,500 in both. The smallest polytechnic was the Police College of Finland with 460 students.

Women completed more than 60 per cent of all degrees

Of polytechnic degrees, most degrees were completed in the field of social services, health and sports, 34 per cent. Eighty-seven per cent of them were completed by women. The second most degrees were completed in the technology and transport sector, 24 per cent. Of these degrees, four out of five were completed by men. The number of degrees completed was third highest, 21 per cent, in the field of social sciences, business economics and administration. Women completed 67 per cent of these degrees. Sixty-one per cent of all polytechnic degrees were completed by women.

Completed polytechnic degrees by gender from 2007 to 2015

Most higher polytechnic degrees were completed in the field of health, welfare and sports, 37 per cent, and second most in the field of social sciences, business and administration, 24 per cent. Women completed 69 per cent of all higher polytechnic degrees.

The highest number of degrees was attained at Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, 2,900, and the lowest at the Police University College, 30. More detailed time series data on polytechnic students and degrees by education and polytechnic, for example, are available in the tables in databases .

Source: Education. Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Anna Loukkola 029 551 3678, koulutustilastot@stat.fi

Director in charge: Jari Tarkoma

Publication in pdf-format (209.0 kB)

Updated 19.04.2016

Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): University of applied sciences education [e-publication].

ISSN=2489-3196. 2015. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 24.10.2022].

Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/akop/2015/akop_2015_2016-04-19_tie_001_en.html
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Tuesday, 19 April 2016 10:54:01 (GMT+3) | Shanghai

Xinjiang Autonomous Region-based Chinese steelmaker Bayi Iron and Steel Group (Bayi Steel) has announced that it has inked a major asset reorganization framework agreement with Shanghai-based steelmaker Baosteel.





Accordingly, Bayi Steel will buy certain industrial gas assets of Baosteel subsidiaries by issuing shares or by cash. In addition, Bayi Steel will acquire a minority interest in some Baosteel subsidiaries as appropriate. Bayi Steel stated that the framework agreement was a preliminary agreement and some uncertainties still existed.
Tuesday, 19 April 2016 23:52:48 (GMT+3) |

Mexican steelmaker Altos Hornos de Mexico (AHMSA) has reached a payment deal with creditors in a meeting held in in Monclova, Coahuila, the steelmaker said this week.





According to AHMSA, creditors approved the companys general payment agreement, which is yet to be approved by the First Civil Court of First Instance in the Judicial District of Monclova (SP Court). The SP Court is expected to issue a ruling on the plan on May 16, 2016.





Without providing further details about the general payment agreement, the steelmaker said that independent recognized creditors holding more than 50 percent of the aggregate principal amount of recognized claims and more than one-third of independent recognized creditors approved the plan.


Tuesday, 19 April 2016 23:54:12 (GMT+3) | Sao Paulo

Brazil steelmaker Companhia Siderurgica Nacional (CSN) has filed a lawsuit to revert an already approved BRL 1 billion capital increase for local flats producer Usiminas , in which CSN has a minority stake as a shareholder.





CSN is said to have filed an injunction last week to revert the capital injection, but since the injunction was denied, CSN expects a local court to judge the merit of the case.





CSN wants the flats steelmaker to transfer BRL 900 million from its mining arm, Mineracao Usiminas (Musa), to Usiminas . It also asks for the annulment of the BRL 1 billion capital increase, as it should dilute and will be harmful for minority shareholders at Usiminas





CSN has a 17.4 percent stake at the local flats producer.




Tuesday, 19 April 2016 10:42:22 (GMT+3) | Shanghai

Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region-based Chinese steelmaker Liuzhou Iron and Steel Group (Liuzhou Steel Group) has announced in its quarterly analysis that it expects to record a net profit of RMB 15.40 million ($2.38 million) for the first quarter of the current year, compared to a net loss of RMB 327 million in the same period of 2015.





Liuzhou Steel Group stated that in the given period it was able to buy raw materials at low prices, while it also made improvements to company management, both of which factors contributed to its net profit for the given period.
Tuesday, 19 April 2016 17:05:54 (GMT+3) | Istanbul

The Malaysia Competition Commission (MyCC) has announced that it has found that there has been no infringement of the countrys competition act by the largest Malaysian flat steel producer Megasteel Sdn Bhd.

In October 2012, the commission initiated an investigation upon receipt of a complaint relating to alleged abuse of dominant position by Megasteel. The complainant alleged that Megasteel as the sole supplier of hot rolled coil ( HRC ) was charging higher than the international price of HRC . The complainant also alleged that Megasteel was competing in the CRC market and often undercut its price.

After deliberating on the written and oral representations submitted by Megasteel, the MyCC has concluded that Megasteel neither abused its dominant position nor practiced margin squeeze in the relevant markets.
Tuesday, 19 April 2016 10:41:29 (GMT+3) | Shanghai

Jiangsu Province-based Chinese steel producer Nanjing Iron and Steel Co. Ltd (Nanjing Steel) has announced in its annual report that in 2015 it registered an operating revenue of RMB 22.252 billion ($3.44 billion), down 20.20 percent year on year, with a net loss of RMB 2.432 billion ($0.38 billion) compared to the net profit of RMB 292 million in 2014.





In the given period, Nanjing Steel produced 8.4294 million mt of pig iron, 8.5904 million mt of crude steel and 7.9206 million mt of finished steel, indicating respective increases of 3.12 percent, 6.83 percent and 8.09 percent year on year.
The US International Trade Commission (USITC) has announced that it has initiated an antidumping (AD) duty investigation on certain carbon and alloy steel cut-to-length plate (CTL plate ) imports from Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Taiwan and Turkey, and a countervailing duty (CVD) investigation for imports of these products from Brazil, China, and South Korea.
Tuesday, 19 April 2016 23:25:58 (GMT+3) | San Diego

According to April 19 data from the US Department of Commerce, Enforcement and Compliance, US import tons of hot dipped galvanized (HDG) sheets and strip from Brazilian steelmakers for the month of February was recorded at 20,789 mt (census data), which is up sharply from the 2,656 mt (census data) that was imported from Brazilian steelmakers in February 2015.Sources close to SteelOrbis continue to report that US based-buyers have maintained interest in booking US import hot dipped galvanized (HDG) and Galvalume coil from this country due to product quality and price.Current ex-Brazilian pricing to the US for 0.019 x41.5625 Gr80/AZ55 Galvalume coil has remained steady since our last report a week ago, with offers still being heard in the approximate range of $37.00-$37.50 cwt. ($816-$827/mt or $740-$750/nt), DDP loaded truck in US Gulf coast ports. As with last week, sources close to StelOrbis report that this particular offer is specific to one Brazilian flats mills, adding that other Brazilian steelmakers continue to ask for higher prices.In terms of ex-Brazilian base price HDG futures offers, one mill continues to offer in the approximate range of $31.00-$32.00 cwt. ($683-$705/mt or $620-$640/nt), DDP loaded truck in US Gulf coast ports, which is also unchanged since our last report a week ago.
Tuesday, 19 April 2016 16:33:33 (GMT+3) | Brescia

Local Italian merchant bar prices have increased on the back of rising scrap prices. Downstream demand is not great but higher merchant bar prices are gaining acceptance because of concerns that prices may rise even further.

At present, base prices (*see the following note on extras) below 50/mt ($57/mt) have disappeared from the market, while most deals are concluded at average base prices in the range 60-70/mt ($68-79/mt) delivered to customer.

*In the Italian market, price extras can vary in the range of 410-610/mt ($463-689/mt) for domestic sales and in the range of 410-620/mt ($463-701/mt) for foreign markets, depending on dimension and product.

On the export side, Italian producers are offering merchant bars at 470-680/mt ($431-768/mt) delivered to customer depending on product dimensions and destinations. The next challenge will be to anticipate the reaction of customers in North Africa as Ramadan approaches since this is a very important market for Italian merchant bar exports.

1 = $1.13
Tuesday, 19 April 2016 23:56:38 (GMT+3) | Sao Paulo

A source from an integrated steel producer in Brazil told SteelOrbis that the company is paying $37/mt for sinter feed fines of 65 percent iron contents, against $35/mt last week, FOB conditions, no taxes included.





The source mentioned that the increase reflects variations of the iron ore price in the Chinese spot market and the evolution of the Brazil -China logistics costs.





According to the source, the price of lumps, under the same conditions, increased from $41/mt to $43/mt, while the price of pellets increased from $66/mt to $69/mt.




By MARK EVANS mevans@stegenherald.com During last Thursdays county commission meeting, the topic of tourism came up. First District Commissioner Karen Stuppy reported on the Tourism Advisory Council and Tourism Tax Commissions joint meeting earlier that week, at which a task force was formed. She said that the tourism department has an $89,548 budget, with $45,000-50,000
President Klaus Iohannis has signed on Monday the decree of appointment of Dragos Pislaru as Labour minister.

President Iohannis said that the new Labour Minister, Dragos Pislaru, takes over the office in a complicated context and wished him good luck and inspiration.

"You take over the office in a complicated context and I wish you good luck and inspiration," Iohannis told the new minister, whom he congratulated and wished good luck with his tenure.

"I cannot overlook an entire complex of issues expecting you, namely the public pay system. It is a complicated situation: for many years now, those in the government, in Parliament have been trying to find solutions to this problem, without having found one that satisfied everyone yet," Iohannis told the new labour minister.

He said there is a great expectation for an increase in public pay and eliminating imbalances in the system.

"I wish you, Mr Minister, that together with all the involved parties, with the colleagues in the government, with the trade unions, with all those who can contribute to this discussion, you consider this matter and find a good, widely accepted solution, which should really improve the situation in the area," the head of state added.

Pislaru was the economic advisor of Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos. Ciolos had nominated Pislaru earlier in the morning.
Pittsburgh Pipe, a supplier of steel bore casings to utility contractors, is moving its headquarters from the north St. Louis riverfront to relatively leafy Hampton Avenue.

The company recently paid $675,000 for the 13,000-square-foot building at 2331 Hampton, about a mile south of Forest Park. Pittsburgh Pipe plans to renovate the building and make the move from 170 Humboldt Avenue by Sept. 1.

Joe Bergfeld, the company's chief executive, said HQ employment will grow by 25 people over the next two years. Pittsburgh Pipe now employs 65 people in St. Louis, Buffalo, Mo., and at its manufacturing plant in Litchfield, Ill. The company plans to sell its Humboldt Avenue site.

Hilliker Corp. represented Kroner Investments LLC and Pittsburgh Pipe in the Hampton Avenue transaction. Twice previously Hilliker handled the sale of the building, which has been used as a bank, a truck dealership and, most recently, medical offices.
LONDON  Anheuser-Busch InBev , the brewer which is in the process of acquiring rival SABMiller , said it accepted an offer from Japan's Asahi Group for Peroni and a group of other SAB beer brands.

AB InBev said Asahi's acquisition of the brands was conditional on the successful closing of its takeover of SAB.

Asahi Group had said in February that it was in exclusive talks to buy SAB's Peroni, Grolsch and Meantime beer brands for 2.55 billion euros ($2.9 billion), as it looks to offset slow growth in its home market.

The sale is part of AB InBev's plan to secure antitrust approval for its $100 billion-plus takeover of SAB, agreed last year.
To shore up its bottom line, UnitedHealth Group Inc. plans to stop selling next year individual medical insurance plans in Missouri, including those offered through the federal governments health insurance exchange.

There was no information on whether UnitedHealth, the nations largest health insurer, would take similar action in Illinois.

The news comes after the UnitedHealth CEO told investors Tuesday morning that the insurer would only offer exchange health plans in a handful of states after expanding to 34 this year. Specifics on the exact footprint was not provided during a conference call with investors.

The insurer cited losses as a reason for exiting the individual exchange business. The online exchanges are a key component of the Affordable Care Act that allows consumers to buy and compare individual health plans online.

UnitedHealth sent a letter, dated April 15, to inform the director of Missouris Department of Insurance, Financial Institutions and Professional Registration of the decision to exit the exchange business altogether.

I am providing you with this formal notice of our intention to effectuate an individual market exit effective 1/1/2017  as well as our decision not to participate on the Individual Exchange for 2017, the letter states.

Current enrollees in UnitedHealths individual insurance plans in Missouri will be notified of the change at least 180 days prior to Jan. 1, according to the letter.

Health insurance broker Emily Bremer, of Clayton-based Bremer Conley, said UnitedHealth offered plans with a network that allowed patients to see a broad number of doctors at different area health systems. Its more common to see very limited networks with individual plans, she said.

The letter says the exit will not affect other UnitedHealth products, such as small and large group insurance plans, sold in the state.

Meanwhile, a UnitedHealthcare spokeswoman declined to say whether the company would exit the Illinois exchange.

The Illinois Department of Insurance had no comment, said spokeswoman Allie Bovis.

Losing money

UnitedHealth Group Inc. said Tuesday that it expects to lose $650 million this year on its exchange business, up from its previous projection of $525 million. The insurer lost $475 million in 2015.

CEO Stephen Hemsley told analysts during a Tuesday morning conference call that his company will not carry into 2017 financial exposure from the exchanges, which represent a small slice of its overall business.

UnitedHealth covered 795,000 people through the exchanges as of the end of March, or roughly 6 percent of the 12.7 million total people who signed up for 2016 coverage through the ACAs public exchanges. Some states operate their own exchanges, while others rely on the federal government to run the online exchanges.

Its unclear how many individuals UnitedHealth covers in Missouri. Insurers also offering individual plans in Missouri include Coventry, Cigna, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield and Humana.

However, a study this week by Kaiser Family Foundation for Health found that 83 percent of Missouri counties would still have a choice of at least two insurers selling exchange plans.

The study also found that consumers in two counties  Buchanan and Clinton in northwest Missouri  would be left with only one insurer to choose from after UnitedHealth leaves the market.

Industry watchers say they expect other companies to also adjust their exchange participation as they put together their coverage plans for 2017. But they dont see UnitedHealths move as the start of a mass exodus.

I think insurers will have to become more selective in terms of which exchanges and how they participate, but by far and away I think the United move will be the biggest one this year, said Mizuho Securities Managing Director Sheryl Skolnick.

UnitedHealth had been cautious about participating in the state and federal exchanges. It begin offering plans in Missouri and other states in 2015, the year following the introduction of the exchanges.

Health and Human Services spokesman Ben Wakana said the government expected insurers to enter and leave exchanges in their early years, and they have confidence that the new marketplace will continue to thrive for years ahead.

Health insurers have faced several challenges in building their exchange business. Their initial wave of customers generated higher-than-normal claims in part because some of the uninsured had not used the health care system for years and were waiting for coverage to help pay for needed care.

Insurers also have struggled in many markets to add younger consumers who dont use as much health care and could balance those more expensive patients. Insurers say they also have been hurt by expensive patients who sign up outside regular enrollment windows.

The Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune contributed to this report.
Gail Pennington Gail Pennington is the television critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Follow Gail Pennington 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

"Containment," 9 p.m. Tuesdays on the CW

Two and a half stars (out of four)

When most of us watch The Walking Dead or a movie like 28 Days Later, we dont actually worry about catching a zombie plague. The Strain doesnt make us fear a vampire virus.

But in the real world, Ebola may be rearing its head again, and were told that mosquito-borne Zika is even scarier than previously thought. Who knows what new catastrophic contagion could be right around the corner?

That makes Containment, arriving tonight (Tuesday, April 19) on the CW, horror drama of a particularly personal kind. Divorcing ourselves from the idea that the next big disease outbreak could hit home proves difficult, especially as Containment finds it striking and quickly crippling Atlanta, a large city not that different in some ways from St. Louis.

People die gruesomely in Containment, adapted from a Belgian series by Julie Plec, co-creator of The Vampire Diaries. The action starts well into the outbreak, then flashes back to brief, happier days when people could still shake hands and a sneeze didnt mean quick progression to bleeding from the eyes and nose, collapse and agonizing death.

Those in jeopardy include the obligatory busload of schoolchildren, a young pregnant woman, an immigrant family from Syria, and doctors and nurses at the hospital treating the first victims.

The government steps in to help, but the only solution is ordering containment, closing a chunk of Atlanta off from the rest of the city to stop the spread of the quick-incubating disease. Only 48 hours, the people in the quarantine zone are told. I know its an inconvenience, but trust me, it will be worth it, police insist. As if.

The point, Plec says, is to examine human behavior in the wake of a crisis, not simply to scare us.

The stuff I like to do is always grounded in really simple but honest and deep themes of love and family and friendship, Plec said when the CW introduced the series to TV critics meeting in Los Angeles.

To be able to drop that into an environment thats extremely chaotic and terrifying, its just its a different way of exploring a genre. Its a horror genre where the monster is an illness, is a virus.

While she was writing, life echoed art.

About the time I was finishing my first draft, the Ebola outbreak happened, and suddenly, it was exactly the cultural conversation, she says. You are seeing what you are trying to portray as what could happen in a very real-world situation, and then you turn on the news, and its happening in the real world.

At that point, she says, You feel this obligation to not aggrandize it and not exploit it, avoiding an icky, ripped-from-the-headlines (treatment), which of course is never the intention.

Icky, though, Containment certainly is. In just the first two episodes, there is enough blood and body fluid to make the strongest stomach turn.

Writers worked really hard to be grounded in medical realities, executive producer Chris Ord says. We had a representative from the CDC helping us with questions of this would happen or not happen. By putting in those rules ... you dont have to rely on supernatural or anything like that.

Containment adheres closely to real-life disease protocols, Plec says.

We talked to the Georgia Department of Public Health (and) were schooled very quickly in the hierarchy of how things need to happen, that it begins at a local level before it becomes the state, that the CDC doesnt immediately come in. They come in later to take jurisdiction.

Politics is always in play, Plec says.

Theres a lot of ways to ruffle feathers and to get people very upset if you make assumptions. I said, Well, when does the World Health Organization come in? They were like, Thats the worst question you could have ever asked us. We are offended deeply. So its a whole world of politics and hierarchy.

On set, actors learned they were infected when they showed up for the day, the producers said.

The makeup department essentially created, like, five stages of the disease, different looks for all five stages, Ord says. We as writers could say, This person is going to be at Stage 2 or Stage 4, or They are about to die at Stage 5. Having that structure in place made everything stay consistent and really adhere to how the disease would affect people.

The graphic symptoms also make Containment as chilling for viewers as any recent series, and those with sensitive constitutions may well find it too graphic.

Filming even left the cast shaken.

Sneezes are, like, a fear, says Kristen Gutoskie, who plays teacher Katie Frank, quarantined along with her whole class, including her young son. I was on the plane, reading a pilot on the way to Atlanta, and this guy kept sneezing beside me. And I just I could not sit still.

Even on set, When someone off camera sneezed, we just panicked, says George Young, who plays a doctor. I think a lot of people who watch this show will start to think of those day-to-day things, actually question those day-to-day things, shaking hands.

And avoid airports. Airports, Plec says, are the worst.

Executive producer Matt Corman says he can no longer take disease concerns lightly.

Often, when you have a medical fear and you talk to a professional, they say, Well, thats unfounded. People read the Internet too much. But in talking to the infectious disease specialists and the epidemiologists, they said, This absolutely could happen. Its something we are very nervous about, and the possibility of an Ebola-type outbreak sort of leaping over to America is something that keeps us up at night all the time. So Ive definitely bought some more Purell.

But the intent of Containment, Plec says, is to make viewers both contemplate how Americans react to a crisis and also ponder their own potential response.

My goal is that (the audience) will recognize the scripted drama component of the show, but also ask themselves the question that we asked ourselves when we made it, which is What would I do if this happened to me? ... What would I do if my loved one was infected? What would I do if I was stuck on the wrong side of that wall?

Its actually a very stimulating exercise to be able to sit around and discuss.

Containment may even prove to be a public service, says Claudia Black, who plays the government official trying to enforce the quarantine.

Weve heard from the showrunners from the original series (in Belgium) that its actually helping the public, she says. They are a very virus-prepared city now.

What "Containment"  When 9 p.m. Tuesday  Where The CW  More info cwtv.com/containment
On Jan. 9, 2014, Gen. Stephen Danner issued a memo that in retrospect seems like a cruel joke.

SUBJECT: Right of Civilian Employees to Present Complaints or Request Assistance from the Inspector General, it read. Danner, the adjutant general of the Missouri National Guard, sent the memo to all civilian employees of the Guard.

Just a couple of weeks later, one of those civilian employees, a video producer named Michael Sandknop, would do exactly what the memo said he could do. Sandknop, a retired Army reservist who served in Iraq, was hired to produce a television show about the Missouri Guard. He felt he was being stifled by his immediate supervisor, that regulations werent being followed, that he wasnt provided the tools for the job, that he was being set up to fail.

On Jan. 27, he complained to the inspector general, just as Danner said he could.

All civilian employees have the right to present complaints or requests for assistance to the Inspector General, Danner wrote. Heres the key passage: Department of the Army personnel are prohibited from taking any action that restricts you from filing a complaint, seeking assistance, or cooperating with the Inspector General. These same individuals are prohibited from taking any disciplinary or adverse action against you for filing a complaint 

On Jan. 31, Sandknop was fired from the Guard. More than two years later, the unemployed Arnold man is still waging war against the government he served that left him out in the cold.

And hes winning.

On April 11, Glenn Fine, the acting inspector general of the Department of Defense, reopened a federal investigation into Sandknops firing. In a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., Fine admitted that Sandknops circumstances appear to be a classic case of a whistleblower being retaliated against by people in power.

I agree that we should have conducted an investigation into the whistleblowers complaint, Fine wrote. Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and McCaskill, who has been key to pushing stronger protections for whistleblowers, wrote to Fine in February, after I had twice written about Sandknops plight. They asked him to look into Sandknops case again, and Fine admitted that the inspector generals office had erred in previously saying the case wasnt worthy of full federal whistleblower investigation.

The frustrating thing for Sandknop is that for most of the past two years, he has had a partial document from the National Guard Bureau that tells him that his complaints were validated, and that he should not have been fired. He has waited more than 680 days for a response to his Freedom of Information Act request to see the investigation into his complaint. He still doesnt have it.

But now he has at least the satisfaction that the Senate Judiciary Committee not only succeeded in getting his investigation reopened, but the inspector general also said he would order his staff to institute a more expansive approach to evaluating disclosures by contract employee whistleblowers and personnel actions alleged to have been taken against them in reprisal.

Sadly, Sandknop is not alone.

In 2014 and 2015, there were 295 complaints made to the Army inspector general by civilian employee whistleblowers. Only one was substantiated.

As Grassley and McCaskill pointed out Friday in a joint statement, It is rare for an Office of Inspector General to admit mishandling a case, and Acting Inspector General Glenn Fine deserves credit for doing his job right. Government contractors can be mistreated just like full-time employees can be mistreated. Like regular employees they deserve fair treatment free from reprisal for whistleblowing, as the law allows.

On Jan. 4, 2014, Danner knew that the federal whistleblower law protected his civilian contract employees. But when he had a chance to stand up for what is right, he apparently turned his back on his own words.

Danner could call Sandknop today, apologize and make good on the Missouri Guards failures. Or he can sit back and wait for the Department of Defense to air the states dirty laundry before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
ST. LOUIS  A crime-fighting app credited with helping to reduce crime in New Orleans will likely make its debut by the summer in the Central West End.

The app is nicknamed by some as Uber for cops in a nod to its similarity to the popular ride-hailing service. It allows users to quickly report problems, snap and send a photograph of suspicious activity, and lets police know senders exact location. Its putting more eyes  ones that also happen to look at smartphones  to work for police.

Little problems, if they get reported, and theres some action taken by the police department, they dont blossom into big problems, said Jim Whyte, head of the Central West End Neighborhood Security Initiative, a property tax-backed group that provides extra security in the neighborhood.

The app is called the French Quarter Task Force app in New Orleans, but the name will be changed to reflect its use here. It will be free for anyone to download.

The app was developed in part by Sidney Torres, a real estate developer from New Orleans who started a waste removal company after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

After burglars robbed his French Quarter home, he became frustrated with the level of crime in the city, and lambasted Mayor Mitch Landrieu in a television ad. Landrieu had known Torres for years, and challenged Torres to do something about the crime problem.

Torres threw $500,000 into the venture and teamed up with retired aerospace engineer Bob Simms to create the app, which debuted in spring 2015.

It allows for the community to have really big input and participate in fighting crime, said Torres.

The app was part of a more comprehensive effort to improve public safety in the French Quarter.

New Orleans police reported a nearly 15 percent reduction in overall crime with a nearly 36 percent reduction in violent crime in the first six months of 2015 compared to the same period the previous year. They emphasize that the app itself is meant to give people a way to report nonviolent crimes, like suspicious people, and that people should still call 911 for emergencies.

From New Orleans to St. Louis

Whyte heard about the app through a news story and talked to Torres by phone. Torres offered to come to St. Louis to give a presentation on the app, and Whyte was sold. He and others from the Central West End Neighborhood Security Initiative hope to visit New Orleans next month to see how the app works and ask questions about administrative setup.

The app will be available on a trial basis before the Neighborhood Security Initiative decides whether to buy a subscription, which costs $1,200 a year for the device for an administrator to use. With setup expenses, Whyte thinks it will cost less than $25,000. He hopes to make it available to the St. Louis police officers who patrol the neighborhood through a private security company. The officers usually patrol on bicycles or ATVs.

A police spokeswoman said the department is aware of the app but isnt involved in its planned test run in the Central West End.

Whyte thinks the app and the neighborhood would be a good match

We have a lot of transitional population with our students, visitors, foreign-exchange students, the medical campus, he said, referring to the Washington University Medical School and visitors to Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

He said some people dont like to call police for what they perceive as quality-of-life issues. He cited one time when a young woman called police to report a homeless person in the lobby of her building. The dispatcher wanted to know if the homeless person was doing anything wrong, making the woman doubt herself about having called 911.

He says the app will help with other circumstances, such as if someone sees a suspect dealing drugs and the suspect is gone by the time police get there. If the person using the app is able to take and send a photo, that can help police.

He said the goal is to give people a more user-friendly option to report crime.

If we have a persistent problem with a particular person or a particular location, if were getting 10 people calling instead of one, that problem will get more attention, he said. And over time, I think that problem will be eliminated.

He hopes other taxing districts that support private security companies will look into the app, and if its successful, he hopes the St. Louis Police Department will be interested.

I think the people are really looking for something like this, said Whyte.
ST. LOUIS  A man found dead inside his St. Louis home Monday afternoon had been shot, police said Tuesday.

After initially calling the case a "suspicious death," police are now calling it a homicide.

Authorities identified the dead man Tuesday as James Pierce, 54. He was found dead about 1:20 p.m. Monday inside his home in the 3700 block of California Avenue. The scene is in the Gravois Park neighborhood.
FERGUSON  For almost a year, city leaders and the Department of Justice were engaged in an intense tug of war about how best to reform the Ferguson police department and municipal court.

Last month in federal court, both parties agreed to a 131-page plan with hundreds of provisions to improve the municipalitys criminal justice system.

Now the public will have the opportunity to weigh in with the federal judge overseeing the agreement.

U.S. District Judge Catherine D. Perry has scheduled a fairness hearing at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Thomas Eagleton U.S. Courthouse in downtown St. Louis.

Members of the public who want to speak need to register with the court between 8 and 9 a.m.

The agreement, called a consent decree, resulted from an investigation into the Ferguson Police Department after a white police officer killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, in August 2014. Browns death has sparked numerous protests over the past 20 months.

Both local and federal authorities found there was insufficient evidence to charge the officer who shot Brown.

Last year, the results of the Justice Departments investigation were compiled in a lengthy report that accused the Ferguson Police Department and Municipal Court of numerous constitutional violations.

In February, the Ferguson City Council, concerned that the agreement might bankrupt the city, sought to revise it, provoking a lawsuit from the Justice Department.

In a letter to the city, the Justice Department suggested that the cost of proposal had been overstated. The council then approved the agreement in its entirety.

For a two-week period that ended on April 12, Perry accepted written comments about the decree; 23 letters were submitted.

Some argued that certain reforms needed to be expanded. Others said that the agreement was the most extensive ever and that the Justice Department had overstepped its bounds.
ST. LOUIS  A St. Louis officer who tried to stop a car that had been reported taken in a carjacking Monday shot and killed a passenger who pointed a gun at the officer, according to police.

The shooting was in an alley behind the 3200 bock of St. Louis Avenue, between Bacon Street and Garrison Avenue, just before noon Tuesday.

Police had not identified the male who was killed, but a police source said he was a juvenile and that the gun he allegedly pointed at an officer was reported stolen in Kirkwood in November.

The officer has been on the force for about 7 years.

Police Chief Sam Dotson said officers spotted the vehicle, which had been stolen from its owners at gunpoint Monday night, and tried to stop it. They saw three people inside the car, and pursued it for about two minutes.

People at the scene who said they witnessed that part of the incident told the Post-Dispatch they saw at least one police SUV chasing a car north on Garrison Avenue. It soon darted down an alley. Two males jumped out and ran in different directions, witnesses said. The driver of the car sped off, Dotson said.

As an officer got out of the passenger side of a police SUV to try to arrest one of the suspects, the suspect pointed a gun at the officer, Dotson said during a press conference about an hour and a half after the shooting. He said the initial information was based on preliminary statements from witnesses and the officers involved.

The officer fired multiple times, hitting the suspect, Dotson said. Bystanders said they heard five to seven shots.

The teen ran about 30 to 40 yards before collapsing, Dotson said. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

A video apparently taken by a bystander shows officers appearing to perform CPR on the injured teen.

At the same time, other officers used a Taser to subdue the back seat passenger from the stolen vehicle after he ran in the opposite direction. He was arrested near a playground, Dotson said.

No officers were injured.

The driver abandoned the stolen car about a mile away and also ran, Dotson said. Police arrested a man believed to be the driver Tuesday afternoon, but he has since been released and police are still seeking the driver.

Carjacking, chase

The car, a 2009 Honda Accord, was taken at gunpoint from a 39-year-old man about 10:15 p.m. Monday, according to police.

The victim told police he pulled up in front of a home in the 1400 block of Webster Avenue when a gunman, whom he described as in his late teens or early 20s, pointed a gun at him while he was still inside his car and demanded he exit the vehicle.

The carjacker then got into the car and drove away. The victims cellphone also was inside the car, according to police.

The scene of the carjacking is in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood less than a mile from Tuesdays shooting scene.

Police say officers spotted the stolen car about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday and pursued it into the alley where the shooting took place.

The officers who were involved did not have in-car cameras, Dotson said. It was not immediately clear whether the teen had fired at officers. A gun was found in close proximity to the man, Dotson said.

A crowd of about 50 people gathered near the scene. Activist Anthony Shahid shouted, If hes shot in the back, theres going to be a problem, and several bystanders joined in the chant. Shahid discouraged people in the area from speaking to reporters.

Dotson said the location of the lethal shot or shots is part of the investigation and must be determined by the medical examiner.

Nobody wants to get to the bottom of this more than I do, he said.

Bullets fly

Meoshia Moore, 55, was in her bedroom with her husband, sleeping in after the night shift, when a bullet cracked through the window Tuesday. She said she looked out the back window the bullet came through and saw the teen lying across the alley from her house on a car port platform.

The police were pumping that babys chest. They were trying to resuscitate him, Moore said. First it was a male officer. But he got tired and a woman (police officer) took over.

Moore, of the 3200 block of St. Louis Avenue, lives about 150 feet from where the shooting took place. The person who was shot collapsed about 50 feet from Moores home.

Henry A. Clark, who lives across St. Louis Avenue from the shooting scene, said he was sitting on his porch during the incident. He said he didnt see the shooting, though he did see the chase in the alley.

Next thing I know, a bullet goes through the window, he said of his residence in the 3500 block of St. Louis Avenue. One of my sons, who is 23 and tall, was laying down on the couch inside. Good thing he wasnt sitting up or it would have got him.

The shooting scene is a few blocks east of North Grand Boulevard near Columbia Elementary School in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood.

The elementary school, at 3120 St. Louis Avenue, was on lockdown after the shooting, said Patrick Wallace, spokesman for St. Louis Public Schools.

Dotson said the investigation was in its very early stages and encouraged anyone who saw anything to come forward.

The community has to have confidence in their police officers, Dotson said. Thats why we have these thorough investigations.

Jesse Bogan, Jessica Bock and David Carson of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
St. Louis Public Schools is seeking to recover more than $42 million in local sales tax revenue paid to charter schools over the past decade, threatening the survival of a system of independent public schools in the city.

The federal litigation filed by the districts Special Administrative Board, the NAACP and others against the Missouri Board of Education centers around the millions of dollars that charter schools each year receive from the 2/3-cent sales tax that funds court-ordered desegregation programs in St. Louis Public Schools. The motion was filed on April 11 in U.S. District Court.

City voters passed the desegregation tax in 1999 to replace state funding that had paid for court-mandated desegregation programs, such as full-day kindergarten, transportation to magnet schools, and the buses that take thousands of African-American students to predominantly white schools in St. Louis County.

The current legal battle centers on whether charter schools  which are tax-funded but independent public schools  are entitled to a share of the desegregation funds.

The court petition argues that terms of the desegregation agreement are clear: Missouri promised it would not seek in any proceeding to limit or diminish the financial relief provided for under the agreement.

When charter schools first began appearing in St. Louis in 2000, proceeds from the desegregation tax were not used to support their operations.

But since 2006, the revenue from that tax has been included in the per-pupil allotment that the state withholds from St. Louis Public Schools and instead sends to charter schools.

In 2008, district officials became aware that the desegregation tax revenue was going to help finance charter schools, the legal petition says.

Richard Sullivan, president of the Special Administrative Board in charge of the district, wrote a letter to then-Education Commissioner Kent King and then-Attorney General Jay Nixon stating that directing the desegregation tax revenue away from the district was in violation of the settlement agreement. This was having an adverse financial impact on district schools, his letter stated.

In January, the district and plaintiffs involved in the motion again asked the state to return about $42 million of the desegregation revenue to the district, plus an additional $8.8 million expected to go to charter schools for the 2015-16 school year. The letter threatened legal action if the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education did not act.

St. Louis Public Schools to ban suspensions for youngest students The district's Special Administrative Board makes significant changes to discipline policies to focus more on interventions and treatment.

On Feb. 15, attorneys representing the school district and the plaintiffs involved in the original desegregation lawsuit then met with Missouri solicitor general about the issue. On March 4, the district received a letter signed by William Thornton, an attorney for the state education department.

We believe that the state of Missouri is distributing these funds in accordance with the Desegregation Settlement Agreement and Missouri state statutes, it says.

If successful, the legal challenge could result in the closure of charter schools, which now educate about a third of public school students in St. Louis.

If it were to merely halt the flow of desegregation tax dollars to charters, their budgets would be reduced by about $800 per student, said Doug Thaman, executive director of the Missouri Charter Public School Association. This year, charter schools received $8,170 per student in state and local funding.

Missouri law states that if it overpays or underpays charter schools, the onus is on the district or the charter schools to remedy the situation in 12 payments over one year.

It would bankrupt them

As charter schools have increased in number and enrollment, the desegregation tax revenue they receive has risen almost every year. Altogether, close to $9 million in proceeds from this tax are going to 35 charter schools each year.

Premier Charter School on Fyler Avenue, with about 900 students, is estimated to receive $752,000 from the tax this school year. St. Louis Language Immersions Spanish School, with about 459 students, expects to receive $354,500.

Thaman said charter schools have every right to the funding because they are public schools in the city that also participate in the desegregation program.

We have schools that receive voluntary transfer students, he said, referring to white students in the county who attend charter schools. Those dollars were for the desegregation of St. Louis schools, part of which charter schools are providing.

But not every charter school accepts transfer students from participating school districts in St. Louis County. Grand Center Arts Academy and St. Louis Language Immersion Schools are those that do. Thaman said Gateway Science schools also do when space is available.

If the district prevails, it could change the education landscape.Thaman said charter schools dont have the financial capacity to repay the $42 million, plus the $8.8 million for this school year.

For many, if not all, it would bankrupt them, he said.

Fair share

Thaman called the legal challenge an attack on school choice and the families that have chosen charters over district schools or moving to the suburbs.

For a district that has been working to restore its reputation, to turn around and assault over 10,000 students and their families who have just helped support their tax levy, it is pretty egregious, Thaman said. I would encourage them to drop the suit.

This month, city voters overwhelmingly voted to increase the property tax levy for schools, which will raise more than $28 million annually for district and charters.

Charter schools are scheduled to start receiving their share of the tax  about one-third of it, depending on enrollment  in 2019. The proceeds could almost offset any potential loss in desegregation dollars to charter schools.

One should not replace the other, Thaman said.

Adolphus Pruitt, executive director of the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP, listed as a plaintiff, said he understands the potential disruption and impact on charter schools, which are growing in number and enrollment.

Of course Im always concerned about the impact of anything on the education of children in St. Louis, particularly those who come from an underserved population, he said. Unfortunately, in this instance, the courts asked the city to pay its fair share in the cost of desegregation. It was their intent then, and the courts intent then, that the tax would go to pay the costs of the desegregation program.
JEFFERSON CITY  Missourians who are at the end of their lives suffering from cancer could legally use marijuana to ease their pain under legislation endorsed in the House Tuesday.

On a 91-59 vote, the House gave preliminary approval to a plan Tuesday to put a question on the ballot asking voters whether they want to allow the cultivation and sale of marijuana for a very limited set of patients in the state.

The measure originally had been crafted to mirror other states in allowing citizens with certain debilitating medical conditions to qualify for special identification cards authorizing them to obtain and use medical marijuana.

But, rather than allow anyone with cancer, Crohns disease, epilepsy or a host of other diseases to legally use the drug, it now only applies to people in hospices dying from cancer.

Lawmakers said it was unfortunate the measure was watered down.

If we really want to try and help people we need to take a serious look at this and re-do what weve done to it today, said Rep. Jeremy LaFaver, D-Kansas City.

The sponsor, Rep. Dave Hinson, R-St. Clair, acknowledged the bill had undergone a drastic change, but he urged his colleagues to vote yes, saying it might have helped his late father in his fight against bone cancer.

Why dont we stand up and get the politics out of this room and do whats right for dying patients? Hinson said.

Although the proposal would limit who can qualify for the drug, it still contains a number of provisions designed to ensure the program is safe and regulated.

The Missouri Division of Alcohol and Tobacco Control would regulate the growing, distribution and sale of the drug. The agency would be able to issue up to 30 licenses for medical marijuana dispensaries and 30 licenses for cultivation centers, subject to strict regulation.

The proposed law would not allow citizens to grow marijuana at home.

Rep. Kevin Engler, R-Farmington, said the restrictions included in the measure convinced him to vote yes on a marijuana legalization bill for the first time in his tenure as a lawmaker.

By doing that, I think we have a chance of having some control over this situation, Engler said.

Rep. Mike Colona, D-St. Louis, said supporting the measure is politically risky, but its the right thing to do.

I dont like the way the bill looks now, Colona said. But, he said he hopes it could be fixed in the Senate.

Supporters urged others to vote yes because of a separate push to put a legalization bill on the ballot this fall.

An organization known as New Approach Missouri is collecting signatures to get a question on the November election ballot asking whether Missourians want to allow medicinal marijuana. It would apply to a wider population of people suffering from painful diseases.

Opponents argue that the cap on the number of licenses will drive up prices for patients.

And, they said financial restrictions on who can apply for the licenses will limit who can get into the business.

Rep. Shamed Dogan, R-Ballwin, unsuccessfully sought to remove restrictions on whether felons could be involved in the cultivation and sale side of the business.

I just think thats unfair, Dogan said. Its like youve got a scarlet letter. I would much rather have them be legitimate entrepreneurs.

I say we give them the opportunity if we keep more people out of prison, said Alan Green, D-Florissant.

The legislation is House Bill 2213.
JEFFERSON CITY  More than 80 juvenile murderers could get parole hearings as part of an overhaul of state crime laws that won preliminary approval in the Senate Monday.

Under the rewrite moving through the Senate, if a juvenile sentenced for first degree murder was younger than 16 at the time of the offense, he could be eligible for parole after 35 years. If the murderer was 16 or older, he or she would be eligible for parole after serving 50 years.

The move, which awaits final approval in the Senate and must still be taken up by the House, is a response to a number of court cases.

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sentencing a juvenile to death was unconstitutional, leaving Missouri with only one option for juveniles convicted of first-degree murder.

In 2012, the high court ruled that allowing only one option for those juveniles  life without parole -- also was unconstitutional.

In March, the states high court ruled that the group of 84 inmates should be granted a parole hearing after serving 25 years of their life sentences.

It is high time we act, said Sen. Bob Dixon, a Springfield Republican who sponsored the rewrite. We have a Department of Corrections, not a Department of Punishment.

Sen. Jill Schupp. D-St. Louis, said 50 years is too long to wait. She said a parole hearing should be allowed after 25 years.

It doesnt mean theyll be released, Schupp said.

Dixon said he believes 25 years is not long enough.

I think that it sends the wrong message, Dixon said. Were talking about cold-blooded, premeditated murder.

The legislation is Senate Bill 590.
JEFFERSON CITY  Inaction by the Republican-led House and Senate on a landmark tobacco lawsuit has come at a cost of $50 million to the state budget.

Under an agreement inked by Attorney General Chris Koster earlier this year, the Legislature had until last week to put that pact into law.

The passage of the April 15 deadline without a bill in place means the state wont receive any payment. Now the clock is ticking on lawmakers to get the bill to Democratic Gov. Jay Nixons desk before the May 13 adjournment in order to guarantee the money in next years spending plan.

On Tuesday, a coalition of business, health, schools and law enforcement groups urged the Legislature to act.

Its a very real economic impact to the state. The state is losing money that could be spent on other things, said Dan Mehan, president and CEO of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Theres a loophole that needs to be closed, added Mike Reid, associated executive director of the Missouri School Boards Association.

At issue is the states failure to adequately enforce part of a landmark 1998 settlement with Big Tobacco. The pact required smaller tobacco companies that didnt sign the agreement to pay into an escrow account.

Under the pact reached by Koster, a Democratic candidate for governor, the money would be restored if the House and Senate tighten laws on the smaller cigarette companies.

In March, Senate President Pro Tem Ron Richard, R-Joplin, signaled that there wasnt support for the agreement, which opponents say could trigger a 400 percent tax increase for the smaller cigarette brands.

Among those opposing the settlement is the lobbying group representing gas stations and convenience stores.

But Jason Lamb, executive director of the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, said the lack of money will mean a reduction in funding for law enforcement. Reid added school funding and money for roads and bridges also could be affected.

The legislation is Senate Bill 1096.
The quiz is loading

It was bad enough when Barack Obama bowled a 37 in Pennsylvania in 2008. But months later he dug a deeper hole when he: Compared his bowling ability to Special Olympics Called bowling great Dick Weber a "fraud" Accused Sen. Bob Casey of greasing lanes Lost a rematch to his daughter Malia Wrong. Right. Obama apologized for the joke, which he had made on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."

In 1948, who did Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey proclaim "probably should be shot at sunrise"? A train engineer His campaign manager President Harry Truman Chicago Daily Tribune headline writer Wrong. Right. Dewey was in Beaucoup, Ill., speaking from a train, when it lurched backward. The engineer said: "I think just as much of Dewey as I did before, and that's not very much."

In 1992, Vice Admiral James Stockdale was the vice presidential nominee on Ross Perot's third-party ticket. How did he begin his opening statement in the Oct. 13 VP debate? "Who am I? Why am I here?" "I feel like I'm an observer at a pingpong game." "We've got to clean out the barn." "If you purify the pond, the water lilies die." Wrong. Right. While Stockdale's opening line actually drew applause from the audience, his overall performance was a disaster, mocked later that week on "Saturday Night Live."

Finish the following George W. Bush quote from 2005: "Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me..." "You can't get fooled again!" "They misunderestimated me." "It's the mother in me." "Is our children learning?" Wrong. Right. Bush made so many memorable linguistic gaffes over the years that they have have a name and a Wikipedia entry: "Bushisms."

True or false: During a sound check before a weekly radio address in 1984, President Ronald Reagan said: "...I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." True False Wrong. Right. Reagan's gaffe was leaked to the public, leading the Soviets to put their army on alert briefly.

When President Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman ...", to which woman was he referring? Monica Lewinsky Gennifer Flowers Paula Jones Dolly Kyle Browning Wrong. Right. The Lewinsky scandal ultimately led to Clinton's impeachment, but he was acquitted of all charges and remained in office.

To which magazine did President Jimmy Carter admit in 1976 that "I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times"? Playboy Esquire Newsweek Guideposts Wrong. Right. While this admission hurt Carter's support among women and evangelicals, President Gerald Ford committed blunders of his own, allowing Carter to win the presidency.

True or false: During a campaign stop in Columbia, Mo., in 2008, Joe Biden mistakenly called state Sen. Chuck Graham "Billy Graham." True False Wrong. Right. His actual faux pas was worse: Biden asked Graham, who uses a wheelchair, to stand up.

Which U.S. president vomited onto Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa at a state dinner? George Bush Jimmy Carter Gerald Ford Bill Clinton Wrong. Right. After this incident, the Japanese coined a new expression, "Bushu-suru," which means "to do the Bush thing."

Which of the following was NOT said by Sarah Palin during her infamous 2008 interview with CBS's Katie Couric? "What would a maverick do in this situation?" "Our next door neighbors are foreign countries." On periodicals she reads: "All of 'em, any of 'em." "Yeah, mocked. I guess that's the word, yeah." Wrong. Right. The "maverick" line actually was spoken by comedian Tina Fey in a "Saturday Night Live" skit where she protrayed Palin.

During a quail hunt in 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot 78-year-old Harry Whittington. Who was the last sitting vice president to shoot a man? Aaron Burr Martin Van Buren Millard Fillmore Theodore Roosevelt Wrong. Right. Burr challenged Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton to a duel in New Jersey in 1804. The outcome? Hamilton died the next day.
Eight years ago, the Environmental Protection Agencys proposal to cap the radioactive material within the West Lake Landfill found little support from residents of Bridgeton and surrounding communities.

But Monday, the EPA was back in Bridgeton, again briefing the community on what such a cap would look like.

This time, though, the EPA says it is considering other approaches to dealing with radioactive contamination dumped in the Bridgeton-area landfill more than 40 years ago. Residents will have to wait until the end of the year to hear whether nearly a decade of additional studies has convinced the agency that it should remove some or all of the West Lake waste. The agency opted to re-examine the issue after a community outcry to leaving the waste in place.

As the EPA prepares to issue its decision, it billed Mondays meeting as a way to educate the community on one of the options  capping in place  to deal with the contamination. It plans to hold more meetings to discuss removing some or all of the contamination.

But just hearing the 2008 proposal to cap the waste in place disappointed longtime nuclear activist Kay Drey.

Im surprised youre even still considering the 2008 Record of Decision (to cap West Lake), Drey said at the meeting. There was such an outcry of discomfort from the public. ... Tonight is like stepping back into some time warp.

But Mary Peterson, the EPAs regional Superfund program director, said the 2008 capping proposal was never thrown out.

What has come since 2008 was a need to evaluate additional alternatives, she said.

Since then, an underground fire has broken out to the south in the adjacent Bridgeton Landfill. The EPA says it is working to hammer the legal and engineering details with landfill owner Republic Services to build a barrier separating the two landfills, but the agency says monitoring data indicate the smoldering fire is under control.

Also, recent EPA studies have identified radioactive contamination beyond where the agency originally thought the waste was confined. Some of it is beyond a protective fence surrounding West Lake, although it is buried and still within Republic Services property.

This new data will help with a more thorough evaluation of the three alternatives, said Terrie Boguski, a consultant who assists the citizen-led Superfund Community Advisory Group that monitors EPA and West Lakes Superfund process.

Boguski explained the basics behind the EPAs proposal to cover the landfill with a 5-foot cap.

The EPAs models, she said, showed that even a groundskeeper who worked on the landfill site regularly wouldnt be exposed to more radiation than the EPA allows. A 4-foot cap would keep radiation exposure to the hypothetical West Lake groundskeeper at 1 millirem or less.

A 4-foot cap would certainly be protective, Boguski said.

The average American gets more than 300 millirems per year of natural radiation and the National Research Council estimates that a dose of 1,000 millirem of acute radiation exposure would be expected to cause a 1 in 1,000 chance of cancer.

But Ed Smith of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment said removal puts the public at the lowest risk.

And the EPAs series of meetings to explain cleanup alternatives drew a rebuke from Missouri Rep. Bill Otto, D-Maryland Heights. An Otto aide read a statement at the meeting that called the EPA-sponsored meetings redundant.

The meetings are interpreted by many as an effort to undermine the Community Advisory Group, Ottos statement said.

EPA representatives disagreed and said the dialogue fostered by the citizen-led group was important.
ST. LOUIS  Thousands of strutting and scratching wild birds looking for a mate in Missouri forests instead met their doom by Wednesday, as spring turkey season moved into its third day.

Hunters have reported more than 15,500 turkeys had been killed since Monday, opening day, according to an online tally updated multiple times an hour by the Missouri Department of Conservation.

Spring turkey season runs from April 18 to May 8 and is popular in counties near St. Louis.

We happen to be in one of the better areas for turkey hunting, said Dan Zarlenga, a state conservation spokesman based in St. Charles County.

Last year, 43,991 turkeys were reported taken during the spring firearm season, which is like an extended holiday in parts of the state, especially Franklin County, which usually leads the harvest.

In 2015, spring hunters bagged 897 birds in Franklin County, followed by 858 in Texas County and 771 in St. Clair County.

The states estimated turkey population is 500,000, up from about 3,000 in the 1950s.

There are spring and fall turkey seasons. Spring is far more popular.

Hunters, dressed in full camouflage, often hide behind blinds as they try to call in a bearded Tom. Male turkeys tend to puff out their feathers and strut to impress hens.

One on Tuesday instead found Slim Grotewiel, 70, who has been hunting since he was a teenager.

I got one this morning, he said by telephone from Washington, Mo. I was sitting in the woods. It was starting to get daylight. I could hear him gobbling. I did some calling and got him to come to me.

He shot it once with a 12-gauge shotgun. He said the turkey had 1-inch spurs and a double beard, one 10 inches long, the other seven.
(Photo: Getty Images)

The quake, Ecuador's largest since 1979, hit near the northern town of Muisne, the United States Geological Survey said.

Officials declared a nationwide state of exception, which gives the government expanded authority, and a state of emergency in six of the countrys 24 provinces.

Deaths were reported in the northern provinces of Esmeraldas, Manabi and Guayas, along the northern border with Colombia.

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa has cut short a visit to Italy to deal with the crisis. "The immediate priority is to rescue people in the rubble," he said.

More than 10,000 troops have been deployed to keep order and help with rescue operations; Venezuela and Mexicos governments pledged specialist aid to help search teams.

The quake also caused hundreds of thousands of buildings to collapse from the main quake's epicentre./.
Have you been dreaming of a trip to Australia and Fiji and were looking for a group to go with? The Clayton Chamber is organizing a trip open to anyone wanting to go.

An informational meeting is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. May 5 at the Center of Clayton, 50 Gay Avenue. Call 314-726-3033 to reserve your spot for this meeting.

The trip begins Oct. 10. You'll explore the Great Barrier Reef, visit Hartleys Croc Farm and see crocodiles in their natural habitat and delve into life at the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Centre. Other highlights include a Sydney harbor tour before spending three nights in Fiji.
LONDON MARKET CLOSE: FTSE 100 ends higher; Mordaunt makes UK PM tilt

Friday, October 21, 2022 - 17:22

The pound regained some poise on Friday afternoon but remained in precarious territory, after falling below the $1.11 mark in afternoon trade.

The pound was quoted at $1.1203 at the close on Friday, down versus $1.1294 at the London equities close on Thursday. It hit an intraday low of $1.1063 not long after midday.

Sterling was hurt by continued political uncertainty. Speculation about who will join Penny Mordaunt in throwing their hats in the ring in the race for Number 10 continues. Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, one-time neighbours at Number 10 and 11 Downing Street - but now bitter rivals - have pockets of support from Tory MPs.

Adding to the pressure on sterling, disappointing UK retail sales data showed a bigger-than-expected decline in September, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics.

Retail sales fell 6.9% annually in September, with the decline accelerating from a 5.6% fall in August. It also was worse than FXStreet-cited market consensus, which had expected a fall of just 5%.

The pound had initially found some support on Thursday after Liz Truss called an end to her disastrous tenure as prime minister - poking above $1.13 - but has since been dragged lower.

The FTSE 100 index closed up 25.82 points, or 0.4%, at 6,969.73 - closing out the week up 1.6%.

The FTSE 250 lost 182.38 points, or 1.1%, at 17,206.55, but still managed to gain 1.0% this week, and the AIM All-Share ended down 1.04 points, or 0.1% at 785.40 - but advanced 0.8% over the past five days.

The Cboe UK 100 closed up 0.4% at 696.31, the Cboe UK 250 ended down 1.0% at 14,694.15, and the Cboe Small Companies lost 0.3% at 12,240.46.

In European equities on Friday, the CAC 40 in Paris lost 0.9%, while the DAX 40 in Frankfurt gave back 0.3%.

The Tories have begun to declare their allegiances in the party's second leadership contest of the year as speculation mounts over who will seek to replace Truss at the helm of the party.

Supporters of Johnson are backing the former prime minister to make an extraordinary political comeback, while ex-chancellor Sunak and Commons Leader Mordaunt also have the public support of several MPs.

Mordaunt become the first to declare her candidacy, with a pledge to re-unite the bitterly divided party.

The leader of the House  who finished third in the last leadership election  said she had been encouraged by the support she had received from fellow Conservative MPs.

There has also been no declaration yet from Sunak, who did not answer questions from reporters as he left his home on Friday morning.

Whoever does win will face an immediate test, choosing whether to go ahead with the planned Halloween statement setting out how the government intends to get the public finances back on track, Downing Street has said.

Work is continuing in Whitehall, led by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, in preparation for the medium-term fiscal plan to be announced on October 31 along with an updated set of economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility.

However, a Number 10 spokeswoman said it would be up to Liz Truss's successor to decide whether to proceed with that approach and with the same timetable.

In London, blue chip miners helped push FTSE 100 higher. Glencore gained 3.6%, Anglo American 3.1%, Antofagasta 2.7%, and Rio Tinto added 1.6%.

Retailers, however, were showing weakness after the disappointing UK retail sales data. A profit warning from Adidas did nothing to help the mood either.

JD Sports closed down 6.1%, Frasers 4.0%, Burberry 2.2%, and Next shed 2.9%.

On Thursday, Adidas lowered annual guidance as it struggles with "deteriorating traffic" in China and high inventory levels.

The sports apparel maker said it has needed to turn to "higher clearance activity" to try and shift stock.

It lost 9.0% in Frankfurt.

Deliveroo gained 3.6%.

The London-based online food delivery service said gross transaction values rose 8.3% annually in the third quarter to 1.70 billion from 1.57 billion, though orders fell by 1.1% to 72.8 million from 73.6 million.

Deliveroo said the decline in orders was due to a difficult consumer environment. With economic data on Friday showing that UK consumer confidence remains near record lows, this seems unlikely to change anytime soon.

InterContinental Hotels gave back 2.2% but reported strong revenue growth in the third quarter to September 30, saying that high global employment levels are boosting occupancy levels.

Revenue per available room, or RevPAR, rose 28% year-on-year and now exceeds its pre-pandemic level, being up 2.7% on the third quarter of 2019.

In the third quarter of 2022, the average daily rate increased by 13% compared to a year ago and was up 11% on 2019.

Chief Financial Officer & Head of Strategy Paul Edgecliffe-Johnson will leave the company in six months time to become CFO of Flutter Entertainment in the first half of 2023.

IHG has started the process of finding a new CFO.

The euro stood at $0.9802 Friday evening, down against $0.9822 at the close on Thursday.

Against the yen, the dollar was trading at JP148.03, compared to JP149.77 late Thursday. The yen was staging a fightback after the open on Wall Street, after nearly hitting JP152 during the Asia session.

Stocks in New York opened higher on Friday, with the DJIA up 1.1%, the S&P 500 index up 0.9%, and the Nasdaq Composite was 0.6% higher.

Brent oil was quoted at $92.84 a barrel late Friday, down from $93.29 late Thursday. Gold was quoted at $1,643.70 an ounce Friday, up against $1,641.90 from Thursday.

In the international economics events calendar next week, Monday will be dominated by a slew of composite PMIs, with Japan overnight followed by Germany, eurozone and the UK in the morning then the US in the afternoon. A quiet Tuesday will be headlined by a US house price index.

On Wednesday, there is Chinese GDP, retail sales and industrial production overnight, then on Thursday attention will be on the European Central Bank interest rate decision at 1315 BST. Friday will be headlined by a Bank of Japan rate decision.

In the local corporate calendar on Monday, there are half-year results from Dr Martens, while education publishing firm Pearson will issue a third quarter update.

Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Two Avon Navigation Trust launches escorted John Filgate's boat Rita Ellen carrying his coffin down the River Avon to Holy Trinity Church. Photo: Mark Williamson

THE owner of Bancroft Cruisers in Stratford-upon-Avon made one final journey on his beloved trip boat on Monday.

John Macartney-Filgate's coffin was transported along the Avon in The Rita Ellen to Holy Trinity Church where his funeral was held.

It was escorted by two Avon Navigation Trust launches to the landing outside the church.

John Macartney-Filgate.

He died last month, aged 75, after a month in hospital.

Born in Birmingham in 1941, Mr Macartney-Filgate grew up in Solihull. He was educated at Oundle, one of Britains leading public schools.

Throughout his life he had a passion for classic cars  both building, maintaining and racing with some success. When he moved to Stratford he set up an engineering business specialising in building small marine engines. ith his lifelong partner, Rita Curnin-Waterson, he started a boat hire business and from 1989 to 1994 supported Ritas son, Mark Curnin-Waterson, in the life of the restaurant boat, the Lady Camelot.

Throughout his time in Stratford John worked closely with the Lower and Upper Avon Navigation Trusts and was, with others such as David Hutchins and Dudley Matthews, instrumental in re-establishing the navigation from Evesham to Stratford  culminating in the opening of the Stratford Lock by the Queen Mother in 1974.

For many years he owned and ran the successful passenger boat sightseeing company, Bancroft Cruisers.

He was regularly seen driving The Grace Darling, The Princess Marina and, from 2008, The Rita Ellen, a wide beam cruiser named after his partner Rita.

Latterly he was chairman of the Stratford and Warwick Waterways Trust  a charity whose main objective is to reopen the navigation from Stratford to Warwick.

Mr Macartney-Filgate was well-loved by all who met him and renowned for his extensive knowledge of classic cars and the Stratford Avon.

His funeral was followed by cremation at Oakley Wood.
Matrox Unveils Monarch LCS  Full-Featured Lecture Capture Appliance at a Breakthrough Price

Easy-to-use H.264 encoder simultaneously captures high-resolution computer presentations and live HD video for streaming and recording

Montreal, QC( )

Matrox Video today introduced Monarch LCS, a compact, easy-to-use, two-input lecture capture appliance priced at just $2,495 US. Monarch LCS accepts video from any SDI or HDMI camera and presentation content over HDMI from computers. The inputs can be encoded independently and in sync for use with the latest multi-stream video players. Alternatively, the inputs can be combined prior to encoding in a variety of production layouts, including picture-in-picture and side-by-side, for use with standard video players. Monarch LCS will be shown for the first time at the 2016 NAB Show (Las Vegas, April 1821) in booth SL6317.

Online video has become a must for student engagement and schools around the world, big and small, are looking to deliver their content simply and effectively, said Dan Maloney, technical marketing manager, Matrox Video. With Monarch LCS, every classroom and presentation venue can now be affordably equipped for streaming and recording high-quality video and high-resolution, computer-generated content.

Monarch LCS is a reliable, standalone network appliance that IT administrators will find simple to set up and integrate into video management systems (VMS) such as Opencast and Kaltura and learning management systems (LMS) such as Moodle. Its intuitive web interface lets users easily define profiles for live streamed and recorded lectures mixing camera and presentation material from SDI and HDMI sources. Powerful scaling, deinterlacing and noise reduction engines ensure only pristine images are sent to the encoders. For streaming purposes, the encoders use either RTMP or RTSP protocol to deliver live streams to local media servers or cloud-based CDNs. In recording applications, the encoders write MP4 or MOV files directly to network-mapped drives, eliminating the need for post-lecture file transfer, or alternatively to local USB drives or SD cards.

Monarch LCS comes complete with a comprehensive set of HTTP-based control APIs that let network- or cloud-based video management platform developers and A/V integrators harness the streaming and recording capabilities of Monarch LCS appliances from within their own environments to create customized user experiences. A control module for Crestron room media controllers is also available.

Price and availability

Matrox Monarch LCS will be available in Q2 2016 through a worldwide network of authorized dealers priced at $2,495 US not including local taxes and delivery. To be notified when Monarch LCS becomes available, register here.

About Matrox Video

Matrox Video is a technology and market leader in the field of 4K, HD and SD digital video hardware and software for accelerated H.264 encoding, realtime editing, audio/video input/output, streaming, A/V signal conversion, capture/playout servers, channel-in-a-box systems and CGs. Matrox's Emmy award-winning technology powers a full range of multi-screen content creation and delivery platforms used by broadcasters, telcos, cable operators, post-production facilities, live event producers, videographers and A/V professionals worldwide. Founded in 1976, Matrox is a privately held company headquartered in Montreal, Canada. For more information, visit www.matrox.com/video.
By Jonathan Saul and Parisa Hafezi

LONDON (Reuters) - Iran faces a struggle to increase oil exports because many of its tankers are tied up storing crude, some are not seaworthy, and foreign shipowners remain reluctant to carry its cargoes.

Tehran is seeking to make up for lost trade to Europe following the lifting of EU sanctions imposed in 2011 and 2012, which deprived it of a market that accounted for over a third of its exports and left it relying completely on Asian buyers.

Iran has 55-60 oil tankers in its fleet, a senior Iranian government official told Reuters. He declined to say how many were being used to store unsold cargoes, but industry sources said 25-27 tankers were parked in sea lanes close to terminals including Assaluyeh and Kharg Island for this purpose.

Asked how many tankers were not seaworthy and needed to go to dry docks for refits to meet international shipping standards, the senior official said: "Around 20 large tankers ... need to be modernized."

A further 11 Iranian tankers from the fleet were carrying oil to Asian buyers on Tuesday, according to Reuters shipping data and a source who tracks tanker movements. That was broadly in line with the number consistently committed to Asian runs since sanctions were lifted in January, putting more strain on the remaining available fleet.

This means foreign ships are needed for a big export push to Europe and elsewhere, said the industry sources, as Iran looks to meet its target of reaching pre-sanctions sales levels this year. But many owners, who are not short of business in a booming tanker market, are unwilling to take Iranian cargoes.

The main reason is that some U.S. restrictions on Tehran remain in place and prohibit any trade in dollars or the involvement of U.S. firms including banks - a major hurdle for the oil and tanker trades, which are priced in dollars.

Eight foreign tankers, carrying a total of around 8 million barrels of oil, have shipped Iranian crude to European destinations since sanctions were lifted in January, according to data from the tanker-tracking source and ship brokers.

That equates to only around 10 days' worth of sales at the levels of pre-2012, when European buyers were purchasing as much as 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) from the OPEC producer.

So far no Iranian tankers have made deliveries to Europe, according to data from the tanker-tracking source.

'PLENTY OF OTHER BUSINESS'

Paddy Rodgers, chief executive of leading international oil tanker company Euronav , said at present there was "no great urgency to do business in Iran".

"There is not a premium to do business in Iran and there is plenty of other business - the markets are busy, rates are good. So there is no stress on wanting to do it," he told Reuters.

"I don't really want to set up a euro bank account in Dubai in order to trade with Iran - that would crazy."

Michele White, general counsel with INTERTANKO, an association which represents the majority of the world's tanker fleet, said: "We have witnessed a reluctance by our members generally to return to Iranian trade given the prohibition on use of the U.S. financial system  essentially no U.S. dollars."

The senior Iranian government official, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, acknowledged his country was finding it difficult to hire foreign tankers.

"We are working on the problems. There are various issues involved, financial, banking and even insurance. It has improved a little bit since the lifting of sanctions but we still face serious problems."

Asked if this and the need to modernize some of the domestic fleet was holding back exports, he said: "Of course it does."

The strain on Iran's fleet is partly because it has struggled to gain access to land storage sites around the world, as sanctions shut it out of the international financial network, making it more reliant on floating storage than many oil-producing rivals including Saudi Arabia.

The problem has been compounded by a global oversupply of oil, and the industry sources estimated Iranian tankers were storing 45-50 million barrels of unsold crude.

POLITICAL RISK

Two other sources with other leading oil tanker operators echoed the concerns of Rodgers and White, and said they were not doing Iran deals at the moment.

One of the two sources said with a new U.S. president to take office in January, tanker owners were unsure whether there could be any change to the nuclear deal Washington and other world powers agreed with Iran which led to the end of sanctions.

"It does not appeal to them to take on the risk and the uncertainty of the U.S. connection and future U.S. political policy that would come into play," said the source, who declined to be named, citing sensitivity over potential Iranian trade.

Gavin Simmonds, of the UK Chamber of Shipping trade association, said of the U.S. presidential timing and the global oil oversupply: "Iran is rejoining the market at the worst possible time."

Before 2012 Iran exported around 2 million bpd, with more than half going to Asia, mainly China, South Korea, India and Japan. Tehran has been banned from selling oil to the United States for decades.

The tanker industry has cited other problems posed by Iranian business. Ship insurers have plugged a shortfall in cover that had been caused by U.S. reinsurers being restrained by Washington's sanctions, although tanker owners say it comes with risks and it could also be withdrawn if, for instance, wider sanctions are reimposed.

"Shipping insurance is still a problem. We see many buyers in the market still avoid buying from Iran," Fereidun Fesharaki, founder of energy consultancy FGE, wrote in a note.

Tanker industry sources also pointed to reports that Iran's arch rival Saudi Arabia had banned Iranian-flagged ships from entering its waters with. Separate reports indicated Saudi ally Bahrain had imposed a ban on any vessels that visited Iran as one of its last three port calls.

"Any spread of the Bahrain-style ban on foreign ships that have recently called Iran can only fuel this hesitancy for owners who trade in the Middle East region," said INTERTANKO's White.

(Additional reporting by Libby George; Editing by Pravin Char)
A pump jack is seen near sunflowers in Guthrie, Oklahoma in a September 15, 2015 file photo. REUTERS/Nick Oxford/Files

By Devika Krishna Kumar

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices jumped more than 3 percent on Tuesday after a strike by workers in Kuwait nearly halved the OPEC member's crude production, overshadowing bearish sentiment after Sunday's failure by producers to agree to freeze output levels.

Thousands of Kuwaiti oil workers remained on strike for a third day on Tuesday to protest against planned public sector pay reform, cutting crude output to 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd), according to an oil spokesman cited by news agency KUNA.

That is little more than half of Kuwait's average output of 2.8 million bpd in March.

Reports of power outages leading to output declines of about 200,000 bpd in Venezuela and a pipeline fire in Nigeria that may have cut production by 400,000 bpd, along with the upcoming refinery maintenance season helped to support prices, traders said.

"The Kuwait strike in particular is a major factor. It was a bolt out of the blue in terms of how much oil came off the market so quickly," said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital, a New York energy hedge fund.

"Usually these things have a ramp down period but this seems to be able to flick a switch ... It's supportive for the market for now."

A spokesman for the Kuwaiti oil and gas workers said on Tuesday their strike would continue until planned public sector pay reforms are canceled.

Brent crude futures settled up $1.12 at $44.03 a barrel while U.S. crude settled $1.30 higher at $41.08.

Short covering added to a rally catalyzed by the S&P 500 index crossing a key level that triggered buying in oil.

Analysts said Kuwait's disruption would likely be brief and expect prices to be pressured again as the market is likely to refocus on the oversupply given the failure of major exporters on Sunday to agree to freeze output to avoid worsening the glut.

A deal to freeze oil output by OPEC and non-OPEC producers fell apart at the weekend meeting in Doha after Saudi Arabia demanded Iran join in despite calls on Riyadh to save the agreement and help prop up crude prices.

Iran has repeatedly said it would prioritize regaining pre-sanctions crude output levels over discussing an output freeze.

Tehran's crude oil exports have risen to around 1.75 million bpd so far in April, according to an industry source and shipping data. Exports averaged about 1.6 million bpd in March

Other exporters who participated in the failed Doha talks have already shifted attention back to their own interests. Russia has indicated it hopes to increase output this year.

The market is also awaiting data from industry group American Petroleum Institute (API) at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time, expected to show a rise in U.S. crude oil inventories last week.

(Additional reporting by Karolin Schaps in London and Henning Gloystein in Singapore; Editing by Andrew Hay and Chris Reese)
This week, The San Jose Mercury News published two articles about K12 Inc. and the California Virtual Academies (CAVA)  eleven independent public charter schools  that are inaccurate, incompletely researched, and missing the balanced input of many parents whose children have attended and been served by these schools.

Most concerning, these stories cite several politically-driven claims about the CAVA schools that are substantially similar, and in some cases identical, to allegations made by the California Teachers Association (CTA) in their multi-year campaign to unionize the CAVA schools. These issues have been addressed and in many instances roundly refuted. The paper fails to disclose that the few teachers quoted in the article represent a small subset of CAVA teachers organizing on behalf of CTA. The union opposes charter schools, and has also lobbied for legislation aimed at shutting down CAVA schools and other similar public schools of choice.

Parents of children with a variety of educational needs choose CAVA schools: students with special needs who are not receiving the services they require at their local schools; children who struggle in traditional schools; students who are bullied; academically gifted children; and many more. We believe parents know their children best, and we respect the choices they make.

The Mercury News articles are inconsistent with the positive experiences of thousands of California parents who thoughtfully choose CAVA schools for their children. They ignore the experience of the majority of CAVA teachers and educators who are passionate about their work, committed to these schools, and who reject the self-serving goals of the CTA. And they fail to represent fairly the volunteersmany of whom are themselves parents of CAVA studentswho serve on the independent, nonprofit CAVA schools' boards. The Mercury News should have considered the input of a wider sample of parents and teachers.

K-12 public schools are highly regulated entities, and as a services provider to public schools across the U.S. we take compliance very seriously. Each CAVA school is governed by a separate and independent charter school board. Each school follows state and federal regulations, and operates under California's Independent Study program designed for non-classroom-based educational programs. These schools are open, transparent, and accountable. They operate under multiple layers of oversight at the state and local levels, undergo annual independent financial and programmatic audits, and have strong records of compliance.

K12's mission is to serve our school partners and to assist them in making student achievement the first goal. Where there are deficiencies, we make improvements. If mistakes are made, we correct them. We work constantly to enhance our products and academic servicesand, in turn, to facilitate student success. K12 is an organization of educators, teachers, and professionals who are dedicated to providing quality services to the schools and students we are privileged to serve. Unfortunately, these articles do not fairly tell that side of the story.
Fueled by Ramen/AtlanticYoung the Giant has released the first track from their forthcoming, third album, Home of the Strange. The song, inspired by early 20th century German writer Franz Kafka, is called "Amerika," and it is streaming now on YouTube.

"We find ourselves searching for our own ethics in between the often-contradictory beliefs of this polarized American Modern Age and those of the romanticized cultures of our forefathers," says Young the Giant of "Amerika." "Our perspective is irreversibly tinged with this rhetoric of the immigrant conscience and guilt. 'Amerika' explores the contradictions of our psyche and America at large."

Home of the Strange will be released August 12.

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
A bottle of Johnson and Johnson Baby Powder is seen in a photo illustration taken in New York, February 24, 2016. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/Illustration

By Ransdell Pierson

(Reuters) - Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) beat quarterly earnings forecasts on strong prescription drug revenue and a weakening dollar, and it reassured investors that it did not expect its blockbuster Remicade arthritis drug to face U.S. competition this year.

The company also said on Tuesday that it remained on track to boost profit margins significantly this year, in part from cost cuts.

In a possibly encouraging signal for other drugmakers that will be reporting results in coming weeks, J&J said the strong dollar took a 3.3 percent bite out of global sales in the first quarter - half the impact in the prior period - as the currency's value eased somewhat.

J&J shares rose as much as 2.7 percent to an all-time high of $113.95. The ARCA Pharmaceutical Index of large drugmakers was up 0.6 percent, outpacing slight gains for the broad stock market.

Until this year, J&J shares had underperformed the healthcare sector every year since 2009 as the company grappled with patent expirations on important drugs and a slew of product recalls and manufacturing setbacks for its consumer division.

But J&J has recently introduced a number of fast-growing medicines. Pharmaceutical sales rose 5.9 percent to $8.2 billion in the first quarter, with increased demand for the Imbruvica cancer drug and Invokana diabetes treatment.

Sales of Remicade, J&J's biggest product, jumped 11.2 percent to $1.78 billion. But investors have been concerned it could be hurt by Inflectra, a cheaper version developed by South Korea's Celltrion Inc <068270.KQ> in partnership with Pfizer Inc (NYSE: PFE). U.S. regulators approved Inflectra earlier this month, but a continuing patent battle between J&J and Celltrion has delayed its introduction.

J&J Chief Financial Officer Dominic Caruso said on Tuesday that strong patents should shield Remicade from biosimilar competition in 2016 and potentially for years to come.

The company is upgrading plants that make its consumer medicines, including Tylenol, to address longstanding quality control problems.

J&J is also restructuring its struggling medical device business to focus on areas like artificial knees and devices for trauma surgery.

Medical device sales slipped 2.4 percent to $6.1 billion in the quarter, while sales of consumer products fell 5.8 percent to $3.2 billion.

Total sales rose 0.6 percent to $17.48 billion, matching the analysts' average estimate compiled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Net earnings fell to $4.29 billion, or $1.54 per share, from $4.32 billion, or $1.53 per share, a year earlier.

Excluding special items, J&J earned $1.68 per share, topping Wall Street expectations of $1.65.

"Overall it was a pretty solid quarter, with J&J beating earnings estimates and delivering on sales," said Edward Jones analyst Ashtyn Evans.

J&J said that based on current exchange rates, it expected sales of $71.2 billion to $71.9 billion in 2016, up from its January forecast of $70.8 billion to $71.5 billion. It raised its earnings outlook to between $6.53 and $6.68 a share from a prior range of $6.43 to $6.58.

(Reporting by Natalie Grover in Bengaluru and Ransdell Pierson in New York; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
LEHI, Utah, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EY announced that DigiCert CEO Nicholas Hales is a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur Of the Year 2016 Award in the Utah region. The awards program, which is celebrating its 30th year, recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence and extraordinary success in such areas as innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities. Hales was selected as a finalist by a panel of independent judges. Award winners will be announced at a special gala event on June 4, 2016 at The Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City.

"Being named a finalist by EY is a great honor, particularly because of the recognition it brings for our employees in their efforts to strive for excellence and provide a superior experience for our customers," said Hales. "The exploding internet connectivity of all things in our lives is exciting but also heightening the need for leadership, innovation and strong security practices. At DigiCert, we strive every day to raise the bar for industry and help organizations achieve strong security at the greatest efficiencies possible."

Continued Hales, "We're excited about what we've accomplished so far and look forward to an even better future, with strong growth."

Hales prescribes to a business model that prioritizes people first: taking great care of the company's culture and its employees so that they then do everything possible to help DigiCert's customers succeed. While pushing the envelope with new technology, Hales has ensured that as DigiCert continues to grow the company maintains a personal touch with its customers. This includes an always-staffed and -available customer support team to help customers navigate digital certificate management.

DigiCert also leads its market through standards setting and innovation. The company participates in more than 60 consortia and drafts many ballots and initiatives to elevate industry practices. DigiCert has led the way as the first to implement new technologies such as Google's Certificate Transparency, Directed Exchange for secure health information sharing, Extended Validation Code Signing, and customer-friendly features that include unlimited certificate reissues and licensing.

DigiCert has innovated with CertCentral, a comprehensive digital certificate management platform, and other tools to automate and simplify processes for businesses. The company is working with many leading platform providers, device manufacturers, healthcare organizations and industrial systems to implement key protections for connected devices and other IoT deployments.

Recently, DigiCert attracted major investments from Thoma Bravo and TA Associates to help it expand. In 2015, the company purchased Verizon's Enterprise SSL business unit and partnered with Cybertrust Japan to increase its reach throughout Europe and Asia.

Now in its 30th year, the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year program has expanded to recognize business leaders in more than 145 cities in more than 60 countries throughout the world.

Regional award winners are eligible for consideration for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year National program. Award winners in several national categories, as well as the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner, will be announced at the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year National Awards gala in Palm Springs, California on November 19, 2016. The awards are the culminating event of the EY Strategic Growth Forum, the nation's most prestigious gathering of high-growth, market-leading companies.

Sponsors

Founded and produced by EY, the Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards are nationally sponsored by SAP America, Merrill Corporation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. In the Utah Region, sponsors also include Beehive Startups, The Community Foundation of Utah, Corporate Alliance, Digital Bytes Production & Design, Diversified Insurance Group, Raymond James Financial Services, Inc., Strong & Hanni Law Firm, The Summit Group Communications, and Utah Business Magazine.

About DigiCert, Inc.DigiCert is a premier, trusted provider of enterprise security solutions with an emphasis on authentication and encryption via managed PKI and high-assurance digital certificates for the web and the Internet of Things. Headquartered in Lehi, Utah, DigiCert is trusted by more than 115,000 of the world's leading government, finance, healthcare, education, and Fortune 500 organizations. DigiCert has been recognized with dozens of awards for providing enhanced customer value, premium customer service, and market growth leadership. For the latest DigiCert news and updates, visit digicert.com or follow @digicert.

About EY Entrepreneur Of The YearEY Entrepreneur Of The Year is the world's most prestigious business award for entrepreneurs. The unique award makes a difference through the way it encourages entrepreneurial activity among those with potential and recognizes the contribution of people who inspire others with their vision, leadership and achievement. As the first and only truly global award of its kind, Entrepreneur Of The Year celebrates those who are building and leading successful, growing and dynamic businesses, recognizing them through regional, national and global awards programs in more than 145 cities in more than 60 countries.

About EYEY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. The insights and quality services we deliver help build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. We develop outstanding leaders who team to deliver on our promises to all of our stakeholders. In so doing, we play a critical role in building a better working world for our people, for our clients and for our communities.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356546 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160119/323390LOGO

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/digicert-ceo-nicholas-hales-named-2016-ey-entrepreneur-of-the-year-utah-region-finalist-300253200.html

SOURCE DigiCert, Inc.
Flexjet will also begin taking Legacy 450 deliveries later this spring

Flexjet experiencing strong market demand for new technology, clean sheet design aircraft

MELBOURNE, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Flexjet LLC, offering travelers access to the worlds most luxurious fleet of private jets, today accepted delivery of the 1,000th business jet ever built by Embraer Executive Jets, a division of Embraer S.A. (NYSE: ERJ; BM&FBOVESPA: EMBR3). The midsized Legacy 500 jet was delivered at the Embraer Executive Jets' Customer Center in Melbourne, Florida, and is part of an order Flexjet placed with Embraer in 2015 that includes the new Legacy 450, due to enter service later this spring.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419006037/en/

The Embraer Legacy 500 is part of Red Label by Flexjet, which features access to the worlds newest fractional private jet fleet, flight crews dedicated to a single aircraft and artisan cabin interiors. (Photo: Business Wire)

Taking a milestone delivery from Embraer, one of the worlds most innovative OEMs (original equipment manufacturer), together with Flexjets commitment to establishing their midsized program via the Legacy 500 and 450, deepens a powerful partnership. That relationship began with the now-iconic Phenom 300 super-light jet, which has been enormously popular among Flexjet Owners. Over the past 15 years, 50 Embraer aircraft have joined the combined fleets managed by Directional Aviation, Flexjets parent.

Embraers Legacy midsized aircraft are a natural progression for us, since they meet a growing demand for jets with larger cabins, longer range capabilities and industry-leading operating economics, said Michael Silvestro, Flexjets Chief Executive Officer. As part of the Red Label by Flexjet fleet, the Legacy 500 and 450 will effectively deliver the speed, luxury and performance our Owners expect.

The Legacy 500 is part of Flexjets Red Label, which features access to the worlds newest fractional private jet fleet, flight crews dedicated to a single aircraft and artisan cabin interiors unlike any ever available before from a fractional operator. Red Label jets provide premium comfort, customization and service that simulate a private flying experience as rewarding and empowering as owning ones own aircraft.

This will be Flexjets fourth Legacy 500 aircraft delivery, and Owner response has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, with shares selling beyond expectations.

The Legacy 500 set six world speed records for its class in 2015, has the largest cabin in its class and can carry eight passengers in the Flexjet LXi configuration. This aircraft has a generous 150 cubic feet of luggage space and seven sound reduction design elements. It is the first midsized business jet with digital flight controls, based on Fly-By-Wire technology. It can fly at 45,000 feet and is powered by a pair of Honeywell HTF7500E engines, the most environmentally friendly in their class. With the ability to take off from airfields as short as 4,084 feet, the Legacy 500 has a range of 3,600 miles or 5,793 kilometers.

Im thrilled to celebrate this milestone with our global team. In a remarkably short period we have populated the business aviation market with the most advanced and reliable aircraft in the industry. Delivering 1,000 business jets to more than 60 countries in just over a decade reflects our strong ability to listen to our customers and respond to them with innovative solutions for different needs, said Marco Tulio Pellegrini, President & CEO, Embraer Executive Jets. We are especially pleased to celebrate this important achievement with our distinguished customer, Flexjet, which has honored us with their trust since we first entered business aviation.

About FlexjetFlexjet first entered the fractional jet ownership market in 1995, and celebrated its 20th anniversary in May 2015. Flexjet offers fractional jet ownership and leasing. Flexjets fractional aircraft program is the first in the world to be recognized as achieving the Air Charter Safety Foundations Industry Audit Standard, and Flexjet is the first and only company to be honored with its 17th FAA Diamond Award for Excellence. Flexjets fractional program fields an exclusive array of business aircraftsome of the youngest in the fractional jet industry, with an average age of approximately six yearsincluding their LXi Cabin Collection consisting of the Learjet 75LXi, Challenger 350, the Embraer Legacy 450, Global Express and the Gulfstream G450, G500 and G650, and the Aerion AS2 supersonic business jets. In addition, the overall jet collection includes the Embraer Phenom 300, Challenger 300 and Challenger 605. Flexjet is a member of the Directional Aviation family of companies. For more details on innovative programs and flexible offerings, visit www.flexjet.com or follow us on Twitter @Flexjet.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419006037/en/

The Hubbell Group, Inc.

Nicholas Parmelee, 781-878-8882 (office)

216-406-5602 (cell)

[email protected]

Source: Flexjet LLC
CLEVELAND, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc. (NYSE: HY) will release 2016 First Quarter financial results and will file its 2016 First Quarter 10-Q after the close of the market on Wednesday, April 27, 2016.

The Company will also host a conference call on Thursday, April 28, 2016 to discuss its results for the 2016 first quarter.

Conference Call: Thursday, April 28, 2016 Time: 11:00 a.m. (Eastern Time) Telephone: (877) 201-0168 (Toll Free) or (647) 788-4901 (International) Conference ID: 87345894 (Call in at least five minutes before start time) For Replay Call: (855) 859-2056 (Toll Free) or (404) 537-3406 (International) Conference ID: 87345894

This call will also be broadcast live and available for replay over the Internet. To access the call, go to www.hyster-yale.com. Please allow 15 minutes to register, download and install any necessary software.

Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc., headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, through its wholly-owned operating subsidiary, Hyster-Yale Group, Inc., designs, engineers, manufactures, sells and services a comprehensive line of lift trucks and aftermarket parts marketed globally primarily under the Hyster and Yale brand names. Nuvera Fuel Cells, LLC, a subsidiary of Hyster-Yale Group, is an alternative-power technology company focused on fuel-cell stacks and related systems, on-site hydrogen production and dispensing systems. For more information about Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc. and its subsidiaries visit the Company's website at www.hyster-yale.com.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hyster-yale-materials-handling-inc-announces-dates-of-2016-first-quarter-earnings-release-and-conference-call-300253269.html

SOURCE Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc.
Business and IT transformation are discussion topics

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- MEGA International and Fannie Mae executives will address attendees of the 2016 Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit May 11-12 in National Harbor, MD.

Fannie Mae directors  David Baldwin, director, Enterprise Architecture; Marcus Bontrager, director, Business Architecture; and Daniel Jamieson, director, Business Architecture  will discuss Blueprint for Success: How Architecture is Enabling Fannie Maes Transformation.

Fannie Mae has emerged from the housing crisis with a lot of lessons learned and has worked to implement changes that will better secure the mortgage industry for years to come, explained Baldwin.

To enable these changes, Fannie Mae has transformed its enterprise architecture practice, continued Bontrager.

This new practice has put in place a methodology that spans business, data and technology to ensure cohesive alignment between organizational resources towards a common goal, added Jamieson.

Kevin Costa, business transformation expert at MEGA, will discuss how companies are overcoming the challenges of resource-heavy IT portfolios that dont deliver value, but consume budgets. His talk, Killing Applications: Dont Become a Victim of the Zombie App-pocalypse, is a look at how lumbering, dying technology and bloated IT portfolios can be considered the zombies of the IT world. Costa will show how to streamline IT resources through crowdsourcing, where many people across the organization are involved in the collection, attestation, and management of data, creating trusted, real-time information that helps stabilize and modernize the IT infrastructure.

The discussion will also show how innovative Fortune 1000 companies are funding capability evolution rather than projects. Enterprises have learned that to move the organization forward, funding results  the capabilities required by a company  is more effective than funding projects, which dont always deliver whats needed to succeed in business transformation.

At the conference, MEGA will demonstrate its HOPEX IT Portfolio Management solution, used by organizations to create resource-rich but cost-effective IT systems that support business needs and innovation. The MEGA solution helps CIOs eliminate obsolete technology and costly redundancies so they can stay ahead of the competition.

About MEGAMEGA International is a global software firm helping companies manage enterprise complexity by giving them an interactive view of their operations. Executives gain the visibility and information they need to make the right choices for effective governance and for striking the right balance between capacity for innovation, cost optimization, and risk management. Backed by HOPEX software and MEGA consulting services, companies can boost business and IT agility in todays disruptive business environment. www.mega.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005285/en/

For MEGA

Sue Myers, 781-784-7684

Sue dot myers @ MarketSmartNow dot com

Source: MEGA International
TORONTO, ON -- (Marketwired) -- 04/19/16 -- Siyata Mobile Inc. (the "Company" or "Siyata") (TSX VENTURE: SIM) (OTC PINK: SIMFF) is pleased to announce it has entered into a share purchase agreement (the "Purchase Agreement") to acquire all of the issued and outstanding shares of Signifi Mobile Inc. ("Signifi"), a profitable Montreal-based company that manufactures, markets, and sells Uniden cellular signal boosters and accessories across Canada and the United States (the "Transaction").

Acquisition Highlights

Highly accretive transaction with a complementary product line and procurement of Signifi's proven revenue and strong sales growth (3 year 45% CAGR, $3.5M March 31, 2016 year end revenue).

Following completion of the transaction, Siyata projects a significant increase in revenue and higher blended margins with approximately 40% of revenue coming from North America.

Strategic alliance with Uniden, a world-wide recognized communication brand, giving Siyata and its devices a sustainable competitive advantage in brand awareness in a large-scale market.

Siyata will gain immediate access to Signifi's sales and business infrastructure with over 50 leading dealers and retailers across North America including Costco, BestBuy, Amazon, The Source and more.

Signifi's North American distribution introduces immediate sales channels for Siyata's connected-vehicle devices, while Siyata's distribution partners open up sizable underserved global markets for Signifi's product line.

Transaction to be financed out of Company treasury, no financing dilution required to close.

The Uniden U60, U65 and U70 cellular booster kits greatly enhance indoor cellular signal coverage, while the UM50 is highly complementary to Siyata's connected vehicle devices to increase cellular coverage in commercial fleets, cars, RVs and other means of transportation.

Available online and in over 50 leading dealers and retailers across North America, Signifi brings an established North American component to Siyata Mobile's growth strategy. Signifi sells to cellular dealers across Canada that specialize in providing solutions to consumers and corporations in remote areas looking for better coverage; quite often Signifi sells to the same end user as Siyata, including RCMP and government offices.

In tandem with Signifi, Siyata is targeting a very large-scale market of users that experience poor or weak cell phone coverage in buildings, in remote locations where coverage is spotty, or while on the go. In North America, 80% of cellular calls are made indoors, the area with the lowest probability of cellular coverage, leaving ~75M homes experiencing dropped calls and slow download speeds.

Upon closing of the transaction, Siyata will be moving its head office to Montreal.

Marc Seelenfreud, CEO of Siyata, states, "Our goal has been to grow sales organically as well as through acquisitions; Signifi is a natural fit for Siyata as they address similar markets that we target and provide a great opportunity to capture market share in both Canada and the US. Most importantly, Signifi has an excellent entrepreneurial team that will be a major asset to us and I am confident that together we will build Siyata into a leading global vendor of innovative cellular products. This is a very exciting time for the Company and our shareholders as we welcome the Signifi team into the Siyata family."

Justin Gold, Signifi Founder, comments, "We are very proud of our achievements to date having helped thousands of consumers and businesses across North America fix their cellular signals. Our products are available at all major North American retailers and key dealerships in the commercial space, and will leverage this network to jointly grow our sales. Although lost cellular communication remains a relatively unknown issue, demand continues to accelerate for cellular boosting technologies in buildings and in transportation. We are excited about adding Siyata's depth and experience in the telecom space to deliver on our objectives."

Transaction Details

Pursuant to the terms of the Purchase Agreement, the Company will pay the principals of Signifi (the "Selling Shareholders") $200,000 and issue 1,000,000 common shares of Siyata (each, a "Siyata Share") on closing of the Transaction. An additional $150,000 cash is payable to the Selling Shareholders on the first anniversary of the closing date. The Company has agreed to issue up to an additional 1,000,000 Siyata Shares to the Selling Shareholders on the first, second and third anniversaries of closing. The Selling Shareholders may elect to receive up to $450,000 of such consideration in cash. Up to an additional $125,000 in cash and up to an additional 1,400,000 Siyata Shares are issuable to the Selling Shareholders if Signifi meets certain annual revenue and gross profit targets as described in the Purchase Agreement.

All securities issued in connection with the Transaction will be subject to a four-month-and-a-day hold period. Closing of the Transaction is conditional on the satisfaction of certain customary closing conditions including the approval by the TSX Venture Exchange. The Transaction constitutes a "related party transaction" of Siyata pursuant to the provisions of Multilateral Instrument 61-101. The Company intends to rely upon exemptions from the requirement to obtain a formal valuation and minority shareholder approval.

About Siyata

Siyata Mobile Inc. is a leading global developer and provider of a vehicle-mounted communications platform over advanced mobile networks. Siyata's customers include cellular operators, commercial vehicle technology distributors, and fleets of all sizes in Canada, the US, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East.

Siyata's "Connected-Vehicle" devices and accessories are specifically designed for professional fleets such as trucks, vans, buses, ambulances, government cars and more. Siyata aims to provide greater mobile connectivity for professional drivers and facilitate replacement of the current in-vehicle, multi device status quo with a single device that incorporates voice, data, and fleet management solutions. Visit www.siyatamobile.com to learn more.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors of:

SIYATA MOBILE INC.

Marc Seelenfreund

CEO and Director

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release may include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. All statements within, other than statements of historical fact, are to be considered forward looking. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices, continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. There can be no assurances that such statements will prove accurate and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under the applicable laws.

Investor Relations:Arlen Hansen Kin Communications [email protected]

Source: Siyata Mobile Inc.
Award Presented at PAYMENTS 2016 in Phoenix

PHOENIX, Ariz.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- VocaLink announced today that it has been selected as the recipient of the 2016 George Mitchell Payments System Excellence Award. The award is given annually by NACHAThe Electronic Payments Association.

The award is named after former vice-chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, George Mitchell, an early proponent of electronic payments. It honors an individual or organization that has shown superior leadership in the development, implementation or advancement of domestic or international electronic payments.

Cara ONions, Marketing and Customer Insight Director, at VocaLink commented: We are thrilled to have won such a prestigious award. The global payments market is evolving fast and its great to be recognised for the key part we have played in its innovation and development.

We are committed to becoming the leading real-time payment infrastructure provider globally and our work in collaboration with central banks, banks and other payment providers in Singapore, Thailand and the US takes us closer to this goal. As the US is the worlds largest payment area, the deal with The Clearing House is a particularly important milestone in reaching this vision. Over the coming year we will continue to focus on innovating our core business, expanding our existing platforms, developing new products based on customer needs and expanding our offering to international markets.

VocaLink received the award for leadership in growing and advancing global payments, according to NACHA. Through innovation, expansion, and development of products supporting faster payments and mobile payments, VocaLink has helped to increase payments access, efficiency and security across the globe. It has successfully achieved this via collaborations with banks and other payment providers globally.

NACHA is proud to recognize VocaLink as the recipient of the George Mitchell Payments System Excellence Award, said Janet O. Estep, president and CEO of NACHA. VocaLink has found innovative ways to meet the needs of a changing payments industry while demonstrating just how important and integral electronic payments are to everyday life.

The award is part of NACHAs Payments System Awards, which recognize the highest degree of achievement in the development, implementation and advancement of electronic payments. These prestigious awards celebrate excellence, outstanding accomplishments and superior leadership in innovation to further the ACH Network.

VocaLink and other recipients of the 2016 Payments System Awards will be recognized during the Payments System Awards Luncheon, sponsored by TD Bank, N.A., at PAYMENTS 2016, which is being held now through April 20 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

PAYMENTS 2016 is the premier educational event for the payments industry. Financial institutions of all types and sizes, solution providers who are changing the market, corporate decision makers and government end-user customer organisations gather annually at the conference to move the payments industry forward.

To learn more, visit payments.nacha.org.

About VocaLink

Were VocaLink. A global payments partner to banks, corporates and governments. We design, build and operate world-class payment systems.

We believe that sustainable economies are powered by easy access to and movement of money. Our award-winning platforms and payment industry expertise make it easier for people to make payments confidently and securely. Last year we processed over 11 billion transactions with a value of 6 trillion. In the UK, we process over 90% of salaries, more than 70% of household bills and almost all state benefits. Every business and person in the UK benefits from our technology.

In the UK, our high availability, resilient payment systems power the Faster Payments Service on behalf of the Faster Payments Scheme, the Account Switching platform, Bacs and the Direct Debit Scheme. We also connect the worlds busiest network of over 70,000 ATMs through the LINK scheme.

Our proven capability of implementing real-time payment systems in the UK has led to the development of immediate payment solutions for other countries such as Singapore and the United States. Our vision is to be the leading real-time payment infrastructure provider globally, creating a positive impact on society by shaping the payments landscape worldwide.

Our approach to designing world-class payment systems is driven by the voice of our customers. Their needs are at the centre of everything we do and we strive to deliver a flawless experience every single time.

Were VocaLink. Powering economies, empowering people.

For payment news and insight from Vocalink visit CONNECT - http://connect.vocalink.com/

PAYMENTS 2016

PAYMENTS 2016, which is taking place April 17-20 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Arizona, is a proven, well-respected, and powerful event that provides attendees with the latest research, industry pilot results, insights, trends and forecasts to support and drive payments innovation. Information is delivered through interactive educational sessions and workshops with renowned speakers from financial institutions, corporations, government agencies, legal and regulatory bodies, consulting and research firms, service providers and more. Content is organized along six newly identified tracks ACH: Now & Next; Surety: Rules, Regs & Risk; Impact: Trends & Technology; Strategy: Plan & Position; Experiences: Corporate & Consumer; and Buzz: Disrupt & Debate  to address the topics of today that are impacting the payments space. In addition, a dynamic Exhibit Hall of industry leaders features top products and services shaping the future of payments. Registration is now open. To learn more about PAYMENTS 2016, visit payments.nacha.org.

NACHA  The Electronic Payments Association

Since 1974, NACHA  The Electronic Payments Association has served as trustee of the ACH Network, managing the development, administration and rules for the payment network that universally connects all 12,000 financial institutions in the U.S. The Network moves money and information directly from one bank account to another. Through its collaborative, self-governing model, education, and inclusive engagement of ACH Network participants, NACHA facilitates the expansion and diversification of electronic payments, supporting Direct Deposit and Direct Payment via ACH transactions, including ACH credit and debit payments, recurring and one-time payments; government, consumer and business transactions; international payments, and payments plus payment-related information. Through NACHAs expertise and leadership, the ACH Network is now one of the largest, safest, and most reliable systems in the world, creating value and enabling innovation for all participants. Visit nacha.org for more information.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419006575/en/

For VocaLink

Charlie Ansdell/Paula Nugent

Redleaf

+44 (0) 20 7382 4762

[email protected]

Source: VocaLink
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - At least four civilians were killed in the Somali capital on Monday when Islamist militants opened fire on government officials in a car and then a car bomb exploded, police and a spokesman for Mogadishu's mayor said.

A spokesman for the al Shabaab group claimed responsibility. He told Reuters that several members of the security forces, rather than civilians, had been killed.

The group's accounts of attacks often differ markedly from official reports. It regularly launches assaults in the capital, seeking to topple the Western-backed government.

"We shot dead one of the militants who killed four civilians with an explosion and shooting in Mogadishu," police Major Nur Osman told Reuters, saying the security forces had prevented the car bomb doing more damage.

The mayor's spokesman, Abdifatah Omar, said the first three civilians were killed when the militants attacked a government vehicle.

The militants then fled their pursuers and their vehicle, packed with explosives, was detonated remotely, killing a fourth civilian, Omar said. Two militants escaped while one was shot dead, he said.

(Reporting by Abdirahman Hussein, Feisal Omar and Abdi Sheikh; Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Dominic Evans)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States welcomed on Tuesday a decision by Azerbaijan to allow human rights activist Leyla Yunus and her husband, Arif Yunus, a historian, to leave the country for urgent medical purposes.

"The United States welcomes as another positive step Azerbaijan's decision," State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.

"We encourage the government to take additional steps and unconditionally release all individuals who have been incarcerated for exercising their fundamental freedoms," he added.

Leyla Yunus, head of the Baku-based Institute for Peace and Democracy, had been held in detention since July 2014 before her release in December. She was sentenced to 8-1/2 years in jail last August.

Her husband, who was sentenced to seven years, was released from prison on Nov. 12. They were convicted of treason, espionage and tax evasion in a case that human rights groups say was part of a campaign to muzzle dissent.

(Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Editing by Leslie Adler)
A tribesman loyal to the Houthi movement carries his rifle as he attends a gathering in Yemen's capital Sanaa, April 17, 2016. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

KUWAIT (Reuters) - Talks to end a civil war and Saudi-led intervention in Yemen will not begin on Monday as planned, the warring sides said as fighting persisted despite an announced ceasefire.

Delegations representing Yemen's Houthi group and the party of ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh - Saudi Arabia's main antagonists - have yet to head to Kuwait for the peace talks, citing heavy combat and Saudi-led air operations.

"There's no point in going to Kuwait if there's no respect for the ceasefire," a senior official in Saleh's General People's Congress party told Reuters on Monday.

Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Salam said it has been the movement's demand from the start that dialogue took place "in an atmosphere of peace and stability." Unfortunately, "aggression" had not stopped and air strikes were continuing in different areas, he said.

The U.N.-brokered truce went into effect on April 11.

Saudi Arabia and some Gulf Arab allies joined the war in March last year to back Yemen's government after it was pushed into exile by forces loyal to Saleh and the Houthi movement, also called Ansarallah.

Previous United Nations-mediated talks in June and December failed to end the Arabian Peninsula war, which has killed about 6,200 people, about half of them civilians.

Fighting and air strikes persist on several battlefronts throughout the country, especially in the contested southwestern city of Taiz and the Nehm area east of the capital Sanaa.

The U.N. envoy to Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, urged the two parties remaining in Sanaa to commit to the talks and travel to Kuwait.

"The next few hours are crucial ... I hope that Ansarallah and the General People's Congress do not miss this opportunity that could save Yemen the loss of more lives and put an end to the circle of violence that has engulfed the country."

Two Yemeni officials from the country's Saudi-backed government said the opposing delegations would likely arrive on Tuesday.

"Representatives from Saleh's party and the Houthis are looking for excuses to delay their arrival at a precise time, but it's expected that they will arrive later in Kuwait on Tuesday," one of the officials said.

Peace talks face an array of obstacles, from the proliferation of warlords to the deepening of a security vacuum that has allowed al Qaeda fighters to seize territory and opened a path for Islamic State militants to launch attacks.

Unrepresented in the Kuwait talks, Yemen's once-independent south is rife with secessionist fervor, and tens of thousands of protesters rallied for independence in the port city of Aden for a second day on Monday.

(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari and Hashem Mostafa, Writing by Noah Browning and Hadeel Al Sayegh; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
1934 ACT FILE NO. 001-14714

UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

FORM 6-K

Report of Foreign Private Issuer

Pursuant to Rule 13a-16 or 15d-16

of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934

For the month of April 2016

Yanzhou Coal Mining Company Limited

(Translation of Registrants name into English)

298 Fushan South Road

Zoucheng, Shandong Province

Peoples Republic of China

(Address of principal executive offices)

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant files or will file annual reports under cover of Form 20-F or Form 40-F.

Form 20-F x Form 40-F 

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is submitting the Form 6-K in paper as permitted by Regulation S-T Rule 101(b)(1): 

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is submitting the Form 6-K in paper as permitted by Regulation S-T Rule 101(b)(7): 

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant by furnishing the information contained in this Form is also thereby furnishing the information to the Commission pursuant to Rule 12g3-2(b) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Yes  No x

If Yes is marked, indicate below the file number assigned to the registrant in connection with Rule 12g3-2(b): 82-

SIGNATURE

Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the registrant has duly caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned, thereunto duly authorized.

Yanzhou Coal Mining Company Limited Date April 19, 2016 By /s/ Zhang Baocai Name: Zhang Baocai Title: Director

Certain statements contained in this announcement may be regarded as 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 involve inherent risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual performance, financial condition or results of operations of the Company to be materially different from any future performance, financial condition or results of operations implied by such forward-looking statements. Further information regarding these risks and uncertainties is included in the Companys filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this announcement represent the Companys views as of the date of this announcement. Except as required by law, the Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, after the date on which the statements are made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Companys views as of any date subsequent to the date of this announcement.

19 April 2016

Dear Shareholder,

Yanzhou Coal Mining Company Limited (the Company)

 Notice of Publication of 2015 Annual Report, Notice of 2015 Annual General Meeting, 2016 First Class Meeting of Holders of H Shares and 2016 First Class Meeting of Holders of A Shares, and the related Proxy Forms and Reply Slips (Current Corporate Communications)

The English and Chinese versions of the Company s Current Corporate Communications are available on the Companys website at www.yanzhoucoal.com.cn and the HKExnewss website at www.hkexnews.hk , or the arranged printed form(s) of Current Corporate Communications is enclosed (if applicable). You may access the Current Corporate Communications on the home page of our website or browsing through the HKExnewss website and viewing them require Adobe Reader.

Shareholders may at any time choose to receive free of charge Corporate Communications (Note) either in printed form, or read the website version; and either in English language version only, Chinese language version only or both language versions, notwithstanding any wish to the contrary they have previously conveyed to the Company. If you wish to receive another printed version of the Current Corporate Communications, or you would like to change your choice of language or means of receipt of the Companys Corporate Communications in future, please complete the Change Request Form on the reverse side and send it to the Company c/o Hong Kong Registrars Limited (the Hong Kong Share Registrar), using the mailing label (no stamp is required if posted in Hong Kong). Otherwise, please affix an appropriate stamp. The address of Hong Kong Share Registrar is 17M Floor, Hopewell Centre, 183 Queens Road East, Wanchai, Hong Kong. You may also send email with a scanned copy of the duly completed and signed Change Request Form to [email protected] . The Change Request Form may also be downloaded from the Companys website at www.yanzhoucoal.com.cn or the HKExnewss website at www.hkexnews.hk.

Even if you have chosen (or are deemed to have consented) to receive all future Corporate Communication s via Website version, for any reason you have difficulty in receiving or gaining access to the Current Corporate Communications, the Company will promptly upon your request send the Current Corporate Communications to you in printed form free of charge.

Should you have any queries relating to any of the above matters, please call the Companys telephone hotline at (852) 2862 8688 during business hours from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. from Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays within 28 calendar days beginning from the date of this letter.

Yours faithfully, By order of the Board Yanzhou Coal Mining Company Limited Zhang Baocai Director

Note: Corporate Communications includes but not limited to (a) the directors report, its annual accounts together with a copy of the auditors report and, where applicable, its summary financial report; (b) the interim report and, where applicable, summary interim report; (c) a notice of meeting; (d) a listing document; (e) a circular; and (f) a proxy form.

YCMH-19042016-1(0)

Change Request Form

To: Yanzhou Coal Mining Company Limited (Company)

(Stock Code: 01171)

c/o Hong Kong Registrars Limited

17M Floor,

Hopewell Centre, 183 Queens Road East,

Wanchai, Hong Kong

I/We have already received a printed copy of the Current Corporate Communications in Chinese / English or have chosen (or are deemed to have consented) to read the Current Corporate Communications posted on the Company s website:

Part A I We would like to receive another printed version of the Current Corporate Communications of the Company as indicated below:

(Please mark ONLY ONE (X) of the following boxes

 I/We would like to receive a printed copy in English now.

 I/We would like to receive a printed copy in Chinese now.

 I/We would like to receive both the printed English and Chinese copies now.

Part - I/We would like to change the choice of language and means of receipt of future Corporate Communications of the Company as indicated below:

(Please mark ONLY ONE (X) of the following boxes

 read the Website version of all future Corporate Communications published on the Companys website in place of receiving printed copies; and receive a notification letter of the publication of Corporate Communication on website; OR

 to receive the printed English version of all future Corporate Communications ONLY; OR

 to receive the printed Chinese version of all future Corporate Communications ONLY; OR

 to receive both printed English and Chinese versions of all future Corporate Communications.

Name(s) of Shareholder(s)# Date Address# (Please use ENGLISH BLOCK LETTERS) Contact telephone number (Please use ENGLISH BLOCK LETTERS) Signature(s)

# You are required to fill in the details if you download this Change Request form from the Company s Website.

Notes:

1. Please complete all your details clearly.

2. If your shares are held in joint names, the shareholder whose name stands first on the register of members of the Company in respect of the joint holding should sign on this Change Request Form in order to be valid.

3. Any form with more than one box marked (X), with no box marked (X), with no signature or otherwise incorrectly completed will be void.

4. For the avoidance of doubt, we do not accept any special instructions written on this Change Request Form.

5. Please note that both printed English and Chinese versions of all the Companys Corporate Communications which we have sent to our Shareholders in the past 12 months are available from the Company on request. They are also available on the Companys website ( www.yanzhoucoal.com.cn ) for five years from the date of first publication.

YCMH-19042016-1(0)

MAILING LABEL Please cut the mailing label and stick this on the envelope to return this Request Form to us. No postage stamp necessary if posted in Hong Kong. Hong Kong Registrars Limited Freepost No. 37 Hong Kong

About the Company

For more information, please contact:

Yanzhou Coal Mining Company Limited

Zhang Baocai, Director

Tel: +86 537 538 3310

Address: 298 Fushan South Road, Zoucheng, Shandong Province, 273500 PRC
Calls to make owning dangerous and menacing dogs more expensive are gaining traction.

The cost of owning a menacing dog should be higher, says a Palmerston North city councillor.

Councillor Rachel Bowen, responsible for the children and families portfolio, said just as the cost of managing dogs fell to dog owners rather than all ratepayers, so owners of problem breeds should have to foot the bill for the extra work involved in keeping people safe from menacing dogs.

"The point is that owning that kind of dog [dangerous or menacing] is a privilege that comes with responsibilities."

Will the new dog laws work? Share your stories, photos and videos. Contribute

Bowen said her concern was particularly for people at risk of being attacked by dogs on private property.

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"My interest is because the recent spate of dog attacks has been in people's homes," said Bowen.

"Dogs can be required to be fenced in, but that does not help what is happening behind the garden gate."

Bowen's call for registration fees for menacing dog breeds to be increased followed comments by Massey University animal behaviour and welfare lecturer Professor Kevin Stafford, who said costs for owners should be steeper.

There were 124 dog attacks in Palmerston North in the last reporting year, including 47 attacks on people, with two people needing hospital treatment.

Just over half of the dogs the council impounded and put down in the 2014-15 year were classified as menacing.

The council would not try to find new homes for menacing dogs whose owners did not claim them.

City council head of environmental health services Wayne Jameson said the Dog Control Act gave councils power to impose an extra 50 per cent on the registration fee for dogs that had been deemed to be dangerous.

There were only two such dogs in Palmerston North.

Jameson said he had checked the law, and found there was no power to extend increased registration fees to dogs that were menacing by breed, such as American pit bulls, or had a track record of attacking or frightening people and were classified menacing by behaviour.

"We would like to be able to put things in place to discourage people from having menacing dogs."

But he said the Dog Control Act was prescriptive, limiting what local authorities could do.

Bowen said she would consider proposing a remit to Local Government New Zealand asking for the Government to change the law so more could be done.

However, the deadline had passed to get the remit on the conference agenda this year.

"It would be next year now, which gives us some time to do the policy work and talk to Government."

Jameson said it would be next July at least before any extra charges that were approved could be introduced.

In the meantime, the Palmerston North City Council is planning to increase dog registration fees by 3 per cent from the beginning of July, after no increase last year.

The new fees would put the standard fee up from $187 to $193. For desexed animals, it rose from $139 to $143.

The cost was less if people paid on time, rising from $125 to $128.

Jameson said about 80 per cent of people paid on time to take advantage of the discount.

The fee dropped lower for preferred owners, to an on-time payment of $84, or $74 if the dog was desexed.
Postal voting will remain the norm for the 2016 local body elections.

Online voting trials planned for October's council elections have been called off, and at least one local government commentator is delighted.

Massey University Auckland-based local body watcher Andy Asquith said the trials would have done nothing to achieve the goal of improving voter turnout.

"I'm delighted it's been canned.

"I think it was a disaster waiting to happen."

READ MORE:

* Time is running out for go-ahead for online voting trials

* Palmerston North prepares its case to trial online voting

The trials were planned to be held in Palmerston North, Whanganui and six other centres.

For Palmerston North, it meant ratepayers would be spared the $100,000 cost of testing the system.

Associate minister of local government Louise Upston cited a lack of public confidence in the security and integrity of online voting for the decision.

She said time had run out to complete and analyse security testing.

Upston said councils might be disappointed, but it was vital that the public had confidence in voting systems.

Asquith said online voting would not address the fundamental issues about why people did not vote.

"It is because they don't know who their councillors are or what a council does."

Asquith said he shared security concerns about online voting, but acknowledged postal voting also had risks.

"We need to go back a step and make people get off their backsides and go and vote."

There needed to be a concerted effort by central Government and local bodies together to demonstrate how important councils were.

Palmerston North mayor Grant Smith said he had been concerned from the outset about the Government's commitment to the trial, because it would not pay for them.

Smith said Palmerston North's digital leaders forum was an example of the city's enthusiasm, and he was sure the council would consider online voting from 2019.

But the 2016 trial needed more time to engage and educate voters about how it worked.

Palmerston North's youngest city councillor Aleisha Rutherford said she did not buy the explanations for canning the trial.

The 2013 census had been conducted using an online option.

"That included some pretty important and sensitive information, and if there were issues and concerns about security, that would not have happened."

Rutherford said she believed testing and setting up online voting was just not a priority for the Government.

Massey University commentator Christine Cheyne agreed that if a census could be conducted online, so could a council election, especially as it would have been backed up with a postal option for those who preferred it.

"Central Government's tardiness in facilitating a trial of e-voting in 2016 is extremely disappointing."

It was time to modernise voting systems to reflect the high level of use of the internet by New Zealanders, Cheyne said.

Horizons Regional Council chairman Bruce Gordon said the Government had left it too late to get the trials properly organised.

"There was no evidence it was going to increase voter turnout."

Horizons councillors refused to contribute to the costs of the Whanganui and Palmerston North trials.
A prisoner in his 30s died in 2011 after Corrections' nurses breached his right to good care.

A prisoner's death after suffering multiple seizures has prompted criticism of the nursing care he received behind bars.

Health and Disability Commissioner Anthony Hill released his decision on Monday into the man's death in February 2011, which found two Corrections Department nurses failed in their assessments of him.

The man, who had been in his 30s, had blacked out in January 2011 and, three days later, complained of feeling unwell and having heart palpitations, so a registered nurse assessed him, but decided he wasn't acutely unwell.

She booked him into the prison doctor's weekly clinic six days later. The doctor saw the inmate and believed he had suffered a viral infection or thyroid problem, which had been resolved because he had no further health problems, but ordered tests to check.

READ MORE:

* 85 prisoners die behind bars

* Prisoner deaths investigated

* Grieving mum slams prisoner son's death investigation

Three days later, the nurse did a blood test on the inmate, who complained of a headache and vomiting that morning. She planned to review him that afternoon, but failed to do so.

That evening, another nurse checked the inmate in his cell because he had had an unwitnessed seizure. She said he had banged his head and had a lump on his forehead, but he was coherent and feeling better, so she told him to call prison officers if needing further help overnight and to see a nurse in the morning.

The inmate had another seizure that evening, but was able to talk with prison staff within a few minutes. However, he had a further seizure 15 minutes later, when he fell unconscious and stopped breathing.

Hill noted there was a 24-minute delay between prison staff entering his cell that night, when he was unconscious, and when they called emergency services.

Corrections officers started CPR until ambulance staff arrived, who used the defibrillator eight times on the inmate, who was in cardiac arrest, before they got a pulse and he was taken to hospital.

"Over the next four days in hospital, Mr B continued to experience seizures and his condition deteriorated. On 11 [February], respiratory support for Mr B was withdrawn and, sadly, he died early the following morning," Hill wrote.

His father complained to the Health and Disability Commissioner over his son's care.

Hill said the first nurse's assessment was inadequate and she failed to arrange an immediate medical review, and failed to review the man herself or alert another nurse to check him after her second visit. The second nurse's management plan was "suboptimal and demonstrated a departure from accepted standards of nursing care" by failing to refer him for a medical review.

Both nurses had breached the inmate's Code of Health and Disability Services Consumers' Rights, he said.

The Corrections Department was found not directly liable or vicariously for the nurses' breaches.

However, he said Corrections had reviewed its care of the inmate and concluded further support should be provided to frontline staff to deliver "best practice" health assessments for prisoners in emergency situations.
A woman, a fisherman and a teenager were all flown to hospital suffering from medical conditions.

The first callout saw the Tauranga-based Trustpower TECT Rescue Helicopter called to Kawerau around 1pm, where a 58-year-old woman had a serious medical event that required immediate hospital care.
National youth and RS:X windsurfing champion Alex Hart has successfully completed his fundraising bid hiking up and down Mauao for 24-hours.

An impressive 25 laps in 24 hours were completed, totalling over 5500 vertical metres.



See video at the bottom of the story. Photo: Tracy Hardy.



To put that in perspective, Mount Ruapehu is 2797m and Mount Cook being 3724m.

The wet weather Mount Maunganui saw this weekend meant conditions were tougher than expected.

Alex spoke to SunLive after his 22nd lap with 22 hours down and two hours to go.

My mind is all right, its just my legs and around my knees that are pretty sore and my feet.

The rains not very nice, its not ideal. Im just walking now, Im too tired to run so its not dangerous, if it was wet and I was running I would be more hesitant. I probably went a bit hard at the start.

His first lap was 18-minutes and slowest was around 40-minutes.

Alex had around six hours sleep during the climb, a head torch as a light during the night and came across a surprising amount of drunk people.

I actually went home at midnight to get a few hours sleep because I had hit a mental wall

He began at 5pm on Saturdayand finished at 5pm on Sunday.

Alexs efforts were to help raise money for his old training partner and current female RS:X windsurfing champion Natalia Kosinska meet Yachting New Zealands standards and funding.

I just wanted to help her out as shes been trying to balance work and training, says Alex.

Since completing the challenge, he says Natalia is really happy about it, shes really grateful and thankful.

Alex was joined by family and friends who supported him throughout the 24-hours and is now recovering.

Im feeling good. The recovery is going well, my legs arent hurting as bad as I thought theyd be.

To donate, visit www.givealittle.co.nz/cause/nataliasolympicwindsurfingselectioncampaign
Veterans Affairs Minister Craig Foss will travel to South Korea today to mark the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Gapyeong.

The 16th Field Regiment of the Royal Regiment of New Zealand Artillery played a significant role in defeating the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Army during the Battle of Gapyeong on 24 April 1951. The Regiment was awarded the Republic of Koreas Presidential Citation.

It is a privilege to be going to Korea for this commemoration, and attending an Anzac service in Seoul the following day makes it extra special. No matter where or when our military personnel served, they deserve to be honoured, Mr Foss says.

While in Korea I will pay my respects to our fallen soldiers buried in the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Busan and visit New Zealand Defence Force personnel deployed to the United Nations-controlled Demilitarised Zone (DMZ).

It will be my honour to present five New Zealand General Service Medals  Korea, and two New Zealand Operational Service Medals to military personnel finishing their deployment to the DMZ.

Mr Foss will also meet his South Korean counterpart, Minister of Patriots and Veterans Affairs Sungchoon Park, and in his role as Minister for Small Business, the Korean branch of the International Council for Small Business.

SOURCE: Office of Craig Foss
Bay of Plenty Police has been announced as one of six policing districts selected as finalists in this years Problem-Oriented Policing Awards.

The district was nominated for its Oho Ake initiative, a tikanga-based intervention programme run in partnership with Tuhoe Hauora that aims to address and prevent Maori youth offending.

Oho Ake (To Awaken) helps Maori children and young people who are caught up in the Justice system to reconnect with their identity, whakapapa and whanau.

Since the programmes launch in 2010, it has since influenced government strategy through the Youth Crime Action Plan 2013-2023.

An independent review also confirms its had having an impacting on reoffending and raising trust and confidence in police, with rangatahi (young people) re-entering education or work environments, parents becoming more engaged with their children and substance abuse reduced.

Now into its fourth year, the New Zealand Police awards recognise and reward police staff for excellence in addressing long term sustainable crime prevention and reduction.

New Zealand Polices deputy chief executive strategy Mark Evans says there were a total of 19 entries for the awards this year and the standard has increased on 2015.

This year the standard of entries was exceptional, reflecting some inspirational initiatives being undertaken across the country to reduce crime and victimisation.

Shortlisting the six finalists was a very difficult decision.

The final will be held at Westpac Stadium in Wellington on Thursday, May 5.

The six finalists will make their presentations to a panel of judges which includes Mark Evans plus NZ Police assistant commissioner Grant Nicholls, the Ministry of Justices Justice Sector deputy chief executive Colin Lynch, and University of Queensland Professor of Criminology Lorraine Mazerolle.

Problem-Oriented Policing involves the proactive identification and analysis of crime and disorder problems and the development, implementation, and robust assessment of effective responses.

Internationally, POP conferences are held to recognise good practice in addressing crime and disorder.



Waikato Police Districts detective Ian Foster and detective Scott Neilson presenting on Operation Daydream, one of the six finalists in the 2016 Problem-Oriented Policing Awards. Photo: Police

THE OTHER FINALISTS

Wellington District: Wahi Pai

Analysis identified retail theft as a major problem in Porirua central business district, with Asian shopkeepers over-represented among victims. A multi-faceted approach saw police working with community groups, such as the Ngati Toa Maori Wardens to engage with retailers, working with businesses and partner organisations. The result has been a significant reduction in offending and victimisation and an improvement in feelings of safety.

Northland District: Community safety initiative for the Kaitaia Community

The Te Hiku o Te Ika NPT has developed collaborative approaches to prevent victimisation, with a focus on dishonesty offending. One successful initiative involved the NPT working with the Far North Safer Community Council to develop a community-owned organisation which monitors the CCTV system and deploys patrols to risk areas. Establishment of this organisation, in partnership with WINZ and MSD, has created nine new jobs.

Canterbury District: Facilitating Change in Male Perpetrators of Family Violence

North Canterbury Police identified a gap in services to male perpetrators of family violence. A working party including Police and government and non-government agencies developed Reach Out, a programme which ensures all men listed in family violence reports, not as victims, are contacted and engaged with. During the course of a comprehensive 12-month evaluation, no man that had come into contact with Reach Out had re-offended.

Counties Manukau District: Gandhi Nivas  Early Intervention

Analysis of Police Safety Order breaches by family violence offenders, identified that many men from South Asian communities would return to the family home rather than seek accommodation elsewhere because of the perceived shame. Police and community partners established Gandhi Nivas, an accommodation facility offering offenders 24-hour support. Of men referred by Police, 93 percent have not reoffended. Services are now available to all ethnicities.

Waikato District  Operation Daydream

Waikato Organised Crime Squad terminated Operation Daydream in rural Waikato and Counties Manukau to counter methamphetamine dealing and use. Analysis indicated a lack of community awareness about the drug so educational material was distributed and meetings organised to improve awareness, reduce demand, build community support and increase trust and confidence. Engaging with drug users helped broaden understanding of the environment, reduce demand and provide Intelligence.
Central District Police are widening their investigation into the disappearance of Levin man, Palmiro MacDonald.

Police are taking a number of active steps to seek information about Palmiros disappearance to assist in building a picture of exactly what has happened to him, says Detective Inspector Ross McKay.

We are very concerned about his wellbeing given the time since he was last seen, the lack of contact from him and rumours which we are aware are circulating in the community.

We are keeping an open mind at this stage about what might have happened to Palmiro, however we cant rule out the possibility of a sinister element in his disappearance.

We are applying a major investigation structure to our inquiries as we take active steps to seek the information we need.

The objective right now is to find Palmiro and get answers for his family. Said Mr McKay

Police are asking anyone with information to contact Central District Police on 0800 677 256.

Alternatively, information can also be provided anonymously via the organisation Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

SOURCE: New Zealand Police
Police have arrested and charged to two men with burglary the theft of a substantial amount of cash from a Bay of Plenty ATM machine.

Overnight on Wednesday, April 13, cash was taken from an ATM machine at the Tarawera Court Mall in Kawerau.
Yes, we need to keep it under control

No, we need to learn to live with it
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SHARE Wade Alexander Matthes James John Fisher Gregory Ernest Buderus Thomas Luke Neiman

By Will Greenlee of TCPalm

ST. LUCIE COUNTY  Six people accused of sex-related crimes involving a 15-year-old girl were arrested Monday and Tuesday following a St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office investigation, records state.

A sheriff's official on Oct. 11 spoke to a relative of the 15-year-old girl. The relative said he found text messages and photos of the teen girl "suggesting she is sexually involved with older men," records state.

Investigators ended up extracting about 12,000 text messages and 20,000 images from her phone.

Those arrested were identified as James John Fisher, 42, of the 3200 block of River Drive, Fort Pierce; Ashley Nikole Page, 20, of the 5800 block of Northwest Burri Court, Port St. Lucie; Thomas Luke Neiman, 21, address not listed; Gregory Ernest Buderus, 21, of the 4600 block of Southwest Savona Boulevard, Port St. Lucie; Wade Alexander Matthes, 20, of the 4300 block of Thousand Pines Drive, Fort Pierce; and Robert Edward Gaban, 18, of the 1800 block of Arizona Avenue in Fort Pierce.

Fisher is accused of having text message conversations with the teen girl in which he "solicited, induced and promoted" the girl to have sex with Buderus.

Buderus said he had sex with the girl, and said she initiated the encounter. He said she texted him to pick her up and that he didn't want to. He said she indicated she would "make it worth your while," and that when he picked her up, she handed him a condom. He said that's when he knew the teen girl wanted to have sex.

The teen girl said her relationship with Page happened during the summer. The teen girl said she "experimented" with Page.

Page said she "hooked up" with the girl at a beach access, and took her to an "adult store" where the girl bought a "toy."

The girl told sheriff's officials she had sex with Neiman in a parking lot. Neiman said the encounter happened after she started touching his genital area.

The girl said she had two sexual encounters with Matthes, the first being one that she initiated when Matthes was "really hammered." She said that happened at a friend's home in Port St. Lucie.

Fisher was arrested on a charge of lewd or lascivious conduct, offender 18 or older. Page was arrested on a charge of lewd or lascivious molestation, offender 18 or older, victim 12 to 16. Matthes was arrested on two counts of lewd or lascivious battery, while Neiman and Buderus each were arrested on a single lewd or lascivious battery charge. Gaban was arrested on two counts of lewd or lascivious battery victim age 12 to 16.
SHARE Images of the arrest of robbery suspect Jeff Linden on Tuesday in Palm Beach County. (PROVIDED/MARTIN COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE) Images of the arrest of robbery suspect Jeff Linden on Tuesday in Palm Beach County. (PROVIDED/MARTIN COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE) Images of the arrest of robbery suspect Jeff Linden on Tuesday in Palm Beach County. (PROVIDED/MARTIN COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE) A security camera shows a robbery suspect at a business that was robbed. (PROVIDED/MARTIN COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE)

By Laurie K. Blandford of TCPalm

MARTIN COUNTY  The man accused of three armed robberies Friday has been caught, said sheriff's officials.

Jeff Linden, 36, of the 200 block of Fernandina Street Northwest in Palm Bay, was arrested at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday in Palm Beach County after detectives tracked him to a hotel in Riviera Beach, said sheriff's spokeswoman Christine Christofek. He was charged with two counts of robbery, Christofek said, but he confessed to detectives about at least six robberies from the Treasure Coast to Broward County.

Linden is accused of robbing a Publix at 3:30 p.m. Friday in Tequesta, then another Publix at 5 p.m. on U.S. 1 in Stuart, followed by a Walgreens at South Kanner Highway and Salerno Road about 6:40 p.m., officials said. He walked into the Walgreens with a gun behind his back, and told the clerk he had a gun and to give him the money because he was desperate.

He was released from prison on Aug. 19 and has an extensive criminal history mainly for property crimes, Christofek said.

Linden remained Tuesday afternoon in the Martin County Jail with a $650,000 bail, according to a jail official.
SHARE Beth Mitchell (left front), President/CEO of the Sebastian River Area Chamber of Commerce, helps Canadian tourists David Grant (center) and Rick MacCaullum, both of Toronto, with maps and information of the Sebastian area while inside the new Pelican Porch Visitor Center. The chamber will unveil the Pelican Porch Visitor Center on April 22 with a ribbon cutting ceremony and open house. (ERIC HASERT/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS) Beth Mitchell, cq Rick MacCaullum, cq David Grant, cq PHOTOGRAPHED: Wednesday APRIL 13, 2016 Accessorized with rocking chairs, the porch of the new Pelican Porch Visitor Center at 700 Main Street in Sebastian provides a view of the Indian River lagoon. (ERIC HASERT/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS) PHOTOGRAPHED: Wednesday APRIL 13, 2016 Sebastian River Area Chamber of Commerce new Pelican Porch Visitor Center at 700 Main Street in Sebastian. (ERIC HASERT/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS) PHOTOGRAPHED: Wednesday APRIL 13, 2016

By Janet Begley, Special to Treasure Coast Newspapers

SEBASTIAN  There's a new look to the corner of Main Street and U.S. 1 in Sebastian and it includes a welcoming front porch.

The Sebastian River Area Chamber of Commerce will unveil the Pelican Porch Visitor Center on April 22 with an open house and ribbon cutting ceremony. The 350-square-foot porch will serve as a "front door" to the community, according to Chamber President/CEO Beth Mitchell.

"We now have a face that shows the beauty of our community and the Indian River Lagoon," Mitchell said. "As a chamber, we will have the tools to educate visitors and show them things they might not find on the own."

The chamber's Visitor Center is designated as the official Visitor Center for the National Scenic Byway Program for the Indian River Lagoon National Scenic Byway. Additionally, the Pelican Porch Visitor Center is one of 30 "Certified Travel Information Centers" for Visit Florida, the official tourism and travel agency for the state.

The current visitor center and chamber office has undergone extensive renovations and remodeling including the newly added porch on the east side, with rocking chairs facing the Indian River Lagoon. Hurricane-resistant windows have been added to the building to protect the interior from storms.

The project cost about $150,000. Renovations took about nine months to complete.

Major sponsors included the Sebastian Clambake Foundation, Health First Health Plans and the Sebastian River Medical Center, with additional contributions from business members, community organizations, Indian River County Tourist Development Council and individuals throughout the Sebastian River Area.

"The project has been very rewarding because of the participation of all our members," said Mitchell. "It's a real statement that everyone has gotten behind this project and offered their tremendous support."

The chamber leases the building from the city of Sebastian. At various times in its history, the building has served as City Hall as well as a fire station. Because of its age, water damage has been an ongoing problem and the just-completed improvements are expected to resolve those issues.
SHARE

By Elliott Jones of TCPalm

As the wait continues in Indian River County to see who won Saturday night's $18 million Lotto, many other Treasure Coast residents have been routinely cashing in their tickets over the years.

Last years total lottery payouts for all forms of games played on the Treasure Coast was equivalent to $161 for every resident, adult and child, according to Florida Lottery records.

Those with winning tickets in 2015 purchased on the Treasure Coast collectively amassed $97.3 million: $44.4 million in St. Lucie County, $27.4 million in Martin County and $25.5 million in Indian River County, the records show. Individual amounts ranged from $1 to several million dollars.

Statistically, though, the payouts were equivalent to $175 for every resident of Martin County, followed by $172 per resident in Indian River County and $138 per resident in St. Lucie County.

Winnings come at a cost. The winnings were about half of what was paid for all the tickets: $190 million was spent on lottery tickets between the three counties in 2015, records show. That means for every 50 cents won, $1 was spent.

The odds of winning $18 million were astronomically remote, making the announcement of someone winning it exciting news for residents of the Treasure Coast and beyond. The winning ticket was one of 3 million sold for Saturdays drawing.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Florida Lottery said the ticket holder hasnt stepped forward with the ticket that was purchased at a Publix grocery store west of Vero Beach, at the intersection of State Road 60 and 58th Avenue.

The cash payout in Saturdays drawing is $13.1 million, and that would have to be claimed within 60 days. The other option is payments including interest totaling $18 million paid over 30 years. That would have to be claimed in 180 days. Usually, winners opt for a cash payout.

The Publix grocery store in the Ryanwood Square shopping center will receive $90,000 for selling the winning ticket, said state Lottery spokeswoman Keri Nucatola. Publix spokeswoman Nicole Krauss said the company plans to share some of that with store employees.

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Indian Riverkeeper Marty Baum (left) and Morgan Marmitt, and engineer with Ocean Research Conservation Association, install a chemical sensor on a Kilroy water quality monitor April 30, 2015, near the Palm City Bridge. The sensor cost around $10,000, according to Marmitt, and was funded by a state grant. (FILE PHOTO)

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By Tyler Treadway of TCPalm

The state won't pay to keep all 25 Kilroy water monitors in the Indian River Lagoon and St. Lucie River because, according to one official, they aren't needed.

The Fort Pierce-based Ocean Research & Conservation Association could start pulling as many as 15 of its Kilroys out of the water this summer because it needs $500,000 to maintain them.

MORE | Follow our Lake Okeechobee discharge meter for daily updates.

That's not a problem, said Drew Bartlett, deputy secretary of the state Department of Environmental Protection. "We have plenty of data on what's happening in the water."

In addition to the 10 Kilroys ORCA has enough money to maintain, Bartlett said, the St. Johns River and South Florida water management districts, state Department of Health and Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute have devices to monitor conditions in the lagoon and river.

"We have the information to know what caused the (mid-March) fish kill in the Banana River and to determine what harm there is to the St. Lucie River estuary from the Lake Okeechobee discharges," said Bartlett, DEP's head of water policy and ecosystem restoration.

Can a brown tide and fish kill happen on the Treasure Coast?

State Rep. Larry Lee Jr., D-Port St. Lucie, said he was told the same Monday night by House Speaker Steve Crisafulli, a Republican from Merritt Island, which is on the northern lagoon.

'PLENTY OF MACHINES'

"The speaker told me that getting data out of the lagoon and the river is not a problem," Lee said Tuesday. "He said there are plenty of machines out there in the water."

Crisafulli was "simply relaying the information from (the) DEP," said Michael Williams, the speaker's communications director, adding that Crisafulli "believes the data presented to him by DEP is accurate."

Edith "Edie" Widder, ORCA's CEO and lead scientist, doesn't.

"To say we know all we need to know about what's going on in the water is akin to a doctor telling a patient, 'We pretty much know what's going on inside you, so we don't need all these monitors on your body to tell us any more,'" Widder said.

The general knowledge is there, Widder said, but the devil is in the details.

"I wish we had more monitors out in the lagoon," Widder said. "The lagoon is facing enormous problems. There's a presumption that it's all understood, but it's not."

Water monitors like Kilroys "give us eyes and ears on the 156-mile lagoon 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Zack Jud, a researcher at Florida Oceanographic Society in Stuart. "Real-time data like that is an invaluable tool for scientists studying the river."

PUBLIC INFORMATION

Because data from Kilroys and monitors called LOBOs are constantly updated on ORCA and Harbor Branch websites, the public can use the information, too.

"Anglers, kayakers and paddleboarders can go online and see exactly what's going on in the water they're headed to," Jud said.

ORCA got a $2 million grant from the Legislature in 2014 to deploy 25 Kilroys throughout the river and lagoon. Maintaining the Kilroys costs about $750,000 a year  $30,000 for each unit  according to Warren Falls, ORCA managing director. For each of the past two years, the state has provided $250,000. That's just $10,000 per unit.

Harbor Branch got a similar grant in 2014 to put four Land/Ocean Biogeochemical Observatory sensor, or LOBO, monitors in the river and one in the lagoon. Harbor Branch's contract includes $350,000 a year  $70,000 per unit  from the state to maintain the LOBOs.

Finding the money isn't an issue, Lee said. "Speaker Crisafulli told me the funds are there because Gov. (Rick) Scott vetoed so many projects from the budget."

State Sen. Joe Negron, R-Stuart, said he'll continue trying to get state money to keep all 25 Kilroys in the water and is working with an unnamed "philanthropic organization" that may contribute toward maintaining them.

The Kilroys and LOBOs have "given us valuable information to help us chart the best way forward for preserving the St. Lucie River and Indian River Lagoon," Negron said. "I'm convinced that they need to be maintained at their current number."
Water from Lake Okeechobee is discharged through the St. Lucie Lock and Dam in Martin County. The discharges began Jan. 30. (XAVIER MASCARENAS/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)

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By Editorial Board

As federal lawmakers seek money for Everglades restoration, it's imperative for them to prioritize their actions.

Specifically, they need to take steps to end the massive discharges of polluted water from Lake Okeechobee into the St. Lucie River and Indian River Lagoon.

Legislation designed to help achieve this objective must take precedent over bills that will provide only partial relief from this decadeslong problem.

U.S. Rep. Curt Clawson, R-Bonita Springs, recently filed two relevant bills. The first  House Resolution 4436  would expedite repairs to the Herbert Hoover Dike surrounding Lake Okeechobee by providing $800 million in emergency funding. It was introduced by U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Delray Beach, on behalf of Clawson and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Miami.

The second  House Resolution 4793 (the Everglades Land Acquisition Act)  would earmark $500 million for the U.S. Interior Department to purchase land south of Lake O.

Only one of Clawson's bills  the latter  has the potential to significantly reduce the discharges, which occur when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers releases excess Lake O water east into the St. Lucie River and west into the Caloosahatchee River. Already this year, more than 100 billion gallons of Lake O water have fouled the St. Lucie River and Indian River Lagoon since January.

Moving water south from Lake O is the ultimate solution to the problem. The University of Florida Water Institute report on Lake Okeechobee, released last year, concluded reducing discharges and meeting the Everglades' need for more water "will require between 11,000 and 129,000 acres of additional land" between the lake and the national park.

One year ago, the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District voted unanimously to kill a proposal to purchase 46,800 acres of U.S. Sugar Corp. land south of Lake Okeechobee.

Clawson's bill resurrects the hope of purchasing land and shunting more water south of the lake  and away from our estuary.

Currently, there are no co-sponsors for the land-buying bill. Treasure Coast Newspapers' Editorial Board urges the members of our federal legislative delegation  including Sens. Bill Nelson, D-Florida; and Marco Rubio, R-Florida; and Reps. Patrick Murphy, D-Jupiter; and Tom Rooney, R-Okeechobee  to sign on and support this important legislation.

Corps officials have said reinforcing the dike won't necessarily reduce the discharges. However, acquiring additional land south of the lake to hold and treat water certainly will help rectify the problem.
Tampa Bay Times Editor Neil Brown (from left) claps as reporter Leonora LaPeter Anton, Times Chairman and CEO Paul Tash, and reporters Lisa Gartner, Michael LaForgia and Cara Fitzpatrick celebrate winning two Pulitzer prizes, Monday in the Times' newsroom in St. Petersburg. The Times won two Pulitzer prizes for Investigative Reporting and Local Reporting. (Will Vragovic/The Tampa Bay Times via AP)

SHARE Sarasota Herald-Tribune Publisher Patrick Dorsey (right) stands behind Investigations Editor Michael Braga (seated center) as the Herald-Tribune received the Pulitzer Prize for the investigative reporting Monday in Sarasota. The project demonstrated that years of budget and staff cuts and overall neglect had resulted in a dramatic uptick of violence in Florida's mental hospitals. (Dan Wagner/Sarasota Herald-Tribune via AP)

By Paul Janensch

The 2016 Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, announced Monday, made me proud to be a part-time resident of Florida and a former member of The Associated Press Managing Editors, made up of news executives at AP member newspapers.

Staffers at three newspapers on Florida's Gulf Coast  The Tampa Bay Times, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and The Charlotte Sun  won Pulitzers, journalism's equivalent of the Academy Awards.

The Associated Press won the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service. That's like the Oscar for best picture.

Even before becoming a snowbird, I thought Florida was an outstanding newspaper state. The St. Petersburg Times  now The Tampa Bay Times, the largest newspaper in Florida  and the Miami Herald set a good example for all the Sunshine State's news media.

They covered the news thoroughly and reliably and invested time, energy and money in fearless investigations. They still do.

On Monday, two Pulitzers went to staffers at The Tampa Bay Times.

Cara Fitzpatrick, Lisa Gartner and Michael LaForgia won the Local Reporting Pulitzer for "Failure Factories," an investigation of the Pinellas County public schools for allowing the return of racial segregation. Schools with students poor and black were denied promised resources.

Staffers at The Tampa Bay Times and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune shared the Investigative Reporting Pulitzer. Leonora LaPeter Anton and Anthony Cormier of The Times and Michael Braga of the Herald-Tribune collaborated on the series, "Insane, Invisible, In Danger," which revealed escalating violence and neglect in Florida's mental hospitals.

John Hackworth, editorial page editor of The Charlotte Sun, won the Editorial Writing Pulitzer for a series of editorials demanding an investigation into the death of an inmate at the Charlotte Correctional Institute.

It was the first win for someone at the small newspaper. But there was little celebrating in the newsroom because Derek Dunn-Rankin, the publication's founder, died at home over the weekend. He was 88.

The AP won the gold medal for its series "Seafood from Slaves," which exposed the widespread use of forced labor in Southeast Asia's fishing industry.

A team spent a year delving into the harvesting and processing of shrimp and other seafood by poor workers held against their will. The investigation led to the release of more than 2,000 captives.

This is the 100th year Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded. Administered by Columbia University, they were established under a bequest by Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born owner of The New York World (which is long deceased) and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (still going).

At first there were only four journalism categories. Entries were restricted to newspapers and wire services. Now there are 14 journalism categories, and entries are welcome from magazines and online news sites. There also are seven prizes for excellence in arts and letters.

I was active in The Associated Press Managing Editors for 16 years. A major APME function is to assess the AP's performance.

In 1989, when I was editor and general manager of the Gannett Co.'s Rockland Journal News in Rockland County, New York, I served as APME president.

I saw up close how AP journalists covered the news accurately and objectively. And aggressively, too, as they did to produce the Pulitzer-winning "Seafood from Slaves."

Paul Janensch, a seasonal resident of Vero Beach, was a newspaper editor and taught journalism at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. His weekly "Treasure Coast Essay" can be heard on WQCS, 88.9 FM, and wqcs.org. Email: paul.janensch@quinnipiac.edu.
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An international team of cybersecurity experts hacked into an iPhone loaned to a U.S. congressman who sits on a key technology committee, in a 60 Minutes demonstration of how easy it is for a criminal to spy on callers by exploiting an international mobile phone network vulnerability. The segment aired Sunday.

The hackers were able to listen in on a call by Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., who sits on the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee, just by getting the actual phone number he was using, according to the program.

The team, led by German security researcher Karsten Nohl, easily penetrated the Signalling System No. 7 network, which it then could use for everything from listening in on calls to tracking the callers movements and intercepting text messages.

Lieu, who volunteered to participate in the hacking demonstration, characterized the ease with which the researchers were able to access the phone data as creepy, and said demonstration left him feeling angry.

Call for Investigation

The congressman is exploring policy fixes for the SS7 flaw, said Jack dAnnibale, senior advisor to Lieu.

In fact, he has called for an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, he told TechNewsWorld.

The applications for this vulnerability are seemingly limitless, from criminals monitoring individual targets to foreign entities conducting economic espionage on American companies to nation states monitoring U.S. government officials, Lieu wrote in a letter sent Monday to Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the OGR committee.

The vulnerability has serious ramifications not only for individual privacy, but also for American innovation, competitiveness and national security, Lieu wrote. Many innovations in digital security  such as multifactor authentication using text messages  may be rendered useless.

Network Still Vulnerable

The computer security team that carried out the 60 Minutes demo first uncovered the SS7 vulnerability at a German hacking conference in 2014.

These vulnerabilities are quite serious, and they certainly warrant immediate action by nearly every phone company which is part of the SS7 system, said Cooper Quentin, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It is a near certainty that criminals and spies are exploiting this vulnerability for nefarious purposes, he told TechNewsWorld.

The U.S. government cannot solve the problem on its own, Quentin added, because the vulnerability is shared by phone companies around the globe, who must work together to fix the problem.

Network vs. Device

Discussions about phone security generally center on one of two issues, noted Christopher Budd, global threat communications manager at Trend Micro. Those issues boil down to either the security of the device or the security of the network.

Some of the issues raised by the 60 Minutes piece relate to the network as opposed to the device.

By and large, while these are interesting and even scary sometimes, theyre not something that most people should worry about, Budd told TechNewsWorld.

Carrying out an attack requires a degree of focused resources against a target, he pointed out, and most regular phone customers are not targets.

Carriers have security teams that typically focus 24x7x365 on the security of their networks, Budd noted. The thing that most people can control is the security of their individual device, which requires running mature security software to keep it up to date.

That last in particular is important, he said, because so many Android devices have been abandoned for updates by the carriers and manufacturers that its impossible to keep them up to date.

Its also advisable to keep multiple layers of security on a phone.

As a security company, we see an increasingly large number of requests for details about how we protect sensitive customer data from third-party access, said GreatHorn Vice President Chris Fraser.

Encryption is part of that narrative, he told TechNewsWorld.

Cybercriminals can find subtle and creative ways to bypass security controls that are put into place, Fraser pointed out, and the best way to prevent against such an exploit is never to rely on one method of cyberprotection as the failsafe.

Relying on encryption, or any single security approach or tool  whether its a passcode on a mobile device or an antivirus tool  is a flawed and seemingly failure bound strategy, he said. What you need is defense in depth.
While many in the tech industry supported Apple's refusal to comply with the FBI's request for help in unlocking the San Bernardino iPhone, not every company is against aiding authorities. Surprisingly, one of these firms is BlackBerry, an organization that is known for its focus on security and privacy.

Thanks to an investigation by Motherboard/Vice last week, it was revealed that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) was able to intercept and decrypt over one million non-corporate BlackBerry messages between 2010 and 2012 as part of an investigation into a mafia slaying.

In his response to the report, BlackBerry CEO John Chen mentioned cooperating with authorities, but he didn't explicitly say if the company handed over an encryption key to the RCMP. "We have long been clear in our stance that tech companies as good corporate citizens should comply with reasonable lawful access requests," the CEO wrote in a blog post.

This very belief was put to the test in an old case that recently resurfaced in the news, which speculated on and challenged BlackBerry's corporate and ethical principles. In the end, the case resulted in a major criminal organization being dismantled. Regarding BlackBerry's assistance, I can reaffirm that we stood by our lawful access principles.

Additionally, Chen seemed to question Apple's approach when it came to handing out backdoor keys. "We are indeed in a dark place when companies put their reputations above the greater good," he added.

Chen pointed out that messages sent from corporate BlackBerry phones cannot be decrypted as they are connected to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which is "impenetrable" and the reason why the company is "e gold standard in government and enterprise-grade security."

BlackBerry didn't say if the authorities are still able to intercept and unencrypt messages using the backdoor key. The company may have refused to give Pakistan access to its servers, but many BlackBerry users are unhappy with these latest revelations.
With its battered batteries now replaced, the Solar Impulse 2 has been cleared to take to the skies once again after the Pacific leg of its trip around the world caused the sun-powered plan to stumble last year.

The Solar Impulse 2 has been hanging out in a hangar for the past nine months, but it is expected to continue making its way back to Abu Dhabi, its point of origin, at some point this week. Exactly when the plane relaunchces will depend on the weather and the openings it offers.

And when the weather conditions are right, Bertrand Piccard, one of the mission's two pilots, will head off to mainland North America. Piccard, project initiator and chairman, has been splitting time with fellow pilot and explorerer Andre Borschberg.

The Solar Impulse 2 team is considering Vancouver, Los Angeles, Phoenix and the San Francisco area for the plane's next stop. It will continue on from one of those locations to New York, Europe or North Africa before it tackles the last leg of the trip back to where it began in Abu Dhabi.

Solar Impulse 2

It's a bold attempt to do something that has never been done before. But the Solar Impulse 2 project is more than a historic attempt to fly around the world. It's an effort to contribute to the development of renewable energy, according to Piccard.

"The primary purpose of this adventure is to demonstrate that modern clean technologies can achieve the impossible and encourage everyone to use these same energy efficient solutions on the ground in their daily lives for mobility, construction, lighting, heating, cooling and more," he said.

The plane itself has the wingspan of a 747, about 237 feet. And though it's covered in solar panels, more than 17,000 of them, it only weighs about as much as a typical sedan or about 5,100 pounds.

The single-occupant plane sails along at a speed of about 88 miles per hour, a real test of endurance considering its autopilot mode only affords the pilot about 20 minutes of sleep. It was that low speed and just the vast size of the Pacific Ocean that left the Solar Impulse 2 crawling to Hawaii last July.

What Went Wrong

The flight from Japan to Hawaii last year was a world record. It took five days and five nights, or about 117 hours and 52 minutes, to cross the ocean and land at the Kalaeloa airport.

The grueling trip from Japan to Hawaii uncovered a cooling issue, one that damaged the plane's batteries. The nights were getting longer and the days were getting shorter. There wasn't enough time to replace the batteries and return to the skies while the days were still long enough to adequately charge the plane's 2,077 pounds of batteries.

"As we experienced many times with Solar Impulse, obstacles often turn out to be opportunities for improvement," Borschberg said. "Ultimately, this time was used to recreate the strong mindset within the team to continue our adventure. It takes sometimes more time to build up the right spirit then to develop new technologies."

By late February this year, the Solar Impulse 2 team began to stir again. From then on, the solar-powered plane has gone through 13 test flights and several training flights for the pilots.

With new batteries installed and a new cooling system to go along with them, the team is ready to finish up the trip. This time, the team is targeting landings spots that are even further away to account for possible deviations in the routes.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
China has again flexed its censorship muscle to pounce and raise its Great Firewall on Medium, a fast-growing online platform, and make it inaccessible, multiple news agencies reported.

One of the world's superpowers, China is known for blocking American-based websites such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as other content management systems like WordPress and Blogger.

Now it's doing the same thing with Medium, an online website that allows users including news websites to publish sharable content. What used to be accessible under the radar has now become unreachable in any of the three telcos in the country.

Although the government has yet to issue an official statement regarding Medium's blocking, it may have something to do with Panama Papers scandal, which has implicated some of the country's powerful elite leaders such as relatives of President Xi Jinping.

The scandal involves more than 11 million documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based firm that is currently being accused of helping high-powered personalities dodge tax and support illegal financial transactions like money laundering by creating shell and anonymous companies in so-called tax havens.

Many of those who ended up on the list including Deng Jiagui, the president's brother-in-law, were discovered to have opened offshore firms mostly found in the British Virgin Islands.

In what China views as a leak heavily influenced by the West particularly America and biased on non-Western key figures, it has asked all types of content pertaining to the scandal purged, most probably including those published through Medium, reports suggest.

Medium, which began in 2012 by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, has since issued a short statement about the blocking, saying, "We are aware of the block and we don't have definitive knowledge why the block has occurred."

The website was also banned in Malaysia early this year when it refused to take down "false content" about the alleged misappropriation of funds by one of the country's party leaders. While Medium hosted the article, the owner was Sarawak Report, a London-based investigative website.

Nevertheless, China remains "the world's worst abuser of Internet freedom," and it has no qualms shutting down anything it doesn't like.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The Internet became one big joke when the story about a man who nuked his entire company with a computer code turned out to be a hoax.

The web of lies began when a certain Marco Masala, who reportedly owned a hosting company, posted a question in Server Fault, an online community for experts and administrators of servers.

He had a major problem. He ran an rm-rf code that proved to be disastrous for his and his clients' businesses. It deleted everything in his computer, wiping out his entire business, and unless he had a backup, he'll never get them back again, server experts expressed with great regret.

In other words, he should have been wishing he'd never made the mistake and seriously thinking of filing for a bankruptcy. He should also have been calling up lawyers because most probably his clients will be after him with lawsuits.

But that's not what happened, and there's probably no way that's going to since he already admitted that not only was his story untrue, he might have just trolled everyone - yes, including us.

Inspired by an article he found in a newspaper a long time ago, he just wanted to test these server experts and that the command he posted in the forum was "harmless, but it seems almost no one has noticed," he said [in Italian].

It was also a shot at viral marketing, which, obviously, he successfully did. He was trying to advertise his startup business that specializes in outsourced server management. He's also planning to write a book based on the "inaccuracies" he found in the forum's comments.

Clearly not happy, Stack Overflow, who runs Server Fault, has already deleted the question after it learned of the truth, but it's currently getting suggestions from its members as removing it "will rob the kind people that took the time to answer him of the rep points they earned for this," the site explained.

Although not all rm-rf cases are fake - remember Pixar's tragedy? - perhaps this story strongly reminds us that the trolls are winning.

The best way to deal with this is to remember our mom's sage advice: never trust strangers, especially those who you simply met in the Internet.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A British Airways plane descending onto Heathrow Airport on Sunday struck an object thought to be a drone, prompting London police to immediately investigate.

The Airbus A320 flight from Geneva, Switzerland, which contained 132 passengers and five crew members, was hit by the suspected drone as it approached the airport at 12:50 BST, the Metropolitan Police said.

The Airbus pilot told officials that a potential drone came into contact with the plane, but arrests have not been made. If the incident is a confirmed drone hit, it will be the first of its kind in the United Kingdom.

The plane landed safely and was cleared for its next flight, airport officials said.

"Safety and security are always our first priority," Heathrow Airport said in a statement. "We will give the police every assistance with their investigation."

Officers are currently speaking to a pilot who has reported a drone flying very close to his aircraft on approach to Heathrow. 1/2 CAD1  Aviation Policing (@MPSHeathrow) April 17, 2016

2/2 This is dangerous, it is also a crime. Please be aware of the rules before you start flying a drone. https://t.co/jMiDJkJb6Y  Aviation Policing (@MPSHeathrow) April 17, 2016

A spokesperson from Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said that it is completely unacceptable to fly drones near airports.

Existing regulations forbid drones from being flown above 400 feet (122 meters) or near crowds of people and buildings. Anyone who breaks the rules can face serious penalties such as imprisonment of up to five years.

Flight safety expert Steve Landells told The Telegraph that a drone strike such as this suspected incident can happen in only a matter of time, especially given the large numbers of drones being used by amateurs who do not understand the risks of flying the devices.

Landells said further education of drone users and strict enforcement of rules are required to make sure that skies are safe from drone threat.

Meanwhile, although the potential threat of drone strikes have been well-researched, there is little data to show how much damage a drone could inflict upon airplanes, according to the British Airline Pilots Association.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) warned in January that drones used by the public are "a real and growing threat" to civilian airplanes.

From January 2013 up to June 2015, there had been about 856 reports of "remotely piloted" aircraft systems near airports and airliners, the IATA said. Nearly 90 percent of the reports were from North American sources.

The United States' Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) revealed in late March that there have been more than 600 instances of drone sightings near airplanes over the last five months.

Last year, the FAA launched a registry for recreational and non-commercial unmanned drones, and an estimated 406,000 people signed up since December 2015.

Photo: Eric Salard | Flickr

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Local franchisees in St. Joseph, Mound City, Missouri are planning to build the McDonald's of the future and part of this plan is to try all-you-can-eat fries.

Nothing seems to beat the idea of having unlimited fried potatoes while relaxing over the weekend or after a hard day's work. Now, that dream is about to come true, thanks to a group of novel-minded businessmen.

Customization Is Key

The branch will have kiosks where customers can customize their orders. This means that patrons may come in and create meals that will suit what they really want. Included in this feature is having the choice to have an all-you-can-eat french fries experience.

Franchise owner Chris Habiger says there are really many options for people to choose from in building the burger of their dreams. What more, they can have a comfortable time as the employees will bring the order to their tables after the orders have been placed.

The customization is not only limited to main meals; desserts may also be changed according to the customer's liking.

The idea may sound very advanced, raising questions about kiosks replacing employees. Habiger says that would not be the case. In fact, the firm plans to hire about 85 employees in the next couple of months.

The Future

Habiger says many things have changed in the past four decades that McDonald's has been present in St. Joseph.

People change through time. They are now, more than ever, connected to their mobile devices and social media. These changes spark evolution and the food industry must also follow suit.

"Today's customers seek a comfortable and inviting atmosphere," he says. With this, he says that their team is geared toward providing a new look and feel in the upcoming restaurant.

Although the branch may seem like a modern-day food joint with kiosks for order customization, the plan is still to make it a casual and quick service place, with armchairs and couches in earthy tones

The New Location

The restaurant measures about 6,500 square foot and is set o open in July. Habiger says it may possibly be among the biggest branch in the four-state location.

The restaurant's address would be at 3504 N. Belt Highway, where the old building was demolished a few weeks back. Workers are now busy at the site to build the new structure. As per the building permit, construction costs about $1.59 million.

Surely, the fast food industry has stepped up and McDonald's seems to be leading the pack. Another example of a novel and interesting twist in their menu is the chocolate-covered fries in their Japan stores.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Billions of cicadas are expected to emerge underground in the northeastern part of the United States. The 17-year-life cycle of these critters started underground in 1999 and will conclude in May as they make a grand appearance.

Brood V cicadas or periodical cicadas are less than 2 inches in length. They have dark bodies and blood-red eyes. The periodical cicadas are also called the "17-year locusts" because of their life cycle.

Periodical cicadas spend 13 to 17 years underground and only emerge when the soil underneath reaches 17.7 degrees Celsius (64 degrees Fahrenheit).

Adult cicadas normally live about four to six weeks following their escape from underground. The goal is to find a mate and lay their eggs before they die.

While these critters are not capable of stinging or biting, they emerge in massive groups and they make loud droning sounds. The male cicadas can be blamed for the noise, which they use to attract female cicadas for mating.

For as long as adult cicadas are present, nearby residents can hear the "cicada songs" early in the day or in the late evening.

The melodic buzzing is nearly frightening as the males cry out to find mates before the end of their 17-year life cycle.

Adult cicadas lay on vegetation and trees. An adult female cicada cuts into small twigs where she lays about 28 eggs on each branch. One female cicada can lay up to 400 eggs in about 50 sites. These eggs will then hatch in about six to 10 weeks.

The newborn cicadas or nymphs then fall from the trees and make their way underground. The process starts again - they will spend the next 17 years underground and feed on fluids from small roots. These new batch of cicadas are expected to emerge in 2033.

While they do not feed on plants, the slits female cicadas make for eggs can cause damage to vegetation and trees. Experts advise homeowners to delay pruning trees prior to the expected cicada emergence. This is especially beneficial to areas that are often heavily infested.

The May 2016 cicada emergence is expected in parts of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia and Long Island.

Photo: Eli Duke | Flickr

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Obesity in late adolescence can increase the risks of death from stroke and heart disease as well as sudden death in midlife, a new research found.

A study team analyzed the data of 2.3 million 17-year-olds in Israel. The team measured the weight and height variations of these teenagers between the years 1967 and 2010.

In mid-2011, they studied the link between late adolescence body-mass index (BMI) and the mortality risks associated with stroke and coronary heart disease in adulthood.

Out of 32,127 deaths, 2,918 deaths (9.1 percent) were linked to cardiovascular causes. Specifically, 1,497 died from coronary heart disease, 893 died from sudden death and 528 died from stroke.

"The continuing increase in adolescent BMI, and the rising prevalence of overweight and obesity among adolescents, may account for a substantial and growing future burden of cardiovascular disease, particularly coronary heart disease," said the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Jeremy Kark, the study's senior author.

The research team came up with two possible explanations how BMI influences the outcomes of cardiovascular disease in midlife.

First, teenage obesity may be harmful because of its link with metabolic abnormalities. Some of the risk factors in this stage include high blood pressure, reduced metabolism of glucose, resistance to insulin and the buildup of aortic atherosclerotic and coronary plaques.

Second, the researchers found that BMI appears to "track along the life course." The timing of the obesity exposure seemed to be a vital player as well. This means that overweight teenagers often end up as obese adults.

Later in life, obesity increases the risks of developing cardiovascular diseases.

In the course of the more than 40-year follow-up, the team found that even teenage BMI that was deemed "normal" was linked to a "graded increase" in all-cause mortality as well as in the development of cardiovascular diseases.

"Our findings appear to provide a link between the trends in adolescent overweight during the past decades and coronary mortality in midlife," added Kark.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises the inclusion of healthy eating habits and activities that can prevent obesity early in life. The CDC also echoed the same findings wherein obese children or teenagers are more likely to end up as obese or overweight adults.

Apart from cardiovascular problems, obese people can also suffer from high risks of osteoarthritis, type 2 diabetes and specific cancers.

The research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on April 13. The Environment and Health Fund in Jerusalem supported the study through a research grant.

Photo: Ben Seidelman | Flickr

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Japan's Akatsuki space mission may not have panned out exactly the way its planners expected, but it was still able to beam back a treasure trove of data about the Earth's sister planet, Venus.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) originally intended the Akatsuki spacecraft to orbit Venus. The probe spent its first five years in space circling the Sun before the space agency was finally able to rescue its orbiter and set it back on course four months ago.

Akatsuki's observations [PDF, In Japanese] included high quality images of what appears to be streaks of acidic clouds and a strange bow-shaped cloud located in Venus' atmosphere.

Masato Nakamura, a JAXA planetary scientist and project manager of the Akatsuki mission, explained that despite experiencing initial setbacks, the instruments onboard the spacecraft seem to be in good working condition.

The plan is to have Akatsuki execute a minor maneuver in the next couple of years designed to keep it away from the solar-power-draining shadow of Venus. This will give the space probe enough power to orbit the planet for five years instead of only two years as initially set by mission planners.

Members of the Akatsuki project presented the probe's latest observations during the International Venus Conference in the United Kingdom. One of the images shown was a high-quality infrared photograph of Venus's sulfuric acid clouds, which according to project scientist Takeshi Imamura, point to the complicated process behind the formation of clouds.

The researchers expect to receive more detailed results from Akatsuki in the coming days as the spacecraft continues its orbit around the planet.

"We will achieve better spatial resolution still," Takehiko Satoh, lead investigator for Akatsuki's 2-micrometre infrared camera, IR2, said. "We promise to give a fantastic data set to the research community for years."

People who attended the conference were intrigued by the bow shape that was captured using the space probe's long-wave infrared (LIR) camera. The mysterious cloud formation stretched across Venus from pole to pole and appeared to rotate with the planet's surface instead of its atmosphere. The researchers suspect that the bow could be connected to features on the planet's surface.

The success of the Akatsuki mission serves as a significant morale booster to scientists since it is now the only functioning space probe orbiting Venus.

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Britain's Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) took the Internet by storm with its online poll on naming the new Royal Research Ship. RRS Boaty Mcboatface tops the public poll after officially closing the Internet voting, but it is unlikely that the $280 million ship will be christened with this name.

As the UK's most advanced and largest research ship publicized its creation, NERC also took advantage of placing an Internet poll on naming the state-of-the-art ship. This encouraged people to participate and create an inspirational title that could embody the purpose of the ship.

On April 16, the voting poll has closed winning the name RRS Boaty McBoatface by 124,109, miles ahead of its rival Poppy-Mai.

But even if the public poll resulted in a majority vote on RRS Boaty McBoatface, the decision of placing the name on the research ship still lies in the hands of Science Minister Jo Johnson.

Unfortunately, Johnson flagged that ministers will unlikely endorse the result of the online poll.

"You won't be surprised to know that we want something that fits the mission and captures the spirit of scientific endeavor. I am grateful to everyone who has participated in the competition," said Jo Johnson on The Daily Telegraph.

He added that the public's suggestions will be reviewed and they will soon come up with a decision on what to name the vessel.

The name Boaty McBoatface was suggested by former BBC Radio jersey presenter James Hand, who apologized when this name topped the public interest on naming the new research ship.

Hands tweeted that the storm brought by Boaty McBoatface "had legs of its own."

The Poll

RRS Boaty McBoat tops the poll by 124,109, followed by 34,371 votes of RRS Potty Mai which was named after the 16-month-old girl whose father gave her the wedding of her dreams by marrying her after knowing that she's diagnosed with incurable cancer.

The third place was RRS Henry Worsley named after the explorer who went solo crossing in the Antarctic without assistance, with 15,231 votes.

RRS It's Bloody Cold Here ranked fourth with 10,679 votes and RRS David Attenborough landed on fifth garnering 10,284 votes.

Other suggestions were RRS Onion Knight, RRS Bowie, RRS I Like Big Boats and I Cannot Lie, and RRS Kanye West.

NERC received almost 7,000 entries within one month polling period and they thanked everyone who participated.

Let us just wait on what will be the final research ship's name.

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If you own the Amazon Echo or any other Alexa-enabled devices, then you can put the feature to good use  and we don't mean ordering pizza! Amazon Echo has been integrated with the KidsMD feature, which will enable parents to quiz it about children's health, among other things.

Thanks to this new skill developed by the Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA) team at Boston Children's Hospital (BCH) for the Alexa-enabled Amazon devices, parents will be able ask several questions about common symptoms or medical dosages.

KidsMD was launched on April 12 and is the first health care skill for Alexa-enabled devices. The idea behind the software is to allow parents to ask Alexa about their child's health. For example, one can issue the command "Alexa, ask KidsMD about fever" to learn if the symptoms are serious enough to warrant a visit to the doctor.

"The KidsMD skill makes it easier to access medical information from Boston Children's Hospital, a world-class medical institution. That access is important for all of our Alexa customers, and particularly parents. We're thrilled to be working with Boston Children's on such a unique and valuable skill. We now have over 500 Alexa skills, and we're looking forward to adding more important skills like this for our customers," said Rob Pulciani, Amazon Alexa director.

The innovative app for Alexa basically taps into the cloud-based content from the doctors at BCH and it also gives age- or weight-specific guidelines for over-the-counter drugs.

BCH wants to focus not only on offering educational information on common pediatric symptoms, but to also give basic guidance to parents on treatments that can be done at home.

In the long-term, IDHA envisions Alexa-enabled devices will be used by the public to verbally interact with the educational content that BCH has developed. Nitin Gujral, IDHA's software development manager, is also optimistic that connected home gadgets such as the Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Tap, Amazon Echo and Echo Dot will be deployed for "intuitive health care delivery."

BCH's Chief Innovation Officer John Brownstein says that the hospital is attempting to extend the know-how beyond its walls via the digital medium, and KidsMD is a step toward the goal of making content available at a wider scale.

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Apple is reportedly running a hush-hush car lab in Berlin, employing 15-20 people to work on cars of the future.

Rumors about Apple's so-called Project Titan have been making rounds for quite some time now, and it seems that Apple is making progress with its car plans. The company's automotive initiative is apparently moving on to the next level, with experts in various fields currently working to imagine and realize Apple's future cars.

The latest information comes from German publication Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a.k.a. F.A.Z. (via Apple Insider). According to F.A.Z., 15 to 20 "top-class" professionals from the country's automotive industry are busy working at Apple's new Berlin car lab.

The report doesn't mention any names for those employees but mentions that they're young "progressive thinkers" with diverse backgrounds covering software, engineering, hardware and sales.

Their managers at traditional automotive companies reportedly held them back, but these professionals are now working at Apple's lab like they would at an incubator for envisioning the cars of the future. The top-class employees are reportedly mulling potential partnerships for manufacturing as well as trying to anticipate any sales concerns and governmental issues that might arise in the country.

F.A.Z. bolsters claim that the first vehicle Apple makes will be electric but notes that its first versions will not include self-driving capabilities. Apple is not done developing computer-assisted technology, which is why initial versions of its first vehicle will not be autonomous.

At the same time, Apple is reportedly considering a business model similar to BMW's DriveNow electric vehicle sharing service, which recently got suspended in San Francisco over parking regulations.

When it comes to final manufacturing, Apple will allegedly strike a deal with the Austrian branch of Magna Steyr. This claim echoes earlier rumors from 2015, when news of an Apple Car first came to light.

Apple has yet to confirm or provide any official comment in regards to its car plans, so it all remains in the rumor state for now. As always in such cases, it is highly advisable to take all leaks, rumors and reports with a healthy dose of skepticism.

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Been tempted to shoot down that annoying drone hovering over your yard and invading into your privacy? Put the thought to rest as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has decreed that shooting down a drone is a federal crime.

According to a report from publication Forbes, the FAA says one cannot shoot down a drone, interfere or disturb an individual flying an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Why?

"Regardless of the situation, shooting at any aircraft -- including unmanned aircraft -- poses a significant safety hazard. An unmanned aircraft hit by gunfire could crash, causing damage to persons or property on the ground, or it could collide with other objects in the air," said FAA, according to a Forbes report.

In the event you throw caution to the wind and choose to bring down a drone with a string of bullets, be prepared to spend up to 20 years in prison. A drone is considered an aircraft by the FAA and shooting down aircrafts is a federal offense per the 18 U.S.C. 32 of the federal statute on Aircraft Sabotage. The statute adjudicates that "United States jurisdiction over aircraft sabotage to include destruction of any aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States."

If you were wondering what the penalty is for disturbing the drone operator or threatening them, you could be looking at doing five years in prison!

"This statute now also makes it a Federal offense to commit an act of violence against any person on the aircraft, not simply crew members, if the act is likely to endanger the safety of the aircraft," the statute reads.

Interestingly, the statute does not detail what it constitutes to be an "act of violence."

While shooting down of drones in U.S. states is not a novelty -- at least 12 drones have been shot down from the sky in 5 U.S. states -- there has been no severe federal prosecution till now. However, in June 2015, we reported that a man was fined $850 by a Californian court for shooting down a drone with his shotgun.

Moreover, in September 2014, a man from New Jersey was arrested and charged with "possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and criminal mischief" as he shot down his neighbor's drone.

With more people deploying drones, the probability of its abuse heightens. Many people will not be thrilled by the notion of drone's roaming freely and having their hands tied.

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Researchers say the sacred Mt. Paektu - or Changbai in Chinese - located along the border between Korea and China could erupt anytime.

A Violent Past

Mt. Paektu has been inactive in recent decades since its last eruption in 1903, but earthquakes in the area were recorded between 2002 and 2005.

Seismic activity usually causes underground magma shift. This has prompted North Korean scientists to wonder whether Mt. Paektu is getting ready to unleash a massive eruption at any moment.

The volcano has had a violent past. Experts say Mt. Paektu spewed one of the largest eruptions in the planet in 946 CE, blasting 96 cubic kilometers of rocks and ash as far away as Japan.

Despite Mt. Paektu's raging outbursts, scientists have yet to unravel mysteries surrounding the 9,000-foot-tall peak. Researchers are using an array of seismometers to peer beneath the volcano.

"It is a volcano with a dramatic past," says seismologist James Hammond, who is part of the research team in North Korea. "We do not know much about it.

What Could Happen If It Erupts?

With six seismometers placed in Mt. Paektu, Hammond and his colleagues detected partially molten rocks in the crust.

The question is: will the melt turn into an eruption? Although volcanologists cannot say for certain, they believe that Mt. Paektu could potentially erupt.

If Mt. Paektu fully wakes up, researchers say the eruption could reach about 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, away from its summit.

What's more, more than 1.6 million North Koreans living within 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, of the volcano would be greatly affected.

Hammond, a geophysics expert from the University of London, has warned that the impact could go way beyond North Korea and China should the volcano erupt.

"We need to keep an eye on it," says Hammond.

Stephen Grand, a seismologist from the University of Texas in Austin, says the chances of a very destructive eruption is very real. He adds that the subsurface could help scientists predict the future, but it won't be definitive.

"One would need to follow how the current situation changes with time going forward," says Grand.

Kayla Iacovino, an expert from U.S. Geological Survey who worked on Mt. Paektu in 2013, added that the volcano's eruption could certainly affect trade routes as well as commercial airline traffics.

Mt. Paektu is holy to North Koreans who have turned the volcano into the country's national emblem. It is said to be the place where the founder of the first Korean kingdom was born.

The findings of the study are featured in the journal Science Advances.

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It was said Apple exec Philip Schiller.

Over the course of the event, developers will be able to attend more than 150 hands-on labs and meet with no less than 1,000 Apple engineers, with WWDC 2016 aiming to help in the integration of the latest technologies of the company's operating systems in the apps of the developers.

How To Register

Registration is now open through WWDC 2016's official website, but attending the event will not be as simple as purchasing tickets. Apple will be offering the chance to acquire tickets by random selection, so developers who are hoping to attend should register to be included in the ticket lottery.

The deadline of registration is on April 22, at 10:00 a.m. PDT. The developers who were picked and can purchase a ticket will be informed by April 25, 5:00 p.m. PDT, as the cost of the ticket will be automatically charged to the credit card or debit card associated with their Apple ID.

Developers who registered should be a member of the Apple Developer Program or Apple Developer Enterprise Program. Tickets do not come cheap at $1,599 each, but for developers looking to dive deeper into Apple's technology would find the cost to be worth it.

How To Watch Online

Unfortunately, not all developers will be able to join the event. For those who will be staying at home, but are still interested in the event, there are a couple of ways to watch a live stream of WWDC 2016.

The first method is to watch the live stream through the official WWDC website, and the second method is to download the official WWDC app and watch through there. The app has not yet been updated for this year, but for last year's event, it contained the schedule, maps and an Apple Watch module, in addition to access to a video stream for the conference.

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Earlier in April, BlackBerry permanently reduced the price of the Priv, the company's first Android-powered smartphone, to $649.99 in the United States, from the original price of $699.99.

That price, however, could still be too steep for some BlackBerry fans who are looking to get their hands on the device.

A new offer listed on Daily Steals will now allow users to get the BlackBerry Priv at an even cheaper price of $449.99, which is a 31 percent discount or $200 off from the smartphone's new price tag.

The BlackBerry Priv being offered in the listing is branded as an AT&T device, but it is an unlocked version. As an unlocked GSM handset, buyers can choose to use it within T-Mobile's network, if they prefer the Un-Carrier over AT&T.

Verizon subscribers will not be able to take advantage of the offer though, as their carrier operates on CDMA. Sprint subscribers are also not in luck as also a CDMA carrier, with the company even previously revealing that it will not carry the BlackBerry Priv despite previously promising that it would.

Interested buyers will have to hurry though, as the deal only has four days left at the time of writing. It should be noted that the BlackBerry Priv being sold are brand new units and not refurbished ones.

The BlackBerry Priv, which has a slide-out physical keyboard that is a trademark feature of BlackBerry devices, adds access to the full Android ecosystem and its apps, along with added security to protect the data that users will store in the smartphone.

The device features a 5.4-inch dual-curved AMOLED screen protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 4, with the smartphone powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 808 and 3 GB of RAM. The BlackBerry Priv also packs an 18 MP rear-facing camera, a 2 MP front-facing camera, a 3,410 mAh battery and an internal 32 GB memory that can be expanded up to an additional 2 TB.

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Apple pulled the plug on supporting QuickTime for Windows after 11 years, and strongly urges Windows users to uninstall the software from their machines.

The OS X developer made clear that zero updates or security patches will land on the PC variant of the multimedia software from now on. This means that virtually all those who continue to use QuickTime on a system running Windows set themselves at risk.

No sooner than last week, digital security analysts at Trend Micro announced that they discovered two new flaws in QuickTime 7 for Windows. Trend Micro went on to add that Apple caught word of the security threats in November 2015.

Last year, the company stated that it didn't plan to issue any patches for the software, as QuickTime "would be deprecated on Windows." Apple also noted that Microsoft should instruct and assist users to remove the unpatched software.

Trend Micro replicated the vulnerabilities in QuickTime, directing it to an infected website and making it play a malicious file. Such nefarious actions help hackers by opening backdoors that allow remote code execution. The method is called "heap overflow" and it is a rather common modus operandi for ill-intended users, who can send malware to vulnerable targets.

Trend Micro says that the flaw was not spotted doing damage across the Internet, but suggests that the single surefire way of avoiding it is to install QuickTime altogether.

Apple delivered the most recent security update for the PC version of QuickTime in January. The company then offered users a thorough QuickTime uninstall guide on its Support Pages website, in March.

The state authorities are backing Apple's advice.

Earlier this month, The Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team addressed the issue and recommended that Windows PC users should uninstall Apple QuickTime video player immediately. The risks from continuing to use the player are considerable.

"Potential negative consequences include loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability of data, as well as damage to system resources or business assets," says US-CERT.

It should be noted that Mac computer users will keep getting regular patch updates, so they can still use QuickTime and be safe. If you're on Windows, however, uninstall it now if you haven't already.

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The Pentagon is one of the best protected places on earth, both physically and digitally, and big figures are spent each year to keep the place as secure as possible.

During the following weeks, the U.S. Department of Defense wants to invest in its security in an uncanny fashion: by paying hackers who manage to break into official government websites.

Meet the "Hack the Pentagon" pilot program, which runs between April 18 and May 12, allowing hackers to attack specific Department of Defense public websites in an effort to locate and highlight cybersecurity weaknesses.

Officials from the U.S. DoD reassure the public that "mission-facing" computer systems will not take part in the experiment. This means that PCs that control the nukes and anti-terrorist cells are safe.

To incentivize the best morally-ambiguous coders to hack into the Pentagon's websites, authorities offer up to $150,000 to those who expose critical security liabilities. News surfaced about the program in early March, but at the time no specific sum was on the table.

There is a catch, though: those who want to join in the program need to pass a background check and meet a tight series of criteria. For example, those coming from countries which the U.S. embargoed are not eligible.

Better Late Than Never

Such pilot programs are commonplace in the tech industry, as big companies often organize "bug bounties" to boost cybersecurity. However, it is a premiere for the U.S. government to deploy a public program of this sort.

Websites that are run by the DoD get harassed or blatantly attacked in huge numbers. For example, 2012 registered 4 billion visits, a quarter of which were detected to have malicious purposes. That amounts to 1 billion attacks to only a few websites, and the hackers' activity intensified in the last four years.

Katie Moussouris is one consultant who worked closely with the Pentagon to implement bug bounty.

"Before this pilot, there was really no legal way for a hacker to report [security flaws] to the U.S. government," she says.

One area where Moussouris thinks the bug bounty will help is in tightening the gap between the federal authorities and the tech community. The two entities were at odds after the Snowden leaks, and the recent FBI vs Apple case does little to increase the fondness between the two groups.

Successful Cyberattacks

In 2015, an attack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management was unveiled, and the results were dismaying: the hackers managed to steal personnel data on a few millions U.S. federal employees.

Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer at F-Secure, warns that the concentrated digital attacks on infrastructure are not a staple of sci-fi movies anymore. This was proven by a series of strikes that caused power outages in Ukraine. The attacks were purported to originate from Russia.

"Cyber warfare and cyberattacks are not just theory," Hypponen notes.

He points out that the United States is one of the most technologized countries in the world, and as such, it makes itself vulnerable.

"You want the hackers to be on your side. You want to work with them," he explains.

We are happy to see that the Pentagon finally acts on the security experts' advice and takes proactive measure to ensure the country's security.

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Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows didn't do anything to dispel the widespread belief that the Bullet Club is going to spread like wildfire in WWE on Monday Night Raw last night.

Instead, they doused the notion with gasoline, ambushing WWE World Heavyweight champion Roman Reigns and putting him on notice that they have the back of AJ Styles, their Bullet Club brethren and the No. 1 contender for Reigns' belt. Add that to the fact that reigning NXT champion Finn Balor is a proud member of the Bullet Club, even touting his branded "Bulletproof Bullet Club" on T-shirts.

So, everything is in place for a reunion, right? Well, not quite. Although it appears like Anderson and Gallows are gung-ho about forming the Bullet Club back up like Voltron and Balor might be on board with that idea, too, Styles showed some apprehension last night.

Styles couldn't be happier being reunited with his brothers earlier in the show, but that feeling would change as Raw continued through the night.



After they beat down Reigns, Styles made it a point to seek out the World Heavyweight champion to let him know that he didn't order the hit and that Anderson and Gallows were acting on their own volition.



Though Styles denied any collusion with his Bullet Club brothers, Reigns wasn't buying it and he made it clear on his Twitter account after the show ended.

I don't need a "club." Consider this your only warning, AJ. Stay away from my family and watch yourself around me. #TheGuy #RomanEmpire  Roman Reigns (@WWERomanReigns) April 19, 2016



When Anderson and Gallows first appeared on Raw last week, they attacked The Usos, Reigns' cousins.

We see this playing out in one of two ways. Either "The Phenomenal One" is downplaying his connection to the Bullet Club to further lure and entrench Reigns into a dubious position, or he's being sincere and the faction from New Japan Pro Wrestling will build itself up without him.

If we had to pick one scenario right now, we'd lean toward the former. Is Styles playing mind games with the new champ?

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Remember back when you were a child and your parents would always yell that you were sitting to close to the TV? You might be finding yourself doing the same thing with your little ones, only this time, it's when they are using a smartphone or tablet.

Mobile devices are probably part of your child's life, whether it's to let them play games, watch a movie or read a book. While smartphones and tablets are a great way for kids to learn and be entertained, they often hold the screens a little too close. We all know that this can be bad for their eyesight.

However, now, there is a solution to this problem that doesn't consist of you having to take the devices away from them. Nope, no tantrums here.

Samsung launched an Android app that prevents kids from holding their devices too close to their faces.

Called Samsung Safety Screen, the app makes sure the child holds the device at the ideal distance so that they do not strain their eyes or cause other potential damage to their vision.

It does so by using facial recognition technology to detect when the device needs to be held out at more of a distance.

Samsung Safety Screen runs in the background so that other apps can run at the same time. As the child is watching a movie, series or playing a game, a screen that features a multi-eyed friendly monster will then pop up to alert the child they have to move back from the screen if they are too close.

The pop-up window will remain open until the user holds out the device to be in the ideal viewing distance. It will then disappear once they do so.

The app helps make sure that kids are reminded to keep a healthy separation between their face and their tablet without feeling too invasive.

The parent can also create a username and password to prevent the child from deactivating the app. However, the best part is that they no longer have to disturb their child when they are immersed in their favorite Netflix kids' series or game.

Samsung Safety Screen is available to download for free from the Google Play Store.

Source: Samsung Safety Screen

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The console wars are heating up once again. Rumors have swirled for months about an upgraded PlayStation 4, now believed to be codenamed "NEO," coming from Sony. Similar rumors continue to circulate around the Xbox One as well, making it seem increasingly likely that Microsoft and Sony are looking to bring new and improved versions of their existing consoles to market.

Despite Xbox head Phil Spencer saying in an interview that he wasn't a fan of the idea of an Xbox One and a half, it does seem like Microsoft is up to something. The Verge reports that its sources have confirmed that Microsoft has been testing out a variety of "prototype" Xbox devices. Some of the prototypes, the site reports, have been tested with upgraded components similar to what would be used to improve a PC gaming machine.

When combined with recent evidence of unannounced filings with the FCC from Microsoft that line up closely with similar filings for components included in the Xbox One, it seems there may be more truth to these rumors than originally believed.

What exactly all of the rumors mean, however, is another story. Spencer has gone on record to say that if there was to be a new version of the Xbox One, it would be "a really substantial change for people  an upgrade."

An upgrade could come in a number of forms, including everything from wireless chip filed with the FCC to improved graphical power and performance. Rumors about Sony's upgraded PS4 console revolve around the company looking to improve its hardware in time for the launch of the PlayStation VR. Aside from simply being an improvement for improvement's sake, it's unclear what Microsoft would be looking to achieve with an Xbox One upgrade, considering it won't be competing in the VR space. Microsoft does have the Hololens headset to consider, but it remains unclear how that piece of technology would work with the Xbox One.

If an upgrade is released, it also raises questions about compatibility. New PS4 NEO rumors state that all PS4 games will work on the original PS4 hardware, but that developers will also have to scale up their games in the future for the improved console as well. If Microsoft is also poised to release an upgraded Xbox One, it will have to answer that question as well.

Many of these mysteries will likely be solved at this summer's E3 expo, where Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will make all their major announcements for the year.

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Bangalore To Host The 3rd Edition of GMASA In July | TechTree.com

The Global Mobile App Summit and Awards (GMASA) is slated to host the third edition of the event in Bangalore on the 6th and 7th of July at the Sheraton Grand Hotel. GMASA will host a two-day summit featuring some of the best names in the mobile app industry.The prominent key speakers for the summit include Mr. Ravi Bhaskaran, Head of Business Development Twitter (Asia), Shalini Poddar, Industry Manager, Google, Arjun Ravi Kolady, Business Head E-commerce, Facebook and a host other renowned entrepreneurs from across the globe.

The summit aims at being a holistic and comprehensive platform for app developers and potential investors to network and create a dynamic start-up ecosystem. The star attraction of the summit is the Start-Up Pitch Fest where app developers and young startups can submit their entries which would be reviewed by a panel of esteemed jury members. The summit will also feature a series of panel discussions covering topics like Mobile Analytic Trends For 2016, The Journey From The App Idea To Funded Mobile Start-Up etc.

The Awards ceremony is touted to be a gala affair that would honor and recognize the talents in the industry. Speaking at the press meet of GMASA, C.R Venkatesh, Chairman of GMASA said, Our aim is to bring together app developers, thinkers from the mobile app industry and investors under one roof. This summit is a unique platform that will provide app developers an opportunity to showcase their apps to a large audience and be recognized. The responses for the previous two summits were fantastic, but we are expecting much more this year.

The first edition of GMASA was held in Chennai and the second edition of the summit was held in Bangkok.

TAGS: Mobile App, Startup, GMASA
Teri Takai, who served as state CIO and secretary of the California Technology Agency from 2007-2010, has been named a senior adviser at the Center for Digital Government, a national research and advisory institute on IT policies and best practices in state and local government.



In her role, Takai will help state and local government leaders incorporate new technologies and advise governments in all 50 states.



"I am excited to be working with the Center for Digital Government in helping state and local government further their agendas through a strong technology platform, Takai said in a statement released Monday. In our changing world  from cybersecurity to the Internet of Things to the continued need to reach our citizens, the role of technology is vital to government, education and health care. I look forward to helping CDG support state and local government in their continued efforts to improve the lives of citizens.



Takai worked for Ford Motor Co. for 30 years in strategic planning and global application development. Then she moved to the public sector, first as CIO of Michigan (2003-07), then as CIO of California (2007-10). She then became CIO of the U.S. Department of Defense. Takai most recently served as CIO of Meridian Health Plan and she currently serves on the board of FirstNet, the national public safety broadband effort.



The Center for Digital Government is a division of Techwire's parent company, e.Republic Inc.





Matt Williams Matt Williams was Managing Editor of Techwire from June 2014 through May 2017. See More Stories by Matt Williams
Facebook is planning to change the world to something new from what we see today. In Facebooks annual developer conference held at San Francisco , Facebooks CEO Mark Zuckerberg put forward the companys plan for the next decade.

The primary objective is to keep the billion users involved and attract new users.

Here is the most important ways by which the social networking company is going to do this:

Bots-The Virtual Friends

Facebook is allowing companies to build automated bots on its Facebook Messenger mobile app that users can interact with to do things like get the weather or news or buy things like flowers or burgers (see Facebook Wants You to Chat with Business Bots). So far, companies including flower seller 1-800-Flowers.com, Burger King, and Dutch airline KLM have signed on.

Chatting with a bot via Facebook Messenger is similar to having a chat with a friendalbeit a friend who only wants to talk about one topic and serves up limited responses to your text-based missives. For instance, the 1-800-Flowers bot gives you options to order flowers or speak with customer support; if you tap Order flowers, it wants to know the shipping address and delivery date, and lets you scroll through a handful of options. No small talk here, as far as we could tell.

If businesses can figure out ways to make this engaging and easy, Facebook could generate a lot of revenue from such bots; for now, though, its hard to tell why youd want to get information or buy things this way rather than via a smartphone app or a website.

Live Videos will be enhanced

So that more people can use them. It has been noted by the company that users watch live videos longer than other videos and comment on them ten times more often than on usual videos. Facebook, will promote the use of live video feature and extend the facility to non verified accounts too.

Facebook has also released software that will enable developers to stream live videos from any device including drones.

The Genius Algorithm

Facebooks website will now know and recognize the content of your photos and videos. You will be able to search images for specific content using text. For example, by typing mountains you can see all your pics of your recent hiking trip.

It is not clear till now whether the technology will be available soon or well have to wait for one or two years.

The technology is based on the same deep learning technique used by Google photos.

Taking VR to Another Level

Virtual Reality has made a debut in last year. But the capabilities of VR headsets and the number of movies and games that can be enjoyed on it are limited. Facebook is working on VR to enhance it on a level where people can use it to interact with other people who are distant.

Researchers have made an arrangement to study human body language as they interact with each other. Researcher Yaser Sheikh, in the conference, talked about using a dome studded with over 500 cameras called the Panoptic Studio to study peoples body language in 3-D as they interact. He said Facebook wants to make getting together in virtual space, to catch up with a friend in another city or for a job interview, close to real life. It would be by far the most compelling electronic social experience yet, said Sheikh. The distance between you and the people you care about would melt away.

Internet will be recreated

You may have heard about free basics and other such services which offered free or subsidized access to the Internet( actually a part of it). Now Facebook is developing a drone named Aquila( Eagle in Latin), which will beam the internet connectivity to the rural areas where setting up Internet is costly.

Facebook is also working on two new technologies to connect remote areas to internet in order to make the world more connected(or to get more people use their services). The social networking company will give away the design of these two technologies for free, so that these can be adopted easily by telecom companies.

These were the important highlights of Facebooks action plan for forthcoming decade. You can share your views in the comments and let us know which thing out of these you liked the most.
A 40 anos de Malvinas

"Revisar el pasado es pensar el futuro". La frase de la presidenta de Telam, Bernarda Llorente, resume el espiritu del documental coproducido entre la agencia de noticias y el canal publico de TV sobre la cobertura que los medios de comunicacion hicieron del conflicto, plagada de censura y mentiras. Una autocritica necesaria para mirar hacia adelante en un (ya viejo) contexto de fake news y negocio informativo.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded an unprecedented number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border in a fiscal year. | Read More
An undated photo of Dung Quat oil refinery in the central province of Quang Ngai. Photo: Hien Cu The finance ministry has backed state-owned oil giant PetroVietnam's controversial demand for the country's sole refinery Dung Quat to be given further tax breaks to compete with cheap imports, local media reported Monday.

The proposal is "absolutely necessary and reasonable," considering that oil products from South Korea have been taxed at 10 percent this year compared to 20 percent earlier, Deputy Minister of Finance Do Hoang Anh Tuan was quoted as saying.

He said his ministry would recommend a new tax policy for Dung Quat to guarantee "equality" between local and imported products.

Last month PetroVietnam and its subsidiary Binh Son Refining and Petrochemical Company, which operates the US$5-billion refinery in the central province of Quang Ngai, had asked the government to reduce its 20 percent import tax on crude oil.

Without tax breaks, they said, Dung Quat would shut down in two or three months as its customers have been reducing orders in anticipation of lower prices since imports from countries with whom Vietnam has free trade agreements, including ASEAN neighbors, have become cheaper due to lower duties.

Last year the finance ministry reduced the import tariff from 35 percent to 20 percent for Dung Quat.

But now the demand has sparked criticism from economists who said Dung Quat, as an underperforming business project, does not deserve more support.

According to figures released by PetroVietnam, Binh Son posted a cumulative loss of over VND1 trillion ($44.79 million) from 2010 to 2014, but that figure would have been a staggering VND27.6 trillion without a policy that allowed it to pay less import duties.

Since it went into operation in 2008, the refinery with an annual capacity of 6.5 million tons has been relying heavily on tax breaks, including a corporate tax of 10 percent, compared to 20 percent for most companies.
A file photo of an automobile show in Vietnam. Photo: Phong Tran

Sales of small cars are expected to increase sharply when a lower luxury tax rate comes into effect this July, local media reported, citing industry insiders.

They expected the prices of cars with engines smaller than 1.5 liters will drop by US$500-1,000 each when new tax amendments takes effect, cutting luxury tax for small cars from 45 percent to 40 percent, news website Saigon Times Online reported. The amendments were passed Wednesday.

This range of cars currently accounts for about half of Vietnam's auto market. They will become even cheaper after January 1, 2018 when the luxury tax rate is lowered further to 35 percent. Cars from other Southeast Asian countries will be imported with tariffs between zero and five percent starting 2018

Popular small cars such as Huyndai i10 and i20, Kia Morning, Toyota Vios, Ford Fiesta and Mazda2 are currently sold at VND300-700 million in Vietnam, the website reported.

Many businesses have already moved to capitalize on the new policy. Euro Auto, which imports and distributes BMW cars in Vietnam, for instance, has recently launched a new 1.5-liter seven-seater car in Vietnam, according to the website.

The market share of small cars will soon exceed 50 percent, industry insiders said.

On the other hand, luxury tax rates for cars with engines larger than three liters will rise sharply to 90-150 percents.

An industry insider was quoted as saying that the new tax rates can increase the prices of those multi-billion dong cars by as least 70 percent.

Starting July the tax rates on cars with engines ranging from 1.5 to 2.5 liters will remain at 45-50 percent, while those between 2.5-three liters will see a rise from 50 percent to 55 percent.

Vietnam's auto sales grew 55 percent to nearly 244,914 units last year. Local producers accounted for 70.6 percent of the total sales, while the rest were from imports, according to official figures.
A Thanh Nien's file photo shows an auto show in Vietnam. The country spent around US$140 million importing more than 7,800 cars from Thailand alone in the first quarter of this year, according to the General Customs Department.

Thailand has emerged as the new champion in the Vietnamese car market with a 30 percent share, thanks in most part to a new regional free trade agreement that has cut import tariffs and lowered prices.

Statistics from the General Customs Department showed that more than 7,800 cars made in Thailand were sold to Vietnam in the first three months, up 64.5 percent from a year ago.

The cars, worth around US$140 million, helped Thailand surpass China and South Korea in the Vietnamese market for the first time.

Car imports from South Korea dropped 41 percent and China 58 percent from the first quarter last year, in terms of units.

Thailand has surged as a major car production base in the region thanks to huge Japanese investment. The country was the fourth biggest car seller to Vietnam last year after China, South Korea and India.

A source from the finance ministry said the market shift is a result of a new free trade agreement among the 10 members of the Southeast Asian bloc ASEAN, under which car import tariffs have been cut from 50 percent to 40 percent this year.

The rate will continue to go down to 30 percent next year and zero in 2018.
State-owned Petrolimex has been offering shares to private investors since 2011. Photo: Ngoc Thang

Vietnams largest fuel retailer Petrolimex on Wednesday announced a plan to sell an 8 percent stake to Japans JX Nippon Oil & Energy to raise money for restructuring a loss-making unit in Singapore.

Bui Ngoc Bao, board chairman of the state-owned corporation, said at a shareholders meeting that it expects to raise at least US$176.4 million from selling 103.5 million shares to the Tokyo-based company.

Bao said the two companies have been negotiating the deal for two years. Petrolimex previously planned to sell a 20 percent stake, but decided to offer less to the Japanese investors amid a weak market, he said, as cited by news website VnExpress.

Petrolimex, which sells more than half of oil products in Vietnam, has been trying to sell shares to private investors since its IPO in 2011. It is expected to reduce the state-owned stake from around 95 percent to as low as 65 percent.

Once the deal is closed, Bao said, he will seek the shareholders agreement to let JX Nippon have one member in Petrolimex board of directors.

A Petrolimex statement said part of the money earned from the deal will be spent on restructuring Petrolimex Singapore, which has lost "trillions of dong."

In December 2014 Petrolimex signed a memorandum of understanding with the Japanese firm, under which JX Nippon would become a strategic investor in Petrolimex.
Vietnamese fishing boats are blown up for violating Indonesia waters. Photo credit: Reuters

Indonesia Thursday released 18 more Vietnamese fishermen it had arrested for illegally fishing in its waters, the ninth batch to be released this year.

Hoang Anh Tuan, Vietnams ambassador to Indonesia, the embassy has intervened to enable nearly 80 fishermen to return home this year.

More than 100 others remain incarcerated but half of them would return home soon, Tuan told news website Zing.

He said helping release Vietnamese fishermen has been a priority for his embassy.

But the mission has become more difficult as Indonesia has begun to crack down on illegal fishing, increasing patrolling and punishing intruders severely.

There is no sign that illegal fishing in Indonesia by Vietnamese will reduce soon, Tuan said.

Indonesia has been treating arrested fishermen humanely, but that might change as the country has pledged tougher measures such as sinking any intruding ship, regardless of nationality.

It sank 13 boats from Vietnam and 10 from Malaysia on April 5.
Two Japanese warships docked Tuesday at Cam Ranh Port in Khanh Hoa Province for a three-day visit.

The visit by the guided-missile destroyers Ariake and Setogiri with 500 officers and sailors on board is the first of its kind, according to the Japanese embassy in Hanoi.

The visit was first planned by Minister of Defense Phung Quang Thanh and his Japanese counterpart Gen Nakatani during the latters visit to Vietnam last November.

Among other things, the two destroyers are expected to participate in an exercise with the Vietnamese Navy, practicing drills for unplanned encounters, known as CUES.

Since Cam Ranh Port officially opened to foreign vessels on March 8, this is the second visit by warships from other countries following Singapores RSS Endurance, which came on March 17.
A taxi driver and his three passengers were found dead in a car recovered from a roadside lake in the northern province of Lang Son on Monday morning.

Locals found the taxi at around 10 a.m., when it lied upside down at the part around two meters deep. Rescuers spent nearly two hours lifting the car.

Police suggested that the car plunged into the lake after midnight the same day.

The 40-year-old driver Dam Hong Quang was dead, so as all three male passengers - Nguyen Ngoc Hieu, 36, Linh Hoang Khanh and Vi Van Tam, both 33. All the victims are Lang Son locals.

Police are investigating the cause.
The arrestees, including alleged kingpin Liu En Hsiang (1st, L), at a police station in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Dam Huy/Thanh Nien

Ho Chi Minh City police on Monday arrested 11 people in a phone scam ring accused of cheating many Vietnamese people out of more than VND2.5 billion (US$112,200).

The arrestees include the Taiwanese alleged kingpin Liu En Hsiang, 26.

Hsiang confessed that he and four other Taiwanese men entered Vietnam in February with tourist visas. In Vietnam, they managed to get six locals involved in their scam.

The gang often called the victims and pretended to be investigators. They questioned the victims for having suspiciously huge phone bills and accused them of being involved in d rug or money laundering crimes.

The officers continued to threaten them into transferring money to an account for investigation.

The Vietnamese members were tasked with opening bank accounts to get the money from the victims.
Nearly 340,000 families in Vietnam's southern and central regions are suffering from water shortage. Photo: Thien Nhan/Thanh Nien

Losses from the severe drought that is parching central and southern Vietnam have risen to almost US$250 million as it ravages vast plantations and seafood farms, officials said.

The number was compiled by the Central Steering Committee on Natural Disasters Prevention which surveyed the impact on agriculture in the Central Highlands, south central provinces and the Mekong Delta in the last three and a half months.

The drought, the worst in the country in 90 years, has destroyed nearly 260,000 hectares of rice and vegetables, more than 160,000 hectares of orchards and cash crops and more than 4,500 hectares of seafood farms, according to the report.

Nearly 340,000 families face a water shortage, it said.

Some 70 percent of agriculture land have dried up in the Central Highlands and south central provinces, which are the main producers of Vietnams prime exports of coffee and pepper.

Low water levels in the Mekong River have caused seawater to intrude 90 kilometers into the basin, the furthest recorded in history. Eleven out of 13 provinces in the delta have declared the drought a natural disaster.

The agriculture ministry has urged the government to provide more than VND1 trillion ($44.6 million) in relief to the affected areas as the situation is likely to continue until September and spread to the north central provinces as well.

Water in rivers in the affected areas can drop by more than 90 percent below average levels, it said.
The Tan Hiep Water Plant has often halted operation this dry season due to short of freshwater. Photo: Diep Duc Minh

Ho Chi Minh City should build reservoirs along upstream Saigon River to store freshwater when the tide goes out since saltwater intrusion is increasing, according to experts from water solutions consultant Vitens Evides International.

Salt content in the river is on the rise, often reaching 600 mg per liter at many places, Rik Dierx of the Dutch company said at a conference held by the Saigon Water Corporation (Sawaco) on April 8.

The companys experts suggested construction of multipurpose freshwater reservoirs near Lang The and Dia Phan canals in Cu Chi District to supply the Tan Hiep water pumping station.

According to Nguyen Hong Tien of the Ministry of Construction, the government has approved a plan to supply 3.6 trillion liters of water a day to HCMC through pipes from the Dau Tieng and Tri An reservoirs.

But drawing water from Dau Tieng, which is 70 km away, could cost up to US$1.5 billion, forcing relevant agencies to consider alternate solutions.

A rise in sea levels and overexploitation of groundwater have been blamed for more frequent flooding in HCMC during the rainy season and saltwater intrusion in the Dong Nai and Saigon rivers in dry season.

Experts are also concerned about the quality of water in the rivers due to discharge of domestic and industrial wastewater into them, leading to unsafe levels of metals and bacteria.

With the salinity encroaching more and more up the Saigon River, Sawaco plans to lay 10km of pipes to get water from further upstream to the Hoa Phu pumping station which supplies Tan Hiep.
Vietnamese and Lao border guards have coordinated to arrest a Laotian man accused of attempting to smuggle 30,000 methamphetamine tablets into Vietnam.

Xi Pa Xot Bun Tham, 50, was arrested on April 7 at a village in Laos Khammuane Province near the border with Quang Binh Province in Vietnam.

Bun Tham confessed that he bought the drug abroad and was attempting to hire Vietnamese people in Laos to smuggle it to Vietnam.

Quang Binh border guards said they had followed the case for a month before arresting him.
The Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency on Sunday night detained a Vietnamese fishing vessel with 14 crew members who were accused of encroaching into Malaysian waters.

According to agency, the vessel was carrying out illegal fishing activities near the port of Tok Bali.

It was detained by a patrol boat about 75.6 nautical miles off the port at around 10.20 p.m.

The agency said that the crew failed to produce valid documents. The gears and a ton of fish were also seized.



The Vietnamese captain and his 13 crew members, aged between 23 and 58, were remanded for 14 days beginning Monday to facilitate investigation.

The vessel, the gears and the catch are worth around US$510,000 in total.

Last Sunday, another Vietnamese vessel with six crew members were seized by Malaysian authorities around 70 nautical miles away from Kula Kemaman.
Ho Chi Minh City police have arrested a Russian man accused of stealing an iPhone from a restaurant manager last week.

Initial investigation found Petrov Vadim, 32, moved from the central city of Phan Thiet to HCMC on April 6. He rented a room on Bui Vien Street in the popular backpacker neighborhood.

The following day he reportedly went to a restaurant on the nearby Nguyen Thai Hoc Street for lunch.

The restaurant manager Lam Huynh Thuy Tien left an iPhone 6 charging at her counter and went away. Vadim allegedly stole the phone and left.

Tien checked security footage and decided to go around the neighborhood to find the suspect.

She saw Vadim walking on Bui Vien Street at around 6:30 p.m. the same day and asked local residents and police to help arrest him.

At the police station, Vadim first rejected the accusation but he later admitted to the theft after police showed him the video.

The Russian man said he worked as a teacher in Mui Ne, the resort town often known as "Little Moscow." He caught a bus to HCMC to avoid paying debt.

Police are investigating the case.
Tourists visit an old watchtower in Da Nang. Photo credit: Tam Nhin

Da Nang police have arrested a 24-year-old man accused of stealing money from a Filipino tourist who was visiting an attraction in the central city.

Nguyen Van Dong works as a photographer at an old watchtower built during the Tran Dynasty (1226-1400) on a Hai Van Pass section in Da Nang. He also rents out ladders to tourists who want to climb the old structure.

According to police, at around 11:40 on April 17, Dong leased a ladder to two Filipino tourists, including Nimfa Sandstrom, who left her bag on the ground.

Nguyen Van Dong at a police station After the tourists climbed up, he allegedly stole VND3.6 million (US$161) from Sandstrom's bag.

The tourist then reported the case to a tour guide and local police.

Dong was arrested later the same day and he confessed to the crime.

Police have returned the stolen money to the tourist. They are proposing criminal charges against Dong.
Congressmen, who support or oppose the impeachment, argue during a session to review the request for Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, at the Chamber of Deputies in Brasilia. Photo: Reuters/Ueslei Marcelino

Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff vowed on Monday to fight impeachment tooth-and-nail in the Senate after a heavy defeat in the lower house of Congress raised the likelihood of an end to 13 years of leftist rule in Latin America's largest economy.

In a raucous vote late on Sunday that sparked jubilation among Rousseff's foes, the opposition comfortably surpassed the two-thirds majority needed to send Brazil's first female president for trial in the Senate on charges she manipulated budget accounts.

If the Senate votes by a simple majority to accept the case next month, as is expected, Rousseff would become the first Brazilian leader to be impeached for more than 20 years.

The crisis has paralyzed the government as it struggles to revive the economy from its worst recession in decades. It has also sparked a bitter struggle between Rousseff, a 68-year-old former Communist guerrilla, and her Vice President Michel Temer, 75, who would take power if she is impeached.

Addressing the nation on television, a combative Rousseff insisted that she had committed no impeachable crime and accused Temer of openly conspiring to topple her government in what she described as a 'coup'.

"While I am very saddened by this, I have the force, the spirit and the courage to fight this whole process to the end," Rousseff told the televised news conference. "This is just the beginning of the battle, which will be long and drawn out."

Rousseff stands accused of a budgetary sleight of hand employed by many elected officials in Brazil: delaying payments to state lenders in order to artificially lower the budget deficit to boost her reelection bid in 2014.

Nevertheless, opinion polls show more than 60 percent of Brazilians support impeaching Rousseff, less than two years after the leftist leader narrowly won reelection. Her popularity has been crushed by the recession and a vast graft scandal at state oil company Petrobras.

A Rousseff aide said the government would focus on clawing back support in the 81-seat Senate, where it lacks the simple majority needed to prevent the case being accepted for trial. Given that it currently has the support of only 31 senators, the aide said the situation looked "very difficult."

The government has been looking to Senate Speaker Renan Calheiros, a crucial but fickle ally of Rousseff's, to delay the Senate vote as long as possible to give it time to negotiate.

However, Calheiros said on Monday he would remain neutral and would meet with party leaders in the Senate on Tuesday to define the calendar for the process.

Paralyzed government

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators from both sides of the impeachment battle took to the streets across Brazil on Sunday in peaceful protests. Millions watched the vote live on television.

The heavy margin of defeat in Sunday's vote shocked many Workers Party insiders, who blamed treachery by allied parties. The final tally was 367 votes cast in favor of impeachment, versus 137 against, and seven abstentions. Two lawmakers did not show up to vote.

More than half the lawmakers who decided her fate on Sunday are themselves under investigation for graft, fraud or electoral crimes, according to Congresso em Foco, a prominent watchdog in Brasilia.

Claudio Couto, professor of political science at Fundacao Getulio Vargas, said that Sunday's loss dramatically weakened Rousseff's ability to strike political bargains and shore up support for her government.

"It is almost impossible the Senate will not take up the impeachment. And with her removal for up to six months, the government's power of persuasion will be dramatically diminished," he said.

Senior Workers Party figures have pledged, if necessary, to take their struggle onto the streets, raising concerns that it could seek to destabilize a future Temer government.

Despite anger at rising unemployment, the party can still rely on support among millions of working-class Brazilians, who credit its welfare programs with pulling their families out of poverty during the past decade.

Member of the Lower House of Congress, Bruno Araujo (C) celebrates with fellow congressmen after his vote in favor of the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff was enough to confirm the process, in Brasilia. Photo: Reuters/Ueslei Marcelino

The U.S. State Department voiced confidence on Monday that Brazil would navigate the political crisis democratically in accordance with the constitution.

Brazilian financial markets have rallied strongly this year after a disastrous 2015 on the prospect of a more business-friendly Temer administration.

Brazil's Bovespa stock index .BVSP shed 0.75 percent on Monday, with traders citing profit taking after it gained more than 20 percent so far in 2016. The real BRBY also weakened more than 2 percent to 3.60 per dollar after the central bank intervened to prevent a sharp rise in the currency.

Once regarded as an emerging markets powerhouse, Brazil has been hit by the end of a long commodities boom as well as political instability. It lost its coveted investment grade credit rating in December.

Fitch, which has a negative outlook on Brazil's 'BB+' sovereign rating, said it would focus on a new leader's attitude to the corruption probe and efforts to stem the steep rise in government debt.
Chinese dredging vessels are purportedly seen in the waters around Fiery Cross Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea in this still image from video taken by a P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft provided by the United States Navy May 21, 2015. Photo: Reuters/U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters

China's Defense Ministry on Tuesday rejected queries by the U.S. military as to why China had used a military aircraft to evacuate sick workers from a new airport on an island China has built in the disputed South China Sea.

CNN quoted Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis as saying it was unclear why China had used a military aircraft rather than a civilian one in the landing on Fiery Cross Reef.

China's Defense Ministry said in a statement its military's tradition was to help those in need as part of its commitment to "wholeheartedly serve the people".

"In sharp contrast, the U.S. side is expressing doubts about whether it's a military or civilian aircraft at a time when somebody's life is in danger," it said.

"We cannot but ask: if a U.S. citizen suddenly took ill on U.S. soil, would the U.S. military look on with folded arms?"

China has indisputable sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and the United States has no right to comment on China's building works and defensive facilities there, the ministry said.

Chinese activity in disputed waters of the South China Sea, including the construction of islands by dredging up sand onto reefs and shoals in the Spratly archipelago, has alarmed rival claimants, in particular the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as the United States.

The United States has repeatedly criticized the construction of the islands and worries that China plans to use them for military purposes. China says it has no hostile intent.

The runway on the Fiery Cross Reef is 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) long and is one of three China has been building for more than a year in the archipelago.

Civilian flights began test runs there in January but the landing by the military aircraft, on Sunday, was the first time China has publicly reported a flight by a military plane to Fiery Cross Reef.

More than $5 trillion of world trade is shipped through the South China Sea every year. Besides China's territorial claims in the area, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan have rival claims.
Iran showed off parts of its new Russian S-300 missile defense system during National Army Day on Sunday, where President Hassan Rouhani said the country's armed forces were no threat to neighboring countries.

Every year, Iran's armed forces hold parades across the country to mark Army Day. In a ceremony in Tehran, broadcast live on state television, trucks carrying the missiles drove past a podium where Rouhani and military commanders were standing. Soldiers also marched passed the podium and fighter jets and bombers took part in an air display.

"The power of our armed forces is not aimed at any of our neighbors ... Its purpose is to defend Islamic Iran and act as an active deterrent," Rouhani was quoted as saying by the state news agency IRNA, in a speech at the Army Day ceremony.

Russia delivered the first part of the S-300 missile defense system to Iran last week, one of the most advanced systems of its kind that can engage multiple aircraft and ballistic missiles around 150 km (90 miles) away.

Russia has said it cancelled a contract to deliver S-300s to Iran in 2010 under pressure from the West. President Vladimir Putin lifted the ban in April 2015, after an interim agreement that paved the way for July's full nuclear deal with Iran that ended international sanctions.

Russian S-300 anti-missile rocket system move along a central street during a rehearsal for a military parade in Moscow in this May 4, 2009 file photo. Photo: Reuters/Alexander Natruskin

Since then, Iran has upset the United States by carrying out four ballistic missile tests, which the United States and its European allies said were in defiance of the United Nations resolution adopted in July.

Rouhani said on Sunday that during the nuclear talks Iranian negotiators also aimed to maintain and boost the country's military capabilities.

Iran has two armies, a regular one which operates as a national defensive force, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that was created after the Revolution to protect the Islamic Republic against both internal and external adversaries.

The army has the biggest ground force in Iran and IRGC is in control of growing arsenal of ballistic missiles.

In its first overseas operation since the Revolution, the regular army said earlier this month that it had deployed some of its special forces and commandos to Syria to help President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war there.
Flames rise at the scene where an explosion tore through a bus in Jerusalem on Monday setting a second bus on fire, in what an Israeli official said was a bombing, April 18, 2016. Photo: Reuters/Noam Revkin Fenton

A bomb blew up a bus and set fire to another in Jerusalem on Monday, wounding 16 people in an attack that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu linked to a six-month-old wave of Palestinian street violence.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility from any Palestinian factions for the blast. Israeli officials declined to assign direct blame.

They said two of the casualties had not yet been identified and may have been bombers.

Suicide bombings on Israeli buses were a hallmark of the Palestinian revolt of 2000-2005 but have been rare since. With Palestinians carrying out less organized stabbing, car-ramming and gun attacks since October, Israel has been braced for an escalation.

"We will settle accounts with these terrorists," Netanyahu said in a speech, referring to whoever executed the bus attack.

"We are in a protracted struggle against terror - knife terror, shooting terror, bomb terror and also tunnel terror," he added, speaking hours after Israel announced its discovery of an underground passage dug by Hamas militants from Gaza.

Police initially said they were looking at the possibility that a technical malfunction caused the fire that consumed two buses on Derech Hebron road, in an area of southwest Jerusalem close to the boundary with the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

But based on the wounds and other findings, authorities concluded that a small and possibly rudimentary explosive device was set off at the back of one of the buses.

Those details recalled the bombing of a Tel Aviv bus by an Israeli Arab during the 2012 Gaza war which caused injuries but no deaths.

In the last half year, Palestinian attacks have killed 28 Israelis and two visiting U.S. citizens. Israeli forces have killed at least 191 Palestinians, 130 of whom Israel says were assailants. Many others were shot dead in clashes and protests.

Drivers behind the bloodshed include Palestinian bitterness over stalled statehood negotiations and the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, stepped up Jewish access to a disputed Jerusalem shrine, and Islamist-led calls for Israel's destruction.

Bombings have not been carried out during this period - though Israeli prosecutors said a Palestinian woman who tried to blow up a gas balloon in her car after being pulled over by police in October was a would-be suicide bomber.
Family members mourn the death of a relative, who was killed in a blast that happened outside a public park on Sunday, in Lahore, Pakistan, March 28, 2016. Photo: Reuters/Mohsin Raza

The Pakistani militants who bombed a Lahore park on Easter Sunday, killing 70 people, taunted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday, declaring their war had come to his doorstep.

The military has said it is hunting the Taliban's Jamaat-ur-Ahrar faction and has carried out several raids since the suicide bombing, but neither the military nor the government has given any details.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar claimed responsibility for the bombing, saying it had targeted Christians celebrating Easter and warning it would step up attacks.

Lahore is the capital of Punjab, Pakistan's richest and most populous province and Sharif's political heartland.

"Let Nawaz Sharif know that this war has now come to the threshold of his home," tweeted Jamaat-ur-Ahrar spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan. "The winners of this war will, God willing, be the righteous mujahideen."

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, an independent faction of the Pakistani Taliban which and also previously declared loyalty to Islamic State, has carried out five major attacks in Pakistan since December.

In a televised address to the nation on Monday, Sharif vowed to continue pursuing militant groups.

"I am here to renew a pledge that we are keeping count of every drop of blood of our martyrs. This account is being settled, and we will not rest till it is paid," Sharif said.

The prime minister did not mention what steps would be taken in the aftermath of Pakistan's worst militant attack since gunmen stormed a Peshawar school in December 2014, killing 134 children.

Military and government officials on Monday said that the military was preparing to launch a new paramilitary counterterrorism crackdown in Punjab.

The move, which has not yet been formally announced, represents the civilian government once again granting special powers to the military to fight Islamist militants.

"The PM ordered a joint operation of the counterterrorism department and Rangers in the border areas of Punjab against terrorists and their facilitators," said one government official who attended a meeting with Sharif and Punjab officials on Monday.

Two military officials and one other government official confirmed the decision on condition of anonymity. Sharif made no mention of the crackdown in his speech, and his party has long opposed any militarized operation against militants in its heartland.

The government also announced that Sharif would be cancelling a planned trip to the United States to attend the Nuclear Security Summit, due to begin on Thursday.

Pakistan's security agencies have long been accused of nurturing some militants to use for help in pursuing objectives in Afghanistan and against old rival India.

The Pakistani Taliban are fighting to topple the government and install a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Sharif's opponents have accused him of tolerating militancy in return for peace in his province, a charge he strongly denies.
Rinat Akhmetov's DTEK energy holding is mulling the sale of OJSC Obukhovskaya Colliery Group and OJSC Don-Anthracite (Rostov region, Russia), DTEK CEO Maksym Tymchenko said in an interview with ZN.UA.

"We are studying the sale of Russian assets in exchange to the transfer and reduction of the debt [DTEK's debt to creditors] of near $436 million. This is aimed at improving financial stability and meeting the interests of creditors. We are discussing the details of the deal with the interested parties. To our opinion, the deal could considerably decrease the debt burden on DTEK," he said.

Tymchenko said that coal production by the company's assets in Russia in 2016 will be around 2.6 million tonnes of rough coal. The company seeks to sell 60% of coal in Russia and the rest of coal will be shipped to Europe.

He also said that the holding is looking for legal ways of settling the problem with the nationalization of Krymenergo power supply company.

"Early 2015 the Council of Crimea decided to nationalize all tangible and intangible assets of Krymenergo. We today are looking for the right legal strategy to fight for this asset. This is rather hard. The damage has not yet been calculated," he said.
Gilbert Riedelbauch, Not O red facets, 2016

In this present collection of work, however, George has investigated how we mark time itself. The small, rectangular format is still used but the wall panel is now based on the weekly diary planner so that each day is included, with five weekdays and the weekend at the end divided diagonally into two halves. In some of the panels there are barely discernible crosses whose meaning is unclear but they rather reminded me of old calendars with special days like red-letter days for saints notated.

Each series of panels is arranged like a tonal colour chart, reflecting a week with its designated colour. Thus we have Orange, Red Week, et cetera. The colours in these panels are very diffuse and seem to swim and dissolve before you. Where the colours are very close in tone, such as in the Ivory Week and the Cream Week series the colours seem to vibrate and float. Yet where the tones are more differentiated, as in the Red Week panel, this effect is not so noticeable. In the Cream and Ivory panels the sense of an added dimension of limitless space underlines the idea of time still being elusive and unbounded and for me greatly adds to the appeal of these particular works.

Last year Avi Amesbury had a very successful exhibition at Form Gallery in Queanbeyan. The works in this exhibition are related to the series of ceramics that were shown there.

Unlike the work of Gilbert Riedelbauch and Mel George, Amesbury uses photographic imagery and text and her work is more overtly connected to a narrative. However, like Mel George, Amesbury's work is also concerned with time and memories.
Late in 1976, I returned to Australia after a prolonged stay in Europe. At the time we were expecting our second child and I quickly realised that I could no longer survive on scholarships and was in need of a less itinerant existence.

The Australian National University made me an offer that I could not refuse, an invitation to establish the academic discipline of art history at the university on a 0.5 appointment to the Faculty of Arts and a 0.5 appointment as a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre. At about the same time, the editor of The Canberra Times, Ian Matthews, phoned me and invited me to be the Senior Art Critic for the paper. All of this was a bit overwhelming for a young bloke in his mid-20s.

Sasha Grishin at the ANU in the mid-1970s.

Now, about 40 years and approximately 3000 published art critiques later, it seems timely to reflect on the role of a newspaper art critic in Australia. Before I came to The Canberra Times, I remember once asking the prominent American art critic, Clement Greenberg, a simple question concerning the changing role of an art critic in the modern art scene. It took me a long time to understand his answer: "An art critic writes for an audience that will understand him and one should never forget that an art critic is a person who learns in public." In a newspaper, one does write for a broad educated audience, but over the years I have had a number of battles on just how accessible one's writing needs to be. I remember one frustrated sub-editor pointing out to me that my pieces should be accessible even to those readers who read the paper from the back, and that I should not use, without explanation, terms like surrealism, cubism and impressionism. It took me some time to explain that those people who normally read the paper from the back, would rarely look at the art section and if they were art-loving and sport-loving people at the same time, in other words, people like myself, then they were unlikely to be in need of a glossary of common art terms.

With regards to learning in public, Clem could not have been more on the money as you grapple with many levels of art and learn on the job. After publishing some of my early art crits in 1977, one of my few old friends at the ANU, the poet AD Hope, took me aside and related to me the following anecdote. He said that when he was a young poet in Tasmania, he once savagely reviewed an anthology by a young emerging poet because, in his words, "she was really bad". A little after his review was published, the poet committed suicide and Alec felt maimed for life by the experience. I never did find out if Alec actually invented this "experience" for my benefit, fearing that my early crits were becoming a little too harsh and critical. Subsequently, I have always had this story at the back of my mind when I review the work of emerging artists, deciding at times to say nothing at all, if I could not find anything positive to say. An artist's exhibition is frequently something very precious and intimate and a critic must be aware that he may be treading on someone's dreams.
More food, more elbow room.

That's what Canberrans want from the next National Multicultural Festival, a new survey has revealed.

Zalie Guyes, 3, at the National Multicultural Festival in February. Credit:Jay Cronan

The city's annual celebration of international food and culture drew record crowds over its three days in February.

But punters overwhelmingly said they'd like more space to enjoy their meat on sticks, the 2016 Spectator Survey showed.
The last flight of the Centaur on Tuesday was an emotional journey Australian Army flight engineer, Sergeant Craig Hartnett, wouldn't have missed for anything.

The CH-47D Chinook, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan with the bullet scars to prove it, was accepted into the collection of the Australian War Memorial by its director, Dr Brendan Nelson, at EPIC just after 11am.

Flight Engineer Sergeant Craig Hartnett with the Chinook CH-47D that has been given to the Australian War Memorial by the Australian Army. Date: April 19 2016 The Canberra Times Photo: Elesa Kurtz Credit:Elesa Kurtz

"I've been involved with this aircraft, and Chinooks in general, for the last 11 years," Sergeant Hartnett said.

"Each aircraft develops its own character. This one certainly has a heart and soul. To see it wind down for the last time is pretty emotional."
Head of national joint-stock company Naftogaz Ukrainy Andriy Kobolev has said that the creation of a vertically integrated oil company on the basis of Ukrnafta, Ukrtransnafta and Ukrtatnafta is unviable.

"I do not believe in this idea anymore. I think that Ihor Valeryovych [Kolomoisky] is a tricky partner for these kinds of projects," he said in an interview with the Ekonomichna Pravda online publication.

Kobolev said that Naftogaz Ukrainy and Ukrnafta are close to resolving the issue of the cost of 10.1 billion cubic meters of gas provided by Ukrnafta and consumed by households from 2006-2011 at prices set by the regulator.

"Kolomoisky seeks to get the highest market price. If I'm not mistaken, he filed a $5 billion claim not against Naftogaz Ukrainy, but against Ukraine. This is an eye-watering amount of money. Our position is different," he said.

He said that under Ukrainian law the price of the gas then was set by the regulator. When Ukrnafta was privatized and Kolomoisky joined the company it was a liability to sell gas at the regulator's price.

"I think that Kolomoisky seeks to prove that the state somehow made conditions worse after he bought a stake in the company," Kobolev said.
Lawyers for the Pakistani government have argued that its high commission is immune from ACT laws during a dispute with a builder over a $1 million debt.

NSW builder Denham Constructions alleges the Pakistani government owes it $1 million for the construction of its new high commission complex in Canberra, which was completed in the middle of last year.

Lawyers for the Pakistani government have argued its high commission is not beholden to the laws of the ACT during a hearing in the ACT Supreme Court. Credit:Graham Tidy

The builder said it was owed for cost overruns and building delays, and took the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to the ACT Supreme Court.

Denham is using the ACT's security of payment laws, designed to ensure parties are paid for construction work, to try to force Pakistan to pay the alleged debt.
Christoph Mueller, the experienced airline executive brought in to turn around ailing carrier Malaysia Airlines, has announced his exit after spending just over a year as chief executive.

Mr Mueller, the former head of Ireland's Aer Lingus who has been restructuring the airline in the wake of the twin losses of MH370 and MH17 in 2014, will depart in September.

Malaysia Airlines chief executive Christoph Mueller has led a major turnaround at the struggling carrier. Credit:Steven Siewert

The airline's owner, Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional, said Mr Mueller would not serve out his three-year contract term "due to a change in personal circumstances". However, he has committed to remaining on the board as a non-executive director to see through a transition to a new leader.

On Mr Mueller's watch, the airline has cut 6000 workers, abandoned unprofitable routes including Brisbane-Kuala Lumpur, signed a new partnership agreement with Emirates and upgraded its A330 business-class product. The airline reported a profit in the month of February, the first positive monthly result in years.
Qantas Airways is likely to take a more conservative approach to the prospect of returning cash to shareholders alongside its annual results in August because of a weaker domestic market, analysts say.

The airline on Monday said it would pull back on planned capacity additions in the second half of the financial year as a result of soft demand attributed to the upcoming federal election and recent drop in consumer confidence.

"It is not unusual to see businesses pull back travel levels prior to an election," Bell Potter analyst John O'Shea said.

"Obviously the consumer confidence is a reflection of how they are feeling about things and a reflection of property and equity markets. The property market, there has been some uncertainty there and the equity market has been volatile this year."
Beefing up the protection of whistleblowers will dramatically improve bank culture, says Jordan Thomas, a pre-eminent lawyer and former regulator in the US, where authorities are taking more aggressive action against banks that retaliate against staff who identify misconduct.

As the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) writes this week to 30,000 companies to encourage their participation in a survey of employee attitudes to whistleblower protection, Mr Thomas, a former assistant director at the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), said whistleblowers are "a powerful engine for law enforcement" in the US because of their inside knowledge of scandals.

Mr Thomas, a partner at Washington law firm Labaton Sucharow, where he represents many whistleblowers, says it is still common for US banks and other companies to retaliate against employees who speak up against bad conduct  and this is now being targeted by the SEC as a matter of priority.

"Retaliation is a very real problem and the US is aggressively policing that part of the equation," Mr Thomas said during a visit to Sydney to conduct a lecture for business students at the University of Wollongong.
Assets up for grabs Fairfax has exclusively obtained court documents revealing the assets to be seized, under a deal struck between fraud investigators and Revell-Reade's lawyers. They include: - a Mini Cooper car, a Land Rover Defender four wheel drive and a Harley Davidson motorcycle in Australia,

- a yacht named 'Bellagio' worth almost a quarter of a million dollars, - one Rolex 'Oyster Perpetual silver' and one Cartier wristwatch, each worth $7500, - $130,000 worth of art in storage in Australia, - $490,000 from his Oz Group and subsidiary companies  a Melbourne-based business specialising in the administration of superannuation funds, and - a mansion in Wimbledon, London, worth 6.5million ($12m).

Tracking down a fortune However the list of assets also betrays the difficulty police had locating Revell-Reade's fortune. In the court documents, a sum of 860,000 is described as an "asset last traced into Enfinium (corporate) structure Hong Kong, whereabouts unknown". Another sum of 580,000 is described as the value of Revell-Reade's interest "last traced to a Thai villa purchase". And 400,000 is listed as "Proceeds of sale of Einstein's Coffee Shop, current whereabouts unknown".

A court-appointed receiver will also recover "tainted" cash gifts he passed to his family and partner. In London's Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday, Judge Michael Gledhill said Mr Revell-Reade had benefited from his criminal conduct to the amount of 43,864,353. "After an extensive investigation by officers of the Serious Fraud Office I am satisfied that the assets available to this defendant to go towards making payment of that benefit amount to 10,751,000." 'Unexpected indignities' Mr Revell-Reade could be jailed for up to an extra ten years if he fails to hand over this amount within three months.

However Judge Gledhill said he was aware the order "does not even cover one quarter of the benefit received by this defendant". If at some future date further assets were found, "I have no doubt at all that an application will be made to re-open proceedings to amend the order to recover assets as and when they are found," he said. He added that he hoped the full 10.75m figure would be paid, as then Mr Revell-Reade would be free to serve the remainder of his jail sentence in Australia. He is currently in London's old Wandsworth Prison, which his lawyer said imposed "unexpected indignities" on his client. "I quite understand why Mr Revell-Reade wants to get home to Australia as soon as possible," Judge Gledhill said.

Revell-Reade was in court for the confiscation order, wearing a scarlet jumper and glasses, following the proceedings intently. The confiscation process for Revell-Reade's co-accused in the fraud, Anthony May, was even less successful. On Monday Judge Gledhill said May had benefited from 69 million in fraud proceeds  however just 250,000 in assets were located. Judge Gledhill said May had not given "full and frank" assistance to the SFO in identifying his assets. "A quarter of a million pounds appears to be but a drop in the ocean, compared with the amount of money the victims were defrauded, I am well aware of that," he said. "But I am afraid that's the amount of assets the SFO are aware of in this case."

Mark Thompson, head of the SFO's Proceeds of Crime division said: "These individuals benefited substantially from their crimes. Their lavish lifestyles featured numerous overseas properties, wine collections and a luxury yacht. We welcome these orders which the pair now need to pay or face a further period of imprisonment." Earlier this year two Hong Kong-based businessmen, James Sutherland and Jack Flader, were acquitted of money laundering after being charged by the SFO over their role in distributing the proceeds of Revell-Reade's fraud. Sutherland spends much of his time in Australia, where his family lives, and Flader was linked to the Trio Capital superannuation scandal, though never prosecuted. The men, who ran a business managing the financial affairs of the mega-rich, wove a web of corporate structures, bank accounts and offshore shells administered from Hong Kong and Switzerland, in a 'blind trust' on Revell-Reade's behalf, spanning companies and accounts across the world, in Europe, Asia and the Caribbean.
Redbubble has officially begun its march towards a listing on the Australian Securities Exchange, with an initial public offering scheduled for May 17.

The Melbourne-based company, which sells clothing and prints designed by artists, is hoping to raise $30 million from the float, with a $9.8 million sell-down by existing shareholders.

Redbubble CEO Martin Hosking, who is leading the online marketplace for artists and designers to a float next month. Credit:Pat Scala

The offer price of $1.33 a share will value the company at $268 million.

Redbubble, which was founded in 2006 by Martin Hosking, Paul Vanzella and Peter Styles, made a net loss of $6.3 million last financial year.
A merger of Target and Kmart will see shoppers abandon both stores in favour of Big W and cost their owner Wesfarmers hundreds of millions of dollars, the conglomerate has been warned.

The two discount chains were brought together under Wesfarmers' new department store division in February, with ex-Kmart boss Guy Russo put in charge of running the businesses and turning Target around.

No Big W stores will be closed as part of the restructure. Credit:Brendan Esposito

Wesfarmers has said it would cut administration and purchasing costs through the restructure and also flagged converting Target stores to Kmarts and vice versa.

But Bank of America Merrill Lynch retail analyst David Errington has described the restructure as a "merger" of two fierce competitors which will be "highly problematic" and cost the company sales and earnings.
It's Anzac season again. That time of year when politicians and corporations sink their snouts into the commemorative trough and critics wring their hands in disgust. Politicians jostle for the title of patriot-in-chief. Commercial interests commandeer the Anzac brand to peddle everything from biscuits and beer to men's magazines. And a vocal minority  generally of the ideological left  protests that Anzac commemoration glorifies war.

I am among the critics of the Anzac circus. I have condemned Anzac's growing commercialisation and questioned why Australia is spending upwards of $535 million  more than all other nations combined  on commemorating the centenary of the First World War. Remembering the tragedy and suffering of the First World War is important, but turning war memory into a nationalist festival is wrong.

Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance. Credit:Luis Ascui

While the ideological lines in the battle of Anzac have barely shifted in one hundred years, I have observed a phenomenon over the course of the centenary commemorations that defies these conventional categories. So potent has Anzac become that it is now a means for disadvantaged and marginalised groups to seek entry into the Australian mainstream. These groups do not criticise Anzac for its militaristic, colonial or racist connotations. Rather they seek to be embraced by it.

Harjit Singh is a 29-year-old Sikh Australian. Growing up in Perth in the 1990s, he copped the usual playground abuse dished out to kids who looked different. Despite being called a "curry muncher" and a "raghead", Singh never questioned the deep affection he felt towards his adopted country.
Love is a many splendoured thing. Cupid's darts find the most unexpected targets. I am not for one minute prepared to exclude the possibility that erotic interest may flower between a man and a goat. The ancient Greeks clearly thought about the possibility: hence their mythologising about Pan and satyrs and other cloven-footed hybrids.

A cursory trawl of the internet reveals  according to the BBC  that in 2006 a Sudanese man called Tombe was surprised in the act in the dark with a female goat and was obliged by village elders to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars to its owner, and then to marry the beast. To the best of my knowledge, they are still together.

Illustration: John Spooner

But I don't think there is anyone of any importance who seriously believes there has been any kind of romance involving the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and any non-human mammal, caprine or otherwise.

So, when a young German comedian called the Turkish leader a "goat -------", in a little-watched broadcast on March 31, you might have thought that the best response  from Turkey's point of view  was a dignified silence. Yes, I suppose it was puerile. And yes, I accept that it was not in especially good taste. But it was what we call a joke. It is utterly bewildering  and slightly shocking  that the Turkish leader has failed to see this.
Large Ukrainian state-run seaports should be given as a concession, and smaller stevedoring companies could be privatized at a transparent and competitive tender that would bring an effective investor, newly appointed Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan has said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

"This is the issue for discussion, as well as the ports management system. Now this system does not meet European experience. We know that city authorities are involved in the development of ports. There are also supervision boards that are formed from representatives of central bodies and local authorities. This is the way we should take," he said.

The minister said that investment and solutions using all available effective forms and tools should be attracted to the transport infrastructure.

"Concession, if we take Europe as an example, is the 'queen' of public private partnership," he said.
I'm meeting with a federal member of Parliament. As part of the small talk, he mentions he is just back from Asia. Leaning close to me, he grins: "What about those Asian women, aye?" I know reflexively that I am supposed to concur, that this may not even be his real self, but it is a male-bonding ritual straight out of the 1950s. I think my face freezes. He quickly moves on.

From casual sexism, through to the recent scandal over Facebook pages where women at Melbourne University were sexually evaluated, through to the frankly rape-based corners of the internet, to the astonishing survival, so far, of Wicked Campers with their deeply offensive slogans  rape culture is clearly something we need to address.

The first step in eliminating rape culture is the way in which we raise boys to become respectful young men.

In therapy groups for violent men, for sex offenders and paedophiles, the clear rule is that talk is the way to start thinking about the problem, and behaviour is the consequence. So the culture is confronted head on.

There is a war we need to fight to change the mindsets of boys, young men, and wider masculinity, to end the awful history of sexual violence against women and girls. The peer group language has to be opened up, talked about, and changed. Former PM Tony Abbott's inability to filter the sleaze out of even his public comments is a good example of this. It's not just a context issue: mistaking the wider public for a peer group where that kind of comment would go down well. The problem is that it may reveal true attitudes that underlie the veneer.
There's nothing compassionate or safe about killing our fellow travellers along the journey of life.

Accepting euthanasia means agreeing some people are beyond any help, for whom taking their life is the only option. I reject that pessimism. I reject the idea that euthanising someone is any sort of solution to the deeply human reality of facing our own mortality. That is a most callous and irresponsible choice. Doctors should instead help people to live their lives well as they make their final journey towards death.

'Legalised euthanasia endangers the lives of our fellow human beings who are seriously ill, elderly, disabled, have low self-esteem or are otherwise vulnerable.' Credit:Jason South

Rather than buying into the dangerous and dishonest euphemism of "dying with dignity", we would do better  and be more human  by dignifying the lives of the dying. Palliative care is one key way we can dignify the dying. We should not accept the chronic under-funding of palliative care in this country and offer lethal injections instead.

Euthanasia is not turning off a life support machine where there is no prospect of recovery. It is not ending treatment that is overly burdensome. It is not giving someone pain relief as they are dying. Rather, euthanasia is giving someone a drug with the intention of ending their life.
I've worked for the ABC, off and on, since 1982. Mark Scott was the seventh managing director during that time, and in my view incomparably the best. Here are a few reasons why I think so.

Next week will be Scott's last as the ABC boss. Through it all, he has managed the Canberra public service and his political masters supremely well. For the first part of his tenure the ABC board had several members who seemed to have been appointed by the Howard government simply on the strength of their outspoken criticism of the ABC. They had no other visible qualifications. Scott coped.

Mark Scott managed the Canberra public service and his political masters supremely well. Credit:Mal Fairclough

The election of the Rudd government in 2007, just over a year into Scott's tenure, certainly made Canberra a less hostile environment for the ABC. But by pressing the right buttons with the right politicians, by managing the opposition as well as the government, Scott succeeded in increasing the ABC's budget and vastly expanding its services.

He has also been a powerful public advocate for the ABC. None of his predecessors made so many important speeches. In these set-pieces, Scott has articulated the rationale for a public broadcaster in the digital world. At times, he was astonishingly blunt about his competitors. In a noteworthy 2009 discourse titled "The Fall of Rome", he compared Rupert Murdoch's conversion to the concept of newspaper paywalls as "a classic play of old empire, of empire in decline".
The US Democrat presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, has done it. He has broken a taboo by publicly criticising Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians under its occupation and siege. He is the first political figure in the history of the presidential race to do so, especially as a person of Jewish faith, and just prior to the crucial New York primary, in which the Jewish votes really matter. What has driven Sanders to take a huge risk to tackle the subject matter head on?

In a major speech in New York last week, Sanders highlighted the plight of the Palestinian people and criticised the hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for using disproportionate force in response to the provocation by the ruling Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. While declaring himself as "100 per cent pro-Israel", he especially focused on Israel's siege of Gaza and imposition of appalling living conditions on the tiny Strip's 1.8 million Palestinians.

Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Credit:AP

He stressed that in Gaza unemployment stood around 40 per cent and that there is a landscape of "decimated houses, decimated health care, decimated schools". He stated that "the United States and the rest of the world have got to work together to help the Palestinian people".

In doing so, Sanders essentially reflected the shifting global opinion in support of the Palestinians' cause and joined a chorus of American and world leaders, from former US President Jimmy Carter to South African Bishop Desmond Tutu and the late Nelson Mandela to Pope Francis and Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom in this respect.
Comedian George Carlin used to say that he was a Roman Catholic "until I reached the age of reason." For Carlin, that happened sometime in the eighth grade, when all his probing questions about faith were answered with, "well, it's a mystery." Of course, as a lifelong contrarian, Carlin also wondered if it was OK for a vegetarian to eat animal crackers.

I thought of him while reading the latest institution-shifting document from Pope Francis, "Amoris Laetitia" - the Joy of Love. The title sets the tone for the continuation of a quiet revolution. Note that it's not called the Job of Love, the Duty of Love or the Unbearable Burden of Love. Instead, the pope implies that there's considerable fun to be had in human relationships. You can even find in its 256 pages a mention of the "erotic dimension" of love and "the stirring of desire." Yes, sex. The pope approves of it, in many forms.

And while skeptics were disappointed that the latest apostolic exhortation did not change church teachings regarding Catholics who are divorced or in same-sex marriages, the document signals the end for one particular kind of medieval millstone - Catholic guilt, especially in regard to sex.

He's not talking here about the guilt that generations of clerics and their enablers should feel for the crimes of sexual abuse against the young, an institutional cancer tied to its own awful pathology.
Australia needs to stop the rhetoric and decide where we wish to innovate. New banking apps to make your credit card debts "easier" to service? New ways to re-distribute what is already there (think Airbnb, Uber) by optimising software?

Is this really what we need to address the dramatic global challenges of water shortages, food supply, pollution or climate change? We will combat increasing instability across the globe by making it easier to order pizza on your phone?

No, the solutions of the future are to be found through "big science" asking big questions, supported by long-term strategic investment.

Australia is uniquely positioned to take advantage of a highly trained and skilled "ideas" workforce. Some 10 per cent of the top 50 universities in the world are here, which is an astounding achievement with only 24 million people.
When Sydney Swans chairman and investment banker Andrew Pridham was offered the chance to buy a painting by famous Australian artist Brett Whiteley for $2.5 million, he thought about it overnight before agreeing to the deal.

Mr Pridham told the Supreme Court on Tuesday the painting, Blue Lavender Bay - which is allegedly fake - had been recommended by art consultant Anita Archer who claimed to have been pursuing the artwork for more than a year from movie producer Robert Le Tet.

Andrew Pridham purchased Blue Lavender Bay for $2.5 million. Credit:Michael Clayton-Jones

Ms Archer had been told by art dealer Peter Gant - who is on trial with art conservator Mohamed Aman Siddique accused of creating and selling fake Whiteley paintings - that Mr Le Tet had directly commissioned Whiteley to paint Blue Lavender Bay for him in 1988.

Mr Pridham said Ms Archer told him Mr Le Tet was a well known art collector and Village Roadshow director who had bought the painting straight from Whiteley's art studio.
"We'll be using the voice in as many different ways as possible because we have people with amazing technique." Nixon explains. "We can do so many things, and there are so many sonnets that there has to be a lot of variety." William Zappa asked Nixon whether she really wanted to do them all. After all, they are not all great. She answered, "Why not?" "They're tantalising and there are so many books about them and it's the four hundredth anniversary of his death on April 23. Sonnets are being produced all over the world at present. They are in the Zeitgeist." I am curious to know how they plan to do all 154 at the one performance on April 30. Nixon is quick to reply that the evening is not intended to be an academic treatise. She and Cole share a life devoted to text and music. Zappa has had a long and illustrious career upon the stage. Nixon explains: "It's meant to be an experience where people will go with the flow and the sound of the language, the sound of the voices and impressions. There would be no way to unpack the precise detail of every sonnet. Anyway, there are too many different views on precisely what each one means. It really has to be done as if it were a piece of music. It needs to have more of a mood that you're sensing." On arrival, audiences will enter the theatre to the sounds of music and snippets of sonnets to tantalise and set the mood. Cole and Zappa and Sutcliffe will be dressed as dapper jazz musicians in sharp suits to avoid any impression of a specific period, although Nixon hopes to use different language idioms to capture different periods. Zappa will revisit his native Essex accent to embellish certain sonnets. An armchair, lectern and Sutcliffe's array of instruments will be the only setting and the transitions of mood will be heightened by atmospheric lighting.

The performance will be reminiscent of a parlour game that one would play, using improvisation and different techniques to express the shifting moods and variety of the sonnets. The sonnets of the time were not intended for publication. They were written to be shared between friends as intensely personal expressions of feelings and thoughts. It is assumed that Shakespeare's sonnets were purloined by an unscrupulous Mr Thorpe and published in 1609, several years before the playwright's death. "We should be teaching people here in Australia to speak in different idioms," Nixon says. Much of her focus in Shakespeare: The Sonnets Out Loud will be to use language in different ways. The use of certain idioms will give the show a theme and variation of its own. The sonnets may start with neutral Australian before having a stab at the original pronunciation. Some may work well as rap, and some in a more contemporary style. All the sonnets are underpinned by the iambic pentameter of 10 syllables to the line, expressed generally by five light stresses and five heavy stresses. However, Shakespeare does vary this, instructing the performer or the reader how to deliver the verse. The variation of scansion allows a performer to try something different. "Maybe we shouldn't be too precious about them and just have fun with the sound." Nixon says. "Some of them are certainly tragic, and we'll obviously milk them for all they're worth. For people to really understand on every level is never going to happen, so we have to try and find an in to every one." One of the ways that Nixon is proposing to do this is to sort them out in batches, so Sonnets 1-17 will serve as a kind of prologue. The popular and familiar sonnets, such as Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day, will then serve as signposts. "That will just help an audience to get a handle on them and follow the themes," Nixon says. "Hopefully that variety will keep the audience with us." That and the considerable musical talents of Nixon, Cole and Sutcliffe and acclaimed acting talent of Zappa. "There are so many things you can do," Nixon says, "having the right people on stage."

Nixon is also playing with the notion of variety in the choice of music. Some sonnets may be spoken or sung to the settings by composer, Hubert H. Parry (1848-1918). One sonnet has inspired the choice of Cole Porter's Night and Day and Sutcliffe, a renowned classical and contemporary musician, is encouraged to improvise in a free-flowing style. Nixon is hoping to pre-record on one of the ANU's old instruments, such as a clavichord or use a Klave to produce a ticking sound to denote the passage of Time. One of the subtexts is also to explore what it is to read, inspired by her late father's love of Shakespeare and the Collected Works that he treasured on the bookshelf at his farm. She is hoping to encourage people to bring their copy of the sonnets to the only performance at The Street Theatre at the end of April and follow along, as people often do with their own score at a performance of Handel's Messiah. At the close of the performance, Nixon hopes that people will leave with an enriched sense of why language matters. And specifically why the musicality of language matters. "If that could be achieved somehow I'd be happy," she says. I ask how she would know. "People would go away and these words would be dancing in their heads. They would leave with a curiosity," Nixon replies. "I would love it if people wrote and said 'I never thought of reading them, but I am going to read them now'." Audiences may leave no wiser about the mysterious identities of Mr W.H., the young man or the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. That is for the scholars to pursue. However, Nixon is hoping that Shakespeare: The Sonnets Out Loud will offer anyone in the audience, no matter what their background, a rare opportunity to get a real sense of fun and pleasure from all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Christian Slater is singing the praises of his King Cobra co-star James Franco for triumphantly avoiding "stereotypical nonsense" in their new gay porn drama.

However the man who the film is based on, Brent Corrigan, has distanced himself from the movie, saying "it's Hollywood's attempt at bastardising" his early years in the porn industry.

King Cobra debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on Saturday to much acclaim for the innovative approach to very challenging subject matter.

The crime drama's plot, which was inspired by a true story, centres around the brutal murder of Slater's gay porn producer character Stephen.
Stiles' book reclaims the infamous 19th-century general from the butt of jokes and shows what a complicated and talented, if doomed, man he really was. Custer's Trials also captures the dramatic tension between the modern society that was quickly developing on the East Coast and the wild territory that still existed in the West.

This year, Stiles told The Washington Post: "Custer is a well-worn subject, but the wear is extremely uneven - mostly on the western side of his story. I wanted to write about him as a man on a frontier in time, immersed in the greatest changes America has ever experienced. I also wanted to foreground the women in his life, who brought the great issues of the day into his household."

Monday's win is Stiles' second Pulitzer; he won the 2010 biography prize, along with a National Book Award, for The First Tycoon, about the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Hamilton originally debuted at the Public Theatre off-Broadway in January 2015, but despite immediate acclaim - or rather, because of the general confidence that the creators and producers had in the show - it did not rush to Broadway in time for last year's Tony Awards. Monday's Pulitzer win will likely inaugurate a whole new season of honuors for Miranda, with the Tony nominations set for May 3 and Hamilton poised to dominate. The cast album has already won a Grammy, and last year Miranda was named a MacArthur fellow.

The revelation of Hamilton is how easily Miranda's hip-hop rhymes work like a verse-driven Shakespearean history, and how profoundly audiences have responded to seeing performers of colour portraying the country's white founders. Miranda consulted with Chernow and aimed to keep his story respectably true to history, even as he rendered Cabinet battles involving Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson as intensely rhymed rap showdowns.
Ukraine will stay in the Extended Fund Facility (EFF) arrangement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the country is ready to continue reforms, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) said after a trip of NBU Governor Valeriya Gontareva to take part in Spring Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank Group.

"Reforms outlined in the IMF's program are of top priority for us. We confirmed at the meeting that Ukraine stays in the program and the new government will step up the continuation of cooperation with the IMF," Gontareva said.

The NBU said that IMF Head Christine Lagarde said at the meeting with the Ukrainian delegation that the IMF is ready to continue supporting Ukraine on its path of economic transformations and stated that the IMF mission will visit Ukraine soon.

Gontareva also met U.S. Treasury Department's Under Secretary for International Affairs Nathan Sheets, Head of Bank of England Mark Carney, Head of Riksbank (Sweden) Stefan Ingves, Head of the National Bank of Austria Ewald Nowotny, Head of the National Bank of Georgia Koba Gvenetadze, Head of the Latvian Financial and Capital Markets Commission Peteris Putnins and representatives of Citi Bank.

The four-year EFF program for Ukraine totalingSDR12.348 billion (about $17 billion), opened by the IMF in March 2015, originally foresaw quarterly revisions of the program, the issue of four tranches to Kyiv in 2015, another four in 2016. However, at present the country has received only the first tranche of funds for $5 billion and the second one worth $1.7 billion.

The IMF needs more clarity about the status of the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian parliamentary coalition for the completion of the second review of the EFF.
There is a deep and abiding truth resonating in the title of Attenborough's Planet Earth (One, 7.30pm): it truly is David Attenborough's planet, and we're just living on it. Which we might not be able to do for all that much longer, and you get the sense that Sir David is a little vexed by this. To be honest it's always a little bit surprising  a pleasant surprise, I hasten to add  when you remember that Attenborough is still alive, and one can't shake the impression that he has simply decided he's not shuffling off the coil until the rest of us get our bloody act together. Happily, this means he should be here for some time yet. Unhappily, of course, we won't be. But at least when the gigantic hyper-intelligent prawn-people who evolve to inhabit the blighted planet in millions of years look back at the records of the feckless land-apes who came before them, they'll be able to take a squiz at programs like this and see what a cracker of a planet Earth used to be.

Sir David does not lend his heart-swelling voice to any production that isn't top-notch, and Planet Earth has all the sweeping grandeur, breathtaking beauty, and spellbinding intimate minutiae that one could want in a televisual tale of the spinning rock we've found ourselves on. All over this planet are wonders and marvels to rattle the brain and agitate the tear ducts, and the great tragedy of human existence is that even the most worldly among us are unlikely to see more than the tiniest fraction of them. That's what makes David Attenborough one of our time's greatest public benefactors: he has allowed millions the opportunity to know, in some small way, what the world is, and why it's worth caring about.

Sir David Attenborough takes us deep into caves this week. Credit:Wayne Taylor

This week's subject is caves, the deep dark places beloved of bears and Batman and smugglers looking to get thwarted by the Famous Five. Here in the claustrophobic chambers and vast halls carved out by nature completely without our knowledge or consent or any kind of planning approval process, there is magic and terror and mind-bending creatures both wondrous and terrifying. I'm guessing not many of those reading this will spend a significant portion of their lives exploring caves in person, so Sir David is doing you a solid here.

The world is fragile and we have but a moment in it  take advantage.
The Viktor & Rolf retrospective, featuring more than 35 haute couture pieces, is one of the NGV's flagship exhibitions for its just-launched summer season.

"They have a universe that they've created all of their own," Loriot says. "You can immediately recognise their style."

It describes what he thinks will happen to the National Gallery of Victoria this October when it hosts a 25-year-retrospective of The Netherlands' biggest fashion exports  avant-garde design duo Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, better known as Viktor & Rolf.

If French curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot had his way, a new verb would make its way into the fashion lexicon: "Viktor-and-Rolferised".

Dutch fashion designers Viktor Horsting (right) and Rolf Snoeren. Credit:Pat Scala

It will occupy one side of the galleries on the ground floor of the International building. The other side will be devoted to a major solo show by acclaimed British artist David Hockney, featuring about 700 of his vibrant landscapes, still lifes and famous digital drawings from the past decade. Many of these digital images will be displayed on fixed iPad stations within the gallery space and some will be printed. An 18-screen video work, The Jugglers, will also feature as will the huge 50-canvas piece, Bigger Trees Near Warter.

Hockney, 78, is widely celebrated as one of Britain's greatest living artists and came to prominence during the pop art movement of the 1960s. He has a prolific output and in recent years has been an evangelist for incorporating digital technology into traditional art forms.

The Viktor & Rolf and Hockney exhibitions continue NGV director Tony Ellwood's focus on contemporary art "blockbusters" over summer, a time when traditionally visitor numbers would drop off. The NGV's current summer exhibition Andy Warhol|Ai Weiwei has broken the gallery's summer attendance record for a ticketed show, with more than 300,000 people through the doors. At Federation Square's Ian Potter Centre, a John Olsen retrospective will debut in September before moving to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Fashion exhibitions have proven to be popular with the public too, with the NGV's Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition drawing more than 220,000 people in 2014-2015 and even smaller institutions such as Bendigo Art Gallery positioning itself as a destination for fashion and costume. Whether Viktor & Rolf's arty aesthetic has the same populist appeal as Jean Paul Gaultier's conical corsets is to be seen.
Treasurer Scott Morrison will announce at least $120 million in additional funding for corporate regulator ASIC as part of a suite of measures to be unveiled on Wednesday, after he and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull were challenged by the Coalition backbench on the need to crack down on bank behaviour.

The announcement will come a day after Mr Turnbull confirmed Australians will go to the polls in a double dissolution election to be held on July 2 and is designed to blunt the political impact of Labor's push for a banks royal commission.

The federal government's formal response to a capability review of ASIC, which was considered by the cabinet on Monday night, will more than restore the $120 million, four-year funding cut from the regulator in 2014.
Two Manus Island locals found guilty of killing Iranian asylum seeker Reza Barati in 2014 could be free in just over three years after being sentenced on Tuesday.

The pair were sentenced to 10-year jail terms, but could be released much earlier because of time already served and because half the term is a suspended sentence.

Mourners at the memorial service for Reza Barati, who was killed in the Manus Island detention centre in 2014. Credit:Kate Geraghty

Trial judge Nicholas Kirriwom said the pair received a lower sentence because there were other people involved in the killing who had not been charged, the ABC has reported.

"I bear in mind that in sentencing these two prisoners, I do not make them guinea pigs to bear the brunt of punishment for those who are not here and have not been prosecuted," the judge said.
Fears over money laundering and the risk of financing of terrorism has prompted calls for Bendigo Bank to abandon any dealings with the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru.

Bendigo Bank is the only bank with a presence on the island, which Australia relies on as a crucial part of its refugee policy.

Until last year, Nauru had an entirely cash economy that used Australian dollars as the currency. Suitcases of cash were regularly ferried from Brisbane to the island to pay the salaries of local workers.

But Westpac, one of Australia's largest banks, recently told Nauru and any companies with links to the government that they must close their accounts by the end of this month.
Eastern Beaches, Ocean Wave or Beachy McBeachface Council?

The public has been encouraged to submit name suggestions for a proposed new eastern suburbs council to be formed from the amalgamation of Waverley, Randwick and Woollahra.

Under the state government's proposal, the new council would start in the middle of the year and stretch from Watsons Bay to La Perouse.

Waverley and Randwick councils, which have been active supporters of amalgamation for several months, have launched a joint competition to find a name for the bigger council.
As it happened: Queensland Parliament question time

Independent MP Peter Wellington has taken to Parliament in an impassioned defence of his right to vote on any changes to the Newman government bikie laws he strongly opposed, in a response to his "critics".

Speaker Peter Wellington accused the opposition of attempting to "deny me a voice". Credit:Dan Peled/Pool Image

Deputy Opposition Leader John-Paul Langbroek wrote to Mr Wellington asking him to excuse himself from any vote changing the laws, given his public opposition to the laws, both under the previous government and the current Labor administration.

That followed the conviction of former Rebels member Mike Smith for drug trafficking. Mr Smith had supported Mr Wellington's re-election campaign, after the Nicklin MP began to public criticise the VLAD laws for their impact on civil liberties.
Crossbench senator David Leyonhjelm has labelled a high-profile racial discrimination case against a group of Queensland university students "an attempt at legal blackmail".

The Liberal Democrats senator said the lawsuit - sparked by a Facebook comment posted when students were kicked out of an indigenous-only computer lab - was being used to constrain free speech.

QUT has been criticised for its handling of the case. Credit:Glenn Hunt

Senator Leyonhjelm said it also demonstrated why the Racial Discrimination Act's controversial section 18C needed to be repealed.

Cindy Prior, an indigenous woman and administration officer at QUT, is suing the university and three students under 18C for almost $250,000 in lost wages and general damages, plus future economic losses.
One of the best bits of a previous management role was working away from head office. As my Sydney bosses plotted, I could get on with running part of the business from Melbourne, close enough to be involved and far enough away to feign ignorance.

I wonder if working outside Corporate Headquarters today is one of the great CLMs (Career Limiting Moves). As companies crank up their cost-cutting chainsaws, their smaller interstate or regional offices are easy targets.

Workers can suffer from unfair Corporate HQ bias. Credit:Louie Douvis

Corporate centralisation, of course, is not new. Companies have focused on head office resources, often at the expense of satellite offices, for years.

But I cannot recall a time when so many large corporates have skeleton staff in interstate offices or a token presence in some of Australia's largest capital cities, despite many of their customers being based there.
A blood test to detect Parkinson's disease has been developed by Australian researchers, a breakthrough which will allow for earlier intervention and treatment of the debilitating condition.

Currently there is no definitive test to diagnose Parkinson's disease and patients have to rely on a neurological exam, which can be problematic because results are often open to interpretation.

Microbiologist Paul Fisher and Parkinson's patient Karyn Spilberg. Credit:Eddie Jim

"This is a really exciting discovery," said microbiologist Paul Fisher, who led the research team from La Trobe University.

Human trials of the test, which picks up on a key biological marker found in the blood, have delivered a 95 per cent accuracy rate.
SPF head hopes to get up to UAH 20 bln to budget from privatization in 2016

The national budget this year could obtain up to UAH 20 billion from the privatization of state-run companies, the head of Ukraine's State Property Fund (SPF) Ihor Bilous has said.

"The budget envisages UAH 17 billion, but everything depends on the final price at the auction to sell Odesa Port-Side Plant. I think we could count on up to UAH 20 billion," he said at a press conference devoted to privatization, which was organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine in Kyiv on Tuesday.
Spending its days foraging among the roots of trees, the slender rat has long escaped the querulous gaze of scientists.

But no longer: an international research team discovered the rat, which goes by the Latin name Gracilimus radix, on the remote and relatively inaccessible slopes of Mount Gandang Dewata, a mountainous region of Indonesia's Sulawesi Island, a renowned hotspot for biodiversity.

Museum Victoria scientist Dr Kevin Rowe with the newly discovered species, the slender rat. Credit:Eddie Jim

The team, including scientists from the US, Indonesia and Australia, report the new species had such a unique anatomy that it was described as a new genus  a step above a new species in the taxonomic rankings.

"We discovered the new genus and species [while] doing mammal surveys in 2011 and 2012 on Mt Gandang Dewata," said Museum Victoria biologist Kevin Rowe. "This marks the third new genus and fourth new species discovered there in the last four years."
Nude photos of 18-year-old Jess Treloar-Walker were posted on the Melbourne's Men's Society Facebook page Credit:Eddie Jim Another photo, said Jess, showed an online conversation between her and a supposed friend. "He posted it in the group," Jess said. "He was promoting me as some sort of toy. "He said if you give me money I can get you in with her."

Fairfax Media has been given a harrowing cache of illegal images and videos from a Facebook group called Melbourne's Men's Society. Many of the images appear to be of under-age women. "They are teaching girls a lesson for, I don't know, for sending them the images," Cat said. Melbourne's Men's Society was shut down by Facebook on Friday. But it is said to be only an imitator compared with another group known as Melbourne Blokes Trade, which has been operating for some time. Melbourne's Men's Society had 7000 members, with another 4500 awaiting approval. The group is hidden on Facebook, and people cannot apply to join it  its adminstrators choose members based on recommendations for induction.

The groups sit at the centre of a galaxy of "lads' groups", which contain low-level profanity and soft-core pornography. A large proportion of the membership of the groups spend their time begging for entry into Melbourne's Men's Society and Melbourne Blokes Trade. One of the less-graphic posts from the Melbourne's Men's Society Facebook page, which has been taken down by Facebook after complaints. Credit:Clay Lucas On Saturday, after being alerted by Fairfax, Facebook investigated Melbourne Blokes Trade's content and ruled the page wasn't breaching any of its community guidelines. The root of the problem, says media and gender expert Dr Lauren Rosewarne, is that male sexual behaviour is treated very differently to female sexual behaviour.

"Men and women are both in [revenge porn] videos, but it only functions as revenge [against] women, because we are a culture that judges a woman's sexual activity in ways we don't judge a man's," she said. She likened the Melbourne's Men's Society Facebook page as homage to the male ego, fuelled by a dangerous pack mentality. Melbourne's Men's Society's three administrators all attended St Peters College in Cranbourne, a co-educational Catholic school. It's probable they all met there, and maintained contact as they went their separate ways.

A photo from Kailum Newland's Facebook page Credit:Facebook Before Melbourne's Men's Society was shut down, one of the administrators, Kailum Newland, posted: "Everyone asking, police have shut us down, we will be back! #standbymms #fkmgp". Over email he told Fairfax that he had not posted any of the images himself, and that the group had got out of hand. "Our intention of the group was to build a brotherly bond in Melbourne! Not to create an under-age pornography folder for a bunch of 15-18 year old males," he wrote. "In some cases I feel bad but you have to understand at least half of these girls have sent pictures to guys asking them to post it, I have no idea why, you'd have to ask them!"

Whose fault is this? After Melbourne's Men's Society was shut down, a dozen or more replacement groups were immediately set up by members, showing the difficulty of stamping out a network that can move and morph with ease. Does Facebook bear some responsibility? Several people with knowledge of the Melbourne's Men's Society and related groups spoke to Fairfax and confirmed they had reported the page multiple times, and every time Facebook took no action. "I had to report heaps of things on MMS. And at first Facebook said that there wasn't anything on the page that breaches their rules," one man told Fairfax. Buzzfeed uncovered a post on the Melbourne's Men's Society's page showing Facebook looked at the group and "found it did not violate our Community Standards".

A Facebook spokesman denied this and said Buzzfeed was wrong. "We have removed this group, and have taken steps to help stop similar groups reforming, and help prevent this abhorrent activity," the Facebook spokesman said. Meanwhile, there are reports police in Victoria were contacted about the Melbourne's Men's Society but said there was nothing they could do. That response did not surprise La Trobe University's Dr Nicola Henry. "If there is a report to police, and they are not pursuing charges using those new criminal charges, that's a big issue right at the coalface of law enforcement," she said.
A Catholic priest sedated and then raped a boarding student before telling the boy to get out of his office because he was disgusted by the child, a trial has heard.

Michael Aulsebrook was the boarding co-ordinator at Salesian College Rupertswood in Sunbury in 1988, when he is alleged to have raped an 11-year-old boy who he had invited to his office one night to play computer games.

Michael Aulsebrook is is alleged to have raped an 11-year-old boy at a boarding school in Sunbury in 1988. Credit:Justin McManus

Mr Aulsebrook, 60, has pleaded not guilty to one charge of rape.

In his opening address to a County Court jury on Tuesday, prosecutor Andrew Grant said the alleged victim remembered being given a soft drink as he played computer games, while the priest sat next to him.
More than three hundred people were evacuated after a suspicious fire broke out at housing commission flats in Fitzroy early this morning.

Six fire trucks were sent out to the Napier Street apartment block around 3.45am on Tuesday after reports of smoke billowing out of the building

The Fitzroy housing commission flats fire is being treated as suspicious. Credit:Paul Jeffers

Metropolitan Fire Brigade crews quickly brought the blaze under control within half an hour, and the residents were able to return to their homes.

An MFB spokeswoman said the fire broke out in a hallway on the eleventh floor of the complex.
Tens of thousands of extra commuters would benefit from an underground railway station at South Yarra, which could be built for as little as $400 million, new research has found.

The research contradicts the Andrews government's justification for not linking South Yarra station to its $10.9 billion Melbourne Metro underground.

The rail line is to run from South Kensington to South Yarra, but does not stop at that suburb's station despite passing just metres from it.

The new findings come from one of the original architects of the Melbourne Metro rail tunnel plan, who was commissioned by Stonnington Council.
A group of Melbourne university students got high and then got naked on Tuesday.

But it's not what you may think.

Students make their feelings about fossil fuel investments known above the sandstone walls. The University of Melbourne was established 163 years ago but still sets trends in higher education. Credit:Michael Dodge

The nine students stood on the roof of the campus' iconic Old Quad building and stripped off to reveal the message "drop your assets" painted on their bare backs and bottoms.

The group is protesting the university's investment in the fossil fuel industry.
A young girl has been sexually assaulted by an unknown man lurking within school grounds at a Melbourne primary school.

Police are now searching for the man, who exposed himself to the girl, before fleeing the scene.

Police are investigating a sexual attack on two young girls at Laburnum Primary School. Credit:Jason South

The young victim was walking with another girl on school grounds at Laburnum Primary in Blackburn about 11.30am on Monday when the alleged offence occurred.

"It is believed the man exposed himself and sexually assaulted one girl who was walking with another girl near a classroom complex on the northern boundary of the school," Victoria Police spokeswoman Amelia Penhall said.
The death of a two-month-old girl and the permanent disability of her twin sister would never have happened if nurses had picked up on unexplained bruising on both babies, a coroner has ruled.

The children were being physically abused by their mother, who repeatedly shook and squeezed them as she tried to settle them in their beds.

Coroner Ian Gray found there were serious failings in the process and training of the Moreland Council Child Health service

The mother later pleaded guilty to infanticide, claiming she suffered from post-natal depression. In sentencing the mother, the trial judge found her moral culpability was negligible, and no court could punish her more than she had been punished by the tragedy herself.

In a finding delivered on Tuesday coroner Ian Gray found there were serious failings in the process and training of the Moreland Council Child Health service, and that a single database to share health information about babies and infants should be set up. Other councils operating such a database.
Shoppers can expect to save up to six per cent of their weekly spend when Aldi's first four stores open in WA in June according to a leading Perth-based retail analyst.

Marketing Focus principal Barry Urquhart said that level of saving - equal to $15 on a $250 weekly shop or $780 a year - had been proven time and time again during the Eastern states expansion of the giant German supermarket.

"When Aldi opens, competition intensifies and the consumer is the winner," he said.

"The biggest loser is likely to be Woolworths that has steadily been dropping market share over the past few years."
Embattled Perth Lord Mayor Lisa Scaffidi wants ratepayers to foot the bill for her stay at a swanky resort in the South West of WA to attend an "exclusive invitation-only" event hosted by the Property Council of WA.

Ms Scaffidi has been feeling the heat since October, when the Corruption and Crime Commission found she engaged in serious misconduct by accepting and keeping secret a $US36,000 ($A48,889.79) trip to Beijing from BHP Billiton.

A report on Lisa Scaffidi was finally released on Parliament on Tuesday.

Several travel scandals involving Ms Scaffidi and the council were exposed by the CCC .

The Department of Local Government's probe into Ms Scaffidi's travel saga is set to be handed down any day, and WAtoday understands both the Lord Mayor and Local Government Minister Tony Simpson have a copy of the report.
Residents of areas in eastern Ukraine not controlled by Kyiv cannot get Ukrainian pensions - minister

People living in areas not controlled by Kyiv (in eastern Ukraine) will not be able to receive Ukrainian pensions there, the minister on the temporarily occupied territories and internally displaced persons of Ukraine, Vadym Chernysh, has said.

"The algorithm is very simple: people in the uncontrolled territories cannot now receive pensions there. We cannot do that because we have no control over these territories. People cannot receive pensions while there is no Ukrainian control there," he told Interfax-Ukraine.

According to him, there are no mechanisms to ensure payment of pensions without establishing control over those territories.

"If there is no Ukrainian control, the Pension Fund does not work, nobody works  how can we make payments there?" the minister said.

Chernysh said internally displaced people receive pensions in areas controlled by Ukraine without problems.
Perth got an old-fashioned drenching on Monday with the wettest April day in four years.

Bickley had the highest rainfall with 33mm while both Scarborough and Perth copped 25.8mm until 9am on Tuesday morning.

It was the highest daily rainfall since April 2012 and the wettest day since August.

Bureau of Meteorology spokesman Gianni Colangelo gave a simple explanation for the downpour.
The father at the centre of the 60 Minutes botched child snatching saga has claimed that if the tables were turned and he'd travelled to Australia with an intention to kidnap he would probably have been "shot on the spot [and] called a terrorist".

On Monday in the middle of the night, over a scratchy phone line, Ali Elamine told his side of the story.

Speaking on 3AW Radio, Ali Elamine said that while he had the power to drop personal charges it also a matter for prosecutors.
Jerusalem: The Israeli military said it had discovered and "neutralised" a tunnel running from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory for the first time since a cease-fire ended 50 days of fighting in the Palestinian coastal territory in the northern summer of 2014.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday hailed the discovery, saying: "The state of Israel has achieved a global breakthrough in the ability to locate tunnels."

An Israeli military drill searches for tunnels on the southern Israel and Gaza border earlier this month. Credit:AP

Describing the breakthrough as "unique", but without providing any details of the technology involved, Mr Netanyahu added: "The government is investing considerable capital in countering the tunnel threat. This is an ongoing effort that will not end overnight."
New York: In an election primaries season of improbable moments, nothing can be ruled out. But it's probably safe to say that Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton are set to win their respective party's votes in New York for a presidential nominee on Tuesday.

As voters head to the polls, Trump is polling at 50-plus per cent in more than half-a-dozen polls. Ditto Clinton; and though the gap between Clinton and challenger Bernie Sanders had narrowed to six per cent in one poll, when eight of them are averaged, Clinton holds a hefty 12 per cent cushion of comfort.

Nothing has been left to chance.
Renault Twingo Set To Provide London With The Ultimate Test Drive Experience







 Free test drives and passenger rides available on the spot from designated test drive hubs in the city

 Capitals streets provide the ideal setting to experience the innovative Twingo city car

LONDON - April 19, 2016: Renault is set to offer Londoners the ultimate urban test drive this week with a fleet of 70 Renault Twingos being set loose around the capitals streets to provide a test drive experience with a difference  including the chance to win tickets to a secret concert.

Between Wednesday 20th and Friday 22nd, and in partnership with Hertz, the eye-catching Twingo motorcade will be roaming around the capitals central landmarks and offering a free on-the-spot test drive, or free passenger ride, from multiple hub locations across central London.

Those who take a test drive on Wednesday 20th April will also have the opportunity to win tickets to a secret gig, hosted by the Spotify music streaming service, which will take place on Thursday evening. The winners will be notified early on the day of the gig and will naturally receive a lift to the secret venue in one of the Twingos. The well-known artist will be announced on Wednesday 20th April.

The Twingos will be available to trial from the following locations between Wednesday 20th April and Friday 22nd April:

 Hertz Marble Arch Branch, Edgware Road, W2

 Westfield (White City)

 Westfield (Stratford)

 ExCel London

 Battersea Park

James Boyer, Marketing Director, Renault UK and Ireland commented: Twingo is the ultimate city car  trendy chic, fun as well as incredibly practical, so what better way to show it off to Londoners than with the most creative city test drive ever, one that comes to you, and that can even get you access to a unique concert that is sure to be a fantastic night.

David Rowlands, General Manager, Hertz UK, said: The new fun and practical Renault Twingo is part of our rental fleet and we are delighted to partner with Renault to allow the public to experience it. It is exciting to be able to welcome those drivers who wish to try the innovative Twingo city car at our popular flagship branch at London Marble Arch.

Greg Jarvis, Sales Director, Spotify, commented: Spotify are thrilled to partner with Renault and offer our users the chance to experience the delights of the new Twingo first hand while en route to a one off secret gig somewhere in London. The new Twingo is a perfect fit for Spotify's young, connected vibrant audience.

Cool, nimble and practical, the award-winning Twingo offers an extremely innovative take on the city car. Its rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive layout meaning that interior space is truly maximised and it is incredibly easy to park, manoeuvre or do a u-turn because the front wheels are not restricted by the engine. Twingo is available with a huge range of colour, trim and personalization options so that buyers can create the exact look they want. Twingo comes as standard with five doors and is priced from 9,495.

The Twingo is powered by a choice of two petrol engines  the SCe 70 and the turbocharged TCe 90 Stop & Start. Both endow the Twingo with the performance to match its agile, nimble handling. All versions feature a five-speed manual gearbox, while a six-speed EDC dual-clutch automatic transmission is also available on models with the TCe 90 engine.

The Twingo is fully connected to the outside world through the standard smartphone-operated R&GO application that turns a smartphone into a touchscreen including sat-nav, or Renaults optional R-Link multimedia system with seven-inch touch-screen.

As with all new Renaults, Twingo is covered by a four-year warranty that offers unlimited-mileage cover in the first two years and then two further years of protection up to 100,000 miles. Four years Renault assistance cover is also included.
MORE: Repair and Maintenance Story Library/p>

BETHESDA, Md., April 19, 2016; As a way to celebrate National Car Care Month, the non-profit Car Care Council is encouraging vehicles owners to order a free copy of the council's popular Car Care Guide. This informative guide offers a wide array of information on the when, why and how of auto care.

"Since the Car Care Guide was first introduced, we have distributed nearly four million guides to savvy motorists who want to drive smart and save money," said Rich White, executive director, Car Care Council. "With 20 pages of new information, the Car Care Guide is a must have if you own or operate a vehicle. Why not celebrate Car Care Month with a free gift for you and your car from the Car Care Council?"

Available in English and Spanish, individual copies of the Car Care Guide can be ordered free of charge by visiting the Car Care Council website at www.carcare.org/car-care-guide.

The 80-page guide uses easy-to-understand everyday language rather than technical automotive jargon, fits easily in a glove box and covers the most common preventive maintenance occasions and procedures that should be performed to keep cars safe, dependable and efficient. It also includes descriptions of major vehicle systems and parts and a list of questions to ask about maintenance or repair procedures. A car care checklist reminds motorists what vehicle systems need to be maintained and when service should be performed.

In addition, the guide includes pages on finding an automotive repair shop, alternative fuels, understanding the warranty, vehicle telematics, careers in the auto care industry and an expanded environmental awareness section. The Car Care Guide was reviewed by industry experts with various backgrounds and areas of expertise and the information has been vetted by car care professionals

The Car Care Council is the source of information for the "Be Car Care Aware" consumer education campaign promoting the benefits of regular vehicle care, maintenance and repair to consumers. For more information, visit www.carcare.org.
LOS ANGELESTEN: The Enthusiast Network (TEN) announced today that Jonathan Anastas has been hired as Chief Marketing Officer, where he will lead all consumer marketing strategies, campaigns, and programs. Anastas will report to Chief Executive Officer Scott Dickey.

Anastas brings more than 20 years of marketing, digital, and data-driven expertise to TEN. His experience has included both significant brand marketing and agency roles, across video gaming, technology, content marketing, and automotive as well as other categories.

Jonathan adds extraordinary marketing experience to the TEN leadership team, said Dickey. He is recognized for developing campaigns that have helped build some of the world's most pioneering and creative companies. His data-driven insights and proven track record of leveraging engaging content across new platforms will help elevate TENs products, marketplace position, and will drive increased revenue across our brands and lines of business. In addition, he is a passionate enthusiast and understands our audiences professionally and personally. 

Anastas joins TEN from Roku, where he was Global Head of User Acquisition, Media, Web & CRM. Anastas helped the company exceed nine million monthly active streamers for the first time in December of 2015, and led marketing efforts for the successful launch of Roku 4.

For five years prior, Anastas was VP, Global Head of Digital at Activision, where he led social and digital marketing across the companys brand portfolio. He helped Call of Duty reach total franchise sales of more than $10 billion dollars. Anastas also contributed to Skylanders launch and its more than $2 billion in sales. During his tenure, the Activision marketing team earned four Effie awards in three years, including the Grand Effie. Anastas also served as VP, Head of Global Marketing for Atari, the legendary video game publisher. At Atari, Anastas led the evolution from traditional launch and awareness-based advertising to an approach of customer acquisition-based marketing, retention, and CRM.

Before moving into a brand marketing career, Anastas spent many years in the advertising agency business, most recently as President of Tribal Worldwides Red Urban division, where he oversaw U.S. launch offices in New York and Dallas. Before joining Tribal, Anastas held a number of management and account service roles at agencies including MullenLowe, Saatchi & Saatchi (cofounding its West Coast digital team) and early Omnicom digital agency THINK New Ideas, rising to the level of Executive Vice President and Managing Director. His clients included categories as varied as automotive (Toyota, Bentley & Rolls-Royce, BMW), QSR (Arbys), technology (Oracle, Network Associates, Time Warner Cable, AT&T), and e-commerce.
IN CONTEXT Isuzu Trucks

CHARLOTTE, Mich., April 19, 2016 -- Spartan Motors, Inc. ("Spartan" or the "Company"), a leader in the manufacturing of high-quality specialty chassis and vehicle assembly, announced today that the Company held a groundbreaking ceremony to recognize its $5.5 million investment in a new 85,000-square-foot truck assembly plant that will manufacture Isuzu's new F-Series trucks. Spartan held this morning's event at its headquarters at 1541 Reynolds Road in Charlotte, Mich.

Isuzu North America Corporation recently expanded its relationship with Spartan by selecting the Company to produce the new line of Isuzu trucks. The F-Series trucks will extend Isuzu's product offering into Class 6 on-highway commercial trucks. This decision to further expand the alliance, which began in 2011 with the production of Isuzu's gasoline-powered N-Series trucks, demonstrates Isuzu's continued confidence in Spartan's quality, people, flexibility, and expertise.

"Today's groundbreaking ceremony represents a significant milestone for Spartan, as we expand our manufacturing footprint and bring new jobs to Michigan," said Daryl Adams, President and Chief Executive Officer, Spartan Motors. "Measurable growth in our relationships with existing clients, such as Isuzu, further confirms our multi-year strategic plan is driving improved performance and will continue to pay dividends for Spartan over the long-term."

Adams added, "We also want to thank our State and local officials for their collaboration and continued support of Spartan's growth initiatives."

New Production Creating Job Growth

The new plant will be part of Spartan's Charlotte manufacturing campus, and it will be dedicated solely to the production of Isuzu vehicles. This new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility will have a flexible production line that can be easily reconfigured to accommodate the assembly of multiple product lines. Further, the production of the F-Series trucks by Spartan at this new plant will bring new jobs to the Michigan workforce.

"We are excited for the opportunity to further grow our business relationship with Isuzu," said Steve Guillaume, Division President, Specialty Vehicles, Spartan Motors. "Contract manufacturing is a core competency of Spartan. This is another great opportunity for us to broaden our portfolio in this key area."

About Spartan Motors

Spartan Motors, Inc. is a leading designer, engineer, manufacturer and marketer of a broad range of specialty vehicles, specialty chassis, vehicle bodies and parts for the fleet and delivery, recreational vehicle (RV), emergency response, defense forces and contract assembly (light/medium duty truck: Class 3, 4 and 5) markets. The Company's brand names - Spartan Motors, Spartan Specialty Vehicles, Spartan Emergency Response, Spartan Parts and Accessories, and Utilimaster, a Spartan Motors Company - are known for quality, durability, performance, customer service and first-to-market innovation. The Company employs approximately 1,700 associates at facilities in Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Indiana. Spartan reported sales of $550 million in 2015. Visit Spartan Motors at www.spartanmotors.com.
Payments of social assistance and pensions to internally displaced people who live in the territory controlled by Ukraine will continue, while in the temporarily occupied territories this will become possible only after the full implementation of the Minsk agreements and the resumption of territorial integrity, Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Rozenko has said.

"As the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, I declare that the establishment of order in social payments and the fight against outflow of budget and pension funds to the occupied territory, which we started in cooperation with the Security Service, will continue. At the same time, all pension and social benefits to real migrants will be paid on time and in full. I will personally control the issue of verification of social payments and assistance to internally displaced persons," Rozenko said.

"Not one kopeck from the national budget of Ukraine or from the Pension Fund will fall into the pockets of terrorists," he assured.

According to the official, the Ukrainian government is unable to pay pensions and other social benefits in the temporarily occupied territory.

"There are no branches of Ukrainian banks, the offices of the Pension Fund, the Treasury Service there, Ukrainian laws are not valid there," he said.
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The Russian Justice Ministry has placed the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People on the list of organizations suspended on account of their extremist activities, the ministry spokesperson said.

"Today the list of public religious organizations suspended in connection with their extremist activities was extended to include the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People," the spokesperson said in a statement obtained by Interfax on Monday.

The move comes after the Crimean prosecutor decided to suspend this public organization, the spokesperson said.

The Mejlis, an organization not registered in Russia, claims the title of a representative body of the Crimean Tatars.

Its current and former leaders  Ukrainian parliamentarians Refat Chubarov and Mustafa Jemilev  reside in Kyiv. The Crimean Prosecutor's Office thinks they played a part in the energy blockade of the peninsula.

It was reported that the Crimean Supreme Court was examining a lawsuit filed by Crimean Prosecutor, Natalya Poklonskaya, to declare the Crimean Tatar Mejlis an extremist organization, and ban its activities in Russia.

"Mejlis is banned from using all state and municipal mass media, conducting various public events, using bank deposits and in general doing any work whatsoever. All their propaganda will be banned," Poklonskaya wrote on Facebook, on April 13.

"The decision to suspend the Mejlis will be in effect until the Republic of Crimea Supreme Court rules on my lawsuit that the this public organization be banned in the Russian Federation, in view of its destructive activity, and declared an extremist organization," the Crimean prosecutor said.

The following day, the European Union demanded a repeal of the decision banning the Crimean Tatar Mejlis as an extremist organization. A spokesperson for the European External Action Service described the decision as extremely alarming, and a serious attack on the rights of Crimean Tatars.
Flybe grows services at Birmingham Airport

AIRLINE Flybe has upgraded services at Birmingham Airport with the launch of six new routes for the 2016 summer season.

The new routes include services to Limoges, Nantes, Rennes, Rotterdam, Luxembourg and Knock. It means the airline now operates 430 flights a week to 30 destinations from Birmingham Airport.

The airlines said it was bringing back several routes after they proved popular with travellers last summer.

The routes include Brest, Avignon, Bergerac, Bordeaux, Biarritz, La Rochelle and Bastia. Lyon remains on the schedule having been available for booking year-round.



Elsewhere, Knock makes a return to the Birmingham schedule this summer with flights operating to Ireland six times per week, and Flybes brand new service to Rotterdam will begin in September.



Frequency has also been increased on a number of popular routes from Birmingham, including Dusseldorf, Milan and Hannover.

To Dusseldorf, there are now five flights per day, while to Milan the frequency has been increased to 19 flights per week. There will be two flights to hannover daily.

Birmingham to Berlin-Tegel is increased to 11 flights per week, while services to Stuttgart are being increased to three flights per day.

Services to Amsterdam are increased to six flights per day.



Flybe said part of Birminghams appeal was for passengers looking to bypass the congested London airports.

Vincent Hodder, Flybes Chief Revenue Officer, said: Time saving, affordable, punctual travel to a wide choice of attractive destinations is what we will be delivering to our customers this summer. Many of the routes we will be operating are specifically scheduled to attract those looking for reasonably-priced, convenient day returns and short breaks, with Birmingham Airport providing a key UK hub for onward travel.




Valentin Rybin, the defense attorney of the Russian citizen Alexander Alexandrov convicted in Ukraine, has dismissed a suggestion made to him by Nadia Savchenko's lawyer Ilya Novikov  that he apply for his client's pardon  as "absolutely unacceptable."

"Today, I spoke to Novikov, who suggested that instead of filing an appeal, I should write a pardon petition. And that they, in turn, would facilitate this," the defense lawyer said on Hromadske TV on Monday.

At the same time, Rybin stressed that this is "absolutely unacceptable" for Alexandrov's defense.

The lawyer also said he and his client will discuss a possible appeal only on Tuesday. "My client has yet to express his opinion on the verdict. I am meeting with Alexander tomorrow, and we will discuss this verdict," Rybin said.

It was reported that, on Monday, a panel of judges at the Holosiyivsky district court in the city of Kyiv, sentenced Alexandrov and another Russian, Yevgeny Yerofeyev, who were captured in the conflict zone in the Luhansk region last May, to 14 years of imprisonment each on the charge of terrorism.
The civil complaint was filed thusly in Manhattan federal court:

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

-v.-

ONE TYRANNOSAURUS BATAAR SKELETON

The dinosaur in question is described as a native of Mongolia from the late Cretaceous period, approximately 70 million years ago. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara filed this 2012 case seeking to have its fossilized remains returned to its native land, where it had been excavated in the Gobi Desert before being smuggled to England, then on to America and a self-described commercial paleontologist.

The paleontologist, Eric Prokopi of Florida, was charged with smuggling in a related case that same year. Manhattan federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein posed a question at an early hearing.

Any idea how big this dinosaur is fully assembled? he asked.

It is about 24 or so feet in length and stands about eight feet high, Assistant U.S. Attorney Martin Bell replied.

So, it would fit nicely in my courtroom, the judge said.

You could probably fit a couple of them in the jury box, your honor, Bell said.

I dont think well have the dinosaur in the jury box, the judge said. But we might have it in the courtroom.

That proved unnecessary when Prokopi pleaded guilty to smuggling numerous fossils from Mongolia. He became what Bhararas office described in court papers as to put it mildly, a unique and important cooperating witness in the annals of national resource crime.

It is safe to say that there is not an active fossil investigation that has not been informed, to some degree, by information given by Prokopi in this case, court papers say.

Bharara is best known in New York for historic prosecutions of crooked political dinosaurs such as state Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver and state Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos. Bharara is renowned in Mongolia for returning actual prehistoric dinosaurs.

The full Tyrannosaurus Bataar skeleton named in the original civil complaint filed in conjunction with the criminal case was officially returned to Mongolian authorities during a formal ceremony in May 2013. Another 18 fossilized remains were returned the following year.

This is a historic event for the U.S. Attorneys Office, in addition to being a prehistoric event, Bharara said.

As listed by the Bhararas office, the fossils returned in 2014 included:

- Two additional Tyrannosaurus Bataar skeletons;

- A skeleton of a Saurolophus angustirostris, a duckbilled, plant-eating dinosaur, and a partial skeleton of an additional Saurolophus;

- Two freestanding Oviraptors, dinosaurs known (perhaps apocryphally) for eating the eggs of other dinosaurs;

- A rock matrix containing at least four Oviraptors;

- A rock slab containing two Gallimimus skeletons, which were large, ostrich-like dinosaurs;

- Two additional Gallimimus skeletons;

- The partial skeleton of an Ankylosaurus, a dinosaur known for having a heavily armored body and a bony, club-like tail;

- The skeleton of a Protoceratops, a dinosaur about the size of a large dog with a distinctive neck frill;

- One restored composite egg nest display piece made of composite dinosaur egg fossils;

- Several small, unidentified prehistoric lizards and turtles; and

- Numerous partial skeletons.

Bhararas office noted in a court filing that these specimens are quite literally of sufficient number to open a museum, and Mongolia is in the process of operating its first-ever such institution based on the dinosaurs recovered in this case alone.

Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj offered his nations gratitude.

Our two countries are separated by many miles but share a passion for justice and a commitment to putting an end to illegal smuggling, he said.

At Prokopis sentencing in 2014, the assistant prosecutor, Bell, remarked on the recovered Oviraptors.

I think a number of them stampeded in the 1996 movie Jurassic Park, Bell said. I was young and awestruck in any event, your honor.

I missed the movie, the judge said. Maybe I should go back to see it.

Every now and then it airs on TNT, Bell said. I will stop what I am doing, particularly now, your honor.

Prokopi, in recognition for his cooperation, was sentenced to just six months, only three behind bars. His insights continued to guide investigators, who recovered yet another fossil in recent days.

On Wednesday, Bharara announced that his office was returning the latest recovery to Mongolia.

We are gratified to add the skull of another Tyrannosaurus Bataar to the roster of fossils returned to Mongolia, he said.

Here was another moment of the right thing done just right, one that offered a too brief mental escape from this tumultuous time of Hillary and Bernie and The Donald and Terrible Ted and, oh yeah, of Kasich.

Then, this New York prosecutors prehistoric work done at least until the next fossil is found, Bharara returned to his historic fight against crooks who masquerade as public servants.

He is said to be investigating allegations of corruption in the NYPD, as well as questions regarding Mayor Bill de Blasios fundraising and suggestions of political favoritism at City Hall.

However it goes in New York, Bharara will still be best known in Mongolia not for United States of America v. Sheldon Silver or for United States of America v. Dean Skelos or Whoever is Next, but for United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton.
After being called delusional, a serial liar, and a potential assassin by the Donald Trump campaign, Michelle Fields has told The Daily Beast all she still wants from campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is an apology.

Palm Beach County, Florida, prosecutors announced on Thursday they would not prosecute Lewandowski for the charge of simple battery after he grabbed Fieldss left arm hard enough to bruise it after a campaign event at Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort on March 8.

Lewandowski told CNN on Friday morning he called Fields on the morning of March 9 but she did not pick up.

I've reached out to Michelle and I've provided my phone records to show that, he said. If she wanted to have a conversation, she could have reached out to me directly or the office. That never took place.

Fields said she would have taken up Florida prosecutors on their offer to drop the case if Lewandowski offered a public apology. That did not happen, but Fields today told The Daily Beast that she would still like an apology from Lewandowski.

I would just like an apology for defaming my character, Fields said on Friday. Thats what I wanted from the very beginning. I never wanted this to blow up, never to end up leaving my job. I just wish they had done the right thing from the very beginning and we could all have moved on.

Instead, the Trump campaign defamed me, Fields said, adding that shes even been driven from her apartment thanks to death threats.

If the campaign is responsible for ruining her life, does that apply to Trump as well?

I dont think him personally. I think him and Corey handled this very poorly and defamed my character. If youre trying to be the president, you should have the responsibility that the buck stops with you.

After denying the incident ever happened for weeks, the Trump campaign suddenly changed its strategy to protect Lewandowski to one of essentially self-defense.

She was grabbing me, Trump claimed on March 29 after police arrested Lewandowski for battery, and just so you understand, she was off base because she went through the Secret Service. She had a pen in her hand, which Secret Service is not liking because they dont know what it is, whether its a little bomb.

"I didnt touch him. I didnt grab him, Fields told The Daily Beast. "In that sense hes responsible for defaming me when it comes to that situation.

Trumps self-defense line would be enough to make jurors believe the state could not prove Lewandowski guilty beyond a reasonable doubt at trial, the Palm Beach County State Attorneys Office explained Thursday.

Mr. Lewandowski may have had apparent authority to assist in the protection of the candidate, specifically to maintain the protective bubble around the candidate, Chief Assistant State Attorney Adrienne Ellis wrote in a memo explaining the decision not to prosecute. While the facts support the allegation that Mr. Lewandowski did grab Ms. Fields arm against her will, Mr. Lewandowski has a reasonable hypothesis of innocence.

For now, Fields is weighing her professional options, having resigned from Breitbart News after the company appeared to side with Trump over her.

I realized that my company didnt have my back, Fields told Fox Newss Megyn Kelly. I cant stand with a company that wont stand for me.

Of her plans, Fields told The Daily Beast, Honestly, Im not sure. Im taking it day by day and trying to put what happened behind me, then Ill figure it out.

I have a great group of friends and a great family and a great support system, she said. Yes, there are people who go on TV and assassinate my character, but there are also really good people and good journalists who are trying to shed lights on the facts and that keeps me optimistic.

Despite Lewandowski not facing prosecution, Fields said that something positive has come from the highly publicized incident.

I think a lot of people realized the character of the Trump campaign as a result of this. That to me is a victory.
Saturday Night Live opened this week with the Democratic debate in Brooklyn, which could only mean one thing: Larry Davids Bernie Sanders was back in Studio 8H.

I am Bernie Sanders, David said to cheers from the SNL crowd that nearly matched Sanderss reception at the actual debate Thursday night. Im a voice for regular people. Im not fancy. Im not the elite. I put on my pants just like all of you. I sit on the edge of the bed and Jane pulls them up for me.

Within minutes, Sanders and Kate McKinnons Hillary Clinton were in a slap fight over the minimum wage and Wolf Blitzer was begging the former Secretary of State to let her opponent go from a headlock.

The cold open sketch instantly improved when Blitzer introduced a question from a real New Yorker: Seinfelds Elaine Benes. The nights host, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, came face to face with the classic sitcoms co-creator and asked about Sanderss plan to break up the big banks.

Once Im elected president, Ill have a nice schvitz in the White House gym, Ill sit them down and yada yada yada, theyll be broken up, Sanders replied.

Elaine pushed back, telling him, You cant yada yada at a debate. Then, to Hillary, she asked, Doesnt it suck to be the only girl in a group of guys? When Clinton answered affirmatively, she added, Dont worry, because everyone thinks you are by far the funniestI mean, the most qualified.

Then, after a question from Friends Rachel Green and a threatened appearance by The Cosby Shows Cliff HuxtableI need black voters, but not that bad, Sanders saidBlitzer returned to one last question from Elaine.

Senator Sanders, you believe the super-rich should pay more in taxes? she asked. But wouldnt that be bad for actors who made a lot of money on a certain very successful sitcom? And in turn, even worse for the person who created that sitcom?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you should vote for her, Davids Sanders admitted.

As for the Veep stars personal politics, Louis-Dreyfus isnt picking sides between the two Democrats. She told The New York Times this week that she will be supporting whoever the Democrat is. Period. End of story.
On Monday, far-right activist Jim Stachowiak plans to grab his rifle and lead an armed rally outside the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta to unite likeminded citizens against Islam and Islamic immigration. The gun-toting activist wishes to raise public awareness to what we perceive as a threat to our nation from Islamic immigration and refugees, as well as the dangerous agenda of the current administration.

In mounting the protest, he intends to publicly shred pictures of Hillary Clinton, President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the Prophet Muhammad, and (of course) the Quran.

You might have already guessed that this man is a Trump fan.

I support Donald Trump because I like his agenda on dealing with the threats to this country  his ban on Islamic immigration, Stachowiak told The Huffington Post on Tuesday, pointing out that Muslim refugees and immigrants are no more than an invading horde or army threatening the United States.

His rally is expected to start on Monday at the statehouse, and wrap up outside CNN headquarters. Stachowiak originally estimated that roughly 200 people would show up to attend, but later revised his estimate to merely a few protesters.

Anyone familiar with Stachowiaks schtick wont be surprised by his latest planned stunt. The right-wing agitator has been calling on the government to STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION for years, loves brandishing his large firearms, and wants you to know that "JESUS CHRIST WAS NOT A PACIFIST."

He also enjoys referring to himself as a well-armed, proud crusader and infidel against the forces of Islam, and any other Satanic Death Cult that would destroy our Liberty."

This time, however, his anti-Muslim antics have managed to catch the attention of the cops.

The Georgia Department of Public Safety and the Georgia Building Authority anticipate a non-permitted, anti-Islamic protest on the sidewalks of the Georgia State Capitol, Capitol Police Director Lewis Young announced in an advisory to state employees, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. You are hereby notified that protest organizers have encouraged their participants to carry loaded long guns. DPS is currently monitoring the threat risk

The Georgia Capitol police told The Daily Beast that, as far as they know, the armed rally is still a go  and that theyre ready for whatever disruptions Stachowiak has in store for Monday.

We do not have any expectations of the crowd [size], however, DPS is always prepared to protect the Capitol and all citizens on the grounds, both civilian and protestors, Captain Mark Perry wrote in an email.

Perry also noted that so far no one at the Capitol has directly expressed any concerns or fears to them.

Stachowiak insists that hes going ahead with his rally rain or shine, permit or no permit, and even if he is the only attendee.

Muslim-American activists, for their part, would much prefer to sit down and talk with the man who hates them and their beliefs so much.

Hatred of Muslims and Islam stems from ignorance, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, executive director of Georgias chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement. We encourage these protesters to put down their guns, cancel their unsanctioned rally, and meet with representatives of our states Muslim community for an open and frank discussion of their concerns.

The Holy Quran instructs Muslims to respond to evil with something better, so that friendship can arise between us and those who hate us, Mitchell added.
The night before the first meeting of UN member-states to discuss drugs in nearly two decades, more than 1,000 leaders worldwide have signed a letter pushing for real reform of drug policy.

Addressed to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, the letter contains signatures from former presidents, celebrities, academics, law enforcement officials, faith leaders, and businessmen.

The list includes a wide range of U.S. figures from presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton to pop culture icons like John Legend and Busta Rhymes.

Its a diverse group with a singular goal: end the war on drugs.

Sen. Sanders signed the letter because he believes the war on drugs has been a failure, spokesperson Josh Miller-Lewis told The Daily Beast Tuesday. Families have been torn apart and far too many people have been put in jail for nonviolent crimes. Instead, Sen. Sanders advocates for drug policy grounded in science, health and human rights.

Hes not alone.

The drug control regime that emerged during the last century has proven disastrous for global health, security and human rights, the letter reads. Focused overwhelmingly on criminalization and punishment, it created a vast illicit market that has enriched criminal organizations, corrupted governments, triggered explosive violence, distorted economic markets and undermined basic moral values.

While boasting a powerful set of names, the letter is not the first to beseech the UN for major reform. In 2014, the most distinguished economists in the worldincluding five Nobel Prize winnerspenned a similar letter to the UN. Their lack of knowledge results in vitriolic reactions, overreactions, John Collins of the London School of Economics said of UN officials at the time. At this point, theyre doing more harm than the drugs themselves.

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliancethe organization that spearheaded the projecthopes this one will be different. The influence and diversity of the leaders who signed this letter is unprecedented, said Nadelmann. Never before have so many respected voices joined together in calling for fundamental reform of drug control policies.

Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), a pioneer in the war on drugs, is equally positive. Blumenauer is spending the week in New York for The United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) summit, hoping to be a voice of reason. Donning a bright green bowtie at the Cannabis Science and Policy Summit on Tuesday, Blumenauer has a unique perspective.

Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1996, hed been exposed to the negative byproducts of marijuana prohibition in Oregon years before. It didnt make sense to me then to criminalize something thats less dangerous than tobacco and alcohol and I continue to feel that way, he told The Daily Beast. My assessment is that this is a whole lot of trouble thats absolutely unnecessary and unjustified.

While in Congress, hes helped shape marijuana reform nationwidewhere 24 states now have access to legal marijuana. He credits Barack Obama for being the first president to tell the truth about marijuana, and says its possible he could remove marijuana from the Schedule I substance list. Ive talked personally to the president about this and said that I hope hes not done. Blumenauer said. He kind of smiled and said Well, were doing lots of things.

As for the next president, hes confident that either Sanders or Clinton would keep drug reform from falling by the wayside. Ive talked personally with Hillary Clinton about this and I think she would continue moving along this line, said Blumenauer. I think Bernie Sanders would too. I dont think anybodys going to be elected president who is anti-marijuana.

Until then, the letter serves as a benchmark of progress, at least in shifting mindsets. Humankind cannot afford a 21st century drug policy as ineffective and counter-productive as the last centurys, the letter reads. A new global response to drugs is needed, grounded in science, compassion, health, and human rights.
BROOKLYN, New York  It was an afternoon of sunlight, revolution, and unicorns in Prospect Park, a fitting setting for the beginning of Bernie Sanderss last stand in New York.

Welcome to the political revolution! he said after taking the stage to a heros welcome. This is a campaign that one year ago was considered a fringe candidacy, 70 points behind Secretary Clinton. They dont consider us fringe anymore.

Sanders seems to have closed the gap here dramatically over the past few weeks. The massive crowds of supporters at his rallies across the state give the impression that Hillary Clintonwith her more modest venues and mostly small crowdsis falling behind.

But the polls show a different picture.

Yes, Sanders is closing the gap, but a Real Clear Politics average of New York state polling shows Clinton leading her opponent 53.5 to 41 percent. Recent polling has him closer, and the Clinton campaign is prepping for a tighter-than-expected race.

And while Sanders campaign staff has sought to dial back expectations as well, his supporters, seeing the enthusiasm around them, believe that the momentum and ultimately the state is behind the Vermont senator. Many said they expect nothing less than an epic upset on Tuesday.

The rally on Sunday did little to quiet their enthusiasm. According to Sanders, about 20,000 poured into the sunny park on Sunday afternoon. In the back of the park, some climbed trees to get a glimpse of his shiny, slightly sunburned head peeking out from behind the lectern.

[Hillary] came and spoke at my school, there were like 200 people there, said Sequoia Sellinger, a student at Purchase College who was perched behind a metal barrier around the large press pen. There were more people outside her speech than were actually there.

I believe Bernie will win the New York primaries, she said. This rally, the Bronx rally the one in Poughkeepsie, there were like 10,000 people there.

We know whos [at Hillary rallies]. Its not young people, said Christopher Graham, of Fairfax County, Virginia, noting that while he cant vote Tuesday, he did vote for Sanders in Virginia.

Sellinger and Graham were two of the thousands who flooded into a meadow in Prospect Park, clutching cardboard cutouts of their heroboth full body and College GameDay-style headsswaying to the sounds of indie rock band Grizzly Bear, and listening to celebrities of various levels of famous actors and musicians who took to the stage to say why they were feeling the Bern.

The smell of marijuana wafted through the spring air, with intermittent plumes of white smoke coming up from the crowd as if from individual smokestacks.

He is a politician we can all trust, and just that alone is such a rare thing, its like unicorn rare, Justin Longa Brooklyn-born actor who played Mac in those grating Mac vs. PC commercialstold the crowd, moments after describing grainy footage of Sanders in the 80s as like watching an actual unicorn.

There was a deep distrust of the polls among Berniacs and a pervasive belief that the system and the polling was rigged to begin withbecause of major media outlets and their association with large corporations.

Its all a lie. Its a conspiracy by CNN and MSNBC, Chuck Blocker, 62, of Connecticut, partially joked.

Yeah, polls can be misleading, if its only reaching 2 percent of the actual population, and those who take it dont necessarily reflect the demographics of the polling group, said Daeha Ko, 37, of New York. Its like anything in statistics, it can be manipulated by specific media outlets, or if the media outlet is reaching toward specific demographics.

Demographics have been a problem for Sanders in his push to the White House, and New York has been no exception.

Both candidates spent several days last week courting the African-American vote, which has been particularly unreceptive to Sanders.

The race has also gotten more divisive on the Democratic side in recent weeks, perhaps because the stakes are so high.

At the Democratic debate on Thursday, the two contenders seemed tired of the others presence in the race.

That lack of love was on full display Sunday, when the mention of Clintons name provoked loud boos from the Sanders crowd.

The Vermont senators riff on Clintons failure to release the text of her paid speeches to banks like Goldman Sachs provoked a particularly raucous chorus of jeers from his supporters.

In the end, Sanderss final pitch deviated very little from his standard pitch, but his supporters didnt care. They were there to be in the movement that Sanders himself has said he never imagined would come to this point.

Lets have a record-breaking turnout on Tuesday, he said. New York state, help lead this country into the political revolution!

Not everyone was on fire.

Yeah, Im cautiously optimistic. Im not a native New Yorker, but Ive lived here a long time now, almost two decades, and the city is very progressive, said rally attendee Jolia Burke. But Hillarys been here a long time and has a foothold, so I dont know. Im cautiously optimistic. Im really hoping to be shocked.

with additional reporting by Kelly Weill.
The Democratic ground has shifted in New York. Yes, the polls suggest Hillary Clinton will win, maybe even handily, Tuesday in what, for want of a more compelling alternative, must be called her home state.

But lets cut to the chase. Going back to the 1950s, the New York primary was the stop on the national schedule where the candidates pledged their loyalty to Israel. I remember very clearly the first New York primary I ever covered, in 1988. That was the year that Ed Koch, then the mayor, famously said that Jews would have to be crazy to vote for Jesse Jackson.

But New York has changed, and its Democratic party has changed dramatically since Koch endorsed Al Gore, who, stuck in third place in a three-way race, opened New Yorks contest by accusing Michael Dukakis of putting public pressure on Israel due to his a naive legalism, an exaggerated faith in the United Nations, and a seeming reluctance to ever have the United States act on its own when necessary.

From there, it was off to the races as Koch endorsing Gore and firing some wild shots at Dukakis and especially Jackson.

That 1988 primary was the worst, but in just about every New York primary since, candidates in both parties have competed to out-Israel each other, which has usually meant adopting not merely pro-Israel talking points but pro-Likud ones.

I expressed the fear after Sanders won Wisconsin that Clinton might try to turn New York into an Israel referendum. She could have. And maybe she would have if the polls were closer. But she has not.

Not only that. The needle moved significantly, and astoundingly, in the other direction. Here, Sanders deserves tremendous credit.

He said at last Thursdays debate: As somebody who is 100 percent pro-Israel, in the long runand this is not going to be easy, God only knows, but in the long run if we are ever going to bring peace to that region which has seen so much hatred and so much war, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity.

An acknowledgement that Palestinians are human beingsduring a New York primary, no less!

Clinton could haveand 12 or so years ago, undoubtedly would haveresponded by saying something like until the Palestinians get better leaders and stop teaching hatred to their children, my posture wont change. Not only did she not do that, but Sanders forced her to acknowledge the point.

She said: As Secretary of State for President Obama, Im the person who held the last three meetings between the President of the Palestinian Authority and the Prime Minister of Israel.  Three long meetings. And I was absolutely focused on what was fair and right for the Palestinians. I was absolutely focused on what we needed to do to make sure that the Palestinian people had the right to self-government.

Sanders is to be commended for this anti-panderingit could herald the start of a positive change in the way Democrats at least talk about the Middle East. But he was also able to get away with it because New York has changed so much. In 2011, Ed Koch came from seemingly nowhere to hijack the special election to replace Anthony Weiner in the House, turning it into a nationally viewed referendum on Obamas Israel policies and costing Democrats what had seemed like a safe seat in the process. That was his last hurrah, and may have also been the last one for the staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Democrats who were once a dominant force in the partys politics.

The Jews who remain in the party, especially those younger than 40 or so, are much more anti-Likud than the generation thats been dying off (if Koch were still alive, hed probably have popped off about Sanderss comment, and wed have stormed our way back to 1988 again).

On that one, Sanders showed that hes more in touch with the current mindset of a crucial New York constituency than Clinton is. But with regard to African-American and Latino voters, especially those older than 40 (which is to say most of them), he still displays no feel at all for them, and no intrinsic empathy. Carrying on as he has about the South being conservative is, as I wrote last week, insulting to black voters everywhere. Id have to bet this is a big topic of discussion on New York black radio, and was Sunday in the social halls of AME churches from Brooklyn to Buffalo.

If Clinton wins, the margin will again be provided by these voters. Ill be very interested to see what the tallies are in states three political regions: the city, the suburbs (Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam), and upstate. If the polls are right and Clinton wins by double digits, she should carry them all; and with 247 total delegates at stake (not including the supers), the difference between a 12-point win and a three-point win could amount to 12 or 13 delegatesa huge difference at this point in the campaign.

I was standing in that field on Pat Moynihans farm that day in July 1999 when Clinton first put herself out there as New Yorks future senator. She served the state by all accounts well, well enough that the Republicans couldnt muster up a serious candidate against her when she ran for reelection, and well enough, if the polling holds up, to push her across the finish line tomorrow.

But if this New York primary is remembered in the future for anything, itll be remembered as the one that finally buried some nasty ghosts from 1988, and itll be Sanders who will deserve the credit for that.
Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada has asked international organizations to give an assessment to Russian authorities' actions that banned the activities of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people and to convene a UN Security Council meeting, Rada Chairman Andriy Parubiy said.

"I address to international organizations on behalf of the Ukrainian parliament to give a response to this crime. I address to the United Nations to consider [...] an opportunity to urgently convene the UN Security Council on this issue," Parubiy said at the Rada morning meeting on Tuesday.

Parubiy on his Facebook page said he had asked Ukraine's Foreign Ministry to discuss a possible urgent convocation of the UN Security Council.

He stressed that a ban of Mejlis of Crimean Tatars is a manifestation of "Russian fascism."

"Yesterday Justice Ministry of Russia declared Mejlis of Crimean Tatars as an extremist organization. This is for the first time after the era of dictators Stalin and Hitler people have been proclaimed as extremists. And this is a manifestation of Russian fascism," he wrote on Tuesday.

Late on April 18 it was reported that Russian Justice Ministry has placed the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People on the list of organizations suspended on account of their extremist activities, the ministry spokesperson said.

"Today the list of public religious organizations suspended in connection with their extremist activities was extended to include the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People," the spokesperson said in a statement obtained by Interfax on Monday.

The move comes after the Crimean prosecutor decided to suspend this public organization.

Its current and former leaders  Ukrainian parliamentarians Refat Chubarov and Mustafa Jemilev  reside in Kyiv. The Crimean Prosecutor's Office thinks they played a part in the energy blockade of the peninsula.
Elliott Williams spent the last five days of his life in a Tulsa County jail, paralyzed and lying on the cold concrete floor. But despite the 37-year-old Oklahoma mans pleas for help, guards did nothing to save him, a lawsuit claims.

At one point, jailers dumped Williamss limp body into a shower and left him there for an hour. The dying inmate would not stand up but we did give him a shower anyway, a captain later testified, according to a sheriffs office internal report.

Another officer saw Williams face down in the shower, screaming, Help me! according to the internal report.

In the days that followed, Williamss father tried in vain to contact his son. He was denied visitation because of Elliotts condition.

Hes acting like hes paralyzed, but we know hes not, a mental health worker told Williamss dad, court papers allege.

Detention officers, nurses, and even a jail psychiatrist accused Williams of faking an illness. His family says they declined to administer medical care or transport Williams to a hospitaluntil it was too late.

Cops arrested the Army vet, who had a history of mental illness, at a Marriott hotel on Oct. 21, 2011. Hotel staff called the cops after Williams, who was with his parents, appeared to have a mental breakdown in the lobby. At the time, his only alleged crime was misdemeanor obstruction.

But he paid with his life.

This guy went almost six days and never got taken to the hospital with a broken neck, Daniel Smolen, an attorney for Williamss family, told The Daily Beast. Theyre throwing food at him and making fun of him in the cell while hes going through a horrific death. You wouldnt do that to an animal or any living thing.

Most of the horrors Williams endured in the jail were captured on the facilitys surveillance footage. The shocking video was released in 2013, two years after the Williams family filed a federal lawsuit against then-Sheriff Stanley Glanz.

The complaint also targeted employees of the private health-care company contracted to operate the jails medical services. The firm, Correctional Healthcare Management, settled out of court two years ago, but the county didnt. Smolen expects the Williams case to go to trial.

Its a slow, torturous death, Smolen said, adding that Williamss case is the worst civil rights violation hes seen captured on film. Youre cognizant of it the whole time. Its like a nightmare.

The Tulsa County sheriffs office told The Daily Beast it would not comment on cases that are pending litigation and about to go to trial. But in one court filing for the Williams case, Sheriff Glanzs attorney, Corbin Brewster, claimed, Williams was surrounded by people in the jail who thought they were taking care of him.

Despite medical staffs incorrect diagnoses of Mr. Williams before his death, the undisputed evidence is that the medical professionals who examined and treated Mr. Williams sincerely believed he was faking paralysis, Brewster wrote.

Williamss legal team, Brewster added, has not established any evidence at anyone at the jail consciously refused to provide him with medical care.

Meanwhile, the alleged scandals within the Tulsa sheriffs department keep adding up.

Former Sheriff Glanz was in the spotlight last year after his fishing buddy and volunteer deputy, 74-year-old Robert Bates, fatally shot an unarmed black man at close range after Bates mistook his own gun for a Taser.

Bates has pleaded not guilty to second-degree manslaughter. His trial began on Monday.

The fatal blunder swept the cable news networks in April 2015, when the high-rolling grandpa killed 44-year-old Eric Harris during a gun-buy sting operation. Bates was accused of being a pay to play cop for his donations to and vacations with Sheriff Glanz.

Harriss family has filed a federal lawsuit against Glanz, Bates, and other officers, alleging excessive force in Harriss death, as well as supervisor liability and deliberate indifference to serious medical needs. The case is still active.

Video footage showed the unarmed Harris running from officers, who then tackled and subdued him. As Harris lay face down on the ground, Bates shot him with his gun, rather than his electroshock weapon. Oh! I shot him! Im sorry! Bates is heard saying on camera.

He shot me! He shot me, man. Oh, my god. Im losing my breath, a dying Harris says, to which an officer responds, Fuck your breath.

A SONS LAST WORDS

Before Elliott Williams was placed in the back of the squad car, he told his father he loved him. It would be the last time they ever spoke.

Williamss marriage was on the rocks and he had been staying with his father since mid-October of 2011, court records show.

On the morning of Oct. 21, Williams became somewhat argumentative while riding in a car with his parents, Earl and Katha. Earl later told investigators with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) that he stopped by the Owasso police department to speak to an officer about Williams, documents state.

An Owasso cop agreed to give Williams a lift home so his parents could continue to a doctors appointment, but moments later, someone with the police department called Earl because Williams had locked his keys in the house.

The parents decided to come home, and according to an OSBI report, the Owasso police department was very nice to them during this time.

Later that afternoon, Williams checked into a Marriott hotel in Owasso and his wife phoned Earl. She couldnt wake Williams up and feared he was dead. The parents rushed to the hotel and knocked on Williamss door. He opened it.

Afterward, Williams joined his family at church. But when the family returned to the hotel, Williams chucked a fast-food bag in the lobby and ran back outside, knocking one of the front doors off track, the OSBI report says.

Two police officers arrived soon after. Earl told them Williamss wife recently left him and he hadnt slept for days.

According to Earls account to OSBI, Williams wasnt making sense when he spoke to the cops, who called a mental health service to help him. Williams became agitated and disobeyed an officers repeated orders to sit down.

Officer Benjamin Wolery later recalled Williams starting singing and talking to God, and plucked some grass and dirt from the ground, saying something religious and touched it to his tongue. Then Williams said, Going to be a beat down tonight, all the way down there to the ground. He asked, Do we know if we are going to wake up in the morning?

Williams continued to make a scene outside the hotel. He told police he was going to kill himself and asked cops to shoot him. I know what this is, a black male and two Owasso officers, homicide or suicide, take two bullets, Earl recalled Williams telling the cops while tapping his chest, the document states.

Eliah is out of my life, she is out of my life, take a shot, Williams allegedly said, referring to his wife. What is wrong with you all, are you scared? Its a suicide; do I need to provoke you?

Officer Wolery told OSBI that Williams took a threatening step toward him and fellow cop Jack Wells, who then pepper-sprayed Williams.

Wells knocked Williams to the ground, allegedly pressing a knee into his back, according to Earls OSBI report. Earl said he saw his sons left foot drag when officers pulled him up and took him to a patrol car.

Earl asked the cops why Williams was being arrested. He was interfering with a police officer, one of them replied. EMS arrived on scene to wash pepper spray from Williamss eyes, and the father and son said what would be their final goodbyes.

On Oct. 22, Earl called the Tulsa County jail to see if he could visit Williams but they said it was too early. The next day, the concerned father phoned again and was told his son was moved to the jails medical wing.

He reached John Lnuk, a worker in the jails mental health area, on Oct. 24 and asked how Williams was doing, OSBI documents show.

Earl told OSBI that Lnuk mimicked a weak voice and told him Williams said, I want a drink of water. Earl was worried Williams was sick, but Lnuk told him not to worry. Hes acting like hes paralyzed, but we know hes not, Lnuk said, according to Earl.

For the next two days, Earl tried to visit his son and spoke with a chaplain, asking him to check on Williams.

Finally on Oct. 27, another chaplin agreed to visit Williams and gave Earl bad news: Williams wasnt responding well to him and Earl had better visit the jail.

Lnuk told Earl a short time later that staff were transporting Williams to the hospital. Then Lnuk became unreachable, Earl told OSBI.

When Earl got to Tulsa County jail that day, he was told Williams was dead. It would take years to learn what really happened to his son.

A LIVING NIGHTMARE

Williamss apparent psychosis didnt end when he got to Owasso police headquarters. He swayed and hummed and fell to the ground in the booking area. He indicated he was suicidal on an intake form.

Despite the check mark, Williams wasnt put on suicide watch, lawyers claim. Instead, police put him in a video-monitored holding cell, pending his transfer to the Tulsa County jail, according to a federal lawsuit filed by his family.

He continued to exhibit behaviors of severe mental illness, including screaming, dancing aimlessly, and crawling on all fours. On several occasions, he slammed his head into the cell walls, court papers allege. Still, Owasso police did nothing to help him.

Things would only get worse in Tulsa.

When Williams arrived to the county jails booking area in the early morning of Oct. 22, Owasso officer Jack Wells slammed him to the floor while trying to handcuff him, according to the cops own interview with OSBI. Officer Wells told OSBI he landed on top of Elliotts shoulder and head, but that the prisoner appeared to be fine with no injuries.

Still, the Tulsa sheriff offices appeared to disagree. In an internal report, the sheriffs department says Williams struggled after the fall, and that his condition was captured on booking cameras. At this time it is obvious that Williams is having a difficult time standing, the document stated.

In body camera footage exclusively provided to The Daily Beast, Williams is heard groaning in pain as hes handcuffed on the floor of the booking area.

Elliott, lay down on the floor. Stay laid down, do you understand me? a cop orders as the inmate screams.

Throughout the footage, his cries are chilling.

Goddamn, an officer is heard on camera in response.

Sheriff Glanz himself later testified that his investigators, after watching surveillance video, were concerned Williams had broken his neck. Glanz added that he saw the footage, too, and shared their worry. After viewing it, I think that thethe officers probably could have done more as well as medical to provide for his care, Glanz said in a May 2013 deposition.

Williams screamed and said he couldnt walk. Cut it out of my belly, he demanded of jail staff. He showed abnormal posturing in his hands, indicative of a serious brain injury, and also appeared to have a seizure, court papers allege.

He never completed the booking process.

According to court documents, Williams was taken to a holding cell, where he rammed his head into a glass window on the cell door, then hit the floor. A fellow inmate later told Sheriff Glanz no one checked on Williams for 20 minutes.

Williams told nurses he couldnt move and felt like his neck was broken, court papers state. One nurse told sheriffs investigators she massaged his neck for a bit, then left him in the cell. She told an oncoming nurse that Williams was fine despite his complaints, according to a disciplinary report for the employee found in court documents.

When a jail captain later checked on Williams, he had urinated and defecated on himself. The captain said it was clear Williams had mental health issues but concluded he was still faking the paralysis, court papers show.

A nurse eventually called a medical emergency, and jailers hoisted Williams onto a gurney lined with trash bags. He continued to scream and say something needed to be cut out of him. The behavior indicated he had serious and emergent mental health and medical needs, court papers allege.

When Williams was rolled to the medical units shower, one nurse told him he should be ashamed of his behavior and to quit faking. She also told him to get his nasty ass in the shower, court documents say.

Jail supervisors tried to get Williams into the shower but he couldnt move. One sergeant then dumped Williams off the gurney, a two- to three-foot fall, and the cops tore his pants off and removed his shirt.

The jails then-Chief Deputy Michelle Robinette, in an April 2013 deposition, admitted her employees dumped Williamss body into the shower. When asked why she felt the jailers conduct was wrong, Robinette replied, Because you dont dump people off of gurneys.

Staff admitted to leaving Williams alone in the shower for at least an hour, court papers reveal.

After the shower, Williams was placed in his cell, lying on his back and naked. He told an officer he couldnt move or drink a cup of water left for him. Look, theres that water in the cup, and I havent drank it. I cant move, Williams told the cop.

The cop alerted a nurse to Williamss claims but she wasnt alarmed. [Williams] continues to tell nursing staff here that he just cannot walk Wants to be waited on, she wrote in a progress report.

According to the complaint, not much is known about what happened to Williams on Oct. 23. He was placed in a general population cell but not separated from other inmates or assessed by a mental health professional, court papers state.

On Oct. 24, another nurse reported Williams was lying on [the] bed without clothes [and] refusing to answer any questions. A counselor came by and made a similar observation, noting Williams acted as if paralyzed, saying I want water.

That night, an officer reported Williams was repeatedly yelling. She told the nursing staff he wants something and asked they at least go down there and look at him. None of the nurses bothered to check on Williams, court papers allege.

The next day, mental health workers at the jail held a meeting to discuss Williams. Instead of seeking a neurological exam or other care, they decided to rule out paralysis by placing Williams in a video-monitored cell. They wanted to see if he was faking the injury, legal papers state.

At around 8:30 a.m., two officers dragged Williams on a blanket to his new cell and placed a Styrofoam cup of water at his feet, video footage shows.

This was the only cup of water placed in [the cell] from October 25 to the time that Mr. Williams died on October 27, court papers charge.

The psychiatrist met with Williams for the firstand lasttime at 9:07 a.m. Williams claimed he couldnt move, didnt know where he was, and demanded a bucket of water to drink, the doctor noted, according to court documents.

At 10:11 a.m., staff tossed a food container onto the floor of the cell, out of Williamss reach. He struggled to grab the cup of water between 1:15 p.m. and 2:12 p.m., court papers state. No one entered the cell to help him.

Jailers dropped a second food container into the cell at 4:41 p.m. Williams tried in vain to open the container and to lift the water cup, the cells surveillance footage shows.

When a nurse reported for her shift that night at 7 p.m., she was shocked by Williamss condition. He had white residue on the side of his mouth and couldnt get up. She asked detention officers to open the cell door so she could help him, but they refused, citing unspecified safety issues, court papers allege.

The nurse gave up.

A counselor visited Williamss cell door around 7:30 a.m. the next day and jotted down her observations as psychosomatic paralysis. She began to taunt Williams, telling him if he wanted to be bailed out by his parents he would have to walk to the car, according to court documents.

Three hours later, Williams desperately attempted to lift one food container within his reach and accidentally knocked over the cup of water. It was never refilled, court papers allege.

On Oct. 27 at 5:10 a.m., the third and final food container was dropped into Williamss cell, at his feet and out of his reach, video shows. A resident physician shadowing jail staff spotted him three hours later, lying with saliva pooled under his head. The doctor saw vomit on the side of Williamss mouth and the unopened food containers.

The doctor warned the jails medical director that Williams looked sick, needed a CT scan and needed to go to the hospital, court documents state. The medical director, however, took no action. The director later testified he didnt remember the doctors conversation but if it happened, it was my bad.

Then he tried to explain away Williamss treatment. People just die sometimes, he said, according to court records.

At 11:01 a.m., Williams was unresponsive. Two nurses made cosmetic attempts at CPR, court papers state. One of them said she would only perform the lifesaving maneuver while standing up.

Within moments, he was dead.

The medical examiner ruled Williams died of complications of vertebrospinal injuries due to blunt force trauma and that he was dehydrated. Regardless of what caused Williamss fatal injuries, attorneys for his family argue Tulsa Countys deliberate indifference to his care led to his untimely death.

THE DEATHS PILE UP

Its not the first time Tulsa County allegedly risked the lives of inmates. A review of court records shows at least a dozen lawsuitsmany of them filed by Smolens firmagainst the sheriffs department alleging injuries to suspects and prisoners, as well as deaths over a lack of care. Two of these cases were dismissed, records show.

One case, filed by Terry Byrum in January 2016, claims volunteer deputy Bates used excessive force when tasing him after a traffic stop. Byrum voluntarily dismissed the case two days later for procedural reasons and expects to refile, his attorney, Smolen, told The Daily Beast.

Another lawsuit, filed by Destiny Holland over her fathers jail cell suicide, was also dismissed. The Daily Beast could not reach her attorney to determine what happened with the case.

In an affidavit for Williamss case, the jails former director of nursing, Tammy Harrington, said she witnessed numerous inadequacies in the services provided to inmates with mental health issues, as well as a lack of leadership that trickled from the top.

Harrington said she and other nurses were directed to hide medical charts and records that would be unfavorable to auditors. During a 2010 audit process, she said she saw medical charts being carried out of the jail.

The inmates were run through the booking process like cattle in a chute. This was not a true medical screening process, Harrington added.

The former employee said several people died at the jail because of a lack of medical care. And when they did pass away, nurses would attempt to resuscitate them and call EMS to take them to the hospital, so the official pronouncement of death would occur off-site. That way, officials wouldnt have to report a jail death, Harrington said.

Supervisors would also routinely direct nurses to falsify and backdate medical records, the nurse said. When inmate Lisa Salgado died of a heart attack in 2011, Harrington said, it was discovered her vital signs were never recorded in a chart. A supervisor ordered nurses to doctor her medical records so that it would appear vitals had been taken, court papers show.

When the allegations surfaced in 2013, an attorney for the sheriff, Clark Brewster, told the Tulsa World he had serious doubts about the veracity of the records falsification claims, which he called sensational.

In 2013, families of deceased inmates Gregory Brown, Gwendolyn Young, and Lisa Salgado joined a lawsuit filed by Bridget Nicole Revilla, who claims the sheriffs departments allegedly inadequate supervision led to a suicide attempt.

The three prisoners needlessly died because of grossly deficient treatment at the jail, the complaint alleges. The case is still active.

Brown arrived to Tulsas pen Feb. 18, 2012, and made multiple requests to see a doctor, the lawsuit claims. He finally saw one four days later after his blood pressure and heart rate dropped dramatically and he spent the previous night vomiting, the complaint alleges.

The doctor, informed of Browns history of perforated gastric ulcers and gastrectomy, ordered meds and fluids, but refused multiple requests by Harrington to send him to the hospital. On Feb. 28, nurses saw Brown had black urine. The next day, his temperature shot to 102.9 degrees and he went to the ER. A surgeon concluded he had bowel perforation and a deadly inflammation of his abdomen and organs. He was placed in the ICU, where he died March 8, court papers claim.

In Salgados case, she was booked into the jail June 25, 2011, and died three days later. While staff were notified of her health issues, which included coronary heart disease, hypertension, and alcohol abuse, they didnt take any vitals, the complaint alleges. When a nurse showed up to work June 28, he found Salgado unresponsive. She had been dead for at least four hours, court papers allege; rigor mortis had set in.

Young had complained of nausea, vomiting, and lower back and abdominal pain hours before she died of a heart attack on Feb. 8, 2013, yet jail staff did nothing to assess her deteriorating condition, according to court papers.

Instead, jail employees falsified documentation to make it appear Ms. Young passed away after being taken from the jail by ambulance, even issuing a press release that falsely claims Ms. Young died at an area hospital, the lawsuit claims.

State and federal authorities warned Tulsa County multiple times about its substandard care since 2009, when the Oklahoma State Department of Health conducted a probe into the death of Charles Jernegan, a 32-year-old inmate who hanged himself in his jail cell, and issued a notice of violation, court papers show.

The Tulsa lockup did not meet Oklahoma jail standards with regard to separating mentally ill prisoners from the general population, monitoring them and providing medical care, the document warned.

Jernegan hanged himself in a jail cell in July 2009. He had indicated he struggled with mental illness on a screening form, but penitentiary staff never evaluated or monitored him, a lawsuit claims.

Jernegan was known to his jailers, having been detained twice earlier that year. Each time, he notified personnel he had suicidal tendencies and one past suicide attempt, according to a lawsuit filed by his family.

Two days before he killed himself, Jernegan submitted a written request seeking treatment but his cry for help was greeted with apathy, the complaint alleges.

In another tragic case, 38-year-old inmate Michael Morittz died after repeatedly begging for his heart medications.

Morittz was booked on charges of burglary of an automobile and assault with a dangerous weapon in May 2006, court records show. A year before, he had surgery for an aortic valve replacement and was on multiple life-sustaining meds, a lawsuit filed by his daughter states.

I have been here since 5-18-06. I had open heart surgery 1-18-05 I have not received any [medication for] blood pressure, blood thinner or pain pills. I am afraid of something happening to me (my heart) please help me! he wrote in a May 25 grievance form, according to the lawsuit.

He submitted another form on June 12, 2006, that read, D.O. [detention officer] says I cant get my meds I dont understand the problem here, court records show.

On Aug. 11, Morittz wrote a letter to his mother and sister, saying he had chest pain, could barely breathe and hasnt seen a doctor. The staff will not answer my sick call slips [and] Ive [submitted] over 20, he said, according to court papers. He concluded the letter by asking them to tell his 10-year-old daughter he loved her.

About two weeks later, Morittz was taken to the hospital ICU. His heart stopped beating and he was experiencing kidney failure. He remained on life support until he died Sept. 16, court papers state. His familys lawsuit against the sheriffs office is still pending.

The fatal shooting of Harris, Williamss horrific jailhouse death, and the series of deadly medical errors are caused by a toxic cover-up culture within the sheriffs office, Smolen told The Daily Beast.

If you go back to a lot of this stuff, youre looking at the falsification of records, whether its medical records, logbooks and welfare check records, or Bob Batess training records, Smolen said in an interview on Friday, referring to former deputies claims, during grand jury testimony last year, that Bates was never properly trained and that his records were falsified.

I see it as such a larger systemic issue, particularly with the Tulsa County sheriffs office, he added. When you allow corners to be cut and view human life as less than human life, very evil, tragic things happen.

AMERICAS WORST SHERIFFS OFFICE?

Allegations of corruption inside the sheriffs office have been leaking out even before the start of Batess trial this week.

Last week, a former employee of Batess attorney, Clark Brewster, filed an affidavit in the Harris familys civil case against Bates.

Michael Hardison, a gunsmith at a shooting range owned by Brewster, provided an affidavit claiming a manager, Eric Fuson, asked him in March 2016 to modify a gun for use in Batess criminal trial by reducing its trigger force.

I told Eric I have a problem with that. I then asked Eric several questions, Hardison said in the court filing. I asked Eric why I needed to do a trigger job on a gun that would be evidence in trial. I noted that it was improper to modify a duty weapon.

Hardison asked why Brewster didnt use the actual gun as evidence, and Fuson allegedly replied that the jury would be too stupid to figure it out.

My impression from this was that the trigger was to be modified in order to fool or manipulate the jury in the Bates trial, Hardison said in his affidavit, adding that he refused to do the job and resigned.

At an April 12 hearing, prosecutor Kevin Gray expressed concern that the sample handgun wouldnt be identical to the weapon Bates used that day. They will have the original gun, and I dont see any reason to send any gun back with the jury thats not Mr. Batess gun, Gray said, according to court transcripts.

Brewster told the judge the replica gun would only be used by his experts and his office, not for a trial exhibit, court records show.

Brewster told Tulsas KTUL he never planned to present a replica gun in court. The notion that he would was ridiculous, he added.

On April 13, as part of the Harris familys civil case against Tulsa County, Smolens firm filed an emergency motion asking the sheriffs office to produce Batess gun for an expert trigger weight test to prevent the spoliation of evidence, stating that once the trial concludes, it will no longer be protected as evidence.

In response, Brewsters firm accused Smolen of drafting a frivolous motion aiming to prejudice Robert Batess right to a fair trial in a pending criminal matter which goes to trial Monday, April 18, 2016, court records show.

Meanwhile, Glanz is also in the hot seat for at least eight active lawsuitsseven against him both personally and in his official capacity, and one against him personallyalleging inmate neglect at the county jail.

Last month, a jury awarded a 23-year-old woman $50,000 in damages over repeated sexual assaults she allegedly endured in Tulsas jail.

The woman claimed she was just 17 when detention officer Seth Bowers allegedly groped her and forced oral sex on her over a four-month period. She filed a federal lawsuit against Glanz and Bowers, who was subsequently dismissed after an undisclosed settlement was reached, the Tulsa World reported.

Bowers was never charged with a crime, despite the sheriffs office recommending the district attorney prosecute him. The officer resigned in June 2010, a day before he was scheduled to take a polygraph test at the sheriffs department, The Frontier revealed. The DA declined to pursue the case.

Glanz resigned last Septemberone day after a grand jury indicted him on two misdemeanor charges, including one for not releasing a 2009 internal report on Bates. A second charge stems from his use of a monthly travel stipend while using a county vehicle. Both charges are still active.

Tulsa activist Marq Lewis led the charge against Glanz. Oklahoma is one of six states that permits citizens to initiate a grand jury through a 5,000-signature petition. Lewis and supporters sought to remove Glanz from office and empanel a civil grand jury to probe for wrongdoingand they succeeded.

During the grand jury testimony, more was revealed about Tulsa Countys alleged attempts to cover up the deaths of both Harris and Williams. Deputy Billy McKelvey said he and a chaplain were asked to meet with Harriss brother days after the shooting to determine whether the family had hired an attorney.

And I, honestly, I told him that attorneys convoluted these types of problems, McKelvey testified, according to court transcripts.

McKelvey then used the Williams case as an example of how to discourage victims families from pursuing litigation.

One of the strategies in that death investigation was for the sheriffs office to make contact with the family members of Elliott Williams and try to get a settlement before attorneys get involved because itit costs a lot more money to defend a civil case and usually the settlements are a lot higher, McKelvey testified.

And, so, that was aa tactic used in that case and that was what I was told to do in this [Harris family] case he added.

Meanwhile, Smolen said revelations in the Harris case show the sheriffs office is just as bad as it was when he began litigating against it a decade ago. The Harris case is bringing to light all this stuff thats going on behind the scenes but we could never prove, he told The Daily Beast.

In February, Smolen vowed Harriss death would finally expose corruption inside the sheriff departments that went unchecked too long.

When Eric Harris was shot, we came out publicly and said were going to show you what happens when you try to cover up a bad shooting, Smolen told The Daily Beast at the time. We werent just talking about that shooting [or] Robert Bates or Stanley Glanz.

We were talking about how, for a decade, this was a corruptand corrupt to the coresheriffs office.
Since launching his Late Show last fall, Stephen Colbert has welcomed presidential candidates including Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders to sit beside him in the Ed Sullivan Theater and make their case to American voters. But when Hillary Clinton appeared on the show Monday night  hours before polls opened in the crucial New York primary  the setting was markedly different.

Rather than conduct the interview in front of his live studio audience, Colbert opted to speak with Clinton seated across a table from the candidate in an empty Carnegie Deli. The piece, which was evidently taped late last week, had a far cozier vibe than some of the hosts previous political interviews, including a confrontational and awkward conversation with John Kasich back in February.

This was Clintons second visit to Colberts Late Show (she made two appearances on The Colbert Report, one during the 2008 primary and one in 2014 to promote her latest memoir) and she seemed seriously at ease with the genial host. And while the name Bernie Sanders barely came up when they talked six months ago, this time it shockingly didnt get mentioned once.

Instead, Colbert began with the man he presumed will be Clintons general election rival. Politics seem to be finding common ground, the host said. What do you have in common with your likely opponent Donald Trump, other than the fact you have beautiful daughters and you both were at his wedding?

Im not sure yet. Im not sure what I have in common with him, Clinton said, pivoting away as fast as possible. However when you are president and youre working with the Congress, there are lots of opportunities to find common ground. When Colbert asked why in the world she wants to return to Washington, D.C., the candidate stressed how much better she will be at doing the job of president compared to running what has been at times an uninspiring campaign.

Then, just when you thought Colbert might bring up Clintons opponent in this weeks New York primary, he changed the subject to talk about what kind of grandmother she is and did an extended bit in which he taught her how to properly eat cheesecake in front of reporters at campaign stops.

And that was it. Colbert jokingly asked if she was OK splitting the check and then comically ran out the door and down the street.

Realistically, no one could have expected Colbert to go that hard on Hillary Clinton in a setting like this one. Its not like he was going to bring up #Benghazi or force her to explain her damn emails. But why not at least give her a chance to discuss the enthusiasm gap between her campaign and Sanders? Or perhaps ask her about one thing that might affect New Yorkers lives?

It was hard not to imagine how his alter ego from The Colbert Report would have used his signature satirical approach to make Clinton confront real, substantive issues at the heart of this contentious race. But apparently, that really was the old Colbert.

If any New Yorkers tuned in Monday night to see how a man who we all know is capable of delivering insightful and funny political commentary might challenge the Democratic frontrunner, they were undoubtedly disappointed.
Maryam Jans voice was shaking almost uncontrollably as we spoke on the phone. The truck bomb that hit the center of Kabul, the Afghan capital, on Tuesday morning was huge, very huge, said the 27-year-old journalist. I havent seen and felt such a huge blast in my whole life in Kabul, she said. I was near the spot with my 4-year-old daughter and she turned mute for five minutes.

Other witnesses reported similar shock. One police officer told the Associated Press that he could not see or hear anything after the detonation, which took place near the defense ministry, but nearer still to a crowded taxi stand, killing dozens of innocent civilians and injuring hundreds.

After the bombing, the Taliban battled security forces with automatic weapons before, finally, order was restored.

The Taliban who are attacking us are cowardly, but we are just feebly and hopelessly watching, said Maryam Jan. No one could protect us from the Taliban, no one, not our Afghan forces, not the U.S. forces. The whole downtown of Kabul city has been turned over to terror and overwhelmed. She sobbed over the phone. I dont know why the Taliban kill poor civilian Afghans.

In fact, when Taliban bombs take a large civilian toll, the Taliban generally do not claim responsibility. But in this case they did.

A former intelligence official with the Afghan Taliban told The Daily Beast that Tuesdays attack was meant to be the completion of a mission that failed last year, when a huge truck bomb killed numbers of Afghans and shattered hundreds of houses. This source said on that occasion the explosives-laden truck went off prematurely in the wrong place, so the Taliban did not claimed it.

Todays attack was carried out by the same cells, according to this source, but this time the truck bomb hit right near the target.

Both the Ministry of Defense and the Presidential Palace are close by. But most of the dead apparently had nothing to do with the targeted buildings. So I asked the Taliban intelligence officer what one could achieve by killing and crippling hundreds of Afghans.

We know thats the case, he said, but in this asymmetrical war we dont have other options.

Another Afghan Taliban source told The Daily Beast, This year, we are in more aggressive frame of mind. We proved that we could attack in the countryside and come to Kabul to attack steps away from the presidents palace and the U.S. embassy. If the current Afghan government could not protect people in Kabul then people should come into the streets to overthrow it, he said.

The so-called Spring Offensive has begun with a bang, and a horrific one at that.
It was the equivalent of a modern-day witch-hunt: In the summer of 1994, four San Antonio lesbians were accused, arrested, and subsequently convicted on charges that they gang-raped two girls in a sensational case that preyed on the Satanic panic that had swept the nation, as well as the prejudiced suspicion that homosexuality was a precursor to child abuse.

The sordid details of the case captivated the news media, which jumped all over the narrative of ritual sexual abuse of children at knife- and gunpoint by a quartet of perverted lesbian witches. Looking back on the trial years later, as director Deborah S. Esquenazi does in her documentary Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four, the crime that sent Elizabeth Liz Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Cassandra Rivera, and Anna Vasquez to prison is all the more alarmingbecause it never happened.

The documentary, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, plays out like another Making a Murderer, starting with the details of the so-called crime that rocked San Antonio and devastated the lives of these women. Through home video-tapes and archival photos, we see glimpses of the foursome in happier times. It was the mid-1990s, and Rivera and Vasquez had fallen in love. They lived together raising Riveras young children and spent a lot of time with Mayhugh and Ramirez, forming a makeshift family outside of the blood relatives who didnt approve of their sexual orientation. After all, in that place and time being an openly gay Latina woman was difficult enough, as Vasquez painfully describes while wearing her prison whites in one of several powerfully intimate interviews captured in Salem.

At trial, thered been just the right elements to conjure a perfect storm of wrongheaded justice, the film recounts. The testimonies of the two young sisters, nieces of one of the accused, cut to the hearts of the jury and the media despite inconsistencies in their retellingand despite the claim that their father had allegedly been obsessed with one of the accused, and was upset to learn that she preferred women.

An expert witness took the stand to assert that physical evidence was consistent with pre-established models of sexual abuse in children. Perhaps most convincingly, the district attorney repeatedly painted the four friends, young mothers and beloved sisters and daughters, as a coven of nefarious predators plotting ritualistic molestation all because they were gaya fact that, some jurors admitted during the selection process, made them uncomfortable.

Southwest of Salem deftly paints a portrait of the jury trials that sent the quartet to prison in 1997 and 1998, and how they cleaved a hole in their lives and those of their still-supportive families back home. But the film takes on a new dimension as it chronicles their path to freedom a decade and a half later.

Rivera was sent to prison first, tried and convicted as the so-called ringleader of the bunch. And before Mayhew, Rivera, and Vasquez were also sent away, theyd tried in vain to find their own evidence to clear their names, playing detective and interviewing former neighbors about the alleged crime, as seen in camcorder footage shot circa 2000.

But it wasnt until a complete stranger from the snowy wilds of Canada started researching their case that the women found any allies on the outside who believed in their innocence because they presented as atypical of recorded female sexual abusers. It just didnt make sense, says Darrell Otto, the research scientist who helped jump-start the womens journey toward freedom. It just didnt fit the pattern at all.

Vasquez was released on parole first, an emotional moment captured by the films cameras. It follows her as she tries to piece her life back together on the outside, sharing the highs and lows and the frustration of having to legally register as a sex offender despite the overturned conviction. Wracked with guilt that the other three are still behind bars, the soft-spoken Vasquez steps up to become the face of the San Antonio Four, fighting for her friends by giving interviews and putting their faces back in the public eye.

Rallying media support is the only way to fight wrongful conviction in this day and age, asserts Innocence Project of Texas lawyer Jeff Blackburn. If people only knew how little youth and justice had to do with the way the legal system works theyd probably amass at the courthouse with lighted torches, says Blackburn, one-half of Southwest of Salems very own Strang and Buting.

Eventually all four women were released from prison when the details of their trial began to crumble under scrutiny. The medical evidence that had damned them had since been debunked as junk science and, more importantly, one of their now-adult alleged victims recanted her accusation, claiming her volatile father and grandmother pressured her into it.

Esquenazis access to these four women during and after their incarceration lends a heartbreaking undercurrent to the proceedings. Once inseparable, the friends and lovers were forced apart when their convictions sent them away. Its hard not to sympathize as they recount the events that upended their lives, still aghast that the system theyd believed was just could have screwed them over so badly.

You believe as youre growing up that if you tell the truth everythings going to be fine, says Vasquez, who recalls waving away friends urgings to lawyer up because, she says, she was innocentso why not tell the police everything she could? I went ahead and cooperated with them and it seemed to turn out to be a mistake, she quietly admits, shaking her head. The biggest mistake.

The engrossing documentary consults legal experts and journalists for a post-mortem on how the San Antonio Four case went so wrong. Its heart lies in the relationships between the women, who remained close and loyal to one another through it all, and the families and children they had to leave behind. Some of the films most emotionally heartrending moments come when the cameras catch up with the women post-release and the niece whose recanted testimony freed Mayhew, Rivera, and Ramirez.

But as Esquenazi most pointedly argues in Southwest of Salem, freedom has still not truly freed the women known as the San Antonio Four. Despite a recent ruling that officially vacated their convictions, they must now await a nine-judge panel to hear their appeal for full legal exonerationa resolution that may never come.

As Making a Murderer did for convicted killer Steven Avery earlier this year, Southwest of Salem highlights the egregious failures of the criminal justice system that should get Americans rightfully riled up, if only so that other untold wrongful convictions may one day get their due. More than a mere chronicle of a crime, it emphasizes the cost of the failures of our justice system pointedly and poignantly, underscoring the futures that were taken away from these women. Its remarkable to realize that were in the midst of a renaissance of true-crime documentary cinemawhich might be a thing worth celebrating, if it wasnt so infuriating.
MOSCOW  Theyre two experienced pros: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. And they seem to have a lot in common, from their appearance to their intentions. Theyre both are tall and skinny, elegant and polished. Both often look old and exhausted from constant travel, long hours of brainstorming, and high-profile political battles.

Diplomacys dynamic duo, according to some, and the odd couple, according to others, have met and strolled and talked together dozens of times in the last three years in Asia, in Europe, in the United States and in Russia. Their long faces and wise eyes appear to penetrate each others, tempting and irritating, as they continue the heavy lifting of the worlds problems. A few months ago, it was containing Irans nuclear program, more recently its been the challenge of Syrian peace talks.

The two are on very good terms, Lavrov said last month, but that does not mean that we should smile from ear to ear and express joy during each and every meeting to please Russian, American, and other journalists.

Russians seem to empathize with the two officials carrying, Atlas-like, the weight of the world on their slim shoulders. The Russian press is much easier on Kerry than it is on U.S. President Barack Obama. It would not take our propaganda machine long to turn Kerry into a pedophile or a sadist, but Lavrov does not allow that, he values their good relationships, Russian political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin told The Daily Beast.

Kerrys gracious manners appeal to the Russians, and many noticed that the U.S. Secretary of State walked the streets of Moscows downtown and made contact with ordinary people.

The latest picture of Putin smiling at Kerry like an old pal appeared on hundreds of websitesas if a harbinger of spring after a winter of bitter isolation. After more than 3 hours of talks with Putin last month, Kerry said there was progress in efforts to combat the Islamic State together. We want the same outcomes, we see the same dangers, we understand the same challenges.

Journalists ironized about the sudden thaw: Remember Obama riling Russia by calling it a regional power? Now Kerry calls the U.S. and Russia powerful nations. Putin will be smiling..,, Steve Rosenberg, BBC correspondent in Moscow, tweeted recently.

Thank Kerry and Lavrov for such progress. They managed to remain cordial, even warm in their relations during some very frostyalmost Cold War frostytimes. And the crises for the two to try to defuse just keep multiplying.

Last week Kerry and Lavrov discussed on the phone peace terms for the wars in Ukraine, Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh. Although they disagreed about many major issues, including the conditions for a peace agreement in Ukraine, and the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, they still sat down to talk or called to talk on the phone, for hours. Last month Kerry traveled to Moscow for the third time in less than a year, still discussing the Syria and Ukraine conflicts with the Kremlin.

And then there was the provocative manner in which Russian Sukhoi Su-24 bombers flew within 30 feet over the USS Donald Cook. Kerry characterized the repeated flybys of Russian jets as dangerous and provocative. Russias Sputniknews said that what happened was a minor incident.

Kerry sounded threatening: the U.S. military could have shot down the Russian jets buzzing a U.S. warship. Moscow insisted that Russian pilots did not break any international rules and that the jets were not even armed. Last November Turkey shot down a Russian jet flying over its border. As direct consequences Russia and Turkey dove into what seemed like a new Cold War as thousands of people lost businesses both countries.

The two counterparts exchanged some ideas before Lavrov took Kerry to see President Vladimir Putin. As they spoke before cameras, with the golden vases of foreign ministry decor as background, Kerry congratulated Lavrov with his 66th birthday: I hope it will bring you extra wisdom, in our conversation. Kerry joked, You look terrific for 39.

Lavrov half-grinned: Thank you. But if wisdom is measured by the number of birthdays, I cannot catch up with you, said Lavrov.

Lavrov has always been a tough negotiator. One year before Crimeas annexation, in the spring of 2013, Lavrov was asked about achieved goals in Putin-era foreign policy. The head of the Russian MID cited the 19th-century diplomat Alexander Gorchakov, who managed the restoration of the Russian influence in Europe after the defeat in the Crimean War, and he did it  without moving a gun. He did it exclusively through diplomacy, he told Foreign Policy. The idea of repeating Gorchakovs job obviously sounded as Lavrovs own goal.

Who of the two has more independence in decision-making, Lavrov or Kerry? Lavrovs job is much harder, as he has no independence and just carries out Putins decisionseven if he disagreed with some of the moves, he did not have a choice, Oreshkin told The Daily Beast.

In one of their latest phone conversations, Lavrov gave a short answer to Kerry regarding the military jets flying over the U.S. ship: The Russian ministry of defense had already given you their explanations. In other words, it was not Lavrov who made decisions for the Russian Army.

Critics of Russias foreign policy listed several major failures in the past few years: as a result of Crimea annexation Russia was punished with economic sanctions, spoiled relations with most Western countries and got kicked out of the G-8 club; the biggest post-Soviet neighbor Ukraine turned deeply anti-Russian during the war with Russia-backed rebels, which took the lives of more than 7,000 people; the failure in restoring spoiled relations with Turkey.

In 2013 and 2014 Lavrov was the most popular minister in the Russian media, but last year Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu moved him to second place.
A University of Mississippi fraternity is under investigation after brothers allegedly made sexual comments to sorority sisters participating in their annual Derby Days charity event.

The Ole Miss chapter of Sigma Chi fraternity asked members of sororities competing to be the Derby Days Queen, Which Sigma Chi they would go down on? and What type of sausage would they prefer: linked or Sigma Chi? according to a Facebook post by one Ole Miss student. A video of the event appears to show the men asking one contestant, whose initials include the letters B and J, what her nickname is.

Bobbie Shmurda, she appears to respond.

So youre telling me your nicknames not BJ? the emcee asks.

Were gonna go ahead and take BJ on that one, another man chimes in.

Ill give you an easier question, the first man says. Whats your fondest memory of the Sigma Chi basement?

The event includes choreographed dances by sororities in addition to the quizzing of Derby Days Queen contestants. Most videos of the event show dozens of women from the sororities dancing in carefully-choreographed unison.

Representatives of the Title IX Office at UM are actively investigating the allegations that have been discussed on social media platforms, the university said in a statement over the weekend. If substantiated, the behavior reported at this event clearly violates campus policy and one of the UM communitys core values, which is for our students to show respect and dignity for all.

The fraternity was ordered to cease Derby Day activities during a school investigation.

University spokesman Jon Scott told The Daily Beast on Monday that the school would have no further comment until its investigation concludes.

At least one student walked out of the event after watching women be humiliated in the name of philanthropy.

Women were busting their asses in extremely choreographed routines some chanting Sigma Chi, Sigma Chi, stroking the egos of guys whose only self worth is found in the letters they wear, Abby Bruce wrote in a Facebook post. If there are great guys in this organization, I have to wonder where they were tonight and if they were there, why they didnt try to stop some of the things their brothers were doing. Or why they werent the ones with control of the microphones.

Her post was shared more than 1,200 times and got more than 500 likes.

Why do we pay money to participate in these events to be humiliated? Why have we allowed ourselves to be objectified? Womens fraternities were started as an empowerment movementwhat happened? Bruce asked.

Bruce said in the Facebook post that she and a friend found at least one other woman outside who had walked out because of the comments. Her posts, as well as comments on it, suggested that some sororities required women to donate blood for the event.

There were some comments made at this past Derby Days dance competition that just were they were wrong. They never should have been spoken and we didnt do enough to stop it, Sigma Chi president Clay Wooley said in an interview Sunday, adding that the organization had opened a dialogue with sororities about future events.

Despite the criticism, this years Derby Days event raised 1,000 units of blood and $25,000 for a local childrens hospital, he said.

And thats something too important to push aside because of one really, really bad event, he added.

An Ole Miss alumna who commented on Bruces post said the problems with the event went beyond just healthy competition. Kelci Armstrong said that when she served on the schools Panhellenic Council from 2012 to 2013, they voted to cease any Derby Days events for that year.

We did this in hopes that the men of Sigma Chi at Ole Miss would come up with a better way of hosting this event so that the Panhellenic women would have a break and recognize the importance of philanthropy, Armstrong wrote. Forcing people to donate blood, money, and dance is hazing. Though I think we should all do these things for the sake of philanthropy, forcing your members to do it is wrong. I am glad that I was in a house that did not force it.

The fraternity could take a page from chapters at other universities, she suggested, and make the event a day of field sports.
Its flu season on a Saturday night and Alex isnt feeling well. By Sunday morning hes miserableshaking, coughing, nauseous, short of breath, and running a high fever. His mother calls, urging him to seek medical care, and his girlfriend offers to drive. Alex hesitates. His regular doctor is closed on the weekend and some of his past experiences seeking care outside his regular doctors office have left him feeling humiliated and ashamed.

In his feverish state, Alex remembers back to the last time he sought medical care outside his regular health care provider. When urgent care staff found out he was living with HIV, their whole attitude toward him changed. They arrived in the room donning goggles, a mask, and two pairs of gloves to simply take his vital signs. They also asked intrusive and medically unnecessary questions about how he had contracted HIV.

The facility even tried indirectly to deny him care by saying they were not trained to deal with HIV. He pushed back, noting that the condition he was seeking help for had nothing to do with his HIV status, but that effort exhausted him.

So this time Alex waits until Monday to see his regular doctor, at which point he is so sick he ends up being hospitalized.

Today, HIV is a chronic condition rather than a death sentence, but the stigma people living with HIV face is very, very real. It appears in individual and insidious wayslike what happened to Alex. Stigma is also present in policies or programs that affect thousands of peoplelike the use of criminal law to penalize same-sex sexual behavior or alleged, perceived or potential HIV exposure.

Whether insidious or in-your-face, stigma affects peoples lives. It discourages people from getting tested for HIV, sharing their HIV positive status with loved ones, and seeking care and sticking to treatment. These experiences are not few and far between. As of 2011, in the U.S. only about 40 percent of people living with HIV are receiving the medical care they need to stay healthy, and reduce the risk of onward transmission of HIV. Stigma contributes to this statistic.

Stigma may seem like a complex issue, but one thing is crystal clear: Well never reach ambitious U.S.-endorsed goals to end AIDS in a generation if we dont address stigma both here in the U.S. and worldwide.

The first step? Pull apart the complexities and actually work to understand stigmawhat it is, why it happens, and how it can be remedied. Thankfully, over the past two decades a growing body of international research has produced more tools than ever to understand, measure, monitor, and reduce stigma and its impact on people living with HIV.

One such tool is the health care facility stigma reduction package, developed under the USAID and PEPFAR-funded Health Policy Project, which provides a standardized questionnaire to measure stigma and discrimination in health facilities and provides training for stigma-reduction among health care staff members.

Data collected by this survey can provide routine monitoring of HIV-related stigma in health facilities, and also support the expansion and improvement of programming and policies that address HIV stigma.

Health care facilities are the very place that people living with HIV should find educated and compassionate care, not stigmatization, like Alex experienced. Health facilities are therefore the frontlines of the fight against HIV stigma.

Its not enough, however, to just better understand stigma. We have to ensure that goals and targets for stigma-reduction are integrated into national HIV strategies, that stigma indicators are included in national monitoring and evaluation frameworks, and that requiring health care facilities to provide stigma-free services to everyone becomes the norm.

Only then will real funding and resources actually be dedicated to eliminating stigma.

Thailand is one country leading the charge; the nation has set a target to reduce stigma as part of their national HIV strategy. With technical support from RTI International, a leading research institute dedicated to improving the human condition by turning knowledge into practice, Thailand is now routinely monitoring stigma and beginning to pilot a national program to reduce stigma and discrimination in its health facilities. Reducing stigma will be a key factor in meeting Thailands national HIV goals, as well as contributing to global HIV goals.

Weve also started to see hopeful movement on addressing HIV stigma in the U.S. Reducing stigma and eliminating discrimination associated with HIV is a key recommended step to achieving one of the goals in the latest U.S. National HIV strategy. And in March, the Office of National AIDS Policy, National Institutes of Mental Health, and the NIH Office of AIDS Research convened a meeting at the White House to discuss how to translate research into action that will reduce stigma and ultimately ensure more people are successfully tested, cared for, and treated.

Still, this is only the beginning, and there is much work to be done.

The fight against stigma is one that doesnt just affect people living with HIV. The LGBTQ community, people living with mental health issues, people who use drugs, and even survivors of diseases like Ebola are just some of the groups who experience stigma.

The HIV research and program community must continue our efforts to measure, understand, and respond to stigma. To achieve our ambitious national and global HIV goals, both national governments and HIV donors must consider more concerted and scaled responses to stigma, integrating stigma-reduction into all aspects of the HIV response.

Most importantly, every single one of us has a role to play. All of us stigmatize, often without knowing it. Our intent isnt to harm, however our inadvertent stigmatizing actions do hurt people like Alex. We must all educate ourselves about HIV and stigma. Together we can create change.
Speaking to Morning Joe on the morning of New Yorks primary, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) once again made it clear that he is no fan of Ted Cruz.

And this time he took it to deadly extremes.

First of all, in case anybody is confused, I am not endorsing Ted Cruz, King said to laughs from the hosts.

I hate Ted Cruz, and I think Ill take cyanide if he ever got the nomination.

King explained that he is not endorsing Donald Trumpand in fact, voted for John Kasich via absentee ballotbut still predicted a big New York victory for the real estate mogul. Previously, the congressman was quoted as saying that any New Yorker who even thinks of voting for Ted Cruz should have their head examined.

Of course, King is not the only Republican member of Congress to use such hyperbolic language to describe this years GOP field. Senator Lindsey Graham infamously described a choice between Trump and Cruz this way: Its like being shot or poisoned. I think you get the same result, whether its quick or takes a long time. However, Graham ended up reluctantly throwing his weight behind Cruz as the lesser of two evils.
Could they not have waited till May the Fourth?

Princes William and Harry engaged in a lightsaber battle today, and said they were huge fans of the Star Wars films, as they toured the British studios where the as-yet-unnamed Episode VIII is being filmed.

The brothers were at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, but Kate did not attend, reportedly staying home with her kids at her parents home instead, recovering from her recent trip to India.

Harry looked bemused as his weapon turned red as he switched it on and asked William: Why do I always have to be the baddy?

In a faux menacing voice, he added: Come on, lets dance.

William shot back: We can do this later outside.

The boys clearly enjoyed themselves.

Harry was later photographed getting a hug from Chewbacca, the hairy Wookiee warrior.

The royal engagement had a serious message and was aimed at recognizing the wealth of British creative talent involved in the production of the Star Wars films, Kensington Palace said.

The Duke is president of BAFTA, the British equivalent of Americas Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Star Wars: Episode VIII is due to hit big screens in May 2017. Benicio del Toro is among the new cast, along with Laura Dern and relative newcomer Kelly Marie Tran.

Prince William said he is a total geek when it comes to the Star Wars films.
Dutch paintings stolen in 2005 and recently found by Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) will be returned to the Netherlands, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has said.

"As for the transfer, of course, it is to be done in line with the procedures: first examination, then the joint examination with Dutch experts and then the paintings will be returned. I hope that once we jointly with Dutchmen will be able to see these painting," he said at a meeting with representatives of business organized by the European Business Association in Kyiv on Monday.

Klimkin said that according to some sources, the rest of the paintings are staying on the occupied part of Donbas, maybe under control of Russian criminal groups.

The minister said that two paintings were found before the referendum in the Netherlands, although it was decided not to announce this before the referendum.

"If the information was spread, there were small chances to find the rest of the paintings. It was decided to work further, without extra PR, in order not to harm the search of the rest of the paintings. As far as I know, many politicians from the Netherlands backed the decision," Kilmkin said, adding that the operation lasted for several months.
The Ukrainian government will make reforms for the sake of European and Euro-Atlantic integration, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has said.

"I'd like to underscore that European and Euro-Atlantic integration remains our priority," Groysman said at the beginning of his meeting with Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen in Kyiv on Tuesday.

The Ukrainian prime minister said he understood the domestic and foreign challenges to his country and noted that quality work of the government would be the best answer.

The government will focus on reforms for the purposes of economic recovery and fight against corruption, Groysman said.
Ardbeg Dark Cove celebrates Islay's dark past

To celebrate the Islay Festival of Malt and Music taking place next month, Glenmorangie-owned whisky distillery Ardbeg is launching a limited edition expression, Dark Cove . . . as Ardbeg Day turns into Ardbeg Night.

Ardbegs island home has a dark past. Centuries ago, at the dead of night, the early distillers would smuggle their whisky from the rocky shores of Ardbeg cove, to black-painted ships moored off the coast, where it would be spirited away to the Scottish mainland. This year, the shadowy history of Ardbegs homeland will be recalled as part of the annual festivities of the Islay single malt, when Ardbeg Day becomes Ardbeg Night.

The yearly celebration takes place on May 28, 2016, when Ardbegs loyal following  the Ardbeg Committee*  and their friends will be invited to attend a series of special tasting events being held at night across the world. As they recall Islays past, Committee members can smuggle in a guest to the venue. Events in the UK will be held at Whistling Shop in London and Bramble in Edinburgh.

Michael (Mickey) Heads, Ardbeg distillery manager, says: Distilling and smuggling whisky was once rife on Islay, and before the Ardbeg Distillery was founded, the coastline roundabout was particularly notorious as a hideout for smugglers. In true smugglers style we will be keeping the finer details of this years Ardbeg Day celebrations under wraps a little longer, but rest assured they will be as intriguing as Ardbegs clandestine past. We will also have a special bottling, called Ardbeg Dark Cove  which pays homage to the shadowy past of Ardbegs coastline.

Ardbegs latest single malt Scotch whisky expression, Dark Cove, bottled at 46.5% ABV and non-chill filtered, launches on Ardbeg Day (28th May). It is made up of whisky matured in sherry casks, married with hallmark ex-bourbon Ardbeg.

The limited edition expression will be available from 28th May 2016 at Ardbeg Embassies (a global network of retailers who love and have agreed to educate their consumers on Ardbeg) for a two week exclusive period. From June 11th, Dark Cove will also be available at whisky specialists and department stores with a RRP of 95.99.

Ardbeg Night will be celebrated at the distillery on Saturday 28th May 2016 and at participating Ardbeg Embassies around the world.

*Ardbeg Day:

Every year, the Islay Festival of Malt and Music takes place in May or June on Ardbegs island home. On the Festivals final Saturday, Ardbeg Day, the Distillery traditionally throws open its doors to welcome fans from all over the world. In 2012 Ardbeg Day became a global event. 15,000 people attended 135 events around the world at the 2015 Ardbeg Day global celebrations.

Smuggling on Islay:

So substantial was the illicit whisky trade between Islay and the mainland, which Excise officers asked for a special Revenue cutter to be stationed off the island, to intercept the smuggler boats that sailed from Islay and elsewhere. Even after John McDougall took out a licence to make whisky legally at Ardbeg, the smuggling continued. The Excise officers complained that they could do little to stop it  but it appears to have largely died out during the late 19th Century.

Ardbeg:

Ardbeg prides itself on being The Ultimate Islay Single Malt Whisky. Established in 1815, Ardbeg is revered by connoisseurs around the world as the peatiest, smokiest and most complex of all the Islay malts. During the 1980s and 1990s, Ardbeg suffered from an uncertain future and it was not until the brand was purchased by The Glenmorangie Company in 1997 that the distillery was saved from extinction.

Ardbeg Committee: The Committee is made up of thousands of Ardbeg followers worldwide who are keen to ensure that the doors of Ardbeg never close again. Committee members are regularly consulted on new bottlings and expressions, and are offered exclusive Committee bottlings. Members also receive invitations to special gatherings, tastings and events. The Committee is free to join at ardbeg.com.

19 April 2016 - Felicity Murray The Drinks Report, editor
An upper-level finance professor at Texas A&M convicted of beating his wife will spend 30 days in jail and 20 months on probation.

Lawyers reached the punishment agreement for 40-year-old Yong Chen Friday morning. Chen will also have to pay a $1,500 fine and complete an 18-week program to learn about domestic violence and how to prevent it.

Chen was convicted Thursday of Class A misdemeanor assault of a family member, which carried a maximum punishment of a year in jail and a $4,000 fine. If Chen violates his probation, he could face up to 300 days in jail.

University officials said Thursday that they would review this situation "in accordance with system policy" before making a decision on the Mays Business School professor's employment status. He also holds the Gina and William H. Flores '76 Professorship in Finance.

U.S. Rep. Bill Flores released a statement Friday afternoon condemning the actions of Chen.

"We recently learned, however, that the holder of the professorship that we originally endowed to the Mays Business School in 2002 was convicted of abusing his spouse," Flores said in a statement. "Gina and I are appalled by his actions and do not believe that he is deserving of the benefits from our endowment."

Flores said that he and his wife, Gina, have asked Texas A&M and the business school to transfer the professorship to a "more deserving faculty member."

In the past, Bill and Gina Flores have not had a role in awarding the endowment, the statement said, but have asked the university to consider the family's values when picking the next professorship.

"Despite the actions and conviction of this professor, we continue to believe that Texas A&M is a world-class Tier 1 research and teaching institution," the statement says.
A Harris County jury awarded $17.72 million Thursday to the family of a construction worker who drowned in 2014 while working on the pedestrian bridge to Baylor Universitys McLane Stadium.

Jurors in 151st State District Court in Houston deliberated about six hours over two days before placing 100 percent of the blame for Jose Dario Suarezs death on Austin Bridge and Road Co., the general contractor hired to build the bridge.

I hope this verdict will send a message to all companies, not only construction companies, to properly train their workers and supervisors and not prioritize speed and profits over safety of workers and people, said Houston attorney Vuk Vujasinovic, who represents Suarezs wife, two daughters, son and mother in the lawsuit.

The jury awarded $5 million in damages for Suarezs pre-death pain and suffering as he drowned; $1 million for each of his three children; about $8 million for his wife; and $2 million in punitive damages.

Vujasinovic said he asked the jury for $27 million in damages.

Austin attorney Larry G. Black, who represents Austin Bridge and Road, did not return a phone message seeking comment.

Baylor was named as a defendant in the original pleadings, but 151st State District Judge Mike Engelhart dismissed the school from the lawsuit in June.

The remaining defendants included Flexifloat Construction Systems; Austin Commercial Inc.; Austin Bridge and Road; Derr and Isbell Construction Inc.; Flintco; Genie Industries Inc.; Terex Corp.; Robishaw Engineering; and Core Safety.

Suarez, 55, of Manor, drowned Jan. 28, 2014, after a hydraulic lift he and another worker, Terry Watson, were strapped to rolled from a modular barge into the Brazos River as the men worked on the bridge.

Watson was able to free himself and swam to the surface, where he was pulled from the cold river.

In jury summations Wednesday morning, Vujasinovic asked the jury to place 100 percent of the blame on Austin Bridge and Road and to find no liability with the other defendants. That is what the jury did.

Pointing fingers

As evidence in the three-week trial played out, most of the companies tried to blame other defendants for the tragic death, Vujasinovic said.

Lots of times people wonder why there are so many companies named as defendants in these type of cases, Vujasinovic said. As it turned out, everybody was pointing the finger at each other and sometimes it takes a trial like this to expose the bad actor.

Vujasinovic had alleged that work crews made no attempt to rescue the two workers after the barge they were tethered to rolled into the river.

Not only did no one try to rescue the men, crews continued working while Suarezs body lay on the bottom of the river because the $266 million project was four months behind schedule and time was of the essence, Vujasinovic alleged.

Suarez and Watson worked for Derr and Isbell Construction. Watson testified in a deposition that the water was freezing cold and the deeper you went, the darker it got.

According to court documents, Watson was under water for almost two minutes before he was able to free himself.

Waco police Officer Francisco Reyes testified at the trial that workers continued constructing the bridge as Suarezs body lay on the river bottom.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Derr and Isbell $7,000 for failing to secure the lift to the barge on which it was sitting.

Watson testified in a deposition that he moved the boom lift from the center of the barge to the corner to give them better access to a work area. The lift was not chained down, as regulations require, according to court documents.
Nadia Savchenko, who was sentenced to 22 years by a Russian court, has said she doesn't consider her criminal case and the trials of Russian intelligence officers Yevgeny Yerofeyev and Alexander Alexandrov in Kyiv to be similar, Savchenko's lawyer Mark Feygin said.

"In light of a verdict passed to Yerofeyev and Alexandrov, the stance of Nadia Savchenko is as follows. The trials in Kyiv and Russia were running in parallel, but it is wrong to call them similar, both due to the type of charges and because of the culpability component," Feygin wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning.

Reporting on the position of his client, Feygin said "Savchenko was kidnapped and transferred to Russia, while Russian security officers appeared in Ukraine by themselves." "Herein lies the principal difference," he said.

Feygin earlier took issue with the statement made by Alexandrov's lawyer Valentin Rybin after the verdict against his client was passed in Kyiv on Monday. Rybin's then said it was absolutely unacceptable for his client to seek a pardon.

"I, as Savchenko's lawyer, consider it wrong to force convicts Yerofeyev and Alexandrov to do anything. This is against the law and legal ethics. Let the politicians deal with negotiations and swap issues," he wrote adding, "This is Nadia's position as well."
Heidi Durrow's debut novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, introduces readers to the painful intersections of race, class and beauty in post-civil rights United States through the lens of mixed-race identity. In doing so, it follows a decade-long tradition of Brazos Valley Reads books that broach socially and politically pressing topics in our contemporary moment.

Durrow's novel addresses the salience of mixed-race identity in 21st century America by looking backwards to a decade in which the first black woman, Vanessa Williams, was crowned Miss America, a national "war on drugs" disproportionately impacted black neighborhoods, and post-civil rights racism showed up in the increasing criminalization of homelessness, unemployment, drug abuse and mental illness.

The young protagonist, Rachel, is the daughter of a white Danish mother, Nella, and an African-American G.I. father, Roger, who move to Chicago after living for many years in Germany. Nella leaves Roger because of an abusive relationship and a tragedy ensues that leaves Nella and two of her children dead. The sole child-survivor of the tragedy, Rachel, develops racial consciousness while growing up with her paternal grandmother in a predominantly black community in Portland, Oregon. There, she learns about the limitations and possibilities of her blackness as a light-skinned mixed-race woman.

Rachel is a fictional revision of Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen (the namesake of Rachel's mother and who is quoted in the novel's epigraph), who was the daughter of a Danish mother and an African-American father, and Clare Kendry, the light-skinned mulatta (a centuries-old term referring to children of black and white parentage) woman in Larsen's 1929 novel Passing. In Passing, Clare struggles with the whiteness of her blackness -- her choice to pass as white in her marriage to a white man, the fear of being found out by her husband and white community, and the consequences of leaving behind her black community in the process. In contrast to Clare, Rachel struggles to come to terms with the blackness of her whiteness -- her understanding of how and why to invest in her blackness and the social costs of being both black and light-skinned.

Durrow's nuanced portrayal of mixed-race identity also is tied to her inclusion of an immigrant narrative in what we have come to understand as the "African-American experience." In alternating between Rachel's and Nella's stories (among others), Durrow allows us to see what happens when Rachel attempts to reconcile her desire to preserve her mother's immigrant traditions and native tongue with her increasing understanding of anti-black sentiment and colorism (or preference for light skin) within her black community.

Rachel, who is blue-eyed, light-skinned, and "straight-haired," quickly becomes the object of desire, affection, and jealousy among black people. Rachel's beauty certainly affords her a measure of social privilege (for example, both black and white men pursue her romantically), but it also forces her to see her blackness as a version of what the black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois called "double consciousness." For DuBois, double consciousness names a contradictory experience in which the black individual first sees herself and measures her worth through the eyes of white America. Rachel learns that "black people don't have blue eyes. I learn that I am black. I have blue eyes" and that "[w]hite people don't think black people are pretty. Mostly it's because of our hair. It works different. And it smells different with more lotions in it. Also, black women are not as pretty as white women. There are exceptions ... but not many." Rachel struggles to reconcile the fact of her blue eyes with the fact of her blackness and must then resign herself to the racist limits of her beauty's value.

Passages such as these bear the heavy imprint of African-American writer Toni Morrison's debut novel, The Bluest Eye, a story set in the pre-civil rights American Midwest in which little black girls learn about limits of their personhood through painful encounters with the beauty of little white girls. Pecola Breedlove, the titular character, longs for blue eyes so that she can resemble the beauty of the white dolls with which she plays. Pecola hopes that blue eyes will earn her the affection of black women whose "eye-slide" toward little white girls is the object of black girls' simultaneous disdain and desire.

In delving into the complexities of mixed-race identity, Durrow's novel dovetails with an emerging subfield of academic scholarship on mixed race. Books on the topic, such as The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium and Global Mixed Race, are gaining traction in ethnic studies, sociology and literature university classrooms.

Even before the advent of mixed race studies as an academic subfield, the South Asian-American cultural historian Vijay Prashad and the African-American cultural studies scholar Robin D.G. Kelley were interrogating the limits of "pure culture" as a way of understanding racial difference. In his book Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, Prashad advocates for what he called a "polycultural" approach in which "culture" is a product of multiple and uneven histories of exchange that can more effectively address the structures and legacies of white supremacy and imperialism.

Durrow's portrayal of race and racial difference resonates with these scholars' work. It presents us with the complex, lived realities of mixed race, refusing to fall into the trap of either a celebratory multicultural narrative in which the social costs of racial difference are all-too-often ignored or a color blind or post-racial narrative in which mixed-race identity purports to move "beyond race."

Brazos Valley Reads is a program developed and coordinated by the department of English at Texas A&M University.

Blinn College and the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research have partnered with the department of English to support this year's program.

We invite the public to join other members of the Brazos Valley community when we welcome Durrow to read from her work 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center, adjacent to the Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the Texas A&M campus. A book signing will follow the reading.

The reading is free and open to the public and parking is free.

 Vanita Reddy is assistant professor in the department of English at Texas A&M University.
Megyn Kelly is a star.

The Fox News prime-time host runs a successful cable news show, has book publishers throwing millions of dollars her way, co-stars with Donald Trump in this season's most compelling political soap opera, and is even starting to consider what life might look like after Fox News.

Kelly deserves whatever success comes her way. Few anchors in cable news history have been able to grab the number of viewers that The Kelly Files has garnered in two short years. Besides, who could fault a parent for tiring of a schedule that rarely allows her to sit down for dinner with her children or tuck them into bed at night?

If Kelly wants to leave Fox News for family reasons, good for her. But if Kelly is thinking of escaping Roger Ailes and Fox News because she thinks she has outgrown the man and his star-making machinery, I humbly offer a friendly suggestion: Call Glenn Beck.

From 2006 to 2008, Beck hosted a show on CNN Headline News. If that comes as a surprise to you, there is a reason. Few people watched the show, and it garnered even less buzz in the media world. Beck was making millions on his successful radio program but few influencers in American politics knew or cared who he was.

Then Ailes called.

Within months, Fox News introduced Beck to millions of TV viewers who started tuning in every day. Within a year, the new Fox News host was holding political rallies on the Mall in Washington and drawing half a million Fox News fans. Ailes's wildly successful cable news platform even gave Beck the reach to launch a successful website called TheBlaze.

Beck began gracing the cover of magazines such as Time and Forbes. And soon enough, the man who saw himself as a latter-day version of Walt Disney was raking in tens of millions of dollars a year, was outpacing competitors on multiple media platforms, and, most important for Beck, was controlling a central place in America's political and cultural zeitgeist.

Beck began to believe he had outgrown Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. He was wrong.

After leaving Fox News in 2011, Beck quickly expanded TheBlaze into a multimedia platform. By 2012, he had signed a deal with Dish TV and reached into over 10 million homes. By 2013, he had expanded his operations in New York and bought a massive facility in Dallas. But the further he moved away from the shadow of the News Corp. empire, the less relevant he became.

Fast forward five years from his Fox News departure and ask yourself when the last time it was you saw a Glenn Beck show on TV, read about him in the newspaper or heard political commentators even discuss his name in a political debate. Other than a brief sighting in Iowa in February, Beck has been largely irrelevant to the 2016 campaign. That may be, in large part, because his business has fallen apart since Beck left Fox News.

As the mercurial TheBlaze founder told staff members last year, "We are three million dollars in the hole! That means we are three million dollars from profit. That means I have to take three million dollars out of my wallet, and I have done this now for several years. I don't have money left. I'm out . . . I need three million dollars by the end of the year. If we wait, it's gonna be massive, bloody cuts." Those massive cuts came later in the year and the media empire Beck imagined creating while sitting comfortably in his Fox News anchor chair never materialized.

Perhaps Kelly could succeed where Beck has failed. But if I were Kelly's agent, I would take a long hard look before telling my client to take that leap. Ailes is part of a media machine that has few rivals in the United States. While broadcast outlets keep bleeding millions in revenue, Fox News rakes in more than $1 billion in profits a year as the channel grows in size and influence. And most important for hosts like Kelly, its audience is one of the most loyal around. That means higher ratings, bigger book deals and more magazine covers.

Maybe the grass will be greener for Meygn Kelly than it was for Glenn Beck. But if history is any guide, Kelly's smartest move may just be building on the remarkable platform that has already been handed to her by Roger Ailes.
A bail of UAH 5 million has been paid for Vyshgorod Mayor Oleksiy Momot, Chairman of the Vyshgorod district administration Oleksandr Horhan has said.

"Bail of UAH 5 million for Momot has been paid," he wrote on his Facebook page on Monday.

He said that a wife of MP from the People's Will group Yaroslav Moskalenko paid UAH 2.585, MP Yuriy Derevyanko paid UAH 1.4 million and Serhiy Kostyrko (PivdenAtomEnergoBud Trust) paid UAH 1 million. Supportive Vyshgorod residents, meanwhile, sent to the account of Momot's wife Maryna Momot UAH 15,000.

"We are thankful to everyone who joined. We are waiting for Vyshgorod Mayor Oleksiy Momot in his native town," Horhan.

He said that Momot is to be released within 24 hours after receiving the document confirming the bank has received the funds.

Prosecutor General's Office in Kyiv region on April 14, 2016 reported that Momot was detained after he allegedly with an associate demanded a bribe of $300,000 and 4,000 square meters in a newly constructed building from a representative of a construction firm. The mayor was detained on the same day in his office after the transfer of EUR 200,000. He and his alleged accomplice were detained in downtown Kyiv as they deposited the first part of the bribe into a bank account.

The criminal case was opened under Part 3 of Article 368 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (gaining improper advantage by an official under collusion by a group of persons accompanied by blackmail).

Pechersky district court in Kyiv on April 17, 2016 ordered Momot be arrested for the period of two months, or pay bail of UAH 5 million.
Crucially, Coffin rejected the government and lobbyists' arguments that the youths did not have the legal right to bring the claim, known as standing. This has previously been a significant hurdle for climate change litigants in the US, defeating an earlier lawsuit brought by the residents of the native village of Kivalina, Alaska, against America's largest utilities and energy companies.

The young litigants have standing - here's why

To establish standing, a plaintiff must show that:

They have suffered an injury in fact that is concrete, particularised and actual or imminent; The injury is fairly traceable to the challenged conduct and; The injury is likely to be redressed by a favourable court decision.

The magistrate judge said national courts are not the right place to air general grievances against government. However, after citing the wide variety of harm alleged, he concluded that "given the allegations of direct or threatened harm, albeit shared by most of the population or future population, the court should be loathe to decline standing to persons suffering an alleged concrete injury of a constitutional magnitude."

Interestingly, he also characterised young people as a discrete class of society, noting the intergenerational issues associated with the suit:

"The intractability of the debates before Congress and state legislatures and the alleged valuing of short term economic interest despite the cost to human life, necessitates a need for the courts to evaluate the constitutional parameters of the action or inaction taken by the government".

Coffin agreed that the US environment agency's action or inaction on regulating greenhouse gasses could result in harm to the plaintiffs. He also took a unique approach to redressability and justiciability, finding that the courts do have the power to fashion an appropriate remedy addressing the plaintiffs' injuries without interfering with policy decisions of government.

The state's duty of protection to its citizens

In a fascinating application of international precedent, he cited the Dutch Urgenda case, in which the Hague District Court ordered the Netherlands to increase its national greenhouse gas emissions reduction target

Although he recognised that the case "does implicate some unmanageable issues", they did not bar the case completely, and a court could conceivably direct the US environment agency (EPA) to adopt standards that prevent the alleged constitutional harm and to take "a hard look at the best available scientific evidence".

The finding also rejected the federal governments' arguments that there is no constitutional right to be free from carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, it accepted that where government action creates a danger to constitutional rights, which it allegedly has through its deliberate indifference to climate change and the imminent harm it poses to the young and future generations, the state must protect those rights.

The magistrate judge noted that the government's actual knowledge or wilful ignorance of impending harm could amount to conduct that "shocks the conscience", thus meeting the legal threshold.

In a comment that will give heart to climate campaigners, he also said that the case could uncover evidence to show when the fossil fuel industry became aware of the harmful effects of carbon dioxide emissions, exposing their duplicity. This appears to be a reference to the recent revelations and investigations into the extent to which Exxon Mobil and other energy companies misled the public about their knowledge of the effects of climate change.

Public trust doctrine applicable at national level

Finally, the magistrate judge also left open the possibility that the public trust doctrine could exist under national law (as opposed to state-level), declining to follow legal precedent.

Under the public trust doctrine, American states are prevented from alienating certain lands, including navigable waterways, coastal tidelands and in some cases public reserves. They must also protect those resources and the public's interest in them. In a strong vindication of continued relevance of the doctrine, the magistrate judge said that the public trust reflects "core values of our Constitution and the very essence of the purpose of our nation's government".

However the decision does not go so far as to recognise an atmospheric public trust, with the impact of climate change on navigable waterways apparently sufficient to ground the public trust claim.

With this important decision, climate change litigants may have wedged open the door to a breakthrough in the fight for climate justice.

Sophie Marjanac is a lawyer at ClientEarth.

Author's note: We will be following the litigation closely, and will provide further updates on the District Court's final ruling, as well as the inevitable appeal, as the case progresses.
SHARE Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he is "increasingly optimistic" that voting at the Republican National Convention in July will go to a second ballot.

The Kentucky Republican's comments seem to suggest that  although he has sought to remain publicly neutral  he does not want to see front-runner Donald Trump emerge as the GOP presidential nominee.

Trump is unlikely to amass the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination ahead of the convention in Cleveland. Voting would then proceed to a second ballot, with a majority of delegates free to vote for whomever they choose.

McConnell says he anticipates he will be a delegate, and "on the second ballot I'll be free to do whatever I want."

He made his comments on WHAS-TV in Louisville.
Denmark will insist on continuing EU sanctions against Russian Federation because of the worsening situation in Donbas and will change its position only after complete implementation of the Minsk Agreements.

"I would like to express concern that through the last months there is violence in eastern Ukraine. I hope that political discussion in a 'Normandy format' will bring progress. I want to assure you that Denmark will be in favor of the EU sanctions against Russia until the Minsk Agreements are fully fulfilled," Premier of Denmark Lars Rasmussen said during a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kyiv on Tuesday.
Trick-or-treat, walk Ed Stone's Haunted Halls and more this week in SE Iowa

Your guide to getting off the couch and out the door this week in Southeast Iowa.
Connecticut is suddenly New Hampshire lite.

A week before Democratic and Republican primary voters cast their ballots for president here, the third-smallest state in the nation is drawing a cavalcade of White House contenders and prominent surrogates to its cities and towns.

Written off by most pundits as irrelevant early on in both parties nominating contests, Connecticut has emerged as an unlikely battleground because of the inability of frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to deliver a knockout.

Not one, but all three Clintons - Hillary, Bill and Chelsea  are scheduled to visit here before April 26.

I think winning Connecticut would be a nice way for the Clinton campaign to try to deprive some oxygen from (Bernie) Sanders, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Larry Sabatos Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Not to be outdone, Trump is expected to squeeze in a second and possibly a third visit to the state after making his Connecticut debut Friday night in Hartford.

John Kasich is also headed back here. The Ohio governor, who is running a distant third to Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruzin the GOP nominating race, will hold a town hall Friday in Glastonbury after attending a similar event two weeks ago atSacred Heart University in Fairfield. The week before that, Kasich was fundraising in Greenwich.

Connecticuts primary falls one week after Democrats and Republicans in New York cast their ballots for president, which experts say could be a preview of how the voting will go in the Constitution State.

In a Democratic race, if its a close New York primary, its going to be treated like its crucial, said Jerold Duquette, an associate professor of political science at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain.

Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton will stump for her mother Wednesday in Hartford, where she is expected to try to draw a contrast between her mothers record on gun control and Sanders record. The Clinton campaign has assailed the Vermont senator on his support for a 2005 law shielding gun companies from wrongful death lawsuits such as one filed by the families of the Newtown victims.

Both Hillary and Bill Clinton are scheduled to visit the state Thursday, with the former president headlining a private fundraiser in Westport and the former secretary of state focusing on the gun issue in a separate appearance. Details of Hillary Clintons visit were not available yet from her campaign.

That tells me that they expect New York is not going to be a 10-point win, Duquette said of Clintons campaign.

In Connecticut, where the Clintons met as Yale Law students, 71 Democratic delegates are up for grabs. They are awarded on a proportional basis. So far, Sanders has not scheduled a Connecticut stop, which political experts say is likely in the works.

I would think Connecticut could be one place where Sanders really thinks he can win, potentially, Kondik said.

For Republicans, 28 delegates are at stake  three in each of the states five congressional districts and 13 at-large for the state. Needing 1,237 delegates to clinch the nomination, Trump is trying to sweep Connecticut.

We might be getting to the point where every single delegate will be important, Kondik said.

neil.vigdor@scni.com; 203-625-4436; http://twitter.com/gettinviggy
NORWALK  A Fairfield man who allegedly attempted to pass himself off as a Norwalk Health Department inspector and barge into the kitchen of a local restaurant was charged with creating a public disturbance.

Police said that 31-year-old Zachary Gunther called the Wild Rice Restaurant at 370 Main Ave. to complain that his girlfriend may have had food poisoning after the couple had eaten there.
NORWALK  The alleged head of a recently busted, large-scale heroin ring is no stranger to Norwalk police.

Following a four-year prison sentence for a 2010 conviction on weapons charges, Sylvester Edwards, 28, recently reappeared on police radar as an alleged local supplier of large quantities of heroin.

As a result of a joint operation between Connecticut State Police and the Norwalk Police Departments (NPD) Special Services Division, Edwards and an associate, Michael Ross, were arrested on numerous drug distribution charges on April 6.

A third suspect, identified by police as Edwards girlfriend, Hilary Guillen, 21, allegedly had been continuing the heroin distribution ring while Edwards was incarcerated on those charges. Guillen was arrested on April 15.

Lt. James Walsh, of the NPD Special Services Division, said that a series of investigative techniques led them to Edwards, Ross and Guillen.

Walsh declined to elaborate on the specific investigative methods used in this case.

We usually use a combination of investigative techniques, Walsh said. We never stop. Our investigations into drug activity are ongoing. Were on to the next one and often have several investigations going at the same time.

The hunt begins

While under police surveillance in early 2016, Edwards allegedly sold several bags of heroin in what was described by police as a controlled buy, court records show.

Using Connecticut State Police funds to purchase heroin, an unidentified individual met Edwards at a pre-arranged location and allegedly purchased several glassine bags of heroin from him. Edwards and Ross were later arrested after a search warrant was executed at their 6 Leuvine St. residence.

Police said that during the search, 496 bags of heroin were located along with a large amount of unpackaged heroin.

According to court records, Edwards is a convicted felon and has previously been arrested for possession of narcotics, possession of narcotics with intent to sell, robbery, probation violation, evading, escape, illegal transfer of a gun, criminal possession of a weapon, and possession of a pistol without a permit.

On March 18, 2010, Edwards was one of three men arrested during an illegal arms deal.

According to court documents, in that case, Edwards had arranged to sell a .25 caliber Bauer pistol in the parking lot of Silver Star Diner, 210 Connecticut Ave.

Police were stationed around the area, and they closed in on Edwards as he was walking from the Silver Star Diner to the nearby Coastal gas station, court documents said.

As police cars flooded the area, Edwards fled down Connecticut Avenue, but Kahn, a police K9 Unit dog, caught up with him in the parking lot of the vacant commercial building at 189 Connecticut Ave. that formerly housed Linens 'N Things, according to police.

Edwards, Sergio Candelario, 19, of Bridgeport, and Rahsen Fisher, 30, of Waterbury, were arrested on multiple gun possession and narcotics charges.

Those arrests were the result of an ongoing investigation conducted by the Special Services Division and the Detective Division of the Norwalk Police Department.

Officers recovered two guns from Edwards, police said. Fisher and Candelario were sitting in the white Nissan parked at Coastal gas station and were arrested at gunpoint, police said.

Guillen, who was not home on Leuvine Street when the April 6 warrant was executed, was arrested on April 14 by Norwalk police.

Stash house raided

Investigators determined through hours of surveillance on Guillen that the suspects allegedly had a stash house in the Rowayton area of town. At this location, police said that the majority of narcotics were stored and packaged for distribution.

An unknowing occupant stated she had rented a room to Hilary Guillen in December 2015. The owner further stated that Edwards was a frequent visitor to the rented area of her house.

Investigators secured the residence and applied for a warrant to search for further contraband. Evidence was also allegedly located inside the room that both Edwards and Guillen had dominion and control over the premises. Police said that they were operating a drug factory to facilitate their heroin distribution in the Norwalk.

Investigators will be pursuing charges against Edwards as a result of the additional evidence found in the Rowayton location, police said.

Police said the following was recovered from the stash location: 671 bags of packaged heroin stamped revenge, 49.1 grams of heroin, more than 7,000 empty bags, an electronic scale, multiple ounces of cutting agent, an electronic blender for processing heroin and cutting agents, hundreds of rubber bands for bundling the packaged heroin, hundreds of plastic bags for packaging, and an ink stamp for marking the product.

The 49.1 grams of heroin powder  when processed with cutting agents  has the capability of filling over three thousand individual bags for street sale, Walsh said.
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has expressed a hope that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin managed to agree on the preliminary algorithm for the release of Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko.

"Yesterday's [telephone] talk with Putin was initiated by me, and based upon preliminary results it seems to me that we succeeded to come to an agreement on a definite algorithm for Nadia's release," Poroshenko said during a joint press conference with Danish PM Lars Rasmussen in Kyiv on Tuesday.

Poroshenko went on to reveal that he had given a few instructions in order to have appropriate mechanisms created to return Savchenko to Ukraine.

"Today, I am going to have a meeting with Nadia's mother and sister, and give appropriate instructions to the Ministry of Justice, in order to have alternative mechanisms created. The respective instruction was given to the Foreign Minister, [Pavlo Klimkin] and this difficult work, must end up, I suppose, as soon as possible, with Nadia getting back home," Poroshenko said.

"At least I emphasized my readiness to send the presidential jet in order to take, along with my representatives, Nadia back home, and return her to Ukraine as soon as possible," he said.

Poroshenko also said that he had discussed with Russian President Vladimir Putin the prospect of granting access to Savchenko for German doctors.

Besides, Poroshenko revealed that during the conversation with Putin, he raised the question of some other Ukrainian prisoners in Russia, including Yuriy Soloshenko and Hennadiy Afanasyev, who are currently in a poor health conditions. "I also hope that the Russian side will demonstrate certain progress in this regard," Poroshenko said.
NORWALK  Residents are registering in droves to vote in Connecticuts presidential primary elections April 26  and nearly half of Norwalks new voters are Democrats.

In numbers, Democrats now nearly match unaffiliated voters in Connecticuts sixth-largest city, according to the city Registrar of Voters Office.

Edwin Camacho, Norwalk Democratic Town Committee (NDTC) chairman, attributed the boost in Democrats numbers in Norwalk to whats happening locally and nationally.

It really is a combination of whats going on nationally and whats going on locally, Comacho said. We have a strong mayor. The city is moving in the right direction. We have a good Common Council.

Nationally people are concerned about the prospect of any one of the three Republican candidates becoming president, he said.

Norwalk and other Connecticut voters will head to the polls Tuesday, April 26, to cast ballots in the states 2016 presidential primary elections.

Connecticut has closed primary elections, meaning one must be a registered Democrat to vote in the Democratic primary, or a registered Republican to vote in the Republican primary. Jan. 26 was the deadline for enrolled party members to transfer enrollment from one party to the other to vote in the primary.

Noon on Monday, April 25, is the deadline for new voters and unaffiliated voters to enroll in either party in-person at their town hall to vote the following day.

Stuart W. Wells, Norwalks Democratic registrar of voters, said the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator hoping to become the Democratic presidential nominee  could be driving the boost in Democrats numbers.

New registrations have trended more Democrat than unaffiliated and more than 2-to-1 on Democrats versus Republicans, Wells said. A lot of the newer ones are probably excited about Bernie (Sanders) getting in. Young people tend to be that way nationally.

As of Monday, unaffiliated persons made up 41 percent of Norwalks registered voters, Democrats 38 percent, Republicans 20 percent and Independents one percent, according to the Registrar of Voters Office.

Thats compared to 43 percent unaffiliated, 35 percent Democrat, 20 percent Republican and two percent Independent in October 2010, according to the office.

Andrew T. Conroy, Norwalk Republican Town Committee (NRTC) chairman and former city councilman, reviewed the recent numbers and wasnt heartened.

I looked up those numbers about a week ago it caused me pause, obviously, because the Democrats are registering more and the Republicans are registering fewer (new voters), Conroy said. We need to register more folks as Republicans and we need to convince a lot of the unaffiliated (voters) that we can get the job done.

Upon being elected NRTC chairman in March, Conroy asked committee members to impress upon their fellow residents the partys successes and contributions to Norwalk.

Karen Doyle Lyons, Norwalks Republican registrar of voters, acknowledged the growing number of voters in Norwalk but stopped short of saying theyve settled upon a presidential candidate  Republican or Democrat. She noted that voters can mark Uncommitted on the ballots.

(Turnout) will be higher, Doyle Lyons said. But when the tally comes in at the end of election night, I am not going to be surprised when I see the amount of Uncommitted votes.

She based her prediction upon the tone of the campaigns.

Both sides are really, unfortunately ..., said Doyle Lyons, pausing to find a word. It would be nice if they were all considerate of each other and of the voters.
May 1 - 7 is National Small Business Week, a week celebrating the role small businesses and entrepreneurs play in America. The U.S. Small Business Association has celebrated every year by highlighting small business owners for their contributions and holding events aimed at helping businesses thrive.

Financial website Wallethub recently looked at which small cities provided the best and worst atmospheres in which to start a small business. As many may have guessed though, Connecticut didn't fare too well.
Question: Several years ago, I was convicted of a crime when I was only 16 years old. The case was pending a while, but I eventually completed probation successfully. I'm now an adult, and, about five years after I was convicted, I sent in a position to our governor seeking a pardon in order to get the offense off of my record entirely. It has been a long time since I sent my petition in, and I haven't heard squat. So, what I am wondering is if there is any requirement that the governor's office or the parole board (or the office that advises the governor on pardons) to, at least, reply to my request?

For those readers who do not know, clemency is the reduction of a criminal sentence or punishment given to a person - the criminal defendant - by some executive who commutes the sentence. We often hear about a presidential pardon, which is a form of clemency. It is easy to think of clemency as leniency or mercy. Clemency can occur when a governor or the President of the United States outright pardons a person, ending his criminal case altogether, or through that executive commuting a criminal defendant's sentence.

For example, a person is sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole (now known by different names, such as Mandatory Supervised Release, depending on what state you are in). The criminal defendant serving the life sentence serves several years in prison, is in poor health, and is near death. The defendant, or his or her family on the defendant's behalf, can seek clemency from the governor or President of the United States, seeking to have the person released. Similarly, a person sentenced to a life sentence in prison could petition the appropriate executive for clemency, resulting in only a reduction of the sentence.

In your situation, the parole board has probably not responded yet because your sentence is discharged, meaning that your case is over and done with. Parole committees receive thousands of requests every year, and I cannot imagine that they respond to the majority of them.

Keep in mind that, despite their large budgets and available resources, these committees still consist of relatively few people, who have huge demands placed on their available time. That being said, contacting them again might not hurt. You might also wish to contact an appellate attorney, who works privately, or, depending on what state you are in, an appellate public defender.

There are certain situations in which a person can have a criminal conviction expunged, meaning that all records of it are destroyed, or sealed, and, therefore, no one will have access to the records. The expungement and sealing of records is often a costly and time consuming process. Furthermore, many offenses are not able to be expunged or sealed. Depending on what state you are in, a felony, even a non-violent one, which you said you were convicted of, might be one of these offenses. Talking with an attorney who handles a matter of this kind, which is often referred to as post-conviction relief, might be the best first step you can take, because there might very well be nothing you can do about your case at this point.

As an aside and for those who are interested, there has been a growing trend legislatively to limit judicial discretion, requiring the imposition of mandatory minimum sentences for certain offenses. Oftentimes, these minimums are a response to one thing or another, such as an increase in the instances of commission of a particular crime. Obviously, we are all probably aware of how politicized such things as presidential pardons have become, not to mention how politicized crime has become. (Just think about a recent statewide or local election and the candidates stressing that they are tough on crime.) That being said, Presidents have on average exercised their clemency powers on a routine basis, some Presidents routinely pardoning people not just at the end of their term in office, but consistently throughout their presidency. Presidents exercising clemency powers include those most respected, such as Abraham Lincoln. That is up until the last few decades. What is ironic about the increasing use of mandatory minimum sentences is that at the same time, the exercise of executive clemency powers has been decreasing.

Have questions for Brendan Bukalski? E-mail him at askthelawyer@gmail.com, or write him, c/o The Edwardsville Intelligencer, 117 N. 2nd St., Edwardsville, IL 62025.
Girl Scouts were shining stars during Girl Scouts of Southern Illinois (GSSI) All That Glitters award ceremony on April 9, 2016 at the Holiday Inn in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. Each year, the banquet recognizes Girl Scouts from across southern Illinois who achieve significant accomplishments in community service and leadership.

Awardees included recipients of the Girl Scout Gold Award, the top individual award a Girl Scout can earn, as well as the Girl Scout Silver Award, which is the highest award a Girl Scout Cadette can earn. Twenty Girl Scouts also were honored with the Trifecta Award, which recognizes the outstanding accomplishment of earning the Girl Scout Bronze Award, the Girl Scout Silver Award and the Girl Scout Silver Award. In addition, Alexandra Lloyd from OFallon, Bailee Warsing from Granite City and Katie Albert from Waterloo were named Graduating Girl Scouts for their extraordinary Girl Scout careers. Lloyd and Warsing received a $500 scholarship funded by GSSIs Annual Brownie Haunted Camp event, while Albert received a $1000 scholarship funded by GSSIs staff giving campaign.

Please see the following list for a full description of awards, as well as a list of this years awardees.

Since 1916, Girl Scouts have been making meaningful, sustainable change in their communities and around the world. Presently known as the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest girl award in Girl Scouting has had several names over the last 100 years. The earliest form of this award is the Golden Eagle of Merit (1916-1918/1919) followed by the Golden Eaglet until 1938. The award was then known as First Class for two years before being named Curved Bar from 1940-1963. The award then went back to being called First Class until 1980, at which time it became known as it is known today - the Girl Scout Gold Award.

The Girl Scout Gold Award recognizes leadership, effort and impact that Girl Scout Seniors and Girl Scout Ambassadors have had on their communities. Only about 5 percent of eligible girls take the rigorous path toward earning this prestigious award, but those who complete the journey change the lives of others and their own in amazing and significant ways. This year, on the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scout Gold Award, we celebrate all Gold Award recipients, past and present, who have contributed to making the world a better place for all of us. This years Girl Scout Gold Award recipients include:

Edwardsville:Maddie Farrar, Troop #433, Alexa Keiser, Troop #433, Kathleen McCracken, Troop #362, Eliza Pauk, Troop #433

Troy:Adrienna Ridgeway, Troop #263, Marlaina Snow, Troop #471

The Girl Scout Silver Award, the highest award a Girl Scout Cadette can earn, is symbolic of accomplishments in Girl Scouting and community activities as a girl becomes her best self and builds the world around her. The Girl Scout Silver Award project benefits a girls community and can be earned as an individual or as part of a group. This years Girl Scout Silver Award recipients include:

Edwardsville: Isabella Doyle, Makenzie Keiser, Emily Kloostra, Lauren McGarr, Allison Paur, Emily Paur, Kylie Schumacher and Gwendolyn Thomas

Glen Carbon: Lindsay Ahlers, Jacquelin Anderson, Briann Beyer, Tessa Bunselmeyer, Dakotah Charleston, Abreya Deckard, Justine Dioneda, Erin Dowdy, Hannah Garde, Alanna Kaminsky, Makenzi Keller, Beth Anne Mislan, Nadia Msakni, Connie Reynolds, Autumn Scott, Carli Scott, Lena Tennant and Marcia Williams

Marine: Samantha Maddox, Holly Plantz and Samantha Tipton

St. Jacob: Denise DAntonio and Lane Sedlacek

Troy: Natalie Blaies, Katherine Jones and Kassandra King

The Girl Scout Trifecta Award recognizes GSSI Girl Scouts who have earned the Girl Scout Bronze Award, Girl Scout Silver Award and the Girl Scout Gold Award. Following are the 2016 GSSI Trifecta Award recipients:

Edwardsville:Maddie Farrar, Troop #433, Alexa Keiser, Troop #433, Kathleen McCracken, Troop #362, Eliza Pauk, Troop #433

Troy:Adrienna Ridgeway, Troop #263, Marlaina Snow, Troop #471

Girl Scouts of Southern Illinois is a high-capacity Girl Scout council serving approximately 13,000 girls and 4,500 adult volunteers in 40  counties in southern Illinois.
Four years ago, two Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville students died in an apartment fire in Edwardsville.

Best friends, and roommates, Lauren Petersen and Lacy Siddall were the victims of the tragedy.

But the families of the victims are now honoring their memory by turning their attention to preventing another tragedy.

The families, and their attorneys, have produced and are now releasing a fire safety video that will be distributed to more than 200 universities nationwide.

The Petersen and Siddall families and their attorneys, Ted Gianaris, of Simmons Hanly Conroy, and Thomas Long, of Sandberg Phoenix & Von Gontard P.C., funded and produced the video to create awareness to protect students and prevent future incidents.

SIUE University Housing and Residence Life Cinema were also partners in the project.

SIUE Director of University Housing Mike Schultz said the video targets students.

We set out to speak specifically to college students, and I believe the video accomplishes that in a dramatic and hard hitting way, Schultz said.

The video features the girls friend Taylor Scott talking about how much she misses them. It also includes footage from the aftermath of the fire that claimed the womens lives.

The families hope the real-life footage will underscore the importance of fire safety for the thousands of student viewers.

Long said he hopes the video will have an impact on the young people it is geared toward.

As each young person views this critical safety video, the tragedy that befell Lacy and Lauren will transform itself into a life-saving awareness opportunity for others, he said.

The safety video was funded from parts of a settlement the family and lawyers won after a two-year battle with an insurance company.

I always hope my work in the courtroom can bring some peace of mind to the families I represent and help make things safer for everyone, Gianaris said. I hope the memory of Lauren and Lacy, through this video, will go on to make a significant impact and save lives.

A statement released by the families said the video will bring some good out of the tragedy.

If this video can prevent other families from experiencing the unspeakable grief of losing cherished loved ones to a preventable danger like an off-campus apartment fire, then that will allow some good to come from tragedy, a family spokesperson said. We hope Lacy and Laurens story will educate landlords, students and even parents about fire prevention for college students living both in on- and off-campus housing.

Lauren and Lacy grew up in Bethalto and were lifelong friends. Lauren, 19, was in the SIUE College of Arts and Sciences. Lacy, 21, was studying speech-language pathology in the SIUE School of Education, Health and Human Behavior.

According to the Center for Campus Fire Safety, approximately 126 students have perished from fires that occurred on a college campus, in Greek housing or in off-campus housing from 2000 to 2014. Of the 89 fatal fires that occurred during that time, over 85 percent occurred in off-campus housing.

Campus Fire Safety President Michael J. Swain said the video should encourage landlords, schools, parents and students to learn more about fire safety and make educated decisions.

We encourage schools and those managing off-campus student housing to upgrade and maintain their fire protection systems to provide a balanced approach to fire safety, he said.

Available through Residence Life Cinema, the video will join the companys educational programming library, which serves over 200 public and private universities. In addition, college officials will have the option to require students to watch the video.

Copies of the video will also be available to local high school officials interested in showing the content to seniors as part of their college preparations.

Schools and other organizations like fraternities and sororities interested in using the video should contact info@reslife.com.
Monday morning's warm temperatures had many folks looking to get outside.

Some did just that.

A power outage struck downtown Edwardsville at approximately 10:15 a.m. Monday, affecting 368 businesses and residences.

The Madison County Administration Building lost power in some offices and the Edwardsville Police Station resorted to generators.

Brian Bretsch, a spokesman for Ameren, said there was no unusual cause for the outage, which lasted approximately 20 minutes.

"We're doing some electric infrastructure upgrades and we're switching from one substation to another," Bretsch said. "When they did that, the fuse didn't hold."

That's when a part of Edwardsville went dark.

"Our guys put in a larger fuse for the future to handle more load and capacity," Bretsch said.

Edwardsville Police Chief Jay Keeven said even though the station lost power, services were not disrupted in any way.

Traffic lights around downtown - such as the one at St. Louis Street and West Street - did go dark.

Keeven said the police department does not use temporary stop signs in such situations, but reminded motorists that when signals are not working, intersections are to be treated as all-way stops, with motorists taking turns in proceeding.

At 1 p.m. Monday, Ameren was reporting just one outage in the 62025 (Edwardsville) zip code.

Work was done Monday on the substations on North Second Street, behind Eden United Church of Christ, and at the intersection of North Kansas and East Union.

Ameren announced in March that it will be modernizing a section of distribution lines that move power through town.

Bretsch said Monday's outage was the result of that work.

New lines are being installed from the Wanda Road substation to the substation on North Second Street.

Bretsch said at that time that temporary outages could be expected.
The Ukrainian Justice Ministry will file the necessary documents within the next two days to make sure that Ukrainian military aviator Nadia Savchenko, who has been convicted in Russia, could return to Ukraine as soon as possible, Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko said.

"The convention that envisions the handover of Ukrainian citizens by other foreign countries provides for certain bureaucratic procedures, and, considering this situation and Nadia's state, the deadlines set in the convention are certainly unacceptable. Therefore, an algorithm of actions has been planned today, which, apart from legal procedures, includes also diplomatic procedures so as to speed up Nadia's return to Ukrainian territory as much as possible. And I believe we will submit the necessary documents literally within the next two days," Petrenko said at a news briefing in Kyiv on Tuesday.
An Alton man will be sentenced later this spring after a jury found him guilty of sexually assaulting a 5-year-old girl.

James A. Steele, 48, had been charged by the Madison County States Attorneys office with two counts of predatory criminal sexual assault.

Jurors on Thursday deliberated for about 90 minutes before reaching their verdict.

Prosecutors say Steele had been in a relationship with the victims mother, according to the States Attorneys office.

The two-day trial began Wednesday at the Madison County Criminal Justice Center in Edwardsville.

The acts happened in December, 2012. Alton police began investigating after the mother approached them with the allegations.

Steele was charged with both felonies in May of 2013.

The case was prosecuted by Assistant Madison County States Attorneys Kathleen Nolan and Ali Foley.

They presented medical evidence - including DNA evidence - during the trial, according to a news release announcing the verdict.

The trial was held before Associate Judge Neil Schroeder.

After the verdict, Schroeder revoked Steeles bond. Steele will be sentenced in six to eight weeks.

The penalty range for a Class X felony is six to 30 years, but Steele could face an extended sentence of 12 to 60 years due to the circumstances of the case.

The evidence in cases involving the sexual assault of a child is extraordinarily graphic and difficult to hear, said Madison County States Attorney Tom Gibbons in a written statement. I want to thank each juror for their willingness to undertake this challenging task, and for their commitment to justice for our community.

Gibbons also praised the Madison County Child Advocacy Center and the medical and scientific personnel who worked with prosecutors to secure a conviction. Working together, the States Attorneys Offices Childrens Justice Division, local law enforcement, the Child Advocacy Center, and so many other dedicated professionals are all fighting every day to secure justice for victims. I hope this result will aid in the healing for this little girl who showed such bravery in coming forward and disclosing the heinous assault by the defendant. She is a role model for other victims who may be afraid to report their abuse. We pray that their bravery will give hope to other victims who may be suffering in silence.

Prosecutors will seek a very lengthy prison sentence for Steele, Gibbons said.
For the Intelligencer

The Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Office of Admissions hosted nine Chicago-area high school counselors on Friday, April 8, to offer a glimpse of the beautiful campus and an opportunity to meet and converse with Edwardsville community leaders.

During the visit, Edwardsville Mayor Hal Patton, Director of Police Jay Keeven and Economic/Community Development Director Walter D. Williams shared details on the valued partnership between SIUE and the community.
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Linkedin Retno LP Marsudi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, April 19, 2016

This week, four European capitals  Berlin, London, Brussels and The Hague  will welcome President Joko Jokowi Widodo, who has embarked on a five-day trip to the continent.

In Brussels, President Jokowis visit marks a historic new chapter in Indonesia-European Union relations. As the first visit by a sitting Indonesian president to EU institutions, the President will hold important talks with all three EU presidents, namely the European Parliament president, European Council president and European Commission president.

The visit will bolster cooperation between Indonesia and the EU, one of the countrys long-time traditional partners, as reflected in the 2009 EU-Indonesia Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA)  the first EU treaty in Southeast Asia and the first after the Lisbon Treaty.

Let us take bilateral economic relations as a yardstick. At US$26.2 billion in total trade, the EU is Indonesias fourth largest trading partner. Total investment from the EU  at around $2.3 billion  is Indonesias third largest investor. Almost 1 million tourists from Europe also visited Indonesia last year.

These figures show Indonesias position as a key EU partner in the region, and vice versa.

The visit from President Jokowi will not only reinforce formal economic ties through avenues such as the launch of negotiations for the Indonesia-EU Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA). It will also promote business-to-business collaborative projects, as a good number of deals are expected to be signed during the visit.

The visit is also about meeting common strategic interests.

Both Indonesia and the EU are confronted with changing global and regional strategic landscapes, including the results of protracted conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. The two parties have to deal with the impacts of these changes including increased irregular migration and influxes of asylum seekers.

Both have also been victims of acts of terrorism, which in Europe has resulted in renewed negative sentiments against Islam  a growing Islamophobia.

As home to the worlds largest modern and tolerant Muslim population, a democratic Indonesia is a natural partner for Europe to confront such new challenges.

We can exchange our respective experiences and learn from each other in dealing with these pressing issues.

Accordingly, Indonesia can offer Europe its best practices and lessons on at least two issues.

The first is confronting the issue of terrorism and extremism.

The recent terror attacks in Jakartas Thamrin area and in Brussels have shown that Indonesia  a Muslim-majority country  and Europe, with a non-Muslim majority, are both victims of terrorism. No country is immune from this threat. Muslims and non-Muslims have fallen due to such heinous acts.

It shows that terrorism knows no religion and respects no nationality. It shows that the ideology of extremism and radicalism are influencing the violence perpetrated by those terrorists.

Therefore, the growing Islamophobia is counterproductive to our common pursuit of peace and prosperity. The Islamic world as well as the rest of the world must work together more closely to combat this common enemy.

In doing so, Indonesia practices a mix of hard and soft approaches.

The hard approach is conducted through law enforcement and effective counterterrorism methods. The soft approach, on the other hand, is carried out through sociocultural and economic empowerment, deradicalization programs and interfaith dialogue. In other words, winning hearts and minds.

The presence of an active and strong civil society in this regard is a must.

Indonesias assets such as the Islamic organizations Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, which have championed religious harmony by engaging other faiths, have been critical partners in this effort.

Furthermore, as home to the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC), Indonesia will continue promoting stronger law enforcement, information sharing and capacity building cooperation with its European colleagues.

Indonesia and Europe must work together to end this once and for all by continuously promoting the values of tolerance and moderation, as well as through better law enforcement cooperation.

Those are the messages that President Jokowi will take to the four European capitals.

Additionally, his visit can also serve as an opportunity for Europe to better understand the true meaning of Islam as a blessing for the whole universe.

The second issue relates to a better response to the matter of irregular migration.

The refugee crisis in Europe and the sudden movement of migrants in the Andaman Sea last May have opened our eyes to the magnitude and complexity of our common problem.

However, while Europe continues to face growing negative sentiments, sensitivity and concerns over the issue of irregular migrants, our region has managed to prove that dialogue, consultation and cooperation in response to immediate challenges, such as irregular migration through the Bali Process, can be very effective.

Against this backdrop, Indonesia last month hosted the Sixth Ministerial Conference of the Bali Process, a regional consultative forum to address irregular migration, asylum seekers and refugee issues.

The conference agreed to establish a special mechanism to address emergency situations and sudden movements of irregular migration as well as working together to address its root causes. Without peace, stability and prosperity in migrants countries of origin, this problem will continue.

During his visit, President Jokowi will underscore that Indonesia and Europe can work together to address the problem of irregular migration, particularly in helping to address its root causes.

In cooperation with relevant international organizations, Indonesia and the EU can help to address the issue of irregular migration, putting humanitarian considerations first in responding to emergency situations and the sudden movement of persons.

To sum up, Indonesia and Europe can learn from each other, especially as we share many interests and face similar challenges.

---------------

We are looking for information, opinions, and in-depth analysis from experts or scholars in a variety of fields. We choose articles based on facts or opinions about general news, as well as quality analysis and commentary about Indonesia or international events. Send your piece to community@jakpost.com.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
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Linkedin - (The Jakarta Post) -  Wed, April 20, 2016

Switzerland headquartered Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and PT Holand for Water are working towards improving nutrition in the first 1,000 days of a childs life in East Java under the Baduta Program, which has access to safe drinking water as one of four program components

There is a direct correlation between safe drinking water and health, especially when linked to the national agenda, called the National Movement for the First 1,000 Days of Life (Gerakan 1000HPK).

People often did not realize the negative effects unsafe water has on their health, until they or their children get a disease, such as diarrhea. The issue of peoples inability to have access to safe drinking water should be tackled properly because otherwise it may affect the governments efforts to reduce stunting and improve the health of the next generation said Ravi Menon, GAIN's Country Manager for Indonesia.

In 2008, the World Health Organization estimated that 50 percent of malnutrition cases worldwide were associated with repeated diarrhea or intestinal infections caused by unsafe water and inadequate hygiene.

Eight years later these rates might have dipped, but they largely hold true in any country where pregnant women and children do not have on-tap access to clean drinking water, We can try to make families change their eating behavior, the government can ensure that foods are correctly fortified and formulated, while the private sector can make sure that they are affordable,

But everything comes to nought if the child is affected by diarrhea caused by drinking unsafe water or because of food prepared using boiled water that is re-contaminated due to improper storage, Menon said.

This is why GAIN decided to integrate access to safe drinking water into their ongoing Baduta Program.

Integrated Nutrition program

GAIN, a Swiss non-profit technical agency with offices in 17 countries, including Indonesia, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Health to support the 1,000 Days of Life Movement by bringing what it had learned globally and incorporating it in the Baduta Program.

The signing was conducted two years ago not long after the government announced its intention to reduce the incidence of stunting and improve the health of the next generation through the Gerakan 1000HPK .

The Baduta Program aims to improve the nutrition status of pregnant women and children aged 6 to 24 months and to show progress on key indicators that contribute to reducing stunting.

40,000 pregnant women and 60,000 mothers and caregivers of children under 2 are expected to participate in intensive program activities at the community level.

The program kicked off in October 2013 and will last until June 2017, with six sub- districts of Malang and Sidoarjo, in the East Java province, being the program areas.

According to Menon, GAIN raises funds internationally and channels them to local implementing agencies. The primary donor for the Baduta Program is the Kingdom of the Netherlands, he said.

At the outset, we had extensive discussions with the Health Ministry and the district health offices to fully understand where we could add value, without replicating what they were doing,

In the end we designed an integrated program with nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive components.

The program has three nutrition-specific components: behavior change in eating habits, capacity building of nutrition knowledge and breastfeeding counseling at Puskesmas, village midwife, and Posyandu levels and providing technical support to review packaging of complementary foods to make them internationally compliant.

The nutrition-sensitive interventions we have chosen are providing water filters and delivering hand-washing messages to the target areas.

GAIN outlined the design for each component and then went through an exhaustive process to select three organizations, namely Save the Children, Yayasan Paramitra and PT Holland for Water that manufactures Nazava Water Filters, to implement them, he said.

Behavior change component

Promoting community level behavioral changes in maternal eating habits and feeding of young children is a major part of the Baduta Program. This involved the development of four television commercials under the tag-line Rumpi Sehat (Healthy Gossip) and developing Emo-Demo games linked to each of the four behaviors highlighted in the TV commercials. The Emo-Demo technique of triggering emotions associated with behaviors was pioneered by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) for hand-washing programs.

For the Baduta program, GAIN worked with LSHTM to develop 11 new emo demos especially for nutrition behavior and the response from the community has been overwhelmingly positive.

Kaders (Village cadres) are thrilled that they have a new instruction technique that has enthused mothers and attendance at monthly Posyandus has swelled. Entire communities are seen to be supporting each other to practice these behaviors through what the implementers have named the Gerakan Rumpi Sehat, Menon said.

Safe drinking water component

The Baduta Program encourages the establishment of a sustainable supply chain of household drinking water filters, community water assessment and education on appropriate household water treatment and safe storage.

Nazava Water Filters (PT Holland for Water), is piloting a micro-entrepreneurship model for the distribution of community water filters. These entrepreneurs, the majority of whom are women with no previous business background, are taught the importance of safe drinking water, the cost savings of filtering versus boiling, and how to assemble and maintain water filters. The GAIN funds allow for these women to receive a small stock of filters and then sell them in installments that are affordable in their community.

GAIN did not want program funds to be used to provide free equipment because we know from experience that anything given for free has little or no value to recipients who eventually stop using that item. Hence we really liked Nazavas proposal to sell the filters in affordable long-term installments and set up a livelihood program which would empower women said Menon

Nazava has reported that early customers have started buying replacement candles which proves to us that the filters are actually being used , which is very good news  he said.

Meanwhile, Nazavas director and co-founder Guido van Hofwegen said that what is innovative about the Baduta Program is that perhaps for the first time in Indonesia, nutrition and access to safe drinking water are combined within one project.

Most projects focusing on nutrition underestimate the importance of safe drinking water, which means that fortified foods and extra nutritional supplements become ineffective if the consumer continues to drink contaminated water and gets diarrhea, flushing away all the nutrition, he said.

Ensuring that filtered water is safe to drink, he explained that the core elements of the Nazava Water Filter is a filter candle made of ceramic and filled with activated carbon and mixed with silver.

The Nazava Water Filter works like a sieve but with holes that are a thousand times smaller, he said.

The pores in the filter are so small (0.4 micrometer/micron) that bacteria (0.5 micrometer/micron) cannot pass, he explained.

So the filtered water is free of bacteria, he adds.

To reach out to rural consumers, the company works together with the district health departments. We team up with Community Health Centers (Puskesmas) to educate women how to make water safe to drink and how to store drinking water properly, he said.

To date, the company serves 47,000 households, reaching almost 250,000 people through more than 120 safe water entrepreneurs in Indonesia alone. It also exports to other Asian and African countries.

Sustainability

The evaluation of the Baduta Program will end in June 2017 and GAIN is preparing to make the program sustainable.

Sustainability is built into our program because every aspect has been designed based on government direction. The most expensive parts of the process have already been done  the formative research, the TVC production, the emo-demo development, testing and the legal research into changing regulations.

The Ministry of Health will evaluate the program this year and then decide if it is worth replicating and scaling up, either as a whole or in parts, in which case they will issue new national guidelines. It is a long process but in the end will ensure the program's sustainability, Menon said.

According to van Hofwegen, Nazava is building a sustainable supply chain for water filters in the Baduta program areas. It is sustainable because we work with entrepreneurs who will keep on selling filters after the program is finished, he said. (Sudibyo M. Wiradji)
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Linkedin (Associated Press) Raleigh, North Carolina, United States  Tue, April 19, 2016

Two rock bands have become the latest to cancel concerts in North Carolina because of the state's new law on LGBT rights.

In a statement issued Monday on the band's website, Pearl Jam called the law "a despicable piece of legislation that encourages discrimination against an entire group of American citizens."

The statement says the band has communicated with local groups and will give them money to oppose the law.

Pearl Jam was scheduled to perform April 20 at PNC Arena in Raleigh.

Earlier Monday, the rock group Boston also announced plans to cancel concerts because of North Carolina's new law regarding the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Guitarist Tom Scholz announced the group's decision on its Facebook page. Concerts were scheduled for Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh early next month.
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Linkedin Khristian Ibarrola (Inquirer.net/Asia News Network)  Tue, April 19, 2016

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has begun experimenting on various kinds of tubers to determine whether theyll be fit to grow on Mars.

The US space agency, together with the International Potato Center in Lima Peru, has been simulating growing potatoes in the Peruvian desert in preparation for possible human colonization on the Red planet.

Citing reports from The Wall Street Journal, NASA chose the soil in La Joya Pampas, a sector of the Atacama Desert in southern Peru, as subject for testing since it is considered one of the driest places on earth.

Once NASA discovers the suited crop, it will be subjected into rigorous Mars-like conditions, including exposure to carbon dioxide and ultraviolet radiation.

The final criterion, meanwhile, requires the crop not just to grow well on Mars but also to be able to reproduce in large quantities.

NASA officials are optimistic that the experiment would eventually pave way to building a farming dome on Marsexclusively for the vegetable.

Meanwhile, the people behind the experiment admitted that the idea of planting potatoes in the deserted planet actually came from science fiction.

As it turns out, it was Matt Damons stranded astronaut/botanist character from the movie The Martian who influenced the decision.

Its got to be a Martian potato that tastes good, said Julio Valdivia-Silva, a Peruvian astrobiologist.

Its a big challenge to take a living organism somewhere else. Weve never done this before, added the NASA scientist.

If NASAs schedule permits, humans traveling to Mars wont be that far off, with the Mars One mission hoping to send astronauts on a one-way trip within the next decade.

The space station is aiming to launch its first manned mission by the year 2020, before specialized crews make their trip in 2026.
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Linkedin Elly Burhaini Faizal (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, April 19, 2016

Submissions for ReelOzInd!, a short film competition and festival, are now open, and all creative Australian and Indonesian filmmakers are invited to contribute their works.

Prominent Indonesian producer Mira Lesmana has been appointed as ambassador to help promote the festival.

I hope the festival will receive many submissions because the genres are varied, it could be animation, or drama...and so on, she said as quoted in an Australia-Indonesia Centre (AIC) press statement released on Tuesday.

Movie director Riri Riza said he hoped the festival would help young Indonesians see their country from a new perspective.

This festival will open a pathway for young people in Indonesia to bring new perspectives, new pictures of Indonesia. I hope their perspectives are fresher and wider than the standard approach of only talking about Bali or other common stereotypical portrayals of our identity as Indonesians, he said.

Riri said ReelOzInd! was a very exciting festival that hopefully would be held routinely.

I imagine young people in Indonesia will be eager to learn about their neighbor. I hope they can investigate and find creative and interesting themes for their short films and during this process they will learn, and through this learning process, a cultural process will occur, he said.

Indonesian Ambassador to Australia Nadjib Riphat Kesoema gave his support to the competition in a video message.

Even though we are neighbors, living less than 200 kilometers from each other, we still dont know much about one another. Its like two families, in two houses, living in the same neighborhood. Every day theyre tired with their respective work, school and social commitments, then they forget to spend enough time to get to know their neighbors, said the ambassador.

This inaugural short film competition, with the theme tetangga, or neighbors, is like one family getting invited for a barbecue and drinks by their neighbors. And you know how Sunday barbecues are, like a picnic  we meet, we share stories, we eat, we laugh, and sometimes we cry together. We spend time with each other and listen to the real story.

And I bet those stories will be much different from the political drama and stereotypes we hear from the news headlines, Nadjib said. (ebf)
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Linkedin Malcolm Ritter (Associated Press) New York, United States  Tue, April 19, 2016

Dinosaurs were in decline long before an asteroid strike polished them off about 66 million years ago, a study says.

It's the latest contribution to a long-running debate: Did the asteroid reverse the fortune of a thriving group of animals? Or were dinosaurs already struggling, and the disruptive effects of the asteroid pushed them over the edge to extinction? Or were the dinosaurs headed for oblivion anyway?

While some have argued that dinosaurs began petering out some 5 million or 10 million years before their final doom, the new paper suggests it started happening much earlier, maybe 50 million years before the asteroid catastrophe.

In terms of species, "they were going extinct faster than they could replace themselves," said paleontologist Manabu Sakamoto of the University of Reading in England.

He led a team of British scientists who analyzed three large dinosaur family trees, looking for evidence of when extinctions began to outnumber the appearances of new species.

They found that starting to happen about 50 million years before the asteroid for most groups of dinosaurs. Two other groups showed increases rather than declines; if their results are included, the overall time for the start of dinosaur decline shrinks to 24 million years before the final demise.

Declining groups include two-legged carnivores like T. rex and the immense, long-necked, four-legged plant eaters known as sauropods. In contrast, another familiar dinosaur, triceratops, belonged to a group that was on the rise.

The results appear in a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Sakamoto said it's not clear what caused the long-term declines.

The results support the idea that the asteroid strike pushed a struggling group into extinction, rather than the idea that dinosaurs were doomed anyway, he said. He also noted that one group in decline still lives on in its descendants, today's birds.

The killer asteroid is thought to have struck the coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, creating widespread wildfires and lingering smoke that blocked sunlight, and changing climate.

Mark Norell, chair of the paleontology division at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, called Sakamoto's analysis "the best you can do" given the lack of available fossils from that time.

Most data came from North America with some from Asia and western Europe he said, and the conclusion would be firmer if fossils could be included from a wider geographical distribution.

David Fastovsky, chair of the geosciences department at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, said placing the seeds of the decline so early in time is striking and unexpected. Paleontologists will no doubt examine the study "quite closely," he said.

___

University of Reading video: https://youtu.be/7X2dz1es-Gw

Journal: http://www.pnas.org
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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, April 19, 2016

In a historic move, the Indonesian government has for the first time organized an official event to talk about the massacre of people accused of being communist sympathizers in 1965 and 1966 to seek reconciliation for the country's dark past.

The two-day event, "Dissecting the 1965 tragedy", will look into the period of time in which at least 500,000 people are believed to have been killed and millions imprisoned without trial for allegedly having links to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

The aim of the symposium is not to put blame on anyone for the tragic communist purge, head of the Symposium committee retired army general Agus Widjojo said. The event would take a historical approach to reveal the truth about the tragedy so the nation could learn a lesson from it and prevent such a incident from happening again in the future.

The event marked the first time Indonesia has held an open discussion on the tragedy. Survivors, the government, the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), academics, human rights groups have come together to seek national reconciliation.

Previously it was hard to hold discussions on the tragedy, Yuniyanti Chuzaifah, the chairwoman of National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan) recalled. Komnas Perempuan had also faced difficulties in checking on the health conditions of the victims.

"We used to go to West Sumatra on government assignment to check on the condition of the 1965 victims, especially women who had experienced sexual harassment, but we faced obstruction and discrimination from locals," she said on Monday.

Catholic priest and iconic advocate of pluralism Franz Magnis Suseno said the event was important as a process to acknowledge the historical facts and recognize victims of the tragedy.

The acknowledgement would also give those who had their passports revoked at the time and have lived in exile since hope of returning to Indonesia, he added.

Survivors demanded the government reveal the truth and deliver justice for the victims, survivor Ilham Aidit said adding that discrimination existed up to the present.

"The important thing for reconciliation is that everybody has a shared understanding, and this will not happen until the truth is revealed from both [the victims and the government], he said.

Catherine Pandjaitan, the daughter of army general Donald Isaac Pandjaitan, who was murdered on Oct. 1, 1965, said it took her almost 25 years to move on from the tragedy that took her father's life.

"I was 18 and a sophomore student in senior high school when I saw my father get shot in the head, I was stressed and traumatized living in that house, but my mom refused to move because the house had just been built," she told thejakartapost.com on the sidelines of the event.

To help her recover from the tragedy, she traveled around and was a stewardess for German-based airliner Lufthansa for five years before getting married based on the suggestions of former President BJ Habibie whom she called uncle.

She returned to Jakarta after she got married and continued her trauma-healing process at her church in Jakarta.

Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan said during his opening remarks that the government would not apologize for the tragedy but emphasized that the government was committed to resolving past human rights abuse cases.

The symposium has received mixed reactions, including protests from a group named Front Pancasila who claim that a resurgent PKI is using the symposium to disseminate communist ideas. (rin)
On Thursday, April 21, at 12.00, the press centre of the Interfax-Ukraine News Agency will host a press conference "Cooperation between Government Agencies and Civil Society: Myth or Reality?" The participants will include co-founder and coordinator of the public initiative CrimeaSOS Tamila Tasheva, law expert of the CrimeaSOS NGO Serhiy Maruschenko, representative of the Social Policy Ministry of Ukraine, manager of the program on strengthening civil society participation in the work of the Social Policy Ministry of Ukraine Sabina Ilyasova (8/5-A Reitarska Street). Accreditation is required by phone: (098) 782 8496, j.fedotovskyh@krymsos.com (Yulia Fedotovskykh).
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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, April 19, 2016

Survivors of the 1965 tragedy have called for reconciliation through the revelation of the truth behind the mass killing of members and sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and their families. It is believed that at least half a million people were killed.

Speaking at a national symposium in Jakarta, victims of the 1965 anti-communist purge said reconciliation was needed, because, while some of the survivors had forgiven what had happened, others, especially those living outside Java, still experienced discrimination.

Many people think of reconciliation as: Please, forgive us for what has happened in the past. But actually, the word reconciliation should come from the victims, 1965 survivor Ilham Aidit, son of the late PKI leader DN Aidit, said on Monday.

Ilham explained that proper reconciliation should be based on a revelation of the truth both from the perpetrators side and the victims side. The truth revealed could then be passed on to future generations.

Ilham called on the government to apologize, not to the PKI, but to the victims of the 1965 tragedy.

Haryono, spokesman of Lembaga Perjuangan Rehabilitasi Korban Orde Baru, an NGO working for the rehabilitation of New Order regime victims, said many people had become victims in the 1965 killings, thus it was important for the government to extend an apology.

We dont want to re-raise communism in Indonesia. We just ask the President to engage in reconciliation, said Haryono. He added that while Lt. Gen. (Ret) Sintong Pandjaitan had claimed at the same symposium that the number of the 1965 victims was only around 80,000, the victims actually numbered 45 million. Haryono did not provide details on where the figure of 45 million came from.

Former Army Special Forces (Kopassus) member Lt. Gen. (Ret) Sintong Pandjaitan was a regiment commander of the Army Para Commando Regiment (RPKAD), which led the anti-PKI campaign in areas across Indonesia.

At the symposium, Sintong denied that the number of victims killed after the G30S/PKI incident amounted to hundreds of thousands.

Its a lie, the retired military general said as quoted by tempo.co. Such a lie has tainted our honor as RPKAD members, he went on.

Sintong was referring to the results of an investigation by a fact-finding commission formed by President Soekarno in December 1965 and led by then-Home Minister Maj. Gen. Soemarno. The team concluded that the number of victims was 80,000. President Soekarno was not sure about the investigation results and confided that to a team member, Oei Tjoe Tat. It is around five to six times higher [than the 80.000 figure], said Oei, as quoted by Julius Pour in his book Gerakan 30 September.

Revealing the truth -- Catherine Pandjaitan, the daughter of Donald Isaac Pandjaitan, one of six military generals murdered on Sept. 30, 1965, speaks to journalists on the sidelines of a symposium in Jakarta on Monday on reconciliation following the 1965 anti-communism purge.(thejakartapost.com/Anton Hermansyah)

The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) decided on July 23, 2012, that violence committed after the Sept. 30, 1965, incident amounted to gross human rights violations.

The head of Komnas HAMs 1965-1966 investigation team, Nur Kholis, said the decision was based on the results of an investigation it had conducted since 2008. Evidence and results from the examination of witnesses found nine crimes belonging to the category of crimes against humanity, said Nur Kholis.

He added the collection and evidence and the examination of 349 witnesses were conducted in areas across Indonesia. We want to show that the incidents occurred evenly in Indonesia. According to Komnas HAM, the number of those killed in the 1965 anti-communist purge was somewhere between 500,000 and three million people.

Haryono said Indonesia could follow the examples of other Asian countries, such as Cambodia and Vietnam, in reconciliation. People in those two countries could move on from massacres conducted in the past, he said.

President Soekarnos daughter Sukmawati Soekarnoputri also called for reconciliation.

"Im ashamed if we compare our country with Cambodia. They are doing good reconciliation. Prince Norodom Sihanouk is really a nationalist. Until now, some Red Khmer former members can get a position in the government. The massacre site of the Red Khmer regime is now a national monument," she said.

Womens National Committee chairman Yuniati Chuzaifah said the 1965 tragedy not only marked a black chapter in the history of human rights in Indonesia but also created a legacy.

"What happened in May 1998 reflects this. A lesson from what happened in 1965 is that massacres are something allowable in Indonesia. This then triggered other instances of violence, such as the Aceh conflicts, the May 1998 riots and others," she concluded. (ebf)
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Linkedin thejakartapost.com (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, April 19, 2016

Indonesias largest lender in terms of assets, Bank Mandiri, plans to employ up to 180 people with disabilities this year in line with the People with Disabilities Law approved on March 17.

Bank Mandiri corporate culture senior vice president Aminarti Widiati said the state-owned lender had been employing 10 physically disabled people, five of whom had been recruited through the Bina Daksa Vocational Rehabilitation Center (BBRVBD) in Cibinong, West Java.

We are targeting to recruit 120 to 180 disabled people this year. We expect to see more companies, especially state-owned enterprises [SOEs], to show their care for people with disabilities, she said in South Jakarta on Monday.

According to a study by the International Labour Organization (ILO), employing disabled people can positive impact employee morale, bring diversity to a company, raise the quality of services to customers with disabilities and increase productivity, as disabled people tended to be more diligent than non-disabled people.

Julian Sulistianto, 24, joined BBRVBD in February 2015 before he was recruited by Bank Mandiri in September 2015. He lives with a disease characterized by brittle bones that are prone to fracture. Hence, he can only move around in a wheelchair.

The biggest challenge for people with disabilities comes from themselves. If we can accept ourselves, we can find a way to do everything with our deficiency, he said.

Meanwhile, Rezky Yami Putri, 27, another disabled person working for Bank Mandiri, said she did not want to be pitied because of her condition. Rezky was born with a deformed left arm half the normal size.

Although Im physically deformed, I want to show that I can be independent in terms of having my own income and even supporting my parents financially, she said.

Looking at the success stories of the first 10 disabled workers, Widiati said Bank Mandiri would expand the program by recruiting more disabled people, including deaf people.

According to the People with Disabilities Law, which revises a 1997 law, the government provides tax incentives for companies hiring disabled people. The law also stipulates that local-government owned companies (BUMD) must reserve 2 percent of their vacancies for the disabled, while private companies must reserve 1 percent.

Under the law, those found to violated the rights of people with disabilities are subject to imprisonment up to five years and a maximum fine of Rp 500 million (US$38,000) (vps/ags)
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Linkedin Jenny Barchfield (Associated Press) Brasilia  Tue, April 19, 2016

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff says she won't step down despite the lower Chamber of Deputies voting in favor of impeaching her.

Speaking a day after suffering a major defeat in the lower chamber of Congress, Rousseff says she will continue fighting those trying to remove her from office.

In her words, "I have the energy, strength and courage to confront this injustice."

The measure to impeach Rousseff now goes to the Senate. If the Senate takes it up, she will be suspended while a trial is conducted.

Rousseff is accused of using state bank money to plug holes in the federal budget. She argues that previous presidents did similar things and stresses that she has not been charged with a crime. (ags)
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Linkedin Ayomi Amindoni (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, April 19, 2016

Indonesia and Germany have agreed to cooperate in vocational education and plan to hold a technical follow-up meeting in May.

In a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Bundeskanzleramt on Monday afternoon, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo said his working visit to Germany focused on cooperation on vocational education between the two countries.

"Indonesia's vocational education needs help from Germany, especially in the industrial sector such as the electrical industry, including on power plants, the textile industry, maritime industries and others," Jokowi said according to a statement by his communication team made available to thejakartapost.com on Tuesday.

The President added that Germany was one of Indonesia's most important partners in Europe, namely its first trading partner and the seventh-largest investor.

In the meeting, President Jokowi and Chancellor Merkel agreed to strengthen economic cooperation under the framework of the Indonesian-European Union Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IE-CEPA). Merkel said Germany fully supported the completion of IE-CEPA as soon as possible.

She also proposed that the two countries set up a steering committee to follow up on the agreement. "The steering committee will report to what extent the Jakarta Declaration has been implemented and how we will continue our bilateral relations," she said.

The two leaders also exchanged thoughts on several world issues, including counterterrorism efforts. President Jokowi said as the country with the largest Muslim population in the world and the third-largest democracy in the world, Indonesia had experience it could share with Germany.

"There are two important approaches that we have carried out [in counterterrorism], namely the use of hard power through law enforcement and soft power through religious and cultural approaches. If the combination of the two is achieved, I believe terrorism could combatted in a better and more comprehensive way," he said.

Meanwhile, Merkel said Germany saw Indonesia as playing a very important role in spreading the values of tolerance, considering that Indonesia was a majority Muslim country while at the same time being a democratic country. (ebf)
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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, April 19, 2016

President Joko Widodos visit to Europe shows the governments concern over declining European Union (EU) trade with Indonesia. Experts have argued that this decline is due to product mismatch.

According to data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), Indonesia's exports to Europe decreased by 5.6 percent annually over the last five years. The slump in trade in 2015 hit 11.74 percent, while the balance of trade dropped by 12.9 percent.

"It is because the European market demands products, while we still depend on commodities," said Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (INDEF) director Enny Sri Hartati to thejakartapost.com on Monday.

She said there was high demand for handicraft products like wood carving and jewelry. "We registered exports of US$973 million to France in 2015 and 43 percent of it was jewelry," she said.

She blamed Indonesian trade attaches for not actively seeking and delivering trade information to help Indonesian traders improve their export performance.

"Foreign trade attaches are really active in Indonesia. They even come to us, analysts and economists, every month to dig out information," she said.

In 2015, total Indonesian trade with EU members amounted to $26.1 billion with a trade surplus of $3.5 billion. Germany is Indonesias biggest trade partner, with trade worth $6.1 billion, followed by the Netherlands with $4.2 billion in trade.

"The EU is still a good market despite economic sluggishness in Europe. There are opportunities, especially in Eastern Europe," economist Faisal Basri said. (ags)
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Linkedin (Associated Press) Tel Aviv  Tue, April 19, 2016

An Israeli military court charged a soldier with manslaughter Monday after he was caught on video fatally shooting a wounded Palestinian attacker, a decision that set the stage for a rare criminal trial against an active serviceman in a case that has bitterly divided the nation.

While Israeli defense officials have criticized the soldier's conduct, large segments of the public have rallied behind him and accused the government of abandoning him at a time of heightened conflict with the Palestinians.

The soldier, identified Monday as a medic named Sgt. Elor Azaria, was charged in a shooting last month in Hebron, a West Bank city that has been a focal point of a seven-month wave of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.

At the time of the incident, the military said two Palestinians had been shot and killed while carrying out a stabbing attack that wounded an Israeli soldier. But a video released by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem showed one of the attackers still alive after the initial shooting.

The video, taken by a B'Tselem volunteer, shows Azaria calmly raising his rifle, cocking the weapon and firing at the assailant's head. An autopsy determined the shot to the head was the cause of death.

In its indictment, the military prosecution said Azaria "acted in contrast to the rules of opening fire and without any operational justification." It said the Palestinian, Abdel-Fattah al-Sharif, "did not present a clear and present threat" and that "the defendant caused the death of the terrorist al-Sharif illegally."

He was also charged with inappropriate military conduct. His attorney, Ilan Katz, said Azaria acted as expected from a combat soldier and would seek a full acquittal.

Since September, Palestinian attackers have killed 28 Israelis and two Americans in stabbings, car rammings and shootings. At least 189 Palestinians have been killed, most of them said by Israel to be attackers, with the rest killed in clashes with Israeli security forces.

The Palestinians have repeatedly accused Israel of using excessive force against attackers who have already been halted or injured, or in some cases, of killing innocent civilians. Activists have released a handful of amateur videos supporting the Palestinian claims.

Palestinians and human rights groups have repeatedly accused Israel's military justice system of doing a poor job of prosecuting wayward soldiers.

Citing official army figures, the Israeli rights group Yesh Din says that of the more than 2,600 investigations opened by the military into alleged crimes committed by soldiers against Palestinians between 2000 and 2014, only 136, or 5 percent, resulted in indictments, leading to 193 convictions. More than one soldier can be listed in a single indictment.

Of about 262 investigations into Palestinian fatalities since 2000, only 16 have yielded indictments. Only one, involving the 2004 death of a British pro-Palestinian activist killed by army fire in the Gaza Strip, resulted in a manslaughter conviction, with the other cases either dismissed or ending in convictions on lesser charges.

Gilad Grossman, spokesman for Yesh Din, said Monday's indictment was "the first case since 2000 where the dead person is a Palestinian."

"We believe that for Palestinians to really receive justice in a military judicial system is very difficult," he added.

Military officials say the justice system adheres to high standards, and that each case must be reviewed on its own.

It was not immediately clear what sentence the soldier could face if convicted. The soldier convicted in the 2004 case was sentenced to eight years in prison, though he was freed after five.

The shooting has polarized Israel. The country's defense minister, its military chief and other top officials called it contrary to the army's values. That outcry in turn kicked up a torrent of support for the soldier, who claims he feared the attacker was carrying an explosive belt.

Right-wing politicians have rushed to the soldier's defense, with many Israelis calling his actions appropriate for a country reeling from months of Palestinian attacks. Military service is mandatory for most Israeli Jews, and young soldiers are often seen with great sympathy.

A rally supporting the soldier is scheduled for Tuesday night in Tel Aviv, with top Israeli musicians due to perform. One of those musicians, Eyal Golan, dropped out of the event Monday because he did not want to appear to be coming out against the military chief. The army is the country's most respected institution among Israeli Jews.

Yohanan Plesner, head of the Israel Democracy Institute, said such a rally was an affront to the military. He said most soldiers act with "proper ethical norms." He said the demonstration "erodes the very values on which the army stands."

The indictment came hours after the Israeli military said it had discovered and destroyed a tunnel from Gaza into Israel  the first one to be discovered since Israel's 2014 war with Gaza's ruling Islamic militant Hamas movement.

Israeli troops detected the tunnel's exit several days ago, according to military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, who said the tunnel is believed to have been built after the war. It stretched several hundred meters (yards), was lined with cement and outfitted with electricity, ventilation and rail tracks to cart away dirt from digging, he said.

In the 2014 war, Israel destroyed more than 30 Hamas tunnels under the border.

Hamas has vowed to rebuild the tunnel network. This year, 14 people died in Gaza while digging tunnels aimed at attacking Israelis or hiding weapons and rocket launch sites, and Israeli officials estimate there are 800 Gazans working as diggers.

Israelis living near the Gaza Strip have reported hearing digging sounds under their homes in recent months.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel has achieved a "global breakthrough in the ability to locate tunnels," and the government was investing considerable capital in countering the threat.

"This is an ongoing effort that will not end overnight," he said.

The Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said the newly discovered and destroyed tunnel was "just a drop in the ocean of what the resistance has prepared to defend its people, free its sanctuaries and prisoners." (ags)
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Linkedin (Associated Press) Milan  Tue, April 19, 2016

Exactly one year after a fishing boat crowded with smuggled migrants capsized, sinking to the Mediterranean Sea floor with some 800 people trapped inside, Italy is launching efforts to raise up the ship and bring it to a Sicilian port.

Italian naval ships were setting sail Monday evening from Sicily for the shipwreck site. There, they will determine how best to lift the wreck, which still contains bodies, from a depth of 360 meters (nearly 1,200 feet). It will then be towed to the Sicilian port of Augusta in an operation expected to take the rest of the month.

The Italian navy has already recovered 169 bodies found near the wreck, after Italy's premier vowed to recover the corpses out of respect for the dead.

A memorial service was held for the victims in Catania, Sicily, at a cemetery where a monument to the victims was erected last year. Officials expressed indignation at reports, still unconfirmed, of yet another shipwreck in the Mediterranean with possibly hundreds of victims trying to reach Italy from northern Africa.

"Exactly one year after the biggest disaster in the history of migration in the Mediterranean in the new millennium, we are experiencing an absurd replay," Catania Mayor Enzo Bianco was quoted by the news agency ANSA as saying. "Europe and the world should not be distracted from yet another terrible tragedy."

Two suspected smugglers, a Syrian and a Tunisian, are on trial in Sicily for the April 18, 2015, wreck, facing multiple counts of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and aiding illegal immigration.

Catania prosecutors said in a statement Monday that systems put in place after another set of tragedies  two deadly shipwrecks off the coast of Lampedusa in October 2013  enabled the speedy identification and prosecution of the suspects. (ags)
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Linkedin Ayomi Amindoni (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, April 19, 2016

President Joko Jokowi Widodo says his governments insistence on applying the death penalty is due to growing drug crimes in Indonesia, which have reached alarming levels.

The President says Indonesia wants Germany to understand that the countrys stance on the death penalty is related to the emergency status of drug abuse in the country.

Jokowi discussed the issue of the death penalty during his meeting with German President Joachim Gauck at the Presidents office in Berlin on Monday, local time.

About 40 to 50 Indonesian citizens die every day from drug abuse, Jokowi said as quoted in a statement released by the Presidents communications team. This is why the death penalty remains a part of Indonesian law, he added.

Although the government maintained the existence of the death penalty, Jokowi said his administration ensured that its implementation was done carefully and legal rights were afforded to death-row convicts.

During the meeting, Jokowi and Gauck also discussed peace and security in both countries. Jokowi claimed that Indonesia was an example of how Islam, democracy and tolerance could go hand in hand. He said that despite being the most populous Muslim country in the world, Indonesia had managed to develop democracy and tolerance.

Commenting on the ongoing territorial dispute over the South China Sea, Jokowi emphasized the importance of peace and stability in the region. He said no country could benefit from an unstable region.

In his statement, President Gauck said Jokowi was a progressive President who had moved Indonesias politics and economy forward. He also appreciated Indonesias role in contributing to peace and stability in the Middle-East.

After his meeting with President Gauck, Jokowi visited a vocational education training center in Siemenstadt, a city built by Siemens AG, the largest engineering company in Europe. Jokowi is visiting Germany to boost economic cooperation in trade and investment and to strengthen cooperation in vocational education between the two countries. (ebf)
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Linkedin (Associated Press) Valletta  Tue, April 19, 2016

Malta's government has survived a no-confidence motion filed by the opposition Nationalist Party after it was revealed that the health and energy minister has a company in Panama.

A 13-hour session on Monday concluded with a 38-31 vote to defeat the measure.

Minister Konrad Mizzi, also the ruling Labour Party's deputy leader, has admitted to having a company in Panama that is held by a trust in New Zealand.

He has commissioned an independent tax audit to prove he has done nothing wrong, and has said that the company will be closed after the tax investigation is concluded.

Before the vote, opposition leader Simon Busuttil said the prime minister was "in denial." Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said the government had committed mistakes, but its achievements outnumbered its errors by far. (ags)
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Linkedin Haeril Halim (The Jakarta Post) Berlin  Tue, April 19 2016

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has appealed to President Joko Jokowi Widodo to abolish capital punishment in Indonesia, following Jakartas decision last year to execute a number of convicted drug traffickers.

Merkel expressed Germanys aspiration during her meeting with Jokowi at the Chancellery in Berlin in which she and Jokowi discussed human rights issues, especially in Papua and Aceh.

It is expected that Indonesia will take the stance with that of Germany [on the death penalty], Merkel responded to a question raised by reporters during a press conference after the closed-door meeting.

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KYIV. April 19 (Interfax-Ukraine)  Almost half of Ukrainians support the idea of visa-free travel to EU member states, while 20% of respondents are against welcoming refugees where they live, according to a poll conducted by SocioStrem AG.

"Some 49% of those interviewed said visa-free travel to Europe "important," 25% said it was "not important" and 26% found it "difficult to say," according to SocioStrem AG expert Ivan Kolodiy, who spoke about the poll during a press conference hosted by Interfax-Ukraine news agency on Monday.

Kolodiy said among those who think visa-free travel is "important" 55% are willing to move to EU for an extended period (35% for work, 5% for studies and 10% for permanent residence).

Some 69% were against - or completely opposed to - accepting Syrian refugees, with only 10% of those polled willing to accept refugees in population centers. Some 10% agreed to welcome refugees, but not where they live. Only 8% of those polled said they would be willing to host refugees if they are Christian, while 3% found it "difficult to say."

Most of those interviewed said the (negative) results of the Dutch referendum were influenced by the ineffectiveness of Ukraine's government. Some 31% of those surveyed said reforms in Ukraine had not achieved results, 18% blamed Ukraine's government for failing to inform Dutch voters (about the situation in Ukraine) and 22% blamed the negative outcome of the plebiscite on the "unwillingness of the Dutch to accept migrants." Some 10% blamed Russia for the result, 7% blamed EU bureaucracy and 2% gave other reasons. Some 11% of those polled replied "difficult to say."

As for (Ukraine's) relations with Russia, 27% said Ukraine-Russia relations in respect to sanctions should be the same as between the West and the Russia. Some 16% of respondents favored the unilateral lifting of sanctions against Russia and 18% said sanctions should be removed on the condition hostilities in Donbas cease. Some 8% of those polled called for lifting sanctions against Russia only if Crimea is returned (to Ukraine), while 9% found it "difficult to say."

The survey was conducted by interview from April 6 to April 12, 2016. Some 40 pollsters interviewed a total of 1,203 people.

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Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, April 19, 2016

Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the largest Islamic outfit in Indonesia, has called on the government to uncover the truth behind the violence and repression that wracked the nation in 1965-1966.

According to NU executive Imam Aziz, the government needs to continue to promote dialogue and shed light on the tragedy, which saw the deaths of around 500,000 people and unjust imprisonment of millions accused of links to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

"The most important thing is to reveal all the facts, and then determine how to continue," Imam told thejakartapost.com on Tuesday, adding that revealing the truth would put an end to the glorification of the perpetrators, who regarded themselves as victors and heroes.

NU itself is alleged to have been implicated in the 1965-1966 communist purge, frequently clashing with PKI sympathizers across Java around that period.

In 2000, then president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid publicly apologized to the victims on behalf of Pemuda Ansor, NU's youth wing, for helping the military commit its atrocities; the apology remains controversial today.

While some of the organization's members maintain an uncompromising stance on the what they see as the necessity of the killings, a number of NU representatives have apologized on behalf of their predecessors in forums held in cities across Java, Imam said.

The apologies were a good step forward for NU, he added.

According to Imam, NU has yet to decide on a firm position in regard to the latest government efforts to settle past human rights abuses and reconcile with the victims, but the ulemas are expected to decide one soon.

"I hope NU will take a positive position , instead of further hampering [the reconciliation process]," Imam said.

The government for the first time in history organized an official event to openly discuss the 1965 massacre, involving the survivors, the government, the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), academics, and human rights groups.

The two-day event, entitled "Dissecting the 1965 tragedy", comprised discussions among stakeholders and aimed to provide recommendations for the government on the efforts to settle the past atrocities. (bbn)
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Linkedin Cristian Kovadloff and Allen Panchana (Associated Press) Manta, Ecuador  Tue, April 19, 2016

Rescuers are in a race against time to find survivors from a powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake as the death toll from Ecuador's strongest earthquake in decades has risen above 400.

On Monday, teams from Ecuador and neighboring countries fanned out across the country's Pacific coastline to look for the dozens of people still missing.

In the port city of Manta, a group of about 50 rescuers working with sniffer dogs, hydraulic jacks and a drill managed to free eight people trapped for more than 32 hours in the rubble of a shopping center that was flattened by Saturday night's quake.

The first rescue took place before dawn, when a woman was pulled head first from a nearly 2-foot (70-centimeter) hole cut through concrete and steel. Firefighters applauded as she emerged from the debris, disoriented, caked in dust and complaining of pain but otherwise in good health.

Another uplifting scene played out in nearby Portoviejo, where a cellphone call to a relative from under the debris of a collapsed hotel led searchers to Pablo Cordova, the hotel's administrator. Once he was gingerly removed, he was immobilized and hauled away on a stretcher, his hands waving in the air in a sign of appreciation to cheering onlookers.

"Since Saturday, when this country started shaking, I've slept only two hours and haven't stopped working," said Juan Carranza, one of the firefighters leading the rescue effort in Portoviejo.

Despite such cheering moments, tragedy continued to mount. At the shopping center in Manta, authorities were working to free a woman they had found buried alive with a heavy concrete slab pinning her legs when an aftershock forced them to abandon the effort. When they returned the debris pile had moved and the woman was dead, said Angel Moreira, a firefighter coordinating the effort.

The government reported late Monday that the official death count had increased to 413 and said they expected the toll to rise further in the days ahead. Among the dead were an American and two Canadians.

Complicating rescue efforts is the lack of electricity in many areas, meaning noisy power generators must be used, making it harder to hear anyone who might be trapped beneath rubble.

Christian Rivera, the head of emergency services for the capital, Quito, said that depending on the circumstances a person without serious injuries can survive up to a week in such conditions.

"After that, there's a quick decline ... and the rescuers' work becomes very difficult," he said.

Foreign Minister Guillaume Long tweeted that 654 search experts from other nations were on the ground late Monday and that more were expected to arrive Tuesday  bringing to 13 the nationalities involved in the rescue.

The US has offered assistance but so far President Rafael Correa, a strong critic of US foreign policy in Latin America, has yet to respond publicly.

The leftist leader on Monday boarded a military helicopter to deliver water, food and other supplies to devastated areas.

He urged Ecuadoreans to remain united in what is likely to be a long rebuilding process that could cost billions of dollars. "The priority is to direct resources where there are signs of life," Correa said.

After a deadly earthquake in Chile in 2010, that South American country was able to get back on its feet quickly thanks to a commodities boom that was energizing its economy. But Ecuador must rebuild amid a deep recession that has forced austerity on the OPEC nation's finances. To assist in the recovery effort, Ecuador plans to draw down on some US$600 million in credit lines from the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and other multilateral lenders.

Manta, a thriving port city, is among the areas hit hardest by the earthquake. Power cables lie in city streets and electricity remains out in many neighborhoods. Among the many building flattened by the shaking was a control tower at the airport that was home to US anti-narcotics missions in South America until Correa kicked the Americans out.

As humanitarian aid begun trickling in, long lines formed as people sought to buy bottled water. Many residents are sleeping outdoors in makeshift camps or in the street cuddled next to neighbors.

Spain's Red Cross said as many as 5,000 people might need temporary housing because of destroyed homes and 100,000 need some sort of aid.

___

Associated Press writer Cristian Kavadloff reported this story in Manta and AP writer Allen Panchana reported from Portoviejo. AP writers Joshua Goodman and Jacobo Garcia in Bogota, Colombia, Alan Clendenning in Madrid and Gonzalo Solano in Quito, Ecuador, contributed to this report.
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Linkedin Nani Afrida (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, April 19 2016

Indonesia will not join a Saudi Arabia-led military coalition to combat the Islamic State (IS) militant group in the Middle East, as doing so would violate the 1945 Constitution.

Saudi Arabia has asked us to join the coalition and fight against IS, but we cant. Our law does not permit it, Defense Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu said on Monday.

Last week, Ryamizard said, representatives of the Saudi kingdom visited him and asked Indonesia to join the coalition, which comprises Islamic or Muslim-majority countries from Asia and Africa.

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Linkedin (Associated Press) Beijing  Tue, April 19, 2016

Taiwan says its delegation was ejected from a meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's steel committee after China complained, part of an apparent hardening of Beijing's attitude toward the island it claims as its own territory.

Taiwan is only an observer rather than a member of the OECD due to China's campaign to isolate it diplomatically. It was participating as a dialogue partner in the meeting held Monday in Belgium to discuss excess steel capacity.

However, the Chinese delegation demanded the Taiwanese leave because the delegates' ranks were not senior enough, Taiwan's official Central News Agency said Tuesday.

CNA cited Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Eleanor Wang as saying that claim wasn't valid because Taiwan had participated in previous meetings at the same level and in the same capacity.

"Strong protests" had been lodged against China, Belgium and the OECD over the ejection, CNA said without giving details.

Taiwan and China recently disagreed over Kenya's deportation of 45 Taiwanese wire fraud suspects to China, with Taiwan saying Beijing had violated a tacit understanding under which both sides agreed not to interfere in the legal affairs of their citizens abroad.

China said it had jurisdiction because the victims of the scammers were residents of mainland China. Officials claimed also that Taiwan hadn't sufficiently punished the perpetrators of previous such scams.

Facing intense public pressure, Taiwanese officials managed subsequently to convince Malaysia to deport a separate group of Taiwanese criminal suspects to Taiwan despite Beijing's request that they be sent to China. With no arrest warrants issued against them, Taiwanese police had no choice but to release the group after their arrival, prompting outrage in China's state media.

Taiwan's Justice Ministry said 10 officials from the police and agencies responsible for contacts with China would travel to Beijing on Wednesday to negotiate over the fate of the 45 and seek ways to boost cooperation in fighting cross-border crime.

China's moves are widely seen an attempt to assert its claims to sovereignty over the island and legal authority over its residents. The sides split amid civil war in 1949 and China has long sought to isolate Taiwan diplomatically by preventing it from maintaining formal ties with most countries, including Malaysia and Kenya. China's economic clout lends it diplomatic influence.
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Linkedin Ayomi Amindoni (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 20, 2016

The Financial Service Authority (OJK) will encourage the financial sector to expand funding in the tourist sector, especially to support the development of 10 new tourist destinations in Indonesia.

The OJK and the Tourism Ministry have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop tourist destinations through expanding the role of the private financial sector. The OJK and the Tourism Ministry are eyeing 20 million foreign visitors by 2019.

The partnership allows non-bank financial institutions such as multi-finance companies, insurance companies, pension funds and the capital markets to finance tourist projects, said OJK deputy commissioner for non-banking supervision Dumoly F. Pardede.

"In the scheme, potential investment could reach around Rp 10 trillion," he said, explaining that the financial sector would cover tourist businesses, special economic zones (KEKs), travel agencies and life insurance for travelers.

The Indonesia Financial Services Association will follow up on the MoU by signing an agreement with the Indonesian Hotels and Restaurants Association on the financing of tourist destinations on April 20 in Bali.

The ten new prioritized destinations are Lake Toba, Belitung, Tanjung Lesung, Thousand Islands, Borobudur Temple, Mount Bromo, Mandalika, Lombok, Komodo Island, Wakatobi National Park and Morotai.

Tourism Minister Arief Yahya said there was potential investment of Rp 10 trillion from the private sector, or 10 percent of the total investment required for the development of the 10 new tourist destinations.

The government has allocated Rp 100 trillion for the development of infrastructure and basic facilities for the 10 new destinations. "In total, Rp 200 trillion is needed to develop the 10 destinations," he said.

Indonesia, according to Arief, needs an additional 120,000 hotel rooms, 15,000 restaurants, 100 recreational parks, 100 diving operators, 100 marinas and 100 KEKs.

He further said the government considered tourism to be a leading sector in the economy because of its contribution to national economic growth and foreign exchange earnings.

President Joko Widodo expects tourism to contribute 15 percent to gross domestic product, generate foreign exchange of Rp 240 trillion, and create jobs for 13 million people. (ags)
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Linkedin (The Star/ANN) George Town, Malaysia  Tue, April 19, 2016

Two Indonesians were gunned down in a shootout with the police at Mount Erskine in Penang, Malaysia, after they committed a robbery.

Two accomplices, however, managed to escape during the 4:30 a.m. incident Monday.

The gang had earlier robbed a house in Lengkok Halia, some 1.3 km away from the scene of the shootout.

Penang police chief Comm Datuk Abdul Ghafar Rajab said a patrol car was dispatched to the house after the police were alerted to the robbery at about 2:30 a.m.

After a short chase, we managed to stop the suspects near a Chinese cemetery in Jalan Mount Erskine.

Just as our officers were alighting from the patrol car, the robbers came out and fired at them.

Two of the suspects were shot dead in self-defense while two others fled into the cemetery, he told a press conference at the Penang police headquarters.

Comm Abdul Ghafar said his officers were not hurt during the shootout, but their car bonnet was hit by two bullets.

We recovered a semi-automatic pistol with three live bullets at the scene.

We also found a black bag with cash, jewelry and five mobile phones at the cemetery, he said, adding that a crowbar, a steel cutter, a parang, a screwdriver, masks and other equipment were seized.

Comm Abdul Ghafar said the car was reported stolen in August 2015.

We believe the Indonesian gang had been involved in at least 25 robbery cases since early 2015.

I do not want to disclose too many details of the latest robbery as there are two suspects still at large, he said.

The case is investigated under Section 307 of the Penal Code.
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Linkedin Jennifer Peltz (Associated Press) New York, United States  Tue, April 19, 2016

The Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for documenting the use of slave labor in Southeast Asia to supply seafood to American tables  an investigation that spurred the release of more than 2,000 captive workers.

The Los Angeles Times was awarded the breaking news prize for its coverage of the shooting rampage by husband-and-wife extremists that left 14 people dead in San Bernardino, California, and The Washington Post received the national reporting award for an examination of killings by police in the US.

Besides recognizing some of the biggest national and international stories of the year, the awards spotlighted deep dives into a chilling rape case, the long arc of school segregation, and the mistreatment of psychiatric patients. The New Yorker was honored in the criticism and feature writing categories, which only recently were opened to magazines.

The New York Times won for international reporting for detailing the plight of Afghan women, while the Times and Thomson Reuters both took the breaking news photography prize for images of refugees. The Times' reporter on the Afghan story, Alissa J. Rubin, said she was "overwhelmed" to see the work recognized.

The Boston Globe also won two awards: the feature photography prize for pictures showing the life of a poor, 6-year-old boy who survived a horrific beating by his mother's boyfriend, and the commentary award for Farah Stockman's work on the legacy of school busing in the city.

The Tampa Bay Times and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune received the investigative reporting prize for demonstrating that years of budget and staff cuts and overall neglect had resulted in a dramatic uptick of violence in Florida's mental hospitals.

The Tampa Bay Times also won in local reporting for detailing the harmful effects of ending school integration in Pinellas County, Florida. After the newspaper reported that the school board failed to provide promised resources to schools with mostly black students, officials increased funding and teacher training.

ProPublica and The Marshall Project won for explanatory reporting for exploring a rape case in which authorities initially didn't believe the victim, prosecuted her for lying, and years later came to realize she was telling the truth.

Marshall Project reporter Ken Armstrong saluted the woman's courage in telling her painful story and marveled that the 17-month-old news site had landed the prize.

"It was just really, really cool to think about what we've done in so little time," he said.

The New Yorker was awarded the feature reporting prize for a story on the enormous Cascadia fault line under the Pacific Ocean, while the magazine's Emily Nussbaum won in the criticism category for her TV reviews. Magazines became eligible for the criticism award this year and the feature writing prize last year.

Nussbaum tweeted her thanks to The New Yorker "for letting me mouth off" and "think out loud."

In editorial writing, John Hackworth of Sun Newspapers of Charlotte Harbor, Florida, was honored for his pieces about a deadly assault on an inmate by guards. Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee took the editorial cartooning prize, with judges praising his "wry, rueful perspectives" and "sophisticated style."

The awards marked the centennial of the Pulitzers, American journalism's highest honors. The prizes are also given in arts categories, where the drama prize went to "Hamilton," the hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton that has become a Broadway sensation.

AP journalists Margie Mason, Robin McDowell, Martha Mendoza and Esther Htusan chronicled how men from Myanmar and other countries were being imprisoned, sometimes in cages, in an island village in Indonesia and forced to work on fishing vessels. The stories also detailed the use of slave labor in processing shrimp.

The project took well over a year and involved tracking slave-caught seafood to processing plants that supply supermarkets, restaurants and pet stores in the US.

"If Americans and Europeans are eating this fish, they should remember us," Hlaing Min, 30, a runaway slave from the Indonesian island, told The AP. "There must be a mountain of bones under the sea."

The stories, photos and video led to freedom for thousands of fishermen and other laborers, numerous arrests and seizures of millions of dollars in goods.

AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll commended all of AP's journalists, saying they "stand up for people who don't have a voice" and "use the tools of our craft to inform the world and, occasionally, right wrongs that need to be righted."

The award was the news cooperative's 52nd Pulitzer and its first for public service.

Htusan, a native of Myanmar, said: "The best prize is that all the men from my country who were trafficked came back home."

The Post, meanwhile, explored an issue that has prompted protests and debate around the US in recent years. The newspaper found that in 2015, on-duty police officers shot and killed 990 people nationwide  and that unarmed black men were seven times more likely to die at the hands of police officers than unarmed whites.

The story also found that FBI statistics on deadly police shootings were unreliable and incomplete. The bureau has since pledged to compile and publish more data.

"It was a very simple idea: How many people were being killed by the police each year, and why don't we, as taxpayers, know that?" said Wesley Lowery, a 25-year-old reporter on the project.

Established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, the prizes were first given out in 1917. Public service award winners receive a gold medal; the other awards carry a prize of US$10,000 each.

___

Associated Press writers Adam Geller, Deepti Hajela and Jake Pearson in New York, Tamara Lush in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Ben Nuckols in Washington and contributed to this report.
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Linkedin Kristen Gelineau (Associated Press) Sydney, Australia  Tue, April 19, 2016

Australia's prime minister said on Tuesday he expects to call a rare early election, with the nation likely to head to the polls in July amid waning popularity for the ruling conservative party.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's comments all but confirmed that Australia was on track to hold its first early election  called a "double dissolution" because both the House of Representatives and the Senate are dissolved  since 1987.

Turnbull, whose administration is scheduled to deliver its first annual budget to Parliament on May 3, has until May 11 to officially announce an early election. He had previously said he would call for a double dissolution if the Senate failed to pass government legislation that would create a construction industry watchdog. The Senate rejected the bill for the second time on Monday, providing the trigger Turnbull had been waiting for.

"My intention is after the budget, at an appropriate time after the budget has been delivered, I will be asking the governor-general to dissolve both houses of the parliament for an election which I expect to be held on the second of July," Turnbull told reporters.

A typical election, in which the entire House of Representatives and half the Senate go to the polls, can be held any time from Aug. 6 until Jan. 14, 2017. A double dissolution can be called earlier to break a legislative deadlock after the Senate has twice rejected a bill passed by the House.

Turnbull's move comes shortly after an opinion poll showed the government trailing the opposition party for the first time since he took over as leader last year. The Newspoll published in The Australian newspaper earlier this month found that support for Turnbull's conservative coalition was behind the center-left Labor Party 49 percent to 51.

The poll was a blow to the ruling party's confidence as it prepares to campaign for a second three-year term in office. The coalition was lagging behind Labor in opinion polls for more than a year until Turnbull replaced the unpopular Tony Abbott as prime minister in September in a bid to boost the party's ratings.

The government did see an immediate boost in popularity under Turnbull, but the recent Newspoll shows his honeymoon with voters may be ending.
KYIV. April 19 (Interfax-Ukraine) - About half of the Ukrainian population supports the idea of a visa-free regime with the European Union, but oppose the acceptance of refugees in the country, as evidenced by the data of sociological research conducted by SocioStream AG.

"Some 49% of respondents consider the introduction of a visa-free regime with the EU important, 25% not important, while 26% failed to express certain opinions," member of the advisory council of SocioStream AG Ivan Kolodiy said at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine.

According to him, among those who consider the introduction of a visa-free regime important some 55% intend to move to the EU for a long time (work - 35%, education - 5%, permanent residence - 10%).

At the same time, 69% of respondents are against or strongly against receiving Syrian refugees. Some 10% are ready to accept refugees in their community, 10% agree to accept refugees but not in their settlement. Some 8% of people polled are ready to accept refugees in their locality under the condition they are Christians, while 3% failed to say exactly.

With regard to relations with Russia, 27% of respondents believe that relations between Ukraine and Russia in matters of sanctions should be the same as between Western countries and Russia. Some 22% of respondents consider it is necessary to terminate all relations with the Russian Federation. At the same time, 16% of persons polled support the full lifting of sanctions against Russia, while 18% support the cancellation of sanctions under the condition of ending the war in Donbas, 8% of respondents support lifting sanctions under the term of returning Crimea, while 9% failed to say exactly.

The survey was conducted by interviews from April 6 to April 12, 2016. Some 1,203 people were polled. Some 40 interviewers were involved in a field study.
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Linkedin (The Star/ANN) Petaling Jaya, Malaysia  Tue, April 19, 2016

The Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam) is concerned about the lack of any specific provision prohibiting child marriages in the amendments to the Child Act 2001.

The commission urged the Government to amend all domestic laws to raise the legal age of marriage for all to 18 years.

This is to be in compliance with the Child Act which defines children as those below the age of 18, Suhakam chairman Tan Sri Hasmy Agam said in a statement Monday.

Amendments to the Act was passed by the Dewan Rakyat on April 6 and will be tabled at the Dewan Negara for approval.

Suhakam also noted that the amended Act omitted any specific provisions against child pornography.

At present, there are no specific penal laws in Malaysia to cover holistically the issue of child pornography.

Hasmy urged the Government to consider introducing specific provisions under the Child Act or the Penal Code, to address the issue of child pornography.

This was in light of Malaysias obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography 2000.
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Linkedin (Associated Press) Manila  Tue, April 19, 2016

The front-runner in the Philippine presidential campaign has apologized for a remark he made about wanting to rape an Australian missionary who was assaulted and killed by prisoners in 1989.

The comment by Mayor Rodrigo Duterte of southern Davao city sparked a storm of criticism ahead of the May 9 election.

Duterte issued an apology Tuesday, saying "sometimes my mouth can get the better of me." He added that he had "no intention of disrespecting our women."

Duterte said at a campaign stop last week that the victim, one of five missionaries killed during a hostage-taking at a prison, was "so beautiful," and as mayor he "should have been the first" to rape her.

Rival candidates, the Australian ambassador and women's groups slammed Duterte for the remark.
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Linkedin Muguntan Vanar (The Star/ANN) Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia  Tue, April 19, 2016

The Federal Governments move to recognize the racial categories of Sabah and Sarawak natives is justified and long overdue because they do not want to be identified as "lain lain" in official forms.

Native-based Momogun National Congress (MNC) president Datuk Henrynus Amin said official recognition for Sabah and Sarawak natives in official forms is a welcome development for the indigenous people of the two states.

He said separate identities for the various natives in official forms will be the next right step towards giving them national recognition.

"There is a need for national recognition of the various native communities," he said in referring to the call in Sarawak, where Dayaks want to be recognized as "Dayak" in the official forms.

However, he said that while MNC expects separate categories for Sarawak and Sabah natives, the Federal Government must retain "lain lain" for other undefined ethnic minorities in the states.

Henrynus felt that dropping the "lain lain" category altogether could be an overreaction and counter-productive.

He said doing away with "lain lain" would defeat the ability to categorize racial minorities or undefined groups such as naturalized Indonesians, Filipinos and Europeans.

"In the case of Sabah, if 'lain lain' were to be dropped, where would you put non-native Filipino Bajau or Visaya, Indonesian Bugis or Tatur or Timorese, etc, who are naturalized citizens, in official forms?" he said.

Though Sarawak natives of various groups have asked to be categorized as Dayak, he said he is not aware of any similar initiative in Sabah for the Dusunic, Murutic and Paitanic speech community, who collectively come under the Momogun or indigenous people of Borneo.
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Linkedin (Associated Press) Kuala Lumpur  Tue, April 19, 2016

Malaysia Airlines says CEO Christoph Mueller will leave his job in September, way ahead of the end of his three-year contract, due to his "changing personal circumstances."

It says Mueller has expressed his interest to stay as a non-executive director. The airline said in a statement Tuesday that it has begun searching for a new CEO from a pool of internal and external candidates.

Mueller, a turnaround veteran, formally began his job in May last year to oversee a US$1.56 billion overhaul that included cutting 6,000 jobs and axing unprofitable routes.

Mueller said "personal reasons will make it difficult for me to complete my full term," without elaborating. He said the airline is back on the right track for growth.
Community Board 3s liquor permit committee last night balked at supporting a wine and beer license for a new restaurant at 45 Avenue B, citing the operators ties to an infamous night club. Much of the conversation centered on the man who wasnt there, Sameh Jacob, former co-owner of Le Souk. While no one mentioned it last night, Jacob was just appointed as a member of Community Board 3.

The applicant is Lamia Funti, manager of Le Souk, now located at 510 LaGuardia Place. She outlined plans to open Lamias Fish Market, a restaurant and retail fish store with seating for 160 people. It would be located in Le Souks former Avenue B space, which has been vacant for the past seven years. The State Liquor Authority canceled the clubs permit in 2009, citing overcrowding and other health and safety issues. Funti is married to to Marcus Andrews, Sameh Jacobs brother and business partner.

Members of the East 4th Street Avenue A to B Block Association spoke out against the application. Funti said her husband and brother-in-law have absolutely nothing to do with the new business, although Marcus Andrews owns the building. The local residents werent buying it.

A leader of the block association, Frank Macken, said, Personally, I dont see how we could possibly support this application, given the history of the family involved. Mark Hannay, the associations co-chair, cited violent incidents at the new location in the West Village. They include an episode last summer in which a man was stabbed in the face with a sharp object during a late night altercation.

In a memo to the board, Hannay mentioned another restaurant owned by Marcus Andrews, Falucka on Bleecker Street. He said Community Board 2 had voted to deny a liquor license renewal for the location, because the venue was being run contrary to its approved method of operation. Other residents talked about the lengthy struggle against Le Souk on Avenue B, which infuriated neighbors with its loud, unruly and sometimes violent crowds.

Committee Chairperson Alex Militano went into detail regarding Sameh Jacobs legal troubles. News reports and court records show he was sentenced in 2014 to two years in prison for using structured account transfers from his restaurants to purchase real estate. Federal prosecutors accused Jacob of making cash deposits in small batches to illegally circumvent bank reporting laws. Once he was convicted, said Militano, he clearly changed the ownership of 45-51 Avenue B LLC.

During questioning from Militano, Funti said Jacob isnt involved in the new venture in any way. He doesnt even know the menu or the concept or anything, she explained. As for her husband, Marcus Andrews, Funti said hes simply her landlord on Avenue B and has no involvement in the new project. Asked if Andrews owns Falucka, Funti said, No. [His name is listed on the liquor permit on file with the State Liquor Authority].

The Manhattan Borough Presidents office has not yet released the names of this years community board appointees. But during a Community Board 3 meeting last week, Chairperson Gigi Li named the new members. They included Sameh Jacob. The borough president selects board members and oversees the screening process.

As for the current permit application, Militano acknowledged that the State Liquor Authority typically approves wine and beer permits, even when local communities object. But in this case, she told Funti, I think (theres) a sufficient history for the SLA to not grant you a beer/wine license. Committee members agreed, voting to deny the application.
An employee shows two commemorative gold bars in Beijing. [File Photo: Xinhua]

China will launch a new contract today to set a "benchmark" price for gold bullion in the world's biggest producer and consumer of gold, as part of efforts to increase its influence in pricing of the precious metal.

The yuan-denominated gold fix will be launched on the Shanghai Gold Exchange this morning, with the benchmark price at 257.97 yuan (US$39.83) per gram, said a statement released by the exchange yesterday.

Eighteen banks and bullion traders have been chosen as initial market makers for the fix, including 10 Chinese lenders, Standard Chartered Bank, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group and six domestic and international bullion traders including Switzerland-based MKS Gold Ltd, the exchange said.

The world's top producer and consumer of gold has long been pushing to be a price-setter for bullion to enhance its influence on Asian and global markets.

The strategic move, coming a decade after China started to reform the gold market, of setting a new gold fix price also supports the internationalization of the yuan, an industry analyst from one of auction participants told Shanghai Daily yesterday. It will add pressure on the century-old London gold fix price.

China, which resumed its regularly reporting of bullion buying in July after a six-year gap, bought an impressive 103.9 tons in the second half of 2015, according to World Gold Council. China's gold reserves have ballooned by 708.2 tons since April 2009, the council added.

Hong Kong and Singapore have also recently launched exchange-traded contracts.
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BEIJING, April 18 -- China's deepening reforms must be "people-centric" and just, President Xi Jinping said at a meeting of the Leading Group for Overall Reform on Monday.

"A people-centric approach should be implemented in all areas of development, addressing people's demands and concerns, and giving them more tangible benefits," Xi said.

The president, also head of the leading group, was joined at the meeting by deputy heads Li Keqiang, Liu Yunshan and Zhang Gaoli, as well as other senior officials.

The meeting approved a document regulating business operations by family members of officials, a practice which has been extended to Beijing, Guangdong, Chongqing and Xinjiang on the basis of a trial in Shanghai.

Also approved were regulations on management of civil servants, regulations on administration of private schools, and regulations on the protection of judges and prosecutors, among others.

Attendees to the meeting said regulating the business activities of officials' spouses, children and children's spouses is a key effort to comprehensively and strictly govern the Party.

It was agreed at the meeting that dividing public servants into professional and administrative categories will make the management of civil servants more efficient and scientific.

The meeting approved the guidelines on the promotion of family doctors. It was agreed that establishing such a system will move more medical resources to the grassroots level and help achieve the goal of providing basic health services for everyone.

The elderly, patients of chronic diseases and mental health illness, would-be mothers, children, the disabled, among other groups, will be among the first to have their own contracted family doctors, according to the meeting.

The meeting approved the guidelines on speeding up the establishment of a social credit system. The attendees agreed that credit related information should be disclosed and shared across agencies and localities, so that an across-the-board mechanism can be established to punish the discredited and award the credit-worthy.

The meeting approved the guidelines on strengthening the party's presence in private schools, the regulations on the registrations of private schools, and the regulations on the supervision and administration of for-profit private schools.

According to a statement released after the meeting, measures to protect judicial staff while they perform their duties should be strictly enforced. No group or individual should be allowed to request judges or prosecutors do things outside their duties.

"Judges and prosecutors can only be transferred, dismissed or demoted in accordance with legal procedures and based on legal reasons, and acts obstructing judicial activities or harming judicial staff and their next of kin with violence will be severely punished," the statement said.

The statement stressed that the core for supply-side structural reform and the overall reform is innovation and their ultimate goal is to create a new economic growth mechanism, calling for reform measures to push forward the progress in cutting overcapacity, de-stocking, de-leveraging.

While highlighting reforms for state-owned enterprises and the fiscal and taxation system, the statement said reform in social aspects that can improve people's livelihoods must be concretely implemented, citing employment, education, income and health.

"Focusing on people's diversified demands, we should advance reforms that will demand less from the people and give more to them, so that we may improve people's livelihood and relieve their concerns," the statement said.
Death penalty in severe cases not replaced by new interpretation, says top court judge

Officials who commit severe corruption crimes, such as taking a huge amount of bribes, may face a new sentence now  life imprisonment without parole. China Daily

Officials who commit severe corruption crimes, such as taking a huge amount of bribes, may face a new sentence now  life imprisonment without parole, according to an interpretation issued on Monday by the top judiciary authorities.

"The life sentence without parole is a new category of penalty for corruption, which means convicts given such punishment will spend the rest of their life in prison, no matter how well they behave while serving their sentences," said Pei Xianding, chief judge of the criminal tribunal under the Supreme People's Court.

In the past, a death sentence with a two-year reprieve could be commuted to a life sentence if the person convicted behaved well during the two years, and the sentence might be further cut if they continue to behave in prison, according to Pei.

But under the new interpretation, effective on Monday, convicts will not have a chance to leave prison if they are given the sentence, he said.

Life in prison without parole will be handed down in conjunction with a death sentence with a two-year reprieve, according to the interpretation by the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate.

"For some defendants, the death penalty is too heavy and a suspended death sentence too light, so we made the new sentence after research and discussion, in a move to ensure punishments will be in line with offenses," he said.

Pei stressed it does not mean there will be no death penalty in corruption cases.

"For those whose offenses meet the requirements of the death penalty, the courts will sentence them to death without hesitation," he added.
Premier Li and Beijing University students.

"Your topic is too broad," Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said to a Beijing University student upon learning that his thesis title was "The Role of General Transfer Payments in Local Public Spending." Premier Li suggested that the student choose a narrower topic.

Li chatted with students in the university's cafeteria about a number of subjects, including food prices at the canteen, student grants and oil production.

"Great undertakings have small beginnings," Premier Li told the students. "It is like the food we eat; whether a dish is good or bad comes down to the details."

Recalling his own time at Beijing University, Li, who graduated from here, said his economics professor's doctoral dissertation was a study of the financial situation of one fiscal year in one district of a city.

"The professor had a lot of very detailed research, including a wealth of information that few people had paid attention to. He even conducted a household survey," Li said to the students. "After working hard to analyze the financial situation of the district, he discovered some problems that really provoked him to think," added Li.

"With regards to [the thesis topic], since you do not know all the basic information, how will you conduct research and come up with an innovative perspective? Li asked the student. This reflects the current problem with education," Li continued. He believes many students' thesis and dissertation topics are too broad, which makes true innovation difficult.

Li suggested that the student closely examine the annual financial data of a specific county before continuing with other research.

Premier Li at Beijing University cafeteria.
After five years of construction, Asia's longest and highest bridge Longjiang Grand Bridge has finished closure in advance and passed load test on April 5. The 8,100-feet-long suspension bridge over Longjiang River, southwestern China's Yunnan province, will open to traffic on May 1, 2016.

The new bridge, connecting the cities of Baoshan and Tengchong, and going straight to Myanmar, hovers at a nail biting 920 feet above the valley below. It is the tallest and longest of its kind to be built across two mountains in Asia.

The central span of the bridge, which is the distance between the two main towers, will measure 3,924 feet and is only slightly shorter than that of the famous Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
Thousands of protesters rally outside the Capitol Hill in the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C., chanting slogans such as "one person, one vote," and "justice," while carrying banners and placards that read "If money is speech, then speech ain't free" on April 18, 2016. (CNS/Diao Haiyang)
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A Chinese court sentenced a former scientific researcher to death for espionage and selling state secrets. He has sold tens of thousands of copies of classified information to foreign spy agencies, including 90 top state secrets.

The man, named Huang Yu, was born on July 28, 1974 in Zigong, Sichuan province. He majored in computer science in college and worked for a Chinese traffic encryption institute since 1997.

The Institute is said to have provided secure communication service for the Communist Party of China and the Chinese military. Suspecting that he might be fired from his job because of his poor performance, Huang decided to start selling secrets at the age of 28.

One day, Huang contacted a foreign spy agency online to sell the confidential information he acquired at work, and he met a foreign spy in a hotel in a Southeast Asian country in June.

Before Huang was detained in 2011, he used his position to make copies of secret documents, including top military secrets. He met with foreign spies 21 times under the cover of attending conferences overseas. He received $700,000 in compensation over the course of 10 years.

Huang tried to convince his old colleagues to come in on the operation with him after he left the institute in 2004. He also used the access of his wife and brother-in-law to acquire confidential information. They were eventually caught by public security authorities in 2011.

Huangs wife was sentenced to five years in prison while his sisters husband received three, both for leaking national secrets. Another 29 people involved in Huang's operation were also punished.
PREAH VIHEAR, Cambodia, April 19 -- Chinese agro firm Rui Feng (Cambodia) International Company began operations at its 360-million-U.S.-dollar sugar production factory here on Tuesday after spending nearly two years for construction.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Bu Jianguo jointly inaugurated the factory, along with a 43,422-hectare sugarcane plantation.

"It is the largest sugar mill in Cambodia," Hun Sen said at the inauguration ceremony, which took part by more than 20,000 people including government officials, local authorities, residents and students.

The mill will produce nearly half-million tones of processed sugar a year for export mainly to Europe and China, he said, adding that the project has created more than 7,000 jobs.

"This huge investment clearly shows that investors have firm confidence in Cambodian People's Party-led government,"he said."This also reflects excellent relations and mutual trust between China and Cambodia."

According to the prime minister, so far, the Southeast Asian country has five sugar mills in Kratie, Kampong Speu, Koh Kong and Preah Vihear provinces.

Liu Feng, president of Rui Feng (Cambodia) International Company, said the firm has spent six years preparing land for the plantation and nearly two years building the sugar mill.

"The firm decided to invest in this mega-project after having seen that Cambodia has good political stability, full peace and favorable atmosphere for businesses,"he said at the ceremony.

The company would increase its investment in the project to 1 billion U.S. dollars by expanding sugarcane plantation, building an ethanol factory and a fertilizer plant, Liu added.

"The company is committed to turning (northern) Preah Vihear Province into the Asia's largest sugar supplier in the future."
2017 iPhone will use all glass casing and battery saving OLED screen

Apple's iPhone is set for the biggest redesign in its history it 2017, a new report has claimed.

KGIs Ming-Chi Kuo, a reliable Apple analyst, says the new handset will drop the aluminium casing for a new all glass casing.

It will also use an AMOLED screen, which are thinner and offer better picture quality than the mainstay liquid crystal display screens.

Apple has opened a production laboratory in northern Taiwan to develop new 'superthin' phone and watch displays for future products, it has been claimed.

Kuo believes that Apple will be moving to an all-glass enclosure, dropping aluminum completely as it will no longer appear 'modern or fresh' in 2017.

'Apple used glass for the iPhone 4/4s front and back, but this was sandwiched together with a stainless steel band,' said 9to5Mac.

'Its currently unclear how an iPhone could be constructed primarily out of glass.'

The reports point ot the fact this years handset, expected to be called the iPhone 7, will not see a radical overhaul - although it is expected to see the firm dump the headphone socket for a thinner phone.

The new glass phone will also feature a new AMOLED display panel, which will be thinner and lighter to compensate for the slight weight increase of glass compared with metal exteriors.

According to the Korean Herald, Samsung and Apple have reached a deal in which Samsung will supply around 100 million OLED display units to Apple beginning in 2017.

The deal is reportedly worth around $2.59 billion and the two companies are expected to maintain the agreement for at least three years as Samsung suplies 100 million 5.5-inch OLED displays.

Earlier this year it was claimed LG and Samsung are to spend over $10bn to create new OLED manufacturing plants to supple screens for Apple's iPhones.

In January, Apple reported little growth in iPhone sales last quarter and an expected downturn in the current quarter.

Japan's Nikkei newspaper first reported earlier this year that Apple plans to start using OLED screens for iPhones starting in 2018.

Earlier this month it was revealed Apple has opened a production laboratory in northern Taiwan to develop new 'superthin' phone and watch displays.

According to Bloomberg, the facility is Longtan has at least 50 engineers.

Apple has recruited from local display maker AU Optronics Corp. and Qualcomm Inc., which used to own the building, the people said.

'Engineers are developing more-advanced versions of the liquid-crystal displays currently used in iPhones, iPads and Mac personal computers, the people said,' according to Bloomberg.

'Apple also is keen to move to organic light-emitting diodes, which are even thinner and dont require a backlight.'

Apple began operating the lab this year as it aims to make products thinner, lighter, brighter and more energy-efficient, it is claimed.

It comes as the firm is expected to reveal a 'mini' iPhone with a 4inch screen on the 2st.

It is believed the second generation smartwatch will be thinner and have improved battery life.

It is then expected to go on sale in March, almost a year after the original went on sale.

Previous claims have said the iPhone 7 handset will be superthin.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims the iPhone 7, which is unlikely to launch until at least September 2016, will be the firm's thinnest handset to date at just 6mm thick.

This would put on a par with the iPod touch, and would be almost a millimetre thinner than the current iPhone 6.

Apple's original iPhone, released in 2007, was 12.3mm thick.

By comparison the current iPhone 6 is 6.9mm thick, while the larger iPhone 6 Plus is 7.1mm.

New screen technologies would allow Apple to develop radical flexible products, such as the rumoured 'iRing'

These devices are noticeably thinner than the iPhone 5S, which measures 7.6mm.

However, thinner devices are potentially more vulnerable to being broken and the iPhone 6 Plus, for example, was criticised for bending in the pockets of its owners due to its larger, thinner design.

The iPod touch is 6.1mm thick, but its screen is smaller than the iPhones - at just 4-inches.

It doesn't take a SIM card, meaning it can be thinner because it needs fewer internal components as the iPhone.

If Mr Kuo's claims are true, Apple's next-generation handset would be its thinnest yet, but it would still be significantly thicker than the thinnest phone in the world - Vivo's X5 Max.

Vivo's Android handset is just 4.75mm, while rival phone-maker Oppo's R5 is 4.85mm.

Samsung also has a super-thin phone called the Galaxy A8 which measures 5.9mm.

WHAT DOES OLED STAND FOR?

OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode.

Its panels are made from organic materials that emit light when electricity is applied to them.

As a result, OLED panels don't use a backlight meaning they are thinner than LCD displays.

OLEDs additionally have bright colours, brilliant contrasts and a wide-viewing angle.
An employee shows two commemorative gold bars in Beijing. [File Photo: Xinhua]

SHANGHAI, April 19 -- China launched its yuan-denominated gold benchmark on Tuesday in Shanghai as it seeks to secure more sway in the pricing of the precious metal.

The Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price (code: SHAU), is the quote for trading of 1kg, 99.99 percent purity bullion, denominated in the Chinese yuan and derived from multiple rounds of trading.

The benchmark was set at 257.97 yuan per gram on Tuesday, the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) said in a statement.

The benchmark also lays the foundation for shifting bullion trading in Shanghai from mostly spot to derivatives to increase the appeal of yuan-denominated bullion trading as financial instruments for both domestic and global investors.

SGE Chairman Jiao Jinpu said the launch of the benchmark offers the opportunity to develop bullion trading in China's financial markets and encourage more participation by global investors.

Standard Chartered Bank (China) Ltd. and ANZ Bank (China) Ltd. are among 12 fixing members for the benchmark trading. The other ten members are domestic banks.

The trading margin is set at 6 percent and transaction fees are exempted until June 30 this year.
Rogers Communications has reported lower year-over-year profits in the first quarter, citing among other reasons higher restructuring costs and an increase in the adjusted operating loss of its traditional media business.

The Toronto-based telecommunications giant said net income in the three months ending March 31 was $248 million or 48 cents per share, down from $255 million or 50 cents per share in the same 2015 period.

Adjusted net income, which excludes certain one-time items, was $263 million or 51 cents per share, down from $275 million or 53 cents in the prior-year period.

Revenue was $3.245 billion, up 2 per cent from $3.175 billion, reflecting growth of 5 per cent in its wireless operations and 2 per cent in business solutions. That was offset by a decline of 2 per cent in its cable business and 3 per cent in media.

Reporting after markets closed, Rogers said its lower consolidated adjusted operating profit largely reflected an increase in the adjusted operating loss of its traditional media businesses, which are facing pressure from a changing advertising landscape.

Net income was also impacted by higher restructuring costs for the company, which announced job cuts in the quarter affecting conventional TV, radio and publishing, as well as some back-office positions to help alleviate some of the pressure on its media business.

Rogers said it posted its best first-quarter wireless postpaid churn in more than five years, thanks among other things to improvements to the customer experience, president and CEO Guy Laurence said in a statement.

Overall, we delivered another quarter of revenue growth, along with continued improvements in key subscriber metrics, despite an intensely competitive quarter. With momentum in wireless, continued growth in Internet, and a clear path forward for our TV and media businesses, were well positioned to achieve our 2016 financial guidance.

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Move over Budget and Enterprise, get ready to compete with just about anybody who wants to use their vehicle to make some extra cash. Turo, a San Francisco-based company that is best described as an Airbnb for cars, has just launched in Canada.

The concept is simple. The company helps people rent their cars to strangers. Turo started out as RelayRides in 2009 and operates a peer-to-peer car marketplace that has rented thousands of cars for over 1 million days throughout its short history.

Our mission is to try to put the worlds cars to better use,says Andre Haddad, Turos CEO.

Canada is the companys first international expansion and the service will only be available in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta. As well, Canadians must be existing customers of Intact insurance or its subsidiary, Belair Direct. Intact has struck a deal to provide up to $2 million in commercial insurance for Turo users.

Consumers want to participate in services like Turo, says Stephanie Sorensen, director of external relations for Intact. We want to ensure that insurance coverage is available.

Turo creates a profile of the vehicle that is available on Turos website and app, with photos and information about the cost. Users have their choice of vehicles and afterward both sides can review and rate the experience. Both users and owners have to go through a screening process before being able to use the service.

For drivers, Turo has no membership fees and all they need to do is sign up. For people who would like to rent their cars, the vehicle needs be to less than 10 years old and have less than 200,000 kilometres on the clock, with some exceptions. There are more than 800 models available for rent, and drop off and pickup is often included.

Many users praise the personal connection created between owners, users and their vehicles. Haddad has rented several cars on the service, including a 2006 Porsche 911 model S that he says has been used for several special occasions including three engagements.

Turo offers a dynamic pricing model that suggests what users can charge, but the car owner ultimately decides how much. Turo takes a 25-per-cent cut. The company initially offered short-term rentals, but has found the longer-term rentals are more popular and focuses on them. On average, cars are rented for five days. Turo claims that prices are generally 30-per-cent lower than traditional rental car companies, and that the average active user who rents out their car makes $600 (U.S.) a month.

Insurance has been an issue. The company paid over $200,000 in fines to New York state because of violations of insurance laws, including false advertising and unlicensed activity. New York is the one U.S. state where Turo does not operate.

Josh Bilerman, who owns a web design company in Montreal, is a Turo fan. .

Ive used it numerous times. I like the simplicity of the website and the ability to see reviews of the car, he says. Youre able to get luxury cars, convertibles, whatever youd like.

He enjoys the convenience of dealing with the cars owner and making arrangements for pickup and drop off directly.

That flexibility has been way better than dealing with the hassle at rental car counters, he says.

Kyle Clark, 32, a video producer at a software company in Denver, has become a Turo super user. After trying the service two years ago to make some extra income on a single car, he now has eight vehicles on the service and is running it as a side business.

Clark borrowed money to buy the cars and says they are all paying for themselves. He expects them to be paid off in three years. One car had a minor fender bender, which the drivers personal insurance ended up covering. In another incident, his car was damaged in a hailstorm. Turos policy didnt cover the damage, but it did pay the $500 deductible. His personal insurer paid for the repair.

There are a few online Turo horror stories most of which relate to unsatisfying insurance outcomes. There are also complaints about the companys customer service.

Turo is not the only company in this space. Getaround is a similar type of service, which says on its website that Toronto may be unlocked as a market soon.

Heres a look at other ways to make some extra cash.

Cars

Airport parking can be pricey, so FlightCar, which operates at 12 U.S. airports, will put your car to use while youre off on a business trip or holiday. List your vehicle and in exchange youll get free parking and a car wash. If its rented by a member, youll make some extra cash.

Boats

Two U.S. companies  Boatbound and Sailo  have already launched, offering up sailboats, catamarans and even luxury yachts. Boatwyze, based in B.C., has a handful of vessels in Ontario.

Bikes

Is that mountain bike just gathering dust in the garage? Put it on Spinlister, which operates in Toronto. Owners set their prices, so hourly, daily or weekly rates can vary significantly. The website also offers up surfboards and ski equipment.

Clothes

Are your closets jammed with clothes that you dont wear or that dont fit any more? Poshmark, which only operates in the U.S. and its territories, lets individuals buy and sell their items on the website, with shipping via priority mail, with the buyer paying the cost.

Parking spot

Got a parking space and its not being used all the time? Rent it out. Companies like Rover and HonkMobile, which is running HonkQ in beta testing right now, serve as brokers, taking a commission on the space rental. Rent the spot when you wish, day or night.

DogVacay

Heading off on vacation? Turns out there are dog lovers who will happily take your pooch for a fee. Try the DogVacay service that pairs owners with sitterssome will watch your pet in your home, while others take in dogs at their homes.

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One of Canadas largest film studios has sold its east Toronto property to a major automaker.

Cinespace Film Studios has sold its Eastern Ave. facility to General Motors of Canada, film studio vice-president Jim Mirkopoulos confirmed Monday.

The studio hopes to move its east Toronto operations to city-owned property on the nearby Port Lands, he said. The move would not take place for a year, giving current clients time to finish production.

General Motors issued a news release late Monday confirming its plans for the facility, after repeated calls for comment were ignored earlier in the day.

The Toronto GM Mobility Campus would be a multi-use facility including office space, research and development facilities and a car dealership, the release said.

The neighbourhood has been a hotbed of redevelopment controversy since SmartCentres first proposed building a shopping centre, including a Walmart, on Eastern Ave. Toronto fought the plan and won at the Ontario Municipal Board. SmartCentres has since come back with a different proposal.

Councillor Paula Fletcher, who represents the ward, said in the GM release that she welcomed its proposal.

This is a major investment in our community by GM. We have fought long and hard for good jobs in our community and this will attract engineering, professional, high-paying jobs to this campus. It will also be a leading centre for green transportation and will allow the current film studio to be relocated from this site to bigger, better production facilities in the east end, Fletchers statement said.

Cinespace is moving out of its long-time premises at 721 Eastern Ave. in part because of the number of projects slated for the area, Mirkopoulos said.

The entire Eastern Ave.-Booth Ave.-Lake Shore corridor has a number of redevelopment projects happening. Clearly, we cant have heavy construction next to TV activity, he said.

The Eastern Ave. studio, one of three the company owns, has produced Heroes: Reborn, Rogue, Killjoys and Bitten, among other titles.

The company has previously complained that rival Pinewood Studios received preferential treatment from the city when it moved out of its premises at 629 Eastern Ave., now the site of the SmartCentres development.

Cinespace also has a large production facility in the west end, on Kipling Ave. But at least half its clients prefer the eastern location because its closer to downtown, he said.

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Customers believe in the promises made by brand-name companies. But hope turns to disappointment when expectations are dashed.

Here are a few stories of people whose faith in a company was restored after a media intervention.

Canadian Tire

John Webb bought a Mastercraft well pump for $300; he wanted a replacement on hand in case his 20-year-old well pump stopped working.

The new pump, which had a one-year warranty, was left unopened in the original packaging. When the old pump expired a few years later, he found the replacement was defective.

It would only draw water up the tank hose 10 to 12 inches and was full of air bubbles, said Webb, who lives in Severn, Ont., north of Orillia. The installer replaced it with a Meyers pump and the system worked as it should. We had water.

Both the Canadian Tire store in Orillia and the companys head office told him that the one-year warranty began on the purchase date. Though the pump had been used for only an hour, he was out of luck.

As a Canadian Tire customer since buying his first bicycle 70 years ago for a Toronto Star paper route, he said he was disturbed at the stores too bad, dont care attitude.

Stephanie Nadalin, a Canadian Tire spokeswoman, said she did care about keeping Webbs loyalty. He was happy to receive a $300 gift card, the same value as his faulty pump.

Enercare

Julius Gorys bought a tankless water heater in August 2009 for $5,079. He was told he had a 10-year warranty.

Last February, the water heater started to leak. Gallons of water were collected and dumped in a sink.

A service technician came to check it out. He was surprised at how much it was leaking, Gorys said in a letter to the company.

He was concerned about potential rust and damage to the electrical components, since the leak came from the heater component that sits on top of everything else inside the unit.

An Enercare supervisor denied his request for a replacement, saying the manufacturers warranty only allowed for repairs.

The repairs took a full day. Enercare had to order extra parts while at the family home because of water damage inside the tankless unit.

The day after I forwarded Gorys email to Enercare, he received a call saying the water heater would be replaced as a goodwill gesture.

HP Canada

Murray Rosenthal ordered a laptop computer and printer online. More than a week later, he had no information about his order.

These were in-stock items paid for with my credit card. Ive been waiting for HP to generate a tracking number so that I can wait for the items to be delivered, he said.

Ive called the call centre many times. Ive sent emails, but just receive a form email starting that my complaint is being looked into. The email is supposed to go to the president, but Im sure he never sees it.

Rosenthal received his computer and printer two weeks after placing his online order. But he wanted compensation for his time.

Our customer service team will connect with him to offer a credit, said Rafael Ruffolo, an HP Canada spokesman. I am still investigating to determine why he did not receive a tracking number for the order.

Rosenthal turned down HPs first offer of a $100 credit. The offer went up to $227 and he said he would accept $375.

I received a call from John Kelly, sales and marketing manager, who apologized profusely and honoured my request for compensation without any hesitation. I just wished Id received this level of attention when things unraveled a few weeks ago.

Equifax and TransUnion

Martin and Yukiko Jepil were renewing their mortgage. When their mortgage broker did a credit check, he found a mysterious $8,500 unpaid debt added to Yukikos report last year.

We tracked it down to a company in Sweden, where we lived 15 years ago. It was a dispute that was resolved before we left, Martin said.

We explained the details to Equifax and TransUnion and asked them to remove it. Neither credit bureau has done anything. Is a 15-year-old case from Europe even valid here?

The credit bureaus acted quickly after hearing that the couples mortgage renewal was at risk of being declined. They removed the Swedish debt from Yukikos report within days of hearing from the Star.

Please note, TransUnion does not knowingly report financial obligations owing to a company outside of Canada unless a judgment was obtained in a Canadian court, said spokesman David Blumberg.

If you challenge information on your credit report, the credit bureaus will investigate and try to clear up the dispute. If they cant resolve it, they let you add a short statement to your credit report explaining why you think the information is inaccurate.

Ellen Rosemans column appears Tuesdays in Smart Money. She deals with consumer issues involving large companies. You can reach her at eroseman@thestar.ca or send a message though her website, www.ellenroseman.com

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WASHINGTONU.S. Rep. Ted Lieu is asking for a congressional investigation after an episode of 60 Minutes in which his phone was hacked to show how easy it is.

In a segment that aired Sunday night, 60 Minutes purchased an iPhone in New York and sent it to Lieu in California. Lieu, who has a computer science degree from Stanford, agreed to use the phone as his personal device for a week.

60 Minutes then gave the phones number to a German company that looks for security flaws in technology, and two German hackers were able to easily listen to Lieus phone calls.

Lieu said that when he showed up to tape the segment in Washington, the hackers had told producers which hotel hed stayed at the night before.

It was really creepy that they knew where I was even though the GPS was turned off, he said by phone Monday.

The segment also shows different hackers demonstrating a technique that allowed them to access reporter Sharyn Alfonsis emails, ride-sharing account and credit card information when she got onto a fake wireless Internet network made to look like it belonged to the hotel where she was staying.

Lieu said hes always tried to be careful what he writes and says, but the 60 Minutes experience has him thinking about how many elected officials are using phones that might have been hacked. He also has been using encrypted messaging systems.

I always sort of thought that whatever I say on my phone or type in my computer ... other people will potentially see it, he said. Now its very real to me.

He mentioned in the segment that President Barack Obama recently had called him on his cellphone, as had other elected officials.

In a letter Monday, Lieu asked the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to investigate a network interchange service called Signaling System Seven, or SS7, which connects phone carriers worldwide and allows cellphone users to transmit information from text messages to bank account numbers.

Lieu said he wants the committee to look at how big the problem is, how it can be fixed and what could happen if it isnt. He pointed to the possibility that hackers could listen in on phone calls for stock trading secrets, foreign governments could hear conversations or rival political campaigns even could eavesdrop on strategy.

This flaw affects everybody. It affects daily life, he said. There are just thousands of ways this flaw affects commerce ... and national security. Im sure the Donald Trump campaign would love to know what the Ted Cruz campaign manager is saying on his cellphone.

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Donald Trump can prove me wrong with a paternity test.

Thats all it would take. A quick DNA check. He cranks open his jaw, something he does 148 times per hour anyway, and in darts a cheek swab. Soon after, mystery solved: we find out if hes really the biological father of Ivanka.

Me, Im not buying it anymore. Im done with this charade. This is one of the greatest political deceptions of all time and it stops here.

Genetically related? Donald and Ivanka dont seem like the same species. Ivanka is a field of roses. Donald is a weedy jequirity, an invasive perennial laced with bright red seeds that are lethally toxic. Ivanka is a hug. Donald is a razor blade. Ivanka is a cool breeze on a muggy night. Donald is a hurricane of crazy, huffing and puffing until he blows the free world down.

The striking contrast between Trump and his alleged daughter has now become a storyline. In a profile this weekend, the New York Times said Ivanka radiates disciplined poise and practiced reserve. Previous descriptions include reasonable, amicable, loyal, sweet level-headed and a delight.

The only way she could sound less like her alleged father is if Ivanka were also: an inspiration for women; close pals with Chelsea Clinton; a convert to Judaism who keeps kosher and observes the Sabbath; a gifted writer; a devoted spouse and friend; philosophical about the spiritual trappings of wealth.

Oh, wait. She is all of those things?

The more I see Donald and Ivanka on the campaign trail, the less familial they seem. Jot down the variances in how they blink, exhale, orient to loud sounds, smile, board escalators, wave and even flash the thumbs up.

You can barely see Donalds thumb, its so freakishly small.

Now consider this: if Ivanka were Donalds biological daughter, would he brag to Howard Stern about her great body? That seems odd. Would he confess on The View, If Ivanka werent my daughter, perhaps Id be dating her?

While incest jokes are never presidential, Id argue theres another explanation for these creepy outbursts: Donald knows Ivanka is not his daughter.

Since Trump is highly litigious and Im remarkably poor, I want to be careful before revealing the next part of my investigation. So I will borrow a disclosure model Trump used in 2011 while questioning the birthplace of Barack Obama.

As Trump told Fox News that year: (Obama) doesnt have a birth certificate. Now, he may have one, but theres something on that birth certificate  maybe religion, maybe it says hes a Muslim  I dont know.

Has anyone seen Ivankas birth certificate? Is it possible there is something on there  maybe it lists her real father, maybe it says she was born in Czechoslovakia, I dont know  that could cost Trump the Republican nomination, since shes easily the secret weapon in his campaign down the stretch?

Or, worse, jeopardize her own future bid for the White House?

Theres more, Im afraid. When she was a child, why did media stories spell her first name Ivancka, with a c thats since vanished? What is the significance of that lost letter? Could it help us identify her real father?

I entered variables into a database, searching for powerful men who may have secretly rendezvoused with Ivana Trump before daughter Ivanka was born in 1981.

Through geographic conflict or common sense, some names were quickly dismissed. Sylvester Stallone? Michael Bloomberg? Please. But as my search deepened, one name kept landing in the highly possible field. This man, based in Arkansas at the time, and the same age as Donald, had reason to visit New York starting in 1979.

This man also has a strange career gap between 1981 and 1983. And his own marital fidelity was once suspect.

Let me ask you something: Have you noticed how effortlessly Ivanka turns tough questions into something positive? Does the ratio of her grin-to-key messages remind you of anyone? Well, this is what Chelsea Clinton told Vogue about her friend Ivanka last year: Shes always aware of everyone around her and ensuring that everyone is enjoying the moment. Its an awareness that in some ways reminds me of my dad.

Chelsea and Ivanka are so close theyve been described as like sisters.

But what if we removed the like? What if that missing c stands for . . . Clinton?

There is only one way to find out. Donald Trump needs to have a paternity test and announce the results before the Republican convention in July. If we cant believe him about fatherhood, we cant believe him about anything.

Ivanka Trump? Theres just no way hes her dad.

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Police are investigating an unprecedented security breach at a Brockville-area childrens aid society after an electronic file containing the names of 285 families involved with Family and Childrens Services of Lanark, Leeds and Grenville was made available on Facebook.

The breach was discovered Monday at 1:42 p.m. after both a client and a community member called the society to complain that a link to the confidential report was posted on the Smiths Falls Swapshop Facebook page, executive director Ray Lemay told the Star Monday night.

The society doesnt know how long the link had been on the members-only page or if it has been shared more widely, he said.

Were looking into whether it has gone any further than that. But we are not sure at this point, Lemay said.

Publishing or otherwise identifying families involved with child protection agencies contravenes the provincial Child and Family Services Act and carries fines of up to $10,000 and three years in jail.

The names were part of a statistical report to the societys community board of directors on new cases between April and November 2015, Lemay said.

A link to the report was obtained by someone  likely a disgruntled client  who hacked the secure portal for board members on the societys website, he said. No staff or board members are suspected of the breach, he said.

Our suspicion, which is a fairly firm suspicion, is that it is a current client who is very disgruntled, very unhappy with us, he said. We have contacted the police. Our lawyer has sent a letter to the website owner as well as to this individual telling them what they are doing is, we think, illegal.

Staff will begin calling all 285 families to tell them about the privacy breach first thing Tuesday morning, Lemay added.

I apologize for this  we will act to ensure that this doesnt happen again. The children and families we serve have a right to privacy  and they deserve respect, Lemay said in a statement released Monday night. Moreover, that someone would inappropriately obtain, then post this document on the Internet purposefully, is deeply troubling. Furthermore, this action is likely in direct contravention to the Child and Family Services Act and directly harms the children and families we serve.

Because of the nature of our work, emotions regarding CAS can run high, Lemay added. That said, there is no excuse for a person to deliberately expose our clients in this way.

The society also takes responsibility for the security breach.

Obviously there was a lapse at our end. That portal was not secure enough. The information should simply not have been accessible, Lemay said in an interview. We acknowledge that. Theres no doubt about our mistake in this, too.

Lemay, who retired in 2014 as executive director of the Prescott-Russell childrens aid society after 30 years in the field, came out of retirement recently to lead the Lanark, Leeds Grenville society.

This is very much a first, as far as I can tell, he said of the incident.

The Ontario Association for Childrens Aid Societies, which represents the provinces 47 societies, said a privacy violation of this magnitude is unprecedented.

We cant even acknowledge that somebody is in our care when the media asks about it, even if it is all over social media, spokeswoman Caroline Newton said.

This is totally unacceptable, she added. The police are involved, as this is very serious. (The society) will be taking steps to figure out what happened and to fix it. And they will work with the people affected.

Barbara Goderre, administrator for the 13,000-member Smiths Falls Swapshop Facebook page, said she had no idea the link was related to a confidential childrens aid report.

If Id have known, I would have been all over that, she said in an interview. Its awful that someone would do something like that.

A police spokeswoman declined to comment on the case.

With files from Nick Westoll

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OTTAWAThe Opposition Conservatives say it was out of line for the international trade minister and a staff member to spend nearly $20,000 on a visit to Los Angeles.

The Tories claim Chrystia Freeland took the November trip for no other reason than to appear on Real Time with Bill Maher, a popular U.S. talk show, since she had no other business there.

But a spokesperson for the minister is throwing cold water on those claims, saying Freeland was there for a trade mission and the show was just one stop of many.

Her schedule included meetings with business leaders, sessions on ties between the economies of California and British Columbia and a meeting with Californias state treasurer.

The Tories are also accusing Freeland of double-dipping and charging taxpayers for meals even though she would have had food on her flights.

But the ministers office says Freeland got stuck in the airport for a day after coming off an overnight flight and bought food as she waited for her flight home.

Freeland made the visit to L.A. on the way back from the APEC summit in the Philippines. Expenses posted online say the total cost for the trip was $13,826.07.

The Conservative total includes the charges made by a staff member who accompanied Freeland on the trip.

Freelands spokesperson said the trade mission was one of several Freeland has done.

The minister is proud to advocate for Canadian businesses with our largest trading, the United States, and has made similar visits to New York, Boston, and Washington, as chair of the cabinet committee on Canada-U.S. relations, Alex Lawrence said in an email.

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BEIJING, April 19 -- A senior political advisor from southwest China's Guizhou Province has been dismissed from his administrative posts for "severe disciplinary violations," the anti-graft authority said Tuesday.

Kong Lingzhong, vice chairman of the Guizhou Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), "severely violated political codes of conduct and resisted organizational investigation, the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said in a statement, citing the results of its investigation into Kong.

Kong allegedly participated in trips, gym programs and banquets arranged by owners of private companies, and took advantage of his posts to seek benefits for himself and his relatives' businesses, it added.

Kong has also been placed on a one-year probation within the CPC.
PRINCE ALBERT, SASK.  A Saskatchewan man who admitted to stabbing another man in the heart before dumping his body in a bathtub has been sentenced to nine years in prison.

Trevor Cook had been charged with second-degree murder in the September 2014 death of Cory Brown of Prince Albert, but he previously pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter.

During Mondays sentencing, the court heard the accused was under the influence of drugs and alcohol when he killed Brown by stabbing him multiple times after catching him with Cooks girlfriend.

He attempted to clean up the scene and placed Browns body in a tub where it lay for hours.

Speaking outside court, Browns family called the sentence an insult.

Cook will get credit for 18 months already spent in custody.

The judge told court that despite substance abuse and neglect during Cooks difficult childhood, there were mitigating factors in determining the sentence that included the repugnant treatment of Browns body.

During her victim impact statement, Browns daughter, Santanna, told court she would never get over the anguish of losing her father.

No one should ever feel this pain, she said.

The victims family said Brown took pride in being a registered organ donor, but after Cook left his body in the tub following the stabbing, his organs were unsuitable for transplants.

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MONTREALThe sky wont fall if Parliament fails to pass legislation on assisted death by the court-imposed deadline of June 6. It was always going to be no longer a criminal act after that date for a medical practitioner to help a patient who wanted to end their life. Plans for a federal law were never meant to do more than circumscribe this new reality.

Faced with a national legal vacuum, the provinces would step in. When it comes to running the health-care system the buck stops with them. Presumably every province has done due diligence on the issue. If they have not, they have been negligent.

It has been more than a year since a Supreme Court ruling voided the Criminal Code prohibition on assisted death on charter grounds. Over that period Parliament has been in flux as the result of a regime-changing election. But the same is not true of most provincial legislatures.

If Quebec found a way to regulate access to physician-assisted death on its own, there is no reason why other provinces cannot do the same, especially since they have a template in hand. They might actually find it easier to adapt the Quebec template to the top courts prescriptions absent the federal legislation introduced last week.

Bill C-14 was expected to chart a common path for the provinces. But it was also expected to align with the courts guidelines. Inasmuch as the legislation barely meets the Supreme Courts threshold (if at all), it has the potential to make life more complicated for the provinces than if they were guided solely by the ruling.

Pre-emptively filling a legal vacuum with a bill that fails to pre-emptively address predictable court challenges is not exactly a recipe for legal clarity or, as it happens, for ensuring a parliamentary consensus.

Based on the initial reactions to the Liberal bill, it is likely headed for relatively smooth sailing in the House of Commons. But safe passage is anything but assured in the Senate.

For the MPs whose top-of-mind consideration is a looming legal vacuum, and for many of those who are only reluctantly coming to terms with having to sign off on an assisted death law, this bill is as good as it can get.

It is hard to see how a federal government of any stripe could have come up with more restrictive legislation than Bill C-14 and still have been able to claim with a straight face that it was responding to the Carter ruling.

By the same token, at least some of the MPs who would have wished for a less restrictive regime stand to be swayed by the governments promise of a loosening of the criteria for qualifying for assisted death at some unspecified point down the road.

But the governments restrictive approach to assisted death  even as it stands to facilitate the bills adoption the Commons  could sink it in the Senate.

Earlier this year, all Senate members of a joint parliamentary committee struck to advise the government on the way forward signed off on a majority report that recommended a significantly more permissive law than Bill C-14. On that occasion the Conservative senators broke ranks with their House of Commons colleagues.

There is more than just senatorial independence at play here. In contrast with the Commons, the upper house has been looking into end-of-life issues such as euthanasia, assisted death and palliative care for more than two decades. The only group in Parliament that can claim to have done any homework on this file sits in the Senate.

Cabinet ministers and the newly appointed government representative in the upper house, Peter Harder, are bound to support the bill at every step of the legislative way. All other parliamentarians will be free to vote as they see fit.

No one, including the Conservative and the Liberal house leaders in the Senate, will give odds as to the likelihood that a majority of their colleagues will support Bill C-14 and/or do so in time for the June 6 deadline. It is possible there will not be enough common ground between the two houses for a federal law to see the light of day. Worse things could probably happen.

Chantal Hebert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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Wayne Clark is one of the first and few Ontario patients to receive a stem cell transplant in Buffalo while hospitals in his home province sort through a capacity disaster.

After nine months of outpatient chemotherapy for a blood disorder that could escalate to acute leukemia, Clark, now 71, was offered a shot in September 2015 to bypass the lengthy waiting list at Juravinski Hospital in Hamilton. At the time, he was one of nearly 200 Ontario patients on the waiting list for a stem cell transplant. His body was ready for a transplant four months earlier, but Juravinski couldnt schedule one because of its heavy caseload.

However, Ontarios Ministry of Health had struck deals with three U.S. hospitals  Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit and the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland  to provide stem cell transplants to patients from the province.

Roswell could admit Clark immediately and offer in-patient care with round-the-clock nursing. If he stayed in Ontario, it was possible he would become an outpatient very quickly after the transplant, putting the burden of care for a medically fragile man whose body had just received a new immune system onto his wife, Ida.

Related: Ontario to spend $100M outsourcing life-saving transplants to U.S.

When I explained that to a couple of nurses at (Roswell), that this procedure in Ontario could be done as an outpatient, they couldnt believe it. They said I misunderstood. I said, thats one of the reasons Im here. I wanted to be hospitalized for a critical medical procedure.

Before the transplant can occur, the patients body must be prepared to accept healthy new donor cells. Chemotherapy and radiation are used to clear parts of the cancerous marrow, essentially creating space for the new stem cells to thrive.

The transplant itself, explains Dr. Philip McCarthy, director of Roswells blood and marrow transplant centre, is somewhat anticlimactic. Its delivered like a blood transfusion through a central venous catheter placed in one of the large veins in the chest, near the collarbone or neck, with several connecting ports where supportive drugs can be injected. The new stem cells should act like homing pigeons  travelling directly to the bone marrow cavity, where they start growing.

The tricky part  the Goldilocks phenomenon, as McCarthy calls it  is figuring out the just right formula of drugs that will allow the donors immune system to eradicate diseased marrow without wildly attacking the patients normal tissue. Its a common reaction called graft versus host disease that could be fatal.

In the first four weeks post-transplant, patients are monitored daily for signs of this disease. Medication is adjusted accordingly. Because the patient is highly susceptible to life-threatening infection during this time, recovery rooms are obsessively cleaned and pumped with filtered air.

The Clarks called Roswell Park home for four months.

During that time, Ida moved into a room at the nearby Kevin Guest House, which bills itself as Americas first health care hospitality house.

While the centre requires that patients travel with a caregiver, the ministry funds only the cost of medical treatment and nothing to offset the expenses incurred by patients and their families while receiving life-saving care in the U.S.

Roswell has agreed to subsidize lodging costs for its Canadian stem cell patients, so the Clarks paid roughly $10 daily during their stay. Hot meals were often provided in the houses communal dining room by kind volunteers and the families of other patients.

Clark was in hospital for 28 days. After discharge, he needed to remain close to Roswell for months longer so he moved with his wife to a larger apartment unit that is part of Kevin Guest House. (The rate remained unchanged.) In the follow-up period, Clark developed a virus that required daily drug infusions for four weeks. When he wasnt in hospital, it was Idas job to flush the ports on Waynes body with saline solution so his intravenous treatments flowed without clogging.

Clark is home in Brantford now, getting over a cold that unfortunately has knocked the wind out of me.

Hes weak, not a lot of strength in my legs, but its too soon to expect much change.

You dont look at change day to day, he says. The recovery process is slow. Very, very, very slow.

But hes optimistic and thankful that everything has gone as well as it has.

I really cant say enough to endorse the medical team and the entire experience we had, Clark said.

We have over 60 people every day who are directly involved in a patients care, McCarthy says, referring to doctors, nurses, lab technicians, pharmacists and other support workers. Its an incredibly complex system so we have to develop as many efficiencies as possible. This is scary for them. If the patient is agitated and unhappy with what we do, it leads to bad care.

McCarthy says the hospital follows an 80-20 rule.

Eighty per cent of what you do can be standardized. Twenty per cent is used to think about the curveballs that get thrown at you.

Clark, who rose through the ranks of a multinational firm to become one of its corporate executives, would like Ontario hospitals and Cancer Care Ontario to figure out a similar model.

The way our hospital systems are run today, theres a lot to be said about a business practice that needs to be changed and changed quickly, said Clark.

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Ontarians with aggressive cancers and blood disorders have been dying on waiting lists because hospitals here havent had the space, staff or funds to meet the rising demand for life-saving stem cell transplants.

And now, the health ministry has approved a plan that front-line doctors fear will create an even deeper health care crisis: outsourcing hundreds of allogeneic transplants to three American centres at a cost of more than $100 million (U.S.), a Star investigation reveals.

So far, the program has proved a hard sell. Only 19 of 202 patients approved for transplants to date in Cleveland, Buffalo and Detroit have agreed to go.

This is a disaster, says Dr. Ahmed Galal, former director of Canadas leading stem cell transplant program at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, which formally shut its doors to new patients last month. Just two other centres in the province  Juravinski Hospital in Hamilton and The Ottawa Hospital  provide the complex treatment, which involves using stem cells from a donor.

Why the money that is now funding American transplants, and the months-long hospital stay required, wasnt used years ago to build Ontarios capacity is a question on the minds of patients and doctors alike.

If there is that money, why cant we spend it to fix our system? asks Dr. Richard Wells, a clinician-scientist at Sunnybrooks Odette Cancer Centre. Is that not the obvious thing?

The ministry began funding U.S. treatments last fall to cope with massive waiting lists while Cancer Care Ontario works with hospital officials in the province to rebuild the system  a process many agree will take at least two to three years.

Princess Margaret, one of the worlds leading cancer centres, which has offered stem cell transplants since the 1970s  began turning away new patients at the end of March.

Related: Ontario cancer patient cant say enough about Buffalo stem cell transplant

Chantel Sousa, 30, is one of them.

The Toronto real estate agent was 34 weeks pregnant in December when routine blood work showed her platelet count, the cells that help the blood clot when it needs to, was alarmingly low.

A bone marrow test, a tool of last resort, was ordered on a Thursday.

On Friday morning, they said youve got acute lymphoblastic leukemia and we need to get the baby out on Tuesday.

Without immediate treatment, the prognosis was grim. She could die within months.

Sousa had a week to recover from the C-section and bond with the five-pound, 14-ounce boy she named Lincoln, who was admitted to Sunnybrooks neonatal intensive care unit and put on a respirator. In that time, she pumped out as much breast milk as she could, knowing it would become pretty much poison once her chemotherapy started.

The chemo was just step one in saving Chantels life  putting her in remission.

How long anyone stays in remission  that golden state that is supposed to earn patients a spot on a hospital waiting list once a stem cell donor is found  can vary from weeks to months.

Its like a ticking time bomb and you dont know when its going to go off, her doctor Richard Wells said. If you wait too long, you miss your chance.

With husband Euan Crisp, 28, at her side every night in hospital, Sousa began imagining her road to recovery at Princess Margaret.

When Sousa got word in late March that an unrelated donor had been found in the Canadian Blood Services OneMatch registry, Wells called Princess Margaret to schedule the transplant. He had no clue they had already closed to new business.

What weve been told is not only is Princess Margaret not accepting patients for transplants but theyve also declared they wont provide followup care, Wells said.

Its horrifying, Wells said. Its horrifying and absurd. Here we are in the biggest city in Canada, the best city in the world. Weve got a medical system thats high-tech and were proud of it. But if you have a disease for which you need a stem cell transplant, we cant help you.

Within two weeks of the Star making inquiries about Sousas place on the transplant list, a doctor at Juravinski Hospital agreed to see her. The family said the hospital will open a rare bed to offer her treatment next month.

Princess Margaret is seeing 25 per cent more allogeneic stem cell transplant patients this year than last, without adding staff.

Its irresponsible for us to take any more patients on our waiting list, said the centres medical director, Dr. Mary Gospodarowicz. We would be misleading patients who think theyre coming to a reputable, good cancer centre and wed be putting them at the end of the seven-month waiting list and offering them substandard care.

Some of those patients are being redirected to Juravinski and Ottawa for tissue typing, consultations and treatments. The majority  147 patients from September to early April  have been referred to out-of-country care.

The cost per patient is roughly $400,000 to $600,000 (U.S.) per patient, roughly two to three times the cost in Ontario, said Robin McLeod, Cancer Care Ontarios vice-president, clinical programs and quality initiatives.

"We have over the last few years increased the funding for stem cell transplants from about $9 million to $19 million in the province, McLeod said. We have had our capacity planners looking at the cost required for new capital. Weve also been working on funding models. She added: "This hopefully, will be a remedy in the short term. Weve got a lot of work to improve things in the long term."

Princess Margaret has hired new social workers to speak with every patient who is asked to go out of country to ensure each understands just how critical timely treatment is.

We need to stress that as much as we feel sorry that its inconvenient, the price for waiting is huge, Gospodarowicz said.

Once a leukemia patient is in remission, a transplant should happen no longer than two to three months later, Gospodarowicz said.

The wait at Princess Margaret is six to eight months.

All the transplant services have had people dying on the waiting list, said Dr. Irwin Walker, Juravinskis hematology chief and bone marrow transplant program director. Just how many is a question Cancer Care Ontario said it cant answer because it doesnt track such data.

Why patients arent going to the U.S. for care is complicated.

Patients dont want to believe they cant get the treatment they need here, Walker said. They trust the health care people who are looking after them, who have treated them with good care up to date.

Another obstacle is the U.S. hospitals requirement that patients be accompanied by a caregiver for the three to six months that they are receiving treatment.

The procedure involves one month of in-patient treatment followed by roughly three months of intense outpatient treatments. By this point patients are medically fragile as their immune system is rebuilt using donor cells. Risk of infection and other complications is high. Caregivers are relied upon to help track medications, flush intravenous tubing and change dressings.

The Health Ministry is expected to announce $30 million in infrastructure funding to be divided equally between Princess Margaret, Juravinski and Ottawa. Hospital executives and senior transplant physicians are meeting regularly with Cancer Care Ontario and ministry officials to discuss when that money will become available.

Going forward, I dont think anybody believes that thats enough, said Gospodarowicz.

The ministry money is supposed to be used to create more beds, but that only addresses one layer of the problem.

More patients than ever with cancer and blood disorders can be helped, even cured, with a stem cell transplant. To meet demand in the province, the system needs more highly trained doctors, nurses, pharmacists and lab technicians to start  resources that the stem cell transplant programs have been pleading for officially since 2007.

Juravinski has doubled the number of patients it sees for allogeneic stem cell transplants to eight a month from four, but hospital President Dr. Ralph Meyer admits that kind of volume is not sustainable.

The physicians felt it was too dangerous and we were too vulnerable, Walker, Juravinskis stem cell transplant director, told the Star. Theyve reluctantly agreed to reduce capacity to six transplants a month until the hospital can adequately address staffing problems.

Walker told the Star he has been walking around with chronic rage for years as hospital administrators and government officials failed to meaningfully address the emerging problem, instead handing out Band-Aid money here and there.

He believes the only reason Ontarians today are being offered an opportunity to seek faster treatment out of country is because one of his own patients, Laura Hillier, spoke publicly last summer when she discovered she was one of more than 30 people at the Hamilton hospital ready and waiting for a transplant that could have cured her acute myeloid leukemia.

Hillier, 18, died on Jan. 20, 2016, at Juravinski Hospital, in the arms of her family.

The problem is that its only patients who can stir things up, Walker said. When people complain that theyre not getting the right treatment, that triggers things.

Without Laura, none of this would have happened.

By the numbers

202: Ontario patients who were candidates for a stem cell transplant and whose cases were reviewed by a new provincial committee of doctors and ministry officials for out-of-country care since the fall of 2015

19: Ontario patients who have received or are going to receive a stem cell transplant in the U.S. through this new program

66: Ontario patients who are clinically ready and waiting for a transplant, whose cases have not yet been reviewed by the provincial committee that approves out-of-country care as of mid March 2016

40: Upper age limit at which patients could be treated with a stem cell transplant when the treatment was introduced in the early 1970s.

55: Average age of patients today who receive stem cell transplants.

35-40: Age range of most stem cell transplanters by the time they have finished their specialized education and residencies.

255: Number of allogeneic stem cell transplants (using related or unrelated donors rather than the patients own stem cells) provided in Ontario for the year ended March 31, 2016 at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, The Ottawa Hospital and Juravinski Hospital.

160: Number of allogeneic stem cell transplants performed across the three hospitals in 2010.

Diana Zlomislic can be reached by email at dzlo@thestar.ca

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Fed-up Toronto councillors are vowing to dismantle the system that sees community groups, developers and the city itself forced to hire off-duty Toronto police officers to direct traffic.

Mayor John Torys executive committee voted unanimously Monday to ask the province for legislative changes to allow lesser-paid special constables to do the work, and for city staff to develop an implementation plan to make that happen.

But there was strikingly tough talk from councillors on and off Torys executive, suggesting council next month could vote to not wait for provincial approval, given that city staff say it may not be required, and move to put a knife into the heart of the paid-duty system once and for all.

Bottom line, its a second income  a second salary for police officers, thats what it is. . . , said Councillor Michael Thompson, an executive committee member and former police services board member. We need to stop it.

Allowing the Toronto Police Association, the union representing rank-and-file officers, to set the paid-duty rate is a macabre and crazy thing, he added.

Another executive member, Councillor David Shiner, said the city, community groups and others are needlessly paying uniformed officers $68 per hour for a minimum three hours, plus higher-paid supervisors for multiple officers, plus 15 per cent administration fees, to direct traffic or often just stand there.

The whole system of paid duty is wrong. The whole system has to be corrected. The time to correct it is now, Shiner said.

We are never going to get the union to agree that taking money out of the pockets of their officers is in their best interests, said Councillor Pam McConnell, a former police board chair who is not on executive but is Torys deputy mayor for Toronto-East York.

Enough is enough, and while we ask for clarification, we should just stop this ridiculous practice, said McConnell, recalling that, when she was young, Grade 8 students with patrol belts ushered classmates across roads.

People understand that police officers have much more important work than looking down holes and drinking coffee. I think thats a bad message.

A city staff report states the province has indicated it sees no legislative barriers to the use of special constables, but staff want the province to amend the Highway Traffic Act to explicitly allow non-police officers to direct traffic and close highways.

While some councillors blamed staff, the police and the police association for the intransigence, Mayor John Tory said politicians have to shoulder some responsibility for not pushing hard enough in the past.

He noted that city council in 2011 approved wording for a memorandum of understanding with police for new traffic control requirements, but never followed up after then-police chief Bill Blair did not sign it.

Get on with it, lets sign an updated version and make changes to allow people to choose if they want to hire a police officer to direct traffic or a cheaper alternative, the mayor said.

Police association president Mike McCormack defended the paid-duty system in an interview with the Stars Betsy Powell.

You can have a highly visible police officer in an intersection on their time off, where theres no impact on the police budget, and you get the presence of a police officer, which is a public safety issue  that changes driving patterns, he said.

Singling out McConnells comments, McCormack said there is not a lot of love for police at city hall these days.

Shes saying, Oh well, I directed traffic in Grade 8. Well Im sure she used to put a Band-Aid on her knee in Grade 5, and that doesnt make her a doctor.

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A woman accused of stabbing the concierge at her Rosedale condo complex will return to court next month for a hearing on whether she is fit to stand trial.

Ellis Galea Kirkland, 60, is charged with attempted murder.

Kirkland made a brief court appearance Tuesday, and will return to court on May 5.

She had been ordered to undergo a 30-day assessment at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to examine her fitness to stand trial.

Such assessments examine the accused persons ability to understand what they are charged with, who the justice system participants are, whether they can communicate with and give instructions to a lawyer and what the potential consequences are in their case.

Kirkland was arrested on March 10 after a four-hour negotiation with police. Officers from the Emergency Task Force rappelled from the roof of a downtown tower to arrest Kirkland, who was seen peering over the edge of a 27th-floor balcony and periodically dangling her legs.

She was also charged with aggravated assault, assault with a weapon and weapons dangerous to the public peace.

RELATED:Victim in Rosedale stabbing tells of blood coming from everywhere after attack

Kirkland is a Harvard-educated architect who founded the NATO Paxbuild Economic Platform, whose aim is to foster growth and prosperity in post-conflict zones, failed states and areas affected by natural disasters.

With files from Alex Ballingall

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A month after the Special Investigations Unit cleared the Toronto police officer who shot and killed Andrew Loku, the attorney general says she has not yet read the secret report that details how that decision was made.

Madeleine Meilleur said her chief of staff, Shane Gonsalves, has a copy and that she will obtain it and read it. But asked Monday if she could make the report public afterwards, she said: You know what, I dont think so.

The opposition is calling on her to immediately release reports by the SIU, Ontarios police watchdog. Randy Hillier, justice critic for the Progressive Conservatives, told the Star hell be raising the issue in the legislature and with Meilleur directly.

We know that one of the hallmarks of justice is that justice must be seen to be done, he said. You cannot have public confidence in the rule of law if the reports are hidden from view.

NDP Deputy Leader Jagmeet Singh, a criminal lawyer, agreed the Loku report should be released, saying the more public scrutiny, the better.

Unless there is a serious risk of personal harm to releasing information, including the officers involved, the contents of SIU directors reports should be public, Singh said.

Black Lives Matter Toronto co-founder Rodney Diverlus said the fact that Meilleur had not yet read the report is further proof that the SIU investigative process is flawed and inefficient.

Already weve talked about how the SIU works with such little accountability and oversight and the only other person who is entrusted to provide that extra set of eyes, and this oversight, doesnt even bother to read the report.

Diverlus said this only further proves to us the need for information to be made widely available to the public.

This raises questions of what other reports havent been read, he said.

At the conclusion of every probe by the SIU  the agency that investigates deaths, serious injuries and allegations of sexual assault involving Ontario police  the director produces a report detailing the decision to lay a charge or clear an officer. Called the directors report, its considered by both the attorney general and the SIU to be confidential.

They claim Ontarios Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act prohibits the release of some information that would be contained in the directors report, including the personal information of everyone involved in an investigation.

But as revealed by the Star, Ontarios Information and Privacy Commissioner says there may be circumstances of significant public interest where the SIU may disclose the name or other information associated with its completed investigations.

Brian Beamish said in an email that the information would be released for the purposes of fostering accountability and public confidence in police services, and ensuring transparency in its operations.

Last week, the Ontario Coroners Offices said the public interest in Lokus police shooting death was among the reasons the office elected to hold a coroners inquest.

Nonetheless, Meilleur said she is reluctant to release the report because she doesnt want to muddy the waters before a wide-ranging review is launched into revamping police laws in Ontario, including the mandate of the SIU.

Thats why we are starting a review  because of public concern. Those are oversight bodies. I want to make sure that the public has confidence in what were doing, Meilleur said. Her ministry will soon be announcing public consultations on Ontarios police oversight system, which includes the SIU.

We want to hear from the public. We want to hear from the police officers, too, to make sure that what will be recommended will be supported by  the majority of the people, she said.

Her spokeswoman, Christine Burke, later indicated in an email to the Star that a conversation around whether or not SIU reports should be made public will be part of the review.

Meilleur said her ministry has yet to appoint a person to oversee the review, and wants the consultations to begin soon, with the aim to make changes in the next six months.

Hillier said that police oversight bodies in Ontario are currently fostering a lack of confidence, and the upcoming review should not keep Meilleur from deciding whether to release the report now.

I expect, and I think most people in our society expect, our ministers to be knowledgeable of their portfolio, to take a keen and passionate interest in their responsibilities, and to do a detailed review by themselves, he said.

As for Meilleurs not having read the SIU report on Lokus death a month after it was submitted, Hillier said: That speaks to somebodys level of commitment, I would say  This is not a part-time job. Put down the scissors and the ribbon cutting and do the important things first.

Singh agreed that with a case as high-profile as Lokus death, you would think the minister would understand that its important to read it.

The SIUs decision to clear the unnamed Toronto police officer who shot and killed Loku has prompted heated protests and pointed criticism of the police watchdog. Black Lives Matter protesters camped out in front of Toronto police headquarters for two weeks, demanding the release of the name of the officer who pulled the trigger.

Loku, a father of five from South Sudan, was shot dead last July in the hallway of his building, which is leased by the Canadian Mental Health Association to house people with mental health challenges.

Police were responding to a call that Loku was armed with a hammer and threatening to kill a woman. According to the SIU, Loku refused to drop the hammer as he approached two officers, prompting one to shoot to thwart an imminent hammer attack.

But that contradicts a witness account of the shooting indicating Loku was not menacingly wielding the hammer at the time and had calmed down by the time officers arrived on scene.

Critics calling for the release of the SIU directors report into Lokus death say it could reveal how there could be such a contradiction between the witness account and what the SIU probe uncovered.

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A Danforth Ave. restaurant where three people have been killed in the past three years  including a fatal drive-by shooting this past weekend  is being converted into a child care centre.

Councillor Mary Fragedakis said the child care centre  to be operated by new management  is scheduled to open at the site of the former Rotana/Cloud Nine cafe on Danforth Ave. near Coxwell in July.

It will be a significant change in the neighbourhood, but a positive change, Fragedakis said in an interview on Tuesday.

She said she understood that talks between the sites landlord and the day care operators have been in the works for awhile.

My understanding is they have been in discussions for a very long time, Fragedakis said. It didnt just happen there overnight.

The dramatic shift in the facilitys use comes after the city pulled the cafes business license for two weeks on Monday. Then the landlord evicted the tenant altogether.

The tenant could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

After the shutdown, Councillor Paula Fletcher triumphantly tweeted a photo of the bailiffs notice saying the lease of the Cloud Nine Cafe had been terminated.

CLOSED! Bailif closed it down today, Fletcher tweeted on Tuesday.

Baillif takes possession of Rotana/Cloud Nine. Locks changed GONE. Community has finally been heard!, Fletcher said in another tweet.

Finally! Councillor Mary Fragedakis tweeted.

The notice is dated April 18, just a day after a fatal drive-by shooting early Sunday.

Abdullah Farah, 20, of Toronto was fatally shot on the sidewalk outside the restaurant around 1:30 a.m. in what police believe was a targeted shooting.

Reaction was immediate and sharp, with Fragedakis tweeting, @PaulaFletcher30 & I are asking landlord, landlord where are you? on Sunday afternoon.

Even Lightning does not strike the same place 3 times! Fragedakis tweeted.

Now maybe authorities will believe us  no a co-incidence, Fletcher added on Twitter. Mayor and Chief need to step up.

Councillor Janet Davis also denounced the establishment, tweeting: Cllrs try to use what regs we have to sanction and close bad bars. But provincial AGCO (Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario) keeps giving liquor licenses.

In 2015, Abdiweli Mohamed Yusuf, 21, was shot to death inside the cafe.

Markham firefighter Dominic Parker, 45, was stabbed to death in 2013 when the Rotana Cafe operated at the same site.

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Years before a bullet fired from more than 200 yards away ended his life, Clinton Yow Foo was living the high life as the alleged kingpin in a ring of drug and weapons traffickers.

Back then, the man found murdered on his driveway in October 2015  killed by what police revealed Tuesday was a sniper using a high-powered rifle  was known to cops as Mr. Big.

With watches worth thousands of dollars on their wrists and a stable of high-end cars, a crew of a dozen drug dealers peddled marijuana, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and methamphetamine throughout Durham Region and into Toronto and York.

In 2009 the Durham Regional Police Drug and Gang enforcement Units launched an investigation codenamed Project Isis with the goal of shutting down the drug pushers.

Police got to work while the dealers lived the high life, preferring to hang out at casinos and nightclubs rather than keeping day jobs, according to Det. Cyril Gillis, supervisor of Durham's Drug Enforcement Unit in 2009.

The investigation began on the streets of Whitby, where undercover agents targeted individuals involved in the drug trade and collected information. Three months later, 12 people were arrested and almost $3 million worth of drugs, cash, guns and property were seized by police.

"An undercover operator infiltrated this operation from that level and we just followed the food chain ... from there we followed the money, followed the drugs and we found Mr. Big," said Det. Gillis in an interview after the bust.

According to an agreed statement of facts from a later appeal, on Aug. 8, 2009 police pulled up outside 22 Mendota Rd., a newly built brick townhouse in Toronto, and found Yow Foos car in the driveway.

When he walked out carrying bags containing items consistent with drug trafficking, the 37-year-old was arrested.

Inside the home police found a locked closet full of drugs and firearms.

Yow Foo was convicted of gun and drug charges and sentenced to 12 years in prison. But in 2013 he appealed the conviction on the basis that he had no control or knowledge of the closet and its contents, was acquitted of all charges related to the guns and drugs found in the house and set free.

Then, in the early hours of Oct. 1, 2015, police received a 911 call about a dead man in the driveway of a house on Kingston Rd. It was Yow Foo.

This week, police announced the homicide had become a national investigation and set up a hashtag, #CatchTheSniper, with hopes the public could provide information for investigators.

On Tuesday, TPS Homicide Det. Sgt. Tam Bui revealed that he believed the person who killed Yow Foo had considerable skill or some training.

This is a shot that was made at a considerable distance  at night, in the dark, it was windy, and Clinton was on the move when he was shot, he said.

Bui explained that an expanded search, including police canine units, mounted units and a drone, located a unique piece of kit, a Browning BLR short magnum lever-action rifle with a Bushnell scope and bipod, a considerable distance away from where Yow Foos body fell.

Bui added that the firearm had a connection to the Montreal and Quebec area, but did not expand on what that could mean, explaining there were several other pieces of evidence located that night that would only be released depending on information gained from Tuesdays news conference.

During the conference, Bui also said Yow Foo had significant ties to organized crime groups in the GTA area, that police were looking for one of Yow Foos friends who found his body and that the homicide unit discovered that Yow Foo visited St. Johns, Nfld., in July 2015, but told his family that he was out of the country. He is believed to have attended a music festival on George St.

According to Bui, the circumstances leading up to this case are unusual.

Overall the evidence that weve recovered, the planning, we believe is unique, Bui said.

With files from Evelyn Kwong and Torstar news service

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Prosecutor Louis Sokolov didnt waste any time trying to paint a picture of a careless cardiologist as the disciplinary hearing of Dr. Bill Hughes resumed on Monday after a month-long hiatus.

The Peterborough doctor is accused of professional misconduct by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, including allegations that he ordered unnecessary tests and overbilled OHIP. Hughes denies the allegations.

Within 30 minutes of beginning Mondays tense inquisition, Sokolov had already revisited the aftermath of Hughes charting error that led to the death of a 35-year-old patient in 2006.

If you had done your job properly, she would still be alive today? asked Sokolov.

I agree, said Hughes.

A college investigator had previously testified that the woman may have died needlessly because Hughes failed to perform a physical examination on her and therefore missed a heart murmur, which her family doctor had been able to detect.

But in a stark revelation, Hughes, responding to questions, confirmed that he has variable hearing issues that can impair his ability to detect heart murmurs. He also said he does not wear hearing aids.

Sokolov went on to question why Hughes routinely ordered excessive amounts of diagnostic testing for his patients at Kawartha Cardiology Clinic, which he owns. He cited one patient who had undergone 11 heart tests, despite U.S. guidelines suggesting such routine heart testing was inappropriate.

Hughes snapped back, defending his approach as one that saves lives.

If my patient has coronary disease and I can detect its getting worse, and can potentially save their life, I dont care what the U.S. guidelines say, he told the four-person panel.

A good part of Mondays hearing was spent debating whether an audio recording of an interview captured during Hughes probe in 2012 would be admissible.

Hughes has previously claimed that the investigator hired by the college as an expert witness to review his practice was not impartial. An interview conducted as part of his investigation, he testified in March, had left him feeling physically quite sick.

Sokolov suggested the colleges four-person panel listen to the audio-recording and judge it for themselves. They decided it would be allowed.

As the days proceedings came to a close, Sokolov also raised the suggestion that there was a conflict of interest between Hughes medical practice and his and his wifes ownership stake in the testing equipment at Kawartha Cardiology.

The clinics nuclear testing equipment is owned by Kawartha Diagnostics, a company that Hughes owns roughly one-third of. His wife and co-worker, Jennifer Fraser, owns 50 per cent of another company that performs tests for the facility.

The more tests the cardiologist ordered, Sokolov argued, the more Hughes and his wifes companies stood to gain.

Hughes disagreed, saying his wifes business operates at a loss.

It is a for-profit corporation but that doesnt make it profitable, he said, explaining that his wifes company hasnt made money for three or four years.

The hearing continues Tuesday.

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ACCRA, April 19 -- China's top political advisor Yu Zhengsheng visited Ghana from Saturday to Tuesday to promote cooperation in various fields and enhance bilateral relations.

Yu, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), was visiting the African nation at the invitation of Ghanaian Parliament Speaker Edward Korbly Doe Adjaho.

In a meeting with Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama, Yu said that China stands ready to expand and promote bilateral pragmatic cooperation between the two countries.

China and Ghana, boasting a deep traditional friendship and great momentum of further development, shared a clear direction on how to boost their bilateral relations when Mahama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Forum on the China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Johannesburg, South Africa, in December last year, Yu said.

He added that China is willing to work with Ghana to promote the implementation of the 10 major plans for the China-Africa cooperation, which was announced by Xi in December.

The development of China and Africa has offered remarkable opportunities for each other, Yu noted, saying that the closer the China-Africa cooperation becomes, the more sustainable their growth will be.

For his part, Mahama said that the Ghana-China amity is deep-rooted and burgeoning, as the two sides enjoy frequent high-level exchanges, increasing exchanges in economic, trade and investment, and eye-catching economic and social benefits thanks to China's major economic and infrastructure projects in Ghana.

Ghana, highly appreciative of the China-Africa cooperation plan proposed, looks forward to engaging with China in more pragmatic cooperation, he said.

The top Ghanaian leader also said that his country is ready to enhance exchanges with China in such areas as development, reform and anti-corruption drive, to which both nations have been committed.

In his meeting with Speaker Adjaho, Yu said that the common aspiration of the China-Africa cooperation is to seek mutual benefit, win-win results and common development.

Therefore, China and Ghana are expected to implement the consensus reached by the two nations' top leaders, increase political mutual trust, promote the cooperation between companies of the two countries to a higher level, enhance the two sides' people-to-people exchanges, and coordinated their stances in the international affairs, Yu said.

The CPPCC is ready to increase exchanges with the Ghanaian parliament in a bid to promote China-Ghana relations, he added.

Adjaho responded by saying that all Ghanaian parties are supportive of developing their nation's relations with China, and willing to enhance with China the bilateral friendly exchanges, the two peoples' friendship and the cooperation between the companies.

In his Ghana stay, Yu also attended with President Mahama the inauguration ceremony of a gas power station project of Sunon Asogli, a local subsidiary of Shenzhen Energy of China in Accra.

Yu said that the power plant, the first of such a project China built in Africa, is expected to provide high-quality energy to help boost local development and tap the country's development potential.

During a meeting with representatives of Chinese enterprises operating in Ghana, Yu said that the Chinese enterprises operating here should take the opportunities unleashed by FOCAC, make adjustments in their business structure in accordance with the latest developments in global market, and the changes in the African economic arena.

He added that they could move up in the industry value chain and focus on their social responsibilities such as environmental protection.

Yu also laid a wreath at the mausoleum of Kwame Nkrumah in remembrance of the first president of Ghana, who forged the Ghana-China traditional friendship with the older generation of Chinese leaders.

Before leaving the country, Yu said that his Africa tour, which has also taken him to Gabon and Cote d'Ivoire, is a great success.

The visit has proved to him the deep friendship the African people harbor for China, Yu said, adding that he is fully confident of the China-Africa cooperation in working together to implement the FOCAC consensus and enhance their reciprocal cooperation in all fields.
Toronto hasnt had a mayor this media-exposed since, well, since the last mayor and his hijinks-a-day howler of an existence.

John Tory operates from the traditional mayors manual. It positions the chief magistrate as super salesman, perpetual promoter and hyper hometown horn blower.

Tory does it well. For a guy who, apparently, doesnt like to travel, the first-time mayor gets around.

Hes just returned from Japan and China selling Toronto. Before that it was the high-tech world of San Francisco that beckoned, and that came after he hummed a pretty tune in Austin, Texas, and rubbed shoulders with the Hollywood types in Los Angeles.

Its not that the mayor has nothing to do at home, from the Rouge River in Scarborough to Etobicoke Creek on the Mississauga border. Its just that his voice needs to be heard abroad as well, lending credibility to hometown cold-calls luring business to locate on the edge of Lake Ontario.

Barely back from Asia, Tory plunged into a long list of bubbling issues. At a news conference Monday, reporters asked:

When is he going to meet publicly with Black Lives Matter? Stubbornly, never. Instead hes seeking black surrogates to populate his own private consultations on what fusses these young black firebrands.

Why did his hand-picked and heralded traffic committee fail to prevent the madness last Saturday when the Don Valley Parkway was shut down at the same time as the Bloor-Danforth subway, the University subway line  all during a Raptors playoff game? His answer isnt worth repeating.

Whats he gonna do about violence on city streets? Ask the police chief for a report to the police board Wednesday on the trends so far this year.

When will he settle the labour dispute with library workers? Hmmm.

Can he get the volatile Uber-vs.-cabbies issue through city council? Yes.

What does he think about bike lanes on Bloor? Doesnt matter, so I cant recall his answer.

Paid duty? Ah, why are some 3,000 police officers making more money than city councillors, the cop pay boosted by legislated moonlighting called paid duty? The reporters didnt quite ask it that way, but Tory said he was mystified and blamed the councillors for that pace of inertia on the file.

So, there is no shortage of issues to consume a mayors time  and leave plenty of hours for snorting crack and drinking ones self into a stupor and desecrating the mayors second-floor office with unofficial off-hours soirees with strange women.

Thankfully, that all ended with Torys election in late 2014. Hes got blind spots, meddles in things he shouldnt, botched the carding file and the policing file. But he arrives early to work and goes non-stop, hop-scotching around town, doing his mayors thing. Its a welcome change. And those who frown at the number of trips hes taken on the publics dime should put on a happy face.

Theres nobody out there selling Toronto, Tory told reporters. Theres not been much presence in recent times. Theres great interest in the city  businesses want to invest  but Toronto is poor at self-promotion, and those who want information are confused and turned off by an unfamiliar regulatory regime and rules.

Tory said he and staff will report soon on the numerous potential jobs that might flow from his Asian mission. Business prospects in China said they havent seen a Toronto mayor in nine years. One potentially good lead would see an investor build a hotel here. Others are interested in retail opportunities. But come back a year later and see if any of the leads pan out.

Mississaugas mayor jets off to China all the time, so does Markhams. Its what mayors do  unless you are distracted by becoming a celebrity for all the wrong reasons.

Who knew the mayor of Toronto could go to Hollywood without the circus?

Royson James usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: rjames@thestar.ca

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Ontario Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur said Tuesday she has finally read the secret Special Investigations Unit report that recommended no charges be laid against the unnamed Toronto police officer who shot and killed Andrew Loku last year.

But both she and Premier Kathleen Wynne are refusing to make the report public until the completion of an upcoming review of police oversight bodies in Ontario, which they say will include public consultations.

I was very well briefed by both the deputy minister and my chief of staff on the report. I read the report, Meilleur, the provinces chief lawyer, told the Star.

Its important for me. I hear the concerns out there from every quarter. I hear from the community, including Black Lives Matter, I hear from the director of the SIU, I hear from the chief of police.

In a statement to the Star, Wynne insisted that public confidence in the transparency of police oversight agencies is a priority for her government.

We recognize that there are concerns about the current process, including whether SIU reports are made public, Wynne said in an email Tuesday.

We have a responsibility to ensure that the public interest is being served, thats why we have committed to public consultations. It is my objective that the review and public consultations will guide the form that public reports will ultimately take.

Wynnes statement comes as the Black Action Defence Committee is calling on her to fire Meilleur, after it was revealed in the Star on Monday that attorney general had not yet read the report into Lokus death, even though it had been submitted a month earlier. The committee also wants the report released immediately.

Can you imagine  with all the controversy that this case has caused, with all the protests, Black Lives Matter outside police headquarters, demonstrations at city council and the legislative assembly, and the barrage of articles and broadcasts by the press, including the series (on the SIU) published by the Star in last Saturday's paper  she did not find it important to read the report? said the committee's director of communications, Kingsley Gilliam.

Saying (on Monday) that her chief of staff has the copy, and that she will read it in due course  is that carrying out the responsibility of attorney general of Ontario? That's why we're demanding that the premier fire her.

A co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto said the issue goes beyond one individual, and is about an entire system that is failing society.

This is a systemic issue, this is a culture where the attorney general thought it was OK not reading the report for a month while Torontonians were outside literally talking about life and death situations, said Rodney Diverlus.

All our government officials must be held accountable, and if that means to step down, or adding new voices to the table, I think that that is something that anybody in this movement would welcome.

Meilleur is standing firm on not wanting to release the report.

It will confuse the consultations. Never (has) any SIU report  been released in the past  never one. There is a call for public release; there is a call for other changes.

Asked if future SIU reports could be made public as a result of reforms, Meilleur said: I dont know yet, because its going to be part of the conversation, part of the consultation.

The SIU director is mandated by legislation to submit every report from a completed investigation to the attorney general, but the government is keeping those reports secret, saying that their release would violate freedom of information and privacy legislation.

But Ontarios Information and Privacy Commissioner told the Star last week that there may be circumstances of significant public interest where the SIU could disclose the names of officers involved in SIU investigations or other information associated with its completed investigations.

Meilleur did say Tuesday that some information in the Loku report could finally emerge at the coroners inquest into his death, for which no date has yet been set.

There will be no comment about the report in the sense that we have a coroners inquest that is starting soon, she said.

Im sure there will be some information from the SIU report that will be released through the coroners inquest, so I am not going to make a decision now to release the report.

More on thestar.com:

Why cant an SIU directors report be released?

Coroner says Black Lives Matter helped prompt Loku inquest

SIUs creation came amidst racially-charged atmosphere

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Work at most demolition sites along the Eglinton Crosstown project has resumed today after a building collapse at the Bathurst and Eglinton site sent seven people to hospital Monday, three with serious injuries.

Demolition work has been temporarily halted at the Bathurst site and another site on Bayview Ave., Metrolinx spokesperson Anne Marie Aikins said in an email on Tuesday afternoon.

The work at the Bayview site will likely resume later on Tuesday or Wednesday, Aikins said.

All demolition work along the line was temporarily suspended immediately after the building facade and construction scaffolding on the former House of Chan restaurant collapsed just before 2:30 p.m. Monday.

As a result of the incident at Forest Hill Station, and with an abundance of caution, Crosslinx temporarily suspended work at other demolition sites along the Eglinton Crosstown project, Aikins said in an email on Tuesday morning.

Work at those other sites will be resuming today, Aikins said on Tuesday morning. The incident at Forest Hill Station remains under active investigation by the Ministry of Labour.

Labour Minister Kevin Flynn said the ministry will allow work at the collapse site to continue as soon as possible.

Our intent is not to hold up the site just for the sake of holding up the site. We want to take the proper time to get the right information to ensure we dont have a recurrence of this, he said at Queens Park before leaving to tour the site early Tuesday afternoon.

It could have been a lot worse, Flynn said.

The fact the demolition was taking place on a work site adjacent to a busy sidewalk and street does drive home the need for extra vigilance, added Flynn, whose ministry has ordered a halt on work at the site until its inspectors gather information they need for their investigation of what went wrong.

We learn from every single investigation, he said.

The Forest Hill station is one of 25 new LRT stations scheduled to open when the line starts running in 2021.

RELATED:Several people hurt as Bathurst-Eglinton building collapses

Some of the injured managed to walk from the debris while firefighters had to rescue others, Toronto Fire Services Cmdr. Bob OHalloran said.

Among those who were examined in hospital were a 7-month-old baby and the infants parents.

The tots stroller blocked the scaffolding from coming into contact with the infant, local MPP Mike Colle said.

I thank God that there was nobody killed, said the Eglinton-Lawrence MPP from the scene following the accident on Monday. I know how lucky that little baby was. That was a miracle.

With files from Star staff

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Does the city need ugly buildings?

The shabby and unfashionable, the weirdo huts and half-abandoned malls and rundown plazas. Could it be they actually serve a valuable purpose in the life and evolution of the city?

Its a question raised recently by the imminent demolition of a strip of stores near Yonge and Eglinton that virtually everyone, it seems, agreed were a blight on the neighbourhood. As Joshua Errett, of CBC News, reported this week, even the architect who designed the wheelchair-inaccessible, above-and-below-ground plaza in the 1980s, Lloyd Alter, has long thought it was horrendously ugly. Its a sentiment Alter told me local residents shared with him almost immediately upon its construction. So when it was announced that it would be demolished to make way for a condo tower, everyone was ready to celebrate.

Except the family-run businesses that leased space in it, like the Korean Cowboy restaurant and the Hollywood Diamond jewellery shop, whose owners and families have commented that they are sad to be forced out. And except for those who have long visited the two video-gaming shops that had been in that plaza. And except those residents of a neighbourhood recently overwhelmed by the Firkin & Starbucks main-street redevelopment routine who now wonder: Where in their area are these kinds of tiny, independent enterprises likely to fit in?

In a city where every new condo development brings a podium filled with banks, big-boxes and chain stores, and where every remaining lovely Victorian century-building attracts a pet spa or a high-end coffee house, the question is: Do unloved, ugly commercial buildings  ones no self-respecting Pottery Barn would consider moving into  serve a purpose by providing viable places for quirky mom-and-pop enterprises to set up shop?

Alter ruminated on this for the CBC and in his own blog post at the site Treehugger, and again when I spoke to him on the phone, invoking Jane Jacobs old maxim, Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

When she wrote that, in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she meant that old buildings, a type synonymous with low-rent at the time, provide a home for riskier and lower-profit types of businesses  the kinds of businesses that might innovate but also provide neighbourhood diversity and character.

As for really new ideas of any kind  no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be  she wrote in the same passage, there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction.

Considering my experience of recent trips to San Francisco and Manhattan, and looking around downtown Toronto and the rapidly gentrifying south of the city, I had started to think that this concept was outdated. Because in modern urban real estate, old buildings are often as high-overhead as new ones, or more so. A former warehouse in the Distillery District or Liberty Village is no longer a cheap place for artists to live or a sketchy bootstrapping startup to house offices  such a brick and beam and stone and wood heritage building is now a prestige address.

Old no longer equals undesirable, or cheap. But ugly? Well, perhaps thats a different story.

And, I think, its not just innovative new ideas that require a lower-rent, less desirable home, but all manner of independent businesses  the record shop, tattoo parlour or video game store that Alter mentions to the CBC, but also the sari shop, the old family-run diner, the pho counter, the Bollywood film rental store, the two-stool barbershop. The kinds of low-margin, low-prospect, no-chain businesses that make a neighbourhood an interesting place to live.

You can wander around in the older parts of the city, the gentrified or gentrifying ones, and notice that it is the tinier and uglier storefronts that tend to house the remaining outposts of eccentricity. Almost more so, you can go to the less-trendy, farther-flung areas of the city and see that while international chains of varying price levels occupy the massive, renovated malls and new-built big-box complexes, the truly interesting independent joints are clustered in ugly old parking-lot strip malls, or in ugly old neighbourhood malls like Agincourt or Galleria.

The concept does present a bit of a riddle when it comes to what to do about it. After all, the reason such a place remains low-rent is its undesirability. The quality that makes it a community asset is the same quality that would lead to widespread celebration at its destruction. Save the eyesores that humiliate even the architects who built them seems like a misguided kind of rallying cry.

Still, you seldom see a neighbourhoods character displayed in the commercial spaces of the buildings that braggarts would say give a neighbourhood its beloved character  the heritage-proud architectural treasures and new-built condos both more often house a less interesting kind of place. Ive heard it suggested, for a start, that condo towers should have smaller store spaces in their base, perhaps sold as independent units themselves rather than leased. Perhaps.

Whether theres anything to be done or not, perhaps its a start to just look upon those ugly buildings in your neighbourhood and, before uttering your ritual wish for their erasure, wonder if theyre actually doing some good.

-

Galleria Mall

Galleria Mall, at Dufferin and Dupont, is also slated for demolition to make way for a new mixed-use condominium complex  years after big chains abandoned it and left it to quirkier neighbourhood businesses.

Gerrard and Carlaw plaza

When the Riverdale dining institution The Real Jerk lost the lease on its newly gentrified longtime home at Queen and Broadview, it found a new one in an unfashionable, half-abandoned strip mall at Gerrard and Carlaw  one that became fashionable after being featured in a Rihanna and Drake music video.

King Palace Restaurant

A space apparently custom-built for an out-of-business doughnut shop, sharing a lot with a car wash, provides a home for Indian and Pakistani cuisine at King Palace Restaurant, in the rapidly redeveloping Davenport and Yonge area.

Jims Best Westerns

A little hole-in-the-wall adjoining an auto body shop continues to house a diner institution  Jims Best Westerns Restaurant  in Riverside, long after trendier bars and organic butchers moved into the area.

Alexandros gyro shop

Captain Johns restaurant ship has hauled out of the harbour, but the neighbouring independent takeout institution Alexandros is still serving gyros from its strange little hut next door on Queens Quay.

Keele Centre warehouse building

Directly to the south is the Dundas West strip of the Junction that the New York Times recently called Torontos most stylish neighbourhood. Directly north is a newer set of big-box complexes filled with the likes of Home Depot and Winners. But the aging industrial monstrosity of the Keele Centre at West Toronto St. still stands, home to small businesses such as Fabric Fabric

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire

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After over 10 years in custody, former Guantanamo Bay inmate Omar Khadr is engaged to be married, to a woman who worked for his freedom.

Khadrs fiancee is 26-year-old human rights activist Muna Abougoush, who campaigned for his release while he was in Guantanamo and visited him after he was transferred to an Alberta prison.

The young couple made it official last Saturday, with family and friends gathered around them, her father, Bill Abougoush, told the Star.

Twenty-nine-year-old Khadrs hands were shaking as Bill, taking the place of Khadrs father, gave him the ring to put on Munas finger, he said.

I was thinking: Wow, after all youve been through, your hands are shaking to put a ring on someones finger, Bill added with a laugh.

After Khadr was released on bail in May 2015 to live with his lawyer, Dennis Edney, in Edmonton, he and Muna began spending time together, at places such as dinners and advocacy events, Bill said.

Then one night, about three months ago, Bill was giving Khadr, whom his grandchildren call Uncle Omar, a ride back from a family dinner to his lawyers home, and Khadr asked him about proposing to Muna.

We had a long, long conversation and I had a few hiccups and hesitations, and then we met again a few more times and had a couple more long conversations, said Bill.

I just find him to be who, in general, everybody thinks he is. Hes a real gentle, gentle person, and Ive never seen a shred of anger, he added.

Bill described his daughter, a recent University of Alberta graduate, as an educated, super bright girl who has always fought for womens rights and particularly Muslim womens rights.

Omar Khadr's life so far

Its so hard to believe that she convinced me to take her to a maximum-security prison to visit Omar Khadr, he said.

Right from the start he seemed like a gentle person, a gentle young man.

One of six children, Muna grew up in Lac La Biche, Alta., and now lives in Edmonton.

As for wedding plans, its up to them, said Bill.

Nobody knows what the future is, but they both seemed really happy.

Muna Abougoush and Omar Khadr did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

In response to questions about the engagement, Khadrs lawyer Dennis Edney sent a message to the Star saying, Omar became engaged and should be left alone to get on with his life.

The news of the engagement first broke in a public Facebook post by someone self-identified as a mutual friend of the young couple, congratulating them on their upcoming engagement.

Messages from supporters poured in on the social networking site.

I am so happy to think you will be sharing your future together after so many years of shared past, read one.

Two such dedicated and strong people providing each other with the support you both deserve will be able to move mountains.

Khadr, a former child soldier, spent more than 10 years in U.S. and Canadian custody, much of that at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba.

He was transferred to Canada in 2012 after accepting a plea deal. Once the youngest detainee in Guantanamo, he was charged with murder in violation of the laws of war for allegedly killing an American soldier in Afghanistan.

He has told the Star in the past he has no memory of the 2002 firefight the charges stem from, and made a plea deal as a way to get out of Guantanamo.

Abougoush is one of a group behind the online campaign Free Omar Khadr Now.

In 2013, she told the Star she was nervous before her first meeting with Khadr in an Alberta prison  and impressed with his resilience.

She said that in 2015 the two of them would talk about schools, different education paths (and) cars.

Omar is very forward-looking, concentrating on his future. He doesnt hold grudges. He knows if he hangs on to the negativity of the past he cant move forward, she said at the time.

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After years of being stuck in arbitration, the Toronto Transit Commission is moving ahead on random alcohol and drug testing of its employees.

In a letter to employees sent Monday morning, TTC CEO Andy Byford said the TTC board approved the funding for random drug testing at its March 23 board hearing.

The TTC, which continues to see instances of impairment while at work, according to Byford, will also be asking the Ontario government to make random drug testing mandatory for public transit agencies.

Random drug testing has been part of the fitness for duty policy since 2011, but funding wasnt approved at some point, and the issue went into a lengthy arbitration process between the TTC and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113, the TTCs largest union.

The move was sparked by an August 2011 bus crash that killed a TTC rider and injured 11 others. The bus driver was charged with negligence and possession of cannabis, but was not found to be impaired.

In the letter, Byford said the TTC is now working to finalize the program over the coming months, despite the ongoing arbitration.

Given the seriousness of this issue  it is, after all, a workplace and public safety matter  the arbitration process is taking far too long to conclude, Byford said in his letter.

Since 2010, when the fitness for duty regime was first implemented, the TTC has seen continued instances of impairment while at work, Byford said in his letter.

That is simply unacceptable.

The random tests would determine only whether an employee was impaired at the time of the test, and not whether employees consume drugs or alcohol in general, Byford stressed.

What you do on your own time is none of our business, so long as it doesnt affect your ability to do your job, he said in the letter.

The move was swiftly criticized by ATU Local 113 president Bob Kinnear, who said he had only been informed of the TTCs decision on Monday afternoon, during a labour board hearing.

Thats not reflective of a cooperative relationship, when they give you a verbal warning before they know its going to get out, Kinnear said.

Kinnear said he was disappointed that the TTC is side-stepping the arbitration process.

It would seem to me the TTC is taking the position that theyre going to ignore our collective agreement. Theyre going to arbitrarily impose whatever working conditions and provisions that they feel like, he said.

The union will ask the arbitrator for an injunction on random drug testing, but if that doesnt go through, the union is willing to take the issue to court, Kinnear said.

There is a lot of discontent amongst our members, and they are extremely frustrated. I can only imagine to what level that frustration is going to escalate to once the members find out this, he said.

TTC spokesperson Brad Ross said random drug testing has been approved since 2011, and the reason it hadnt been implemented yet was more the lack of funding than the ongoing arbitration.

Ross said hes willing to see the issue go to court if thats what the union wants, as it will probably take less time to resolve there than in arbitration.

We feel as an organization that we need to get on with it, Ross said.

If the union decides the courts is where they want to go with it  then perhaps that is the better place for it to be tested.

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Headlines

Its been a month since the SIUs report cleared an officer in the shooting death of Andrew Loku, yet the Attorney General says she still hasnt read it let alone consider releasing it to the public.

Const. James Forcillos lawyers are asking the court for less than two years of house arrest instead of the minimum five-year sentence for the attempted murder of Sammy Yatim in July 2013.

Linda Christina Redgrave, the first witness in the Jian Ghomeshi trial, has waived the publication ban on her name in an effort to change the legal system for sexual assault victims.

Weather and traffic

The sunny skies will continue today, but youll want to bring a sweater or light coat with you. Todays high is only forecast to reach 16 C. Overnight the temperature will drop to 2 C.

The TTC and GO Transit arent reporting major delays.

Flights at Pearson and Billy Bishop airports are operating on schedule, but make sure to check the status of your flight.

How about that local sports team?

Jonas Valanciunas was front and centre as the Toronto Raptors evened up their playoff series against the Indiana Pacers. The Raptors beat the Pacers 98-87 in Game 2 at the Air Canada Centre last night.

Theres some good news on the local hockey front. The Toronto Marlies are going into the AHL playoffs.

Whats happening in entertainment?

Doris Roberts, who was well-known for playing the intrusive mom on Everybody Loves Raymond, has died at the age of 90.

Stana Katic, the Hamilton native who plays detective Kate Beckett on ABCs Castle, wont be returning for the shows ninth season.

Today in history

1904: The Great Toronto Fire destroyed around 100 buildings and 20 acres of land. Firefighters from as far as Niagara Falls and London came to assist and crews used between 9.5 and 11 million litres of water.

1934: Actress Shirley Temple appears in her first film, Stand Up and Cheer!

Whats coming up?

The Toronto Blue Jays play the first of three games against the Baltimore Orioles at Oriole Park today starting at 7:05 p.m. The Jays beat the Boston Red Sox 4-3 yesterday.

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Willy Kouadiane had a dream  to become an accountant. He had enrolled in university to study accounting sciences in his native Ivory Coast. And he saw a glowing future before him.

But then his dreams evaporated. A civil war erupted as forces loyal to then-opposition leader Alassane Ouattara tried to oust then-incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo at the end of 2010.

And suddenly Kouadiane and his aunt  his only living relative still in the Ivory Coast  were on the run. His aunt had been an active supporter of Gbagbo and she and her nephew were targeted by Ouattara forces, he says. Anything associated with Gbagbo was destroyed and burned, he recalls. People were killed; people were hurt.

At first they hid with a neighbour, but then the neighbour, fearful of the repercussions of hiding them, asked them to leave. Kouadiane and his aunt got separated as they made their way to a refugee camp in nearby Ghana. Kouadiane made it to the United Nations Ampain refugee camp, which is home to about 4,000 people. His aunt didnt.

All around him there was suffering and despair. He lived in a tent with five others. There was no privacy. Every month he was given 12 kilos of rice, oil, one cup of beans and soy. I thought my life is going to be bad, he said. I thought I will never succeed in life. My life had stopped. No school, no comfortable situation, no opportunity. Its like you turn around and around. You wake up in the morning, there is nothing to do in the camp.

But now, five years later, Kouadiane dares to dream again. The 22-year-old, his partner Juslaine Dji, his adopted son Jean and his 8-month-old baby Divine recently came to Canada as refugees, sponsored by the refugee committee of Our Lady of Grace church in Aurora and the Office of Refugees for the Archdiocese of Toronto.

It was like he had won a lottery. He had never thought about coming to Canada. He thought after fleeing his homeland he would have to make a life of some sort in Accra, Ghanas capital. But then he met Dr. Martin Mark from the Archdiocese of Toronto and his life changed in an instant. Mark, the head of the Catholic churchs refugee office, had some spots he could fill to bring refugees from Ampain to Canada.

And so after a three-year wait, the young family arrived in the GTA on Feb. 25. They were thrilled. Its when you put your foot in Canada, you can finally say: Yes, Im in Canada, he said, describing what he thought as the plane landed at Pearson.

Other refugees arent that lucky  with critics suggesting Ottawa is neglecting refugees from other parts of the world because its focus had been on Syria and its pledge to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of February, part of a nationwide initiative to help remedy one of the worst humanitarian crises since the Second World War.

Also at play is a cap imposed on Canadian visa offices in Nairobi, Cairo, Pretoria, Dar es Salaam and Islamabad in 2011, limiting the number of refugees allowed to come to Canada, said Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees.

This restriction, as well as a backlog of 27,959 privately sponsored refugees, deep financial cuts to the department and long processing times of up to 70 months in some places, have made it difficult for refugees from certain regions to come to Canada.

Ottawa announced earlier this year it will be increasing the number of refugees the country will welcome in 2016 to 58,000 from 6,000 the previous year, but its unclear where those refugees will come from.

Immigration Minister John McCallum also announced that another 10,000 Syrian refugees will be making their way to Canada this year. But that leaves many other refugees in other parts of the world facing an uncertain fate. Ottawa has not yet announced whether caps on visa offices as well as sponsorship agreement holders will continue and at what level.

The politics of Canadas refugee policy isnt something Kouadiane concerns himself about. He is grateful to finally be here  especially since he worried that when he first applied to come he was single and by the time the application was processed he was part of a family of four. He feared he might no longer qualify. And he was relieved to hear his sponsors had no difficulty taking them all on.

From their arrival the family was swept up into the welcoming arms of the refugee committee at Our Lady of Grace and has now settled in Richmond Hill. They had an instant new family  one that was caring and compassionate.

Kouadiane is looking enthusiastically towards his future. He has a job working part-time as a carpenters assistant; his partner Juslaine will begin English classes soon. Shed like to become a police officer. The family speaks French, but there are no plans to move to Quebec. Kouadiane says they love it here. Most of all he hopes one day to fulfill his dream of becoming an accountant. I love numbers, he said. I was good in mathematics. I love everything algebraic.

Until then, he and his family are settling in, getting a sense of their new neighbourhood. Kouadiane marvels at the nearby park where Jean and Divine can play freely, without worry. He listens contentedly to his son drumming on a plastic pail and singing; watches with delight as his daughter sleeps and smiles shyly at his wife in front of strangers. But above all, they are safe and have a home at last.

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By now, the plot is familiar: A mysterious virus appears. The disease, spread by mosquitoes, is linked to an alarming surge in birth defects. There is no vaccine or treatment.

The world has been watching this nightmare unfold in countries such as Brazil, where the Zika virus is suspected of causing birth defects and other neurological disorders. Now, in Ontario, another viral outbreak is being linked to a surge in newborn deformities, albeit in a different population: sheep.

The little-known Cache Valley virus has long circulated in Canada but veterinarians are alarmed by what they say is the largest outbreak in recent memory.

And there are reasons to worry about Cache Valley beyond its disturbing impact on baby lambs. While its risk to humans is currently low, there are signs that the virus could be causing more problems than we realize  and, if it ever explodes the way Zika has, the world will be just as unprepared.

Cache Valley is not very well understood at all. It was kind of ignored for a long time, said medical entomologist Philip Armstrong, who studies the virus and conducts mosquito surveillance for the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

As a veterinary pathogen of sheep, its certainly important  as to human disease, I think the jurys still out.

For veterinarian Paula Menzies, the first sign of trouble in Ontario came around Christmas.

It was like this huge explosion of cases, said Menzies, a professor at Guelph University. Veterinarians were sending (us) these deformed fetuses and I got an email from a couple of (sheep) producers saying, This is happening on my farm. What the heck is this?

The answer, as a Texas laboratory later confirmed, was Cache Valley virus. First discovered in Utah in 1956, Cache Valley is spread by several mosquito species and is believed to circulate in deer. It mostly affects other ruminants, such as sheep and goats.

While outbreaks have been documented in sheep flocks since the early 1980s, the recent Ontario outbreak has caught everyone by surprise.

Its certainly the largest that anybody that Ive worked with is aware of, said Menzies, who is trying to determine the scope of the outbreak but knows of at least seven affected flocks. The question is why?

Among Cache Valleys many mysteries is also the extent to which it affects humans  a question that remains unresolved 60 years after the virus was discovered.

Zika suffered from a similar problem of neglect and, as some cant help but notice, that virus has striking parallels with Cache Valley.

To be clear, the two viruses are very different in many ways  for one, Cache Valley belongs to the Bunyaviridae family, while Zika is a flavivirus. But like Zika, Cache Valley is also spread by mosquitoes, causes mostly asymptomatic infections in the affected population and lacks any vaccine or treatment.

Cache Valley causes birth defects in sheep, attacking the fetuss brain development when pregnant ewes are infected during their first trimester  another echo of what Zika now appears to be doing in humans.

What scientists do know is that Cache Valley can be transmitted to people by mosquito bites (humans dont catch the virus directly from animals). To date, three human infections have been documented in the United States, all with dire consequences: meningitis, encephalitis, and death.

But experts suspect Cache Valley is probably causing more human disease then we realize. A 2012 study in Mexico found Cache Valley antibodies (suggesting previous exposure) in 18 per cent of 823 patients treated for fever.

The Public Health Agency of Canada has also analyzed blood samples from suspected West Nile patients in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, finding that between 5 per cent and 16 per cent had antibodies against Cache Valley.

Its very likely that mild illnesses are going undiagnosed, Armstrong said. Most physicians have never heard of this virus, he said. Its not on their radar.

Another unresolved question is whether Cache Valley could also cause human birth defects, a hypothesis that now needs closer scrutiny in light of Zika, said Armstrong.

At least one paper has provided preliminary evidence that Cache Valley could be linked to a congenital malformation  not microcephaly, the condition linked to Zika, but its polar opposite, macrocephaly, where babies heads are larger than normal.

The paper  far from conclusive  called for further investigations, but none have been undertaken. It was published two decades ago.

What surprises me is that nobody has followed this up, said lead author and arbovirologist Charles Calisher, who is now retired. Cache Valley is a representative of a problem that we refuse to face.

Calisher notes, however, that there are many disease threats to worry about  including others that can cause animal outbreaks and congenital problems  and not all can be prioritized.

For Michael Drebot with the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Zika epidemic is casting a spotlight on all mosquito-borne viruses, which must be better understood, especially since they are always mutating.

In fact, there is already evidence that Cache Valley is evolving. Last year, Armstrong published a study reporting on a new strain of Cache Valley virus, apparently originating in Mexico, which emerged in Connecticut in 2010 and has now become the dominant strain.

That strain has now slipped into Canada and was the culprit behind a sheep outbreak in 2011, and possibly the recent one, too. (The virus from last years outbreak has yet to be isolated and the outbreak was confirmed through antibody testing).

There is early evidence that this strain can grow a little faster and replicate more efficiently, said Drebot, who is now pursuing further research.

Is it responsible for increased cases of lamb deformities? he asked. Could there be a higher risk for humans? We dont know the answers to those questions but I think it is important to further study these particular agents.

Struggling to protect their flocks

The first dead lamb looked like something from a Picasso nightmare. Delivered on Christmas Eve, its spine was curved into an unnatural S shape and one leg jutted awkwardly in the wrong direction, giving it the appearance of having three front legs.

Sheep farmer Sean McKenzie chalked it up to a genetic deformity, especially when the lambs three siblings came out similarly disfigured.

But then, another one of his ewes gave birth to a deformed lamb  and another and another and another. After an exhausting 18 days, McKenzie was left with a pile of death  between 16 and 18 stillborn lambs, all grossly deformed.

Their joints are fused and nothing is pointing in the right direction; legs are backwards  Its just a mess, McKenzie said. It was demoralizing.

McKenzie owns a mid-size sheep farm just outside of Oshawa and was one of several Ontario farmers hit by a major outbreak of Cache Valley virus last year.

The little-known virus causes no symptoms in adult sheep, making it a silent spreader. But if pregnant ewes are infected during their first trimester, it will attack the developing brain cells of the fetus.

While Cache Valley is endemic in Canada, this is the first time McKenzie has seen the virus in his six years as a sheep farmer.

What we cant figure out is why all of a sudden this last year its exploded like this, McKenzie said. Some farmers Ive talked to have been in the business 26 years and theyve never seen it before.

In Canada, the first laboratory-confirmed outbreak of Cache Valley occurred in 2011-12, when several flocks were affected in Ontario and Quebec. Many other outbreaks have also been reported anecdotally.

But this latest outbreak appears to be the most dramatic one yet. Farmers and veterinarians have heard of cases from Windsor to the Ottawa area. Guelph veterinarian Paula Menzies is now conducting a survey to determine how many farms are involved.

Investigators suspect pregnant ewes were likely infected by a silent outbreak that spread in the late summer or early fall. One theory is that an unseasonably warm winter prolonged the mosquito-biting season; another is that a new strain of Cache Valley has recently emerged.

But either way, farmers like McKenzie are powerless to protect their flocks. There is no vaccine for Cache Valley, so all they can do is try to prevent mosquito bites  a hard enough task for people, let alone sheep.

I just cant put them all in barns, McKenzie said. One paper (I read) said to avoid having sheep outdoors breeding during mosquito season. Well, in Canada, that means you can have them outside from October to February and thats about it.

McKenzie estimates Cache Valley killed about 10 per cent of his lambs born this winter, representing a loss of about $5,000. But because ewes infected early into their pregnancy often just lose the embryo, he suspects his actual losses are even greater.

Still, he is relatively lucky. Another farmer he knows lost roughly half his lambs. That was a huge hit, McKenzie said

The worry now is that last years outbreak could signal the start of a new normal. What happens if in the next couple of years, that virus mutates to become more pathogenic such that theyre having outbreaks every year? asked Maria Spinato, a pathologist with the University of Guelphs Animal Health Laboratory, who autopsied lambs killed in the recent outbreak.

This has already happened in Europe with a related virus called Schmallenberg, Spinato notes.

The good news is that sheep already exposed to Cache Valley appear to develop lifelong immunity.

But in the face of a mysterious new threat, sheep farmers are bracing themselves for what other surprises the future may bring.

If it became a recurring theme, it would drastically change the landscape in terms of how we do business, McKenzie said. Its going to be a challenge to avoid it, if its going to come back.

The spread of Cache Valley: A timeline

A new virus emerges

In August 1956, scientists doing routine surveillance collect a pool of Culiseta inornata mosquitoes under a bridge  and are surprised to discover a virus they have never seen before. They name it Cache Valley, after the northern Utah region where it was found.

The animal connection

In 1981, Cache Valley virus is isolated from a sick sheep and healthy cow in Texas. Scientists connect the virus to previously unexplained outbreaks of newborn lamb deformities, and a causal link is later confirmed when scientists experimentally infect sheep and cattle.

A cause of human birth defects?

Curious about whether Cache Valley can also cause human birth defects, researcher Charles Calisher obtains archived blood samples from 1,000 women from multiple U.S. states who participated in a rubella study between 1959 and 1964. He finds a statistically significant link between Cache Valley antibodies and macrocephaly (larger-than-normal head size). The study, which has a relatively small sample size, is not definitive, but it is never followed up.

The first human case

Cache Valley virus is confirmed in a human for the first time after the New England Journal of Medicine publishes a paper on a 28-year-old man who fell sick after a deer-hunting trip in North Carolina. The man recalled being bitten several times by mosquitoes. After a long and painful disease  involving a leg amputation and the loss of his ability to speak, eat or walk  the patient died from pulmonary complications in June 1996.

A second victim

The second human case of Cache Valley is reported in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a peer-reviewed journal published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The patient, a 41-year-old Wisconsin man, became ill and developed a severe case of meningitis in October 2003. He was discharged after three days and fully recovered.

The latest patient

The third and last human case documented so far is reported in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology. In September 2011, a 63-year-old woman shows up at a hospital in upstate New York, complaining of fever, headache and neck stiffness. She develops meningitis but gradually improves and is discharged four days later. The woman suffered from lingering symptoms, however, and a year after being discharged was still struggling with worsening headaches and memory loss.

Cache Valley in Canada

In the winter of 2011-12, an outbreak of Cache Valley in sheep is confirmed by laboratory testing for the first time in Canada. It causes lamb deformities in Ontario and Quebec. There have been many prior anecdotal reports of Cache Valley outbreaks, however, and the virus is believed to be widespread. Studies in Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec have found that as many as 40 per cent of sheep studied harboured antibodies that reacted to the virus.

A new twist

In 2015, Philip Armstrong, a medical entomologist in Connecticut, publishes a paper analyzing Cache Valley virus samples taken from mosquitoes over 18 years. He discovered that in 2010, a new strain of Cache Valley suddenly emerged in Connecticut, quickly becoming dominant by 2014. The strain appears to have originated in southern Mexico, but how it managed to travel to Connecticut, and on to Canada where it has since appeared, is anyones guess.

How the virus affects sheep

Brain: The virus attacks developing brain cells, so affected lambs can have underdeveloped or absent brain tissue, with fluid accumulating in the void.

Spine: Because bones develop under the direction of the nervous system, Cache Valley can cause skeletal malformations, like S-shaped spines.

Joints: Another telltale sign of Cache Valley is fused or immobile joints. This often makes it very painful and difficult for ewes to deliver affected lambs.

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What a difference a few dinners can make.

This week, after hosting her fourth annual Heritage Dinner, Premier Kathleen Wynne finally conceded that these sumptuous fundraiser suppers are leaving a bad taste.

Back in 2013, after her debut speech to the mostly business audience, I asked Wynne how she could defend donations from all those corporate and union supporters  illegal, by then, at the federal level.

The premier replied (with a straight face) that everyone should be encouraged to support democracy in their own way, whether licking envelopes or cutting cheques. And that she had no intention of reforming a system that worked perfectly well for Ontario.

Now, all these years (and newspaper stories) later, she is grudgingly promising to follow the federal lead.

As social mores change and public expectations change and different models are used . . . I think that we need to look at what changes we need to make, Wynne told me after wrapping up this years speech.

But again I will, I will stand by what I said in 2013  which is, political parties need money in order to be able to operate. And people do take part in different ways.

But why, exactly, do different jurisdictions legislate campaign financing in such dramatically different ways? And how did Ottawa find the political will to act, while Ontario remained frozen in time, relying on cabinet ministers to meet annual targets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, as detailed by the Star earlier this week?

Many readers remain incredulous every time I write that the ban on corporate and union donations was brought in by former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. Its true that his Liberal predecessor, Jean Chretien paved the way by dramatically lowering the contribution limits in the wake of federal spending scandals in Quebec, but Harper finished the job by eliminating them entirely in 2006.

With his partys fundraising apparatus finely tuned, and his membership base highly motivated, Harper calculated  correctly, as it turned out  that he could hobble his Liberal rivals by suddenly cutting their links to the corporate contributions theyd long relied on. Perhaps Harper did the right thing for the wrong reasons, but he ultimately did a good thing for Canadian democracy.

In his landmark study of campaign funding in Ontario from 2004 to 2011, York University political scientist Robert MacDermid found that Ontarios three major parties raised more than $162 million, with nearly 40 per cent coming from corporations and another 5 per cent from unions. The Liberals raised a disproportionate 50 per cent of their $72 million from corporations  mostly developers and the wider development industry, followed by big banks and energy firms.

In 2007, Ontario responded to concerns about third parties  special interest groups that try to influence elections  by requiring full disclosure of their spending, but without imposing any spending caps, as Ottawa did. That gave free rein to the infamous Working Families coalition of unions to spend millions of dollars in subsequent elections attacking the Progressive Conservatives as anti-labour.

Cabinet sources who must deal with corporate donors says their gravest concern is the influence of property developers, notably those seeking changes to the boundaries of the Green Belt or making inappropriate demands at both the provincial and municipal levels. An earlier study by MacDermid showed that developers and related donors funded 43 per cent of 2006 election in the regions of Halton, Peel, York and Durham.

The same sorts of patterns are always there, he said in an interview, adding that reforms to date have been pretty grudging and pretty minimalistic.

Government sources say the Liberals are now looking at updating municipal campaign financing, but are hamstrung by the hypocrisy of ordering tighter rules at the urban level before the provincial free-for-all is dealt with.

Significantly, however, the City of Toronto acted on its own in 2009 to cut off corporate donations  and it did so cold turkey, undermining Wynnes argument that Ontario needs to gently phase in any reforms to avoid any sudden disruptions to political parties. Moreover, the province has already had 10 years advance notice to prepare for change and wean itself from corporate money after getting the heads up from those federal reforms in 2006.

Nowadays, the lavish Heritage Dinner put on by the Ontario Liberals has no parallel in the more streamlined and modernized federal party. Many former provincial staff who have migrated to Ottawa now work in a more democratized federal fundraising machine that seeks a greater number of smaller donations, rather than relying on the same old corporate fat cats that pay the Ontario partys way.

Another way to level the playing field, beyond banning corporate and union donations, would be to reduce the overall spending limits for general elections. The notion that all parties require ever-increasing sums for market research and advertising is a false premise, perpetrated by high-priced consultants and high-powered campaign managers.

Our elections can still be a contest of ideas, and a competition between leaders, not just a fight to the finish among fundraisers who can then outspend one another. In democracy, as in life, sometimes less is more.

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BEIJING, April 19 -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday called for coordinated development of cyberspace security and informatization as well as breakthroughs in core Internet technology.

Xi, also head of the central Internet security and informatization leading group, made the remarks while presiding over a symposium on the topic.

Security is a prerequisite for Internet development, and development will also safeguard Internet security, Xi said.

Stressing a correct outlook on cybersecurity, Xi urged accelerated development of a system to protect key information infrastructure and ensure online security.

Internet defense capabilities should be enhanced, Xi said, adding that securing the online environment is a common responsibility for all of society and requires commitment from the government, enterprises, social organizations and all netizens.

He also called on the industry to achieve more breakthroughs in core Internet technology.

"More personnel, material and financial resources should be put toward research and development of core and strategically important technologies," the president said.

He called on entrepreneurs, scholars, scientists and technicians in the industry to work together toward the goal.

"New technology is the achievement of civilization and we will never resist its development as long as it helps improve productivity and the people's lives," Xi said.

The leading group's deputy heads Li Keqiang and Liu Yunshan also attended the symposium.
Pressure is mounting on Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown to discipline Jack MacLaren after the controversial MPP was forced to remove fake testimonials from his official website.

MacLaren, who had to apologize last week after the Star revealed he humiliated a female Liberal MP with a sexist joke at a cancer fundraising dinner in Carp, Ont., is in trouble again.

The Ottawa Citizen discovered the Carleton-Mississippi Mills MPP had adorned his official website with praise from phoney constituents.

Thanks for everything you did to help me resolve my problem with the Ministry of Transportation, said Darren, from Mississippi Mills, Ont., beside his alleged photograph.

But the Citizen found Darren is actually Sam Muirhead, a New Zealand-born software developer who lives in Berlin, Germany.

Muirhead told the newspaper unless I have a secret evil Canadian twin, Darren does not exist.

There was also a discrepancy over Scott from Almonte, Ont.

Thank you for getting my OHIP card. After trying myself, for a year and a half, I was ready to give up, he said on MacLarens website.

However, the photo of Scott was taken by a photographer in the Netherlands and has been swirling around the Internet for almost a decade.

After the embarrassing story was published Tuesday night, a new message popped up on the Tory MPPs website.

Disclaimer: In order to maintain the privacy of constituents, stock photos and generic names have been used, it said beneath the six testimonials from constituents represented by a telegenic, multicultural group of headshots.

Hours later the offending page was removed and MacLaren issued a terse apology.

Measures were taken to protect the privacy of individuals who provided positive feedback to my office, the MPP said in a statement Wednesday.

While this was not intended to be misleading, I recognize that it was improper. I apologize and have asked for the content to be removed immediately.

He then huddled in the foyer of the legislature with Browns advisers for 70 minutes after the morning question period, hoping to duck the media.

I apologize and we have removed it from my website and were sorry it happened. Thank you very much, MacLaren eventually told a large throng of reporters, before hightailing it for his office two floors above with cameras in chase on the marble staircase.

His entire MPPs website was then taken offline.

Surprisingly, Brown  who was stuck answering for MacLarens transgressions for the second time in a week  had yet to discuss the newest problem with the gaffe-prone member.

Internal party discipline matters are private, but I will weigh my options once I gather all the details. This has come out rather quickly and Im going to do my due diligence, said the Tory leader.

Brown refused to discuss the punishment options available, which could include ejecting MacLaren from caucus.

Sources said late Wednesday the troublesome MPP had been demoted from his ceremonial role as chair of the Tories Eastern Ontario caucus, a symbolic body that has never held a meeting with him at the helm. It will now be chaired by Jim McDonell (Stormont-Dundas-South Glengarry).

While some PC activists are alarmed at the damage MacLarens antics are causing, Brown insisted he isnt worried about the partys reputation taking a hit as he tries to rebuild the Conservative brand after four consecutive election losses to the Liberals.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath pointed out everybodys real on my website.

Theres an expectation that youre truthful with the public and anything that looks as if youre not being truthful really doesnt go over very well, she said.

Conservatives at Queens Park were abuzz over MacLaren.

Patrick needs to do something. This hurts us all, said one senior PC official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

This is a problem, admitted another Tory insider.

Michele Austin, a prominent Ottawa Conservative who lives in MacLarens riding, said enough is enough.

His sign wont be going on my lawn next time, thats for sure. Frankly, I think he should consider retirement. He has clearly lost touch with his constituents, said Austin, who was chief of staff to two ministers in former prime minister Stephen Harpers government.

There are absolutely no reasonable explanations for his actions, she said.

The website fiasco is the most recent setback triggered by the maverick MPP.

On March 24, he told a vulgar joke about Liberal MP Karen McCrimmon (Kanata-Carleton) at a March 24 charity event that both were attending.

MacLaren urged a reluctant McCrimmon to the stage in Carp, put his arm around her shoulder then made a comment about her body.

Im not getting behind you, the MPP said, as he shifted on stage before reading the prepared text of an oral sex joke about McCrimmon and her husband.

Two weeks later  after the Star revealed the story and Brown called him on the carpet  MacLaren finally emailed McCrimmon to apologize.

He has embarrassed the entire group by making such crude comments at their event. These are wonderful people who work so hard for their community. They deserve better than that, the Liberal MP said at the time.

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Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown insists he has done enough to punish rogue MPP Jack MacLaren.

Obviously, I was upset, Brown said of MacLaren, who in the past week has been forced to apologize for making a sexist joke about a female Liberal MP at a charity fundraiser, and for posting testimonials from fake constituents on his official website.

It was the totality of events, not one single (thing), said the Tory leader, who removed the Carleton-Mississippi MPP from his largely ceremonial post as chair of the Tories Eastern Ontario caucus.

This is a post just like a regional minister would be. Its speaking to the riding associations. Its a leadership position in the party, said Brown, who has handed the symbolic title to MPP Jim McDonell (Stormont-Dundas-South Glengarry).

It was important to express that I wasnt happy and theres consequences, and thats why he was demoted from that position. The demotion speaks for itself, he said.

MacLaren, who brushed past reporters Wednesday after uttering a terse apology for the website ruse, wasnt seen at Queens Park on Thursday and could not be reached for comment.

But, privately, his caucus colleagues are fuming that he hasnt been sanctioned more severely.

This is basically meaningless, said one senior Tory, noting MacLaren never once chaired a meeting of the Eastern Ontario caucus.

Jack made Patrick look bad and he made all of us look bad.

The Tory caucus got a much-needed morale boost Thursday afternoon when former prime minister Brian Mulroney dropped by Queens Park to give them a pep talk.

Im in town to do an event tonight and Patrick, whos an old friend of mine, asked me to come by and say hello to the caucus. We had a great meeting, Mulroney told the Star.

The man who governed the country from 1984 until 1993, who delivered back-to-back Conservative majority election wins, and drove major policy changes at home and abroad, gave Brown some counsel on being a leader.

I guess the only advice is obvious advice: if youre the leader of the opposition its a very difficult job and you depend on the support and loyalty of your colleagues, said Mulroney.

If that is provided, big things can happen; if its absent, theres going to be trouble, he said, adding he implored Browns confreres to rally behind their rookie chief.

So I certainly urged them to do what happened to me when I was leader of the opposition; I got tremendous support from my caucus throughout my 10 years there and I hope the same thing is ongoing here.

MacLarens transgressions have had a debilitating effect on the Tories at Queens Park since the Star revealed last week that he told a vulgar joke about Liberal MP Karen McCrimmon (Kanata-Carleton) at a March 24 charity event in Carp, Ont., that both were attending along with 350 people.

On Tuesday, the Ottawa Citizen disclosed the MPPs official website, which has since been taken offline, boasted six fake testimonials accompanied by photos lifted from the Internet.

Thanks for everything you did to help me resolve my problem with the Ministry of Transportation, said Darren, from Mississippi Mills, Ont., beside a photograph of Sam Muirhead, a New Zealand-born software developer who lives in Germany.

Muirhead told the Citizen that unless I have a secret evil Canadian twin, Darren does not exist.

When the story was first published, a message was added to MacLarens website: Disclaimer: In order to maintain the privacy of constituents, stock photos and generic names have been used.

Later, the page was removed, then the entire website was finally shut down Thursday afternoon.

I apologize and we have removed it from my website and were sorry it happened, MacLaren said at the time.

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Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown should turf controversial MPP Jack MacLaren from his caucus for misogynistic behaviour, says Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne.

When I talked some months ago about misogyny in our society, the kind of behaviour that this member has demonstrated is exactly what I was talking about, Wynne said Friday.

MacLaren has been under fire since the Star revealed last week that he told a sexist joke about Liberal MP Karen McCrimmon (Kanata-Carleton) in front of 350 people at a March 24 charity event in Carp, Ont.

On Thursday, the Ottawa Citizen posted audio recordings from a previous Carp Fair mens night that included the Carleton-Mississippi Mills making crude references to Wynne.

Do you not think you should support our premier in blowing everybody up through the ass? MacLaren told his audience, referring to Liberal policies like the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan, estate taxes, and carbon pricing.

Thats how you f--- things up  and shes doing a marvelous (job).

The tapes emerged the same week as the MPP had to apologize for posting fake testimonials from constituents  complete with photos lifted from the Internet  on his official website, which has since been taken offline.

Wynne said she does not find MacLarens antics amusing.

Its the kind of language and behaviour that fuels misogyny. From my perspective its unacceptable and if he were a member in my caucus wed be having a very different conversation about whether he would remain a member of caucus or not, the premier said in Mississauga.

I said when we heard about the first incident that I hoped there would be a full and personal apology. Its obviously up to Patrick Brown and his team to make this decision. But if I were dealing with this situation, it would be different, she said.

There would need to be a much more public apology. There would be a much more serious discussion about whether it was appropriate to have someone who behaves in this way as a member of caucus.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said Thursday that the rookie Tory chief needs to act.

I havent been faced with that specific situation, but it definitely is something that Mr. Brown is going to have to deal with, said Horwath.

Not only in terms of the individual in question but also to indicate to his caucus that there is a requirement to be above board and to be disciplined and to remember that everything you do will impact your leader as well as your team.

Brown, who is facing caucus unrest over his handling of MacLaren, was not available Friday to respond to the public challenge from Wynne.

He and his advisers were laying low as they scramble to do damage control.

On Thursday, the Tory leader said he was upset with the MPP, which is why he removed him as chair of the PC Eastern Ontario caucus, a largely ceremonial post.

It was important to express that I wasnt happy and theres consequences, and thats why he was demoted from that position. The demotion speaks for itself, said Brown, stressing he will not tolerate misogyny in his party.

MacLaren did return not messages seeking comment Friday.

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JAKARTA, INDONESIAIndonesias foreign ministry said Tuesday that 10 Indonesian nationals are being held hostage after their ship was hijacked in Philippine waters.

The ministry said in a statement that the owner of the hijacked tug boat and coal barge has received two telephone calls, purportedly from militant group Abu Sayyaf, demanding a ransom.

It does not know exactly when the incident occurred but said the ship owner was first contacted on Saturday. The ministrys statement also referred to the hostage takers as pirates.

The current priority is the safety of 10 citizens who were taken hostage, the statement said. It said the company that owns the ship has informed the families of the crew.

Abu Sayyaf, which is on U.S. and Philippine lists of terrorist organizations, is notorious for bombings, extortions and kidnappings for ransom in the volatile south of the Philippines. It has been weakened by years of U.S.-backed Philippine offensives but remains a security threat.

If confirmed as the work of Abu Sayyaf, the kidnapping would be among its largest number of hostages since 2001.

The tug, Brahma 12, and the Anand 12 barge were going from Sungai Putting in Kalimantan, which is the Indonesian part of Borneo island, to Batangas in the southern Philippines.

The Facebook page of the Brahma 12s captain, Peter Tonsen Barahama, shows smiling photos of him and the crew on the vessel preparing for the voyage and good luck wishes from friends commenting on a port clearance document he posted. The document shows the vessel and its barge left a port in southern Kalimantan on March 15.

Philippine police say the tug boat was found in Languyan town in the southernmost Philippine province of Tawi Tawi. Indonesias foreign ministry believes the barge carrying about 7,000 tons of coal is still under the control of the hostage takers.

Philippine security officials suspect the al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf for last years abductions of two Canadians, a Norwegian and a Filipino woman from a marina on southern Samal Island. The kidnap victims are believed to be held in the jungles of southern Sulu province.

In a recent video posted on a Facebook account linked to the militants, they threatened to kill the hostages unless a huge ransom was paid by April 8. The Philippine military said the governments no-ransom policy remains and security forces would continue efforts to secure the safe release of the captives.

Indonesia has been helping the Philippines forge a peace agreement with Filipino Muslim rebels by sending soldiers to join an international oversight group which helps monitor government and rebel adherence to a cease-fire.

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CEDARBURG, WIS.A duck that lost its feet to frostbite is waddling again thanks to a U.S. school teacher and a 3D printer.

Vicki Rabe-Harrison rescued Phillip the duck and, after watching a video of a 3D printer online, turned to South Park Middle School teacher Jason Jischke in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for help.

Rabe-Harrison tells WBAY-TV that she was planning to put Phillip down when Jischke called to say he and his class were working on the project. It took them six weeks of trial and error to get the prosthetic feet just right.

Phillip was a bit wobbly when he first tested his new feet, but has now joined other birds and animals at a sanctuary north of Milwaukee. Autumn Farm Sanctuary co-founder Alyssa Herbst says Phillip is getting used to his new feet.

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NASHVILLEA Tennessee transgender bathroom bill has failed after a sponsor pulled the measure until next year.

The move Monday comes after intense opposition from businesses and gay, lesbian and transgender rights organizations that called the measure discriminatory and amid questions of whether the state would lose more than $1 billion in federal education funds.

The bill would have required students in public schools and universities to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their sex at birth.

The proposal is part of a wave of legislation across the country that opponents say is discriminatory and stemmed from the U.S. Supreme Courts landmark ruling last year that effectively legalized same-sex marriage.

Supporters of the measure maintained they were only trying to protect student privacy.

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NATO will admonish Russia over provocative military maneuvers after a spate of close calls in the Baltic Sea last week in which Russian warplanes buzzed U.S. forces.

Allies plan to bring up the unprofessional and unsafe behaviour of Russian planes in a meeting with Russias ambassador on Wednesday, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Luxembourg on Tuesday.

Russian tactics that risk an accidental confrontation just underline the importance of open military lines of communication, of predictability and risk reduction, he said.

Russia and the U.S.-led alliance have eyed each other warily since the Kremlins seizure of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine in 2014 brought back memories of the Cold War standoff.

Russia has stepped up military drills on its western borders and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has rotated forces into eastern Europe to protect allies like Poland that were once under Soviet dominion.

A Russian SU-27 fighter veered within 50 feet of a U.S. reconnaissance jet over the Baltic late last week, days after other Russian attack planes and a helicopter made low passes over the guided missile destroyer USS Donald Cook, the Pentagon said.

Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz pointed to the long-term threat posed by Russias military concentrations along its European frontiers and in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea.

These are offensive forces which far outnumber NATO capabilities in this region, Macierewicz told Rzeczpospolita newspaper. Poland is spearheading calls for an additional allied military commitment to eastern Europe at a NATO summit it will host in Warsaw in July.

Russia says the West started it. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday that Russia feels threatened by very unfriendly actions of the alliance in terms of capacity-building at our borders.

Wednesdays meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels is the first since June 2014, shortly after Russia took Crimea from Ukraine.

NATO has regularly accused Russia of risky military practices since then, with warplanes frequently testing allied air defenses. In the most notable incident, Turkey in November shot down a Russian combat jet that crossed into its territory.

Evoking Cold War-style hotlines and early-warning systems, Stoltenberg said NATO will push Russia to enhance the mechanisms of risk reduction. One model would be the contacts set up by the Russian and western air forces to prevent accidents in the skies over Syria.

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VERONA, N.J.An email from a concerned friend of a suicidal student in Verona, Italy, mistakenly went to a police department of the same name in New Jersey, but authorities said it helped save a life.

Mitchell Stern, police chief in Verona, New Jersey, said the department received an email April 14 from a Chinese student in the United Kingdom concerned about another Chinese student at the Verona Academy of Fine Arts in Italy.

After trying to find contact information for the Italian police department of the same name and the Italian embassy, he eventually got in touch with Interpol, a network of police forces around the world. Interpol forwarded it to the state police in Italy.

The student was found with her wrists partially slit and with a half-empty bottle of antidepressants when local police arrived at her apartment, the Italian Interior Ministry said in a statement.

The student had told her friend in an online chat that she was going to harm herself, Stern said.

It really makes you step back and think you can help to save a life half a world away, Stern said.

Stern said the 30-member Verona, New Jersey, police department occasionally gets emails looking for lost luggage or reporting thefts in Verona, Italy, but nothing at the same magnitude as last Thursdays.

Stern said he wouldnt have shared the story, but Italian authorities saw it as an opportunity to show how police work together.

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Toby Rickettss first wedding vow was a solemn one: I agree that I will always put salt in the water and allow it to boil before cooking the pasta.

Pasta, after all, is holy business to Ricketts and his bride Marianna Fenn, whom he married on Saturday.

The couple consider themselves members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, worshippers of a spaghetti-and-meatball god. And on Saturday, these two Pastafarians became pioneers of their decade-old religion: the first believers in the world, they think, to marry in a government-sanctioned ceremony officiated within their church.

The mythos of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was created by Bobby Henderson, now a 35-year-old resident of Portland, Ore., in 2005. Since then, thousands of people have paid for a $25 (U.S.) certificate of ordination as a ministeroni, and an unknown number have simply declared themselves followers and thus become Pastafarians, Henderson said on Monday.

The religions tongue-in-cheek creeds mock organized belief, particularly Christianity. But Henderson and other followers insist that while they might not all believe in the literal truth of their doctrine  neither do many followers of other faiths, they point out  their religion is in no way a joke.

While a judge in Nebraska ruled only last week that this belief system is not a religion, Pastafarians elsewhere have won the right to wear their religious headgear  a pasta strainer  in their photographs on drivers licenses and have put up noodle-themed banners alongside Christmas trees on public property.

And now, in New Zealand, they have officially conducted a state-sanctioned wedding.

Ricketts and Fenn, who had dated for four years, did not think they needed a wedding to formalize their love  until Ricketts, working on a documentary on why religious groups (not including the Pastafarians) are tax exempt, learned that the Flying Spaghetti Monster church had recently been added to the list of 727 religions, denominations, congregations and ministries authorized to perform legal marriages in New Zealand. And if they acted fast, he and Fenn could be the first bridegroom and bride.

Rapidly, they declared themselves believers and found a ministeroni.

Our deitys just as valid as any other supernatural deity, Ricketts said on Monday.

The church doesnt require that anyone literally believes. Skepticism is encouraged. Asking questions is part of the faith, Fenn said. But she added that she likes her Pastafarian god. The Flying Spaghetti Monster, I believe, is as plausible as any of the other thousands of deities around the world. And the idea makes me happy.

The wedding took place aboard a pirate ship, with the couple and their 40 guests dressed as pirates, because the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster teaches that all humans descended from pirates. Without much precedent to draw on, Fenn and Ricketts came up with their own wedding rituals, including an exchange of rings while blindfolded. A la Lady and the Tramp, they ate the same strand of spaghetti until their mouths met in a kiss.

Henderson says that he has heard of other weddings performed in the church he founded, but he believes those couples also obtained civil marriage certificates.

U.S. laws vary state by state on who can perform a wedding.

Henderson himself said he has not been to a wedding in his church. And if he ever marries, hes not sure his own wedding would be pirate-themed or spaghetti-catered.

I would think about it. Im not sure, the founder of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster conceded. I think usually the lady gets to pick how weddings go down.

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MANILA, PHILIPPINESThe front-runner in the Philippine presidential race apologized Tuesday for a campaign rally remark about wanting to rape an Australian missionary who was assaulted and killed by prisoners during a hostage-taking in 1989.

The comment by Mayor Rodrigo Duterte of southern Davao city sparked a storm of criticism ahead of the May 9 election.

Duterte issued an apology saying sometimes my mouth can get the better of me and adding that he has no intention of disrespecting our women and those who have been victims of this horrible crime.

At a campaign stop last week, Duterte said he should have been the first to rape Australian Jacqueline Hamill, whose throat was slit by prisoners after she was raped during a 1989 prison siege.

His supporters laughed and cheered at the comment.

Rival candidates and womens groups, however, were shocked and slammed the tough-talking mayor for the remark.

A rival candidate for the presidency called Duterte a crazy maniac who is not fit to lead the nation.

Australian Ambassador Amanda Gorely tweeted Sunday that rape and murder should never be joked about or trivialized and violence against women and girls is unacceptable anytime, anywhere.

An incensed Duterte asked Gorely to shut up, according to news reports.

Dutertes campaign promise to rid the Philippines of criminals, drug dealers and corrupt politicians in six months has won him wide support, but political analyst Ramon Casiple said his rape remark may alienate the undecided, whose backing may be crucial in the tight contest among four contenders.

Duterte was in the lead in a voter preference survey conducted days before his comment.

It can possibly be his Waterloo, Casiple said. Theres not much time. It remains to be seen whether corrective measures by his camp can still gain traction.

Duterte has come under fire for past remarks. Last year, he cursed Pope Francis for causing a traffic jam during a visit to Manila that trapped the mayor for hours.

Stunned Roman Catholic bishops criticized the mayor, who later said he was sorry and wrote a letter of apology to the pope.

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Visa changes promise easier travel for Chinese to New Zealand

WELLINGTON, April 19 -- Chinese visitors to New Zealand will soon find travel easier with a raft of new visa initiatives, Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse said Tuesday.

The introduction of "e-visas" enabled Chinese nationals to now apply online, and a Chinese logon service, allowing a complete online Chinese language application process, from registration to approval, said Woodhouse.

Later this year applicants would also be able to pay for online visa applications using China UnionPay debit and credit cards.

"China is New Zealand's second-largest and fastest growing tourist market," Woodhouse said in a statement.

"Last year, over 355,000 Chinese citizens visited New Zealand and contributed over 1.6 billion NZ dollars (1.12 billion U.S. dollars) to our economy," said Woodhouse.

"The government has been looking at ways to make it easier for Chinese travellers to visit New Zealand and ensure they have a positive experience when they come to our country," he said.

"These measures deliver on that by providing an easy, streamlined visa application and approval process for Chinese nationals."

Other changes already in place to make travel to New Zealand easier for Chinese visitors included doubling the length of the multiple-entry visa to two years and introducing a three-year multiple entry business visa.
BUSAN, SOUTH KOREAThree decades ago, a policeman tortured Choi Seung-woo over a piece of bread he found in the boys schoolbag.

After being stripped and having a cigarette lighter repeatedly sparked near his genitals, the 14-year-old falsely confessed to stealing the bread. Two men with clubs came and dragged him off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.

Even now, Choi weeps as he speaks of what happened there.

A guard in Chois dormitory raped him that night in 1982, and the next, and the next. So began five hellish years of slave labour and near-daily assaults, years in which Choi saw men and women beaten to death, their bodies carted away like garbage.

Choi was one of thousands  the homeless, the drunk, the unlucky, but mostly children and the disabled  who were forced into facilities for so-called vagrants in the 1970s and 80s. The roundup came as the ruling dictators prepared to bid for and host the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which they saw as international validation of South Koreas arrival as a modern country. So they ordered police and local officials to purify the streets.

Today, nobody has been held accountable for the hundreds of deaths, rapes and beatings on the grounds of Brothers, the largest of dozens of facilities for those considered undesirable, according to an Associated Press investigation. The AP found that abuse at Brothers, previously almost unknown, was much more vicious and widespread than had been realized, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates, most of whom had not spoken before publicly.

Secrecy around Brothers persists because of a coverup at the highest levels, the AP found. Two early attempts to investigate were suppressed by senior officials who went on to thrive in high-profile jobs; one remains a senior adviser to the current ruling party.

Products made using slave labour at Brothers were sent to Europe, Japan and possibly beyond, and the family that owned Brothers continued to run welfare facilities and schools until just two years ago.

The few former inmates speaking out want a new investigation. The government is blocking an opposition lawmakers push to revisit the case, contending that the evidence is too old.

Ahn Jeong-tae, an official from Seouls Ministry of the Interior, said Brothers victims should have submitted their case years ago to a temporary truth-finding commission. We cant make separate laws for every incident, Ahn said.

The official silence means that even as South Korea prepares for its second Olympics, in 2018, thousands of traumatized former inmates have still received no compensation, let alone public recognition or an apology.

The government has consistently tried to bury what happened. How do you fight that? Choi asked. Look at me now. I am wailing, desperate to tell our story. Please listen to us.

Police officers, assisted by shop owners, rounded up children, panhandlers, small-time street merchants, the disabled and dissidents. They ended up as prisoners at 36 nationwide facilities, and numbered 16,000 by 1986, according to government documents obtained by AP.

Nearly 4,000 were at Brothers. Once an orphanage, Brothers Home at its peak had more than 20 factories behind its well-guarded walls in the southern port city of Busan, churning out goods made by mostly unpaid inmates.

Some 90 per cent of those shouldnt have been there because they didnt meet the governments definition of vagrant, former prosecutor Kim Yong Won told the AP, based on Brothers records and interviews compiled in 1987 before government officials ended his investigation.

A former inmate, Lee Chae-sik, said he watched the man he worked for, chief enforcer Kim Kwang-seok, lead near-daily, often fatal beatings at a corrections room. Lee said he also saw records that sometimes listed as many as five daily deaths. The AP tried repeatedly to track Kim down but could not.

Amid the violence was a massive money-making operation partly based on slave labour. Eleven of the factories, ostensibly meant to train inmates for future jobs, saw a profit by the end of 1986, according to Busan city government documents obtained exclusively by the AP.

The documents show that Brothers should have paid the current equivalent of $1.7 million (U.S.) to more than 1,000 inmates for their dawn-to-dusk work over an unspecified period. However, facility records and interviews with inmates at the time suggest that most people at Brothers were subjected to forced labour without pay, according to prosecutor Kim.

In his autobiography and elsewhere, Brothers owner, Park In-keun, has denied wrongdoing, saying he simply followed government orders. Repeated attempts to contact him through family, friends and activists were unsuccessful.

The former second-highest management official at Brothers, Lim Young-soon, attributed the facilitys high death toll to the many inmates he said arrived there in poor health.

These were people who would have died in the streets anyway, Lim told AP in a phone interview.

While Park grew rich, inmates struggled to survive.

On his second day at Brothers, Choi said he watched a guard drag a woman by her hair and beat her with a club until blood flowed.

Death tallies compiled by the facility claimed 513 people died between 1975 and 1986; the real toll was almost certainly higher. Most of the new arrivals at Brothers were in relatively good health, government documents show. Yet at least 15 inmates were dead within just a month of arrival in 1985, and 22 in 1986.

Brothers downfall began by accident.

While pheasant hunting, Kim, then a newly appointed prosecutor in the city of Ulsan, stumbled upon bedraggled prisoners working on a mountainside. Their guards said they were building a ranch for the owner of the Brothers Home in nearby Busan.

Kim and 10 policemen raided Brothers in January 1987. But at every turn in his investigation, Kim said, high-ranking officials blocked him, in part out of fear of embarrassing pre-Olympics news. Internal prosecution records reveal intense pressure from the presidents office for Kim to curb his probe and push for lighter punishment for the owner.

Kims boss, Park Hee-tae, then Busans head prosecutor and later the nations justice minister, pushed to reduce the scope of the investigation, Kim said, including forcing him to stop efforts to interview every Brothers inmate. Park, a senior adviser to the current ruling party, denied AP interview requests. His personal secretary said Park cant remember details about the investigation.

Kim, now 61 and a managing partner at a Seoul law firm, said his bosses also prevented him from charging the owner for suspected widespread abuse at the main compound, limiting him to pursuing much narrower abuse linked to the construction site hed found.

Despite interference, Kim eventually collected bank records and financial transactions indicating that, in 1985 and 1986 alone, the owner embezzled millions from government subsidies. The Supreme Court in 1989 gave Park 2  years in prison for embezzlement and violations of construction, grassland management and foreign currency laws.

Brothers finally closed its gates in 1988.

While most former inmates are silent, a few are demanding an apology and an admission that officials encouraged police to kidnap and lock away people who shouldnt have been confined.

How can we ever forget the pain from the beatings, the dead bodies, the back-breaking labour, the fear . . . all the bad memories, said Lee, who now manages a lakeside motel. It will haunt us until we die.

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Re Sugar tax would be healthy for us, April 11

The Canadian Beverage Association would like to point out that our recent statement on sugar taxes is accurate in reference to taxes in Denmark. The facts are that in 2011, Denmark implemented a tax on all products high in saturated fat, which included milk and yogurt drinks (beverages), and repealed it shortly thereafter for negative effects on the economy. Furthermore, this failure caused the Danish government to denounce its health-based tax policy as a whole, which included a later plan for a tax on sugar. Summarizing as we did in the quoted statement is factually accurate.

Jim Goetz, President, Canadian Beverage Association, Toronto

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(Global Times) 09:23, April 19, 2016

Brazil's lower house won the two-thirds majority on Monday it needed to impeach President Dilma Rousseff. A simple majority of the upper house is enough to suspend her for up 180 days. The leftist president now stands at a political precipice.

Rousseff has been impeached over charges of manipulating government accounts, and is widely accused of corruption and juggling the accounts to make Brazil's economic performance appear better. But deep down, this comes because her government is unable to lead the country out of its current economic plight.

Brazil enjoyed robust exports, massive foreign exchange revenue and improved social well-being in recent years due to speedy development of other emerging countries like China. But in 2015, Brazil witnessed a negative growth of 3.8 percent and its welfare policy was crippled.

The weakened capabilities of the leftist government in promoting social benefits allowed rightists to thrive in Latin America. Rousseff's Workers' Party can't rule without support from a dozen parties, and negative growth prompted some of these parties to split from Rousseff and her party.

However, impeaching Rousseff won't mean a U-turn for Brazil. Rousseff has been endorsed by the poor in Brazil and she allegedly manipulated government accounts in a bid to protect them. With staggering income disparity, Brazil's trade unions will again be revitalized if Rousseff steps down.

In this sense, Brazil can be tilting toward neither left nor right. In elections, candidates compete to make enticing promises to the public, which they can hardly honor. The Brazilian system encourages politicians to compete for interim favor of the public by blaming others.

Brazil is blessed with ample resources, and much habitable land which is not over-populated. But it is stuck in the middle-income trap and faced with an unstable economic and political situation as its political system is unable to handle the diversity and complexity of society. Aside from Rousseff, the vice president and head of the Senate are also mired in corruption scandals. Brazil does not have a comprehensive anti-corruption scheme in place and corruption accusations are often exploited.

The impeachment of Rousseff opens a new battlefield of political struggle in the country. Such impeachment may happen unexpectedly in the future as Brazil's 30-some parties can hardly win half of the votes required to rule, so the country is more likely to be ruled by a coalition of small parties.

Brazilians are nominally given democratic rights, but apparently they are unable to influence the country's political direction.
The Chinese market recently witnessed a sharp rise in garlic prices. Analysts believe that declining production and increasing demand are the decisive factors behind the rise, but speculators are also contributing to it.

Xinhua conducted investigations in several major producing areas, including Jinxiang County in eastern China's Shandong province. In Jinxiang, the acquisition price of garlic was about 4.7 yuan ($0.7) per kilogram last July, but the price rose 170 percent this March to 12.8 yuan.

The highest garlic price this year has already surpassed the peak price in 2010, another time when garlic prices surged unexpectedly, said Yang Jiahua, secretary general of a garlic industry association in Jinxiang.

Cui Xiaona, an agricultural products analyst, believes there are three factors contributing to the rise of garlic prices. Besides declining production and increasing demand, speculation is also a key factor.

"National production dropped by 8 to 10 percent in 2014, and this year it is expected to decline even further because of the cold wave at the end of 2015," she explained.

Sellers sort out garlic in a market in Zhongmou, Henan province.

Most dealers insist that market supply and demand are determining the market price, but they also admit that speculation is a driving force. Some speculators made millions of yuan from this round of speculations, and several made over 100 million yuan. At the same time, others suffered heavy losses.

Some dealers are gambling to increase their profits. For instance, a number of property agents in northeast China and Shanghai purchased a huge amount of garlic and bid up the price in March and April when supply is relatively short, creating the expectation of rising prices, according to Liu Shaochen, president of a cold storage industry association in Zhongmou County, Henan province.

The investigation also found that the expectation of a reduction in garlic output has contributed to the rise. According to a dealer in Jinxiang, information about the reduction dates back to a message from an industry conference held in Shandong at the end of February, saying that the stored garlic nationwide only amounted to 600,000 tons.

Rumors about a rise of garlic prices consequently began to spread, but the message has been greatly exaggerated and even exploited since it was first released. Dealers are using all kinds of tactics to jack up the price, an insider said.

Analysts believe that more authoritative information should be released in order to reduce speculation and stabilize the market price.
The second largest Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, reported on Sunday that due to Chinas growing appetite for mutton hotpot, the price of Japanese school uniforms is rapidly rising.

Japanese media said that Chinas appetite for lamb has led to an increase in the amount of sheep being exported for meat, meaning that fewer sheep are being raised for wool, a primary component of Japanese school uniforms. With the increasing demand for mutton, Asahi Shimbun said that farmers in Australia and New Zealand have had to prioritize mutton over wool, so the prices of Japanese school uniforms have increased by 3,000 yen since 2010, according to Global Times.

So, is all this true?

The 2015 Report on Meat and Livestock of Australia shows that mutton exportation has been very stable in the past two years  about 235,000 tons each year. So far in 2016, the Australian mutton yield has actually dropped 3 percent. A report about beef and lamb in New Zealand also indicates a 1.5 percent drop in exports during 2014 and 2015. Chinas consumption of imported lamb also decreased in 2015, due both to the higher price of imported goods and the improved quality of domestic lamb.

This is not the first time Japanese media has made false accusations about China. The fact is that Abenomics, the economic policies of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, are what is really to blame for the higher prices of school uniforms. Ever since the implementation of Abenomics, prices have been rising and the Japanese people have been experiencing increased hardships.
Over 90 tables were set up for the banquet, filling a whole street. (Photo/ Hainan Special Zone News)

A special "gate" was made from a red curtain. (Photo/ Hainan Special Zone News)

A man recently set up nearly 100 tables for his son's wedding banquet on a street in the city of Qionghai in China's southern island province of Hainan.

Given that the street was occupied, some nearby residents complained about the inconvenience. However, the man claimed that he had gotten approval from relevant authorities, and arranged for people to reroute traffic on the wedding day so that the banquet didn't cause too much trouble.

A reporter with Hainan Special Zone News was at the scene.

Guo Chunxiong, the father of the groom, explained to the reporter that April 17 was his son's wedding day. Guo is a wealthy businessman. As he and his wife both have many friends and relatives, they decided to hold the banquet outside on the street so there would be more room. Guo set up over 90 tables, and the banquet included two rounds  one around at noon and another in the evening.

Guo said, "I told the neighbors about the banquet. They didn't object, and many actually volunteered to help."

A representative from the local government said that on a weekday, the banquet would have been allowed to occupy one-third of the street at maximum. However, since the banquet was held on a weekend, there were no special limitations. Additionally, because Guo reported the event to the government in advance, and because the banquet was not projected to cause traffic or security problems, it was allowed.
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Tony covers breaking news for TheStreet. He's been a reporter for this publications for more than eight years. He graduated from American University with a bachelor's degree in communications and lives in New York. He likes to tweet about the Washington Football Team and the Washington Nationals, but has a wide range of interests.

Send Tony an email here.
Recently, 10 students from Glen Ridge High School of New Jersey came to Hangzhou and spent a couple of days with the students of Yucai Middle School in Hangzhou. The American students took Chinese class, English class and calligraphy class alongside their Chinese classmates; they came prepared to experience Chinese-style education.

Alex, one of the 10 students from Glen Ridge, remarked that his Chinese classmates were quite serious about their studies and warm toward the American students. Although he has studied Chinese in the U.S. for three years, the ancient poems his classmates created in Chinese class were still beyond his comprehension. Compared to in the U.S., Alex also noticed that there are more students per class in China, and the Chinese students focus more closely on their studies during class.

Alex said that he was shocked to find an iPad on the desk of every student. Many of the American students were stunned by the advanced equipment and facilities this Chinese school had. In the afternoon, the students from the U.S. took part in an activity to learn about Chinese tea culture. The students sat cross-legged on the lawn, tasting green tea while listening to zither-like guzheng music. After school, the American students returned with their Chinese classmates to homestays. They did not feel surprised when they were told to get up at 6:30 a.m. and go to sleep at 9:30 p.m., as their first class each morning in the U.S. is scheduled at 8:30 a.m.
In this April 5, 2016, photo, President Barack Obama speaks in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington. The president's trip to the Middle East and Europe may have been planned as the first in a series of farewell visits, but it's shaping up to be a reassurance tour. When Obama lands in Saudi Arabia, Britain and Germany this week, he'll be met by leaders who share worries about the United States' long-term commitment to them and irritation at him describing them as international "free riders." (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) meets with former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien in Beijing, capital of China, April 19, 2016.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said there is great scope for China and Canada to cooperate more as he met with former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien in Beijing on Tuesday.

China and Canada are both important countries in the Asia-Pacific region, complementary in their economies and sharing a strong friendship, Li said.

China attaches much importance to relations with Canada and appreciates current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's efforts to improve bilateral ties, according to the premier.

He said China is willing to hold more high-level exchanges with Canada, and to cooperate more in trade and investment, synchronizing their development strategies.

Chretien agreed that Canada and China are natural partners, enjoying particular potential for more cooperation in nuclear power and infrastructure construction.

He also voiced his confidence in the development of the Canada-China relationship and his willingness to help.
As a new step in the way of becoming a Smart Tourism City, Tel Aviv is leading an integration of travel apps made in Tel Aviv into 12% of the citys hotels. The apps will allow tourists to enjoy improved communication with the hotels before and during their stay, enhanced segmentation in suggesting activities and events, advanced tourist profiling for hotel marketers, and more.

Tel Aviv was awarded Smartest City in the World in 2014 and was ranked the #1 startup ecosystem outside of the United States in 2015. In addition, the city was recently ranked as one of the top tourist destinations by Lonely Planet.

Tel Aviv is currently investing in becoming a Smart Tourism City, combining its specialties in the field of tourism and technology.

Some of the participating technologies include:

Howazit, which provides a seamless connection between guests and hotels throughout the different phases of the visit;

Dotz, which offers the ideal events guide for visitors based on their geo location and personal interests;

Aspectiva, which offers customer review insights.

The participating hotels are: Royal Beach, Isrotel Tower, the Dan Group hotels, Deborah, Golden Beach, Arkadia Tower, Carlton, Mergoza, West, Alexander, Embassy, Cucu and Port.

Eytan Schwartz, CEO of Tel Aviv Global and Tourism: Tel Aviv has been recognized as one of the worlds smartest cities, taking advantage of its flourishing Startup Ecosystem to improve its residents quality of life. This smart quality is now being leveraged in our tourism industry as part of the Smart Hotels initiative: to make the experience of visiting Tel Aviv easier, more connected and fun, while lowering the price of vacationing in our Nonstop City. The result will benefit international tourists, Israeli visitors, and local startups.

Dr. Isaac Mizrachi, Director of Tourism at Tel Aviv Global: It is our duty as a DMO (Destination Marketing Organization) to facilitate innovation across the tourism map of the city. There is such a dynamic startup scene here in Tel Aviv and many great products, that it would be a shame not to exploit that for the benefit of both visitors and businesses.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Israel Tax Authority Inspectors visited businesses in southern Israel as part of its ongoing tax enforcement effort. The inspectors visited 348 businesses in Ashkelon, Beersheva, Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, Arad, Yerucham and other municipalities. They learned that in 8% of the businesses, income was not recorded as required by law.

During a visit to a matzah factory in Ashkelon, inspectors registered NIS 15,000 of unreported income. The case has been handed over to a tax official for further investigation. During a visit to a travel agency inspectors documented NIS 12,000 in unreported income. The owner explains it was nothing more than an honest error, not an intentional effort to defraud tax officials.

In Beersheva, inspectors visited a number of businesses and found that in one, NIS 17,000 in income was not reported in March 2016. When asked to explain, the owner stated he is new at being an independent businessman and not exactly clear on the law and how one must register income.

In another business, NIS 3,500 in undeclared income was found. That owner explained I planned to write a receipt and simply did not get to it.

Acting on a tip, inspectors visited a garage and learned the owner received NIS 8,000 for working on cars but did not report the income to tax authority.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with New Zealand Prime Minister John Key in Beijing, capital of China, April 19, 2016.

Chinese President Xi Jinping met with New Zealand Prime Minister John Key in Beijing on Tuesday, hailing "unprecedented" cooperation between the two nations.

Reviewing the great progress of bilateral relationship over the past 44 years since the establishment of diplomatic ties, Xi said China stands ready to work with New Zealand to seek further development of their comprehensive strategic partnership on the basis of mutual respect, equality and reciprocity.

Xi proposed the two sides enhance mutual trust, boost economic cooperation, promote people-to-people exchanges, elevate law-enforcement cooperation and increase military-to-military interactions.

According to Xi, China hopes to build a long-term agricultural partnership with New Zealand and Chinese companies look forward to participating in New Zealand's infrastructure construction.

"The two sides can join our development strategies and work together cultivate new growth points of cooperation in bio-medicine, energy-saving, environment protection and innovative industry," said the president.

Xi also looked forward to closer cooperation with New Zealand in the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank and other multilateral mechanisms.

Echoing the president, Key said there is great opportunity for the development of the bilateral relationship.

The prime minister said New Zealand hopes to make joint efforts with China to speed up the negotiations to upgrade the free trade agreement between the two countries and deepen reciprocal cooperation in agriculture, tourism, education, law-enforcement and other sectors.

As the first Western country that has joined the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, New Zealand is willing to cooperate with China on regional economic integration, Key told the Chinese president.

The prime minister also voiced New Zealand's willingness to increase communication with China in international and regional affairs.
Following the weekly cabinet meeting in the Golan Heights on Sunday, 9 Nissan, Syria responded angrily and with threats. The Syrian Foreign Ministry called the Israeli decision to mark the cabinets first birthday with an official meeting in the Golan Heights provocative and reckless, with the nations Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad adding Syria is prepared to do what it takes to get the Golan back.

During the weekly cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced Israel will never leave the Golan Heights, which was liberated in the June 1967 Six Day War and the government in 1981 annexed the Golan to the State of Israel, but this move has yet to be recognized by the international community.

Mekdad explained that the Golan Heights is currently Israeli-occupied and his nation does plan to get it back.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Recent polls in Israel have shown that the Yisrael Beitenu party headed by MK Avigdor Lieberman would gain seats if elections were held today. Lieberman, whose party is a member of the opposition today, is becoming an increasingly vocal critic of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, his coalition and his policies.

Lieberman is frequently speaking on the radio and granting media interviews, showing a hard right-wing side coupled with an anti-chareidi policy. Lieberman has stated on a number of occasions that he believes this administration will not last another year.

His openly critical statements of the Prime Minister of late have led to sharp statements against Lieberman from Mr. Netanyahu, who warns voters Lieberman is trying to bring down the right-wing. During a pre-Pesach Lchaim with fellow Likudniks, PM Netanyahu mentioned that Lieberman is teaming up with Arab Bloc MK Ayman Udeh to bring down the right-wing, an accusation that Lieberman vehemently denies, adding the Prime Minister is stressed and nervous and trying to deflect pressure of his failures in his direction.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
The Binyamin Regional Council has launched two new initiatives to highlight the abundance of new tourist attractions and internationally accessible programs this Pesach. With a viral video showcasing some of the 36 activities available from visiting ancient Shiloh to swimming in the 9 springs and riding camels at Eretz Bereshis to visiting internationally acclaimed wineries and breathtaking hikes across multiple nature reserves. In recent months the increase of tourism to Yehuda and Shomron has made international headlines with talk of the over 200 hundred Bed and Breakfasts options available, fifty of which are just in the Binyamin Region, north of Jerusalem.

In recent years the YESHA Council together with the 6 regional councils and 13 local councils that it represents has hugely invested in telling its story to the world. Finding that the best way to explain the Israeli re-settlement of Yehuda and Shomron is to invite people on life changing visit of the area.

In the last five years tourism has increased significantly across Yehuda and Shomron. Tourism-related businesses have more than doubled. Fifteen new visitors centers have opened, all of which offer presentations in multiple international languages. The wine industry has also blossomed with over 20 boutique wineries, making internationally acclaimed wine.

An estimated 1.5 million tourists visit sites across Yehuda and Shomron annually. The major demographic are faith-based tourists, both Jewish and Christian, with a special interest in Judeo-Christian history. A record number of Biblical sites have recently initiated new and extremely high-quality audio-visual presentations in multiple languages, including Shiloh, Hebron and the Herodian, among others.

This Pesach we are expecting a huge rise in tourism to the Binyamin region in particular and Judea and Samaria in general, because there is just so much more for people to do here. We are especially looking forward to welcoming all of our supporters from abroad that are visiting Israel for the holiday and understand the importance of visiting the Biblical heartland of Israel Said Miri Maoz-Ovadia, spokesperson for the Binyamin Regional Council.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
The Lod Magistrate Court on Monday 10 Nissan approved to permit Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto to participate in his brothers chasunah on erev Pesach. As such, he will most likely be permitted to remain out of prison on Shabbos, which permits him to remain out of prison for seder.

The chasunah will take place on Friday at 17:00. In order to avoid Chilul Shabbos, he is permitted to remain out of prison until after Shabbos.

Israel Prison Authority officials believed the timing of the chasunah is not coincidental, but rather designed to permit the rabbi to be out of jail for seder night.

Rabbi Pinto is serving a one-year prison term as per a plea agreement he signed with the prosecution.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
U.N. Ambassador Samantha Powers trip to Cameroons front lines in the war against Boko Haram started horrifically Monday as an armored jeep in her motorcade struck and killed a young boy who darted into the road.

The incident occurred near the small city of Mokolo, in northern Cameroon, where Power, her aides and accompanying journalists were headed to meet refugees and others displaced by the years of brutal attacks across West Africa.

All those meetings included small children.

Power said she learned of the death with great sorrow.

She said she met with the boys family to offer our profound condolences and our grief and heartbreak.

Power returned to the scene of the bloody accident several hours later to meet the 7-year-old boys mother and father, while residents of his village stood solemnly on a sandy expanse.

The motorcade was moving at a fast clip, at times exceeding 60 mph, while villagers lined up along the sides of the road. But when the boy darted onto the two-lane highway, there was no time for the sixth car in Powers convoy to react. The driver was Cameroonian.

At the moment of impact, a man could be seen running up the embankment, with his arms held high, to the street to try to stop the child. A Cameroonian helicopter traveling overhead as part of a large security contingent saw the collision.

The vehicle that hit the boy initially stopped, but was ordered by American security forces to continue traveling through the unsecured area. An ambulance in the U.S. caravan immediately attended to him.

The boy was rushed to a local hospital, though his condition was already hopeless, according to people familiar with the incident, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Several U.S. officials were visibly affected, with one Power aide turning away to cry as his boss met with refugee children shortly afterward.

The motorcade moved at a significantly slower pace for the rest of the day.

Officials did not immediately identify the boy. U.S officials wouldnt comment immediately on any plans for compensation to the boys family.

(AP)
Tomorrow, April 19, is Primary Day across New York State. Voters will be selecting the candidates within each political party who will be running for President of the United States in the General Election. Voters in selected districts will also have a chance to participate in a special election for vacant seats in the New York State Assembly and Senate. Agudath Israel urges all of its constituents and friends to vote.

Voter turnout in primaries is generally low. That makes each vote count even more than it ordinarily does. That is especially true in this years presidential primary, when none of the candidates has yet clinched his or her partys nomination.

Moreover, no matter who is ultimately elected, government officials look at which groups vote, and take their positions on the major issues of the day accordingly. Communities that vote are communities that are listened to and heard.

In the words of Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, Executive Vice President of Agudath Israel, please, take the time to vote. Do it for yourself . . . for your children . . . for your community . . . for Klal Yisroel.

Disclaimer: Agudath Israel does not endorse or support any candidate in any election race.

(YWN World Headquarters  NYC)
[PHOTOS IN EXTENDED ARTICLE]

A wave of activity surrounds the entire facility as the minds and hands of scores of volunteers work together to pack, haul and load over 15,000 boxes of nutritious Pesach food.

Welcome to the Tov Vchesed warehouse, a singular hive from where 37,000 children are fed annually.

14 years ago, I started out by feeding 200 local families. With the help of so many kindhearted Yidden, were now feeding thousands of children all across Israel, says Tov VChesed founder Rabbi Yaakov Eliezer Shisha.

I try to fulfill my childhood promise  made in the throes of shame that poverty brings  by feeding these kids with dignity.

Indeed, each package that leaves the Tov VChesed premises is delivered to the recipients door, sparing them the humiliation of claiming their food in public.

Though this fourteenth distribution was an epic one, a small episode in the midst of the action jolted everyone back to a very harsh reality:

As the volunteers finished a bountiful meal during a much-needed lunch break, they noticed how young neighborhood children began to gather the leftovers to bring home to their families. The paradox of the situation was stark: inside, 40,000 pounds of matzah and chicken were being distributed while outside, poverty was still not cured.

Employees at the Tov VChesed offices attest to the rise in poverty as they sort through the endless amount of applications pouring in: desperate families are still begging for food for Pesach!

You can join the hundreds who have already made a difference and contributed by visiting www.tovvchesed.com to make your generous donation today.
Israels Ambassador to the United Nations and the non-profit One Family hosted Natan and Renana Meir, the widower and daughter of Dafna Meir, at a special meeting of the Security Council on the situation in Israel today (Monday). Ambassador Danon opened his remarks by noting that The endless incitement and the ongoing glorification of violence, by the Palestinians is directly responsible for the murder of innocent Israelis.

Ambassador Danon then criticized the Security Council for failing to condemn terrorism against Israelis despite the wave of ongoing violence over the past seven months. Since no one else will ask the hard questions, I will, said Ambassador Danon. He then turned to the Palestinian representative Riyad Mansour and asked Are you ready right now to denounce terror against innocent Israelis? Asked Ambassador Danon. When the Palestinian representative refused to do so, Ambassador Danon denounced him saying Shame on you! Instead of denouncing terror, you are encouraging it!

In his speech before the Security Council, Ambassador Danon recalled the story of Daphna Meir who was murdered at the entrance of her home in Otniel, Israel by a fifteen year-old Palestinian. Three of Meirs children were home at the time. Daphna fought with her attacker, saving her childrens lives. The terrorist later admitted that he was inspired to kill by video clips and other hate filled content on Palestinian TV and social media. Natan and Renana are here with us in this chamber sitting behind me, said Ambassador Danon. The Palestinian culture of hate and constant brainwashing is responsible for the loss of too many Israelis. And it is directly responsible for the murder of Dafna Meir, he concluded.

At the opening of the Council meeting Natan and Renana Meir noted that It is difficult to express in words the deep pain and unbearable longing. This sense of loss breaks our heart and our soul. With broken hearts we ask the international community for help. We hear those who say that terror is a result of frustration, and we ask  is there anything more frustrating than what we have endured?

One Family, an Israeli non-profit which cares for those who have been bereaved or injured in terrorist attacks, accompanied the Meirs on their visit to New York.

The impact of terrorism can only be understood through the stories of the victims themselves, said Chantal Belzberg, Executive Vice-Chairman of One Family. We believe that Natan and Renanas perspective on terror is important to anyone who wants to understand what is happening to the people of Israel, and especially to those who want to put an end to this horror. By bringing them to New York we hope to bring this unique vision to the world and ultimately defeat terrorism, Ms. Belzberg concluded.

(YWN World Headquarters  NYC)
[By Rabbi Yair Hoffman for the Five Towns Jewish Times]

GRINDING THE WHEAT

Pious people observe the grinding of the wheat themselves carefully to ensure that there is no concern of the wheat becoming Chometz during the grinding process (Ramah citing the Mordechai 453:8). At a minimum, a G-d fearing individual with some knowledge of the halachos should be performing it. A child or someone without such knowledge should not be the one performing the grinding (MB 453:41 citing the PMG).

The wording of the Ramah seems to differ from that of the Pri Magadim. Are the pious people watching it or doing it? Is it sufficient merely to ensure that the grains are ground properly or does the very act of grinding itself need to be done with the proper intentions?

INTENT REGARDING GRINDING

Just as there is a debate regarding the nature of proper intent regarding harvesting, there exists a debate about the proper intent regarding the grinding of the grains as well. Ideally, one should follow the stricter view requiring that the flour be ground with the proper intent.

Therefore, the grinding should be done by hand rather than by machine. This is more of a serious issue than having the harvesting done by machine. More Poskim hold that grinding is not an action attributed to the operator of the machine as much as the harvesting would be. When the term hand-ground is used, it refers to manpower rather than power by machine. Therefore, grinding done by a bicycle would also be permitted.

We find that the stringencies in regard to the grinding of the Matzah have been practiced for thousands of years. Indeed, the Talmud Yerushalmi (Psachim 20) relates that Rabbi Yossi the son of Rabbi Abun did not wish to use a grinder who had been grounding wheat not destined for Matzoh because he was afraid that the grinders clothing may have had other wheat on it that was not designated for Matzoh use .

The machine used for grinding should be for exclusive Passover use. The reason is that other grinding machinery processes grains that were washed. The liquid from this water can gather in the machines and cause the flour to become Chometz.

GRINDER AND ROOM MUST BE CLEAN AND DRY

To be sure, the flour also has moisture content, and if the stones of the grinder are not cleaned from this moisture, the stones may also cause the flour to become Chometz. Many G-d-fearing individuals replace the stones of Passover grinders each year, on this account.

If moist grains were ground in the room, the walls and ceilings must be cleaned in order to grind flour for Pesach, as the flour particles can fall and mix into the Passover flour.

When the grinding takes place in the rainy season, care must be taken to make sure that water is not tracked in with raincoats, wet boots and umbrellas. The workers should make sure that their clothing is clean and that their hands and beards are clean and dry as well. The concern is that a particle of flour will have mixed with the Pesach flour. Although it will be nullified by the more than sixty times the amount of kosher flour, during the holiday of Pesach itself it is reinstated. (MB 467:16)

ALLOWING THE FLOUR TO COOL

The grinding itself causes the flour to be warm. Therefore, a dough that is made on the day that the flour is actually ground is more susceptible to becoming Chometz on account of the additional heat in the flour. Therefore, one should not knead the flour on the day that the flour was ground  one should wait at least a day or two. Ideally, it should be two days later.

At a minimum one should allow the flour to cool overnight (SA 453:9 and MB 453:42). If, however, it was done sooner than that, the dough is not forbidden. Rather, one should take extra precautions and handle the dough even more often so that it not be given a chance to rise.

When dealing with high speed grinders and a large volume of grain, the machinery can get very hot. The BaDatz Yerushalayim issued guidelines that the machine be slwed down so that the grinder temperature not reach more than 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), and certainly never above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit).

When grinding the wheat by hand, however, the flour does not warm up to any significant degree, and technically, one does not have to wait. However, it is good to be stringent in this matter (Beer Heitev 453:20).

THE FORMULA RECITED

When grinding the wheat one should recite the formula, LeShaim Matzos Mitzvah for the sake of the Mitzvah of Matzoh. (extension of Beer Heitev 456:4 regarding drawing of the water).

THE FLOUR BAGS

Ideally, one should be careful not to place the bags of flour one on top of the other. One should also avoid sitting on top of the bags because the additional warmth can cause them to become Chometz faster (See Ramah 453:7). If a person did place the bags on top of each other for a significant amount of time, they should be separated and the kneading should not begin until 24 hours have elapsed (MB 453:35).

It is permitted to place them next to each other even if they are touching, because in this manner they do not warm up to any significant degree. Likewise, it is permitted to stack the bags of wheat before they have been ground, because until they are ground they will cool.

It is also worthwhile to keep the bags of wheat elevated above the ground in case of a water leak or flood.

SIFTING THE FLOUR

Before the flour is kneaded it should be sifted. The sifter should either be new or one used exclusively for Pesach. One may not kosherize a sifter and use it for Pesach.

If a new sifter is not available, it is preferable not to sift according to the Mishna Brurah.

Preferably a 40 mesh sifter should be used for hand-ground flour and a 60 mesh sifter should be used for machine ground flour.

Nowadays most facilities use electric sifters.

When sifting the flour, one should avoid speaking because saliva may come out of his mouth and ruin the flour (See Ritva Psachim 35a).

After the flour is sifted it is important not to force down the flour into the bags. Forced flour does not knead well (Ramah 456:1).

DOUGH SIZE

The Shulchan Aruch rules that one should not make a dough that is too large at one time, i.e. larger than the shiur of Challah without a bracha. This size is 1200 grams according to the Chazon Ish and 1250 grams according to Rav Chaim Noeh. Chazal felt that a person would not be able to adequately work the dough from all sides on account of its large size (SA 456:1). If one had done so, however, it does not cause the dough to be forbidden (SA 456:2).

Some hold that the size restrictions are specific to when one individual was making the Matzos, and the ovens were small ovens. Nowadays, however, the production of Matzos involves numerous people and the ovens are much larger. Therefore, nowadays a larger dough could be made without a concern that it be too large to handle. Nonetheless, G-d fearing individuals are still strict, like the first opinion.

TWO SEPARATE ROOMS FOR DOUGH MIXING

One person should be appointed to place the flour into the mixing bowl, and a different person should be appointed to place the water in (See MB 459:45). One person should not perform both tasks because the water can drip onto the flour and cause it to become Chometz. On account of this, it is worthwhile to have two separate rooms for this, where the person pours in the water through a portal.

When the flour is placed in the bowl one should recite the formula, Leshaim Matzas Mitzvah. (SA 456:1)

THE BOWL

One should make sure that there are no cracks or lines on the bowl in which one kneads the Matzah dough, as it will not be possible to clean it effectively afterward. It does not matter whether the crack is in the middle of the bowl or on the outer lip, there is a chance that some dough will enter the crack and become Chometz and will contaminate a later dough (Ramah 459:4). One should also be careful in this matter regarding the other means of production, such as the table, etc. (MB 459:39).

THE WATER REQUIREMENTS

One may only knead Matzos with water that is called Mayim Shelanu (SA 455:1). This is a Rabbinic requirement because regular water is warmed in the underground spring. Mayim shelanu is water that has been drawn before sunset from a spring, and allowed to have rested in pitchers for a full night. These waters have been cooled and will not cause the dough to become Chometz.

One may not place ones hand in the mayim shelanu, because it will warm up the water.

In a very pressing situation, as long as the water was drawn before midnight, and twelve hours have elapsed since the drawing, the water may be used (MB 455:4).

When it is difficult to draw the water, it is preferable to draw it before twilight than after Tzais HaKochavim  when the stars emerge (MB 455:5).

Before the water is drawn, one should recite the formula LeShaim Mitzvas Matzah. (Beer Heitev 456:4).

If there is not enough Mayim Shelanu, then it is permitted to add a smaller amount of regular water to the Mayim Shelanu to increase its volume. There is a debate as to whether one may add up to 33% (opinion of Bais Yoseph) or up to 49%. The Mishna Brurah rules leniently and permits up to 49%. (MB 455:38) It must be done before the kneading process and may not be done during the kneading process.

One may draw the water once for a number of days of baking. One should just take care that the water be kept in a cool location (SA 455:1).

The water should not be drawn by a gentile or by a child for perhaps they may not be so careful regarding Chometz. This is true whether it is for regular Matzah or for the Matzos that will be used on the Seder night. If it was drawn by them, the water is not forbidden to be used (Ramah 455:1 and MB 455:21).

One should filter the Mayim Shelanu. Some therefore place a cloth over the spigot of the container where the water is kept.

One should measure the amount of water that one will put in the dough. In Israel, for every half kilo one uses 250 grams of water. However, this changes based upon the flour and the climate.

One may also use rainwater instead of Mayim Shelanu (MB 455:28). The reason is that the sun does not heat up water when it is in the air . Tap water, however, is forbidden because chemicals are added into the water suplly for various reasons.

Before one pours the water onto the flour one should recite the formula, LeShaim Mitzvas Matzah. (Beer Heitev 456:4).

THE PREP AREA

One must cover up the windows in the area where one is baking. This is true even on a day when there is no sun. The concern is that it may be cloudy and the sun will emerge without one noticing.

Nowadays, when the oven heat is quite strong, one should ensure that there is an air conditioning unit where the workers are for two reasons: So that the dough not get excessively warm and so that the workers will not be unduly stressed by the heat.

It is a custom in Klal Yisroel to appoint a supervisor Mashgiach to oversee the process of baking (MB 459:33). He should oversee that every worker has clean hands and has his nails cut short.

The tables where the Matzoh dough is worked are covered with paper that is replaced every eighteen minutes. This paper should be stored in an elevated area rather than on the ground. One can make a tacit assumption that the floor of a bakery is considered Chometz.

THE FLOUR MAN

The person who handles the flour should not be the same person who puts the water in the flour. The reason is that he is filled with the flour dust and there is a chance that some of the flour could enter the mixture and become Chometz (MB 459:45).

THE WATER MAN

The water man should carefully measure the amount of water that he puts in the flour.

THE FARNEMER (THE MEGABEL)

This is the person who does the initial mix of the water and flour. The initial mix is central to the smooth flow of the rest of the process. The goal is to spread the water as evenly as possible throughout the mixture. Experience demonstrates that the key is not to use the palm of ones hand to do the initial mix, but rather to utilize the fingers.

If he uses the palms of his hand what ends up happening is that some of the dough becomes soft and some of it becomes hard, making the job of the subsequent workers much harder.

He should also try to gather all the spread out particles of flour and push them toward the middle.

The process works best when the Farnemer digs a pit in the flour. He then spreads the water as evenly as possible.

It is also best if the Farnemer wears a pair of Kosher for Pesach latex gloves.

THE FINNER (LOSH)

This is the person who does the actual mixing. He must continue working with the dough until it is handed to the people who will form the raw Matzos. He must pound the dough with either his hand or with a device. After he is done with it he should continue to handle it. Just touching it is not sufficient to prevent the dough from becoming Chometz.

THE WORKERS

The workers must be adults and must have the capability of performing the activities of Matzah making with the correct intentions  Lishma. Someone who is not religious does have the capability of performing the acts of Matzah baking Lishma  with the correct intentions. However, there is the additional factor of making sure that the activities are performed with meticulous adherence to Halacha. The Pri Magadim (AA 460:1) rules that someone who does not observe the commandments is suspected of not adhering to halacha meticulously in regard to Matzah baking. Therefore, one should only consume Matzah produced by non-religious Jews if there was someone strictly observing them at all times.

Similarly, if the worker is not knowledgeable in halacha, there is also a concern. In such a situation there must be someone strictly observing the workers at all times.

THE KNEADING

The author of the Shulchan Aruch (459:2) writes that ideally, one should not leave the dough to remain without activity even for one moment. He goes on to explain that one it is touched by hand, if one leaves it without activity it becomes chometz, immediately. The term immediately needs to be defined

Matzah that was needed by a gentile or a deaf-mute, a child or someone who is mentally ill is invalid for use for the Seder itself. The same is true if it is baked by one of them (MB 460:3).

When a Jew stands over a gentile or a deaf-mute, child, or one who is mentally ill and tells them to have in in mind for the Mitzvah it is a debate as to whether it is kosher  even post facto. Some are lenient relying upon the daas of the adult Jew. If there is a choice between the gentile or the latter, one should opt for the latter.

One should not knead the dough in a sunny place, but should only do it in the shade. The reason is that the sun warms the dough and can make it Chometz.

THE EIGHTEEN MINUTE CLEAN UP

The manager should set a special clock or timer to indicate when the 18 minutes will elapse after the initial mixing of the water and flour.

THE WOODS TRANSPORTING THE MATZAH

After the Matzos are scored they are placed on poles to transport them to the oven. These poles are covered with a disposable paper. Even though the poles are covered, the woods are scraped afterward.

The woods that transport the Matzos to the oven each time must be different woods for each round of Matzos baked, as they get hot and could cause the other Matzos to become Chometz (Ramah 459:4 and MB 459:32).

THE OVEN

The Chayei Adam (128:27) writes that the oven should be kosherized since there is a concern that the previous bakers may not have been so careful in the baking.

THE BAKING

How long should the Matzah bake? If the Matzah were to be cut or broken and there are no strings of dough that could be pulled out it does not become Chometz after this point (SA 461:3). This sign, however, only works when the Matzah is still warm, but if it cooled down, the dough hardens and it is no longer an effective means of determining (MB 461:13) whether it was indeed fully baked.

The person baking the Matzah should be careful not to remove the Matzos prematurely  it should be baked to completion. If he did remove it early, he should not place it back into the oven, as it may have become Chometz in the interim (Ramah 461:3). If it was taken out and put back in by accident, the Matzah is not forbidden (MB 461:16).

Matzah that became folded and or stuck in a manner that the fire cannot reach the place where it became stuck is forbidden. If it was during Pesach, the entire Matzah is forbidden. If it was before Pesach one must remove Kdei Netilah 2.4 centimeters from the surrounding area where it was stuck (Ramah 461:5. Note: Rav Chaim Noeh requires only 2 centimeters, and Rav Moshe Feinstein requires 2.2 centimeters).

One must be careful that the Matzos in the oven not touch each other before they are fully baked. If they do touch each other and they are not immediately separated  they have the halachic status of folded Matzos. If it is before Pesach the amount of Kdei Netilah must be removed from both of them. If it happened on Pesach itself both Matzos are forbidden. If the person baking them separated them immediately and it was before they were inserted in the oven, it is permitted (Ramah 461:5).

A SWOLLEN MATZAH

A Matzoh that has become swollen in the middle of it, and the height of the swelling is above that of an Etzbah, the entire Matzoh is forbidden (Ramah 461 and MB).

One should not place the Matzoh at the very edge of the oven, because the front of the oven is not as hot, and Matzos placed there are not baked sufficiently with this heat. There is therefore a likelihood of it becoming Chometz. All Matzos that have become invalid, either on account of swelling, or folding or for some other reason should be completely removed from the work area so that the other Matzos not come in contact with them.

The author can be reached at [email protected]
Hadassah Hospital spokesperson Hadar Elboim released the following update on the condition of the wounded from the Monday 10 Nissan Jerusalem bus bombing attack.

The bomb was detonated on an Egged number 12 bus in the Talpiot area of the capital. A second bus caught fire too and some 20 people were injured, transported to Hadassah Hospitals and Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital:

Four victims are being treated including three in intensive care units, listed in moderate-to-serious condition, sedated and on assisted ventilation.

One victim is admitted to a plastic surgery unit in moderate condition, alert and oriented.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Dear Friends,

Please take a minute to read this heartfelt plea.

When you get into legal trouble you hire an attorney, an accountant prepares your taxes, and you seek a doctor when you feel ill. You seek an expert when you need advice on a matter. I have been following politics for quite some time, and as you know, my instincts were usually proven right.

In 2008 and 2012 I warned that Barack Obama will cause irreversible damage to the United States. His policies, including Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and tax increases resulted in the worst economic recovery in history. His approach to Israel empowered terrorists and his leading from behind created a vacuum of leadership in the world.

Please take a moment to read why you  living in Boro Park/Flatbush  can make a difference. Our district  NYC10  is the only one where Ted Cruz can beat Donald Trump, and we can send a powerful message by voting Cruz.

Heres why:

1) Hillary Clinton: Donald Trump loses to Hillary Clinton in every poll by double-digits. His candidacy will also cause the Senate and House to flip to the Democrats. This will allow Clinton to pass liberal legislation without protest (remember when Obama had a free reign?).

2) Yeshivos: The Republican-led NYS Senate (with Simcha Felder at its helm) passed legislation that helps Yeshivos (e.g. free transportation). A Trump candidacy will flip the State Senate to the Democrats. If you hope that Education Tax Credits will become law, it wont happen with Democrats. Not to mention that Trump would not endorse school choice.

3) Israel: Donald Trump vowed that Israel will make concessions to Hamas in his peace plan (which will take two weeks) and that hell be neutral. He failed to condemn BDS and said that the both are at fault. Even Hillary Clintons rhetoric has been more pro-Israel!

4) Economy: Donald Trumps economic policies will destroy the U.S. and world economies. Unlike his businesses, Donald Trump cannot experiment with an economy and then reset it with a bankruptcy.

5) Trade: Can you imagine voting for someone who insists that hell ban computers because it destroys jobs? Trade allows you to buy more products at cheaper prices. Free-trade propelled the U.S. economy to be the strongest economy in the world! Also, we do not have free trade with China (as Trump believes), rather with the World Trade Organization.

6) Cuba: You may not care about Cuba, but did you see photos of Obamas visit? The reason why they do not have modern cars or goods is because they are not allowed to trade with other countries!

7) Taxes: Donald Trump proposed the largest tax hike in U.S. history. You know its bad when it is supported by Paul Krugman and Elizabeth Warren.

8) Nanny State: Donald Trump vows to ban anything thats not to his liking. Remember Mike Ban Bloomberg? Think worse. From free press to presidential candidates and by the way, Trump endorsed de Blasio for Mayor (how is that working for you?).

9) Religious Liberties: The Supreme Court may rule as to whether a non-Jewish woman can be a ,  or . Donald Trump said that Religious Liberty will not be a litmus test for a nominee to the Supreme Court and that he may appoint his (liberal) sister.

10) Isolationism: Donald Trump says that all countries should fight between themselves and we should abolish NATO (despite his support for the UN). This will create chaos in the world with a potential nuclear war. Dont think that the U.S. will not feel any repercussions.

Bottom Line: In 2012 our district had 800 Republican voters in the primary. If you vote for Ted Cruz  an avowed supporter of Israel and our needs  then we can grant him 3 delegates!

Please dont be influenced by gold nameplates, music claiming that Trump is the best and by high-school bully tactics. A vote against Trump may be the most important vote in your lifetime.

Dave Hirsch  Brooklyn

(YWN World Headquarters  NYC)
I wasnt sure what to expect.

Ive seen enough Donald Trump footage to know it would be interesting. It was certainly a mark of prestige that our magazine, Mishpacha, served as the forum for a one-on-one interview with the Republican front-runner.

There were no pre-conditions and I assumed no obligation to provide a positive report. Im certainly not qualified to have an opinion or endorse candidates. I write these impressions simply so that the public can make an informed decision.

I experienced a moment of complete intimidation when Mr. Trump welcomed me in to his office.

But just a moment. He was disarmingly warm and courteous, interested in our magazine and the community it serves.

Then he invited me to ask my questions. He addressed each one head on, with a lightning-fast grasp of the topics presented, offering realistic answers.

He spoke- how to say this- like a normal person. No grandstanding, no theatre, no empty phrases and no affectations.

Of particular interest was not just his respect for the Jewish community, but his visceral understanding of our fears: we spoke about Israel, but also how a stronger Israel would affect a Jew walking on a quiet street in New York. When nations will know that attacking Israel is something you cant get away with, then the teenagers in Europe will know that assaulting a Jew is something you cant get away with.

He shared his distaste for the way that the Obama administration likes Iran better than Israel, when Israel should be at the top of the list, delivering these ideas not as sound bites, layered with presumptuousness and pageantry: he wasnt checking his words with anyone or reading from notes.

Now, politicians are politicians, its true.

But this one made it clear that, win or lose, he wont be reined in by handlers or advisors: he will say what he thinks and, if the American people choose to reject it, he will go back to his day job- one he clearly seems to enjoy, by the way.

He was razor sharp on the economics of the frum community, understanding that none of us lack ambition; its a community that cherishes knowledge and we have many students and scholars who choose their lifestyle happily. His zero percent tax plan- yes, zero percent for couples earning less than fifty thousand dollars- could be a difference maker to many in our community.

And because hes Donald Trump, he breezily added, And who has time or energy to fill out those income tax forms anyhow, why cant they make it simpler? It cant be that difficult to overhaul the program so that Americans can actually fill out their own forms without paying H.R. Block to do it.

And when he says these things, you find yourself nodding along.

Around his offices, the people love him. Many employees have been with him their entire careers, as one woman told me, Its not just loyalty, its comfort. We feel taken care of.

I went down in the elevator with him and saw his casual banter with the workers, the people he claims to understand: I believe it.

Donald Trump is different. Hes got an ego. Hes unpredictable. Sometimes he makes you uncomfortable.

But hes decent, straight-talking and unambiguous. Hes a problem solver with a proven ability to hire the best and let them be even better- I met several of them.

Particularly impressive is Jason Greenblatt, one of Trumps top advisors on Israel. The executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Trump Organization is more than a confidante: the shomer Shabbos attorney is a man of intellect and passion, a perfect voice to represent and present our voice to a world leader.

Donald J. Trump the front-runner with a real chance to win the nomination; the Ribbono shel Olam has brought him this far against all odds and theres no telling where hell end up.

Should he become president, I am convinced that our community will have a good, loyal, courageous friend in the White House.

(Yisroel Besser- Contributing Editor, Mishpacha Magazine / YWN World Headquarters  NYC)


The attached video is from a helmet cam of one of the firemen who responded to the terrorist bombing attack on board an Egged 12 bus in the Talpiot section of Jerusalem on Monday, 10 Nissan. Authorities are continuing the investigation into the attack which left some 20 wounded, including some in critical (the terrorist) and serious condition. Police believe the bomb detonated prematurely and that the terrorist wanted to detonate it in a more crowded area.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
IDF Sgt. Elor Azariya was indicted on Monday, 10 Nissan on charges of manslaughter for shooting the wounded terrorist in Hebron on Purim who stabbed and wounded an IDF soldier minutes earlier.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu commented As the father of a soldier and as Prime Minister, I would like to reiterate: The IDF backs its soldiers. I am convinced that an examination of the event in Hebron will be done responsibly and sagaciously. In my familiarity with the military justice system, I am convinced that the court will consider all circumstances regarding the incident. Our soldiers are not murderers. They act against murderers and I hope that a way will be found to balance between the action and the overall context of the event. In the meantime, I suggest that everyone lower the flames.

The parents and family of the soldier organized a support rally which will take place on Tuesday evening at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
IDF officials on Monday 10 Nissan announced the uncovering of a major Hamas terror tunnel stretching from Gaza to the Israel side of the border.

Some of the military experts involved in the case explain that in all likelihood, the tunnel was constructed before the 2014 IDF assault in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge. It is added that perhaps the portion of the tunnel inside Israel is new but clearly, the tunnel that was found represents years of work.

Hamas reacted to the widespread news of the tunnels discovery including the IDF releasing video footage. Hamas officials in Gaza vow the tunnel uncovered was nothing more than a drop in the bucket as it continues preparing to arm itself for the next round of warfare against Israel.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Law enforcers say theyve made about 30 arrests in a New York City gang takedown.

WABC-TV reports that the arrests are part of a yearslong investigation that targeted activities at East Harlem housing projects in upper Manhattan.

The neighborhood has seen a recent increase in gang activity, including a shooting that claimed the life of a teenager.

The suspects are accused of involvement in drug and firearms dealing.

(AP)
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that a suburban Cincinnati man is competent to stand trial on charges that he plotted to attack the U.S. Capitol in support of the Islamic State group.

The court finds that a preponderance of the evidence supports that conclusion, U.S. District Judge Sandra Beckwith wrote.

She noted in her order that a psychologist for the defense testified in a Monday hearing that Christopher Lee Cornell, 22, is currently able to participate in his defense. The psychologist had filed an evaluation last year concluding Cornell couldnt properly assist his defense, but has modified his opinion, Beckwith wrote.

Psychologist Scot Bresler, of the University of Cincinnati, who has met repeatedly with Cornell, said for the first time Sunday he asked to be called Chris instead of Raheel Mahrus Ubaydah, which he had adopted as his Muslim name. The long hair and beard Cornell had when arrested in January 2015 have been cut off.

The psychologist testified Cornell has anxiety and personality disorders and can be deeply depressed, and urged he be re-evaluated before trial because his competency could change.

Prosecutors filed a report by another psychologist concluding Cornell is competent, and also filed exhibits including letters from Cornell the government said show he understands the charges against him and can help his attorneys.

Cornell, held without bond, has pleaded not guilty to four charges, including attempted murder of U.S. officials and employees. His father has said he was misled and coerced by a snitch.

His attorneys could still pursue an insanity defense.

(AP)
It is abundantly clear that with only a few short days until Pesach, the international Islamic community is determined to make Jewish visits to Har Habayis a front page media item. In recent weeks and months there has been a growing sentiment based on PA (Palestinian Authority) propaganda that Israel plans to overrun al-Aqsa Mosque. All involved are keenly aware that this is not so and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu continues releasing statements of calm.

Israel has recently announced its approval for the plan to install security cameras on the holy site, which would be monitored by Israel, Jordan and the Waqf Authority, despite the fact the cameras would be used to indict Israel in the international community.

Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour on Monday, 10 Nissan, announced his countrys was backing out, citing a lack of PA interest in the joint project. Clearly the PA does not want to give Israel any additional official roles on Har Habayis, which UNESCO this week recognized as an Islamic site exclusively.

Jordan last month spoke of the installation of 55 cameras which the Waqf was going to use to monitor Israeli violations against al-Aqsa. Palestinians however have been against the plan from the beginning, vowing to smash them after they are installed. They are poignantly aware that permitting Israel to monitor events via live closed circuit feed is counterintuitive as it would facilitate documenting the lies spread by the PA.

Amid calls from the PA and Muslims to keep Israelis off Har Habayis on Pesach whatever it takes, Israel will be sharply stepping up the security presence on the holy site during yomtov. Yated Neeman this week released a column calling on Israel to bar Jews, citing the proponents of visiting the holy site are not truly interested in the religious significance but rather they are advancing a political agenda.

It must be noted: According to the Poskei Hador one is absolutely forbidden to visit Har Habayis, and there is an Isur Karess for one that goes there.

A number of years ago on Sukkos, President Shimon Peres paid a visit to the Sukkah of Maran HaGaon Rav Elyashiv ZATZAL, where Rav Elyashiv called on the President to prevent Jews from visiting Har Habayis, stating it is an act that that is viewed as extremely provocative by the goyim. Maran stated everything possible must be done to avoid a religious war, and the provocateurs are playing with fire.

Maran is quoted as explaining to the president that Halacha forbids going onto Har Habayis but today, it is more than this, it is an act that may lead to a religious war and bloodshed.

This is and remains the view of poskei hador. This is also the view of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. Among the rabbonim who share this view are HaGaon HaRav Chaim Kanievsky Shlita, HaGaon HaRav Shmuel Halevy Wosner ZATZAL, HaGaon HaRav Gershon Edelstein Shlita, Maran HaGaon HaRav Aaron Yehuda Leib Shteinman Shlita, Maran HaGaon HaRav Ovadia Yosef ZTL, Maran HaGaon HaRav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv ZTL and many others.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)


[COMMUNICATED CONTENT]

At this time of the year when we are all preparing our houses for Pesach there are many Jews who do not know what Pesach is all about and how to lead a Pesach seder. We at Yad Yisroel are helping over a thousand Jews to have a Kosher Seder in cities Pinsk, Grodno, Minsk, Kalinkovich etc.

As you can imagine we cant do it alone. We are turning to you to participate in the expenses in order to give these many Jews the same opportunities that we have.

Although only a few hours remain before Pesach, you can still reach out and help one of our many brethren in need.

For only $54 you can sponsor the seder for a community member.

When you sit down at your seder table this Yom Tov, your guests will be doing the same 6,000 miles away!

Please join me and hundreds of others to support this amazing organization. Wishing you and your family for a Chag Kosher Vsomeach.

Sincerely,

Rabbi Shmuel Dishon

Yad Yisroel is dedicated to the revival of Jewish life in the former Soviet Union, as well as assisting former Soviet Jewry wherever they may be. Thanks to the passion, vision and hard work of the Yad Yisroel emissaries, Jewish schools and community centers have been opened in Kiev, Minsk, Pinsk, Lvov and in other cities in the Ukraine and Belarus.

Today, Yad Yisroel is the leading Jewish organization in Belarus, with Pinsk as the epicenter of Jewish life in the country. Pinsk has a boys and a girls boarding school recognized as state orphanages, community outreach programs, Chesed Fund, a Yeshiva, summer and winter camps, Holocaust memorial programs , a Graduate Program and a Wedding Fund, as well as other Jewish community infrastructure.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE & DONATE

Watch a beautiful video of our boys baking matzahs



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4VXWaJ872s

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE & DONATE
A former police officer convicted in the shooting death of an unarmed man in a darkened stairwell was spared prison time Tuesday, and a judge reduced his manslaughter conviction to a lesser charge.

Peter Liang was sentenced to five years probation and 800 hours of community service in the 2014 shooting of Akai Gurley, who was walking down a stairway in a public housing complex when the rookie officer fired a bullet into the dark  by accident after being startled, he said. The bullet ricocheted and killed Gurley, 28.

Given the defendants background and how remorseful he is, it would not be necessary to incarcerate the defendant to have a just sentence in this case, Brooklyn state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun said in sentencing Liang, also 28.

A jury had convicted him in February of a manslaughter charge carrying up to 15 years in prison. But Chun on Tuesday reduced the offense to criminally negligent homicide, which carries up to four years in prison.

Brooklyn prosecutors recommended Liang serve no time, based on his record and the circumstances of the trial. They suggested five years of probation, six months of home confinement and 500 hours of community service.

Some members of Gurleys family said they felt betrayed by Thompsons recommendation and had hoped Chun would sentence Liang to prison anyway.

The shooting happened in a year of debate nationwide about police killings of black men. Activists have looked to Liangs trial as a counterweight to cases in which grand juries have declined to indict officers, including the cases of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York. Like Gurley, Brown and Garner were black and unarmed. Liang is Chinese-American.

Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson cautioned that Liangs case shouldnt be commingled with others. But relatives of other New Yorkers killed in police encounters had joined Gurleys family outside court during the trial to call for police accountability.

Meanwhile, Liangs supporters have said he has been made a scapegoat for past injustices.

The missteps made by Liang after the shooting were on display during the trial, including that he failed to aid the bleeding Gurley as the dying mans girlfriend frantically performed CPR. A neighbor called out instructions delivered from a 911 operator on the phone. Liang and his partner, who wasnt charged and testified during the trial, said they didnt help because they werent well-trained. The admissions prompted an internal investigation into training by Commissioner William Bratton.

Liangs attorneys had sought to get the verdict tossed out based on juror misconduct, but the judge refused. Liang was fired after the verdict. So was his partner.

(AP)
[By Yehoshua (Jeff) Ballabon]

I read Nick Muzins heartfelt piece about his friend and boss Senator Ted Cruz and Jews and decided to echo it with one of my own experiences with Cruz  from before he was a presidential candidate, or even a senator.

For many years off and on I attended the first day or two of CPAC  the American Conservative Unions annual massive gathering conservatives  in Washington. It started midweek and ran through Saturday night, but, of course, I would have to leave midway to get back to New York before Shabbos.

In 2012, hearing of a group that was bringing a number of Jewish college students to CPAC, I called the leaders and told them that if they would urge the kids to attend, I would organize a private Shabbos program onsite  meals and davening and leining. [email protected] was an instant success and Shabbat meal registration is now an option on CPACs official program.

That first CPAC Shabbos was revelatory. We hoped for 20-25 people, but ended up with well over 100. (Fortunately, a magnificent spread for the entire Shabbos was supplied by my friend Yanky Brach, who insisted on providing lavish, simcha-worthy food for even more people than that, because You never know  and you dont want to turn anybody away from Shabbos!.) It was all word of mouth. Our suite was tucked away far from the main action  but the word kept spreading and people kept coming. I remember a sublime moment when a bunch of college kids were hustling over before my wife lit candles to help us set up the room  their arrival was preceded by an excited Shabbos is coming song echoing down the halls of CPAC.

I remember the guy dressed like he was in a rock band sitting quietly and taking it all in. We were going around the room and introducing ourselves and when it was his turn he stood up and said This is my first Shabbos meal since my grandfather died when I was seven. Im 22 now and Im sitting here thinking of how much I missed. I am going to put Shabbos back in my life. And, as it turns out, he was in a rock band  a new band playing songs that promote patriotism.

Talk show hosts, campaign operatives, policy wonks, Hill staffers and journalists who otherwise would have had no Shabbos spent hour after hour enjoying a real heimishe Shabbos with divrei Torah, zmiros and, endless, amazing food. Throughout Friday night and all day Shabbos politicians and pundits came by, drank a lchaim, said a few words, then headed back to hobnob and socialize at CPAC.

But for me, the standout visitor that Shabbos was a relative unknown. A candidate for the US Senate  outsider and Tea Party darling Ted Cruz.

Mr. Cruz came and sat modestly towards the foot of the long table. But unlike the other politicians, his wasnt a drop-by. He came before Kabbolas Shabbos and he stayed for the meal and he was still there almost three hours later, after most of the crowd had gone out to enjoy the more political offerings of CPAC.

At that point, according to the schedule, I was to give a 45 minute shiur on the parsha, just in case anyone wanted to stick around. There was a group of perhaps 20 or so mostly observant Jewsand this fellow Cruz. It was Shabbos Yisro and my topic was the structure of the Aseres Hadibros. Ted Cruz engaged immediately. In describing one shitah as to why the Luchos and Dibros are structured the way they are, I introduced to the otherwise almost entirely Jewish group the fact that Christians count the 10 Commandments differently than we do and, in fact, Catholics and Protestants differ amongst themselves. Cruz already knew. My father s a pastor and Ive argued 10 Commandments cases, he explained. I love this. He was totally knowledgeable, engaged and at home and his participation turned the session into an animated, vibrant, informed discussion that went on nearly two hours.

There were many places a candidate for Senate from Texas should have been that night if his first priority was political ambition. But Ted Cruz preferred to spend his time with us, with Jews enjoying Shabbos.

Since then, Ive had a chance to be with Senator Cruz at a number of non-political events, for example a lunch visit of Jewish Yale students to his office organized by an alumni group to which Nick and I both belong. The Senator was actually scheduled for a midday drop-by this time, no more. But his connection to the politically diverse students was real. He wanted to talk about Israel, then under global onslaught for responding to the terror from Gaza, and about BDS and anti-Semitism and what it feels like to be Jewish today on a liberal college campus. He shared with us his concern over the normalization and intensification of international anti-Semitism and the impact of the widespread perception of America distancing itself from Israel under the Obama administration. Cruz pushed off other meetings and stayed for lunch and beyond. Republican, Democrat and Independent, the young impressionable Jewish students were deeply impacted by the senator from Texas knowledge, insight, empathy and passion.

The usual rap that the Left gives conservative candidates is that they are unintelligent. It doesnt matter if they have academic and professional accomplishments that far outstrip their Democratic opponents. That spin simply wasnt available with Ted Cruz, whom liberal Jewish icon Alan Dershowitz has publicly proclaimed to be off-the-charts brilliant. So instead they spun as a negative what should have been a positive  Cruz willingness to stand on principle and not surrender to DC politics as usual. The knock against Cruz now is that he is unlikeable because he isnt popular with the establishment. Nonsense. In the larger social settings Ive seen and in private one-on-ones, Ive never found Cruz to be anything other than warm, open, intimate and inspiring. That many in Washington resent his principled service is a badge of honor. As Winston Churchill famously observed  and as Jews know very well  You have enemies? Good. That means youve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Politics is a rough business and it takes guts to stand up for what is right. The Ted Cruz Ive seen is driven by idealism and principle  above all, a fierce love for America as an exceptional country whose uniqueness derives from its moral leadership. It is equally clear that for Ted Cruz the wellbeing of Jews is a deeply personal commitment and that in the face of rising anti-Semitism, Americas moral leadership only exists inasmuch as it is committed to protecting Jews in Israel and around the world. In private as in public, Ted Cruz is a true Oheiv Yisroel and the kind of unyielding moral warrior we need in the White House.

Yehoshua (Jeff) Ballabon is ceo of B2 Strategic (www.b2strategic.com), chairman of the Iron Dome Alliance (www.IronDomeAlliance.com) and a senior fellow at the American Conservative Unions Center for Statesmanship and Diplomacy (http://acufoundation.conservative.org/policy-centers/).
It's time to fight back against the energy giants who are sitting on 1 billion of your cash.

In just minutes you can claim back hundreds but greedy energy suppliers won't give a refund unless you ask.

Yesterday the Mail revealed how eight million households are in credit after an unusually mild winter.

The warmest winter temperatures in England and Wales since records began in 1910 meant customers used less heating, leaving them 132 in credit on average.

Battle: Energy firms will eventually refund the money customers have overpaid during the mild winter - but not without a fight

Despite this, energy firms are clinging to the cash, but it should be as easy as giving them a meter reading and asking them to pay the money back.

If you are one of the 16 million who pay by direct debit, your supplier will already have your bank details. Under the regulator's rules, they can't reject you unless they have a good reason.

For example, they might claim bills are set to rocket because the weather is about to turn colder. But now winter is over and the weather is set to heat up, heating bills should only drop.

Prices may even fall in coming months if suppliers pass on the full drop in wholesale gas and electricity costs, which have tumbled 40 per cent and 30 per cent respectively since 2014.

All the 'big six' announced cuts to their gas prices at the start of the year but these were around 5 per cent on average and none of the suppliers cut electricity prices.

However, readers have told us some suppliers are offering only to reduce direct debits, rather than pay a lump sum. Don't put up with this nonsense.

HOW TO CLAIM YOUR MONEY BACK STEP ONE: Take a meter reading. If you have a metric meter, ignore the numbers after the decimal point, if its an imperial meter, ignore the numbers in red and if its a clock-like dial meter, ignore the final dial. STEP TWO: Call your supplier, give them your meter reading and ask for your current balance. If you are in credit, ask for the money back and your direct debit to be lowered. STEP THREE: If you supplier says you arent entitled to the money back and that your account will even out over the rest of the year, dont be fobbed off. Remind them it is your right to ask for a refund at any time. STEP FOUR: If your provider makes it difficult to claim your money back, tell them you want to lodge an official complaint. If problems continue, call the Energy Ombudsman on 0330 440 1624 to escalate your complaint.

In fact, it's your right to demand the company does both. If you are in credit after the winter, it's a sign your monthly bill has been set too high.

'It's not in a supplier's interest to give customers their credit back,' says Mark Todd, of price comparison website Energyhelpline. 'It's effectively free cash for them to finance their business. So it's up to you to chase it.

'Your energy usage will reduce through summer so that credit is just going to get bigger. Demand it back.

'If your supplier refuses, you can switch or raise a formal complaint.'

Three in five households pay their bills by direct debit. Under these plans, your energy supplier looks at how much gas and electricity you used the previous year and estimates how much you'll spend over the coming one.

It then splits this into equal monthly or quarterly payments. In the summer, households tend to use less energy and end up in credit.

This surplus should cover winter, when usage is typically higher. At year-end, you should break even.

The moment you give a meter reading, you'll see if your supplier's estimate reflects your usage and your bills should be adjusted.

Customers checking their bills and meters now are finding they used less energy than they did last year. The average temperature was 5.5c, compared to 3.9c in 2014/15, according to the Met Office.

Sneaky: Energy firms are clinging to your cash, but it should be as easy as giving them a meter reading and asking them to pay the money back

Around half the households who pay by direct debit are likely to be owed money, according to Mr Todd. But many are being fobbed off.

Ruth Lyons, 65, lives alone in a three-bedroom cottage in Herefordshire. She only heats the rooms she uses and relies on a woodburner in the sitting room to keep warm.

In March, she found she'd built up 372 credit over the winter, so Ruth called Npower to ask for a refund and for her direct debit to be reduced from 115 to 60.

Npower said it would do so, but a week later it still hadn't. Instead, Ruth received a letter telling her that Npower was dropping her direct debit to 20 a month.

There was no mention of the 372 refund. So Ruth called again. This time she was told it would take up to two weeks to transfer the money.

But the refund never arrived and now she was 487 in credit as her March payment had been taken. So she called again.

This time a call centre worker told her he was only authorised to refund up to 250 and he'd have to escalate her request for the remainder.

She was then passed to someone else, who told her she'd have to wait another week.

Ruth, a retired massage therapist, says: 'In this day and age, money can be transferred so speedily it's unacceptable it should take this long  they just want to hang on to your money as long as possible.'

Through sheer perseverance, Ruth eventually received a 421 refund and had her monthly payments reduced to 65.
We are trying to recover money charged by O2 for calls we are supposed to have made while en route to, and in, the West Indies.

Our phone bill after the holiday was 902, but some of the calls are timed when we were in the air, flying to Barbados. On another occasion we were at sea.

There is another call relating to Norway, but I do not know anybody there.

I never used my phone while I was away and when it was not in my personal possession it was in the cabin safe. I have twice asked for the bill to be investigated but it has done nothing.

Mrs P. R., London.

Flight of fancy? One reader was horrified to receive a mobile phone bill for 902 after returning from holiday

O2 has now investigated and made a substantial refund. It also has an explanation for some of the mysterious calls  though it does not exactly tally with your contention that you did not use your phone at all while you were away.

Having seen the evidence it has presented, its case seems credible to me.

For example, you state the first two calls were made while you were on a flight to Barbados. However, O2 has checked the flight number and it appears the plane landed early at 14.25 local time.

The calls were made at 15.16, so perhaps you may have called friends or family to say youd arrived safely.

You also mention calls listed as being made in Jamaica, which you did not visit. O2 says it uses partner networks in the Caribbean that are registered in Jamaica, so this is what would show on your bill even if you didnt visit the country.

Theres even an explanation for the Norway calls: most cruise ships and ferry companies offer mobile network services, the P&O ship you were on is registered in Norway, so any calls made using the ships network would show as Norway on the bill.

There is also a call made to a London number lasting five hours and 22 minutes. This is a number you have called regularly, but it seems that on this occasion the call did not end properly.

So what has O2 done? Well, firstly it has credited you with the 443.63 cost of this call, which is almost half of your total bill.

Since then its complaints review service has increased the goodwill gesture to 665.45. This will be refunded to your bank account.

An O2 spokesman says: We have contacted Mrs R. to explain and clarify the breakdown of her bill.

We understand her concerns, so in this instance as a gesture of goodwill we have credited her mobile account with 75 per cent of the bill.

We encourage all customers to monitor mobile phone usage, especially when abroad.

I would add that anyone travelling to certain parts of the world, such as the Caribbean, should take special note of the very high costs of calling home  and be doubly sure they have disconnected the call properly.

In addition, those travelling on cruise ships should make sure they check the cost of calls.

YOU HAVE YOUR SAY - FRAUD VICTIMS ABANDONED BY BANKS AND POLICE Every week Money Mail receives hundreds of your letters and emails. Heres what you had to say about our investigation into how fraud victims are being abandoned by banks and the police: Cyber crime is a real problem for old people  they grew up before any of this stuff existed and they just dont realise theyre being conned. A. Y., Leeds. Banks cannot escape all responsibility. They need to check with account holders when unusual transfers are being made. My bank knows my normal direct debits and those whom I pay regularly. It even texts me if I change the details. O. L., London. This happened to my 70-year-old mother. Fraudsters stole 18,000 and Halifax said it was her fault because she logged them in to her online banking. Moral of the story: never give anyone your bank details over the phone, no matter how plausible the reason may seem. A. B., Surrey. Banks encourage customers to go online and the resulting job losses in the banking industry boosts their profits. Customers now do a lot of the work themselves and get nothing for it except poor customer service  if thats what it can be called. H. K., Portsmouth. It ought to say very clearly on all internet banking sites never to give anyone any information if you receive a cold call or email. L. W., Bournemouth. If you phone your bank, it asks you security questions. When your bank phones you it still asks you security questions. Thats the problem. If anyone phones asking for ANY personal information, consider it a scam and hang up. K. N., Edinburgh. Some bank security is rubbish. One of the security questions is my mothers maiden name. E. P., Birmingham. Its about time banks started tracing where all this stolen money is moved to. Set up infrastructure that prevents outlaws from taking money anywhere. International criminals need big money to pay for their networks. W. S., Chatham, Kent.

My energy supplier, First Utility, is pestering me to take up its three-year dual-fuel tariff now, before it disappears. The email makes it sound like a fantastic deal. What do you advise?

P. M., London.

First Utility is clearly on a marketing blitz to lure people on to this three-year deal.

Many readers tell me theyve had the same email, which seems straightforward at first, but it could lead to the unwary paying higher bills (and possibly early exit charges on their existing contract).

Anyone tempted in will pay 16.84p for every kWh (kilowatt-hour) of electricity and 3.6p per kWh for gas for the next three years. This compares with the 12.88p charge for electricity and 2.7p for gas on First Utilitys cheapest one-year deal.

So it would cost a medium user household an extra 235 in the first year and, if energy prices remain unchanged, 705 over three years  though you do get a free smart thermostat.

The flipside is that if energy prices sky-rocket, theres a chance you could benefit from locking into todays rates. But theyd have to rise by a lot.

And remember: oil prices have plunged this year and big power giants are only just cutting prices in response.

So is First Utility trying to push people into an expensive deal only for its own benefit?

A spokesman says: Just like any company, we market different offers to our customers that they may find beneficial.

It makes me wonder what befuddling marketing might start to pop up if energy suppliers are allowed to contact rivals customers with details of their latest deals, as proposed by the Competition and Markets Authority last month.

My wife fell ill, so we decided to cancel her membership to a local hotels swimming club.

It is demanding the final months fee of 36 even though the terms and conditions state that 30 days notice isnt necessary if youre cancelling due to a medical condition.

Its been frustrating and stressful. The club has even contacted debt collectors. Will I have to pay?

D. E., Northampton.

What a heartless way to treat someone whos suffering from an illness. Its becoming far too common for energy providers, banks, telecoms firms and now gyms to call in debt collectors at the drop of a hat.

Your letter makes it quite clear that your wife is no longer able to use the pool due to her medical condition. Im glad you stood up to Spirit Health Club and contacted Money Mail  and I have good news.

Spirit has seen sense, read through its terms and conditions again  and agreed to drop the charges. Like most health clubs, those run by Spirit ask for a doctors note to prove illness when leaving a contract.

Its worth getting hold of one of these before you try to cancel gym memberships, phone contracts and so on for health reasons.
Property website Zoopla has stolen a march on its rivals by snapping up a software firm for 75million - giving it access directly to 8,000 estate agent branches across the UK.

The FTSE 250-listed company said the takeover of The Property Software Group will be a game-changer in the industry, Zoopla claimed. It has bought the business from LDC - the private equity arm of Lloyd's Banking Group - which backed a 17.8million management buy-out of PSG from the Guardian Media Group in 2013.

The group said the acquisition will allow it to bring new revenue opportunities to the UK property industry with the first end-to-end service of estate agency software, digital marketing and market insight tools.

Game changer: Online property portal Zoopla has stolen a march on its rivals by snapping up an estate agency back-office software firm for 75million, giving it access directly to 8,000 branches across the UK

Zooplas chief executive and founder Alex Chesterman said the PSG deal would transform services for UK agents and consumers.

He added: Our ambition has always been to be the most effective partner to the UK property industry and this deal will allow us to work more closely with our agent partners and offer them an even more compelling service.

PSG was launched in 2007 and provides work-flow tools to 40,000 estate and letting agents across the UK. The software includes day-to-day management of inventory, diary management and business reporting tools.

As part of the takeover, PSG chief executive Mark Goddard will join Zoopla as managing director of the group's property services division.

However, the deal is subject to the cancellation of PSG's existing consumer credit licence or the FCA's approval of the change of control.

Mr Goddard said: We've had a long-standing relationship with the team at Zoopla and are incredibly excited to continue our journey as part of their growth and innovation story."

Analysts at broker Jefferies said the acquisition will ultimately lead to less complexity and more services for Zoopla and PSG's customers.

They added: In our view, the acquisition provides agents with a one stop solution to their front and back office systems, a clever move and one not available to their main (organic growth) focused competitor.

And Numis Securities said the deal: Looks a sensible fit, at face value price looks okay given retention and customer renewal rates, fits Zoopla strategy of expanding beyond core agency model.

In reaction, shares in Zoopla were around 1.7 per cent, or 4.8p to 282.1p in afternoon trading as the firm also confirmed its full year results would come in at the higher end of expectations.

The firm highlighted a boost to its price comparison website uSwitch, which Zoopla bought in a 165million deal last year.

Zoopla and website rival Rightmove suffered last year after the launch of a new service On The Market, backed by a number of big estate agents.

But both firms shares have recovered recently amid signs that some members of On The Market have been unhappy with the business.

In a trading update in February, Zoopla said it had attracted a record 58 million visits by homebuyers to its website in January.
When James Hayward moved in 2011 he was sure the newly built, five-bedroom family house in Halifax, West Yorkshire, was a smart choice.

He'd just got engaged to fiancee Liz and, with a wedding to plan, he was keen to avoid the damp, dodgy circuitry and hidden cracks that so often taint older properties.

But the couple's plans for a settled family life closer to Liz's work in Bradford were scuppered the moment they received the keys.

As soon as they walked through the door, James and Liz discovered holes in the plasterwork, paint was missing from some of the walls, the boiler was hanging off, alarming bulges protruded from the gables and there were dents in the garage door.

Shaky foundations: With too few houses to go round  particularly in urban areas  construction companies are being asked to build more homes, faster

The developer, David Wilson Homes, an upmarket brand owned by housing giant Barratt Homes, apologised and promised to fix the problems.

The couple were assured the repairs would take only a fortnight. But 'two weeks' of dust-covered furniture and disruption quickly turned into 15.

More problems surfaced and the 15 weeks rolled into months . . . and the months into years.

Today, five years on and both now aged 35, James and Liz are still fighting for a finished home. And they aren't the only casualties in the battle to solve Britain's chronic housing shortage.

There are now ten buyers battling it out for each home. Young families scrambling to join the property ladder before prices soar out of reach face competition from buy-to-let landlords and a steady flow of immigrants.

With too few houses to go round  particularly in urban areas  construction companies are being asked to build more homes, faster.

Now, the rush to cash in appears to be behind a spike in complaints about the quality of new-build homes.

2012: The unuseable kitchen shortly after James Hayward moved in to his five-bedroom family house in Halifax, West Yorkshire

2016: Five years on James and Liz are still fighting for repairs to the house built by David Wilson Homes

The National House Building Council, an industry group which provides the warranties covering homes built by most major developers, paid out more than 87 million to nearly 11,000 homeowners in 2015.

The total was up 10 per cent, from 79 million the previous year. Ten years ago it was 37 million  less than half as much.

Experts fear that the quality of new buildings will only deteriorate further as Britain's population swells.

Young buyers often get only a glimpse of a show home before putting down a deposit  and risk later being trapped in housing that is not up to scratch.

Mr Hayward is one of thousands caught out as they struggle to get on the housing ladder

Paula Higgins, of the HomeOwners Alliance campaign group, says: 'Developers are rushing up substandard housing just to keep their shareholders happy. It's a national disgrace.

'We are inundated with complaints from buyers who hoped to find their dream home but ended up purchasing a nightmare.

'As soon as housebuilders make the sale, they see their customers as problems, not people.'

Housebuilders are under a lot of political pressure to expand the number of houses in Britain; before the election, the Conservatives pledged to build one million new homes by 2020.

It's a tall order. There were 219,000 new houses built in 2008, but numbers plummeted when the banks stopped lending so much and the recession took hold.

In 2013, the numbers hit a post-war low, before recovering to 152,000 last year. That's still far below the 250,000 new homes a year experts say are needed to meet the Government's target.

In Greater London, where average prices have hit 530,000, housing charity Shelter has recommended building into restricted Green Belt countryside to provide space for new homes. And ministers are reportedly considering forcing developers that buy publicly owned land to build on it more quickly.

The average time it takes to build a new house has jumped from 24 to 32 weeks, but the Government is desperate to slash that.

In February, Housing Minister Brandon Lewis blasted developers' efforts as 'not good enough', claiming they should be able to build a house in three to four weeks.

As developers strive to meet these targets they're struggling to find enough qualified staff. Many older, experienced builders quit the industry during the downturn, and attracting young replacements has proved difficult

A survey by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors says it is the industry's greatest skills crisis since 1998.

Work in progress: Scaffolding surrounds the five-bedroom property during Mr and Mrs Hayward's five-year battle to get the problems fixed

There are also 19,000 fewer building firms today than when the recession struck in 2009. It puts enormous weight of responsibility on the major developers, and their bosses admit too much is expected of them.

Pete Redfern, chief executive of major developer Taylor Wimpey, says it is 'frustrating' to be told to go faster.

He says developers are 'sometimes rightly accused of accelerating those early stages [of building] too much'.

But builders are also going at breakneck speed to satisfy profit-hungry bosses and shareholders. They know there are huge amounts of money to be made if they can meet more of the demand for homes.

Money Mail understands that the standard of workmanship can plummet when a company faces a big deadline, such as the end of its financial year.

This is when all its sales and costs must be totted up and declared to shareholders. It means buildings are sometimes finished in a rush and sold earlier than they should be.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the chief executive of one major British developer says: 'Some developers do rush to get sales completed before their deadlines. It can be a real problem.'

Not so sweet: Andy Bell and wife Victoria outside the problem home they bought from Persimmon Homes

Regrets: Andy Bell at home with his wife Victoria and daughter Sophia, 5. The 28-year-old manufacturing worker, thought a new-build house would provide a stress-free move

CUT THE COST OF OWNING A HOME WITH A BETTER MORTGAGE Getting the right mortgage is essential to making sure buying a home is as affordable as possible. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of options out there, so, as well as doing your own research, this is an occasion to search out expert opinion from a good mortgage broker. This is Moneys best buy table (right) highlights quite how low the best two-year fixed mortgages have fallen. Our mortgage calculator and best buys table can show you a full list of the best deals that suit your circumstances. Check to see if you can find a cheaper mortgage here. You can also get fee-free advice from our carefully chosen mortgage broker partner London & Country. Those on the hunt for the best rates and wondering whether to fix or track - or how long to fix for - should also read This is Money's regularly updated What next for mortgage rates?

Could it be worse depending on when in the year you buy?

The source thinks the time of year the Haywards chose to buy might have exacerbated their troubles. James and Liz bought in June, which just happens to be the final month of Barratt Homes's financial year.

Barratt declined to comment when Money Mail put this point to it.

James, a management consultant, says nothing seemed to help convince Barratt to resolve the blizzard of problems. In desperation, he set up a website called mydavidwilsonhome.co.uk to record photographs and letters from his dispute.

He is now pursuing Barratt for the money he and Liz spent on hotels (around 150 a night) when the builders were fixing their home.

James says he was offered 3,000 if he agreed to sign a gagging order to stop him speaking out. He refused and says the offer was then withdrawn.

After creating his website, James discovered Barratt had bought up a host of sites about itself, including barratthomessucks.co.uk and ihate davidwilson.com. It means other disgruntled customers cannot use these web addresses.

He feels the developer has spent more time covering its own back than addressing his problems.

'This has had a massive, long-term, negative effect on our lives,' he says. 'We got engaged. We were going to get married. We moved house in 2011, yet we only got married last year because of all the stress.'

This has had a massive, long-term, negative effect on our lives

Andy Bell ran into troubles with his first property, bought from Persimmon Homes last July.

Fed up of renting a mould-infested flat with his wife and stepdaughter, he was determined to get on the housing ladder and fell in love with a new property in Andover, Hampshire.

The 28-year-old manufacturing worker, who is doing an engineering degree with the Open University, thought a new-build house would provide a stress-free move.

He used the Help to Buy scheme and his mother gave him cash for a deposit out of her pension pot.

'I liked the layout of the area, the local school was superb and it was the ideal location for me and my work,' he says.

'The show homes were immaculate. But in terms of our own property, I didn't see it until I got the keys.'

When Andy went into his new garage, he was confronted by a building site. Tools and rubble were strewn across the floor.

Inside the home itself, there was a hole in one of the walls, a wonky window and a damaged kitchen.

His wife Victoria broke down in tears at the thought of having to move in with her five-year-old, Sophia.

'It's been a nightmare,' says Andy. 'It's put my university work behind and I've had to take time off work.'

The problems are finally being tackled by Persimmon after Mr Bell appealed to his MP and the Press, but it took nine stressful months to resolve.

John Gosling ran into problems after buying a 250,000 Barratt house in Milton Keynes in June 2010.

The 49-year-old moved into the four-bedroom home with his wife and daughter so his recently widowed mother could live with them, too.

But soon, a host of problems revealed themselves. Badly finished skirting boards and poorly fixed radiators were the first issues he spotted.

Disaster zone: John Gosling in front of the Barratt home he bought in Milton Keynes in 2010 which was plagued with problems

Then, knots started appearing in all the woodwork; John believes this is because paint was put on badly. The dishwasher leaked, too.

But the biggest problem of all was the creaking floors.

'You could be sitting downstairs, and if someone walks across the floor above you'll just hear a 'crack, crack' noise,' says John. 'They've torn the ceilings out twice to try to fix it.'

John says he has had builders in more than 20 times.

The work has taken a toll on his family. 'There's very little appreciation of what it's doing to you,' he says.

'They play this game with people where, at first, they make you think they sold you something special. They want to see how cheaply they can make the houses before too many people start complaining and they start losing money.'

You could be sitting downstairs, and if someone walks across the floor above you'll just hear a 'crack, crack' noise

The housebuilders say what happened to James, Andy and John was unusual.

Persimmon says it sold 14,572 houses in 2015 and 'the overwhelming majority' went to 'satisfied customers'.

A spokesman says: 'In the event there are issues to be resolved, such as in the case of Mr Bell's property in Andover, Persimmon's sales, construction and customer care teams work closely with the buyer to ensure these are addressed in a timely manner.

'We acknowledge that some of Mr Bell's concerns have taken longer to resolve than we would ideally like. However, throughout the process we have maintained regular communication with him.'

A spokesman for Barratt says: 'We are working closely with Mr Hayward to rectify his issues. We recognise there have been a number of them, but have always worked hard to resolve them and are doing so for the few remaining items.

'We have completed the outstanding issues for Mr Gosling as part of our new homes warranty and have fully investigated his concerns through our customer complaints procedure. There is one outstanding issue which is currently being reviewed by the National House Building Council.
A boss at the Government-backed British Business Bank has delivered an upbeat assessment of increasing lending to companies, and is hopeful that it is sustainable.

Chief operating officer Patrick Magee said: Theres good news in the bank lending market and the flow of finance is up.

The bank market is beginning to recover and the credit appetite is coming back. The asset finance market has been doing really well. It was just under 13billion in 2012 and was more than 16billion in 2015. Then the alternative finance peer-to-peer lending market is growing and theres more equity out there.

Small business: Money raised through the alternative finance sector last month was 66% up on March 2015

According to research firm AltFi Data, money raised through the alternative finance sector last month was 66 per cent up on March last year.

It said 342.5million of financing was originated during the month, a 12 per cent rise on February, adding that Funding Circle, RateSetter, LendInvest, Zopa and MarketInvoice were the biggest lenders.

This month, the International Monetary Funds latest half-yearly Global Financial Stability Report called for urgent action on the problems faced by eurozone banks. It said a third of these would have to overcome significant challenges to be sustainably profitable.

But despite the IMFs warnings of a fresh financial crisis, Magee said: Were not back to the heights of 2007-8, but were getting back to what we hope might be a new normal. I dont have significant concerns that this isnt sustainable. People say, OK, theres more finance flowing, but then if you get global worries or other issues then markets begin to seize up again. Were pleased with the progress weve seen and hope that its sustainable because of the diversity on the supply side.

In the Budget the Government announced three designated internet platforms for its new referrals scheme for firms rejected for loans by banks

In the March Budget the Government announced three designated internet platforms for its new referrals scheme for firms rejected for loans by banks  Businessfinancecompared, Funding Options and Funding Xchange.

Meanwhile, the BBB announced last week that it has invested 30million in Cordet Direct Lending, a new debt fund focused on medium-sized businesses.

Magee dismissed concerns the Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme, where the Government acts as a guarantor for loans to small and medium enterprises, is lending to fewer firms. Just 446 were granted loans through the scheme in the final quarter of 2015 against 2,030 in the second quarter of 2009.

He said: It had an exceptional period in 2009 because that was after the financial crisis and the banks had no capital and no credit. EFG is finding an appropriate level. Were reviewing it and improving it. Were still supportive of the scheme.

Last week, the Bank of Englands Credit Conditions Survey for the first quarter of 2016 found that the proportion of small business loan applications approved increased for the fourth consecutive quarter. Meanwhile, demand from SMEs is expected to rise this quarter.

Jo Harris, managing director for business banking at Lloyds Banking Group, said: Default rates on lending have fallen, reflecting an improvement in credit quality, and Bank of England statistics show there was an annual net increase of 1.6 per cent in loans and overdraft balances of SMEs in the year to the end of February.

However, in the first quarter of 2016 there was a slight fall in demand from small firms, perhaps as a result of uncertainty in many markets. Lloyds increased its lending by 5 per cent in the last year.
For many small business owners struggling to get off the ground, spending money on marketing, branding and raising their profile can feel frivolous. But this is exactly the kind of thing that Starling Bank wants to help them to do, with its new competition which could net start-ups thousands of pounds in cash. The challenger bank's Take Flight initiative will see SMEs pitching their business case to celebrity judges who themselves have experience in running companies, including TV personality and business founder Carol Vorderman. The ten winning companies will each be awarded 5,000, which Starling says will help them 'get to the 'next level'. This is Money asks Vorderman, and Starling CEO Anne Boden, what the panel will be looking for.
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By Bill Parry

Speed cameras have been critiqued and criticized as a cash grab for the city, according to state Sen. Jose Peralta (D-East Elmhurst). But he says they work and he wants more of them to save children from injury and counter the citys epidemic of hit-and-run collisions.

Our children need and deserve safer streets, Peralta said. We must ensure we put all the mechanisms in place to make sure people drive at safe speeds, at slower speeds.

Peralta and state Assemblyman Michael DenDekker (D-East Elmhurst) unveiled three pieces of legislation last week that would crack down on speeding drivers in an effort to reduce traffic injuries and fatalities ciywide.

The proposals would eliminate time restrictions on school speed cameras, expand the program to all school zones in the city and suspend the registration of a vehicle after five traffic camera violations. The use of these speed monitoring devices currently is limited to one hour before school starts to an hour after the school day ends.

Clearly, installing speed cameras in school zones has been a successful initiative and to make it even more effective we should do away with these senseless restrictions on times of operation and the nuber of cameras that may be in use, Peralta said. Accidents, especially preventable accidents, can occur at any time of the day, any day of the week. Speeding is one of the leading factors in many fatal and serious accidents, so lets make sure we do everything we can to deter drivers from speeding, especially in school areas. This new legislation would make streets safer for our kids and all pedestrians in general.

Since 140 speed cameras were installed in school zones beginning in 2014, 945,000 speed violation tickets were issued by September 2015. City Department of Transportation statistics show that at first each speed camera issued an average of 192 violations per day. By September 2015 the number decreased to an average of 69 summonses per day, or a 60 percent drop.

Just by looking at the number of tickets issued, we can see that drivers are speeding less and less in areas where cameras are installed, Peralta said. When the state Legislature authorized the use of speed cameras in 2013, it established a 2018 end date to the pilot program. Under Peralta and DenDekkers measures, the program to improve pedestrian safety would be made permanent.

In a separate bill sponsored by DenDekker, if a vehicle has five traffic violations in one year, the owner of the vehicle will have its registration suspended for six months. When a speed camera issues a summons, the owner of the vehicle receives a $50 ticket in the mail.

The speed cameras are working, but nobody is held accountable because the camera cant tell who was driving that car, DenDekker said. If you allow someone to drive your car dangerously, then well take your car away for six months if that car has five traffic camera violations in one year.

Peralta hopes all three bills will pass by the end of the legislative session June 16. Cristina Furlong, co-founder of Make Queens Safer, supports each measure and wants the program expanded citywide.

Speeding is the leading cause of traffic deaths in New York, and if we have a way to deter people from speeding in our neighborhood, it must be enacted, she said. Traffic safety cameras have reduced speeding by 60 percent in school zones where they have been installed, but 93 percent of schools in the city still lack them. Every child deserves the protection that these cameras provide for a safer trip to school.
More than 200 people were killed and over 100 children abducted by armed men from South Sudan in a cross-border raid into Ethiopia, the country\s leader said.

Ethiopian officials blame Murle tribesmen from South Sudan for a series of deadly attacks on Ethiopian villages in the western Gambella region on Friday.

"The atrocities committed by an armed Murle tribe from South Sudan claimed the lives of 208," Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn said on state television on Sunday evening, increasing the death toll from an earlier estimate of 140.

Hailemariam said "mothers and children" were among the dead and, "they also abducted 102 children."

The foreign ministry said over 2,000 livestock were also stolen.

The Murle, a tribe from South Sudan based in the eastern Jonglei region close to the Ethiopian border, often stage raids to steal cattle and abduct children but rarely on such a large or deadly scale.

"There had been abduction of children and raiding of cattle from Gambella through crossing the Ethiopian border. However, Friday\s attack was massive" Hailemariam said.

"The Ethiopian defence force is taking measures against the attackers to free the abducted children without any precondition," he said, without specifying whether Ethiopian troops had crossed the border into South Sudan.

Friday\s attacks targeted the Nuer tribe, one of the two main ethnic groups in South Sudan, who live on both sides of the border.

The western Ethiopian region of Gambella, which borders South Sudan, is also home to some 272,000 South Sudanese refugees who have fled the civil war that erupted in their country in December 2013.

The raid  dubbed the "Gambella massacre" in the Ethiopian media  reinforces long-standing fears that South Sudan\s civil war since December 2013 would spill into Ethiopia.

The conflict has split South Sudan roughly along ethnic lines pitting the president\s Dinka tribe against the rebel leader\s Nuers. Ethiopia believes the raids are not linked to the ongoing conflict in South Sudan.

Located 50 kilometres (31 miles) from the South Sudanese border, Gambella is home to Ethiopian Nuers.

Local journalists have reported attackers carrying AK-47 assault rifles and killing anyone who resisted.

SOURCE: AFP
The United States will send more troops to Iraq, potentially putting them closer to the front lines to advise Iraqi forces in the war against Islamic State militants.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter made the announcement on Monday during a visit to Baghdad in which he met U.S. commanders, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, and Iraqi Defence Minister Khaled al-Obeidi.

The additional support comes with Iraq engulfed in a political crisis over anti-corruption reforms that is crippling state institutions and threatening to slow the military campaign against the militants.

Iraq\s parliament has failed three times to vote on a cabinet overhaul sought by Abadi to stem graft.

About 200 additional troops will be deployed, raising the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to about 4,100, a senior U.S. defense official said. The Pentagon will also provide up to $415 million to Kurdish military units.

Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, head of the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State, said the United States would discuss how the funding would be spent with the Kurdish government, but that part of it would likely be spent on food for the Kurdish peshmerga forces.

"Right now the peshmerga are not getting enough calories to keep them in the field, so we\re very interested in making sure that they have enough food just to carry on the fight," he said.

Carter did not meet Kurdish leaders during his visit, but spoke with the president of the Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, by telephone.

Monday\s announcement is the latest move in the past several months by the United States to step up its campaign against the hardline Sunni jihadists. U.S. special forces are also deployed in Iraq and Syria as part of the campaign.

Iraqi forces  trained by the U.S. military and backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition  have managed since December to take back territory from Islamic State, which seized swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territory in 2014.

Some U.S. troops already in Iraq will be shifted to establishing logistics for Iraqi forces as they move up towards Mosul, Carter said. Such logistics include establishing food and other supply lines, particularly important as Mosul is 400 km (250 miles) north of Baghdad.

"We\re on the same page with the Iraqi government," Carter told reporters. "We want more action by Iraqi forces towards victory here and more action will require more logistics."

The new U.S. troops will consist of advisers, trainers, aviation support crew, and security forces. Most of the new military advisers are expected to be army special forces, as is the case with the approximately 100 advisers now in Iraq.

The advisers will be allowed to accompany smaller Iraqi units of about 2,500 troops that are closer to the frontlines of battle, whereas now they are limited to larger divisions of about 10,000 troops located further from the battlefield.

That will allow the U.S. military to offer quicker and more nimble advice to Iraqi troops as they try to retake Mosul, the largest Iraqi city still under Islamic State control.

But by placing them closer to the conflict, it could leave them more vulnerable to enemy mortars and artillery.

"This will put Americans closer to the action," Carter said. "Their whole purpose is to be able to help those forces respond in a more agile way.

The United States has also authorized the use of Apache attack helicopters to support Iraqi forces in retaking Mosul, Carter said. The United States had originally offered the Apaches to the Iraqi government in December.

The Iraqis did not take up the offer then but Carter said Abadi had agreed that the United States would provide the use of the Apaches as the campaign to retake Mosul progresses.

The United States will also deploy an additional long-range rocket artillery unit to support Iraqi ground forces in the battle for Mosul, Carter said. There are two such batteries already in place in Iraq.

SOURCE: REUTERS
Airport development adding to economy, jobs in the region

Pittsburgh may always be known as the Steel City, but a wave of new industries are popping up near its airport to redefine business in the region.
TORIN HALSEY/TIMES RECORD NEWS The 1963 Volkswagen Transporter Type 2 purchased recently by Reese Inman. The vintage pickup-style vehicle is rated to carry 2,000 pounds of payload and has a 47-horsepower air-cooled engine.

SHARE TORIN HALSEY/TIMES RECORD NEWS Reese Inman is the proud owner of a 1963 Volkswagen Transporter. The pickup-like vehicle was restored in California and bears a distinct turquoise color. Inman purchased to vintage vehicle about 3 months ago. TORIN HALSEY/TIMES RECORD NEWS The distinctive Volkswagen VW emblem is prominent on this 1963 Volkswagen Transporter Type 2 owned by Reese Inman. The turquoise and cream-colored classic is the third vintage Volkswagen in the Inman garage. TORIN HALSEY/TIMES RECORD NEWS Reese Inman drops the tailgate on his 1963 Volkswagen Transporter Type 2, a classic car he purchased about 3 months ago. The sides of the pickup bed also fold down for convenient loading and unloading of cargo. TORIN HALSEY/TIMES RECORD NEWS Reese Inman, a retired school teacher, purchased this 1963 Volkswagen Transporter Type 2 recently and enjoys its bare bones simplicity and German craftsmanship. The rare vehicle turns heads as he drives it around town.

By Ted Buss, Special to the Times Record News

Curious eyes invariably fix on Reese Inman every time he tools around town in his classic 1963 Volkswagen Transporter. The uncommon automotive icon has a magnetic appeal in a funky sort of way, but to Inman it represents a story of reverence and remembrance.

A '60s VW Transporter Type 2 with all its whistles and bells could be described as a Boy Scout or Swiss Army Knife. As its various hidden compartments unfold, it has the characteristics of a car, pickup, van, bus and flat bed truck all rolled into one.

When Inman, a retired Wichita Falls public school teacher, saw the photos of the restored 1963 Volkswagen Transporter earlier this year on an automotive website, dialogue with its California owner went from mild to serious to let's make a deal.

"I looked at about 150 photos, asked many questions and I felt comfortable with the seller," Inman said. "It took him two years to restore everything including its original color. He had quite a few offers, so we didn't have a lot of negotiating room. But we made the deal and about a month later my Transporter was delivered in an enclosed trailer to my home. It is all I hoped for and more."

The motivation for buying this particular vehicle goes back in time when Reese was about five years old, tagging along like a puppy at the heels of eventual lifelong friend Tom Danaher. At the time Inman knew little of Danaher's heroics as a Navy/Marine Corps pilot in World War II and Korea.

"I just took to him as a friend," he said. "He became my mentor and our friendship lasted 'til the day he died (Sept. 12, 2014). The more I grew to know Tom, the more I admired him. He had many friends. Despite his notoriety as a pilot in the war and later in the Hollywood movies he flew in, he was kind and a gentleman to anyone who approached him."

Danaher was intrigued by the air-cooled VW engine and the simplicity of the auto in general. In 1957 he opened the city's first Volkswagen dealership. It was actually one of the few VW dealerships in Texas at the time.

"I was told he sold a lot of Volkswagens and that every time he met one of his customers on the street he always asked for updates on the car and if the buyer was satisfied," Inman said.

When Danaher built his Lake Wichita Airport in 1968, young Reese spent summer days and after school hours helping him maintain the airport's runway.

"He had an old Volkswagen (bus) and I'd ride along in the back and we'd shoot weeds sprouting up in the runway," Inman said. "That Volkswagen was old and rusty but it kept on running and Tom loved it. He kept telling me that I needed to buy one when I grew up."

When the mint turquoise green VW Transporter was wheeled off the carrier ramp and settled in Inman's driveway, a long-awaited mission was completed. He could hardly wait to drive it; to study each feature in an original '60s VW Transporter owner manual; and to reveal every unique compartment to any friend or neighbor who cared to take a look. "With the sides up, it's like a pickup," Inman explained. "With the sides and tailgate down it becomes a long flatbed truck that was designed for easy loading and unloading of heavy merchandise.

"And look here," he added, like a five-year-old boy, "When this side compartment opens you have storage space below; a lockable, weather-tight compartment. It's like a hidden treasure chest. You can pack things in it for work or vacation travel. This vehicle was created for countless conversions for specific owner needs."

Although the VW Transporter was a common staple in Germany during the 1950s and '60s, it is estimated that fewer than 40,000 made it to the U. S. during the early to mid-60s.

Technically speaking, the Volkswagen air-cooled boxer engine had four horizontal cast-iron cylinders, heads and pistons; a forged steel crankshaft and connecting rods. The stick shift, 47 hp rear-mounted motor would deliver excellent gas mileage and cruising speeds up to 50 mph.

"Tom loved the simplicity of the engine," Inman said, "He liked the low maintenance and the fact that the engine and all that heat was behind you. He was excited later on when he opened the first Volkswagen dealership here. He didn't have trouble selling them, and he did his best to stay in touch with his customers.

"I grew up with an interest in aviation and knowing Tom made it even more appealing. He was an American war hero who loved life and was down-to-earth and friendly to people he met. I guess next to flying planes in the war and later in movies like "Empire of the Sun," he felt comfortable driving down his airport runway shooting weeds in that old VW van."

Many times he told young Reese that he should get a VW Transporter one day because it would be the most fun he would ever have.

Inman smiled and said, "He was right. Wheeling around in this vehicle is pure fun."

And the memories it evokes aren't bad, either.
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Remove those thumbs from that keypad long enough to read this: Anecdotally, doctors are seeing an uptick in painful hand conditions like carpal tunnel and trigger finger.

There are plenty of other causes, of course, including wear-and-tear and "life," but it would be hard not to associate all that typing and texting we're doing to the increase.

In the past eight years, Dr. Michael Mulligan of the Division of Orthopaedic Surgery at Albany Medical Center and associate professor at Albany Medical College, said he's seen more people with these problems and at younger ages.

"You can't say it isn't playing a role," he said.

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Luckily, it's the kind of thing that can be managed, first with bracing and nerve testing, and then, if you do need surgery, it's a relatively simple and short recovery. And by young, he means 30s, 40s and 50s.

There are three common hand conditions Mulligan will address later this month at the HealthyLife Seminar. Here are the basics:

1. CARPAL TUNNEL which causes pain and numbness in the fingers that ultimately leads to loss of dexterity.

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2. TRIGGER FINGER is tendonitis that can occur in any finger, not just the one on the trigger. It happens when the tendon can no longer move freely, locks up and you are unable to straighten your finger. It also is fairly common  men and women in their 40s and 50s get it  and treatable, Mulligan said.

3. THUMB ARTHRITIS is the second most common arthritis in the hand, which usually presents itself when someone has trouble opening a jar. After braces, anti-inflammatory medicines and sometimes a steroid injection, this can require a surgery to replace the thumb with a tendon from the arm.

Most people, though, don't end up getting surgery, Mulligan said. The recuperation is longer, with the patient wearing a splint for two weeks and then a cast for another four.

"It's not an overnight deal," Mulligan said.
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New York turned out to be the state where the presidential front-runners regained their mojo.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump  both globe-trotters who call New York home  were the clear winners in a state primary that for the first time in decades played a key role in the race for the White House.

In initial results Tuesday night, Clinton bested her Democratic opponent, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. It was Clinton's first victory since March 22, when she staged a commanding win in Arizona's primary. Until Tuesday, Sanders had been on a roll, racking up seven wins in several western states as well as Wisconsin.

Clinton was set to address a celebratory rally at the Sheraton in Times Square. She was joined there by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was by her side  and alongside her husband, former President Bill Clinton  during the final week of her New York campaign. Clinton served as New York's junior U.S. senator from 2001 to 2009, when she became secretary of state.

Trump needs to secure 1,237 pledged GOP delegates to win the nomination and head off the possibility of a brokered convention in July. As of Tuesday, he had collected 756. Cruz had 559 and Kasich had 144.

Addressing supporters and the media at Trump Tower in Manhattan, the real estate mogul thanked "the people who know me best" before launching into a capsule version of his stump speech.

"We don't have much of a race any more," Trump said, referring to his Republican opponents. " ... It's impossible to catch us."

All five of the candidates visited the Capital Region in the two weeks preceding the vote; Kasich came twice.

The state primary was in reality a collection of 27 contests in each of the state's congressional districts. While 163 Democratic delegates will be awarded proportionally based on each candidate's vote tally, Trump's strong finish will give him an large chunk of the 81 delegates handed out by Tuesday's voting, plus a separate stock of 14 delegates for winning the statewide vote. Under Republican rules, any candidate finishing with a majority in any congressional district captures all three of the delegates from that district.

The primary was marred in Brooklyn by the apparently inadvertant purging of more than 100,000 voters from the city's rolls, although it was unclear on Tuesday night how many people had been unable to vote in the primary because of the glitch. City officials, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, promised swift investigations.

In the Capital Regtion, the excitement surrounding the primary created some confusion at the polls, especially among those who showed up to vote only to discover they were not listed on either party's rolls.

Robert Lewis, an artist who is registered as an independent, showed up at the Ancient Order of Hibernians Hall in Albany just after the polls opened at noon. "I didn't realize I had to be in a party because I haven't voted in a primary in a few years," Lewis said. "You learn something new every day."

He was allowed to fill out a provisional or "affidavit" ballot, which was placed in an envelope that would be mailed to the Albany County Board of Elections after the polls closed at 9 p.m.

The Board of Elections' office off Central Avenue was busy for much of Tuesday afternoon. "The phones have been crazy," said Ellen Graziano, the county's GOP deputy election commissioner.

One Sanders supporter, Eric Carlson of Colonie, was turned away at his polling place. "They say that I'm not in the system and I've been purged because I moved," said Carlson, a psychology professor at Schenectady County Community College.

The records showed him living in Columbia County. He suspected his voter registration reflected that because he had once renewed his driver's license there.

Carlson was weighing whether he had time drive to Columbia County and return in time to teach an evening class.

"They told me I was in the Republican book," said Watervliet resident Heather Moffit. The 35-year-old switched from the GOP to the Democratic party because she wanted to support Sanders  but didn't do so until February, well past the Oct. 9 deadline to change parties.

Megan Parsons and John Darcy, both of Albany, had like Moffit used the state Department of Motor Vehicles website to switch registration, but they also did it too late. They said the site failed to make it clear that switching parties had to be done by last October.

Santosh Baraily, a 26-year-old refugee from Bhutan, had a broad smile and voiced no complaints after casting his ballot for Sanders at the Hibernian Hall.

Baraily, who came to Albany with his family in 2009 after they spent 19 years in a refugee camp in Nepal, said the 20-minute wait in line was well worth it.

"It is a great honor and a privilege," he said. "I feel a sense of being an American."
Washington, D.C.

Upstate New York is the northernmost edge of one of two mosquito types associated with transmitting the Zika virus, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention map distributed Monday by the White House.

But senior public health officials noted that the 346 cases of Zika in the continental U.S. are all the result of travelers infected while visiting tropical locations such as Brazil, Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean.

"I don't think it's anything to panic about or get agitated about, but we can't just make the assumption'' that a Zika outbreak would be as easy to control as other mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever and chikungunya, said Anthony Fauci, chief of infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

"So while we hope we're not going to see a sustained local outbreak, we need to be prepared,'' Fauci told reporters at a briefing.

Zika causes only mild symptoms, but among pregnant women in Brazil and the Caribbean it has been linked to an uptick in births of children with small heads, called microcephaly.

The type of Zika-linked mosquito found in the Capital Region, Aedes albopictus (the Asian tiger mosquito), is present throughout most of New York state except the North Country border region with Canada and a small portion of western New York. But Fauci and Anne Schuchat, principle deputy director of the CDC, said it is less efficient than the other kind of mosquito transmitter, Aedes aegypti, at spreading the disease.

Aedes aegypti (also known as the yellow-fever mosquito) has been most frequently implicated in Zika transmission, the officials said. It is common to the southern and western U.S., with its northeastern border ending on Long Island and southwestern Connecticut.

While not wanting to sound alarms, both officials said they were surprised at the potential implications of a serious outbreak in the U.S.

"The more we learn, the more concerned we actually get in some respects with regard to what this virus can do,'' Fauci said.

As the U.S. enters its warm-weather season, mosquitoes potentially could bite someone with Zika and transmit it to another person with the next bite.

Officials said anyone traveling to an infected area in the Caribbean or South America should continue to use insect repellent for five weeks or so after returning to the U.S. in order to prevent this kind of transmission.

Also, researchers have found Zika can be sexually transmitted.

Researchers are working on drugs and a vaccine to prevent Zika but the work remains in the preliminary stages with no specific preventative or cure in sight.

Federal health officials have been consulting state and local counterparts to prepare for the diagnosing and testing that would be necessary to detect a rash of Zika cases.

Health officials at all levels "need to be ready because we may not be lucky'' and avoid it, Schuchat said.

The Obama administration has reprogrammed $510 million from Ebola-virus-related programs to fund Zika preparedness. But the White House nevertheless is asking for a $1.9 billion emergency appropriation to fight Zika worldwide and prepare for thwarting it at home. Republicans so far appear to be lukewarm.
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St. Augustine, Fla.

A Roman Catholic priest in Florida whose body was found in rural Georgia dedicated his life to working with prisoners and society's downtrodden, a calling that police say put the 71-year-old cleric in contact with his killer.

The Rev. Rene Robert, who had ties to the Capital Region, is believed to have been helping a troubled Jacksonville man recently released from jail when he was killed, authorities said. They believe the suspect kidnapped the priest, took him to Georgia in his own car and killed him there, but the motive for the slaying remains unclear.

"He did prison ministry, and unfortunately in this case it seems to have come back against him," said the Rev. John Gillespie, a fellow priest in the Diocese of St. Augustine where Robert was a senior priest. Gillespie said Robert's work sometimes took him to places and people most would consider dangerous.

Robert, who graduated from St. Mary's School in Waterford and Catholic High in Troy, was never assigned to the Albany Roman Catholic Diocese, but came back to visit from Florida and occasionally stayed at St. Mary's Church in Waterford and St. Augustine in Troy.

Robert's sister, Debra Bedard, fought through tears at a televised news conference to say she was glad to be able to take her brother's body home.

"My brother died doing what he loved: helping people," she said.

The body, which still must be positively identified, was found near Waynesboro, Ga. Authorities were led to the spot by the man who was arrested while driving Robert's car.

St. Johns County, Fla., Sheriff David Shoar said Tuesday that all the evidence indicates the body is Robert.

Law enforcement authorities in Aiken, S.C., found Steven James Murray, 28, following a manhunt. He was driving Robert's Toyota Corolla, which the sheriff said Murray had driven back and forth between Florida and South Carolina.

Authorities believe Robert was introduced to Murray by a young woman the priest had been counseling.

"She warned the father about this guy," Shoar said.

Murray was arrested April 13 and returned to St. Augustine two days later on charges of fleeing and attempting to elude law enforcement officers and on being a fugitive. He was being held without bond Tuesday in the St. Johns County Jail.

Officials say Murray likely will face murder charges in Georgia.

Shoar was a close friend of Robert's.

"We talked about that ... that over the years that he'd go out in the middle of the night and help people and give them money. People who had just gotten out of jail," Shoar said.

Investigators believe Robert was killed Sunday, April 10, in the evening, Shoar said. He was reported missing April 12 after church officials became concerned when he missed an appointment.
Washington

The Pentagon misled Congress by providing inaccurate or vague information about sexual assault cases in an effort to blunt support for Senate legislation that would make a major change in how the military handles allegations of sexual misconduct, an Associated Press investigation found.

At issue is whether local district attorneys and police forces failed to act on allegations of misconduct against U.S. service members who were prosecuted in military courts for sex crimes. According to the Pentagon, there were more than 90 cases that military commanders insisted on taking after civilian authorities said no.

The results buttressed the Pentagon's position that curbing authority of commanders to decide which crimes go to trial  as the Senate bill proposes  will mean fewer victims will get justice because there will be fewer prosecutions.

There is nothing in the records that supports the reason the Pentagon told Congress about the cases in the first place: To cast top military brass as hard-nosed crime fighters who insisted on taking the cases to trial after civilian law enforcement said no.

The records were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the advocacy group Protect Our Defenders, which provided the documents exclusively to AP. The group on Monday said it found no evidence that any case was prosecuted at a commander's insistence.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who spearheaded the bill, issued a statement in which she said she was "deeply troubled" by the findings in the report.

"It is unacceptable for the Pentagon to mislead Congress in their testimony on any issue, but it is particularly disturbing when it is being done to oppose bipartisan reform to combat military sexual assault," the New York Democrat said. "The claims made by the Department of Defense were often repeated on the floor of the U.S. Senate during debate and in my own personal lobbying meetings with senators. It is without doubt that these false claims had a serious impact on senators' positions on the reform."

Military representatives defended the accuracy of information sent to Congress.

The bulk of the cases involved soldiers. Army spokeswoman Tatjana Christian said the case descriptions were written by service attorneys who had "personal and direct knowledge of the circumstances." She said they contacted the local authorities in each case to ensure the description was accurate. The Army declined to make an official available for an interview.

The more than 90 cases had been discussed publicly only as statistics that underpinned the Pentagon's objections to the Senate bill, the Military Justice Improvement Act.

Three years ago, Navy Adm. James A. Winnefeld, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned a Senate panel that if approved, the bill would result in fewer sexual assault cases going to trial. He retired last year.

In response to the AP's reporting, Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman Richard Osial described the information that Winnefeld provided the committee as a snapshot based on data that was supplied by the military services. "He had confidence to go with it," Osial said.

The consequences could be significant if lawmakers believe they were misinformed. A backlash may stoke additional support for the Senate bill that failed to pass largely because of the military's strident opposition.

The legislation aims to stop sexual assaults by stripping senior officers of their responsibilities to decide whether to prosecute sexual assault cases and giving that authority to military trial lawyers. Protect Our Defenders supports the bill.

"Someone at the Pentagon should be held accountable," said retired Col. Don Christensen, the group's president and former chief Air Force prosecutor. "Whether you agree or disagree with the policy, every senator  especially those who repeated the claim or based their vote on the claim  should be outraged."

The often unflattering image of civilian law enforcement projected in the records also runs counter to the close working relationships local prosecutors said they've forged with the uniformed legal staffs at military installations.

Civilian prosecutors said it's not unusual to transfer a sexual assault case to the military, particularly when the incident occurred off post and involved two or more service members. Yet these referrals routinely leave the impression the charges would not have been pursued had military authorities not stepped in.

At Fort Drum, the Army took credit for prosecuting a soldier who had been previously convicted for the possession of child pornography but was never discharged from the service. The soldier, whose identity AP could not confirm, didn't register as a sex offender. After he was allowed to stay in uniform, he groped a girl and sent sexually explicit messages. He was court-martialed and got five years in jail.

Kristyna Mills, the district attorney in Jefferson County, where Fort Drum is located, disputed the Army's conclusion that her office turned down the case. She said the decision for the Army to take it was a "collaborative effort" made with Fort Drum.
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Albany

Almost a decade after they began the process, the state of California and Xerox Corp. have scrapped an effort to update the Golden State's vast Medicaid billing system.

Officials in New York, though, insist they'll move forward in their deal with Xerox to update the Empire State's Medicaid billing.

New York's agreement was finalized a year ago after Xerox prevailed over a competitor, Hewlett Packard, to revamp the system.

The California program started much earlier, in 2007, and was originally supposed to be completed this year.

But by 2012, the state had devised a "corrective action plan" to cope with delays, according to state documents and published reports.

The two parties then reached a legal settlement ending the deal. Now, California officials will start from scratch with efforts to modernize their system.

Xerox will continue to operate the current system there.

In announcing the end of their deal with a Xerox subsidiary, the California Department of Health Care Services said that the pace of technological change for such systems has "significantly accelerated" since 2007.

"These changes have created an opportunity for DHCS to reevaluate the nearly decade-old design, development, and implementation strategies of the Replacement System and to reconsider the best course to ensure that California has a modern, robust, and sustainable system," the statement said.

A New York Health Department spokesman said they have been monitoring the California situation, but they expect to benefit since Xerox workers will now be joining the effort.

"The California settlement is not anticipated to result in a negative impact and the state expects to benefit from experienced staff now joining New York," a DOH spokesman said in a prepared statement. "We are currently working with the contractor on updates to the project schedule."

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Xerox spokeswoman Erin Isselmann in a prepared statement said that "This agreement has no impact on Xerox's implementation of the Health Enterprise Platform in New York."

She also pointed out that the firm had announced last October that they did not expect to complete the project in California.

Xerox in 2014 won New York's $500 million, five-year contract to revamp the state's Medicaid claims and billing system.

The Norwalk, Conn.-based firm with roots in Rochester had been competing with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard and the state's current contractor, Computer Sciences Corp., of Falls Church, Va.

Computer Sciences Corp. didn't compete for the newest contract, however, saying the 18-month period for assembling the new system was unrealistic.

rkarlin@timesunion.com  518-454-5758  @RickKarlinTU
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Albany

The unusual interest in the New York presidential primary is making this much clear: Our election laws are an embarrassment.

When it comes to encouraging voters, the rules in this supposedly progressive and forward-looking state are among the most restrictive and regressive in the country. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that the state's voter participation rates are often among the nation's worst.

In recent weeks, the rule that is getting the most attention is the early deadline for voters who are registered but want to switch or join parties. The October cutoff, the nation's earliest, slipped by when few voters were thinking about the primary.

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The rule kept Eric and Ivanka Trump, both unaffiliated voters, from registering as Republicans and voting for their father.

It will also keep many thousands of other voters on both sides of the aisle from participating on Tuesday  and may even ensure that Hillary Clinton defeats Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.

"You don't have a say unless you're affiliated with a party way ahead of time," said Robert Baldwin, a 38-year-old union electrician from Colonie who wants to vote for Sanders, but can't.

"I didn't realize how soon you had to switch," said Baldwin, who is registered to vote but unaffiliated with a party. "It's frustrating."

Dawn Baldwin  she isn't related to Robert  is in a similar situation. The 60-year-old secretary from Glenmont is a registered Democrat who feels the party has become too liberal. She wanted to vote for Trump, but missed the deadline.

"I'm not happy with the system," Baldwin said. "It's supposed to be for the people and by the people."

Instead, few states make it harder than New York for voters to participate.

In addition to the early deadline for party switchers, New York is just one of only 11 states that has a closed primary system, and unlike 14 states and the District of Columbia, it doesn't allow same-day registration.

New York is also among just 13 states without early voting  a potential impediment to those with children or demanding jobs.

"We're throwing unnecessary roadblocks up in the way of people who decide they want to be engaged in the process," said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, who noted that New York's political parties have unusual sway over how elections are administered.

"This is the way political parties maintain control," Lerner said. "The system is rigged against the voter."

The result is predictable. Voters often don't participate.

Consider statistics from 2014, when just 29 percent of New Yorkers who were qualified to vote participated in the general election. Only Indiana had a lower rate, according to the United States Election Project, which tracks participation data.

In 2012, no state had less voter participation in a primary than New York and only six states had less in the general election. (New York also had the lowest primary participation rate in 2008, another presidential election year.)

The system is broken, clearly, but measures that might improve voter engagement are rarely discussed in the Legislature.

Gee, I wonder why?

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Could it be that lawmakers have an interest in preserving a failing system that protects incumbents and limits challenges to the political establishment?

OK, so some would argue that primaries are essentially internal party choices and that "outsiders" shouldn't be allowed to influence the outcome.

But here's a counter-argument: The outsiders help pay for the elections.

"The parties want it both ways," said John Opdycke, president of Open Primaries, a New York-based advocacy group. "They want to claim that they're private organizations, and then they want the taxpayers to pay for their private elections."

More than 3.2 million of New York's 11.7 million registered voters are not enrolled as Republicans or Democrats. Presumably, many of those people would vote Tuesday, but they're essentially disenfranchised.

That probably won't impact the result on the GOP side, where Trump is heavily favored. But it might influence the Clinton-Sanders race, which is expected to be closer.

Sanders supporters are generally less likely to be registered Democrats or established voters. He also draws significant support from independents and members of the Working Families and Green parties. In other states, those voters helped Sanders win. But that can't happen in New York  to the delight of the Democratic establishment.

Some wannabe voters will probably show up at the polls only to be shocked that they can't vote. Lerner is encouraging them to avoid directing anger at poll workers and to instead demand change from state legislators.

"We really are on the rump end of election law here in New York," she said. "There's no justification for it."

cchurchill@timesunion.com  518-454-5442  @chris_churchill
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This election matters.

Your high school civics teacher was correct: Voting always matters.

But on Tuesday in New York, it matters more than it has in decades, regardless of whether you're a Republican or a Democrat.

"All eyes are on New York," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday in Rochester, where he stumped for former New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, who's facing the Brooklyn-born Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

More Information Casting your votes Polls in the Capital Region are open from noon to 9 p.m To find your polling place or get answers to other questions, call your county's board of elections. Albany: 487-5060 Rensselaer: 270-2990 Saratoga: 885-2249 Schenectady: 377-2469 Read more about the primaries and get updates throughout the day at Timesunion.com See More Collapse

Among Republicans, it's Manhattan businessman Donald Trump against Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

While New York's contest is usually an afterthought to a national nominating battle that's usually been settled by the end of March, this year's race  and the likelihood of at least one party holding a brokered national convention  is different.

But among those who pay close attention to the granular details of politics, a handful of factors will be decisive. Such as:

What are the final turnout numbers?

Given that there seems to be no shortage of voter interest in this election, there should be a higher than normal turnout for both parties' primaries  though that doesn't mean numbers will approach general election levels.

On the Democratic side, turnout should surpass 1 million, though even with two native New Yorkers (Trump and Sanders) and one adoptive New Yorker (Clinton) on the ticket, surpassing the 1.8 million turnout number from 2008 may be tough.

On the Republican side, it should be easier to surpass the 2008 mark of 670,000 votes.

In 2008, about 33 percent of all active registered Democrats and 26 percent of GOP voters took part.

But it's the percentage of registered voters who turn out and not the total numbers from each party that will serve as the best measure of each party's enthusiasm. Consider that earlier in the cycle, Democratic turnout was down in early voting states even as GOP turnout exploded.

With Sanders coming off a string of victories before his labors in New York and Trump pounding his home turf, will that early trend flip?

Does Trump win by a majority, or just by a plurality?

New Yorkers have been nothing if not consistent during the two-week flurry of primary activity here.

Republican voters have held Trump up on a pedestal, with his poll numbers hovering around 50 percent overall, with Cruz and Kasich splitting the remainder. In one of the latest snapshots of the race, a CBS News Battleground Tracker poll released Sunday, Trump led with 54 percent of registered Republican support to Cruz's 21 percent and Kasich's 19 percent. In Monday's Emerson College poll, Trump was at 55 percent support among likely voters to Kasich's 21 percent and Cruz's 18 percent.

So the question isn't whether Trump will win, but whether he'll do so by more than 50 percent in each of the state's 27 congressional districts.

If he clears that percentage in a district, he'll win all three of its delegates. If he finishes with less than a majority in a given district, one of its three delegates will go to the second-place finisher, assuming that candidate takes at least 20 percent of the popular vote. Eighty-one delegates statewide will be handed out in this way.

Another 14 delegates are awarded to the overall statewide winner.

With Cruz closest to Trump in the national delegate hunt (the Texan trailed by 185 delegates as of Monday), there's not much of a chance he'll close the gap on Trump.

While Trump led by 48 percent upstate in the most recent Siena Research Institute poll, he polled above 50 percent in both New York City and its suburbs. That could be crushing for Kasich and Cruz: Even though upstate has the lion's share of New York's Republican voters, each of the 17 downstate congressional districts weighs the same in terms of number of delegates as the 10 upstate districts do.

Put simply: Siphoning a delegate or two from Trump upstate doesn't matter much if he comes out of downstate with all 51 delegates in his pocket.

How does Sanders do without independents voting?

Democrats have been similarly consistent in recent polls.

Clinton has held steady with a lead of more than 10 percent. A CBS News Battleground Tracker poll released Sunday had her up 10 percent. According to a Emerson College survey released on Monday, Clinton was up 15 points.

Among the challenges Sanders faces on Tuesday is that New York has a closed primary system, meaning only registered members of each party are allowed to take part. Independent or non-affiliated voters are shut out. As in the GOP battle, the primary is by congressional district, with five to seven delegates apiece handed out. Unlike the Republican race, those delegates will be handed out proportionally based on how each candidate does in the popular vote.

Half of Sanders' 16 state wins have come in state's with some kind of open primary or caucus, meaning independent voters (those who aren't affiliated with a party) could cast ballots. While it is true that Clinton has won 13 such states, in three of them Sanders has come within at most two delegates of Clinton's total haul. In Iowa, where caucuses technically are closed but voters can change their registration at the polls, Sanders came within less than a percentage point of Clinton.

Though he is a native son, Sanders also is at a disadvantage in that Clinton is a former senator elected statewide in New York. Setting aside her comfortable margins of victory in 2000 and 2006, consider that Clinton beat out Barack Obama in New York in the 2008 primary by more than 300,000 votes. Voter interest was similarly up that year. (It's worth noting that New York's 2008 primary was much earlier in the year, before Obama began to pick up momentum.)

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With those two issues in mind, even if Clinton wins the state, Sanders can still come away with a nice pile of delegates if his supporters help him win individual congressional districts.

Another chunk of delegates will be awarded through an intraparty process that isn't dependent on the primary vote.

Does this primary change the state Senate math?

There is more than enough at stake in just the presidential race on Tuesday. But a special election to fill the Long Island legislative seat vacated by the conviction of former state Senate Leader Dean Skelos could have statewide implications.

If Republican Chris McGrath wins the race, the GOP's currently tenuous grip on Senate power will be bolstered. If Democratic Assemblyman Todd Kaminsky wins, the Senate's mainline Democrats have a new case to make to the independent Democrats who remain allied with the Republicans.

Confused? Here's how the math breaks down:

Thirty-two votes are needed to control the chamber. The chamber is is currently led by 31 Republicans, plus Brooklyn Democrat Simcha Felder  who has always caucused with the Republicans  and the five members of the Independent Democratic Conference, a "frankenmajority" that adds up to 37 seats.

There are 25 mainline Democrats in the minority. Skelos occupied the 63rd seat until his December conviction.

If McGrath wins, it will return the 32nd GOP vote needed to secure one-party control of the chamber. If Kaminsky wins, the mainline Democrats and the IDC could conceivably reconcile  though probably not before the end of the session in June.

Felder has indicated he would continue to stick with the Republicans despite the outcome of the special election on Long Island.

In the latest Siena College poll of the race, McGrath has opened an 8 percent lead  a plunge from last month, when he was down by only 2 percent in the first poll of the race.

Three other special elections, for Assembly seats, will be held in New York City, including one to fill the seat vacated by former Democratic Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Primary turnout, however, could have a major impact on the special election. For what it's worth, there will be separate ballots for the primary and the special election races.

"It's a real crapshoot," said Larry Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. "Anybody who says they know how the dice are going to turn up or what they mean is kidding themselves."

mhamilton@timesunion.com  518-454-5449  @matt_hamilton10
Master Sgt. David Lind, center, a motivational speaker, visited Titusville High School, his alma mater, on Monday, where he shared his experience dealing with his injuries when a vehicle he was riding in was hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Lind, who has two prosthetic legs, said he got through his rehabilitation with support from his family and friends. Joining Lind are Bill McCrillis, commander of Bruce Shorts Post 5958 VFW, left, and high school Principal Phil Knapp. Residents are invited to meet Lind at the VFW, at 206 St. John Street, tonight, at 7.
April 19, 2016

Until now, IT teams have relied on perimeter defenses or security prevention to keep attackers out. However, the reality is that the bad guys are still getting in. Additionally, organizations are recognizing that more threats are now coming from within due to employee error and the BYOD trend, which can contaminate the network.







A complicating factor is the rapid increase in network speeds. They now routinely hit 100 Gigabits per second, or roughly 70 million times faster than the typical network connection when firewalls were introduced. This poses a number of challenges, particularly in the area of security. Network growth, along with the data deluge, puts a great amount of pressure on organizations to combat cyber threats and analyze cyber-attacks in real time so that necessary actions can be taken with minimum delay.

Consequently, there is a growing emphasis on security detection using network analysis to detect anomalies as a first indicator of new types of threats, either zero-day threats or ones that come from within the network. Gartners (News - Alert) Shift Cybersecurity Investment to Detection and Response research projects that by 2020, 60 percent of enterprise information security budgets will be allocated for rapid detection and response approaches, up from less than 20 percent in 2015. It is in this context that post-analysis comes into its own, as it is not always easy to catch threats as they happen.

The ability to do deep analysis offline or even post-attack to determine what happened, then, is crucial. The analysis allows management to make decisions and take actions in response to an attack. More importantly, it is needed to ensure that a cyber event has been truly resolved so that all public disclosure, notification of impacted parties and internal remediation can be completed.

Too Much Information

Attacks on high-speed networks are at their highest level to date  and they are only increasing. However, in most cases the attacks are discovered weeks later. Network security solutions are facing a two-fold growth challenge: Data traffic is increasing exponentially, so there is more to analyze at faster speeds. At the same time, cyber-attacks are also growing in number and complexity.

As part of the ongoing process of defeating network attacks, there is no shortage of security alerts or events in an organizations environment  in fact, just the opposite. Entire industries have been created to fulfill the need to process the tens of billions of events generated every day in a typical large enterprise. The security team faces the huge task of collecting this data from all the tools and then prioritizing them by severity.

The trouble is that, although alert management tools generate massive numbers of events reported, organized and prioritized, the tools often give either incomplete or contradictory information about a given event. Add to this that once an attacker is inside, he will often compromise the credentials of a legitimate user and might disguise himself as an employee to do searches and extract sensitive data.

Breaches Get More Costly

The 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study revealed that the main cause of data breaches (47 percent) in 2015 was malicious or criminal attack. The average cost of a data breach was $3.79 million, a 23 percent increase since 2013. Worse, these direct expenses often are only the first of many legal, shareholder, employee, regulatory, customer and reputational ripples. The Ponemon Institutes (News - Alert) The Post Breach Boom revealed that while detection and escalation costs rose to $417,700, up from $395,262 over the past year, post-data breach response and detection costs rose to $1.6 million, up from approximately $1.41 million.

Layered Security

In light of all this downside potential, organizations need to deploy a diverse strategy that:

Ensures all security prevention solutions have the necessary bandwidth and capacity to handle high-speed, high-volume attacks.

Not only ensures the security detection solutions are in place to detect anomalies in real time but also to record network activity for deeper analysis and/or later detection of a past breach.

It is no longer possible to rely on one single security solution. Traditional point defenses cannot adequately address the new, faster-moving, multi-layer threats and more sophisticated attackers. Whats required is a layered approach with defense-in-depth, where an organization not only relies on network security appliances for indications of data breaches but also network behavior analysis.

Consequently, the last security tool is continuously recorded network data. A network forensics solution should continuously capture all data 24x7, regardless of whether anything interesting is happening in a particular moment or not. Then, in conjunction with alerts from the other tools, the security team can investigate whether the event was a false alarm or something that needs to be actioned. Moreover, they can see what happened after the breach and achieve the ultimate goal: determining all the assets the attacker may have accessed and whether he has truly been eliminated from their environment.

The Bigger Picture

While tools currently exist that can offer a partial network recording based on an event, that data is inevitably incomplete if the recording tool did not see anything it considered interesting. For effective network forensics, best practices today suggest complementing solutions that can record everything continuously at high speed. It must be purpose-built for this, since the demands for storage and indexing of this volume of data are much different than the architecture of other security tools.

By introducing the concepts of data capture and retrieval-on-demand, real-time data capture can be taken a step further. The network forensics solution must provide an immediate and indexed answer to an investigator pursuing an event. It is crucial that security officers can quickly go to the time and place of the event to start analysis, and waiting several hours for this initial answer can cause serious delays while the attacker may still be inside.

IT security teams are challenged by the massive tsunami of data they must deal with. It can be tedious and often quite expensive to store and analyze every single data packet.

This reality drives the need to be able to retrieve data on demand with a few simple commands. In this scenario, users are able to get to the root of the problem by accessing the packets from a certain server or time period. Ultimately, as critical as it is to capture data, its equally critical to have rapid retrieval speed and data on demand. Using this kind of layered solution approach, organizations can build the security prevention perimeter higher and wider. However, if attacks emerge from outside the network or within it, teams can ensure that they have the security detection capabilities in real time and on demand to detect what is going on and determine the root source of the breach.

About the Author

Daniel Joseph Barry (News - Alert) is VP Positioning and Chief Evangelist at Napatech and has over 20 years experience in the IT and Telecom industry. Prior to joining Napatech (News - Alert) in 2009, Dan Joe was Marketing Director at TPACK, a leading supplier of transport chip solutions to the Telecom sector. He has an MBA and a BSc degree in Electronic Engineering from Trinity College Dublin.

Edited by Peter Bernstein
[April 19, 2016] ClinEdge Network is Expanding Its Borders

ClinEdge Network, a division of ClinEdge and an exclusive network of clinical research sites across North America, has announced that based on an increase in demand of running clinical research studies outside of North America our network will be expanding to fulfill a needed obligation. In 2015, ClinEdge Network sites in the US & Canada met or exceeded patient enrollment in over 95% of clinical research trials and have consistently been the industry leader in successful enrollment across a range of therapeutic areas. Based on ClinEdge Network's proven track record of excellence, Sponsors and CROs have shown an increased demand for ClinEdge Network to partner with clinical research sites in other countries. Therefore, ClinEdge Network has recently completed the due diligence process on two separate research site organizations with a combined 14 locations that have extensive experience in a range of therapeutic areas. Our Newly Joined Experienced Partner Research Site Organizations Based in the Netherlands, Germany & Romania have Extensive Research Experience in the Following Areas: Cardiology, Dermatology, Endocrinology/Metabolic, Gastrointestinal, Hematology, Infectious Disease, Internal Medicine, Neurology, Oncology, Pain/Inflammation, Psychiatry, Respiratory, Sleep, Urinary Systems, Vaccines, Women's Health



President of ClinEdge, Christian Burns, discusses his excitement about the new global focus. "With an increased demand in Pharmaceutical Companies & Contract Research Organizations requesting ClinEdge Network Research Sites to enroll all of the patients for their clinical trials, our Network sees a tremendous value & benefit in partnering with site organizations that meet and exceed our same centralized processes and quality standards outside of North America. Our goal is to be able to work with Pharmaceutical Companies & CROs in providing research sites for their clinical trials with processes that allow efficiencies from research site identification, study start-up and patient enrollment/retention across the world. Our clinical research site organizations will now be able to collaborate with Pharmaceutical Companies/CROs across a range of therapeutic areas in new countries to expedite the whole clinical trial process. ClinEdge Network is thrilled for the opportunity to be the leader in clinical trial execution across the world and is excited to bring additional countries to the table over the next year," Burns said. Through the new global focus, ClinEdge Network will be able to provide Pharmaceutical /CRO clients with the following features:

Experienced Multi-Specialty Research Facilities across the World that can assist with ever Increasing Global Demands.

Efficiencies in Start-up & Enrollment- Historical Clinical Trial Data, Expedited Contracts/Budgets, Regulatory, Centralized Patient Recruitment & Retention, ClinEdge Patient Database Community, Full Service Call Center, Patient Travel Coordination, Clinical Trial Management Technology.

Sites that have a Track Record for Providing Good Quality Data and Integrity that will Meet or Exceed Enrollment Goals. This exciting expansion highlights the success and vision of ClinEdge Network and emphasizes their commitment to leading the industry in growing and maintaining a high-quality network of clinical trial research sites worldwide. For more information on this release please contact Ashley Eldridge at (857) 496-0054 or via email at [email protected]. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419006211/en/

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[April 19, 2016] The Government of Canada Highlights Federal Support for Clean Technology

OTTAWA, April 19, 2016 /CNW/ - The Honourable Jim Carr, Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, the Honourable Catherine McKenna, Canada's Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, and the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, today acknowledged the release of Analytica Advisor's Canadian Clean Technology Industry Report. The report provides a snapshot of the global clean technology landscape and how the Canadian clean technology industry contributes to it, and recommends actions to help support the sector. The Government of Canada is already addressing many of the report's recommendations. In Paris, alongside 194 other countries, Canada agreed to take steps to support the transition to a global low-carbon economy. In partnership with provinces and territories, the Government is now developing a pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change. Canada has also joined Mission Innovation in which twenty governments have agreed to double their respective investments in transformative, clean energy research and development over five years, encourage private sector investment in clean energy technology, and increase collaboration among participating countries. In Budget 2016, the Government is supporting these commitments with series of strategic investments that will help Canadian companies increase their competitiveness, excel in he production of clean technology and capture their share of this growing global market.



The Government of Canada will continue to support a clean growth economy that will help Canada take advantage of new global opportunities. Support for clean technology will diversify Canada's economy, open access to new markets, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and create good, well-paying jobs for Canadians. Quote

"We plan to invest almost $200 million in clean technology research and development because we understand its important role in Canada's transition to a lower-carbon economy. Investments like these help bring clean energy technologies closer to commercialization, reducing the environmental impacts of energy and creating clean jobs." The Honourable Jim Carr

Canada's Minister of Natural Resources "Our government believes that protecting the environment and growing the economy go hand in hand. That is why we are committed in making Canada a leader in the changing economy by focusing on innovation and clean technologies as a central part of our plan to transition into the economy of tomorrow." The Honourable Navdeep Bains

Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development "We know the environment and the economy go hand in hand. That is why the federal government has committed to supporting clean economic growth: to tackle climate change while creating good, well-paying jobs. As the world moves towards a more sustainable, low-carbon economy, Canadian companies have a tremendous opportunity in front of them. I am confident that, through the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Canadian entrepreneurs, our investments will be a springboard for success." The Honourable Catherine McKenna

Canada's Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Related Links

Budget 2016  Support for an Innovative and Clean Economy Follow us on Twitter: @NRCan (http://twitter.com/nrcan) NRCan's news releases and backgrounders are available at www.news.gc.ca. SOURCE Natural Resources Canada

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[April 19, 2016] Washtenaw County, Michigan, Signs Contract with Tyler Technologies for ERP Solution

Tyler Technologies (News - Alert), Inc. (NYSE: TYL) has signed an agreement with Washtenaw County, Michigan, for Tyler's Munis enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. The agreement includes implementation, support and related professional services. County leaders sought an ERP system that would expand its use of automation to eliminate paper-based processes, as well as increase reporting capabilities and support employee decision making. The county also wanted to replace its legacy ERP solution because it was unable to support modern applications needed to provide high-quality customer service and accommodate the county's growth. After a competitive review, Washtenaw County partnered with Tyler and selected core Munis applications, including financials, human resources and payroll. Munis will help the southeast Michigan county streamline workflow while enabling better communications across multiple departments through consistent and timely access to data. The flexible nature of Munis will facilitate the strategic expansion of business best practice, enabling staff to work more efficiently as the county continues to grow.



Washtenaw County, home to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, has approximately 354,000 residents. The county has an existing partnership with Tyler, having implemented its EagleTM recording and property tax assessment solution, as well as Tyler's Odyssey court case management solution. Washtenaw County received a 2015 Tyler Public Sector Excellence Award for its rapid Odyssey implementation, replacing paper files within 60 days and providing expanded access within the courthouse and online. About Tyler Technologies, Inc.

Tyler Technologies (NYSE: TYL) is a leading provider of end-to-end information management solutions and services for local governments. Tyler partners with clients to empower the public sector - cities, counties, schools and other government entities - to become more efficient, more accessible and more responsive to the needs of citizens. Tyler's client base includes more than 14,000 local government offices in all 50 states, Canada, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and other international locations. Forbes has named Tyler one of "America's Best Small Companies" eight times and the company has been included six times on the Barron's 400 Index, a measure of the most promising companies in America. More information about Tyler Technologies, headquartered in Plano, Texas, can be found at www.tylertech.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005315/en/

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[April 19, 2016] Biz2Credit Partners With TaxSpanner, to Boost Financing Success for Individuals and SMEs in India

NEW DELHI, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Biz2Credit, a leading online resource in personal and small business finance, today announced a marketing partnership with TaxSpanner, one of India's largest and most trusted company that offers online preparation and filing of Income Tax Returns (ITR) for individuals and businesses. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/10144183 )

Through this partnership, Biz2Credit and TaxSpanner will leverage their client channels to offer customized services that will holistically grow their companies. Individuals who are seeking finance can also benefit from this tie-up. It marks a positive start of a mutually beneficial relationship between the two entities to drive greater success in small business and personal finance. "Our agreement will ultimately enable individuals and entrepreneurs to access personal and business finance more efficiently," suggests Biz2Credit CEO Rohit Arora. "We're always seeking opportunities to enhance the experience of our clients and we are pleased to be able to provide them with a valuable resource on our platform." Further, TaxSpanner's business clients will receive access to a wide range of technology products and services, including data and risk analytics through Biz2Credit's patented BizAnalyzer Score, enabling lenders to process transactions with an enhanced level of confidence. "Tax professionals often serve as trusted advisors related to matters of personal and business finance for clients who ae starting or growing their businesses," said Ankur Sharma, CEO TaxSpanner. "One area where we can be helpful is by guiding clients through personal and small business financing process through the expertise of our partners at Biz2Credit."



"This innovative arrangement expands Biz2Credit's international footprint in finance and we couldn't be more excited about it," said Thomas Abraham, Strategic Advisor at Biz2Credit. "Our relationship with TaxSpanner will play an intricate role in the growth of Biz2Credit, fund-seeking individuals and small enterprises in India." Financing on Biz2Credit's platform ranges from INR 3 lakhs to 30 crores and can be coordinated in as little as 24 hours for personal finance, working capital, commercial real estate and other applications. For more information on Biz2Credit's online lending marketplace, visit http://www.biz2credit.in.

About Biz2Credit Info Services Established in 2007 in U.S., Biz2Credit is an online marketplace bringing together an array of lenders and fund seeking entrepreneurs and individuals to arrange online SME loans, line of credit, equipment loans, working capital and other business funding options as well as consumer loans. With more than 11 lakh users, 1,300 lenders, credible credit agencies like D&B and Equifax, Biz2Credit has earned itself a repute of a trusted online credit resource in the U.S. Backed by that immense faith, Biz2Credit has now ventured in India to provide a similar platform for individuals and SME community in India. Biz2Credit uses a patented technology (BizAnalyzer) to match lenders as per the exclusivity of each loan application, offering the borrowers a wide range of options to choose from. With free registration, businesses and individuals can compare various financing options and choose the one that is most suitable to them. About TaxSpanner TaxSpanner is India's leading and most trusted website offering online preparation and filing of Income Tax Returns (ITR) for individuals and businesses. TaxSpanner ensures that filing of returns for individuals is hassle-free and saves tax. Also, businesses can better prepare and file their taxes through their platform. Established in 2007, TaxSpanner is based out of New Delhi and Bangalore. Since then, it has grown to build one of the largest customer base in this market segment. TaxSpanner is registered with the Income Tax Department of the Government of India as an e-return intermediary and is recommended by top employers to their employees for compliance, confidentiality and ease-of-use. Media Contact:

Ravi Chamria

[email protected]

+91-9818592244

Biz2credit





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[April 19, 2016] Flytxt Shortlisted for Big Data Analytics Innovation Award

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Flytxt, a leading mobile consumer analytics solution provider for enterprises, announced today that it has been named as a semi-finalist in 'Big Data and Analytics' category in 'Pipeline's Innovation Award' program for 2016.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140527/10098680 )

Pipeline recognizes companies that offer innovative solutions to the industry. The nominations are adjudged by key executives from top service providers, influential industry analysts and the editors of the world's leading communications and technology magazines. Flytxt was shortlisted along with 22 other vendors from an initial list of 60 contenders in different categories. The final winners will be announced at a red-carpet Innovation Awards Reception, which will be held on May 9th, 2016, at Le Negresco in Nice, France. Flytxt was selected for its innovative mobile consumer analytics solutions that enable telcos to play a bigger role in digital economy by helping them leverage their fast-growing data assets. The technology platform is designed to integrate big data, fast data and derive in-depth consumr insights using proprietary packaged analytical models. These actionable insights help telcos to deliver personalised digital experience to their customers as well as to launch new lifestyle products with other enterprise partners.



In addition, through self-service and integrated analytics capabilities of the platform, Flytxt aims to improve the speed of decisioning across the telco's business functions. The platform also eliminates silo-based decisioning, allowing departments within the telco to have a single view of customers and the business for smarter strategic and operational decision making. Flytxt has consistently delivered 2 to 7% economic impact to its customers with its comprehensive data monetisation solution stack, combining technology, packaged analytics, business applications, and enabling services.

About Pipeline Pipeline magazine provides communications service providers with critical industry information relevant to driving profitability and delivering the latest generation of communication services. Pipeline covers news and commentary on market demands, government mandates, technical advances, and industry trends. About Flytxt Flytxt partners with enterprises in their digital transformation journey, enabling them to generate measurable economic value from data through mobile consumer analytics. Flytxt's comprehensive data monetisation solutions help enterprises to personalise customer experience across digital touch points as well as increase revenue, optimise margins, and enhance loyalty. The company has deployed its platforms at more than 50 customer locations across 30 countries, analysing data of more than 500 million mobile consumers. Flytxt has consistently delivered 2 to 7% economic impact to its customers with its full solution stack combining technology, packaged analytics, business applications, and enabling services. The company has its headquarters in The Netherlands, corporate office in Dubai and presence in Paris, London, Trivandrum, Mumbai, Singapore, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Mexico City. For more information, please visit http://www.flytxt.com. Media Contact:

Gargi Basu

[email protected]

+914713082753

Manager - Marketing

Flytxt



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[April 19, 2016] Frost & Sullivan Recognizes NCC Group for Its Dominance in the Red Teambased Penetration Testing Services Market

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on recent analysis of the red team-based penetration testing market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes NCC Group as the winner of the 2016 European Product Leadership award. NCC Group helps organizations evaluate their cyber resilience and recommends effective security mechanisms by demonstrating well-orchestrated cyber attacks that take into account the nature of the industry, organization and its human capital. "New cyber threats are generated at an alarming rate, leading to rapid obsolescence of the countermeasures previously installed," said Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst, Arjun Sreekumar. "Red team-based penetration testing is a way to achieve cyber resilience through continual testing of a firm's security framework. The effectiveness of red teaming depends on the ability to emulate real-world threat actors and create advanced and realistic attack scenarios after careful and systematic assessments of the organization and operational processes." NCC Group is widely chosen by companies, spanning industries such as oil and gas, banking and finance, and pharmaceuticals, to evaluate their cyber resilience and recommend specific strategies to enhance security. The company has carved out an impressive niche through its ability to converge physical and cyber threat factors seamlessly into the red teaming exercise. The company's services have the versatility to scale up and down according to the complexity of the challenge and the diversity of the client's institutional framework to deliver superior customer value. "The optimum combination of knowledgeable human capital, advanced processes, and clear ability to understand client requirements enable NCC Group to deliver a consistent and quality output solution," iterated Sreekumar. "This gives it a strong head start as demand for red teaming-based penetration testing services is on the rise, driven by regional instability, the emergence of new nation states, and the proliferation of cyber terrorism." Robert Horton, European MD of Security Consulting at NCC Group, said he is delighted that the Group's red teaming services have been acknowledged. He added: "The award demonstrates to emplyees, customers, investors and the public that the Group is superior in the red team based penetration testing space."



Having anticipated this surge in demand, NCC Group recently made several well-planned acquisitions to enlarge both its capabilities and its footprint in Europe. Retaining the best talent and nurturing a select workforce make NCC Group one of the most reliable and quality-oriented participants in the red teambased penetration testing space. Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has developed a product with innovative features and functionality, gaining rapid acceptance in the market. The award recognizes the quality of the solution and the customer value enhancements it enables.

Frost & Sullivan's Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for outstanding achievement in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research. About NCC Group NCC Group is a global expert in cyber security and risk mitigation, working with businesses to protect their brand, value and reputation against the ever-evolving threat landscape. Through a unique range of services, the company helps businesses to prepare for and respond to cyber threats, providing freedom from doubt that their most important assets are protected and operational at all times. Listed on the FTSE 250, NCC Group is a trusted advisor to more than 15,000 clients worldwide. Headquartered in Manchester, UK, with over 30 offices across the world, the Group employs more than 1,800 people. https://www.nccgroup.trust/ncc-group-frost-and-sullivan-2016/; https://www.nccgroup.trust About Frost & Sullivan As a Growth Partnership company, Frost & Sullivan collaborates with clients to leverage visionary innovation to address global challenges and related growth opportunities that could make or break today's market participants. Frost & Sullivan's Growth Partnership supports clients by addressing these opportunities and incorporating 2 key elements driving visionary innovation: the Integrated Value Proposition and the Partnership Infrastructure. The Integrated Value Proposition provides support to clients throughout all phases of their journey to visionary innovation, including research, analysis, strategy, vision, innovation, and implementation.

provides support to clients throughout all phases of their journey to visionary innovation, including research, analysis, strategy, vision, innovation, and implementation. The Partnership Infrastructure is entirely unique as it constructs the foundation upon which visionary innovation becomes possible, including 360 degree research, comprehensive industry coverage, and career best practices as well as Frost & Sullivan's global footprint of more than 40 offices. For more than 50 years, Frost & Sullivan has been developing growth strategies for the global 1,000; emerging businesses; the public sector; and the investment community. Is your organization prepared for the next profound wave of industry convergence, disruptive technologies, increasing competitive intensity, Mega Trends, breakthrough best practices, changing customer dynamics, and emerging economies? Contact Us: Start the discussion Join Us: Join our community Subscribe: Newsletter on "the next big thing" Register: Gain access to visionary innovation Contact: Mireya Espinoza

P: 210. 247.3870

F: 210.348.1003

E: [email protected] Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356461 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/frost--sullivan-recognizes-ncc-group-for-its-dominance-in-the-red-teambased-penetration-testing-services-market-300253023.html SOURCE Frost & Sullivan

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[April 19, 2016] Five Challenges Merchants Must Address Now

ATLANTA, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Vesta Corporation, a global leader in the field of card-not-present (CNP) transactions, has released a new white paper, "Five Challenges Merchants Must Address Now." Based on shifts in consumer preferences and the new threats that come along with adding new purchase channels, the paper identifies the top five issues facing merchants today. While there are a number of challenges merchants face as consumer preferences change, Vesta experts identified five that should take priority: The need to accept high risk payments The shift to "Fast Fraud" Burdens caused by manual reviews Making consumer data actionable Creating and using actionable KPIs Experts continue to predict increases in card-not-present (CNP) fraud as e-commerce volume grows rapidly, with expectations for e-commerce to reach $480 billion by 2019 and CNP fraud to hit more than $6 billion by 2018. The introduction of EMV in the U.S. in October 2015 is also driving fraudsters away from physical stores and toward online purchases as they seek easier targets.



As consumers show greater preference for shopping through e- and m-commerce channels, retailers are adapting and offering goods and services through a wider variety of channels. The unfortunate reality for merchants is that many of these new channels, like mobile, are more susceptible to fraud. Mobile payments are also costlier for merchants than other channels, costing $3.34 per dollar of fraud loss versus $3.29 on other channels, according to LexisNexis. "Merchants are facing a fork in the road where they are going to have to decide if they want to be in the business of fighting fraud or of selling their goods and services," said Chris Uriarte, chief strategy and payments officer at Vesta. "They can devote their operational resources to building in-house solutions that are difficult to scale, or they can look to a more experienced third-party vendor who will allow them to refocus on activities that will grow the business."

Merchants must recognize that fraud is on the rise across all channels. Fortunately, there are steps merchants can take to better protect their business, their data and their customers from fraudsters. To download a complimentary copy of Vesta's new white paper, "Five Challenges Merchants Must Address Now," please visit http://info.trustvesta.com/challenges. About Vesta Corporation Vesta Corporation is the global leader of revenue-generating payment solutions for enterprise partners in the telecommunications, media, financial, and digital sectors. The company's patented fraud protection technology is proven to increase conversion and acceptance while eliminating fraudulent transactions and merchant liability. Vesta has been recognized as a leading innovator in payments technologies, holds multiple patents, and has won numerous awards as one of America's fastest growing companies. Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Atlanta, GA, Vesta's operations span the Americas, Europe and Asia. Media Contact:

Sarah Nickell

Communications Strategy Group, on behalf of Vesta Corporation

720-726-5454

[email protected] Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356537LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/five-challenges-merchants-must-address-now-300253036.html SOURCE Vesta Corporation

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[April 19, 2016] Teletrac Navman and Garmin Partner to Provide New In-cab Fleet Management Solution in North America

GLENVIEW, Ill., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Teletrac Navman, a leading GPS tracking and fleet management provider, announced a partnership with Garmin to provide a new in-cab tablet solution. This solution enables customers to use Teletrac Navman's fleet management app suite, Drive, with Garmin's world leading navigation. Teletrac Navman Drive on Garmin focuses on daily customer workflows like in-cab communication, dispatching, routing and navigation. Additionally, Drive delivers on compliance. With more than 10 years as an industry leading solution in Hours of Service (HOS) and Driver Vehicle Inspection Reports (DVIR), Teletrac Navman takes the worry out of compliance, minimizes risk and enhances operating efficiency. "We are committed to serving the trucking and private fleet market. Our customers rely on us to keep them compliant, especially now that the FMCSA Electronic Logging Device (ELD) Final Rule has been officially published. Fleet operations need a trusted in-cab solution to provide Records of Duty Status (RODS)," said Sid Nair, Sr. Director Transport & Compliance at Teletrac Navman. "Drive on Garmin 670 does this and more, seamlessly connecting the back office to the trucks; putting fleet owners i the driver's seat."



Trucking and Private Fleets are constantly monitoring route efficiency, delivery deadlines, safety, and compliance while trying to maximize driver quality of life. The Teletrac Navman Drive app suite is built with this in mind, prioritizing ease of use, thus enabling drivers and users to focus most on their critical task of driving. With the driver's attention to the road, Drive will manage communication, compliance and other logistical aspects. "Garmin's Fleet 670 hardware is optimized for in-cab commercial truck use with a dust-proof design, high-sensitivity GPS, extra loud speaker, and a sunlight readable, 6-inch capacitive touch screen that makes it easy to see driving-related information at a glance," said Chad Sallman, Garmin's Sr. Business Development Manager for Commercial Solutions. "We are pleased to partner with Teletrac Navman to provide support for their Drive app suite on our Fleet 670. The combination of our hardware with their robust fleet management software will undoubtedly and reliably simplify and optimize fleet logistics."

Teletrac Navman and Garmin are proud to release this product in time for two upcoming fleet industry tradeshows: the National Association of Fleet Administrators (NAFA) Institute and Expo in Austin, Texas from April 19-22 and National Private Truck Council (NPTC) Annual Conference and Expo in Cincinnati, Ohio from April 24-26. Interested users at both shows can get a hands-on demo of Teletrac Navman Drive on Garmin 670 and learn more about its capabilities. About Teletrac Navman

Teletrac Navman represent global leadership in GPS-based fleet optimization products and services, including real-time vehicle tracking and analytics that enable companies to monitor, measure and improve operational costs and efficiencies. The company's technology currently tracks more than 500,000 vehicles owned by over 40,000 organizations on six continents, making it one of the world's largest fleet management providers. The company, headquartered in Glenview, IL, has offices in the United States, Mexico, Europe, New Zealand and Australia. http://www.teletracnavman.com/growforward About Garmin

For more than 25 years, Garmin has pioneered new GPS navigation and wireless devices and applications that are designed for people who live an active lifestyle. Garmin serves five primary business units, including automotive, aviation, fitness, marine, and outdoor recreation. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356582

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356853LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/teletrac-navman-and-garmin-partner-to-provide-new-in-cab-fleet-management-solution-in-north-america-300253427.html SOURCE Teletrac Navman

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[April 19, 2016] Deloitte Receives 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award: SAP S/4HANA Adoption Partner of the Year

NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Deloitte today announced that it has received a 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award as the SAP S/4HANA Adoption Partner of the Year, which recognizes its outstanding contributions as an SAP Partner. SAP presents these awards annually to the top collaborators that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP and helping customers run better. Winners and finalists in 19 categories were chosen based on recommendations from the SAP field, customer feedback and performance indicators in the following umbrella categories: Build, Service, and Sell with each category including a Customers' Choice award, which recognizes a customer-nominated SAP Partner. "This Pinnacle Award recognizes the value that we place on collaborating with SAP to make SAP S/4HANA the premier solutions platform for transforming the enterprise today," said Jan Waals, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and global SAP practice leader. "As our customers continue to see big results from SAP S/4HANA, we look forward to helping more organizations adopt it for their evolving business needs." Deloitte earned not only distinction as the SAP S/4HANA Adoption Partner of the Year but also a second 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award as the Workforce Partner of the Year. Deloitte also placed as a finalist in a third 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award category, Services Provider of the Year. The 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award for SAP S/4HANA Adoption Partner of the Year recognizes Deloitte's strength in helping accelerate adoption of the platform, based on co-innovation efforts, market impact, and innovative solutions. For descriptions of the awards, visit: http://www.sap.com/partners/become/partner-program/benefits/pinnacle-awards.html.



"Winning the SAP Pinnacle Award is a tremendous accomplishment," said Rodolpho Cardenuto, president of SAP Global Channels & General Business. "Only 16 companies in our ecosystem of 13,000 partners received this recognition. Deloitte should be very proud of their success."

Kevin Ichhpurani, executive vice president of SAP Strategic Business Development & Global Ecosystem added, "The SAP Pinnacle Award winners represent the very best in our partner community, and we congratulate Deloitte for a well-deserved 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award." Deloitte is an SAP global services partner and has received multiple awards from SAP. With more than 13,000 practitioners dedicated to SAP solutions in its global network, Deloitte has served more than 7,000 clients, assisting them in their efforts not only to efficiently implement SAP solutions, but equally as important, to realize business value from those investments.

SAP Pinnacle Awards shine a spotlight on SAP's partners' remarkable contributions, acknowledging their dedication to teamwork, innovative approach and capacity to challenge what is possible to help customers achieve their goals. Award winners will be formally recognized at the SAP Global Partner Summit to take place on May 16, in conjunction with SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP's international customer conference, May 17-19 in Orlando, Florida. About Deloitte

Deloitte provides audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk management, tax, and related services to public and private clients spanning multiple industries. With a globally connected network of member firms in more than 150 countries and territories, Deloitte brings world-class capabilities and high-quality service to clients, delivering the insights they need to address their most complex business challenges. Deloitte's more than 225,000 professionals are committed to making an impact that matters. SAP, SAPPHIRE and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. See http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx for additional trademark information and notices. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. SAP Forward-looking Statement

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates. For more information, please visit www.deloitte.com/SAP, or contact [email protected]. As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120803/MM52028LOGO-a To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/deloitte-receives-2016-sap-pinnacle-award-sap-s4hana-adoption-partner-of-the-year-300253474.html SOURCE Deloitte

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[April 19, 2016] EverlyWell Launches Innovative Health Testing to Put Actionable Results into the Hands of Consumers

AUSTIN, Texas, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EverlyWell, an Austin-based digital health startup, today announced its $2.5 million seed round of financing and the public beta launch of its at-home test kits, available at EverlyWell.com. EverlyWell, led by co-founder and CEO Julia Cheek, is transforming traditional health testing by providing consumers with convenient access to tests and easy-to-read results. The company's e-commerce platform enables customers to buy a variety of test kits online, easily collect their sample at home, and get informative results at their fingertips. EverlyWell will offer a suite of proven tests with physician review that don't require consumers to visit a lab or doctor's office. Currently, Food Sensitivity, Women's Health and Hormones, and Elements kits are available for order. "Diagnostic testing is a subpar experience for the individual," said Dr. Murdoc Khaleghi, EverlyWell's Chief Medical Officer. "EverlyWell has developed an innovative platform that places the consumer at the center, empowering the individual to order, understand, and improve thir own biomarkers. Health information is a powerful tool in preventing long-term and chronic disease, and ultimately should be accessible and understandable to all."



EverlyWell's platform is easy to use. A customer selects and purchases a kit that arrives to their home, and he or she collects a sample and sends it to EverlyWell's lab partners. Results are available in a few days through an easy-to-read digital interface with both infographics and descriptive information. Kit samples are collected via pinprick dried blood spot, saliva or urine. EverlyWell is partnering with several of the country's most advanced CLIA-certified laboratories to conduct the test analyses and is working with a national physician network to authorize the test requisitions and review customer results. The company recently moved its corporate headquarters from Dallas to Austin, Texas to take advantage of the capital city's growing life sciences industry.

"We are pleased to launch our business in a vibrant market like Austin, which is known for its creativity and cutting-edge innovation," said Cheek. "We want to be centered among the brightest, most entrepreneurial minds who can help us revolutionize the health testing industry. Our promise to consumers is to deliver a world-class product that simplifies the testing process and provides actionable, easy-to-read results that will help them take ownership of their own health." About EverlyWell, Inc. Your tests. Your time. Your terms. EverlyWell is a direct-to-consumer health testing company that provides innovative, at-home kits and redesigned lab results. We are at the forefront of personalized medicine, focused on transforming the $25 billion diagnostics industry. EverlyWell does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment; we recommend you share your results with your primary care physician. Find out more at EverlyWell.com, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter. CONTACT: Jenifer Sarver, 512-577-9099, [email protected] Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356738LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/everlywell-launches-innovative-health-testing-to-put-actionable-results-into-the-hands-of-consumers-300253303.html SOURCE EverlyWell, Inc.

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[April 19, 2016] Trina Solar Files its Annual Report on Form 20-F for 2015

CHANGZHOU, China, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Trina Solar Limited (NYSE:TSL) ("Trina Solar" or "the Company"), a global leader in photovoltaic ("PV") modules, solutions, and services, today announced the filing of its annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2015 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The annual report on Form 20-F can be accessed on Trina Solar's investor relations website at http://ir.trinasolar.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=206405&p=irol-sec or on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Trina Solar will provide a hard copy of its annual report on Form 20-F containing the audited consolidated financial statements, free of charge, to its shareholders and ADS holders upon request. Requests should be directed to Investor Relations, Trina Solar Limited, No.2 Tianhe Road, Trina PV Industrial Park, New District Changzhou, Jiangsu 213031, the People's Republic of China. About Trina Solar Limited Trina Solar Limited (NYSE:TSL) is a global leader in photovoltaic modules, solutions and services. Founded in 1997 as a PV system integrator, Trina Solar today drives smart energy together with installers, distributors, utilities and developers worldwide. The company's industry-leading position is based on innovation excellence, superior product quality, vertically integrated capabilities and environmental stewardship. For more information, please visit www.trinasolar.com. Safe Harbor Statement This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as "will," "may," "expect," "anticipate," "aim," "intend," "plan," "believe," "estimate," "potential," "continue," and other similar statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact in this announcement are forward-looking statements, including but not limited to, the Company's ability to raise additional capital to finance its activities; the effectiveness, profitability and marketability of its products; our expectations regarding the expansion of the Company's manufacturing capacities; the Company's future business development; the Company's downstream project development, operation and pipeline; the Company's beliefs regarding its production output and production outlook; the future trading of the securities of the Company; the Company's ability to operate as a public company; the period of time for which the Company's current liquidity will enable the Company to fund its operations; general economic and business conditions; demand in various markets for solar products; the volatility of the Company's operating results and financial condition; the Company's ability to attract or retain qualified senior management personnel and research and development staff; and other risks detailed in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections about the Company and the industry in which the Company operates. 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 the Company cautions investors that actual results may differ materially from the anticipated results.









Trina Solar Limited Christensen IR Teresa Tan, CFO (Changzhou) Linda Bergkamp Email: [email protected] Phone: +1 480 614 3014 (US)

Email: [email protected] Yvonne Young

Investor Relations Director

Email: [email protected]



To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trina-solar-files-its-annual-report-on-form-20-f-for-2015-300253688.html SOURCE Trina Solar Limited

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[April 19, 2016] Stop & Shop Opens State-of-the-Art Green Energy Facility

QUINCY, Mass., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company LLC celebrated the opening of its Green Energy Facility in Freetown, Mass. on April 15, just in time for Earth Day. The innovative facility will convert inedible food from its Stop & Shop New England stores into energy that will help power the company's distribution center in Freetown. The Stop & Shop Green Energy Facility is expected to process an average of 95 tons of inedible food per day, an estimated 34,000 tons per year. As the food breaks down, it produces gas that fuels a generator that, in turn, generates electricity. The energy produced by the 12,000-square-foot facility will provide up to 40 percent of the 1.1 million square-foot Freetown distribution center's energy needs, enough power to operate the facility for four months out of the year. Once fully operational, the Facility will create approximately 1.25 megawatts of clean electricity. "As a responsible retailer, one of our top priorities is reducing our environmental footprint, specifically through the conversion of food that would otherwise go into a landfill," said Mark McGowan, President, Stop & Shop New England Division. "As part of doing business, our stores generate inedible food that cannot be donated. This inedible food will now be sent to our Green Energy Facility where it will be converted into clean energy and used as a power source for our distribution facility." 212 Stop & Shop New England Stores Power the Green Energy Facility The Green Energy Facility houses an anaerobic digester, which uses innovative technology to turn organic material into sustainable power. Inedible food products from all of Stop & Shop New England's 212 stores that cannot be sold or donated to regional food banks or local farms is transported to the Green Energy Facility. Then, by recreating the naturally-occurring process of anaerobic digestion carbon in the organic material is converted into a biogas and used as a power source. The process is carried out in a contained, oxygen-free area, which does not produce any odors.



The Green Energy Facility was created and is operated by Divert, Inc., a Massachusetts-based technology company devoted to creating a waste-free retail industry. A $400,000 grant was provided by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center for the creation of the facility. "Stop & Shop and its parent company, Ahold USA, are committed to energy efficiency and environmental stewardship, with a goal to achieve zero waste companywide by 2020, "said Marissa Nelson, Senior Vice President, Responsible Retailing and Healthy Living, Ahold USA. "The Stop & Shop Green Energy Facility is a perfect example of our ongoing efforts to be greener in our operations."

Stop & Shop Takes the Lead with Environmental Initiatives In addition to the Stop & Shop Green Energy Facility, the company is proud to be an industry and community leader in responsible and sustainable retailing. Among many others, Stop & Shop is leading with the following environmental initiatives: Stop & Shop diverts 88 percent of waste to someplace other than a landfill  through donations, recycling, composting and now the Green Energy Facility.

Stop & Shop recycles enough cardboard to save over 1.8 million trees yearly.

Stop & Shop's better bagging methods have saved enough plastic bags to circle the earth three times.

All Stop & Shop stores offer more than 200 sustainable seafood products.

Stop & Shop partnered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other organizations to improve energy efficiency, reduce greenhouse gases and decrease air pollution. Even our transportation systems limit fuel usage and carbon dioxide output.

New Stop & Shop stores have energy efficient day lighting, T5 fluorescent lighting and refrigeration systems with high-efficiency fan motors. The stores utilize automatic occupancy sensors, reflective roofs that reduce heat absorption during the summer and systems that curb electric power during peak demand times.

In 2015, Stop & Shop donated more than $12 million in product and cash to food banks and hunger relief organizations throughout New England. To learn more about Stop & Shop's responsible retailing efforts, visit stopandshop.com/environment. About Stop & Shop The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company LLC employs over 61,000 associates and operates 419 stores throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey. The company helps support local communities fight hunger, combat childhood cancer and promote general health and wellness  with emphasis on children's educational and support programs. In its commitment to be a sustainable company, Stop & Shop is a member of the U.S. Green Building Council and EPA's SmartWay program and has been recognized by the EPA for the superior energy management of its stores. Stop & Shop is an Ahold company. To learn more about Stop & Shop, visit stopandshop.com or facebook.com/stopandshop. About Divert, Inc. Divert is a Massachusetts based company devoted to creating a zero-waste retail industry. Divert's innovative solutions leverage customers' existing transportation and distribution systems to provide greater visibility; simplify processes; generate clean, sustainable power; save millions of dollars on waste removal costs; and reduce the retailers' impact on the planet. More information is available at divertinc.com. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/357039LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/stop--shop-opens-state-of-the-art-green-energy-facility-300253716.html SOURCE Stop & Shop New England

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[April 19, 2016] ALM Launches BenefitsPRO Suite of Resources

NEW YORK, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ALM has launched the new BenefitsPRO suite of resources for benefits professionals. BenefitsPRO, the branded content engine delivering all the critical resources benefits professionals need at every point in their career arc, now offers a consistent branded experience across every available platform, including website, magazine, face-to-face and digital events and online information services. "Our single, unified brand identity and digital content hub will make it easier for all of our core audiencesemployee benefits brokers, retirement advisors and benefits managersto seamlessly discover critical information, connect to their peers and compete more effectively in their industries," said Tamara Patterson, Employee Benefits Group Publisher at ALM. "This is another step in our ongoing company-wide initiative to better serve customers through a greater emphasis on both digital-first content and cross-platform integration." The BenefitsPRO brand launch was announced today following the presentation of the Broker of the Year Awards at the 2016 Benefits Selling Expo at The Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, FL. Reed Smith, Senior Vice President, Employee Benefits Practice Leader at CoBiz Insurance in Denver, received the 2016 Broker of the Year Award, one of the industry's most prestigious awards recognizing brokers and consultants who have influenced the industry in a positive way. Smith's unique career path and focus on consumer-driven healthcare and technology make him a perfect example of the broker of tomorrow. Broker of the Year finalists include: Bradley Davis , Partner at Wraith, Scarlett & Randolph Insrance Services, California

, Partner at Wraith, Scarlett & Randolph Insrance Services, Nathaniel Garfield , Vice President, Director of Employee Benefits at APFS Rochester, New York

, Vice President, Director of Employee Benefits at APFS Fred Garfield , Senior Vice President at The Horton Group, Illinois

, Senior Vice President at The Horton Group, Sallie Giblin , Executive Vice President at Lockton Insurance Brokers, LLC, California



April 2016 issue of Benefits Selling magazine. Broker of the Year winner Reed Smith will be featured in the May 2016 issue. Visit http://www.benefitspro.com for more information. To provide a more consistent experience for benefits professionals when they seek to discover industry information and analysis or connect to professionals to help move their business forward, Benefits Selling magazine has been renamed BenefitsPRO magazine and Benefits Selling Expo has been renamed BenefitsPRO Broker Expo. The first issue of the rebranded BenefitsPRO magazine will be published in June 2016. The magazine will continue to be published in print on a monthly basis, with digital content available on the BenefitsPRO website at http://www.benefitspro.com. While its name remains unchanged, the BenefitsPRO website has a fresh new look with the same critical industry news, analysis, research, sales tactics and exclusive resources that benefits professionals depend on to compete at every level of their careers.

"When our readers and customers see the new BenefitsPRO logo on our website, eNewsletters, magazine, events and social media channels, they will know that it is the same great content they have come to rely on," said Paul Wilson, Editor-In-Chief of BenefitsPRO. "We remain committed to providing our audiences with the latest news and analysis, and will continue to be the go-to resource for benefits industry information." About ALM

ALM, an information and intelligence company, provides customers with critical news, data, analysis, marketing solutions and events to successfully manage the business of business. Customers use ALM solutions to discover new ideas and approaches for solving business challenges, connect to the right professionals and peers creating relationships that move business forward, and compete to win through access to data, analytics and insight. ALM serves a community of over 6 million business professionals seeking to discover, connect and compete in highly complex industries. For more information, visit www.alm.com. Media Contact:

Dana Taormina

JConnelly

(973) 850-7305 / [email protected] Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160109/320646LOGO

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356860LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/alm-launches-benefitspro-suite-of-resources-300253748.html SOURCE ALM

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[April 19, 2016] Cybersecurity Technologies for Industrial Control Systems to Migrate from IT to Operational Technology-Centric Approaches

LONDON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- New cybersecurity operational technologies are emerging to protect industrial control systems against impending IT threats and attacks. ABI Research, the leader in transformative technology innovation market intelligence, indicates that demand will focus on network level security in the short term but eventually shift to place the significance on embedded security and lifecycle management. "The connectivity of traditionally closed industrial settings represents a new threat vector for cyberattacks," says Michela Menting, Research Director at ABI Research. "These threats target critical infrastructure sectors, including energy, water, waste management, transport, and agriculture. Current cybersecurity methods are not enough to keep industrial control systems safe. IT-based cybersecurity now requires an adapted, OT-centric approach." As the market adapts, industrial control system (ICS) vendors are at risk. They will need to redesign next-generation control systems with digital security in mind. And cybersecurity vendors need to create new product solutions for operational technology (OT) settings, as existing IT-based cybersecurity is not easily configurable. Yet, the market may face opposition as it migrates toward OT-centric cybersecurity solutions. There is a chance that security costs and elevated risks associated with connecting ICS are too high for some industrial operators. This may force some of them to forego connectivity within industrial settings. "To move forward, security companies need to recognize OT as its own market that requires new solutions and new research and development investment," concludes Menting. "ICS vendors need to incorporate cybersecurity in product development and lifecycle management. Industrial operators need to reconcile security differences in IT and OT management, converge security training and education, and enable dialogue between both camps." These findings are part of ABI Research's Cybersecurity Technologies Service (https://www.abiresearch.com/market-research/service/cybersecurity-technologies/), which includes research reports, market data, insights, and competitive assessments. About ABI Research For more than 25 years, ABI Research has stood at the forefront of technology market intelligence, partnering with innovative business leaders to implement informed, transformative technology decisions. The company employs a global team of senior analysts to provide comprehensive research and consulting services through deep quantitative forecasts, qualitative analyses and teardown services. An industry pioneer, ABI Research is proactive in its approach, frequently uncovering ground-breaking business cycles ahead of the curve and publishing research 18 to 36 months in advance of other organizations. In all, the company covers more than 60 services, spanning 11 technology sectors. For more information, visit www.abiresearch.com.











Contact Info: Mackenzie Gavel Tel: +44.203.326.0142

[email protected]





Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151014/276887LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cybersecurity-technologies-for-industrial-control-systems-to-migrate-from-it-to-operational-technology-centric-approaches-300253780.html SOURCE ABI Research

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[April 19, 2016] Safety Vision and Synovia Solutions Partner to Provide Integrated Video and Fleet Management Solution

Safety Vision, LLC, a leader in mobile video surveillance innovation, and Synovia Solutions, LLC (Synovia), creator of the most complete fleet management technology for K-12, government and commercial organizations, announced today a partnership to create user-friendly and intuitive compatibility between Synovia's management tools and Safety Vision's Observer digital video recorders. "This is a win-win for both of us as well as all of our customers," said Safety Vision's Vice President of Sales Randy Wise. "Synovia users will now be able to take advantage of the camera views and video recording provided by the Observer series, and our Observer users have a great new option for fleet management. The benefits that Synovia and Safety Vision provide are extremely complementary." One of the innovations with the new combined solution, rear facing cameras can be displayed automatically on the Synovia tablet when the bus is placed in reverse, avoiding collisions and protecting pedestrians. Additionally, Synovia's software will provide the health status of the Observer system, complementing their maintenance notifications that allow fleet managers to be proactive about potential problems. Synovia Solutions offers a variety of fleet management solutions including GPS tracking, engine diagnostics, the advanced Comparative Analysis system, and the innovative and nationally recognized Here Comes the Bus application. Safety Vision's popular analog Observer series utilizes solid-state storage mediaand threaded mobile-rated connectors to reliably record up to four camera channels. Compatibility between the two products is facilitated by a new connector on Synovia's tablet which makes installation a simple task.



"Customers will get significant benefits from our integration with Safety Vision's technology," said Synovia Solutions' President, Jon King. "In addition to an enhanced user experience, we have also created a number of programs to make it easy for customers to acquire our combined solutions." Synovia and Safety Vision are eager to demonstrate their solutions to fleet managers and administrators at the upcoming North American School Bus EXPO Conference and Trade Show (STN EXPO), presented by School Transportation News magazine in July in Reno, Nevada, and the National Association for Pupil Transportation (NAPT) Conference and Trade Show in November in Kansas City, Missouri.

About Safety Vision, LLC Safety Vision is among the most recognized vendors of mobile video surveillance products in North America since 1993. Our comprehensive solutions continually enhance vehicular safety in both the private and public sectors. Safety Vision's product offering includes digital video recorders, network video recorders, hybrid video recorders, analog and IP cameras, rear vision cameras, as well as a suite of intuitive software. Safety Vision prides itself on its forward-thinking ideology, comprehensive solutions, extensive client list, and proven results. Please contact us at www.safetyvision.com or 800-880-8855. About Synovia Solutions,LLC Synovia Solutions, LLC empowers public or private organizations, of all sizes, to manage vehicles and mobile assets more effectively. Our Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) solution will increase savings, improve safety and enhance customer service. Customers pay an affordable, all-inclusive monthly service fee, with no upfront costs that includes lifetime warranty, spare replacement hardware, service guarantees and more. Please contact us at www.synoviasolutions.com or 877-SYNOVIA (877.796.8842). View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419006373/en/

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[April 19, 2016] Onix Partners with Mindbreeze to Offer Search and Knowledge Management Solutions

LAKEWOOD, Ohio and LINZ, Austria, April 19, 2016 /CNW/ -- Onix is pleased to announce a new partnership with Mindbreeze to provide enterprise search solutions to customers. Mindbreeze is a leading provider of software products that make finding relevant information from corporate data and the Internet both fast and intuitive. Their products offer customers a consolidated overview of corporate intelligence, empowering decision-makers throughout all aspects of their business. Mindbreeze is well-established in Europe with more than 1,000 customers, serving governments, banks, health care, insurance, educational institutions and corporate customers. Mindbreeze InSpire is delivered as a pre-installed enterprise search appliance box. Configuration is simple and crawling of data sources can begin quickly. Mindbreeze InSpire unites business facts from company-internal data sources and from the Internet in one semantic search index. The product's out-of-the-box connectors are an exceptional feature, intelligently uniting information from all data sources. Mindbreeze InSpire also ensures that each user will find only business facts which he or she is allowed to access by verifying access rights directly from indexed data sources. "Enterprise search has been a illar of Onix's product offerings since 2001," said Onix President and CEO Tim Needles. "We are excited to partner with Mindbreeze. They are an established leader in enterprise search, and we are confident that InSpire from Mindbreeze will deliver the performance our customers expect."



Mindbreeze founder and CEO Daniel Fallmann said, "Mindbreeze is delighted to count Onix among our selective and fast-growing international network of partners. We have the knowledge management products customers want, and we look forward to working with the Onix team and their customers in the United States and Canada." To learn more about Onix's enterprise search services or to request a free consultation with an Onix search expert, visit the Onix website.

About Onix

Onix is a leading developer and provider of technology solutions and consulting services to a broad range of corporate and government customers. Onix partners with technology industry leaders and offers extensive expertise in the design and implementation of end-to-end comprehensive solutions. About Mindbreeze

Mindbreeze, with headquarters in Linz/Austria, is a leading European provider of software products and search appliances for enterprise search, big data and knowledge management. Contact:

Karen Masuga

216-529-3043

[email protected] Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/357118LOGO

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/357119LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/onix-partners-with-mindbreeze-to-offer-search-and-knowledge-management-solutions-300253856.html SOURCE Onix

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[April 19, 2016] Innovative Video Conferencing Now in a Way You Never Knew Existed

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The online market continues to rapidly expand globally, with customers flocking on to website from all parts of the world and teams having to connect in 'real-time' instantly, it has never been a more exciting time for Tagove to launch its new innovative video-conferencing solution. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/357182 As simple as 1-click of a button you can join your customers/team member where ever they are, no more 3rd party softwares to install, registration forms or unique id code. This seamless feature brings teams and customers together within the same office or globally in real-time. Improving online customer engagement in a digital environment is not so straight forward. However, customer queries can now be handled in real-time within a video conference. There is no need to send meeting invitations or calendar requests in order to make a video call; instead calls can be directly initiated from the website, making conferencing easier and more efficient. Businesses can take full advantage f this feature to more easily interact with customers that are less tech-savvy without the hassle of having to download plugins. In addition, the feature can be used across all software platforms, including Android and iOS.



By allowing customer service agents to easily escalate calls to higher management without needing to disconnect the call will inevitably improve customer service. In this way, all customer queries can be addressed in one seamless transaction. Moreover, if necessary, customer service agents can also invite external users to the conference by simply sending them a unique URL, thus allowing multiple agents to connect with multiple users without having to disconnect the call. Allowing the customer to see the salesperson or customer service agents they are interacting with will help to reinforce a better relationship with them by building a rapport. Increasing the customer's trust in the business whilst ensuring their loyalty to the business.

At Tagove, we understand the importance of keeping business conversations safe and secure, thus it has taken the appropriate measures to maintain the security and privacy of the customer's data. About Tagove Tagove Limited was formed in the Mountain View, California and has been providing unique customer support solutions to businesses in the United States and the United Kingdom since 2015. It is known for providing exceptional live-chat and remote assistance customer support services such as voice calling, video chat, text chat, web conferencing, co-browsing, screen sharing and file transfer solutions. For additional information, please visit their website at https://www.tagove.com This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/innovative-video-conferencing-now-in-a-way-you-never-knew-existed-300253946.html SOURCE Tagove

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London based alt-electronic-pop crew Jarbird are winning over fans across the world their their brand new four track EP Such Is The House which was released on burgeoning independent label Oskar in March.

The band are a melting pot of musical perspectives, coming together to craft some incredibly stunning, off kilter electronic ambient pop.

Having received love from BBC Radio 1 DJs Annie Mac and Huw Stephens, as well as Beats 1, XFM, and KCRWs Jason Bentley (Morning Becomes Eclectic) thanks to the EPs title track, its now time to get familiar with this impressive introductory release.

To celebrate its release, the band have kindly penned a track by track run down of the EP which you can check out below along with the stream. Give Such Is The House a spin and if you like what youre hearing stay locked to the bands Facebook page.

Such is the House

For everyone who has ever looked at themselves in the mirror and wanted to see something else, this is about accepting yourself, warts, wrinkles and all.

Iona

Iona is a tiny, remote Hebridean island off the west coast of Scotland. We finally went there last year, and it feels like the end of the earth, totally and utterly tranquil.

Gavelkind

This started life as a ballad, a love song, until we came across this word  Gavelkind. The word means splitting your inheritance equally among heirs when you die, and inserting this idea turned the song upside down, from one of love, to greed.

Jocasta

The story goes that Oedipus, in trying to escape his fate, ends up killing his own father, and marrying his own mother, Jocasta
For those uninitiated, SQUAD is one of Victorian youth music organisation The Push Incs killer new Music Industry Mentoring initiatives, providing women performers aged 18  25 with the chance to be teamed up with industry professionals.

As youre probably aware, the music industry though rather progressive in a number of ways, it can still be a tricky industry for female and female-identified hopefuls to break into and once in, to be valued within. Thats why mentoring opportunities like SQUAD are so integral to the health and vibrance of our music communities.

The Pushs Creative Producer, Kate Duncan said This is a really important and exciting time for The Push to be venturing into programs targeted towards fostering young women artists and their future careers in the contemporary music industry. I cant wait to see what personal growth and career opportunities develop for participants through their involvement in this innovative program.

To get to know a little more about SQUAD and the first influx of participants, we caught up with local music industry legend and SQUAD co-organiser Mel Krause. For more visit www.thepush.com.au.

What is SQUAD?

SQUAD is an all-female mentoring program for performers. The Push has been working in the mentoring field for many years and this is just an expansion on our already successful mentoring programs for 18-25 year olds with a music industry aspiration.

We match them with an industry mentor, they can attend industry masterclasses and attended a special SQUAD camp which hosted a huge list of industry experts and incredible performers who will drop in and spend some time with our SQUAD.

The Inspiration Behind SQUAD

The Push has seen a huge contingent of talented and inspiring young women getting involved in the industry and somewhere along the line dropping out.

Female participation in our programs has always been so strong but we wanted to do something more for these exceptional young performers so that they dont fall by the wayside. A huge part of the program is about visibility for these artists and we will be working extensively to support and promote their creative endeavours.

SQUAD Crew Members

We were absolutely astounded by the level of applicants that weve had this year. We cant wait to continue working with these artists and show you what theyve been up to! We recently saw SQUAD member Gabriella Cohen launch her killer album Full Closure and No Details at the Tote. The album which is released on independent label, Dirty Power, run by Cohen and her friend and producer Kate Dillon, has received the attention of NME and Rolling Stone!

Full Closure And No Details by Gabriella Cohen

Fronting punk trio, Wet Lips, Grace Kindellan will be a quintessential member of our SQUAD. Wet Lips PBS Drive Live performance recently was so fun and inspiring. Wet Fest, a day of supreme wetness featuring Melbournes most moist bands amazingly curated and presented by Wet Lips presents them as DIY dynamos and champions of the scene.

Wet is Best by Wet Lips

For something a bit different to what the other SQUAD crew are up to, check out Bridgette Les Leisure Suite. Having recently released and toured their second EP, Lay Low, and a killer set at Paradise Festival, Leisure Suite are firming themselves as favourites in the electronic scene. With a full band in tow, their live set is not to be missed.



Joining them are Hollie Joyce who also plays guitar with Oscar Galt & The Eventual Somethings, Demi Louise fresh from showcasing her new single Taxi Driver at SXSW, Biddlewoods Tali Mahoney who recently branched out solo and is supporting Tiny Little Houses on their upcoming Milo Tin Tour.

We will also see a new divine and beautifully recorded single from Seavera, electronic artist Cheyenne Harper is one to watch out for, hopefully releasing music at some point this year.



Eilish Gilligan brings her pop stylings to SQUAD as well as her indie outfit Frida, last but definitely not least Francesca Gonzales has been working on new music with electronic / soul and R & B vibes, she also recently featured on UV Bois If She, If He.

Limbo by Frida

Why Its Important For Women To Be Supported In The Music Industry

I think its important for everyone to feel supported in this industry but especially so given we are seeing a real gap in terms of women entering and staying an active member/s of the Music Industry.

Theres been a lot of conversation about the issues at hand lately but we felt especially like it was our place to do something to help, support and nurture the talent we see every day.

Hopes & Ambitions For SQUAD 2016

The sky is the limit really! We want our SQUAD participants to leave the program feeling more visible and more supported and also to be active members of the music community. We hope to see some growth in their careers, which of course will be their doing with us along for the ride.



SQUAD Mentors

Were working hard on locking them in at the moment. Long-time mentoring supporter and all round legend Ainslie Wills has signed on so has Adalita and Nuns Jenny Branagan, so we are are incredibly thankful for that!

We had Jelena Goluza of Outright and Jo Syme of Big Scary drop into SQUAD camp, who inspired us with all their worldly career advice including talks on touring, labels and more. Journalist and Author, Jenny Valentish gave practical insight into working with the media, and Jennifer Tutty talk all things legal. Chloe Turner popped in to talk Music Victoria and LISTEN.

We also heard from past Push mentee Lorrae McKenna who talked us through her experiences at Remote Control records. The camp was no doubt, a money cant buy experience! Thats not all from our mentees, we will also hear from many more in the coming months through masterclasses and individual one on one mentoring.

If Youd Like More Info

You should definitely check our our website www.thepush.com.au / or our Facebook page.

Other Killer resources For Women Wanting Info On The Music Industry

The most important thing is to get out there and give it a go!!! But there are so many great resources available these days! Subscribe to our mailing list for all things The Push, we always have incredible opportunities!

[include_post id=438975]Music Victoria run really informative and essential artist development workshops and masterclasses which are mostly free for their members. Music Victoria also have set up an Womens Advisory Panel in response to a report they did on Women in the Victorian Contemporary Music Industry, who will be doing some great things in this field Being a member of Music Victoria also gives you a bevy of other industry related discounts www.musicvictoria.com.au.

LISTEN, a not-for-profit org have put together a conference which runs over two days and has some really beneficial information, check out LISTEN and LISTEN Records to hear more about the gender conversation in Melbourne.

Jen Clohers workshops I Manage My Music are great for the artist who wants to take on a DIY approach to the management of their music.

For some inspo, check out oneofone, who feature some incredible women!
New Zealand-bred, LA-based duo Broods have announced they will be celebrating the release of their new album, Conscious, which is set to drop on Friday, 24th June, with an East Coast Australian tour this July.

The pair recently completed a string of US tour dates supporting Ellie Goulding and theyre riding a wave of momentum thanks to the buzz surrounding their latest single, Free, which you can check out below.

Free, the first single to be taken from Conscious, has been streamed more than two million times on Spotify since dropping two weeks ago and shot to #11 on the Shazam Chart, ranked Top 20 on iTunes singles chart and has reached 315,000 streams in Australia alone.

Joining Broods for all three dates will be Vera Blue and Xavier Dunn. Check below for all dates and ticketing details. Tickets are set to hit sale 10am Friday, 22nd April and make sure you act fast because they will fly.

Broods Australian Tour Dates

Tickets on sale 10am Friday, 22nd April

Friday, 8th July 2016

The Tivoli, Brisbane

Tickets: Broods

Saturday, 9th July 2016

Enmore Theatre, Sydney

Tickets: Broods

Monday, 11th July 2016

The Forum, Melbourne

Tickets: Broods
Jack Gleeson is an actor from County Cork in Ireland, who will for the rest of his life have people hurling abuse at him and giving him evil looks, because he was both blessed and burdened with playing King Joffrey on Game of Thrones.

If youre not familiar with the critically hailed HBO fantasy series, Joffrey is one of the most evil characters ever to appear on any screen, big or small, and Gleeson played the part to absolute, infuriating perfection.

But in real life Gleeson is a nice Irish lad and is actually a big fan of triple j and in particular Like A Version, recently telling Breakfast hosts Matt and Alex that he keeps up to date with the segment online, calling it the best.

I suppose what I like about it is seeing bands that you admire admiring other bands. And you realise that the bands you love are actually fans of other bands that you love, and theres a nice relationship there, Gleeson told the hosts.

The actor cited Alex Turners hazy performance of Feels Like We Only Go Backwards as one of his favourites and claimed he is addicted to the incredible cover of Praise You performed by local outfit The Belligerents.

Check out the conversation with Matt and Alex below or head on over to the triple j website to check out King Joffreys top five favourite Like A Version covers ever.
Theres been a few nostalgia parties going down in major cities around Australia lately. For whatever reason, were all feeling really sentimental about life circa 2006-2008. After all, life was so much simpler back then.

But music fans in the US are currently reliving something we Australians all experienced eight years ago  theyre in love with local electronic duo Empire of the Suns dreamy debut single, Walking on a Dream.

The band  comprised of former The Sleepy Jackson frontman Luke Steele and Pnaus Nick Littlemore  recently appeared on Ellen to promote the song, which it should be noted came out in 2008, the lead single from the bands debut of the same name.

And no, the single was not only just released for the American market recently. Since Walking on a Dream came out (in both Australia and the US), Steele and Littlemore have released a sophomore album and several more singles.

So what are Empire of the Sun doing promoting an eight-year-old song? Lets take a ride. Specifically, lets take a ride in a Honda Civic. A popular commercial for the vehicle that recently debuted in the US featured, you guessed it, Walking on a Dream.

Whilst Walking on a Dream, as well as We Are The People, another single from the bands debut, and Alive, taken from the bands sophomore effort, Ice on the Dune, were all top 25 hits here at home, they never cracked the mainstream charts in the States.

As SPIN reports, Hondas latest ad promoting the Civic, entitled The Dreamer, is everywhere right now, and its led to a renewed interest in the ads soundtrack, which US television viewers have been Shazaming like theres no tomorrow.

Whats more, the interest translated into sales for the Aussie duo. Back in January, SPIN reported that the song had moved almost 30,000 units in a week, sending it to No. 30 on the Digital Songs chart and No. 82 on the Hot 100.

As Billboard reported last month, Walking on a Dream led the February Billboard + Clio Musics Top Commercials chart after it nabbed 117,000 Shazam tags, which subsequently translated into 45,000 digital downloads in February, and 6.1 million domestic streams.

This followed impressive January numbers, which included 297,000 tags, 116,000 digital downloads, and 7.6 million streams. Walking on a Dream ultimately peaked at No. 65 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 6 on Hot Rock Songs, No. 10 on Alternative Songs, and No. 27 on the Adult Top 40.

Ive been getting phone calls, mums at my kids schools [talking about it], Steele told SPIN. And then, [the label], theyre getting excited when Shazam is like, [Its the] number-five song Its amazing how many people havent heard that song, you know.

We had another song, We Are the People, that was used in a Vodafone ad in Germany, and it turned up a number one in Germany, he continued. You can never underestimate the power of pop culture.

The surge in popularity could not have come at a better time for the band, who are preparing to release their follow-up to Ice on the Dune, which was released back in 2013.

The third record, weve been working on for about two years, Steele said. The timing is, like, immaculate. Were going to the studio next week to have a big band listening session its pretty exciting.

I think now that this has happened, its going to be probably, definitely September, Steele added. The companys gonna be like Guitars down, headphones off.
Kanye West has been telling fibs and one fan is looking to take him to court over it. As News Corp reports, Justin Baker-Rhett has filed a class action lawsuit in San Francisco federal court claiming the rapper defrauded fans into signing up for Tidal.

Tidal is the troubled streaming service famously (or perhaps infamously) owned by Jay-Z and West had previously claimed that his latest album, The Life of Pablo, would be exclusive to the service and not available to stream or purchase anywhere else.

West tweeted as much back in February and Baker-Rhett was one of many fans who took the rapper for his word and signed up for Tidal, agreeing to pay the US$9.99 (AUD$13) per month fee for the otherwise maligned streaming platform.

When The Life of Pablo subsequently appeared on Apple Music and Spotify a couple months later, Baker-Rhett was incensed. Hes now accusing West and Tidal of tricking consumers into signing up for Tidal, adding millions of customers to the struggling service.

According to the suit, the apparent conspiracy tripled Tidals subscriber base to three million, increased its value from US$24 million to US$84 million, and violated the privacy of fans by forcing them to give Tidal their credit card data.

My album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale You can only get it on Tidal.  KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016

The Life of Pablo reportedly clocked 250 million streams within 10 days of release. You cant trick people into paying money and giving up personal information just because the company is struggling, a lawyer for Baker-Rhett told News Corp.

The suit is seeking class action status for anyone who subscribed to Tidal between 15th February and 1st April and streamed The Life of Pablo within 24 hours of subscription. The suit is seeking actual and punitive damages and the scrubbing of user data.
A tiny vegan chocolate company based out of greater Kansas City, MO that makes raw vegan chocolate bars + vegan confections like caramels, marzipan etc. dipped in delicious raw chocolate." right now they're starting. Read more: Handcrafted raw vegan chocolates, direct trade cacao | Manifest Chocolates
Citizen Media Beats KCPD Again

Citizen Media locals sends this word of KCPD tech trouble and their take on recent protest arguments . . . The argument may earn support or disagreement among our blog community but there's a very apt juxtaposition here regarding the future of spy tech and public access to video.Meanwhile, Kansas City insiders are happy to report that the horse who was slapped is recovering nicely.Remember last week, April 12th, when activists went to the Board of Police Commissioners meeting and told them what a horrible job they are doing with public safety because they tramples innocent citizens with horses and then sprayed them with pepper spray? Video link is pasted below in case you forgot.Well, activists called the KCPD Media Department to get a copy of the DVD of the public meeting and were told that the Board of Police Commissioners recording equipment was not working that day!!Chief Forte and Mayor Sly James just spent tens of millions remodeling that old police station down town and the public is treated like "enemy combatants"? This brings into question the quality of all audio/video storage at KCPD may very well be corrupted by means of incompetence?Emanual Cleaver calls for body cams but what's the use?It's time all government meetings in Jackson County are put up on LIVESTREAM so the public can see who is present and who speaking in all these meetings concerning public business .We've listen to hours of video evidence from KCPD Dashboards that have been provided through the Freedom Of Information Act at the cost of 6 dollars per CD? We can buy CD's from local rappers for two dollars a disc and they better quality than the KCPD with their multi million dollar budget . . .##########Related:You decide . . .
Mayor Sly Seyz Downtown Toy Train Streetcar 'Human Contact' Is Better For Kansas City!!!





Quick mini-movie quote for the overnight . . . File this clip away for the inevitable and tragic first Kansas City streetcar shooting, stabbing and/or assault.



Deets:



"Selected from 78 finalists from across the U.S., Kansas City, MO, is one of seven cities working toward a transformative transportation plan that could net them up to $50 million in support from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and its philanthropic partner, Paul G. Allen's Vulcan Inc."



More later . . .
France signed several deals worth about 2 billion ($2.26 billion) with Egypt during a visit by French President Francois Hollande to Cairo, the French president's office said.



The deals included a satellite communications contract agreed upon following discussions between the two presidents and their defence ministries, the Elysee said.



The military telecommunications satellite is expected to be build by France's Airbus Space Systems et Thales Alenia Space.



French energy Engie firm said earlier that it also signed LNG and renewable energy contracts during the visit. -Reuters
Alstom, a world leader in integrated railway systems, and Qatar Rail have unveiled the design of the Citadis tram for its four-line network project at Lusail, the newest planned city in Qatar coming up on a 35-sq-km area north of the city centre of Doha.



The design of the Lusail tram, with its front shaped like the bow of a vessel, is inspired by the dhows, the traditional boats of the area, said a statement from Alstom.



The trams blue tones also reflect the sea, inviting passengers to climb aboard and take a cool break from the heat of Qatar. The interior design echoes the architecture of the area, incorporating touches of yellow that recall the Lusail flower, it stated.



Alstom was awarded an integrated tramway system contract for the engineering, procurement, construction, testing and commissioning of four tram lines, totalling 38 km (of which 10 km are underground) with 30 stations as part of a consortium by Qatar Rail in June 2014.



The consortium, which comprises Alstom and a Qatari shareholding company QDVC (a joint venture between Qatari Diar and Vinci Construction Grands Projets) are in charge of civil works.



The contract also included the supply of Citadis trams, power supply, signalling and track works, said a statement from the French group.



Commenting on the unveiling, Abdulla Al Subaie, Qatar Rails managing director said: "Across our projects, our build and design stages have been guided by the powerful coming together of tradition with modernity."



"Deeply entrenched in Qatari culture and heritage, the Lusail tram designs celebrate the convergence of our countrys history with ground-breaking technologies and cutting-edge solutions. We are creating a seamless consumer journey and experience built around the local communitys needs and values," he noted.



Gian Luca Erbacci, the senior vir-president for Alstom (Middle East and Africa) said: "There are currently more than 1,800 Alstom light rail vehicles in operation throughout the world. Each Citadis has its own specific design and is customised to reflect its citys image and culture."



"We are very happy to have partnered with Qatar Railways to come up with a unique design that will certainly please the passengers and residents of Lusail," stated Erbacci.



The Citadis tram for Lusail is 33 m long in single unit and can accommodate 207 passengers in common and family classes. It can be coupled to double its capacity. The tram features the latest technologies such as permanent magnet motors which reduces energy consumption.



With 17 integrated tramway solutions projects awarded, Alstom is the world leader in this field. It is currently managing the construction of seven integrated tramway systems including Cuenca (Ecuador), Rio (Brazil), Sydney (Australia) and further projects in Algeria.



According to Alstom, the Citadis trams for Lusail will be manufactured in La Rochelle (France) for the first five trams and the remaining ones in Barcelona (Spain).



The following Alstoms sites in France will also be involved in the project: Le Creusot for bogies, Ornans for the engines, Tarbes for drive, traction chains and equipment, Villeurbanne for onboard electronic systems and passenger information, Valenciennes for interior design and Saint-Ouen for the tram design, it added.-TradeArabia News Service
Middle East Traders, a major retailer of high-end products and prominent global brands, is set to launch Turkeys leading sanitary ware brand ECA Serel at the upcoming gulfBID expo in Bahrain.



The annual show for the GCCs construction sector is being organised by Hilal Conferences and Exhibitions (HCE) from April 26 to 28 at the Bahrain International Exhibition and Convention Centre under the patronage of HRH Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, the Prime Minister of Bahrain.



Middle East Traders has an established reputation as one of the GCCs top suppliers for building and interior materials. It was recently appointed as the exclusive agents of the ECA Serel range of sanitary ware products.



Salman Alkhan, the business development manager of Middle East Traders, said: "GulfBID 2016 plays a major part for the market positioning of our company. We will use the event to introduce Turkeys leading brand of sanitary ware products, ECA Serel."



The company will also be introducing products such as its new slab construction solution 'Cobiax voided slabs' and Tarketts latest flooring solutions along with Tandus carpets at the exhibition.



Welcoming the company, Jubran Abdulrahman, the managing director of HCE, said: "For over 65 years Bahrains Middle East Traders have played a major role in the development of the building and interiors sector in Bahrain and the GCC."



"The presence of a company so well regarded in Bahrain at gulfBID will add value to the visitor experience at the expo," he added.



During the show, Middle East Traders will also be conducting two presentations on April 28 (2pm  3pm) on the new Cobiax voided slabs and Tarkett complete flooring solutions (3pm  4pm) at the Bahrain International Exhibition Centre.



The gulfBID exhibition takes place in conjunction with two other major shows  gulfInteriors and Gulf Property Show providing the biggest integrated business-to-business showcase for the construction, interiors and property sectors ever to be staged in the Northern Gulf. It is sponsored by Haji Hassan and Kuwaiti Manager Contracting (KMC).-TradeArabia News Service
More than 150 regional energy professionals and international experts discussed the most pertinent challenges in protecting critical energy assets at the inaugural Infrastructure Security Conference (Infrasec) which got underway in Bahrain today (19 April).



The one-day pre-conference workshop and two-day conference is being held under the patronage of Dr Abdul Hussain bin Ali Mirza, Bahrains Minister of Energy at The Gulf Hotel in Manama.



With the threats to safeguarding the supply and distribution of energy and petroleum-related products growing by the day, experts assessed whether regional leaders in countries endowed with natural resources could benefit from better inter-regional cooperation to ward off potential attacks.



Dr Kevin Rosner, senior fellow with the Institute for Analysis of Global Security, and one of the speakers, said not only GCC governments, but all countries can learn from one another on how to better maintain and secure their own critical infrastructure (CI).



The problem has been that efforts to learn and reflect on CI protection have been fragmented at best with often those looking for information and contacts left at a loss of where to turn, said Rosner.



GCC governments should join with others to better understand the re-emergence of conventional attacks and exploitation of natural resources as a mechanism and weapon for conducting hybrid warfare, he noted.



Talking about asymmetric warfare, Rosner warned that hostile groups seeking to undermine infrastructure are already studying how to best bring it down: Leon Trotsky probably said it best: 'you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you', added Rosner. In short, there is no place to hide in this business and ignoring the problem wont make it go away, he stated.



Keith Tupman, the former principal security advisor at the Kuwait Oil Company, is among the speakers on the second day of Infrasec.



He agreed a unified front from regional stakeholders was key to improve the resilience of critical infrastructure and deter would-be attackers.



The obvious way to improve deterrence is to present a unified front at both national and regional levels, said Tupman, who will speak about the interoperability of maritime security assets and aerial surveillance assets in sea-facing oil and gas environments.



Regular national and regional inter-agency top-table discussions and exercises will go a long way towards advertising the fact that regional oil and gas majors are taking a proactive interest in protecting their own and collective critical infrastructure, noted Tupman.



Organised by Messe Frankfurt Middle East, Infrasec is supported by Intersec, the worlds largest trade show for safety, security and fire protection; Bahrains National Oil and Gas Authority; and the Bahrain National Gas Company (Banagas).



Ahmed Pauwels, the CEO of Messe Frankfurt Middle East, said: "The dependence on energy supply throughout the Middle East makes it imperative to ensure the safe and secure distribution of these resources to keep economies running."



"Infrasec addresses these issues head-on, bringing together leading international security experts and thought leaders with regional stakeholders and energy-related decision makers," stated Pauwels.



The other headline speakers at Infrasec include Khaled Al Mansouri, the president of the International Council at the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM), Abdulrahman Al Manea, the security operations manager and cyber security expert at Saudi Aramco; Adel Ahmed Al Gaoud, security manager at the Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco), Bahrain; and Halim Boudiaf, the former security manager at ConocoPhillips, Algeria.



Infrasec also features an exhibition showcasing the latest innovations and solutions in critical infrastructure perimeter security, physical security, information and cybersecurity, and commercial security.-TradeArabia News Service
The US government is poised to approve two long-delayed sales of Boeing fighter jets to Qatar and Kuwait, and could announce the multibillion-dollar deals during President Barack Obama's visit to the Gulf this week, according to two sources familiar with the matter.



Both deals have been stalled amid concerns raised by Israel that equipment sent to Gulf states could fall into the wrong hands and be used against it, and by the Obama administration's broader decision-making on military aid to the Gulf.



However, the Pentagon and the State Department both have signed off on the sale of some 36 F-15 fighter jets to Qatar and 24 F/A-18E/F Super Hornets to Kuwait, both built by Boeing. The White House is expected to follow suit shortly.



The sale to Kuwait is worth about $3 billion and the one to Qatar is probably close to $4 billion, sources familiar with the matter said.



"The last hurdle now is getting approval from the National Security Council and the White House," said one of the sources.



The Pentagon had no immediate comment.



A senior Obama administration official said it was the administration's policy not to comment on potential arm sales until it has formally notified Congress of an intent to sell something.



But, the official said, the US is committed to the security and stability of the Gulf region and defense sales "fit into the overall US regional diplomatic strategy."



Expected approval of the fighter jet sales comes as the White House seeks to shore up relations with Gulf allies as they increase their military capabilities amid growing fears that Washington is drawing closer to Iran in the aftermath of the nuclear deal with that country.



Senior US officials, including Navy Secretary Ray Mabus have publicly urged approval of the weapons sales, which will help maintain production of the fourth-generation Boeing fighter jets, while the newer and more advanced Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jet enters service in coming years.



One senior US defence official said the Pentagon is keen to see the Boeing F-15 and F/A-18 production lines in St. Louis continue and does not want to "foreclose any options on fourth-generation aircraft at this point."



Boeing already is spending "hundreds of millions" of dollars to buy long-lead materials such as titanium to prepare for a possible Kuwaiti order for F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and a separate US Navy order for 12 jets put on the service's "unfunded priorities" list submitted to Congress.



The Navy is hoping that Congress will provide the funding to pay for the Boeing jets in fiscal 2017, although the planes were not included in its base budget request. It already has earmarked funding for more F/A-18E/F jets in fiscal 2018.



A larger concern now is the Boeing F-15 line, which is set to end in 2019 after Boeing completes work on a large order for Saudi Arabia, unless a follow-on order is approved. - Reuters
France-based Acome, a company developing automotive products and systems, will open a plant worth an investment of 25 million ($28.3 million) in Tangier, said a report.



Acome is a manufacturer of cables, fibre optics, and synthetic tubes for telecoms and infrastructure networks, buildings, and the automotive industry.



The plant will provide around 150 jobs, added the Morocco World News report.



The statute of the company was approved early November, endorsing the creation of the Moroccan subsidiary of Acome, the companys head of communications, headquartered in Paris, was quoted as saying in the Huffington Post Maroc.



In 2014, Acome realised a turnover of 405 million ($458.6 million), of which 58 per cent was generated internationally. The company employs nearly 1,400 employees, who after three years of employment become full associates.



The company, which has factories in Mortain, France; Irate, Brazil; and Shandong and Hubei provinces in China, expects to supply the Renault factory in Tangier and other car factories in Morocco and Africa, added the report.



As a supplier in the automotive sector for more than 60 years, the company is now among the three world leaders for zero-halogen environmentally friendly, high tech wires and cables, added the company official.
Iran plans to set up a petrochemical hub in Austria in order to better access its target markets in Eastern Europe, said a senior Iranian petrochemical official in a report.



Irans Petrochemical Commercial Company recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with an Austrian company to set up a petrochemical hub to access petrochemical markets in Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Slovakia, Mehdi Sharifi Niknafs managing director for Petrochemical Commercial Company, was quoted as saying in an Iran Daily News report.



He said that Iran needs to put on display the potentialities and capabilities it developed under the sanctions by holding exhibition.



Niknafs further called for holding expos in Iran to better present its petrochemical activities and achievements to the world.



He noted that the company has been in talks with a number of European delegations to increase petrochemical exports to Europe.
Oman is spending billions of dollars to develop the Duqm area as part of efforts to wean the country off exports of crude oil and gas and diversify into downstream industries before the country's limited financial and oil reserves begin to run out.



On a stretch of barren coast 550km (345 miles) south of the capital Muscat, workers at a ship repair yard swarm over cargo vessels from around the world, labour that will help to determine Oman's fate in an era of cheap oil.



The yard, owned by the government's Oman Drydock Company and operated by South Korea's Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, is far from the country's industrial areas in the north.



But it's at the centre of the biggest single economic project in the history of Oman, part of efforts to wean the country off exports of crude oil and gas and diversify into downstream industries before the country's limited financial and oil reserves begin to run out.



The government is spending billions of dollars to develop the area around the remote fishing village of Duqm into a sprawling business zone, aiming to attract companies that will create tens of thousands of jobs.



In addition to the ship repair yard and its adjacent port, the Duqm Special Economic Zone will include an oil refinery, a petrochemical complex, manufacturing operations and warehousing and logistics facilities.



A fish processing district will become the focus of Oman's fishing industry. A tourism area aims to bring in hard currency from foreign visitors.



The strategy -- spend lavishly on infrastructure, jump-start key industries with state funds and lobby the private sector to participate -- carries substantial financial risks.



But it is a key plank of economic policy in Oman, a thinly populated country of just 4.4 million people that lacks the deep pockets of neighbouring oil exporters such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE.



"We are diversifying beyond hydrocarbons," said Saleh Hamood Ali Al-Hasni, the executive in charge of handling investment applications at Duqm. "We have to create jobs for the people and attract foreign direct investment."



Other Gulf Arab oil exporting states have cut spending on infrastructure and development projects in the past 18 months as low oil prices have strained their finances.



Oman's finances have also been hit hard, but it does not have as much time as its neighbours. Its financial reserves are estimated in the tens of billions of dollars rather than hundreds, and its proven oil reserves will last only 15 years at the current rate of production, oil company BP estimates.



So the government is continuing to spend heavily on Duqm and other, smaller projects to move the economy beyond crude oil. Total state investment spending rose 5.5 percent from a year earlier to OR2.81 billion ($7.3 billion) in the first 11 months of 2015, even as the government ran a budget deficit of OR4.07 billion, the latest official data shows.



"Oman's infrastructure and industrial investment drive remain near the top of the government's agenda and key strategic projects, such as the vast Duqm port and economic zone, will go ahead," analysts at Eurasia Group said in a report.



SPENDING



Five years ago, Duqm had a population of about 3,000 villagers and no commercial air links to the rest of the world; workers coming from outside were housed in tents, portacabins or a retired cruise ship moored at the port.



Now, four-lane highways -- still almost empty of vehicles -- snake across the desert while power and water lines have been laid across scores of square kilometres. Housing complexes and commercial buildings are rising from the sand. An airport opened in 2014, but the passenger terminal is still under construction.



The area's population has risen to about 13,000, including workers, and is set to hit 67,000 in 2020, officials say. In the longer term, authorities talk of a city of 100,000 or more.



Financing all of this building is a challenge. The government has so far spent $1.2 billion and will find it hard to come up with the billions more that will be needed if oil prices stay low.



Al-Hasni said the zone was looking at several options to raise money, including a possible bond issue and a loan from international banks, and had started generating fee income that would help it to finance itself.



A bigger challenge may be attracting enough private investment.



Duqm is marketing its location as an advantage; situated on the Arabian Sea near major shipping routes through the Red Sea to Asia and Africa, it is outside the crowded Strait of Hormuz, which is vulnerable when regional tensions rise.



But an important part of the vision is in doubt. The zone was to have been connected to the other Gulf Arab states by a 2,100 km (1,310-mile) railway due to be built by 2018, allowing the port to receive imports for the entire region and transport them north by rail as far as Kuwait.



Governments' strained budgets have now delayed that project indefinitely, and Omani officials say they may instead focus on building a domestic rail network.



Companies from around the region have expressed their intention to invest $2.15 billion in Duqm, in sectors including housing, tourism, fisheries, commercial services and chemicals, said Al-Hasni, the investment executive.



In a sign of how commercial links may develop in coming years, Iranian companies -- keen to expand after the lifting of economic sanctions on Tehran in January -- are the second biggest source of that investment after Omani firms.



In January, an Omani sovereign wealth fund and Iran's biggest auto maker, Khodro, agreed to study a proposal for a $200 million auto plant in Duqm, for example.

Unlike most other Gulf Arab states, Oman has comfortable diplomatic and economic ties with Iran, and this may help to ensure Duqm's success. - Reuters


More than 20 communities will be represented through 16 cultural performances and more than 200 market stalls at the fifth Bahrain For All festival at Prince Khalifa bin Salman Park in Hidd on April 29.



This years event, the largest to date, is expected to draw more than 50,000 visitors with the aim of strengthening solidarity among all the kingdoms residents, expatriates and locals alike.



The events headliners are Bahraini rap and hip hop artist The Mystro (Hamed Al Fardan), and the critically acclaimed DJ Outlaw, along with Flipperachi and Kuwaiti star Daffy. The show will be emceed by internationally renowned comedic talent Waddah Swar.



The events ethos, Bahrain for all, all for Bahrain, celebrates the cultural diversity in Bahrain, and brings people from all communities together for a day of fun and activities. The event has been held twice a year since 2013, and has become bigger every time, explained organiser Nivedita Dhadphale.



The event fosters a spirit of togetherness among all Bahrains communities, including the locals and the various expatriate populations, said Dhadphale. Its a joint effort that wouldnt be possible without the involvement of all the clubs and embassies that are supporting it. We are excited to have new performers and sellers added to this years line up, which promises to be bigger and better than ever. Everyone is welcome to this free family event which will celebrate Bahrains unity in diversity.



This years programme lineup includes cultural performances by the Nepalese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Sri Lankan, Egyptian, Jordanian, Filipino, Pakistani, Sudanese, and Palestinian communities. In addition to market stalls, which will sell a range of products such as food, clothes, jewellery and handmade goods, 10 embassies will be present to showcase their countries culture and heritage. Discover Islam and Alliance Francaise will also offer information about their services, while an artists corner will feature locally produced art for sale. Specially allocated kids areas will offer face painting, henna, balloon twisters, and colouring stations. Shuttle services will be provided from participating clubs premises to the venue and back.



The event is from 4 pm to 11 pm and entrance is free for all. - TradeArabia News Service
Visitors to the new Ramada City Center Bahrain will see unique artwoks displayed at the hotel which have been designed by Artasa.



Artasa, the French Art design company, has created impressive paintings for the new Ramada City Center Hotel at Manama.



Riadh Sifaoui, art director at Artasa, said: "Because we nurture the ambition of creating genuine Signature Interiors, we have designed our Islamic Art collections to offer suppleness and richness to our customers. Thanks to this, the interior designer of the project Sue Henson has had the opportunity to customise all the artworks of the Ramada City Center Bahrain hotel.



Sue Henson, design director at Summit Interior Design, said: I was introduced to Artasa artwork at the Dubai Hotel Show in 2014, and was determined to involve them for the new Ramada City Centre Hotel in Bahrain. We specified three different styles of artwork for the project: handmade paintings showing old mosques in a contemporary way, art pieces showing traditional geometric patterns highlighted with colors and contemporary finishes, and 3D ceramics painted and delicately gilded by hand. I particularly liked the contemporary colored Islamic geometric patterns which we used through the corridors to the hotel guest rooms. Since we had designed three different colour pallets for the corridors to define the smoking, non smoking and executive floors, I thought it would be complexe to communicate and develop the range of colours required within each artwork to match the various schemes. However working with Artasa was very easy, they developed the colour pallets for the islamic patterns perfectly and the communication was quick and very professional. We will definitely be specifying Artasa products in our future projects. - TradeArabia News Service


Oman Air Holidays is offering two special packages for motorsports fans, who are invited to watch superstar Omani driver Ahmad Al Harthy race at two of Europes most iconic circuits.



With prices starting from just OMR464 ($1,201.4), the packages have been designed to celebrate the Oman Racing Teams eagerly-anticipated participation in the Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup at Monza in Italy, and Silverstone in the UK. Oman Air is a major sponsor of the Oman Racing Team and Ahmad Al Harthy is a brand ambassador for the airline.



Each package includes return flights from Muscat, return airport transfers, accommodation for four nights on a twin share basis, daily buffet breakfasts, day return transfers from the hotel to the racing circuit and tickets to the race.



Motorsports fans who wish to attend the Monza race can choose from Business Class or Economy Class packages. The Business Class option includes airport lounge access, return flight to Milan in Oman Airs exclusive Business Class cabin  which offers fully lie-flat seating and a la carte inflight dining  and accommodation at the luxurious five-star Boscolo Milano Autograph Collection hotel in Milan. The Economy Class option offers accommodation at the stylish NH Milano Touring Hotel in Milan.



Business Class packages to Monza cost as little as OMR1,175 ($3,042.5) per person and Economy Class packages are available at just OMR464 per person.



The UK packages include return flights from Muscat to London on either of the airlines two daily services. Accommodation for Business Class customers is offered at the top-of-the-range Hilton, Park Lane in London, whilst Economy Class customers will enjoy the four-star Hilton London Paddington.



Business Class packages to Silverstone are available at OMR1,695 ($4,389) and Economy Class packages cost just OMR636 ($1,646.8).



All prices quoted include airport taxes and surcharges. Rooms and race tickets are subject to availability and terms and conditions apply. To book, customers should email [email protected], or call Oman Air Holidays on +968 2453 1000 before May 5.



Mahfood Ali Saleem Al Harthy, Senior Vice President Sales, GCC & MEA at Oman Air, said: Monza and Silverstone are two of the best-known and most challenging motor racing circuits in the world. They are a dream destination for any motorsports fan. Add Omani racing legend Ahmad Al Harthy and the Oman Racing Team and you have a recipe for a thrilling and unforgettable visit to Europe.



Furthermore, as customers fly Milan or London, they will have the opportunity to enjoy Oman Airs award-winning service, spacious and comfortable interiors and delicious inflight cuisine," he said. - TradeArabia News Service
Bahrain today unveiled a new brand identity for its tourism sector, focusing on the hospitable culture the island is known for.

The brand's Ours. Yours. Bahrain slogan embraces the countrys biggest asset, its people  their warmth and welcoming attitude, officials said unveiling the new logo at a press conference.

Organised by The Bahrain Tourism & Exhibitions Authority (BTEA), the conference at the Four Seasons Bay Bahrain saw a number of top officials from the hospitality sector as well as the media in attendance.

Dignitaries at the event included Zayed R. Al Zayani, Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism; Kamal bin Ahmed, Minister of Transportation and Communication; Shaikh Khalid bin Hamood Al Khalifa, CEO Bahrain Tourism and Exhibition Authority and Vivian Jamal, Executive Director - Marketing & Communications of the Economic Development Board.

Participating in an open discussion, the dignitaries delved deeper into the idea behind the new tourism strategy and what it seeks to achieve.

Development of the country's beaches and promoting the concept of island living on surrounding islands such as Durrat, Dilmunia, etc. were also on the agenda.

The country also plans to revamp its access points for foreign visitors, including port facilities for yachts that arrive in Bahrain from other countries.

The strategy, according to Al Zayani, would focus mainly on awareness, attraction, access and accommodation.

Our first step would be to create awareness and identify what we need to project, which we are doing along with our shareholders, he said.

After reviewing our existing tourist attractions, we have noticed that there are many that are lacking due attention, which needs to be revived.

Our beaches and other parts of the island are also insufficiently used, and we will be focusing on those aspects as well.

The authorities are also looking to take advantage of its human capital with a plan to certify 100 tourist guides by the end of the year. We want to show more Bahraini faces to our tourists, Al Zayani said.

He hoped the campaign would almost double the tourism sectors contribution to the GDP by 2018.

Tourism, by way of income, currently contributes 3.6 per cent to the countrys GDP. We hope to double this to 6.6 per cent, he said.

Our goal is to not only promote Bahrain as a popular holiday spot in the GCC, but to also expand to other countries like China and India.

Our hospitality sector has recorded the average stay per tourist as two nights, which we are looking to increase to three nights per tourist.

Our cruise sector has also seen an average of 67,000 tourists coming in as of 2015, which we also aim to increase by 2018.

Through Brand Bahrain, the BTEA is hoping to place Bahrain on the world map by not only showcasing its authentic culture and heritage but also the harmonious blend of an old and modern, business-friendly world.

At the conference, the minister also revealed plans to improve the access for tourists, with airport expansion plans underway and other efforts to better the King Fahad Causeway and Khalifa Bin Salman Port.

83 per cent of tourists into the country come through the causeway, which brings a rise to traffic congestion, which we are working to overcome with our Saudi partners, Al Zayani said.

We are also looking at revamping the port facilities to provide better infrastructure to the yachts that bring tourists to the country.

This will include facilities that will be able to receive yachts from the GCC and support yachts moving from north to south on the Arabian Gulf.

Plans to increase the number of hotels and also establish a hospitality and culinary college are included in the agenda.

Many of our tourists opt for sea-view facing hotels. With that in mind, we are encouraging investment in more of these hotels to attract visitors.

We currently have six new sea-view hotel projects under construction, Al Zayani said.

The new brand campaign is also looking to tap into the Mice market as well, with plans for a new exhibition centre revealed at the conference.

We are working on plans for a new exhibition centre, which will be located near the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir.

The new centre will cover an area of 40,000 sq m, as opposed to the existing facility which covers only 14,000 sq m, and will be able to accommodate over 5,000 people at a time.

The new centre is currently in the designing phase should expect to start construction early next year.

Furthermore, the country is planning to set up new tourism offices in key markets at the end of the year as part of efforts to promote the kingdom.

The new offices will be located UK, France, India, Germany, Russia and one other GCC country, which has not yet been announced.

The offices will be dedicated to promoting Bahrain as an ideal destination and increase the flow of tourists each year from these countries, Shaikh Khalid said.

The new promotion drive will also see a four-month regional advertising campaign around the GCC, starting from May 1. - TradeArabia News Service
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A new crowdfunded documentary seeks to pull back the curtain on how airlines source, prepare, and deliver meals to passengers inflight.



(TRAVPR.COM) IRELAND - April 19th, 2016 - DUBLIN - A full-length documentary film seeks to pull back the curtain on how airlines source, prepare, and deliver meals to passengers at 35,000 feet. Titled "The Inflight Food Trip and developed by Nik Loukas  creator of the popular and informative site InFlightFeed.com, hopes to reveal a world few passengers ever see.

Loukas has secured agreements to go behind the scenes with some of the worlds biggest airlines. The film plans to highlight how airlines, among them Cathay Pacific, Qantas, Turkish Airlines, Air France plus many more, develop menus in line with modern gastronomic trends, train their in-flight chefs, and occasionally manage to convince travelers to pay more for an

enhanced meal experience. "The Inflight Food Trip" will also dive into the surprising history of airline food, which dates all the way back to 1919.

Working together with accomplished Producer/Director James Mellor of Rainbow Trout Films, Loukas is currently crowdfunding the film idea via a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of 65,000 (USD$74,000). May 4 is the deadline for pledged donations, with filming for "The Inflight Food Trip" set to begin in summer 2016 and scheduled to complete before the end of 2016.

"Our purpose is to tell stories," explains Loukas, "and each airline we feature has a unique perspective and tale to tell behind how they produce passenger meals." Airline food no doubt suffers from a negative reputation, but good or bad the level of planning and expert execution behind every slice of tomato, every piece of pasta put onto a plane is extraordinary. "We want to reveal the behind-the-scenes pressure and precision of this overlooked industry thats key to the modern air travel experience. The 'stars' of our film will be not just the airlines, but also cabin crews, inflight caterers, and the general public."

Interested parties can pledge a donation in return for some fantastic rewards here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inflightfeed/the-inflight-food-trip-its-not-just-plane-food

About InFlightFeed

Nik Loukas created InFlightFeed.com as an online guide for passengers who wanted to know more about the food available on various flights. The site includes features covering menu information, meal reviews, and notes from Loukas own globetrotting culinary adventures working with the airlines. Loukas has been quoted in publications like Vogue, The New York Times, and Conde Nast Traveler. He's also a regular columnist for UK magazine Onboard Hospitality and has contributed articles on airline food trends to CNN Travel and Yahoo Travel.

Contact:

Nik Loukas

+49 1525 600 5009

eat@inflightfeed.com

###
Two Aussie tourism talents have joined the growing start-up



(TRAVPR.COM) AUSTRALIA - April 19th, 2016 -

Sydney, Australia: In response to growing customer demand and international expansion plans, a top Australian tourism start-up has added two incredible industry talents as permanent staff members.



Starting off the year with a huge partnership announcement with tourism giant Expedia, Sydneys Booking Boss continues to hit major goals and now welcomes Tourism NTs Julieta Vallance along with Red Balloons Emma Rodwell.

CEO Renee Welsh says the companys growth exceeded expectations in 2015. With business booming she says Booking Boss is ready to make a stronger footprint in the market here and overseas.

We have been fortunate to experience some unprecedented organic growth within Australia and overseas. It is important, as with any expansion, that you have the right people in the right positions. Both Julieta and Emma are very well respected in the travel industry and bring a wealth of experience to the Booking Boss team.

Both Ms Vallance and Ms Rodwells roles will build on forging strong relationships with activity and tour operators both here and overseas.

The move to Booking Boss from their old roles was an organic progression with both additions hearing about the opportunity from industry colleagues.

Ms Vallance says she couldn't pass up the chance to work with the Booking Boss team. After almost a decade of working in the public sector, the shift to the fast-paced world of start-ups was an exciting prospect.

"There is so much in the pipeline and so many opportunities, she says.

I wanted to move forward into this industry and it was well-worth jumping straight in with Booking Boss."

Ms Rodwell says shes particularly enjoying working closely with the entire team on projects.

The role combines all my passions of travel and working with different sized businesses. Its satisfying and motivating.

Both new team members say they look forward to working hard in order to foster close relationships and to bring new partnerships onboard.

Booking Boss is an all-inclusive booking system for tour, activity and attraction operators. In 2015, the popular booking software gained nationwide attention after it closed a $2 million Series A financing round.

The company has already begun its international expansion.

###


Search News Archive : Fast Travel News Promotion Via Search, Social Media + Email Follow Us On : THE CLEMENT PALO ALTO OFFERS LIFETIME CHARTER MEMBERSHIPS TO FIRST 50 GUESTS Industry: Marketing

The Clement Palo Alto, one of the most innovative, personalized and unique luxury hotels in the country, is offering charter memberships with lifetime benefits for the first 50 guests of the hotel.



(TRAVPR.COM) USA - April 19th, 2016 - Palo Alto, CA, April 19, 2016  The Clement Palo Alto, one of the most innovative, personalized and unique luxury hotels in the country, is offering charter memberships with lifetime benefits for the first 50 guests of the hotel.



With 23 spacious and richly appointed one-bedroom suites, The Clement Palo Alto sets a new standard for personalized luxury accommodations in a contemporary residential-style atmosphere.



As one of the hotel's highly regarded inaugural guests, the Clement Charter Membership is limited to the first 50 guests of the hotel and has the following lifetime benefits:



 No charges for guests or visitors. Charter Members will never pay extra charges for guests (limit one guest per visit) which is valued at $150 per night. For day or evening guests (guests not spending the night) this is a value of $35-$75 per day.

 Reservation priority. With only 23 suites, The Clement Palo Alto will have limited availability. Clement Charter Members will have exclusive priority VIP reservation status, advancing members to the top of the waiting list during sold-out periods.

 Advisory Group. Members are invited to participate in the Clement Advisory Group and suggest ideas and recommendations for making guests stay a memorable one. The hotel will reach out to the Advisory Group after check-out for feedback and comments. Clement Charter Members will play a significant role in helping the hotel provide service and an overall guest experience that is second to none.

 25% off in Monterey. Clement Charter Members are entitled to 25% off room rates Sunday through Friday at The Clement's sister property, InterContinental The Clement Monterey.



While unparalleled service is key to any great luxury hotel, The Clement Palo Alto takes its impeccable service to another level with an all-inclusive concept, including personalized concierge services, breakfast, lunch and dinner in an on-premise location of the guest's choice.



All wine, beer and cocktails, in-room mini-refrigerator (stocked with the guest's favorites), and fully-stocked Guest Pantry available around the clock, are just a few of the amenities included in this all-inclusive experience.



In fact, The Clement Palo Alto is more than all-inclusive, it is all-exclusive, catering exclusively to the guest's personal tastes and desires.



No detail has been overlooked at The Clement Hotel, from the guest's favorite sparkling water and snacks in the mini-fridge to the plush Stearns & Foster European pillow top California King beds with luxurious Frette bed linens.



The moment guests arrive at the front door, they will step into an oasis of sophistication, service and comfort. Instead of the typical lobby and registration desk of most hotels, guests at The Clement Palo Alto will be greeted by their own Personal Concierge.



This Personal Concierge will have an iPad with all the pertinent information about the guests, including their wants and needs, and take them directly to their rooms. The Personal Concierge will take care of the guests for the duration of their stay and take care of all their personal needs.



During their stay, guests can have breakfast, lunch and dinner prepared in The Kitchen, the hotel's open kitchen, with an executive chef presiding over the menu tailored to their tastes and requirements. Guests can dine in The Dining Room, the outdoor Dining Terrace, the privacy of their guest suite, or in a private cabana on the private roof-top pool deck overlooking the picturesque Stanford University campus.



Guests also have access to the beautifully appointed communal guest kitchen, which is similar to a high-end residential kitchen, with access to a fully stocked guest pantry that is available around the clock.



The 650-square-foot, one-bedroom suites offer modern and sophisticated comfort reflecting the Northern California lifestyle. Each suite provides an intuitive layout with an array of carefully curated amenities to enhance the guest's stay. State-of-the-art technology is combined with comfort of the highest quality, such as sumptuous Frette linens, 65-inch Samsung Smart TVs, Nespresso Vertuoline coffee machines, and fully stocked in-room refrigerators.



Spacious stone-lined bathrooms include a soaking tub and a separate glass-enclosed shower, lighted makeup mirrors at a dry vanity area, and a TV behind the mirrors, just a few of the features that will delight their senses.



Other luxurious touches include remote-controlled motorized draperies, a desk fully stocked with office supplies and a connectivity panel for Internet and charging, robe options and slippers of the guest's choice in the spacious closets.



The common areas of the hotel feature the elegant Living Room, which is accented with a stone fireplace and is the perfect location to relax with a favorite cocktail or glass of wine. Or they can enjoy the firepit on the outdoor Dining Terrace or at the roof-top deck with a swimming pool, whirlpool and private cabanas.



In addition, there is a fully equipped exercise room on the second floor of the hotel available to guests 24 hours.

The interior design of The Clement Palo Alto was created by Stanford Hughes of the renowned, award-winning San Francisco hotel design firm Brayton Hughes Design Studios.



The Clement Palo Alto is ideally located across from Stanford University and next to downtown Palo Alto, with its award-winning restaurants, world-class shopping and upscale spas. It is just 45 minutes south of San Francisco and only 30 minutes north of San Jose, not only making it convenient, but easily accessible to the world-famous sights and myriad activities of both cities.



Overall, The Clement Palo Alto offers a unique, one-of-a-kind 6-star experience in the heart of Silicon Valley with unparalleled personal service, all-inclusive luxury and privacy in a warm, inviting and luxurious residential environment.



About Pacific Hotel Management, LLC

The Clement Hotel is owned and managed by Pacific Hotel Management, LLC. Pacific Hotel Management, LLC. is a privately-owned company that specializes in the development and management of high quality hotels using a variety of franchise brands. Pacific Hotel Management, LLC (PHM) manages all of the hotels owned by affiliates of Clement Chen & Associates, combining a focused corporate administrative staff with a "hands-on" management philosophy to operate profitable, well-maintained hotels. PHM is based in San Mateo, California, and can be visited on the Web at www.phmhotels.com.



The Clement Hotel

711 El Camino Real

Palo Alto, California 94301

650.322.7111

www.theclementpaloalto.com



Contact:

Marci Bracco Cain

Chatterbox PR

Salinas, CA 93901

(831) 747-7455

http://www.theclementpaloalto.com ### Please contact the person or company listed above for information regarding the content of this press release. TravPR.com are not the issuers of this press release and are not responsible for the accuracy of the content. Share Release :



CONTACT INFORMATION Name: Marci Bracco Cain Company: Chatterbox PR Phone: (831) 747-7455 Email: pr@straightlinepr.com Web: PRESS RELEASE TAGS
Tucan Travel are delighted to announce the opening of their new sales office in Toronto this month.



(TRAVPR.COM) CANADA - April 19th, 2016 - Tucan Travel are delighted to announce the opening of their new sales office in Toronto this month.

With sales offices already in London, Sydney and Cuzco, the Toronto office has been set up to better serve the Canadian clients and to show Tucan Travels commitment to the growing market in North America.

Established in 1987, Tucan Travel has had a long history of providing group travel to the North American market with Canadians and Americans being some of the first to experience Tucan Travels group tours in South America. Today, North American bookings make up approximately 15% of all sales with the rest coming from Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Europe and while it varies each month, over half of their bookings are made through travel agents.

Tony Perdomo, Director of North America, is quoted, At Tucan Travel, every agent and their clients are important to us. The opening of our office in Toronto is an exciting step for a growing company. We have had an office in Cuzco for a few years serving the North American market. With the opening of the office, we now have a TICO certification and also to become members with ACTA. By taking this step, we going to expand our presence in the Canadian market and offer a better customer service for agents and clients alike.

To celebrate the opening of the Toronto office, Tucan Travel will also be offering travel agents the chance to win a two week trip for two to Costa Rica. One of their most popular destinations, Canadian travel agents will automatically be entered to win for every client that they book onto a Tucan Travel group tour up until the end of May. The more people they book onto Tucan Travels trips, the more times they are entered to win. With competitive commission structures, this competition is open to any travel agent based in Canada.

For more information on the competition click here.

Tucan Travel can be reached at 1-855-566-8660 and by emailing adventures@tucantravel.com, and they are open 24 hours, Monday to Friday, and limited hours on Saturday.

###
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 19

A chargesheet was filed against the Medical Superintendent (MS) of PGIMER Dr AK Gupta and a reply sought within 10 days.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had asked the PGI administration in February to take action against the institutes Medical Superintendent for allegedly disobeying the ministry orders and continuing a two-month-long assignment with the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Nepal in 2014.

Meanwhile, Dr Gupta remained unavailable for comments despite repeated attempts. When contacted, PGI public relations office expressed ignorance.

However, sources in PGI administration claim that Dr Gupta has been maintaining he went abroad with the permission of the PGI director.

Significantly, in December last year, the PGI administration was directed by the ministry to initiate action against Dr AK Gupta.

The case dates back to 2014 when Dr Gupta went to Nepal on a WHO assignment for two months. During a meeting of the PGI governing body, the then health minister Harsh Vardhan emphasised that the MS of PGI could not take long leave without the consent of the governing body.

In the letter sent to the PGI the ministry had said Dr Gupta continued the assignment in spite of the then health ministers disapproval. It directed that regular departmental proceedings might be initiated. Despite repeated attempts, Deputy Director (Administration) Amitabh Avasthi and Director Dr Yogesh Chawla could not be contacted.
Satinder Pal Singh

Dera Bassi, April 18

The mysterious behind the death of 22- year-old Kamaljeet Kaur deepened when residents of Tasimbli village here told the police that she died of natural causes.

Bharat Bhushan, in-charge of the Handesera police post, said area residents denied that Kamaljeet was harassed or physically assaulted by her in-laws. The villagers said though her husband Gurbir Singh was a drug addict, they never heard or seen them fighting over dowry or any other serious issue, Bharat Bhushan said.

Bhushan further added that the next course of action could only be decided after the viscera report was received. A case has already been registered against her husband Gurbir and his parents following a complaint lodged by the deceaseds father on April 17 at the Handesera police post, he added.

Kamaljeets family has alleged that their daughter was killed by her in-laws.  Though a post-mortem was conducted by a panel of doctors at the Civil Hospital, Dera Bassi, on April 17, Kamaljeets family members expressed dissatisfaction over the report following which the body was taken to the Rajindra Hospital, Patiala for the autopsy, Bhushan said.

Kamaljeet was found dead at her house in Tasimbli village under mysterious circumstances. She married Gurbir Singh five months ago.
Tribune News Service

Mohali, April 18

A Delhi-based liquor barons son, who is pursuing business management studies at Geneva in Switzerland, was arrested by the Mohali police for posing as an SSP. One of his nine private security guards escorting the imposter was also arrested for possessing illegal arms and ammunition. While the fake SSP, identified as Parth Wadia (23), son of Ashok Wadia, was released on bail, his security guard was sent to judicial custody. The remaining accused also got bail in the case.

Giving details, Inspector Lakhwinder Singh, SHO of the Phase VIII police station, said a security guard bragged about Parth Wadia, claiming that he was an SSP, when the police asked him about his identity at a naka around the PCA Stadium for an IPL match here yesterday.

The police booked Parth and his nine bouncers under Sections 419, 120 B and 177 of the IPC at the Phase VIII police station and arrested all of them.

Inspector Lakhwinder Singh said Parth was driving his swanky Porche car, bearing the registration number CHS 7, behind his private security guards Gypsy (PIP 8) and a Safari vehicle (DL 9LX 9999) when he was stopped by the police at the naka. They were going to the stadium to watch the match.

Asked about the identity of the youngster, one of the security guards told us that he was an SSP. When we enquired further, all of them sped away in their vehicles from the spot, said the SHO, adding that all of them were nabbed at the next naka.

During a search, one of a security guards, Jatinder Kumar, was found possessing a .32-bore revolver with an arms licence from Uttar Pradesh. Inspector Lakhwinder Singh said as the licence in question was invalid here, Jatinder Kumar had also been booked under the Arms Act. While nine accused, including Parth, were later released on bail, Jatinder Kumar was remanded in judicial custody.

Not related to Ness Wadia: Police

As the key accused shares his surname with IPL Kings XI co-owner Ness Wadia, rumours were rife that he was related to the business tycoon. However, the police dismissed the rumours, claiming that he was not related to Ness Wadia.
Gen V P Malik (retd)

All supreme leaders of China have either been generals or political entities in the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). But unlike his predecessors, Xi Jinping has taken much greater interest in matters military. Within days of taking over, Xi made high-profile visits to many army, air force, space programme and missile command facilities. Speaking to sailors on board the Haikou, a guided-missile destroyer, he said that his dream was of China to become a strong nation, and added, To achieve the great revival of the Chinese nation, we must ensure there is unison between a prosperous country and a strong military.

Xi unveiled his plans to transform the PLA in the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on November 12, 2013. The first phase has been completed. The remaining changes are expected to be completed by 2021. The military reforms on the one hand are to transform the land-focused PLA into a well-trained, technologically capable, specialised force to meet the demands of the future battlefield. That would lead to effective integration of the civil-military leadership, restructuring the military and its force level, and the teeth-to-tail ratio. On the other hand, it involves some reshuffle of authority, aimed at enforcing discipline and getting a firmer grip on the military.

In recent years, several instances of corruption in the PLA have been reported in the Chinese media: the worst hit being the system of promotion. Two former vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission (CMC), Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou, were arrested and imprisoned. According to reports, 47 PLA generals were investigated in 2015. As one military expert noted, If you have a military where you can buy positions, it doesn't matter if you have the best weapons in the world.

The anti-corruption campaign needed to focus on the issues of military discipline, inspections, audit and an independent judicial supervision. A new Commission for Discipline Inspection is being set up under the CMC to ensure strict discipline within the PLA.

Xi has ordered the PLA to change its culture and adopt a style of frugality and austerity because ostentatious habits kill professionalism! Ten Regulations on Improving the Work Style of the PLA have formally banned liquor at PLA functions, forbade holding of big banquets and called on the PLA brass to adopt a simple style in their inspection tours. Senior officers have been told to spend two weeks on the frontline as enlisted soldiers. Regiment and brigade commanders will do this once in three years, the division and corps commanders once in four years, and higher leaders from higher headquarters once in five years.

More important changes are those related to the PLA command and control organisation, its employment and doctrine. In China, the CMC is the highest military body which exercises command and control over the PLA forces through four general departments-General Staff, Politics, Logistics, and Armament. These departments are now to be replaced by 15 new departments, signalling a more direct control.

Earlier, the General Staff Department (GSD) was the number one organ of the armed forces, in charge of operations as well as intelligence. It commanded the army, through which it controlled seven military regions across the country. The GSD has now become the Joint General Staff Department, to function purely as a staff organisation, similar to the joint chiefs of staff system of the USA.

The PLA ground forces will now become a separate service. This marks the reduction of the power of the ground forces but some improvement of command and control within the army. The erstwhile Second Artillery Corps in its new avatar will become the Rocket Force and will control all short, medium and long range ballistic missiles. The General Political Department has transferred control of the military legal system to the new Law Commission.

The General Armaments Department was responsible for developing military equipment and managing aviation units. The responsibility for development of new military equipment has now been distributed to the four armed forces.

A new Strategic Support Force (SSF) has been created to work on integrated air and aerospace developments and strategy. The SSF will be responsible for satellite positioning, communication, and remote sensing. The precise delineation of responsibilities between the SSF and the PLA Air Force is yet to be seen.

The existing Chinese command system involves seven Military Regions, headquartered in Shenyang, Beijing, Jinan, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Lanzhou. The Military Region structure is being redrawn. Instead, Integrated Battle Zone commands with increased focus on combat will be established through joint operations command and ability. For a combat mission to be effectively executed, the commander of a battle zone has to be entrusted with the authority and discretion to mobilise troops within his area of responsibility. This will enhance overall joint operations capability of the forces involved and also improve development of joint as well as cross-region air and naval operations when required.

In the new set-up, the CMC will take direct charge of the administration of the PLA. The 'CMC-battle zone-troops' system will ensure closer, more effective political leadership of the armed forces. The service headquarters of the army, air force, navy and the rocket force will be detached. Their task will be to provision and train their respective forces.

The reforms envisage a cut of 300,000 personnel in the 2.3 million PLA forces. The idea is to 'remake the PLA from a man-power intensive force to a smaller, technologically able and mobile force capable of combat beyond its geographical borders'. The proportion and force structure of different forces will be streamlined to suit new security needs and operations.

The PLA transformation is in line with the current security concepts and trends. It reflects mission-oriented operational thinking, enhanced deterrence capability, and preparedness to play a role beyond geographic frontiers, when required.

In India, we had discussed such issues in the Group of Ministers (2002) and the Naresh Chandra Committee (2011-12), though not as comprehensively. But our political leadership, civil bureaucracy in the Ministry of Defence and the Service headquarters have managed to stall recommended reforms due to lack of military education and/or parochial interests.

The over-riding lesson that the Chinese process offers is the important role of political leadership in the military reform process. No transformative change can take place in the military of any society  democratic or authoritarian-without the direct involvement of the political class. As this important task can no longer be postponed in India, I hope that Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, who began his three-day visit to China on April 18, 2016, will find time to learn from the Chinese example.

 The writer is a former Army Chief
Abhinav Vashisht

Kullu, April 18

Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh said the state needed liberal Central funds for alternative cropping to tackle the problem of drug trafficking, illegal cannabis and poppy cultivation.

He was addressing mediapersons at the inauguration of three-day conference on Drug problem in Himachal Pradesh organised by the Institute of Narcotics Studies and Analysis (INSA) at Dev Sadan here today.

The Chief Minister said the nexus between the drug mafia and traffickers needed to be dealt with heavy hand. Drug abuse and trafficking had become a serious issue. The law-enforcement agencies should curb inter-state drug trafficking. He said a few regions in the state were known for the cultivation of opium and poppy but growing fruit or other cash crops as a substitute crop in such areas led to transformation in the cultivation pattern.

As per report, an estimated 1.87 crore deaths were reported due to drugs in 2013 and the figures were much more than reported, the Chief Minister said.

He said the population of India had reached over 1 billion and the country was growing at a rapid pace.

Earlier Devendar Dutt, secretary, INSA, welcomed the Chief Minister.

He said the conference was being organised with an active support from the Centres agency  the National Fund for Control of Drug Abuse (NFCDA).

Rural Development Minister Anil Sharma, Kullu MLA Maheshwar Singh, Wool Federation chairman Raghubir Singh Thakur, former minister Satya Prakash Thakur, State Congress Committee general secretary Sunder Singh Thakur, HIMBUNKAR chairman Tehal Singh Rana, DCC president BS Thakur, Superintendent of Customs and former superintendent of Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) OP Sharma, Information and Public Relations director Dr MP Sood, INSA members Jogendra Singh and Anil Sharma were also present on the occasion.

1.87 crore deaths reported in 2013
Moscow, April 18

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today met her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and raised issues of killing of an Indian and the death of two Indian girl students in a fire tragedy in the country besides discussing key bilateral matters.

EAM (External Affairs Minister) raised the cases of Indian nationals Yasir Jawed (who was killed in Kazan) and Puja Kallur and Karishma Udai Bhosle (who died during a fire at the Smolensk State Medical Academy). FM Lavrov briefed on the progress of the investigations, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

Swaraj enquired about the progress of investigation into the killing of Javed, a businessman from Srinagar who died in Russia's Kazan city last month following an attack on him by a group of local goons.  PTI
Haridwar, April 19

Shankaracharya of Dwarka Peeth Swaroopanand Saraswati today waded into yet another controversy with comments that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj's choice of clothes during her Iran visit delivered a "blow" to India's prestige.

Swaroopanand said Swaraj chose to wear outfits that catered to Iranian sensibilities but neglected India's tradition.

"Swaraj wrote outfits in Iran which followed the Iranian tradition and went against our own traditions. She thus delivered a blow to India's prestige abroad," he said.

He compared Swaraj with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who always wore clothes that reflected her "Indianness" during foreign visits.

"Unlike her, Indira Gandhi on her foreign visits took great care to ensure that her Indianness reflects in her clothes and conduct," the Shankaracharya said.

Known to court controversies, Swami had recently said entry of women into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra would lead to increase in crimes like rape against them.  PTI
Beirut, April 19

Air strikes on a vegetable market in opposition-held northwest Syria killed around 40 people and wounded dozens on Tuesday, a rebel commander, rescue worker and war monitor said.

It was not clear if the air strikes were carried out by Syrian or Russian warplanes that have been deployed to Syria to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The rescue worker said 38 people were killed in the town of Maarat al-Numan in the insurgent stronghold of Idlib province, and said 10 people were also killed in an air strike on the nearby town of Kafr Nubl.

"We have more than 20 cars that have been moving dead and injured to hospitals in the area," said Ahmad Sheikho, a member of the civil defence corps, a rescue service operating in opposition-held territory.

"The air strike at the central vegetable market in (Maarat al-Numan) was around noon. Another strike at the same time hit Kafr Nubl's own market," Sheikho said

Ahmed al-Seoud, head of the 13th Division, a foreign-backed faction fighting under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army, told Reuters the air strikes hit the main vegetable market, killing around 40 people and wounding around 80.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said 37 people were killed in Maarat al-Numan and seven were killed in Kafr Nubl.

Many of the injured are in a serious condition and the death toll is expected to rise, the Observatory said.

The Syrian military could not immediately be reached for comment, and state news agency SANA made no mention of air strikes in Idlib.

UN battles to save Syria peace talks

The UN was struggling to keep troubled Syria peace negotiations on track, as the opposition suspended its "formal participation" in the talks in protest at escalating violence on the ground.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Barack Obama meanwhile agreed to help strengthen a fragile ceasefire in Syria, seen as essential to paving the way towards a lasting deal to end the bloodshed.

With fighting surging around Syria's second city Aleppo and negotiations in Geneva stalled over the fate of President Bashar al-Assad, the opposition said they had had enough.

"Since these talks began in Geneva, the Assad regime has worsened the situation on the ground," Salem al-Meslet of the main opposition High Negotiations Committee said in a statement.

The group said the talks must be placed on "brief hold in order to end the Assad regime's truce violations", accusing the regime of more than 2,000 violations of the ceasefire since it began on February 27.

"The HNC remains fully committed to the political process and establishing peace through diplomacy," Meslet said. "We remain in Geneva ready to engage in serious talks." HNC coordinator Riad Hijab said earlier it was "unacceptable" for the negotiations to continue while Assad's regime continues to "bombard and starve civilians" in Syria.

The regime responded by accusing Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar  all backers of the opposition  of seeking to derail the negotiations.

"The Saudi, Turkish and Qatari sponsors do not want to stop the bloodbath in Syria and do not want a political solution in Syria," the regime's lead negotiator in Geneva, Bashar al-Jaafari, said in an interview late yesterday with Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen.

Jaafari added that the opposition and the countries that support it are "annoyed because of the progress being made by the Syrian army on the ground".

But UN peace envoy Staffan de Mistura insisted the ongoing round of indirect discussions, which began on April 13, would continue through the week as planned.

The HNC may continue to meet UN staff at their hotel "to pursue technical discussions", including on a political transition in Syria, de Mistura said.

The UN envoy stressed that the indirect talks format  which has seen the HNC and Assad's representatives meet separately with UN mediators  created flexibility to continue the discussions.

But the opposition's announcement is a clear blow to the already precarious negotiations aimed at achieving political transition, a new constitution, and presidential and parliamentary elections by September 2017.

The landmark ceasefire negotiated by Russia and the US in February dramatically curtailed violence across much of Syria, raising hopes that a lasting deal could be struck to end the five-year civil war.  AFP
Islamabad, April 19

Pakistan government relaxed the rules to allow former military dictator Pervez Musharraf to go abroad, a special court hearing the high treason case against him was told today.

Musharraf (72) was allowed in February to go to the UAE for medical treatment, angering the special three-member tribunal hearing the case against him for suspending the constitution in 2007.

If found guilty, he can be sent to the gallows.

Maj Gen (retd.) Rashid Qureshi, who had given surety bonds for Musharraf's bail in the case, in an application said that the federal government failed to use powers to restrict the movement of the accused, the Dawn reported.

Qureshi insisted that he was not solely responsible for regulating the movement of his former boss, and the government was also involved in it.

"Exit from Pakistan (Control) Rules 2010 provide a complete mechanism for the situation, which needs to restrict movement of any person from going abroad," it said.

However, the federal government did not invoke the relevant provisions of the rules to stop Musharraf from leaving the country, the application claimed.

It noted that the superior judiciary "did not put any restriction on the movement of the accused in spite of having full and complete knowledge of the order of the special court".

In February, the court had summoned Musharraf to record his statement, but he left Pakistan the following month after the government removed his name from the exit control list.

Qurehi said that he "is a retired army officer who stood surety in consideration of sympathy, kindness and fear of God and he has not gained any monetary benefit from the accused (Gen Musharraf) in any manner whatsoever. He has no other income but only limited resources including the property he rendered as the bond of the accused."

He requested the court not to forfeit the property he had pledged as surety bond for the accused.

During proceedings on March 31, the special court had remarked that in case Musharraf did not appear, the court may order the surety bond as forfeit.

The defence team also filed another application, asking it to dispense with the personal attendance of Musharraf, saying he would return after his recovery.  PTI
Last month, the Tulsa World and the Oklahoma Weekly Group partnered with Reach Out & Read in a month-long book drive to collect books for children aged birth-5 years old.

I wanted to take a moment to sincerely thank the Skiatook community for their generosity. Because of you, the Skiatook Journal was able to contribute 418 books to the drive

In total between the Tulsa World, the Skiatook Journal. the Broken Arrow Ledger, the Sand Springs Leader, the Wagoner Tribune, the Coweta American, the Owasso Reporter, and an event with Just Between Friends, we raised 2,947 books which will be distributed to area clinics in Tulsa and the greater Tulsa area where they will get into the hands of children & parents who need them most.

Samantha Extance, the Tulsa World event coordinator said, While there are many places to check out books to read, your local library and school, there is something about owning a bookbeing able to take it off the shelf anytime you want, to draw in it, to write in it, to read it with your parents or friendsit allows you to dream.

Your generosity will help bring families together as they read to their children. You will help children who wouldnt have had books at home be better prepared when they start school. You have helped the next generation jump-start their education.

Thank you for you time and your donations, but most importantly, thank you for being a community that is always willing to give to others.
It must have been fate putting Eva Radana Jinek in front of a camera when she took her first breath.

The Tulsa World was in the delivery room with her parents 37 years ago. It was to be a natural birth, which was uncommon in America at the time. Her Czech mother insisted, so the labor was documented.

In the last few minutes, the atmosphere becomes feverish, rushed. Suddenly, it is quiet. At 2:37 p.m., two tiny, never-before-tried lungs, force out their first breath of air, and with it a great loud cry, and the universe resounds with the joyful cry, I am, wrote medical writer Janet Pearson, quoting Russian composer Alexander Scriabin.

The Tulsa World published a photo essay by J.R. Jones that featured the 7 pound, 11 ounce baby getting measured, weighed, evaluated by doctors and put into the arms of her parents.

Jinek went on to become a celebrity television host in Holland. Pearson will be inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame later this month. Jones left the Tulsa World photo job after two decades to become an artist and art historian, living in Europe for 19 years. He is now in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, running a gallery.

On Monday, Jinek and Jones met in the Tulsa World newsroom for a reunion. Jones burst into tears.

I cried then, and Im crying now, Jones said. It was so intense. It was a big deal. You have no idea how much of a big of deal that was. Seeing you come into the world was seeing this angel child. It just took me away. I never saw anything so beautiful in my life.

This is from a photographer who captured Elvis on film in front of the Mayo Hotel. He was there when Eric Clapton and George Harrison recorded with Tulsas Leon Russell, with whom Jones has remained friends. He was part of chronicling Tulsas music scene and city growth from the late 60s to about 1980.

Yet, it was that babys birth he remembers in detail and with such emotion.

Its wonderful to be here today and see you, Jones said while wiping away tears. I was 22 years old, and Im witnessing something amazing. It was a marvelous moment in my life.

Im American and Im European: Jinek and a film crew have been driving and flying their way across the country, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. She is examining different aspects of America as a lead-up to the November presidential election. Issues include opinions on race and freedom.

The goal is to figure out what makes Americans tick, what are they bringing to their choices in the election? Jinek said. In Tulsa, this is my personal story. Is it the same as I remember as a child? I remember America as being nice and open.

Driving into Tulsa from Texas brought some depressing scenes  cluttered yards, ramshackle homes and small towns with struggling businesses. Then, Tulsa dazzled.

I am surprised at what is going on in downtown Tulsa, she said. Here the people are so enthusiastic. There is great music and nightlife. What is being done to rejuvenate downtown is incredible and wonderful. We were just thinking that we could live in Tulsa for a couple of months.

Meeting at a downtown coffee shop for an interview, she noted the hipster vibe.

Ive seen more man buns here than at any place in Amsterdam. And Amsterdam has a lot of hipsters, she jokes. Im American and Im European. Its good to be back.

Jineks parents  Paul and Radana Jinek  fled Czechoslovakia in 1968 from the invading Soviet Union. They moved to The Hague, Netherlands.

In 1977, the couple moved to Tulsa after Paul got a job with Cities Services international treasury. They had their first child (Jinek) the next year and her brother about 1 years later.

Her father spoke English but her mother did not. They enrolled in a public school night English language course for immigrants. They were the only Europeans in a class full of Vietnamese.

There, they met Gail Strassberger, who was an instructor. She became a friend of her mother and has sent a Christmas letter every year. The two met last weekend.

I dont know anyone from that time in my parents lives, and I had never met Gail. I wanted to find out more about what they were like, Jinek said. She remembered Mom always cooking, which she still does, and would come over every Tuesday. With two little children and no family around, Gail would help.

Strassberger took her to her former home in the Forest Oaks neighborhood. It was big, well-maintained and impressive. It looked like the American Dream of a home, with a pool, driveway and porch. But, its different than life in Holland.

In Amsterdam, you walk outside and people are there. You meet people on the streets. Here, I saw it would not be like that. My dad traveled a lot, and my mom felt isolated.

Jinek left Tulsa at age 2 with her family for Washington, D.C. At age 11, her parents decided to raise their family in Europe and moved to the Netherlands. It is where Jinek graduated from Leiden University after studying American history and going into the television news business.

She got started as a foreign editor of the Dutch public network news NOS Journaal, where she covered U.S. affairs. She then became an anchor and won attention for co-hosting Amerika Kiest (America Votes) on the U.S. presidential elections.

Now, she is the only woman with a late-night news and culture television program in the Netherlands. She thinks the American influence has shaped her success.

With a laugh, she references the full page of photos putting her in a public light at birth.

I want to thank the Tulsa World for putting me on this journey, Jinek said.

No, Im Okie: Jinek has kept that Tulsa World article in her home. Jones also made copies of photos that did not make it into publication.

Her favorite is one of her parents expressions as they saw her for the first time.

I remember the nurses talking about this crazy lady who didnt want any epidural or sedation, but your mom was so strong, Jones said. Your dad was this tough kind of guy.

He still is, and that was my mom being all European, Jinek said.

Jones asked if he could photograph Jinek each year as she grew up  a long-term project. He was turned down. Her father was worried that the attention might warp her upbringing.

So, here I am in front of a camera every day, Jinek said.

My parents are very proud of me, but this is not a life they choose for me. Before I came, my dad called to say I really didnt need to talk about them that much. I understand my parents and brother do not want to live so publicly.

Jinek has been wearing a pair of boots she picked up in San Antonio, Texas. I mentioned she might change when arriving in Washington.

No, Im Okie, she said, lifting her heel to the air. Im going to keep them on. I was born in Tulsa and am proud of that. For me, this is very special.
OKLAHOMA CITY  Several organizations, including the Oklahoma City Thunder, sent Senate Pro Tem Brian Bingman a letter opposing two gun bills pending before the upper chamber.

House Bill 3098 would allow people to openly carry firearms without a permit.

House Joint Resolution 1009 would let voters decide to amend the state constitution to make it more difficult for lawmakers to put regulations on gun ownership.

The organizations said they had significant concern with the two measures.

If enacted, the measures would jeopardize the rights of businesses to keep guns from being carried onto their private properties, the letter states.

The measures would also jeopardize the rights of those hosting events at public parks, recreational areas and fairgrounds, and impact events financially, the undated letter says.

In addition, the measure would jeopardize the ability of colleges to prohibit guns on campus, the letter says.

Finally, the legislation would lessen the ability of law enforcement officials to protect the publics safety, the letter says.

Until these issues can be addressed, we ask that these measures not move forward in the Senate, it says.

Organizations signing the letter include the Oklahoma State Troopers Association, Oklahoma State Fairgrounds, City of Oklahoma City, University of Oklahoma, State Chamber of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, Tulsa Regional Chamber, Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, Oklahoma Hospital Association, Oklahoma Municipal League, Oklahoma Bankers Association and the Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association.

A spokeswoman from the National Rifle Association said in a statement that this resolution would allow Oklahomans to strengthen the state constitutional protections for gun rights.

This improved amendment would make it crystal clear that Oklahomans have the right to use a firearm for personal defense, hunting, and recreational shooting, spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen said.

Sen. David Holt, R-Oklahoma City, said he had concerns that the House Joint Resolution, if passed and approved by voters, would have unintended consequences.

Weapons are not allowed in Chesapeake Energy Arena, where the Oklahoma City Thunder plays its home games. Approval of House Joint Resolution could nullify the state law prohibiting guns in the arena, he said.

The Thunder has been an incredible boon to the state, Holt said.

Holt said he could not support a measure that could cause the NBA to leave the state.

Sen. Nathan Dahm, R-Broken Arrow, said House Bill 3098, the open carry measure, would not allow for the open carrying of weapons where it is currently prohibited, such as college campuses and private businesses.

Senators have heard from Oklahomans who support the bills and also have heard the concerns that some have with the measures, said Bingman, R-Sapulpa. The Senate has until Thursday to consider these two bills and, until then, senators will continue to review the bills and their merits in anticipation of their consideration.
Dear Doctor K: A while back, you commented on a study that said getting cancer was mainly caused by bad luck. You said you thought the study was wrong. Then recently, I heard that another study agreed with you. Can you explain?

Dear Reader: In April 2015, I responded to a question about a study from a famous cancer researcher. The media had interpreted the study to say that getting cancer was just a matter of bad luck. In other words, there was not much people could do to protect themselves against getting cancer.

As I read the original study, I thought its main point was to explain why cancer affects certain organs more than other organs. The authors did say that certain types of cancer clearly were caused by factors a person could control. For example, not smoking greatly reduces the risk of lung (and several other) cancers. However, the way the study was presented led the media to conclude otherwise.

The paper created a firestorm among cancer researchers. Thats because a lot of time and money are spent on cancer prevention programs. If getting cancer is just a matter of bad luck and cant be prevented, then why bother trying to prevent it?

As you say, a new paper on this topic has just been published. It argues strongly that many cancers are caused by factors in the environment that can be controlled. The study concludes that only a small fraction of cancers are caused by factors such as defective genes (bad luck).

Sometimes genes that we inherit from our parents cause cancer. An example is the BRCA1 gene that causes some cases of breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Some people have the bad luck to inherit this gene. However, that doesnt mean there is nothing a person can do about it. It is possible to test a person to see if they have inherited this gene. If so, the risk of cancer caused by the gene can be greatly reduced by careful monitoring and, if necessary, surgery.

The new paper concludes that 70 percent to 90 percent of cancers are caused by factors in the environment such as tobacco smoke, alcohol and sun exposure. This includes such common cancers as lung, colon, melanoma, stomach and prostate cancers.

It also includes somewhat less common cancers. For example, the paper cites studies finding that 75 percent of cases of esophageal cancer are caused by tobacco and excessive intake of alcoholic beverages. It estimates that the human papilloma virus causes 90 percent of cases of cervical and anal cancer. It concludes that infection of the liver by hepatitis B or hepatitis C viruses causes 80 percent of liver cancer.

By avoiding risk factors (like smoking and excessive sun exposure), by being tested for cancer-causing infections (like human papilloma virus) and by getting other cancer-screening tests, you can protect yourself.

As I said in my column last April, we can control our fate, though not completely. Thats true of minimizing our risk of cancer, as well. Cancer is not just a matter of bad luck.
Former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett says Ex-Liberal Treasurer-turned Nine Network Chairman, Peter Costello, must show some leadership over the 60 Minutes debacle in Lebanon.

Kennett, who acknowledges he is a director of Seven West Media and an intermittent contributor to the Sunrise program, has penned an opinion piece in the Herald Sun.

I cannot believe that no one at Channel 9, as I write this, has been publicly held accountable, he writes.

Every aspect of good governance has and is being ignored and denied by those in positions of authority.

The board of Channel 9, now led by Peter Costello, must take control and exercise accountability regardless of what position these people may hold.

Only a public act of such accountability can help those Channel 9 staff members being held in custody in Lebanon.

Kennett says several media organisations were offered the Sally Faulkner story but declined.

He feels sorry for Sally Faulkner, and the Nine crew.

But knowingly they knew the risks they were taking. That they were part of a covert action to break the law in another country

But where is there any acceptance of responsibility by Channel 9 that might actually help secure the release of their employees quicker than is occurring?

Nine has previously stated it is working relentlessly to bring the crew home, with a Lebanese legal team, and support from Australian diplomatic representatives in Lebanon, and DFAT officials in Canberra.

The case returns to court in Beirut today.
In news that will surprise nobody, Nine has again pulled Worlds Worst Prisons from its schedule.

The UK series sees a journalist go behind bars to report on the grim conditions of incarceration.

It initially scheduled the show for last Sunday night, before rescheduling it this week (on the same night as 60 Minutes no less). While it has reinserted President Trump: Can He Really Win? it will replace Worlds Worst Prisons with a repeat of a documentary on the Ku Klux Klan.

If things get any worse in Lebanon these Nine titles currently scheduled could be next in the firing line: I Am Innocent, Major Crimes, Prime Suspect, Fugitive: Black Ops, Underbelly.
In 2014 comedian Ronny Chieng was pretty lucky to be approached by the ABC to develop his own sitcom.

It was a mission he gladly accepted.

And then he threw out everyones suggestions to come up with Ronny Chieng: International Student.

I feel like sitcoms with stand-up material in them had been done. That was the natural inclination by everyone around me: producers and TV execs said, Hey you should put your stand-up in and then cut-away from that,' he tells TV Tonight.

Initially my struggle was to be a stand-up in Melbourne while doing University. But sometimes you can get caught up in your own world. No-one really gives a f*** about stand-up comics. Its not relatable because no-one really does that.

The result is a comedy based on his experience studying Law and Commerce at Melbourne University. On screen as a Malaysian student he appears smart, driven and competitive, but finds himself as an outsider amid beer-drinking Australians -and even the Mahjong-playing Asians or the blazer-wearing intellects.

The only story I felt I could tell that other people couldnt, the only thing unique in terms of television, was the international student perspective. Its kind of under-represented in television. They make up a huge part of the community in Melbourne. At least temporarily, until they go back home, he says.

My friends came here, studied and left. It was almost like a dream.

Chieng has an atlas of life-experience within him: born in Malaysia, raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, the US and Singapore. But he has no problem in being claimed more locally either.

You can say Aussie Comedian because I started comedy here. So all my comic sensibilities are informed, and continue to be informed, by Australia. Specifically, Melbourne. Im sure you know the stylistic differences between Melbourne and Sydney. Melbourne is a little bit more formal and self-indulgent. So Im very much informed by a festival-style of comedy.

International Student, the first of 6 new Pilots in ABCs Comedy Showroom initiative, was co-written with writer Declan Fay (The Chaser, Rove, Problems, Dirty Laundry Live). Produced by Sticky Pictures, it also features Molly Daniels, Hoa Xuande, Dave Eastgate, Laurence Boxhall and Felicity Ward. It is produced by Donna Andrews and directed by Jonathan Brough.

Pilots are so difficult because you have to set up the universe and tell a story. So youre juggling so many balls, Chieng explains.

We had all these ideas and we had to squeeze them all into the Pilot because we thought we might not get a second chance. So lets not save any bullets in the chamber!

If nothing else its a cool learning experience.

I dont think you have to be a student to like it, or Asian to like it.

One of the 6 new comedies will proceed to a full season, based on audience feedback via iview. It puts a slightly competitive edge into the initiative, something of a dilemma for Chieng who knows 4 of the other comedians hoping for good news. Hes not sure Presidential-style campaigning for votes is really his thang.

We put our heart and soul into the Pilot so you hope people like it. But I cant beg people to like it. Its just not in my DNA! he laughs.

(Im more) I hope you guys like this, but if its not good enough I can accept it.

As far as I know Australia has never had a Pilot season. So its cool to give 6 people a chance to tell their stories and see which ones are most likely to be made into a series.

But I dont think you have to be a student to like it, or Asian to like it. It captures that time where youre growing up and you think you know what youre doing, but you actually dont.

Im pretty sure it was Trevor Noah

Chieng must know something about what hes doing. His star continues to rise following an invitation by US-based comedian Trevor Noah to be a regular on the much-lauded Daily Show.

Im very honoured. Its a very important show, if I do say so myself. I dont want to get caught in the hubris of how important comedy is but its important, especially at this time during elections. It plays an important function in pop culture, he explains.

No matter who you are, you want your work to matter. Whether youre a construction worker, chef, or whatever it is you do.

Being on this show Im very fortunate to feel like everything we do, matters. We put holes in peoples arguments or change peoples opinions or (get them to) question things. I couldnt ask for a better job in Comedy.

Since joining the Comedy Central show, Chieng has moved to the US, and says the opportunity has completely changed his life.

Ive never worked in Television before at this level and pace. Ive only been doing stand-up for 7 years so Im still a baby. Its a very different skill-set being a correspondent on The Daily Show doing on camera-stuff as well as writing your own segments, he says.

Im lucky I have the benefit of working with people who are very experienced at what they do. So they help me to look good.

And despite jumping at the chance, the humble Chieng concedes he hasnt actually asked anybody how he came to be considered for the show. For real.

I havent asked him directly, but Im pretty sure it was Trevor Noah, he ponders.

I did a Gala with him in Montreal 3 years ago. He was very friendly to me, but then we didnt speak for 2 years. So Im pretty sure he asked them to audition me.

What can I say? I struck the lottery, man!

Ronny Chieng: International Student premieres 9pm Wednesday April 27 on ABC

NB: All Comedy Showroom projects will be available on iview thereafter.
Veteran US actress Doris Roberts, best known for Everybody Loves Raymond, has died, aged 90.

She died in her sleep of natural causes on Sunday night.

Roberts played Ray Romanos (Raymond Barone) mother Marie on Everybody Loves Raymond from 1996  2005.

The role earned her seven Emmy nominations and four wins for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. She also won an Emmy for a guest appearance on St. Elsewhere and was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for the American Playhouse production of The Sunset Gang.

She began her acting career in the early 1950s on TVs Studio One, going on to on appear in The Naked City, Way Out, Ben Casey and The Defenders.

Amongst her many credits were All in the Family, Remington Steele, Desperate Housewives, The King of Queens, The Middle, Greys Anatomy, Law & Order: SVU, Alice, Barney Miller, Full House, Soap, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Film credits included A Lovely Way to Die, No Way to Treat a Lady, The Honeymoon Killers, Such Good Friends, Little Murders, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and the National Lampoons Christmas Vacation.



Her stage career includes numerous Broadway shows, including The Desk Set, Neil Simons The Last of the Red Hot Lovers and Terrence McNallys Bad Habits.

Roberts still has a film in post-production awaiting release, The Red Maple Leaf.

Source: Deadline
Keith Schneider, now at York University in Toronto, Ontario, will join the University's faculty as director of CBBI in August.

James Hoffman (left) points out some areas of note in a scanning image, with CBBI Manager John Christopher at the controls.

Robert Simons (center) cut the proverbial ribbon to open the Center for Biomedical and Brain Imaging, flanked by (left to right) Deputy Provost Charles Riordan, Prof. James Hoffman, Acting President Nancy Targett and Provost Domenico Grasso.

In his keynote address, Kenneth Norman, professor at the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute, talked about recent research using fMRI data.

The University of Delaware Center for Biomedical and Brain Imaging houses the first fMRI scanner in the state of Delaware. It has the capability to map the brain in action, as well as to provide remarkably detailed images of muscles, discs, bones and organs.

4:08 p.m., April 19, 2016--Research capacity at the University of Delaware took another long stride forward Friday with the opening of the Center for Biomedical and Brain Imaging, the second major facility added in as many months.

The new center, near the corner of Academy Street and East Delaware Avenue, holds a 3-Tesla magnet, nearly 14 tons in weight  a cutting-edge instrument that offers high-resolution images and the ability to do complex examination of brains, bones, and other biosystems and brings powerful new possibilities to UD's investigators.

The strong magnetic field made possible by the new super-conducting magnet combines with other features to enable the stability, pure signal, and consistent results needed for useful neuroimaging.

"It's absolutely the best tool for doing this type of science," said Kenneth Norman, a Princeton University professor who delivered a keynote address on his pioneering fMRI research before the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

"This is an incredibly exciting day for research at the University of Delaware," said Charles Riordan, deputy provost for research and scholarship. "This is a core facility  of value to every one of the seven colleges at this campus."

It was just a month ago that researchers cut the ribbon on the new University of Delaware Nanofabrication Facility. The UDNF, housed about a block away in the Harker Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Laboratory, is a nanoscale workshop that allows for the most intricate of maneuvers.

CBBI's powerful new magnet  the Siemens Magnetom Prisma  offers the latest in imaging technology and is especially exciting to those studying the brain because it provides images of real-time function, showing researchers exactly where neurons are most active at any given time.

"I'm very interested in understanding how reward interacts with attention and how it changes what we pay attention to," said Leeland Rogers of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, a graduate student in the Perception and Learning Lab of Timothy Vickery, assistant professor of psychological brain sciences. Vickery, a cognitive neuroscientist, has traveled routinely to College Park, Maryland, to use the fMRI at the University of Maryland in his research.

"It has been an incredible experience already working with Tim," Rogers said. "We're all kind of learning it together. There's a big sense of community."

No exposure to radiation or shots or other chemicals is necessary in fMRI. It is non-invasive, accomplished by the powerful magnetic field that interacts with radio waves and allows researchers to see the changes in neural activity as a person views images or performs tasks.

The instrument measures blood flow, which is correlated with neural activity. More oxygen is needed in areas where neural activity is high  and blood with higher oxygen levels has different magnetic properties than blood with lower oxygen levels.

That doesn't mean a researcher can read your mind once you slide into the machine's bore, almost two feet in diameter, where the magnetic resonance imaging is done. But that might not be too far off, given a sketch of recent research described by Princeton's Norman, who was part of the pioneering team that developed an fMRI data analysis method called "multivariate pattern analysis" or MVPA.

"It's basically mind-reading based on fMRI data," said Norman, professor of psychology at Princeton's Neuroscience Institute. "We take brain scans and guess what you're thinking."

Specifically, his lab studies learning and memory by looking for patterns in brain activity that are related to specific thoughts and memories.

The fMRI provides enormous quantities of data, but using that data in valuable ways requires more than observation. Higher neural activity does not mean anything unless the reason for increased activity is understood. If the study goes from a blank screen to a face, for example, and higher neural activity is noted, it might mean only that the brain was interested in seeing something other than a blank screen. But seeing a difference in activity between images of a boot and a face or a scene and an object can provide meaningful information about how the brain processes specific information.

The MVPA method uses pattern classification algorithms to deduce what a person was viewing when the data were collected  a shoe or a bottle, for example. The overall accuracy of these computer analyses  matching pixel to pixel  has reached about 96 percent, Norman said.

Norman also is exploring competing memories and how memory is retrieved or inhibited  work that could one day help clinicians treat such conditions as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The capacity offered in CBBI goes well beyond brain science.

Dawn Elliott, professor and chair of biomedical engineering, said she is "thrilled" to have MRI capacity for her lab's ongoing study of intervertebral disc function and degeneration. Much of her study involves human spine segments and also goat spines, whose disc size and properties are similar to humans. In the goats she is gathering preclinical data that measures how well a potential treatment is working over time. If the treatment is successful, these data would be used as part of approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The new center is designed to accommodate animals, and Elliott said it will offer much more statistical power for longitudinal studies.

Christopher Modlesky, associate professor of kinesiology and applied physiology in the College of Health Sciences, will continue his studies of the musculoskeletal system in children with cerebral palsy and other conditions.

"This has a lot of advantages," Modlesky said. "It is more powerful, delivers higher quality images and now we can combine musculoskeletal and brain imaging work."

At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the ceremonial scissors went to Robert Simons, professor and chair of UD's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

"Bob Simons was the driving force  a bulldog  and he continues to be a bulldog for creation of this center," said his colleague, James Hoffman, professor, interim director of CBBI and director of the cognitive psychology graduate program at UD. "I'm pretty sure without Bob Simons, this building wouldn't be here."

Several new faculty and fMRI experts have been drawn to the University by the new magnet.

Already on site is CBBI Manager John Christopher, who brings years of technical expertise to UD from the University of Virginia and said that for cancer research "there isn't anything better" than this fMRI instrument.

The new director of CBBI, Keith Schneider of York University in Toronto, Ontario, will start in August. He was on hand for the opening-day ceremony.

"The people here have done everything right," Schneider said. "They made all the right decisions. With a brand new scanner and an administration that is really supportive  that will help people do research. I'm anticipating heavy use."

Financial support for CBBI was provided by the University, the Unidel Foundation, the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Health Sciences, and the College of Engineering.

When additional funding is available, the University hopes to add a 9-Tesla magnet to a dedicated space on CBBI's second floor and other capacities  ultrasound and micro-CT, for example  to the adjacent multimodal suite, making many other kinds of imaging studies possible.

Article by Beth Miller

Video by Robert DiIorio

Photos by Evan Krape
Poblacht Na H Eireann: the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the people of Ireland. Bethesda, Md.: Wild Apple Press, 2005.

Let Erin Remember. Postcard from Kathleen Clarke to Maeve Brennan. Laid into Maeve Brennans copy of Robert Brennans memoir Allegiance (Dublin: Brown and Nolan, 1950). Special Collections, University of Delaware Library.

12:59 p.m., April 19, 2016--The University of Delaware Library has announced that an event commemorating the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin will take place on Sunday, April 24, at the Morris Library in conjunction with the Special Collections exhibition A terrible beauty is born: The Easter Rising at 100.

Featuring curators remarks and Bernard McKenna, associate professor of English, and John Montano, professor of history), the event will be held from 12:30-2 p.m. in the Class of 1941 Lecture Room in the Morris Library. Light refreshments will be available.

Shortly after noon on April 24, 1916, Padraig Pearse emerged from the newly formed headquarters of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic at Dublins General Post Office. A small band of republicans brief insurrection over Easter Week 1916 resulted in their declaration of independence from Great Britain to form the Irish Republic (Poblacht na hEireann).

Quickly and violently squashed by the British, the Easter Rising became a defining moment for the complex landscape of Irish culture, politics, and history in the 20th century.

The Special Collections exhibition A terrible beauty is born: The Easter Rising at 100 commemorates the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising through an examination of events and attitudes before and after the events of Easter Week 1916, including the Gaelic Revival, the rise of Irish Nationalism, the War of Independence (1917-21), the Civil War (1922-23), and Irish literature produced in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland during The Troubles in the latter half of the 20th century.

The event is open to the public. The Special Collections gallery will be open from 2-3:30 p.m. for additional viewing of the exhibition.

A digital version of the exhibition may be viewed online.
3:05 p.m., April 19, 2016--Two University of Delaware students have earned scholarships from the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, considered the premier undergraduate award of its kind.

Victoria Muir, an Honors Program student from Hockessin, Delaware, with a double major in chemical engineering and biological sciences, with a cellular and molecular biology and genetics concentration, and Hannah Wastyk, an Honors Program student from Palmyra, Pennsylvania, majoring in chemistry and biochemistry, were among 252 Goldwater Scholars selected this year from 415 institutions nationwide. Both students are Eugene du Pont Distinguished Memorial Scholars, funded by the Unidel Foundation.

The scholarship program, which honors the late senator from Arizona, was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering.

Goal in academia

Muir, a sophomore, plans to earn a doctorate in chemical engineering and complete a post-doctoral fellowship at a biomedical institution such as the National Institutes of Health, ultimately becoming a professor in the field.

I would like to research nanocarriers for drug delivery, specifically working toward options for personalized cancer treatment, Muir said.

Advisers to Muir include Thomas H. Epps, III, the Thomas and Kipp Gutshall Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering with a joint appointment in materials science and engineering, and Millicent O. Sullivan, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

My research aims are to optimize the polymer composition of siRNA (short interfering) nanocarriers and create an optimized dosing schedule for siRNA delivery, Muir said. This is done by combining laboratory experiments with mass action kinetic modeling of the polymer system.

Muir credits teachers and mentors who have sparked her interest in the sciences, including Charter School of Wilmington biology teacher Rose Lounsbury and UD graduate students Jill Emerson and Chad Greco, who provided an introduction into chemical engineering and its potential to solve a large diversity of potential problems.

I am extremely grateful for having had the opportunity to be part of professors Epps and Sullivans research groups, Muir said. Seeing their work and how much they enjoy being researchers, educators and collaborators significantly influenced my decision to become a professor.

Muir said her greatest source of inspiration is her mother.

She challenges me to pursue my dreams, no matter how lofty they can be, Muir said. She has taught me that the most important thing is to have a positive and happy outlook on life.

Teaching and research

Wastyk, a junior who is an Ethel and Donald Hofmann Scholar, said she hopes to pursue a doctoral degree in biological engineering, with a focus on immunotherapeutics, followed by a teaching and research career.

The human immune system fascinates me, and my main research interests are the identification of disease targets and development of therapeutic immune responses against them, Wastyk said. Within this field, I would be able to conduct interdisciplinary research aimed at understanding the protective mechanism of our immune system using approaches grounded in the fundamentals of biology and biochemistry, to aid in effective biopharmaceutical design and development.

Wastyks adviser is Catherine Grimes, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry and biological sciences.

I am currently conducting independent research on Crohns disease and the biochemical interactions between its mutant proteins with chaperone molecule Hsp70, Wastyk said. Understanding Hsp70s action and determining a method of control in Crohns disease could also be extended to stabilize a large number of other disease-relevant mutated proteins for focused and characterized treatment.

As a high school student, Wastyk worked at the Penn State Hershey Melanoma Center at the Penn State Hershey Cancer Institute under Gavin Robertson. Her mentor was Greg Kardos, then a graduate student.

Greg Kardos had a very large impact on my passion for research and my current career objectives, Wastyk said. I consider him to be one of the most influential people in my life. He placed a lot of faith in me by letting conduct experiments on my own and learn through experience.

In the summer after her freshman year at UD, Wastyk worked in a bioengineering laboratory at Dartmouth College, under Margie Ackerman and Casey Hua.

This was my first experience with engineering, and it opened a new side of research that I had never considered or experienced before, Wastyk said. I worked on the construction of computationally designed antibodies specific to cancer cells. It was actually because of this experience that I would like to expand my knowledge in biochemistry to include molecular engineering applications.

Wastyk added that her greatest models and role models at UD include Grimes and Vishnu Mohanan, a former graduate student who pushed her to think outside the box and to think like a researcher.

Immediately drawn to professor Grimes laboratory while on a tour of the chemistry building during orientation week, Wastyk considers Grimes to be dynamic, driven and extremely smart, and a great inspiration as a role model and woman in science.

Problem-based learning courses have been the most transformative in my academic experience, so I would like to try and implement this into the classroom, as well, Wastyk said. I am extremely grateful to all the mentors in my research experience thus far, as they have had a large part in shaping who I am today as a scientist and a person.

Wastyk also said that UD has given her both breadth and depth in academia, including the opportunity to take classes ranging from biochemical engineering to Chinese philosophy.

I am always looking to learn new ways of approaching problems, Wastyk said. I think the chemistry and biochemistry department at UD especially fosters creative thinking.

About the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program

The one- and two-year scholarships cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.

Goldwater Scholars have very impressive academic qualifications that have garnered the attention of prestigious post-graduate fellowship programs. Recent Goldwater Scholars have been awarded 86 Rhodes Scholarships, 125 Marshall Awards, 134 Churchill Scholarships, and numerous other distinguished fellowships such as the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships.

The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established by Public Law 99-661 on Nov. 14, 1986. The Scholarship Program honoring the late U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. The Goldwater Scholarship is the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields.

Since its first award in 1989, the foundation has bestowed 7,680 scholarships worth approximately $48 million. The trustees plan to award about 260 scholarships for the 2017-18 academic year.

Article by Jerry Rhodes

Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson
8:28 a.m., April 19, 2016--For those who have ever wanted to have one of their friends arrested, they will have their chance at the University of Delaware on Friday, April 22.

The event is all in fun, but the money raised will support three student-run global projects at UD  a water project in Malawi and a water/sanitation project in the Philippines being undertaken by Engineers Without Borders and a new school for underprivileged children in Burkina Faso planned by buildOn.

The event will take place on the Trabant University Center patio from 11 a.m.-3 p.m.

To support the cause, buy a warrant for a friends arrest at the Trabant University Center or online. On the day of the event Jail N Bail volunteers wearing official T-shirts will be walking around campus to "arrest" anyone with an outstanding warrant.

Troublemakers will then be taken to the jail cell on the Trabant Patio. They can serve their sentence in the jail cell for 10 minutes or post $5 bail and leave immediately.

Assistant dean Chuck Shermeyer in the College of Engineering has agreed to be arrested if enough money is raised. Use the link above to fill out a warrant in his name and come by on Friday to see if hes in jail.

Contact Shelby Roseman at shelbyar@udel.edu for more information.

About the organizations

Engineers Without Borders USA builds a better world through engineering projects that empower communities to meet their basic human needs and equip leaders to solve the worlds most pressing challenges, including water supply, sanitation, energy, agriculture, civil works and structures.

Visit the website to learn more about UDs chapter of EWB.

BuildOn is an international nonprofit organization that runs youth service afterschool programs in United States high schools, and builds schools in developing countries.

Visit the website to learn more about UDs chapter of buildOn.

Article by Diane Kukich
8:33 a.m., April 19, 2016--The University of Delaware Library has announced that Holly Michael, associate professor in the departments of Geological Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Unidel Fraser Russell Chair for the Environment, will present Arsenic in Bangladesh: A Conflict between Water Resources and Dense Populations at noon, Tuesday, April 26.

The presentation will be held in the Class of 1941 Lecture Room in the Morris Library as part of the University of Delaware Library Assembly of Professional Staff (UDLAPS) Scholar in the Library series.

The brown-bag luncheon program is open to the public. Light refreshments will be available.

As populations rise worldwide and climates change, stress on water resources increases, and thousands of people die each day from water-related diseases.

In Bangladesh and other areas of southern Asia, widespread contamination of shallow groundwater with naturally-occurring arsenic threatens the health of tens of millions of people who use the water for drinking and irrigating crops.

Michael will talk about water in the world and her work to understand how deep,low-arsenic groundwater can be used as an alternative water source in a sustainable way.

She will address how the geologic structure of the subsurface as well as water use intensity in the megacity of Dhaka can determine how vulnerable water resources are to invasion of arsenic and the risks related to geologic uncertainty.

She will also discuss the interdisciplinary nature of the arsenic problem and how teams of researchers work together to address the questions that span hydrology, chemistry, biology, geology, sociology and economics.
The team from the central Russian city claimed their first league title last summer with victory against former UEFA Futsal Cup winners FC Dynamo to earn a European debut.

Their impressive 5-2 defeat of holders Kairat Almaty in their first elite round game was key to their perfect qualification, in which they scored 44 goals. Eder Lima got 13 and leads the way as competition top scorer, just as the Russian international did at UEFA Futsal EURO 2014. Two weeks ago they won their second Russian Futsal Cup 10-2 on aggregate against Sibiryak. Sunday's 7-3 league win at the team they succeeded as champions, Dina Moskva, kept them within a point of FC Dynamo with one regular season match to go.

Ugra Yugorsk (RUS)



v Benfica (Friday, 17.30CET)

Finals appearances since 2007: debut season

Best performance: debut season



Ugra lifted the Russian Cup earlier this month AMFR

Preliminary round: bye

Main round: Kremlin Bicetre United 5-0, APOEL 4-3, Georgians Tbilisi 3-0 (Group 1 winners)

Elite round: Kairat Almaty 5-2, EP Chrudim 4-1, Gyor 5-4 (Group C winners)

Top scorer: Eder Lima 13

Key players: Vladislav Shayakhmetov, Robinho, Eder Lima

League position: second

Three questions: Dmitri Lyskov



It was a terrific achievement beating champions Kairat in the elite round. How much confidence does that give you ahead of the semi-finals?

I'd say beating Kairat was a huge confident booster in the elite round, because it was our first game. After that win we were confident in our qualification. As for the final four  it's a completely different tournament. All four teams are really strong and anyone can win in the end. Our opponents will give 100% just like we will, so it's completely unpredictable.

Vladislav Shayakhmetov (right) has previously won this trophy Gyori ETO FC

Your team-mate Vladislav Shayakhmetov won the UEFA Futsal Cup with Sinara Ekaterinburg in 2008  so although Ugra are in their first season you have players who have been there before. How can his experience help Ugra?

Robinho won it as well! Those two are great players with a lot of experience. During our first games in the competition they tried to convince us we didn't have to be nervous. Although I think it's only natural to be nervous as it is our first time in the competition. At the same time all our players know our strengths and weaknesses. We know our level and we know what we have to do in order to get the result.

2015 was a terrific year for you, with your goals leading Ugra to the title. Describe the moment when Ugra lifted trophy as Russian champions for the first time?

It was very special. I was deeply in shock, in a good sense of course. The emotions were very similar to the ones I felt after winning the European Under-21 title in 2008. I was very happy, but somehow that feeling didn't last for long. Already the next day we were joking that we have to start preparing for the next season to defend our title. But still it was a huge satisfaction. We worked so hard for it and our supporters deserved that success.
Romania is going to intensify defence cooperation with Ukraine and donate non-lethal military equipments to the Government of Ukraine.

Ambassador Stelian Stoian, the Permanent Representative of Romania to NATO, said this in an exclusive commentary to a Ukrinform correspondent in Brussels.

"Currently, a donation of non-lethal military equipments to the Government of Ukraine is in the process of completing, the specific details of this donation being subject of consultations between Romania and Ukraine," he said.

Stoian stressed that Romania attached a special attention to developing good cooperation relations with Ukraine on defence sector.

According to the Romanian ambassador, the activities devoted to training the military personnel have increased both in terms of substance and number during 2015.

"The participation of Ukrainian Armed Forces, alongside their Romanian counterparts, in multinational exercises, has contributed to achieving a higher degree of interoperability and to consolidating our bilateral relationship," the Permanent Representative of Romania to NATO said.

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The Kyiv city authorities have increased the value of school nutrition by almost 40%, compared with the previous year, from UAH 8 to UAH 12 per portion of a hot breakfast.

The Deputy Chairman of Kyiv City State Administration, Hanna Starostenko, said this while checking the quality of hot breakfasts at school No.90 in Pechersky district in Kyiv, the administrations press service reports.

According to our calculations, the average cost of qualitative school food should be not less than UAH 12. Since the beginning of the current year, we have found the funds to raise the cost of one hot breakfast from UAH 8 to UAH 12. At the same time, by allocating additional funds, the city must be sure of their efficient use, she said.

Starostenko also added that last week the Kyiv Council decided to allocate an additional UAH 35 million so that all districts in Kyiv could recalculate the cost of school food, hold additional tender procedures and develop a balanced menu for schools.

In general, UAH 330 million has been allocated this year for school and kindergarten nutrition programs.

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The exchange of trade restrictions and the abolition of a free trade area (FTA) with Russia will cause a rise in the foreign trade deficit by $119 million for Ukraine.

This is stated in a research note by the group of German advisers to the Ukrainian government, the text of which is available to Ukrinform.

"New restrictions, according to our calculations, will lead to a decline in Ukrainian exports to Russia by $624 million and a decrease in Russian imports by $505 million a year. Thus, the annual trade deficit of Ukraine will grow by $119 million, or 0.1% of GDP," reads the report.

Russian trade restrictions will also affect many sectors of the Ukrainian economy, according to the document. At the same time, three sectors will suffer the most: livestock products, metals and machinery. These three sectors account for 53% of a total expected decline in exports to Russia, which totals 12.9 %.

New trade restrictions are another step in the ongoing process of deterioration of trade relations between the two countries. This resulted in a decline in Ukrainian exports to Russia to $4.8 billion in 2015, compared with $19.8 billion in 2011, or almost a quarter. A similar situation is seen with imports from Russia. Thus, the process of economic disintegration between the two neighboring countries is taking place very quickly, the authors concluded.
The course towards European integration, carrying out of reforms and improving the situation in the state are the main priorities of the new Ukrainian government.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said this at a meeting with Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who is on an official visit to Ukraine, a Ukrinform correspondent reports.

European and Euro-Atlantic integration remains our priority. We should renew the countrys economic growth, we will deepen and speed up reforms in the areas of justice and fighting corruption, Groysman said.

According to the Ukrainian prime minister, the government plans to focus on the recovery of the national economy. I would like to stress that the issues connected with developing agriculture are still priorities of development, Groysman added.

The Ukrainian premier also noted that one of the main tasks for the government is to improve the conditions for doing business in Ukraine. We know our problems in the sphere of tax legislation, he said.

In addition, according to Groysman, Rasmussens visit to Ukraine is undoubtedly a historical one, as this is his first to Ukraine and this is the first international meeting of the new Ukrainian government that was formed only last week.

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The scope of a continental problem, which may be caused by a decision, was not taken into account during the holding of the Dutch referendum on the ratification of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.

This opinion was expressed by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, answering a question from Dutch parliamentarian Pieter Omtzigt at the PACE session in Strasbourg, a Ukrinform correspondent reported.

"The referendum in the Netherlands and its results are disappointing. It did not take into account the scope of a continental problem, which may be caused by such a decision on association with Ukraine. However, it is not an issue of the European Commission and the European Union, it is a problem of the Dutch government," he said.

Juncker did not respond to a question on whether the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement would be revised due to the results of the referendum in the Netherlands.

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Johannes Hahn, European Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, will visit Kyiv on April 20-21.

Ukrinform news agency learned this from the European Union Delegation to Ukraine.

During the visit, the representative of the European Union will meet with President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman and other members of the Cabinet of Ministers.

According to the agenda, the European Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations will discuss the issue of visa liberalization for Ukrainian citizens.

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KABUL 17 April 2016: On his first visit to the country since his appointment as Assistant High Commissioner for Operations in 2015, Mr. George Okoth-Obbo emerged from a meeting with recent refugee returnees at UNHCR's Kabul Encashment Centre with a simple message. "Returning refugees continue to demonstrate incredible resilience and faith in their futures in Afghanistan. We cannot disappoint them. Now more than ever, the people of Afghanistan need the support and solidarity of the international community," he stated.

The Kabul Encashment Centre, which is run jointly by UNHCR and the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation, received and assisted 16 families yesterday. The number of refugees returning under the UNHCR-assisted repatriation operation is at a historic low, likely reflecting growing concerns among refugee populations in neighbouring countries over the deteriorating security and economic conditions within Afghanistan. The overall return figure as of 15 April stands at 2,200, 74% from Pakistan and 25% from Iran. Following his visit to the Encashment Centre, Mr. Okoth-Obbo also thanked neighbouring host communities for continuing to provide support to those who are not yet prepared to return to Afghanistan.

As part of a wider regional mission, Mr. Okoth-Obbo's visit comes at a crucial moment for the future of Afghanistan, in advance of the NATO summit in Warsaw in June and the Brussels Conference on Afghanistan in October, at which new development assistance pledges will be made. Mr. Okoth-Obbo recently visited Pakistan and is scheduled to travel to Iran after a visit to an IDP settlement in Herat. Noting that some 2.4 million registered refugees remained in neighbouring host countries, the Assistant High Commissioner stressed the need for sub-regional solutions to one of the world's longest refugee crises and urged the Afghan Government and the international community to redouble efforts to promote sustainable livelihoods, affordable housing, and improved access to health and education.

Mr. Okoth-Obbo also drew attention to the rising numbers of internally displaced people as a result of growing insecurity and called on the Government to ensure that they could find adequate protection and their needs are fully integrated into national development plans and initiatives. Over 80,000 Afghans have so far been displaced in 2016, continuing the trend in 2015, in which some 380,000 people were forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of fighting. Hundreds of thousands of longstanding IDPs, who often lack access to basic services and security of tenure, remain in makeshift, informal settlements throughout the country.

"We fully support President Ghani's goal of eradicating internal displacement from the Afghan vocabulary. This can only be done through a concerted partnership between the Government and international community to ensure that the more than one million IDPs can enjoy basic rights and build better futures for their children wherever they may choose to settle," said Mr. Okoth-Obbo. In the absence of a more cohesive and realistic approach to sustainable integration for both IDPs and returnees, he highlighted the risk that increasing numbers of Afghans could seek protection and better lives elsewhere, alluding to the dramatic population movements to Europe over the past year.

Mr. Okoth-Obbo, accompanied by Ms. Daisy Dell, UNHCR Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific, began his two-day visit on 16 April. In Kabul he met with Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, Minister for Refugees and Repatriation Sayed Hossein Alemi Balkhi and other key Ministers. He also held consultations with the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Mr. Nicholas Haysom, Deputy SRSG Tadamichi Yamamoto, and UN and NGO humanitarian and development partners, as well as donors and embassies to discuss long-term solutions to the regional Afghan forced displacement situation.

Mr. Okoth-Obbo thanked the Government and people of Afghanistan for generously hosting a large population of refugees for the first time in its history.

UNHCR's Representative in Afghanistan, Ms. Maya Ameratunga, welcomed the visit of the Assistant High Commissioner and his constructive meetings with senior government officials to find durable solutions for the 2.4 million Afghan refugees remaining in neighbouring host countries.

"The Assistant High Commissioner's visit is a tangible demonstration of UNHCR's longstanding and continuing commitment to find solutions to one of the world's most protracted and complex refugee and forced displacement contexts," said Ms. Ameratunga, stressing that "The international community cannot afford to turn its back on Afghanistan after investing and achieving so much. As the international spotlight focuses on Afghans on the move to Europe, it is important to remember that the largest and most vulnerable displaced populations in need are right here in their home country and in the regional neighbourhood. Millions of refugees and IDPs still have great hopes for their future in Afghanistan, and so do we."





Media contact

Mohammad Nader Farhad in Kabul +93 791990018, [email protected]
In South Sudan a combination of new fighting in previously peaceful areas, food insecurity in Northern Bahr El Ghazal and Warrap States, and severe humanitarian funding shortages continues to cause a sharp worsening of the situation for many civilians. Recent fighting between government and opposition forces in Western Bahr al Ghazal has displaced more than 96,000 people to Wau town, in the north-west of the country. All neighbouring countries are now reporting rising refugee inflows. With the Regional Refugee Response Plan funded at just 8 per cent, many life-saving services are threatened. UNHCR is extremely concerned.

Sudan

An estimated 52,000 South Sudanese have fled into Sudan since late January, exceeding planning projections for 2016. At present they are mainly in East and South Darfur and West Kordofan. UNHCR non-food item distributions by truck in East Darfur are expected to begin on Wednesday and distributions have already taken place to all new arrivals in South Darfur and to some of the new population in West Kordofan. The World Food Programme has been distributing 1-month food rations to new arrivals in East and South Darfur, and is prepared to begin distributions in West Kordofan pending security clearance from authorities. Together with partner agencies a three-month response plan has been prepared to accommodate an additional 120,000 new arrivals before June.

Uganda

Uganda has seen a sharp increase in refugee arrivals from South Sudan since January, sometimes as many as 800 individuals per day. In all, 28,000 South Sudanese - 86 per cent of them women and children - have sought refuge in Uganda. The site where the South Sudanese refugees are sheltered, Maaji III in the north-west of the country, is nearing capacity and basic life-saving services and other services are severely stretched.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia, which hosts some 285,000 South Sudanese refugees, is seeing a recent - albeit more modest - increase in arrivals after a long period in which there were very few new refugees. Since 5 April, more than 300 new arrivals have been registered by at the Okugo refugee camp in the Gambella region. Most of the new arrivals, including dozens of unaccompanied and separated children, said they fled intra-ethnic clashes in Pochalla in the eastern part of South Sudan, and trekked in the jungle for several days before reaching Okugo. This recent spike in the rate of arrival from South Sudan followed a long lull with an average daily arrival rate of less than one for the past two months. UNHCR and partners have been providing basic assistance including corn soya blend to children, plastic sheets, mosquito nets, blankets, sleeping mats and water jerry cans at the camp.

Democratic Republic of the Congo

While fighting has subsided in the Western Equatoria region of South Sudan since February, some 12,000 people crossed into Democratic Republic of the Congo and sought shelter in the north-eastern province of Haut-Uele in the past few months. The local communities have been welcoming of the refugees, and many of those who came at the end of 2015 have found shelter with local families. But capacities are stretched, and thousands of the more recent arrivals have settled in very precarious conditions. Strong rains on 14 April destroyed the makeshift shelters of refugees at a spontaneous site in the small town of Doruma, leaving them without a place to live. The area is difficult to access and there are few humanitarian organisations present.

Central African Republic

The conflict in Western Equatoria has also forced thousands of South Sudanese from Source Yubu and Ezo to cross the border and to seek asylum in the Central African Republic. As of 11 April, UNHCR had registered 10,454 South Sudanese refugees in the town of Bambouti, located in a difficult-to-reach area in the easternmost part of the Central African Republic. The new arrivals in Bambouti greatly outnumber the host community, estimated at around 950 inhabitants, putting a severe strain on resources. Many refugees are suffering from malaria, waterborne diseases and malnutrition. Access to potable water, food, healthcare, sanitation and shelter is urgently needed for the entire population. UNHCR led an inter-agency mission to Bambouti last month to assess the needs of the refugees, and organized a 12-truck convoy transporting food, medicine and emergency relief items, including blankets, kitchen sets and mosquito nets, which arrived on 7 April. Given that access to Bambouti from Bangui is difficult, UNHCR is currently exploring other options to provide urgently needed assistance, either by air or by road from Uganda.

Kenya

UNHCR's Kakuma Operation in north-eastern Kenya has recorded a steady increase in new arrivals from South Sudan, rising from an average of 100 people a month at the start of this year to 350 people a week over the past two months. So far, Kakuma camp hosts some 4,185 new South Sudanese refugees received in the year, the majority of whom are children and women, mostly from Eastern Equatoria, Upper Nile and Jonglei States, in the east of the country. They cite insecurity, intense famine and the high cost of living as the reasons for their flight.

2.3 million people have had to flee their homes since violence broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, 678,000 of these across borders as refugees and 1.69 million displaced inside the country.

For further information on this topic, please contact:
Syrian refugee Khaled carries trays of potatoes at a farm in the Jordan valley.  UNHCR/I.Pricket

JORDAN VALLEY, Jordan, April 19 (UNHCR) - In the four years since they fled from Hama to Jordan, 22-year-old Syrian refugee Khaled has been the sole wage earner for his family of eight. With no valid work permit for his farm-laboring job, Khaled has lived with the ever-present fear that he would be caught and his family's financial lifeline severed.

When he received an SMS last week from UNHCR informing him of new measures introduced by the Jordanian government to make it easier for Syrian refugees to get work permits, he wasted no time. Together with his Jordanian employer, Khaled went to the nearest government employment office to apply, and within days was issued with a permit valid for one year.

"It feels great," said Khaled, proudly holding the blue credit card-style permit with its official government crest. "Now I can go anywhere and work in comfort without the fear of being stopped. I feel like my efforts are worth something."

Under the new measures, employers in the informal sector have a three-month grace period to obtain work permits for Syrian refugees and regularize their employment. During this time, the usual fees for obtaining the permit - which range from US$170 to US$1,270 depending on the sector - have been waived.

The move will potentially put Syrian refugees on the same footing as migrant workers in sectors such as agriculture, construction, service industries and food and beverages. This would provide a much-needed economic boost to the roughly 630,000 registered Syrian refugees in the Kingdom, the vast majority of whom currently live below the poverty line and rely on humanitarian aid for survival.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, estimates that the measures could potentially see up to 78,000 Syrians able to work legally in the short term and many more thousands in years to come. The change will also benefit Jordanian employers of Syrians, allowing them to legalize their employees and avoid steep fines of between US$280 and US$2,100.

Since the beginning of March, Jordanian authorities have also allowed Syrian refugees to use Jordanian Ministry of Interior identity cards and UNHCR-issued asylum-seeker cards to obtain work permits. Previously, the only way to do so was using a passport and proof of legal entry into the country.

Jordanian Abu Mustafa runs the large farm in the lush Jordan Valley where Khaled works and lives in several tents with his parents and siblings. He said he was happy to help Khaled get his work permit and pay the small fee for his medical exam.

"Khaled is a good worker, but he and his family are very poor. This was a good way for me to help out a man who works for me," Abu Mustafa said. "It's also good for me. Now all of my workers are legal, and nobody can say anything or accuse me of breaking the rules."

Khaled, who earns one Jordanian Dinar - equivalent to US$1.40 - per hour for planting, harvesting and other physically demanding work, says he is fortunate to have a supportive employer who agreed to sponsor him in order to get his permit.

"Not all landowners or employers are willing to sponsor Syrian workers, so that will be the main challenge for refugees who want to become legal. I'm one of the lucky ones, because now I have peace of mind for me and my family."

For more details on recent measures improving access to Jordan's labor market for refugees, please click here.

By Charlie Dunmore in the Jordan Valley
A woman refugee from South Sudan stands outside a shelter in Bitima village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  UNHCR/C. Delfosse

GENEVA, April 19 (UNHCR) - A combination of new fighting in previously peaceful areas, food insecurity and severe humanitarian funding shortages continue to cause a sharp worsening of the situation in South Sudan for many civilians.

Recent fighting between government and opposition forces in Western Bahr al Ghazal state has displaced more than 96,000 people to Wau, a small town in the north-west of South Sudan, the world's youngest country.

All the African nation's six neighbours - Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda - are now reporting rising refugee inflows, at a time when operations to meet their needs are severely underfunded.

"With the Regional Refugee Response Plan funded at just eight per cent, many life-saving services are threatened and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is extremely concerned," spokesperson Ariane Rummery told a news briefing in Geneva on Tuesday (April 19).

Since late January, an estimated 52,000 people have fled to neighbouring Sudan, from which South Sudan gained independence in 2011. The influx exceeds planning projections for 2016. At present they are mainly in East and South Darfur and West Kordofan.

The distribution by truck in East Darfur of UNHCR relief items - including plastic sheeting, kitchen sets, sleeping mats and blankets - is expected to begin on Wednesday. Distributions have already taken place to all new arrivals in South Darfur and to some of the new population in West Kordofan. Together with partner agencies a three-month response plan has been prepared to accommodate an additional 120,000 new arrivals before June.

Neighbouring Uganda has seen a sharp increase in refugee arrivals from South Sudan since January, sometimes as many as 800 individuals per day. In all, 28,000 South Sudanese - 86 per cent of them women and children - have sought refuge there.

"The site where the South Sudanese refugees are sheltered, Maaji III in the north-west of the country, is nearing capacity and basic life-saving services and other services are severely stretched," Rummery said.

MORE ARRIVALS REACH ETHIOPIA

Ethiopia, which hosts some 285,000 South Sudanese refugees, is seeing a recent - albeit more modest - increase in arrivals after a long period in which there were very few new refugees. Since April 5, more than 300 new arrivals have been registered by at the Okugo refugee camp in the Gambella region.

Rummery said UNHCR and its partners have been providing basic assistance including corn soya blend to children, plastic sheets, mosquito nets, blankets, sleeping mats and water jerry cans at the camp.

While fighting has subsided in the Western Equatoria region of South Sudan since February, some 12,000 people crossed into Democratic Republic of the Congo and sought shelter in the north-eastern province of Haut-Uele in the past few months.

Rummery stressed that local communities there have been welcoming of the refugees, and many of those who came at the end of 2015 have found shelter with local families, "but capacities are stretched, and thousands of the more recent arrivals have settled in very precarious conditions."

The conflict in Western Equatoria has also forced thousands of South Sudanese from Source Yubu and Ezo to cross the border and to seek asylum in the Central African Republic. As of April 11, UNHCR had registered 10,454 South Sudanese refugees in the town of Bambouti, located in a difficult-to-reach area in the easternmost part of the Central African Republic.

"The new arrivals in Bambouti greatly outnumber the host community, estimated at around 950 inhabitants, putting a severe strain on resources," Rummery noted. "Many refugees are suffering from malaria, waterborne diseases and malnutrition. Access to potable water, food, healthcare, sanitation and shelter is urgently needed for the entire population."

UNHCR led an inter-agency mission to Bambouti last month to assess the needs of the refugees, and organized a 12-truck convoy transporting food, medicine and emergency relief items, including blankets, kitchen sets and mosquito nets, which arrived on 7 April.

UNHCR's Kakuma Operation in north-eastern Kenya has recorded a steady increase in new arrivals from South Sudan, rising from an average of 100 people a month at the start of this year to 350 people a week over the past two months.

So far, Kakuma camp hosts some 4,185 new South Sudanese refugees received in the year, the majority of whom are children and women, mostly from Eastern Equatoria, Upper Nile and Jonglei States, in the east of the country. They cite insecurity, intense famine and the high cost of living as the reasons for their flight.

Some 2.3 million people have had to flee their homes since violence broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, 678,000 of these across borders as refugees and 1.69 million displaced inside the country.
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BOR, South Sudan, 18 April 2016  As the plane lurches forward, so does Changkuoth. Nothing could have prepared him for this journey. Sure, it is his first time flying, but its also what  or who  awaits him at his final destination. Two years after their family was torn apart by conflict, 13-year-old Changkuoth and his siblings will be reunited with their parents.

Despite his nerves, he smiles. He has grown, but he knows they will not have forgotten his face.

Its a great feeling. Im really very happy because Im going to see mum and dad today, he says, his smile growing.

Suddenly, mayhem. Changkuoths sister spots a familiar sight out the window. They are home.



Missing a mothers love

Earlier that morning in Bor, Changkuoth and 17 other children were sitting in the dusty and sparse UN Protection of Civilians site, waiting for the car to take them to the airport. We originally were brought here for school, he says. Then the conflict came in 2013 and we couldnt get home. Since then I havent been in touch with my parents at all.

The fighting in South Sudan began just before the Christmas holidays. Without any means of communication, they had no idea if their parents in Akobo were still alive. UNICEF and partners have registered more than 12,000 children like Changkuoth for family reunification since 2013.
The commencement speech in a graduation day is often a common cliche, but these words of wisdom addressed to the grads are so inspiring that they linger forever.

Steve Jobs at Stanford University, 2005

The late Steve Jobs gave uplifting graduation guidance about life, death, and lost at the lowest level. Jobs shared some of the most pivotal points in his life in front of the grads, saying, "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." He made a point on how his invention was purely based on his inner voice and intuition. And the most unforgettable phrase of the former CEO would be to "Stay hungry, Stay foolish."

Oprah Winfrey at Harvard University, 2013

Delivering her commencement speech at the Harvard University, the media mogul expressed her excitement for being invited. Oprah shared an important message to the audience by stating, "The key to life is to develop an internal moral, emotional G.P.S. that can tell you which way to go."

John F. Kennedy at American University 1963

Time Magazine favorited John F. Kennedy commencement speech by featuring it in one of its digital edition. JFK made a moving statement about piece, stating "let us examine our attitude toward peace itself," - which reflects the mankind and uncontrollable forces happening today. The former president advised the grads, that there is not a problem that's unsolvable.

Ellen Degeneres at Tulane University, 2009

The all-time favorite comedian and TV personality, Ellen Degeneres, shared her most bitter experiences in her life, in a hilarious way. She admitted of attempting suicide and that a letter from her inspired-fan was the bullet that saved her. Ellen repeatedly stating that being 'true to yourself' is what frees you. The GradSpeeches transcribed her most memorable line, "For me, the most important thing in your life is to live your life with integrity and not to give into peer pressure to try to be something that you're not."
Penns Al Filreis: Courseras Outstanding Educator Award Print Issue April 19, 2016, Volume 62, No. 31 Al Filreis, the Kelly Family Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the recipient of an inaugural Coursera Outstanding Educator Award. Dr. Filreis, who is also the director of Penns Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and faculty director at Kelly Writers House, received the Transformation Award, given to an instructor who has contributed the most to the platforms vision of enabling anyone, anywhere to transform their life through its massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Dr. Filreis Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo) was among the first humanities courses on the Coursera platform. The introduction to poetry class emphasizes experimental verse, from Dickinson and Whitman to the present. Al Filreis is one of the pioneers of online learning, said Provost Vincent Price. His ModPo course has changed our understanding of what is possible online while shaping the knowledge of poetry around the world. Above all, he embodies our mission of embracing online the most powerful values of teaching and learning at Penn. Stanton Wortham, a Penn Graduate School of Education professor and faculty director of the Penn Online Learning Initiative, accepted the award for Dr. Filreis on March 22 in the Netherlands at the annual Coursera Partners Conference. In a video played at the conference, Dr. Filreis said MOOCs will transform the old style of lectures in the classroom. Global collaboration yields better knowledge and understanding than the old lecture. MOOCs, rather than reinforcing the mode of the lecture, will see the end of the lecture as we know it, Dr. Filreis said. Penn was a founding university partner in Coursera in 2012 and has continued to be at the forefront of online learning, offering 87 courses, representing all 12 Penn Schools, with almost five million enrollments. The next live, interactive 10-week session of ModPo will begin on September 10 and will conclude on November 21. See https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo
Aug. 19, 2022

Fitness. When the average citizen thinks of being fit, it is easy for cardio and strength training to come to mind. That is not the case for those serving in the Air Force and Space Force. Comprehensive Airman Fitness teaches that to have overarching fitness and resilience, one must work on his or
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Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

By Anvar Mammadov - Trend:

A groundbreaking ceremony will be held in the Azerbaijani city of Astara Apr. 20 for construction of a railroad bridge over the Astara River.

After the ceremony, a meeting will be held between the Azerbaijani and Iranian delegations.

The Azerbaijani delegation will be led by the Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev, while Iran's Communication and Information Technology Minister Mahmoud Vaezi will lead the Iranian delegation.

Mustafayev and Vaezi are the chairmen of the Azerbaijan-Iran Intergovernmental Commission for Economic, Trade and Humanitarian Cooperation.

The bridge over the Astara River will be built jointly according to an agreement signed between the Azerbaijani and Iranian sides.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Anvar_Mammadov
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By Staff Reports

The Ventura County District Attorney has arrested and charged a Los Angeles County man with grand theft in a real estate case.

Juan Carlos Guerra, 29, allegedly instructed a client who was refinancing a home to deposit $44,000 over a period of four years into bank accounts that he provided. Guerra was an employee of Burbank-based Planet Investment Group and the money was reportedly for the refinancing effort. The accounts, though, were not connected to the company but were instead the defendant's personal accounts, authorities said.

The charge came about after an investigation by the District Attorney's Real Estate Fraud Unit.

Guerra was released on bond and is scheduled to be arraigned May 3 in Courtroom 12 of Ventura County Superior Court.
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By Dave Schermer | READER SUBMITTED CONTENT

Ventura County Superintendent of Schools Stan Mantooth has been presented the 2016 Pinnacle Award from the California Association of School Business Officials (CASBO). The Pinnacle Award is CASBOs highest honor and recognizes Mr. Mantooths many years of service and dedication to education. As part of this recognition, Mr. Mantooth receives honorary lifetime CASBO membership benefits.



CASBO Executive Director Molly McGee Hewitt said, Stan Mantooth was one of CASBOs first Chief Business Official certification recipients, helping to launch what has now become one of our premier professional development programs. CASBO has been the beneficiary of Stans nearly 30 years of membership in and commitment to our association, and we could not be more pleased to see this honor conferred upon him.



Mr. Mantooth has been instrumental in leading the development of many programs that have had both local and statewide impact. In Ventura County, he helped secure funding for beginning teacher training, spearheaded the financing of high speed internet service for local schools, and transitioned several VCOE departments to a fee-for-service operation when state funding was no longer provided. Many of these programs were later adopted and implemented by other CASBO members and county offices of education.



Mr. Mantooth says hed like to express his gratitude to CASBO for the recognition and his appreciation to the selection committee. The financial component of public education touches all aspects of our school system, from teaching to facilities to student health, he said. Im proud to have had the opportunity to help ensure that every dollar we spend on our schools is used as efficiently and effectively as possible.





About the California Association of School Business Officials



The California Association of School Business Officials is the premier resource for professional development and business best practices for California's school business leaders. CASBO is dedicated to promoting excellence and professionalism in all aspects of school business. Founded in 1928, CASBO serves more than 3,000 members by providing certifications and training, promoting business best practices and creating opportunities for professional collaboration. CASBO members represent every facet of school business management and operations. Learn more at www.casbo.org.



About the Ventura County Office of Education



The Ventura County Office of Education provides a broad array of fiscal, training and technology support services to local school districts, helping to maintain and improve lifelong educational opportunities for children, educators and community members. VCOE also operates schools that serve students with severe disabilities and behavioral issues, provides career education courses, and coordinates countywide academic competitions including Mock Trial and the Ventura County Science Fair. Learn more at: www.vcoe.org.
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By Staff Reports

Ventura County Superintendent of Schools Stan Mantooth has received the 2016 Pinnacle Award from the California Association of School Business Officials.

CASBO is a resource for professional development and business best practices for the state's school business leaders.

Executive Director Molly McGee Hewitt said CASBO has benefited from Mantooth's nearly 30 years of membership.

"Stan Mantooth was one of CASBO's first Chief Business Official certification recipients, helping to launch what has now become one of our premier professional development programs," she said in a news release.

Among his accomplishments in Ventura County, Mantooth helped secure funding for beginning teacher training, led funding of high-speed Internet for schools, and introduced a fee-for-service operation for several Ventura County Office of Education departments.

"The financial component of public education touches all aspects of our school system, from teaching to facilities to student health," Mantooth said in a news release. "I'm proud to have had the opportunity to help ensure that every dollar we spend on our schools is used as efficiently and effectively as possible."
SHARE CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Rafael Dagnesses ROB VARELA/THE STAR Julia Brownley

By Bartholomew Sullivan, bsullivan@gannett.com

WASHINGTON  Democratic incumbent Julia Brownley raised 10 times more campaign contributions than Rafael Dagnesses, her Republican opponent for Ventura County's 26th Congressional District, in the first three months of the year, Federal Election Commission records show.

In Simi Valley's congressional district, Democrat Bryan Caforio outraised incumbent Rep. Steve Knight, R-Lancaster, in the first quarter although Knight still has more than double the available cash.

And in the race for the open congressional seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara County supervisor Salud Carbajal, a Democrat, outraised four others for the district representing a coastal sliver of Ventura County plus Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

Brownley, whose district takes up most of Ventura County, raised $441,553, spent $120,325 and had $1.8 million in cash on hand on March 31. More than $140,000 of it came from political action committees.

Brownley was an early target of the National Republican Campaign Committee, which last year named the 26th District one of the 19 vulnerable seats it hoped to pick up. The district includes Ventura, Oxnard, Ojai, Newbury Park, Moorpark, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village.

Dagnesses, a real estate agent, raised $41,770 in the first quarter, spent $20,777 and had $93,342 in cash on hand. He received $3,500 from political action committees in the first three months of the year, and received backing from the campaign committees of former Congressmen Elton Gallegly and Howard "Buck" McKeon, who represented the area, and Jeff Gorrell, who sought the seat in 2014.

Knight raised $161,971 in the first quarter, including $82,293 from PACs, for re-election to a seat representing most of Simi Valley, plus Santa Clarita, Palmdale and the northern parts of the San Fernando Valley. He has $500,871 cash on hand. The district leans Republican, according to the nonpartisan analysis of the Cook Political Report.

Knight serves on the Armed Services Committee and that is reflected in PAC contributions from United Technologies, Boeing, General Electric and Northrop Grumman. .

Caforio, a Los Angeles attorney who moved into the district to challenge Knight, raised $163,430 in the first quarter and spent $92,684. He reported $205,492 cash on hand.

Also seeking to unseat Knight is Los Angeles police officer Lou Vince, who raised $23,027 in the first quarter.

Those seeking the open 24th District seat, which represents the coastal sliver of Ventura County including parts of the city of Ventura, include Carbajal, who raised $303,884 in the first quarter and had just over $1 million on hand; Republican San Luis Obispo Assemblyman Khatcho Achadjian, who raised $240,366 and had $400,554 on hand; Republican cattle rancher Justin Fareed, who raised $164,818 and had $727,797 on hand; Democrat and Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider, who raised $91,258; and Democrat and farmer William Ostrander, who raised $12,065.

Under California rules, the two top vote getters in the June 7 primary will appear on the November ballot, even if they are members of the same political party.
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Camarillo

Lecturers will have their art on display

CSU Channel Islands will have its fifth annual Faculty Showcase on display now through May 5 at John Spoor Broome Library Gallery, 1 University Drive.

There will be an opening reception from 5-7 p.m. Thursday.

Art lecturers Leslie Lloyd, Aldo Figueroa and Peter Harper will display their two- and three-dimenstional work, which includes sculpting, digital painting, print making, multimedia production, music and writing.

For more information, call 437-8561.

YMCA will celebrate its anniversary

The Camarillo Family YMCA will celebrate its 10 year anniversary from 4-7 p.m. Friday at 3111 Village at the Park Drive.

The program begins at 4:15 p.m. There will be class demonstrations, light refreshments and a photo booth.

To RSVP, contact Janet Jensen at janet.jensen@ciymca.org or 484-0423.

Simi Valley

Expo provides free health screenings

A wellness expo will go from 8 a.m. until noon Wednesday at the Simi Valley Senior Center, 3900 Avenida Simi.

There will be free screenings including carotid artery, glucose, balance testing, hearing, thyroid, memory, depression, COPD, BMI and more.

The Simi Valley Police Department will provide a free prescription drop off. There will be more than 76 exhibitors attending to provide services.

For more information, call 583-6363.

Thousand Oaks

Council focuses on stopping pollution

Clean Technology Council will have a presentation "Stopping Ocean Pollution" from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Wednesday at 394 N. Moorpark Road.

Roland Geyer, from the UC Santa Barbara, Bren School of Environmental Science, will speak.

Cost is $15. To register, visit www.cleantechnologycouncil.org.

Ventura

Speaker will share local film history

The Museum of Ventura County will continue its speaker series with "The History of Hollywood in Ventura" from 1-2:30 p.m. Wednesday at 100 E. Main St.

Marc Wanamaker, film historian and founder of Bison Archives, will speak.

Cost is $7 and free for MVC members. For more information, visit http://venturamuseum.org/speaking-of, email Tina Nielsen at tnielsen@venturamuseum.org or call 653-0323, ext. 330.

League will host volunteer meeting

Canine Adoption and Rescue League will have a volunteer orientation at 9:45 a.m. Saturday at the Ventura Pet Barn, 3203 E. Main St.

The meeting will include a slideshow and presentation, informational packets and a question-and-answer session.

Before attending the meeting, interested people should fill out an application at www.carldogs.org.

Westlake Village

Guild will host annual fundraiser

Conejo Valley Guild of the UCLA Jonsson Cancer Center Foundation will have its annual fundraising event from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. May 5 at the North Ranch Country Club, 4761 Valley Spring Drive.

The event features a buffet lunch, boutique, raffle and games. The boutique is open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Games start at 10 a.m.

Admission is $65. RSVPs are due by Thursday to Isa Brente-Shekter at 480-2492.
CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR An intensive care unit for children is expected to open May 3 at Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks.

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By Tom Kisken of the Ventura County Star

A long-awaited intensive care unit for children will open at Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks on May 3, officials said.

The four-bed unit, expected to open last year, is designed for children who may have been injured in accidents or have conditions where they require ventilators or constant monitoring.

A pediatric intensive care unit at Ventura County Medical Center closed temporarily more than a year ago because of staffing and other issues.

"We'll be the only PICU in the county," said Dr. Michael Mah, chief of pediatrics at Los Robles, contending a county with a population of 850,000 needs such a unit. "There is a demand."

The VCMC pediatric intensive care unit is expected to reopen as an eight-bed unit by the end of the year as part of the Ventura hospital's new wing.

Los Robles officials said they have state approvals and nurse staffing in place to operate their pediatric ICU. Mah said the final barrier to opening the facility was cleared a pact was reached with Children's Hospital Los Angeles Medical Group to staff the unit with pediatric intensive care doctors.

The doctors will be in the unit 12 hours a day and on call for immediate response the rest of the time.

"I'm very excited. It's been a long time coming," said Dr. Betsy Weisz, a Thousand Oaks pediatrician and a member of a steering committee for the new unit. She said it will allow local care for children who are transferred to hospitals in Tarzana, Northridge and Santa Barbara, she said.

Children with less severe conditions that may deteriorate to the level of pediatric intensive care also currently need to be transferred, said Dr. Kenneth Saul, another pediatrician on the steering committee.

A remaining challenge is to attract a wider array of pediatric specialists, including surgeons who can respond to patients in the new unit. Mah said negotiations for those specialists are ongoing with Children's Hospital.

"We think once it's built, they will come as it says in the movie," Saul said, referring to "Field of Dreams." "That's what we're counting on."

An open house will be held at the new unit on April 26, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The event is at 215 West Janss Road, Thousand Oaks.
SHARE CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Volunteer Jeri Pfannenstiel goes through a "natural horsemanship" session in the corral with April at Ojai's California Coastal Horse Rescue, which is celebrating Help A Horse Day on Sunday. Equine rescues and sanctuaries nationwide are raising awareness about abused and neglected horses. CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Volunteer Jeri Pfannenstiel grooms horses at Ojai's California Coastal Horse Rescue, which is celebrating Help A Horse Day on Sunday. Equine rescues and sanctuaries nationwide are raising awareness about abused and neglected horses. CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Sue Francis is a volunteer at the California Coastal Horse Rescue in Ojai, which is celebrating Help A Horse Day on Sunday. Equine rescues and sanctuaries nationwide are raising awareness about abused and neglected horses. CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Volunteer Jeri Pfannenstiel grooms horses at the California Coastal Horse Rescue in Ojai, which is celebrating Help A Horse Day on Sunday. Equine rescues and sanctuaries nationwide are raising awareness about abused and neglected horses.

By Alicia Doyle, Special to The Star

Every animal at the California Coastal Horse Rescue in Ojai has a story.

Bridge, a 20-year-old Arabian, is one of them. He came to the rescue nine years ago after being used for showing and breeding purposes.

"He worked with trainer after trainer," said Adri Howe, of Oxnard, the president and executive director of the rescue. "He became aggressive and had an unpleasant demeanor, not through any fault of his own. He was reacting to the way he was treated. One of the people working with him broke his jaw."

After nine years at the Ojai shelter, Bridge is now friendly with people and especially loves children, Howe said.

"It was thought he was beyond help. But now he's able to work with our trainer and he's able to work with our volunteers," she said. "Now, after a very long road, we are looking for a new home for him."

Raising awareness of rescued horses and the work involved in their rehabilitation is the goal of Help a Horse Day on Sunday. The nationwide event is sponsored by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.

On Sunday, the Ojai rescue will have an open house, vendors, food, games and a silent auction, as well as rides on miniature horses for children. Activities include horseshoe decorating and photo opportunities with Taffy and Rosie, the rescue's "equine ambassadors" that will be dressed as unicorns.

"The activities will be geared toward kids but anyone can participate," Howe said. "Our hope is to give people a fun, happy day because there is a very happy and hopeful part of rescue, and we want people to experience that while we educate them.

"These horses deserve our care and help," Howe added. "We want to educate people on how they can lend a hand to horses in need."

Horses are rescued from a variety of situations, she said. Some come to the rescue after animal control officers remove them due to cruelty and neglect issues, while many were with owners who couldn't afford to care for them anymore. Others live at the rescue because they're elderly and have physical issues.

"That's the sad and hard part of rescue, but there's also a happy and hopeful part as well," Howe said. "It's a very bipolar world in a sense that we see a lot of sadness, neglect and abuse. But we have found that we can turn their lives around."

The Ojai rescue joins related efforts across the county, including the work of the Animal Guardians Horse Rescue in Simi Valley. Because it doesn't have its own rescue ranch facility, Animal Guardians houses horses with foster caregivers and at boarding stables.

Another grassroots effort, Saffyre Sanctuary Inc., is a Los Angeles-based horse rescue and rehabilitation program that cares for horses that have been abandoned, abused or neglected. On May 1, a fundraiser for Saffyre will take place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Santa Rosa Valley Park, Camarillo. The event, known as the Hope Family Picnic & Hoedown, will also raise awareness of the Warhorse Alliance, which serves veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; and Steeds of Light, which offers therapeutic work through horses.

Ventura County Animal Services in Camarillo also rescues horses. From 2011 to 2015, the Camarillo site rescued 48 horses, according to Randy Friedman, media and marketing manager. Some were returned to their owner, some went to sanctuaries and a few were humanely euthanized, he said.

The California Coastal Horse Rescue in Ojai, located on nearly 10 acres, was founded in 2000 and can house up to 18 "horse units" at a time, Howe said.

"Each horse is given a unit value in terms of size," she explained. "For example we have two miniatures that are half a unit."

The rescue is currently at capacity.

The goal of Help a Horse Day is twofold, Howe said: First, it's to raise awareness of the work at the horse rescue, and second is to make the nonprofit eligible for a grant.

"Any rescue organization that participates in Help a Horse Day is eligible to submit a grant," Howe said. "This year's top grant is $25,000. So this is a wonderful incentive because we need funding. There are also grants for $5,000 and $10,000."

The funds could help support several efforts, including an agility obstacle course for the horses, a local network of fosters and the construction of a new pasture area for the horses to spend more time in larger areas.

"It will help us expand the work we're doing," Howe said. "With $25,000 we can do so much regardless of what we choose to apply it to. It's exciting to contemplate."

In conjunction with national Help a Horse Day, Ojai Mayor Paul Blatz recently issued a proclamation announcing commendation for the lifesaving work California Coastal Horse Rescue provides to area equines.

IF YOU GO

What: Help a Horse Day

When: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday

Where: California Coastal Horse Rescue, 600 W. Lomita Ave., Ojai

Admission: Free

Information: 649-1090; www.calcoastalhorserescue.com; www.facebook.com/events/1501283416844969/

Also

What: There's No Place Like Hope Family Picnic & Hoedown

When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. May 1

Where: Santa Rosa Valley Park, 10241 Hill Canyon Road, Camarillo

Admission: Free

Information: www.thehopepicnic.com
STAR FILE PHOTO The Santa Paula City Council has rejected a long-running proposal to develop a hillside west of the city limits.

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By Claudia Boyd-Barrett, Special to The Star

A long-running proposal to build 79 single-family homes on a hillside west of Santa Paula has been voted down by the city council.

Developers have been working with city officials for years to try to get the project known as the Anderson/Hagaman Project approved, and nearly a year ago, the city's Planning Commission OK'd it. But at its regular meeting Monday night, Santa Paula City Council voted 4 to 1 against the proposal. Councilman Jim Tovias cast the lone vote in favor of the development.

Council members denied the project "without prejudice," meaning that the developers can return to the city with a different proposal for the site within less than a year. The parcel is north of Foothill Road and west of Peck Road.

Monday's denial followed more than an hour of debate and public comments, during which about a dozen residents spoke out in opposition to the project. Many complained that the development as proposed was too dense, crowding homes together on the 32.5-acre parcel. Some speakers, almost all of whom live near the site, said the developer should build fewer and bigger "executive-style" homes instead.

"I just think, frankly, the city is missing the opportunity to have 20 or 25 larger lots over there with higher-end properties," said speaker Richard Main, who said such homes are lacking in Santa Paula. "It would frankly be a much better credit to the city."

Other speakers repeated concerns brought up during past hearings, mainly that construction of the development would cause pollution and traffic problems for nearby residents. In order to build on the hillside, the project would require removing 750,000 cubic yards of dirt and depositing it elsewhere in Adams Canyon.

Some residents also questioned whether removing so much dirt and building homes on the hillside  the site of an ancient landslide  would be safe. Later during the discussion, Planning Director Janna Minsk acknowledged that under the city's normal rules, the proposed density of homes was too high for a hillside development. However, this particular project is governed by a separate specific plan, she said.

"Normally the number of units would probably have to be reduced," Minsk said.

The project parcel is currently not within city limits and would have to be annexed into Santa Paula.

Development consultant Michael Pisker said the project construction would actually stabilize the hillside. He added that the proposal would also create oversized basins to capture storm water and alleviate flooding concerns in the area, and an extra traffic study would be included to pinpoint any additional measures the developer could take to ease traffic problems.

"We're just going above and beyond because that's what we think is the right thing to do right now," Pisker said.

Fred Robinson, head of the Santa Paula Chamber of Commerce, said his organization supports the development because the community needs more jobs and housing.

In voting to approve the project, Tovias called the proposal a "good project" and pointed out that voters approved developing the parcel in a 2003 ballot initiative.

"It's going to enhance the entire area," Tovias said. "I just think this thing has been kicked around long enough. I think it's time to move forward with the project."

But Councilman John Procter and Mayor Martin Hernandez said they didn't think the developers were being flexible and responsive enough to issues raised about the project. They and Councilwoman Jenny Crosswhite also agreed with concerns about density.

Hernandez said he would welcome an alternative proposal for the site.
STAR FILE PHOTO Council member Christy Weir in 2012.

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By Staff Reports

Ventura City Council member Christy Weir will discuss new housing projects during a meeting of east end residents Thursday night.

Weir will also talk about other city issues during the monthly gathering of the East Ventura Community Council.

California State Parks Ranger Alexis Frangis will discuss how to help endangered species.

The group represents residents who live east of Victoria Avenue.

Bring books in good condition for the San Buenaventura Friends of the Library.

The meeting starts at 7 p.m. at the First Assembly of God Church, 346 N. Kimball Road. All are welcome. For more information, call John McNally at 804-7558.
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For decades, the Republican Party gave voters the impression that they get to pick the presidential nominee. The much-weakened GOP establishment theoretically has the power to choose someone else, but not, I believe, the strength of purpose to do it.

The author of this dilemma is, of course, Donald Trump. After a two-week pause in the primary schedule, Trump  a Manhattan icon  is expected to romp in New York on Tuesday and capture the lion's share of the state's 95 delegates. Polls show he is also likely to post big wins next Tuesday in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

The bigger his victory margins, the closer Trump can come to securing the 1,237-delegate majority, thus making all the "contested convention" machinations moot. But it seems likely that when all the primaries and caucuses are done, he will fall short.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that he comes to the convention with about 1,100 delegates, far more than rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich. What happens then?

The Cruz campaign has worked tirelessly and successfully to ensure as many delegates as possible are Cruz supporters, even if they are pledged to vote for Trump on the convention's first ballot, which presumably would be inconclusive. In later rounds of voting, those delegates would be free to switch to Cruz and ultimately give him the nomination.

To pull this off, however, Cruz would need the support, or at least the acquiescence, of party insiders who dislike him almost as much as Trump. Many leading Republicans believe Cruz, with his hard-right views, would be an even surer loser in November than the unpredictable Trump, who is unburdened by philosophy.

I have heard veterans of GOP smoke-filled rooms make the argument this way: If the party is going to incur the wrath of primary voters and caucus-goers by nominating someone other than Trump, why pick a candidate who will most likely lose to Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee? Why not pick someone who has a fighting chance with independents, such as John Kasich? Or even a "white knight" such as House Speaker Paul Ryan (who made it clear last week that he does not want the nomination)?

I have also heard prominent Republicans argue that convention delegates will have what amounts to a fiduciary duty to choose a candidate fit to serve as president. Trump's volatile temperament and ignorance of policy, according to this view, make him ineligible.

And then there's the political calculation. Some GOP graybeards believe the party is unlikely to capture the White House with any nominee. But Trump's massive unpopularity with the wider electorate  about two-thirds of Americans view him unfavorably, and a recent Associated Press poll of registered voters found 63 percent said they would never vote for him  could threaten the party's Senate and House majorities. Cruz, Kasich or a white knight might lose without dragging the rest of the ticket down with them.

All of this is fascinating to ponder, at least for those who love politics. But I wouldn't bet on any of these scenarios. I believe that if Trump comes anywhere close to a delegate majority, the party leadership caves and he gets the nomination.

Trump would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what's coming. In recent speeches, he has staked out the position that the candidate who comes to the convention with the biggest number of delegates should be the nominee, period. Polls show a majority of Republicans agree with that. Once you tell people they get to choose their standard-bearer, they don't take kindly to being patted on the head and told to go sit in the corner.

Trump said Sunday that, gee, he sure hopes there's no violence in Cleveland if the party tries to take the nomination from him. Not that he would ever suggest such a thing.

As I said, all of this is moot if Trump wins a delegate majority outright. But if he narrowly misses the magic number, I don't believe the debilitated establishment can muster the solidarity it would need to deny him. At this point, the GOP is much more Trump's party than theirs.

Eugene Robinson's email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com. He writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr.19

Trend:

An Armenian X-55 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was destroyed by the Azerbaijani armed forces, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry told Trend Apr. 19.

The UAV was destroyed as it was attempting to fly over the Azerbaijani positions along the frontline, added the ministry.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers.

The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides,

Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.


Murray Celebrity Magician and Set Designer Andy Walmsley took the backstage tour today of Don Ardens Jubilee at Ballys Las Vegas one last time as the show closes for good this Thursday (Pictured: Murray SawChuck in the Jubilee Theater).

Murray and Andy are huge vintage Vegas fans. Both are transplants, one from Canada and the other from Britain. Growing up as kids in their home countries, dreaming of being successful in Las Vegas. Ironically, both have done just that with Andy designing more that 17 sets on the Las Vegas strip and Murray going into his 4th year as Las Vegas Strip headliner currently at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino.

Murray has been known to go to all the older hotel auctions and buy some priceless memorabilia like the Frank Sinatra Suite Chandelier from the Riviera Hotel, Debbie Reynolds items from the original Dunes Hotel, the Club Tropicana sign from the Follies and many more

Murray said, Vegas was iconic for many original things you couldnt see anywhere else in the world and Don Ardens Jubilee was one of them!
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr.19

Trend:

President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker has urged the parties of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to adhere to the ceasefire.

First of all, it is necessary to cease the fire, Juncker said while addressing the meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg Apr.19.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers.

The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides,

Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
The suspects, 40 and 45 years old, were caught on April 17 while carrying the heroin and 15,000 ecstasy pills on a motorbike. Officers said the batch was the biggest drug haul seized in the border province this year. Vietnam has some of the worlds toughest drug laws.

The production or sale of 100 grams of heroin or 300 grams of other illegal narcotics is punishable by death. Those convicted of possessing or smuggling more than 600 grams of heroin or more than 2.5 kilograms of methamphetamine also face the death penalty.
The debris of a collapsed house is cleared after an earthquake struck off the Pacific coast, in Guayaquil, Ecuador. (Photo source: REUTERS/Lalo Calle)

PORTOVIEJO, Ecuador: The biggest earthquake in Ecuador in decades has killed 272 people -- but that toll will 'certainly' rise even further, the president said on Sunday as overwhelmed rescuers struggled to pull survivors out of the destruction.

The 7.8-magnitude quake struck the small, oil-producing South American nation late Saturday, shattering hotels and homes along its Pacific coast popular with tourists and reducing several towns to rubble.

More than 2,000 people were injured as structures tumbled during the quake or its dozens of aftershocks.

The capital Quito, farther inland, escaped with cracked walls and power outages, and the country's strategic oil facilities appeared unscathed, officials said.

But along the coast, the devastation prompted neighboring Colombia, as well as quake-experienced Mexico and El Salvador, to rush in rescue personnel to help out.

In Portoviejo, a city 15 kilometers (10 miles) from the coast, the temblor knocked down walls in a prison, allowing 100 inmates to escape.

Some were recaptured or returned later, but police were hunting the others, Justice Minister Ledy Zuniga tweeted.

Elsewhere in hard-hit Portoviejo, the stench of decaying bodies began to fill the tropical air as rescuers raced to find survivors.

"We have already recovered three dead and we believe there are 10 to 11 people still trapped," said one worker digging through the debris of what used to be a six-story hotel called El Gato.

STATE OF EMERGENCY

Officials have declared a state of emergency in the worst-hit provinces, and a national state of "exception," both of which suspend certain civil rights and liberties to allow security forces and officials to react faster.

President Rafael Correa visited the disaster zone last Sunday, after cutting short an official trip to the Vatican and flying home.

He said the latest toll of 272 dead "will certainly rise and probably in a considerable way" in the hours ahead.

Among the worst-hit towns was Pedernales, where Mayor Gabriel Alcivar estimated there were up to 400 more dead yet to be confirmed, many under the rubble of hotels that collapsed.

"Pedernales is devastated. Buildings have fallen down, especially hotels where there are lots of tourists staying. There are lots of dead bodies," he told local media.

Soldiers patrolled the beach town, and the Red Cross and the army had set up a center to treat the injured and receive bodies.

Two Canadians were among those killed by the quake, their country's government told AFP.

Colombia's foreign ministry said five Colombians had also died.

In Calderon, near Portoviejo, 73-year-old resident Nelly, who would not give her last name, told AFP in tears that she rushed into the street after the quake and saw that the covered market had collapsed.

"There was a person trapped who screamed for help, but then the screaming stopped. Oh, it was terrible," she said.

RING OF FIRE

Ecuador's Geophysical Office reported "considerable" structural damage as far away as Guayaquil, Ecuador's biggest city with more than two million people, which is 350 kilometers (220 miles) away.

Although Ecuador frequently suffers seismic shudders because of its position on the Pacific rim's Ring of Fire, the weekend's quake -- which lasted a full minute -- was the worst to hit it in nearly 40 years.

Ecuador has been rocked by seven earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or higher in the region of Saturday's quake since 1900, the US Geological Survey said. One in March 1987 killed about 1,000 people.

David Rothery, a professor of geosciences at Britain's Open University, said the 7.8 magnitude meant that "the total energy involved was probably about 20 times greater" than the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed at least 41 people in southern Japan on Saturday.

He said there was no causal link between the two quakes.

International concern and sympathy -- and offers to assist -- have flowed in.

Pope Francis urged prayers for the victims.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and European Union chief diplomat Federica Mogherini expressed condolences and said they were ready to help.


Nghi Son oil refinery and petrochemical complex as of April 2016 - source Dantri

>> Jx- nippon oil invests in nam van phong

According to a press release posted on Idemitsus website, the joint venture, named Idemitsu Q8 Petroleum Limited Liability Company, will operate in the import, wholesale and retail of petroleum products, mainly through the construction and management of service stations (SS), across Vietnam. The products will come from the upcoming Nghi Son complex in Vietnams central province of Thanh Hoa, where Idemitsu and KPI have a stake.

Through the establishment of a petroleum product distribution company, the two companies will supply to the growing Vietnamese market, where demand for petroleum products is expected to follow a steady upward trend.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Trades (MoIT) data, as of now in Vietnam there are 24 fuel wholesalers, which import fuel or buy it from the countrys sole operating refinery Dung Quat, and sell in the domestic market.

News of Idemitsu and KPIs move has been met with the strong support from people who made comments on local online newspapers that they wanted another option.

Idemitsu Kosan Co. Ltd. operates in oil refining and manufacturing and sale of petrochemical products as well as exploration, development, and extraction of oil, coal, geothermal energy, and other mineral resources. The company has been pushing ahead with the establishment of a foundation for the petroleum products business that covers supply and sales operations in growing overseas markets centering on Pacific Rim countries.

The Nghi Son oil refinery and petrochemical complex was licensed in 2008, with four investors namely PetroVietnam, Kuwait Petroleum International, and Japanese companies Idemitsu Kosan and Mitsui Chemicals. With an area of 400 hectares, the refinery produces LPG, Ron 92 and 95 fuels, diesel, fuel oil, jet fuel, polypropylene, para-xylene, benzene, and sulfur.

The investors raised the capital by $2.8 billion in 2013 to make the refinery the biggest oil refinery and petrochemical project ever licensed in the country. It is scheduled to become operational in 2017 and reach its maximum annual capacity of 9.62 million cubic metres of petroleum products by 2018.
The Facebook page can be accessed at https://www.facebook.com/CanhSatHinhSuKhanhHoa/, said Colonel Tran Huu Tuong, who is from the Department of Police in Khanh Hoa Province.

Colonel Tuong added that citizens can report criminal-related issues via the departmental hotline 0947 513 113, noting that these are the two official channels.

Those who want to notify provincial police of criminal acts just post content on the pages timeline, send messages to its inbox, or call the hotline for immediate support, he said.

The Facebook page doubles as a portal that provides information about security, crime prevention, and current criminal trickery.

Facebook has proved itself an efficient information medium as it provides immediate contact with the public, the official said, adding the police department has leveraged the page as a means to battle crime and keep locals alert.

No matter how many officers we have, it is really hard to detect all crime activities immediately without support from civilians, Col. Tuong said.

Some cases, unknown to local authorities, have been first busted by the witnesses as they took photos, recorded and posted footage on Facebook.
Rescuers guide dogs to search for victims buried in a landslide due to the recent earthquakes in the village of Minami-Aso in Kumamoto prefecture. (KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP)

MINAMI-ASO: Japan on Monday (Apr 18) enlisted US help to airlift supplies to some of the 100,000 people made homeless by earthquakes in the country's south, as rescuers struggled to find those still missing in a massive landslide.

Many of those evacuated after their homes were damaged or destroyed have had to sleep in temporary accommodation or huddle in makeshift shelters, and media have reported problems in delivering food and other essentials.

The disaster-prone country's worst humanitarian challenge since 2011 - when a quake, tsunami and then nuclear meltdown hit the northeast coast - has left 44 dead as of early Tuesday, Jiji press reported, and more than 1,000 injured.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the government was working to find survivors and care for the displaced, and that the US military had sent aircraft to help with the daunting relief effort.

"Many people are spending anxiety-filled days at evacuation facilities," he told reporters. "We will continue to offer hands-on assistance to the individuals affected."

Around 10,000 people are staying in their cars at an exhibition hall parking lot in the town of Mashiki, but emergency supplies have not been delivered as the facility is not registered as a shelter, Fuji television said.

In another case, volunteers sent supplies and the military brought six tonnes of water to a hospital in Kumamoto city after a doctor complained on Facebook that there was not enough water or food for patients. "Thanks to this, we don't have to worry about water to wash hands after treating patients," doctor Takeshi Hasuda said.

Kumamoto's mayor took to Twitter on Monday to apologise to the "many voices" who had complained about delays in providing help. "Please be patient," Kazufumi Onishi wrote, promising that the situation would quickly improve.

The disaster comes at a particularly sensitive time for Abe, just months ahead of elections for the upper house of parliament.

RACE AGAINST TIME

Up to 25,000 Japanese military and other personnel have fanned out through villages where scores of traditional houses have been left in ruins by Saturday's 7.0-magnitude quake, which struck a part of Japan not used to such tremors.

A number of people are still missing, feared engulfed by landslides, after earthquakes struck the island of Kyushu.

An initial quake on Thursday, measured at 6.2-magnitude by US geologists, affected older buildings and killed nine people. But Saturday's more powerful tremor brought even newer structures crashing down.

Kazuya Shimada, 63, a resident of the landslide-ravaged village of Minami-Aso, said that he had evacuated to another town as his home was uninhabitable. "Not a single tile is left on the roof," Shimada said. "I have never seen a landslide like this before," he told AFP. "I had never worried about this before, living here."

Villages in remote mountainous areas have been completely cut off by slippages and damage to roads.

The US military, which has almost 50,000 servicemen and women stationed in Japan, is also taking part in rescue activities. Tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft were flying to the disaster zone after arriving at a US Marine airbase to take part in relief efforts, officials said.

Troops of Japan's Ground Self-Defence Force carry emergency aid supplies from a US Marine tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft as part of relief efforts. (KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP)

"The capacity of the Osprey, with vertical takeoff ability, is necessary to swiftly carry supplies to those who are isolated or facing serious traffic congestion," Defence Minister Gen Nakatani said Monday.

More than 500 earthquakes have rocked Kumamoto and other parts of central Kyushu since Thursday, stoking fears that houses not damaged in the two major quakes could yet be affected.

Five airlines including All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines said they will resume flights to Kumamoto Airport on Tuesday, Jiji press reported, quoting transport minister Keiichi Ishii as saying this will help accelerate reconstruction efforts.

But flights from the airport remain suspended, Jiji said, as damage from the quakes, including the collapse of ceilings in the airport's terminal buildings, meant it was unable to carry out security checks.

Japan is one of the world's most seismically active countries, sitting on the so-called 'Ring of Fire' around the Pacific tectonic plate.

A huge undersea quake in March 2011 killed around 18,500 people when it sent a devastating tsunami barrelling into the northeast coast, sparking a nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

Authorities were lashed for their response to the meltdown, faulted in particular for confusion as the crisis unfolded as well as the handling of evacuees from stricken areas.


Super Movepick Villas bearing the international brand

Unmet demands

In 2015 and before that, investors quickly put money on the table once they realised the benefits of owning a beach villa and the profitability of this investment channel. But in 2016 experienced investors will compare among beach villas to see which one possesses the most outstanding competitive advantages. Investors no longer invest in coastal resort villa products with low investment into quality. Instead they will seek high quality products in terms of design, construction, operation and management.

When talking about high class coastal resort villa products, besides developer reputation, investment policy and geographical location of the project, the operating company is an important factor. Vietnamese have a saying, The products durability depends on the users. Operators with high standards and professional management procedures will protect and increase the value of the resort real estate over time. On the other hand international operators also attract foreign investors into Vietnamese resort real estate.

According to Matthew Koziora, transactional director of real estate investment fund VinaCapital, the coastal resort real estate in Vietnam has not been exploited to its whole potential.

In some areas such as Phu Quoc and Vung Tau, there are still very few projects that can match the quality standard in order to attract the international investors. Almost all investors are Vietnamese living in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. Although international investors are interested in Vietnamese coastal resort real estate, they demand more in terms of quality and projects scale, he said, adding that there are also many obstacles and restrictions legal-wise.

If the Vietnamese government invests more in infrastructure and the policies are more flexible, it will attract more foreign investors in the segment of resort real estate, he said.

Eurowindows offering

Foreseeing the needs of domestic and foreign investors for the resort real estate with high-class management, Eurowindow is currently investing in two 5-star resort areas at Bai Dai, Cam Ranh - Radisson Blu Cam Ranh managed by Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group and Movenpick Cam Ranh Resort managed by Movenpick Hotels and Resorts Group (Switzerland).

Within Movenpick Cam Ranh Resort the developer has set aside a part for Movenpick Villas and Movenpick Condotel with special incentives for secondary investors.

We are very enthusiastic about this project. Movenpick Hotels and Resorts currently manages a large number of properties worldwide, but Movenpick Cam Ranh Resort will be the first resort we manage in Vietnam, which is a key market for us and our expansion plans, said Andrew Langdon, senior president of Movenpick Hotels and Resorts Group.

For this resort to truly represent our Movenpick brand, we will ensure excellence in design, construction and management, to guarantee the delivery of 5-star international standards which we are known for. With the knowledge and experience we have gathered through years of managing our properties, we believe Movenpick Resort Cam Ranh will be an exceptional resort which delivers quality and results, he said.



100 per cent Movenpick Villas, living rooms and bedrooms are facing the sea and posses sea-view

According to Hannes Romauch, Eurowindow Nha Trangs general director, the 121 luxury Movenpick villas lead the high-class resort real estate segment in the market due to many unique features, one of which being that all of the villas have only one floor. The living room and bedrooms have a view of the sea.

The villas also have flexible policies. Buyers can participate in the sub-lease programme with high profits and also have the right to live in the villa for up to six months per year. The developer committed to share 85 per cent of the rental profit with the customers and the profitability is not less than 10 per cent per year within 10 years. In addition, to ensure greater safety for their investment, the purchasers can choose the guarantee plan of VPBank with a profit commitment of a minimum 9 per cent per year for 10 years.

The presence of a resort real estate product under the Movenpick brand with many competitive features brings in more options for domestic and foreign investors. Moreover, with Movenpick Villas, purchasers can trade and transfer the properties under the Movenpick brand, said a resort real estate investor.



Movenpick Hotel, an international standard 5-star hotel

Bai Dai, Cam Ranh, has recently been singled out by the Khanh Hoa Peoples Committee for a focus in investment. Infrastructure in the area is going to be improved to meet the growing tourism needs. Together with a flawless beach, impressive architecture, and international-standard management, the infrastructure will firmly strengthen the tourism potential of the area and the attractiveness of the Movenpick Cam Ranh Resort project as an investment.

Movenpick Resort Cam Ranh is a 5- star luxury hotel project designed by famous architects in the world with both modern and traditional style. The resort consists of 121 luxury villas, 250 rooms 5-star international hotel and 96 apartments in Condotel resort which will provide amusement services including Swiss village, golf court, tennis court, beach club, restaurants and children playground.Beach resort property is becoming a highly profitable and attractive investment channel. To get investment consulting, please contact us via 0932888008 or visit the website: villa.movenpickcamranh.com
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

Trend:

Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry has commented on the recent visit of the Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan to Azerbaijan's occupied lands.

"The recent visit of the Armenian leadership to the occupied lands and the military briefing held there is another provocative step that will even more aggravate the situation," the Foreign Ministry's spokesman Hikmat Hajiyev told Trend Apr. 19.

"These provocative actions once again prove that Armenia pursues the policy of occupation of Azerbaijani lands to the detriment of international law and the UN Charter," he added.

Hajiyev said this once again shows that Yerevan stands behind the tension on the line of contact starting from Apr. 2 and the intensive violation of the ceasefire.

"The continuation of the aggressive policy by Armenia, despite the persistent calls by international community to start comprehensive political processes for resolving the conflict, Yerevan's refusal to withdraw its forces from Azerbaijani territories, the ceasefire violation and other actions aimed at escalation of the situation are a serious threat to peace and stability in the region," said Hajiyev.

As an occupant country, Armenia is fully responsible for the aggravation of the situation on the frontline, he added.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers.

The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides.

Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Vu Anh Minh, head of the Ministry of Transports (MoT) Department for Enterprise Management, told VIR that Aeroport de Paris (ADP) and Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) were assessing each others documents on financial reports, human resources, and others. The talks would focus on the price per share, the involvement of ADP in ACVs board of directors, business governance, investment plans, and others.

As per our schedule, the result of the negotiation will be secured in July before being submitted to the government for approval, Minh said.

According to a resolution passed at ACVs shareholders general meeting in March 2016, the negotiation starting price will be VND13,100 ($0.6) per share, which was the lowest winning bid set at the initial public offering (IPO) last December.

If everything goes smoothly, this stated sale, which is the hottest in the aviation industry, is expected to be fully completed in September 2016, Minh said. As a company managing 37 airports, including some of Europes biggest, ADPs revenue from its airport operations made up 95.4 per cent of its total revenue in 2014. We hope they can help ACV improve its state governance and financial capacity.

According to the equitisation plan, ACV, which is currently operating 22 airports in Vietnam, has the chartered capital of VND22.43 trillion (nearly $1.03 billion), whose 75 per cent is held by the state. ACV plans to sell a 20 per cent stake to ADP, and will operate as a joint stock company from April 2016 onwards, and will join the unlisted public companies (UPCoM) by July at the latest. ACV is aiming to rake in over VND12.095 trillion ($554.8 million) in revenue, and VND2.056 trillion ($94.3 million) in pre-tax profits in 2016, when it also expects to handle 73.46 million passengers, up 16 per cent from 2015.

This year, the corporation plans to pump VND5.8 trillion ($266.05 million) into ongoing and new projects, including the $48.6 million expansion of Tan Son Nhat international airport; the $31.92 million expansion of Phu Quoc international airports passenger terminal; and the construction of Cat Bi international airports passenger terminal, worth $22.93 million.
Opportune time for investment

According to the report released at the end of March 2016 by the Phu Quoc Working Group under the Southwestern Regional Steering Committee on the two years of implementing special policies to develop Phu Quoc island, in the past two years authorities of the province approved 65 projects with the total land area of 1,709 hectares. Up to now, the island has attracted 236 projects with the total land area of 10,179ha and the total investment of VND311.8 trillion ($14 billion).

The working group has recently proposed the National Assembly pass the strategy to turn Phu Quoc in a special administrative and economic zone with even more and better incentives. According to an article published on the Financial Times, now is a good time to invest in Vietnams real estate, and that this market is receiving a lot of attention from investors from Hong Kong, Singapore and the US. In addition, resort properties in Vietnam has competitive price and is of a wider variety compared to other locations such as Phuket in Thailand, Sentosa in Singapore, Bali in Indonesia and Boracay in Philippines.

Pham Ngoc Anh, general director of Ban Mai JSC in Hanoi, said that after hearing about the project and reading information on the potential for development of Phu Quoc, even though she was really busy, she went on a trip to the island to see with her own eyes the islands potential for tourism development. Then she decided to buy a seaview villa in Premier Village Phu Quoc Resort developed by Sun Group.

I was totally convinced when I came to Mui Ong Doi, where Sun Group built Premier Village Phu Quoc Resort. Two sides of the villas have a view of the sea, Anh explained.

Long-term profitability

At the conference to introduce the project to Singaporean investors in the beginning of this year, Phylicia Ang, executive director of Savills Singapore said Sun Groups Premier Village Phu Quoc Resort was like the heart of the tourism site.

The price of resort properties in Phu Quoc is still low compared to similar products in other countries. The reason, according to experts, is that its only the beginning of a period of explosion in the demand. Therefore, the market may see a rise in price in the future as Phu Quoc is on its way to become Vietnams first special administrative and economic zone by 2020. Moreover, Phu Quoc is blessed with very pleasant weather, with no storm ever, so the real estate is likely to be rented by tourists for about 11 or 12 months a year, a lot higher than the figure at other northern coastal cities and provinces.

These explain the appeal of villas in Premier Village Phu Quoc Resort since the day the project was announced. Moreover, owners of the villas receive 85 per cent of the profit from renting their villas, and the amount is not going to be lower than 9 per cent of the price of the villa. This committed rate is very competitive so this investment channel is more stable than other channels.

At the sales launch a lot of investors including those from Japan, South Korea and Singapore said that the price of a villa at the resort was even more attractive given the stable income that it could bring to the owners.
The cargo port of Nha Trang is managed by Nha Trang Port JSC, a firm 61.41 percent owned by the government through the state-run Vietnam National Shipping Lines (Vinalines).

On Thursday, Vinalines signed a deal to transfer all of the state holdings, worth more than VND150 billion (US$6.7 million), to the Khanh Hoa administration, giving the province the authority to operate the port, located in the provincial capital city of Nha Trang.

Following the takeover, Khanh Hoa will turn the cargo port into Vietnams first-ever international tourist port, Tran Son Hai, standing deputy chairman of the provincial administration, said the same day.

The port will focus on receiving international tourists who arrive in the coastal province on luxury cruise ships, the official said, citing a plan approved by the government.

Cargo ships will then be transferred to dock at the provinces Cam Ranh Port, he added.

The Khanh Hoa administration hopes to receive at least 150,000 international visitors and one million domestic tourists via Nha Trang Port on an annual basis.

Vinalines is infamous for a serious corruption case in 2008 that eventually resulted in a death penalty for its former chairman Duong Chi Dung.

Dung and his accomplices were found to cause a loss of over VND366 billion ($17.4 million) to the state budget as of May 2012, through Vinalines purchase of an old floating dock, worth only $2.3 million, at $9 million in 2008.

He was sentenced to death in December 2013 on charges of intentionally violating state regulations on economic management, causing serious consequences and embezzlement.
A view of the Bach Ho oil field, which belongs to the Viet Nam-Russia Oil and Gas Joint Venture (Vietsovpetro) under the Viet Nam Oil and Gas Group. Global crude oil prices fell as no agreement on cutting oil output was reached among giant oil producers. Vietnamese investors' sentiment of the market is likely be affected this week. - VNA/ VNS Photo Huy Hung

The benchmark VN Index on the HCM Stock Exchange on Friday inched up 0.1 per cent to finish the week at 579.86 points. The southern index gained 1.3 per cent from the previous week.

The HNX Index on the Ha Noi Stock Exchange declined very slightly on Friday to end the week at 80.26 points. The northern index remained nearly flat over the week.

Oil prices may fall further into negative territory, hitting investor confidence after major producers, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, failed to reach an agreement on freezing output to stabilise prices.

The talks broke down after Saudi Arabia said a deal would only be reached if Iran joined in, which was considered a disappointing stance, given that the other producers had already agreed to the pact.

Iran had earlier refused Saudi Arabia's demand to join the deal, wanting to raise its output to pre-sanctions levels. Sanctions against the country were removed earlier this year. Iran's stance had also prevented other producers from arriving at a production ceiling in December to steady prices.

Investors and traders will now have to wait until the next OPEC meeting in June to see if any progress is made on the production freeze. Crude prices are expected to reach the balance point in mid-2017, instead of mid-2016, which was earlier forecast.

US crude West Texas Intermediate (WTI) slumped 4.8 per cent to trade at US$38.43 per barrel yesterday in early trading. US crude has dropped 8.9 per cent in the last four sessions.

US crude hit a four-month high of $42.17 per barrel, an increase of nearly two-thirds from the 12-year low of $26.21 per barrel on February 11.

Meanwhile, London-traded Brent crude fell 4.3 per cent to trade at $41.27 per barrel, extending its losing streak of 7.7 per cent for a fourth day of trading.

Brent had soared 60 per cent to reach a three-month high of $44.69 per barrel last Tuesday from a record-low of $27.88 per barrel in late January.

Last week, investors could seek profits from the recent gains in energy stocks.

Among energy firms, PetroVietnam Gas Corp (GAS) jumped 5 per cent during the week, PetroVietnam Drilling and Well Service Corp (PVD) added 2.6 per cent, PetroVietnam Technical Service Corp (PVS) gained 2.5 per cent, and PetroVietnam Coating Corp (PVB) was up by 0.9 per cent.

However, investor confidence may decline as analysts have shown little faith in a possible deal between oil producers and its positive effects on the global glut. The decline in energy stocks may also erode investor confidence in other stocks, especially the blue chips that made gains last week, including Vietcombank (VCB), property developer Vingroup JSC (VIC) and insurer Bao Viet Holdings on the southern bourse, and Tien Phong Plastic JSC (NTP), An Phat Plastic and Green Environment JSC (AAA) on the northern bourse.

VCB, VIC and BVH advanced by 2.7 per cent, 9.5 per cent and 4 per cent, respectively. AAA and NTP increased by 1.2 per cent and 3.9 per cent.

Securities corps, such as HCM City Securities Corp (HCM), Sai Gon-Ha Noi Securities Corp (SHS), VNDirect Securities Corp (VND) and Bao Viet Securities Corp (BVS), also saw gains last week.

Both local markets traded nearly 192 million shares per day worth VND3.1 trillion ($137.5 million), an increase of 16.5 per cent in trading value and 12 per cent in trading volume from the previous week.
Photo by ASSOCIATED PRESS

Dusty sculptures made of cast-off baby dolls sit in an open-air museum and art workshop off a trash-strewn street cutting through some of the poorest neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince.


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Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

Trend:

Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry has commented on the recent visit of the Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan to Azerbaijan's occupied lands.

"The recent visit of the Armenian leadership to the occupied lands and the military briefing held there is another provocative step that will even more aggravate the situation," the Foreign Ministry's spokesman Hikmat Hajiyev told Trend Apr. 19.

"These provocative actions once again prove that Armenia pursues the policy of occupation of Azerbaijani lands to the detriment of international law and the UN Charter," he added.

Hajiyev said this once again shows that Yerevan stands behind the tension on the line of contact starting from Apr. 2 and the intensive violation of the ceasefire.

"The continuation of the aggressive policy by Armenia, despite the persistent calls by international community to start comprehensive political processes for resolving the conflict, Yerevan's refusal to withdraw its forces from Azerbaijani territories, the ceasefire violation and other actions aimed at escalation of the situation are a serious threat to peace and stability in the region," said Hajiyev.

As an occupant country, Armenia is fully responsible for the aggravation of the situation on the frontline, he added.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers.

The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides.

Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
China says a military plane has landed on one of the country's man-made islands in the disputed South China Sea, the first public acknowledgement of such a mission.

China's state-run media said Monday that the plane was on patrol in the area Sunday when it received an emergency call to land on Fiery Cross Reef to evacuate three injured construction workers.

After picking up the injured workers, the plane then flew to Hainan Island where it was met by an ambulance.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, said such rescue missions are part of the military's tradition.

"On Chinese territory, something like this is not out of the ordinary," he said.

China completed the 3,000-meter runway on the island in the disputed Spratly archipelago last year, and began test flights of commercial airlines there in January.

Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said the United States has serious concerns about China's actions in the South China Sea.

He said other Asian countries in the region have been expressing their concerns to the United States both publicly and privately about China's military actions, which he said "stand out in size and scope."

U.S. military officials have said that any attempt by China to fly military aircraft from the man-made islands would not deter U.S. flights over the area.

China claims much of the South China Sea, while several other nations  including the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam  have rival claims.
Ivory Coast's National Order of Architects has opened the countrys first professional architecture school, where professors want to instill in students an understanding of the countrys specific building needs and heritage.

Nineteen students enrolled in the Abidjan School of Architecture's inaugural class in December. They will each spend six years completing coursework, internships and a thesis before they receive their diplomas.

The schools founders said it was high time Ivory Coast had a professional architecture school of its own. Up to now, many would-be architects have opted to study in France or the United States.

Francis Sossah, one of Ivory Coasts most prominent architects and a professor at the school, estimated there were only about 100 professionally trained architects in the country, which boasts one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

By way of comparison, he noted that Ivory Coast, a country of 25 million inhabitants, doesn't even have as many architects as the small French city of Toulouse, and yet there are an increasing number of hospitals, schools, offices and other structures that need to be built in urban spaces.

During the early phase of their training, Sossahs students spend a lot of time thinking about Ivory Coasts architectural heritage. They have already gone on trips to study buildings in the beach town of Grand-Bassam and in Kong, a city in the countrys northeast.

Adding to heritage

Student Georges Brou said the trip to Kong helped students understand their own heritage, which is architecture made from the earth. The heritage needs to be conserved and built upon, he said, because the most beautiful buildings, the ones with the simplest concepts, aren't being replicated anymore.

Other students are looking to make their mark on Abidjan, Ivory Coasts modern economic capital, a regional hub with four million inhabitants.

Marie-Danielle Kangah said she hoped to build high-quality housing for poor city residents currently living in shantytowns.

Current construction isn't being regulated, she said; developers build as they want, when they want, where they want. The architects work for individuals and are not focused on the entire population. The country can benefit, she said, from a new generation of Ivorian architects with a broader understanding of the country's building requirements.

The Abidjan School of Architecture is significantly more expensive than many other private schools in the country. Yearly fees start at roughly 4.5 million francs CFA, or around $8,000. The school hopes to offer scholarships in the future.
Police in Bangladesh have arrested a veteran journalist on charges of plotting to kill the formerly U.S.-based son of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and they are preparing to arrest another newspaper editor in the same case.

Following Saturdays arrest of Shafik Rehman, 82, editor of the monthly magazine Mouchake Dhil, police said he visited the U.S. in 2012 to facilitate a secret deal with an FBI special agent seeking confidential information about Hasinas son Sajeeb Wazed Joy and help in the conspiracy to abduct and kill him.

Police said that while Rehman was being interrogated, newspaper editor Mahmudur Rahman, who has been in jail following his arrest for sedition and other charges in 2013, would be taken in next. Rehman and Rahman both are known as journalists who are backed by the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Hasina said Monday in Dhaka that "American investigators caught one FBI agent taking a bribe from a BNP leader. The involvement of Shafik Rehman and Mahmudur Rahman in the conspiracy got exposed in an American court, not in any Bangladeshi court.

Facebook post

Upon Rehmans arrest, Joy, who lives in Bangladesh now, wrote in a Facebook post Sunday: The U.S. Department of Justice discovered Shafik Rehmans direct involvement in the plot to kidnap and kill me. They provided this evidence to our government. He was arrested based on this evidence.

Khaleda Zia, former prime minister of Bangladesh and chairperson of the BNP, said that by arresting Rehman, the government had shown its autocratic face.

In his writings, Shafik Rehman relentlessly exposed failure, corruption and other malpractices of this government. Trumped-up charges have been slapped against him, and he has been arrested because the government could not restrict him from writing in other ways, Zia said in a statement.

Last year, a U.S. court sentenced former FBI Special Agent Robert Lustyik to five years in jail for taking bribes from Bangladeshi immigrant Rizve Ahmed, a k a Caesar.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Lustyik was sentenced for accepting and soliciting bribes in exchange for providing internal law enforcement documents and other confidential information about a prominent citizen of Bangladesh for use by a political rival.

The son of a U.S.-based BNP leader, Ahmed received a 42-month prison term in the case and he remains in jail in the U.S.

After Ahmed was sentenced last year, police in Dhaka initiated a criminal case against some BNP leaders for allegedly attempting to abduct and kill Joy.

Rehman was not named as an accused either in the bribing case in the U.S. or in the case in Bangladesh. But in the course of the investigation, his involvement in the plot was detected, police said.

In a statement, a group of journalist union leaders in Dhaka sought immediate release of Rehman and said his arrest in the case was extremely illogical.

Shafik Rehman is known for his writing in support of democracy and good governance. His arrest is a blow to the rights to our freedom of expression, the statement said.

Threats to freedoms seen

Rights group campaigners say that the Hasina-led government has been using harsh tactics to crack down on dissent, which, they say, could threaten freedom of speech and press in Bangladesh.

The Hasina-led government relies on such tactics as its key weapon after occupying the office without the peoples true mandate, said legal rights activist Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman, liaison officer of the Hong Kong-based Asian Legal Resource Center.

The use of strong-arm tactics is not surprising in a jurisdiction where the basic rule-of-law institutions, like the law enforcement agencies, the crime investigation agency, the prosecution and the courts, survive as subjugated tools in the hands of the government of the day, Ashrafuzzaman told VOA.

Hasina and her Awami League-led government are using sedition and criminal defamation laws to systematically silence media voices that they view as being hostile to their interests, said Phil Robertson, Asia deputy director of Human Rights Watch.

By going after leading editors of newspapers and magazines using harsh criminal charges, it's clear she's engaged in a bare-knuckled pummeling of what remains of Bangladeshis' rights to freedom of the press and freedom of expression, Robertson told VOA.
Belgian authorities say they have evidence to suggest more Islamic State recruits are looking to return to Europe.

The head of the government crisis center, Paul Van Tigchelt, told RTFB television, intelligence indicates foreign terrorist fighters in Syria want to return, "not just to Belgium, but to Europe to carry out an attack".

Belgium maintains its terror alert at the second highest level a month after suicide bombings killed 32 people in Brussels. Tigchelt said the terrorist threat to the country is "still considered serious, grave, and likely".

Investigations into the March 22 attacks claimed by IS militants continue amid tight security in airports, railway stations, and nuclear power stations.

Two suicide bombers at a Brussels airport and a third at Maalbeek metro station blew themselves up, marking the country's worst ever terror attack. A fourth bomber, Mohamed Abrini, could not detonate his device and was arrested on April 8 in Brussels.

A series of other arrests have been made in recent weeks as Belgian authorities try to uncover a terrorist network linked to both the attacks in Brussels as well as the November 13th attacks in Paris.
Some Chinese netizens say Twitters recent appointment of a regional executive with a background in the country's military and state security apparatus has quashed any hope of maintaining a censorship-free micro-blogging platform.

Since last week, when Kathy Chen was appointed Twitter's first managing director for China, Chinese users of the U.S. microblogging site have raised concerns over Chen's past links to the Chinese government and wondered if their freedom of speech on the platform would be compromised.

Although blocked in China, Twitter is a popular platform for Chinese  especially those living overseas  to freely express themselves in their native language. While China has produced homegrown equivalents such as Weibo, the government exerts strict controls over what can be said on them and by whom.

For years, Chinese netizens said Twitters lax registration requirements, which document and index search activity and private chat records, left Beijing government censors largely unable to identify them.

But now they doubt Twitters platform security.

"This is indeed somewhat puzzling, wrote one microblogger who declined to be identified. Why did an American IT giant fancy someone with so obvious a Communist background?

It is no secret that Chens former employer, CISCO, has unusual relations with the Chinese government, they continued. Another of her former employers, a Chinese company, helped the Chinese government in the Sino-U.S. cyber war.

Twitter has fallen, almost like Weibo, a Chinese netizen who uses the handle "Simba" told VOAs Mandarin Service on Sunday. I think this is entirely possible. I am not optimistic about it.

Weibo is one of Chinas most popular web sites, whose domestic market penetration mirrors that of Twitter in the United States. Heavily-censored by government officials, Weibo, founded in 2009, has more than a quarter billion subscribers and sees more than 100 million posts daily.

Some Chinese Twitter users, however, believe critics of Chens appointment are overacting, describing Twitter as a trusted U.S. company. Even if it hired someone with suspicious background, they said, its corporate culture, servers, technology and policies will not change.

Because of Chens "low-level position, she will have no access to users privacy information," posted one subscriber.

"Twitter has only one purpose [and] that is to attract Chinas rich to advertise on Twitter. Big companies such as Lenovo and Hainan Airlines, etc., they have special advertising needs, the blogger continued.

Twitter cares about profit. [There are] so many rich people in China, said another. As for Chinese users, no need to worry if the Party wants to find you, they dont need to invade your Twitter account.

In an emailed statement, Twitter said it was usual for the Chinese government to assign graduates to jobs in the 1980s. Chen's computer science degree made her a prime candidate for a job as a junior engineer in the People's Liberation Army, the company said.

Chen, who will be based in Hong Kong, was most recently an executive with Microsoft Asia-Pacific Research and Development Group before being hired by Twitter.

She has not publicly responded to Twitter user concerns.
Never mind the predictions. As Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters see it, the New York presidential primary race is down to the wire.



Clinton, her supporters argue, wears the home jersey in New Yorks Democratic primary  a state she served for eight years as U.S. senator. Polls indicate she holds a 12 percentage point lead heading into election day.

But with hours to go before voters head to their precincts, Bernie Sanders' supporters remain optimistic, particularly in the borough of Brooklyn, where both campaigns have set up official shop. Brooklyn also happens to be the Vermont senator's birthplace.



Just three kilometers separate the rival campaign headquarters: Clintons in a modern marble floor high rise in Brooklyn Heights and Sanders in a Gowanus neighborhood warehouse  colorfully decorated with multicultural, multigenerational banners: Unidos con Bernie, Asian Americans + Pacific Islanders for Bernie, and Boomers for Bernie.



In both locations, a slow, steady flow of volunteersoften sporting team logos  approach their respective front desks. In Gowanus, a SIGN IN poster, hand-drawn in capital bubble letters, marks the entrance for volunteers.



Brooklyn native Crystal Taylor has spent her day canvassing for Sanders and says she senses enthusiasm and support on the streets. She said she would be very surprised if Clinton wins the state.



We were just walking down the street, two ladies and a baby and a stroller, with the signs. And people just went crazy  Yeah, Bernie, Im voting on Tuesday, Ill be there! You can count on my vote! It was just amazing, says Taylor. I really havent seen that with any other candidate, and Ive been looking.

Miscommunication



In Brooklyn Heights, the sign-in process for volunteers is similar to Gowanus. But Clinton volunteers are greeted by building doormen.



There, during a 15-minute span, several would-be volunteers approach the security table. When asked if they have appointments, a couple of them say, yes. They show an ID and proceed to the elevators.



But for those without appointments, the process is more complicated:



Do you have a contact?

No

Its by appointment only.

Can you provide a number?

Sorry, I cant.



One Clinton supporter expresses her frustration. Im just trying to volunteer, she says. After locating an alternate phone bank location, she turns to me. Its really bad  This happened two times already.



If I didnt believe in her so much, she adds, shaking her head.



A contest built on character



Outside Clintons headquarters, two Sanders supporters hold up signs and an American flag, silently, in protest. NEOCON, the sign reads in capital blue, below a caricature of Clintons face.



Joe Giannini, a Vietnam veteran with the 1st Battalion 3rd Marines, says he will not vote for Clinton in part because of her 2002 vote as U.S. senator to go to war in Iraq, labeling her decision making politically expedient.



A self-described Brooklyn kid, Giannini says the decision to support Sanders, for him, is about character.



Im okay with Bernie, he says. I dont think hes a real leader, but at least he has good judgment.



Still, Clinton supporters in Brooklyn insist she will win, and have the polls in their favor to prove it.



Brian Fox, an African American voter from Bedford-Stuyvesant, near Brooklyn Heights, says Hillary is more in-tune with the needs of the neighborhood.



She came to the area to see what we were looking for, said Fox. Youve got a lot of people that talk the talk, but dont walk the walk. So I just think shes a better candidate.



Haitian-born U.S. citizen Pierre Pretpetit, now a retired taxi driver, agrees. He says the United States has given him everything, but he has one last request.



I would like her [Clinton] to be president, then Im going to be happy, said Pretpetit, laughing. I have my black president, so now I will get the whole package.
Billionaire Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won Tuesday's presidential primaries in the northeastern U.S. state of New York, extending their leads over rivals trying to earn the Republican and Democratic nominations.

With the bulk of the votes counted, Trump had a huge win with about 60 percent compared to 25 percent for Ohio Governor John Kasich and 15 percent for Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Clinton was beating Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders 57 percent to 42 percent.

The candidates are trying to amass a majority of convention delegates in order to clinch their party nominations for the November general election.



Trump earned almost all of New York's 95 delegates for the Republicans, putting him at 845 delegates after Tuesday's vote. Cruz remained at 559 delegates, while Kasich gained a few to reach 147. A Republican needs 1,237 to be nominated, a level Trump may not be able to reach before the party's July convention.

The Republican front-runner thanked his supporters and continued to cast himself as the only GOP candidate with enough support to win the nomination.

"We don't have much of a race anymore, based on what I'm seeing on television, Senator Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated," Trump said.

Trump also hinted at his continued criticism of the delegate selection process, saying "It's really nice to win the delegates with the votes."

Open convention



Cruz and Kasich are now hoping for an open convention where Trump is not chosen on the first ballot and delegates are free to vote for them in the second round. In remarks to his supporters Tuesday, Cruz likened himself to Sanders.

"The people in state after state have made it clear, they cry out for a new path," Cruz said. "This is the year of the outsider. I'm an outsider, Bernie Sanders is an outsider. Both with the same diagnosis, but both with very different paths to healing."

Sanders also faces a mathematically tough road to his party's nomination.

Clinton maintains lead over Sanders



Clinton's win put her at 1,887 delegates, including the so-called super delegates who have pledged to support her, while Sanders trailed at 1,174. The Democrats have more overall delegates, so a candidate needs 2,383 to clinch a majority.

But Sanders remains positive and told an enthusiastic crowd Tuesday that Clinton is "getting a little bit nervous." He also highlighted a potential benefit that his campaign with its mass of young, passionate supporters could have for the Democratic Party as a whole.

"This is the campaign that has the energy, that has the enthusiasm, and that in November will create the kind of voter turnout that will not only allow us to retain the White House, but we'll regain the U.S. Senate, we'll do better in the House."

Clinton used part of her victory speech Tuesday night to reach out to those Sanders backers.

"To all the people who supported Senator Sanders, I believe there is much more that unites us than divides us."



WATCH: Related video report by Jim Malone
The co-founder of Germanys anti-immigration PEGIDA movement went on trial Tuesday on hate speech charges for using derogatory language about refugees on social media.

Lutz Bachmanns comments were made in a September 2014 Facebook posting, in which he called migrants and refugees "cattle", "garbage" and "scumbags".

Dresden state prosecutors have charged Bachmann with incitement, saying his insulting language constituted an "attack on the dignity" of refugees, intended to deny them an equal life in Germany.

Bachmann has denied the charges, saying the trial is purely politically motivated to discredit him and the group.

If found guilty, the 43-year-old Bachmann faces three months to five years in prison.

Bachmann expressed regret shortly after his posting and apologized for harming PEGIDA.

A group of supporters gathered outside the court Tuesday, some holding German flags and placards.

One of them read We want a Germany out of the euro, out of the European Union, out of NATO and with true democracy" and another calling for Chancellor Angela Merkel to resign.

PEGIDA has strongly criticized Merkels open door policy on refugees.

PEGIDA ( a German acronym for Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West) entered into the German political scene last year with anti-immigrant rallies that started in the eastern city of Dresden, the capital of Saxony, and spread to several other cities.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

Trend:

Security issues in the South Caucasus, including the situation in Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh were discussed by Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin and the US ambassador in Russia John Tefft, RIA Novosti agency reported Apr. 19, citing Russian Foreign Ministry's message.

The sides also exchanged views on the cooperation forms in solving the Ukrainian crisis, said the agency.

The situation in Moldova and Georgia was also touched upon during the US-initiated meeting, according to the agency.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

Edited by SI
Caldoun Abuhakel and his 12-year-old son, Baraa, traveled from their Minnesota home to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Congress and key staffers.

Some 300 Muslim-Americans from across the United States gathered Monday on Capitol Hill to talk with their representatives about Muslim-American issues.

Baraa told VOA that he has experienced taunting at school, when other kids told him to "stop being so Muslim, stop being so terrorist."

But he says his younger brother, Muhamad, is frightened and upset by the anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

The boys' father said that after watching campaign coverage on television, seven-year-old Muhamad asked if the family would have to move if Trump or Cruz were elected.

On Monday, Baraa looked for answers for his brother.

The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) organized Mondays second Muslim Advocacy Day. First, the delegates received training on how to make the best use of their time  about 15 minutes  with each lawmaker or staff member. Then, the group split up into smaller state delegations and fanned out to meet with their representatives.

The first stop for the Minnesota group was Samantha Cyrulnik-Dercher, senior staffer for Democratic Representative Tim Walz.

Cyrulnik-Dercher expressed her concern about the anti-Muslim rhetoric presented by some Republican candidates, but assured Baraa that she and others would fight any proposals banning Muslims from entering the U.S.

Countering Islamophobia

All the delegations raised the issue of increasing Islamophobia, especially in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks. They asked each representative to support two current resolutions that recognize and condemn Islamophobia.

So far, 150 members of Congress  all Democrats  support the resolutions. One goal for Mondays advocacy day was to win over support from some Republicans. The Minnesota delegation met with a member of Republican Representative Erik Paulsens staff, and was told Paulsen would look into the resolutions.

Bread-and-butter issues

The delegations also asked lawmakers to help Muslim-Americans and other minorities with bread-and-butter issues, including the Credit Access and Inclusion Act that would help minorities establish strong credit to purchase cars and homes.

The delegations also asked for support of the Food Deserts Act  legislation intended to promote the opening of grocery stores in poorer communities that only have convenience stores and fast-food restaurants.

In addition, visitors shared their concerns about the Obama administrations efforts to counter violent extremism, saying they feel the Muslim-American community has been singled out for intelligence gathering activities and other potentially abusive law enforcement practices.

The administration says Muslim-Americans are key allies in the effort to thwart terrorist attacks.

Whether or not their legislative goals were reached, members of the Muslim group from Minnesota stressed the success of their visit in strengthening relationships between Congress and the Muslim-American community.
Authorities in Russia-annexed Crimea have released a journalist affiliated with the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty on bail, but with travel restrictions, according to a report quoting his lawyer.

Prosecutor General of Crimea Natalya Poklonskaya says a criminal case has been launched against the journalist, named as Nikolai Semena, for alleged extremism and supporting violations of Russias territorial integrity.

Russias parliament made questioning the country's territorial integrity a criminal offense shortly after it approved the March 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. If found guilty, Semena could get up to five years in prison.

Poklonskaya claims Semena has published reports on the Radio Liberty program Crimea Realities in support of Ukrainian activists trade blockade of the Black Sea peninsula.

"In this article, and in a number of other publications prepared by this media representative, there are justifications for subversive activities, Poklonskaya told Russian state media, which have been conducted against all Crimeans, justification for terrorist intent ... as well as calls for extremist activities.

Crimea Realities quoted Semenas lawyer, Emil Kurbedinov, saying the journalist denied the charges and had not worked for the program since 2014. Semena also previously worked for a Ukrainian newspaper and a Russian newspaper.



Semena was detained Tuesday during a series of raids on homes in Crimea that also targeted other journalists. Crimean authorities say they seized computers and documents to be used as evidence.

RFE/RL's web site quoted the broadcaster's editor in chief, Nenad Pejic, as saying "Police conducted forced searches at the homes of seven people across Crimea, including some RFE/RL correspondents." While RFE's report did not give Semena's name, Pejic said one of the journalists now faced criminal charges based on his work.

Pejic described the broadcaster's Crimea web site as one of the "last remaining sources of independent news" on Crimea.

The the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees VOA, RFE/RL and three other U.S. broadcasting entities, condemned "the targeting of independent journalists in Russia-annexed Crimea."

The charges being considered against Semena are baseless and are aimed only at silencing independent voices and dissent, BBG CEO and Director John Lansing said. Threats to the free practice of journalism must neither be made nor tolerated by any government.

OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic expressed concern about what she called the intimidation against Semena and other journalists.

This recent detention only shows the urgent need to stop the arbitrary practice of silencing journalists in Crimea, Mijatovic said.

The raids come just a day after Russias top investigator called for the criminal prosecution of anyone denying the results of the internationally dismissed referendum in Crimea that Moscow used to justify annexing the peninsula. Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russias Investigative Committee, said in an opinion piece published in a Russian magazine that denial of the referendums legitimacy should be equated with extremist activity.

The rushed vote in Crimea was held after Russian special forces seized Ukrainian military bases there. The referendum included only two options - independence or joining Russia. Moscow claimed nearly 97 percent of Crimeans supported becoming part of Russia.

Bastrykin says his proposal to criminalize questioning the referendum's results was part of a series of tough measures is a response to what he called a hybrid war unleashed by the U.S. and its allies. The restrictions included Internet and media censorship using China as a model.

Poklonskaya, the Crimean prosecutor, declared her approval of Bastrykins proposal. On Tuesday, Russias Justice Ministry suspended the Crimean Tatars highest ruling body, the Mejlis, for extremist activities.

Tatars make up about 12 percent of Crimea's population and openly opposed Russias annexation. The ministry said the ban was based on an order by Poklonskaya.

Bastrykins statement was not purely personal opinion, but part of a shift to more authoritarian stance taken by the Russian government to head off any challenges, New York University Professor of Global Affairs Mark Galeotti told VOA in an interview via Skype.

And, this means everything from, lets say, the rising tide of labor unrest across the country to Tatar militants within the Crimea. So, I think its a sense of a fear that things might spin out of control, especially as we move toward election season, he said. So, I think it does definitely speak to a new, rather more paranoid and certainly worried mood within the Kremlin."

RFE/RL receives funding from the United States government. Like Voice of America, it is overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
Cuba's Communist Party says 84-year-old President Raul Castro will hold the party's highest post for another five years, alongside his chief lieutenant, 85-year-old hardliner Jose Ramon Machado Ventura.

Those disclosures came Tuesday, capping a four-day secret party congress that many analysts had expected to produce signs that party stalwarts - many of them in their 70s and 80s - would begin to step aside in favor of younger leaders.

Government news sites said Castro, whose presidency ends in 2018, will remain the party's first secretary and that Machado Ventura will hold the post of second secretary.

Castro had earlier called for drastic changes to Cuba's Soviet-style command economy, while calling for top leaders to retire at age 70. But he has also indicated that new party rules would not be operational until the next party congress in 2021.

The reports say the party also chose its powerful 15-member political bureau, which observers say is largely devoid of new and younger party members.

The twice-a-decade congress ended a month after U.S. President Barack Obama's historic visit to Havana, the first visit by a sitting U.S. president in nearly 90 years. Since then, Cuban leaders have sought to portray that visit as a U.S. attempt to woo ordinary Cubans away from the country's socialist values and toward a multi-party democracy.

More than a half century ago, Machado Ventura fought alongside Fidel Castro and Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara in a rebellion against dictator Fulgencio Batista, who ruled in the 1950s.

He has since sat on the powerful Politburo for the past four decades and has frequently been deployed by both Castros to maintain party discipline.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Tuesday that Turkey must meet all remaining conditions before the EU can open up visa-free travel.

His comments came a day after Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu warned that if the EU does not approve the visa liberalization by June then Turkey will not abide by its agreement to help stop the massive flow of migrants to Europe.

Davutoglu said he does not think there will be a problem, but stressed that the EU-Turkey agreement is a mutual one and it would be "unthinkable" for his country to carry out its part if Europe does not.

'A matter of criteria'



Juncker told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that since the March 18 agreement went into effect, the number of people making the sea crossing from Turkey to Greece has sharply decreased. But he said the EU will not rush or ease the visa regulation process with Turkey.

"Visa liberalization is a matter of criteria," he said. "The criteria will not be watered down in the case of Turkey."

Europe has been scrambling to respond to the influx of people arriving on its shores in the past few years, most of whom fled Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The International Organization for Migration says more than 1 million people have landed in Greece since the beginning of 2015. But that migration route, the most popular one, has been met by governments that do not want the extra people and have put in place measures to block their borders.

EU-Turkey agreement



The EU-Turkey deal calls for Turkey to prevent migrants from departing on the sea routes and taking back those who illegally arrive in Europe. In exchange, Turkey gets aid and other benefits, such as visa-free travel in the EU for its citizens.

The European Commission announced another $68 million in aid for the migrants sent back from Greece to Turkey, as well as $56 million in new funding for the millions of Syrian refugees who have fled to Turkey to escape the five-year civil war in their country.

A separate round of emergency aid is sending $94 million in fresh funding to Greece to help improve the living conditions for refugees there.
Syrian activists say airstrikes targeted two opposition-held towns in northwestern Syria, killing 44 civilians.

The Syrian Observer for Human Rights said a vegetable market in the town of Maarat al-Numan was shelled Tuesday killing about 40 people. Another strike in the nearby town of Kafranbel in Idlib province, left at least four dead. Both areas are known as pro-opposition strongholds.

The shelling followed fighting Monday in the coastal province of Latakia, the stronghold of President Bashar al-Assads minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam.

The rebels insists the offensive was in response to regime's violations of the cease-fire deal that came in effect in February.

Both the Syrian pro-government forces and the rebels have accused each other of a string of breaches around Aleppo and in other areas of the country. The truce excluded areas controlled by Al-Nusra and the Islamic State group.
Many parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas are scorching in heat caused by a cyclical phenomenon known as El Nino. The unusually warm waters that come up to the surface in the Pacific Ocean every three to six years cause extreme weather conditions. The resulting drought is especially hard on the poorest people of sub-Saharan Africa.

Somaliland is one of the poorest African regions. Its rural population is struggling to make a living in the best of times, but drought makes it impossible.

"I am 80. In the 80 years of my life, I've never seen such severe drought. It has killed so many animals and caused so much famine. Our lives are in danger," said Mohamed Omar, a farmer.

The situation is similar in the neighboring Puntland region and parts of Ethiopia. The United Nations last month called for urgent aid to save 1.7 million people in the affected parts of Somalia.

"Communities are losing their means for survival, and we need to stop this loss of lives and forced displacement as people have no other option than to move in search of food, water and income," said Peter de Clercq, a U.N. humanitarian coordinator.

But when there is no food and water for miles and miles around, moving may be futile. Some Ethiopian farmers have crossed the border to try to escape famine.

"The drought has been raging for three years in Ethiopia. We were told that there were pastures on the other side of the border. But when we got here, we found nothing," said farmer Hawo Rayab.

Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous country, is in the grip of its worst drought in decades. The government is appealing for aid to help 10 million affected people.

The food shortage is also grave in Malawi, which has not yet recovered from last year's record flooding.

"Before the floods, my child was doing well. But after we lost our crops, my child got sick and became malnourished. That is what made me come to this hospital for treatment and food," said Liza Fatchi, a Malawian woman.

Malawi's president has declared a state of national disaster. But the food crisis in parts of Africa could get worse yet.

The peak of the crisis is still to come. So, I think we will see the situation getting worse before it will get better. We talk about maybe a small improvement around mid-2016 or shortly after this," said Echo Ethiopias Johan Heffinck.

Experts say people in the affected areas depend on aid to survive and are calling for an urgent step-up of humanitarian efforts.
Heavy rains poured down Sunday night on the Texas Gulf Coast and throughout eastern Texas, leaving about a thousand houses flooded and hundreds of people in need of rescue.

As much as 37 centimeters (more than 14 inches) of rain fell in the hardest hit areas of Texas.

The heaviest downpours came in the early morning hours Monday, along with hail and small tornadoes in some areas. By daylight, city officials in Houston were scrambling to deploy rescue teams all around the city, and Mayor Sylvester Turner was asking citizens to stay home.

"With respect to our situation, there is water all over the place, flooding all over the place," he told residents.

The mayor said rescue crews had used high-water vehicles early on, and then used boats in heavily-flooded areas to rescue 400 people  many of whom are now in shelters. Underpasses on many major streets and highways are flooded and sections of Interstates 10 and 45 are closed.

In one area, rescuers in boats reported seeing several horses struggling to keep their heads above water as they searched for a way out of the fast-moving current. At least one dog was rescued, but crews primarily focused on saving humans.

Turner asked citizens to remain calm and patient as city, county and state officials respond to the disaster.

"We are deploying resources; we certainly want to make sure people are safe, especially our elderly and people who are living by themselves, he said. That is the number one priority."

Hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled at Houston's two large airports, but neither of the airports closed.

However, more trouble is on the way, as additional rain is expected into Tuesday.

Official flood warnings extend through Louisiana and Arkansas and into southern Missouri, but the biggest danger remains in the Houston area, where the rain-soaked ground cannot absorb the heavy rains that are expected. The new downpours could cause already-swollen rivers and bayous to overflow their banks and further swamp residential areas.



WATCH: Video footage of Texas flooding
International and United Nations agencies are mounting a large-scale emergency operation to assist tens of thousands of people affected by the worst earthquake to hit Ecuador since 1979. The latest figures put the number of dead at more than 400 and the number of injured at more than 2,650.

The disaster has displaced an estimated 40,000 people and the number of dead and injured is expected to rise. The earthquake, which struck northeast Ecuador Saturday, had a magnitude of 7.8.

The government has declared a state of emergency in six of Ecuadors 24 provinces and has requested international assistance. The worst damage is in the Pedernales area in Manabi province. Aid agencies reportedly are having difficulty in accessing the area because of extensive damage to the roads and infrastructure.

Spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs Jens Laerke says the earthquake has been followed by some 300 aftershocks. He says many people are believed to be trapped under the debris.

The top priority in the response remains search and rescue operations, and local teams continue to search through the rubble in many of the worst hit places in the north of the country ," Laerke said. " Also, International Urban Search and Rescue teams, called USAR teams, from six countries have deployed to Ecuador.

The government of Ecuador says it has enough medical teams to respond to the emergency. But, the World Health Organization (WHO) says it is assessing needs and is ready to increase medical and surgical personnel, if required.

WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic says several staff members are in the country assessing health needs. He tells VOA water-borne diseases are a risk for people who live in crowded places as commonly happens after a disaster.

I mentioned a couple of viruses that are circulating like Zika, like Chikungunya, because (of) people who live in shelters," Jasarevic said. "So there will be maybe an issue of having more of stagnant water and breeding sites for mosquitoes. It is important to reduce those.

He says it is important to work with authorities on strengthening disease control around homeless shelters. Latin America is the epicenter of an outbreak of the Zika virus, which is linked to microcephaly, a brain disorder in newborn babies.
Iraq's parliament has cancelled another session after failing to vote on the fate of their speaker, continuing a week of turmoil.

A majority of Iraqi lawmakers voted to dismiss Parliament Speaker Salim al-Jibouri and his deputies Thursday after chaos erupted over approving new Cabinet nominees. The parliament members proceeded to elect Adnan al-Janabi, leaving two claims to the speaker position.

Jibouri supporters argue the vote was not legal because the necessary quorum was not achieved.

After negotiations, the house agreed to convene Tuesday to vote on whether to remove speaker Jibouri, but the session dissolved into chaotic arguments. Jibouri then suspended parliament "until further notice", but Janabi called for a session Thursday.

As well as seeking to sack Jibouri, lawmakers have staged sit-ins and have even thrown punches in the chamber this week.

In February, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called for fundamental change to the government and called for the inclusion of academic and professional figures in the Cabinet. Since then he has proposed several reform measures that have been delayed or otherwise undermined by parties and politicians with vested interests in keeping the current system.

The United States and United Nations have stressed the political crisis in Iraq could distract from efforts to combat the Islamic State jihadist group, which overran large areas of Iraq in 2014.
The Islamic State (IS) may have raised as much as $100 million by digging up and selling priceless antiquities from territory it controls, according to experts consulted by a U.S. congressional panel.

At a Tuesday hearing of the House Task Force to Investigate Terrorism Financing, experts said IS is the wealthiest terror group operating today. The illegal relic trade is a "key source" of some of that wealth, according to Lawrence Schindell who tracks art sales and money laundering in the art world and heads ARIS Title Insurance Corporation.

Looting of historic sites was going on before IS took over, but witnesses said IS "institutionalized the activity and operates on an industrial scale. IS is organizing an increasingly sophisticated, systematic, destructive and profitable campaign to plunder some of the thousands of archeological sites in areas of Iraq and Syria.

Professor Amr Al-Azm of Shawnee State University in Ohio, says IS sees cultural heritage items as resources to be exploited for revenue, in much the same way as oil.

WATCH: Looting Means Millions of Dollars for IS

Yaya Fanusie of the Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance, says the illegal relics trade is not as lucrative as the sale of oil by IS. But he says the relic trade requires less capital investment and can provide work badly needed by residents in areas where the economy is disrupted by conflict. IS also licenses relic hunters in areas under its control, taxes their finds, and is increasingly directly involved in finding and selling these goods.

Fanusie says the relic trade is not likely to be disrupted by air strikes that have hurt revenue from oil operations. The relics trade is also easier to foist on populations under IS control, than kidnapping, extortion, confiscation, or taxes which also produce revenue.

IS is well known for destroying key historic relics that do not confirm to its ideology, actions that sparked global outrage after assaults on historic relics in Palmyra and elsewhere. Experts say spectacular acts of vandalism by IS are a propaganda tool intended to show the world the international community is powerless to stop them. Witnesses say what is less known is that IS tends to destroy buildings or artifacts that are too large to move, while earning millions by selling many smaller items.

Experts say IS methods of collecting relics are destructive, and sometimes employ bulldozers and trucks. Archeologists use trowels and paint brushes to carefully unearth relics.

Patty Gerstenblith of the art preservation group Blue Shield says scholars glean great insight from the location and surroundings of their historic finds. She says the crude actions by IS closes these windows into history forever.

Gerstenblith says freshly looted antiquities are the perfect vehicle for money laundering and other illegal activities connected with terrorism. According to Schindell, that is because artwork is a high-value highly-portable asset traded in a market defined by discretion.

Several hearing witnesses discussed better tracking of artworks, stronger laws regulating sales of relics harvested in conflict zones, better coordination between financial regulators and law enforcement, and relevant training for intelligence and other agencies.

Fanusie says learning more about IS relic operations can give new insight into the terror group's operations, leadership, intentions, and vulnerabilities. He called for Washington to step up enforcement and penalties for relic buyers

Schindell says the looting and destruction of the global historic heritage will only stop when smarter enforcement makes selling plundered pieces of history less profitable.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

By Elmira Tariverdiyeva - Trend:

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will be discussed between the Russian and Armenian foreign ministers in Yerevan, Mariya Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia's Foreign Ministry, told Trend Apr. 19.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is not expected to visit Baku soon, according to Zakharova.

Earlier, speaking at a press center in Moscow, she said the work continues to resolve the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and talks are underway for finding compromises.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers.

The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides,

Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
An Israeli court on Tuesday convicted the man who led the 2014 revenge killing and burning of a Palestinian teenager that helped spark a 50-day war in Gaza.

The court rejected an insanity plea by Yosef Haim Ben David, saying he was fully aware of his actions at the time of the murder. He is due to be sentenced next month.

Two other Israelis have already been convicted for the killing, with one getting a life sentence and the other 21 years in prison.

All three confessed to killing 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir after snatching him from an East Jerusalem street and driving him to an Israeli forest. The crime was carried out in retaliation for the abduction and killing of three Israeli teens by Hamas militants near the West Bank.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pledged Monday to continue working on a two-state solution for Israeli-Palestinian peace during President Barack Obama's final nine months in office.

During a speech to the Israel advocacy group J Street, Kerry stressed the importance of ending the long-running conflict and that the two-state path is the only one that will work.

"You can't just keep condemning the other side and then not try to change lives and build up the capacity to be able to change choices," Kerry said. "You have to work at this."

Top priority



Kerry made Israeli-Palestinian peace one of his stop priorities when he became secretary of state in early 2013. He got the two sides to talk for nine months, but the process broke down in April 2014 with no agreement. Months later a 50-day war in Gaza that killed more than 2,100 Palestinians cemented a divide that persists today.

One outstanding obstacle has been Israel's continued construction of settlements in areas the Palestinians see as part of a future state.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, in his own address to J Street, cited the settlements as well as the lack of condemnations from Palestinian leaders of attacks against Israelis as damaging and counterproductive acts that prevent any progress.

"I firmly believe that the actions that Israel's government has taken over the past several years -- the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures -- they're moving us and more importantly they're moving Israel in the wrong direction," Biden said.

Not optimistic



Biden met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last month during a visit to the region, and said Monday the trip gave him no encouragement about the prospects for peace in the near future.

"There is at the moment no political will that I observed from either Israelis or Palestinians to go forward with serious negotiations," the vice president said.

Similar to Kerry's remarks, Biden said the U.S. has continued trying to push for a two-state solution, despite "sometimes overwhelming frustration with the Israeli government."
An infusion of American aid to Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi forces will help step up the fight against the Islamic State group in Iraq, Kurdish officials said.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced Monday that $415 million in financial assistance would go to Iraqi Kurdish forces as a part of a package to boost the fight against IS militants in the country.

Carter made the announcement during a visit in which he met with Iraqi officials in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The U.S. is sending eight Apache helicopters to Iraqi forces and will provide more than 200 additional U.S. troops to advise and train select Iraqi and Kurdish forces as they work to try to retake the city of Mosul from IS.

This [assistance] will only help the Peshmerga and Iraqi forces to continue the war on Daesh [IS] terrorists, Jabar Yawar, chief of staff of the Kurdistan Regions military forces, told VOA.

The Kurdish regional government is facing financial difficulties because of a drop in oil prices, and Kurdish forces lack adequate food and military hardware to keep up the fight against IS in northern Iraq. The Kurdish regional government has also had budget disputes with the central Iraqi government.

Yawar told VOA that the U.S. government was aware of the financial situation in the Kurdish Region and said U.S. assistance was vital for the Kurdish forces.

The U.S. assistance will be largely used for salaries of Kurdish fighters and for military equipment, Kurdish officials told VOA.

There must be a mechanism to use this money, said Jabar Qadir, a Kurdish policy expert based in Irbil, Iraq. Kurdish forces need financial steadiness to have a winning strategy in the war against Daesh.

The Iraqi government announced last month that the process of Mosul liberation had begun and that the operation to retake the city could take months.

Kurdish forces have been ready to take Mosul, Yawar said. But we need the Iraqi army to be fully prepared and make a decision to begin the process of Mosul liberation.

A Kurdish delegation visited Washington last week to lobby for more financial support from the U.S.

We told our U.S. allies that the [financial] challenge we are facing is serious, Qubad Talabani, the deputy prime minister of the Kurdish Region, who headed the delegation, told VOA.
Kurdish security officials say a targeted airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition has killed an Islamic State military adviser.

The Kurdistan Region Security Council said the airstrike on April 16 killed Khaled Afer, also known as Abu Sarya. He was a military adviser in Mosul and was a close associate of the group's spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani.

According to the KRG security council, Abu Sarya was also responsible for IS operations in Mosul.

Saturday's targeted strike took place in Sahel al-Aysa, near the Salam Hospital.

The strike appeared to be the second successful joint operation against IS leaders in less than a week.

On Monday, security officials in Iraqi Kurdistan said IS commander Salman And Sahib al-Jabouri, also known as Abu Saif, was killed as he traveled near Hamam Ali, south of Mosul.

Separate sources said that a number of documents had been found in the vehicle.
Malawi has started moving 10,000 Mozambique asylum seekers back from the border to the newly reopened Luwani camp in southeastern Malawi.

Nearly 12,000 Mozambicans seeking asylum have crossed the border into Malawi since December.

There was excitement as the first buses arrived to move them to newly reopened Luwani camp.

The buses traveled 320 kilometers to the camp.

Upon arrival, the U.N. refugee agency gave the refugees food and utensils and assigned each family a plot. Tents were already set up.

Before its official closure in 2007, the Luwani camp hosted more than 300,000 Mozambican refugees who had fled civil war between 1977 and 1992.

The people being relocated here are from Zambezia province, one of five opposition strongholds where there has been sporadic fighting since the disputed 2014 elections.

Increased tensions late last year pushed thousands of civilians to flee.

Pensulo Loponi said pro-government FRELIMO fighters were torching houses and killing people they accuse of harboring opposition RENAMO fighters.

He said he was with two friends coming from the market when FRELIMO soldiers accused them of being RENAMO and pointed guns at their heads. He said he showed his voting certificate as identification and was spared, but his two friends had nothing to show and were shot dead.

The government said RENAMO fighters are attacking civilians to turn them against the government.

As the asylum seekers were being moved Saturday, Mozambique state media reported President Filipe Nyusi called on RENAMO fighters to lay down their weapons and come to dialogue.

The reopening of Luwani camp has been controversial for some. The governor of one affected district in Mozambique told state radio there in March that there is no conflict. He said people were fleeing drought and food shortages.

Arriving at Luwani camp, 83-year-old Edess Maison said that is not true. She said her family had to abandon their pigs, goats and maize fields.

She added that because there is no peace in their country they cannot return home. She said that as she spoke, fighting continued in their area. Maison also said that she and her family are thanking the Malawi government for taking them to this camp.

The U.N. refugee agency said the relocation exercise continues all week. A UNHCR field officer told VOA that asylum seekers, as well as the host community, will have access to health facilities and a school there.
Beside Central Park, at the southern tip of New York's Harlem neighborhood, Second Canaan Baptist Church  erected in 1947  welcomes a diverse, mostly African-American set of voters.

Inside, altars and chairs have been replaced with booths and registration tables. In place of a pastor, a voting clerk directs people to formally cast a ballot.

"We have a first-time voter!" declares one volunteer, to the cheers of everyone in the room.

This is primary election day in New York City. From 6 a.m. until 9 p.m., churches and elementary schools throughout the city are packed with voters.

The neighborhood itself  Central Harlem  is a democratic stronghold. So much so that one might get the impression it is a two-person race: Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton.

Inside, we spoke to Deborah, a Harlem resident who came to cast her vote for Sanders.

"I was taken in by the words 'political revolution,' that really got me going," she said.

Deborah was not swayed by recent polls, which had Sanders trailing Clinton  and by especially large margins among minority communities.

"Even if he doesn't win, he's going to have great influence on whatever the policies are that follow," she said.

Jacob, on the other hand, a retiree originally from Africa, was not feeling the Bern.

"I'm a diehard Democrat and I will be voting for Hillary Clinton," he said. "I don't want our Social Security being privatized and she's a strong supporter of not having our Social Security privatized."

Even as they headed to the polls, some New Yorkers remained undecided. Harlem resident Rena Hughes wanted more reasons to vote for Clinton.

"I would love to see a woman in the presidency because we haven't had that, but that's really just not enough, it's not enough," Hughes said.

WATCH: Harlem Voters Express Support for Clinton, Sanders

If it comes down to a "gut feeling," she indicated she might go with Sanders.

Regardless, one thing Hughes knew for sure was that Republican Donald Trump would not get her support.

"I don't think he represents me at all, she said. He has a lot of money and I think that's what really has brought him as far as he's gotten."

Trump, she argued, does not represent lower-class and middle-class values, which she said affects many in her neighborhood.

"To live in New York, it's expensive and a lot of us can't afford to move  if you have to choose between paying your rent and groceries, I think that's a big deal  especially in New York state," Hughes said.
New York voters headed to the polls Tuesday for presidential nominating primaries, with pre-election surveys showing Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump holding strong leads over their challengers.

A decisive win for Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state, would move her closer to becoming the first woman to be a major party U.S. presidential nominee. A convincing victory for Trump, a billionaire real estate mogul who has never held elective office, would keep alive his hopes of clinching the Republican nomination before the party's July presidential nominating convention.

Strong ties



Both Clinton and Trump have strong ties to the state. Clinton has made it her adopted home and twice won Senate races in the state, while Trump has developed numerous properties in New York City and lives in a luxury high-rise building that bears his name.

The latest political surveys showed Clinton, the wife of former U.S. president Bill Clinton, with a double-digit percentage edge over her sole competitor, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has attacked her financial ties to Wall Street corporate chiefs.

Trump has been collecting about 50 percent of the Republican vote in the pre-election New York polls, far ahead of his two challengers, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a conservative firebrand, and Ohio Governor John Kasich, who has called for a more seasoned approach to governing than the brash Trump.

WATCH: Voters in Harlem



Convention delegates



Even with a Trump victory, analysts are waiting to see whether he reaches a majority in the vote count in localized congressional districts. The Republican rules in New York call for the winner in each district, if he reaches 50 percent, to get all three national convention delegates, but only two of the three if he fails to reach a majority vote, with the other going to the second-place finisher.

New York's 291 Democratic convention delegates are generally being split, according to the vote count.

Heading into Tuesday, Clinton led Sanders 1,758 - 1,076, including several hundred so-called super delegates who have pledged support for her but are free to change their minds. She needs 2,383 to be the party nominee in November's national election to pick the successor to President Barack Obama when he leaves office next January.

Because of the proportional way in which the Democrats award delegates in their contests, Sanders needs to win by big margins in order to catch up. Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, said Monday the senator has a "close to impossible path to the nomination."

On the Republican side, Cruz and Kasich are trying to win enough of New York's 95 convention delegates to keep Trump from being able to clinch the 1,237 majority necessary to seal the party's nomination before its convention.

Trump entered Tuesday with 744 delegates, while Cruz had 559 and Kasich 144.

Generally, the delegates Trump has won in the months-long, state-by-state voting are only obligated to vote for him on the first convention ballot, but could switch their allegiance to Cruz or Kasich on a second and subsequent ballots until someone wins a majority of the votes and the nomination.
One day before President Barack Obama is to arrive in Saudi Arabia, U.S. senators of both parties indicated varying levels of support for legislation that has infuriated Riyadh and drawn criticism from the White House.



The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act would make it easier for families of the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks to sue foreign governments deemed to have aided al-Qaida. Although the bills language singles out no individual country and could be applied to any terrorist group, it is widely seen as targeting Saudi Arabia, the nation of origin of many 9/11 plotters.



We should use every means available to prevent the funding of terrorism. And the victims of terrorism in our country should be able to seek justice, said Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who wrote the bill with New York Democrat Chuck Schumer.



It is my hope that this legislation will serve as an effective deterrent and make foreign governments think twice before sending money to terrorist groups who target our homeland, Cornyn added in a floor speech Tuesday.



The White House is warning of unintended consequences, saying the bill undermines an international legal norm that has benefited the United States on the world stage.

The whole notion of sovereign immunity is at stake. And it is one that has more significant consequences for the United States than any other country, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Monday.



Saudi Arabia has long denied any role in the 9/11 attacks. Last week, The New York Times quoted Saudi officials as saying they would sell off hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. assets if the Cornyn-Schumer bill becomes law.



The legislation was approved in committee earlier this year and could be taken up by the full Senate at any moment. For now, even some of the presidents most loyal Democratic lieutenants in the chamber are on record supporting the bill or say they are inclined to do so.



I would lean in favor of it, but Im going to read the 28 pages before I make a definitive decision, Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California told VOA.



The 28 pages refers to a classified portion of a congressional report on the 9/11 attacks widely believed to have delved into possible ties between Saudi elements and the hijackers who in 2001 committed the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.



Boxer indicated she is not swayed by the White Houses opposition to the bill.



Im not the president of the United States. Im a member of the Senate, and my job is to look out for the rights of the people of this country, she said.



In an unusual twist, one of Obamas toughest foreign policy critics said  in this case  the White Houses concerns are valid.

Groups that we see as terrorists, other countries see as allies, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told VOA.



Graham said the bill must make clear that only direct backing for terror operations  not generalized support for a terrorist group  can be the subject of a civil lawsuit in U.S. courts. If the legislations language is too broad, international protections the United States enjoys could be eroded.



We want to make sure this thing [the bill] is as tight as it can be, the senator said. During Bosnia, we hit the Chinese embassy. We hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital [in Afghanistan]. We dont want to put our soldiers and our diplomats at risk by setting a precedent that could come back to haunt us.



Even so, Graham expressed confidence that the bills language can be clarified to alleviate his concerns and earn his support.



The legislation is one of many thorny topics likely to arise during Obamas trip to Saudi Arabia.



The Saudis see the administrations engagement with Iran as a threat to them, said Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, adding that, while the administration continues to call Saudi Arabia an important ally, [U.S.] actions, they feel, belie those words.



The administration is going to be going into some difficult meetings. The president has a real challenge in assuring the Saudis that we are truly going to be a continuing ally, Menendez said.
North Korea will eventually have nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching all of its adversaries despite a recent string of technological failures, according to the latest warning from a top U.S. military official.

The commander of U.S. Pacific Command's Army forces, Gen. Vincent Brooks, testified Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee and shared a bleak assessment of rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

"They're struggling with getting the program up and operational," Brooks said when asked about Pyongyang's efforts to build intercontinental ballistic missiles. "Over time, I believe we're going to see them acquire these capabilities if they're not stopped."

Nominated to lead U.S. Forces in South Korea, Brooks said that it would be his job to provide options for how the U.S. could use military pressure to change the North Korean calculus.

"North Korea is moving in the wrong direction, and the changes that we've seen are all provocative and more dangerous  their willingness to draw blood, to sink vessels, to fire some of their numerous artillery systems into populated areas," he said.

Kim, undeterred

When asked by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, a Republican, about the "immaturity and the unpredictability of the rotund ruler in Pyongyang," Brooks responded that it is clear that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un "is not yet deterred."

Brooks also warned that continued purges of North Korea's military leadership show Kim is unwilling to take advice.

Still, there are questions about how long it will take for North Korea to acquire a full range of nuclear weapons capabilities.

U.S. officials called a test earlier this week of a road-mobile ballistic missile on North Korea's east coast a "fiery, catastrophic" failure. Others say Pyongyang, while aiming for significant capabilities, has yet to demonstrate it can get key aspects of the technology to work.

There have also been indications that the pursuit of high-end technology, including submarine-launched ballistic missiles, has hurt the ability and readiness of North Korea's conventional forces.

"This is like watching someone ride a bike, but falling off of it," Brooks told lawmakers. "Eventually, they can become a BMX champion. We can't underestimate the hazard that is emerging on this."

Very dangerous prospect

Pyongyang's slow but undeterred progress comes despite increased pressure from the international community, including a new round of tougher U.N. sanctions adopted last month.

Officials fear one reason North Korea has been able to move forward with its nuclear and missile programs is that China, a long-time supporter of the regime in Pyongyang, has failed to do enough to crack down.

Brooks said senior Chinese military leaders have told him that they, too, are frustrated.

"There are challenges that have been expressed to me by the senior Chinese military leadership that they don't have the influence they once had," Brooks told lawmakers.

"I would want to challenge that," he said. "I do believe they have opportunities to influence [Pyongyang] greater than they have."

Brooks also said there is "some evidence" North Korea is getting help from Iran, a prospect he said was "very dangerous for the world, very dangerous for the region."
A group of Taliban insurgents staged a bomb and gun attack in the Afghan capital Kabul Tuesday morning, killing at least 30 people and wounding more than 327, according officials.

The assault targeted a building, which officials say houses a special unit of the Afghan security force working under the Afghan spy agency and responsible for protecting government officials.

The attack began at around 9 a.m. local time with a suicide bomber detonating his explosives-laden vehicle at the entrance.

Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Siddiqi told reporters "hundreds of kilograms of explosives" were packed in the vehicle. He said investigations are still underway to determine details about the number of attackers but admitted security lapses led to the deadly assault.

Gunfight

Officials said the ensuing intense gunfight between the assailants and Afghan security forces lasted for several hours and left all the attackers dead, with some blowing themselves up.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has condemned the attack "in the strongest possible terms" and said many people have been killed and wounded. He said the attack "clearly shows the enemy's defeat in the face-to-face battle" with Afghan security forces.

Taliban claim responsibility

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the violence, with a spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, saying all three attackers were wearing suicide vests.

In a statement sent to reporters, the Taliban said the assault targeted the Afghan intelligence agencys office, calling it one of the brutal and inhuman organs of the Kabul government.

Mujahid said the suicide bombing made way for other heavily armed Taliban suicide attackers to enter the building and engage personnel of the intelligence agency in a gunfight.

Mujahid claimed the assault inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy and the massive car bombing destroyed a portion of the building.

The insurgent group often issues inflated details of attacks against government and military targets.

During the White House briefing in Washington, Press Secretary Josh Earnest strongly condemned the cowardly attack on Afghan forces and civilians. He said the United States remains committed to supporting the Afghan people and government.



We also call on the Taliban to pursue a pathway of peace instead of continuing a military campaign responsible for the senseless deaths of Afghan civilians, Earnest told reporters Tuesday.



The White House spokesman says he didnt have an updated assessment as to what impact, if any, the attack would have on the U.S military posture going forward. But Earnest noted U.S. strategy in Afghanistan will be among the important policy decisions of President Obamas successor.

Afghan officials immediately pointed fingers at Pakistan, blaming the neighboring country for not delivering on its commitments to uproot Taliban sanctuaries on Pakistani soil.

Islamabad rejects the allegations, citing counterterrorism operations underway to secure volatile tribal areas near the Afghan border.

The deadly assault prompted Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah to postpone his official visit to Islamabad.

Abdullah was due to under take the trip on May 2 at the invitation of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, officials said.

"After initial evidence of today's suicide attack in Kabul, CE Dr. Abdullah decided to postpone his upcoming visit to Pakistan," said an announcement posted on Abdullah's official Twitter account.

Blast near US embassy complex

Television footage showed a thick plume of black smoke rising from the area immediately after the powerful blast, which took place not far from the presidential palace and the sprawling U.S. embassy complex in Kabul.

The U.S. Embassy released a statement Tuesday, condemning the attack.

"Afghanistan deserves peace and security, not attacks that victimize parents taking their children to school, workers on their morning commute, and people who have stepped forward to help defend their fellow citizens," the statement read.

The NATO-led Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan "strongly condemned" the assault.

Todays attack shows the insurgents are unable to meet Afghan forces on the battlefield and must resort to these terrorist attacks, U.S. Army General John Nicholson, Resolute Support commander.

The incident comes as Taliban insurgents have intensified battlefield attacks in more than 15 Afghan provinces as part of their annual spring offensive.

The United Nations condemned the attack, saying it is verifying facts on numbers of civilian casualties.

"Taliban use of huge bomb in a densely populated area shows total lack of respect for civilian live," said the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

Civilian casualties

In a report released Sunday, UNAMA said that the Afghan conflict caused about 2,000 civilian casualties in the first three months of this year, including 600 dead.

Neighboring Pakistan, where Afghan officials said Taliban leaders are sheltering, also condemned the bloodshed.

"We extend our heartfelt sympathies and condolences to those who have lost their loved ones and pray for an early recovery of the injured," a foreign ministry statement issued in Islamabad said, and reiterated that the government "condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestation."
Moscow, Russia, Apr. 19

By Orkhan Yolchuyev - Trend:

Russia as one of the mediators in Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has to help the conflict sides to find solution and bring the positions closer, said Mariya Zakharova, spokesperson for Russia's Foreign Ministry, Trend's special correspondent reported.

Zakharova made the remarks at a press center in Moscow Apr. 19.

"Our task is to create an appropriate atmosphere for the continuation of this work," she said.

She noted that the aggravation like the recent events undermines the atmosphere, which helps the conflict's settlement.

Zakharova added that Russia's task is to bring the situation, which was thrown back, to its previous positions.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

Edited by SI
U.S. President Barack Obama and Saudi Arabias King Salman are set to meet just as relations between the White House and the monarchy have become increasingly frayed, and the two longtime allies face significant disagreements over how to combat terrorism and regional conflicts.

Obama will meet Wednesday with the monarch in Riyadh on his fourth trip to Saudi Arabia as president.

The visit will be followed on Thursday with a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), an alliance of six Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman.

It appears, however, that fundamentally different priorities and strategies on combating terrorism and bringing stability to the region likely will keep Washington and Riyadh at odds on myriad key challenges.

Competing priorities

The United States and much of Europe see the Islamic State group and al-Qaida as the top threats in the region and around the world.

For many of the Gulf states, though, the main threat emanates from Iran and the people and groups that Tehran supports  like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The Sunni-majority Saudis have led a costly military intervention against the Houthis.

To almost all of the Arab states, Assad is at least as serious a threat as ISIS [Islamic State]. Iran and the Shiite domination of Iraq is far more serious than ISIS. And in Yemen the Houthi, Iran and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP] are the dominant threats, said Anthony Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The White House said Obama and GCC leaders will look at ways to step up cooperation, and align their policies and approaches in areas of mutual interest, such as countering terrorism and promoting peace and stability in places like Yemen and Syria.

In an interview that raised questions about the state of U.S.-Saudi relations, Obama referred to the Saudis as free riders in the battle against Islamic State, implying Riyadh benefits from the U.S. security umbrella without sharing the burden.

He also told The Atlantic that Saudi Arabia would have to learn to co-exist with Iran by learning to share the neighborhood.

White House officials would not say if the president and the king planned to discuss Obama's remarks in The Atlantic interview.

Islamic State threat

Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes explained, The nature of the threat from ISIL [Islamic State] is not restricted to the targeting of one nation. We see ISIL as posing a threat to the entire world.

Rhodes added that while cooperation between the U.S. and Gulf states has improved since the first U.S.-GCC summit last year at Camp David, there is always room to see what more can be done.

Rob Malley, White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, described current U.S.-Saudi relations as complicated.

He asserted that sectarian fights, like the one in Yemen, create humanitarian crises and distract attention away from the coalitions fight against Islamic State and al-Qaida. So the White House is seeking to de-escalate sectarian conflicts and shift focus back to terror groups it views as global threats.

"As that fight against the Houthis in Yemen de-escalates. ... We will be able to focus more activities against ISIL and against al-Qaida, Malley said. I think that is a very important reason why we believe that these regional conflicts that often have a sectarian tinge to them need to be de-escalated.

Despite efforts by the U.S. and its coalition partners to push back Islamic State and stabilize the region, the Middle East remains fertile ground for terror groups, sectarian conflicts, political chaos and proxy wars.

Still, Malley argued, The trend line is positive.

Ongoing trends

He pointed to fragile cease-fires in Yemen and Syria, and successes by Iraqi forces in recapturing territory from Islamic State in the last year.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which faces shrinking revenues with the downturn in oil prices, is working to build up its missile systems as regional rival Iran continues to bolster its military capabilities.

Iran does not stop improving its air, missiles and naval capabilities to threaten traffic through the Gulf, Cordesman said.

Overall, expectations for any significant outcomes from this summit are low, especially during a presidential election year.

"The Saudis obviously are looking at a situation where you have presidential candidates that as yet have not really provided any clear indication as to what the United States will be as an ally in the future, Cordesman said.

This is a summit in which on every important issue there are no good options for either country, he concluded.
More than 40 U.S. Senate Democrats sent a letter Monday to Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, demanding immediate passage of $1.9 billion in emergency funds to fight the Zika virus.

The Democratic lawmakers accuse Republicans of failing to act even after 800 Americans, including 89 pregnant women, have been infected.

"It would be shortsighted and dangerous for Congress not to act quickly to give the administration the resources it needs to fully fight the ZIka virus and protect Americans," according to the letter.

The Obama administration said last week it will use $510 million in unspent funds for fighting Ebola to tackle Zika.

But Democrats say public health officials should not have to choose between the two diseases, noting that 13 new Ebola cases have cropped up in West Africa over the last month.

Republican leaders say they want more information about the president's emergency request for Zika, and that they plan to approve some funding. However, they have been vague on when and how much.

U.S. health officials confirmed last week that Zika is a cause of birth defects, including microcephaly  a condition in which babies are born with abnormally small heads.

Experts warn pregnant women or those planning to get pregnant to avoid travel to Latin American countries with large Zika outbreaks.
South Sudanese rebel leader Riek Machar failed to return to the capital for a second straight day Tuesday, saying the government did not provide flight clearance for a plane carrying his top general.

Rebel spokesman William Ezekiel told VOA no date has been set for when Machar will arrive in Juba to be sworn in as vice president, per terms of a peace deal signed last August to end 2 years of civil war.

Government spokesman Michael Makuei told reporters that the rebel general, Simon Gatwech, was trying to bring more than 200 extra soldiers with him, beyond the agreed number of rebel troops allowed in Juba.

Makuei also accused the rebels of trying to bring anti-tank rounds and laser-guided missiles.

Rebel spokesman Ezekiel said Gatwech is only bringing 45 troops, in line with agreements, and said they have no such heavy weaponry.

The government itself is accused of bringing extra troops into the city, though international cease-fire monitors have not commented on the claims.

Machar was initially scheduled to arrive Monday, but an issue with flights delayed that arrival.

South Sudan erupted into civil war in December 2013, six months after President Salva Kiir fired Machar as vice president.

Much of the fighting has been along ethnic lines, with Kiir's Dinka tribe battling Machar's Nuer tribe.

The U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday that the fighting and ongoing food shortages have now displaced more than 2.3 million South Sudanese, including more than 670,000 who have fled to neighboring countries.
Prospects for a political resolution to Syrias crisis have dimmed after the main opposition group pulled back from U.N.-facilitated talks with the Syrian regime and called on the International Syria Support Group for help.



The opposition High Negotiations Committee blames the Syrian government for an uptick in fighting that has occurred since the two sides agreed on a cease-fire.



During a Tuesday news conference in Geneva, opposition chief coordinator Riyad Hijab urged the 17-nation International Syria Support Group to intervene.



They can look into and re-evaluate the humanitarian procedures followed and undertaken and also to evaluate the cessation of hostilities, which has ended, he said.

In a statement, the opposition said it would pause its participation in the political talks in Geneva because of concerns about the Syrian governments truce violations.

In a bid to bolster its claims that President Bashar al-Assad's regime is responsible for the bulk of the violence, the group issued a new statement, on Tuesday, blaming the regime for air strikes that it said killed 40 people in northwest Syria.

"Assad is telling the world he has no interest in diplomacy for peace," said the High Negotiations Committee.

Secretary of State John Kerry and foreign ministers in the International Syria Support Group have had several rounds of talks but the U.S. acknowledges that challenges remain.



I dont think that we would characterize these talks as anything other than the difficult endeavor that they have always proven to be and that they will continue to prove to be, said State Department spokesman John Kirby.



Some analysts doubt the U.S. and other world powers in the support group, however, have the leverage needed to get talks back on track.



Some say the prospects for the world powers to breathe life into the Syria talks are dim, unless there are changes on the ground.



Unless you have some military changes on the ground in Syria will Assad and his backers feel the need to compromise. And until they do so, there is no way the opposition is going to agree to keeping in power the person who is responsible for the death of close to half a million Syrian citizens, said Adam Ereli, a foreign policy analyst and former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain.



There also is concern about a perceived lack of buy-in, on both sides, concerning the political talks.



Both sides have to be convinced that they can do better by going to a political outcome than by continuing the violence and I am pretty sure that the regime does not feel that way and I doubt that the opposition, or major portions of it, feel that way, said Daniel Serwer, director of the Johns Hopkins conflict management program.



Syrias crisis is among the issues on the agenda for Secretary of State John Kerry, who will be accompanying President Barack Obama this week at a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in Saudi Arabia.
The U.N. refugee agency reports new fighting and severe food shortages in previously peaceful areas of South Sudan are causing thousands of people to flee into neighboring countries.

About 2.3 million people have been forced to flee their homes since civil war broke out in South Sudan in December 2013. More than 670,000 are refugees in neighboring countries.

The U.N. refugee agency warns refugee numbers are rising in all of South Sudan's neighbors as fighting spreads to formerly peaceful areas of Northern Bahr el-Ghazal and Warrap States.

The agency says the new refugees create a huge burden in the asylum countries. It says the UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies are short of cash, putting life-saving services for the refugees at risk.

The UNHCR reports an estimated 52,000 South Sudanese have fled into Sudan since January, exceeding planning projections for this year.

Uganda, Ethiopia



Spokeswoman Arian Rummery says Uganda too has seen a sharp increase in new refugees since January, with as many as 800 people a day arriving.

Altogether, 28,000 South Sudanese have sought refuge in Uganda and 86 percent of those are women and children , said Rummery. "A particular site where they are being sheltered, the Maaji III in the north-west of the country is almost near capacity and basic life-saving services are severely overstretched.

Ethiopia hosts some 285,000 South Sudanese refugees, more than any other country. Rummery says more South Sudanese have arrived in recent weeks after a long period in which very few crossed the border. She tells VOA many of the newcomers are children.

Many of the new arrivals into Ethiopia from South Sudan are, in fact, unaccompanied and separated children and they fled intra-ethnic clashes in Pochalla in the eastern part of South Sudan and many of them trekked through jungles for several days before reaching Okugo, said Rummery.

DRC



The UNHCR reports a similar spike in South Sudanese refugees in Democratic Republic of Congo, where 12,000 people have arrived in the past few months.

Northeastern Kenya and the Central African Republic are also recording new arrivals from South Sudan. The UNHCR says the number in Kenya has risen from an average of 100 people a month early this year to 350 people a week during the past two months.

The refugees say they are fleeing insecurity, intense drought and the high cost of living.
Poor Brazilians have been lured to coffee plantations with promises of good wages only to find themselves living in squalor and debt bondage, although the government has taken steps to name and shame farms involved in modern slavery, aid agencies said on Monday.

South America's largest country has made significant improvements in tackling forced labor in agriculture, with the Ministry of Labor publishing a "dirty list" of employers benefiting from modern slavery, said Michael Sheridan, director of the 'Coffeelands Program' of Catholic Relief Services.

Conditions "analogous to slavery" have been seen on some of the 15 farms flagged by Brazilian authorities, with armed guards preventing workers from leaving properties and laborers required to apply toxic chemicals without protective equipment, Sheridan said, citing Brazilian government data.

"Brazil is ahead of the curve when it comes to tackling slavery in supply chains," Sheridan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"There are some flaws in their [monitoring] programs, but Brazil is positioning its coffee companies to deliver the kind of transparency customers are demanding," he said after presenting a report on modern slavery in Brazil's coffee sector to U.S. business executives last week.

About 400 workers have been freed from slave-like conditions in Brazilian coffee plantations since 2002, Sheridan said, adding that total number of indentured farmers is likely far higher.

As the world's largest coffee producer, conditions on farms in Brazil face scrutiny from large, multinational firms and consumers around the world.

Two of the world's largest coffee firms, Nestle and Jacobs Douwe Egberts, admitted last month that Brazilian beans produced using slave labor may have ended up in their coffee, following reports from rights groups.

"Unfortunately, forced labor is an endemic problem in Brazil and no company sourcing coffee and other ingredients from the country can fully guarantee that it has completely removed forced labor practices or human rights abuses from its supply chain," Nestle said in a statement.

Despite problems in the industry, Brazil's government has been relatively transparent in publishing information on farms that have been caught abusing workers - unlike other coffee-exporting nations, Sheridan said.

This data allows for campaigners to better monitor the situation and suggest improvements, he said.

With Brazil's government in paralysis after President Dilma Rousseff lost a crucial impeachment vote in the lower house of Congress on Sunday, some observers worry that the fight against modern slavery will take a back seat to political wrangling.

"In the short-term, we are more likely to get more traction from the private sector than the public sector because of the political issues Brazil is dealing with," Sheridan said.
The two presidential front-runners, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, are in a New York state of mind as they look ahead to Tuesday's presidential primary in the Empire State. Public opinion polls show both Clinton and Trump are the favorites to win in New York, and victories there would solidify their status as favorites for the party nominations.

For Trump, a big win in his home state could be a major step toward securing his party's nomination.

"On Tuesday, you have go out and you have to vote. You have to get your friends. Because we have a movement going on. It is a movement like they've never seen in this country," Trump told supporters at a recent rally in Syracuse.

Stepping stone to nomination

Trump's campaign insists he will be able to secure the 1,237 delegates he needs to claim the Republican nomination outright at the national convention in Cleveland in July. In order to make that happen, however, Trump needs to win virtually all of the 95 delegates at stake in New York. There are 14 statewide delegates at stake in Tuesday's primary, and the rest of delegates are awarded by congressional district.

Some analysts have noticed a softer tone from Trump in recent days, though he still complains about a "rigged" and "dirty" delegate selection process in some states in which rival Ted Cruz has been able to take advantage. Cruz won all 14 delegates in Wyoming after this weekend's state convention.

But Trump is doing his best to talk up party unity in hopes of rebounding from his defeat at the hands of Cruz in Wisconsin two weeks ago.

"I think we are going to make our delegates fairly easily and I think we are going to be fine. I think the convention is going to be unity. I hope it is going to be unity because the Republican Party needs unity. It really needs unity," Trump told reporters in the New York City borough of Staten Island.

Cruz picking off delegates

Cruz hopes to pick up a few delegates Tuesday in New York, but he may have to wait until the Indiana primary May 3 for his next best shot at slowing down the billionaire.

Cruz continues to focus on his main argument that if the Republicans nominate Trump in Cleveland, it would virtually assure that Clinton will become the next president.

"Nationwide, about 70 percent of Republicans recognize that if Donald Trump is the nominee, Hillary Clinton wins. Hillary beats Donald Trump by double-digits. If I am the nominee, we beat Hillary," Cruz told reporters during a recent campaign stop in Buffalo.

Ohio Governor John Kasich also makes the argument that he would be a stronger candidate against Clinton than either Trump or Cruz. And during a recent Republican gala in Manhattan, Kasich sought to draw a contrast with his rivals by touting a more optimistic message and approach.

Kasich warned against making either Trump or Cruz the nominee "because we risk losing everything from the White House to the courthouse to the State House if we don't advance a positive, uplifting, unifying message to this country. That is what we need to do!"

Key moment in Democratic race

In the Democratic race in New York, Clinton also is looking for a clear victory over persistent challenger Bernie Sanders. Sanders has pulled off an impressive string of recent victories, many of them in smaller caucus states, and Clinton needs a New York win to reassert her status as the clear front-runner.

Clinton was taking no chances at a rally in Staten Island.

"If you will go out and vote for me on Tuesday, I will fight for you during this campaign and I will fight for you every single day in the White House. Thank you and God bless you, Staten Island!" she said.

Sanders took time off Friday from the campaign trail to speak at a Vatican conference on economic inequality, a core theme of his campaign. He also met privately with Pope Francis.

Polls show Sanders has an uphill climb in New York, however, even though he may be closing the gap a bit in the latest surveys. Sanders asserted that he would be the stronger Democratic candidate in the general election against whomever the Republicans nominate.

"I believe from the bottom of my heart that I am the stronger candidate running against a Republican, and I think more and more Democrats understand that as well," Sanders said.

Sanders hanging tough

Sanders also dismissed analysis from pundits and Clinton supporters that he faces a must-win battle in New York.

"No one state is a must-win. From Iowa on I have heard how every state is supposed to be a must-win. Obviously, New York State has a lot of delegates. It is very important, and we want to do as well as we possibly can," he said.

But Sanders clearly has his eye on later primaries, including the June 7 showdown in California.

On VOA's "Issues in the News" program, CBS radio analyst Michael Williams predicted that Sanders and his appeal will remain a force in the Democratic race for the foreseeable future.

"He is honest in the extreme. He is oddly appealing with his disheveled, frumpy look," Williams said. "Will he win? No. But has he affected this race and the course of the Democratic Party for the long term? Certainly, he has."

Sanders also is urging some of the Democratic superdelegates who already have declared for Clinton to switch their votes and back him instead. So far, though, there hasn't been much response.

In short, New York victories for Trump and Clinton would be a big step toward clinching the party nominations, but the outcome of the primary likely will not be definitive. Trump has work to do to remove the prospect of a contested convention in Cleveland, where he could lose.

And even with a win in New York, Clinton likely faces a long road of holding off Sanders  right up through the Democratic convention in late July in Philadelphia.
A United Nations special session met Tuesday to discuss global drug policy  the first U.N. meeting on the subject in nearly 20 years.

Global leaders debated an international trend toward more liberal drug laws, with countries across the board agreeing that the drug problem needs to be addressed, but deeply divided on how to do that.

A number of Latin American countries said an aggressive war on drugs has failed, leading to thousands of lives being destroyed worldwide. These leaders urged the U.N. to accept the trend to legalize soft drugs, while other member states such as Russia remained wary of the United States' push to regulate access to marijuana.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry issued a statement in which he expressed the goals of the United States as "implementing alternatives to incarceration where appropriate, the use of drug courts, and sentencing reform to channel those who suffer from substance use disorder into recovery and treatment, not just prisons."

No major decisions are expected to be made this week.

Punishments

Another contested issue addressed in Tuesdays session was the use of the death penalty for drug-related offenses. The outcome document adopted by member states did not criticize the death penalty, but only said that countries should ensure that the punishments are proportionate to the crimes.

Prior to the meeting, Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, as well as rock star Sting and hundreds of others, signed an open letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stating that the war on drugs has failed.

The letter falls in line with the concerns of many national leaders and activists who call for more attention to health and human rights, as opposed to criminalization.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry held talks Tuesday in New York with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, aimed at ensuring that Iran gets the sanctions relief promised in the landmark nuclear deal reached in January.

Tuesday's meeting at U.N. headquarters came just weeks after Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei complained that many international companies have avoided doing business with Tehran since the deal was reached.

In nationally televised comments March 20, Khamenei focused on what he called Iran's difficulties in recouping banking assets frozen in Western countries under years of sanctions imposed to try to persuade Tehran to curb its nuclear program. He also said many international companies, fearing U.S. reprisals, were shying away from doing business in the Islamic Republic.

Following Tuesday's meeting, Kerry told reporters that he and Zarif agreed to cooperate to ensure that the Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was implemented the way it was meant to be. "We worked on a number of key things today. We made some progress on it," he said.

Speaking separately to reporters, Zarif acknowledged progress and said he and Kerry would meet again Friday in New York to "make sure the [post-sanction] benefits will be there for Iranian people to enjoy."

Ahead of the talks, Kerry told the pro-Israel group J Street that Iran so far had received about $3 billion as a result of the deal to constrain its nuclear program. He said that was far less than figures given by critics, and he reiterated that the agreement showed the power of prioritizing diplomacy.

"Despite the skeptics' most dire predictions, we are in a place that some people thought was unimaginable and others unacceptable," Kerry said.

The meeting between Kerry and Zarif also came at a time when the U.N.-facilitated process for a political transition in Syria appears to be fraying.

Asked Tuesday about bilateral progress in the meeting on war-torn Syria and Yemen, Zarif said the talks focused on details of the nuclear deal.

The two sides have been holding indirect talks in Geneva on both conflicts.

Iran supports the Syrian government while the U.S. has supported the moderate opposition. But Tehran and Washington are part of the International Syria Support Group, which has been backing the process for a political transition.
The United States, Japan and South Korea held senior level diplomatic talks Tuesday to discuss joint measures that could be taken if North Korea continues to defy the United Nations Security Council resolution banning its nuclear and ballistic missile development.



The trilateral meeting in Seoul among U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Lim Sung-nam and Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Akitaka Saiki took place amid reports that North Korea is preparing to conduct a fifth nuclear test.



The South Korean official said Security Council Resolution 2270, passed in March, includes the provision for additional sanctions against Pyongyang if it commits further nuclear or missile provocations.



If the North goes ahead with a fifth nuclear test, the U.N. Security Council would take correspondingly significant measures, but regarding the details of the measures that would be included in the additional resolution, it would be premature to give you my expectation, said Lim.



Nuclear site activities

Recent satellite images of North Korea's Punggye-ri nuclear test site show only "limited" activity that would not necessarily indicate a test was imminent, said analysts at the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins University on Tuesday. They note, however, that North Korea has worked to conceal past nuclear preparation efforts.



South Korean President Park Geun-Hye said Monday that intelligence sources detected signs that Pyongyang was preparing a new test and ordered her military to stay on high alert.



In March, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered further nuclear tests to assess the power of newly developed nuclear warheads and tests to improve nuclear attack capability," according to North Korean state media KCNA.



Analyst Jeffrey Lewis at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California said satellite images taken over the last few months show an expanding network of tunnels at North Korea's nuclear test site where past blasts have been detonated.



South Koreas Defense Ministry said on Monday the North is prepared to conduct another nuclear test anytime, and that it is likely to be a warhead test that will be conducted underground.



North Korea is also believed to have a sufficient stockpile of plutonium and highly enriched uranium to make eight to 12 nuclear bombs.



There is an expectation that Kim Jong Un wants to put on a demonstration of nuclear power to reinforce a public perception of him as a strong leader in advance of a major congress of the ruling Workers' Party early next month.



Speculation that another nuclear test was imminent also grew after a North Korean mid-range missile test attempted on Friday ended in catastrophic failure.



We have to at all costs put a stop to this. We are at a very important phase in this regard, said the Japanese vice foreign minister.



Sanctions support



North Korea has been under U.N. sanctions since 2006 for its multiple nuclear tests and rocket launches.



Tougher new international sanctions were adopted in March in response to North Koreas fourth nuclear test, conducted in January, and a satellite launch in February that utilized banned ballistic missile technology.



The government of Kim Jong Un has so far responded defiantly by firing a number of short- and mid-range missiles and accelerating its nuclear development timeline.



In the long term, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Blinken says the sanctions, which include suspending currency transfers and restricting North Koreas lucrative mineral trade, will cut off funds to the countrys nuclear program and impose significant economic pain that will force the leadership to return to denuclearization talks.



It takes some time for those measures to actually take effect. So what were looking at first and foremost is the implementation of this existing Security Council resolution as well as additional measures that countries are taking individually or collectively to increase the pressure on North Korea, said Blinken.



The deputy secretary of state also urged North Korea to follow the example of Iran, which halted its nuclear program to reach a deal with the West, as well as Cuba and Myanmar, and choose peaceful negotiations over confrontation.



"If a country, even one with which we've had the most profound differences, is prepared to engage seriously and credibly in answering the demands of the international community, we are also prepared to engage," he said.



On Monday, the U.N. Security Council released a list of additional banned items related to North Koreas nuclear and missile programs, that include certain aluminum, nickel and cobalt magnets, large steel bars and tubes, frequency converters, and chemicals that can be weaponized, such as aluminum chloride, dichloromethane and sodium metal.



The trilateral diplomats said it was also important to maintain support for sanctions from North Korea's allies in the region, Russia and China.



Beijings support for these international sanctions is considered crucial because 90 percent of North Korean trade flows through China.



While China has expressed frustration with North Koreas insistence on pursuing nuclear weapons, it does not want sanctions to spark regional instability that could increase the flow of refugees at the border, or lead to the collapse of the government in Pyongyang, leaving Washingtons close ally, Seoul, in control of the entire Korean peninsula.
Boston's Tom Scholz and Gary Pihl (Credit: Kamal Asar)Boston is among the music latest acts to cancel concerts in response to North Carolina's "bathroom bill" legislation, which critics believe is anti-LGBT.

The veteran rock band announced its decision via a statement posted on its official website. "It is with deep regret, that I must announce the cancellation of our upcoming shows on May 4, 5 & 6 in Charlotte, Greensboro, and Raleigh in order to raise awareness, and protest in the strongest terms, the recent passage of HB2, the so called 'North Carolina bathroom law,' writes Boston founder and lead guitarist Tom Scholz. He goes on to call it an "oppressive discriminatory law against a small minority," adding, "Other aspects of the new law arguably encourage bigotry. With thousands of fans in attendance at our shows, it is likely that some members of our audience and/or their loved ones are affected on a daily basis by this ugly expression of intolerance."

Scholz finishes, "My sincere apologies to our fans who have already made arrangements to attend these shows...We look forward to the day that the state government of North Carolina will come to its senses and treat ALL individuals with equal freedom in their pursuit of happiness here in the United States."

The new-classic rock band Pearl Jam also canceled a concert in North Carolina this week, a show in Raleigh that had been scheduled for Wednesday. A statement posted on the band's website Monday reads, "The HB2 law that was recently passed is a despicable piece of legislation that encourages discrimination against an entire group of American citizens. The practical implications are expansive and its negative impact upon basic human rights is profound. We want America to be a place where no one can be turned away from a business because of who they love or fired from their job for who they are."

Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr previously canceled North Carolina dates in protest of House Bill 2, or the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, which mandates that people must use public bathrooms that match the sex that's indicated on their birth certificates.

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 19

By Elena Kosolapova - Trend:

The Jewish communities must support and protect Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia, says an article published in Jewish Journal.

"The international community has repeatedly stated that the ongoing Armenian occupation of over 20 percent of the sovereign Republic of Azerbaijan, is completely illegal, designating the massacres committed against Azerbaijani people in the early 1990's, at the start of the same occupation, as crimes against humanity," Rabbi Simchah Aaron Green from Abrahamic Alliance International non-profit organization wrote.

"Azerbaijan's longstanding and unabashed support for Israel is a worthy enough reason to raise our community alarms for their current crisis," the author wrote.

The article said that Azerbaijan and Israel share over 20 years of deep, strategic alliance.

"We have a moral imperative to stand in solidarity with the people of Azerbaijan," the author wrote. "Only 25 years ago, in the same region of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijani people were subjected to what Israel's President Reuven Rivlin likened to genocide, at the hands of the same invaders, in the name of the same occupation that is still continuing."

"I can't help but see the effectiveness of the Armenian propaganda and lobbying effort, rumored to cost over $10 million a year to produce, in the U.S. alone," the author wrote.

"The media, U.S. Congress and various state legislatures are clogged by Armenian special interests, and in the process, a precious and incomparable ally faces an ongoing campaign of brutality, while the world essentially sits and does nothing, if not making it worse," the author wrote.

The author wrote that Jewish communities have a responsibility to advocate for the protection and preservation of Azerbaijan.

The article said that Azerbaijan is the only truly secular democracy in the entire Muslim world, and has an iconic history, upholding multi-faith harmony for centuries.

"Azerbaijan proves to the world that Jews, Muslims and Christians can live in absolute and lasting peace," the author wrote.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.



Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.



The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

---

Follow the author on Twitter:@E_Kosolapova
U.S. law enforcement officials say they are being thwarted in solving dozens of criminal cases because they cannot access incriminating information that suspects have stored in encrypted files on their cellphones equipped with the latest technology.

New York City Police chief of intelligence Thomas Galati told the House of Representatives investigations panel Tuesday his officers "have the legal right to open [information in suspects' phones], but not the technical expertise." He said police once relied on wiretaps to listen to suspects plotting crimes, but "now we are likely in the dark."

The debate about whether protecting the public's right to privacy is more important than the need by authorities to halt terrorist activity and everyday crimes has taken on a new urgency in the United States, as Apple and other technology companies sell devices with tough-to-crack encrypted features.

During the congressional hearing, one Federal Bureau of Investigation official, Amy Hess, said encryption "renders suspects virtually anonymous on the Internet." She said investigators at the FBI, the country's top law enforcement agency, are seeing criminals "urging others to move to encrypted devices."

The issue has figured prominently in the investigation of Syed Rizwan Farook, an American-born Muslim, who with his Pakistani--born wife, Tashfeen Malik, shot 14 people to death at a local government center in San Bernardino, California, last December. Authorities say it was an attack inspired by overseas terrorists.

The FBI sued to force Apple to develop software to crack into Farook's iPhone, but the technology giant refused, saying it would endanger the security of the phones for millions of its customers. The FBI abruptly dropped the lawsuit and paid hackers to break into Farook's phone, although it is not known what information was stored on it

The chairman of the House panel, Republican Tim Murphy, said encryption has given criminals "a cloak of invisibility. It's pretty frightening."

A police intelligence official in the midwestern state of Indiana, Charles Cohen, said Apple has developed cellphones "without a key." He added that some suspects remain free because possibly incriminating evidence on their cellphones is "completely out of reach" for police.

The lawmakers listening to the complaints about the information being hidden on encrypted devices said they want to devise some middle ground policy on access to the information, protecting privacy rights while also allowing law enforcement officials access to incriminating evidence they need to arrest and convict criminals and terrorists.
Every year, the Pentagon spends hundreds of millions of dollars protecting its computer systems from hackers. But for the next few weeks, U.S. defense officials are changing their strategy: they're inviting hackers to attack the Pentagon.

The "Hack the Pentagon" pilot program, which began Monday and lasts until May 12, allows hackers to attack certain Department of Defense public websites as a way to identify cyber security weaknesses.

U.S. officials stress no sensitive "mission-facing" computer systems will be involved in the program. They also say that all hackers must undergo a background check and meet other qualifications.

But if they succeed in exposing security flaws, the hackers could receive cash rewards.

Move 'overdue'

Large companies have for years used such "bug bounty" programs as a way to boost cyber security. But this is the first time the U.S. federal government has ever used such a program. Many experts say the move was long overdue.

"Hackers will look at your systems anyway," says Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer at F-Secure, an online security and privacy company. "And once they find vulnerabilities, do you want them to tell you or do you want them to do something bad, or maybe sell them to someone else?"

And it's true - U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) websites are already subject to a dizzying number of cyber attacks. In 2012 alone, DoD public websites had four billion visits, according to Christopher Lynch, who heads the Pentagon's new U.S. Digital Service. He says 25 percent of the visits were nefarious in some way.

"Think about that  a billion attempts to undermine security. And thats just a couple of websites," Lynch said in a recent article published on TechCrunch. "Its a mind-numbing challenge that we have to step up to."

Shift in strategy

Katie Moussouris, a consultant who helped the Pentagon launch the bug bounty, calls the program a significant shift in cyber security strategy - from punishing hackers to attempting to work with them.

"Before this pilot, there was really no legal way for a hacker to report [security flaws] to the U.S. government, because essentially all of the activities that are allowed in this pilot are technically illegal under U.S. law,"she told VOA.

Moussouris says the program could also help improve relations between the U.S. government and the tech industry - a relationship that has suffered after the fallout over the intelligence leaks by ex-security contractor Edward Snowden.

'Cyber Pearl Harbor'

In recent years, top U.S. officials have warned of the danger of a cyber attack that could disrupt the country's critical infrastructure. Most notably, ex-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned in 2012 of the possibility of a "cyber-Pearl Harbor," referring to the Japanese attack on a U.S. naval base in 1941.

Those security risks were underscored more recently by a cyber attack on the Office of Personnel Management, the U.S. federal government's human resources agency. The attack, discovered in 2015, resulted in the theft of personnel data on millions of U.S. federal employees and their families.

Hypponen, the cyber security expert, also points to other recent examples of cyber attacks, including an attack last year that originated in Russia that resulted in widespread power outages in Ukraine.

"Cyber warfare and cyber attacks are not just theory," he says, adding that the U.S. is particularly vulnerable. "The United States is arguably the most technologically dependent nation on the planet. It brings you great benefits but it does open you up for new kinds of risks."

Given the risks, he says it is an "obvious step" to employ bug bounty programs. "You want the hackers to be on your side. You don't want to fight them. You want to work with them," he says.
The U.S. Supreme Court is divided over whether one U.S. state is allowed to sue another.

The justices split 4-4 Tuesday over whether to overturn a 27-year-old Supreme Court precedent that allows courts in one state to sue and penalize government agencies in another state.

The case stemmed from a tax dispute involving a California resident who moved to Nevada. Gilbert Hyatt claims he moved to Nevada in 1991, shortly before receiving $40 million in patent fees for developing a computer chip.

California officials say Hyatt moved to Nevada in 1992 and owes the state millions in back taxes.

The deadlock means the precedent that was considered when the ruling was made, Nevada v. Hall, will remain in effect. California officials had asked the justices to overturn a 1979 case that said courts in one state can hear a private citizen's lawsuit in another state.

In a second case, also involving a state's authority to sue another state, the court ruled 6-2 that the Supreme Court of Nevada was in error when it awarded $1 million in damages to Hyatt, who had sued the California government.

The majority ruled the Supreme Court of Nevada ignored rules of immunity by awarding damages above the $50,000 maximum that would be acceptable in similar suits against Nevada.

Writing for the majority in the case Franchise Tax Board v. Hyatt, Justice Stephen Bryar said a state cannot treat another state in a "hostile" manner.

The 4-4 ruling is the third time the short-handed court has deadlocked since the February death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
April 18, 1960 was a momentous occasion for Zimbabwe, which saw Robert Mugabe roar onto the world stage as the newly elected Prime Minister of the Republic of Zimbabwe, after lengthy negotiations with the British, in what has now become known as the Lancaster Agreement.

But the jubilation was soon usurped by violence in the Matabeleland and Midlands regions, ignited by allegations of an uprising, which was quelled by another settlement between Zanu-PF and PF Zapu, known as the Unity Accord in 1987, which paved the way for Mugabe to become president and Joshua Nkomo his deputy.

Thirty-six years on and eight-presidential elections later - some heavily contested, particularly 2008 which forced a negotiated five-year power sharing government between Zanu-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change with Morgan Tsvangirai as Prime Minster  President Mugabe and Zanu-PF, still reign after defeating Tsvangirai in the 2013 elections.

President Mugabe has declared repeatedly that he will never cede power to the British, or imperialists, as he has often labelled the MDC.

There will never be a regime change here said President Mugabe. There will always be the people of Zimbabwe in control.

President Mugabe has repeatedly accused the West  U.S., Britain and other European countries - of plotting regime change against his government, and also strangling the countrys economy through targeted sanctions, which he has called a false pretext of human rights violations and electoral fraud, for forcing white farmers off the land.

The reforms we are undertaking, including measures to attract investments, will materialize if the unjustified sanctions Zimbabwe has been subjected to for the past 15 years are removed.

Despite initiatives like the economic blue print, ZIMASSET, Zimbabwes economy has struggled to improve, due to dependency on multiple-currencies after abandoning the Zimbabwe dollar, investor fear due to indigenization, and massive company closures that have forced many into the streets as vendors.

Government and Zanu-PF assurances that the country is making progress, in such sectors as mining, farming and manufacturing, or that President Mugabe is still the best leader for the country, at 92, have failed to calm nerves, in light of mishaps like his repeat of the State of the Nation Address at the opening of Parliament, and the revelation of the disappearance of $15 billion in diamond revenue.

Mugabes grip of his Zanu-PF party is also under question, fueled by factionalism as groups allegedly backing his wife, First Lady Grace Mugabe and Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, tussle to succeed him, in the absence of a known successor or him stepping down.

President Mugabe has appeared at pains in trying to contain the divisions in his party, which many have described as unprecedented.

Shut up and let us not hear, any divisive voices from you. The G-40s, or what you call Lacoste, whatever, shut up, Mr. Mugabe has ordered on many occasions.

Those who revered him, including some war veterans, and even former Vice President Joyce Mujuru, who was also ousted from the party on allegations of factionalism and plotting to overthrow Mr. Mugabe, no longer defend him as they used to. Mujuru has since formed her own party, called People First, and is planning to challenge President Mugabe in the 2018 elections.

I really dont know where the family, or the president and his wife want to take the country to, said Mujuru. But the end result they are actually destroying Zanu-PF, they are destroying the revolution.

In light of the economic downturn, social frustration and also increased human rights violations, personified by the public disappearance of activist Itai Dzamara, opposition political parties are calling for Mr. President Mugabes resignation, including MDCs Morgan Tsvangirai, who recently led a street march through the capital.

We are demanding a dignified exit for a tired Mugabe, declared Tsvangirai.

That President Mugabe still has strong support within Zimbabwean citizens, is unquestionable, and even more is the support among African leaders, who last year overwhelmingly voted for him to serve as chair of both the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union. A dilemma, U.S. Congressman Chris Smith, a Republican representing the state of New Jersey, acknowledged in a recent hearing.

As a hero of Independence Day movement however, has endured the support of many other African leaders who have considered him an honored elder and generally declined in international efforts to sanction his government, said Smith. This has placed the united states in an awkward position.

With the 2018 elections approaching, amid so much uncertainty, at 36, many want to know Whats the Way Forward for Zimbabwe?
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Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

By Elmira Tariverdiyeva - Trend:

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will be discussed between the Russian and Armenian foreign ministers in Yerevan, Mariya Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia's Foreign Ministry, told Trend Apr. 19.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is not expected to visit Baku soon, according to Zakharova.

Earlier, speaking at a press center in Moscow, she said the work continues to resolve the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and talks are underway for finding compromises.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers.

The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides,

Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 20

Trend:

The OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs will brief the OSCE chairman-in-office Apr. 20 in Berlin on recent hostilities and the way forward on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, James Warlick, the Minsk Group's US co-chair, tweeted on April 19.



On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire again.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
After digesting Johnny Depp and Amber Heards forced dog-smuggling apology, Aussie deputy PM Barnaby Joyce realized he had acting tips to share. The politician initially wrote on his Facebook that the couples 42-second video, which addressed Australian immigration laws for Heards trial, was important because the consequences of a disease outbreak [in the #WarOnTerrier] could have been terrifying. But in a series of early-morning interviews  one can be found above, via The Guardian (more here)  Joyce encouraged the actor to apologize with more gusto next time. I think hes auditioning for The Godfather, he quipped. Hes very good at playing every person, except Johnny Depp. And so it goes, Depp will have to wait another year to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Live-Action Biosecurity Short.


Carol Kaye plays bass guitar in a Los Angeles recording studio in the mid 1960s. Photo: GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images

Early in 2015s Love & Mercy, a film based on the life of Brian Wilson, a foxy blonde in cats-eye sunglasses addresses the Beach Boys leader. Hey, Brian? I think you might have screwed up here, she says, gesturing to the sheet music with her pencil. Youve got Lyle playing in D, and the rest of us are in A major. How does that work? Two bass lines in two different keys?

As she often was in real life, that blonde bassist Carol Kaye is the lone woman in the studio, and the only female member of an informal, unheralded lineup of talent  drummers, guitarists, percussionists, piano, and horn players  that you hear on the Beach Boys legendary Pet Sounds. Shes also on a jukeboxs worth of hit songs from the 60s: Ritchie Valenss La Bamba, Nancy Sinatras These Boots Are Made for Walkin, Simon & Garfunkels Scarborough Fair, to name a few.

Mostly, these musicians were jazz players brought in from Los Angeless teeming nightclub scene to lend their chops to the recordings of rock bands, some of whom (like the Monkees) rarely touched an instrument inside a studio. So, dramatic liberties aside, its unlikely that How does that work? was a phrase uttered by the now 81-year-old Kaye, whom Wilson and Quincy Jones have called the greatest bassist in the world.

And yet, because so few people know her name, its all too easy to fictionalize a woman who made such a big and influential noise while working in the shadows, and in a nearly all-male world.

Kaye never exactly expected to be remembered. Most session musicians thought they were creating ephemeral pop hits, not lasting touchstones. Music up to that time had a life span of about ten years, says the chatty, gray-haired Kaye, speaking from the sofa in the living room of her home on a warm day in early April, her white poodle mix Rusty beside her. Were shocked those songs lived on.

Legacies are complicated affairs. As anyone who shares success with other people knows, collaboration and dispute tend to go together. For instance, session drummer Hal Blaine claims he, Kaye, and their colleagues were known as the Wrecking Crew, a sobriquet he came up with after older studio hacks expressed a concern that these firebrands would wreck the music industry with their faddish rock. As nicknames go, the groups is pretty badass  except, according to Kaye, its an ex post facto bit of mythmaking from Blaine. We were never called that, she says bluntly, and it bugs her that the term has stuck.

Not in dispute, though, are Kayes bona fides. Carols genius was to look at extremely basic songs and figure out a way to make them interesting, says Michael Molenda, editorial director of Bass Player magazine. Shed listen to the musicians and just find that hooky, memorable bass line to drive the song forward. She could show up at a session for Sonny & Chers The Beat Goes On and rescue the tune with a bouncy lick in F, or improvise, on a lark, a zippy bass solo on Mel Tormes classic Games People Play that makes the song.

Kaye doesnt record much anymore, but she gives lessons via Skype, and if you order any of her 40 or so educational books and DVDs, you might receive some cool memorabilia, like a photocopy of her check for playing on the Mission: Impossible theme song ($70). Two years after moving into her one-story house here on the edge of the Mojave in Antelope Valley, California, and she still hasnt finished unpacking decades worth of stuff, but her instruments are resting prominently in the living room.

We liked [rock] because it was so easy, see, she says of sessions that typically lasted a few hours and yielded five or six songs. That meant we could do a whole album in six hours. Assuming that album wasnt for fellow bassist Wilson, that is. Pet Sounds, which turns 50 next month, took more than a year to finish, with upwards of 30 takes on tracks like Wouldnt It Be Nice and Kayes favorite, Sloop John B. Wilson was heavily influenced by Phil Spectors symphonic productions for the Ronettes and the Crystals, and Kaye worked for that notoriously difficult producer, too. Once, when a very pregnant Kaye needed to use the bathroom, Spector told her to maneuver through a studio packed tight with musicians without touching any of the mikes placed precariously around the room.

Wilson was less dictatorial, more experimental. Hed say, Okay, can you do a dooba dooba dooba?  recalls Kaye, and wed go, Whats a dooba dooba dooba?  Kaye was unaware she was helping to create a masterpiece with Pet Sounds and on an instrument associated with Wilson. [Pet Sounds] was just some more work for Brian, she says. By that time, he was having hit after hit after hit, so we thought, Okay, this is just another one. Not quite. When Paul McCartney rhapsodizes about how the bass lines on that album partially inspired Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, hes talking about Kayes performance.

More classic Kaye performances: Then He Kissed Me, the Crystals, 1963; Youve Lost That Lovin Feeling, the Righteous Brothers, 1965; and Im a Believer, the Monkees, 1966.

Carol Kaye (born Smith) grew up too fast like a lot of Depression-era children. Her parents were musicians, but her father sold her moms piano to finance a move from Washington to Wilmington, California, at the start of World War II. He was abusive, which is partially why Kaye takes a complicated view of Beach Boy patriarch Murry Wilson, who allegedly smacked Brian so hard he went deaf in one ear. Im not trying to stick up for him, she says. But most of us got hit back then. [In our house] the only thing that stopped the fights was music. I got the picture: If you do music, it makes things all right.

At 9, Kaye encouraged her mom to divorce her father and took odd jobs cleaning apartments to earn some extra income. Perhaps noticing young Carol singing around the house, Kayes mom saved up $10 and bought her 13-year-old daughter a steel guitar from a traveling salesman. Probably to get me out of her hair, Kaye says. She took lessons from a teacher in Long Beach, who eventually set her up with gigs playing bebop in L.A. nightclubs.

But jazz didnt pay much, and Kaye worked day jobs, including as a comptroller at Hughes Airport, to support her mother and children. Shed had a baby at 16 and pretended to be a widow until she married musician Al Kaye two years later. They had a second child but divorced soon after. He drank a lot, and I couldnt stop it, she says.

One night in 1957, producer Robert Bumps Blackwell, an early associate of Ray Charles, walked into Hollywoods Beverly Cavern looking for a guitarist to play on Sam Cookes Summertime. Kaye hesitated, because studio work often spelled the end of a jazz career, but it paid more than she made in a week.

The work became regular. One day a bassist was a no-show, Kaye switched instruments, and after that she was first call  the highest compliment you can bestow upon a session musician. Kaye estimates she was making the equivalent in todays dollars of almost $10,000 per week by 1965. She booked so many dates that she would lay down on her case to catch a few minutes sleep. Fellow musicians wives would come down to the studio, and Id joke, I slept with your husband today!  she says.

Kayes second husband didnt approve of her jobs late hours, and he especially didnt like it when she was playing with black musicians, which was often  the late virtuoso drummer Earl Palmer was a close friend. So one night, Kaye came home late from a session for Ike Turner, who had paid the crew in cash, and woke her husband up by dumping the money on the bed. Thats what the ladies of the evening got back then, she says with a grin. Kaye divorced him not long after, got a live-in nanny, and said, Screw it, Im working.

Even in retrospect, Kaye doesnt necessarily see that kind of career-oriented attitude as feminist. Honing her craft in jazz clubs, where women werent an anomaly, she didnt consider gender an issue, so whenever she was treated to an insult, Kaye would hurl it right back with a Well, you play good for a guy.

It got to be so that if she couldnt make a date, producers asked other bassists for the Carol Kaye sound, which she says boils down to clean lines, perfect timing, and hard picking that let her dance on top of the beat, which she does most gloriously on Good Vibrations. You can hear other prime examples on the opening to Glen Campbells Wichita Lineman, on which her playing somehow translated the songs feeling of mystical whimsy, and in the verve of her lines on Joe Cockers Feeling Alright.

As she talks, Kaye is momentarily distracted by an ice-cream truck cruising down the cul-de-sac, blasting a ragtime tune. He stopped in front of my yard one time, she says, eyeing the screen door. I said, Move that fucking truck! Excuse my language. I was shy for a while, but working with men all the time, its like, Ugh, screw off. 

She also appears on Homeward Bound, Simon & Garfunkel, 1966 and River Deep  Mountain High, Ike & Tina Turner, 1966.

A roundtable in 2015s The Wrecking Crew documentary gives a sense of what it was like not to be a white guy in a studio in the 60s. I dont think anyone ever really felt that [Carol] was a woman-woman, says Hal Blaine, which probably passed for respect at the time. Meanwhile, guitarist Tommy Tedesco teases Kaye about the sexual-harassment lawsuits she could have filed. (Kaye did sue Tedesco in the early 80s for allegedly calling her a dumb cunt.)

By 1969, Kaye was exhausted. She was sick of drinking multiple cups of bad coffee every day, and the music started to sound like cardboard. Things were even worse at home. Within the span of two weeks that year, Kayes first husband and fiance both died, and her house was robbed. She got into a car accident on the way to one of the funerals, and then Charles Manson, whom she had met with Brian Wilson, masterminded a killing spree. Everybody got scared, says Kaye. We pulled our names and phone numbers out of the union books so fast. Some of her colleagues began carrying guns to work.

By then, Kaye had started a publishing company to release her book, How to Play the Electric Bass. She still went to the studio, but it was mostly for soundtrack work  thats Kaye on the theme songs to M.A.S.H. and Shaft. More and more, rock bands felt that having other musicians on their albums was inauthentic.

We knew that someday [the rock sessions] would stop, says Kaye, who ended up on food stamps for a while after signing a crooked publishing deal (which she prefers not to discuss). Circumstances eventually improved, and she was content to return to playing jazz and transition into teaching. She estimates she makes a few thousand dollars a year in residuals from her studio days, though she has to be vigilant about tracking down contracts in order to prove that, yes, its her on Ray Charless America the Beautiful. Its just another aspect of whats become a minor battle for control over the Wrecking Crew narrative  getting credit, something Kaye doesnt have an appetite for.

I dont need somebody to say Youre great, because they could easily say Youre terrible. But you cant take away a persons musicianship, she says. Everybody wants to be somebody. What is that? When youre born, you are somebody. Why do you have to keep proving yourself all the time?

*This article appears in the April 18, 2016 issue of New York Magazine.
David Hockneys compound, steep in the Hollywood Hills, is anonymous from the street, but once youve been invited through the gray gate, everything is painted in festive and surreal Hockney colors  blue and red and pink. Inside, I find Hockney slumped, asleep, in a comfy chair in the middle of his cheery skylit studio, wheezing peaceably. Its just after noon, but Hockney is almost 79 and not, or so it seems today anyway, a particularly young 79. His work is some of the most recognizable and beloved in the world, whimsical and serious at once. Its so familiar that its difficult to not think of what, for example, Los Angeles would look like uncontaminated by the way he painted it. Isnt his L.A. the one you fantasize about living in even if you actually live there? And its hard to imagine the current ecstatic swagger of the L.A. art scene existing in quite the way it does without Hockneys mythic blessing.

The next couple of years will bring about a kind of celebration and codification of Hockneys legacy  a definitive traveling retrospective, a vivid documentary directed by Randall Wright, an impractically large Taschen monograph of his work. All this looking back must be exhausting for a man who always tried to capture how we see a moment  be it a splash of pool water or, more recently, the morning light through his window, drawn with his thumb on a program on his iPad.

Newspapers and art books are stacked around Hockney, ashes and cigarette butts at his snoozing feet. His handsome studio manager is at work on a laptop, and from somewhere, I hear the distinctive tone of a certain gay hookup app, announcing a message, and then again. Nearby, a short-sleeved curator from the Tate Britain hovers over a maquette of his museums temporary exhibition spaces, holding a tiny, recognizably Hockney painting  I glimpse a naked man emerging from a pool, as seen from the rear  between his fingers. This is in preparation for the retrospective, which will open there next February before traveling to the Centre Pompidou and then the Met Breuer.

Hockney, who is wearing a cozy, pilling blue cardigan and a threadbare brown cloth cap over his no-longer-bottle-blond hair, starts awake. He fumbles for a Davidoff from his pants pocket, shifting a bit in his seat, and lights it, drawing himself back into the room with his inhale, looking at me assessingly, since I had not been there when hed dozed off. An assistant fills him in, and Hockney motions for me to sit on the chair next to his, then asks the assistant to fire up the enormous flat-screen TV along the wall. We begin to watch a video of another of his current looking-back projects, that Taschen volume, which is too large for a coffee table, more the size of a wizards book of spells. He still has to sign each of the 10,000 copies before its scheduled fall release.

Onscreen, a disembodied hand turns the pages steadily. Grocers, newsstands, shops. This is 1953, 54, Hockney explains. I am a student in Bradford, the art school he went to at 16. Theyve never been reproduced anywhere before, he says of his juvenilia. They all disappeared. One of the staff took them. They were very good things: He said, Oh, I preserved them.  Hockney shakes his head. And then we land on the famous Domestic Scene, Los Angeles 1963, of a man showering while his back is washed by another man. The scene was painted before he had ever been to California  a fantasy of what life could be.

Hockney at the beach. Photo: Courtesy of Film Movement/David Hockney Photo: Courtesy of Film Movement/David Hockney

Hockney finally found his way to L.A. in 1964 with the money he made selling his take on William Hogarths The Rakes Progress, updated for the modern age. What he remembers most, he says, from when he first flew in was looking down from the sky at all the pools. On the ground, he found what he was looking for.

The house were in was built originally in the 1950s; Hockney bought it in 1981. This was a very dark house, the ceilings were very low, he says. The first thing I did was put in skylights; California is about light. The view faces toward the Valley  when he had the vegetation cut back once, you could see down to Universal Studios, but now that its grown in, it feels a bit like a tropical island. Down below, I glimpse the pool, quiet and private.

This is where Hockney passes almost all of his time lately. In 2005, he left L.A., then spent nearly a decade working in Yorkshire close to where he grew up, creating enormous, implausibly ravishing paintings of the local countryside, and lavish photographic experiments involving multiple cameras on a kind of rig, providing multiple perspectives at once. But he had a stroke in 2012 and found himself temporarily unable to complete a sentence (and, as he complained to the Guardian more recently, unable to get a good erection thereafter). The next year, one of his young assistants died horrifically, drinking drain cleaner after a cocaine-and-ecstasy bender. Around that time, Hockney decided it was best to come back to L.A. and sunshine.

Along the studios longest wall are hung seven or eight of the 82 identically sized portraits he has been painting in this very room of people in his life over the past several years, which will be shown at the Royal Academy of Arts this summer. Galleys of the accompanying catalogue are on a music stand in front of him, and he flips through a copy, reading for me through the list of his friends depicted, from artists like John Baldessari to old pals like the fashion designer Celia Birtwell (who is a dotty delight in the Hockney documentary) and Hockneys brother and sister-in-law. They took three days each. Some of them took two days  Larry Gagosian gave me two days. Hockney has known the megadealer since he had a poster shop in Westwood, he says, but has never sold with him. He wants to sell everything, he explains. I dont want to sell everything.

The Tate curator finishes up and leaves, and we walk outside and down the stairs to the main house, which is a level down from the lush ravine he lives in, for lunch. Several of his assistants sit at a round table, with a lazy Susan stocked with sushi.

One of Hockneys recent series of portraits  of Barry Humphries, better known as Dame Edna  that will be on display at the Royal Academy of Arts in London starting in July. Photo: Richard Schmidt/Courtesy of The Royal Academy of the Arts Photo: Richard Schmidt/Courtesy of The Royal Academy of the Arts

Among his concerns these days is which museum gets what paintings when he dies  the Tate and LACMA will both get their share  and in the meantime trying to cajole some of his long-standing collectors to loan works to the retrospective. He mentions to his studio manager that the Tate curator was having a hard time borrowing paintings, actually. He replies: Im not surprised. Its for 18 months. London, Paris, New York.

As Hockney, who stopped drinking years ago to save his pancreas, sips a near beer, we talk about his idea of bohemia, and how it has changed. I did think I could always find like-minded people. And it was a bohemia. Now there seems to be no bohemia, doesnt it? Well, for one thing, gay people dont feel different anymore, I note; we dont feel the need for a world apart. I think Im different still. I came out when I was, what, 23? I was just a student at the Royal College of Art. And people said, Wasnt that good of you? But I said, I expected to live all my life in bohemia. And in bohemia you could be gay. Because it didnt matter. I didnt expect it would close down sometime.

We talk about his other show coming up, in Australia, which will be about technology, mostly, with a focus on the paintings he made on his iPad. Hockney has always been an early adopter: He messed around with making work using fax machines when they were current, and the documentary is full of footage he shot himself, using whatever video technology was available.

One of his assistants mentions that Hockney recently was invited in by a movie studio to try out its virtual-reality headsets, which he was skeptical about. In the video he saw, he explains, they had a monster come toward me. And I wanted to touch it. But the only reason I wanted to touch it is because I knew it wasnt real. But I didnt have any hands. And I didnt have any feet. You dont have a body actually. Well, how will that catch on? He goes on: The headdresses totally isolate you. Where is shared experience going to come from? Weve always had shared experiences. The church was a shared experience. In the 20th century, the mass media was a shared experience. Everyone went to the cinema and looked at the newspaper and things. Its all been atomized. How do you reach the masses now?

Hockney painting. Photo: Jean-Pierre Goncalves/Courtesy of Film Movement Photo: Jean-Pierre Goncalves/Courtesy of Film Movement

Its true that Hockney has always played well to the crowd. I always thought art was for everybody, he tells me. Its like when the concert masters of Europe in the 19th century said classical music is for the educated, its not folk music. And Wagner said thats not understanding the power of music. And I thought, Oh, yes, yes. And the power of cheap music, of course. I think a few people have said that: Never underestimate the power of cheap music.

His assistants disperse, and we sit and talk over coffee. Other than his marijuana-delivery guys coming  Hockney smokes weed most nights, and watches a lot of Netflix  were uninterrupted. And as a man who is in the midst of creating an orderly sense of his past, he ends with a lesson:

I live in the now. There is only now, isnt there? Life is a killer. And we all get a lifetime. He waves another Davidoff. Thats why I smoke.

Hockney, the documentary, opens April 22.

*This article appears in the April 18, 2016 issue of New York Magazine.
Its hard enough to summarize a short story by George Saunders, whose strange and empathetic tales could constitute their own genre (comic dystopian realism, maybe). Hes been understandably tight-lipped, then, about his first full-length novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, the cover of which you can see here. Per Random Houses tantalizing catalogue copy, the book, which will come out early in 2017, sees Abraham Lincolns preteen son Willie die in 1862, at the height of the Civil War, and the president sneaking out to the crypt to cradle Willies body; journeys into a Buddhist netherworld ensue. We reached Saunders to find out a little bit more, and he graciously called in from a rest stop in Wyoming.

How did you decide on the look of the cover?

I got a few designs, and this one just leapt out at me as being so weirdly in the spirit of the book. It wasnt just a picture of Lincoln. I see it as being at dusk, and I thought it picked up the feeling of America in the mid-19th century  half pastoral, half burgeoning industrial. And it just had a feeling of mystery that I really liked.

Its hard to believe this is your first novel. Have you tried before?

Two or three times, and they just always shrunk. But this material has been on my mind for years, and I thought, Im just gonna discharge it, and whatever length it is, thats what Ill take.

George Saunders, novelist Photo: David Levenson/Getty Images

Where did the idea come from?

A really long time ago, in the Bill Clinton era, my wife and I and my wifes cousin were driving by Oak Hill Cemetery in D.C., and she just said casually, Did you know that when Lincoln was president, his son died and he was buried right out there? And she pointed up to the exact crypt where Willie Lincoln was. Several of the newspaper accounts said that Lincoln had been back to visit the crypt. And wow, this image came to mind of the Lincoln Memorial plus the Pieta. It just stuck with me for many, many years. I knew I couldnt possibly do it justice, but after a while I thought, if its this insistent, it would be kind of dishonorable to not try.

Did you find out if it actually happened  that he had cradled the body?

You couldnt prove it but it was mentioned in more than one newspaper at the time. I dont think people treated it like a big deal or a scandal. The relation to death was different. To be physical with a loved ones body wasnt a freaky thing.

The Bardo is a Buddhist state of purgatory?

If you read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, there is a period of consciousness after death and things happen there  but its not really a purgatory because youre there briefly before you go on to your next destiny.

Do you personally believe in this place?

My wife and I are Buddhists, and yeah, I believe in them as literal experiences. The question is what that is. I dont know if you read this book by Patricia Pearson called Opening Heavens Door. Western scientists have compiled all this data from people who were in a vegetative state for many years, and there were a number of cases where the low brain function theyd had dropped to zero at the time of death, and then it spiked up to an above-normal level for periods ranging from three to 20 minutes. What is that about? I have no idea. There was this early period in the writing where I tried to be faithful with the after-death experiences in different traditions, but thats not what my story is.

Its still a George Saunders story, then. Whats new about doing it at the length of a novel?

Well, how do you keep suspense, how do you generate problems and then solve them? That was something that every day I was trying to figure out. Its like if you were building custom yurts and then somebody commissioned a mansion, Id say, I cant do that. Well actually you could, if you can conceptualize a mansion as a series of interconnected yurts. But the big difference is that youre concentrating on the same problem for four years, so it gets really deep. At this stage of your career and your life what youre really hoping for is something that will make you feel vital every day youre working on it. Its like when youre writing your first book, and youre trying to figure out what kind of writer you are. This was like that.
Michael Shannon in Elvis & Nixon. Photo: Amazon Studios

In these days when President Obama routinely hosts rappers at the White House, it will be hard for younger folks to understand the weirdness of the title pairing of Elvis & Nixon, a thoroughly charming comedy that bobs on a sea of incongruities. You have to realize that  as the expanding body of lip-smacking-good Oval Office tapes makes clear  Richard Nixon was likely the most ill-at-ease chief executive weve ever had and that his alienation from the popular culture of his day was absolute. Although John Lennon made a pest of himself, Nixon didnt put any rock stars on his enemies list because they werent a part of his consciousness. He loathed them generally, from a distance, for their sexual magnetism, authority flouting, drug taking, and presumed alliance with antiwar protesters and other godless communists. When, in the winter of 1970, Presley delivered a letter to the White House asking to meet with Nixon and be appointed a federal agent at large in the war on drugs, it must have seemed like a Candid Camera prank. Its only in this movie that the encounter makes psychological  and poetic  sense.

Michael Shannon plays Elvis at the start of his absurd last stage, before the weight gain but after his own alienation from the modern world had taken hold. Shannon doesnt deliver an Elvis impersonation and doesnt, in truth, conjure the man who by 1970 had sullied his persona with Viva Las Vegas, Clambake, and 29 other wretched films the Colonel shoved him into. But the Elvis he gives us is, on its own terms, revelatory. Shannon is too fine an actor to play crazy. What he plays, instead, is a kind of casual, soft-spoken kingliness. This well-mannered southern boy  who abused only legal drugs  cant abide the chaos and disrespect he sees on one of his many Graceland TV screens. His idee fixe is that he can speak to the young and disillusioned as no one else can. Emboldened by memories of his Army stint, various honorary badges he has been awarded by local sheriffs, and a culture of guns, spy movies, and karate, he sees himself as Nixons natural ally. And Nixons men Egil Bud Krogh (Colin Hanks) and Dwight Chapin (Evan Peters) see an unexpected opportunity to show the youth of the world that their boss is a cool guy. A surreptitious parking-garage meeting between the presidents men and Elviss handlers (played by Alex Pettyfer and Johnny Knoxville) is a nuthouse inversion of All the Presidents Men.

Working from a script by Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal, and (oddly enough) Cary Elwes, director Liza Johnson has the perfect sprightly touch. (The film is a trim 87 minutes.) Watch characters faces freeze in amazement and incomprehension as Elvis matter-of-factly strolls up to the White House gate and into various federal offices: He should be laughed off, but  hes the King. He has a delicious scene with Tracy Letts (in whose plays Shannon made his mark) as a federal deputy whose response to Presleys contention that movie acting has made him a master of disguise is I  I  I  I  (Only African-Americans  in a sop to modern audiences  are shown regarding him with skepticism for the plundering of their culture.) Elvis arrives at the White House with multiple concealed guns, and proceeds  pointedly  to ignore every last bit of protocol. He even stops Nixon in his tracks.

In the opening crawl, Elvis & Nixon alerts us to the fact that no transcript exists of the title encounter, but if it didnt happen the way it does here, it should have. Start with a president played by Kevin Spacey  whos stupendous, the best and subtlest Nixon ever. With seeming effortlessness, Spacey captures the stiffness born of terrible insecurity that makes all that protocol necessary. Unused to someone who doesnt bow and scrape, his Nixon is further disarmed by Presleys stream (part real, part cunning) of anti-hippie invective. That really was how subordinates won Nixons confidence  by attacking his enemies even before he could.

Perhaps out of fear the audience wont be able to relate to anyone, Elvis & Nixon makes Pettyfers Jerry Schilling an ingenue, forced to choose between his lifelong friend and his fiancee back in Los Angeles. Its not a suspenseful plotline, but its not painful, and it does prompt a few good speeches in which Elvis laments the way his image has overwhelmed his true self. Those speeches make its makers intentions clear. Theyre satirists who have sympathy for the objects of their satire. They show how the fortress of celebrity brings out the absurd in its prisoners.

*This article appears in the April 18, 2016 issue of New York Magazine.
Amazing. Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images

Eddie Vedder will indeed stand with his buddy Bruce Springsteen and join the growing North Carolina boycott. Pearl Jam announced on Monday that their show in Raleigh scheduled for April 20 has been canceled in response to the anti-LGBTQ HB2 law. In a statement, the band calls the law a despicable piece of legislation that encourages discrimination against an entire group of American citizens. They continue: The practical implications are expansive and its negative impact upon basic human rights is profound. We want America to be a place where no one can be turned away from a business because of who they love or fired from their job for who they are. It is for this reason that we must take a stand against prejudice, along with other artists and businesses, and join those in North Carolina who are working to oppose HB2 and repair what is currently unacceptable.

Vedder further elaborated at Pearl Jams concert in Virginia Monday night on why boycotting North Carolina was the best way to protest:

Joining Pearl Jam in protesting the law are Cirque du Soleil and the band Boston, both of which have also canceled upcoming performances in North Carolina. On Friday, Cirque called off shows in Greensboro, Charlotte, and Raleigh with the following message: Cirque du Soleil strongly believes in diversity and equality for every individual and is opposed to discrimination in any form. The new HB2 legislation passed in North Carolina is an important regression to ensuring human rights for all. On Monday, Boston also canceled its shows in the same three cities, with founder Tom Scholz explaining that human rights are more important.

Springsteen and Ringo Starr were among the first to cancel shows in North Carolina, while trans and gay artists like Against Me!s Laura Jane Grace and Brandi Carlile have opted to perform in North Carolina in defiance of the law. Cyndi Lauper recently announced she will be donating all proceeds from her Raleigh concert to Equality North Carolinas fight to get HB2 repealed.
Hey guys! Phoebe is away, so Im covering Real Housewives of Dallas this week. These women are nuts, so lets get cracking.

LeeAnne is feeding a dog whose look of indifference aptly captures my own toward her. Cary is tattooing nipples onto a breast after a reconstruction. Tiffany and her husband, Aaron, flirt, and Brandi and Stephanie visit with LeeAnnes friend, Marie. Brandi, as you may recall, is a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and has found the healthiest way to relive her glory days: by helping Marie stage-mom her child. Brandi didnt come from money and taught herself how to be a cheerleader by tumbling in the woods. Marie is a little too rich to allow her daughter to do such a thing.

After a cute dance session with Maries daughter, Brandi apologizes to Marie for her disagreement with LeeAnne at her event. Marie essentially responds, No, I get why you find LeeAnne obnoxious, and Stephanie and Marie believe that Brandi and LeeAnne will bond over humor. I cant imagine a woman who takes herself as seriously as LeeAnne does will bond with anyone over humor, and neither can Brandi.

We see Cary in the kitchen with her husband, playing dumb about not knowing how to use a toaster oven, and then describing how her magical junk convinced an overweight married man to lose enough weight for her to want to be his trophy wife. Im not surprised that an admitted trophy wife is this shallow, but I am shocked that she thinks that her magical junk made the difference, as if rich man leaves wife for younger, prettier one isnt a story weve heard before. Their baby is adorable, though I suspect she isnt the polyglot Cary wants us to believe she is.

LeeAnne goes to see a hat designer, and although the whole scene is eye-roll inducing, I am glad that the show has finally acknowledged that black people actually live in Dallas by showing us the black hat designer. LeeAnne is getting a hat made in preparation for the Madhatters Luncheon, a big charity event where everyone brings their best chapeau game. Last year, she wore an expensive floral monstrosity, which she tackily explains the designer gave her for free. LeAnne basically admits to having used charity as a social-climbing tool for the last 16 years, but it seems to me that she might be the charity case.

Brandi, our self-made rich girl whom the producers seem hellbent on making the hero of the bunch, and her bestie, Stephanie, are using crafts to decorate a hat for the luncheon, mocking the women who take the event too seriously. But if people at these events arent your style  which I get, they aint mine either  why wouldnt you just donate directly to the organization and skip the event itself? Its pretty lame to expend all this energy trying to be punk rock on the Dallas Charity Circuit, no? During the hat-making session, Stephanie, who looks just like  and is just as mercurial as  Sarah Newlin from True Blood, admits to writing LeeAnne an email to smooth over their confrontation at the last event. Brandi says she isnt upset with Stephanie, but I bet she is.

Tiffany, LeeAnne, and their partners are barbecuing and we get the womens relationship history. Both were models and party girls back in their day, though Tiffany admits to hating LeeAnne when they first met. Tiffanys husband Aaron, a.k.a. Keith Urbanlite, gives an unnecessarily detailed description of how, as a child, he would artificially inseminate cows on a dairy farm. Then, Tiffany and LeeAnne try to pressure LeeAnnes totally uninterested boyfriend into proposing.

Later, Tiffany and Aaron discuss their life goals. We learn they used to live a rich Hollywood lifestyle before they left for Dallas. Tiffany emphasizes that Aaron moved to Dallas for her, but it feels suspiciously like the couple moved to Dallas to be cast on this show, as they have yet to purchase a permanent home and havent figured out a plan for Aarons career in Dallas. Wanna grow old in Texas with me? Tiffany asks. I wanna grow old with you, Aaron answers, as an unspoken NOT IN TEXAS THOUGH hangs in the air.

We get a scene with Brandi making poop jokes as she and her daughters make a chocolate pie to celebrate her mothers birthday. Brandi thinks her scat humor is hysterical, but her daughters are not amused. Neither am I, to be honest. Stephanie comes over to visit, and the two moms lament the difficulties of child-rearing while their husbands are away pursuing business goals.

Tiffany and Aaron go house hunting. Tiffany falls in love with a gorgeous mansion, and is ready to stretch money to buy it, but Aaron pushes back. He finally admits what we all knew: He doesnt want to be in Dallas for the long haul.

Brandis family comes over to celebrate her mothers birthday. Brandi explains her upbringing  that her mother was a teen mom of two kids, and how she was alienated for this. Brandi has never met her grandfather, because he too alienated Brandis mom. This explains why Brandi doesnt care much what other people think of her, but it doesnt explain her obsession with poop jokes. At the table, Brandi sweetly thanks her mom for all the sacrifices shes made to raise Brandi and her brother, and they embrace. Aww.

Next, we see everyone getting ready for the luncheon. While LeeAnne pretends to care what her boyfriend thinks of her too-loud outfit, Brandi arrives at Stephanies house wearing her crafted hat, replete with a toy dog and fake poop. Eye-roll.

Finally, were at the Madhatters Luncheon, which is supposed to be the biggest charity event of the year, but just looks like the tent setups at Ivy League reunions. Everyone fakes compliments Brandis hat, which is funny to watch, but that comes to an end when Tiffany tells LeeAnne theres fake dog poop on Brandis hat. LeAnne takes it too seriously, as expected, and gossips with some lame dude who says, I cant believe her husband is letting her do all this. How sexist and gross. Brandi is a grown woman, and though Im annoyed with her choice to put fake feces on her head, Im more annoyed by the idea that she should obey her husband. Please. When LeeAnne finally interacts with Brandi, she too is fake about Brandis hat and even allows herself to be photographed with her.

Ever the agitator, Brandi approaches Tiffany and tells a prolonged story about her fake poop falling off her hat in the restroom. After not getting the outsized reaction she wanted, Brandi recruits Cary to plant one of Brandis fake turds near LeeAnne, and LeeAnne tattles on Brandi to one of her powerful society connections. Well, okay. This is a thing that happened at an event attended by adults. Lame.

So, what did you think of the episode? Is Brandi going to be shunned after the luncheon? Do you like any of these characters yet?
As memes go, last months Sad Ben Affleck  sparked by a since-removed YouTube video in which Affleck appears to momentarily contemplate the meaningless of existence after being asked by an interviewer to respond to terrible reviews for Batman v Superman, set to a soundtrack of Simon & Garfunkels Sound of Silence  is very entertaining. Its not the first meme to set a captured look of earnest despair to music, and its one of a seeming endless stream of memes based around an implied moment of celebrity sadness. Still, given its context (the hyper-artifice of a publicity junket) and its subject (the endlessly vivisected Affleck), its no wonder that this meme seemed, at first click, to be the perfect piece of internet schadencandy.

Which is why I was so surprised recently, while being regaled by someone Id only just met about the importance of the imminent presidency of Donald Trump, to be recalling that haunting image of Sad Ben Afflecks face. After all, this moment  a virtual stranger rabidly babbling nonsense directly into my earholes  had nothing to do with Ben Affleck, and yet the haunting image of his tight, polite, constricted smile is, I realized, more widely symbolic and more aptly applicable than it first appeared. Isnt this exact sensation  one of keeping your composure in the face of a torrent of uninvited nonsense  a feeling we encounter often in the modern age? If you have ever written anything and posted it online, for example, be it an essay, a confession, or even just a tweet, you may have had the experience of reading the resultant responses  and isnt this the perfect expression to capture just how that too often feels?

In fact, isnt this also the perfect expression for how it feels when, say, youre stuck in the back of an Uber or a cab while your driver launches into some racist rant? Or how it feels to tentatively open your Facebook page to find a parade of forwarded wisdom-nuggets in Comic Sans from childhood friends you otherwise long ago lost touch with? Or to sit at a holiday table as an inebriated relative rails on loudly about how the only deterrent to imminent terrorist annihilation is assault rifles in the hands of every schoolchild? Or to ride in a crowded New York subway car while someone goes on loudly to no one about the Jews? Or to find out that Bill OReilly thinks that part of the problem with America today is that African-Americans have too many forehead tattoos? Or pretty much anytime youre forced into proximity with the wit and wisdom of Ann Coulter? Dont you, in other words, feel a little bit like this every single day?

The more you really think about it, the less this meme seems like a moment of hilarious celebrity aloofness and the more it feels like the representative image of a particularly pernicious brand of modern ennui: Basically, the feeling of being bombarded against your will by someone elses animus. Now, you might counter by saying: Argue back with that Uber driver! Shout down that drunk relative! Loudly ridicule that subway racist! Engage Bill OReilly in thoughtful debate! To which I say:

This aspect of Sad Ben Affleck is not a disposable meme; its a modern analogue to the famous image of Edvard Munchs The Scream. If The Scream represents the existential anguish of modernity, Sad Ben Affleck represents the barely suppressed despair of living in a world of way too many screamers, with way too many conduits to scream right in your face. You could, of course, scream back. Or you can just sit, and ride it out, and hope for a better tomorrow, while patiently and stoically enduring the indignities of today. Either way, Sad Ben Affleck, cest moi.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

Trend:

The Azerbaijani side has located and took away the body of a serviceman who died during prevention of the Armenian provocation on the contact line of troops, Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense said in a message.

The body was discovered in the area where searches were carried out repeatedly. Earlier, the Armenian side said it located the serviceman's body, yet refused to hand it over to Azerbaijan.

"On April 19, the search for the Azerbaijani serviceman, who went missing on the battle field, has been renewed with the mediation of the ICRC and the OSCE representatives," the message said. "This gives grounds to say that the Armenian side took away the body earlier, and for some unknown reasons kept it and didn't inform either the mediators or the Azerbaijani side."

After the official information was disseminated that the search will be resumed on April 19, the Armenian side secretly brought the body to the area where the search was previously carried out, according to the defense ministry.

Procedures to clarify the conditions, reasons and time of death of the Azerbaijani serviceman are currently being implemented, a forensic examination to identify the signs of violence, abuse of body, identification expertise and other necessary procedures are being conducted, the defense ministry said.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Sibs. Photo: Getty Images

Another day, another bit of Marvels Iron Fist casting news! Variety is reporting that the upcoming Netflix/Marvel superhero series has added 90210 and The Following veteran Jessica Stroup and Banshees Tom Pelphrey as siblings Joy and Ward Meachum, respectively. Theyll be recurring characters who clash with protagonist/billionaire/crime fighter Danny Rand, played by Finn Jones. Apparently, the sibs have spent their lives building Rand Enterprises to its current standing in the world, only to have all their work put in jeopardy when Danny returns to claim his birthright. That fits with the tiny bit of information we already have about Joy, which was a mysterious out-of-office note that Marvel released as the shows first promo image. Given how pretty both performers are, you should expect a fair amount of intra-family erotic fanfic.
Photo: Gabe Ginsberg/WireImage

Susan Sarandon is no stranger to suffering slings and arrows, but at least she wears them well: When I met up with the Oscar-winning actress over the weekend at a room in the Beverly Wilshire hotel, she hobbled over to meet me, a surprisingly chic leg brace offsetting her dress. I fell down a mountain while hiking in Colombia, she explained, waving away the injury as though it were as inconsequential as a paper cut. If that fall didnt get much press, its only because Sarandon herself has been dominating the headlines as of late, whether shes coming under fire for her cleavage or clashing with Debra Messing on Twitter after an MSNBC interview where Sarandon, a vocal advocate for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, was interpreted by the Will & Grace star as preferring even Donald Trump to Sanders rival Hillary Clinton.

Hopefully not lost in all the hubbub is that Sarandon has a movie coming out this week, The Meddler, that gives her a great, full-bodied film role for the first time in years. In the Lorene Scafariadirected film, Sarandon plays Marnie, a sweet and sunny widow whose move to Los Angeles is perceived as an invasion of space by her sullen adult daughter (Rose Byrne). Marnie cant help but get involved, and neither can Sarandon, as she told me in our very candid chat.



Its been a little while since you had the lead role in a movie. Was it exciting when you read the script, that this older woman could be the main character?

I was moved when I read the script. I wasnt dying, I wasnt helping someone else die. So that was good! [Laughs.] You know, you do get a lot of supporting parts as you get older. I listen to Helen Mirren, who told me, I look and see where the character comes into the script, and then I go to the last page and I see if shes still in the film at the end  and if shes not, then I dont even read it. I thought thats pretty good advice.



But youll still take supporting roles if you like the project?

Im doing a small thing in Canada for Xavier Dolan next. But I really like him, and I loved Mommy. Hes really fun and hes got interesting people involved. So it doesnt always matter if its a small part as long as the character has good scenes or affects something. I learned my lesson, because sometimes you jump on films where they end up cutting out most of your part. You see the final thing and youre barely in it. So you have to make sure that the function of your character is important to the movie.



Does that maybe also say something about how Hollywood regards female characters as expendable?

Yeah, definitely. Thank you for saying it so I dont sound like Im whining. And I think it is easier for women to imagine themselves in male leads than it is for men to imagine identifying with a film that has a female lead, and its men that are financing films.



And if the status quo caters to your gender, you may not see how much everyone else is longing for representation.

Thats something that you have to think about when you hop on to a project. Youre asking people to identify with these characters. Thats why every film is political, because what youre doing in The Nutty Professor is rooting for the cute woman to get the fat guy. Thats really subversive! So when a film reinforces ageism, sexism, racism, you maybe dont notice it, but when it challenges the status quo, its important.



Its nice to see your character, this woman in her sixties, get a romantic arc with J.K. Simmons.

You know, what is seen as being sexy onscreen is really about connection, rather than being sexy. When two people see each other onscreen and you believe they see each other in a way nobody else does, that is chemistry. It can be between a man and a woman, two men, two women  in The Client, it was me and the kid  but thats what the audience tunes into, is connection. It translates as chemistry.



I was talking to George Miller a few months ago for Mad Max, and he said that when you worked together on Lorenzos Oil, you taught him something very interesting about screen chemistry.

Really? I never thought he heard a thing I said! [Laughs.]



He said that you told him that great screen chemistry comes when the actor has somewhat feminine qualities and the actress has somewhat masculine qualities. It creates a kind of frisson.

Also, for me, those sorts of actors are the ones that Im interested in. All of the guys you think of as really charismatic, to me, have recognized and embraced their feminine side: Even if youre a Sean Penn or a Brad Pitt or a Johnny Depp, you get the feeling that theyre not stuck in this masculine idea. For women, thats true also. The great women actors that I know have that.

And why not? Thats what so exciting about living right now, is the fluidity of definitions and combinations. In the same way that gay marriage has helped to re-examine straight marriage in terms of role, I think transitioning and everything else thats happening is going to force us to take a look at quote-unquote masculine and feminine qualities. Its not something that should be threatening. Your crayon box isnt challenged  it just means that you have more crayons to color outside the lines with.



So even J.K. Simmons, with that booming voice and mustache, has feminine qualities?

Yeah, because look at the way he looks at her! Thats really whats so beautiful. Hes so quiet and centered and gentle. And that smile and those baby blues! You feel like shed be safe with him.



And your character is so devoted to taking care of other people, its a relief to think this person might be willing to take care of her, too.

As a woman who is in the habit of nurturing too much myself, I understand that problem. The curse of the competent woman is that you get used to doing everything and then other people assume they dont have to take care of you, and then you no longer say, Could you get me this? or Could you call me about that? Youre used to making reservations, youre used to planning everything, its multi-tasking women gone amok. I mean, if someone says to me, Ill take care of that for you, Im theirs! If someone says, Ill drive, then Ill get in that car and go wherever you want.



Even in your earliest relationships, did that tendency to nurture come naturally to you?

Im the oldest of nine children, so I was trained. Neither of my parents had families  my mom grew up in foster care and orphanages, and my dads father died really young and he was out on his own. Then they met, and my moms Catholic, so they had all these kids. So yeah, I always had a kid on my hip, but for me, it was really grounding. I was in my imagination a lot, playing with dolls still in eighth grade, so it was good for me to always have to think about those kids. But yeah, nurturing is a habit thats hard to break. And I enjoy it!



What do you enjoy most about nurturing another person?

Well, the thing I miss about being in a relationship is really just being in love. I could definitely identify with Marnie, because I love doing little things for someone that Im with, or writing little notes. All the things that are not cool, that youre not supposed to do if you want to keep your man? I do them.



Thats why they are cool, Susan! Because theyre authentic.

I dont know. Someone gave me a book called Why Men Love Bitches. Do you know this one? I thought, Wow, I have done everything wrong my entire life. Ive been too straightforward, I definitely talk about my needs constantly, I make excuses. Yeah. Im an over-nurturer.



One of the things I liked about this movie is that in the age of anti-heroes, its about a kind person.

Its such an interesting thing in our culture that people would find that kindness to be negative. I remember someone saying once, What is up with Mia Farrow adopting all those children? I was like, Really, thats a problem? Thats something youre going to fault her on? Cant you talk about someone else whos like a coke addict or something and leave poor Mia alone? I do think that with my kids, the two things I have always talked about with them are authenticity and kindness. If you can commit to those two things, thats a life well-lived, because were motivated so much by a place of fear. Thats how they sell everything, including our leaders.



So how do you deal with unkindness, like when Piers Morgan bashes you on Twitter for showing your cleavage? Do you think hes motivated by a place of fear, too?

Yeah, I do. I dont take any of that personally, I try not to take any attacks personally. Most of the time its ignorance. I mean, we extended Pierss career with that! That went on for a while. Thats an interesting press approach, I suppose. It must feel really bad to be a person thats mean. I cant imagine that feels good; I just feel sorry for them.



But dont you deal with that a lot online? Youre on Twitter, you recently got into an online argument with Debra Messing. Are people spamming your mentions with hate?

I look at the ones that come through my dog. My dog tweets, @mspennypuppy, and I see more of those. I dont really read the ones that come to my other account, although I post on there. My assistant will tell me, There was a reaction to this, and Ill say, How bad? or Do you think we need to address it?

In the case of those misleading headlines that were put on that interview, what was really disturbing about that is I got a peek into the way that people hysterically get their information. If you read or watched the interview, I didnt say what the misleading headlines said. Everyone wants the most sensational headline to draw traffic to their site, so a news source can say anything. It became a snowball thing, and people are so irresponsible to put things out there without ever really looking into it, which was shocking to me.



So to clear the record, what are your thoughts on Donald Trump?

Well, Trump is probably less threatening than Cruz, because I dont think Trump believes in anything.



That scares me too, though. Who knows where hell land?

But whos gonna vote for him? A lot of Republicans are voting for Bernie Sanders. Ive been in the states where theyre changing their affiliations. A lot of sane Republicans are not gonna vote for Trump. Half the population is female and most of them wont vote for him. Minorities wont, unions wont, so who does he have? Its been an interesting thing, and a scary thing, because hes normalized hate and made it okay to be violent, and thats not good.

But in terms of if he were the nominee, I feel like I could beat him. Seriously! This is one of the things I mentioned, that some people say, Let him get in and then the revolution really will begin, but that would be such an extreme situation, were he to get elected. I cant believe that the Republican party, who managed to steal two elections, cannot make sure that Trump doesnt get the nomination. But then who do we have? Kasich? I mean, Hillary Clinton is the best Republican thats out there. Shes completely a Republican. Everything that she stands for and doesnt stand for is Republican.



Youre questioning whether all those groups would vote for Trump, but it wouldnt be the first time the Republicans have convinced people to vote against their own self-interest.

Thats so true. But its the discontent, its the frustration with the system, its the distrust of candidates that have given rise to these two options, Trump and Bernie Sanders. Its like a Vonnegut novel. One of them is all light and about joining people together and not excluding anyone and being free of ties to these terrible companies  Big Pharma, fracking, Monsanto  and the other one is all about blaming someone, putting up a wall, dividing everyone. That just doesnt work.
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As youve probably noticed, the length of each Kimmy Schmidt episode has ballooned. Season one was originally ordered for NBC, so all of the episodes came in relatively tight, if not broadcast-svelte. Now that UKS is officially a made-for-Netflix property, the new episodes are quite a bit longer.

So far, that hasnt really been an issue: After all, premium-cable comedies like Veep and Silicon Valley pull off a 30-minute run time with ease, and UKS usually crams in more jokes into ten minutes than most network sitcoms manage to pull off in their entire twenty-two. The shows made good use of the extra breathing room, too, by adding levels of emotional nuance that 30 Rock would have been forced to cut. But Kimmy Gives Up! runs a particularly bloated 33 minutes, and it was definitely the first episode where I caught myself watching the clock. Its trying to do a lot, yet not getting enough plot movement to satisfy.

The Kimmy plotline is unquestionably the strongest: After essentially getting benched for the past three episodes, Kimmy finally gets another crack at a reunion with Dong when she finds out his GED test information was misdelivered. But Dong has a much bigger concern than the big test: He and Sonya have their green-card interview, and hes terrified hell be deported. I dont want to go back to Vietnam, Kimmy. Its full of baby-boomer tourists trying to feel something.

And so, Kimmy takes on the crafting emergency of helping Dong and Sonya contrive a relationship photo album, largely through the use of a rotating ad and some clever costumes. (The shots include Hawaii, Aspen, and met Steve Harvey at a spa  hes taller than youd think!) But after Sonya vanishes, it isnt long before Kimmy once again confesses that she hasnt given up on Dong. Dont you still hope? she asks. He doesnt: We have an arrangement that works, he says, aside from Sonyas weird obsession with a park statue of Neptune. Dongs rejection of Kimmy is so thorough that he fishes 78 cents out of a fountain so he doesnt have to return her missing scrunchie, and Ellie Kemper acts the hell out of the scene, showing a layer of genuine sadness in the otherwise irrepressible character. (Of course, Dong still loves Kimmy, as we later learn when we see him sniffing the scrunchie in question.)

Theres good stuff in this episode that would have been cut in a shorter show, like Kimmys series of long talks with Lillian. Although Kimmys greatest strength is her ability to never give up after all those years in the bunker, Lillian tries to remind her that it can also be her greatest weakness. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is just quit, and walk away, she says, citing how she waited years in a low-rent Murray Hill apartment for the Second Avenue subway to arrive. It wasnt until she finally decided to move out that she met her husband and actually moved on with her life, and she doesnt want Kimmy to keep pining over Dong instead of doing the same. Its a nuanced, thoughtful emotional arc that doesnt sacrifice jokes (Kimmy: Giving up just isnt my jam. My jams are grape, Jock, and Space) or provide an easy win for Kimmy, who ends up sleeping through the GED test because she spent her study time trying to help Dong. Not giving up has real consequences.

Unfortunately, the two other plotlines are respectively underbaked and lazy to the point of offensive. The former designation goes to the sloppy Titus B-story, in which hes so happy about Mikey and the success of his one-man show that he quite literally cant get the song out of his heart  until Lillian makes him worry about whether his luck will last, and then he cant get sad songs out of his heart. The show initially uses this concept to get in some sly satire. (A tune from Alabama!, the black version of Oklahoma!: Oh what a glorious morning / Oh all the joy it will bring / If I dont mind never voting / Or my church burning down while I sing.)

But while I enjoyed the callback to last seasons goofy incest musical Daddys Boy, we didnt need two additional songs from it soundtracked over other plotlines, followed by a host of parodies banged out by Titus on a bedbug-ridden piano. It may make for fun re-watch material to parse out all the double entendres that Jeff Richmond (a.k.a. Gangly Orphan Jeff) slips into his tunes, but Im not really eager to try  and I actually like musical theater. Richmond is a huge asset to the show, but his stuff is best in small doses. It seems like this episode was designed to showcase his work without the risk of being a full-on musical. Its a halfway approach that serves no one.

The plotline that outright pissed me off was Jacqueline and Buckleys. The underlying concept is great: Jacqueline has never spent a day alone with Buckley, having always had help from a nanny, or a driver, or an iPad taped to a bag of sugar. Given her reduced circumstances, she actually has to parent, which is tough to do with an energetic young boy whos also probably acting out in the wake of his parents divorce. Buckleys pediatrician notices the discipline issue, but tells Jacqueline not to worry: Im not suggesting actual parenting. I know how busy we all are.

Instead, he suggests Dyziplen  a drug designed to treat ADHD, hyperactivity, and Kanye West spectrum disorder  which immediately turns Buckley eerily agreeable  basically, hes a Stepford kid. When Jacqueline takes one herself, she realizes that the pills turn life into a dull, gray, joyless affair, so much so that she cant even enjoy lifes greatest pleasure: a Karl Lagerfeld wardrobe fitting.

Time to be an internet killjoy. Sorry, Tina Fey! ADHD drugs are certainly no substitute for good parenting (or adequately staffed classrooms), and some of the kids who take pills probably dont need them. If the episode hadnt specifically called out ADHD as the hobgoblin, I probably would have just chalked it up to standard absurdity. But since Dyziplen is effectively a stand-in for Ritalin, Adderall, et. al., its worth emphasizing that this plotline is woefully ignorant about ADHD drugs. (The most commonly prescribed formulations are mild stimulants, for one thing, and thus unlikely candidates for making anyone feel blah.) It also seems blind to the pretty obvious fact that ADHD drugs are necessary for a lot of people  many of them are adults, and many of those adults are women. (FWIW, I am not one of them.) Would we be laughing if Buckley were joyless and withdrawn, and the show mocked Jacqueline for giving him antidepressants?

Making fun of overmedicated kids is also just a really tired way to do this plot. What if Jacqueline ended up abusing the pills to be more productive (as many people do with Adderall)? What if she discovered that Buckley didnt have ADHD, but she actually did, and that the drugs were helpful? I cant imagine that the millions of people who take ADHD drugs wont be offended by the implication that their lives are gray, empty morasses. Im glad that Jacquelines experience helps her to figure out parenting a little more, and the final scene of them destroying the high-end boutique is great fun. But needlessly stigmatizing people who take psychiatric drugs isnt original, and it isnt particularly funny.

Other Notes:
Enemy of the state. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox

In addition to repeatedly committing acts of murder, Deadpool is now running afoul of Utahs liquor laws. The states Mormon majority generally eschews alcohol, and the citizens who do choose to imbibe face restrictions more thorny than one would have to deal with elsewhere. As a result, a Salt Lake City movie theater  charmingly named Brewvies  has apparently gotten into legal trouble for screening Deadpool, because its against the law to show movies with sex acts while also serving alcoholic beverages.

According to the citys Fox affiliate, two undercover agents were deployed to Brewvies to purchase beer and watch the R-rated flick, which depicts Ryan Reynolds banging and getting pegged by Morena Baccarin. Subsequently, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control said the theater had committed a grave violation of liquor laws and threatened to suspend or revoke Brewviess liquor license, as well as fine it. DABC spokespeople have declined to weigh in on the situation, but Brewviess lawyer Rocky Anderson is demanding that the agency back off. This isnt supposed to be the Taliban, he told a Fox reporter. This is supposed to be a state agency. Unfortunately, Brewvies doesnt appear to be showing Deadpool anymore, so any boozy protest viewings are out of the question at the present time.
Details added (first version posted on 14:56)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

Trend:

The Azerbaijani side has located and took away the body of a serviceman who died during prevention of the Armenian provocation on the contact line of troops, Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense said in a message.

The body was discovered in the area where searches were carried out repeatedly. Earlier, the Armenian side said it located the serviceman's body, yet refused to hand it over to Azerbaijan.

"On April 19, the search for the Azerbaijani serviceman, who went missing on the battle field, has been renewed with the mediation of the ICRC and the OSCE representatives," the message said. "This gives grounds to say that the Armenian side took away the body earlier, and for some unknown reasons kept it and didn't inform either the mediators or the Azerbaijani side."

After the official information was disseminated that the search will be resumed on April 19, the Armenian side secretly brought the body to the area where the search was previously carried out, according to the defense ministry.

Procedures to clarify the conditions, reasons and time of death of the Azerbaijani serviceman are currently being implemented, a forensic examination to identify the signs of violence, abuse of body, identification expertise and other necessary procedures are being conducted, the defense ministry said.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Arkansas-based Central Tube and Bar has signed a lease on a 40,000-square-foot building in Greater Waco and will hire more than 20 people in the near future, and more over the long haul, company president Dustin Ward said.

Ward added that Time Manufacturing in Waco is among its largest customers.

Our Texas plant will allow us to service our existing customer base much better in Waco and the surrounding areas, Ward said. It will also help facilitate our current growth patterns by giving us additional laser capacity. We have had this expansion in the works for some time and are very excited to finally be here.

The company makes tubing from carbon, aluminum and stainless materials, and provides such services as laser cutting, bending, sawing, shearing and parts finishing.

It is a prime supplier to Time Manufacturing, a homegrown Waco company with an international reputation for its truck-mounted hydraulic lifts. Time in December announced it was celebrating its 50th anniversary by spending $5.8 million to expand its facilities at Imperial Drive and Texas Central Parkway.

That expansion reportedly will create 121 jobs in the next four years, and should give Central Tube and Bar even more work.

Ward said he considered placing the plant in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, but chose instead to get as close as possible to Time Manufacturing.

It will move into a 37,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at 2712 Old Dallas Road in Lacy Lakeview, where it spent $2 million on improvements.

Ward said he has already hired four people and more are on the way.

Asked about the companys pay scale, Ward said a general laborer will make $15 to $20 an hour, but he did not want to comment further.

The more skilled will make somewhere north of that, but I dont want to get any further into specifics, he said.

The crew already is making product, but the official opening of the facility has been publicized as April 25.

My wife is a Baylor Bear, so Im familiar with Waco, and Im excited about what I see happening, Ward said.

The headquarters for Central Tube and Bar is Conway, Arkansas, and the company has another manufacturing facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

It claims to have the largest tube laser in Texas, with a 16-inch diameter capacity, according to a release by the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce.

Ward said his company did not receive the promise of economic incentives to locate in Waco, but joked that he wouldnt mind getting some.

City of Waco and McLennan County officials in December voted to give tax abatements and a combined $200,000 in economic development incentives to Time Manufacturing, based on its employment and investment pledges. Time, which makes Versalift equipment used in telephone and power line maintenance, has quadrupled its business in the past decade to become a $200 million company, employing 421 people in its main Waco plant at the time it announced its expansion.

The firm has locations in Denmark, Pennsylvania and Oregon, but chose to expand production in Waco because of its skilled staff here, company President Charles Wiley said.

Central Tube and Bar reportedly prepares materials Time uses in the production of its booms.
McLennan County will move a few offices out of the courthouse in order to keep its no weapons signs up at the building under a new agreement with the Texas Attorney Generals Office.

The district attorneys office pretrial services and hot check department will move to the administrative area of the old sheriffs office on Columbus Avenue and out of the courthouse annex. Those with a concealed carry license will be able to carry in the old sheriffs office building but not in the courthouse or annex.

County Judge Scott Felton said representatives from the AGs office visited the McLennan County Courthouse on April 13 to tour the building and the annex.

The visit came after the AGs office notified the county it needed to remove signs at the entrances of the courthouse and the annex or face penalties for prohibiting licensed handgun holders from entering an entire building simply because the courts or the offices of the courts are located in a portion of a multipurpose building.

County leaders have stood against allowing licensed handgun holders to enter the historic building with their weapons, citing security issues.

We knew it was important to us. Were glad it was important for them to come here and actually walk the facility, Felton said about the representatives.

Well save a lot of money on extra security we would have put into place if people were allowed to carry weapons within the common areas of the courthouse.

Felton said county staff informed the AGs office representatives during the visit to Waco that there is now a preliminary plan to relocate the district attorneys pre- trial services and hot check department out of the annex. The new offices will have a more accessible public entrance at Columbus Avenue.

The AGs office reported that those plans will allow the courthouse to retain its ban on weapons and that the office will not file suit or seek the collection of civil penalties.

Commissioner Ben Perry said after the AGs office originally told the county to remove its signs, county leaders chose to communicate first rather than jumping straight into litigation.

Perry said the AGs office was very receptive to hearing from the county and recommended the modifications.

Will (moving the offices) cost us money? Yes. There will be an expense to build out some office space, but it will be a minimal expense compared to litigation or compared to additional security at the courthouse, Perry said.

Perry said this is an example of good government at work.

The county received a violation letter March 30, alleging the courthouse and annex  which is accessed through the courthouse  were in violation for prohibiting licensed handgun holders from entering into an entire building with their weapons.

The violation letter was prompted by complaints from Open Carry Texas.

CJ Grisham, Open Carry Texas president and CEO, said the group is looking into civil disobedience to force the issue into a court case.

What the AG and the county is saying is that in order to exercise my First Amendment right, I have to surrender my Second Amendment right, Grisham said, noting the commissioners courtroom is still in the courthouse.

If they want to play this game where theyre going to suppress the rights of the citizenry, then were going to stand up and were going to challenge them.

Felton said there is plenty of room in the new space for the offices, and the building is already compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

We came out with a real amiable solution, he said.
Portals into fantasy lands will be dispensed freely in Waco on Saturday at a family book giveaway on South 19th Street.

The Texas American Federation of Teachers awarded its annual 40,000-book giveaway, which is intended to promote reading at home, to its Waco chapter this year.

The giveaway will be from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at a warehouse at 2025 S. 19th St.

The giveaway is limited to Waco Independent School District students, who each will receive five books and a T-shirt.

Educators from the Waco and La Vega districts, because of their Title I priority campuses, also are allowed up to 40 books. Title I districts are in the bottom 5 percent of districts statewide, based on standardized test performance.

The books are new, primarily hardback and range in reading level from pre-kindergarten through high school.

These are books children like to read, said Rosalinda Silva, secretary treasurer of Greater Waco American Federation of Teachers.

The Waco Transit System will provide free rides to the warehouse for any Waco ISD high school student with a student ID.

Waco teacher Gloria McCoy helped unload books Monday and said she is thrilled with the organizations generosity.

McCoy has been teaching in Waco since 1989, many of those years spent as a reading teacher. McCoy said many of her students had no books at home, preventing them from practicing their reading skills outside of class.

If you let them take the books home (from the library), they dont bring them back, and they cant check other books out if they havent returned the books, she said.

La Vega Independent School District teacher Yolanda Thompson said she plans to restock her classrooms minilibrary with the books from the giveaway.

Thompson said her students use her classrooms books heavily, and she is looking forward to expanding her stock.

I think its an awesome opportunity to get books for my classroom so that my students have books to read other than whats in the library, she said.

There are a few students already scouting what is available.

University High School senior Edith Rodriguez volunteered to help sort the books Monday with her classmates and plans to return for the giveaway Saturday.

Rodriguez said she is an avid reader and is eyeing a few of the selections.

Its like a sneak peek, she said.

-----

If you go

What: 40,000-book giveaway

When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday

Where: 2025 S. 19th St. warehouse

More information: The giveaway is open to Waco ISD students and educators from Waco, La Vega and McGregor school districts.
A Waco police sergeant suffered injuries after a teenage motorist made an improper turn on Interstate 35 and struck the on-duty officer Sunday evening, Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said.

Waco police Sgt. D.J. Adams, 32, was struck on I-35 near South 17th Street when 19-year-old Kelsey Marie Stiles, of Lorena, struck Adams patrol vehicle when she made an improper left turn onto the interstate, Swanton said. The impact caused Adams airbag to deploy when Stiles vehicle veered into the officers lane.

Adams was taken to Baylor Scott & White Hillcrest Medical Center with minor injuries, Swanton said. He was treated and released from the hospital later Sunday evening.

Police reported that Stiles also suffered minor injuries, but declined to be taken to an area hospital. She was cited in the incident, Swanton said.
In an era when way too many budding journalists have a fractured idea of what the role of a responsible, fact-scouring press is all about, kudos to onetime Baylor University journalism instructor David McHam, honored this past weekend as a distinguished alumnus of Columbia Universitys prestigious Graduate School of Journalism. He comes from a healthy tradition of journalism teachers  those whose foundation for teaching new generations rests on daily work in the news media.

McHam began his career in journalism at The Spartanburg Herald in South Carolina while in high school and he later worked at what was then the Waco News-Tribune, Houston Post and Dallas Times Herald. During his years at the Waco paper, he toiled as a student and then a teacher at Baylor. He is author of Law and the Media in Texas, in circulation since 1972.

In a frank, concise and revealing interview with the Trib in 2011, McHam stressed the confounding situation that greets not only those contemplating careers in the many-splendored news media but new generations of readers and TV viewers, some easy pickings for basic news coverage manipulated to favor one end of the political spectrum over the truth.

All of this talk radio and Fox television and news blogs  they distort so much, McHam told us. And as Pat Dougherty, editor of the Anchorage Daily News and my former student (at Baylor), said, the average reader has a difficult time sorting it all out. What Ive found in the last three or four years is that this is seeping down into society, all the way down to the students. They have a hard time figuring out whats real.

Congrats to McHam, who left Baylor in 1974 and retired from the University of Houston last year, for setting his students straight over a half-century. His insights as a journalism educator and mentor, built on rock-solid experience in the daily newspaper business, are instructive beyond those of us in the profession.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

Trend:

The body of Armenian serviceman, who died during the recent military operations on the contact line between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops will be handed over to the Armenian side on April 20 at 15:00 (GMT + 4 hours), Azerbaijan's State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing People told Trend Apr. 19.

The commission said that this decision was made by the relevant government structures, adding that the body of the Armenian serviceman was located April 11 on the territory under the control of Azerbaijan.

The state commission appealed to the ICRC so that it take part in the humanitarian mission and inform the Armenian side.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers.

The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.



Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.



The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Given the terribly lean state of the much-sullied mainstream news media and the fact they remain far more credible than whats offered by social-media sites masquerading as legitimate news sources, pardon us while we pause to praise Trib journalists honored by their peers in this months Texas Associated Press Managing Editors conclave in El Paso.

An excellent example of the very best in our newsroom can be seen in the first-place win for deadline writing by veteran Trib staffer Mike Copeland and former staffer Olivia Messer, then still a newcomer to the profession. Competing against the very best of 13 Texas newspapers in their division including the Corpus Christi Caller-Times and El Paso Times, the two were recognized for our first-day coverage of the May 17, 2015, Twin Peaks shooting melee, which left nine people dead.

And for those critics who suggested to us that this first-day coverage failed to reflect wrongs committed against the 177 bikers arrested that day, we should note that our teams reporting sought to make sense of the chaos and bloodshed that reigned  and that the Trib also scored two first-place wins for pieces raising concerns about due process for the jailed bikers.

Journalism involves lots of different subjects, not just the big stories of the day. Were proud of all our team who won awards for pieces ranging from the life-saving diligence of a school nurse (chronicled by Stephanie Butts) to the work behind saving Wacos historic buildings (by veteran Trib staffer J.B. Smith). Its easy to criticize  and were eternally self-critical  but in our mind nobody does it better.
Back to the future

Footage of Donald Trump spewing his hatred to cheering crowds reminds me of the films of Hitler and Mussolini spewing their hatred to cheering crowds. Trumps rabid supporters dont care that hes a racist, sexist, bigot, misogynist, bully and xenophobe. Hes the authority figure they crave, a strongman who will protect them. His mostly white supporters are understandably angry over lack of jobs and income inequality. Theyre angry about and scared of the cultural and demographic changes in this country, changes they are powerless to stop. Most believe this demagogue and narcissist will make America white again and take our country back to their perceived glory days of the 1950s when white men held all the power, and women, gays and minorities held none.

The Economist Intelligence Unit warns a President Trump could start a trade war that would disrupt the global economy, and he would boost terrorist recruiters with his anti-Islamic rhetoric. Trump incites violence, says he is his own best adviser, doesnt bother to learn policy and wont give his own policy details. Creating an aura of personality, he encourages his supporters to swear allegiance to him. With a Trump presidency, we could witness the birth of a dictatorship.

Carolyn Matkowsky, Wilmington, Delaware

Good judgment

I disagree with the April 12 letter from John Mayne concerning guns in the county courthouse. Sheriff Parnell McNamara and the commissioners court are to be commended for showing the leadership, courage and good judgment to take a stand against the ridiculous instructions of Attorney General Ken Paxton. Its too bad Paxton was unable to place public safety ahead of political ideology.

This is an example of the state trying to take away local control over a matter best left to local officials. It reminds me of the law adopted in Michigan that resulted in taking away local control over the water department in the city of Flint. That caused the poisoning and brain-damaging of thousands of children.

As a taxpayer, Im not concerned about spending a few dollars to defend public safety and common sense. I think the great majority of citizens in McLennan County agree with their local elected leaders on this. I encourage county officials to stick to their guns.

Charles Reed, Waco

Counting votes

In the first paragraph of McLennan County Democratic Party Chair Mary Dutys April 13 column regarding the Election Day voting snafu, she sternly remarks that one vote lost is one vote too many, but she seems to almost totally disregard that only nine cases of voter fraud were proved in mail-in ballot elections in Oregon. I wonder if shed feel the same way if those nine fraudulent votes disenfranchised Democratic voters rather than Republicans?

Mark Ethridge Woodward, Woodway
RAYMOND  Jim Ballards political campaign led the county commissioner hopeful to a lot of doors over the last few months, and the longtime winery owner found theres always something new to learn.

Its not that he didnt have experience talking to county residents, after all thats part of the routine at James Arthur Vineyard.

Its something I do every day in the winery, Ballard said. But out here Im selling wine. When I knock on the door, Im selling myself.

By now, Ballard has nearly covered the entire district, much like Joe Lefler, the other Republican vying for the District 2 seat. His volunteers have played a key role.

Ive had some incredible help with volunteers, he said. Thats kind of humbling that people are willing to volunteer their time and help me.

Those volunteers plan a number of activities, including all the knock and walks.

Its been interesting, Ballard said. Its been a lot of fun, but its been a lot of work. Ive made connections with people I havent seen in a while.

Most people were very receptive to his campaigning, Ballard said. Though not everyone knew exactly what a county commissioner is.

Usually the first question people ask is what does a county commissioner do? Ballard said.

The candidate then explains to voters that commissioners are stewards of the countys money and that they regulate and monitor public safety, roads and the sheriffs office.

We help oversee all that, Ballard said. We set the budget for all those departments.

Talking with voters has reinforced a lot of the reasoning behind why the longtime resident threw his hat into the ring in the first place. Property taxes top the list of conversations topics.

A lot of folks are just worried about their taxes when we knock on doors, he said.

Many residents are worried their property taxes will continue to climb into the future, Ballard said. If elected, he would stay the course set by the existing board, keeping tax rates stable and as small of a burden as possible.

I think the current board has done an incredible job over the last four years with keeping taxes stable, he said. Id like to keep that tax rate stable.

As far as lowering taxes goes, Ballard admits thats a tougher nut to crack.

I dont have any magic bullet that says hey, were going to cut property taxes, he said, adding that hell strive to keep money handling efficient.

Ballard has experience keeping budgets trim and tightening waistlines, having operated James Arthur Vineyards for the past two decades.

Weve had to set budgets, he said. Weve had to make tough decisions.

All of those decisions are important, as business decisions affect employees and their families. Ballard said that experience should translate well for county business.

Beyond taxes, residents have also talked with Ballard about the state of infrastructure in the county, noting the 80 or so bridges that are in need of repair.

Thats something the county board has to take a look at, he said. Thats a safety issue.

Last years flooding only exacerbated the issue, and its one that personally affects Ballard.

Weve got a bridge on Raymond Road that desperately needs to be fixed, he said. We need tough, common sense decisions. If we dont, that situations only going to deteriorate.

He said he does support offering extra county money for road and bridge repair.

Despite getting a better idea of the amount of responsibility involved in the office, Ballard is still interested in the job.

Im past the point of no return, he said. Its something Ive given a lot of thought to.

He wants to help the county hes made home continue to grow.

We want to make sure we have a great business climate, he said. Thats one of the ways were going help the economy grow.

The Nebraska Primary Election is May 10, both Ballard and Lefler will be on the ballot.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

Trend:

Under an instruction of Azerbaijan's supreme commander-in-chief, a large amount of funds will be allocated for acquisition of modern weapons and equipment for the country's army, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry told Trend Apr. 19.

The ministry was commenting on the reports about the collection of $6.5 million to provide the Armenian occupying forces with the modern weaponry.

"Armenians' becoming active after the recent developments along the line of contact between the Armenian and Azerbaijani troops is of provocative nature only, and, as always, such words as "volunteers", "diaspora" and "rich Armenians" are used in standard inspirational news stories spread by the Armenian side," said the ministry.

"Unlike Armenia, the economic potential of Azerbaijan enables to provide the country's armed forces with the most modern weapons and military equipment," according to the ministry.

"Following the recent incidents, the president of Azerbaijan, the supreme commander-in-chief, declared that the care and attention to the country's armed forces will rapidly increase," said the ministry. "In addition, work is underway to provide the necessary financial and social assistance to the families of those killed and wounded during the prevention of Armenia's recent provocations."

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 19

Trend:

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev attended the opening of a new administrative building of Azeravtoyol OJSC April 19.

Saleh Mammadov, chairman of Azeravtoyol OJSC, informed the president about the conditions created in the administrative building. The large-scale repair-construction and landscaping work was carried out in the area, which occupies a total area of 1.7 hectares. Under the decree of President Aliyev dated March 9, 2016, Azeryolservis OJSC was renamed Azeravtoyol OJSC.

A bust of national leader Heydar Aliyev was installed inside the building. There are photo stands reflecting the national leader's life and political activities, as well as President Ilham Aliyev`s attention to the development of road and transport infrastructure in Azerbaijan.

The building has a canteen, 252-seat auditorium and elevators. There are also 210 cabinets for employees. The building was equipped with the most modern ventilation and fire protection systems.

High quality building materials were used in the construction of the building. The modern video observation and computer systems were installed here. The network of a new digital communication system was also established. The design of the roof of the building was completely renovated. The green areas were laid out in the area.

President Aliyev wished the staff success.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:

The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan sold $19.9 million to eight banks through the auction held by the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA), SOFAZ's message said Apr. 19.

SOFAZ offered $50 million for sale through the auction, according to the message.

SOFAZ will continue selling foreign currency through auctions in 2016.

The foreign currency is sold as part of SOFAZ's transfers to the Azerbaijani state budget, which are envisaged to stand at 7.615 billion Azerbaijani manats in 2016.

SOFAZ was established in 1999 with assets of $271 million.

As of January 1, 2016, SOFAZ assets reduced by 9.5 percent compared to 2014 ($37.1 billion) and were estimated at $33.57 billion.

Edited by SI

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
Tehran, Iran, April 19

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:

Iran and Azerbaijan are set to start building a historic bridge in a couple of days, a recent report said.

The bridge's bricklaying is scheduled to be held April 20 with top officials from both countries are scheduled to be present, Hossein Malek ICT Ministry of Iran's spokesman told Trend April 19.

ICT Minister Mahmoud Vaezi is slated to travel to Azerbaijan April 20 for a two-day stay which includes attending the bricklaying ceremony.

Vaezi is also the Iranian co-head of the Iran-Azerbaijan economic cooperation commission and is leading a high-ranking delegation to Azerbaijan.

The bridge is part of the North-South corridor that connects Europe to India by passing through Azerbaijan and Iran, lessening shipment time from 40 to 14 days end-to-end.

Vaezi will also discuss with Azerbaijani side the implementation of a dozen of agreements signed between the two countries during an official visit to Tehran by Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev earlier this year.

The sides will also sign two contracts during the Iranian delegation's visit, Malek said, refraining from providing details.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 18

By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:

Azerbaijan's state oil company SOCAR exported nearly 410 million cubic meters of gas to Georgia in 1Q2016, SOCAR told Trend Apr. 18.

"About 4.5 million cubic meters of gas per day was exported to Georgia in 1Q2016," said the source. "More than 91 million cubic meters of gas was delivered to Iran in January-March 2016 with the daily volume of one million cubic meters."

SOCAR exported 1.36 billion cubic meters of gas to Georgia in 2015.

Azerbaijan exports gas to Georgia via a pipeline linking the two countries in the Azerbaijani district of Gazakh.

This pipeline can pump about three billion cubic meters of gas a year.

Deliveries to Iran are carried out in order to provide gas to the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic (NAR), located in the blockade because of the occupation of Azerbaijani lands by Armenia.

About 287 million cubic meters of gas was delivered from Azerbaijan to Iran in 2015 for the needs of NAR.

Azerbaijan and Iran are connected with the Gazi-Magomed-Astara-Bind-Biand gas pipeline, This route is a branch of the Gazakh-Astara-Iran pipeline commissioned in 1971.

Edited by SI

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
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Inc., DB Servizi Amministrativi S.r.l., DB Strategic Advisors Inc., DB Structured Derivative Products LLC, DB Structured Products Inc., DB Trustee Services Limited, DB Trustees (Hong Kong) Limited, DB UK Bank Limited, DB UK Holdings Limited, DB UK PCAM Holdings Limited, DB US Financial Markets Holding Corporation, DB USA Core Corporation, DB USA Corporation, DB Valoren S.a. r.l., DB Value S.a.r.l., DB VersicherungsManager GmbH, DB Vita SA., DB lmmobilienfonds 5 Wieland KG i.L., DB lo LP, DBAH Capital. LLC, DBCIBZ1, DBFIC Inc., DBNZ Overseas Investments (No.1) Limited, DBOI Global Services (UK) Limited, DBR Investments Co. Limited, DBRE Global Real Estate Management 18 Ltd., DBRMS4, DBRMSGP1, DBUK PCAM Limited, DBUSBZ1 LLC, DBUSBZ2 S.a. r.l., DBX Advisers LLC, DEBEKO lmmobilien GmbH & Co Grundbesitz OHG, DEE Deutsche Erneuerbare Energien GmbH, DEUKONA Versicherungs-Vermittlungs-GmbH, DEUTSCHE BANK AS., DI Deutsche lmmobilien Treuhandgesellschaft mbH, DISCA Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, DWS Alternatives France, DWS Alternatives Global Limited, DWS Alternatives GmbH, DWS Asset Management (Korea) Company Limited, DWS Beteiligungs GmbH, DWS CH AG, DWS Distributors Inc., DWS Far Eastern Investments Limited, DWS Group GmbH & Co. KGaA, DWS Group Services UK Limited, DWS Grundbesitz GmbH, DWS International GmbH, DWS Investment GmbH, DWS Investment Management Americas Inc., DWS Investment S.A., DWS Investments Australia Limited, DWS Investments Hong Kong Limited, DWS Investments Japan Limited, DWS Investments Shanghai Limited, DWS Investments Singapore Limited, DWS Investments UK Limited, DWS Management GmbH, DWS Real Estate GmbH, DWS Service Company, DWS Shanghai Private Equity Fund Management Limited, DWS Trust Company, DWS USA Corporation, Deposit Solutions, Deutsche (Aotearoa) Capital Holdings New Zealand, Deutsche (Aotearoa) Foreign Investments New Zealand, Deutsche (New Munster) Holdings New Zealand Limited, Deutsche Access Investments Limited, Deutsche Aeolia Power Production Societe Anonyme, Deutsche Alternative Asset Management (UK) Limited, Deutsche Asia Pacific Holdings Pte Ltd, Deutsche Asset Management (India) Private Limited, Deutsche Australia Limited, Deutsche Bank (Cayman) Limited, Deutsche Bank (China) Co. Ltd., Deutsche Bank (Malaysia) Berhad, Deutsche Bank (Suisse) SA, Deutsche Bank (Uruguay) Sociedad Anenima lnstitucien Financiera Externa, Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft, Deutsche Bank Americas Holding Corp., Deutsche Bank Europe GmbH, Deutsche Bank Financial Company, Deutsche Bank Holdings Inc., Deutsche Bank Insurance Agency Incorporated, Deutsche Bank Luxembourg S.A., Deutsche Bank Mutui S.p.A., Deutsche Bank Mexico. S.A., Deutsche Bank National Trust Company, Deutsche Bank Polska Spelka Akcyjna, Deutsche Bank Representative Office Nigeria Limited, Deutsche Bank S.A, Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., Deutsche Bank Securities Limited, Deutsche Bank Societe per Azioni, Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, Deutsche Bank Trust Company Delaware, Deutsche Bank Trust Company National Association, Deutsche Bank Trust Corporation, Deutsche Bank. Sociedad Anenima Espanola, Deutsche CIB Centre Private Limited, Deutsche Capital Finance (2000) Limited, Deutsche Capital Hong Kong Limited, Deutsche Capital Markets Australia Limited, Deutsche Capital Partners China Limited, Deutsche Cayman Ltd., Deutsche Custody N.V., Deutsche Domus New Zealand Limited, Deutsche Equities India Private Limited, Deutsche Finance No. 2 Limited, Deutsche Foras New Zealand Limited, Deutsche Gesellschaft fur lmmobilien-Leasing mit beschrenkter Haftung, Deutsche Global Markets Limited, Deutsche Group Holdings (SA) Proprietary Limited, Deutsche Group Services Pty Limited, Deutsche Grundbesitz Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH i.L., Deutsche Grundbesitz-Anlagegesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, Deutsche Holdings (BTI) Limited, Deutsche Holdings (Grand Duchy), Deutsche Holdings (Luxembourg) S.El r.l., Deutsche Holdings Limited, Deutsche Holdings No. 2 Limited, Deutsche Holdings No. 3 Limited, Deutsche Holdings No. 4 Limited, Deutsche India Holdings Private Limited, Deutsche India Private Limited, Deutsche International Corporate Services (Ireland) Limited, Deutsche International Corporate Services Limited, Deutsche International Custodial Services Limited, Deutsche Investments (Netherlands) N.V., Deutsche Investments India Private Limited, Deutsche Investor Services Private Limited, Deutsche Knowledge Services Pte. Ltd., Deutsche Leasing New York Corp., Deutsche Mexico Holdings S.a. r.|., Deutsche Morgan Grenfell Group Limited, Deutsche Mortgage & Asset Receiving Corporation, Deutsche Nederland N.V., Deutsche New Zealand Limited, Deutsche Nominees Limited, Deutsche Oppenheim Family Office AG, Deutsche Overseas Issuance New Zealand Limited, Deutsche Postbank, Deutsche Postbank Finance Center Objekt GmbH, Deutsche Private Asset Management Limited, Deutsche Securities (India) Private Limited, Deutsche Securities (Proprietary) Limited, Deutsche Securities (SA) (Proprietary) Limited, Deutsche Securities Asia Limited, Deutsche Securities Australia Limited, Deutsche Securities Inc., Deutsche Securities Israel Ltd., Deutsche Securities Korea Co., Deutsche Securities Mauritius Limited, Deutsche Securities SA. de C.V.. Casla de Bolsa, Deutsche Securities Saudi Arabia, Deutsche Services (Cl) Limited, Deutsche Services Polska Sp. z o.o., Deutsche StiftungsTrust GmbH, Deutsche Strategic Investment Holdings Yugen Kaisha, Deutsche Trustee Company Limited, Deutsche Trustee Services (India) Private Limited, Deutsche Trustees Malaysia Berhad, Deutsche Wealth Management S.G.I.I.C. SA., Deutsche lmmobilien Leasing GmbH, Deutsches lnstitut fur Altersvorsorge GmbH, Durian (Luxembourg) S.a. r.l., EC EUROPA IMMOBILIEN FONDS NR. 3 GmbH & CO. KG i.l., Elizabethan Holdings Limited, Elizabethan Management Limited, European Value Added I (Alternate GP.) LLP, Fiduciaria Sant Andrea S.r.l., Finanzberatungsgesellschaft mbH der Deutschen Bank, Funfte SAB Treuhand und Verwaltung GmbH & Co. Suhl "Rimbachzentrum" KG, G Finance Holding Corp., German American Capital Corporation, Grundstucksgesellschaft Frankfurt Bockenheimer LandstraBe GbR, Grundstucksgesellschaft Miesbaden LuisenstraBe/Kirchgasse GbR, Hollandsche Bank-Unie, ISTRON Beteiligungs- und Verwaltungs-GmbH, IVAF l Manager S.a.r.l., Immobilienfonds Buro-Center Erfurt am Flughafen Bindersleben I GbR, J R Nominees (Pty) Ltd, Joint Stock Company Deutsche Bank DBU, Jyogashima Godo Kaisha, KEBA Gesellschaft fur interne Services mbH, Kidson Pte Ltd, Konsul lnkasso GmbH, LA Water Holdings Limited, LAWL Pte. Ltd., Leasing Verwaltungsgesellschaft Waltersdorf mbH, Leonardo lll Initial GP Limited, MEF I Manager. S. a r.|., MIT Holdings Inc., Maher Terminals Holdings (Toronto) Limited, Morgan Grenfell & Company, MortgageIT, MortgagelT Inc., MortgagelT Securities Corp., OOO "Deutsche Bank TechCentIe", OOO "Deutsche Bank", OPB Verwaltungs- und Treuhand GmbH, OPB-Oktava GmbH, OPB-Quarta GmbH, OPPENHEIM Capital Advisory GmbH, OPPENHEIM PRIVATE EQUITY Manager GmbH, OPPENHEIM PRIVATE EQUITY Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, PADUS Grundstcks-VermietungsgeseIlschaft mbH, PB Factoring GmbH, PB Spezial-lnvestmentaktiengesellschatt mit Teilgesellschaftsvermogen, PCC Services GmbH der Deutschen Bank, PT Deutsche Sekuritas Indonesia, Pan Australian Nominees Pty Ltd, Plantation Bay. Inc., Postbank Akademie und Service GmbH, Postbank Beteiligungen GmbH, Postbank Direkt GmbH, Postbank Filialvertrieb AG, Postbank Finanzberatung AG, Postbank Leasing GmbH, Postbank lmmobilien GmbH, Quantiguous, R.B.M. Nominees Pty Ltd, RREEF, RREEF America LLC., RREEF China REIT Management Limited, RREEF European Value Added I (G.P.) Limited, RREEF Fund Holding Co., RREEF India Advisers Private Limited, RREEF Management LLC., RoPro U.S. Holding Inc., Route 28 Receivables. LLC, SAB Real Estate Verwaltungs GmbH, SAGITA Grundstucks-Vermielungsgesellschaft mbH, SAPIO Grundstucks-Vermietungsgesellschaft mbH, Sal. Oppenheim, Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie. Beteiligungs GmbH, Sharps SP l LLC, Stelvio lmmobiliare S.r.l., Suddeutsche Vermeigensvewvaitung Gesellschaft mit beschrenkter Haftung, TELO Beleiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Tempurrite Leasing Limited, Thai Asset Enforcement and Recovery Asset Management Company Limited, Treuinvest Service GmbH, Triplereason Umited, VOB-ZVD Processing GmbH, WEPLA Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Wealthspur Investment Ltd., World Trading (Delaware) Inc., lmmobilienfonds BuroCenter Erfurt am Flughafen Bindersleben II GbR, lmmobilienfonds Wohn- und Gescheftshaus Koln-Blumenberg V GbR, and norisbank GmbH.

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Baku, Azerbaijan, April 19

By Anakhanum Khidayatova - Trend:

After the Doha oil talks fiasco, oil prices began reducing rapidly, Eldar Kasayev, representative of the expert council of the Russian Union of Oil and Gas Producers, told Trend via e-mail.

Kasayev added that this trend will continue.

The expert said that the market has nothing to rely on except the groundless rhetoric of some players.

"According to these players, the OPEC oil exporters and non-OPEC member-states still will be able to come to a consolidated decision to freeze the oil production," the expert said.

Kasayev added that the April 17 meeting in Qatar demonstrated a lack of any effective dialogue in the OPEC and non-OPEC member-states format due to acute political and economic disagreements among key negotiators.

"Saudi Arabia will not assist Iran, which has been a "lump in the throat" for Saudi Arabia for a long time," he said. "The reason is that Iran prevents Saudi Arabia to hold a dominant position in the Muslim world."

The oil producers' meeting held Apr.17 in Doha on oil output freeze ended without an agreement. The event was attended by representatives of 17 countries. The meeting kicked off about 6.5 hours later than the fixed time.

Reportedly, the meeting was delayed as Saudi Arabia unexpectedly said it wants all OPEC countries, including Iran to participate in the output freeze. Iran wasn't represented at the meeting.

Earlier, the country's Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zangeneh said that Iran did not participate in the process that led to the imbalance of the global oil market, and therefore does not intend to freeze the oil production.

The expert believes that the OPEC meeting to be held in summer will unlikely bring positive results, since the confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran will continue, while the attempts of Russia, Venezuela and other states to reach out to Riyadh or Tehran are doomed to fail.

"Since oil prices react to expectations, traders may well once again use the information about the upcoming meeting of oil exporters to influence the prices," the expert said.

He said that there are still no fundamental factors for the growth of prices for raw materials, while the speculative factor remains.

"The oil market will probably be unstable this year, as it was in 2015," said Kasayev. "It's not worth expecting speedy stabilization of prices. However, in the medium term, the situation will improve, and that will happen not as a result of bilateral or multilateral agreements of oil suppliers, but due to the fact that the supply will meet the demand."

World oil prices continue to decline during trading on Apr.19.

On Apr. 19 morning, the June futures for Brent (North Sea) crude oil at the London-based ICE Futures exchange fell by $0.23 to $42.66 per barrel. The May futures for WTI crude oil declined by $0.4 to $39.67 per barrel as of Apr. 19 morning.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Anahanum
New York Community Bancorp, Inc. is the bank holding company for New York Community Bank. New York Community Bank is the nations 47th-largest financial institution and its largest thrift. As a thrift, the bank specializes in real estate and consumer accounts specifically real estate loans and savings accounts and has limited exposure to other forms of business banking. Among the benefits to consumers are interest-bearing checking and saving accounts that come with higher-than-average interest rates.

New York Community Bank was founded in 1859 to serve Queens County, New York. It operated under that name, growing all the while, until 2000 when it changed its name to better reflect the business. The company IPOd in 1993 and has made multiple acquisitions in the time since. As of 6/30/2022, the bank had $63.1 billion in assets and $41.2 billion in deposits.

New York Community Bank operates in greater New York City, New Jersey, Ohio, Florida, and Arizona. The company provides deposit products ranging from interest-bearing checking and money market accounts to savings accounts, IRAs, and CDs. Brands under the companys umbrella include AmTrust in Florida and Arizona, Ohio Savings Bank, Garden State Savings Bank, and Atlantic Bank.

The bank offers a wide range of real-estate-related loans including but not limited to multi-family loans, commercial real estate loans, construction loans, and consumer loans and mortgages. Investment products include annuities, mutual funds, and life insurance. Customers include individuals, small businesses, and organizations and are served through a network of more than 230 branches, and 300 ATMs, online, mobile, and by phone. Many of the locations are open 24 hours and 6 days a week although those hours are not available at all branches. Clients can access their accounts digitally 24/7.

New York Community Bancorp and its underlying business carry investment-grade credit ratings from all the major rating agencies. The credit outlook in the 4th quarter of 2022 was stable as it had been for some time. In New York, it is a leader in the multi-family market specializing in lower-cost housing in rent-controlled areas. As of June 30, 2022, the multi-family loan portfolio accounted for more than 75% of all investments. The company has a stock purchase and dividend reinvestment plan that help to sustain a high level of ownership.






State Street Corporation, through its subsidiaries, provides a range of financial products and services to institutional investors worldwide. The company offers investment servicing products and services, including custody; product accounting; daily pricing and administration; master trust and master custody; depotbank services; record-keeping; cash management; foreign exchange, brokerage and other trading services; securities finance and enhanced custody products; deposit and short-term investment facilities; loans and lease financing; investment manager and alternative investment manager operations outsourcing; performance, risk, and compliance analytics; and financial data management to support institutional investors. It also engages in the provision of portfolio management and risk analytics, as well as trading and post-trade settlement services with integrated compliance and managed data. In addition, the company offers investment management strategies and products, such as core and enhanced indexing, multi-asset strategies, active quantitative and fundamental active capabilities, and alternative investment strategies. Further, it provides services and solutions, including environmental, social, and governance investing; defined benefit and defined contribution; and global fiduciary solutions, as well as exchange-traded fund under the SPDR ETF brand. The company provides its products and services to mutual funds, collective investment funds and other investment pools, corporate and public retirement plans, insurance companies, foundations, endowments, and investment managers. State Street Corporation was founded in 1792 and is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.
Rentokil Initial plc, together with its subsidiaries, provides route-based services in North America, the United Kingdom, rest of Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and internationally. It offers a range of pest control services for rodents, and flying and crawling insects, as well as other forms of wildlife management for commercial and residential customers. The company also provides hygiene services, including the provision and maintenance of products, such as soap and hand sanitizer dispensers, hand dryers, air care and purification, cubicle and surface sanitizers, feminine hygiene units, toilet paper dispensers, and floor protection mats. In addition, it engages in the supply and laundering of workwear, uniforms, cleanroom uniforms, and protective equipment. Further, the company installs and services interior and exterior plant displays, flowers, replica foliage, Christmas decorations, and ambient scenting for commercial businesses; offers property care services consisting of damp proofing, property conservation, and woodworm and wood rot treatment; and provides a range of specialist cleaning services, such as graffiti removal deep cleaning of kitchens and washrooms, trauma cleaning, and flood or fire damage cleaning, as well as specialist industrial cleaning and disinfection services, including the professional and discreet disinfection of areas that have been exposed to bio-hazardous situations, such as crime and trauma scenes, prison cells, void properties, emergency vehicles, and healthcare establishments. Additionally, it offers a range of healthcare waste management services comprising the collection, disposal, and recycling of hazardous and offensive waste produced by businesses and organizations associated with the provision of healthcare; and color-coded sharps disposal bins to deal with various types of waste. Rentokil Initial plc was founded in 1903 and is headquartered in Crawley, the United Kingdom.
Serco Group plc provides public services in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, the Asia Pacific, and the Middle East. The company offers base and operational support engineering, and management and information, as well as nuclear, space, and maritime services for the defense sector; and custodial, immigration detention, and detainee transport and monitoring services for the justice and immigration sectors. It also provides rail, ferry, and cycle operations; road traffic management; and air traffic control services to the transportation sector, as well as integrated facilities management, pathology and non-clinical support, and patient administration and contact services for the health sector. In addition, the company offers citizen services, including contact centers and case management; middle, back office, and IT; and employment and skills services. The company serves the United Kingdom and Canadian governments, devolved authorities, and other public sector customers; and federal and civilian agencies, and various state and municipal governments. Serco Group plc was founded in 1929 and is based in Hook, the United Kingdom.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 18

By Aygun Badalova - Trend:

Supply-side re-balancing will gather pace in the second half of 2016 with the oil market moving into deficit from 2017, according to the expectations of BMI Research, which is a part of Fitch Group.

"In the near-term, there are some downside risks to price (in particular from Kuwait), but the general outlook is very bullish and we expect Brent to end the year significantly higher," Emma Richards, an oil and gas analyst with BMI Research told Trend.

Oil prices rose on April 19 as a strike in Kuwait cut huge amounts of crude out of the supply chain.

Kuwait's crude output fell to 1.1 million barrels per day (bpd) on Sunday, from 2.8 million bpd in March as thousands of workers went on strike, according to Reuters.

Brent crude was at $43.25 a barrel at 0651 GMT, 34 cents above their previous close. The US WTI futures were up 33 cents at $40.11 a barrel.

Richards noted that looking at prices and at positioning in the Brent futures and options markets, sentiment was very bullish in the run up to the meeting in Doha.

She believes that market participants were pricing in a freeze.

"Those expectations have obviously been disappointed and prices have declined in response. That being said, the decline has been much softer than I had anticipated, with the +1.5 million bpd outage in Kuwait offering key support," Richards said.

Oil producers on Sunday in Doha failed to reach a deal to freeze oil output. The talks collapsed after Saudi Arabia surprised the group by reasserting a demand that Iran also agree to cap its oil production.

Richards said recent developments in the oil markets have exposed some of the weaknesses in OPEC. The deterioration of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran has been a key part of that and of the difficulties putting the freeze agreement in place, she believes.

Cyril Widdershoven, Middle East geopolitical specialist and energy analyst, partner at Dutch risk consultancy VEROCY and SVP MEA-Risk told Trend, that oil price assessments are difficult, but looking at all, a price of $60 is not far-fetched.

"It just needs to be assessed by most producers if this would be the right approach. Putting more pain on non-OPEC and new producers will force them out more, and block possible new investors to join the market to quick. We also will see the negative effects soon of 3-4 years of CAPEX cuts, production will be hit," Widdershoven said.

He believes that the demand-supply issue is bottoming out - demand is growing, while supply has been decreasing.

"The fundamentals already show since long that a price increase is imminent," analyst said.

Widdershoven believes that current instability in the market even supports the idea that if there is new geopolitical confrontation in the world, prices even will hike.

"Due to lower investments, and a lack of new production, demand will push prices up. If the market looks rational again, you will see a steady price increase for the next months to come. A new agreement between OPEC-Russia and others in June only would be a bonus, putting a bottom under the price and pushing it up even further," Widdershoven said.

Global oil markets are moving toward a supply-demand balance in the second half of 2016, as demand growth remains steady while non-OPEC oil production continues to decline, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The agency expects global oil demand will ease to 1.2 million bpd in 2016. Global oil supply is expected to shrink by 300,000 bpd to 96.1 million bpd.
Rio Tinto has maintained its iron ore export target for 2016 despite being behind the pace required to reach that target and despite flagging problems with its automated train system.

Rio shipped 84 million tonnes from its operations in Australia and Canada, including tonnes owned by joint venture partners like Sinosteel and Gina Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting.

The result was slightly better than analysts had expected.

But exports from the Pilbara were weaker than expected with the company pointing to disruptions from a cyclone.
In 1998, a special session of the United Nations General Assembly agreed to set a 10-year deadline to make the world drug free. After an embarrassing failure to achieve this goal, the deadline was extended a further 10 years, setting the world up for another inevitable failure in 2019.

In the intervening years, the use, availability and variety of illicit drugs have escalated exponentially. It is estimated by the UK charity Transform Foundation that 300 million people worldwide used illegal drugs in 2012, contributing to a global market with a turnover of $US330 billion a year.

The use, availability and variety of illicit drugs has escalated exponentially.

The vision of a drug-free world has faded. We are instead presented with a nightmare scenario, where a multi-billion dollar black market funds organised crime and terrorist organisations.

In pursuing a drug-free world, national governments have unwittingly been responsible for the incarceration of millions of non-violent drug offenders; heightened HIV and hepatitis epidemics; restricted access to morphine pain relief for 75 per cent of the worlds population; human rights abuses; and avoidable loss of life.
Customs officers take a keen interest in some flights, if contraband is suspected, but otherwise low-risk passengers, such as Heard, are often waved through passport checks.

But the business aviation industry has been calling for dedicated quarantine inspection service at all private jet bases for many years and has offered to pay for it. The industry wants consistency of service. Melbourne has an impressive new private jet base, but too often has to bus its wealthy passengers to the regular international terminal.

Sydney and Brisbane fare better, but provision is still at the discretion of the border agents. Arrive at peak hour or in summer and the chances of completing your paperwork in the hangar are slim.

Companies that run private jet terminals, or fixed base operations (FBOs) in the jargon, are more than willing to pay for the permanent stationing of customs, immigration and quarantine staff. The Australian Border Force is open to the idea and agreed in principle two years ago to introduce a new charging mechanism.

The 2014 Review of Border Fees, Taxes and Charges even recommended a user-pays model for private jet off-terminal clearance. A new charging mechanism had been expected in last years federal budget. Yet the process has been stymied by the Department of Agriculture. Any new model would require Agricultures biosecurity officers (formerly quarantine inspectors) to work alongside Border Force officers in FBOs.
Every generation likes to think it is special, so a sense of deja vu is hardly surprising when reading about the unique threats confronting Generation Y.

Their concerns about student debts, housing and employment should not be dismissed, but are not unique to one generation. People with longer memories will remember the violent protests over unemployment during Malcolm Fraser's years as prime minister in the mid-1970s and early '80s, and his neat reminder that "life wasn't meant to be easy".

Let's not get into another shouty debate about what other generations think of Gen Y (people born during the 1980s and early '90s), which, given the origins of these generational tags, is nothing more than arguing about someone's marketing strategy anyway.

There are real concerns for Gen Y and its successors and it isn't these fairly predictable behavioral markers. Rather, we should worry about a kind of cultural smothering that has been occurring in our tertiary education system, with well-intentioned governing and student bodies reducing personal resilience and the ability to engage with diverse and occasionally disagreeable viewpoints.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 19

By Aygun Badalova - Trend:

The oil market will remain oversupplied in the near term and the potential to test the 1999 lows of $9 per barrel is very real, Sam Barden, the director of Wimpole International, an energy market development company believes.

"Not only is there a lack of above ground storage globally for oil, but there is a glut in shipping. That is to say, to many cargoes and not enough tankers," Barden told Trend on April 19.

In the near term, oil will definitely trade below $25 per barrel.

Oil prices are up Tuesday as the markets continue to grapple with the fallout of the Doha production-talks fiasco, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Oil producers on Sunday in Doha failed to reach a deal to freeze oil output. The talks collapsed after Saudi Arabia surprised the group by reasserting a demand that Iran also agrees to cap its oil production.

Barden said that there was never any chance of a production freeze agreement in Doha at the weekend, and the resulting disagreement between members was fully expected.

"The reality was that OPEC members wanted to freeze production at January levels. Firstly, in January OPEC members were pumping flat out, so any freeze would have been at maximum production levels, hardly a recipe to support the oil price," Barden said.

"Secondly, Iran, who is only just beginning to re-enter global markets, oil in particular, would have been disadvanteged by any production freeze, as Iran wants to grow output and claw back lost market share. There was never, ever going to be a production freeze agreement in Doha at the weekend, and there is likely never going to be one in the future," Barden added.

He also noted that Doha's meeting confirmed the belief that OPEC is finished as price setting mechanism.

"We need a new system where oil is priced via local exchanges which are transparent and accessible to all players. From here a physical, internationally linked oil market will discover prices locally," Barden said.

Importantly, he added, a new market structure will include consumers and producers together in a co-operative market place, rather than just producers competing against each other for market share (OPEC).

The most significant change is needed for oil markets is to start pricing oil in units of energy, not dollars, Barden believes.
And that's it for the day for me. What happened?

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull confirmed the election would be held on July 2 ;

confirmed the would be held on ; he praised the Senate's efficiency in dealing with the building watchdog legislation ;

efficiency in dealing with the ; both houses of Parliament not sit again until the budget week of May 2;

not sit again until the week of May 2; Labor , the Greens and independents criticised the government for recalling Parliament for two weeks only to have it sit for less than two days;

, the and criticised the government for recalling for two weeks only to have it sit for less than two days; the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal will be abolished after the Senate did at least one thing the government wanted it to do.

My thanks, as always, to my co conspirators Andrew Meares and Alex Ellinghausen and to you for reading and commenting.

You can follow me on Facebook.

And Alex has a page too - it's gorgeous.

Andrew, Alex and I will be back, with Parliament, on May 2. Until then - go well.
Microsoft has sued the US government, arguing that a law that can be used to prohibit technology companies from telling customers when law enforcement comes looking for their data is unconstitutional.

Microsoft's lawsuit is the US technology industry's latest high-profile challenge to the reach of law enforcement into cyberspace, coming a couple months after Apple fought an FBI order to disable an encryption measure on an iPhone connected to a mass shooting.

Orders that prevent Microsoft telling their customers when they're being surveilled are becoming more common, according to Microsoft. Credit:Bloomberg

The company's case, filed in US District Court in Seattle, challenges a law enforcement tool Microsoft argues is being used in a way that violates its rights and those of its customers.

When law enforcement agencies get a warrant to grab emails or other data stored online, they can request a court order that bars internet service providers from informing the user that their documents were seized. Microsoft has received about 5600 federal demands for consumer data in the last 18 months. Almost half were accompanied by such secrecy orders.
Patrick Norman Pat Chapman is a 34-year-old, Caucasian male who was last known to be in Piedmont which is near the area of Greenville, Missouri on May 10, 2020.

Pat had stayed the night with a friend and his wife at their home. In the early morning when the friend woke to go to work.

Pat was gone in his own Burgundy color 1995 Ford Escort. That is the last anyone was known to have seen him. The vehicle was later recovered on May 29, 2020 in Mill Spring, Missouri.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 19

By Aygun Badalova - Trend:

Iran will need some massive investment and the EU has the financial ability and the technical knowledge to help Iran realize energy export schemes to the West, the US expert on Central Asia and energy issues Bruce Pannier told Trend on April 19.

"The EU of course would also like to import some of those Iranian energy resources," Pannier added.

He said that the recent visit of EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini to Iran was symbolically a sign the day is getting closer when Iran will be exporting oil and natural gas to the EU countries.

"That is not to say that day will be soon, but that is the direction relations are moving and it is something both Iran and the EU want," Pannier said.

Federica Mogherini arrived in Iran, heading a high-ranking economic and political delegation April 16. One of the topics of discussions during the visit was energy cooperation.

At the joint press conference with Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Tehran, Mogherini said that Iranian oil and gas will be an important part of European energy mix and will improve our energy security in Europe.

She also said that the EU will provide Iran with technical assistance to increase its production capacity and energy efficiency.

Pannier however believes that there are some obstacles to be dealt with, before Iran's energy resources could reach the EU.

European financial institutions are still wary of investing in Iran, especially because the US continues to maintain some sanctions on Iran for what Washington says is Tehran's sponsorship of designated terrorist organizations, Pannier said.

He noted that in the past the US has imposed large fines on entities doing business with Iran and also wishing to continue doing business with the US.

"Also, as Mogherini said in Tehran, Iran's recent ballistic missile tests are of concern to the EU. Should Iran continue to conduct such tests that might also scare investors away if they feel sanctions could be re-imposed on Iran," Pannier said.

There is also the complicated history of the Islamic Republic of signing agreements then demanding changes to the terms of contracts later, according to the expert.

"European businesses expressed their frustration with this Iranian habit in the past, potential European partners will want to be sure that once a deal is signed there will be no sudden demand for renegotiation," Pannier said.

He believes, once all that is sufficiently resolved Iran can start to export energy resources to the EU and the easiest means at this point would be by tanker and that could be both oil and LNG.

Realistically, with the negotiations needed to reach such deals, it would probably be four or five years at least before tankers with Iranian oil or LNG arrive at European ports, Pannier said.

"Longer term, 10 years or more, one could foresee construction of gas and/or oil pipelines from Iran to Europe. Tehran has been mentioning for more than a year that it could contribute to the EU's Southern Gas Corridor project, for example, and Iranian officials have also mentioned participation in the Trans-Anatolian [gas] Pipeline that aims to bring gas from Azerbaijan across Turkey to Europe," Pannier said.

Reportedly, Iran's daily oil output is now surpassing 3.5 million barrels per day. The country's oil export has doubled after lifting sanctions reaching 2 million barrels per day.

The lifting of sanctions could enable Tehran to become one of the major players on the world gas market.

Iran's proven gas reserve stood at 34 trillion cubic meters as of early 2015, according to BP. The country's share on the world gas market is 17 percent. The country repeatedly stated that LNG export to Europe is its priority.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

Trend:

The meeting of OPEC and non-OPEC countries that was held Apr. 17 in Doha (Qatar) did not give the results expected by Kazakhstan, said Rashid Zhaksylykov, chairman of the presidium of KazService Union.

He made the remarks during the briefing of the Central Communications Service under the President of Kazakhstan, Kazinform agency reported.

"All of us are concerned about the oil prices, and what impact it will have on our country's development," said Zhaksylykov. "Also there is an issue about the future of companies that operate in the sphere of oil services."

The meeting in Doha didn't give the expected results due to Iran's disagreement to reduce the oil output, he said.

Iran started the year with oil output of 500,000 barrels per day and has brought the oil production up to 1.5 million barrels per day, noted Zhaksylykov. He also added that Iran intends to bring the oil output up to 4 million barrels per day by the end of the year.

There is still hope that one more meeting will be held in a month and the work to stabilize the oil prices will continue, said Zhaksylykov.

Kazakhstan has reduced the oil production in 2016. The country plans to sell 74 million tons of oil versus 80 million tons sold in 2015.

"This is a great loss," said Zhaksylykov adding that the further decline in oil output will lead to a shortage of funds for the development of the country's production, regional development, and social programs.

Edited by SI
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Apr. 19

By Huseyn Hasanov- Trend:

A two-day International Conference of Entrepreneurs that will be attended by representatives of 29 countries has begun its work Apr. 19 in Turkmenistan's Avaza national tourist zone.

Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov addressed the participants, saying the conference that the creation of joint enterprises with foreign partners and the assimilation of the best practices is one of the major tasks.

The state provides a favorable legal basis, creates other necessary conditions and provides the private sector with permanent support for its effective operation, the president said.

About 162 representatives of international organizations and companies were registered for participation in the conference. Turkmenistan will be represented by 165 members of the country's Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, managers and specialists of ministries and departments, and by the spheres of trade, transport, banking and insurance, construction and tourism.

The prospects for cooperation in the development of Turkmenistan's transit routes, transport infrastructure and logistics are on the agenda.

Currently, the private sector's share in the country's GDP is 62.3 percent. A number of export goods produced by local private entrepreneurs will be exempt from customs duties since May 1, 2016, according to the Turkmen president's order.

Edited by SI
He knew what was going on.Those were the words of Hugh Craig, a lawyer for the Ontario Securities Commission , aimed at CEO Allen Chan as closing arguments began following 173 days of hearings in the case of Sino-Forest Corporation, which has its corporate office in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.Sino-Forest executives are accused of perpetrating a massive fraud prior to the collapse of the forestry firm back in 2012 with Craig claiming that Chan was a hands-on CEO and was behind all of the companys transactions.In a report by the Canadian Press, Craig argues Chan was behind two fraud cases known as the standing timber fraud and the Greenheart fund. Indeed Craig went as far as to claim they would not have happened but for him and his dishonesty.According to the Canadian Press report, in the first alleged instance, Chan hid his interest in Sino-Forests acquisition of forest products company Greenheart Group Ltd; and in the second case it is alleged the company lied to investors by overstating its assets value. According to Craig the committee was unable to locate 500,000 hectares of standing timber with an estimated value of $2.9 billion.Initial claims were made against Sino-Forest back in June 2011 when Muddy Waters Research suggested the company had made up sales transactions and exaggerated assets  allegations that the firm denied.Though it was based in Ontario, the company did the bulk of its business in China and reached a market capitalization of $6 billion at its peak  making it the most valuable forestry company on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Its shares leapt from June 2005-March 2011 from $5.75 a share to $25.30 a share.Now Chan, along with executives George Ho, Alfred Hung, Albert Ip and Simon Yeung, is accused of misleading investigators by inflating assets and lying to investors. It is alleged they had deceitful conduct and provided misleading information.Meanwhile, Chans lawyer argued that the companys practices were merely workarounds needed to operate in China where practices are different.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Apr. 19

By Huseyn Hasanov- Trend:

President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, during the meeting with heads of regional administration, discussed the course of seasonal agricultural work, in particular the care of wheat seedlings, the country's government said in a message Apr. 19.

This year, it is planned to collect 1.6 million tons of grain from 760,000 hectares of land in Turkmenistan. More than 1.4 million tons of grain were grown in 2015.

The Turkmen president instructed to ensure full readiness of combine harvesters, vehicles, as well as elevators and barns, noting that not much time is left before the harvest begins.

In addition, stressing the need to comply with agro-technical standards and implement quality care for crops, Berdimuhamedov "expressed dissatisfaction with the weakening of control in this sphere."

Noting that the current situation may lead to lower yields, the president instructed to take urgent measures for the rapid elimination of shortcomings.
Tribune Photo

Im sure theres a comedian somewhere that sucked his teeth when he read The Tribune headline yesterday quoting Leslie Miller, PLP MP for Tall Pines, as saying The Bahamas learned corruption from the US.

Miller went on to say that the granting of government contracts to political supporters will never stop because politicians must do what they have to do to win elections."

These two brief statements confirm Lord Actons lamentation that Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Read it all here

He made these comments in response to the 2015 Human Rights Report on The Bahamas recently released by the US Department of State.

That comedian is most annoyed that Miller stole a couple good joke lines.

Of course corruption in our country has seemingly become widespread and the 2015 Human Rights Report is a very serious report indeed deserving of a reasoned response where necessary.

However Mr. Miller's comments suggest he's got to decide what he wants to pursue as a career. A comedian, where he can spout trite one liners or a Member of Parliament, where, as a leader he should encourage ethics, civility and the rule of law.

If he continues his comedic aspirations, Mr. Miller can add the old Mexican saying I heard yesterday, For our friends, anything. For our enemies, the Law! to his repertoire.

Should he wish to assume the leadership role he was elected for, seems some soul searching is appropriate.
Tehran, Iran, April 17

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:

Some German companies are finding it hard to start business with the post-sanctions Iran due to their business being somehow tied to the US, Ina Vettkotter, VDMA (German Engineering Federation) representative at Iran Plast 2016 exhibition said.

"But I think every company tries to find its own way to deal with that phenomenon," she told Trend April 17.

European companies which used to hope to have an exquisite chance of starting business with Iran after the removal of international sanctions are being discouraged since they often find themselves tied to the still-in-place US primary sanctions.

As a prime example, Airbus CEO Fabrice Bregier said last week that despite a deal to sell airplanes to Iran, the company could not defy the US sanctions by using as it does US-made parts in its products.

However, many foreign delegations, largely from Europe, have been visiting Iran to make deals with partners here.

"Partnership with Iranians has a long tradition. Our companies are quite satisfied with the event here and they had a lot of discussions with Iranian sides who are interested in starting cooperation," Vettkotter said.

"We should bring together the official sides as well in order to create more opportunities. It's not much about buying a machine as starting a long-term partnership."

The international sanctions that had crippled Iran's economy were lifted following a January implementation of a deal between Iran and world powers called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). However, the problem of US primary sanctions has already started to feel heavy on Iran's international business, finding reverberations in official statements from Iran inviting the US to be more cooperative.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on April 16 said Washington should do more to remove obstacles to Iran's banking system.

On April 15, Valiollah Seif, the head of Iran's Central Bank, accused the US and the EU of failing to honor the JCPOA by keeping Iran locked out of the international financial system.
By WestKyStar & WKCTC Staff Apr. 19, 2016 | 04:04 PM | PADUCAH, KY

Cake decorating classes have been one the most popular community education offerings at West Kentucky Community and Technical College this spring, and to accommodate the overwhelming community response, WKCTC is offering two more courses beginning next month.



Back by popular demand, the Course One Building Buttercream Skills course will be offered on four consecutive Tuesday evenings May 3-24. Next will be the new Course 2 Flowers and Cake Design course on four consecutive Thursday evenings May 12  26 and June 2.



Both four-week courses will be offered in the Emerging Technology Center from 6  8 pm with a cost of $69 for each of the four sessions. Fee includes student kit and guide.



Certified Wilton Method Instructor Linda Mayes, who has been decorating cakes for nearly 20 years, is back to teach the both courses. Participants should bring their own apron and wear closed-toe shoes.



Course One Building Buttercream Skills



Participants can learn how to decorate cakes and sweet treats with basic buttercream techniques and six simple-to-pipe flowers that transform ordinary cakes into extraordinary results.

Lesson 1, May 3



Start with the basics and learn how to make buttercream icing, stars, rosettes, bag striping, professionally ice a cupcake and so much more. Participants will decorate their cupcakes before going home to show friends and family all they learned in class.



Lesson 2, May 10



Learn how to ice a cake and decorate with dots, pulled dots, piping gel pattern transfer and more. Participants will decorate cakes at the end of class and be amazed with the new skills they learned in only two classes.



Lesson 3, May 17



Learn different borders like zigzag, easy ruffle, shell, and bead. Create decorations like the Star Drop Flower, Swirl Drop Flower, Daisy, Sunflower and the Zinnia.



Lesson 4, May 24



Learn the technique to writing on cakes and the Ribbon Rose. Decorate cakes with the techniques learned throughout the entire course.



Note: A list of optional supplies costing approximately $40 will be provided the first night of class for this four-week course.



Course 2 Flowers and Cake Design



Participants will learn how to create professional-looking flowers and designs made from royal icing. Your Certified Wilton Method Instructor teaches you how to make lifelike rosebuds, pansies, and violets, plus detailed patterns, like lace and basket weave designs.



Lesson 1, May 12



Learn color principles to know how to pair colors together in cake design such as Cornelli Lace, Brush Embroidery and the blossom.



Lesson 2, May 19



Participants will go cover Royal Icing Appliques, Rosebud and the famous Wilton Rose.



Lesson 3, May 26



The fun continues learning to create the Pansy, Violet, Lily and Poinsettia flowers.



Lesson 4, June 2



Learn more borders and the basket weave. The course concludes with participants making and decorating in the class using all the skills learned up to this point.



Register for the cake decorating classes by calling 270-534-3335 or online at http://ws.kctcs.edu/westkentucky, select Culinary.




Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19



By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:



Tehran and Moscow are keen to boost economic ties as the volume of trade turnover between Iran and Russia has dropped over the past several years, an Iranian official said.

Masoud Kansari, the head of Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture, has said that Iranian and Russian delegations have discussed removing obstacles against the expansion of trade ties at a meeting in Tehran, Tasnim news agency reported. The sides are also planning to expand banking ties and pave the way for opening LCs (letter of credits ) in order to facilitate banking transactions for traders.

Speaking about obstacles against expansion of trade ties between Iran and Russia he said that the constant devaluation of Russian currency poses restrictions against exporting Iranian goods to Russia. The trade turnover between Iran and Russia in 2009 was $1.2 billion which sharply dropped following Western imposed sanctions on Iran. In a joint statement on Jan. 16, the EU High Representative Federica Mogherini and Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif announced the implementation of the JCPOA, aka nuclear deal, and the removal of economic sanctions on Iran. The EU confirmed that the legal framework, providing for lifting of its nuclear-related economic and financial sanctions, is effective, according to the statement.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 19, 2016 | 11:24 AM | PADUCAH, KY





Police are getting closer to a motive on the why a Paducah couple was murdered last week. McCracken Sheriff Jon Hayden says they have learned that a conflict over money might be behind the killing of Paducah couple 73-year-old Gerald B. Boyes and his long-time girlfriend, 67-year-old Billie Potter.The suspect, Boyes' son, 53-year-old Gerald Robert Boyes of Jacksonville, Florida, had a brother who was killed in a motorcycle-car crash last year by a woman charged with drunk driving, and Sheriff Hayden says bad blood over settling the brother's estate could possibly be the motive.There was another clue in the car of the younger Boyes - clothing that was believed to have been worn during the Paducah crime."We believe these were the pants being worn by him at the time of the murder. His father was killed in his backyard, and it was raining at the time of the killing, explaining the mud," according to Hayden.Forensic testing will be used to determine if the blood on the pants belongs to either victim. Telephone records also show the younger Boyes was in McCracken County at the time of the murders."As the evidence continues to increase, we believe that he committed the murders," Hayden said.Forensic tests of blood samples, fingerprints, shoe impressions and other evidence are pending, according to Hayden.Hayden believe Boyes was driven to murder because he was upset about not receiving anything from his late brother's estate.50-year-old Gregory Boyes of Antioch, Illinois, died in August 2015 when he was hit by a motorist who authorities say was drunk and fled the scene. The driver later was arrested and faces charges.Gerald Boyes' strained relationship with his father may also have been a factor in the murders, Hayden said.The elder Boyes and Potter were found dead at their home April 12 by a neighbor, deputies say, by blunt force trauma.Boyes and Potter were beaten to death with a claw hammer police found at the house, Hayden said.The case involving the scene of the shooting in Antioch, Illinois will eventually be reviewed by the Lake County state's attorney's office. State's Attorney Michael Nerheim in Antioch pledged to make his findings public.
By Russell Lissau, The Daily Herald & Matt McClain, West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 18, 2016 | 09:23 PM | PADUCAH, KY

The fugitive who was fatally shot by police in the Chicago suburb of Lake County, Illinois likely killed his father and a woman in Paducah after a dispute about money and his late brother's estate, authorities said Monday.The Chicago area Daily Herald is reporting that revelation from the McCracken County Sheriff Department, as the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force and the Lake County coroner's office continued investigating the confrontation that left the younger Gerald Boyes dead outside a pizza place in Antioch, Illinois early Saturday morning.It's looking more likely that Boyes killed his 73-year-old father, Gerald B. Boyes, and the older man's longtime girlfriend, 67-year-old Billie Potter of Paducah, according to McCracken County Sheriff Jon Hayden.The Daily Herald is reporting the autopsy conducted on Monday revealed Boyes, 53, of Florida, died of multiple gunshot wounds, according to Lake County Chief Deputy Coroner Orlando Portillo said. Authorities are investigating whether any wounds were self-inflicted, Portillo said. The coroner's office can't finish its report until it gets more information about the shooting from the task force, he added.Boyes was raised in the Chicago area and formerly lived near Antioch. He had an extensive criminal history, including arrests in Illinois and Florida, and spent more than 20 years imprisoned in Florida, records show. He was wanted on a warrant in Florida for a probation violation, but he also was a suspect in last week's murders in Paducah.Boyes and Potter lived in Antioch until they moved to Paducah last year.Police already knew Boyes pawned his dead father's wallet at a pawnshop in another Chicago suburb, Villa Park, Illinois on Thursday, and that he had prescription medication filled at a Paducah pharmacy belonging to his late father when he was shot by police. On Monday, Hayden said police found a pair of blood- and mud-stained pants in the car in which Boyes died."We believe these were the pants being worn by him at the time of the murder," Hayden said. "His father was killed in his backyard, and it was raining at the time of the killing, explaining the mud." Forensic testing will be used to determine if the blood on the pants belongs to either victim, Hayden said.Additionally, telephone records show the younger Boyes was in McCracken County at the time of the murders, Hayden said. "As the evidence continues to increase, we believe that he committed the murders." Hayden said.

On the Net:
By Ro Morse Apr. 18, 2016 | 09:03 PM | PADUCAH, KY

Thousands of quilters headed to Quilt City USA have already arrived to begin QuiltWeek in Paducah.

J.P. Roberts, Bristol Broadcasting traffic reporter and retired Paducah policeman, recalls years of patrolling the streets during the annual AQS Quilt Show, meeting hundreds of quilters walking along and across the highways and sidewalks. His advice to locals during this week is, "Take an alternate route to avoid the I-24 Loop between Kentucky Avenue and Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. Slow down. Allow plenty of time if you are headed downtown or to the Kentucky Oaks Mall area. Be aware of cars with out-of-town license plates. They may drift in and out of lanes, looking around and changing their minds as they look for their destinations. Show our Paducah hospitality and be patient. We double our population this week, and it's important to make our quilting visitors feel welcome and safe."

Dianne Wise from Elkhart, IN, is a quilter who knows too well how an accident can happen. Twenty years ago she was crossing the I-24 loop by the Quilt Museum and was hit by a car, thrown over the hood and found herself lying in the street.

"A Paducah police officer rescued me and made sure I was taken care of at Western Baptist Hospital. Healing was slow and painful, but my husband Wally and I have returned each spring to the annual show. We look forward to spring in Paducah. I know it sounds crazy but when we are here, we get all caught up in the excitement of the quilts and all that Paducah has to offer. We can't imagine not being here, being part of the celebration of quilting and of course the dogwoods."

With the construction of a long-awaited new hotel on the previous dome pavilion site, traffic flow has been altered to accommodate visitors coming in and out of the Convention and Expo Centers this week. Police on foot, bicycle and in patrol cars will be on site to insure the safety of quilters as they walk to and from the new location of the dome pavilion at 6th and Campbell Streets. It's a popular, high-traffic corner this week where the Greenway Trail entrance, horse-drawn carriage barn, bus and trolley drop-offs all intersect. A bus will take quilters to and from the Convention Center if they prefer to ride instead of walk.

Carson Park will be busier than usual with a bus shuttling to and from downtown and the convention center. Once at the show, buses and trolleys will transport visitors to Kentucky Oaks Mall, Wal-Mart, the Rotary Antique Quilt Show at the Cherry Civic Center, hotels, Hancock's of Paducah and other locations. There is no fee to ride. A map with shuttle routes is linked below.

On the Net:
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Apr. 19, 2016 | WESTERN KENTUCKY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 19, 2016 | 12:52 PM | WESTERN KENTUCKY

Mike Pape and Jason Batts, two candidates in the First Congressional District Republican Primary, joined together Monday in demanding an apology from candidate James Comer for what they call insults to their supporters.



Citing an email dated March 27 that was reported online and was supplied directly to the Pape campaign, Comer reportedly quoted a buddy who said his supporters might be the only ones who put up campaign signs, because "Michael Pape's supporters are too old to physically put signs up and the Batts boy's supporters don't own any property to put any signs on!



Comer reportedly commented in the email that the theory has a lot of merit.



This is yet another example of why James Comer is the typical establishment career politician, said Pape. His arrogance insults the people who would be his constituents, and he thinks he can get away with it. We demand an apology to the people of our district.



"Jamie Comer owes all the voters an apology, said Batts. "Calling Kentuckians poor and old is what we'd expect from a Washington politician. After sixteen years running for one office after another, Jamie has forgotten the hard working Kentuckians he's trying to represent. His ignorant words are inexcusable."



Attempts to confirm the content of the email and get a comment from the Comer campaign have not received a response.
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By The Associated Press

Apr. 19, 2016 | FRANKFORT, KY

By The Associated Press Apr. 19, 2016 | 03:38 PM | FRANKFORT, KY

Former Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear has called Republican Gov. Matt Bevin's investigation of his procurement practices a ``pathetic spectacle'' and says the accusations have no basis in truth.



Bevin accused Beshear on Tuesday of issuing no-bid contracts to benefit friends and forcing state workers to make political donations. Bevin said he will hire a private law firm and give it subpoena power to help the Finance Cabinet investigate the allegations.



Beshear said he never forced employees to donate to political campaigns and said he followed the spirit and letter of procurement laws. He said Bevin's investigation is an attempt to distract people from his own administration's problems. And he noted Bevin has refused to release his personal tax returns. Beshear released his tax returns while he was governor.



Attorney General Andy Beshear says Bevin's decision to hire a private law firm to help investigate his predecessor is overstepping his authority under state law.



Andy Beshear, Steve Beshear's son, says the Executive Branch Ethics Commission should be the one to examine any allegations of wrongdoing.



Bevin is also calling on Andy Beshear to return campaign contributions from Tim Longmeyer, a former official in Steve Beshear's administration who pleaded guilty Tuesday to federal bribery charges. Andy Beshear says he did not know of Longmeyer's activities and plans to donate any left over money from his campaign to Common Cause, a government watchdog group.
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Tehran, Iran, April 19

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:

Iran has started talks with seven European and East Asian countries for the export of oil, the Iranian Oil Ministry's International Relations Director Mohsen Qamsari announced.

Agreement is about to be made for Iran to deliver oil to Shell and BP at their African refineries, he said, Mehr news agency reported April 19.

Final talks are also being held on long-term export to Italy's Saras and Eni as well as Turkey's Tupras, the official stated.

Besides China and India, Iran intends to export oil to some new Eastern Asia markets as well, he said.

The Oil Ministry has stated it intends to increase export by over one mbpd. Iran's crude export dropped from 2.3 mbpd to one mbpd under sanctions.

Reports say Iran is also in talks with companies in Romania, Sweden, Hungary, Austria, Czech, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Serbia.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

By Fatih Karimov - Trend:

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani says his country's oil exports have increased by 1.1 million barrels per day since the nuclear deal came into force last January.

He made the remarks addressing the residents of the Semnan city Apr. 19, the state-run IRINN TV reported.

Iran's oil exports during the sanctions decreased to one million barrels per day, but today the country has managed to revive its position in the oil market thanks to the nuclear deal, Rouhani said.

He added that Iran now is exporting over two million barrels of oil on a daily basis.

While Tehran was forced to buy the vital oil and petrochemical industry equipment from limited providers with huge prices under sanctions, now it is able to buy the same equipment with prices as low as one third and even one tenth, he said.

Regarding the achievements of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, aka nuclear deal) in the nuclear field, Rouhani said Iran is now a seller of enriched uranium and heavy water in the global market.

Commenting about the nuclear deal's outcome for the banking sector, Rouhani said Iranian banks are establishing ties with global banks.

He further said the JCPOA is a political and legal honor in the country's history.

Rouhani also called on the domestic media to observe ethics while criticizing his administration.

"There are no problems with criticizing the government and it is even necessary sometimes, but people don't like the chaos created by the media," said the Iranian president.

He further said the JCPOA is approved by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Parliament and the Supreme National Security Council, adding that now it is time for using the opportunity and the deal's implementation, but not criticism.

Iran and the P5+1 group of countries (the US, France, the UK, Germany, China, and Russia) agreed in July 2015 on a landmark nuclear deal to curb Tehran's sensitive nuclear activities in return for lifting of the sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

The international sanctions on Iran were removed as the JCPOA entered the implementation phase on Jan. 16.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

By Fatih Karimov - Trend:

The Islamic Republic welcomes UN-brokered Yemen peace talks in Kuwait, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab-African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said, Fars news agency reported April 19.

It is while the talks which were scheduled to begin April 18, got postponed reportedly due to delay of the Iran-backed Houthi delegation's attending of the event.

Delegations representing Shiite Houthi rebels and the party of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh were due to arrive in Kuwait ahead of the talks, but while the government delegation managed to come to Kuwait on time, the opposite side delegation remained behind in Yemen.

Amir-Abdollahian said that Tehran supports political talks and achieving a political agreement between Yemeni groups.

The last one year developments in Yemen proved that the only solution for the country is "national dialogue" and no foreign intervention, the top Iranian diplomat said.

He further expressed hope that the efforts of the UN special envoy to Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed to resolve the political crisis will lead to an outcome, acceptable by Yemeni people.

Yemen has been in turmoil since September 2014, when the rebels overran the capital Sanaa, forcing President Abd-Rabbu Mansour to flee to Saudi Arabia. Since March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition, which includes Bahrain, Qatar, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, has been battling the rebels to restore Hadi to power.

Saudi Arabia accuses the Islamic Republic of providing military support to the Yemeni Shiite rebels, something that Tehran denies.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19



By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:



Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has urged the US to fulfill its commitments regarding the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA/ nuclear deal).



"We should prevent the previous US regulations from posing restrictions against establishing banking and financial ties between institutions in Europe and Asia with Iran," IRIB news agency quoted Zarif as saying.



Saying that over the past several years the Americans imposed restrictions on the trade ties with Iran, Zarif added that those restrictions have been removed following the implementation of the JCPOA.



He further added that now it is necessary to make the international institutions sure that establishing ties with Iran will not harm them.



Saying that Iran is not after establishing trade ties with the US, he underlined that the Islamic Republic, however, is not barred from establishing "healthy" economic ties with the US.



Speaking about topics to be discussed during his upcoming meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry, Zarif said it is necessary to have a meeting with Kerry for following the issue of the implementation of the JCPOA.



Zarif left Tehran for New York on April 18 to participate in the UN Climate Summit.



He is scheduled to have a meeting with his American counterpart John Kerry to discuss Iran's nuclear deal and also the latest regional developments.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 19/04/2016 (2378 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

VANCOUVER  A green sea turtle rescued from British Columbias frigid ocean this winter is on his way back to warmer waters.

The turtle, dubbed Comber by Vancouver Aquarium staff, was found on a remote beach on the west coast of Vancouver Island in January, suffering from hypothermia so severe that it was difficult to tell if the animal was alive.

Comber was brought to the Vancouver Aquariums Marine Mammal Rescue Centre, where staff slowly warmed him while using an ultrasound to keep track of his heartbeats.

Comber the rehabilitated green sea turtle swims in a tank at the Vancouver aquarium in Vancouver, Tuesday, April, 19, 2016. Comber was found on a remote beach on Vancouver Island in January and has been recovering from hypothermia at the aquarium ever since. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

Aquarium staff say the 35-kilogram turtle responded to treatment quickly and is now ready to begin a long journey back to the wild, starting with a trip to the border Wednesday, where hell be picked up by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Comber, who staff estimate is between 12 and 20 years old, will be taken to SeaWorld San Diego to finish his rehabilitation and once water temperatures off the coast of California are warm enough, he and a number of other rescued turtles will be released.

Green sea turtles are listed as endangered world wide and are usually found in the waters off Mexico and Hawaii.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 19/04/2016 (2378 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA  Canada has dispatched an assessment team to Ecuador to help determine what can be done to help in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake that killed more than 400  including four Canadians.

International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau confirmed Tuesday that two more Canadians died in the weekend quake, but she offered no other details, citing privacy concerns.

Jennifer Mawn and her son, Arthur Laflamme, were reportedly killed when the roof of their residence caved in as the 7.8-magnitude quake struck Saturday night.

Volunteers search for survivors and bodies inside a hotel destroyed by the earthquake in Pedernales, Ecuador, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. The strongest earthquake to hit Ecuador in decades flattened buildings and buckled highways along its Pacific coast, sending the Andean nation into a state of emergency. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa)

While the assessment team is typically sent as a precursor to Canadas Disaster Assistance Response Team, no decision has yet been made on whether to deploy the DART, Bibeau said.

We are really waiting on the recommendation of the team to make any decisions, Bibeau said.

Earlier, Bibeaus spokesman Bernard Boutin said in an email that Canada had received a request for assistance from the Ecuadorian government.

The DART was last deployed to Nepal last May after a devastating earthquake that killed more than 3,200 people. The teams disaster response capabilities include a field hospital, engineering help and water purification.

Bibeau said Canada would co-ordinate its response with international humanitarian agencies.

It will be health. It will be feeding people, providing shelters, she said.

The aid agency Oxfam was already on the ground Tuesday with a seven-person team that was providing help with basic hygiene and clean drinking water.

Oxfam planned to send its first two-ton load of supplies on Wednesday as well.

But Oxfam Canada said Canadians would once again be called upon to contribute to Ecuadors recovery after the Humanitarian Coalition of agencies raised $8 million last year for the Nepal earthquake.

Canadians were so generous at that time and we hope theyll help again in Ecuador, said Ann Witteveen of Oxfam Canada.

The earthquake, the strongest to hit Ecuador since 1979, levelled buildings and buckled highways along the Pacific Coast of the South American country.

It was centred about 170 kilometres northwest of the capital, Quito.

Global Affairs has asked friends and relatives of those known to be travelling in Ecuador to contact its emergency response centre.

It is also providing consular assistance for the families of those killed.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 18/04/2016 (2379 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Staff returned to work at the downtown Winnipeg offices of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada Monday, but several dozen protesters remain camped in the lobby demanding an end to the Indian Act.

Additional protesters were camped out around a fire outside the INAC building on Hargrave Street near Ellice Avenue.

Over the weekend, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Derek Nepinak visited to show support.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS People protest in front of the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) offices by blocking Hargrave and occuping the offices of INAC in Winnipeg Sunday, April 17, 2016.

The protesters, who refer to themselves as Occupy INAC Winnipeg, began staking out the INAC offices in Winnipeg Friday. Similar protests are underway in Toronto, Regina, Gatineau, Que., and Vancouver. The Winnipeg office as well as those in Toronto and Regina were closed Friday, but in a statement from INAC headquarters in Gatineau Monday, officials said all offices were operating but were closed to the public.

The Government of Canada is committed to ensuring minimal disruption of services to Canadians during this time, reads the statement.

Workers within the Winnipeg building confirmed they were in the office; however, public access for services such as the registration office is not allowed. INAC has set up a phone number for people who have business with the registration office to call  1-800-567-9604  and is also directing people to the website: http://wfp.to/indianaffairs.

Winnipeg police said they are aware of and monitoring the situation.

The protesters are there to draw attention to the suicide epidemic plaguing northern remote First Nations including Pimicikamak Cree Nation in Manitoba, where band leaders called a state of emergency last month after six people took their own lives since December and more than 100 were on a suicide watch.

Rusty Garrioch, a youth leader from Pimicikamak, travelled to Winnipeg to meet with the protesters Sunday. In a video posted to the groups blog, Garrioch said he wants to show the youth out there hope.

Enough of being hopeless, he said. All I see out there is hopeless.

He said he was proud of the protesters for taking a stand.

Attawapiskat First Nation in northern Ontario declared a state of emergency last week after 11 people attempted suicide in one weekend.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett flew to Attawapiskat Monday to show support and talk to band and youth leaders.

She was accompanied by NDP indigenous affairs critic and the MP for the area, Charlie Angus.

However, the Winnipeg protesters want Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to meet with First Nations youth.

In a written statement posted to Facebook using the hashtag #occupyINAC Friday, the Winnipeg group said, This issue is inseparable from the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women; the legacy of residential schools; the 11,000 and counting children in care in Manitoba; and the theft, pollution, and exploitation of the land, water, and air.

The Winnipeg protesters made several demands, including the abolition of the Indian Act, the reserve system and numbered treaties.

They also want an end to the denial of adequate health care, housing and education, the restoration of culture and spirituality to indigenous communities, a respect by the colonial state of the land and water, and an end to two-spirited discrimination causing much of the suicidal crisis our youth are facing.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 18/04/2016 (2379 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There is no more important event in the hearts and minds of Australians and New Zealanders than ANZAC Day.

Observed on April 25, ANZAC Day is a national day of remembrance that commemorates members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC).

The original ANZACs fought at Gallipoli during World War I, explained Toby Elson, who lives in Charleswood. These days, the term refers to any Australian and New Zealand soldier serving, or who has served, in military operations around the world.

Courtesy of Brian Hydesmith Parade marshall Gordon Keatch at the 100th anniversary celebrations of ANZAC Day in 2015.

Here in Winnipeg, members of the Down Under Club (DUCW) will observe ANZAC Day on Sat., April 23 at the Scandinavian Cultural Centre (764 Erin St.).

A social group of Australians and New Zealanders, the DUCW has many members with strong connections to ANZAC Day.

Elsons grandfather survived the Second World War but lost many good friends and comrades.

I appreciate the DUCW organizing this event, Elson affirmed. It allows us to honour people like my grandfather who fought and died for our freedom.

For most expats from down under, ANZAC Day is deeply personal.

Its a time to remember my father, who served with the Australian Air Force in World War II, said St James resident Carol Bigold. Im always overwhelmed by the emotion of it all, knowing that he and others sacrificed so much.

Bigold owns High Tea Bakery (2103 Portage Ave.).

This year, well be making the traditional ANZAC biscuits for our customers as our way of honouring the day.

ANZAC biscuits (cookies) are made with oats, golden syrup and coconut. They were shipped to soldiers at the front during World War I to provide them with a little taste of home, Bigold said.

At 91 years young, Silver Heights resident Gordon Keatch, himself an ANZAC, has long been the parade marshall of the annual event.

The first time we did this back in 1949, we borrowed an Australian flag from the Free Press, and the then-mayor of Winnipeg, Garnet Coulter, placed a wreath on behalf of the city.

Its not only about remembering, Keatch added. Its also about celebrating mateship and camaraderie, which is important for us because we are so far from home.

Last year, the DUCW marked the 100th anniversary of ANZAC Day with a major event at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada.

This year will be a little different, but no less significant, Keatch confirmed.

For more information, or to attend the event, contact the DUCW at info@downunderclub.mb.ca or by calling 204-414-1159.

Jenny Gates is a community correspondent for St. James. Contact her at words@jennygates.com with questions and ideas.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:

Valiollah Seif, the head of Iran's central bank, has urged the US to remove ambiguities over banking ties with Iran. "Washington should feel accountable for removing ambiguities over the cooperation of the European banks with Iran," IRNA news agency quoted Seif as saying.

"Nevertheless, the Americans have taken some measures in this regards, that are not sufficient in our point of view," he added. Saying that sanctions on Iran were removed and the country's oil exports increased following the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in January, he said there are still obstacles against banking transactions between Iran and European banks, in particular. He described the concerns of European banks over running afoul of the US regulations as a main reason behind the European financial institutions' approach towards Iran. Stating that the Italian and Austrian banks have better ties with Iranian banks, he further predicted that the ties with other European banks will gradually improve. Earlier in an interview with Bloomberg TV and also during a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations in the US he accused Washington and Europeans of failing to honor the JCPOA. "In general, we are not able to use our frozen funds abroad," Seif said Apr. 15.

Valiollah Seif, arrived in Washington earlier this week to attend the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group held April 15-17.
The Winona City Council on Monday night approved a bid for the Masonic Temple roof project, despite it coming in more than $100,000 beyond estimated costs.

The project includes redoing all three tiers of the roof, reinforcement of the trusses inside the building, and work on other aspects of the building.

The council unanimously awarded the contract to Winona Heating and Ventilating for a bid of $528,000.

The city approved an extra $128,000 taken out of the facilities budget to cover the cost increase.

The vote of approval, which came without absent council members Pam Eyden and Gerry Krage, went forward despite concerns about the cost increase.

Council member Al Thurley wanted to be assured that the roof would be properly inspected and the quality of the work assured going forward.

I dont want to do this again in a few years, Thurley said. Since weve dealt with this project a long time  it would be helpful for us to have updates and reports going forward.

The roof has been a documented problem for several years; in 2010 the backdrops in the theater were evaluated and found to be in poor condition, in part because of leaking from the roof.

In 2014 the estimates for a roof repair were around $218,000. That was increased to $450,000 in November.

Council member George Borzyskowski said the project didnt seem unreasonable, despite the increase.

I think thats a very good price, considering what all theyre going to do, Borzyskowski said.

There is no scheduled start or time frame for the project yet.

Chad Ubl, the citys community services director, stressed that the roof is one of the most vital parts of keeping the building from further deterioration.

Its step one of any steps in this building, Ubl said. The first step is to secure the roof and then maintain the building going forward.

Ordinances eased for breweries

Small breweries, in-house brewing and micro-distilleries got another nod of approval from the council Monday night, with new amendments introduced to allow a variety of sales from those businesses.

The three changes are modeled after provisions recently updated by the Minnesota Legislature which city staff thought would be appropriate to adopt.

Two amendments create on- and off-sale options for small brewers with taprooms, which would allow customers to consume on the premises or take beer somewhere else.

The third amendment creates an on-sale cocktail room option, under which a micro-distillery licensed by the state could sell products for consumption on the premises.

Last year the council amended city provisions to allow off-sale of growlers, commonly half-gallon containers, for carrying beer.

Monica Hennessy Mohan, Winonas city clerk, said the changes anticipate there will be interest in micro breweries in town, but noted that the city hasnt had any recent requests.

We have some interest in doing these kind of licenses, Mohan said. So we thought we could do this ordinance before someone comes in with a request.
Winona will welcome a new guest on the Mississippi River this fall.

The 150-passenger remodeled riverboat Louisiane, owned by the French America Line based out of New Orleans, is expected to dock Sept. 26 and Oct. 10 in Winona as part of a tour of the Mississippi River.

It will mark the first season for the newly formed cruise line, which expects to launch its tours along the Mississippi in August with Winona being a featured stop for the Mississippi Headwaters tour. The Columbia Queen, re-christened the Lousiane, was built in 2000 and bought from the U.S. Maritime Administration earlier this year.

Joel Ann Rea, PR consultant for French America, said the company was started by a group of business people who had worked in cruises and tourism, and the business is one they expect a lot of interest in.

Absolutely, theres a growing market, Rea said. Theyve been watching the explosion of river cruises in Europe and want to recreate that.

Rea said that they hope to change their business model from traditional cruises to be more accessible by having both short and long trips, almost entirely through all-inclusive tickets and using a relatively small boat.

In addition to the 150 passengers, the boat would also house a 64-member crew. The schedule is expected to run from August to November, when the boat would then be docked for the winter in New Orleans.

Rea said the tour focus is on areas of the country that have been influenced by the French, with different regional twists, and how the influence has evolved over time in different areas history, culture and food.

The docking dates were unanimously approved by Winonas City Council Monday.

Mayor Mark Peterson said as they continue talks to get other boats  like the American Queen  to put Winona on their scheduled stops, the Louisiane will be a welcome addition.

I think its exciting to see a boat coming back, Peterson said.
President Obamas standing in the eyes of the American people has recovered after a three-year slump  and thats good news for Hillary Clinton.

Obamas job approval rating  the percentage of voters who say hes doing a decent job  has reached an average of about 50 percent over the last two months.

A 50-50 split may not look like a historic achievement, but its a better number than Obama has seen since 2013. And its not a mirage; the presidents standing has been on a gradual upswing for the last four months.

Thats been enough to make Obama aides throw their hats in the air, figuratively speaking. Five points makes a huge difference, one of them told me last week.

Politicians routinely pretend that they dont pay attention to the polls, but theres no question Obama pays attention to his. During his years in the polling wilderness, he often sounded frustrated that he wasnt getting credit for his accomplishments.

Now, though, Obama sounds more confident that he might be able to end his presidency on a high note. I feel greatly encouraged, he told Democrats in Texas last month. I think when people step back and get some perspective, theyll say we did good.

And he sounds eager to campaign for a Democratic successor who can continue the legacy that we built  especially if its Hillary Clinton, who has embraced his record more fervently than Bernie Sanders.

A popular president, even one on the way out, is naturally a bigger asset to his party than an unpopular one. Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has found that when a two-term president leaves office, his party is likely to win the next election if his job approval is over 50 percent, but lose if the number is below 50 percent.

But theres a quirk inside Obamas improved poll numbers.

The president and his aides would like to think his standing has improved mostly because Americans have finally recognized that the economy is on the upswing, and acknowledge the presidents role in making that happen. But most of the available evidence doesnt support that theory. The Gallup Polls economic confidence index, a measure of how Americans feel about the economy, is the same now as it was late last year, when the president was less popular.

Theres no clear correlation with presidential approval, Democratic pollster Mark Mellman noted.

Instead, Obamas numbers appear to have gone up in large part because the Republican campaign  in particular, GOP front-runner Donald Trump  have reminded many voters why they chose Obama in the first place.

The public image of the Republican Party has fallen as the presidents has risen. During the last three months, the CNN-ORC poll found that the share of voters with an unfavorable view of the GOP swelled from 50 percent to 61 percent. In the same period, Trump impressed increasing numbers of American voters  in the wrong direction. In the CNN-ORC poll, 67 percent of adults said they had an unfavorable impression of the real estate magnate, the highest negative rating ever recorded for a major partys presidential candidate.

The Trump hypothesis is bolstered by other surveys showing that much of Obamas increased support has come from younger voters and Latinos, two groups that have reacted strongly against the Republican front-runner. Both groups are strongly opposed to more restrictive immigration policies, Trumps signature issue.

Obama has tried quite bluntly to capitalize on the vulnerabilities of the GOP field as he has tuned up his message for the fall campaign.

I actually think that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have done us a favor, he said at a Democratic fundraising event in San Francisco on April 9.

The favor, he explained in Los Angeles, is laying bare, unvarnished, some of the nonsense that weve been dealing with in Congress on a daily basis. People act as if these folks are outliers. But theyre not ... We should thank Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz for just being honest.

Thats a partisan argument, of course, aimed at rallying Democrats around their president and, eventually, their new nominee.

But thats what a presidential campaign is mostly about: making sure a partys voters come home and vote for their side  or against the other side, which is just as effective. Thats pretty much what Obama did in 2012, when he succeeded in painting Mitt Romney as a heartless plutocrat.

Obamas standing is still fragile. He and his aides would feel better if he were over the 50 percent mark. They know that an economic reversal (which they consider unlikely) or a terrorist attack (entirely possible) could blow a hole in his job approval.

But for the moment, their prospects for securing the Obama legacy with a third Democratic term have been improved  thanks to the unlikely assistance of Donald Trump.
I am writing in response to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources' ongoing consideration of a lead shot ban, which would affect Whitewater State Park, among other areas.

The DNR has a lack of substantive scientific evidence to support a lead shot ban on state wildlife management areas. The proposed ban, which was very quietly announced with no public input, is nothing more than a gateway to banning traditional ammunition statewide.

With alternative shot being more expensive such a ban would have a direct negative impact on the communities that rely on hunting. By pricing people out of the sport it will cause long-term devastation to the Minnesota conservation model which relies on federal excise taxes gathered from firearms and ammunition to fund habitat conservation that benefits both hunted and non-hunted game. According to Hunting Works for Minnesota, hunting creates more than 12,400 jobs, and generates $235 million on trip-related expenses from Minnesota hunters and the more than 20,000 hunters who come from out of state.

Luckily, there is bipartisan support from both Republicans and Democrats in the Minnesota Legislature to keep this proposed ban on lead shot from being enacted. Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk is one of the coauthors of a bill in the Senate to prohibit the DNR from banning lead shot. Hopefully, the Legislature can put an end to this unnecessary and overreaching proposal by the DNR. Hunters support Minnesotas economy and wildlife, and I support hunters.
The decision by the United States Appeals Court to send a recent voter ID case back to the Federal District Court acknowledges that for some, obtaining an ID to vote is so burdensome that they may not be able to vote, in violation of the state and federal law. The Appeals Court directed the lower court to find a way to allow some voters to vote without a photo ID because they cannot receive one the way the law currently stands.

This is not a surprise to those of us that did not support passage of this proposal. Voting is a right for every eligible person in Wisconsin and it is simply not the job of any political party to place barriers in front of those that want to vote. The illusion that voter fraud is a reality has been shattered many times. Attorneys general, judges and district attorneys have found no voter fraud. It is this simple: voting is just not a high benefit crime for criminals and the outlier in our 5 million person state who votes more than once is found out and prosecuted like the case against Republican Robert Monroe.

To sum up the decision, while the court said it is not an undue burden for most people to obtain a valid photo ID to vote, it is too difficult for some people. Some people can even be put into classes, or groups of individuals who cannot obtain a valid ID that qualifies under the Wisconsin law. While three groups are a part of this action by the court, some may say there are other groups that have exceptional difficulty obtaining a valid ID to vote. This ruling opens the door.

Homeless and those that move frequently for a variety of reasons often have no valid ID because they live on the streets, in shelters or on a friends couch. Being transient does not make an individual ineligible to vote. In Wisconsin, the number of people experiencing homelessness has increased every year since 2008, with the numbers reaching at least 25,000 in Wisconsin. In this decision, the court acknowledged that for some groups of individuals who want to vote, obtaining a valid photo ID is an exceptional challenge. My hope is that through this decision and what happens next in the lower court there will be a clear path for the right to vote for all.

The absence of Legislative remedy is not a reason for the court to be blind to the realized and actual shortcomings of the law. The courts job under the Constitution in the balance of the powers doctrine is to interpret the law. The Republican Legislature passed this law and said over and over not one voter would be displaced by this law. It is the job of the courts to make sure that is a reality.
The parking lot at The Watermark, Beaver Dams new community center, will be paved, but there are still questions about who gets to park where.

The Operations Committee couldnt come to an agreement with Evonne Boettge, community activities and services administrator, about parking stall layout.

As a result, the committee approved the paving plan for The Watermark, but not the parking assignments.

Alderperson Mick Fischer said he would vote against this plan unless staff parking is pushed to the farthest area in the parking lot.

As a result, a future meeting would decide the parking assignments.

The option recommended would involve a 10-foot buffer alongside the Beaver Dam River for a concrete walkway, parallel parking stalls along the river as well as handicap stalls and straight parking stalls closer to the building.

This option eliminates some parking as compared to another option that would include straight parking stalls.

Downtown street parking amendments

Three ordinance amendments were unanimously approved during the Beaver Dam Common Council meeting that affects the area surrounding The Watermark.

On South Center Street from Madison Street to Mill Street there will be two hour parking between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. on any day except Sundays and holidays.

A loading zone was created in front of The Watermark on the east side of South Center Street. In that area, vehicles can park for 10 minutes. There is a similar parking zone in front of the library on Spring Street..

Committee recommends project contracts

Beaver Dam Operations recommend that MSA Professional Services handle the bidding process for demolition of a building inside of 151 Business Park.

According to the outline, the planning would cost $3,880.

Ritchie Piltz, director of facilities and engineering said he is allowing MSA to handle the bidding process because he is busy bidding other city projects at the moment.

This project will demolish a barn and two other small buildings that currently stand in the 151 Business Park.

Another building coming down this year is the former Senior Center, 114 E. Third St., and the green house on the same property.

The committee recommended Badgerland Demolition and Earthwork in De Pere with the low bid of $22,580 for the project. According to the resolution, $40,000 is available in the Capital Improvements Program fund.

Six bids were received for this project.

All of the recommended project recommendation will appear at the May 2 Common Council meeting for a final vote.

The committee also recommends Kopplin and Kinas Company in Green Lake for the East Third Street Water Quality Pond project with the low bid amount of $338,791.

This project will construct a stormwater retention pond behind the Beaver Dam Community Library, 311 N. Spring St.

The funding for a portion of this project comes through a Pollution Abatement and Storm Water Management Grant from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. This grant only applies to the pond.

Mike Laue, from MSA Professional Services said that according to the Kopplins proposal, it expects it will take $206,000 to complete. He said its possible for the city to get a max of $103,000 to match 50 percent of the pond project cost.

In total, Laue said he received four bids for this project.

Three alderpersons exit

Alderpersons Mick McConaghy, Donna Maly and Teresa Hiles Olson were recognized for their contributions to the city and the Common Council after they lost in the April Spring election.

Mayor Tom Kennedy said these three alderpersons had more than 30 years of experience working with the city.

We are losing a lot of experience, he said.

Council President Jon Litscher praised all three alderpersons for their work on a variety of city committees over the years and said that they will all be missed,
RANDOLPH | Randolph School Board approved an alternative pay plan for district teachers.

District administrator Kevin Knudson said there were two main goals when formulating the pay plan, offering a competitive starting wage for teachers compared to neighboring districts and keeping good teachers in the district.

Knudson said the starting salary in the district would be $37,000, and the committee came up with a formula to help bring teachers hired within the last few years ahead of that. The plan also includes supplemental payments for activities teachers do in the district.

The school board approved offering a staff retirement incentive for the 2015-16 school year, with the district offering three payments of $7,000 to a 403B, a tax-sheltered annuity retirement plan made available to employees of public schools.

In other business, the school board swore in new board member Wayne Vanderploeg, whose two-year term begins April 25. Vanderploeg replaces Shannon Greeno who filed non-candicacy papers after serving three years on the school board. Incumbent board members Craig Freitag and Laurie Boomsma will begin new two-year terms on April 25.

Board president Keith Medema recognized Greeno for his service to the school district.

We really appreciate your time and service, Medema said.

I think everybody should have to serve on the board, Greeno said.

Randolph High School choir students may get the opportunity to perform at Carnegie Hall in New York next spring. District music teacher Jessica Lee told the school board that she takes the choir to her alma mater, Carthage College in Kenosha for a clinic. She said one of her former professors has been invited to conduct a concert at Carnegie Hall, and reached out to invite her students to participate in the performance.

They will also be working with a professional orchestra, Lee said.

Lee said the performance is scheduled at the start of spring break, with a planned trip that would last four days for rehearsal time, and offer a chance for some sightseeing in New York. She said the tour might include the Empire State Building, and hopefully, a Broadway musical.

The Carnegie Hall performance would be on March 27, 2017.

Lee said she hopes to take at least eight students on the trip, as the cost is less if groups of four attend.

The board offered preliminary approval for the trip, so that interested students can begin fundraising efforts. The board suggested Lee return during the September board meeting for formal approval of the trip.
Theft  Saturday at 3:08 p.m., a man reported that a neighborhood child took toys out of the familys sandbox in the 100 block of Gould Street. An officer made contact and counseled both parties.

Disorderly conduct  Saturday at 6:56 p.m., a man told police that there was a confrontation in the Autozone parking lot, 1632 N. Spring St. A 35-year-old man was cited with disorderly conduct.

Disorderly conduct  Saturday at 8:28 p.m., a 54-year-old woman reported a confrontation with children on bikes near the South Lincoln Avenue and Stone Street intersection.

Intoxicated person  Saturday at 9:25 p.m., a 51-year-old man was reported to be belligerent and intoxicated in the 100 block of Lake Crest Drive.

Fire  Sunday at 12:07 p.m., an officer responded to an illegal burning in the 600 block of South Center Street. The fire was extinguished.

Accident  Sunday at 12:25 p.m., there was a two-vehicle accident in the 100 block of Industrial Drive.

Hit and run  Sunday at 1:02 p.m., a 55-year-old woman reported that her vehicle was struck while it was parked on the street in the 200 block of Fourth Street.

Accident  Sunday at 1:51 p.m., two vehicles were involved in an accident near the Madison Street and Curie Street intersection.

Retail theft  Sunday at 2:37 p.m., an employee at Walmart Supercenter, 120 Frances Lane, told police that two people were shoplifting. A 20-year-old man was cited with retail theft.

Animal  Sunday at 5:57 p.m., a man reported that a dog in the 200 block of Norris Street had bitten him.

Hit and run  Sunday at 10:59 p.m., a 44-year-old man in the 500 block of DeClark Street told police that his parked vehicle was struck.

Theft  Monday at 11:30 a.m., 68-year-old man called to report that a check and model car were taken from his residence in the 200 block of Lake Street.

Retail theft  Monday at 2:29 p.m., an employee at Walmart Supercenter, 120 Frances Lane, told police that someone stole Air Soft guns. Later that day, two 18-year-old men were cited with retail theft.

Theft  Monday at 2:46 p.m., a 30-year-old woman reported that she believes that someone stole her coin purse out of her vehicle while she was inside Menards, 121 Frances Lane.
The Juneau County Board of Supervisors began another term on Tuesday with two newly-elected members getting their first taste of county government.

Juneau County Judge John Roemer officially swore in the 21 board members  Bev Larson was absent from Tuesdays meeting, which included new supervisors Jack Jasinski Sr. and Ray Zipperer. Alan Peterson was appointed to another term as board chairperson by a unanimous vote. Mike Kelley was appointed first vice chairman, while Ed Wafle was voted in as second vice chairman.

Also on Tuesday, the board said goodbye to departing board members Dave Arnold and Paul Tadda. Arnold, who was not present at Tuesdays meeting, was recognized by Peterson for 18 years of service, while Tadda was honored for 14 years. Tadda showed dedication to serving on the board and various committees despite suffering from poor health due to a recent stroke. One of the board members called Tadda a trooper and appreciated the effort he put in despite his obstacles.

Board member Jerry Niles praised Arnolds steadfast work for almost two decades. Arnold was defeated in a re-election bid.

Losing Dave on this board is really a loss to Juneau County, Niles said.

Transmission line to run through trail

The new electrical transmission line being proposed by American Transmission Company (ATC) will run through a small portion of the Omaha Bike Trail.

The line, which must be at least 25 feet above ground, will run through .28 acres of the trail south of Camp Douglas, but shouldnt affect those using the trail for recreation. ATC has offered to pay the county $10,000 to use the land.

The lines will be placed way above the trail and weve been told it wont affect it at all, Peterson said.

Area ambulance service honored

The Juneau County Health Department presented the Mauston Area Ambulance Association with the Partners in Public Health Award for its work to raise awareness of child passenger seats in vehicles throughout the county.

Jessica Zilisch, Mauston Area Ambulance Director, accepted the honor, presented by John Wenum from the county board and county public health nurse Jackie Brown. Since June of last year, the ambulance service has been integral in conducting monthly car seat safety checks. The county has five certified child passenger safety technicians and 106 car seats were inspected last year. Correctly used child safety seats can reduce the risk of preventable deaths by more than 70 percent.

McCauley approved as sheriffs deputy

Also on Tuesday, the board approved a pre-employment agreement for Christy McCauley to become a sheriffs deputy with the Juneau County Sheriffs Office.

McCauley will receive just more than $22 per hour, plus benefits, for the position. The hire is pending McCauleys completion of a training course paid for by the county. If McCauley passes, the county will be reimbursed; if she doesnt, the county cant hire her.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 19

By Dalga Khatinoglu- Trend:

The U.S. Government is fulfilling its obligations under the nuclear agreement and is not blocking Iran's access to its released assets, US State Department's Persian Language Spokesperson Alan Eyre told Trend on April 19.

The United States Secretary of State John Kerry was quoted by media outlets on April 19 as saying that Iran has received only $3 billion of its money since the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) implementation in mid-January.

Some Iranian authorities and media criticized the US, raising concerns that Washington is somehow "blocking" access to banking operations for other countries' companies.

Responding to the question "is the US acting according to its JCPOA obligations?" Eyre said "first, Let me be crystal clear: we are not blocking Iran's access to their own funds, and we are not encouraging banks or other partners to do so".

He said, "We think Iran has about $50 billion in assets held abroad unfrozen by the JCPOA and that most of that will be used for needed investments in Iran's economy. That is exactly what seems to be happening. I don't think anyone would have expected that Iran would use all $50 billion abroad in three months".

This American diplomat, who also served as a member of the US nuclear negotiator team with Iran, added that "secondly, the JCPOA needs to be worthwhile and to work for all participants. Just as we and the rest of the international community have seen benefits from the JCPOA, so too has Iran. Its oil sales have more than doubled, major contracts have been signed, and its access to international banks through the SWIFT system has been restored. This is as it should be".

Eyre added that "thirdly, we are not standing and will not stand in the way of legitimate business with Iran, the kinds of transactions permitted in the JCPOA, and if banks or other firms have any questions, we are happy to answer them".

"In fact, Secretary (of the Treasury) Jack Lew and Secretary Kerry have sent our teams to meet with partner governments and businesses to clarify what is now allowed; we have issued new licenses to reduce the regulatory burden of taking advantage of legitimate, post-JCPOA opportunities in Iran. We will continue to meet not just the letter but also the spirit of our commitments," Eyre added.
A University of Wisconsin System official deleted video of UW chancellors describing the impact of state budget cuts on their campuses after those presentations were scrapped amid concern they could lead to criticism from lawmakers.

Spokesman Alex Hummel said he never saved the video of chancellors rehearsing their presentations because the talks were canceled, and later deleted the files to clear space on a camera so he could record the Board of Regents meeting where the chancellors planned to speak.

UW System institutions have eliminated hundreds of jobs, reduced course offerings and cut services such as advising and maintenance as they absorb their shares of a $250 million decrease in higher education funding in the 2015-17 state budget.

Hummel said last week that erasing the videos was a mistake. On Monday, however, UW System officials said they were not required to keep the videos, and Hummel said his actions were not in error.

While statutes generally require state agencies to keep video recordings for at least 120 days, UW System deputy general counsel Jennifer Sloan Lattis on Monday pointed to a section of UW records policies stating that video recordings of meetings must only be kept until they are no longer needed for administrative purposes.

Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council President Bill Lueders said deleting the videos could fuel speculation that UW System administrators wanted to keep the presentations under wraps.

When you destroy the records, you create the impression that theres something youre trying to hide, Lueders said.

Hummel denied that he deleted the videos out of concern that the footage could be politically unpopular.

But state Rep. Terese Berceau, a Madison Democrat who has called for a public hearing on the budget cuts, said the decision to delete the videos followed what she described as a trend of UW officials being afraid to talk about the impact of reduced state funding because they fear retribution from the Legislature.

Its part of regular practice now to make sure that the Legislature is not going to hear or see anything that might anger it, Berceau said.

The State Journal first reported earlier this month that the UW Systems 14 chancellors had been told to prepare five-minute presentations, as well as one-page printed summaries, detailing how they were carrying out the states funding cut ahead of the Regents April 7-8 meeting.

On April 1, the chancellors delivered their presentations as part of a dry run with UW System President Ray Cross. Hummel, the UW Systems associate vice president for communications, told the State Journal he recorded video of the presentations so the chancellors could review them later.

After Cross heard the presentations, though, he decided to take them off of the Regents agenda, in part out of concern that they could backfire politically if the legislators who will soon consider UWs next budget request accuse officials of exaggerating the impact of state funding cuts.

Cross and Regent President Regina Millner have also said the brief presentations didnt give chancellors enough time to detail how their institutions were being affected by reduced state funding.

They have encouraged chancellors to discuss the cuts impact with residents, business groups and legislators more locally.

Several professors and Democratic legislators criticized Cross and other System officials for not allowing chancellors to give the presentations.

The State Journal requested the videos under Wisconsins open records law April 8. Hummel responded Friday that the System did not have the videos.

Because the presentations were canceled and chancellors would no longer need to review the footage, Hummel said he never transferred the videos from the camera to a computer.

Hummel said he deleted the video files on the following Monday or Tuesday, April 4 or 5, so he could have space to record the Regents meeting at UW-Green Bay later that week. No one directed him to delete the videos, Hummel said.

The System last week released the one-page summaries UW institutions prepared to accompany the chancellors presentations.
A De Pere businessman under investigation for allegedly defrauding the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. of more than $1 million has been indicted on unrelated federal bank fraud charges.

Ronald Van Den Heuvel, 62, his wife, Kelly, and an Appleton man employed at Horicon Bank were indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury, U.S. Attorney Gregory J. Haanstad announced.

The 13-count indictment is based on an alleged scheme in 2008 and 2009 in which Van Den Heuvel and his wife fraudulently obtained loans from Horicon Bank.

Also indicted was Paul Piikkila, a loan officer at Horicon Bank.

According to a statement issued by Haanstad, Piikkila approved loans totaling more than $1 million to benefit the Van Den Heuvels and their business entities. Horicon Bank had instructed Piikkila not to loan money to Van Den Heuvel, and none of the loans was made to him by name.

Instead, Haanstad said, the loans were made to straw borrowers who did not receive the money and were not expected to pay it back.

The loans were not used for the business purposes represented on the loan applications, and the collateral offered by Van Den Heuvel was inadequate to secure the loans, according to Haanstad.

If convicted of the first count, all three face a maximum penalty of imprisonment for not more than five years, a fine of not more than $250,000, or both, plus a mandatory $100 special assessment and a period of supervised release not to exceed three years.

Van Den Heuvel and his wife face more charges that carry penalties of up to 30 years in prison, a fine of not more than $1 million, or both, plus the mandatory $100 special assessment and a term of supervised release not to exceed five years.

The case is being investigated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Haanstad said. Van Den Heuvel has not been arrested. A spokesman for Haanstad said an arraignment date is set for May 6, at which time a judge would set bail conditions.

A message left for Van Den Heuvel at his business was not immediately returned.

Van Den Heuvel and his company, Green Box NA Green Bay, have been under investigation since January 2015 by the Brown County Sheriffs Office. A search warrant executed at Van Den Heuvels home and business in June alleged that he had defrauded WEDC out of about $1.2 million.

In January, Van Den Heuvel told the Wisconsin State Journal he planned to repay WEDC by the end of February.

WEDC sued Green Box a year ago and a judge placed the company in receivership, but so far the company has not repaid the state agency, WEDC spokesman Steven Michels said.

The receivership action is ongoing, WEDC along with the other creditors continue to collectively pursue collection action through the receiver, Michels said.

The Green Box case is similar to a $500,000 loan to Building Committee Inc., which the State Journal first reported in May. In both cases, the companies didnt disclose prior lawsuits to WEDC and defaulted on their loans, and yet WEDC continued to work with them.

WEDC officials have said policies have been put in place to ensure situations like that dont happen again.
North Carolina has a lot of Bruce Springsteen fans.

A lot of disappointed Springsteen fans, but proud nonetheless that their musical hero canceled a sold-out concert April 10 in Greensboro rather than pump revenue into a state that is practicing out-and-out discrimination against LGBT Americans. Ringo Starr has dropped a concert scheduled for June 18 in Raleigh for the same reason.

Yes, the religious zealots are at it again, masquerading their hatred in the name of religion, just like other generations used the Bible to justify slavery. This time theyre lining up against gays and lesbians, not blacks. They were wrong then, and theyre wrong now.

It all started when the city of Charlotte joined hundreds of cities across the nation in enacting a city ordinance prohibiting businesses from refusing to offer services to customers, just because they happened to be gay. Homophobes in the state Legislature, appalled at any sign of tolerance toward gays in the Tarheel State, rushed into action. Within hours, with no public hearing, they pushed through House Bill 2, which Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law the same night.

HB 2 bans all cities in North Carolina from enacting their own anti-discrimination measures. They must follow statewide standards, instead, which provide no protection for LGBT residents. Thats right. You can still be fired from your job in North Carolina, just because youre gay. And, of course, this is the legislative product of hypocritical conservatives who preach local control  until they dont like what local governments decide.

And if you make the mistake of traveling to North Carolina, be careful what bathroom you use, too. In a direct slap at transgender persons, HB 2 also requires that people may only use the public restroom of the sex marked on their birth certificate, based on the fear that transgendered men will suddenly be rushing into womens restrooms.

This is not only discriminatory, its also absurd for several reasons. One, theres no need for it. Theres never been a reported case of a transgendered person flashing his or her private parts in a public restroom. Two, its totally unenforceable, unless you assign a police officer to stand outside the door of every restroom, checking ID. And, seriously, how many people carry their birth certificate around with them all the time? But even then its a joke, because most states permit transgendered men or women to change both their name and sex on their birth certificate, reflecting their entirely new identity. Just ask Caitlyn Jenner.

Unfortunately, this hatewave is not limited to North Carolina. A similar, and even broader, bill, HB 1523, was signed into law by Phil Bryant, the governor of Mississippi. Other so-called religious freedom bills are pending in Missouri, South Carolina, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia.

Theres no doubt that such laws eventually will be struck down by the courts. This is, after all, the United States of America, where the Constitution is still our guiding document. So what if some religious crazies believe that the Gospels, which theyve obviously never read, require them to deny equal rights to gay Americans? Theyre not only dead wrong  Jesus never says anything in the New Testament about homosexuality, but he does teach us to love and respect everybody, even those we may disagree with  they cant use their perverted reading of the Bible to trump the Constitution and practice discrimination against anybody for any reason.

Indeed, Rev. William Barber, head of North Carolinas NAACP and leader of the Moral Monday movement, has warned state leaders he will lead sit-in protests in the capitol unless legislators rescind HB 2 before April 21. HB 2 is the politics of Jesse Helms revisited, says Barber. Its not about bathrooms. Its about oppression.

But in the end, it may be business leaders, not religious leaders, who save the day. Threats from Coca-Cola and other companies to abandon Georgia convinced that states governor, Nathan Deal, to veto his states version of the bathroom bill. Now, more than 100 companies in North Carolina, including Google, Starbucks, Citibank, Hilton, Paypal and Wells-Fargo, have petitioned McCrory to rescind HB 2, or else they may leave the state or cancel plans to expand there. Their message is very sound and very simple: Discrimination is not only unconstitutional. Its not only immoral. Its bad for business.

Amen to that.
The likely departure of a 25-year Columbia County Sheriffs Office veteran has prompted county officials to reflect on how the county can improve its attraction and retention of good deputies and jailers.

At Mondays meeting of the County Boards Public Safety Committee, Sheriff Dennis Richards announced that the Portage Police Department had offered one of the sheriffs offices top leaders, Lt. Richard Hoege, a position as a patrol lieutenant -- replacing Penny Kiefer, who had recently stepped down due to a career-ending injury.

Portage city officials have not, as of Wednesday, released any details on hiring for the patrol lieutenants position, and there is no starting date set.

According to Chief Ken Manthey, before any announcements can be made, an offer has to be reviewed by City Administrator Shawn Murphy, brought before the citys Human Resources Committee, then approved by the full Common Council. Murphy said the patrol lieutenants position is likely to be discussed when the Human Resources Committee meets April 28.

The Public Safety Committee was talking about the matter Monday in the context of an agenda item -- Richards request to replace a lieutenant, in anticipation of Hoeges departure. The committee approved the request.

If Hoege transfers to the PPD, he will be the second high-ranking Columbia County Sheriffs Office officer to do so in as many years. In May 2015, Detective Sgt. Daniel Garrigan was hired as a PPD lieutenant, replacing the retiring Lt. Mark Hahn.

Richards said it is likely that the lieutenants post will be filled by a promotion from within the department, and then a new deputy would need to be hired to succeed whoever is promoted.

Richards said that, based on his conversations with Hoege, hes quite sure Hoege will take the PPD job.

As Richards understands the likely terms of Hoeges Portage employment, hell be paid more and will be covered by health insurance that doesnt require co-payments.

He told me, I have to think about my family and my retirement,  Richards said of Hoege.

Chief Deputy Mike Babcock said its not just the Portage Police Department that is offering better wages and benefits than the Columbia County Sheriffs Office. Several nearby departments, including the Lake Delton Police Department, pay their officers more, he said.

Babcock attributed this discrepancy to Columbia Countys overall strategy regarding its employees, that the compensation would generally be in the middle of the pack compared to similar jobs in the public and private sector.

With other departments competing for qualified police officers, Babcock said, Columbia Countys middle-of-the-pack compensation doesnt attract as many candidates. The department used to get about 100 applicants for every deputy opening; now, the number is closer to 30 to 35.

I just think there is going to be a revolving door, he said.

But, pointed out Committee Member Adam Field, the 33 sworn deputies ranked at sergeant or below are represented by a union, the Wisconsin Professional Police Association.

Thats true, said County Board Vice Chairwoman Mary Cupery. However, Cupery said that, as a member of the countys negotiating team for the deputies most recent contract, the county could not implement the 4 percent pay raise that the deputies initially asked for, because all other county employees got an across-the-board increase of only 1 percent.

Committee member Susanna Bradley said employee turnover is a problem throughout the county, not just in the Sheriffs Office.

But, noted committee member Mark Sleger, the loss of a longtime employee like Hoege hurts the Sheriffs Office, and the current situation could lead to more losses.

There probably are other Riches that you are going to lose, he said.

Daily Register Reporter Jonathan Stefonek contributed to this story.

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Lawmakers upset with a bill that made them look like fools spoke to more than 3,000 retirees Thursday in the nations capital.

More than 20 speakers  even some not scheduled to participate  took to the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol Building to criticize a recovery plan for Central States Pension Fund, a plan that would cut retirees pensions by up to 70 percent in July, reported Bob Brockway, one of about 50 from Endeavor who attended the rally.

It was a beautiful day, Brockway said. The sun was shining, and we really got to see all those men and women travel all this way on their own dime to protect whats theres to begin with.

Wisconsin speakers like U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Rep. Gwen Moore were among the most vocal, Brockway said, railing against the embarrassing Multiemployer Pension Reform Act slipped into Congress omnibus spending bill in 2014. Thursdays speakers agreed representatives who voted for it likely never read the bill that effectively did away with ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974), which had guaranteed pensions.

This rally turned out 10 times better than we could have hoped for, said Milwaukee chapter leader Bernie Anderson, who often speaks in Endeavor.

Theres a great buzz in the Capitol.

Busloads came from all over the U.S. for a trip Brockway and Anderson said helped solidify congressional support, which, months ago, was difficult to come by.

In Washington, Protect Pensions members on Wednesday met with Sen. Ron Johnson for the first time.

He was going through the explanations of the cuts and how they were derived  and he couldnt figure it out, Anderson said of Johnson, a Republican from Oshkosh, who chairs the Senates Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He said theres no rhyme or reason to how this is laid out, explained or done. So hell write letters to Central States and everyone involved in the process to find out how this was done.

Protect Pensions members in Washington also met with chiefs of staff for Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, Anderson said.

All these people are finally listening to us, and now we need them to help us in some way, Anderson said.

A federal decision on Central States recovery plan is expected May 7.

In the meeting with Johnson, Anderson said, the senator asked Protect Pensions members how much Central States told them it would cut from their pensions. Most in the room cited cuts in the 50 to 60 percent range, significantly higher than the recovery plans cover letter that noted an average cut of 22.6 percent. The lowest was Andersons, at 30 percent  information that surprised Johnson.

Theyre all finding out they were misled on the information.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, informed Protect Pensions members in Washington that preliminary investigation of the U.S. Department of Labor is underway, an investigation promised after a Senate Finance Committee hearing in March, Anderson said. The U.S. Department of Labor is said to have had the biggest role in oversight of Central States funds.

He believes they werent watching out for our best interests, Anderson said of Grassley.

Perhaps the most encouraging development in Washington, Brockway and Anderson agreed, is a letter to the U.S. Treasury Department signed by every member of the Senate Democratic caucus, opposing the Central States recover plan.

Thats four pages of signatures, Anderson said. Thats pretty cool.

Thursdays speakers did not include Sen. Bernie Sanders due to the presidential candidates meeting with Pope Francis in Italy, Anderson said. Sanders, who introduced the Keep Our Pensions Promises Act of 2015, was instead represented at the rally by a spokesman, Jeff Cruz.
Think fixing up a house is exhausting? Try a church.

The congregation of TurnPoint Pentecostal Church and countless volunteers have been painting, gutting, building, pulling out walls and constructing new rooms since it moved to its new location at 659 Ellinwood Ave.

The church bought the site in June 2015 and renovations are complete. A special dedication ceremony will be held to mark the milestone at 2 p.m. April 23. It will feature music, a ribbon-cutting and visit by John E. Putnam, superintendent of the Wisconsin District of United Pentecostal Church International.

Senior Pastor Ed Herman said the church needed room to grow. It serves parishioners from seven counties and draws about 60 people per service. That number jumps to around 80 for holiday services at Christmas and Easter.

Paula Herman, Ed Hermans wife, added that some members are willing to commute to attend Turnpoint.

One lady told me, A church alive is worth the drive, she said.

Outreach

The new building was altered with one purpose in mind: To bring people closer to God through fellowship and worship.

It has an open cafe area for meetings, bible studies, live music and after-service gatherings. Like a lot of fellowship-based churches it will have coffee before and after service, along with the occasional snack or treat.

Volunteers also built Sunday school rooms and added handicap-accessibility to the womens bathroom. The sanctuary has a long open platform with space for the church band and pulpit. A drum cage in one corner ensures that percussion doesnt overpower the other instruments and vocals.

Ed Herman said a sound booth at the back of the sanctuary controls microphone volumes on instruments and the pulpit.

The finished product is a far cry from how the building looked last year. About two-thirds of the structure needed renovations ranging from new electrical to fresh paint. A garage door used to be on a wall that now makes up part of the sanctuary. Ed Herman said it was handy during repairs since crews could haul in materials and tools but it went from boon to burden when it was time to fill in the wall.

He added that the church was overwhelmed with volunteers who donated materials and time. Not everyone was a member of the church.

A lot of incredible people did a lot of incredible things, he said.

He said the church holds service on Sunday night and a bible study on Wednesdays. During summers the bible study stops to let church members volunteer at Reedsburgs concerts in the park.

Being at the concerts gives the church a chance to reach out to the community.

Ed Herman noted that, even if the congregation hadnt purchased the building, it still would have bolstered its evangelism efforts. The new church is just one way for TurnPoint to fulfill that goal.

We are very grateful but our mission is reaching people not building buildings, he said.

For more information about TurnPoint, visit www.turnpointpentecostal.org.
Earlier this month, Meyer Insurance president Lise Meyer-Kobussen received an unexpected letter from Wisconsins governor.

In it, Gov. Scott Walker identified her as a torchbearer for women, a recognition she received as part of the 2016 Governors Trailblazer Awards for Women in Business.

She is one of 14 recipients from eight counties around the state, and the only winner from Sauk County. To date, 71 Wisconsin women-owned businesses across 24 Wisconsin counties have been recognized as Torchbearers and Trailblazers.

The torchbearer designation comes from Meyer-Kobussens role as a third generation business owner of an insurance agency thats nearly 100 years old and has had women as its principles beginning with her grandmother.

The agency was started in 1919 by Meyer-Kobussens grandfather, Rolf Meyer after he returned from World War I. Her parents, Paul and Barbara Meyer, bought the agency in 1956 after Rolfs sudden death, and operated it out of the their home.

People would come to the door; theyd have to walk over my legs as I was watching TV, Meyer-Kobussen said. So my parents added on a separate entrance.

She was in college when her parents bought Meyers current location across the alley from her parents home, where she and her husband Dan live and have raised their family.

As the family business thrived, Meyer-Kobussen had other plans once she was out of college.

She lived in Washington, D.C. where she sold specialty foods to restaurants and hotels. While living there, a missionary group called Youth With a Mission visited her church.

They were part of a traveling hospital ship that visited underdeveloped countries giving medical services to poor people.

Meyer-Kobussen was hooked.

My ship came in  literally, Meyer-Kobussen said. I was one of 355 people who lived on board the ship.

She managed the ships gift shop, book store and snack bar.

After nearly 10 away from the Sauk Prairie area, she came home. Her dad had heart surgery in 1994, so Meyer-Kobussen jumped in to help out. Her sales and marketing background served as a good basis to help run the business.

Her parents retired in 1999 and Meyer-Kobussen took over managing the firm.

She said she never expected to be in the family insurance business, but since 1999, she hasnt looked back.

She immersed herself in insurance classes and got her agents license. She loved the business so much, she and her husband Dan took over as owners of the agency in 2004.

I can vicariously enjoy other peoples lives through insurance, Meyer-Kobussen said. I have long-term relationships with people. I watch their kids grow up. They all have interesting stories about their lives. You find out whats important to them.

In a press release about the Trailblazer awards, Gov. Walker highlights the importance of women like Meyer-Kobussen.

Here in Wisconsin, we have many woman-owned businesses leading the way for others like them. Its great to acknowledge these business owners for their hard work and commitment to excellence. We hope they will continue their businesses legacy and be role models to other women who are considering opening a business and creating jobs in Wisconsin.
Jerrald Jerry W. Kindschi, 86, of Prairie du Sac, succumbed to a short illness on April 14, 2016, at his home, surrounded by his loving family.

He was born in the same home on June 21, 1929, to Elmer and Grace (Gasser) Kindschi. Jerry was active in many community groups, including the Tri-County Co-op, Township Board, Bank of Prairie du Sac, Masonic Lodge, Library Building Committee, Sauk-Prairie Hospital Memorial Committee, VFW, Sauk-Prairie Historical Society, Wisconsin Crop Improvement Association, Concordia United Methodist Church and Delta Theta Sigma Fraternity.

Jerry graduated from Prairie du Sac High School in 1947 and from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1951. He served in the United States Army during the Korean War, 19521955. He was a life-long farmer on land that has been worked by his family since 1878. Hundreds of local teenagers worked their first jobs detasseling corn on the Kindschi farm.

He married Alice Schroeder on Aug. 20, 1955. They had three children, Wayne Kindschi of Prairie Du Sac, Steve (Holly) Kindschi of Prairie du Sac, and Kay (Matt) Nelson of Kasson, Minnesota. He treasured his six grandchildren, Ashley, Jared, Nicole, Eric, Hayden, and Michael, and one great-grandchild Alyce. Jerry enjoyed traveling the world with Alice and accompanying each grandchild on a special trip to a location of their choosing. His most recent trip was on the Badger Honor Flight to Washington, D.C.

Jerry was an avid historian and Civil War buff. He loved to share the history and stories of Sauk County with anyone who wanted to know.

He is survived by his wife Alice; his children; and his sister, Bonnie Wiersig of Bryan, Texas.

A funeral service was held at 11 a.m. Tuesday, April 19, 2016, at the Concordia United Methodist Church in Prairie du Sac. Burial with military honors will follow at the Sauk Prairie Cemetery. Visitation was held from 4-7 p.m. Monday, April 18, 2016, at the church with a Masonic service immediately following. Memorials are suggested to the Badger Honor Flight.

The Hooverson Funeral Home is assisting the family.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his American counterpart John Kerry met in New York on Tuesday, IRNA reported.

The meeting between Zarif and Kerry took place behind the closed doors.

The Iranian and US top diplomats were supposed to discuss the latest developments concerning the implementation of nuclear agreement and Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The US officials said that the way for resolving the Syrian crisis and Iran's assistance to this end were also among the topic of discussion between Kerry and Zarif.
A decision to shut down access to a popular Wisconsin River recreational area has some area residents disappointed, angry and in search of a solution.

For decades river recreationalists have parked their cars and launched canoes and kayaks next to a make-shift parking and launch area off County Highway N along the Wisconsin River about two miles northwest of downtown Wisconsin Dells.

In addition to blocking off the river entrance, Upham Woods is also planning on blocking access to nearby Blackhawk Island. Both areas are on property owned by the University of Wisconsin-Extension.

The property is part of the Upham Woods Outdoor Learning Center, which hosts nearly 10,000 school children a year for various outdoor learning activities. The center cited liability and safety concerns for its students as the two primary factors in deciding to shut down the launch spot.

In a letter to the Stewards of the Wisconsin Dells of the Wisconsin River, Upham Woods Assistant Director Toby Grabs said, Weve performed a risk management review and have determined that the little piece of Upham property along Highway N alongside the side channel of the Wisconsin River presents us with significant risk management issues. This is a liability concern for us. More importantly, if people are allowed to park here they can easily enter our camp unseen which is a great safety concern since we often have youth on site.

Grabs went on to say Upham Woods is working with the Juneau County Highway Department to make the stretch of road on Upham property a no-parking enforcement zone. He said signs will be installed soon and the organization will be constructing a fence as a physical and visual barrier so the public will understand it is private property and will know they cannot use it for fishing, as a boat launch or for parking.

The decision was a shock and disappointment to Stewards of the Dells of the Wisconsin River president and co-founder Debbie Kinder.

Many people, including Upham campers, have learned that the best way to see the Dells is from a canoe or kayak, Kinder said in a letter to the Dells Events. Its critical for the public to have access to the safest and most beautiful section of the Dells river corridor and the path around Blackhawk Island with its no-wake zone.

Stewards Co-Founder Easton Dreher has been conducting kayak tours on the river with his company Vertical Illusions for more than ten years. He said it is very difficult to find a safe location on the river to launch kayaks, noting that high boat traffic during the tourist season often creates dangerous wakes.

Karl Griffin has been using the location for more than 20 years to launch his kayak and was also very disappointed at Upham Woods decision. Its the only place to launch, he said. If you put in by the boat docks you have to travel all of that open water to get to the channels and this is where all of the heavy boat traffic is during the summertime.

Griffin noted that kayakers can launch at the Illinois Avenue boat docks, but said theres not really a safe place to kayak from the wharf up to the narrows. That stretch is very busy with speed boats and a lot of heavy waves from the large tour boats.

While Kinder said Grabs has done a great job of establishing excellent community relations with Dells area citizens, she said the decision to close off the area could reverse that.

The damage that will be done to community relations by denying the generous tradition of sharing the beauty of the Dells by allowing access to the river would be dramatic, she said. By building fences and calling in parking violations, Upham staff time would be diverted from the positive energy needed to manage a successful camp.

Upham Woods Director Justin Hougham said his organization is aware of the popularity of the launch site and island, but said safety is the No. 1 priority for the thousands of students who visit the camp each year.

The reality of it being like any other school ground or university property is we have to manage toward student safety, he said. Our management expectation is like that of any other school. I understand Debbies (Kinder) perspective. But we have 10,000 kids coming from all over the state whose parents expect a safe environment for their kids to be in.

Houghman said that the kayak launch site and Blackhawk Island are areas where many of Uphams kids are regularly walking and learning. Unfortunately I see packs of cigarettes, beer bottles, feces and toilet paper at both locations, he said.

Hougham added that Upham Woods has always strived to maintain a solid relationship with the Dells community noting its work with the citys Parks and Recreation Department and school district.

Theres a good story here to tell. Were a good neighbor to the kids in the Dells community, he said. We want to make sure this is a good community experience when we have visitors from all over the place.

Wisconsin Dells Mayor Brian Landers is working with both Upham Woods and The Stewards of the Wisconsin Dells to resolve the situation.

Landers stressed that the decision to close river access points is not coming directly from Upham Woods.

I dont want this to turn into a battle between the locals and Upham Woods, Landers said. This is actually coming down from the university. Uphams managers are trying to become community involved and they really want the locals to be a part of Upham Woods, but unfortunately they are just the messengers of bad news.

Landers said he is also going to talk with Kinder. Im going to be asking for the Stewards to join Upham Woods in fully understanding why theyre being asked to make these decisions.

When people are taking up landing spots that are intended to be for these kids to safely get to and out of the island, its becoming an issue for Upham Woods, he said. On top of that, the beach goers, to some degree, have themselves to blame for this because theres lots of photos of beer bottles, trash and human feces on the beach.

While The Stewards of the Dells continues to hold hope that Upham Woods will reverse its decision, the organization was conditionally approved by the City of Wisconsin Dells Parks and Recreation Committee to install a floating canoe and kayak dock at the Illinois Avenue boat docks.

The dock would be very beneficial because it gets right down to the water level so you can put the boat right off of it, Dreher said. It would be a beautiful system for the community to use.

The Stewards hopes to have the new launch dock installed in time for the summer season.
Known for its thrills, Mt. Olympus Water Park and Theme Park is looking to chill this summer with its latest, giant water attraction -- and citizens of Lake Delton and Wisconsin Dells are invited to check it out, for free.

Promising Something Huge, Something Water! on billboards across the Dells-Delton area since last fall, the waterpark, theme park and resort will make good on that promise later this spring with the opening of The Great Pool of Delphi, a 27,000-square-foot, 500,000-gallon swimming pool and water attraction.

Set to be the largest swimming pool yet in the Waterpark Capital of the World when it opens in June, according to an announcement Monday by Mt. Olympus owners Eva and Nick Laskaris, the $4-million attraction will bring a beach-like atmosphere to the area of the park along Wisconsin Dells Parkway down the hill from the go-kart track and the parks iconic Trojan Horse.

Its back to the basics, Nick Laskaris said Monday as he and his wife toured the construction site, with hints of the new pool feature already evident as construction that began late last fall picks up pace.

Weve got so much thrill already in this park, a little bit of relaxing will be good, said Laskaris.

The Laskarises were inspired to add the swimming pool feature by their visits to such world-renowned resorts as Atlantis in the Bahamas, where giant pools offer lounging relaxation alongside water slides and other water park features. The couples mutual love for the beach also was a factor in their decision.

The number one attraction in the whole world, Nick Laskaris said, is the beach, Eva Laskaris added.

Weve got the ocean over there, Nick Laskaris said, pointing toward Poseidons Rage wave pool and back toward the construction site, and weve got the lounging over here. It needs that mix.

I love lounging in the pools -- I like relaxing with a nice drink in my hand, Eva Laskaris said with a laugh.

The Laskarises hope is that both Millenials and families with children will be drawn to the Great Pool.

Our daughters are in that (Millenial) group, between age 16 and 36, and theyre excited about this, Nick Laskaris said.

The Laskarises also have been inspired to to give back to the community, in the words of Nick Laskaris. With the opening of the new pool, residents of Lake Delton and Wisconsin Dells will have free, unlimited access to Mt. Olympus outdoor water park, including the new Great Pool of Delphi, all summer long.

The idea for the local promotion stemmed in part from Nick Laskariss fond, boyhood memories of riding his bike to the local pool, he said Monday.

In most communities they have to build a municipal pool -- here, were going to have more than just a municipal pool, we have a wave pool and water slides, and it doesnt cost the taxpayer one dollar -- were giving it to them, said Laskaris, adding that the jury is still out on whether the free for residents feature might last beyond 2016.

Its aim toward relaxing notwithstanding, the giant, new pool will be accompanied by the grand flourishes that have come to characterize the park and resort complex. Those flourishes will include a 100-foot geyser, a 50-foot waterfall, four islands featuring tanning decks and a childrens splash pad, with two zero-depth, beach-style entrances and cabanas rimming the perimeter, according to the news release.

The pool will hold up to 2,000 people, and the entire pool area along the front of the park will accommodate approximately 4,000, Laskaris said.

The new pools name is inspired by the actual archaeological site in Greece, the spot considered to be the center of the world, according to Mt. Olympuss news release.
Identify thefts from businesses have become big business for thieves  and thats why the issue is on the list of important topics to be discussed May 5 at the Wisconsin Dells Police Departments third annual Business Summit at Chula Vista Resort.

The summit, which will take place from 8 a.m. until noon, will feature speakers from Wisconsins Office of Consumer Protection and Department of Justice, each of whom will seek to educate local business owners and operators in attendance about protecting their businesses from identity theft and about securing their automated and computer systems, according to Dells Police Officer Jed Seidl.

Dells Police Department officers also will be on hand to offer advice to businesses as they prepare for the coming summer season and the yearly influx of international workers  many of whom come from countries with different laws and social mores from those in the United States.

With increased public awareness of identity theft from private individuals cutting into that particular mode of crime, identity thieves have begin to prey on unsuspecting businesses, Seidl said, sometimes with dramatic results.

Its unfortunate, but the Dells-Delton area is not exempt from the potential from identify-type thefts from businesses, Seidl said. Like every business in every place, computers are a fact of life, and unfortunately with all that information out there  payrolls, business records, etc.  its a great opportunity for thieves to access that information and steal from businesses.

Using illicit copies of a businesss checks or making fraudulent phone orders in a businesss name are two of the tactics thieves have used successfully, Seidl said.

Of course, a business is going to have bigger pockets, he said. They (thieves) can make thousands of victims from breaking into one server for one business.

Protecting servers and the computers connected to them also will be discussed at the May 5 summit, he said.

Interested Wisconsin Dells business owners and operators are urged to register for the summit online at www.wdpd.com or at the departments Facebook page (www.facebook.com/pages/Wisconsin-Dells-Police-Department).

If you have any questions, call Seidl at 253-1611.
USDA announces $1 billion debt relief for 36,000 farmers

The USDA announced a program to provide $1.3B in debt relief for about 36,000 farmers who have fallen behind on loan payments or face foreclosure.
Tehran, Iran, Apr. 19

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:

The case of the murder of an Afghan girl in Iran will be addressed out of turn, says local governor Mohsen Khansari.

Citing high respect for the Afghans living in Iran, the official said Iran provides all sorts of social services for them, IRINN TV reported Apr. 19.

A few days ago, a 17-year-old Iranian boy kidnapped an Afghan girl, Setayesh Qoreishi, and horribly murdered the girl after raping her.

The murderer was soon arrested by the police and confessed to his heinous crime.

Meanwhile, the deputy head of Iran's Judiciary for social affairs, Mohammad Baqer Olfat said he will pursue the case of the murder of the six-year-old Afghan girl.

Preventive measures should be put top on the agenda at the provincial branches of the Judiciary to reduce the chances of such bitter happenings, he stressed.
Those in Armenia who spend less than $5 a day constitute 76 percent of the country's population, according to the recent World Bank (WB) report, NEWS.am website reported.

The WB considers those who spend less than $5 a day to be poor, according to the website.

"The thing is that the WB presents the poverty level with two separate standards: one, from the viewpoint of spending $2.5 a day, and the other, from the viewpoint of spending $5 a day," the website reported, adding that from the viewpoint of [spending] $2.5, the poverty level in Armenia amounted to 26 percent in 2014.

According to the Armenian National Statistical Service (NSS), poverty rate in the republic amounted to 30 percent at the end of 2014 (2 percentage points less, as compared to 2013).

"With the NSS methodology, those, whose consumption per adult was below the upper general line of poverty (in 2014, this was 40,264 drams [nearly $84] per month), were assessed as poor," the website said.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu warned Monday that Turkey could not be expected to stick to its commitments if it was not granted visa-free travel in the EU by June, Anadolu Agency reported.



Under a deal with the EU late last year, Turkey agreed to take back refugees from Greece while Turkish nationals were promised a relaxation of the visa regime in Europe.



Addressing journalists at Ankara's Esenboga Airport before his departure to Strasbourg, France, Davutoglu said he expected the visa arrangements to be finalized by June.



"If it is not carried out, no-one would expect Turkey to adhere its commitments," he said in reference to the deal, which also promised a financial package for Turkey to support refugees and fast-tracked EU accession.



The agreement allows for the return of "irregular migrants" from Greece to Turkey in exchange for Syrian refugees to be relocated within the EU. The resettlement program began earlier this month.



Last week, EU Minister Volkan Bozkir said he expected visa-free travel to be in place by June.
President's message on the Task Force on Race and Race Relations

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President Taylor Reveley sent the following message to the campus community on April 19, 2016 - Ed.

Dear William & Mary Community,

Our Task Force on Race and Race Relations has completed its report, which is now posted on the Task Force website along with a list of frequently asked questions and a related story in the William & Mary News.

As you recall, the Task Force was led by our Chief Diversity Officer Chon Glover and composed of students, faculty, staff, alumni and a member of the Board of Visitors. This group met regularly over the past year to gather information, listen to the campus community, and make recommendations. The Provost and I met with the Task Force at its final meeting earlier this month to thank its members for their hard work and discuss their recommendations.

Much thought went into the Task Forces report. We must give equally careful attention to consideration of its 51 recommendations. While that process is underway, here are steps we plan to take immediately.

William & Mary will launch a $1-million initiative to recruit new faculty members who will increase our diversity. The budget we present to the Board of Visitors this week will include $500,000 toward this goal and represents the single largest new programmatic investment we will make this coming year. We will recommend an additional $500,000 for academic year 2017-18 for an annual recurring commitment of $1 million. This is significant, but only a start. We will do more. The budget will also include $100,000 in annual support for additional staffing for the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity.

We will propose that the Board of Visitors name two prominent buildings on campus in memory of African Americans important to W&Ms past. Thus, we will recommend that one of our Jamestown Residence Halls become Lemon Hall, named after an enslaved man owned by the College in the late 18 th century. He is the person for whom our Lemon Project is named; this is a university initiative launched by the Board of Visitors in 2009 to explore William & Mary's part in slavery and segregation, as well as our current efforts to overcome that legacy. We will propose that the second Jamestown Residence Hall become Hardy Hall, named after the late Carroll Hardy, the longtime Student Affairs administrator who was affectionately known on campus as Dean Hardy. For over 15 years Dean Hardy worked tirelessly to increase the diversity of our student body through six summer enrichment programs for students in grades 8 to 12, by establishing the National Black Student Leadership Development Conference for college students, through the creation and nurture of 15 multicultural student organizations, and by founding the Hulon Willis Association, a W&M organization devoted to African-American alumni. By any measure, Carroll Hardy was a trailblazer at William & Mary. In 2012 she was elected an honorary alumna of the College.

century. He is the person for whom our Lemon Project is named; this is a university initiative launched by the Board of Visitors in 2009 to explore William & Mary's part in slavery and segregation, as well as our current efforts to overcome that legacy. We will propose that the second Jamestown Residence Hall become Hardy Hall, named after the late Carroll Hardy, the longtime Student Affairs administrator who was affectionately known on campus as Dean Hardy. For over 15 years Dean Hardy worked tirelessly to increase the diversity of our student body through six summer enrichment programs for students in grades 8 to 12, by establishing the National Black Student Leadership Development Conference for college students, through the creation and nurture of 15 multicultural student organizations, and by founding the Hulon Willis Association, a W&M organization devoted to African-American alumni. By any measure, Carroll Hardy was a trailblazer at William & Mary. In 2012 she was elected an honorary alumna of the College. We will strengthen practices for considering diversity in hiring, training and the assessment of campus climate.

We will have mandatory diversity training for faculty and staff. Student Affairs will expand diversity training for students and student groups.

An external consultant will be engaged to help us better understand the concerns of African American employees, particularly non-exempt employees in Facilities Management. The consultant will also help us develop a plan to improve workplace conditions, review wages and examine management practices.

I will appoint a committee charged with reviewing the Task Forces recommendations and developing a plan for further implementation.

As the Provost and I discussed with the Task Force members, William & Mary is committed to becoming a more diverse and inclusive university for every member of our community. W&M, because of its past, has a special obligation to do this for African-American faculty, staff, students, and alumni.



It is also worth noting that the work of our Lemon Project, begun seven years ago, has served as a model for other institutions and been unusually thorough in its research, teaching, symposia and community outreach.



Also of note, at the beginning of this school year, we decided to remove Confederate imagery from the College Mace and to move the then-existing Civil War plaque from the Wren Building to Special Collections so that we could replace it with a new plaque that lists all the W&M alumni, students, faculty and staff who fought in the Civil War whom we can now identify, including Union soldiers as well as Confederate.



Last fall when racial issues took center stage at universities across the nation, we had already formed our Task Force on Race and Race Relations. Over the course of the past year, the Task Force held six community forums with students (both undergraduates and graduates) faculty and staff. These forums helped open lines of communication more fully than ever before.

All of us  students, faculty, staff and alumni  have a role in shaping what William & Mary becomes. Its vital that we continue to take steps crucial to the health and success of our community.



Taylor Reveley
Duke Award honors Whitakers life of service

Duke Award Lydia Whitaker, business manager for the applied science department, is the recipient of the 2016 Charles and Virginia Duke Award. Established in 1997, the award honors outstanding non-student, non-instructional staff members for individual accomplishment and exemplary service to William & Mary. Photo by Stephen Salpukas Photo - of - Hide Caption

Behind the world-class scientific research that takes place at William & Mary lies a great administrative burden. Equipment must be purchased, grants must be allocated and researchers must be paid  all on an unforgiving schedule.

Lydia Whitaker has been essential to this herculean administrative effort for over 20 years now, having first served as office manager for the biology department before becoming the business manager for applied science, where she has ensured that research could continue without a fiscal hitch for 12 years and counting.

Yet her day job is but one facet of Whitakers wide-ranging contributions to William & Mary, which have included serving in countless community service and mentorship roles, being a tireless advocate for campus diversity, holding a Board of Visitors seat, and participating in a variety of staff organizations, frequently in leadership positions.

Although hers are frequently behind-the-scenes efforts, Whitakers work has not gone unnoticed. Thats why she will be receiving the 2016 Charles and Virginia Duke Award. Established in 1997, all non-student, non-instructional faculty employees of William & Mary are eligible for the Duke Award, which seeks to recognize individual accomplishment and exemplary service to William & Mary.

Award winners are recognized at the Commencement ceremony and receive $5,000. The award is not necessarily an annual one  if no one meets the criteria, then none is given.

No one doubted that Whitaker met  and exceeded  the criteria.

Simply no person I know on this campus has had such a wide-ranging and positive impact on the collective life of the College, Professor and Chair of Applied Science Christopher Del Negro wrote in a nomination letter. Ms. Whitaker is far more than an excellent administrator for the College, but a mentor, friend, champion and leader who deserves recognition for her exceptional service and contribution to the William & Mary community and the community at large.

Service is in my genes

Born to a military family in Spokane, Washington, Whitaker lived in several military towns but mostly grew up in the Denbigh neighborhood of Newport News. Her familys commitment to their community, wherever they were at the time, deeply influenced Whitaker.

My parents were always involved in the community and helping, Whitaker recounted. My mom always collected food and clothing for those in need, and even my grandmother advocated to bring water and sewage utility service to the Richneck Road area, close to where Fort Eustis is now. So, its genetics  service is in my genes.

When her husband, Early Whitaker, retired from Army service, Whitaker looked back to Virginia to start the next chapter of her life.

I decided to come back home. With no job, nothing, just on a prayer, I came here in July 1995, and in August of 1995, Eric Bradley hired me as a temporary employee in the biology department.

With that, Whitaker was off to the races. Bradley permanently hired Whitaker as biologys full-time office manager a few months later, and Whitaker began her decades-long career of service at William & Mary.

She immediately became involved with the Black Faculty and Staff Forum  now an all-inclusive organization called The Forum  serving as its co-chair in 1997 and president in 2000. Whitaker organized and served as emcee for the annual Black History Trivia Contest, and has served as a mentor for the Center for Student Diversity.

Whitaker served as president of the Staff Assembly from 2012 to 2013, during which time she sat on the Board of Visitors and advocated for staff and hourly William & Mary employees. And, just this past year, she served on the Presidents Task Force on Race and Race Relations.

Indefatigable, Whitaker also actively gives back to the greater Williamsburg community in a variety of roles. She has organized collection efforts for the March of Dimes for nearly 20 years and routinely volunteers to feed the homeless around Williamsburg and Hampton Roads.

A commitment to others

Of all her contributions to campus, perhaps the most significant is her commitment to fellow members of the William & Mary community as individuals.

Lydia  has served as a guide and genuine mentor to many of the College staff. What is less well known is her personal interaction with our students that goes beyond the formal office setting, Bradley said in a nomination letter. Well before the College had established the current programs to support our underrepresented minority students, Lydia was there  hard at work. I recall many students (and staff from all departments) dropping in to visit Lydia for what was actually advice and counsel.

From almost her first day at William & Mary, Whitaker has had a special way with coworkers and students.

I must have confidential written across my forehead because I will have students and other people come in and say, Can we talk for a minute? This wont go anywhere else, will it? Whitaker said. People seem to find me.

And she stays in touch with those she has affected.

Eric now is a pediatrician with his own practice, one of the twins is now a college professor in upstate New York, and there are quite a few business owners, Whitaker recounted. These are all past African-American biology students who would just stop by and talk. They have all done very well.

These relationships, by no means part of her job description, exemplify Whitakers substantial footprint at William & Mary.

You dont have to genius or a billionaire to serve. One hour a month is all it takes, Whitaker said. I think we are on this Earth to help one another.
W&M announces actions to improve diversity, race relations on campus

Task force at work: Members of the Task Force on Race and Race Relations engage in discussion during a meeting. Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Task force at work: Members of the Task Force on Race and Race Relations engage in discussion during a meeting. Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Diversifying the faculty: As part of the effort to increase faculty diversity, W&M has included $500,000 in next years budget, and another $500,000 will be recommended for 2017-18. Artisia Green, pictured here, is an associate professor of theatre and Africana studies and was a member of the task force. Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Jamestown renamed: The president also said he will propose to the Board that W&M rename the two Jamestown Residence Halls, which opened in 2006 and border Jamestown Road. Photo by Stephen Salpukas Photo - of - Hide Caption

William & Mary plans to commit $1 million to recruit a more diverse faculty, President Taylor Reveley announced today. The effort is just one of several immediate actions the university will take based on recommendations from the Task Force on Race and Race Relations.

The university also plans to rename two buildings to more fully reflect African-American history at the university, hire a consultant to explore the concerns of employees and strengthen practices that promote diversity in hiring, training and assessment of campus culture.

As the provost and I discussed with the task force members, we are committed to making William & Mary a stronger, more diverse and more inclusive university for every member of our community, Reveley said in a campus message.

After creating the task force last spring, Reveley charged it with providing recommendations in four areas: campus climate, prevention and education, recruitment of diverse faculty and senior administration, and bias reporting and incident protocol. The task force, led by Chief Diversity Officer Chon Glover, submitted its report to Reveley at the end of March 2016 with a list of prioritized recommendations. It is now available on the task force website.

We have sought out, and heard from, faculty, staff, alumni, administrators, students and community members, the report says. We have analyzed, debated, and discussed our findings. We have reached out beyond the W&M walls, looking across the country to see what other universities are doing and have done. We have also critically reflected upon the actions of institutions whose failures have made national headlines. We have found ourselves, at times, saddened by what we have learned but we have also found ourselves inspired to purposefully commit to the task at hand.

Immediate actions

Although Reveley and other campus leaders are still in the process of reviewing the report and its recommendations, the president has already committed to implementing several immediate actions, including the initiative to recruit new faculty to increase W&Ms diversity. As part of that effort, the university has included $500,000 in next years budget, which will be presented to the Board of Visitors this week. The recruitment initiative would be W&Ms single largest new programmatic investment for academic year 2016-17, Reveley said. Another $500,000 will be recommended for 2017-18 (for an annual recurring commitment of $1 million) as well as $100,000 for additional staffing and programming support next year for Glovers Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity.

This is a significant step, but in my view, only a start, Reveley said.

In his campus message, the president also said he will propose to the Board that W&M rename the two Jamestown Residence Halls, which opened in 2006 and border Jamestown Road.

One would become Lemon Hall, in memory of an enslaved man owned by William & Mary in the late 18th century and for whom the universitys Lemon Project is named. Established by the Board of Visitors in 2009, the Lemon Project is an ongoing research initiative that is exploring William & Marys involvement in slavery and segregation and its ongoing relationship with the African-American community. While very little is known about Lemon himself, his name represents an effort that has become a model for other universities looking to study, acknowledge and learn from their past history. In many ways, Lemon stands in the place of the known and unknown African Americans who helped to build, maintain and move the College forward, the project states on its website.

The other residence hall would become Hardy Hall in recognition of the late Carroll Hardy, a longtime administrator in student affairs who made an indelible impact on diversity at the university. Dean Hardy, as she was affectionately called by students in the 1980s and 90s, is credited with being a tireless advocate for diversity at W&M and improving the campus experience for students of color. Hardy joined W&M in 1980 as associate dean of multicultural affairs and served in several different capacities, including associate dean of students for minority and commuting student affairs and associate dean of student affairs. Among her many accomplishments at W&M and beyond was the establishment of the National Black Student Leadership Development Conference for college students across the country. She also founded the Hulon Willis Association for African-American students and alumni, worked to increase diversity of W&Ms student body through six summer enrichment programs for students in grades 8 to 12, and helped create and support 15 multicultural student organizations at William & Mary. Hardy, who received honorary alumna status at W&M, passed away in 2012.

The consultant who will be retained to understand the concerns of African-American employees will take an especially close look at non-exempt employees in facilities and management and will help the university develop a plan to improve workplace conditions, management practices and wages. William & Mary will also conduct a periodic campus climate survey to help identify and address potential issues. Additionally, William & Mary will have mandatory diversity and inclusion training for faculty and staff and expand diversity training and education for students and student groups.

Reveley will also appoint an implementation team to review the task forces recommendations and develop a plan for future actions.

Work of the task force

The 21-member task force included faculty, staff and administrators (several of whom are also alumni), students and a member of the Board of Visitors, organized into four subcommittees around the four areas of Reveleys charge.

The task force began meeting monthly in March 2015 and, throughout the year, focused on four tasks: discussing current programs and practices at William & Mary, hosting six on-campus forums on the universitys racial climate, reading and discussing feedback from the community received on the task force's website and examining events related to race and race relations across the country both on university campuses and beyond.

The task forces report includes 10 prioritized recommendations, including several related to the presidents announced immediate actions such as renaming campus buildings to more fully reflect the diversity of the W&M community; retaining an outside vendor to understand the concerns of facilities management staff; implementing diversity and inclusion training for faculty, staff and students; institutionalizing a periodic campus climate survey; and appointing an implementation team.

The other prioritized recommendations from the task force include:

Creating a vice president of diversity and inclusion position

Increasing diversity among faculty and senior administrators and demonstrating commitment to that goal with a $35 million investment of resources

Implementing an Incident Information System that unites the universitys existing reporting channels under one gateway, engages in appropriate review and referral of all reports with consideration for freedom of expression and provides annual reports of its activity

Realigning current university resources and identifying private support to fund the implementation of the recommendations

The report includes a total of 51 recommendations. A soon-to-be-named implementation committee will begin its work as soon as possible, and review what other actions are possible in the near term, what are long-terms goals for the university and which recommendations need further analysis or modification.

Some of our recommendations are easily achievable; many, however, are not, the report says. Nevertheless, we believe that this current historic moment -- one in which issues of race and inclusion appear almost daily on the front page of newspapers everywhere -- represents an enormous opportunity. The Task Force report includes recommendations that urge William & Mary to seize the moment, to be proactive rather than reactive, and to become a national leader on issues of race and race relations, here our campus and beyond.

More to be done

William & Mary has been striving to become that kind of leader through such efforts as the Lemon Project, the removal of Confederate imagery from the campus last year and the task forces campus forums, Reveley said in his message. However, the university still has much to do, as outlined in the report.

Last fall when racial issues took center stage at universities across the nation, we had already formed our Task Force on Race and Race Relations. Over the course of the past year, the task force held six community forums with students (both undergraduates and graduates), faculty and staff. These forums helped open lines of communication more fully than ever before, and we are committed to continuing that dialogue, Reveley said.

All of us  students, faculty, staff and alumni  have a role in shaping what William & Mary becomes, he said. Its vital that we continue to take steps crucial to the health and success of our community.
US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter told his Saudi counterpart that the two countries should deepen bilateral cooperation on training for special operations and integrate missile defense systems, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said in a statement on Monday.

"Carter identified several areas where the United States and Saudi Arabia can deepen their security cooperation for the benefit of both countries, such as enhancing training for special operations and counterterrorism forces, integrating air and missile defense systems, bolstering cyber defenses, and strengthening maritime security," Cook said.

The US defense secretary met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh ahead of a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit in the Saudi capital this week.

The Pentagon statement noted that the two leaders also discussed mutual security issues, "including checking Iranian destabilizing activities in the region and countering violent extremism" from groups like Daesh.

Carter is expected to review a number of counterterrorism agreements with GCC leaders during his trip to the Middle East.




China News on Women





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Headline changed, details added (first version posted on 14:12)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

Trend:

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov can visit Iran in 2016, RIA Novosti reported Apr. 19 citing the Russian president's special representative.

Iran and Russia are discussing the possibility for Lavrov's visit to Tehran, said Zamir Kabul, the Russian president's special representative for Afghanistan, and director of the Second Asian Department at the Russian Foreign Ministry.

He added that the date of the visit hasn't been discussed yet.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Russia and the US have no right to put terms before Turkey for the Turkish-Syrian border's closure, Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.

He said the situation on the border with Syria is Ankara's internal issue, TRT Haber news channel reported Apr. 19.

"Only Turkey has the right to settle the situation within its borders," said Davutoglu.

The Turkish-Syrian border is the only hope of the Syrian refugees, who are fleeing from the war in their country, he said.

It was earlier reported that the US President Barack Obama and the Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed a number of issues, including the Turkish-Syrian border's closure during their last phone talk.

Currently there are more than two million Syrian refugees in Turkey. Syrian refugee camps in that country accommodate about 300,000 people. The rest of the refugees are spread throughout the provinces and cities of Turkey. In Istanbul alone, there are currently 40,000 refugees from Syria.

Syria has been suffering from an armed conflict since March 2011, which, according to the UN, has so far claimed the lives of over 220,000 people.

Militants from various armed groups are confronting the Syrian government troops. The "Islamic State" (IS, aka ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) and Jabhat al-Nusra are the most active terrorist groups in Syria.

Edited by SI

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
IAEA sees improved regulation in Bulgaria

19 April 2016

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Bulgaria's nuclear safety regulatory system has improved significantly in recent years but its high staff turnover remains a concern, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) peer review mission has concluded.

The IAEA Integrated Regulatory Review Service (IRRS) team, led by Marta Ziakova of the Slovak Nuclear Regulatory Authority, yesterday concluded a seven-day mission to Bulgaria. The team were making a follow-up mission to assess the regulatory framework for nuclear and radiation safety in Bulgaria, reviewing developments since a previous mission in 2013.

The review was carried out at the invitation of the Bulgarian government by a nine-member team comprising experts from the nuclear regulatory bodies of Germany, Greece, Norway, Pakistan, Slovakia and Slovenia as well as three IAEA experts.

"The Bulgarian Nuclear Regulatory Agency (BNRA) followed up on the earlier mission with a comprehensive action plan that led to significant progress in all areas," Ziakova said whilst presenting the team's preliminary findings. "Among improvements are a clearer division of responsibilities between BNRA and the Ministry of Health."

This improved division of responsibilities as well as strengthened coordination and cooperation between BNRA and the Ministry of Health has "reduced the risk of duplication or gaps in regulatory work", the team said.

The IRRS team also found that BNRA has strengthened its inspection process, upgraded its management system and substantially improved emergency planning arrangements, including by establishing systematic emergency training.

However, Ziakova said the team noted "that more work is needed in some areas, such as staff retention". The IAEA-led team suggested the BNRA should continue negotiations with relevant authorities "for sufficient financial resources that would allow for competitive salaries".

The mission also suggested the Ministry of Health should consider developing a systematic program to ensure that all areas it regulates are covered by inspections within a given period.

BNRA chairman Latchesar Kostov said, "The IRRS follow-up mission was beneficial and effective in assisting a continuous improvement of the Bulgarian regulatory infrastructure."

The IRRS team will present its final mission report to the Bulgarian government in about three months.

The IAEA offers the IRRS as a peer review service to strengthen and enhance the effectiveness of national nuclear regulatory infrastructures whilst recognizing the ultimate responsibility of each state to ensure safety in these areas. An IRRS mission is preceded by a pre-mission phase including a self-assessment by the regulator under review. A follow-up mission allows the host country and IRRS review team to assess progress in implementing any recommendations and suggestions, as well as providing an opportunity to identify additional technical and policy issues for review, to identify further good practices and provide input for the review of IAEA safety standards.

Bulgaria has six nuclear power reactors at its Kozloduy site, of which two are in operation and four are being decommissioned. Nuclear energy contributed almost one-third of the country's electricity production last year. Bulgaria also has used fuel storage sites and radioactive waste facilities, as well as numerous users of radioactive sources in the industrial, research and medical fields.

The BNRA was established under the Safe Uses of Nuclear Energy Act 2002 and took over the functions of its predecessor, the Committee on the Safe Use of Atomic Energy for Peaceful Purposes, originally set up under a 1985 Act. The NRA is responsible for both regulation of nuclear installations in relation to safety and radiation protection, and also the management of radioactive wastes. The Ministry of Health is also involved with radiation protection, and determines relevant standards.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
GE-Hitachi to exit laser enrichment JV

19 April 2016

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Australian company Silex Systems is considering taking an equity position in Global Laser Enrichment (GLE), the exclusive licensee for its laser uranium enrichment technology, after GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy announced its intention to exit the company.

GLE is a joint venture between GE (51%), Hitachi (25%) and Cameco (24%) and has exclusive rights to commercially develop the SILEX laser isotope separation process technology developed by Silex Systems under an agreement signed in 2006.

In 2012, the company received a construction and operation licence for a full-scale laser enrichment facility - the first ever granted anywhere for such a plant - from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The first phase of a three-phase program to commercialize the technology - a test loop demonstration - was successfully completed at GLE's facility in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 2012. The second phase of the program, including economic and engineering validation for the initial commercial production module, began the same year.

GLE was selected by the US Department of Energy (DOE) to enter contract negotiations on the construction of a laser enrichment plant at the DOE's former gaseous enrichment site at Paducah, Kentucky to re-enrich its inventory of high-assay depleted uranium tails. Although those negotiations are continuing, the pace of commercialization activities was slowed in 2014 when GLE underwent restructuring.

Silex Systems CEO Michael Goldsworthy said that the relationship had been a productive one and that his company respected GE-Hitachi's decision to exit GLE, which was precipitated by a change in business priorities at GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy. "Whilst this is disappointing, we are encouraged by interest from within the nuclear industry and opportunities that may eventuate once the nuclear fuel markets recover from the current downturn," he said. "We believe this is a game-changing technology which can enter the market and make a difference to nuclear fuel economics as nuclear power inevitably comes back into favour in an emissions constrained world," he added.

In response to GE-Hitachi's decision, Silex Systems is considering increasing its direct participation in the development project and is negotiating a term sheet with GE-Hitachi that would effectively give Silex the option to take an equity position in GLE, the company said in a statement. No information was given on the timing of GE-Hitachi's exit from GLE, but Silex said that the material terms of any GLE restructure will be announces as soon as discussions are finalized.

Silex also said that it is "reviewing the possibility" of contributing up to AUD 10 million ($7.8 million) of funding for ongoing activities at its laser facility at Lucas Heights, Sydney and at GLE's Wilmington facility to ensure that the current budget for 2016 continues to be adequately funded while discussions are held with potential investors.

Laser enrichment uses a laser beam to preferentially excite the uranium-235 isotope in gaseous uranium hexafluoride, which can then be separated. Its proponents claim that it has the potential to be more efficient than the centrifuge enrichment technology that is currently used to produce enriched uranium on a commercial scale. The principles of the SILEX (Separation of Isotopes by Laser EXcitation) process were formulated by Goldsworthy and Horst Struve in the early 1990s, but the technology is classified under US and Australian law.

Cameco, which acquired a 24% share in GLE in 2008, remains supportive of the project. "We continue to believe laser enrichment has potential and are supporting Silexs efforts to restructure and secure new investment," a Cameco spokesman told World Nuclear News.

Silex said that it "remains positive" with respect to the medium-term prospects for the technology, particularly with the Paducah commercial plant opportunity. "That said, at this point in time there is no guarantee of obtaining new investors for GLE given current market conditions," it said.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
Joanna Giannouli

By: Mahesh Sarin

A young woman in Greece, revealed that she was born without a womb and private parts, a condition that afflicts one in around 5,000 women across the globe.

27-year-old Joanna Giannouli of Athens, said that when she was 17 years old doctors made a surgical cut in her body in order to be able to have sex.

Giannouli was taken to a doctor when she turned 14 years old because she did not get her period. The doctor did not want examine her, and when she turned 16 years old, she was sent to a hospital to be checked out.

Doctors at the hospital then realized that she is suffering from Rokitansky syndrome, as she was born without a womb, cervix and upper vagina.

When she turned 21 years old, Giannouli got engaged, but when her fiance learned about her condition, he dumped her.

When she turned 22 years old, Giannouli finally found love.

Her current boyfriend knows about her condition, and he decided to stay in the relationship despite knowing that she will never have children.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

The European Parliament (EP) acts in the interests of the Armenian lobby by calling Turkey to recognize the events of 1915 as the "Armenian genocide," said Devlet Bahceli, chairman of Turkey's Nationalist Movement Party.

This call has no meaning since there was not only the "Armenian genocide" but also any genocide towards other nations, noted Bahceli.

On Apr. 14, the EP called on Turkey to recognize the events of 1915 as the "Armenian genocide".

Armenia and the Armenian lobby claim that Turkey's predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, committed the so-called genocide against Armenians living in Anatolia in 1915.

While strengthening the propaganda of "genocide" in the world, Armenians achieved its recognition by parliaments of some countries.

Edited by SI

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Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Lake (illustration)

By: Feng Qian

Prosecutors in Austria, announced that they have filed charges against a man who did not rescue a drowning teenager.

The teenager died after she jumped into a lake naked for a midnight swim.

The man who accompanied the girl, is being charged by the police after he did not call for help and instead, tried to cover up the incident.

The tragedy happened along at the Traunsee Lake in Gmunden, where 19-year-old Johanna P. was out with her 21-year-old friend.

The two had allegedly been drinking together before they went out for a walk on a small wooden pier, where Johanna decided to jump into the lake for a swim.

When she did not resurface, her friend panicked. He allegedly grabbed his clothes, the womanas cellphone and other valuables, and ran away from the scene without calling for help.

Police allege that when he got home, the man destroyed the womanas phone and tried to pretend that nothing had happened.

Prosecutor Christian Hubmer said that man is facing charges for failing to provide assistance, damaging property and trying to cover things up.

aHe did not even call emergency services, and when he finally owned up, he said that the two had been drinking heavily. He apparently panicked because he believed that it was partly his fault that the teen had decided to go for a swim and he had not stopped her,a Hubmer said.
Helium balloons (illustration)

By: Chan Yuan

A wedding guest was rushed to a hospital after helium balloons that he was holding in his hands exploded.

The incident took place before the wedding of Maria R. in Austria, where part of the celebration involved the bride being welcomed loudly by a group of single men.

In preparation, the group of young men filled balloons with helium and tied them to a fence on a lawn, where the wedding was to take place.

The men said that they planned to pop the balloons all at once when the bride arrived.

However, the fun ended in disaster when 18-year-old Andreas W. was burned when two balloons he was holding suddenly exploded.

Andreas was taken to a hospital by air ambulance about 3:20 p.m. The wedding was supposed to begin at 4:00 p.m.

Andreas was taken to a hospital in Salzburg, where he was treated for first and second-degree burns to his upper body and hands.

Andreas missed the wedding, and he remained in the hospital for a day.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 19

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Turkish police have listed four suicide bombers as wanted, the Haber7 newspaper reported Apr.19.

Reportedly, the suicide bombers, who are the members of the "Islamic State" (IS aka ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) terrorist group, illegally entered Turkey's territory from Syria.

All of them are Turkish citizens, said the newspaper citing the sources in the country's intelligence service.

Earlier, Turkey's intelligence service warned about the possibility of new terrorist attacks in the country.

Turkey faced deadly terrorist attacks in March.

On March 13, a car bomb attack in Ankara left 37 people dead. Istanbul was also targeted by a suicide attack on March 19, leaving five people dead. Turkish authorities have accused the IS, the PKK and the PYD terrorist groups for the attacks.

Edited by SI

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Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Innovative New Business Degree Will Allow Students to Earn as They Learn

This article is old - Published: Tuesday, Apr 19th, 2016

Students will soon be able to earn as they learn by signing-up to an innovative new degree.

North Wales Business School (NWBS) launches its Applied Business programme this September, offering students two days of education at Wrexham Glyndwr University and three days of work at a top local company each week.

The undergraduate offering will see them become permanent members of staff receiving full employee benefits, as well as learning fresh skills and leaving after three years with a BA (Hons) qualification.

It will also appeal to those who are already in employment but who are keen to improve their business acumen or move up the ladder in their current role, with NWBS working side by side with each firm on interviewing candidates and assessing them at the end of each semester.

Among the topics included are management accounting, digital marketing, employment law, supply chain operations, sales theory and practice, corporate governance and economics.

Programme leader Claire Blanchard is urging businesses and prospective students to get in touch and join them in preparing the next generation of graduates for the world of work, before theyve even graduated.

Speaking about the new course, Claire said: This is an exciting and ground-breaking way to study which we believe will appeal to people from all backgrounds and sectors.

At Wrexham Glyndwr we care about our students from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave, and for the rest of their lives as they enter the workforce and follow their chosen career.

This is the first step in that relationship and gives them an edge on other people looking to enter into the same industries as they are, given that they will already have vital work experience and be earning a wage as well.

The University launched North Wales Business School six months ago and it is already going from strength to strength, with the number of applications up to 20% ahead of this time last year.

Professor Chris Jones, Head of NWBS, said: The Applied Business degree is one of several new courses we have in place that are designed not only to educate but to ensure our students are job-ready when they eventually graduate.

As a School we have grown and brought in more people with real industry experience from consumer psychologists to others in event management and with years of experience in banking.

There is a really positive vibe within the School, our lecturers have bought into the University vision and their passion is rubbing off on our students. This led to 25% of them passing modules in the First Class honours classification (according to 2014 figures), which is 5% higher than the national average.

He added: We are flexible and meet the needs of our students, we dont tie them down to long degree courses if that does not suit them or their employer. We can offer education in steps that make life easier for people; we are open to those wanting to take bits of education and become lifelong learners.

The Business team was received high praise last year after it was recognised by the Awarding Body at The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) for delivering first-class academic quality at postgraduate level. The CIM commended the University for the excellent standard of results achieved for assessments submitted in the summer.

Businesses wanting to find out more can email Laura Gough: l.gough@glyndwr.ac.uk.

For those interested in studying Applied Business at NWBS call 01978 293439 or email enquiries@glyndwr.ac.uk for further information.
Man Found By Road Following Serious Assault in Ruabon

This article is old - Published: Tuesday, Apr 19th, 2016

UPDATE: This appeal has since been withdrawn after investigations found the injuries were due to a fall, rather than involving another individual  more here.

Original information below

A man is in hospital following a serious assault in the Ruabon area of Wrexham early this morning.

Earlier this morning there were a number of reports of heavy police activity around to the north end of Park Road with an area cordoned off with police tape.

A spokesperson for North Wales Police has since confirmed that enquiries underway in the Ruabon area following a serious assault in the area in the early hours of this morning.

The victim, who is in his late 20s, was found on the main B5605 road through Rhosymedre, just after 4am today by a passing motorist.

Police say the male is being treated in hospital as a result of the incident.

DI Boycott, from Wrexham CID, said ; Anyone who may have witnessed the incident or has any information should call the police on 101, quoting reference U055767.

Thanks to Matthew for sending in the above picture of the taped off area.
The effects of El Nino in farmlands are getting worse. (Photo : Reuters)

The Mekong Deltas worst drought which has affected most of Vietnams crops may be caused by several man-made reservoirs, some Mekong River conservationists declared.



According to the Asian Correspondent, the southern portion of the Mekong Delta had been at the receiving end of the effects of the worst drought that hit the river.



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While the Chinese government tried to supplement water to Vietnamese farmers' crops by ordering a release of water from the Mekong Delta dam, it appears as though they are actually the ones responsible for the worsening effects of the dry spell.



Effects of the Drought



The Mekong River is 4,900 kilometers long and is responsible for sustaining livelihood of about 60 million people in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.



Among these livelihoods include farming, an industry that Vietnamese farmers thrive from. But because of the extreme drought being experienced in the area, farmers like Nguyen Van Thach who grow sugarcane in their farm are left without anything to survive on.



Talking to Reuters, the 62-year-old farmer said he had decided to quit sugarcane farming because his crops, aside from being withered, are too salty even for cows.



Apparently, the Mekong Delta was hit by salination because the record-low level of waters in the Mekong River allowed seawater to enter about 90 kilometers inland.



One of the worst hit areas is Vietnam, a major exporter of rice, pepper, coffee, fish and shrimp all over the world.



According to government tallies cited by Reuters, preliminary crop loses reached as much as 5.57 trillion dong or $250 million as of April 14.



Blaming Man-made Reservoirs



Authorities and government officials placed the blame of this worsening calamity to the obvious culprit: the El Nino weather phenomenon.



However, conservationists cited by the Earth Island Journal believe that most of the blame should be put on the dams built upstream of the Mekong River located within China's borders.



According to Chiang Khong Conservation Group head Niwat Roykaew, the drought is a result of the erection of six major man-made reservoirs that were keeping the water from flowing through the field lands of Vietnam.



"The Mekong River has a cycle," he said. "Rainwater in the monsoon season refreshes the snowpack and raises water levels. Snow melts in the dry season when the water levels are low. We don't need more water from dams in the dry season. We need to sustain the natural circle that feeds the ecosystems and our livelihoods."



Several environmental groups have called for a halt in dam constructions and operations in a bid to save the Mekong River.



An advocacy group based in the U.S. known as Pianporn Deetes of International Rivers told Reuters that the Mekong was "held hostage by hydropower development."



"The dams are killing the Mekong Delta. A shortage of fertile soil is the unavoidable death," Can Tho university speaker Duong Van Ni said.






Two weeks after the Brussels attacks, which claimed 32 victims and wounded hundreds, six suspects were detained, including Mohamed Abrini, Europes most wanted man after the arrest on March 18 of Salah Abdeslam, wanted for the November 13 attacks in Paris.

The Brussels attacks exposed stunning failures of Belgian and European intelligence. As early as December, a police report in Malines had given Abdeslams location, but Abdeslam was not arrested. Belgian intelligence had also received intelligence from Turkey and Israel identifying the Islamist forces around Abdeslam who were likely to have been his accomplices on November 13, and in the preparation of attacks in the Brussels airport and subway.

Abrini was known to police for having contacts in radical Islamist and jihadist circles in Molenbeek-St Jean in Belgium. He was suspected of having played an active role in the Brussels attacks, as his DNA was found in two safe houses in the Schaerbeek neighborhood used by the terrorists, and also of being the third man in a hat seen in security camera footage at the Brussels airporta point he then confirmed to investigators.

In his defense, Abrini said he was forced to get into the taxi with the El Bakraoui brothers, who carried out the bombings, to go to the airport. He claims he fled after hearing two explosions, that he never went to Syria and that he would not hurt a fly.

According to British press reports, he had pictures of areas of the city of Birmingham on his mobile phone, which has led some to speculate that Islamist networks may now target cities in Britain.

Abrini is suspected of having left to go to Syria in the summer of 2015. Investigators have alleged that he probably went to Syria in June 2015 and probably did not spend much time there. According to Le Monde, Abrini reappeared on the intelligence services radar screen in the days following the November 13 attacks. He is suspected of having made two trips from Brussels to Paris with the Abdeslam brothers in the days before the attacks, to rent rooms at Bobigny and Alfortville that served as safe houses for the terror squads.

The Brussels prosecutor has revealed the identity of two other suspects, Osama K and Herve B M. Osama K was reportedly wanted under the alias, Naim Al-Hamed, on his false Syrian passport. He allegedly arrived in Europe in the flow of refugees from Syria on the Greek island of Leros on September 20, 2015. He was accompanied during this trip by Ahmed A (Mounir Ahmed Alaaj), who was arrested on March 18 in Molenbeek with Salah Abdeslam.

The sixth person to be arrested had just finished serving a prison sentence in Belgium after returning from Syria, according to Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens.

Based on the Belgian police report, Mohamed Abrini and Salah Abdeslam were very rapidly identified as having participated in the Paris attacks. Abrini was able to remain hidden in the Brussels area, Le Monde claimed, because he most likely had enough accomplices, while the investigative services had not yet identified him.

These revelations again point to the astonishing failures of the Belgian and NATO intelligence agencies. Abrinis accomplices were known to them, as were their aliases and their locations, yet they did not arrest themand that, even though refugees fleeing the Syrian war were strictly monitored at European Union borders, often numbered as if they were detainees of Nazi camps, and then subjected to deportation or the confiscation of their savings.

In contrast, Osama K and his associates were able to use their false passports to go to Belgium, even though at least one of them had already been arrested by Turkish authorities.

These intelligence underscore the political significance of the support given by layers of the intelligence services to the Syrian war and the Islamic State (IS) militia. They used Islamist terrorist circles to carry out a war against the Assad regime as a proxy force for the imperialist powers. The terrorists were able to travel to Syria and return to Belgium without trouble from police, establishing a vast network in Europe to send radicalized youth to Syria.

Defeats suffered by IS and Al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq, and Washingtons tactical turn closer to Moscow on the Syrian issue have somewhat relieved pressure on the Assad regime, and Islamist elements originally supported by France in Syria are now turning on their imperialist allies.

The reactionary character of the imperialist intervention in Syria and of the forces mobilized in this war emerges clearly in the bloody attacks in France and Belgium. The Islamist forces are inflicting on the European public the type of bloody attack that they initially inflicted, with the aid of US and European intelligence agencies, on Syrian cities. As for the intelligence agencies, they seem overwhelmed by the vast network of Islamist fighters that they helped spawn and in which they are complicit.

All the attacks in Europe were committed by terrorists well known to the intelligence services, who played down or closed their eyes to the danger posed by attacks prepared in Europe.

While the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly, the team involved in the Charlie Hebdo attacks, were well known and considered dangerous by French intelligence, Coulibaly was able to obtain weapons from Claude Hermant. He was a weapons dealer, a member of a far-right paramilitary group associated to the far-right National Front, and also a police informer.
Global oil prices initially fell sharply after the collapse of talks between major oil-producing countries in Doha on Sunday, sparking fears of a return to the market turbulence that characterised the first two months of the year. Prices then steadied yesterday on the basis that supply would fall because high-cost producers were starting to be forced out of the market.

The failure of the talks, which had been expected to result in an agreement among the worlds major suppliers to hold production at last Januarys levels and stabilise the market, came after Saudi Arabia made an about-turn and insisted that Iran had to be part of the deal.

Before the talks began, the Iranians had signaled they would not take part in any restrictions until their production returned to the levels reached before the imposition of sanctions that were lifted in January. On the eve of the meeting, Irans oil minister Bijan Zanhaneh said the reality of the countrys return to the oil market should be accepted. If Iran freezes its oil production  it cannot benefit from the lifting of sanctions, he said.

According to the International Energy Agency, Irans output was 400,000 barrels higher in March than it was at the start of the year. Iran has indicated that it wants to add a total of one million barrels of production this year.

Saudi oil minister Ali al Naimi appeared to have agreed that Iran would not be a part, at least initially, of any agreement. Delegates to the meeting said they had expected the Saudis to rubberstamp the deal. According to a report in the Financial Times, a senior delegate of the oil group, OPEC, said last month the Saudis would comply with a curb on production, even without Irans involvement.

However, when the talks opened, a second draft of the agreement was circulated. Directed against Iran, it indicated a freeze would only take place as long as all OPEC members and major exporting nations were unanimous on a deal.

This shift followed a major intervention by the 30-year-old Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the second in line to the throne and the countrys defence minister. Bin Salman has been given wide powers by his father, the king. As well as being the youngest defence minister in the world, he has been placed in charge of the state oil monopoly. The New York Times reported in January that his swift accumulation of power and influence had upended the usual power balance within the vast royal family.

In an interview with Bloomberg, bin Salman insisted Saudi Arabia would not hold back production unless all oil producers, including Iran, did the same. He warned that his country could increase production immediately if we wanted to.

The crown princes intervention is directly related to the ongoing rivalry between the Saudi regime and Iran. One of his first actions after being appointed defence minister in 2015 was to organise the Saudi military intervention in Yemen against the Iranian-supported Houthi rebels.

The chief area of contention is Syria, where Saudi Arabia is working for the ousting of the Assad regime, which is supported by Iran.

The political tensions and conflicts were reflected in the responses to the break-up of the talks. They had been organised on the basis of an agreement in mid-February between Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and Qatar that something be done to halt the slide in oil. At one point earlier this year, the price fell below $30 per barrel, compared to the high of $115 per barrel as recently as June 2014. In the wake of those discussions on an output freeze, the price of oil rose to over $40 per barrel.

After the failed meeting, Russias oil minister, Alexander Novak, said he was surprised some OPEC members put forward new demands at the meeting. He added, in a thinly veiled criticism of Saudi Arabia, that Iran was not the cause of the collapse of the talks. Russia is allied with Iran in its support for the Assad regime in Syria.

Qatars oil minister Mohammed bin Saleh al-Sada tried to smooth over the differences, telling a press conference that the group of nations assembled at the meeting needs more time to reach an agreement. The next scheduled gathering is the OPEC meeting on June 2. That meeting will involve Iran but not Russia, which is not a member. Some OPEC members said if Iran agreed to join the production freeze at that meeting then talks with non-OPEC producers could resume.

While the failure of the talks appears not to have caused too much immediate turbulenceoil prices rebounded after initially falling by as much as 7 percentthe underlying instability of the market, fuelled by both political and economic tensions, remains.

In comments issued on the eve of the talks, oil industry historian Daniel Yergin, now vice-chairman of the market consultant IHS, said the fundamental issue was money because the revenues of oil-exporting countries had collapsed.

In 2014, OPEC revenues were about a trillion dollars. Last year, they were half a trillion dollars. This year theyre on a course to be down another 20 percent, he said. This creates inordinate pressure on governments. Very difficult choices have to be made. Budgets have to be cut, credit ratings go down. There is a risk of social turmoil and problems.

Besides the Saudi crown princes concern to deal a blow against Iran, these pressures may well have been at work in his intervention. In an interview with Bloomberg earlier this month, bin Salman set out a plan for establishing a Public Investment Fund (PIF) that will eventually control some $2 trillion. This would involve corporatising the state-owned oil giant Aramco and transferring its shares to the PIF, so that investments would become the source of Saudi revenue rather than oil sales.

The restructuring of the Saudi economy has already begun with a series of measures, taken at the end of last year, following the oil price plunge, to cut government spending and raise the price of fuel and electricity. Bin Salman told Bloomberg that the investment plan would be very aggressive and the PIF would be the worlds largest fund.
After just seven months in office, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull today announced he would ask the governor-generalthe head of statefor a double dissolution election for all seats in both houses of parliament, most likely to be held on July 2.

At his media conference, Turnbull said it was his intention to make a formal request to the governor-general to dissolve the House of Representatives and the Senate for such an election once the government had delivered the annual budget, which has been brought forward to May 3.

As a result, Australia is facing the first double dissolution election in three decades, and only the seventh since the country was established as a federation in 1901. Normally only half the Senate, the upper house of parliament, is up for re-election.

The Liberal-National Coalition governments manoeuvre is a desperate attempt to break the parliamentary logjam in which its austerity measures have been blocked by the opposition Labor Party and the Greens, along with so-called independents or crossbenchers.

Amid a worsening economic situation, the government has been under intense pressure from the corporate and financial elite to slash social spending and conduct a broad offensive against wages and working conditions. At the same time, it faces intense popular opposition to further inroads into living standards, which the opposition parties and crossbenchers are seeking to exploit.

The immediate pretext for the election was a vote by the Senate yesterday for the second time to reject a government bill directed against construction workers. This gave the government the constitutional triggertwo rejections of a bill passed by the lower houseit needed to call such an election.

Turnbull set the stage for yesterdays parliamentary sitting via a proclamation issued on March 21 by the governor-general, recalling parliament for an unscheduled three-week session to demand that the Senate pass the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) Bill, or face a double dissolution.

By 36 votes to 34, the Senate last night rejected Turnbulls ultimatum. Only hours after the parliament reconvened, four so-called independent senators joined Labor and Greens to defeat the bill, which would reestablish a body with draconian powers to interrogate construction workers, under threat of imprisonment, for taking any form of industrial action.

The selection of the ABCC bill as a double dissolution trigger is a warning of the governments underlying agenda. While presented as a measure directed against the construction trade unions, the bill is aimed squarely at building workers themselves. It is part of the governments attempt to address the demands of big business for a wider offensive against workers conditions and basic legal and democratic rights.

Immediately prior to the March 21 proclamation, the Turnbull government, supported by the Greens in the Senate, pushed through changes to electoral laws designed to make it more difficult for minor parties and independents to win seats in the upper house. The aim is to purge the Senate of crossbench senators.

Turnbulls manoeuvres could seriously backfire, however. Half a year after Turnbull deposed his predecessor Tony Abbott, who had failed to break through the political impasse, the Coalition government is increasingly discredited and unpopular. The election could well result in another hung parliament like that of 201013, with neither the Coalition nor Labor able to gain a majority in the House of Representatives, or a Labor victory.

Moreover, a double dissolution election will halve the statewide quota of votes normally needed to win a Senate seat, lowering it from about 14 percent to 7 percent of voters. Despite last months changes to the electoral laws, this could result in a greater number of crossbench senators being elected.

The extraordinary election move points to an intensifying political crisis. Not only is the government facing demands from big business for tough austerity measures, but it is under pressure from Washington to play a more aggressive role in the US pivot to Asia against China. In particular, the US is pressing for the Australian military to join in so-called freedom of navigation operations to directly challenge Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea.

These demands have only intensified the dilemma confronting the Australian ruling class which is heavily reliant on China as its biggest export market, but remains dependent on the US as its longstanding ally to defend its strategic interests. Turnbull has just returned from his first trip to China as prime minister where he had to walk a fine line between promoting Australian business interests while at the same time toeing Washingtons line on the pivot.

Yesterday, however, Turnbull underscored the governments agreement with Washington to meet another US demand, for increased military spending. On the first day of what has effectively become a 10-week election campaign, he announced the local construction of a new fleet of naval patrol boats.

The government and the media presented this as a jobs announcement. Turnbull declared that the boat contracts would directly secure more than 2,500 jobs for decades in South Australia and Western Australia. It was blatant pork-barrelling in two states where the Coalition fears heavy electoral defeats.

But the announcement is also part of a $40 billion commitment to build 42 new warships, including frigates, over the next decade. Within weeks, the government is also expected to name the successful bidder from competing Japanese, German and French contractors to build a $50 billion new submarine fleet.

Throughout the election campaign, every effort will be made by the political and media establishment to continue burying from public view the US preparations for war against China, and Washingtons escalating pressure on the Australian government to step up its involvement in the confrontation.

Nevertheless, the naval shipbuilding program is a warning that, amid the political crisis, the danger of war is escalating. In recent months, Labor has publicly called for Australian warships and planes to participate in the US-led freedom of navigation operations against China.

For electoral purposes, Labor, which began the slashing of health, education and welfare under the 200713 governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, is attempting to capitalise on the popular discontent by making an anti-austerity pitch.

Labor leader Bill Shorten yesterday declared that Labor stood for decent jobs, better schools and healthcare, not vested interests and the big banks. In reality, Labor has assured the financial markets that it is committed to austerity. In response to last weeks warning of a credit rating downgrade by Moodys, shadow treasurer Chris Bowen swiftly pledged to heed the message and take the tough decisions needed on revenue and spending.

In a revealing incident yesterday, Shorten was compelled to join the chorus of condemnation of one of his senior shadow ministers, Steven Conroy, for criticising the role of Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove in using his constitutional powers to summons the parliament to re-assemble yesterday.

Conroy had raised the spectre of former Governor-General Sir John Kerr, who invoked the reserve powers of the British monarchy to dismiss the Whitlam Labor government in 1975. Shorten sprang to Cosgroves defence, saying: The governor-general has one of the most important roles in our democracy and that should be respected by everyone.

The extreme sensitivity of the political establishment to any reference to the 1975 coup is an indication of the depth of the current crisis and the recognition in ruling circles that the broad, undemocratic powers held by the governor-general might have to be used again.
Several of us from the World Socialist Web Site, Sybille Fuchs, Stefan Steinberg and myself, spoke for some time to Stephen Parker, author of a new biography of the German playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life. We posted a review of the work yesterday.

Parker, professor of German at the University of Manchester, is articulate and thorough in conversation, as he is in print. Even when we expressed sharp disagreements with his views, he remained gracious and thoughtful.

Our interview was carried on between participants in three countriesGermany, the UK and the US. Stefan Steinberg opened the conversation by asking Professor Parker about his background and the intellectual origins of the Brecht volume. Parker explained that the book emerged out of his focus on German culture and history and, specifically, research into postwar society in East Germany (or the German Democratic Republic, GDR).

In the course of that effort, Brecht was constantly present. Parker had found important material on the writer, he explained, in the archives of both the German Academy of Arts, which existed (under various names) in East Berlin until reunification, and the East German literary journal Sinn und Form (Sense and Form).

He told us, I gained a very different view of Brecht after the wara view at odds with the presentation of Brecht as a socialist classic author developed by the SED [Socialist Unity Party, the ruling East German Stalinist party] government after his death.

Parker went on, There were many ways in which Brecht was a heretic rather than a follower of the partys doctrine of Socialist Realism. The experience of working in the archives made me realise I had something new to say on Brecht. In the early 2000s, he developed the idea of writing a biography of the writer, a huge project that would eventually take him five years.

We praised the book for its readability and its comprehensiveness, at the same time as we indicated we did not see eye-to-eye on a number of important issuesWe have very definite views on Stalinism, on so-called Socialist Realism and East Germany.

Parker thanked us for our praise. He noted that his aim was to produce a book that was informative and enjoyable. He aspired to generate a vantage point, in the tradition of famed Henry James biographer Leon Edel, by virtue of a modulation between critical distance and empathy for the subject in question. You can talk about important issues in economic history, and then go on to talk about related issues in aesthetics.  Essentially Brecht was a committed artist. His was an imaginative engagement, an aesthetic engagement with critical political, social and economic issues.

In response to a question about Brechts generally hostile reception in East Germany after he returned from exile in 1949, Parker expounded in some detail his understanding of the writers relationship to the Stalinist authorities.

Parker explained that he had obtained access to confidential GDR files stamped for the eyes of ministers only. What those files made clear, he suggested, was that cultural figures such as Brecht who returned from exile in the West to East Berlin had aesthetic assumptions which did not correspond with those held by the group that came back from Moscow, i.e., the leadership obedient to Stalinist policies and put in power in East Germany by Soviet troops.

The hostility of the Stalinist officialdom in the postwar period had a pre-history, Parker commented. When Brecht was editor of Das Wort [The Word], a literary journal published in Moscow (the playwright was then a refugee from the Nazis in Denmark), numerous attacks were launched against him by pro-Stalinist figures such as Alfred Kurella and Georg Lukacs. Brechts experimental approach was deemed virtually unusable, our interviewee observed.

He added that the only way to understand a work like [Life of ] Galileo Brechts play about the Italian scientist under attack by the Catholic Church and its Inquisition in the 17th century, a drama written after the genocidal Moscow Trialswas to see it as a response by the playwright to the enormous pressure exerted by the Stalinists on him to recant his views.

Parker continued, After the war, Brechts position was quite untenable for the GDR bureaucracy and Brecht scholars in East Berlin, such as Werner Mittenzwei and Ernst Schumacher, really doctored the record, to put it bluntly. The first version of Galileo [written in Denmark in 1938] remained unpublished until 1988.

The pre-war disagreements between Brecht and the Stalinist political and artistic authorities were merely a prologue to what took place in East Berlin, and some of the same political-cultural figures were involved. The recent publication of letters to Brecht demonstrates just how far the editors in Moscow were pursuing the campaign against Brecht and which figures recur in postwar East Berlin. The person who orchestrated things was the [East German Stalinist leader] Walter Ulbricht. Parker said, I would maintain that the SED leadership in Moscow never wanted Brecht in East Berlin.

Stefan Steinberg raised the issue of Brechts attitude to the workers uprising in Stalinist East Germany in June 1953. The first thing that Brecht did publicly, Steinberg commented, was to write a letter to Ulbricht giving unconditional support to the party [the Stalinist SED], suggesting that the two men do a joint radio programme. In your book, you cite Brechts many often scathing comments about Stalin and Stalinism before the war. After all, some of Brechts closest collaborators in the USSR were picked up, persecuted and even killed in the course of the purges. But at the same time, publicly Brecht always maintained his loyalty to the Stalinist party. How do you account for this disparity, based on your research?

In his reply, Parker addressed himself first to Brechts relationships with the GDR Stalinist apparatus, arguing that Brecht was put under huge pressure prior to the June 1953 events, when a strike by East Berlin construction workers over threatened wage cuts sparked strikes and protests throughout the country against Stalinist repression and anti-working class measures.

Parker described a series of actions the East German regime had taken, starting in the autumn of 1952, against Brecht and his company, the Berliner Ensemble. So it very much looked like Brecht was on his way out, they didnt want him. This was the cultural prong of the SEDs pursuit of its policy Aufbau der Grundlagen des Sozialismus [Building the Foundations of Socialism].

As for Brechts offer to Stalinist leader Ulbricht, at a time when tens of thousands of workers were expressing their opposition to conditions in the socialist GDR and the policies of the SED, Parker argued it was part of a consistent theme in Brechts writings of the time, where he insisted that there had to be a great conversation with the people conducted by the [Stalinist] party. That request was included in his letter to Ulbricht as part of his proclamation of support. It was then cut along with other elements of the letter for publication, making it look as if Brechts letter was simply a bare statement of support. Brecht was furious.

Brecht had come to view SED cultural policy, Parker observed, as being in some respects similar to Nazi cultural policy. This included the use of crude language like das Volk [the folk, the people], and the determination to eradicate what proponents of Socialist Realism, just as Nazi cultural figures, called decadence. This term referred to the avant-garde and modernist types of art produced by Brecht and his supporters. Ulbricht had no clue how to mount a great conversation. He was a figure who was incapable of carrying people with him.

If this is true, of course, it is even less excusable that Brecht would seek to proclaim essential support for such a reactionary regime and its policies.

Parker pointed out that the June 1953 revolt, suppressed by 20,000 Soviet troops and 8,000 East German police at the cost of dozens of lives, led to the SED bureaucracy backing off, in some shock for a couple of years, on the cultural front. They only returned to the offensive after the autumn of 1956 after Brechts death. Parker offered this overall defense of the playwrights relationship to the Stalinist regime: He was not always direct in his challenges to power, and who could be?

Along the same lines, Parker took note of Brechts many critical comments about Stalin, the Soviet Union and the Moscow Trials. I think its clear that by 1938, Brecht was taking a very different view on the Moscow Trials compared to the position hed taken at the outset of 1936. He took the view that Stalinism had become a reactionary phenomenon and that Stalin was behaving more like a monarch than the leader of the Marxist-Leninist revolution.

However, Parker continued, Brecht would never go public on these issues because he felt there was a greater loyalty, i.e., to the first socialist state formed by workers revolution. This was, of course, the false reasoning of many left intellectuals and artists in the 1930s.

Parker then pointed to the writers personal situation: Brecht could see no other force that would enable him one day to return to his country from exile than the Red Army. The Red Armys actions remained a very important point of reference for him until 1945, so I dont think it is hard to see how Brecht sought to maintain his loyalty to the first and only socialist state that could combat fascism.

It is not hard to see, but that does not make it correct. Brecht was unable, like many of his artistic contemporaries, to orient himself to the working class as an independent revolutionary force, acting apart from the bureaucracy that dominated it and claimed to represent socialism and the heritage of the October Revolution. As was made clear in the review of Parkers biography, there was of course a viable alternative in the perspective of Trotsky and the Left Opposition.

At this point, Sybille Fuchs remarked that Brechts attitude towards Stalinism and the KPD [Communist Party of Germany] is a very complex question. On the one hand, the playwright was loyal to the October Revolution, and, on the other hand, he tries to criticise the bureaucracy. As we know, she pointed out, Brecht praised Trotskys writing, but at the same time disagreed with his politics.Why did Brecht reject Trotskys position? What do you think of Brechts attitude to Marxism?

This is Professor Parkers response in full:

This is a great question and I cant give an answer that would be completely satisfactory. I have to admit here to real limits in sources, and I did not want my book to speculate. For me, the complexity and ambivalence are very much part of a predicament. Understanding that predicament adds up to a position of integritydoing what a person reasonably can in a situation.

I wondered about Trotsky again and again while reading everything I could find. I was fascinated that figures such as Fritz Sternberg [left-wing German sociologist and social critic] visited Trotsky, and visited Brecht around the same time. There was huge anxiety on Brechts part about being seen to take up Trotskys position because it would have cut him adrift from the focus of loyalty towards the Soviet Union. He was a German writer in exile and wouldnt take that step.

You rightly point out his great praise for Trotskys writings and also his rejection of Trotskys policies, and his view in 1927 that Stalin had taken the appropriate position. Did he study Trotskys works? Almost certainly. He cites Trotsky approvingly in the stories that he writes. I think one can look more into that. I did some work on this, but I didnt feel I could say more than I did.

The echoes of Trotsky are quite strong when it comes to the discussion of the predicament of the heretic in Galileo. A colleague wrote some years ago that Galileo is really a cypher for Trotsky. I dont think one can go that far, but there are parallels, also with [Nikolai] Bukharin [Bolshevik leader executed after the third Moscow Trial in 1938]. Brecht studied the protocols of the Show Trials and used Bukharins statement at the conclusion of his trial.

I then commented that a satisfactory answer to Brechts simultaneous admiration for Trotskys writings and rejection of his revolutionary internationalist views could only come out of a historical and cultural objective analysis of what was a predicament bound up with some of the great tragedies of the 20th century.Our aim is not to demonise Brecht or anybody else for their failings.

We were familiar with Brechts justifications (echoed by numerous others) for remaining within the Stalinist fold at the time, but, I said, we reject those arguments because, in fact, Stalins policies continuously weakened the Soviet Union: the massacre of the Bolshevik cadre; the Stalinist betrayals of the working class in Spain and France, China, Britain and above all Germany. Brechts public refusal to state what he knew to be the case wasnt simply an individual issue. Artists around the world tragically took the same position. This was an enormous historical and political problem. The Marxist tendency received savage blows in the 1930s and 1940s, from both fascism and the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy.

I added that I felt there were artistic consequences from Brechts relationship with Stalinism and his attitude toward Hitlers rise to power. Brecht, I suggested, alternated between the view that Hitlerism was the inevitable outcome of German history, on the one hand, or that the German population was responsible for that defeat, on the other, and that this pessimistic outlook colored his subsequent work. In our view, this leaves aside the parties and tendencies that were responsible for that defeat. I think that is a big question.

I argued that while Brecht was unquestionably the major playwright of the 20th century, it is his early works that interest me the most, that are the most flashing, fascinating and lively. The defeat in 1933 and his exile leads to work that while it is more technically interesting, is less lively, spontaneous and innovative.

Parker agreed that there were certainly consequences of remaining loyal to the Soviet Union. Its documented on a horrific scale and Brecht saw that clearly before the war. He didnt speak out and that would always be held against him. He did not make that break. Why? Parker then returned to his previous argument, to the effect that Brecht viewed the USSR as the only force capable of defeating Nazism  He wasnt convinced by Trotskys policies, and that a fragmented revolutionary left could combat fascism.

He also enjoyed those early unfettered and spontaneous works, Parker acknowledged. But they were dangerously unfettered for him personally. Brecht was living out an instinctual life and realising that he couldnt sustain the consequences. This was an issue in the 1920s which I write about, in terms of his body and his relationship to his body. I refer to a sort of biophysical determinism which underpins much of his writing and gave it a sharply satirical edge. Quite a lot of that survives in exile, and his anti-fascist satires.

Parker argued that Brecht did some of his finest work following his exile. In my opinion, he said, the short scenes in Furcht und Elend [Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, also known in English as The Private Life of the Master Race] are amongst Brechts finest writing.

He added, The works from Galileo onwards until 1943 have a definite tone. They were works of someone in exile who was seeking to survive and they are marked by a confessional, personal quality and also a complexity related to the understanding of his predicament, which didnt diminish in the early years of the war.So I dont see him in that period entering into artistic compromises which were inimical to his development.

Sybille Fuchs commented that in going through Brechts work she was always struck by the complexity of his artistic personality. He can be quite the pedagogue, thinking about how the spectator should behave and how the actor should play the role. On the other hand, in his lyrics, he is very spontaneous and warm-hearted, as in his early playsbut at other times didactic and formally political.

Parker concurred that Brecht was a very complex individual, described once as the most complex human being in the past 50 years. He lives out that complexity in his writings and forces contradictions apart. His was a life beyond most lives led. There is an extraordinary combination of acute intelligence and artistic sensibility, which for me relates so much to his relationship to his body, and the acute sense that one must live in the here and now. So we have that enormous spontaneity, an incredible lyrical agility, but also a sensibility from a very early stage which seeks to give shape and form to artistic experience, to achieve a distance to the material from which one can better understand experience.

Toward the end of the conversation, I returned to the question of Brechts relationship to Stalinism, as it related to his artistic and theatre theories. Faced with the Stalinization of the Communist Party and the series of catastrophic defeats suffered by the working class, I suggested that Brecht sought to use theatrical technique to get around what were essentially problems of political perspective. One of the chief problems was that he was in the orbit of the Communist Party, which was primarily responsible for the defeat of the German working class. In other words, the issues he was taking on could not be resolved by theatrical technique and organisation alone. He wanted to make his theatre a substitute for a revolutionary party and that could not be done. The problems were profound ones of leadership, perspective, party and programme within the working class.

Parker then reiterated his contention that Brecht was not that close to the Stalinist party and had never joined it, and maintained a very wide range of relations, with people such as Sternberg, Walter Benjamin, Karl Korsch and others. These relationships were all part of a bigger, fuller picture; one which I think can help us to overcome some of the limitations we have been encouraged to adopt. Consider Brechts treatment of the German revolution and his great respect for Rosa Luxemburg. The German Communist Party, as it was organised in Moscow, was an important point of reference. Theres no doubt about that. But after 1935 it was out of the question for Brecht to seek exile in Moscow.

He concluded: I believe that Brechts artistic innovations were primarily driven by an artistic sensibility and not by a political imperative. For Benjamin, Brecht was the key writer of that time who actually succeeded in reconciling aesthetic and political concerns.

On that note, having expressed our appreciation to Stephen Parker for his time, we finished our conversation. As we hope the reader will agree, the lengthy discussionwhich we could only present in partcovered some vital issues of 20th century art and politics. Clarifying these issues is essential to the rebuilding of an international socialist culture in the working class, to which the World Socialist Web Site is dedicated.
The Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers union (RMT) and the train drivers union ASLEF have backed a Leave vote in the June 23 referendum on British membership of the European Union.

They claim that their stance offers a left-wing alternative to the official line of the Trades Union Congress, which is backing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and his campaign in support of a Remain vote.

Corbyns assertion that the EU provides jobs and protection for workers is exposed by the devastating austerity imposed on Greece and other countries by the big business bloc, as well as its brutal treatment of refugees fleeing the wars which Britain and the other European powers have played a lead role in stoking. But RMT General Secretary Mick Cashs claim that the rail unions are standing up for the tradition of progressive and socialist opposition to the EU is equally bogus.

Writing in the Stalinist Morning Star, ASLEF General Secretary Mick Whelan argued that the rail unions were in favour of a Brexit because proposals from Brussels will be bad for Britain in general and bad for the railway in particular.

This is in reference to European Commission plans to privatise large swathes of public services through legislation such as the Fourth Railway Package and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) it is negotiating with the US.

Likewise, the RMT argued that it would be frankly ludicrous to support staying in a bosses club that seeks to ban the public ownership of our railways, attacks the shipping and offshore sectors, and embraces the privatisation of the NHS and other essential services that our members depend on.

The two unions claim that continued membership of the EU would prevent a Corbyn-led Labour government from renationalising Britains railways. Neither attempt to square this claim with Corbyns own statements in support of the EU. Moreover, their own opposition to privatisation is purely verbal.

The trade unions did not lift a finger in opposition to the privatisation of British Rail by the Conservative government almost 20 years ago. Instead, they diverted opposition to the measures into support for Tony Blairs Labour government, which then escalated the Tories privatisation offensive to include track, signalling and stations and initiated a series of Public Private Partnerships (PPP). This included the part privatisation of the London Underground infrastructure, through the creation of Metronet in 2003, which collapsedat huge public expensein 2007.

In 2012, when the then Conservative-Liberal Democrat government adopted the McNulty report aimed at slashing jobs and wages, the rail unions were forced to organise protests. These were quickly wound down when the unions were given a consultation role with the Rail Delivery Group (RDG) staffed with company CEOs tasked to implement the cuts.

The following year the RMT was again forced to organise a 48-hour strike in the face of militant opposition from workers to the imposition of Driver Only Operations at London Overground Rail Operations Limited, which threatened the elimination of 130 safety-critical conductor jobs. The RMT went on to help organise the elimination of these posts.

This is a pattern of betrayal that has continued in the last year. In June 2015, the RMT called off a national strike by 16,000 Network Rail workers and agreed to an Efficiency and Improvement Project to deliver savings.

Just weeks before announcing their support for Brexit, the rail unions had collaborated with Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnsonwho leads the right-wing Vote Leave campaignin closing all 265 London Underground ticket offices and pushing through 24-hour Night Tube working.

Whelans claim that his union will not campaign alongside, or stand on any platforms with, any of the racist, xenophobic and misogynist supporters of the Tory and UK Independence Party (UKIP) dominated Leave campaign is worthless. Whether or not the rail unions appear in public with these forces, nothing fundamentally distinguishes their support for a Leave vote from those they nominally criticise. They oppose the EU not from the standpoint of developing a unified movement of workers across Europe against its big business agenda, but on the nationalist grounds that the interests of British capital can be better served outside.

Last month the RMT organised a campaign to protest the take-over of the Northern Rail franchise by Germanys Deutsche Bahn, in which it attacked the Tory government from the right. Complaining that the Union Flag waving Conservative government has just handed over the operation of the North of England railways to the German state railway, its stunt consisted of flying the German flag over various Northern Rail stations. There was no appeal to German workers for a joint offensive against privatisation.

This is just one of a series of similar nationalist stunts. In 2009, faced with widespread job losses on the railways, the RMT initiated an anti-German campaign, accusing Deutsche Bahn of striving for world domination. In 2011, 1,400 jobs at the Canadian-owned global transportation manufacturer Bombardiers plant in Derby were threatened after the then Conservative/Liberal government awarded Siemens the 1.4 billion contract to build passenger trains.

The RMT opposed a joint struggle with Bombardier and Siemens workers in the UK, Germany and throughout Europe. Instead Bob Crow, the late general secretary of the RMT, complained of the government, Its no good them running around with a Union Jack  saying Britains Best and then transferring the work to somewhere else.

One of the outcomes of such nationalist divisions enabled Bombardier in February 2016 to announce 7,000 job cuts across the world: 3,200 of those will be lost in its train division in Berlin.

Before his death in 2014, Crow had been the figurehead of the No2EU electoral coalition, involving the Socialist Party and the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), and its later incarnation, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. Both these organisations specialised in promoting left nationalism in the service of a faction of the British bourgeoisie. This had earned Crow the praise of UKIP leader Nigel Farage who boasted, Bob and I get on remarkably well  He is 100 percent a British patriot 

Writing in the right-wing Tory Spectator magazine Allie Renison, from the Institute of Directors, bemoaned Crows passing under the headline, Eurosceptics have lost a valuable general.

When the time comes for an Out campaign in Britain, Bob Crows voice will be sorely missed, she said. Many on the right were counting on him to bring home votes not just from the left but from the broader disaffected working class, who neither the Tories nor UKIP could reach.

It is these traditionsof class collaboration and nationalismto which the rail unions really belong. Small wonder that Farage welcomed the announcement by the RMT and ASLEF, stating he was encouraged by their decision. He knows who his allies are.

It is in opposition to the reactionary nationalism of both the Remain and Leave camps that the Socialist Equality Party has taken the principled decision to call for an Active Boycott of the Brexit referendum.

As its statement explains, Against the national chauvinism and xenophobia promoted by both sides in the referendum campaign, the working class must advance its own internationalist programme to unify the struggles of workers throughout Europe in defence of living standards and democratic rights. The alternative for workers to the Europe of the transnational corporations is the struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe.
On Saturday, French President Francois Hollande arrived in Lebanon as part of his four-day trip to the Middle East, visiting Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan.

Hollandes visit to Lebanon reportedly focused on official talks regarding the Syrian refugee crisis, the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. What emerged from these talks is the increasing inability of the imperialist powers to effect any change in policy to address the catastrophic consequences of their bloody wars in the region, particularly in Syria and Iraq.

In Lebanon, Hollande met with parliament speaker Nabih Berri and Prime Minister Tammam Salam. Since the six-year term of President Michel Suleiman ended in May 2014, Lebanon has been in political crisis, unable to elect a president and with a deadlocked parliament as the Syrian crisis spilled over to Lebanon.

In a joint press conference with Berri, Hollande urged the election of a President. I want to visit Beirut again when there is a president in Lebanon but the issue lies in the hands of Lebanese lawmakers who should resolve the deadlock and elect a head of state, he said.

In Beirut, Hollande expressed hypocritical sympathy to Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria stoked by the United States, France, and other major NATO powers, while insisting that refugees should not come to Europe.

What these families want is not to go to Europe, but to return home as quickly as possible, he declared at the Dalhamiye camp.

He announced token plans to support refugees in Lebanon, which is now home to about 1.5 million Syrians, or one-fourth of Lebanons population. He announced 100 million in aid over the next three years supposedly helping Syrian refugees in Lebanon, and visited an informal Syrian refugee camp in Lebanons eastern Bekaa Valley.

Hollandes pose of solidarity with Syrian refugees and Frances minimal aid reek of hypocrisy. It was aimed at covering up Frances responsibility in the unpopular war for regime change that produced the Syrian refugee crisis, and where the NATO powers trained Islamist terror networks that are now carrying out attacks in Europe, including in France and Belgium.

But it is France and the other NATO powers that bear the principal responsibility for monumental crimes against the Syrian people in the course of their proxy war. The Syrian conflict has claimed over a quarter of a million Syrian lives. Over 3 million people have fled from Syria, and 6.5 million are internally displaced within the country.

The response of the European powers to Syrian refugees fleeing to Europe is now mass deportation. At the Munich Security Conference in February, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls publicly attacked the initial German policy in the Syrian refugee crisis of allowing Syrian refugees in Europe to travel on to Germany as unacceptable to France.

Hollande also announced plans to strengthen military cooperation with Beirut: France stands with Lebanon and is keen on consolidating security in Lebanon through military cooperation.

Hollandes proposal for military cooperation with Lebanon comes after Saudi Arabia announced in February that it would scrap a $3 billion grant for the Lebanese Army to buy French weapons. The Saudi-funded Donas military aid program was announced in December 2013 by the late King Abdullah and signed between France and Saudi Arabia at the end of 2014.

At the time, Paris and Riyadh saw military aid to Beirut as essential in order to boost influence and aggressively counter Syria and Iran. France was taking a bellicose stance against the Syrian government, aggressively pushing for air strikes against Syria before the United States suddenly decided not to carry out a full-scale attack. After France sought to reorient its policy and develop closer ties to Iran after Tehran signed a deal with Washington over its nuclear program, French relations with Saudi Arabia rapidly worsened, however.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders held their final campaign events Monday before the April 19 New York primary, which will choose 291 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Most polls show Clinton with a double-digit lead in New York, but Sanders has been closing the gap in the final days, which have featured a series of large rallies in New York City attended by a total of more than 80,000 people.

A Gravis Poll published Sunday night showed Clinton up by only six points, 53 percent to 47 percent. Meanwhile an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed Clinton up only two points nationally, 50 percent to 48 percent. This is the latest of several polls showing Sanders and Clinton in a near tie nationally, in terms of the preferences of Democratic Party voters and Democratic-leaning independent voters.

Clinton has a lead of about 250 convention delegates, but needs to win by large margins in New York Tuesday, and in five other East Coast states a week later in order to maintain or increase her lead.

Clintons edge in New York polls is due more to the rules governing the primary than to her eight years as a US Senator in the state. Unlike Michigan and Wisconsin, where Sanders won, registered independents cannot vote in the Democratic primary in New York. The deadline for registered independents to re-register as Democrats was October 25, 2015, nearly seven months ago. Previously unregistered individuals could register as Democrats only until March 25, 2016.

The Sanders campaign has publicly downplayed its chances of an upset victory. An email sent out by the campaign on Monday noted the Gravis Poll result, then added, We dont have to win New York on Tuesday, but we have to pick up a lot of delegates. This poll shows that if we keep fighting, we may actually have a chance to do both.

The 2016 campaign is the first in 40 years in which a New York primary has been significant for either big business partys presidential nomination. A sizeable victory would strengthen the position of the two frontrunners, Clinton on the Democratic side, and billionaire Donald Trump on the Republican side.

Clinton was elected to the United States Senate from New York state in 2000 and 2006, and won the state easily over Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential primary. Only a few months ago, most media pundits took it for granted that Clinton would win New York, but Sanders comes into the state having won eight of the last nine contests, most of them caucuses in Western states but culminating in a sweeping victory in the Wisconsin primary April 5.

Sanders self-identification as a democratic socialist and his rhetorical condemnations of social inequality and the billionaire class have found a broad popular response in New York among younger voters and among many workers. Clinton is widely regarded as the representative of the corporate and banking elite.

The Vermont senator is expected to win significant support across the upstate region, dominated by auto, steel and other heavy industries in deep crisis. Clinton aims to win her largest margins among minority voters in New York City, particularly Brooklyn, the Bronx and Harlem, where she has the full support of the Democratic Party machine and most elected officials.

The Clinton campaign has focused almost entirely on appeals to identity politics, including middle-class women as well as black and Hispanic voters. The former Secretary of State closed her campaign in Manhattan Monday with a rally featuring three other female endorsers: US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, former US Representative Gabrielle Giffords and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.

Clintons remarks to the rally focused almost exclusively on domestic policy, particularly education, equal pay for women and abortion rights, although she found time to condemn the Chinese government for its one child policy and to pledge to defeat terrorism, and ISIS in particular by building a coalition of nations to stand with us.

The former Secretary of State made no reference to the announcement Monday that the Obama administration is sending additional troops to both Iraq and Syria, or to the horrific death toll among refugees fleeing the war zones in which US warplanes and drone-fired missiles are laying waste to country after countryIraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, among others.

Bernie Sanders was likewise silent on the widening scope of US military intervention in the Middle East as he addressed much larger crowds than Clinton in the four main boroughs of New York City. He kicked off the final stretch of the New York campaign with a rally estimated at 18,500 in the Bronx; followed by last Wednesdays rally of some 30,000 at Washington Square Park in Manhattan; a rally Sunday afternoon at Prospect Park in Brooklyn attended by 28,000; and a final get-out-the-vote rally Monday evening at Hunts Point in Queens, where at least 5,000 turned out.

At Prospect Park, Sanders was introduced by Representative Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii, and by actor Danny DeVito. The crowd, as has been the case at Sanders rallies all over the US, was motivated largely by anti-corporate and anti-establishment sentiment.

On Monday morning, Sanders walked through 15 blocks of midtown Manhattan, stopping traffic and being hailed by many passers-by. The main event was an appearance on the picket line of Verizon workers at a corporate office in midtown, where Sanders addressed the strikers over a megaphone, appealing to economic nationalism.

We will not tolerate large profitable corporations sending jobs to low wage countries, he said, throwing American workers out on the street, cutting back on health care benefits, and then playing their CEO $18 million a year. He added, That is the kind of greed that is destroying the American middle class.

Sanders is a bourgeois candidate operating within one of the oldest capitalist parties in the world and has made no proposals that threaten the present economic and social system or the profits of the banks and corporations. His campaign is designed to trap the leftward movement of millions of working people and youth inside the Democratic Party.

At a Monday night rally in the borough of Queens, Sanders attracted about 5,000 supporters. The World Socialist Web Site spoke to a number of those who had come to hear the candidate.

Tahir, a small business owner, said, These people who control the system, who are behind the curtain, didnt expect the number of people who are supporting this candidate. From the point of view of the common people, we dont worry about a label. You have to have a home, food on the table and a job with decent wages, whatever you call it, progressive or liberal or socialist.

The fact that nobody talked about socialism for so long is not good. If the system that isnt working is capitalism, then we need a way a challenge it, whatever it is called. There has to be a sustainable income to support everyone, whether it is a wage or a federal supplement because a lot of people are losing their jobs or their pay is going down. There should be a system that protects them. Sometimes its more important to save the people who dont have things. But in the capitalist system theyre only concerned about people at the top who do have things.

Charles Favre, 73 years old, told the WSWS: The issue is that both parties feed from the corporate trough and Sanders is against politics heavily invested in the status quo. The one issue that has touched every American was [the economic crisis that began in] 2008. It goes beyond race, gender, ethnicity, gender preference. Every politician is shacked by funding from the status quo. Sanders is beholden only to the voters.

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The overnight visit to Rome by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to address a Vatican conference and meet for five minutes with Pope Francis was the occasion for a mixture of mockery and head-scratching in the American media.

The visit certainly invited ridicule: Sanders conduct was both undignified and demeaning. He left New York barely an hour after his Thursday night debate with Hillary Clinton and flew for seven hours to Rome, arriving less than an hour before his 15-minute speaking slot at a conference reportedly focused on economic inequality and hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

After his remarks, along with those of two Latin American presidents, Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Evo Morales of Bolivia, a message arrived that the Pope would not be attending the event. The Vatican announced that there would be no meeting between Sanders and Francis.

Sanders adjourned to his apartment in a papal guest house, where he dined with several bishops and waited hopefully for a sign from Gods purported representative on earth. This duly arrived: if he was outside the popes apartment the next morning at 6 am, the pontiff would deign to greet him on his way out the door.

The brief encounter took place. Senator and pope shook hands and exchanged a few words, then each rushed off to his respective chartered jet. Sanders flew west to New York City to rejoin his campaign, Francis flew east to Greece for a photo op at a refugee detention camp on the island of Lesbos.

There was a serious and politically illuminating aspect to this entire episode. Sanders and Pope Francis are engaged in parallel missions in which each sees association with the other as providing mutual benefit.

The pope is seeking to give a left and compassionate face to the Roman Catholic Church, one of the most important bulwarks of ideological reaction on a world scale. Sanders is doing something similar for the Democratic Party, adding a socialist gloss to what has been described as the worlds second-most-enthusiastic capitalist party (trailing only the Republicans).

Since he assumed the papacy in 2013, the former Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Berguglio has proven to be a cunning political tactician, striking a posture of public humility and sympathy for the poor while playing a significant role in global affairs, most notably in brokering the recent deal between the Obama administration and Cuban President Raul Castro.

Earlier this year, Pope Francis made headlines by seeming to rebuke Donald Trump for his bigoted attacks on Mexican immigrants. Now he makes more headlines by cultivating the most left of the major-party candidates for the US presidency.

At the same time, the pope has upheld all the traditional medieval dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, including prejudices against women and gays and adamant opposition to both abortion and contraception. And the Church, one of the worlds largest property owners, remains immovably aligned with the interests of the possessing classes, both capitalists and landowners, in every country.

Sanders journey to the Vatican allows him to capitalize on both sides of the new papacy. His much-publicized admiration for the first Latin American pope is no doubt aimed at boosting his credibility with Catholic voters, particularly Hispanics. More importantly, his attendance on the leader of an institution that has long been a bastion of anti-communism and political reaction sends a definite political signal to the US ruling elite.

The Vermont senator is underscoring the fact that his socialism is little more than the type of moral sympathy for the poor professed for millennia by the Catholic Church, even as it upheld a social order that placed all wealth in the hands of kings, nobles, landowners, capitalistsand the high clergy. It has nothing to do with any mobilization from below of social forces that could threaten the wealth and property of the financial aristocracy. It opposes the class struggle and the independent mobilization of the working class.

It is noticeable that since his return from Rome, Sanders has made repeated reference in his speeches to the need for a moral economy, with denunciations of corporations like General Electric for destroying the moral fabric of America.

In justifying his adulation of Pope Francis, Sanders has praised the pontiffs supposedly progressive views on economic and social inequality. The conference Sanders attended, however, was not, as reported by much of the media, devoted to inequality. Rather, the occasion was a celebration to mark the 25th anniversary of the papal encyclical Centesimus Annus, issued by the arch anti-communist Pope John Paul II.

An extremely conscious defender of capitalism, John Paul wrote the encyclical as a warning to the international bourgeoisie not to take the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to mean an end to the danger of socialist revolution. He cautioned against too extreme an assault on the jobs and living standards of the working class in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, on the grounds that this might push workers back onto the revolutionary road.

The Latin title of John Pauls encyclical refers to the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the famous anti-socialist encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, which gave papal sanction to the establishment of Catholic trade unions and Christian Democratic parties to fight the domination of the European workers movement by Marxism.

It may seem doubtful that Senator Sanders, a secular Jew, was familiar with the theological subtext to the Vatican conference. But his 15-minute speech to the conference consisted largely of favorable references and direct quotations from a series of papal encyclicals, some issued by Francis, but going back to Rerum Novarum itself.

The obsequious tone of Sanders remarks deserves note. He hailed Pope John Paul II, the apologist for right-wing military dictatorships and imperialist gangsters like Reagan and Thatcher, for giving a clarion call for human freedom in its truest sense.

The Democratic candidate presented the Roman Catholic Church as a powerful advocate of workers and the poor and a trenchant critic of capitalism, declaring, There are few places in modern thought that rival the depth and insight of the Churchs moral teachings on the market economy.

He gushed of the current pontiff: Pope Francis himself is surely the worlds greatest demonstration against such a surrender to despair and cynicism. He has opened the eyes of the world once again to the claims of mercy, justice and the possibilities of a better world.

Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist. But his approach to the Roman Catholic Church is diametrically opposed to that of genuine socialists, who have long recognized organized religion as one of the main ideological fetters from which the working class must free itself.

It is not a matter of making provocative threats against religious institutions, let alone attacking workers who retain religious illusions to one degree or another. Religion is not simply a mistake in thought, but has an objective source in the historical development of class society. As Trotsky wrote in Culture and Socialism (1927), The main element in the culture of the old society was religion. It was the most important form of human knowledge and unity; but in this form was expressed most of all the weakness of man before nature and his powerlessness within society.

The building of a revolutionary leadership in the working class, the decisive task in preparing the transition from capitalism to socialism, requires an intransigent struggle against illusions and false consciousness of all kinds, particularly those fostered by the various organized religions.

The Catholic Church has been an especially conscious and implacable opponent of socialism. Here is what Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum, a politically sophisticated manifesto for the mobilization of all the reactionary forces of Europe to defeat the threat represented by the socialist proletariat, rapidly growing (in the late 19th century) both organizationally and politically.

Private ownership, the pope wrote, is the natural right of man, and to exercise that right, especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary.

He explicitly rejected the Marxist doctrine of the class struggle: The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict.

After a lengthy exposition of the many evils that capitalists inflict upon the workers, the pope then explained, To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor mans envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies.

The goal of social equality, Leo XIII maintained, was itself intrinsically wrong: It must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain.
Chinese ships guarding an oil rig in the South China Sea near Vietnam. (Photo : Reuters)

Chinese fleets have conducted advanced training drills to increase their combat effectiveness using situations that resemble actual combat conditions, Reuters reported, citing an article published by the PLA Daily on Sunday, April 17.



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The drills started on April 7 using new methods that included training within an electromagnetic environment. The fleets had previously undergone training in all-weather condition, low altitude, beyond visibility range, and high-speed exercises for pilots.



"To think about special situations in an even more complex way, to make the enemy situation even more dangerous, to make the battlefield environment even more lifelike, is an important path in order for the navy and air force to stick close to the demands of real combat and accelerate its transformative production model for fighting strength," Tian Junqing, a division commander, was quoted as saying.



It was not disclosed where in the South China Sea the drills took place.



The report added that other drills will be explored by the fleets, including 24-hour maritime attack drills, minimum altitude defensive dashes and other military tactics. The fleet will also work in coordination with other branches of the military in early aerial warnings, surface ships and ground anti-aircraft defense.



More than $5 trillion in global trade passes through the South China Sea every year. Part of the sea is claimed by Southeast Asian neighbors that include Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan.



In Dec. 2015, the Chinese navy also carried out naval exercises in the disputed South China Sea as part of their routine drills.



"The People's Liberation Army Navy in recent days organized a fleet to go to relevant seas in the South China Sea, by way of the Western Pacific, to carry out exercises," China's Defence Ministry said in a statement.



"This action is a routine arrangement made in accordance with this year's naval training plan," it added.



Similarly, the Chinese military did not say where exactly the drills took place, but pictures of navy ship doing live-fire exercises were shown in social media accounts of the state media.



The U.S. has been criticizing China for building artificial islands in the disputed waters and conducting patrols near the area.


In the name of promoting Quebec independence and preventing Premier Philippe Couillard and his federalist Quebec Liberals from retaining office, Quebec Solidaire is preparing to ally with the Parti Quebecois (PQ), including in a coalition government. No matter that when in office, the big-business PQ has slashed public services, criminalized workers struggles, stoked anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant chauvinism and supported Canadian imperialisms participation in US-led wars in Afghanistan and Libya.

The political ambitions of Quebec Solidaire (QS)a pseudo-left party that counts Syriza, Podemos and the German Left Party among its allieswere on display at a recent public debate organized by the pro-Quebec independence, Montreal daily Le Devoir under the title QS, PQ: Is the Left condemned to opposition?

The event coincided with a series of initiatives launched by the PQ to bring about a convergence among the different sovereignist parties and groups. The debates two main participants were Jean-Francois Lisee, a PQ Member of the National Assembly and former cabinet minister, and Francoise David, QSs co-leader and the head of its three-member National Assembly faction.

Throughout the debate, Lisee advocated for a PQ-QS alliance to defeat the Liberals in the next provincial election, slated for 2018. He reminded the audience he has previously worked closely with QS MNA Amir Khadir to create the conditions for a convergence of their respective parties.

At first David sought to keep a certain distance from the PQ, citing some of the most unpopular right-wing measures imposed by PQ governments. But it soon became clear that the organization she represents wants nothing more than to join forces with the PQ so as to gain access to the corridors of power and play a direct role in managing the crisis-ridden capitalist system.

The turning point of the QS-PQ debate was when David said that her party would be willing to be the junior partner in a PQ-led government on condition that the PQ move forward with introducing proportional representationthat is, the distribution of at least some National Assembly seats according to the percentage of total votes received, rather than solely on the basis of first-past-the-post electoral constituency contests. The PQ has proposed this in their program since 1977, said David. If they had implemented it, we would perhaps be in power together today.

This is an explicit commitment by Quebec Solidaire to follow the example of its Greek sister party and role model, Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left). Brought to power early last year on the basis of a vow to end the austerity measures that had ravaged Greece, Syriza quickly repudiated its election promises, refused to appeal to European workers for a joint struggle against austerity and the capitalist order, prostrated themselves before the European Union and IMF and ultimately imposed austerity measures even more draconian than those of the previous governments.

Like Syriza, Quebec Solidaire adopts a verbal left stance, but has nothing to do with the working class, let alone socialism. It is comprised of elements drawn from upper layers of the middle class, including academics and other professionals, community activists, feminists and other promoters of identity politics, and self-styled Marxists whose Marxism is a total sham. QS characterizes itself as a party of citizens seeking to democratize Quebec and which combines the politics of the ballot-box, with the politics of the streeti.e., that seeks to pressure and work with Quebecs ruling elite through parliament and protest-politics and collaborates closely with the union bureaucracy.

The current first-past-the-post electoral system favors the established big business parties, placing a high bar for smaller parties to gain entry into the National Assembly and facilitating the efforts of the Liberals and PQ to polarize the electorate along federalist-pro-independence lines. QS fears that in this context a formal alliance with the PQ will result in its political marginalization, if not dissolution into its sister sovereignist party.

Under a system of proportional representation, QS calculates it would be much better able to counter PQ appeals not to divide the sovereignist vote and, once the elections were concluded, would be in a stronger position in negotiating for influence and cabinet posts in a PQ-led government.

Hence, QSs push for a somewhat more democratic electoral system is in reality all about increasing its leverage in horse-trading with the political and big business establishment, especially if the ruling class should consider a PQ-QS government necessary to accelerate its assault on jobs, public services and workers rights.

Another concern for Quebec Solidaire as it ponders closer collaboration with the PQ is its fear that convergence could damage its efforts to revive support among workers and youth for Quebec independantiste nationalism. If QS is too closely identified and allied with the PQ, it will be less able to provide a left cover for the PQ and the reactionary project of a section of the Quebec bourgeoisie to reshuffle North Americas state borders and create a capitalist Republique du Quebec.

Quebec Solidaire seeks to convince this faction, whose political instrument has long been the PQ, that a rainbow coalition, affording more exposure to the elements of the middle class active in QS, will promote Quebec independence by giving it a greater appearance of all-class support and popular legitimacy.

Significantly, at the most recent meeting of the PQs National Council, Pierre Karl Peladeauthe telecommunications magnate and notorious rightwinger who captured the partys leadership last yearproposed a resolution to revise Quebecs voting system. In doing so, Peladeau said it would help promote a real convergence with Quebec Solidaire and Option Nationale (ON), a pro-independence party established in 2011 by the investment banker and one-time PQ MNA Jean-Martin Aussant.

In advocating collaboration with the so-called left sovereigntists, the PQ is clearly trying to burnish its popular image, which has been severely marred by the right-wing policies it has pursued whenever it has held office.

The last time was for 18 months between September 2012 and April 2014. The ruling elite turned to the PQ to defuse the political crisis engendered by the 2012 Quebec student strike and the explosion of working class opposition to Jean Charests Liberal government when it passed emergency legislation outlawing the strike and illegalizing demonstrations over any issue throughout Quebec.

QS played an important role in assisting the pro-capitalist unions in politically diverting the opposition to Charests austerity program and state repression behind the PQ. In June 2012, when the unions were pressing for an end to the student strike under the watchword After the streets, to the ballot box, QS formally proposed that the PQ join it in an electoral alliance. And just days before the September 4, 2012 provincial, the QS announced it was ready to support a PQ minority government unconditionally for at least one year.

The result was an electoral victory for the PQ. It rescinded the Charest governments university tuition fee hikes, then brought forward its own raft of austerity measures including tuition fee increases. Headed by Pauline Marois, the PQ government also introduced a Secular Charter designed at whipping up anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant chauvinism so as to divide the working class and divert attention away from its social spending cuts. Quebec Solidaire termed the Charter and the reactionary debate over religious accommodation that had preceded it as legitimate and necessary, with its only caveat being that the PQ had gone a bit too far.

Ten years after its founding as an ostensible left pro-independence party, QS continues to view the PQ as a fellow sovereignist party and once and future ally. Recently, QS President Andres Fontecilla boasted that QS is having an ongoing internal debate and very fruitful dialogue about prospects for working with other pro-independence parties. Following a day of reflection March 19 on its strategy for winning independence, QS issued a press release that urged the other sovereignist organizations, including the PQ and its sister party in the federal parliament, the Bloc Quebecois (BQ), to do the same. This, said the QS press release, would establish a basis for discussion.

QS has in fact long been in a de facto alliance with the PQ, BQ and Option Nationale through its participation in YES Quebec (formerly the Council for Quebec Sovereignty). Chaired by former Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU) President Claudette Charbonneau, YES Quebec is a non-partisan, civil society organization that aims to develop a common roadmap so as to advance together toward independence."

YES Quebec states that it has learned from the example of Catalonia and the coalition Together for the Yes (Junts pel si), in which the forces of the Catalan pseudo-left and what they call citizen organizations joined forces with the openly pro-austerity, nationalist right to win increased seats in the Catalan parliament.

In Septermber 2015, the PQ, QS and ON sent emissaries to Catalonia to take part in an observer mission during the campaign for the Catalan legislative elections. The representative of the PQ, Daniel Turp, said at the time: We have several organizations here (the National Movement of Quebecers, the St.-Jean-Baptiste Society, YES Quebec) that could, in our own debate, play a role similar to that of the Catalan National Assembly and [the Catalan separatist] Omnium Cultural in promoting convergence and joint action among the various pro-independence parties.

Presse-toi a Gauche (Hurry up and move left), a nationalist web site largely directed by the anti-Trotskyist Pabloites of Gauche Socialiste, has launched a debate on how QS can rally and reinvigorate the Quebec sovereignist movement, including on the pertinence of tactical and strategic alliances with the PQ. The Communist Party of Quebec, which like Gauche Socialiste is an integral part of Quebec Solidaire, responded by baldly calling for QS to enter into a no-compete agreement, i.e., a formal electoral bloc, with the QS and ON for the 2018 elections.

The author also recommends:



Quebec Solidaire welcomes suppression of anti-austerity struggle

[23 March 2016]



Quebec Solidaires disingenuous role in Canadas reactionary niqab debate

[15 October 2015]




According to numerous news sources, another disaster involving a refugee boat took place Monday in the Mediterranean Sea. Italian President Sergio Mattarella spoke of several hundred deaths, while German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier confirmed over 300. Somalias ambassador in Egypt told BBC Arabic that there were 400 deaths.

Reports say the refugees came from Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Egypt and Sudan. They were reportedly traveling from Egypt to Italy in boats that were poorly equipped for the voyage.

The BBC published interviews with 41 survivors who said up to 500 people died. The survivors spoke to the BBC from the southern Greek city of Kalamata, where they are being held after their rescue. The news agency quoted Abdul Kadir, a Somali, as saying some 240 migrants left the Libyan port of Tobruk heading for Italy. He said that once out on the Mediterranean, traffickers made them move in the middle of the night onto a bigger wooden boat that already had at least 300 people on it. This boat then capsized.

The BBC quotes Muaz, from Ethiopia, saying, My wife and baby drowned in front of me.

At the time of writing, neither the Italian nor the Greek coastguard had confirmed the reports about the tragedy. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and other voluntary organisations also had no information on it. However, Reuters cited a United Nations refugee agency official as telling Swiss broadcaster SRF that he knew of 40 survivors from what appeared to be the same incident.

In a separate incident, six bodies were recovered and 108 migrants rescued when a rubber dinghy sank off the coast of Libya, according to the organization SOS Mediterranean.

Experts have long been warning that another incident involving large numbers of deaths would occur in the Mediterranean. The responsibility for this lies with the European powers and the European Union, which are forcing refugees to take ever more life-threatening routes by sealing off Europes borders and largely suspending sea rescue programmes.

The US government is equally culpable, having led the 2011 war for regime change that killed some 50,000 Libyans, toppled and murdered Muammar Gaddafi, and plunged the entire country into a tribal civil war that continues to devastate Libyan society. The bloodletting and chaos have forced thousands of displaced and desperate Libyans and others fleeing imperialist wars in the Middle East and North Africa to make the perilous trip across the Mediterranean.

Just last week, in an interview with Fox News, President Obama called the current situation in Libya a mess and termed his failure to plan for the day after the overthrow of Gaddafi the worst mistake of his presidency. At the same time, he defended the US-NATO intervention as justified by humanitarian considerations.

The US-led war in Libya was not a mistake; it was one of the greatest war crimes of the young 21st Century.

On the same day as this latest tragedy, exactly a year ago, 18 April, 2015, the worst refugee boat disaster to date occurred, claiming more than 700 lives. Within the space of a single week, 1,200 refugees were drowned.

Even at the time, the EU accepted the deaths as a price worth paying, and even desired them, as the study Death by Rescue: The Lethal Effects of the EUs Policies of Non-Assistance at Sea, released immediately prior to the latest catastrophe, has confirmed.

Researchers from Goldsmiths College (University of London), who evaluated internal EU documents and protocols, demonstrate in the study that the EU deliberately ignored the warnings of the border protection agency Frontex that the number of refugee deaths would increase when it ended the Italian Navys Mare Nostrum rescue mission in 2014, replacing it with the Frontex operation Triton. Within the framework of Mare Nostrum, some 150,000 refugees in distress at sea were brought to Italian territory, while Triton was aimed above all at deterring refugees.

Charles Heller, the co-author of the study, said in an interview to the Press Association, Can we really qualify the ending of Mare Nostrum and its replacement by Triton, in all knowledge of the consequences this would have, as a mistake? I would rather argue that this was a case of institutionalised wilful neglect, and that European policymakers and Frontex have made themselves guilty of killing by omission.

After last Aprils catastrophe, many refugees sought to reach Europe via the Balkan route. Many lost their lives in the sea leg of this route, but the relatively short distance from Turkey to the Greek islands made the voyage less risky than the much longer journey from either Libya or Egypt to Italy across the Mediterranean.

With the sealing off of the Balkan route and the dirty refugee deal with Turkey, many migrants are once again risking the more dangerous route across the Mediterranean. The estimates of the number of refugees waiting for an opportunity to travel from Libya range from 100,000 to half a million. Despite bad weather, 24,000 have made it to Italy since the beginning of the year. In March alone there were 9,000, four times as many as the same month last year.

The EU is responding by strengthening efforts to deter refugees and at the same time using the refugee crisis as the pretext for new military interventions and imperialist wars of conquest. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has proposed a refugee deal with African countries along the lines of the EU-Turkey agreement. At the weekend, he sent a proposal to this effect to EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and EU Council chief Donald Tusk.

According to the plan, the regimes in North Africa will accept the return of rejected asylum seekers, establish EU-funded detention camps and secure zones in Africa, and manage migration flows by separating refugees from economic migrants. In exchange, the regimes will receive billions, which Renzi proposes to fund via EU migration bonds.

To this end, the EU intends by military means to establish a puppet regime in Libya, led by the government of national unitys Fayez Sarraj, who is currently based at the Abu Sitta naval installation near Tripoli but does not control his own territory. These plans were discussed yesterday evening at a meeting of EU foreign and defence ministers in Luxembourg, in which Sarraj participated by video link.

On 14 and 15 April, the Munich Security Conference met for the first time in Africa. Some sixty high-ranking officials from Africa, Europe and the United States, including several foreign and defence ministers, discussed how German and European security policy in Africa could in the long term resolve the two great challenges with which it must currently concern itselfthe refugee crisis and terrorism, as the head of the security conference, Wolfgang Ischinger, told Die Welt.

We require something drastic, an offensive under the heading: Europe creates security, the veteran German diplomat and foreign policy expert declared, making it clear that this offensive could include military action.
The anti-Trotskyist blog site of Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner reports a meeting that they hosted in Brooklyn, New York, on April 12. According to the report:

While the overall turnout of about 30-35 participants was gratifying to the organizers, one disappointment was the lack of representation of members of the Greek community in New York. This is undoubtedly related to the demoralization many Greeks now feel as a result of the betrayal of their hopes by the Syriza government.

The above paragraph is an indictment of everything Steiner and Brenner posted on their blog site, permanent-revolution.org, between January and July 2015. During those critical six months, they devoted this site to denouncing the ICFI sectarians, who were exposing the class character of Syriza and warning that it was preparing a massive betrayal of the working class. Having for months extolled the experience of Syriza, they now bemoan the demoralization caused by its policies.

To the best, or should one say worst, of their abilities, Steiner and Brenner contributed to that demoralization.

On January 22, 2015, they wrote:

the conciliatory character of SYRIZAs leadership should not diminish the magnitude of the historic change that this election represented. For the first time in more than a generation a political party that claimed to be Left - even far-Left has won a national election in Europe and is forming a government. And the election itself electrified Greece.  The sectarian groups are blind to the opportunities because they are indifferent to the mass movement. And when that mass movement breaks out as it did in the election of SYRIZA, they work overtime to make this inconvenient truth go away.

They also published a lengthy denunciation of the ICFIs appraisal of the Syriza government, written by a Greek opportunist:

One has to be patient and to see what this experiment will bring before condemning the attempt even before it has taken power. Denying political realities and not supporting the ONLY left-leaning elected government in Europe only gives support to the enemies of the left, something that the left has been prone to and used by the right for years and thus accentuating the lefts failures to convince a majority of population that revolution and support of the working class is the only way out.

In its defense of Tsipras government, Steiner and Brenner went so far as to object to the WSWS characterization of Syriza as a bourgeois party. They wrote:

Marxists use a category like bourgeois party to understand political reality more deeply, but in the hands of a sectarian such a category becomes devoid of content, and little more than a form of name-calling.

This line of attack continued unabated throughout 2015. But now, without explanation, they write of the widespread demoralization caused by the Syriza government.

The climax of the Steiner-Brenner meeting was a speech by Savas Michael, the leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party in Greece, who addressed the meeting via Skype from Athens. Michael is a political ally of Steiner, and their principal bond is a shared hatred of the International Committee.

Like Steiner and Brenner, Michael painted the Syriza regime in bright colors in 2015 and denounced the ICFIs warnings. But ecstasy has given way to agony. According to the report, Michael likened that betrayal to the historical betrayal of the Greek partisans in 1944 by the agreement drawn up by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt and the later even worse betrayal by the Greek Stalinists when they forced the fighters in the civil war to surrender their arms to the British in 1945.

It does not diminish the treachery of Syriza to avoid historically inaccurate comparisons. But Savas Michael is an opportunist political type that abounds in Greece. He thinks with his lungs and confuses oratorical bombast with political analysis. After devoting himself tirelessly in 2015 to celebrating the revolutionary potential of the Syriza regime, he now compares the post-referendum situation to the catastrophic events of the Greek civil war, which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers. This is a wild exaggeration, and does nothing to clarify the present political situation.

In fact, Michael does not take his own exaggerations seriously. Having compared the betrayal of July 2015 to the destruction of the Greek workers movement in the 1940s, Michaelaccording to the report on the Steiner-Brenner blog sitenoted that while the working class had been betrayed, they have not been defeated.

This is sophistry of the worst sort. The working class, he claims, has suffered a monumental betrayalwhich Michael compares to the disasters of the 1940sbut it has not suffered a defeat.

Those who are familiar with Savas Michaels political history will recognize the source of his cynical distinction between betrayal and defeat. He learned this opportunist word play from Gerry Healy, who, in the period of his return to Pabloism, spoke of the undefeated nature of the working class in order to downplay the political significance and impact of every setback suffered by the working class. Savas Michael lapped up this political nonsense, not only out of stupidity, but also because it enabled him to evade political responsibility for the consequences of his own opportunism. In more personal terms, as long as no harm comes to Michael, the betrayals of the working class do not amount to a defeat. A mere betrayal means that living standards of the working class plummet. A defeat occurs only when it might become impossible for Michael to publicly dispense his pseudo-dialectical platitudes at one of his favorite Athenian cafes.

As for Steiner and Brenner, who denounced the International Committee in July 2015 for stating that the Greek working class had suffered a political defeat, they provide no accounting of their political role during the events of 2015. They fail to explain why they devoted all their political energies to attacking the International Committees exposure of the criminal duplicity of the Syriza government.

The author also recommends:

The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique (Mehring Books)

Behind the designation of Russia and China as imperialist: A case study in theoretical charlatanry

[14 April 2016]
The walkout by 39,000 Verizon workers in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states is at a critical juncture. The determination of workers to resist the telecom giants sweeping concession demands was shown in the mass picket Monday morning involving thousands of workers in front of a mid-town Manhattan hotel, which was reportedly housing strikebreakers.

The strike has become a focal point of opposition with broad sections of workers and youth, from firefighters and fast-food workers to teachers and college students expressing their support. Verizon workers are expressing a growing mood of resistance in the working class, which has suffered a decades-long decline in living standards even as corporate profits, CEO pay and the stock markets hit record highs.

It has become clear, however, that the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have no strategy or intention to win the strike. In fact, every action taken by the unions has only aided and abetted corporate management and encouraged its intransigence. Corporate executives like CEO Lowell McAdam long ago took the measure of the CWA and IBEW leaders and know it is only a matter of time before they sell out the Verizon workers again.

While the CWA and IBEW forced workers to labor without a contract for eight months and offered $200 million in givebacks, Verizon was mapping out plans to draw in managers from throughout the country and train replacements to keep its operations going in the event of the strike it was provoking. The company has refused to engage in further talks and is demanding that the union accept federal mediation, knowing full well the outcome would be no different than 2011, when the CWA accepted deep health care concessions.

Opposed to any real struggle, which would disrupt its corporatist partnership with the company and its relations with the Democratic Party, the CWA and other unions have isolated the embattled Verizon workers. Even though all telecom workers are facing the same attacksthe slashing of jobs, outsourcing, attacks on health care and pensionslast week the CWA ordered 15,000 AT&T West workers in California, Nevada and Hawaii to remain on the job without a contract after the expiration of its previous agreement. The CWA defied the overwhelming strike vote by AT&T workers against the highly profitable company, which spent $49 billion to buy DirectTV last year and continues to demand, in the words of the CWA, outrageous concessions.

While leaving workers vulnerable to this coordinated attack, the unions have tried to sow deadly complacency among workers. They have claimed that the giant corporations, which have the full backing of both big-business parties, the courts and federal mediators, can be pushed back through toothless publicity stunts, media attention and empty pronouncements of support from Democrats like Bernie Sanders, Bill and Hillary Clinton and New York Senator Chuck Schumer.

The entire strategy of the CWA and IBEW has been to subordinate the fight of Verizon workers to the political maneuvers of the Democrats, who are holding their presidential primary in New York today. Former president Bill Clinton, who visited picket lines in Buffalo, New York Monday, spearheaded the deregulation of the telecommunications industry in 1996, which encouraged the wave of mergers and acquisitions that resulted in the monopolization of the industry and the wiping out of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The Obama administration, with the full support of Clinton and the CWAs candidate Bernie Sanders, implemented the misnamed Affordable Care Act, which is being used by Verizon and the rest of corporate America to force workers to accept substandard coverage and shift the burden onto the backs of workers.

Both political parties have also handed billions to Verizon and AT&T to subsidize the supposed expansion of their fiber optic systems, while lifting caps on the rates they charge customers. The outcome of this can be seen in the planned FiOS buildout in Boston where Verizon is apparently using taxpayer money and publicly owned infrastructure, combined with the labor flexibility concessions granted by the IBEW and new labor-saving technology to reap windfall profits.

If this struggle is not to be defeated like the 2011 strike and countless other battles betrayed by the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win labor federations, everything depends on the independent initiative of rank-and-file workers themselves. The Socialist Equality Party and the WSWS Verizon Strike Newsletter urge workers to elect new bodies of self-representation: rank-and-file strike committees that are democratically controlled by workers themselves and free from the authority of every faction of the CWA and IBEW bureaucracies and both big-business political parties.

These committees must oppose the sabotage of the strike, including the possibility that the CWA will simply shut it down shortly after the New York State primaries. Instead, Verizon workers should fight for the mobilization of the broadest sections of the working classauto and steel workers, teachers and other public sector workers, high school and college students and other sections of workersto come to their defense. This should be the beginning of a common industrial and political counteroffensive against the government-backed corporate onslaught on the working class.

Striking Verizon workers at the rally in mid-town Manhattan spoke to the strike newsletter Monday. Gina Woods, an inside tech, said, We are fighting for our benefits, jobs, rights, pensions and medical. This is our livelihood. They want to cap our pensions at 30 years, increase our medical costs, but not give us a raise enough to cover the cost of the health care cuts. They want to outsource all of our jobs from customer service to inside technical jobs. They cant outsource the outside tech jobs. But they want to send people 80 miles from home at the drop of a dime.

The union said if they dont take these four issues: wages, pensions, outsourcing and medical off the table, they will not meet with the company again. The company doesnt want to hear that their two percent wage increase does not cover the medical costs.

The company has prepared. I have heard they now have 17,000 managers to cover for 40,000 workers. Everything is backed up, and the customers are suffering from this. We should not have gone back so quickly in 2011. We are willing to stay out.

Steven Delorbe, a field tech from the Bronx, criticized the CWA Local 1101s decision to cancel its Tuesday general membership meeting. Because of what is going on right now, you would want to get some information about what is taking place. I didnt learn anything from the speakers this morning. I would like to know how the strike is progressing in getting us to the bargaining table. I think we know why the strike was called now because the company hasnt budged in 10 months. I think the timing worked out with the primary candidates in the city.

They are trying to outsource business offices across the country and overseas. I dont have a comment on the 40 percent tax Obamacare is placing on our health care coverage as a Cadillac policy but we are not happy with the cuts. I need to protect my family, and up until the last contract we had full all-costs-paid coverage. After the 2011 strike when we went back to work before the hurricane, we took concessions and started to have to pay for health care. I wasnt sure of why we went back in 2011. I thought staying out longer would have helped us avoid more concessions then.

The WSWS Verizon Strike Newsletter also spoke with strikers in Northern Virginia.

One worker with over 20 years experience, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern the company would victimize him, said he had seen the WSWS article on Twitter. Although he did not consider himself a socialist, he was supportive and said that the WSWS was doing a good job covering the strike.

He noted that there was an atmosphere of conflict in the workplace, where the workers are completely scrutinized and monitored. Every minute there is a threat of discipline. Ive never seen a more hostile work climate.

He said that coming to work was sort of like being a battered spouse, where you kept on coming back despite knowing that you were just waiting for the next beating.

There are all types of arbitrary rules that can be used by management to discipline workers. For example, you can be disciplined for having an untidy truck, such as just leaving a clipboard on the seat. No electronics are allowed in the vans, including cell phones, which have to be secured in the back of the van. If a supervisor calls their cell phone and they pick up, they will get in trouble.

Jerry, a service technician with 15 years with the company, said these rules were just another company strategy to get rid of workers. Service techs are often set up to fail, he said. For example, they could be assigned six jobs between 8am and 12pm, which is impossible to accomplish. The service techs, however, are responsible for calling up the customers they cant get to and renegotiate a service time. If a customer complains, the service tech can be written up for a customer mistreat.

Verizon workers have not seen a significant pay raise in years, he said. In fact, it has felt like it has been years since they had gotten anything of lasting substance. He said it was similar to what was seen with the concessions given up by the UAW.

When asked about the Democratic Party, another service technician said he has barked in our union hall for years that we are supporting Democrats that forget all about us after they are elected. We need a strong working-class party, a socialist party, he said.

Noting the low number of strikes, the worker felt that the American people seem to have been asleep. A WSWS reporter noted that the trade unions have largely been responsible for suppressing the class struggle. The worker agreed, saying that the unions were like a toothless dog only concerned with capturing dues.

The union is a business just as much as Verizon is a business, the worker observed.
Google Android Wear smart watches are displayed during the 2015 Google I/O conference. (Photo : Getty Images/Justin Sullivan)

The Microsoft Outlook app has been in Apple Watch since last year, and now, it is available on Android Wear smartwatches. Previously, the idea of reading an email on one's wrist seemed impractical as looking at the wrist was usually for checking on time only and the smartwatch could be the last device one wants to read and manage email on.



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However, as smartwatches started to flood the market, evolving into nearly mini phones that can be accessed sans the actual smartphone, checking emails on the wrist does not appear like an awkward move anymore. The email apps on the Apple Watch have proven some people are already using their watches to manage emails.



There is not much a smartwatch can do alone, but the wearable can become a useful gadget when it has a lot of application software. Fortunately, developers pay attention to the market and slowly add support for the iOS and Android devices. The choices for email apps on Android Wear are not many, and Outlook is among the best third-party options that can be a big win for users.



Microsoft's Outlook has been considered as among the best email apps available right now. With Outlook on iOS and Android, users will be notified with new emails which they can scroll through existing items on the app, and can reply by tapping on pre-set messages or by using voice dictation. It can be a simple but useful app on the Android Wear, according to Android Community.



With Outlook on Android Wear, people need not reach for their smartphones to check and manage their emails as they can already see them from their watches. Microsoft Outlook landed into iOS' Apple Watch in August and now the popular email app is introduced to Android Wear through an update dubbed as "Outlook for Android" which raises the app's version number to 2.0.57. The changes of this update are intended for Android Wear support only, Betanews has learned.



To get the support of Android Wear, users can update Microsoft's email app on Google Play and check if it is already available, since the rolling out is gradual. The news about Microsoft Outlook coming to smartwatches run by Google's Android is on the video clip below:






As China develops, more emerging industries will be demanding for more skilled workers from overseas. (Photo : Getty Images)

China will be launching a digital database to properly match demand for foreign workers with competent overseas talent, according to an article by China Daily.



The database will include all legally employed foreign workers' nationalities, field of expertise, industry, residence, and employer information, according to Zhang Jianguo, director the State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs.



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The idea of an online platform was first proposed by Zhang during the Conference on International Exchange of Professional held in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province.



"Both the supply and demand sides are positive, but many employers can't find the right candidates," said Zhang. "They key issue here is matching employers with the right employees."



Between 2011 and 2015, overseas workers made three million visits to China and this included short trips and longer trips for employment purposes. This is a noticeable 30-percent increase in contrast to the previous years.



According to Zhang, in the past, overseas talent was managed by government policies and talent projects, but there is now a need for a more dynamic system.



"The market should lead overseas talent recruitment, and the government must work to create a conducive environment for such talent and this can come in the form of a simplified visa application process," he said.



As China develops, more emerging industries will be demanding for more skilled workers from overseas.



However, China has room for more improvement as local and foreign companies based in the country are lagging in international recruitment, according to Christine Raynaud, Greater China CEO for Morgan Philips Group.



"Chinese companies are becoming more competitive globally and it requires them to attract more capable talent overseas," said Raynaud. "However, most of them have outdated recruitment models that do not take advantage of technology and other digital tools."



For China to remain on top of the global market, it must adapt to the changing landscape of overseas recruitment and embrace more innovative methods.


ST. CLOUD, Fla. (AP) - A central Florida woman has been charged with animal cruelty after authorities say they found six dead horses.

Osceola County sheriff's deputies said they also found four malnourished horses with severe skin infections when they visited a second property in St. Cloud on Saturday. Authorities said in a news release the horses had no access to food and no shelter. Their only source of water was a pond near an overgrown field in the back of the property.

Deputies said the horses on both properties were owned by 55-year-old Melissa Marie Payne. Authorities said additional charges are pending. The Osceola County Corrections website listed she was still in custody Monday. It did not indicate whether she had hired an attorney

The horses were placed with county animal control officials.
Tallahassee, Fla. (WTXL)--We're learning more about Friday's deadly standoff in Dooly County, Georgia.

It took teams from counties across the area including Lowndes, Crisp, Tift, and and Turner to de-escalate the situation. But one county's response is gaining attention and credited for saving lives.

The Lowndes County Sheriff's Office was awarded a grant from Homeland Security which helped them obtain an armored vehicle known as a "Bearcat".

While many are often intimidated by it's militant look, officials say that's not it's purpose.

"The same reason that we give firefighters fire trucks is the same reason you give law enforcement the ability to withstand gunfire", Lt. Joseph Dukes.

In fact, the "Bearcat" isn't even equipped with lethal weapons but with tear gas and simple diffusion methods.

"It's simply designed to protect the people inside", Dukes explains.

The "Bearcat" is dispatched anytime there is a violent situation like Friday's standoff. It is also available to agencies within a 100 mile radius. The Georgia State Patrol has a similar model.
MIAMI - Carnival Corp. says it will delay the first cruise from the United States to Cuba if the Cuban government does not allow Cuban-Americans to travel aboard.

Cuban regulations bar people born in Cuba from returning to the country by ship. As a result, Carnival had prohibited barred Cuban-Americans from buying tickets on the May 1 cruise from Miami to Havana and a series of other Cuban ports.

Carnival said in a written statement Monday that it was optimistic that Cuba would allow Cuban-Americans to join the cruise by May 1 and would begin selling tickets to Cuban-Americans. The company said that if Cuban-Americans were not allowed to join the cruise, it would be delayed.

Carnival has been sued by Cuban-Americans claiming discrimination and protesters have targeted its headquarters in Doral.
CLARKESVILLE, Ga. (AP) - Law officers in the northeast Georgia mountains are asking residents to leave the area of a shooting as they search for a suspect.

Habersham County sheriff's officials said in a statement Tuesday morning that officers are going door-to-door to check on residents in the area.

They said they're also using a helicopter and police dogs to search for an "armed and dangerous suspect."

Authorities said roads in the area are being closed during the search.

Few other details on the shooting were immediately available early Tuesday.

Habersham County is about 80 miles northeast of Atlanta.
Current iPhones' LCD displays are both cheaper and less realist so Samsung's OLED displays are a possible solution. (Photo : YouTube/nano tec)

Apple might be planning to buy OLED displays from Samsung to use it in iPhones to be rolled out in 2017. The new decision is emerging against the all the business considerations because iPhones' LCD displays are both cheaper and less impressive compared to OLED technology.



Apple is reportedly purchasing OLED displays from Samsung to be incorporated into the iPhones coming out next year. Although the decision may weigh heavy on business because Samsung is the most formidable contestant of the iPhone maker, Apple Insider reported.



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The partnership between Apple and Samsung could be the most astonishing news for the tech world, because the two companies have always gone head to head in acquiring the smartphone market for their respective S series phones. If Apple adds Samsung-provided to its 2017 iPhones, the tech titan will become dependent on its competing smartphone maker for OLED screen supplies.



Digging deeper into the story, Apple had too many times fallen short of creating impressive displays with LCDs compared to Samsung's OLED screens. It seems like finally Apple is finally yielding to the fact that AMOLED displays are superior to current iPhone displays.



Active Matrix Organic LED displays or AMOLED screen is a latest technology that features much brighter and clearer imagery while Liquid Crystal Screen appears dim and out-dated in comparison. Besides, LCD displays are much cheaper which, to be found in such a costly smartphone, has always invoked criticism from the tech heads.



The rumors of Apple-Samsung partnership began in Jan. 2016, saying that they may possibly sign up OLED supply deal for iPhones, Mac Rumors reported. However, later hearsay hinted that Samsung was making a 7.47 billion dollar investment for its competitor's mobile panels.



Previously, it was also rumored that Apple was turning LG, AU Optronics or Japan Display to secure OLED displays for future iPhones, but according to the news website, that timeline has been pushed up, as Apple has selected OLED displays for 2017 iPhones.



Apple's possible partnership with Samsung could be a turning point for both tech titans. The following video by YouTube Channel nano tech reports that Apple has ordered 100 million Samsung OLED panels for 2017 iPhone 7S Plus.






EVERETT  Two fugitive brothers wanted for allegedly killing a missing Arlington couple have been sighted several times in Mexico, and investi
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Samsung's next Note device, Galaxy Note 6, will be the successor of Galaxy Note 5. (Photo : YouTube/TopKambo Tech)

As Samsung is persistently rumored to have been scheduled the Galaxy Note 6 for an earlier release date, likely by July 2016 to get way ahead of the iPhone 7 September rollout, leaks of the next-gen phablet feature upgrades are dropping down in torrents. The latest is that the Note 6 will rock a slightly bigger AMOLED display, up to 6GB of RAM and faster delivery of firmware updates.



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Picking up a leaked screenshot from an unidentified Samsung insider, TechnoBuffalo reported that Samsung's next flagship phablet will unbox with a 5.77-inch or near-5-8-inch Quad HD display that beams out in 2560 x 1440 screen resolution. The measurement provided is a slight bump from the Galaxy Note 5, which unboxed with a 5.7-inch front panel.



As expected, Samsung's signature AMOLED display technology will be part of the Note 6 unpacking.



Inside the upcoming phablet, the same report said that the bigger sibling of the Galaxy S7 is powered by same mobile chip - Exynos 8890 chip that will be supported by up to 6GB of RAM. While not mentioned in the report, it is likely too that variants of the Note 6 will run on SD 820 in the same way that S7 does.



However, recent reports have suggested that Samsung might opt for a huge jump in the Note 6 computing power, which could be fired up by the tandem of Snapdragon 823 and a whopping 8GB RAM provision. This scenario though remains unconfirmed.



Yet what is certain is that the next Samsung Galaxy Note phablet will see faster or more frequent firmware update even if its operating system will remain a layered version of Google's Android. SamMobile said in a report that the Note 6 seems to be geared for release bearing identical codename and model numbers save for slight variations.



In most markets where the Galaxy Note 6 will be made available, the device codename Grace will stick plus the serial SM-N930. This is so for the new phablet to get quicker firmware updates than before, which SamMobile said Samsung already showed can be done with the Galaxy S7. It is understood that the more frequent updates will be independent of Android upgrade cycle.



The Galaxy Note 6 is all but confirmed to again skip the Berlin IFA trade show in September as its release date will likely happen in July 2016 with the package rumored to include Android N out of the box.


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New leaked pictures suggest that Sony is planning to release a Sony Xperia C model. (Photo : Baidu/Hao Ge 042)

xperia c6 (Photo : baidu)

xperia c6 (Photo : baidu)

xperia c6 (Photo : baidu)

The second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, Sony, has been mum on the status of its Z series since the introduction of its Xperia X line up at Mobile World Congress 2016. Speculations are now increasing that Sony will not continue developing its Xperia Z line up.



In February, rumors suggest that the Japanese multinational corporation would drop details about its Xperia Z6 device; however, Sony presented its all-new Xperia X line up - X Performance, Xperia XA and Xperia X. Now, it is said that the release of Xperia Z6 is still in shadows, and Xperia Z5 may likely be the last model to the company's Z series.



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On the contrary, Sony Mobile US head of marketing Don Mesa clarified that Xperia Z6 will not be replaced by the X series, and the latter was only released specifically for consumers who prefer less than what Xperia Z line provides, Android Pit reported. He added that Sony's X product line is a separate line from the Xperia Z series.



Since the company representative already clarified that the Xperia Z lineup will not go away, there may be a chance that Zony Xperia Z5's successor will be unveiled during the Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin (IFA), which will be held on Sept. 2 to Sept. 7, since Z5 was introduced at the same event in 2015.



If Sony will release its much anticipated Xperia Z6 at IFA 2016, it is said that Sony fanatics can expect better hardware and specs, as Z6 is rumored to be equipped with a higher battery capacity, a Snapdragon 820 chipset and an improved 25MP rear snapper.



Meanwhile, another Sony Xperia lineup is now making waves online. Earlier this year, Sony was supposed to announce the much-hyped Xperia C6, but the company failed to do so; however, recent leaked images of Sony Xperia C6 proved that Sony will continue its plan on releasing the said device.















The leaked image of Xperia C6 shows a very thin side bezel smartphone packed with 6-inch screen display, with a large front snapper with flash. Aside on what was seen on the leaked images, previous reports claim that Xperia C6 will run on MediaTek Helio P10 processor backed with 2GB of RAM. It will also feature 16GB built-in ROM that can be expandable up to 200GB via an SD card.



Since the leaked images, which appeared in Baidu, was shown to the public, fanatics can not stop to wonder on when it will hit the shelves; however, Sony has yet to comment and verify if the images are authentic, or if it really is the much anticipated Xperia C6.



Watch the video below:




Samsung Galaxy S5 LTE-A was released in 2014 with Android 4.4.2 KitKat and now it is getting Android Marshmallow. (Photo : YouTube/ Marques Brownlee)

Android Marshmallow is rolling out for T-Mobile's Samsung Galaxy Note 5, Sprint and Verizon's Galaxy S5, and Note 4.



According to T-Mobile's support page, the Android Marshmallow update is rolling out for all users of Samsung Galaxy Note 5, with the version number N920TUVV2DPD1. The update is more than 1GB in size, so it is recommended to download it via the Wi-Fi network. The device should also be charged to more than 50 percent for a hassle-free download experience.



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Other network carriers like AT&T and Verizon had released the update for Samsung Galaxy Note 5 earlier in March, according to GSM Arena. Sprint also started the rollout in March-end for Galaxy Note 5.



Meanwhile, network carriers Verizon and Spring have started the rollout for Samsung Galaxy S5. Sprint began their Android Marshmallow rollout for S5 users on April 7. The rollout will come to all users in a phased manner and will be complete by May 19.



The Android Marshmallow update is almost 1 GB and so users should only download it over a stable Wi-Fi network. Verizon has also started the rollout along with numerous patches, which fix the known bugs.



There is no confirmed word as to when the other carriers such as US Cellular, T-Mobile and AT&T will begin the rollout. It is rumored that in light of the other rollouts, it may start by the end of this month. Meanwhile, the update is also rolling out for all the Samsung Galaxy users in South Korea.



Android Marshmallow rollout for Samsung Galaxy Note 4 users is also on the horizon. The update is expected to kick off in South Korea and then to other regions. There are also rumors that it may be only available to those devices, which have the Exynos Chipset.



As, the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 with the Exynos Chipset was released in regions like Australia, India, Singapore and Europe. Hence, these regions will get to experience the update first. Other models of Samsung Galaxy Note 4 are also expected to get the update, though the release schedule is not confirmed.



Watch this video to know more about the top features of Android Marshmallow here:






The Netherlands Jews are once again finding themselves under attack as they witness an upsurge in anti-Semitic-related incidents. According to one local Jewish man, slogans such as filthy Jew can increasingly be heard throughout the country, Holocaust denial has become commonplace, anti-Israel protests are the norm and a rising number of violent attacks go unreported.

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This combination, said the resident (who requested to remain anonymous for fear of harassment), has prompted a flight of the Netherland's Orthodox Jewish community to Israel in recent years.

"Between 50 and 60 percent of Orthodox Jews around my age have already left for Israel," he estimated.

Guy Muller of the Netherlands Center for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI explained the hazards of appearing externally Jewish in public: "If you walk around and are identifiable as a Jew, there is a higher chance that you will be attacked. We know that there are people who are attacked more than once each year."

Anne Frank House in Amsterdam (Photo: Reuters)

Notwithstanding the recorded attacks, a report published by the European Union revealed that 74 percent of all Jewish victims of anti-Semitic attacks did not report the incidents to the authorities.

"They simply put up with it; they take a few hits, put their heads down and carry on," said Muller.

The situation for Dutch Jewry has become so worrisome that that the country's chief rabbi, Benjamin Jacobs, said, "People are debating removing the mezuzahs from their doorposts, since they identify them as Jews.

"Once, I got to school, but the parents insisted that their children stay at home because they said, 'You're not going to brainwash my child.'"
The 67 Yemeni Jews who refused to join the recent secret airlift to Israel organized by the Jewish Agency are now having second thoughts. Sources in Yemen report that the group, comprised mostly of children and the elderly and located in the Yemeni capital Sanaa and its neighboring province of Amran, has been subject to constant harassment.

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Speaking to The Media Line on condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals, a Yemeni Jew now trying to leave for Israel said the remaining Jews complain that in addition to increasing abuse by Muslims, there is no one to lead their religious rituals or to educate their children.

The Jews who remained behind have confirmed reports that the spate of publicity accompanying the mini-exodus and the showcasing of the 600-800 year old Torah scroll that the emigrants took with them has effectively drawn targets on the backs of those who opted out of the airlift.

Prime Minister Netanyahu with Yemeni Jews who recently immigrated to Israel with the Torah scroll they brought with them (Photo: GPO)

The Jewish Agencys decision to release the news about the manuscript arriving in Israel caused us even more seclusion. In Raydah (a city in Amran), they treat us like strangers, even though we are Yemenis just like them. Our religion, which is different from theirs, has made them look at us as (inferior). They have fenced our houses in with stones and cut off the roads leading to our homes (to prevent) us from escaping and to make it difficult for us to get food or any other supplies we need into our homes, he explained.

After the news about the manuscript became public, people became very wary of us, accusing us of treason against our country, Yemen. Now they are always watching us. We cannot stand to live here anymore.

Some Yemeni Jews remained for economic reasons. Saeed Al-Natehi and his wife Muzal Bint Uda, were unable to sell their home, a three-story structure with a large yard enclosed by a stone fence, where they live with their three daughters, a son and two grandchildren. Muzal said they will join the others as soon as their home is sold  which should not be long.

Muzal also expressed her love for Yemen, but concludes that, currently the best solution is to leave.

In sharp distinction to Raydas Jews, those in Sanaa refused to discuss their situation or reasons for not having left for Israel. Of those who did offer comments, one Sanaa resident said the silence is due to security reasons, while another said that he cannot afford to buy a ticket to leave. That, however, seems unlikely given the Israeli governments commitment to relocate Yemens remaining Jews.

Yemen has also been accused of prohibiting Jews from leaving the country, but officials deny such a prohibition exists. Khalid Al-Shaif, chief of Sanaas International Airport, told The Media Line that Jews are free to leave the country and there is nothing stopping them.

He explained that, They are Yemenis, who are subject to the same rules as other citizens. We check their bags, and see their exit and entrance visas. Being Yemenis, we treat them as such; there is no religion-based bias at all, said Al-Shaif.

Arrests were reported to have been made after the Jewish agency secretly transferred 17 Jews to Israel. But Yemeni officials and local Jews told The Media Line that is not true.

When The Media Line asked the Jewish Agency to comment on word that the airlift failed to rescue all of those who want to go to Israel, spokesman Avi Meyer said, It was supposed to be the last massive operation. Our understanding was that those people remaining intended to stay there. We said that if any individual who wishes to make aliyah, we will facilitate and they should know that they are welcome in Israel.

To the question of jeopardizing the safety of those who remained, Meyer said, The immigrants themselves approved the publicity surrounding their arrival and have proudly spoken to numerous media outlets about their journey home.

Article written by Ali Ibrahim Al-Moshki and Yasser Rayes

Felice Friedson contributed to this article
When comparing the tunnels discovered and destroyed during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 with the tunnel discovered two weeks ago, it is clear that Hamas has greatly improved the structural engineering of its tunnel and its construction methods.

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The wall of the tunnels discovered during Operation Protective Edge consisted of pre-cast concrete slabs placed vertically, with reinforced concrete arches above them to prevent the tunnel from collapsing due to the weight of the soil above it.

New-style Hamas tunnel, right, old-style Hamas tunnel, left (Photo: IDF spokesperson)

In this type of construction, the wide vertical slabs are the weak point, and that is why Hamas is now building its tunnels using long, narrow concrete slabs laid horizontally, one on top of the other, within a metal frame.

This structure is much stronger and more durable. I can withstand not only the pressure from the soil overhead, but also explosions and fighting inside the tunnel. It also allows for safer working conditions on rainy days when water seeps into the work area.

The new tunnel discovered two weeks ago (:  ")

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The recently discovered tunnel was dug at a depth of 20 to 30 meters. Too much rainfall could cause the soil above a tunnel built using the pre-Protective Edge method to collapse, as seen several times in recent months. The new structure makes it far less likely that the tunnel would collapse.

The new tunnel discovered two weeks ago (Photo: IDF Spokesman's Unit)

Meir Rofe, the technical director of Shaffir Engineering, explained just how much progress the tunnel diggers have shown since Operation Protective Edge. "You can't see clearly if the new segments are wood, iron, or concrete. But in the old method, they didn't connect the concrete slabs together, only placed them close together. Perhaps that's also the reason they experienced collapses, and why they decided to build it lengthwise and (make) the tunnel sturdier."

Rofe explained that now, "The columns that are holding the segments can withstand great pressure, but it's impossible to know how stable they are inside a tunnel, and how long they'll be able to handle all of that weight. You can tell that the Palestinians are using tracks to move materials. Their logistical work has improved. They usually dig by hand, since it's Kurkar (sandstone), not solid rock."

The new tunnel discovered two weeks ago (Photo: IDF Spokesman's Unit)

"As primitive as the means are, they do the job for them, but these are not tunnels you'd want to pass through, they're problematic and unstable and may collapse," he added.

Recent months have seen a significant increase in the number of collapses of tunnels dug by Hamas's military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, in the Gaza Strip. At least nine tunnels collapsed so far, costing at least 15 people their lives  which raised awareness of the topic in the Palestinian media as well.

The new tunnel discovered two weeks ago (Photo: IDF Spokesman's Unit)

The Hamas regime in Gaza attempted to cover up the matter at first, but news of the collapses leaked onto social media. Hamas leaders quickly realized they couldn't stop the flow of this information, especially with casualties involved. It is not out of the question, however, that the terrorist organization has been able to hide the fact that other tunnels have also collapsed.






Racheli Dadon was desperately looking for her daughter, 15-year-old Eden, after the bombing on bus number 12 in Jerusalem on Monday, "when I found her, I saw that he entire body was burned."

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Police investigation found that an explosive device blew up at the back of the bus. Security forces are investigating the possibility that one of the wounded is a suicide bomber.

From her bed at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem's Ein Kerem, Racheli recounted in tears the terrifying experience.

Racheli Dadon, injured in the bus attack (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

"My daughter and I got on the number 12 bus, and my daughter went to the back to find us seats while I paid the bus driver. We hadn't even sat down when all of a sudden we heard a huge explosion, and glass began to fall on us. Everything was dark and full of smoke," she recalled.

"I collapsed. Her whole face was black and burned. It was impossible to see her," Dandon continued. "Paramedics had to carry my daughter out of the bus because she couldn't move under her own power."

The bus (Photo: Yarden Litner)

After breaking down in tears, she added "I've always watched these things happen from the outside, but when it happens to you I can't believe that I'm here and that my daughter isn't. She'll be 16 in a month, and now she's sedated and on a ventilator. I'm praying that she'll get out of this ok."

Racheli also requested that the Israeli public pray for her daughter's recovery.

She recalls other vicitims of the attack, saying, "someone had to have a limb amputated - she was next to my daughter. She wasn't able to get out of the bus, so the first responders took her out."

Wounded being evacuated to Hadassah Ein Kerem (Photo: Yoav Dudkevitch)

Akiva Betzalel, 13, was lightly wounded in the bombing. His father, Asher, said his son's condition is good. "He's frightened, and has some scratches, but he's awake and remembers the explosion," he said.

"(Akiva) went on the bus and sat at the front, there was a massive explosion in the back. People were screaming, there were wounded and blood, his cell phone flew out of his hand," Asher said.

"I was at home and heard about the explosion, and knew my son was on the bus. A paramedic called me and told me my son was on his way to the hospital and his condition was good," he recounted.

'No one aroused my suspicions'

Bus driver, Moshe Levi, said none of his passengers had aroused his suspicions. If I would have suspected someone, I would have acted before anything happened," he said.

Moshe Levi, driver of the bus that got attacked (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky)

"I got on the bus and did a security check twice. I made sure that everything was OK. People got on the bus  everyone paid. The whole trip was OK. I got to Talpiot and got stopped on Baram Road because of a traffic jam. I then heard an explosion at the back part of the bus, opened the doors, and told everyone to get out of the bus. I told people in private cars to call for help," he recounted.
Significant developments have taken place in the investigation of five Jews suspected of involvement in acts of terrorism against Palestinians, the Petah Tikva Magistrate's Court cleared for publication on Monday.

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The group, currently under investigation, has been interrogated by the Shin Bet and the Israel Police over the past two weeks for allegedly committing hate crimes against Palestinians.

The suspects included two minors and a soldier. The court decided to extend their remand by four days due to the evidence gathered against them.

'Price tag' attack on a Palestinian car (Photo: AFP)

"The investigation is developing and evidence against the minors is being collected. It must be noted that the evidence is in relation to events which could have put peoples' lives in danger," Judge Eliana Danielly said.

The judge also wrote that the suspicions against the second minor have increased.

However, the judge sharply criticized the way the investigation is being handled, and even noted the medical complications that one of the minors experienced, which required emergency care on Friday.

"The parents gave their agreement for medical treatment, but they weren't given updates as to what was going on. It goes without saying that the parents are very worried because they don't know the medical condition of their son," Judge Danielly said.

Pinhas Shandorfy and Schneur Dana, whose names were cleared for publication last week, are suspected of burning a Palestinian vehicle, affiliation with criminal activities and involvement in an illegal organization.
US Vice President Joe Biden on Monday acknowledged "overwhelming frustration" with the Israeli government and said the systemic expansion of Jewish settlements was moving Israel toward a dangerous "one-state reality" and in the wrong direction.

Addressing the J Street lobby group in Washington, Biden said despite disagreements with Israel over settlements or the Iran nuclear deal, the United States had an obligation to push Israel toward a two-state solution to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

"We have an overwhelming obligation, notwithstanding our sometimes overwhelming frustration with the Israeli government, to push them as hard as we can toward what they know in their gut is the only ultimate solution, a two-state solution, while at the same time be an absolute guarantor of their security," Biden said.
The United States signalled its opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent declaration that the Golan Heights will forever remain a part of Israel, stressing on Monday that Washington did not consider the Golan a part of Israel.

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"Every administration on both sides of the aisle since 1967 has maintained that those territories are not part of Israel," US State Department Spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

Kirby went on to say that the conditions under which the Golan Heights should be returned must be decided through negotiations between the respective parties. "And obviously, the current situation in Syria makes it difficult to continue those efforts at this time," Kirby said.

Meanwhile, US Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged "overwhelming frustration" with the Israeli government and said the systemic expansion of Jewish settlements was moving Israel toward a dangerous "one-state reality" and in the wrong direction.

Addressing J Street's annual gala, Biden said despite disagreements with Israel over settlements or the Iran nuclear deal, the United States had an obligation to push Israel toward a two-state solution to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

US VP Joe Biden, Photo: AP

"We have an overwhelming obligation, notwithstanding our sometimes overwhelming frustration with the Israeli government, to push them as hard as we can toward what they know in their gut is the only ultimate solution, a two-state solution, while at the same time be an absolute guarantor of their security," Biden said.

Biden said his recent meetings with Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas left him discouraged over the prospects for peace at present.

"There is at the moment no political will that I observed among Israelis or Palestinians to move forward with serious negotiations," Biden said, "The trust that is necessary to take risks for peace is fractured on both sides." He said both Palestinians and Israelis needed to tamp down rhetoric that fueled violence and actions that undermined confidence in negotiations.

Efforts by the Palestinian Authority to join the international criminal court were "only damaging moves that take us further from the path to peace," he said.

For Israel's part, Biden said the "steady, systematic expansion" of Jewish settlements on disputed land wanted by the Palestinians moved "Israel in the wrong direction."

"They are moving toward a one-state reality and that reality is dangerous," Biden said, warning that moving in that direction would mean an endless cycle of conflict and retribution.

Biden condemned the bombing of a bus and attack on another in Jerusalem on Monday by "misguided cowards" and offered prayers to the injured and their families.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry echoed Biden's remarks, also addressing J Street's gala. We will continue to try to advance a two-state solution, the only solution, because anything else will not be Jewish, and it will not be democratic.
Yosef Ben-David, 30, was convicted on Tuesday morning of murdering Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July 2014, after the Jerusalem District Court found him responsible for his actions.

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In November, the Jerusalem District Court ruled that Ben-David committed the murder, but did not convict him because of a previous psychiatric assessment presented by his attorneys which questioned his sanity.

In February, however, a court-appointed psychiatrist has determined that Ben-David is responsible for his actions and fit to stand trial. Furthermore, the psychiatrist determined that Ben-David's claims were not credible and was only pretending to be insane.

Yosef Ben-David in court (Photo: Gill Yohanan)

But Ben-Davids defense team filed for further psychiatric evaluation. In a private opinion written by Dr. Yonathan Sirkin, it was determined that he committed the kidnapping and murder during a psychotic episode, and therefore is not responsible for his actions.

The judges, however, determined that Ben-David did not have a psychotic episode, and is responsible for his actions.

Muhammad Abu Khdeir (Photo: Reuters)

Hussein, Abu Kdheirs father, said at the end of the hearing, "We knew from the beginning that he was not crazy but rather a liar. It hurts us very much. The trial lasted too long, this is the 35th hearing. Every time we see him our blood boils."

Before the hearing, Hussein demanded justice, saying "Their house should be destroyed, as is done to the Arabs. I expect that he will remain in prison for life and that he will not receive a pardon.

MKs Ahmed Tibi and Osama Saadi (Joint List) attended the hearing.

Abu Khdeirs murder sparked a wave of terrorism in Jerusalem. Ben-David and two minors, who were both convicted for their role in the murder, abducted the 16-year-old teenager and killed him after the funeral of the three Jewish teens Gil-Ad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach who were kidnapped and murdered on June 12, 2014.
SANAA - Yemeni security officials say a member of the country's Jewish minority has been detained over allegations he helped smuggle an 800-year-old scroll to Israel.

The officials say Yahia Youssef Yaish is being interrogated by the intelligence service run by Shiite Houthis rebels, who control the country's capital, Sanaa.

The officials also said on Tuesday that three airport employees have also been detained over the same allegations.

In Israel, Avi Mayer, the spokesman for the Jewish Agency, confirmed the Torah scroll was smuggled out of Yemen with a rabbi and 18 Yemeni Jews who left to Israel last month.

Yemeni intellectuals issued a statement demanding Yaish's release and describing allegations against him as "fabricated."
The IDF will continue work to uncover all sections of the recently-discovered Hamas tunnel over the next few weeks to ensure that there are no other exit shafts inside Israel, as it is unclear how far the tunnel penetrated into Israeli territory.

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Simultaneously, the defense establishment is developing a system to combat the Gaza tunnels threat which is due to be completed within two years. This system will include engineering and technological measures to detect and destroy the tunnels and will supplement the border fence.

Hamas tunnel located by the IDF (Photo: IDF spokesperson's unit)

The new method that was used to discover the Hamas tunnel, which combines military, intelligence and engineering strategies, will be put to use in the coming days in several other areas along the Gaza border where the IDF is digging in search of any additional cross-border tunnels. It's expected to be fully operational all across the border soon.

Fighting inside the tunnels

The IDF faces a new reality whereby it's forced not only to locate tunnels, but also fight inside them. Since Operation Protective Edge, the IDF has formulated new strategies to prevent the kidnappings of the bodies of soliders killed in action - such as what befell Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul - as well as the kidnapping of live Israeli citizens and soldiers, like what happened to Gilad Shalit.

Moreover, the IDF has augmented its infantry battalions with a wide array of equipment specifically designed for tunnel combat. These include, amongst other tools, mini walkie talkies which can function underground, oxygen masks, night-vision equipment which can be used in complete darkness, handguns, and lighter body armor.

The new phenomenon is so serious that a new combat doctrine was specifically written for tunnel combat, and it addressed every soldier in the army from the the infantry battalion level to special forces.

Photo: IDF Spokesman

At present, the solution to the tunnels is divided into two parts: the first is the discovery and identification of cross-border tunnels both during war and peacetime. Hamas plans to use these tunnels to send dozens of fighters from its elite "Nukba" unit into Israel with the aim of killing and kidnapping Israeli civilians. The second part focuses on IDF soldiers' ability to fight inside the terror tunnels during the next war - either in Gaza or in southern Lebanon.

Hamas was able to deliver heavy blows to the IDF using its tunnels throughout Operation Protective Edge and exact a painful price in its subterranean infiltrations of the Be'eri Forest near Kibbutz Nir Am and the pillbox near Kibbutz Nahal Oz. The bodies of the two IDF soldier killed during Protective Edge were snatched by Hamas militants via tunnels located inside the Gaza Strip.

IDF engineering forces searching for tunnel (Photo: IDF Spokesman)

In the past, a combat unit operating in enemy territory that discovered a tunnel needed to call in Yahalom (a special forces unit affiliated with the IDF combat engineers) or other special forces units to deal with it. With the new system, any battalion will be able to quickly and effectively neutralize the tunnel threat.

We already have clear instructions as to what our forces need to do when finding a tunnel, a commander of a regular division told Ynet. The answer is multi-faceted and depends on the severity of the threat and our needs at that moment. An infantry battalion knows today how to locate a entry shaft, how to block it, and prevent an enemy from exiting from it, he continued.

Meanwhile, the Yahalom unit has become an essential component in the military since Operation Protective Edge as is shown by its significant increase in size.

While the commander said that the tunnels constitute a significant but not existential threat, he noted that We are not overlooking it and we look into every single report of sounds of digging.

Indeed, statements made by Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot appear to support the commanders conclusions. While he too said that the location and destruction of the tunnels was the number one objective, he added that the the tunnels are not a strategic threat. Just last week we completed additional training for dealing with the tunnels. We acquired the necessary combat equipment to handle them, and we created an intelligence booklet detailing information on all 25 divisions of Hamas, Eizenkot said.

Whatever the extent of the threat, his final conclusions may have put the public slightly more at ease. Of all things, the threat of the tunnels in the Gaza Strip is easier to take care of.
Chinese police parade a group of 15 convicted criminals to be sentenced in public, most of which are likely to face the death penalty, on November 15, 2004 in Xian, China. (Photo : Getty Images/China Photos)

China's state television has confirmed the death sentence handed to a Chinese man under the charge of Espionage by selling leaked classified information to an unidentified foreign spy organization.







The man has been identified as Huang Yu, who worked in Encryption Research Institute, a government department that handled state secrets in Sichuan province. However, he was dismissed from work at 2002 due to his poor performance.



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In 2011, Huang was arrested over suspicions about his sudden unexplained wealth. After a series of investigation, it has been learned that Huang earned more than $700,000 by selling more than 150,000 leaked materials, including 90 top States secrets - ranging from the Communist Party to Military and China's financial issues, Daily Mail has learned.



According to local media, the 42-year-old Huang decided to sell all the confidential information to an unidentified foreign spy organization, as his way to seek vengeance for being sacked. Huang handed three electronic documents' containing military secrets to the mentioned foreign spy, for which he was paid $10,000 each and was promised a $5,000 monthly for more documents.



It was reported that the documents were obtained by him while working for his former employer. However, as Huang runs out of documents to offer, he targeted his wife and brother-in-law who also worked in a government department handling state secrets. Since then, he frequently traveled to Southeast Asia and Hong Kong under the guise of attending meetings.



Now, the recent state report reveals that Huang was sentenced to death over the matter, although no further details with reference to when or if the execution had happened. His wife named Tang was sentenced to five years in jail, while his brother-in-law was sentenced to three years behind bars on the charge of negligent disclosure of State secrets, China Daily reported.



The publication noted that this is just one of the numerous' cases involving the disclosure of State and Military secrets that have been reported in the past years. As of recently, China established 'April 15, 2016,' as the country's first National Security Education Day to raise public awareness of national security.



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A day after a bombing attack on a Jerusalem bus which wounded 21 people, the capitals residents are once again forced to think twice before using public transport.

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For most people in Israel the attack is reminiscent of the second intifada, which saw daily suicide bombings across Israel that claimed the lives of hundreds of Israelis.

Yossi Grantz, who traveled to Jerusalem from Beitar Ilit, explained his feelings following the attack. There is always a feeling of fear. It is a natural emotion. You always have to turn around, look around and observe who is next to you. On the other hand though, the people of Israel are always strong, Grantz said

Bombing attack on Jerusalem bus (Photo: Arik Abuloff, Israeli firefighter department)

One Jerusalem resident, also called Yossi, said that despite the difficulties caused by the bombing, we are in Jerusalem and here, and perhaps in all of Israel, we already have a lot of experience in this unfortunately.

Nevertheless, Yossi also said that the attack would not stop him from traveling on the buses. I dont think that I will stop traveling on the buses because of the attack yesterday. We will simply have to do things with greater caution, he continued.

In light of the current situation and the bombing attack, police will upgrade the level of security by deploying thousands of extra policemen to Israels streets ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover

The police have also called upon the public to stay alert and not to hesitate to contact the police by dialing 100 if they notice any unusual incidents or notice suspicious objects.

Jerusalem District Commander Yoram HaLevy confirmed on Monday that an explosive device was the cause of the explosion. Thirteen people still remain hospitalized, one of whom is in serious condition. Four others are being treated for moderate-to-serious wounds, two in moderate condition and six is light condition.
BERLIN - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, speaking a day after an attack on a bus in Jerusalem that wounded at least 21 people, said Tuesday his administration rejects violence against civilians.

Abbas said during a visit to Germany that "we are against all forms of terrorist activity that affect Israeli and Palestinian civilians."

After meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Abbas told reporters that Palestinians "want to achieve an end to the occupation and the building of settlements through diplomatic means, and through peaceful resistance by the Palestinian people."

Merkel condemned Monday's attack, saying there could be "no justification for violence." She also urged a halt to Israeli settlement activity on disputed land.
The European Union's foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini reiterated on Tuesday that the EU does not recognize Israel's claim to the Golan Heights, echoing a similar statement from the US the day before.

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"The EU recognizes Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries, regardless of the (Israeli) government's claims on other areas, until a final settlement is reached," Mogherini said before a meeting in Brussels of international donors in support of the Palestinian economy.

"This is a shared position reaffirmed by the European Union and its member states," she added.

EU foreign policy chief Mogherini and Prime Minister Netanyahu in joint press conference (Photo: AP)

Israel captured 1,200 sq. km. of the Golan Heights during the 1967 Six-Day War. Its annexation of the territory in 1981 has never been recognized by the international community, and some 510 sq. km. rest under Syrian control.

In a special government meeting on Sunday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the Golan "will forever remain in Israel's hands," and urged the international community "to recognize finally that the Golan will remain permanently under Israeli sovereignty."

His declaration was condemned by the Arab League and Syria. "The occupied Golan is Arab land according UN Security Council resolutions," said Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Miqdad.

"We are prepared (to do) everything to restore the Golan employing all necessary means including military means," he added.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry also sent two letters to the UN Secretary General condemning the Israeli cabinet meeting that was held in the Golan Heights for the first time.

"Syria condemns in the strongest terms the holding of a provocative meeting of the occupation government in the occupied Syrian Golan," the letter said. "Syria emphasizes that the meeting is null and void. Syria calls on the UN and the UN Security Council to intervene immediately and to condemn the irresponsible meeting, and demand that the meeting that took place on Syrian soil not happen again."

On Monday, the US signalled its opposition to Netanyahu's statement as well. "Every administration on both sides of the aisle since 1967 has maintained that those territories are not part of Israel," US State Department Spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

Kirby went on to say that the conditions under which the Golan Heights should be returned must be decided through negotiations between the respective parties. "And obviously, the current situation in Syria makes it difficult to continue those efforts at this time," Kirby said.
UNITED NATIONS - US Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in New York on Tuesday to discuss implementation of the Iran nuclear deal and ways Tehran can use its influence to end Syria's civil war, officials said.

Kerry was expected to raise Tehran's concerns over difficulties with accessing the global financial system despite the lifting of some US sanctions under the nuclear deal, US officials said on Monday.

Kerry and Zarif, who were talking behind closed doors at the Manhattan headquarters of the United Nations, declined to comment to reporters on their way into the meeting.
WASHINGTON - Air strikes that killed around 40 people in a crowded vegetable market in rebel territory in Syria were likely carried out by Syrian government forces, US State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday.

Despite the bombing of the market in Maarat al-Numan in Idlib province, which a monitoring group said it believed was the deadliest single attack since a partial ceasefire began on Feb. 27, Kirby said the United States believed the so-called cessation of hostilities was still largely holding but fragile.
Elsie H. Epp, age 91 of Henderson, passed away Friday, April 15,2016 at Henderson Care Center.

She was born to Henry P. and Mary (Klassen) Huebert, on Sept. 4, 1924 in their rural farm home five miles northwest of Henderson.

Upon her confession of faith in Jesus Christ, Elsie was baptized by Rev. A. W. Friesen on Dec. 27, 1942. As a member of the Bethesda Mennonite Church she was active in several organizations and served on numerous committees and boards as time would permit.

Elsie received her elementary education in Districts #38 and #33 in Hamilton County. After graduation from Henderson High School in 1942, she attended York College for one year.

During the next 24 years she continued to enroll in both on-campus and off-campus courses. She accumulated enough credits to graduate from the University of Nebraska during the summer session of 1965. In the meantime, she taught in rural schools for six years and in the newly consolidated Henderson Community School for 12 years.

In the afternoon of Nov. 30, 1952, Elsie and Arlie E. Friesen exchanged marriage vows with Rev. Arnold Nickel officiating. Their temporary home was made in Henderson until her home place was available. After 20 years of farming, Arlies health continued to decline which prompted them to build a new house in Henderson in 1976. Arlie passed away on April 17, 1979.

On February 12, 1983, Elsie and Willard J. Epp exchanged marriage vows with Rev. Albert Epp

officiating. The couple became involved with the Retired Senior Volunteer Program in Aurora and also spent many hours pursuing their hobbies. Willard passed away on April 21, 1997.

Elsie became involved with the genealogy committee while planning for the Mennonite Centennial in 1974. In the years which followed she was motivated to compile six genealogies in which more than 23,000 descendants are listed. While residing in assisted living at Rosewood Court, Elsie constructed buildings to scale of her home place. She then constructed buildings of her farm as they were when she and Arlie moved to Henderson.

Surviving are three step-children and their families, Ken and Lavera Regier, Larry and Lorna Epp and Ralph and Delilah Jane Ross; nieces and nephews. Preceding her in death were her parents; both husbands and sister and brother-in-law, Clara and Dan P. Thieszen.

A short memorial service will be held at 11a.m. April 20, 2016 at Metz Mortuary in Henderson, with the Reverend Jim Voth officiating. Interment will follow in the Bethesda Cemetery. Visitation will be Tuesday, April 19 from 1  9 a.m. at Metz Mortuary in Henderson. Memorials may be directed to Henderson Health Care.

Condolences may be left for the family at www.metzmortuary.com. Metz Mortuary, Henderson, Neb. is handling arrangements.
The US Secretary of State will later head to Riyadh

US Secretary of State John Kerry will meet with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry in Cairo during a brief visit on Wednesday, the US State Department said on Monday.

During Kerrys one-day visit, the officials will discuss bilateral ties and regional issues, department spokesperson John Kirby said in a statement.

Kerry will come to Cairo after concluding talks in New York with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad to discuss the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal as well as regional issues including ending Syria's civil war.

Kerry will then fly to Riyadh on Thursday to join President Obama at the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit.

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Egypts Defence Minister Sedki Sobhy and his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian stressed the strong ties and military cooperation between the two countries during an inspection visit to an Egyptian air base on Monday.

The visit to the base, which hosts a number of Rafale jet fighters purchased by Egypt last year came on the sidelines of a two-day visit by French President Francois Hollande to Cairo during which the two countries signed deals worth about 2 billion euros.

The Egyptian minister stressed the strong military ties between both countries, highlighting Frances backing for Egypts people and its armed forced in the fight against terrorism as well as cooperation in bolstering the capabilities of the Egyptian military, the army said in a statement late on Monday.

Le Drian was quoted in the statement as saying that Egypt and France are one thing. This is a message that we want to stress."

The deals signed by the two states included a military telecommunication satellite which is expected to be built by France's Airbus Space Systems and Thales Alenia Space, the French president's office said.

Egypt has recently become a major market for France's military hardware, becoming the first foreign buyer of French Rafale fighter jets in 2015.

Cairo signed a multi-billion euro deal in February 2015 to purchase 24 of the warplanes, a frigate and missiles from France. Six of the multi-role combat jets have already been delivered by Paris to Cairo. It also purchased two Mistral helicopter carriers.

Earlier in March, Egypt and France conducted a joint military exercise in the Mediterranean in which the Rafale warplanes took part.

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A group of Egyptian public figures, including government opponents, met with French President Francois Hollande in Cairo on Monday, and reportedly raised questions about whether French economic and military support for the country comes at the expense of a focus on the human rights situation.

The meeting, which took place at the French ambassadors residence in Cairo, was attended by leftist lawyer Khaled Ali, media figure Gameela Ismail  both former presidential candidates -- political analyst Abdallah El-Sennawy, parliamentarian Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat, economist and former deputy prime minister Ziad Bahaa El-Din, and the dean of Cairo Universitys economy department, Hala El-Saed.

Gameela Ismail said on her Facebook page that she asked Hollande why the Rafale [fighter jet] and warship [deals] took the focus away from real interest in freedoms at the time when tens of thousands are jailed.

Ismail said Hollande told her that we dont bargain or give up on our values, and we succeeded in our goal of the visit, which is to discuss human rights and freedoms in every meeting we had.

He added that the deals France signed with Egypt have no other role than supporting Egypt, Ismail stated.

Rights lawyer Khaled Ali told Hollande that he carried a message from a number of Egyptian youth who accuse not only France but the majority of European countries of adopting double standards.

The youth say, according to Ali, that European countries talk only about rights and freedoms but in reality, investment and weapons deals make them turn a blind eye to everything.

Hollande, according to Ali, said he talked a lot during his visit to Egypt about the necessity of protecting human rights, and that the war on terrorism should not be at the expense of these rights.

There is a need to develop security institutions and the justice system, and there is no country in the world where its people dont accuse the security apparatus, Ali quoted Hollande as saying.

Economist Ziad Bahaa El-Din, a former deputy prime minister who resigned in January 2014, said on his Facebook page that Hollande had expressed his wish to increase cooperation with Egypt in the areas of economy, culture and education.

I left this meeting with the impression that the entire world wants to help Egypt, but that Egypt is the one that doesnt want to help itself, Bahaa El-Din added.

Hollande left Egypt on Tuesday after a three-day visit that witnessed the signing of at least 18 financial deals worth more than 1.5 billion euros, as well as memorandums of understandings in the fields of transport, energy, renewable energy, gas and tourism.

The French president also discussed regional affairs with his Egyptian counterpart President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and met with parliament speaker Ali Abdel-Al.



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Prosecutors in Egypt confirmed that Tuesday's lethal shooting of a street vendor by a lower ranking policeman in New Cairo took place after a quarrel over payment for "a cup of tea."

According to investigations conducted by the prosecution, three lower ranking policemen  the shooter who has been arrested, and his two peers who are still at large  were regular customers of the street vendor spot near the high-middle class residential compound of El-Rehab, where they reportedly always drank tea without paying for it.

Investigations indicate that the victim refused to serve the policemen for free, causing a verbal dispute that led to one of the policemen  identified as El-Sayed Zeinhom Abdel-Razek  firing shots in the air.

According to the prosecution, the victim suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the chest.

The prosecution added that when friends of the victim attempted to take the policemans weapon, another shot was fired, injuring another man.

Earlier on Tuesday, the interior ministry reported that two passers-by were injured in the shooting and taken to New Cairos Specialised Air Forces Hospital.

Following the shooting, angry bystanders surrounded the policemen's car in an attempt to attack them. The trio managed to escape before the shooter was arrested, while an arrest warrant has been issued for his colleagues.

Pictures and videos circulating on social media, seemingly taken from the scene in El-Rehab, showed an overturned police van with shattered windows which eyewitnesses say belonged to Abdel-Razek and his two colleagues.

A video circulated on social media showing an impromptu protest at the site of the shooting, with an angry crowd surrounding an ambulance and chanting "the interior ministry are thugs," a slogan that was chanted on different occasions over the past five years over police abuses.

Al-Ahram Arabic news website reported that police dispersed the crowd with warning sirens after their gathering led to the smashing of police and ambulance cars.

Reported pictures of the corpse of the unidentified victim were also circulated by social media users.

Interior minister Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar said in statements, according to the state-owned MENA agency, that any member of the police force who commits wrongdoings is referred directly to investigative bodies, stressing that any mistakes by individual policemen should not tarnish the efforts and sacrifices made by all policemen.

In February, another low-ranking policeman killed a driver in the working-class Cairo district of El-Darb El-Ahmar following a dispute over a fare.

A court sentenced the policeman to life in prison this month, one of the harshest sentences issued against police officials convicted of similar violent crimes. The verdict can still be appealed.

Abdel-Ghaffar promised in February the proposal of legislative amendments that would regulate the performance of security services, stressing that they would apply to the entire police force, not only low-ranking policemen.

The amendments have been referred to parliament but have not yet been voted on.

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According to the Real Estate Institute of New South Wales (REINSW)Vacancy Rate Survey for March, Sydneys vacancy rate remained steady at 1.7% during the month, despite the fact conditions were mixed across the city.

The REINSWs figures show March saw vacancies in Inner Sydney sit at 1.3%, while in Middle Sydney the vacancy rate increased from 1.6% to 1.9%.

During March the vacancy rate in Outer Sydney pulled back from 2.1% to 1.8%.

REINSW president John Cunningham said the Sydney market, in particular Inner Sydney, would likely remain tight for the foreseeable future.

The last time Inner Sydney had a vacancy rate of 1.3% was March 2014. The market is tight and is expected to remain tight for some time, Cunningham said.

Rises in Middle Sydney and falls in Outer Sydney balanced out to see the vacancy rates for Sydney steady overall, he said.

Outside of Sydney, the Hunter saw 0.3% fall in its vacancy rate to 2.6% during March, with Newcastles vacancy rate falling from 2.6% to 2.1%.

In the Illawarra vacancy rates were up 0.1% at 1.3%, with Wollongongs vacancy rate falling 0.2% to 1.0%.

Source: REINSW

Across regional areas, availability in Albury fell 0.1% at 3.6%, New England rose 0.8% at 3.6% and Orana dropped 0.4% to 3.3%.

Coffs Harbour fell 0.8% to 1.5% and Northern Rivers rose 0.1% to 1.5%.
As a homeowner, you probably already know that you should be working to maintain your home. But, chances are, you Read More
The Global and United States Hydrobike Market Report has been published by QY Research recently. Hydrobike Market Analysis and Insights This report focuses on...
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- Save Romania Union (USR) leader, Catalin Drula requested on Monday that President Klaus Iohannis dismissed the Minister of the Interior, Lucian Bode, stating that he is "a corrupt minister, because of whom Romania risks not entering Schengen." Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste

- President Klaus Iohannis and visiting Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Wednesday will call on the Getica National Joint Training Centre at Cincu, Brasov County. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro  Help your friends

- President Klaus Iohannis signed on Monday the decree by which Ligia Deca was appointed education minister. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro  Help your friends know more about Romania! Share this article on Facebook

- We need zero tolerance for plagiarism, and the new education laws must include explicit provisions on preventing and punishing this toxic phenomenon of the educational environment, said President Klaus Iohannis on Monday morning, at the opening of the university year at the Ion Mincu University of

- President Klaus Iohannis signed, on Monday, the decree for the decoration of maestro Cristian Macelaru, principal conductor of the WDR Radio Symphony Orchestra in Cologne and artistic director of the "George Enescu" International Festival. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste

- On Monday, President Klaus Iohannis sent a congratulatory message to the new leader of the British Conservative Party, Liz Truss. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro  Help your friends know more about Romania!

- President Klaus Iohannis declared on Monday that there has recently been an intense and natural debate on the future of education, showing that he expects the debate to continue in Parliament until a legislative form that helps teachers to fulfill their aspirations is reached. Fii la curent

- President Klaus Iohannis on Monday signed a decree regarding the submission to Parliament for ratification of a loan agreement and a grant agreement between Romania and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) related to the first programmatic financing for the development
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- President Klaus Iohannis condemned on Tuesday the attacks with Russian missiles over the cities and civil infrastructures of Ukraine, showing that the analysis doesn't reveal, at the moment, an increase of risks in Romania. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro

- President Klaus Iohannis on Tuesday welcomed visiting Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace, with military honours. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro  Help your friends know

- Salome Zourabichvili, the President of Georgia, will be received on Tuesday at the Cotroceni Palace by President Klaus Iohannis, on the occasion of her official visit to Romania. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro  Help

- Firefighters' Day was marked, on Tuesday, by a ceremony organized at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace, with President Klaus Iohannis highlighting firefighters' activity in support of communities, as well as the importance of strengthening the integrated intervention system in Romania. Fii

- President Klaus Iohannis signed, on Tuesday, the Condolence Book opened in memory of Queen Elizabeth II at the residence of the ambassador of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Romania, the Presidential Administration announced. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri.

- President Klaus Iohannis on Tuesday will sign the condolence book opened in memory of Queen Elizabeth II at the residence of the ambassador of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to Romania, the Presidential Administration announced. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri.

- President Klaus Iohannis on Tuesday sent a message on the European Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day, underscoring that the stigmatization and discrimination of minorities must be "severely sanctioned." Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro

- President Klaus Iohannis decorated on Friday several German personalities at a ceremony that took place at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro  Help your friends know more about Romania!
Former vice-president Mohamed ElBaradei called on Tuesday for an independent fact-finding committee to examine the legal status of the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir, which the Egyptian government says belong to Saudi Arabia.

In a series of posts on his official Twitter account, the Nobel laureate and former vice president stated that the relationship between the Egyptian and Saudi people is more important than "a legal dispute" caused by different explanations of "historical events" and "legal documents."

"Aside from politics and emotions, the two countries can agree to form an independent neutral fact-finding committee of legal experts to reach a legal opinion," wrote ElBaradei in Arabic, adding that there were past experiences and alternatives that could solve the current controversy.

Last week, the Egyptian government signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia to redraw maritime borders so that the islands of Tiran and Sanafir would fall within Saudi territorial waters.

The decision created controversy and anger in Egypt, with some public figures insisting that the islands are in fact Egyptian territory.

The government has released several statements supporting its position, and President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi himself addressed the issue in a televised speech.

ElBaradei found himself part of the controversy when the Egyptian government cited his use of the word "Egyptian occupation" to describe the modern situation of the islands, in a 1982 article he wrote for a legal journal. A statement by a government body used the term to support its contention that the islands belong to Saudi Arabia.

ElBaradei responded with a denial that he supported that view, writing on Twitter that his use of the word occupation simply denoted possession and control.

I didnt go into the issue of ownership, which is settled according to facts, historical documents and resorting to international law, ElBaradei wrote.

The Egyptian-Saudi border agreement is still pending ratification by Egypt's House of Representatives.



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All the victims of the attack were members of central security forces

Unknown assailants fired a rocket at a police vehicle on Tuesday in the North Sinai city of Sheikh Zuweid, leaving three conscripts dead and eight others injured from the central security forces, Egypt's interior ministry announced.

"Security forces combed the area where the incident took place and are still searching for the perpetrators of the attack," the statement read.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the incident.

The army has been fighting a militant insurgency, mostly against the Islamic State affiliate Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, in parts of North Sinai for several years. Hundreds of troops and militants have been killed in clashes.

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The Taliban attack left 30 people dead and hundreds wounded

Egypt strongly condemned on Tuesday the bombing that hit the Afghan capital Kabul earlier in the day and left 30 people dead and hundreds others wounded, a statement by Egypt's foreign ministry read.

Egyptian foreign ministry spokesperson Ahmed Abu Zeid affirmed in the statement Egypt's full solidarity with Afghanistan during these "difficult times.

A truck bomb tore through central Kabul in the Tuesday attack before a fierce firefight broke out.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in the densely crowded neighbourhood.

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Guwahati: Four suspected militants have been arrested and a cache of arms and ammunition recovered from them by Assam police which is trying to ascertain if they have any links with 'jihadi' outfits.

Bodoland Territorial Area Districts Inspector General of Police L R Bishnoi said a joint team of Kokrajhar and Chirang police raided several places in the two districts late last night.

During the raids at Tulsibil, Muwamari, Bhawraguri and Jaypur of Kokrajhar and Dawkhanagar of Chirang, the four suspected jihadis were nabbed, he added.

The accused have been identified as Abu Bakar Siddique, Jahanur Alam Sheikh, Samad Ali Mandal and Azizul Sheikh, Bishnoi said.

The joint police team recovered one HE grenade, one revolver, seven rounds of M20 ammunition, two army camouflage dresses and five mobile phones from them, he added.

Bishnoi said interrogation of the militants is on to ascertain whether they have any links with jihadi outfits.
New Delhi: A day after Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal warned of strict action against app-based taxi operators, the Delhi government officials on Tuesday impounded at least 18 Ola and Uber cabs for overcharging.

The development was confirmed by new agency ANI.

This comes a day after CM Kejriwal had warned of 'strict action' against app-based taxis, including cancellation of permits and impounding of vehicles, for charging fares more than the rates prescribed by the government.

However, soon after the the Chief Minister's warning, Uber cab service said that they were temporarily suspending surge with immediate effect.

"Given the threat to livelihood of our partners, at the expense of reliability, we're temporarily suspending surge with immediate effect," Uber Delhi said.

"Hope to work with Delhi government to provide a reliable mobility option in the city, especially at time when citizens need us most," it added.

After Uber, Ola also temporarily suspended surge pricing in Delhi.

The warning from Kejriwal came after the government received some complaints against the app-based taxi service providers Ola and Uber of hiking the fares exorbitantly during rush hours.

The rates were allegedly also hiked today, the first full working day of the fortnight-long odd-even scheme when offices, schools and other institutions reopened after an extended weekend, as per PTI.

Meanwhile, Transport Minister Gopal Rai made an appeal to the commuters to register their complaints at 011-42400400 against exorbitant fares charged by the app-based taxi service providers.

"If we receive complaints against arbitrariness of any app-based taxi service, we will impound their vehicles," Rai said.

(With Agency inputs)
Cervantes's "Don Quixote" is one of the world's most translated works, perhaps only surpassed by the Bible

He is best known for "Don Quixote", but the eventful life of Spain's revered author Miguel de Cervantes was just as intriguing as any adventures of the delusional wanna-be knight of his famous novel.

Cervantes -- whose death on April 22, 1616 will be commemorated in Spain this week just as Britain marks the passing of Shakespeare 400 years ago -- survived a sea battle, capture by pirates, five years of captivity in Algiers and stints in prison.

"What gives such power to Cervantes' literature is that he lived his life so intensely," says photographer Jose Manuel Navia, who, for a Madrid exhibition, travelled to sites where the author once set foot.

Many questions surround the life of the soldier turned captive turned tax collector, whose writings largely took a back bench until he achieved overnight success with "Don Quixote" in his late fifties.

Using official archives, scant witness accounts and autobiographical prefaces to his books, academics have for decades tried to decipher the myth of the man known as the father of the modern novel.



Born in 1547 in Alcala de Henares near Madrid, his family struggled financially.

They settled in Madrid when the future superstar author was close to 20, and he wrote his first known poetry there.

But a few years later in 1569, Cervantes moved to Rome for reasons that remain unclear, and may have had to do with his involvement in a duel that forced him to escape.

In Italy, he enlisted as a soldier and fought in the 1571 Battle of Lepanto that saw more than 200 galleys of an alliance of Christian powers confront and defeat an Ottoman Empire fleet in the seas off Greece.

"Trembling with fever, he lies in a rickety old bed infested with lice between decks in an area that serves as a sick bay... afflicted by sea sickness and malaria," writes biographer Jean Canavaggio of the day of the battle.

But Cervantes still went on deck to fight, ending up shot in the chest and in the left hand, which he would never again be able to use.

After recovering from his wounds, Cervantes continued to participate in military campaigns until deciding to return to Spain in 1575.

But his ship was captured by pirates and Cervantes was taken to Algiers -- a bustling city administered by the Ottoman Turks.

He remained there for five years despite several attempts to escape, waiting to be freed in exchange for a ransom.

One of these attempts saw him and others hole up in a cavern east of Algiers for five months, waiting for a ship dispatched by his brother that never arrived.

Eventually, his family and a religious order raised money for the ransom and he returned to Spain, where he tried unsuccessfully to get official postings in return for his services as a soldier.

Then in 1584, Cervantes had a daughter -- his only offspring -- with one woman before marrying another who was nearly 20 years his junior.

He settled with her in a tiny village in the central region of Castilla-la-Mancha, where "Don Quixote" would later be based.

During that time he wrote his first novel "La Galatea," without much success.

Finally in 1587, he got an official posting that saw him on the move again, criss-crossing southern Spain for the next decade requisitioning wheat and oil for authorities and then collecting taxes.

During that time, he went to prison for what may have been debt-related reasons, and some believe he could have started dreaming up "Don Quixote" then.

When the novel was finally published in 1605, it was an overnight success.

The years after saw Cervantes move to Madrid and devote his time to writing -- including the second part of "Don Quixote" -- before dying of illness in 1616, a relatively poor man who probably never expected to leave such a lasting literary legacy.



"Don Quixote" has become one of the world's most translated works, perhaps only surpassed by the Bible.

Its tale of a man who fancies himself as a knight and set outs to rid the world of its ills has been universally praised.

Cervantes' portrayal of a hero as vulnerable and imperfect as any other human being was revolutionary, and inspired authors from Jane Austen and Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Gustave Flaubert and Mark Twain.

More than 300 events -- exhibitions, plays, readings, conferences -- are taking place in Spain over the year to mark his death.

On Saturday, Spain's royals and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy will go to Alcala de Henares to attend the prize-giving ceremony for the annual Miguel de Cervantes award, which honours the lifetime achievement of a writer.

And for Javier Rodriguez Palacios, mayor of Alcala de Henares, the author is still hugely relevant today.

"You describe his life to a 16-year-old guy... and he will start to realise that what is happening now in some places -- unemployment, youth having to go abroad, occasional conflict between those of Spanish origin and those who aren't -- Cervantes experienced this too," he says.

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New Delhi: Verdict is expected on Tuesday in the Mercedes hit-and-run case that took place in the national capital recently.

Hindustan Times reported that the Juvenile Justice Board could pronounce its judgment in the case today, in which a minor mowed down a 34-year-old with his speeding Mercedes car.

The Class 12 student, who turned 18 just four days after the incident, was allegedly driving at a speed of 80 kmph when his car hit Siddharth Sharma near Ludlow Castle School in north Delhis Civil Lines area.

The accused surrendered before the police on April 10 and was sent to a juvenile justice home.

The Delhi Police last week charged him with culpable homicide after it emerged that the accused was a repeat offender.

His father was also taken into custody for abetting the crime but was later granted bail.

The CCTV footage of the accident had gone viral on social media and showed the victim crossing the road when the speeding Mercedes hit him, throwing him several feet in the air.
Washington D.C.: To avoid the devastating public health consequences of climate change, policy makers need to act now to curb greenhouse gas emissions, as per the American College of Physicians (ACP).

ACP cites higher rates of respiratory and heat-related illnesses, increased prevalence of diseases passed by insects, water-borne diseases, food and water insecurity and malnutrition, and behavioral health problems as potential health effects of climate change. The elderly, the sick, and the poor are especially vulnerable.

ACP says that physicians have a role in combating climate change, especially as it relates to human health.

ACP calls on the health care sector to implement environmentally sustainable and energy efficient practices and prepare for the impacts of climate change to ensure continued operations during periods of elevated patient demand.

ACP encourages physicians to become educated about climate change, its effect on human health and how to respond to future challenges. ACP recommends that medical schools and continuing medical education providers incorporate climate change-related coursework into curricula.

The study is published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
World's largest marine heritage is under threat. For the first time ever, coral population in Sydney Harbour is showing signs of bleaching due to warm waters, according to the scientists.

The researchers of the two Australian universities, University of Technology (UTS) and Macquarie University made this shocking revealation in which they discovered the first ever incident of 'paled coral colonies during routine monitoring at a number of locations in Sydney Harbour'

The coral colonies thrives in cold water but the El Nino season of 2015-16 raised the temperature of the East Australian Currents.

The researchers claimed that around 45% of harbour's hard corals has been devastated by these warm waters.

Coral bleaching usually occurs when the temperature of sea water rises abnormally. Several factors are responsible for such warm waters like climate change, global warming, El Nino etc.

The video below shows how slowly and steadily we are losing the most diverse underwater ecosystem.
Delhi: Global health officials are racing to better understand the Zika virus behind a major outbreak that began in Brazil last year and has spread to many countries in the Americas.

The following are some questions and answers about the virus and current outbreak:

How do people become infected?

Zika is transmitted to people through the bite of infected female mosquitoes, primarily the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the same type that spreads dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said Aedes mosquitoes are found in all countries in the Americas except Canada and continental Chile, and the virus will likely reach all countries and territories of the region where Aedes mosquitoes are found.

How do you treat Zika?

There is no treatment or vaccine for Zika infection. Companies and scientists are racing to develop a safe and effective vaccine for Zika, but the World Health Organization (WHO) had said it would take at least 18 months to start large-scale clinical trials of potential preventative shots.

How dangerous is it?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that infection with the Zika virus in pregnant women is a cause of the birth defect microcephaly and other severe brain abnormalities in babies. The CDC said now that the causal relationship has been established, several important questions must still be answered with studies that could take years.

According to the World Health Organization, there is strong scientific consensus that Zika can cause the birth defect microcephaly in babies, a condition defined by unusually small heads that can result in developmental problems. In addition, the agency said it could cause Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that can result in paralysis. Conclusive proof of the damage caused by Zika may take months or years.

Brazil has confirmed 1,113 cases of microcephaly, and considers most of them to be related to Zika infections in the mothers. Brazil is investigating an additional 3,836 suspected cases of microcephaly. Colombia has confirmed two cases of microcephaly linked to Zika.

Current research in Brazil indicates the greatest microcephaly risk is associated with infection during the first trimester of pregnancy, but health officials have warned an impact could be seen in later weeks. Recent studies have shown evidence of Zika in amniotic fluid, placenta and fetal brain tissue.

What are the symptoms of Zika infection?

People infected with Zika may have a mild fever, skin rash, conjunctivitis, muscle and joint pain and fatigue that can last for two to seven days. But as many as 80 percent of people infected never develop symptoms. The symptoms are similar to those of dengue or chikungunya, which are transmitted by the same type of mosquito.

How can Zika be contained?

Efforts to control the spread of the virus focus on eliminating mosquito breeding sites and taking precautions against mosquito bites such as using insect repellent and mosquito nets. U.S. and international health officials have advised pregnant women to avoid travel to Latin American and Caribbean countries where they may be exposed to Zika. Cases of sexual transmission have also been reported, prompting health officials to advise use of condoms, or abstaining from sex, to prevent infection between partners.

How widespread is the outbreak?

Active Zika outbreaks have been reported in at least 43 countries or territories, most of them in the Americas, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Brazil has been the country most affected. (http://1.usa.gov/1ovAJyh)

Africa (1): Cape Verde

Americas (35): Aruba, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Bonaire, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Curacao, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Martinique, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Saint Lucia, Saint Martin, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Maarten, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, U.S. Virgin Islands and Venezuela

Oceania/Pacific Islands (7): American Samoa, Fiji, Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, New Caledonia, Samoa, and Tonga.

What is the history of the Zika virus?

The Zika virus is found in tropical locales with large mosquito populations. Outbreaks of Zika have been recorded in Africa, the Americas, Southern Asia and the Western Pacific. The virus was first identified in Uganda in 1947 in rhesus monkeys and was first identified in people in 1952 in Uganda and Tanzania, according to the WHO.

Can Zika be transmitted through sexual contact?

The World Health Organization (WHO) said sexual transmission is "relatively common" and has advised pregnant women not to travel to areas with ongoing outbreaks of Zika virus.

The U.S. CDC is investigating about a dozen cases of possible sexual transmission. All cases involve possible transmission of the virus from men to their sex partners. The WHO has also identified Zika cases in Argentina, Chile, France, Italy and New Zealand as likely caused by sexual transmission.

British health officials reported Zika was found in a man`s semen two months after he was infected, suggesting the virus may linger in semen long after infection symptoms fade.

The PAHO said Zika can be transmitted through blood, but this is an infrequent transmission mechanism. There is no evidence Zika can be transmitted to babies through breast milk.

What other complications are associated with Zika?

Zika has also been associated with other neurological disordes, including serious brain and spinal cord infections. The long-term health consequences of Zika infection are unclear. Other uncertainties surround the incubation period of the virus and how Zika interacts with other viruses that are transmitted by mosquitoes, such as dengue.
Raipur: Two unidentified men armed with sharp-edged weapons barged into a church in Chhattisgarh's Bastar district and allegedly set ablaze a Bible and other articles besides thrashing the pastor and his pregnant wife, police said on Tuesday.

The incident took place on Sunday evening at village Karanji Matagudi Para under Parpa police station limits.

"As per the written complaint of Pastor Deenbandhu Sameli, an FIR has been lodged in this connection. Continuous patrolling is being done in the region to nab the attackers. We are pretty sure that the culprits will be arrested soon," Bastar Superintendent of Police RN Dash told PTI.

As per the complaint, two men identified themselves as belonging to some other denomination of the Christian community and expressed their desire to pray in the church.

After entering inside the premises, they launched an attack on the pastor and poured inflammable liquid on the Holy Bible, furniture and other religious material kept inside and set them ablaze.

"After getting information about the incident, we immediately rushed to the spot and deployed a policeman for security throughout the night," Dash said.

A case under sections 295 (injuring or defiling place of worship), 392 (robbery), 452 (house-trespass after preparation for hurt), 435 (mischief by fire or explosive substance), 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt) and 34 (common intention) of the IPC was registered against the unidentified persons, he added.

Meanwhile, president of Chhattisgarh's Christian Forum Arun Pannalal alleged that the attack was carried out by the workers of Bajrang Dal and accused police of "covering up" the incident.

"This was third attack on the religious premises of Christian community in the region. It was carried out by the goons of Bajrang dal. Police are trying to cover it up," Pannalal claimed.

The attackers were armed with a knife, hammer, sword and petrol.

After breaking locks of church premises, they barged inside and poured petrol on the Bible, other holy books, furniture and mike set and torched them, he said.

They also poured petrol on pastor Deenanath and his pregnant wife, Meena and tried to set them afire but somehow they managed to escape, Pannalal added.

Police personnel immediately reached the spot after getting report of the incident and deployed night gaurds there, he added.
Wagah: The mortal remains of Kirpal Singh, the Indian prisoner who died under mysterious circumstances in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat Jail, were on Tuesday brought to the Wagah International Border.

Kirpal Singh's body was handed over to the Indian authorities by the Pakistani officials here. Indian officials who received Kripal Singh's body then took it to the Integrated Check Post (ICP) for documentation and other formalities.

Family members of Kirpal Singh had last week met Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh to express their concerns over the gruesome treatment meted out to Indians languishing in Pakistani jails.

The Home Minister, after the meeting, assured them that all concerns related to the bringing of the body of Kirpal Singh back from Pakistan will be properly addressed.

External Affair Minister Sushma Swaraj had earlier assured the kin of Kirpal Singh that India would get his body back home.

Kirpal Singh's family had earlier rejected Pakistan's claim that he died of a heart attack and demanded a post-mortem to ascertain the true facts behind his sudden death.

"How can we believe that he died of heart attack? His body should be sent to us and post-mortem should be done. We want to know the truth," Singh's nephew had told ANI.

Kirpal had allegedly crossed the Attari-Wagah border to enter Pakistan in 1992 and was subsequently sentenced to death in a serial bomb blasts case in Pakistan's Punjab province.
New Delhi: This may spell a serious trouble for yoga guru Baba Ramdev and his Patanjali Ayurved.

Some samples of Patanjali's cow desi ghee have failed the test and it has been found that colour was added to the ghee, according to a report in India Samvad.

A Lucknow resident - Yogesh Mishra - has complained about the Patanjali's cow desi ghee after he found fungus in the ghee.

According to Yogesh, the Patanjali ghee that he purchased from market was yellow in colour. He raised a complaint based on the samples.

The samples were sent for tests on 7th Jan 2016.

The detailed report of the tests have been sent to chief food security officer.
Beijing: In a bid to improve border management and avoid frequent stand-off between the two armies, India and China are mulling setting up a hotline between the military headquarters of both the countries.

According to reports, China has reacted positively towards setting up a military hotline with India.

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, who is Beijing, met Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan yesterday and held discussions on improving border management through a new round of confidence building measures (CBMs) with him.

"The Chinese have returned the draft of the memorandum on establishing a hotline between the two military headquarters. The issue should be closed within one or two months," media reports quoted Parrikar as saying after the meeting.

Parrikar, who is presently on a five-day visit to China, is the first Indian Defence Minister to visit the country after A.K. Antony in 2013. He will also be meeting the top Chinese military officials.

Parrikar arrived at Shanghai yesterday, accompanied by a delegation which included senior officials from the Defence Ministry and from the Army and Navy.
Wagah: The family members of Kirpal Singh, the Indian prisoner who died under mysterious circumstances in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat Jail, have complained about the alleged inhuman treatment meted out to him in Pakistan and demanded a fresh post-mortem in India.

Speaking to reporters shortly after Kirpal Singh's body arrived at the Wagah International Border, his nephew said, ''There are injury marks on his face and body. Blood is seeping out from his eyes. We want another post-mortem here so that the truth comes out.''

While alleging that Kirpal Singh was badly tortured in the Pakistani jail, his sister claimed that the authorities there wanted him to admit that he had committed crimes against Pakistan.

The reaction from Kirpal's family came shortly after his body arrived at the Wagah Border check post.

Kirpal Singh had recently died under mysterious circumstances in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat Jail.

The Border Security Force (BSF) took charge of the body at the Attari land border, the officials said.

The Indian officials who received Kripal Singh's body then took it to Integrated Check Post (ICP) for documentation and other formalities.

Family members of Kirpal Singh had last week met Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh to express their concerns over the gruesome treatment meted out to Indians languishing in Pakistani jails.

The Home Minister, after the meeting, had assured them that all concerns related to the bringing of the body of Kirpal Singh back from Pakistan will be properly addressed.

External Affair Minister Sushma Swaraj had earlier assured the kin of Kirpal Singh that India would get his body back home.

Kirpal Singh's family had earlier rejected Pakistan's claim that he died of a heart attack and demanded a post-mortem to ascertain the true facts behind his sudden death.

"How can we believe that he died of heart attack? His body should be sent to us and post-mortem should be done. We want to know the truth," Singh's nephew had told ANI.

Kirpal had allegedly crossed the Attari-Wagah border to enter Pakistan in 1992 and was subsequently sentenced to death in a serial bomb blasts case in Pakistan's Punjab province.
New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday continued to target Congress in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan case, accusing the party of having underplayed "a terror plot" against the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

Addressing a press conference, Bharatiya Janata Party spokesman Sambit Patra said that Congress compromised national security.

The BJP attack came after a media report said the then Home Minister P Chidambaram had signed the first affidavit in the encounter case, which he had reportedly denied earlier.

Meanwhile, another BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said Chidambaram was resorting to falsehood by claiming he was not aware of the first affidavit.

"Mr Chidambaram has spoken a blatant lie that he was not aware of the first affidavit. Now it is in public domain that he approved the first affidavit and also approved the second affidavit as well," he told reporters here.

"What was the first affidavit? The first affidavit was Ishrat Jahan was part of a terrorist module and action was taken, including some terrorists across the border. The first affidavit said it was a serious terrorist threat and there is no need for a CBI inquiry," the Union minister said.

"In the second affidavit, Chidambaram was very keen to pursue that bypassing the consultations with then home secretary. It is stated that CBI inquiry can be done. It has two purpose, demoralise the security forces and somehow frame Amit Shah and Narendra Modi. It was part of a design to frame Amit Shah and Narendra Modi in Ishrat Jahan case," he said.

"Ishrat was claimed as LeT mole by the Lashkar-e-Toiba website. And even (David) Headley in his deposition has confirmed that. Therefore, Congress party needs to explain why national security was sought to be compromised for political reasons," Prasad said.

The Congress and Chidambaram reacted to the development saying the BJP was ignoring and diluting the "real" issue of "fake" encounter in which Ishrat Jahan was killed.

Chidambaram said he cannot comment on the issue of the first affidavit without perusing the files and notings.

But, he said, the BJP was ignoring the "real" issue of the "fake" encounter in which Ishrat Jahan was killed.
Libyan authorities said Sunday they had arrested 203 African migrants in the capital who were preparing to make a perilous sea crossing to Europe.

An alleged people smuggler was also detained.

An early morning raid by forces battling clandestine migration targeted a house in eastern Tripoli's Al-Hashan district and netted several dozen people, an AFP journalist said.

Armed and masked members of the authorities in bullet-proof vests rounded up the migrants and put them on vehicles to be driven to a detention centre.

Dozens more were detained in another raid on a house in the same neighbourhood.

No force was used in either operation and there was no resistance.

"After a tip-off about a people smuggler preparing a crossing to Europe by clandestine migrants the raids were carried out in a Tripoli suburb," a security official said.

"We arrested 203 illegal migrants from different nationalities. They were with there with their smuggler," he said.

Libya has long been a stepping stone for migrants seeking a better life in Europe, with Italy some 300 kilometres (185 miles) away across the Mediterranean.

Smugglers have stepped up their lucrative business in the chaos that has followed the 2011 ouster of longtime dictator Mummar Gaddhafi.

The interior ministry in Rome put migrant arrivals in Italy at 23,739 since the start of the year as of Thursday morning, compared with 19,589 by April 14 last year.

On Friday, the International Organization of Migration said nearly 6,000 migrants had reached Italy by sea in the space of four days.

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New Delhi: Indian doctors on Tuesday ruled out any foul play in the death of Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh, who died in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat Jail last week.

The announcement was made by the Indian doctors based on the outcomes of the post-mortem which was performed by them on Tuesday evening.

The doctors also said that some internal body part have been found missing from Kirpal Singh's body. However, they attributed it to the first post-mortem, which was performed by Pakistani doctors. They also told that there were no injury marks on Singh's body.

"It was found that there is no internal or external injury on the body. Some of the organs of the body are missing. They could have been removed to take samples during first post-mortem in Pakistan," said Dr Ashok, head of the panel which performed the post-mortem.

Answering to a question about the cause of Singh's death, the doctors told that it was possible to tell only after analysing the report of the chemical report, which needs some more time to come.

"Cause of Kirpal's death not established yet. Will be known after going through the report of chemical examiner and previous post-mortem," added Dr Ashok.

Earlier in the day, the family members of Kirpal Singh have complained about the alleged inhuman treatment meted out to him in Pakistan and demanded a fresh post-mortem in India.

Speaking to reporters shortly after Kirpal Singh's body arrived at the Wagah International Border, his nephew said, ''There are injury marks on his face and body. Blood is seeping out from his eyes. We want another post-mortem here so that the truth comes out.''

While alleging that Kirpal Singh was badly tortured in the Pakistani jail, his sister claimed that the authorities there wanted him to admit that he had committed crimes against Pakistan.

The reaction from Kirpal's family came shortly after his body arrived at the Wagah Border check post.
New Delhi: Akali Dal on Tuesday came down heavily on BJP-led NDA government for its stand in the Supreme Court on the issue of bringing back the Kohinoor diamond from Britain.

The Centre had yesterday told Supreme Court that the British East India Company did not take away the Kohinoor diamond but it was gifted to Britain by Maharaja Duleep Singh.

How can 'Kohinoor' diamond be gifted? Does anyone give gifts to the enemy?, news agency ANI quoted Akali Dal as saying.

The government's stand on the matter was conveyed to the bench of Chief Justice TS Thakur and Justice Uday Umesh Lalit in response to a public interest litigation by an NGO, All India Human Rights and Social Justice Forum, seeking directions to the government to make efforts for getting the diamond back to India.

The court, while giving the government six more weeks, said that if it accepted the government position and dismissed the PIL, all future avenues for staking any legitimate claim over the diamond will be shut.

The apex court also gave the time as Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar told it that the stand was that of the cultural affairs ministry but the "ministry of external affairs is also a party and their response is yet to come".

The 108-carat diamond was presented to the then British monarch, Queen Victoria, in 1850 after the Anglo-Sikh wars, in which Britain gained control over the Sikh empire in the then undivided Punjab.
New Delhi: Following the government's assertion that the legendary Kohinoor diamond could not be brought back to India as it was 'gifted' to the British, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy on Tuesday expressed his disappointment over the stand of the ruling dispensation.

Swamy also said that he would write to Prime Minister Narendra Modi regarding the facts of the diamond's transaction from India to Britain way back in 1850.

"The first production of the Kohinoor was during the Kakatiya dynasty, which was in Warangal and this was taken out from the Guntur mines. It was later taken over by the Mughals, who put it in the peacock throne then it went to Abdali then to his opponents and then to Maharaja Ranjit Singh. When he was getting sick and he knew that he may die, he wrote his will and bequeathed the diamond to Jagannath Mandir. That's final. You can't change that," Swamy told ANI.

Expressing his frustration at the law officers of the government, he said that he was ashamed of them for claiming that this was a 'gift' to the British when the truth was miles away from it.

Throwing light on the history of the diamond's transaction, Swamy added that Maharaja Ranjit Singh's 13-year-old son Dilip Singh had a British tutor.

"When the young prince was about to meet Queen Victoria, he was told that he would have to present her a grand gift, which is when he gave the diamond. However, he regretted what he did as he grew older," said Swamy.

"All this is recorded in the book of our High Commission in London. The book is titled 'exile'. The Prime Minister should tell the Additional General and the Solicitor General to compulsorily read that book first and then file a new affidavit," Swamy said.

The government on Monday told the Supreme Court that as per the Ministry of Culture, India should not stake a claim to the famed Kohinoor diamond as 'it was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away'.

Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, appearing for the government, said this was the stand of the Culture Ministry.

Chief Justice T.S. Thakur asked the Centre if it wants the case to be dismissed as they would face a problem in the future when putting forward any legitimate claim.

The Supreme Court has asked the Centre to file a detailed reply within six weeks.

Following the furore by the government's assertion, Union Minister of State for Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation Mahesh Sharma said that only the Centre can act on the issue of the Kohinoor diamond.

"According to the guidelines, the Central Government can take steps on things that were gifted or procured by the British before independence. Expert opinion on this regard will be taken at an appropriate time," he told ANI.

The diamond is now part of the glittering purple-velvet Queen Mother's Crown in the Tower of London. For years, the politicians and others in India and in the UK have said the diamond was seized after the British annexed Punjab. The gem was once the largest diamond in the world and is twice the size of the Hope Diamond.
Delhi: The juvenile board on Tuesday dismissed the bail plea of a minor accused in the killing of a 33-year-old business consultant in a hit-and-run case.

As per reports, the Juvenile Justice Board said that the class XII student was a repeat offender.

Reacting to the development, Shilpa Mittal,victim's sister said, "Happy that accused's bail is rejected. This case should be a lesson for all parents,"as per ANI.

His father, Manoj Aggarwal was granted bail on April 10, two days after his arrest, on personal bail bond of Rs 1 lakh.

Police had apprehended the minor offender after he killed Sidhharth Sharma by hitting with his overspeeding Mercedes car when the victim was crossing Sham Nath Marg in north Delhi's Civil Lines area to get some eatables from the nearby market.

The minor was then freed on bail, as he was only booked under section 304A (causing death by negligence) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

After an uproar followed by allegations by the victim's family that police officers were going soft on the accused, police later took a U-turn, not only changing the IPC section mentioned in the FIR but also arrested Aggarwal.

Aggarwal was arrested under section 304 (abetting the crime of culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of IPC as the investigators found that he, despite knowing the fact that his minor son had caused a road accident earlier, gave the vehicle's key to him.

The Delhi Police had managed to get Aggarwal's one-day custody on the basis of the proofs they submitted to the court, saying he had "not taken a single step in prohibiting his son from taking the vehicle" which is an act of criminal omission.

Police also found in its investigation that it was not the first offence of rash and negligent driving by the juvenile. In the past, he has also been found driving in such a way thereby causing a road accident with another vehicle.

Police had earlier informed court that a CCTV footage clearly showed that the minor offender was driving his car in extremely fast speed in a residential area.

(With Agency inputs)
New Delhi: The mortal remains of Kirpal Singh, the Indian prisoner who died under mysterious circumstances in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat Jail, will be handed over to India on Tuesday, according to sources.

Family members of Kirpal Singh had last week met Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh to express their concerns over the gruesome treatment meted out to Indians languishing in Pakistani jails.

The Home Minister, after the meeting, had assured them that all concerns related to the bringing of the body of Kirpal Singh back from Pakistan will be properly addressed.

External Affair Minister Sushma Swaraj had earlier assured the kin of Kirpal Singh that India would get his body back home.

Kirpal Singh's family had earlier rejected Pakistan's claim that he died of a heart attack and demanded a post-mortem to ascertain the true facts behind his sudden death.

"How can we believe that he died of heart attack? His body should be sent to us and post-mortem should be done. We want to know the truth," Singh's nephew had told ANI.

Kirpal had allegedly crossed the Attari-Wagah border to enter Pakistan in 1992 and was subsequently sentenced to death in a serial bomb blasts case in Pakistan's Punjab province.
New Delhi: The Government on Tuesday said that most of the issues concerning the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter aircraft from France have been duly addressed and a deal would be finalised soon.

New agency PTI quoted Rao Inderjit Singh, MoS Defence, as saying, ''Most hitches in Rafale fighter plane deal have been addressed. Next Defence Acquisition Council meet will address the remaining issues.''

The announcement from the government is significant as a high-level team from France is expected to arrive here next month to firm up the order for the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter aircraft by India as both countries have managed to narrow down their differences over pricing.

The development comes nearly four months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Francois Hollande signed a memorandum of agreement to purchase 36 Rafale combat jets.

The Indian side has been negotiating hard to bring down the price with Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar refusing to buckle under pressure even as questions were being raised about the delay in signing the contract.

The deal comes with the clause of 50% offsets, which will be a bonanza for the domestic industry as it will lead to business worth at least 3 billion and create new jobs in India.

The tough part of the negotiations that began in July 2015 was to get the French side to agree to 50% offsets in the deal. Initially, Dassault Aviation, makers of Rafale, was willing to agree to reinvest only 30% of the value of its contract in Indian entities to meet the offset obligations.

The French side finally agreed to invest 50% of the value following a phone conversation between Modi and Hollande late last year.

The commercial negotiations, as in the pricing of the planes, equipment and other issues, actually began only in mid-January this year.

Government sources said the deal has not been concluded yet but it is in final stages.

The sources said the price for 36 Rafales, as per the UPA tender, keeping the cost escalation and dollar rate in mind, comes to a little over Rs.65,000 crore. This includes the cost involved in making changes India has sought in the aircraft, including Israeli helmet mounted display and some specific weaponry, among others.

The effort is to bring down the price to less than 8 billion (Rs.59,000 crore), the sources said. The expectation is that the final deal will be clinched by May-end.

Under the proposed deal, French companies apart from Dassault Aviation, will provide several aeronautics, electronics and micro-electronics technologies to comply with the offset obligation.

Companies like Safran and Thales will join Dassault in providing state-of-art technologies in stealth, radar, thrust vectoring for missiles and materials for electronics and micro-electronics.

With PTI inputs
New Delhi: The controversial documentary based on the 2014 Narendra Modi-Arvind Kejriwal election battle has been denied certificate for public exhibition.

The Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT) has denied certificate to 'Battle for Banaras' for public exhibition on the basis of various grounds, according to a report in TOI.

Communal disharmony

According to FCAT, it may cause communal disharmony.

Division among castes

Also, it may lead to divisions among members of different castes.

Hate and inflammatory speeches

According to an order passed on April 4, FCAT headed by Justice S K Mahajan (retired) upheld the censor board's order.

The censor board's order said that the 'Dance for Democracy/Battle for Banaras' was full of "hate and inflammatory speeches given by all the leaders of the political parties'' and "tries to divide people on caste and communal lines".

Who made the documentary?

The controversial documentary has been made by director Kamal Swaroop.
Patna: Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, who last year forged an alliance with Janata Dal (United) to take on the Narendra Modi-powered BJP, on Tuesday advocated for Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar being projected as the next prime minister.

When asked whether RJD would support the Bihar JD (U) leader as the prime ministerial candidate, Lalu said, Yeah sure, there is no second thought on this.

Ever since Lalu and Nitish, the arch rivals-turned-friends, steered the 'Mahagathbandhan' to a resounding victory in 2015 Bihar Assembly Elections, both have been very critical of PM Narendra Modi.

Earlier, there were reports in media that a ''Third Front'' comprising of regional parties is likely to be formed under the leadership of Nitish Kumar.

Nitish had snapped ties with the Bharatiya Janata Party after Modi was appointed as the PM candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

The Bihar CM was recently elected as the JD (U) president.

Nitish's elevation might be a headache for the Congress, which would like Rahul Gandhi to be projected as the only Modi challenger in the 2019 parliamentary elections. However, going by the clean track record of the Bihar CM and his ability to connect with the voters, he can pose a big challenge for the Gandhi scion.
Jammu: There is no end to provocation from across the border in Jammu and Kashmir.

Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi prepared to visit Katra on Tuesday, Pakistani troops violated ceasefire along the International Border (IB) in Samba district.

PTI quoted a senior BSF officer as saying that Pakistani troops opened 4-5 rounds of fire on a forward post in Samba sector early this morning.

BSF troops retaliated in full measure, he said.

No loss of life or injury was reported.

BSF troops also picked up suspicious movement near a forward area in Samba sector and resorted to firing thereby forcing the person to flee, he said.
Syria's opposition High Negotiations Committee threatened Sunday to suspend its participation in UN-backed peace talks if there is no progress on a political transition away from President Bashar al-Assad.

HNC representatives said the indirect negotiations could collapse if the regime refuses to compromise on political and humanitarian issues.

"We might suspend (our participation in) the talks if things carry on this way, and then there will be no prospect for any political solution," HNC member Abdulhakim Bashar told AFP.

Syria's government and the HNC arrived in Geneva last week for a fresh round of talks held by UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura.

The HNC has questioned the regime's commitment to a political solution to Syria's five-year war, particularly in the wake of renewed violence in the northern province of Aleppo.

A Russian-backed government offensive near the provincial capital of Aleppo city has also strained a shaky ceasefire in place since February 27.

"The humanitarian situation is continually deteriorating, the issue of the detainees has not seen any progress, the ceasefire has almost collapsed, and now there is an attack on Aleppo from three sides," Bashar said.

"Given these factors, we are reviewing everything, and we will continue our meetings today so that tomorrow we can decide what to do."

A second member of the HNC delegation, speaking anonymously because he was not authorised to make press statements, said the talks were nearly at "an impasse".

"The negotiations have nearly reached an impasse with the intransigent regime's refusal to negotiate the fate of Assad in the Geneva talks," the member said.

He warned that the current round "is at risk of failing" if world powers, especially the United States and Russia, did not put pressure on Damascus.

Assad's fate has remained the main sticking point in peace talks, with Syria's opposition clinging onto its call for his ouster since the conflict broke out in 2011.

But the regime has rejected the embattled leader's departure, calling his fate "a red line".

More than 270,000 people have died in Syria's war, and millions more have been displaced.

World powers thrown their weight behind UN envoy Staffan de Mistura's efforts to put an end to the conflict, but little progress has been made.

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Delhi: National National Investigation Agency (NIA) said on Tuesday that they have sufficient evidence on Pathankot terror attack and that the team was ready to go to Pakistan on a short notice.

As per CNN-NEWS18, NIA DG Sharad Kumar has said that his team is ready to go to Pakistan even on a short notice.

"We welcome Pakistan PM's Adviser on Foreign Affairs statement to CNN News18. Our teams are ready to go to Pakistan even on short notice. We have already given sufficient evidence against JeM in the Pathankot case. A non-bailable warrant has been issued by the court and we are writing to the CBI for Red Corner notice," he was quoted as saying by the website.

Yesterday, Pakistan Prime Minister's Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz had indicated that his country may consider a request by India for a visit by its NIA team to further probe the Pathankot attack, days after top Pakistani envoy ruled out the same.

Aziz had said that Pakistan High Commissioner to India Abdul Basit's comments that the bilateral peace process was "suspended" did not mean "cancelled or given up" and hoped that the Indo-Pak dialogue will resume soon.

On whether India's NIA team will be allowed to visit Pakistan in connection with Pathankot attack probe, Aziz had said that "once the stage is reached... India makes a request and then we will see".

Claiming that Basit's comments that cooperation not meaning reciprocity were "over-interpreted", he had said that he did not exclude option of NIA's visit to Pakistan.

"I don't think he used that word. He said that right now cooperation is more important than that of reciprocity and does not exclude option and he said that let's cooperate and then thing will work out. So, I don't think one should over interpret statement, he (Basit) just said that cooperation is more important which is true," Aziz had said, as per PTI.

Earlier this month, Basit had indicated that an Indian probe team is unlikely to be allowed to visit Pakistan, which had sent its JIT to probe the terror attack at the air base, saying, "...The whole investigation is not about question of reciprocity in my view. It is more about extending cooperation or our two countries cooperating with each other to get to the bottom of the incident", as per PTI.

Aziz also downplayed Basit's remarks on "suspension" of Indo-Pak peace process, saying "... Suspending doesn't mean cancelled or given up".

"For the time being you called it suspended as obviously after January, four months have passed, and to that "extent dialogue is suspended but I hope it will resume soon," he had added.

(With Agency inputs)
Kolkata: Ahead of addressing rallies in poll-bound West Bengal, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited his ailing guru Swami Atmasthananda Maharaj, the president of Ramakrishna Math and Mission Order, in Kolkata today.

The Prime Minister's guru, who is suffering from age-related health complications, is presently undergoing treatment at the Ramakrishna Mission Seva Pratishthan - Shisumangal.

The senior monk had congratulated Prime Minister Modi after he won the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and invited him to visit the Math.

The 97-year old Swami is the president of the order started by Swami Vivekananda.

After his visit, the Prime Minister's first address will be at Nadia district's Krishnanagar, which is likely to begin at around 3.30 p.m., while the second one will be in West Bengal's capital city.
New Delhi: In a fresh ray of hope for deemed varsities graded 'B' and 'C' categories, the Supreme Court on Tuesday granted them liberty to seek upgradation by moving the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) afresh.

A bench comprising Justices Dipak Misra and Shiva Kirti Singh said it will not go into the grievances of the deemed universities with regard to their gradation and they will have to move NAAC itself afresh.

"We direct the National Assessment and Accreditation Council to dispose off the pleas of deemed universities within 12 weeks on the issue," the court said.

Institutions graded A, B and C are considered very good, good and satisfactory respectively, and are accredited as deemed universities with the UGC. Grade 'D' is an unsatisfactory rating and is not accredited.

NAAC, in pursuance of the apex court order, has assessed and accredited 38 deemed universities across the country and granted grade 'A' to 17, 'B' to 20 and grade 'C' to one.

During the hearing, the bench, on being intimated by the authorities, clarified that the D Y Patil Education Society which also runs a medical college in Pune has been graded 'A' by NAAC.

It also recorded the submission of senior advocate Sanjay Hegde, appearing for Viplav Sharma who had filed the PIL in 2006 on the issue of deemed universities, that such varsities will have to always mention that they are "deemed".

Hegde also said they cannot be allowed to run off-campus centres. The submission was objected to by senior advocate Rajeev Dhavan, who appeared for a deemed university.

The court posted the PIL for further hearing on July 12.

Earlier, the apex court had asked NAAC to put in the public domain the gradation list of all 38 deemed universities.

NAAC has considered various aspects including self- appraisal report of these universities before putting the information regarding their gradation on the website.

Prior to this, the court had rapped the UGC over the physical verification of infrastructure and faculty strength of deemed universities which were black-listed by a government-appointed committee.

The remarks were made when the UGC counsel was trying to explain the circumstances causing the delay, by submitting that there was a need to modify the apex court order as the commission cannot go the way PN Tandon Committee categorised the deemed universities.

The UGC had said it could only conduct inspection after seeking response of such universities, place the report with the government which would then express its view before the court.

The bench had asked the UGC to comply with its earlier direction and conduct physical verification of the 41 deemed universities. It had said that after completing the procedure of verification and rectification of deficiencies, the UGC will file its report both to the Centre and the apex court.

The universities had gone to the Supreme Court after they were put in the 'C' category in 2009 by Committee headed by PN Tandon, a retired professor from prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

Prior to this, 44 deemed universities were found unfit for the status by the Tandon committee. However, the number came down to 41 after two of them surrendered the deemed varsity tag, while the third one was converted into a centre of national importance.

After the Supreme Court's direction, UGC had in October last year set up a committee under its vice chairperson H Devaraj to conduct physical verification of seven universities whose deemed category status had come under question.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday pulled up the state governments for not filing the affidavit with regard to encroachment of roads, pavements and sideways by construction of religious structures or installation of statues of public figures.

The apex court had earlier on March 8 instructed the states to chalk out an action plan and file an affidavit.

An apex court bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Gopal Gowda hit out at the state governments and asked them to take the orders seriously.

"Are orders of the court meant to be kept in cold storage? Is there no respect left for the orders of the court? We know what should be done. We have summoned all the chief secretaries of all the state and then they will have to tell that why did the states not abide by the orders of the court," the apex court bench said.

The court has bestowed all states with a time slab of two week to submit a report to Additional Solicitor General. Those who fail to do so will be summoned by the court.

The court will hear the matter next in the second week of May.

The apex court`s ruling addresses a common hazard in all Indian cities and towns where unauthorized religious structures - often thinly disguised cases of land grab - have sprung up on public and private land and are obstructing roads and inconveniencing residents.

The order can empower municipal and government bodies to prevent unauthorized constructions being carried out under the garb of religious structures as often local political interests and religious sentiments render authorities helpless.
News Delhi: In a major setback for the country, three officers of India's external spy agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) have 'willingly' disappeared. All these defections took place in last three months.

According to a report in the Sunday Guardian, all three of them are now likely to be in a large Western country, which has a history of accepting and facilitating such disappearances of Indian intelligence officers.

The Cabinet Secretariat, the controlling body of the RAW, remains tight-lipped on the issue. Several emails seeking its response on the issue did not get any acceptance or denial from the body.

All three officers, one of whom was posted at a senior level, had already shifted their families that western country before disappearing. The news report says that two of these officers were looking after South Asian countries whereas, the third officer was handling a large East Asian country.

It is feared that all these officers had been working for this western country for a long time and may had passed on several vital informations to them.
New Delhi: Shayara Bano, who has filed a petition in the Supreme Court appealing for triple talaq to be declared unconstitutional, has said that her husband forced her to undergo six abortions.

Bano, who hails from Uttarakhand, told 'The Times of India' that she petitioned the apex court as she was no longer able to bear the ordeal and wanted justice for her.

While narrating her ordeal, Bano said her husband Rizwan Ahmed forcibly administered her pills that ultimately ruined her health. Bano further said that she wanted to be with her children, who are still with her husband.

Bano knocked at the doors of the SC after her husband last October sent a letter to her with "talaq, talaq, talaq" written on it.

Petitioner Shayara Bano has challenged the constitutionality of Section 2 of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 in so far as it seeks to recognise and validate polygamy, triple talaq and nikah halala.

She has also challenged the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, 1939 saying that it fails to provide Indian Muslim women with protection from bigamy.

Talaq-e-bidat is a Muslim man divorcing his wife by pronouncing more than one talaq in a single tuhr (the period between two menstruations), or in a tuhr after coitus, or pronouncing an irrevocable instantaneous divorce at one go (unilateral triple-talaq).

A high-level committee set up by the Central government to review the status of women in India has reportedly recommended a ban on the practice of oral, unilateral and triple talaq (divorce) and polygamy.

As a debate over gender bias in temples and places of worship has gripped the country, All India Muslim Women Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB) president Shaista Ambar has called for nullifying the triple talaq system.

Terming the triple talaq system as un-Islamic and an evil practice, Shaista said she would leave no stones unturned to nullify the instant way of divorcing.

The All India Muslim Personal Law Board is likely to oppose any move to scrap triple talaq and the Shayara Bano case which had called it unconstitutional in the Supreme Court.

As per a report by ToI, the AIMPLB had last week decided to thwart any attempt by the Centre or "any authority" in the Muslim personal law to scarp triple talaq.
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Kolkata: More than 1.37 crore electorates will decide the fate of 418 candidates, including 34 women, in 62 constituencies on Thursday as campaign for the third phase of polling for the West Bengal assembly elections came to end on Tuesday evening.

A total of 1,37,42,000 electorates comprising 71,33,978 male, 65,79,218 female, 159 third gender and 28,645 service electors will cast their votes at 16,461 polling stations having 18,930 Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and 1,214 Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) system, including reserved.

The Election Commission, meanwhile, has prohibited political parties and candidates in West Bengal from giving any print advertisement without pre-certification on April 20-2 1 in connection with the third phase of polling.

In a statement, the EC said the decision has been taken in view of instances of advertisements of offending and misleading nature published in the print media. It said such advertisements in the last stage of the election vitiate the polling.

The candidates and parties will have to take pre-certification of the advertisement from the Media Certification and Monitoring Committee at the state and district level.

A similar direction has also been issued to all newspapers in the state not to publish any advertisement on these two days which has not been approved by the poll body.
Sriganar: The Jammu and Kashmir has ordered all WhatsApp groups running "news" to be registered, as per a report.

"The Divisional Commissioner, Kashmir, Dr Asgar Hassan Samoon, directed the operators of social media news agencies to obtain proper permission from the concerned Deputy Commissioners for posting news on social media news groups, along with sources," CNN-NEWS18 quoted a government press release as saying.

However, the reports said that it was not clear how the government would differentiate "news" groups from informal WhatsApp groups.

Before this registration certificate to run a WhatsApp group has not been issued.

The report added that the government would act against those who do not comply.

Meanwhile, as peace returned after a week, curfew-like restrictions were today lifted from Handwara and Kupwara towns, on a day the authorities gave in to the demand of locals by removing four bunkers of security forces from the epicentre of the unrest that began last Tuesday.

Restrictions were eased in Handwara for four hours from 8 am, two hours after the authorities started demolishing the security force bunkers in the town, a police official said, as per PTI.

As the four hours passed off peacefully, the relaxation was then extended till 6 pm.

The authorities then decided against re-imposing the restrictions, saying there was no law and order problem.

Curfew-like restrictions were imposed in Handwara town and some adjoining areas following violent protests over the alleged molestation of a girl last Tuesday.

In Kupwara and Trehgam towns, the restrictions were lifted at noon following peaceful morning.

Earlier in the morning, the municipal authorities of Handwara demolished four security force bunkers from the main market, fulfilling one of the long-pending demands of the local residents, the official said.

He said the main bunker, located in the round-about of the main market, has also been demolished and taken over by the municipal authorities.

The municipal authorities also erected a board on the premises of the bunker, marking the place for conversion into a public park.

The locals had been demanding removal of the bunkers for quite sometime but the Army had put its foot down, saying it was strategically important for the troops.

However, the demand for removal of these bunkers intensified after last week's violence triggered by alleged molestation of a girl.

Three persons including a woman were killed in firing by security forces on protestors on Tuesday while two more persons were killed in separate security forces's action against protestors on Wednesday at Drugmulla and on Friday at Nathnusa.

(With PTI inputs)
Srinagar: In yet another development in the alleged molestation case, the Jammu and Kashmir Police on Monday night arrested Hilal Ahmed Bandey, one of the two accused named by a minor girl from Handwara town.

The arrest comes two days after the girl, who was initially alleged to have been molested by an Army soldier, told a Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) that no soldier misbehaved with her.

Narrating the incident, the girl said, No soldier or anyone entered the toilet when she was inside. But when she came out, two local boys, one of whom was wearing a school uniform created a scene by snatching her bag and shouting at her."

Bandey is accused of manhandling the girl on April 12 while she was stepping out of a public restroom in Handwara town.

Kashmir has been witnessing huge protests since past few days after rumours of the girl having molested by an Army jawan spread across the Valley. Huge protests erupted last Tuesday after the rumours spread. People in large numbers gathered and attacked the Army bunker in Handwara chowk. They assaulted the personnel deployed there, ransacked the bunker and attempted to set the bunker on fire.

In total, five civilians have been killed in Kashmir's Kupwara district following violent protests after the rumours spread.

The J&K government had on Monday ordered a probe by Additional District Magistrate into the firing incident of April 12 in Handwara in which three civilians were killed.

Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti has appealed to the people to help restore peace and promised severe punishment to those involved in the violence in Handwara and Kupwara that left five people dead.
Libya's unity government is to take control of three ministries from Monday, its deputy prime minister said, in the latest step to assert its authority over the conflict-torn country.

The government's deputy prime minister, Ahmed Maiteeq, told a press conference that it would begin running the ministries of social affairs, youth and sports, and housing and public works from Monday, regardless of the results of a confidence vote due the same day.

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Srinagar: One person was arrested in connection with an alleged molestation case of a girl in Handwara, an incident that triggered a cycle of violence for past one week in North Kashmir.

Hilal Ahmed Bandey, one of the two accused identified, was arrested from Handwara by Jammu and Kashmir Police last night, official sources said, adding he is being questioned.

Bandey was among the two persons named by the girl in her statement before Chief Judicial Magistrate. He is accused of manhandling the girl on April 12 while she was stepping out of a public restroom in Handwara town.

The girl had also denied the allegation by local people that an armyman had tried to molest her.

In her statement before the Judicial Magistrate, "she said that on April 12 after school hours, while proceeding to her home with her friend, she entered in a public lavatory near main chowk in Handwara for answering the call of nature.

"As soon as she came out of lavatory she was confronted, assaulted and dragged by two boys and her bag was snatched. One of the boys was in school uniform. The production of the girl along with her father before the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Handwara was to comply with the order of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court," police had said.

The sources said that a manhunt had been launched to arrest the other accused named by the girl in her statement to unravel the entire conspiracy. Initial investigation indicate that the girl was spurning offers for a relationship from one of the two boys.

However, the entire case will be solved once the second accused is also arrested, the sources said.

Immediately, after the locals dragged the girl from the public restroom, angry mob started pelting stones and ransacked the Army bunker in Handwara town.

Incidentally, the locals had been demanding withdrawal of the bunker for quite sometime but the army had put its foot down, saying it was strategically important for the troops.

Now the state government is likely to hand over the bunker to civil administration for development.

Meanwhile, curfew-like restrictions continued in Handwara and its adjoining areas.

Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti has appealed to the people to help restore peace and promised severe punishment to those involved in the violence in Handwara and Kupwara that left five people dead.
Katra: On his visit to Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that both Centre and state government will work closely for taking the state to "new heights" of development.

On his first visit to the state after the new government assumed office on April 4, Modi came out in fulsome praise of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and hoped that the formation of new government led by "young and energetic leadership will usher in a new era of development across the state."

At the same time, he invoking Atal Bihari Vajpayee's vision of 'Insaniyat, Kashmiriyat and Jamhooriat' as the way out to resolve problems in J&K.

PM Modi addressed the convocation of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University and inaugurated a multi-speciality hospital.

Later he tweeted - "There is something very beautiful about J&K that draws me to the state so often. Always happy to be in J&K" - and posted some of the pictures from his visit on micro-blogging site Twitter.

See them below:

There is something very beautiful about J&K that draws me to the state so often. Always happy to be in J&K. pic.twitter.com/ecRthh2x69  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 19, 2016

Great facilities at Shri Mata Vaishnodevi Narayana Superspeciality Hospital will immensely benefit local citizens. pic.twitter.com/JQiSYFY3l3  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 19, 2016

Wished students the very best & urged them to work for the welfare of the poor in any way possible in the future. https://t.co/zuPbpnHsuX  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 19, 2016

Recalled Atal ji's vision for J&K & highlighted the scope of development in J&K, particularly in areas like tourism. https://t.co/KUtEcqM0rE  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 19, 2016

(With Agency inputs)
Ranchi: Main opposition Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) on Tuesday called for a shutdown in Jharkhand state on May 14 to protest against the domicile policy.

The decision to call for a shutdown was taken at a JMM meeting on Monday evening.

"The rights of the Moolvasi (indigenous residents) have been snatched in the domicile policy. The BJP government, led by Raghubar Das, has shown a dictatorial attitude. They want to divide people in the name of the domicile policy," Hemant Soren, former chief minister and JMM leader, told reporters here on Tuesday.

According to the policy, which the state government announced on April 7 and notified on Monday, any person living in the state for 30 years will be deemed a 'Jharkhandi,' a permanent resident, and receive full benefits of such a status.

Also to be deemed a 'Jharkhandi' would be a person born in the state who has passed his class 10 schooling in Jharkhand and a person or their ancestor having figured in the land records.

The BJP-led coalition government also announced a recruitment policy according to which local people and local languages will be given preference over others in hiring people for the third and fourth-grade jobs.

The domicile policy has been opposed by JMM and other opposition parties. The BJP's alliance partner All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU) has also found fault with the policy.

The JMM said only the last land records should be the criterion for the domicile. The AJSU has objected to equating the criterion of last land record with that of class 10 qualification.

JMM sources said the party is also considering calling for a protest action on April 24 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in Jharkhand and will address the Gram Panchayats (village councils) across the country.


Ranchi: Protesting against the state government's definition of domicile policy, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) has called a statewide bandh on May 14.

Dismissing the state government's April 7 announcement of the policy, the JMM at its central executive committee meeting here yesterday, chalked out a series of protests in the run up to the bandh, a party release said today.

The party will observe Kolhan Division bandh on April 24 as a mark of protest to the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Jamshedpur, which falls under the Division, demanding a policy that would "honour people's expectation", it said.

From April 20 to 28, the party will launch an awareness drive and connect with the people on the issue, pitching for a new definition of the domicile policy based on the last revenue survey '(khatiyan-land title)'.

Demonstrations will be held in all blocks and district headquarters of the state on April 30 and May 7 respectively, the release added.
Bengaluru: As violence intensified to more areas in Bengaluru against the tighter rules for withdrawal of PF money by garment workers, Section 144 has been imposed in the area on Tuesday evening.

Karnataka Home Minister G Parameshwar confirmed the news to ANI and said, "Section 144 has been imposed in the area and preventive arrest has been ordered if in case anybody tries to create problem again."

His announcement came in the midst of escalating protests by labour unions, especially the violent Bengaluru agitation, against the bar on withdrawing employer's contribution from the PF money till the age of 58 years.

Denying the reports that there was an intelligence failure that led the Bengaluru protest turn violent, Parameshwar said that there was no lapse from the intelligence agency.

"There was no intelligence failure. The government took enough precautionary steps and senior police officers were monitoring each and every development in the city. However, it took a different turn, unfortunately," he asserted.

"Police showed more restraint as there were lot of women among protestors. Had we taken some extreme steps, it would have led to more injuries", the state home minister said.

Thousands of garment factory workers in Bengaluru took to streets and blocked traffic, set vehicles on fire today to protest against changes in PF withdrawal rules. At least 62 people, including 24 policemen, are said to have received injuries in the protests. Among the injured is an 18-year-old college student, who was hit by a bullet.

Protesters pelted stones at Hebbagodi Police Station in Bengaluru and torched seized vehicles parked there, as the spontaneous agitation with no trade union leading it spun out of control.

Police said they had to resort to lathicharge and fire teargas shells to disperse violent protesters.

At least two Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation buses and one of Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation have been set on fire, according to police.

Incidents of stone-pelting on buses and other vehicles were reported from different parts of the city such as Bannerghatta and Jalahalli cross, as also near the Electronics City, the hub of IT firms.

(With PTI inputs)
Kollam: Three more persons were arrested today by Crime Branch officials in connection with the Puttingal Devi temple fireworks tragedy that claimed 108 lives.

The arrested were workers engaged by one of the contractors who conducted the pyrotechnic display at the temple on April 10, police said.

With this, the total number of persons taken into custody in connection with the mishap has risen to 16.

Out of the 16 arrested, seven are members of the temple's managing committee and others workers of the contractors, police officials said.

Police have registered cases against them on charges including attempt to murder.
Mumbai: The Maharashtra government on Tuesday imposed a ban on digging of borewells below 200 feet in view of the water crisis the state has been facing since quite some time.

Confirming the reports, Water Supply and Sanitation Minister Babanrao Lonikar said any violation will invite action under the 'Maharashtra Groundwater Development and Management Act' which can lead to fine or even imprisonment.

"The Maharashtra Groundwater Development and Management Act has to be implemented strictly due to the severe drought conditions prevalent and the depleting water stock. We have spoken to all senior officials and decided to ban the digging of borewells below 200 feet," PTI quoted Babanrao Lonikar as saying.

Adding further he added that with the amount of water being drawn out from the ground, it's imperative to control the digging of borewells.

"While the Act will be implemented strictly, we require participation of the people." he said.

In the wake of the acute drought in the state, th Maharashtra government has sanctioned Rs 750 crore for water distribution.
Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: In what can be called as an addition to the field of technology, the web mapping service of Google will allow you to plan your road trips in a better way.

Users can now use Google Maps on their phones to navigate their way to a particular place while taking several breaks.

However, it comes with a restriction that you can plan your trip and set pit stops only on the desktop version of Google Maps.

Start by selecting an origin and destination and then go on adding points on the way that have to be covered in the trip. Following this, the map will automatically generate a route as per your preference.

If you are familiar with the desktop version of Google Maps, then you can send the directions to your phone using the "send to phone'' option.

Google might respond by saying that this option is not available and for that, you need to copy the URL of the route and mail it to yourself so that it can be accessed on the phone.

You can make use of this useful trick while heading back to your place and at the same time drop people off on the way.
Bhubaneswar: At least 25 people were killed when a bus carrying over 40 artistes of an opera team fell down a 300-feet gorge in Odisha's Deogarh district on Sunday evening, police said. The toll could go up, rescuers said.

The bus of the Bharati Gananatya opera party fell into the gorge off the Tilaebani Gaelo ghat, Deogarh Superintendent of Police Sarah Sharma told media persons.

Many injured people, including women and children, have been rescued. The rescue operations were continuing, police said.

Additional Superintendent of Police Debiprasad Das said the toll could go up.

He said the rescue operation was on with the help of fire and ambulance services, but it was getting hampered due to poor visibility.
Bhubaneswar: Earmarking Rs 300 crore for developing infrastructure for supplying potable water in Odisha, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Tuesday directed officials to provide free drinking water to the urban poor.

The chief minister directed officials to make efforts to ensure water supply, both in rural and urban areas.

The decision to provide free drinking water to the poor in urban areas across the state was taken at a high-level meeting chaired by the chief minister here.

Special Relief Commissioner PK Mohapatra said about Rs.300 crore given by the 13th Finance Commission and previous commissions to all panchayats in the state will be spent for drinking water infrastructure development.

He said that in rural areas, all panchayats have been directed to spend 30 percent of the panchayat funds towards piped water supply.

"All panchayats have been issued directions to utilise 30 percent of their funds towards piped water supply. We are receiving complaints on a daily basis on our helpline. Accordingly, efforts are being taken for redressal," he said.

On reports regarding the death of 53 people due to sun stroke, he said: "On inquiry, it was found that deaths in 15 of these cases occurred due to other reasons. The remaining cases are under inquiry."


Israeli authorities on Tuesday were investigating a Jerusalem bus bombing that wounded 21 people and raised fears of a sharp escalation in violence, while police planned tightened security for the Jewish Passover holiday.

The bomb tore through a bus in a relatively isolated area of southern Jerusalem on Monday night, with the fire spreading to a second bus.

In total at least 21 people were wounded, police said, with Israeli media reporting a 15-year-old girl in serious condition.

Israeli domestic security agency Shin Bet referred to the explosion as a "terror attack".

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld confirmed officers were seeking to question the wounded and did not rule out the possibility of potential suspects among them.

"The investigation is looking to see how the explosive device was placed on the bus," he said.

Police imposed a gag order on further details of the investigation and any suspects.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to "find whoever prepared this explosive device".

"We'll settle the score with these terrorists."

The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which rules the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip, welcomed the attack but there was no claim of responsibility.

The explosion comes with tensions high following Israel's deadly use of force against Palestinian protesters in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, killing 201 Palestinians and 28 Israelis since last October.

Bus bombings were common during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the early 2000s, but Monday's attack was the first bomb targeting a bus in Jerusalem since 2011, when a British tourist was killed.

In Tel Aviv, a bomb exploded on an empty bus in 2013 in what Israeli authorities called a "terrorist" attack.

But Avi Dichter, a lawmaker and former Shin Bet chief, stressed the bomb did far less damage than those during the intifada.

The frame of the bus was still largely intact, unlike with larger bombs.

"The explosive charge was much lower than those we experienced during the suicide bombings of the second intifada," Dichter told public radio.

The blast comes ahead of the Jewish Passover holiday, which starts on Friday evening.

The Israeli government regularly closes off access to Israel for Palestinians during major Jewish religious festivals, and is expected to do so again.

Rosenfeld said the threat level would be raised during the week-long holiday.

"Security assessments were made immediately yesterday evening following the attack," he told AFP.

"Extra police units and border police are patrolling public areas," including bus stations and the light rail tram system in the city, he said, without specifying how many reinforcements.

Thousands of Jewish pilgrims flock to Jerusalem and other holy sites during Passover, which commemorates the Jewish exodus in Biblical times.

Brachie Sprung, spokeswoman for Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, said the city council was not planning any changes to its schedule.

"We are telling people to go back to normal -- we don't cancel events," she told AFP. "We talk about being super cautious but going back to normal as quickly as possible."

Itamar Yaar, former deputy head of Israel's National Security Council, said he did not expect any major security clampdown in the city.

"I really don't think there will be any change in the Israeli behaviour," Yaar told AFP. "Perhaps in the first few days you will see more checks at checkpoints.

"But the most effective activities in this case are collecting intelligence and trying to reach the people that organised it."

Separately on Tuesday, an Israeli court ruled that a Jewish man found to be the ringleader of the beating and burning alive of a Palestinian teenager in 2014 was sane and convicted him of the attack.

Israeli settler Yosef Haim Ben-David, 31, was found in November to have led the assault, but his lawyers had submitted last-minute documents claiming he suffered from mental illness.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online.

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Shillong: Conrad Sangma, the younger son of former Lok Sabha speaker Purno Sangma, is likely to contest the bypoll to Tura Lok Sabha seat in Meghalaya, necessitated by the death of his father and sitting MP last month, party sources said on Tuesday.

Conrad Sangma will stand on a ticket of his father's National People's Party (NPP), according to the sources.

Though a party meeting is scheduled to be held on April 22 to select its candidate for the seat, it is learnt that Conrad, a former Meghalaya legislator, is most likely to be given the ticket. Conrad's elder brother, James Sangma, is a sitting lawmaker in the northeastern state.

Before Purno Sangma, who won the seat in the 2014 general elections, the Tura constituency was represented by his daughter Agatha Sangma, who was a union minister in the UPA-II government.

Bypolls to the Tura parliamentary constituency and nine assembly constituencies in seven states will be held on May 16, the Election Commission announced on Tuesday.


New York: Scientists have developed a new system that can identify people using their brain waves or 'brainprint' with 100 per cent accuracy, an advance that may be useful in high-security applications.

Researchers at Binghamton University in US recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset while they looked at a series of 500 images designed specifically to elicit unique responses from person to person - eg a slice of pizza, a boat, or the word "conundrum."

They found that participants' brains reacted differently to each image, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer's 'brainprint' with 100 per cent accuracy. "When you take hundreds of these images, where every person is going to feel differently about each individual one, then you can be really accurate in identifying which person it was who looked at them just by their brain activity," said Assistant Professor Sarah Laszlo.

According to Laszlo, brain biometrics are appealing because they are cancellable and cannot be stolen by malicious means the way a finger or retina can. The results suggest that brainwaves could be used by security systems to verify a person's identity.

"If someone's fingerprint is stolen, that person can't just grow a new finger to replace the compromised fingerprint - the fingerprint for that person is compromised forever," said Laszlo.

"In the unlikely event that attackers were actually able to steal a brainprint from an authorised user, the authorised user could then 'reset' their brainprint," Laszlo said.

Zhanpeng Jin, assistant professor at Binghamton University, does not see this as the kind of system that would be mass-produced for low security applications, but it could have important security applications.

"We tend to see the applications of this system as being more along the lines of high-security physical locations, like the Pentagon or Air Force Labs, where there aren't that many users that are authorised to enter, and those users don't need to constantly be authorising the way that a consumer might need to authorise into their phone or computer," Jin said.

The study was published in The IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security journal.
Kabul: At least 28 people were killed and hundreds wounded when a Taliban truck bomb tore through central Kabul on Tuesday.

A fierce firefight ensued the attack, a week after the insurgents launched their annual spring offensive.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a densely-crowded neighbourhood, which sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing into the sky and rattled windows several kilometres away.

The brazen assault near the Defence Ministry marks the first major Taliban attack in the Afghan capital since the insurgents announced the start of this year`s fighting season.

"One of the suicide attackers blew up an explosives-laden truck in a public parking lot next to a government building," Kabul police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi told reporters.

"As a result 28 people were killed, most of them civilians. The second attacker engaged security forces in a gunbattle before being gunned down."

Rahimi said the attack also left 183 people wounded but the Health Ministry said that figure was almost 330, with many battling for their lives in hospital.

The gunfight appeared to die down several hours after the powerful explosion, but some security officials expressed concern that other bombers may still be on the loose.

The Interior Ministry denounced the attack as a "war crime" and pledged to track down the perpetrators.

The Taliban said on their Pashto-language website that they had carried out the suicide bombing on "Department 10", an NDS (National Directorate of Security) unit which is responsible for protecting government ministers and VIPs.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed their fighters had managed to enter the offices of the National Directorate of Security. However, Afghan officials denied that, saying the target of the attack was a government office responsible for providing security to government VIPs.

The Taliban are generally known to exaggerate battlefield claims.

Pitched gunbattles were ongoing near the building, which was cordoned off by security officials as ambulances rushed to the scene. "(We) condemn in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Puli Mahmood Khan neighbourhood of Kabul, as a result of which many of our countrymen were martyred and wounded," President Ashraf Ghani said in a statement.

"Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism."

A thick plume of black smoke was seen rising from the area near the sprawling US embassy complex immediately after the blast.

Warning sirens blared out for some minutes from the embassy compound, which is also close to the headquarters of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission.

The US embassy and the NATO mission both said they were not affected by the blast.

The Taliban on Tuesday last week announced the start of their "spring offensive" even as the government seeks to bring them back to the negotiating table to end the drawn-out conflict.

The Taliban warned they would "employ large-scale attacks on enemy positions across the country" during the offensive dubbed Operation Omari in honour of the movement`s late founder Mullah Omar, whose death was announced last year.

The insurgents began the fighting season last week by targeting the northern city of Kunduz, which they briefly captured last year in a stunning setback for Afghan forces.

But officials said Afghan security forces drove Taliban fighters back from the city on Friday.

The annual spring offensive normally marks the start of the "fighting season", though this past winter the lull was shorter and rebels continued to battle government forces, albeit with less intensity.

The Taliban`s resurgence has raised serious questions about Afghan forces` capacity to hold their own. An estimated 5,500 troops were killed last year, the worst-ever toll.

Peace talks which began last summer were abruptly halted after it was revealed that Taliban leader Mullah Omar had been dead for two years, a disclosure which sparked infighting in the insurgents` ranks.

A four-country group comprising Afghanistan, the United States, China and Pakistan has been holding meetings since January aimed at jump-starting negotiations, though their efforts have so far been in vain.

(With Agency inputs)
Islamabad: Pakistan government relaxed the rules to allow former military dictator Pervez Musharraf to go abroad, a special court hearing the high treason case against him was told on Tuesday.

Musharraf, 72, was allowed in February to go to the UAE for medical treatment, angering the special three-member tribunal hearing the case against him for suspending the constitution in 2007.

If found guilty, he can be sent to the gallows.

Maj Gen (retd.) Rashid Qureshi, who had given surety bonds for Musharraf's bail in the case, in an application said that the federal government failed to use powers to restrict the movement of the accused, the Dawn reported.

Qureshi insisted that he was not solely responsible for regulating the movement of his former boss, and the government was also involved in it.

"Exit from Pakistan (Control) Rules 2010 provide a complete mechanism for the situation, which needs to restrict movement of any person from going abroad," it said.

However, the federal government did not invoke the relevant provisions of the rules to stop Musharraf from leaving the country, the application claimed.

It noted that the superior judiciary "did not put any restriction on the movement of the accused in spite of having full and complete knowledge of the order of the special court".

In February, the court had summoned Musharraf to record his statement, but he left Pakistan the following month after the government removed his name from the exit control list.

Qurehi said that he "is a retired army officer who stood surety in consideration of sympathy, kindness and fear of God and he has not gained any monetary benefit from the accused (Gen Musharraf) in any manner whatsoever. He has no other income but only limited resources including the property he rendered as the bond of the accused."

He requested the court not to forfeit the property he had pledged as surety bond for the accused.

During proceedings on March 31, the special court had remarked that in case Musharraf did not appear, the court may order the surety bond as forfeit.

The defence team also filed another application, asking it to dispense with the personal attendance of Musharraf, saying he would return after his recovery.
New Delhi: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has been keeping a constant eye on the movements and changes in the sun, since 2010.

However, NASA's team was in for a surprise, when they noticed an obtrusive mid-level solar flare emitted by the sun.

The event was captured at 8:29 pm EDT on April 17, 2016.

For those who are unaware, solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however, when intense enough, they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

According to NASA, this flare is classified as an M6.7 class flare. M-class flares are a tenth the size of the most intense flares, the X-class flares. The number provides more information about its strength. An M2 is twice as intense as an M1, an M3 is three times as intense, etc.

NASA further reported that the flare came from an area of complex magnetic activity on the sun  known as an active region, and in this case labelled Active Region 2529  which has sported a large dark spot, called a sunspot, over the past several days. This sunspot has changed shape and size as it slowly made its way across the suns face over the past week and half. For much of that time, it was big enough to be visible from the ground without magnification and is currently large enough that almost five planet Earths could fit inside. This sunspot will rotate out of our view over the right side of the sun by April 20, 2016. Scientists study such sunspots in order to better understand what causes them to sometimes erupt with solar flares.
Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake, who is currently aboard the International Space Station (ISS) manages to keep all the space enthusiasts on the edge of their seats by sharing some beautiful pictures.

The British astronaut,who joined the Expedition 46 crew five months ago to be a part of NASA's Expedition 46 and Expedition 47 has again mesmerised his followers with beautiful and clear image of Suez canal from space.

Check out his tweet:
Pudukottai: Karti Chidambaram, the son of senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, is not contesting the Tamil Nadu Assembly Election 2016.

DNA has quoted sources as saying that Karti Chidambaram has, in fact, not even sought a ticket from the Congress party.

"Karti did not seek a ticket from the Congress and he is not going to be contesting the polls this time around."

On Sunday, P Chidambaram had expressed dissatisfaction over seat-sharing arrangement with ally DMK, saying his party has been allotted "seats which we do not need".

"In this election, we have been allotted only 41 seats to contest. Even in those 41 seats, we have been allotted seats which are not desired by us. We have been offered seats which we do not need," he had said.

"We do not know whether they (Congress leadership) will field candidates as per our wish. But, we cannot neglect (contesting polls) it just by saying we are not happy," he had said, addressing a party meeting here.

After much deliberations, Congress and DMK had arrived at their seat-sharing formula on April 04, for the May 16 polls with the national party being allotted 41 constituencies.

(With PTI inputs)
Chennai: A day after DMDK chief Vijayakant announced his candidature from Uloontherpet constituency for the May 16 Assembly polls, PMK today changed its nominee for the seat, fielding party spokesperson K Balu.

Party President G K Mani announced the candidature of Balu, an advocate and a regular on TV channel debates, in a statement.

Earlier, R Ramamurthy had been fielded as PMK's nominee, Mani recalled, adding Balu's candidature has been approved by PMK founder S Ramadoss and his son and the party's Chief Ministerial candidate Anbumani.

The constituency is all set to witness a four-cornered showdown between the three Dravidian parties-- AIADMK, DMK, DMDK, and PMK.

Originally allotted to DMK ally MMK, the Muslim party later opted out of contesting from this Assembly segment in Villupuram district, prompting DMK to announce its candidate.

AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa has fielded her party's sitting MLA R Kumaraguru.

Vijayakant had announced yesterday that he will be seeking his fortune from Ulunthoorpet, jumping constituencies for a second time.

He had made his electoral debut from Vriddhachalam in 2006, but had shifted to Rishivandiyam in 2011 from where he won.
Chennai: Expelled former DMK strongman MK Alagiri on Tuesday said he will not support any party in the May 16 Assembly polls in Tamil Nadu.

"No support for anyone. That's all," was the Madurai leader's cryptic response when reporters asked him whom he will support in the coming election.

"It applies to my supporters also," he added.

In 2014 Lok Sabha polls, leaders, including MDMK founder Vaiko and BJP's H Raja had called on Alagiri in an apparent effort to get his support.

Vaiko had contested from Virudhunagar and Raja from Sivaganga, both South Tamil Nadu constituencies.

Alagiri, elder son of DMK president M Karunanidhi, had enjoyed tremendous clout as party's organisation secretary South, when DMK was in power between 2006 and 2011.

However, he fell out of favour with the party leadership following a power tussle with younger sibling MK Stalin, resulting in his suspension and expulsion later.

Alagiri had recently called on Karunanidhi here, triggering speculation of his homecoming but Stalin had dismissed any such move, saying there was no politics behind the meeting.
Hyderabad: Telangana on Tuesday sought more central assistance for drought relief and to tide over the drinking water problem.

State Panchayat Raj Minister K. T. Rama Rao made this request on Tuesday during a meeting with central ministers Choudhary Birender Singh and Ram Kripal Yadav here.

Rama Rao said the central government released only Rs.791 crore for drought relief though the state had sought an assistance of Rs.3,064 crore. Similarly, it gave Rs.72 crore against the request for Rs.555 crore for drinking water supply.

According to an official statement, the two central ministers informed the state that Niti Aayog is likely to provide more funds.

Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Minister and Birender Singh and Minister of State for Drinking Water and Sanitation Ram Kripal Yadav held a review meeting with the state minister and officials over drought and drinking water.

The central ministers were briefed over the state's ambitious programme Mission Bhagiratha, aimed at ensuring piped water supply to every household in the state. They lauded the programme and said this was a role model for other states facing drought and shortage of drinking water.

The officials made a power point presentation and screen an audio video documentary on the programme. The central ministers enquired about the progress of the works and the mobilisation of resources.

Birender Singh said he would stay in the state for two days to see the works being undertaken under Mission Bhagiratha. Assuring all possible assistance in mobilizing funds for the project, he said he would personally talk to Japan International Cooperation Agency (JAICA) and National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).


Turkish armed forces on Tuesday killed 32 suspected Islamic State militants in the Bashiqa area of northern Iraq in response to an attack on a Turkish tank at a military camp there, broadcaster CNN Turk reported.

CNN Turk said Turkish soldiers had killed 10 Islamic State militants during an operation that destroyed a building, and had killed another 22 militants as they fled. The report could not immediately be verified.

NATO member Turkey has soldiers stationed at the Bashiqa camp near the city of Mosul, which it says are training local forces to fight Islamic State.

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Etah: A minor girl and a woman in her 30s were allegedly raped in separate incidents in Etah district of Uttar Pradesh following which four men were booked, police said today.

Both incidents took place on Sunday and separate FIRs were registered yesterday.

In the first incident, a minor girl was allegedly raped by a young man in Agarpur village in Mirechi police station area.

The accused, Hardesh, took the 10-year-old girl on a motorbike ride and allegedly raped her, police said, adding Hardesh has been arrested.

In another incident, a woman in her 30s was allegedly raped by three persons when she was alone at home in Prahladpura village in Jaithera police station area.

The accused -- Vinod, Amit and Vimal -- allegedly raped her at pistol point when the rest of her family members went to the fields. No arrest has been made in connection with the incident, police said.

Meanwhile, a teenaged girl was allegedly eve-teased and assaulted when she went to relieve herself in the fields in Jinhera village in Mirechi police station area yesterday.

Police said Dinesh of the same village eve-teased the girl and when she objected to it, she was assaulted by him and his family members.

An FIR has been registered, police said, adding no arrest has been made so far in this connection.
Lucknow: The engines of the Sabarmati Express and Chauri Chaura Express caught fire on Tuesday at two different places in Uttar Pradesh, inconveniencing their passengers, a railway official said.

The Chauri Chaura Express engine caught fire around 10 am at the Shujatpur station in Kaushambi district while on way from Gorakhpur to Kanpur.

The engine was immediately decoupled from the train and fire engines rushed to the spot to douse the flames. The train chugged off after a delay of three hours, but only after all necessary safety checks had been undertaken.

The engine of the Sabarmati Express, moving from Varanasi to Ahmedabad, caught fire around 4 p.m. as it chugged off from the Varanasi Cantonment station.

Suspecting a fire, the train driver brought it to a halt at Shivpur station, some eight km from the city. After the railmen and others helped douse the fire, the train proceeded to Lucknow after a delay of one hour.


Kolkata: A Kolkata court on Tuesday pronounced death sentence for eight persons in connection with the murder of a college student.

According to ANI report, the quantum of punishment was pronounced today in the murder of Sourav Chowdhury whose body was recovered near the railway line on July 5, 2014 at Bamungachi in North 24 Parganas district.

One of the 13 accused in the case was acquitted for want of evidence while 12 others were convicted.

Sourav Chowdhury, a student activist from Bengal, was killed on July 5 for allegedly protesting against liquor and drug dens in his locality of Bamungachi, 30 kilometres away from Kolkata.

Sourav had reportedly protested against hooch dens in his neighbourhood that were allegedly run by one Shyamal Karmakar. His protests reportedly forced many liquor dens in the area to shut shop.

However, the 21-year-old student's body was found on the morning of July 5 in 2014, hacked to pieces, on the railway tracks near his village.

His family alleges that he was called out of his house by a group of people led by Shyamal Karmakar.

Shyamal Karmakar, the main accused, was arrested from Rampurhat in Birbhum district. Days later, police also arrested another local criminal Anup Talukdar in connection with the case.
Stockholm: Princess Sofia of Sweden, married to fourth-in-line to the throne Carl Philip, gave birth to a baby boy on Tuesday, the palace announced.

"For my wife and me, this is a great day full of emotion," Carl Philip told a news conference following the birth of the couple`s first child, who will be fifth in line to the Swedish throne.

The baby weighed in at 3.6 kilograms (8 pounds) and measured 49 centimetres (19.3 inches), the prince added.

Both Princess Sofia, 31, and her new son were in good health, the palace said in an earlier statement.

Carl Philip, 36, is the second child and only son of King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia.

Elder sister Princess Victoria is heiress to the throne.

Carl Philip married Sofia Hellqvist, a former contestant on TV reality show "Paradise Hotel," in June last year.

She famously posed topless with a boa constrictor in a men`s magazine when she was 20.

She later studied accountancy in New York and became a yoga teacher, while also jobbing as a waitress before returning to Sweden.

Sofia has since headed an NGO for disadvantaged children in South Africa that she founded in 2010 after earlier African charity work, but gave up the role after her marriage to focus on royal duties.
London: Bell ringers will attempt to set a world record at Britain's largest church, Liverpool Cathedral, on Thursday on Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday.

The team of seven ringers will ring the world's heaviest peal of bells, a task that involves ringing the six heaviest bells for almost five hours.

The attempt comes 65 years after the Queen, as a young Princess Elizabeth, visited the cathedral to officially signal the first ever ringing of the bells in 1951, reports Xinhua news agency.

Once the ringing starts, the team will have to continue through a range of over 5,000 changes, without a break or allowing a handover to other ringers.

The biggest bell, a tenor called Emmanuel, weighs four tonnes, measures almost 2.5 meters in both diameter and height, and will take two ringers to operate. The six bells together weight almost 13,000 kg.

Len Mitchell, of the Cathedral Guild of Change Ringers, told Xinhua: "We are looking forward to this challenge on the Queen's birthday, especially as she started the first ever peal of the bells just a year before she became our Queen."

Although the bells were installed in the cathedral tower in the 1930s, because of World War II they remained silent and were not rung until November 17, 1951. The Queen and Prince Philip arrived on an ocean liner after a tour to Canada, and she came to Liverpool to "open" the bells at the cathedral.

"We have a peal of 13 bells in the cathedral, the heaviest set of bells in the world. As the bell chamber is 220 feet above ground level, they are also the highest set of bells in the world."

He explained the style of ringing they carry out as "traditional English ringing," meaning each bell turns full circle at 360 degrees.

It is a physically demanding job for the ringers, even more so when it involves the six heaviest bells, he said, adding that what they were attempting had never been done before.

"There are strict rules governing our attempt, such as the number of changes without a break, and we reckon it will take almost five hours without a break. Once we start we have to continue. If one person stops, the attempt comes to an end," Mitchell said.

Mitchell said around the world there are 6,000 sets of bells, mostly in church towers, but around 97 percent of the bells are in Britain.

The cathedral has a rarely rung the 14th bell, the Great George, traditionally used on solemn occasions such as the death of a monarch. It weighs more than 14 tonnes and is the third biggest bell in the British Isles.


Brussels: Swedish national Osama Krayem, charged in connection with the Brussels bombings, has also been charged over the Paris attacks, Belgian media has reported citing prosecutors.

Krayem, 23, was charged on April 9 with "terrorist murders" over last month's suicide blasts in the Belgian capital, but the new charges reflect growing links between the attackers and those who carried out November's jihadist carnage in Paris.

"His fingerprints were found at several hideouts used during preparations for these attacks," Flemmish television station VRT reported yesterday.

Belga news agency confirmed the fresh charges, citing prosecutors.

The prosecution service and Krayem's lawyers were not immediately reachable by AFP, but prosecutors are due to hold a news conference today.

The coordinated bombings at Brussels airport and a metro station near European Union headquarters, claimed by the Islamic State group, left 32 people dead months after the Paris attacks killed 130 people.

The authorities suspect Krayem, a Swede of Syrian origin, of buying the bags used for the Brussels bombings.

He was filmed on CCTV with Maalbeek metro station bomber Khalid El Bakraoui minutes before the bomb went off.

Krayem's lawyer Vincent Lurquin told reporters last week that his client had also planned to blow himself up but decided not to go ahead with it.

Investigators are still looking for the backpack Krayem was wearing that day.

Three men detonated suicide bombs in Belgium's worst-ever terror attack: brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui and Najim Laachroui.

A fourth man, Mohamed Abrini, the so-called "man in the hat" who accompanied the two airport bombers but did not detonate his own device, was arrested in Brussels on April 8. He has also been charged over the Paris attacks.

Initial investigations suggest that the Brussels attackers had planned to hit France, but with police on their trail, decided Belgium was an easier target.
Washington: The Pentagon on Tuesday called on China to reaffirm it has no plans to deploy military aircraft in the Spratly Islands after Beijing used a military plane to evacuate sick workers from a new airstrip on an island it has created in the disputed South China Sea.

China`s Defence Ministry earlier dismissed U.S. queries as to why China had used a military aircraft rather than a civilian one in Sunday`s evacuation from Fiery Cross Reef.

U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told a regular news briefing it was "difficult to understand" why China would have had to use a military aircraft for the evacuation. He also said it was "a problem" that the workers had apparently been working on "infrastructure improvements of a military nature."

A Pentagon spokesman, Commander Gary Ross, called on China to clarify its intentions.

"We urge China to reaffirm that it has no plans to deploy or rotate military aircraft at its outposts in the Spratlys, in keeping with China`s prior assurances," he said.

Ross also called on all rivals in the South China Sea to clarify their claims in accordance with international law and "to avoid unilateral actions that change the status quo."

China`s Defence Ministry said Beijing had indisputable sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and the United States had no right to comment on Chinese building works and defensive facilities there.

It said it was Chinese military tradition to "wholeheartedly serve the people" and help those in need.

"In sharp contrast, the U.S. side is expressing doubts about whether it`s a military or civilian aircraft at a time when somebody`s life is in danger," it said.

"We cannot but ask: if a U.S. citizen suddenly took ill on U.S. soil, would the U.S. military look on with folded arms?"

Chinese activity in disputed waters of the South China Sea, including the construction of islands by dredging sand onto reefs and shoals in the Spratly archipelago, has alarmed rival claimants, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam.

The United States has repeatedly criticised the construction of the islands and worries that China plans to use them for military purposes. It worries that trade in what is one of the world`s busiest waterways could be threatened, but China says it has no hostile intent.

The runway on the Fiery Cross Reef is 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) long and is one of three China has been building in the archipelago.

Civilian flights began test runs there in January but Sunday`s landing was the first China has publicly reported by a military plane at Fiery Cross Reef.
Beijing: Even as the issue of 'Love Jihad' is well known in India, a similar issue  albeit in a different context - is worrying our neighbour across the Himalayas.

The Chinese government has issued a warning to young female government workers about dating handsome foreigners, who may actually be a spy.

On the occasion of National Security Education Day, the government has issued a poster warning young women about the threat.

Titled "Dangerous Love," the 16-panel, comic book-like poster tells the story of an attractive young Chinese civil servant nicknamed Xiao Li, or Little Li, who meets a red-headed foreign man at a dinner party and starts a relationship.

The man, David, claims to be a visiting scholar, but he actually is a foreign spy who butters Xiao Li up with compliments on her beauty, bouquets of roses, fancy dinners and romantic walks in the park.

After Xiao Li provides David with secret internal documents from her job at a government propaganda office, the two are arrested. In one of the poster's final panels, Xiao Li is shown sitting handcuffed before two policemen, who tell her that she has a "shallow understanding of secrecy for a state employee."

The poster has appeared on local governments' public bulletin boards, targeting mainly rank-and-file state employees.

With AP inputs
London: Former Chilean president Patricio Aylwin, who played an instrumental role in restoring democracy in his country following 17 years of dictatorship, has passed away at the age of 97.

Aylwin became the president in 1990 and received widespread acclaim for combining booming economic growth with the establishment of democracy during his four-year tenure, the Guardian reported.

Michelle Bachelet, the current president, paid rich tribute to Aylwin and described the former president as a great statesman who made possible a democratic country once he assumed the presidency of the republic.

Aylwin, a lawyer by profession, was also known for constituting a commission which investigated human rights violations committed under his predecessor and tyrant General Augusto Pinochet.

He was married to Leonor OyarzAn and had five children.
Manila: A leading Presidential frontrunner in the Philippines has made a highly controversial and offensive remark about an Australian missionary who was abducted, gang-raped and later killed in 1989.

According to reports, a video clip had appeared on YouTube which showed Rodrigo Digong Duterte, the mayor of Davao City on Mindanao in the Philippines addressing a rally and recalling a 1989 prison riot in which an Australian missionary was gang-raped and later killed by the inmates who had lined up to rape her.

"I was angry because she was raped, that's one thing. But she was so beautiful, the mayor should have been first. What a waste," Duterte can be seen saying in the video while referring to himself.

The YouTube video showing the mayor making these statements has caused an uproar even in a country accustomed to some raunchy politics.

The controversial video was shot during a campaign rally in Quezon City on April 12, CNN Philippines reported.

In 1989, the inmates of the jail had overpowered the guards and grabbed their weapons, taking 15 people, including 36-year-old Australian Jacqueline Hamill, hostage in 1989.

Hamill had told Rev. Fred Castillo, another hostage who would later escape, that she had been raped by her captors. They also slashed her throat.

As troops stormed the prison, killing 15 captors in a hail of gunfire, Hamill was shot in the neck and died.

Mayor's comments have evoked a sharp response from the Australian Embassy in the Philippines, which said in its Facebook post, ''Rape and murder should never be joked about or trivialised. Violence against women and girls is unacceptable anytime, anywhere."
Clashes between Yemeni loyalist forces and rebels have killed 13 fighters, military sources said Tuesday, as the UN chief urged warring parties to begin delayed peace talks.

UN-brokered peace talks, which were set to open in Kuwait on Monday, were delayed after the insurgents failed to show up over alleged Saudi violations of a ceasefire that took effect on April 11.

Fighting erupted late Monday in Marib province, east of the rebel-held Yemeni capital Sanaa, with warring parties trading blame for the ceasefire breaches.

Five soldiers loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and eight rebel fighters were killed in the clashes which continued intermittently through Tuesday, the pro-government military sources said.

They said the fighting erupted when the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and their allies tried to capture positions held by loyalist troops.

The toll could not be independently confirmed.

Sporadic fighting was also reported in other areas, including Nahm northeast of Sanaa and in the southwestern province of Taez.

At the United Nations, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the Gulf-backed government and the Shia Houthi rebels and their allies to engage with his envoy "so that talks can start without further delay".

Pro-Hadi chief-of-staff General Mohammed Ali al-Maqdishi slammed the rebels for "not respecting" the ceasefire which he said his forces were committed to.

"The truce is still holding based on orders from our political leadership," said Maqdishi.

The rebels meanwhile accused loyalist forces of launching attacks and dispatching reinforcements to several provinces, in a statement on their sabanews.net website.

They also said warplanes belonging to the Saudi-led coalition, which has intervened militarily in support of loyalists since March last year, flew sorties over several areas of Yemen despite the ceasefire.

In a statement on Facebook late Monday, rebel spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam said "we affirm our continued commitment to dialogue... and this is why our demand from the first day was for talks to be held in an atmosphere of calm, peace, and stability."

"But unfortunately, since April 11, the aggression hadn't stopped and the air strikes have continued on several areas," he said.

UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed and government representatives were still in Kuwait on Tuesday, according to officials close to the government delegation.

Previous attempts at peace talks -- including a failed round in January -- have been unable to stop Yemen's conflict, which the United Nations says has killed more than 6,400 people and forced almost 2.8 million from their homes.

Jihadists including from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the powerful Yemeni branch of the extremist network, have exploited the conflict to seize territory and gain influence.

On Tuesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up before reaching a security checkpoint in main southern city Aden, where jihadists have carried out deadly attacks against pro-government forces in recent months, a security official said.

There were no casualties apart from the assailant himself, said the official, describing the bomber as "an extremist".

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Washington: Democratic presidential front runner Hillary Clinton has condemned the terrorist attack in a bus in Jerusalem which left at least 21 people injured.

"I strongly condemn the terrorist attack in Jerusalem - my thoughts and prayers are with the wounded and their families, and I pray for their recovery. This attack comes in the midst of a wave of violence that has rocked Israel for months," Clinton said in a statement.

'Israelis have been living in fear of going about their daily lives - going to the store, to the boardwalk, riding the bus. All of us, including Palestinian leaders, must condemn such violence," she said.

"I will always stand with Israel's right and ability to defend itself - it's security is non-negotiable. Israel must continue to know that it has no greater friend than the US," Clinton said.

Both the State Department and the White House said they have seen such news reports, but no condemnation came from them.

"Obviously we're aware of those reports, and law enforcement officials in Israel are taking a close look at this, as they should. And I'm confident that they'll take a close look at this and that US officials will stay in touch with them on this matter," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.

"We certainly have seen the reports of this explosion on a bus in Jerusalem. We're watching this as closely as we can," State Department Spokesman John Kirby said.

"Israeli authorities are really a better source of information at this time. I don't have any more specific information about the exact cause or if it ? I know they've said they?re treating this as if it was an act of terrorism," he said.

A bomb blast ripped through a bus and sparked a fire, in Jerusalem yesterday wounding at least 21 people.
Washington: A large number of Indian -Americans and people from the South Asian community joined a massive rally in front of the US Supreme Court in support of Obama Administration's plans to defer deportation of four million illegal immigrants whose children are US citizens.

The Supreme Court, which is hearing the case, is now split on the Obama Administrations plans to defer deportation called Deferred Actions for Parents of Americans (DAPA).

It has been challenged by some 26 States.

During the hearing yesterday, four conservatives judges appeared to be critical of DAPA and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), while another liberal justice suggested that the case had no business being before the courts at all.

Supporters of DAPA, including a large number of Indian Americans held a rally outside Supreme Court calling for these programs to move forward swiftly and keep families together.

"This is a misguided and unnecessary challenge to eminently common-sense immigration programs that allow some aspiring Americans to remain with their families, continue contributing to the American economy, and pursue their dreams," the South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) said in a statement.

"An estimated 5.2 million immigrants, including at least 200,000 undocumented Indian-Americans and countless more South Asians, are eligible for DAPA and expanded DACA announced under President Obama's executive action on immigration in 2014," SAALT said.

"DAPA and the expanded DACA programs are the latest in the long struggle for immigrant rights in this country that should have ended with comprehensive immigration reform legislation in Congress, which the Senate passed with bipartisan support in 2013," said Suman Raghunathan, executive director of SAALT.

"While Congress has been unable to advance a bill, we hope the Supreme Court will uphold the constitutionality of these programs as a first step toward protecting millions from deportation, including thousands of undocumented South Asians. This occurs as South Asians are the fastest growing demographic in the country, totaling nearly 4.3 million strong as of 2013," Raghunathan said.

Democratic presidential front Hillary Clinton in a statement said the Supreme Court would upheld the decision of the Obama Administration in this regard.

"This case only underscores how crucial it is that our country finally enacts comprehensive immigration reform. I will propose legislation to do that within my first 100 days. We need to stand up, fight for families, fix our broken immigration system, create a reliable path to citizenship and end the fear that haunts too many lives and communities," Clinton said.

Obama acted within his legal and constitutional authority in halting the deportation of parents and children, she said.

"I hope the Court will uphold his actions. If elected president, I will do everything I can to protect the President's executive actions and go further to bring more people relief and keep families together," Clinton said.
District of Columbia: US President Barack Obama said he expects Iraq`s second city Mosul to be retaken from the Islamic State group "eventually".

Obama`s comments in an interview with CBS News on Monday came on the same day that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Washington would send Apache attack helicopters and more troops to Iraq.

"As we see the Iraqis willing to fight and gaining ground, let`s make sure that we`re providing them more support," Obama said.

"We`re not doing the fighting ourselves, but when we provide training, when we provide special forces who are backing them up, when we are gaining intelligence -- working with the coalitions that we have -- what we`ve seen is that we can continually tighten the noose," he added.

"My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall."

Mosul, in northern Iraq, was overrun during a jihadist offensive in June 2014 and has become an IS stronghold.

Washington heads an international coalition that is carrying out strikes against IS and also providing training and other assistance to forces fighting the jihadists in both Iraq and neighboring Syria.

Carter, on an unannounced trip to Baghdad, said the Apaches being sent to Iraq will support Iraqi efforts to surround and eventually recapture Mosul.

Iraqi forces have begun preparatory operations in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, but the actual assault to retake the city is not expected for months, and possibly not until next year.
Tokyo:A UN special envoy urged the Japanese government on Tuesday to protect media independence, which he warned is facing "serious threats."

The visit of David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, came as concerns over media freedoms have grown.

The government and ruling Liberal Democratic Party have both drawn criticism for allegedly threatening the press.

Parliament in 2013 passed a law on protecting specially designated secrets, while the cabinet minister responsible for regulating broadcasting told parliament this year the government can revoke licences if broadcasters fail to correct reporting deemed politically biased.

"There's a significant concern about the direction of independent media in Japan," Kaye told reporters after a week-long visit, saying he had heard from journalists of worries "about their ability to independently report on issues, particularly issues of sensitivity to the government".

In 2014 the conservative LDP wrote to broadcast networks urging "fair" coverage ahead of a general election, in what was seen as an attempt to intimidate media.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe supported the February comments by Internal Affairs Minister Sanae Takaichi on the broadcast law, which stipulates "politically fair" coverage. But Abe has insisted his government "cherishes freedom of speech".

Kaye said the law should be amended since "the government -- any government -- should not be in the position of determining what is fair."

"Broadcast media should not even theoretically be subject to regulation by government administration," he said, adding they should be overseen by an independent entity.

He said he was unable to meet Takaichi during his visit despite repeated requests.

The envoy also touched on the secrets protection law, saying he remains concerned even though the government assured him harsh penalties would not be applied to journalists.

"The law should be so amended to eliminate any chilling effect" on journalists, he wrote in a report on his preliminary observations.

The envoy also called on Japan to abolish its press club system, under which select media outlets have exclusive access to government ministries and police departments at the national and local levels.

Critics say the system allows authorities to spoon-feed information to a compliant press corps.

"The problem is that the system of journalism and the structure of media itself in Japan doesn't seem to afford journalists the ability to push back against" the government, Kaye said.

Japan ranked 61st out of 180 countries in the 2015 World Press Freedom Index announced by Reporters Without Borders, down from 59th in 2014 and 53th in 2013 and 2012.
Kuwait City: Kuwaiti oil workers Tuesday rejected fresh appeals to call off their three-day old strike as the state oil firm said it had managed to restore some affected production.

"The strike is continuing until all our demands are met," spokesman for the Kuwait Workers Union Farhan al-Ajmi told a news conference.

"We will return to work only after (national oil firm) Kuwait Petroleum Corp. scraps all decisions that took away some rights of the workers," Ajmi told thousands of striking workers.

The demands include abolishing decisions by authorities to cut some incentives in the face of falling oil prices and excluding the oil sector form a new payroll scheme for public servants.

Ajmi said several initiatives to reach a settlement did not succeed.

His comments came after KPC spokesman Sheikh Talal Khaled Al-Sabah said Kuwait output was now running at 1.5 million barrels per day -- 50 percent of normal output -- against 1.1 million bpd when the strike first erupted on Sunday.

Sheikh Khaled said a crude gathering centre in the north of the emirate had been put back into production and that the company had plans to reopen three more.

He did not specify how they were being staffed but on Sunday the cabinet gave orders for KPC to recruit contractors from abroad to operate some of its facilities in defiance of the indefinite strike called by the Kuwait oil workers union over planned wage cuts.

The stoppage in the OPEC oil cartel`s fourth largest producer has helped world prices to recover after a sharp fall on Monday following the failure of major producers to reach agreement on a proposed output freeze.

Besides the fall in Kuwait`s crude production, refining also dropped from 930,000 bpd to 520,000 bpd and natural gas output dropped to 620 million cubic feet (17.6 million cubic metres) from 1.3 billion cubic feet (36.8 million cubic metres).

Sheikh Khaled said the strike had not affected exports or domestic supplies as the emirate was using its strategic storage.

Late on Monday, acting oil minister Anas al-Saleh urged striking workers to return to work and pledged that their wages will not be cut.

KPC said on Sunday that reserves of petrol and derivatives were sufficient to meet domestic demand for 25 days and that strategic reserves could cover a further 31 days.
Valleta: Malta's left-of-centre government survived a no confidence vote linked to revelations from the so-called Panama Papers, which named the energy minister and the prime minister's chief-of-staff.

After 13 hours of debate, during which 50 of the parliament's 69 members had asked to speak, the opposition motion was dismissed by 38 to 31.

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said on Twitter following the vote: "The vote of confidence is strong and without ambiguity, and gives us the energy to continue to work hard and achieve results."

Meanwhile, leader of the opposition Simon Busuttil described the government as "in crisis and corrupt".

The Labour government has an eight-seat majority, but the opposition-led attack is seen as damaging to Muscat's administration.

Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi and Muscat's chief of staff, businessman Keith Schembri, were both named in the leak of millions of files from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca.

The files appear to indicate the law firm had been instructed to open bank accounts for the two officials in the Caribbean, Panama, Dubai and Miami.

They also reveal that the banks concerned were asking for initial deposits of USD 1 million.

Both Mizzi and Schembri have denied any wrongdoing and have rebuffed calls for them to resign.

Muscat has said he will await the outcome of an investigation before taking any decisions.

The Panama files have created problems for political figures in a number of countries around the world.

Spanish industry minister Jose Manuel Soria resigned on Friday after he was shown to have connections to offshore companies that he had initially denied.

Iceland's prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson was forced to resign after it emerged he had huge amounts of cash stashed in the British Virgin Islands.

The majority of offshore accounts and companies are legal but their opaque structures are sometimes used to conceal ill-gotten or politically inconvenient wealth.
Sydney: Two pieces of debris recovered from beaches in Mozambique almost certainly belong to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Australian officials said today, signalling a possible breakthrough in the search for the plane that vanished mysteriously with 239 people in 2014.

Australia is leading the massive multi-nation search in the remote southern Indian Ocean, believed to be the final resting place of the Boeing 777.

"Part No. 1 was a flap track fairing segment, almost certainly from the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft, registered 9M-MRO," the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) report said of the piece found December 27.

The second piece of debris was found February 27, about 220 kilometres from the spot where the first item was discovered.

"Part No. 2 was a horizontal stabilizer panel segment, almost certainly from the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft, registered 9M-MRO," the report said.

Its stencilling was also consistent with that used by Malaysia Airlines, the ATSB said.

MH370's disappearance is one of the world's biggest aviation mysteries. The plane vanished from radar on March 8, 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, with 239 people, including five Indians, on board.

The ATSB said both pieces were also examined for "marine ecology and remnants of biological material" which could provide clues to their sea journey.

"Visible marine ecology was present on both parts and these items were removed and preserved," the report said.

"At the time of writing, ongoing work was being conducted with respect to the marine ecology identification as well as testing of material samples.

"The results from these tests will be provided to the Malaysian investigation team once complete."

The ATSB said the pieces found in Mozambique would be returned to Malaysia this week.

Despite a two-year investigation costing millions of dollars, only one piece of debris has been confirmed as coming from the aircraft ? a 6-foot-long wing flap that washed up on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean.

Investigators said they would analyse another possible piece found on a Mauritian island in March.

The debris washing up on the East African coast is consistent with computer models showing how ocean drift would carry the wreckage across the seas, according to officials.

The relatives of several passengers aboard flight MH370 have filed suits against the airline amid doubts about the official explanation for the plane's disappearance.
New York: New York goes to the polls Tuesday in a pivotal presidential primary tipped to hand Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump victories in the race to clinch the Democratic and Republican tickets to the White House.

The former secretary of state, first lady and New York senator leads the polls by double digits over her Brooklyn-born challenger, Bernie Sanders, even if nationwide surveys put them neck and neck.

Trump, the brash Manhattan billionaire whose controversial campaign has appalled the Republican establishment, is streets ahead of his evangelical rival Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich.

The tycoon is banking on a big home state victory in his quest to sew up the nomination before Republican grandees can deny him the ticket and anoint another candidate at the party convention in July.

The polls open at 6:00 am (1000 GMT) and close at 9:00 pm (0100 GMT Wednesday) when Clinton and Trump have scheduled what they hope will be victory parties in Manhattan.

To the disadvantage of Vermont senator Sanders, only New York`s 5.8 million registered Democrats and 2.7 million registered Republicans are eligible to vote. Independents are barred from participating.

With both races for the White House nomination so competitive, it is the most consequential New York primary in decades in the country`s fourth largest state that is home to an incredibly diverse electorate.

Uniquely, three of the candidates lay claim to calling New York home: Trump, who has never lived anywhere else, Clinton who was twice elected the state`s US senator, and Sanders who was raised in Brooklyn.

"We all have a stake in America, that is what this election is about. Please, come out! Vote tomorrow," Clinton said Monday in an impassioned plea to become the country`s first woman president.

She spent the day pressing the flesh in a whirlwind of campaign stops that included greeting nurses, stopping by a car wash, chatting to kitchen workers and eating ice cream.

In the evening, she made a joint appearance with her husband, former president Bill Clinton, at a Manhattan rally for Irish Americans.

A big victory in the state, which elected her over Barack Obama in 2008, would stall the momentum generated by her self-styled Democratic socialist rival who has won seven out of the last eight state votes.Clinton holds 1,790 delegates compared to 1,113 for Sanders, putting her on course to scoop the 2,383 needed to secure the party`s ticket.

Only California has more than the 247 Democratic delegates and 44 superdelegates up for grabs in New York.

Sanders, 74, who has galvanized a youth movement with his call for healthcare as a right, free college education and campaign finance reform, needs a win to keep alive his hopes of winning the presidency.

"If we get a larger voter turnout again tomorrow we`re going to win again in New York," he told a rally in Queens late Monday.

But earlier in the day he signaled he could be willing to swing behind Clinton, should she win the nomination, provided she move further to the left on causes that he has highlighted.

"It`s a two-way street," he said. "The Clinton people are going to have to say, `you know, maybe Bernie has a point,`" he told CNN.

On the Republican side, Trump hopes that winning the majority of New York`s 95 Republican delegates can lessen his chances of facing a contested nomination at the party convention in Cleveland.

Republicans in rural areas and fallen manufacturing cities have warmed to his populist message despite a backlash among party elites fearful that his insults of women, Mexicans and Muslims make him unelectable.

The 69-year-old tycoon leads his home-state polls at 53.1 percent, with Ohio Governor John Kasich and Texas Senator Ted Cruz languishing at 22.8 and 18.1 percent respectively, according to RealClearPolitics.

Addressing a raucous rally in Buffalo, he attacked his rivals, gave a rousing defense of New York values, which Cruz has insulted, and blasted party rules as he has lost recent delegate hauls to Cruz.

"It is a rigged and corrupt system but we`re going to get there and I believe we`re going to do it much more easily than people think," Trump told the roaring crowd.

"No New Yorker can vote for Ted Cruz."

Cruz, who is widely disliked in New York, limited himself to only private meetings and television appearances in New York on Monday.
Washington: A fifth North Korean nuclear test could trigger new sanctions including an effort to choke off hard currency earnings by its laborers abroad, the top US diplomat for the Asia-Pacific region said on Tuesday.

"Like a regimen of medicine, the dosage can be upped when the effects fall short of whats required," Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Danny Russel told Reuters.

Russel made clear he was speaking about possible fresh sanctions by the UN Security Council, by the United States on its own or by a group of like-minded states from the European Union and Southeast Asia, along with the United States.

The United States, South Korea and Japan also could take unspecified "defense-related measures" if the North were to conduct what would be its fifth nuclear test, Russel said.

North Korea conducted a fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch the following month, triggering expanded UN sanctions aimed at starving it of funds for its atomic weapons program.

Some experts expect North Korea to conduct a fifth nuclear test in the near future, possibly before its party congress in early May, following an embarrassing failure of an intermediate-range missile last week.
London: A replica of one of the most iconic monuments destroyed by Islamic State (IS) jihadists in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra was unveiled in London's Trafalgar Square.

The six-metre (20 feet) tall scale recreation of the Triumphal Arch is made of Egyptian marble and was carved in the northern Italian region of Tuscany using precision digital technology such as 3D modelling.

The project is the brainchild of the Oxford-based Institute of Digital Technology (IDA), a joint venture between a group of international academics.

"If something can be rebuilt in this fashion, then those images of things being blown up and destroyed forever, that's undercut," IDA director Roger Michel told AFP after the replica was revealed in front of a crowd of several hundred people.

"Part of what we're doing is to send the message that things that have been destroyed can be replaced and that act of destruction is not final," he added.

Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site northeast of Damascus known as the "Pearl of the Desert", was taken back by the Russian-backed Syrian army from IS fighters last month.

The city was a major tourist destination before the Syrian conflict erupted in 2011, known for its ancient ruins, colonnaded streets and 2,000-year-old temples.

IS seized Palmyra last year and beheaded its 82-year-old former antiquities chief three months later.

The jihadists destroyed some of the city's most striking monuments and used the ancient amphitheatre as a venue for public executions.

The remains of the Triumphal Arch, dating back to the era of Roman Emperor Severus in the third century, are now scattered on the ground, with only the two columns that once sustained the central crown still standing.

Experts are divided on whether the ancient ruins can be restored.

Syria's antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim has said the job could be done in five years but Annie Sartre-Fauriat, a member of a UNESCO group of Syrian heritage experts has voiced doubts.

Abdulkarim repeated his appeal for international assistance for the restoration at Tuesday's event in London and suggested that the replica arch could go on display in the modern city of Palmyra.

"We need you, we need the international community," he said.

London Mayor Boris Johnson, who spoke at the unveiling ceremony, told the crowd that they were "here in a spirit of defiance of the barbarians who destroyed the original".
Related Battle lines drawn as Britain squares up for EU vote

Support for Britain to stay in the European Union has risen two percentage points to 53 percent, according to an ORB poll for The Telegraph newspaper.

The Telegraph said support for support for leaving the 28-member block had fallen by three percentage points to 41 percent since an earlier poll published on April 5.

Six percent of those questioned said they did not know how they would vote. Britain holds a referendum on EU membership on June 23.

The Telegraph said the poll surveyed 800 people but did not give any further details.

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New Delhi: The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) at its Istanbul Summit has extended support to the Kashmir struggle and said that it could not be equated with terrorism, according to a media report on Monday.

The OIC has called upon India to implement the United Nations Security Councils (UNSC) resolutions on Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistani English daily Dawn reported citing the country's foreign office.

The OIC's position was stated in a joint communique at the end of the summit in Istanbul, the report said.

OIC has reportedly expressed concern at the indiscriminate use of force and gross violation of human rights in Kashmir by the security forces, it added.

The 13th summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation was held in Istanbul on April 14. The leaders of Muslim nations had gathered to address issues such as terrorism, migration crisis, and the issue of Palestine.
Madrid: Spanish police said Tuesday they had detained a Moroccan man in the Mediterranean island resort of Palma de Mallorca suspected of recruiting jihadists for the Islamic State (IS) group.

"A police probe revealed that the accused had close contact with established terrorists involved with Daesh who are currently located in Syria," they said in a statement using a synonym for IS.

They added that the man used virtual platforms to recruit new jihadists for Syria and Iraq, "encouraging them and facilitating their trip to the conflict zone so that they could join the ranks of Daesh."

The operation was launched as part of a probe opened by Spain`s National Court, which specialises in extremism cases.

Spanish police regularly announce the detention of people suspected of having links with jihadist groups, although it is unclear exactly how many have been held so far this year.

Last year, the interior ministry said it had arrested around 100 suspected jihadists.

Since June Spain has been on a heightened anti-terror alert -- level four of a possible five -- following attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait on the same day.
Dubai: A new Islamic fatwa bars one from stealing his/her neighbour's WiFi signals.

The fatwa, or a religious edict, has been issued by Dubai's top religious authorities.

According to them, stealing neighbour's WiFi signals is not a proper Islamic conduct.

The religious edict issued by Dubai's Islamic Affairs & Charitable Activities Department states: "There is nothing wrong in using the line if your neighbours allow you to do so, but if they'd don't allow you, you may not use it."

The fatwa is available online to read.

Dubai's Islamic Affairs & Charitable Activities Department answers a variety of online questions. They range from prayers and religious matters to modern issues like cosmetic surgeries and illegally downloading movies.
London: In what may open up a big debate, a court in the United Kingdom has prevented a Muslim man from forcing his sons to circumcise.

The 36-year-old Algerian born dad wanted to circumcise his two sons aged six and four in accordance with his Muslim faith.

However, the mother of the kids, who is separated from her husband, was staunchly opposed the idea, leading to the matter reaching the court.

The Muslim man, who had entered Britain illegally in 2001, argued in the court that circumcision went to the very core of his identity as a Muslim.

As per a report in The Telegraph, he said all his family were circumcised and would feel "devastated" if his application were not granted.

However, the judge was not impressed.

She said: "Just as the father is passionate in his cause and the reasons for circumcision, the mother is resolutely opposed to it at this point," adding that the children should not be circumcised until they are old enough to decide for themselves.
United Nations: The United States and Iran made progress Tuesday on implementing an international nuclear deal during a UN meeting of the countries` chief diplomats, who said they would meet again on Friday.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met for two-and-a-half hours after Tehran complained that it was not receiving enough sanctions relief.

"We worked on a number of key things today, we made some progress on it," Kerry said.

"We are both working at making sure that the JCPOA -- the Iran nuclear agreement -- is implemented in exactly the way that it is meant to be and that all the parties to that agreement get the benefits that they are supposed to get out of the agreement," he added.

Zarif confirmed that the talks touched on ensuring "that we will draw the benefits that Iran is entitled to from the implementation of the agreement."

"We agreed that we will continue to work on this and meet again on Friday to see how best we can put the necessary measures into operation and into motion in order to make sure the benefits will be there for Iranian people to enjoy," he added.

Iranian officials have complained that the United States has not lived up to its side of the agreement, as Western banks and corporations have been reluctant to renew business ties.

But Washington has also pointed the finger at Tehran, warning that it retains the right to impose new sanctions over Iran`s ballistic missile tests.

The meeting at the United Nations was the first face-to-face encounter since January 16, when the two sides met in Vienna to formally implement the nuclear deal, which imposes controls on Tehran`s nuclear ambitions in exchange for sanctions relief.
London: United States Defense Secretary Ash Carter said that he will talk with his commanders in the coming days to identify new ways the US can intensify the fight against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, which including more airstrikes and cyber attacks.

According to the Guardian, Carter expressed confidence that the White House will approve recommendations, saying nothing he has asked President Barack Obama for yet in the conflicts has been turned down.

The Pentagon announced yesterday that, air strikes by the US and its allies on Friday hit 15 ISIS targets in Iraq and three in Syria.

Carter has said that Obama and other US leaders will encourage other Gulf nations to contribute economically to the effort to rebuild Iraq once Isis is defeated.
New York: Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton on Tuesday looked set for solidifying their presidential front-runner status after suffering a series of losses recently as polling began in the potentially game-changing New York state primary.

All the presidential hopefuls packed in back-to-back campaign stops, making final pitches before voters ahead of the crucial primary election.

Democratic contenders Clinton and Bernie Sanders and their Republican rivals Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich toured across the state holding rallies and meeting voters yesterday, seeking to solidify their positions.

At stake are 291 Democratic delegates and 95 for Republicans.

68-year-old Clinton, the New York senator for eight years, is leading the delegate count with 1,307, while Sanders has 1,094 delegates. The one who clinches 2,383 delegates in all wins the party's nomination.

Clinton is trying to end a seven state winning streak for 74-year-old Sanders in this primary.

A total of 1,237 delegates are needed to sew up the Republican nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Trump, 69, leads in the total delegate count with 743, followed by Cruz with 543 and Kasich with 144.

Trump, who has faced defeats at the hands of Cruz recently, is desperately trying to get enough delegates to avoid a contested convention this summer.

For Trump, a win in New York would be his first since he won the Arizona Primary on March 22.

A new NBC New York/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll shows Trump will garner 54 per cent of the Republican primary voters. Ohio Governor Kasich is expected to come in second, instead of Cruz.

On the Democratic side, Clinton has a double-digit lead over her competitor Vermont Senator Sanders.

However, nationally, Republican presidential front-runner Trump has the support of a record 40 per cent Republican voters while Clinton is engaged in a tough contest with Sanders, according to a latest poll.

Trump has the support of 40 per cent of the Republican primary voters and is followed closely by Senator Cruz with 35 per cent and Ohio Governor John Kasich with 24 per cent, according to a latest opinion poll by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic party, Sanders (46.3 per cent) has all but eliminated Clinton's (47.7 per cent) primary polling lead, it said.

While Trump would need as many votes as possible, he will not be getting two from his own family.

Since only registered voters from participating parties may vote, Trump's children Eric and Ivanka Trump missed the deadline to register with a political party, making them ineligible to cast ballots for the billionaire businessman.

Clinton sought support of the minorities and women doing her various stops across the city.

"Whether it's Chinese government policy in the past, for one child and forced abortions and sterilisation, or the policies of the communist regime in Romania, with forced childbearing, we cannot, we must not, ever let governments and politicians make those decisions," Clinton told her supporters.

"And as long as I'm around, we never will," she said.

Sanders called on New Yorkers to come out and vote, saying he needs their support to achieve job growth and hold corporations who ship jobs abroad accountable.

"My experience has been, in this campaign so far, is that we win when the turnout is high. We lose when the turnout is low. Tomorrow, let us all do everything we can to make sure that New

York State has the largest turnout in a Democratic primary in its history," Sanders told a cheering crowd in Long Island City.

"Tomorrow, New York State can help take this country a giant step forward for the political revolution. Let's do it.

"I just want to say a word to thank all of you for the courage to stand up for justice and against corporate greed," Sanders said.

"We will not tolerate large profitable corporations sending jobs to low-wage countries, throwing American workers out on the street, cutting back on health care benefits, and then paying their CEO USD 18 million a year," he said.
Washington: The US has expressed concern over China landing its military jets on a man-made island in South China Sea and asked Beijing to keep its prior commitments not to deploy military aircraft at its outposts.

"We're aware that a Chinese military aircraft landed at Fiery Cross Reef on Sunday in what China described as a humanitarian operation to evacuate three ill workers," Pentagon spokesman Capt Jeff Davis told CNN after news reports appeared that China has landed a military jet on a man-made island in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

"It is unclear why the Chinese used a military aircraft, as opposed to a civilian one," Davis said.

"We urge China to reaffirm that it has no plans to deploy or rotate military aircraft at its outposts in the Spratly's, in keeping with China's prior assurances," he said.

China said it landed a military aircraft on this newly build island for the first time to evacuate three critically ill construction workers.

However, experts here have described this as China asserting its military power in the South China Sea.

The Chinese move comes days after the US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter landed abroad a US aircraft carrier, which experts said was aimed at delivering a message to China.
Related Egyptian dairy firm Domty plans to list in March

Egyptian dairy producer and juice maker Arabian Food Industries Co. (Domty) signed a $10 million deal to export to the Russian market, the company said in a press release sent to the Bourse on Tuesday.

Domty agreed with Russian yper chain Magnit to export their products within a period of four years, Ahmed El-Homosany, the head of investors relations at the company, told Ahram Online.

The dairy producers sold 12.25 million shares in a public offering in March at EGP 9.2 per share, with the sale hugely over-subscribed.

Arabian Food industries' share price gained 1.79 percent to reach EGP 9.68 a share in the first hour of trade on Tuesday.

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Air France-KLM's new airline will operate in "ultra-competitive" markets which have so far been loss-making for the group

The breakdown of an Air France jet has stranded 165 passengers in Montreal since Sunday and the airline says it needs another day to get them home.

The Airbus A340 jetliner was scheduled to fly from the Canadian city to Paris on Sunday but had to turn back to the terminal shortly after leaving the gate.

Passengers were asked to wait for the aircraft to be repaired instead being rescheduled on other flights.

"We've been waiting two days for a flight to Paris," passenger Didier Pasquet told AFP Monday evening.

"Terrible experience and ruined vacation," Daniel Dahan said in a Twitter message.

An Air France spokesman told AFP most of the passengers would be transferred to two other Air France flights Tuesday night. The rest would be reserved seats aboard competitors' flights, including KLM, Air Transat and Air Canada also Tuesday.

All of the passengers would reach Paris no later than Wednesday, Air France pledged.
France-based global gas supplier Engie said on Monday that it signed two cooperation agreements with Egypt to meet some of the Arab nations demands for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and for further renewable energy development.

The agreements were signed with the Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company, the National Renewable Energy Association and the Egyptian Electricity Transport Company during President Francois Hollandes three-day visit to Cairo, accompanied by a large delegation of French businessmen, Engie said on its website without further details.

Over the last two days, Holland and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi signed a number of financial deals worth more than 1.5 billion euros, as well as memorandums of understandings in the fields of transport, energy, renewable energy, gas and tourism.

Engie, formerly known as GDF Suez, and its partners are already conducting a number of renewable energy projects in Egypt including solar photovoltaic and wind projects in the south.

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By most indications, Hillary Clinton will break Sen. Bernie Sanderss recent winning streak on Tuesday with a big victory in the New York Democratic primary, putting her another step closer to wrapping up the Democratic presidential nomination.

Although Sanders is clearly better at stirring his liberal base and turning out huge crowds -- as he did again on Sunday, drawing an estimated 28,000 supporters to Prospect Park in his native Brooklyn -- the latest CBS News Battleground Tracker shows Clinton leading Sanders by 10 percentage points in New York, 53 percent to 43 percent, with 291 delegates at stake.

Related: Sanders Berns Clinton on Minimum Wage Issue

Clinton currently leads Sander, 1,748 delegates to 1,084. A total of 2,384 delegates are needed to win the Democratic presidential nomination this summer.

Regardless of Sanders unflinching argument that he still has a narrow pathway to the nomination this summer, Clinton can derail his long-shot bid with a solid performance Tuesday, followed by strong showings or victories next week in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland and other Northeastern states seen as friendly terrain for her.

However, a new survey by the Wall Street Journal/NBC News released over the weekend contains alarming news for Clinton: Sanders stepped up attacks on her -- for accepting millions in speaking fees and contributions from Wall Street and her support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and a raft of international trade agreements that hurt average workers -- have cut deeply into her overall approval rating.

Some Democrats now worry that if Sanders keeps up his attacks, even after it becomes obvious he has no way of securing the nomination, he could end up undermining Clintons prospects for beating GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the general election.

Among Democratic and Republican voters overall, 56 percent have a negative view of Clinton while just 32 percent have positive things to say about her, according to the survey. Clinton has struggled from the beginning of her campaign to overcome negative views about her honesty and integrity, especially in the wake of the controversy over her handling of sensitive emails during her four years at the State Department. But the latest poll shows a startling one-month drop of 24 points in her approval rating among all registered voters.

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Related: Bernie Sanders Goes All in with Pope Francis

For sure, she does much better among Democrats than Republicans. Among Democrats, she scores a 63 percent positive rating, while just 20 percent are highly critical of her. Sanders, the self-styled democratic socialist who has surprised many with his highly effective campaign, is viewed positively by 73 percent of Democrats, while only 11 percent harbor negative views.

There was a time when many political analysts argued that even while Sanders was unlikely to win the party nomination, his attacks on Clintons policies and decision making forced her to sharpen her rhetoric, tack strategically to the left to broaden her appeal and generally get into fighting shape for the much tougher general election campaign.

Yet Sanders in recent weeks has stepped up his criticism of Clinton so much  essentially dismissing her as a tool of Wall Street and the establishment and as a second rate thinker and leader who time and again showed faulty judgment  that now there is a risk he will leave her seriously wounded entering the general election.

Sanders and Clinton engaged in some of the nastiest exchanges of the campaign Thursday night during the final Democratic debate before Tuesdays New York primary. And on Sunday, he continued his line of attack that Clinton is the darling of Wall Street and other special interests as the country faces the threat of oligarchy.

Related: Clooney vs. The Pope -- Whose Endorsement Will Count More?

This is the issue of American politics today: Do we have a government that represents all of us or just the 1 percent?" Sanders said during an appearance on CNN's State of the Union program. Youre not going to have a government that represents all of us, so long as you have candidates like Secretary Clinton being dependent on big money interests.

Trump, who is even more unpopular than Clinton among registered voters in general (65 percent view him unfavorably), has picked up on Sanders drumbeat against the former secretary of state and U.S. senator from New York. Bernie Sanders says that Hillary Clinton is unqualified to be president, Trump wrote on Twitter last week. Based on her decision making ability, I can go along with that!

Larry J. Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, said on Monday that a one month, 24-point drop in Clintons approval rating is a little hard to believe, even with both Sanders and the Republicans beating up on her. Yet Clinton better prepare for the worst.

The campaign has gotten more negative and the attacks on her by Sanders are now sharper, he said in an email. That may explain some of the change. Normally a candidate's unfavorability declines once the nomination is decided and the party begins to reunify. Probably that awaits Clinton in June and July.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Since the late 1970s, the American conservative movement has been an uneasy  and unstoppable  alliance of big-business-friendly finance boosters and poor, evangelical Christians whose major issues were things like gay marriage, abortion, and forcing women into "traditional" gender roles, not taxation and "small government."



The alliance between "fiscally conservative" bankers and "morally conservative" working class voters that Jerry Falwell forged in the late 1970s has been fracturing through the past three or four election cycles, but as the split in today's GOP shows, it's all but shattered.





The most tangible evidence of this division can be see in the southern states that have passed spiteful, unconstitutional bills punishing trans people for using public restrooms, a pandering, dogwhistle move that is purely symbolic, a way for the dwindling bigots of America to assert their significance.

These states are seeing a predictable backlash from entertainers and other traditional progressive actors, but also from a surprising quarter: giant corporations.





When companies like Disney, Paypal, Pepsi and Dow Chemicals take up arms against the GOP leadership of states, it's hard to see how the relationship between the religious right and big business can be salvaged. The religious right is now adopting an anti-"big business" rhetoric, calling the biggest companies in America "bullies."

It's a way to understand the rise and rise of Trumpism  and also Sanders. Things are shifting.



The implications for modern conservatism are even more consequential. Social conservatives were an essential part of the Republican coalition that Ronald Reagan assembledcomposed of pro-business conservatives, national-security hawks, and the Christian right. The coalition always entailed fudging policy differences: not all social conservatives were true believers in big tax cuts and deregulation; business elites often didn't feel strongly about abortion and prayer in schools. But, as Daniel Williams, a historian at the University of West Georgia and the author of a history of the Christian right, told me, "Even though the relationship between the two sides was always complicated, they were willing to make a bargain, because each side needed the other." The L.G.B.T. fight shows how far that bargain has eroded. To many conservative business leaders, today's social-conservative agenda looks anachronistic and is harmful to the bottom line; it makes it hard to hire and keep talented employees who won't tolerate discrimination. Social conservatives, meanwhile, think that Republican leaders are sacrificing Christian principles in order to keep big business happy. "There's more than a fair amount of anger and a great deal of disappointment," Williams said. Evangelicals have called companies like Apple and Disney "corporate bullies," to whom Mammon matters more than morals.

Unlikely Alliances

[James Surowiecki/New Yorker]

(via Kottke)

(Image: LGBT flag map of Georgia, Fry1989, CC-BY-SA)


Pakistan's daily news service Dawn reports on the rise in scorpion smoking there:

(Seventy-four-year-old Sohbat Khan's) addiction to opium doesn't bother him as much; Sohbat says opium's affects are far safer than scorpion smoking. He knows his body is too old to bear the high, but there are days he still feels the pull.





"Chars aw powder kho asi gup dai," Sohbat says in way of explanation"Hashish and heroin's so-called relief is nothing in front of scorpion."









During his years of addiction, Sohbat remembers madly roaming around his house and village, hunting for scorpions. Often, when the need was too overwhelming and there was no scorpion in sight, he would make his way to Peshawar. "It's a worst form of addiction," he says in Pashto.





"I would inhale the smoke coming out of the fire," Sohbat says, although it is the tail that addicts really wantits poisonous venom makes for dangerous addiction.
The Ismailia International Film Festival for Documentaries and Shorts will return this year after being postponed in 2015. Ahram Online talks to the festival's director Mohamed Atef about this year's highlights

The Ismailia International Film Festival for Documentaries and Shorts is back for its 18 edition, taking place from 20 to 26 April.

The festival returns after a longer-than expected absence; the 17th edition took place in 2014 and the 2015 event was cancelled.

The director of the festival, film critic Mohamed Atef, has just completed his role as an artistic director of the Luxor Egyptian and European Film Festival, the fourth edition of which took place between 30 January and 5 February. Although long involved in the Ismailia festival in different capacities, this is his first year as director. Ahram Online sat down to speak with him about the upcoming event.

Ahram Online (AO): In the press conference you explained that this year the festival this will be far from politics and that it aims at bringing joy to its audience. What does that mean in terms of the film selections?



Mohamed Atef (MA): I wanted to make it clear that our main concern is the artistic quality of the films. However, films which depict human stories naturally reflect political and social realities in different countries, many of which are similar to our reality. As such we did not omit those films but we were very selective in terms of diversity and balance between all the films presented.

For example, a Pakistani short feature film titled Departure talks about labourers who are tricked by travel agencies which take their money for the dream of a job opportunity abroad. This subject reminds us of issues raised in Egyptian cinema in the 1970s and the 1980s.

The film selection is an eye-opener for what we share with others. We look at how the experiences of the other add to our knowledge. We also take into consideration how those experiences were depicted in terms of the technique or the artistic beauty.



AO: The festival did not have a 2015 edition. How did this gap affect the festival?

MA: The Ismailia International Film Festival for Documentaries and Shorts has a very good reputation in Egypt and in the region. It is an event that many film-makers and cinema-lovers look forward to.

There were many problems last year and it was not an easy time for the festival. The decision to postpone the 2015 edition was not easy on the selection committee either since they already had the programming ready when the decision to postpone the festival was issued. However, now it is not a matter of why it was postponed but how we deal with this gap.

Due to the festivals criteria, only [films produced during] the year or the previous year is eligible. The committee had to go through the selection process from the beginning. It was also a heart-breaking decision to see many beautiful films that could no longer take part in this years edition.

Yet, at the end of the day, despite all the challenges, we are glad that the festival is back.



AO: As festival director, what do you think you bring to this years event that is new?

MA: As a cinema critic, I have always considered the Ismailia festival to be my favourite in the country. I used to be involved in all its activities, and was a member of its selection committee for several years.

The festival is a very special event for many cinema followers; it attracts film-makers and film students from all over the country. It is a specialised festival and a space for enhancing young film-makers talents and networks.



This year the festival will reflect youthfulness, and will talk about gender and human diversity. This will be reflected through the film selection as well as other activities, and even the committee and the jury. Even the festivals logo is filled with a joyful spirit. Hence we can say that we return with a lot of joy and enthusiasm.



AO: How far does the film list reflect the diversity of techniques, especially in documentaries?

MA: When you organise a film festival you not only import what is new in film production, but also what is new in festival organising.

This year we considered giving a space not only to the films but to introduce how the films are being made. There will be a seminar titled Documentary Films Between the Old Traditions and the Beauty of Film-Making. It will introduce the most recent trends in film-making in terms of the camera movement, the film treatment, the subject. The film selection reflects those elements and techniques very clearly.



AO: You mentioned at the press conference held a few days ago that among the festivals focuses is the issue of gender. What did you mean by that?

MA: It relates to issues that are a main concern of women. We have a special programme called Act where juries will look into films that deal with womens issues. Also most of the jury in this section are women.



AO: Securing the budget is not an easy task and it remains one of the main challenges for any festival organised in Egypt. How did you manage to deal with the financial requirements of the event? And what other challenges did you face?



MA: The festival had a sum of EGP 1.2 million secured. Add to this logistic support from the Ministry of Culture and Ismailia governorate, as well as several other governmental institutions, and volunteers in Ismailia.

Funding is always the main concern and we need money or logistical support for many aspects of the festival. It is not easy even to screen the films.

For instance, a film that won several awards has high financial demands. As follows, it is always a tough task to make a perfect balance between the price of the films and the general quality of the festival.

Also, in terms of screening equipment we are still depending on the traditional tools. Newer technology is more protective of the film. This makes it even harder to get the screening rights from the international distributors.

All of these elements make it a difficult task to hold a film festival, but it is not impossible. For sure we could have done better have we had better capacities, however we did the best we could under the circumstances.



AO: And since the festival is held in Ismailia, a city in northeastern Egypt, how does the event relate to the reality of this governorate?

MA: Actually we tried to take the festival out of the traditional, previously practiced, concept of an event that comes from Cairo with Cairo visitors who stay for one week in Ismailia.

We wanted the festival to attract the local audience. Young film-makers and cinema students in Ismailia are part of all the activities of the festival. We have several film-making and animation workshops targeting the young people form Ismailia and the neighbouring governorates. In addition, all the volunteers at the festival are from Ismailia.

As for the screenings, the festival will take place at the halls that operate under the Ministry of Culture and at private cinemas, as well as a few open-air locations. So, we hope to reach to different audiences.



AO: Why did you choose Sherif El-Bendarys Dry Hot Summer (Har Gaf Sayfan) for the festival opening?

MA: Dry Hot Summer already gained a lot of praise during the 13th Dubai International Film Festival [which took place earlier this year]. In Ismailia it will have its Egypt premiere and it is good to open such an event with an Egyptian premiere.

Dry Hot Summer is a very interesting film about the fate of Egyptian women when it comes to what the society expects from them. It tells a story of a young lady on her wedding night.



AO: What about Arab cinemas presence in the festival?

MA: We have several Arab documentaries.

Documentary film-making is progressing considerably in the Arab world and many new narratives are being explored.

An interesting film in the Panorama section is Babor Casanova by Algerian director Karim Sayad. It is about the phenomenon of the Ultras in the Arab world.

Also the Lebanese film Kamal Joumblatt, in the official competition of the long documentaries is worth shedding light on. The film represents the sectarian face of Lebanon through the life story of the Lebanese political leader.

In addition, a film from Morocco called Amal is interesting to see, as is Egyptian documentary Tuk-Tuk.

We also have several promising Egyptian films made by cinema students, such as A Present From the Past and The Eye of Life.

There is definitely a lot to look for.



AO: And do you have favourite films at the festival?

MA: The selection committee watched almost a thousand films and chose 74. I cannot really point to a list of favourites. I think that the whole selection is very good.

Among many films Id like to highlight, lets begin with an important film, Stony Paths, the French-Turkish production about an Armenian film-maker who traced the path of the Turkish people who saved the lives of his family during the massacres.

The addition, the film The Man Who Mends Women has a very innovative way of dealing with the issue of the female victims of rape.

There is also The Third Generation, a very special Iranian film about the victims of Vietnam who are still suffering from the effects of the American napalm.

Those films have won many awards, but the most important element is that they really represent a different reality in an innovative way.

Most of these films also are about universal ideas, human stories, and common visions.

For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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[There are important lessons about failing and trying again that we're missing out on by avoiding failure at all costs. / Thinkstock]

Imagine a toy thats specifically designed to make you fail. The soon-to-be-released Failure Toy teaches people all about floppingwhich, according to the founder of Twenty One Toys, is a core skill for the 21st century.

How do we reframe failure, which should be a normal, natural part of our learning and development and how we grow and not this this terrible thing we want to avoid at all costs? says Twenty One Toys founder and lead designer, Ilana Ben-Ari. We want to get the learning across that failure is natural in all parts of our learning.

When you know how failure works, you know how you work with failure, she adds. Were in a stage of failure abstinence right now instead of failure education.

Designed for people aged six to CEO, the Failure Toy is a kind of puzzle than involves balancing and stacking things. It follows the release of the companys wildly successful Empathy Toy, an abstract, wooden 3D puzzle for two or more players. One person builds a pattern with the puzzle and has to describe that pattern to others so they can re-create itwhile everyone is blindfolded.

Ben-Ari first came up with the Empathy Toy while doing a research project in university for the visually impaired community. It is a metaphor for how do I communicate with someone cant see or who sees things differently or has a different perspective than myself, Ben-Ari says. It involves frustration and patience: how do I creatively communicate to someone else who cant see? The toys have us looking at self-assessment and self-reflection.

The Empathy Toy, which has been available for over two years, is used in 43 countries, at 30 post-secondary institutions and in some MBA programs, and by corporations ranging from Fed-Ex to Scotiabank. Some companies even pull out the Empathy Toy during interviews and have prospective employees play with it. Fuelling its success is research into how empathy can actually improve business practices and outcomes.

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Companies are more profitable and productive when they act ethically, treat their staff well, and communicate better with their customers, according to the latest Lady Geek Global Empathy Index. The top 10 companies in the 2015 index increased in value more than twice as much as the bottom 10 and generated 50 per cent more earnings. Average earnings among the top 10 were up 6 per cent this year, while the average earnings of the bottom 10 dropped 9 per cent.

The Failure Toy is due out later this year. Ben-Ari , who has a background in industrial design and now works out of the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto, was one of five female entrepreneurs to receive an interest-free loan from a funding initiative called Radical Generosity, established by a network of 500 female entrepreneurs, to help launch it.

The [toys] challenges are very complex and require creativity, she says. For us its about elevating the important social and emotional skills, which are just as important as STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] skills.
By Jonathan Stempel (Reuters) - A federal judge on Monday cleared the way for Pacific Investment Management Co to pursue a California lawsuit accusing American International Group Inc of causing big losses by lying about its subprime mortgage exposure before its 2008 bailout. U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty in Manhattan said it made sense for a California state court to handle Pimco's case, rather than have him decide, as AIG wanted, whether the unit of German insurer Allianz SE waited too long to sue. Jon Diat, an AIG spokesman, said the Manhattan-based insurer disagreed with Crotty's decision but looks forward to defending against Pimco in California. Timothy DeLange, a lawyer for Pimco, declined to comment. AIG had in March 2015 won court approval of a $970.5 million class action settlement over its exposure to subprime mortgages and credit default swaps, culminating in $182.3 billion of federal bailouts. Pimco, which oversees $1.5 trillion of assets, chose to opt out of that settlement, which some plaintiffs do when they hope to recover more by suing on their own. The Newport Beach, California-based firm sued AIG a week later in an Orange County state court, on behalf of more than 60 funds including the flagship Pimco Total Return, over securities it bought between 2006 and 2008. AIG then sued Pimco a month later, seeking a declaratory judgment that Pimco's federal securities law claim was stale. Crotty, however, said letting the California court decide the case was better than "piecemeal" litigation. He also said he could not "countenance" AIG's effort to seek a declaratory judgment, which he called an effort to benefit from "more favorable" legal precedents. "After extensive litigation, it is clear that Pimco's chosen forum (where it is headquartered) is suitable for the resolution of the dispute," Crotty wrote. No trial date has been set. The case is American International Group Inc v. Pacific Investment Management Co et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 15-03339. The California case is Pacific Investment Management Co et al v. American International Group Inc, California Superior Court, Orange County, No. 30-2015-00779738-CU-SL-CXC. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
TORONTO (Reuters) - A building that was being demolished has collapsed in Toronto, injuring as many as seven people, the fire department in Canada's largest city said on Monday. Four people have been rescued from beneath the structure, with three transported to hospital. Another three or four people were injured and treated at the scene, Toronto Fire Services Captain Michael Westwood told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Westwood said the building appeared to be in the process of demolition, and parts of the building and attached scaffolding had collapsed onto the sidewalk and road in central Toronto. He said rescuers believed they had found all the people injured in the collapse but were continuing to search the area. Toronto Police said on Twitter a canine unit had been sent to assist with the search and rescue. (Reporting by Andrea Hopkins; editing by Andrew Hay)
By Lauren Hirsch and Greg Roumeliotis (Reuters) - Private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners LP is in advanced talks to acquire Give and Go Prepared Foods Corp, a Canadian maker of thaw-and-serve sweet baked goods such as Two-Bite Brownies, according to people familiar with the matter. The potential deal illustrates how cash flow-rich companies producing high-calorie confectionaries are still popular with some investment firms, despite the consumer industry's broad move toward healthy eating. "The consumer today has a split personality. They are increasingly focused on health and wellness, but equally love to splurge on quality indulgences," said Michael Dart, a private equity partner at consulting firm A.T. Kearney who is not involved in the Give and Go Prepared Foods sale process. OMERS Private Equity, the buyout arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System which owns Give and Go Prepared Foods, has granted Thomas H. Lee exclusivity in its negotiations in order to reach a deal, the people said on Monday. There is no certainty that Thomas H. Lee will successfully conclude its negotiations, the people said. The price Thomas H. Lee was offering could not be learned, but the sources said it was lower than the $800 million that OMERS was previously seeking. Twinkies maker Hostess Brands LLC had also participated in the auction for Give and Go Prepared Foods, Reuters previously reported. The sources asked not to be identified because the negotiations are confidential. Thomas H. Lee and Give and Go Prepared Foods declined to comment, while Hostess did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In addition to Two-Bite miniature baked treats, Give and Go Prepared Foods also sells Kimberly's Bakeshoppe cupcakes. OMERS bought Give and Go Prepared Foods from private equity firm Kilmer Capital Partners in 2007. (Reporting by Lauren Hirsch and Greg Roumeliotis in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
OTTAWA,ON--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - The Food Processing Human Resources Council (FPHRC) would like to introduce the world's FIRST program developed to prepare Canadian newcomers for employment opportunities in Canada's food and beverage processing industry. The newly developed Pre-Arrival Food Safety Management Training (PAFSMT) Program will provide approved permanent residence or pre-arrival immigrants with employment and food safety related training in an innovative, engaging and self-paced online environment.

Canada is a country that encourages immigration, multiculturalism and equality. Food and beverage processing is the largest manufacturing industry in Canada in terms of value of production, and is an essential channel for Canadian agricultural products. It is a key economic sector, connecting producers to consumers and touching the lives of all Canadians, directly and indirectly. However, the industry struggles to find workers and this is a growing and pressing concern for Canadian farmers and processors. Over the next 3 years, Canada's food and beverage processing industry will need to hire a minimum of 23,000 workers.

"There is a labour shortage in Canada's food (and beverage) processing industry. As a growing food business it is a challenge for us to find and retain new workers. We are always looking to recruit qualified food safety personnel, entry level and skilled workers. We spend a lot of time advertising, recruiting and training workers. The industry needs a program like this, where new Canadians are coming trained and ready to work right away." Mike Timani, President, Fancy Pokket Corporation

For newcomers to Canada there are many barriers once they have been accepted to Canada. They have a difficult time finding work despite an overall Canadian government policy that encourages immigration. Canadian employers may not know how to assess their credentials, or may find their language and skills insufficient.

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"Immigrants are a substantial portion of the Canadian food and beverage processing workforce. The Council is in a unique position to provide food safety related training through this new program which will expedite the transition of new immigrants to exciting employment opportunities within the industry." Jennefer Griffith, Executive Director, Food Processing Human Resources Council

In partnership with Planning for Canada and Prepare for Canada the FPHRC is ready to address these issues. The PAFSMT Program is focussed on eligible pre-arrival clients. Successful clients who complete the program will leave their home country with 12 Canadian employment and food safety related certificates. An introduction to the sector will highlight the many employment benefits and promote the food manufacturing industry as a viable career choice. The pre-arrival online training will provide a seamless transition into the Canadian workforce, and direct pre-arrival clients to the many available employment opportunities across Canada's rural and urban areas.

Training will include;

Canadian Employability Skills for Food Manufacturers (5 courses)

Basic Food Safety Skills (9 courses)

Technical Food Safety Training (7 courses)

This means new immigrants will arrive with valuable skills creating a pool of possible workers for the food and beverage processing industry saving Canadian employers recruitment and training costs. This is a win-win situation for all involved! For more information about the Pre-Arrival Food Safety Management Program and recruitment opportunities please visit www.fphrc.com/careers-for-new-canadians/

About the Food Processing Human Resources Council (FPHRC)

The FPHRC is a non-profit organization that serves as the Human Resource (HR) voice for Canadian food processors. FPHRC monitors the industry's skills and learning needs, and is a leader in delivering training tools to support a safe and secure food supply and a viable food and beverage sector. For more information about the FPHRC go to www.fphrc.com

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Canadians can now rent their personal vehicle to others through a U.S. company that has just launched in this country.

"We're actually the first company to bring the benefits of peer-to-peer car rental to Canada." says Cedric Mathieu, director at Turo Canada.

"It's an entirely new way for you to start making money out of your car."

- ANALYSIS Regulation would strengthen sharing economy in the long run

Just how much money is open for debate. Car owners would also have to be comfortable allowing complete strangers to rent their vehicles. And renters would have to be comfortable renting vehicles from private individuals.

But experts say the average lifetime maintenance cost alone for a mid-size vehicle in Canada is around $10,000.

And Transport Canada says every shared vehicle would take eight cars off the road.

So if the idea catches on  and count Google and General Motors among those who think it will  it has the potential to take millions of vehicles off the road, and significantly disrupt both the car rental business and the auto industry as a whole.

How it works

Turo, based in San Francisco, offers a service that is similar to AirBnB, but for vehicles.

Through Turo's app or on its website, owners can list their vehicles for rent by the day, week or month, earning money from what is often an under-utilized, depreciating asset.

"It's very expensive to own a car these days," says Mathieu.

"Especially in Canada where the depreciation of cars is faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, because of the weather, because of the cost of insurance and so on."

"With Turo, you can cover the cost of ownership of your car and you can even turn a profit."

Mathieu says the average Canadian's car is parked more than 90 per cent of the time.

In order to list a car on Turo in Canada, vehicles must be 10 years old or newer, have fewer than 200,000 kilometres on the odometer, and can't be worth more than $75,000.

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Turo, a private company with venture capital from both Google and General Motors, among others, has been operating in the U.S. since 2009.

The company says U.S. members who list vehicles on its platform earn an average of $600 per month.

A check of Turo's website for vehicles available in San Francisco shows many listed for less than $25 per day. A 2013 Honda Fit, for example, was priced at $20 per day.

The higher-priced vehicles range from between $200 and $400 US per day. (A Mercedes C class is listed at more than $800 US per day, but that seems an outlier. Owners can set their own price or have Turo's dynamic pricing set the amount).

Of that, Turo takes a 25 per cent fee from the owner (and tacks on a further 10 per cent fee for the renter).

What's in it for the renters?

Turo claims to have several advantages over traditional car rental services, chief among them price.

The company says that, on average, vehicles on its platform cost about 30 per cent less than those from traditional car rental companies.

All payments are made through the app or the website.

Turo also says its members have access to a greater variety of vehicles, as many as 800 makes and models on its platform in North America right now. In that same San Francisco vehicle search, it was possible to rent a Tesla (both a Roadster and a Model S), a Porsche, multiple BMW models, off-road capable Jeeps, and minivans.

Users can also request vehicle delivery to their home. And in more mature markets such as San Francisco, the number of members means it may be possible to rent a vehicle from someone within a few blocks of home.

Turo says it has members in more than 2,500 U.S. cities.

What about insurance?

Renters can purchase insurance from Turo when they rent a vehicle, much the same way they would from a standard car rental company.

Turo says most credit cards that would normally cover the cost of rental car insurance don't work with Turo, because they "don't consider Turo a rental company."

But the company says Canadians listing their vehicles are covered for the full value of their vehicle along with $2-million liability coverage.

That insurance may not cover all eventualities, however.

In 2012, when the company was still operating as RelayRides, the New York Times reported a renter crashed a car into another vehicle, killing the renter and seriously injuring four people in the other vehicle.

The newspaper reported the claims in that case could exceed the insurance provided by Turo/RelayRides, putting the owner of the vehicle at risk.

Most insurance policies in Canada won't cover personal vehicles that are used for commercial purposes such as peer-to-peer rentals.

Currently in Canada, only one company, Intact Financial Corporation, allows its policy holders to operate this way. So in this country, only owners with insurance through Intact Insurance and its subsidiary, Belair Direct, are eligible to list their vehicles on Turo.

That's one reason why, at launch, the company is operating only in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec.

Safety a key

Turo says it has safeguards in place to ensure that people you rent your car to are, in fact, who they say they are.

"We are vetting every member on the Turo marketplace by verifying their identity, by evaluating their risk, and by actually making them eligible to become a member on Turo," Mathieu said.

"Our promise to you is that as soon as you join the Turo community, you're in a safe environment."

But last year, a Turo member blogged that his vehicle was stolen by a renter using fake credit cards and a fake driver's licence. He wrote that the car was eventually recovered and Turo covered all the damages.

Turo won't reveal exactly what's involved in the vetting process or what sort of security measures it takes, for proprietary reasons.

Just the beginning

Turo is one of several similar services operating in the U.S. At least one  Getaround  says on its website that it will also be coming to Canada soon.

Those who track the sharing economy say more will follow.

"We expect that there will be different ways of car sharing, ride sharing, car pooling, where more and more people will not just drive their own car but will share cars. And there's definitely a lot of benefit in that in terms of lower congestion, lower carbon emissions, and people having lower costs of maintenance," says Joeri van den Steenhoven, director of Mars Solutions lab, which recently released a report on the sharing economy.

"But, of course, we need to ensure that it's done in a way that is legal and that, for instance, liability and insurance are being properly implemented."
Timelapse images captured of Mexicos Popocatepetl volcano erupting are as facinating as they are horrifying.



Residents of Puebla have been told to limit outdoor activities due to smoke and ash drifting over their city from the nearby volcano which erupted around 2:30 a.m. Monday morning.

The volcano, nicknamed El Popo, began emitting gas and ash in late March. Its intensity increased with a fiery blast that sent rocks flying more than a kilometer away from the mountaintop and created an ash cloud that rose more than three kilometers into the sky, leaving surrounding cities covered in the volcanic dust, resembling a snowfall.

Masks were distributed by local authorities to keep resident protected from inhaling the ash, which coated everything in its path. They were also advised to sweep up the fine dust rather than wash it away with water.

Volcanic eruptions are not rare in this part of Mexico and Popocatepetl has been active since 1994, with

its last major eruption taking place in 2000 when more than 40,000 people were evacuated from the area.
(Reuters) - British police arrested an 18-year-old man at Manchester airport on Saturday on suspicion of terrorism offences related to Syria's civil war. The teenager from the central English city of Birmingham had posed no risk to the public, West Midlands Police said in a statement, without giving further details about why he was held. The detention was not connected to Friday's arrests of five other people from Birmingham, police said. Those were linked to last month's suicide bombings in Brussels, which killed 32 people, and November's attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead, a security source said. Earlier, police in Spain arrested a couple believed to be part of a group that supported and recruited Islamic State fighters, including individuals that had carried out suicide bomb attacks in Syria. Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel warned earlier this week that further threats to Europe were still a possibility, and that security forces had to stay alert. (Reporting by Elisabeth O'Leary; Editing by Helen Popper)
The French president and the German vice-chancellor toured several archaeological sites in Egypt during their diplomatic visit to the country

On the final day of his visit to Egypt, French President Francois Hollande was guided by Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Khaled El-Enany on a tour around the Salaheddin Citadel and the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo.

President Hollande insisted on visiting these two sites because they highlight Egypt's long history of religious tolerance.

From the Coptic Museum, Hollande called on the entire world to visit Egypt, and pointed to several cooperation deals signed between both countries in a number of domains, including the archaeological field.

The director-general of the Grand Egyptian Museum Tarek Tawfik also escorted German vice-chancellor and economy minister Sigmar Gabriel on his tour at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir and the Giza Plateau.

Gabriel was reportedly impressed with the distinguished ancient Egyptian artefacts on display at the museum.

He also met with German restorer Christian Eckman and heard about his work in restoring the iconic mask of Tutankhamun and the restoration works being carried out on Tutankhamun's golden sheets.

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A court in South Africa has finalised the dates for the sentencing of former Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius for murder.

The sentencing will begin on 13 June and will be heard until 17 June, High Court Judge Aubrey Ledwaba said.

The disgraced Olympic and Paralympic gold medallist made a brief appearance in court to hear the judge's decision.

He faces a minimum of 15 years behind bars for the killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in 2013.

The 29-year-old was originally sentenced to five years in prison for the lesser charge of "culpable homicide" - South Africa's equivalent of manslaughter.

In December, however, the Supreme Court upgraded the "culpable homicide" conviction to murder after ruling the original trial judge had made a "fundamentally flawed" judgement.

Three months later, the country's top court rejected his right to appeal against his murder conviction.

Pistorius shot Ms Steenkamp at his home in Pretoria on Valentine's Day 2013.

During his trial he maintained he fired out of fear for his life after believing an intruder was in his property, however the prosecution said he shot Ms Steenkamp after an argument.

The judges who upgraded his conviction argued that he should have known death was inevitable after he fired through the toilet door four times, leaving Ms Steenkamp with "nowhere to hide".

Pistorius served less than a year of his original five-year jail term after he was freed to live under house arrest at his uncle's property in October.
VALLETTA (Reuters) - The Maltese government comfortably won a confidence vote in the House of Representatives on Monday after 13 hours of non-stop debate over revelations in the Panama Papers. The opposition had presented a motion of no confidence in the government after Prime Minister Joseph Muscat failed to remove Energy and Health Minister Konrad Mizzi and his own chief of staff, Keith Schembri, who were found to each have a secret company in Panama and a trust in New Zealand. They were formed after the government took office in 2013. The Panama Papers, published on April 3, are a set of 11.5 million confidential documents with information on about 214,000 offshore companies compiled by Panamanian lawyers Mossack Fonseca that illustrate how individuals and corporations hide assets from public scrutiny and avoid taxes. Mizzi insisted in Parliament that he had done nothing wrong and his arrangements were for the management of family assets, although he admitted that choosing Panama "wasn't the best choice." "I regret that the Panama Papers distracted from the government's successes," Mizzi said. "Investigations will show I did nothing wrong." Muscat said he would base his decisions on facts, but he agreed that there was an issue of political correctness, saying that "doing nothing is not an option". He did not say what actions he might take, however. Opposition leader Simon Busuttil said there was no logical reason why a minister and a chief of staff would set up a Panama company and a trust in New Zealand and also attempt to set up bank accounts in eight countries. This case, he said, harmed Malta's reputation and the government's inaction made a bad situation worse. Schembri has also denied wrongdoing, saying the arrangements were for the management of assets related to businesses he was involved in before taking up the government post. (Reporting by Chris Scicluna)
A California university student has claimed he was removed from a flight at Los Angeles International Airport because a fellow passenger overheard him talking on the phone in Arabic.

Southwest Airlines said in a statement that the passenger, Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, was removed from a flight from Los Angeles to Oakland on 9 April for questioning and the aircraft took off while that was happening.

Mr Makhzoomi, a 26-year-old senior at University of California, Berkeley, said he had been calling his uncle before the flight to tell him about a speech he had attended by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

He told the New York Times: "I was very excited about the event, so I called my uncle to tell him about it."

The student said he was talking to his uncle about asking a question on the Islamic State group at the event, and used the phrase "inshallah" - which means god willing - at the end of the conversation.

A woman on the aircraft sitting in front of him then turned around and began staring at him, he said.

"That is when I thought, 'oh, I hope she is not reporting me'," he said.

Mr Makhzoomi said an Arabic-speaking Southwest employee escorted him off the plane and asked him why he had been speaking in the language.

He said he told the employee "this is what Islamophobia got this country into", and he was then told he could not get back on the plane.

The FBI in Los Angeles said in a statement it had investigated the situation and found no further action was necessary.

Southwest Airlines said it could not comment until he has spoken to Mr Makhzoomi. It added that it regrets any less-than-positive experience by a customer, but said its primary focus is on safety and its crew members followed protocol.

It added the company "neither condones nor tolerates discrimination of any kind".

Mr Makhzoomi was able to book a flight on another airline and arrived home eight hours later than planned.

He told the New York Times: "Human dignity is the most valuable thing in the world, not money.

"If they apologised, maybe it would teach them to treat people equally."
By James Oliphant WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hes a successful businessman making his first foray into politics. He wants to secure the southern border with Mexico and dump global trade deals. And like Donald Trump, he wants to be the Republican establishment's worst nightmare. Hes Paul Nehlen, who has emerged as a Republican rival to Paul Ryan, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in his home district in Wisconsin. Ryan, the most powerful elected Republican in the country, is the epitome of that establishment. While many Republican operatives fear Trumps tumultuous presidential bid will hurt House and Senate races this year, a handful of candidates like Nehlen are embracing Trumps message, although not always the man himself. A loss by Ryan or another high-profile incumbent would send shockwaves through the party and could prompt fellow establishment Republicans to rethink positions on advocacy of free trade and support for immigration reform. In New Hampshire, where Trump won the nominating contest, or primary, by 20 points, Jim Rubens, a former Republican state senator who has endorsed the billionaire businessman, is attempting to unseat incumbent Senator Kelly Ayotte. In Arizona, another state Trump won, state senator Kelli Ward is challenging veteran Senator John McCain by talking up securing the border and courting voters at Trump rallies, although she has not endorsed the presidential candidate. The dynamic of outsiders challenging establishment candidates is one that has been taking place within the Republican Party for several election cycles, but in Trump, the insurgency has a new, more popular face. Beyond the races in Wisconsin, Arizona and New Hampshire, it has played out in states like Alabama, where Jonathan McConnell greeted voters outside a Trump rally in Huntsville in a bid to unseat veteran Senator Richard Shelby, and North Carolina, where Rep. Renee Elmers, facing a challenge to her seat, said she had voted for Trump in that states presidential primary. But, unlike the anti-establishment wave that swept Tea Party-aligned lawmakers into Congress in 2010, these candidates do not appear to represent a new anti-Washington groundswell, suggesting there are limits to Trumps brand of politics, which at times runs deep against Republican orthodoxy on issues such as trade and taxes. I been surprised that there havent been any Senate or House incumbents that have lost primaries as a result of a groundswell of support for Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, said Nathan Gonzales, an independent analyst on congressional races in Washington. Shelby, for example, soundly defeated challenger McConnell in Alabama's Republican primary race in March. Other candidates could try to replicate his message, but no one can replicate Donald Trump, Gonzales said. Still, many analysts and political operatives believe Republicans unhappy with Trump as the nominee won't vote in the general election, potentially causing Republicans to lose their congressional seats to Democratic contenders. TOP TARGET It would be easy, to dismiss Nehlens challenge to Ryan, who is popular among Republicans inside and outside of Wisconsin and has a large campaign warchest. A poll last month by Marquette University Law School showed him with more than an 80 percent approval rating among Wisconsin Republicans. But less than two years ago, Eric Cantor, then the No. 2 Republican in the House of Representatives, was also considered a rising Republican star. He suffered a shock defeat in the 2014 congressional elections in Virginia to an obscure conservative college professor, David Brat. Cantor, too, had looked unbeatable. That race is what reinforced in my mind this is possible, Nehlen said in an interview. Trump has frequently criticized Ryan for the $1.1 billion budget deal struck with Democratic President Barack Obama last December. And Ryans support of trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and comprehensive immigration reform is squarely at odds with Trumps positions. Nehlen said those two issues motivated him to mount his challenge to Ryan, although he stopped short of saying he embraced Trump's candidacy. Rubens, who is challenging Ayotte in New Hampshire, isnt as restrained. I admire his independence, Rubens told Reuters. Rubens, like Trump, calls for a fence along the southern border and for doing away with so-called birthright citizenship, a policy that grants anyone born on U.S. soil a citizen. Ayotte, a first-term senator, was praised by conservatives when she ran in 2010 and was endorsed by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin at the height of Palins popularity. But she earned their wrath when she backed immigration reform. She also frustrated moderates by voting against a bill that would block suspected terrorists from buying guns. Ayotte, Gonzales said, "is an example of someone who cant come out guns blazing against Donald Trump. She needs every Republican possible in the state. In Arizona, Ward is challenging McCain, the moderate who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, in a state where rancor over immigration issues runs high. Ward has said she supports Trump's claim that Mexico was sending criminals to the United States. Mexico has ridiculed the allegation. Ward has an opportunity. A poll released last month by the firm Public Policy Polling showed McCain with a 33 percent approval rating among Republicans in Arizona. (Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell and David Morgan, editing by Caren Bohan and Ross Colvin)
The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) is joining the mission to scan several of Egypt's pyramids

After having submitted a request to the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, the #ScanPyramids project is welcoming a new team of researchers from the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the Institute of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe (Irfu).

Communication Officer, Malak Elkhadem, announced that since the launching of the project, the CEA team has shown interest due to its know-how in muon tomography. The team has been developing over many years micro-pattern gas detectors called Micromegas.

The #ScanPyramids project aims at scanning over the course of one year a number of Egyptian pyramids, including the Khufu and Khafre pyramids in Giza as well as the Bent Pyramid and Red Pyramids.

The project combines several non-invasive and non-damaging scanning techniques to search for the presence of any hidden internal structures and cavities in ancient monuments, which may lead to a better understanding of their structure and their construction processes / techniques.

The Micromegas detectors are used to reconstruct particle tracks for many scientific endeavours in high energy physics. According to Elkhadem, the detectors have been installed in the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in the US.

Using these unique detectors, the CEA team is building specialised muon telescopes for the #ScanPyramids mission, currently under construction and testing in the CEA laboratories at Saclay in France.

This new generation of muon telescopes, Elkhadem explains, will supplement the other muon techniques conceived in Japan. The Japanese devices are used to scan inside the pyramids while the CEA telescopes will scan from the outside.

Elkhadem continues that the CEA is a public research organisation working in four main areas; defense and security, nuclear and renewable energies, technological research for industry and fundamental research.

The CEA takes part in implementing cooperation projects with a wide range of academic and industrial partners.

With its 16,000 researchers and employees, it is a major player in European research and is currently expanding its international presence.

The #ScanPyramids project was launched in October 2015 under the authority of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and is led by the Faculty of Engineering at Cairo University along with the Heritage, Innovation and Preservation Institute in Paris (HIP).

The mission involves the use of infrared thermography, muon tomography and 3D reconstruction techniques.

Several international scientific institutions are taking part in the project: Nagoya University in Japan; the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation in Tsukuba, Japan for muon tomography; and Laval University in Quebec, Canada for infrared thermography.

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By David Lawder WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury Department is finalizing new tax rules aimed at combating the use of shell companies to evade taxes, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said on Saturday amid increased pledges by global finance leaders to cooperate on tax issues. In a statement to the International Monetary Fund's steering committee, Lew said the Treasury was finalizing a rule that would require banks to identify the beneficial owners of new customers that are companies. "In addition, we are about to propose a regulation that would require the beneficial owners of single-member limited liability companies to identify themselves to the Internal Revenue Service, thus closing a loophole that some have been able to exploit," Lew said. In the wake of controversy stirred by the so-called Panama Papers, which revealed widespread use of tax havens and shell companies by wealthy global elites, officials from the Group of 20 major economies on Friday threatened to penalize tax haven countries that do not comply with new information-sharing efforts and moves to reduce tax mismatches between countries. They called for criteria by July to identify non-cooperative jurisdictions. "Defensive measures will be considered by G20 members against non-cooperative jurisdictions" if progress toward tax goals is not made, the group said in its statement. Lew said the United States fully supports calls for all countries to automatically exchange financial account information. The new U.S. shell company rules will follow steps taken by the Treasury earlier this month to curb corporate "inversion" deals in which U.S. firms buy foreign rivals to move their tax jurisdictions offshore. Those changes were cited as scuttling a $160 billion merger between U.S. drug maker Pfizer Inc and Dublin-based Allergan Plc that would have shifted the combined company headquarters to Ireland, where corporate tax rates are 12.5 percent, compared to the top U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent before deductions and credits. "Tax evasion and tax avoidance hurt government budgets, reduce the equity of our tax systems and hinder global growth," Lew said. In his statement, Lew also repeated calls for euro-area countries and Japan to use available fiscal policy space to stimulate domestic demand while enacting structural reforms to their economies. "Japan should deploy a flexible fiscal policy in the near term that provides a supportive fiscal impulse, while accelerating the implementation of structural reforms, including labor market reforms and opening the service sector to increased competition." He offered up a long to-do list for China, saying the worlds second-largest economy should prioritize reforms that strengthen its social safety net, reduce industrial over-capacity, open up the services sector to competition, tackle rising corporate leverage, confront the associated challenges to the banking system, and allow for a market-determined allocation of credit. (Reporting by David Lawder, Editing by Andrea Ricci)
The US has agreed to send more than 200 additional troops to Iraq along with Apache helicopters to aid in the fight against Islamic State.

The new force will consist mostly of Army special operators, US defence officials said.

The remaining troops will be made up of trainers, security forces and maintenance teams for the Apaches, the officials told the AP news agency.

The new Army special operators will serve primarily in advise and assist teams embedded with Iraqi forces.

Previously, US advisers typically worked with Iraqi troops at the headquarters level - away from the front lines.

US forces will now likely be closer to the fight, allowing them to provide more tactical combat advice as the Iraqi units move toward the IS stronghold of Mosul.

The move follows discussions between President Barack Obama, Iraqi leaders and US commanders on the ground in Iraq.

The President's decision authorises the increase of US forces in Iraq from 3,870 to 4,087.

In March, the US deployed a detachment of Marines to Iraq to support operations against Islamic State.

The Iraqi government has been deploying federal forces to northern Iraq to prepare for an offensive against Mosul.

The addition of Apache attack helicopters for the first time will provide forces on the ground with precision fire during the fight.

US officials have been working with Iraqi leaders to negotiate American assistance for the fight against IS.

Iraqi officials have been reluctant to have a large number of US troops in Iraq, but they also need certain capabilities that only American or coalition forces can provide, a US defence official told AP.

Mr Obama is travelling to Saudi Arabia later this week to talk with Gulf leaders about the fight against the extremist group in Iraq, Syria and other parts of the Middle East.
Learning Management Systems

Wheaton College Deploys New LMS

Wheaton College in Illinois has implemented a new learning management system (LMS) with the goal of improving the teaching and learning experience for faculty and students.

Wheaton's 2,500 students and 300 faculty members had indicated that the college's previous LMS did not meet their expectations or needs, according to information on the college's site. IT staff also reported technical difficulties with the LMS, which prevented them from providing stable services. The college decided that it was time to re-evaluate its LMS and consider replacing it with a more modern system with tools and functionality that could support the college's new teaching and assessment methods and graduate and global education initiatives.

When the college began its search for a replacement LMS, the administration invited students and faculty to participate in the selection process. "The students were clear that they wanted a platform that was simple to use on any device and powerful enough to be fully adopted by all faculty so that there would be just one LMS for all of their courses and activities," said Wendy Woodward, chief information officer at Wheaton College, in a prepared statement.

Their search led them to Schoology, which features course management, assessment management, in-depth analytics and flexible standards-based integrations with other systems. Faculty and students can also access their courses and campus activities from anywhere using Schoology's native mobile apps. According to information from the company, Schoology uses a learner-centric rather than course-centric design, and it can support any type of campus activity, in addition to courses. "We selected Schoology because of its intuitive learner-centric design, its ability to support our traditional and new teaching methods, and its strong integration capabilities," said Woodward.
By Philip Blenkinsop and Sue-Lin Wong BRUSSELS/BEIJING (Reuters) - Under pressure to curb steel output and relieve a global glut, China said on Tuesday its production actually hit a record high last month as rising prices, and profits, encouraged mills that had been shut or suspended to resume production. The China Iron & Steel Association (CISA) said March steel production hit 70.65 million tonnes, amounting to 834 million tonnes on an annualised basis. Traders and analysts predicted more increases in April and May. The data comes as major steel producing countries failed to agree measures to tackle an industry crisis, with differing views over the causes of overcapacity. A meeting of ministers and trade officials from over 30 countries, hosted by Belgium and the OECD on Monday, concluded only that overcapacity had to be dealt with in a swift and structural way. Washington pointed the finger at China, saying Beijing needed to cut overcapacity or face possible trade action from other countries. "Unless China starts to take timely and concrete actions to reduce its excess production and capacity ... the fundamental structural problems in the industry will remain and affected governments - including the United States - will have no alternatives other than trade action to avoid harm to their domestic industries and workers," U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a statement. Asked what steps the Chinese government would take following the unsuccessful talks, Commerce Ministry spokesman Shen Danyang told reporters on Tuesday: "China has already done more than enough. What more do you want us to do?" "Steel is the food of industry, the food of economic development. At present, the major problem is that countries that need food have a poor appetite so it looks like there's too much food." In a monthly report, the CISA said a recent rally in steel prices in China - up 42 percent so far this year - was unsustainable given the rising production, and it warned that increased protectionism in Southeast Asia and Europe would make steel exports more difficult. "The big rise in steel prices has led to a rapid reopening of capacity that had been shut or suspended ... a large rise in output will not be good for the gap between market demand and supply," the CISA said. The OECD says global steelmaking capacity was 2.37 billion tonnes in 2015, but declining production meant only 67.5 percent of that was being used, down from 70.9 percent in 2014. Britain in particular has felt the squeeze as its largest producer Tata Steel has announced plans to pull out of the country, threatening 15,000 jobs. Last week, more than 40,000 German steel workers took to the streets to protest against dumping from China. China, the world's top steel producer, has ramped up exports of steel in recent years, as it steers its economy into services-led growth and away from traditional manufacturing, while avoiding mass job losses. China's steel exports jumped 30 percent to 9.98 million tonnes in March from a year ago despite a slew of anti-dumping measures globally. Blaming China for the global steel industry crisis is simply a lazy excuse for protectionism and will be counter-productive, China's official Xinhua news agency said. "It's more been their competitive advantage into Asian countries which has really driven that rise in exports," said Daniel Hynes, commodity strategist at ANZ Bank. "I think that will continue and will keep those export levels relatively high despite the pressures we're seeing now." DEEP DIVISIONS The deep divisions between China and rival producers were clear at a news conference following Monday's meeting. Cecelia Malmstrom, the EU's trade commissioner, insisted governments should not grant subsidies that keep unviable plants running and should subject state-controlled firms to the same rules as the private sector. China's assistant commerce minister, Zhang Ji, said China had cut 90 million tonnes of capacity, with plans to reduce it by a further 100-150 million tonnes. "That is only 10 million tonnes less than the capacity in Europe," he said, although critics say China would still have a capacity of around 1 billion tonnes, far in excess of its needs. The CISA has previously acknowledged that the flood of Chinese steel product exports is damaging to Beijing's to gain market economy status from the European Union - an important goal as its domestic economy slows. Tensions have erupted between other producers, too, with Japan leading criticism of Indian minimum prices for imported steel at a recent World Trade Organisation meeting. Japan and South Korea have also come under fire for exporting steel products cheaper than they sell them at home. In a step to reduce trade frictions with Washington, Beijing agreed to scrap some export subsidies on products including steel, the United States said last week. On Monday, the United Steelworkers union (USW) said it filed a case with U.S. regulators seeking to stem a "flood" of aluminum imports which it says damage U.S. producers and threatens jobs. The case is the latest move by the U.S. aluminum industry to prod the authorities to investigate the impact of rising imports, particularly from China. (Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop and Sue-Lin Wong, with additional reporting by Eric Beech in WASHINGTON, Melanie Burton in MELBOURNE, Ruby Lian and David Stanway in SHANGHAI, Manolo Serapio Jr in MANILA and Meng Meng in BEIJING; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Ian Geoghegan)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House expressed confidence on Monday that Saudi Arabia would not follow through on a reported threat to sell U.S. assets if Congress passed a bill that could hold the kingdom responsible for any role in al Qaeda's Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The New York Times reported on Friday that Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told U.S. lawmakers that the country would be forced to sell up to $750 billion (524 billion pounds) in Treasury securities and other U.S. assets in response to the bill if it passed. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama did not support the legislation and would not sign it. The bill would allow the Saudi government to be sued in a U.S. court for any role in the Sept. 11 attacks. "I'm confident that the Saudis recognise, just as much as we do, our shared interest in preserving the stability of the global financial system," Earnest told reporters. Obama, who is travelling to Saudi Arabia later this week, said he opposes the bill because it could expose the United States to lawsuits from citizens of other countries. "If we open up the possibility that individuals in the United States can routinely start suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States to being continually sued by individuals in other countries," Obama said in an interview broadcast on CBS News on Monday. Most of the 19 attackers on Sept. 11, 2001 were Saudi nationals who hijacked four planes and flew them into New York City's World Trade Center, the Pentagon near Washington and into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers revolted. The attack was mounted by the al Qaeda militant group, then based in Afghanistan. No U.S. investigation to date has reported finding evidence of Saudi government support for the attacks. The debate over the congressional legislation has gained traction on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, has broken with the Democratic administration and said she supported the bill. Her rival, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said he shared the Obama administration's concern that the legislation could open up the United States to liability from other countries but said it was important to look into any potential Saudi role in the attacks. "I think its important to have a full investigation and an understanding of the role, the possible role, of the Saudi government in 9/11," he said on NBC's "Today" programme. Clinton and Sanders' remarks on the issue on Monday came on the day before New York state's Democratic primary, a crucial race for both candidates. Businessman Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner in the race for the White House, dismissed concerns about a Saudi sell-off of U.S. assets. "Thats OK, Trump told New York radio show host Joe Piscopo in a phone interview on Monday morning. Let'em sell 'em. And well all buy them, Joe, thats OK. ... It's called a fire sale, nothing better than a fire sale. The bill, which has 22 co-sponsors, passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, but it has not come up for a vote in the Republican-dominated Senate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells office said on Monday that no vote has been scheduled. Family members of victims who were killed in the September 2001 attacks urged Obama to support the legislation and to bring up the issue on his trip. "It is not acceptable ... to succumb to the demands of a foreign government that we abandon principles of American justice while we pursue our diplomatic goals," they wrote in a letter to Obama that was released to the media. In September, a U.S. judge dismissed claims against Saudi Arabia by families of victims of the attacks, saying the kingdom had sovereign immunity from damage claims. (Reporting by Jeff Mason, Timothy Gardner, Patricia Zengerle, Susan Heavey, Steve Holland, Eric Beech, Eric Walsh and Idrees Ali; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Cynthia Osterman)
Today the permanent premises of the International Criminal Court, the ICC, officially open in The Hague, Netherlands, beside the dunes on the shores of the North Sea. The new building combines innovative solutions purpose-made for a judicial institution with modern design reflecting both the transparency and independence of the Court.

Representatives of states from all over the world are gathering to celebrate the occasion. A groundbreaking institution in which they have invested enormous efforts has finally settled in its permanent home.

The message of todays ceremony is clear: the International Criminal Court is here to stay.

The opening of the Courts permanent premises testifies to an incredible journey that has taken place over more than two decades since the negotiations on the creation of the ICC started in the mid-1990s.

Today the Court is fully operational, with more proceedings in its courtrooms than every before. 124 States have ratified the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the Court, El Salvador being the latest to join last month.

We have reached this point against all odds.

A permanent international court that could prosecute individuals irrespective of their official position was a revolutionary idea. During the negotiations, many asked: would states ever agree to establish an international body with such power?

Many did, because they recognized that genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes present such a serious threat to humankind that the international community has to come together to stop them. States saw the need for a collective structure, a court of last resort that could step in when national courts fail to address the matter themselves.

The ICCs mandate is relevant everywhere. Where massive atrocities have occurred, international justice helps ensure that such crimes are addressed, that the perpetrators are held responsible and that victims receive justice.

In areas under the threat of conflict, the ICC is an invaluable tool in the prevention of large-scale violations of human rights. The credible likelihood of a legal process and accountability is key to effective deterrence of future crimes.

The Court is equally important in places where international crimes may be unimaginable today. History teaches us that no country, no region is immune to war, conflicts or atrocities.

The ICCs mandate is clear, but it cannot meet its goals without global cooperation and support.

As a judicial institution, the ICC is a distinct kind of international organization. States established the it, but they must respect its judicial independence. Interference with the Courts work would undermine the credibility of the very institution they created.

At the same time, the cooperation of states and organizations is necessary for the ICCs ability to collect evidence, protect witnesses, or arrest suspects. Likewise, without cooperation, the Court cannot provide adequate reparations to the victims of crimes addressed by the Court.

The ICC is today playing an important role in the efforts of the international community to ensure accountability for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, whether they take the form of mass killings, persecution on ethnic grounds, rape as a weapon of war, use of child soldiers, large-scale torture, deportations, or attacks on civilians.

But the ICC cannot do this everywhere. Misunderstandings about the ICCs possibilities under its founding treaty have led to perceptions of selective justice. However, unless the Security Council of the United Nations decides to submit a situation to it, the Court can only investigate when the countries concerned have voluntarily accepted its powers  and many of the worlds worst conflict zones are currently outside its reach. Our states parties must continue efforts to encourage more countries to join the Rome Statute system of international criminal justice if they want to see an ICC that is able to address all crimes in an equal manner.

The International Criminal Court is here to stay. Its commitment to justice is stronger than ever, and the Court is actively taking new initiatives to improve its efficiency and effectiveness in order to meet the challenges before it.

But the ICC cannot fight impunity alone. How effective it will be depends on the cooperation of states and the determination of the global community to make accountability for the most serious international crimes a non-negotiable objective.

As the ICC becomes more active and more effective, it faces increasing attacks from those that are opposed to its mandate. This is when the commitment of governments to international justice is put to a real test.

The inauguration of the ICCs Permanent Premises gives us all, court officials, states and the international community as a whole, the opportunity to make a pause in our journey to celebrate what has been already achieved through our collective efforts to enhance accountability. It also gives the opportunity to reflect anew how we can best ensure together that the new building of the Court becomes a true icon of justice for future generations. There has been incredible progress but also setbacks. The journey must continue.

ICC President Judge Silvia Fernandez

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 18, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Panoro Minerals Ltd. (TSXV:PML) (Lima:PML) (Frankfurt:PZM) and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Panoro Trading (Cayman) Ltd. (Panoro or the Company) are pleased to announce that they have received the first US$1 million payment for Early Deposit as part of the Precious Metals Purchase Agreement (the Cotabambas Early Deposit Agreement) with Silver Wheaton (Caymans) Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Silver Wheaton Corp. ("Silver Wheaton") (TSX:SLW) (NYSE:SLW) in respect of the Cotabambas project located in Peru as announced on March 21, 2016.



The principal terms of the Cotabambas Early Deposit Agreement are as described in the Companys press release on March 21, 2016, whereby Silver Wheaton will pay Panoro upfront cash payments totalling US$140 million for 25% of the payable gold production and 100% of the payable silver production from the Companys Cotabambas Project in Peru. In addition, Silver Wheaton will make production payments to Panoro of the lesser of the market price and US$450 per payable ounce of gold and US$5.90 per payable ounce of silver delivered to Silver Wheaton over the life of the Cotabambas Project.

Panoro is entitled to receive US$14 million spread over a period of up to 9 years as an early deposit with payments to be used to fund corporate expenses related to the Cotabambas Project. The financing includes provisions to accelerate these payments through Silver Wheatons matching, up to certain limits, any third party financing by Panoro targeted for exploration at the Cotabambas Project. The acceleration could result in total early deposit payments of up to US$7 million being made to Panoro in the first two years of the agreement. The balance of the US$140 million is payable in instalments during construction of the Cotabambas Project.

About Panoro

Panoro Minerals is a uniquely positioned copper exploration company focused on Peru. Panoro is advancing its significant portfolio of copper and gold projects in the key Andahuaylas-Yauri belt in south central Peru, including its advanced stage Cotabambas Copper-Gold-Silver-Molybdenum and Antilla Copper-Molybdenum Projects.

Since 2007, the company has completed over 70,000 m of exploration drilling at these two key projects leading to the delineation of mineral resources in late 2013 of:

Cotabambas: Indicated Resource 117.1 Mt @ 0.42% Cu, 0.23g/t Au, 2.74 g/t Ag & 0.001%Mo (@0.2% CuEq cutoff)

Inferred Resource 603.5 Mt @ 0.31% Cu, 0.17g/t Au, 2.33 g/t Ag and 0.002 %Mo (@0.2% CuEq cutoff)

(Tetra Tech, with an effective date of October 2013) Antilla: Indicated Resource 188.5 Mt @ 0.40% Cu and 0.009% Mo (@0.2% CuEq cutoff)

Inferred Resource 145.9 Mt @ 0.28% Cu and 0.009%Mo (@0.2% CuEq cutoff)

(Tetra Tech, with an effective date of December 2013)





The results from the updated PEA of the Cotabambas Project were announced on September 22, 2015 demonstrating a base case, after tax NPV of $US 683.9M, an IRR of 16.7% and a payback of 3.6 years. The updated PEA included mining of 483M tonnes of mill feed from two open pits, feeding an 80,000 tonne per day mill and concentrating plant producing a single copper concentrate grading 27% Cu, 11 g/t Au and 134 g/t Ag with no penalty attracting deleterious elements.

The updated PEA was prepared by Amec Foster Wheeler Americas Ltd. and Moose Mountain Technical Services Ltd. in accordance with the definitions in Canadian National Instrument 43-101. The PEA is considered preliminary in nature. It includes Inferred Mineral Resources that are considered too speculative to have the economic considerations applied that would enable classification as Mineral Reserves. There is no certainty that the conclusions within the updated PEA will be realized. Mineral Resources are not Mineral Reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability.

Luis Vela, a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information in this press release.

On behalf of the Board of Panoro Minerals Ltd.

Luquman A. Shaheen, M.B.A., P.Eng., P.E.

President & CEO

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, CONTACT:

Panoro Minerals Ltd.

Luquman A. Shaheen, President & CEO

Phone: 604.684.4246 Fax: 604.684.4200

Email: info@panoro.com

Web: www.panoro.com

CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS: Information and statements contained in this news release that are not historical facts are forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation and involve risks and uncertainties. Examples of forward-looking information and statements contained in this news release include information and statements with respect to:

acceleration of payments by Silver Wheaton to match third party financing by Panoro targeted for exploration at the Cotabambas Project

payment by Silver Wheaton of US$140 million in installments

Panoro weathering the current depressed equity and commodity markets, minimizing dilution to existing shareholders and making targeted investments into exploration at the Cotabambas Project

mineral resource estimates and assumptions

the PEA, including, but not limited to, base case parameters and assumptions, forecasts of net present value, internal rate of return and payback;

copper concentrate grade from the Cotabambas Project;



Various assumptions or factors are typically applied in drawing conclusions or making the forecasts or projections set out in forward-looking information. In some instances, material assumptions and factors are presented or discussed in this news release in connection with the statements or disclosure containing the forward-looking information and statements. You are cautioned that the following list of material factors and assumptions is not exhaustive. The factors and assumptions include, but are not limited to, assumptions concerning: metal prices and by-product credits; cut-off grades; short and long term power prices; processing recovery rates; mine plans and production scheduling; process and infrastructure design and implementation; accuracy of the estimation of operating and capital costs; applicable tax and royalty rates; open-pit design; accuracy of mineral reserve and resource estimates and reserve and resource modeling; reliability of sampling and assay data; representativeness of mineralization; accuracy of metallurgical test work; and amenability of upgrading and blending mineralization.

Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation:

risks relating to metal price fluctuations;



risks relating to estimates of mineral resources, production, capital and operating costs, decommissioning or reclamation expenses, proving to be inaccurate;



the inherent operational risks associated with mining and mineral exploration, development, mine construction and operating activities, many of which are beyond Panoros control;



risks relating to Panoros ability to enforce Panoros legal rights under permits or licenses or risk that Panoros will become subject to litigation or arbitration that has an adverse outcome;



risks relating to Panoros projects being in Peru, including political, economic and regulatory instability;



risks relating to the uncertainty of applications to obtain, extend or renew licenses and permits;



risks relating to potential challenges to Panoros right to explore and/or develop its projects;



risks relating to mineral resource estimates being based on interpretations and assumptions which may result in less mineral production under actual circumstances;



risks relating to Panoros operations being subject to environmental and remediation requirements, which may increase the cost of doing business and restrict Panoros operations;



risks relating to being adversely affected by environmental, safety and regulatory risks, including increased regulatory burdens or delays and changes of law;



risks relating to inadequate insurance or inability to obtain insurance;



risks relating to the fact that Panoros properties are not yet in commercial production;



risks relating to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates, interest rates and tax rates; and



risks relating to Panoros ability to raise funding to continue its exploration, development and mining activities.





This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect the forward-looking information and statements contained in this news release. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in the forwardlooking information. The forwardlooking information contained in this news release is based on beliefs, expectations and opinions as of the date of this news release. For the reasons set forth above, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Panoro does not undertake to update any forward-looking information and statements included herein, 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 release.
DGAP-News: R-Biopharm AG / Key word(s): Alliance/Miscellaneous R-Biopharm AG to collaborate with HMNC Brain Health on complementary diagnostic test for optimization of depression treatment 19.04.2016 / 09:00 The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- R-Biopharm AG to collaborate with HMNC Brain Health on complementary diagnostic test for optimization of depression treatment Darmstadt, Germany, April 19, 2016 - R-Biopharm AG announced today it has entered into a collaboration agreement with HMNC Brain Health in the field of complementary diagnostics. Under this agreement R-Biopharm AG will develop an in vitro PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) based genetic test. The goal is to identify ABCB1 gene variants in patients who are treated with antidepressants in order to optimize the efficacy of depression therapy. The collaboration includes the development, regulatory approval, manufacturing and commercialization of the ABCB1 test. "Complementary diagnostics play a central role in delivering tools that help identifying those individuals who are most likely to benefit from specific treatments" said Dr. Frank Apostel, Vice President Companion Diagnostics, R-Biopharm AG. "We are delighted about this agreement as it expands our service in the field of personalized healthcare. Our goal is to help patients and their physicians to determine the best treatment option available." "A laboratory test that supports the physician in his treatment decision to choose the best drug and the appropriate dose for the individual patient represents a major improvement in antidepressant treatment." states Professor Florian Holsboer, CEO of HMNC Brain Health. "To develop the ABCB1 test together with R-Biopharm is encouraging and an important step to achieve our ambitious goal even faster." Complementary diagnostics are increasingly in demand with the recognition that personalized medicine provides a way to improve patient care and reduce health care costs by matching specific therapies to individuals most likely to benefit from them, since all patients do not respond in the same way. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Contact: R-Biopharm AG Companion Diagnostics Dr. Frank Apostel, Vice President Business Devlopment An der neuen Bergstrae 17 64297 Darmstadt, Germany Phone: +49 (0) 61 51 - 81 02-537 E-mail: f.apostel@r-biopharm.de www.r-biopharm.com www.companion-diagnostics.com About ABCB1: The ABCB1 gene encodes the P-glycoprotein, which transports various molecules across extra- and intracellular membranes. It functions as transporter for drugs such as antidepressants in the blood-brain barrier. Variants in the ABCB1 gene influence intracerebral concentration of certain antidepressants (e.g., citalopram, paroxetine, amitriptyline, venlafaxine) and thus their efficacy. The ABCB1 test delivers a decision aid for physicians with respect to the type and dosing of antidepressant medication, leading to faster time to remission and higher overall remission rates. About HMNC Brain Health: HMNC Brain Health GmbH (Munich, Germany) is specialized in the development of innovative drug treatments for depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. The portfolio includes laboratory diagnostics that help to stratify patients according to underlying causal mechanisms and to identify the right drug for the right patient. Early stage projects cover the development of molecules that engage with unprecedented targets and work through novel modes of action. Together with partners from academia and with investors, the company utilizes prominent research results to generate innovative and marketable concepts. About R-Biopharm AG: R-Biopharm AG (Darmstadt, Germany) is a globally active life science company and a leading provider of reliable test systems for clinical diagnostics and for analyzing human food and animal feedstuffs. Since 1988, R-Biopharm has been developing innovative products characterized by top quality, reliability and efficiency. A strong sense of responsibility, long-standing experience and a network more than 20 affiliated companies and subsidiaries in Europe, the US, South America, China and Australia, as well as more than 100 distribution partners, make R-Biopharm a prime partner for clients from retail, industry and public institutions looking for answers and solutions for current analytical challenges. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 19.04.2016 Dissemination of a Corporate News, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases. Media archive at www.dgap-medientreff.de and www.dgap.de --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 455077 19.04.2016
NEW YORK and SOFIA, Bulgaria, April 19, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ontotext, the developer of GraphDB, is proud to release the new version 7 of its industry-leading semantic graph database. GraphDB 7 boasts major enhancements specifically designed to deliver even easier-to-use database management to organizations, users and developers. GraphDB's ver. 7 makes database setup and data access even easier, further improves implementation and monitoring of business critical services, and is updated to use and support the latest versions of the relevant W3C standards and third-party open source libraries integrated with GraphDB.



GraphDB is a semantic graph database that serves organizations to store, organize and manage content and data in the form of semantically enriched smart data. A non-relational (NoSQL) database, GraphDB handles massive loads, queries and inferencing in real time, allowing for seamless integration of disparate data silos and a holistic 360-degree view of information.



The new release offers new tools to access and explore data, eliminating the need to know everything about the dataset before start working with it. GraphDB 7 enables users to navigate their way through third-party and any other dataset regardless of data volumes, which makes it a powerful Big Data analytics tool. Ver.7 offers visual exploration of the loaded data schema - ontology, interactive query builder for better entity retrieval, and full support for RDF 1.1 allowing smooth import of a huge number of public Open Data as well as proprietary Linked Datasets.



GraphDB 7 allows easier installation and database setup in a one-click installation step. Setting-up the new version is as easy as the setup of any other application on a PC or server. Ver. 7 has a simplified deployment model with every feature necessary embedded. GraphDB 7 runs as a native application on Windows, MacOS and Linux-based OS.



GraphDB 7 improves efficiency in monitoring of business critical services. The new version of the semantic graph database adds automated SLA monitoring and has new intuitive Database health checks. Ver.7 features a powerful yet simpler server side database configuration over HTTP and improved database logging.



From a technical standpoint, GraphDB 7 integrates the latest versions of all third-party open source libraries integrated with GraphDB. GraphDB 7 is upgraded to Sesame 2.8 with all changes in its API. It runs with the latest versions of Lucene, Solr and Elastic and applies the latest W3C standards.



Get your GraphDB 7 Free copy.



About Ontotext

Ontotext provides a complete semantic platform transforming how organizations identify meaning across massive amounts of structured and unstructured data. Ontotext blends text mining, powerful semantic graph queries, semantic annotation and semantic search with GraphDB, an RDF graph database that infers new meaning at scale. Ontotext S4, The Self-Service Semantic Suite, allows developers to build text mining and semantic applications in the cloud.

About GraphDB

GraphDB is the only native RDF semantic graph database with the ability to perform semantic integration and inferencing at scale. Ontotext launched GraphDB as OWLIM in 2004 and the product has been successfully deployed by organizations around the world including the BBC, AstraZeneca and the Getty Trust. GraphDB is available in three versions: GraphDB Free; GraphDB Standard (also available in the cloud), and GraphDB Enterprise that adds clustering capabilities. Key capabilities include:
MELVILLE, N.Y., April 19, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canon Solutions America, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Canon U.S.A., Inc., today announced that DMM, Inc., a leading transactional print and direct mail solutions provider, has expanded its industry-leading document print production capabilities to support continued growth with the installation of two Oce VarioStream 8000 Twin continuous feed printers at its Scarborough, ME headquarters. The company's most recent investment increases DMM's data driven transactional print and direct mail production capabilities and capacity for its customers who utilize high volume, business-critical, and time-sensitive print and direct mail pieces.



DMM was founded over 30 years ago as a data solutions and direct marketing provider specializing in transactional printing, data driven digital print on demand, mission-critical document output, direct mail production, fulfillment distribution services, and much more. With a proven track record in data composition and direct mail production, DMM has received multiple industry awards and continues to bring innovative solutions and best-in-class technology to a number of Fortune 100 companies across the nation in the financial, insurance, and healthcare industries.



Over the course of the last five years, DMM experienced a notable spike in new business that compelled the direct mail leader to research newer forms of print technology. Providing extensive transactional print solutions for healthcare and financial services clients puts a significant emphasis on productivity and output management; with those factors firmly at the forefront of DMM's decisions, the company looked to Canon Solutions America to provide alternative options. After working with and reviewing the Oce VarioStream 8000, the Maine-based company recognized Canon Solutions America's dynamic portfolio of continuous feed technologies was the perfect fit to help grow and transform its business.



With the need to meet a higher volume of work, DMM turned to the VarioStream 8000 continuous feed printer for its high print quality options, wide media handling capability, and top-line configuration flexibility. Designed to provide maximum performance for every transactional application, the product seamlessly blended with DMM's existing fleet, and has since allowed the company to secure additional business with the ability to now process work at a much higher volume and at higher margins.



"Highly personalized business-critical print and mail, with confidential information delivered from our secure facility, gives our customers the confidence they need to know their communications are being delivered cost-effectively and in a timely manner," said John Cloutier, president and CEO, DMM, Inc. "This technology allows us to produce more cost-effective business-critical documents at a higher level of productivity, providing a higher degree of flexibility and faster time to market."



In addition to the increased production capacity, DMM has implemented the Oce PRISMAproduction software. "This software centralizes and accelerates print management, giving clients faster production times at lower operating costs," reported Cloutier. This innovative software manages the platform of printers in order to improve cycle time, streamline digital workflow, and provide customer personalization and flexibility in document production. Additionally, the newly acquired software allows DMM to process virtually any input standard print description language with a wide range of media, input types and protocols. The new workflow and output management system has vastly increased DMM's overall efficiency as it pertains to turnaround time and quality of work.



"Our journey with DMM has just begun," added Francis A. McMahon, senior vice president, Marketing, Production Print Solutions, Canon Solutions America. "As we grow and expand our technologies, so too will DMM and its already impressive list of customers. What we value most with our customers is helping them expand to new markets, while creating beneficial business opportunities. DMM is undoubtedly prepared for that next level of expansion."



About DMM, Inc.

DMM, Inc. is a 32-year-old transactional print and direct mail solutions provider specializing in business-critical document output production, data-driven digital print on demand, transactional printing, direct mail production, and fulfillment distribution services. DMM brings innovative cutting-edge solutions with best-in-class technology to the financial, insurance, healthcare and insurance industries. DMM has received multiple industry awards including the Print On Demand (PODi) Initiative Best Practices in Digital Printing, the New England Direct Marketing Association (NEDMA) Award of Creative Excellence and the Printing Industries of New England (PINE) Award of Excellence. DMM, Inc. is headquartered in Scarborough, ME and has a second facility in North Wales, PA. For more information visit: www.thinkdmm.com.



About Canon Solutions America, Inc.

Canon Solutions America provides industry leading enterprise, production, and large format printing solutions, supported by exceptional professional service offerings. With the technology offerings of the Canon and Oce brands, Canon Solutions America helps companies of all sizes improve sustainability, increase efficiency, and control costs through high volume, continuous feed, digital and traditional printing, and document management solutions. A wholly owned subsidiary of Canon U.S.A., Inc., Canon Solutions America is headquartered in Melville, N.Y. and has sales and service locations across the U.S. For more information on Canon Solutions America, please visit csa.canon.com.



Canon is a registered trademark of Canon Inc. in the United States and elsewhere. Oce is a registered trademark of Oce-Technologies B.V. in the United States and elsewhere. All other referenced product names and marks are trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged.



 2016 Canon Solutions America, Inc. All rights reserved.
SALT LAKE CITY, April 19, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, in an official ceremony, Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed a resolution declaring pornography a public health crisis. This resolution, which passed unanimously through the Utah State Senate and House of Representatives, was drafted by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE).



"Utah is on the cutting edge of addressing the public health crisis of pornography," said Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director of NCOSE. "The harms of pornography are becoming clear in light of overwhelming scientific and social researchresearch which demonstrates that resolutions like the one in Utah are vital for the sexual health of future generations. For instance, research shows that pornography use is linked to increased verbal and physical sexual aggression, acceptance of rape myths, decreased brain matter, reduced impulse control and decision making, risky sexual behaviors among adolescents, higher incidence of STIs, and increased sexual dysfunction. Utah's resolution not only raises awareness about these harms and the need to protect children from early exposure, but also serves as a guidepost for leaders about future policy decisions such as requiring libraries and schools to install filtering software."



"I believe pornography will follow the trend of the tobacco industry in public perception," Hawkins continued. "Pornography today is pervasive and popular, similar to smoking in the 1950s, but as the harms become apparent, both the general public and elected officials will demand that a multi-disciplinary public health approach be implemented across the country to address it."



Founded in 1962, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) is the leading national organization dedicated to opposing pornography by highlighting the links to sex trafficking, violence against women, child abuse, and addiction. NCOSE embraces a mission to defend human dignity and to advocate for the universal right of sexual justice, which is freedom from sexual exploitation, objectification, and violence.

If you would like to schedule an interview, please contact Haley Halverson at (202) 393-7245 or haley@ncose.com
As of August 26th, 2021 Yahoo India will no longer be publishing content. Your Yahoo Account Mail and Search experiences will not be affected in any way and will operate as usual. We thank you for your support and readership. For more information on Yahoo India, please visit the FAQ
The Seoul Metropolitan Government has distributed clothes donated by citizens and non-governmental organizations to 10,000 needy people. In total, 53 organizations and 368 citizens have donated 100,000 pieces of used clothing since the project was launched last February.

The city distributed donations to homeless shelters, and each person received about 10 pieces including outerwear, undergarments, socks, shoes, bags and other items.

The clothing donation drive was launched last year to raise awareness of homelessness issues.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's aunt and widow of executed eminence grise Jang Song-taek was probably not returned to North's rubber-stamp parliament, an intelligence official here said Thursday.

"It appears that Kim Kyong-hui either quarreled with Kim Jong-un or voluntarily stepped down," the official said.

The name Kim Kyong-hui was on a list of the 687 Supreme People's Assembly members who were picked at the weekend, but intelligence officials here believe that is another individual of the same name. The representative was elected in the Taepyong district of North Pyongan Province, and there is no reason why Kim's aunt would run in that remote part of the country.

During the last Supreme People's Assembly elections in 2009, there were two candidates called Kim Kyong-hui, and Kim's aunt was the one who ran in Pyongyang.

She has not been seen in public since a concert in September last year, months before her husband was executed. The government here believes she went to Russia last autumn for receive heart surgery and has been bedridden since her return.
Actor Song Joong-ki held a fan meet at Kyunghee University in Seoul on Sunday, drawing a huge number of fans from China and Japan, as well as Korea.

Song Joong-ki /Yonhap

The actor has become a hot property across Asia thanks to his role in the mega hit TV series "Descendants of the Sun," which ended its 16-episode run last week.

Fans take photos with their cellphones as a car thought to be carrying actor Song Joong-ki passes by at Kyunghee University on Sunday. /Yonhap

The event lasted as long as four hours, with 4,000 fans cheering for the star.
Brazil is in political turmoil awaiting reaction from President Dilma Rousseff on the launch of impeachment proceedings against her less than four months before the Olympic Games open in Rio de Janeiro.

The Senate could vote in early May to proceed with impeachment against the 68-year-old leftist leader, and if it does, she would be forced to step down for up to 180 days while an impeachment trial is conducted. Only a simple Senate majority is needed to proceed with a trial and Brazil media reports say 45 of the 81 senators favor a trial.

Vice President Michel Temer, once Rousseff's ally but now accused by her of being a traitor, would assume the presidency if Rousseff is suspended. But he has been implicated in Brazil's mammoth corruption scheme centered on the state-run Petrobas oil company and he also signed off on some of the government's same budgetary maneuvers at the heart of the impeachment case against Rousseff.

In six hours of raucous voting Sunday, Brazil's lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies, voted overwhelmingly, by a 367-137 margin, to start the impeachment process.

Fireworks lit up the night sky in Sao Paulo and Rio following the vote. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, many calling for Rousseff's ouster and others supporting her, took to the streets in cities and towns across the country in peaceful protests.

"Impeachment!" shouted the front page headline Monday in the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper. "Close to the end," another leading paper, O Globo, said, adding, "Dilma Rousseff yesterday started to say goodbye to the presidency of Brazil."

Rousseff did not make an immediate statement after the vote against her, but was expected to give her reaction later Monday.
Actor Johnny Depp's wife Amber Heard will not be going to jail over charges she illegally brought two dogs to Australia last year.

Instead she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of providing a false immigration document.

The so-called "war on terrier" started when the couple arrived in Australia with their Yorkshire terriers Pistol and Boo. Depp was working on the fifth installment of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies.

Heard could have faced up to 10 years in prison had she been found guilty of importing the dogs. Bringing pets into Australia requires obtaining a permit and putting the animal into quarantine for at least 10 days so officials can make sure it's not carrying an infectious disease like rabies. Instead, she will face about a $770 fine if she breaks an Australian law in the next month.
Britain's treasury chief George Osborne says leaving the European Union would be "an extraordinary self-inflicted wound" that could cost each household the equivalent of $6,100 a year by 2030.

Osborne released a 200-page document Monday about the long-term costs and benefits of EU membership.

He told the BBC Britain would be permanently poorer if it left the European Union, and he believes the country is stronger, safer and better off in the bloc.
As a candidate, both in 2008 and this year, there are things Hillary Clinton has done and not done, as in missed opportunities, that make me cringe. In a recent interview, she said she's better at doing a job than campaining for it and for me that explains everything. I truly believe she would make a great president and wish she were better at selling herself to voters. By comparion, if I were only considering the campaign, I would have gone for Bernie. That is until he was pressed on how he would accomplish his goals and not able to articulate reasonable plans and then recently turned so nasty and mean.
Payment for purchase transactions is due within three (3) business days of placing your transaction. Payment for a Kitco purchase transaction depends both on your country of residence (or the country in which your principal place of business is located) and the value of your purchase, as follows:

First-Time U.S. and Canadian customers

Payment Type Purchase Limit* Currency Holding Period Cleared Funds on a Kitco Account (FOA) Unlimited USD, CAD, EURO, GBP** None Credit Card $10,000 USD, CAD None PayPal $10,000 USD, CAD None Bank Wire Unlimited USD, CAD, EURO, GBP** None Bank Check Bank Draft Bank Money Order $10,000 USD, CAD 3 business days Personal / Company Check $10,000 USD, CAD 6 business days E-check $10,000 USD 6 business days Online Bill Pay Unlimited CAD None *The purchase limit indicated is applicable to first-time buyers. Depending on the transaction, you may contact us to increase your purchase limit. **Euros or pounds sterling may ONLY be used for purchases paid by Bank wire or Cleared funds on a Kitco account (FOA).

Kitco can accept the following methods of payment. Read further for more details on each before sending in your payment.

Bank wire

Personal/ business check

Bank check (draft, certified, cashier, money order)

Credit card

PayPal

Funds on Account (FOA)

Online Bill Payment

If paying at our Montreal Counter, other payment options, or restrictions may apply. Please call us at 1-877-7754826 to go over your payment options.

Kitco does not accept multiple bank wires, checks or money orders sent at the same time.

The name on the payment must match the name(s) on the Kitco account; Kitco does not accept third-party payments.

Note: to ensure compliance with anti-money laundering/counter-terrorist financing regulations, incoming payments are subject to review. We may request additional information or documents to clarify the source of funds.

Bank Wires

In order to pay by bank wire, please log into your Kitco account. Our banking information is located under the profile section. If you place an order and select bank wire as a form of payment, you will receive the bank wire instructions through your order confirmation email and a reminder to reference your order number in the note field of your bank wire payment. We recommend printing the instructions and taking them to a teller at your bank, along with your order total. Our office typically receives wire transfers within 1-3 business days of submission. Please note; we only accept same-day bank wire payments and no ACH transactions.

Personal / Business Checks

Personal / business checks can be accepted up to $10,000 USD/ CAD. Customers with prior payment history may have an increased limit of $50,000 USD/ CAD.

Personal and business checks are subject to a holding period of six (6) business days from the date of deposit to ensure clearance.

Kitco can only accept checks in U.S. or Canadian Dollars.

When sending us a check, please ensure that it is made out to Kitco Metals Inc. and that your name and account number are clearly referenced on the check, as illustrated here

Checks will be returned to you by Kitco if they are incorrectly written (with an incorrect or missing date, dollar amount discrepancies, incorrect spelling, missing signature, etc.). Your bank will return your check if there are insufficient funds in your bank account or if your bank account is closed or not traceable. Should this happen, you will be charged an administrative fee of $35 (USD for U.S. dollar amounts and CAD for Canadian dollar amounts). Checks returned by Kitco will be sent to you by regular mail. At your request, we can return your check by courier for a fee of $30 (USD for U.S. dollar amounts and CAD for Canadian dollar amounts).

Bank Checks

Includes certified checks, cashiers checks, bank drafts, and money orders.

Bank checks can be accepted up to $10,000 USD/ CAD. Customers with prior payment history may have an increased limit of $50,000 USD/ CAD.

Only money orders issued by banks are acceptable. Kitco does not accept postal money orders. Bank checks are subject to a holding period of three (3) business days from the date of deposit to ensure clearance. Bank drafts received in person at our Montreal Counter are subject to a five (5) business day hold.

Kitco can only accept checks in U.S or Canadian Dollars.

When sending us a check, please ensure that it is drawn in favor of Kitco Metals Inc. and that your name and account number are clearly referenced on the check, as illustrated here

Checks will be returned to you by Kitco if they are incorrectly written (with an incorrect or missing date, dollar amount discrepancies, incorrect spelling, missing signature, etc.). Checks returned by Kitco will be sent to you by regular mail. At your request, we can return your check by courier for a fee of $30 (USD for U.S. dollar amounts and CAD for Canadian dollar amounts).

Credit Card / PayPal

Depending on shipping address, purchase limits on Credit Cards and PayPal can be limited to $10,000 or up to $25,000 USD/CAD. Purchases of Kitco Pool or VaultChain cannot be paid by Credit Card or PayPal. Kitco may require additional verification for transactions paid by credit card and PayPal. Orders that go through verification are typically shipped within 48 hours.

FOA

Funds on account, or FOA are funds that you sent to Kitco that are placed in your account with us, to be used towards a purchase, or can be returned at your request. Funds on account are considered cleared when there are no holds placed on the funds. FOA must be clear for the processing of a purchase, or to be returned to you. There is no limit to how much FOA you can hold, and it is available to be held in USD, CAD, EURO, GBP.

Online Bill Payment

Available to all customers paying in Canadian currency through the following banks: BMO, CIBC, RBC, National Bank, Scotia Bank, TD, Simplii Financial, Laurentian Bank, Desjardins, Tangerine and Manulife.

Use the following steps to send your online payment to Kitco:

Go into the Payments section of your online bank account

Click "Pay a Bill" and then "Add a Payee"

Search: Kitco, then select "Kitco Metals"

Enter your Kitco account number as reference

Complete your payment following the instructions provided on your online banking account

International customers

International customers can pay for their Kitco purchases by any of the following methods:
For precious metal bullion products purchased from Kitco, the following shipping and insurance charges are applicable: Standard/ regular purchases United States & Canada Cost Timeframe Standard Shipping** $15 USD/CAD FREE with purchase of $5,000 USD or more** 2-5 business days* Insurance 0.65% of the total metal value ($6.50 per $1,000) United State Exceptions

Washington State: 0.80% of the total metal value ($8 per $1,000)

Texas State: 0.99% of the total metal value ($9.90 per $1,000) *Standard service delivery may take 10 - 15 business days in rare circumstances when shipping through USPS or Canada Post. Items being shipped to a P.O Box or to rural areas will be shipped using USPS or Canada Post. Kitco does not ship to Army Post Office (A.P.O.) **Purchases valued at $5,000 USD/CAD or more that are being shipped to the continental United States, or within Canada will be shipped using Standard service, free of charge. Large/ non-standard purchases Large/non-standard purchases include, but are not limited to: Multiple 500-coin Monster Boxes;

100 or 400 oz gold bars;

700 oz or more of product;

Purchases worth over $100,000;

Purchases requiring armored shipment;

Purchases deemed non-standard by Kitco. Large/non-standard purchases may be shipped in more than one package and are sometimes shipped by armored car. Such shipments cost more than the rates advertised in the above table. Packages shipped by armored car can be delivered only to businesses, banks or depository services and not to residential addresses or post boxes. If such a delivery can be arranged or facilitated by Kitco, a price will be quoted for it on a case-by-case basis. For shipping quotes and time frames for armored car services, call 1 877 775-4826 or 514 313-9999.

If you request delivery of precious metal bullion products to a location outside the United States and Canada, taxes and duties, including Value Added Taxes (VATs), may be applicable on the shipment, depending on the country of import. As per our Terms and Conditions, you are solely responsible for paying any fees, taxes or duties (including VATs) that may be levied by the competent authorities in your jurisdiction.

Purchases are shipped to Canadian and United States addresses by Kitcos preferred mail delivery services. All packages require a signature. Certain high-value items and large, or non-standard purchases require other methods of shipping. For details, see How are large purchases shipped? Depending on its weight and value, your purchase may be shipped in more than one package and may arrive on different days. If you are not at home when the courier attempts to deliver your package, they will leave a notice asking you to contact them to re-schedule the delivery or to arrange for you to pick up the package. When picking up your package, please carry valid photo identification. If you do not receive your package within the appropriate shipping timeframes, please call 1 877 775-4826 or 514 313-9999. International shipments (outside the United States or Canada) are shipped using Kitcos preferred courier services and are shipped from Canada. All packages require adult signature. You are responsible for any customs fees, VATs, or duties that are incurred through the shipping process. It is strongly recommended that you contact your local customs agency prior to transacting to ensure you are well informed on the potential costs, as well as any documentation that may be required to import your metals. If you do not receive your package within the appropriate shipping timeframe listed in the table above, please call 1 877 775-4826 or 514 313-9999.

In most circumstances, you can request to have your purchase shipped to an address other than the one on your account: Call 1 877 775-4826 or 514 313-9999 to place your order, or call us after your order has been placed.

Inform the customer service representative that you want your purchase shipped to an alternative address

Specify whether you want only the present purchase or all future purchases shipped to the alternative address

In certain circumstances, you may be required to fill out a Shipping Direction form to fill out and send back to us along with a clear copy of a valid, government-issued photo identity document (passport, drivers license, national identity card, citizenship card or permanent resident card). When having your purchase shipped to an alternative address, please note that: Transactions paid by PayPal or Credit Card can only be shipped to a verified ship to address or the credit card billing address.

Kitco cannot be responsible for any package delivered to a non-residential address and signed for by a third party

Only purchases shipped by U.S. Postal Service registered and insured mail or by Canada Post can be sent to a post office box

Once a package is signed for, it is no longer covered by insurance

For all other shipping methods, you must specify a street address and the package must be signed for upon delivery

Please contact Kitcos customer service team at 1 877 775-4826 or 514 313-9999 to see if we can accommodate your request. A $20 administration fee will be applicable for any changes in address once a package has already shipped.

Under normal circumstances, all packages shipped by Kitco require a signature upon delivery. If you do not have a signature waiver on file with the courier company and you believe that your package was delivered without your signature having been obtained, call 1 877 775-4826 or 514 313-9999 immediately. Due to COVID-19 restrictions put in place by certain carriers, your package may be left without signature. Until the restrictions are lifted, we cannot guaranty that a signature will be requested. For this reason, we suggest closely following the tracking number of your shipment so your package is not left unattended. Kitco cannot be held responsible for any packages delivered to you if you have a signature waiver arrangement with UPS, FedEx, or other couriers.

Kitco fully insures all shipments. Our insurer is liable if anything should happen to your package while it is in transit. However, Kitco cannot accept responsibility if: You have a signature waiver on file with the courier company

You have your purchase delivered to a non-residential (or alternative) address

Your package is signed for by a third party

Kitco recommends to refuse any package that is damaged or appears tampered with. If you think that any items are missing from your shipment, or if you believe that the items were damaged during transit, please call 1 877 775-4826 or 514 313-9999 immediately. Please do not discard the packaging in which your purchase was shipped. If an investigation into your purchase shipment is opened, we may need images of the packaging for our records. We may also require a notarized letter from you that attests to what is missing or damaged from your shipment. Our customer service representative will explain what documents and photos are required when you call in to report the missing items.

Packages shipped are considered undeliverable if there is refusal to take delivery of the package, or if the address provided is incorrect, incomplete or illegible. The courier will return the package to us as being undeliverable. Kitco will promptly notify you about it and seek further instructions Once we receive your reshipment instructions, we will reship the package to you. Normal shipping and insurance charges are applicable.

If we do not receive your reshipment instructions within 10 business days of the date on which we notify you of the non-delivery of your original shipment, we will buy the goods back from you

If Kitco is forced to buy back your precious metal bullion products for the reasons described above, you will be charged an administrative fee of $20.

The precious metal bullion products will be bought back using the last available price fixing published by the London Bullion Market Association on the date that the deadline for receiving your reshipment instructions expires (or the corresponding Kitco live spot price for rhodium) plus applicable premiums

Proceeds from this sale of your precious metal bullion products, less all applicable fees and charges, will be deposited as funds on your Kitco account

Subject to the availability of inventory, you can request to pick up your purchase at our Montreal Counter in Canada or one of our locations in the Eastern United States. This pick-up facility is available only for purchases made over the phone. A fee of $70 may be charged for each pick-up. For further information about picking up or paying for a purchase in person or to make a pick-up appointment, call 1 877 775-4826 or 514 313-9999.

Depending on the type of purchase you make, your tracking number will be posted on your account online and/or sent to you by email. Tracking number may take up to 24 hours to show any activity through the courier's websites.
This article was originally on GET.com at: 4 Things Unwed Mothers In Singapore Are Still Missing Out On

It has recently been announced that unwed mothers will soon be entitled to the same 16-week maternity leave that married mothers here in Singapore enjoy, double that of the 8-week paid maternity leave that unwed mothers currently enjoy.

Slated to kick in by September 2016, their children will also receive a Child Development Account (CDA) - a savings account that will come in handy when it comes to paying for their childcare and healthcare needs where the Singapore government matches deposits that parents make by up to $6000 for their first and second child. The CDA is currently not available for children born to unwed mothers.

Just last month, the government said it would deposit $3000 into the accounts of children born from March 24 2016, even before parents who are married or unwed make a deposit. I can only imagine how much more helpful that would be for parents, and especially for those who make less money and have less to chip into the CDA.

These measures that seek to lessen discrimination against children born to unwed mothers are of course good and meaningful in nature as they give additional support for these children and help their mothers have an easier life.

Here at GET.com, we list the 4 things unwed mothers in Singapore will still be missing out on despite the jolly news revolving around changes to maternity leave entitlement and the CDA.

4 Things Unwed Mothers In Singapore Are Still Missing Out

1. Baby Bonus Cash Gift

Unwed mothers will still not receive baby bonus cash gift of up to $8000 unlike their married counterparts for their first and second child. This money would have come in handy to alleviate unwed mothers financial burden by quite a bit.

Image source: Ministry of Social and Family Development

For more information on the Baby Bonus scheme, click here.

2. Parenthood Tax Rebate

Income earners who make enough money are supposed to file and pay income taxes whether one is married or not. One caveat of the well-meaning Parenthood Tax Rebate is the fact that unwed mothers do not qualify for it though they are technically playing the roles of parents to their little one(s).

Story continues

According to the IRAS, parents who are married, divorced or widowed can claim tax rebates of up to $20,000 per kid.

3. Eligibility To Buy An HDB Flat

But of course, housing is and always will be an issue for unwed mothers, unless something miraculous happens in lieu of their plight of not being regarded as a legitimate family nucleus as yet. Rental units can be costly and that will inevitably weigh down on their finances even more.

Unwed mothers who are below the age of 35 will have to till they turn 35 before they are eligible to buy an HDB flat under the Single Singapore Citizen Scheme.

4. Acceptance

What else can I say besides throwing out the words "prejudice" and "social stigma"? The majority of conservative Asians, Singaporeans included, discriminate against women who have children out of wedlock whether they genuinely mean to, or not.

Of course, thats not to say that Im undermining the traditional family unit that happens to be the social norm that we have come to accept for what it is. But unwed mothers who choose to keep their babies in spite of the conscious knowledge that everything is going to be an uphill battle for them are only human just like you and I. And surely they deserve more support and faith than what theyre getting now from the state, their co-workers, their friends, and even their own family.

What do you think? Share your comments with us below!

GET.com Singapore is Singapore's lifestyle and personal finance website. We help you GET more for your money - food, travel, home loans, credit cards, shopping - everything!

Like GET.com on Facebook and sign up to get the HOTTEST stories delivered to your inbox!

For serious stuff, you can compare home loans, personal loans and credit cards at GET.com.

Our free GETdeals App helps you get the best credit card discounts near you for dining, shopping, lifestyle and more. Download it today!

Other Articles You May Like From GET.com
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's aunt has reappeared in the country's state media after a long absence from the screens since her husband Jang Song-taek was executed in an internal power struggle.

On Jan. 14, [North] Korean Central TV aired a program honoring the nation founder that included footage of Kim Kyong-hui marching in a parade when she was a student at Kim Il-sung University in May 1967. A close-up shot showed her saluting.

On Jan. 17, a program marking the 70th anniversary of the Socialist Youth League made it clear that a woman named Kim Kyong-hui who currently holds a senior position in the regime is not Kim Jong-un's aunt but a different person of that name.

Instead, a documentary on April 4 showed the aunt next to former leader Kim Jong-il on a visit to a food factory, and another on April 9 sitting next to Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un while presiding over a military exercise.

In other words she only reappears in historic footage.

Pundits speculate that she is ill and has been included in the official history again in case she dies soon. An intelligence source here said, "Kim Kyong-hui is believed to be in Pyongyang, and that is the extent of our information about her at this point."


Princess Sofia of Sweden, married to fourth-in-line to the throne Carl Philip, gave birth to a baby boy on Tuesday, the palace announced. "For my wife and me, this is a great day full of emotion," Carl Philip told a news conference following the birth of the couple's first child, who will be fifth in line to the Swedish throne. The baby weighed in at 3.6 kilograms (8 pounds) and measured 49 centimetres (19.3 inches), the prince added. Both Princess Sofia, 31, and her new son were in good health, the palace said in an earlier statement. Carl Philip, 36, is the second child and only son of King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia. Elder sister Princess Victoria is heiress to the throne. Carl Philip married Sofia Hellqvist, a former contestant on TV reality show "Paradise Hotel," in June last year. She famously posed topless with a boa constrictor in a men's magazine when she was 20. She later studied accountancy in New York and became a yoga teacher, while also jobbing as a waitress before returning to Sweden. Sofia has since headed an NGO for disadvantaged children in South Africa that she founded in 2010 after earlier African charity work, but gave up the role after her marriage to focus on royal duties.
This article was originally on GET.com at: Non-Oil Domestic Exports In Singapore Plunged To Lowest Level In 3 Years

Non-oil domestic exports (NODX) numbers in Singapore have plunged to their lowest in 3 years. The 15.6% fall last month was worse than the market forecast of a 12.3% drop.

The low export numbers could result in a downward revision to the first quarter manufacturing output and GDP (gross domestic product) growth figures.

The decline in March is said to be caused by the drop in exports for both electronics and non-electronics NODX. In light of this, Singapores economic outlook continues to be weak.

For example, the NODX to EU fell 39.1%, after its 16.1% increase in February. The NODX to China fell 14%. NODX to Indonesia fell 20.2%, which was much worse than the 5.9% decrease in February.

The slowdown in China has weakened our exports to China and this has dampened our overall exports in the past year.

The gloomy economic outlook in Singapore has a trickle-down effect on the property market. Weak demand in Singapore properties has caused resale prices in HDBs and private properties to be stagnant.

HDB resale prices faced a slight fall last month, while prices for private resale flats increased minimally. As a result, property buyers are more risk-averse at this point in time.

Keen To Look For A Property?

If youre looking to buy an HDB flat or a condo, the recent decline in rental and resale home prices is a good reason to start thinking about buying seriously.

Or if youre looking for a home loan in Singapore, use a home loan comparison site like GET.com to help you make a decision.

On the other hand, if you are looking to refinance your home loan, here are 4 things you can consider when comparing home loans.

What do you think? Share your comments with us below!

GET.com Singapore is Singapore's lifestyle and personal finance website. We help you GET more for your money - food, travel, home loans, credit cards, shopping - everything!

Story continues

Like GET.com on Facebook and sign up to get the HOTTEST stories delivered to your inbox!

For serious stuff, you can compare home loans, personal loans and credit cards at GET.com.

Our free GETdeals App helps you get the best credit card discounts near you for dining, shopping, lifestyle and more. Download it today!

Other Articles You May Like From GET.com
Oil prices extended their losses on Tuesday as disappointment over the failure of talks to freeze output outweighed the possible impact of a strike by oil workers in key producer Kuwait.

Prices had plunged early Monday soon after news that the long-awaited meeting of major producers in Doha had collapsed, fanning worries about a persistent global oversupply.

However, the losses were pared through the day on news that thousands of workers in the Kuwaiti oil sector had started industrial action over planned wage cuts.

After a brief rally early Tuesday, US benchmark West Texas Intermediate for May delivery was down 18 cents at $39.60 a barrel at around 0400 GMT, while Brent crude for June fell 27 cents to $42.64.

"It appears that this (Kuwait strike) may be resolved pretty quickly and so the overall interruption would not be large," CMC Markets analyst Michael McCartney told AFP from Sydney.

The strike has seen crude output in Kuwait, the fourth largest producer in the OPEC exporters cartel, dive more than 60 percent.

Oil prices had rebounded last week on hopes that major producers -- including the biggest two, Russia and Saudi Arabia -- would agree to freeze output at January levels.

But Saudi Arabia's decision not to take part unless bitter rival Iran also joined in torpedoed any hopes of a deal. Iran had said it would not agree to any caps having just returned to the export market after years of Western nuclear-linked sanctions.

Analysts said focus will now shift to a key OPEC meeting in June, although BMI Research warned in a note that the gathering was unlikely to see a breakthrough.

"Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran will prevent a political consensus from being reached, while the vast majority of oil producing countries will continue to favour winning or retaining market shares rather than supporting prices," it said.
AFP News

Ukraine on Sunday denounced as dangerous lies suggestions from Russia that it was preparing to use a "dirty bomb". Its western allies also dismissed the allegations from Moscow, just hours after Russia went public with the claims. In conversations with his British, French and Turkish counterparts, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu conveyed "concerns about possible provocations by Ukraine with the use of a 'dirty bomb'", Moscow said. Russia did not mention the alleged "dirty bomb" allegation in its statement following Shoigu's call with Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin. "If Russia calls and says that Ukraine is allegedly preparing something, it means one thing: Russia has already prepared all this," President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address on social media. "I believe that now the world should react as harshly as possible." Earlier Sunday, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba denounced Moscow's claims as "absurd" and "dangerous". "Russians often accuse others of what they plan themselves," he added. A British defence ministry statement said Defence Secretary Ben Wallace had "refuted these claims and cautioned that such allegations should not be used as a pretext for greater escalation". And in Washington, National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson dismissed Moscow's "transparently false" claim. "The world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation," she added. - 'Vile strikes' - Russia also announced Sunday that it had destroyed a depot in central Ukraine storing over 100,000 tonnes of aviation fuel. Kyiv's energy operator meanwhile said scheduled power cuts had been introduced in the Ukrainian capital due to Russia's repeated strikes on the nation's power network. The blackouts started from 11:13 am (0813 GMT) with consumers in Kyiv divided into three groups "disconnected for a certain period of time", energy company DTEK said. DTEK reiterated calls for residents to use electricity "sparingly" and for businesses to limit their use of external lighting. More than one million Ukrainian households have lost electricity following recent Russian strikes, according to the Ukrainian presidency, at least a third of the country's power stations having been destroyed ahead of winter. Zelensky condemned the "vile strikes" in comments late Saturday, after Russian attacks caused power cuts across the country. - 'Save your strength' - In the southern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rig, deputy mayor Sergiy Miliutin was dealing with emergencies and power outages from his underground bunker, used as a venue for a children's martial arts competition. "I've reached a point where I just survive on my drive. You have to stay level-headed and save your strength. No one knows how long this will all last," he told AFP. The intensification of Russian strikes on Ukraine, particularly energy facilities, came after the bridge linking the annexed Crimea peninsula to mainland Russia was partially destroyed by an explosion earlier this month. It was another major setback for Moscow's forces, battling to contain a Ukrainian counter-offensive in the south and east of the country. French President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday that it was for Ukrainians to decide when "peace is possible", in comments made in Rome at the start of a peace summit. Ukraine reported three deaths in an overnight Russian artillery strike in the Toretsk area, a governor of the eastern Donetsk region said. Inside Russia, two lines of defence have been built in the border region of Kursk to deal with any possible attack, a local governor said on Sunday. On Saturday Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor in the neighbouring Russian border region of Belgorod, said the construction of defence structures had begun. Gladkov said two civilians had been killed in strikes there Saturday, and that 15,000 people had been left without electricity. - Kherson evacuations - Meanwhile Ukraine's SBU intelligence service said it had detained two officials of Ukrainian aircraft engine maker Motor Sich on suspicion of working with Russia. The SBU said management at the company's plant in Ukraine's southern Zaporizhzhia region -- partly controlled by Russian forces -- had colluded with Russian state-owned defence conglomerate Rostec. The suspects had supplied Russia with Ukrainian aircraft engines that were used to make and repair attack helicopters, the SBU said. In the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, which Russia claims to have annexed, pro-Moscow officials on Saturday urged residents to leave "immediately" amid a "tense situation" at the front. Kherson, the region's main city, was the first to fall to Moscow's troops and retaking it would be a major prize in Ukraine's counter-offensive. A Moscow-installed official in Kherson, Kirill Stremousov, told Russian news agency Interfax on Saturday that around 25,000 people had left Kherson city to the left bank of the Dnipro River. Ukraine has denounced the removal of residents from Kherson, describing them as "deportations". bur-imm/raz/jj/lcm
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned the European Union Tuesday it needs Turkey more than Ankara needs the bloc, as tensions grew over promises for visa liberalisation in a crucial deal on stemming the flow of migrants to Europe. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu had earlier bluntly told the EU that Ankara would no longer abide by the March migrant accord if Brussels fails to implement the pledge to grant Turks visa-free travel by June. Tensions have also been fuelled by a European Parliament report published last week that accused Turkey of backsliding on democracy and pressure from Ankara on Berlin to prosecute a German comic over a poem satirising Erdogan. The issues are coming to a head as Chancellor Angela Merkel and top EU officials prepare to travel Saturday to the Turkish city of Gaziantep close to the Syrian border to discuss implementation of the migrant deal. "The European Union needs Turkey more than Turkey needs the European Union," Erdogan said to cheers in a televised speech to municipal leaders in Ankara, denouncing as "provocative" the European Parliament report. He lashed out at the report for not praising Turkey's hosting of some 2.7 million refugees from the war in neighbouring Syria. "Three million people have been looked after in this country so they don't disturb the Europeans. Is there anything about this in the report?" said Erdogan. "At a time when our relations with the European Union are in a positive phase regarding the migrants... it is provocative to come out with a report like that." - 'Mutual commitment' - Turkey has been given a string of promises from the European Union -- including visa-free travel to the border-free Schengen Zone and new momentum for its long-stalled membership bid -- in return for stepping up efforts to stop migrants crossing to EU territory. "This is a mutual commitment," Davutoglu said on Monday of the promise to exempt Turks from visas by the end of June. "If the EU cannot take the necessary steps required of it then of course it cannot be expected of Turkey to take these steps," Davutoglu told reporters before heading to Strasbourg to address the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). If the June deadline is not adhered to, "of course no-one can expect Turkey to adhere to its commitments," he added. Marc Pierini, visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, told AFP that Ankara was "very keen" to obtain the visa-free regime but was also aware there were are 72 technical conditions to be fulfilled. "As of today, these conditions have not been met yet," he said. Once they are met, the issue will be put to EU interior ministers for a qualified majority vote in June. "Turkey does not have the ability to change the voting procedures in EU Ministerial Councils," Pierini commented. - 'Won't be watered down' - EU Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker also warned Ankara on Tuesday that the "criteria (on visa liberalisation) will not be watered down in the case of Turkey". He said Davutoglu had raised the issue in talks in Strasbourg "but he did not need to because... I have made clear that this will be done when Turkey has fulfilled all the conditions, which it is in the process of doing." He added: "We concluded an accord and this deal is being applied. There is no need to make any kind of threat." The March 18 accord sets out measures for reducing Europe's worst migration crisis since World War II, including stepped-up checks by Turkey and the shipping back to Turkish territory of migrants who land on the Greek islands. But the prospect of visa-free travel for Turks has been hugely controversial in some EU countries, where leaders have been accused of bending over to fulfil Erdogan's demands at a time when he is accused of growing authoritarianism. In his address to the PACE, Davutoglu did not emphasise the visa issue but lamented the lack of foreign assistance given to Turkey for the Syrian refugees, saying this amounted to just $500 million (440 million euros) compared to Turkey's spending of $10 billion. He warned of the risk of a "lost generation" with 152,000 Syrian children born in Turkey and 400,000 children who do not have access to eduction.
A mid-ranking Pentagon official on Thursday expressed optimism that Seoul and Washington can come to an agreement over the stationing of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense batteries on the Korean Peninsula.

Brian McKeon, a deputy under secretary, said while the two sides have yet to start official talks, there have been "some meetings... looking at the siting and the funding issue." McKeon added, "So I think we're optimistic we will get to a decision. I just don't have a timeline for you."

McKeon was speaking at a U.S. House Armed Services Committee hearing when asked about implications of the ruling Saenuri Party's defeat in Wednesday's general elections on the deployment plans.

"We have a firm view as expressed previously this is about protecting our deployed forces and our Korean partners and has nothing to do with China or China's deterrent and they shouldn't worry about it," he said.

Beijing opposes the deployment of THAAD batteries here because they form the core of the U.S.' missile defense shield aimed at containing China.

U.S. Navy Vice Adm. James Syring also told the hearing that THAAD "can provide fantastic coverage capability for not only our ally there, but our U.S. deployed forces."

The Defense Ministry here remained buttoned up. "At present, Korea and the U.S. are continuing negotiations over the deployment of THAAD batteries on the Korean Peninsula, but a final decision has yet to be made," a spokesman said.

Seoul and Washington have performed an epic fan dance over what sorts of discussions have taken place and how official they are. According to recent claims here, formal talks were launched in March, months after it became public knowledge that the U.S. is pushing Seoul to agree to the THHAD deployment.
Lazada became the mobile-first company in 2014, and today it has more than 30 million downloads to its credit

Earlier this week Alibaba announced its behemoth US$1 billion investment into Lazada, Southeast Asias largest e-commerce company. Present in six countries, from the Philippines to Vietnam, Lazada is, with no doubt, one of the most known regional ventures, with more than US$136 billion items sold in 2015 alone.

For Alibaba, the deal signals further appetite for international markets (as if 80 per cent of domestic market share in China wasnt enough, right?). Aside from its retailer AliExpress, operating along the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and, of course, China), the company will be now able to offer a wide array of products in lucrative 550 million-strong Southeast Asia market.

Now everyone knows that in early April, Alibaba became the largest retailer in the World, surpassing even the iconic Wallmart. A filling with the SEC highlighted more than 3 trillion yuan in annual gross merchandise volume, what corresponds to US$476 billion.

By the same token, little attention was given to Alibabas enormous mobile footprint. Alibaba makes boatloads of money on mobile. In Q4 2015, more than 65 per cent of all company revenues originated from mobile devices.

Now here is the deal. Lazada, too, is the mobile-first business already. In fact, the company crossed the 50 per cent mobile revenue threshold in mid-2015, around the same time as Alibaba did. Traffic-wise, Lazada became the mobile-first company already in 2014, and today it has accrued more than 30 million downloads of its mobile app. Thats impressive knowing the scale of mobile in China. After all, from among 649 million Internet users in China in 2014, a whopping 557 million are mobile users.

As you can imagine, to manage such mammoth mobile audience is easier said than done. I talked to Lazadas EVP of Mobile, Aurelien Pallain, who joined the company three years ago and built its mobile department from scratch. Aurelien shared with me a number of best practices for transitioning to mobile and gave a solid view on function of mobile department at Lazada.

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Success Factors when Transitioning to Mobile

The larger the organisation, the more challenging is to start a change, while e-commerce businesses, in particular, requires triple the effort. To give you an idea, at the end of 2013, short before its mobile app was launched, Lazada was at 3-digit funding level; no other platform in the region has ever spent anywhere close to it.

Aurelien believes that for operations-heavy business, starting a new mobile organisation is the winning approach. The transition requires empowerment from the top management, which trusts the leader responsible for the change. The mobile-focused department has its mobile-only KPIs, produces dedicated content for chat apps and manages mobile ad networks.

Lazada Team

Lazada HQ Mobile Team supports Local Mobile Owners.

This refers equally to technical resources, with mobile developers + mobile product manager + UX specialist forming a key part of the team. There will be one dedicated mobile tracking experts and multiple mobile CRM specialists. The API team and core technology is shared between both mobile and desktop environments. Altogether, more than 20 people are responsible for mobile-originating revenues at the company, with additional local roles, including mobile partnerships managers.

How Mobile is Better

The rationale behind transitioning to mobile clearly stems from market factors. Yet, there are a number of benefits that Lazada gained as it grew its mobile audiences. Aurelien summarised them as follows:

Mobile is resistant to daily usage variations typical for desktop audiences: People can buy at anytime, because they carry their smartphones everywhere.

Simplified product: Mobile requires lighter layouts and product presentation, with less text and visuals. Consequently, this helps simplify desktop products too.

Loyalty: As Lazada was first to master mobile e-commerce, its users are now more loyal. People buy through various websites, but they want just one shopping app.

Recurrence: With ongoing use of push notifications, recurrence and value of the basket went up

Engagement: Thanks to mobile, Lazada managed to boost engagement and interaction with its products up to 10 times.

Big Data: More precise, location-based tracking helped Lazada discover additional user insights.

Best Practices for Mobile Growth in Established company

Aurelien sees mobile growth primarily as the derivative of great management and solid tech footprint. Clear division of responsibilities between mobile vs non-mobile teams and making use of mobile tracking fall under this category.

With 7-digit monthly marketing budget, Lazada pays special attention to mobile tracking. It was one of the first startups in the world to create its own multi-click attribution model, which helped create massive savings in retargeting. It carefully tracks fraud, which in Asia accounts to 20-30 per cent of all clicks, subsequently killing all under-performing ad networks.

Mobile web at Lazada is treated as a first touch-point for the mobile user. The company doesnt aggressively push its mobile app to mWeb visitors, but a gentle mobile banner reminds the users to download the app at first. Only when the users familiarise themselves with the web-based product, Lazada would gladly use its custom audiences to then convert them to mobile app. Today conversions on mobile app of Lazada are up to 3x higher than for mobile Web.

As in any e-commerce company, SEO plays a key role to user acquisition and re-discovery. It took two months for Lazada engineers to implement app indexing, which is directly managed by the product team and strategised by the ASO Specialist.

Aurelien believes that it will take time until app indexing becomes as important as web SEO to e-commerce economy. For now, the company focuses more on deferred deep linking, localised per country and language. The logic is very straightforward  every mobile Web visitor, who has downloaded the app, should always be redirected to Lazada app, so as to smooth buying experience.

Lazada Deep link

There is no doubt that thanks to its mobile focus, Lazada made it to the list of the hottest tech companies in the world. Whereas no two markets are identical (Thailand and Indonesia lead Lazadas transition to mobile, while Vietnam appeared to be the most challenging), we can say that approaching mobile with the same, utmost dedication, definitely helped bring together two of the great companies such as Lazada and Alibaba.

I am thrilled to observe how this powerful deal evolves. What do you think will come next for Alibaba + Lazada group? Will they launch a new delivery service? Or offer direct purchase of products from China? Share your comments below.

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The views expressed here are of the authors, and e27 may not necessarily subscribe to them.e27 invites members from Asias tech industry and startup community to share their honest opinions and expert knowledge with our readers. If you are interested in sharing your point of view, submit your article here.

The post Lazada is Alibabas big bet on m-commerce, but how hard it was for Lazada to be mobile-first? appeared first on e27.
Through this partnership, Vinh University in Vietnam, will recognise credits for blended online courses on Coursera

Hot on the heels of Kyna.vns seven-digit seed funding, another Vietnam-based edtech company Topica has announced it has signed a landmark deal: a partnership with leading US-based online learning platform Coursera.

Through this pact, Vinh University in Vietnam will become one of the first educational institutes to recognise credits from any one of Courseras 1,800 online courses provided by top universities across the globe, including Stanford, John Hopkins University, and University of Michigan.

Students will be able to access online video courses, have discussions with tutors via live video and discussion fora on the Topica-Vinh University online degree platform and gain credits towards a Vinh University Bachelors degree programme.

On completion of the course, they will also receive Coursera Certificates.

The pilot courses will involve 30 students who are enrolled in the Topica-Vinh University online Bachelors program. They will take courses based on Financial Engineering and Risk Management.

If the pilot is successful, Topica will scale this model up across thousands of students, 11 university partners across Philippines and Vietnam, and 30-50 per cent of the courses required for a Bachelors degree.

Also Read: 1337 Ventures marks entry into Vietnam with Alpha Startups Vietnam 2016

They are expected to only pay an annual tuition of under US$1,000 including all content, tutoring, support services, exams, and credits  about one-fifth to one-twentieth of what American online degree programs are currently charging.

What Coursera provides to learners is content from top universities that you might not be able to access, either because you dont live in the country where the schools are based or you dont have time to enroll in the full-time programme. So we offer that access and also a number of services to help students complete the programme, said Rebecca Taber, Head of Government Partnerships at Coursera, in an official press statement.

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Topica claims to be experiencing consistently good retention rates, for which it credits its innovative blended learning platform  92 per cent of students complete the first trimester and 82 per cent complete all courses (12 to 15 courses) within a year.

The blended learning comprises of live tutoring, forum discussions, occasional face-to-face sessions, timely support services, gamification mechanics, 3D simulations, student drop-out prediction and prevention techniques.

Partnering with Coursera is part of a disruptive plan to improve career opportunities for students in the emerging markets. It gives them access to high quality content from top universities, together with our tutoring and support services that have delivered world-class retention rates at a fraction of the usual tuition cost. Our mission from day one has been: Match global quality, help millions study,' said Pham Minh Tuan, Founder and CEO of Topica Edtech Group.

Also Read: 5 must-learn tips for e-commerce entrants in Vietnam

The Topica Edtech Group currently employs a team of 1,000 staff and 1,800 instructors in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Among its other programmes include Topica Native, which provides online English speech tutoring courses in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Topica also manages the Thailand and Vietnam chapters of the Silicon-Valley accelerator Founder Institute, whose graduates have raised million dollars funding rounds. Last year, Topica acquired Hanoi-based co-working Hub.IT with the aim of scaling up its incubation programmes.

The post Two edtech giants team up: Topica announces partnership with Coursera appeared first on e27.
Hyundai and affiliate Kia posted disappointing quarterly sales in China in the first quarter of the year.

Their Chinese sales plunged over 10 percent in the January to March period on-year, despite the expanding local automobile market.

The carmakers said on Monday that they posted combined sales of 369,320 cars in China, down 16.2 percent from the 400,514 cars in the first quarter of last year.

The Korean automakers are the only ones to report a sales drop out of the top five players in the Chinese market.

The poor performance is largely due to the declining popularity of old sedan models including the Langdong (Avante MD in Korea) and Verna (Accent in Korea). Sales of the Verna in the first quarter almost halved to 35,417 cars from 65,734 last year.

Volkswagen topped the market in terms of sales with 978,884 cars, up 1.8 percent, followed by General Motors with 628,237 cars, up 22.3 percent. Ford's sales rose 14.7 percent to 251,361 cars and Nissan's 10.5 percent to 221,395 cars, placing them fourth and fifth.
Online Test Prep

ACT and Kaplan collaborate to Make Test Prep Live, Free

ACT, Inc., maker of the ACT test, and Kaplan Test Prep are partnering to create the only online ACT preparation program with live instruction from teachers. The program will be available for free to low-income students and to all students at a lower cost than traditional test prep programs.

The new program, ACT Kaplan Online Prep Live, will give students access to live, online, content-based courses taught by experienced teachers who can answer student questions and provide interactive, instructional guidance in real time. The platform will also include recorded sessions that students can access on demand with nearly any device.

The program will focus on developing students academic skills, knowledge and readiness for college. It will cost less than $200 and will be provided for free to low-income students who register for the ACT with a fee waiver. It will be available in the fall.

During the 2014-15 academic year, ACT test fee waivers valued at $34.4 million were offered to more than 700,000 low-income students, according to a press statement.

In this deal, announced Monday, Kaplan will become the exclusive, official partner for live, online prep for the ACT test.
* A look at the day ahead from European Economics and Politics Editor Mark John and EMEA Markets Editor Mike Dolan. The views expressed are their own.

LONDON, April 19 (Reuters) - After months of wrangling, there seem to be optimistic signs of consensus emerging at last as Greece and its international lenders resume talks in Athens. The aim is to wrap up the review of its reforms "as soon as possible" and in any case before euro zone finance ministers meet in Amsterdam on Friday. The review must be concluded before more bailout money is released.

Germany's ZEW investor sentiment index is expected to show a rise for April after a solid start to the year for Europe's largest economy, most recently seen in the strong rebound in its exports and more resilient industrial output than some had feared. That comes as the ECB's lending survey will give us more insight as to how successful the bank has been in stimulating mortgage and corporate lending across the euro zone.

The Bank of England's Mark Carney will speak to Britain's House of Lords upper chamber today with Brexit again most likely the focus. Amid signs that the approach of the referendum is delaying some investment decisions, he might choose to sound a starker warning in this appearance. That came after the National Farmers Union overnight said continuing membership of the EU was in the best interest of the country's farmers (who collectively get around three billion pounds a year in EU subsidies) but said it would not actively campaign in the upcoming referendum -- a nod to the fact that many of its members disagree.

MARKETS (at 0645 GMT)

It (Other OTC: ITGL - news) 's like Monday never happened. World markets (Xetra: 4WM.DE - news) have completed a rapid U-turn as crude oil prices regained all the losses suffered after the collapse of the weekend output freeze deal. A Kuwaiti workers strike that more than halved daily output from the Gulf nation was blamed for the oil rally and world markets that had riffed off energy prices followed suit. But given the strike is likely to be temporary, there could be some considerable volatility in prices ahead. Soothed by the oil reversal, the S&P500 set new highs for the year last night, with its total return index at a new record. The ViX volatility index is also testing new 2016 lows of about 13 pct. Japan's Nikkei225 more than reversed Monday's steep losses and bounced back 3.7 pct as dollar/yen rallied and tried to regain 109/$. Most other Asia markets, including Shanghai and HK, were higher too. Wall St stock futures are modestly higher also. Sterling is firmer after the latest opinion poll showing a 12-point lead for the camp supporting the UK to remain in the EU and as BoE chief Carney speaks later. The big data release of the morning will be Germany's April ZEW, with one eye drifting toward this week's ECB meeting. Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS-PB - news) results will be watched later in a heavy Q1 earnings day in the United States. Brazil stocks retreated yesterday after President Rousseff said she will continue to fight impeachment proceedings despite losing a vote on the issue in the lower house of parliament at the weekend.

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Upcoming events/data/ themes for market reports on Tuesday:

- European corporate events: Danone (LSE: 0KFX.L - news) , L'Oreal, Publicis (Paris: FR0000130577 - news) . Roche, Accor (EUREX: 485822.EX - news) (all sales), Associated British Foods H1 results, Meggitt (Other OTC: MEGGF - news) trading update, BHP Billiton (NYSE: BBL - news) operations review

- Euro zone Feb current account

- Germany ZEW economic sentiment

- BoE's Carney speaks to members of the House of Lords on Tuesday

- Russia March PPI/retail sales/unemployment/real wages

- US Q1 earnings: Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust, Omnicom, Intel (Euronext: INCO.NX - news) , Yahoo (Hanover: YHO.HA - news) , Prologis (NYSE: PLD - news) , Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ - news) , Harley-Davidson

- U.S (Other OTC: UBGXF - news) . March housing starts (Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
drmanhattan2

Warner Bros/Watchmen

Oil prices are being annihilated on Monday after several oil producers, responsible for almost half of the world's output, failed to reach a production-freeze agreement at a meeting in Doha on Sunday.

Any hopes that oil prices will return to the triple-digit highs of 2014 were just killed off because Iran has gone rogue.

Saudi Arabia demanded that Iran join the freeze and an agreement could have helped lift oil prices because there is too much oil on the market and too little demand.

However, Iran effectively said "screw you" to Saudi Arabia  one of the world's largest oil producers.

Crude oil tanked by nearly 5% early Monday morning.

crudeoil8

Warner Bros/Watchmen

The international benchmark of oil prices  Brent oil  also tumbled by over 4%. However this is a slight recovery from earlier readings where prices crashed by around 7% immediately following the lack of a deal:

brentoil9

Warner Bros/Watchmen

Oil prices are likely to remain under pressure for some time.

My colleague Greg McKenna said that the lack of a deal puts that rally under pressure and leaves traders with no clear guide to when the widening gap between oil supply and demand will be closed.

And basically all eyes are on Iran.

Iran has only just had its sanctions lifted and it is not looking at reducing the amount it can produce while it is trying to rebuild its battered economy with lucrative oil reserves. Oil production constitutes 23% of Iran's wealth, according to Trading Economics. There is no love lost between Iran and the Saudis. And the Iranians are going to put their own economy before the interests of the Russians and the Venezuelans.

Irans oil minister Bijan Zanganeh said over the weekend that other producers had to deal with the reality that Iran has returned to the oil market.

If Iran freezes its oil production  it cannot benefit from the lifting of sanctions."

So in other words, we're just going to keep on pumping out oil because we can finally make some money and repair our economy after years of sanctions.

Story continues

While the Doha meeting resulted in no deal, one thing is for sure  Iran is going it alone when it comes to oil.

NOW WATCH: Walmart is making a major change that will impact more than 5,000 stores

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SEE ALSO: NO DEAL: Saudi Arabia demands Iran join the oil production freeze
* Kuwait oil output at 1.5 mln bpd - KUNA

* Bearish sentiment to return once Kuwait output recovers

* Russia eyes output increase (Adds settlement prices)

By Devika Krishna Kumar

NEW YORK, April 19 (Reuters) - Oil prices jumped more than 3 percent on Tuesday after a strike by workers in Kuwait nearly halved the OPEC member's crude production, overshadowing bearish sentiment after Sunday's failure by producers to agree to freeze output levels.

Thousands of Kuwaiti oil workers remained on strike for a third day on Tuesday to protest against planned public sector pay reform, cutting crude output to 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd), according to an oil spokesman cited by news agency KUNA.

That is little more than half of Kuwait's average output of 2.8 million bpd in March.

Reports of power outages leading to output declines of about 200,000 bpd in Venezuela and a pipeline fire in Nigeria that may have cut production by 400,000 bpd, along with the upcoming refinery maintenance season helped to support prices, traders said.

"The Kuwait strike in particular is a major factor. It (Other OTC: ITGL - news) was a bolt out of the blue in terms of how much oil came off the market so quickly," said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital, a New York energy hedge fund.

"Usually these things have a ramp down period but this seems to be able to flick a switch ... It's supportive for the market for now."

A spokesman for the Kuwaiti oil and gas workers said on Tuesday their strike would continue until planned public sector pay reforms are cancelled.

Brent crude futures settled up $1.12 at $44.03 a barrel while U.S (Other OTC: UBGXF - news) . crude settled $1.30 higher at $41.08.

Short covering added to a rally catalyzed by the S&P 500 index crossing a key level that triggered buying in oil.

Analysts said Kuwait's disruption would likely be brief and expect prices to be pressured again as the market is likely to refocus on the oversupply given the failure of major exporters on Sunday to agree to freeze output to avoid worsening the glut.

Story continues

A deal to freeze oil output by OPEC and non-OPEC producers fell apart at the weekend meeting in Doha after Saudi Arabia demanded Iran join in despite calls on Riyadh to save the agreement and help prop up crude prices.

Iran has repeatedly said it would prioritize regaining pre-sanctions crude output levels over discussing an output freeze.

Tehran's crude oil exports have risen to around 1.75 million bpd so far in April, according to an industry source and shipping data. Exports averaged about 1.6 million bpd in March

Other exporters who participated in the failed Doha talks have already shifted attention back to their own interests. Russia has indicated it hopes to increase output this year.

The market is also awaiting data from industry group American Petroleum Institute (API) at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time, expected to show a rise in U.S. crude oil inventories last week. (Additional reporting by Karolin Schaps in London and Henning Gloystein in Singapore; Editing by Andrew Hay and Chris Reese)
HARARE, April 19 (Reuters) - China's Sinosteel Corp Ltd's business in Zimbabwe has ceded half its mining claims to the government, complying with Harare's demands to chrome producers to give up some of their claims, a company official said on Tuesday.

The Southern African nation holds the world's second largest deposits of chrome, which is smelted to produce ferrochrome, a raw material used in the making of stainless steel.

Zimbabwe's mines minister last year asked Sinosteel's Zimasco and Zimbabwe Alloys, which owned 80 percent of all chrome mining claims, to release some ground for distribution to new investors. The companies were owned by Anglo American (LSE: AAL.L - news) until 2006.

The government has previously said it wants to redistribute some claims to several local investors as part of its black economic empowerment drive and would not pay compensation.

Zimasco held 45,900 hectares of claims before giving up half to the government, Clara Sadomba, the company's general manager for administration told Reuters.

"It (Other OTC: ITGL - news) is accurate regarding Zimasco in that we have indeed ceded 50 percent of our chrome claims to the government," said Sadomba.

Zimbabwe Alloys officials would not say whether they had also given up some of the company's claims.

Zimbabwe holds more than 950 million in chrome reserves, according to ministry of mines data.

In 2014 Zimbabwe produced 260,000 tonnes of high-carbon ferrochrome, which was 2.3 percent of global output. Zimasco produced 68 percent of Zimbabwe's ferrochrome in 2014. (Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe; Editing by Alexander Smith)
The former Seoul bureau chief of Japan's Sankei Shimbun, who was cleared of defaming President Park Geun-hye in a high-profile legal debacle, has filed a suit for costs, the Seoul Central District Court said Sunday.

In Korea, individuals found innocent of criminal charges are eligible to recover their costs. Tatsuya Kato is seeking compensation refunds for legal costs as well as transportation and accommodation.

Prosecutors took the controversial decision to indict Kato in August last year over a column that mentioned rumors that Park spent seven hours with a crony on April 16, while the ferry Sewol was sinking off the southwest coast, killing nearly 300 people.

The Seoul Central District Court accepted that the article was factually incorrect but said there was no intent to defame, but by then the damage was done and the case had become the subject of global derision. The current U.S. human rights report alludes to the case as an attempt to stifle criticism of the government.
By Colin Packham SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia's parliament returned for a special sitting on Monday to debate crucial labour reform bills which are likely to be blocked in the upper house Senate, leading to the dissolution of both houses and an election on July 2. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in March recalled parliament from a seven-week recess, only the fourth time in more than 50 years that a special session has been demanded. The bills are likely to be blocked in the Senate by smaller parties such as the influential Greens and the main centre-left opposition Labor Party. A decision is expected this week. The government has proposed a regulator for the construction industry, opposed by the main opposition Labor Party and trade unions, many of which believe the watchdog would place undue oversight over their operations. Greens leader Senator Richard Di Natale reiterated his party's rejection of the legislation. "It tells us that the number one priority isn't innovation, it's not bringing us into a new economy, it is not tackling climate change and the loss of the Great Barrier Reef, the jobs that are going because we've got inaction in managing that transition to a new economy," he said. "Their number one priority is their own survival." Opinion polls showed support for Australia's ruling Liberal Party-led coalition lingering at its lowest level since Turnbull assumed office last September. Support for the coalition was 49 percent, a Newspoll found on Monday, on a two-party preferred basis where votes for minor parties are redistributed to the two main blocs according to preferences. Turnbull retained his lead as preferred prime minister over Labor leader Bill Shorten. But his popularity has waned amid perceived dithering over tax reform, a rejection of calls for an investigation into major banks and planned cuts to spending on hospitals and schools. The sagging polls and likely early election will add pressure on Australia's Treasurer Scott Morrison to issue a voter friendly budget on May 3. But analysts said Morrison faces a difficult task of addressing a ballooning budget deficit of about A$40 billion (21.65 billion) this year while shoring up electorate support. (Editing by Nick Macfie)
HONG KONG (Reuters) - A 60-year-old British man who went missing for several weeks in late March, was confirmed to have been killed in China, the Hong Kong police said in a statement after being notified by Chinese authorities. Hilary St John Bower, who had worked as an English language instructor at the Polytechnic University in Hong Kong, had been dead for more than a week by the time he was reported missing on March 30, according to a police statement. "The victim was killed on the evening of March 22 in mainland China," the Hong Kong police said, after receiving notice from their Chinese counterparts. The police statement included no specifics, however, on how he was killed, a possible motive, or why it had taken so long to confirm Bower's death. Hong Kong media reported that Bower had a longtime girlfriend and a son in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, and had often travelled between the two places. The Chinese Public Security Bureau in Shenzhen said it had no information on the case, when contacted by Reuters. The Polytechnic University also gave no immediate response to inquiries about Bower. A British embassy representative said, "We are providing support to the family at this difficult time, and will remain in close contact with local authorities." The Hong Kong police are seeking further details from Chinese authorities and investigations are continuing. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he had only just heard about the situation and did not know any other details. Bower had taught at the Polytechnic University since 1996, according to his profile on the university website. He had previously taught in China, South Korea, Thailand, Spain and Kuwait. Murders of foreigners are extremely rare in China, though the murder in 2011 of another British man, Neil Heywood triggered one of the country's biggest political scandals in decades. The wife of former top Chinese leader Bo Xilai was later convicted as Heywood's killer, leading to Bo's downfall and sentencing to life in prison in 2013 for corruption. (Reporting by Tris Pan and Kevin Dai; Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Beijing; writing by James Pomfret; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
YAOUNDE (Reuters) - The United States will give $40 million(28 million pounds) in humanitarian assistance to countries bordering Lake Chad fighting Islamist militant group Boko Haram, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said on Tuesday. The money was to help about seven million people affected by the insurgent group that has killed around 15,000 people. It takes total U.S. aid to the sub-region since 2014 to $237 million, she said. Power was in the capital of Cameroon and met President Paul Biya and attended a ceremony to burn 2,000 tusks in a bid to end elephant poaching. The trip includes visits to Chad and Nigeria. "We discussed the monstrous threat posed by Boko Haram and we agreed, and he was very forceful on this point, that the military response alone could not succeed in defeating Boko Haram in the long-term," she said of her meeting with Biya. Respect for human rights, good governance, economic and forest development and a focus on civil society were essential components of the campaign, she said. Cameroon, Nigeria and Chad are contributing forces to fight the group. Power has been scheduled to visit the region's Multinational Joint Task Force, which is staffed with troops from the three nations as well as Niger and Benin. The United States has sent troops and drones and offered to send a special operations mission to the fight against Boko Haram, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State. On Monday, a vehicle in her motorcade that was carrying United Nations and Cameroonian officials struck a young boy. Medics in the convoy treated him but he died of his injuries. "I joined the (Cameroonian) governor of the area ... the leading U.N. official who manages the humanitarian and development response and Ambassador Hoza, and we visited with the boy's family to offer our profound condolences," Power said in a speech. Power also described meeting refugees and called for financial support from the international community to aid the development of areas battered by Boko Haram. (Reporting by Sylvain Andzongo in Yaounde and Makini Brice in Dakar; Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by Grant McCool)
By Frank Jack Daniel and Nelson Acosta HAVANA (Reuters) - President Raul Castro will serve up to five more years as head of Cuba's Communist Party as he and other ageing revolutionaries keep their grip on power at a time of economic reform and detente with the United States. The Communist Party announced the result of internal elections on Tuesday. Wrestling with economic change and transition from the generation that toppled a U.S.-backed government in 1959, the party wants to avoid any chaotic shake-up within its leadership ranks. Speaking at the closure of a four-day party congress, Castro, 84, signalled he and his fellow octogenarian No. 2 would step aside sometime before the next such meeting in five years. "This seventh congress will be the last one led by the historic generation," Castro said, at the closing ceremony where delegates gave his older brother, former president and revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, 89, a roaring ovation. In an admission of mortality, the elder Castro startled Cubans used to his towering presence over the island's politics since he was a young man. "Soon I will be 90 years old," he said. "Soon I will be like all the rest. Our turn comes to all of us," the now frail former leader said in his most extensive public appearance in years. Raul Castro had proposed an age limit of 70 for top officials as the party gathered for the start of the congress over the weekend, raising expectations veterans would begin to step aside. But he said the next five years would be for transition and such rules would not be fully applied until then. The congress is not due to reconvene until 2021. Castro steps down as Cuba's president in 2018 and when he does he could either remain in the more powerful role as head of the party or retire from that post as well. The congress backed steps towards more foreign investment and a growing private sector of small businesses, but few details of new measures to free up the economy were revealed and Castro made clear that such changes would not be rushed. "(We will) introduce the necessary changes, without hurry and with no improvisation, which would only lead to failure," he said. At the end of the congress, the first since 2011, the Communist Party said Castro had been re-elected as first secretary, with Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, 85, re-elected as second secretary. Machado Ventura, a doctor, fought alongside Fidel and Ernesto "Che" Guevara in their 1950s rebellion. He is seen as a ideological hard-liner who has sought to slow a move to market economics, leading a campaign to reintroduce price controls after an inflation spike at the end of last year. The two men are close, but Castro is seen as more of a pragmatist who built Cuba's army and brought efficient management to some of the military's powerful companies during long years in the shadow of his brother Fidel, who ruled the country until 2008. AFTER OBAMA The younger Castro ordered market reforms to the economy and oversaw the thaw with the United States that led Barack Obama to become the first U.S. president to visit Cuba in 88 years. Since that historic visit last month, the brothers have hardened anti-U.S. rhetoric and raised political defences out of a stated concern Washington plans to topple them. Under Castro, Internet usage has slowly grown in one of the world's least connected countries, and Cubans are more open in expressing political views. But the congress made no political concessions, reaffirming the importance of a one-party state. After encouraging self-employment to lower the state's responsibilities at the last congress, about half a million Cubans now work for themselves or for small private businesses, forming a growing middle class. Only a fifth of planned reforms have been fully implemented and there is growing irritation more has not been done, with thousands of young Cubans taking advantage of new travel freedoms to leave for good. While top posts were unchanged, the party brought in five mostly younger faces to the powerful political bureau. In an attempt to diversify the mostly white, male bureau, the new members included three women. Two were of mixed Afro-Cuban descent. Arturo Lopez-Levy, who teaches Latin American politics at Texas University, likened Castro's moves to defensive driving as he seeks to maintain Cuba's single-party political system. "Castro expressed a desire to broaden the scope of the reforms and speed up their implementation, but he wants to preserve a cushion space for manoeuvre and reverse," Lopez-Levy said. Younger faces include Miguel Diaz-Canel, 55, who as first vice president of the country is widely seen as Raul Castro's successor. He was re-elected to a senior position in the party but was not promoted. (Additional reporting by Marc Frank; Editing by Bill Trott and Tom Brown)
By Aaron Maasho ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - The death toll from a raid carried out by South Sudanese gunmen in western Ethiopia has risen to 208 people and the assailants kidnapped 108 children, an Ethiopian official said on Sunday. The attack took place on Friday in the Horn of Africa nation's Gambela region which, alongside a neighbouring province, hosts more than 284,000 South Sudanese refugees who fled conflict in their country. By Sunday afternoon, the number had risen to "208 dead and 75 people wounded" from 140 a day earlier, government spokesman Getachew Reda told Reuters, adding the assailants had also abducted 108 children and taken 2,000 head of livestock. "Ethiopian Defence Forces are taking measures. They are closing in on the attackers," he said. Getachew did not give further details, but officials in Gambela said on Saturday Ethiopian troops had crossed the border in pursuit of the attackers. Cross-border cattle raids have occurred in the same area in the past, often involving Murle tribesmen from South Sudan's Jonglei and Upper Nile regions - areas awash with weapons that share borders with Ethiopia. Previous attacks, however, were smaller in scale. The gunmen are not believed to have links with South Sudanese government troops or rebel forces who fought the government in Juba in a civil war that ended with a peace deal signed last year. South Sudanese officials were not immediately available for comment. Under pressure from neighbouring states, the United States, the United Nations and other powers, South Sudan's feuding sides signed an initial peace deal in August and agreed to share out ministerial positions in January. (Reporting by Aaron Maasho; Editing by Elias Biryabarema and Stephen Powell)
President Park Geun-hye on Monday "humbly accepted" her party's devastating rout in last week's general elections but insisted on completing the projects that lost the Saenuri Party its majority.

"With a sense of mission, I will do my best to complete the three-year plan for the country's economic development and economic reform," she said.

Park was speaking at a meeting of senior presidential secretaries at Cheong Wa Dae.

Always a somewhat oracular speaker, she mentioned no conclusions she may have drawn from the defeat directly, saying only, "The outcome of... the general elections gave me an opportunity to think of the consensus of public opinion."

The election results have split the National Assembly into three blocs, with the 38 members of the new People's Party holding the voting power by which the main parties' initiatives stand or fall.

Meanwhile, Park will pay a state visit to Iran on May 1-3, where she will meet with her Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani, according to a Cheong Wa Dae spokesman.

Park will be the first Korean president to set foot in Iran.

Korean companies are keen to do business with the oil-rich country now that it has emerged from international isolation, and that will be the focus of her trip.
Sky News can reveal that a group of men arrested in Denmark two weeks ago were all named in Islamic State recruitment files leaked to us in March.

The link between the arrests and the files also exposes a connection between Danish IS recruiters and British extremists.

On 7 April, Danish police raided properties in several parts of Copenhagen. A number of arrests were made.

Two days earlier, a 20-year-old man was arrested at the city's airport. It is understood he was trying to board a plane with a large quantity of cash.

In total, five people were detained and a further four "detained in absentia". Their whereabouts are not known.

However, authorities refused to give many further details. In a so-called "double-locked door" legal hearing, the media were prevented from publishing the names of the men.

But Sky News has seen their names and those of the men still being sought. All appear in files leaked to Sky by a disillusioned IS member in March.

Filled out by IS gate keepers when recruits entered the self-proclaimed caliphate, the files are now exposing fighters who have slipped back into their home countries.

One by one authorities are picking them up and piecing together a terror franchise that spans the continent.

We rang the doorbell at the address of one of the detained men.

His entry form lists him as married. He lists his occupation as "childcare" and it states that he entered IS territory on 1 July 2013. It is not clear when he returned to Denmark.

A neighbour told us she knew the man well.

"I would say hello to him every time I walk in or out of the door. A really nice guy, very helpful. He offers to drive me so I don't have to take a cab," Lise-Lotte Christensen said.

We showed her the man's file. "It really surprises me. I had no idea he was that kind of guy, he was just really nice. A lovely, warm person," she said.

She confirmed to us that he has two young children and a Danish wife, all information which tallies with the associated file.

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As with all the files, it lists the person who recommended the man's entry to IS. In his case it was an individual called Abu Hifs al Pakistani, one of two names which crops up frequently in the files.

Across town, we visit another neighbourhood and the scene of another raid.

One man was taken from a second floor apartment in a block. The name on the doorbell is the same as that on the file which lists further details.

Born 1990, married, entered IS - 9 September 2013, recruiter - Abu Khatab al Pakstani. His name is the other which appears in a number of the files.

The form of the man arrested at the airport details him as a 20-year-old former mobile phone technician who travelled to Syria on 10 July 2013 when he'd have been just seventeen.

A well-known Copenhagen mosque is listed as his home address.

We know the man was close to the mosque's imam. We were told the imam was away in Mecca and our calls to his mobile phone didn't connect.

The recruit's sponsor is, once again, Abu Hifs al Pakistani.

Between them, Abu Hifs and Abu Khatab are named as the recruiters in all but three of the Danish files.

We have obtained footage of Abu Khatab at a rally in Copenhagen in late 2012. The IS files show us that he would have been recruiting people for jihad at this time.

In the footage, he is seen plugging a mobile phone into a loudspeaker.

On the other end of the line is the radical cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, who was once based in Britain and whose connections to radical groups in the UK remain strong.

YouTube footage shows Abu Khatab alongside Abu Hifs in Syria in 2013.

Both men are now dead, but both had contact with known British extremists like Bakri Mohammed and another who can't currently be named for legal reasons.

The two men's exposure as high profile recruiters helps European intelligence agencies join up the dots.

A former analyst at the Danish Intelligence Service says that highlighting patterns in the forms is crucial in helping to understand IS.

"One of the most interesting things in the files is who recommended the recruits," Anja Dalgaard-Neilsen said.

Ms Dalgaard-Neilsen is now the director of the Institute for Strategy at the Royal Danish Defence College. She says the files help not only to apprehend suspects but to prosecute them.

"It has now been criminalised to join a terrorist organisation and that's the reason why these files are potentially very interesting to the authorities, because they could support the argument of the authorities of the prosecution that these people joined a terrorist organisation," she said.

"It is, for obvious reasons, difficult to gather evidence in a war zone.

"Until recently it wasn't a crime in and of itself to travel to Syria so you couldn't know if people were doing humanitarian work or whether they had actually joined a terrorist organisation."

The challenge for the authorities is identifying all those in the files.

There are many more Europeans named in files than there have been arrests. Some individuals may have died in Syria. But others could have travelled back to their home countries.

After the atrocities in Paris and Brussels, and IS' pledge to attack again, there is an urgency to find them.
BERLIN (Reuters) - A leader of German Muslims on Monday likened the attitude of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party toward his community to that of Hitler's Nazis toward Jews. The AfD entered three state parliaments last month by luring voters angry with Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to welcome mainly Muslim refugees fleeing war in Syria, and says Islam is incompatible with Germany's constitution. "It is the first time since Hitler's Germany that a whole religious community is discredited and existentially threatened," Aiman Mazyek, head of Germany's Central Council of Muslims, told Germany's NDR public television. He was responding to AfD plans, announced at the weekend, to press for bans on minarets and burqas at its congress in two weeks' time. "The AfD is riding a wave of Islamophobia," Mazyek said. "This is not an anti-Islam path, it is an anti-democratic path." Asked about the AfD remarks on Islam, Merkel told reporters during a news conference after talks with Indonesian President Joko Widodo that freedom of religion was a right guaranteed by the constitution, known as the Basic Law. "This naturally also applies to Muslims in our country," Merkel said. "Experience has shown that the vast number of Muslims here practice their religion within the framework of the Basic Law." She added that security forces could take action when this was not the case. Merkel's conservatives have also called for an effective ban on the burqa, saying the full body covering of some Muslim women should not be worn in public. But they have not said Islam is incompatible with the constitution. AfD leaders say the influx of more than one million migrants last year, mainly Muslims fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, makes the "Islamization of Germany" a real threat. The rise of the AfD has alarmed mainstream parties, who rely on compromise to form coalitions. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, a Social Democrat, accused the AfD of using language similar to that of Hitler's Nazis. (Writing by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Angus MacSwan)
Several hundred migrants are believed to have died after four boats capsized in the Mediterranean.

Italy's president, Sergio Mattarella, said there had been a migrant "tragedy", as unconfirmed reports suggested the vast majority of those on board the vessels were Somalis, trying to cross the sea from Egypt to Europe.

Speaking at a prize giving ceremony in Rome, Mr Mattarella said Europe needed to reflect in the face of "yet another tragedy in the Mediterranean in which, it seems, several hundred people have died."

Around 800 migrants and refugees drowned on 18 April last year, when the overcrowded fishing boat they were in capsized in waters between Libya and the Italian island of Lampedusa .

Mr Mattarella did not give any further details - and neither Egyptian or Greek officials were able to confirm the reports of a major disaster.

The Italian coastguard said they knew nothing about the reported disaster.

However, they were involved in the overnight rescue of 108 migrants from a semi-submerged rubber dinghy. Six people drowned in the incident.

Italian foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni added: "We are looking for more details, information. But what is sure is that we are again with a tragedy in the Mediterranean - exactly one year after the tragedy we had, not in the Egyptian but in the Libyan waters.

"This is another strong reason for Europe to commit itself not in building walls but in strengthening our common commitment towards migration, especially towards Africa."

It comes as a report by academics accused EU policymakers of "killing by neglect" by reducing search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean.

Mare Nostrum, the Italy-led rescue mission, was scrapped in October 2014 and replaced by Triton, which deployed fewer ships and prioritised deterring migrants over rescue operations.

The change has since potentially cost the lives of more than 1,500 migrants, according to the report, Death By Rescue: The Lethal Effects Of The EU's Policies Of Non-assistance At Sea.

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A charity warned the numbers of migrants braving the perilous journey by sea to Europe is unlikely to fall - despite an EU deal to deport those who have failed to gain asylum.

"The numbers will not stop coming because they have no choice but to try and reach Europe," said Sarah Tyler, head of communications for Save The Children International.

"What they are leaving behind is not a life that is worth living, many children have told me. So, yes, the safe passage has to be implemented and search and rescue measures need to be continued."
By Frank Simon OGGERSHEIM, Germany (Reuters) - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a fierce critic of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door refugee policy, and her ex-mentor Helmut Kohl agreed on Tuesday it was questionable whether Europe could continue to absorb migrants indefinitely. Orban and Kohl issued a joint statement after the right-wing Hungarian leader paid a rare private visit to the 86-year-old Kohl, architect of Germany's 1990 reunification and a major driver of European integration in the 1990s. Orban's meeting with Kohl, 86, who makes only rare public appearances and is largely wheelchair bound, stoked speculation that it was meant as a snub to Merkel and that Germany's foremost elder statesman disagrees with her course. Trying to play down talk of any such rift, the Kohl-Orban statement said they and Merkel shared the overall objective of alleviating the humanitarian emergency represented by migrants but signalled differences over how to tackle the challenge. "There is complete agreement on the goal," the two said in the statement issued by Kohl's office after the hour-long Orban visit to the conservative Christian Democrat's longtime home in Oggersheim near the Rhine river in southwestern Germany. "It is about a good future for Europe and peace in the world. The efforts of (Merkel) point in the same direction." But, they added, "how many people can Europe sensibly take in and in the end integrate? And what happens to the remaining millions of people in need around the world who cannot flee?" Critics say Merkel's decision last year to let in Syrian refugees without restriction contributed to the arrival of more than 1 million asylum-seekers in Germany - the great majority of those reaching European Union territory - in the last year. HUNGARY SLAMS DOOR TO REFUGEES By contrast, Orban's government has built a razor wire fence on Hungary's border with Serbia and Croatia to keep out mostly Muslim migrants, citing the need to help safeguard Europe's Christian civilization. In a column published on Sunday in Berlin's Tagespiegel daily, Kohl said he did not think the EU could integrate millions of refugees. "The solution lies in the affected regions. It does not lie in Europe. Europe cannot become a new home for millions of people in need around the world," he wrote. Merkel has acted of late to deter an uncontrolled influx of migrants into the EU and defuse intensifying criticism from her conservative Bavarian coalition ally and the public at large. Last week, she agreed to require migrants granted residence rights to show willingness to integrate by learning German and seeking work or see their benefits cut. Her government has also introduced steps to speed up processing of applications and deportations of those refused permission to stay. Neighbouring Austria as well as Balkan countries have also sealed their borders against undocumented migrants, cutting their overland route from Greece to Germany. The migrant flow has since ebbed and the pressure on Merkel has eased. She appeared relaxed about Orban's visit with Kohl, saying the two had known each other a long time and the talks were "sensible and useful". Orban presented Kohl with a Hungarian-language version of the former chancellor's book "Out of Concern for Europe". Kohl governed from 1982 to 1998, during which the Berlin Wall fell and Communism collapsed in eastern Europe. Merkel was his protege in the 1990s but their relations cooled after she called on the Christian Democrats (CDU) to break with their "old warhorse" over a party funding scandal. Since then, Kohl has voiced doubt about some of Merkel's policies, including her handling of the euro zone debt crisis. (Reporting by Reuters Television, Thorsten Severin and Krisztina Than in Budapest; Writing by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
By Steve Scherer ROME (Reuters) - Italy is bracing for an expected rush of boat migrants this summer as the European Union's failed relocation programme ratchets up pressure on the country's shelter system, a top immigration official said. Mario Morcone, the official in charge of managing Italy's immigration system, told Reuters that arrivals were up slightly this year over 2015, when more than 150,000 migrants came by boat, mostly from Libya. As of Monday, about 25,000 boat migrants had come to Italy, compared with just under 24,000 during the same period last year, an increase of 4.7 percent, according to the Interior Ministry. With calmer seas now favouring more crossings, Italy is trying to create 150,000 spots for asylum seekers and migrants in its shelters, where 112,700 are already housed. "It's getting more and more complicated to find places and open new immigration centres," Morcone said in his office at the Interior Ministry. According to an EU relocation programme for refugees, up to 40,000 asylum seekers from Syria, Eritrea and Iraq can be shifted to other member countries over two years to help relieve pressure on Italy, a frontline state in Europe's worst immigration crisis since World War Two. Since the plan took effect in October, however, Italy has found spots for just 560 people, Morcone said, because of a lack of solidarity from partners and the programme's focus on only the three nationalities it specifies. "Member states are offering only a few spots, the procedures are very slow, and we can relocate only Eritreans. Syrians don't come here, and nor do Iraqis," Morcone said. "On the whole, the response ... is not what had been asked for." Turkey and the EU last month sealed a controversial deal intended to halt illegal migration to Greece from Turkey in return for financial and political rewards for Ankara. The deal aims to shut down a short sea corridor that brought over 850,000 refugees and migrants to Europe last year. Countries along the so-called "Balkan route" have closed their borders to stop movement there as well. Italy is concerned that the migrant flow will shift after the agreement, with more boats coming to Italy from North Africa, and especially from Egypt. "Already three or four boats have arrived from Egypt this year," Morcone said. "Egypt could be the main worry." "Since there are people blocked in Greece, we fear that there will be a bypass either through Egypt or Albania or even from Morocco to Spain. We must wait and see how the situation evolves." Because the Mediterranean sea journey to Italy mainly consists of young people from impoverished African countries seeking a better future, Europe must develop a long-term migrant policy focused on Africa. "As long as the economic divergence between us is so high, it's impossible to convince people who suffer in some African countries not to come in Europe. Their hopes for a future lie in getting into the Schengen area." (Editing by Tom Heneghan)
Over 850 homeless people subsist around the subway stations of the capital and some 70 percent of them have been homeless for more than three years.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government quoted research from the Korea Center for City and Environment Research that there were 855 homeless people in Seoul as of 2014.

Some 554 people or 65 percent are living in the downtown districts of Jung, Yeongdeungpo, Jongno and Yongsan.

The city government said the reason why they prefer these districts is that there are underground spaces to sleep in and soup kitchens nearby. About five percent of the homeless are women. The most common place to sleep was underground spaces, followed by parks, in buildings, and in the street.

The city government is trying to persuade homeless people to sleep in shelters, but last year only 3,605 people signed up for the shelter. The city government gives homeless who live in shelters housing assistance and runs self-support programs and vocational training.
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea is likely to conduct its fifth nuclear test in the near future, possibly before its party congress in early May, a media report said on Sunday, citing South Korean government sources based on their reading of activity around the test site. The news of signs indicating the North is readying a nuclear test comes as Pyongyang is gearing up for a ruling Workers Party congress in early May, where leader Kim Jong Un is likely to boast about his achievements in building a weapons programme. The likelihood of North Korea conducting a fifth nuclear test, possibly within weeks, has increased because of a failed missile launch on Friday that was an embarrassing setback for leader Kim, South Korean officials and international experts said. "Compared to last month, the frequency of vehicle, workforce and equipment movements increased two-to-threefold recently," Yonhap News Agency said, quoting multiple government sources. The possible test, if it happens, follows a fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch in February, which led to new U.N. sanctions that have failed to halt Pyongyang's weapons programmes. South Korea's military has said Pyongyang is technically ready for an additional nuclear test, depending on its leadership's political decision. The South Korean defence ministry said it could not confirm the report but reiterated that North Korea can conduct its new nuclear test at anytime. (Reporting by Ju-min Park; Editing by Michael Perry)
By Rania El Gamal and Reem Shamseddine DOHA (Reuters) - A deal to freeze oil output by OPEC and non-OPEC producers fell apart on Sunday after Saudi Arabia demanded that Iran join in despite calls on Riyadh to save the agreement and help prop up crude prices. The development will revive oil industry fears that major producers are embarking again on a battle for market share, especially after Riyadh threatened to raise output steeply if no freeze deal were reached. Iran is also pledging to ramp up production following the lifting of Western sanctions in January, making a compromise with Riyadh almost impossible as the two fight proxy wars in Yemen and Syria. Some 18 oil nations, including non-OPEC Russia, gathered in the Qatari capital of Doha for what was expected to be the rubber-stamping of a deal - in the making since February - to stabilise output at January levels until October 2016. But OPEC's de facto leader Saudi Arabia told participants it wanted all members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to take part in the freeze, including Iran, which was absent from the talks. Tehran had refused to stabilise production, seeking to regain market share post-sanctions. After five hours of fierce debate about the wording of a communique - including between Saudi Arabia and Russia - delegates and ministers announced no deal had been reached. "We concluded we all need time to consult further," Qatar's energy minister Mohammed al-Sada told reporters. Several OPEC sources said if Iran agreed to join the freeze at the next OPEC meeting on June 2, talks with non-OPEC producers could resume. Russian oil minister Alexander Novak called the Saudi demand "unreasonable" and said he was disappointed as he had come to Doha under the impression that all sides would sign the deal instead of debating it. Novak said Russia was not shutting the door on a deal but the government would not restrain output for now. Russia is a key ally of Iran and has been defending Tehran's right to raise output post-sanctions while also supporting the Islamic Republic in many of its conflicts with Riyadh. TOUGH SAUDI STANCE The failure to reach a global deal could halt a recent recovery in oil prices. "With no deal today, markets' confidence in OPEC's ability to achieve any sensible supply balancing act is likely to diminish and this is surely bearish for the oil markets, where prices had rallied partly on expectations of a deal," said Natixis oil analyst Abhishek Deshpande. In December, OPEC failed to agree on output policy for the first time in years after Iran disagreed over a production ceiling proposed by Saudi Arabia, arguing again that it wanted to boost output post-sanctions. "Without a deal, the likelihood of markets balancing is now pushed back to mid-2017. We will see a lot of speculators getting out next week," said Deshpande, who added that prices could fall close to $30 per barrel. Brent oil has risen to nearly $45 a barrel, up 60 percent from January lows, on optimism that a deal would help ease the supply glut that has seen prices sink from levels as high as $115 hit in mid-2014. Amrita Sen of Energy Aspects said oil prices could fall below $40 on Monday in a knee-jerk reaction. "While todays lack of a freeze deal has no negative impact on balances - since Iran is really the only country likely to raise output substantially - it has a huge negative impact on sentiment especially as the deal had been hyped up so much," she said. Gary Ross, the founder and executive chairman of New York-based consultancy PIRA, said the failure to reach a deal was negative but would not have a long-lasting impact. "The market has recently moved up due to tightening balances. We see geopolitical risks to supply rising, we see U.S. production declining. In many respects, the rebalancing has already started," he said. Saudi Arabia has taken a tough stance on Iran, the only major OPEC producer to refuse to participate in the freeze. Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Bloomberg that the kingdom could quickly raise production and would restrain its output only if Iran agreed to a freeze. Iran's oil minister Bijan Zanganeh said on Saturday OPEC and non-OPEC should simply accept the reality of Iran's return to the oil market: "If Iran freezes its oil production ... it cannot benefit from the lifting of sanctions." (Reporting by Rania El Gamal and Reem Shamseddine; Additional reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin, Sam Wilkin, Katie Paul and Tom Finn; Writing by Dmitry Zhdannikov and Andrew Torchia; Editing by Dale Hudson)
By Rania El Gamal DOHA (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's top oil official, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said Riyadh could boost output immediately and almost double it long term, in comments that could threaten the signing of a global production freeze deal planned for Sunday. The second in line to the throne of the world's largest crude exporter added in remarks to Bloomberg that the kingdom would only restrain its output if all other major producers, including Iran, agree to freeze their production. His remarks appeared to cast doubt on a freeze plan to be discussed by producers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and non-OPEC member countries such as Russia on Sunday in the Qatari capital Doha. Iran, a fellow OPEC member but also Saudi Arabia's regional rival, said it would not participate in Sunday's meeting as it could not accept proposals to freeze production. "We have told some OPEC and non-OPEC members like Russia that they should accept the reality of Iran's return to the oil market," Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh was quoted as saying by the oil ministry's news agency SHANA. "If Iran freezes its oil production at the February level, it means it cannot benefit from the lifting of sanctions." Yet OPEC delegates told Reuters there was still a chance for a deal on Sunday if participants can find a compromise - and avoid a repeat of the last OPEC meeting in December where Iran and Saudi Arabia clashed over output policy. The fact that Tehran's stance has not torpedoed the convening of the meeting suggests fellow producers may be prepared to tolerate a rise in Iran's output, provided there is no new price rout. The freeze proposal has helped oil prices to rise over 60 percent from a 12-year low near $27 a barrel hit in January, despite little change to the market's supply glut. "I am optimistic," acting Kuwaiti oil minister Anas Khalid al-Saleh said on Saturday regarding prospects for a deal. Several sources told Reuters there was support among the producers, including another OPEC delegate who said: "I still think there will be a deal." Delegates said a number of approaches were being discussed and there was talk of setting up a committee to monitor compliance. "We have a deal," one senior oil source told Reuters, referring to a proposal backed by several producers for an output freeze at January levels that would last until October. MARKET SHARE Producers have struggled for nearly two years with low oil prices and an oversupplied market but have been loath to cut output as that would cede market share to rivals. Sanctions imposed by the United States and other world powers were lifted in January in return for Tehran agreeing to long-term curbs on its nuclear program. Prince Mohammed said Saudi Arabia would cap its market share at about 10.3 million to 10.4 million barrels a day (bpd), if producers agree to the freeze. "If all major producers dont freeze production, we will not freeze production," he said. The prince, who has emerged as Saudi Arabias leading economic decision-maker, said Riyadh could increase output to 11.5 million barrels a day immediately and go to 12.5 million in six to nine months "if we wanted to". If the kingdom chose to increase investment in its oil industry, production capacity could be increased to 20 million bpd, he said in remarks made on Thursday and published on Saturday. "I dont suggest that we should produce more, but we can produce more," said the prince. It is not clear to which extent his comments reflect the thinking of the Saudi leadership and king. They contrast with mostly conciliatory statements from market players in recent weeks. Iran's production has already surpassed 3.5 million bpd and exports are set to reach 2 million bpd next month, Iran's deputy oil minister was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA. (Reporting by Rania El Gamal, Katie Paul, Parisa Hafezi, Tom Finn, Sam Wilkin, Reem Shamseddine; writing by William Maclean; editing by Jason Neely and Ralph Boulton)
PRETORIA (Reuters) - Disgraced Olympic and Paralympic gold medalist Oscar Pistorius will face sentencing in June following his conviction for murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine's Day in 2013. "The matter is postponed to the 13th of June 2016, and it will be heard until the 17th of June 2016," High Court Judge Aubrey Ledwaba said. Pistorius, known as "Blade Runner" for the carbon fiber prosthetic blades he used to race, faces a minimum 15-year jail sentence. The Supreme Court in December upgraded the 29-year-old Paralympian's sentence on appeal to murder from "culpable homicide" - South Africa's equivalent of manslaughter, for which he had received a five-year sentence. In March, the Constitutional Court, the country" top court, rejected Pistorius' right to appeal against his conviction for the murder. (Reporting by Zandi Shabalala; Editing by James Macharia)
By Elaine Lies TOKYO (Reuters) - Aftershocks rattled southwestern Japan on Friday after a strong quake the night before killed nine people, injured at least 1,000 and cut power and water across the region, forcing the temporary shutdown of several auto and electronics factories. By afternoon, more than 130 aftershocks had hit the area around the city of Kumamoto in the wake of the initial 6.4 magnitude quake the night before. Officials said the frequency was tapering off but the risk of further strong aftershocks will remain for about a week. While the magnitude of Thursday's quake was much lower than that of the 9.0 March 11, 2011 quake that touched off a massive tsunami and nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima, the intensity was similar because it struck on land and at a much shallower depth. "We managed to huddle into a space, that's why we were saved," one man told NHK national television after he and his family were rescued from their collapsed house two hours after the quake hit. "We're all safe, that's what counts." More than 44,000 people initially fled to schools and community centers, some spending the night outside after the first quake hit around 9:30 p.m. Roads cracked, houses crumbled, and tiles cascaded from the roof of the 400-year-old Kumamoto Castle in the center of the city. Among those pulled from the wreckage was an eight-month-old baby girl, wrapped in a blanket and passed hand to hand by firefighters. Several hospitals had to evacuate patients. Japanese stocks ended down 0.4 percent, with the impact of the quake limited primarily to regional shares that could experience some direct impact. Regional utility Saibu Gas Co Ltd <9536.T> finished 2.7 percent lower. Several companies, including Honda Motor Corp <7267.T>, suspended operations at plants in the area. More than 3,000 troops, police and firemen were dispatched to the area from around Japan, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said more would be sent if needed. "We will do everything in our power to ensure the safety of local residents," Abe told a parliamentary committee. Most of the dead came from Mashiki, a town of around 34,000 people near the epicenter of the quake, where firefighters battled a blaze late on Thursday. Daylight showed splintered houses under tiled roofs and an apartment building whose ground floor was pulverized, where two people died. "I want to go home, but we couldn't do anything there," one boy at an evacuation center told TBS television as he bounced a baby in his arms. Though the intensity of Thursday's quake on the Japanese scale matched that of the March 2011 quake that left nearly 20,000 dead, the absence of a tsunami helped keep the death toll down. Service on the Shinkansen superfast train in Kyushu was halted after one train derailed, and highways were closed after some sections collapsed. About 12,200 households were without electricity as of 12 p.m. (0500 GMT), according to Kyushu Electric Power Co Inc <9508.T>, while some 58,000 lacked water. The Nuclear Regulation Authority said there were no irregularities at three nuclear plants on the southern major island of Kyushu and nearby Shikoku. Sony Corp <6758.T>, Mitsubishi Electric Corp <6503.T> and tire maker Bridgestone Corp <5108.T> also suspended operations at factories in the area. The 2011 quake temporarily crippled part of Japan's auto supply chain, but some companies have since adjusted the industry's "Just in Time" production philosophy in a bid to limit any repeat of the costly disruption. (Additional reporting by Joshua Hunt, Naomi Tajitsu and Tokyo newsroom; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
By Joseph Nasr and Michael Nienaber BERLIN (Reuters) - Turkish officials at Istanbul airport detained and denied entry on Tuesday to a German public television journalist who arrived from Cairo and planned to travel to the Turkey-Syria border. Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was working to ensure he is set free. Volker Schwenck, who works for public broadcaster ARD, announced his detention on Twitter and posted a picture of an entry ban letter given to him by authorities with the headline in Turkish and English: "Inadmissible Passenger Notification Report." "I am committed of course to ensure that the journalist's ability to work is reinstated fast," Merkel said during a news conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "And we are following this and it is naturally a source of some concern." ARD broadcaster said in a statement that Turkish officials gave no explanation to Schwenck why he was not allowed to enter the country. In his tweet, Schwenck suggested he was detained because of his profession, saying: "... am journalist. A problem?" A Turkish official confirmed a German journalist had been detained and would soon be deported from Turkey. The journalist had deliberately attempted to contravene a blacklist by entering the country, the official said, without giving more details about the blacklisting. The German Foreign Ministry said diplomats were in contact with the journalist as well as with Turkish authorities. The incident is another test of Germany's relations with Turkey, which have been strained this month by Ankara's insistence that Germany prosecute a satirist who mocked President Tayyip Erdogan on television. Erdogan has demanded that Germany press charges against Jan Boehmermann after he recited a crude poem about the Turkish leader in a show on another public broadcaster, ZDF. Merkel last week agreed to allow prosecutors to pursue the case against Boehmermann under a section of the German criminal code that prohibits insults against foreign leaders. The European Union, United States and rights groups have criticised the Turkish government for what they say is its attempt to bridle the press. The German media and public have criticised Merkel's decision to allow prosecutors to pursue the case against Boehmermann, accusing her of failing to protect free speech. (Reporting by Markus Wacket and Andreas Rinke; Additional reporting by Orhan Coskun in Ankara; Writing by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Alison Williams)
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's military returned fire into an Islamic State-controlled region of Syria on Tuesday after three rockets landed in the Turkish border town of Kilis injuring some people, a Turkish security official said. Kilis, just across the border from a region of Syria controlled by Islamic State militants, has come under repeated rocket fire in recent weeks and the Turkish military has responded by returning fire. Four people were killed on Monday when five rockets landed in the town. (Reporting by Orhan Coskun; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
KIEV (Reuters) - A Ukrainian court on Monday sentenced two Russian soldiers captured last May to 14 years in prison for their involvement in the pro-Russian separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine. Russia denies sending troops to help the rebels and says Alexander Alexandrov and his commander, Captain Yevgeny Yerofeyev, had quit their special forces unit to take part in the fighting on their own initiative. Ahead of the court session, Yerofeyev's lawyer said the verdict was a foregone conclusion because of Ukraine's wish to exchange the servicemen for Ukrainians detained in Russia, including pilot Nadezhda Savchenko. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko later said he had talked with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin about the Russian soldiers and Savchenko. "Ukraine calls on Russia to free Nadezhda Savchenko immediately," Poroshenko was quoted as saying in a statement. The soldiers, who have found themselves pawns in the most tense confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cold War, were found guilty of preparing an "act of terror" and illegally crossing into occupied Ukrainian territory, among other charges. Their lawyers said they had not yet decided whether to appeal the verdict. Their conviction follows the sentencing of Savchenko to 22 years in a Russian prison in March, a verdict the United States called a "blatant disregard for the principles of justice". Savchenko, 34, found guilty of involvement in the killing of two Russian journalists during the separatist conflict, has become a symbol of the deep division between the one-time allies following Ukraine's pivot towards Europe. She is a national hero in Ukraine, but many in Russia see her as a Ukrainian nationalist with the blood of civilians on her hands. Putin and Poroshenko agreed that Ukraine's Consul General in Rostov-on-Don would be granted access to Savchenko soon, the Kremlin said. (Reporting by Natalia Zinets and Alexei Kalmykov; Additional reporting by Pavel Polityuk; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Angus MacSwan and John Stonestreet)
KIEV (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Tuesday he and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin had agreed a framework for a deal to secure the release of Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko from a 22-year jail sentence in Russia. The sentencing of two captured Russian servicemen in Ukraine on Monday fuelled speculation that they might be swapped for Savchenko, 34, who was found guilty of involvement in the killing of two Russian journalists in 2014 during Ukraine's separatist conflict. She has denied any involvement. "Yesterday I initiated a conversation with Putin and based on preliminary preparations it seems to me we have managed to agree on a certain algorithm to free Nadezhda," Poroshenko told journalists. The sentencing of the Russian soldiers "opens certain possibilities of initiating a swap. But I strongly urge no speculation about a timeframe for (her) return or future steps." In her homeland, Savchenko is a regarded as a national hero and symbol of resistance to Russia, which annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in March 2014 after a Moscow-backed president was toppled during street protests in Kiev. Russia has also backed separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. But many in Russia see her as a Ukrainian nationalist with the blood of civilians on her hands. She was captured by pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine in June 2014 at the height of fighting there between the Kiev government's forces and Russian-backed separatists. At her trial in Donetsk in Russia earlier this year she was accused of directing artillery fire that killed two Russian television journalists. Poroshenko said he had spoken to Savchenko by telephone and that she had agreed to end a hunger strike she has been observing on-and-off since late last year. Speculation that a deal might be afoot increased with the sentencing of two Russian soldiers, Alexander Alexandrov and his commander, Captain Yevgeny Yerofeyev, to 14 years in jail. The pair were captured almost a year ago in eastern Ukraine and subsequently charged with preparing "an act of terror". Russia denies sending members of its military to help the rebels and says Alexandrov and Yerofeyev had quit their special forces unit to take part in Ukraine's conflict on their own initiative. Last week Putin said he was in touch with Ukraine's leaders regarding the Savchenko case, but that "it's better not to get ahead of ourselves." On Monday Poroshenko said Putin had agreed to grant Ukraine's Consul General in Rostov-on-Don access to Savchenko. One of her lawyers said the diplomat had visited the prisoner on Tuesday. (Reporting by Natalia Zinets and; Alexei Kalmykov; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
uruguay marijuana selfie

Matilde Campodonico/AP

The movement to legalize marijuana just took a big step forward in Uruguay. The second smallest country in South America unveiled plans to open the world's first state owned and operated weed dispensaries later this year, The Guardian's Alex Marshall reports.

Two cannabis producers have been commissioned to grow product, which will go on sale in pharmacies starting this summer. Residents  medicinal patients and recreational tokers, alike  will be able to buy up to 40 grams of pot a month for about $1 per gram.

But regulation comes with a catch. Buyers must enroll in a government register and provide a thumbprint to prove their identity, according to The Guardian.

Uruguay effectively legalized the drug back in December 2013 under the administration of former president Jose Mujica. People over the age of 18 could grow marijuana at home or smoke at a cannabis club, though the plant wasn't yet sold in stores.

The legislation was intended to squash cartels who were importing weed from Paraguay.

Uruguay's President Jose Mujica

Matilde Campodonico/AP

"If we legalize it, we think that we will spoil the market (for drug traffickers) because we are going to sell it for cheaper than it is sold on the black market," Mujica told CNN in an interview in 2012. "And we are going to have people identified."

The idea of a government registry is a cause for concern for some cannabis activists. They worry future governments may leverage this user database for sinister purposes.

Still, regulation brings many benefits. Marijuana users will now have access to product that is grown safely and responsibly. It also enables the government to keep the cost down by stripping criminal organizations of their control.

By instituting an age restriction, the policy may even curb marijuana use among young people. When the Uruguay government raised the legal age to buy tobacco in 2005, the smoking rate among young people dropped from 32% to 12%.

Roughly 100 pharmacies in Uruguay will begin stocking bud this July.

NOW WATCH: Inside the insane marijuana mansion party thrown by Instagram's 'Marijuana Don'
We can help you make sense of the agribusiness industry, extending from chemicals and fertilizers used as inputs into agriculture, to the commodities, food and by-products that are an output to farming, with policy and regulation applied at every step of the value chain.
KKR has agreed to buy into seeds provider Advanta Enterprises in a deal which values the business at about $2.25bn.
US private equity major Thomas H Lee Partners is said to be the leading bidder for Canadian bakery goods maker Give and
We meet a couple who have not been put off by the problems on Turkey's borders.

Waves of excitement rippled through Izmir on Turkey's west coast in November - it emerged that Hollywood golden couple 'Brangelina' have bought a $2.6-million beachside home there. In fact, Brad and Angelina's purchase was welcomed nationally and came at a good time. The news broke just as Turkey's popular AKP party won back a majority in the general election, the combination of events injecting some needed confidence into the country's property market.

Sandwiched between Europe and the crisis-ridden Middle East, Turkey has lost some of its shine among British property-buyers in 2015. However, while it's hard to ignore the country's border with Syria and largely Islamic nation, those that know Turkey well believe there's nothing to fear purchasing in the west of the country.

"People at work did ask if we weren't worried buying in Turkey, given the situation in Syria," said Kevan Paradine, who bought a Turkish property with partner Lynda Catling. "But the distance between the problems in the east and the resorts in the west, like Dalyan where we bought, is huge - it's like comparing two different countries. We've always been aware of the political situation and were very comfortable buying when we did. We've never seen any signs of the problems when we've been out there."

Kevan and Lynda, who live in Cranfield in Bedfordshire, completed on their semi-detached villa on 31st December 2014. They discovered Dalyan four years ago, having enjoyed holidays in different resorts in Turkey for a number of years previously.

"Immediately it felt different to other places we'd been to in Turkey," said Kevan. "Dalyan is really a working town that caters for tourists, with low-rise development and just a few hotels. So its way of life is very Turkish, with an innocent family feel about it, which we like."

Nestled in a river delta, Dalyan is still a busy fishing and farming hub. Much of the surrounding countryside, dotted with cotton fields and fruit groves, is a designated conservation area, meaning there are tight building restrictions in the town, including on the height of property. A 40-minute boat trip downstream, where the Dalyan River meets the sea, is Iztuzu beach, a protected turtle breeding sanctuary also known as Turtle beach.

The area has history too - facing Dalyan across the river is the ancient city of Kaunos with its Rock Tombs. Meanwhile, upstream is Lake Koycegiz, with its beaches, as well as thermal springs at Sultaniyeand the popular Dalyan mud baths.

Easily won over by the area, by 2014 Kevan and Lynda had decided to buy a second home there and began researching what they could purchase on the Internet.

"We earmarked around eight properties we liked the look of and last November went out for a week to view them," said Lynda. "One we saw was just right so we made an offer and everything moved very swiftly after that. The estate agent Sunray Property managed the purchase for us and actually made the process enjoyable. Before we flew home they had helped us to pay a deposit, open a Turkish bank account, get our Turkish tax ID and grant power of attorney to a local lawyer, who completed on our behalf the following month."

Kevan and Lynda paid 80,000 in sterling for their property, which came furnished and is located on a quiet road in the Metliner area of the town. They have three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a terrace, balconies and a swimming pool that they share with just one neighbour.

In the 11 months since buying, the couple have visited their property three times and expect the three adult children they have between them to make use of it too.

To reach their villa, Kevan and Lynda usually fly out of Luton to Dalaman, which is around 30 minutes' drive from Dalyan. They've also had success renting out their property to holidaymakers. It seems not everyone has been put off visiting Turkey.

search property in turkey


European stock indexes closed higher on Tuesday, as a sharp tick-up in oil prices and commodity stocks boosted sentiment, along with an encouraging set of corporate updates.

The pan-European STOXX 600 closed around 1.4 percent higher provisionally, with all industry sectors in positive territory. The FTSEuroforst 300 Index hit a three-month high during the session.

London's FTSE 100 index gained around 0.8 percent by the market close, lifted by the outperformance of U.K.-listed mining stocks. The index hit a four-month high during the session.

France's CAC ended provisionally up 1.2 percent, while the German DAX jumped around 2.2 percent after positive ZEW economic sentiment data for the country was released. The ZEW survey for April showed sentiment at 11.2 points, compared to 4.3 in March, suggesting fears over the global economy were easing.

Basic resources stocks were Europe's top performers on Tuesday. Glencore was among the biggest gainers, ending around 7.7 percent higher on the day after Societe Generale raised its price target on the stock. Oil prices recovered after Monday's drop, with a Kuwait oil workers' strike subduing production. Brent and U.S. crude traded at around $44 and $41 per barrel respectively.

The rally in crude boosted oil stocks such as Tullow Oil and Statoil .
Shopping for car insurance, like many other types of shopping, has largely moved online, a new J.D. Power study finds, but it adds that while consumers shop for insurance online, many still make the actual purchase through an agent.

The study found that 74% of shoppers use insurer websites or aggregators for obtaining quotes and researching information. While nearly half of customers obtain a quote via insurer websites, only 25% actually purchase their policy online; 50% close through an agent and 22% phone a call center.

While many customers want to shop online, they often still want to talk to someone when they buy their insurance to make sure they are getting the right coverage or have questions about their policy answered, said Hoeg. Insurers need to focus on the delicate balance of providing an easy shopping experience while providing product differentiation and professional service.

Rankings

Erie Insurance and Liberty Mutual tied for first place in providing a satisfying purchase experience, each with a score of 853. This marks the fourth consecutive year Erie Insurance has ranked highest in the study.

The Hartford ranks third (850); American Family fourth (845); and Automobile Club Group fifth (840).

Now in its 10th year, the J.D. Power U.S. Insurance Shopping Study measures auto insurance shopping, purchase behavior, and purchase experience satisfaction among customers who recently purchased insurance.

The study found that direct premiums written increased by approximately 4.7% to $199 billion in 2015, with much of that growth coming from new business generated by direct writers.

Direct writers have invested heavily in digital channels to increase the functionality and ease of using their websites, which has clearly created an advantage for direct distribution relative to traditional agency distribution in some respects and has supported agency distribution in others, said Greg Hoeg, vice president of U.S. insurance operations at J.D. Power.

Fewer shoppers

Hoeg said the challenge for insurance companies is that there are fewer consumers shopping around for insurance at the moment. Many companies have kept premiums flat or even lowered them, giving consumers fewer reasons to look for cheaper policies.

In addition, customers who do switch are saving an average of $356 on their annual premiums, less than the $388 in savings for those who switched in 2015.

With more price competition and smaller savings, there simply is not as much motivation for most customers to switch, said Hoeg. Many policyholders see insurance as a price-differentiated commodity, and shoppers are opting to remain with their incumbent insurer as they find the savings offered by competitors is not as great as they had expected, or as much as they saved the last time they switched.

The 2016 U.S. Insurance Shopping Study is based on responses from more than 17,000 shoppers who requested an auto insurance price quote from at least one competitive insurer in the past 9 months and includes more than 50,000 unique customer evaluations of insurers.
Widely publicized data breaches at major retailers have opened everyones eyes to the threat of fraud on their credit and debit card accounts. Many consumers can relate personal experiences as the unfortunate victims of fraudsters who stole their payment card data for illegal use in unauthorized transactions. At best, the impact to the cardholder is inconvenience; at worst, the effect of fraud can be devastating and long lasting, especially if identity theft is involved.

Fraudsters follow the money. And consumers may not realize that the bounty for todays payments pirates extends beyond credit, debit and prepaid cards. Thieves in the digital age target the treasures in any payment account, and it is up to the vigilance and technology of the consumers financial institution to protect their members accounts  all their accounts  from unauthorized access and misuse. Fraud never sleeps, and that means a financial institutions risk management measures must never rest. Members expect and deserve maximum protection from harm. It is an implied promise of the service experience.

Here is a story that will alarm you on one leveland positively reassure and make you quite comfortable on another.

Greenville Federal Credit Union (Greenville, S.C.; assets $200 million) is a long-time PSCU member-owner (since 1998) that offers credit card and bill pay processing services to its members through PSCU. In late 2015, someone unlawfully attempted to process fraudulent online bill payments using a members checking deposit account. The fraudster scheduled nearly two dozen payments totaling close to $300,000 to be paid to a variety of bogus payees, or accomplices. With the fraud scheme underway, the member was completely unaware of the attack on his bill pay account.

Fraud is stealthy and silent that way. But thankfully in this case, so is fraud prevention.

PSCUs bill pay fraud detection platform looks at every scheduled bill payment from every bill pay subscriber and evaluates the transaction for its fraud potential. In this case, the fraud detection system immediately determined the members scheduled payments were at odds with the members previous bill payment history in terms of the amounts and the payees involved. The fraud detection software automatically cancelled the scheduled payments, and the credit union was able to notify the member of the brazen takeover attempt on his account. The proactive response of the system and risk analytics averted nearly $300,000 in fraudulent payments.

We were alerted of the bill pay fraud attempt by PSCUs fraud prevention team, noted Tommy Lentz, Member Support Manager for Greenville FCU. They advised us that one of our members had been targeted for bill pay fraud with 20 payments totaling $298,000. The $298,000 of fraud was going to unknown individuals located in different states. The payments were scheduled to be processed overnight. PSCU immediately and accurately identified the payments as fraudulent. PSCU canceled the payments on our members behalf. We were then able to advise the member to change all passwords and close the account. Thanks to that vigilance, neither the member nor our credit union incurred any losses.

Greenvilles members conduct about 13,000 online bill payments per month worth about $3 million. We regularly perform fraud monitoring on our own, but we also partner with PSCUs fraud management team to help closely monitor our members activity for possible fraud. Their fraud prevention technology allows us to focus more of our energy on relationship building with our members. Thats real value and a big reason were owners in the PSCU cooperative.

Lentz further remarked, PSCUs fraud department is very responsive and makes the necessary adjustments to their fraud detection policies to stay ahead of the curve. PSCUs fraud detection and prevention is one of those specialty areas where additional technology and resources can really help credit unions reduce fraud losses and at the same time increase member satisfaction with our services.

PSCU provides 24/7 fraud protection for its bill pay subscribers free of charge to credit unions. It is part of our commitment to ensuring the best possible service experience for members, said Mike Williams, SVP, Account Management for PSCU. The last thing we want our member-owner credit unions and their members to worry about is the threat of fraud on their accounts. As our owners partner in risk management, we work hard to minimize their members exposure to fraud.
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Quashing the bill of Rights, denying prisoners and patients the right to refuse toxic medications, removing questions of mental illness from the courts to special 'health professional' courts full of unelected people many of whom receive drug company kickbacks.... these are some of the provisions of a bill introduced by Republican congressman Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania.



GOP Congressman Tim Murphy of PA Seeks To Criminalize Mental IllnessPennsylvanians have the chance to vote out this tool of animal vivisecting, pricegouging, toxin producing drug cartels in November. Congressman Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania wouldremove clients accused of mental illness from regular courts and drag them intocourts run by psychiatrists and psychologists, the priests of international pharmaceutical cartels. who receive kickbacks for prescribing antidepressant drugs which cause tardifdyskinesia, which must carry warning labels that they can cause homicide or suicide.He would remove the acknowledged constitutional right of patients to refuse toxicmedications He also seeks to deny those suspected of 'mental illness' access to the courts, reminiscent of the Stalinist form of political punishment.. Haldol causes tardivedyskinesia or permanent shaking. Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and other 'antidepressants' have been correlated in copious studies to homicide, suicide, and random acts of violence. They cause weight gain and impotence as well. Every 'medication' given has serious toxic side effects. Ativan and navane are highly addictive and have been correlated to suicide. Nearly all of these drugs are outrageously expensive as well.Republican Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in 1990 wrote that "an inmate's interests are adequately protected, and perhaps better served, by allowing the decision to medicate to be made by medical professionals rather than a judge." (These 'medical professionals' are not elected, often receive kickbacks from drug companies, and become used to the great power of those who can lock others up.)a national day of action was held to oppose Murphy's draconian bill'Washington's horrible mental health legislation'More opposition to the forced and expensive provisions of the Murphy billLegal fallacies of 'antipsychotic' drugs14th Amendment: the right to refuse antipsychotic drugsTo contact senators and representatives 202 224 3121Poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen sings of his own torture in a psychiatric ward in his song The Tower Of Song(thank you to SV for passing this along)
Oakland proposal to redefine affordable housing harms the poor tenantsrule [at] yahoo.com) by Lynda Carson

Redefining the definition of affordable housing, and transferring $800,000 in funds from the affordable housing trust fund to middle class income earners making as much as $110,350 a year, is an obscene way to ignore the fact that Oakland is in the midst of a housing crisis!
Rodrigo Dutertes authoritarian vision is no way forward for the Philippines.

This election season, candidates for the Philippine presidency [1] have raised barely a word about the minimum wage, land reform, inequality, or climate change. While recent contests in Latin America have pressured even conservative politicians to pay lip service to socially progressive causes, in the Philippines the discussion has shifted so far to the right, there is no room for pretense.Among the choices are the current administrations Liberal Party frontrunner, Mar Roxas, who promises business as usual, and Vice President Jejomar Binay, who proposes an even more aggressive suite of neoliberal economic reforms, and himself faces a round of corruption charges.The emergence of Miriam Defensor Santiago and her chosen running mate, Bongbong Marcos [2], son of the former dictator, show that history repeats itself in this country in farcical ways. Then theres Senator Grace Poe  perhaps the sanest bet  who, like her father before her, risks being kicked out of the presidential race entirely over questions of her Filipino citizenship.With little principled, issue-based politics, Philippine elections rapidly take on the character of a celebrity showdown.Except that this time, there is a wild card  Davao city mayor Rodrigo Rody Duterte [3].Part of his agenda: the declaration of a revolutionary government [4] that would strengthen the states security apparatus to cleanse the nation of its undesirables. Duterte speaks openly of public executions and granting amnesty to police officers found guilty of human rights violations. He has long been known for his support of vigilante death squads responsible for at least a thousand extrajudicial killings over the past decade [5].Human rights groups have repeatedly denounced what has become something of a model for other mayors across the country, whose targets [6] consist of an assortment of petty criminals, drug addicts, human traffickers, and drug lords, but also journalists, farmers, trade unionists, children, and the working poor.Dutertes revolution promises a quick fix, bypassing an onerous liberal democratic system to enact sweeping reforms against a rentier state whose institutions have long been subordinated to corrupt vested interests.In the parlance of the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), whose leadership is an ardent supporter of Duterte [7], the nation suffers under bureaucrat capitalism, entrenched by the countrys colonial history and a crony system facilitated, ironically, by the Marcos dictatorship  a return to which many of Dutertes fans aspire for.He reserves his strongest attacks for the nations landlord class, a vaguely defined sugar bloc  a reference to the current presidents family and the administrations hand-picked successor, Mar Roxas. Never mind the fact that these clans have long ago departed from a reliance on sugar cultivation, and now have diversified monopolies in media, commercial real estate, privatized public utilities, and the commercial conglomerates that Duterte does not speak against.Feeding off the publics desire for security, he poses a simplistic war against a variety of scapegoats, from rice smugglers and corrupt government officials to drug addicts. For the failures of the current political system, he suggests concentrating executive power to clean up house through what can only be assumed would be a transitional dictatorship toward the introduction of a federal-parliamentary system.Yet for all his radical posturing, his is a schizophrenic platform riding on the sentiments of voters desperate for change.While he speaks of rule of law, his interpretation of the constitution is selective at best and manipulative at worst, with no qualms about rejecting habeas corpus and supporting summary executions. While he speaks of challenging elites, he also calls them friends [8], and epitomizes the double standards of the Philippine judicial system  advocating the death penalty for petty criminals but a heros burial for former dictator Ferdinand Marcos.While he calls himself a man of the Left, [9] even a socialist, his positions on economic issues, exposed in a 2015 Asia CEO Forum [10], include promises to ensure stability for business investors, not-so-veiled threats to extinguish the legislature [11], and guarantees of a more efficient bureaucracy with streamlined processing of business permits and lower taxes. To great applause, he concluded with the remark, good governance is good business. [12]More recently  in a political campaign where murder has been openly endorsed the most times in the countrys history  he has threatened to kill trade unions that threaten corporations [13].Elsewhere, Duterte has spoken of mega-infrastructure projects as a solution to Manilas traffic woes, to be financed with billions of dollars in foreign loans. Less transparent are his connections with elites in his home province of Davao, who have ties with Mindanaos unique political ecology of conflict. There, where drugs, arms, the Maoist insurgency, and a legal economy of large-scale mining and logging feed off each other and prosper under the protection of that regions most powerful political clans.An unabashed womanizer, he claims to support LGBT rights [14] and denounces labor contractualization [15] if only because it harms Filipino skills  another aspect of a contradictory platform that finds him allies from both left-leaning NGOs and business groups.This, in sum, is Dutertes revolution. One that promises to deal not with a system where capital, state violence, and corruption converge to reproduce a chaotic political landscape, but to deal with its aftereffects through a vigilante government and a militarized war on petty crime. A vision of capitalism with Filipino characteristics, in other words, where a neoliberal economy and political authoritarianism combine with the utmost efficiency.Bloody RepercussionsExcept that a one-man revolution isnt a revolution  its a dictatorship [16], a dictatorship Duterte has openly endorsed as the only solution to the Philippiness problems. Despite all this, he is overwhelmingly popular  especially among urban residents in the capital of Manila  if recent surveys are to be believed [17].For factions of the bourgeoisie [18], Duterte represents a better bargain for those who feel they have benefited less from the fruits of the nations recent economic growth than leading elites and transnational corporations. Capitalism in the particularly virulent and exploitative form that it takes in economies like the Philippines features mostly jobless growth where the most profitable investments are not those in long-term, employment-generating industries but in quick, speculative real estate, construction, and the extractive sector.Persistent low wages and a consequently weak consumer base concentrates capital in politically well-connected classes that benefit from choice government contracts and captive markets, in a cronyism where oligopolies have their hands in virtually every industry imaginable, from water and privatized hospitals to malls, major media networks, and telecommunications.At a time of regional economic integration [19], Duterte seems something of a throwback to the days of protectionism, offering assurances to capitalists lower on the totem pole of a government better able to promote domestic competition while providing some shelter against transnational capital. At the same time, he appears committed to an economic reorientation toward China [20].For middle-class professionals aspiring to higher incomes and better lifestyles while also fearful of the lower classes, amid increasing awareness of stark income inequalities, he promises security and social discipline, income tax cuts, and a more efficient government bureaucracy.For working-class voters largely excluded from promises of inclusive development, he projects the image of a straight-talking figure who stands not only for the marginalized but also for the rural poor, with a thick provincial accent to boot, from regions long bereft of political representation in the highest office of government.Perhaps Dutertes winning edge derives from years of mastery of the delicate balancing act required in the management of the testy politics characteristic of the nations war-torn southern frontier. Or perhaps hes just another example of an anti-political candidate in an election season otherwise shorn of meaningful political hope.Or the fact that, really, there is no alternative.Like every demagogue, he has a way of sounding good to every possible audience, selecting his scapegoats carefully, denying his intention to run for president until the very last moment, and even warning people against voting him with its potentially bloody repercussions [21].Yet it is not Duterte himself that is so frightening, but the willingness of the majority to fall for his message  a phenomenon echoed elsewhere, from the rise of far-right parties in Europe to Donald Trump in the United States.In the minds of many, Duterte is associated with Davao City, a place oddly compared to Singapore, a mascot transplanted to a country with an entirely different historical, political, and economic context, and fed by the illusion that its success (clean streets, low crime rates) might be replicated nationwide. In a similar way, Duterte is compared with a benevolent dictator in the figure of Lee Kuan Yew [22] or Ferdinand Marcos.While martial lawera nostalgia is nothing new, what is new in the revival of the cult of the strongman is the fervor with which a new dictatorship is openly espoused as a viable alternative. What escapes most is the fact that the martial law era coincided with a period of state-led developmentalism [23], a functioning welfare state, and moderate industrialization in the region more broadly, fed by a short-lived postwar boom that allowed some space for progressive economic policies. It occurred not because of the Marcos dictatorship, but in spite of it.Those who would have us return to a golden age that never was forget that Dutertes narratives of stability and security echo, in a different way, the current Aquino administrations gestures toward good governance and of restoring trust in the state. They speak to an increasingly fragile political climate and a realization by some factions of the nations elites of their tenuous hold on legitimacy.If rule by a pseudo-democratic oligarchy has failed us, we are told, perhaps one-man rule is a viable alternative.Duterte and the Philippine LeftDutertes rise raises new questions about the emergence of a new fascism [24] in the Global South. The Philippine elections reveal a vacuum in public consciousness, where the best hope is for the Left to tell a different story. But far from shifting the terms of political debate, support for Duterte has come from unusual quarters.The Maoist CPPs contradictory radicalism [25] oscillates between a commitment to seize and smash the state through armed struggle and collaboration with the political establishment, a strategy that has found it more than once lock arms with its most backward elements.Recently the pendulum appears to have swung again. CPP chairman Joma Sison notes the partys long history of engagement with the Davao mayor, not least because of his ability to negotiate between the military and the CPPs armed wing, the New Peoples Army (NPA), maintaining the political balance of power in the region.While Sison claims the CPP refuses to support the legitimacy of the electoral system, the partys front organizations have in the past openly endorsed presidential candidates in the hope of joining their tickets. Having first back Grace Poes bid for the presidency [26], following the belated announcement of Dutertes run, they now believe they can benefit from his popularity.Crucially, they see in him hope for a viable peace process, presumably through a settlement around the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) twelve-point program. Considering Dutertes own recent positions on economic development, it is difficult to see this bearing much fruit.Indeed, Dutertes authoritarianism mirrors that of the CPP, which has become something of the reverse image of the state violence it ritually condemns. In what is now the longest-running communist insurgency in Asia, the CPPs peoples war has claimed thousands of lives and sapped energy, time, and resources from alternative means of political mobilization.In denial about major defeats in its armed struggle, it also risks losing the long and much harder battle for hegemony.On the legal front, the broader networks around the CPP-NDFP leave much to be desired when it comes to raising political consciousness or putting forward an inspiring alternative to the status quo.Local struggles, from agrarian reform efforts by grassroots peasant organizations to factory strikes to anti-slum demolition and anti-mining movements by the urban poor and indigenous communities, are subordinated to the partys overarching goals. The objective is less to win these campaigns than to maximize the opportunity to recruit activists, with the possibility of convincing them to join the armed struggle.The bulk of the CPPs presidential campaign interventions, moreover, consist of slandering candidates in largely personal terms, often at the expense of a deeper, more structural analysis.Overall, one is left with the impression that the party (which claims it alone is the Left) overwhelmingly seeks to be known for what it is not, and whom it is against, rather than what it is for. In Filipino, there is a special word for the fatigue that comes with repetitive consumption, and it applies as much to the CPPs brand of political discourse as it does to food: umay.It is for these reasons and more that the CPP, as currently constituted, is a barrier to a new socialist politics in the Philippines.Nevertheless it remains the largest organized force on the Left, with a membership consisting of trade unions and mass organizations that actively campaign on key issues. It is therefore difficult to find a way forward unless the CPP and its supporters come to a critical assessment of the impasse to which they have arrived, introduce democracy among its ranks, and accept the reality that it can never have a monopoly on the narrative of social change.Above all, a new vision for the Philippine left requires a new set of narratives for a democratic, pluralist alternative, in the best tradition of internationalism, principled political engagement, and solidarity.This means being fully committed to restoring faith not in the state, the party, the nation, or in a strongman, but in democracy (of a fundamentally different kind), in the ability of the people to hold the powerful to account, in the transition toward a society that runs along fundamentally different lines.After all, isnt that everything the Left is supposed to stand for?CJ ChancoP.S.* Rodrigo Dutertes One-Man Revolution. Jacobin. 2.19.16:* CJ Chanco is currently based at the Department of Geography, University of the Philippines Diliman.Footnotes[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_presidential_election ,_2016[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/philippines/11825814/Son-of-ex-Philippine-dictator-boasts-of-fathers-achievements-as-he-plots-presidential-bid.html [3] See available on ESSF (article 37248), Rodrigo Duterte (Davao): Outcry as Filipino presidential nominee admits killings.[4] http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/716664/duterte-eyes-revolutionary-government [5] https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/04/06/you-can-die-any-time/death-squad-killings-mindanao [6] See available on ESSF (article 37249), Tough justice: On the trail of Philippine death squads  Officially-sanctioned vigilantism is spreading nation scale.[7] See on ESSF (article 37250), Philippines (Mindanao): CPP extends kudos to Davao Vice-Mayor Duterte for standing up against US interference.[8] http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2015/10/19/1512528/palace-wants-duterte-endorse-friend-roxas-president [9] http://www.rappler.com/nation/politics/elections/2016/110679-duterte-contradictions-dictatorship [10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_Fg8CgiCCg [11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_Fg8CgiCCg [12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEhp1WMqHzo [13] http://www.rappler.com/views/imho/122177-duterte-anti-labor-fascist [14] http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2015/07/13/1476508/duterte-declares-support-gay-marriage-lgbt-rights [15] http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/746158/duterte-on-labor-contractualization-you-will-kill-the-filipino-skill [16] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow9FUAHCclk [17] http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/747180/put-me-last-in-surveys-duterte-tells-pollsters [18] http://www.rappler.com/business/economy-watch/97473-businessmen-davao-duterte-president-2016 [19] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/31/will-the-asean-economic-community-be-a-bang-or-a-bust.html [20] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/31/will-the-asean-economic-community-be-a-bang-or-a-bust.html [21] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSSsafAMTpI [22] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/lee-kuan-yew-conundrum-democracy-singapore/388955/ [23] See on ESSF (article 37251), Development From Below  Any country where working people try to raise their voice, the first power they come up against and they have to confront is their own ruling classes.[24] See on ESSF (article 37252), The Restructuring Crisis of Global Capitalism and the Spectre of 21st Century Fascism  The counterweight: transnational struggle from below.[25] See on ESSF (article 35654), The War Is Over  The Communist Party of the Philippines.[26] ESSF (article 37255), Philippine Presidential Election: Makabayan formally endorses Grace Poe, Chiz Escudero.Reds leader backs DuterteDAVAO CITY  The founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) Jose Maria Sison officially endorsed Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte for the 2016 presidential elections.This was revealed by Mayor Rodrigo Duterte during the Run Duterte Run at San Pedro Square this city. The mayor shared the voice message of Sison sent to him from Netherlands minutes before he came to the rally venue.In his message, Sison said that Duterte has the integrity, strength of character and political will for good.Sa tingin ko bukas naman siya sa development ng Pilipinas sa pamamagitan ng Filipino owned industrialization and land reform at kumbinsido ako na makabayan siya at ipag tatanggol niya ang pambansang soberenhiya at integridad ng teritoryo nga Pilipinas (I can see he is open to the development of the Philippines through Filipino-owned industrialization and land reform and I am convince he is a nationalist and he will defend national territorial sovereignty and integrity of the Philippines, Sison said.According to Duterte, Sison sent the message to him upon learning he was on his way to rally organized by his supporters.
Former SEIU corporatist president Andy Stern is now representing Airbnb and working with SEIU Pres Mary Kay Henry to make a deal supporting the business plans of Airbnb.

Andy's At It Again In Cahoots With SEIU Pres Mary Kay Henry And AirbnbAirbnb negotiations with powerful US labor union facing backlashPotential partnership with SEIU sparks outcry from labor activists and New York politicians over controversial collaboration with tech startupHome-sharing startup Airbnb has been in discussions with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to reach a deal under which the home-sharing service would promote unionized housekeepers. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty ImagesSam Levin and Julia Carrie Wongin San FranciscoMonday 18 April 2016 22.36 BSTLast modified on Monday 18 April 2016 22.52 BSTAirbnbs attempt to negotiate a deal with one of the most powerful unions in the US is being undermined after intense backlash in the labor movement, the Guardian has learned.The home-sharing startup has been in discussions with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to reach a deal under which the home-sharing service would promote unionized housekeepers.Airbnb has long been in conflict with workers rights groups but is discussing a deal with the unions under which it would promote unionized housekeepers in short-term rentals.The potential partnership with SEIU, which represents 2 million workers in the service sector, is the closest Airbnb has come to a formal agreement with a labor group after years of unsuccessful attempts to partner with unions across the US, according to sources familiar with the discussions.If the SEIU deal is successful, it would mark the first-ever formal partnership between a major company in the gig economy and a labor union.Yet sources say that negotiations have been delayed by internal union dissent over the ethics of the home-sharing startup with some labor activists, including some SEIU members, concerned that Airbnb has exacerbated housing crises in cities across the US, including in San Francisco, where Airbnb is headquartered.We have been engaged in conversations with organizations and community leaders about how to best help working familiesChristopher Nulty, Airbnb spokesmanThe Guardian contacted Airbnb and SEIU with detailed queries about the negotiations on Monday morning. Hours later, the Washington Post published a story on the still-to-be-completed negotiations, citing documents that laid out the terms of a possible agreement.The potential deal, it reported, would include Airbnbs endorsing a $15-an-hour minimum wage and direct hosts to cleaners who are paid at least $15 an hour and are trained and certified in providing green home cleaning services.The report said the partnership, if implemented, would be modeled on a pilot program, announced last year, between Airbnb and Cooperative Cleaning, a Brooklyn-based worker-owned cleaning agency. The Washington Post described the deal as one that allows the company [Airbnb] to make the claim that it is creating good jobs for local residents.However, the proposed agreement has been fomenting a quiet backlash from some figures in the labor movement in recent weeks.We are appalled by reports that SEIU is partnering with Airbnb, a company that has destroyed communities by driving up housing costs and killing good hotel jobs in urban markets across North America, said Annemarie Strassel, a spokeswoman for a rival union, Unite Here.Airbnb has shown a blatant disregard for city and state laws, has refused to cooperate with government agencies, and turns a blind eye to the fact that its business model exacerbates the affordable housing crisis. She added: A partnership with SEIU does little more than give political cover to Airbnb.Airbnb spokesman Christopher Nulty did not respond to a request for comment about the backlash to the potential deal.We have been engaged in conversations with organizations and community leaders about how to best help working families find solutions to economic inequality, including creating specific ways we could leverage the Airbnb platform to help create quality union jobs that pay a livable wage, he said.SEIU Internationals president, Mary Kay Henry, declined to discuss details of the collaboration with Airbnb. We dont have a partnership thats been finalized  that conversation is under way, she said on Thursday, after the Guardian first contacted the union about its controversial negotiations with Airbnb.Pressed for specifics on the timing and details of the pilot, she said the deal hasnt been finished and declined to comment further.In a statement on Monday, an SEIU spokeswoman said: We actively and regularly engage in conversations with companies who are committed to doing right by their workforce by paying better wages and giving them a voice at work through their union. Airbnb is one such company, however, there is no formal relationship or agreement between SEIU and Airbnb.New York politicians express concern with the dealAdvertisementThe potential partnership is also raising eyebrows among New York politicians. On Friday, the Manhattan borough president, Gale Brewer, 18 members of the New York state senate and assembly, three New York City council members and 20 local housing organizations sent a letter to the SEIU president expressing concern with the deal and requesting a meeting.We find it troubling that SEIU is exploring entering into an agreement with Airbnb  a company whose business model displaces the very people you are seeking to represent and protect from their homes and communities, the letter states. Such a partnership would lend credence to Airbnbs illegal manipulation of the housing market, and give the worst actors  a legitimate platform to conduct their illegitimate and harmful business activities.The partnership is unexpected given that labor unions across the country, including SEIU, have long been vocal opponents of Airbnb among other sharing economy startups. Ride-hailing apps Uber and Lyft, for example, consider their drivers independent contractors and have vigorously opposed efforts by their for-hire drivers to be recognized as employees and form a union. Delivery startups including DoorDash and Postmates typically classify their workers as contractors, meaning they have few rights or protections and cannot engage in collective bargaining.In May 2014, Airbnb first approached the New York chapter of Unite Here, a separate union that represents hotel workers, to try to orchestrate a similar deal, according to the New York local president, Peter Ward. Airbnbs CEO, Brian Chesky, met Ward at the unions New York offices, Ward claims, where he told the startup boss that his union would refuse to work with a company that advertises illegal hotels.Ward said he and other union leaders have refused to work with Airbnb because the company enables people to illegally turn their homes into hotels, which takes permanent housing off the market and worsens affordable housing shortages.Ward said Chesky described his union as one of his biggest obstacles in New York City, saying: The reason were not winning here is because of you and your union. Im here to see what I can do to remove you from the field. An Airbnb spokesman denied that Chesky said these words.It goes against all the principles of the labor movementUnionizing Airbnb cleaners could legitimize the startup while providing minimal benefits to a small group of workers, Ward said. If SEIU signs a contract with Airbnb, They are essentially selling cheap cover to an American corporation for union dues from a few members, he said. It goes against all the principles of the labor movement.Its political cover for this corporation thats doing all this damage in the community.Jennifer Fieber, San Francisco Tenants UnionUnions have played a big role protesting against Airbnb and pushing for stricter regulations in cities across the country.Opponents also argue that users of Airbnb, which is worth an estimated $25.5bn, dont pay their fair share of taxes. Community and labor groups in San Francisco pushed unsuccessfully for a 2015 ballot measure that would have dramatically increased restrictions on Airbnb users in the companys home city.One union that backed the anti-Airbnb measure was SEIU Local 1021 in northern California, another subsidiary of the international organization which spent more than $78,000 to support the campaign and has repeatedly criticized the company for its role in the housing crisis.In another twist, SEIU Internationals former president Andy Stern, now a consultant and Henrys predecessor, is representing Airbnb in the negotiations with his former employer.AdvertisementCalifornia housing groups that have previously protested against Airbnb and recently learned of the potential SEIU collaboration said they were outraged about a potential partnership.Its a complete betrayal to housing groups who have been working on this problem of Airbnb gobbling up the rental stock, said Jennifer Fieber, of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Its embarrassing to put union labor into illegal hotels that we are trying to shut down.Its political cover for this corporation thats doing all this damage in the community.Judy Goldman, who co-founded a Los Angeles-based group called Keep Neighborhoods First, which is critical of Airbnb, said the companys partnership with a union appeared to be little more than a PR stunt. I think its really unfortunate that SEIU would send union labor into these thousands of illegal, rogue hotels when so many tenants have lost their homes, she said.So many people involved in these unions are the ones that are being evicted. Julia Carrie Wong previously worked as a researcher for Unite Here Local 2.
Sunday Morning at the Marxist LibraryThe good, the bad and the ugly:updates from the Prisoners' Hunger Strike Solidarity.As a result of the 2011 and 2013 hunger strikes in California prisons the use of indefinite solitary confinement by California Department of Corrections has come to an end. That is the good news. Of course, the struggle by prisoners does not end with this victory.Carol Strickman, one of the lawyers in the case that was won, will give an update on the state of the victoryreduction in prisoners placed in the Security Housingas well as the state of the current conditions as well as the ugly torture newly practiced on all prisoners in isolation: sleep deprivation.Urszula Wislanka will focus on the new forms the struggle of the prisoners is now taking: "Prisoners Human Rights Movement Blueprint.Sunday, April 24, 2016 - 10:30am to 12:30pm6501 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland (just North of Alcatraz Ave.)Seating is limited, so plan to come early. We start promptly.FREE - but hat will be passed for donations to NPMLAbout Sunday Morning at the Marxist LibraryA weekly discussion series inspired by our respect for the work of Karl Marx and our belief that his work will remain as important for the class struggles of the future as they have been for the past.For info or to subscribe to our weekly announcements,Call Gene Ruyle at 510-332-3865 or email: cuyleruyle [at] mac.com For our full schedule, go to icssmarx.org
Technos Prize winner Meaghan Mormann 16 poses with President Eric Jensen.

Mormann '16 Named Technos Award Winner

April 19, 2016

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. Illinois Wesleyan University senior Meaghan Mormann 16 (Grawn, Mich.) has been awarded the 2016 Technos International Prize, an annual award recognizing a student who has excelled academically and has contributed to broadening international awareness and understanding. The award is presented through the Tanaka Ikueikai Educational Trust in Japan and was created to improve international relations.

A Hispanic Studies and biology double major following the pre-med program, Mormann served as a general biology and animal physiology teaching assistant, a Writing Center tutor, and a Language Resource Center Spanish tutor. She has been involved with biochemical research with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Melinda Baur and research on avian eggshell fragments with biology faculty members Given Harper and William Jaeckle. She has also acted as a translator during three Global Medical Brigades to Honduras and studied abroad for a semester in Barcelona, Spain. This year she also assisted as a translator at the McLean County Health Departments WIC program.

On campus she has served as president of three organizations: Mortar Board national collegiate honor society, Sigma Delta Phi national collegiate Hispanic honor society, and Spanish Club. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies, Beta Beta Beta national biology honor society, Phi Beta Delta honor society for international scholars, and National Society for Leadership and Success.

After graduation from Illinois Wesleyan, Mormann will enter medical school at Michigan State Universitys College of Human Medicine. She will also be a member of the schools Leadership in Medicine for the Underserved (LMU) certificate program, enabling her to spend two years in clinical experience in Flint, Mich. There she can work in rural and urban underserved communities as well as Spanish-speaking underserved populations including work in migrant healthcare clinics.
Updates On 2016 Kentucky Derby Horses: From a speed figure standpoint, no horse stands out heading into Kentucky Derby 142 on May 7 at Churchill Downs. The talented Nyquist, while undefeated and impressive in both wins this year, does not hold towering TimeformUS numbers over his rivals. The rest of the contenders offer a varied list of pros and cons.

Updated Kentucky Derby 2016 Odds & Post Positions

Watch how many speed horses find their way into the Top 20. Back-of-the-pack closers at double-digit odds clunk their way into the superfecta because the pace helps. Without pace, horses like Golden Soul do not hit the board.

1. Gun Runner (151): The points leader breezed five furlongs in 1:00 flat at Churchill Downs yesterday for trainer Steve Asmussen in company with Gold Hawk.

2. Nyquist (130): Reports indicate the undefeated son of Uncle Mo will breeze at Keeneland on April 22.

3. Exaggerator (126): Clockers Corner spotted him recently on the Santa Anita racetrack. Other than that, there is nothing new to report.

4. Outwork (120): No new updates. Some pedigree analysts might snub the 11.00 Dosage Index, but remember the formula tends to not factor in important distance influences such as Empire Maker.

5. Brodys Cause (114): The Blue Grass winner galloped yesterday at Churchill Downs. Trainer Dale Romans finished third in the 2012 Kentucky Derby with Dullahan, who also ran as a closer and won the Blue Grass.

6. Creator (110): Gun Runners stablemate took advantage of a hot pace and won the Arkansas Derby last weekend. Asmussen comes into Churchill Downs loaded.

7. Lani (100): The UAE Derby winner continues to gallop in the mornings at Churchill Downs. No UAE Derby shipper has won the Derby, although most Derby curses eventually end at some point.

8. Mor Spirit (84): According to Tim Wilkin, the Santa Anita Derby runner-up will ship to Churchill Downs on Friday.

9. Mohaymen (80): The former Kentucky Derby favorite jogged at Churchill Downs yesterday for trainer Kiaran McLaughlin. Expect decent value on the Shadwell Stable runner.

10. Danzing Candy (60): Trainer Clifford Sise plans to take an unusual route to the Derby, by training him at San Luis Rey Downs first in California (because their track more closely resembles Churchill Downs than Santa Anita).

11. Destin (51): Last Saturday, the Tampa Bay Derby winner worked five furlongs in 1:00.94 at Palm Beach Downs.

12. Suddenbreakingnews (50): Like Creator, this late-closer took advantage of the Arkansas Derby pace to finish second. A horse like this seems ideal for underneath slots in a Derby superfecta.

13. Oscar Nominated (50): The son of Kittens Joy, out of a Theatrical mare, breezed four furlongs in 49.60 seconds on the Churchill Downs training track last Saturday. Miracles happen.

14. Shagaf (50): After finishing fifth in the Wood Memorial, the hype on social media is almost non-existent for this Chad Brown-trained son of Bernardini.

15. Whitmore (44): Ron Moquetts Derby hopeful ran third in the Arkansas Derby. He still lacks any route wins, which is a concern for bettors.

16. Toms Ready (44): Last Thursday, he breezed five furlongs in 1:01.60 at Churchill Downs. Maybe trainer Dallas Stewart (Golden Soul, Commanding Curve) can work his magic again and get this one in the superfecta.

17. My Man Sam (40): Updates are scarce on Chad Browns other Derby hopeful. Traffic will pose a problem for this late-runner in the Derby.

18. Majesto (40): According to Mike Welsch on Daily Racing Form, last Thursday he breezed an easy 5/8 over very cuppy track at Gulf Park West in 102.48 with impressive gallop out up a mile in 1.44.29.

19. Trojan Nation (40): He reportedly flew back to California last week. Fans will dismiss this runner because of his maiden status, but a closer like him can blow up the superfecta.

20. Mo Tom (32): Some drama unfolded when Mo Tom briefly slipped to No. 21, but Cupids defection clears the way for a Derby run. Expect a couple more defections, as they happen around this time every year.

The 142nd Kentucky Derby will be televised on NBC from 4:00-7:30pm ET on Saturday, May 7, 2016. Post time for the Kentucky Derby is currently set for 6:34pm ET.

Related Links:

Thinking About Running Styles in Kentucky Derby 142
A New Jersey appeals court affirmed an $11 million damages award to a woman who claimed a defective vaginal mesh product produced by Johnson & Johnson caused unbearable nerve pain.

Defendant Johnson & Johnson was aware that the Prolift vaginal mesh could disintegrate in the vaginal wall and cause pain from the mesh arms. The court cited the companys series of ill-considered choices for failure to include adequate safety warnings in affirming the award.A French physician notified the company of the defect before marketing materials were sent to doctors across the country. However, Johnson & Johnson decided not to add the warnings to the label because the printing job was already at the printer.The plaintiff, Linda Gross, had the Prolift product inserted in 2006. Her doctor described her reaction to the mesh as catastrophic.Within two months of the surgery Gross complained of pelvic pain. After six months with the mesh, the doctor performed a second surgery to remove the mesh and found a wrinkled bulge and discovered that the mesh had shrunk overtime.Physician Kevin Benson testified he trusted Johnson & Johnson to provide fair, balanced, and truthful information about Prolift. He further testified that he would not have recommended the procedure had the additional warnings been present.Gross continued to suffer complications even after multiple surgeries for the mesh. She was unable to have an intimate relationship with her husband, lost her job as a nurse, and suffers from severe depression and anxiety.On appeal, the defendant argued that under the intermediary doctrine the lower court erred by:1. Failing to bar Gross claim for deceit as a matter of law; and2. Misapplying the learned intermediary doctrine to the failure to warn claim.The learned intermediary doctrine imposes a duty on a manufacturer to warn physicians of any risks involved with its products. The physician becomes the intermediary between the manufacturer and communicates warnings to patients.The purpose of the doctrine is to allow patients to make well-informed decisions and balance the benefits against the risk of procedures. Johnson & Johnson failed to notify the physicians of the issues until years after Gross sustained complications from the mesh.Regarding J&Js claim of deceit, the court stated the plaintiff is required to prove the manufacturer intentionally concealed or misrepresented of a fact which the plaintiff would rely and caused the injury.Johnson & Johnson staff testified they were aware of the risk and issues with the Prolift before it went onto the market. But, the risk were ignored because they believed surgeons were responsible for fixing the issues.Further, the impetus to have the product on the market and reluctance to reprint marketing materials was more important. The court held there was sufficient evidence to show Johnson & Johnson failed to inform physicians and the intermediary doctrine does not bar the deceit claim.The defendant argued the lower court erred in its jury instruction for the failure to warn claim. Johnson & Johnson stated the instructions allowed the jury to find causation based on reading the patient brochure.There were multiple opportunities for the jury to make inferences that course of treatment for Gross would have been altered had appropriate warnings were provided.The opinion states that Benson relied on the pamphlets and instructions for use provided with the mesh kits. Gross herself testified if all the risks, including information about multiple surgeries, chronic pain, and difficulty of removal was present, she would have declined the surgery.The three-judge panel disagreed with the defense argument and ruled the plaintiff presented enough evidence for the jury to determine an inadequate warning was provided.This case isCase No. A-0011-14T2, Superior Court of New Jersey
- The Nigerian army has successfully repelled an attack by the Boko Haram sect

- Men of the 113 battalion have been attacked by Boko Haram insurgents

- The jihadist allegedly attacked the Nigerian troops at Kareto, in the early hours of the day

- About 30 terrorists killed with several others injured

- Twenty-four soldiers have also been reportedly injured following the clash

Boko Haram insurgents attack army at Kareto

The Nigerian troops have successfully repelled an attack by Boko Haram terrorists who attempted an incursion into 113 Battalion at Kareto northern Borno state.

According to Colonel Sani Kukasheka Usman, acting director army public relations, the timely response of the troops involved air cover as more reinforcement were deployed to restore calm while mopping exercise was carried out.

READ ALSO: Prophets at war: TB Joshua attacked by Ghanaian prophet

Colonel Usman had earlier stated on Monday, April 18, that Boko Haram terrorists attacked troops of 113 Battalion at Kareto Northern Borno state.

Vanguard reports that 30 Boko Haram terrorists were killed while scores escaped with gunshot injuries.

About 24 soldiers were injured, the military said in an e-mailed statement.

All of them have been evacuated to Military Hospital Maiduguri where they are receiving treatment, the acting military spokesman said in the statement.

The troops successfully repelled the attack and killed quite a number of the terrorists.

Now in its 7th year of violent operations in a bid to impose its version of Islamic law in Nigeria, Boko Haram has seen to the death of about 20,000 people; leaving 2.3 million others displaced from their homes.

In 2015, it was ranked as the world's deadliest terror group, according to the Global Terrorism index.

On Friday, April 15, the Nigerian army killed 34 suspected members of the jihadist sect in clashes in Borno state. About 455 abducted people were rescued in that operation.

Source: Legit.ng
- EFCC picks up Jonathan's aide, Waripamowei Dudafa who has been on the run, in Lagos airport

- Dudafa alongside Jonathans ex Aide-de-Camp, Col. Ojogbane Adegbe, were accused of giving N10bn to delegates at the presidential primary of the Peoples Democratic Party in December 2014, in which Jonathan emerged as the winner

- Dudafa has been transferred to Abuja for further questioning

Nigerian security operatives have arrested Waripamowei Dudafa, ex-president Goodluck Jonathans special assistant on domestic matters, at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos, Premium Times reports.

It was learnt that Dudafa was arrested and quizzed by the operatives of the State Security Service (SSS), before he was handed over to the EFCC on Monday, April 18.

According to a source, Dudafa has been on the EFCCs wanted list for his alleged involvement in the sharing of N10billion to delegates during the December 2014 presidential primaries of the Peoples Democratic Party.

He has been on our wanted list for a long time and he evaded arrest on several occasions, a top EFCC official, on condition of anonymity said.

READ ALSO: $2.1b arms deals: Ex-president Jonathans men return funds

SSS arrest Waripamowei Dudafa, ex-president Goodluck Jonathan's top aide

Another source, who did not want his name in print, told The Punch: We have arrested Dudafa. He arrived at the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos and was swiftly arrested by the DSS. He was subsequently flown down to Lagos and handed over to the EFCC.

He is in our custody as we speak and our findings will be made public in due course.

When asked to explain the crux of the case, the source added: The money was diverted from the CBN to bribe or settle the PDP delegates to adopt ex-President Goodluck Jonathan for a second term.

Dudafa is expected to provide the list of beneficiaries of the largesse. All the beneficiaries will be unveiled by the EFCC and they have to refund public funds.

It was gathered that Dudafa allegedly converted the money into US dollars, amounting to $47million, and distributed to delegates from the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.

READ ALSO: Fear of EFCC sends confusion to Jonathans camp

After investigations, the anti-graft agency believes the fund was part of the alleged $2.1billion meant for the purchase of arms, which was allegedly distributed to politicians through the office of a former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki.

Dudafa, alongside Jonathans ex Aide-de-Camp, Col. Ojogbane Adegbe, were accused of giving N10bn to delegates at the presidential primary of the Peoples Democratic Party in December 2014 in which Jonathan emerged as the winner.

According to reports, the money was diverted by the Office of the National Security Adviser from a Signature Bonus Account in the Central Bank of Nigeria.

The N10bn is believed to have been diverted from oil receipts as follows: $5m (November 14,2014); $47m ( November 27, 2014); 4m (December 3, 2014) and 1.6m (December 24, 2014)

But while Adegbe was arrested but later released, Dudafa was said to have fled to either Dubai or a Caribbean country where he stayed for several months.

He was however arrested by security officers upon arrival at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos on Monday, April 18.

It was learnt that immediately Dudafa was screened at the port of arrival, the security officials were alerted and he was immediately arrested.

He was subsequently interrogated and then transferred to Abuja.

Source: Legit.ng
- In spite of the CCT trial, Bukola Saraki comes to the Senate to open the plenary

- Senate moves to stop Sarakis trial as it summoned CCT justice

The Senate president Bukola Saraki and his deputy Ike Ekweremadu

Danladi Umar, the chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, has on April 18, Monday said that the Senate president Bukola Saraki must abandon Senate sittings and attend his trial every day.

However, Saraki has today, April 19, arrived in Senate and taken the opening prayer.

READ ALSO: Unbelievable! See who may replace Saraki as Senate president

Later he handed over to Ekweremadu for continuation as he heads to CCT.

The Senate Committee on Ethics, Privileges, and Public Petitions summoned Danladi Umar in a bid to disrupt corruption trial of the Senate president.

Overruling Sarakis lead counsels application for the trial not to hold when the Senate is having plenary, CCT chairman said the president of the Senate was the one facing trial not the Senate.

READ ALSO: Dear Saraki, for the sake of Nigeria, please resign now

Saraki is currently facing trial at the CCT following a 13- count charge leveled against him by the Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, bordering on alleged corruption and false declaration of assets.

Source: Legit.ng
In the Navy Reserve, men and women from all walks of life join together to experience unrivaled training, undeniable purpose and uncommon adventure. Click here to learn more about roles and responsibilities.

The Navy Reserve is the Reserve Component (RC) of Americas Navy. Within this structure, there are organizational categories that further define a members service responsibilities and commitment status. Each has its own way of contributing to the overall mission. As a Navy Reserve Sailor, you will fall into one of the following categories depending on your military experience, military status and individual situation.

Ready Reserve

The Ready Reserve provides a pool of trained servicemembers who are ready to step in and serve whenever and wherever they are needed. It is made up of the Selected Reserve, which includes Drilling Navy Reserve Sailors/Units, as well as Training and Administration of the Reserves (TAR) personnel and the Individual Ready Reserve.

Selected Reserve (SELRES)

This group is the largest and most relied upon of the Ready Reserve. It consists of:

Drilling Navy Reserve Sailors/Units  These are designated Navy Reserve Sailors who are available for recall to Active Duty status. They serve as the Navys primary source of immediate manpower. They typically fulfill the traditional service commitment of one weekend a month and two weeks a year. They receive many of the same benefits and perform many of the same duties as their Active Duty counterparts. This includes people on initial Active Duty for training.

 These are designated Navy Reserve Sailors who are available for recall to Active Duty status. They serve as the Navys primary source of immediate manpower. They typically fulfill the traditional service commitment of one weekend a month and two weeks a year. They receive many of the same benefits and perform many of the same duties as their Active Duty counterparts. This includes people on initial Active Duty for training. Training and Administration of the Reserves (TAR)  These are designated Navy Reserve Sailors who perform full-time Active Duty service that relates to the training and administration of the Navy Reserve program. They may be assigned to shore activities, commands, or operational units. They are not typically reassigned to different locations as often as those on regular Active Duty, but they receive the same pay, allowances and benefits as Active Duty members.

Individual Ready Reserve (IRR)

This group consists of people who have had training or have previously served in an Active Duty component, or in the Selected Reserve:

Inactive Status  These members of the Individual Ready Reserve do not drill, are not obligated to take part in military activities. They do not receive pay or benefits.

 These members of the Individual Ready Reserve do not drill, are not obligated to take part in military activities. They do not receive pay or benefits. Active Status  People assigned to the Individual Ready Reserve may be eligible to receive pay or benefits for voluntarily performing specific types of Active Duty service.

Standby Reserve

The Standby Reserve is made up of Navy Reserve Sailors who have transferred from the Ready Reserve after fulfilling certain requirements established by law. The most common Standby Navy Reserve Sailors are people who have been deemed key civilian employees by the government, or those suffering through personal adversity or disability. While they are not required to perform training and are not part of any specific unit, they do create a pool of trained individuals who could be mobilized, if necessary, to fill manpower needs in specific skill areas.

Retired Reserve-Inactive

The Retired Reserve-Inactive is made up of Navy Reserve Sailors who receive retired pay, or are qualified for retired pay, upon reaching 60 years of age.
Brookfield Asset Management held the final close on Brookfield Strategic Real Estate Partners II (BSREP II) with 8 billion (US$9.0 billion) of equity commitments, creating a global opportunistic real estate fund that will invest in a diversified portfolio of high-quality property assets in North America, Europe, Australia, Brazil and other

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Goodman Group is developing a 12,500 sqm property for Gutmann, a manufacturer of extractor hoods and individual ventilation systems for modern kitchens. Completion of the facility at the Pforzheim-Buchbusch Industrial Park, one of the most important logistics locations in Baden-Wurttemberg, is planned for November 2016. Gutmann will join other Goodman

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BNP Paribas Real Estate Investment Management Luxemburg prepared a new closing for the NEIF II Fund (Next Estate Income Fund II), backed by Belgian & French & Spanish Insurance companies and pension funds for around 80 million of new commitments.

The final closing of the fund is expected before su...

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Knowledge

Over the years weve made a number of videos about the online media and good online public relations practice.

The Online Media

A short overview of how public relations stories can spread online. Produced in December 2008 the video has been viewed over 16,000 times and is the No.1 ranked video on Google for a search for "online media"

Releasing Influence

This video explains how the RealWire service helps your press release achieve impact in the online media world.

Online Public Relations

Animation about how to approach Online Public Relations. The video highlights the community nature of the online media and suggests that in the beginning it may help your success if you imagine you are the guest at a party where you don't know many people.

Produced in August 2009 the video has been viewed over 53,000 times and is the No.1 ranked video on Google and YouTube for "online pr".

An Inconvenient PR Truth

Produced in January 2010 the video highlights the issue of irrelevant press release emails a.k.a. PR spam. It was watched over 2,000 times on its first day and was a key element of the campaign lead by RealWire and involving some major figures in the UK public relations community which lead to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), Investor Relations Society (IRS) and the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) jointly producing a "Media Spamming Charter".

The Charter sets out detailed guidelines for PR professionals on good practice for media relations. This was the first and only time that all four relevant professional bodies have co-authored such a document.

Social Media News Release

An overview of the Social Media News Release. This video is showing its age a little as it was produced in July 2007 and back then RealWire was called WebitPR and our Chief Executive, Adam, had more hair.

Its been viewed over 37,000 times though and still serves as a good history of how the press release evolved.
Image above is a digital render of the 2020 Mahindra Thar

The second generation Mahindra Thar prototypes have been testing with heavy prototypes and pre-production body configurations for over a year now. The new off-roader which is set to be launched sometime later this year has now been spotted with fully production-ready body panels for the first time.

Although this particular example is disguised with white wrapping all around, we can make out several design features better than before. For starters, Mahindra has opted for bold and premium looking paint job in combination with contrast black alloy wheels.

While basic design elements have been retained, every single panel is new. The 2020 Mahindra Thar appears to be noticeably wider than its predecessor. This particular one seems to be equipped with a traditional fabric roof but it is to be noted Mahindra has been testing a hardtop version as well.

Previous spyshots confirmed that the new Thar receives a completely new dashboard with upmarket features such as a touchscreen infotainment system (reported to incorporate Apple CarPlay and Android Auto), a new instrument cluster with MID, multi-function steering wheel, etc. The front seats are plushier and sporty.

While the entry level variants are expected to adopt traditional rear longitudinal bench seats, some variants will feature conventional forward facing seats to appeal to family car buyers. ABS and dual front airbags will be standard fitment along with speed alert system and reverse parking sensors.

Based on a new platform that has been developed from scratch, the 2020 Mahindra Thar is expected to have improved off-roading abilities. Propulsion would come from a BS6-ready version of the 2.2-liter mHawk diesel engine which is set to generate around 140 hp. A 2.0-liter turbocharged direct injection petrol engine belonging to the recently revealed mStallion family is also expected to be on offer. Standard transmission would be a 6-speed manual unit and an automatic box is likely to be introduced at a later stage.

Being a true blue off-roader, higher variants of the new Mahindra Thar will be equipped with a 44 system, replete with low-transfer case. Its reasonable to assume that ground clearance, approach and departure angles to be better than those of the outgoing version.

The 2020 Mahindra Thar will be competing with next generation Force Gurkha which debuted at the Auto Expo 2020. Maruti is expected field its Jimny compact off-roader as well in this segment.

With a wider appeal, improved practicality, enhanced safety and new upmarket features, the new gen Thar would be aiming to cater to a much larger audience base than its predecessor.
Massive tree die-offs due to drought have ravaged forests across the American West and left ecologists struggling to predict how and when tree deaths will happen, and how rising temperatures due to climate change might affect the health of forests.

In a new study, a team including Princeton University researchers has identified the traits that best protect trees against death from drought. Published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study found that the species most resistant to drought are those that are better at withstanding stress to the water transport system -- composed of internal pipes known as xylem -- that carries water from the roots to the crown.

Better understanding the susceptibility of trees to drought could help forestry experts create early-warning systems and take precautionary steps, such as planting more resilient species or thinning overcrowded forests to reduce a forest's vulnerability to drought, the researchers report.

"We don't really know the future of forests in a changing climate," said lead author William Anderegg, an associate research scholar in the Princeton Environmental Institute and an incoming assistant professor of biology at the University of Utah. "Our results provide a foundation for improving our predictions of drought-induced tree mortality across Earth's diverse forests."

'Like a heart attack for a tree'

Trees normally pull water from the soil into their roots then up through their trunks to the leaves. Water inches up the xylem to replace water evaporating from the leaf surface. This pulling of water creates tension that Anderegg compared to a spring getting tauter and tauter as drought progresses.

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When water is scarce, the trees have to pull much harder on the water in the xylem, which allows air bubbles to infiltrate the pipes. The bubbles cause blockages, or embolisms, that clog the pipes the way a blood clot blocks flow through an artery. The result, Anderegg said, is "like a heart attack for a tree."

The study found that the ability to withstand this stress was more predictive of survival than other factors such as the overall amount of water lost through leaves and the depth of roots. Tree species with a larger "hydraulic safety margin" -- measured by how well the trees can tolerate the tension from pulling water through the xylem -- are better able to survive drought, said Anderegg.

The team found that angiosperms (flowering trees) and gymnosperms (cone trees) were equally likely to die in drought. Among angiosperm species, wood density emerged as a useful predictive trait of drought survival, perhaps because trees with dense wood tend to have more armor around their xylem.

Data for the study was obtained from dozens of published peer-reviewed scientific studies and the Xylem Functional Traits Database, which contains measurements of the hydraulic safety margins for each species as determined through laboratory experiments.

Anderegg designed the study in collaboration with Tamir Klein of the Agricultural Research Organization, Volcani Center, in Israel. Data and analytical tools were provided by Adam Pellegrini, a Princeton graduate student of ecology and evolutionary biology; Lawren Sack and Megan Bartlett, a professor and graduate student, respectively, of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California-Los Angeles; Brendan Choat, a senior lecturer at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University in Australia and Steven Jansen, professor of botany at Ulm University in Germany.

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The team collected information on drought-induced tree deaths from 33 individual studies performed around the globe, which included data on 475 species and over 760,000 individual trees. They examined various forest environments, including tropical rainforests, temperate deciduous forests, evergreen forests and savanna woodlands. In all, the team investigated 10 physiological traits they deemed important for predicting mortality.

The study may help predict how drought-induced tree mortality fits into models of future climate change, Anderegg said. Although rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can benefit tree growth, the associated rising temperatures can trigger droughts that kill trees, which in turn dampens CO2 removal from the atmosphere.

The western United States has been a hotspot for die-offs in recent years, with forests facing danger in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Texas and California. According to Anderegg, recent estimates indicate that between 20 million to 60 million trees are dying from the current drought in California.

Park Williams, an assistant research professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that the research reveals how it is that trees to a species succumb to drought, and how scientists can analyze that process to assess drought vulnerability.

"We all know that the chances of a plant dying goes up when water becomes limited, but we're unsure what the exact processes are inside the plant that cause death during drought and we're even more unsure how to model those processes," said Williams, who was not involved in the work. "This new meta-analysis sheds important light on this issue by telling us that trees are more-or-less all sensitive to the same thing during drought -- hydraulic failure.

"When a tree is forced to work too hard to pull water out of soil its 'straws' collapse similarly to how a straw collapses if we work too hard to drink a milkshake," Williams continued. "This paper agrees with other recently published research that indicates that if we can accurately model how hard trees are having to work to pull water from soil, this would improve our ability to model how likely they are to die during a drought."

Todd Dawson, professor of integrative biology at the University of California-Berkeley, said the research provides a holistic understanding of tree die-off at a time when global temperatures -- and possibly drought conditions -- are expected to rise.

"The paper adds a long-overdue global analysis to the ongoing discussion about the root causes leading to tree mortality across a wide range of trees," said Dawson, who is familiar with the research but was not involved in it. "Unfortunately, as the climate warms and extreme droughts and heatwaves increase, I fear that we will be adding more examples and numbers to the database Bill Anderegg and his co-authors report in their important paper."

One limitation of the study is that it did not compare the same species of trees in different regions, which could lead to some missed variations in drought response. The next step will be to understand how variable these drought-protective traits are within the same species in different regions.

"We'd like to have a crystal ball to see the future of forests," Anderegg said. "Right now we've got a very fuzzy and cracked ball that we're slowly trying to polish and get a better view."
In the past two years, phosphorene has attracted increased attention due to its potential in thin, flexible electronics. And because it is naturally a semi-conductor, phosphorene holds promise where miracle material graphene falls short.

"There has been a decade-long attempt to make graphene semi-conducting," said Northwestern University's Mark Hersam. "Our group and others have tried to do it with limited success. So why not just use a material that is already a semi-conductor?"

In order for phosphorene to reach its full potential, it needs to be incredibly thin -- preferably at the atomic scale. Until now, researchers have experienced difficulties in exfoliating atomically thin flakes from the bulk material, called black phosphorus, in a quick and efficient manner. Hersam, however, may have solved this problem. His group recently developed a method that results in substantially higher exfoliation yield and much thinner flakes than previous efforts.

Supported by the National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research, the research is described online in the April 18 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Joohoon Kang, a graduate student in Hersam's laboratory, is first author of the study.

After being exfoliated from black phosphorus, phosphorene has dramatically different electronic and mechanical properties from its parent material. Not only are the atomically thin, two-dimensional layers powerful semiconductors, but they also efficiently emit light, suggesting opportunities for optoelectronics.

"Graphene taught us that the most scalable method was to exfoliate in a solution," said Hersam, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. "You begin with a solvent and then add graphite and a surfactant. After introducing energy via sonication, you can exfoliate the graphite down to graphene. It would seem obvious that the same approach would work with phosphorene. The difference, however, is that phosphorene is very reactive chemically, which requires important changes in protocol to achieve exfoliation without degradation."

When exposed to open air, the chemical reactivity of phosphorene leads to rapid deterioration. The result suggests that components of air, such as water and oxygen, are driving degradation and need to be avoided. Consequently, Hersam initially bypassed this issue by exfoliating with organic solvents in a closed, air-free and water-free environment.

"The problem with the organic solvent approach is that it is very inefficient," he said. "It results in low exfoliation yield and flakes that are relatively thick."

The breakthrough came when Hersam and his team realized -- after a year of studying the degradation process -- that phosphorene degrades in the presence of both water and oxygen together. By bubbling an inert gas through water, Hersam deoxygenated it to create an aqueous solvent for exfoliating black phosphorus that avoids degradation. After sonicating black phosphorus in a mixture of deoxygenated water and surfactants, he found substantially higher exfoliation yield and much thinner flakes that reached the atomically thin limit.

In addition to providing superior phosphorene materials, the method uses commonly available, environmentally benign water as opposed to organic solvents.

"We took the resulting exfoliated flakes and fabricated transistors out of them," Hersam said. "The device metrics were among the best reported for any exfoliated phosphorene, thereby confirming that we had isolated high quality material in a scalable manner without degradation."
Thirty years ago, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Pripyat, Ukraine, became the site of the world's largest nuclear accident. While humans are now scarce in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, continued studies--including a just-published camera study conducted by researchers from the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory--validate findings that wildlife populations are abundant at the site.

The camera study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment and led by UGA's James Beasley, is the first remote-camera scent-station survey conducted within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or CEZ. The study's results document species prevalent in the zone and support earlier findings that animal distribution is not influenced by radiation levels.

The restricted CEZ encompasses the bordering lands of Ukraine and Belarus impacted by radiation fallout from the accident, which occurred April 26, 1986.

Within the southern portion of Belarus is the Polessye, or Polesie State Radiation Ecological Reserve, with over 834 square miles of diverse landscape including forests and deserted developed lands. The levels of radiation vary significantly across this landscape.

The previous study, published in fall 2015, determined populations were thriving in the CEZ by counting animal tracks. Beasley and his research team used a more contemporary research method--remote camera stations--to substantiate previous findings.

"The earlier study shed light on the status of wildlife populations in the CEZ, but we still needed to back that up," said Beasley, an assistant professor with UGA's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and the senior author on the study. "For this study we deployed cameras in a systematic way across the entire Belarus section of the CEZ and captured photographic evidence--strong evidence--because these are pictures that everyone can see."

The study was conducted over a five-week period at 94 sites using 30 cameras. A remote camera was set up on a tree or tree-like structure for seven days at each location. Each station was equipped with a fatty acid scent to attract the animals.

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Sarah Webster, a graduate student at SREL and Warnell working with Beasley, set up the stations approximately 2 miles apart to prevent animals from visiting more than one station during a 24-hour period.

The team documented every species captured on the cameras and the frequency of their visits, specifically focusing on carnivores, Webster said, because of their hierarchy on the food chain.

At the top of the food chain, carnivores have an increased opportunity to receive contamination. In addition to ingesting it from prey that have foraged on the landscape, they receive it directly from the environment--through the soil, water and air.

"Carnivores are often in higher trophic levels of ecosystem food webs, so they are susceptible to bioaccumulation of contaminants," Webster said. "Few studies in Chernobyl have investigated effects of contamination level on populations of species in high trophic levels."

Beasley and his research team saw 14 species of mammals on the camera footage. The most frequently seen were the gray wolf, wild or Eurasian boar, red fox and raccoon dog, a canid species found in East Asia and Europe. Beasley said all of these species were sighted at stations close to or within the most highly contaminated areas.

"We didn't find any evidence to support the idea that populations are suppressed in highly contaminated areas," Beasley said. "What we did find was these animals were more likely to be found in areas of preferred habitat that have the things they need--food and water."

Webster said locations were chosen to ensure habitat variance and to incorporate the diverse levels of radiation in the zone.

The study provides much needed verification, Beasley said, but further studies are needed "to determine the density of wildlife and provide quantitative survival rates."
An increase in women with breast cancer choosing double mastectomy may be influenced by media coverage of celebrities, a new study finds.

From 2000 to 2012, 17 celebrities publicly disclosed their breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Researchers from the University of Michigan analyzed 727 articles from major U.S. print publications that covered these celebrity diagnoses. Results are published in Annals of Surgical Oncology.

Four celebrities underwent double mastectomy, and 45 percent of the media coverage about their diagnoses mentioned that. Of the 10 celebrities who had a single mastectomy or breast conserving therapy, 26 percent of the media coverage discussed it.

During that time, the number of women with breast cancer who underwent double mastectomy at the University of Michigan rose nearly five-fold.

"People underestimate the impact of celebrity news reports on medical knowledge. It's naive to think this is not a source from where we get our medical information," says study author Michael Sabel, M.D., chief of surgical oncology and a breast cancer surgeon at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

"Much more often, patients are not coming in asking what their options are for treatment. They are coming in saying they want a bilateral mastectomy. Patients are increasingly using outside sources of information, such as the internet, and coming to their own conclusion," he says.

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When actress Christina Applegate was diagnosed with breast cancer, a family history and BRCA mutation influenced her decision to have a double mastectomy. The BRCA mutation meant she had a high risk of cancer returning in one breast or a new cancer developing in the other breast. It's a detail that only a small proportion of media coverage included.

Then, in 2013, Angelina Jolie wrote in the New York Times that she had both breasts removed because a BRCA mutation put her at high risk of breast cancer.

"In Angelina Jolie's case, almost every single article explains why she had a bilateral mastectomy. Contrast that to Christina Applegate, who also had a BRCA mutation. That was rarely discussed in media articles," Sabel says.

While many refer to the "Angeline Jolie effect" as influencing the rise in double mastectomy, it began earlier than that. Given the timing and the differences in media coverage, Sabel and co-author Sonya Dal Cin, Ph.D., suggest it might be more aptly deemed the "Christina Applegate effect."

It's not uncommon for celebrities to influence health trends. Following Jolie's announcement, more people sought genetic testing. After Katie Couric underwent a colonoscopy on the Today Show, colonoscopy rates increased. In 1987, after Nancy Reagan chose a mastectomy over breast conserving therapy, rates of breast conservation dropped 20 percent.

The concern, the authors write, is that women today are choosing double mastectomy based on inaccurate information about the risks and benefits. And because they are coming to their surgeon with their mind made up, there's less opportunity for surgeons to educate.

"When the next celebrity has a double mastectomy, we need to make sure we are putting the right messages out. This includes framing the story in terms of why the patient had a bilateral mastectomy and when that might be a good decision for a patient," Sabel says.

"Reporters need to be aware that their stories could have an impact on what patients are choosing to do."
<p>Jackie Borum</p>

Three years ago, a dog and cat were found huddled together at the end of a driveway in a rural area of Florida. The cat was paralyzed, and the dog was covered in ants from standing guard over her, trying to protect her. The pair was abandoned - but clearly not alone. They had each other.

Jackie Borum

They were taken in by Seminole County Animal Services, and not long after, were adopted by Jackie Borum, who works at a pet grooming store in Lake Mary, Florida. She named the cat Ruth and the dog Idgie, after the famous friends from "Fried Green Tomatoes," because she could see that the animals had such a close relationship. Ruth and Idgie spent a lot of time at their new mom's store when they were first adopted, and received so much love from the staff and customers. Eventually, people would come into the store just to see them and their adorable bond.

Dodo Shows Foster Diaries Scared Pittie Gets So Happy When He Meets This Guy And His Pack Of Dogs

This browser does not support the video tag. YouTube/Orlando Sentinel

But it wasn't just locals who fell in love with these guys. "Ruth and Idgie have become international darlings after their video from the Orlando Sentinel went viral in 2014," Borum told The Dodo. Today, Ruth and Idgie are still living with Borum at her home, and are just as close as ever.

Jackie Borum

"Their love and admiration for one another has only grown stronger over these last few years," Borum said. "There is no doubt that Idgie would have laid down her life to protect her BFF. Thank God she will never have to!"

This browser does not support the video tag. YouTube/Orlando Sentinel

Even years after being rescued, Idgie has never stopped trying to protect Ruth. Every time someone new approaches, Idgie checks them out first before allowing them to interact with Ruth. Idgie will always be Ruth's protector, no matter where they are. After adopting this special pair, Borum was inspired to help other animals in need as well. She is the president of Project Paws, an organization that raises money to provide medical care for abused and abandoned animals. Ruth and Idgie are, of course, the mascots of the organization, and help to inspire people to give back.

This browser does not support the video tag. YouTube/Orlando Sentinel
Kora, a 1-year-old Great Dane and English mastiff mix from Nebraska, has a LOT of energy.

Wes McGuirk

Ever since her dad, Wes McGuirk, adopted her, Kora has always had a strong desire to run, play and especially chase. Any sort of small animal that crosses Kora's path ends up being the target of a game of chase, no matter the time of day or night. "There is a family of raccoons east of the fence in the woods who taunt her every morning," McGuirk told The Dodo. "She always charges that fence first thing every morning I let her out."

Wes McGuirk

Kora even chases stuffed animals sometimes. "A large stuffed goat with bells had her retreating and barking," McGuirk said. "Once she realized they wouldn't eat her, she wants to chew on them." McGuirk has always known his girl has drive and determination, but he had no idea just how much until recently, when she found herself in a bit of a predicament. One that got her quite a bit of media attention.

Dodo Shows Faith = Restored Couple Meets A Beach Dog In Mexico Who Changes Their Life

Wes McGuirk

"As far as doing crazy stuff she likes to drag and chew on pillows, and if she gets a squeak toy she'll squeak it for like 10 minutes just to see if you're paying attention to her," McGuirk said. "But climbing trees - I never saw that one coming." When McGuirk arrived home one night last week, he didn't see Kora out playing in the yard with their other dog, Heineken, and assumed she was inside hanging out with his roommate. When he went to look for her, his roommate said she was outside - but neither of them could see Kora anywhere. McGuirk and his roommate searched all over, looking for possible holes in the ground or a fence she could have escaped through. They checked all of the usual places she liked to hang out, but to no avail. What they didn't realize at first was, throughout all this, they could actually hear her. "During this I would hear a low occasional whimper but I figured it was Heineken. About 45 minutes into this I was getting very concerned," McGuirk said. "We searched again, nothing, then heard the same whimper but this time I was looking right at the little guy." To rule him out, McGuirk put Heineken inside, went back out - and could still hear the whimper. "I heard it again but this time above me. I was like, 'No friggin way.' We raised our flashlights up together and there she was," McGuirk said.

Wes McGuirk

Somehow, some way, Kora the 120-pound-dog had gotten herself stuck in a tree. It's unclear how or why Kora ended up in the tree, but more than likely, she was chasing an animal and got a little too excited. Kora was definitely scared, and McGuirk and his roommate acted as quickly as possible to try and get her down safely.

"We called the sheriff's department. They thought it was a prank call. Twenty minutes later the yard is full of emergency vehicles and a bunch of firefighters and some deputies all saying to themselves and each other, 'How on earth did this dog get up that high in a tree?'" Two different fire departments, Elmwood Volunteer Fire and Rescue and Plattsmouth Volunteer Fire Department, both responded to the call. Of everyone who came to help Kora that night, no one had ever seen anything like it. Once everyone was assembled and over the shock of it all, they began to formulate a plan to get Kora down.

Wes McGuirk

"The first plan was trying to guide her back down the way she came up," Jacob Blunt, a firefighter with Elmwood Volunteer Fire and Rescue, told The Dodo. "The owner of the dog was up in the tree with her and was also helping us with that task."

Elmwood Volunteer Fire and Rescue

Kora refused to move, and so they tried to use a harness to safely lower her down. When the stitching on the harness started to fail, Kora fell the rest of the way down and into the safety tarp below.

The best part about Kora's rescue? Her very casual reaction to it all. "She got out of the net and walked into the house like nothing happened," Jon Hardy, a lieutenant with the Plattsmouth Volunteer Fire Department, told The Dodo. While Kora was scared when she was up in the tree, once she was down, she was completely back to normal, and off to figure out her next adventure.

Elmwood Volunteer Fire and Rescue
Facebook/Best Video You Will Ever See

He's a Belgian Blue bull, a breed of cattle raised for beef, and, unfortunately, he's a symbol of just how far people will go to make a buck.

Belgian Blues have a naturally occurring mutation called "double-muscling" - they are selected and bred by the meat industry to perpetuate this mutation and thus produce more meat.
Batty the bulldog was born blind.

Sacramento SPCA

And it only got worse from there. Earlier this month, 5-month-old Batty arrived at the Sacramento SPCA (SSPCA) covered in feces and sporting a large abscess on his chin.

Sacramento SPCA

Batty's previous owner gave him up because of his poor overall health and a lack of funds to provide the medical care Batty needed, especially for his eyes, according to the SSPCA.

Dodo Shows Soulmates Dog Goes Everywhere In His Dad's Kangaroo Pouch

Sacramento SPCA

"The owner's story was definitely off," Sarah Varanini, foster care coordinator at the SSPCA, told The Dodo. She suspects that Batty was the result of backyard breeding based on the questionable story the bulldog's former owner told the SSPCA.

Sacramento SPCA

Batty more than likely has glaucoma, Varanini said. Glaucoma is a condition where internal pressure is placed on the eye, leading to the destruction of the optic nerves. Flat-faced breeds like bulldogs, pugs and shih tzus are more likely to suffer from eye conditions than other dogs.

Sacramento SPCA

"He had diarrhea with lots of straw or hay in it, so we can only imagine that he was living in that as bedding and was eating it as well," Varanini added. Batty - who was named Fatty before, but was renamed to match the saying "blind as a bat" - is enjoying his new life in caring, supportive hands. Varanini said the staff immediately fell in love with him "Obviously, he's adorable and sweet," she said.

Sacramento SPCA

Varanini also said the thin dog has been happily gobbling up everything fed to him. Batty is now with a foster family and soon will be heading to the UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital for a consultation on his eyes. Varanini said while Batty was still at the SSPCA, he absolutely loved playing with squeaky toys.

Sacramento SPCA

"We think he probably had never had a toy before, so it must have been exciting [for him]," she said. "He would run around and throw them in the air, then hunt them down again. Within a few hours he had already 'mapped' out the office and was able to navigate without running into things."

Sacramento SPCA

His current foster family, which has only had him for a day, also says that Batty is puppy pad trained and remains quiet as a mouse throughout the night. Batty is now receiving antibiotics for his abscess, although next steps concerning his eyes are still undetermined.

Sacramento SPCA

Varanini said it's most likely that Batty's slightly larger eye will need to be removed.

Sacramento SPCA
In the age of touch-ups and Photoshop, it's easy to see a photo this perfect and be skeptical about whether it's even remotely real. But it's that organic connection between photographer Hunter Lawrence and his dog, Aspen, that makes his photos resonate with so many fans. The photos capture Aspen as he really is. "We're not doing something to make him smile," Lawrence, who runs an Instagram account with more than 160,000 fans, told The Dodo. "He's just genuinely happy."

Lawrence, better known as Aspen the Mountain Pup's human, spoke with The Dodo about trust, human-dog eye contact and what he thinks Aspen's thinking when modeling for one of the many stunning photos for which he's grown famous.

As perfect as Aspen's photos appear, Lawrence and his wife, Sarah, were uncertain whether they wanted to use Instagram to share photos of their dog, but when they saw how the photos turned out, they convinced themselves that the images were worth sharing.

Dodo Shows Cat Crazy Fluffy Cat Wants To Sit On His Dad At All Times

"We had taken beautiful photos of him in some wild places, and we thought, 'Hey, I think we got something here,'" Lawrence recalled. "Let's just share them with our friends and family to show where we're taking our dog.

In addition to the colorful Colorado landscape that frequently works as a backdrop, Lawrence's photos are known for featuring Aspen's incredible focus and eye contact, which is sometimes stoic and sometimes joyful, but, as Lawrence put it, always "organic."

"Aspen's as organic as it gets. Camera or no camera, it's the same dog," he explained, noting the difference between working with a dog and a human as a model. "There's always the risk as soon as you pull out a camera that people will get shy." But when it comes to being photographed, Aspen couldn't care less. "He's fully secure. There's just this connection between he and I."

That connection is in part due to their history together. Lawrence has cared for Aspen for four years since he was "a tiny, little ball of fur," he said. "He's always been the same cuddly pup over the last four years."

Even back then, Aspen sported his signature stare - straight into the camera - that Lawrence explained comes naturally to the dog. "His eyes are constantly on me and Sarah," he said. "Sometimes I won't even put the camera up to my eye. I'll just look right at him and hold the camera low. I can see it in my viewfinder. I don't even need to put it up to my eye and sever that connection."

About a year ago, Lawrence, Sarah and Aspen moved from their home state of Texas to live in Colorado, where they're better able to travel for work, as both Lawrence and his wife are professional photographers.

"We're always up in the mountains for those, or we're traveling by car up to places like Canada or Oregon," Lawrence said. "He'll come along for the ride."

"We don't even take him on a leash anymore," Lawrence said. "He'll just go run up a mountain or jump into a freezing cold river." He always comes right back, Lawrence added.

Lawrence attributes the trust he's built with Aspen to the years of spending time with each other and deciding to train him. "They're only as good as you're willing to put in effort and time," he said. It's the trust and understanding that allows Lawrence to take photographs of Aspen in situations where most dogs would be running around, overly stimulated by their surroundings.

"He's well-trained, so if I tell him to place, he's not going to leave until I tell him release," Lawrence said. "I can see it in his eyes; He's thinking, 'Come on dad, can we hurry this up? Can I get back to what i was doing? Can I get back to digging in the snow or can I get back to jumping in the water?'" Lawrence imagines. "But I don't think he minds too much."

Thanks to Lawrence, Aspen has seen more nature in a year than some house dogs get to see in a lifetime, but that's only part of the reason Aspen loves going on hikes and adventures with Lawrence and Sarah. The other reason has to do more with something that all dog owners can relate to, no matter where they are.
CRUISE INDUSTRY

Cuban rule may delay planned Carnival trips

Carnival, the worlds largest cruise operator, may delay the start of trips to Cuba as it negotiates with the Cuban government over whether people born in that country may travel there by sea.

The company had planned a May 1 inaugural voyage through its new Fathom brand, which would mark the first U.S. cruise line to arrive in Cuba in 50 years.

While optimistic that Cuba will treat travelers with Fathom the same as air charters today, should that decision by Cuba be delayed past May 1, Carnival Corporation will delay the start of its voyages to Cuba, the company said Monday.

Last month, Miami-based Carnival said that company executives and Cuban officials signed agreements authorizing the trips and that it was cleared to take the 704-passenger MV Adonia to Cuba.

While the country lets Cubans travel by air, government rules prevent any Cuba-born person from coming and going by sea, Carnival chief executive Arnold Donald told Bloomberg News. Thus, the company wasnt accepting reservations from those passengers. The policy provoked criticism of Carnival and protests outside corporate headquarters last week.

Carnival said Monday it had updated its reservations process so that all travelers could book cruises to Cuba, including Cuban-born individuals in anticipation of Cuba allowing travel on a similar basis as they would if they were traveling by air.

 Bloomberg News

RETAIL

Nordstrom will cut 400 jobs, focus online

Nordstrom is eliminating as many as 400 jobs, looking to save money and focus more on reaching its customers online.

The cuts, which will come mostly from the retailers corporate center and regional support teams, will save about $60 million in the companys current fiscal year. The moves will be complete by the end of the second quarter, which runs through July, Nordstrom said Monday in a statement.

The job cuts are Nordstroms latest attempt to rein in expenses as mall traffic slows and shoppers increasingly seek to buy clothing online.

 Bloomberg News

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ABC News(NEW YORK) -- As New Yorkers head to the polls Tuesday, another battle is brewing to select the delegates to represent them at the GOPs national convention this summer. And if the Republican presidential race goes to a contested convention, a small group of New York Republicans may have an outsized role in helping sway the outcome.



The low number of Republicans in populated places like New York City, coupled with the power the New York State GOP bequeaths to county chairs, means that the local leaders can exert significant influence on selecting the individuals who will determine who will represent the Empire State at the partys national convention in July.



If no presidential candidate secures enough delegates to clinch the nomination on the conventions first ballot, when New Yorks and most other states delegates are required to follow their states vote, those New York delegates can choose whomever they like.



That dynamic means the county chairs, who can exert influence over the small number of elected Republican officials who select those delegates at conventions across the state next month -- members of the partys state committee -- can become the surest target for campaigns hoping those officials pick people who are willing to switch allegiance to another candidate on later convention ballots.



It would be foolish to say the chairs dont have influence on the committee members, Raymond Scollin, the chair of the Franklin County GOP, in upstate New York, told ABC News, although he added that those members have minds of their own.



Most of the state committee people from our counties are going to be people that we know, that weve trusted to be in that position, so that we can generally speak to our own state committee people about who we would like to see as delegates, Mike Cuevas, the chair of the Schenectady County GOP and a supporter of Republican hopeful and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, told ABC News.



Each of the states 27 congressional districts sends three delegates to the Republican National Convention; in addition to those 81, 14 more delegates will be selected at the statewide level. Those interested in running for a delegate slot at the district level will typically just make their desire known to their county chair, who can float their names in the nomination process, according to Scollin.



In less populated parts of the state, where one congressional district may encompass three counties, a larger number of representatives will wrangle over the identities of just a few delegates. But in New York City, home to relatively few Republicans but many congressional districts, one person can affect delegate selection in several districts.



The Manhattan chair will probably have a greater influence, because there are multiple congressional districts inside the borough, Jessica Proud, a spokeswoman for the state GOP, told ABC News.



Nine delegates, or about 9 percent of the states total count, will come from Manhattan.



In an interview with ABC News last week, Manhattan GOP Chair Adele Manpass said it was way, way, way too early to speak about the delegate selection process before Tuesdays primary vote had even taken place, but she did marvel at the newfound role New York found itself playing in the GOP race.



Candidates typically only visit the Big Apple to raise money and appear on national television.

For many people, its a new thing to have people come and ask people for their vote, Manpass said.



And every vote counts -- some more than others. In one congressional district spanning part of the Bronx and the city's northern suburbs, just 285 people cast ballots in the Republican presidential primary in 2012. Two of the three 2016 Republican candidates -- Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich -- have visited the overwhelmingly Democratic Bronx to ask for residents votes.

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Tech giant Intels campus in Santa Clara, Calif. The company announced April 19 that it will cut up to 12,000 jobs. (Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP/Getty Images)

TECHNOLOGY

Intel to cut 12,000 jobs worldwide

Intel says it will cut 12,000 jobs  about 11 percent of its workforce  as it reorganizes to confront a decline in sales of personal computers.

The chipmaker said Tuesday that the cuts will include voluntary and involuntary departures from operations around the world. Most affected workers will be notified in the next 60 days. Intel said the cuts will provide about $1.4 billion in annual savings by the time they are completed next year.

The company is a leading supplier of computer chips but is trying to focus on its most profitable business, such as making processors for data center computers and Internet-connected gadgets.

 Associated Press

RETAIL

Visa to speed up chip-card processing

While chip cards have been adopted and generally accepted by customers, there have been some complaints the chip transactions take longer, Visa Vice President Stephanie Ericksen said.

Visa said the upgrade will be rolled out over the next six months. The technology is not exclusive to Visa and could be adopted by MasterCard and American Express cards as well.

 Associated Press

Also in Business

 Theranos Inc. board member David Boies defended chief executive Elizabeth Holmes on Tuesday, saying she has the skills to lead the blood-testing start-up despite criminal and civil investigations of the company. Boies, whose law firm is providing legal advice to Theranos, said the board hasnt felt pressure from investors even as the Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorneys Office in San Francisco. Boies expressed confidence in Holmes, who founded Theranos, saying she is clearly equipped to be CEO of the company, and I think she has demonstrated that not only through her scientific bones, but management skills.

 From news services

Coming Today

 From news services
Goldman Sachs reported Tuesday that its quarterly profit fell by more than half and revenue slumped to its lowest level in more than four years. (Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters)

Goldman Sachs, one of the most prominent banks on Wall Street, is having a difficult year. It agreed to a $5 billion settlement with federal authorities earlier this month over selling shoddy mortgage loans. Its stock is down nearly 10 percent so far in 2016.

And on Tuesday, the megabank reported that its quarterly profit fell 56 percent.

The operating environment this quarter presented a broad range of challenges, resulting in head winds across virtually every one of our businesses, Lloyd Blankfein, the companys chief executive, said in a statement.

But as with the rest of Wall Street, Goldmans dismal year is not as bad as it appears. Goldman still managed to report a net profit of $1.14 billion during its first quarter. The New York bank will be able to deduct some of its $5 billion settlement from its taxes. And its stock price rose more than 2 percent Tuesday.

Goldman is the last of the big banks to report lackluster financial results for the first few months of the year. Net income dropped 53 percent at Morgan Stanley and 7 percent at JPMorgan Chase, the countrys largest bank by assets. At Wells Fargo, profit fell 5 percent.

But each still raked in billions in profit. JPMorgan led the pack with $5.9 billion in the first quarter.

Were earning decent returns. We have good margins, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgans chief executive, told analysts during a conference call last week when asked about the banks trading business. I would look at it as quite a good performance.

The financial sector has been whipsawed lately by a volatile stock market, which experienced weeks of deep declines and falling oil prices, before recovering more recently. Analysts have fretted that U.S. banks could take heavy losses from the loans they made to energy companies during better times. In fact, Bank of America raised the amount it has set aside for losses on loans to oil and gas company to $1 billion during the first quarter, and Wells Fargo is setting aside $1.7 billion.

The expectations were for a truly terrible [first quarter], and that did not come to pass, said Erik Oja, an analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. They are jumping over a very low bar.

Now, market conditions have begun to improve. Stocks have bounced back from their deep losses earlier this year and oil prices have edged back up. And when compared with their European counterparts, the U.S. banking industry is thriving. German behemoth Deutsche Bank reported a $7.6 billion loss last year.

When you look at the losses that European banks are taking, the U.S. banks look remarkably strong, Oja said.

This comes at a time when Wall Street is under a microscope. Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), a Democratic presidential candidate, has repeatedly called for a breakup of the big banks, saying they are still too big and pose a threat to taxpayers. That message gained energy last week when federal regulators ruled that five of the countrys largest banks, including Bank of America and JPMorgan, do not have a credible plan for winding down their operations without taxpayer help if they start to fail.

If the banks do not come up with living wills acceptable to regulators by October, they could be forced to increase their financial cushion and take other measures that could eat into profits.

I think that if they dont get the living wills approved, the regulators have shown that they will be merciless, Oja said.
Ive been raving about Viet Thanh Nguyens extraordinary debut novel, The Sympathizer, since it appeared last March, so I was thrilled to see it win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday.

Nguyens book is a cerebral thriller about a Viet Cong spy who flees Vietnam during the fall of Saigon and comes to California, where he continues to report back to his masters for years. Its chilling and moving  and sometimes very funny.

The Pulitzer judges praised the novel as a layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a man of two minds  and two countries, Vietnam and the United States.

[Read The Posts review of The Sympathizer]

Nguyen was 4 when his family made a harrowing escape from Vietnam. In 1975, as the communist army overran his small village, his mother took him and his older bother and walked 120 miles so that she could reach her husband, who was away on business. They escaped on a refugee boat and eventually reached Guam and then, later, the United States.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Nguyen via Skype (watch here), and I met him in person when he came to last years National Book Festival in Washington (watch here). Debut novelists are rarely invited to speak at the festival, but now that invitation looks particularly prescient.

In addition to writing a brilliant novel, Nguyen, who teaches English and American studies at the University of Southern California, is also an incredibly gracious person. On Monday night, when we corresponded by email, and he was typically modest about what he has accomplished:

Im thrilled, honored, surprised to win this award, but I can never think of such an award as something that I merited on my own. My novel is made possible by the heroic struggles of many thousands of people before me who fought for equality, social justice and equal representation for all, in society as a whole and in the literary world in particular. The novel is also made possible by the many writers, remembered and forgotten, who have blazed the path for todays minority writers, writers of color, Asian American writers, Vietnamese American writers. It would take a book to acknowledge the sacrifices of everyone who has worked to make this moment and my existence as a writer possible.

For Peter Blackstock, Nguyens editor at Grove/Atlantic, the Pulitzer Prize confirms what he felt when he took a chance on a once unknown writer.

Im over the moon to hear this news, Blackstock said via email. I fell in love with this novel, as did our publisher, Morgan Entrekin, and others here, from the moment I read it on submission. I was so pleased to be able to publish it, and to hear this news today is just completely staggering. Im thrilled for this immensely talented writer, and happy to have played a part in bringing this book to the world.

The paperback edition of The Sympathizer came out last week, but the cover already has to be updated to reflect this well-deserved recognition. The publisher doesnt mind. Grove/Atlantic has gone back to press for 40,000 additional copies.
The Everybody Loves Raymond cast included, from left to right: Peter Boyle, Doris Roberts, Ray Romano, Patricia Heaton, Monica Horan and Brad Garrett. (Monty Brinton/CBS)

Doris Roberts, who played the tart-tongued, endlessly meddling mother on the longrunning sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, died April 17 in Los Angeles. She was 90.

A family spokeswoman, Janet Daily, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.

Ms. Roberts won four Emmy Awards for her portrayal of Marie Barone on CBSs Everybody Loves Raymond, receiving a total of seven nominations as best supporting actress for the sitcom.

The sitcom, which aired from 1996 to 2005, also starred Ray Romano, Brad Garrett and Patricia Heaton. Peter Boyle, who played Ms. Robertss crotchety husband Frank Barone, died in 2006.

Boyles character is a Korean War veteran who is not shy about regaling others with his sexist, obnoxious commentary. He belittles his sons as ladies  0ne of whom was played by Romano  and is dismissive of his wife, Marie.

Doris Roberts, left, and James Coco hold up the Emmys they received as best supporting actress and actor for their roles in the NBC television series "St. Elsewhere" in 1983. (AP)

When she tells Frank that she is not a trophy wife, he replies: Youre a trophy wife? What contest in hell did I win?

Ms. Roberts also was known for the recurring role of feisty receptionist Mildred Krebs in the 1980s TV detective series Remington Steele. She had supporting parts in movies including The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), as the wife of the beleaguered mayor amid a subway hostage standoff in The Rose (1979) and Madeas Witness Protection (2012).

Doris May Green was born in St. Louis on Nov. 4, 1925, and grew up in Manhattan. Her mother ran a public stenography company that typed scripts for Broadway plays, and young Doris got to see dozens of productions for free. Starstruck, she decided to become an actress and adopted her stepfathers surname as her stage name.

She had small roles on Broadway starting in the 1950s, amassing credits that eventually included Neil Simons The Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969) and Terrence McNallys one-act double-header Bad Habits (1974). In early TV appearances, she was seen in episodes of Studio One, Naked City and The Defenders.

She almost had a TV breakthrough in the late 1970s, when she was asked to audition for the sitcom Maude, starring theater veteran Bea Arthur.

We instantly went into this New York routine about a dressmaker we shared, Ms. Roberts told the Denver Post, and had a great time. While Bea was driving me back to my motel, she told me that I had the job. I was thrilled. Then the producer came over and said, Weve made a terrible mistake. Youre too much like a little Bea Arthur. So Rue McClanahan got the part.

Ms. Roberts received her first Emmy Award in 1983, for her supporting role as a homeless woman on the series St. Elsewhere.

1 of 66 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Notable deaths of 2016 View Photos Remembering those who have died this year. Caption Prince, David Bowie, Debbie Reynolds, Harper Lee and others: Remembering those who have died this year. Debbie Reynolds Actress Debbie Reynolds starred in the 1952 classic movie Singin in the Rain with Gene Kelly, shown above. Reynolds died one day after the death of her daughter, actress-writer Carrie Fisher. Reynolds was 84. Shes now with Carrie and were all heartbroken, her son Todd Fisher said. Read the Debbie Reynolds obituary AFP/Getty Images Wait 1 second to continue.

An enthusiastic cook, Ms. Roberts co-wrote Are You Hungry, Dear? Life, Laughs, and Lasagna, a memoir with recipes, in 2005.

Her first marriage, to Michael E. Cannata, ended in divorce. Her second husband, William Goyen, whom she married in 1963, died in 1983. Survivors include a son from her first marriage and three grandchildren.
(Washington Post illustration; iStock)

If you read beer trade publications  or, more likely, beer blogs that write about beer sales figures  you might have been shocked to learn that, according to Chicago market research firm IRi, the most popular craft beer of 2015, at 1.95 million cases sold, wasnt from Samuel Adams or Sierra Nevada: It was Not Your Fathers Root Beer, from Wisconsins bucolic-sounding Small Town Brewery.

Why is that shocking? Because there is no way in the world that this alcoholic root beer resembles actual beer, let alone craft beer.

Okay, sure. Not Your Fathers and its adult-soda doppelgangers are technically similar to beer, as they are fermented malt beverages. But so is Smirnoff Ice, and no ones comparing that stuff to Dogfish Head or Stone.

Hard root beer had its breakthrough last year, but lets be clear: This syrupy, chemical-flavored beverage is the new Mikes Hard Lemonade, the new Bacardi Breezer. Its a drink for people who want to get drunk but dont like the taste of beer, or cider, or wine  or alcohol in general. It is, when you get down to it, the new birthday cake vodka. One Washington beer bar manager, who reluctantly sells the stuff, told me that the people buying it are the happy hour crowd . . . 21, 22 years old. Its approachable and really new for them.



Not Your Fathers Hard Root Beer sold almost 2 million cases in 2015. (Goran Kosanovic/For The Washington Post)

The label of Not Your Fathers Root Beer bills it as ale with the taste of spices. Thats like describing International Delight as gourmet coffee with the taste of Baileys Irish Creme. No. What comes out of that bottle isnt ale, at least in the way anyone who drinks beer knows ale. When was the last time you bought a craft beer whose listed ingredients were natural vanilla extract, other natural and artificial flavors and

caramel color?

Caramel color? What kind of honest-to-goodness ale cant be brewed with a different malt in order to change the color of the finished product?

When Pabst took over and expanded distribution of Not Your Fathers last spring, the drink became a legitimate national sensation. Stores couldnt keep it in stock. Naturally, competition quickly entered the marketplace: Coney Island, an offshoot of the Boston Beer Co., released its Hard Root Beer a few months later. By December, AB-InBev, the parent company of Budweiser, had rolled out Best Damn Root Beer.

I wasnt surprised. But, upsettingly, even craft brewers have felt compelled to get in on the action: San Diegos award-winning Mission Brewing has its own Hard Root Beer, released last spring. Abita, which has long made a non-alcoholic root beer with Louisiana cane sugar, unveiled Bayou Bootlegger at the end of 2015. Saranac, makers of the non-alcoholic Saranac 1888 line of root beer, ginger beer and orange soda, released Jeds Hard Root Beer in October. (Saranac isnt exactly new to the game: If you were in college in the late 1990s or early 2000s, you were probably introduced to Jeds Hard Lemonade at some point. The brewery revived the name just for this line of alcopops.)

Whats in that bottle of root beer might be gross, but Im also appalled by the idea that this stuff is considered craft anything by people who should know better.

Even worse than the branding, though, is how the stuff tastes. In the interest of education, I bought bottles of Not Your Fathers, Best Damn Root Beer, Coney Island, Mission and Bayou Bootlegger and held a tasting party at my house. If Im lucky, my friends might forgive me and come to another one.

All five root beers were poured into plain plastic cups, and it didnt take long for the criticism to come pouring out. Best Damn Root Beer has a lingering, medicinal, cough syrup aftertaste. Mission coats your tongue unpleasantly and finishes with a bitter chemical artificial mint chewing gum note.



Four-fifths of the hard root beer taste-test field: Best Damn; Coney Island, the winner; Mission; and Abitas Bayou Bootlegger. Not Your Fathers was the other candidate. (Goran Kosanovic/For The Washington Post)

Theres something that just doesnt seem right about Bayou Bootlegger, I said.

Theres nothing thats good about it, my wife responded, comparing the weird mix of spices  anise, mint, vanilla  to a bad mulled wine.

There were grimaces with each sip. The only one that we didnt outright hate was Coney Island, which, if you close your eyes, tastes closest to real root beer. But no one asked for seconds, so I volunteered to open a large bottle of Green Flashs double stout, brewed with serrano peppers, to kill the aftertaste with fire.

Not Your Fathers murky origin story reminds me of those bourbon outfits that spun tales of their familys bootlegging adventures and pre-Prohibition distilling recipes while they were actually buying aged whiskey from a factory in Indiana. Reporters have dug into Small Town Brewery, based in Wauconda, Ill., and heard stories about a father and son home-brewing, and 17th-century recipes passed down from a great-great-grandfather who brewed beer on his ships while ferrying some of the earliest settlers to America. (Alarm bells going off yet?) Theyve also heard plenty of skepticism about the brewerys methods.

Whatever its history, the companys current corporate ties are undeniable. Listed on its label application to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau in September 2014 is Drink Four Brewing, the company that owns Four Loko  remember the alcoholic energy drink?  and Mosketto. And the address listed is that of City Brewing, one of the largest contract breweries in the country, with a capacity of 7 million barrels a year and a client history that includes Smirnoff Ice, Mikes Hard Lemonade and other malternatives, including Four Loko.

Pabst Brewing Co., which signed up as the distributor of Not Your Fathers Root Beer in early 2015, acquired a stake in the company last summer and now owns the production rights. For that reason, the Brewers Association doesnt consider Not Your Fathers to be craft beer and lumps Small Town under the Pabst umbrella with legacy brands such as National Bohemian, Schlitz and PBR. (Full disclosure: Ive consumed my share of those beers.)

Some bar professionals Ive spoken to about hard root beer say the trend is at, or close to, its peak. I wish I shared their optimism. In March, Not Your Fathers Root Beer got government approval for mass-producing a draft version that is 10.7-percent alcohol by volume  almost twice as strong as the current stuff. And the competition keeps coming: Already this year, Seagrams released a hard root beer, as did Wisconsins smaller Rhineland Brewing Co. That ones called Over the Barrel.



Jake Kovac, left, and father Tim Kovac created Not Your Father's Root Beer and beer recipe, it has emerged into a national force. The brewery is also getting ready to open their first taproom by the end of August. (John Konstantaras/For the Chicago Tribune) FOR USE WITH 4/16 FOOD ONLY, NO SALES, NO TRADES (John Konstantaras/For The Chicago Tribune)

Its abundantly clear that Im not the target audience for hard root beer. But Im worried that might change. For the spring cocktail list at Jack Rose, head bartender Trevor Frye says he is planning to really dive down into the beer-and-a-shot combo. Instead of the usual bourbon-

and-imperial stout pairings, Fryes choices are more along the lines of a smoky mezcal with a radler, the German mashup of wheat beer and grapefruit soda. Its like a Paloma [cocktail], you know? he says.

But one of the most unexpected choices on this new menu pairs green Chartreuse, a centuries-old herbal liqueur, with Coney Island Hard Root Beer, which Jack Rose beer director Nahem Simon agrees is the best of the hard root beers. The combination goes back to the Rickhouse in San Francisco, where it was a popular post-shift drink. I love Chartreuse, but I hate root beer, Frye says.

The bitter, vegetal Chartreuse and the sweet, fizzy root beer are an odd couple  and just like in a stereotypical romantic comedy, they bring out the best in each other.

Frye encourages alternate sips from the glass and bottle: Chartreuses burn is countered by the root beers vanilla notes, and the spices from the liqueur offer a firm base that meshes with and even enhances Coney Islands sarsaparilla undertones. Something just pops. All of a sudden, Im not associating hard root beer with the cringe-inducing cough-syrup notes in Best Damn Root Beer or the unpleasantly bitter, artificial mint in the finish of Mission Root Beer. Im wondering what else this stuff could be paired with.

And now Im scared theyve won.


Bay scallops are smaller than the more commonly sold sea scallops. (Dixie D. Vereen/For The Washington Post)

Every inch of me, at least the parts not covered with waterproof gear, has become soaked with rain. My jeans, my shoes, my socks, my will to live. The drizzle barely qualifies as a storm, but as we take a small boat into the Black Narrows just off Chincoteague Island, the rain strikes cold and hard. It pelts my face with knitting-needle drops.

Yet the semi-heavy weather doesnt faze Eli Nichols and Raymond Jones, the nursery manager and farm hand, respectively, for Rappahannock Oyster Co. Theyve strapped on waders and jumped into the cold waters to fetch a few mesh bags submerged in floating cages, not far from the causeway into Chincoteague. They will spend the next 30 minutes or so picking through the bags to select about 150 shellfish for an informal reception the following night at the Rappahannock Oyster Bar inside the Districts Union Market.

The reception would prove to be a homecoming party of sorts: a chance to toast the Chesapeake Bay scallops return to the dinner table, if only for the evening. The bay scallop has not been commercially viable in the Chesapeake region since 1933, when a combination of disease and a Category 4 hurricane devastated the shellfishs sea grass habitat on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The scallop industry along the Chesapeake, which produced nearly 2 million pounds of the sweet delicacy in 1930, has never recovered, despite multiple attempts.

The scallop is no more in the Chesapeake, says Ryan Croxton, co-founder of Rappahannock Oyster Co. It seemed like a perfect place for us to jump in. Whether it works, who knows? Were definitely not mortgaging the house to do it.

Rappahannock may be the perfect company to take on the reclamation project. Cousins and co-owners Ryan and Travis Croxton have already conquered the challenge of Eastern oysters in the Chesapeake, a commercial industry that had nearly collapsed in the early 2000s. Rappahannock was an early adopter of oyster aquaculture in Virginia. The company raised its first crop of 3,000 oysters in 2002. Today, Rappahannock harvests 180,000 oysters a week, shipping bivalves all over the country as well as to Asia and Canada.



Chad Chance farms scallops for Rappahannock Oyster Co. near Chincoteague Island. (Dixie D. Vereen/For The Washington Post)

As Rappahannock adopts another type of shellfish aquaculture, the companys economic strength may be just as important as its experience hatching, growing, harvesting and shipping oysters. Rappahannocks healthy bottom line means it can afford to experiment with bay scallops  and see if the company can produce enough of them to help revive a dead industry in the Chesapeake. Its a risk: Bay scallops are much more temperamental than Eastern oysters. Just as problematic, the modern Chesapeake scallop farmer has precious few resources to mine for guidance. The published literature is scant, and commercial scallop operations died out generations ago.

The Croxton cousins have relied heavily on experts with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William & Mary to launch their scallop operation. Among other groups, the institutes Eastern Shore Laboratory in Wachapreague, Va., has been working periodically since the 1970s to restore sea grass and bay scallops in the Chesapeake. The institute has catalogued every step along the way, compiling some of its research in manual form. The Rappahannock team regularly relies on a slim volume, Bay Scallop Culture, which the institute published in 1998.

What the experts and the manual will tell you are the same: Bay scallops are the hothouse flowers of shellfish. Theyre finicky creatures that dont like extreme water temperatures. They dont grow well in low-salinity waters. They dont like muddy waters, either. They hate rushing currents, and they require a lot more space than oysters. As if that werent enough, bay scallops can suffer other indignities: During spawning season in summer, oyster larvae may affix themselves to a single scallop, which will soon disappear under a bouquet of oyster shells.

During their early development stages, scallops hate the sediment, but they hate having you rinse them off. They dont like to get cold, and they dont like to get hot. Theyre just the wimpiest little things, says Mark Luckenbach, professor of marine science at the Virginia institute.

The Rappahannock crew received an early lesson in bay scallop fragility. The Croxtons bought about 50,000 larvae from a hatchery in New York. As part of the painstaking process to transition the scallops into Chincoteague waters, the Rappahannock team placed the larvae in an upweller system, where the embryonic shellfish are fed nutrients and given a safe space to grow until theyre ready for a natural environment. At least thats the theory. But a water pump broke on one of the upwellers, and a farmhand didnt check it for two days.

We lost a ton [of scallops]. That was just stupidity, says Ryan Croxton. That was an easy lesson: Just dont do that again.



Divine "Tink" Hinmon checks scallops at the Rappahannock Oyster Co. farm in Black Narrows, near Chincoteague Island. (Dixie D. Vereen/For The Washington Post)

More lessons are still to come as Rappahannock moves forward with its scallop production. Among them are the best methods for harvesting scallops  typically we dont harvest in the boat, says Ryan Croxton  and shipping them across country. The scallops fragile shell makes it difficult to pack the creatures for transit.

Then theres the marketing side. Part of the reason scallops havent recovered in the Chesapeake, says Luckenbach, is that there hasnt been a consumer market developed for them. The key, Luckenbach adds, is whether diners will be willing to eat scallops on the half shell, with the stomach, intestines and mantle folds visible, looking like an oyster on the half shell that dressed up for a Goth convention. (Typically, only the adductor muscle  a clean ivory nubbin of flesh  is served as a bay scallop.) When eaten on the half shell, a bay scallop tastes like a cross between a sea urchin and the larger sea scallops found in the worlds oceans.

If diners wont accept scallops on the half shell, there will be little reason for Chesapeake aquaculture farmers to adopt the shellfish. After all, they wouldnt be able to compete with the major bay scallop producers, whether in Chile or China, who can sell seafood much cheaper.

It doesnt really make sense for us to shuck bay scallops down to the adductor muscle, says Ryan Croxton. Weve got a limited number out there. For us to shuck that out, wed have a pint jar and then wed be done. . . . Plus, youre throwing out so much good stuff.

Rappahannock faced a similar issue when the company entered the oyster business, which was devoted to the shucked market, given that gourmands considered Chesapeake Bay oysters on the half shell inferior compared to those in other U.S. regions. But Rappahannock convinced chefs  starting at the top with Eric Ripert at the four-star Le Bernardin in New York  that its Chesapeake oysters on the half shell were a cut above, Travis Croxton says chefs are already expressing interest in Rappahannocks scallops, even though the company is not in a position to start selling the product.



Rappahannock Oyster Co. served its bay scallops on the half shell at a reception last week. (Tim Carman/The Washington Post)

Both Jose Andres (Jaleo, Zaytinya, Minibar, many others) and Jamie Leeds (Hanks Oyster Bar, Hanks Pasta Bar) say they would happily put Rappahannocks scallops on their menus. And neither restaurateur would think twice about introducing diners to a whole scallop on the half shell, guts and all.

When you eat the stomach and the liver and everything else, its so good and so tasty. Why would you want to throw it in the garbage? says Andres. If the [Rappahannock] guys are successful and they can produce them, hopefully in quantities one day, it can be good news for the bay.

But those days lie far in the future. Rappahannock still faces numerous challenges before it enters the wholesale scallop market. For starters, the Croxtons want to develop their own hatchery, so they dont have to deal with the hassles of introducing scallop larvae from outside waters into the Chesapeake. Then they have to figure out workable systems for growing, harvesting, shipping. Even pricing. Theyre not yet sure how much they might charge for a Chesapeake Bay scallop, although one of the Croxtons is already seeing dollar signs.

Were still not necessarily thinking about this as a huge revenue stream, says Ryan Croxton.

To which his cousin, Travis, immediately retorts: I am.


Dear Amy: I thought I had the perfect marriage until I met Brian about three years ago.

I instantly felt a connection and attraction to him. I try my hardest not to feel this way. I dont see him very often (we work together), but I cant shake these feelings.

We have spoken about the mutual attraction between us and have kissed once.

He doesnt do anything to encourage a relationship between us, and neither do I.

He is in the process of getting divorced, and I know he doesnt want to come between my husband and me.

I just cant stop thinking about him  even if I dont see him for months at a time.

Im becoming numb and depressed at home, and I dont know how to change these feelings. I cant talk to anyone about this. I feel ashamed, guilty and embarrassed.

Ive been married for 26 years and have never looked at or thought about another man before.

How can I stop these feelings?

Sad

Sad: You say that you and Brian have not done anything to encourage a relationship, b-u-u-u-t . . . sharing intimacies, complaining about your marriage and  hello  kissing are all choices that foster an intimate relationship between two people, while also interfering with your respective marriages.

Your reaction now  feeling depressed, numb and ashamed about your work relationship  will also interfere with your marriage.

You are having an emotional affair, and it doesnt matter how often you actually see this other person because your emotions are running the show.

If you want to save your marriage, then you will have to reengage with your husband and be very intentional about trying to repair and recommit to him. You cannot do that and have any contact with this other person, because the contact (in person or textual), triggers the cycle.

The best way to deal with this is to invite your husband to strategize about how to improve your marriage. Counseling can help.

Dear Amy: I recently planned a three-day driving trip for four other couples to a remote location in another country.

All the arrangements were made based on my experience traveling there many times for almost 20 years, but I made it clear that I was not the guide and was doing this as a courtesy.

I wired the hotel deposit, emailed information and paperwork to everyone and even had a get-together in my home the week before the trip so everyone could meet.

Two of the couples were old friends, but I knew the wife of another (Brenda) very slightly. Prior to the trip, Brenda sent me numerous emails challenging and questioning every part of the plan.

At the destination, she complained about the parking, didnt like the food or the amenities and took advantage of the kindness of a friend of ours who lives there. These negative comments were voiced to me on a daily basis, and it affected my enjoyment of the trip.

On the other hand, when we got home, she sent me a lovely thank you.

There seems to be a big disconnect between her actions and her perception of the effect of her behavior.

So, what do I do when (or if) she calls and wants to get-together? Do I lie and say that Im busy, or do I just tell her that I dont see our friendship moving forward?

Wanting to be an Ex

Wanting to be an Ex: Because this person was polite enough to thank you for allowing her to ruin your vacation, you seem to think she will want to engage in an ongoing friendship with you. I doubt this, but if she makes an overture you can very easily say, No thank you. Im still trying to get over our vacation.

Dear Amy: Im responding to Desperate Parent, who wanted to control her daughters major in college.

We supported our daughter through college  both emotionally and financially. We never criticized her choices. They belonged to her and to her only.

One year out of college, with a year of full-time work under her belt (she was offered two jobs the first week after graduation), she is off to nursing school at an Ivy League college. She did this all entirely by herself. She owns this. Are we proud? You bet.

To the worried mother I say: Let her go!

Proud Mom

Proud Mom: If the student is doing well, I agree that parents should suggest but not dictate academic choices.

Amys column appears seven days a week at washingtonpost.com/advice. Write to Amy Dickinson at askamy@tribpub.com or Ask Amy, Chicago Tribune, TT500, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson solicited a donation from a major food service contractor two months after a whistleblower lawsuit accused the company of swindling millions of dollars from the school system, according to emails obtained by the Associated Press.

The 2013 email exchange  which The Washington Post also obtained  brings into question whether Henderson acted appropriately in personally asking for donations from a beleaguered city vendor whose contract was set to lapse.

The emails between Henderson and the school systems food contractor, Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality, reveal that the companys president emailed the chancellor asking her to send sponsorship information in September 2013 for an upcoming teacher gala. The DC Public Education Fund  a nonprofit group that is separate from D.C. Public Schools  hosted the annual Standing Ovation for D.C. Teachers gala at the Kennedy Center.

The chancellor connected the companys president, Warren Thompson, with someone who provided him with information about how to donate. She then asked Thompson to donate at the $100,000 level. The emails indicate that the two had met in person the week prior, although the school system would not say what that meeting entailed.

Warren, were hoping you come in at A Round of Applause, as wed love to have a dozen of your team members able to share in celebrating the teachers they support every day, Henderson wrote. (A Round of Applause-level donation is $100,000.)

Thompson ultimately donated $25,000, and the email exchange ended with Henderson writing: You Rock!

The D.C. schools chancellor has been involved in fundraising for the annual event, and school vendors are allowed to donate money to the DC Public Education Fund. The funds executive director said she is regularly in contact with the chancellor regarding the event and fundraising.

We followed all the rules here, said Michelle Lerner, a D.C. Public Schools spokeswoman.

D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At-Large), who chairs the councils education committee, said that Henderson has no sway over D.C. Public Schools contracts. That goes through the D.C. Office of Contracting and Procurement. The D.C. Council then has to approve the contracts, but Grosso said he has never talked to Henderson about any potential contracts.

The worst part about this is the timing, Grosso said, referring to the email exchange between Henderson and Thompson. The donation didnt help Chartwells to avoid any council hearings. I think the chancellor was just trying to raise money for something that is good for the teachers.

Henderson typically contacts all of the school systems education partners to support the Standing Ovation gala, Lerner said. City Bridge Foundation, FedEx and Cisco have all donated to the event in the past.

The school system declined to provide further emails showing Henderson contacting potential donors about the time she exchanged emails with Thompson in 2013.

The DC Ed Fund does its best to attract donors to the event, and the Chancellor plays an important role in that, Lerner wrote in an email. However, there is a firm wall between the management of DCPS contracts and the fundraising of the DC Ed Fund. In particular, the Chancellor is not involved in the selection or management of DCPS vendors.

Jessica Rauch, the DC Public Education Funds executive director, said that in the months leading to this years Standing Ovation gala in February, she and Henderson exchanged about 20 emails making introductions with potential donors.

The fact that D.C. Public Schools has an independent nonprofit group raising money for its causes is unusual for a city agency, which can make it particularly unusual when the chancellor raises money for an organization that directly benefits her missions.

Henderson is the person who is driving the strategy of the district, so there is a nice synergy between the strategy that is being developed at D.C. Public Schools and the fundraising efforts at DC Public Education Fund, Rauch said.

Chartwells also donated $25,000 to the star-studded gala celebrating the school systems teachers in 2015, months before the company settled the whistleblower case.

Jeffrey Mills  executive director of the school systems Office of Food and Nutritional Services from 2010 until he was fired in early 2013  filed the lawsuit against the food provider in July 2013, alleging that the company overcharged the city and mismanaged the school meals programs, with food often arriving at schools late, spoiled or in short supply.

The suit was settled in June 2015, with Chartwells and Thompson Hospitality agreeing to pay the school system $19 million.

[D.C. schools food vendor pays $19 million to settle whistleblower lawsuit]

Thompson did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

D.C. Public Schools most recently signed a year-long contract with Chartwells, which is the biggest of three food providers for the school system, in 2012. The school system has had the option to renew that contract each academic year, which it has done.

This year, the school system released a request for proposal for a new food provider contract for the next academic year. Lerner would not say whether Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality applied.

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A federal appeals court in Richmond has ruled that a transgender high school student who was born as a female can sue his school board on discrimination grounds because it banned him from the boys bathroom.

In backing high school junior Gavin Grimm, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit deferred to the U.S. Education Departments position that transgender students should have access to the bathrooms that match their gender identities rather than being forced to use bathrooms that match their biological sex. The department has said that requiring transgender students to use a bathroom that corresponds with their biological sex amounts to a violation of Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funding.

[Were human beings. Transgender teen Gavin Grimm gratified after courts ruling in bathroom case]

Its a complete vindication for the Education Departments interpretation of Title IX, said Joshua Block, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represents Grimm.

In a 2-to-1 decision, the 4th Circuit ordered a lower court to rehear the students claims that the Gloucester County, Va., school boards bathroom policies  which restrict transgender students to using a separate unisex bathroom  violate federal law. The judges also ruled that the lower court should reconsider a request that would have allowed Grimm to use the boys bathroom at Gloucester High School while the case is pending.

The 4th Circuit is the highest court to weigh in on the question of whether bathroom restrictions constitute sex discrimination, and the decision could have widespread implications on how U.S. courts interpret the issue as civil rights activists and local politicians battle over bathrooms.

[Read the 4th Circuit opinion in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board]

The question of which bathrooms transgender people can use has become a divisive political issue in several states, emerging as an emotional fight in South Dakota, Texas, Illinois, Mississippi and Virginia. In North Carolina, a law banning local protections for gay and transgender people  a measure centering on bathrooms  has sparked protests, boycotts and calls for an immediate repeal.

Public bathrooms have become the latest battleground in the fight for LGBT rights, with conservative activists and some state lawmakers pushing restrictions that prevent transgender people from using bathrooms in accordance with their gender identity. Activists have used the bathroom debate as a venue for rolling back broader civil rights protections, arguing that allowing transgender people into the supposedly safe spaces of single-sex bathrooms creates dangerous scenarios and violates privacy and common sense.

The 4th Circuit judges wrote that interpretations of federal discrimination policies should be left to politicians, in this case the Obama administrations Education Department. The court ruled that Grimm has an argument that his school board violated his rights based on those interpretations, but the court did not decide whether transgender students faced discrimination in Gloucester, leaving that question to the lower court.

At the heart of this appeal is whether Title IX requires schools to provide transgender students access to restrooms congruent with their gender identity, the courts opinion said. We conclude that the Departments interpretation of its own regulation . . . as it relates to restroom access by transgender individuals, is . . . to be accorded controlling weight in this case.

LGBT advocates celebrated Tuesdays court decision and were hopeful that it would help turn back the tide of efforts by state lawmakers to get bathroom restrictions on the books. The Human Rights Campaign, which tracks bills related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues, counted 14 states that debated bills that would restrict bathroom usage for transgender students.

A transgender woman gathers likeminded North Carolinians in Charlotte to protest the state's controversial new law that restricts transgender people from using the bathroom that corresponds with their self-identified gender. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)

[Transgender students access to bathrooms is at front of LGBT rights battle]

I think this is going to be a wake-up call for legislators, said Peter Renn, an attorney for an LGBT advocacy group. He said he believes that lawmakers contemplating bathroom restrictions for transgender people are essentially on a collision course with federal law and federal courts.

Lawyer Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, which has backed efforts to roll back LGBT protections for students, took a more cautious view, noting that the judges opted to send the case back down to the district court. I dont think this case has any definitive answer, and its not a definitive ruling on what Title IX says, Staver said.

[Va. transgender students case could have national implications]

The issue has been at the center of state-level debates in recent months, most notably in North Carolina, where Gov. Pat McCrory (R) recently signed into law a ban on local government measures that protect gay and transgender people from discrimination; he focused specifically on the bathroom issue in arguing that the ban was necessary to prevent local governments from allowing a man to use a womans bathroom, shower or locker room. A transgender university student and employee already have sued to overturn the new law and the 4th Circuits ruling could bolster their argument that bathroom restrictions are discriminatory, Renn said.

The North Carolina law has sparked protests and economic boycotts in the state. Duke University leaders this week publicly condemned in the strongest possible terms the North Carolina law and called for its repeal.

[Duke leaders call for repeal of North Carolinas bathroom law]

McCrory said in a video statement posted online Tuesday that he disagreed with the 4th Circuits ruling, calling it a bad precedent.

South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) vetoed a bill that would restrict transgender public school students from using bathrooms in accordance with their gender identity, arguing that schools were best equipped to handle accommodations for transgender students.

Voters in Houston last year voted down a law that would have extended nondiscrimination protections to gay and transgender people, and a new law in Mississippi allows schools to require students to dress and use the bathroom in accordance with the gender on their birth certificate.

The case in Virginia centers on Grimm, now a junior at Gloucester High School. Grimm, who was born with female anatomy, came out as male to his classmates in high school and began using the boys bathroom his sophomore year. Seven weeks later, angry parents raised concerns with the school board, prompting members to pass a policy that requires students to use school bathrooms corresponding with their biological gender and indicates that transgender students should use a separate, unisex bathroom.

Grimm sued the school board in federal court, arguing that the new rule violated Title IX, the federal law that bars gender discrimination in the nations schools. He also asked for a preliminary injunction to allow him to use the boys bathroom while his case proceeded.

[Transgender student files lawsuit against schools over bathrooms]

Troy M. Andersen, chair of the Gloucester County School Board, and David Corrigan, the attorney representing the school board, did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

Transgender students say that using the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity is important for them  and others  to feel comfortable. A transgender boy who appears male may generally raise alarms if he is forced to use the girls bathroom.

Grimm has said that the debate made him the subject of ridicule within his community.

Matters like identity and self-consciousness are something that most kids grapple with in this age range, Grimm said in January. When youre a transgender teenager, these things are often very potent. I feel humiliated and dysphoric every time Im forced to use a separate facility.

In a dissent, Judge Paul V. Niemeyer of the 4th Circuit said the ruling completely tramples on all universally accepted protections of privacy and safety that are based on the anatomical differences between the sexes.

This unprecedented holding overrules custom, culture, and the very demands inherent in human nature for privacy and safety, which the separation of such facilities is designed to protect, Niemeyer wrote.
Former Prince Georges County executive Jack B. Johnson, who pleaded guilty in a broad corruption scheme and is serving 87 months in prison, is asking a Maryland judge to set aside his conviction and sentence.

In a motion filed in U.S. District Court of Maryland, Johnson claims he has newly discovered evidence that uncovers probable law enforcement misconduct in connection with the federal investigation into him that ended with his 2011 plea on extortion and witness and evidence tampering.

The latest motion claims that Johnson and his family received several offensive and hate-filled notes containing implied death threats, before Johnson reported to prison in 2012. He suspects that a member of the Prince Georges County Police Department sent them, though the motion acknowledged that there was no solid evidence to prove it.

At least one note was sealed in a Prince Georges County government envelope and mailed to Johnsons home in Mitchellville, according to court records. That envelope contained Monopoly money with handwritten notes on the back urging Johnson to Rot in Jail. Another was sent to the College Park home of his eldest son, Jack Johnson Jr. One of the notes referenced two county police officers whom Johnson prosecuted while he was states attorney from 1994 to 2002.

I have always suspected that law enforcement, involved in prosecuting the case against me, sent these hate-filled and threatening message to me and my family, Johnson said in a sworn declaration accompanying his motion.

Terry Eaton, Johnsons attorney, declined comment other than to say: We look forward to litigating the issues we raised in court.

Johnson hired private investigators and a forensic lab to help determine who was involved in the alleged intimidation, including possibly federal agents, according to records. The lab found DNA trace evidence on the back of the envelope mailed on county government stationery and said it matched DNA from a second envelope.

Johnson, 67, said he would not have pleaded guilty had he known that it was possible to recover DNA evidence from the envelopes.

Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein, whose office prosecuted Johnson and his wife, said Johnsons motion is without merit.

Mr. Johnson admitted under oath that he was guilty of serious crimes, Rosenstein said in a statement on Monday. His motion does not include anything that casts doubt on the propriety of his conviction and sentence.

Johnson, who served as county executive from 2002 until December 2010, masterminded a corruption conspiracy and received more than $1.6 million in bribes, and implicated his wife, Leslie Johnson, and several developers, county officials and businessmen.

Johnson and his wife were arrested at their Mitchellville home by the FBI in November 2010 as part of a sting operation. They were overheard on a wiretap scheming to flush a $100,000 check that he received as a bribe down the toilet, and stash $79,600 in cash in her underwear. Jack Johnson also was videotaped taking cash bribes from a longtime associate and developer.

A grand jury returned an eight-count indictment against the Johnsons in February 2011.

Jack Johnson, who could have received a maximum of 14 years in prison, agreed to a plea deal and was sentenced to 87 months. The judge also fined him $100,000 and ordered him to undergo alcohol treatment and forfeit $78,000 and his antique Mercedes-Benz.

Johnsons sentence was among the longest in Maryland history for a politician in a corruption case.

He is in custody at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md., and is scheduled to be released in June 2017, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Leslie Johnson, who was elected to the County Council 10 days before her arrest, pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to commit witness and evidence tampering. She received one year and one day in prison, and was released in 2013.
MARYLAND

Man killed by police

after random gunfire

A 28-year-old man was shot and killed by a police officer in Prince Georges County after the alleged gunman fired at law enforcement from the third-floor balcony of an apartment.

The man was identified by Greenbelt police as Rico Don Rae Johnson of Greenbelt. The officers name was not immediately made public.

The incident began Monday around 10:30 p.m. when Greenbelt police officers received a call that someone was shooting a gun in the area of the 6200 block of Springhill Court.

Officers found a man firing from the balcony of an apartment, said George Mathews, a spokesman for the Greenbelt Police Department. Mathews said the man appeared to be firing randomly for about an hour.

He was going in and out of the apartment from the balcony, and he was continuously firing, Mathews said. There was no way we could get to him.

 Dana Hedgpeth

Victims in weekend shootings identified

The victims in two weekend homicides have been identified by Prince Georges County police. They said Carl Patrick Marshall, 22, of Clinton, was shot Saturday night in Clinton on Vienna Drive.

In the second shooting, police said Gamaliel Nerio Rico, 25, of Bladensburg, was killed Sunday morning in the 6800 block of Riggs Road in Chillum.

Police have said they do not think either shooting was a random event. However, no information was available about motives or suspects.

 Lynh Bui

and Martin Weil

Plane crash near Bay Bridge leaves 2 dead

Two people were killed in a single-engine plane crash Tuesday in Queen Annes County, a Maryland State Police spokesman said.

The crash happened about 12:44 p.m. near Route 8 and eastbound Route 50 in Stevensville, said Cpl. DaVaughn Parker with the state police.

Parker said a man and a woman were pronounced dead at the scene. Authorities did not know whether they were departing or arriving at nearby Bay Bridge Airport, Parker said.

 Victoria St. Martin

VIRGINIA

Wildfire closes trails, part of Skyline Drive

The National Park Service said that 3,000 acres of Shenandoah National Park have been charred since a fire began there Saturday. Officials dont know what sparked the fire, but they think it was probably human-caused.

The smoke could be seen Monday afternoon via visible satellite imagery.

Skyline Drive is closed between mile 65 around Swift Run Gap and mile 79, Loft Mountain. Four miles of the Appalachian Trail are closed because of the fire, and 12 other Shenandoah trails have been closed indefinitely.

The fire was expected to spread farther on Tuesday afternoon because of high temperatures and dry conditions.

 Angela Fritz
David Trone takes the self-funding crown for congressional candidates partly because he has given money to his own campaign as direct contributions  not loans to be paid back through subsequent fundraising. (Marlon Correa/El Tiempo Latino)

Maryland Democratic congressional candidate David Trone has put another $2.5 million of personal funds into his campaign for the 8th District Democratic nomination, according to new filings with the Federal Election Commission.

The latest contributions, combined with the $9.9 million reported on his first-quarter campaign finance disclosure last week, makes Trone the heaviest self-funding House candidate ever.

Trone spokesperson Mary Werden declined to comment on the donations and said the campaign does not publicly discuss strategy.

[District 8 Democrats get one last chance to jab at one another]

Notice of the two contributions, one for $977,000 and the other for $1,504,000, were filed with the FEC on Friday and Sunday respectively. Federal election law requires special notice for all contributions of $1,000 or more made less than 20 days but more than 48 hours in advance of an election. The primary is April 26.

Even without Trones money, the 8th District race has become the priciest House contest so far in the 2016 cycle at $4.3 million, according to data compiled by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. Most of that sum ($3.3 million) has been spent by two candidates: former news anchor Kathleen Matthews and State Sen. Jamie Raskin. Matthews reported last week that she put $500,000 of her own money into her campaign.

The total collected by candidates other than Trone through traditional fundraising ($6 million), trails only the $9.2 million in Wisconsins 1st District House race, nearly all of it amassed by the incumbent, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI).

[Self-funding candidates find that money doesnt guarantee votes]

Trone takes the self-funding crown in part because he said his money is in the form of direct contributions  not loans to be paid back through subsequent fundraising.

Democrat Phil Maloof loaned his campaign close to $10 million in two 1998 losses (one a June special election, the other the November general) for New Mexicos 1st District House seat. Part of the loan was repaid, resulting in a net self-funding of a little over $6.3 million (about $9.2 million in current dollars), according to center data.

West Virginia Democrat James Humphreys loaned his campaign $7.8 million (about $10 million in current dollars) in 2002, when he lost to then-Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R) in the states 2nd Congressional District.
Harold J. Morowitz, a biophysicist known within his field as a leading authority on the origins of life and to the wider community as an author of humorous essays on subjects including the thermodynamics of pizza, overpriced breakfast cereal and the use of the guillotine, died March 22 at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va. He was 88.

The cause was complications from sepsis, said a son, Noah Morowitz.

Since 1988, Dr. Morowitz had been a Clarence Robinson Professor of biology and natural philosophy at George Mason University in Fairfax County. He had earlier spent 32 years at Yale University, where he became a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry.

Dr. Morowitzs research led him to propose ideas about evolution and the origins of life on Earth. In a departure from many other theories in this area, he suggested that life was generated through the working of fundamental physical and chemical laws on the environment that existed immediately prior to the emergence of the first living organisms.

And he was prominent among those involved with efforts to link the scientific concept of entropy to the origin of life. Entropy is a unifying concept that provides insight into the behavior of physical systems on the basis of the flow of energy to them and from them, and how their overall orderliness or disorderliness increases or decreases. His books included Energy Flow in Biology (1968).

In the early 1980s, Dr. Morowitz testified in the Arkansas court case McLean v. Arkansas  sometimes called Scopes II  in which parents, scientists, religious groups and others successfully challenged a state law calling for the teaching of creation science in schools alongside evolutionary biology. Dr. Morowitz gave expert testimony that there is no scientific basis for the creationist belief in the origin of life and therefore it should not be taught as science in the public school curriculum.

At George Mason, he was one of the first faculty members to join the Robinson Professor program, which brings to the universitys Northern Virginia campus distinguished senior faculty members at other institutions to focus on undergraduate teaching.

This semester, he was teaching an honors course, Reading the Arts: Biological Themes in Literature. He had written essays on this theme, one of which he began by confessing, For years I have been practicing English without a license.

He helped establish at George Mason the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, named for the late Northern Virginia businessman Shelley Krasnow, who gave $20 million to GMU. A body of scholars, including four Nobel Prize-winners, determined that the institute would function as a think tank to study the brain. Dr. Morowitz was its director from its opening in 1993 until 1998.

Harold Joseph Morowitz was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., on Dec. 4, 1927. His father was a newspaper and magazine distributor. He graduated in 1947 from Yale, where he also received a masters degree in physics in 1950 and a doctorate in biophysics in 1951.

He was on the Yale faculty from 1955 to 1987, including five years as master of Pierson College, one of the residential colleges at Yale.

Survivors include his wife of 67 years, Lucille Stein Morowitz, of Woodbridge, Conn.; four sons, Eli Morowitz of Foster City, Calif., Joshua Morowitz of Greenville, S.C., Zachary Morowitz of New Haven, Conn., and Noah Morowitz of Kensington, Md.; and nine grandchildren. A daughter, Joanna Morowitz, died in 2010.

Dr. Morowitz, who lived in Fairfax County, was author or co-author of 19 books and was a consultant to NASA on space missions.

As an essayist, he liked to explore the application of scientific principles to such happenings as the retention of heat in a freshly baked pizza, the physics of washing a load of laundry, homeopathy, admissions to American medical schools, the evolution of snakes, the baking of bagels, the mixing of a martini, and a cross-cultural analysis of bathing habits.

In an essay titled The Kindly Dr. Guillotin, he wrote of Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a physician and deputy in the National Assembly of France in the early stage of the French Revolution who recognized and promoted the swift and efficient decapitation contraption that came to bear his name.

Guillotin, according to Dr. Morowitz, thought this method of execution was in keeping with the equality principle of the revolution by subjecting all capital offenders, nobility and commoners, to the same method of death. Previously commoners had died by the noose and aristocrats by the axe.
Police say school volunteer Deonte Carraway, 22, made pornographic videos with children during school hours and on the grounds of Judge Sylvania W. Woods Elementary School (Mark Gail/For The Washington Post)

The confession of a former Prince Georges County elementary school teaching assistant arrested on child pornography charges should be tossed because it was not given voluntarily, according to a legal argument filed by his lawyers.

The attorneys representing Deonte Carraway argued in legal filings that the 22-year-old  who was in special-education classes for all of his schooling and has an IQ of 63  did not fully understand his rights when he spoke to law enforcement investigating the case in February.

In a psychological evaluation, it is noted that, he exhibited significant cognitive deficits . . . which placed his overall intellectual functioning in the deficient range, Carraways attorneys wrote in documents filed Friday in federal court. Numerous cases hold that limited intelligence and mental disability weigh heavily against a finding of voluntariness.

[For years, Pr. Georges didnt strengthen school sex-abuse policies]

Carraway has been charged federally with 13 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and production of child pornography after police allege he abused and filmed inappropriate behavior with children who were as young as 9. Carraway also faces related local charges connected to the case and is being held at the county detention center.

Deonte Carraway (Prince George's County Police Department)

Carraway abused and filmed students during the school day and on the grounds of Judge Sylvania W. Woods Elementary School since at least January 2015, police have said. Carraway also abused children at a community center, church and in private homes, claiming at least 17 victims, according to police.

The case has prompted the county school system to conduct a review of its policies and procedures to determine how Carraway was permitted enough time alone to allegedly perpetrate such acts and why other adults in the school did not notice or did not report problems.

[An elementary school volunteer filmed child pornography at school, police say. These tweets show parents anger and anguish.]

The Carraway case has also prompted at least five civil suits against the school system, including a class-action lawsuit.

Carraway distributed phones to some of his victims and communicated with them on the devices through social media, police and prosecutors allege.

Carraways attorneys have also requested that the judge block evidence collected from at least two cellphones connected with the case, saying the information was obtained with a tainted search warrant.

The affidavit underlying the warrant did not establish probable cause to believe evidence of a crime would be found at the location, according to a legal motion tied to one phone.

On another phone, Carraways attorneys argued that police searched it without a warrant.
A Southeast Washington resident was killed Monday in a car crash in Prince Georges County, authorities said.

They said the victim, Ashley Murphy, 24, of Hartford Street, was killed when a car left Suitland Road near Meadowview Drive and struck a pole. The site is in the Suitland/Silver Hill area.

The driver of the car was critically injured, but not identified.

Police said they were trying to determine why the driver lost control.
Nicole Mittendorff, in an undated family photo. She was reported missing last week and her car was found in rural Virginia over the weekend. (Family photo)

The Fairfax County fire department normally responds to emergencies, but on Tuesday the fire chief said he was issuing his own urgent 911 call for help in the mysterious disappearance of one of his firefighters.

Flanked by dozens of firefighters and a truck at Fire Station 32, Richard R. Bowers Jr. pleaded for tips from the public to help locate Nicole K. Mittendorff, who has been missing for nearly a week.

We are putting out a 911 call to the general public and media, Bowers said at the news conference.

Mittendorff, 31, of Woodbridge last contacted her family April 13, and her car was found Saturday in Shenandoah National Park, prompting a search by aircraft, dogs and rescue teams that has so far turned up no sign of her. Virginia State Police said they have no evidence to indicate foul play at this point.

[Search widens for missing Fairfax County firefighter in Shenandoah National Park]

The husband of missing Va., firefighter Nicole Mittendorff made an emotional plea for help in tracking her down. Steve Mittendorff broke down in tears at a news conference on April 19. Mittendorff disappeared on April 15 at Shenandoah National Park. (WUSA)

Steve Mittendorff, her husband and an officer with the Virginia State Police, issued his own tearful plea at the news conference. Nicole Mittendorffs sister and brother-in-law, who is also a Fairfax County firefighter, stood nearby.

Sweetheart, I love you, Steve Mittendorff said. I am praying for you. Im not sure where you are, but know that we are all looking for you, and I look forward to your safe return.

Steve Mittendorff said it was unbearable not knowing where his wife was. He and Bowers did not offer new information about the circumstances surrounding her disappearance and did not take questions.

Nicole Mittendorffs family members and the firefighters bowed their heads in a moment of silence to pray for her at one point during the news conference.

Nicole Mittendorffs father, Robert Clardy, wrote in a message posted on Facebook that she did not show up for work Friday. He wrote that that was unusual for her, and Virginia State Police said Steve Mittendorff reported her missing on Friday.

Clardy wrote that his daughters last contact was a text message around 10:50 a.m. on April 13. Her last known location was in Warrenton, Va. She may have traveled to Shenandoah National Park to train, since she is an avid runner and triathlete.

A park ranger found Nicole Mittendorffs cream-colored 2009 Mini Cooper in a pullout near Whiteoak Canyon Trail shortly before 8 p.m. on Saturday, Virginia State Police said. The trail is close to Old Rag, a mountain that is popular with hikers.

[Vehicle found at Shenandoah National Park, search for missing woman continues]

Virginia State Police said searchers spent Sunday combing the area. About 100 federal, state and volunteer searchers returned Monday as the search expanded from Whiteoak Canyon Trail to others in the area. The search resumed Tuesday morning and included members of the Fairfax County fire department who are part of a K-9 search-and-rescue team.

Virginia State Police said the area is mountainous and densely forested, so the search has been difficult. Police have declined to say whether anything was found in Mittendorffs car that might indicate what happened to her or where she was headed.

Bowers, the fire chief, said Tuesday that the department had no indication that Mittendorff was in any kind of trouble in the days and weeks before she disappeared. He described her as a high performer who loved her job and was respected by her peers. Her locker at the station was filled with gear Tuesday, as if she had just finished her shift.

A prayer service was held for Mittendorff on Monday night at St. Paul United Methodist Church in Woodbridge, and the fire department was planning another vigil for her at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday at Station 32 in Burke.

Steve and Nicole Mittendorffs wedding website describes her as an Air Force brat through and through who graduated from high school in Michigan and earned a degree in psychology from George Mason University. The website said she previously worked as a business analyst.

Nicole Mittendorff is described as white, with blond hair and green eyes. She is about 5-foot-6 and weighs about 125 pounds.

Anyone with information is asked to call 703-803-0026 or email questions@vsp.virginia.gov.
Prince Georges County police have identified the man who was fatally shot Saturday night in Clinton as Carl Patrick Marshall, 22.

Officers responded to the report of a shooting about 9:50 p.m. in the 5300 block of Vienna Drive and found Marshall, a Clinton resident, wounded in the street, police said.

Authorities pronounced him dead at the scene.

Marshalls shooting does not appear to be a random act, police said. Detectives are still searching for a suspect and motive in the case, they said.

Authorities are offering a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to an arrest and indictment in Marshalls slaying. Police are asking anyone with information to call 301-772-4925 or 1-866-411-8477.
Justin Nelzen, in red vest, joins others as they work to rescue up to 70 horses along Cypress Creek in Humble, Tex., northeast of Houston. (Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle via AP/Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle via AP)

TEXAS

Four deaths reported amid Houston flooding

More than a foot of rain fell Monday in parts of Houston, submerging scores of subdivisions and several major interstate highways, forcing the closure of schools and knocking out power to thousands of residents who were urged to shelter in place.

Four fatalities appeared to be weather-related, authorities said.

Sylvester Turner, mayor of the nations fourth-largest city, told residents to stay home to fend off a weather system he called stubborn. More rain was projected over the next two to three days, he said..

Rain gauges in parts of Harris County, which includes most of Houston, showed water levels approaching 20 inches since late Sunday night.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the countys chief administrator, said that two bodies were found in a vehicle that was shown on traffic cameras driving around barricades and unsuccessfully attempting to navigate a flooded underpass. In addition, one person, believed to be a contractor with the citys airport system, was found in a submerged vehicle not far from the airport. Also, a truck driver was found dead in the cab of his rig after encountering high water on a freeway service road.

 Associated Press

SUPREME COURT

Justices extend ruling

on lower prison terms

The Supreme Court on Monday voted 7 to 1 to extend its year-old ruling that makes people convicted of repeated violent crimes eligible for reduced prison terms.

Justice Anthony Kennedy said last years decision that threw out part of the Armed Career Criminal Act applies retroactively to defendants whose convictions are final.

The justices only heard arguments in the case in March. But they may have felt a need to rush their decision because some inmates face a June deadline under federal law for challenging the longer sentences. Only Justice Clarence Thomas filed a dissent.

The provision of the recidivist law in question included a catchall phrase that defined what crimes make a defendant eligible for a longer prison term. The justices said last year that phrase was too vague.

 Associated Press
Khaula Hadeed talks to her husband on the phone after she and other Muslim Americans spent the day lobbying members of Congress. (Abigail Hauslohner/The Washington Post)

The placard beside the door announced that this was the office of Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (R-Ala.)  exactly where they were supposed to be  but the group of Muslim lobbyists paused for a moment before walking in.

The Alabamians were new at this game. Led by an energetic 31-year-old named Khaula Hadeed, they included a NASA aerospace engineer and his two teenage sons, a human-rights lawyer, and a small-town imam, all of whom had traveled to Washington to join a few hundred others for an annual Muslim advocacy day on Monday.

A few minutes earlier, they had been packed into an ornate conference room with more than 300 other Muslims from around the country, as leaders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the countrys largest Muslim advocacy groups, walked them through a crash course in lobbying.

Be polite and be clear, instructed Robert McCaw, CAIRs government-affairs manager. Say thank you. Use real life experiences to illustrate points  it makes you more relatable. And take pictures with the members of Congress  always asking first if thats okay to do  that you can post widely to social media.

The point of this years drive was to invite lawmakers to sign on to a House resolution condemning Islamophobia, advocate for broader criteria through which an individual can acquire good credit  a bill co-introduced by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), one of two Muslims in Congress  and promote the construction of more grocery stores in food deserts, a bill introduced by the other Muslim member of Congress, Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.).

But more broadly, it was an effort to promote understanding of a religion that has been taking a rhetorical beating in the ongoing presidential campaign, and whose members have felt a growing hostility from some sections of the American public, particularly since the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., carried out by two Muslim extremists.

We need to put a human face on the Muslim community, said CAIRs executive director, Nihad Awad; its harder to support anti-Muslim policies if you can put a face to the name.

Awad advised the group to use the hashtag #MuslimHillDay for its Twitter and Facebook posts. Then, he added, cautioning those with foreign accents about their pronunciation: Not Muslim Hell Day. The crowd laughed.

The Alabama six knew their charge would be more challenging than that of their California or New York counterparts, the latter of which had a delegation that was a few dozen strong. Theirs was a red state through and through, Hadeed said. Alabamas governor, Robert Bentley (R), has tried to block the resettlement of Syrian refugees in his state; and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) of Alabama is Donald Trumps only Senate endorser.

None of Alabamas nine representatives on Capitol Hill, including the two senators, agreed to meet with the Muslim lobbyists Monday, on the 10th annual Muslim Hill Day. But five allowed for meetings with their staffers.

At Aderholts office, the group had been granted a meeting with Megan Medley, the congressmans deputy legislative director, who promptly ushered them into an office and closed the door. After a few minutes, they reemerged.

She said they had no position on it, Hadeed said, referring to the Islamophobia resolution. And that shes not in that department, added David Gespass, a human-rights lawyer from Birmingham, who chairs the board of CAIRs Alabama chapter.

Fifteen-year-old Abdallah and 14-year-old Assem, the sons of Said Belhadj, the aerospace engineer, looked dismayed. Theres no precedent for this, Hadeed assured them. Many of these lawmakers have never met Muslims before, she said.

The group agreed that the meeting in and of itself was a positive step. They snapped a group photo next to Aderholts placard  Medley declined to be photographed with them  and set off down the marble hallway to the next meeting.

According to Hadeed, who started CAIRs Alabama chapter last year, there is no accurate count on the number of Muslims in the state, but there are at least 33 mosques. She estimates that at least 5,000 Muslims live in Birmingham, because thats about how many turn out at the mosque for Eid al-Fitr, the day that marks the end of Ramadan, every year.

Hadeed, who grew up in Pakistan, got U.S. citizenship last month after having a green card for years. The need to become a citizen  and to be able to vote  began to feel suddenly urgent as a growing number of American politicians voiced suspicion and called for anti-Muslim policies in the aftermath of the San Bernardino attacks.

I was worried  am I going to be able to have a say? she said, her heels clicking across the sidewalk behind the Capitol in between meetings. She wore a long, fitted white coat and had her hair swept up on top of her head beneath a navy blue scarf.

Seventy-eight percent of Republican voters in Alabama said last month that they would support Trumps proposal to ban non-American Muslims from entering the country, according to a Super Tuesday exit poll conducted by ABC News.

That means my neighbors are thinking that, Hadeed said. I was like: I have a daughter. What if someone boots me out?

Two of the five congressional offices that granted the Alabama group meetings assigned their national security advisers to the task, an event that the group found vexing.

(That was not our guy, Hadeed declared after exiting a meeting with Hanz Heinrichs, Sen. Richard C. Shelbys national security adviser. But anyway, he was one of the people who did reply to us  so yay!)

At the office of Rep. Martha Roby, the group met with the Republicans military legislative assistant, Andrew W. Ashley, who told the visitors that he deals with defense, foreign affairs and national security issues.

Were actually here for some legislative issues, Hadeed said.

Are yall from Alabama? Ashley asked.

Everyone nodded and offered halting introductions. Huntsville, Birmingham, a love of the South.

Muhammed Haq, the imam whose Pakistani upbringing left him with a thick accent, said he was from the Appalachian town of Anniston. Hadeed mentioned her Alabama college degree, and she joked with the others about the grueling days of law school as the two congressional aides sat stone-faced.

Hadeed told them about the resolution to denounce anti-Muslim bigotry, and about the credit initiative and about the food deserts.

Abdallah Belhadj, the 15-year-old, told them about an anti-Muslim group that wanted to have an armed protest outside their mosque.

Ashley said they would have to review the bills, including the Islamophobia bill with its 71 Democratic co-sponsors.

As they stood up, Hadeed asked if they could take a picture together.

I generally dont take pictures with groups, Ashley said.

By lunchtime, the group had met with staffers from three congressional offices, including one who said they get about 100 resolutions a day, according to Abdallah. The Belhadj family, who had driven 11 hours to Washington the day before, had to hit the road again. The trip was very positive, the elder Belhadj said. It would have been appreciated if the congressmen were actually there, Abdallah added.

In the Rotunda, Hadeed and Haq ran into an acquaintance from the California team. Wow, you met with an actual congressman, Hadeed said, after hearing his cheerful account. The man replied that the representative is really nice  they meet all the time.

Lucky them, Hadeed sighed as the man walked away.

But the final meeting sparked a little hope.

Walking into Rep. Bradley Byrnes office, Hadeed hoped she might see a former law school classmate. He wasnt there, but the Republicans legislative director, Chad Carlough, knew about the connection, and he welcomed Hadeed and Haq warmly.

Twenty minutes later, Hadeed emerged, grinning. Now I know the difference between a good meeting and a great meeting, she exclaimed. Carlough, who had lived in Bahrain, hadnt signed on to any of the proposals, but he understood what we were saying right off the bat.

In Bahrain, a Muslim woman had given Carloughs wife a special tour of the Grand Mosque, Hadeed said. He understands that regular Muslims are not the September 11 people  that theres a difference. She was breathless.

Carlough, she said, even let them take a picture.
BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT Dilma Rousseff insists that the impeachment movement against her is a coup against democracy. It manifestly is not. Ms. Rousseff is credibly accused of violating a Brazilian law limiting government spending, and the vote against her by the lower house of the National Congress on Sunday was in keeping with the Brazilian constitution. The Senate will now vote on whether to temporarily remove her from office while it adjudicates her case. This observance of the rule of law has nothing to do with the seizures of power by generals and other strongmen that blot Brazils history and that of other Latin American nations.

The prosecution of Ms. Rousseff is nevertheless troubling for a variety of reasons, one of which is that it offers little prospect for ending Brazils political crisis or providing a means to address its profound economic problems. Though she may have violated a budget law in order to overspend during her 2014 reelection campaign, Ms. Rousseff has not been accused in the far more serious graft scandal linked to the state oil firm Petrobras, which has seen criminal cases brought against scores of lawmakers and businessmen.

The majority of the congressmen who voted to impeach the president themselves face allegations of wrongdoing, while Vice President Michel Temer, who would assume the presidency, has been accused of the same offense as the president. The leader of the campaign against Ms. Rousseff, lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha, who is second in the presidential line of succession, is charged with receiving millions in bribes and stashing them in a Swiss bank account.

With political vote counters predicting a Senate vote to suspend Ms. Rousseff from office by early next month, Mr. Temer is already preparing to take over. He accidentally leaked an audio-recorded draft of his first speech, in which he promised a government of national salvation. But the 75-year-old vice president, who represents a party that abandoned a coalition with Ms. Rousseffs Workers Party, would surely find it difficult to muster the support for the economic medicine that Brazil needs, including sharp spending cuts or tax increases to address a mammoth government fiscal deficit. Polls show that almost as many Brazilians  about 60 percent  wish to see Mr. Temer impeached as favor ousting Ms. Rousseff.

The result is likely to be a continuation of economic misery and drift. The International Monetary Fund predicts Brazils economy will contract by nearly 4 percent for the second consecutive year. From the sidelines, Ms. Rousseff and her left-wing party will fiercely oppose measures to repair the damage of years of overspending and excessive government economic intervention. Meanwhile, prosecutors and judges will continue, as they should, criminal investigations that could imperil a new government.

Brazils best recourse would be new elections, something that would require either a constitutional amendment or, more likely, a determination by the electoral authority that the last presidential vote was tainted by illegal campaign funding. Failing that, Latin Americas biggest power may be doomed to spend the next couple of years mired in recession and domestic conflict. Its a high price to pay for the rule of law  but so far, that is the one area where Brazil is getting stronger.
IN THREE years at the helm of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has been a source of inspiration for millions of faithful around the world. In one critical respect, however, he has fallen short of his own promise: to come fully to terms with decades of child sex abuse by clergymen and the institutional cover granted to them by bishops and cardinals.

Francis has pledged the zealous vigilance of the Church to protect children and the promise of accountability for all. Yet there has been scant accountability, particularly for bishops. Too often, the churchs stance has been defiance and obstruction.

In his trip to the United States in the fall, Francis told victims that words cannot fully express my sorrow for the abuse you suffered. Yet his initiative to establish a Vatican tribunal to judge bishops who enabled or ignored pedophile priests has come to naught. Not a single bishop has been called to account by the tribunal, which itself remains more notional than real.

Meanwhile, church officials have fought bills in state legislatures across the United States that would allow thousands of abuse victims to seek justice in court. The legislation would loosen deadlines limiting when survivors can bring lawsuits against abusers or their superiors who turned a blind eye. Many victims, emotionally damaged by the abuse they have suffered, do not speak until years after they were victimized; by then, in many states, it is too late for them to force priests and other abusers to account in court.

Eight states have lifted such deadlines, known as statutes of limitations, for victims who are sexually abused as minors. Seven states have gone further, enacting measures allowing past victims  not just current and future ones  to file lawsuits in a finite period of time, generally a two- or three-year window.

In many more states, however, the bishops and their staffs have successfully killed such bills, arguing that it would be unfair to subject the church to lawsuits in which memories and evidence are degraded by the passage of time. Quietly, they also say the church, which has suffered an estimated $3 billion hit in settlements and other costs related to clergy sex abuse scandals nationwide, can ill afford further financial exposure.

A typical case is Maryland, where bills to extend the statute of limitations until the alleged victim turns 38 have failed even to come to a vote, owing to opposition from House of Delegates Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph F. Vallario Jr. (D-Prince Georges) and the Catholic Church, among others.

In his trip to the United States, Pope Francis praised bishops for what he called their generous commitment to bring healing to victims and he expressed sympathy for how much the pain of recent years has weighed upon you. Yet by its actions, the churchs commitment to bring healing has seemed far from generous. And it seemed perverse to address the bishops pain when the real suffering has been borne by children.
A Halliburton facility in Port Fourchon, La., in 2011. The Justice Department has announced it would fight the proposed merger of Halliburton and Baker Hughes. (Mira Oberman/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

The Obama administration has a new economic worry: competition or, allegedly, the lack of it. Americas businesses, the indictment goes, merge too often, innovate too little and bilk consumers too much. The open question is whether this argument is shrewd politics, shrewd economics  or both.

No doubt, the politics are enticing. In this election season, criticizing big, impersonal firms has a strong populist appeal. And Americans venerate competition, at least in the abstract, as a check on companies market power. So the White Houses pitch is familiar.

The President is launching a new initiative to stoke competition, the White House announced. No corporation [will] unfairly squeeze their competitors, their workers, or their customers. Strong stuff.

Backing the words with deeds, the president supported a proposal from the Federal Communications Commission to open up set-top cable boxes to competition. Renting the set-top boxes (at a reported average annual cost of $231) is a rip-off, the White House suggested. If cable companies faced competition, consumers could buy boxes with more digital features at less cost.

The president also asked departments and agencies to report back in two months on pro-competitive executive actions they could take to empower consumers, workers and entrepreneurs.

As the administration sees it, many U.S. firms are engaging in an orgy of anti-competitive behavior. Testifying recently before a congressional committee, Bill Baer, the assistant attorney general of the Antitrust Division, reported that in fiscal 2015, there were 67 proposed mergers valued at more than $10 billion  more than twice the number in fiscal 2014.

To the administration, many mega-mergers are motivated by the quest for greater market power: the ability to raise prices. Not surprisingly, the administration has rejected many of these deals: the merger between cellphone firms AT&T and T-Mobile; Comcasts proposed merger with Time Warner Cable; appliance-maker Electroluxs acquisition of General Electrics appliance division; the proposed merger of two large makers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron.

More pending major mergers may face administration opposition. The Justice Department has already announced it would fight the proposed merger of two large oil service firms, Halliburton and Baker Hughes. Also, there are two mergers of big health insurers that require government approval: Aetna and Humana, and Anthem and Cigna.

The White Houses Council of Economic Advisers finds other evidence of diminishing competition. In an array of industries from retail stores to hospitals, total revenue became increasingly concentrated among the top 50 firms from 1997 to 2012. Likewise, the rate of new start-up businesses has declined, perhaps indicating more barriers to entry.

The administrations case is strong but not airtight. Generally, there are two types of competition: one named after Adam Smith (1723-1790), involving price and quality competition among firms producing similar products (think steel, groceries or clothes); and the other named after Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), emphasizing the clash between new products and production techniques and the old (think jet travel vs. railroads, big box stores vs. local merchants or the Internet vs. newspapers).

Do we have a competition deficit? It depends on the form of competition. If its Schumpeters competition, the answer is almost certainly no  and this is the most disruptive type of competition and the hardest to defend against. Dozens of industries are making fundamental adjustments to the Internet and its side effects. Companies that built their business models based on one set of products and strategies have difficulty coping with circumstances largely outside their experience or competence.

Unfortunately, one response to this intensifying competition is to try to limit Adam Smiths traditional competition by merging with major competitors. Thats what seems to be happening now. Facing slow growth, increasing IT costs and greater uncertainty, companies are trying to create growth, cut costs and reduce uncertainty by getting bigger. Its a baffling mixture that does not sit well with traditional antitrust thinking. The jury is still out on whos right.

Read more from Robert Samuelsons archive.
Syrian refugee families wait to register their information at the U.S. processing center for Syrian refugees during a media tour held by the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan, on April 6. (Muhammad Hamed/Reuters)

Mark Hetfield is the president and chief executive of HIAS, a Jewish nonprofit dedicated to refugee resettlement. Jack Moline is a rabbi and the president of Interfaith Alliance, an organization committed to protecting faith and freedom.

South Carolina became a pioneer in providing sanctuary to refugees fleeing religious persecution with the March 1, 1669, Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina protecting the rights of Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from the purity of Christian religion. This included a Charleston community of Sephardic Jews, who finally found sanctuary after generations of roaming the globe following their expulsion from Spain.

The document, co-authored by John Locke, was revolutionary. It helped to form the philosophical bedrock that laid the foundation for the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the American tradition of serving as a refuge for the persecuted.

In the coming days, however, South Carolina could go in a different direction, this time pioneering dangerous and misguided legislation that would create a hostile environment for refugees, pressuring them  and the faith-based groups that help them  to self-deport from the state.

This legislation, which recently passed the state Senate and will soon be considered by the House, would force social service agencies and houses of worship to register any refugees they help resettle and hold them liable in civil court for any crimes those refugees might commit.

As the shocking rise in anti-Muslim bigotry collides with increasing concern about terrorism at home and abroad, legislation attacking refugees has spread rapidly spread across the country. But South Carolinas bill could set a unique and dangerous precedent. If South Carolina passes this disastrous legislation, it risks not only endangering those seeking refuge on our shores and tarnishing our countrys proud tradition of assisting those forced to flee their homes, but also jeopardizing the promise of religious freedom that is the core of American civic life.

This proposal rests on a fundamental misconception about refugees and immigrants, one too often promoted by those who peddle in bigotry and fear. From our experiences, from the stories of our families and communities, and from countless people weve worked with over the years, we know the significant contributions that refugees make to our country. Refugees have become our religious leaders and successful entrepreneurs. They are artists, scientists, scholars, police officers, doctors and soldiers; they are our neighbors. But most important, they are children of God, entitled to equal opportunity, dignity and respect.

Moreover, South Carolinas bill is a solution in search of a problem. Crime rates are actually much lower among the foreign-born than among those born in the United States. To force religious organizations to bear responsibility for any crimes refugees might commit is at once to demonize those refugees and to pretend that they do not hold the same responsibility for their own actions as anyone else. This is to deny their God-given potential and their humanity.

This bill is a failure of both our religious ideals and our promise of religious freedom. Houses of worship and religious communities have always held a privileged place in American life, groundwork that was also laid in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. That privilege has allowed religious communities to be at the forefront of movements for social justice throughout our history, and it enables us to step up and serve refugees today. Conservatives have used this religious-freedom claim to carve out exemptions for religious organizations to non-discrimination laws, health-care mandates and much more. That so many of them seem ready to abandon religious-freedom concerns when it comes to refugees, subjecting religious organizations to undue scrutiny and impeding their ability to serve, suggests that these politicians value religious freedom only when it serves their political agenda.

Our nation is struggling to address the deteriorating situation in the Middle East and the largest global refugee crisis since World War II. We cannot allow South Carolinas dangerous proposal to become an example for states across the country and our international neighbors. We hope that the people of South Carolina will help defeat this legislation and continue the hard work of finding real solutions.

The ultimate irony is that faith organizations have played such a vital role in responding to the refugee crisis precisely because of the failure of our federal, state and local governments to act. If South Carolinas disastrous, discriminatory idea becomes the norm, who will be left to reach those people in need? All of us who cherish religious freedom should be deeply concerned by this proposal that is so obviously aimed at discouraging religious organizations from fulfilling our sacred duty to serve.
CAN THE country do without nuclear power and natural gas? Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) thinks so. But his position would set back the fight against global warming.

While campaigning in New York, Mr. Sanders has played up his opposition to nuclear power, and in particular the Indian Point power station 25 miles north of Manhattan, which provides a quarter of the citys electricity. The plant is a catastrophe waiting to happen, he declared. His criticism came as little surprise; he had already promised to phase out nuclear power nationwide by steadily retiring existing reactors.

Mr. Sanders has also attacked fracking, the process of fracturing shale formations deep underground in order to extract natural gas. After years of contentious debate, New Yorks state government banned the technique, which drillers use widely in neighboring Pennsylvania. As with nuclear power, Mr. Sanders was not just bowing to New York environmentalists; he had long insisted that the federal government should ban fracking across the country if we are serious about safe and clean drinking water and clean air.

In fact, if we are serious about global warming, we will ignore Mr. Sanderss sloganeering.

When burned, natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal. The recent fracking boom contributed to a reduction in national carbon dioxide emissions over the past several years, as utilities switched from cheap coal to now-cheaper gas. It is true that some concerns remain. Methane leaks from natural gas wells and pipelines. Many worry about drinking water near fracking operations. But the government can require drillers to address these issues without shutting the industry. It is also true that natural gas is a waystation; though it is cleaner than coal, natural gas still produces carbon dioxide emissions. Yet gass price and emissions profile is still attractive enough that the Environmental Protection Agencys Clean Power Plan, the most aggressive global warming policy the country has ever had, relies on gas displacing coal to meet medium-term emissions goals.

Mr. Sanderss rhetoric on nuclear power is even more concerning. Nuclear accounts for about a fifth of the countrys electricity, and it is practically emissions-free. Shutting down that much clean electricity generation would put the country into a deep emissions hole. Mr. Sanders argues that he will invest heavily in renewables. Yet every dollar spent to replace one carbon-free source with another is a dollar that could have been spent replacing dangerous and dirty coal plants. Under Mr. Sanderss vision, either the country would fail to maximize emissions cuts, or it would waste huge amounts of money unnecessarily replacing nuclear plants. Unsurprisingly, the Clean Power Plan relies on nuclear, too, assuming that the country will get about the same amout of electricity from nuclear in 2030.

Mr. Sanders is right that climate change demands an aggressive response, and he is right to favor a carbon tax. He should leave it at that: put a price on carbon, insist on adequate regulation and let the market find the fastest and most efficient road to slowing the warming of the planet.
Rich Leotta holds a photo of his son, Montgomery County police officer Noah Leotta, who was killed in December when a drunk driver struck him, on Feb. 10 in Annapolis. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

IT TOOK a perfect storm of good timing, tragic events and tenacious advocates, but finally Maryland has started to overcome the retrograde forces in Annapolis that for years blocked no-nonsense laws to control drunken driving.

In the closing hours of this years legislative session, those forces combined to impel, and shame, Maryland legislators into passing a bill that significantly expands the use of ignition interlocks, dashboard devices that prevent vehicles from starting if the driver has had too much to drink.

The legislation was spurred by the death of a young police officer in Montgomery County, Noah Leotta, who died after being struck by a suspected repeat drunk driver on Rockville Pike last December while on patrol to catch just such offenders. Mr. Leotta was one of 50 Montgomery County officers to be struck by a drunk driver in the past three years. Many people, including Mr. Leottas parents, worked hard to ensure his death would not be in vain.

The resulting legislation, known as Noahs Law, was similar to previous bills that had been buried in the Judiciary Committee of the House of Delegates, where harrumphing lawmakers seemed concerned with protecting drunk drivers more than their victims. This year, with anti-drunken-driving advocates dedicated to the memory of Mr. Leotta, the dynamic in Annapolis changed. No longer could legislators mumble about the unfairness of imposing dashboard Breathalyzers on offenders who were just one sip over the line.

The measure toughens existing law considerably. Under current law, ignition interlocks are optional, and easily avoided, for run-of-the-mill drunk drivers. They are imposed mainly on repeat and youthful offenders, or those who are inebriated to the point of incoherence, with a blood alcohol content of 0.15.

Under Noahs Law, the devices, which have proved highly effective, will be required for drivers who meet the legal definition of drunk, meaning 0.08 or higher. The interlocks, which require the driver to prove his sobriety by blowing into a tube before the car will start, will be imposed for six months upon conviction, or nine months should a driver refuse to take the breath test. The number of devices installed in Marylanders cars (at the drivers expense), currently around 11,000, could increase substantially.

The public outcry about drunken driving in this country has faded over the past couple of decades, but it was revived in Maryland for Noahs Law. Joining Mr. Leottas parents as eloquent and compelling advocates for tougher laws were activists from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, police officials including Montgomery County Chief J. Thomas Manger, and lawmakers such as Del. Benjamin Kramer (D-Montgomery).

In the House of Delegates, Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) made it clear to the Judiciary Committee chairman, Joseph F. Vallario Jr. (D-Prince Georges), who has routinely blocked such legislation, that the jig was up. At last, lawmakers were ready (or forced) to reckon with the fact that about one-third of the traffic deaths in this country still involve drunk drivers  one sip over the line or not.
Its very close to my heart because I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7-Eleven, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down, and I saw the greatest people Ive ever seen in action.

 Donald Trump, April 18

May 1, 2017

Remarks by the President

The White House

President Trump: I want to welcome all of my Cabinet secretaries here for this meeting. We have completed our first 100 days in office and already we have made America Great Again. Amazing! The best!

I know everybody took a Big Gulp when I changed 9/11 to 7-Eleven last year. They thought I was a stupid person. A loser! Erin Gloria Ryan of Vocativ said I would start talking about the Japanese bombing of Pearl Jam and the Native Americans Trail of Sears. Other terrible people  the worst!  thought I would refer to the eBay of Pigs, the Normandy landing on DQ Day, the Dodge Challenger disaster, Black & Decker Tuesday of 1929, the 1906 San FranCisco Systems Fire and the 1814 burning of the White Castle by the British.

Wrong! Turning 9/11 into 7-Eleven was the beginning of something huge. Phenomenal! The people at 7-Eleven  great retailer, decent coffee, convenient!  loved it. Loved it! They said to me: Mr. Trump, if you could mention us and other corporations more often at unexpected moments, we think it would really help to Make America Great Again. And I said: We will do even better. We will Make America Great Again by selling some of our greatest assets to you and to Americas other great corporations.

We are meeting here in the MapQuest Room of the Trump National White House because our new Crate & Barrel Cabinet Room is being refurnished. Next well have a drink in the Johnnie Walker Blue Room, and well eat in the Allstate Dining Room. Look out the window there and youll see amazing billboards going up on the Washington Mutual Monument, across the reflecting pool from the Lincoln Financial Group Memorial. In the distance youll see the white dome of Capital One, the Tide Basin and Boeing National Airport. Huge!

Jeff Sessions, our phenomenal secretary of Homeland Depot Security  great guy!  tells me Mexico has already paid for the wall. Its now the Aeromexico Wall  because the only way around it is over it! Great slogan! We are making only the best deals, throughout the Federal Express government and across the entire United States of American Eagle Outfitters.

They said I couldnt unify the Republican Party. But then I renamed the Navy the Ted Cruz Line. They said I couldnt hold on to the evangelical Christians. But then I renamed the Liberty University Bell and Niagara Falwells.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump listens to introductory remarks before speaking in New York's Trump Tower building, Monday, April 18, 2016. (Richard Drew/AP)

Most of all, they said I couldnt get rid of the entire federal debt  $19 trillion!  in one year. They said I was stupid  a loser! But I traveled this land, from the Redwood Inn forest to the Gulfstream G-650, and knew that everybody wanted to buy American! So I sold the Treasury Department to Citigroup, the Pentagon to Lockheed Martin, the Food and Drug Administration to Pfizer, HHS to CVS, the EPA to Waste Management, the FBI to Apple, the NSA to Google and the Grand Canyon to GMC. Great deals! China gave up all $1.3 trillion of our debt  and all I had to give them was the Walt Disney Company. Phenomenal deal!

Now we are placing corporations names in amazing places  the greatest  and we are winning, winning, winning, and we are making a lot of money. A lot. We are bringing out the best in America, the fast and convenient spirit of 7-Eleven, and I say: Oh, thank heaven. We are Making America Great Again.

[APPLAUSE]

Twitter: @Milbank

Read more from Dana Milbanks archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Sen. Bernie Sanderss overnight trip to the Vatican last week was parsed mostly as a campaign tactic  whether this was a wise use of time with the New York primary approaching. Sanderss supporters relished the contrast with Hillary Clinton. While the Vermont senator went to the Vatican and met with Pope Francis, Clinton traveled to California for two fundraisers with George Clooney, including a Friday night soiree asking a startling $353,400 contribution per couple to make it to the head table with Clinton.

For the most part, however, the substance got lost. Sanders went to the Vatican to speak at a small gathering of world figures convened by the prestigious Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Centesimus Annus, the encyclical released by Pope John Paul II soon after the breakup of the Soviet Union. He used the occasion to provide a moral grounding for his political appeal.

In his remarks, Sanders located Centesimus Annus in a line of papal teaching that can be traced back to the dawn of the Industrial Age, with Pope Leo XIIIs encyclical, Rerum Novarum, issued in 1891 and forward to Franciss stirring Laudato Si, issued last year.

Sanders summarizes the essence of Centesimus Annus (issued for the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum) as the belief that while a market economy can be beneficial for productivity and economic freedom, the pursuit of profit cannot be an end in itself. John Paul II called on the state and society to provide an adequate wage level for maintaining families, arguing that unions are central to this mission. Profit that is the result of illicit exploitation, speculation and breaking of solidarity among working people ... has no justification and represents an abuse in the sight of God and man.

Twenty-five years after this encyclical, Sanders argues, we have failed to heed its warnings. Speculation, illicit financial flows, environmental destruction and the weakening of the right of workers are far more severe than they were a quarter century ago.

Now we witness an economy not aimed at the common good, but operated for the very few, as the working class, the young and the poor fall further and further behind. And the wealthy few reap the returns of the campaign contributions in the form of special tax privileges, unbalanced trade agreements that favor investors over workers.

This threatens not only our economy and democracy but also, Sanders argues, the very soul of our nation as the public loses faith in political and social institutions. He quoted Franciss indictment from World Environment 2013: Man is not in charge today; money is in charge; money rules.

Francis calls this the Globalization of Indifference. Quoting from the encyclical, Sanders read: We end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other peoples pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone elses responsibility and not our own.

And Sanders added, on Wall Street, financial fraud has become the new business model. Top bankers have shown no shame for their bad behavior, and have made no apologies to the public. The fines levied on their banks were just another cost of doing business, while their own fortunes went untouched.

Sanders made one last point to the gathering: This was not inevitable, that it could be changed. I am told time and time again, he said, that we should be practical . . . that a truly moral economy is beyond our reach. But the consistent moral teaching of the church demands better. Francis himself, Sanders noted, is surely the worlds best demonstration against such a surrender to despair and cynicism.

For Sanders, the hope and sense of possibility comes from Americas young people. Our youth are no longer satisfied with corrupt and broken politics and an economy of stark inequality and injustice. They are not satisfied with the destruction of our environment . . . They are calling out for a return to fairness, for an economy that defends the common good.

We are rich enough, Sanders concludes, to meet our needs and to protect the planet. Our challenge is not mainly technological or financial. Our challenge is mostly a moral one, to redirect our efforts and vision to the common good.

As his brief remarks at the Vatican demonstrated, Sanderss platform is much more than a poll-driven assembly of popular ideas; he is moved by a moral indictment of what we have become, and the faith that we are better than that. He has been sounding these notes his entire life. The grueling 24-hour trip to the Vatican will likely have little impact in the New York primary. But it did provide Sanders with the setting to reflect and to speak on the moral challenges we face. Few candidates would spend the time and energy. He could not pass it up.

Read more from Katrina vanden Heuvels archive or follow her on Twitter.
For decades, the Republican Party gave voters the impression that they get to pick the presidential nominee. The much-weakened GOP establishment theoretically has the power to choose someone else  but not, I believe, the strength of purpose to do it.

The author of this dilemma is, of course, Donald Trump. After a two-week pause in the primary schedule, Trump  a Manhattan icon  is expected to romp in New York on Tuesday and capture the lions share of the states 95 convention delegates. Polls show he is also likely to post big wins the following week, on April 26, in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

The bigger his victory margins, the closer Trump can come to securing 1,237 delegates, a majority, and thus making all the contested convention machinations moot. But it seems likely that when all the primaries and caucuses are done, he will fall short. Lets say, for the sake of argument, that he comes to the convention with around 1,100 delegates  far more than rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich. What happens then?

The Cruz campaign has worked tirelessly, and quite successfully, to ensure that as many delegates as possible are Cruz supporters, even if they are pledged to vote for Trump on the conventions first ballot, which presumably would be inconclusive. In subsequent rounds of voting, those delegates would be free to switch to the Cruz side  and ultimately give him the nomination.

To pull this off, however, Cruz would need the support, or at least the acquiescence, of party insiders  who dislike Cruz almost as much as Trump. Many leading Republicans believe, in fact, that Cruz, with his hard-right views, would be an even surer loser in November than the unpredictable Trump, who is unburdened by philosophy.

I have heard veterans of GOP smoke-filled rooms make the argument this way: If the party is going to incur the wrath of primary voters and caucus-goers by nominating someone other than Trump, why pick a candidate who will most likely lose to Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee? Why not pick someone who has a fighting chance with independents, such as John Kasich? Or even a white knight such as House Speaker Paul Ryan (who made clear last week that he does not want the nomination)?

I have also heard prominent Republicans argue that the convention delegates will have what amounts to a fiduciary duty to choose a candidate who is fit to serve as president. Trumps volatile temperament and ignorance of policy, according to this view, make him ineligible.

And then theres the political calculation. Some GOP graybeards believe the party is unlikely to capture the White House with any nominee. But Trumps massive unpopularity with the wider electorate  about two-thirds of Americans view him unfavorably, and a recent Associated Press poll of registered voters found that 63 percent said they would never vote for him  could threaten the partys Senate and House majorities. Cruz, Kasich or a white knight might lose without dragging the rest of the ticket down with them.

All of this is fascinating to ponder, at least for those who love politics. But I wouldnt bet on any of these scenarios. I believe that if Trump comes anywhere close to a delegate majority, the party leadership caves and he gets the nomination.

Trump would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see whats coming. In recent speeches, he has staked out the position that the candidate who comes to the convention with the biggest number of delegates should be the nominee, period. Polls show that a majority of Republicans agree with the helmet-haired billionaire. It turns out that once you tell people they get to choose their standard-bearer, they dont take kindly to being patted on the head and told to go sit in the corner.

Trumps newly hired convention manager, GOP veteran Paul Manafort, accused the Cruz campaign of using Gestapo tactics to steal delegates. Trump said Sunday that, gee, he sure hopes theres no violence in Cleveland if the party establishment tries to take the nomination away from him. Not that he would ever suggest such a thing, of course.

As I said, all of this is moot if Trump wins a delegate majority outright. But if he narrowly misses the magic number, I dont believe the debilitated establishment can muster the solidarity it would need to deny him. At this point, Im afraid, the GOP is much more Trumps party than theirs.

Read more from Eugene Robinsons archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.
THE SYRIAN cease-fire has achieved diplomatic zombie status: It is dead but lives on in the otherworldly rhetoric of its promoters, headed by the Obama administration. Heavy fighting has resumed in several parts of the country, including south of Aleppo, in the coastal province of Latakia and in the suburbs of Damascus. Humanitarian aid deliveries have virtually ceased. Airstrikes killed dozens of civilians in two rebel-held towns in Idlib province on Tuesday. In Geneva, the head of the oppositions delegation said it would not return to U.N.-sponsored peace talks until the government stopped its attacks and allowed aid convoys to enter besieged areas.

The U.S. response to this renewed carnage has been to point out, weakly, that not every part of Syria has returned to all-out war. More Syrian people are living better lives as a result of the cessation than they were before, State Department spokesman John Kirby declared Monday. Unfortunately, such rhetoric appears to be all the United States has to offer. Since President Obama refuses to take steps such as creating a safe zone for refugees or stepping up aid to the rebels, the United States lacks leverage over the regime of Bashar al-Assad and its Russian and Iranian allies.

The Assad regime breached the cease-fire from its inception in late February. It has continued to assault strategic territory in the Damascus suburbs and around Aleppo, which is split between opposition and government-controlled areas. It has blocked humanitarian convoys and stripped some of those it has allowed of vital medical equipment, in direct violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254, which set the terms for the cease-fire. U.N. officials reported last week that there had been only four aid operations this month and that less than 1 percent of besieged civilians had been supplied.

In Geneva, the regimes negotiators have flatly rejected the Security Councils terms for a settlement, which begin with the creation of a transitional government. In Damascus, the prime minister brazenly announced that preparations were underway with our Russian partners to liberate the rebel-held side of Aleppo, which would require a major new offensive and months of bloody fighting. Russia, which portrays itself as the United States co-sponsor of the cease-fire , has done nothing to rein in the regime. On the contrary, its planes continue to back up government forces near Aleppo, weeks after the withdrawal ostentatiously staged by Vladimir Putin.

The White House reported Monday that Mr. Obama had spoken to Mr. Putin by telephone about the unraveling cease-fire. A statement suggested he covered all the bases, including the importance of pressing the Syrian regime to halt its offensive attacks against the opposition, the urgency of humanitarian access and the need for progress toward a political solution. But there was no indication that Mr. Putin was given any incentive to respond cooperatively, other than an appeal to his goodwill. If thats the case, the cease-fire will remain a zombie.
Colin Taylor Ross opined in his April 18 op-ed, Special prosecutors are not the answer, that electoral accountability is the answer to a lack of confidence in the criminal justice systems ability to deal fairly with police-involved shootings. As a retired career prosecutor, I disagree with Mr. Ross: Electoral accountability is not the answer, for at least three reasons.

Voting a prosecutor out of office is not possible for an aggrieved community that is a voting minority, and the failed attempt could leave the aggrieved community feeling more alienated. Voting a prosecutor out of office after the fact does not accord justice to the victim of a possibly improper police shooting. And the possibility of being voted out of office can incentivize a rush to judgment by a prosecutor, which is as corrosive to public confidence as a failure to prosecute an appropriate case. Consider the case a year ago in Baltimore in which a prosecutor stated that Freddie Grays knife was not illegal under Maryland law, only to find that it may have been illegal in Baltimore, where the Gray tragedy occurred.

A special prosecutor operating with an independent grand jury is the best option to ensure a review untainted by the natural identification of prosecutors with their law enforcement colleagues.

David Farnham, Parkville, Md.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump told supporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan that his campaign is "really, really rocking," after coming out ahead in New York's primary April 19. Rival Ted Cruz appeared to still be hopeful, telling Pennsylvania voters, "This is the year of the outsider. I'm an outsider." (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

Republican front-runner Donald Trump told supporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan that his campaign is "really, really rocking," after coming out ahead in New York's primary April 19. Rival Ted Cruz appeared to still be hopeful, telling Pennsylvania voters, "This is the year of the outsider. I'm an outsider." (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

Donald Trump is the projected winner of the New York Republican primary and Hillary Clinton is the projected winner of the Democratic primary, according to exit polls and early returns.

The Associated Press called the race for the party front-runners after polls closed at 9 p.m. ET, with Trumps projected win called almost immediately, and Clintons at 9:45 p.m. The victories help Trump and Clinton solidify their leads at a time when both are beginning to talk more about the general election.

Trumps victory puts him closer to clinching the GOP nomination and should at least temporarily quell speculation that he will fall short of the votes needed before the July convention.

Clinton held a comfortable lead throughout the campaign and her victory makes it near-mathematically impossible for Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) to overtake her lead in the race for convention delegates.

Today you proved once again, theres no place like home, Clinton told a raucous crowd of supporters gathered in Manhattan.

Nearby, at his Trump Tower, Trump greeted supporters in the lobby of his famed building flanked by his family.

This has been an amazing week, he said, noting that he is scheduled to campaign in Indiana, which votes next month, and will head to Pennsylvania in the coming days.

We dont have much of a race anymore based on what Im seeing on television, he added, gesturing to a nearby screen showing race results.

Polls had shown Clinton and Trump leading by double-digit margins in a state with a vastly diverse backdrop, stretching from the riches of Wall Street and suburban Westchester County to the struggles of industrial cities upstate like Watervliet and Watertown.

A big win for Trump brings him closer to securing an outright majority of Republican delegates  an outcome that remains in jeopardy and has prompted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to mount a spirited, methodical campaign to force a contested convention.

A Clinton victory provides momentum after a blitz of recent primary and caucus wins for Sanders. Unlike Trump, she is so far ahead in the delegate count that it would be nearly impossible for Sanders to catch her.

While the party front-runners spent much of the day in New York, Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich on the GOP side and Sanders in the Democratic race stumped for votes in Maryland and Pennsylvania, which will hold primaries next week.

1 of 33 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  What it looks like on the ground in New York for the primary election View Photos New York voters head to the polls for the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries. Caption New York voters headed to the polls Tuesday for the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries. April 19, 2016 After winning the New York primary, Hillary Clinton speaks to a packed room of supporters during the victory party at the Sheraton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Melina Mara/The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

[6 things to watch in New Yorks primary tonight]

Early exit poll results in New York showed that Trump was poised for a commanding victory thanks to a less conservative electorate that favors an outsider in the White House.

A clear majority of New York Republican voters  seven in ten  said the party should nominate the leading candidate regardless of whether they achieve an absolute majority of convention delegates, according to exit poll results reported by CNN.

Trump has struggled among the most conservative Republicans this year, but in his home state he won more than six in ten of both very and somewhat conservative voters, far more than his competitors Kasich and Cruz, who won less than three in ten conservative supporters each. While moderate and liberal Republicans have typically been one of Trumps best groups, he split this group with Kasich about evenly in early exit poll data with just over 40 percent support for each.

Most GOP primary voters also said they want the next president to hail from outside the political establishment. If that figure holds, it would mark the highest level of support for a political outsider in Republican contests this year.

Among Democrats, non-white primary voters made up a larger share of this years electorate, and Clinton led Sanders by 67 to 33 points among this group in preliminary exit polls reported by CNN, but her margin was slightly smaller than previous contests this year, where shes led by an average of 41 points. Among white voters, Sanders led Clinton by just two percentage points in preliminary data.

New Yorks primary allowed only registered Democrats and Republicans to participate in the contest, and the exit polls suggest that requirement played strongly to Clintons benefit. Fully 83 percent of Democratic primary voters said they typically consider themselves Democrats, 10 points higher than the average so far this year and trailing only Mississippi. Clinton won self-identified Democrats by a 61 to 39 percent margin. Sanders won nearly three-quarters of independents, but they accounted for only 14 percent of the electorate, similar to 12 percent in 2008.

Tuesdays vote signaled stronger unity among Democrats than Republicans. At least six in ten New York Democratic primary voters said they would definitely support either Clinton or Sanders as the partys nominee, according to preliminary exit poll data reported by ABC News. But about half of Republicans said they would definitely support Trump, while roughly a quarter would support Cruz, and three in ten would support Kasich.

[Trumps field director steps aside]

Trump spent the evening at Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he lives and works. While several hundred reporters gathered in the pink marble lobby for his appearance, guests dressed in cocktail attire took the escalator downstairs to a party in the buildings food court.

Trumps campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, told reporters that his team is already looking ahead to the burst of nominating contests next week in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

I think the Cruz campaign is going to be mathematically eliminated from the nomination a week from tonight, Lewandowski said. If the results go well tonight, he has to win 95 percent of the remaining delegates moving forward, which is almost an impossible task. I think its time to unite around Donald Trump, hes the only person who can win the nomination, hes the only person who can get the delegates, hes the only one who can expand the map moving into the general election.

When asked about the campaigns sudden and dramatic restructuring, which has shifted power away from Lewandowski, the campaign manager replied: Were growing, baby.

[Trumps shift to more-seasoned staffers is a key inflection point for bid]

In New York City, the Board of Elections conceded that tens of thousands of Brooklyn voters had been purged from the voter rolls and residents complained about problems at polling sites across the city. Angered by the news, city officials announced plans to audit the agency and New York Mayor Bill be Blasio said he wanted the problems fixed in time for congressional primaries scheduled in June.

Despite the troubles, many New Yorkers celebrated their newfound relevance Tuesday, even if they have grown a bit weary of the barrage of ads on the airwaves in recent weeks.

Its nice. I feel like our vote usually doesnt count, said Sunita Ray, 41, who voted for Clinton in Midtown Manhattan. Still, she said she will not miss some aspects of the heated primary campaign. The ads were a little annoying.

[Clinton asks New Yorkers to make primary a referendum on Trump]

On Tuesday night, hundreds of upbeat Clinton supporters gathered in a Midtown Manhattan ballroom for her victory party. They danced to a live band and DJ as they waited for results to roll in. When news networks called the race for Clinton, the band played Another One Bites the Dust by the band Queen, and Signed, Sealed, Delivered by Stevie Wonder.

Aaron Leth, 30, has been a Clinton fan since he was a 6-year-old from Nebraska sending letters to the first lady in the White House.

Shes gonna win. Its her home territory, she knows it, Leth said as he danced to the live band.

Throughout the campaign, Leth says he has seen Clinton become more relaxed and rise to the occasion.

I feel like she stayed true to what she believes, Leth said.

Leth said he thinks that the primary continues well into June for a reason, and that Sanders has every right to remain in the race: The people are speaking.

Clinton cast her own vote in Chappaqua in suburban New York, where supporters had waited outside with signs and buttons. She later flew to Washington to address the North Americas Building Trades Unions (NABTU) legislative conference before returning to New York City.

Sanders, who has been trailing throughout the contest, played down his prospects in New York, citing the states closed primary.

At a rally at Pennsylvania State University before the polls closed in New York, he told a crowd in a packed field house that he was going to do a lot better there than people thought, despite a number of obstacles.

Were going to do just fine tonight in New York, Sanders told more than 6,600 people in State College, mostly college students, according to a figure supplied by the venue.

Angered by the closed primary, Sanders said New York officials need to make some fundamental changes about how they do business.

Sanders also said it was absurd that polls in upstate New York did not open until noon, a time that makes it impossible for some working-class voters to participate.

Like Sanders, Cruz braced for a loss in New York, polling behind not only Trump in recent surveys but also Kasich, whose only primary victory so far came in his home state. The loss came after a string of victories in Western states.

Campaigning in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, Cruz unveiled a new campaign stump speech, telling a crowd at the National Constitution Center that this is the year of the outsider.

I am an outsider, Bernie Sanders is an outsider, he added. Both with the same diagnosis, but both with very different paths to healing. Millions of Americans have chosen one of these outsiders. Our campaigns dont find our fuel in bundlers and special interests, but rather directly from the people.

Cruz planned to meet Tuesday night with dozens of Republicans running to serve as national convention delegates at the Cleveland convention. On Wednesday, he is scheduled to campaign in Hershey, Pa.

Phillip and Johnson reported from New York and OKeefe from Washington. John Wagner in State College, Pa., Sean Sullivan in Philadelphia, Jose A. Del Real in New York and Scott Clement, Juliet Eilperin and Anne Gearan in Washington contributed to this report.
Weeks after his campaign vowed to turn things around in the hunt for delegates, GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump is still struggling to ensure that supporters will be there to vote for him at the Republican convention in Cleveland.

In recent days, supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) earned delegate slots in Wyoming, Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia. Theyre also packing party meetings in Nebraska and Washington state, where Republicans are beginning to pick delegates before primaries next month.

Trump is expected to easily win the New York primary on Tuesday and most if not all of the 95 delegates at stake, ensuring that the businessman will remain well ahead of Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

But the GOP presidential race continues through June on dual tracks  the fight to win delegates in caucuses and primaries and the more complex task of picking people to attend the convention in July, which Cruz has excelled at. Although most delegates are bound to support a primary or caucus winner on a first ballot, many can choose to support someone else if there is a second ballot  which is what Cruz is counting on by installing his supporters.

There is no magic involved. Theres no trickery, theres no sleight of hand. Its just good old-fashioned democracy, said Saul Gamoran, Cruzs state chairman in Washington.

Donald Trump claims he's treated unfairly a whole lot. Here are just a few of the times he said he wasn't getting his due. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

The Cruz campaign has identified supporters down to local precincts in Washington who will turn out for the state convention next month to support Cruz delegates.

I have seen no signs of Trump, Gamoran added.

In Nebraska, the GOP primary is next month, but the process of selecting delegates is underway. J.L. Spray, a Nebraska committeeman for the Republican National Committee, said that he has attended dozens of precinct and county party meetings to prepare and that Cruz had a presence and Trump had nothing.

The Trump campaign has failed to return several phone calls offering to give the campaign access to Republican voter data, Spray said.

If I were them, I would have called me back, he said, adding that Trump had a campaign with earned media and has no grass roots. Hes AstroTurf, and its hard to grow grass roots all of a sudden.

On Monday, Trump hired William McGinley, a veteran Republican elections attorney, to work with the campaign on delegate and convention matters, a person familiar with the move said. He is a partner at Jones Day, the same firm that employs Don McGahn, Trumps top campaign attorney. McGinley advised the 2012 GOP convention rules committee, thus bringing needed knowledge on the arcane process to Trumps campaign. He is also a well-known attorney for lawmakers facing ethics issues. News of the hire was first reported by Politico.

Trump has repeatedly complained in recent days that the rules for selecting GOP delegates are rigged and that party bosses are picking them instead of voters.

[More setbacks for Trump, as Cruz out-muscles him  again  in delegate selection]

In several states, Trump is correct. Indiana Republicans picked a slate of delegates last week that was packed with longtime party activists opposed to Trump. In Florida, party leaders met behind closed doors to pick 81 of the states 99 GOP delegates. Party rules dictate that county party officials pick delegates from congressional districts. If a district overlaps multiple counties, the top three party leaders in each of the counties meet to pick delegates.

In three Tampa-area congressional districts, party leaders picked themselves or local lawmakers as delegates. A Miami-area delegation will include Nelson Diaz, chairman of the Miami-Dade GOP and a close friend and former aide to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in March.

This is how its always been done by Republicans across the state, Diaz said. I spend a lot of time working for the party, more than the grass-roots people, he added. So whats to say that a party leader doesnt deserve or doesnt have the right to go as a delegate?

Diaz said Trumps supporters, who turned out to protest the party meeting on Saturday, do little to help elect Republicans to local office. A handful of Trump supporters applied to serve as delegates, saying they were willing to pay thousands of dollars to travel to Cleveland.

They have time to do this, but whenever we send an email out trying to raise money for the party or trying to get volunteers to a phone bank, the silence that comes from them is deafening, he said. Theyre nowhere to be seen  nowhere.

Cruz supporters also prevailed in Georgia, where Trump won the primary handily. Over the weekend, most party leaders in the states 14 congressional districts officially assigned two delegates each to Trump and a third to either Cruz or Rubio, who placed second in Georgia. But in many cases, a Cruz supporter will cast the votes.

[Trump on contested convention: I hope it doesnt involve violence]

Trumps continuing struggles prompted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to tell a Kentucky television station over the weekend that Im increasingly optimistic that there may be a second ballot.

Republican Party rules require a candidate to win at least 1,237 of the 2,472 delegates at a national convention. Some members of the Republican National Committee, who are scheduled to meet this week in Florida, have proposed changing how the party nominates a candidate before the convention convenes. But McConnell told WHAS-TV that he prefers the current rules.

This notion that theres some group of people in Washington who can handpick somebody and deliver it is not true, he said. If there were such a group, Id probably be a part of it. But there isnt a group.

Also Monday, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, repeated his call for either Cruz or Kasich to drop out and allow the party to unite around one non-Trump candidate. Speaking on a podcast hosted by journalist David Gregory, Romney brushed off Trumps complaints about picking delegates.

Campaigns have to be able to navigate those rules. And by the way, theres probably nothing wrong with making it difficult, Romney said. These rules are a lot simpler than the rules of foreign affairs, for instance, or the rules of our economy. And if you want to be president, youre going to have to deal with things far more complicated than Republican delegate rules.
Tuesdays decision was the third time the court has deadlocked 4 to 4 since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

A tie vote at the Supreme Court means California officials can be hauled into a Nevada state court to face allegations in a long-running tax dispute with a Nevada inventor.

But on a separate issue in the case, the justices ruled 6 to 2 that Nevada cant award damages greater than what California or Nevada law would allow. The court threw out a $1 million judgment awarded to Gilbert Hyatt over allegations that Californias tax agency invaded his privacy and committed fraud.

It was the third time the court has deadlocked 4 to 4 since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February.

Hyatt is a former California resident who says he moved to Las Vegas in 1991, just before collecting $40 million in patent fees for developing a computer microprocessor chip.

California officials say that he moved out of the state in 1992 and that he is on the hook for millions in back taxes.

But Hyatt sued the agency, claiming that its officials were overzealous while pursuing him. He won a $500 million judgment that was later reduced to $1 million.

California officials had asked the justices to overturn a 1979 ruling that said one state can open the doors of its courts to a private citizens lawsuit against another state. Lawyers representing California argued that such lawsuits violate the sovereign protections of states.

Writing for the high court, Justice Stephen Breyer said the court was divided on the issue, leaving the current law intact.

But Breyer said Nevada courts could not allow greater damages than what California or Nevada would ordinarily permit in such cases. California law would allow no damages in such lawsuits, while Nevada law limits damages to $50,000.

Breyer said the Nevada court allowed damages to exceed $50,000 in this case under a special and discriminatory legal rule that would apply only to sister states. The court said that was unconstitutional.

The case now returns to lower courts to be resolved.

Hyatt accused the tax agency of outrageous behavior: sending officials to peer through his windows, contacting estranged family members and sharing his personal information with business associates.

It was the second time the dispute has ended up before the Supreme Court. The justices ruled in 2003 that Californias Franchise Tax Board was not immune from a lawsuit in Nevada courts, even though California law would prevent the agency from being sued in California.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. dissented, saying the Constitution does not block a state from applying its own law to address an injury within its own borders. He was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Also Tuesday, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that Maryland officials overstepped their authority when they offered financial subsidies to encourage construction of a power plant in the state.

The justices said the Maryland plan interferes with federal law governing wholesale electricity rates.

The ruling is a setback for Maryland and other states that want to ensure a reliable supply of electricity for customers at reasonable rates.

The case involves a 2012 decision by state regulators to order construction of a natural-gas power plant. Officials offered the winning bidder a financial incentive by requiring utilities to buy electricity from the plant for 20 years at a fixed price.

Lower courts sided with rival power suppliers who said the incentive interfered with pricing in wholesale markets, which are subject to federal regulation.

Writing for the high court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg acknowledged that states have authority to encourage development of in-state power plants. But she said that Marylands program impermissibly intruded on the wholesale electricity market. She said the power to set wholesale electricity prices lies exclusively with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Ginsburg noted that the court was not preventing states from taking other measures to encourage development of new or more environmentally friendly power plants. Those could include tax incentives, land grants, direct subsidies or other actions that dont intrude on federal authority, she said.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump leaves his polling location in New York. In recent days, the presidential candidate has brought in advisers with extensive experience in campaigning. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Donald Trumps presidential campaign has undergone a series of sudden and dramatic changes in recent days, marking a key inflection point  a moment that either rescues his White House bid or one that came too little and too late.

Although Trump has won more than 20 state nominating contests  more than twice as many as his top rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.)  he is at risk of failing to gain the support of a majority of state-level delegates before the Republican Partys convention in July.

The threat of coming so close yet still losing has prompted Trump to quickly rebuild his inner circle of trusted advisers, spend millions of dollars more on his operation and shift his campaign approach. He has brought in a team of seasoned Republican operatives while slowly diminishing the role of the less-experienced staffers who got him this far by simply allowing Trump to be himself.

Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, 42, has largely been sidelined and is now functioning more like a scheduler than chief campaign architect. Meanwhile, Paul Manafort  a 67-year-old operative who has worked for several presidents and joined Trumps team barely a month ago  has become Trumps right-hand man and is swiftly filling the staff with his own associates.

The shift hasnt been easy for many of the longtime staffers who believed in Trump when no one else did, made do with limited resources and tried their best to channel the immense energy behind his candidacy into voting booths. But thats not enough anymore, prompting Trump to bring on staffers particularly focused on the behind-the-scenes battle for delegates.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has hired more experienced political operatives and shuffled his top staffers as talk of a contested convention grows. One of his top staffers, national field director Stuart Jolly, resigned amid the changes. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

[Trump campaign shake-up underscores the limits of his loyalty]

When you bring other people in, I could see some people, their feelings get a little bit hurt, Trump said in an interview Tuesday on the Fox News Channel, adding that everyone on his staff is getting along. But, frankly, you know, were in a position where wed like to see if we can close it out.

Trump himself has changed. He seems to have heeded advice from his wife and daughters to tone down his rhetoric, although glimmers of his uncontrollable nature still shine through. He is tweeting less, skipping the Sunday news shows where pointed questions have recently tripped him up, reading from notes at rallies and refocusing on the economic issues that first brought him success early in the campaign. There are plans for him to soon give a series of policy speeches, perhaps with the assistance of a teleprompter  a device that to him once symbolized the bloodless establishment.

Since launching his once-long-shot campaign last June, Trump surrounded himself with fiercely loyal staffers who rarely challenged him. Theres Lewandowski, a gruff former law enforcement officer who had never worked on a presidential campaign. Michael Glassner, a former aide to Sarah Palin, was considered the strategic brains behind the campaign. Press secretary Hope Hicks is a 20-something who has had to learn about presidential politics on the fly, while Daniel Scavino Jr., a caddie-turned-executive, handles Trumps social media.

The small crew traveled nearly everywhere with Trump on his jet, often bunking at his luxurious properties and private club in Palm Beach, Fla. They operated under a simple philosophy: Let Trump be Trump. Together the campaign largely ignored those who deemed the front-runner unpresidential: What he was doing was working, so why stop?

Lewandowski recruited a number of his former colleagues and friends to work for the campaign, and he delighted in turning down well-known strategists and GOP insiders.

But these aides are finding themselves overshadowed by the newly arriving strategists, members of an insider class that Trump used to mock on the trail.

1 of 45 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Trump captures the nations attention on the campaign trail View Photos The Republican candidate continues to dominate the presidential contest. Caption Businessman Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee at the partys convention in Cleveland. Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at Trump Doral golf course in Miami. Carlo Allegri/Reuters Wait 1 second to continue.

Speaking with reporters Tuesday night ahead of a Trump news conference, Lewandowski shrugged when asked if he is okay with the campaign restructuring. Were growing, baby, he said.

Trumps inner circle is now dominated by Manafort, who long has had an apartment at Trump Tower, and a growing number of new hires. Rick Wiley, who has deep ties to the Republican National Committee, previously managed Scott Walkers campaign and is now Trumps national political director. William McGinley, a veteran GOP elections lawyer, will advise the campaign on delegate and convention rules.

Assisting with the effort to preserve and grow Trumps delegate count are two former members of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carsons presidential campaign, Ed Brookover and Barry Bennett.

The new team is expected to not only help Trump gain the nomination but also to build a campaign structure that could challenge likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and heal Trumps fractured relationship with the party.

[While the GOP fears convention chaos, Trump pushes for showbiz feel]

Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has also become a key policy adviser, especially on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Trump credited Kushner with helping to write a speech he gave at a pro-Israel conference last month, which members of Trumps campaign team have pointed to as a blueprint for future policy speeches that could help shore up the candidates credibility. Kushner, who is married to Trumps daughter Ivanka, is owner of the New York Observer, which recently endorsed Trumps presidential bid.

The clearest sign of a new way of doing things came Monday, when Trumps national field director, Stuart Jolly, sent him a resignation letter that began Dear Mr. Trump and often read more like a fan letter than a formal notice.

Jolly, 52, had never worked on a national campaign when he joined the staff  mostly to help his friend Lewandowski, whom he knew from their time working together at Americans for Prosperity, an advocacy group that is backed by a network of conservative donors organized by brothers David and Charles Koch.

While Lewandowski has been known to be tough on his staff  sometimes yelling or speaking harshly  Jolly was considered his friendly, soothing counterpart. But Jolly often lacked the knowledge of how to properly organize in key early-voting states, irritating several staffers at the state level.

Jolly said in an interview Monday that he recently learned that he would report to Wiley instead of Lewandowski. Thats when he decided it was time for him to leave.

That wasnt going to happen, Jolly said of the change in bosses. I just decided not to go that route and let the new team have a shot at it. We have a great group of folks in place on the ground, and theyre kicking butt and doing great work.

Jolly included some advice to Trump in his resignation letter than echoes a concern held by several longtime staffers: We did these simple things, we won, and we continued to win because we followed a winning formula. . . . My hope is that you will continue to listen to those who have propelled you to victory.

Jose A. DelReal contributed to this report.


The bright, open floor plans stretch from the formal living room all the way back to the breakfast room off the kitchen. (Benjamin C. Tankersley/For The Washington Post)

Michelle Williams and her husband, Donald, were living in a large custom-built home in Ellicott City, Md., before realizing something wasnt quite right. Michelle Williams, a physician, said the home was too big for them and that they were looking to right size.

We have two little kids, and we wanted to travel and do a lot of other things, she said.

Soon after, the family decided to move to Hanover, where Toll Brothers is building new luxury townhouses in the Arundel Mills mall corridor. The residences come with classic brick exteriors and more than 2,000 square feet of living space spread out over four stories.

The Williams family moved to the Enclave at Arundel Preserve at the end of October. She said they like the communitys pool and playground and like being able to walk to restaurants and shops.

Its the convenience and closeness that drew her to the community, Williams said. She can get to her job in Pasadena in 10 minutes by car. Her husband works for the government and can get to work in just five minutes by the MARC train.

Many are attracted to the Hanover community because its within walking distance to a host of shopping and dining options, said Allison Nugent, a representative from the Toll Brothers community. She added that commuting to both Baltimore and the District is ideal and that major employment centers like Fort Meade and the National Security Agency are just a short drive away.

[These rooms come with a view of a popular Northwest Washington park]

Many of our buyers are local to the area, with some relocating for jobs around the Fort Meade area, she said.

1 of 15 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Buying New | Enclave at Arundel Preserve in Hanover, Md. View Photos The townhouses are priced from $412,995 to 450,995. Caption The townhouses are priced from $412,995 to 450,995. Toll Brothers is building new luxury townhouses called the Enclave at Arundel Preserve in the Arundel Mills mall corridor in Hanover, Md. Benjamin C. Tankersley/For The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

Finished basements are standard: Once completed, Arundel Preserve will have 475 residences. The development is 75 percent sold and has about 70 homes left to sell. One of the first things youll notice are the bright, open floor plans that stretch from the formal living room all the way back to the breakfast room off the kitchen. There are large windows on both ends of the residence that provide plenty of natural light .

Toll Brothers offers two models, the Bethesda and the larger Easton. Each plan comes with different exterior variations, including country manor, traditional and Georgian.

The townhouses come with a finished basement on the lower level near the garage entrance, which has an open, multifunctional space that can be used as a playroom. The Williams family chose an end-unit Easton floor plan with nearly 2,500 square feet. The Easton has a sunken foyer that steps up directly into the formal living room and dining room facing the front of the home.

[An appealing urban enclave just off Columbia Pike in Arlington]

A hall leads past the powder room and into the family room and gourmet kitchen with a butlers pantry and breakfast area. The model home includes features like a rustic brick accent wall, bay window, home theater room, wet bar, an oversize shower made for two and an extensive closet organization system with built-ins.



Wine bottles are stacked along a wall near doors to the patio. (Benjamin C. Tankersley/For The Washington Post)

Rooftop terrace: There are three spacious bedrooms on the second floor, including a master suite with a standard vaulted ceiling, large soaking tub and walk-in closet.

The Bethesda model also has an open main level, making it ideal for hosting family and friends. The layout is similar to the Eastons. The only difference is that the formal living and dining room in the Easton are separated by a columned entry and that some of the rooms in the Bethesda are more spacious.

Bonus spaces include a fourth-level loft with a cathedral ceiling and optional skylights, available in both plans.

Nugent said that there are hundreds of customizing options for buyers to choose from. In fact, thats one of the features that Williams said she liked most about the community. I loved the flexibility and the ease of making adjustments to the base floor plan, she said.

Williams said she wanted to add a fourth bedroom on the lower level for her nanny, and Toll Brothers was able to make it happen.

Off the loft is an optional, room-size rooftop terrace. The rooftop terrace is ideal for outdoor gatherings. The space in the model is furnished with trendy outdoor furniture and a TV.



A fourth-level loft with a cathedral ceiling and optional skylights is available in both plans. (Benjamin C. Tankersley/For The Washington Post)

Community amenities: The development includes a clubhouse with state-of-the-art fitness center, pool, tennis court, multipurpose court, playground and a walking trail.

Whats nearby: In addition to the on-site amenities, there are plenty of shopping and dining options nearby. The neighborhood is within walking distance of the Shops at Arundel Preserve, part of the Arundel Preserve Town Center, which features offices, restaurants, a spa and a hotel. Arundel Mills mall is close by.

Transit: Residents have quick access to the MARC train as well as Interstate 95, Fort Meade and Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.



The rooftop terrace is ideal for outdoor gatherings. (Benjamin C. Tankersley/For The Washington Post)
High-level meetings show good momentum of China-India ties: FM

2016-04-19 03:55

BEIJING, April 18 (Xinhua) -- The ongoing intensive meetings between high-ranking Chinese and Indian officials demonstrate the good momentum of relations between the countries, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on Monday.

Spokesman Lu Kang said at a routine press briefing that China's State Councilor Yang Jiechi and India's National Security Adviser Ajit Doval will hold a 19th round of talks between special representatives on boundary issues in Beijing from Wednesday to Thursday.

Earlier on Monday, Chinese State Councilor and Defense Minister Chang Wanquan held talks with visiting Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar in Beijing.

The Foreign Ministers of the two countries are also slated to meet with each other during the 14th Meeting of the Foreign Ministers of China, Russia and India on Monday in Moscow.

The meetings show that mutual political trust between China and India have increased, and bilateral exchanges and cooperation are advancing, Lu said, adding the two sides also maintain good coordination and collaboration in global and regional affairs.

Although China and India have some differences, both sides are willing to effectively control and solve the issues through friendly negotiations and consultations, according to Lu.

In fact, China and India have always maintained close high-level contacts, he said.

The development of China-India relations is not only in line with their interests but also conducive to regional and global peace and stability, Lu stressed, noting China and India are the two biggest developing countries, important emerging economies and major powers in a multi-polar world.

"We are ready to work with India to constantly make new progress on building the China-India Strategic and Cooperative Partnership for Peace and Prosperity," said the spokesman.
A Syrian child receives treatment at a makeshift hospital after an airstrike on a vegetable market in Maarat al-Numan, in Syria's northern province of Idlib on April 19. (Mohamed Al-Bakour/AFP/Getty Images)

Even though they strongly oppose militants linked to al-Qaeda, residents of a rebel-held town in northwestern Syria on Tuesday faced devastating airstrikes from pro-government warplanes that killed at least 37 people, according to activists and a monitoring group.

The air raids targeted an area crowded with civilians in Maarat al-Numan, killing and wounding scores, including women and children, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The death toll is almost certain to rise, said the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory, who uses the alias Rami Abdulrahman. He described the attack as a massacre. His group operates a team of activists in Syria that monitors the conflict.

Mohammad Karkas, a media volunteer for local rebel groups in Maarat al-Numan, said the death toll could be as high as 51. A warplane targeted the towns main market with two rockets, cutting down scores of people  including families  as they shopped for fruits and vegetables, he said.

There were charred bodies all over the street. Their insides were torn inside out, he said, noting that local medical facilities were overwhelmed with the wounded. There were people who lost arms and legs.

A woman tends to a wounded Syrian man at a makeshift hospital after an airstrike on Maarat al-Numan on April 19. (Mohamed Al-Bakour/AFP/Getty Images)

[How the Syrian revolt went so horribly wrong]

The bombing struck amid faltering peace talks in Geneva and the apparent collapse of a partial cease-fire, initiatives that have received backing from both the United States and Russia. Even though they are divided over the civil war, the two powers have pursued intensified diplomacy in recent months to end a civil war that has killed 250,000 people and displaced millions.

It was unclear whether the raid was carried out by government warplanes or aircraft operated by Russia, which intervened militarily in the Syrian conflict last year to bolster its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, against rebel forces. The United States backs Assads moderate opponents.

Footage posted by activists on social media, which could not be independently verified, shows Maarat al-Numans formerly bustling market area reduced to rubble and smoldering ruins. Other images showed stunned residents limping away from the attacked area, as well as emergency responders carrying away the wounded.

For critics of Assad, Tuesdays raid on the town in northwestern Idlib province further demonstrates how his forces deliberately target civilians in the countrys devastating war. Some critics charge that Assad also seeks to empower extremists as a way to delegitimize the rebellion against his rule.

Since early March, residents of the town about 170 miles north of Damascus have held large demonstrations against Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaedas affiliate in Syria, forcing the radical group to withdraw from the town. The departure of its militants from the area  where they had once roamed the streets with virtual impunity  demonstrated that moderate voices in the Syrian conflict have not been silenced, analysts and opposition supporters said.

[Al-Qaeda affiliate faces unusual backlash in Syria]

A Syrian man stands amid debris following an air strike on a vegetable market in Maaret al-Numan on April 19. (Mohamed Al-Bakour/AFP/Getty Images)

This massacre of innocents in a market place in Maarat al-Numan shows the true face of the Assad regime  utterly brutal, totally careless of human life, said Salem al-Meslet, a spokesman for the opposition High Negotiations Committee delegation to the peace talks in Geneva.

On Monday, the HNC suspended its participation in the talks, citing alleged intransigence by the government delegation, especially over the issue of Assads future.

Assad is telling the world he has no interest in diplomacy for peace, but is determined to go on killing Syrians with impunity, Meslet said in a statement.

The partial cease-fire, which took effect Feb. 27, had reduced hostilities enough to allow public rallies in opposition areas against Syrias government. Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State were not included in the cease-fire.

In Maarat al-Numan, those demonstrations quickly escalated into protests against Jabhat al-Nusra over what residents said were increasingly heavy-handed measures imposed by the group. These included the violent treatment of religious minorities and forcing residents to obey strict fundamentalist rules, such as the mandatory covering of women in public places.

The group also angered residents after it attempted to disperse anti-government rallies and attacked local rebel fighters.

[Assad holds elections denounced by foes as a farce]

Mohammed Alaa Ghanem, a senior political adviser at the Syrian American Council, said Jabhat al-Nusra would probably try to exploit Tuesdays attack by attempting to demonstrate its anti-Assad bona fides to residents. The al-Qaeda affiliate has a reputation for effectiveness in battles against Syrian government forces.

These kinds of attacks make it impossible for people to rise up against extremism, denying them any chance to build a civil society and a sense of normalcy in their communities, he said.

Imad Salamey, a political science professor at the Lebanese American University, said Tuesdays bombings further demonstrate how extremist groups and the Syrian government find common cause in trying to marginalize moderate opposition forces.

This just shows again how both extremes in the Syrian conflict  the regime and the radical Islamists  feed off each other and need each other to survive, he said.

Zakaria Zakaria in Istanbul contributed to this report.

Read more

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Vice President Joe Biden speaks at J Streets National Gala on April 18. The present course Israels on is not one thats likely to secure its existence as a Jewish, democratic state  and we have to make sure that happens, he said. (J Street/via YouTube)

When President Obama was elected to his first term, the liberal advocacy group J Street was in its infancy, barely a year old.

Seven years later, the self-defined pro-Israel, pro-peace organization has earned the gratitude of the administration for its support of the Iran nuclear deal and its lobbying for a two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

On Friday, Obama invited college student activists from J Street to meet with him in the Oval Office. And Monday night, the administration sent two heavy hitters, Vice President Biden and Secretary of State John F. Kerry, to J Streets annual gala.

Their appearance before a group that has frequently criticized Israeli government policies underscored the administrations belief that political discourse on Israel can be pointed without undermining support for the Jewish state. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders earned applause at last weeks Democratic primary debate when he said Israel had a right to defend itself but called its response to terrorist attacks disproportionate.

J Streets president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, said the appearances by Biden and Kerry reflect a broad shift underway, as politicians are expressing a wide range of opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is a watershed moment in the political currents that shape American policymaking around Israel and the Middle East, he said.

Kerry used the forum to defend the Iran deal that was vigorously opposed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden balanced blunt criticism of the Israeli government with vows that the United States will always guarantee Israels security.

We have an overwhelming obligation, notwithstanding our sometimes overwhelming frustration with the Israeli government, to push them as hard as we can toward what they know in their gut is the only ultimate solution, a two-state solution, while at the same time be an absolute guarantor of their security, Biden said.

Biden called the path to peace shrouded and said that when he visited the region last month he came away discouraged at the prospects for peace talks.

There is at the moment no political will that I observed among Israelis or Palestinians to move forward with serious negotiations, he said. The trust that is necessary to take risks for peace is fractured on both sides.

Biden criticized Palestinian leaders for failing to condemn terrorist acts but also singled out the steady, systematic expansion of Israeli settlements on land Palestinians desire for a state as a step in the wrong direction.

They are moving toward a one-state reality, and that reality is dangerous, Biden said.

He concluded with a grim warning: The present course Israels on is not one thats likely to secure its existence as a Jewish, democratic state  and we have to make sure that happens.

Both Biden and Kerry thanked J Street for its support of the Iran nuclear deal, which was opposed by the Israeli government and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a more traditional pro-Israel lobbying group.

Kerry said that despite predictions Iran would get a windfall of as much as $150 billion when its assets were unfrozen under the deal, Iran has received only $3 billion since the accord was implemented in January.

And Kerry vowed to use the nine months remaining of the Obama administration to continue pursuing negotiations to end the conflict.

We will continue to try to advance a two-state solution, the only solution, Kerry said. Because anything else will not be Jewish, and it will not be democratic.

Obama has had a famously testy relationship with Netanyahu, even while the administration has provided more military aid to Israel than at any time in U.S. history. White House positions on Israel and the Middle East align more closely with those of J Street than AIPAC, a point Biden stressed when he said the group proves there is no contradiction between being progressive and pro-Israel.

The White House cautioned against reading too much into the presence of Biden and Kerry, the first sitting secretary of state to address the group.

We certainly appreciate J Streets support for our initiative to verifiably prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, said National Security Council spokesman Ned Price. At the same time, however, we interface with other groups that didnt offer the same support. Were primarily interested in hearing from a variety of voices on how we can best support our Israeli ally.

Some polls have shown a generational shift among American Jews in attitudes toward Israeli government policies, though there is no lessening of support for Israel itself.

Lizzie Stein, a 22-year-old student at Occidental College in Los Angeles, is a regional vice president for J Street U, the campus branches of the group.

Our views arent different, but weve had different experiences, said Stein, who was one of eight J Street U student leaders who met with Obama last week. I was 8 months old when [Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin was shot. All weve known is the lost hope of peace.

Stein said there is a sense of urgency among her peers.

Im sick of seeing pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel groups yelling past each other, she said. That doesnt get us anywhere. It doesnt change the fact we continue to have violence, and Israel would be more secure with defined borders.
Sitting across from the attorney general in a plush green chair, Indianapolis police patrolman Jeff Patterson talked of the colleagues he had seen killed, the others who had taken their own lives and the stress that had left him staring for hours at his computer screen when he was supposed to be working.

Loretta E. Lynch stared at him intently and nodded, offering only occasional comments. For Patterson, just that was meaningful.

Thank you for caring, he said, his eyes welling with tears. Its the first time that anybody has.

[After forging her path from N.C. to Brooklyn, Lynch is poised to become attorney general]

Since she took office a year ago, Lynch has made a point of mending relations between the Justice Department and local police, even as the two sometimes find themselves at odds in civil rights investigations and use-of-force cases. Indianapolis was the ninth stop on her Community Policing Tour, in which Lynch visits various cities across the country to chat with officers and commanders about their work and their relationship with residents.

Look, were all law enforcement, Lynch said in an interview. As part of my role as attorney general, I think its important that the Department of Justice have a strong working relationship with our state and local counterparts. Frankly, it also makes for better policing. It makes for safer policing.

The tour is part public-relations campaign and part opportunity for officers and their bosses to chat with the countrys top law-enforcement official about problems. The particular objective in Indianapolis was to highlight the police departments efforts to promote officer safety and wellness through a program meant to encourage those experiencing mental-health problems to seek help. But the trip also helps improve the Justice Departments reputation among those patrolling city streets.

Lynch sat in on an Indianapolis police training class and a roll call and spoke at a roundtable of officers, community leaders and health professionals. She more than once paused to recognize two officers killed in the line of duty  Officer Steven Smith of Columbus, Ohio, and Sheriffs Deputy Carl Koontz of Howard County, Ind.  a point that resonates with police.

Lynch met personally for nearly an hour with Patterson and his wife, Teresa, continuing the conversation even as her staffers tried gently to get her to leave for her next event.

Patterson, 53, told Lynch about the grisly crime scenes he had witnessed, the problems the job caused in his home life and the inhospitable attitude among officers toward those in their ranks with mental-health problems. He said he received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder five years ago, and he hoped the attorney general would push for national standards so that others in his situation would not face professional setbacks for seeking help.

Its one of the things Ive had to do, Patterson said.

Takes a lot of strength, actually, Lynch responded.

That is not to say that Lynch is universally loved by those in local law enforcement, or that she is dialing back the Justice Departments role in investigating and prosecuting alleged police wrongdoing.

Under Lynch, the department has opened major pattern-or-practice civil rights investigations of the Chicago and Baltimore police departments and has negotiated consent decrees with several others, requiring local leaders to implement significant and sometimes costly reforms. In fiscal 2014 and 2015, the Justice Department charged 129 people working in law enforcement with civil rights violations.

[Federal interventions at troubled police departments across the country drag on for years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.]

The department sued the city of Ferguson, Mo., when local leaders balked at signing an agreement to implement reforms, and the city ultimately agreed to the changes that Lynchs department had sought. Lynch also has  to the chagrin of some police officers  said there is no data backing the existence of what has been called the Ferguson effect, an idea that officers are policing their communities less aggressively out of fear of becoming embroiled in high-profile incidents. FBI Director James B. Comey is among those to say that there is legitimacy to the theory.

Lynch defended her position in an interview and said other peoples views might be a reaction to the uncertainty that comes with changes in the profession.

There is no data to support it, and certainly the officers and chiefs that Ive talked to, you know, feel very much that their officers are still engaged, still committed and still dedicated to protecting and serving their communities, Lynch said.

In Cleveland  which reached a consent decree the month after Lynch was confirmed in her job  the attorney generals tour has not done much to allay the concerns of officers that they cannot always count on the backing of those in the highest levels of government, said Steve Loomis, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmens Association.

Loomis said that he thinks federal investigators came to completely false conclusions about the police department and that he wishes Cleveland leaders had pushed back in court. He said that the investigation was politically motivated and that it was difficult to reconcile the sound bites from Lynchs visits to local police departments with the Justice Departments actions.

If youre going to come out and do listening tours and act like youre listening, then you have to act on what youre hearing, and shes not doing that, Loomis said.

[Attorney General: There is no data backing existence of a Ferguson effect]

But Lynch has made some progress mending relations with police that might have been frayed because of her predecessors outspokenness on race and civil rights issues, other union officials said.

Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, said that when he first met Lynch, he was prepared to be unimpressed by a U.S. attorney who at the time was not particularly high-profile. But what was to have been a 15-minute meeting with FOP leaders during Lynchs attorney-general confirmation process turned into a vigorous, 45-minute discussion, and at a reception some days later, Lynch approached him to press a point she had forgotten to make earlier.

Pasco said that he was pretty impressed by that and that he has maintained a close relationship with the Justice Department through one of Lynchs top lawyers, Vanita Gupta, who heads the Civil Rights Division and with whom Pasco said he speaks three or four times a week.

Lynchs tour has included Birmingham, Ala.; Richmond, Calif.; Cincinnati; and Pittsburgh. She has three stops planned, in Fayetteville, N.C., Phoenix and Los Angeles. This years visits take her to cities that Justice Department officials think are implementing policies spelled out by the presidents Task Force on 21st Century Policing, a group of police, civic and academic leaders asked to research best practices in local law enforcement.

An explosive event could, of course, instantly sour any good relationships that have been built. Union leaders said officers were critical in particular of strident rhetoric that then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. used in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of an African American, 18-year-old Michael Brown, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014. The Justice Department, while finding broader race-related problems with law enforcement in the city, ultimately did not charge the officer in that case.

Prosecutors under Lynch have recently been presenting evidence to a grand jury in the death of Eric Garner, 43, whose video-recorded takedown by New York City police officers sparked national outrage. Lynch declined to comment on that case specifically but said her tour would not change the way the Justice Department investigates and prosecutes officers who are accused of wrongdoing.

They have to trust that we look at these cases thoroughly, fairly, independently, efficiently, but the same way every time, she said.

Read more:

FBI chief again says Ferguson is having chilling effect on law enforcement

Six Cleveland police officers fired for fatal 137 shots car chase in 2012

Justice Department will investigate practices of Chicago police
On Friday, school officials announced that nearly one third of recently tested elementary and middle schools in Detroit Public Schools (DPS)just 60 miles from the Flint, Michigan, lead poisoning disasterare contaminated with either lead or copper in the drinking water.

Fifteen schools registered lead-in-water samples greater than the US Environmental Protection Agencys (EPAs) current safety threshold of 15 parts per billion (ppb); and eight had more than the 1,300-ppb level set for copper. The highest lead levels were found during first-draw samples at drinking fountains at Ronald Brown Academy (1,500 ppb), Moses-Field Elementary-Middle School (280 ppb) and Carver Academy (83 ppb).

The sample at Ronald Brown Academyshowing 100 times the EPA lead standardwas taken from a drinking fountain labeled Pre-K.

No level of lead is considered safe to ingest. It is a neurotoxin that causes irreversible brain damage and assorted behavioral problems for children. Older children and adults can suffer a broad range of problems including stomach and abdominal pain, headaches, and miscarriage. Copper is known to cause liver damage and kidney disease.

Altogether 19 DPS schools, of the 62 tested beginning at the end of March, have registered toxic contamination. One school, Sampson Webber Middle School, had no clean water available at all last Friday. DPS plans to test its remaining 31 buildings over the next two weeks.

The startling results prompted Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, in charge of the Detroit Health Department, to advise that all children in the city under six years of age be tested for lead poisoning, according to the Detroit Free Press. The 15 [parts per billion] is the actionable limit, he told the newspaper. But ideally, we want no lead in the water. The most important thing is to make sure that kids are no longer getting the water and that the kids themselves are getting tested.

I was definitely upset to learn that there was lead and copper in the water of DPS schools, Dorothea, the mother of two children in Detroit schools, told the World Socialist Web Site.

Currently, my children attend the old Northern High school. My children both have disabilities. My youngest daughter has been suspended on multiple occasions due to behaviors. These suspensions continue, and her behaviors have gotten worse.

I am curious if the escalation in her behaviors are related to possible lead ingestion. My older daughter has disabilities that impact her physically, emotionally and socially. It is my understanding from her teachers that she has become disinterested in learning. She already suffers with ADHD and more. Could this disinterest be coming from possible lead ingestion?

I plan to have both of my children tested because so many of the older schools have high lead traces. It is my understanding that lead can cause so many negative health impacts in learning and in proper development.

Dorothea also referred to the little-known fact that US federal law does not require all school systems to test the water being delivered to students, despite the well-documented and irreversible brain damage caused by lead, as well as other dire consequences from other dissolved metals. Astoundingly, about 90 percent of schools in the US do not test their water and are not required to if they use municipal services, according to a report in Russia Today.

Outrage over the mass lead poisoning in Flint has led to belated calls in the Michigan legislature for stricter limits on lead in drinking water. Governor Rick Snyder, who bears a large share of the responsibility for the citys calamity, has now sought to cover his tracks by calling for a 10-ppb ceiling by 2020. In fact, 10 ppb is already the standard of the World Health Organization and therefore most of the world.

Detroit Health Department officials responded to the DPS crisis by demanding a full mitigation plan in 15 days and a 90-day action plan going forward.

It is well established that schools in older buildings using lead delivery pipes are most likely to have contaminated water. However, many schools simply cannot afford to replace the antiquated pipes. Michigan is one of several states that provide zero dollars for building infrastructure updatesany revenues needed to rehabilitate aging buildings must be raised from hard-pressed individual homeowners through additional property tax levies.

The water is bad because of poor maintenance in the school buildings, Dorothea agreed. Look at Spain! Those kids have gone through so much, she said, referring to the elementary school that became notorious for its terrible conditions during the teacher walkouts last January. The building has a leaky roof and a broken school yard, and had its gym sectioned off from school due to pervasive moldand this week it has been identified has having lead in the water.

Dorothea said similar problems were plaguing Northern. The roof continually leaks. There are plumbing problems in restrooms, leaks in the small gym, mold in classrooms. Many times the heat does not work in the winter. Staff and students are walking around with their coats on. There is poor inside and outside maintenance. This all creates safety concerns. Not only that, rodents are coming out.

School district authorities attempted to put a positive spin on the lead-in-water crisis in Detroit schools by saying that the district was being proactive in conducting tests, pledging to bring in more bottled water and post warnings regarding drinking from bathroom sinks.

After the first two schools tested positive for metal contaminants, the DPS emergency manager, Stephen Rhodes, issued a complacent statement emphasizing that schools provide 8 oz. bottles of water for students to drink with meals and throughout the day. Finally, the transition manager tried to offload responsibility by saying the main place for exposure [to lead] is in the home due to lead-based paint that is damaged and peeling. This is especially true in cities that have older housing stock such as Detroit. 

Such official apologetics for the role of the Democrats and Republicans and the profit system itself are wearing thin. Dorothea said, The governor is the lead person here. He appoints the emergency manager. They brought in [DPS Emergency Manager] Darnell Earley, someone not familiar with education.

It is my understanding that state law mandates we send our children to school. Failure to do so means a parent can face truancy charges, penalties and even jail time. State law states our school system must ensure the health, safety and wellbeing of our babies when they are in the schools care. How could they do this?

Could the deplorable conditions account for these low achievement levels? Parents are damned if they do and damned if dont send children to school. What a government! she concluded.

There is mounting evidence that crumbling infrastructure in American schools is creating a national health and safety problem.

In March, sinks and water fountains at 30 of 66 schools in Newark, New Jersey, were ordered to be shut off after testing indicated they were delivering unsafe water. The high lead levels were known about as far back as six years ago, according to the New York Times, but they were generally dealt with by adding water filters or replacing faucets.

An elementary school in Ringle, Wisconsin, tore out its drinking fountains more than 10 years ago and decided to start buying bottled water for its students (at a cost of $1,000 a month), because replacing the pipes was far more costly, according to the Associated Press. Pennsylvania, Maine and New Jersey have been cited as having the greatest numbers of schools with unsafe drinking water.

Among schools and day care centers operating their own water systems, EPA data analyzed by the Associated Press showed 278 violated federal lead levels at some point during the past three years. About a third of those had lead levels at least double the federal limit. Yanna Lambrinidou, president of Parents for Nontoxic Alternatives and a colleague of Virginia Techs Marc Edwards, added that under EPA guidelines, schools and day care centers are legally entitled to report that an entire building is safe even if an individual drinking fountain is above the threshold.

By far, most cases of lead-in-water within schools arise from aging buildings with lead pipes, older drinking fountains and water fixtures with parts made from lead. A recent study entitled State of Our Schools: Americas K12 Facilities explains that an abysmal support level for educational building and maintenance has resulted in a $46 billion per year shortfall in critical upkeep or new construction to keep US schools at recognized building standards.

State of Our Schools estimates that it would take an investment of $145 billion to provide safe and healthy schools across the country. The low priority, under capitalism, of childrens health and education is demonstrated by the fact that this seemingly large sum represents only some 14% of the US militarys annual budget.
CPC targets foul play at local elections

2016-04-19 03:55

BEIJING, April 18 (Xinhua) -- The Communist Party of China (CPC) has vowed to spot and punish malpractice in the current round of local elections.

More than 900 million Chinese will elect over 2.5 million lawmakers at county and township levels in the elections running into next year.

In a Monday statement, the CPC stressed a ban on forming factions, bribery, fraud and leaking confidential information, among other types of malpractice. It urged local Party committees, disciplinary organs and organizational departments to carefully oversee the elections.

"Disciplinary violations... must be punished on a case by case basis and publicized in a timely manner," the statement said.

In a massive electoral fraud case in Hengyang City of Hunan Province in 2013, 56 provincial legislators offered 110 million yuan (18 million U.S. dollars) in bribes to nearly 600 municipal lawmakers and members of staff.

A total of 467 people have been given Party or administrative punishment for their roles in the case, and 69 were transferred to judicial organs.

The CPC called for the establishment of specialist groups to investigate violations and supervise punishment.

"Supervisory officials will be pursued and punished for nonfeasance and jobbery," the statement added.

The public can report electoral malpractice to organizational departments at or above county level via the Internet, SMS, hotlines or personal visits.
US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced a further escalation of the US war in Iraq to include deployment of at least 200 additional troops, along with Apache helicopter gunships and artillery.

Carters announcement, made during an unannounced visit to Iraq, is the latest in a steady drumbeat of US escalations in Iraq and Syria, which now occur on a near-weekly basis. This is despite the fact that current troop levels are already well above the Obama administrations official limit of 3,870. US forces are increasingly involved in conventional and large-scale ground combat, making a mockery of Obamas numerous vows to the contrary.

Carter made clear that the deployments are part of a generalized escalation of the US wars in Iraq and Syria, continuing into the indefinite future. Weve gotten approval from the White House every time the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and I have gone to ask for something that weve needed to accelerate. So that really isnt the issue for us, the issue for us is to identify more ways to accelerate the campaign.

The additional US troops and heavy weaponry are being deployed in support of a joint US-Iraqi force overseen by American advisors. This force will use the reinforcements as part of an offensive for control of Mosul, Carter said. The new US forces will perform training and advising missions, and will embed themselves in frontline combat commands.

Carters announcement must be taken as a warning: a massive escalation of war in the Middle East and beyond is being readied for the period after the US elections in November. These plansand the growing danger of world warare being deliberately excluded from the election campaigns of both major parties and all of their candidates, including the supposed socialist Bernie Sanders.

The financial-corporate elite and the military-intelligence establishment do not want the war drive to become a topic of discussion in the elections, because they are well aware of the broad antiwar sentiment of the population. The exclusion of this, the most critical of all questions, highlights the antidemocratic character of the electoral process.

The additional US soldiers, drawn primarily from the US Armys Special Forces, will link up with frontline Iraqi units as part of the preparations for a punishing battle to retake Mosul from ISIS, the Washington Post reported.

The US is also allocating an additional $400 million to fund Kurdish proxy forces in northern Iraq, which are being organized by US commandos and will be critical in retaking Mosul, Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis said.

The Kurdish fighters, acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal on Monday as the USs most reliable partners in the fight against the Islamic State, began carrying out regular airborne raids throughout northern Iraq this year, under the supervision of the special targeting force announced by Carter earlier this year.

The US plans to enlist regional states to assist American forces intervening in the ISIS-held regions of northern Iraq once Mosul and other ISIS-held cities are retaken, according to the Pentagon. Over the past year, the Pentagon has repeatedly announced measures to bolster the US militarys basing arrangements in Iraq, including the new firebases announced earlier this month as part of the accelerated campaign against ISIS.

The return of US forces to major combat operations, less than five years after the official end of the Iraq war, is aimed at propping up the US puppet regime installed after the 2003 invasion and reinforcing the US military presence in the oil-rich region. Having already lost significant parts of the north and west to ISIS forces, the Iraqi government faces a spiraling crisis, fueled by the fall in world oil prices. Oil exports account for more than 90 percent of Iraqs revenues.

The decades of war crimes committed by Washington have wrecked Iraqi society nearly beyond the point of repair, according to a study by the Minority Rights Group International (MRG), which found that more than 8 million Iraqis are in dire need of humanitarian aid and more than 3 million remain internally displaced.
From ELLE

There's always a buzz around Kourtney Kardashian, but lately it's literal. The world's most famous big sister has just confessed her love for bee venom ("It doesn't hurt!") and its restorative skin care properties. Gwyneth and Victoria Beckham have, too, but only Kourtney is backing a brand along with the bees: Manuka Doctor Honey.

The label, which has apiaries across New Zealand, injects its products with bee byproducts that freshen skin.

We sat with the 36-year-old mega star in a pristine hotel suite, drinking tea spiked with-what else?-Manuka Doctor Honey and wondering what her tabloid-stalked life is really like.

The surprising thing is, she kind of told us.

Where do you find out about new beauty treatments like Manuka Doctor? Your sisters? Your makeup team?

I found out about it from our [Keeping Up With the Kardashians] production crew! They would eat spoonfuls of manuka honey between takes. If one person felt like they were getting sick, they'd all pull out jars and start eating it. And you know-when you feel like you're getting sick, if someone tells you, "Oh, this helps," you'll try anything.

Especially if it's plant based.

Yeah, after I had my son, I started getting much more into natural remedies and homeopathic solutions to health. So I started taking this honey, and I loved it. I felt it really worked in my system, so I started researching it, and discovering other uses, like skin care. And anything I can find that's natural that actually works, I will invest in it.

But one of the ingredients in Manuka Doctor is bee venom. Are you not afraid of bees?

No, I am! Although thankfully, I'm not allergic. But you know who's not? Kim. When Kim was little, she used to hold bees and play with them. Finally, she got stung and she stopped. But they were like her friends.

"Selfie makeup" is a thing. What about "selfie skin care"?

You know, being in the public eye means you're always photographed. In my case, we're always filming, which means we always have makeup on. That makes your skin worse, which means you need more makeupit's a circle. And we all learned pretty quickly that you have to take better care of your skin before and after your makeup goes on, so that when the cameras are off your skin still looks good.

Story continues

When are the cameras off?

Oh, a lot! I love to chill! On the weekends I'm at home with no cameras. We hang around the house, relax, play outside-I mean, we're busy, but it's normal downtime with little kids.

Makeup at the gym: yes or no?

I am not into makeup when I work out.

But you post so many photos during your workouts!

I swear, in those photos I do not put makeup on. Even if my skin is bad that day, I'll just stay far enough from the camera that it blurs it out. It's worth it, rather than put makeup on while I'm exercising, which is so, so bad for your complexion. Kim and Khloe don't wear any, either. We're adults and we know better. It's a huge no.

What about during SoulCycle or a group exercise class?

Put on glasses when you're walking in. Glasses and a hat. Anything is better than makeup!

Can I ask you about your daughter, Penelope?

Sure.

I feel like she's gunning for Harper Beckham status with her outfits. Does she have a color palette, like North?

Oh, clothing wise? No, Penelope doesn't really do that. I lean towards certain clothes in general when picking things out for her. And I try to steer her in a good direction, but I try to let Penelope have as much freedom as possible when picking her clothes. I mean, if the shoes are totally wrong for the rest of the outfit, I'll tell her, "That doesn't match; what if we pick a different pair?" But I think picking out her clothes makes her feel more independent, and for me, fashion was always a way to express myself, even when I was very small. I think it's important to let your kids be who they are, and that includes clothes. I like to give her choices as much as possible.

You're from a family of independent, enterprising women. So I assume Penelope will be a smart and strong adult, too.

Yes!

How do you teach her that beauty isn't just about makeup and clothes when a big part of your job is being photographed?

Well, Penelope sees me getting makeup and hair done all the time. She plays in my closet all the time, and tries on my clothes. But I don't think that counteracts being smart, or a great leader, or anything like that. My sisters and I watched our mom get dressed all the time. We always played with her makeup. We always tried on her clothes and shoes. And so Penelope does too, because it's part of how kids play. The scary thing is when she tries to put makeup on.

It's messy?

The opposite. The scary thing is, she does the best job. She blends foundation perfectly. She's three.

How do you handle it when she gets into your beauty products?

I try to tell her, "That's not good for your skin. Your skin is so beautiful anyway! You don't need that. Let's wipe it off together so everyone can see you." But I don't want to offend her, and I don't want her to feel like she's done anything wrong by exploring, you know? So I'm trying to teach her the balance, like, "Makeup is a part of fashion. It's a part of expressing yourself." But it's such a fine line, because getting the right message across, about being beautiful inside and being a caring person, that is so important. But I don't think that means you can't experience fashion and beauty. And I hope I can show her that balance.

It was hard to do research for this story, because on Google, there are literally millions of news stories that mention you. A lot of them seem pretty farfetched. What's the dumbest rumor you've read about yourself lately?

Hmmm. The first thing my mind goes to is, there was some random rumor floating around that Kim lit a skunk on fire.

Huh?

I know. It's absurd. It's the strangest thing I've ever heard. Obviously Kim does not set living things on fire! And anything I've heard about myself, it just pales in comparison to that. It's the weirdest thing I've ever heard.
The war on terrier is officially over! Amber Heard avoided jail time Monday by pleading guilty in an Australian court to illegally bringing two dogs, Yorkshire terriers named Pistol and Boo, to the country a year ago. In exchange, the actress and her hubby, Johnny Depp, whom Heard was traveling down under to visit, appeared in a very bizarre video for the Aussie government in which they apologized for their mistake.

In Southport Magistrates Court in Queensland, Heards lawyer argued that the starlet was sleep-deprived and exhausted and thought Depps staff had handled the necessary paperwork for her. However, Heard, 29, still entered a guilty plea to providing false information on her incoming passenger card on April 21, 2015. Prosecutors dropped more serious charges claiming she had illegally imported the dogs, which could have landed her in jail for two years and cost her a fine of about $15,000. (Considering shes flying around the world on private jets, $15,000 probably wasnt a huge concern.)

While it was no surprise that The Danish Girl actress resolved her legal issues, the video  featuring Depp and Heard  that was released by the government soon after quickly went viral because it was just so darn weird. In it, the pair awkwardly apologize for their headline-making run-in with government officials, but Depps stiff demeanor and clipped cadence make it feel more like a hostage video than a PSA.

Amber Heard and Johnny Depp arrive at court. (Photo: Getty Images)



Australia is a wonderful island with a treasure trove of unique plants, animals, and people, the blond actress begins.

It has to be protected, the unimpressed Depp adds.

Australia is free of many pests and diseases that are commonplace around the world. That is why Australia has to have such strong biosecurity laws, Heard explains.

Then its Depps turn again: And Australians are just as unique, both warm and direct. When you disrespect Australian law, they will tell you firmly.

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Heard adds that she is truly sorry that Pistol and Boo were not declared and notes that protecting Australia is important.

Depp, who looks irritated, ends the message: Declare everything when you enter Australia. Thanks. The tone of his thanks makes us wonder if hes actually saying something else, but as long as Pistol and Boo are safe, does subtext really matter?

Depp was in Australia filming the fifth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise when the couple ran into trouble. Arriving via private jet, as one does when married to one of the most famous actors in the world, Heard failed to declare the pups. Authorities became aware of their presence after an enthusiastic groomer posted their mugs on Instagram a few weeks later, and they jumped to take action. In fact, Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce told Depp through the press that unless the dogs left the country within 72 hours, they would be euthanized  and instantly made himself into a real-life Disney villain. Soon, a petition was circulating online to save Depps suddenly famous dogs, while press camped out in front of Depp and Heards temporary abode, hoping to get a glimpse of Pistol and Boo.

On Monday, Joyce seemed happy with Depp and Heards video apology. He shared it on his Facebook page, writing, Depp and Heard make a public statement highlighting the importance of biosecurity in Australia. The consequences of a disease outbreak could have been terrifying. We cant take the risk.

Alls well that ends well  and now we have this amazing new performance by Johnny Depp to enjoy over and over.
BOSTON (Reuters) - Bill Cosby's wife on Tuesday underwent a second day of questioning by lawyers for seven women who have sued the comedian for defamation for denying their claims that he sexually assaulted them. Camille Cosby, 72, cooperated to the best of her abilities while being questioned under oath for more than five hours, attorneys for her and her husband said in a joint statement. The deposition showed that "Mrs. Cosby has no relevant non-privileged information to offer in this case," it said. "... We are thankful for this distraction to now be over." Her lawyers had asked a federal magistrate judge last week to spare her a second day of questioning at a Boston hotel. They contended an earlier deposition was mainly aimed at embarrassing her by delving into her sexual past and matters she is not obligated to testify about due to her marriage with the accused actor. U.S. Magistrate Judge David Hennessy rejected that request but admonished lawyers for both sides to be better behaved during the second round of questioning. He noted that marital privilege allows Camille Cosby to decline to answer questions about matters discussed privately with her husband. More than 50 women have accused Cosby, 78, of sexual assault, often after plying them with drugs and alcohol. The allegations, many dating back decades, have toppled the actor best known for his role as the father in the 1980s television hit "The Cosby Show" from his position as one of the United States' best-loved entertainers. Most of the alleged crimes are too old to be criminally prosecuted. Authorities in Pennsylvania charged Cosby with sexually assaulting a woman in 2005. Cosby, who is out on bail, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. Tamara Green filed the Massachusetts lawsuit in December 2014. She was later joined by six other women who say Cosby sexually assaulted them and defamed them by calling them liars. Cosby has countersued, accusing the women of defaming him. (Reporting by Tim McLaughlin; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Cynthia Osterman)
MADRID  Geraldine Gonard, the former managing director of Madrids Imagina Intl. Sales, has hung her own shingle, Inside Content, a financing, co-production and pre-sales company focusing on content from Latin markets and Europe.

Inside Content is based out of Madrid. It will focus primarily but not exclusively on scripted TV, but has made its first move taking world sales rights to The Night My Mother Killed My Father, the latest comedy from Ines Paris (Miguel and William).

Inside Content play off two major assets: Gonards now extensive experience in film and TV sales, having served as managing director and COO at IIS from 2007 to 2015, sales and then general director at Grupo Pi (2001-06), and as a sales exec at Sogepaq (1997-2001); the vibrant lift in the international TV drama business in the last two-to-three years which Gonard, heading up IIS, Spains main scripted drama export house, has experienced first hand and indeed, when it comes to Spain, help drive and channel.

Scripted TV is a hugely active sector. The film sector is increasingly moving into TV series production. Its a great moment to be in the business, Gonard told Variety.

She added: Theres also a large need for a bridge between series creators, especially at smaller companies, and broadcasters and international producers, whether structuring organic co-productions or even in such aspects as marketing, presentation of the bible, the package. Opportunities to bring in an international distribution company on a project in early development have also increased, she added.

French-born, but Madrid-based, Gonard will also look to serve as a link between not only Spain and her native France but Europe and Latin America. There is a lot of co-production in Northern Europe, she said. There is much less in Southern Europe. But a significant number of key Latin American TV players are driving into higher-end TV drama. OTT platforms have evolved audience needs.

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As broadcasters, under large fiscal pressure in stagnant or contracting ad markets, seek to tap into high-end drama and other ambitious pay TV players look to create signature shows for their services, there is a growing need for international co-production.

Also, audiences are embracing stories from around the world. Who would have thought 10 years ago, theyd be interested in a series about a drug-dealer in Colombia? she said in reference to Narcos, pointing also to ratings for the Baltasar Kormakur-created Trapped on Gallic pubcaster France 2.

Gonard will work a two-way street working with companies outside Spain and Latin America looking to link into these markets, and vice-versa. As soon as I see a content, I know which territory and channel it will work in and on, Gonard said. Currently, there are very few independent executives not tied to a company with that knowledge of the Latin TV world.

Produced by Beatriz de la Gandara and Jose Luis Rancano, The Night My Mother Killed My Father will screen in competition at Spains Malaga Festival and segue to the Cannes Film Market. A crazed huis clos feature with a strong Spanish cast, the dinner-long comedy plays out as a 40-year-old actress (Belen Rueda, The Orphanage) makes a desperate bid to persuade her crime writer husband (Eduard Fernandez, Biutiful) to give her the lead role in his next film. Hes more interested in snagging the services of a famed Argentine thesp (Diego Peretti, The German Doctor). When her ex (Fele Martinez, Bad Education) turns up with his current girl-friend, who gets the hots for the actor, tensions escalate. Screenplay is by Paris, in collaboration with Fernando Colomo (South From Granada). This is perfect title for a remake, said Gonard.
Make the Right Decision

Parents want the best high school for their children, whether it's public, private or a different educational model.

Find out what parents should be looking for in a high school to ensure that their teen thrives in the years leading up to college.

1. Academic Programs Offered

Many times, experts say, deciding on a type of school comes down, at least in part, to the academic programs offered, from dual enrollment to Advanced Placement courses or International Baccalaureate programs.

If the student is interested in pursuing a particular subject area, such as theater, parents might also want to consider whether the school provides related opportunities.

2. Cost

Determining how much money to spend -- if any -- on a child's high school education can be a challenging but important decision for parents.

Private high schools generally charge tuition, for example -- though parents considering public schools, which are usually free, should also be aware of costs that aren't stated outright.

3. Diversity

Consider the diversity of a high school, experts say, to ensure that teachers and officials are sensitive to cultural issues and that the child becomes aware and respectful of different values.

Parents might want to examine how schools teach diversity, including when it comes to historical issues.

4. Size

Whether it's a small school with more personal attention, or a larger high school with more opportunities to build relationships, parents should pick the environment that's best suited for their child.

Keep the child's personality in mind, experts say. For an introverted student, for instance, a smaller school might be best.

5. Student-Teacher Interaction

When touring a school, looking to see how students and teachers interact with each other can give parents an idea of the school's overall atmosphere, says one expert.

Take note if any students or teachers greet parents personally, and observe students' moods and how they treat each other.

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6. Graduation and College Attendance Rates

While parents shouldn't base their decision off of numbers alone, certain statistics can suggest how successful a school has been at bringing students to the next stage of their lives.

Two stats to consider, experts say, are graduation rates and college attendance rates.

7. School Culture

The best way to get a feel for a school's culture is to simply walk through the halls, Mark Reford, then CEO of BASIS Independent Schools, told U.S. News.

Parents might consider what they expect the school to teach their child about life beyond academics, and determine whether the school seems like a joyful place overall.

8. Technology and Resources

It's important to understand what schools are doing with emerging technology to benefit students and how they are integrating it into the classroom setting, experts say.

Some high schools use interactive whiteboards, provide students with laptops or tablets and assign online coursework.

9. Extracurricular Activities

It's vital for students to get involved outside the classroom through extracurricular activities, and experts say to look for a school that offers a variety.

Extracurriculars are also an important part of the college application and can speak volumes about a student's interests and values.

10. Parent Engagement

Determining whether there's a parent group or parent-teacher association can help parents learn more about the high school their child is attending, says one expert.

They should ask how involved parents can be in activities and other meetings or events. Parent involvement can show students that they should take their education seriously.

More on Choosing a High School

Find out more about students' experiences at high schools across the U.S. on the High School Notes blog and get our complete rankings of the Best High Schools.

For additional advice and information on how to navigate the high school selection process, connect with U.S. News Education on Twitter and Facebook.

Jordan Friedman is an online education editor at U.S. News. You can follow him on Twitter or email him at jfriedman@usnews.com.


A massive car bomb detonated around 9 a.m. local time in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital city, has left at least 28 dead  a number likely to rise  and 327 injured. The Taliban quickly claimed responsibility for the attack.

The bomb went off in a densely populated area of the city, near government buildings. A gunfight between attackers and Afghan security forces at the site ensued.

Q

Source: Rahmat Gul/AP

"This was one of the most powerful explosions I have ever heard in my life," police commander Obaidullah Tarakhail, who was near the site when the bomb went off, told the Associated Press. It took 20 minutes for Tarakhail to recover his hearing and for him to be able to see anything. "All around was dark and covered with thick smoke and dust."

Source: Wakil Kohsar /Getty Images

Source: Shah Marai /Getty Images

Just one week prior to the attack, on April 12, the Taliban announced the beginning of their "spring offensive," also referred to as "Operation Omari," named after the terrorist network founder Mullah Mohammad Omar. The offensive seeks to topple the American-supported government.

"Jihad against the aggressive and usurping infidel army is a holy obligation upon our necks and our only recourse for re-establishing an Islamic system and regaining our independence," the Taliban announced in a statement, Reuters reports.

Source: Rahmat Gul/AP

Source: Shah Marai /Getty Images

Source: Shah Marai /Getty Images

Source: Rahmat Gul/AP

Source: Wakil Kohsar /Getty Images

Source: Rahmat Gul/AP

Source: Rahmat Gul/AP

Source: Rahmat Gul/AP

Source: Shah Marai /Getty Images

Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah speaks with reporters in Kabul at the site of the attack.

Source: Shah Marai /Getty Images

"[We] condemn in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Puli Mahmood Khan neighborhood of Kabul, as a result of which many of our countrymen were martyred and wounded," President Ashraf Ghani said in a statement, according to the Guardian. "Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism."
The U.S. News Short List, separate from our overall rankings, is a regular series that magnifies individual data points in hopes of providing students and parents a way to find which undergraduate or graduate programs excel or have room to grow in specific areas. Be sure to explore The Short List: College, The Short List: Grad School and The Short List: Online Programs to find data that matter to you in your college or grad school search.

Attending a college with a low student-to-faculty ratio can mean more personalized attention for students.

Prospective students looking to learn in a tight-knit classroom environment may want to consider U.S. liberal arts colleges instead of larger universities.



[Learn 10 reasons to go to a small college.]

Among the 222 ranked National Liberal Arts Colleges that provided student-faculty ratios to U.S. News in an annual survey, the average was just 11 students per faculty member. Schools in this category focus on undergraduate education and award at least half of their degrees in the liberal arts fields of study.

In comparison, the ratio at ranked National Universities, which offer a wide range of undergrad programs, plus master's and doctoral degrees, was 16 students per faculty member.

At the 21 National Liberal Arts Colleges that had the lowest student-faculty ratios in fall 2014 , the average was just half of that: eight students for each faculty member.

Marlboro College in Vermont had the lowest student-faculty ratio, 5-to-1, as well as the lowest total undergraduate enrollment, 230, among the 21 schools on the list.

Among all 222 liberal arts colleges, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology and Colorado Mesa University had the highest student-faculty ratios, with an average of 23 students per faculty member.



[Consider attending a U.S. college outside a major urban area.]

The top three National Liberal Arts Colleges -- Williams College and Amherst College in Massachusetts, and Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania -- all made the list of schools with the lowest student-faculty ratios. The latter two had an average of eight students per faculty member, while Williams College -- ranked No. 1 -- saw a 7-1 ratio. Student-faculty ratio is among the many factors U.S. News considers when ranking the Best Colleges, making up 1 percent of the rankings formula.

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Most of the schools on the list were also on the East Coast, though there were a handful located elsewhere, including three in California.

Below is a list of the 21 National Liberal Arts Colleges with the lowest rounded number of students per faculty member in fall 2014. Unranked schools, which did not meet certain criteria required by U.S. News to be numerically ranked, were not considered for this report.

Don't see your school in the top 21? Access the U.S. News College Compass to find student-faculty ratio data, complete rankings and much more. School officials can access historical data and rankings, including of peer institutions, via U.S. News Academic Insights.

U.S. News surveyed nearly 1,800 colleges and universities for our 2015 survey of undergraduate programs. Schools self-reported myriad data regarding their academic programs and the makeup of their student body, among other areas, making U.S. News' data the most accurate and detailed collection of college facts and figures of its kind. While U.S. News uses much of this survey data to rank schools for our annual Best Colleges rankings, the data can also be useful when examined on a smaller scale. U.S. News will now produce lists of data, separate from the overall rankings, meant to provide students and parents a means to find which schools excel, or have room to grow, in specific areas that are important to them. While the data come from the schools themselves, these lists are not related to, and have no influence over, U.S. News' rankings of Best Colleges, Best Graduate Schools or Best Online Programs. The student-faculty ratio data above are correct as of April 19, 2016.



Jordan Friedman is an online education editor at U.S. News. You can follow him on Twitter or email him at jfriedman@usnews.com.


Summer vacation and graduation are on the horizon for high schoolers in May, but first, many have to make it past one more hurdle: Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate testing.

Final exams for these college-level courses are often held in May.

[Discover the difference between AP and IB classes.]

AP exam season is a stressful time for students, says Erica King, a school counselor at Northwest Pennsylvania Collegiate Academy in Erie, where most students take two to three AP exams each year -- though a few take four or five. Along with AP exams, some students take Pennsylvania's state assessments in May, and there are extracurriculars and graduation activities going on as well, she says.

Students need to master a wide breadth of material, one or two year's worth, ahead of these exams.

And the scores students receive on AP and IB exams can determine whether they will receive college credit. For IB exams, their scores can also determine whether students will receive the IB diploma.

Parents can help students succeed during AP and IB testing season by doing the following.

-- Help with the basics: Parents need to make sure that their student starts studying early for AP exams, says King, rather than cramming at the last minute.

Make sure students have all the materials they need to study, whether purchased or from the library, and that students have a quiet place to work at home, says King. Parents could also encourage their teen to study in groups and should make sure they prioritize studying over other activities.

Before the exam, parents should ensure teens get a good night's sleep and eat a good breakfast, King says, as well as make sure their children get there on time -- they may not be able to take the exam if they arrive late.

[Get three last-minute AP prep tips to ace the exam.]

-- Avoid adding extra pressure: Parents shouldn't tell their student that they expect him or her to ace the exam -- that can add extra pressure, says King. But they also shouldn't suggest that the exam will be easy because that belittles the student's experience and the student could be a little resentful.

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"Just be positive and supportive," says Jane Dittus, a school counselor at International Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where students are preparing for IB exams. That's probably the key thing that parents can do because these students put enough pressure on themselves, she says.

Dittus also suggests that parents help their student by making sure expectations at home aren't too high, in terms of what the student has to do around the house.

"Keep it calm at home, if possible," she says. "Because the students, they are stressed. You know, they want to do well."

That's something she thinks parents at her school, where students have been participating in the IB program for four years, understand.

[See photos of the Best High Schools.]

-- Trust that students know what they are doing: Especially at this stage in students' lives, parents need to trust that students know what they have to do to prepare for the exam and are doing that, says Dittus.

"Most of these kids are going off to college in the fall," she says, so hopefully they have pretty good study skills already.

And don't doubt or question students too much about how much they are studying, she says. Just because a parent doesn't see his or her child studying doesn't mean that the student isn't -- many study in groups or at the library, she says.

In a lot of ways, it's no different than being a supportive parent in any other difficult phase of a child's life, says Dittus. Parents should be their child's cheerleader, maintain positivity and not drag students down, she says.

Have something of interest to share? Send your news to us at highschoolnotes@usnews.com.

Alexandra Pannoni is an education Web producer at U.S. News. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at apannoni@usnews.com.
County in East China: aisle of history

From:chinadaily.com.cn | 2016-04-19 10:30

An old house with stone-carved patterns. [Photo by Zhou Fuyang, Li Huihuang and Jie Gang/China Daily]

When twilight falls, Hu Qinghua's routine starts. After he finishes work in his rice fields he visits a family in Youdian village, speaking to them about the history of their house and narrating stories about their common ancestors, hoping to persuade them to repair their house, which was built hundreds of years ago.

Hu, 63, can trace his ancestry back to more than 20 generations in an ancient village in East China's Jiangxi province. All the buildings of Hu's village in Jinxi county are ancient houses dating back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

However, most of the houses are empty. And some are even on the verge of collapse.

"Young people move to cities, leaving their parents behind in the village. It's almost empty now," says Hu.

Hu's village is one of more than 100 ancient villages in Jinxi. All these villages have traditional houses built also in styles of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). There are about 11,000 houses built during both dynasties in the county, according to the local government.

"It's like a huge museum of ancient architecture. It's rare to see ancient houses that are mostly in their original forms in such large numbers in China," says Guo Daiheng, an expert on Chinese traditional architecture.

With China's modernization, ancient villages are disappearing at a fast pace as residents replace old houses with modern buildings. An average of 100 villages are vanishing each day in China, scholar Feng Jicai remarked during last year's two sessions in Beijing.

Children play in an old ancestral temple. [Photo by Zhou Fuyang, Li Huihuang and Jie Gang/China Daily]

The top annual meetings of the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference are commonly referred to as the two sessions.

But not all old houses are demolished. Some are transformed into tourist attractions and the local residents are replaced by businesspeople.

Guo says houses in Jinxi have retained their olden-day forms as locals have great respect for their ancestors.

"People don't demolish old houses. They may leave for the cities or build new houses near their village," says Guo, whose team has been in the area for two months now with the sole aim of studying the houses and protecting them.

She has helped with a conference called Digital Heritage Around China to raise awareness and money for the protection and preservation of ancient villages.

In Youdian village, there are 72 ancient stone buildings with walls that are several meters high. The village's most famous ancestor was Hu Guifang, a senior official in the Ming Dynasty, who was then in charge of construction, transportation and agriculture.

He returned to the village only after his retirement.

[Photo provided to China Daily]

The village mainly houses descendants of the official. They have lived in the buildings built by their ancestors for generations.

Other villages in Jinxi share many similarities with Youdian. They have ancestral temples, schools and houses with similar layouts that include ponds, long and narrow stone alleys. Well-known ancestors of today's villagers were influential scholars, writers, poets and powerful officials in imperial China.

All these villages have been influenced by Confucianism and Taoism, says Guo. That's why they are built in harmony with the surrounding rivers and mountains.

Now, all these villages face a common problempeople leaving and the houses decaying.

Meanwhile, Hu Qinghua's daily visits and persuasion have continued for more than a year.

For the few residents of the village, they recognize that their houses must be preserved as a kind of cultural heritage after the local government offered them money to help them with repairs.

"I told them (the villagers) that if they don't repair their houses, it's a kind of disrespect to their ancestors," says Hu.

[Photo provided to China Daily]

Most villagers take Hu's words seriously. But they can't afford the cost of repairs.

To repair an ancient house takes a lot of money.

Just to stabilize it and fix its wooden windows can cost about 30,000 yuan ($4,500). But the average annual income of villagers who work in the rice fields is about 10,000 yuan, says Hu.

Huang Qinhua, a local official in Jinxi, says: "A resident often pays 2,000 to 6,000 yuan for the repairs and the government covers the rest."

Separately, Huang says the local government also wants to bring in private funds to protect the ancient villages.

An elderly villager at his ancient house in Jinxi county, Jiangxi province. [Photo by Zhou Fuyang, Li Huihuang and Jie Gang/China Daily]

For instance, Guo's team and the organizer of Digital Heritage Around China have promised to help fix decaying houses.

But Guo says repairing the houses is relatively easy compared with convincing young villagers to return home from the cities.

These villages that reply mainly on agriculture can't provide enough job opportunities like big cities do. However, Guo says she sees hope when she meets young people making plans for their hometowns.

A young man who Guo met earlier this year told her that he realized the value of the houses in his village when he saw how ancient houses are protected in other countries.

So he has decided to return home and to start work on repairing his own house.

"In China, the link between people and their villages is very powerful. So, I believe there's hope that the next generation will respond," she says.

Contact the writer at dengzhangyu@chinadaily.com.cn
Home to iconic sights, like the Eiffel Tower, the gilded Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre, the City of Light beckons to travelers with its inspiring landmarks and its irresistible charm. However, Paris, with its vibrant neighborhoods, tucked-away quarters, trendy boutiques and bohemian cafes, offers much more than striking art and architecture. And though it's impossible to soak up all of the city's classic and trendsetting spots in one weekend, to embrace the city's authentic charms, you must explore the city's can't-miss tourist attractions and off-the-beaten-path corners. With this in mind, here are seven smart ways to plan the perfect weekend getaway in France's enchanting capital.

[See: The Best Cities for a Weekend Getaway.]

Stay in an Apartment

If you want to trim down costs, consider renting an apartment rather than splurging on an expensive hotel. Not only can you shave a few hundred euros off your trip, but you'll easily get acclimated to Parisian culture in a short time frame. Many reputable vacation rental sites, like Paris Perfect, offer great deals on short-term rentals in many of the city's most popular arrondissements, or districts, such as Le Marais in the 3e and 4e arrondissements and St. Germaine, in the 6e arrondissement.

Shop at the Local Markets

It's no secret that shopping in Paris can be a little pricey, especially when it comes to food and wine. To save money on food costs while visiting, buy snacks and groceries from street carts and markets. One of the most popular farmers markets is the marche raspail, which is open on Sundays from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Here, you'll find everything from locally grown produce to charcuterie to fresh fish and cheese varieties. Another favorite haunt is Rue Montorgueil in the 1e and 2e arrondissements. While perusing the market, you may even spot some of Paris's top chefs and food writers shopping for pastries, cheeses and other ingredients.

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Allow Ample Time to Explore Famous and Lesser-Known Attractions

While there certainly are certain must-see sights to explore if you've never been to Paris, including the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and the Champs-Elysees, the City of Light offers many other exciting, lesser-known attractions. After visiting these iconic attractions in the morning or before closing times to dodge crowds, make sure to check out some hidden gems, such as the Musee des Arts Decoratifs (the Decorative Arts Museum) on Rue de Rivoli and the Musee Marmottan-Claude Monet on Rue Louis-Voilly, which houses the largest collection of works by Claude Monet. Locals also love the the Jardin des Serres d'Auteul, a collection of 19th-century greenhouses that surround a magnificent central tropical greenhouse. And if you're a lit fan, make sure to visit Pere Lachaise, a cemetery near the 20e arrondissement that holds the graves of Oscar Wilde and Frederic Chopin.

[See: 12 Great Destinations in Europe You Can Afford.]

Take the Metro, Bus or Walk

Even though taxis may be convenient, they are one of the most expensive ways to get around the city. Because of the city traffic, many rides end up costing nearly double what they should. To avoid hefty rates, see more of the city by walking or taking the quick and convenient metro. You'll find stops in almost every neighborhood, and single ride tickets cost just 1.80 euro. If you'd prefer to stay above ground, take the bus. Bus tickets cost about 2 euros and give you easy access to the city's most famed attractions.

Dress Like a Local

If you want to blend in effortlessly while you stroll along the city's wide boulevards, skip the sweatshirts, baggy jeans and fanny packs. Instead, don something a little more chic, such as fitted pants and suit jackets for men or fashionable dresses and comfortable flats for women. And if you're planning a fall, winter or spring weekend getaway, opt for a trench coat, fitted blazers and a long scarf that you can easily pack into a compact carry-on.

Explore Vintage Markets

Like Paris's best cafes and cozy bistros, the best outfit retailers are found in the city's quieter, lesser-visited neighborhoods. For an eclectic mix of old and new items, visit Rue de Charonne, which is situated behind the bustling Bastille. Here, you'll find rows of fashionable boutiques tailored to a variety of budgets. The Etienne Marcel neighborhood is another crowd-pleasing area for shoppers, thanks to its laid-back vibe and quirky boutiques filled with records, unique prints and well-tailored fabrics.

[See: 10 Secret European Spots to Visit This Year.]

Practice a Few French Phrases

The French have long been regaled as being unfriendly to Americans. However, this myth is far from true. The key to winning over Parisians is to simply speak the local language. Before your trip, learn a few key phrases to better communicate with locals and easily navigate around the city, haggle for the lowest prices and ask questions. Phrases like "bonjour" (hello), "parlez-vous anglais?" (do you speak English?) and "Ou est...?" (where is ...?) are simple to learn and put into practice.


Even though some litigious folks have tried over the years, you can't sue a weatherman for giving you the wrong information. Did you end up getting soaked because the weather report said it was going to be 75 and sunny this weekend when in reality a mini-monsoon landed on your front door? Well, you're out of luck on multiple fronts.

The fact of the matter is that weather reports provide no real guarantee as to anything weather related. They are, in very pure sense, mere predictions. And sure, modern-day computing has perhaps improved the accuracy of weather reports, but it's important to remember that weather reports still remain nothing more than educated guesses. As it stands today, we're currently at a point where the weather can be reasonably, kinda sorta, predicted about 10 days out into the future.

DON'T MISS: The only way to get Googles awesome new app that lets you control your phone by voice

That being the case, meteorologists are none too thrilled with the fact that a company called AccuWeather has begun issuing 90-day weather forecasts. ArsTechnica points us to a blogpost from Dan Satterfield who calls Accuweather's 90-day forecasts "indefensible."

Writing for the American Geophysical Union, Satterfield explains:

Forecasts of this type beyond 7-10 days (at the most) are simply not possible. If someone tells you otherwise, theyre wrong, because we are in the realm of palm reading and horoscopes here, not science. I agree completely with Jason Samenow from the the Capital Weather Gang at the Washington Post [AccuWeather] is simply peddling a useless product to people who dont know better. These forecasts are actually even worse than the Farmers Almanac, since they give rain chances and temperatures for exact points months into the future!

Naturally, AccuWeather vehmently disagrees. During a recent NPR interview, company founder and president Joel Myers defended AccuWeather's new initiative.

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An excerpt of the interview reads:

SIEGEL: Weather forecasts have gotten better over time, but, personally, I wouldn't be at all surprised if next Monday's forecast didn't hold, never mind the forecast for a Monday 90 days from now. Is this 90-day forecast - is it a best guess based on historical data or do you really have tools that allow you to see that far into the future? MYERS: Well, I would bet on the forecast for next Monday if it's the AccuWeather forecast. All of our forecasts are based on the latest science. We bring more weather data and model data into AccuWeather's headquarters in State College, Pa. than any other place on the planet, and it's how we mix these various models and all the other data we have and - with 100 plus meteorologists - how we put together the forecast. SIEGEL: But I've heard from meteorologists that predictions are really reliable, say, up to seven to 10 days. After that, the element of luck increases. Do you disagree with that? MYERS: Well, no, the forecasts - all forecasts have and always will deteriorate with time. The point of the matter is this, people want information, and they want information that is worthwhile. If we didn't have the statistics to show that the forecast - and here's the measure of what the value is - it's got to be more accurate statistically than you can come up with by using past normals and whatever climatology that you have, and it does.

I'm no weather expert, but seeing as how weather reports even 5-7 days out seem to be hit or miss, I'm inclined to believe that a 90-day weather forecast is not something you should put a lot of faith in.

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Warsaw (AFP) - Environmental groups on Tuesday lodged a complaint with the European Commission over Poland's large-scale logging plans in the Bialowieza forest, which includes Europe's last primeval woodland.

"We risk turning this forest into a tree plantation and reducing our natural heritage into blocks of wood," Greenpeace Poland head Robert Cyglicki told reporters, alongside representatives from six other groups including the Polish branch of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Poland's Environment Minister Jan Szyszko last month gave the go ahead for the large-scale logging -- despite protests from scientists and ecologists -- to combat a spruce bark beetle infestation.

"The Commission is concerned about the recent decision of the Polish authorities," EU environment spokeswoman Iris Petsa told AFP on Tuesday, adding that the institution had reached out to Warsaw and "will decide on any further steps" based on replies it received Monday.

Under the new plan, loggers will harvest more than 180,000 cubic metres (6.4 million cubic feet) of wood from non-protected areas of the forest over a decade, dwarfing previous plans to harvest 40,000 cubic metres over the same period.

The environmentalists take issue with the government's rationale, saying "the intensive wood extraction is a threat for priority habitats and species".

"Contrary to what the minister of environment says, the bark beetle outbreak does not pose any threat to the habitats," Przemyslaw Chylarecki from Polish environmental group Greenmind said in the joint statement.

The groups said the logging plan, which could begin as early as this spring, violates EU conservation law.

"We cannot challenge this decision under Polish law, so complaining to the Commission is our last resort," said lawyer Agata Szafraniuk from the non-profit organisation ClientEarth.

"In the past, breaches of EU nature law have led to hefty fines and withdrawal of funding. We hope the minister will reconsider before this irreplaceable forest is lost forever."

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Sprawling across 150,000 hectares (around 370,650 acres), the Bialowieza forest extends over the Polish border with Belarus, where it is entirely protected as a nature park.

Designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979, the forest is home to 20,000 animal species, including 250 types of bird and 62 species of mammals, among them Europe's largest, the bison.

Europe's tallest trees, firs towering 50 metres high (160 feet), and oaks and ashes of 40 metres, also flourish here, in an ecosystem unspoiled for more than 10 millennia.
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's plans to increase logging in the Bialowieza Forest could breach European Union law because it would some of its destroy natural habitats, campaigners lobbying the European Commission for action said on Tuesday. The forest is a UNESCO World Heritage site that sprawls across the border between Poland and Belarus, occupying almost 580 square miles of woodland and providing home to rare European wood bison among others. Environment Minister Jan Szyszko said in March he would approve a tripling in the volume of wood to be harvested because of an infestation of the spruce bark beetle. "We told the minister his action was illegal, but he didn't listen. We cannot challenge this decision under Polish law, so complaining to the Commission is our last resort, said Agata Szafraniuk, lawyer at environmental law firm ClientEarth said. The complaint was sent on Tuesday by seven Polish and international organizations, including ClientEarth, Greenpeace and WWF. They said Szyszko's decision breached Europe's Habitats Directive, which conserves natural habitats and rare fauna and flora, and could result in Poland being taken to the European Court of Justice. Iris Petsa, spokeswoman for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries at the Commission, said the Commission was concerned about Poland's decision and was looking into it. "The Commission decided to contact the Polish authorities to make sure that the proposed interventions are in line with EU law. Based on the replies received yesterday from the Polish, the Commission will decide on any further steps," Petsa said in response to the groups' letter. Many local communities support the foresters plans and say the environmentalists are attacking their way of life and the source of their livelihood. (Reporting by Agnieszka Barteczko; Additional reporting by Barbara Lewis; Editing by Alison Williams)
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Air strikes on a vegetable market in opposition-held northwest Syria killed around 40 people and wounded dozens on Tuesday, a rebel commander, rescue worker and war monitor said. It was not clear if the air strikes were carried out by Syrian or Russian war planes that have been deployed to Syria to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The rescue worker said 38 people were killed in the town of Maarat al-Numan in the insurgent stronghold of Idlib province, and said 10 people were also killed in an air strike on the nearby town of Kafr Nubl. "We have more than 20 cars that have been moving dead and injured to hospitals in the area," said Ahmad Sheikho, a member of the civil defense corps, a rescue service operating in opposition-held territory. "The air strike at the central vegetable market in (Maarat al-Numan) was around noon. Another strike at the same time hit Kafr Nubl's own market," Sheikho said Ahmed al-Seoud, head of the 13th Division, a foreign-backed faction fighting under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army, told Reuters the air strikes hit the main vegetable market, killing around 40 people and wounding around 80. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which monitors the conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said 37 people were killed in Maarat al-Numan and seven were killed in Kafr Nubl. Many of the injured are in a serious condition and the death toll is expected to rise, the Observatory said. The Syrian military could not immediately be reached for comment, and state news agency SANA made no mention of air strikes in Idlib. (Reporting by Lisa Barrington and Tom Perry in Beirut, and Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman.; Editing by Dominic Evans)
In 2013, as the United Kingdom celebrated the birth of Prince George, gifts from heads of state for the royal baby poured in from around the world. But there was one present that caught the attention of the international media: a cardboard baby box sent to Georges parents, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, from Finlands government.

The packageabout 50 items, such as onesies, bibs, bedding, socks, and babys first bookhas been distributed to new moms in Finland since 1938. The practice has been widely credited with reducing infant mortality in the Nordic nation. Although the British royal family likely didnt need such supplies, plenty of impoverished parents do. So in the hope of boosting child welfare, Scotland now plans to distribute the boxes.

RELATED: Why It Might Be Time to Treat Child Poverty Like a Medical Condition

The baby box is such a simple idea but has been proven to have a real impact, reducing child mortality and helping families at the start of a childs life, First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon told the Sunday Mail.

In Finland, if a family couldnt afford a bassinet or crib, the infant could safely sleep in the box itself. Now its become tradition for even babies in well-off families to sleep in their boxes for the first few months. Sudden infant death syndrome was contributing to Finlands high rate of infant mortality10 percent of children there once died before reaching their first birthdays. Now its down to 0.2 per cent, according to The Guardian.

About 0.37 percent of infants die from crib death in Scotland. Sturgeon sees the box as not just a means of lowering that number, but also as a tool to boost the overall welfare of Scottish kids. According to a study released last year, 1 in 10 Scots live in severe poverty.

RELATED: Finlands Education System: 10 Surprising Facts That Americans Shouldnt Ignore

By providing every newborn with a baby box, we can help child healthand by providing greater support to new families, we will also help to tackle child poverty and improve the chances of some of our most deprived children, said Sturgeon.

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Given that perspective, it seems a baby box could be useful in the United States as well. Roughly 22 percent of American children live in poverty. But given that politicians in the U.S. are wrangling over giving minimum-wage-earning moms and dads diapers and parental leave, the chances of the government distributing free boxes of baby supplies seem slim.

Sign the Petition: Tell Congress: Don't Make Workers Choose Between Family and a Paycheck

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 Finland Plans to Give Every Citizen, Rich or Poor, $870 a Month

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Original article from TakePart
Washington (AFP) - Apple received some 30,000 data requests from law enforcement agencies globally in the second half of 2015, and provided information in a majority of cases, the company's latest transparency report showed.

In the report released late Monday, Apple said it provided some data in 80 percent of the 4,000 request from US law enforcement agencies in the July-December period.

The news comes with Apple at the center of a controversy over whether it can be compelled to help authorities decrypt devices where only the user has encryption "keys."

The issue hit a boiling point last month when Apple refused to help the FBI weaken the operation system of an iPhone used by one of the shooters in last year's San Bernardino killing spree. The government eventually withdrew the request, but similar cases are pending in the courts.

The latest report from Apple showed a total of 30,687 law enforcement requests from authorities around the world, involving more than 167,000 devices. That compared to some 26,000 requests in the prior six-month period affecting more than 360,000 devices.

Apple said it provided at least some data in 63 percent of the cases in its Asia-Pacific region and 52 percent of the cases in the region that includes Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, and 80 percent for Latin America and North America.

"When we receive an account request from law enforcement requesting a customer's personal information, we will notify the customer a request concerning their personal data was made unless we are explicitly prohibited from doing so," the report noted, adding that some exceptions are made "for extreme situations when we believe disclosing information could put a child or other person in serious danger."

Apple said that any government agency "must get a search warrant" and that "our legal team carefully reviews" each one.

"We only comply with information requests once we are satisfied that the request is valid and appropriate, and then we deliver the narrowest possible set of information," the report said.

The report showed Apple received the largest number of request from the region which includes Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India, or more than 30 countries. The total number of requests in the second half of 2015 was 19,322, with more than 11,000 coming from Germany.

The Asia-Pacific region including 11 countries accounted for 7,300 requests, including some 3,000 from Australia, more than 1,900 from Singapore and some 1,000 from China.
When Palestinian primary school teacher Hanan Al Hroub won the 2016 Global Teacher Prize, she put an international spotlight on the impact teachers can have through her use of play to resolve violence and tension in her classroom of Palestinian refugee students. Al Hroub, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp and attended Al-Quds Open University in the Palestinian territories, was recognized for her outstanding teaching.

Teaching can prove a rewarding career for education grads in the Arab region. And whether students choose to pursue the teaching route, a degree in education can launch a variety of education-focused careers. Teachers may later want to venture into another area in the field.

Anies Al-Hroub, chairman of the department of education and professor of educational psychology and special education at the American University of Beirut, says education careers can vary, including curriculum designers, education psychologists, experts at NGOs focused on education and policymakers. The school offers a bachelor's in elementary education and a master's in education with several concentrations, such as educational psychology and science education, among others.

[Explore how Arab region universities are evolving.]

Al-Hroub, no relation to Hanan, says that many AUB graduates work in Gulf countries in education ministries in addition to schools, as well as in NGOs and educational institutions as consultants, experts or researchers and as faculty members at Lebanese universities.

One possible career route, Al-Hroub says, is the ministry of education in a student's home country, promoting education reform and implementing educational policy changes that address disadvantaged and refugee students.

This concept is close to the heart of Syrian national Sinamis Doughouz, who graduated in 2015 with a master's in international and comparative education from the American University in Cairo. Doughouz says she chose AUC for its high standard of education and reputation in the region, which she felt could equip her with the knowledge and tools needed to rebuild her homeland. She says the staff in AUC's Graduate School of Education helped her see that she could evolve into a developer, policymaker and activist for education reform.

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[Learn what parents should weigh before sending a child to an overseas Arab region university.]

Doughouz is working to advocate as a policymaker on behalf of Syrian and other refugees in Sweden to ensure educational accessibility. She teaches English to Syrian, Somali and Afghani students in Sweden whom she says are newcomers to the country, escaping war or poverty. She also develops English as a Second Language programs and is using her master's capstone project to help refugees solve conflicts and be positive citizens in their host country.

"This should ease the transition they are facing," says the high school teacher, who has a bachelor's in English language and literature from Damascus University in Syria. She hopes to start educational projects in Syria that address education reform.

Ted Purinton, dean of AUC's Graduate School of Education, says the school was founded in part "to demonstrate to the region that broader possibilities do indeed exist, and to prepare people for work in educational policy, educational research and educational activism."

The school offers two master's degrees with four concentrations: one in international and comparative education, with concentrations in teaching and learning and international education development and policy; the other, in educational leadership with concentrations in school leadership and higher education. Purinton says many students plan to go to the U.S. or U.K. for a Ph.D. with the intention of returning to Egypt to work in policy; leadership in the ministry of education, universities and NGOs; or academia.

A career in academia interests Algerian national Nora Merouani, who started as a teacher and has taught English and humanities at the secondary level in Algeria and Egypt for 16 years.

Merouani says she's ready for another challenge. She is pursuing a master's in educational leadership at Qatar University, which offers Bachelor of Education degrees in primary, secondary and special education, and master's degrees in educational leadership, special education and curriculum.

She says Qatar has many opportunities in the education sector, including for non-Qataris, to help implement education reform. She says she didn't find such opportunities in Algeria.

[Find out the factors to consider when choosing a university in the Arab region.]

"Qatar is undertaking educational reform and welcomes research projects and ideas that help achieve its Vision 2030 and 'education for a new era.' I want to find a job in the education sector and use my ideas and experience to help the country," says Merouani, who has a bachelor's in teaching English as a Second Language from the University of Constantine in Algeria, a master's in international education from the American International College branch campus in Egypt, and plans for a Ph.D.

While teaching may be a common path for education majors, the field is wide open to experiment and explore multiple career routes, whether inside or outside the classroom.

And educators are much in need. Al-Hroub, from AUB, says the region suffers from a large number of refugee and disadvantaged children and youth. He says there's a need for education centers and local NGOs to serve underprivileged children and provide education support by training psychologists, mental health workers, school counselors and social workers to deal with academic and psychological issues.

From education advisers to diagnosticians to curriculum designers, Al-Hroub says, "all are needed."

See the complete rankings of the Best Arab Region Universities.

Anayat Durrani is a Los Angeles-based freelance education reporter for U.S. News, covering Arab region universities.




Buenos Aires (AFP) - Argentina borrowed $16.5 billion on Tuesday in its triumphant return to international credit markets 15 years after a disastrous default, the government said.

Finance Minister Alfonso Prat-Gay said Argentina raised billions more in sovereign bonds than it had planned in the country's first debt auction since the default in 2001.

"The 2001 default phase is now definitively closed," Prat-Gay told a news conference.

He said investors accepted an average rate of return of 7.2 percent on the bonds, which have maturities ranging from three to 30 years.

That was a higher rate than on much South American sovereign debt, reflecting lingering uncertainty about Argentina's financial fortunes following a lengthy absence from the markets.

Prat-Gay earlier said the government received demand for $60 billion in bonds, several times bigger than the supply in the auction, which was initially forecast to raise between $12.5 billion and $15.0 billion.

That was "the highest demand in history in an emerging economy and among the 20 biggest debt issues in history," he told a news conference.

"We are very happy to have come so quickly out of the darkness to be able to reconnect with the world."

He said two thirds of the new investors were from the United States, a quarter from Europe and about five percent each from the Middle East and Latin America.

Argentina will use part of the borrowed money to settle a 15-year lawsuit by US investment funds known as "holdouts" who demanded full repayment of debts dating to the default.

"On Friday, when the funds (from the bonds) are credited to our account, we will pay $9.3 billion" to those creditors, the minister said.

"We have reached 220 agreements with holdout investors of various sizes."

Argentina's leftist ex-president Cristina Kirchner branded the holdouts "vultures" and refused to negotiate with the holdouts, leading Argentina to be seen as a pariah on financial markets.

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Her successor, conservative President Mauricio Macri, has claimed the return to the international financial fold as a victory.

Since taking power in December, he has been trying to boost Argentina's flagging economy by scrapping Kirchner's protectionist policies.

- Social cost of debt -

Macri's opponents said poor families would bear the cost of his borrowing since public spending cuts would be imposed to pay off the debts eventually.

He has removed currency controls and raised utility prices, triggering angry protests from Argentines who say their spending power is declining.

The bond sale "is a major step forward," Agustin Carstens, head of the IMF's Monetary and Financial Committee, said Saturday.

"It is very good to have a country as important as Argentina putting the house in order."

He warned, however, that Argentines would have to endure tough economic cutbacks to stabilize the economy and public finances.

"Needless to say, in the short term, some measures may be difficult to digest," Carstens said in Washington.

The International Monetary Fund forecasts that Argentina's economy will contract by one percent this year and grow 2.8 percent in 2017.

Prat-Gay has given a stronger forecast of around zero growth this year and growth of up to four percent next year.

After the 2001 crisis, some Argentines object to taking on new debt -- not least Kirchner and her allies. Her side was only narrowly beaten by Macri in last year's election.

"Once again, history is repeating itself and catching the Argentines out. Debt, devaluation, layoffs, political persecution, price rises," Kirchner said in a speech last week.

Macri has announced a series of social welfare measures that he said would help the poor cope with the cuts.

Credit rater Moody's raised Argentina's sovereign rating ahead of the bond sale.

It still ranks as a speculative investment with a "high credit risk," but less high-risk than before.
By David Schwartz

PHOENIX (Reuters) - A man accused in a string of freeway shootings that terrorized the Phoenix area last year was likely to be released from custody after defense lawyers on Tuesday called the ballistics evidence into question.

Judge Warren Granville reduced the bail for Leslie Allen Merritt Jr., 21, to nothing from $150,000 after Merritt's attorneys told an emergency hearing in Maricopa County Superior Court that an expert prosecution witness now said the reported ballistics match does not exist.

Theres no evidence against him that hes responsible for this, defense attorney Jason Lamm told the court. He is no more the I-10 freeway shooter than, respectfully, you are your honor.

Granville ordered that Merritt wear an electronic monitoring device and report back to court on May 18.

A spokesman for the Maricopa County Attorney's Office declined comment, citing a gag order in the case. Lamm could not be reached for comment following the court proceedings.

Merritt has been held on 15 criminal counts including drive-by-shooting and aggravated assault, for the first of four shootings along a 10-mile (16-km) stretch of Interstate 10 that passes through Phoenix.

Merritt told a judge at his initial court appearance last September that authorities had "the wrong guy" and has maintained his innocence in the case.

His bail was originally set at $1 million but later lowered to $150,000.

Merritt, a landscaper from the Phoenix area, was the lone suspect tied to a spree of 11 shootings along the busy thoroughfare that left drivers fearful and unsettled throughout the area.

Only one person suffered a minor injury during the shootings before it ended with Governor Doug Ducey announcing Merritts Sept. 18 arrest with an emphatic We got him! message on Twitter.

Merritt was arrested after police said they were able to "forensically link" four of the shootings to his handgun, which was found later by investigators at a local pawn store.

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A state police spokesman had said that bullets from the handgun discovered at the store were then matched to fragments found at some of the shooting scenes.

State police initially branded the case an act of domestic terrorism, but no such charges were brought by prosecutors. Authorities have not made public what they believe the motive was for the shootings.

(Reporting by David Schwartz in Phoenix; Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Peter Cooney)
Japanese beer giant Asahi said on Tuesday it would buy the Peroni and Grolsch brands from the world's top brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev, which it had pledged to sell as part of a tie-up with SABMiller.

Terms of the deal -- which also includes UK brand Meantime -- were not released, but AB InBev in February said Asahi had offered 2.55 billion euros ($2.8 billion) for the brands.

"This transaction will be completed concurrently with and subject to the completing of AB InBev's acquisition of SABMiller," Asahi said in a brief statement, adding that it expected the deal to be completed in the second half of this year.

Last year, AB InBev said it wanted to sell the Italian, Dutch and British brands in order to ease competition concerns and win approval from regulators.

In November, AB Inbev announced it had agreed to take over British rival SABMiller for $121 billion, the third largest acquisition in history, that would make it a juggernaut brewing three times as much beer as its nearest rival.

Japan's beer and liquor giants including Suntory and Asahi -- best known abroad for its Super Dry brand -- have been shopping overseas in recent years as they face a shrinking market at home.

Two years ago, Suntory said it would pay about $16 billion for the firm behind Jim Beam bourbon in one of the biggest-ever overseas acquisitions by a Japanese firm.

Asahi posted annual sales of $1.85 trillion yen ($16.9 billion) last year. Its key domestic competitors are Suntory and brewer Kirin.
Apples general counsel, Bruce Sewell. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP).



Congressional committee members questioned security experts, law enforcement officials and Apples head lawyer in a congressional hearing on Tuesday, marking the second time in two months that lawmakers have sought to understand both the risks and benefits that encryption poses to modern society.

The nearly four-hour hearing comes less than a month after the FBI abandoned a controversial case against Apple, in which the federal agency sought to compel the tech companys help to access the iPhone of a San Bernardino shooter. After encountering heavy opposition from activists, academics, tech companies and lawmakers, forensic investigators found a last-minute solution to break into the Apple device by instead hiring an outside party, whose identity it has not revealed. Since then, however, the agency has continued to pursue legal access to Apples encrypted devices in a pending court case.

Related: Congress moving ahead on encryption vs. terrorism debate

The testimonies offered Tuesday addressed several technical and ethical issues surrounding the governments regulation of encryption, as well as questions about how it plans to balance the requirements of national security and individual privacy in a technologically driven world. As Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., said in her opening statement to the committee: None of our conversations seem to be focused on workable solutions. What I want to hear today is from both law enforcement and industry about possible solutions going forward.

Witnesses from the law enforcement side included FBI assistant director Amy Hess, Indiana state police captain Charles Cohen, and New York City intelligence bureau police chief Thomas Galati. They were joined by MIT research scientist Daniel Weitzner, University of Pennsylvania associate professor of computer science Matt Blaze, RSA security firm president Amit Yoran, and Apples general counsel Bruce Sewell.

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FBI assistant director Amy Hess with New York City police intelligence bureau chief Thomas Galati, center, and Indiana state police captain Charles Cohen. (Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP).

Most notably, Hess said that the FBIs strategy to use a third-party mobile forensic expert in the San Bernardino case was not a reliable method for accessing evidence in the future.

These solutions are very case by case specific, she said in reply to a question from DeGette. They may not work in all instances. Also, theyre very time-intensive and resource-intensive, which may not be scalable to enable us to be successful in our investigations.

DeGette, who referenced the FBIs decision to use a gray hat party to help open the phone in the San Bernardino case, followed up by asking why the government couldnt develop its own sophisticated techniques for breaking into devices.

I dont see that as possible, Hess responded. I think that we really need the cooperation of industry, we need the cooperation of academia, we need the cooperation of the private sector in order to come up with solutions.

Hess testimony contradicts the suggestions of numerous security experts including encryption expert Susan Landau, who testified in front of Congress in March  that the FBI could and should create its own techniques to break into phones, rather than rely on the industry that engineers them for help.

In another line of questioning related to the San Bernardino case, Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., questioned the ethics of relying on a third-party to break into phones and asked if the government needed to enhance its technological capabilities.

We need the help of the private industry, Cohen replied. Both the industry that makes the technology and others. There are over 18,000 police agencies in the United States. While the FBI may have some technical ability internally, the police stations do not.

On the technical panel, Prof. Blaze of UPenn emphasized that even as the public grapples with whether government can be trusted with keys to peoples data, cryptographers dont know how to engineer a system that offers exclusive access. In other words, if the government is able to access encrypted communications, so can sophisticated cybercriminals.

The encryption issue has been characterized as a question of whether we can build systems that allow the good guys in and keep the bad guys out, Blaze, who has been studying encryption for over two decades, said in his opening statement. Much of the debate has focused on questions of whether we can trust the government with keys for data. But before we can ask that question, theres an underlying technical question, of whether we can trust the technology to actually give us a system that does that. And unfortunately, we simply dont know how to do that safely and securely at any scale.

Blaze, alongside the rest of the technical panel, agreed that asking third-party hackers to help with government investigations was not a good policy. But he differed with law enforcement officials by saying the government should develop a solution to access data on its own.

It requires enormous resources, Blaze said. With the resources they currently have, I think its likely they dont have the ability. When pushed by DeGette, however, he said I think this is a soluble problem.

At one point during the hearing, Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., expressed exasperation with the repetition of law enforcements statements.

I find it hard to come up with any question that is going to elicit any new answers from you, Yarmuth said. I think your testimony and the discussion weve had today is an indication of how difficult this situation is.
Kabul (AFP) - At least 28 people have been killed in a bomb blast near government offices in Kabul, the latest insurgent attack in the highly fortified area.

The following are high-profile attacks on embassies, media, the UN and NATO properties in and near the diplomatic quarter since Mullah Akhtar Mansour was appointed the head of the Taliban in July 2015, following the revelation that the group's founder Mullah Omar had been dead for two years.

August 6-10: Kabul is hit by four attacks, of which three are claimed by the Taliban. Almost 60 people are killed in the heaviest toll in the capital since NATO's mission in Afghanistan was declared at an end in December 2014.

August 22: At least 12 people, including three US nationals employed by NATO, are killed in an attack against foreign forces, The Taliban deny responsibility.

December 11: A car bomb explodes during rush hour near the Spanish embassy. Four Afghan policemen and two Spanish nationals are killed. Following several hours of fighting the attack, which is claimed by the Taliban, ends with the death of four of its militants.

December 21: Six US soldiers die when a motorcycle explodes near the Bagram air base. Claimed by the Taliban, it is one of the year's most deadly attacks against NATO.

January 20, 2016: A suicide bomber rams his car into a minibus carrying staff of the Afghan television station Tolo, killing seven. It is the first major attack against Afghan media, which is accused of broadcasting "propaganda" and reporting on alleged rapes by Islamist rebels in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan.

February 1: Twenty policemen are killed when a Taliban suicide bomber strikes their base in Kabul. Another 29 are wounded when the bomber infiltrates a queue of police officers waiting to enter their base.

February 27: A suicide bomber targets the defence ministry in Kabul, killing 12 people, including two soldiers. Analysts suggest the increase in attacks might be a Taliban strategy to gain leverage ahead of attempted peace negotiations.

April 19: A Taliban truck bomb and ensuing firefight kills at least 28 people and wounds some 300 others, a week after the insurgents launch a spring offensive.
By Kirsti Knolle and Shadia Nasralla VIENNA (Reuters) - Austrian voters look set to shake the foundations of the centrist coalition government in a presidential election on Sunday and may give yet another boost to the anti-Islam Freedom Party as Europe's migrant crisis rumbles on. The president plays a largely ceremonial role from offices in the imperial Hofburg palace. But he or she is head of state, swears in the chancellor, has the authority to dismiss the cabinet and is commander in chief of the military. Members of the center-left Social Democrats and the conservative People's Party have filled the job since it was first put to a popular vote in 1951. The two parties have ruled the nation of 8.7 million in tandem for most of the postwar era. But Austrians are fed up with political cockfighting, including bickering between Social Democrat Chancellor Werner Faymann and conservative Vice-Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner, and appear to be looking elsewhere for their new head of state. The migrant crisis, which has seen around 100,000 asylum seekers arrive in Austria since last summer, has dominated the campaign from which two front-runners have emerged. Alexander van der Bellen, a 72-year-old Greens Party veteran, has criticized the government for being too harsh in its treatment of asylum applicants, while right-wing Freedom Party (FPO) candidate Norbert Hofer says it has been too soft. Hofer got 24 percent support in a recent poll by market researcher OGM, while van der Bellen got 25 percent as his lead over his rival shrinks. If neither win a majority in the first round on April 24, a run-off vote will be held. "Presidential elections are considered less important than other elections, and that's why people use them as a way to teach politicians a lesson," said Eva Zeglovits, opinion researcher at the IFES institute. Hofer, a 45-year-old shooting fan, has called Europe's deal on migrants with Turkey "fatal" and does not want neutral Austria, a major destination for refugees from the Middle East and Afghanistan, to become a land of immigration. The candidates from the centrist parties, one in their 60s and the other their 70s, were floundering on about 11 and 15 percent in the OGM poll. "Only the fear of forthcoming elections and the immigration crisis bind the two (centrist) parties together," independent political consultant Thomas Hofer said. Recent polls for parliamentary elections, due to take place in 2018, show the Freedom Party above 30 percent, while the coalition parties would struggle to get a combined majority. Van der Bellen has opposed the FPO's EU-critical stance and said he would not swear FPO head Heinz-Christian Strache in as chancellor. The far-right FPO's criticism of the EU has also irked independent candidate Irmgard Griss - a former high court chief justice who headed a hard-hitting inquiry into Austria's biggest banking disaster and is the only woman running. She is polling at around 20 percent. Trailing far behind in polls is 83-year-old retail magnate Richard Lugner, best known for repeated marriages to younger women and the eccentric lifestyle he flaunts in reality television shows. (Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Baku (AFP) - Azerbaijani rights activists Leyla and Arif Yunus travelled to the Netherlands Tuesday for medical treatment after authorities lifted a travel ban in place since they were released from prison last year.

"On Monday, Azerbaijan's Supreme Court allowed my clients to go abroad for medical treatment," the ailing couple's lawyer, Elchin Sadykhov, told AFP.

"They left Azerbaijan for Amsterdam on Tuesday morning," he added.

Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders welcomed the couple to the country "after a difficult time in Azerbaijan".

"They are now in the Netherlands, along with their daughter, in order to find some rest after their fight for human rights," Koenders said in a statement.

Leyla Yunus, 60, who heads the Institute for Peace and Democracy, and her husband Arif were handed long jail terms last year on fraud and tax evasion charges, but rights groups slammed their trials as politically motivated.

After international outcry over their imprisonment the pair -- who were both suffering ill health -- were released from jail towards the end of last year but remained under a travel ban.

The couple still face treason charges in a separate case.

International rights groups have decried the prosecution of the couple as an attempt by Azerbaijan's authorities to prevent them from continuing their work.

Leyla Yunus suffers from ailments including hepatitis C and diabetes, while her husband Arif has been diagnosed with a brain tumour and hypertension, according to their lawyer.

Any form of dissent in the oil-producing South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan is usually met with a tough government response.

Strongman President Ilham Aliyev took over in 2003 after the death of his father Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB officer and Communist-era leader who had ruled newly independent Azerbaijan with an iron fist since 1993.
Stockholm (AFP) - Princess Sofia of Sweden, married to fourth-in-line to the throne Carl Philip, gave birth to a baby boy on Tuesday, the palace announced.

"For my wife and me, this is a great day full of emotion," Carl Philip told a news conference following the birth of the couple's first child, who will be fifth in line to the Swedish throne.

The baby weighed in at 3.6 kilograms (8 pounds) and measured 49 centimetres (19.3 inches), the prince added.

Both Princess Sofia, 31, and her new son were in good health, the palace said in an earlier statement.

Carl Philip, 36, is the second child and only son of King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia.

Elder sister Princess Victoria is heiress to the throne.

Carl Philip married Sofia Hellqvist, a former contestant on TV reality show "Paradise Hotel," in June last year.

She famously posed topless with a boa constrictor in a men's magazine when she was 20.

She later studied accountancy in New York and became a yoga teacher, while also jobbing as a waitress before returning to Sweden.

Sofia has since headed an NGO for disadvantaged children in South Africa that she founded in 2010 after earlier African charity work, but gave up the role after her marriage to focus on royal duties.
The public schools honored among the U.S. News Best High Schools educate all of their students well, not just those who are likely to head to college.

U.S. News reviewed more than 28,000 schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia for the 2016 Best High Schools rankings. Out of those schools, 19,908 had enough data from the 2013-2014 school year to be considered in the rankings.

To earn a gold, silver or bronze medal from U.S. News, schools must pass a four-step evaluation, which looks at students' performance on required state tests, their graduation rates and their college readiness.

[Learn more about how U.S. News calculated the Best High Schools rankings.]

Gold medal schools are those whose students demonstrate the highest level of college readiness, based on students' Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate participation rate and the proportion of students who do well on those exams. The top 17 nationally ranked gold medal schools achieved the highest possible score for college readiness -- 100.

The state of Maryland has the largest percentage of schools with gold medals. California has the most gold medal schools.

The top-ranked schools serve a diverse group of students across a variety of communities. The types of institutions also vary. Only 15.3 percent of schools with gold, silver or bronze medals are either charter or magnet schools. About 38 percent of medaled schools are in rural areas.

Students in poverty made up at least 25 percent of the total enrollment in about three-fourths of all medaled schools. And at more than a third of schools, at least 25 percent of the student body is black or Hispanic.

Stay up to date with the U.S. News High School Notes blog.

Briana Boyington is an education Web producer at U.S. News. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at bboyington@usnews.com.
As Bill Cosby takes to an appeals court to fend off a criminal prosecution for aggravated indecent assault, and as the embattled entertainer dukes it out in court with seven women who accuse him of defamation, he's pushing New York Magazine to turn over full interviews and other unpublished material from its July 2015 cover article titled "I'm No Longer Afraid." In response to a subpoena, the publication is asserting privilege under New York's Shield Law. Today, Cosby's attorneys told New York federal judge Judge Paul Crotty that the publication is not playing by the rules and thus has waived its ability to invoke privilege.

"I'm No Longer Afraid" is the award-winning story that featured 35 women sharing their stories of being sexually assaulted by Cosby. The subjects of the article were photographed and videotaped, and Cosby hopes to get his hands on these testimonials for the purpose of potentially identifying inconsistencies that will aid him in depositions and at trial.

New York Magazine considers the subpoena to be "broad and overreaching," and tells the court that to overcome a law intended to further the autonomy of the press, Cosby must show the information is highly relevant, that he cannot present a defense or pursue claims without it and such information cannot be obtained from another source. The publication submits that Cosby hasn't met his burden.

The interviews were apparently done on-the-record, and Cosby is pointing out that the information is not confidential. As such, Crotty's ruling could set some precedent.

Cosby also has a technical argument in support of his subpoena demands. His attorneys say that as a threshold matter, to be in compliance with federal rules of civil procedure, New York Magazine must produce a privilege log, or a listing of the various materials it wishes to withhold as privileged. Without doing so, the publication "has thus waived any qualified reporter's privilege that could be applicable," according to Cosby's memorandum filed yesterday.

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New York Magazine has pointed to how preparing such a privilege log would be chilling. It quotes one judge in a prior case as saying that "the heavy costs of subpoena compliance would be a significant issue if reporters have to immediately prepare a privilege log upon being served with a subpoena," and in any case, adds that Cosby has no need for a privilege log because it's clear what's being shielded.

The magazine also warns that to accept Cosby's at-large position, "every journalist who has covered the important public controversy over the Cosby accusations would be denied the reporter's privilege. The result would be a chilling effect not only on the media, which would have to weigh the burdens and costs of responding to endless such demands before pursuing matters of public interest, but also on crucial media sources - in particular in this case, victims of sexual assault who would be even more likely to avoid sharing their stories."

Cosby maintains that this isn't a fishing expedition, that the materials being sought are critical and necessary to challenge the published statements of his female accusers. He can't get specific yet, but that's because he doesn't know what's in the unpublished materials, he says. To insist that he establish the information is helpful to him with certainty is "unfair," he maintains.

"This is not a situation where granting Mr. Cosby's motion will result in the subpoenaing of every news outlet that has reported on Plaintiffs' case against Mr. Cosby," the entertainer's lawyers told the judge. "What is critical here are Plaintiffs' own recorded words. Unlike other news outlets repeating statements made by Plaintiffs' lawyers or spokespeople, [New York Magazine] spoke directly to Plaintiffs about their allegations, videotaping at least two Plaintiffs in the process. Plaintiffs' statements to [New York Magazine] may reveal descriptions of the alleged assaults by Mr. Cosby that differ from prior or future versions of these accounts."

In Massachusetts, a federal judge recently refused to stop the defamation case while the criminal one in Pennsylvania plays out. The judge, though, did allow that the Fifth Amendment would limit Cosby's own testimony. As for the criminal charges, Cosby was denied a petition of habeas corpus that maintained that the proceeding should be dismissed based on a prior deal with the former district attorney. Cosby has applied to the Superior Court of Pennsylvania for a writ of prohibition to prevent the trial court from conducting further proceedings. An interim stay has been issued. Last week, Cosby filed his opening appellate brief with a response due May 11.
MOSCOW - Russia's Bolshoi Theatre is bringing Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti's comic opera "Don Pasquale," which premiered in Paris in 1843, into modern times with a new production. The opera centers around the scholar and bachelor Don Pasquale and the consequences of his decision to marry as he approaches his 70th birthday. It is the first opera by Russian director Timofey Kulyabin for the Bolshoi. Last year, Kulyabin was the center of controversy for his production of Richard Wagner's "Tannhauser" at Novosibirsk's State Opera and Ballet Theatre, which a senior cleric in the Russian Orthodox Church said had offended believers. Don Pasquale will premiere at the Bolshoi on April 19.
By Anthony Boadle BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's left-leaning President Dilma Rousseff said on Tuesday she had been singled out for impeachment by a male dominated Congress partly because she is a woman and warned that the campaign to oust her was fuelling hatred and intolerance. Rousseff, Brazil's first female president, once again said there were no legal grounds for her ouster on charges of breaking budgetary laws, after the lower house of Congress backed her impeachment on Sunday. That vote, in an overwhelmingly male chamber, was marked by tussles and shouts of "goodbye dear" by a number of congressmen as they cast their votes to impeach Rousseff. "There has been, mixed in all of this, a large amount of prejudice against women," Rousseff said at a news conference with international media in Brasilia. "There are attitudes toward me that there would not be with a male president." Latin America's largest country has more female than male voters but just 45 of the 513 deputies in the lower house are women. In the business world, a study by Corporate Women Directors International published last year found that women make up just 6.3 percent of board members at major Brazilian companies. Rousseff's impeachment case now moves to the Senate where the opposition is expected to win the simple majority required to suspend her and start a trial that could last six months. Rousseff would become the first Brazilian president to stand trial in more than 20 years. Senate speaker Renan Calheiros said a 21-member committee that will report on the impeachment case would be selected on Monday, which could delay the start of a trial until mid-May. That raised protests from Rousseff opponents who demanded it be set up immediately. Rousseff's supporters on the other hand are pushing for delays in an attempt to win the required support in the 81-seat Senate. The crisis has paralyzed the government as it struggles to revive the economy from its worst recession in decades, copes with an outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus and scrambles to prepare to host the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. "Rousseff must be removed immediately. Eight ministries have no head and the economic crisis worsens day by day. We cannot wait eight days," Senator Ricardo Ferraco of the centrist PSDB party said in the chamber. ACCUSERS FACE CHARGES THEMSELVES Rousseff's ouster would mark the end of 13 years of Workers Party (PT) rule, which has mobilized labor union and leftist social movements to defend the leftist leader, raising the risk of heightened unrest. The Workers Party warned it would give no quarter to Rousseff's successor if she toppled. "Our opposition will go far beyond Congress. We are telling society that an illegitimate government will have no peace, there will be a fight," said PT leader Rui Falcao at a news conference in Sao Paulo with party founder Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at his side. Brazils largest oilworkers union federation FUP said it will debate a walkout and is exploring with other unions a plan for a general strike to oppose Rousseff's impeachment which they fear will undermine labor rights and hand over Brazil's oil to foreign multinationals. Rousseff stands accused of a budgetary sleight of hand employed by many elected officials in Brazil in order to boost her re-election campaign in 2014: borrowing money from state lenders and delaying repayment in order to artificially lower the budget deficit. Rousseff on Tuesday lashed out at her political opponents, noting that unlike her, many of them were facing criminal charges for corruption. More than half the lawmakers who decided her fate on Sunday are under investigation for graft, fraud or electoral crimes, according to Congresso em Foco, a prominent watchdog in Brasilia. Rousseff singled out for attack her vice president, Michel Temer, for conspiring against her, and speaker of the lower house Eduardo Cunha, who faces charges of corruption and money laundering. She said Cunha set the impeachment in motion out of revenge after her Workers Party refused to help him avert an ethics committee on whether he lied to Congress about having undeclared Swiss bank accounts. "This is an attempt to have an indirect presidential election by a group of people who would otherwise never be elected," she said, denouncing the impeachment process as a "coup." (Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Additional reporting by Silvio Cascione; Writing by Stephen Eisenhammer; Editing by Daniel Flynn, Bill Trott and Andrew Hay)
By William James LONDON (Reuters) - Leaving the European Union would have serious consequences for Britain's security, the head of EU's law enforcement agency Europol said on Tuesday, warning that negotiating security pacts from outside the bloc would be a "damage limitation exercise". National security has become a key area of contention between rival campaigners as Britain prepares to vote in a June 23 referendum on whether to stay in the EU, particularly in the light of Islamic State attacks in Paris and Brussels. "I think there are some pretty serious security consequences actually," Rob Wainwright told Reuters. "If we accept that the EU does provide an important part of our security ... then the debate moves on to how do we mitigate that potential loss, so it becomes a damage limitation exercise." Prime Minister David Cameron, who champions Britain's continued membership of the bloc, says the country would be safer inside the EU. Rival campaigners argue that greater control over immigration would reduce the threat, and that intelligence-sharing would not be harmed by an EU exit. "If you put at risk any part of the framework for international police cooperation and intelligence sharing, that Britain currently relies on then there clearly is potential for consequences," Wainwright said in an interview on the sidelines of a security exhibition in London. He said he would expect Britain to get associate membership of Europol, similar to that which the United States and Canada currently have, but that that arrangement would not give the UK direct access to its databases on suspected militants. "Useful access, certainly, but just not as good," he said. He said there would also be uncertainty about Britain's access to the Schengen Information System, which shares data on criminal suspects within the passport-free zone in Europe, and its use of the European Arrest Warrant, which allows easier extradition of criminal suspects inside the EU. "I have no doubt that Britain will secure at least partial access to most of the systems, but that access will be variable and it will depend on many factors," he said. BRUSSELS BOMBINGS Speaking after suicide bombers in Brussels killed 32 people last month and November's attacks in Paris left 130 people dead, Wainwright said some of those responsible may not yet have been apprehended by police. "I'm not entirely confident," he said when asked whether all the organisers had been detained. "That's because we have a fragmented intelligence picture of precisely who is involved and where they are." He said he was "certainly not confident" that other attacks were not being planned, and that the number of people who could be involved in planning such attacks in Europe was "not necessarily in the thousands, but in the hundreds". Wainwright said there had been a strategic shift in the approach of Islamic State (IS) towards pushing "battle hardened" militants back into Europe from Syria with the specific intention of carrying out spectacular attacks. "It is not alarmist to say there could certainly be more cells out there planning these attacks - it is certainly the intention of IS," he said. Speaking publicly later, he said that militants were being radicalised much more quickly - in weeks, not months and years - and that the profile of those militants was changing. "Many of the individuals we have identified and are helping to track are motivated less by religious zealotry and more by an idea that they are ... military heroes carrying out a campaign - perhaps in keeping (with the) PlayStation games that as teenagers they grew up playing," he said. (editing by Stephen Addison)
London (AFP) - A British vote to leave the European Union would "liberate" people across the continent by giving them the courage to demand change, a senior minister backing a so-called Brexit said Tuesday.

Justice Secretary Michael Gove, a member of Prime Minister David Cameron's Cabinet, said a decision to leave the 28-member bloc in the June referendum would show that "a different Europe is possible".

"Our vote to leave will liberate and strengthen those voices across the EU calling for a different future -- those demanding the devolution of powers back from Brussels and desperate for a progressive alternative," he said.

Gove added: "For Britain, voting to leave will be a galvanising, liberating, empowering moment of patriotic renewal.

"For Europe, Britain voting to leave will be the beginning of something potentially even more exciting -- the democratic liberation of a whole continent."

Gove said many Europeans were "profoundly unhappy" with the EU, referring to the Dutch rejection this month of a European pact with Ukraine and votes against the doomed European constitution in the 2000s.

Many of their concerns had been ignored, he said, adding that this approach "will not survive the assertion of deep democratic principle that would be the British people voting to leave".

Gove is one of over 100 lawmakers in Cameron's Conservative party who are campaigning against the prime minister ahead of the June 23 vote, in an increasingly heated debate.

A report from the finance ministry on Monday said Britain's economy could be six percentage points smaller than it would otherwise have been by 2030 if it leaves.

Brexit supporters dismissed the study as "flimsy", and Gove warned that the campaign "treats people like children, unfit to be trusted and easily scared by ghost stories".

He acknowledged that a "Leave" vote might "enrage and disorientate EU elites" but rejected suggestions that EU leaders could punish Britain for its departure by imposing damaging trade barriers.

While acknowledging that Britain may not be part of the single market post-Brexit, Gove said: "It is in their own interests to maintain the current free trade arrangements they enjoy with the UK."
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain has no plans to send combat troops to Libya, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said on Tuesday, responding to media reports that British special forces were already operating in the country. "I am clear that there is no appetite in Libya for foreign combat troops on the ground," Hammond told parliament on his return from a visit to the new UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. He added: "We do not anticipate any requests from the GNA for ground combat forces to take on Daesh (Islamic State) or any other armed groups and we have no plans to deploy troops in such a role." During his visit this week, Hammond offered the GNA 10 million pounds ($14.4 million) in support and said Britain was ready to offer further technical assistance. On Monday, Libya's new prime minister Fayez Seraj called for European help to combat people-smugglers but stopped short of making the formal invitation the EU says it needs to move its Mediterranean naval mission into Libyan waters to stem a new tide of migrants. Libya has been in anarchy since Western-backed rebels overthrew President Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, with two competing governments based in Tripoli and the far east. Previous training efforts ran into difficulties in 2012 and 2013 when Italy and Turkey started training police and, along with Britain and the United States, planned to build a force of 8,000 troops. Those programs were hampered by militia infighting and political squabbling among Libyan factions. (Reporting by Stephen Addison; editing by Kate Holton)
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain has no plans to send combat troops to Libya, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said on Tuesday, responding to media reports that British special forces were already operating in the country. "I am clear that there is no appetite in Libya for foreign combat troops on the ground," Hammond told parliament on his return from a visit to the new UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. He added: "We do not anticipate any requests from the GNA for ground combat forces to take on Daesh (Islamic State) or any other armed groups and we have no plans to deploy troops in such a role." During his visit this week, Hammond offered the GNA 10 million pounds in support and said Britain was ready to offer further technical assistance. On Monday, Libya's new prime minister Fayez Seraj called for European help to combat people-smugglers but stopped short of making the formal invitation the EU says it needs to move its Mediterranean naval mission into Libyan waters to stem a new tide of migrants. Libya has been in anarchy since Western-backed rebels overthrew President Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, with two competing governments based in Tripoli and the far east. Previous training efforts ran into difficulties in 2012 and 2013 when Italy and Turkey started training police and, along with Britain and the United States, planned to build a force of 8,000 troops. Those programmes were hampered by militia infighting and political squabbling among Libyan factions. (Reporting by Stephen Addison; editing by Kate Holton)
By Eric M. Johnson

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Two brothers suspected in the presumed murder of a married couple who lived next door to one of the men in Washington state may be trying to flee to Mexico, a county sheriff's office said on Tuesday.

Detectives believe the brothers, one of whom according to court records was locked in an "ongoing and constant" property dispute with the couple, ditched a Volkswagen on Monday in Phoenix and were in possession of an Acura, the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

The Acura's license plates were electronically scanned at an unspecified location near the Calexico, California, which borders on Mexico, the office said.

The exact location of the brothers, John Reed, 53, and Tony Reed, 49, was unknown, but there "is reason to believe they may be trying to flee to Mexico," the statement said.

A search for the two men was launched on Sunday after detectives found evidence linking them to the disappearance of Patrick Shunn, 45, and his wife, Monique Patenaude, 46.

The couple was reported missing April 12 by neighbors in a sparsely populated area in the foothills of the Cascade mountains about 60 miles (97 km) northeast of Seattle.

Though their bodies have not been found, the couple is presumed to be "the victims of homicidal violence" based on evidence collected at the scene of their vehicles, which authorities found abandoned in a remote wooded area, as well as at John Reed's former residence, the sheriff's office said. Reed lived on a neighboring property.

In a search warrant affidavit filed on Monday in a Snohomish County court, detectives portray John Reed as a disgruntled and aggressive former neighbor of the couple.

In 2013, according to the affidavit, Shunn reported to sheriff's office officials that John Reed had threatened him and his wife over "the cutting of brush between their properties," and that Reed repeatedly said he would "shoot or assault" them if they did not leave him alone.

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Two or three weeks ago, a Snohomish County parks employee told detectives that he became aware of complaints made by Patenaude that John Reed was living at his former property illegally after he had sold it to the county at the end of March.

John Reed was "very unhappy" about being ordered to leave for trespassing, the parks employee recalled, according to the affidavit.

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Dan Whitcomb, Alan Crosby and Leslie Adler)
Brussels (AFP) - Swedish national Osama Krayem, charged in connection with the Brussels bombings, has also been charged over the Paris attacks, Belgian media reported Tuesday citing prosecutors.

Krayem, 23, was charged on April 9 with "terrorist murders" over last month's suicide blasts in the Belgian capital, but the new charges reflect growing links between the attackers and those who carried out November's jihadist carnage in Paris.

"His fingerprints were found at several hideouts used during preparations for these attacks," Flemmish television station VRT reported.

Belga news agency confirmed the fresh charges, citing prosecutors.

The prosecution service and Krayem's lawyers were not immediately reachable by AFP, but prosecutors are due to hold a news conference on Wednesday.

The coordinated bombings at Brussels airport and a metro station near European Union headquarters, claimed by the Islamic State group, left 32 people dead months after the Paris attacks killed 130 people.

The authorities suspect Krayem, a Swede of Syrian origin, of buying the bags used for the Brussels bombings.

He was filmed on CCTV with Maalbeek metro station bomber Khalid El Bakraoui minutes before the bomb went off.

Krayem's lawyer Vincent Lurquin told reporters last week that his client had also planned to blow himself up but decided not to go ahead with it.

Investigators are still looking for the backpack Krayem was wearing that day.

Three men detonated suicide bombs in Belgium's worst-ever terror attack: brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui and Najim Laachroui.

A fourth man, Mohamed Abrini, the so-called "man in the hat" who accompanied the two airport bombers but did not detonate his own device, was arrested in Brussels on April 8. He has also been charged over the Paris attacks.

Initial investigations suggest that the Brussels attackers had planned to hit France, but with police on their trail, decided Belgium was an easier target.
Wall Street is extending yesterday's gains following a rally in overseas markets. Stocks are mostly higher (^DJI, ^GSPC, ^IXIC), but weakness in some big tech names like Netflix are putting pressure on the Nasdaq.

Netflix shares fall on weak outlook

Netflix (NFLX) shares fell sharply in early trading after a weaker subscriber-growth forecast for the current quarter overshadowed results for the first three months of the year. Netflix expects to add less than half as many subscribers as it did during the first quarter, with one-fifth of the growth coming from the U.S.

IBM (IBM) posted earnings and revenue that topped analysts' estimates for the first quarter thanks to strong demand for its cloud services. However, the company's revenue fell for the 16th straight quarter, with sales down 4.6% from a year ago.

Get the Latest Market Data and New with the Yahoo Finance App

Goldman Sachs (GS) managed to report earnings that topped Wall Street views. But revenue missed estimates with sales down 40% from a year ago as market volatility took a toll on the company's bond trading and investment banking businesses.

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) delivered better-than-expected earnings for the first quarter. The company also raised its outlook for the year. However, revenue came in slightly shy of estimates, as the stronger dollar and Venezuela's currency devaluation weighed on sales.

UnitedHealth (UNH) raised its guidance for the year after the nation's largest health insurer reported a beat on both its top and bottom lines in the first quarter. Revenue jumped nearly 25% fueled by strength in its health-service unit Optum and its consulting business, which helped offset losses on Affordable Care Act plans.

Target to hike minimum wage: Reuters

Reuters is reporting that Target (TGT) is raising employee wages to a minimum of $10 an hour. The $1 per hour raise marks the second time the retail giant has hiked prices in a year. Could Targets profit take a hit from a higher minimum wage?

Amazon looks to sell e-books to NYC schools

New York City's department of education will vote tomorrow on the initial three years of a contract with Amazon (AMZN) to sell e-books to the city's schools. The deal is valued at about $30 million.
Ottawa (AFP) - Canada's competition watchdog announced Tuesday it was closing its investigation into allegations Google abused its dominance in online search advertising to keep rivals down.

The move comes as the EU is set to unveil formal antitrust charges against the US-based tech giant over how it markets its Android mobile phone operating system, while it continues to investigate shopping services on Google's search engine.

In Canada, the Competition Bureau said it had found evidence to support one of the allegations against the company: that it used "anti-competitive clauses" in certain contracts that effectively excluded its competitors.

But it said Google corrected those problems in 2013 after US authorities raised similar concerns.

Other accusations -- including the manipulation of search results to highlight Google-related links over others and preferential treatment for its other services -- were dismissed due to a lack of evidence, the Competition Bureau said.

The bureau noted that it would "closely follow developments with respect to Google's ongoing conduct, including the results from investigations of our international counterparts."

"We will continue to monitor firms in the digital economy to ensure they do not engage in anti-competitive conduct," said Competition Commissioner John Pecman.

"Should new evidence come to light of anti-competitive conduct that may affect the Canadian marketplace, by Google or any other market participant, I won't hesitate to take appropriate action."
By Nidal al-Mughrabi GAZA (Reuters) - With a thick black marker pen in hand, Palestinian graffiti artist Belal Khaled carefully draws an intricate Arabic calligraphic design on a silver Skoda. The art work decorates the sides of the car, running along the windows and down its doors, the latest in the 24-year-old's mission to turn everyday objects into things of beauty. From cars, handbags, street walls as well as human bodies, Khaled is leaving his prints almost everywhere in the Gaza Strip, which is run by the Islamist Hamas movement and under blockade by neighboring Egypt and Israel. "Some of the works you don't necessarily need to understand (what they mean), such as a specific sentence," he told Reuters. "But it carries and adds a certain beauty to the letters." In his eclectic choice of objects and backgrounds, his calligraphic graffiti is brightening up the densely populated, impoverished Palestinian enclave of 1.95 million people. He also takes photos of both daily life and vestiges of the long conflict with Israel, with which Hamas fought a war in 2014 that shattered much of coastal Gaza. But he says his work is not meant to convey any political message, or to make money. "It is not commercial for me, it is art. I want to spread art everywhere I can get to. Soon I will introduce it to the work of fashion and design of dresses," Khaled told Reuters. Khaled, who also works as a photographer and sculptor, began creating his art pieces about a decade ago before turning his drawings to objects as well as human bodies. "Arabic script is strong and I wanted to connect it to physical strength. I drew on chests and backs of body-builders. "Some people saw what I drew on body builders' skin as tattoos and having a tattoo is forbidden in Islam. This is not a tattoo, it is temporary writing and can be washed away." Khaled's work is proving especially popular with retailers, namely those selling women's accessories such as handbags. He is now looking to branch out by decorating women's clothes. "Many of the customers liked the bags and they constantly requested it," he said. "They liked this work so this opened up other opportunities for me to expand on the products I work on." (Additional reporting by Mohammed Shana; Editing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian/Mark Heinrich)
SANTIAGO, April 19 (Reuters) - Health authorities in Chile have for the first time in decades found a specimen of the mosquito species responsible for spreading the Zika virus and say more are likely to appear. Chile eradicated the Aedes aegypti mosquito species in 1961 on its mainland and the World Health Organization has said it does not expect the Zika virus to spread to the country. The mosquito specimen was found dead in a home in the city of Arica, located some 1,033 miles (1,663 kms) north of capital city Santiago in the Atacama desert next to the border with Peru, health authorities said. "The mostly likely scenario is that it isn't just one (specimen) because it was captured as an adult and it probably came here in an egg; it's easier to transport that way," Health Undersecretary Jaime Burrows said on Tuesday. "Now we're in the process of counting them, seeing how many larvae there are, where they are found," said Burrows. Large parts of Latin America and the Caribbean have been affected by the Zika outbreak, with Brazil hardest hit so far. It is likely to spread to all countries in the Americas except Canada and Chile, the WHO has said. There have been no reported cases in mainland Chile of mosquitoes infecting people with the Zika virus. In March the country reported its first case of the Zika virus being sexually transmitted. U.S. health officials have concluded that Zika infections in pregnant women can cause microcephaly, a birth defect marked by small head size that can lead to severe developmental problems in babies. The World Health Organization has said there is strong scientific consensus that Zika can also cause Guillain-Barre, a rare neurological syndrome that causes temporary paralysis in adults. The connection between Zika and microcephaly first came to light last fall in Brazil, which has now confirmed more than 1,100 cases of microcephaly that it considers to be related to Zika infections in mothers. (Reporting by Anthony Esposito; Editing by Andrew Hay)
Santiago (AFP) - Patricio Aylwin, who guided Chile back to democracy after General Augusto Pinochet's iron-fisted rule ended, died Tuesday at the age of 97.

The government declared three days of national mourning and said a state funeral would be held for Aylwin, who took power in 1990 and served for four years as he oversaw Chile's delicate transition back to civilian rule.

"Chile has lost a great defender of democracy," President Michelle Bachelet said.

Aylwin died of natural causes, his family announced.

The late Pinochet seized power in 1973 in a US-backed military coup and proceeded to launch a crackdown on leftist opponents both real and perceived. The regime is blamed for an estimated 3,200 deaths and the torture of some 38,000.

Aylwin won the first elections held after Pinochet stepped down as head of state, although he remained in charge of the army.

Aylwin is well known in Chile for apologizing to relatives of victims of the regime. He did so in a speech to the nation as he presented the results of a truth commissions probe of the regime, a year after he took power. Aylwin's voice broke as he spoke to the people of Chile.

But Aylwin is also known for having once defended to foreign press Pinochet's ouster of President Salvador Allende in the 1973 coup.

While in office Aylwin sought to stay on good terms with Pinochet, who still wielded enormous influence as army chief, and to open up Chile commercially and diplomatically after years of isolation.

During the dictatorship, it was Aylwin who in 1980 negotiated with Pinochet to win constitutional reforms that included a timetable for restoring democracy.

It was agreed there would be a plebiscite in 1988 on maintaining or ending military rule. Pinochet lost, and was forced to call elections in 1989.

Aylwin, a Christian Democrat taking part in a leftist coalition which had defeated the general in the plebiscite, won that vote.

Pinochet died in 2006.
China and India are moving towards setting up a military hotline, Chinese state media reported, with a border dispute and tensions over terror sanctions still lingering over relations between the Asian giants.

China "reacted positively" to the idea of setting up a hotline, the official Xinhua news agency cited Defence Minister Chang Wanquan as saying Monday during talks with his Indian counterpart.

The world's two most populous nations are jockeying for regional influence in Asia and their relationship is coloured by territorial disputes at both ends of the Himalayas.

In 1962 they fought a border war over the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, parts of which Beijing claims as South Tibet.

Tensions rose in 2014 when hundreds of Chinese troops allegedly moved into mountainous areas of Ladakh under Indian control, as China's President Xi Jinping arrived in India on a landmark visit.

Xinhua late Monday cited Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar as saying India "hopes to beef up bilateral exchanges and cooperation (with China) in all sectors".

Parrikar repeated a call for clear demarcation of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between the two countries, Indian news agency PTI reported.

But it added that China "expressed reservations over such a move" which was proposed last year when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited China.

India reacted angrily earlier this month after China blocked its request to add Masood Azhar, head of the Pakistani militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad, to a UN sanctions blacklist.

China enjoys close relations with India's arch-rival Pakistan, and is pursuing a multi-billion-dollar slew of infrastructure projects there.

In a bid to gain Chinese investment, Islamabad said in January it was considering upgrading the constitutional status of a northern region which is also claimed by India.

PTI reported that Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj asked Beijing Monday to "review" its position on Azhar, who is accused of masterminding an attack on the Pathankot airbase in the northern state of Punjab.
By Philip Blenkinsop and Sue-Lin Wong BRUSSELS/BEIJING (Reuters) - Under pressure to curb steel output and relieve a global glut, China said on Tuesday its production actually hit a record high last month as rising prices, and profits, encouraged mills that had been shut or suspended to resume production. The China Iron & Steel Association (CISA) said March steel production hit 70.65 million tonnes, amounting to 834 million tonnes on an annualized basis. Traders and analysts predicted more increases in April and May. The data comes as major steel producing countries failed to agree measures to tackle an industry crisis, with differing views over the causes of overcapacity. A meeting of ministers and trade officials from over 30 countries, hosted by Belgium and the OECD on Monday, concluded only that overcapacity had to be dealt with in a swift and structural way. Washington pointed the finger at China, saying Beijing needed to cut overcapacity or face possible trade action from other countries. "Unless China starts to take timely and concrete actions to reduce its excess production and capacity ... the fundamental structural problems in the industry will remain and affected governments - including the United States - will have no alternatives other than trade action to avoid harm to their domestic industries and workers," U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a statement. Asked what steps the Chinese government would take following the unsuccessful talks, Commerce Ministry spokesman Shen Danyang told reporters on Tuesday: "China has already done more than enough. What more do you want us to do?" "Steel is the food of industry, the food of economic development. At present, the major problem is that countries that need food have a poor appetite so it looks like there's too much food." In a monthly report, the CISA said a recent rally in steel prices in China - up 42 percent so far this year - was unsustainable given the rising production, and it warned that increased protectionism in Southeast Asia and Europe would make steel exports more difficult. "The big rise in steel prices has led to a rapid reopening of capacity that had been shut or suspended ... a large rise in output will not be good for the gap between market demand and supply," the CISA said. The OECD says global steelmaking capacity was 2.37 billion tonnes in 2015, but declining production meant only 67.5 percent of that was being used, down from 70.9 percent in 2014. Britain in particular has felt the squeeze as its largest producer Tata Steel has announced plans to pull out of the country, threatening 15,000 jobs. Last week, more than 40,000 German steel workers took to the streets to protest against dumping from China. China, the world's top steel producer, has ramped up exports of steel in recent years, as it steers its economy into services-led growth and away from traditional manufacturing, while avoiding mass job losses. China's steel exports jumped 30 percent to 9.98 million tonnes in March from a year ago despite a slew of anti-dumping measures globally. Blaming China for the global steel industry crisis is simply a lazy excuse for protectionism and will be counter-productive, China's official Xinhua news agency said. "It's more been their competitive advantage into Asian countries which has really driven that rise in exports," said Daniel Hynes, commodity strategist at ANZ Bank. "I think that will continue and will keep those export levels relatively high despite the pressures we're seeing now." DEEP DIVISIONS The deep divisions between China and rival producers were clear at a news conference following Monday's meeting. Cecelia Malmstrom, the EU's trade commissioner, insisted governments should not grant subsidies that keep unviable plants running and should subject state-controlled firms to the same rules as the private sector. China's assistant commerce minister, Zhang Ji, said China had cut 90 million tonnes of capacity, with plans to reduce it by a further 100-150 million tonnes. "That is only 10 million tonnes less than the capacity in Europe," he said, although critics say China would still have a capacity of around 1 billion tonnes, far in excess of its needs. The CISA has previously acknowledged that the flood of Chinese steel product exports is damaging to Beijing's to gain market economy status from the European Union - an important goal as its domestic economy slows. Tensions have erupted between other producers, too, with Japan leading criticism of Indian minimum prices for imported steel at a recent World Trade Organisation meeting. Japan and South Korea have also come under fire for exporting steel products cheaper than they sell them at home. In a step to reduce trade frictions with Washington, Beijing agreed to scrap some export subsidies on products including steel, the United States said last week. On Monday, the United Steelworkers union (USW) said it filed a case with U.S. regulators seeking to stem a "flood" of aluminum imports which it says damage U.S. producers and threatens jobs. The case is the latest move by the U.S. aluminum industry to prod the authorities to investigate the impact of rising imports, particularly from China. (Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop and Sue-Lin Wong, with additional reporting by Eric Beech in WASHINGTON, Melanie Burton in MELBOURNE, Ruby Lian and David Stanway in SHANGHAI, Manolo Serapio Jr in MANILA and Meng Meng in BEIJING; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Ian Geoghegan)
BEIJING (Reuters) - China is "positive" towards proposals to establish a military hotline with India to deal with issues along their disputed border, Defence Minister Chang Wanquan told his Indian counterpart during a meeting in Beijing, state media reported. The two nuclear-armed neighbors have been moving to gradually ease long-existing tensions between them. Leaders of Asia's two giants pledged last May to cool a festering border dispute, which dates back to a brief border war in 1962, though a messy territorial disagreement remains. Chang "reacted positively toward setting up a military hotline with India on border security", state news agency Xinhua reported late on Monday, after Chang's meeting with Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar. Chang "also suggested the two sides strengthen defense exchanges and jointly safeguard peace and tranquillity of the border area", the report added. Xinhua cited Parrikar as saying India is ready to work with China to maintain the stability of the border. China lays claim to more than 90,000 sq km (35,000 sq miles) ruled by New Delhi in the eastern sector of the Himalayas. India says China occupies 38,000 sq km (14,600 sq miles) of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau in the west. India is also suspicious of China's support for its arch-rival, Pakistan. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
By David Brunnstrom and Ben Blanchard WASHINGTON/BEIJING (Reuters) - The Pentagon on Tuesday called on China to reaffirm it has no plans to deploy military aircraft in the Spratly Islands after Beijing used a military plane to evacuate sick workers from a new airstrip on an island it has created in the disputed South China Sea. China's Defence Ministry earlier dismissed U.S. queries as to why China had used a military aircraft rather than a civilian one in Sunday's evacuation from Fiery Cross Reef. U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told a regular news briefing it was "difficult to understand" why China would have had to use a military aircraft for the evacuation. He also said it was "a problem" that the workers had apparently been working on "infrastructure improvements of a military nature." A Pentagon spokesman, Commander Gary Ross, called on China to clarify its intentions. "We urge China to reaffirm that it has no plans to deploy or rotate military aircraft at its outposts in the Spratlys, in keeping with China's prior assurances," he said. Ross also called on all rivals in the South China Sea to clarify their claims in accordance with international law and "to avoid unilateral actions that change the status quo." China's Defence Ministry said Beijing had indisputable sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and the United States had no right to comment on Chinese building works and defensive facilities there. It said it was Chinese military tradition to "wholeheartedly serve the people" and help those in need. "In sharp contrast, the U.S. side is expressing doubts about whether it's a military or civilian aircraft at a time when somebody's life is in danger," it said. "We cannot but ask: if a U.S. citizen suddenly took ill on U.S. soil, would the U.S. military look on with folded arms?" Chinese activity in disputed waters of the South China Sea, including the construction of islands by dredging sand onto reefs and shoals in the Spratly archipelago, has alarmed rival claimants, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam. The United States has repeatedly criticized the construction of the islands and worries that China plans to use them for military purposes. It worries that trade in what is one of the world's busiest waterways could be threatened, but China says it has no hostile intent. The runway on the Fiery Cross Reef is 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) long and is one of three China has been building in the archipelago. Civilian flights began test runs there in January but Sunday's landing was the first China has publicly reported by a military plane at Fiery Cross Reef. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel and James Dalgleish)
China announced its first-ever "fix" for the gold price on Tuesday, as the world's biggest producer and consumer of the yellow metal seeks to establish its own benchmark.

The Shanghai Gold Exchange set the price for 99.99 percent gold at 256.92 yuan ($39.71) per gram, it said on its website.

It was marginally higher than the international price at the time, according to figures from goldprice.org.

"China needs a gold benchmark that reflects local market flows and reduces gold's price dependency on the US dollar," Roland Wang, managing director of industry group the World Gold Council in China, said in a statement.

"An Asian-focussed, yuan-denominated benchmark will significantly increase the liquidity and efficiency of the gold price," he said.

The industry group has put mainland China's demand for gold at 984.5 tonnes last year, with jewellery at 783.5 tonnes, and bars and coins at 201 tonnes.

Analysts said denominating the gold fix in China's own yuan currency is aimed at increasing international use of the unit.

"Having more sway in the gold market befits the long-term strategy of expanding the yuan's role as a global currency," Jiang Shu, chief analyst at Shandong Gold Financial Holdings Capital Management, told Bloomberg News.

China keeps a tight grip on inflows and outflows of the yuan, but says it is seeking to eventually make the currency fully convertible.

Head of the Shanghai Gold Exchange, Jiao Jinpu, said in December that launch of a yuan-dominated benchmark for gold would promote "internationalisation" of its business.

The exchange will also study yuan-dominated benchmark prices for other precious metals including silver, platinum and palladium, according to domestic media reports.
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's ruling Communist Party will widen a pilot anti-graft scheme to four more regions beyond the business hub of Shanghai as it seeks to rein in business activities by the families of senior government officials. Rules announced last May bar spouses and children of senior officials in Shanghai from registering individual businesses or partnerships, investing in non-listed enterprises or registering a business overseas and doing business back in China. Spouses of senior officials in Shanghai are also banned from holding top positions in private companies or senior appointed positions in foreign-invested enterprises. Now four more regions, from Beijing, the capital, to southwestern Chongqing, far western Xinjiang and southern Guangdong, will also join the scheme, state media said late on Monday, following a meeting overseen by President Xi Jinping. The government will work to "strictly define business activities, make detailed rules and procedures to implement" the scheme, state news agency Xinhua said, adding that the rules would eventually become long-term and normal practice. It gave no further details. Reports in Chinese and foreign media about families of officials who have leveraged relationships to enrich themselves have ignited public anger. Officials have frequently faced criticism for the behavior of family members. The party and government have ejected thousands of so-called "naked officials", whose spouses and children have emigrated abroad. China is in the midst of a massive crackdown on corruption overseen by Xi, but the government has repeatedly had to rebuff criticism that the campaign is more about an internal power play than actually tackling graft. The recent release of the so-called "Panama Papers" revealed offshore companies linked to the relatives of Xi and other powerful current and former Chinese leaders. The government has denounced as "groundless" accusations arising from the documents. Separately, state media said officials found guilty of serious corruption and given life sentences would never be eligible for parole, a concession previously available, depending on their behavior in jail. "For some defendants, the death penalty is too heavy and a suspended death sentence too light, so we made the new sentence after research and discussion," senior judge Pei Xianding told the official China Daily. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
BEIJING (Reuters) - Putting aside the usual rancour between the two countries, China's President Xi Jinping has sent a message of condolence to Japan's emperor over a series of earthquakes that hit Japan over the past few days. Xi said he was shocked by the news of the quakes which have caused a heavy loss of life and damage, China's foreign ministry said late on Monday. He extended condolences to bereaved families and the injured, and said he hoped Japanese people would overcome their difficulties and rebuild their homes. The earthquakes, measuring up to 7.3 in magnitude, struck Japan's southwestern island of Kyushu from Thursday, killing at least 42 people and forcing major companies to close factories. China, the world's second-largest economy, and Japan, the third-largest, have a difficult political history, with ties strained by the legacy of Japan's World War Two aggression and conflicting claims over a group of uninhabited East China Sea islets. Ties have been thawing recently, with meetings between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Xi, but Beijing remains deeply suspicious of Japan, particularly of moves by Abe to allow the military to fight overseas for the first time since the war. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's new special envoy for the Syria crisis will visit Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia to push for a peaceful solution of conflict there, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday, the latest diplomatic effort by Beijing in the region. While relying on the region for oil supplies, China tends to leave Middle Eastern diplomacy to the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, namely the United States, Britain, France and Russia. But China has been trying to get more involved, including recently hosting both Syria's foreign minister and opposition figures, though at different times. China appointed Xie Xiaoyan, a former ambassador to Iran, as its special envoy for Syria last month, and he is in Geneva participating in peace talks, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing. When he has finished there, he will go to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia, she added. Xie is going to "have a deep exchange of views with relevant parties on pushing for a political solution to the Syria crisis", Hua added. She provided no other details. Xie this month praised Russia's military role in the war, and said the international community should work harder together to defeat terrorism in the region. (This story has been refiled to add dropped word "Russia" in sixth paragraph) (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel)
Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have each announced their support for a bill that would allow victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks to sue the government of Saudi Arabia  and, if passed, could prompt the desert kingdom to deal a massive blow to the U.S. economy.



Both candidates spoke about the controversial legislation on Monday, the eve of the New York primary, saying the Senate should pass the bill no matter the consequences.



"Wherever the trail may lead, it should be followed," Clinton said on WABC radio. "We need justice."



It's important "to try to find out what actually did happen," the former secretary of state added. "If there are people or institutions or governments who should be held accountable, that should be part of the bringing to justice anyone or any state that had any role in the horrors of 9/11. We've got to continue to seek the justice that the people who are suing deserve to have."







Sanders also voiced his support for the bill on CBS This Morning.



"It is about suing any government, not just Saudi Arabia, that may have been involved in terrorism," he said, adding that "getting the truth out about the role Saudi Arabia may be playing is a good and right thing."





What the 9/11 Bill Could Mean for the U.S.

The Obama administration, meanwhile, opposes the bill, and has lobbied Congress to block the legislation from passing, fearing it would put Americans at legal risk overseas and incite economic retaliation from Saudi Arabia, reports The New York Times.









Saudi Arabia has threatened to sell off hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. assets if the bill passes, and also warned the Obama administration and members of Congress of a diplomatic fallout.



The Times reports:



"Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the kingdom's message personally last month during a trip to Washington, telling lawmakers that Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.



Several outside economists are skeptical that the Saudis will follow through, saying that such a sell-off would be difficult to execute and would end up crippling the kingdom's economy. But the threat is another sign of the escalating tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United States."



Obama will arrive in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh on Wednesday to meet with King Salman and other Saudi officials. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said he did not know whether the leaders would discuss the 9/11 legislation, according to NBC News.



Saudi Arabia has long denied any involvement in the terror attacks on Sept. 11, and the 9/11 Commission found "no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization." But critics still suspect that less senior officials or parts of the Saudi government could have played a role in aiding the hijackers responsible for the attacks.



"Suspicions have lingered, partly because of the conclusions of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the attacks that cited some evidence that Saudi officials living in the United States at the time had a hand in the plot," the Times writes.



Those conclusions are detailed in 28 classified pages within the 838-page congressional report. There is a renewed push to make the pages public, from 9/11 families and politicians including Bob Graham, a former senator and former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and now Sanders.



On Monday the Vermont senator called on Obama to "declassify the 28-page section of the 9/11 Commission Report on the potential sources of foreign support received by the hijackers."



"If no such connection exists, then our country deserves the information necessary to put that speculation behind us," he added.
YAOUNDE (Reuters) - The United States will give $40 million in humanitarian assistance to countries bordering Lake Chad fighting Islamist militant group Boko Haram, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said on Tuesday.

The money was to help about seven million people affected by the insurgent group that has killed around 15,000 people. It takes total U.S. aid to the sub-region since 2014 to $237 million, she said.

Power was in the capital of Cameroon and met President Paul Biya and attended a ceremony to burn 2,000 tusks in a bid to end elephant poaching. The trip includes visits to Chad and Nigeria.

"We discussed the monstrous threat posed by Boko Haram and we agreed, and he was very forceful on this point, that the military response alone could not succeed in defeating Boko Haram in the long-term," she said of her meeting with Biya.

Respect for human rights, good governance, economic and forest development and a focus on civil society were essential components of the campaign, she said.

Cameroon, Nigeria and Chad are contributing forces to fight the group. Power has been scheduled to visit the region's Multinational Joint Task Force, which is staffed with troops from the three nations as well as Niger and Benin.

The United States has sent troops and drones and offered to send a special operations mission to the fight against Boko Haram, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State.

On Monday, a vehicle in her motorcade that was carrying United Nations and Cameroonian officials struck a young boy. Medics in the convoy treated him but he died of his injuries.

"I joined the (Cameroonian) governor of the area ... the leading U.N. official who manages the humanitarian and development response and Ambassador Hoza, and we visited with the boy's family to offer our profound condolences," Power said in a speech.

Power also described meeting refugees and called for financial support from the international community to aid the development of areas battered by Boko Haram.

(Reporting by Sylvain Andzongo in Yaounde and Makini Brice in Dakar; Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by Grant McCool)
The war against the Islamic State has now cost American taxpayers more than $7 billion, a figure that could increase dramatically as the U.S. prepares to send 200 more troops to Iraq to help fight the extremist network.

As of March 15, the price tag for 568 days of war was $6.8 billion, with an average cost of $11.5 million per day, according to a Defense Department report released on Tuesday. If the daily tab has held steady since then, another $402.5 million can be added to the sum, putting the total over $7.2 billion.

Related: Pentagon May Pull US Troops Due to Threat of ISIS Attack

Given the Obama administrations airpower-first approach to battling ISIS its not surprising that daily flight operations accounted for 48 percent of the wars cost, or about $3.2 billion.

Mission support  including personnel, logistics, surveillance and reconnaissance  accounted for 28 percent of the cost, or $1.8 billion, and munitions made up 24 percent, or just under $1.6 billion.

Broken down by military branch, the Air Force has spent the most by far on the anti-ISIS fight, roughly $4.6 billion. The Army has spent $918 million, the Navy $734 million and special operations forces account for $503 million, according to the Pentagon.

The cost to the other services will likely increase soon. On Monday, the Defense Department announced it would loosen the restrictions on what U.S. troops deployed to Iraq can do there and send another 200 service members to support Baghdads forces as they try to recapture the city of Mosul.

Related: US Says Momentum Has Shifted in the War Against ISIS

The U.S. will also provide Army Apache attack helicopters -- something the Pentagon had been pushing for months, despite resistance from the Iraqi government.

The new forces will raise the U.S. troop level in Iraq to more than 4,000 and theres no indication it will stop there as Baghdads security forces prepare to retake Mosul, Iraqs second-largest city. The city fell to ISIS in the summer of 2014 after Iraqi army soldiers abandoned their posts, allowing the jihadists to claim vast amounts of territory inside Iraq and Syria.

Story continues

ISIS Cost

The boost in forces does not change the basic elements of the strategy, which is that this has to be a fight that is led by local forces with the support and assistance of the United States and our coalition partners," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday.

As usual, its the Obama administrations anti-ISIS strategy, not the cost, that has invoked the wrath of Capitol Hill lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Related: How Long Will It Take for the Iraqis to Recapture Mosul?

Senate Armed Services Committee chair John McCain (R-AZ) welcome the additional deployment but called it yet another example of the kind of grudging incrementalism that rarely wins wars, but could certainly lose one.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Copenhagen (AFP) - Danish lawmakers on Tuesday approved a plan to commit F-16 warplanes, a transport aircraft and 400 military personnel to expand the country's fight against the Islamic State jihadist group from Iraq to Syria.

In a 90-19 vote, only three small leftist parties opposed the proposal, which was announced last month by Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen.

"The brutal and ruthless terrorist organisation IS should meet a powerful response from the outside world," Rasmussen said in a statement.

Starting from "mid 2016", the Danish contribution will consist of seven F-16 warplanes -- four of them operational at any one time -- a C130J transport aircraft and 400 military personnel, including 60 special forces troops.

Nikolaj Villumsen, a lawmaker for the leftist Red Green Alliance, said during the parliamentary debate that Denmark was "once again on its way into a misguided war that could destabilise Iraq and Syria further".

The US heads an international coalition that is carrying out strikes against IS and also providing training and assistance to forces fighting the jihadists in both Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

Denmark is a member of the coalition but previously only had a mandate to intervene in Iraq.

From October 2014 until October 2015, it had seven F-16s fighting IS in Iraq.

Denmark currently has around 120 troops stationed at the Al-Asad air base some 180 kilometres (110 miles) northwest of Baghdad, where they have been training Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish security forces.
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Denmark said on Tuesday it will expand its mission against Islamic State into Syria as well as Iraq, as part of a U.S.-led coalition now operating in the region. Parliament approved deploying seven F-16 fighters, a C-130J transport aircraft and military personal, including special operations forces and support staff, for the Syria campaign. Denmark took part in coalition air strikes from October 2014 to October 2015 in Iraq, but not in Syria. It was unclear when the mission would begin, but Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen said last month Danish forces would join the campaign by the middle of the year. Four of the seven F-16 fighter jets will take part in the air strikes; three will be kept in reserve. The C-130J will drop supplies to allied forces and aid for civilians. The special operations forces, about 60 personnel, will conduct a broad range of missions throughout Iraq and Syria with the coalition forces. Denmark's expanded mission into Syria comes after direct requests from France and the United States. The defense ministry said last month the larger mission would make Denmark one of the highest contributors per capita in the fight against the militant group. (By Erik Matzen; editing by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen, Larry King)
They grow up so fast. Too fast. That realization can come crashing down as kids approach college age, and there's no money (or nowhere near enough) in a savings account or a 529 plan.

You wanted to save money, or save more, of course. But maybe something got in the way, like a health issue, divorce, credit card debt or the recession. Or maybe you simply didn't make enough. There's no use blaming yourself. Whatever happened, happened.

It is probably too late to save up the tens of thousands your kid will likely need for college tuition -- but it isn't too late to start the borrowing and begging process. Just don't wait any longer.

[See: 11 Ways to Save Time and Money.]

Start with the FAFSA. That is, you'll want to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, or FAFSA, as soon as possible. Why? So you can see what federal aid your kid is eligible to receive.

If your student hopes to begin classes during the fall of 2016, you have until June 30, 2017, to apply for loans for the 2016-2017 academic year. And, sure, it might sound like that's plenty of time to apply for money, since you can request financial aid long after your kid starts college. But you know the saying: The early bird gets the money. Or something like that.

Plus, going after money earlier means you aren't colliding into as many parents later. The closer you get to the fall, the harder it may be to get not only money but to have questions about that money answered.

"Financial aid offices receive thousands of calls during the summer months, which can impact response times to students," says Geoff Marsh, senior director of financial aid at Biola University in La Mirada, California. He adds that the larger schools' financial aid offices receive calls in the tens of thousands over the summer.

And many states use the FAFSA form to determine whether you're eligible for financial help with college, and your state may have a deadline that's much earlier than June 30, 2017. For instance, Ohio's deadline is October 1; Kansas's was April 1, 2016. Universities and colleges often have their own deadlines for determining financial aid, too, and many universities ask students to submit deposits for the following school year on May 1. So if you haven't started looking for financial aid for the upcoming school year, you really need to move on this now.

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Ask the experts for their advice. Start with friends and family members who have college-age kids, and see what they did to find money. You may also want to discuss private loans with your bank, although keep in mind that private student aid loans are generally tougher than federal loans; that is, they have more interest and more restrictive payment plans. Still, if you have good credit, you may want to start a dialogue.

[See: 12 Simple Ways to Raise Your Credit Score.]

But if you work for a relatively big employer, certainly take another look at the benefits package in case there's any tuition assistance your kid could get, or talk to the human resource department, suggests Jennifer Horner, director of financial aid at Eastern Connecticut State University.

Horner also suggests that your child meet with the high school guidance counselor, stat. "Often the guidance counselors have information about scholarships to which the student can apply. Scholarships should always be an option explored. They take a little elbow grease but can greatly reduce a student's bill," she says.

Change your expectations. If you don't have money saved up, and paying for a traditional four-year college is going to be a reach, you may want to adjust your thinking about sending your kid to one, says Derrick Handwerk, who owns a Lansdale, Pennsylvania-based wealth management firm that specializes in working with affluent families.

"I would suggest that a child look into a two-year program at a community college that has agreements with larger universities so the child can matriculate to a university that offers a four-year bachelor's degree," Handwerk says. "At the end of four years, the student will have [a] bachelor's degree diploma from a name-brand university, and if they live at home, they can have the degree for less than $50,000 total."

True, you may have never imagined your child living at home or missing out on dorm life, but Handwerk offers his opinion that if it's going to be a huge financial burden, it's really not worth it.

And, of course, you could try to pay as you go. Many colleges offer some sort of pay-as-you-go plan, whereby after the financial aid package is tapped out, you pay the tuition costs every month. There generally is no interest, which is a big plus, but it can be a big drain on your budget if you aren't ready for it, Marsh says.

"It might mean downsizing in other areas of life to allow more of a family's current income to go towards college costs," Marsh says.

[See: How to Live on $13,000 a Year.]

Handwerk doesn't suggest that you downsize too much, however.

"I believe that we have a higher education bubble," he says. "When the average family cannot afford the average education or home etc., etc., that is a bubble."

He adds, "To have your child take out $80,000 in loans to get through college, only to have about half of the jobs available to them not pay well and those jobs not needing a college degree, just doesn't make much economic sense."

Still, there's something to be said for higher learning, and census records and studies have shown that college graduates make significantly more money than high school graduates. So in that sense, it's worth it, right? It'll probably feel as if it is once your kid is wearing that cap and gown and holding that degree, and you're sitting in the stands with a goofy grin on your face.

Of course, that prideful afterglow may not last too long -- if you're trying to help your kid pay for graduate school.
Doris Roberts, who delighted audiences as the meddling mother next door on Everybody Loves Raymond, has died, her representative told The Hollywood Reporter. She was 90.

Roberts, who won Emmys for best supporting actress in a comedy for playing Marie Barone, the mother of Ray Romano's sportswriter character, in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2005, died Sunday night in her sleep of natural causes in Los Angeles, Janet Daily said.

In 1996, Roberts landed the part of Marie Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond, playing Ray's mom and the wife of the cranky Frank (Peter Boyle). She was with the hit CBS sitcom for every one of the show's nine seasons, covering 210 episodes.

"When Peter Boyle and I met for the first time on the show it was as if we had known each other for 45 years," she said in a 2014 interview with Parade magazine. "We got more laughs just giving each other dirty looks than anything else."

She was scheduled to appear at an Everybody Loves Raymond reunion in June in Austin.

"Truly the end of an era," Patricia Heaton, who did battle with Roberts as daughter-in-law Debra on the show, wrote on Twitter. "My wonderful TV mother-in-law and ELR nemesis Doris Roberts was a consummate professional from whom I learned so much. She was funny and tough and loved life, living it to the fullest."

Read More: 'Everybody Loves Raymond' Creator Pays Tribute to Doris Roberts (Guest Column)

Roberts once said she based Marie on a combination of Romano's mother, an Italian, and series producer Phil Rosenthal's mom, a German Jew.

"Everything [Marie does, she does] because she wants them [the other characters] to make a better life, a better home," she said. "It all comes from love. That's why I'm very pleased and excited that I have that much of a contribution for that character that makes everyone laugh, because if you laugh at me, you can laugh at your own parents."

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Wrote Rosenthal on Twitter: "We loved our mom, the great #DorisRoberts. A wonderful, funny, indelible actress and friend."

"Doris Roberts had an energy and a spirit that amazed me," Romano said in a statement. "She never stopped. Whether working professionally or with her many charities, or just nurturing and mentoring a green young comic trying to make it as an actor, she did everything with such a grand love for life and people."

Roberts excelled in motherly roles throughout her career. She played Donna Pescow's mother on the 1979-80 ABC series Angie, created by Garry Marshall, and joined NBC's Remington Steele as Mildred Krebs, the receptionist for the detective agency run by Pierce Brosnan and Stephanie Zimbalist, in 1983. She stayed with the show through 1987.

Roberts also won another Emmy in 1983 for a stint on St. Elsewhere. She received 11 noms in all, three more for Everybody Loves Raymond, one for Remington Steele and one apiece for Perfect Strangers and American Playhouse.

See More: Doris Roberts' Most Memorable Roles (Photos)

A native of St. Louis who was raised in the Bronx after her father left the family when she was 10, Roberts made her Broadway debut in 1955 in The Time of Your Life, written by William Saroyan, and appeared in The Desk Set that year as well.

She left New York when Lily Tomlin saw her in the Terrence McNally play Bad Habits - for which she won an Outer Critics Circle Award - and brought her to California to do ABC's The Lily Tomlin Comedy Hour in 1975.

Her big-screen resume included Something Wild (1961), Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Honeymoon Killers (1969), A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Hester Street (1975), Rabbit Test (1978), The Rose (1979), National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989) and Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star (2003).

She reunited with Heaton on ABC's The Middle for three episodes a few years ago and wrote a 2005 best-seller, Are You Hungry, Dear? Life, Laughs and Lasagna.

Her marriage to novelist and short story writer William Goyen lasted 22 years until he died of leukemia in 1983 at age 68. Survivors include her son Michael, daughter-in-law Jane and grandchildren Kelsey, Andrew and Devon.

Asked in the Parade interview why the audience seemed to identify with her, Roberts replied: "I'm not a bull artist. I tell it like it is. I'm not some celebrity thinking, 'I'm greater than anybody else.' I'm one of the people. And they know that. It's wonderful when they say to me, 'Thank you for the humor you've brought us all these years.' I am a lucky son of a gun. I get paid for it."

Ryan Parker and Jennifer Konerman contributed to this report.

See More: Hollywood's Notable Deaths of 2016
The Hague (AFP) - Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte's ruling coalition Tuesday narrowly defeated a motion calling for the country to immediately pull out of an EU-Ukraine deal rejected by voters in a referendum this month.

Some 75 Dutch lawmakers voted against the motion brought by the eurosceptic Socialist Party with 71 in favour in the 150-seat lower house.

The party had wanted the Netherlands to immediately withdraw from the association agreement which aims to forge closer ties between Brussels and Kiev.

On April 6 more than 4.1 million people, accounting for about 32 percent of some 12.8 million eligible voters, cast their ballots in a non-binding referendum with 61 percent spurning the pact with Kiev.

The result was hailed by eurosceptics across the continent as well as in Russia as a blow to European unity, ahead of a British referendum in June on whether to remain in the 28-nation body.

Tuesday's defeat of the motion gives Rutte more breathing space to deal with the political hot potato of negotiating changes to the deal with his EU partners, observers said.

Rutte himself last week pleaded for more time to reach a "solution that will do justice to the referendum," saying his cabinet will aim to give an answer within the next two months ahead of the summer recess.

"If we don't succeed... cabinet will not ratify the agreement," Rutte said during a parliamentary debate last week.

The Netherlands, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, is now the only country in the bloc that still needs to ratify the agreement.

Voters were asked if they supported the EU's association agreement with Ukraine, which aims to foster better trade relations with the war-torn country and former Soviet satellite.

But referendum organisers admitted the non-binding ballot was essentially about pushing a broader anti-EU agenda.

Dutch media reports said Rutte could now possibly argue in Brussels for a clause to be written into the accord, explicitly stating that Ukraine cannot join the EU.

Another option could be to try to split the agreement into its trade and political components with the Dutch keeping the trade section and dumping the political side.

Or Rutte could insist on scrapping a paragraph about closer military cooperation and demand a tougher stance on corruption in Ukraine, newspapers said.
Cairo (AFP) - An Egyptian policeman shot and killed a Cairo street vendor on Tuesday after an argument over the cost of a cup of tea, the interior ministry said.

A security official said the officer involved was arrested after dozens of bystanders protested at the scene of the shooting in an eastern suburb of the capital, chanting: "The police are thugs."

"During a police patrol a dispute broke out between the officer and the seller over the price," the ministry said in a statement.

"The policeman opened fire, killing the vendor and wounding two passers-by."

Egypt's police have been on the defensive after rights groups denounced alleged torture and deaths in detention, as well as arbitrary arrests and the disappearances of government opponents.

The alleged abuses are reminiscent for many Egyptians of those perpetrated by police under the rule of longtime president Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled in 2011 partly as a result of public outrage to impunity for security services.

A court this month sentenced a policeman to life in prison for shooting dead a taxi driver over a fare dispute.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had said he would ask parliament to amend the law to toughen sanctions for police abuses after the February killing.

Thousands of doctors held a protest earlier this year against the police after officers allegedly assaulted two doctors in a hospital.

And several policeman have been detained for violence against prisoners and some have been sentenced to jail in the past year.
By Omar Fahmy and Ahmed Aboulenein CAIRO (Reuters) - A riot erupted in a Cairo suburb on Tuesday after a policeman shot three people after an argument over the price of a cup of tea, killing one of them, the Interior Ministry and witnesses said. Public anger over allegations of police brutality has been bubbling over the past months, with several incidents spilling over into skirmishes and protests, five years after the ministry's officers were a major focus of the 2011 uprising. One of the onlookers held up a bullet casing and accused the police of killing "poor" Egyptians. A crowd quickly gathered, overturning a police vehicle and beating up another policeman at the scene, said a witness, who did not see the shooting but said he arrived at the scene in the well-to-do neighbourhood of Rehab shortly afterwards. "The Interior Ministry are thugs," chanted the crowd in a video sent to Reuters by the witness. Around 200 people were in the crowd, according to a Reuters estimate from the footage. Rights activists say police brutality is widespread in Egypt and that there is a culture of impunity. The Interior Ministry says abuses are isolated and incidents are investigated. Witnesses said on social media the argument on Tuesday was over the price of a cup of tea, which was confirmed to Reuters by security sources. The video, one of several shared by the witness, showed a man lying still on the floor surrounded by angry onlookers. The Interior Ministry said in a statement that a policeman got into an argument with a vendor over "the price of a drink" and shot him dead, injuring two others in the process. A judicial source told Reuters the policeman shot the three men with an assault rifle and fled. The victim died from a bullet to the heart, the judicial source said. "There are clashes between the police and locals. Security forces brought in two riot police vehicles and an armoured truck and the victim's family is here and pelting them with rocks," said the witness who sent the video and who declined to be named for fear of reprisal. "Security forces are retreating and promising justice but the crowd is demanding police hand over the killer." Anger over perceived police excesses helped fuel the 2011 uprising that ended President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule and began on a Police Day holiday. Since then, police have regained their power and human rights groups say they have returned to their old ways. Public anger against police has surged again in recent months. In February, a policeman shot dead a driver in the street in an argument over a fare, prompting hundreds to protest outside the Cairo security directorate. There were also riots in Ismailia and the southern city Luxor over the authorities' handling of at least three deaths in police custody in a single week in November. Egyptian security forces have also faced scrutiny over the killing of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni in Cairo this year. Human rights groups say his death bears the hallmarks of Egyptian security agencies. Officials deny involvement. "A hundred years of isolated incidents," wrote one commentator on Twitter. (Additional reporting by Ahmed Mohamed Hassan and Haitham Ahmed; Writing by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Lin Noueihed and Alison Williams)
If your dream job is to be a teacher, a public defender or to milk cows in North Dakota, youre in luck. A number of programs will forgive your student loan debtif youre eligible.

These state and federal programs are generally awarded to individuals who work for non-profit organizations or at underserved professions.

Related: Guess Who in Congress Has $100,000 in Student Loans

States use these programs to attract people in hard-to-fill jobs. These programs can be a real win-win for areas that need professions and for borrowers that have taken on more debt than they can necessarily afford, says Betsy Mayotte, director of regulatory compliance at the nonprofit organization American Student Assistance.

The most common jobs eligible for state-specific programs are doctors, nurses, veterinarians and attorneys.

One example of a state-level program is the North Dakota State Veterinarian Loan Repayment Program, which offers up to $80,000 in student loan repayment in exchange for veterinarians who have commercial practices.

On the federal level, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program offers borrowers early termination of loans in exchange for 10 years of working at a public service job at either the federal, state or the local level. In order to qualify, the borrower must have made 120 on-time payments.

Real Time Student Loan Debt in the US | StartClass

Related: Heres Why It Takes Women Longer to Pay Off Student Loans

Some of the jobs that qualify for this program include public school teachers, professors at public universities, firefighters, and state police officers, among many others. Employees of tax-exempt nonprofit organizations that are classified as 501(c)(3) organizations are also eligible for the PSLF.

Other options are also available to teachers. The federal government offers Teacher Loan Forgiveness, which forgives a portion of highly qualified teachers loans after 5 years of teaching. Highly qualified teachers have certain licenses or certificates, hold at least a bachelors degree and are deemed competent.

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Teachers with loans from the Federal Perkins Loan Program might also qualify for a full cancellation of their loan if they work full-time for one academic year in a school that serves students from low-income families, works as a special education teacher or teaches in a field that has a shortage of qualified teachers.

Members of the military can also eliminate their student debt upon joining. Although every branch is different, people who serve up to three years on active duty will have their loans forgiven.

While these programs offer students a great benefit, Mayotte cautions people against fully relying on them. No one should ever go to school assuming their student loan will be forgiven later. People should look at programs like this as an added bonus, but should never plan on these programs, Mayotte says.

Thats because repayment programs are subject to funding and can be tossed at any point.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
STRASBOURG (Reuters) - Growing euroscepticism in the EU is partly due to too much interference from Brussels in ordinary people's lives, which needs to be toned down, the head of the European Commission said on Tuesday. In comments likely to resonate in Britain as it gears up for a June referendum on whether to stay in the bloc, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said more powers should rest with the capitals rather than central EU institutions. Asked by British conservative lawmaker Nigel Evans what he planned to do about growing euroscepticism, Juncker said: "I think that one of the reasons why European citizens are stepping away from the European project is due to the fact that we are interfering in too many domains of their private lives. In many of those areas, individual states were "better placed to take action and to pass through legislation." For that reason, Brussels was passing far fewer new pieces of legislation than under previous presidents, Juncker said. He was speaking after Dutch voters, in a swipe at their government as well as the EU, rejected closer ties with Ukraine earlier this month, having also voted against a proposed EU constitution in 2005. "I made it clear back in 2006 that the European project was running out of steam, there was disappointment. I don't think the situation has fundamentally changed, on the contrary," Juncker told the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe. "Yes it's right we are not very popular when we plead the case for Europe. You are no longer respected in your country if you insist that in the necessity of supra-national bodies." Voters in EU's newer eastern member states including Poland and Hungary have also in recent years elected governments that are more critical of the EU. But Juncker also said more close cooperation was needed between the 28 states to tackle joint challenges, including the migration crisis and security threats, and he has strongly advocated for Britain to stay in the EU. "We were wrong in overregulating and interfering too much in the daily lives of our fellow citizens... But we would also be wrong if we insufficiently respected the principle of solidarity." (Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska; editing by John Stonestreet)
Investigators were on Tuesday examining two more pieces of debris for clues to the fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, along with marine life found on two other items which "almost certainly" came from the lost jet.

The latest two pieces -- one found in South Africa and another on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius -- were brought to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's laboratories for testing last week.

"Investigators from the ATSB and the Malaysian authorities are currently examining those two pieces for details which would serve to identify them as coming from a Boeing 777," the bureau said in a statement.

"And in particular for any details which might serve to link the debris as coming from MH370."

Two parts found on beaches in Mozambique along its Indian Ocean coast have already been identified as "almost certainly" from the missing plane.

Australia is leading the search in the remote southern Indian Ocean, believed to be the final resting place of the plane which disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014 carrying 239 passengers and crew.

Last year a wing part recovered from the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, which neighbours Mauritius, was confirmed as coming from the jet.

Since then two more items found about 220 kilometres (140 miles) apart from each other in Mozambique in December 2015 and February 2016 have been examined.

The ATSB confirmed Tuesday earlier statements that both pieces "almost certainly" came from the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft operating as MH370.

The first part, which had a number stencilled on it, was identified as a segment from a Boeing 777 flap track from the right wing, with the stencilling on it conforming to that used by Malaysia Airlines.

The second part, which had the words "No Step" on it, was identified as a segment of a Boeing 777 horizontal stabiliser panel. Its stencilling was also consistent with that used by the carrier, the ATSB said.

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Both pieces were also examined for "marine ecology and remnants of biological material" which could provide clues to their sea journey.

"Visible marine ecology was present on both parts and these items were removed and preserved," the report said.

"At the time of writing, ongoing work was being conducted with respect to the marine ecology identification as well as testing of material samples.

"The results from these tests will be provided to the Malaysian investigation team once complete."

The ATSB said the pieces found in Mozambique would be returned to Malaysia this week.
Geneva (AFP) - An avalanche on Tuesday swept away two-time world extreme snowboard champion Estelle Balet to her death in the Swiss Alps, police said.

The 21-year-old Balet, who had won her second straight title on the Freeride World Tour only two weeks ago, was making a film when she was killed, Swiss police said in a statement.

Balet was speeding down a slope near the resort of Orsieres on her snowboard when the avalanche started and carried her away, police added.

Another snowboarder had been on the slope just before Balet passed.

The Swiss woman was wearing a tracking device, an airbag and was wearing a helmet.

Rescuers managed to dig her out of the snow, but police said: "Despite an attempt to resuscitate her, she died at the scene of the accident."

"I feel a huge sadness, a feeling of bitterness and above all solidarity with her family and friends," Nicolas Hale-Woods, founder of the Freeride World Tour, told AFP.

"It is a reminder that no matter how well prepared you are, taking part in freeride in the mountains has an element of uncertainty," he added.

Balet came from the Valais region of Switzerland and had been snowboarding since the age of 10. She had been on the Freeride World Tour since the junior level.
Its November 6, 2016. The world is not in good shape.

After years of historic lows, oil prices have reboundedin fact, they have rebounded too well. Gas is now fast approaching $4 per gallon. High energy costs have kicked the Chinese economy into a depression, and the United States begins hemorrhaging workers. With fear spreading, the South China Sea is getting testier. Whats more, its been a terrible tropical-cyclone season, and southern cities are ailing. Miami and its suburbs, specifically, might take a decade to recover from Hurricane Paula.

Amid this unease, some moderate, middle-aged white voters have started taking renewed interest in Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president. To them, his once-ludicrous rhetoric is sounding more and more accurate. Their support still wouldnt give him the popular vote, but it might let him take Ohio, Florida, and the electoral college.

Recommended: The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck

With the election two days away, younger and urban Americans are terrified. Some are arranging ways for their Muslim friends to leave the country. Thats the atmosphere in which two senior Facebook engineers approach Mark Zuckerberg, the companys CEO, and tell him that this whole mess can be stopped right now.

Could this happen? Would Facebook be able to single-handedly stop Donald Trumpor any other presidential candidate? Its a question that some at Facebook appear to be asking.

* * *

At the end of every week, Zuckerberg holds an internal question-and-answer session for employees. Usually before these sessions, the company circulates a poll internally asking what concerns he should address. On March 4, as one of these polls circulated among workers, many employees voted to ask him: What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?

This surveys existence was first reported by Gizmodo. Facebook hasnt yet commented on whether Mark addressed this question or what he said.

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Voting is a core value of democracy and we believe that supporting civic participation is an important contribution we can make to the community, said a Facebook spokesman in response to the report. We as a company are neutralwe have not and will not use our products in a way that attempts to influence how people vote.

The worlds largest social network says it wont avert a Trump presidencybut could it? In its story on the survey question, Gizmodo hypothesizes one way that the company could step in. By gradually wiping pro-Trump stories from its feed, Facebook could suffocate a campaign that has run on free media attention.

Recommended: Why Americans Are So Sensitive to Harm

Facebook wouldnt have to disclose it was doing this, and would be protected by the First Amendment, writes Michael Nunez, a Gizmodo editor.

It makes sense as a scenario, and it would be hard to track. Over the past two years, journalists have discovered the incredible power wielded by Facebooks News Feed. The feature can divert massive amounts of money and attention to news sites. Detecting changes in how News Feed works is notoriously hard: In todays New York Times, web publishers fret that they are rarely sure whether drops in traffic from News Feed are felt across the industry or only happening to them.

But there is an easier way that Facebook (or a few rogue engineers) could change American history, and it would be even trickier to verify. Since 2008, Facebook has displayed an I Voted! button like this on every major election day:

If you tell Facebook you voted, your name and picture appear near the button when other friends view it. Facebook encourages your friends to go out and vote as well.

Social pressure like this can be quite potent, and the company has often deployed this button for experimental ends. In 2010, researchers at the University of California used the button and internal Facebook data to conduct a 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. They found that someone was 0.39 percent more likely to vote if they were told by Facebook that their friends had voted. Because of the social ripple effects of this, they concluded that more than 340,000 additional votes were cast in that midterm election because of the I Voted! button.

Recommended: Why Dont Americans Save More Money?

In the text of the study, the authors added that voter-turnout efforts like Facebooks could have changed the outcome of the 2000 presidential election:

Voter mobilization experiments have shown that most methods of contacting potential voters have small effects (if any) on turnout rates, ranging from 1 percent to 10 percent. However, the ability to reach large populations online means that even small effects could yield behavior changes for millions of people. Furthermore, as many elections are competitive, these changes could affect electoral outcomes. For example, in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, George Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes (less than 0.01 percent of votes cast in Florida). Had Gore won Florida, he would have won the election.

If Facebooks effects on voter turnout are as large as this research suggests, then Facebook could easily skew the 2016 election. By selectively presenting the I Voted! button to some voters, for instance, it could juice turnout among reliably Democratic demographics without increasing it among their Republican counterparts. As my colleague Derek Thompson has detailed, the single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree. Facebook knows many of our educational histories all too well. By only encouraging educated users to head to the pollsor by only inspiring urban voters in some statesit could change the contest.

To be clear, the company has repeatedly said it has no appetite to do this. Facebook would never try to control elections, Sheryl Sandberg, its chief operating officer, told an Indian television network in 2014.

Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard University who has previously written about Facebooks electoral power, told me it was good that Facebook was now on the record about not tampering with the vote. He confirmed that no legal mechanism would prevent them from trying it.

Facebook is not an originator of content so much, it is a funnel for it. And because it is a social network, its got quite natural market dominance, he said. With that power came a need for public concern and awareness.

Questions like these will keep coming up until Facebook and other major technology companies take their role as an information fiduciary more seriously, he said. Theres no such thing as a neutral News Feed, he told me. As a fiduciary, the platform would forswear trying to advance its agenda over yours and over what you want to see happen in the world.

All of the mass media work of the 70s and 80s was about worrying that, My god, theyre only three major networks, and theyre kind of all the same! Its funnythey were ringing the bell then, and it turned out not to be so much of a big deal, especially as cable came onto the scene. And now its likeyou guys, you might want to come back!

For now, Mark Zuckerberg seems content to intervene in the election as any other person wouldby commenting on it. At Facebooks developers conference last week, he condemned Trump without ever using his name.

I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as others. I hear them calling for blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, for reducing trade, and in some cases even for cutting access to the Internet. It takes courage to choose hope over fear, he said. If the world starts turning inward, our community will just have to work harder to bring people together.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Today is tax day, and like every tax season, Americans have collectively spent billions of dollars and millions of hours preparing their taxes for federal and state governments.

But in the future, theres a chance that thing could look different for a large number of American taxpayers: Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation that would require the Internal Revenue Service to provide American taxpayers with tax forms that are automatically filled out in advance. This is called return-free filing, and it means that the IRS populates tax forms with the information it already gathers, by law, from employers. And its hasnt always been a liberal issue: Ronald Reagan, in a 1985 speech, praised the idea of return-free filing.

While return-free filing wouldnt work for everyonetaxpayers with, say, capital gains would need to fill out additional paperwork on their ownit would simplify the process for tens of millions of taxpayers. And if for whatever reason they dont want to sign off on the forms the IRS sends them, they would still have the option to prepare their own taxes or go to an accountant. Such a system is already the norm in eight OECD countries, and many taxpayers there have reported that return-free filing means that they can spend just five minutes (and zero dollars) to file their taxes.

Recommended: The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck

Why isnt this in place in the U.S.? It all goes back to an agreement that the IRS made with private tax-preparation companies more than a decade ago. In 2001, one initiative of the White Houses Office of Management and Budget instructed the IRS to provide Americans with the option of free online tax preparation. But instead of developing its own software, the IRS turned to the tax software industry. What resulted was the IRSs partnership with the Free File Alliancea nonprofit that counts among its members several major U.S. private-sector tax-preparation companieswhich guarantees free e-filing for anyone who makes $62,000 or less. The catch is that since 2003, the IRS has been prohibited from creating its own tax-preparation and e-filing software.

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Which is where Warrens proposed legislation comes in. The Tax Filing Simplification Act would do away with this partnership by banning the IRS from entering into agreements that restrict its ability to provide free online tax preparation or filing services. The bill also mandates that the IRS would have to develop its own free online software.

According to Warrens bill, the problem with Free File is that less than 3 percent of eligible taxpayers use ita dismally low rate that is often attributed to the fact that not many people know it exists and that it is not very easy to use. The National Taxpayer Advocate, an organization within the IRS that represents taxpayer interests, has been calling for the Free File program to end for years.

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Return-free filing isnt some unattainable foreign law to pine for; its actually already established in California. The states program, CalFile, uses information the state already has to calculate taxes for single filers making up to $169,730 and married filers making up to $339,464 a year. (Virginia once had a similar program, called iFile, which existed for decade before it was outlawed and replaced in 2010 by a Free File Alliance-backed program similar to the current IRS partnership thats now in place in 19 states.)

Joseph Bankman, a professor of tax law at Stanford Law School who has been an advocate for return-free filing, says that while state programs are useful, a federal program would be better, because thats the one that people almost always fill out first. Bankman was one of the creators, in 2005, of Californias ReadyReturn, another return-free program that has since been rolled into CalFile. According to the Franchise Tax Board of California, 97 percent of those who used ReadyReturn said theyd use it again, and ReadyReturn filers were significantly less likely to have errors in their returns.

Private tax-preparation companies, naturally, oppose Warrens bill, as their bottom lines would likely be affected if return-free filing takes off. Reporting by ProPublica shows that Intuit, the maker of Turbotax and a member of the Free File Alliance, has spent millions on lobbying against return-free filing. A company spokeswoman recently told ProPublica that Intuit remains a staunch opponent to government-prepared tax returns.

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Tim Hugo, the Free File Alliances executive director, disputes the idea that Free File isnt working. He notes that Free File has facilitated 48 million returns in the last 13 years, which equates to $1.4 billion worth of tax software. Hugo says he "would welcome millions more  The problem I see is that people just don't know about it. The only catch is that you have to go to IRS.gov to get it." He went further, claiming that a program like Warrens would carry risks: Return-free filing is doing tax preparation and tax collection all in one entity, he says. That is a recipe for a backdoor tax increase."

Some academics argue that this idea shouldnt be controversial, because what the agency would be doing amounts to data entry. Pre-populating a return for these kinds of taxpayers that we're talking about, low- and middle-income taxpayers who take the standard deduction, who don't have mortgage interests or if they do they don't have enough itemized deductions to actually itemize, which is 70 percent of taxpayers, that is just scriveners work, says Dennis Ventry, a professor at UC Davis School of Law. He adds, It's not [a] sophisticated tax practice that requires paying a cent for. Taxpayers should not have to pay for that kind of work and the government is in the perfect position to actually go ahead and do that for the taxpayers.

And as for those concerned that the IRS would start secretly extracting additional tax revenues, Bankman says that its easy enough to take those forms to a tax preparer or accountant. If the private companies say, 'We're doing more for you than the government. We're adding value,' that's greatjust like your accountant can say that, he says.

Currently, both Democratic presidential candidates have voiced support for Warrens bill. And while the program would cost taxpayers money, the net savings could be huge. Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of Obamas Council of Economic Advisors and a professor at the University of Chicagos Booth School of Business, estimated in 2006 that return-free filing would save American taxpayers $2 billion. Further, once such a program is set up, the maintenance costs would be low: According to the California Franchise Tax Board, CalFiles annual costs are about $100,000, which goes toward updating the program in accordance with any new tax legislation, and saves the state over half a million dollars a year. (For comparison, the private-sector tax-prep industry is estimated to bring in $10 billion in revenue every year.)

What we know is that given the choice, people really like [return-free filing]  The people who used this in California loved it, says Bankman. I think it's a blueprint for where the government is going to go, should go in the future, and sooner or later will get there. Because it's just too stupid for us all to spend the equivalent of $50 billion a year filing our individual income taxes.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
New on the jean scene: FRAME Denim, a favorite of Reese Witherspoon, power stylists Petra Flannery and Micaela Erlanger and Karlie Kloss (she has her own "Forever Karlie" style), just opened its debut store on L.A.'s Melrose Place (8467 Melrose Place, Los Angeles, 90069, 310-464-2270).

The London-inspired, Los Angeles-made blue jeans brand joins The Row, Irene Neuwirth and Violet Grey on what is arguably the city's most charming yet upscale-cool, tree-lined shopping block. The inviting, sun-lit space was designed by Swedish architect Christian Hallerod (NYC's Byredo and Stockholm's Acne Studios) with "warm minimalism" in mind.

Customers will soon be able to sip and shop as FRAME's floor-to-ceiling glass doors will open out to Alfred Tea Room (going in across the street from fashion blogger mecca Alfred Coffee, a.k.a., #ButFirstCoffee) and Moon Juice - both currently under construction. Here, FRAME Denim's co-founders Erik Torstensson and Jens Grede talk shop.

Pret-a-Reporter: Why'd you choose Los Angeles for FRAME's first store?

Torstensson: L.A. is the home of FRAME, we have our design studio in Culver City and we manufacture all of our denim here. (A second store is scheduled to open later this summer in downtown NYC).

And, what made Melrose Place your ideal destination?

Grede: We did not even consider anywhere else - it is such an iconic west coast location.

What was your design inspiration - any particular references?

Grede: We wanted the store to reflect the label's unique fusion of European and Californian design sensibility

Torstensson: Oversized windows allow west coast light to engage with the space's architecture and warm touches - Californian Redwood, a fireplace, stone and marble fixtures.

Who are your personal style icons?

Grede: They might be considered slightly unconventional, but Matt Dillon and Willem Dafoe. (Dafoe appears in the spring 2016 campaign for the new FRAME men's ready-to-wear).

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What's the hottest selling FRAME jean in L.A. vs. NYC?

Grede: Le Skinny De Jeanne [a classic, mid-rise slim-fit jean] is our most popular women's style across the board.

All photos by Carol McColgin
Sydney (AFP) - Coral bleaching has been detected in Sydney Harbour for the first time, Australian scientists said Tuesday, blaming the damaging phenomenon also found in the Great Barrier Reef on warming sea-surface temperatures.

Aerial surveys of the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef off Queensland's coast last month revealed the worst bleaching on record along a 1,000-kilometre (600-mile) stretch of the site's pristine north.

Now marine biologists from two Sydney universities have discovered "paled coral colonies during routine monitoring at a number of locations in Sydney Harbour".

The scientists estimated around 45 percent of corals in some locations in the harbour have been bleached.

Bleaching occurs when abnormal environmental conditions, such as warmer sea temperatures, cause corals to expel tiny photosynthetic algae, draining them of their colour.

"It's enough to cause us quite a bit of concern. This is the first time it's been observed at Sydney Harbour," Matthew Nitschke of University of Technology Sydney (UTS) told AFP.

"It (the bleaching) is slightly different in Sydney Harbour, so we don't reach as high temperatures as we do in the Great Barrier Reef, but we still have reached a high temperature for Sydney Harbour."

UTS' Samantha Goyen said scientists studying the corals did not expect to see "such a rapid change in their physiology".

"They appear to have bleached in a matter of weeks," she added in a statement.

The monitoring data compiled by the researchers, who also include experts from Macquarie University, showed that waters in Sydney Harbour had reached 26.5 degrees Celsius (79.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The average temperature for this time of year is 24-24.5 degrees Celsius, Nitschke said.

With water temperatures dipping down to 23 degrees before the southern hemisphere winter begins, the scientists were hopeful the corals would recover from the bleaching in two to three months or longer.

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But they cautioned the phenomenon was making marine invertebrates more susceptible to other stresses including disease.

Scientists said in findings published in the journal Science last week that a further rise of as little as 0.5 degrees Celsius could cause reef bleaching to spread dramatically.

The Great Barrier Reef -- the world's biggest coral reef ecosystem -- is under pressure from the threat of climate change, as well as farming run-off, development and the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish.

Nitschke said it was too early to tell if the Sydney Harbour bleaching was linked to climate change, with further monitoring needed.

"If this happens again in the absence of an El Nino event, then it's a clear sign of this being attributable to global climate change," he said.
Istanbul (AFP) - More rockets hit a Turkish town on the Syrian border on Tuesday, wounding at least three people, a day after five were killed by fire from an area of Syria controlled by jihadists, a Turkish government official said.

In the last few weeks, Islamic State (IS) jihadists have repeatedly fired rockets at Kilis, the only town in Turkey where refugees from Syria's five-year conflict now outnumber local Turks.

"Three rockets slammed into three different spots in the centre of Kilis, one in an empty field, one near a school and another near a mosque," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The official said the rocket fire left three people lightly injured while the strikes caused a fire to break out one of the houses.

Four Syrian children are now confirmed to have been killed in the strikes by Katyusha-type rockets Monday on Kilis, along with a Syrian shepherd, the CNN-Turk and NTV channels reported.

The death toll from Monday's rocket strikes rose to five on Tuesday after another Syrian child died in hospital, reports said.

The children were killed when a rocket ripped through a three-storey building where nine Syrian families had been living, state-run news agency Anatolia said.

The children had lost their fathers in the war at home and had come to Turkey with their mothers around two years ago, it added.

At least 11 people have now been killed so far in strikes on Kilis from Syria but this was the heaviest toll recorded so far in a single day.

Last week, Kilis residents held protests over the inability of local authorities to protect them, prompting a visit by Turkey's powerful spy chief Hakan Fidan.

The government has promised to compensate the material losses sustained by the residents by the strikes from Syria.

Turkey has responded to each of the strikes on Kilis by destroying the launching positions of the jihadists with howitzer fire.

Turkish officials have repeatedly lauded the hospitality of people in Kilis towards Syrians as an example of how Turks are hosting the 2.7 million Syrians who have fled their country's civil war to Turkey.
The American Revolutionary War started on April 19, 1775, at the towns of Lexington and Concord. But how accurate are some of the key facts that have been handed down to us through the generations?

Weve done some historical sleuthing to find out what the real deal was with Paul Revere and the shot heard round the world.

To set the scene: The Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts were the official start of hostilities between colonists who objected to British rule and British soldiers sent to restore order in the Colonies.

Not all colonists favored the Revolution and by some estimates, about 20 percent were Loyalists, while another 25 percent were mostly neutral.

But parts of New England were a hotbed of Patriot activity. British troops were garrisoned in Boston and their commander, General Thomas Gage, sent a force from Boston to seize military supplies stored by the Patriots in nearby Concord.

The rebel forces knew of the plans and were well-organized and armed. The British troops confronted one small group in Lexington, and for some reason, a shot rang out. The British opened fire upon the Patriots and then started a bayonet attack, killing eight local militia members.

The British ran into much stiffer resistance approaching Concord. Another shot rang out, and the British quickly found themselves outnumbered and outflanked by a combined force of Patriot minutemen and militia.

The British regulars then made a difficult retreat to Boston, which was greatly aided by the arrival of reinforcements led by Lord Percy. Today, we estimate that 49 Patriots and 73 British troops died in the fighting.

So lets start with a few famous reports and quotes related to the first battle of the war.

1. Did Paul Revere really say, The British are coming?

That seems highly unlikely for several reasons. Revere was on a secret mission to warn the Patriots about the advance of British forces, and at the time, the colonists were British. His more likely response was, The regulars are coming out.

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2. Did Revere ride by himself at midnight to warn the Patriots?

There were multiple riders as part of the intelligence effort set up by the Patriots. Two other men, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, rode with Revere. In fact, Revere never reached Concord as part of the ride. He was detained by the British after leaving Lexington. It was Prescott who rode from Lexington to Concord.

3. Who shot the shot heard round the world?

In Ralph Waldo Emersons Concord Hymn, the embattled farmers fired the shot heard round the world at the British regulars in Concord. More likely, the shots were fired at Lexington, where the British fired on the Patriot militia, who also may have taken a few shots in the confusion.

One eyewitness to the skirmish was Paul Revere, who had been detained but not arrested by the British. He couldnt tell who fired the first shot, in his account. Both sides later accused the other of firing first.

4. Were the colonists just a bunch of farmers fighting against the British?

In reality, the Patriots at Lexington and Concord were well organized and well supplied. Many were veterans of the French and Indian campaigns, and they better understood the battle tactics in the area than the British. After withdrawing back to Boston, Lord Percy said, They have amongst them those who know very well what they are about, having been employed as rangers among the Indians.

5. Did the Patriots engage the British from a distance using rifles?

The Colonists primarily used muskets, and not rifles, and had to get fairly close to the enemy in small-group formations to be effective.

An article on the American Rifleman website makes a convincing argument that the Patriots were better shots than the British, but only 2 percent of their shots were on target.

Much of the fighting in the British retreat was in hand-to-hand combat, and the British were able to use bayonets. The Patriots used circling tactics to constantly harass the British while building up their own troop strength. In the end, about 15,000 Patriot militia and Minutemen surrounded Boston as they trailed the British retreat.

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By Kylie MacLellan CAERPHILLY, Wales (Reuters) - In the shadow of Caerphilly's 13th Century castle, a handful of activists have been handing out leaflets to Saturday shoppers for several weeks to drum up support for a British exit from the European Union. Elsewhere in the Welsh former mining town, members of Britain's main opposition Labour Party have also been out campaigning. But the vote they are focused on comes seven weeks before the June 23 EU membership referendum. Like Scotland, Northern Ireland and much of England, people in Wales will vote in local and regional elections on May 5 -- timing that could prove costly for the EU "In" campaign. Prime Minister David Cameron, whose own Conservative Party is deeply divided on whether or not to stay in the EU, is relying on Labour and other pro-EU political rivals like the Scottish National Party and Liberal Democrats to get supporters out to vote to remain in the 28-member bloc. But with those parties distracted by the May 5 polls, the field is wide open for those in favor of Britain leaving the bloc to push their overlapping political message. The anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) in particular hopes to fuse growing euroscepticism with local election issues such as the impact of immigration on housing availability to steal many of Labour's traditional voters. It's a situation the leaders of the United Kingdom's devolved administrations in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland had hoped to avoid. Earlier this year, they wrote to Cameron calling on him to hold the referendum later in the year so that it would not conflict with the local election campaign period. "Cameron went ahead anyway and one of the consequences might be that the remain camp suffers ... because people are going to be focusing on other things," said Roger Scully, Professor of Political Science at Cardiff University. "They are all focusing on May 5 and then after May 5 they'll want to rest and so who is going to actually get out and do a lot of the work for remain?" AVOIDING THE SUBJECT UKIP candidate and Wales campaign manager Sam Gould, who increased his party's vote share in Caerphilly by 17 percentage points at last year's UK-wide election, says rivals are avoiding the subject of the EU. "The other parties didn't want to see any crossover whatsoever," he says, pausing to thrust a campaign leaflet at a passerby. "They know it will help us." UKIP has seized on the potential collapse of Tata Steel's Port Talbot plant in south Wales, saying the EU did not do enough to stop cheap Chinese imports and the bloc's rules on state aid have prevented government intervention. With Tata expected to set a deadline to sell by the end of May, thousands of jobs could be lost just weeks before the EU vote, adding to the "In" camp's woes. Hefin David, Labour's candidate in Caerphilly, said he may get involved in the "In" campaign after elections for the devolved Welsh Assembly, but his focus is on local issues for the time being. "The Welsh Labour campaign that I am running in Caerphilly is about the bread and butter issues of health, education and social services," David told Reuters. "If people want to vote to get out of Europe they can do that on June 23. This is the Assembly campaign and I think they should be separate ... I'm not thinking past May 5," as he warmed his hands on a coffee in a local supermarket cafe. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is also focused on May 5, his first major electoral test since taking over in September with the strong backing of party members but little support among his own lawmakers. With some of his opponents in Labour looking for a reason to justify a leadership challenge, all eyes are on the May results. LABOUR STRONGHOLD NO MORE? There is reason for Labour to be concerned. Wales, which has a population of around 3 million and is the poorest region in Britain, according to official statistics, is traditionally a Labour stronghold where the party has won every Assembly election since it was created in 1999. Opinion polls show the party is now running around 14 percentage points below where it was at the same time before the last assembly election in 2011. Cardiff University's Scully says a worse result than in 2007, when Labour won 26 out of 60 assembly seats in its poorest performance there so far, would set off alarm bells that could have national implications. "Some losses have been priced in ... 2007 is probably the benchmark. If they are doing worse than that then I think serious questions will be raised and should be raised, both about the leadership in Wales and the leadership of the party across Britain," he said. "You could have a situation where Labour will certainly have their worst ever performance in Scotland and they could have their worst ever devolved election in Wales as well, and lose significant ground in the English locals." A long-time eurosceptic, Corbyn now backs the party's position that Britain should remain in the bloc. But he has come under fire for not doing enough to help the cause, and with polls showing that backers of Cameron's Conservatives are more likely to be eurosceptics, some supporters fear the "In" politicians are cutting it very fine. A YouGov poll published on April 11 showed support in Wales for Britain leaving the EU had risen 3 percentage points from a month earlier to 39 percent, while those wanting to remain had dropped by the same amount, to 38 percent. "If we don't get the Labour vote out, we are going to lose," said one person involved in the "Wales Stronger In" campaign. (Reporting by Kylie MacLellan, editing by Elizabeth Piper and Sonya Hepinstall)
By Julie Carriat PARIS (Reuters) - France will guarantee a 20-minute response of police and military anti-terrorism units to any future militant attacks, drawing on lessons learned from November's Islamic State shootings in Paris, its interior minister said on Tuesday. Besides more security personnel, specialist units will get new clearances to bypass the traditional carve-up of responsibilities between police and military forces that can hinder a timely armed response, Bernard Cazeneuve said. The measures will ensure a minimum 20-minute response to attacks on population centers anywhere in France, he said. "In a crisis our citizens expect faultless collaboration at all times," Cazeneuve told a news conference. "It's no time for competition between forces, but rather for unity, pooling resources and cooperating in our common interest." In the wake of the Nov. 13 attack on the Bataclan concert hall, which killed 90 people, questions were asked about why a police assault was ordered a full two hours and 40 minutes after militants began shooting people inside. A further 40 people were killed in coordinated gun attacks on nearby bars and restaurants. A parliamentary committee last month heard that military units were close to the music venue at the time but did not intervene. Incidents within Paris typically fall within the competence of the specialist BRI police division, which arrived on the scene within about 40 minutes. Jean-Luc Taltavull, a senior police union official, also told the committee that better-armed military personnel outside the Bataclan had refused to join police preparing to enter the building because they had not been ordered to do so. During an earlier hearing on March 7, Cazeneuve dismissed suggestions that the armed response had been too slow. "In a context like that, where there are suicide belts and the place may be rigged with explosives, and we don't know how many terrorists are present or where they are, you can't intervene until you have the site under control," he said. (Writing by Laurence Frost; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Skopje (AFP) - Several thousand people marched through the Macedonian capital on Tuesday for the eighth day running, protesting at President Gjorge Ivanov's decision to halt a probe into top politicians embroiled in a wire-tapping scandal.

The protesters marched throughout central Skopje carrying placards reading "No justice, no peace" and "Ivanov resign." Smaller protests were also held in other towns.

The two-year-long political crisis in the landlocked Balkan country ratcheted up a gear a week earlier, when Ivanov announced a decision that would protect more than 50 public figures from possible prosecution.

Those amnestied include the president's ally, former prime minister Nikola Gruevski, and the head of the main opposition, Zoran Zaev.

The move was also condemned by the European Union and United States. Observers saw it as damaging to Macedonia's ambitions to draw closer to the EU and Washington.

The ambassadors of EU countries met Ivanov on Tuesday, the EU's representative in Skopje, Aivo Orav, said in a tweet.

"Pardons undermine accountability and rule of law. What future for the country and its Euro-Atlantic integration?", the tweet said, without giving details of the talks.

The EU has invited Macedonian leaders to talks in Vienna Friday on ending the drawn-out crisis.

Gruevski's ruling VMRO-DPMNE conservative party has accepted the invitation. The opposition Social Democrats (SDSM) have yet to announce if their leader Zaev will join the talks.
Genetics may have a say in when people lose their virginity. A new study of more than 125,000 people in the United Kingdom has identified gene differences that influence the age of puberty, as well as the age at which people first have sexual intercourse and have their first child.

The age at which people have their first sexual intercourse is largely influenced by social factors, for example, peer pressure and family culture, the researchers noted. But the new findings also suggest that genetics also play a role.

"Clearly some of the things that impact the age of first sex are social," study co-author Felix Day, a genetics researcher at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., told Live Science. "By using genetics, we hope to uncover additional biological factors that contribute." [10 Surprising Sex Statistics]

The researchers identified 38 genes, which can be broadly separated into two groups. Some of the genes influence a person's physical maturity, whereas others appear to contribute to personality type, the team reported today (April 18) in the journal Nature.

"The first group includes genes that act on known reproductive pathways and are involved in the timing of puberty," Day said. These genes influence when people's bodies are biologically ready for sex, which in turn affects the age of first sexual intercourse.

The second group of genes, which are linked to people's personality traits, appear to influence people's tendency to take risks, which is linked to having sex earlier, or their level of irritability, which in the study appeared to be linked with having sex later.

The reason the age of first sexual intercourse is of interest to scientists is that it is linked with negative outcomes in educational achievements and mental health later in life. Similarly, puberty at an earlier age is linked to increased risk for diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and some cancers, the researchers said.

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By exploring the genetic influences underlying these traits the researchers hope to better understand the relationship between these health outcomes, Day said.

"Like with many other situations, it's nature and nurture. There's likely to be some influence of both, and also some interplay between the two of them," Day said. [10 Facts Every Parent Should Know About Their Teen's Brain]

One interesting finding of the study was that over recent generations, the average age at which people first have sex has decreased, Day said. "That's not going to be due to genetics, so societal factors are clearly playing an important role," he said.

The analysis was done using genetic data from 125,000 men and women between ages 40 and 69, who participated in UK Biobank, a national study for health research. The researchers also looked at two other independent datasets, including about 240,000 people in Iceland and 20,000 participants in the United States. While information about the age of first intercourse wasn't available in these two datasets, the researchers observed the same relationships between the identified genes and the age at which people first had a child.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

Copyright 2016 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
BERLIN (Reuters) - The co-founder of Germany's anti-Islam PEGIDA group arrived at a Dresden court on Tuesday for his trial on incitement charges wearing a rectangular black strip obscuring his eyes in a mocking gesture toward the German media and privacy rules. Lutz Bachmann, a 43-year-old with drugs and burglary convictions, is charged over sending social media posts in which he called refugees "cattle", "garbage" and "scumbags". He says he is not racist. Bachmann's defense lawyer Katja Reichel told the court her client rejected all charges, arguing it was not he who had written the comments on his Facebook page. Bachmann, wearing the dark strip across his eyes like sunglasses, appeared to be taking a swipe at the German media for double-standards and prejudging him. In Germany, photo-editors normally protect the identity of suspects on trial by placing a black bar across their faces in the print media. PEGIDA, short for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, forced itself onto Germany's political agenda in 2014 with its anti-immigrant rallies that started in the eastern city of Dresden and spread to several other cities. Bachmann, who briefly quit as leader of PEGIDA last year after pictures were printed of him posing with a Hitler moustache and haircut, shook hands outside the court with a handful of supporters, some holding Germany flags and placards. One read: "We want a Germany out of the euro, out of the European Union, out of NATO and with true democracy". Another read: "(Chancellor Angela) Merkel to court!" He could face a prison term of between three months and five years, prosecutors said. "We accuse the defendant of insulting asylum seekers and refugees in a publicly accessible Facebook comment. In addition, he is said to have denied them an equal life in Germany," said state prosecutor Lorenz Haase. At its height, just over a year ago, PEGIDA's twilight rallies drew tens of thousands of supporters, with many waving Germany flags and chanting xenophobic slogans. A rally on Dresden on Monday night drew about 3,000 people, German media reported. Despite the influx of over 1 million migrants to Germany last year, the grassroots movement's appeal has waned. Support has shifted to the anti-immigrant right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) which has won seats in eight regional assemblies. However, mainstream politicians are worried about right-wing attacks on migrants. Earlier, German police near Dresden arrested five people they suspect of forming a far-right militant group and preparing attacks on asylum seekers using explosives. (Reporting by Reuters TV, Madeline Chambers and Michael Nienaber; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
Berlin (AFP) - German police on Tuesday freed a mentally disabled 26-year-old woman who was believed to have been locked away in an apartment by her own mother, possibly for years.

The young woman was found in a "physically run-down and neglected state" in a rubbish-strewn flat in the southern city of Rosenheim, a police spokesman said, adding that she had been sent to a psychiatric hospital.

"Communicating with her is very, very difficult," the spokesman, Stefan Sonntag, told the DPA press agency.

Police discovered the captive by chance while carrying out an eviction order.

As they sought to enter the apartment, the 54-year-old tenant, who is believed to be the captive's mother, threw herself down the stairwell shaft from the second floor in an apparent suicide attempt, the spokesman said.

The woman suffered severe injuries from the fall and was taken to hospital.

When officers subsequently entered the apartment they broke down a locked door and discovered the younger woman.

"We believe that this is the tenant's daughter, who was in a physically run-down state and who had lived in there for a long time, maybe even for years," Sonntag told local news site rosenheim24.de.

An unidentified neighbour told the news site that he had lived next door since 2003 but had never seen the 26-year-old.

Another neighbour estimated that the young woman had been held inside for five years, after leaving a mental institution.

That neighbour said the young woman would cry out and knock on the walls at night.

"One time, last year, she managed to get out of the apartment. When we saw her we didn't think there was anything unusual going on," the neighbour told DPA, adding that the mother would refuse any offer of help.

German media, citing locals, said a younger brother, aged around 15, also lived in the house with the two women.
Riek Machar signed a peace deal designed to end one of Africa's worst conflicts, but he says U.S. neglect could unravel it.

Lutz Bachmann, the founder of Germanys far-right anti-Islamist movement, has practically made a habit out of appearing in court. Over the past few decades, the 43-year-old has been convicted of drug dealing, drunken driving, and assault, to name a few.

Now hes back on trial in the eastern German city of Dresden on charges he incited racial hatred by posting on Facebook that refugees fleeing to Germany from war zones in the Middle East are scumbags and filth. He also referred to them as cattle.

He entered the courtroom Tuesday wearing a jean jacket and black sunglasses meant to mimic a censorship bar. Although he did not speak to reporters, in February he posted on social media that the case is a constructed and politically motivated trial.

Bachmanns movement, PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of Europe), gained strength in its inflammatory social media presence, and by 2015 was hosting rallies in Germany that attracted tens of thousands of people.

According to the Dresden court, Bachmanns comments, which date back to 2014 and were widely shared on social media, disrupted public order and were an attack on the dignity of innocent people fleeing war.

If Bachmann is found guilty, he could serve up to five years in prison.

His groups rise has coincided with the emergence of other right-wing groups, an increase in hate speech toward migrants and refugees, as well as attacks on refugee camps and shelters throughout Germany. Many of his supporters later joined the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany, which has described Islam as a foreign body in Germany. This week, AfD deputy leader Beatrix von Storch, who is also a member of the European parliament, told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that the party is in favor of a ban on minarets, on muezzins, as well as full veils.

Aiman Mazyek, chairman of Germanys Central Council of Muslims, said Monday that these remarks amount to religious hatred as extreme as Nazism. For the first time since Hitlers Germany there is a party that again seeks to discredit an entire religious community and threatens its existence, Mazyek said.

Photo credit: MATTHIAS RIETSCHEL/Getty Images
In this limited series, OZY looks at leading-edge ideas from the fields of technology, healthcare and education that are emerging from different countries within Africa.

In Accra, Ghanas capital, its easy to tell the start of election season. Its not the glossy posters on the streets or the political ads on television that give it away  its all the text messages. Months before heading to the polls, Ghanaians start to receive friendly SMS from their government, reminding them how many ambulances they have bought that year  or from the opposition, explaining how many schools they would build if they were in power.

Mobile campaigning will likely be crucial in the upcoming November election in this West African country, because the political battlefield is inside peoples pockets. Dozens of mobile governance initiatives are popping up in the country, including GotToVote!, which helps people find nearby voting registration stations, and My Ghana Budget, which lets citizens navigate and understand their states budget. Phones are also being used to prevent electoral fraud. A study by the countrys Center for Democratic Development  Ghana found that on the day of the last election, a coalition of 4,000 independent election observers equipped with basic mobile phones reduced fraud by about 60 percent at the stations where they were deployed.

Ghana is certainly not the only African nation trying to use phones to strengthen democracy. But with 83 percent of the population using mobile phones  only second to South Africa  its certainly in the lead, says Christian Echle, media program director in Sub-Sahara Africa for the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung foundation. That doesnt mean theres no room for improvement. In the 2012 election, 8.5 percent of electoral colleges reported instances of fraud. Which is why this year, the electoral commission will be reintroducing  and expanding  the program they rolled out in the previous election using independent election observers with mobile phones.

Phones are also helping candidates win votes. When it comes to mobile campaigning, Ghana is way ahead of the U.S. Mobile advertising is extremely popular and, with little legislation to protect users privacy, Ghanaian political parties are trying to win votes one text at a time. After all, mobile communication is much more personal. It feels very different to watch a TV ad than to get a personalized SMS signed by the president, says Andrew Small, a London School of Economics graduate whose thesis focused on mobile governance in Ghana.

These initiatives also risk replicating the Western phenomenon of clicktivism, when it becomes easy to get involved, but it is hard to turn that into actual results.

But can phones really boost democracy? Or is it just the same old politics with a new name? Eben Nunoo, a Ghanaian TV journalist who has been studying civic participation, says that while we should be wary of phones save the day stories, mobile technology has definitely broadened participation in public debate. And copy-and-paste solutions arent likely to work. Each initiative needs to adapt to the local reality, says Small, pointing out the example of VOTO MOBILE, which carries polls in English as well as four other Ghanaian languages.

Last years campaign, #dumsormuststop, started as a mobile-led, civil activist initiative and became a movement that flooded the streets of Accra in protest against erratic power outages. If the countrys next election is more transparent and rigorous because of mobile technology, some experts say the system could be of immense help in other countries  starting with Uganda, which actually banned mobile phones from polling stations during the last disputed elections, angering opposition members and political activists. Or maybe in Kenya, which is going to choose a new president next year and suffers from lingering fear of fraud that led to postelectoral violence in 2007-2008.

Of course, like in any potential mobile revolution, there are caveats. For starters, this system is expensive. Whats more, mobile usage (especially smartphones) tends to be more widespread in urban areas, so polls or accountability systems may overrepresent urban, highly educated citizens and neglect the rural majority. And companies are still trying to find partners and figure out how to offer their services at a reasonable price for the long run. These initiatives also risk replicating the Western phenomenon of clicktivism, argues Echle, when it becomes easy to get involved, but it is hard to turn that into actual results.

But one thing is for sure, says Nunoo: A successful democracy needs to go where the people are. And Ghanaians are on their phones.

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By Nina Chestney LONDON (Reuters) - Global wind energy capacity will nearly double in the next five years, largely led by further market growth in China, but also as a stronger industry emerges in the United States, the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) said on Tuesday. In its annual report on the status of the global wind industry, GWEC said cumulative wind energy capacity was 433 gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2015, a 17 percent rise from the year before. That should nearly double to around 792 GW by the end of 2020 as countries develop more renewable energy to comply with emissions cut targets, prices continue to fall and policies to support wind power in the United States stabilize, the wind industry association said in the report. Wind energy installed in 2015 reached 63 GW, a 22 percent increase from the previous year. China alone installed nearly half of that new capacity -- 30.8 GW. In December last year in Paris, almost 200 countries agreed a landmark deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions from 2020 with the aim of limiting global average temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius. "The Paris Agreement requires a fully decarbonized power system by 2050 if not before, if we are keeping temperatures below 2 C above pre-industrial levels," Steve Sawyer, GWEC Secretary General, said in a statement. New markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America are also emerging which will be sources of growth in the next decade. Outside of China, the Asian market will be led by India but new markets in Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Pakistan and Mongolia are also developing quickly, the report said.
By Eric Auchard FRANKFURT (Reuters) - For more than a decade, Internet search and advertising giant Google, now a unit of holding company Alphabet Inc, has sparred with competitors in an expanding range of industries from Internet to media to telecoms to automobiles. It has also battled with judges and regulators. After fending off charges of anti-competitive behavior for many years, the Silicon Valley company has, since 2014, seen the tide swing against it in several antitrust cases worldwide. On Tuesday, Canada's Competition Commission closed an inquiry into Google's search and advertising practices dating from 2013. The European Competition Commission is expected on Wednesday to charge Google with anti-competitive charges concerning its Android mobile phone operating system, two people familiar with the matter said. A timeline of Google competition cases follows: 2007  USA - Competitors and consumer groups push U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate Googles acquisition of online display advertising firm DoubleClick. FTC signs off on deal but warns it will monitor Google closely for anticompetitive practices. http://reut.rs/1SpRyoH 2008 - USA - Google and Yahoo abandon pact to run Google search ads on Yahoo sites after U.S. Justice Department moved to block deal saying the two competitors would dominate online ad market. 2009-2010  EUROPE - Rivals and industry trade groups file complaints against Google to a variety of national regulators in Europe, citing competition concerns. 2010  EUROPE - European Commission launches formal antitrust probe of Google search business, which continues. http://reut.rs/1Nz2yvq 2013 - USA - The FTC drops a two-year antitrust probe of Google, concluding it has not manipulated search results to hurt rivals. Google had to agree to certain changes in search business practices in local search, advertising and with regard to licensing patent portfolio to mobile phone makers. http://reut.rs/23VVYsx 2013 - SOUTH KOREA - Korean Fair Trade Commission clears Google after two-year antitrust inquiry brought by local search rivals NHN (now Naver) and Daum (now Kakao), which dominate the countrys search market. The FTC finds the rival companies market share changed little despite Googles pre-loading requirements for its apps on Android phones. Smartphone makers defend Googles role in Android as saving them time and money. 2013  BRAZIL - Brazilian antitrust watchdog CADE investigates whether Google unfairly scrapes the content from rival websites, discourages their advertisers and favors its own product listings in search results. http://reut.rs/1Vzfhqp 2013-2014 - EUROPE - Back and forth ensues between Google and EU over terms of a potential settlement that would have ended European Commission antitrust probe. Competitors complain Commission is letting off Google too easily. EU antitrust chief Joaquin Alumnia eventually admits resolution of Google search case unlikely before his term expires later in 2014. http://reut.rs/1NyZGyM 2014  EUROPE - Mounting anti-Google feeling among European politicians is reflected in the passage of a symbolic, non-binding resolution calling for the break-up of Googles search engine business from the rest of the company. The motion, which does not mention Google explicitly by name, passes with 384 in favor to 174 votes against. http://bit.ly/22Kpkrs 2015  EUROPE - New EU Antitrust Chief Margrethe Vestager charges Google with distorting its search results to favor its own shopping service over rivals. European Commission also says it is investigating Googles Android business, scraping on rivals Web content and various advertising issues. http://reut.rs/1qVY5ya 2015  INDIA - Competition Commission of India (CCI) concludes a three-year enquiry into Googles paid search results. It accuses Google of abusing its dominant position in search in a report which has yet to be publicly released. CCI has received Googles response but sets no timeline for a final decision. http://reut.rs/1NkjmLY 2015  USA - The U.S. Federal Trade Commission opens a preliminary investigation into whether Google uses its Android operating system to dominate competitors as more consumers go mobile, sources told Reuters. 2015 - EUROPE - Russias anti-monopoly agency finds Google guilty of abusing its market position in the country by favoring its own apps on Android and requiring it to amend its contracts with smartphone makers. Google files a court appeal, which is rejected in March 2016. http://reut.rs/1RJLcxg 2016 - CANADA - The Competition Bureau closes a three-year long investigation into Google's online search business, saying it will take no action against the company. The Canadian watchdog says it found evidence to support one allegation that Google had made it hard for advertisers to compare Google ad rates to rivals, but says the company has already remedied the practice. http://reut.rs/1S8BkBr 2016  EUROPE - European Competition Commission is expected on Wednesday to charge Google with favoring its own apps on Android phones, sources tell Reuters. http://reut.rs/1VxTAad http://reut.rs/23InDjY (Sources: Reuters, European Commission, U.S. Federal Trade Commission, FairSearch lobbying group) (Additional reporting by Diane Bartz in Washington D.C., Yun-chee Foo in Brussels, Vincent Lee in Seoul, Byron Kaye in Sydney and Himank Sharma in Mumbai; Editing by Susan Fenton)
Athens (AFP) - Greek island officials on Tuesday began letting migrants leave detention centres where they have been held, as Human Rights Watch heaped criticism on a wave of EU-sanctioned deportations to ease the crisis.

As the European Union pushed ahead with a controversial deal with Turkey to send back all migrants whose asylum claims were rejected, Pope Francis took fresh aim at Western indifference to the plight of people fleeing war, bloodshed and abject poverty.

"Forgive us the closure and indifference of our societies which fear the changes to our way of life and our way of thinking that your presence requires," Francis said in an address to refugees, just days after bringing home three Syrian families from the Greek island of Lesbos.

"Treated like a burden, a cost, in reality you are a gift... a bridge that brings together people who are far apart."

Days after the 79-year-old pontiff travelled to Lesbos in a powerful gesture of solidarity, Greek officials said they had begun allowing people to leave the island detention camps where they have been held while their asylum requests are processed.

Since an EU-Turkey deal went into force on March 20, around 7,500 people have landed on the Greek islands where they have been kept in holding centres while waiting to be processed to determine whether they can legitimately claim asylum.

But on Tuesday, the SOMP agency which is coordinating Greece's response to the crisis said those who had spent 25 days inside the holding centres and who had filed an asylum claim would be "allowed to leave" the camps.

The decision aims to ease pressure on the registration centres.

A SOMP spokesman said the "the vast majority" of new arrivals had submitted an asylum claim, and that a new round of deportations would only resume when there was "a sufficient number of people" to warrant it.

- 'Abusive deportations' -

Under terms of the EU-Turkey deal, Greece began sending back irregular migrants from the islands on April 4, with more than 320 people expelled in the first week, most of them Pakistanis.

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The expulsions are aimed at easing the pressure on the European Union which is straining to cope with its worst migration crisis since World War II.

But the EU-sanctioned deportations have drawn sharp criticism, with Human Rights Watch describing them as "abusive" and expressing concern about the fate of the deportees.

"In the mad dash to start the deportations deal with Turkey, the European Union and Greece tossed rights to the wind, including for people who wanted to seek asylum, said HRW's Fred Abrahams.

"The abusive deportations expose the fundamental flaws in the EUs expedited mass returns to a country that cannot be considered safe."

It said the deportees had not been informed they were going to be expelled, were not told where they were being taken and some of them were not allowed to take their personal possessions.

Once in Turkey, they were unreachable on their mobile phones and the Turkish authorities had not allowed humanitarian organisations access to them, HRW said.

- Fast-tracking applications -

With the help of around 100 European experts, Greek officials have begun examining hundreds of asylum requests under an expedited procedure which takes 15 days, SOMP said.

Those who fail to make a claim, or whose application for asylum is rejected face being sent back to Turkey.

Since the deal went into effect, new arrivals on the Greek Islands have stabilised at around 100 a day -- a tenth of the daily figure last year.

Despite the reduction, the arrivals would still amount to "more than 3,000 a month" which would be difficult for Greece to manage "if, in parallel, the European plan for redistributing refugees who have arrived since March 20 doesn't pick up pace," the spokesman said.

Some 50,000 people, many of them fleeing the war in Syria, have been stranded in Greece since the closure of the migrant route through the Balkans in February.

More than 10,000 of them are stuck in a slum-like camp at Idomeni on the Macedonian border, which has seen a growing number of violent incidents sparked by desperate attempts to break through the frontier.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers are struggling in the heat of the 2016 campaign to find new ways to help treat millions of long-neglected mentally ill Americans.

While the two parties are light years apart on Obamacare and health care reform more generally, they are eagerly seeking common ground on mental health issues in the wake of numerous mass shootings over the last few years.

Related: As Heroin Addiction Grows Like a Cancer, Obama Orders New Health Treatments

Republicans argue that gun-related violence can best be addressed through increases in mental health programs and spending, rather than by toughening gun-control laws. We have seen consistently that an underlying cause of these attacks has been mental illness, and we should look at ways to address this problem, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI) said recently.

President Obama and the Democrats agree that it is essential to revamp the federal mental health system to begin to address increased violence and mass shootings in the country. But Democrats also feel strongly that the gun laws, especially regarding background checks of gun purchasers, should be addressed in tandem with the mental health proposals -- and that could prove to be a major sticking point.

If were looking at the gap between the parties, Democrats are very fearful that Republicans are going to use the mental health issue to basically say, See, weve done something about guns, Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, said on Tuesday. Theyve got a point, certainly. But if the idea is that you basically kill action on a bill because some people are going to use it as traction on the gun issue, its pretty unfortunate.

While the federal government spends an estimated $130 billion a year on more than 100 mental health programs, the mental health treatment system is most notable for its glaring deficits. The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations calls it a chaotic patchwork of antiquated programs and ineffective policies across numerous agencies.

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For instance:

More than 11 million Americans suffer from severe schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, by some estimates, yet many go without treatment as their families struggle to find affordable care. There is a shortage of nearly 100,000 psychiatric beds nationwide, in part because of outmoded restrictions on Medicaid spending.

Prisons and jails have long been used as dumping grounds for profoundly mentally ill people, which has led to unspeakable abuses, neglect and deaths. According to a report by CBSs Sixty Minutes , the mentally ill now make up more than 40 percent of the inmate population in New York Citys notorious Rikers Island prison.

Federal privacy rules often prevent family members of mentally ill patients from obtaining needed information from doctors and hospitals about the condition and treatment of their loved ones.

There is no federal mental health czar or top level official to coordinate the work of federal and state programs.

Members of Congress ranging from Sens. Christopher Murphy (D-CT), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Al Franken (D-MN) and John Cornyn (R-TX) to Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA), a trained psychologist, and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) have offered a wealth of ideas on how to proceed.

Related: How the Mentally Ill Are Being Warehoused in Prisons

Tim Murphy and Johnson, for instance, have advanced legislation that would consolidate federal mental-health programs under a single assistant secretary; spend more to expand treatment services; and reform commitment procedures to better target the most severe and potentially dangerous cases.

The bill would also eliminate an anachronistic Medicaid Institutions for Mental Disease (IMD) exclusion dating back to the mid-1960s. That provision strictly limits the use of Medicaid to cover the treatment of people with mental illnesses and drug addictions in residential facilities.

Many of the legislative proposals from both sides of the aisle and both chambers are complicated and controversial, especially over issues of federal privacy restrictions on doctors in discussing their patients conditions with family members. And the various proposals have pitted mental health advocacy groups against one another.

Related: The New War on Heroin Has Only Just Begun

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut freshman who took office shortly after the Sandy Hook shootings, sponsored a bill similar to Tim Murphys measure in the House. But it has been significantly watered down in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) and lacks many of the features of the House bill, including a provision addressing the limit on the number of hospital beds eligible for coverage under Medicaid.

Champions of mental health reforms are hopeful a compromise can still be worked out to make the Senate version palatable to the House. But there is another obstacle to passage of legislation this year that wont be as easy to overcome.

Democrats have pressed for consideration of new gun control measures as amendments to the new health reform legislation, despite strong opposition from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

The Morning Consult reported last week McConnell and other Senate GOP leaders are determined to oppose bringing a bill to the floor this year if it means that vulnerable GOP senators up for reelection would be forced to vote on controversial gun amendments before the November election.

Related: State Prisons Break Away from Soaring Cost Trends

Democrats nonetheless have been aggressive on the gun issue, and appear bent on forcing votes whenever possible and keeping up a steady stream of passionate floor speeches about gun violence, according to Morning Consult.

This bill is not a gun issue, its a mental-health issue, Tim Murphy, the House member, told The Washington Post earlier this year. I think it diminishes its importance to say this is the counterpoint to gun control. Its not.

A spokesman for McConnell said last week that no decisions have been made yet on the timing of bringing the mental health legislation to the floor, nor whether gun control amendments would be made germane.

For now, agreement on the first major rewriting of federal mental health legislation in a half century seems a long-shot at best, yet some believe the two sides will come together, either before the election or during a lame-duck session in late November or early December.

John Snook, the head of a non-partisan group that fights for legislative reforms of programs that help mentally ill Americans, said last week that until recently he was highly skeptical that Congress could wrap its arms around an issue so complex and approve major legislation this year.

Related: A New Push to Boost Spending on Mental Health

However, in the past several weeks, he said, House and Senate Democratic and Republican players have begun talks that could potentially lead to new landmark legislation before the end of the year.

Just as the epidemic of heroin and opioid drug abuse has captured the attention of millions of Americans, mental health issues have captivated the concern of lawmakers from across the country in the wake of the mass shootings at schools, colleges, churches and the workplace.

Honestly, before these discussions, I probably would have told you that we were at a point where things were just too polarized and too broken, said Snook, the Executive Director of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Virginia. But you now have members of Congress  representatives and senators  who typically arent talking about any other issue, but they are having conversations on these mental health issues. And Im really optimistic that were getting things done.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Attackers armed with guns and grenades burst into a bar and opened fire, killing a woman and seriously wounding three other customers in Burundi's capital Bujumbura on Monday night, police said. Officers said they were still investigating the motive for the attack in Ngagara neighbourhood, near a base housing police officers in charge of protecting government offices. Retaliatory attacks between President Pierre Nkurunziza's security forces and his opponents have escalated since April 2015 when he announced a disputed bid for a third term and then won re-election in July. Nkurunziza's opponents said his decision violated the constitution and a peace deal that ended the central African country's 1993-2005 civil war. The government cited a subsequent court ruling that said he could run again. Three people in civilian clothes and armed with guns and grenades burst into a bar opened fire on a group of people who were having beer there. One lady died instantly three others were serious injured," Deputy Police Spokesman Moise Nkurunziza told Reuters. If it was just robbery, they would have taken money and not killed innocent people," he added. "Lets wait the outcome of investigations." U.N. officials have said the crisis risks pushing Burundi back to the kind of ethnically charged conflict that characterised the war, in which 300,000 people died. About 250,000 people have fled since violence erupted, most to border camps in neighbouring Tanzania and more than 400 people have been killed in the ensuing violence, according to estimates by the U.N. and rights groups. A U.N. report seen by Reuters on Monday, said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has proposed sending between 20 and 3,000 police to Burundi, but warned that the government had indicated it would only accept 20 unarmed experts. (Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Dresden (Germany) (AFP) - The founder of Germany's xenophobic and anti-Islamic Pegida movement went on trial Tuesday on hate speech charges for allegedly branding refugees "cattle" and "scum" on social media.

Lutz Bachmann, founder of the far-right "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident" movement, was charged in October with inciting racial hatred through a series of widely-shared Facebook posts.

The trial was held under tight security in Dresden in the former communist east, the birthplace of Pegida, which bitterly opposes Chancellor Angela Merkel's liberal migration policy that brought more than one million asylum seekers to Germany last year.

The court said the 43-year-old's comments, which date back to September 2014, constituted an "attack on the dignity" of refugees.

If found guilty, Bachmann could face between three months and five years in jail.

Bachmann, who has branded the process a "political show trial", appeared smiling at the court, wearing a pair of glasses that mimicked the black bars printed over people's eyes in censored photos.

Outside the court, several dozen supporters cheered Bachmann and waved signs that demanded putting "Merkel on trial", as chanting counter demonstrators yelled "Jail for Bachmann".

While he did not speak in court, his defence lawyer Katja Reichel said Bachmann had not written the offending words, and that rather his Facebook account may have been "hacked".

However, the court also watched video footage of a Pegida rally in January 2015 where Bachmann appeared to be defending the Facebook comments, saying he had merely "used words that everyone has used at least once".

Pegida rallies at that time peaked at around 25,000 people, but interest then began to wane following wide coverage of Bachmann's overtly-racist comments and the surfacing of "selfies" in which he sported a Hitler-style moustache and hairstyle.

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- 'Criminal invaders' -

The pendulum swung back a few months later, as tens of thousands of asylum-seekers -- many fleeing war in mostly Muslim countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan -- poured into Germany each week.

Bachmann has repeatedly labelled the newcomers "criminal invaders" while also railing against "traitor" politicians and the "liar press", whom he blames for jointly promoting multiculturalism.

At Pegida's weekly rally in Dresden on Monday, Bachmann made no reference to his trial but waded into a row over a German TV comedian who wrote a satirical poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Popular comic Jan Boehmermann could be convicted under a rarely-enforced section of the criminal code -- insulting organs or representatives of foreign states.

"Imagine the outcry... if that poem had been written by me," Bachmann told a crowd of several thousand.

"I would have been immediately arrested on stage, placed in custody... (and) executed," he said sardonically.

A trained chef and head of a public relations agency, Bachmann has previously been convicted of drug, theft and assault charges.

In the late 1990s, he left Germany for South Africa to avoid a jail term, but was extradited two years later and served some 14 months behind bars in Germany.

- Hotspot for attacks -

The eastern state of Saxony, of which Dresden is the capital, has been a hotspot for many of the 800 attacks on refugee shelters recorded in Germany last year.

Small towns such as Freital near Dresden earned nationwide notoriety last year as neo-Nazis and angry residents hurled abuse at people fleeing war and misery -- and rocks at police sent to protect those seeking a safe haven.

An elite German police anti-terror unit carried out dawn raids Tuesday to capture five right-wing extremist suspects accused of attacking refugee shelters and political opponents, federal prosecutors said.

The suspects, four men and a woman, are accused of belonging to a far-right terrorist organisation called the Freital Group.

"According to preliminary investigations, the aim of the group was to carry out explosives attacks on homes for asylum seekers as well as the homes of political opponents," the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

It said the suspects stockpiled hundreds of fireworks from the Czech Republic to use in attacks. The assaults include blowing out the windows of the kitchen of a refugee shelter in Freital in September 2015.
By Frank Simon OGGERSHEIM, Germany (Reuters) - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a fierce critic of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door refugee policy, and her ex-mentor Helmut Kohl agreed on Tuesday it was questionable whether Europe could continue to absorb migrants indefinitely. Orban and Kohl issued a joint statement after the right-wing Hungarian leader paid a rare private visit to the 86-year-old Kohl, architect of Germany's 1990 reunification and a major driver of European integration in the 1990s. Orban's meeting with Kohl, 86, who makes only rare public appearances and is largely wheelchair bound, stoked speculation that it was meant as a snub to Merkel and that Germany's foremost elder statesman disagrees with her course. Trying to play down talk of any such rift, the Kohl-Orban statement said they and Merkel shared the overall objective of alleviating the humanitarian emergency represented by migrants but signaled differences over how to tackle the challenge. "There is complete agreement on the goal," the two said in the statement issued by Kohl's office after the hour-long Orban visit to the conservative Christian Democrat's longtime home in Oggersheim near the Rhine river in southwestern Germany. "It is about a good future for Europe and peace in the world. The efforts of (Merkel) point in the same direction." But, they added, "how many people can Europe sensibly take in and in the end integrate? And what happens to the remaining millions of people in need around the world who cannot flee?" Critics say Merkel's decision last year to let in Syrian refugees without restriction contributed to the arrival of more than 1 million asylum-seekers in Germany - the great majority of those reaching European Union territory - in the last year. HUNGARY SLAMS DOOR TO REFUGEES By contrast, Orban's government has built a razor wire fence on Hungary's border with Serbia and Croatia to keep out mostly Muslim migrants, citing the need to help safeguard Europe's Christian civilization. In a column published on Sunday in Berlin's Tagespiegel daily, Kohl said he did not think the EU could integrate millions of refugees. "The solution lies in the affected regions. It does not lie in Europe. Europe cannot become a new home for millions of people in need around the world," he wrote. Merkel has acted of late to deter an uncontrolled influx of migrants into the EU and defuse intensifying criticism from her conservative Bavarian coalition ally and the public at large. Last week, she agreed to require migrants granted residence rights to show willingness to integrate by learning German and seeking work or see their benefits cut. Her government has also introduced steps to speed up processing of applications and deportations of those refused permission to stay. Neighboring Austria as well as Balkan countries have also sealed their borders against undocumented migrants, cutting their overland route from Greece to Germany. The migrant flow has since ebbed and the pressure on Merkel has eased. She appeared relaxed about Orban's visit with Kohl, saying the two had known each other a long time and the talks were "sensible and useful". Orban presented Kohl with a Hungarian-language version of the former chancellor's book "Out of Concern for Europe". Kohl governed from 1982 to 1998, during which the Berlin Wall fell and Communism collapsed in eastern Europe. Merkel was his protege in the 1990s but their relations cooled after she called on the Christian Democrats (CDU) to break with their "old warhorse" over a party funding scandal. Since then, Kohl has voiced doubt about some of Merkel's policies, including her handling of the euro zone debt crisis. (Reporting by Reuters Television, Thorsten Severin and Krisztina Than in Budapest; Writing by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Washington (AFP) - The International Monetary Fund has suspended aid to Mozambique after discovering the country had hidden debt of more than $1 billion.

"The undisclosed borrowing exceeds $1 billion and significantly changes our assessment of Mozambique's macroeconomic outlook," said Antoinette Sayeh, head of the IMF's African Department, in a statement to AFP on Tuesday.

As a result, the global crisis lender has cancelled a staff mission to the African country this week that was part of its $283 million standby credit facility and a policy support program from the IMF.

That cancellation of the mission effectively puts on hold any disbursements from the facility. A first instalment of $117.9 million was made in December to help the country cope with lower commodity prices that have depressed revenues.

Mozambican Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho Rosario on Tuesday began an emergency visit to Washington to meet with IMF and World Bank officials.

Aid has been suspended "pending a full disclosure and assessment of the facts," on the unreported borrowing, Sayeh said.

"It is difficult to imagine how the government will provide a satisfactory explanation for its handling of the debt," wrote Anne Fruhauf of the New York-based Teneo Intelligence in a note to investors.

"All this will have a massive impact on virtually every financial lifeline available to Maputo, at a time when the country thought it was just getting past its balance of payments tight spot."

Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world, and a quarter of its budget comes from donors.

The discovery of oil in 2010 sparked a period of optimistic growth and investment, but the fall in world prices of raw materials saw the local currency, the metical, drop by more than 40 percent against the US dollar last year.

In December 2014, the IMF froze financial aid to another African country, Mali, for six months after discovering "lapses" in public financial management and the purchase of a new $40 million presidential airplane.
New Delhi (AFP) - The Indian government said Tuesday it would make "all possible efforts" get back a priceless diamond that is part of the Queen Mother's Crown, only a day after telling a top court the stone belonged to Britain.

The 108-carat Koh-i-Noor gem, which came into British hands during the colonial era, is the subject of a historic ownership dispute and has been claimed by at least four countries including India.

India's Solicitor General (SG) sparked uproar after telling the Supreme Court, which is hearing a suit seeking return of the stone, on Monday that the gem was given to the British and not stolen.

"The government of India wishes to put on record that certain news items appearing in the press regarding the Kohinoor Diamond are not based on facts," the government said in a statement late Tuesday.

"[The government]... further reiterates its resolve to make all possible efforts to bring back the Kohinoor Diamond in an amicable manner," it added.

SG Ranjit Kumar told the court that 19th-century Sikh king Ranjit Singh had given the gem to Britain.

"It was given voluntarily by Ranjit Singh to the British as compensation for help in the Sikh Wars. The Koh-i-Noor is not a stolen object," Kumar said.

The government said Tuesday that the SG's comments did not reflect the official stance of the government.

It added that what the SG said was a "preliminary submission" and had references to stands taken by earlier governments including India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1956, when he said "there was no ground to claim this art treasure back."

It cited three other "significant pieces of India's history coming back home" from Australia, Canada and Germany since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in May 2014.

"Thus, with regard to the Kohinoor Diamond too, Government of India remains hopeful for an amicable outcome whereby India gets back a valued piece of art with strong roots in our nationas history," it said.

The Koh-i-Noor diamond is now set in the crown that was worn by Queen Elizabeth's mother until her death in 2002, and is on public display in the Tower of London.

Its name translates as "Mountain of Light" and it is traditionally worn by a queen -- it is said to bring bad luck to any man who wears it.
Tehran (AFP) - Iran will not accept an oil output freeze because it would effectively mean a prolonging of sanctions, its oil minister said Tuesday, insisting rival producers caused a supply-led price slide.

Iran has been pumping more crude since sanctions were lifted on January 16 under its nuclear deal with major powers, aiming to regain market share lost in recent years but adding to a global glut.

Oil prices rebounded last week on hopes that major producers -- including the largest two, Russia and Saudi Arabia -- would agree at a weekend meeting in Doha to freeze output at January levels.

Prices plunged early Monday soon after news that the long-awaited meeting in Doha had collapsed with no decision taken, but they recovered in volatile trading on Tuesday.

OPEC cartel member Iran did not send a representative to the Doha meeting and Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh's comments underlined why Tehran sees no justification for changing its stance.

"Accepting a production freeze in practice amounts to a voluntary acceptance of sanctions by our country after years of effort to have them lifted," state television quoted Zanganeh as saying.

"A freeze by Iran at January 2016 production levels would mean that sanctions are not lifted and Iran's exports would be stabilised at the sanctions level."

Sanctions were lifted in return for curbs on the Islamic republic's nuclear programme, which saw the OPEC cartel-member return to world oil markets and increase exports to around two million barrels per day, up from just over one million bpd previously.

Zanganeh, without naming any states, blamed other producers for the oversupply.

"Some countries imagine that after the lifting of sanctions they can create an atmosphere among oil producers to distract public opinion from the fact they have caused the market instability.

"Iran has had no role in destabilising the oil market and those who were responsible for this instability and the saturation of the market are now trying to escape from it," he said.

Zanganeh, however, endorsed the talks in Qatar as "a start for cooperation among non-member and OPEC countries for returning stability to the oil market".
Washington (AFP) - Iran has so far seen only around $3 billion in previously frozen assets returned since it struck a nuclear deal with world powers, US Secretary of State John Kerry said.

The extent to which Tehran stands to gain from the agreement to place its nuclear program under tight controls has been a matter of fierce debate since Iran signed the accord last year.

In the United States, Republican opponents of the deal have alleged that it will allow Iran to get its hands on more than $100 billion with which it could fund "terrorism" against American allies.

Meanwhile, in Iran, officials have complained that the country has yet to see much benefit from the end of nuclear sanctions, as banks and private companies have been slow to renew ties with the former pariah.

The US administration has been trying to find its way between the competing claims, insisting it has met its side of the bargain in lifting sanctions while vowing it will not tolerate Iranian backsliding.

And so Kerry, who is to meet with his Iranian counterpart Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in New York on Tuesday, hit back against critics of the deal, insisting their figures are wrong.

"Remember the debate over how much money Iran was going to get?" he said to delegates at a dinner hosted by the progressive pro-Israel group J Street.

"Sometimes you hear some of the presidential candidates putting out a mistaken figure of $155 billion. I never thought it would be that.

"Others thought it would be about $100 billion, because there was supposedly about $100 billion that was frozen and so forth," he continued.

"We calculated it to be about $55 billion, when you really take a hard look at the economy and what is happening," he said, giving the usual State Department estimate.

"Guess what folks. You know how much they have received to date? As I stand here tonight, about $3 billion."

The United States has not had diplomatic relations with Tehran since April 1980, but Kerry got to know Zarif while negotiating the nuclear deal, and the two speak fairly regularly.

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Tuesday's meeting in New York will be the pair's first face-to-face encounter since January 16, when they met in Vienna to formally implement the accord.

Iranian officials have since begun to complain the United States has not lived up to its side of the agreement, as sanctions aimed at its missile program and financing of militias abroad have continued.

But Washington has also pointed the finger, warning that it retains the right to impose new sanctions if Iran's ballistic missile tests breach separate United Nations resolutions not covered by the nuclear deal.
Baghdad (AFP) - Embattled Iraqi parliament speaker Salim al-Juburi Tuesday announced the suspension of parliament sessions "until further notice" after a week of turmoil during which lawmakers brawled and sought to sack him.

The political crisis comes as Iraq battles the Islamic State jihadist group, which overran large areas in 2014, and contends with a serious economic crisis caused by low oil prices and years of mismanagement and corruption.

Both the United States and the United Nations have warned that the crisis could distract from efforts to combat IS.

Some MPs voted last week to remove Juburi and elected Adnan al-Janabi as his interim replacement, meaning there are now two claimants to the speakership.

Juburi insists the vote to sack him and his deputies was invalid because the session lacked the necessary quorum, but his opponents are seeking to move ahead with selecting replacements.

"I announce the suspension of sessions... of the Iraqi parliament until further notice," Juburi said in a statement.

But Janabi has called for a session to be held on Thursday, so MPs may still meet without Juburi's leadership.

Juburi's decision was taken to "preserve the reputation of parliament" and prevent it from being "a place for conflict", he said.

There has been plenty of conflict in parliament over the past week: lawmakers held an overnight sit-in and threw punches in the chamber, as well as seeking to sack Juburi.

The turmoil began with disagreement over proposed cabinet line-ups presented by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, but shifted to calls for Juburi to go.

Abadi has sought to replace the cabinet of party-affiliated ministers with a government of technocrats, but has faced significant opposition from powerful political parties that rely on control of ministries for patronage and funds.

President Fuad Masum proposed a plan to end the parliamentary leadership crisis, but the session he called for failed to resolve differences among lawmakers.

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Under Masum's plan, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, parliament was to convene for an "extraordinary session" to vote on whether or not to remove Juburi and his two deputies.

The proposal was accepted by Juburi but rejected by his opponents on the grounds that it would return to the issue of whether or not he should stay in office, which they insist has already been resolved.

According to a parliamentary official who was present, Janabi presided at the Tuesday session, announcing that nominations would be accepted to replace Juburi and his deputies and saying the next meeting would be on Thursday.

The move was criticised by lawmakers who do not support Juburi's removal, meaning parliament will remain divided for now.

Abadi called on Monday for parliament to put aside its differences and do its job, saying he hoped for a vote on a new cabinet within days -- something that looks increasingly unlikely.
Washington (AFP) - US President Barack Obama said he expects Iraq's second city Mosul to be retaken from the Islamic State group "eventually".

Obama's comments in an interview with CBS News on Monday came on the same day that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Washington would send Apache attack helicopters and more troops to Iraq.

"As we see the Iraqis willing to fight and gaining ground, let's make sure that we're providing them more support," Obama said.

"We're not doing the fighting ourselves, but when we provide training, when we provide special forces who are backing them up, when we are gaining intelligence -- working with the coalitions that we have -- what we've seen is that we can continually tighten the noose," he added.

"My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall."

Mosul, in northern Iraq, was overrun during a jihadist offensive in June 2014 and has become an IS stronghold.

Washington heads an international coalition that is carrying out strikes against IS and also providing training and other assistance to forces fighting the jihadists in both Iraq and neighboring Syria.

Carter, on an unannounced trip to Baghdad, said the Apaches being sent to Iraq will support Iraqi efforts to surround and eventually recapture Mosul.

Iraqi forces have begun preparatory operations in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, but the actual assault to retake the city is not expected for months, and possibly not until next year.
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Islamic State militants seized Syrian government-controlled territory in the eastern Syrian city of Deir al-Zor on Tuesday, a war monitor and a news agency affiliated with the ultra-hardline Islamist group said. Islamic State took complete control of the city's industrial district after fierce clashes with Syrian government and allied forces, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The militant group captured nearly all of Deir al-Zor province, which borders Iraq, after seizing the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014. The Syrian government, however, still controls part of the city of Deir al-Zor, which is besieged by Islamic State fighters, and an air base. Five air strikes and shelling hit the area of fighting that was moving south towards the city's military airport, the Observatory said. The Amaq news agency, affiliated with Islamic State, also said the group had taken positions previously controlled by the Syrian government in the industrial district, and was pushing south into the next district. Syrian state news agency SANA did not mention gains made by Islamic State, but said Syrian forces destroyed some Islamic State arms caches in the industrial neighborhood. Syrian and allied forces, supported by Russian air support, pushed Islamic State out of the ancient city of Palmyra in central Syria last month, eroding links between the group's presence in the west and east of the country. The militants seized the city in May 2015. (Reporting by Lisa Barrington; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israeli authorities on Tuesday were investigating a Jerusalem bus bombing that wounded 21 people and raised fears of a sharp escalation in violence, while police planned tightened security for the Jewish Passover holiday.

The bomb tore through a bus in a relatively isolated area of southern Jerusalem on Monday night, with the fire spreading to a second bus.

In total at least 21 people were wounded, police said, with Israeli media reporting a 15-year-old girl in serious condition.

Israeli domestic security agency Shin Bet referred to the explosion as a "terror attack".

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld confirmed officers were seeking to question the wounded and did not rule out the possibility of potential suspects among them.

"The investigation is looking to see how the explosive device was placed on the bus," he said.

Police imposed a gag order on further details of the investigation and any suspects.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to "find whoever prepared this explosive device".

"We'll settle the score with these terrorists."

The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which rules the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip, welcomed the attack but there was no claim of responsibility.

The explosion comes with tensions high following a wave of violence that has killed 201 Palestinians and 28 Israelis since last October.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, according to Israeli authorities.

However the level of violence had decreased in the weeks before the bombing.

- Intifada fears -

Bus bombings were common during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the early 2000s, but Monday's attack was the first bomb targeting a bus in Jerusalem since 2011, when a British tourist was killed.

In Tel Aviv, a bomb exploded on an empty bus in 2013 in what Israeli authorities called a "terrorist" attack.

Nir Hasson, writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, called such scenes the "ultimate Jerusalem nightmare."

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"Fifteen years have passed since these scenes were repeating themselves on a weekly basis."

But Avi Dichter, a lawmaker and former Shin Bet chief, stressed the bomb did far less damage than those during the intifada.

The frame of the bus was still largely intact, unlike with larger bombs.

"The explosive charge was much lower than those we experienced during the suicide bombings of the second intifada," Dichter told public radio.

The blast comes ahead of the Jewish Passover holiday, which starts on Friday evening.

The Israeli government regularly closes off access to Israel for Palestinians during major Jewish religious festivals, and is expected to do so again.

Rosenfeld said the threat level would be raised during the week-long holiday.

"Security assessments were made immediately yesterday evening following the attack," he told AFP.

"Extra police units and border police are patrolling public areas," including bus stations and the light rail tram system in the city, he said, without specifying how many reinforcements.

Thousands of Jewish pilgrims flock to Jerusalem and other holy sites during Passover, which commemorates the Jewish exodus from Egypt in Biblical times.

Brachie Sprung, spokeswoman for Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, said the city council was not planning any changes to its schedule.

"We are telling people to go back to normal -- we don't cancel events," she told AFP. "We talk about being super cautious but going back to normal as quickly as possible."

Itamar Yaar, former deputy head of Israel's National Security Council, said he did not expect any major security clampdown in the city.

"I really don't think there will be any change in the Israeli behaviour," Yaar told AFP. "Perhaps in the first few days you will see more checks at checkpoints.

"But the most effective activities in this case are collecting intelligence and trying to reach the people that organised it."

Separately on Tuesday, an Israeli court ruled that a Jewish man found to be the ringleader of the beating and burning alive of a Palestinian teenager in 2014 was sane and convicted him of the attack.

Israeli settler Yosef Haim Ben-David, 31, was found in November to have led the assault, but his lawyers had submitted last-minute documents claiming he suffered from mental illness.
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel remains in favour of installing security cameras at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, even after Jordan reneged on the project due to Palestinian reservations, a senior official said Tuesday.

"Israel's support for placing cameras on the Temple Mount remains unchanged. That's because we believe in transparency," the Israeli official told AFP on condition of anonymity, using the Jewish term for the site.

"It is regrettable that the Palestinian Authority objects to this idea. It's clear that they don't want repeated Palestinian provocations caught on tape," the official said.

Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Nsur had on Monday announced his state would not be proceeding with its plan to install 55 cameras at the site, Islam's third holiest, citing Palestinian "doubts about the aims of the project".

"Because we respect the point of view of the Palestinians... we believe the project is no longer consensual, but a potential source of conflict, and have decided to end it," he said.

On March 20, Jordan said it would set up the security cameras around the flashpoint compound to monitor any Israeli "violations".

The site, which is revered by Jews as their holiest, is administered by a Jordanian trust or "Waqf".

In October, after meeting Jordan's King Abdullah II and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, US Secretary of State John Kerry endorsed a plan for cameras at the site in a bid to calm repeated disturbances.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed.

Kerry hailed the agreement as an important breakthrough at the time. On Monday the US State Department expressed disappointment that the plan has apparently failed.

"We still see the value in the use of cameras," said spokesman John Kirby.

The compound in east Jerusalem, which was occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed in a move not recognised internationally, houses the famed golden Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque.

Clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli security forces erupted at the compound last September amid fears among Muslims that Israel was planning to change rules governing the site which enable only Muslims to pray.

Netanyahu has repeatedly said there are no such plans.
Paris (AFP) - After disappointment at being left out of the main competition at Cannes next month, three Italian films were included in the Director's Fortnight contest held alongside the prestigious cinema showcase.

Italian cinema great Marco Bellochio, 76, saw his latest film "Fai Bei Sogni" (Sweet Dreams) chosen to open the increasingly prized sidebar competition, after being snubbed in the Palme d'Or selection.

The film about a boy coping with the death of his mother is his first to be shown at Cannes since "Vincere" (To Win) was shown in the main competition in 2009.

The other two Italian films are "Fiore" by Claudio Giovannesi, set in a juvenile detention centre, and "La Pazza Gioia" (Like Crazy) -- about two patients who escape a mental institution.

They are among 18 feature films chosen for the Director's Fortnight, which often offers up some of the most raved about films during Cannes.

"This year there is a mixture of the veterans, Jodorowsky, Bellochio, and the youth," said Director's Fortnight artistic director Edouard Waintrop.

Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, 87, will present his autobiographical feature "Poesia sin Fin" (Endless Poetry).

Another film initially slated to be included in the main competition that ended up in the Director's Fortnight is "L'Economie du Couple", a tale of a divorced couple who continue to live under the same roof for economic reasons, by Belgian director Joachim Lafosse.

Chilean director Pablo Larrain's "Neruda", starring Gael Garcia Bernal as an inspector hunting for poet Pablo Neruda, who became a wanted man in Chile in the late '40s for his communist sympathies, also got the nod.

Indian director Anurag Kashyap -- who directed the acclaimed psychological thriller "Ugly", shown at Cannes in 2013 -- returns to the genre with "Psycho Raman" about a serial killer terrorising Mumbai in the '60s.

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American director Laura Poitras, who won an Oscar for "Citizenfour" about fugitive US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden, will be showing her latest documentary "Risk" focusing on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The independent competition will end with "Dog Eat Dog" by Paul Schrader, director of the 1980 crime drama American Gigolo and author of numerous screenplays for Martin Scorsese films, including "Taxi Driver".

Starring Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe, "Dog Eat Dog" follows three ex-cons trying to adapt to life outside bars.

The traditional animated film entry will this year be Claude Barras' debut "Ma Vie de Courgette" (My Life as a Courgette) about a nine-year-old boy making it in a foster home after his mother's sudden death.
By Gavin Jones ROME (Reuters) - Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Tuesday defeated two parliamentary no-confidence motions tabled by opposition parties that accuse his government of conflicts of interest and bowing to industrial and banking lobbies. Both motions, which were voted on in the upper house Senate, were comfortably beaten as expected, with Renzi relying on the support of his center Democratic Party (PD) and its center allies. The first motion, filed by the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, was defeated by 183 votes to 96. The second, tabled by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party and the right-wing Northern League, was rejected by 180 to 93. Renzi, who would have been forced to resign if he had lost either vote, defended his government's record and said the motions were a waste of parliament's time and aimed only at grabbing the attention of the media. "Politics is about respecting those who govern and it's about constructive opposition, not constantly shouting," he told the senators. He then left the Senate without waiting for the vote, to the protests of the opposition. The 41-year-old premier, who took office in February 2014, has seen his personal approval ratings fall steadily over the last year, although the PD remains Italy's most popular party, according to opinion polls. He got a boost on Sunday when a referendum aimed at curbing Italy's offshore oil and gas industry failed to secure the necessary quorum, with a sizeable majority of voters shunning the ballot as Renzi had advised. The no-confidence motions follow the resignation last month of Industry Minister Federica Guidi in an influence-peddling scandal. Phone-tapped conversations released by police appeared to show Guidi assuring her partner the government would pass legislation that helped his energy business. "This government has to go because it only acts in the interests of the lobbies, their friends and their relatives," 5-Star founder Beppe Grillo said on his blog before the votes. In December, Constitutional Reforms Minister Maria Elena Boschi, one of Renzi's closest allies, faced down calls to resign over an alleged conflict of interest after a banking scandal that left thousands of savers out of pocket. Her father, a former vice-president of one of the banks involved, was fined by the Bank of Italy for misconduct. (Reporting by Gavin Jones; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Japanese beer giant Asahi Group said Tuesday it would buy the Peroni and Gro lsch brands from the world's top brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev, clearing a key regulatory hurdle for the Belgium-based firm's tie-up with SABMiller.

Terms of the deal -- which also includes UK craft brewer Meantime -- were not released Tuesday, but AB InBev in February said Asahi had offered 2.55 billion euros ($2.8 billion) for the brands.

"This transaction will be completed concurrently with and subject to the completing of AB InBev's acquisition of SABMiller," Asahi said in a brief statement, adding that it expected the deal to be completed in the second half of the year.

AB InBev said last year it wanted to sell the Italian, Dutch and British lineup in order to ease competition concerns and win approval from regulators.

In November, AB Inbev -- which owns Corona, Beck's, Budweiser and Stella Artois -- announced it had agreed to take over British rival SABMiller for $121 billion, the third largest acquisition in history, that would make it a juggernaut brewing three times as much beer as its nearest rival.

Together, the two brewers would be behind one in three beers sold globally, according to market research group Euromonitor International.

Last month, InBev said it would sell SABMiller's stake in leading Chinese beermaker Snow Breweries to a local firm for $1.6 billion, in a move that appeared aimed at persuading Chinese regulators to sign off on the giant merger deal.

AB InBev sees the buyout of SABMiller as a key way to counterweight falling beer demand in big markets by building its presence in Africa and other regions where sales are going up.

The Belgian-Brazilian brewer, which saw its net profit fall nearly four percent in 2015, earlier warned that problems persisted in once-shining markets in China and Brazil last year, putting even more pressure to finish the SABMiller deal.

- 'Opting for European brands'-

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Asahi is well known abroad for a beer brand called Super Dry, which debuted in 1987 at the height of Japan's boom years, before a stock market and property crash ushered in a slow economic decline.

The Asahi deal marks one of the largest overseas takeovers for a Japanese beermaker, which have been shopping abroad in recent years to counter a shrinking market at home.

Two years ago, Suntory said it would pay about $16 billion for the US firm behind Jim Beam bourbon in one of the biggest-ever overseas acquisitions by a Japanese company.

The Tuesday deal marks Asahi's first major European acquisition, and one that could pose challenges for a company unfamiliar with the market, said Credit Suisse analyst Masashi Mori.

"That's why I have some concerns. Asahi's main market is still Asia-Pacific," he added.

But "Asahi and other Japanese firms are now looking for acquisition targets outside Asia-Pacific, where some domestic players are getting bigger and will cost too much for Japanese firms to buy. That is why Asahi is opting for European brands."

Asahi, whose domestic competitors include Suntory and brewer Kirin, posted annual sales of $1.85 trillion yen ($16.9 billion) last year.
By Taiga Uranaka and Ritsuko Shimizu

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Seven & i <3382.T> named an executive backed by U.S. activist investor Daniel Loeb as its new leader, ending two weeks of management turmoil at the $90 billion retail group in a case seen as a test of corporate governance in the country.

Seven & i, Japan's biggest retail group, said its board on Tuesday nominated Ryuichi Isaka, currently head of its profitable convenience store unit Seven-Eleven Japan, to be the president of the parent.

Isaka, 58, a career insider at Seven-Eleven Japan, has been credited with driving the growth of the convenience store chain. In an open letter addressed to Seven & i's board in March, Loeb had called Isaka the leading candidate to helm the group.

But earlier this month, Isaka was targeted by Seven & i's charismatic CEO Toshifumi Suzuki for an ouster, which failed after a close board vote, leading to the 83-year-old Suzuki resigning his post.

The leadership fight at the 7-Eleven parent is a sign of improving corporate governance in Japan as the board refused to rubber-stamp the powerful CEO, analysts have said.

Seven & i on Tuesday also nominated Katsuhiro Goto, currently its Chief Administrative Officer, to its No. 2 post, and Kazuki Furuya to succeed Isaka as president of Seven-Eleven Japan. The appointments are subject to approval by shareholders.

"We apologize to all stakeholders for creating disturbance over our personnel matters," Isaka said in a statement announcing the new management.

TOUGH TASK AHEAD

The new management, though, faces a tough task to steer the company that had been built up over decades by Suzuki, a legendary figure in Japan's retail industry, and to carry out a drastic restructuring of its loss-making supermarket chain Ito-Yokado demanded by Loeb's company Third Point and some other shareholders. Third Point owns an undisclosed stake in Seven & i.

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"They should work on improving profit, including giving consideration to Third Point's demand to offload it," said Takayuki Suzuki, an independent retail analyst, referring to Ito-Yokado.

Recent acquisitions of companies such as luxury clothing store Barneys Japan and mail-order business Nissen should also be reconsidered, he said.

"The M&A deals under Suzuki were mistakes. There were no synergies from Nissen and Barneys, and they needed to be cut off. So it will involve rejecting a lot of what was done under the Suzuki leadership," he said.

Seven & i shares, which have risen 5.5 percent since the management tussle took a dramatic turn two weeks ago, ended 1.2 percent higher on Tuesday, ahead of the announcement of the appointments.

(Additional reporting by Ritsuko Ando; Editing by Edwina Gibbs and Muralikumar Anantharaman)
Its been nine years since the onset of the great recession, and while the U.S. is generally in good shape, some areas havent seen the necessary growth to thrive. Detroit, for example, suffered such economic destruction and population loss over the years that a recovery seemed almost unthinkable.

But since exiting bankruptcy in 2014, things have been looking up. One bright spot in the turnaround came when JPMorgan Chase (JPM) said it would pledge $100 million over five years to revitalize Motor City. Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Andy Serwer spoke to chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon to find out why helping Detroit was so important to him.



Detroit's one of the only major American cities that didn't have a recovery, Dimon says in the video above. Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnatithey all had some kind of recovery.





(c) 2014 JPMorgan Chase

With JPMorgans already large presence in the city, it made sense that the bank would partner with Detroit's government. We're the biggest bank in Detroit already  consumer, small business, large corporations  so when we saw them [rebuilding the city], we said, We're going to roll up our sleeves and go help them," Dimon explains. We're helping them with work skills initiatives, we're helping them with affordable housing.

And you dont have to take his word for it. Serwer spoke to Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan about JPMorgan's partnership with the city. In Duggans view, the effects of the partnership have been huge.



Take for example housing. For one particular 200-unit housing development, JPMorgan invested $5 million, but Duggan notes that the money leveraged an additional $30 million from other parties who were putting in market rate loans. Because [the investment] has been done so strategically, the impact has very been significant.



While JPMorgan has been operating in the city for quite some time, Duggan says it had been years since the bank has shown this kind of commitment to the city, and he says it all comes down to Dimon.



Its really been Jamie Dimons interest personally, Duggan explains. He can you tell about the different neighborhoods in Detroit, what weve done to put the street lights on, and what the policing practices are  its a pretty remarkable commitment.
By Steve Bittenbender LOUISVILLE (Reuters) - Kentucky's Republican governor on Tuesday called for an investigation into how his Democratic predecessor awarded state contracts and solicited campaign contributions, opening a new round in the feud between the two political families. Governor Matt Bevin said he has asked for the hiring of a law firm to determine whether Steve Beshear's administration coerced state employees into donating to political campaigns. The call by Bevin comes just over a week after Beshear's son Andy, Kentucky's attorney general, sued Bevin in an effort to block funding cuts to public universities that he said are illegal. Bevin on Tuesday said his administration also has concerns about contracts, some issued through a no-bid process, that may have rewarded family members of Beshears staff. The law firm would have the ability to subpoena witnesses and records, and work closely with the state inspector general, he said. These discoveries ... raise questions that must be answered in an open and transparent way, Bevin, who is the just second Republican elected to the states highest office since 1971, said at a press conference. Only then will the citizens of the commonwealth begin to have confidence in their government. Beshear, who was barred from seeking reelection due to term limits, strongly denied the charges in a Facebook post. "There was never any attempt to pressure employees to make political contributions, and we followed both the spirit and the letter of procurement laws," he said, adding Bevin's move was a "pathetic spectacle." Andy Beshear said Bevin was not properly pursuing the issue. The attorney general said in a statement Tuesday that he agreed issues such as no-bid contracts should be scrutinized, including a pair awarded by Bevin's administration. "The governor is once again overstating his authority," Beshear said, adding that the Kentucky Executive Branch Ethics Commission and not the cabinet was the appropriate agency for any such probe. Before taking office in December, Bevin called Steve Beshear's appointment of his wife to an unpaid seat on the state horse park commission an "embarrassment." Meanwhile, the former governor has launched a campaign against Bevin's healthcare initiatives. (Reporting by Steve Bittenbender; Editing by Ben Klayman and Leslie Adler)
If you are interested in a career in medicine, you can begin to set yourself up for a lifetime of academic and professional success by taking a challenging, appropriately balanced curriculum in high school. High school students should begin their planning early, and they should consider the advice below.

[Find out about saving for medical school with a 529 plan.]

1. Understand the impact of your high school performance: Your high school achievements are primarily evident on your medical school application in terms of their impact on your college record. A rigorous high school curriculum affects the undergraduate programs you'll be admitted to, whether you earn college credit for your work in high school and how well prepared you are for college.

Generally, three factors matter most when applying to medical school: the college you attend, your undergraduate GPA and your MCAT score. You may receive college credit if you register for and excel in Advanced Placement or dual-enrollment classes, but even if you do not receive credit, you may understand the material more thoroughly when you take it at a finer level of detail in college, which thus makes it possible for you to improve your GPA.

In addition, each time you take a subject, you will likely find it easier to master, and, as previously mentioned, your knowledge of it will broaden. Cell biology is just one subject that a hopeful physician will study at every level, including medical school, and it may be wise to become intimately familiar with it early on.

[Understand the factors behind medical school admissions.]

2. Choose the correct courses: The ideal high school schedule includes AP, or honors classes if AP courses are not available. The hard sciences -- biology, chemistry and physics -- underpin the practice of medicine, and as the MCAT now integrates more disciplines than ever, it makes sense to complete both AP Biology and AP Chemistry. As you take these AP classes, focus on their overlap in areas like modern experimental techniques and molecular structure.

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Use your four years of high school to also take an advanced English course like AP English Language and Composition or AP English Literature and Composition. A science-minded student who can apply the critical reasoning and language skills required by the humanities will do better in both science classes and on the MCAT's Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills section.

Learning Latin can also improve your verbal ability. This can be invaluable on the SAT, and it can help you understand vocabulary in your science courses up to -- and especially including -- your medical education. Develop the habit of studying etymology, whether in Latin or in English class, such as when you encounter Greek poetry concepts.

When it comes to math, Algebra II is the minimum experience you will need to interpret graphs and solve equations in undergraduate science classes and on the MCAT. Higher-level math is always welcome, with calculus and statistics particularly complementing one another.

[Explore ways teens can prepare for medical or law school in high school.]

3. Select applicable extracurriculars: Be certain that you want a life in medicine, as it is an all-consuming, challenging career. The utility of shadowing physicians as an extracurricular depends on how you approach this experience -- doctors are busy, and you will not learn all you need to know about medicine from them.

But most physicians are caring people, and they enjoy helping a young person who hopes to follow the medical calling. Shadowing lets you listen closely to a doctor, which is an opportunity to gain an insider's perspective. Since you may not follow a physician all day, keep in mind that you may not be seeing all the settings in which he or she works: the clinic, emergency room, wards and more.

Volunteering in a nursing home can provide an additional opportunity to interact with doctors, as can volunteering as an EMT. If you meet the minimum age requirement, you can gain patient care experience, as well as anatomy and physiology knowledge. While it is not the same as being a physician, ensuring you are comfortable with vital responsibility is important before you commit to many years of medical training.

With both college and medical school admissions growing in difficulty each year, challenging yourself in high school can both improve your chances of acceptance to medical school, and prepare you for the long road ahead.

Vipinjeet Sandhu is a professional MCAT tutor and contributing writer with Varsity Tutors. He earned his bachelor's degree in neuroscience and behavior from Columbia College of Columbia University. He holds an M.D. from St. George's University School of Medicine.
New York delivered big wins to a favorite son and a favorite daughter on Tuesday, as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump dominated returns.

Clintonwho isnt a native, but in the grand tradition of New York transplants, represented the state in the U.S. Senatebested Senator Bernie Sanders, who spent his early years in Brooklyn and retained the accent despite his long residence in Vermont. Clintons win was no surprise, but she ended up beating Sanders by around 15 points, exceeding most predictions. On the Republican side, Queens native Trump cruised to a huge victory and celebrated his win at Trump Tower, where he announced his campaign with a brash and splashy press conference 10 months ago.

The Republican side was the one to watch Tuesday. Trump has dropped the last couple of nominating contests, and hes been shellacked at state conventions across the country where delegates are selected to go to the Republican National Convention. That puts Trump in danger at a contested convention, where delegates are freed up to vote for the candidate of their choice on the second, third, or subsequent ballots (depending on state rules), and makes it even more important for him to secure the 1,237 delegates required to win the nomination outright.

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That figure has become more challenging in recent weeks, but it is not out of reach for Trump, and Tuesdays dominant showing brought it a lot closer. By winning the state, Trump picked up 14 of its 95 delegates. But most of the GOP delegates are allocated by congressional districtany candidate who tops 50 percent clinches all three in each district, while theyre otherwise split. For John Kasich and Ted Cruz, the goal on Tuesday was simply to keep Trump under 50 percent in as many places as possible and peel off a few delegates.

It wasnt a great night for those plans. With the votes mostly counted, Trump was on pace to take roughly 90 delegates. By Tuesday night, Cruzs campaign had decided the Texan was unlikely to win a single delegate. He spoke before the polls had even closed at a rally in Philadelphia, where he was campaigning ahead of next Tuesdays Pennsylvania primary, and barely mentioned Trump. (It turns out that turning an entire states values into a pejorative is not an effective tool for winning that state.) Kasich, meanwhile, had placed many hopes on New York. Lagging well behind both Trump and Cruz, the Ohioan had hoped that the Empire States demographics might echo his home state and give a boost to his campaignand his argument that only he can win a general election.

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Trump was jubilant but uncharacteristically brief at his victory party in Manhattan, where he was backed by his family and joined by New Yorkers from businessman Carl Icahn to former gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino. He sought to declare the race effectively over.

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We dont have much of a race anymore based on what Im seeing on television. Senator Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated, Trump said, using the Texans formal title rather than Trumps usual favored epithet, Lyin Ted. But Trump also issued a threat to Republican insiders, warning that voters would not stand for him being denied the nomination if he reaches the convention with only a plurality of delegates, rather than the 1,237-delegate majority. Its a crooked system, its a system thats rigged, and were going to go back to the old system, he said. Nobody can take an election away with the way theyre doing it in the Republican Party.

Perhaps Trumps brevity was intended to avoid the provocative comments he has sometimes made on election nights and elsewhere. Certainly, he seemed to be avoiding controversy. Alluding to a recent campaign shakeup, however, he said, Its a team of unity. People dont understand that. The press does understand that, but they dont want to talk about it.

Kasich finished second to Trump, with around a quarter of the vote, and he seemed likely to peel off five delegates. Cruz finished a distant third and earned no delegates.

Bernie Sanderss finish proved a disappointment. (Early exit polls suggesting a closer-than-expected race proved misleading.) Clintons home-field example helped her to an easy win. While that edge was always expected, Sanders made a play for New York, campaigning hard across the state, save a short jaunt to the Vatican over the weekend, where he spoke at an event and briefly met Pope Francis.

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Its the first bad night for Sanders in a long time. He had won seven of previous eight Democratic contests, and despite the Clinton campaigns hopes and expectations, the Democratic race seems to be tightening as it goes forward, rather than allowing Clinton to pull away. In some polls, including the first PRRI / The Atlantic poll this month, Sanders has tied or pulled ahead. But Sanders still lags Clinton by more than 200 pledged delegates (to say nothing of superdelegates), and so he needs big wins to overtake her. The result in New York doesnt do that for him.

Today we have proved again theres no place like home, Clinton told a crowd in Manhattan. New Yorkers, youve always had my back, and Ive always tried to have yours.

Like Trump, and not for the first time, Clinton tried to pivot to the general election and put the primary behind her. But she put that in her strongest terms yet.

"The race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch and victory is in sight," she said, telling Sanders supporters, There is much more that unites us than divides us.

As usual, Sanders far outpaced Clinton among young voters; the two candidates roughly split voters ages 30 to 44, according to exit polls. Those polls also showed the pair roughly splitting white voters, but Clinton winning African Americans 3-1 and Hispanics 2-1. She also won among the poorest voters.

Sanders barely spoke Tuesday, giving his traveling press corps the slip and jetting back to Vermont, where he held a brief press conferencemost of it via conference call, with reporters still on the trail.

The results were somewhat marred by irregularities in the voting process. Reports spread of eligible voters being purged from the roles, in some cases at large scale. Some polling places reportedly opened late or voting machines were not functional. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer promised an audit. There is nothing more sacred in our nation than the right to vote, yet election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get into their polling site, he said. Mayor Bill de Blasio backed Stringer.

That followed several days of complaints about the system. New Yorks primary is closed, which means only registered Democrats and Republicans could vote, and the deadline to switch registration was months ago. That system put Sanders at a disadvantage, as he has drawn support from independents, and some of his backers complained that the process was unfair. Also shut out were two of Donald Trumps children, who couldnt vote for their father after missing the deadline to register as Republicans.

The small number of votes might have helped Trump in Manhattan, which he was on pace to lose narrowly to Kasich, and where his most prominent developments stand. Home-state status can be a boon, but too much familiarity really does breed contempt. But Manhattan was one small, 13-mile blemish for Trump on an otherwise excellent night.

David A. Graham

11:12 PM Emma GreenLink

If delegates were awarded to candidates based on the number of counties they win, Sanders would have swept New York. With nearly all the results in, its striking that he seems to have won nearly four times as many counties as his opponent. Too bad the population density of many of those he capturedonly ones lying north of Rockland and Westchester Countiesis less than 50 people per square mile.

11:12 PM Clare ForanLink

Bernie Sanders's campaign manager Jeff Weaver went on MSNBC to spin the campaign's New York defeat. Weaver projected a veneer of optimism as he tried to cast New York as an anomaly. "The Secretary and her people should be congratulated for their victory tonight, no doubt about it. But she had a special relationship with the people of New York," Weaver said, adding: "the fact that she did very, very well in New York doesn't necessarily mean the same thing in these other states."

Pressed to project the future, Weaver refused to give an inch. He argued it's unlikely that either Sanders or Clinton will have sewn up the nomination by the time the convention takes place. If that happens, Weaver suggested, the Democratic establishment will decide the outcome. "It's going to be an election determined by the superdelegates," he said. Team Sanders has been saying that they hope to win over superdelegates for some time, but Weaver's assertion nevertheless seems at odds with the campaign's populist power-by-the-people sentiment.

11:03 PM Emma GreenLink

Russell spent his evening in Trump Tower, hanging out with other members of the press, well-heeled residents, and political supporters of the unlikely Republican front-runner. He explains just how much has changed:

Ten months ago, the reporters who gathered to hear Trump rail against illegal immigrants and American decline were paraded in front of a couple hundred supporters who were supposedly paid to stand and demonstrate that there were people who wanted this billionaire real estate tycoon to lead them. On Tuesday night, a media contingent numbering in the hundreds were barred from speaking to any supporters at all. Penned in by velvet ropes and the Secret Service, they could only watch as Trumps well-dressed guestssome of whom, like Trump, lived upstairsmingled in the lobby and waited for The Donald to come down and claim his win.

Read the rest of his take on Trumps big win in New York here.

10:58 PM Nora KellyLink

The Clinton campaign is already fundraising off the spending difference Emma mentioned. In an email missive sent before her victory speech tonight, Hillary noted that we were outspent by more than $2 million, but this team proved that we have the grit and determination to overcome any obstacle in our path. Seems like Sanderss impressive fundraising operation was one of those obstacles.

10:56 PM Vann R. Newkirk IILink

Today you proved once again, theres no place like home, Hillary Clinton said in her victory speech tonight in the Big Apple. Although exit polls indicated a much closer race, the mood at her event was unambiguously triumphant, as CNNs current vote tally shows an easy victory.

Clinton took the time to capitalize on some of the controversies that have dogged the Sanders campaign over the past few weeks. In this campaign weve won in every region of the country, she said, calling to mind recent criticism that the Sanders camp has received over comments that seemed to minimize the importance of the South in the primaries as front-loaded for Clinton. After looking ahead to other regions that were ostensibly more liberal, the big loss in New York comes as a blow to Sanders, who has now lost the all-important advantage of momentum going into other Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic contests.

Clinton also went after Sanderss recent struggles in an interview with the New York Daily News editorial board, which ended up endorsing Clinton. Under the bright lights of New York, we have seen that it is not enough to diagnose the problem, we have to know how you would actually solve the problems, she said, referring to Sanderss difficulties in elucidating specific policy levers and outcomes for his plan to break up banks. That interview is the gift that keeps on giving for Clinton.

It seems the former secretary of state is now looking ahead and sees a victory. Depending on the vote tally at the end of the night, there are just not very many pathways for Sanders moving forward, especially after having outspent Clintons campaign by a wide margin on ads in New York. Perhaps that bleak outlook is reflected by Sanderss trip to Vermont this evening to recharge. A turnaround victory now will require all the energy he can muster.

10:51 PM Emma GreenLink

During her victory speech, Hillary mentioned donations a number of timesgo online, text her hotline, doesnt matter, just give her cash. Money-wise, though, Bernie is hurting more than his opponent this evening. According to the Center for Public Integrity, he outspent her on broadcast, cable, and radio ads in New York by about $3 million. Not a great price to pay for a big defeat.

10:42 PM Nora KellyLink

I spotted Carolyn Maloney in the audience just behind Clinton, waving an American flag. The New York congresswoman, whose district includes parts of Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, has been a longtime Hillary booster. Back in 2013, she embraced the Ready for Hillary campaign, which sought to encourage a 2016 Clinton run. To a New York City radio station that year, Maloney said that if Clinton were to launch a bid, I want her to know that Im there, my friends are there. Fast-forward a few years and Maloney is actively campaigning for the former secretary. And, apparently, cheering her on at victory parties.

10:41 PM Priscilla AlvarezLink

Bernie Sanders briefly congratulated Hillary Clinton for her win in New York. It was a strange unfolding of events, however, as Sanders appeared to have left his national press corp behind, leading him to hold a conference call. As for why hes back in Vermont tonight, Sanders said, I need to get recharged and take a day off.

10:35 PM Matt FordLink

Ohio Governor John Kasich has yet to win a state outside his home turf, but hes making an impressive showing in Trumps backyard. In the 10th and 12th congressional districts, which encompass Manhattans lower half, hes poised to snatch 2 delegates from the real-estate baron. Keep in mind this is where Trump has rubbed elbows and built skyscrapers for his entire adult life! Now hes struggling to break 50 percent among the people who should know him best. If only his kids had changed their voter registrations in time...

10:31 PM Clare ForanLink

Wondering what Hillary Clinton thinks about the state of the Democratic race? Her victory speech tonight provided an answer. After the New York primary win, Clinton thinks shes got the nomination pretty well sewn up. The race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch, and victory is in sight, she told an adoring crowd.

10:27 PM Sacha ZimmermanLink

Donald Trump closed his brief New York victory speech with the chairman of the board. Classic, yes. But also dated. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, comes to the stage with Alicia Keyss cool, cool, cool Empire State of Mind. Thats the difference a great campaign staff can make.

10:14 PM Sacha ZimmermanLink

Ive been sober for ten grueling wonderful years, and as I sit here watching democracy favor an orange billionaire whose theory of campaigningwinning!was originally coined by Charlie Sheen, its hard not to be a smidge jealous of those who imbibe and who can therefore tamp down all this insanity. When it occurs to me that Donald Trumpwho has been a lifelong teetotaleris a total waste of sobriety. I mean, if youre going to spend a lifetime not drinking, use that to achieve great things, like Warren Buffet or Chuck D. Someone could become Donald Trump while being drunk All. The. Time. What a waste.

10:10 PM Clare ForanLink

Sanders may have lost the New York primary, but as voting results come in, he is still winning out over Clinton in areas of western and upstate New York, including Erie County where my hometown of Buffalo is located. That doesn't surprise me. Buffalo is a rust belt city with a long-struggling economy that's been hard hit by a manufacturing decline. It makes sense that Sanderss populist economic message caught on in the city just as it did in Michigan.

10:06 PM Nora KellyLink

Donald Trump always tries to project self-confidence, telegraphing to his detractors: Im unbeatable, unavoidable, and you might as well get on board.

His base-line attitude is so triumphant that even on the night of a significant primary win, hes his typical self. Were close to 70 percent, Trump said Tuesday night from Trump Tower. (CNN at the time was reporting his support at closer to 60 percent.) Were going to end at a very high level, and get a lot more delegates than anybody projected even in their wildest imaginations.

Thats some deliberately compelling phrasing, but really, Trump was expected to win. Race watchers have mostly been debating how much hed win by. The candidate himself is ready to call the primary entirely right now. We don't have much of a race anymore based on what Im seeing on TV, he said, adding how he has hundreds more delegates than his rival Ted Cruz. Later, he criticized the Republican electoral process that allocates those delegates, and expressed sympathy for Bernie Sanderss battle on the Democratic side for superdelegates.

Trump kept his remarks fairly short and didnt take questions, as he has at previous victory events. But he made sure to get in a reference to his staff, which has been under a harsh spotlight in recent days after reports of intra-campaign fracturing. He called his campaign a team of unity, and suggested people simply dont understand whats really going on.

Trump seemed to take pride in his home state delivering for him. Theres nowhere where Id rather have this victory, Trump said. Moments later, he walked away from the lectern to Frank Sinatras New York, New York.

10:03 PM Priscilla AlvarezLink

It looks like John Kasich will win second place in the states primary. His campaign is pitching this as an indicator that Kasich is best prepared to come against Trump in the Northeast. Kasich has shown no signs of backing down from the race. Last week, he suggested in a speech that there are two options for the Republican nomination, comparing his pathwell trod, it is at times steep, but it is solidto another, which could drive America down into a ditch and not make us great again. In any case, it appears Kasich is still likely to affect the convention as he splits the vote in state contests.

09:54 PM Emma GreenLink

Bernie may hail from Brooklyn, but voters from four of the five boroughs were cold to the Vermont senator during today's primary. With nearly all of the results in from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, CNN is showing roughly 20- to 30-point percentage leads for Clinton over Sanders in those districts. The only exception: Staten Island, which still went to Clinton, but by a much smaller margin.

09:50 PM Priscilla AlvarezLink

The Empire State building is nowyou guessed itblue, as a result of Hillary Clintons win in the New York Democratic primary.

.@cnn turns the Empire State Building blue for projection of Hillary Clintons win pic.twitter.com/RPIZbc3W2b  Tal Kopan (@TalKopan) April 20, 2016

09:43 PM Clare ForanLink

ABC and NBC News have now called the New York primary race for Hillary Clinton. Her campaign must be breathing a major sigh of relief after early exit polling results showed Clinton with a tight, but relatively narrow, lead. As the results have started to trickle in, Clinton opened up that lead. CNN, which also just called the race for Clinton, shows her with 60 percent of the vote to Sanderss 39 percent.

09:35 PM Sacha ZimmermanLink

Staten Island goes 80+ percent for Trump. But Kasich is leading in Manhattan. Trump of course has literally plastered Manhattan with his name. So hes winning the state but not his home turf, whichagainbears his name all over the place. Maybe its time to show Shoalin some love? Next up: Trump Towers Brighton Heights? The Apprentice: Willowbrook?

09:27 PM Yoni AppelbaumLink

CNNs gaudy election night stuntturning the Empire State Building red to announce Trumps huge winis a feat of high technology. The buildings state-of-the-art LED-illumination system can display 16 million colors. But its also a throwback, to a time when such stunts served a much more practical purpose.

In 1891, the 1.5 million candlepower lantern atop Joseph Pulitzers New York World building projected the election results up on the cloud-covered sky in Morse code. The next year, not to be outdone, the Herald mounted an enormous searchlight on Madison Square Garden. It wouldve shone toward Harlem to signal a Benjamin Harrison win; instead, it beamed its message south toward Battery Park, to tell the city that Grover Cleveland had prevailed.

These days, New Yorkers have faster ways to find resultsthey can pull out their phones, and load this liveblog. But lighting the Empire State Building restores some sliver of the civic ritual of election nightsummoning ordinary New Yorkers to look out their windows, or come out into the streets, to see what theyve collectively decided about the future of the country.

The Empire State Building turns blood red as Donald Trump wins the New York primary. pic.twitter.com/zK6wPdxQT9  Micah Grimes (@MicahGrimes) April 20, 2016

09:23 PM Emma GreenLink

Sanders has pushed the issue of income equality and corporate greed mercilessly throughout the campaign, and particularly during last weeks Democratic debate. But CNNs exits show him losing out to Clinton among the poorest New Yorkers. The networks poll of 1367 respondents shows her winning 55 percent of voters who make less than $30K per year.

09:15 PM Priscilla AlvarezLink

Exit polls show a narrow gap between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders among Latino voters. According to CNNs results, 59 percent backed Clinton compared to Sanderss 41 percentthe closest numbers I can recall in the presidential primary thus far. In other states with a number of Hispanic eligible voters, like Florida and Texas, Clinton held a commanding lead, with 68 percent in Florida and 71 percent in Texas. As I noted earlier, the two candidates spent time in New York courting Hispanic voters, but this may signal gains for Sanders in the community.

09:13 PM Sacha ZimmermanLink

The Empire State Building just went from red, white, and blue to all stark red. Presumably because the Republican race was just called. Or to herald the arrival of the antichrist. Or both.

The Empire State Building turns blood red as Donald Trump wins the New York primary. pic.twitter.com/zK6wPdxQT9  Micah Grimes (@MicahGrimes) April 20, 2016

09:05 PM Clare ForanLink

Polling has suggested that New York state will deliver a victory for Hillary Clinton, and based on CNN exit polls Clinton does have a lead, though it is narrower than many would have expected with Clinton at 52 percent and Sanders at 48.

New York is a critical contest for Democrats given that there are 247 delegates at stake, which will be awarded proportionally based on the results. Clinton continues to beat Sanders in the all-important delegate race, but her campaign could still use a lift, and victory in New York would certainly deliver. Sanders has won a slate of recent primary contests, and Clintons national polling lead has eroded.

09:01 PM Nora KellyLink

Earlier this week, Donald Trump issued a mandate to New York's voters: "We have to win by big numbers!" he said at a rally in Poughkeepsie.

It's looking like his Empire State compatriots listened. Just as the polls closed at 9 p.m., MSNBC and CNN called the state for Trump, who'll soon be speaking at Trump Tower. They didn't waste a minute in announcing his victory, because he was widely expected to do well, particularly in the city, on Long Island, and in western parts of the state. He's looking for a clean sweep. As my coworkers have previously mentioned, if he gets more than 50 percent of the statewide vote, he'll win 14 delegates. And if he snags more than 50 percent in each congressional district, he'll get three delegates per district.

John Kasich and Ted Cruz, who were polling in second and third, respectively, in New York, hoped the voters there wouldn't give their hometown boy a major victory. They hoped to pick off delegates here and there, in their ongoing effort to temper Trump's confidence going into the GOP convention.

In the coming hours, we'll see just how big Trump's win is.

09:00 PM Russell BermanLink

At Trump Tower in Manhattan, hundreds of reporters are packed into a makeshift press area in the lobby, all awaiting Trump to claim his expected victory in New York. Velvet ropes separate the media from Trump's well-heeled supporters, some of whom live in the building. Supporters are crowded into the atrium downstairs and along the gold-rimmed escalators. Trump is expected to speak shortly after the polls close.

08:57 PM Priscilla AlvarezLink

Ted Cruz isnt going to win New Yorks primaryand he knows it, kicking of his speech Tuesday night with a nod to Donald Trump, the politician winning his home state tonight." The Texas senator spoke in Philadelphia shortly before the polls closed in New York. The event was originally dubbed an election night watch party, but changed to a Pennsylvania kickoff event, according to The New York Timess Matt Flegenheimer.

And that it was. Cruz presented himself as an outsider, even aligning himself with the outsider in the Democratic race, Bernie Sanders. This is the year of the outsider. I am an outsider. Bernie Sanders is an outsider. Both with the same diagnosis, but both with very different paths to healing, Cruz said. Millions of Americans have chosen one of those outsiders. Our campaigns dont find our fuel in special interests, but rather directly from the people.

The location of the speech alone made clear that Cruz didnt expect to emerge the victor in the Empire State, despite a recent string of victories. Cruz, perhaps stained by his past remarks on "New York values, trailed behind Donald Trump in the run-up to the election. Exit polls didnt paint a promising landscape for Cruz either. Evangelicals comprised just a quarters of voters, according to ABC Newss preliminary exit poll results. And only two in 10 voters identified as very conservative. Compare this to the nearly two-thirds of GOP primary voters who favor an outsider rather than someone with political experience.

But Cruzs campaign continues to fight for enough delegates to prevent Trump from securing the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. As NBC reported, Cruz has shifted his focus to Pennsylvania for the states unbound delegates. And there, Cruz, who invoked Presidents Obama slogan, hopes to secure a win: Coming together as one, as we the people, because not only do we say yes we can, beginning here and now we pledge, to each and every one of us, yes we will. And now, my friends, onward to victory.

08:26 PM Nora KellyLink

Less than one hour from now, Donald Trump is scheduled to speak at his gilded Trump Tower, where his campaign first began. This time, he won't need to pay actors to cheer him along; the Midtown crowd is bound to be enthusiastic by its own choosing.

At least one recent entrant to Trump Tower, though, isn't so supportive of his campaign. The Boston Globe's Matt Viser points out on Twitter that a subversive Bernie Sanders supporter left behind a campaign sticker in support of the Vermont senator.

In one of the grand entryways to Trumps party this evening, there is an intrusive bit of campaign paraphernalia. pic.twitter.com/ArHI2ySuxM  Matt Viser (@mviser) April 19, 2016

It may've been planted as an act of protesta signal to Trump and his ilk that he doesn't have this election in the bag yet. But Trump backers looking to celebrate a likely win may simply view it with bemusement.

07:30 PM Yoni AppelbaumLink

Theres another result in ABCs exit poll thats no less shocking for being a routine feature of the campaign season. Even in cosmopolitan New Yorka state built on successive waves of immigration, serving as a port of entry for generations of Americanssix in ten Republican voters told pollsters theyd support a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.

Thats actually somewhat lower than the rate in other states this season, but its still a dispiritingly clear majority of GOP voters prepared to employ a religious test for entry.

But theres some question how to interpret such results. In a recent PRRI / The Atlantic survey, we put the question a little differently: Did voters support banning people who are Muslim from entering the U.S.?

Just dropping the word temporary generated dramatically different results. Levels of support were still high: 49 percent of Trump supporters, 37 percent of Republicans, and 24 percent of all Americans. But those tallies are still much lower than those generated by exit polls. And the fact that not even a majority of Trump voters support a ban when its not presented as a temporaryand presumably, emergencymeasure provides some reason for optimism.

07:18 PM Yoni AppelbaumLink

The early exit polls are out, and if theyre accurate, they portend a very good night for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

ABC Newss poll shows that, as in other states, Clinton has done much better among Democrats, and Sanders among independentseach, the poll suggests, winning two-thirds. But only two in ten Democratic voters identified themselves as independents, probably because New York holds a closed primary with the most restrictive registration rules in the nation.

On the Republican side, ABC shows 56 percent of voters saying that Trump offers their best chance in November. Thats usually a decent proxy for his overall level of supportpeople who arent voting for Trump tend to be less sanguine about his prospects. And it suggests he has a real shot at securing an outright majorityand with it, every delegate up for grabs. But, as always, these early returns need to be taken with a very large grain of salt; they suffer from methodological limitations, and their results will be adjusted to reflect the rest of the voting, and the actual returns.

06:10 PM Clare ForanLink

Bad news for Bernie. An eleventh-hour lawsuit that supporters of the senator hoped might open up New York states closed primary wont be decided in time to have an impact on the Democratic primary race. The New York Times reports that a court, not wishing to interfere with the primary election, deferred a ruling to a later date. The lawsuit was filed on Monday by Election Justice USA, a group that calls itself as a national voting rights organization. The group took to Facebook yesterday to announce that it planned to file the emergency lawsuit in New York federal district court. As noted on this liveblog, an open primary would stand to benefit Sanders by allowing Independent voters to cast ballots for him in the crucial primary. Unfortunately for Team Sanders, it looks like that wont come to pass.

05:58 PM Andrew McGillLink

No one is expecting John Kasich to make a big splash tonight. (Havent we written that about a million times?) But he polls surprisingly well in some parts of the state outside New York City. In Staten Island, where Trump reins supreme, the Ohio governor is behind by nearly 60 percent, according to an Emerson College poll conducted late last week. But in western New York, where nearly a third of voters say theyd vote for him, the gap drops to around 10 points. That doesnt mean hell actually win anything, but he could keep a few sorely needed delegates away from Trump.

05:53 PM Russell BermanLink

The reports of voting problems plaguing polling sites in Brooklyn have gotten the attention of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who issued a statement shortly before 5:30 Eastern denouncing a purging of the voting lists that apparently affected entire buildings and blocks. "I am calling on the Board of Election to reverse that purge," said de Blasio, who is himself a Brooklynite.

He said he supported the auditwhich Emma reported on earlierthat Comptroller Scott Stringer said he would undertake in advance of down-ballot primary elections scheduled for June. These errors today indicate that additional major reforms will be needed to the Board of Election and in the state law governing it, the mayor said. We will hold the BOE commissioners responsible for ensuring that the Board and its borough officers properly conduct the election process to assure that voters are not disenfranchised. The perception that numerous voters may have been disenfranchised undermines the integrity of the entire electoral process and must be fixed.

05:31 PM Matt FordLink

For the Democrats, today's delegate math is easy. Clinton and Sanders will fight for New York's 247 pledged delegates on two fronts. First, 84 delegates will be divvied up based on the statewide vote. At the same time, the remaining 163 delegates will be proportionally awarded based on the results in each of New York's 27 congressional districts. Between 5 and 7 delegates are up for grabs in each district.

The GOP delegate hunt is a little more complex. 95 delegates are up for grabs for Trump, Cruz, and Kasich. Like the Democrats, they'll compete for a pool of statewide delegates, as well as 27 smaller pools of delegates in each congressional district. A candidate who wins 50 percent or more of the statewide vote gets all 14 statewide delegates. If no candidates gets more than 50 percent, those 14 delegates are awarded proportionally, with a 20 percent threshold to receive any of them.

The 50-percent rule also applies for the remaining 81 delegates in the 27 congressional districts. Each district offers 3 delegates apiece. If Trump, who leads by a wide margin in recent polls, wins 50 percent or more in a district, he gets all of its three delegates. But if two candidates keep the third one below 50 percent in a district, 2 delegates go to the first-place candidate and the remaining one goes to the runner-up.

If tonight's results reflect the polls, Trump could leave his home state with a substantial sum of delegates. But it also wouldn't be hard for Cruz or Kasich to chip away a few delegates for themselves. Each one they grab puts Trump one step further away from the 1,237 delegates he'll need to clinch the Republican nomination on the first ballot in Cleveland.

05:11 PM Nora KellyLink

More on what Emma wrote below about polling irregularities: Voters also reported missing poll workersand, as a result, late facility openingsat more than one site in Brooklyn. One Board of Elections official told ABC 7 his department will get to the bottom of the delays.

Meanwhile, Stringer has been aggressively going after the Board of Elections. We intend to find out why the BOE is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient, he said on Tuesday. This isn't the first time this primary cycle that weve heard of troubles at the polls, as Priscilla mentioned. But this is certainly the most full-throated response Ive seen from an official condemning whats gone wrong.

05:01 PM Emma GreenLink

The New York City comptroller, Scott Stringer, has issued a throw-down to the New York City Board of Elections. Responding to a number of voter complaints reported today, he sent a letter to the executive director, Michael J. Ryan, notifying him of an impending audit. As Im sure you would agree, whether you are a Democrat or Republican, all New Yorkers deserve an electoral system that is free, fair, and efficientnot one riddled with chaos and confusion, Stringer wrote.

Among the complaints he cited, along with other primary-related dust-ups: Polling stations opening late and operating faulty machines. Misleading postcards sent to roughly 60,000 newly registered voters which suggested the wrong date for the primary. Another error on the Spanish version of absentee ballots, which cost more than $200,000 in postage fees to correct. An unexplained drop in the number of Democrats listed on voter rolls in Brooklyn between November of last year and this month63,558 names disappeared, according to WYNC.

A lawsuit about the voter-registration changes was filed Monday.

04:38 PM Sacha ZimmermanLink

Im from Syracuse, New Yorkthe city of, not the suburbs. I get that lake effect is a term of art, and I bleed orange. Heres a common phenomenon: I once had a conversation with a guy from Brooklyn who asked why someone like me, who wasnt from New York, knew so much about the governorthis is the solipsism of my fair states largest city. People in New York City also call parts of the Bronx upstate New York. As if. (Besides, in Cuse, we think of ourselves as central New Yorkers.)

The New York City myopia is widespread. Pundits are quick to warn liberal candidates for statewide office that upstate voters arent New York New Yorkers. If you think of New York City as a primary, then the rest of the state is like the general election. Candidates on the left move to the centerfor all those rural upstate voters.

But heres the thing: Its a lie. Upstate is not the deep-red hinterland it is portrayed to be.

In fact, of New York states registered voters, half are Democrats and just a quarter are Republicans. There are also more Independents in the state than there are Republicansthats why this closed primary is such a big deal. This means a tiny, insular, and downright weird New York Republican Party is running the showand the days of New York Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki are over.

Who did the GOP run against Andrew Cuomo for governor in 2010? Carl Paladino, a Buffalo businessman whose campaign slogan was: Im mad as hell, and Im not gonna take it anymore! Apparently, he once saw Network. As Rachel Maddow pointed out last night, this Tea Party favorite also enthusiastically emailed hard-core pornography to hundreds of people, sent out racist emails about the Obamas, proposed turning vacant jails into dorms for the poor, and called Kristen Gillibrand Chuck Schumers little girl. In other words, he was Donald Trump before Trump.

Unsurprisingly, thats also who Paladino is supporting this election. And, as my hometown paper, The Post-Standard, reports, he has been bullying GOP legislators to do the same. Six years after his loss to Cuomo, it seems Paladino is still mad as hell.

You are supposed to make decisions in the best interests of your constituents, Paladino emailed New York House Republicans last month. Theyre angry. Its a festering anger, built up over the years by a smoke and mirrors government working to keep the political class comfortably feeding at the public trough.

Then: This is the beginning, he said. Its going to get worse for those that continue to hold out. Im being nice  I will do everything I can to marginalize them.

A final email declared, This is our last request that you join Trump for President and try to preserve whats left of your pathetic careers in government.

Its not clear where Paladino goes from here threat-wise, but it seems fair to say that the New York Republican Party is in as much disarray as the national Republican Party. No wonder Trump is doing so well among New York Republicans upstateand downstate.

04:20 PM Priscilla AlvarezLink

For some New York primary voters, todays elections have been quite the headache. The New York Daily News reports that at some polling locations in Brooklyn and Queens, voters arrived to broken machines and belated polling. Ben Casselman from FiveThirtyEight documented some of the chaos via Twitter when polls couldnt open because a coordinator was not present on site. The location eventually opened. Voter woes are not entirely surprising. Throughout the presidential primary, there have been a series of snafus, perhaps most notably in Arizona, where voters waited hours in line to vote. (The Democratic National Committee, along with the Clinton and Sanders campaigns, are suing the state.)

In New York, voters are also filing complaints about the states closed primary rules in addition to other issues, according to a report by ThinkProgress. The traffic to our polling hotlines has been pretty significant, said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Were seeing a high volume of calls, which suggests this is not an election that is problem-free.

03:57 PM Emma GreenLink

Those Sanders voters, man, can they be a handful, wearing their buttons and T-shirts and other Berned paraphernalia. Theres a whole cottage industry for Feeling and Expressing the Bern. But according to New York state law, no political banner, button, poster or placard shall be allowed in or upon the polling place or within such one hundred foot radial. Warnings abound on reddit, local media, and elsewhere: Leave the swag at home.

Perhaps the temptation is on both sides of the Democratic race, though. This car? Definitely not allowed to in a polling place for the New York primary.

Kathy Willens / AP

03:00 PM Priscilla AlvarezLink

New York is home to one of the largest Hispanic populations in the country at about 3.7 million. According to the Pew Research Center, Hispanics make up about 14 percent of New York eligible votersa significant uptick from 1990 when Hispanics made up 8 percent of the electorate. Despite struggling to gain traction among minority voters, Bernie Sanders appears to be roughly even with Hillary Clinton among Hispanics nationwide, according to a PRRI / The Atlantic poll. The two candidates courted Hispanics in the lead up to the states primary.

Clinton has secured the support of New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito as well as Representatives Jose Serrano and Nydia Velazquez. Hispanic voters are unlikely to dramatically sway the vote on Tuesday. But it could provide a glimpse into how Sanders and Clinton have been doing among the electorate, which has been a point of contention in the past. Younger voters appear to be more enthusiastic about Sanders, as has been in the case throughout the primary, while older voters have mostly backed Clinton.

02:34 PM Andrew McGillLink

An interesting point, Clare. New York is not alone in having closed primariesmore than a dozen states, including soon-to-vote Pennsylvania, also bar voting across party lines. But in New York, the deadline to switch party affiliation was Oct. 9, 2015, nearly 200 days ago, the longest gap in the country. Recall that in October, Clinton was ahead in national polls by 16 points or so; Sanders has now narrowed the gap to single digits. It appears theres a lawsuit in the works to challenge this.

02:20 PM Clare ForanLink

One aspect of New York voting that puts Bernie Sanders at a disadvantage is the fact that, as others have mentioned, the state holds a closed primary. Anyone currently registered as an Independent wont be able to vote for Sanders as a result. That could spell trouble for the Vermont senator since, as Priscilla noted, Sanders tends to do well with Independent voters. On Tuesday, the candidate rebuked the rule, telling reporters: Today, 3 million people in the state of New York who are independents have lost their right to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary. Thats wrong. The argument lines up well with Sanderss message that the system is rigged against the kind of political revolution hes trying to build. If Sanders loses to Clinton in New York, as polling predicts, expect the candidate to point to the inability of Independents to vote for him as part of the reason why.

02:08 PM Emma GreenLink

As Rob noted last week, Clinton and Sanders faced off on climate issues in the most recent Democratic debateone of their most sophisticated conversations on energy and environment so far in the campaign. Sanders came down hard on Clinton for her positions on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking: While he supports a nation-wide ban, she supported expansion of the practice while she was secretary of state and now only wants to limit its use. The campaign also put out an ad last week highlighting Sanders categorial position against the the drilling practice.

This could be important in the New York primaries: Part of the state sits on the Marcellus Shaleprime territory for natural-gas extraction. Last summer, the state officially banned the practice, and a 2014 University of Michigan poll suggested that less than a third of residents supported this kind of drilling. A few counties in the Southern Tier of the statethe part that borders Pennsylvania to the northdid threaten to secede once the ban announcement was made, but they seemed to be in the minority.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Sanders has close ties to two of the few U.S. states and localities that have banned fracking: Vermont, which was the first state to ban the practice; and New York, where hes from.

12:41 PM Priscilla AlvarezLink

Donald Trump made an easy decision on Tuesday: He voted for himself. The Republican front-runner, whos polling ahead of Cruz and Kasich, cast his ballot at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. Its a proud moment. Its a great moment. And who wouldve thought? Its just an honor, Trump said. As CNN notes, its the first time Trump has ever voted for himself.

12:26 PM Vann R. Newkirk IILink

Despite Senator Sanderss protests about the front-loading of southern states in the Democratic primaries and the sentiment that liberal hotbeds were buried in the calendar, New York's primary is ideally situated for him. Although polling in the Empire State still shows Hillary Clinton with a sizable lead, Sanders has closed the polling gap by almost 30 points since March. He has also gained ground in the other Democratic powerhouse of California, which will hold its primary contest in June.

Had these states held primaries on Super Tuesday in March, theres a good chance that Sanders would be out of the race today. The two states hold a whopping 722 delegates, and even if Sanders does not win New York he can continue to extend the fight by pulling close to even. Had Sanders lost on similar lines to his earlier polls, he would have been behind several hundred delegates, with no momentum of which to speak.

This is all, of course, a hypothetical of limited usefulness. States tend to warm to candidates as they campaign there. But it does bring the question of just what Sanderss complaint about the South was meant to accomplish. Outside of the February contests, states choose when they place their primaries, and Clinton might have been expected to have early leads regardless of which states chose to vote first. Sanderss fundraising apparatus has had the time to kick into high gear, outspending Clinton by wide margins in New York ads.

All-in-all, the calendar seems most amenable to a late momentum-fueled charge for Sanders. Save for an alternate reality of clairvoyant cherry-picking of contests that he would win and placing them early, this was the likely route. Interestingly, the original conceptualization of superdelegates by the Hunt Commission in 1981 was as a way to counteract the front-loading problem by including independent delegates that would decide how and when they wanted. Now, while publicly decrying the system, the Sanders camp seems to have embraced the primary process as the Commission envisioned it would work for outsider candidates: weathering early losses and relying on a war of attrition and the support of superdelegates to bring the race to the convention.

11:57 AM Nora KellyLink

Ted Cruz clearly knows, just as any Philadelphia-area native does, that Philly is a less expensive, but nevertheless dynamic, alternative to New York City.

11:56 AM Russell BermanLink

All five remaining candidates have criss-crossed the Empire State over the last two weeks, stumping not only in New York City but Upstate and on Long Island as well. When the polls close on Tuesday, however, the two front-runners will be just a few blocks away from each other in midtown Manhattan. Hillary Clinton is holding her primary-night event at a Sheraton on 53rd Street and 7th Avenue, while, as Nora mentioned, Donald Trump will be holding his now-customary election night press conference atwhere else?Trump Tower, which is on 5th Avenue and 56th Street. The third New Yorker in the race, Bernie Sanders, won't be in the state on Tuesday, having already decamped to the next big battleground, Pennsylvania. He'll be holding an evening rally at Penn State. Ted Cruz will be in Philadelphia, while John Kasich will be holding a town hall in Maryland on Tuesday night.

11:02 AM Russell BermanLink

Donald Trump will get the hard-won vote of at least one of his children in the New York primary. His campaign just announced that the Republican's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., will cast his ballot for his father Tuesday afternoon at a polling place on the east side of Manhattan. As Ive written and Priscilla mentioned below, two of Trumps other adult children, Eric and Ivanka, cant vote in the New York primary because they didnt register as Republicans in time. The Donald's youngest daughter, Tiffany Trump, 22, is reportedly eligible to vote for him in Pennsylvania, where she is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. That would give Trump a 50 percent turnout rate among his eligible children, making his family fairly representative of the nation at large!

10:35 AM Clare ForanLink

Tensions are running high in the Democratic race as voters head to the polls in New York. The Hillary Clinton campaign put a finer point on its argument that Bernie Sanders doesnt have the partys best interests at heart on Tuesday when chief strategist Joel Benenson wondered aloud whether Sanders would become a Ralph Nader and try to destroy the Democratic Party when it comes to defeating Republicans in November during an interview on CNN. The accusation refers to the 2000 presidential election, in which Nader ran as a Green Party candidate. Some Democrats feared Nader would siphon off support from then-Democratic nominee Al Gore, who ultimately lost the election to George W. Bush.

The remarks were prompted by a scuffle that erupted on Monday between the Sanders and Clinton campaigns. It all started when the Sanders campaign leveled an accusation at the Hillary Victory Funda joint-fundraising committee for the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and 32 state Democratic Partiessuggesting that the fundraising effort has been used to improperly subsidize the Clinton campaign. In a press release, team Sanders raised the possibility that the fund may have violated campaign finance laws. At least some election-law experts are so far casting doubt on the claim, and it may be more of a political maneuver than a valid accusation. But it has already started quite a fight. The Clinton campaign rushed to denounce the accusations on Monday, calling the incident irresponsible and poisonous.

10:14 AM Nora KellyLink

Senator Lindsey Graham famously said that choosing between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination is like being shot or poisoned. Earlier this morning, as his home state turned out to vote, New York Congressman Peter King took the self-harm metaphor to a whole new level. I hate Ted Cruz, said the typically blunt rep. And I think I'll take cyanide if he ever got the nomination.

This wasn't the first time Kingwho isn't endorsing any of the remaining candidates, but voted absentee for John Kasichhas expressed such disdain for Cruz. But while his remarks are extreme, his anti-Cruz attitude dovetails with that of other members of Congress. His attitude might also reflect New York voters sentiments about Cruz. The Texas senator isnt expected to do well in the state, and he got an icy reception last week at a Manhattan GOP gala. Kings own Long Island, meanwhile, is expected to turn out for Trump.

10:05 AM Andrew McGillLink

On Sunday, The New York Times published an interesting map showing the distribution of Trump contributors in New York City's five boroughs. The surprising thing for me: Even in a place with a population as dense and diverse as New Yorks, there are entire swaths of the city where not a single person contributed more than $200 to his campaign. Trumps financial support is largely concentrated in Staten Island, the southern part of Brooklyn, and the northern stretches of Queens, as well as midtown Manhattan (which likely includes donors who listed their office as their address). FiveThirtyEight highlights the similarities between Staten Island and Queens, noting that both boroughs have sizable white populations who identify as being of Italian, Irish or American" ancestryall strong indicators for Trump support.

09:53 AM Priscilla AlvarezLink

Its official. Hillary Clinton has cast her ballot. As Nora noted earlier, Clinton might have a home-field advantage. A win in the state could give her a leg up after Sanderss recent string of victories.

.@HillaryClinton casts her ballot this morning in Chappaqau, NY pic.twitter.com/P9dIc6u5t0  Amy Chozick (@amychozick) April 19, 2016

09:51 AM Priscilla AlvarezLink

In 2008, more than 1.89 million voters cast a ballot in the New York Democratic primary compared to roughly 670,000 Republicans in the same year. With increased interest in the race this cycle, those numbers, particularly on the Republican front, could rise.

But New York is also known for its restrictive voting laws, which has so far excluded two of Trumps adult children from voting and could go on to hinder Sanders supporters. As Russell noted, the state has no early voting and same-day registration. Last week, Trump told the hosts on Fox & Friends that Ivanka and Eric wont be able to vote for him in the states closed primary because they missed the deadline to register with a political party. On the Democratic side, Sanders has fared well with independents, but unless they changed their party registration by the October deadline last year, they wont be able to cast a ballot for their preferred candidate. In any case, county election officials are preparing for huge turnoutand perhaps voters unaware that they are ineligible to cast a ballot.

09:33 AM Emma GreenLink

Why is this mid-Atlantic primary different from all other mid-Atlantic primaries? This year, New York skipped a week ahead of Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and a couple of New England states with its Democratic and Republican races. The answer has to do with state politics, the DNC  and Passover.

It started in 2011, when the New York legislature passed a bill to move the next years primary to April. That piece of legislation expired in 2012, which meant the primary reverted back to the date set previously in state lawthe first Tuesday in February. This violated national party rules, so the legislature tried to set this years contest for April 26. The only problem: Passover falls late in the Gregorian calendar this year, meaning that some voters would be observing the holiday or out of town on that date. An estimated 6 percent of New Yorkers are Jews. This was a problem.

Their solution: hold the primary on April 19. Thanks to that change, the Jews of New York will be able to eat their matzohopefully the kind made by Ted Cruzcomfortably knowing the results of the New York primary this year.

You can read moreprobably more than youd ever want to know about New York electoral politics, honestlyat the Frontloading HQ blog.

This wasnt how it was supposed to go.

After cordially putting up with competition from less prominent Democrats, Hillary Clinton should have locked up the nomination weeks, if not months, ago. Donald Trump, who felled senators, governors, and fellow outsiders with ease, should have already seized the Republican crown.

Instead, both front-runners have found themselves fending off competition far too long for their taste. As the party conventions draw nearer, they are banking on New York to bring order to the entropy of this U.S. primary race.

Empire State voters hit the polls on Tuesday, starting at 6 a.m., after days of intense focus from the presidential candidates. For Trump and Clinton, both New Yorkers themselves, this race could be the end of weeks-long losing streaks that have emboldened their opponents. Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders racked up wins in Wisconsin and the West. Chatter about a contested Republican convention grew loud, and Clintons lead has been constantly challenged by questions about how long Sanders could stay in the race.

New York, though, looks like it could give Clinton and Trump back some much-needed mojo. Though polling this cycle hasnt always been reliable, recent surveys show Clinton and Trump with strong leads. If they snag big wins in the delegate-rich state, they could argue their opponents successes were aberrations and not reflective of the larger contest.

Clintons lead isnt as wide as Trumps. According to a RealClearPolitics average, shes got roughly 12 points on Sanders, whose home borough of Brooklyn houses her campaign headquarters. While both candidates can call themselves New Yorkers, Clinton probably has the home-field advantage. In recent days, shes gone hard touting her record as a two-term New York senator on the trail. Clinton also has the backing of high-profile public officials like Governor Andrew Cuomo, as well as the states major labor unions. Nevertheless, Sanders is attracting attention. More than 25,000 people reportedly showed up to a rally he held in Manhattan last week.

Democratic candidates are bound to be popular in New York, a true-blue state with much of its population concentrated in stereotypically liberal New York City and its suburbs. Where theyll do well varies, though. Clinton-related predictions are based in part on her own electoral historywhere she did well as a Senate and presidential candidate in past cycles. She is expected to see success in New York City, with its many minority voters; in the suburbs of Westchester County, where she lives; and on Long Island. Sanders, by contrast, could do better upstate, with its predominantly white and rural voters, and in more progressive parts of the city, like the Upper West Side and neighborhoods of Brooklyn. He, like Trump, could be hamstrung by the states closed primary, which restricts voting to registered Democrats and Republicans. Independents wouldve had to re-register back in October to vote on Tuesday.

On the Republican side, Trump has a cozy lead. Hes got the strongholds of New York City, Western New York state, and Long Island, and hes practically Staten Islands patron saint. But whats even more interesting than Trumps home-state popularity is how his opponents campaigns in the state have shaken out. John Kasich, the moderate-ish governor of Ohio, is polling in second behind Trump, while Ted Cruz is far behind. The Wall Street Journal described Kasich as relishing his second-place polling status. These numbers bolster the argument Kasich has been making all along: He can do better in non-red states than Cruz, the so-called establishments last-ditch hope for beating Trump.

Cruz, whos won far more states than Kasich, isnt counting on New York. His typical jabs about New York values wont play there, and the state doesnt have many of the evangelical voters he has come to rely on. Already, hes moved on to states voting later in April. For anti-Trumpers, Tuesdays goal will be to prevent the billionaire from taking all of the states delegates. New York is a not a winner-take-all contest, so each candidate has the chance to win some delegates; snagging most or all 95 would be a boon to the front-runner. But Trump, for his part, seems to be feeling positive. Hes already scheduled a press conference for Tuesday night from Trump Tower, the place where he launched his campaign. He only does that, it seems, when he feels a big win coming on. -Nora Kelly

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Around 66 million years ago, the sky fell on the dinosaurs heads. An asteroid smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula, causing cataclysmic climate changes that marked the end of the Cretaceous period, and killed off some three-quarters of animal species. A small proportion of hardy birds survived, but the other dinosaurs went extinct.

They were, however, already in decline.

Manabu Sakamoto from the University of Reading has shown that dinosaur species were going extinct faster than new ones were appearing, for at least 40 million years before the end of the Cretaceous. The dinosaur opera had already been going through a long diminuendo well before the asteroid ushered in its final coda.

Many other researchers had looked at the fates of the dinosaurs before that infamous extinction event and suggested that they were already declining. But most of these studies had simply tabulated raw numbers of species from different blocks of time. This approach has problems: the rocks from certain time periods may simply be better at preserving fossils, or may have been more intensively scrutinized by fossil-hunters.

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After a recent attempt to adjust for these biases, using up-to-date information and better statistical techniques, Stephen Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh found no evidence for a progressive decline in total dinosaur species richness. Two groupsthe horned ceratopsians and the duck-billed hadrosaurswere fading in both number of species and variation in body shapes, but the others were not. Recently, the idea that the dinosaurs were reigning strong has dominated the academic debate, says Sakamoto.

He begs to differ. Together with Michael Benton and Chris Venditti, he took a recently published family tree, comprising 614 dinosaur species, and modeled the rates at which new species arose and old ones went extinct. Were not counting numbers of species throughout the history of dinosaurs, but of speciation events, he explains. (A speciation event occurs when one species diverges into two.)

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The titanic long-necked sauropods went through the biggest downturn. They experienced a burst of speciation in the early Jurassic period that culminated in the late-Jurassic arrival of iconic giants like Brontosaurus and Diplodocus. But by 114 million years ago, they were losing species faster than they could replace them. Even the arrival of the record-breaking titanosaurs couldnt compensate for this evolutionary recession.

The meat-eating theropods went through a similar, but less pronounced, rise and fall. The Cretaceous period was known for its extremely diverse range of theropods, including sickle-clawed dromaeosaurs like Velociraptor, pot-bellied and scythe-clawed therizinosaurs, ostrich-like ornithomimosaurs, and mighty tyrannosaurs. But many of these lineages originated much earlier in the Jurassic; during their Cretaceous heyday, they were also going extinct faster than they were speciating.

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Ironically, the only exceptions to this pattern were the ceratopsians and hadrosaursthe two groups that Brusattes analysis showed were in decline. These plant-eaters radiated into species with very similar builds, but with subtle variations in skulls and teeth that allowed them to exploit different sources of food.

Then again, scientists may have overestimated the number of species in these two groups, says Susannah Maidment from Imperial College London. For example, theres a fierce ongoing debate about whether Torosaurus was actually an older version of Triceratops. Over-splitting of this group relative to other dinosaur groups could produce a false picture of high speciation rates at the end of the Cretaceous, says Maidment. The method used in [Sakomoto's] study requires us to have an accurate dinosaur evolutionary tree, and although we are very happy with the major branches, the arrangements of the twigs at the end is still debated and constantly undergoing change with each new dinosaur discovered.

Even if the ceratopsian and hadrosaur trees are right, these groups represented just one seventh of total dinosaur diversity. For the dynasty as a whole, extinction rates were surpassing speciation rates for roughly 48 to 53 million years before the asteroid impact.

I think we sometimes have a tendency to overthink the dinosaur extinction, myself included.

The causes of the slowdowns are unclear, says Sakomoto. The Cretaceous was a time of severe environmental change, with intense volcanic activity for tens of millions of years and fluctuating sea levels. I think that dinosaurs were probably under stress for a very long time, says Sakomoto. And their prolonged downfall left plenty of space and time for competitors to diversify in their place, including those pesky mammals.

This isnt to say that the dinosaurs were going extinct before the asteroid impact, but they were getting more vulnerable and susceptible to mass extinction says Sakomoto. And thats relevant to us in the modern world. We are putting a lot of pressure on modern species, and extinctions are happening at an unprecedented rate. If some kind of catastrophe occurs, it might be even more damaging than what were observing right now.

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I love seeing big datasets and new methods thrown at some of these classic mysteries, says Brusatte. The result seems very robust, but I question what it means. Does that mean that dinosaurs were doomed to extinction, that they endured some kind of long death march before the asteroid impact finished them off, like a boxer knocking down their opponent with a light punch after several rounds of pummeling? I dont think so.

He suspects that the results say more about dinosaur booms than dinosaurs busts. They emerged during the Triassic period and after an extinction event killed off most of their competitors (like the obscure but highly successful crurotarsans), they evolved like mad during the Jurassic. After that burst, a slowdown was inevitable. That doesn't mean the economy is necessarily doomed; it just means things aren't growing as insanely fast anymore, says Brusatte. He suspects that youd see the same pattern in other groups that suddenly rose to power, including mammals like us.

I think we sometimes have a tendency to overthink the dinosaur extinction, myself included, Brusatte adds. The way I see it, it came down to the asteroid. Simple as that. Diversity declines may have made dinosaurs somewhat more susceptible to the asteroid impact, but probably nothing was going to save them.

The focus on the extinction event also obscures the breathtakingly long nature of the dinosaurs reign. It invites us to think that all the dinosaurs were familiar with were around at the same time, and then suddenly they werent. Thats not true: as Brian Switek says, less time separates us from Tyrannosaurus than separated Tyrannosaurus from Stegosaurus. If anything, Sakomotos study, in revealing the dinosaurs slow decline, reminds us about just how long they ruled fora period of 180 million years, during which many species came and went.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Seoul (AFP) - A South Korean court has ordered a fried chicken restaurant owner to pay 14.5 million won ($12,500) for refusing to comply with a ban on using the luxury Louis Vuitton brand name for his outlet, a report said Tuesday.

The owner, identified only by his surname Kim, had called his restaurant in Seoul, "LOUIS VUITON DAK" -- a play on the word "tongdak" which means whole chicken in Korean.

He also ran up a logo very similar to that of the French fashion house and had it printed on his napkins and fried chicken take-out cartons.

None too pleased with Mr. Kim's ingenuity, Louis Vuitton filed a suit in September last year, saying the use of the company's name to sell fried chicken was damaging to the brand.

A district court in Seoul agreed and in October ordered Kim to desist and threatened a 500,000 won-per-day fine for non-compliance.

Kim responded by tinkering with the restaurant name and came up with "chaLouisvui tondak" which he unsuccessfully argued was different enough to comply with the court ruling.

Louis Vuitton complained again and this week and the court ordered Kim to pay the fashion house 14.5 million won for the 29 days that the amended name was displayed.

"Although he changed the name with different spacing, the two names sounded almost the same," the Korea Times quoted the judge as saying.
Paris (AFP) - Two nights after the Paris attacks in November, a young couple stripped to their waists and kissed in the rain on the Place de la Republique as crowds gathered to grieve and share their shock at the killings.

She was French and he Syrian, and the photo of them holding a handwritten placard saying "Love will always win" went viral.

"I knew it was bad when my friends began calling me from Syria asking if I was OK," said artist Hamid Sulaiman, of the jihadist attacks in which 130 people died.

The feeling that senseless death and fanaticism was following him was almost too much to bear, the 30-year-old said.

So he and his partner, theatre director Aurelie Ruby, wrote the gunmen and suicide bombers a message: "F*** OFF.

"As a French-Syrian couple every day we pay the price of terrorism, fanaticism, racism, borders, arms etc. Love will always win."

Then Sulaiman was then just an unknown refugee, another bearded face in the human tide which has spilled out over Syria's borders after five years of unending war.

Three months later his graphic novel "Freedom Hospital", which tells the story of an underground hospital in a besieged Syrian town, is being acclaimed in France and Germany.

By turns harrowing, heart-breaking and funny, it follows a group of wounded rebels and the staff of the field hospital who treat them as the revolution's idealism is drowned in a river of blood.

- Tortured to death -

Big, bearded and teddy bearish, Sulaiman is an unlikely revolutionary.

He took part in the 2011 Arab Spring protests, drawing them for the underground anti-regime media in his black and white cinematic style.

But he was soon picked up by the police and thrown in jail for a week. When the authorities released him unexpectedly a few days before he was to stand trial for "supporting terrorism", he took his chance and fled.

"I said goodbye to no one. I got a taxi straight to Jordan," said Sulaiman.

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His friends have not been so lucky. "Freedom Hospital" is dedicated to his best friend Hussam Khayat who was tortured to death by Bashar al-Assad's secret police three years ago.

He was 24 and was "only staying to finish his studies. He was no longer taking part in any anti-regime activities," Sulaiman said.

"Just before they arrested him he told me that he just wanted to keep his head down and get out.

"We were five friends. Hussam was killed, another disappeared and another guy was found shot dead in his car. We don't know what happened. Another friend was in prison for two years and is now in Germany. I was very lucky to get out."

None of his middle-class family are still in Syria. They have been scattered to the wind. "It is not unusual now for Syrians to have a member of their family on all five continents," he joked.

But wherever they are, the war follows them.

"As a Syrian you cannot escape it," he told AFP. "I wrote 'Freedom Hospital' because it is impossible to ignore the war," he said.

- From taxi driver to emir -

The book does not flinch from showing how a group of people forced together in the hospital set up in a former restaurant turn on each other as the war drags on.

All of the Syrian mosaic is there -- Sunnis, Kurds, Alawites, leftists, jihadists and old-style nationalists who hark back to a time before Assad's father grabbed power in 1970.

And as every episode ends, the death toll ticker rises in the corner of the page.

But despite the bloodshed and chaos, the book shows that love and human decency are still possible even in the darkest and most desperate of circumstances.

"I don't think anyone can say what is really going on in Syria today, even people who are there," said Sulaiman.

"'Freedom Hospital' is my point of view. I don't try to be neutral and I cannot be. This is a homage to the people who have tried to do something, to help others."

Still the book does not flinch from reality. A fundamentalist taxi driver treated in the hospital ends up becoming Islamic State emir of the city.

Graphic novels have the power to tell stories readers might be afraid to broach in other forms, Sulaiman argued, pointing to Joe Sacco's classic on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, "Gaza 1956", and the success of "The Arab the Future" by Franco-Syrian Riad Sattouf.

"That's why in the book I always note where all the weaponry comes from -- Russia, the US, France... because war is a business too," Sulaiman added.

"To be Syrian now is to live with a kind of madness. I am lucky because I can live in a place in my head where I can create. And I am happy there.

"I love and I am loved. And that is all that matters... From that you can built again."
Kuala Lumpur (AFP) - The German picked last year to turn around Malaysia's ailing flag carrier will quit as CEO in September before the end of his three-year contract, the airline said Tuesday.

Christoph Mueller, Malaysia Airlines' first foreign boss, had previously initiated a rescue plan at Ireland's Aer Lingus that involved hefty job cuts.

"I am proud of what we have achieved as a team in such a short time and that the hard work of all of our employees is already showing the first signs of success," he said in a statement issued by Malaysia Airlines.

"Unfortunately, personal circumstances will make it difficult for me to complete my full term," he added without elaborating.

He was hired following twin disasters which hit the airline.

In March 2014 flight MH370 disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew aboard, and remains missing.

Four months later flight MH17 was blown out of the sky by a suspected ground-to-air missile over Ukraine, claiming the lives of all 298 passengers and crew onboard.

Last June, soon after he took over, Mueller declared Malaysia Airlines to be "technically bankrupt".

"We are technically bankrupt and that decline of performance started long before the tragic events of 2014," Mueller told a press briefing.

"The restructuring process will start today with a hard reset."

That reset included slashing 6,000 jobs, a trimmed route network and a revamped brand image as part of its recovery plan.

Beset by poor management, Malaysia Airlines had struggled for years to remain competitive, posting losses for most of the past five years.

Khazanah Nasional Bhd, the country's sovereign wealth fund and the airline's sole shareholder, said it was working out a succession plan.

It added that Mueller would remain on the Malaysia Airlines board as a non-executive director to see through the leadership transition and continue contributing to the implementation of its recovery plan.

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Mohamad Nor Yusof, Malaysia Airlines' chairman, said the airline had gained from Mueller's leadership.

The appointment of a foreigner had sparked some grumbling in Malaysia, but the German called on employees to pull together to save the airline.

"But let me be clear, I cannot walk on water. What is ahead can only be achieved as a team, a strong team," he said last May. "Please help me to get the job done."
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad, calling for Prime Minister Najib Razak to resign over the 1MDB state fund scandal, has applied for a court order to freeze Najib's assets, Mahathir's lawyers said on Tuesday. The lawyers said in a statement Mahathir was also seeking a court order for Najib to disclose all assets held under his name as well as under the names of his nominees. Mahathir, along with two others, filed a suit in March against Najib alleging corruption and abuse of power. The lawsuit also accused Najib of interfering in several probes into debt-laden 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Najib has come under criticism over allegations of graft and mismanagement linked to 1MDB and deposits of about $681 million into his personal bank account. He has denied any wrongdoing and maintains that he did not use the funds for personal gain. In January, Malaysia's attorney-general cleared Najib of any criminal offence. Mahathir was joined in the lawsuit by Khairuddin bin Abu Hassan and Anina binti Saadudin, former members of the ruling United Malay National Organisation (UMNO) party which Najib heads. The three, citing misfeasance and breach of duty, are seeking exemplary damages from Najib to the government of 2.6 billion ringgit ($669.93 million) and aggravated damages of 42 million ringgit - equal to the amounts that were deposited into Najib's account. (Reporting by Rozanna Latiff; Editing by Nick Macfie)
The minister said the order was an attempt to create stagnation in the higher education sector and that it was definitely a setback for the sector's progress.
LONDON (Reuters) - Battling with light sabres and sitting in an A-wing fighter, Britain's royal princes got a taste of the "Star Wars" universe on Tuesday when they visited the set of latest episode in the sci-fi saga. Accompanied by Daisy Ridley and John Boyega, the young stars of "The Force Awakens", and Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill, Prince William and Prince Harry toured Pinewood studios outside London, where "Star Wars: Episode VIII" is being made. In a tweet, Kensington Palace said the visit was to "recognise the wealth of fantastic British creative talent involved" in making "Star Wars" films. The princes met the creative teams working behind the scenes, checked out props and posed with characters such as Chewbacca and droid BB-8. "Star Wars: Episode VIII" is due for release in December 2017. (Writing By Marie-Louise Gumuchian, editing by Larry King)
Dozens of families of those killed when a missile shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine two years ago are considering suing the carrier for compensation, their lawyer told AFP Tuesday.

All 298 passengers and crew -- the majority of them Dutch -- died when the Boeing 777 was hit by a Russian-made BUK anti-aircraft missile over war-torn eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.

"We are still negotiating the case. But the offers that Malaysia Airlines are making are almost offensive for our clients," lawyer Veeru Mewa told AFP.

His office, Beer Advocaten, represents the families of 91 people killed in the disaster. But he is also leading a core group of Dutch lawyers, acting for the families of some 168 people who died on the ill-fated flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

Under a 1999 international accord dubbed the Montreal Convention, the families have until the second anniversary of the disaster -- July 17 -- to decide if they want to press a lawsuit.

Mewa said the airlines' insurers were "taking advantage of Dutch law" under which if someone dies in an accident then you can only claim "compensation for the funeral costs."

"According to international standards that would mean a Dutch life is worth less than any other life," he said.

The lawsuit, if it is filed, would seek damages for the loss of earnings as well as compensation for the "psychological" trauma of those who lost loved ones.

The legal team was also thinking of holding Malaysia Airlines "liable for flying over Ukraine" which was in the middle of a conflict with government forces fighting pro-Russian rebels.

Many "families are struggling with real traumatic bereavement, real post-traumatic stress syndrome because of the images, seeing rebels walking on the gravesite, and not being able to go there, knowing that the Dutch government was not there to collect the bodies for quite a while," Mewa said.

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They just want "a just" settlement, and the offer so far on the table did not give them "satisfaction," he added.

It remains to be decided if the suit would be filed in The Hague or in Malaysia, he said, adding that as well as Dutch clients the group including Swiss, Indonesian and Australian nationals.

"Malaysia Airlines, immediately after the crash said that they will take responsibility and take care of the families. And the offers they are making is not suggesting that."

Officials with the Dutch Safety Board (OVV) concluded last year as part of an international investigation that the Boeing 777 was hit by a BUK missile.

In February, a separate criminal investigation team said they hoped within months to pinpoint the exact spot from which the missile was fired.
By Elizabeth Piper LONDON (Reuters) - Justice minister Michael Gove accused government colleagues on Tuesday of treating voters like children, saying they were trying to scare them into voting to stay in the European Union with "new bogeymen every night". Gove, a friend of pro-EU Prime Minister David Cameron, used a speech to lampoon "In" campaigners, who include top ministers, deepening a rift in the ruling Conservatives before a June 23 referendum on membership of the 28-nation bloc. He also attacked a report delivered on Monday by Chancellor George Osborne, who said an exit from the EU, or Brexit, could cost Britons thousands of pounds a year and sap funding for public services. With British voters evenly split over whether to stay in the bloc, the campaign to convince the large numbers of undecideds has heated up, pitting Conservative MPs against each other in increasingly personal debates. "The 'In' campaign want us to believe that Britain is beaten and broken ... (It) imagines that the people of this country are mere children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night," Gove told supporters and journalists at a building overlooking Westminster. He mocked the remain campaign, led by Cameron, for suggesting fewer foreigners would play in England's top footbell league, electricity would be cut off and the City of London financial district would lose influence if Britain left the EU. Gove said, instead, Britain would reclaim control over its borders, financial structures and legal systems. "If we vote to stay, we are not settling for the status quo ... we are voting to be a hostage locked in the boot of a car driven by others to a place and at a pace that we have no control over," he said. Answering questions at the end of his speech, Gove played down any enmity in the Conservative Party, which is deeply split over Britain's EU membership. He also presented what he saw as the future if Britain voted to leave - a new start when the country "holds all the cards" in future talks with the EU, with an economy intact. However, in Gove's most direct attack on the government, he said Osborne's report was "an official admission from the 'In' campaign that if we do vote to stay in the EU then immigration can continue to increase by hundreds of thousands year on year". The government, which wants to reduce immigration to tens of thousands, says the nation can only control its borders if it cooperates with the EU and has warned that thousands of refugees may flock to Britain from France if the country left. The leader of the Labour Party's campaign to keep Britain in the EU characterised Gove's speech as "bluster". "Michael Gove wants to wish away reality, but the truth is every credible independent forecaster says Brexit will hurt our economy," Alan Johnson said in a statement. (Additional reporting by Kylie MacLellan,; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Tony Jimenez)
By Olivia Oran

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Having searched high and low for revenue growth with little success, Morgan Stanley is taking a hatchet to costs.

The bank cut total expenses by 14 percent last quarter, results released on Monday showed. This followed an even sharper decline the prior period when it announced a sweeping plan to shed more of its bond-trading business.

Much of the cost reduction has come from paying fewer employees less money, and the bank plans to do more of that. Morgan Stanley cut 3 percent of its staff during the first quarter, and compensation-related expenses fell 19 percent compared with the year-ago period.

But even with those steps, analysts grilled Morgan Stanley executives about whether they will be able to hit Chief Executive James Gorman's target of a 9 to 11 percent return-on-equity by 2017. That measure of how profitably the bank is using shareholder capital was just 6.2 percent during the first quarter.

"If Morgan Stanley doesn't get to this target, investors will want to think about the next alternative," CLSA banking analyst Mike Mayo said, referring to more drastic changes in its business mix. "We're not there yet, but we need to see evidence they're on track for 2017."

Gorman suggested the bank may, in fact, have to do more to hit his goal. Absent a revenue revival which seems unlikely this year, that means more cost cutting ahead.

"If these markets were to continue as is, our goals would be extremely difficult to achieve," Gorman said. He later added, If indeed the environment continued as is, we would be much more aggressive on the cost front.

The extent of Morgan Stanley's cost-cutting is leading some analysts and investors to wonder whether the bank is going too far.

Wall Street has a tendency to cut through fat into muscle, and sometimes bone, when markets are rough for extended periods as they have now been for more than five years. When conditions improve, banks that cut too much miss out on opportunities to grow revenue and gain market share in key businesses, because they no longer have the staff and resources to be nimble.

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Banks "need to be careful," said Tyler Ventura, a research analyst with investment management firm Diamond Hill in Columbus, Ohio. "As the entire industry cuts, some are going to cut more than others and you want to make sure you can still maintain your business."

In January, Morgan Stanley announced an initiative to cut up to $1 billion in costs by 2017 in an initiative called Project Streamline. The plan included shifting operations to low-cost cities, outsourcing more and using technology to become more efficient.

Morgan Stanley Chief Financial Officer Jonathan Pruzan told Reuters in an interview on Monday most of the cost-cutting last quarter came from tightening up discretionary spending. More cost cuts are on the way, but it will take time for them to be reflected in earnings, he said.

The bank is also moving more staff to cities where salaries and overhead cost less than in New York or London. Around 40 percent of Morgan Stanley's bank-office staff sit in cheaper cities like Mumbai and Glasgow today, Pruzan said on a call with analysts. The bank wants to boost that to 50 to 55 percent.

MOVING TO THE CLOUD

Technology is another big part of Morgan Stanleys cost-cutting drive.

The bank is relying more on cloud computing, which is storing and processing data through a shared, centralized system offered by large tech firms.

Using the cloud tends to be cheaper and more efficient for companies than buying and maintaining their own servers. But it takes time to transition, and for costs related to old technology to fade away.

As it stands, Morgan Stanley has few other options than to focus on costs, analysts say.

"As market activity improves, some of the cost-cutting questions at Morgan will probably go away," said Brian Kleinhanzl, a banking analyst with KBW. "But as of now, its the only lever that banks can really pull in this type of environment."

(Reporting by Olivia Oran in New York; Editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra and Cynthia Osterman)
Moschino is bringing its Men's Spring/Summer 2017 and Women's Resort 2017 shows to Los Angeles, with the Italian luxury brand's creative director Jeremy Scott playing host for the first time.

The show, scheduled for June 10 at L.A. Live, is also part of the West Coast debut of MADE Los Angeles, supported by WME/IMG. It features presentations, live music, parties, fashion shows and a fashion bazaar.

Scott says that the idea to move the show to Los Angeles this year has been brewing for a while.

"As I've been a Los Angeleno now for over a decade, the thought to transplant my Moschino show to the west coast for a special showing has been on my mind since I took the role as Creative Director," he says. "So when WME | IMG and MADE let me know they were brewing up an idea to do something in LA, it took me no time at all to say YES!'"
By Joseph Ax

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A former New York City police officer avoided prison on Tuesday for the killing of an unarmed black man in an unlit stairwell, prompting demonstrations outside a Brooklyn courthouse.

State Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun sentenced Peter Liang to 800 hours of community service, after prosecutors recommended six months of home confinement.

Liang, a rookie who lost his badge after his conviction, had faced up to 15 years for his manslaughter conviction in the death of Akai Gurley, 28.

The officer was patrolling the darkened stairs inside a public housing building in Brooklyn on Nov. 20, 2014, when he fired a single shot that he testified was accidental. The bullet ricocheted off a wall and struck Gurley in the chest as he walked one floor below.

Before imposing the sentence, Chun reduced Liang's manslaughter count to the lesser felony of criminally negligent homicide, finding prosecutors failed to prove Liang "consciously disregarded" the risk of causing another person's death.

"There is no evidence, circumstantially or otherwise, that the defendant was aware of Akai Gurley's presence," he said.

As Chun announced Liang would not face prison, some of Gurley's supporters in the courtroom began sobbing.

The shooting fueled nationwide protests over law enforcement's use of excessive force on minorities. But the case differed from many other high-profile incidents that helped intensify the Black Lives Matter movement. Liang, who is Chinese-American, was not accused of deliberately killing Gurley.

Chinese-American activists organized their own rallies after his conviction, claiming Liang was a scapegoat for police misconduct. Chun said he had received 40,000 letters in support of Liang, though many were identical.

Outside the courthouse, dueling groups of protesters - one supporting Liang, the other Gurley's family - stood on opposite sides of the street, holding signs and chanting.

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Both prosecutors and defense lawyers on Tuesday urged Chun not to hold Liang responsible for the actions of other officers.

"This simply is not a case of police brutality," said Assistant District Attorney Joseph Alexis. "This prosecution has always been about justice; it's not about revenge."

Members of Gurley's family have criticized Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson for recommending no prison time.

In a statement, Thompson said Liang would have to "always live with the fact that he recklessly caused Mr. Gurley's death."

Before he was sentenced, Liang apologized to Gurley's family in court and said he never intended to fire the fatal bullet.

"My life is forever changed," he said.

Liang testified at trial that he did not realize the bullet had hit anyone until he saw Gurley's girlfriend desperately trying to revive him. The officer claimed a noise startled him, causing his finger to pull the trigger.

But prosecutors said he acted recklessly in drawing his weapon and discharging a round.

(Editing by Frank McGurty and James Dalgleish)
By Robin Emmott BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Russian and NATO envoys are unlikely to ease the worst tensions since the Cold War very much when they meet on Wednesday in their highest-level talks on security in almost two years. Already bridling at NATO's expansion eastwards into its old Soviet sphere of influence, the Kremlin sees the U.S.-led alliance's new deterrents as a threat. NATO believes Moscow's annexation of Crimea puts Europe's stability at risk and is modernizing to defend itself against an assertive Russia. The NATO-Russia Council, which was broken off in June 2014 after the Crimea crisis, will meet in Brussels to discuss Ukraine, Afghanistan and how to avoid military accidents that might lead to war. "We are not afraid of dialogue," said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who will chair the talks with the alliance's 28 ambassadors and Moscow's envoy to NATO, Alexander Grushko. While the West and Russia remain at odds over eastern Ukraine, where more than 9,000 people have been killed in separatist fighting that NATO accuses Moscow of backing, the meeting is a sign of willingness to improve relations. Agreeing on the meeting was a breakthrough in itself after many disagreements over the agenda, NATO diplomats said. However, the simulated attack passes of Russian warplanes near a U.S. guided missile destroyer in the Baltic Sea last week, followed by the interception of an U.S. air force plane by a Russian fighter two days later, have again strained the mood. Stoltenberg called the Russian maneuvers "unprofessional and unsafe behavior" on Tuesday, saying they highlighted the need for dialogue. NATO allies worry that Russian pilots are ignoring safety precautions agreed during the Cold War. Grushko said it was the alliance, not Moscow, that was increasing the risks of conflict in Europe. He cited NATO's biggest modernization since the Cold War, possible plans for a bigger NATO presence in eastern Europe, and a U.S. missile defense shield as reasons to be worried. "Today we are facing a NATO military build-up which is completely unjustified," Grushko told reporters. "I don't see any possibility for a qualitative improvement of our relations if NATO continues on its path of deterrence and relevant military planning." NO IMPROVEMENT IN EUROPEAN SECURITY Washington says the U.S. missile defense shield in Europe is not directed at Russia and is designed to shoot down any ballistic missiles that might be launched by Iran. The United States is developing sites in Romania and in Poland, two former Soviet allies, and may eventually hand over command and control to NATO. Poland and the Baltic states worry about an increase in the Russian military presence in Kaliningrad, where Russia is positioning longer-range surface-to-air missiles. NATO'S response is likely to be a small multinational force in Poland and the Baltics. It says it will respect a 1997 agreement with Russia not to station large numbers of permanent combat forces in eastern Europe. Russia is likely to say that NATO's insistence on a "persistent", not permanent, presence is simply twisting words. "We don't see any difference between a continuous, persistent rotation and a permanent presence," Grushko said. "The military build-up in center of Europe will not improve European security." (Reporting by Robin Emmott)
By Eileen Soreng and Tenzin Pema (Reuters) - Netflix Inc is thinking global but needs to act more local to realize its full potential, analysts said after the company's subscriber forecasts came up short of expectations. The company's high-flying stock, up by a third in the past 12 months, closed down nearly 13 percent at $94.34 on Tuesday. That was the stock's biggest one-day drop since October 2014. The video streaming pioneer launched its service in almost every country in the world in January, further boosting investors' expectations about the company's growth prospects. However, Netflix on Monday forecast U.S. and international subscriptions would grow at a slower pace than Wall Street expected this quarter, underscoring the troubles it is grappling with as it adapts the service to different markets and cultures. "We believe this highlights the increasing challenges facing the company as it expands into more non-English speaking countries and countries with more localized content," said Mizuho analyst Neil Doshi, who rates the stock "neutral." Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves believes Netflix is taking is slow. "The reductions reflect heightened seasonality and lower incremental adoption, as local content and marketing are being phased in more slowly than previously anticipated," Hargreaves wrote in a note to clients. At least eight brokerages, including Mizuho, trimmed their price targets on the stock. Baird was the most bearish, cutting its target to $108 from $115. The median price target on the stock is $123. J.P. Morgan Securities analysts were among those that said Netflix needed to add more languages and local content and payment options. Netflix offers dubbing and subtitles in 18 languages including English, German, Spanish and Japanese. After its global rollout in January, it also offers subtitles and a limited amount of dubbing in Arabic, Korean and Chinese. The company, whose original shows include "Orange is the New Black" and "House of Cards", is also facing increased competition in its home market from the likes of Amazon.com Inc and Hulu. Amazon announced on Monday it would offer its video streaming service as a standalone monthly subscription as it looks to drive membership in its Prime subscription service. Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter, one of the few analysts with a "sell" or "underperform" rating on Netflix, said Amazon's move could spell trouble for the video streaming company. "Amazon Video will up the ante for acquiring new content. This creates a double-whammy for Netflixhigher content spend and slowing subscriber growth," Pachter said. (Reporting by Eileen Soreng and Tenzin Pema in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Savio D'Souza)
(Reuters) - Newcastle United manager Rafael Benitez has given the squad belief they can avoid Premier League relegation, midfielder Moussa Sissoko said ahead of Tuesday's clash against Manchester City at St James' Park. The second-from-bottom Magpies, who sacked manager Steve McClaren last month, beat Swansea City 3-0 on Saturday to record their first win in eight matches and close to within three points of 17th-placed Norwich City. "The belief is returning. We can stay up. If we beat City we'll be level on points with Norwich," Sissoko, who was made captain by Benitez in Saturday's win, told British media. "It won't be easy, especially against City, but we have to give everything. We need to believe because we're good enough to do it. Manchester City are one of England's best sides but we're in front of our own fans and we'll give everything." (Reporting by Shravanth Vijayakumar in Bengaluru. Editing by Patrick Johnston)
By Lanre Ola MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) - The Nigerian army, backed by the country's air force, on Monday repelled an attack an attack by Boko Haram fighters near the border with Niger in the jihadists' northeast heartland, the military said. The group allied to Islamic State had been fighting for at least seven years to carve out an Islamist caliphate in the region in a conflict which has displaced more than 2 million people and killed thousands. The militants struck as the troops were on their way to the border town of Damasak where they wanted to set up a permanent base, a military source said. The army took the area back from Boko Haram last year, but has struggled to hold it. "The Nigerian troops have successfully repelled an attack by Boko Haram terrorists who attempted an incursion into (the) 113 Battalion," army spokesman Sani Usman said in a statement carried by PR Nigeria, which releases government statements. Kareto is the army's next base in the area. "So far our troops had two officers and 22 soldiers wounded in action," he said without giving further details. No further information was immediately available from the remote area which is largely disconnected from mobile phone networks. Boko Haram controlled a swath of land in northeast Nigeria around the size of Belgium at the start of last year, but was pushed out by Nigerian troops, aided by soldiers from neighbouring countries. The group has since stepped up cross-border attacks and suicide bombings against markets, bus stations and places of worship. (Reporting by Felix Onuah, Ulf Laessing and Lanre Ola; editing by Dominic Evans and G Crosse)
By Libby George and Julia Payne LONDON/ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigeria's state oil company is in a standoff with energy giants ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell over ownership of physical crude cargoes as the West African nation seeks to shore up its creaking budget. The dispute has delayed some of the country's monthly oil export programmes and added to confusion over just how much crude Nigeria has at its disposal to exchange for gasoline, sell to fund its record 2016 budget or use as debt collateral. Discrepancies between NNPC and companies with production sharing contracts (PSCs) that entitle them to oil have always existed, but the crude price crash has increased the urgency to sort them out as both state and foreign firms feel the pinch. The stakes are high for Nigeria, which is fighting its worst financial crises in years and is also swapping more oil for gasoline to end a nationwide fuel shortage. "NNPC needs every cent they can get for fuel," said a source close to the negotiations, adding that "NNPC had a different set of books" than oil majors. But oil majors have also been forced to foot a hefty bill to cover NNPC's portion of joint venture project costs, making them unlikely to give ground. At issue is how much oil NNPC gets each month and how much it has to give to majors to cover costs under PSCs that help Nigeria export some 2 million barrels per day (bpd). The lower the oil price, the more cargoes needed to pay companies under contracts. But sources told Reuters that NNPC was taking nearly as much crude for itself as when oil was above $100, eating into oil companies' allotments. Exxon has confronted NNPC, sources said, by refusing to allocate barrels from the Erha stream  significantly delaying its loading programmes. Sources said NNPC had got some six cargoes in total more than its share. "As a matter of practice, we do not comment on private discussions with government," Exxon said in a statement, adding "however, it is ExxonMobil's expectation that all parties recognise the need to meet their contractual obligations." An NNPC spokesman did not provide a response to detailed questions from Reuters, stating that the company was "anchored on transparency and honesty". The company recently began publishing detailed monthly accounts of its financial status and crude liftings. Shell is in a similar battle over Bonga crude, though it has simmered under the surface and not caused significant loading programme delays. Still, a source close to the situation told Reuters that NNPC had taken roughly nine more cargoes than oil majors thought it should  oil worth some $357 million at current oil prices. Shell declined to comment. The problem is likely to persist. Nigeria, Africa's largest economy, relies on crude sales for the bulk of government revenues, but NNPC has reported losses since it began publishing its data from August last year. As NNPC's liquidity problems mount, it has turned to oil majors themselves to cover costs for joint venture projects, so-called "cash calls", making its oil debt to them even greater. NNPC already owes at least $3 billion in cash calls, according to NNPC head Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, and its finance minister said it plans to dip into money reserved for cash calls if revenue this year falls short of expectations. "NNPC has always had difficulties meeting its cash call  and that's the bottom of the issue," said Dolapo Oni, head of energy research at pan-African lender Ecobank. "The IOCs get more cargoes diverted to them to cover these costs." Nigeria badly needs revenue to fund a proposed 6.06 trillion naira ($30.6 billion) budget aimed at stimulating the economy. It is also increasingly turning to its crude to tame fuel shortages that began last month. "There aren't enough cargoes available to NNPC," Oni said of efforts to swap more crude for gasoline, adding "they had to allocate those extra barrels to the IOCs" to cover debts. Still, given the gravity of the situation, NNPC could continue to fight for cargoes. "Stopping a rebellion over fuel shortages is a priority right now," one source told Reuters. (Additional reporting by Alexis Akwagyiram in Lagos, editing by David Evans)
Oslo (AFP) - A Norwegian court said it will deliver its verdict Wednesday on a lawsuit brought by mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik over what he says are his "inhuman" prison conditions.

Norway's most notorious inmate has been detained in a high-security prison unit since he massacred 77 people in a bombing and gun rampage in 2011.

The 37-year-old rightwing extremist claimed during the March hearing into his lawsuit that his solitary confinement was a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

But the state's lawyers argued that his isolation was necessary because Breivik is "extremely dangerous", and said his conditions fall "well within the limits of what is permitted" under the European convention.

Breivik used the hearings -- held in the gymnasium of the Skien prison in Telemark where he is incarcerated -- to promote his extremist views and at the opening of proceedings made a Nazi salute.

He is serving a maximum 21-year sentence -- which can be extended if he is still considered dangerous -- for killing eight people in a bombing outside a government building in Oslo and then murdering another 69, mostly teenagers, in a shooting spree on at a Labour Youth camp on the island of Utoya in July 2011.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said in an interview broadcast on Monday that the United States is providing more support to Iraq as its military moves to take back territory from Islamic State, and he expects the city of Mosul will be retaken eventually. "As we see the Iraqis willing to fight and gaining ground, let's make sure that we are providing them more support," Obama said in an interview with CBS News. U.S. officials announced in Baghdad on Monday the United States will deploy about 200 additional troops, mostly as advisers for Iraqi troops as they advance toward Mosul, the largest Iraqi city still under Islamic State control. The increase raises the authorized U.S. troop level in Iraq to 4,087, not including special operations personnel, some logistics workers and troops on temporary rotations. "Were not doing the fighting ourselves," Obama said, "but when we provide training, when we provide special forces who are backing them up, when we are gaining intelligence, working with the coalitions that we have, what we've seen is that we can continually tighten the noose" on Islamic State. "My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall," Obama said. (Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Washington (AFP) - President Barack Obama's plan to delay deportation for nearly half of the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants was fraught with uncertainty Monday, as US Supreme Court justices signaled deep divisions.

If the eight justices deadlock in their ruling, due by late June, the plan would remain on hold, dealing a bruising defeat to Obama during his last year in office and pushing the issue to the next president.

Hundreds of activists massed outside in blazing sunshine, brandishing heart-shaped signs reading "Keep families together" and chanting "Si se puede" -- putting a Spanish twist on Obama's 2008 campaign slogan "Yes We Can."

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, two conservatives whose opinions are critical in this case, sparred repeatedly with the Obama administration's attorney during an extended 90-minute session of oral arguments.

At stake is a series of executive actions the president took in November 2014 to bypass a Republican-held Congress that refused to enact his promised reform of America's immigration system.

One initiative, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), would shield from deportation people living in the United States since 2010 whose children are US citizens or residents. They would also be able to obtain a work authorization and pay taxes.

Another measure would expand on an existing program that grants a reprieve to immigrants who entered the country as children.

Obama, who has deported more people than any other US president, said he wanted to prioritize deportations of "felons, not families."

The four liberal-leaning justices pointed to similar executive actions by his predecessors.

Critics accuse Obama of overstepping his authority, a view echoed on the conservative wing of the bench.

- 'Upside down' -

"It's as if the president is setting the policy and the Congress is executing it," Kennedy said. "That's just upside down."

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Mirroring Obama's gridlock with Congress on immigration is that of a Supreme Court evenly split between liberals and conservatives while Senate Republicans refuse to fill the ninth seat left vacant by the late Antonin Scalia.

One way out of a stalemate would be for the justices to issue a narrow ruling on whether the 26 mostly Republican-led states bringing the challenge would suffer enough injury as a result of Obama's actions to legally sue the federal government.

Roberts, who has insisted the Supreme Court should stand above the political fray, is likely to focus on the issue, which dominated much of the court's morning session.

Texas, for instance, claims it would cost the state millions of dollars in public funds to provide driver's licenses at a subsidized cost to the huge group of immigrants who would be allowed to stay.

If the states lack legal standing, that would be enough to dismiss the case -- allowing the justices to eschew a decision on more fundamental aspects of the immigration debate, an immensely divisive issue at the heart of the White House race.

Justice Stephen Breyer, a liberal, noted that if Texas is allowed to sue the government on immigration, that would open the door for states to challenge "all kinds" of federal regulations with which they disagree.

But Roberts repeatedly challenged Solicitor General Donald Verrilli as he argued on behalf of the administration that Texas had no grounds to sue.

While declining to predict the outcome of the case, White House spokesman Josh Earnest expressed "continued confidence in the power of the legal argument" the government's attorney presented to the court.

Senate Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid urged Republicans to cooperate to pass immigration reform in Congress for a "permanent solution."

"Our nation would be far better off with a bipartisan, comprehensive overhaul of our nation's immigration laws," he said.

- 'Unprecedented, unlawful' -

Nearly five million people would get relief from deportation under Obama's policy.

Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller called the actions "an unprecedented, unlawful assertion of executive power."

But Verrilli stressed that those who would win a reprieve would be a low priority for deportations anyway.

"There is a pressing humanitarian concern in avoiding the breakup of families that contain US citizen children," he said.

Roshell, a 17-year-old protester who declined to give her last name, said she lives with the fear "every day" that authorities could come deport her and her parents, who brought her to the United States illegally when she was just a toddler.

"We have hope, we are on the right side of justice," said Uruguayan immigrant and activist Victoria Siciliano, while Mexican Mariachi bands played the US national anthem outside the court.

America's huge population of undocumented immigrants is "living in the shadows," said Sonia Sotomayor, the court's first Hispanic justice and the daughter of Puerto Rican-born parents.

"They are here, whether we want them or not."
World

Obamas Saudi Arabia visit complicated by proposed 9/11 lawsuit bill

A Senate bill that would allow U.S. citizens to sue the Saudi Arabian government over the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is still being finalized, senior lawmakers said on Tuesday, adding that it was important to consider the impact on the U.S.-Saudi alliance. The review comes as President Obama is headed to Saudi Arabia to discuss the two nations relationship. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama did not support the legislation and would not sign it. Republican Sen. Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said lawmakers were trying to resolve concerns about whether individuals should be able to sue foreign governments.

If we open up the possibility that individuals in the United States can routinely start suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States to being continually sued by individuals in other countries. Obama

Meanwhile Obama says the top-ranking U.S. intelligence official is reviewing classified material in a Sept. 11 report that families of attack victims and some lawmakers are demanding be made public. To date, no U.S. investigation has reported finding evidence of Saudi government support for the attacks. Some lawmakers are concerned the bill allowing U.S. citizens to sue a foreign government may have unintended consequences. The New York Times reported on Friday that Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told U.S. lawmakers his country would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in U.S. assets in response to the bill if it passed.
Rome (AFP) - They left war-ravaged Syria, family and friends behind them. France was where they were aiming for. A Greek island was where they ended up.

Now, five months after fleeing their home in the suburbs of Damascus, young Syrian couple Hassan and Nour and their two-year-old son Riad find themselves in Rome as guests of Pope Francis, who plucked them and two other Muslim families from Lesbos on Saturday.

An odyssey fraught with danger and the fear of the unknown has ended with plates of lasagna and strolls in the spring sunshine of the Eternal City.

Nour, 30, clutches little Riad's hand as she explains why they had no option but to get out of a Syria on its knees after five years of civil war.

"We were neither for the Syrian regime or for the Islamists," the scientist said. "We had to leave the country because my husband had been conscripted to join the army."

As Nour had studied in France and speaks the language, that was where they decided to head for.

But first they had to get out of Syria and into Turkey, a challenge that involved the ordeal of being detained for a week by the Islamic State group in the region of its stronghold Raqa.

- Capture could mean death -

At a time when Syrian and Russian warplanes were intensifying air strikes on the region, it was a terrifying experience. But they escaped from it thanks to a trafficker skilled at smuggling people over the border.

"Between Turkey and Greece, if you are caught it is not serious, you are likely to only be in prison for a few hours. If you get caught in Syria, you can get killed," said Nour.

Hassan, 31, recalled being swindled in a Turkish port by a less helpful smuggler who tried to convince him to join more than 60 people on board a rubber dinghy made for 40 in rough weather.

"I refused," said Hassan.

Eventually, the family found their way across the narrow strait of the Aegean Sea that separates Turkey from Lesbos, only to find themselves bogged down in the interminable bureaucracy associated with trying to enter the European Union via its southeastern tip.

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Having arrived before the entry into force in March of an EU deal allowing migrants arriving clandestinely to be sent back to Turkey, they were not in danger of deportation.

But with their hopes of a new life in limbo, the Greek island was no less a prison to them for that - until representatives of the Catholic Sant-Egidio community began to raise the possibility of a transfer to Italy, without ever mentioning the pope or his plane.

"Even now I do not believe what happened to us, it is like a beautiful dream," said Nour.

Once on the plane, Francis came to greet them. "He ruffled our little boy's head. Now Riad kisses his picture."

- An uncertain future -

Installed in temporary accommodation in the Trastevere district of Rome while the Vatican prepares longer-term housing for the families, Hassan says the relief of reaching safety cannot remove the pain of being so far from loved ones.

"The pope is an amazing person. We hope every religious person should be like the pope," he said.

"You can find a new place but you cannot find a new family."

The couple also feel a longing for a time when Syria was not a place of war, when people of different religions and cultures were able to co-exist peacefully.

And they see the pope's gesture as all the more symbolic because of how it highlighted the failure of the Muslim world to come to the aid of the Syrian people in their hour of need.

"No Muslim cleric, no president felt our suffering," Nour said.

"None of them have done what the pope has done. And yet they have the means, the money. I am thinking of the Gulf states. They have everything to take in Syrian refugees but they have not done it."

Having already taken their first language lessons in their new home, the family now face another odyssey of sorts: dealing with Italy's notorious bureaucracy over their application for asylum.

Who knows what the future holds for them but Nour is clear about one thing: "I want my son to have the kind of life I had before the war."
(Reuters) - A federal judge on Tuesday finalized a ruling that an Ohio man accused of plotting to attack the U.S. Capitol with guns and bombs was competent to stand trial.

U.S. District Judge Sandra Beckwith in Cincinnati preliminarily ruled on Monday that Christopher Cornell, 22, was competent and she finalized that decision in a filing.

Cornell, of Green Township, Ohio, near Cincinnati, was arrested in January 2015 and accused of plotting an attack using pipe bombs and bullets. He pleaded not guilty to charges of attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State militant group, attempted murder of government officials, possession of a firearm to commit a crime and solicitation to commit a violent crime.

Cornell, who is being held without bond, faces up to life in prison if convicted. A trial date has not been set.

Cornell researched the construction of pipe bombs, purchased a semi-automatic rifle and 600 rounds of ammunition, and made plans to travel to Washington to carry out the plot, according to the original indictment.

Last November, Beckwith ordered a psychiatric evaluation for Cornell after his attorneys questioned his mental competence.

A doctor chosen by Cornell's attorney found that the defendant was competent to stand trial but also said he should be re-evaluated prior to any plea or trial, according to court documents. A second doctor, who met with Cornell at the court's direction, agreed the defendant was competent to stand trial.

"The court concludes that a preponderance of the evidence establishes that defendant is competent to stand trial," Beckwith wrote in her Tuesday order, citing forensic reports submitted by both parties, Bresler's testimony, evidence filed by prosecutors and the defense, and letters written by Cornell while in jail.

(Reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit; EDiting by Steve Orlofsky)
By Asad Hashim ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - More than 140 rebels surrendered to Pakistani authorities in insurgency-hit Baluchistan province, the government said on Tuesday, touting the development as a victory in the battle to secure a province targeted for major Chinese investment. The rebels, from groups including the Baluchistan Liberation Front (BLF), the Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA) and the Lashkar-e-Baluchistan, laid down their arms on Monday, said Anwaar ul Haq, a provincial government spokesman. They included two "commanders" who were relatives of BLF chief Allah Nazar Baluch, Haq said. He did not give a specific figure for the number who surrendered, beyond saying there were "more than 140". "According to them, they were disillusioned from the fight, because they joined thinking that it was for a national cause, but within a year or two, they realised ... that the movement was directionless," Haq said. A BLF spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the reported surrenders, but Baluch separatists have dismissed previous such events as government-staged propaganda. Baluch separatists have been fighting the Pakistani state for nearly a decade in their struggle to attain independence for resource-rich Baluchistan province from Pakistan. The government is keen to secure the province as work begins on the $46 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor, a project that will see a trade route built along the length of Pakistan, culminating in Baluchistan's deep-water port at Gwadar. China Overseas Ports Holding Company took over Gwadar's operations in 2013. Attacks on security forces by the separatists are common, as are retaliatory operations by the Pakistani military and paramilitary forces, who rights group allege have abducted and killed hundreds of Baluch political activists. Monday's surrenders took place in Kalat district, about 130 km (80 miles) south of the provincial capital Quetta, which has seen a paramilitary crackdown in recent days. Pakistani paramilitary forces said they killed 34 members of the rebel United Baluch Army during an operation there ten days ago. (Writing by Asad Hashim; Editing by Nick Macfie)
By Asad Hashim ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - More than 140 rebels surrendered to Pakistani authorities in insurgency-hit Baluchistan province, the government said on Tuesday, touting the development as a victory in the battle to secure a province targeted for major Chinese investment. The rebels, from groups including the Baluchistan Liberation Front (BLF), the Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA) and the Lashkar-e-Baluchistan, laid down their arms on Monday, said Anwaar ul Haq, a provincial government spokesman. They included two "commanders" who were relatives of BLF chief Allah Nazar Baluch, Haq said. He did not give a specific figure for the number who surrendered, beyond saying there were "more than 140". "According to them, they were disillusioned from the fight, because they joined thinking that it was for a national cause, but within a year or two, they realized ... that the movement was directionless," Haq said. A BLF spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the reported surrenders, but Baluch separatists have dismissed previous such events as government-staged propaganda. Baluch separatists have been fighting the Pakistani state for nearly a decade in their struggle to attain independence for resource-rich Baluchistan province from Pakistan. The government is keen to secure the province as work begins on the $46 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor, a project that will see a trade route built along the length of Pakistan, culminating in Baluchistan's deep-water port at Gwadar. China Overseas Ports Holding Company took over Gwadar's operations in 2013. Attacks on security forces by the separatists are common, as are retaliatory operations by the Pakistani military and paramilitary forces, who rights group allege have abducted and killed hundreds of Baluch political activists. Monday's surrenders took place in Kalat district, about 130 km (80 miles) south of the provincial capital Quetta, which has seen a paramilitary crackdown in recent days. Pakistani paramilitary forces said they killed 34 members of the rebel United Baluch Army during an operation there ten days ago. (Writing by Asad Hashim; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Panama Papers Week II

Fallout from the epic Panama Papers story driven by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism rolled into a second week and I suspect may actually gather momentum in certain areas.

The Spanish industry minister resigned  adding to existing political crisis in Spain  OECD finance ministers met in a hastily convened session in Paris specifically called after Panama Papers, police raided the offices of Mossack Fonseca in Panama and Britains David Cameron announced a new multi-national tax secrecy initiative. Theres even a suspicion that Pakistans prime minister Nawaz Sharif is vulnerable after he made a dash to England, supposedly for medical treatment after calls for him to quit.

The ICIJs own reporting burst on the project has abated a little this week with more on reaction and great contributions from Martha Hamilton, Emilia Diaz-Struck and the stalwart Hamish Boland-Rudder who has kept the remarkable Panama Papers microsite running and blogged throughout as the pace of resignations, raids, discoveries, conspiracy theories and claims emerged.

By mid-this week the Panama Papers had generated more than 40 million page views on our properties (along with partners using our tracking code), 23 million of which went to the Power Players interactive. The explanatory video has been viewed more than 1.65 million times.

Its a stunning achievement by ICIJ Director Gerard Ryle, Deputy Director Marina Guevara Walker and their team and partners around the world. Gerard has been asked to attend a Commonwealth panel ahead of Camerons slightly ironic Anti-Corruption Summit in London in May. While state media in places like Ecuador (where Gerards salary was published on the front page of a newspaper) and Russia continued to spew out conspiracy theories there is great recognition from journalism professionals at the scale of the achievement by the ICIJs work on the leak and its use of a network of more than 370 reporters worldwide to manage the leak received by German paper Suddeutsche Zeitung.

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I suspect this one will run and run as they say.

Separately, the ICIJ crew  Sasha Chavkin, Michael Hudson and Cecile Schilis-Gallego - in partnership with Huffington Post won first place/writing for website from the 82nd National Headliner Awards for Evicted and Abandoned: The World Banks Broken Promise to the Poor. The World Bank project was also a finalist in the IRE Awards for innovation in investigative journalism.

Flint and the story in your backyard

Talia Buford, a member of Jim Morriss environmental reporting team, was in the Washington Post and on our site with a thoughtful and I thought courageous commentary about her home town of Flint and why she didnt quite appreciate the import of what her own mother was telling her about the drinking water bans. "Id bought into the idea that Flintstones could take anything, never once questioning why they should have to, she writes in a piece which I suspect will become a standard text for young journalist and was brave to write. You can see other pieces Talia has worked on through her author page on the Public Integrity site.

On a side note, Talia and her colleague Kristen Lombardi received a special finalist citation for Environmental Justice, Denied in the Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award competition, sponsored by the Columbia School of Journalism. The award honors outstanding achievements in reporting on racial or religious hatred, intolerance or discrimination in the United States. The project is also a finalist for science, technology and environmental reporting in the annual contest of the Deadline Club, the New York City chapter of Society for Professional Journalists.

Tracking the nukes

President Barrack Obama chaired his last 53-nation nuclear security summit in Washington recently and R. Jeffrey Smith who heads our national security coverage with a small but able team, focused on just how much is still to do nearly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Foreign Policy tweeted that Jeffs piece was the one you need to read. The teams work was also cited in expert analysis of the state of nuclear proliferation for the summit by groups including Harvard Universitys Belfer Center and the Stimson Center

The National Security team has really been on the ball with a strong news angle on the fact one of the Brussels suicide bombers was among those it had reported earlier involved in a plot to develop a dirty bomb.

This story is part of Inside Publici. Stories were working on, the impact of our investigations, news about our fundraising efforts, and other issues that shape our work. Click here to read more stories in this topic.

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Bernie outspends Hillary in ads

Michael Beckel, a witty and data-skilled, reporter on the federal politics team was nicely praised in a piece in the Washington Post for his ongoing work on who is sending what in the political race  in this case the Democratic race. Its a good analysis in a sense by an outsider into what really makes the Center for Public Integritys focus on data and money in politics tick.

What were reading and thinking about

Two perspicacious pieces about the state of modern media  all of it and mostly commercially funded rather than non-profit  from two people I respect this week. Rafat Ali, whom I have quoted before and who founded the Skift travel site sees a clear out in new media (which if he is right I think will potentially impact on Public Integrity to some extent) while the sage Ken Doctor, of Newsonomics, sees a similar picture of dramatic change in our landscape underway right now thanks to shrinking display advertising revenue. Anyone who cares about the future of the newspapers, magazines or websites they read or TV news they watch will find both valuable.

I welcome feedback on this note.

Peter Bale, CEO, The Center for Public Integrity

This story is part of Inside Publici. Stories were working on, the impact of our investigations, news about our fundraising efforts, and other issues that shape our work. Click here to read more stories in this topic.

Related stories

Copyright 2016 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
With the groundbreaking release of the Panama Papers and the subsequent global uproar, you're not alone if you find yourself wondering: Just what is a tax haven?

The massive leak of millions of papers from the database of a Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, detailed dozens of global politicians and associates purportedly using offshore tax havens to hide assets.

All told, the names of 12 current or former world leaders were found in the document dump. Iceland's prime minister resigned just days after the release, and several other heads-of-state are now in the hot seat.

[See: The 10 Best ETFs for Value Investors.]

What is a tax haven? Simply put, a tax haven is generally a country with a low rate -- or even a zero rate -- of income tax, says Narelle MacKenzie, a tax consultant in San Diego. The Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the Bahamas each boast a zero percent rate for corporate taxes.

Countries considered tax havens also don't typically reveal the financial accounts of foreign investors, she says. This opacity gives bad actors an air of anonymity that lets them more comfortably leave foreign accounts off their IRS filings.

And it's that failure to file where criminality often rears its ugly head.

Who typically uses tax havens? Companies and high net-worth individuals disproportionately use tax havens in an attempt to lower their tax burdens. "The top corporate statutory tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, which is substantially higher than the average 2015 worldwide tax rate of 22.9 percent, though some countries favor much lower tax rates," says Susan Albring, associate professor of accounting at Syracuse University's Martin J. Whitman School of Management.

When you take in billions in revenue, as some companies do, cutting the tax rate by even 1 percent is a veritable financial windfall.

Still, there's more than enough incentive for individuals to seek out low-tax jurisdictions, too.

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"Other than the country of Eritrea in Africa, (the U.S.) is the only country that taxes its citizens no matter where they live," says Nuri Katz, president of Apex Capital Partners, a global advisory firm. For instance, a Canadian working in Brazil would pay taxes only to Brazil, he says. But an American working in Brazil would pay taxes to Brazil and would have to file in the U.S.

[Read: 5 Delicious Ways to Invest in Organic Food.]

That system creates an incentive for Americans to lower or defer taxes through offshore avenues.

Using tax havens to your advantage isn't illegal. Mark Matthews, formerly chief of criminal investigations for the Internal Revenue Service and now an attorney at Caplin & Drysdale in the District of Columbia, says tax havens are legal for "the vast majority of economic and financial activity."

Although the term "tax haven" is arguably a dirty phrase nowadays, there are certainly legitimate uses of them.

For instance, a U.S. citizen who owns a construction company in Cyprus would have a large tax bill if the company paid him dividends directly, Katz says. But if the construction company was instead owned by a firm headquartered in the Cayman Islands, "then fees of all sorts, like dividends, royalties and other fees could legally be paid to that Caymans company from Cyprus with no tax."

It's when you don't report your ownership of these foreign companies that you can get into big trouble.

Historically, accurate reporting has been tough to enforce. Famously secretive Swiss banks, for instance, weren't required to give up their clients' names to the U.S. government. The banking secrecy afforded by tax havens has facilitated "financial crimes like tax evasion, money laundering and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations," Matthews says.

Consequences can be stiff for offenders. In 2010, Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, making tax-haven shenanigans far more difficult.

"FATCA basically forces all banks around the world to report financial information to the American government," regarding any Americans with interests in foreign accounts, Katz says.

Depending on the crime, prison sentences can range from 5 to 20 years. But if you earned the money legally, there's "generally an IRS disclosure program available to avoid prosecution and publicity, although with likely stiff financial penalties," Matthews says.

"The government is also interested in third parties such as bankers, advisors and the like who come forward to cooperate even if they may have helped Americans hide money," Matthew says.

[Read: 10 Great Ways to Pack Your Portfolio With Blue Chips.]

There's an odd consequence of these stricter rules. The term "tax haven" is ultimately relative. A desirable tax haven for a citizen of one country might not be such an appealing option for a citizen of another, due to differing tax rates and treaties.

New standards from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development take further aim at tax havens by introducing stricter financial reporting requirements between countries.

But the U.S. isn't required to furnish names of non-U.S. citizens with accounts in America to their country of origin. The new standards could encourage "foreigners to stash more money in America by keeping secrets from other governments," Katz says.

Essentially, the U.S. is itself becoming a tax haven of sorts.

The bottom line on tax havens? Simply put, people use them to pay less taxes. Sometimes they're used criminally, most of the time they aren't. Illegally shielding assets in today's day and age is an ill-advised, Herculean task, and becoming more difficult by the day to pull off.

Consult an appropriate tax lawyer if you're thinking about legally setting up offshore financial accounts. And definitely consult a lawyer if you've already done it the other way ... because the Feds may be ringing your doorbell very soon.

John Divine is an investor, freelance financial writer and assistant editor at InvestorPlace.com. Follow him (at your own risk) on Twitter @divinebizkid or spam him with email at jdivine@investormedia.com.
Tokyo (AFP) - Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela called on Tuesday for global efforts to tackle the "Panama Papers" scandal, insisting it is not a problem just for his country but the international financial system as a whole.

Panama is scrambling to avert redesignation as a tax haven that assists money laundering after the disclosure of the offshore dealings of many of the world's wealthy, famous and infamous.

These came to light when millions of documents covering nearly 40 years of business were leaked from the archives of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

The revelations have had far-reaching political consequences, already bringing down the Icelandic prime minister and Spain's industry minister, while forcing others to explain their financial dealings.

"(The)'Panama Papers', it is not about Panama," Varela, who arrived in Japan on Sunday, told an investment seminar in Tokyo.

"It's about a global problem that is tax evasion and also the use of the financial systems and legal system," he added.

Varela said his country is willing to cooperate with an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development initiative to share tax information, saying: "We have the door open to do it in a multilateral way."

He also reiterated his demand that France drop Panama from a blacklist of tax havens.

Following the recent disclosures Paris has put Panama back on its national list of Uncooperative States and Territories. It had removed it in 2012.

Such an international designation would deal a heavy blow to Panama's vital financial services sector. The Panamanian government recently imposed reforms to move it towards global transparency standards.

Varela said he plans to announce a bilateral taxation scheme with Japan under OECD standards on Wednesday following his meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The world's leading economies took a step last week toward denying tax evaders and money launderers the ability to hide behind anonymous shell companies.

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Acting in the wake of the scandal, finance chiefs of the Group of 20 meeting in Washington on Friday supported proposals requiring authorities to share the identities of shell companies' real owners.

They also backed creating a blacklist of international tax havens that do not cooperate with information-sharing programmes.

On Monday Varela said in an interview with Kyodo News agency that Panama has "decided to join the common reporting standards", referring to the measures on exchanging financial account information with tax authorities set by the OECD.

OECD head Angel Gurria said last week that Isabel De Saint Malo, vice president of the Central American country, had called him to express willingness to cooperate with his organisation.
Pearl Jam on Monday became the latest band to boycott North Carolina over a law against transgender people, calling the measure "despicable."

The alternative rockers led by Eddie Vedder called off a concert scheduled in the state capital Raleigh for Wednesday, saying they hoped to be able to return at a later date.

The band said North Carolina's law "is a despicable piece of legislation that encourages discrimination against an entire group of American citizens."

"The practical implications are expansive and its negative impact upon basic human rights is profound," the band said in a statement.

"We want America to be a place where no one can be turned away from a business because of who they love or fired from their job for who they are," it said.

Rock legend Bruce Springsteen earlier canceled a concert and businesses including online payment leader PayPal and Deutsche Bank reversed or froze investments in the southern state.

Cyndi Lauper, meanwhile, said she would go ahead with a concert but devote all proceeds to campaigners fighting the law. Pearl Jam also said it would make a donation to the cause.

The law, signed last month by the state's Republican governor, Pat McCrory, bans local governments from acting to stop discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people in public facilities or restrooms.

The state legislature voted on the move to prevent an anti-discrimination ordinance passed by North Carolina's largest city, Charlotte.

Faced with the outrage, McCrory has clarified that state government employees would remain protected from job discrimination but has not budged on the most controversial part which requires transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender listed on their birth certificate.

Pearl Jam, one of the biggest acts in the 1990s alternative rock boom, has long been active on political causes.

Vedder is a prominent supporter of US President Barack Obama and has rallied support for environmental protection and the right to legal abortion.

Pearl Jam in its heyday waged a high-profile -- although ultimately unsuccessful -- battle against leading ticket seller Ticketmaster to control surcharges passed on to fans.
New York (AFP) - Pearl Jam on Monday became the latest band to boycott North Carolina over a law against transgender people, calling the measure "despicable."

The alternative rockers led by Eddie Vedder called off a concert scheduled in the state capital Raleigh for Wednesday, saying they hoped to be able to return at a later date.

The band said North Carolina's law "is a despicable piece of legislation that encourages discrimination against an entire group of American citizens."

"The practical implications are expansive and its negative impact upon basic human rights is profound," the band said in a statement.

"We want America to be a place where no one can be turned away from a business because of who they love or fired from their job for who they are," it said.

Rock legend Bruce Springsteen earlier canceled a concert and businesses including online payment leader PayPal and Deutsche Bank reversed or froze investments in the southern state.

Cyndi Lauper, meanwhile, said she would go ahead with a concert but devote all proceeds to campaigners fighting the law. Pearl Jam also said it would make a donation to the cause.

The law, signed last month by the state's Republican governor, Pat McCrory, bans local governments from acting to stop discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people in public facilities or restrooms.

The state legislature voted on the move to prevent an anti-discrimination ordinance passed by North Carolina's largest city, Charlotte.

Faced with the outrage, McCrory has clarified that state government employees would remain protected from job discrimination but has not budged on the most controversial part which requires transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender listed on their birth certificate.

Pearl Jam, one of the biggest acts in the 1990s alternative rock boom, has long been active on political causes.

Vedder is a prominent supporter of US President Barack Obama and has rallied support for environmental protection and the right to legal abortion.

Pearl Jam in its heyday waged a high-profile -- although ultimately unsuccessful -- battle against leading ticket seller Ticketmaster to control surcharges passed on to fans.
The Hague (AFP) - A 17th century silk dress found perfectly preserved with hundreds of other objects in a shipwreck swallowed below the seabed off the Dutch coast has gone on display in a unique exhibition.

"The clothes are so intact, you could wear them," enthused Dutch archaeologist Rob van Eerden, saying the discovery was almost like the opening of "Tutankhamen's tomb".

The dress, along with other items such as a lice-comb made from cow horn nestled in its red velvet holder or a perfume bottle to be filled with flowers and worn around the neck, is part of an exhibition called "Garde Robe" (Wardrobe) on show until May 16 at the Kaap Skil museum on the island of Texel off the northern Dutch coast.

They were all part of a discovery by an amateur diving club, which found the three-masted sailing ship dubbed the "Palmhoutwrak" lying some five metres (15 feet) below the sandy seabed.

The ship appears to have been immediately engulfed by sand when it sank off the remote Dutch coast "creating an environment lacking in oxygen, perfect for preservation," Van Eerden told AFP.

Five members of a local diving club had been exploring the wreck since first discovering it in 2009. But on one "exciting" chance dive in the summer of 2014, they saw something new.

"The sand which had been covering the ship had been swept away by the sea. And in the hull we discovered fragments of wooden caskets in which fabric had been stowed," said Gerrit Jan Betsema, a 58-year-old who has been diving for the past three decades.

Some of it appeared to be a kind of damask, a glorious heavy silk with a flowery embroidery. It unfolded to reveal a long-sleeved, tight-waisted dress, with a high-neck collar, and a wide, full-pleated skirt, dating back four centuries.

- Royal cargo? -

It resembles a dress worn by a noble lady called Catherine Howard, the wife of a prominent English landowner, in an early 17th-century painting by William Larkin.

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"All the clothes are the same size and may have belonged to one woman, who was likely fleeing the Civil War," said Van Eerden.

Early analysis of the wreck shows it was built and sank in the mid-17th century -- a time of great turmoil in England when King Charles I was pushed off the throne during the rebellion led by Oliver Cromwell.

The treacherous waters off the northern Dutch coast are strewn with shipwrecks from different epochs.

But mystery abounds over who was on board this boat when it sank, and speculation has deepened as a book cover was found among the belongings bearing the seal of the English royal family, the Stuarts, which had links to the Dutch royal house of Orange-Nassau.

A team of some 10 experts at the North Holland provincial archaeological centre, the Huis Van Hilde, have been entrusted with the task of dating the hundreds of objects brought back to the surface.

It is a painstaking task carried out by comparing the objects with paintings and tracing back the origins of the materials.

Some of the fabric seems to have come from Turkey, India or even as far away as Persia as it is embroidered with flowers and animals unknown in Europe at the time.

"It is such an exceptional discovery and so unexpected that we are calling on different disciplines to determine what type of research to undertake," said Van Eerden.

As for the wreck -- which remains almost intact at the bottom of the shallow Wadden Sea stretching from the Netherlands to Denmark -- it is to be re-covered in sand to protect it from erosion until better excavation techniques are developed to allow it to be safely hoisted to the surface.
Lima (AFP) - Visitors arriving in Peru by air on Tuesday from Zika-infected countries were given condoms as part of a government campaign to curb the sexual transmission of the virus.

The measure follows Peru's announcement on the weekend of its first case of Zika contracted on its territory. A 32-year-old woman in the capital Lima caught the virus through sex with her partner, who was believed to have been infected on a recent trip to Venezuela.

Zika, present in much of tropical Latin America and some South Pacific islands, is linked to birth defects in babies.

It is typically spread by mosquitoes, but some cases of sexual transmission from infected partners have been detected.

"That is why it's important to use condoms when somebody has sexual relations, especially if the woman is pregnant because that's when the risk is greatest," Peru's deputy health minister, Percy Minaya, told reporters.

She was at Lima's international airport on Tuesday watching as condoms and information pamphlets were handed to some passengers.

The health ministry plans to expand the operation to other airports in the country, as well as land border crossing points and seaports.

Peru's previous cases of Zika were all from people who had caught the disease in Brazil or Venezuela and returned home.
Manila (AFP) - Leading Philippine presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday finally apologised for his apparent joke about the rape and murder of an Australian missionary after initially sneering at the widespread outrage he sparked.

Duterte, longtime mayor of the southern city of Davao, told cheering supporters last week that when he saw a female Australian lay minister who was raped and murdered in a Philippine prison riot in 1989, his initial reaction was: "she was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor should have been first."

He initially refused to apologise despite widespread condemnation by rival candidates and the public.

However on Tuesday he issued a statement saying: "I apologise to the Filipino people for my recent remarks in a rally. There was no intention of disrespecting our women and those who have been victims of this horrible crime."

Duterte, who has previously boasted of extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals, defended himself, saying: "I will not apologise for the things I've done to protect our people, especially the weak and defenceless, from crime."

Many Filipinos have embraced Duterte for his profanity-laced speeches and his promise to get tough on crime. He has vowed to oversee the mass killing of criminals if elected.

On Tuesday, respected research agency Pulse Asia released the results of a survey taken from April 5-10, showing Duterte well ahead of other presidential candidates with 32 percent of respondents compared to 25 percent from second-placed Senator Grace Poe.

The survey was conducted before the furore over Duterte's rape remark.

Pulse Asia president Ronald Holmes said it was hard to tell if the mayor's statements would change his standing.

"The people who are affected (by his rape jokes) are the ones who do not support Duterte," he told AFP.

He conceded that Duterte's remarks could "potentially" scare off some voters.

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Duterte's supporters defended him on social media with one saying on Twitter: "at least he is true to himself. The other candidates are just putting up a front."

Duterte has previously been criticised in the devoutly-Catholic Philippines after he called Pope Francis a "son of a whore" for causing traffic jams during his visit last year.

He later apologised for the remark.
On the verge of securing his family's biggest victory since their humiliating downfall three decades ago, Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos's son talks confidently about his political ambitions and his father's legacy.

In an exclusive interview with AFP ahead of May 9 elections, with surveys showing he could win the vice presidency, Ferdinand Marcos Jnr conceded there were "widespread human rights abuses" during his father's rule.

But the 58-year-old insisted the Marcos name remained one of his strongest assets, as he stuck to a no-apology mantra that has been a key part of his family's remarkable political resurrection.

"I think one of the things that is happening now is I am a beneficiary of the good work that was done in my father's time," Marcos said on Monday night at his campaign headquarters in the Philippine capital.

"There were so many different things that were initiated at that time that to this day are of benefit to the people."

Marcos was a fresh-faced provincial governor in his father's dictatorship when millions took to the streets in a famous 1986 "People Power" uprising that forced the family to give up two decades of power and flee into US exile.

The Marcos family and its business allies are accused of plundering billions of dollars during the patriarch's rule, while the regime's security forces allegedly killed and tortured thousands of critics.

However, after Marcos Snr died in exile in Hawaii in 1989, his controversial wife, Imelda, and their children were allowed to return to the Philippines, and they slowly began rebuilding a power base.

- 'Golden age' debate -

Part of their strategy was to portray the Marcos years as a golden age of peace, security and infrastructure-building for the nation.

They also consistently denied any major wrongdoing, fending off dozens of legal challenges and probes aimed at retrieving the fortune allegedly stolen from state coffers.

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Marcos, who rarely gives interviews, deflected questions about mass theft by his parents, saying he believed accusations against them were exaggerated but that he was not privy to their decisions.

"I think a great deal of it was made up because none of it has been verified," he told AFP when asked whether they stole billions.

"These huge numbers that we hear about, we don't really know where they come from and how they were made up."

Marcos did concede there were abuses under his father's regime, but insisted they were no worse than those committed by the democratically elected governments that followed.

"I acknowledge that there were," Marcos said when asked about human rights abuses under his father's rule.

"(But) there are widespread human rights abuses in any administration and that is a problem that we as a country have to face."

Memories of the Marcos years have dominated this election campaign.

In the Philippines, the president and vice president are elected separately.

Marcos's bid for the vice presidency has stolen many headlines away from the race for the top post -- which in itself is a fascinating four-way tussle.

President Benigno Aquino, whose mother led the "People Power" revolution and succeeded Marcos as president, has repeatedly urged Filipinos in recent months to never forget the dictatorship's horrors and stamp out the Marcos comeback.

- Presidential plans? -

However Marcos -- who has enjoyed a high national profile as a senator since 2010 -- is in the lead or running a close second in the race for the vice presidency, according to various surveys.

His controversial mother, Imelda, 86, is also regarded as a near certainty to win a third term as a congresswoman representing the family's northern provincial stronghold of Ilocos Norte.

And one of his sisters, Imee, will secure a third term as Ilocos Norte governor, with no opponent challenging her, while other relatives are expected to easily secure lower level posts.

One important aspect of the family's success has been its ability to tap into a vast network of allies that never fully crumbled despite the revolution.

A younger generation of voters fed up with corruption and politics in modern society has also proved receptive to the Marcos "golden age" mantra.

Asked why he wanted to become vice president, the former governor of Ilocos Norte spoke at length about wanting to return to the executive branch of government because that is where he could do the "most good".

He insisted he was not gunning for vice president as part of a grand plan to run for the presidency at the next elections in 2022.

"That's not something I am thinking of at all right now. Every brain cell that I have is directed towards this campaign," he said, when asked about a presidential bid in six years, but then nevertheless spoke candidly about his loftier ambitions.

"Of course you have a political career and many times you'd be frustrated and think: 'God if I was president I'd fix this in a flash'... and in that sense I guess we all aspire to that."
Lisbon (AFP) - A Portuguese ex-policeman who headed the probe into the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann has won his appeal in a libel battle with her parents, overturning a verdict that saw him ordered to pay out huge damages, the court said Tuesday.

Kate and Gerry McCann sued Goncalo Amaral over his 2008 book "The Truth of the Lie," in which he accused the couple of concealing the body of their daughter after she died accidentally.

In April 2015, Amaral was ordered to pay the parents 250,000 euros ($284,000) each in damages, plus interest in excess of 100,000 euros.

The couple plan to challenge the latest ruling, which was issued last Thursday by the Lisbon appeals court, their lawyer Isabel Duarte said.

The court ruled that Amaral had exercised "legitimate freedom of expression" and that the McCanns had to accept limits on their privacy after they had launched an international media campaign to find their daughter, TVI television reported.

Madeleine disappeared from her room on May 3, 2007, just days before her fourth birthday, in the small seaside resort of Praia da Luz in southern Portugal where the family were on vacation.

After 14 months of controversial investigations -- which saw Madeleine's parents investigated and Amaral sacked -- Portuguese police closed the case in 2008 before reopening it five years later.

British police opened their own inquiry in July 2013, but on-site excavations in Praia da Luz yielded no evidence and Scotland Yard has since sharply reduced the number of investigators working on the case.
Men make a lot of mistakes, and it appears they're more likely than women to let crooks access sensitive information. According to a recent survey, guys are almost twice as likely as women to store passwords or PINs to credit cards, debit cards, online bank accounts and other online accounts on their smartphones, tablets and laptops -- a poor security habit that could lead to chaos if one of those devices were stolen or hacked into.

This is according to a survey jointly conducted by the U.K. division of Equifax and the London-based research firm Gorkana, which questioned 500 British persons of all ages, according to The Register. The study found that 21 percent of male respondents stored passwords on their devices, compared to 11 percent of females, and that 14 percent of men stored their credit- or debit-card PIN numbers, as opposed to 7 percent of female respondents. (Most credit cards in Europe require a PIN to use.)



MORE: The Best (and Worst) Identity Theft Protection

While the companies didn't completely explain how those users were improperly storing that sensitive information, we can presume Equifax and Gorkana meant that respondents were keeping login credentials in a plaintext note-taking software such as Windows' Notepad, iOS's Notes or Google Keep. Anyone who got a look at those files would have access to the credentials.



It's possible that the numbers also include users of encrypted password managers like LastPass or 1Password, but those people would be following better security practices and normally wouldn't be worth worrying about.



The survey found significant differences in how younger and older users handled sensitive information. Thirty-eight percent of respondents 18 to 24 stored passwords to online accounts on their devices, as opposed to 16 percent of users overall.

Twenty-one percent of the 18-to-24-year olds admitted to storing credit- and debit-card PIN numbers on their devices. Older users seemed less likely to do so; only 10 percent of all respondents kept PINs on their devices.

Copyright 2016 Toms Guides , a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
By Joseph Ax and Nate Raymond

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The guards, authorities say, wanted to send a message.

"Somebody's leaving in an ambulance tonight," Eliseo Perez, an assistant chief for security at New York's Rikers Island jail complex, told inmates after a rash of attacks on guards, according to prosecutors.

Then he allegedly instructed five subordinates to take prisoner Jahmal Lightfoot into a room and kick his teeth in, an attack that left him with facial fractures.

The ongoing trial of nine correction officers for the alleged 2012 assault and a subsequent cover-up is the latest in a string of prosecutions targeting dozens of Rikers employees over the past four years.

More than 50 guards at the 10,000-inmate complex, one of the three largest in the United States by population, have faced criminal charges since 2012 for assault, falsifying reports and smuggling contraband, court documents and data from various city agencies show.

That is about double the rate of prosecution in the prior four years, as authorities crack down on what they say is a toxic atmosphere of violence and corruption.

"Rikers is a very troubled institution," said Mark Peters, the commissioner of the city's Department of Investigation, which leads most Rikers-related probes. "We are now seeing the result of systemic neglect."

Rikers houses male, female and adolescent prisoners in 10 separate facilities, mostly inmates awaiting trial.

RIKERS UNDER MICROSCOPE

Mayor Bill de Blasio has made Rikers reform a priority since taking office in 2014.

Peters, whom de Blasio appointed two years ago, said he had devoted one investigative squad exclusively to Rikers and increased its staff from 20 to 30 members.

Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark, whose office prosecutes most Rikers-related cases, recently proposed a new prosecution bureau based at the complex itself.

The list of law enforcement officials whose attention has turned to Rikers also includes Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan.

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Next month, federal prosecutors will put two guards on trial for the fatal beating of an inmate. Brian Coll, a correction officer, is accused of stomping Ronald Spear to death and enlisting two other guards to help him conceal the truth. One guard has already pleaded guilty to the cover-up.

Bharara's office also threw the weight of the federal government behind a lawsuit brought on behalf of adolescent inmates by the New York Civil Liberties Union. The case led to a settlement mandating reforms overseen by a court-appointed monitor.

A two-year investigation by Bharara's office found the correction department failed to discipline guards adequately for excessive force from 2011 to 2013, said Sara Shudofsky, the chief of the office's civil division, in an interview.

In 2014, de Blasio also appointed Joseph Ponte to head the correction department. Since then, it has pursued internal investigations more aggressively, with 200 cases ending in disciplinary charges last year, up from 93 in 2013, according to department statistics.

The focus on guards has met stiff resistance from the correction officers union, which claims the effort hides the true causes of Rikers' problems.

"It is clear from the department's own statistics that inmates are attacking correction officers and other inmates at an alarming rate," the union president, Norman Seabrook, said in a statement.

Seabrook also said visitors, not guards, are primarily responsible for smuggling contraband, citing the hundreds of visitors arrested in the last year for bringing illegal items into Rikers.

SMUGGLING SURGE

The Department of Investigation has also pursued broader reforms in response to the persistent problems, Peters said.

In 2014, an undercover investigator posing as a guard gained access to Rikers six times despite carrying heroin, marijuana and razor blades. Another department probe uncovered red flags among two-thirds of a class of new hires, such as prior felony convictions or known gang ties.

In response, the correction department has installed drug-sniffing dogs at Rikers' entrances and increased its "applicant investigation unit" from 19 employees to 87, to screen potential recruits' backgrounds and psychological fitness.

Both Peters and Ponte say their departments are now working more closely to address misconduct. That cooperation was on display this month, when a guard was caught on video assaulting an inmate who had thrown a cup of liquid in his direction.

Correction officials turned over the video to investigators immediately, and the guard was arrested within hours.

But the level of violence still troubles observers. The Lightfoot trial, which began in March, highlights the difficulties in curbing incidents by both inmates and officers.

Perez and his team were part of an elite unit assigned to reduce inmate attacks, but prosecutors say their solution was to turn to assault themselves.

Defense attorneys have argued at trial that the guards simply defended themselves when Lightfoot attacked them with a weapon. Prosecutors have said that assertion is false.

"They decided they were going to set the tone that night," Assistant District Attorney Pishoy Yacoub said at the start of the trial.

(Editing by Scott Malone and Diane Craft)
London (AFP) - Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her 90th birthday on Thursday with a family gathering and a cake baked by a reality television star, as a new poll finds Britain's longest serving monarch is as popular as ever.

The queen has reigned for more than 64 years and shows no sign of retiring, even if she has in recent years passed on some of her duties to the younger royals.

A new poll suggests the British public want it to stay that way, with 70 percent saying she should reign for as long as possible, the highest proportion since 1981.

Support for the monarchy remains high at 76 percent, according to the Ipsos-Mori poll for King's College London.

"The queen is hugely popular, she is liked personally and is felt to have done an excellent job," Roger Mortimore, a professor at the Institute of Contemporary British History at King's College London, told AFP.

Thursday's celebrations will be low-key, with the main public events, including a military parade and lunch for 10,000 guests on The Mall outside Buckingham Palace, taking place as part of her official birthday celebrations in June.

With her husband Prince Philip, she will meet members of the public near Windsor Castle, her weekend residence, before lighting the first of a chain of beacons stretching across Britain and its overseas territories.

At an event in Windsor's town hall, the queen will be presented with a cake baked by Nadiya Jamir Hussain, the winner of the "Great British Bake Off", a hugely popular television cooking competition.

The Muslim mother-of-three will present the orange drizzle cake, with orange curd and orange butter cream, to the queen personally -- a prospect she said has left her "so nervous I can't even look at the oven".

The queen will also attend a family birthday dinner organised by her heir Prince Charles, emphasising her role as the head of four generations of the House of Windsor.

Charles and his son William are increasingly taking over the queen's duties, although she still carried out 341 engagements last year, including state visits to Malta and Germany.

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William, who with his wife Kate and two young children has brought fresh energy to the royals, paid tribute to the matriarch he and his brother Harry describe as "the boss".

"I am incredibly lucky to have my grandmother in my life. As she turns 90, she is a remarkably energetic and dedicated guiding force for her family," William said.

- Lunch with Obama -

The queen has seen 12 prime ministers pass through Downing Street since she ascended to the throne in 1952, meeting them once a week at the palace and still receiving daily updates of the workings of parliament.

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron will pay tribute to the monarch in parliament on Thursday, while US President Barack Obama will also pay his respects when he joins the queen for lunch at Windsor on Friday.

The queen is widely viewed as a constant and stabilising presence in a turbulent world, a status she has cultivated by refusing to make public her personal views.

Her determination to remain above politics has come under pressure ahead of Britain's EU referendum on June 23, after a newspaper reported that she favoured a vote for Britain to leave the 28-nation bloc.

The claim in The Sun, under the headline "Queen backs Brexit", prompted a rare and strongly worded denial from Buckingham Palace, emphasising that she has and will always be politically neutral.

In September last year, the queen broke Queen Victoria's record to become Britain's longest reigning monarch, but played down the achievement, saying it was "not one to which I have ever aspired".

"Inevitably, a long life can pass by many milestones. My own is no exception," she said.
London (AFP) - Would leaving the EU make Britain "great" again or risk its global power status?

US President Barack Obama is set to back continued membership on a visit to London Friday but "Leave" campaigners say the world's most powerful man is wrong.

Over 100 anti-EU MPs signed a letter urging the US president not to intervene in the debate over the June referendum ahead of his visit to London. The White House has already said it wants Britain to stay.

The visit by the popular leader of Britain's leading international ally has helped crystallise arguments on both sides about whether it would be stronger in the European Union or outside it.

The "Leave" camp are fighting to convince voters that, free of EU red tape, Britain's best days could be ahead of it, not behind it following the mid-20th century decline of the country's empire.

Pro-Brexit figures list a string of nations which Britain could emulate.

London Mayor Boris Johnson points to Canada, saying Britain could strike a series of free trade deals and cut tariffs. Others look to Norway or Switzerland.

"If we hold our nerve and we're not timid and we're not cowed by the gloomadon poppers (pessimists) on the 'Remain' campaign and if we vote for freedom and the restoration of democracy... then I believe this country will continue to grow and prosper and thrive as never before," Johnson told a campaign event last week.

In response, Cameron warned that voting "Leave" was essentially a "leap in the dark".

- 'Unwanted headache' -

The stakes are high -- not just for Britain, but globally.

Britain has the world's fifth-largest economy and defence budget. It is a member of NATO and has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

The country has close ties with both the US and China, with ambitions of becoming the "best partner in the West" of Beijing.

The "Remain" camp argues that Britain is stronger inside the EU, from where it can help negotiate collective trade deals and foreign policy decisions.

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Tim Oliver of the London School of Economics, a specialist in British foreign policy, said Brexit would cause the US an "unwanted headache".

"The UK has a special relationship with the USA but that is most true in the three areas of nuclear weapons, intelligence and special forces," he told AFP.

"The wider relationship fits into a much wider and special US-European relationship."

Oliver argued that a Brexit would also cause problems for Beijing, adding: "Few in the UK appreciate that one of the longest-standing supporters of European integration has been China."

As for the free trade deals which Johnson and others suggest Britain could cut from outside the EU, some academics are sceptical.

Paul James Cardwell, an EU law expert at Sheffield University, argued that such post-Brexit agreements would depend on the state of Britain's relationship with the EU at that point -- including whether it could access the single market.

"The choice seems to be remaining in the EU with current agreements... or leaving in the hope that states respond positively to the UK," he said.

"There is no evidence yet to suggest they would do so, and plenty of evidence to the contrary."

- History of euroscepticism -

Those who want to leave the EU warn that there are major risks associated with continued membership.

"If you're in a structurally unsafe building, the obvious alternative to remaining is walking out," eurosceptic Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan wrote in the Daily Mail this month.

"With the migration and euro crises deepening, the EU is just that -- structurally unsafe."

History also plays its part in the argument for Britain leaving.

Many do not see themselves as European. A European Commission survey last year found that 56 percent of Britons saw themselves as citizens of the EU, compared to a 67 percent average in the rest of the bloc.

Britain is separated from mainland Europe by 20 miles (32 kilometres) of sea and centuries of battling the Romans, French and Germans.

When its colonial power withered following World War II, Britain tried to get into Europe, only to be vetoed twice by France. It finally joined in 1973.

Since then, its mainly eurosceptic press has delighted in ridiculing Brussels while a string of leaders like Margaret Thatcher have had frosty ties with the EU.

Anti-EU Britons may protest about people from overseas telling them what to do -- but Cameron will be hoping that, in Obama's case, a foreign intervention can help save the day this time.
Moscow (AFP) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday insisted that Syria peace talks in Geneva were "not frozen" as he slammed main opposition chiefs for walking out.

Lavrov said that while the main opposition High Negotiations Committee has announced it is putting its participation on hold, a government delegation and other groups are still taking part.

"The talks are not frozen," Lavrov said at a press conference with French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault in Moscow.

"We are coming from the position that (UN envoy) Staffan de Mistura is continuing his shuttle diplomacy with those who are not trying to put forward ultimatums and conditions," Lavrov said.

Delegates from the opposition High Negotiations Committee were leaving Geneva after the group suspended its formal participation to protest escalating violence and restrictions on humanitarian access.

Lavrov blasted the HNC opposition group as "capricious participants in the talks who are spoilt by their external patrons".

"They imagined that they could insist on what would be the agenda for the negotiations, stating that it needs to be clear for the start of these negotiations when and how (President Bashar al-Assad) will cease to lead Syria," Lavrov said.

"No one can win the war. All experts recognise this," Lavrov said. "There are some external players who dream about deposing the regime by force and try to do everything including disrupting the talks in Geneva."

The United Nations has insisted the talks have not collapsed, with de Mistura saying they would continue through the week.

He said that the indirect talks format -- which has seen the HNC and Assad's representatives meet separately with UN mediators -- created flexibility to continue the discussions.

This week's talks are meant to focus on Syria's political future, as the UN pushes a plan involving a transitional authority, a new constitution and eventual elections.

Russia is one of Assad's firmest backers and has launched a bombing campaign in Syria to help back up his forces on the ground.
The vitriol is palpable. Its captured in the headlines of newspapers from San Francisco to New York and in many conversations, with more than 60 percent of Americans opposing the welcoming of refugees onto U.S. soil from this conflict-ridden country. Seemingly everyone from mayors to presidential candidates are weighing in on what might happen if we let these outsiders call the United States their new home.

Only were not talking about Syria, and this isnt 2016.

Come aboard the St. Louis, where its 1939 and German Jews such as Herbert Karliner are fleeing Nazi persecution  and literally waiting on the shores of North America. The plight of the men, women and children aboard that transatlantic liner confounded American officials: Should they accept the asylum-seekers, or send them back to into the arms of the Third Reich? The St. Louis was saddest ship afloat, wrote The New York Times.

That journey of the St. Louis reminds us how high the stakes can be with refugees. On the one hand, refugees very lives may be on the line. On the other are questions about domestic safety. Politicians including Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have recently argued that the risks outweigh the rewards, and late last year, the House passed legislation to suspend Syrian and Iraqi resettlement, with support from both sides of the aisle. A November Gallup poll found that more than 60 percent of Americans opposed accepting Syrian refugees. The question then becomes, How do you [respond] in a way where the refugee benefits and America benefits? says Robert Krakow, whose SS St. Louis Legacy Project has documented the voyage.

The first word I learned in Spanish was manana, but manana never came. Herbert Karliner, St. Louis ship passenger

Karliner remembers standing on the deck of the St. Louis in June 1939, with the sun in his face, staring at the distant shores of Miami. Just a few days earlier, the ship had landed in Havana, where he and 936 other passengers sought safe haven. Karliner recalls Cuban officials inspecting their documents while families lined up outside their cabins. Up until that point, the journey seemed glamorous  at least in the eyes of a 12-year-old  and the passengers were treated like wealthy tourists. There was a statue of Adolf Hitler on board (this was a German ship), but Captain Gustav Schroeder reportedly covered it up at one point. But in the Cuban harbor, only a couple dozen people were allowed to disembark. The first word I learned in Spanish was manana, but manana never came, says the now 89-year-old Karliner.

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Gettyimages 537569937

Refugees aboard the St. Louis, including women and their children, are denied landing in Cuba.

Source: Getty

So the captain tried taking his ship of refugees to Miami, where he was met by the U.S. Coast Guard. At the time, no special status was given to refugees in the U.S. They were treated just like other immigrants, which meant they had to prove they had enough money to live independently and provide a clean police record  difficult given the police were the Nazis and the passengers had been stripped of their belongings. Those regulations, combined with extreme anti-immigrant sentiment  more than 80 percent of Americans opposed immigration, polls showed  meant it would have been political suicide for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was gunning for a third term, to allow the refugees ashore. Indeed, the U.S. ultimately refused the ship, as did Canada, and the St. Louis headed back east.

But a return to Germany, where hundreds of synagogues had been burned and thousands of Jewish businesses looted, would have meant a death sentence for many Jews, says Krakow. And hundreds of families approached the captain, saying they would jump overboard rather than return to Germany. So the captain made his way back to Europe, where countries including Belgium, Holland, France and the U.K. took the refugees in. Yet within a year, everyone but those who remained in the U.K. were again living under Hitlers rule. More than 250 of the passengers ended up dead at the hands of the Nazis, many in Auschwitz. Karliner was one of the lucky few. Today, just as he had dreamed, he lives in Miami.

Tune in Tuesday at 11:00 p.m. EST for PBS new late-night series Point Taken to see OZY co-founder Carlos Watson moderate a spirited debate on whether or not the U.S. should take in more refugees or fewer.

The fate of the St. Louis passengers alone didnt directly alter U.S. immigration and refugee policy, experts say, though it did help shift policy along with other outcries. Back then, immigration decisions were focused on a country-based quota system, which favored white Europeans. Eventually, Mexican laborers and Chinese immigrants were admitted in the 1940s, while Hungarians fleeing the Soviet Unions communist regime led to much bigger openings for immigrants in the 1950s. Refugee-assistance programs continued to roll out in the 60s (for Cubans), when immigration began favoring skill sets and family reunification over origin-based quotas, as well as the 70s (for war-fleeing Cambodians, Vietnamese and Laotians). But it really wasnt until the 1980 Refugee Act that the U.S. adopted the United Nations definition of refugees and separated this group from other immigrants entirely.

Gettyimages 537569935

More than 250 of the ships passengers ended up dead at the hands of the Nazis, many in Auschwitz.

Source: Getty

Change has been gradual, often taking place in the face of fierce public disapproval. Since 1939, when opposition peaked at 83 percent, the disapproval rating has hovered between roughly 55 percent and 70 percent. And when new acts have been passed and refugee caps increased, theyve usually been due to presidential edicts, such as when Jimmy Carter doubled the number of refugees allowed in 1979, or when George H.W. Bush extended special protection to Chinese nationals involved in Tiananmen Square protests. Turns out Barack Obamas move to increase Syrian refugees isnt all that unprecedented.

Still, the debate today about whether to allow more or fewer Syrians into the U.S. does bear a resemblance to the past, some experts argue. With the attacks in Paris, Brussels and San Bernardino, its perhaps little surprise that Cruz, to CNN, has called Syrian refugees potential terrorists. And back in 1939, there were national security fears  that the Germans would pressure Jewish refugees who had family back in Germany to be spies agents and saboteurs, says Allan Lichtman, a distinguished professor at American University and author of FDR and the Jews.

So what to do this time around? The St. Louis return to Europe, some say, was used as so-called proof that the Jews were unwanted. Ultimately it fit into the [Nazi] narrative of the final solution: If nobody wants them, we can finish them off and do what the world has always wanted, says Krakow. Which means, perhaps, that a denial of entry for Muslim Syrians could be what ISIS then uses as propaganda to recruit more followers.

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Michael Bervell, 18, now a freshman at Harvard University majoring in neurology and computer science , raised more than $90,000 during high school to pay for college.

His first work experience came in 10th grade, working minimum wage at a HIV/AIDS nonprofit that was organized through Teens in Public Service, a Seattle-based organization that connects high school teens to paid summer internships. Bervell earned nearly $10 an hour for 25 hours a week that summer.

"I ended up applying for scholarships and got about $75,000," says Bervell, who received multiple scholarships. "And my second method was from always working in the summer."

Many students, like Bervell, say paying for college is part of their responsibility and start saving in high school.

A 2015 College Savings Foundation report, which surveyed 500 high school students, found that 81 percent think paying for some part of college is their responsibility. The same report found that around 51 percent of high school students are saving for college. Of those saving, 83 percent socked away at least $1,000 and 33 percent accumulated more than $5,000.

"There's a greater awareness today with students than there was 10 or 15 years ago," says Rick Polimeni, vice chair of the foundation and director of educational savings at Merrill Lynch." They're taking it more seriously, have jobs and are putting money away."

Most high school students are working hourly, part-time jobs at restaurants or fast food places such as McDonald's, Polimeni says.

[Explore all the U.S. News Best High Schools.]

Working a paid internship during the summer is one way high school students earn money for college, experts say.

Seventeen-year-old Yao Yao Gao, a senior at John Bowne High School in Queens, New York, saved $3,000 last summer interning at accounting firm KPMG in midtown Manhattan where she made around $11 an hour.

"I spent $500 already on college expenses, application fees, SATs and coursework," says Gao, who hopes to attend New York University this fall. "I saved $2,500 for future use, so I can use that for textbooks and housing."

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Some U.S. cities have public or private programs that support teen employment during the summer, such as New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program. The program is one of the oldest in the country -- it dates back to the 1960s -- and employs more than 54,000 youths between the ages of 14 and 24 during the summer months. Youths in the program make at least minimum wage, now $9 an hour in the state.

[Take these five steps to find an internship during high school.]

Ashley Moguel, 19, participated in the organization's Ladders for Leaders program last year, working at the city chief medical examiner's office. Moguel, who graduated from Forest Hills High School and was homeless at the time, accumulated $1,250 through the program.

"The program really helped me out and it's the reason why I'm in school," says Moguel, who is studying for her nursing degree at LaGuardia Community College. She plans to transfer to Hunter College to earn her bachelor's and is also taking EMT courses at night.

Moguel spent $500 she earned through the program to pay for transcript requests, application fees and her anatomy and physiology textbook.

"Financial aid covered the rest," Moguel says.

For students not in New York City, there are other paid summer internship programs, such as the Bank of America Corp.'s Student Leaders program. The program connects 200 high school juniors and seniors annually with paid hourly work at community organizations across 25 states as well as the District of Columbia.

[Learn how to land a summer internship as a high school student.]

Bervell was a Bank of America student leader and interned at nonprofit Housing Hope, a Seattle-based organization that provides housing support to low-income families, for $11 an hour -- the minimum wage in Seattle in 2014. He banked $4,000 that summer and deposited his earnings into a 529 college savings plan.

The Harvard freshman, who now has an internship at Twitter, stashed some of his money from summer internships into his 529 plan and another portion into his parent's bank account for safekeeping.

Bervell needed his 529 account when he won the Build-a-Bear Workshop Huggable Hero scholarship -- the award required him to have one to receive the $7,500 scholarship.

It's not just a 529 account that helps savvy high school students save for college. Opening a bank account helps teens put money away, experts say.

Research shows it's important for teens to set up a bank account to establish healthy financial habits, says Julia Breitman, senior director of youth employment at the NYC Department of Community Development.

"When young people are banking, they do tend to save more," Breitman says.

The 2015 CSF report found 40 percent of high school students are willing to forgo material things to save for college -- a 12 percent increase from the previous year.

"Always save. You'll regret spending that $30 on a new pair of jeans because you're going to need it later on," Moguel says, on self-funding a college education.

Bervell recommends students save for college in multiple ways, from scholarships and summer jobs to starting your own company.

"Don't be afraid to take initiative and be out of your comfort zone because I got my first job when I was a sophomore in high school," Bervell says. "There's never a point when it's too early to start, but there is a point when it's too late to start."

Trying to fund your education? Get tips and more in the U.S. News Paying for College center.

Farran Powell is an education reporter at U.S. News, covering paying for college and graduate school. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at fpowell@usnews.com.
London (AFP) - A rare compilation of Shakespeare's complete works was shown off before sale by Christie's auction house on Tuesday in the week that Britain celebrates the 400th anniversary of the legendary playwright's death.

The "First Folio" was published in 1623 -- just seven years after Shakespeare's death -- preserving "Macbeth" and 17 other works that were never published in the Bard's lifetime and would otherwise have been lost.

Around 750 "First Folios" were published and only around a third of them have been preserved.

Academics earlier this month hailed the discovery of one edition on the Scottish island of Bute.

Christie's has put the estimated price tag of its compilation at at least A800,000 (1.0 million euros, $1.2 million).

The auction house will also be selling three other editions of the full works published in 1632, 1664 and 1685.

"It's very unusual" for the collected works of an author to be published so soon after their death, said Margaret Ford, the international head of books and manuscripts department at Christie's.

"It is deeply moving to handle the first printed record of his collected plays and to be reminded of their tremendous impact."

The work will go on display in New York and London ahead of the sale in the British capital on May 25.

The anthology contains 36 works including 18 that were published for the first time in the book and would probably have disappeared including "Macbeth", "The Tempest", "The Taming of the Shrew", "All's Well that Ends Well" and "A Winter's Tale".

The University of Oxford this month announced that a new First Folio had been found at the Mount Stuart stately home on the island of Bute, where it will be on display to the public until October.

"In terms of literary discoveries, they do not come much bigger than a new First Folio, and we are really excited that this has happened on Bute," said Alice Martin, head of collections at Mount Stuart, at the time.

The anniversary of Shakespeare's death on Saturday is being marked with a series of performances and exhibitions, as well as a candlelit vigil by his tomb in his hometown of Stratford-upon Avon.
LONDON (Reuters) - On the 400th anniversary of his death, Shakespeare is more popular abroad than in Britain and makes a significant contribution to the UKs prosperity and influence, according to a survey published on Tuesday. The British Council, which commissioned the YouGov survey of 18,000 people from 15 countries, said the results showed that internationally Shakespeare is widely known, liked and understood. "Four hundred years after his death, Shakespeares work continues to play a vital role in educating and entertaining people around the world," said the Council's Rosemary Hilhorst in a statement. The Council, which fosters cultural relations between Britain and other countries, said Shakespeares influence internationally helps generate a positive attitude towards the UK. Over a third of people questioned said Shakespeare made them feel more positive about Britain in general, with the greatest number of respondents holding this view in Brazil (57 percent) and India (62 percent). The survey also found Shakespeare was more popular (65 percent) in terms of being liked, understood and still regarded as relevant today overseas than in his home country (59 percent). But his popularity in other English-speaking countries such as Australia and the United States was significantly lower than in the non-English speaking countries polled including China, Turkey and Mexico. The British Council said his popularity had a direct influence on Britain's economy, not just in terms of attracting visitors to Shakespeares theaters but also contributing to the country's standing in the world which had the knock-on effect of attracting tourists. William Shakespeare's work, which includes 38 plays and 154 sonnets has been translated into over 80 languages and is performed throughout the world. The precise date of his death is not known but his funeral was held on April 25, 1616. (Reporting by Bethany Rielly; editing by Stephen Addison)
By Tom Esslemont LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Sierra Leone's government helped British private security service firms recruit former child soldiers to work as guards in Iraq from 2009, said a Danish academic who has spent years investigating the issue. Thousands of children were forced to fight in Sierra Leone's 11-year civil war, which ended in 2002. More than 50,000 people were killed in the fighting and many tens of thousands more mutilated or raped by rebels. By 2009, with Iraq in chaos, impoverished Sierra Leone was looking for a way to engage its workforce, said Maya Mynster Christensen, a researcher at the Danish Institute Against Torture who made repeated trips to the West African country. "From a Sierra Leone government perspective the recruitment was supposedly quite a good deal because it could take the local troublemakers and send them to Iraq for a couple of years," the anthropologist told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "The government returned the men, many of them now in their late twenties and thirties, with money earned on their overseas deployment," she said. But Christensen said this ran counter to Sierra Leone's stated policy of demobilization following the civil war. Of the 72,500 combatants demobilized by January 2002, nearly 10 percent were children, according to the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF. A spokesman for Sierra Leone's government did not immediately respond to a request for comment. "SLAVERY" Christensen's allegations appear in a new Danish-made documentary, "The Child Soldier's New Job", which reveals that thousands of ex-soldiers were re-assigned to private security contractors in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The Thomson Reuters Foundation cannot verify how many of those recruited to Iraq were once child combatants, but in the documentary those who were deployed described feeling awe-struck on arrival in the war-torn country. In filmed interviews, one former child soldier, who had only received training in light weapons in Sierra Leone, said he heard mortar shells every day in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. "For many of the ex-soldiers, Iraq reactivated memories of the civil war. It was traumatic," said Christensen, who also works for the Royal Danish Defence College. British contractors operating on behalf of U.S. security companies recruited up to 10,000 former Sierra Leonean militia fighters from 2009 onwards, said Christensen. She said two UK-based contracting companies were operating in Sierra Leone over a three year period - Sabre International ran a training camp in Sierra Leone in 2009, while Aegis Defence Services Ltd was recruiting men when she visited in 2012. Of those recruited, around 3,000 were actually deployed, usually to guard U.S. military bases in Iraq, Christensen said. "Some of the recruits found out subsequently they would only get paid $200 per month once they got to Iraq, but a number of them went on strike when they arrived," she said. "The recruits frequently likened the experience to slavery." Sabre International and Aegis Defence Services did not respond to requests for comment. Britain's Guardian newspaper earlier this week quoted a former Aegis senior director saying the firm employed mercenaries from Sierra Leone to work in Iraq because they were cheaper than Europeans, and did not check if they were former child soldiers. James Ellery, a director of Aegis Defence Services between 2005 and 2015, said it helped reduce costs for the U.S. presence in Iraq and contractors had a "duty" to recruit from countries like Sierra Leone. Aegis was taken over last year by GardaWorld, a Canadian security company. Child rights groups were alarmed that ex-child combatants appeared to have been recruited to protect U.S. assets in Iraq. "It is surprising that a defense contractor, in its quest to find lower cost labor, should conclude that former child soldiers form a good recruiting pool," said Dan Collison, director of programs at War Child UK, a charity helping former child combatants. "The risks of re-exposing former child soldiers to the trauma of conflict seem not to have been considered." (Reporting By Tom Esslemont, additional reporting by Kieran Guilbert. Editing by Belinda Goldsmith and Katie Nguyen; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, womens rights, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)
MOGADISHU/ROME (Reuters) - Somalia's government said on Monday about 200 or more Somalis may have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to cross illegally to Europe, many of them teenagers, when the boat they were on capsized after leaving the Egyptian shore. Italian President Sergio Mattarella had said earlier on Monday that several hundred people appeared to have died in a new tragedy in the Mediterranean, after unconfirmed reports spoke of up to 400 victims of capsizing near Egypt's coast. More than 1.2 million African, Arab and Asian migrants have streamed into the European Union since the start of last year, many of them setting off from North Africa in rickety boats that are packed full of people and which struggle in choppy seas. "We have no fixed number but it is between 200 and 300 Somalis," Somali Information Minister Mohamed Abdi Hayir told Reuters by telephone when asked about possible Somali deaths in the latest incident. Another Somali government statement, which offered condolences, put the number at "nearly 200", saying they were mostly teenagers. It said the boat they were on had capsized after leaving Egypt. "There is no clear number since they are not traveling legally," the minister said, adding that he understood the boat might have been carrying about 500 people, of which 200 to 300 were Somalis "and most of them had died". He did not give a precise timing for the incident. One year ago, an estimated 800 migrants drowned off the Libyan coast when the fishing boat they were traveling in collided with a mercantile vessel that was attempting to rescue them - the most deadly Mediterranean shipwreck in decades. Egyptian, Italian and Greek officials had earlier been unable to confirm the report of a new sinking. A U.N. refugee agency official told Swiss broadcaster SRF he knew of 40 survivors from what appeared to be the same incident. "We know there are 40 survivors and that as many as 460 people may have been on the boat who sailed from Egypt," the UNHCR's Beat Schuler told the broadcaster in what it said was a report from Malta. In an article on the Somali National News Agency (SONNA) website, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud on Monday "sent his heartfelt condolence on his behalf and on behalf of the citizens of Somalia to the families who lost their loved ones". The president urged Somalis to stand together in helping "stop such hazardous trips to overseas". Somalia has a large diaspora, with many Somalis in Europe and the United States, after fleeing two decades of conflict. The Western-backed government is seeking to rebuild the Horn of Africa nation but is still battling an Islamist insurgency. Islamist al Shabaab rebels often carry out gun and bomb attacks, particularly in the capital Mogadishu, where some hardy Somalis business people are returning to from abroad to invest. (Reporting by Edmund Blair in Nairobi, Abdi Sheikh in Mogadishu, Gavin Jones and Steve Scherer in Rome, Michele Kambas in Athens, Michael Georgy in Cairo and Michael Shields in Zurich; Editing by Alison Williams)
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa imported white maize from the United States last week for the first time since 2004, the country's Grain Information Service (SAGIS) said on Tuesday. White maize is the staple source of calories in South Africa and industry sources estimate imports of over a million tonnes of this variety of the grain in the coming marketing season between May and April next year after the domestic crop was scorched by drought. In the current marketing year, which ends April 30th, South Africa has already imported over 70,000 tonnes of white maize from Mexico and Zambia, according to SAGIS data. Last week it imported 1,330 tonnes from the United States, the data showed. Wandile Sihlobo, economist with producer group Grain SA, said it was the first time South Africa had imported U.S. white maize since 2004. He said the importers probably wanted to check the quality of the U.S. white maize and also ensure it was not genetically modified (GMO). Most of South Africa's maize crop is GMO but it differs from the U.S. varieties. "If it's fine, we might see an increase in imports from the United States," Sihlobo said. Zambia and other countries in the region have also been hit by drought and so will not be able to export enough white maize to meet South Africa's needs. That leaves Mexico and the United States as the main sources for the grain. The white maize contract for July eased 1.57 percent on Tuesday to 4,440 rand ($310.90) a tonne but remains within range of its historic peak of 5,165 rand a tonne scaled in January, according to Thomson Reuters data. ($1 = 14.2812 rand) (Reporting by Ed Stoddard; Editing by James Macharia)
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's government will talk with mining firms to overcome differences in a new proposed Mining Charter that requires the companies to keep black ownership at 26 percent, the mining minister said on Tuesday. The state published the requirements on Friday but companies have opposed the proposals saying that once a company should be considered to have met the empowerment principle even if shareholders subsequently sell off their stake. Regulatory uncertainty is a key concern for miners in Africa's most industrialised economy, which has been hard hit by job cuts due to weakening global commodities prices for its platinum, gold, iron ore and coal exports. "We will engage robustly and also iron out this matter," Mosebenzi Zwane, the minister of mineral resources, told a media briefing before tabling his budget speech in parliament. "We are not radical... What we are proposing does not differ much from what has been there, but we have proposed some structural changes," Zwane said. Bullion producer Sibanye Gold said on Monday it was concerned by the lack of consultation over the regulations. [nL5N17L3TE] The state and the Chamber of Mines, which represents mining firms, have been in court seeking a ruling to clarify how the law, meant to redress the absence of South Africans excluded from the mining industry under apartheid, should be applied. The charter review published on Friday says mining companies have three years from 2016 to raise their empowerment levels to 26 percent, and will be open for public comment for 30 days, the department of mineral resources said. Failure to meet the empowerment targets can result in mining permits or rights being revoked in an industry which is an increasingly hard sell to foreign investors in the face of labour unrest, depressed prices, soaring wage and power costs. (Reporting by Wendell Roelf; Editing by James Macharia)
By Angus McDowall , Phil Stewart and David Rohde RIYADH/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Six years ago, Saudi and American officials agreed on a record $60 billion arms deal. The United States would sell scores of F-15 fighters, Apache attack helicopters and other advanced weaponry to the oil-rich kingdom. The arms, both sides hoped, would fortify the Saudis against their aggressive arch-rival in the region, Iran. But as President Barack Obama makes his final visit to Riyadh this week, Saudi Arabia's military capabilities remain a work in progress  and the gap in perceptions between Washington and Riyadh has widened dramatically. The biggest stumble has come in Yemen. Frustrated by Obama's nuclear deal with Iran and the U.S. pullback from the region, Riyadh launched an Arab military intervention last year to confront perceived Iranian expansionism in its southern neighbor. The conflict pits a coalition of Arab and Muslim nations led by the Saudis against Houthi rebels allied to Iran and forces loyal to a former Yemeni president. A tentative ceasefire is holding as the United Nations prepares for peace talks in Kuwait, proof, the Saudis say, of the intervention's success. But while Saudi Arabia has the third-largest defense budget in the world behind the United States and China, its military performance in Yemen has been mixed, current and former U.S. officials said. The kingdom's armed forces have often appeared unprepared and prone to mistakes. U.N. investigators say that air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition are responsible for two thirds of the 3,200 civilians who have died in Yemen, or approximately 2,000 deaths. They said that Saudi forces have killed twice as many civilians as other forces in Yemen. On the ground, Saudi-led forces have often struggled to achieve their goals, making slow headway in areas where support for Iran-allied Houthi rebels runs strong. And along the Saudi border, the Houthis and allied forces loyal to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh have attacked almost daily since July, killing hundreds of Saudi troops. Instead of being the centrepiece of a more assertive Saudi regional strategy, the Yemen intervention has called into question Riyadh's military influence, said one former senior Obama administration official. "There's a long way to go. Efforts to create an effective pan-Arab military force have been disappointing." Behind the scenes, the West has been enmeshed in the conflict. Between 50 and 60 U.S. military personnel have provided coordination and support to the Saudi-led coalition, a U.S. official told Reuters. And six to 10 Americans have worked directly inside the Saudi air operations center in Riyadh. Britain and France, Riyadh's other main defense suppliers, have also provided military assistance. Last year, the Obama administration had the U.S. military send precision-guided munitions from its own stocks to replenish dwindling Saudi-led coalition supplies, a source close to the Saudi government said. Administration officials argued that even more Yemeni civilians would die if the Saudis had to use bombs with less precise guidance systems. Saudi officials see the intervention as a qualified success, halting Iranian expansionism in Yemen and bringing their opponents to the negotiating table. They compare it to the 1991 Gulf War when a military threat was addressed overwhelmingly by military power. They said Saudi-led forces have stabilized large parts of the country and allowed its government under President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to remain viable. They also dispute the number of civilian deaths and have announced investigations into the strikes. Among many of their fellow Gulf Arabs, who believe they face a broader struggle against Iran, the war continues to be popular. At a forum in Riyadh this week the mostly young audience started to cheer when speakers said the campaign had demonstrated a new self reliance. Spokesman for the Saudi-led Arab coalition, Brigadier General Ahmed al-Asseri, said the main goal of degrading Houthi capabilities had been achieved. Coalition-backed Yemeni forces had paused after taking ground north of Sanaa at the request of the U.N. and to encourage talks, he said. Prince Sultan bin Khaled al Faisal, a former Saudi special forces officer and now a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, said the intervention had succeeded. "You cannot say there is no progress," he said. "The enemy is on the back foot. They are surrounded in every single city that they are in  and they are blockaded from the sea." SELLING STUFF The United States has been helping equip and train Saudi armed forces since U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdulaziz Al Saud struck an oil-for-security alliance in 1945. "Our tanks are American. Our infantry vehicles are American. Our jet fighters are American," said Asseri, the Saudi general. "Our command and control system is American so having these people working with us is normal." Some of the largest beneficiaries of the alliance have been U.S. defense contractors. Vinnell Arabia, now a Northrop Grumman subsidiary, has received multimillion-dollar contracts to train Saudi Arabia's National Guard since 1975, for instance, including a five-year contract worth up to $550 million in 2010. In an effort to counter Iran, U.S. arms sales grew under President George W. Bush administration and even more under the Obama White House. The primary goal of the huge 2010 sale was to defend against Iran, according to both American and Saudi officials. The Obama administration also saw a chance to turn Saudi Arabia into a regional military power that could act as a stabilizing influence in the Middle East. Saudis emphasize their own interests rather than those of the United States. "Saudi Arabia chooses and buys its weapons according to its own strategic planning, needs and interests, not those of anyone else," said Prince Sultan. "The whole premise that we bought weapons to play a role for someone else is false." Whatever the motivation, between 2009 and 2015, IHS Jane's estimates that General Dynamics delivered $5 billion worth of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, Boeing $2.9 billion and Raytheon $2.5 billion. European defense contractors profited, as well with Eurofighter, a European consortium, delivering $5.6 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia and U.K.-based BAE Systems delivering $2.9 billion during the same period, according to Jane's estimates. Current and former U.S. officials said one of the reasons arms sales to Saudi Arabia had faced little opposition in Washington was the deal's failure might have resulted in Saudi Arabia buying arms from Russia or China. They also said the sales boosted U.S. defense contractors as the Obama administration cut military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We sold them that stuff," said one U.S. official, "because that's what creates jobs in America." ADVANCING STEP BY STEP? Even with more weaponry, the Saudi-led coalition has struggled in Yemen. That's been apparent in its bombing campaign from the start. "Initially there was far too much reliance on the (Riyadh-backed) Yemeni government for intelligence and far too little effort to confirm it," said a Saudi with knowledge of the campaign. He said targeting rules had improved in the second half of last year. But Brigadier General Samir Haj, a Yemeni and the official spokesman for the government's military forces, told Reuters that the coalition has "joint military operations rooms in Aden and Riyadh which work together with the coalition countries to coordinate targets for both air strikes and battle operations on the ground." Problems with targeting are particularly embarrassing because they were also issues during the border war between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in 2009-2010, U.S. embassy cables released by WikiLeaks show. A cable dated Feb. 7, 2010 noted one instance in which Saudi jets aborted an air strike on a target supplied by the Yemeni government because it turned out to be the headquarters of a senior general and rival of then president Saleh. Six years on, errors are still occurring. Just last month, two American-made laser-guided bombs struck a market and killed at least 97 civilians, 25 of them children, along with 10 Houthi fighters, according to Human Rights Watch investigators who reached the site of the bombing. U.N. investigators who reached the site reported 96 civilian dead, including 24 children. Asseri said the coordinates had been provided by coalition-backed Yemeni forces fighting in that area, and the bombs had struck a gathering of Houthis, not civilians. U.S. officials said the United States does not provide detailed targeting information to the Saudis in Yemen. "We're giving them broad intelligence of the area," said a third U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. American officials said they have repeatedly tried to find ways to improve Saudi targeting. As well as the extra precision-guided bombs, the Pentagon sent U.S. military lawyers to train their Saudi counterparts on how to ensure the legality of coalition strikes. They say the Saudis have American software designed to help them determine whether certain munitions might cause destruction beyond the target. Matthew Spence, who served as the Obama administration's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for the Middle East from 2012 to 2015, said it takes time for any country to learn how to use advanced weapons systems. "It's going to be an imperfect process that advances step by step," Spence said. Michael Knights, an expert on the conflict in Yemen at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the fact that the Saudi military had been able to maintain a year-long intervention in a country as complex as Yemen has surprised some observers. "They're able to maintain operational tempo for a year," Knights said. "These are things that if you'd asked somebody about this two years ago, they would say there's no way Saudi can do that." But investigations by the U.N., Human Rights Watch exposed scores of Saudi missteps. A January report by a U.N. Security Council panel of experts found that the Saudi-led coalition had carried out attacks that appeared to violate international humanitarian law 152 times, including 41 strikes on residential neighborhoods, 22 on medical facilities and 10 on marketplaces. U.N. investigators also found at least 38 violations by Houthi and Saleh forces. The Saudis "are dropping bombs with a large payload on a house in the middle of a residential neighborhood," said Belkis Wille, Human Rights Watch's Yemen researcher, who just spent three weeks in the country investigating civilian deaths. "If you do that, you are bound to cause collateral damage. Using these kinds of bombs in this context is indiscriminate." Asseri, the Saudi-led coalition spokesman, has repeatedly questioned such investigations, saying they are often carried out remotely or with guidance from locals employed by the Houthis, and that they have made little effort to engage with the coalition or Yemen's government. U.N. officials said they have a team of 19 investigators stationed inside Yemen who visit the sites of attacks on their own. They said the team members, both foreigners and Yemeni nationals, follow a thorough methodology that U.N. human rights investigators use worldwide and are not taken to sites by Houthis. "We collect our information direct from the scene of incidents and from witnesses and victims," said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. "We are careful to avoid manipulation by any of the warring parties." Asseri said the Saudi air force uses the same procedures as those of the U.S. air force to assess targets, and checks information against images from drones and a no-hit list. He said munitions were selected to avoid causing harm beyond the selected target. U.S. officials said they have urged the Saudi-led coalition to better distinguish between military targets and civilians. Asseri said a Saudi colonel with a doctorate in law has been appointed to run an investigative commission into civilian deaths and is now selecting members. BORDER PROBLEMS One of the stated goals of the Saudi-led campaign was to protect the kingdom's borders. In many ways, though, the war has made them less secure. The mountainous western stretch of the Yemeni border, which runs from the Red Sea to the Empty Quarter desert, is rife with smuggling and illicit crossings. The Houthis had not attacked Saudi Arabia along the frontier since 2010. Beginning in July 2015, though, when the coalition regained complete control of Aden after three months of brutal street fighting and airstrikes, the Houthis and Saleh's forces began to launch near daily attacks across the border. The assaults have killed and injured around 400 civilians inside Saudi Arabia, the coalition said. Diplomats say around 400 Saudi soldiers and border guards have died. The coalition said it will not release figures on the number of military casualties until after the campaign, though Asseri did not dispute the broad number. The rugged border areas held by the Houthis  steep mountains scattered with boulders and pitted by gullies and deep, scrubby valleys  are ideal for guerrilla warfare. Saudi officials said they had been hampered by the decision not to take territory inside Yemen, which they feared would feed Houthi propaganda that Riyadh's war goals were territorial. "It is the most difficult thing to conduct a static defense," said Asseri. Between July 2015 and the beginning of the tentative truce last month, an average of 130 mortars, shells and rockets were fired at Saudi Arabia's frontier every day, the coalition said. The Houthis and their allies also staged frequent incursions, overrunning villages, pushing several kilometers into Saudi territory and laying large numbers of explosive devices, according to both Western and Saudi officials. Houthi-aligned media have posted dozens of video clips showing Yemeni fighters in Saudi territory or attacking Saudi targets. In February, the Houthi-aligned al-Masirah television station, which broadcasts from Lebanon, reported on daily attacks along the border, often accompanied by video or photographs. It listed sniper killings of Saudi soldiers, mortar and anti-tank rocket attacks on Saudi border posts and military vehicles, ambushes, infiltrations and guerrilla raids. The Saudis have evacuated around a dozen villages, shuttered hundreds of schools in the region and closed the airport of Najran, a provincial capital that lies a few kilometers from the border. Riyadh concedes it underestimated the number of Houthi ballistic missiles. Days into the conflict, Asseri said the Houthis' ability to fire rockets at Saudi Arabia had been neutralized. But the Houthis continued to fire Scuds at the kingdom until well into 2016. Asseri said the Houthis hid weapons in schools and evacuated embassies. Riyadh believes Iran sent weapons to Yemen by plane before the war and by ship afterwards, he said. Houthis have denied that. Riyadh used to enjoy an extensive network of patronage and influence in Yemen that gave it an unrivalled understanding of the workings of its complex neighbor. But those networks were run by the late Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, a veteran defense minister, and deteriorated as his own health began to fail just over a decade ago. The Saudi with knowledge of the campaign said the performance of the army had been patchy and varied greatly from one unit to another. He and other Saudi and Western officials said the kingdom's forces on the border have been hampered by their lack of battlefield surveillance technology, which meant they were often unable to watch threats emerge in real time. Riyadh has partly addressed that by buying drones from China, Western and Saudi officials said. As well, the Royal Saudi Land Forces, which were trained for desert warfare, are beefing up their mountain training, first started after the 2009-10 war. EXPEDITIONARY FORCE A few days before operations began in Yemen last year, Riyadh tried to bring together a broad Muslim military alliance. But none of its most powerful Muslim allies  Egypt, Pakistan or Turkey  ended up taking leading roles. Asseri said Riyadh never requested big numbers of ground troops from them, believing that a large-scale land operation would be counterproductive. Turkey chose not to participate from the start. Pakistan's parliament voted to remain neutral, but only after its flag had been displayed alongside those of other coalition countries. It later committed a ship to help enforce a partial blockade, Asseri said. And Egypt eventually committed a naval expedition to the coalition. That left Saudi Arabia itself to produce ground forces along with several thousand troops from other Gulf neighbors, principally the United Arab Emirates. Morocco carried out airstrikes and Sudan committed two companies of troops late in the war. Saudi Arabia decided to entrust ground operations inside Yemen to local fighters backed by Gulf Special Forces and air strikes. But many of these fighters were untrained and disorganized. Asseri said that as the war has progressed they have been organized into a more coherent army. The lack of a professional ground operation hurt, say military experts. Asseri said using a large foreign army would have created the impression of an invading force and encouraged militant attacks. He pointed to the recapture of Aden in July as evidence that only small numbers of foreign troops were needed for specific operations. But the inexperience has shown in incidents such as a Houthi rocket strike in September in Marib. A senior Saudi officer told Reuters forces in Marib had been positioned too close together and near a munitions store, causing a high number of deaths. Asseri acknowledged that procedures had not been followed in Marib. "This is their first fight," he said. "You learn the hard way." (Additional reporting by William Maclean in Dubai, Warren Strobel in Washington and Mimi Dwyer in New York; Edited by Simon Robinson)
Beirut (AFP) - Suspected government air strikes killed at least 44 civilians at markets in northwestern Syria Tuesday, as opposition chiefs said they were leaving peace talks in Geneva because of such attacks.

In some of the deadliest violence since a ceasefire took effect in February, a suspected regime bombing raid hit a market in the city of Maaret al-Numan, killing at least 37 civilians, a monitor said.

Footage showed bloodied bodies scattered among twisted metal stalls in a street strewn with fruit and vegetables.

Another strike on a fish market in the nearby town of Kafranbel killed seven civilians, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group.

The strikes were in Idlib province, which is under the control of Al-Qaeda's Syrian offshoot Al-Nusra Front.

Like the Islamic State group, Al-Nusra is excluded from the ceasefire and regime forces have continued offensives in areas under its control.

The main opposition High Negotiations Committee condemned the strike on Maaret al-Numan as a "massacre" and clear violation of the truce.

"It is a dangerous escalation of an already fragile situation, showing contempt for the whole international community at a time when there is supposed to be a cessation of hostilities," said spokesman Salem al-Meslet.

The raid was "Assad's response" to the HNC's decision to suspend its formal participation in negotiations.

"Our decision to postpone our participation in the Geneva talks was taken to highlight the cynicism of the regime in pretending to negotiate while escalating the violence... The world must not ignore this challenge," said Meslet.

- UN insists talks go on -

The troubled talks -- the latest in a long series of efforts to end Syria's five-year conflict -- failed to get off the ground this week despite hopes brought on by the ceasefire.

The partial truce, brokered by the United States and Russia, led to a dramatic drop in violence across Syria but a recent surge in fighting, especially around second city Aleppo, has raised fears of its total collapse.

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The opposition announced Monday it was putting its participation on hold to protest escalating violence and restrictions on humanitarian access.

HNC coordinator Riad Hijab said Tuesday that he and other delegates were beginning to leave Geneva.

"I will be travelling today along with some of my colleagues from the HNC. Some people left yesterday and today and they will keep leaving gradually until Friday," he said.

"It is not suitable, neither morally nor on the humanitarian side, to be part of negotiations when Syrians are dying daily from sieges, hunger, bombings, poisonous gases and barrel bombs."

The UN has insisted the talks have not collapsed, with its envoy Staffan de Mistura saying they would continue through the week.

He said the indirect talks format -- which has seen the HNC and Assad's representatives meet separately with UN mediators -- created flexibility to continue the discussions.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also insisted the talks were "not frozen" and slammed the HNC as "capricious participants in the talks who are spoilt by their external patrons".

- 'Price of time is blood' -

This week's talks are meant to focus on Syria's political future, as the UN pushes a plan involving a transitional authority, a new constitution and eventual elections.

But Assad's future has been the key sticking point, with the opposition insisting he must go and the regime refusing.

Speaking in Moscow, Lavrov said: "No one can win the war. All experts recognise this.

"There are some external players who dream about deposing the regime by force and try to do everything including disrupting the talks in Geneva."

The regime's lead negotiator reiterated Tuesday that Assad's fate remained off-limits but said Damascus was prepared to discuss the creation of a new unity government.

"A broader unity government is the only topic of discussion here," said Bashar al-Jafaari, Syria's ambassador to the UN.

"It is not in our jurisdiction, it is not within our prerogatives to discuss the fate of President Bashar al-Assad."

World powers have backed the ceasefire and talks as the best hope yet to end a conflict that has devastated Syria, killed more than 270,000 people and forced millions from their homes.

But the rising violence in recent weeks has lowered expectations of a breakthrough.

The HNC has accused the regime of violating the ceasefire more than 2,000 times.

Hijab called for international observers to be sent in and for ceasefire violators to be held to account.

He warned against wasting time, saying: "For Syrians the price of time is blood."
Geneva (AFP) - The leaders of Syria's opposition delegation were leaving Geneva on Tuesday after the group suspended its formal participation in troubled peace negotiations, the opposition chief said.

The coordinator of the main opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC), Riad Hijab, told journalists he was leaving a day after the group put its participation at the talks on hold to protest escalating violence and restrictions on humanitarian access in Syria.

"I will be travelling today along with some of my colleagues from the HNC. Some people left yesterday and today and they will keep leaving gradually until Friday," Hijab said, speaking in Arabic.

Some delegation members will meanwhile remain in Geneva for technical discussions at their hotel with UN staff and for workshops on humanitarian issues and detainees, Hijab said.

UN peace envoy Staffan de Mistura said Monday he had been informed of HNC's intention to suspend its "formal participation" in the talks.

But he insisted the latest round of indirect discussions, which began on April 13, would continue through the week.

The UN envoy stressed that the indirect talks format -- which has seen the HNC and Assad's representatives meet separately with UN mediators -- created flexibility to continue the discussions.

- 'No truce' -

But Hijab appeared deeply disillusioned with the process.

"We will not accept negotiations while our people are still suffering," he thundered.

"It is not suitable, neither morally nor on the humanitarian side to be part of negotiations when Syrians are dying daily from sieges, hunger, bombings, poisonous gases and barrel bombs," he insisted.

The HNC has accused the regime of President Bashar al-Assad of violating a fragile ceasefire in effect since late February more than 2,000 times.

"There is no truce on the ground because theres no accountability," Hijab said, urging the UN Security Council to review the cessation of hostilities agreement negotiated by Russia and the United States in February.

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The landmark agreement initially curtailed violence across much of Syria, raising hopes that a lasting deal could be struck to end the five-year civil war.

But surging fighting around Aleppo is threatening to topple the truce and reignite a war which has already killed more than 270,000 people.

Hijab called for international observers to be sent in and for ceasefire violators to be held to account.

He warned against wasting time, "because for Syrians the price of time is blood."

Hijab also slammed Assad's main ally Russia, charging that it was giving Damascus free rein to violate the ceasefire by providing them "with the weapons used in bombings and massacres."

At the same time he voiced disappointment with Washington, the opposition's main backer, charging that rebels on the ground had seen their access to arms dry up.

"Maintaining the truce is not possible by preventing arms from reaching the rebels and preventing them from defending themselves, but by strengthening them and maintaining a balance of power," he said.
Beirut (AFP) - The Syrian regime late Monday accused Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar -- all backers of the opposition -- of seeking to derail peace talks in Geneva, after the rebels suspended their participation in the negotiations.

"There has been a decision... in Saudi Arabia, in Turkey and in Qatar to derail inter-Syrian decision-making," the regime's lead negotiator in Geneva, Bashar al-Jaafari, said in an interview with Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen.

"They do not want there to be a dialogue between Syrians -- they want to make the Geneva negotiations fail."

He added: "The Saudi, Turkish and Qatari sponsors do not want to stop the bloodbath in Syria and do not want a political solution in Syria."

Jaafari said the opposition and the countries that support it are "annoyed because of the progress being made by the Syrian army on the ground".

The UN struggled Monday to keep the troubled Geneva talks on track, as the opposition suspended its "formal participation", accusing the regime of repeated violations of a fragile ceasefire in place since February 27.

Riad Hijab, coordinator for opposition umbrella group the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), said it was "unacceptable" for the negotiations to continue while the regime of President Bashar al-Assad continues to "bombard and starve civilians".

But UN peace envoy Staffan de Mistura insisted the ongoing round of indirect discussions, which began on April 13, would continue through the week as planned.

The fate of Assad remains a major sticking point between the two sides.

The HNC insists that any peace deal must include Assad's departure from power. Damascus has so far said the president's future is off limits.

Jaafari said Monday that an "expanded government" was its objective in Geneva. "The presidency has nothing to do with the activities of the delegations (and discussing this issue) is not the responsibility of the negotiators in Geneva," he added.
Geneva (AFP) - Syria's regime is prepared to discuss the creation of a new unity government at peace talks in Geneva but President Bashar al-Assad's fate remains off limits, its lead negotiator told AFP on Tuesday.

Assad's chief representative in Geneva, UN ambassador Bashar al-Jafaari, had during previous rounds of peace talks insisted that any discussion of a political transition in Syria was premature.

"A broader unity government is the only topic of discussion here," Jafaari said in the interview with AFP.

"It is not in our jurisdiction, it is not within our prerogatives to discuss the fate of President Bashar al-Assad."

Jafaari made the comments a day after the main opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) suspended its formal participation at the UN-brokered talks in protest at escalating violence and continuing restrictions on humanitarian access in Syria.

But the HNC pledged to remain in Geneva and may continue to meet informally with mediators outside the UN compound.

Despite the setback, UN envoy Staffan de Mistura told reporters on Monday that the government's readiness to even discuss political transition in Syria amounted to progress.

"Indeed, there is one major improvement in what we used to have: everybody agrees the word 'political transition' is the point of the agenda," he said.

He said huge divides exist in terms of how each side defines political transition, but there is "no doubt about the need" to tackle the subject.

However, prospects for a breakthrough on the crucial issue of Assad's future remain dim.

The HNC has insisted that the president must go and cannot be part of any transitional or interim government.

The opposition rejected an idea, floated during talks with de Mistura, that Assad remain the ceremonial head of a transitional body that would include three vice presidents of the HNC's choosing.

And Jafaari told AFP that Damascus was also unequivocally against such a proposal.

Story continues

That idea "will never be discussed in any upcoming session because it is not within the authority of the negotiators in Geneva," he said.

De Mistura insisted the negotiations would continue, even as rising violence around the northern Syrian city of Aleppo further threatened a fragile ceasefire on the ground.

The truce broked by the United States and Russia and declared on February 27 led to a sharp decline in bloodshed in the five-year conflict that has killed more than 270,000 people and displaced millions.

De Mistura is set to meet the ceasefire monitoring taskforce later Tuesday after talks with two smaller opposition groups that are independent of the HNC.
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Air strikes on two markets killed up to 50 people in northwest Syria on Tuesday, as Syrian government forces backed by Russian air power also launched strikes against rebels in the province of Latakia, a rebel group and a conflict monitor said. Targets included towns and villages where a partial truce agreement had brought about a lull in fighting between the government and rebels since Feb. 27. That agreement has unraveled in recent weeks. In the insurgent stronghold of Idlib province, which neighbors Latakia, air strikes on a vegetable market in the town of Maarat al-Numan killed around 40 people and injured dozens, the monitor, rescue worker and opposition source said. In the nearby town of Kafr Nubl between seven and 10 people were killed, the sources said. The attacks represented a "dangerous escalation" of the five-year conflict, the main Syrian opposition bloc the High Negotiations Committee said in a statement. It had already postponed its participation in peace talks. "We have more than 20 cars that have been moving dead and injured to hospitals in the area," said Ahmad Sheikho, a member of the civil defense corps, a rescue service operating in opposition-held territory. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which monitors the conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said 37 people were killed in Maarat al-Numan and seven were killed in Kafr Nubl. The Syrian military could not immediately be reached for comment, and state news agency SANA made no mention of air strikes in Idlib. Rockets fired by insurgents, meanwhile, killed three children in nearby Kefraya, a Shi'ite town loyal to the government, the Observatory said. State media said the dead were members of one family. The fighting in Latakia was focused on areas where insurgent groups had launched an attack on government forces on Monday, and where battles had often erupted despite the cessation of hostilities agreement. "The regime is trying to storm the area, with the participation of Russian helicopters and Sukhoi (warplanes)," said Fadi Ahmad, spokesman for the First Coastal rebel group in the area. The Observatory said fighting had been raging since morning. A Syrian military source said: "There have been a number of offensives and attacks by armed groups on the Syrian Arab army in (areas of northern Latakia) on military positions where the Syrian Arab army has been since before the cessation of hostilities agreement. The Syrian Army has responded to these attacks." Government air strikes and barrel bombing was also reported in northern areas of Homs province that are under rebel control. The use of barrel bombs, or oil drums filled with explosives, has been denied by the Syrian government but widely recorded including by a U.N. commission of inquiry on Syria. The Observatory said around 15 air strikes also hit northern areas of Homs province on Tuesday. (Writing by Tom Perry; Reporting by Lisa Barrington; Editing by Alison Williams)
AMMAN (Reuters) - The Syrian government's chief negotiator said President Bashar al-Assad's future was not up for discussion at peace talks, underlining the bleak prospects for reviving U.N.-led negotiations postponed by the opposition. Bashar Ja'afari, speaking to Lebanese TV station al Mayadeen, also said his team was pushing for an expanded government as the solution to the war - an idea rejected by the opposition fighting for five years to topple Assad. Ja'afari was reiterating the Syrian government's position as spelt out last month ahead of the latest round of talks, indicating no shift on the part of Damascus as it continues to enjoy firm military backing from Russia and Iran. "In Geneva we have one mandate only to arrive at an expanded national government only, this is our mandate ... this is the goal we strive to achieve in the Geneva peace talks," Ja'afari said in comments broadcast overnight. He added that these views were relayed to U.N. Syria mediator Staffan de Mistura. Ja'afari also said Assad's fate could never be raised in peace talks nor was it a matter that any U.N.-backed political process could deliberate. "This matter (the presidency) does not fall under the jurisdiction of Geneva ... this is a Syrian-Syrian affair, Security Council or no Security Council," he said. The Western-backed Syrian mainstream opposition decided on Monday to take a pause in peace talks. It said Damascus was not serious about moving towards a U.N.-backed political process they say would bring a transitional governing body with full executive powers without Assad. A U.N. Security Council resolution in December called for the establishment of "credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance", a new constitution, and free and fair elections within 18 months. Ja'afari also said any ideas such as those floated recently by de Mistura that sought to bridge the gap between the two sides should not touch existing state institutions or the army. "We won't allow any constitutional vacuum to take place. What does that mean? It means the army stays as it is and state institutions continue to function," he added. The opposition says restructuring the army and security apparatus is an essential step towards establishing a democratic Syria. Ja'afari accused the Western-backed opposition of seeking to bring about a collapse of the country and replicate the chaos seen in Iraq and Libya after Western military intervention brought down long severing authoritarian rulers. "They want to repeat the experience of Libya and Iraq ... and turn Syria into a failed state," he said. (Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Tom Perry and Tom Heneghan)
By John Irish and Tom Perry GENEVA/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian peace talks appeared all but doomed on Tuesday after air strikes killed about 40 people in a crowded vegetable market in rebel territory, with the opposition saying a truce was finished and it would keep out of negotiations indefinitely. A monitoring group said it believed the strike on the market in Maarat al-Numan in Idlib province was the deadliest single attack since a partial ceasefire took effect on Feb. 27. The main opposition HNC described the attack as a "dangerous escalation" which reinforced its decision a day earlier to suspend negotiations. France described the bloodshed as "another massacre". A rescue worker said warplanes had simultaneously struck markets in two towns in Idlib killing at least 38 people in Maarat al-Numan and 10 others in nearby Kafr Nubl. "We have more than 20 cars that have been moving dead and injured to hospitals in the area," said Ahmad Sheikho, a member of the civil defense corps, a rescue service operating in opposition-held territory. The air strike, accompanied by intense fighting in other areas, appears to leave the fragile six-week-old ceasefire in tatters. The truce was brokered by the United States and Russia to pave way for the first peace talks attended by the warring factions since fighting began five years ago. Those talks, taking place under U.N. auspices in Geneva, were already close to collapse after the opposition called a pause on Monday. "There cannot be a political process which prolongs the life of this regime. We will not accept this," said Riad Hijab, chief coordinator for the main opposition HNC bloc. "We will fight under all circumstances, even with stones. And never give up." So far, the opposition has been careful to say it is not pulling out of the talks altogether. Some members of its delegation will remain in Geneva for expert-level talks on technical issues like humanitarian aid and swapping prisoners. But Hijab said he himself was leaving Geneva. There was no chance of returning to the main talks while the government broke the truce, blocked humanitarian access and ignored the issue of detainees, he said. "ANOTHER MASSACRE" It was not immediately clear whose aircraft were responsible for the air strikes. Both Syria's own air force and that of its Russian allies have been operating despite the truce. "We learned today there had been another massacre this morning," French envoy Franck Gellet said in Geneva. Damascus and Moscow say they are striking only territory held by Islamist fighters who are not covered by the ceasefire, but opposition groups dismiss this, saying the government and Russia use the Islamists to justify wider attacks. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said 37 people were killed in Maarat al-Numan and seven in Kafr Nubl. Many of the injured were in a serious condition and the death toll was expected to rise, it said. Asked if it was the deadliest attack recorded since the ceasefire began, the Observatory's head, Rami Abdulrahman, said: "I believe so." Ahmed al-Seoud, head of the 13th Division, a foreign-backed faction fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, also gave a death toll of about 40 in Maarat al-Numan and said 80 people were wounded. The Syrian military could not immediately be reached for comment, and state news agency SANA made no mention of air strikes in Idlib. As fighting raged and air strikes on rebel-held areas intensified, the opposition urged foreign states to supply them with the means to defend themselves, a reference to the anti-aircraft weapons long sought by insurgents. U.S. President Barack Obama told Russia's Vladimir Putin in a phone call on Monday that Syria was starting to fray more rapidly. The two Cold War era super-powers are joint sponsors of the peace process and ceasefire, after intensifying diplomacy following Russia's decision last year to join the war, an intervention that tipped momentum Assad's way. The Geneva talks aim to end a war that has killed more than 250,000 people, created the world's worst refugee crisis, allowed for the rise of the Islamic State group and drawn in regional and world powers. Damascus blames the rebels for breaking the cessation of hostilities. Chief Syrian government negotiator Bashar Ja'afari said his team was pushing for an expanded government as a solution to the war, an idea rejected by the armed opposition which has fought for five years to oust Assad. With fighting reported across much of northwest Syria on Tuesday, both sides were obdurate. The government says it is willing to negotiate on a national unity government that could include some opposition figures, but not on the question of Assad leaving power. "Our mandate in Geneva stops at forming a national unity government," Ja'afari told Reuters. "We have no mandate whatsoever either to address the constitutional issue meaning establishing a new constitution or addressing parliamentary elections or addressing the fate of the presidency." NO DATE TO RESUME TALKS The opposition made clear its suspension of political talks was indefinite. Still, a Western diplomat said it was important that the opposition delegation had not stormed out altogether. "They have made this point...that they will not participate in formal meetings for perhaps a short period of time, but are open to continued discussions at the technical level." Syrian forces backed by Russian warplanes launched a counter-attack against rebels in the northwestern province of Latakia, a rebel group and the Observatory reported. Targets included towns and villages where the truce agreement had brought about a lull in fighting. Fighters predicted more bloodshed. "Let's be realistic. The escalation will start," said Bashar al-Zoubi, a rebel leader. Ahmed Al-Seoud, the head of another rebel group, said he hoped for more military support from Assad's foreign enemies. Rockets fired by insurgents killed three children in Kefraya, a Shi'ite town loyal to the government, the Observatory said. State media said the dead were members of one family. Fighting in Latakia focused on areas where insurgent groups had launched an attack on government forces on Monday, and where battles had often erupted despite the cessation of hostilities. "The regime is trying to storm the area, with the participation of Russian helicopters and Sukhoi (warplanes)," said Fadi Ahmad, spokesman for the First Coastal rebel group in the area. The Observatory said fighting had raged since morning. Government air strikes were also reported in northern areas of Homs province under rebel control. (Reporting by Tom Perry and Lisa Barrington in Beirut, John Irish and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Suleiman Al-Khalidi in Amman, writing by Peter Millership and Peter Graff; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwanese officials will travel to diplomatic rival China on Wednesday to discuss two cases of telecoms fraud, one of which led to 45 Taiwan nationals being deported to China from Kenya, infuriating Taipei. The officials hoped to establish a way to jointly investigate the two cases, in which the scams were conducted from a third country, and visit the detained Taiwanese, the Taiwan Justice Ministry said on Tuesday. Taiwan has been in uproar since Kenya forcibly deported the 45 nationals to China this month. China regards self-ruled Taiwan as a wayward province and Kenya said it was deporting the 45 back to where they came from. Kenya does not have official relations with democratic Taiwan and considers the island part of "one China", in line with the position of Communist Party leaders in Beijing. Over the weekend, China slammed Taiwan for freeing 20 Taiwanese suspects deported to the island from Malaysia in a separate telecom fraud case linked to China. Taiwan has said it had no evidence to detain the individuals. China's Ministry of Public Security said last week Taiwanese had been heavily involved in telecoms fraud in China and had caused huge losses. Taiwanese criminals "have been falsely presenting themselves as law enforcement officers to extort money from people on the Chinese mainland through telephone calls", the ministry added. (Reporting by J.R. Wu; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Taipei (AFP) - Taiwan said Tuesday it would protest to Beijing and Belgium after its delegation was barred at a global industry conference in Brussels due to complaints from China.

It is the latest bout of diplomatic sparring between Taiwan and China as tensions simmer ahead of the inauguration of Taiwan's president-elect, Tsai Ing-wen, in May.

Beijing does not trust Tsai's historically pro-independence party and ties are predicted to deteriorate.

Although it is self-ruling, Beijing considers Taiwan a province awaiting reunification since the two sides split after a civil war on the mainland in 1949.

Taiwanese officials attending the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) steel symposium in Brussels were barred from a meeting Monday after China complained to Belgium they were not sufficiently high-ranking, Taiwan's economic ministry said.

Taiwan is not an OECD member but has attended the organisation's steel committee meetings since 2005.

"Our delegation protested on the spot, and pointed out that nearly half of the heads of delegations held similar ranks as us," Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement.

The Taiwanese group were unable to enter the meeting because of China's complaint, it added.

"That is an unreasonable and discriminatory act," the statement said.

Taiwan's representative to the European Union has asked the island's Mainland Affairs Council to lodge a complaint with China, and the delegation will submit a protest letter to the Belgian government Tuesday, it said.

Taiwan's five-member delegation included a section chief from the economic ministry, as well as representatives from the trade bureau and the island's steel sector.

Taiwan is barred from a number of international organisations as Beijing's global dominance has grown and its number of allies is dwindling -- the island now only has diplomatic ties with 22 states.

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The Brussels snub comes after Taiwan last week blasted Beijing for being "rude and violent" over the deportation of 45 of its citizens from Kenya to China where they face investigation for fraud.

Taiwan said it will send 10 officials to the mainland Wednesday in an attempt to bring the suspects back to the island for investigation and trial.

The island has also alleged that Beijing sought to deport another group of Taiwanese implicated in telecom fraud in Malaysia.
San Francisco (AFP) - Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June, the company announced.

The weeklong gathering will kick off on June 13 with a keynote presentation at which Apple will showcase its software platforms for mobile devices, smart watches, Macintosh computers and Internet television.

"With four innovative operating systems and a new, intuitive programming language powering over one billion devices worldwide, there has never been a more exciting time to bring our developer community together," Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Philip Schiller said in a statement, released on Monday.

"WWDC 2016 is going to be a landmark event for developers who are coding in Swift, and building apps and products for iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS."

Tickets for the event typically sell out quickly, but Apple said conference sessions would also be streamed live online.

Google's annual developers conference will take place in May near its main campus in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View.

Fun, functional or hip applications created by third-party developers have become major factors in the popularity of smartphones or tablets powered by rival operating systems.
If you ask the average politician to talk about anything related to technology, chances are you'll come away distressed by their total lack of knowledge. However, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau last week wowed the tech world during an event at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo when expertly answered a question related to quantum computing. However, his impressive response to a question on quantum computing may have been too good to be true.

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The video of Trudeau's response went viral over the weekend, The Telegraph reports. The former teacher schooled the press in attendance by elaborating on the differences between quantum computing and regular computers. Don't get me going on this or we'll be here all day. Trust me," he said. The video follows below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZBLSjF56S8

However, as Gawker points out, the whole question was staged, as Trudeau challenged reporters before the event to ask him that question. This suggests the prime minister prepared himself specifically for the event, though it doesnt mean he doesnt know what quantum computing is and why its important.

You dont have to be a geek like me to appreciate how important this work is, Trudeau told journalists during a speech. Although I have to tell you when we get to the media questions later Im really hoping people ask me how quantum computing works because I was excited to deepen my knowledge of that this morning.

A video showing Trudeaus challenge to the press follows below.

https://youtu.be/Y34jkcX-Q3A?t=827

Even if staged, Trudeaus explanation of quantum computing is still pretty impressive.

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This article was originally published on BGR.com
We're surrounded by voice-enabled personal assistants these days, but what if we could make them all talk to one another? That's the ambition of Leon Nicholls, who recently activated Siri on an iPhone by going through three different voice-enabled assistants first. As you'll see in the following video, the chain reaction among all the computerized assistants is a pretty amusing sight.

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Here's the full video Nicholls posted on YouTube earlier this month:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjlVUtKZ4BM&feature=youtu.be

He starts off by activating voice commands on his Raspberry Pi and he asks it to "ask Alexa how to use Siri."

"Alexa, ask Google Now to enable 'Hey Siri,'" says the Raspberry Pi.

"OK Google, how do I enable 'Hey Siri?'" asks the Amazon Echo.

"According to MacWorld, the next time you summon Siri with a command by either holding down on the home button or by calling out 'Hey Siri!' when your iOS device is plugged in, you'll be prompted with a setup screen," replies Google Now.

"Yes?" Siri then chimes in.

At any rate, this is the most amusing (albeit inefficient) way we've ever seen someone activate Siri. It'll be interesting to see what other tricks people can come up with when using all these different services together.

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Texas pastor and founder of the Church of Open Doors Jordan D. Brown tweeted a photo Monday of a cake he had allegedly picked up from a local Whole Foods, saying, "That's not the cake I ordered, @WholeFoods and I am offended for myself & the entire #LGBT community."

The cake in the photo had "Love Wins Fag" written on it in frosting  a message that would likely be upsetting to many. The only problem? Whole Foods says Brown made the entire thing up.

LOVE WINS FAG. That's not the cake I ordered, @WholeFoods and I am offended for myself & the entire #LGBT communitypic.twitter.com/cuxuv6mL3G https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgWDeozVAAED2da.jpg:large

In a statement on their website, Whole Foods maintained that the request had been for a cake that said "Love Wins," and that's what the customer got.

Our team member wrote "Love Wins" at the top of the cake as requested by the guest, and that's exactly how the cake was packaged and sold at the store. Our team members do not accept or design bakery orders that include language or images that are offensive. Whole Foods Market has a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination. We stand behind our bakery team member, who is part of the LGBTQ community, and the additional team members from the store, who confirmed the cake was decorated with only the message "Love Wins."

Brown announced on Twitter that he planned to hold a "press conference," ostensibly about the cake on Monday afternoon. Brown's congregation, Church of Open Doors, bills itself as a "place where all can experience God" and "LGBT friendly."

As of Monday evening, Brown hadn't addressed Whole Foods' response on Twitter. It's not yet clear whether the cake he allegedly received, which had "fag" written in the middle in frosting, was altered after purchase, or was, despite Whole Foods' official response, the fault of someone behind the counter. But many on Twitter are already accusing Brown of staging the entire thing.

@PasJordanBrown Obviously made by different piping bag. A clear LIE to get attention by pretending to be a victim. @WholeFoods should sue
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - Three rockets hit the southeastern Turkish town of Kilis near the Syrian border on Tuesday, security sources said, the second straight day the town has come under fire. Kilis, which is just across the border from an Islamic State-controlled region of Syria, has been hit by repeated rocket fire in recent weeks. On Monday four people were killed when five rockets landed in the town. (Reporting by Seyhmus Cakan; Editing by Andrew Heavens; Writing by David Dolan)
Donald Trump has a 9/11 problem  and its not that he called it 7/11 on the eve of the New York primary.

At a rally in Buffalo, N.Y., Monday, the Republican frontrunner referred to the wrong date while recalling the 2001 terror attacks  a flub that was soon trending online. But it was a story about his own experience at Ground Zero that is drawing scrutiny.

Everyone who helped clear the rubble  and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit  but I want to tell you: Those people were amazing, Trump said. Clearing the rubble. Trying to find additional lives. You didnt know what was going to come down on all of us  and they handled it.

The real estate moguls anecdote was meant to illustrate his New York values  a phrase that has become a conservative flashpoint in Trumps battle with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the race for the GOP nomination.

Trump speaks at a rally in Buffalo, N.Y., on Monday. (Photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters)



But his assertion that he helped clear rubble in the search for 9/11 survivors is fraught with questions.

Did he mean he picked up a few chunks of concrete? Philip Bump writes in the Washington Post. Sent staff to assist? Its not clear.

Its clear that Trump was at or near Ground Zero in the days following the attacks.

New York Newsday spotted Trump there on Sept. 13, according to this excerpt cited in Bumps report:

The workers are so worn out that they barely glance at the sight of Donald Trump, every hair in place and impeccably dressed in a black suit, pressed white shirt and red tie, walking into the plaza with his cellular phone to his ear. No, no. The buildings gone, he says into the phone.



The same day, standing three blocks from Ground Zero, Trump gave an interview to a German television reporter who asked the real estate mogul whether he would be involved in the reconstruction efforts.

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Well, I have a lot of men down here right now, Trump replied. We have over 100 and we have about 125 coming. So well have a couple of hundred people down here.

But there appears to be no evidence to substantiate Trumps claim that he helped  even a little bit  in the rubble removal.

The Trump campaign did not immediately return a request for comment. But as the brash billionaire has already proven in this campaign, a lack of evidence doesnt stop Trump from making claims about 9/11.

Thousands and thousands of people



While defending his call for the surveillance of certain mosques, Trump said he saw thousands and thousands of people in New Jersey cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center with his own eyes.

I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down, Trump said at rally in Birmingham, Ala., in November. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.

In a subsequent interview with ABCs George Stephanopoulos, Trump doubled down.

They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down, Trump said. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down  as those buildings came down  and that tells you something. It was well covered at the time, George. Now, I know they dont like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time. There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.

While there were images of people in parts the Middle East cheering the attacks, there is no evidence that similar celebrations took place in New Jersey. But the GOP hopeful didnt budge.

It did happen. I saw it, Trump insisted. It was on television.

I watched those people jump



At a rally in Columbus, Ohio, the following day, Trump made another 9/11 claim: that he witnessed people jumping out of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan  from his luxury apartment in midtown.

"Many people jumped and I witnessed it, I watched that. I have a view  a view in my apartment that was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center, Trump said. And I watched those people jump and I watched the second plane hit  I saw the second plane hit the building and I said, Wow thats unbelievable.

Trump has long maintained his residence inside Trump Tower, which is located more than four miles away from Ground Zero. But he never clarified how he managed to witness people jumping out of the World Trade Center from his apartment.

And during a GOP debate in February, Trump said he lost hundreds of friends in the attacks that killed 2,983 people.

But the Trump campaign has refused repeated calls from the Daily Beast to name one.

In his interview with the German television station, Trump said he had just come from the site, but made no mention of the friends hes since said he lost.

I just went to what they call Ground Zero, he said. Ive never seen anything like it. The devastation, the human life thats been just wasted for no reason whatsoever. Its a terrible scene. Its a terrible sight. But New Yorkers are very strong and resilient and theyll rebuild quickly.

On the 12th anniversary of the attacks, Trump did, however, offer some kind thoughts to his Twitter followers.



I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th, Trump tweeted on Sept. 11, 2013.

The tweet was eventually deleted.
Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Ted Cruz. (Photos: John Minchillo/AP; Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx/AP; Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

They may be the frontrunners, but a majority of Americans cant see themselves supporting either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Nor, for that matter, could they fathom supporting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

According to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal national poll, 68 percent of registered voters say they couldnt see themselves supporting Trump, while 58 percent say the same about Clinton. Sixty-one percent of voters surveyed said they couldnt see themselves backing Cruz.

SLIDESHOW  The battle for New York >>>

Bernie Sanders and John Kasich fared slightly better, with a minority of voters saying they couldnt see themselves supporting either the Vermont senator (48 percent) or the Ohio governor (47 percent).

Whats more, 65 percent of all voters hold a negative view of Trump  making him the most unpopular major presidential candidate in the history of the NBC/WSJ poll. A majority of voters (56 percent) have an unfavorable view of Clinton  a figure that has risen five points in the last month  while 49 percent view Cruz the same way.

In terms of favorability, Sanders and Kasich scored net-positive favorability ratings, the NBC/WSJ poll found. Sanders is also the only candidate who more voters could see themselves supporting than could not.

To top it off, NBC senior political editor Mark Murray noted, just 19 percent of all respondents give Clinton high marks for being honest and trustworthy, while only 12 percent give Trump high scores for having the right temperament.

Nonetheless, a majority of likely voters in both parties say theyd be satisfied with them as their nominees.

Among Democrats, 73 percent say theyd be either very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with Clinton as the nominee, while 63 percent of Republicans said the same about Trump.

Still, more GOP voters say theyd be satisfied with Cruz (66 percent) than with Trump.

New York Rep. Peter King is not one of them.

I hate Ted Cruz, King said on MSNBCs Morning Joe on Tuesday. I think Ill take cyanide if he got the nomination.
By Edward Krudy and Susan Cornwell NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump were favored to win their parties' U.S. presidential nominating contests in New York state on Tuesday, but voting was overshadowed by official confirmation that more than 125,000 people were missing from New York City voter rolls and reports of other irregularities. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer ordered an audit of the city elections board after it confirmed the names had been removed from voter rolls. The city has roughly 4 million voters considered active for the presidential primaries. Stringer complained in a letter to the board that it was "consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient." He cited faulty ballot scanners, late-opening polling stations and scant staffing. Opinion polls in New York put Clinton, 68, a former U.S. senator from the state, ahead of Brooklyn-born U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, 74, of Vermont in the Democratic race. The state has been the scene of some of their harshest exchanges during a long campaign. Clinton hopes to recapture the momentum she lost to Sanders, winner of seven of the last eight state-by-state nominating contests. "Any double-digit win would really reassure everybody that the (Clinton) campaign is reaching the voters who are going to be the people in November that are going to carry her to victory," said Dan Fass, a longtime Democratic donor in Rye, New York. Last week, after the Democratic candidates debated in Brooklyn, Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri sought to play down expectations by expressing skepticism about the accuracy of some polls showing Clinton with a double-digit lead. "We are always cautioning people to not put a lot of stock into public polls and particularly ones that show big leads," Palmieri said. Clinton has 1,758 of the 2,383 party convention delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination to Sanders' 1,076 delegates, according to an Associated Press tally. A total of 291 delegates are up for grabs in New York, and a big Clinton win there could make her delegate lead nearly insurmountable. During the Democrats' July 25-28 convention, the delegates will select the party's nominee to the Nov. 8 presidential election. In Democratic nominating contests, pledged delegates are awarded proportionate to the support a candidate receives in each state, while superdelegates, who make up a smaller proportion, can support any candidate. TRUMP LOOKS PAST NEW YORK Trump, 69, a New York billionaire businessman, already was looking past New York to future contests by sending Paul Manafort, who is charged with chasing the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination, to meet with lawmakers from the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. Manafort "feels that there are four or five different pathways to 1,237," Congressman Scott Desjarlais of Tennessee said, referring to the number of delegates a candidate needs to secure the Republican nomination. Trump, front-runner for months in the Republican race, has 744 delegates, while U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, 45, of Texas has 559 and Ohio Governor John Kasich, 63, is trailing far behind with 144, according to an Associated Press count. The count includes endorsements from several delegates who are free to support the candidate of their choice. Opinion polls show Trump has a double-digit lead in New York, where the "winner takes most" primary carries 95 delegates. But a big win for Trump in the state York would not erase his vulnerabilities. If Trump does not secure enough delegates needed to win the Republican nomination outright at the party's July 18-21 convention in Cleveland, delegates would be allowed to switch to other candidates. Trump remains unpopular with the Republican leaders and activists who select and serve as delegates, whereas Cruz has invested time and money courting them. Some establishment Republicans have been alienated by Trump's more incendiary proposals, such as building a wall along the border with Mexico and slapping a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country. Trump has sought to mend fences with new hires and through contacts with party leaders in Washington. Congressman Lou Barletta of Pennsylvania said Manafort told House lawmakers the Trump campaign has an "open door." "It is good that they are reaching out to members here, to get policy ideas, and bounce ideas off," said Barletta, who has endorsed Trump. (Reporting by Edward Krudy and Susan Cornwell; Additional reporting by Amanda Becker, Emily Flitter, Steve Holland, and Luciana Lopez; Writing by Amanda Becker and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Frances Kerry and Howard Goller)
Istanbul (AFP) - The Turkish army killed 32 suspected fighters from the Islamic State group in northern Iraq on Tuesday following an attack on one of its tanks, Turkish media reported.

Turkish troops destroyed a building used by IS, killing 10 jihadists, and then killed another 22 who tried to flee the scene, the Anatolia news agency said.

It was not immediately possible to independently verify the toll.

The agency said the incident occurred after militants fired an anti-tank missile at one of its tanks near the Bashiqa military camp not far from the city of Mosul, which has been an IS stronghold since 2014.

Dogan news agency said the tank crew was unhurt and that they had fired back in response, shelling the building from which the fire came and causing it to collapse, killing 10 jihadists.

They also fired at a group of people fleeing the scene in seven cars and four motorcycles, killing 22 of them, the agency said.

Last month, a Turkish soldier was killed and another wounded when missiles fired by IS fighters hit another military base in northern Iraq during clashes with local Kurdish forces.

Bashiqa camp has been targeted several times by IS jihadists.

In December, Turkey said it had sent hundreds of troops to Bashiqa to protect Turkish military personnel involved in training Iraqi fighters, sparking a diplomatic row with Baghdad.

At the time, a senior Turkish official said up to 300 soldiers and 20 tanks were deployed there, although an unspecified number were pulled back following US pressure to end the row with Baghdad.

The same month, IS militants attacked the camp, wounding four soldiers, and tried again in January although the Turkish military repelled them, with Ankara claiming 18 IS jihadists were killed. Baghdad flatly denied the claim.

Turkey says its troops are training Iraqi forces to fight IS extremists but Baghdad has accused Ankara of using training as a pretext to increase its influence in northern Iraq.
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish armed forces on Tuesday killed 32 suspected Islamic State militants in the Bashiqa area of northern Iraq in response to an attack on a Turkish tank at a military camp there, broadcaster CNN Turk reported. CNN Turk said Turkish soldiers had killed 10 Islamic State militants during an operation that destroyed a building, and had killed another 22 militants as they fled. The report could not immediately be verified. NATO member Turkey has soldiers stationed at the Bashiqa camp near the city of Mosul, which it says are training local forces to fight Islamic State. (Reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley; Editing by Nick Tattersall)
Ankara (AFP) - Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Monday warned the European Union to stick by a promise of visa free travel for Turks by June this year, saying otherwise Ankara would not abide by its commitments under a key migrant deal.

Turkey earlier this year agreed a series of measures to help the EU stem the flow of migrants from Syria and other troubled countries to European shores, in exchange for the promise of visa free travel and a boost for Ankara's longstanding bid to join the bloc.

"This is a mutual commitment. If the EU cannot take the necessary steps required of it then of course it cannot be expected of Turkey to take these steps," Davutoglu told reporters at Ankara airport before heading to Strasbourg.

"I maintain my belief that, God willing, we will have the visa exemption in June. In the absence of that, then of course no-one can expect Turkey to adhere to its commitments," he added.

"Turkey is a serious interlocutor. It does what is has promised and will allow no concessions on what it has been promised," he added.

The March 18 accord sets out measures for reducing Europe's worst migration crisis since World War II, including stepped-up checks by Turkey and the shipping back to Turkish territory of migrants who land on the Greek islands.

In return, Turkey is slated to receive benefits including visa-free travel for its citizens to Europe, promised "at the latest" by June 2016.

But the prospect of visa-free travel for Turks has been hugely controversial in some EU countries, where leaders have been accused of bending over to fulfil Turkey's demands.

Turkey is also to receive a total of six billion euros in financial aid up to the end of 2018 for the 2.7 million Syrian refugees it is hosting.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had on April 7 already warned the EU there were "precise conditions" in the agreement. But Davutoglu's comments represent the most explicit warning by Ankara on the issue yet.

The premier is due to host German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the President of the European Council Donald Tusk in the Turkish city of Gaziantep on April 23 to discuss the migrant deal.
By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) - The U.S. Census Bureau has reached a $15 million settlement of a lawsuit claiming it discriminated against black and Hispanic job applicants with criminal histories during the 2010 census by making it too hard to document their readiness for work.

Tuesday's accord was described in papers filed in Manhattan federal court, and requires a judge's approval.

It requires the Census Bureau to hire two "industrial organizational" psychologists to design criminal history screening criteria for the 2020 census that limit the impact on blacks and Hispanic job applicants.

About $5 million of the payout would go toward helping notify class members of upcoming hirings, or fix mistakes in their criminal history records. Much of the remainder could go toward legal and administrative costs, court papers showed.

Though a judge in July 2014 certified a class action covering roughly 450,000 blacks and Hispanics, individual class members would not receive payments, court papers showed.

The Census Bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tuesday's accord would end a 2010 lawsuit challenging a Census Bureau requirement that applicants with arrest records provide "official" paperwork explaining them within 30 days, including for minor offenses and regardless of whether convictions resulted.

According to court papers, the requirement ended job prospects for about 700,000 of the 3.8 million people who applied for temporary work to complete the 2010 decennial count, and disproportionately affected blacks and Hispanics.

"It just was an impossibility" for many people to provide the documentation, Ossai Miazad, a partner at Outten & Golden representing the plaintiffs, said in a telephone interview.

The settlement "is going to open up job opportunities for hundreds of thousands of African Americans and Latinos who were denied jobs in 2010," she added. "We believe it is going to have a significant and lasting benefit to the class."

The case is Gonzalez et al v. Pritzker, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 10-03105.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York)
By Gary Robertson RICHMOND, Va. (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday ruled for a Virginia transgender student seeking access to the bathroom of his gender identity in a case that could impact the national bathroom wars playing out between gay rights activists and social conservatives. The ruling by the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals sent back to a lower court a widely watched case weighing protections for transgender students under the 1972 Title IX Act, which prohibits sex-based discrimination by schools receiving federal funding. Student Gavin Grimm was barred from using the boys bathroom at his local high school in Gloucester County, Virginia. Grimm was born a female but identifies as a male. After drawing community complaints for allowing Grimm to use the boys bathroom for a time, the school district approved a policy in December 2014 requiring students to use single-stall unisex restrooms or restrooms associated with their physical sex. The appellate court reversed a district court's dismissal of the student's Title IX claim and said he could proceed with his lawsuit, which contends that the policy was discriminatory. "Todays decision gives me hope that my fight will help other kids avoid discriminatory treatment at school, Grimm said in a statement, calling the ruling a relief and vindication. The superintendent of Gloucester County Public Schools, Walter Clemons, declined to comment. U.S. President Barack Obama's administration filed a brief in support of Grimm. In its ruling, the appellate court noted that federal education officials have interpreted Title IX to extend to transgender students and said the lower court did not appropriately defer to the regulations. The decision, marking the first time a federal appeals court has found such protections for transgender students under Title IX, could have wide impact. "The Fourth Circuit decision is truly unprecedented," said Matt Sharp of the non-profit Alliance Defending Freedom, which advocates for conservative positions on religious liberty. "Schools are going to be told that you have to allow biological males to share bathrooms and locker rooms and other private facilities with females," he said in a phone interview. The court's jurisdiction includes North Carolina, which recently became the first state in the nation to restrict bathroom access to an individual's sex at birth. The Republican governor of North Carolina, Pat McCrory, supported the school district in the Virginia case. He said he would review the ruling. This is a major, major change in social norms, he said. (Writing by Letitia Stein in Tampa, Florida; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
By Toni Clarke (Reuters) - A U.S. House of Representatives committee on Tuesday approved an amendment to an agricultural funding bill that would make it easier for e-cigarettes to win regulatory clearance than currently proposed by the Food and Drug Administration. Under a proposed FDA rule, almost all e-cigarette and vapor products introduced after Feb. 15, 2007, would be required to meet regulatory standards that the industry considers excessively stringent. The House Appropriations Committee voted 31-19 on Tuesday in favor of easing the process. The amendment was offered by Republican Tom Cole of Oklahoma and Democrat Sanford Bishop of Georgia. A vote by the full House of Representatives on the spending bill has not yet been scheduled. "What happened today is a big boost of momentum for the industry," said Arnaud Dumas de Rauly, treasurer of the Vapor Technology Association, which represents manufacturers and businesses. "We're happy to have bipartisan co-sponsors because up until now we only had Republican buy-in. Now we have Democratic buy-in as well." Public health advocates criticized the amendment, saying it benefits industry at the expense of public health. The 2009 Tobacco Control Act allows a new tobacco product to be authorized for sale if it can be shown to be "substantially equivalent" to a product already on the market before February 15, 2007. If no such product exists, the new product must undergo a much more stringent review under the agency's "premarket tobacco application" (PMTA) process. The vapor industry says almost all its products would be subject to PMTA review under the FDA's proposal because only one e-cigarette was on the market in the United States before the grandfather date. Since then, some 100,000 new e-cigarette and vapor products have been introduced. Moving or invalidating that grandfather date would allow some or all of the products to act as "predicates" for future products, something public health advocates say would allow e-cigarettes and other tobacco products to escape a critical first-step review by the FDA. The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network said in a statement changing the date would "make it easier for new products to stay on the market before it is determined whether they attract youth or otherwise harm public health." A premarket tobacco application requires a company to prove, with scientific data, that the new product will not harm the population as a whole. So far only one company, Stockholm-based Swedish Match AB, has cleared that bar. Last year the FDA authorized the sale of eight of its smokeless snus products. The FDA is expected soon to issue a final rule giving it authority for the first time to regulate e-cigarettes and vapor products, which generated $3.3 billion in U.S. sales last year. The agency already has authority to regulate cigarettes, smokeless tobacco and roll-you-own tobacco. The Tobacco Act gave it the option of extending its authority over other tobacco products after issuing a rule. (Reporting by Toni Clarke in Washington; editing by Alan Crosby and Bernard Orr)
(Reuters) - A federal judge in Michigan on Tuesday dismissed one of several proposed class actions by residents of Flint against Governor Rick Snyder and other state and local officials over contamination of the city's water supply. The lawsuit's claims are addressed by federal regulations for safe drinking water, and the plaintiffs can seek relief under state law, U.S. District Judge John Corbett O'Meara ruled. O'Meara found the constitutional violations alleged in the lawsuit stem are covered by the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, which gives the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency exclusive enforcement authority. Attorney Valdemar Washington, who represents the residents in the lawsuit, said they were considering filing an appeal of O'Meara's ruling and also possibly filing similar claims in Genesee County court, the Michigan Court of Claims, or both. Flint was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager when it switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River in April 2014. The city switched back in October 2015, but not before testing confirmed high levels of lead in Flint's tap water and in the blood of some children. Lead is a toxic agent that can cause permanent damage to children. When the lawsuit was filed, the lawyers for the residents said they were seeking more than $150 million in damages in the 12-count complaint, including compensatory and punitive damages. (Reporting by David Bailey; editing by David Gregorio and Marguerita Choy)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The incorrect placement of a night vision goggles case caused a U.S. military transport plane to crash in Afghanistan in October, killing 14 people, the U.S. Air Force said in a report. At the time of the crash, a spokesman for the Taliban said its fighters had shot down the aircraft, but even then the U.S. military had said enemy fire was not suspected as a factor in the crash. The Air Force report, released last week, said that in order to provide more space while loading and offloading cargo at Jalalabad airfield, the pilot had put the case in front of the yoke to hold the elevators in place. However, the report said, because the pilots were flying at night and wearing night vision goggles, "neither pilot recognized and removed" the case. During takeoff the plane climbed rapidly which lead the co-pilot to misidentify the issues as a trim malfunction. This caused the aircraft to stall and crash 28 seconds after takeoff. The report added that because the blocking of flight controls during loading is a "non-standard" procedure, there is no "regulatory guidance to prohibit the act, or to address the proper placement and removal of the object blocking the controls." Six U.S. military service members and five civilian contractors who were employed by the U.S.-led international force in Afghanistan were killed in the crash. Three Afghan nationals were also killed. "Our hearts go out to the family members and friends of those killed in this accident," said Brigadier General Patrick Mordente, who led the accident investigation board, in a statement. (Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Sandra Maler)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States welcomed on Tuesday a decision by Azerbaijan to allow human rights activist Leyla Yunus and her husband, Arif Yunus, a historian, to leave the country for urgent medical purposes. "The United States welcomes as another positive step Azerbaijan's decision," State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement. "We encourage the government to take additional steps and unconditionally release all individuals who have been incarcerated for exercising their fundamental freedoms," he added. Leyla Yunus, head of the Baku-based Institute for Peace and Democracy, had been held in detention since July 2014 before her release in December. She was sentenced to 8-1/2 years in jail last August. Her husband, who was sentenced to seven years, was released from prison on Nov. 12. They were convicted of treason, espionage and tax evasion in a case that human rights groups say was part of a campaign to muzzle dissent. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Editing by Leslie Adler)
By Mark Muhumuza KAMPALA (Reuters) - Thousands of cancer patients in Uganda will be left untreated for months after the nation's only radiotherapy machine broke down, triggering public criticism about underfunding in the health system weeks after the president's re-election. The device, bought in 1995 and sited at the main Mulago referral hospital, stopped working early in April, Christine Namulindwa, the cancer unit spokeswoman told Reuters. A new machine was bought in 2013 but the government delayed allocating 30 billion shillings ($8.97 million) for a special building, called a bunker, to house it, she said. About three quarters of the 44,000 new cancer patients seen last year needed treatment, Namulindwa said. "In the next six months, we expect ... the new radiotherapy machine to be installed." Members of the public and activists took to social media saying the government was neglecting health care - accusations that it rejects. "The cruel indifference by government to the health needs of Ugandans is astonishing," said Asia Russell, Uganda-based executive director of Health GAP, a public health pressure group. Government critics say public healthcare has been neglected under President Yoweri Museveni, 71, a former rebel who took power in 1986. They accuse his government of focusing funds on the army and bloated civil service. The government dismisses such charges. Officials point to the transformation of Uganda under Museveni who restored order and delivered economic growth to a nation that had been plunged into chaos under successive dictators before he seized power. Junior Health Minister Chris Baryomunsi told parliament that some patients would be airlifted to Nairobi for treatment, Ugandan newspapers reported on Friday. Officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Deputy government spokesman Shaban Bantariza dismissed accusations that the government was more concerned with a winning re-election than dealing with the sick. "We have many priority areas as a government yet funds are not enough. No one has diverted any money," he said. Last year, there was a shortage of anti-HIV drugs, leaving an estimated 240,000 patients on publicly funded HIV treatment at risk. Health activists at the time blamed a shortage of cash to buy them the drugs because of political campaigning, a charge the government denied. ($1 = 3,343.0000 Ugandan shillings) (Writing by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by Edmund Blair and Andrew Heavens)
Your smartphone could one day be replaced by an electronic display laminated to the back of your hand, if the inventors of a new ultrathin "e-skin" have their way.

For the first time, Japanese scientists have demonstrated a superflexible electronic skin (or e-skin) display, made from organic electronics, that doesn't degrade when exposed to air. And crucially, the researchers used processes similar to the way organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays are manufactured for conventional smartphones and TVs.

Organic electronics, made from carbon-based polymers, hold huge promise for wearable devices because they are far lighter and more flexible than traditional electronics made from inorganic materials, such as silicon and gold. But OLEDs and organic light detectors normally degrade in air, so they typically need bulky protective coatings that decrease their flexibility. [Body Bioelectronics: 5 Technologies that Could Flex with You]

Now, a team from the University of Tokyo has developed a unique method to create a protective coating that can shield the electronic components from the air while remaining thin enough to stay flexible.

"Our e-skin can be directly laminated on the surface of the skin, allowing us to electronically functionalize human skin," said Takao Someya, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Tokyo, and author of a paper on the new device published April 15 in the journal Science Advances.

"We think that functionalizing the skin may replace the smartphone in the future," Someya told Live Science. "When you carry an iPhone, it is a bulky device. But if you functionalize your own skin, you dont need to carry anything, and it's easy to receive information anywhere, anytime."

Previous organic electronic displays have been built using glass or plastic base materials, or substrates, but their flexibility was limited by their thickness. [Important to point out thickness is the problem] Other, thinner versions have been manufactured, however, these materials have not been stable enough to endure in air for more than a few hours.

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Someya's group was able to extend the device lifetime to several days by creating a protective film, called a passivation layer, which consists of alternating layers of inorganic silicon oxynitride and organic parylene. The film shields the device from damaging oxygen and water vapor but is so thin that the entire device is just 3 micrometers (millionths of a meter) thick and highly flexible, the researchers said. For comparison, a strand of hair is about 40 micrometers thick.

Substrates this thin can be easily deformed by the high-energy processes needed to produce the ultrathin, transparent electrodes that connect the components, Someya said. So, the group's second innovation was to optimize these processes to reduce the required energy to a level that did not damage the ultrathin materials.

In the near future, this technology could be used to monitor people's health, Someya said. To demonstrate its potential, his team created a device consisting of red and green OLEDs and a light detector that could monitor the concentration of oxygen in a human subject's blood when the e-skin is laminated to the person's finger using highly flexible adhesive tape. [Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies]

The scientists also created both digital and analog displays that could be laminated to the skin, and all of the devices were flexible enough to distort and crumple in response to body movement, without losing their functionality.

"The potential uses range from information display to optical characterization of the skin," said John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, who also works on developing e-skin but was not involved with the new study. "Opportunities for future research in this context include the development of power supply systems and of wireless schemes for data communication and control."

By employing materials and processes that are already used in the industrial production of OLED displays, Someya said the group's work should be able to transition smoothly to large-scale production.

Hyunhyub Ko, an associate professor of chemical engineering at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea who also researches e-skin, agrees that this method could eventually be applied to the manufacturing of commercial products.

"The formation of [an] ultrathin and flexible passivation layer is a challenging task," Ko told Live Science. "Their fabrication process includes the solution coating and chemical vapor deposition methods, and thus can be scaled up for commercial products."

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Copyright 2016 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The Hague (AFP) - UN chief Ban Ki-moon Tuesday made a powerful plea for nations everywhere to end impunity for the world's worst crimes, as he officially opened the new premises of the International Criminal Court.

The first permanent headquarters for the ICC, situated on the edge of the sand dunes in The Hague, was "a milestone in global efforts to uphold human rights and the rule of law," Ban Ki-Moon said.

"When civilians are indiscriminately bombed, when rape is used as a weapon of war, when populations are targeted based on ethnicity or faith, when children are forced to carry guns and fight, people can now legitimately expect that the perpetrators will be brought to justice," Ban said.

The new building, with state-of-the-art security and surrounded by a water-filled moat, gives the ICC a permanent base just steps from the prison where some of those awaiting trial are held.

In 1998 some 120 nations adopted the Rome Statute establishing the legal framework and basis for the world's only permanent war crimes tribunal. The statute entered into force in 2002.

On Tuesday Ban told some 350 VIP guests, including Dutch King Willem-Alexander, that he was increasingly concerned about states and perpetrators who disregard human rights and who commit atrocities.

"More should be done to save human lives," Ban said.

"Only by their actions can nations and their leaders show that they fully support accountability and an end to impunity.

"Only by their actions can they show that they are committed to upholding human rights."

Built at a cost of 206 million euros ($218 million) and paid for by the parties to the Rome Statute, the new building "will help us carry out the essential functions of this court," said ICC president Argentinian judge Silvia Fernandez.

The ICC has in recent years come under attack particularly from African countries, which accuse it of unfairly targeting its leaders.

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The court's supporters including major human rights organisations however say the ICC remains the best chance for victims of finding justice and bringing perpetrators to book.

The court's opening comes as a rare bit of good news after major setbacks in efforts to prosecute top Kenyan politicians accused of fomenting the deadliest violence in the east African nation since independence in 1963.

A case against Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta -- the son of the country's independence leader Jomo Kenyatta -- arising out of the violence collapsed at the end of 2014. And war crimes judges dropped the charges against Deputy President William Ruto on April 5.

Ban warned that around the world "terrible abuses still occur."

"When governments fail to enforce the rules and act on the principles they have agreed - or, even worse, are themselves the perpetrators of violations -- the result is even more violence, vast disillusion and the erosion of the foundations of international order," he intoned.
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The UN Security Council expressed "serious concern" on Tuesday over delays in the return of South Sudan's rebel leader Riek Machar to the capital Juba as part of a peace deal.

The 15-member council met behind closed doors at the request of the United States to hear a report on the latest hurdle in the way of the agreement to end the two-year civil war.

Council members "urged all parties to quickly form the transitional government and fully implement the peace agreement," said Chinese Deputy Ambassador Wu Haitao, whose country holds the council presidency.

UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous told the council that there had been disagreements over security arrangements allowing rebel forces to be stationed in Juba in advance of Machar's arrival, which was supposed to have been on Monday.

But he said he was hopeful that Machar would return on Wednesday, diplomats said.

The council called on all sides to "remain calm" and said it was "ready to address any obstruction of implementation of the agreement," although it did not specify which measures were envisaged.

Under the peace deal, Machar was to join President Salva Kiir in a new 30-month transitional government leading to elections.

The deal is to end a devastating war that erupted in December 2013 after Kiir fell out with Machar, who was his deputy.

"The United States is extremely disappointed that Riek Machar has not fulfilled his commitments under the peace agreement and returned to Juba as he stated publicly he would," said US Deputy Ambassador David Pressman.

"We expect Riek Machar and all parties to live up to their commitments under the peace agreement and do their part to establish the transitional government."

Tens of thousands of people have died in the fighting and more than two million have been driven from their homes.

Machar was supposed to return to Juba for the first time since the war began from his tribal stronghold of Pagak in the east of the country to formally take up his post as vice president.

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Speaking to reporters at Juba airport, rebel spokesmen William Ezekiel said on Tuesday that unspecified "issues relating to logistics" were to blame for the latest delay. He was unable to say when Machar might arrive.

South Sudan's information minister Michael Makuei said the government had blocked Machar's flight because he wanted to bring "machine guns and laser-guided missiles" as well as additional troops in violation of the peace agreement.

Various rebel officials have given differing explanations for the delays, with some citing difficulties in getting Machar's bodyguards' weapons across the border while others blamed bad weather.
Tokyo (AFP) - A UN special envoy urged the Japanese government on Tuesday to protect media independence, which he warned is facing "serious threats."

The visit of David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, came as concerns over media freedoms have grown.

The government and ruling Liberal Democratic Party have both drawn criticism for allegedly threatening the press.

Parliament in 2013 passed a law on protecting specially designated secrets, while the cabinet minister responsible for regulating broadcasting told parliament this year the government can revoke licences if broadcasters fail to correct reporting deemed politically biased.

"There's a significant concern about the direction of independent media in Japan," Kaye told reporters after a week-long visit, saying he had heard from journalists of worries "about their ability to independently report on issues, particularly issues of sensitivity to the government".

In 2014 the conservative LDP wrote to broadcast networks urging "fair" coverage ahead of a general election, in what was seen as an attempt to intimidate media.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe supported the February comments by Internal Affairs Minister Sanae Takaichi on the broadcast law, which stipulates "politically fair" coverage. But Abe has insisted his government "cherishes freedom of speech".

Kaye said the law should be amended since "the government -- any government -- should not be in the position of determining what is fair."

"Broadcast media should not even theoretically be subject to regulation by government administration," he said, adding they should be overseen by an independent entity.

He said he was unable to meet Takaichi during his visit despite repeated requests.

The envoy also touched on the secrets protection law, saying he remains concerned even though the government assured him harsh penalties would not be applied to journalists.

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"The law should be so amended to eliminate any chilling effect" on journalists, he wrote in a report on his preliminary observations.

The envoy also called on Japan to abolish its press club system, under which select media outlets have exclusive access to government ministries and police departments at the national and local levels.

Critics say the system allows authorities to spoon-feed information to a compliant press corps.

"The problem is that the system of journalism and the structure of media itself in Japan doesn't seem to afford journalists the ability to push back against" the government, Kaye said.

Japan ranked 61st out of 180 countries in the 2015 World Press Freedom Index announced by Reporters Without Borders, down from 59th in 2014 and 53th in 2013 and 2012.
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned Tuesday that Morocco's expulsion of staff from the UN mission in Western Sahara could be exploited by extremists and urged the Security Council to restore the peacekeeping force.

Ban said in a report obtained by AFP that staff cuts ordered by Rabat are weakening the MINURSO mission and "can be expected to be exploited by terrorist and radical elements."

"I call on the Security Council to restore and support the mandated role of MINURSO," said the report sent to the council on Monday.

"The risk of a rupture of the ceasefire and resumption of hostilities, with its attendant danger of escalation into full-scale war, will grow significantly in the event that MINURSO is forced to depart or finds itself unable to execute the mandate that the Security Council has set," he said.

Council members are to vote on April 28 on whether to renew mandate of the mission, which was established in 1991 after a ceasefire ended a war that broke out when Morocco sent troops to the former Spanish territory in 1975.

Morocco expelled 83 civilian staffers of MINURSO a month ago and shut down a military liaison office, severely crippling operations in what was once a 500-strong mission.

The move was in response to a visit by Ban to the region during which he used the term "occupation" to refer to the status of Western Sahara, a term fiercely rejected by Rabat.

In his report, Ban said the mission should stay on for a further 12 months, until April 2017.

- Critical UN presence -

Ban's appeal to the Security Council put pressure on France, Senegal and Spain which have been in close contact with Morocco over the fate of MINURSO.

While the council has called for the mission to continue its work, it has been divided on the way forward.

The UN chief warned that downsizing MINURSO will have "significant implications for the stability of the region as well as the credibility of the Security Council and United Nations peacekeeping" worldwide.

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Diplomats have raised concerns that concessions to Rabat will embolden other governments unhappy with a UN presence to try to weaken the missions.

Keeping MINURSO intact is "absolutely critical, not just for Western Sahara but also for UN peacekeeping broadly," said British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft.

"It's the Security Council that decides the mandate, it's the Security Council that decides whether to change it or not," he said.

Morocco maintains that Western Sahara, which it forcibly annexed in 1976, is an integral part of its kingdom despite a UN resolution that tasks MINURSO with organizing a referendum on the future of the territory.

Sahrawis have long campaigned for the right to self-determination and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic is a full member of the African Union.

Ban also requested that the council approve the deployment of 14 additional military medical personnel to a new MINURSO outpost in response to the cuts in personnel that have affected drivers and communications.

He said the time had come to engage in "serious negotiations" on a political solution to end the decades-old conflict.
The architecture college at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri has announced its plans to ban the use of styrene in model-making, according to Dezeen.

The college, within the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, becomes the latest architecture school to stop using the material, citing health grounds.

Health risks have already been associated with the material, with some attesting that it could be a human carcinogen. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration has said that exposure to styrene can cause headaches, dizziness and confusion.

Styrene is used to make rubber and resin as well as polystyrene foam -- more commonly known as styrofoam. Besides its use in disposable cups and take-out containers, styrofoam is also used to make boards for architecture models.

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture has not taken an official stance on the use of styrene in school design studios.
Baghdad (AFP) - The United States will send Apache attack helicopters and more troops to Iraq, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in Baghdad Monday, as the coalition weighs retaking second city Mosul from the Islamic State group.

President Barack Obama hailed the 2011 withdrawal of American troops from Iraq as a major accomplishment of his presidency, but the US has been steadily drawn back into the country since IS jihadists overran swathes of territory in 2014.

Washington heads an international coalition that is carrying out strikes against IS and also providing training and other assistance to forces fighting the jihadists in both Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

"We are going to bring in additional forces," Carter said after arriving in Baghdad on an unannounced visit.

Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis told reporters an additional 217 personnel would be deployed, bringing the official number of US troops in Iraq to 4,087.

Troops will also be authorised to advise Iraqis at the battalion and brigade level as opposed to the larger divisions, potentially exposing them to greater risks closer to the front lines.

Carter also said that the Apaches -- which can respond "quickly" and "dynamically" when needed -- will support Iraqi efforts to surround and eventually recapture Mosul from IS.

"They are being offered for the move on Mosul. It will be at the government of Iraq's discretion as to whether or not they are deployed," Davis said of the Apaches.

General Sean MacFarland, commander of the US-led operation against IS, later told reporters travelling with Carter that the US had not ruled out sending further troops at a later stage if the current boost proves insufficient.

"If the conditions are sufficiently favourable for us to go in and liberate the city (Mosul) with the forces that we have in hand, great. If they prove to be insufficient, that will be another assessment that we will make (about additional forces)," he said.

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During his visit, Carter also pledged $415 million in assistance for the peshmerga forces of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, which are fighting IS in the north.

The region has, like Baghdad, been hit by financial difficulties from low oil prices.

- Political chaos -

Carter's visit comes after a week of political turmoil that has been a setback for Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. The US defence chief has previously stressed the need to support the embattled premier.

Carter met with Abadi after arriving in Baghdad from the United Arab Emirates, his first stop on a Gulf tour during which he will seek to shore up support for Iraq.

He has said that "the success of the campaign against (IS) in Iraq does depend upon political and economic progress as well," and that "it's important that we continue to support (Abadi)".

The premier has sought to replace the current cabinet of party-affiliated ministers with a government of technocrats, but has faced major opposition from powerful parties that rely on control of ministries for patronage and funds.

Abadi's cabinet efforts were overshadowed by days of chaos in parliament, where lawmakers held a sit-in, brawled in the chamber and sought to sack the speaker.

The premier called on Monday for parliament to put aside its differences and do its job, saying he hoped a new cabinet would be approved "in the coming days".

In addition to major security and political challenges, Iraq also faces a serious economic crisis caused by low oil prices and years of mismanagement and corruption by officials.

IS overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in 2014, but Iraqi forces have since regained significant ground from the jihadists.

Iraqi forces have begun preparatory operations in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, but the actual assault to retake the city is not expected for months, and possibly not until next year.

While most American forces in Iraq play advisory and support roles, Washington has also sent in special forces to carry out raids against IS.

Obama repeatedly pledged that there would be no "boots on the ground" to combat IS, but US forces are engaged in combat with the jihadists and two American military personnel have already been killed.
Nairobi (AFP) - A senior US official accused Burundi's government of being behind the central African country's prolonged political crisis, saying Tuesday that the administration was doing everything possible to stop Washington helping civilians.

Burundi has been in turmoil since April 2015, when President Pierre Nkurunziza decided to run for a third term, which he went on to win in July, with violence leaving hundreds dead.

"The government of Burundi is the driver, not the victim of this current crisis, whether it's on the political side or the economic side," Thomas Perriello, US special envoy for Africa's Great Lakes region, told a press conference in the capital Bujumbura.

"The government is doing everything it can to make it impossible for us and other partners to continue to support the Burundian people and the Burundian economy."

The opposition, as well as civil groups and some of Nkurunziza's own supporters, accuse him of violating the constitution and the Arusha peace deal that ended Burundi's 1993-2006 civil war -- a conflict that claimed an estimated 300,000 lives.

Violence over the past year has left more than 400 people dead and forced more than 250,000 people to flee Burundi, and watchdogs have repeatedly sounded the alarm.

On Monday, UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said his team had recorded at least 345 cases of torture and ill-treatment in Burundi since January and nearly 600 over the past year, and warned that the actual numbers were probably higher.

"These shocking figures are a clear indicator of the widespread and growing use of torture and ill-treatment by government security forces," Zeid said.

Perriello said there had been "concrete pledges from the president himself, just a few weeks ago, about the release of political prisoners -- we have not seen that.

"We saw a pledge from the president himself about 200 African Union monitors, and there continues to be games played," he added.

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The US envoy said there was "systematic documentation" of torture and extrajudicial killings "at a time where the government says they are committed to making sure that Burundians feel safe for returning to their country".

"This is the kind of double speak that doesn't build confidence in the government or the path forward," he added.

"A lot of the cards are in the hands of the government, whether or not they are interested in trying to solve the economic and political crisis by delivering on the pledges that they've made on the highest level."

Perriello was in Burundi after a tour that took him to France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

He is set to meet in the coming days with former Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa, who has been appointed a mediator in the Burundi crisis by the six-nation East African Community.

Perriello expressed support for Mkapa's efforts to find a resolution to the crisis, including the establishment of a dialogue between the government and the exiled opposition.
Washington (AFP) - The United States imposed sanctions Tuesday on a senior Libyan official and supporters accused of undermining the country's UN-backed peace process.

President Barack Obama authorized the US Treasury to target all enemies of the plan and the agency named Khalifa Ghweil, who runs the Tripoli administration.

The US decision follows a similar one taken by the European Union to impose costs on Libyans opposing the installation of a new UN-backed unity government.

Ghweil was the only named figure added to the Treasury sanctions list, but Obama's executive order allows US officials to target all opponents of the peace plan.

The order sanctions all those that "threaten the peace, security, or stability of Libya or obstruct or undermine the Libyan Government of National Accord."

The international community sees the Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA) under prime minister-designate Fayez al-Sarraj as the best hope for Libya.

But some of the factions that have seized chunks of the country since dictator Moamer Kadhafi was ousted and killed in 2011 do not recognize the accord.

Ghweil, who heads a rival authority which has armed supporters and controls much of the capital Tripoli has not submitted to the new regime.

And on Monday the recognized Libyan parliament in Tobruk postponed a vote of confidence in the new UN-backed regime because of "major differences."

According to the Treasury, any assets held by Ghweil in areas under US jurisdiction will be frozen.

"Today's action also complements the European Union's designation of Ghweil on April 1, 2016 for undermining the political transition in Libya," it added.
Washington (AFP) - The US Supreme Court is notoriously anachronistic when it comes to new technology. But in a rare move, it allowed several smartphones and tablets in the courtroom Tuesday to swear in a dozen deaf and hard of hearing attorneys.

Chief Justice John Roberts used American Sign Language instead of English for the first time to admit the largest group of deaf and hard of hearing attorneys to the Supreme Court Bar.

The 12 members of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Bar Association (DHHBA) participated in the swearing-in ceremony with the help of sign-language interpreters and a real-time transcript delivered via a restricted wi-fi signal to their electronic devices.

The use of electronic devices is usually strictly banned during sessions in the cavernous marble courtroom that can seat around 400 people.

Justice Department appellate lawyer John Stanton, who is deaf, sponsored the group.

Roberts signed "your motion is granted" to indicate the attorneys were admitted, a phrase he learned especially for the ceremony, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said.

"It was amazing to be part of the swearing-in ceremony today," DHHBA president Anat Maytal told AFP, saying the move marked "tremendous progress."

"It was very thoughtful for Justice Roberts to acknowledge the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Bar Association the way he did."

The attorneys included representatives from disabilities groups, Kansas practitioners Charla Beall and Leonard Hall, and US Customs and Border Protection attorney-advisor Reema Radwan.

"The real-time captioning was very helpful to ensure we were able to follow the arguments with everyone else in the courtroom," Maytal said.

"This event helps potential employers see that deaf and hard of hearing lawyers are just as qualified and can be just as successful."

A deaf lawyer has argued a case before the Supreme Court only once, in 1982 -- and lost.

"While the number of Supreme Court Bar members that actually get to argue is very low, that's no reason why a deaf or hard of hearing member can't make that exclusive list one day soon," Maytal said.

"Many already argue in the lower federal and state courts, after all."

A Supreme Court Bar admission allows attorneys to argue cases before the top court. They must be sponsored by two current members of the Bar and be attorneys in good standing for at least three years.
Lyle Denniston, the National Constitution Centers constitutional literacy adviser, looks at why the Supreme Court was silent on the Take Care Clause in Mondays immigration arguments.

From the time that 26 states launched their courthouse effort to block enforcement of President Obamas ambitious shift in immigration policy, their lawyers have wanted to rescue a part of Article II from relative constitutional obscurity. It is the Take Care Clause, which tells the nations presidents that they are to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The Clause has not often been interpreted by the Supreme Court, so it still is not clear to whom presidents owe a faithful duty, or how failure to do so would be defined.

Bringing that claim into the case, the lawyers seemed to believe, would lift their case out of the tangled web of administrative law and give it a higher profile, even a historic one. In fact when state officials in Texas announced their lawsuit in December 2014, shortly after the new policy was unveiled, their emphasis fell heaviest on the Take Care Clause feature of their case.

Greg Abbott, then the states attorney general who would soon become governor, told reporters that the presidents unilateral executive action tramples the Constitutions Take Care Clause and federal law. The Clause limits the presidents power and ensures that he will faithfully execute Congresss laws  not rewrite them under the guise of prosecutorial discretion.

Texas, together with 25 sister states, pressed that point in two lower courts in their challenge to the 2014 initiative that the Obama administration took to delay the deportation of perhaps four million undocumented immigrants who, as law-abiding folks with roots in their communities, are a low priority for being sent out of the country. However, neither of those courts ruled on that issue, finding a narrower basis in procedural law for their temporary order against enforcement of the policy.

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When the case moved on to the Supreme Court, in an appeal by the federal government, the states stepped in to urge the Justices to add their Take Care Clause argument to the mix. In something of a surprise, the court agreed to do so when it took on the case in January. The court seldom accepts review of a constitutional issue not previously decided in lower courts. The court, as is its custom, did not explain why it was  or could be  interested in that constitutional point.

Yesterday, that case  United States v. Texas  was examined by the Justices in a 92-minute hearing. But not a word was said, by eight Justices or four lawyers, about that aspect of the case.

In fact, there was a great deal of talk about the Constitution  about Article III, and its curb on the authority of courts to hear merely hypothetical legal claims, and not Article IIs admonition to presidents to faithfully carry out the laws passed by Congress. Federal courts, under Article III, can only rule on live cases or controversies, meaning cases where the complaining entity or individual has a genuine legal grievance, not a hypothetical complaint.

No one doubts that there is a live controversy over the Obama policy, but it is, at its core, a political controversy over how to make and carry out policy to deal with the undocumented immigrant situation in America. The Justices no doubt are aware of the controversy in the political realm, but the issue in which they were the most strongly interested was whether this case belongs in the federal courts at all.

If it does turn out that there is a majority for one position or its opposite on the Article III question, that could be decisive. A decision that the challenging states lack Article III standing to sue would abruptly end their case, completely, and the Obama policy would have survived. If, however, there were a majority supporting the states right to proceed in court, that would force the court to move on then to the procedural law questions  and, if it were interested, in the Take Care Clause point.

It very quickly became abundantly clear, at least as the court pored over the Article III dispute yesterday, that there are four Justices who are not at all persuaded that Texas and its sister states do have a live legal grievance (constitutional or otherwise) with the Obama policy. And it was equally clear that at least two of the conservative members  Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr.  are at least attracted to the idea that the states do have a legitimate legal complaint.

That, of course, adds up only to six Justices. Of the other two, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said almost nothing about Article III, and Justice Clarence Thomas maintained his usual silence, throughout.

If it should turn out that either Kennedy or Thomas were to join with the courts four liberal Justices, then the states lawsuit would be at an end.

But if Kennedy and Thomas were to join with the Chief Justice and Alito to permit the state lawsuit to go forward to a decision on its legality, the court could well be split 4-to-4. That would leave in place the lower court decision that the states did have the right to pursue their lawsuit, and the Justices would then move on to assess the legality of the policy under the federal Administrative Procedure Act and, maybe, under the Take Care Clause.

In that event, would the court fulfill the states desire to produce a ruling on whether Obama had faithfully executed his constitutional duty? (Needless to say, perhaps, a ruling that the president had not done so would be a momentous decision, and, of course, it would reverberate as a political issue, too, especially in this presidential election year in which immigration is a front-and-center issue.)

However, the Take Care Clause question would not be guaranteed an answer. It is a deeply ingrained tradition that the court will not decide a constitutional issue if it can base a decision on anything else that is credible. The problem for the states, in the case of United States v. Texas, is that a ruling based on procedural law could be the end of the case.

If the court were to declare that the law does violate procedural law, there would then be no need to decide the Take Care Clause issue. But if it were to find that the law does not violate procedural law, which in this instance is closely tied to what the immigration laws now on the books say, then the faithful execution question might lose its significance altogether.

One lesson, of course, is that lawyers can decide how they want to put their cases together, including whether to throw in a constitutional question, but they cannot be sure that the courts will provide the answer that they seek.

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Explore the Best High Schools

U.S. News evaluated more than 28,000 schools for the 2016 Best High Schools rankings. These 10 schools scored the highest out of the 500 top-ranked gold medal schools.



10. Carnegie Vanguard High School

Carnegie Vanguard High School is a Texas school for talented and gifted teens. Students can take either pre-Advanced Placement or AP courses.

Learn more about Carnegie Vanguard High School.

9. International Academy

All students at the International Academy in Michigan follow the International Baccalaureate middle years and diploma programs.

Learn more about the International Academy.

8. Academic Magnet High School

All academic courses at Academic Magnet High School are Advanced Placement or honors level. With the assistance of a mentor, students at the South Carolina high school have to complete a yearlong research project before graduation, according to the school's website.

Learn more about Academic Magnet High School.

7. Pine View School

Pine View School is a public school for gifted students in Florida. Students are admitted based on a series of tests, recommendations and other data, according to the school's website. Students can be referred to the school by parents, teachers and administrators.

Learn more about Pine View School.

6. BASIS Oro Valley

BASIS Oro Valley was founded in 2010 and serves students from grades six through 12 in Tucson, Arizona. Students take honors and Advanced Placement courses.

Learn more about BASIS Oro Valley.

5. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

In Virginia, TJHSST offers a STEM-focused curriculum and houses 15 specialized research labs, including ones dedicated to astrophysics, microelectronics and oceanography.

Learn more about Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.



4. School of Science and Engineering

This Texas school focuses on preparing its students to compete globally in science and engineering. Students can take accelerated classes in science, English, math and computer science, allowing them to move at their own pace.

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Learn more about the School of Science and Engineering.



3. BASIS Tucson North

In Arizona, BASIS Tucson North has the largest campus of the BASIS charter schools. AP exams are required and paid for by the school.

Learn more about BASIS Tucson North.

2. BASIS Scottsdale

BASIS Scottsdale is one of more than a dozen BASIS charter schools located in Arizona. The high school offers a variety of honors and Advanced Placement courses for students.

Learn more about BASIS Scottsdale.

1. School for the Talented and Gifted

This Dallas high school follows Texas' Distinguished Achievement Program. Most of the academic courses are Advanced Placement, including electives.

Learn more about the School for the Talented and Gifted.

More About the Best High Schools



For more Best High Schools rankings and data, check out the top charter schools and top magnet schools.

Read our High School Notes blog to stay up to date on high school news. Connect with U.S. News Education on Facebook, or tweet @USNewsEducation using the hashtag #BestHighSchools to share your thoughts on the rankings.

Briana Boyington is an education Web producer at U.S. News. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at bboyington@usnews.com.
For the last 12 months, Bernie Sanders has been trash-talking bankers and other wealthy dealmakers through a megaphone. Theyre getting sick of hearing it.

I asked Anthony Scaramucci, founder of the hedge fund Skybridge Capital, what hed say to Bernie Sanders if given the opportunity. Id say, please move to Cuba, Scaramucci tells me in the video above. Spend a year in Cuba. You can recognize its a completely failed state -- 58 years of failed socialist policy and statism.

Sanders, the pugnacious Democratic presidential contender, doesnt quite advocate Cuban-style socialism as an antidote for Americas economic problems. He doesnt call for the government takeover of most industries, for instance, or central planning in the old Soviet fashion.

But he does want to break up the banks (whatever that means), hike taxes on the wealthy, kill free-trade deals, make college free and boost the minimum wage to $15. Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist rather than an outright socialist, but the distinction is often lost among those in Sanderss crosshairs.

Sanders argues that the biggest U.S. banks  J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and so on  are a threat to the U.S. economy because a handful of firms control too much wealth and might take down the whole financial system if one of them failed. But the Dodd-Frank reforms passed in 2010 have reduced risk-taking at banks and cut into profitability.

Scaramucci argues against the idea of forcing Wall Street banks to shrink. I think our banks need to be big to stay competitive in the global landscape, he says. It would be disheartening to break up the banks, then find the largest banks with the most scale being in China or places like Europe.

Sanders isnt the only politician who needs convincing. Republicans Donald Trump and Ted Cruz havent echoed Sanders's call to break up the banks, but they have attacked various aspects of the financial industry, such as the carried interest tax break for private-equity firms and the light regulation hedge funds enjoy, compared with banks that take deposits. Meanwhile, Neil Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has joined Sanderss crusade to shrink the big banks, and even Hillary Clinton has moved to the left on issues such as free trade.

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Taking rhetorical cracks at the financial industry isnt the same thing as passing new laws or regulations meant to constrain it. But its a step in that direction. The question for banks is whether anti-Wall Street sentiment will be strong enough once the next president takes office to trigger a new onslaught of legislation further reining in the banks.

It scores a lot of political points, Scaramucci says of the bank bashing. Theyve tapped into the politics of envy, of class division  which I think is sort of unfair. Voters get their say in seven months.

Rick Newmans latest book is Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.
New Yorks primary: The U.S. state votes today in the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries. Polls show Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump ahead of their respective rivals.

A suicide bombing in Kabul: At least seven people are dead and more than 300 wounded in the attack claimed by the Taliban. News reports say a suicide car bomb allowed Taliban gunmen to enter the area in the center of the Afghan capital. A battle with Afghan force is ongoing.

Ecuador quake toll rises: Its now at 413, the government says. The 7.8-magnitude quake struck the countrys Pacific coast on Saturday.

News from last night here.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
The Obama administrations plan to spend an estimated $1 trillion dollars over 30 years on rebuilding the nations nuclear facilities and modernizing nuclear weapons was part of an effort in 2014 to control nuclear arms globally. Instead, The New York Times reports, the United States, Russia and China are now aggressively pursuing a new generation of smaller, less destructive nuclear weapons[which] threaten to revive a Cold War-era arms race.

The Fiscal Times requested and was granted permission from the Federation of American Scientists to reprint this article on Nuclear Transparency and the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan by Hans M. Kristensen.

I was reading the latest Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and wondering what I should pick to critique the Obama administrations nuclear policy.

Related: Why Adding $1 Trillion for Nuclear Arms Might Be a Bad Idea

After all, there are plenty of issues that deserve to be addressed, including:

Why NNSA continues to overspend, over-commit, and create a spending bow wave in 2021-2026 in excess of the Presidents budget in exactly the same time period that excessive Air Force and Navy modernization programs are expected to put the greatest pressure on defense spending?





Why a smaller and smaller nuclear weapons stockpile with fewer warhead types appears to be getting more and more expensive to maintain?





Why each warhead life-extension program is getting ever more ambitious and expensive with no apparent end in sight?





And why a policy of reductions, no new nuclear weapons, no pursuit of new military missions or new capabilities for nuclear weapons, restraint, a pledge to put an end to Cold War thinking, and the goal of disarmament, instead became a blueprint for nuclear overreach with record funding, across-the-board modernizations, unprecedented warhead modifications, increasing weapons accuracy and effectiveness, reaffirmation of a Triad and non-strategic nuclear weapons, continuation of counterforce strategy, reaffirmation of the importance and salience of nuclear weapons, and an open-ended commitment to retain nuclear weapons further into the future than they have existed so far?

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What About The Other Nuclear-Armed States?

Despite the contradictions and flaws of the administrations nuclear policy, however, imagine if the other nuclear-armed states also published summaries of their nuclear weapons plans. Some do disclose a little, but they could do much more. For others, however, the thought of disclosing any information about the size and composition of their nuclear arsenal seems so alien that it is almost inconceivable.

Related: The 8 Most Important Things to Know About the Iran Nuclear Deal

Yet that is actually one of the reasons why it is necessary to continue to work for greater (or sufficient) transparency in nuclear forces. Some nuclear-armed states believe their security depends on complete or near-compete nuclear secrecy. And, of course, some nuclear information must be protected from disclosure. But the problem with excessive secrecy is that it tends to fuel uncertainty, rumors, suspicion, exaggerations, mistrust, and worst-case assumptions in other nuclear-armed states  reactions that cause them to shape their own nuclear forces and strategies in ways that undermine security for all.

START Treaty

Nuclear-armed states must find a balance between legitimate secrecy and transparency. This can take a long time and it may not necessarily be the same from country to country. The United States also used to keep much more nuclear information secret and there are many institutions that will always resist public access. But maximum responsible disclosure, it turns out, is not only necessary for a healthy public debate about nuclear policy, it is also necessary to communicate to allies and adversaries what that policy is about  and, equally important, to dispel rumors and misunderstandings about what the policy is not.

Nuclear transparency is not just about pleasing the arms controllers  it is important for national security.

So here are some thoughts about what other nuclear-armed states should (or could) disclose about their nuclear arsenals  not to disclose everything but to improve communication about the role of nuclear weapons and avoid misunderstandings and counterproductive surprises:





Russia should publish:

Full New START aggregate data numbers (these numbers are already shared with the United States, which publishes its own numbers)





Size and history of overall nuclear weapons stockpile





Number of history of nuclear warhead dismantlement (has made statements about percentage reductions since 1991 but not disclosed numbers or history)





Basic overview of which nuclear forces are nuclear-capable (has made some statements about strategic forces but not shorter-range forces)





Plans for future years force levels of long-range nuclear forces (has made occasional statements about modernizations but no detailed plan)





Overall status and out-year budgets for nuclear weapons and nuclear forces

China should publish:

Size and history of overall nuclear weapons stockpile (stated in 2004 that it possessed the smallest arsenal of the nuclear weapon states but has not disclosed numbers or history)





Basic overview of its nuclear-capable forces





Plans for future years force levels of long-range nuclear forces





Overall status and out-year budgets for nuclear weapons and nuclear forces



France should publish:

History of overall nuclear weapons stockpile (has disclosed the size of its nuclear stockpile in 2008 and 2015 (300 weapons), but not the history)





Number and history of nuclear warhead dismantlement (has declared dismantlement of some types but not history)

(France has disclosed its overall force structure and some nuclear budget information is published each year.)

Britain should publish:

History of overall nuclear weapons stockpile (has declared some approximate historic numbers, declared the approximate size in 2010 (no more than 225), and has declared plan for mid-2020s (no more than 180), but has not disclosed history)





Number and history of nuclear warhead dismantlement (has announced dismantlement of systems but not numbers or history)

(Britain has published information about the size of its nuclear force structure and part of its nuclear budget.)

Pakistan should publish:

History of overall nuclear weapons stockpile





Basic overview of nuclear-capable forces (occasionally declares that a missile test involves nuclear-capable weapon)





Plans for future years force levels of longer-range nuclear forces





Overall status and out-year budgets for nuclear weapons and nuclear forces

India should publish:

History of overall nuclear weapons stockpile





Basic overview of nuclear-capable forces (occasionally declares that a missile test involves nuclear-capable weapon)





Plans for future years force levels of longer-range nuclear forces





Overall status and out-year budgets for nuclear weapons and nuclear forces





Israel should publish:

or should it? Unlike other nuclear-armed states, Israel has not publicly confirmed it has a nuclear arsenal and has said it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Some argue Israel should not confirm or declare anything because of fear it would trigger nuclear arms programs in other Middle Eastern countries.

On the other hand, the existence of the Israeli nuclear arsenal is well known to other countries as has been documented by declassified government documents in the United States. Official confirmation would be politically sensitive but not in itself change national security in the region. Moreover, the secrecy fuels speculations, exaggerations, accusations, and worst-case planning. And it is hard to see how the future of nuclear weapons in the Middle East can be addressed and resolved without some degree of official disclosure.

North Korea should publish:

Well, obviously this nuclear-armed state is a little different (to put it mildly) because its blustering nuclear threats and statements  and the nature of its leadership itself  make it difficult to trust any official information. Perhaps this is a case where it would be more valuable to hear more about what foreign intelligence agencies know about North Koreas nuclear arsenal. Yet official disclosure could potentially serve an important role as part of a future de-tension agreement with North Korea.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
London (AFP) - Women drivers are not physically able to drive quickly enough in Formula One, the sport's supremo Bernie Ecclestone suggested at a conference in London on Tuesday.

"I don't know whether a woman would physically be able to drive an F1 car quickly and they wouldn't be taken seriously," the 85-year-old told an audience at Advertising Week Europe.

But he predicted a rise in female chief executives, saying: "Women are more competent and they don't have massive egos."

There are currently no female drivers in Formula One, with test driver Susie Wolff, who retired last November, the last woman to be employed in a driving capacity by an F1 team.

But women have enjoyed greater success at boardroom level, with Claire Williams notably the current deputy team principal at Williams.

In a wide-ranging interview with F1's non-executive director Martin Sorrell, the outspoken Ecclestone also said that Russian President Vladimir Putin "should be running Europe".

He said that comments he had made in praise of Adolf Hitler's leadership methods in a 2009 interview were taken out of context, but reiterated that the Nazi leader "got the job done".

He also declared that he was "100 percent" in favour of Britain leaving the European Union ahead of the June 23 referendum on the matter and said that immigrants had not made a contribution to British life.
Thinkstock

We all know its tough to save for retirement today. Somehow, workers will have to save more for retirement than previous generations, all while dealing with the pressures of student loan debt, stagnating wages and rising fixed costs.

Some workers are cracking under that pressure, new research by PwC shows. Nearly half of 1,600 workers surveyed said theyve saved less than $50,000 for retirement. Almost the same number of workers said they will probably have to tap their nest egg to cover unexpected expenses before they retire, driving them to prolong their working years.

Stats like these shouldnt just trouble individual workers. Here are two reasons employers should be worried, too:

Its killing their productivity.

Twenty-eight percent of workers admitted money problems have distracted them during their working hours, up from 20% in 2015. Nearly half of workers said they devote three working hours or more each week handling financial issues, up from 37% last year. Younger workers are the most likely group to be distracted at work. More than one-third of millennial workers this year said they worry about meeting their monthly expenses, up from 23% in 2015. Considering millennials make up the majority of the workforce today, employers should pay attention.

It makes it a lot tougher to attract new talent.

The less confident workers are in their ability to retire, the more likely theyll stick around at their jobs. In PwCs survey, more than half of boomers said they plan to retire later than they originally planned, compared to 44% of Gen Xers and 32% of millennials. The primary reason? Not saving enough. And when older employees stick around, it becomes harder for employers to attract fresh talent. Youve got older employees, less productive, less healthy employees hanging around longer and that isnt a good solution for the employer, says Kent Allison, head of PwCs employee financial wellness practice.

What can be done?

The bottom line is its not enough to encourage workers to save for retirement while ignoring all the roadblocks that stand in their way. For years, weve seen employers shift away from programs that help ease the financial burden of their workers, like 401(k) matching contributions and employer-provided health care plans (to counter some of these developments, the federal government has delivered programs like the Affordable Care Act and MyRA, where workers can save for retirement if their employers dont offer a dedicated plan). Only 3% of employers offer some kind of student loan repayment assistance program now. The U.S. is still one of the only developed countries that doesnt require paid maternity and paternity leave for workers.

These trends should be reversed. Already, a few major corporations are leading the way. The question is whether others will follow suit.
Marib (Yemen) (AFP) - Clashes between Yemeni loyalist forces and rebels have killed 13 fighters, military sources said Tuesday, as the UN chief urged warring parties to begin delayed peace talks.

UN-brokered peace talks, which were set to open in Kuwait on Monday, were delayed after the insurgents failed to show up over alleged Saudi violations of a ceasefire that took effect on April 11.

Fighting erupted late Monday in Marib province, east of the rebel-held Yemeni capital Sanaa, with warring parties trading blame for the ceasefire breaches.

Five soldiers loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and eight rebel fighters were killed in the clashes which continued intermittently through Tuesday, the pro-government military sources said.

They said the fighting erupted when the Iran-backed Huthi rebels and their allies tried to capture positions held by loyalist troops.

The toll could not be independently confirmed.

Sporadic fighting was also reported in other areas, including Nahm northeast of Sanaa and in the southwestern province of Taez.

At the United Nations, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the Gulf-backed government and the Shiite Huthi rebels and their allies to engage with his envoy "so that talks can start without further delay".

Pro-Hadi chief-of-staff General Mohammed Ali al-Maqdishi slammed the rebels for "not respecting" the ceasefire which he said his forces were committed to.

"The truce is still holding based on orders from our political leadership," said Maqdishi.

In Kuwait, representatives of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council sent a message to the rebels saying they "understand their fears" and urging them to "quickly join" the talks, according to a Western diplomat.

The rebels meanwhile accused loyalist forces of launching attacks and dispatching reinforcements to several provinces, in a statement on their sabanews.net website.

- 'Commitment to dialogue' -

Story continues

They also said warplanes belonging to the Saudi-led coalition, which has intervened militarily in support of loyalists since March last year, flew sorties over several areas of Yemen despite the ceasefire.

In a statement on Facebook late Monday, rebel spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam said "we affirm our continued commitment to dialogue... and this is why our demand from the first day was for talks to be held in an atmosphere of calm, peace, and stability."

"But unfortunately, since April 11, the aggression hadn't stopped and the air strikes have continued on several areas," he said.

UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed and government representatives were still in Kuwait on Tuesday, according to officials close to the government delegation.

Previous attempts at peace talks -- including a failed round in January -- have been unable to stop Yemen's conflict, which the United Nations says has killed more than 6,400 people and forced almost 2.8 million from their homes.

Jihadists including from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the powerful Yemeni branch of the extremist network, have exploited the conflict to seize territory and gain influence.

On Tuesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up before reaching a security checkpoint in main southern city Aden, where jihadists have carried out deadly attacks against pro-government forces in recent months, a security official said.

There were no casualties apart from the assailant himself, said the official, describing the bomber as "an extremist".
New York (AFP) - New Yorkers went to the polls Tuesday in the state's most decisive presidential primary in decades with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump firm favorites in the race to clinch the Democratic and Republican nominations.

Polls show that Clinton -- the former secretary of state, first lady and New York senator -- has a double-digit lead over her Brooklyn-born challenger, Bernie Sanders, even if nationwide surveys put them neck-and-neck.

Trump, the 69-year-old Manhattan billionaire whose controversial campaign has appalled the Republican establishment, is well ahead of his evangelical rival Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich.

The tycoon is banking on a big home state victory in his quest to sew up the nomination before Republican grandees can anoint another candidate at the party convention in July.

"It was just a great honor and I think it's a great honor for New York," Trump said after voting in a synagogue, reiterating his campaign slogan. "We're going to make America great again."

A relaxed and confident-looking Clinton, 68, dressed in a colorful tunic, voted with her husband, former president Bill Clinton, in the leafy Chappaqua suburb they call home, taking time to greet well wishers outside.

"I had a great time going around the city in the last couple of days just seeing a lot of old friends, meeting new people," she said. "Everybody please come out and vote before 9:00 pm tonight. That would be terrific."

With both races for the White House nomination so competitive, it is the most consequential primary in decades in New York, the country's fourth largest state and one with a vastly diverse electorate.

Three of the candidates can claim New York as home: Trump, who has never lived anywhere else; Clinton, who was twice elected the state's US senator; and Sanders, who was raised in Brooklyn but is now senator for Vermont.

But there has been some frustration over New York's strict rules governing the vote, particularly among independent voters not allowed to participate and who in other states have tended to favor Sanders.

Story continues

Only New York's 5.8 million Democrats and 2.7 million Republicans who registered by last October -- four months before the nation's first caucus election in Iowa -- are eligible to vote.

- 'Hillary knows how' -

Nevertheless turnout was brisk at polling stations visited by AFP in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where a string of Democrats said they had voted for Clinton, who would make history if elected as America's first woman president.

"I think she's got the record across all of the issues that matter to me," said Rachel Karpf, 30, an arts producer who works in theater and lives in Brooklyn.

"I like Bernie Sanders, I love his energy and his passion," said Carlos Rios, a human resources manager in Chelsea who voted for Clinton.

"But I worry that he is not going to be able to withstand the political reality we have today, and for better or worse, Hillary knows how to navigate."

A victory in New York, which also selected Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008, would quash the momentum generated by her self-styled democratic socialist rival, who has won seven out of the last eight state nominating contests.

Only California has more than the 247 Democratic delegates and 44 superdelegates up for grabs in New York.

Clinton already leads with 1,791 compared to 1,115 for Sanders, according to a CNN tally -- putting her on course to clinch the 2,383 delegates needed to secure the party's presidential nomination.

The 74-year-old Sanders -- who has galvanized a youth movement with his call for health care as a right, free college education and campaign finance reform -- needs a win to keep alive his hopes of winning the presidency.

But in stark contrast to victory parties arranged by the Clinton and Trump campaigns in New York, Sanders opted to spend Tuesday in the neighboring state of Pennsylvania, which holds its primary next week.

The senator has also signaled he could be willing to swing behind Clinton should she win the nomination, provided she moves farther to the left on causes that he has highlighted.

While New York City is largely Democrat, Republicans in rural areas and fallen manufacturing cities upstate have warmed to Trump's populist message, despite his insults of women, Mexicans and Muslims.

The tycoon will be looking to win as many of the state's 95 Republican delegates as possible.
Apple Pay

Apple Pay has arrived in Singapore, putting the mobile service payment system in six countries worldwide, reports The Verge.

While the service is currently only available to American Express users, Apple says it hopes to include support for Visa credit and debit cards soon, as well as banks like DBS, UOB and Standard Chartered.

Apple plans to bring Apple Pay to Spain and Hong Kong later this year, while it has already launched in Australia and Canada, in partnership with American Express. The majority of users in the US, UK and China are already able to use the payment system with the bank of their choice.
Applepay

SINGAPORE  Apple has launched Apple Pay in Singapore, but it's just for American Express-issued cards for now.

The company announced Tuesday the mobile payment service has gone live here, becoming the sixth country after the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and China to have it. Amex confirmed in October last year it will follow with Hong Kong and Spain to roll out Apple Pay there within the year.

For now, only American Express-issued cards will work, and Visa cards from other banks like DBS Bank, UOB and Standard Chartered will start getting accepted "soon," says Apple.

SEE ALSO: Too many people try to sign up on Apple Pay's first day in China

Apple Pay works with the Apple Watch, iPhone 6, iPad Air 2, iPad Pro and iPad Mini 3, and is compatible with existing contactless payment terminals in stores.

Like other tap-to-pay modes such as Visa payWave and MasterCard's PayPass, Apple Pay transactions are capped at S$100 ($75) each.

The Apple Pay service first debuted in the U.S. in October 2014.

Is Amex-only crippling the service?

With Apple Pay's Amex-only debut in Singapore for the moment, people waving their iPhones or Watches at tills won't be a common sight just yet. Compared with Amex, Visa and MasterCard have much broader adoption rates in the country.

In Australia, for instance, the service is only supported on Amex, and not by any of the country's big four banks.

That's proven to be a bit of a crippling factor Down Under, as Mashable experienced for itself.

Apple avoided that in China for its February debut in the important market, which is the world's largest smartphone base. It tied up with the country's sole interbank network, China UnionPay, allowing access to the vast majority of cards in the country.

It worked; the first day of Apple Pay in China proved so popular that the service couldn't accommodate everyone jumping on, and Apple said it had to stagger the number of sign-ons. According to Apple, 3 million cards were added in the first 72 hours of the service going live in the country.

Story continues

According to data from research firm IDC Asia-Pacific, Amex is estimated to be on fewer than 5% of the total credit and debit cards in circulation in Singapore. Merchants are generally less keen to support Amex as well, because its fees are known to be higher than that of the competition.

Chris Anderson, head of mobility at research firm IDC Asia-Pacific, told Mashable: "I'm not convinced (the Amex launch) will lead to an influx of applications for Amex cards in Singapore, since customers know that other options will be available soon."

His colleague, vice president of devices research at the firm, Bryan Ma, said:

When Visa comes on board, it could certainly help Apple Pay adoption in Singapore.

Ooi Huey Tyng, Visa country manager for Singapore and Brunei, said that about a third of Visa transactions are done via payWave.

Clement Teo, a senior researcher at Forrester, pointed out that Android mobile payments aren't big locally yet because of "limited" support, so Apple Pay will be a strong contender.

Apple's biggest competitor here, Samsung, recently launched its tap-to-pay service in Singapore, although Samsung Pay is just limited to a handful of chain stores and mostly public transportation. It rolled out the service two weeks ago simultaneously in China, where it accepts most credit cards, and in Singapore, on the EZ-Link payment network that is mostly used for subway trains and buses.

There are only a few Android models that support EZ-Link payments, such as Samsung's newer phones and LG's Optimus G and Sony Xperia Z smartphones. But until Android payments can be accepted at a broader swathe of stores, Apple has managed to get a jump on the competition  for now.

UPDATE April 19 7:30 p.m. SGT: Added Visa's statement.
Turns out that firing a gun into the air to shoot down your neighbors drone is illegal. In other news, water is wet.

The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed to Forbes that  despite what some well-armed citizens may think  trying to shoot down a drone is, in fact, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

The FAA made the statement in response to questions by Forbes following an incident in which an Arkansas man thought his neighbor was flying a drone over his backyard to videotape his children. To stop what he saw as an invasion of his privacy, the man grabbed his rifle and shot the drone out of the sky.

But, according to the FAA, a drone is considered a civilian aircraft. And, under Title 18 of the U. S. Code, section 32, destroying one can get you up to 20 years in the slammer, as well as a hefty fine.

The Arkansas incident isnt the first of its kind. People have been shooting down drones all over the country, from California to my home state of New Jersey.

But it seems citizens are receiving mixed signals about whether they have the right to blast a drone they consider to be invading their privacy out of the sky.

Take, for example, the case of Kentucky resident William Merideth, who shot a drone that he said was hovering over his backyard last summer. According to Kentuckys WDRB, Merideth was charged with wanton endangerment and criminal mischief. A judge eventually dismissed the charges, saying Merideth had a right to protect his privacy by shooting down the drone.

The matter gets all the more interesting when you take into account the fact that at least one drone owner managed to affix a gun to his flying machine.



So where does that leave us? Well, the federal government has yet to prosecute an individual for shooting down a drone. But that doesnt mean the feds wont step in at some point and bring the hammer down on some drone-blaster.

When faced with a drone or drone operator who may be invading your privacy, your best bet is to get as much information as you can and report it to the police. Theyll be able to handle things from there.

Story continues

Conversely, if youre a drone owner, maybe you should try to avoid flying over peoples houses  or at the very least, dont hover over their backyards.

Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.



via: Forbes
TipRanks

For stock market watchers, 2022 will be remembered as the year of the bear. Going by year-to-date performance, the major indexes are likely to see out 2022 posting negative returns. The same, however, cannot be said for natural gas stocks, which driven by the macro conditions  namely Russias invasion of Ukraine - have delivered excellent returns for investors, even accounting for the segments recent pullback. Looking at the prospects of the U.S.s natural gas sector, Jefferies Lloyd Byrne th
#COVID-19 New COVID-19 cases post sharp on-week rise amid resurgence woes South Korea's new COVID-19 cases stayed below 30,000 for the fifth consecutive day Sunday, but the daily count recorded a sharp hike from the previous week amid rising concerns ove...

#illegal gambling China-based online gambling ring busted; 20 arrested Law-enforcement authorities here said Sunday they have busted an online gambling ring based in China for illicit operations in South Korea, worth a total of 5.7 trillion won (US$3....
Charlie Cox says his return as Daredevil "still feels too good to be true"
Head of European Diplomacy, Federica Mogherini, said that the blocks foreign and defense ministers would discuss concrete economic and security projects via video link with Libyan Prime Minister-Designate Fayez al-Sarraj. The EU wants to support Libyas new unity government in order to tame the influx of migrants to Europe and strengthen its position against the Islamic State. Mrs Mogherini said that the ministers would work to identify concrete projects in different fields that are the priorities of the Libyan people and of the Libyan governmenton the economic and political and security side.

French and German foreign ministers, who visited Libya last weekend, said that international support was indispensable to restore stability in the country. French minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, commented that the migration problem is obviously part of this important question, the fight against Daesh is also part of this question. He added that the EU would like to discuss further steps to limit migrant smuggling and arms trafficking. Libya has been in chaos for almost five years following the toppling of Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.

To support Libya, Brussels has prepared an aid package of 100 million in development and humanitarian aid, which will also cover the training of the police and coastguard. Some EU countries also want the new Libyan government to give Operation Sophia, an EU naval mission established last year, a permission to enter its territorial waters to help tackle migrant trafficking. The EUs mission in Libya, EUBAM, was founded in May 2013 to support the Libyan authorities in improving and developing their capacity to enhance the security of their land, sea and air borders in the short term, and to develop a broader Integrated Border Management strategy in the long term.
Piotr Bakowski and Laura Puccio (European Parliamentary Research Service)

EU Member States are currently being increasingly confronted with the problem of foreign fighters. A foreign fighter is generally considered to be such an individual who is involved in an uprising or fighting outside the borders of their own state and is primarily ideologically or religiously motivated. For the EU, such individuals can pose a threat especially after their return from the fighting in the Middle East or other war-torn regions to the individual Member States. With the ongoing war in Syria, this phenomenon has taken a completely new dimension.

The Syrian conflict has attracted the most foreign fighters in history. It is estimated that about 20,000-30,000 of such individuals have joined the fighting. The very fact that about 5,000 of these fighters come from some of the EU Member States  notably from France, Great Britain, Belgium and Germany  should serve as a warning sign for the Union. For this reason, since 2013, the issue of foreign fighters has been a top priority for the EU and its fight against terrorism. EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, defined six points, which are crucial for an effective fight against this dangerous phenomenon, including a better understanding of this issue, preventing radicalism, detecting suspicious travel activity, investigating and prosecuting individuals, checking suspected returnees, and cooperation with third countries.

The EU is also actively trying to solve the situation directly in Syria. In 2015, the EU issued its regional strategy for Syria, Iraq and the threat posed by the Islamic State. The importance of the fight against terrorism for the EU can be also observed in case of the EUs Internal Security Strategy for 2015-2020, which points to the issue of terrorism as its top priority. During the meeting in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris in autumn 2015, ministers drew the conclusion that it is necessary to complete the Passenger Name Record (PNR) directive and fight harder against illegal trade in firearms or terrorism financing.

Given the security threat that foreign fighters represent, some EU members have addressed this issue in their own legislation. Confiscation of passports of suspected persons, cancellation of residence permits to foreigners or even bans on entering the country are some of the concrete steps in this regard. Overall, we can grasp the gravity of the whole situation, which demands that the EU adopts a coordinated approach and also calls upon the most affected Member States to pursue cooperation beyond the EU.

(The study can be downloaded here:http://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document.html?reference=EPRS_BRI(2016)579080)
10,000 Chinese workers to create magic at Shanghai Disney Updated: 2016-04-19 07:14 (Agencies)

Zhou Jian, a 26-year-old folk dancer, dreams of a stage career, and he said he believes the Magic Kingdom can help him get there.

Zhou recently made a 14-hour journey by train from inland Shanxi province, to attend a job fair in Shanghai, where he hoped to land work at Walt Disney Co's 389-hectare, $5.5-billion resort set to open on June 16. He covets a role in the Lion King musical production that will be performed in Mandarin for the first time.

"I want to be famous before I turn 30 years old," he said. "I've performed on big and small stages for several years and haven't made much progress. Disney is a world-famous brand. I thought it would be a very good stage for me."

Disney has been using brand cachet to its advantage during a four-year recruiting drive to staff up at Shanghai Disneyland. It's the company's sixth park worldwide, and Chief Executive Robert Iger called it the company's greatest business opportunity since founder Walt Disney bought land in central Florida in the 1960s.

It's also a massive management challenge. Iger said last year the park would employ about 10,000 workers in an economy where rapid-fire turnover and uneven customer service can be challenges for multinational corporations.

"The focus on customer service is very important for Disney, but there is still a huge gap between their standard and normal Chinese standards," said Sara Wong, Kelly Services' Hong Kong director of recruitment process outsourcing. "They are not hiring 10 people, they are hiring 10,000."
China urges India to strictly follow WTO rules on anti-dumping investigations Updated: 2016-04-19 10:21 (Xinhua)

BEIJING - China said it hopes India can strictly follow the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules on its anti-dumping investigation into Chinese iron and steel exports on Monday.

An official with the Ministry of Commerce said in an online notice that China always advocates prudent, restrained and lawful measures in employing trade remedy instruments.

Steel overcapacity is a worldwide problem which requires joint effort from all countries, the official said. Trade protection measures could not solve the problem and will hinder normal international trade orders.

Since mid-April, India has successively conducted anti-dumping investigations against Chinese steel imports including hot-rolled steel coils and stainless steel plates.

China always encourages its steel companies to tackle trade problems through cooperation with overseas competitors, the official said.
You, too, can be a civilized tourist Updated: 2016-04-18 17:04 By Yang Feiyue(chinadaily.com.cn)

Participants at a campaign calling for civilized travel. [Photo provided to China Daily]

A new campaign calling for civilized travel was launched in Beijing on April 15.

Sponsored by the National Tourism Administration, the effort aims to encourage more tourists to exhibit civilized behavior during their travels.

Roughly 10,000 tourists gathered at nine tourist attractions during the campaign's launching ceremony.

Every tourist's action and word represents their country's image and civilization development, says Xu Zhijun, deputy secretary general of the Beijing government.

"Tourists shouldn't forget their behavior when enjoy themselves and happiness," Xu adds.

Chinese tourists paid 120 million visits abroad in 2015, the National Tourism Administration reports. Bad behavior by some Chinese travelers has been frequently made news headlines.

Related:

Travel service providers face blacklist in Beijing
At the beginning of the year, global markets were extremely worried about the state of Chinas economy. Stocks were adversely affected on several days by a series of disappointing economic reports. This was one of the major factors which had dragged down the broader indexes throughout last year and into this year until a rebound in oil prices boosted markets.

However, a spate of positive economic data indicates that a semblance of stability has returned to Chinas economy. Additionally, global leaders have recently stated that fears over Chinas economy have eased. The country still offers some good choices for discerning investors and it makes sense to add them to your portfolio at this time.

Financial Leaders Express Relief

Speaking at the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings held in Washington, the worlds financial leaders expressed their relief over Chinas economic situation. The general consensus was that though some concerns continue to linger, the Chinese governments recent actions have reduced fears over the state of the economy.

IMFs managing director Christine Lagarde said the degree of anxiety regarding the worlds second largest economy has declined. Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said new policies outlined by Chinas National Peoples Congress in March have attempted to address fundamental problems including the overriding issue of excess capacity.

Series of Encouraging Economic Reports

Of all the encouraging economic data released last week, GDP numbers were possibly the most crucial. First quarter GDP increased by 6.7%, indicating that the economy has managed to tide over the crisis it was facing in the recent past. Stimulus measures implemented by the government have ensured that growth has remained within the target range of 6.5% to 7%.

Other economic indicators also show that the economy has reached a certain level of stability. Industrial production increased by 6.8% in March, higher than the average of 5.4% recorded in January and February. Retail sales exceeded most expectations to increase by 10.5%. Growth in fixed asset investment also exceeded expectations, coming in at 10.7%. Credit growth touched its highest level in 20 months.

Story continues

Our Choices

A series of encouraging economic reports point to a recovery in the Chinese economy. The worlds financial leaders have also stated that steps taken by the countrys government have managed to stabilize the economy.

This means that it is still possible to pick good China stocks with strong fundamentals. However, it may be difficult to pick winning stocks.

This is where our VGM score comes in. Here V stands for Value, G for Growth and M for Momentum and the score is a weighted combination of these three scores. Such a score allows you to eliminate the negative aspects of stocks and select winners. However, it is important to keep in mind that each Style Score will carry a different weight while arriving at a VGM score.

We have narrowed down our search to the following stocks based on a good Zacks Rank and VGM score.

Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co. Ltd. SHI or Sinopec is China's largest petrochemical company.

Sinopec has a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) and a VGM Score of A. The forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio for the current financial year (F1) is 9.93, lower than the industry average of 15.57. Its earnings estimate for the current year has improved by 9.7% over the last 30 days.

Daqo New Energy Corp. DQ is engaged in the manufacture and sale of polysilicon and wafers to photovoltaic product manufacturers.

Daqo New Energy has a Zacks Rank #1 and a VGM Score of A. The company has expected earnings growth of 63% for the current year. It has a P/E (F1) of 6.49, which is lower than the industry average of 18.04. Its earnings estimate for the current year has improved by more than 100% over the last 30 days.

JinkoSolar Holding Co., Ltd. JKS is a manufacturer of photovoltaic products which are sold in China and across the world.

JinkoSolar has a Zacks Rank #1 and a VGM Score of A. It has a P/E (F1) of 4.35, which is lower than the industry average of 11.99. Its earnings estimate for the current year has improved by 11.7 % over the last 30 days.

China Eastern Airlines Corp. Ltd. CEA is an airline company based in Shanghai.

China Eastern Airlines has a Zacks Rank #1 and a VGM Score of B. The company has expected earnings growth of more than 100% for the current year. It has a P/E (F1) of 5.12, lower than the industry average of 10.14. Its earnings estimate for the current year has improved by 5.4% over the last 30 days.

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The logo of U.S. technology company Apple is seen in Zurich, Switzerland April 5, 2016. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann

By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O) has been asked by Chinese authorities within the last two years to hand over its source code but refused, the company's top lawyer told lawmakers on Tuesday in response to U.S. law enforcement criticism of its stance on technology security.

The congressional testimony highlighted an issue at the heart of a heated disagreement between Apple and the FBI over unlocking encrypted data from an iPhone linked to last December's San Bernardino, California shootings - how much private technology companies should cooperate with governments.

Law enforcement officials have attempted to portray Apple as possibly complicit in handing over information to China's government for business reasons while refusing to cooperate with U.S. requests for access to private data in criminal cases.

"I want to be very clear on this," Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell told Tuesday's hearing under oath. "We have not provided source code to the Chinese government."

Apple has previously denied the accusation as a "smear" originating from the U.S. Department of Justice's effort to force Apple to help unlock the iPhone 5c used by one of the two San Bernardino killers, who were inspired by Islamist militants.

The claim resurfaced in the hearing called by a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee to examine potential common ground between law enforcement and the technology sector in the encryption debate, though more than three hours of testimony yielded little clear agreement.

Captain Charles Cohen, commander in the Indiana State Police, repeated the suggestion that Apple has quietly cooperated with Beijing, which strictly regulates technology in exchange for access to its market.

But when pressed by Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, for the source of that claim, Cohen only cited news reports.

That takes my breath away," a visibly frustrated Eshoo said. "That is a huge allegation.

The Justice Department had argued in the San Bernardino case that it would be willing to demand Apple turn over source code that underlies its products, though at the time it only sought the company's cooperation in writing new software that would disable the passcode protections on the phone.

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Technology and security experts have said that if the U.S. government was able to obtain Apple's source code with a conventional court order, other governments would demand equal rights to do the same thing.

After winning a court order in February, the Federal Bureau of Investigation dropped its case against Apple last month when it said it had found a third party entity to help investigators hack into the iPhone used by gunman Rizwan Farook.

On Tuesday, Apple and the FBI were making a second appearance in Congress since March to testify over law enforcement access to encrypted devices, a decades-old dispute between Silicon Valley and Washington that gained renewed life from the San Bernardino case.

While that standoff underscored national security concerns posed by advances in technology security, the growing use of strong default encryption on mobile devices and communications by criminal suspects is handicapping investigators' ability to pursue routine cases, law enforcement officials told the hearing. Apple and other companies defend the technology as integral to protecting consumers.

The FBI relies heavily on the "services and specialized skills that we can only get through the private industry, and that partnership is critical to our success," testified FBI technology official Amy Hess.

Separately, the tech advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Justice Department in San Francisco federal court on Tuesday, seeking to force the disclosure of any secret orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that may have forced companies such as Apple or Google to decrypt communications.

Thomas Galati, chief of intelligence at the New York Police Department, said his investigators had been unable to open 67 Apple devices from October 2015 to March 2016. Those phones were implicated in 44 violent crimes 23 felonies, including 10 homicides, two rapes, and the shooting of an officer, Galati said.

The government has redoubled its efforts to use the courts to force Apple's cooperation in cracking encrypted iPhones by announcing plans to continue with an appeal in a New York drug case.

The secrecy surrounding the method used on the San Bernardino phone has prompted criticism from security researchers who said Apple and others should be made aware of the flaw, in accordance with a White House vulnerabilities review process that favors disclosure.

But Obama administration sources have told Reuters the group that helped unlock the device has sole ownership of the method, making it highly unlikely the technique would be disclosed by the government to Apple or anyone else.

I dont think relying on a third party is a good model, Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado, the committee's top Democrat, said at the hearing.

(Reporting by Dustin Volz in Washington; additional reporting by Dan Levine in San Francisco; editing by Grant McCool)
ORLANDO, FL--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - TRU Simulation + Training, a Textron Inc. (TXT) company, announced today that it signed an agreement with Avianca, a leading Latin American airline headquartered in Colombia, for the purchase of a full flight simulator (FFS) and a flat panel trainer (FPT) for the new Airbus A320neo. The full flight simulator, scheduled to be delivered in the third quarter of 2016, will be installed in Avianca's new state-of-the-art training center in Bogota, Colombia.

George Karam, General Manager and Vice President of TRU's Air Transport division, commented that, "We are proud to be selected by Avianca, a major carrier in the Latin America region. This new agreement marks the third full flight simulator that TRU has delivered to the airline, including ATR and A320 full flight simulators." Santiago Diago, Chief Operating Officer of Avianca added that, "TRU continues to be a trusted supplier and partner in providing world-class training devices and support, and we're thrilled to work with TRU to aid with training on this new aircraft."

The Airbus A320neo (new engine option) is a modernized version of the original Airbus A320 offering improvements to the aircraft's aerodynamics including the fuel-saving sharklet wingtip devices along with the option of CFM International LEAP-1A or Pratt & Whitney PW1100G engines.

TRU Simulation's highly customized full flight simulator being supplied to Avianca will be convertible to support both the legacy A320 with its CFM56 and IAEV2500 engines as well as the A320neo with the CFM and Pratt & Whitney engines.

This A320neo full flight simulator features the TRU proprietary visual display system compatible with the latest projector technologies, aXion Image Generator, MOOG electric motion system and state-of-the- art Instructor Station.

About TRU Simulation + Training

TRU Simulation + Training Inc., a Textron Inc. (TXT) company, delivers innovative, end-to- end flight training solutions to the commercial and military markets while providing superior technical support and customer service. Headquartered in Goose Creek, S.C., the company is known for its Air Transport Simulation, Business & Military Simulation, Mission & Maintenance Training, and Training Centers & Services. More information is available at www.TRUSimulation.com.

Story continues

About Textron, Inc.

Textron Inc. is a multi-industry company that leverages its global network of aircraft, defense, industrial and finance businesses to provide customers with innovative solutions and services. Textron is known around the world for its powerful brands such as Bell Helicopter, Cessna, Beechcraft, Hawker, Jacobsen, Kautex, Lycoming, E-Z-GO, Greenlee, Textron Systems, and TRU Simulation + Training. For more information visit: www.textron.com.

Certain statements in this press release may project revenues or describe strategies, goals, outlook or other non-historical matters; these forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made, and we undertake no obligation to update them. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward- looking statements.

The following files are available for download:
The Obama administration hasn't been able to eliminate the "carried interest" tax break for hedge fund managers, but Vice President Joe Biden called it "not sustainable" and predicted the next president will succeed.

The tax break allows certain compensation for hedge fund managers, among others, to be taxed at lower capital gains rates rather than ordinary income. "There's no justification," Biden said in an interview with CNBC, and the White House has asked Congress to close the loophole.

The administration hasn't won on the issue, Biden said, because its crowded agenda has never permitted sustained focus on it.

"We haven't had the clear space to do nothing but talk about how unfair the tax system is as it relates to the tax expenditures, loopholes we want to eliminate," he said. "And consequently what happens is a lot of people can go home, if you're a Republican, and say, 'These Democrats are just going after business.' "

Indeed, when the administration first sought to close the loophole, one major Wall Street figure, Steve Schwarzman , likened its approach to business to Hitler's invasion of Poland. Schwarzman subsequently apologized.



Biden laughed off the comparison, saying, "I'd say it's like us liberating death camps."







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bill clinton bill gates

Presidential hopefuls love to say how great they will be at boosting the economy and creating jobs.

But exactly how they do that is a bit of a conundrum in a capitalist society, where most of the nation's jobs are in the hands of businesses, not the control of government.

The federal government is, of course, itself a very large employer of over 4 million people. Still, candidates don't tend to campaign on promises of hiring more federal workers.

So listen up. The world's wealthiest man, tech-mogul turned philanthropist Bill Gates, has got a fairly simple answer: The federal government needs to increase its spending on research.

In an essay, he says that the federal research budget has been "America's Secret Weapon":

Investing in R&D isn't about the government picking winners and losers. The markets will do that. It's about doing what we know works: making limited and targeted investments to lay a foundation for America's entrepreneurs. This approach has been fundamental to U.S. leadership for decades, and it will become only more important in the years ahead.

Gates says that a bunch of the world's largest and most important companies and industries all came about because of US investment in research.

"By the end of World War II, the United States led the world in automobiles, aerospace, electronics, medicine, and other areas," he writes.

US funded research also spawned the "microchip revolution," which led to the PC industry, including the creation of Microsoft and other software giants.

US research investment also created the internet, while investments in health and biotech research do everything from global disease control to funding university breakthroughs.

But, he notes, the US is in danger of falling behind (emphasis added):

More countries than ever are competing for global leadership, and they know the value of innovation. Since 2000, South Korea's research and development spending (measured as a percentage of GDP) has gone up 90 percent. China's has doubled. The United States' has essentially flatlined. It's great that the rest of the world is committing more, but if the United States is going to maintain its leading role, it needs to up its game.

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For example, Gates points out that, in previous decades, the US Department of Energy spent billions developing technology around fossil fuels.

"Yet, until this year, the DOE's research budget hasn't seen a real increase since the Reagan administration," he writes.

He'd like to see the department investing more into new clean-energy tech that will, he argues, not only create jobs but also fight climate change, reduce US dependence on foreign oil, and improve the lives of 1.3 billion poor people who don't have affordable energy today.

And he made it pretty clear that this is an open letter to all the presidential candidates.

Gates says that "something that I hope every candidate will agree on" is "when the United States invests in innovation, it creates companies and jobs at home, makes Americans healthier and safer, and saves lives and fights poverty."

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TORONTO, April 19 (Reuters) - Canada's Competition Bureau said on Tuesday it will take no further action against Google after alleging in 2013 that the company was abusing its dominant position in online search.

The watchdog said it found evidence to support one of the allegations against Google, now a unit of holding company Alphabet Inc, but said the company has already made changes to remedy those concerns and that it has agreed not to reintroduce anticompetitive clauses in its contracts.

(Reporting by Alastair Sharp, editing by G Crosse)
SANTIAGO, April 18 (Reuters) - Chile's state-owned miner Codelco said on Monday that operations at its El Teniente underground copper mine were still suspended following torrential rains over the weekend, and that it expects to restart operations on Thursday.

The world No.1 copper producer told Reuters that it loses approximately 1,500 tonnes of copper output each day the mine is halted. It expects the mine to be suspended for a total of six days.

(Reporting by Anthony Esposito)
Bruce Sewell Congress

During a hearing in front of Congress on Tuesday, Apple's top lawyer Bruce Sewell confirmed that the Chinese government has asked Apple for its source code, and Apple refused.

Republican congressman Tim Murphy from Pennsylvania asked Sewell about providing source code to China, and he responded:

"We have been asked by the Chinese government and we refused," Sewell said. When Murphy followed up, Sewell clarified that China had asked "during the past two years."

Because the exchange took place during a congressional hearing, Sewell was under oath when he made those comments.

Source code is one of the most valuable assets any technology company has, and Apple's code for software such as iOS or Mac OS X has incalculable value.

The Chinese government has put pressure on American software companies in the past to modify their software for the Chinese market. Microsoft, for example, produces a custom version of Windows 10 for the Chinese government, although that doesn't mean that that software has a "back door," or a way for the government to access data on users' machines.

Before the question-and-answer part of the hearing started, Sewell added three notes to his prepared remarks:

Apple has not provided source code to the Chinese government

Apple does not have an encryption key that it had months ago that it has since thrown away

Apple has not announced that it plans to add passcode encryption protection to iCloud

Here's the video of the congressional hearing:

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China's Premier Li Keqiang (L) walks with New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key as they inspect the Chinese honour guards during a welcoming ceremony outside of the Great Hall of People in Beijing, April 18, 2016. REUTERS/China Daily

BEIJING (Reuters) - China aims to expand an existing free trade agreement with New Zealand, Premier Li Keqiang told Prime Minister John Key during a meeting in Beijing, state media said on Tuesday.

New Zealand was the first OECD country to sign a free trade agreement with China, in 2008, and China became New Zealand's largest export market in 2014.

"China will work to expand trade within the framework of the FTA and create conditions on broadening the agreement," the official China Daily paraphrased Li as telling Key.

China will also expand cooperation overall with New Zealand, in areas such as agriculture and food safety, Li added.

The report quoted Key as saying he will also work to upgrade the free trade agreement. The newspaper gave no further details.

The move comes as New Zealand and 11 other advanced economies accounting for 40 percent of the global economy have signed the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), to which China is not a party.

Beijing has been keen to shore up bilateral trade deals and promote the 16-member Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in the face of TPP, concerned by Washington's effort to reshape and liberalise Asia's trade rules.

Though the TPP faces opposition in the U.S. Congress, China could lose some ground to manufacturing competitors such as Vietnam if the deal goes into force, as it would expand duty-free access among members.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Richard Borsuk)
By Philip Blenkinsop

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - China and other major steel-producing countries failed on Monday to agree measures to tackle a global steel crisis as the sides argued over the causes of overcapacity and whether Beijing is keeping loss-making producers afloat.

A meeting of ministers and trade officials from over 30 countries, hosted by Belgium and the OECD, sought to tackle excess capacity, but concluded only that it had to be dealt with in a swift and structural way.

The OECD said global steelmaking capacity was 2.37 billion tonnes in 2015, but declining production meant that only 67.5 percent of that was being used, down from 70.9 percent in 2014.

Britain in particular has felt the squeeze as its largest producer Tata Steel has announced plans to pull out of the country, threatening 15,000 jobs.

At a news conference following Monday's meeting, deep divisions were clear.

China's assistant commerce minister, Zhang Ji, countered accusations that Beijing subsidizes steel exporters, saying that China had cut 90 million tonnes of capacity and had plans to reduce it by a further 100-150 million tonnes.

"That is only 10 million tonnes less than the capacity in Europe," he said, although critics say it would still have a capacity of around 1 billion tonnes, far in excess of its needs.

China says the fundamental cause of steel overcapacity was the collapse of demand due to the 2008-2009 financial crisis and that the issue of excess capacity is a global one for all countries. International trade, it says, is not to blame.

However, deputy U.S. trade representative Robert Holleyman said Zhang's talk of steel export subsidies missed the point.

"What we are talking about are subsidies that encourage steel capacity or that sustain loss-making enterprises or plants," he said, adding that a "critical mass of economies" needed to agree additional steps.

Cecelia Malmstrom, the EU's trade commissioner, insisted that governments should not grant subsidies that keep enviable plants running and should subject state-controlled firms to the same rules as the private sector.

Story continues

Mexico's Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo also highlighted the problem of cheap imports, saying domestic producers had half of the local market in 2010, but only 25 percent now.

The OECD Steel Committee is made up of 25 members and associates such as Brazil and Russia, with China, the world's largest steel producer and consumer, also invited to participate. A further high-level discussion is provisionally set for September.

(Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop, editing by Louise Heavens)
April 18 (Reuters) - China Investment Corp, China's state-owned sovereign wealth fund, is backing a group of investors who have expressed interest in buying a majority stake in Yum Brands Inc's China unit, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

A deal could value Yum's China unit at $7 billion to $8 billion, Bloomberg said, citing sources. (http://bloom.bg/1XFGLIn)

The investor group also includes KKR & Co LP and Baring Private Equity Asia, the report said.

Sources told Reuters in March that Yum Brands was in talks with private equity firms KKR & Co and Hopu Investments, among others, over the sale of a minority stake in its China unit as it prepares to spin off the once booming unit.

Yum plans to spin off its 6,900 restaurants in China, which account for about half of the company's total sales, by the end of 2016. Yum China would list on the New York Stock Exchange, and possibly in Hong Kong.

Yum Brands and CIC could not be immediately reached for comment.

(Reporting by Rama Venkat Raman in Bengaluru; Editing by Sunil Nair)
Employees work at a KFC store in Shanghai in this July 29, 2014 file photo. REUTERS/Aly Song/Files

(Reuters) - China Investment Corp [CIC.UL], China's state-owned sovereign wealth fund, is backing a group of investors who have expressed interest in buying a majority stake in Yum Brands Inc's (YUM.N) China unit, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

A deal could value Yum's China unit at $7 billion (5 billion pounds) to $8 billion, Bloomberg said, citing sources.

The investor group also includes KKR & Co LP (KKR.N) and Baring Private Equity Asia, the report said.

Sources told Reuters in March that Yum Brands was in talks with private equity firms KKR & Co and Hopu Investments, among others, over the sale of a minority stake in its China unit as it prepares to spin off the once booming unit.

Yum plans to spin off its 6,900 restaurants in China, which account for about half of the company's total sales, by the end of 2016. Yum China would list on the New York Stock Exchange, and possibly in Hong Kong.

Yum Brands and CIC could not be immediately reached for comment.

(Reporting by Rama Venkat Raman in Bengaluru; Editing by Sunil Nair)
donald trump

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are poised to win some of their biggest victories of the election cycle on Tuesday in their home state of New York.

Almost every major poll in the month before the primary has shown both candidates with a massive lead in their respective presidential primaries.

But though some analysts predicted just a month ago that each would run away with the nomination, a win in New York may not be enough to overcome a month full of setbacks for both candidates.

In recent weeks, Trump's path to the nomination has hit serious speed bumps.

The real-estate magnate has rearranged his top campaign infrastructure to beat back Sen. Ted Cruz, whose well-organized campaign has helped him pick up a number of delegates in states like Colorado, Georgia, and Wyoming. Recent losses have made it more difficult for Trump to win the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the Republican nomination outright on the first ballot at July's Republican National Convention.

New York's 95 delegates  and how many of them Trump is able to pick up  could go a long way in putting Trump on the path toward the magic 1,237 number.

He is hoping to take the vast majority of those delegates. Trump could win all of the state's delegates if he finishes above 50% statewide and in each of the Empire State's 27 congressional districts. But if no candidate gets above that 50% threshold in individual districts, then each district's three delegates are awarded proportionally.

Buoyed by rising poll numbers and a recent string of victories in small primary and caucus states, Clinton's lone Democratic rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, has also shown no signs of throwing in the towel. He is making a strong push in New York, Clinton's adopted home state, where victory by a single-digit margin could signal weaknesses in her campaign.

Sanders has also ramped up his rhetoric on Clinton over the past few weeks. On Monday, his campaign launched a new line of attack against the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Sanders' attorney alleged that the Clinton campaign was skirting campaign-finance laws by manipulating a DNC joint-fundraising account to increase small-donor donations that benefit Clinton.

Story continues

Her campaign railed against Sanders, saying that the self-styled economic populist was needlessly attempting to sully Clinton even though Sanders' path to victory appears slimmer.

"It's hard to see how anyone  other than Donald Trump and Ted Cruz  benefits from this downward spiral of irresponsible and baseless attacks," Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said in an email blasted out by the campaign. "Right about now is when we ought to be talking about coming together as a progressive movement, not undermining a generation of voters' faith in the Democratic Party and in the woman who is almost certain to be its nominee."

Publicly, the Sanders campaign still maintains that it can win.

Speaking to reporters after Thursday's Democratic debate, Tad Devine, the Sanders campaign's senior strategist, asserted that the campaign still has a shot regardless of the outcome in New York.

"I think we have to do well here in New York, but there are plenty of events between here and California and Washington, DC, at the end for us to make up the difference," Devine said. "We were 326 pledged delegates behind on the 15th of March. We are 214 now behind. We've shaved a third off of her advantage by winning eight of the last nine contests."

He added:

I'm not going to say that we are going to win every contest between now and the middle of June, but we are going to win most of them. We are going to win by far most of the delegates. We can make up the pledged delegate differential. And I believe, when the voting is over, we will be ahead in pledged delegates.

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A rainbow is seen behind European flags during a euro zone EU leaders emergency summit on the situation in Greece at the European Council headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, July 7, 2015. REUTERS/Eric Vidal/Files

By Francesco Guarascio

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission is inconsistent in how it applies fiscal rules requiring European Union states to keep budgets under control, EU auditors said on Tuesday, criticising the bloc's executive for being too lenient on Italy and France.

EU countries are obliged to keep their budget deficits below 3 percent of gross domestic product and to limit their debt to 60 percent of GDP.

If a country's deficit is above the ceiling or its large debt does not decrease by enough, the European Commission and EU finance ministers set targets and deadlines to correct the imbalances under what is called an excessive deficit procedure (EDP).

The Commission "is not applying the procedure in a consistent manner," the EU auditors said in a report, adding that the EU executive has also not been effective in collecting reliable data from EU countries and pushing them to carry out necessary structural reforms.

The auditors said the Commission used "a high degree of flexibility and discretion" for Italy and France in 2015, deciding not to open an EDP against Italy despite a "prima facie" breach of the debt rule. It also allowed France more time to bring its deficit below 3 percent in spite of data showing the procedure should have been made tougher, they said.

These decisions were deemed by auditors as "not always based on sufficiently objective arguments."

In remarks attached to the ECA report, the European Commission rejected this criticism, saying it was treating EU countries in an equal manner.

After Greece, Italy has the second-largest public debt in the EU at 132.8 percent of GDP in 2015 from 132.3 percent the year earlier, EU Commission's figures show. It is forecast to drop slightly to 132.4 percent in 2016.

France's deficit was 3.7 percent of GDP in 2015, from 3.9 percent in 2014. It is estimated by the Commission to be at 3.4 percent this year.

The report audited the Commission's application of the EDP between 2009 and 2015 in six EU states. Other than Italy and France, it included Germany, the Czech Republic, Cyprus and Malta.

Story continues

The European Court of Auditors (ECA), the EU institution charged with monitoring the bloc's finances, urged the Commission to be more transparent in the way it assesses countries' compliance with fiscal rules.

"There is still too little information openly available about the Commission's data assumptions and parameters," the report said, adding that this "raises questions about the overall reliability of its assessments."

A Commission's spokesman said that "the Commission already commits to action in areas where the report identifies challenges and expresses concerns."

(Editing by Philip Blenkinsop and Hugh Lawson)
(adds more details on Italy, France)

By Francesco Guarascio

BRUSSELS, April 19 (Reuters) - The European Commission is inconsistent in how it applies fiscal rules requiring European Union states to keep budgets under control, EU auditors said on Tuesday, criticising the bloc's executive for being too lenient on Italy and France.

EU countries are obliged to keep their budget deficits below 3 percent of gross domestic product and to limit their debt to 60 percent of GDP.

If a country's deficit is above the ceiling or its large debt does not decrease by enough, the European Commission and EU finance ministers set targets and deadlines to correct the imbalances under what is called an excessive deficit procedure (EDP).

The Commission "is not applying the procedure in a consistent manner," the EU auditors said in a report, adding that the EU executive has also not been effective in collecting reliable data from EU countries and pushing them to carry out necessary structural reforms.

The auditors said the Commission used "a high degree of flexibility and discretion" for Italy and France in 2015, deciding not to open an EDP against Italy despite a "prima facie" breach of the debt rule. It also allowed France more time to bring its deficit below 3 percent in spite of data showing the procedure should have been made tougher, they said.

These decisions were deemed by auditors as "not always based on sufficiently objective arguments."

In remarks attached to the ECA report, the European Commission rejected this criticism, saying it was treating EU countries in an equal manner.

After Greece, Italy has the second-largest public debt in the EU at 132.8 percent of GDP in 2015 from 132.3 percent the year earlier, EU Commission's figures show. It is forecast to drop slightly to 132.4 percent in 2016.

France's deficit was 3.7 percent of GDP in 2015, from 3.9 percent in 2014. It is estimated by the Commission to be at 3.4 percent this year.

The report audited the Commission's application of the EDP between 2009 and 2015 in six EU states. Other than Italy and France, it included Germany, the Czech Republic, Cyprus and Malta.

Story continues

The European Court of Auditors (ECA), the EU institution charged with monitoring the bloc's finances, urged the Commission to be more transparent in the way it assesses countries' compliance with fiscal rules.

"There is still too little information openly available about the Commission's data assumptions and parameters," the report said, adding that this "raises questions about the overall reliability of its assessments."

A Commission's spokesman said that "the Commission already commits to action in areas where the report identifies challenges and expresses concerns." (Editing by Philip Blenkinsop and Hugh Lawson)
George Mitchell has a pretty amazing history of distinguished public service. Before he was a U.S. Democratic senator from Maine and Senate Majority leader, he was a judge in his home state of Maine. Later he would serve as a special envoy from the U.S. government to negotiate peace in North Ireland and the Middle East. But Mitchell also knows the private sector, serving as chairman of Walt Disney (DIS) from 2004 to 2007 and also as head of law firm DLA Piper where, among other things, he helps big companies settle disputes with government agencies.



So with his background and all the friction between government and business these days, it makes sense to ask Sen. Mitchell why the public sector and the private sector just dont see eye to eye. For starters I asked Mitchell if President Obamas new proposals aimed at opening up competition for consumers last week, starting with set top boxes, amounts to a war on business? I don't. First of all, in our society we have a tendency to overuse the word "war." We have had wars on just about everything... mosquitoes now, too.



"I think that we have been a remarkably successful society. The United States, despite our many serious imperfections, remains, in my judgment, the most free, the most open, the most just, the most innovative and the most successful society in all of human history. And I expect that to continue. One reason for that is that we have found, roughly, the proper amount of government regulation of a democratic capitalist society that has enabled innovation, development, massive creation of wealth, unfortunately now not fully distributed throughout the whole society. That's something that I think we do have to deal with and we have to deal with the loss of employment created by technological advances in the world, a second industrial revolution, as I call it. But I don't think it's a war on business and I think what happens is that the degree of regulation fluctuates back and forth depending upon the political party and the circumstance of the time, but I think 90% of us agree on certain things."



OK, so with all this common ground, how come business and government dont seem to get along? Mitchell says it's because people tend to focus on differences rather than commonalities. When I was Senate Majority Leader we worked three years on the Clean Air bill. It was very complicated, very difficult," he says. "We negotiated for a long time. We reached agreement on almost all of it. And then the Washington Post ran a story mostly devoted to the differences. And when I spoke to the reporter I said "Gee, you know I worked so hard, we've gotten so much done, and to read your story you think it's all about the fighting.'" The Post reporter responding, saying the paper would never run a story with a headline like "Two million commuters made it safely to work today," but it will run plenty of headlines saying "Six people were killed in a car crash out on the highway."



"The settled issues, the really big issues, the values that have made America great, we don't really disagree about," Mitchell says. "It's on the margins. And so people tend to, news media and us as individuals, tend to focus on the discrepancies. I really don't mean to say that there are no differences. There are differences, they're real and substantial and they change over time. But many things that are ferociously contested in one era are settled and accepted in others as s society changes, as business practices change, you move on to other things.



He gave two examples of instances of government action where business was initially hostile, but later came around. First: When President Franklin Roosevelt created a raft of government agencies, specifically the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934 -- he was accused of waging a war on business. "I would argue, and I believe that many historians and economists would also say, that the creation of the SEC was good for capitalism and good for American business because it introduced some degree of assurance of fairness and openness, transparency into the process, he says.



Second, Mitchell points out that child labor laws were hugely controversial one hundred years ago. There too, businesses strongly objected to the new rules, describing them as a "war on business." Of course today nobody thinks we shouldn't have child labor laws.



On the other hand, Mitchell says there have been things that the government has done that have gone too far that have been reversed, so we continue the battle on the margins.




Niketown London

Google says it has mapped "tens of thousands of stores" in the UK in an effort to link its online ads to driving in-store purchases.

Google first announced its "Store Visits" product within AdWords  its search advertising platform  in late 2014. It rolled out to the UK in the summer of last year.

The analytics tool determines whether a person who clicked on an ad went on to visit a store, using data from Google Maps users on Android and Apple devices who have their location history switched on.

The user's unique Google ID links the visit with an ad that has previously been served or clicked.

Google aggregates and anonymizes the data so advertisers don't know that a specific customer visited a particular location, but they can extrapolate whether their search advertising is lifting in-store sales in a meaningful way.

"Mapping" stores involves ensuring each retailer's Google Maps location is highly accurate, so it can pinpoint when a user actually entered the store (rather than stopping outside for a moment or visiting the store next-door.)

eileen naughton

Speaking to Business Insider at Advertising Week Europe in London on Monday, Google UK and Ireland managing director Eileen Naughton said it was encouraging how many retailers were already using the product.

She said: "We work hard to build tools that marketers use that actually drive respectful interactions with consumers because we've seen research show again and again that customers will allow you in if you bring them information  it could be an ad that's relevant  that's useful, helpful, and information. And if they calibrate their marketing communications well using [some of Google's] tools, they actually can bring more and more value to the consumer without being seen as intrusive."

Speaking earlier on stage at Advertising Week Europe, Naughton said automaker Hyundai used Google's Store Visits tool to attribute 4.9% of clicks on its paid mobile advertising to visits to its dealerships  a 1,700% return on investment.

Story continues

"Good players have 70-80% of their search investment containing some form of data layer," she added.

Over time, Naughton told Business Insider she expects Google to move from just offering in-store tools that determine after the fact whether someone has visited, to "dynamic ads being served [in-store] and prompting decisions."

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BRUSSELS, April 18 (Reuters) - The mission chiefs of Greece's lenders are set to resume talks in Athens after progress made in recent days with the aim of swiftly concluding a review of Greek reforms, the European Commission said on Monday.

"Following constructive talks in Washington, the mission chiefs are returning to Athens today and tomorrow. The aim of the mission remains to conclude the first review of the programme as soon as possible," a Commission spokesman told a news conference in Brussels.

International lenders and the Greek authorities were in contact last week in Washington during the International Monetary Fund's meetings.

(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; editing by Philip Blenkinsop)
* Kohl, driver of EU integration, sees right-wing Orban

* Kohl, Orban query Merkel's open-door policy on migrants

* Unfazed Merkel says Kohl-Orban talks "sensible and useful"

By Frank Simon

OGGERSHEIM, Germany, April 19 (Reuters) - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a fierce critic of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door refugee policy, and her ex-mentor Helmut Kohl agreed on Tuesday it was questionable whether Europe could continue to absorb migrants indefinitely.

Orban and Kohl issued a joint statement after the right-wing Hungarian leader paid a rare private visit to the 86-year-old Kohl, architect of Germany's 1990 reunification and a major driver of European integration in the 1990s.

Orban's meeting with Kohl, 86, who makes only rare public appearances and is largely wheelchair bound, stoked speculation that it was meant as a snub to Merkel and that Germany's foremost elder statesman disagrees with her course.

Trying to play down talk of any such rift, the Kohl-Orban statement said they and Merkel shared the overall objective of alleviating the humanitarian emergency represented by migrants but signalled differences over how to tackle the challenge.

"There is complete agreement on the goal," the two said in the statement issued by Kohl's office after the hour-long Orban visit to the conservative Christian Democrat's longtime home in Oggersheim near the Rhine river in southwestern Germany.

"It is about a good future for Europe and peace in the world. The efforts of (Merkel) point in the same direction."

But, they added, "how many people can Europe sensibly take in and in the end integrate? And what happens to the remaining millions of people in need around the world who cannot flee?"

Critics say Merkel's decision last year to let in Syrian refugees without restriction contributed to the arrival of more than 1 million asylum-seekers in Germany - the great majority of those reaching European Union territory - in the last year.

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HUNGARY SLAMS DOOR TO REFUGEES

By contrast, Orban's government has built a razor wire fence on Hungary's border with Serbia and Croatia to keep out mostly Muslim migrants, citing the need to help safeguard Europe's Christian civilization.

In a column published on Sunday in Berlin's Tagespiegel daily, Kohl said he did not think the EU could integrate millions of refugees. "The solution lies in the affected regions. It does not lie in Europe. Europe cannot become a new home for millions of people in need around the world," he wrote.

Merkel has acted of late to deter an uncontrolled influx of migrants into the EU and defuse intensifying criticism from her conservative Bavarian coalition ally and the public at large.

Last week, she agreed to require migrants granted residence rights to show willingness to integrate by learning German and seeking work or see their benefits cut. Her government has also introduced steps to speed up processing of applications and deportations of those refused permission to stay.

Neighbouring Austria as well as Balkan countries have also sealed their borders against undocumented migrants, cutting their overland route from Greece to Germany. The migrant flow has since ebbed and the pressure on Merkel has eased.

She appeared relaxed about Orban's visit with Kohl, saying the two had known each other a long time and the talks were "sensible and useful".

Orban presented Kohl with a Hungarian-language version of the former chancellor's book "Out of Concern for Europe".

Kohl governed from 1982 to 1998, during which the Berlin Wall fell and Communism collapsed in eastern Europe.

Merkel was his protege in the 1990s but their relations cooled after she called on the Christian Democrats (CDU) to break with their "old warhorse" over a party funding scandal. Since then, Kohl has voiced doubt about some of Merkel's policies, including her handling of the euro zone debt crisis.

(Reporting by Reuters Television, Thorsten Severin and Krisztina Than in Budapest; Writing by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
LONDON (Reuters) - Indonesian airline Garuda (GIAA.JK) has signed a 4 billion pound deal with planemaker Airbus (AIR.PA) and engine-maker Rolls-Royce (RR.L) to upgrade 14 A330 aircraft to the newer A330neo version of the jet, the British government said.

The deal was signed on Tuesday in London on the first day of Indonesian President Joko Widodo's visit to Britain, and announced by Downing Street in a statement which said it would boost Britain's economy.

The wings for Airbus planes are made in Britain and UK firm Rolls-Royce will make and service the engines for the jets.

The A330neo is a more fuel-efficient version of the Airbus A330 long-distance jet with new Trent 7000 engines from Rolls-Royce (RR.L), launched in 2014.

(Reporting by Sarah Young and Andy Bruce; editing by Kate Holton)
KUWAIT (Reuters) - Kuwait plans to boost crude oil production back to normal levels, despite an open-ended strike by Kuwaiti oil workers, an official from state refiner Kuwait National Petroleum Co (KNPC) was quoted as saying on Monday.

The Kuwaiti government has said it would take legal action against what it said were instigators of a strike by thousands of workers over planned public sector reforms which labor unions say will affect workers' benefits.

Khaled al-Asousi, KNPC's deputy chief executive for support services, told Dubai-based al-Arabiya television that output was now 1.1 million barrels per day -- the same as the first day of strike on Sunday -- but would be back at normal levels in coming days.

"We have several alternative plans - today some of the staff returned to their places of work. Partner companies are participating in the increase in production. The situation is reassuring."

Before the strike, Kuwaiti oil production was running at about 2.8 million bpd, Reuters data shows.

"We expect a big increase in crude inventory in the coming days and we have enough stocks for export and we have no fears of a stoppage of any shipment," Asousi said.

He also said: "Supplies of petroleum derivatives for the local market are enough for a whole month."

Asousi earlier said the country's current refinery output was between 510,000 and 520,000 barrels per day -- almost unchanged from Sunday, down from 930,000 bpd before the strike.

Unions have not said how long the walkout will last. Non-Kuwaiti workers in the industry are not on strike.

Union members contacted by Reuters on Monday said there had been no developments in the strike or talks with the government.

The government, at its weekly meeting, vowed to press ahead with legal action against what it called instigators of a strike it sees as harming the national interest.

Kuwait's acting oil minister Anas al-Saleh on Monday called oil sector workers to return to work, stressing that the reforms would not impact their basic rights, their salaries, gratuity and additional benefits.

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Al-Saleh also checked out stocks of petroleum products, which are enough for at least 30 days, he said in a statement on Kuwait state news agency Kuna.

At the workers' union headquarters in Kuwait's Ahmadi city, strikers gathered in tents despite rising temperatures that kept most of the public inside.

Protest banners reading "we will not compromise" and "no to a strategic alternative, the country is not for sale" were hung by workers who vowed to continue pickets, even if they were fewer in number than on Sunday.

"Workers in Kuwait Oil Company are determined ... We are convinced of all that we do, the workers have a legal right to strike," said Eman, an employee in KOC's administrative department.

She said her colleagues who were not participating in the strike were supportive of it but feared the consequences of walking out.

Abu Abdallah, another worker, questioned government threats to take legal action against organizers of the strike.

"I don't believe that Kuwait would do such a thing or turn into a police state," he told Reuters.

(Additional reporting by Hadeel Al Sayegh in Dubai; Writing by Katie Paul and Sami Aboudi,; Editing by David Evans and Louise Heavens)
Quito (AFP) - Oil-producing Ecuador has already taken a big hit from the drop in global crude prices, so the last thing it needed was the devastating earthquake that struck last weekend.

The 7.8-magnitude tremor, which killed at least 480 people, also reduced buildings along the country's Pacific coast to rubble, knocked down bridges and power pylons, and ripped up roads.

It is still too early for the government to give a firm estimate of reconstruction costs, but it looks like they will be enormous given the heavy damage, especially in tourism-dependent coastal towns like Pedernales, Manta and Portoviejo.

That will be a tough blow, as the government has been trying to push tourism as another source of hard currency to offset low oil prices.

"Pedernales will have to be rebuilt," President Rafael Correa said Monday during a visit to the town, as he listed especially hard-hit places that will need assistance.

On Tuesday, he said the long rebuilding effort could cost up to $3 billion.

Nature's timing with Saturday night's minute-long twitch of the earth was exquisitely bad for Ecuador.

The drop in oil prices and a fall in non-petroleum exports has already cost OPEC's smallest member billions of dollars.

Ecuador's exports have suffered in part because neighboring Colombia and Peru both devalued their currencies. That made their products cheaper for buyers in other countries, causing money to flow out of Ecuador and imports to roll back in.

The government had forecast the economy would expand by four percent last year but instead it grew by only 0.1 percent.

For this year, the official forecast is for one-percent growth, although the International Monetary Fund has predicted output will contract by a stunning 4.5 percent.

So far the government has earmarked $450 million for rebuilding, Vice President Jorge Glas told AFP, also during a visit to Pedernales.

Ecuador will also receive financing from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and other lenders, as well as aid from countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, Spain and Peru.

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- 'A really bad time' -

That will cover just part of the cost of rebuilding the hundreds of buildings, bridges, roads and other structures that were destroyed in the quake. Some had been built with free flowing money from the now-ended oil boom of recent years.

"An earthquake is always bad, but in this case it has caught Ecuador at a really bad time, with little money for the emergency," said Sebastian Oleas, a professor of economics at San Francisco de Quito University (USFQ).

One good thing is that the country's oil pipelines were not ruptured by the quake, nor were refineries damaged, according to government officials.

Airports in the quake-hit area are still up and running. And the areas most heavily damaged by the quake are not big contributors to GDP, said economist Alberto Acosta, of the Spurrier consulting group.

"In other words, this is not going to stop production or justify an economic contraction," said Acosta.

"But in these circumstances, rebuilding is going to be much more difficult, more costly, because there is no money," said Acosta, adding that the government would have to reallocate resources from other parts of the budget to help rebuild.

Out in the ruined streets of the quake-hit towns, the damage has a human face.

In Manta, 58-year-old Ruben Gallard saw the hotel and two grocery stores he owns come tumbling down.

"We lost everything. We do not even have clothes left. We lost our only source of revenue. We need help from somewhere," Gallard told AFP as he stood beside what remains of his hotel.
Christoph Mueller, CEO of Malaysia Airlines, speaks during a panel discussion at the 2015 International Air Transport Association (IATA) Annual General Meeting (AGM) and World Air Transport Summit in Miami Beach, Florida, U.S. June 8, 2015. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia Airlines Berhad's (MAB) Chief Executive and Managing Director Christoph Mueller will leave in September, well before the end of his three-year contract, the company said on Tuesday.

The airline said in a statement Mueller was leaving because of "his changing personal circumstances".

Mueller will serve a six-month notice period to September 2016 and has expressed his intention to the MAB board to remain as a non-executive director, the carrier said.

"We are very disappointed to lose Christoph as CEO but we fully understand his reasons and respect his need to do this," MAB Chairman Md Nor Yusof said.

MAB has begun a search for a new CEO and is considering both internal and external candidates, it said.

Mueller formally took charge in May last year to lead restructuring efforts at the airline formerly known as Malaysia Airlines Systems (MAS).

Malaysia state investor Khazanah took MAS private in 2014 as part of a 6 billion Malaysian ringgit (1.07 billion pound) restructuring aimed at returning the carrier to profit within three years.

MAS suffered twin disasters in 2014 after flight MH370, which was carrying 239 passengers and crew, disappeared in March. In July 2014 another flight, MH17, was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

(Reporting by Rozanna Latiff; Editing by Praveen Menon and David Goodman)
SYDNEY, April 19 (Reuters) - Michigan-based University Bank, a unit of University Bancorp, is planning a debut sale of Islamic bonds (sukuk), a rare sharia-compliant deal in the United States, according to the law firm advising on the transaction.

The community bank will sell an undisclosed amount of perpetual sukuk to raise its Tier 1 capital, paying a maximum annual profit rate of 5.75 percent, law firm Linklaters said in a statement late on Monday.

University Bank specialises in Islamic finance, including sharia-compliant mortgages, which follows religious principles such as a ban on gambling and outright monetary speculation.

The sukuk would be governed under the laws of New York state, the statement said. This contrasts with previous sukuk issued by U.S. entities, which have opted for offshore domiciles.

In 2006, Texas-based energy firm East Cameron issued a $165.67 million sukuk through a Cayman Islands vehicle.

GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric, tapped the market in 2009 with a $500 million sukuk domiciled in Bermuda to fund a lease-based aviation deal.

(Reporting by Bernardo Vizcaino; Editing by Sam Holmes)
WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - African Lion, the largest annual US joint military exercise in Africa, kicked off on Monday in Agadir, Morocco, less than a week after Morocco replaced Turkey and joined the Netherlands as new co-chair of the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF). The two milestones highlight the depth and breadth of Morocco's engagement on issues of security and counterterrorism.

First launched in the 90s as a biennial US-Morocco training exercise, African Lion is now an annually scheduled, bilateral military exercise sponsored by Morocco and US Africa Command "designed to improve interoperability and mutual understanding of each nation's tactics, techniques and procedures." In this year's iteration, US, Moroccan, German, Senegalese, Mauritanian, Italian, Spanish, Canadian, Dutch, British, and Tunisian troops will engage in military training through April 27. US service members completed a three-week intelligence training course for members of the Moroccan Royal Armed Forces and the Armed Forces of Mauritania last month in preparation for the exercise.

On Wednesday, April 13 at a meeting of the GCTF coordination committee, Morocco replaced Turkey and joined the Netherlands as new GCTF co-chair. Morocco and the Netherlands were previously co-chairs together of the Forum's Foreign Terrorist Fighters Working Group.

"Assuming this responsibility shows the clear, determined and constructive involvement of Morocco in the fight against terrorism," said Morocco's Minister Delegate to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation Nasser Bourita on the occasion. The GCTF, of which both Morocco and the US were founding members, was established with the mission of supporting the implementation of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy and to provide a venue for counterterrorism officials and practitioners to meet with their counterparts from around the world to share best practices and build capacity.

African Lion and the GCTF are just two of the many ways the US and Morocco coordinate on security measures. Designated as a "major non-NATO ally," Morocco was the first Maghreb country to be a member of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition. During the US-Africa Leaders Summit in August 2014, the two countries signed a Framework for Cooperation on Training for Civilian Security Services "to develop mutual expertise in the areas of crisis management, border security, and terrorism investigations to strengthen regional counterterrorism capabilities and to deny space to terrorists and terrorist networks." The framework also outlines steps to develop Moroccan training experts and then jointly train forces in partner countries in the Maghreb and Sahel -- a clear sign that the US continues to recognize Morocco's vital role in promoting stability and security in the region. Indeed in a joint statement issued after the third US-Morocco Strategic Dialogue held last year, the two countries expressed their commitment to security cooperation, with Secretary Kerry noting US "appreciation for Moroccos' leadership in countering violent extremism."

"Morocco's role at the Global Counterterrorism Forum and the continuation of African Lion confirm what the US has known since 1777, when Morocco became the first country to recognize the US's independence: Morocco is a staunch ally of the US and a leader on issues of security," said former US Ambassador to Morocco Edward M. Gabriel.

The Moroccan American Center for Policy (MACP) is a non-profit organization whose principal mission is to inform opinion makers, government officials, and interested publics in the United States about political and social developments in Morocco and the role being played by the Kingdom of Morocco in broader strategic developments in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

This material is distributed by the Moroccan American Center for Policy on behalf of the Government of Morocco. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC.
China steel

The US and China are preparing to enter a new, dangerous phase in their strained economic relationship, and in Washington, politicians are preparing for battle.

On Monday, the ranking member of the US Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) fired the first warning shot. In a statement, he accused China of distorting the commodities markets by flooding the market with goods, thereby suppressing price.

"Over the past few decades, China has used market-distorting subsidies and industrial policies to prop up their own industries and rip off American jobs," read Wyden's statement.

It continued:

Steel, tires, solar panels  the same story plays out over and over again. Too often, China's economy is not run by the markets  it's run by government committee. So even though its own State Council has called out the problem of "severe excess capacities," China clings to the same old, destructive policies.

Wyden's right: China has just begun to flood global markets with a glut of certain commodities  specifically, steel and aluminum, for now  that built up during the country's investment growth surge. This process is only going to expand to other commodities over time, and it's unclear when it will be over.

The thing is, what makes this a complicated issue is that China doesn't really have a choice in this matter. In fact, if it wants to become an economy that is actually driven by market factors rather than government planning, it has to sell all of this extra stuff it has lying around that it seems the world is no longer interested in.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the making of a good old-fashioned economic showdown. No one tell Donald Trump.

Steely, damn

China is trying to move its economy from one based on investment to one based on domestic consumption. That means old growth drivers in the country's economy have to die. Unfortunately, these drivers  mostly in manufacturing and commodities-based industries that have built up a lot of debt and supply since China's slowdown started in earnest  have fewer places to be sold.

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Of course, that doesn't mean China has turned off the machine. We're talking about massive industries employing millions of people that have to be wound down. Reuters reports that 5 million to 6 million Chinese people could be fired from coal and steel industries over the next few years.

People out of work is bad for the consumption-based model China is trying to build, and the slowdown happened faster than Chinese officials expected. So now, as they try to figure out how to shrink these industries as gently as possible, they're also firing them on all cylinders.

Aluminum is a great example. Check out this chart from Citi showing how production dropped off in early 2016, but then ramped up again:

china aluminum production

As Citi pointed out, this is the reversal of an agreed-upon production cut. Now, the bank expects China to have a surplus of aluminum in 2016. Some of that will feed the beast that is China's property market, which is also ramping up again to keep the economy going.

But part of that will also head out to the rest of the world.

"Chinese aluminum exports surged in March to 420kt, up 17% yoy and 50% mom, as restarts occurred," Citi analysts wrote.

Steel has a similar story. Prices have rallied from 2015 lows, mostly on a revival of China's bubbly property market, where sales of commercial and residential  excluding affordable housing  surged 60% from this time last year. Prices in first- and second-tier cities are surging. That usually leads a construction boom.

Conversely, other sectors where steel is used are just seeing "meh" demand.

"Among the six end-use sectors for domestic steel demand, both property construction and infrastructure saw steel demand continue to improve significantly in April, with the former approaching previous peaks in April 2014 and August 2013 and the latter significantly higher than previous peaks," wrote analysts at Macquarie in a recent note.

They continued: "The other four sectors, which are mostly flat steel product consumers, were however much calmer, with white goods and autos orders dropping moderately, while demand from shipping and machinery improved only slightly."

steel demand china macquarie survey

You can also see this in the fact that export demand has ticked up much less than domestic demand. Meanwhile, steel prices are still low.

Bringing it home

For better or worse, politicians around the world are starting to pick up on this issue. In the UK, politicians railed against Tata Steel when it rejected a reconstruction plan that would've stopped it from being sold abroad.

In the US, United Steel has said that it will lay off a quarter of its nonunion workforce because of "depressed steel prices and unfairly traded imports."

That is why Wyden wrote his letter.

It said:

In my judgment, the U.S. is badly in need of a safeguard against this economic tidal wave. That's why I'm standing in lockstep with my friend Leo Gerard and the United Steelworkers, who today filed a petition for relief under Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974. Without an immediate economic balm, the U.S. is in danger of losing thousands of good, family-wage jobs across the country.

And you know how the US needs its good-paying jobs these days. Both sides have a lot to lose here, and this going to get worse before it gets better.

Check out the full text of the letter below:

Wyden Statement on Senate Floor on Chinese Aluminum Market Manipulation

As Prepared for Delivery

WASHINGTON  Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., delivered the following statement on the Senate floor today calling on the administration to stand up to Chinas market-distorting trade policies and support a new case by the United Steelworkers to defend U.S. aluminum producers:

Over the past few decades, China has used market-distorting subsidies and industrial policies to prop up their own industries and rip off American jobs. Steel, tires, solar panels  the same story plays out over and over again. Too often, Chinas economy is not run by the markets  its run by government committee. So even though its own State Council has called out the problem of severe excess capacities, China clings to the same old, destructive policies. And today I want to address whats happening now with Chinas huge overcapacity of aluminum.

The amount of aluminum Chinese smelters are churning out has gone up by more than 1,200 percent in a decade and a half. In 2000 they produced 2.5 million metric tons. In 2015, China produced 32 million metric tons. When you create a glut of aluminum production the way China has, you send the markets into turmoil and do enormous harm to workers in the U.S.

I spoke last week at a public hearing held by the U.S. Trade Representative and the International Trade Commission about how the overproduction of steel in China is an urgent threat to steel jobs here in America. While Chinas steel mills are churning out more steel than ever, American steel towns are suffering or worse. Thousands of jobs nationwide have been lost just in the last year. Even though one third of all steel produced today has no buyer, China continues adding to the glut by producing more steel.

The same story is playing out in the case of primary aluminum: theres a huge overcapacity in China driven by market distorting government policies. And it unleashes a chain of events that ends in economic devastation across this country. Global aluminum prices have plummeted, undercutting American firms. Between the start of 2011 and this upcoming June, the lights will have gone out at nearly two thirds of the aluminum smelters in the U.S. More than 6,500 jobs will have been lost. And you can bet that sooner or later, the damage will ripple downstream through the entire aluminum industry, which employs nearly three quarters of a million Americans either directly or indirectly.

In my judgment, the U.S. is badly in need of a safeguard against this economic tidal wave. Thats why Im standing in lockstep with my friend Leo Gerard and the United Steelworkers, who today filed a petition for relief under Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974. Without an immediate economic balm, the U.S. is in danger of losing thousands of good, family-wage jobs across the country.

Its my view that the administration should act in this case as soon as possible to defend our workers and businesses from economic ruin. The U.S. and our trading partners must ramp up the pressure on China to stop overproduction. And our trade enforcers must take on the trade cheats using every tool in the box  including the ENFORCE Act, the Leveling the Playing Field Act, and the other measures my colleagues and I on the Finance Committee fought to get signed into law over the last year.

I firmly believe workers in Oregon and across this country can compete with anybody in the world. But the U.S. cannot afford to sit idly by and watch Chinas destructive policies cause our aluminum industry to be wiped out. Enough is enough. The Steelworkers are standing up and fighting back, and Im committed to standing with them.

NOW WATCH: A new simulator in China shows people what it's like to die and be reborn





More From Business Insider


Ever since it began to look as though Donald Trump might have an actual prayer of becoming president, there has been a steady stream of stories about foreign diplomats and other officials contacting their US counterparts to express their discomfort at the prospect of The Donald wielding the power of the White House.

However, a new survey by YouGov, working for the German business publisher Handelsblatt, found that there is at least one country in the G20 where Trump is the preferred candidate in a matchup between the billionaire, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

That country, it will come as little surprise to anyone who has followed the long-distance flirtation between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, is Russia.

Related: Only the Best? Why Trump Is Shaking Up His Campaign

In fact, it wasnt even close. The Russian people surveyed by YouGov supported Trump over Clinton by a margin of 21 percent. For reference, Trumps next-best showing in the poll was in China, where he lost to Clinton by 12 points -- a 33-percentage point swing.

Mexico, unsurprisingly given Trumps antagonistic stance toward the USs southern neighbor, was the most likely to prefer Clinton to Trump, with a margin of 54 percent. However, north of the border Clinton didnt do nearly as well. Canadians gave her the nod over the former reality television star by only 17 points.

Related: Let the Games Begin -- Republicans Begin Fight Over Convention Rules

That Trump should do well in Russia is no doubt due in part to Putins favorable public remarks about him. The Russian president has praised Trumps business acumen and touted him as the clear leader in the race to be the next president.

Trump, for his part, ate it up, and has frequently noted that Putin referred to him as brilliant last year. He also appeared to defend the Russian strongman against allegations that a suspicious number of journalists have turned up dead in Russia during Putins rule.

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Trump insists that as president, he would form a strong bond with Putin, and uses the Russian leaders comments as proof. However, theres a fairly persuasive argument that in talking up a brash billionaire, Putin is just returning to his KGB roots with a little light trolling of the US establishment.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Panama President Juan Carlos Varela arrives after a meeting with various ambassadors to Panama to deliver a speech to the nation at the Foreign Affairs building in Panama City April 6, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso

By Minami Funakoshi

TOKYO (Reuters) - Panama will adopt international tax reporting standards and participate in the automatic exchange of tax information by 2018, President Juan Carlos Varela told Japanese media on Tuesday, as his country came under a harsh spotlight in the wake of revelations arising from the "Panama Papers" controversy.

"To prevent the illegal use of Panama's financial systems, we would like to cooperate with other countries to improve transparency," Valera told broadcaster NHK on Tuesday, during a visit to Tokyo.

Members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which helped establish the information-exchange scheme, will visit Panama as early as this week to negotiate specific methods for sharing information, Varela told the Nikkei newspaper.

The agreement on automatically swapping tax information, which around 100 countries have now joined, is due to come into effect in 2017.

The leak of thousands of confidential documents from a Panamanian law firm earlier this month highlighted Panama's failure to cooperate in international efforts to clamp down on tax evasion by the rich and powerful.

Valera's comment comes after OECD chief Jose Angel Gurria said on Thursday that Panama has decided to adopt international tax reporting standards.

Panama will also set up a committee of six to eight domestic and foreign experts within six months to make the Panamanian financial system more transparent, Valera told several Japanese media.

(Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
BRUSSELS, April 19 (Reuters) - Portugal is at risk of breaking European Union budget rules, European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told a news briefing on Tuesday, adding that an updated assessment would be issued by the EU executive in May.

Dombrovskis said that based on the Commission's forecasts from February for Portugal's economic performance and an assessment measures the government proposed then, the country could be in breach of the rules - the Stability and Growth Pact.

"On the fiscal situation ... the Commission considers that the government plans are at risk of non-compliance with the provisions of the Stability and Growth Pact," Dombrovskis said.

Portugal is aiming to reduce its budget deficit to 2.2 percent of GDP this year from 4.4 percent in 2015 and believes it is on track to do that.

The International Monetary Fund believes Lisbon will have to implement more measures to achieve that goal.

The Commission will make its assessment in May on the basis of final 2015 fiscal data for Portugal that will be published by the EU statistics office on Thursday and on the basis of its own forecasts as well as projections of the Portuguese government.

(Reporting By Jan Strupczewski)
How Is Eni Restructuring Its Business Model?

(Continued from Prior Part)

Enis cash flow from operations, investing, and financing

In 2015, Enis (E) cash flow from operations stood at 12 billion euros, falling from 15 billion euros in 2014. Enis cash outflow from investing stood at 11 billion euros in 2015, a rise over 9 billion euros in 2014.

Enis cash flow from financing activities mainly consisted of changing debt levels and shareholder returns in the form of dividend payments. Enis dividend yield currently stands at 6.1%. Enis peer ExxonMobils (XOM) dividend yield stands at 3.5%.

Comparatively, BP (BP) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) have higher dividend yields of 8.1% and 8.0%, respectively. For exposure to high-dividend stocks, you can consider the iShares Core High Dividend ETF (HDV). The ETF has ~20% exposure to energy sector stocks.

Analyzing Enis cash flow strategy

In 2015, Eni generated 12 billion euros in cash from operations, but it had a cash outflow of 14 billion euros in the form of investments (mainly capital expenditure) and 3.5 billion euros in the form of dividend payments, amounting to a total of 17.5 billion euros in cash outflow.

How did Eni make up the difference?

Due to lower cash flow from operations, Eni had to resort to asset sales and the issuance of fresh debt to make up for the difference of 5.5 billion euros in cash flows. Eni executed divestments to the tune of 3 billion euros in 2015. In the same year, it raised 2 billion euros worth of additional debt. The remaining cash was drawn from its cash reserves.

How long can this strategy be maintained?

If oil prices remain subdued for an extended period, Eni cannot perpetually raise debt to fund its capital expenditure and dividends. Going forward, higher production could improve Enis cash flow from operations, but the degree of improvement will mainly depend on the level of oil prices.

If oil prices remain low, Enis cash flow from operations will feel the pressure. If cash flows dont improve, Eni will likely not be able to maintain its current levels of capital expenditure and dividends.

Story continues

Continue to Next Part

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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia needs economic reforms but should not rush them through, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday, balancing reassuring words for business with promises to ease the economic pain for ordinary people.

Many economists and investors argue that Russia's economy, now in its second year of recession, badly needs reforms to improve its business climate, reduce its dependence on volatile commodity prices and improve over-stretched government finances.

That may require potentially unpopular measures, such as cutbacks in spending on pensions and the defence industry, which the Kremlin has been reluctant to implement.

In an annual address to parliament summing up the work of the government, Medvedev repeated previous promises to pursue reforms. But in a sign of the political difficulty of implementing painful changes, he said they should not be too fast.

"Yes, the country needs deep structural reforms. The government understands this well," he said.

"But it also understands how this is now being reflected in the social sphere. Any forced transformations would strengthen and lengthen the crisis phenomena for several years."

"We will not conduct reforms at the expense of people," Dmitry Medvedev said to rapturous applause.

His caution highlights the government's worries about the political consequences of widespread economic hardships, a few months before parliamentary elections in September that will test the popularity of the pro-government United Russia party.

Although still the most popular party - helped by still high support for President Vladimir Putin - United Russia's support is declining and has fallen below 50 percent, according to weekly polls by the Public Opinion Foundation polling centre.

In another sign of the government's nervousness ahead of the election, Medvedev said there were no plans to revise this year's budget in the spring.

Government officials have previously said the budget would need to be revised to reflect lower-than-expected oil prices. Russian media have reported that the amendments will be delayed until after the elections.

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Medvedev also emphasised Russia's economic resilience in the face of tough conditions including low international oil prices, Western sanctions and unstable global markets, as well as structural economic problems at home.

"Our economy is adapting to new conditions," Medevdev said. "Two years ago it was fundamentally different, both in terms of structure and costs. Diversification of the economy is happening."

"We have in effect begun the creation of the prototype of the Russian economy of the next decade."

(Reporting by Darya Korsunskaya and Yelena Fabrichnaya; Writing by Jason Bush; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
(Adds details)

MOSCOW, April 19 (Reuters) - Russia needs economic reforms but should not rush them through, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday, balancing reassuring words for business with promises to ease the economic pain for ordinary people.

Many economists and investors argue that Russia's economy, now in its second year of recession, badly needs reforms to improve its business climate, reduce its dependence on volatile commodity prices and improve over-stretched government finances.

That may require potentially unpopular measures, such as cutbacks in spending on pensions and the defence industry, which the Kremlin has been reluctant to implement.

In an annual address to parliament summing up the work of the government, Medvedev repeated previous promises to pursue reforms. But in a sign of the political difficulty of implementing painful changes, he said they should not be too fast.

"Yes, the country needs deep structural reforms. The government understands this well," he said.

"But it also understands how this is now being reflected in the social sphere. Any forced transformations would strengthen and lengthen the crisis phenomena for several years."

"We will not conduct reforms at the expense of people," Dmitry Medvedev said to rapturous applause.

His caution highlights the government's worries about the political consequences of widespread economic hardships, a few months before parliamentary elections in September that will test the popularity of the pro-government United Russia party.

Although still the most popular party - helped by still high support for President Vladimir Putin - United Russia's support is declining and has fallen below 50 percent, according to weekly polls by the Public Opinion Foundation polling centre.

In another sign of the government's nervousness ahead of the election, Medvedev said there were no plans to revise this year's budget in the spring.

Government officials have previously said the budget would need to be revised to reflect lower-than-expected oil prices. Russian media have reported that the amendments will be delayed until after the elections.

Story continues

Medvedev also emphasised Russia's economic resilience in the face of tough conditions including low international oil prices, Western sanctions and unstable global markets, as well as structural economic problems at home.

"Our economy is adapting to new conditions," Medevdev said. "Two years ago it was fundamantally different, both in terms of structure and costs. Diversification of the economy is happening."

"We have in effect begun the creation of the prototype of the Russian economy of the next decade." (Reporting by Darya Korsunskaya and Yelena Fabrichnaya; Writing by Jason Bush; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
JAKARTA, April 19 (Reuters) - Southeast Asian stock markets

traded mixed on Tuesday with the Thai index extending gains to

close at its highest since Nov. 4, while stocks in the

Philippines were down amid uncertainty ahead of a presidential

election in May.

Thailand's SET index gained 1.2 percent, with shares

of Siam Cement PCL rising 4.7 percent to their highest

since Oct. 2015. Siam Cement gained 3.6 percent on Monday when

Nomura raised its target price for the stock.

The Thai benchmark rose for a fifth session on Tuesday.

"Much of the investors' attention may now be shifting to

earnings as the first-quarter earnings season is just around the

corner," broker Phillip Capital in Bangkok said in a note.

"In our view, Thai stocks are no longer cheap after the SET

index's FY16 forward P/E has climbed back to 15x, but we believe

earnings plays may support the market's downside," it said.

Some financial companies in Thailand have started reporting

earnings this week.

Taking cues from an Asian stocks rally, Singapore's Straits

Times Index rose 1.2 percent, closing at its highest

since Nov. 12.

MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan

was up 1 percent.

Meanwhile, the Philippine stock index fell 0.4

percent, extending losses to a third day, amid political

uncertainty.

"Locally, volumes are expected to remain subdued as

investors continue to take a wait and see attitude with

elections nearing in less than three weeks," SB Equities said in

a note to clients.

A presidential election in the Philippines could go down to

the wire after an offensive gaffe by front-runner Rodrigo

Duterte about a rape victim caused outrage and could mean a loss

of crucial swing votes with just three weeks to go.

Stocks in Malaysia fell 0.4 percent, while those in

Indonesia rose 0.3 percent.

For Asian Companies click;

SOUTHEAST ASIA STOCK MARKETS

Change on day

Market Current Prev close Pct move

Singapore 2951.81 2917.75 1.17

Kuala Lumpur 1711.15 1717.68 -0.38

Bangkok 1416.00 1398.77 1.23

Story continues

Jakarta 4881.93 4865.53 0.34

Manila 7215.09 7243.4 -0.39

Ho Chi Minh 568.28 579.86 -2.00

Change on year

Market Current End 2015 Pct move

Singapore 2951.81 2882.73 2.40

Kuala Lumpur 1711.15 1692.51 1.10

Bangkok 1416 1288.02 9.94

Jakarta 4881.93 4593.008 6.29

Manila 7215.09 6952.08 3.78

Ho Chi Minh 568.28 579.03 -1.86

(Reporting by Fransiska Nangoy; Editing by Biju Dwarakanath)
A general view of a cargo terminal at the Port of Barcelona, in this October 23, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Albert Gea/Files

By Sarah White

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's caretaker government on Tuesday said it aimed to cut the public deficit this year and next at a slower pace than originally agreed with Brussels, after a wide miss on 2015 targets left it scrambling to plug a budget gap.

Madrid wants to whittle down the deficit to 3.6 percent of economic output in 2016 from a previous target of 2.8 percent, which would have met the 3 percent threshold recommended by the European Commission.

It projects that goal will now only be reached in 2017, with a deficit at 2.9 percent of gross domestic product instead of the 1.4 percent previously forecast.

The acting centre-right government - in place since an inconclusive national election in December left parties short of a majority and unable to agree on a coalition - said sticking to the original targets could hurt an economic recovery.

"It would have required a very significant budget adjustment," acting Economy Minister Luis de Guindos told parliament.

He confirmed Spain was lowering its annual growth forecasts for 2016 to 2.7 percent from 3 percent previously, and citing a slowdown in the world economy.

"The new budget plan is in line with the situation we had at the end of 2015 and will allow us to reduce the deficit without putting the pace of growth at risk," he said.

In spite of spending cuts by the previous People's Party (PP) administration and a rebound over the past two years after a prolonged recession, Spain has struggled to bring its public deficit in line with Brussels' demands.

Tax cuts brought in months before the December election partly contributed to a wide deficit miss last year.

Spanish regions, which manage their own budgets in areas such as education and healthcare, also overspent, driving the deficit to 5 percent of gross domestic product rather than the 4.2 percent target agreed with the European Commission.

In a joint statement with the European Central Bank, the Commission warned on Tuesday that Spain's efforts to cut the deficit, one of the highest in the euro zone, had dwindled.

Story continues

"The needed progress on fiscal consolidation has come to a halt, with part of the structural adjustment implemented in earlier years being reversed," they said.

Further reforms were needed to rebalance the economy, they added, in a country still suffering from one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe, at 20 percent of the workforce.

The political stalemate has stifled momentum for further structural changes this year, however, and the prospect of fresh elections at the end of June if parties cannot agree on a government this month would suppose more delays.

Brussels has yet to formally sign off on the new deficit goals envisaged by Madrid.

Spain's acting government has also tweaked forecasts for its public debt to GDP ratios, elevating the 2016 target to 99.1 percent of output from 98.5 percent previously, and the 2017 goal to 99.0 percent from 96.5 percent.

(Addtional reporting by Paul Day and Robert Hetz in Madrid and John O'Donnell in Frankfurt; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden's Financial Supervisory Authority said on Tuesday it - and not the central bank - should get an expanded role in policing the economy, deepening a rift between the two over who should take charge in heading off any future financial crisis.

With soaring household debt levels and real estate prices, Sweden has been locked in a debate about how to prevent imbalances from building up and threatening the health of the economy.

A report earlier this year recommended that the government review both the Riksbank's mandate and the framework for financial oversight, giving the central bank more power, a move the Financial Supervisory Authority rejected.

"The responsibility for macro prudential oversight should lie with the FSA," FSA Director General Erik Thedeen and Chairman Sven-Erik Osterberg said in a signed article in daily Dagens Nyheter.

"The Riksbank's independent role is suitable for monetary policy, but not for decisions where clearly political considerations are necessary."

The FSA said that Sweden's Financial Stability Council, which comprises the watchdog, the Riksbank, the Finance Ministry and Debt Office, should have a key role and that democratic oversight of measures that would impact the wallets of ordinary Swedes was necessary.

The two agencies have been locked in a battle over financial oversight following the financial crisis of 2008. The government handed financial policing powers to the FSA in 2013.

But the lack of measures to head off a damaging housing bubble has frustrated the Riksbank and the two agencies have repeatedly clashed.

Earlier this year, FSA chief Thedeen sent a letter to the Riksbank complaining that the central bank was stepping on the watchdog's toes over regulating banks' liquidity requirements.

The FSA said tighter mortgage rules - delayed by uncertainty over the watchdog's legal powers - were now on the way, but that more might be needed to cool the housing market.

"The FSA, therefore, needs broader powers," Thedeen and Osterberg said.

Story continues

In its response to the monetary policy review by former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King and U.S. academic Marvin Goodfriend, the Riksbank said it should be given more power over financial oversight, although it did not go into specific details.

Both the FSA and the Riksbank said the watchdog's powers should be clarified, while the government undertakes a review of the framework for macro prudential oversight and the Riksbank's mandate.

(Reporting by Simon Johnson; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter (L) meets with United Arab Emirates Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces Mohammed bin Zayed in Abu Dhabi on April 19, 2016 (AFP Photo/Senior Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz) (DoD/AFP)

Riyadh (AFP) - The United States is seeking greater special forces and naval cooperation with the Gulf states to counter Iran's "destabilising activities" in the region, a senior American official said.

Defence Secretary Ashton Carter, who arrived in the Saudi capital on Tuesday, will meet his Gulf counterparts on Wednesday.

The following day he is expected to join President Barack Obama at a summit with monarchs of the six Gulf Cooperation Council states.

They will gather in an atmosphere of tension with regional leaders offended by Obama's perceived reluctance to get involved in the region's problems, and in particular his tilt towards Iran.

The Sunni Gulf monarchies are worried after the lifting this year of international sanctions against their regional rival, Shiite Iran, under an international agreement to curb Tehran's nuclear programme.

Riyadh and its neighbours fear the US-supported deal will only embolden Iran which they accuse of interference throughout the Middle East.

Over the past 15 years the US has sold combat aircraft to Gulf states, but the senior American defence official said Iran's activities "won't be countered" in that way.

Rather, "special operations forces and maritime interdiction" are needed, he said.

The US is proposing to help train Gulf special forces and to develop their naval capacity to prevent Iran from supplying Shiite groups that it supports in the region, the official said.

In "just over a six month period we and our coalition partners were able to interdict four weapon shipments off the coast of Yemen", he said.

The United States provides precision-guided weapons and intelligence support to a Saudi-led military coalition that intervened in Yemen 13 months ago to support the government against Iran-backed rebels.

Royal Saudi Air Force jets, many of them US-made F-15s, have carried out intensive air strikes against the rebels and their allies. The coalition maintains a naval blockade of Yemen.

Story continues

Carter will also repeat to his GCC counterparts the importance of increased support for Iraq, where the government is trying to reconquer territory seized by the Islamic State group of Sunni extremists.

"We are urging them to come in... provide funds and support, both political and economic, to the Iraqi government," the American official said.

Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Iraq presented his credentials in January, re-establishing relations a quarter-century after they were cut following ex-president Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.

"In a perfect world, we would see full diplomatic normalisation between all Gulf countries and the Iraqi government," the official said.

"There has been some reluctance among the Gulf states".

On Monday in Baghdad, Carter announced new US support for the Iraqi government, including the deployment of an additional 217 military personnel.

The Gulf Cooperation Council includes Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman.
trump pledge

Donald Trump has spent much of the past few days bellowing about the "rigged" Republican nominating process, taking his on-and-off feud with the Republican National Committee to new heights.

It comes even as he looks to cruise to a big victory Tuesday in his home state of New York, further cementing his status as the party's frontrunner.

The real-estate mogul has bemoaned the party's delegate-selection process. It has been dominated by Ted Cruz, the Texas senator nipping at Trump's heels for the party's nomination.

The past two weekends left Trump and his campaign with significant setbacks. First, Colorado's Republican Party held a convention in which Cruz won all of its delegates.

Then, last weekend, during what Politico called a "massacre" and a "delegate bloodbath" for the Manhattan billionaire, Cruz delegates were elected en masse in Georgia, Wyoming, South Carolina, Kansas, and Florida caucuses and conventions.

The three Southern states were key Trump victories in their primary contests, while Cruz won in Kansas' caucuses and Wyoming's convention.

Trump has helped push turnouts in primary and caucus contests to new heights in the Republican Party. But the growing number of delegates that are becoming entrenched in Cruz's camp could provide Trump with significant trouble heading into July's Republican National Convention.

If Trump is unable to secure the nomination by entering the convention with the requisite 1,237 delegates, it'd be increasingly unlikely that he'll be able to grow his delegate total after a theoretical first ballot. Meanwhile, Cruz is theoretically positioned well to gain ground in potential subsequent ballots.

Trump has railed on the process at his rallies, during media appearances, and, of course, on Twitter.

"Lyin' Ted Cruz can't get votes (I am millions ahead of him) so he has to get his delegates from the Republican bosses," Trump tweeted Sunday. "It won't work!"

Story continues

"Lyin' Ted Cruz can't win with the voters so he has to sell himself to the bosses-I am millions of VOTES ahead! Hillary would destroy him & K," he posted early Monday, referring to Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus leaves the stage after addressing the Faith and Freedom Coalition

Top Republican officials have sought to diminish Trump's rhetoric with indirect barbs toward the party frontrunner.

Last week, after Trump suggested the process of selecting delegates at statewide conventions rather than through a popular-vote system was a "crooked deal," RNC Chair Reince Priebus shot back.

"Nomination process known for a year + beyond," Priebus tweeted late Tuesday. "It's the responsibility of the campaigns to understand it. Complaints now? Give us all a break."

RNC spokesman Sean Spicer made a similar argument as Priebus during a Fox News appearance Tuesday.

"Not understanding that is one thing, but it's hardly rigged when it's done right out in the open," he said.

Trump's effort to collect delegates ahead of the Republican National Convention has been hindered, according to experts and outside accounts, by his team misunderstanding certain rules and making clerical errors, and, perhaps most importantly, by the stronger ground game and organization of the Cruz campaign.

Paul Manafort, tasked by Trump to run his convention strategy and improve his delegate-accumulation strategy, suggested earlier this month that Cruz used "Gestapo tactics" to shut out Trump in Colorado. He said the campaign will be filing "several protests" over results in at least Colorado and Missouri.

But some Trump advisers have apparently been more willing to admit that they were simply out-gunned in other states, like Wyoming.

"The Allies didn't invade every Japanese island," campaign adviser Alan Cobb told CNN last weekend. "We skipped some to get to the prize."

For his part, Cruz accused the Trump campaign of acting like "union-boss thugs" as tensions between Trump and the RNC have flared up.

"There are all sorts of different behaviors they display, but one of them is projection, that the conduct they do regularly they accuse everyone else of doing," Cruz told CNN's Anderson Cooper during a town-hall event last Wednesday.

"So literally, in the last few weeks, Donald's team ... was threatening to out the hotel rooms of delegates who dared to cross Trump so they could be intimidated," he continued. "They're acting like union-boss thugs."

In one particularly loaded example, the chair of the Colorado Republican Party reportedly claimed that he's received death threats from Trump supporters.

Donald Trump

Ahead of Tuesday's big New York primary, where Trump is expected to win almost all of the 95 delegates in play, New York GOP strategist Evan Siegfried told Business Insider that the past week was a referendum on the true weakness of the Trump campaign's ground game.

"While the majority of Trump supporters and people who don't pay as much attention to how the process works are seeing this and saying, 'Wait a minute, something's rotten in the state of Denmark,' the reality is these are complex rules that were put in place months ago, which every campaign is subject to," he said. "They weren't put in place to go against Trump or go against Kasich."

"Every campaign knew these were the rules and if you want to take advantage of them, you're going to have to be on the ground," he continued. "And Trump is just trying to make excuses for his own inadequate ground game. When push comes to shove, he can whine all he wants, but the real person he has to blame is himself."

Siegfried added that Trump's struggles have exposed him as a potentially flawed general-election candidate.

"And I think this shows that if Trump gets the nomination, he's going to have real problems competing in all 50 states," he said. "And this is going to make it harder for the Republicans to win not only the White House but maintain control of the House and the Senate in November."

NOW WATCH: Watch Trump accidentally refer to '9/11' as '7/11' at a New York rally





More From Business Insider


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House expressed confidence on Monday that Saudi Arabia would not follow through on a reported threat to sell U.S. assets if Congress passed a bill that could hold the kingdom responsible for any role in al Qaeda's Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The New York Times reported on Friday that Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir told U.S. lawmakers that the country would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other U.S. assets in response to the bill if it passed. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama did not support the legislation and would not sign it. The bill would allow the Saudi government to be sued in a U.S. court for any role in the Sept. 11 attacks. "I'm confident that the Saudis recognise, just as much as we do, our shared interest in preserving the stability of the global financial system," Earnest told reporters. Obama, who is travelling to Saudi Arabia later this week, said he opposes the bill because it could expose the United States to lawsuits from citizens of other countries. "If we open up the possibility that individuals in the United States can routinely start suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States to being continually sued by individuals in other countries," Obama said in an interview broadcast on CBS News on Monday. Most of the 19 attackers on Sept. 11, 2001 were Saudi nationals who hijacked four planes and flew them into New York City's World Trade Center, the Pentagon near Washington and into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers revolted. The attack was mounted by the al Qaeda militant group, then based in Afghanistan. No U.S. investigation to date has reported finding evidence of Saudi government support for the attacks. The debate over the congressional legislation has gained traction on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, has broken with the Democratic administration and said she supported the bill. Her rival, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said he shared the Obama administration's concern that the legislation could open up the United States to liability from other countries but said it was important to look into any potential Saudi role in the attacks. "I think its important to have a full investigation and an understanding of the role, the possible role, of the Saudi government in 9/11," he said on NBC's "Today" programme. Clinton and Sanders' remarks on the issue on Monday came on the day before New York state's Democratic primary, a crucial race for both candidates. The bill, which has 22 co-sponsors, passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, but it has not come up for a vote in the Republican-dominated Senate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells office said on Monday that no vote has been scheduled. Family members of victims who were killed in the September 2001 attacks urged Obama to support the legislation and to bring up the issue on his trip. "It is not acceptable ... to succumb to the demands of a foreign government that we abandon principles of American justice while we pursue our diplomatic goals," they wrote in a letter to Obama that was released to the media. In September, a U.S. judge dismissed claims against Saudi Arabia by families of victims of the attacks, saying the kingdom had sovereign immunity from damage claims. (Reporting by Jeff Mason, Timothy Gardner, Patricia Zengerle, Susan Heavey, Steve Holland, Eric Beech and Idrees Ali; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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No more pipelines jumping on the bed.B.C. Orders Enbridge to Seek New Environment Certificate for Northern GatewayEnbridge will have to secure an environmental assessment certificate from the B.C. government if it wants to proceed with its Northern Gateway oil pipeline according to an order issued by B.C.s Environmental Assessment Office on Friday.Early on in the Northern Gateway process, the B.C. government signed an equivalency agreement with the federal government, giving Ottawa the responsibility for the environmental assessment.However, a Supreme Court of B.C. decision this January found that the B.C. government acted improperly and that the province must still make its own decision about issuing an environmental assessment certificate.In a letter to Enbridge posted last week, B.C.s Environmental Assessment Office states that it will accept the National Energy Boards (NEB) joint review panel report as the assessment report, but it will carry out its own consultation with Aboriginal groups  if and when Enbridge indicates its ready to proceed (its clear Enbridge must make a move here).The big open questions are what does consultation look like and how will that impact their decision? said Eugene Kung, staff counsel at West Coast Environmental Law. Are they just going through the motions to issue a certificate?The B.C. government formally opposed the project in its final argument to the NEB panel.How do they incorporate their own previously stated opposition to the project? Kung asked. It seems hard to imagine them issuing a certificate given their previously stated positions.The provinces letter states that no decisions will be made on any permit applications related to the construction or operation of Northern Gateway until a decision on the environmental assessment certificate has been made.That calls into question the projects existing federal environmental assessment certificate, which has several conditions attached including one that stipulates that Northern Gateway must have proven firm supply contracts accounting for 60 per cent of capacity by July 1, 2016. Further to that, Northern Gateways certificate will expire by December 31, 2016, unless it begins construction.While the Enbridge Northern Gateway project is widely seen as dead  with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promising to legislate a ban on oil tankers on B.C.s north coast  the latest news raises questions about Kinder Morgans Trans Mountain pipeline proposal.The province of B.C. signed the same equivalency agreement for the review of Trans Mountain, but will now need to make a decision on issuing its own provincial environmental assessment certificate and needs to consult with affected First Nations on that decision.The province also opposed the Trans Mountain project in its final argument to the joint review panel.Enbridge Northern Gateway would transport 525,000 barrels of bitumen per day from Alberta to Kitimat, where it would be loaded onto tankers bound for Asia.Kinder Morgans Trans Mountain expansion would triple the capacity of that pipeline, allowing for the transport of 590,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta to Burnaby, where it would also be loaded onto tankers bound primarily for Asia.
NEBRASKA CITY -- Barb Fife, whose mother taught her to sew while she was growing up on a farm near Auburn, Neb., will show her applique quilts during the April 26 meeting of the Heritage Needlework Guild in Nebraska City.

Fife, who moved to Olathe, Kan., after accepting a job with the Federal Aviation Administration after her college graduation, now works part-time and teaches classes at Prairie Point quilt store in Shawnee, Kan. Her quilts have been included in books by a number of noted quilters, including Barbara Brackman, a widely known quilt historian who authored an encyclopedia of historic quilt patterns.

According to her mother, Fife always had a sewing project in her hands while she was growing up. She sewed her first quilt, a double wedding ring pattern, while she was still in junior high, using scraps from her mother's sewing bag.

Today she enjoys making quilts for her three grandchildren and other family. Her "Pineapple Geese" quilt won Best of Show at the Kansas State Fair in 2000, while "Black Beauty 2" won Best of Show at the Johnson County, Kan., Fair in 2006 and later hung at the Houston quilt show. "Japanese Fans" was displayed at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Ky., in 2006. She taught at Quilt Nebraska, the annual convention of the Nebraska State Quilters Guild, in 2015.

Heritage Needlework Guild meetings are held on the fourth Tuesday of the month at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church at 314 S. 16th St. in Nebraska City. Meetings begin with a social gathering at 6:30 p.m. with the program starting at 7 p.m.

Guests are welcome to attend meetings. Membership is open to those interested in quilting and other forms of needlework.
One of Plattsmouths most notable native sons has to be illustrator, John Philip Falter.

Born in Plattsmouth in 1910, Falter moved with his family to Falls City in 1916. There his father, George H. Falter, established a clothing store.

By the time John was in high school, he had created a comic strip, Down Thru the Ages, published by the Fall City Journal.

His cartoons drew the attention of J.N. Darling, a Pulitzer Prize-winning artist, who urged John to become an illustrator.

After graduating from high school, Falter attended the Kansas City Art Institute. He also studied at the Grand Central School of Art, and eventually illustrated covers for pulp magazines.

Inspired by Norman Rockwell, the Plattsmouth-born artist shared a studio with Harris Clarke and Richard E. Lyon.

After enlisting in the Navy during World War II and designing more than 300 recruiting posters, Falter began a 25-year relationship with the Saturday Evening Post illustrating more than 120 covers for the magazine.

Like Rockwell, he painted what he knew the best, life in small-town America.

Falls City has immortalized the artist by opening the John Philip Falter Museum, 17th and Stone Street downtown, in 2015.

This spring, Nebraska Tourism Commission selected the museum as one of 80 sites in its 2016 Passport Program.

This years program runs from Sunday, May 1, through Friday, Sept. 30, said Dobey Falter Haws, a promoter of the museum and distant relative of Falter. The museum is also celebrating its first anniversary May 1.

Because Falters origins trace back to Plattsmouth, Haws hopes local history buffs will visit the museum in Falls City.

The museum will be open 1-4 p.m. Sundays through Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. starting May 1.

Haws said the Falter Museum is also sponsoring an art walk 5-8 p.m. Friday, April 29.

A new jazz exhibit begins that evening featuring prints and original paintings by John Falter, some of which are on loan from Nebraska State Historical Society in Lincoln, she said.

People are encouraged to stop by for refreshments and hear some recordings by Fall s Citys native son and renowned jazz trumpet player, George Pee Wee Erwin.

For more information on this exciting and fun passport program and to learn how to get your passport and win prizes, go to www.nebraskapassport.com

For more information about the Falter Museum and its events, please contact Haws at 402.450.3724 or at dobey.haws@gmail.com.

Visit Facebook and at the website: johnphilipfaltermuseum.com
A North Bend man was sentenced to serve prison time Monday morning in Dodge County District Court.

Zachary Renard, 21, pleaded no contest and was found guilty on Dec. 28, 2015, of third-degree assault of an officer, a Class IIIA felony. On that same date, additional charges of resisting arrest second offense, a Class IIIA felony, and a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct were dropped.

On Monday, Renard was sentenced by District Court Judge Geoffrey Hall to serve one year in the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services, followed by a mandatory three years of parole.

The defendant was credited with serving 257 days in Saunders County Jail and under the Nebraska Good Time Law, Renard could be eligible for release in six months.

Renard, who has also been convicted of a sexual assault charge in Platte County, was arrested on Aug. 5, 2015, when Dodge County Sheriffs Office deputies were dispatched to the 200 block of East Ninth Street in North Bend in regard to a disturbance complaint, court records show.

Upon arrival, deputies found Renard, one male and one female  his brother and mother  in a physical altercation on the floor of the home. Records show that Renard was separated from the altercation and continued to be aggressive and resistant.

After being taken into custody, Renard was transported to Fremont Health Medical Center to be examined for possible bodily injury where he continued to be uncooperative.

Medical examination led to the discovery that Renard was under the influence of both alcohol and narcotics, court records show.

After being cleared to leave Fremont Health Medical Center, records show Renard attempted to flee from deputies, kicking one in the leg while they attempted to restrain him.

In other District Court news:

*A Norfolk woman was sentenced to serve 300 days in the Saunders County Jail following a joint recommendation from her defense attorney and the prosecution.

Tanya Hernandez, 33, pleaded no contest and was found guilty of being in possession of a controlled substance  methamphetamine, a Class IV felony.

Court records show that a traffic stop was conducted on Feb. 16 by a Dodge County Sheriffs deputy after it was determined that Hernandez vehicle was traveling faster than the posted speed limit.

During the stop, a plastic baggy contacting methamphetamine was located, and Hernandez was arrested.

The defendant was credited with 17 days served and under the Nebraska Good Time Law, Hernandez could be eligible for release in 150 days.
Sigma Theta Tau International is the only honor society for the nursing profession with more than 486 chapters in more than 90 countries and territories and an overall active membership of more than 130,000 nurses and future nurses.
The Nebraska Department of Roads will hold an Information Open House May 3 regarding proposed improvements to U.S. Highway 30 (US-30) between Rogers and Fremont in Dodge County.

Identified as Rogers to North Bend and North Bend to Fremont, the proposed projects would construct approximately 21 miles of four-lane expressway on new alignment between Rogers and Fremont.

An open house for the proposed projects will be held from 4-6 p.m. at the North Bend City Auditorium, 741 Main St., in North Bend.

Personnel from the Department of Roads will be available to answer questions, receive comments, and discuss any aspect of the proposed highway improvement projects. Information regarding the projects will be available after the meeting on the NDOR website at www.roads.nebraska.gov/projects/future-projects/ by clicking on the Rogers to Fremont link.
Today

DAV Mobile Service Office, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., DAV Joseph C. H. Bales Chapter 18, 137 N. D St., Fremont. Help from the mobile service office is free to all veterans and members of their families.

Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, noon, Chapter 5 Club, 136 N. Main St., Fremont.

Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, 5:15 p.m., Chapter 5 Club, Fremont.

Fresh Hope Support Group, 7 p.m., Trinity Lutheran School, 16th Street and Luther Road, Fremont. The support group offers faith-based help for those with mood disorders and for loved ones trying to understand. For more information, call David and Wray Lynn Trost at 402-480-1777.

Narcotics Anonymous Library Group, 7 p.m., Keene Memorial Library East Building, 1030 N. Broad St., Fremont.

Alcoholics Anonymous, 8 p.m., Chapter 5 Club, Fremont.

Thursday

Alcoholics Anonymous big book study, 10 a.m., Chapter 5 Club, Fremont.

Parkinsons support group, 10-11 a.m., Caring Senior Service, 1455 N. Bell St., Suite A, Fremont.

Storytime, 10-10:30 a.m., Keene Memorial Library auditorium, 1030 N. Broad St., Fremont.

Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, noon, Chapter 5 Club, Fremont.

Fremont Kiwanis Club, noon, Fremont Golf Club.

Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, 5:15 p.m., Chapter 5 Club, Fremont.

Narcotics Anonymous It Works Group, 6:30 p.m., Good Shepherd Lutheran Church East Building, west of the church, 1440 E. Military Ave., Fremont. Enter through the rear door.

WinItBack, 6:30 p.m., Keene Memorial Library, Fremont. This meeting will be an open discussion on Strategy 2016. For more information, email WinItBack.dc@gmail.com or call 402-720-7158.

Bingo, 7 p.m., Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 8223, 742 N. Main St., North Bend. Everyone is welcome.

Civil Air Patrol, 7 p.m., 1201 W. 23rd St., in yellow hangar at Fremont Airport.

Storytime, 7-7:30 p.m., Keene Memorial Library auditorium, Fremont.

Tally Ho Toastmasters, 7-8 p.m., Hy-Vee Conference Room, Fremont. Everyone is welcome to learn skills in communication, self-confidence and leadership. For more information, call Jan at 402-720-5526.

Alcoholics Anonymous big book study, 8 p.m., Chapter 5 Club, Fremont.

Narcotics Anonymous open meeting, 8 p.m., First Evangelical Lutheran Church, 201 N. Davis Ave., Oakland.

Friday

Cosmopolitan 100 Service Club, 7 a.m., USA Steak Buffet, 830 E. 23rd St., Fremont.

Al-Anon meeting, 9:30 a.m., Chapter 5 Club front room, Fremont.

HomeStore, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., 701 E. Dodge St., Fremont. The HomeStore sells donated items at discounted prices. Proceeds support the mission of Fremont Area Habitat for Humanity.

Storytime, 10-10:30 a.m., Keene Memorial Library auditorium, Fremont.

Baby and toddler time, 11 a.m. to noon, Keene Memorial Library auditorium.
Heres a note of caution that has nothing to do with the chaos of the current campaigns for the president in both parties, largely because the participants fortunately are flying in privately chartered airplanes.

The rest of us arent so lucky and even in business we must rely on commercial airlines with the best prices we can find. This makes us more than a little vulnerable to those who promote not only lower fares, but the rest of the needs of the average traveler  mainly hotel space and rental cars. These are generally middle men who operate online and continue to bombard you with daily emails touting the latest exotic trips and deals to Bora Bora or Armpit Missouri or wherever for just a pittance. You probably shouldnt open these unless absolutely necessary or have a tendency toward masochism.

Im reminded of the pilgrim who answered one that provided an opportunity for a $100 trip to a Caribbean island and when he showed up, found himself slammed into an inner tube and shoved out into the ocean. An hour later his conveyance bumped into a similar one carrying another man.

I hope they fly us back, said the pilgrim.

Yeah, said his new acquaintance. But they didnt the last time.

Thats probably an extreme case for most of the companies that profess great savings. They are backed by the airlines, who encourage them as a way to cut their own costs through fewer employees they must hire and train as reservationists. Not a bad idea at all, except when it is.

I must confess that I have used one of these ticket promoters, Travelocity, frequently and found everything satisfactory ... well, most of the time. On several occasions I realized the flight I had chosen suddenly went up in price as I waited for the final confirmation. The latest of these glitches got me thinking that perhaps I wasnt getting the best fare after all. Duh!

I went online the other day to book a business trip to Indianapolis, chose a morning nonstop flight at a reasonable rate, and filled in all the necessary blanks to purchase a round trip ticket. Then I waited for confirmation and waited, and waited with a notice on my screen that I shouldnt turn off my computer or otherwise disturb the process. Finally, I gave up without knowing whether I had successfully completed the transaction.

I called the selling agency directly to check if I had. After the usual disembodied interrogation about what I wanted, I talked to a young woman with a heavy accent listened to my complaint, breaking in irritatingly every now and then to thank me for my patience, which was wearing pretty thin. Forty-five minutes later I was still there having gone over the flight I wanted at least five times.

In the midst of this I was told that my flight would not cost $192 roundtrip as I had selected from the menu, but $300 and I could reduce that slightly if I took a hotel room in the deal. Explaining to her that I did not need a hotel room, did not want a hotel room, and wasnt going to pay for a hotel room, she finally put the finishing touches on the transaction ... I thought. I complained bitterly that I resented the fare increase but really had no choice. Then I remembered a near doubling of the cost had occurred twice before in dealing with this agency and I had let it go, believing it was the airlines decision.

After providing all the credit card information and listened to her go over the itinerary for the umpteenth time and thanking me for my patience, she said she would now confirm everything, which I thought already had been done. Suddenly I hear music and since I dont suffer from the problem of extraneous noise, I deduced she had gone away somewhere. Like an idiot, I waited another 10 minutes before realizing she probably wasnt coming back. I hung up on Travelocity forever.

I called American Airlines directly to ask if the flight had been booked. It had not. But a pleasant reservationist took only moments to make them.

The cost  $192. A cautionary tale? You bet!
In the wake of the terror attacks in Paris, Brussels and beyond, President Barack Obama has recognized the need to accelerate the campaign against the Islamic State before the jihadis strike big again in Europe _ or in the United States.

U.S. air strikes have helped Kurdish and Arab fighters take back territory from the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. But the jihadis are still entrenched in the main centers of their so-called caliphate _ Raqqa, Syria, the city where the Islamic States senior leaders plot their overseas attacks, and Mosul, Iraqs second-largest urban area.

We should no longer tolerate the kinds of positioning that is enabled by them having headquarters in Raqqa and Mosul, Obama said earlier this month.

Yet the administration is caught up in a debate over which to target first, a decision so fraught that it must be made in the White House.

After a trip last month to the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria, Id argue that the choice is clear: Raqqa first. The city is the seat of Islamic State caliph Omar al-Baghdadi. Its loss would smash the Islamic State territorial and religious myths.

Moreover, Raqqa is much smaller than Mosul and less ethnically complex, and there is a Syrian fighting force on the ground that, with American help, holds the potential of taking the city. In Mosul, to the contrary, the Iraqis are far from having enough forces to succeed, and the Iraqi government is in turmoil.

Yet a decision to assault Raqqa is hung up in large part not by resistance from jihadi enemies, but by opposition from Turkey, a (supposed) NATO ally.

How can this be? Because going for Raqqa would require a closer U.S. alliance with the Syrian Kurds, who are loathed by Turkeys Kurdophobic president.

Kurdish fighters have seized back swaths of Syrian territory from the Islamic State with the help of U.S. air strikes. But the Syrian Kurds PYD party is detested by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan because of its ideological links to the PKK, the Turkish Kurdish rebel movement.

Syrian Kurds, who share a long border with Turkey, have declared their own federal statelet within Syria, and Erdogan fears they will inspire Turkish Kurds.

However, PYD leaders point out that their movement is not at war with Turkey and is not attacking Turks. Moreover, they insist they do not want a united Kurdistan that would link them up with Turkeys Kurdish region. They say their goal is a federal state within Syrias current boundaries.

The PYD is eager to have its fighters, joined by local Sunni Arab tribes, push the Islamic State out of towns along the Turkish border, and link up areas the Kurds have already liberated. These towns include Manjib, an Islamic State hotbed that nurtured some of the jihadis who attacked Brussels. These jihadi killers were able to enter and leave Turkey from Syria at will for years _ with little effort to stop them by Ankara.

Yet on a recent trip to Washington, Erdogan denounced U.S. cooperation with the Syrian Kurds and called them terrorists. He wants Obama to back Syrian Arab and ethnic Turkmen rebels who are allied with Turkey. Never mind that these groups are painfully small in numbers and have proved hapless when confronting the Islamic State along the Turkish border. Erdogan still insists that America back his guys and stiff the Kurds.

Whats so frustrating is that Ankara was talking to the Syrian Kurds not so long ago. And Erdogan was negotiating with the imprisoned leader of the PKK. But recently, due to Erdogans political ambitions and some PKK mistakes, the Turkish-PKK civil war has restarted. Thus domestic Turkish politics are blocking progress in wiping out the Islamic State caliphate.

U.S. officials are humoring Erdogan up to a point _ since Turkey is a NATO member and Washington wants to use the Turkish airbase at Incerlik. However, the Pentagon is still helping Syrian Kurdish fighters with air strikes, light arms, and the presence of 50 U.S. special forces in Syria. That number could increase.

Sooner rather than later, the White House must clarify to Erdogan that his Kurdo-phobia is thwarting the campaign against the Islamic State. U.S. officials might recall that when U.S. planes helped Syrian Kurds retake the border town of Kobbani from the Islamic State, in the face of Erdogans outrage, the Turkish leader caved in.

However, there is another obstacle to the liberation of Raqqa that U.S. forces are working to address: the need to substantially increase the numbers of Sunni Arabs who are fighting with the Kurds in an umbrella force known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. This is critically important because Raqqa and nearby small towns have a heavy population of Sunni Arabs and would be fearful of an operation that was spearheaded predominantly by Kurds. And Sunni forces will be needed to police Raqqa after the Islamic State is gone.

However, if Sunnis are convinced an operation to liberate Raqqa is on the way, firmly backed by Washington and its allies, those tribal fighters are much more likely to materialize. Its time to make that commitment, and to make clear to Erdogan that he cant stand in the way of the fight to end the caliphate.

The message to Ankara must be clear:

There is no way to liberate Raqqa without full participation of the Syrian Kurds. And the operation to liberate Raqqa needs to start soon.
A roundup of legislative and Capitol news items of interest for Monday, April 18, 2016:

ARTS AWARDS: The Iowa Arts Council is seeking nominations for the Governors Arts Awards recognizing and honoring individuals, organizations and businesses in Iowa that have made a significant impact on the vitality of the arts in the state.

Nominations must be submitted by June 6 at www.iowaartscouncil.slideroom.com. Individuals may submit nominations for any or all of the following award categories: Collaboration and Partnership in the Arts; Excellence and Innovation in the Arts; Impact and Accessibility in the Arts; and Arts Learning Leadership.

The Governors Arts Awards will be presented Aug. 5 during the 2016 Iowa Arts Summit at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines. Registration is $50 per person; $35 for students and artist. A limited number of scholarships are available. For more information, visit www.iowaculture.gov.

PLATE OF THE UNION: A team of Iowa State University students finished as a runner-up winner in the 2016 Plate of the Union grassroots campaign calling for bold action to reform the nations food system. The student-driven effort netted $2,500 to the ISU participants.

A team from Ohio State University won the $5,000 grand prize while other runners-up with ISU were teams from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

The Plate of the Union is a collaborative campaign created to amplify the voice of millions of Americans who care about food and farm issues during this election season by calling on presidential candidates to reform the U.S. food system so that every American has equal access to healthy, affordable food that is fair to workers, good for the environment and keeps farmers on the land, according to organizers. For more information, www.plateoftheunion.com.

STEM TOUR RESUMES: Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds said Monday she plans to conduct more science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) school visits across Iowa to discuss the importance of giving students a world-class education in STEM.

Reynolds is co-chair of the Governors STEM Advisory Council along with Chris Nelson, president and CEO of Kemin Industries.

The councils over-arching goal is to increase STEM interest and achievement and to regain Iowa's historic legacy as a leader in education and workforce development. The lieutenant governor plans to hold STEM tour visits at schools in Des Moines on Thursday and in Mason City and Charles City on Friday.

WATER SYMPOSIUM: The University of Iowas Public Policy Center will hold a symposium next month to explore the state of Iowas drinking water and to examine the challenges confronting water providers to deliver reliably safe drinking water to Iowans.

The June 17 event  entitled Iowas Drinking Water: Could Flint Happen Here? -- at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines is co-organized by the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination. It will include panels of water experts from academia, industry and public sector representatives including the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

In light of recent high-profile incidents of public health crises arising from drinking water contamination around the United States, a special focus will be placed on whether drinking water supplies in Iowa are susceptible to similar vulnerabilities experienced elsewhere. This includes a presentation by members of the Flint Water Study, who will share first-hand experiences and lessons learned from the public health crisis in Flint, Michigan. Panel topics also will address other potential threats to the sustainability of Iowas drinking water supplies.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: We have no problem in this state that $300 (million) to $400 million wouldnt solve. We just need another $300 (million) to $400 million. -- Sen. Matt McCoy, D-Des Moines, in discussing the fiscal 2017 state infrastructure budget bill Monday.

--Compiled by the Des Moines Bureau
DES MOINES  Three dozen Republican legislators are calling on Democratic Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller to withdraw from an effort to use consumer protection laws against energy companies and others that argue against climate change and global warming.

The 36 Iowa senators and representatives said they believe man-made climate change is certainly not settled science, but their primary concern is that the attorneys generals effort is a potential assault on First Amendment rights of Iowa citizens and businesses that do not embrace the governments conclusion on man-made climate change.

Reps. Ralph Watts, R-Adel, and Steven Holt, R-Denison, emphasized their concerns in remarks prepared for delivery late Monday during points of personal privilege.

Miller is one of a group of 17 state attorneys general that is pursuing litigation against companies that commit potential fraud for knowingly misleading the public and investors on the dangers of climate change.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said when the effort was announced in late March that fossil fuel companies and their interests use money and power to sway Congress and the American public, running ad campaigns and spending millions of dollars fighting renewable energy development.

The Iowa Attorney Generals Office acknowledged receipt of the legislators letter, but said it has not opened any investigations as a result of Millers participation in the attorneys general announcement

Holt and Watts questioned why Miller is involved at all if his concern is consumer protection, not climate change.

The lawmakers concluded their letter to Miller asking him to remove himself from the coalition which has chosen a path that could threaten First Amendment rights in pursuit of climate progress.

According to The Associated Press, the vast majority of peer-reviewed studies, science organizations and climate scientists agree that the world is warming, mainly due to rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and most of the increase in temperature comes from man-made sources.

In their prepared remarks, Watts predicted more research will prove the alarmist claims of man-made climate change appear to be greatly exaggerated.

Holt said there is disagreement whether the cause of climate change is part of a cycle that has always occurred or is caused by fossil fuels and mans carbon footprint.

However, Holt said, it is vital for this debate to continue, and dangerous to attempt to silence differences of opinion on either side.
DES MOINES  When Julie Stewart travels the country talking about the need for sentencing reform, she often tells the tale of Mandy Martinson, a Mason City woman serving 15 years in federal prison for drug-related offenses.

I think her personal story is very typical of a lot people, especially a lot of women, who are addicts and hook up with men who have the drugs, said Stewart, the president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. And also just that the sentence is so stiff.

Stewart will give the Drake University Harkin Institutes spring lecture.

Martinson was 27 years old in 2004 when she was arrested and charged with possession with intent to distribute and conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine and marijuana, and possession of a firearm during a drug trafficking crime.

Martinson, who had never been arrested before, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. Her boyfriend, with whom she had been living for only a month, was sentenced to only 12 years for the same crimes after he testified against Martinson.

She needed to be arrested. She needed to be punished, Stewart said Monday during an interview at the Iowa Capitol. Even if you want to punish her, fine. But why 15 years? Why is that the right number? And what damage is going to be done by her being there?

Stewart said overcrowding in the nations prisons and the high costs associated have led lawmakers to warm up to the idea of sentencing reform, and that Martinson is an example of someone who Stewart believes should not be in prison for a decade or more.

In addition to telling Martinsons story, Stewart said she plans to talk about the growing bipartisan support in federal and state governments for sentencing reform for low-level, non-violent offenders.

Iowa U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley is shepherding through the judiciary committee he chairs bipartisan legislation that addresses sentencing reform, albeit at a reduced scope to what Stewart said she favors.

Stewart called the federal legislation a terrific first step, but said she would go much further.

Grassleys bill would reduce a third-time drug offenders mandatory minimum sentence from life to 25 years, and second-time offenders from 20 to 15 years, among many other provisions.

Sen. Grassley has been great this year. He has not been an easy person to persuade. I think hes beginning to listen to his constituents, Stewart said. I think he has recognized that theres a problem and it needs to be addressed.

The Iowa Legislature has not addressed sentencing reform this year.

Stewart said while more and more lawmakers are embracing sentencing reform, many remain opposed. She believes some are hesitant to make changes to laws enacted 30 years ago, and have a fear of threatening public safety.

People sort of look at these mandatory minimum sentences that are in place and have been on the books for 30 years and they almost look at them a little bit like theyre the Bible, Stewart said. So I think thats part of it.

And then the other part of it is that theres this fear that if somehow we reduce sentences in any way it will make the streets less safe. Now, the statistics dont bear that out.

Stewart pointed to past sentencing reform measures that yielded a reduction in crime rates.
MASON CITY  More than 1,500 people watched the April 5 City Council meeting online on the citys website and countless others watched it on the public access channel.

City Administrator Brent Trout said typically about 60 watch meetings on the citys website. No figures are available for the local access channel.

At the meeting, the council voted 6-0 to approve terms of a development agreement with Prestage Foods of Iowa to build a pork processing plant in Mason City. More than 50 citizens spoke at the meeting, most of them against the plan.

The City Council will meet Thursday to consider the next step, approval of an urban renewal district in which the plant will be located.

City Administrator Brent Trout said the meeting will be in its usual place, the Mason City Room at the public library at 7 p.m., but arrangements are being made to handle a possible overflow crowd.

The Commons area, adjacent to the Mason City Room, will be made available for people to sit and watch the meeting on television. Anyone from that area who wants to speak at the public forum can do so, he said.

Trout said despite the anticipated large turnout, officials decided not to move the meeting to a larger venue because the Mason City Room is equipped to televise it, giving thousands of people the opportunity to watch it.

He said the meeting was moved from its usual Tuesday time to Thursday because some officials are in Washington lobbying congressional leaders and will return Wednesday.

The proposed location for the plant is on 43rd Street Southwest between Golden Grain Energy and the Avenue of the Saints.

The $240 million plant is expected to create an estimated 2,000 jobs over the next four years.

Objectors cite many environmental concerns, including odors, the possibility of confinement facilities dotting the landscape, influx of workers from outside of North Iowa, and potential impact on schools, law enforcement and property values.

On Tuesday, May 3, the council is expected to take up the finalized development agreement. A public hearing will also take place at this meeting.

Objectors are hoping to sway enough council members so that the measure will be defeated. They need three no votes.
A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at the First Baptist Church, 105 Chapel Lane, with the Rev. Ruth Yeaton officiating. Visitation will be one hour prior to the service at the church. Interment will be in Riverside Cemetery in Charles City with military honors by the Charles City VFW.
Funeral services will be 10:30 a.m. Thursday at Major Erickson Funeral Home, Mason City, with Pastor Kathy Graves of Trinity Lutheran Church officiating. Visitation will be held one hour prior to the service. Interment will take place in Memorial Park Cemetery with military honors conducted by the Mason City Veterans Association. Memorials may be directed to the Roger Dunahoo Memorial Fund in care of the family.
ALGONA  Two Algona men were killed in a single-vehicle crash Monday afternoon about 1 miles east of Algona.

According to a report by the Iowa State Patrol, Harry Fraker, 63, and David Ludwig, 65, were killed about 1:47 p.m. when the 1999 Chevrolet Silverado they were traveling in left the road and crashed into a power pole. Fraker was the driver of the vehicle.

The report said the vehicle was westbound on U.S. Highway 18 approaching the intersection with 140th Avenue when it crossed the center line and went into the south ditch. The vehicle went up the embankment of 140th Avenue and became airborne, flipping over, striking an electric power pole and landing on its top.

Both occupants died from injuries sustained in the collision and were pronounced dead at the scene.

 Bob Steenson
VENTURA  A Ventura woman has been charged with stealing money from a local breast cancer charity.

Leanne Hicks, 51, has been charged with felony ongoing criminal conduct and second-degree theft.

Shes accused of stealing $3,486 from Buddies for Boobies, a breast cancer charity, during the 19 months she served as president, according to court documents.

Police say Hicks wrote herself $2,596 in checks for cash from the groups checking account and took $890 from a 2015 fundraiser.

Hicks says she did not take the money.

Breast cancer is something Im really passionate about and I wouldnt do this, Hicks said Tuesday in a phone interview.

Officers said they began investigating the allegations in February at the request of the groups treasurer, who called police during the organizations Feb. 20 meeting in Clear Lake.

Organized six years ago by a group of friends, Buddies for Boobies raises money to support breast cancer patients and families. In 2014, the group donated $5,400 to the Mercy Breast Center to cover transportation costs for local breast cancer patients.

Local nonprofit donates to Mercy Breast Center MASON CITY | When Clear Lake resident Eileen Miller was diagnosed with breast cancer, her fr

Hicks, who was arrested Friday, is now free on bond.

Her next court appearance is April 29 in District Court in Mason City.
This editorial by the Storm Lake Times was published April 9.

Some 200 people crammed into the Mason City Council chambers April 5 to voice their opposition to a proposed pork slaughter facility. Fifty people voiced their concerns to the council in a meeting that lasted from 7 p.m. to midnight.

Opponents pressed issues of potential negative environmental impact, cultural clashes with workers coming into the community, the threat of plant- and hog-farm-related smells, and problems with traffic, housing, crime and drugs, the Mason City Globe Gazette reported.

North Iowa is not ready for this plant.

Cultural clashes. Crime. Drugs.

Mexicans. Asians. Sudanese.

Thats what the people of Mason City are telling their City Council, ugly as it may sound.

The City Council responded by voting 6-0 to go ahead with the plant, including about $11 million in local government incentives for a slaughterhouse that will pay most of its workers less than $15 per hour.

The state is larding on another $11 million in gifts to Prestage Farms of North Carolina to build the $240 million plant that is supposed to hire 2,000 workers. It is unproductive in lifting rural wages, and it is unfair to existing food processors that do not enjoy government subsidy but pay their workers more.

Mason Cityans opposed the plant for seemingly different reasons.

There is no doubt that the proposed pork plant will draw most of its work force from non-resident labor. And that does present challenges to the schools and housing market, as Storm Lake knows full well.

We would like to think, however, that Storm Lakers have come to appreciate over the past 20 years the tremendous diversity that The City Beautiful enjoys from our new neighbors. They are hard workers. They are not drug-runners.

And they are no more criminal than white people bred and born in Storm Lake or Newell or Alta. The police statistics prove it, year after year.

Mason City used to be a magnet for immigrants from sugar beet processing. Many Latino names survive although the migrant field workers and permanent plant workers are gone. People have apparently forgotten their contributions to the community.

We have seen similar comments made when meatpacking plants have been proposed in other rural communities, such as Spencer and Iowa Falls. Residents told their councilors in each of their communities that they liked their communities white, and that they did not want to become like Storm Lake.

Those other places, including Mason City, are shrinking in population and future prospects.

It is silly for the state and local governments to throw money at a slaughterhouse that would locate here, anyway, because of our corn and soybeans. It is wrong to oppose its location over cultural clashes. That simply has not been the experience in Storm Lake.

The community is growing, and food processing gives people a foot on the first rung of the ladder to American success. Storm Lake will be a far stronger community in future generations than those who shut out people who do not look like them over base misperceptions.
I believe that many residents of Mason City are concerned about odor and other environmental issues if the Prestage packing plant is built in our city. Even members of the Prestage family have said there will be odors.

In Iowa we acknowledge that southwest winds are the primary carrier of pollutants. So who will have the greatest risk of living with the foul smells? Anyone living north and northeast of the proposed pork plant. And the stronger the wind, the further the odor will be carried.

I would like to see the city of Mason City hire some independent experts to look at the pork plant plan, visit the proposed site and then give us an environmental impact report.

To date, we, the public, have received very little information from our city leaders. It seems it has been mostly about the number of jobs and salary information, and is that all we need to know? Some of our city leaders have said that those of us with concerns do not have good information.

I support agriculture. It has been the primary focus of my life's work. But I seriously question the wisdom of building a pork plant on the south side, inside the city limits of our proud city.

Lyle Mackey, Mason City
As a newcomer to Mason City, I have been pleasantly surprised by the great hospitality of its people. I am proud that we're a Blue Zones community, and I was excited to learn about the new partnership between the city and University of Iowa students designed to improve services and increase our quality of life.

However, I ask the City Council to slow down on Prestage Farms. An April 11 Globe Gazette article informed us that according to Chad Schreck, president of the North Iowa Corridor Economic Development Corp., neither the city nor the EDC commissioned an environmental impact study on the plant and the proposed site. I find this alarming.

Antibiotic-resistant organisms can infect people living in proximity to confinements and processing plants. With the plant located so close to town and on the south side, hog particulates and odor will often blow right into town, increasing respiratory illnesses such as asthma and COPD and definitely decreasing everyone's quality of life.

I ask the Mason City Council to: a) commission a study from an impartial agency that will consider the effect of the hog processing plant on our surrounding water and land and on the health of Mason City citizens; b) share the full results with the community; and c) bring this issue to Mason City residents for a vote.

Please, let's at least give the Prestage Farms project that environmental and health due diligence that we owe to our city and to our state.

Suzanne Kelsey, Mason City
SAN DIEGO, April 19, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ciclofilin Pharmaceuticals Inc. ("Ciclofilin" or the "Company"), a privately held biotech, announced today that it will discuss important new data for its cyclophilin inhibitor, CPI-431-32, during a presentation at the Cambridge Healthtech Institutes Eleventh Annual Drug Discovery Chemistry Conference to be held April 19-22, 2016 at the Hilton San Diego Resort in San Diego, CA. CPI-431-32 is Ciclofilins lead drug candidate for the treatment of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection.



Ciclofilins CEO, Robert T. Foster, PharmD, PhD, will present findings that demonstrate CPI-431-32 is a best-in-class host-targeting antiviral drug. To date, CPI-431-32 in vitro completely suppresses HBsAg, suppresses HBeAg, and suppresses intracellular HBV DNA by greater than 90%, while also inhibiting viral uptake by blocking NTCP transporter activity. CPI-431-32 also reduces HBV DNA in the HBV1.3 transgenic mouse model. In contrast to other cyclophilin inhibitors, CPI-431-32 demonstrated a wide selective index (SI) as measured by the toxicity:efficacy ratio (CC50:IC50), which is sufficient for clinical development in HBV.

We have almost three decades worth of experience in cyclosporine chemistry. Drawing upon this experience in structure-activity relationships, we have learned that relatively small and selective changes to the chemical structure of the cyclosporine backbone can have very dramatic consequences in pharmacology, commented Dr. Foster. With that in mind, we have discovered a compound that has demonstrated a significant shift in both the efficacy against the hepatitis B virus and cytotoxicity profiles in a way that provides for a clear and meaningful separation of these two properties. This degree of separation, known as selective index, is something we have not seen with other known cyclophilin inhibitors, making CPI-431-32 extremely unique and compelling.

About Ciclofilin:

Ciclofilin is a privately held life sciences company based in San Diego, California, with R&D facilities in Edmonton, Canada. The company's lead oral drug candidate, CPI-431-32, is being developed as a treatment for chronic HBV infection. CPI-431-32 interferes with the ability of the HBV to infect cells, propagate, and cause disease primarily by preventing HBV interaction with host cell cyclophilins. CPI-431-32 also demonstrates anti-fibrotic activity in the liver, and may offer clinical benefits to patients in addition to anti-HBV activity. CPI-431-32 has a wide selective index, allowing for HBV clinical development.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including with respect to the potential of our lead drug CPI-431-32 for the treatment of HBV. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained in this press release are forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the significance of our preclinical results and potential applications of our compound for the treatment of HBV patients. Statements that are not historical facts are based on our management's current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections about our business and the industry in which we operate and our management's beliefs and assumptions. The statements contained in this release are not guarantees of future performance and involve certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions, which are difficult to predict. Therefore, actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed in such forward-looking statements. These statements speak only as of the date of this release, and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Ciclofilin undertakes no obligation to update or revise these statements, except as required by applicable law.
NEWTOWN, Pa., April 19, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE:EPAM), a leading global provider of product development and software engineering solutions, today announced that it was ranked in the Leadership Zone in Zinnov Zones for Digital Services Ratings. EPAM was one of only five service providers, out of the 16 assessed, to be ranked in the Leadership Zone and was also ranked in the Leadership Zone in all five assessment categories: Digital Consulting Services, Design and Experience Services, Digital Application Engineering Services, Digital Platform Integration Services and Data Management and Analytics Services.



As we continue to see strong demand from our clients for digital capabilities, we are focused on enabling them to unleash the power of digital technologies to create new sources of value, said Kevin Labick, VP Digital Strategy and Experience Design, EPAM. We are pleased to be recognized in the Leadership Zone across all five service lines assessed by Zinnov for digital services. This recognition confirms EPAM as a market leader, demonstrating our strong capabilities of delivering end-to-end services and our focus on innovative and scalable software solutions across most verticals.

EPAM also scored high across the five assessment categories on scalability, which includes product engineering services (PES) experience. The report states that existing capabilities of Product Engineering Service Providers provide them a head start in digital services market and that PES vendors employ a large proportion of new technologies and research-focused talent, which is not the case for traditional IT services firms. The report also states that PES vendors were early movers in Agile, Scrum, DevOps and Design thinking.

This annual list supports business decision-makers who lead global digital partner selection. Recognition in the Leadership Zone indicates excellent performance across service lines, digital prowess and scalability. Digital prowess includes analysis of services spread, ecosystem leverage, digital workforce, digital assets and engagement models. Scalability includes scale of digital business, digital clientele and product engineering experience.

Zinnov ranked 16 service providers based on digital prowess and scalability by evaluating digital clientele, scale of digital business, product engineering experience, spread of services, digital workforce and assets, engagement models and ecosystem leverage. Service providers were then rated across five service lines including digital consulting and transformation, design and experience, digital application engineering, digital platform integration and data management and analytics.

Zinnov Zones for digital is an extensive, annual study of the capabilities of Digital Service providers, and is designed to assist enterprises in making the right decisions in their selection of outsourcing partners from across the world.

Visit https://www.epam.com/solutions to learn more about EPAMs capabilities.

About EPAM Systems

Established in 1993, EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE:EPAM) is recognized as a leader in software product development by independent research agencies. Headquartered in the United States, EPAM serves clients worldwide utilizing its award-winning global delivery platform and its locations in over 25 countries across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. EPAM was ranked #6 in America's 25 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies and #3 in Americas Best Small Companies lists by Forbes Magazine.

For more information, please visit http://www.epam.com/.

About Zinnov:

Founded in 2002, Zinnov  meaning Zeal in Innovation  is a leading Globalization and Market Expansion Advisory firm, with specialization in areas such as Digital Transformation, Global Sourcing, Emerging Markets Expansion, Human Capital Optimization, Small & Medium Businesses, Innovation, Cloud Computing and Enterprise Mobility. Zinnov offers advisory services to global leaders in business and technology and works collectively with them to tackle prevailing organizational challenges by analyzing changing dynamics, improving performance, and building institutional capability. The services delivered to its clients through advanced reasoning and analytical techniques, provides solutions help in integrating organizational vision, business definition and processes.

Visit us at www.zinnov.com. To request information, contact Jaya Shukla at jaya@zinnov.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes statements which may constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, the accuracy of which are necessarily subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions as to future events that may not prove to be accurate. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied include general economic conditions and the factors discussed in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. EPAM undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities law.
TEMPE, Ariz., April 19, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Northern Tier Energy LP (NYSE:NTI) today announced that it has established a record date of May 19, 2016, and a meeting date of June 23, 2016, for a special meeting of its common unitholders. At the special meeting, which will be held at 9:00 a.m. Tempe, Arizona time, NTI common unitholders will vote on the previously announced proposed merger of NTI and a subsidiary of Western Refining, Inc. (NYSE:WNR), and related matters pursuant to the Agreement and Plan of Merger dated as of December 21, 2015, by and among NTI, WNR and their respective affiliates.

NTI common unitholders of record at the close of business on May 19, 2016, will be entitled to receive notice of the special meeting and to vote at the special meeting. Subject to satisfaction of the remaining closing conditions, including receipt of NTI common unitholder approval, the parties currently expect to complete the merger during the first half of 2016.

About Northern Tier

Northern Tier Energy LP (NYSE:NTI) is an independent downstream energy company with refining, retail and logistics operations that serves the PADD II region of the United States. Northern Tier operates a 97,800 barrels per stream day refinery located in St. Paul Park, Minnesota. Northern Tier also operates approximately 168 convenience stores and supports approximately 109 franchised convenience stores, primarily in Minnesota and Wisconsin, under the SuperAmerica trademark, and a bakery and commissary under the SuperMoms brand. Northern Tier is headquartered in Tempe, Arizona.

More information about Northern Tier is available at www.northerntier.com.

Information about the Proposed Merger and Where to Find It

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities or a solicitation of any vote or approval. In connection with the proposed merger, WNR filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) a preliminary Registration Statement on Form S-4 that includes a preliminary proxy statement of NTI that also constitutes a preliminary prospectus of WNR. A definitive proxy statement/prospectus will be sent to security holders of NTI seeking their approval with respect to the proposed merger. WNR and NTI also plan to file other documents with the SEC regarding the proposed transaction. INVESTORS AND SECURITY HOLDERS ARE URGED TO CAREFULLY READ THE PROXY STATEMENT/PROSPECTUS AND OTHER DOCUMENTS FILED WITH THE SEC WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE, BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. Investors and security holders may obtain free copies of the proxy statement/prospectus and other documents containing important information about WNR and NTI once such documents are filed with the SEC through the website maintained by the SEC at www.sec.gov. Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by WNR will be available free of charge on WNRs website at www.wnr.com under the Investors section or by contacting WNRs Secretary at (602) 286-1400. Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by NTI will be available free of charge on NTIs website at www.northerntier.com under the Investors section or by contacting NTIs Investor Relations Department at (602) 302-5450.

Participants in the Solicitation Relating to the Merger

NTI, WNR and certain of their respective directors and executive officers may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from the unitholders of NTI in connection with the proposed merger. Information about the directors and executive officers of the general partner of NTI is set forth in the 2015 Annual Report on Form 10-K for NTI, which was filed with the SEC on February 26, 2016. Information about the directors and executive officers of Western is set forth in the Proxy Statement on Schedule 14A for WNRs 2015 annual meeting of shareholders, which was filed with the SEC on April 22, 2015. These documents can be obtained free of charge from the sources indicated above. Other information regarding the participants in the proxy solicitation and a description of their direct and indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, will be contained in the proxy statement/prospectus and other relevant materials to be filed with the SEC when they become available.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are identified as any statement that does not relate strictly to historical or current facts. These forward-looking statements include statements about, among other things, record and meeting dates, the Agreement and Plan of Merger and proposed transactions relating thereto, satisfaction of closing conditions including NTI common unitholder approval and completion of the merger during the first half of 2016 or at all. NTI cannot, and does not, give any assurance that expectations about future events will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors, many of which may be beyond NTIs control, that may cause actual results to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include the risks that the proposed transaction may not be consummated. These and other risks and uncertainties are discussed in more detail in filings made by WNR and NTI with the SEC, which are available to the public. All forward-looking statements are only as of the date made and NTI does not undertake (and expressly disclaims) any obligation to update publicly or to revise any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the dates such statements were made, or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated or other events.
HOUSTON, April 19, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GulfMark Offshore, Inc. (NYSE:GLF) announced today that its first quarter 2016 operating results conference call is scheduled for Tuesday, April 26, 2016, at 9:00 a.m. eastern time. The conference call will include a discussion by management regarding the Companys results of operations. The Company will issue results for the first quarter the evening before the scheduled call.

To participate in the teleconference, investors in the U.S. should dial 1-888-317-6003 at least 10 minutes before the start time and when prompted, enter the passcode 8679397. Canada-based callers should dial 1-866-284-3684, and international callers outside of North America should dial +1 412-317-6061. The webcast of the conference call can also be accessed by visiting the Companys website, www.gulfmark.com.

A replay of the conference call will be available beginning one hour after the end of the conference call and ending May 3, 2016 at 11:59 p.m. eastern time. To access the replay from the U.S. please dial 1-877-344-7529; outside the U.S. please dial +1 412-317-0088. Please reference conference number 10080780. An audio file of the conference call will be available on the companys website approximately one hour after the end of the call.

GulfMark Offshore, Inc. provides marine transportation services to the energy industry through a fleet of offshore support vessels serving every major offshore energy industry market in the world.
SAN DIEGO, April 19, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- USA Funds and Gallup today announced during the ASU GSV Summit their collaboration on a new research platform that will deliver first-ever insights from past, current and future consumers of higher education. Each day, 350 days a year, Gallup will conduct nationally representative interviews with approximately 500 U.S. adults about their higher education interests, experiences and outcomes.

The aim of this collaboration is to disseminate concrete research that enables more U.S. students and adults to complete postsecondary education with a purpose  to achieve a great career and fulfilling life.

"We are partnering with the most recognized and trusted name in research to give voice to the consumer perspective on higher education on a scale that has never been done before," said William D. Hansen, USA Funds president and CEO. "This ongoing survey will allow us to more effectively identify strategies that promote what we call 'Completion With a Purpose'  helping more students complete college prepared to launch rewarding careers."

This first-of-its kind research will provide the substance for weekly reports on timely topics related to training and postsecondary education, periodic reports based on in-depth research and an annual report focused on the voices of postsecondary education consumers at the national, state and local levels.

The research will provide insights to improve student success in college and graduates' success in their careers by:

 Offering guidance to prospective college students and their families, as well as current college students, in the selection of postsecondary education programs and in-school practices, such as mentors and internships, to promote college completion and career readiness.

 Informing national, state and local policy discussions aimed at improving the returns on the public's investment in postsecondary education and training programs.

 Transforming educators' practices to better serve students and the needs of the workforce.

"Research on this scale and depth has never been done before in the history of education. The vision to unlock the voice of prospective, current and former students in postsecondary education is exactly what our country needs to guide our investment of time and money in one of the most precious assets we have," said Brandon Busteed, executive director of education and workforce development at Gallup.

The project will deliver information about various demographic groups, including education levels, as well as by state and MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) locality. Included among the daily questions Gallup will ask U.S. adults are:

 Whether they would recommend their educational path to others, and what they would do differently if they could go back and do it all over again

 How valuable and necessary additional credentials or further education would be to their career progression

 The extent to which they use the skills they learned during their educational experience(s) in their life today

USA Funds and Gallup have collaborated on two previous major research initiatives, including studies of the experiences and educational outcomes of minority graduates and of graduates who completed two-year degree programs. In addition, Gallup is among the partners contributing to USA Funds' College Value initiative of four major projects spanning 12 states. The initiative is designed to develop new models to assess the value of postsecondary programs based on outcomes, such as employment, earnings, and noneconomic benefits including graduates' long-term wellness.

About USA Funds

USA Funds is a nonprofit corporation that supports Completion With a Purpose, building a more purposeful path for America's students to and through college and on to rewarding careers and successful lives. USA Funds pursues its nonprofit mission through philanthropic activities and partnerships, policy research and programs and services that enhance preparation for, access to and success in higher education. Learn more at www.usafunds.org.

About Gallup

Gallup delivers analytics and advice to help leaders and organizations solve their most pressing problems. Combining more than 80 years of experience with its global reach, Gallup knows more about the attitudes and behaviors of employees, customers, students and citizens than any other organization in the world.


Re: Venture Capital / Private Equity Goals [ #permalink

Thanks for the great advice everyone. Kryzak thanks for the clarification between VC and PE -- I was interested in VC as an engineering undergrad before what I knew PE and IB stood for! As far as shaping career goals go -- I am shooting for writing about a MC position post-MBA, hoping to leverage my IT/industry experience in big pharma -- does that sound like unique enough of a story (with additional details, of course) to differentiate myself from the rest of the MC applicants (most of whom do not seem to be concentrating in healthcare).



Would it make sense to go as far as to concentrate in the healthcare/pharma track in B-school if my goal is to start out in consulting leveraging what I know, or should I just go out on a limb and say I want to focus on finance or something?



I am pretty confidant MC is what I want to do but am concerned about differentiating my profile to adcom! Thanks!
What to do 30-14-7-3-1 Days before the gmat [ #permalink

What to do 30-14-7-3-1 Days before the test

A collection of tips how to maximize your score and avoid score-dropping mistakes.Keep in mind, these tips alone are not enough to give you a high GMAT score  you need to have a clear study plan, measurable results, and books or courses to study/review. This thread may add some points to your final score but most importantly, it is designed to prevent you from losing points. Some of these tips are more useful than others  feel free to skip around, and most importantly  we are all different; what works for others, may not work for you.

What to do at 30 days

If you are taking the test in person, check availability in your area. Note that some seasons/areas are in high demand and may be booked out months in advance. This was the case with me and I had to take an overnight trip to take the GMAT. If you are doing it online, usually pretty easy to schedule it a week out. Note that sometimes there are issues with the scheduling system so don't wait until the day before.

I do not recommend scheduling too far in advance since the rescheduling fees are horrendous

At this time you should be within 50 points of your target score. E.g. if you are aiming for 700, you should be scoring 640 or above. If you are still 100 points below (unless you are taking an intensive course or intensive self study plan), you should seriously looking into 1) rescheduling; 2) finding the reason for being off-target

14 days

You should have finished covering all of the material or your course work. This means, you are done studying . If you are not done studying, you are not 14 days out

. If you are not done studying, you are not 14 days out If you have not already, this is a good time to start coming up with check-lists, items to memorize, and so on (some examples are here: Arithmetic to memorize; SC checklist by Whiplash)

At this point you should plan on taking 2  3 full length tests per week to polish your test-taking skills, timing, stamina, and also testing out plans for when things go not as planned. Spend most of your time reviewing, refreshing, and doing test/mistake analysis to spot areas that need to be polished

Make sure you are familiar with test center noteboard and how the marker works on the GMAT. You can get a set from here: http://www.amazon.com/Manhattan-GMAT-Si ... r-mr-title and if you are doing an online test, I suggest that you practice with it during these 2 weeks on all of your tests

You should be within 40 points of your target score; if you are more than 50, I highly recommend you consider rescheduling

7 days

Point of no return  if you cancel after today, you will NOT get any credit and your test fee will be wasted. There are very few reasons why you should reschedule your test after this point in time.

3 days

If you are taking an in-person test, familiarize yourself with the environment  video and list of rules/prohibited items(very important  you dont want to visit your locker during the break and pull out notes/phone/etc). Your test will be canceled as the result.

If you are taking GMAT Online, make sure you will be alone, your room fits the requirements, and you try to come up with a few backup options to reduce stress

Superficial Things:

Food for the test center  there is a whole discussion on this as well but the bottom line is  play safe and use familiar snacks. Dont drink energy drinks if you usually dont drink them.

1 Day (24 hours before the test)

If possible, the last day before the test, should be a copy of your test day experience (wake up at the same time you would for the test, eat what you would, wear the same clothes, etc).

Take the test at the same time as your appointment  try to take a GMAT prep if you have one left. If not, take whatever test is available. Make sure it is a full IR/AWA drill with breaks/etc.

After you finish, do a 30-min review (dont agonize too much) and have a healthy meal. Spend the rest of the day relaxing and doing something that would be relaxing for you and keep your mind off the test. This should be something more active than watching movies or playing games that tends to decrease your brain stimulation. Try going on a nice easy walk/hike or doing something exciting.

It is OK to bring a few flashcards for the last set of concepts/check lists/etc and glance at them/study as you go around your day but no heavy studying should be done now. For one it is too late, and two, you have a risk of not performing at the peak on the day of.

Athletes train and force their bodies to adapt to the training schedule and their bodies start expecting to provide a certain level of output. Then before the competition, they take it easier for a day or two to get the most of mental and physical output when it counts. Make sure the test day is your best day, not your recovery day. If you run or exercise in the mornings, dont do the double-doze even though you may feel absolutely up for it. It will wipe you out.

The BIG Day:

Do not arrive super early  mistake many make (more than an hour in advance (half an hour is the best to give you time for unpredictable)  you wont be able to take the test earlier and will only spend time waiting and stressing out. This is especially true about the online GMAT. If your appointment is in the morning, you will have more time to sleep and rest.

Do not stress out if you have not been able to fall asleep at the time like you usually do. It is a big day and most people get less sleep. Do not stress out about that. Everyone does it. Thats why it is helpful to schedule a test at least 30 days before the deadline so you can retake if you need to (not that you should plan on retaking but this should take some stress away). If you are a procrastinator and know that you wont be motivated enough if you have a secondary date then you may want to use an opposite strategy.

Don't screw up - know the rules! http://gmatclub.com/forum/8-things-not- ... 20625.html

Good luck!

Other Related and Helpful Posts:

P.S. This is still being improved and edited. if you have suggestions, please PM me. Thank you!

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1. http://gmatclub.com/forum/what-to-do-fo ... 20895.html 2. http://gmatclub.com/forum/test-day-warm-up-78595.html -------------------------------------------------_________________
Hey There,Congrats on getting into two great schools! You have a tough decision ahead of you!I want to jump in on this conversation and give you my thoughts!First of all, I'm having trouble with Flyte says as they don't give any specific data or details to backup their opinion. (Separately, I am having a hard time finding a time when they have been pro-SOM in any thread, so you might want to take that with a grain of salt). bb has taken a swing at this, but allow me to finish up where he started.It's a real shame that you won't be able to visit the campuses, as I am sure that you'll find them to be fairly different in regards to culture. I've only spoken to folks who have visited and applied, but I can't speak to Darden since I have not gone there, but at SOM we emphasize several things that are different form Darden:First off, we have an integrated core curriculum, and as a result, you will not be learning all of your classes based on the case-methodology. This methodology has its time and place, but the professors at SOM feel that certain topics are best learned in different teaching styles - for example, our Operations Engine class should be taught differently from our Customer Class, which should be taught differently from our Modeling Managerial Decisions.Secondly, as it sounds like you come from a non-profit background, you might fit in a bit better here. SOM has been known for it's focus in nonprofits in the past, and while we do lead our peers in regards to the percentage of students who enter this sector, it remains in the single digits percentage-wise. While this is the case, anyone you meet at SOM is socially conscious - and in this regard, I think that SOM students are very self-selecting. While many of us will not go into fields that not in the government or in the nonprofit sector, we believe strongly that we must be good stewards of our communities - and this is reflected in our coursework, events, and dialogues that take place on campus.Thirdly, SOM is really emphasizes diversity - we have 40% international students in our MBA class, as well as 40% women MBAs, compared to Darden's 29% and 32% respectively - and when you add the Masters of Advanced Management Candidates, our international student percentage approaches 50%. Further, together with 27 other business schools from around the world, SOM is part of the Global Network for Advanced Management, where students can take classes with other students from GNAM schools, visit peer schools, and participate in masters classes. Finally, SOM has among the highest number of joint-degree candidates of any business school, approaching 20% of the MBA class, and MBAs can take classes anywhere throughout the entire Yale University - for example, I'm taking CS courses this Spring.Fourthly, New Haven. Location entirely depends on what you're looking for. New Haven sometimes gets a bad reputation for it's post-industrial history, but recently has been undergoing a significant amount of revitalization with new projects, many Yale-based, in and around our community. If you're looking just for an isolated college town, you can go with Charlottesville. If you're looking for a mid-sized city (with all the benefits (Among the highest restaurants-per-capita) and drawbacks (some crime etc), within a train ride of both New York and Boston (which helps tremendously for recruiting), consider New Haven.Fifth - Reputation, Trajectory, and Community - as bb noted, we're really proud of SOM's trajectory. B-school is sometimes compared to an investment and in this regard, you should look for a school that will provide you with a good ROI. I think SOM provides a unique value proposition in this regard, particularly with the Stewardship of Dean Snyder. SOM is fortunate to be associated very closely with Yale University and we are all very tightly-knit. Anyone whom I have reached out to - from SOM and from the greater University has always gotten back to me and been tremendously helpful. SOM, while a younger school, has an extraordinary alumni base - with the second highest alumni annual contribution rate (over 50%) and this year the class of 2016 reached a 100% participation rate for our class gift.Alright, now on to consulting.I had a tough time, just like bb finding specifics in regards to MBB placement. I'm not involved in Consulting (I'm a Tech Club Co-leader, and Technology is my wheelhouse), but if we do look at P&Q's aggregate analysis, I see there being very little differentiation between the two schools with regards to Consulting placement:Industry:Darden 29.4%SOM 29.3%Function:Darden 31.6%SOM 37.1%While I don't know about this for Darden, I do know that SOM is one of the 10 core schools for all MBB. Looking at the percentages above, I'd say that SOM is at least as good as Darden, if not better if you're looking for consulting.When it comes down to it, I think bb is on the money - it would be imprudent for companies to hire just based on a school's reputation. Rather, it should be the individual candidate who is evaluated for a specific position.Happy to jump on the phone if you'd like to chat - or if you'd like to also chat with friends in Consulting, I'm happy to put you in touch too! Just shoot me a note at daniel.kent[at]yale.eduBest of luck,Dan '16
Dozens of New York voters are suing the state, saying that their voter registration changed without their input, costing them the ability to vote in Tuesday's primary. The lawsuit, filed this afternoon in Long Island federal court by the group Election Justice USA, argues that the voters' alleged registration changes deny them equal protection under the constitution, and demands a blanket order allowing "tens of thousands" of potential plaintiffs to vote in tomorrow's presidential primary.

"Plaintiffs are in imminent harm of losing their right to vote," the suit reads. "They have beseeched the various Boards of Elections without result. Nothing can save their right to vote save an order from this Court."

New York's primaries are closed, meaning only members of a given party can vote in that party's primary, and the deadline to change parties is more than six months before Primary Day, the earliest in the country. Those who signed onto the lawsuit say that their paperwork was in order, and in many cases they had voted repeatedly in Democratic primaries from the same address, but that recent checks of their voter registrations revealed that their party had been changed or could not be found at all. The accounts echo online reports of other spurned would-be voters.

"We were seeing an alarming number of voter affiliations changed without people's knowledge or consent, people who were registered listed as not registered," said Shyla Nelson, a spokeswoman for Election Justice USA.

As the primary neared and the group solicited accounts of irregularities, reports poured in, she said: "What started as a trickle is now a river."

More than 200 voters signed onto the lawsuit, Nelson said on Friday (she was still tallying late additions this afternoon as lawyers pushed up against the close-of-court deadline).

One plaintiff, a 24-year-old from Suffolk County, says that he registered as a Democrat in 2009, and that a change of affiliation form the BOE showed him, supposedly proving he left the party, bears a signature that is an "identical, pixel-by-pixel" copy of the signature on his driver's license. Another plaintiff, a 58-year-old from upstate Onondaga County, had been registered as a Democrat since 1989, but on April 11th found that her registration was "purged." An employee of the county told her that the change was a clerical error, but that she would not be able to vote on Tuesday, according to the suit. Others named in the lawsuit registered for the first time within days of the new voter deadline in March, or the party-change deadline last October.

Nelson, a Vermont performance artist, described Election Justice as nonpartisan, though she and several other core members identified on its website are vocal supporters of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Most of the complaints we've seen publicized online center around spurned voters seeking to cast a ballot for Sanders in tomorrow's Democratic primary. In recent days, the state Board of Elections has chalked up concerns such as these to voter ignorance of New York's restrictive rules, and of the occasional data entry error.

Election Justice USA formed recently after Republican officials in Arizona's Maricopa County drastically reduced the number of polling places for the state's March primary, leading to lines as much as five hours long, with the worst impacts in majority-Latino districts.

"We wanted to develop a response to voter suppression, issues at pollingthe widespread problem at polls this election cycle," Nelson said.

In New York, voters certain that they should be registered Democrat have in many cases been unable to affirmatively prove their status. In one such case, Long Island resident Jonathan Carrillo, a DJ, said that he registered as a Democrat for the first time in March, but that he was listed in Board of Elections records as a Republican. Consultation with Nassau County election officials brought up a 2013 DMV form that shows he registered as a Republican when getting a license, which he says he never would have done.

In this situation, Carrillo's only remaining option is to go to the county Board of Elections office on Primary Day and explain his case to a judge, in hopes of getting a court order to allow him to vote. This is unfair, Election Justice argues.

"The Board of Elections, not voters, holds the voting records and should be responsible to prove a voters ineligibility, rather than putting this burden on the voter. As it is currently structured, the statute places an onerous and excessive burden on the voter to prove their eligibility," said Blaire Fellows, one of the New York attorneys filing the suit. "It requires securing a court order, which takes time that many New Yorkers simply dont have, as it means loss of income over and above what they lose by simply taking time off to vote."

The other procedure available to voters with irregular registration records is to vote at a polling site using a provisional ballot, wherein one explains the nature of the irregularity, for commissioners to consider when they're counting votes. This process, the lawsuit says, is the product of "one of the nation's most opaque and oppressive voter laws."

The suit asks for the state to preserve all provisional ballots and create a hearing process where voters can explain irregularities, adding a layer of due process, where currently, lawyers argue, the ballots are "discarded by the Board of Elections in a closed room." What the lawsuit calls "purges," its authors argue, disproportionately affect Hispanic, African-American, and Hispanic voters, as have previous electoral manipulations in the state's history. The legal filing, which shows signs of being assembled in extreme haste, also cites the just-reported decline of registered Democrats in Brooklyn by 63,500, voters it also calls "purged."

One Brooklyn resident recounts registering as a new voter last month and, upon being unable to find her registration, calling the Brooklyn BOE only to be told it was probably lost in the mail. Photojournalist Natalie Keyssar said she registered by mail within 48 hours of the March 25th deadline for forms to be postmarked, and that when she returned from an assignment in Mexico on Friday, she looked online to see where to vote, but found she is not registered. Repeated calls to the county board didn't go through, and after an hour of trying again today, she said she reached a Ms. Jackson who told her that she "shouldn't have left it till so close to the deadline," that the office was receiving some 2,000 forms a day towards the end, and that her record can't be found, likely because it hasn't been processed yet.

"How can the U.S. actually tell its citizens their right to vote has been lost in the mail?" she wrote in a Facebook post.

She said she found it even more "shocking" when several friends reached out to say that they were having similar problems. "Thats just 8 of my random friends who just happen to be looking at Facebook, so this problem must be very widespread," she said.

A call to the state BOE left her unsatisfied.

"What Im waiting to hear is someone to take responsibility, to say that I did everything correctly and Im still not a registered voter," she said. "I have a U.S. passport, a drivers license, a Global Entry photo ID, and an NYPD press passI am who I say I am. I just want to vote."

Sanders bemoaned the closed primary setup in a recent speech.

"We have a system here in New York where independents can't get involved in the Democratic primary, where young people who have not previously registered and want to register today just can't do it," Sanders said during his recent 27,000-strong rally in Washington Square Park.

Republican candidate Donald Trump has also bumped up against New York's tight limits, as his children Eric and Ivanka just straight-up missed the deadline to register, and thus can't vote for him. A state BOE spokesman has said that Trump supporters are also among those who have inundated his office with complaints.

An open primary would mostly eliminate the need to prove party affiliation in the first place, as Republicans would be able to vote in Democratic primaries and vice versa (and of course, Conservative, Green, and Working Families party members could vote outside their respective sandboxes).

In the 1970s, a group of New Yorkers sued to have the state's early party-change deadline declared unconstitutional, but after two courts agreed with them, the Supreme Court overturned the decisions in a five to four ruling. In 2003, New York City's independent/Republican mayor Michael Bloomberg pushed a ballot proposal to create nonpartisan primaries for city positions, in which the top two vote recipients would go on to the general election. Voters rejected this idea.

A bill currently before the Assembly would open up the presidential primary to those who are not members of a party. It is laid over in the election law committee, and if past efforts to expand voter access in New York are a guide, it may never see the light of day.

A state Board of Elections spokesman declined to comment, saying his office has not yet been served.

A hearing on the suit is set for 9 a.m. Tuesday.

For more information on voting in the Tuesday presidential primary, see our guide here.
A volunteer officer with the Orthodox Jewish Borough Park Shomrim, a community-based policing force, was charged in Manhattan federal court on Monday for bribing NYPD officials with cash for expedited gun licenses.

While officials' names have not been released by investigators, the Daily News reports that the License Division's commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Michael Endall, 48, has been demoted to administrative work "pending further review." Sergeant David Villanueva, 42, and Officer Richard Ochetal, 36, have also been placed on modified duty.

Alex "Shaya" Lichtenstein, 44, came to investigators' attention earlier this month when he approached an acquaintance within the NYPD, allegedly claiming that his previous connections in the Licensing Division had dried up. Lichtenstein ultimately offered the officer $6,000 per license, bragging that he'd used his connections to obtain 150 gun licenses to date.

The officer in question, who has not been named, notified the Internal Affairs Bureau, which is already in the midst of a joint-FBI investigation into NYPD brass taking cash and gifts in exchange for favors, like police details for weddings and funerals. The ongoing probe has already seen several heads roll, including commanding officers who allegedly traded favors with Upper West Side developer Jona Rechnitz and Borough Park businessman Jeremey Reichberg. Mayor de Blasio, who has received substantial campaign donations from both men, is also feeling the heat.

The same cop who tipped off the IAB to Lichtenstein's alleged offer met with Lichtenstein in Borough Park last week, wearing a concealed camera. Apparently agitated, Lichtenstein patted the cop down and said that he'd rather meet with "in your underpants and undershirt," according to the complaint filed Monday in Manhattan federal court.

Ultimately assured that the cop was legit, he eventually promised that, "I'll give you.... more than you'll make in the police department." He then took out a calculator and multiplied $6,000 per license by 150 licenses, indicating that the officer could make as much as $900,000.

Lichtenstein's operation has allegedly been ongoing for three years. In 2013 a commanding NYPD officer allegedly introduced Lichtenstein to a veteran sergeant in the Licensing Division, whose name has not been released. Once the relationship was forged, Lichtenstein allegedly hung out with the sergeant at his office in the Licensing Division on a near-daily basis. The sergeant, in turn, bragged about his close relationship with the Hasidic Community, and the Commanding Officer who had introduced him to Lichtenstein.

He also wasn't quiet about his transactions with Lichtenstein. Earlier this year he allegedly told fellow Licensing Division officers that Lichtenstein charges his customers $18,000 per gun license. But the relationship turned sour. Lichtenstein apparently told the bugged officer last week that the sergeant had gotten "pissed off" because "people got information" that he'd been paid "so much money."

Questioned in relation to the probe, an officer who processed applications for Lichtenstein said that he often received "lunch money" in exchange for his services, to the tune of about $100.

The NYPD License Division receives about 5,000 applications per year, according to the department. Before an application is approved, the NYPD reviews the individual's criminal and mental health history, conducts an in-person interview, and, if applicable, assesses the need for a license to carry. At least one of the applications associated with Lichtenstein is for an unnamed gun license holder who had been listed in at least four domestic violence complaints and had allegedly threatened to kill someone at least once.

"This bribery scheme allowed a man to obtain a gun who made a threat against someones life," said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Diego Rodriquez in a statement. "Its further alarming that Lichtenstein bragged about beating the system and potentially put the general public in danger.

Lichtenstein, who now lives in Pomona, New York, was released on $500,000 bail. He has been charged with one count of bribery, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, and one count of conspiracy, which carries a maximum of five.

Commissioner Bratton, who said earlier this month that a bout of demotions of top brass in relation to the FBI probe would not be remembered as a "particularly good day for the department," stated on Monday that, "this investigation will continue to go where the leads take us.
Our latest Quick Bites brings us to Butterfunk for some boiled peanuts & more.

THE VIBE

Many have attempted to open a Neighborhood Soul Food Joint over the past decade, in areas all over the city, but few have pulled it off with such immediate success as the new Butterfunk Kitchen in Windsor Terrace. This is one of those restaurants that, in both style and temperament, fits so effortlessly into its surroundings, and feels so relaxed when you sit down to eat inside, that newcomers to the block (like me) might have a hard time guessing it's only been open for a couple of weeks.

Part of that insta-comfort comes from co-owner Eugenie Woo and her husband, chef Chris Scott, who for the past five years have run the popular cafe/brunch spot Brooklyn Commune located next door. Free interesting bar snacks like Boiled Peanuts and Kool-Aid Pickles certainly add to the hominess, as do the couple's family photographs jumbled across the dark-green walls. Scott is one of 27 grandchildrenhe credits his Nana for teaching him that love and respect are the secrets to great cookingso there were lots of memories from which to draw, including some that stretch back to the 19th century.

Butterfunk is a small restaurant, with seating for about 30 at the butcher-block tables, plus five seats at the bar, but Woo hasn't crammed it all in too tight, and the room feels plenty spacious. In fact, they've left one corner empty, which functions as a stage of sorts for local jazz and blues musicians a couple of nights of week, adding to the community feel.

THE BITES

They pretty much nailed the neighborhood spot vibe, but the best news here is that Scott and his crew can really cook.

Entrees can sometimes be the weak link in Southern/Soul Food spots, with starters and sides being the real stars, but not at Butterfunk. Portions are hefty, too. The Sweet Lemonade Fried Chicken, for example, is crackling and juicy (yup, even the dreaded breast), with only a hint of astringency making its way into the lively mix of seasonings.

Even better is the BBQ Baby Back Ribs, which are baked and uniquely prepared with sinus-clearing amounts of mustard and piles of fiery corn salsa. It sounds overwhelming, but it works. The meat itself, tender and rich, slides so easily off the bone that it won't survive the trip to your mouth without plopping back onto your plate (or lap), so be prepared to knife-and-fork your way through these chunks of sweet swine.

The breaded, crispy Fried Catfish offers a decent alternative to all that meatthe jalapeno jam that's loaded on with abandon ensures that the dish is no wallflower at the big-flavors partybut it's still less exciting that the offerings from the barnyard.

The only starter I tried was the Crispy Deviled Eggs, which featured battered and deep-fried whites filled with a whipped yolk. A flag of crunchy fried collard green completes the multi-textured delight.

All of the sides sound appealing, and the two that I tried were even better than I hoped. The Mac and Cheese is made with one of the more corkscrew-type pastas, the sharp cheese charred and chewy on top. And when my server recommended the Green Beans with Smoked Turkey Neck (above the Yams, the Collards, and even the Blackeyed Peas!) I just went with it, no regrets. The beans themselves are cooked to maximum comfort-food softness, very much not on-trend for veggies right now, but the addictive, funky broth gives the dish a lot more depth than meets the eye.

Really, there's nothing timid about any of the food, and if you want to fire up the intensity even higher, be sure to ask for some of Scott's chunky, no-joke hot sauce. That hot sauce goes particularly well with the Savory Cornbread, the only thing I ate that needed a little jolt. If it's bread you're after, and don't mind a bit of sweetness, the Brown Sugar Biscuits served with a prune butter is the move.

And speaking of sweetness, save room for dessert. Specifically: the Shoefly Pie, which doesn't materialize nearly often enough in my travels around town, and is phenomenal here. The crust is as dense and buttery as shortbread, and the pie features deep pools and sneaky rivulets of sticky-icky-icky molasses.

THE VERDICT

Butterfunk Kitchen is a big win for Windsor Terrace, the sort of restaurant locals will likely find themselves eating in again and again. But for anyone along the F or G lines with a frequent craving for Southern cuisine, the Hamilton Parkway stop is literally right across the street, and Butterfunk is well worth a quick trip.

Butterfunk Kitchen is located at 1295 Prospect Avenue, right near Greenwood Avenue, and is open on Tuesday through Sunday at 5:30 to 10:00 on weeknights, and until 11:00 on Friday and Saturday. CLOSED MONDAYS. CASH ONLY. (917-909-0421; butterfunkkitchen.com)
James Dixon, who pleaded guilty earlier this month to killing Islan Nettles in 2013 because she was transgender, was sentenced today to 12 years in prison. Prosecutors had originally asked for 17 years, and at today's sentencing, Nettles's family pleaded with the court, saying that 12 years is not enough.

"For him to only get 12 yearsthats not right," Nettles's 19-year-old sister, Sky Nettles, said today, adding, "My sister couldn't even speak. She didn't look like herself...She looked like a monster."

Nettles, who worked as an assistant at a fashion company, died in 2013 after she was brutally beaten in Harlem. Police initially charged another man for the attack, but dropped the charges and, over a year later, arrested Dixon on charges of manslaughter and felony assault.

According to Dixon's guilty plea and court records, Dixon, 25, along with at least six other young men, encountered Nettles and two other trans women on Eighth Avenue between 147th and 148th Streets on August 17th, 2013. Dixon hit Nettles and her head struck the pavement, after which he hit her again, causing a traumatic brain injury, the Manhattan District Attorney's office said when Dixon pleaded guilty.

Dixon reportedly admitted to attacking Nettles after realizing that she was transgender. During a recorded questioning, he said that he "just didn't want to be fooled." Known as the "trans panic" defense, this tactic was banned in California in 2014.

When offering a statement today in court, Nettles's mother addressed Dixon directly, Mic reports.

"I hope you die," Delores Nettles said. "I will hate you for the rest of my life for taking something that belonged to me. Your mother can see you every day and say 'I love you.' I can't hear that. I'm subjected to seeing my child on a mantle...I had eight children and never thought that I'd have to bury one."

When Dixon's plea deal was announced, Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance said that "members of the transgender community are far too often the targets of violent crime. I hope that this conviction provides some comfort to Ms. Nettles family and friends, and affirms my offices commitment to protecting members of the LGBTQ community." However, some advocates say that this is far from the case, as Lourdes Hunter, director of the TransWomen of Color Collective, told Rewire:

"This is not a win for the trans community...James Dixon going to jail will not stop trans murders, it will not bring Islan Nettles back, it will not bring peace to Delores Nettles, who for many years sat in anguish as the murderer of her child roamed the streets due to the negligence of the New York Police Department and the New York District Attorney."

Nearly twice as many transgender and gender-nonconforming people were killed in 2015 as in 2014, according to Rewire, and the majority were people of color. Just this past Saturday, Keyonna Blakeney, a 22-year-old black trans woman, was killed in Maryland.

Dixon reportedly showed no remorse at his sentencing, and declined to make any statement before Justice Daniel P. Conviser sentenced him to 12 years.

"He can go home after those 12 years and see his family," Nettles's mother told the court. "It's not fair."
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Yesterday, dozens of New York voters sued the state, alleging that their registrations in the Democratic party had been purged or altered and were thus preventing them from voting in today's presidential primary; the same day, it was reported that the number of registered Democrats in Brooklyn had dropped by 63,500. Now, that number has doubled: the NYC Board of Elections has reportedly removed 126,000 Brooklyn Democrats from the rolls since last fall.

Michael Ryan, who's the executive director at the NYC Board of Elections, told WNYC that the number breaks down as follows: 44,000 voters were inactive; 70,000 were removed from the inactive voter list; and 12,000 people had moved out of the borough.

Why so many? Brooklyn was "a little behind" in maintaining its voter records, Ryan said. He told the NY Post that Brooklyn's Board of Elections saw a number of retirements and staff illnesses, meaning that it was catching up on a backlog.

Mayor de Blasio demanded yesterday that the Board of Elections provide his office with more analysis on the drop in registered Brooklyn Democrats.

"I admit that Brooklyn has had a lot of transient populationthats obvious," de Blasio said. "Lot of people moving in, lot of people moving out. That might account for some of it. But I'm confused since so many people have moved in, that the number would move that much in the negative direction."

Ryan told WNYC that he provided the same explanation to the mayor's staff: the borough was between six months and a year behind in updating its records.

Yesterday's lawsuit, which has a hearing this morning, is not about Brooklyn Democrats specifically, but rather was filed by voters from across the state who claim that their registrations were changed or purged without their input. Because New York has closed primaries, only those registered in a given party can vote in that party's primary, and those filing the lawsuit say that these changes to their registrations are denying them equal protection under the constitution. They want a judge to issue a blanket order allowing anyone in their situation to vote in today's primary.

If there's a problem with your voter registration (which you can check here), you're not entirely out of luck, even if the lawsuit doesn't get a favorable ruling by the end of the day. You can go to your local Board of Elections, where a judge can hear your case and, if he or she thinks you should be allowed to vote, give you paperwork that you can bring to your polling place. Alternately, you can fill out a provisional ballot at your polling place, on which you can make your case for being eligible to vote. If you're deemed ineligible by the election commissioners tasked with assessing your provisional ballot, you should receive a mailing informing you of that fact.

You can report problems to the hotline set up by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, at (800) 771-7755; to the New York U.S. attorney's offices at (718) 254-6323 (for Brooklyn, Queens, Richmond, Nassau, and Suffolk counties) and (212) 637-0840 (for New York, Bronx, Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, and Westchester counties); or to the FBI, at (212) 384-1000.
As expected, Solenex LLC of Baton Rouge has opted to continue its 34-year quest to desecrate 6,200 acres of sacred land in the Badger-Two Medicine area of the Lewis and Clark National Forest. The callous, but persistent oil and gas drilling company is going back to federal court to challenge the Interior Departments March 17 cancellation of its lease.

The lease is within a 165,000-acre area deemed by the government to be a Traditional Cultural District of the Blackfeet. Its the site of the creation story for the tribes of southern Canada and the Blackfeet Nation of Montana.

According to tribal oral histories, humans roamed these acres for thousands of years before European contact. Solenex, on the other hand, obtained its lease in 1982 for a dollar an acre.

Solenex wants the case to go before U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, D.C., who has been sympathetic to the company's arguments in prior court hearings.

In 2013, for example, Solenex filed a lawsuit saying it had waited too long with a suspended lease and a decision had to be made on whether the company could drill an exploratory well.

Leon agreed, saying, "No combination of excuses could possibly justify such ineptitude or recalcitrance for such an epic period of time."

But if 30-some years constitute "an epic period time," is there even a word to describe the thousands of years indigenous people have held Badger-Two Medicine sacred?

Here's how Solenex lawyer William Pendly sees the land in question: "Youre talking about an area that has a railroad through it, has a pipeline through it, Highway 2 goes through it. Were not talking about a wilderness area; were not talking about an area where man is a stranger and does not remain ... So, were not talking about some pristine area that has never seen activity."

Even though the Environmental Impact Statement on Solenexs application said the chances were small that any one well it drilled would result in substantial returns, Pendly views Badger-Two Medicine with dollar signs in his eyes.

"We have known for a long time, geologists have known that this area has tremendous potential for oil and gas development. And if (Solenex) were to drill there and able to drill and made a discovery, it would be wonderful news, it would be great news, he is quoted by Montana Public Radio as saying.

Wonderful news? Great news? Really?

Not so, say the tribes.

Back in November when advisers recommended canceling the lease, Harry Barnes, chairman of the Blackfeet Nation Tribal Council, said, Badger-Two Medicine is too sacred to develop. Were grateful this administration has taken a critical step toward permanent protection of this site that is like a church -- a divine sanctuary -- to our people.

Blackfeet tribal historian John Murray put it this way: "This area, this landscape, this wild, this solitude, this inextricably inalienable relationship we have with the Badger-Two Medicine would be destroyed if they came in here and started drilling and building pipelines and roads and bridges. They would destroy that. For what?"

Bruce Babbitt, the interior secretary who suspended the lease during the Clinton administration, agrees, "(Go) west across the Great Plains and gradually you see enormous alpine front. It looks like the Himalayas. It comes straight up out of nowhere. ... And the incredible richness and diversity of plant and animal life as you make this transition between the high plains up into the true Rocky Mountains, its a remarkable place."

Which argument resonates most with you as a devotee of Montana? Has the land here ever spoken to you? What did it say?

It tells me that thousands of years trump 33 years, and spirit trumps profit. It says, "Hitch your wagon to another star, Solenex -- this a battle you are fundamentally unworthy to fight."
Social conservatives in North Carolina used a familiar playbook when they helped pass a draconian law restricting which restrooms transgender people can use. The tactic was fear: They whipped up anxieties about modesty and vulnerability in public restrooms until they created full-fledged bathroom panic over victimization by sexual predators. Last week, with banks, businesses and Bruce Springsteen announcing boycotts to protest the discriminatory law, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory announced half-measures to try to dampen the backlash, but he did nothing to alter the deception inherent in bathroom panic.

The North Carolina law, House Bill 2, took aim at an ordinance that was about to go into effect in Charlotte, N.C. The Charlotte City Council had voted to prohibit discrimination against gay and transgender people in public accommodations and by government contractors, expanding an existing law that protected other minorities. In response, the state legislature invalidated the ordinance and seized the opportunity to target transgender people using the crudest  and most baseless  of fears: No men in womens bathrooms.

When McCrory signed HB2 into law, he claimed he was protecting the basic expectation of privacy in the most personal of settings and acting to stop a radical breach of trust and security. Peter Sprigg of the conservative Family Research Council defended the need to force transgender people into restrooms aligned with their birth gender by citing legitimate fears that people have about their safety. Yet hundreds of similar nondiscrimination measures are in place across America, and law enforcement officials have reported no surge in bathroom victimization as a result.

Sprigg and company borrowed their playbook from a successful effort in Houston last year. With a ballot measure, voters there repealed a nondiscrimination ordinance after a campaign that included an ominous television ad showing a man in a dress following a little girl into a bathroom stall.

As the New York Times reported, the ballot measure fight was turned from one about equal rights to one about protecting women and girls from sexual predators. The anti-discrimination ordinance lost, 61 percent to 39 percent.

Such fear mongering against gays and transgender people is a time-tested strategy, despite plenty of evidence that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. In the battle for marriage equality, the nation was told time and again that marriage itself, along with the American family, would be imperiled if same-sex couples were allowed to marry. Freedom will be taken away, said one infamous 2009 ad titled Gathering Storm. Religion would be destroyed because the clergy would be forced to conduct same-sex weddings, no matter their convictions. Yet none of these doomsday scenarios has come to pass.

The particular terrors that fueled the campaigns in Houston and North Carolina have an even longer history. In the debate over dont ask, dont tell, opponents of openly gay service spent decades fanning the flames of anxiety about straight recruits sharing quarters  sharing showers!  with known gays and lesbians. At one point, senators held congressional hearings in the bowels of a nuclear submarine to infuse the news cycle with frightening images of the compromised privacy of military life. The message was clear: In such conditions, gay people were not to be trusted, unit cohesion could not be maintained and an inclusive policy would be a clear and present danger to the United States.

Again, none of this was true, as a wealth of research before and after dont ask, dont tell concluded (some of it was buried by those opposed to change).

A 2003 Palm Center study found that the experience of military and paramilitary organizations that lifted their gay bans showed that cohesion, morale, recruitment, retention and privacy will be preserved or even enhanced by ending policies that required gay people to lie about their identities or stay out of uniform. Other scholars noted that, all across the globe, people in various contexts that might seem erotic (especially when social conservatives insisted on eroticizing them) in fact developed an etiquette of disregard. In doctors offices, in military barracks, in locker rooms and restrooms, most people simply finished their business and ignored those around them. Those who had predicted disaster were spectacularly wrong.

But no amount of evidence seems capable of stopping the fear strategy. The Rand Corp. has completed a new study on transgender military service concluding, unsurprisingly, that ending discrimination against transgender troops will not harm military readiness. The Pentagon has neither released the study nor met its own deadline for reviewing the policy. Sen. James M. Inhofe R-Okla., who wrongly predicted that openly gay military service would complicate things and make it very difficult for us to take care of the troops, is now opposing service by transgender troops because  guess what  he cant understand which bathrooms they would use. And Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, who had earlier wrongly predicted that openly gay troops would drive away one-quarter of the military, is now predicting that transgender service will increase sexual assaults.

Voters should see these kinds of fear-based charges for what they are  a cynical, angry and wildly inaccurate response to LGBT people gaining equal rights. In the barracks and at the marriage altar and in the bathroom, equality for sexual minorities does not cause harm to others.
DECATUR  The Decatur City Council on Monday cleared the way for residents to sell baked goods prepared in their homes, over the strong objections of the Macon County Health Department.

The council unanimously passed the home kitchen ordinance, which allows bakers to sell less than $1,000 per month in baked goods prepared in their homes. State law that took effect Jan. 1 allowed for local governments to establish these types of ordinances.

A group of home bakers spoke in favor of the measure, first at the April 4 council meeting and again Monday.

But representatives of the health department said city could be creating risk to residents' health. Specifically, the ordinance allows the health department to inspect home kitchens in the event of an outbreak or complaint, but does not require them to do so or provide any inspections before the baking takes place.

The mission of the Macon County Health Department is to protect and promote the health of Macon County residents, said administrator Dianna Heyer. To only respond when an outbreak occurs is unacceptable. We are about prevention.

In order to qualify, the bakers must have monthly gross sales of less than $1,000; sell directly to the consumer and provide notice that the food was prepared in a home kitchen; attach a label with allergen information; and store the food in the residence where it is prepared or packaged.

I've baked and decorated cakes since I was 12 years old. I've never poisoned anybody yet, said Holly Mowry, the former owner of Mowry Baking Co.

She said her children made extra money by selling baked items when they were growing up. It's an opportunity, too, for young mothers who can't afford a babysitter and want to try to get ahead.

Several council members said they had experienced food poisoning before, sometimes at restaurants that would have undergone inspections.

You've got to take a little risk and live a little, and in the age of government overreach and trying to determine when people can go to the bathroom, I think we ought to just buy cupcakes and stop worrying about it, Councilman Chris Funk said, to applause from the audience.

Heyer also expressed concerns about the health department's ability to inspect the home kitchens in the event of an illness outbreak. The state budget impasse has already led to the reduction of staff and services, she said, and more cuts could be coming.

We will do our best, but I cannot tell you for certain the status of the health department in the coming months, she said. We are literally looking at trying to keep our doors open in the next few months.

The council did amend the measure in an attempt to address concerns about food safety training. The ordinance now requires that the home bakers receive a food handler certification, which can be done online and costs $15, according to several of the speakers.

In other business, the council heard a report from Dewberry Architects Inc. on the status of the city's seven fire stations.

The report identified structural problems, leaky roofs, consistent heating and air conditioning issues and facilities that were sometimes too small to accommodate new equipment and vehicles.

The firm recommended replacing three stations and making multiple repairs at the others. The total cost was estimated at $8.1 million, but the most immediate needs, in the next one to three years, are projected at $1.8 million.

The council also welcomed back resident Russell Shulke, who collapsed at the April 4 meeting and was resuscitated through efforts of Fire Chief Jeff Abbott, Councilwoman Dana Ray and other city officials.

Shulke said he had been a walking time bomb for months, and thanked all those who responded for helping to save his life. The event took place at the right place and time, he said.
SPRINGFIELD  Democrats in the General Assembly have begun their election-year push for a plan they say would lower income taxes for more than 99 percent of Illinoisans while generating $1.9 billion in new revenue by raising rates on the wealthy.

State Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie, is sponsoring legislation that would lower the state income tax rate from 3.75 percent to 3.5 percent for individuals earning less than $100,000 a year and families earning less than $200,000. The proposal would create a new top tax bracket of 9.75 percent on individuals income of more than $1 million and families income above $1.5 million.

Langs fair tax proposal is tied to a proposed amendment that would do away with the Illinois Constitutions requirement that all taxpayers be charged the same rate. That proposal, sponsored by Rep. Christian Mitchell, D-Chicago, would require the support of three-fifths majorities in the House and Senate to be put to voters for approval on the November ballot.

At a time where Illinois citizens are still hurting due to an economy that had faltered over the years, 99 percent of them will receive a tax cut under this legislation, Lang said Monday in a conference call with reporters.

But the proposal is already facing strong headwinds from conservative-leaning groups such as the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and the Illinois Policy Institute.

The plan would punish small-business owners and would accelerate the documented flight of high net worth individuals out of our state, Todd Maisch, the Chambers president, said Friday.

However, Sen. Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, the Senate sponsor of the proposed constitutional amendment, said the vast majority of businesses also would see a tax cut under the proposal because they are taxed at the personal rate, not the corporate rate.

The fact is this is a tax cut for small and middle-size businesses and for those job creators, Harmon said. This will enable them to put more money into their businesses to expand and to grow.

Emily Miller, policy director at the advocacy group Voices for Illinois Children, said that while the proposal isnt an immediate solution to the current budget impasse, it would help social service providers and others who have been hurt by the states inability to enact a budget.

Its time for us to start being a little bit more forward-thinking in the way that we plan our budgeting process, Miller said, and this is going to allow us to have the tools we need to not rely on low- and middle-income families when we need to be able to respond to the needs of our service providers.

Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, who has been locked in a budget standoff with legislative Democrats for nearly 10 months, has repeatedly said he would support plans to generate new revenue. But his office issued a statement Friday to the Capitol Fax blog saying this proposal would be the straw that breaks the Illinois economys back.

With social services providers, state universities and community colleges struggling without state funding due to the impasse, the Democrats tax proposal could shape up to be a key issue heading into the November election.

Kristen Crowell, campaign manager for the Fair Tax Campaign, said the proposal is perfectly politically viable.

A poll done for the group by Tulchin Research earlier this year showed 71 percent support statewide, including majorities in the Chicago area and downstate and, to widely varying degrees, across the political spectrum.

This is a safe vote for legislators to take, Crowell said.

While there are, in theory, enough Democrats in the House to pass the proposed amendment on a party-line vote, the supermajority has failed to hold together on several key issues in the past year.

Mitchell said they hope to earn support from across the aisle, especially given the exigent threats for a lot of (Republican) members in their districts due to the ongoing impasse.
Most Illinois legislators are good people, trying to do the right thing.

With that premise, the 10-month long budget impasse is a bit of a mystery. Why would good legislators allow the state to sink into such a mess?

The reason, as least partially, is the voters.

Whether we like it or not, House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, and Gov. Bruce Rauner control a lot of what happens in Springfield. Thats because those two men control a lot of campaign dollars. Both political leaders have massive war chests built up that they can give to candidates they like, or use against candidates that dont support them.

The common belief is that makes legislators beholden to their party leader. Either do what Madigan or Rauner wants or campaign money wont be there when you need it. Or worse, your political boss will finance a primary opponent.

That kind of blunt force happens, but there are some subtleties. Neither Rauner nor Madigan want their legislative supporters to struggle. The best scenario for both parties is that most legislative races are non-competitive. That allows them to put their money, and campaign help, into a few key races. The leaders want as few of their candidates "in trouble," as possible.

Thats where voters come in. If voters were making local legislators feel the heat over the lack of a budget, those legislators would do more to encourage Rauner and Madigan to get the problem fixed. If Rauner and Madigan thought that voters would punish local legislators for the lack of a budget in the November election, they would be much more focused on finding a solution.

There are some obstacles to that, of course. Because of the political gerrymandering allowed by Illinois a lot of legislators, from both parties, are located in "safe" districts.

However, voters can still make their voices heard. There are plenty of contested races in November and even if your local senator or representative isnt involved in a contested race, theyll listen if enough people tell them the lack of a budget is a problem. But voters need to add that if the problem isnt solved, they are ready to take out revenge at the polls.

Simply stated, voters need to put some heat on their local legislators, who then will turn and put the pressure on Rauner and Madigan.

Listed below are local legislators you can contact. Its time to make legislators, and our political leaders, understand that the budget impasse has to end.
New Braunfels, TX (78130)

Today

Cloudy skies early, then off and on rain showers overnight. Low 73F. Winds SSE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 40%. Higher wind gusts possible..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early, then off and on rain showers overnight. Low 73F. Winds SSE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 40%. Higher wind gusts possible.
Three citizens of Armenia and three of Georgia were arrested yesterday in Tbilisi on charges of selling US$200 million worth of uranium-238.

Davit Abesatze, lawyer of one of the arrested individuals, stated that four of the six are aged 74-75 and that two of them are Armenian citizens, and the other two Georgian citizens.

The lawyer also stated that the arrested have claimed they are innocent of the charges.

Georgian state investigator Savleh Motishvili told the local press that transportation containers full of uranium-238 were found in the house of one of those arrested.

If found guilty of illegally trading in nuclear material or equipment, those arrested face from 5-10 years imprisonment.

Two days ago the Tbilisi Civil Court issued an order detaining the six individuals while an investigation is launched.

This is not the first time that citizens of Armenia have been arrested in Georgia for selling radioactive material. In January of this year, Georgian security personnel arrested three individuals charged with selling cesium-137.

Two Armenian citizens were seized at the Sadakhlo border crossing between Armenia and Georgia in August 2014 as they attempted to smuggle an undisclosed amount of cesium-137 from Armenia into Georgia.

In 2010, Armenian citizens Sumbat Tonoyan and Hrant Ohanyan were sentenced by a Georgian court to 14 and 13 years respectively after being found guilty of smuggling radioactive materials into the country and of illegal trafficking.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu today accused Armenia of unleashing aggression against Azerbaijan in an address delivered at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

Davutoglu stated that the increase of violence in Nagorno Karabakh once again proves that the status quo is untenable and that tensions are now seen in Nakhijevan.

It is important that the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chairs warn Armenia to steer clear of aggression. It is very important that we find a way to overcome the problems that have resulted from the occupation of Azerbaijani territory, Davutoglu said.

Reporters were not allowed to pose questions to Davutoglu. After his address, parliamentarians were allowed to ask questions but members of the Armenian delegation werent able to take advantage of the opportunity.

Oksana Mousayelyan reporting from Strasbourg

Photo: Reuters
Tia Nelson, the daughter of Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, spoke about climate change at San Jose State University in April 2015. She is set to join President Obama Friday as he signs a historic international agreement on climate change.
Share your opinion on this topic by sending a letter to the editor to tctvoice@madison.com. Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. Please keep your letter to 250 words or less.
State Debate: What would Tommy do? He'd make friends with UW, says columnist
Hans Breitenmoser works with North Wind Renewable Energy to install solar panels at his dairy farm near Merrill in 2015.
From left, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which considers judicial nominations, and the Senate Democratic leadership, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., hold a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington April 14 calling on the Republican leadership to allow a confirmation hearing for Judge Merrick Garland, President Barack Obamas choice to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
Just before 2 a.m. Saturday the Sauk County Dispatch Center received a call that a vehicle had entered Lake Delton near the boat launch at the intersection of East Adams Street and Canyon Road.

Village of Lake Delton Police Chief Dan Hardman said the vehicles On Star system automatically sent an alert to emergency personnel, who responded to the scene.

Initially the driver and passenger indicated they were trapped in the vehicle and it was almost fully submerged. When members of the Lake Delton Police Department, Delton Fire Department and Dells-Delton EMS arrived, however, they discovered the two occupants had been able to exit the vehicle before the vehicle submerged.

Hardman said when officers asked the person who said he had not been driving how many people were in the car he responded probably two more. Upon hearing this, a Lake Delton police officer started to take off his gun belt to enter the lake. When the passenger was asked the same question again he changed his answer to just the two of us.

As the passenger was loaded onto an ambulance, he said, I think our friend was with us. At that point emergency personnel called the Dive Team. While waiting, the Delton Fire Department used a pipe pole to put a hole through the front window of the submerged car and along with equipment from Platts towing company partially pulled the car out of the lake.

Emergency personnel then discovered there was nobody else in the car. Hardman said the passenger then said now that I think about it, it was just us two. Officials quickly called off the Dive Team.

Dells-Delton EMS personnel treated and medically released both occupants on the scene for exposure to cold water. The driver, 29-year-old Heather Reed of Winona, Minnesota, was arrested for OWI after breathalyzer tests indicated she was more than twice the legal alcohol limit and she was booked into the Sauk County Jail.

The passenger, described as Reed's boyfriend, who police think was also intoxicated, was taken to his hotel in Lake Delton by police.
RACINE  What began with two men arguing about whether one was a contractor ended with a Racine resident dead on the floor in the hallway of his Grove Avenue home, investigators say.

Three Racine men were charged on Monday in the April 9 death of Thomas J. Borglin, 34. Borglins death is the citys third homicide of the year.

Mecquon J. Jones, 33, and Bobby L. Mitton, 28, who both live in the same home in the 3100 block of 16th Street in Racine, each are charged with being a party to the crime of first-degree intentional homicide and misdemeanor theft. The homicide charge is punishable by life behind bars if convicted of this count.

Derryle L. Allen, 27, of the 1500 block of Flett Avenue in Racine, is charged with two counts of harboring or aiding a felon and one count of misdemeanor theft. He is charged as a repeat offender.

The allegations in this case are truly shocking, Racine County District Attorney Rich Chiapete said during Jones initial appearance in court on Monday. Kind of a wolf pack mentality. This was a severe beating.

The Milwaukee County Medical Examiners Office ruled Borglins death the result of blunt-force trauma to his neck and chest, according to the trios criminal complaints.

Allen reportedly told investigators that Borglin and Mitton began to fight because Mitton thought Borglin was fake and he thought Borglin was lying about working as a contractor, the complaints state.

Borglin didnt want to fight, Allen said, but Mitton kept pushing it over and over. Allen said he saw Mitton pick Borglin up and body-slam him to the ground before he then punching Borglin, the complaints state.

Jones then began stomping on Borglins upper torso, according to the complaints.

Violent and unprovoked attack

Two TVs  a 50-inch and 32-inch  reportedly were stolen along with a knife, keys, Borglins wallet and cellphone. The items were stolen from the home or off his body, the complaints state.

Mitton told police that he spotted Jones stomping on Borglin and he and Allen pulled Jones off. But Jones broke free, Mitton allegedly told police, and resumed stomping on Borglin, the complaints state.

Jones allegedly admitted to punching and kicking Borglin, but told police he couldnt remember the number of times because he was too drunk, according to the complaints.

This was truly a violent and unprovoked attack, Chiapete said during Mittons initial appearance in court on Monday.

Chiapete called for Jones and Mitton to be held on $500,000 cash bond, while asking for Allens bond to be set at $75,000 cash.

Im not going to object to a reasonable amount of cash bail, Assistant State Public Defender Erin Larsen said, but not recommending specific bond amounts for Jones and Mitton.

She requested a $5,000 cash bond for Allen, saying he is a lifelong Racine resident and he actually sought out law enforcement on his own to provide information about the killing.

Court Commissioner Alice Rudebusch set Jones and Mittons bonds at $500,000 cash each, and Allens at $50,000. The Wisconsin Department of Corrections has a probation hold on Jones, meaning even if he could pay the $500,000 bail, he wouldnt be released from jail.

Borglins family didnt attend the initial appearances Monday. According to his obituary, Borglin was a gifted painter who found his niche in interior design  He also had an affinity for reptiles and snakes and began collecting from a very early age. His collection was diverse and began with a python.

All three men remain in the Racine County Jail. Their preliminary hearings are set for April 27.

The trio were arrested on Thursday in connection with Borglins death, according to Racine police.

Racine Police began investigating Borglins death on April 11, after his body was found in his home, 1547 Grove Ave. Racine County court records show Borglin previously has lived in a home in the 1700 block of Douglas Avenue in Racine, at a home in Caledonia and at Homeless Assistance Leadership Organization of Racine, a local shelter.
A Racine woman who lost control of her vehicle, crashed into a duplex and caused a fire early Saturday morning has been charged with operating while intoxicated, police said.

Racine Police Lt. Al Days said police cited Michelle L. Kirchoff, 48, of the 1300 block of Blaine Ave., for first offense OWI after the crash and fire. First offense OWI is not a criminal offense in Wisconsin.

Police and fire officials reported that the crash occurred at about 1:40 a.m. Saturday at 3401-03 Victory Ave. When police arrived, both the duplex and vehicle were on fire. The Racine Fire Department reported that the car went through the front of the house and caused major fire and structural damage to the duplex.

A Saturday news release from the Fire Department estimated the crash and fire caused approximately $50,000 in damage to the duplex.

A passenger in Kirchoffs vehicle, Brian Treiber, was cited for a child support violation, Days added. Kirchoff and Treiber sustained minor injuries in the crash. Nobody was injured in the home at the time of the crash, the Fire Department reported.
Madison police on Tuesday were investigating an early-morning disturbance outside a Far West Side bar that left a Madison man fatally shot and another man with minor injuries.

The shootings happened at around 1 a.m. in the parking lot of Martin OGradys Irish Pub, 7436 Mineral Point Road, police said. Investigators later found at least eight shell casings, fired from at least two guns, at the scene.

Tuesday afternoon, the Dane County Medical Examiners Office identified the man killed as Martez Moore, 30, of Madison. An autopsy determined the death was due to homicidal firearm trauma, the office said, with additional testing underway. No information was provided on how many times or where on his body Moore was shot.

An acquaintance of Moores, Jannelle OConnell-Parks, who lives in Chicago, said she grew up with Moore in Madison, and she was mourning his shocking death Tuesday.

He was awesome and funny, she told the State Journal. He was a great guy  so sad that hes gone so soon.

Police spokesman Joel DeSpain said no suspects had been identified Tuesday, but several people inside and outside the pub at the time of the shooting had been interviewed. Some provided useful information, and others did not, frustrating investigators, DeSpain said.

There are people weve talked with who we believe have first-hand information (about the shootings) who are not providing us with the details we need, DeSpain said. We want to get into that core group of people who likely have information on what transpired outside.

On Tuesday, police had only a sketchy outline of how things happened.

A large group of 15 to 20 men and women had gone into OGradys Irish Pub, then about half of them went outside, DeSpain said. A short time later, a disturbance took place outside with multiple shots fired.

There were no apparent signs of trouble inside the bar before the smaller group of people walked outside.

The people who run the pub say there was no problem with these people inside, DeSpain said. There was no arguing, there was no fighting.

The departments Violent Crimes Unit is running the investigation under the direction of Lt. Cory Nelson, from a command post set up in the departments West District.

Members of the departments gang and drug units also are helping  because they may know some of the people involved, not because the shootings necessarily revolved around anything drug- or gang-related, DeSpain said.

Police didnt know on Tuesday what prompted the dispute. The scene was chaotic as officers arrived and many in the parking lot scattered.

The homicide victim is found not far from the door, on the sidewalk and deceased, having been shot at least one time, DeSpain said. We were later able to find a second (man) who sustained a gunshot wound, described to me as a grazing wound to the head, for which that person was treated (at a local hospital) and released.

The injured man was not cooperative, DeSpain said. DeSpain said it isnt known if anyone else was injured during the incident.

OGradys is located in the west corner of the Cambridge Court strip mall, next to a Pizza Hut and across the road from Shopko, near West Towne Mall.

Other strip mall businesses include higher end outlets such as Lu Anders Boutique, Rejuvenation Spa and the popular French bakery La Baguette. Business remained brisk at the adjacent businesses throughout Tuesday as police worked the scene in the parking lot in front of the pub in a large area cordoned off with tape.

DeSpain said the neighborhood was not a problematic area, with one mugging reported at the pub in February, but little else of note for previous area crime.

But thats not always a good predictor of gun-related violence, as crime generally becomes more mobile, or less contained to certain streets or neighborhoods.

I dont think theres any real rhyme or reason anymore for where some of this gun violence takes place, DeSpain said. You have people who have a beef and when they cross paths, shots could be fired. And that could be in a shopping mall or outside a business or in a neighborhood with no other crimes associated with it.

Police asked anyone with information about the incident to call Madison Area Crime Stoppers at 608-266-6014.

 State Journal reporters Barry Adams and Bill Novak contributed to this report.
Most of the buffalo roaming around the area have been recaptured and returned, according to a press release from Juneau County Sheriff Brent Oleson.

He said four to six buffalo are unaccounted for, so locals will want to continue to be careful when driving. The owner of the buffalo, who police have not identified other than saying he's an "Amish man," will continue to search for the remaining bison.

Four of the animals were found 12 miles from where they escaped. With the consent of the owner, they were put down and sent to a Juneau County meat shop for processing.

The Star-Times has been unable to get a response on where exactly the buffalo were taken for meat processing, the identity of the buffalo's owner and other questions.

Mauston Police Department sent out an alert Thursday night warning that a herd of up to 120 buffalo had broken out and was wandering around Union Center, Wonewoc and Elroy.

State Highway 33 was shut down Friday afternoon due to the buffalo.

Earlier reports indicated most of the buffalo appear to be on private property, but law enforcement suggested everyone should still use caution when driving anywhere in the area.

If anyone sees a buffalo, they should not approach it and should call the sheriff's department.
Brewers at Wisconsin Brewing Co. in Verona are getting more work, this time from a company that wants to nationally distribute a boozier version of its hit alcoholic root beer.

Small Town Brewery of Wau-conda, Illinois, announced Tuesday that it has contracted with WBC to be the exclusive brewer for a 10.7 percent alcohol-by-volume version of Not Your Fathers Root Beer. Small Town has rolled out a version of Not Your Fathers Root Beer that is 5.9 percent ABV nationwide, but until now, the 10.7 percent version was available only in limited quantities in the Chicago area.

The 10.7 percent version will be available on draft in restaurants and bars across the country and in limited edition 22-ounce bomber bottles. The rollout will begin in Illinois in May, with 44 other states receiving it by the fall.

Carl Nolen, co-founder, president and CEO of WBC, would not disclose how much of the beverage will be made for Small Town but said the contract is beneficial for his brewery, which in 2015 produced 13,000 barrels of beer. The $8.5 million, 21,000-square-foot brewery opened in 2013 with an 80-barrel brewing system.

The exposure is very helpful and positive and creates opportunities we dont even know of, Nolen said. Being able to manage capacity is whats key in this industry going forward because of the cost of (the facility). I think we set ourselves up for this because we built a brewery with a tremendous amount of capacity.

In October, WBC announced a deal to brew Old Tankard Ale on contract for San Antonio-based Pabst Brewing Co. Under the terms of that agreement, WBC is brewing the ale to be sold initially in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Michigan, before rolling out to more states in the future.

The contract with Small Town will use a mobile bottling system to fill bomber bottles as WBC does not have its own bottling line, said Jessica Schluter, the brewerys marketing manager.

City Brewery in La Crosse is the producer of the 5.9 percent ABV version of Not Your Fathers Root Beer. Small Town took the brand national after the 10.7 percent ABV Not Your Fathers Root Beer became a cult hit in the Chicago area starting in 2012. A similar trajectory could occur for the higher-octane version.

Demand is strong and has been growing, Tim Kovac, founder and brewmaster at Small Town, said in a statement. The biggest challenge of rolling out this product nationally was finding a partner who could scale up production while consistently maintaining our quality standards.
A motorcyclist who gave the finger to a car driver on the Beltline had a passenger in the car retaliate by pointing a gun at him, with the two men in the car arrested a short time later.

The road rage incident happened at about 4 p.m. at Rimrock Road, Madison police said.

John Stephens IV, 23, Madison, was tentatively charged with disorderly conduct while armed, and Tylor Galloway, 23, Madison, was tentatively charged with carrying a concealed weapon.

According to police:

The motorcyclist, a 25-year-old Mount Horeb man, told police the handgun pointing "Scared the crap out of me," fearing he was going to be shot.

The motorcyclist initially flipped off the car driver in a moving dispute over following distance.

"Shortly afterward, the passenger in the car displayed the firearm," said police spokesman Joel DeSpain.

Police were given a description of the car and the license plate number, with the car pulled over by police on Old Middleton Road.

A handgun allegedly was found in the car under the driver's seat.
A 31-year-old man arrested last week  the fifth person arrested on charges of sexual assault with the same 15-year-old girl  was the girls Snapchat pimp, selling subscriptions to access nude pictures and videos of the girl, a criminal complaint filed Tuesday alleges.

Jacob F. Medina, of Cottage Grove, was also charged with sexual assault of a child under 16 after the girl told police he repeatedly had sex with her at his home, where he lived with his girlfriend and five children.

In one instance, the girl told police, they had sex while Medinas 6-month-old son was in the room, according to the complaint, filed in Dane County Circuit Court.

Medina appeared in court on Tuesday, where he was jailed on $3,000 bail and ordered to have no contact with the girl or with anyone under 18 without adult supervision. Hell be back in court for a preliminary hearing on April 28.

Assistant District Attorney Andrea Raymond said the investigation is continuing and more charges are possible.

When Madison police arrested Medina on Thursday he became the fifth person arrested for alleged sexual assaults involving the girl. The criminal complaint in Medinas case does not tie him to the other men. Instead, it details how the girl said that Medina told her that she could make quick money by selling nude photos and videos of herself through Snapchat, a smartphone app used to send short-lived images to the public or to select users.

According to the complaint:

The girl told police that because she was too young to have a Paypal account to collect payments, Medina created her Snapchat accounts and a means for him to collect subscribers money. She said that when she received requests to subscribe, she would send them to Medina. In all, she said, she had 400 to 500 subscribers to her private Snapchat account.

The girl told police that she posted images to her Snapchat account daily, even hourly, and said that Medina told her to do it.

She also told police that she and Medina had a sexual relationship that lasted from December to March. She said Medina told her they needed to keep the relationship secret, and that it continued even after he knew how young she was.

Police were contacted on April 7 after the recreation coordinator at the girls school found pictures of her nude or in sexual situations on an iPhone that the girl had borrowed. The phone had no calling service, but could connect to Wi-Fi for Internet access.

The staffer told police that she took the phone back from the girl because she was using it irresponsibly, then discovered the pictures.

Last month, John Gilbert, 46, of Fitchburg, and Brian V. Holmes, 37, of Madison, were charged with first-degree sexual assault of a child by use or threat of force for alleged assaults of the girl in and near a motel on Madisons South Side.

Last week, two other men, David J. Dewane, 29, and Brennan J. Dufek, 22, both of Madison, were charged with first-degree sexual assault of the girl for sexual contact that allegedly occurred at Dewanes West Side apartment. According to a criminal complaint, Gilbert had brought the girl to Dewanes apartment, where they were joined later by Dufek.

The girl has also alleged that Gilbert took her to his house, where he photographed her having sex with other men.
Two women allegedly tried to hide the fact of a crash in Brodhead Sunday night by taking the license plates off the crashed vehicle, but the driver ultimately admitted the ruse and was ticketed.

Jordan Rowley, 20, Footville, was cited for failure to notify police of a crash and not keeping a vehicle under control, while Paige Connolly, 20, Brodhead, was cited for knowingly assisting a person fleeing from a crash, Brodhead police said.

Police found a heavily-damaged vehicle Monday morning in the parking lot for the trail head for Pearl Island, on Decatur Road.

"The vehicle had the plates removed and the VIN (vehicle identification number) was covered with a torn cigarette pack," said Sgt. Robert Werren.

The investigation revealed that Rowley was driving on Decatur Road when she lost control of her vehicle, hitting a bridge rail, sliding back across the bridge, hitting the bridge rail on the other side, then bouncing back to hit the rail on the other side once again.

The vehicle's airbags deployed, but Rowley was able to drive the damaged car to the parking area, where she called Connolly, who came and picked her up, and allegedly suggested taking off the plates and covering the VIN number.

"Rowley attempted to report the vehicle as stolen to Brodhead police, but ultimately admitted to being the operator and sole occupant during the crash," Werren said.
Update: The victim in the shooting was identified Monday evening by the Rock County Medical Examiners Department as David R. Tilton, 37, of Janesville.

A 37-year-old Janesville man was fatally shot while turkey hunting with family members early Sunday in the town of Johnstown, the Rock County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

Deputies, detectives responded at 7:37 a.m. to a report of a male with a gunshot wound in a field near North Lima Center Road and East Highway A, about 9 miles east of Janesville. Milton Fire and EMS also responded, along with a doctor from Mercy Hospital and Trauma Center in Janesville.

Upon locating the man, the first responders took over life-saving efforts from his family members, but they were unsuccessful, the Sheriff's Office said.

Initial investigation determined the shooting occurred when the man, who was hunting with two other people, left a blind to retrieve a wounded turkey and ran into the field of fire of another member of his hunting party who was trying to kill the bird. The man, who was shot in the back, died at the scene, authorities said.

The Sheriff's Office said the incident appeared to be "an unfortunate hunting accident."
Biblical messages were replaced with chanting and yelling as growing turbulence over weekly Jesus Lunch events held near Middleton High School spilled over to the luncheon itself.

Hundreds of students congregated Tuesday in Firemans Park either to partake in the faith-based luncheon or to spar with fellow students over what some perceive as an encroachment of religion into public schools.

Chants of Jesus Lunch, Jesus Lunch and Separation of church and state emerged from a mass of teenagers, who fought the latest round in a dispute over the religious luncheons relation to the high school.

Since 2014, the luncheons have been organized by a group of parents and held in a park next to the high school, but swelling attendance piqued interest from students, parents and secular groups, prompting school district administrators to call for an end to the lunches in the park last week.

Firemans Park, however, is owned by the city and used by the district through a non-exclusive lease agreement. That arrangement has created disagreement among lunch organizers, their opponents, and city and school district officials about whether the districts policies apply in the park during school hours.

Adhering to the opinion of the city attorney, Middleton officials granted organizers of Jesus Lunch an event permit, but Tuesdays luncheon was far from typical, attracting a sizable student protest backed by the secular advocacy group, Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Amid the somewhat chaotic scene, Jesus Lunch organizers quickly scrapped the traditional three to five minutes of biblical truths that usually accompany the brown bag event.

The vast majority of students ate alongside friends inside the parks pavilion, but at any given time throughout Middletons two lunch periods, as much as a third of the people at the event gathered around the foundations array of cookies and cupcakes at the south end of the pavilion, where a handful of protesters took turns speaking atop a picnic table.

Among the protesters was Joshua Biatch, an 18-year-old senior, who identifies ethnically as Jewish but considers himself atheist.

I hear people saying its bringing the community together; it clearly isnt, Biatch said. This event is designed purely for Christian students and that creates divisions between Christians and every other student.

People keep saying, Oh, this isnt a big deal. Its been blown out of proportion. They are always white, Christian people.  I have had to defend myself and explain myself so many times this week. People dont get it because people dont think beyond themselves.

As Biatch and others spoke, a scrum that included both protesters and supporters of Jesus Lunch reacted with a variety of cheers and jeers. A few clementines from lunches flew through the air, and there was a brief shoving incident that quickly dispersed amid calls to remain peaceful. It was unclear who instigated the pushing.

Middleton Police Chief Charles Foulke said he did not see the shoving incident but said the event went well overall.

Sophomore Jarrett Horst, 16, stood with a couple of friends near the back of a counter-protest. A self-identifying Christian and member of Blackhawk Church, Horst said he regularly attends the luncheon and views it as a chance to relax, enjoy a nice meal and hear an uplifting message.

Horst and other regulars at Jesus Lunch agreed with protesters that the meal has become a divisive topic at school, but he disputed the notion that proselytizing is a primary goal of the luncheon.

They only teach a passage about God for about five minutes and we just go back to eating, Horst said. I dont see anything wrong with it. They allow anybody to come. Anybody can just come here and eat food. You dont have to learn about the Bible. Obviously, this is getting kind of out of hand.

Junior Camilla Vellon, 17, said she wasnt initially alarmed by Jesus Lunch because it started as a group of children and their own parents. The growth of the free lunch changed her mind and on Tuesday, Vellon was excused by her mother to attend the protest during both lunch periods.

Its a very isolated situation that can make other groups feel uncomfortable, whether its atheists, Muslims or Budhists, Vellon said.

The meal is typically attended by about 400 students. In light of the heightened attention to Jesus Lunch, organizer Melissa Helbach said parents prepared for as many as 1,000 people, but she did not know how many lunches were distributed Tuesday.

The group will have to discuss how to proceed if protests persist, Helbach said.

Up until this week, the Jesus Lunch has not been a contentious point within the school walls. Have there been some kids that have been opposed to it? Absolutely. But it hasnt been a focal point, she said. What you saw here today is something were going to contemplate and think over.

School district spokesman Perry Hibner said administrators stayed inside during the luncheon and planned to intervene only if things got out of hand.

In an email to parents last week, Superintendent Donald Johnson and high school Principal Stephen Plank wrote that they believed religious or political events have no place in schools or on campuses, except when sponsored by a student group. Because the district leases that area of Firemans Park, they believed those policies extended to that area during school hours.

The city and school district have interpreted the lease differently, so Hibner said the district is anticipating Jesus Lunches will continue through the remainder of the school year.

Were trying to make this a teachable moment for our kids, helping them understand there are times when people are going to be at opposing viewpoints, Hibner said. It doesnt mean you have to agree with them, but you do have to be respectful of them.
Dropout rates for students at for-profit colleges have remained high in recent years, as just over 40 percent of Wisconsin students who enrolled at the institutions left school without finishing their programs, according to state officials.

A report released last week by the Educational Approval Board, the agency charged with regulating for-profit institutions, found that less than one-third of the 66,819 students who enrolled in the colleges between 2012 and 2014 made it to graduation.

Dropout rates were highest among adults who enrolled in online, for-profit degree programs  more than half of students who started an online degree program in 2012 never earned one.

David Dies, the boards executive secretary, said it is concerning to see so many students fail to earn a degree, noting that many of them took out student loans to pay their tuition.

Previous board reports have shown similarly high numbers of students dropping out.

For-profit college officials have said one reason their institutions see high dropout rates is that they tend to attract older, non-traditional students who can have a harder time focusing on school.

Critics, including state and federal regulators, have charged that the schools use aggressive marketing and convince students to take out loans for their high tuition costs, then give the relative few who manage to graduate a degree with limited value in the workforce.

The report on student outcomes found 27 percent of those who enrolled in 2012 left after their first year; that number increased to 31 percent in 2014. In the University of Wisconsin System, 86.5 percent of freshmen either stay in school or transfer to another UW institution for their second year.

Of the students who enrolled in for-profit institutions between 2012 and 2014, only 30 percent finished their program.

Dies said the boards oversight role could soon be limited if Wisconsin joins a national reciprocity agreement for regulating for-profit schools. The EAB would lose its oversight of institutions not based in the state, which make up 117 of the 260 schools it has approved to operate in Wisconsin.

Gov. Scott Walkers 2015-17 state budget sought to eliminate the Educational Approval Board, but lawmakers rejected the proposal.
A Fitchburg Democrat has signaled a bid for the state Assembly seat now held by Democratic Rep. Robb Kahl.

Calling himself a progressive through and through, Jimmy Anderson issued a news release Monday announcing his candidacy. Anderson is running in Assembly District 47, which covers a swath of the southeast Madison area including Monona, McFarland and most of Fitchburg.

Kahl, the second-term Assemblyman and former Monona mayor, told the Wisconsin State Journal on Monday he has not decided whether to seek re-election.

Its early, and I havent made that decision, said Kahl, who has represented the district since 2013. Its something my wife and I will decide.

If Kahl or other Democrats file to run against Anderson in Assembly District 47, they would square off in the Aug. 9 primary for the right to advance to the November general election.

Andersons campaign website touts his personal story: his parents and brother were killed  and he was left paralyzed from the chest down  in a car wreck caused by a drunken driver.

After the crash, Anderson started Drive Clear, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the victims of drunken driving.

Andersons website makes no mention of his previously having held elected office. His supporters include Fitchburg Mayor Steve Arnold.
Madison Public Library's dedication to community service and engagement is being honored nationally.

The library is one of 10 recipients to win the 2016 National Medal for Museum and Library Service, the award announced Tuesday by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

IMLS is a federal agency that provides federal funding to 123,000 libraries and 35,000 museums across the country.

"We are honored to receive the national medal," said Greg Mickells, director of Madison Public Library. "This achievement reflects our community's appreciation of and commitment to public libraries, and our library's dedication to excellent, innovative library service and community engagement."

Mickells and community member Rob Franklin will head to Washington D.C. for award ceremonies on June 1.

Madison Public Library is in some pretty heady company in winning the award, with other entities including the Brooklyn Public Library and the Chicago History Museum winning the award this year.
Well be here every day of the gun deer season except Thanksgiving, from about 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., DNR's Julie Widholm said. Well collect CWD samples, age deer, accept deer carcass parts and scraps, and have equipment available to do e-registration.
If that doesn't happen, Exelon's CEO Chris Crane said on the company's fourth-quarter earnings call, "we'll have to make the rational economic decision" on money-losing plants, Crain's Chicago reported in February. Crane said there would be no choice but to prepare for a potential early retirement in the face of continued financial losses, unless there was an urgent policy directive that would change market dynamics.

SPRINGFIELD - Two Illinois nuclear plants - at Clinton and the Quad Cities - could be shuttered, Exelon is threatening, if the cash-strapped state with no functioning budget in place doesn't find a way to provide financial assistance.

Closing the two plants in downstate Illinois would be devastating for local economies, State Rep.of Forsyth told a local radio station this week. The Clinton nuclear plant has about 600 employees. Losing them would have the same economic impact as Chicago losing 105,000 jobs.

If Madigan had to face the loss of over 100,000 jobs, can you imagine that (would) not be on the frontburner of Speaker Madigans plate?, Mitchell said.

And not only would local areas' economies be affected, so will regional utility rates when the cost of electricity skyrockets, he said.

If you remove nuclear power, you are going to see you electric bills go sky high, Mitchell said. In the next six weeks, the Illinois General Assembly must get down to business and pass a bill to make sure Clinton power plant stays in business and thrives.

So apparently, the Hobson's choice for taxpayers is to help prop up Exelon or pay "sky high" electric bills, along with bearing the cost of hundreds of unemployed.

More at Crain's Chicago
SPRINGFIELD, IL - The House today approved a measure to create a pilot program to help Illinois high school students earn dual credit for taking community college classes, according to Representative McSweeney (R-Barrington Hills), the sponsor of the legislation.

House Bill 5561 creates the Accelerate College pilot program and is based on a local program currently being used in District 300 in Algonquin. The voluntary pilot program provides a pathway for interested high schools to form dual credit partnerships with local community colleges. The bill passed the House today 115-0.

Programs such as this can be used as another tool to address college readiness and can help open up the possibility of college to those who otherwise wouldnt consider it, Rep. McSweeney said. At a time when college costs are rising significantly, this could help students, who may have thought college was out of reach, save a considerable amount of money.

HB 5561 allows a community college district board to voluntarily enter into an Accelerate College educational partnership agreement with any high school in their district's jurisdiction. The legislation has a sunset date of three years to allow for an assessment of the pilot programs success.

HB 5561 now moves to the Illinois Senate for further consideration. Senator Michael Connelly (R-Wheaton) will carry the legislation in the Senate.
Just about everyone who does business with the state can expect to wait at least two months to get paid. For many businesses its much longer. Nursing homes teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, pharmacies are shutting down, gas stations are turning state police cars away as the state struggles to pay what it owes.

The state has a $7.8 billion bill backlog and its continuing to dig itself billions of dollars further into the hole.

Illinois lawmakers may find themselves waiting months to get paid  just like many firms that do business with the state. Illinois has been functioning without a budget for 10 months. Despite this, the courts have put the state on autopilot, authorizing spending that the legislature has failed to act upon.

But one privileged group has largely avoided the pain: lawmakers and the states six constitutional officers. Long before the states current budget crisis, lawmakers enacted a law that allows them to get paid even if the state doesnt have a budget in place. So legislators are sitting pretty  atop the manure pile that is Illinois government.

Typically, lawmakers earn about $80,000 a year for their part-time jobs. Some could earn more in the private sector. There are some impressive resumes in the legislature.

But there are a fair number who lack even the rudimentary leadership skills necessary to be an assistant manager at a fast food restaurant.

I know that sounds harsh. But that is what I have observed during my 17 years covering the Illinois General Assembly.

Along with the bright lights, there are some pretty dim bulbs on the legislative marquee. They became lawmakers in the least democratic way possible  they were picked by party bosses. And they have hung on to their jobs because our legislative districts are drawn in such a way that voters often have had little choice but to keep them.

And they know the only way they can imperil their jobs is if they displease their party boss. So they kowtow.

So there is a part of me that likes the idea of seeing some of these folks waiting to get paid  just like every firm that does business with the state.

And heres how Comptroller Leslie Munger explained it over the weekend when she announced her decision to make lawmakers wait to get paid: Our social service network is being dismantled, mass layoffs are occurring and small businesses across Illinois are awaiting payments for services theyve already provided. As our cash crunch grows in the coming months, it is only appropriate that the unfair prioritization of payments to elected leaders ends. We are all in this together, we all will wait in line.

But, gee, Leslie, if it is such a good idea why didnt you start doing it 10 months ago? The reason is pretty simple. This is a political move not a fiscal one. The amount lawmakers would be paid out of that multi-billion dollar backlog of bills is picayune.

Munger who faces Chicago City Clerk Susana Mendoza in November is posturing with a bit of populist rhetoric.

One could ask, why stop at state lawmakers? Why not make all state workers wait to get paid? Their collective salaries, in fact, do have a significant impact on the state finances.

But youll never hear Munger or any other politician endorse such a plan because it would not only be illegal to force rank-and-file workers to wait to be paid but it would also be unpopular. And no politician wants to bear the brand of unpopularity.

While Mungers proposal to make politicians queue up for their pay seems almost poetic in its justice, it's just a ploy. And our state needs solutions -- not more gimmicks.

Scott Reeder is a veteran statehouse journalist, who has covered government for almost 30 years. He works as a freelance reporter in the Springfield area. He can be reached at ScottReeder1965@gmail.com.
Cullerton was confident his measure would pass out of a Senate subcommittee Tuesday as well as Executive Committee Tuesday afternoon.

State Senator Tom Cullerton (D-Villa Park) told reporters in a press conference at the State Capitol Tuesday that he expected Senate Joint Resolution Constitutional Amendment 29 to be heard on the Senate floor later this week. SJRCA 29 would abolish the office of lieutenant governor in Illinois, adding it to Arizona, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon and Wyoming, which do not have the office.

SPRINGFIELD - As soon as this November, Illinois voters may be deciding whether or not Illinois should become the sixth state that does not have a lieutenant governor position.

"As most people know, I have been successful regarding consolidation og local governments starting in 2013, when I ran SB 494 that looked to consolidate local governments within DuPage County. This is a followup on that effort. The savings we estimate will be $1.6 million a year."

The measure will go to referendum on this November's ballot if passed by the Senate and House.

"We have large bipartisan support for this, as it did in 2013," Cullerton said.

While Cullerton has yet to add any Republican senators to his effort, in the Illinois House, State Rep. David McSweeney (R-Barrington) has been working to add numerous sponsors to a parallel measure.

As of this morning, House Sponsors for HJRCA 5 include Rep. David McSweeney - Jack D. Franks - Jeanne M Ives, Thomas Morrison, Carol Sente, Andrew F Skoog, Michelle Mussman, Katherine Cloonen, Martin J. Moylan, Stephanie A. Kifowit, Deb Conroy, Natalie A. Manley, Frances Ann Hurley, Kathleen Willis, Sue Scherer, Daniel V. Beiser,John Bradley, Brandon W. Phelps, Jerry Costello, II, Tim Butler, Joe Sosnowski, Christine Winger,Barbara Wheeler, Terri Bryant and Mike Smiddy.

Having passed committee, McSweeney's resolution is ready for a House floor vote.

If the proposal were to be passed by the legislative chambers and then by voters, the amendment would go into effect before the next gubernatorial election. At that time, the constitutional succession order would then be governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and then "as provided by law."

Just before the last gubernatorial race, the legislature decided that the top slot and the lieutenant governor candidate would run as a team. That provision would, of course, be eliminated with the passage.

In Tennessee and West Virginia, the President of the Senate also serves as lieutenant governor and is elected from within the legislature.
Mogens Lykketoft, President of the Seventieth session of the United Nations General Aassembly, held a press conference to outline upcoming events pertaining to the signing ceremony for the Global Climate Agreement and the thematic debate on implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.

This Friday, politicians from across the world will meet at the United Nations Headquarters in New York to sign an agreement to keep global temperature rise below 2 degree Celsius, which UN members agreed in Paris in December last year.

Representing China at the signing ceremony will be Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli, who delivered a speech at a UN climate meeting in New York in September 2014 at a time when the world body was desperate to expedite the process to reach a deal in Paris.

Zhang's presence at the UN Headquarters reflects just a tiny part of Beijing's commitment to fighting climate change as a global leader. China is also helping set rules of global governance by synergizing the efforts of all countries to overcome problems in other areas too.

Since the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, two subjects have often hit the headlines: questioning of China's conviction in fighting climate change and developed economies' failure to transfer funds and technologies to poor countries to help them combat and adapt to climate change which is the result of the greenhouse gases emitted mostly by industrialized nations.

China, despite being a developing country, has always joined global efforts to combat climate change. In 1992, then premier Li Peng signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro. And in 2009, then premier Wen Jiabao made every effort possible to reach a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen.
Honda dealerships have started taking bookings for the BR-V, a compact SUV that will rival the Hyundai Creta and Renault Duster.

By India Today Web Desk: Honda is gearing up for the launch of its compact SUV, the BR-V, on May 5 and dealerships across India have started taking booking orders for the car for a token amount of Rs 21,000. The Honda BR-V will rival the Hyundai Creta and Renault Duster. The bookings are being taken by the dealers directly, and no official communication has come from Honda on the subject.

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Also Read: Honda Cars India to spice up the compact SUV segment with BR-V launch



The BR-V is based on an extended version of the Brio's platform and embodies Honda's 'Active Solid Motion' design philosophy. At the rear, the tail lamps are a single unit giving the BR-V a look, unlike any other Honda.

Also Read: Can Honda BR-V dislodge Hyundai Creta from top spot?



The BR-V is powered by a 1.5-litre SOHC petrol engine that churns out 117 bhp and 146 Nm of torque. It also gets the 1.5-litre i-DTEC diesel option that puts out 99bhp and 200Nm of torque. The engine delivers the power to the wheels through a 6-speed manual gearbox. Honda will also offer the choice of a CVT(Continuously Variable Transmission).

Also Read: Honda unveils 7-seater BR-V, to be launched in India this year



We expect the Honda BR-V to be priced between Rs 8-12 lakh.

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Like the Dark Custom range, the 2016 Harley-Davidson Roadster is focused on a more younger audience.

The new Roadster puts a powerful new level of sport into the Sportster line-up.

By India Today Web Desk: Harley-Davidson unveiled the Dark Custom models last year and were also showcased at the Auto Expo 2016 in February. Now, the American motorcycle company has added yet another model to the Sportster range with the unveiling of the 2016 Roadster for a price of $11,119 (Rs 7.37 lakh).

Harley-Davidson already has the Iron 883, 1200 Custom and Forty-Eight in the Sportster line-up and have now brought one more to the family of motorcycles specifically designed for the younger audience.

The Harley-Davidson Roadster comes with a 1200cc, air-cooled evolution, V-Twin power engine has peak torque of 103Nm @3,750rpm.

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ALSO READ: Indulge in the Harley Davidson experience at IBW 2016

The Harley-Davidson Roadster comes with a 1200cc, air-cooled evolution, V-Twin power engine has peak torque of 103Nm @3,750rpm.

The Roadster has a wheelbase of 1506mm with a length of 2184mm and a ground clearance of 152mm.

The Roadster has a wheelbase of 1506mm with a length of 2184mm and a ground clearance of 152mm.

The new Roadster puts a powerful new level of sport into the Sportster line-up. Its refined performance package includes 43mm inverted front forks with massive triple clamps, powerful dual-disc front brakes, premium rear suspension and new dual gauge instrumentation to complement the iconic fuel tank and chopped rear fender.

ALSO READ: Harley Davidson launches Sportster 1200 Custom at Rs 8.9 lakh

The riding position is aggressive, but comfortable for long rides thanks to the 19" front and 18" rear offset-split 5-spoke cast aluminum wheels, lowered bars, mid-mount controls and a new two-up seat.

The Roadster will come in four color options- Velocity Red Sunglo, Billet Silver/Vivid Black, Black Denim and Vivid Black.

You get blacked-out styling details, slammed bars, chopped rear fender, race-inspired graphics, a finned timer cover and slotted black exhaust shields among others.

Moreover, the Harley-Davidson Roadster also gets modern features like a hands-free, factory installed H-D Smart Security System, dual disc front brakes with floating rotors and an optional anti-lock brakes front and rear.

The Roadster will come in four color options- Velocity Red Sunglo, Billet Silver/Vivid Black, Black Denim and Vivid Black.

There is no confirmation if the motorcycle will be coming to India.

ALSO READ: Harley-Davidson launches 2016 Dark Custom line-up at Rs 4.52 lakh

The 2016 Harley-Davidson Roadster is expected to arrive in the US by June this year. There is no confirmation if the motorcycle will be coming to India.

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Mahindra has launched its electric car, the E2O, in the United Kingdom. The car will be available in two variants to buyers in the UK.

By India Today Web Desk: Indian car maker Mahindra has launched its electric car, the E2O, in the United Kingdom for a price of 12,995 pounds (Rs 12.25 lakh). Two variants of the E2O will be sold in the UK.

The E2O is a three-door hatchback which can seat four people. The City and TechX variants will be sold in the UK. One of the plus sides for the E20 being sold in the UK is that it will be exempted from the congestion charge in London.

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The E2O which will be sold in the UK is twice as expensive than the model sold in India as the car will be exported as a CBU unit. The UK version of the car gets more standard features over the Indian version of the E2O such as daytime running lights (DRLs), fog lights, push-button start, electric windows and electrically foldable ORVMs.

In terms of safety, the UK version gets dual front SRS airbags, ABS and Electronic Stability Control (ESC)as standard features. A Regenerative Braking System (RBS) is also among the standard features on the UK variants.

The power is delivered by a 31 Kwh electric motor which can produce 42bhp and 91Nm of torque. The E2O is capable of doing the 0-80 kmph run in 18 seconds and using a 14 Kwh lithium ion battery, it has a range of 127 km. A complete charge takes nine hours to complete. The TechX trim gets a fast charging option that allows you to charge 90 per cent of the batteries in 90 minutes.

The Mahindra E2O will rival the Renault Twizy and Peugeot iOn in the UK, and is priced considerably above them.

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The government has taken this step after distressed parents recently approached Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and complained of fee hike ranging from 20 to 55 per cent.

The proposals seeking increase of fees have to be submitted on DoEas website by May 31 following which they will be scrutinised.

By Mail Today: The Delhi government has asked private schools in the national Capital to seek prior sanction from the Directorate of Education (DoE) before increasing student fee and submit detailed proposals in this regard.

Key documents, including details of receipts and payment account, income and expenditure account, balance sheet for the years 2013-14, 2014-15 and 2015-16 along with budget estimates for the ensuing year, statement of salary disbursed to staff, and detail of all funds - reserve, general and gratuity - also need to be submitted by the schools.

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"All heads of private unaided recognised schools, allotted land by the land-owning agencies on the condition of seeking prior sanction of DoE for increase in fee, are directed to submit their proposals, if any, for prior sanction for the academic session 2016-17," DoE Director Saumya Gupta said in a communication to private schools.

The government has taken this step after distressed parents recently approached Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and complained of fee hike ranging from 20 to 55 per cent.

Sisodia had directed DoE to take necessary action against the errant schools that have not only hiked fees but also compelled students to buy books from private publishers.

Following this, the Department directed Delhi Public School's Rohini and Mathura branches on Saturday to rollback the fee hike and refund the excess amount collected. "Many of the parents protested outside DPS Rohini and Mathura branches regarding the fee hike. The department took cognizance of the complaints and have decided to take stern actions against the schools," a senior official from DoE told Mail Today.

The proposals have to be submitted on DoE's website by May 31 following which they will be scrutinised by a team of officials. In case the schools have already charged any increased fee prior to issue of this order, the same shall be liable to be adjusted by the schools in terms of the sanction by DoE.

"In case no proposal is submitted by the school, it shall not increase the fee and any increased fee already charged shall be refunded/adjusted by it," the letter said. The communication said all private schools built on land allotted by the DDA/other government agencies will not increase tuition fee without prior permission.

Also read:

Roll back fee hike: Sisodia to pvt schools

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Bollywood fans were unable to get over the news of Malaika Arora Khan and Arbaaz Khan's separation, when the rumours of another B-Town marriage being on the rocks started doing the rounds. And this time it was Soha Ali Khan and Kunal Kemmu. Buzz had it that all is not good in their paradise. But Kunal soon took to Twitter to slam the divorce rumours. And after her husband, this is what Soha has to say.

By India Today Web Desk: Bollywood fans were unable to get over the news of Malaika Arora Khan and Arbaaz Khan's separation, when the rumours of another B-Town marriage being on the rocks started doing the rounds. And this time it was Soha Ali Khan and Kunal Kemmu. Buzz had it that all is not good in their paradise.

ALSO READ: Soha Ali Khan and Kunal Kemmu heading for divorce? Kunal Kemmu has this to say



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But Kunal soon took to Twitter to slam the divorce rumours. The Bhaag Johnny actor wrote on the micro-blogging site, "What!! Why is my marriage in trouble?? Why am I heading for a divorce? Am I in a different reality or the people reporting this nonsense (sic)."

And after her husband rubbished the reports, Soha calls the rumours laughable.

In an interview to DNA, the 37-year-old actor said, "The rift rumours are laughable. It started with a shot in the dark piece and then just took on a life of its own from fighting to filing for divorce. Kunal has been putting off filing his nails for ten days now. Forget filing for a divorce!"

Soha, who got married to Kunal in January 2015, says that she believes in the institution of marriage and her parents have been the biggest source of inspiration.

"I've always felt when you are committed in a relationship, you have to work through the difficult times. I've seen my parents in a successful solid marriage for 44 years," she added.

But at the same time, the Rang De Basanti actor doesn't like looking at marriage through rose-tinted glasses and believes that it is important to make things work in any relationship. "There is no perfect relationship," she says. "You have to work around the dissatisfaction. I am sure even my parents had their problems. They were completely different personalities, but they must have worked on their marriage and made it work," said the Ghayal Once Again actor.

She added, "I never felt any insecurity regarding my parents' marriage. They handled their issues and the public face of their marriage was very dignified. If I am a secure person today, it's because of the marriage my parents shared. I'd certainly want my child whenever it happens, to feel the same sense of security."

Soha and Kunal got engaged in July 2014 in Paris and later tied the knot in Mumbai in January 2015. On the work front, the two have worked together in films like 99 and Dhoondte Reh Jaaoge.

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Tiger Shroff and Shraddha Kapoor fans have an all-new reason to wait for Baaghi with bated breath. Telugu star Sudheer Babu is making his Bollywood debut with Baaghi, as the villain who Tiger and Shraddha will need to fight on screen.

By India Today Web Desk: Tiger Shroff and Shraddha Kapoor's chemistry in Baaghi has already received a thumbs up from both their fans and B-Town. Now, director Sabbir Khan has given Tiger and Shraddha's fans another reason to wait for Baaghi with bated breath - the villain.

ALSO READ: I'd love to hold a screening of Baaghi for Hrithik Roshan, says Tiger Shroff

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ALSO READ: After Jackie Chan, people of China are upset with Tiger Shroff

ALSO READ: Tiger and Shraddha didn't want to waste water for their rain song. So they did this

Sabbir Khan, whose last film Heropanti saw 21 newcomers being launched, is now launching popular Telugu actor Sudheer Babu with Baaghi. Sudheer will be playing the antagonist to Tiger's hero in Baaghi, and has been touted as an apt adversary for Tiger in the film.

Baaghi will mark Sudheer's Bollywood debut. The actor, who is Telugu superstar Mahesh Babu's brother-in-law, has done several films down South. While his roles in Telugu films have mostly been good, white ones, Baaghi is the first time Sudheer is trying his hand at playing a grey character.

Sudheer Babu in a still from Baaghi Sudheer Babu in a still from Baaghi

The trailer of Baaghi gave the audience a glimpse of Sudheer's antics in the film. Pitted against Tiger, the actor delivers a commendable performance as far as action is concerned.

The team of Baaghi, along with producer Sajid Nadiadwala and director Sabbir Khan are to launch Sudheer and introduce him to the media with a special event on April 19.

Baaghi sees Tiger and Shraddha uniting for the silver screen for the first time. The actors have been praised for their kicking-punching sequences in the film, right from the time the trailer was unveiled. The film is slated for an April 29 release.

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Titled "Dangerous Love," the 16-panel, comic book-like poster tells the story of an attractive young Chinese civil servant nicknamed Xiao Li, or Little Li, who meets a red-headed foreign man at a dinner party and starts a relationship.

By AP: China is marking National Security Education Day with a poster warning young female government workers about dating handsome foreigners, who could turn out to have secret agendas.

Titled "Dangerous Love," the 16-panel, comic book-like poster tells the story of an attractive young Chinese civil servant nicknamed Xiao Li, or Little Li, who meets a red-headed foreign man at a dinner party and starts a relationship.

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The man, David, claims to be a visiting scholar, but he actually is a foreign spy who butters Xiao Li up with compliments on her beauty, bouquets of roses, fancy dinners and romantic walks in the park.

After Xiao Li provides David with secret internal documents from her job at a government propaganda office, the two are arrested. In one of the poster's final panels, Xiao Li is shown sitting handcuffed before two policemen, who tell her that she has a "shallow understanding of secrecy for a state employee."

The poster has appeared on local governments' public bulletin boards, targeting mainly rank-and-file state employees.

A Beijing district government said in a statement that it would display the poster to educate its employees about keeping classified information confidential and reporting to state security agencies if they spot any spying activity. It said it would familiarize employees with ways to counter espionage.

The central government's inaugural National Security Education Day, which was last Friday, was meant to make people aware about security problems in China, and was marked by speeches and the distribution of materials.

ALSO READ:

Sushma's dig at China: Can't have double standards in war on terror



Chinese military aircraft makes first public landing on disputed island





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Christianity and Judaism already had wine as a sacred beverage and now they have 'biblical beer as well'.

By India Today Web Desk: Christianity and Judaism already had wine as a sacred beverage, which is also mentioned in their scriptures. But, now they have 'biblical beer' as well.

A brewery in Israel has come up with a craft beer and the creators say dates back to the time of Jesus.

By using a wheat that was used for beer two millennia ago, Herzl Brewery in Jerusalem produced 20 litres of "biblical beer". The Tel Aviv University donated 5 kilos of grain out of which the nectar was created.

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Other ingredients such as hops, yeast and water along with honey and berries were used to create the biblical bear which has a three per cent alcohol content.

Itai Gutman, Herzl's owner has left with only one bottle and does not intend to make more of it. He and his friends consumed the concoction whose production took six months.

Gutman told Reuters that he was curious to produce the first 'biblical beer' but its flavour makes it less desirable in the market.

According to the Jewish Museum in Munich, beer was brought over from Egypt by the ancient Israelites. So, maybe Jesus and his disciples were aware of the drink.

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54-year-old Kirpal Singh was arrested in 1992 on charges of spying for India.

By India Today Web Desk: The mortal remains of Kirpal Singh, who died in a prison in Pakistan's Lahore on April 11, was handed over to Indian authorities today afternoon.

Singh's body was brought to the Attari-Wagah border by Pakistani authorities and handed over to the Border Security Force (BSF) after completion of legal formalities.

Close relatives and residents from Kirpal Singh's village in Gurdaspur district gathered at the border on the occasion.

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Dr B S Bal, Principal of Government Medical College Amritsar, told reporters after an autopsy of Kirpal Singh's body that "during the postmortem examination, it was found that his heart as well as stomach were missing. However, no internal and external injury was found on his body".

Bal said "now we have his kidney and liver and samples of these two organs would be sent outside Amritsar for laboratory tests to bring out more facts with regard to his death".

He said that "during autopsy it was also found that Pakistan during autopsy has not taken any sample from kidney and liver which were essential to find out the exact cause of death".

Further, he said that Pakistan has not sent the autopsy report as of now.



54-year-old Kirpal Singh was arrested in 1992 on charges of spying for India. He died under mysterious circumstances in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat Jail.

However, Pakistani officials have claimed that he suffered a cardiac arrest. Singh's family has challenged this claim.

ALSO READ

Sushma Swaraj assures Kirpal Singh's family of return of his mortal remains from Pakistan



MEA seeks response from Pakistan on Kirpal Singh's mysterious death in Lahore jail



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"We will settle accounts with these terrorists," Prime Minister Netanyahu said in a speech, referring to whoever executed the bus attack.

By Reuters: A bomb blew up a bus and set fire to another in Jerusalem on Monday, wounding 16 people in an attack that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu linked to a six-month-old wave of Palestinian street violence.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility from any Palestinian factions for the blast. Israeli officials declined to assign direct blame.

They said two of the casualties had not yet been identified and may have been bombers.

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Suicide bombings on Israeli buses were a hallmark of the Palestinian revolt of 2000-2005 but have been rare since. With Palestinians carrying out less organised stabbing, car-ramming and gun attacks since October, Israel has been braced for an escalation.

"We will settle accounts with these terrorists," Netanyahu said in a speech, referring to whoever executed the bus attack.

"We are in a protracted struggle against terror - knife terror, shooting terror, bomb terror and also tunnel terror," he added, speaking hours after Israel announced its discovery of an underground passage dug by Hamas militants from Gaza.

Police initially said they were looking at the possibility that a technical malfunction caused the fire that consumed two buses on Derech Hebron road, in an area of southwest Jerusalem close to the boundary with the Israeli-occupied West Bank.



Israeli police forensic experts work at the scene after an explosion tore through a bus in Jerusalem on Monday and set a second bus on fire, in what an Israeli official said was a bombing. (Photo: Reuters)

But based on the wounds and other findings, authorities concluded that a small and possibly rudimentary explosive device was set off at the back of one of the buses.

Those details recalled the bombing of a Tel Aviv bus by an Israeli Arab during the 2012 Gaza war which caused injuries but no deaths.

In the last half year, Palestinian attacks have killed 28 Israelis and two visiting U.S. citizens. Israeli forces have killed at least 191 Palestinians, 130 of whom Israel says were assailants. Many others were shot dead in clashes and protests.

Drivers behind the bloodshed include Palestinian bitterness over stalled statehood negotiations and the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, stepped up Jewish access to a disputed Jerusalem shrine, and Islamist-led calls for Israel's destruction.

Bombings have not been carried out during this period - though Israeli prosecutors said a Palestinian woman who tried to blow up a gas balloon in her car after being pulled over by police in October was a would-be suicide bomber.

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By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 19 (PTI) The Union Cabinet is expected to take a decision tomorrow on expanding Indias preferential trade agreement (PTA) with Chile.

The proposal, moved by the Commerce Ministry, is likely to be taken up by the Cabinet, an official said.

The move would help in boosting two-way commerce and also bridging the imbalance in trade between the nations.

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Since 2007, India and Chile have a preferential trade agreement.

In a PTA, two trading partners cuts or eliminates duties on limited number of goods traded between them. It is followed by free trade agreement (FTA) which covers bulk of goods and also include services.

The bilateral trade between the countries stood at USD 3.64 billion. It is in the favour of Chile.

India mainly imports metals such as copper from Chile.

Expanding trade relations with the country will also help in increasing its reach in the south American continent. PTI LUX RR MKJ

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According to the new norms, subscribers will not be able to claim withdrawal of PF after attaining 54 years of age. They would have to wait till attaining the age 57 years.

By India Today Web Desk: In a landmark decision that will be a major relief for many, the government has allowed withdrawal of Provident Fund (PF) for certain expenses including housing, major medical treatment for self and family members, medical, dental and engineering education of children, and for their marriage.

The relaxation has also been extended to members who have joined an establishment belonging to or under the central or state government.

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However, this will come into effect from August.

The Labour Ministry has eased restrictions on the withdrawal of contribution to the employees' provident fund. Thereby, withdrawal for dental and engineering education of children and their wedding is now allowed, the report said.

The labour ministry said that the government will now pay full accumulations to the credit of a member, including interest up to the date of payment if the withdrawals are being made for any of the aforementioned reasons, the report added.

According to the new norms, subscribers will not be able to claim withdrawal of PF after attaining 54 years of age. They would have to wait till attaining the age 57 years.

Earlier this year, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley during the Union Budget had announced amendment in the EPF Scheme 1952 to tighten the various norms for withdrawal of provident fund including increasing age limit for filing such claims by retiring employees to 58 years from 54 years.

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The two sides were discussing the move to address tensions arising out of aggressive patrolling by both sides.

By Press Trust of India: India and China have moved a step closer in setting up a hotline between the two military headquarters as part of their efforts to improve border security.

China reacted positively towards setting up a military hotline with India on border security, Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan said after meeting Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar.

Parrikar later said that "the Chinese have returned the draft of the memorandum on establishing a hotline between the two military headquarters. The issue should be closed within one or two months."

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The two sides were discussing the move to address tensions arising out of aggressive patrolling by both sides.

Chang Wanquan spoke highly of the healthy and stable development of China-India relations in recent years, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

He called on the two sides to do a good job in implementing the consensus reached by leaders of the two countries, enhance strategic communication, so as to safeguard common interests.

He also suggested that the two sides strengthen defence exchanges and jointly safeguard peace and tranquillity of the border area.

Vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission Fan Changlong who also met Mr Parrikar said China regards bilateral ties from a strategic and long-term perspective and is willing to strengthen military-to-military cooperation to contribute more to peace, stability and prosperity of two countries.

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Mumbai's iconic Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus was all lit up in stunning hues last night to celebrate World Heritage Day.

By India Today Web Desk: Last night, Mumbaikars were treated to the mesmerising site of an illuminated CST. Draped in hues of violet, blue and yellow, the building stood out against the night sky, in celebration of World Heritage Day.

Maharashtra's Chief Minister, Devendra Fadnavis, and the central Railways' Chief Public Relations Officer, Narendra Patil, both tweeted stunning images of the illuminated facade of the building's gorgeous Victorian Gothic Revival architecture from last night.

Picture Courtesy: Twitter/@Narendra_IRTS

Picture Courtesy: Twitter/@Narendra_IRTS

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Illuminating the CST to mark special occasions has somewhat become a tradition. It was previously lit up in the colours of the Indian flag for Independence Day and in those of the French flag to express solidarity with the victims of the terror attacks in Paris.

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The Delhi government ordered the prohibition of the sale, purchase and possession of all forms of chewable tobacco, saying violators can be imprisoned for up to six months and fined up to 300,000 rupees.

In this April 17, 2016 photo, pan and chewable tobacco are displayed for sale at a roadside in New Delhi.

By AP: The Delhi government has banned chewing tobacco in an effort to lower the high incidence of mouth and throat cancers.

The Delhi government ordered the prohibition of the sale, purchase and possession of all forms of chewable tobacco, saying violators can be imprisoned for up to six months and fined up to 300,000 rupees.

Chewable tobacco products reportedly cause 90 per cent of all mouth cancers in India. Tobacco manufacturers won a court stay against earlier bans, but public awareness about the risks has grown and the New Delhi government has vowed to enforce the new ban, which was welcomed by health activists and doctors after it was announced last week.

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The tobacco leaves are typically mixed with lime and betel nut, a mild natural stimulant that produces a bright red juice and has been used for centuries across the South Asian continent. Indians place the concoction inside their mouths for an extended period, increasing their oral cancer risk. Tobacco bits, perfumed betel nut powder and flavoring are sold in small plastic pouches, making it easy to carry and consume.

Delhi's Health Minister Satyendra Jain told reporters that the government has ordered police teams to conduct surprise checks on shops and retail outlets to ensure that the ban is strictly enforced.

Health activists say the number of oral cancer deaths caused by chewing tobacco is alarmingly high.

"This is a positive step by the government and we welcome it. The use of chewing tobacco is so widespread that India is often referred to as the oral cancer capital of the world," said GR Khatri, president of the South Asia chapter of the World Lung Foundation.

Officials say around 1 million Indians die every year in the country due to diseases caused by tobacco consumption.

Khatri, who has for decades been campaigning for a ban on chewing tobacco, said surveys conducted in different parts of India had conclusively proved the prevalence of chewing tobacco, especially among adolescents and young adults.

"In a survey of tobacco habits among adolescent boys, we found that 20.8 per cent of boys between the age of 13 and 18 years were using tobacco, both cigarettes and chewing tobacco," Khatri said Monday.

The survey was conducted by the World Lung Foundation, jointly with the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.

India accounts for nearly a third of all tobacco-related deaths in the world, and the government has been trying to curb tobacco use.

Several health voluntary organizations have mounted a publicity campaign to create awareness about the health risks from chewing tobacco through advertisements on television and radio.

"The ban on chewing tobacco in Delhi is a first step. We will mount a campaign to curb sales of cigarettes as well," said Khatri.

India has banned tobacco advertising for more than a decade. Tobacco companies are resisting a recent order for warning messages to cover 85 percent of cigarette packages.

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The Juvenile Justice Board rejected the bail application of the minor, a Class 12 student, observing that he was a repeat offender. He had been earlier warned by the traffic police for rash driving.

By India Today Web Desk: The Juvenile Justice Board today dismissed the bail plea of a Class 12 student who is accused of killing while driving his father's Mercedes at high speed in Delhi. The board termed the case as a classic case of bad parenting.



According to sources, the Juvenile Justice Board rejected the bail application of the minor observing that he was a repeat offender. He had been earlier warned by the traffic police for rash driving.

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"Happy that accused's bail is rejected. This case should be a lesson for all parents," Shilpa Mittal, victim's sister said.



The accused, who turned 18 just four days after the accident, was allegedly driving at a speed of 80 kmph when his car hit Siddharth Sharma in Delhi's Civil Lines area on April 4. He surrendered on April 10 and was sent to a Juvenile Justice Home. His father was also taken into judicial custody but granted bail later.

The boy's father was arrested under section 304 (abetting the crime of culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of IPC for letting his minor son to drive even after knowing that he had caused an accident earlier.

Police had apprehended the minor accused on April 5, a day after he killed Sidhharth Sharma by hitting him with his Mercedes car the previous night when the victim was crossing a road after buying eatables.

He was then freed on bail as he was only booked under section 304A (causing death by negligence) of the Indian Penal Code.

Police had earlier told the court that CCTV footage showed that the minor offender was driving the car way above the permissible speed limit in a residential area.

ALSO READ:

Delhi hit-and-run case: Father of accused juvenile arrested



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Commenting on the latest incident, the British Airlines Pilots Association said that more education for drone users and stronger enforcement of the rules around drones were needed to keep aircraft safe.

By Reuters: A British Airways passenger aircraft was hit by what most likely was a drone as it prepared to land at Britain's Heathrow Airport, police said, increasing worries about the risks posed by increasing civil drone use.

Police said the pilot of the BA flight from Geneva had reported that he believed a drone had struck the aircraft before it landed safely on Sunday at Terminal 5.

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Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch confirmed on Monday that it had launched an investigation into an incident involving an unmanned air vehicle and a passenger aircraft at Heathrow, Europe's busiest airport.

The use of civil drones, whether for commercial purposes such as crop surveillance, monitoring of natural disasters, photography or just as a leisure activity, is rising.

That popularity has led to increasing reports of near-misses with commercial aircraft.

The European Commission has conceded that "drone accidents will happen", while the UK's Civil Aviation Authority last year issued a warning after seven incidents in less than a year where drones had flown near planes at different British airports.

Pilots' associations and others have called for drones to be fitted with geo-fencing technology, which uses GPS software to stop them straying into certain areas, along with height and distance limits. They also call for registration of drones.

Commenting on the latest incident, the British Airlines Pilots Association said that more education for drone users and stronger enforcement of the rules around drones were needed to keep aircraft safe.

"It was only a matter of time before we had a drone strike given the huge numbers being flown around by amateurs who don't understand the risks and the rules," BALPA flight safety specialist Stephen Landells said.

British Airways, which is owned by IAG, said in its statement that the aircraft, which had 132 customers and five crew on board, was fully examined by engineers before being cleared to operate its next flight.

The incident was reported to police by the pilot after the flight landed at about 1150 GMT on Sunday.

"It transpired that an object, believed to be a drone, had struck the front of the aircraft," the police said.

The incident on Sunday followed another at Heathrow in February, when a New York-bound plane was forced to return to the airport after a "laser beam incident".



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By PTI: Thane, Apr 19 (PTI) Police today summoned directors of the pharmaceutical company, from whose godown ephedrine drug worth Rs 2,000 crore was seized last week, and claimed to have identified the man linked to the firm who was allegedly operating a drug trafficking racket.

Talking to reporters here, Thane Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh said the directors of Avon Life Sciences company, have been called for questioning with respect to the seizure of 18.5 tonnes of ephedrine from their factory at Chincholi in Solapur, around 400km from here, late last week.

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However, Singh did not disclose the dates of their appearance for questioning.

Police have claimed that the confiscated recreational drug is worth Rs 2,000 crore in the international market. Thanes Anti-Narcotics Cell (ANC) raided the factory after arresting a Nigerian from the city on April 10 with 500 grams of ephedrine.

Five persons, including the factorys manager, were arrested in connection with the illegal stocking of ephedrine, used for sniffing and also to manufacture mephedrone powder, a party drug.

Singh said a man identified as Punit, was specifically brought in by the management to run the drug trafficking racket from the factory.

Punit played the main role in the entire racket and was assisted by two others-Kishore Rathod and Jai Mukhi. All three are absconding and a search has been launched for them, the police officer said.

Punit and Kishore had links in foreign countries and carried the drug from Solapur to Ahmedabad and after processing, sent it out of India, he said.

The trio had made more than 30 trips abroad in the last one year, Singh said.

The IPS officer said more than 10 tonnes of the drug were found to have been concealed behind the factory.

In reply to a question, he said police had definite information that the firms management had specifically appointed Punit in the factory. Hence, it can be said the management had a role in the racket.

However, the extent of their involvement will be known only after the arrest of Punit and others, he said.

"We have alerted the airports and authorities at other exit routes to prevent the trios escape from the country," the Thane police chief said.

Avon had yesterday denied any wrongdoing and claimed it has valid licences and statutory registrations for making, stocking and selling all products manufactured at its Solapur unit. PTI COR RSY SRY

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In the show, that has been removed from YouTube, Boehmermann's satire describes Erdogan of being too familiar with animals, among other things.

By India Today Web Desk: A German television aired a programme earlier this month featuring comedian Jan Boehmermann who made fun of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan which led to a criminal investigation against him. What landed Boehmermann in court can now get you a 1000 pounds reward in England.

In the show, that has been removed from YouTube, Boehmermann's satire described Erdogan of being too familiar with animals, among other things. The comedian read out a poem that included references to the Turkish president watching child porn and committing bestiality, as well as kicking Kurds and smacking Christians. It seems Boehmermann was unaware of a German law that prohibits citizens to make fun of foreign heads of state.

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That means he might have violated a German law against insults to foreign heads of state. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has given her nod to criminal investigation against the comedian. The law says -"Whosoever insults a foreign head of state, or, with respect to his position, a member of a foreign government who is in Germany in his official capacity, or a head of a foreign diplomatic mission who is accredited in the Federal territory shall be liable to imprisonment not exceeding three years or a fine, in case of a slanderous insult to imprisonment from three months to five years."



The show led to a predictable backlash from Turkey, where journalists and other critics of the notoriously prickly president can face legal censure and arrest even for negative posts about Erdogan on social media. Although Boehmermann's poem was removed from the YouTube, damage was already done.

In the meantime, British journalist Douglas Murray was unhappy with Merkel's decision. "I'm a free-born British man, and we don't live under the blasphemy laws of such despots," he wrote in British magazine The Spectator. "So in honour of this fact I have spent the weekend writing rude limericks about Mr Erdogan. And I would hereby like to invite all readers to join me in a grand Erdogan limerick competition."



Murray initially said that he wasn't offering any prizes, except the affirmation of freedom of speech. He also warned people who wanted a box of Ferrero Rocher or Turkish Delight to enter the limerick contest. But since then, a benefactor has stepped in and offered a 1,000 pounds to the winner.

Here's the tweet by a British Douglas Murray who has invited limericks ridiculing Erdogan.



I am pleased to announce my inaugural 'President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition'. Entries by 23 June please: https://t.co/RhjWr4OKBh Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) April 18, 2016

And more...

UK magazine holds insult-Erdogan contest https://t.co/tld76RKpjT Seira Howden (@fyjylotozaxy) April 19, 2016

An offensive poem I wrote:

Mr Erdogan

You're not a nice man. That's as far as I got, but it's scathing. Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) April 19, 2016

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The target of the attack is not known, but the Ministry of Defense and one of the country's intelligence service's offices are near the blast site.

By AP:

Armed militants in Afghanistan staged a coordinated assault on a key government security agency in the capital Tuesday morning, killing at least 28 people and wounding more than 320. The Taliban has claimed responsibility. SEE PHOTOS

The attack, including a suicide car bombing, appears to have targeted an agency similar to the US Secret Service, providing personal protection for high-ranking government officials.

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Ismail Kawasi, spokesman for the Public Health Ministry, said so far seven dead bodies and 327 wounded, including women and children, have been brought to area hospitals. An Interior Ministry statement said that dozens of civilians were killed and wounded in the attack. The casualty figures are expected to rise.

Sediq Sediqqi, spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, said that the suicide bombing was followed by an assault by armed militants.

"One armed terrorist was shot and killed by security forces and the gun battle is still underway with an unknown number of other terrorists," said Sediqqi.

Later a spokesman for the Kabul police chief, Basir Mujahid, said that the gun battle in the compound had ended.

"This was one of the most powerful explosions I have ever heard in my life," said Obaidullah Tarakhail, a police commander who was present when the attack began. Tarakhail said he couldn't see or hear anything for 20 minutes after the initial explosion. "All around was dark and covered with thick smoke and dust," he said.

Dozens of civilian apartment buildings, houses, shops and several government buildings were damaged by the car bomb blast.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack. Taliban insurgents have stepped up their attacks recently since announcing the start of their spring offensive last week.

President Ashraf Ghani issued a statement condemning the attack and saying it, "clearly shows the enemy's defeat in face-to-face battle with Afghan security forces."

The attack in Kabul comes four days of another attack by Taliban insurgents in northern Kunduz province which was repelled by the Afghan security forces.

Officials in Kunduz said that security has improved in the city and that the Taliban were defeated in other parts of the province, but operations were still underway to clear militant fighters from the rest of the province.

The Taliban held Kunduz for three days last year before being driven out by a two-week counteroffensive aided by US-airstrikes. It was their biggest foray into an urban area since 2001.



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Police have arrested six persons for their alleged involvement in betting in Indian Premier League matches.

By India Today Web Desk: Police have arrested six persons in Sambhal, a district in the state of Uttar Pradesh, for their alleged involvement in betting in Indian Premier League matches

"Ravi Kumar, Govinda, Pradeep Kumar, Arun Kumar, Vikram and Monu Raghav were arrested on Monday during an IPL match," they said.

Four mobile phones, a TV set and Rs 2000 cash were seized from the spot, police said, adding, a case has been registered.

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(With PTI inputs)

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The High Court announced its decision while hearing a 13-year-old murder case, in which a mob was accused of intercepting commuters, committing dacoity and even killing a pillion rider Mukesh Panchal.

By India Today Web Desk: A bench belonging to the Gujarat High Court ruled that in cases involving charges of rioting, all the members of a mob should be held guilty for the offences committed by any one of them.

The High Court announced its decision while hearing a 13-year-old murder case, in which a mob was accused of intercepting commuters, committing dacoity and even killing a pillion rider Mukesh Panchal. Six of the 12 accused were held guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment by a lower court, but they challenged the decision in the High Court.

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Upholding the conviction, a bench of Justice K S Jhaveri and Justice G B Shah said, "Riots, resulting in serious injuries or even death, are of frequent occurrence in this state and cases relating to such riots require careful handling."

"A large number of persons are involved and evidence is often entirely of partisan character. There is, moreover, great danger of innocent persons being implicated along with the guilty, owing to the tendency of parties to try to implicate falsely as many of their enemies as they can," they added.

The bench further observed that the "law is very clear that if an offence is committed by any member of an unlawful assembly in furtherance of the common object of that assembly, every member of that unlawful assembly is guilty of that offence".

"Specific overt act of each member needs not be proved when the accused are proved to be members of that assembly," the bench said.

Keeping in view the above observations, the High Court rejected the defence argument on the grounds that their intention was "to spread havoc in the city".

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Hilal Ahmed Bandey, one of the two accused identified, was arrested from Handwara by Jammu and Kashmir Police last night, official sources said, adding he is being questioned.

By Press Trust of India: One person was arrested in connection with an alleged molestation case of a girl in Handwara, an incident that triggered a cycle of violence for past one week in North Kashmir.

Hilal Ahmed Bandey, one of the two accused identified, was arrested from Handwara by Jammu and Kashmir Police last night, official sources said, adding he is being questioned.

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Bandey was among the two persons named by the girl in her statement before Chief Judicial Magistrate. He is accused of manhandling the girl on April 12 while she was stepping out of a public restroom in Handwara town.

The girl had also denied the allegation by local people that an armyman had tried to molest her.

In her statement before the Judicial Magistrate, "she said that on April 12 after school hours, while proceeding to her home with her friend, she entered in a public lavatory near main chowk in Handwara for answering the call of nature.

"As soon as she came out of lavatory she was confronted, assaulted and dragged by two boys and her bag was snatched.

One of the boys was in school uniform. The production of the girl along with her father before the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Handwara was to comply with the order of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court," police had said.

The sources said that a manhunt had been launched to arrest the other accused named by the girl in her statement to unravel the entire conspiracy. Initial investigation indicate that the girl was spurning offers for a relationship from one of the two boys.

However, the entire case will be solved once the second accused is also arrested, the sources said.

Immediately, after the locals dragged the girl from the public restroom, angry mob started pelting stones and ransacked the Army bunker in Handwara town.

Incidentally, the locals had been demanding withdrawal of the bunker for quite sometime but the army had put its foot down, saying it was strategically important for the troops.

Today, municipal authorities removed three security force bunkers from the main market, fulfilling the demand.

Three bunkers, which were constructed on top of shops in Handwara main market, have been removed by municipal authorities," a police official said.

He said the main bunker, located in the round-about of the main market, has also been vacated and taken over by municipal authorities.

"This bunker will also be demolished and the task will be completed by 2 PM today," the official said.

Meanwhile, curfew-like restrictions continued in Handwara and its adjoining areas.

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Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti has appealed to the people to help restore peace and promised severe punishment to those involved in the violence in Handwara and Kupwara that left five people dead.

Also read:



Handwara violence: Did Mehbooba govt, security forces mishandle the situation?

Handwara protests: Mobile internet services restored in Kashmir





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Hrithik Roshan and Kangana Ranaut's legal battle has become one of the most-talked-about topics of 2016. From mud-slinging to allegations to counter attacks, the two actors have tried almost everything to pass the buck on to the each other. And in a new twist to the events, it has been revealed that the proceedings into the ongoing legal battle has been stalled as the Queen actor has not yet recorded her statement to assist in the investigation.

By India Today Web Desk: Hrithik Roshan and Kangana Ranaut's legal battle has become one of the most-talked-about topics of 2016. From mud-slinging to allegations to counter attacks, the two actors have tried almost everything to pass the buck on to the each other. But to no avail. And the public fight seems to be getting murkier by the day. In a new twist to the events, it has been revealed that the proceedings into the ongoing legal battle has been stalled as the Queen actor has not yet recorded her statement to assist in the investigation.

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ALSO READ: Fresh twist in the tale, Kangana Ranaut accuses Hrithik Roshan of spreading lies

ALSO READ: Varun Dhawan labelled Kangana Ranaut and Hrithik Roshan's legal battle as...



According to Hrithik's lawyers, Kangana is yet to record her statement following a complaint lodged by Hrithik which says that a fake email-ID has been created and an impostor has been operating it under his guise.

Hrithik's lawyers told IANS, "Instead of giving so many media statements, they (Kangana) should record one official statement with the cyber crime cell which will really help the investigation. They are clearly more interested in media wars than anything else. The entire process of investigation is stalled because they haven't officially recorded their statement with the authorities."

Reportedly, Hrithik has already recorded his statement in the case. The cyber crime team has been trying to get Kangana's statement but she has so far not done so.

According to reports, the cyber crime team was to record Kangana's statement on Monday but the actress's counsel had a different take on the issue.

"I have been receiving calls from media persons since last two hours. They have been told by Hrithik Roshan's PR team that police is coming to meet Kangana today (Monday). That's a blatant lie as no one is visiting Kangana, as has been communicated by Hrithik's team," the counsel said.

"My client is not a coward to disappear suddenly. We have always been handling the matter legally and without any fear. Hrithik's PR team is just misleading media persons for obvious reasons.

"He should rather concentrate on acting on my counter-notice or responding to it, as it has been more than 45 days since he received it. Such acts of misleading media persons shows acts of desperation. Hrithik never bothered about any imposter in the last about two years... how has it become so important now. Hrithik did what he had to do, now he should wait patiently as law will take its own course," the counsel added.

The controversy began earlier this year after Kangana hinted at Hrithik being a "silly ex".

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Hrithik Roshan and Kangana Ranaut's legal battle has only become murkier by the day. It has not only become a daily fodder for the media, but now has also become an amusing topic for Bollywood celebs. Varun Dhawan, who has just wrapped up the shooting for his upcoming film Dishoom, was asked about Hrithik and Kangana's fight.

By India Today Web Desk: Hrithik Roshan and Kangana Ranaut's legal battle has only become murkier by the day. It has not only become a daily fodder for the media, but now has also become an amusing topic for Bollywood celebs.

ALSO READ: Hrithik-Kangana fight - Fresh twist in the tale, Ranaut accuses Roshan of spreading lies

ALSO READ: Hrithik Roshan-Kangana Ranaut fight - Kangana and her sister Rangoli haven't received any summons



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Varun Dhawan, who has just wrapped up the shooting for his upcoming film Dishoom, was asked about Hrithik and Kangana's fight. Varun replied saying, "That is Dishoom-Dishoom but our film is just Dishoom," as reported by Pinkvilla. And this reaction by the Badlapur actor is quite funny.

Not just Varun Dhawan, earlier Kareena Kapoor Khan was also asked the same question. She had said, "That is something I really don't have an opinion. It is so personal and so sad. I am very fond of both of them. But I really don't have any opinion. And it really doesn't matter because it doesn't feature in my life."

Hrithik and Kangana's legal battle is said to be Bollywood's dirtiest quarrel ever. The latest development in their case is that Hrithik, through his lawyer has warned Kangana to co-operate with the investigation. The police went to Kangana's residence to record her statement yesterday (April 18), but her lawyer, Rizwan Siddiquee, said she was not available.

Their legal battle started after Kangana referred to Hrithik as a 'silly ex' in an interview. And their legal battle has become the talk of the town and it doesn't seem that their fight is going to end any time soon.

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"It was rape and yes I was flogged and bashed to the point where I knew I had to do it in order to survive, but survival was basically for other prisoners' pleasure," said the victim.

By India Today Web Desk: In a sickening revelation, a transgender woman has revealed a horrifying tale of rape and assault that she faced inside an Australian prison. Identified as Mary, she was serving a sentence for theft in a male prison in Brisbane, when she was allegedly raped for more than 2,000 times.

Inmates are often forced to indulge in sexual activities to get protection from sexual offenders, Mary said. For the victims, it's an unending ordeal of humiliation and pain. Another transgender prisoner committed suicide, she claimed.

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"It was rape and yes I was flogged and bashed to the point where I knew I had to do it in order to survive, but survival was basically for other prisoners' pleasure," Mary was quoted as saying by the British media.

Her misery began when she first stepped into the prison compound for a body check-up and was asked to strip in front of other inmates. To add to her humiliation, this revealed her transgender identity to everyone in prison.

Things got worse when she was denied hormonal treatment inside the prison due to which her facial hair returned. To escape the trauma, Mary made three unsuccessful attempts to flee from the prison.

"We are human beings and most of us were born this way and we want to just live our lives but are ridiculed by society because we have the guts to be who we are," Mary said after being released from the prison.

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By PTI: From Aditi Khanna

London, Apr 19 (PTI) Imams appointed for prisons in Britain routinely distribute extremist literature among Muslim inmates, a leaked report claimed today.

Areview of the countrys prison system, ordered by UK justice minister Michael Gove last year, found extremist pamphlets and CDs in more than 10 jails in November.

"It uncovered misogynistic and homophobic leaflets, hate tracts encouraging the murder of apostates and ultra- conservative Islamic literature preaching contempt for basic British values," The Times reported.

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The material was kept on bookshelves in prison chaplaincy rooms where it was available for anybody to come in and pick up, the paper reported, citing a Whitehall source.

The review, led by former senior UK Home Office official Ian Acheson, has not yet been cleared for publication.

The paper saidthe ministry is awaiting clearance from the Prime Ministers office to publish the report.

Imams at several jails also encouraged prisoners to raise funds for Islamic charities with links to international terrorism, according to the review.

It warned that lax controls and failings at a senior level of the prison service had created a breeding ground for Islamist radicalisation, the paper said.

Jails in England and Wales held 12,328 Muslim inmates at the start of this year, of whom 131 were convicted terrorists and a further 1,000 were deemed vulnerable to radicalisation.

Muslims make up 4.8 per cent of the UK?s prison population but 14.5 per cent of prisoners.

About 100 Muslim chaplains or imams are employed full- time in jails on salaries of up to 40,000 pounds a year.

The extremism review began in September 2015 and the 40,000-word report with 69 recommendations was presented to the justice secretary?s office last month.PTI AK ZH

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Later addressing a rally in Katra, Modi lauded Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehboob Mufti and said she is working hard for the development of the state.

By India Today Web Desk: India has the power of knowledge to rule the 21st century, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said today. Speaking to students at the fifth convocation of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University in Katra today, the PM said that Jammu and Kashmir represents a mini India.

"There is a mini India in Jammu and Kashmir. Dream to do something and not to become someone. India will lead the 21st century because the energy required for it is with us. India has 800 million youth power which is below 35 years. Dream of every youth can become a progress story for the country," Modi said.

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"Our nation is scaling new heights of progress and with such a youthful population we can achieve so much. Dream to do something and not to become someone," he said.

PM Modi's Karta visit comes at a time when tension has gripped parts of the state following violent clashes between locals and security forces in Handwara town.

Situation in Handwara continues to be tense after last week's police firing in which five people were killed. Several towns and villages in north Kashmir are still under curfew and heavy deployment of police and paramilitary forces has been made to avoid the repeat of the last week's incident.

Pain in Kashmir's heart must be addressed: Mehbooba

In her first public rally after taking over as the first woman Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti said she is proud of living in India but added that the "pain in the heart of Kashmir" should be healed as soon as possible.

"In Pakistan, the government is fighting against its own people. I am proud to live in a nation where people from different religions live in peace and harmony but there is a pain. There is a pain in heart of Kashmir and we all have to heal it together," Mufti said .

"We need to heal it so that the youth of Kashmir flourish like those in rest of the country," she added.

Modi lauds Mehbooba

Later addressing a rally in Katra, Modi lauded Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehboob Mufti and said she is working hard for the development of the state.

"Whenever we meet, Mehbooba ji always talks about the development of Jammu and Kashmir. When such a thought is there, development is bound to happen. Centre and the state government are working together for the infrastructure development here. Solution to all of our problems is development and only development," PM Modi said.

"We remember Mufti Sahab (Mufti Mohammad Sayeed). He spent years in public life. He always talked about bridging the gap between Jammu and Srinagar," he said.

Earlier, PM Modi inaugurated the 230-bed Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Narayana super speciality hospital set up in Katra. The hospital is built at a cost of about Rs 300 crore and will be providing much needed specialised medical care to the people of Reasi district.



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The winning formula for Kolkata, who have won three out of their four matches in the ongoing tournament, has been the success of their openers Gambhir and Uthappa.

he Gambhir-Uthappa pair has scored majority of the runs for Kolkata that laid the foundation for their victories this season. (BCCI Photo)

By Subhasish Dutta: Two-time champions Kolkata Knight Riders lived up to their top billing in the Indian Premier League season nine with a resounding six-wicket victory over Kings XI Punjab in Mohali on Tuesday.

Robin Uthappa and Gautam Gambhir's 82-run opening stand paved the way for Kolkata to grab their sixth consecutive victory over Punjab in IPL.

With this victory, Kolkata - winners of the 2012 and 2014 editions - moved to the top of the IPL table.(Uthappa, spinners hand Kolkata Knight Riders 6-wicket win over Kings XI Punjab)

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The winning formula for Kolkata, who have won three out of their four matches in the ongoing tournament, has been the success of their openers Gambhir and Uthappa.

The Gambhir-Uthappa pair has scored majority of the runs for Kolkata that laid the foundation for their victories this season.

Both Gambhir and Uthappa, who were discarded from the Indian team following inconsistent performances, have stitched impressive opening stands of 69, 21, 92 and 82 in four matches for KKR.

Following the victory against Punjab, Uthappa, who won the Man of the Match for his 28-ball 53, said he shares a good chemistry with Gambhir and that was the reason behind the success the of the two.

"Myself and Gambhir have a good understanding. You don't try to fix something that ain't broke. We share a good chemistry. The understanding between us is one of the secret to our success. We rotate the strike well. The understanding and camaraderie is very, very good. We just complimented each other. That is about it," he said.

Skipper Gambhir, who is now the league's highest run-scorer with 226 runs under his belt, said he wants his team to continue the winning momentum.

"We were pretty professional. We were chasing 138. Obviously opening partnership was the key. The way Robin batted, he made it easy. Well, I think there is always room for improvement. We want to continue doing well. Winning is a habit. We need to continue the good work that we are doing.

Gambhir also praised mystery spinner Sunil Narine, who impressed in his second match for the team. Narine took 2 wickets for 22 runs in his quota of four overs.

When asked about Narine's performance, Gambhir said: "We wanted to ease Narine into this competition. We don't want to put pressure on him. We have quality bowlers apart from Narine. It is for others to take the burden from Narine. We know when he is confident, he can be lethal."



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BJP's Sambit Patra said Chidambaram must reveal the name of the person who forced him to change the affidavit in which references to Ishrat being a Lashkar operative was made.

By India Today Web Desk: Congress president Sonia Gandhi came under severe fire from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party today over the Ishrat Jahan encounter issue. The BJP suggested that it was Sonia who had asked the then Home Minister P Chidambaram to file a second affidavit in the encounter case.

Talking to reporters in New Delhi, BJP's Sambit Patra said Chidambaram must reveal the name of the person who forced him to change the affidavit in which references to Ishrat being a Lashkar operative was made.

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"Mr P Chidambram let the nation know. Who is she who wrote the conspiracy? Because we all know that in the Congress party diktats come from a singular address. You know the address. The remote control lies with her," Patra said, without naming Sonia Gandhi.

He also accused Sonia, former PM Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram of suppressing information provided by the NIA and other agencies regarding threat to Narendra Modi's life and Ishrat being a terrorist.

"Why did you suppress it? What was the need? Because you could not tolerate these two persons (Modi and Amit Shah). You could not tolerate him as you feared him becoming the Prime Minister. You tolerated terrorists," Patra said

Ishrat was killed in an encounter by Gujarat police in 2004. A court-monitored CBI probe had found the encounter fake and a major row erupted after the UPA government filed in September 2009 a second affidavit which, unlike the first, did not make any reference to her links with Lashkar-e-Taiba.

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Mumbai college girl Ishrat Jahan and her three alleged associates Pranesh Gopinath Pilai, Amjad Ali and Jishan Johar were killed by Gujarat Police in an allegedly staged shootout on June 15, 2004.

By India Today Web Desk: Levelling serious allegations against the Congress over the Ishrat Jahan shootout case, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday said the Congress almost connived to get a political rival eliminated in Gujarat.

"Here is a political rival, the then chief minister of Gujarat, whom the Congress could not face politically. So they quietly saw a terror plot bloom," union minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was the then Gujarat chief minister.

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"The then union home minister gave two affidavits in court. They tried to show as if there was no terror plot, as if there was no threat to Modi's life," she added.

Sitharaman said that since both of the affidavits on a single matter can't be true, the then home minister P Chidambaram was either trying to "hide some facts or add something not germane to the case" in the submission before the court.

The BJP's outburst came after TV channel Times Now revealed that the first affidavit, which described Ishrat Jahan as a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, was indeed signed by Chidambaram, who has been denying signing it.

However, the second affidavit said there was no conclusive evidence to suggest that Ishrat was linked to LeT.

"By politicising the Ishrat Jahan encounter case, the Congress has undermined the national security. They have weakened the entire security network," Sitharaman said, adding whether the shootout was real or fake was a secondary matter.

Mumbai college girl Ishrat Jahan and her three alleged associates Pranesh Gopinath Pilai, Amjad Ali and Jishan Johar were killed by Gujarat Police in an allegedly staged shootout on June 15, 2004.

Gujarat Police had described the four as Pakistani-controlled terrorists who came from Jammu and Kashmir to assassinate then chief minister Modi.

In February, LeT operative David Headley told a Mumbai court that Ishrat Jahan was a member of the Pakistan-based terror group.

Also Read

Ishrat Jahan was a Lashkar operative, says David Headley

Ishrat Jahan encounter: Govt denies permission to prosecute ex-IB officials



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"It is possible that ISIS is conceiving of a new terror dimension. The beaches cannot be protected," a senior German security official said.

By India Today Web Desk:

Tourist destinations, including beaches in Italy, Spain and Southern France, may be on the radar of ISIS, says a report published in German tabloid Bild.

In a report quoting sources and tip-offs in the French, German and Italian intelligence, Bild said European holiday resorts are in the cross-hairs of the ISIS and assassins may pose as vendors on beaches.

The reports also said these "vendors" could detonate suicide vests and bombs buried under sun loungers and could cause heavy casualties.

"It is possible that ISIS is conceiving of a new terror dimension. The beaches cannot be protected," a senior German security official told the tabloid.



The intelligence agencies said the beaches which are definite targets include resorts in southern France, the Costa del Sol in Spain and both coasts in Italy.

ALSO READ: Most Arabs reject ISIS, think caliphate will fail: surveyMost Arabs reject ISIS, think caliphate will fail: survey



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The state is likely to get the distinction of being the first place where you would need a registration certificate to have a WhatsApp group.

By Shuja-ul-Haq : In times of end to end encryption, the Jammu and Kashmir government wants a license of sorts for running a WhatsApp group.

The government has kick-started an official crackdown on social media platforms like WhatsApp. The state is likely to get the distinction of being the first place where you would need a registration certificate to have a WhatsApp group.

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"The Divisional Commissioner, Kashmir Dr. Asgar Hassan Samoon, Monday directed the operators of social media news agencies to obtain proper permission from the concerned Deputy Commissioners for posting news on social media news groups along with sources", read an official press release.

The statement also had a stern warning for those who don't comply. It promised action against the violators.

The move comes after a series of other curbs like complete blackout of internet whenever there is slight anticipation of trouble. The recent instance being the clashes and tension after the Handwara firing incident. For almost 3 days internet services remained shutdown across the valley.

This news of registration for WhatsApp groups and close monitoring of social media activity has taken netizens by surprise. Many asking how could there be such restrictions on web in an age when the world is moving towards increased privacy and encryption.

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On Karan Thapar show panelists discuss whether India has lost the right to demand the diamond's return.

By India Today Web Desk: The Modi government yesterday told the Supreme Court that it cannot force the United Kingdom to return the legendary Kohinoor diamond . Solicitor The government said that the famous jewel was not looted or stolen from India but it was given as a "gift" in 1849 by successors of Maharaja Ranjith Singh to the East India Company.

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Till now all the governments have been saying that it will take steps to bring back the $200 million gem.

Significantly, the RSS too has been asking the Modi government to reclaim it through diplomatic channels.

With the government clarifying that the Kohinoor was gifted and not stolen, has India lost the right to demand the diamond's return? Questions also arise whether India' s claim over Kohinoor better than that of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan and are Indian artefacts safer out of the country because they will be better looked after?

Speaking to Karan Thapar on the show To The Point, famous historian and author Irfan Habib said that the Kohinoor was gifted by prince Duleep Singh, who was a minor then, to Queen Victoria at Hyde Park in London in 1850.

Narayani Gupta, professor of History at Jamia Millia Islamia had a completely different and interesting story about how the diamond went out of India.

"After the British conquered Punjab, one of the conditions in their list of demands for peace treaty was that the Kohinoor be handed over to the British. Later, the then Governor General of India, Lord Dalhousie, described the Kohinoor as a trophy of war," Narayani said.

Big Questions #ByeByeKohinoor: Gifted or stolen? How did British acquire the Kohinoor? No grounds to ask for Kohinoor's return? Is government's version of history disputable? Government's version on Kohinoor riddled with holes? Who gave Kohinoor to the British - Ranjit Singh or Duleep? Punjab rulers forced to give away Kohinoor? Does India have the right to demand Kohinoor? Government's stand to boost relationship with Britain? Government's version different from party and RSS view?

Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Vice Chancellor of Ashoka University, also rejected the "gift" theory being presented by the government.

"Dalhousie engineered a meeting between Duleep Singh, who was just 13 then, and Queen Victoria. Infact, the queen first asked her prime minister, "Should we show it to the young man?" and when the prime minister gave his nod of agreement, she brought out the diamond, which was already with her, and placed it on Duleep Singh's palms. He then gave it back to the queen," Mukherjee said.

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Mukherjee added that Indian artefacts are better off where they are. "We don't have resources to preserve them," he said.

Rajya Sabha MP Chandan Mitra also said that the diamond was handed over to the British by Duleep Singh, the minor son of Maharaja Ranjith Singh.

"The question is whether India can legitimately stake claim to get the diamond back? I think that claim is contentious," Mitra said but added, "Last possessor of Kohinoor was an Indian king, so if anybody who can claim it back it is India."



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According to the Culture Ministry, since Koh-i-noor has been taken out of the country prior to Independence, the ASI is not in a position to process the matter.

By Harish V Nair: Drastically changing india's stand on bringing back the $200 million Koh-i-noor diamond from UK, the Modi government in a controversial statement on Monday told the Supreme Court that going by a 44-year-old law, the diamond cannot be reclaimed as it was given as a "gift" in 1849 by successors of Maharaja Ranjith Singh to the East India Company and not stolen or forcibly taken away from India.

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Till now all the governments have been saying that it will take steps to bring back the 105 carat legendary gem. Significantly the RSS too has been asking the Modi government to reclaim it through diplomatic channels.

But a bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur said it will not dismiss the PIL which sought directions for bringing back the diamond saying it might affect any future attempts to get back the gem.

"Do you want us to dismiss the PIL? We would have done so after such a statement. But if the government is making a legitimate claim later we wonder our dismissal will stand in your way.

They will say your own supreme court has dismissed the case so how can we interfere," CJI Thakur asked Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar. The court asked Kumar to take instructions from the External Affairs and Culture Ministries in this regard and file an affidavit within six weeks.

Under the provisions of the Antiquities and Art Treasure Act, 1972, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) takes up the issue of retrieval of only such antiquities as have been illegally exported out of the country.

According to the Culture Ministry, since Koh-i-noor has been taken out of the country prior to Independence, the ASI is not in a position to process the matter.

The diamond is set in a crown which is on display in the Tower of London. In 2013, during a trip to India UK Prime Minister David Cameron had ruled out sending the diamond back to India, declaring that he does not believe in "returnism".

The SG told the court that the diamond was given to the British by Ranjith Singh's successor Prince Dalip Singh as some "compensation" after the 1849 Sikh wars.

The government's statement comes at a time when a group of Indian businessman and Indian-origin UK law makers are attempting to mount a legal bid to force Britain to return the diamond, from the crown jewels, to India. The group has instructed lawyers to attempt to begin proceedings in England's High Court.

Also read:

Kohinoor given to East India by Punjab rulers: Govt tells SC



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By PTI: Kohima, Apr 19 (PTI) Nagaland Chief Secretary Pankaj Kumar has become the first Ambassador for Girl Child (AFGC) under the Centres Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) project, officials said today.

Kumar also released the AFGC badge during a meeting of various head of departments yesterday, they said.

The BBBP project was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year to address the issue of decline in Child Sex Ratio, while AFGC is the brain child of Nagaland State Resource Centre for Women.

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Under the Ambassador Scholarship programme, officers of various departments will have the opportunity to support a girl child in realising her dreams, Secretary of State Resource Centre for Women Daisy Mezhur said.

Every AFGC will provide one under privileged girl child the chance to live a better life besides contributing towards quality education of such girls.

Under this scheme, one can also speak about the importance of girl child and her education in every relevant platforms, she added. PTI NBS NN NSD LNS

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The Prime Minister is on a day-long visit to the state and is scheduled to hold a public meeting in Kakryal later in the day.

By India Today Web Desk: Prime Minister Narendra Modi today inaugurated the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Narayana Superspeciality Hospital in Katra in Jammu and Kashmir. He will shortly address the convocation of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University.

The Prime Minister is on a day-long visit to the state and is scheduled to hold a public meeting in Kakryal later in the day.

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The Prime Minister arrived at Jammu airport in a special plane in the morning for a day's visit. State Governor NN Vohra, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and other senior ministers and government officials received the Prime Minister at the airport.

A thick security cover has been set in place in Katra and its adjoining areas. The Governor has directed the Chief Secretary and other senior officers to ensure that all necessary arrangements were made for the Prime Minister's visit.

Meanwhile, helicopter services carrying pilgrims from Katra town to the Trikuta Hills where the cave shrine is located has been suspended as a security measure.



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By PTI: From Shirish B Pradhan

Kathmandu, Apr 19 (PTI) Nepal government has decided to observe September 20 as the national day to mark the promulgation of the countrys new constitution last year.

Nepal on September 20, 2015 promulgated its new constitution. The constitution was endorsed through 85 per cent of the votes in the 601-member Constituent Assembly despite boycott by Madhesi parties.

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The decision was made during a cabinet meeting, said minister for Information and communication Sher Dhan Rai.

"There will be Government holiday on that day. As the constitution of 2015 has institutionalised the achievements of the Peoples Movement of 2006, the day constitution was promulgated will be observed as the national day, said minister Rai.

The government has scrapped holiday on Loktantra Diwas, which falls on Baishakh 11 or April 23. PTI SBP UZM

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By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 19 (PTI) As many as 56 companies including Tata Power, Alstom India, state-run ONGC and GAIL have failed to comply with regulator Sebis norms to appoint at least one woman director on board, leading data provider Prime Database said.

These non-compliant firms include a host of PSUs (Public Sector Units) and PSBs (Public Sector Banks).

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All listed firms were required to have at least one woman director on their boards from April 1, 2015, as per a Sebi directive, as also under the Companies Act, 2013.

These rules are aimed at ensuring gender diversity in boardrooms.

According to Prime Database, a total of 56 NSE-listed companies have not appointed a woman director on board.

BEML, BPCL, Hindustan Organic Chemicals, HMT, IOC, MMTC, National Fertilisers, Power Finance Corp, Syndicate Bank, Rural Electrification Corp, Oriental Bank of Commerce, State Trading Corp and Madras Fertilisers are among the PSUs that are yet to comply with Sebis directive.

Some of the private entities that still have to induct women directors are Lanco Infratech, DB Corp, Valecha Engineering, Servalakshmi Paper and Salora International.

The rule was first announced by Sebi in February 2014 with an initial deadline of October 1 the same year that was later extended by six months.

Since then, most of the companies listed on NSE have hired a woman member on board. Interestingly, a significant number of firms appointed a woman member from the promoter family to comply with the rule within the deadline.

Acting against listed firms without a mandatory woman director, Sebi in April 2015 announced a minimum Rs 50,000 fine and warned of further action, including against promoters and directors, if they remain non-compliant beyond six months.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) announced a four-stage penalty structure wherein fines would increase with the passage of time. The market watchdog had asked the stock exchanges to levy the fines as the violation relates to the Listing Agreement.

The listed companies complying between April 1, and June 30, 2015 will have to pay Rs 50,000. Those complying between July 1 and September 30 would need to pay Rs 50,000 and an additional Rs 1,000 per day till compliance.

The listed firms complying on or after October 1, 2015 will have to pay Rs 1.42 lakh, plus Rs 5,000 per day till the date of compliance.

For any non-compliance beyond September 30, 2015, the regulator may take any other action against the non-compliant entities, their promoters and/or directors or issue such directions in accordance with law, as considered appropriate. PTI SP ANU

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A day before Doval's visit, Chinese officials said they were "in communication" with India over the issue, but reiterated their stand that placing the technical hold was done "in accordance with facts" and rules of the UNSC 1267 sanctions committee.

By Ananth Krishnan: National Security Adviser Ajit Doval will on Wednesday in Beijing begin high-level talks with China on the boundary question and other strategic issues, amid new strains between the two countries over China blocking the listing of Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar at the United Nations Security Council.

A day before Doval's visit, Chinese officials said they were "in communication" with India over the issue, but reiterated their stand that placing the technical hold was done "in accordance with facts" and rules of the UNSC 1267 sanctions committee.

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"We hope we can continue with such kind of communication so as to properly resolve the issue," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said, but declined to elaborate on what "facts" had prompted China's stand.

Asked about External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj's comments in Moscow, at the Russia-India-China summit on Monday, hitting out at "double standards" in the global fight against terror, Hua said China too was "firmly opposed to double standards on the terrorism issue" and China was "also a victim of terrorism".

"We believe that only by working as one can the world fight against terrorism and maintain peace and stability of the whole world. There is no doubt about that," she added.

Hua reiterated China's view that it was "dealing with the listing matter in accordance with facts and relevant resolutions and we are also in sound communication with all relevant parties including the Indian side".

The issue has also figured in Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar's on-going China visit. He told reporters in Beijing on Monday after talks with the PLA leadership in Beijing that "what happened at the UN was not the right direction" China had taken on terror and that both sides should stand together.

NSA Doval will on Wednesday hold the 19th round of border talks with Chinese top diplomat and State Councillor Yang Jiechi, his counterpart as Special Representative (SR). Besides the boundary question, both officials will discuss a range of strategic issues, officials said, including counterterrorism.

Doval will also meet a senior Chinese leader, most likely Premier Li Keqiang.

Hua said the two SRs will continue "working on framework settlement so as to work out a plan that could be acceptable to both sides".

Both sides have been deadlocked in negotiations for a framework agreement for all three sectors of the border since 2005, when the first stage of the talks, an agreement on political parameters, was concluded. The final stage will involve delineating the border in maps and on the ground.

"During this 19th session the two sides will continue to strive to reach a settlement acceptable to both sides," said Hua, "and the two sides will also exchange views on international and regional issues?..to create favourable conditions for improvement of bilateral relationship."

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Hua noted that China had "completely settled territorial disputes with 12 out of 14 of our land neighbours" - only India and Bhutan are pending - and that "both history and practice have proven that it is practical to resolve territorial disputes through negotiation and consultation."

Also read:

Sushma's dig at China: Can't have double standards in war on terror



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This is a drastic decline in water storage as at this time last year, the level in Marathwada's dams was much higher at 11 per cent, Aurangabad Divisional Commissioner Umakant Dangat said.

By Press Trust of India: In more bad news for the drought-hit Marathwada region, only 3 per cent water is left in dams in the parched region, officials said today.

Eight of the region's 11 major dams are at dead storage level, meaning water from these dams cannot flow out but has to be lifted.

This is a drastic decline in water storage as at this time last year, the level in Marathwada's dams was much higher at 11 per cent, Aurangabad Divisional Commissioner Umakant Dangat said.

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"We will also use the groundwater stock and as the IMD forecast is good, we hope that we will be able to carry on till the monsoon arrives," he said.

This is the fourth year of drought in Marathwada in the past five years. Each of its 8,522 villages have been affected for two consecutive years.

"We have already cut water supply to (the) industry. The collectors and divisional commissioner have been instructed that the use of water for drinking is the top priority," Maharashtra Water Resources Minister Girish Mahajan said.

As many as 2,745 water tankers are being used in the region compared to 939 this time last year.

Latur in Marathwada has been getting water by a special "water train" filled at Miraj in western Maharashtra.

The Aurangabad collector has already announced a 20 per cent water cut to local breweries and a 10 per cent overall cut to local industry.

Dams across the state have only 19 per cent water left compared to 32 per cent this time last year, an official of Maharashtra Irrigation Department said.

ALSO READ: Munde selfie row: Congress accuses BJP of mocking Maharashtra drought, Sena joins in



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By Hemul Goel: Fashion weeks after fashion weeks with the same style of runway presentations can get monotonous, if not boring, for fashion watchers. And that monotony can cause one's interest to wane. However, that wasn't the case when fashion designers Vrinda Sachdev and Gurinder Singh of Qbik launched their Spring-Summer '16 collection.

Presenting their creations in what can be termed as a seamless meeting between theatre and fashion, the duo presented their designs in a wedding-themed skit--that came with a twist--conceptualised by theatre personality Bubbles Sabharwal.

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Also read: Harper's Bazaar India turns 7; fashion fraternity pays tribute to ikat with special exhibit

Talking about the idea, Vrinda Sachdev said, "It would have been very easy for me to have a show with models walking in the store, as we have a fairly large store, but we took that extra step because people are tired of fashion weeks. So I wanted to give them something they would enjoy. Bubbles aunty's daughters have been coming to me for years, so I spoke to her about the idea my team had come up with."

Elated by the successful response, Bubbles Sabharwal added, "The designer came to me and she wanted to do something with fashion and theatre. I was like, "Oh My God, it's all jhaadi, raasta, road, cats and sabziwallahs here (Shahpur Jat), where are we going to do theatre?" Then we decided to do it amphitheatre style and instead of using a set, we used the shop, because it's real. No one would have come here for serious theatre, so we made it fun, with a wedding--because what's better than that to showcase clothes? And so it became a fun experiment."

Conceptualised in a period of just 10 days, Bubbles termed it "flash theatre", borrowing from the concept of a flash mob.

From choosing to go for a plus-size bride around whom the story was centered to the Bollywood thumkas--the presentation had a mix of exaggerated personalities that came with a realistic touch, showing off the clothes. While the characters gyrated and moved, one could make out the fall of a drape or the shimmer of the mukaish work on the fabric.

Bubbles added, "I'd love for more designers to do this--you have got be different. Nobody has that long-term vision. It made clothes come alive, clothes become interactive. Also, nobody expected a fat bride, but that's how real life is--real fat girls marry good looking guys too, so it's a real story."

Be it chevron or pin tucks, for their Spring Summer '16 line Vrinda and Gurinder have mostly brought back chikan in a renewed avatar. "The Spring-Summer collection started with us sitting online looking at chikan. That's one style that keeps coming back, so we decided to get chikan back in our way. As a brand that specialises in Indian wear--Up in the Air (the name of the collection)--came about, as it's very hot. So we decided to use georgettes and chiffons and used chikan as appliques by making it very indo-western and chic by using a chunni of one piece, a lehenga of another or a kali from another."



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Well, if only fashion designers could make fashion more fun and engaging, and less serious, with such experiments, this is a format we could happily get behind.

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Randeep Hooda collapsed on the sets of Salman Khan's Sultan on Sunday and had to be hospitalised for a surgery.

Randeep Hooda had to lose 18 kilos in 4 weeks for his role in Sarbjit

By India Today Web Desk: Randeep Hooda collapsed on the sets of superstar Salman Khan's upcoming film Sultan on Sunday (April 18). Following that, the actor was rushed to the hospital where he had to undergo an appendix surgery. Now, his sister and doctor Anjali Hooda has said that drastic weight change is difficult "mentally and physically".

ALSO READ: Randeep Hooda collapses on Sultan sets, in hospital for a surgery

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ALSO READ: Sarbjit has affected Randeep Hooda in a way beyond imagination

Randeep collapsed on Sunday evening following a severe attack of appendicitis. He underwent surgery at the Fortis Hospital in the capital on Monday (April 19).

The Jism 2 star had to shed 18kg in just four weeks' time in order to prepare for his role as Sarabjit Singh in Omung Kumar's upcoming biopic, Sarbjit.

Asked how difficult it is for an actor to mould his body for a character which needs a drastic weight change, Anjali, a specialist in metabolism, told IANS, "For an actor, it may not be difficult because he is very motivated. But for his body, it is very difficult because it doesn't understand starvation. It is very difficult mentally and physically."

Randeep Hooda as Sarbjit Randeep Hooda as Sarbjit

Anjali also added that the "motivation is so high for these people (actors) that they don't realise the implications" of fluctuating weight change.

Asked if sudden fluctuation of body weight was the reason for Randeep's health problem, she explained, "It (appendicitis) is not directly related to fluctuation of weight. But yeah, weight loss of extreme type can cause faeces becoming hard because there is no fibre. This is minimal of a problem that can happen and this is a good example for people to know..."

Anjali also mentioned that this is a minute problem, but such major weight loss programmes can cause other "unforeseen problems" in the body.

Randeep's ailment could be related to the "extreme make-over" he had for Omung Kumar's Sarbjit, for which he "put his life on the line", she said.

Sarbjit is based on the life Sarabjit Singh, an Indian farmer who was convicted of terrorism and spying in Pakistan and was sentenced to death. He was attacked by inmates at a prison in Lahore in April 2013 and died a few days later. The film is about Sarabjit's sister Dalbir Kaur's struggle to get her brother out of prison. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is essaying the role of Dalbir Kaur in the biopic.

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Randeep, while shooting for the biopic, was given enough food to "sustain for the day".

"So, we were giving him very less calories and we were making sure that he doesn't get any blood-related issues like electrolyte problems and lack of energy," Anjali said.

The doctor added that the inflammation of appendix is "not directly related to weight loss, but can happen due to lack of fibre, calories and water... it can lead to anything."

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Doris Roberts aka Marie Barone of the 1990s sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, was everything a woman would want to be in her older years.

Doris Roberts in a still from Everybody Loves Raymond

By India Today Web Desk: Actress Doris Roberts, fondly remembered as the acerbic mother Marie Barone on 1990s sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, passed away at the age of 90.

Roberts died overnight in her sleep on Sunday in LA, her spokeswoman Janet Daily said yesterday. Roberts' son, Michael Cannata, informed Daily about his mother's demise.

During her 60-year acting career, Roberts won 5 Emmy awards, 4 of them for Everybody Loves Raymond. The top-rated show was a long-running CBS comedy series (1996-2005). Also read: Doris Roberts, the mom from Everybody Loves Raymond, dies at 90

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Doris, who became a household name as Raymond's mom, was chosen to play the role after about a hundred women were auditioned for the role.

In an interview, Doris revealed that she was chosen after about a hundred actresses were auditioned across the US. During the audition, she revealed, she told the casting agent, "I better get this ******* show, my name is on this one". And rightly so, Doris immortalised the character of Marie Barone.

Remembering her with some of her best moments from the show.









And here's a bonus. Doris, the queen of sass, at 71.

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Ajay Devgn has been in Bulgaria for quite some time now shooting for his upcoming film Shivaay. The actor has been shooting in extreme conditions and has taken the film at the highest peak of Bulgaria's Vihren peak in Bansko. Ajay took to micro-blogging site Twitter to share the video of his shooting schedule in Bulgaria.

By India Today Web Desk: Ajay Devgn has been in Bulgaria for quite some time now shooting for his upcoming film Shivaay. The actor has been shooting in extreme conditions and has taken the film at the highest peak of Bulgaria's Vihren peak in Bansko.

The temperature is believed to be -19 degrees Celsius. The Drishyam actor has managed to pull up the stunt in these conditions in just a t-shirt and a jacket. He has reportedly got hypothermia due to extreme cold, very tough terrain and lack of adequate warm clothing. Despite advising him to rest for two days, the actor sprung up in 30 minutes and continued with the shoot of his directorial venture.

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Ajay Devgn took to micro-blogging site Twitter to share the video of his shooting schedule in Bulgaria and wrote, "When the going gets tough, tough get going! Heartfelt thanks to fantastic TeamShivaay for an Extreme Bulgaria shoot (sic)."

When the going gets tough, tough get going! Heartfelt thanks to fantastic TeamShivaay for an Extreme Bulgaria shoot.https://t.co/8W7D1n7RKo Ajay Devgn (@ajaydevgn) April 18, 2016

As soon as the scene got over, the crew members helped him wear a jacket and sit on a scooter to ride him to his hotel room. The Gangaajal actor also shared a image from his shoot on Twitter.

The Omkara actor had earlier also shared a picture of a stunt in which he is seen hanging from the cliff in the picturesque locales of Landour.

Trying to overcome my fear of heights, do you guys think this will help?? pic.twitter.com/gSGJNuD73V Ajay Devgn (@ajaydevgn) December 26, 2015

This forthcoming directorial venture by Ajay is said to emphasize on the human elements of Lord Shiva. It highlights Lord Shiva's imperfections and their role in making him strong. Shivaay is slated to release on Diwali this year.

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The 3-day fashion extravaganza in the Capital was all about showstoppers as designers showcased their Spring/Summer collections.

Model Noyonika Chatterjee sported two looks for designer Rajdeep Ranawat as she opened and closed his show.

By Radhika Bhalla/Mail Today: The weekend saw the latest Spring/Summer collections by young designers at the India Runway Week 2016, a three day long event that took place at the Thayagraj Stadium in the Capital.

Unlike other fashion weeks in the city, the runway week focused heavily on showstoppers, such as transgender activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi who walked for Delhi based jewellery designer Akassh K Aggarwal. Tripathi walked the ramp in a black sari with a keyshaped statement necklace, a bright red pout and her characteristic big, red bindi.

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Also read: Transgender rights activist, Laxmi Narayan, walks the ramp at India Runway Week

Jewellery designer Akassh Aggarwal with Mandira Bedi & Laxmi Narayan Tripathi.

The 'Coeur Collectives' was inspired from the French word for heart and showcased filigree motifs, stamped light-weight metal sheet work and embossed 3D. Commenting on the collection, Aggarwal said, "The collection comes with a social message of gender equality, and sensitisation refers to modification of behaviour by raising awareness. In a male dominated society such as India, the other two genders--female and LGBT--are facing social and personal issues. I want to spread the message of gender equality through my collection."

Actress and designer, Mandira Bedi also walked for Aggarwal, looking chic in a pink and orange sari, worn with a strappy silver-gold blouse. A large gold wire cuff bracelet with pearls, a statement pearl ring and a gold and pearl choker completed her look.

Also read: Kate Middleton goes from ravishing in red in Bhutan to wow in white at the Taj Mahal

Supermodel Noyonika Chatterjee opened and closed the show for designer Rajdeep Ranawat. The curly haired beauty first walked in a floral wrap-around maxi dress and strappy heels. The second time over, Chatterjee looked like a tribal beauty in an ensemble inspired by the nomads of Kutch. With a red dupatta draped over a black and white lehenga, she cut an exotic figure with smokey eyes, nude lips and a septum ring.

Model Noyonika Chatterjee.

Speaking of Ranawat, the Noyonika said, "Rajdeep is very talented and creates beautiful ensembles using sustainable organic fabrics which breathe during summers."

Actress Neha Dhupia.

Looking pretty in gold, actress Neha Dhupia walked for Mugdha Art Studio in a delicately embroidered lehenga. Tollywood star Shriya Saran wore a purple, light blue and gold ensemble as she turned showstopper for designer, Architha Narayanam.

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Following zodiac signs to to have a better grip on future while those conventional zodiac signs looked celestial. But an artist re-imagined all the zodiac signs and made some really heavy illustrations to give them a wicked look.

By Mohak Gupta:

Turning the pages of your newspaper, sliding up and down that screen to read your horoscope, you never thought you'd come across this right. All our little heavenly zodiac signs could look this way, we never thought.

An artist illustrated the zodiac signs and they all look just so wicked.



ARIES

They are famous for rage.

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TAURUS

They are famous for their impatience.



GEMINI

They are famous for their silence.



CANCER



They are famous for their weariness.



LEO

They are famous for their temper.



VIRGO

They are famous for their compulsive behaviour.



LIBRA

They are famous for their instability.



SAGITTARIUS

They are famous for their lethargy.



CAPRICORN

They are famous for over thinking.



AQUARIUS

They are famous for their anxiousness.



PISCES

They are famous for their isolation.



SCORPIO

They are famous for their hostility and violence.



These strong illustrations of zodiac signs are made by Damon Hellandbrand which gives us a wicked sense of this celestial magic.

Let the stars be aligned now.





--- ENDS ---
By PTI: From Manash Pratim Bhuyan

Moscow, Apr 19 (PTI) External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today left for home after winding up her four-day two-nation tour to Iran and Russia.

"Dasvidaniya Moscow! After a productive visit to Iran and Russia, EAM @SushmaSwaraj departs for Delhi," External Affair Ministry Spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted.

In Iran, Swaraj called on President Hassan Rouhani and held talks with her Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif, besides meeting with Supreme Leader Sayyed Ali Khameneis Advisor Ali Akbar Velayati and deliberated on a range of issues.

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During the meeting, Rouhani assured Swaraj that his country can be a "reliable partner" for Indias energy needs. The two nations also decided to significantly expand engagements in their overall ties, particularly in oil and gas sectors.

In Moscow, the Minister attended the Foreign Ministers meeting of RIC (Russia-India-China).

During the meeting the three nations vowed to deepen cooperation in combating terrorism and pitched for setting up of a broad counter-terrorist front with the UN playing a central role.

She also held talks with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

She also had a meeting with Russias Deputy Prime Minister Dmitryi Rogozin. PTI MPB NSA

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Complaining about heavy airstrikes, mobilizing of troops, Iran's armed men coming in and Russia's unmanned planes and rockets the opposition thinks there is no real will for a political solution.

By India Today Web Desk: A diplomatic effort to move forward peace talks in Syria suffered a blow when the mainstream opposition announced a pause in talks at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva.

The opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) in a letter to rebel fighters said that government military advances meant a ceasefire was over. So, it called postponement in the talks, however, the negotiating team will be in the city.

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The rebels have launched an assault against the government forces in Latakia province on the Mediterranean coast after accusing that the government broke the ceasefire and tried capturing the northern city of Aleppo.

The government launched air strikes in Homs province, while the opposition fighters made advances further east in Hama.

Amid the military escalation and worsening humanitarian situation, there was "no way" the opposition could resume formal talks, a senior opposition negotiation Mohammad Alloush told Reuters.

"We want real negotiations, not farcical ones," he said. adding that the opposition had not decided whether it would continue to meet U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura.

Violence amid peace talks



Complaining about heavy airstrikes, mobilizing of troops, Iran's armed men coming in and Russia's unmanned planes and rockets Alloush says there is no real will for a political solution.

The U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura has acknowledged that violence had become "worrisome", particularly around Aleppo. He assured that he would call on Russia and the US to meet urgently if there is no improvement in the situation.

Mistura has come further than any envoy so far in getting President Bashar al-Assad's government and its opponents to negotiate, with the United States and Russia sponsoring a partial ceasefire since Feb. 27 to allow the talks to take place.

Assad's opponents are clear on not participating in talks as long as the fighting goes on.

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Baahubali star Tamannaah Bhatia has decided to clear the air regarding rumours of her marriage to a computer engineer.

Tamannaah will soon be seen in Baahubali: The Conclusion

By India Today Web Desk: Tamannaah Bhatia, who was seen on the silver screen last year in Baahubali: The Beginning, on Tuesday (April 19) dismissed rumours that she was planning to get married. Bhatia said that she is currently busy with her professional life.

ALSO READ: Tamannaah to romance Ranveer Singh in Rohit Shetty's next film?

ALSO READ: Why did Kattappa kill Baahubali? Here's the answer you've been waiting for

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The actor also shared that she will "let the world" know when she decides to get hitched.

"This is a false news. I am not getting married. The day I get someone in my life, I will let the world know about it first. I am currently busy shooting for Prabhudheva's next and few South films," Tamannaah said in a statement.

Over the last few days, many reports had surfaced suggesting that the actor was getting married to a computer engineer. There was much speculation regarding Tamannaah's post-marriage life too.

Some reports had stated that Bhatia was to go the Asin way, i.e., she was probably quitting films after marriage. Asin, who tied the knot with Micromax co-founder Rahul Sharma last year, chose to go off the silver screen altogether after her marriage.

However, the Baahubali actor has refuted all such rumours.

On the work front, Tamannaah has earned accolades for her latest release Oopiri, the Telugu film which also stars Akkineni Nagarjuna and Karthi. She will reportedly be seen now in a Hindi film, Rohit Shetty's next with Ranveer Singh. The actor will also be seen in Baahubali: The Conclusion, SS Rajamouli's sequel to the blockbuster Baahubali: The Beginning, opposite Prabhas.

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By PTI: Colombo, Apr 19 (PTI) The Leader of Opposition in Sri Lankan Parliament and the chief of the main Tamil party TNA has criticised the governments proposed project to build 65,000 houses in the Northern and Eastern provinces, citing its high-cost and unsuitable construction material.

In a letter to President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, R Sampanthan said that the proposed homes pre-fabricated of steel would not suit the tropical climate of the areas.

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"The project is offering 65,000 homes when the need is for over 135,000 houses," Sampanthan, the leader of Tamil National Alliance (TNA), said.

"The cost per house provided by the contractor Arcelor-Mittal, an Indian and French outfit is too high. They can be built 2-3 times lower than the current 2.1 million Sri Lankan rupees quoted," he argued.

"On behalf of the Tamil people I urge the government not to waste this opportunity. If the government is committed to reconciliationthen its action must reflect that," Sampanthan said underlining the need to build homes in the area devastated by over three decades of a conflict.

President Maithripala Sirisena had earlier taken a decision to review the project after concerns were raised over the project.

Meanwhile, Sampanthan came under fire for his comments that there was a good chance of Tamils winning a federal solution in the current Constitution-making process.

"This statement shows that Tamil leaders are still living in the past," Nishantha Sri Warnasinghe of the Sinhala majority nationalist JHU, who is also a Sirisena advisor, told reporters.

"Federalism is no solution," he said. PTI Corr NSA

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By PTI: From Jaishree Balasubhramanian

Bangkok, Apr 19 (PTI) Thailand has requested India to deport a Bhutanese woman detained in New Delhi for her alleged involvement in a drug trafficking network, that also includes Indians, after a gang members body was found in a suitcase in a canal here.

Sonam Zam is among seven foreigners wanted for their suspected involvement in the death of a Bhutanese man, whose body was found in a suitcase in the canal here this month.

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A large quantity of crystal methamphetamine was found in the stomach of the dead man. Police believe he was trying to smuggle the drugs in condoms that burst and killed him.

The seven suspects are from Bhutan, India and Nepal.

According to a letter sent to the Indian embassy here, Sonam fled Thailand for Delhi on April 7 on a Thai Airways International flight.

Indian Embassy sources confirmed to PTI that the letter had been received.

The letter said Thai authorities had immediately contacted Indian officials to stop the woman and send her back to Bangkok for prosecution.

Bureau commissioner Nathathorn Prousoontorn said yesterday that Indian immigration officers apprehended the suspect on arrival in Delhi. Nathathorn said he has contacted the relevant authorities to send her back to Thailand.

However, Bhutanese authorities were later contacted by their Indian counterparts about the arrest and Bhutans Foreign Ministry opposed her handover saying the woman has denied the smuggling allegation, Nathathorn said.

"Such opposition is natural and it is their right," he said. "The suspect is still in custody in India and we are waiting on how India deals with the issue."

It was the first time Bhutanese and Nepalese drug traffickers had been detected in Thailand, the Bangkok Post reported citing the police. PTI JB ABH AKJ ABH

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By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 18 (PTI) Three persons were killed and 11 others, including four children, seriously injured when a cooking gas cylinder exploded in East Delhis Gandhi Nagar area tonight.

The cylinder blast triggered a fire and the walls of the house in which the blast took place and another opposite it collapsed under the impact of the explosion, senior district administration official said.

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Seven fire tenders were rushed to the spot after the incident which took place around 8 PM, a Fire Brigade official said.

The deceased were identified as Rajesh Goyal, Poonam and Soni Ram, all family members. The injured were Naina (4), Girish (6), Krish (12), Naushad (8), Sonu Kashyap (60), Ahmad and Abbas. The other injured persons are yet to be identified, police said.

Ahmad, Abbas and Naushad were either passing by or had come to the area for some work, the officials said.

Another cylinder blast incident was reported at south east Delhis Ashram area around half an hour later.

"Several persons are feared injured in the fire incident which occurred in a house following a cylinder blast. Rescue operation is going on," a senior district administration official said.

Fire department official said that the incident was reported around 8.30 pm and several fire tenders were rushed to the spot. PTI DEY VIT RG

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The fund US$ 700,000 was part of the US$ 4 million given by ISI to Kashmiri American Council, as alleged by federal prosecutors during court proceeding.

By Press Trust of India: US Republican front-runner Donald Trump's new top campaign aide Paul Manafort lobbied for a Washington-based group that has been charged for operating as a front for Pakistan's spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), a media report said on Monday.

The company of Paul Manafort, who was recently hired by Trump campaign as its convention manager, allegedly received $700,000 from the Kashmiri American Council (KAC) between 1990 and 1995, the Yahoo News reported.

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The money was received by Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, which was Manafort's lobbying firm.

Ghulam Nabi Fai, the head of Kashmiri American Council, was sentenced by a US court for two years of imprisonment on charges of receiving money from ISI and working on its behalf.

The fund US$ 700,000 was part of the US$ 4 million given by ISI to Kashmiri American Council, as alleged by federal prosecutors during court proceeding.

The ISI has denied the allegations. The US Government never charged Manafort, who was registered as a lobbyist.

Manafort during a trip to Islamabad in 1994 presented plans to influence members of Congress to back Pakistan's case for a plebiscite for Kashmir, the report said.

The report quotes an unnamed former Pakistani official, who was part of that meeting.

Internal budget documents obtained by the FBI show plans by the Kashmiri American Council to spend US4 80,000 to US$ 100,000 a year on campaign contributions to members of Congress, it said.

"There is no way Manafort didn't know that Pakistan was involved with the KAC," the former official said was quoted as saying by the report.

The Trump Campaign did not respond to questions sent on the allegations against Manafort.

ALSO READ

Padma Lakshmi calls Donald Trump a racist buffoon



Donald Trump would try to squeeze Mexico into funding border wall

--- ENDS ---
Ever wondered what a cancer cell looks like up close, or how gorgeous the Northern Lights looks from space? If curiosity is your virtue, these pictures of the "unseen" may just quench your thirst for the day.

By India Today Web Desk: We don't live in a world where one can claim to have see it all. Human life is just to limited a period of time to experience everything the universe has to offer. So, unless you are a reincarnation or a vampire, it is safe to say you haven't seen everything there is to see.

But one can still try. And it does not always come at the cost of giving up your daily life and flying to some other corner of the world.

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Some of the most astonishing things are happening right around us, everyday. All you would probably need to witness them is a microscope, a telescope or a good camera.

For example, imagine looking into the insides of a burning log or wood, or at a perfectly round-shaped rainbow.

If those imageries interest you, scroll down to see more of such stunning pictures of the unseen:

1. This is what the Northern Lights look like from space

Source: Imgur Source: Imgur

2. Here's what the insides of a burning log is look like

Source: Imgur

3. A microscopic view of cancer cells

Source: Imgur

4. This is the clearest photo of planet Mercury ever taken

Source: Imgur

5. Here's a 3D-printed face

Source: Izismile

6. This is a rare photograph of a perfectly round rainbow

Source: Imgur

7. Here's what a natural geyser looks like just before eruption

Source: Imgur

8. And here's what a human tongue looks like under the microscope

Source: Imgur

9. This is an aerial view of a scrap tire dump

Source: Imgur

10. At last, enjoy a glimpse of this Mad Hatter: A frog wearing a lizard for a headwear

Source: Imgur

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By PTI: From Lalit K Jha

Washington, Apr 19 (PTI) Strongly condemning the "cowardly" terrorist attack in Afghanistan that killed at least 30 people, the US today called on the Taliban to pursue a pathway of peace instead of continuing a military campaign responsible for the "senseless" deaths of Afghan civilians.

"The United States strongly condemns the cowardly attack on Afghan forces and civilians in Kabul this morning that killed dozens and wounded hundreds," said Ned Price Spokesman of the National Security Council.

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The US reiterated its commitment to support Afghanistan.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and their loved ones. At the outset of this years fighting season, we remain committed to supporting the Afghan people and their government," he said in a statement.

"We also call on the Taliban to pursue a pathway of peace instead of continuing a military campaign responsible for the senseless deaths of Afghan civilians," Price said.

The US will remain steadfast partners with Afghan security forces as it works to promote peace and stability in the region, and as they counter the threat of terrorism that affects all, Price said.

In a separate statement, the State Department Spokesman John Kirby sent his deepest condolences to the loved ones of those killed and injured.

"This incident underscores the harm the Taliban and other violent extremists continue to inflict on the Afghan people. Attacks like these only deepen our support for the people and Government of Afghanistan, and their efforts to bring security and stability to Afghanistan," Kirby said.

At least 30 people were killed and hundreds wounded when a Taliban truck bomb tore through central Kabul and a fierce firefight broke out today. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a densely crowded neighbourhood. PTI LKJ UZM

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The move comes in protest against the recent Vatican decision which announced Diocese of Ootacamund located in Mylapore is reinstating Joseph Jeyapaul to ministry.

By Press Trust of India: A 26-year-old American woman will file a lawsuit against a Catholic Indian priest and his church in India for allegedly sexually abusing her during his posting in the US between 2004 and 2005.

The move comes in protest against the recent Vatican decision which announced Diocese of Ootacamund located in Mylapore is reinstating Joseph Jeyapaul to ministry.

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Minnesota attorney Jeff Anderson will file suit on behalf of the victim in federal court that claims the Diocese of Ootacamund endangered children by reinstating Jeyapaul.

Jeyapaul who served as a priest in Crookston township of Minnesota in 2004 and 2005 was arrested in India in 2012 and extradited to the US on charges of sexually abusing two girls in a congregation.

He was later deported to India last year, after serving his sentence of one year and one day.

In a statement, advocacy group SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) announced that one of the sexual abuse survivors would sue the priest and the diocese.

"It may be the most irresponsible Vatican move we've ever seen: Catholic officials in Rome have lifted the suspension of a recently convicted predator priest. We are stunned and saddened by such blatant recklessness and callousness,"

Barbara Dorris of St Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, said in a statement today.

A letter sent to Anderson and Roseau County Attorney Lisa Hanson and signed by over 500 Jeyapaul supporters in India will also be released as evidence of the public danger (nuisance) permitted by Indian Bishop and Vatican, it said.

"On January 16, 2016, with the permission of Pope Francis, Bishop Amalraj lifted the suspension of Father Joseph Jeyapaul," the firm said, adding that in 2015, after his extradition from India, Jeyapaul plead guilty to criminal sexual conduct involving the sexual abuse of a minor girl while he worked in the Diocese of Crookston in 2005.

"Catholic officials refuse to keep this admitted sex offender away from kids, so our only hope of stopping him is to get him charged and convicted again," Dorris said.

Over the weekend, Barbara and the victim were seen distributing leaflets outside the church in Crookston to find another sex abuse survivor.

"Our goal is to find just one more victim who might be able to file criminal charges and get this proven predator behind bars," the victim told local 'Grand Forks Herald'.

The lawsuit would charge Catholic officials with creating "public nuisances" by hiding and helping predator priests.

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"It was the first victim's courage that brought forward a second victim of Fr Jeyapaul. It was the second victim's courage that prodded Fr Jeyapaul to plead guilty. And we hope the courage of a third victim will get Fr Jeyapaul extradited, convicted and jailed again, so that no more innocent lives are shattered," SNAP said.

"Until he's charged and convicted again, Jeyapaul should be put in a remote, secure, independently-run treatment center far from families who have learned to trust him," it said.

ALSO READ: I was raped 2,000 times in prison, says transgender woman



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By Reuters, Press Trust of India: Hoping that Saudi Arabia understands their shared interest in protecting the stability and security of the international financial system, the White House has threatened to veto a bill that would allow the 9/11 terror attacks victims to sue the Saudis.

Saudi Arabia has reportedly threatened to offload its USD 750 billion investment if the Congress passes the legislation.

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"It's difficult to imagine a scenario in which the President would sign the bill as it's currently drafted," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his daily news conference yesterday.

President Barack Obama, he said, believes that the most effective way to advance the interests particularly as it relates to countering violent extremism and counter terrorist organisations around the world, is to use American military where necessary to protect the American people but to try to work cooperatively with other countries around the world to advanced our shared interest.

"Since 9/11 we have seen a genuine focus on the part of the Saudis to counter those who seek to propagate extremist ideology. We recognise and the Saudis now recognise just how dangerous that is, and the US and Saudi Arabia now work together to counter those who seek to advance these ideologies," he said.

"We do that in a way that demonstrates the ability of our two nations to cooperate, particularly on issues that are important to national security of the citizens in both our countries," he added.

"I feel confident in telling you that the Saudis recognise the shared interest that the US and Saudi Arabia have in protecting the stability of the international financial system," he said when asked about the reported threat by Saudi to withdraw USD 750 billion it has invested in the US market.

Obama is headed to the Saudi Arabia later this week.

"I don't know that this issue is going to come up in their meetings, in part because I'm confident that the Saudis recognise, just as much as we do, our shared interest in preserving the stability of the global financial system," he said.

"Our concerns about this law are not related to its impact on our relationship with one particular country. In fact, our concern is about an important principle of international law, the whole notion of sovereign immunity is at stake," he added.

"It is one that has more significant consequences for the US than any other country. The concern that we have is simply this: it could put United States, and our taxpayers, and our service members and our diplomats at significant risk, if other countries were to adopt a similar law," he said.

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Police had to use force to control the mob after they started pelting stones and burnt several buses and other vehicles at various spots at Hosur road, Tumkur road and Jalahalli.

By India Today Web Desk: A protest by garment industry workers turned violent in Bengaluru today forcing the police to resort to lathicharge and tear gas shelling to control the rampaging mob. The workers were protesting against change in provident fund withdrawal rules. Over 60 people, including some policemen, were injured in the violence.

In Pics: Violent protests in Bengaluru over new provident fund rules

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Hundreds of workers blocked the busy Mysore-Bengaluru highway leading huge traffic snarl. Police had to use force to control the mob after they started pelting stones and burnt several buses and other vehicles at various spots at Hosur road, Tumkur road and Jalahalli.

Bengaluru has dozens of garment factories employing over 5 lakh workers. Workers have been protesting for over two months now against curbs put in place on withdrawal of money from their provident fund accounts.

Workers opposing amendment to Employees Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 have expressed fear that the new rule would take away their right over employer's contribution portion of provident fund till they attain 58 years.

The government had to withdraw its budgetary proposal to tax a major chunk of PF contributions following a huge protest from the Opposition and public.

However, garment industry workers are confused over the new PF rules which will come into effect from May 1.

Also Read:

Cheer up: Now you can withdraw PF for housing, medical expenses

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Here's everything you need to know about the widely celebrated Jain festival.

By India Today Web Desk: Mahavir Janma Kalyanak or Mahavir Jayanti is the most auspicious holiday for Jains, celebrated with much enthusiasm within the community.

But if you're wondering who Mahavir is and why we celebrate his birthday, here are five quick pointers that will give you some insight:

Also read: Why is Mahashivratri celebrated?

Mahavir Jayanti commemorates the birth of Lord Mahavir, who was born in 599 BC at Kshatriyakund, Bihar, and was the founder of Jainism in India. He was the 24th and the last Tirthankar (teaching god who preaches dharma). Born to King Siddartha and queen Trisala, Mahavir was named Vardhaman by his parents, and lived his early life like a prince. In his early years, Vardhaman developed a deep interest in the core beliefs of Jainism and started meditating. At the age of 30, he renounced the throne and his family to seek spiritual truth and spent 12 years as a monk. Mahavir led an extremely ascetic life and practiced meditation and severe penance for 12 years; his courage and commendable actions earned him the name Mahavir. Lord Mahavir devoted the rest of his life to preaching the truth of spiritual freedom. Thus, Mahavir Jayanti is celebrated every year to commemorate his preaching and Jain philosophy.

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Mahavir taught his followers the practice of non-violence and introduced them to the concept of salvation. Every year on Mahavir Jayanti, Jain followers offer prayers and respect by visiting temples that are lavishly decorated with flowers and flags. Rath yatras are also carried out by devotees on the day.



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Government sources have told India Today that they will do whatever they can to bring the Kohinoor back to the country.

By India Today Web Desk: 24 hours after it told the Supreme Court that the Kohinoor diamond cannot be brought back to India from UK as it was "gifted" to the British queen, the Modi government has done a U-turn over the issue.

Government sources have told India Today that they will do whatever they can to bring the Kohinoor back to the country . A senior government functionary said that the government has resolved to make all possible efforts to bring back the legendary gem in an amicable manner.

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The official also said that the government wishes to put on record that certain news items appearing in the media regarding the Kohinoor diamond are not based on facts.

The factual position is that the matter is sub-judice at present. A PIL has been filed in the Supreme Court that is yet to be admitted, the official said.

The Supreme court had asked the Solicitor General to seek the views of the government over the issue. The Solicitor General informed the top court about the history of the diamond and gave an oral statement on the basis of the existing references made available by the ASI. Thus, it should be reaffirmed that the government has not yet conveyed its views to the court, contrary to what is being misrepresented.

The court granted six weeks time on the prayer of the Solicitor General to take instructions for making his submission in the matter.

The status report on which the preliminary submission was made by the Solicitor General have references to the stand taken by governments earlier that the Kohinoor was a gift and cannot be categorized as an object stolen. The material further has references to the views of India's first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru dating back to 1956.

Pandit Nehru went on record saying that there is no ground to claim the treasured gem back. He also added that efforts to get the Kohinoor back would lead to difficulties.

Pandit Nehru also said, "To exploit our good relations with some country to obtain free gifts does not seem to be desirable. On the other hand, it does seem to be desirable that foreign museums should have Indian objects of art."

It may be added that ever since he has taken over as PM, Narendra Modi' s efforts led to three significant pieces of India's history coming back home. In October 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel returned a 10th century Indian statue of Goddess Durga that was stolen in 1990 and found in 2012 at a museum in Germany. In April 2015, then Canadian PM Stephen Harper returned a sculpture known as the 'Parrot Lady', which dates back to almost 900 years.

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Then Australian PM Tony Abbott, on his India visit in 2014, had returned antique statues of Hindu deities that were in Australian art galleries. None of these gestures affected India's relations with either Canada, Germany or Australia.

Narendra Modi, who as the chief minister of Gujarat then, got back the ashes of Shyamji Krishna Varma almost 70 years after his death in 2003.

Read: Kohinoor gifted, can't bring it back: Modi government

Kohinoor conundrum: Should India forget about bringing back the legendary diamond?





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By Javed Anwer: Around one year ago Motorola had launched the Moto G3. This means, it's time for the Moto G4. And as the launch nears, leaks have started coming in. The latest Moto G4 leak shows a device that has a fingerprint scanner under the screen. This is slightly unusual for a Moto phone because these devices have on-screen navigation buttons. But if the Moto G4 is coming with front fingerprint sensor, it is possible that Motorola may use the area as the touch-sensitive home button.

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We are fairly certain that the Moto G4 will launch in May. At the moment not all details of the phone are known but from some leaks on Twitter, and some information from our sources, we are certain that the Moto G4 will have a faster processor and a better hardware compared to the Moto G3.



Also Read: Motorola Moto G (Gen 3) review: Android on budget doesn't get any better

It seems all certain that the Moto G4 will be powered by an octa-core processor. Although, Motorola, which is now a Lenovo-owned brand, is rarely aggressive about the hardware in its phones. Instead, the company focuses on experience and we expect that the octa-core processor in the Moto G4 is likely to be Qualcomm Snapdragon 615. The Moto G4 is also likely to pack a 5.5-inch screen with thin bezels -- so the size of the phone won't be too big -- with FullHD resolution.

The new phone will come with a more capable camera, possibly with special focus-related features, and turbo-charging similar to what we saw in the Moto X Play. Like other Moto phones, the G4 too is likely to have a body that is resistant to water and dust.



From the leaked images we also see that Motorola is tweaking the design a bit. It is possible that design tweaks have been necessitated because the phone has a larger screen. The new design shows curvier edges and a stylish metal frame around the camera module.



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By Saurabh Singh: The PlayStation 4 was launched in 2013. It took Sony almost 7 years in the making. But, once up and running, the PS4 was as good as they get - nay better -- in the world of consoles. Well until now.

Nearly 3 years after launching the original PS4, the Japanese tech giant is looking to shake things up. And mind you, it's not just about going slim or super-slim this time round. We are looking at a very noticeable upgrade with the Sony PS4.5 or PS4K or whatever the company decides to call it. Whether or not it's going to be a 'substantial' one that would compel users into replacing their existing PS4s is yet to be seen.

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Reports suggest folks back at Sony are calling it NEO internally. NEO is said to come with an upgraded CPU, an improved GPU and greater bandwidth. It may do 4K considering Sony's ultra-fascination for Ultra HD knows no bounds. The company actually made the world's first 4K-toting smartphone for crying out loud. It would be a shame should the NEO (of all things) not support 4K in this day and age.

Here's a lowdown of what's being said to be inside the new console from Sony:

--CPU: 8 Jaguar cores at 2.1 GHz as opposed to 8 Jaguar cores clocked at 1.6GHz in the original

--GPU: Improved AMD GCN, 36 CUs at 911 MHz up from 18 Radeon GCN compute units at 800MHz in the PS4

--RAM: 8 GB GDDR5, 218 GB/s which is a 24 per cent boost to bandwidth in comparison to the previous model



Also Read: With PlayStation VR, Sony just gave people another reason to buy the PS4

Now, those are some exciting specs if you observe closely. The PS4.5 could be the next 'big' thing in consoles that is if you've been waiting for one at this point of time. We are basically looking at higher (and more stable) frame rates, enhanced visual (graphical) fidelity, additional graphics features perhaps and not to forget, the ability to upscale 1080p content to Ultra HD. That's every hardcore (console) gamers' dream, done right.



But what about the original (base) PS4? Is it all but redundant now? Well, that depends. Frequent upgrades are something you associate with PC gamers. Console gamers, well, they have to wait for Sony (or Microsoft) to launch a new one to make an investment. The PS4 as mentioned earlier took 7 years coming. And already we are looking at a (probable) successor. Or is it?

Sony apparently wants you to not throw away your original PS4s yet, at least for some more time. Not when they are looking to make (more) money out of it. The PS4 is an integral part of Sony's ecosystem and that as many as 36 million people are using it around the world is a key indicator. Sony wants these people to usher in the VR era. The future of the PlayStation VR depends on these 36 million people and more.

Instead, it wants the PS4 and the PS4.5 to co-exist. That's probably why it wants developers not to build NEO-exclusive games. At the same time, there will be no NEO-exclusive in-game content or VR-exclusive Neo modes. This means all NEO-based games will run on the PS4 and vice-versa. The NEO will just be able to squeeze better graphics out of these games. As for existing games, developers will have the option to integrate NEO support into them via patches.

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We do not have a definite timeline for when the PS4.5 will hit the shelves but Sony has given developers the right to bring out dual PS4/PS4.5 compliant titles well before its launch. Such titles are expected to hit the shelves starting from October this year.



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The company seems to be steadily gaining ground, after it failed to meet its own sales expectations last year.

By Saurabh Singh: Chinese company Xiaomi has sold as many as 14.8 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2016 says a new IHS report. Analyst Kevin Wang notes that the company shipped almost the same number of units (14.98 million) last year during the same period. The 14.8 million phones figure includes sales outside China as well.

India is the second biggest market for the company, after China. This means, Xiaomi also sold a considerable number of phones here as well during the period. Only recently, it launched the flagship Mi 5 and the budget Redmi Note 3 in India.

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The company seems to be steadily gaining ground, after it failed to meet its own sales expectations last year. Xiaomi sold 70 million units in 2015. It had set a target of selling 80 million units. A large part of it can be attributed to its failure of bringing out a flagship device, in so long. The Mi 5 took almost two years in the making, and is now here. The company will be looking to make its presence felt with the Mi 5, a phone that has quite the spec-sheet of a high-end phone, but at more mainstream prices.



Also Read: Xiaomi maybe working on 6.4-inch Max phone

At the same time, the Redmi Note 3 also sits well with buyers looking for a high-end device, but at affordable prices. The phone comes with all-metal build, a fingerprint scanner, good hardware and a 3,000mAh battery.

The company may also have a third phone up its sleeve: the Max. A couple of photos doing the rounds allegedly showed off the front of the device in question recently.

The images (said to be coming straight from the production line) suggest the Xiaomi Max may look largely similar to the company's previous phones, most notably the Mi 4. The front panel (as per the images) appears to be nearly borderless (with minimum side bezels) and comes with physical capacitive keys. Interestingly, the physical home button we saw in the Mi 5 is missing out. The phone is said to have a 6.4-inch display and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 processor under the hood.



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* PermaKat Eleonora Rosati received the 2022 Adepi Award

* PermaKat Eleonora Rosati listed as one of the World Intellectual Property Review's "Influential Women in IP" of 2020.

* PermaKat Eleonora Rosati listed as one of the Managing Intellectual Property magazine's "Fifty Most Influential People" of 2018.

* IPKat founder and Blogmeister Emeritus Jeremy Phillips listed as one of the Managing Intellectual Property magazine's "Fifty Most Influential People" of 2005, 2011, 2013, and 2014.

* Recommended by the European Patent Office as reading material for candidates for the European Qualifying Examinations, 2013.

* Listed as "Top Legal Blog" in The Times Online, March 2011.

2010 ABA Journal 100. * One of the only two non-US blogs listed in the Blawg100.

* Court Reporter Top Copyright Blog award winner, November 2010.

* Number 1 in the 2010 Top Copyright Blog list compiled by the Copyright Litigation Blog, July 2010.

* Selected by the United States Library of Congress for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials related to Legal Blawgs as of 2010.

* Top Patent Blog poll 2009: 3rd out of 50 in the "Favourite Patent Blog" poll and 2nd out of 50 in the "Most-read" poll.

Blog of the Year, 20 August 2008. * ComputerWeekly IT Law and Governance, 20 August 2008.
Despite the fact that Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, and Qatar had already agreed among themselves to freeze output at Januarys levels, the prospects for success of the Doha meeting came into question recently, especially amidst conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran regarding whether the latter would participate.

The Iranians had previously expressed their intentions to sell oil at the highest achievable level in order to reclaim market share lost under economic sanctions related to the Iranian nuclear program. The Saudis, meanwhile, had indicated that they would not concede to a freeze agreement unless all relevant states including Iran participated as well.

That outcome proved to be unattainable even before the meeting convened. The day before, Iran elected to cancel its plans to attend, according to the Associated Press. It thereby acted in accordance with its predetermined non-cooperation, as opposed to publicly arguing the point and exposing itself to Arab counter-arguments.

Russia, Kuwait, and some other countries had expressed hope that the agreement could go ahead even in absence of full participation, and disagreement on this point reportedly contributed to a discordant Doha meeting. Saudi Arabia and its supporters did not change their position on Iranian participation however, and the gathering ended without an agreement, leading the Saudis to promise that they would cease to impose limits on their oil exportation.

Presumably, the main purpose of a Saudi increase in oil output under these circumstances will be to interfere with Irans efforts to recover its own oil economy and reclaim market share, respective to its regional competitors.

There are certainly economic components to such Saudi decisions, but the disagreement an output freeze underscores the political and diplomatic conflict between the two traditional Middle Eastern rivals. Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran began to particularly degrade in January when the Saudi execution of a dissident cleric led to a flare-up of sectarian tensions and the storming of the Saudi embassy and consulate by Iranian mobs.

In the aftermath, the Saudis severed diplomatic ties with Tehran, prompting Saudi partners in the Persian Gulf region and beyond to follow suit. The failure of the Doha talks apparently undercuts whatever hope might have existed for reconciliation. And in light of Irans imperial activities and the close connections among the Gulf Arab states, it is certain that many policymakers will hold Iran responsible for that failure and for the persistence of regional discord.

The Saudis and their partners raised related issues last week during a meeting of the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation. In that case, Iran did follow through on its plans to attend, but Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif cancelled their attendance at the meetings last session in protest over remarks decrying Irans regional interference and support for terrorism.

It is not clear that such protests have done much to generate sympathy among states that are caught between the global influence of Riyadh and Tehran. Among most Arab states, the effect seems to be quite the contrary. On Monday, one day after the failed Doha meeting, the Wall Street Journal reported that Jordan had recalled its ambassador to Tehran, citing concerns over Iranian interference in areas like Syria and Yemen.

While the proximity of these two events may be coincidental, it may also suggest that Jordan was hedging its bets concerning Iran policy until after the Islamic Republic had had a chance to reconcile with its regional adversaries.

This is not to say that Iran hasnt invited such reconciliation, but when it has done so it has done so on its own terms. Fox News reports that Sunday, as well as marking the Doha oil meeting, was also Army Day in Iran. Iranian officials and military personnel celebrated with parades and the unveiling of new military equipment, and televised speeches boasting of the strength of the Iranian armed forces.

Fox News indicates that President Rouhanis speech on this topic simultaneously emphasized the idea that the Iranian military is no threat to its neighbors and also that it is a formidable force, capable of standing against supposed threats from the US and Europe. Such commentary appears very much in line with the Iranian regimes core identity and aspiration to global leadership against Western powers.

In light of this tone in Army Day speeches  criticizing the West and speaking well of regional unity  it is arguably ironic that relations between Iran and the Gulf Arab states continue to degrade while major forces in the West continue to push for rapprochement and expanded trade with the Islamic Republic.

As an example of this, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Monday that European Union officials are joining with Iran in pushing for the US to permit Iran access to American financial markets. In this sense, they are specifically pushing back against American lawmakers who see this is as threat to the last important bits of leverage that they have over an Iranian regime whose behavior is fundamentally unchanged. Such advocacy also threatens to undermine assurances from the White House and the Treasury Department that this leverage would remain intact even under the nuclear deal that was implemented in January.

Such developments are just some symptoms of the eagerness that some European businesses and government officials have shown to the prospect of regaining access to Iranian oil and import markets. This eagerness was on display in a number of state visits that have already taken place between Iran and EU countries. Business delegations visited Iran from the EU even before the nuclear deal was implemented, some even coming from France, which had developed a reputation for holding a particularly hard line on Iran in the nuclear negotiations.

France was also one of the first countries to host President Rouhani and to implement post-sanctions business agreements, including the resumption of Air France commercial flights to the Islamic Republic. The first such flight touched down in Iran on Sunday, according to Conde Nast Traveler. The flight brought along another 15-member French delegation including Transport Minister Alain Vidalies.
The Tabnak news website, which is affiliated with former IRGC Commander Mohsen Rezaii, acknowledged this fact on Thursday, April 14.

IRGC Brigadier General Mohammadreza Fallahzadeh was the Governor of Yazd for six years (2007-2013), coinciding with the last six years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejads presidency. He was injured as his vehicle came under mortar fire in southern Aleppo. He was immediately transferred to Tehran and is currently hospitalized in a hospital there.

The state media also reported that five IRGC members and mercenaries fighting for the groups foreign operations branch, the Quds Force (QF), were killed in Syria on April 15 and 16. They were: Alireza Safarpour from Armored Unit 60 of Gonbad-e Kavous County (northern Iran); Hosseinali Kiani and Aqil Shabik from Sistan and Baluchistan Province (southeastern Iran); Ali Bayat, a commander of Afghan forces in the Fatemyoun Division which operates under IRGC-QF command; and Abdollah Tohidi from Pardis County (Tehran Province) also an Afghan under QF command.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) issued a communique on April 8 reporting on the increase of Iranian regimes forces in Syria. According to reports obtained from inside the Iranian regime, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has ordered additional large-scale deployments of IRGC forces and mercenary militias, as well as Iranian Army personnel, to Syria to launch new attacks against the opposition and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), especially in Aleppo province.

According to the NCRI, Khamenei is extremely fearful that following the relative cessation of hostilities pursuant to an agreement between the United States and Russia and a halt or significant decline of bombings in areas under the opposition control, the situation will return to conditions like those prior to September 2015, when FSA forces reportedly had the upper hand on the Syrian Army and the IRGC.

The NCRI statement added: In a move unparalleled since the Iran-Iraq war, Khamenei has deployed his military on a large scale for export of terrorism and warmongering abroad. Amir Ali Arasteh, deputy coordinator of the armys ground forces, stated that forces from the 65th Commando Brigade have been dispatched to Syria and other army units will join them as well. The 65th Commando Brigade, aka Nohed, is extremely loathed by the Iranian people for suppressing Iranian people in the 1978-79 uprising and during the rule of the mullahs regime.
[April 18, 2016] Turnitin Feedback Studio Launched; Revamp of Flagship Product Puts Focus on Instructors, Feedback, Accessibility

Today, Turnitin announced a new version of its flagship product with a focus on ease-of-use, accessibility for students, and new mobile features to support instruction in the modern classroom. Formerly known as "Turnitin," the new version is being renamed "Turnitin Feedback Studio" and will be made available to its two million educators and 30 million students on an opt-in basis beginning today. Click to Tweet. Turnitin Feedback Studio has been reimagined from front to back with an emphasis on providing instructors tools to give relevant feedback that students will understand and learn from, while also supporting academic integrity. "Worldwide, instructors rely on Turnitin for preventing plagiarism in student writing. Turnitin Feedback Studio goes a step further in helping students become better writers by giving instructors a single place to quickly provide direct, actionable feedback on all aspects of student work," said Will Murray, chief product officer at Turnitin. Feedback Studio offers: Great feedback, fast. Re-designed user interface brings plagiarism prevention, feedback, and grading into a unified view that helps educators mark faster while making it easier for students to engage with their instructors' comments.

Re-designed user interface brings plagiarism prevention, feedback, and grading into a unified view that helps educators mark faster while making it easier for students to engage with their instructors' comments. Anytime, anywhere learning. Responsive design works on PCs, tablets, and smartphones to support students and instructors wherever theyare and however they work.

Responsive design works on PCs, tablets, and smartphones to support students and instructors wherever theyare and however they work. Accessibility improvements . Major upgrades make Turnitin Feedback Studio more usable by all students, moving closer to compliance with WCAG 2.0 AA Standards for web accessibility.

. Major upgrades make Turnitin Feedback Studio more usable by all students, moving closer to compliance with WCAG 2.0 AA Standards for web accessibility. Unparalleled content coverage. Enhanced technology intelligently and rapidly crawls and indexes the most relevant and up-to-date content on the Web, including content hidden behind Javascript, expanding Turnitin's vast content database in support of academic integrity.



http://go.turnitin.com/feedback-studio-demo. In addition to Feedback Studio, Turnitin offers two complementary products: Turnitin Revision Assistant, which provides instant feedback on student writing, and Turnitin Scoring Engine, which provides automated assessment of student writing.

Turnitin Feedback Studio will be made available to all current Turnitin users and is available on a per-student, annual subscription basis to new customers. About Turnitin Turnitin is revolutionizing the experience of writing to learn. Turnitin's formative feedback and originality checking services promote critical thinking, ensure academic integrity, and help students improve their writing. Turnitin provides instructors with the tools to engage students in the writing process, provide personalized feedback, and assess student progress over time. Turnitin is used by more than 30 million students at 15,000 institutions in 140 countries. Backed by Insight Venture Partners, GIC, Norwest Venture Partners, Lead Edge Capital and Georgian Partners, Turnitin is headquartered in Oakland, Calif., with international offices in Newcastle, U.K., Utrecht, Netherlands, Seoul, South Korea, and Melbourne, Australia. @Turnitin Tweet: [email protected] launches Feedback Studio. Flagship product emphasizes giving feedback. New mobile features. bit.ly/feedbackstudio View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160418006643/en/

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[April 18, 2016] Green Dot Files Definitive Proxy Statement and Sends Letter to Shareholders

Green Dot Corporation (NYSE:GDOT) (the "Company") today announced it has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC (News - Alert)") its definitive proxy materials in connection with the Company's 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and is mailing the materials to its shareholders. Green Dot shareholders of record as of the close of business on March 31, 2016 are entitled to vote at the 2016 Annual Meeting. This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160418006752/en/ Green Dot's Board of Directors also sent a letter to shareholders urging shareholders to vote "FOR" Green Dot's highly qualified slate of nominees, Steven W. Streit, Timothy R. Greenleaf and Michael J. Moritz, on the WHITE proxy card by telephone, Internet, or mail. These Green Dot incumbent nominees possess a valuable combination of financial, technology and public company expertise that has been instrumental in guiding the Company to its undisputed leadership position as the largest, most respected, highest revenue and most profitable prepaid company in America. (See: Green Dot's Letter to Shareholders) The letter to shareholders can be viewed at the recently launched 2016 Annual Meeting website www.GDOTValue.com. The website will be updated as additional information becomes available. The definitive proxy statement and letter to shareholders can also be viewed on the SEC's website, www.sec.gov.



About Green Dot Green Dot Corporation, along with its wholly owned subsidiary bank, Green Dot Bank, is a pro-consumer financial technology innovator with a mission to provide a full range of affordable and accessible financial services to the masses. Green Dot invented the prepaid debit card industry and is the largest provider of reloadable prepaid debit cards and cash reload processing services in the United States. Green Dot is also a leader in mobile technology and mobile banking with its award-winning GoBank mobile checking account. Through its wholly owned subsidiary, TPG, Green Dot is additionally the largest processor of tax refund disbursements in the U.S. Green Dot's products and services are available to consumers through a large-scale "branchless bank" distribution network of approximately 100,000 U.S. locations, including retailers, neighborhood financial service center locations, and tax preparation offices, as well as online, in the leading app stores and through leading online tax preparation providers. Green Dot Corporation is headquartered in Pasadena, Calif., with additional facilities throughout the United States and in Shanghai, China.

Important Additional Information The Company has filed a definitive proxy statement (the "Proxy Statement") and accompanying WHITE proxy card with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") on April 18, 2016 in connection with the solicitation of proxies for the 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. GREEN DOT STOCKHOLDERS ARE URGED TO READ THE PROXY STATEMENT (INCLUDING ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS THERETO), THE ACCOMPANYING WHITE PROXY CARD AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS THAT GREEN DOT WILL FILE WITH THE SEC WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. The Company, its directors and certain of its executive officers will be participants in the solicitation of proxies from stockholders in respect of the 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. Information regarding the names of the Company's directors and executive officers and their respective interests in the Company by security holdings or otherwise is set forth in the Proxy Statement Investors and stockholders may obtain a copy of the definitive proxy statement and other documents filed by the Company free of charge from the SEC's website, www.sec.gov. Green Dot stockholders may obtain, without charge, a copy of the definitive Proxy Statement and other relevant filed documents by directing a request by mail to Green Dot Corporation, 3465 East Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, California 91107, Attn: Investor Relations, or from the Company's website, www.greendot.com or the Company's proxy solicitor for the 2016 Annual Meeting, Innisfree M&A Incorporated, toll-free at (877) 800-5186 (banks and brokers may call collect at (212) 750-5833). View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160418006752/en/

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[April 19, 2016] CoreOS Fest to Bring Technology Experts Together as European Companies Look to Solve Issues of Security, Consistency and Efficiency

Open source community conference welcomes DevOps from around the world to discuss software containers and distributed systems developing GIFEE BERLIN, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- WHAT: CoreOS Fest will bring together developers, journalists and enthusiasts of container technologies and distributed systems for a two day technical conference on building Google's Infrastructure For Everyone Else (GIFEE). Google, Intel, Cisco, Deis, Project Calico, SignalFx and other companies will join CoreOS, Inc. to lead discussions on the future of hyperscale infrastructure and how they can work together to build a more secure Internet. Beginners through those with advanced knowledge of hyperscale infrastructure are all welcome to attend keynote presentations, especially from Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, on day one. With an introductory track, Kubernetes track and security track, attendees will learn about the tools and best practices used to build modern infrastructure stacks. WHEN: May 9 and May 10, 2016; 8 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. CEST, each day WHERE: The bcc, Alexanderstrasse 11,10178 Berlin, Germany WHO: CoreOS Fest speakers will feature leaders in the container industry, including CoreOS founders Alex Polvi and Brandon Phlips, and other experts from the open source community:



Greg Kroah-Hartman , Fellow at the Linux Foundation: State of the Linux Kernel

, Fellow at the Linux Foundation: State of the Linux Kernel Diego Ongaro , creator of the Raft consensus algorithm: An Overview of the Raft Protocol

, creator of the Raft consensus algorithm: An Overview of the Raft Protocol Lennart Poettering, creator of systemd: Security Features in Systemd

Filip Grzadkowski, senior software engineer, Google: Kubernetes Performance & Scalability Deep-Dive CoreOS thanks the following sponsors of CoreOS Fest 2016: Premier Sponsors: Cisco, Google, Intel

Main Sponsors: Deis, Project Calico, SignalFx

Additional Sponsors: Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Datadog, Exoscale, Mirantis, OpenStack, Packet, StackPointCloud, StorageOS, ScaleFT, Sysdig and Wercker TICKETS: Purchase a ticket at www.coreos.com/fest. A special 15 percent off discount is available with code EssentialEurope until May 1. Media may request a ticket by emailing [email protected].

SOCIAL: Tweet to @coreosfest or @coreoslinux and stay up to date with #CoreOSfest. Direct any questions to [email protected]. About CoreOS, Inc.

CoreOS, Inc. is running the world's containers securely on CoreOS, Tectonic and Quay. CoreOS is the creator of Tectonic, the universal Kubernetes solution, that combines Google's Kubernetes and the CoreOS stack to deploy, manage and secure containers anywhere. CoreOS' Quay technology allows companies to securely store Linux containers in private hosted repositories or behind customer's firewalls. In addition, CoreOS is the creator and maintainer of open source projects CoreOS Linux, etcd, fleet, flannel and rkt. The strategies and architectures that influence CoreOS allow companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to run their services at scale with high resilience. Learn more at https://coreos.com/ or follow CoreOS on Twitter @coreoslinux.

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[April 19, 2016] Atlantic Council Invites John De Santis, HyTrust Chairman & CEO, to Speak at "Future of Defense Innovation" Summit

The prestigious international affairs think tank The Atlantic Council has invited John De Santis, the Chairman and CEO of HyTrust, to participate in a panel discussion in Washington D.C. that seeks ways to involve private sector technology companies in helping to address international security challenges. The "Silicon Valley and the Future of Defense Innovation" event, part of the Captains of Industry series, will be held on Tuesday, April 19, 2016 at 4:30pm (EST) at 1030 15th St NW, 12th Floor, Washington, DC. It will also be streamed live here. The discussion will be moderated by Steven Grundman, M.A. and George Lund Fellow at the Atlantic Council, with remarks by the Honorable Robert Gelbard, Board Director of the Atlantic Council. It will address how Silicon Valley's most innovative companies are responding to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter's outreach to the commercial technology sector. The event is open to members of the press and on the record. Topics of discussion may include: Data sovereignty in the digital era

Speeding deployment of security technologies in sensitive locations

Enhancing alignment between innovation and procurement

Enhancing processes that ease the customization of emerging technologies to suit public sector installation "At HyTrust, we've long understood the critical role of security in every operational undertaking, especially as it relates to a trustworthy infrastructure," Mr. De Santis noted. "With the ever-increasing migration to virtualization or the cloud, along with a 'software-defined' future, security isn't just a business priority, it's a national security issue. Our solutions portfolio provides workload security that automates controls to address regulatory compliance, data protection, and hybrid cloud control needs. Weare committed to applying this level of innovation to enhance security internationally."



About HyTrust HyTrust's mission is to make private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructure more trustworthy for enterprises, service providers and government agencies. HyTrust provides solutions that automate security controls for software-defined computing, networking and storage workloads to achieve the highest levels of visibility, granular policy control and data protection. Areas of focus include the automation of security controls for infrastructure management, workload encryption and key management, infrastructure integrity checking and global workload placement and migration.

HyTrust customers benefit from being able to accelerate cloud and virtualization cost savings while improving their security posture by automating and enforcing security policy in real time, adapting quickly to compliance requirements, and preventing unplanned outages. Headquartered in Mountain View, CA (News - Alert), HyTrust is backed by the leading providers of strategic IT infrastructure including VMware, Cisco, and Fortinet; by the vanguard of innovative solutions for the intelligence community, In-Q-Tel; and by a world class group of financial investors including AIT Ventures, Granite Ventures, Trident Capital and Vanedge Capital. HyTrust; HyTrust, Inc.; HyTrust CloudControl (HTCC); HyTrust DataControl (HTDC); HyTrust DataControl: VM Edition; HyTrust DataControl: Virtual Storage Edition; HyTrust DataControl: AWS Edition; HyTrust KeyControl (HTKC); HyTrust Appliance; HyTrust Appliance Community Edition; HyTrust Cloud Control; HighCloud; HighCloud DSM (News - Alert); HighCloud VMV; HighCloud Key and Policy Server; "Virtualization Under Control"; "Cloud Under Control" and "Virtualization & Cloud Under Control" are all trademarks of HyTrust, Inc. All other names and trademarks are property of their respective firms. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005465/en/

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[April 19, 2016] First Presentation of Overall Survival Data for Opdivo (nivolumab) Shows Significant Survival Benefit at One-Year Versus Investigator's Choice in Recurrent or Metastatic Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the Head and Neck

Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (NYSE: BMY) announced today the first presentation of data from CheckMate -141, a Phase 3 open-label, randomized trial, evaluating Opdivo in patients with recurrent or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (SCCHN) after platinum therapy compared to investigator's choice of therapy (methotrexate, docetaxel, or cetuximab). In the trial, which evaluated overall survival (OS) as the primary endpoint, patients treated with Opdivo experienced a 30% reduction in the risk of death, with a median OS of 7.5 months (95% CI: 5.5-9.1) compared to 5.1 months (95% CI: 4.0-6.0) for investigator's choice (HR=0.70 [97.73% CI: 0.51-0.96] p=0.0101). The one-year survival rate for Opdivo was 36% compared to 16.6% for investigator's choice. The safety profile of Opdivo in CheckMate -141 was consistent with prior studies, with no new safety signals identified. These data were featured today, Tuesday, April 19, during the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) official press program at 8:30 A.M. CT and will be presented during the Immuno-Oncology Clinical Trials II Plenary Session from 10:30 A.M. - 12:15 P.M. CT. Maura Gillison, M.D., Ph.D., lead investigator, Jeg Coughlin Chair of Cancer Research, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, commented, "Squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck that progresses after platinum-therapy is a devastating disease with a very poor prognosis. There are no systemic therapies that improve survival, and therefore, there is a tremendous unmet need for new treatment options for this patient population. In CheckMate -141, Opdivo demonstrated an improvement in survival compared to three standard of care options in this overall patient population, regardless of PD-L1 expression levels and HPV status." Based on a planned interim analysis, this trial was stopped early in January 2016 because an assessment conducted by the independent Data Monitoring Committee concluded the study met its primary endpoint of OS in patients receiving Opdivo compared to the control arm. Jean Viallet, M.D., Global Clinical Research Lead, Oncology, Bristol-Myers Squibb, commented, "We are excited to share, for the first time, data from the CheckMate -141 trial with the oncology community at the 2016 AACR Annual Meeting. We are encouraged by the overall survival results seen with this investigational use of Opdivo versus three standard of care options for patients with recurrent or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck, who often face poor survival rates. These findings are supportive of our Immuno-Oncology research goal to study potential treatment options for their ability to help patients with difficult-to-treat cancers achieve long-term survival." About CheckMate -141 CheckMate -141 is a Phase 3, open-label, randomized trial evaluating Opdivo versus investigator's choice of therapy in patients with recurrent or metastatic SCCHN with tumor progression within six months of platinum therapy in the adjuvant, primary, recurrent or metastatic setting. Patients were randomized 2:1 to receive Opdivo 3 mg/kg intravenously over 60 minutes every two weeks, or one of the following single agents: methotrextate 40 mg/m2 intravenously weekly, docetaxel 30 mg/m2 intravenously weekly, or cetuximab 400 mg/m2 intravenously once then 250 mg/m2 weekly. Therapies chosen for the control arm represent the most commonly used therapies in the platinum refractory setting. The primary endpoint was OS. Secondary endpoints included objective response rate (ORR) and progression-free survival (PFS). Additional endpoints included safety. In the trial, patients treated with Opdivo experienced a significant reduction (30%) in the risk of death, with a median OS of 7.5 months (95% CI: 5.5-9.1) compared to 5.1 months (95% CI: 4.0-6.0) for the control arm (HR=0.70 [97.73% CI: 0.51-0.96] p=0.0101). The one-year OS rate was 36% for Opdivo compared to 16.6% for the control arm. CheckMate -141 also evaluated the efficacy of Opdivo by HPV status and PD-L1 expression compared to investigator's choice of therapy. HPV testing was performed for patients identified by investigators with oropharyngeal tumors. In the study, Opdivo demonstrated improved survival in this overall population, regardless of HPV status. HPV-positive status was associated with greater magnitude of effect with Opdivo versus investigator's choice. In HPV-positive patients treated with Opdivo, median OS was 9.1 months vs. 4.4 months for patients treated with investigator's choice of therapy (HR=0.56 [95% CI: 0.32-0.99]). In HPV-negative patients treated with Opdivo, median OS was 7.5 months vs. 5.8 months for patients treated with investigator's choice of therapy (HR=0.73 [95% CI: 0.42-1.25]) Of randomized patients, 72% (260) were evaluable for PD-L1 expression. Rates of PD-L1 expression were balanced between subgroups. Opdivo demonstrated improved survival in the overall population, regardless of PD-L1 expression level (chart below).







Efficacy Summary: Median Overall Survival by PD-L1 Expression Hazard Ratio (HR) for Opdivo vs. Investigator's Choice Therapy

(Median OS, mos) >1% PD-L1 expression level HR=0.55 [95% CI: 0.36-0.83] 8.7 mos vs. 4.6 mos (95% CI: 5.7-9.1) (95% CI: 3.8-5.8) <1% PD-L1 expression level HR=0.89 [95% CI: 0.54-1.45] 5.7 mos vs. 5.8 mos (95% CI: 4.4-12.7) (95% CI: 4.0-9.8)

The safety profile of Opdivo in CheckMate -141 was consistent with prior studies with no new safety signals identified. Treatment-related adverse events (TRAEs) of any grade occurred in 58.9% of patients on Opdivo vs. 77.5% of patients on investigator's choice. Grade 3-4 TRAEs were reported in 13.1% of patients on Opdivo vs. 35.1% of patients on investigator's choice. Two drug-related deaths were reported as related to Opdivo (pneumonitis and hypercalcemia), and one Grade 5 event of lung infection on the investigator's choice arm. About Head & Neck Cancer Head and neck cancer is the seventh most common cancer globally, with an estimated 400,000 to 600,000 new cases per year and 223,000 to 300,000 deaths per year. The five-year survival rate is reported as less than 4% for metastatic Stage IV disease. Squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (SCCHN) accounts for approximately 90% of all head and neck cancers with global incidence expected to increase by 17% between 2012 and 2022. Risk factors for SCCHN include tobacco and alcohol consumption, and the increasing role of Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) infection leading to rapid increase in oropharyngeal SCCHN in Europe and North America. Quality of life is often impacted for SCCHN patients as physiological function (breathing, swallowing, eating, drinking), personal characteristics (appearance, speaking, voice), sensory function (taste, smell, hearing), and psychological/social function can be affected. Bristol-Myers Squibb & Immuno-Oncology: Advancing Oncology Research At Bristol-Myers Squibb, we have a vision for the future of cancer care that is focused on Immuno-Oncology, now considered a major treatment choice alongside surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and targeted therapies for certain types of cancer. We have a comprehensive clinical portfolio of investigational and approved Immuno-Oncology agents, many of which were discovered and developed by our scientists. Our ongoing Immuno-Oncology clinical program is looking at broad patient populations, across multiple solid tumors and hematologic malignancies, and lines of therapy and histologies, with the intent of powering our trials for overall survival and other important measures like durability of response. We pioneered the research leading to the first regulatory approval for the combination of two Immuno-Oncology agents, and continue to study the role of combinations in cancer. We are also investigating other immune system pathways in the treatment of cancer including CTLA-4, CD-137, KIR, SLAMF7, PD-1, GITR, CSF1R, IDO, and LAG-3. These pathways may lead to potential new treatment options - in combination or monotherapy - to help patients fight different types of cancers. Our collaboration with academia, as well as small and large biotech companies, to research the potential Immuno-Oncology and non-Immuno-Oncology combinations, helps achieve our goal of providing new treatment options in clinical practice. At Bristol-Myers Squibb, we are committed to changing survival expectations in hard-to-treat cancers and the way patients live with cancer. About Opdivo Cancer cells may exploit "regulatory" pathways, such as checkpoint pathways, to hide from the immune system and shield the tumor from immune attack. Opdivo is a PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor that binds to the checkpoint receptor PD-1 expressed on activated T-cells, and blocks the binding of PD-L1 and PD-L2, preventing the PD-1 pathway's suppressive signaling on the immune system, including the interference with an anti-tumor immune response. Opdivo's broad global development program is based on Bristol-Myers Squibb's understanding of the biology behind Immuno-Oncology. Our company is at the forefront of researching the potential of Immuno-Oncology to extend survival in hard-to-treat cancers. This scientific expertise serves as the basis for the Opdivo development program, which includes a broad range of Phase 3 clinical trials evaluating overall survival as the primary endpoint across a variety of tumor types. The Opdivo trials have also contributed toward the clinical and scientific understanding of the role of biomarkers and how patients may benefit from Opdivo across the continuum of PD-L1 expression. To date, the Opdivo clinical development program has enrolled more than 18,000 patients. Opdivo was the first PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor to receive regulatory approval anywhere in the world in July 2014, and currently has regulatory approval in 50 countries including the United States, Japan, and in the European Union. U.S. FDA APRPOVED INDICATIONS OPDIVO (nivolumab) as a single agent is indicated for the treatment of patients with BRAF V600 wild-type unresectable or metastatic melanoma. OPDIVO (nivolumab) as a single agent is indicated for the treatment of patients with BRAF V600 mutation-positive unresectable or metastatic melanoma. This indication is approved under accelerated approval based on progression-free survival. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in confirmatory trials. OPDIVO (nivolumab) is indicated for the treatment of patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with progression on or after platinum-based chemotherapy. Patients with EGFR or ALK genomic tumor aberrations should have disease progression on FDA-approved therapy for these aberrations prior to receiving OPDIVO. OPDIVO (nivolumab) is indicated for the treatment of patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) who have received prior anti-angiogenic therapy. IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION Immune-Mediated Pneumonitis Immune-mediated pneumonitis, including fatal cases, occurred with OPDIVO treatment. Across the clinical trial experience with solid tumors, fatal immune-mediated pneumonitis occurred with OPDIVO. Monitor patients for signs with radiographic imaging and symptoms of pneumonitis. Administer corticosteroids for Grade 2 or greater pneumonitis. Permanently discontinue for Grade 3 or 4 and withhold until resolution for Grade 2. In Checkmate 037, 066, and 067, immune-mediated pneumonitis occurred in 1.8% (14/787) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=2) and Grade 2 (n=12). In Checkmate 057, immune-mediated pneumonitis, including interstitial lung disease, occurred in 3.4% (10/287) of patients: Grade 3 (n=5), Grade 2 (n=2), and Grade 1 (n=3). In Checkmate 025, pneumonitis, including interstitial lung disease, occurred in 5% (21/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO and 18% (73/397) of patients receiving everolimus. Immune-mediated pneumonitis occurred in 4.4% (18/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 4 (n=1), Grade 3 (n=4), Grade 2 (n=12), and Grade 1 (n=1). Immune-Mediated Colitis Immune-mediated colitis can occur with OPDIVO treatment. Monitor patients for signs and symptoms of colitis. Administer corticosteroids for Grade 2 (of more than 5 days duration), 3, or 4 colitis. As a single agent, withhold OPDIVO for Grade 2 or 3 and permanently discontinue for Grade 4 or recurrent colitis upon restarting OPDIVO. In Checkmate 037, 066, and 067, diarrhea or colitis occurred in 31% (242/787) of patients receiving OPDIVO. Immune-mediated colitis occurred in 4.1% (32/787) of patients: Grade 3 (n=20), Grade 2 (n=10), and Grade 1 (n=2). In Checkmate 057, diarrhea or colitis occurred in 17% (50/287) of patients receiving OPDIVO. Immune-mediated colitis occurred in 2.4% (7/287) of patients: Grade 3 (n=3), Grade 2 (n=2), and Grade 1 (n=2). In Checkmate 025, diarrhea or colitis occurred in 25% (100/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO and 32% (126/397) of patients receiving everolimus. Immune-mediated diarrhea or colitis occurred in 3.2% (13/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=5), Grade 2 (n=7), and Grade 1 (n=1). Immune-Mediated Hepatitis Immune-mediated hepatitis can occur with OPDIVO treatment. Monitor patients for abnormal liver tests prior to and periodically during treatment. Administer corticosteroids for Grade 2 or greater transaminase elevations. Withhold for Grade 2 and permanently discontinue for Grade 3 or 4 immune-mediated hepatitis. In Checkmate 037, 066, and 067, immune-mediated hepatitis occurred in 2.3% (18/787) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 4 (n=3), Grade 3 (n=11), and Grade 2 (n=4). In Checkmate 057, one patient (0.3%) developed immune-mediated hepatitis. In Checkmate 025, there was an increased incidence of liver test abnormalities compared to baseline in AST (33% vs 39%), alkaline phosphatase (32% vs 32%), ALT (22% vs 31%), and total bilirubin (9% vs 3.5%) in the OPDIVO and everolimus arms, respectively. Immune-mediated hepatitis requiring systemic immunosuppression occurred in 1.5% (6/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=5) and Grade 2 (n=1). Immune-Mediated Endocrinopathies Hypophysitis, adrenal insufficiency, thyroid disorders, and type 1 diabetes mellitus can occur with OPDIVO treatment. Monitor patients for signs and symptoms of hypophysitis, signs and symptoms of adrenal insufficiency during and after treatment, thyroid function prior to and periodically during treatment, and hyperglycemia. Administer corticosteroids for Grade 2 or greater hypophysitis. Withhold for Grade 2 or 3 and permanently discontinue for Grade 4 hypophysitis. Administer corticosteroids for Grade 3 or 4 adrenal insufficiency. Withhold for Grade 2 and permanently discontinue for Grade 3 or 4 adrenal insufficiency. Administer hormone-replacement therapy for hypothyroidism. Initiate medical management for control of hyperthyroidism. Administer insulin for type 1 diabetes. Withhold OPDIVO for Grade 3 and permanently discontinue for Grade 4 hyperglycemia. In Checkmate 037, 066, and 067, hypophysitis occurred in 0.9% (7/787) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=2), Grade 2 (n=3), and Grade 1 (n=2). In Checkmate 025, hypophysitis occurred in 0.5% (2/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=1) and Grade 1 (n=1). In Checkmate 037, 066, and 067, adrenal insufficiency occurred in 1% (8/787) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=2), Grade 2 (n=5), and Grade 1 (n=1). In Checkmate 057, 0.3% (1/287) of OPDIVO-treated patients developed adrenal insufficiency. In Checkmate 025, adrenal insufficiency occurred in 2.0% (8/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=3), Grade 2 (n=4), and Grade 1 (n=1). In Checkmate 037, 066, and 067, hypothyroidism or thyroiditis occurred in 9% (73/787) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=1), Grade 2 (n=37), Grade 1 (n=35). Hyperthyroidism occurred in 4.4% (35/787) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=1), Grade 2 (n=12), and Grade 1 (n=22). In Checkmate 057, Grade 1 or 2 hypothyroidism, including thyroiditis, occurred in 7% (20/287) and elevated thyroid stimulating hormone occurred in 17% of patients receiving OPDIVO. Grade 1 or 2 hyperthyroidism occurred in 1.4% (4/287) of patients. In Checkmate 025, thyroid disease occurred in 11% (43/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO, including one Grade 3 event, and in 3.0% (12/397) of patients receiving everolimus. Hypothyroidism/thyroiditis occurred in 8% (33/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=2), Grade 2 (n=17), and Grade 1 (n=14). Hyperthyroidism occurred in 2.5% (10/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 2 (n=5) and Grade 1 (n=5). In Checkmate 037, 066, and 067, diabetes mellitus or diabetic ketoacidosis occurred in 0.8% (6/787) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=2), Grade 2 (n=3), and Grade 1 (n=1). In Checkmate 025, hyperglycemic adverse events occurred in 9% (37/406) patients. Diabetes mellitus or diabetic ketoacidosis occurred in 1.5% (6/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=3), Grade 2 (n=2), and Grade 1 (n=1). Immune-Mediated Nephritis and Renal Dysfunction Immune-mediated nephritis can occur with OPDIVO treatment. Monitor patients for elevated serum creatinine prior to and periodically during treatment. For Grade 2 or 3 increased serum creatinine, withhold and administer corticosteroids; if worsening or no improvement occurs, permanently discontinue. Administer corticosteroids for Grade 4 serum creatinine elevation and permanently discontinue. In Checkmate 037, 066, and 067, nephritis and renal dysfunction of any grade occurred in 5% (40/787) of patients receiving OPDIVO. Immune-mediated nephritis and renal dysfunction occurred in 0.8% (6/787) of patients: Grade 3 (n=4) and Grade 2 (n=2). In Checkmate 057, Grade 2 immune-mediated renal dysfunction occurred in 0.3% (1/287) of patients receiving OPDIVO. In Checkmate 025, renal injury occurred in 7% (27/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO and 3.0% (12/397) of patients receiving everolimus. Immune-mediated nephritis and renal dysfunction occurred in 3.2% (13/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 5 (n=1), Grade 4 (n=1), Grade 3 (n=5), and Grade 2 (n=6). Immune-Mediated Rash Immune-mediated rash can occur with OPDIVO treatment. Severe rash (including rare cases of fatal toxic epidermal necrolysis) occurred in the clinical program of OPDIVO. Monitor patients for rash. Administer corticosteroids for Grade 3 or 4 rash. Withhold for Grade 3 and permanently discontinue for Grade 4. In Checkmate 037, 066, and 067, immune-mediated rash occurred in 9% (72/787) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=7), Grade 2 (n=15), and Grade 1 (n=50). In Checkmate 057, immune-mediated rash occurred in 6% (17/287) of patients receiving OPDIVO including four Grade 3 cases. In Checkmate 025, rash occurred in 28% (112/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO and 36% (143/397) of patients receiving everolimus. Immune-mediated rash, defined as a rash treated with systemic or topical corticosteroids, occurred in 7% (30/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=4), Grade 2 (n=7), and Grade 1 (n=19). Immune-Mediated Encephalitis Immune-mediated encephalitis can occur with OPDIVO treatment. Withhold OPDIVO in patients with new-onset moderate to severe neurologic signs or symptoms and evaluate to rule out other causes. If other etiologies are ruled out, administer corticosteroids and permanently discontinue OPDIVO for immune-mediated encephalitis. In Checkmate 057, fatal limbic encephalitis occurred in one patient (0.3%) receiving OPDIVO. Other Immune-Mediated Adverse Reactions Based on the severity of adverse reaction, permanently discontinue or withhold treatment, administer high-dose corticosteroids, and, if appropriate, initiate hormone-replacement therapy. In < 1.0% of patients receiving OPDIVO, the following clinically significant, immune-mediated adverse reactions occurred: uveitis, pancreatitis, facial and abducens nerve paresis, demyelination, polymyalgia rheumatica, autoimmune neuropathy, Guillain-Barre syndrome, hypopituitarism, systemic inflammatory response syndrome, gastritis, duodenitis, and sarcoidosis. Across clinical trials of OPDIVO as a single agent administered at doses of 3 mg/kg and 10 mg/kg, additional clinically significant, immune-mediated adverse reactions were identified: motor dysfunction, vasculitis, and myasthenic syndrome. Infusion Reactions Severe infusion reactions have been reported in <1.0% of patients in clinical trials of OPDIVO. Discontinue OPDIVO in patients with Grade 3 or 4 infusion reactions. Interrupt or slow the rate of infusion in patients with Grade 1 or 2. In Checkmate 037, 066, and 067, Grade 2 infusion related reactions occurred in 2.7% (21/787) of patients receiving OPDIVO: Grade 3 (n=2), Grade 2 (n=8), and Grade 1 (n=11). In Checkmate 057, Grade 2 infusion reactions requiring corticosteroids occurred in 1.0% (3/287) of patients receiving OPDIVO. In Checkmate 025, hypersensitivity/infusion-related reactions occurred in 6% (25/406) of patients receiving OPDIVO and 1.0% (4/397) of patients receiving everolimus. Embryo-fetal Toxicity Based on its mechanism of action, OPDIVO can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman. Advise pregnant women of the potential risk to a fetus. Advise females of reproductive potential to use effective contraception during treatment with an OPDIVO- containing regimen and for at least 5 months after the last dose of OPDIVO. Lactation It is not known whether OPDIVO is present in human milk. Because many drugs, including antibodies, are excreted in human milk and because of the potential for serious adverse reactions in nursing infants from an OPDIVO-containing regimen, advise women to discontinue breastfeeding during treatment. Serious Adverse Reactions In Checkmate 067, serious adverse reactions (37%), adverse reactions leading to permanent discontinuation (14%) or to dosing delays (28%), and Grade 3 or 4 adverse reactions (72%) occurred in the OPDIVO arm. The most frequent (=10%) serious adverse reactions in the OPDIVO arm were diarrhea (2.6%), colitis (1.6%), and pyrexia (0.6%). In Checkmate 037, serious adverse reactions occurred in 41% of patients receiving OPDIVO. Grade 3 and 4 adverse reactions occurred in 42% of patients receiving OPDIVO. The most frequent Grade 3 and 4 adverse drug reactions reported in 2% to <5% of patients receiving OPDIVO were abdominal pain, hyponatremia, increased aspartate aminotransferase, and increased lipase. In Checkmate 066, serious adverse reactions occurred in 36% of patients receiving OPDIVO. Grade 3 and 4 adverse reactions occurred in 41% of patients receiving OPDIVO. The most frequent Grade 3 and 4 adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients receiving OPDIVO were gamma-glutamyltransferase increase (3.9%) and diarrhea (3.4%). In Checkmate 057, serious adverse reactions occurred in 47% of patients receiving OPDIVO. The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients were pneumonia, pulmonary embolism, dyspnea, pleural effusion, and respiratory failure. In Checkmate 025, serious adverse reactions occurred in 47% of patients receiving OPDIVO. The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients were acute kidney injury, pleural effusion, pneumonia, diarrhea, and hypercalcemia. Common Adverse Reactions In Checkmate 067, the most common (=20%) adverse reactions in the OPDIVO arm were fatigue (53%), rash (40%), diarrhea (31%), and nausea (28%). In Checkmate 037, the most common adverse reaction (=20%) reported with OPDIVO was rash (21%). In Checkmate 066, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) reported with OPDIVO vs dacarbazine were fatigue (49% vs 39%), musculoskeletal pain (32% vs 25%), rash (28% vs 12%), and pruritus (23% vs 12%). In Checkmate 057, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) reported with OPDIVO were fatigue (49%), musculoskeletal pain (36%), cough (30%), decreased appetite (29%), and constipation (23%). In Checkmate 025, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) reported in patients receiving OPDIVO vs everolimus were asthenic conditions (56% vs 57%), cough (34% vs 38%), nausea (28% vs 29%), rash (28% vs 36%), dyspnea (27% vs 31%), diarrhea (25% vs 32%), constipation (23% vs 18%), decreased appetite (23% vs 30%), back pain (21% vs 16%), and arthralgia (20% vs 14%). About the Bristol-Myers Squibb and Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Collaboration In 2011, through a collaboration agreement with Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd (Ono) Bristol-Myers Squibb expanded its territorial rights to develop and commercialize Opdivo globally except in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, where Ono had retained all rights to the compound at the time. On July 23, 2014, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Ono further expanded the companies' strategic collaboration agreement to jointly develop and commercialize multiple immunotherapies - as single agents and combination regimens - for patients with cancer in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. About Bristol-Myers Squibb Bristol-Myers Squibb is a global biopharmaceutical company whose mission is to discover, develop and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail over serious diseases. For more information about Bristol-Myers Squibb, visit us at www.BMS.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. Bristol-Myers Squibb Forward-Looking Statement This press release contains "forward-looking statements" as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding the research, development and commercialization of pharmaceutical products. Such forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and involve inherent risks and uncertainties, including factors that could delay, divert or change any of them, and could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially from current expectations. No forward-looking statement can be guaranteed. Among other risks, there can be no guarantee that Opdivo will receive regulatory approval for an additional indication in SCCHN. Forward-looking statements in this press release should be evaluated together with the many uncertainties that affect Bristol-Myers Squibb's business, particularly those identified in the cautionary factors discussion in Bristol-Myers Squibb's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015 in our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and our Current Reports on Form 8-K. Bristol-Myers Squibb undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005566/en/

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A los 51 anos fallece de cancer reconocida actriz y cineasta israeli Ronit Elkabetz, protagonista de Gett
Charleston library to screen newest Star Wars film

CHARLESTON -- The newest Star Wars movie will be shown at 4 p.m. Thursday at the Charleston Public Library, Rotary Room B.

For more information, contact Kattie Livingston, adult services manager, at 217-345-4913.

Historical society to host frontier presentation

ROBINSON -- The Crawford County Historical Society will be hosting a program entitled How We Changed the Frontier and How the Frontier Changed Us at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Crawford County Museum, 408 S. Cross St.

The Rev. Dennis Latta, Knox County, Indianas official historian, will be the presenter. A $5 donation is requested at the door. Coffee and cookies will be served.

Books to Prisoners to hold annual book sale

URBANA -- Urbana-Champaign Books to Prisoners is hosting its annual spring book sale on Saturday from noon- 5 p.m. at the IMC Building in downtown Urbana (same building as the downtown Urbana post office).

Books to Prisoners is a non-profit organization which sends books through the mail at no cost to inmates in Illinois prisons. Since starting operation 12 years ago, members have sent out over 118,000 books to nearly 18,000 inmates. The books they send out are all donated by the community, but the money raised at the book sales helps cover expenses of postage and shipping.

For more information, contact Lolita Dumas at 217-390-9290 or lolita@books2prisoners.org.

Wire wrapping workshop scheduled Saturday

MATTOON -- A Wire Wrapping Workshop including framing, wire weaving, and spiraling with Audrey Ray, owner of "Broken Locket Boutique," and sponsored by the Coles County Arts Council, Fiber Arts Division, will be held from 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday at the Mattoon Area Family YMCA.

Check in will be at front desk. This event is free, plus the cost of materials, and is open to all Coles County residents. Class size is limited.

For questions or to register, e-mail Jan Smitley (hostess) at jrsmitley@yahoo.com.
MATTOON -- The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Springfield Mobile Vet Center is scheduled to visit Mattoon today.

Vet Center staff will be in attendance from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Lake Land College behind the Luther Student Center, 5001 Lake Land Boulevard, to answer questions about Vet Center services. The center's staff encourages all veterans to come learn more about Vet Center and VA programs from which they may eligible to receive services.

The center's staff consists of outreach specialists and readjustment counselors. Most of them are veterans. They are trained and certified to assist veterans from all eras, family members and the general public on a first-come, first-served basis on a wide range of veteran issues to make appropriate referrals and provide counseling services on post-war readjustment.

The Vet Center program is a division of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. They welcome home war veterans with honor by providing quality readjustment counseling in a caring manner.

Vet Center staff members understand and appreciate veterans war experiences, while assisting them and their family members toward a successful post-war adjustment in or near their community. Vet Centers provide individual, family, and group counseling services for combat-related readjustment as well as military sexual trauma. Vet Centers also provide bereavement counseling services to surviving parents, spouses, children and siblings of service members.

The centers respect the privacy of all clients, and they hold information in confidence. No information will be communicated to any person or agency without written consent except in necessary circumstances to avert a crisis.

Operation Iraqi Freedom Marine Corps Veteran John Mizer is the lead for the Mobile Vet Center and will be on hand to discuss services and benefits with veterans, family, and community members.
CHARLESTON -- A woman was sentenced to prison time when she admitted attacking an employee at a Charleston motel.

Sarah D. Hernandez, 35, for whom court records list an address in Windsor, pleaded guilty to an aggravated battery charge in connection with the attack of an employee at the Days Inn in Charleston on Oct. 29.

With the agreement reached in her case, Hernandez was sentenced to four years in prison for the conviction that could have resulted in a two- to five-year prison term. Prison time wasn't required.

Also with the agreement, the Coles County sentence will run at the same time as a four-year prison sentence Hernandez received in March when she pleaded guilty to a Shelby County methamphetamine offense.

Records in the case indicate that the motel employee responded to a noise complaint and found damages to the room in which Hernandez was staying.

According to the employee's account, Hernandez grabbed her and pulled out some of her hair and appeared to be under the influence, the records say.

Coles County Circuit Judge Teresa Righter sentenced Hernandez, accepting the terms of a plea agreement that Assistant State's Attorney Rob Scales and Public Defender Anthony Ortega recommended.

In other cases in court recently, Righter also accepted guilty pleas from:

Anthony A. Harrison, 30, whose address on record is 326 Hazel St., Oakland, to a charge of possession of methamphetamine precursor alleging he had medicine with pseudoephedrine to make the drug on Dec. 12, 2014.

There was no agreement on a sentence and Righter scheduled a sentencing hearing for June 17. Prison time will be required because Harrison has a prior methamphetamine offense conviction and the range of the sentence is three to 14 years.

The prosecution did agree to dismiss a methamphetamine possession charge that accused Harrison of having at least 3 1/2 ounces of the drug. A conviction for that offense would have required a six- to 30-year prison sentence.

Assistant State's Attorney Bryant Hitchings is prosecuting the case and attorney Todd Reardon represents Harrison.

A co-defendant, Lindsay A. Harrison, 29, for whom records list the same address, received probation when she pleaded guilty to a precursor possession charge in November 2014.

Sidney R. Woolcot, 44, whose address on record is 504 S. 26th St., Mattoon, to a charge of possession of cannabis with intent to deliver alleging he had marijuana he planned to distribute on Oct. 29.

The amount of marijuana listed in the charge was reduced and Woolcot was sentenced to two years of first offender probation, which means he won't have a record of a conviction if he follows requirements.

Probation terms included substance abuse treatment and payment of about $3,200 in fines and court fees. Hitchings and Reardon recommended the plea agreement.

Justin R. Sloan, 20, for whom records list an address of 1512 First St., Charleston, to a cannabis possession charge alleging he had marijuana on Jan. 28.

The amount of marijuana in the charge was reduced, making it a misdemeanor offense instead of a felony. Terms of Sloan's one-year probation sentence included substance abuse treatment and about $2,000 in fines and fees.

Hitchings and Ortega recommended the plea agreement.
In reacting to a letter of mine published in the Eastern Daily News in which I suggested students and staff not frequent businesses of Representative Phillips till he supported Eastern by his votes in the legislature, Tom Andres asked me ". . . why would Representative Phillips ever cast a vote in Springfield unfavorable to the success of EIU?"

A question to be put to Mr. Phillips is this, "Why did you not vote to over-ride Governor Rauner's veto of funding bills?" It took two votes last time to do so, and Mr. Phillips and eight other Republican legislators educated at public Illinois institutions failed in their duty to their constituents. Two out of nine was all it would have taken!

On Wednesday the house voted approval of SB 2046, but Mr. Phillips voted against it, similar to bills he had voted for, but before he recently won renomination for his post.

Perhaps, as Mr. Andres suggests, I am chasing windmills or is support for funding an impossible dream with Mr. Phillips as our representative?

Jim Laughlin, Charleston
The Plan International ARO Regional Office has a vacancy for the Regional Surge Capacity Coordinator for the Transforming Surge Capacity Project. This is being advertised internally and externally so please can you forward to your teams as well as passing on to any friends, family members or contacts whom you think might be interested and suitable.

Project Background:

The Transforming Surge Capacity Project is a START Network project supported by a consortium of 11 humanitarian agencies led by ActionAid. Plan International is hosting the Regional Platform of this ground-breaking interagency project. With support from the Department for International Development (DFID) through the Disasters Emergency Preparedness Programme (DEPP), the surge project is part of an ambitious suite of projects launched by the START Network designed to develop decentralized approaches to capacity building and to improve the quality and speed of humanitarian response in countries at risk of natural disaster or conflict related humanitarian emergencies.

The project is focused on improving the capacity of humanitarian agencies to scale up resources in emergency response - getting the right people to the right places, doing the right things in the shortest amount of time. It will achieve this by strengthening systems for surge capacity at national and regional levels to better complement international surge. It aims to build a more collective and collaborative approach to surge capacity amongst agencies in the sector. This collaboration will extend not only to actors within the NGO sector, but will also explore how civil society surge capacity can be strengthened with links to other stakeholders including the UN, private sector, public sector and academic institutions. The project is being delivered through the formation of coordinating national, regional and international platforms, the delivery of pilots to develop inter-agency collaboration, and through sharing good practice and resources.

Job summary:

This is a local contract based in Bangkok or Manila and therefore we are ideally looking for someone who is already based in Thailand or the Philippines with the legal right to live and work there. A work permit may be available to the right candidate but local terms and conditions of employment will apply.

This role works under the direction of the Regional HR&OD Partner for Asia and the International Project Manager who is based in the UK.

The postholder will be responsible for co-ordinating and delivering the Regional Platform project plans for the remainder of the project to December, 2017. This will entail working with key stakeholders to agree milestones, implementing and monitoring the project plans, and setting, monitoring and managing the project budget to deliver the plans. The postholder will be responsible for accurate and timely reporting for key stakeholders and compliance with donor and stakeholder requirements, including Plan Internationals internal policies and procedures. Risks related to the project will need to be proactively identified, monitored and managed.

It will be vital that the postholder is able to build effective relationships across the START network partner agencies as well as with key stakeholders at the regional level, including INGOs, NGOs, UN agencies, government bodies and the private sector. This will require personal credibility and the ability to influence and build consensus at a senior level and with diverse stakeholders.

The overall aim of the project is to enhance surge capacity in the Asia region so that affected populations receive faster support after a disaster and this position represents a great opportunity to contribute to this goal. overseeing and promoting the implementation of Plan Internationals Global Security Policy, Security Standards, and Security, and other Regional Security Advisors. The ability to analyse security related data and advise on its implications at both the operational and strategic levels will be important.

Dimensions of Role:

The person in this role will be responsible for the coordination, design and implementation of the Regional Platform of the Transforming Surge Capacity Project:

Review, develop and manage the project plans to deliver the Regional Platform, including key milestones.



Monitor, revise and manage the budget for the Regional Platform activities.

Monitor and manage progress against the plan, including delivery of quarterly objectives / key milestones.

Provide accurate and timely reports for key stakeholders in accordance with their reporting requirements.

Provide leadership, coordination effective collaboration at the Asia regional level with INGOs, NGOs, UN agencies, government bodies and private sector for the Surge Capacity Project.

Enhance surge capacity across the Asia region.

Ensure there is active collaboration and coordination with the national and international platforms.

Communicate and disseminate information effectively about this project and learning / outputs to key stakeholders.

Identify risks at the regional level that may affect final delivery of project outcomes and monitor and manage these with support from key stakeholders as required.

Ensure compliance with internal Plan standards and policies and manage the project in line with Plans project management and financial systems.

This post has no direct reports but will be required to work effectively with multiple stakeholders across the Asia region and influence and effect change outside of line management relationships.

Typical Responsibilities - Key End Results of Position:

What is done and why, but not how; include indicators for success

Lead the process of developing annual project implementation plans for the Regional Platform with detailed activities, and budget for implementation over the remaining project period of this 3-year project:

Provide overall technical and managerial oversight and leadership for the project design process.



Coordinate a baseline assessment of surge capacity within the Asia region to inform the project.

Ensure there is effective communication, consultation and collaboration with stakeholders during the project design phase.

Develop annual plans and budgets for the Regional Platform element of the project.

Work with key stakeholders and the projects MEL officer to develop a basic Monitoring and Evaluation framework for the Regional Platform element of the project.

Ensure that the appropriate consortium arrangements are in place for the Regional Platform, including funding agreements and mechanisms for this.

Proactively anticipate risks for the Regional Platform and build in monitoring and mitigating of these as part of the project design.

Ensure there is appropriate monitoring and management of the Regional Platform activities:

Oversee the monitoring, delivery and management of the Regional Platform activities.

Ensure compliance with all donor requirements and all agreed consortium arrangements.

Ensure compliance with Plans project management and financial systems (eg, PPM).

Identify good practice from the project implementation and feed this into organisational learning, both within and external to Plan.

Establish and maintain quality reporting and learning systems:

Responsible for monitoring, evaluation and reporting to ensure the timely delivery of all planned activities as required by the donor and agreed with stakeholders.

Ensure that all project reports (narrative and financial) are high quality and submitted in a timely way as agreed with key stakeholders.

Ensure that there is appropriate documentation of all learning, including the collation of case studies on the project within the Surge Regional Platform.

Provide input into project simulation coordinated by the International Project Manager.

Feed into research conducted by People in Aid, the project evaluation and the final project report.

Establish and maintain a strong external network at the Asia regional level and beyond which will support the project delivery:

Establish effective communication channels amongst stakeholders, consortium members and promote and communicate effectively about the Regional Platform activities.

Liaise closely with the National and International Platforms, ensuring there is effective communication and collaboration and to minimise duplication, attending meetings convened by the International Project Manager as required.

Build a network of INGOs, NGOs, International Organisations, Government bodies, and private sector organisations to support the Regional Platform activities and build synergies / agreements on surge capacity within the Asia region.

Liaise closely with START Network consortium members within the Asia region to support the delivery of this project, fostering the cultivation of an active community willing to share of good practice.

Develop surge capacity in the Asia region via:

Work with stakeholders to identify current gaps and issues with surge capacity and opportunities to collaborate to overcome them.

Identify opportunities for collaboration  e.g., workforce planning, developing a shared roster, sharing learning and good practice.

Collate roster members with the Regional Platform and make formal agreements with members on how agreed countries can trigger and use the regional roster.

Work with key stakeholders to identify boundaries of where rosters will be drawn from and where it will respond.

Recruit more roster members in accordance with agreed priority areas

Work with the Surge Project HR Advisor to support the coordination of regular events to improve surge capacity and sharing of learning and good practice related to this within the Asia region.

Work with the Project Training Coordinator to identify current skills gaps at the regional level and methodologies for addressing this, including at least 3 regional training events on improving surge capacity.

Liaise with the Project HR Advisor and members of the Regional Platform to agree policies and practices to support the regional roster, including hosting cost and retaining agreements where required.

Proactively identify opportunities for future funding for this work in collaboration with other key stakeholders.

Implement a pilot to explore new ways for civil society to collaborate with the private sector to support surge in the Asia region.

Dealing with Problems:

Complexity of problems handled & the degree of investigation, analysis, & creative thinking required solving them

Pro-actively provide support when local platforms require it.



Managing a complex project with multiple stakeholders and tight deadlines

Proactively challenge and influence other stakeholders

Working across agencies with different agendas, priorities and management structures.

Communications and Working Relationships:

Working contacts inside and outside the organization; include the purpose and level (high, medium, low) of the contact

Communicates and influences effectively at all levels

Works in co-operation with other platform leads

Able to communicate and influence at a senior level INGOs, NGO, Government bodies, UN agencies and the private sector

INTERNAL

Plan Regional HR & OD Partner

Plan Asia Disaster Risk Management Team

Plans Humanitarian Resourcing Manager

Plan Finance and IT teams

EXTERNAL
Bluewater Group (Asia) Co., Ltd is a team of professionals that does outsourcing works mainly for the Australian Market. Our roles includes Hydraulic (Sanitary) Designs and Drafting works for medium to high density Housing projects, Researching, Back-tester & Analyst for stock trading, Hydraulic (Sanitary) Estimation and Tendering, Web Designs and Web Content Specialist and other client requirements.

Our mission is to provide our employees with an honest and helpful working environment, where every employee individually and collectively, can dedicate themselves to providing our customers with exceptional workmanship, extraordinary service, and professional integrity. Our commitment to this mission allows the team at Blue Water Group (Asia) to be solution focused and are dedicated to solving all our clients needs.

At The Bluewater Group (Asia) we are committed to the continual improvement of our business, systems and customer serv
ETPRO SUMIT DESIGNS CO., LTD., is a small architectural service company which was founded 2005. Its office is currently located at Ladprao 122, Bangkok. The company provides architectural design and consulting services to its customer in Thailand. Presently, the company plans to construct a new pipeline, approximately 48 Km in length beginning from the existing block valve station SN7 of the Provincial Gas Transmission pipeline project to Welgrow Industrial Estate on Bangna-trad road, Bangpakong, Chachoengsao province. Due to this upcoming project, the company is currently in need of three key professionals personnels: Civil Engineers, Architects and Draftmans.
The successful candidate must be a bright self-starter and have:

A 'can do' attitude, with the ability to flexibly manage competing demands, work to tight timescales and manage project work.

Good English and Thai (speaking, writing and listening)

Natural creativity and particularly the ability to be able to suggest out-of-the-box solutions.

Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with experience of working in a commercial environment.

An excellent standard of literacy/numeracy.

Previous HR experience within a commercially focused environment.

Knowledge of Thai Labour Law

Financial and business awareness.

Impact and influence.

Remuneration

An attractive salary package commensurate with the responsibility of the post will be offered. This will be reviewed annually.

Applications

Applications for the post should be emailed to careers@brightoncollegebangkok.com and must include:

a) A typed letter of application, outlining your suitability for the role, which should be addressed to Bursar at Brighton College International School Bangkok;

b) A current CV, including the names, email addresses and telephone numbers of three professional referees, one of whom must be your current or last employer.

Please note that incomplete applications will not be considered and the College reserves the right to make an appointment at any stage of the recruitment process.

Please visit our website for more information: www.brightoncollegebangkok.com.

Brighton College Bangkok is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children; the successful applicant will be subject to an enhanced disclosure through the UKs DBS or local police checks.
Costco and Lincoln Premium Poultry will no longer will consider a site near Nickerson in Dodge County for a poultry plant.

But officials with the Greater Fremont Development Council said Tuesday in a news release that the companies will continue to evaluate other sites in the Fremont area.

Costco is working with Lincoln Premium Poultry, a Georgia-based company, to develop a plant and grower network around Fremont that would supply a third of the giant retailer's fresh chicken. The plant would likely create more than 1,000 jobs.

The Nickerson Board of Trustees on April 4 voted against changing the village's future land use map that would have paved the way for the project. That vote came after residents of both Nickerson and Fremont expressed opposition to the potential poultry operation.
Cabela's stock soared Tuesday after a report that its biggest rival is ready to offer a bid for the company.

Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reported Tuesday that Bass Pro Shops has teamed up with the private equity arm of Goldman Sachs to make a bid for the Sidney-based outdoors retailer.

The news service said the partnership with Goldman would give Bass Pro Shops the necessary financing to complete a deal.

Cabela's stock rose more than 6 percent to close at $52.51 a share, putting its market cap at nearly $3.6 billion.

The Reuters report said that Bass Pro Shops is not the only entity interested in Cabela's, and the sale process is still in early stages.

The report also said that Cabela's has received interest from potential buyers interested in buying its credit card operation separately. That business is based in Lincoln and employs several hundred people.

Experts have said a separate sale of the credit card operation could be positive or negative for the Lincoln operation depending on who the buyer is.

Cabela's said in December it was working with investment bank Guggenheim Securities LLC to explore strategic alternatives including a sale.

The company has been under pressure since late October, when Elliott Management announced it had amassed an 11.1 percent stake in the company. Elliott is an activist hedge fund known for forcing changes at the companies in which it invests.
Gov. Pete Ricketts has added his signature to a $20 million aid package aimed at easing property tax bills for Nebraska farmers and ranchers.

When it takes effect next year, the measure will raise the overall amount provided by state government to offset people's local property taxes each year to $224 million.

The move comes as farm earnings sink and ag land values begin to slip following years of record sales. Yet land valuations used for tax purposes have remained high, leading to cries for relief from landowners.

"There are important steps," Ricketts said Tuesday during a bill-signing ceremony at the Capitol.

"This is not something that happens easily. It happens because you have a lot of people who are working very, very hard to push this along and make it happen."

Coupled with a measure Ricketts signed Monday, the bills (LB958 and LB959) are the result of eight months' work by members of the Legislature's Revenue and Education committees, the governor's office and their staffs.

They take a twofold approach: providing direct reductions in the form of state credits that will appear on people's property tax bills, and changing parts of the state's school aid formula to discourage excess taxation and trigger about $9 million in additional aid to certain districts, mostly in rural areas.

"This was a step forward," said John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union. "While we've made progress, we obviously have a lot more work to do."

Agricultural land owners' average property tax burden will swell by an estimated 6 percent this year, Hansen said, while the measure Ricketts signed Tuesday is expected to cut tax bills by about 2 percent in 2017.

Ricketts cautioned those who seek to "downplay" LB958 and LB959.

"I know that these bills are not everything we all wanted when we started the process, but that's part of the give and take that goes along with this legislative process," he said.

The bills were championed by two term-limited legislative leaders: Revenue Committee Chairman Mike Gloor of Grand Island and Education Committee Chairwoman Kate Sullivan of Cedar Rapids.

Sullivan also guided the process of eliminating the Omaha-area Learning Community's common levy, in which property tax revenue is pooled among 11 districts in Douglas and Sarpy counties. That bill (LB1067), which some viewed as politically bound to the property tax measures, was signed by Ricketts on Tuesday morning.

In addition to Sullivan and Gloor, the Legislature is losing Speaker Galen Hadley, Appropriations Committee Chairman Heath Mello and other leaders who are completing their second terms this year, Hansen noted.

"Eight years in this legislative process goes by very quickly."

But Nebraska Farm Bureau President Steve Nelson expressed optimism that future Legislatures can address landowners' immediate concerns, as well as the long-running complaint that education funding in Nebraska is systemically unfair to farmers and ranchers.

"More and more senators understand that there's a problem and that it has to be fixed," Nelson said. "The legislative process can work."
WASHINGTON - US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin discussed Syria and Ukraine in a phone call on Monday, the White House said.

Obama shared his concern over the status of a cease-fire agreement, known as the Cessation of Hostilities in Syria between the Syrian government and the opposition parties, the White House said in a statement.

The two presidents also "committed to intensify their efforts to shore up the Cessation of Hostilities" and agreed on the need to end attacks by all parties.

The United States and Russia agreed on a plan for a cease-fire in Syria that began on Feb 27.

The cessation of hostilities was largely envisaged in Munich on Feb. 12 during a meeting of the International Syrian Support Group, which is co-chaired by the United States and Russia.

The group is composed of the Arab League, the European Union, the United Nations, and 17 countries including China.

On Ukraine, Obama urged Putin to "take steps" to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine and stressed the importance to move forward with full implementation of the Minsk agreements.
The gunman who shot and killed a man and critically injured another inside a home remained at large Monday night, Lincoln police said.

Gunfire erupted inside 1966 Euclid Ave. just before 3:30 p.m., with neighbors saying they heard as many as eight shots, according to police.

Officers entered the two-story rental propertys main-floor unit and found the 32-year-old man who lived there dead from gunshot wounds, Lincoln Police Capt. Bob Farber said. His name was being withheld Monday night as police tried to notify his family.

A second man, who was a visitor, was conscious but had sustained life-threatening injuries.

He was taken to Bryan West Campus and was in critical condition late Monday, Farber said.

Animal Control officers carried a dog out of the residence on a stretcher. The brown boxer had been shot, and was taken to a veterinary hospital.

Several children who were in the home during the shooting were unharmed and have been placed with family members, Farber said.

Police hadn't arrested anyone as of 9 p.m. in connection with the killing, but investigators believed there was at least one shooter at large.

Farber said police weren't ready to release a full description of the shooter because they were still vetting information.

"A lot of information is still coming in, he said.

Monday afternoon's shooting brings the citys homicide total to four this year and follows the death of a woman killed by her husband in what police described as a murder-suicide last Thursday.

There was only one murder in Lincoln in 2015.

Moments after Monday's shooting, deputy U.S. marshals and Nebraska State Patrol troopers with a police dog scoured the neighborhood, looking for the shooter.

Police officers carrying carbine rifles stood at the scene and outside Prescott Elementary School, which is just a block away.

Officials locked down the school briefly before giving the all-clear to dismiss students within half an hour of the regular dismissal time of 3:38 p.m.

Once released, children and concerned parents walked past crime scene tape stretched across Euclid Avenue.

Small bicycles and toys, including a Fisher-Price van, lay on the ground in front of the home where the shootings occurred.

Cars often come and go from that house, said Colleen Selvage, who lives a few houses down the street.

Selvage makes frequent calls to police expressing concern about suspicious activity there, she said.

She doesnt know the tenants, but sees them outside playing with their children.

When she heard news there had been a shooting on her street, Selvage wasnt surprised.

This was not a matter of if, it was a matter of when, she said. The expectation was there that something would eventually happen.
Lincoln Christian School has a new superintendent.

Zach Kassebaum, who has been superintendent of Ashland-Greenwood Public Schools since 2011, will start his new job at Lincoln Christian in July.

Lincoln Christian, a private K-12 school with more than 650 students at 5801 S. 84th St., has had an interim superintendent for a year, said Mark Wilson, who retired from the job last year and consults with the school part time.

Kassebaum grew up in Hebron and earned his bachelor's, masters and doctorate degrees from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He was superintendent of Parkview Christian School 2009-11 and vice principal at Waverly High School for six years before that.

Rodney Zach, Lincoln Christians elementary school principal, has been interim superintendent since Wilson stepped down and the school began a search for a permanent replacement.

Kassebaum and his wife, Kami, have three children who will attend Lincoln Christian.
RACINE COUNTY  If delegates play an outsized role in selecting the Republican presidential nominee at this summers convention, the county will have one of its own in the middle of the proceedings.

Longtime Republican activist Bill Jaeck of Yorkville has been named a delegate to the 2016 Republican convention, set for July 18-21 in Cleveland. He was selected Saturday at the 1st Congressional District caucus in Clinton.

Bill Folk, the former chairman of the Racine County Republican Party, was named an alternate delegate.

Contested convention?

Delegates could play a much larger role than most years if no candidate gains the 1,237 delegates necessary to clinch the nomination before the convention.

Delegates are bound to a specific candidate on the first ballot at the convention. Should no nominee emerge, most are free to support whomever they choose in subsequent ballots, though Wisconsin delegates have tighter restrictions than most other states.

Delegates from the 1st District, which includes Racine County, are at least initially bound to Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who won the district as part of a decisive Wisconsin primary victory on April 5.

Jaeck, 64, a retired GE Healthcare employee, declined to speculate on possible convention scenarios. But he reiterated his support for Cruz, calling him a strict constitutionalist who would engage Congress.

Im going to enjoy the experience and Im going to represent the people of my district as best I can, Jaeck said. I said in my speech to (the caucus) Im going to do a good job and Im going to take the right votes. I want to make them proud.

Thats really all I can say because the rest is all conjecture.

Jaeck was one of three 1st District delegates chosen in a meeting with about 150 to 200 Republicans. He has been active for several years in the Racine County Republican Party and 1st Congressional District party. The other two delegates were Rose Ann Dieck and Bryan Steil, whose places of residence could not be confirmed Monday.

Folk couldnt be reached for comment Monday.

Democratic choices soon

State Democrats will select their delegates on May 1, state Democratic Party spokesman Brandon Weathersby said.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., won 48 Wisconsin delegates and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won 38 on April 5.

In the 1st Congressional District, Sanders and Clinton each won three delegates.
RACINE  With relatively little fanfare, the Racine Unified School Board has approved the districts calendar for next year and effectively ended the year-round school schedule at Janes Elementary School.

The decision makes this the final year for a year-round program at Janes, 1425 N. Wisconsin St., which has had that calendar since 1994 and was reported at the time to be the first year-round school of its kind in Wisconsin.

In a 6-3 vote Monday evening, the board approved the districts otherwise routine calendar proposal, which made no mention of Janes but included it as one of the elementary schools on a traditional calendar, according to administrators.

Before voting for the calendar proposal, board member Mike Frontier noted that the year-round school has been a noble experiment. But he echoed district administrators rationale that the school is struggling academically and unpopular with families who live nearby.

I think this was a noble experiment and we tried it, but I think there is reason to question its future, Frontier said.

He also noted that few parents attended meetings about the change, signaling a lack of energy and passion around the school.

District spokeswoman Stacy Tapp explained that the district did not survey parents on the issue, seeing a listening session as a better way for both sides to communicate their views. Mostly staff and few families attended the meetings the district held.

Declining scores, enrollment

Administrators have previously explained that switching Janes to the same calendar as other schools will allow the district to more effectively channel resources and training to the struggling school.

While arguing that the year-round calendar hasnt shown better achievement results than the traditional calendar, administrators have reported that the schools enrollment has been dropping and parents who live in the current Janes attendance area have largely chosen to send their children elsewhere.

Do more research

Christina Brown, a special education teacher at Janes who addressed the board during a public comment period Monday night, explained that her research into year-round schools shows that they generally dont show extraordinary academic achievement. But Brown said they do tend to have a strong positive impact on at-risk students, including those in poverty, those with disabilities and those learning English. She noted many students at Janes fit in those categories.

These students have to be looked at individually, Brown said. So, what Im proposing is that we do a little bit more research on this  do more research instead of having a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of decision that is going to affect a lot of kids and a high percentage of Janes Elementary students.

Board member Julie McKenna opposed the change for Janes at Mondays meeting. She acknowledged that achievement has fallen in recent years, but she said other factors may have played in a role in that decline.

I will vote down the whole package for one school, McKenna said. I was on the board when we started the year-round school and my heart has always been in it and my heart hasnt changed.

Board members Don Nielsen and Dennis Wiser joined McKenna in voting against the proposal. The other six board members voted to approve it.

Tapp said families living in the Janes attendance area will no longer have the ability to opt out of Janes without going through the districts school choice program. However, she said students in the Janes attendance area already attending another school will be allowed to remain at their current school.
RACINE  The Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services Department will distribute a limited number of free Milwaukee Brewers tickets for a game against the Philadelphia Phillies at 7:10 p.m. Friday, April 22, at Miller Park in Milwaukee.

The giveaway will begin at 10 a.m. Tuesday, April 19, at the PRCS office, 800 Center St., Room 127. Tickets will be given away in presorted packs, one per person, on a first-come basis to Racine County residents. Proof of Racine County residency is required in the form of a current Wisconsin photo ID.
RACINE  The City Council's Public Works Committee will reconsider a recommendation to accept the second-lowest bid for a $1.5 million street renovation project made last week.

The City Council Monday night voted 13-0 to have the committee review and reconsider a recommendation to award the project to LaLonde Contractors, Inc., of Milwaukee, even though Cornerstone Pavers of Racine submitted the lowest bid by $30,000.

The committee made the recommendation April 12, believing that LaLonde was the lowest responsive and responsible bidder to reconstruct a stretch of Kinzie Avenue.

Cornerstone completed two projects for the city in 2015, but there were delays associated with those projects.

Amy Cape, of Cornerstone, appeared before the council Monday and said her firm has submitted additional information to the city explaining those delays and expressing their disappointment in not getting the project.

We were elated, Cape said. This project was a perfect fit for what we do.

The city is not legally bound to accept the lowest dollar amount bid, but the bid from the lowest responsive and responsible firm, said Deputy City Attorney Nicole Larsen.
A high school with an open campus lunch policy is just that. Students allowed to leave campus for lunch are, by definition, free to travel where they like in the immediate vicinity, with the understanding that they will return in time for the next class period.

If students want to gather off campus at a nearby fast-food restaurant, or for a spiritual talk, frankly, thats their business, provided that the students are obeying municipal laws and school policy.

Which is what makes Middleton High Schools stance toward off-campus Jesus Lunches a cause for concern.

A handful of parents have organized the Tuesday lunches in Firemans Park since fall 2014, the Wisconsin State Journal reported Friday. But what started out as a small gathering of a few parents and their children for food and spiritual talks has gotten larger, putting organizers and school district officials at odds over its legality.

The park is leased for non-exclusive use by the school on school days, Middleton Police Chief Charles Foulke said.

Reasonable people differ over the interpretation of the wording of the lease, Foulke said Friday in a statement.

School district officials believe that the lease extends school rules to Firemans Park during school hours.

We believe that religious or political events do not have a place in our school or on our campus, except when sponsored by a student group in accordance with our rules, which require prior approval, district officials said in an April 12 email to parents.

In addition, many students have conveyed to us their concern about a group offering free food to incentivize participation in a religious event on campus.

A statement from organizers, provided by parent Beth Williams, asserted that the group is legally allowed to hold lunch in the park and students are not required to participate in the religious portion to enjoy the food. The parents have a rental agreement for use of the park pavilion on the days the Jesus Lunches are held, Fox News reported.

By law, the lease agreement between the city and the school district of Middleton does not privatize the park, the statement said.

Were inclined to agree with Williams. The schools lease of the park does not make it school district property. Its a public park, which makes it public property all of the time; therefore, lawful gatherings of any kind are permitted.

The Jesus Lunch will likely continue until the end of the school year, but with a supervisory police presence, Foulke said Friday. Foulke said that groups from both sides will likely be present for the lunches and asked both sides to remain peaceful.

Middleton Police Officers will be nearby, not to interfere in any way with anyones right of assembly or speech, but we will intervene if things get contentious, he said in the statement.

School district Superintendent Donald Johnson and high school Principal Stephen Plank said in the email to parents that rules about food preparation and visitor policies are also in question and that organizers of the lunches have threatened legal action against the school district.

Did it need to come to this? Couldnt school administrators have simply acknowledged that the schools lease didnt stop the park from being a public park, and that therefore the students were free to congregate in this manner?

State Journal columnist Chris Rickert offered a simple solution: Middleton students start organizing and leading the Jesus Lunch, perhaps with cooking help from the parents.

While the courts have looked askance at public school officials who initiate prayer or other religious expression on school grounds, they have long protected student-initiated religious activities in schools, Rickert wrote.

If its run by a student group, its a constitutionally protected see you at the pole gathering, said UW-Madison lecturer Shawn Peters, who studies religion and the law.

That would simplify things, and make Middletons lunchtime gathering no different than kids at Racine public high schools gathering in prayer outside the school at the start of the day.

But with talk of legal action from the Jesus Lunch organizers and the school further asserting that it has jurisdiction, we join Rickert in doubting that a simple solution is on the horizon in Middleton.

If the campus is open, then students are open to go across the street and pray if thats what they choose.
Student protesting for concealed carry

cited for wearing EMPTY holster;

'threatening safety of campus'

By Kassy Dillon. April 15th, 2016

Two University of South Alabama students were confronted by campus police Wednesday, and one student was cited for "causing alarm" by wearing an empty holster.

"This week is the empty holster protest for Students for Concealed Carry in Alabama to demonstrate that students are defenseless on campus," D.J. Parten, president of Students for Concealed Carry, told Campus Reform. Along with fellow club member Kenneth Tews, Parten was also promoting an upcoming screening of the movie Can We Take a Joke? when three campus police officers approached their table demanding identification.

Video footage, obtained by Campus Reform, shows one of the police officers asking to search the students, and when they exercise their right to refuse, another officer becoming aggravated and warning that he will find something to charge them with if they remain uncooperative -- a threat that is eventually carried out against Parten.

"The right to self-defense shouldn't end because someone chooses to get an education," Parten opined. .......

It's hard to even believe such lunacy and avoid laughing. Maybe a simple fanny pack would be just as 'dangerous'. Some educational establishments seem to be taking their definition of "causing alarm" or "dangerous" to and beyond the realm of absurdity -- being probably tops on the list of 'gun-free-zones' at the same time. Common sense seems out the window - supposedly it's best to remain max vulnerable to armed attack.

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Several killed, scores injured in Kabul suicide explosion

Several people have been killed and more than 200 have been injured in a huge explosion in the centre of the Afghan capital Kabul, officials say.
Army took her little girl away, claims one mother in Baglung

Anita BK of Narethanti village in Baglung district was only 11-year-old when she was reportedly arrested by the then Royal Nepal Army in 2002.
CEDAW Convention: Civil society to send alternate report

With the government 10 months behind submitting Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) period report, the civil society is gearing up to send an alternate report from Nepal.
Chinese band Wang Wen to organise concert to mark quake anniversary

Namaste Nepal Foundation and Texture Studio along with a Chinese band Wang Wen is all set to organise a charity show at Purple Haze in Thamel, Kathmandu on April 23.
CoAS Chhetri to visit US next week

Having completed visits to two neighbouring countries, Chief of Army Staff (CoAS) General Rajendra Chhetri is leaving for a 11-day visit to the United States on the invitation of US Army.
Coming clean

Parties need to show that they are willing and able to prosecute war-era cases
Ecuador quake death toll hits 413

At least 413 people are now known to have died in the earthquake that struck Ecuador, the country's government says.
Embassy writes to Indian ministry to probe reports

The Nepali Embassy in New Delhi wrote to the External Affairs Ministry of India on Monday, asking it to investigate reports of Nepali Children being trafficked to the United Kingdom as domestic help from India.
Govt set to call House session from mid-May

The government is all set to call Parliament session to unveil its policy and programme by the second week of May.
Kabul hit by large suicide attack, at least 28 dead

At least 28 people have been killed and 329 injured in a huge explosion in the centre of the Afghan capital Kabul, police and officials say.
Langtang denizens disappointed with govt

Langtang locals are disappointed with government for its apathy towards reconstruction in the region.
Madhesis, Janajatis announce tactical alliance for struggle

Madhesi parties and fringe Janajati forces have announced a tactical alliance to launch a joint struggle against the constitution that, in their words, curtails the rights of indigenous and marginalised communities.
Meghauli Airport back in operation

Meghauli Airport in Chitwan has been brought back online under the initiative of CG Hotels and Resorts that owns the luxury Taj Safari Resort Meghauli Serai.
Migration causes labour shortage in Parsa-Bara

Factories in the Parsa-Bara Industrial Corridor are facing a growing shortage of workers as the trend of going abroad for employment has spread in the region.
New directions

India does not mind connecting with China, but Nepals linkages with the Chinese have always been a matter of concern for it
No requests for refinance, interest subsidy yet: NRB

Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) has said that it is yet to receive any requests from banks and financial institutions (BFIs) for refinance and interest subsidy to businesses affected by last years earthquake and the Indian blockade.
Road kill

Road accidents in Nepal often do not get the same attention in comparison to other accidents or deaths resulting therefrom
Succour for Bahrabise PHCC

US Ambassador to Nepal Alaina B Teplitz and Minister for Health and Population Ram Janam Chaudhary jointly unveiled plans to rebuild a new, earthquake-safe Bahrabise Primary Health Care Center (PHCC) on Monday.
Times are different

Nepals political stability and national security are of international significance
UNESCO Director General concludes her Nepal visit

UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova headed back to France on Tuesday concluding her three-day Nepal visit.
Approve share allotment to locals: Agriculture and Water Resources Committee

The Agriculture and Water Resources Committee (AWRC) of the Parliament on Monday directed the government to immediately approve the proposal put forth by Ministry of Energy regarding the amount of shares to be allotted to locals residing in areas to be affected by the 900MW Upper Karnali Hydropower Project.
Yes, its hard to to tell when one enters the city limits

Yes, they will make the city more inviting

Maybe ... does it really matter?

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No, it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars

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The Police in Rukungiri have arrested former FDC presidential candidate Dr Kizza Besigye, Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago and newly elected Kawempe South MP Mubaraka Munyagwa.

The trio was arrested in Rwamucucu in Rukiga County as they headed back from Kabale court. Its however, not yet clear why they have been arrested.

Earlier, the Kabale Chief Magistrates court adjourned a case of inciting violence against Dr Besigye.

Besigye is accused together with Kampala Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago, and FDCs Ingrid Turinawe.

They are accused of inciting violence back in 2012 during their 4GC rally held in Kabale stadium during the walk-to-work campaigns.

According to prosecution, the violence incited by the group led to the injuring of four police officers and damaging of three police vehicles.

The case has been adjourned to 6th June because the magistrate was not around.

Earlier Besigye was greeted by cheering supporters as they attended prayers at the party offices in Kabale.

Story By Ali Mivule
The CUT 4.0, by TOPS Knives, looks like a handy defensive-carry knife.

Short for Combat Utility Tool, the CUT 4.0 was designed by martial artist Joshua Swanagon.

The idea behind the CUT 4.0 was to combine the offensive-defensive capabilities of a karambit with the usefulness and practical application of a utility knife, according to TOPS Knives officials.

It features a 4.24 inch 1095 high-carbon steel blade and a tan canvas Micarta handle with a finger hole at the end for improved grip.

For more information on the CUT 4.0, check out the full article on Recoil Magazines website.
By Andrew Hammond



In the wake of the Panama Paper revelations, UK Prime Minister David Cameron is doubling down on his preparations for hosting a potentially landmark anti-corruption summit next month in London. While the Panama disclosures in recent days are financial in nature, they have already had far-reaching political implications, including the resignation of the Icelandic prime minister, and Cameron may now announce a number of significant new measures to increase global tax transparency at the international meeting.



While the Panama paper episode was described by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday 14th as a US plot to destabilise his country and other key states, it is actually numerous UK territories that are seen by many as being at the heart of the affair. Hence, the reason why the London summit in May, which is being billed by the UK Government as the first of its kind and will bring together world leaders, business and civil society, is assuming such increased international focus.



During the process of decolonisation, Britain held on to a global network of islands, which either voted to remain UK territories, or have not chosen independence. Amongst these are the present-day 14 overseas territories and three British dependencies.



A number of these feature prominently in the Panama papers, including the British Virgin Islands which is named at least 113,000 times. What this underlines is that some of these remnants of Empire are amongst the world's leading centres of international tax avoidance.



The UK government has taken actions to ensure that these islands have fairer and more open tax systems, but this is very much a work in progress. The territories and dependencies have been asked three main requirements by London: automatic exchange of tax information, common reporting standards for multinational firms, and central registries so there is transparency over who owns companies. All the islands have delivered on the first two items of this agenda, and most on the third, and Cameron now is pushing for as much progress as possible before the summit in London in which tax transparency will be at the fore.



Ratcheting up the pressure on the prime minister, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has proposed that the government imposes direct rule on any of these territories which do not conform, fully, to UK tax laws. London has cracked down in the past in similar ways so this is not inconceivable.



In 2009, for instance, it imposed direct rule on the Turks and Caicos after local officials were accused of selling government land for personal gain. The islands saw home rule restored only after the local government passed acts that mandated tax information sharing with the British government.



It's unclear at this stage whether the UK government will take comparable measures for any of the territories that have been named in the Panama Papers, but the international and domestic pressure to act is mounting with, for instance, almost 200,000 people having signed in recent days one online petition by the 38 degrees campaign group demanding the government to "shut down British tax havens". While imposing direct rule is, in principle, a relatively straight forward process, critics have pointed out that a consequence of seeking to close down these UK centres of tax avoidance would be that people and firms simply move their money from one jurisdiction to another where there might be even fewer tax regulations and less transparency.



Many have therefore highlighted that what is needed is greater global moves toward tax transparency. This is a key reason for Cameron hosting next month's summit which will seek to galvanise the global response to tackle corporate secrecy, government transparency, the enforcement of anti-corruption laws, and the strengthening of international institutions. It is planned that specific, practical steps will be agreed to expose corruption, punish the perpetrators and support those affected by corruption.



Aside from next month's summit, the United Kingdom has generally been at the forefront of debate on tackling international tax avoidance. The 2013 G-8 summit in Northern Ireland, also hosted by Cameron, resulted in the Lough Erne Declaration, which urged countries to "fight the scourge of tax evasion". Leaders agreed, for instance, to measures that would combat the illegal evasion of taxes, as well as the use of tax havens and loopholes.



And Britain is the first member of the G20 to establish a public central registry of company beneficial ownership information which will go live in June. It has also introduced some of the world's strictest legislation on bribery, in 2010, making it for instance a criminal offence for a company to fail to prevent a bribe being paid. Moreover, London also co-chaired a UN panel that put tackling corruption at the heart of the new UN Development Goals.



However, despite all of this, Cameron remains on the defensive after the Panama Paper revelations, not least because of his former personal connections with his now-deceased father's Blairmore Investment Trust. Critics have pointed to Cameron's apparent double standards here given that he has referred to tax avoidance as a moral issue, and at the 2013 G8 summit in Northern Ireland said, "You have to collect the taxes that are owed. That is only fair for companies and for people who play by the rules". That same year, Cameron also lobbied the European Commission to exclude offshore trusts from being included in an EU-wide crackdown on tax dodging financial instruments, arguing that companies were the real issue and that trusts should not be subject to the same rules.



Taken overall, the Panama paper episode means that next month's London summit is assuming significantly increased international focus. With Cameron looking to get on the offensive following recent revelations, the meeting could see significant new measures announced to fight corruption and increase global tax transparency.



Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS (the Centre for International Affairs, Diplomacy and Strategy) at the London School of Economics.




scarpenter@kpcmedia.com

GARRETT  Garrett business leaders and organizations met for the annual Chamber of Commerce meeting and dinner Friday at the Garrett Eagles.

New Mayor Todd Fiandt presented his State of the City message, detailing the citys activities and progress during the past year.

Fiandt reported the water department is setting up a program to systematically replace lead water service lines to avoid a situation similar to the crisis in Flint, Michigan. If funds are available, water main lines will be replaced in the 1000-to-1200 blocks of South Peters Street, he added.

The wastewater utility has been running properly and the police department, under the direction of interim Chief Adam Sheffield, is doing business as usual, the mayor said.

Fiandt said the fire department has two new vehicles on order  a command SUV and a fire truck. He also praised the departments response time of 4.4 minutes from station-to-site.

The city electric utility is busy working to bring Auburn Essential Services fiber optics to Garrett in addition to keeping up with normal maintenance issues, Fiandt said.

The Streets and Parks Department has been busy filling potholes and preparing the parks for the spring and summer activities that include concerts at Eastside Park, ball games, family reunions, movies and a dive-in at the city pool.

Fiandt said the city has seen a 49.1 percent increase in new family dwellings, according to City Planner Milton Otero. The city is continuing its 50/50 sidewalk replacement and Safe Routes to Schools programs. Progress on the City Hall renovation is progressing very well, he said.

He praised Clerk-Treasurer Marcie Conkle for keeping a hold on the purse strings and doing her best to keep spending in line.

Fiandt reported the city is working with Garrett High School to host an industrial fair at the school on May 19.The event will showcase what is made in Garrett and the area, as well as displaying work done by the schools Garrett Industrial Academy.

You will be amazed at what is going on at Garrett High School, Fiandt said.

He concluded that through meetings with other mayors in the state, he found many cities and towns did not have the advantages that Garrett has with a main highway, rail lines nearby, an identity with its own school, city-owned utilities, parks systems, pool, library, community center or large city close by.

We have a viable product, Fiandt said of Garrett, adding that many people want to live in a place with such amenities.

Why dont we market ourselves like you would a product and sell the community to bring in new families, new businesses, new ideas to our city? he asked.

So lets buff-up our community like you would to sell your house or car and work at selling Garrett. Garrett is great and getting greater, Fiandt concluded.

Otero shared the citys new website at garrettindiana.us for the group.

When creating the site, the emphasis was on being user-friendly and simple and creating a logo for the city to be used on all sites.

Included on the site are city codes, events, department information, top and bottom search menus and photos from events in town, Otero said.

Board members chosen

During a brief business meeting, board President Todd Miller shared some of the activities in which the Chamber has been involved during the past year:

 partnering with the DeKalb County Horsemens Association for the annual Parade of Lights in November;

 sponsorship of the annual Heritage Days Baking Contest; and

 organizing an annual shredding day for chamber members and the community to shred confidential documents. Another shred day will be scheduled again this spring, he said.

Four current members were re-elected to three-year terms on the chamber board during Fridays meeting. They are Marc Chamberlin of Edward Jones Investments, Todd Miller of Beacon Financial Credit Union, Matt Etzel of the Garrett Public Library and Chad Roberts from Insurance Trustees.

They will join current members Terry Gall of Garrett State Bank, Julie Heal of C.J.s Canteena, Amy Demske of Garrett Country Club, Brea Miller of Beacon Financial Credit Union and Chris Hoeffel of Garrett New Market.

Three board members have turned in resignations, including Darrick Brinkerhoff of Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, Richard Griffis of Griffis Excavating, and Dr. Sarah Ragan of Ragan Chiropractic.

Ex-officio members are Melvin Diederich, Mayor Todd Fiandt, Dan Brinkerhoff and Garrett-Keyser-Butler school board representative Terry Yarde.

Miller encouraged local business people to consider serving on the board of directors.
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The Rev. Brenda Ginder closed her 20-year career in the ministry with the Christmas Eve service at Forest Park United Methodist Church. Ginder was instrumental in founded Noble House, a shelter for women and children, in Albion before entering the ministry. She served at Wolf Lake UMC southwest of Albion, at Trinity UMC in Albion, then at a church in coastal St. Marys, Georgia, before returning to northeast Indiana and serving at Forest Park UMC on Kentucky Avenue in Fort Wayne.
One of the largest destinations in Wisconsin Dells is adding a massive swimming pool.

Nick and Eva Laskaris, owners of Mt. Olympus Water Park & Theme Park Resort, announced Monday that they are building a $4 million, 27,000-square-foot pool that can hold up to 2,000 swimmers.

Dubbed the Great Pool of Delphi, it will be located along Wisconsin Dells Parkway between the resorts Trojan Horse and wave pool and is scheduled to open in June.

With this addition, we wanted to create a more relaxed take on summer vacation, Nick Laskaris said.

This new attraction gives families a chance to slow down and enjoy their time together with a layout that allows parents to see their children playing nearby on the splash pad, Eva Laskaris added.

The pool will include four islands with tanning decks, a 100-foot geyser, childrens splash pad, 50-foot waterfall, two zero-depth, beach-style entrances and cabanas rimming the perimeter.

The Delphi name was inspired by the city the ancient Greeks considered to be the center of the world. According to Greek mythology, Zeus released two eagles, one to the east and one to the west, and Delphi was the point where they met after encircling the world.

In addition, the Laskarises announced that residents of the village of Lake Delton and city of Wisconsin Dells will have free admission to the resorts waterpark this summer.

The project is the latest from the Laskarises, who have built one of the largest and most visible resorts in the Wisconsin Dells. In 2007, the $7 million Poseidons Rage Wave Pool opened. At 480 feet long and 440 feet wide, the wave pool can hold up to 4,000 people who are battered with waves up to nine feet.

In 2010, the resort began spending more than $20 million to purchase and remodel several hotels and motels near the resort to increase its stock of rooms for guests. The resort now owns more than 1,500 rooms. An indoor theme park was added in 2006 and a sand beach in 2010.
In observance of Earth Day 2016, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development will join city leaders to officially announce the awarding of federal funds to the City of Viroqua for the improvement of the citys wastewater treatment facility.

In addition, USDA Rural Development has selected the project as a 2016 National Earth Day Project here in Wisconsin.

The official announcement and award presentation will be held at in the city council chambers at Viroqua City Hall, 202 N. Main St., Friday, April 22, at 11 a.m.

Those in attendance include Stan Gruszynski, USDA Rural Development Wisconsin State Director, Larry Fanta, Viroqua Mayor, John Medinger, office of Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Karrie Jackelen, office of Congressman Ron Kind and Sarah Grainger, City of Viroqua engineer

Through this project, the City of Viroqua will improve and upgrade the existing wastewater treatment plant. The project will provide for the rehabilitation of processes and other modifications to improve operations; including a new pump station and force main for discharge. The project also includes the replacement of sanitary sewer lines along Rusk Avenue.

Upon completion of the upgrades, the city will be better able to meet the more stringent Phosphorus removal and discharge requirements set by the DNR.

In addition, the Mississippi River watershed will be guarded from contaminants entering the system, groundwater will be protected from leakage, and the environment will be cleaner for the residents of Viroqua and the surrounding area.

Earth Day is observed annually on April 22 to raise awareness about the role citizens, businesses and communities can play in protecting the environment.
The Viroqua High School Music Department will host a Fazolis Italian dinner in the high school commons, Sunday, April 24, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

The meal will include pasta choices, sauce choices, salad, breadsticks, dessert and a beverage. The cost is $8 for adults and $6.50 for children 12 and under. All profits will be used for next years Washington, D.C., and New York City tour. Carryouts are available.
Donna M. Uting

BLACK RIVER FALLS, Wis.  Donna M. Uting, 85, of Black River Falls, passed away April 16, 2016.

She was born Dec. 13, 1930, in North Bend, Wis., to Arthur and Gretchen Brinker. The family later moved to La Crosse, where Donna graduated from La Crosse Central High School.

Over the years Donna worked at Trane Company as a key punch operator and at Habelman Bros. Cranberry Marsh as a seasonal worker.

Donna was known for loving her family and giving big hugs. Donna was very involved with the Pine Hill Coffee Group and Jackson County Bird Club. She was instrumental in keeping the Shamrock Union Church open and active. She served as the church treasurer and caretaker. Donna enjoyed searching for arrowheads and old bottles. Most of all Donna enjoyed her children, grandchildren and living in her country home that was surrounded by beautiful natural habitats and wildlife.

Along with her husband, George, of 63 years of marriage, Donna is survived by her five children, Vickie Seifert, Gary (Tamie) Uting, Rodney (Brenda) Uting, Sandra Uting and Kenneth (Sally) Uting. She also is survived by 11 grandchildren, Elizabeth, Justin, Chad, Shayla, Kylie, Nicole (Steven), Michael, Travis, Daniel, Eric (Amanda) and Lindsey; and one great-grandchild, Logan. In addition she has many extended family members and loving friends.

She was preceded in death by her parents.

Funeral services will be 11 a.m. Saturday, April 23, 2016, at Shamrock Union Church, located on County Road S, south of County Road O, east of Highway 27 in Shamrock, Wis. The Rev. Terry Marg will be officiating. A luncheon will follow the service. Burial will take place afterwards in North Bend Evergreen Cemetery, located off of County Road 54 and Russel Road, between Melrose, and Galesville, Wis.

Family and friends are invited for visitation from 6-8 p.m. Friday, April 22, 2016, at Buswell Funeral Home, 106 S. Second St. in Black River Falls.

Family and friends also are invited for visitation from 10 a.m. until time of service Saturday at church.

Buswell Funeral Home of Black River Falls is assisting the family with arrangements.
The overarching theme emerging from Chinas ongoing Communist Party congress is one of continuity, not change. The weeklong meeting is expected to reappoint Xi Jinping as leader, reaffirm a commitment to his policies for the next five years and possibly elevate his status even further as one of the most powerful leaders in Chinas modern history. For many Chinese, weary of pandemic restrictions, the more immediate question is whether there will be any easing of zero-COVID after the party congress. The answer is probably not immediately, and when changes do come, they will most likely be gradual.
A Fillmore County home and shed burned Friday after a grass fire spread through the property, occupied by a couple who face charges of manufacturing methamphetamine.

The Fillmore County Sheriffs Office received a report at 3:23 p.m. of a fire at 10517 Hwy. 113, in an unincorporated community in Canton Township referred to as Prosper.

The initial report was that a grass fire had spread to a house and shed. The Canton Fire Department responded and upon arriving on scene, requested mutual aid from the Mabel Fire Department. The Fillmore County Sheriffs Office conducted traffic control on the adjacent Hwy. 52 and was later assisted by the Minnesota State Patrol. Fillmore County Sheriffs Office investigators also arrived on scene.

On April 11, Fillmore County Sheriffs Narcotics Investigator Jesse Grabau had executed a narcotics search warrant at the same address on suspicion that methamphetamine was being manufactured there. Grabau was assisted by members of the Southeast Minnesota Violent Crime Enforcement Team and members of the sheriffs office.

As a result of the investigation and search warrant, a subsequent search warrant was obtained for an adjacent property, 10491 County Road 113, where evidence of manufacturing methamphetamine was discovered and seized, leading to two arrests.

Jeffrey George Torgerson, 48, and Joan Elizabeth Torgerson, 40, both of the property 10517 Hwy. 113 that caught fire, were taken into custody. Both have been arraigned in Fillmore County District Court and are being held in the Fillmore County Detention Center.

The fire remains under investigation by the Minnesota State Fire Marshals Office and the Fillmore County Sheriffs Office.
With an election season on many minds, politics and policy became the focus of the La Crosse Area Development Corp.s spring economic forum.

Experts spoke about the housing market, manufacturing economy and the political landscape after breakfast in the Radisson Hotel Ballroom. Both sectors are important to the states economy, the experts said, before shifting to upcoming legislative or regulatory issues their sectors are facing.

Wisconsin Realtors Association President and CEO Mike Theo spoke about the strong housing market last year and which has continued into 2016. More homes were sold in Wisconsin in 2015 than any year since 2005 and the first quarter of 2016 was the strongest first quarter for sales since 2007.

Prices also have been increasing since the tumble during the Great Recession and should continue this year. Theo also predicted an increase in new construction that will could begin to release the pressure of the tight inventory.

But there were some concerns on the horizon. Theo said his promotes legislation and regulations that help the real estate industry. He is focused on issues such as the high level of property taxes in Wisconsin and the possibility of losing mortgage tax credits in federal income tax reform, which could negatively affect home ownership.

Housing and real estate contribute 10 to 11 percent of Wisconsins gross state product, Theo said.

Kurt Bauer, the CEO and president of Wisconsin Manufacturing and Commerce, spoke next. With one in five jobs in La Crosse in manufacturing, which makes up more than 21 percent of the gross state product, manufacturing is a major economic engine, he said.

One factory job creates three more jobs in the economy, Bauer added. There are more than 458,000 workers in the manufacturing industry in Wisconsin, he said, with an average compensation of $65,000, which is 19 percent higher than other lines of work.

Bauer said federal regulations take hundreds of millions of dollars out of the manufacturing economy, high corporate tax rates make other countries more appealing to businesses, and proposed new environmental rules will cost jobs and put the squeeze on the energy sector, which is the lifeblood of manufacturing.

Federal policy is shooting us in the foot, he said, and later when talking about offshoring of manufacturing added, We could be bringing back many of those businesses we lost in the 70s if we had a better business climate.

Finishing off the forum was Charles Franklin of the Marquette University Law School, which is respected for its polling work. Along with sharing some national economic data on poverty and wages, he shared some statistics that demonstrate growing partisanship in politics.

This shift over the past several decades has made policy change and compromise over issues difficult. It results in a less responsive government that can be blind to what is going on, he said.

Some examples were the fact that Republican voters are more split over the immigration issue than the vocal party line is in Washington, and that Obamas approval rating has stayed mostly flat during his two terms, especially when broken down by political party. Even when he has been successful, such as the capture of Osama bin Laden, or screwed up, such as the health care exchange roll-out, the numbers havent changed much.

Your enemy is your enemy no matter what he does, Franklin said. And your friend is your friend no matter how bad he screws up.
MADISON  Madison police say a 30-year-old man has died from gunfire outside a bar and restaurant near West Towne Mall.

Police Chief Mike Koval says a gun fight erupted in the parking lot of Martin O'Grady's Irish Pub about 1 a.m. Tuesday.

Koval says investigators have found at least eight spent gun casings from two, or possibly three firearms. The chief says a vehicle that fled from the scene was stopped several blocks away. A bullet hole was found in the vehicle and a man inside had suffered a bullet graze wound.

Koval says some possible witnesses to the shooting have been unwilling to talk about the crime.

For updates, click on this story at the Wisconsin State Journal.
Western Wisconsin residents will have a chance to share their concerns with the states railroad commissioner Thursday during two public listening sessions.

Commissioner Yash Wadhwa will be in De Soto and Stoddard as part of an effort by state Sen. Jennifer Shilling to address conflicts between railroads and residents of Mississippi River communities.

Enforcement of a 2006 law that restricts pedestrians to designated railroad crossings has cut off access to thousands of acres of public hunting and fishing lands along the river, leading to frustration among sportsmen.

Efforts by western Wisconsin lawmakers to alleviate the problem have failed to make it into law.

Much of the crude oil mined in North Dakota is transported along the Mississippi River corridor, prompting safety concerns after a series of fiery derailments last year. Residents of river towns have also complained about trains idling for hours at a time, disturbing residents and blocking what is sometimes the only crossing.

I recognize that the freight rail industry is an important part of Wisconsins economy. Yet, the recent increase in rail traffic has led to new concerns about public access and community safety across the state, Shilling said in a news release. I want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to weigh in on what can be done to improve our transportation infrastructure, protect access to public land and strengthen our emergency response readiness.
As a recent candidate for La Crosse County supervisor for District 14, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all friends and family who supported me in my campaign. I truly enjoyed meeting residents of District 14 as I went door-to-door and appreciated your candor and graciousness as we discussed the issues at hand. I believe the people on French Island are among the best I have ever met. Thank you for your votes.
If you found yourself walking down Michigan Avenue in Chicago late at night and you saw another person approaching from the other direction  the person is older, well-dressed, carrying a briefcase, and moving matter-of-factly  I doubt you would have any problem walking past that person. Now take the same situation but the person is younger, perhaps early 20s, dressed in torn jeans, a hoodie, heavily tattooed and walking unsteadily. Most of us would be ready to cross the street. Is this racist? No. I didnt mention this persons race or gender. Is this profiling? Yes. The simple fact is there are fewer violent crimes committed by well-off older people. Our experience tells us this. It is common sense.

We profile when we make a conclusion about many based on our culture, values and experiences with some. Everyone does it, but in our politically correct world were supposed to pretend we dont.

Was it proper for law enforcement to scrutinize Italians associated with the Mafia, La Cosa Nostra or the Gambino crime family?

Should the IRS target those ethnic restaurants that never ring up the bill when we pay cash?

Should the Securities and Exchange Commission be on the lookout for white males who are the majority of those engaged in insider trading?

What comes to mind when you think of a person who flies the Confederate flag?

If you were in charge of Israels airport security, would you stop a 23-year-old male who appeared Middle-Eastern as he entered the country?

Your answers say whether you approve of racial and religious profiling.

President Obama says we should welcome thousands of Syrian refugees so we can lead by example. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz say keep them out. Hillary Clinton calls Republicans dangerous, extremist, bigoted and racist. Likewise, liberals believe extra policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods is both offensive and causes a disproportionate impact on minorities. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered the police to reduce stop-and-frisk as he believes it causes psychological and social harm to minorities. What do you think happened? The New York Daily News reported during the first five months of 2015 as the number of stops fell by 42 percent, the number of murders increased 19.5 percent.

The legal argument is the Constitution prohibits profiling. The Equal Protection and the Due Process Clauses do not prevent either racial or ethnic profiling. It may offend, but it is not illegal.

The Israelis have it right. They freely admit they use racial profiling. One of my sons landed in the Ben Gurion airport. His passport had stamps from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. He was stopped, detained and aggressively interrogated by a team of Israelis for hours. When he returned to La Crosse I could see with his deep tan and being unshaven he might have appeared Middle-Eastern. Was he afraid? No, he knew he had done nothing wrong. Was he racially profiled? Probably. Was he harassed? Yes. Were his rights violated? Yes. So what? The safety of Israeli citizens is far more important than my sons feelings.

When my wife and I moved to La Crosse 45 years ago, it was because it appeared to be a wonderful place to raise our children  little crime, drug or racial problems. It was and still is for the most part. Last year, La Crosse had 123 violent crimes per 100,000 population, far below Springfield, Ill., a mere 400 miles away, where it was 768 per 100,000. But today the local drug problem is much worse than it has ever been, especially with meth and heroin. In 2000, there were 266 drug arrests in La Crosse. That increased to 470 in 2015 - an increase of more than 75 percent. When I asked La Crosse Narcotic Detective Matthew Malott about local profiling, he replied, Our officers make traffic stops based on reasonable suspicion of a violation of law. It doesnt matter who the driver is or what race they are.

Perhaps not in La Crosse, but there are places where a certain population statistically commits more crime or religions have more suicide bombers. Why shouldnt we be more suspicious of those populations? If not concentrating on these groups, where would the social justice liberals put the police? Some racial and religious profiling is just common sense. Why is common sense bigoted? Just like my son  the innocent have nothing to fear.
State attorneys formally asked a Madison judge on Monday to stay his ruling declaring Wisconsin's right-to-work law unconstitutional while they appeal the decision.

State Justice Department attorneys filed a motion requesting a stay with Dane County Circuit Judge William Foust as well as a notice of appeal with the 3rd District Court of Appeals. If Foust grants the stay, the law would remain in effect until the appeal is settled.

The DOJ attorneys argued in their motion that leaving right-to-work in place won't cause labor unions substantial harm and the law clearly benefits the public since 25 other states have such statutes. Without a stay, non-union members could be forced to pay dues, upsetting families that rely on weekly paychecks, they added.

"This (ruling) will have significant, immediate impacts on the State and its citizens," the motion said. "Due respect for the presumption of constitutionality and the public interest requires that the judgment should be stayed until the appellate courts can finally decide whether Wisconsin, alone among its sister States, is prohibited from enacting a right-to-work law."

Right-to-work laws prohibit businesses and unions from reaching agreements that require all workers, not just union members, to pay union dues. Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed Wisconsin's law last year and touted it during his brief presidential bid last summer.

The Wisconsin AFL-CIO, Machinists Local Lodge 1016 and United Steelworkers District 2 filed a lawsuit challenging the law, alleging it amounts to a taking of union services without just compensation since the unions must represent all employees in a workplace even if the workers don't pay dues. Foust sided with the unions earlier this month, handing down a ruling finding the law unconstitutional.

Fred Perillo, the lead attorney for the unions, said he hadn't been served with the motion yet and had no immediate comment.

Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, said in a statement that Walker and Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel shouldn't play politics with workers' freedom to stick together.

"If we want a strong economy," he said, "we should be strengthening unions so that workers can continue to collectively negotiate better workplaces for future generations."
Purdue comes to town to face the Badgers for their homecoming game on Saturday. Hopefully the Badgers can get back on track.
La Crosse Loggers owner Dan Kapanke is again running for the Wisconsin Senate seat he lost in a recall election five years ago.

Announcing his candidacy Monday, Kapanke said the state has experienced a reversal since Republicans took control of government in the 2010 elections but added there is more work to do.

It came to me about two months ago that there was much to do, he told a group of supporters and media at the La Crosse County GOP headquarters.

Kapanke said his priorities would be patching the transportation budget, reforming the school funding formula and continuing to add jobs. He did not commit, however, to increasing the gasoline tax or vehicle registration fees, saying only that the state cannot borrow more to pay for transportation projects.

Those answers will be forthcoming, he said on what funding mechanism he would support.

Kapanke vowed to run a positive campaign while highlighting differences between him and Democratic Sen. Jennifer Shilling of La Crosse.

When I was in Madison I heard a Democratic senator  on the floor  saying business owners have to do more. They have to step up. We need more of their money, Kapanke said. Bernie Sanders  thats all he wants. He wants all of our money, everybodys. Thats their party. Thats what they do. Our side, we want taxpayers to keep as much possible as they earn. Its just a difference in philosophy.

Shilling defeated Kapanke with 55.4 percent of votes in the recall election fueled by the uproar over the GOPs move to curtail collective bargaining rights for most public-sector workers. She was elected to a second term in 2012 with more than 58 percent of the vote and has since gone on to become Senate minority leader.

That certainly is not the reason Im running, Kapanke said of the recall. I dont hold grudges, he said.

He added that voters have had time to see the benefits of Act 10, which the governor says has saved the state $5 billion.

Kapanke previously served in the Senate for more than six years, winning the open seat in 2004 with 52.5 percent of the vote and defeating Democratic challenger Tara Johnson in 2008 with 51.4 percent.

The State Senate Democratic Committee issued a statement calling Kapanke a rubber stamp for Gov. Scott Walker and blaming his past votes for the states lagging job creation and stagnant middle-class wages.

Voters overwhelmingly rejected Mr. Kapanke in 2010 and 2011 after he sided with Gov. Walker over local families, the statement read. His record of supporting massive school cuts, attacks on worker rights and limits on womens health care continue to hurt local families and small businesses.
Effective immediately, the town of Bergen and village of Stoddard, in conjunction with the Stoddard-Bergen Fire Department, is removing the current burning ban.

The current fire danger level is at Moderate.

General information

To see the current levels by county, visit http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/forestfire/restrictions.html.

We are happy to report that there were zero calls for our department for wild-land fires during this burning ban, Joe Pfaff, fire chief of the Stoddard-Bergen Fire Department, said in a press release.

...Because media, village of Stoddard, town of Bergen and fire department have worked together, zero dollars in property damage and zero acres were burnt, Pfaff said. This is also a savings to the taxpayers. Not having to send equipment and manpower to fight these very preventable fires saves hundreds of dollars per hour.
China says a military airplane landed on one of the countrys man-made islands earlier this week in the South China Sea.

The plane was on patrol Sunday when it received an emergency call to land on Fiery Cross Reef, Chinese media reported. It said the plane was told to remove three construction workers who were injured.

The workers were flown to Hainan Island, where they received medical treatment.

The man-made island has a 3,000-meter long runway for aircraft. Construction workers completed the runway last year. Test flights by commercial airlines started in January.

Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said the United States has serious concerns about Chinas actions in the South China Sea.

He said that other Asian countries have expressed their concerns about Chinas actions, both publicly and privately, to U.S. officials.

China claims much of the South China Sea. Several other nations, including the Philippines and Vietnam, have competing claims.

Im Pete Musto.

VOANews.com reported this story. Jim Dresbach adapted the report for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or visit our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

patrol  n. the act of walking or going around or through an area in order to make sure that it is safe

reef  n. a long line of rocks or coral or a high area of sand near the surface of the water in the ocean

runway  n. a long strip of ground where airplanes take off and land
Ecuadors President says billions of dollars will be needed to help the country rebuild from the powerful earthquake last Saturday.

The earthquake killed at least 413 people and injured more than 2,500. Thousands of people were left homeless.

President Rafael Correa visited the northeastern town of Portoviejo Monday to see some of the damage. Portoviejo and the nearby cities of Manta and Pedernales were among the areas that suffered the greatest damage in the earthquake.

The government says it will take loans from several international organizations, including the World Bank, to pay for its rescue and recovery efforts.

Ecuador is a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The economy of the small, South American country is in recession because of low oil prices on international markets.

A United States government agency announced Tuesday that it will send two teams to Ecuador. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will deploy one team to assist the government by studying the countrys damage and needs.

A second team will work with the United Nations to help organize international rescue activities. USAID has promised to donate at least $100,000 for supplies.

The U.N. Childrens Fund reported Tuesday that the earthquake damaged 119 schools, affecting at least 150,000 children.

Search-and-rescue crews have launched an effort to find survivors trapped in the wreckage of buildings destroyed in the earthquake. Three people were rescued from the wreckage of a shopping center in Manta after being trapped for 32 hours.

Thousands of soldiers and police have been deployed throughout Ecuador to provide temporary shelters and food. And aid workers from many nations -- including Spain, Peru, Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela -- have arrived to help.

Im Jonathan Evans.

This story first appeared on VOANews.com. Christopher Jones-Cruise adapted it for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section, or visit our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/voalearningenglish




The president of Iran promised to defend Muslim countries against terrorism and Israel, in a national speech on Sunday.

President Hassan Rouhani made the speech during a National Army Day parade. Rouhani also said Irans neighbors should not feel threatened by a show of military power.

Rouhani offered aid to other Islamic countries and said its military power is for defense.

If tomorrow your capitals face danger from terrorism or Zionism, the power that will give you a positive answer is the Islamic Republic of Iran, he said.

Zionism is political support for the creation and development of a Jewish homeland in Israel.

Rouhani praised fellow Iranians who are helping in Syria and Iraq to fight Islamic State terrorists.

Since its revolution in the late 1970s, Iran has had conflicts with its neighbors. They fought Iraq for nearly eight years starting in 1980. Saudi Arabia has been Irans recent rival. The two countries support opposite sides in the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars.

Iran displayed its weapons in the parade. The weapons included Russian-made S-300 air defense missiles. Iran also showed off its tanks, submarines and short-range missiles.

Im Jim Dresbach.

The Associated Press contributed to this article. Jim Dresbach adapted this story for Learning English and VOANews.com. Kathleen Struck was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or visit our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

Zionism  n. political support for the creation and development of a Jewish homeland in Israel
Ethiopian officials say at least 200 people were killed Friday in a raid by a South Sudanese ethnic group called the Murle.

Media reports say more than 100 women and children were kidnapped.

The Murle are based in the eastern Jonglei region of South Sudan.

Ethiopian communication minister Getachew Reda told the Associated Press close to 60 attackers were killed, said He said Ethiopian forces may pursue the gunmen and those kidnapped into South Sudan.

Ethiopia is home to thousands of refugees who have fled South Sudan. More than 270,000 of the refugees are in the Gambela region, which borders Ethiopia and South Sudan. The refugees fled to Ethiopia in late 2013 after war broke out in South Sudan.

Thousands of refugees have been killed and more than 2 million have been forced from their homes during the war.

The staff of VOA News wrote this story. Jim Dresbach adapted this story for Learning English. Kathleen Struck was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section or visit our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

region - n. area

cattle rustling  v. the theft of livestock, especially cattle


This is Whats Trending Today:

Justin Trudeau has been the Prime Minister of Canada for only about six months.

In that time, he has impressed people by greeting an airplane filled with Syrian refugees, showing off his ability to do yoga, and participating in traditional Indian dances.

But last Friday, he showed off his intelligence, and everyone loved it.

Trudeau talked with reporters after visiting a physics research center. He stood in front of a board with complex physics notations.

One reporter said, I was going to ask you to explain quantum computing But then he asked him a question about Canadas work in fighting against the Islamic State terror group.

Trudeau stopped the reporter. He told him he actually did know about quantum computing.

Trudeau then said: Normal computers work  its one or a zero. Theyre binary systems. What quantum states allow for is much more complex information to be encoded into a single bit.

Trudeau continued his explanation of quantum computing for about 20 more seconds.

A video posted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has already been viewed over 7 million times.

A lot of people are still talking about the video. They are impressed with Trudeau's explanation of quantum computing.

One Canadian wrote about the video on Facebook. My Prime Minister can explain the core principles of quantum computing? I just teared up a little.

Another person on Facebook wrote that "Trudeau is not just a pretty face. He is also someone who embraces his inner geek and nerd!"

But others on social media wondered if Trudeau should have answered the reporter's other question: about Canadas role in the fight against the Islamic State.

A Canadian blogger, J.J. McCullough, criticized Trudeau. He said he thought the question and answer on quantum computing were planned in advance. He added that reporters should challenge the young prime minister more often.

But most Canadians were not worried about that point of view. They were only celebrating their prime ministers intelligence.

One social media user wrote, I'm not going to second guess this man's ability to run the country, because it's obvious he's very capable.

And thats Whats Trending Today.

Im Ashley Thompson.

Dan Friedell adapted this story for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.

What did you think about Trudeaus answer about quantum computing? Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

geek  n. a person who is interested in and knows a lot about a particular field or activity

nerd  n. a person who is very interested in technical subjects, such as computers

noble  adj. having, showing, or coming from personal qualities that people admire

core  n. the central part of something

principle  n. the central part of something
For their annual 3rd grade Arbor Day poster contest, the Lexington Tree Board named Myia S. Hofaker from Sandoz Elementary School this years winner. Myia and the School will be honored on Arbor Day, Friday, April 29, at 2:30 p.m., at Sandoz School. Members of the Tree Board will be planting a tree on the grounds of Sandoz School, and presenting Myia with her poster framed for posterity.

The Tree Board judged 123 poster entries from Lexington elementary school pupils, but has no knowledge of the artist until the judging is over. Every year there are many talented artists and creative posters, which makes the judging challenging but rewarding. The purpose of the contest is to build appreciation at an early age for trees and the many benefits they give us.

Arbor Day was originated in Nebraska and has become a national day that celebrates trees, and is always the last Friday in April. The National Arbor Foundation is headquartered in Nebraska City.

Lexington Tree Board members are: Glenn Hawks, Brad Schott, Gordon Sellin, Marty Smith and Dave Stenberg.
In the midst of war of words between Hrithik Roshan and Kangana Ranauts legal counsels, there was a fresh development on Monday evening that the actress will be recording her statement with the cyber crime cell on April 30.

Kanganas fight with rumoured former beau Hrithik Roshan took an ugly turn when they both filed legal notices against each other sometime early this year.

However, over the past few days, their disagreement had deviated and focused on the cyber crime cells investigations following an FIR filed by Hrithik on March 5 which says that a fake email-ID has been created and an impostor has been operating it under his guise and misleading many of his fans, including Kangana. Kangana had not yet recorded her statement to assist in the investigations and hence the proceedings in the ongoing legal battle were stalled, Hrithik's counsel claimed.

Ever since, reports of Kangana being 'summoned' by the police and being asked to cooperate with their investigation have been doing the rounds. Kanganas lawyer, Rizwan Siddiquii said, We communicated the date (April 30) to the cyber crime on Saturday as that is the earliest when all three of us  Kangana, her sister Rangoli and I will be available.

Earlier during the day on Monday (April 18) there was strong buzz that the cyber crime team was to record Kangana's statement at her residence on Monday but the actress's counsel had denied any such development. "I have been receiving calls from media persons since last two hours. They have been told by Hrithik Roshan's PR team that police is coming to meet Kangana today (Monday). That's a blatant lie as no one is visiting Kangana, as has been communicated by Hrithik's team," the counsel said further adding, "My client is not a coward to disappear suddenly. We have always been handling the matter legally and without any fear," said Rizwan.

"He (Hrithik) should rather concentrate on acting on my counter-notice or responding to it, as it has been more than 45 days since he received it. Such acts of misleading media persons shows acts of desperation. Hrithik never bothered about any impostor in the last about two years. How has it become so important now? Hrithik did what he had to do, now he should wait patiently as law will take its own course," the counsel added.

The controversy began earlier this year after Kangana hinted at Hrithik being her 'ex' when she said in an interview that she failed to understand 'why exes do silly things to get your attention'.

Meanwhile, Hrithiks counsel, while attacking Kangana and her legal team, issued a statement saying, "Instead of giving so many media statements, they (Kangana) should record one official statement with the cyber crime cell which will really help the investigation. They are clearly more interested in media wars than anything else. The entire process of investigation is stalled because they haven't officially recorded their statement with the authorities." Reportedly, Hrithik has recorded his statement in the case and the cyber crime team has been trying to get Kangana's statement.

Refuting these allegations, Kanganas lawyer reiterated, My client is not interested in any media war nor is she interested in the matter initiated by Hrithik Roshan. She herself fails to understand as to why Hrithik did not file a proper complaint in May 2014 and proper investigation into the matter, if he really felt that there was someone impersonating him. His silence for two years has created serious doubts."

"What is more confusing is that in his belated complaint and public statement Hrithik had confirmed that many people have given him information about this alleged impostor. Even then till date on one else has been named or questioned. Suddenly Hrithik wants my client and her sister to be a witness in his complaint without asking any questions. He also wants my client not to see the copy of the FIR nor exercise any of her rights. Isnt he asking for too much?

Kanganas counsel further stated, He has done whatever he felt is legally right and my client is doing whatever is legally required to determine the truth. Hrithik should not interfere with my clients rights or try to pressurise her on the said matter any further, whether directly or indirectly.
Actor Johnny Depp's wife Amber Heard pleaded guilty on Monday to providing a false immigration document when the couple brought their two dogs into Australia last year. However, she managed to avoid jail time over what was dubbed the "war on terrier" debacle.

Prosecutors dropped more serious charges that Heard illegally imported the Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, into the country while Depp was filming the fifth movie in the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' series. A conviction on the two illegal importation counts could have sent the actress to prison for up to 10 years.

The couple submitted a videotaped apology to the court that was played during Monday's hearing.

In the decidedly low-budget clip, Depp and Heard sit stone-faced in front of the camera, delivering stilted lines about the importance of protecting Australia's biodiversity by respecting the country's strict quarantine laws. Bringing pets into Australia involves applying for a permit and quarantine on arrival of at least 10 days to prevent the spread of diseases such as rabies.

"When you disrespect Australian law," Depp says in the video, "they will tell you firmly."

"Australia is a wonderful island," Heard begins, "with a treasure trove of unique plants, animals and people."

"Australians are just as unique  both warm and direct," a grim-looking Depp later chimes in. "When you disrespect Australian law, they will tell you firmly."

The clip quickly began trending on Twitter, with many  including comedian Ricky Gervais  comparing it to a hostage video. Others questioned whether the couple's awkward delivery was a deliberate swipe at the Australian government.

Was the filmed apology over an international dog smuggling scandal supposed to look like a hostage video? Was the weirdly wooden delivery a deliberate protest by the unhappy actors? And does the Australian politician at the heart of the world's most bizarre biosecurity case think he could have directed it better himself?

Well, yes  at least to the last question  Australian Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce said on Tuesday when asked about the widely panned videotaped apology from Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

"I don't think he'll get an Academy Award for his performance ... he looked like he was auditioning for 'The Godfather,'" Joyce told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio with a chuckle. "At the end of it, we've got a message that is going all around the world right now  it's going off like a frog in a sock  telling people that if you come into this nation and you don't obey our laws, you're in trouble."

"Going off like a frog in a sock," by the way, is Australian slang for "going crazy."

The "war on terrier" debacle has been going crazy since last year, when Joyce helped catapult the case into global headlines by accusing the couple of smuggling their Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, into Australia.

Joyce, who is now Australia's deputy prime minister, prompted countless parodies by stating, "It's time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States." He then ominously warned that the dogs would be euthanized if they didn't flee the country within 72 hours  and flee they did, with just hours to spare.

Joyce sidestepped questions about the origins of the video on Monday, saying he didn't know if the agriculture department had helped with the script. The department later confirmed it had "provided input concerning the offense and biosecurity messaging," but said the video came about after Heard herself offered to publicly apologize for the incident.

He acknowledged the couple was likely less than enthusiastic about the project.

"I don't think it would have been something that they would have willingly wanted to do," Joyce told reporters.

During an interview on Channel 7's 'Sunrise' on Tuesday, Joyce couldn't contain his giggles as he watched the video again and rejected suggestions that he had written the script himself.

"As far as me directing that atrocious movie, no. Even I could have done a little bit better than that," Joyce said with a laugh before mimicking what he would have been like as the director: "Do it again, Johnny, do it with gusto, mate! A bit of gusto, come on. Rise to the camera, old trout! Rise to the camera!"

Watch the video here:

With inputs from AP
New Delhi: Facing protest, the government on Tuesday kept in abeyance for three more months the proposed move to bar withdrawal of employer's contribution to the provident fund corpus until the employee attains the age of 58 years.

"The notification (tightening PF withdrawal norms) will be kept in abeyance for three months till July 31, 2016. We will discuss this issue with the stakeholders," Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya told reporters.

His announcement comes in the midst of protest by labour unions in several parts of the country against the bar on withdrawing employer's contribution from the PF money.

People have also launched online campaign against the decision, which was to be implemented from February 10 but was later put on hold till April 30.

Police yesterday lathicharged a crowd of garment factory workers protesting against the amendment to the EPF Act.

Dattatreya said a meeting of the Central Board of Trustee would be called "to see how best the employers' contribution to EPF (3.67 per cent of basic wages) can be utilised for workers."

The Labour Ministry is also contemplating permitting withdrawal of all accumulations by Employees' Provident Fund Organisation's (EPFO) subscribers on grounds like purchase of house, serious illness, marriage and professional education of children. The matter has been referred to Law Ministry for clearance.

In February, the ministry had issued a notification restricting 100 per cent withdrawal of provident fund by members after unemployment of more than two months, among others.

Following the concerns raised by trade unions and other stakeholders, the ministry decided to keep the notification in abeyance till April 30. Its implementation has been again deferred till July 31, as per a Labour Ministry statement.

Now, the EPFO subscribers who are out of job for more than two months can file for full and final settlement of provident fund till July end.

"On the direction of Labour Minister, the said provision will now come into effect from August 1, 2016 by issue of an

amended notification," the statement said.

The proposal to amend the scheme to allow all accumulations on different grounds like purchase of house, serious illness, marriage and professional education of children, has been sent for vetting by the Law Ministry.

The proposal also allows withdrawal of all accumulation by EPFO members who have joined an establishment or firm of central or state government and became the member of contributory provident fund or old age pension under any scheme frame by them.

The unions have been demanding complete rollback of the decision tightening the PF withdrawal norms.

Earlier in February, the EPFO had amended the EPF Scheme 1952 to tighten the various norms for withdrawal of provident fund including increasing age limit for filing such claims by retiring employees to 58 years from 54 years.

Besides, the EPFO had also restricted withdrawal of PF to own contribution of subscribers and interest earned on that, if the claimant has remained unemployed for more than two months. The member would be able to withdraw employer's contribution on maturity.

It was stipulated that the requirement of two months' unemployment will not apply in cases of women members resigning from the services for the purpose of getting married, on account of pregnancy or child birth.

According to the new norms, subscribers will not be able to claim withdrawal of PF after attaining 54 years of age. They would have to wait till attaining the age 57 years.

As per the earlier norms, subscribers were allowed to claim 90 per cent of their accumulations in their PF account at the age of 54 years and their claims were settled just one year before their retirement.

As per experts, the earlier clause was relevant because there were establishments where retirement age was 55 years or 56 years. But this will create a problem in private as well as public sector where people opt for voluntary retirement.

In another change, EPFO had made it mandatory to wait till attaining the age of 57 for claiming PF withdrawal for transferring that to the Life Insurance Corporation of India for investment in Varishtha Pension Bima Yojana.

Earlier norms used to allow subscribers to claim 90 per cent of their accumulations for investing in the scheme after attaining the age of 55 years.
India's services export fell by 12.6 percent in February to $12.33 billion over the same month a year ago, the Reserve Bank data showed.

In February 2015, the services export was at $14.09 billion. Import of services too fell by 8.9 percent to $7.19 billion during the month, as compared with $7.89 billion in February 2015, as per the RBI data on International Trade in Services.

The services sector contributes about 55 percent to country's gross domestic product.

RBI releases the provisional aggregate monthly data on India's international trade in services with a lag of 45 days.

Monthly data on services are provisional and undergoes revision when the Balance of Payments (BoP) data are released on a quarterly basis.
New Delhi: Stunned by the massive violent protests in Bengaluru that led to torching of vehicles and even burning down of a police station that went on almost throughout the day, the Narendra Modi government at the Centre finally bowed to the people's demand and cancelled the notification on tightening of Provident Fund withdrawal norms.

The notification was issued on 10 February.

"The notification issued on 10th February, 2016 is cancelled. Now the old system will continue," Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya said at a press conference in Hyderabad.

"I will take ratification from CBT (Central Board of Trustees of EPFO)," he said after violence rocked Bengaluru for the second day when garment industry workers torched several buses and attacked a police station protesting against the tightening of rules.

Giving reasons for the rollback, Dattatreya said, "The reason is the request of trade unions. The earlier decision (to tighten the PF withdrawal norms) was also taken by the opinion of the trade unions. Now, when the trade unions are requesting, then we have rolled back the decision."

Earlier in the day in New Delhi, the Minister had said, "The notification (tightening PF withdrawal norms) will be kept in abeyance for three months till July 31, 2016. We will discuss this issue with the stakeholders."

Dattatreya said employees and workers need not have any misconceptions in the wake of the cancellation of the notification.

The decision would have barred withdrawal of the employer's contribution from the PF money till the age of 58 years.

In a placatory move, the Labour Ministry also said it was contemplating permitting withdrawal of all accumulations by Employees' Provident Fund Organisation's (EPFO) subscribers on grounds like purchase of house, serious illness, marriage and professional education of children. The matter has been referred to Law Ministry for clearance.

People have also launched online campaign against the decision, which was to be implemented from 10 February but was later put on hold till 30 April.

Protesters pelted stones at Hebbagodi Police Station in Bengaluru and torched seized vehicles parked there, as the spontaneous agitation with no trade union leading it spun out of control.

Police said they had to resort to lathicharge and fire teargas shells to disperse violent protesters.

At least two Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation buses and one of Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation have been set on fire, they said.

City Police Commissioner NS Megharikh said the situation was under control, but there "are some issues" on the city's outskirts.

"...we are at work, our officers are at the spot, reinforcement has already gone there. The situation is being brought under control," he said.

Police said other workers too have joined garment workers in the protest on Tuesday.

There are approximately over 12 lakh garment factory workers in Bengaluru, the city police chief said.

Workers opposing amendment to EPF Act have expressed fear that the new rule would take away their right over employer's contribution portion of provident fund till they attain 58 years.

Dattatreya said a meeting of the Central Board of Trustee would be called "to see how best the employers' contribution to EPF (3.67 per cent of basic wages) can be utilised for workers."

In February, the ministry had issued a notification restricting 100 per cent withdrawal of provident fund by members after unemployment of more than two months, among others.

Following the concerns raised by trade unions and other stakeholders, the ministry decided to keep the notification in abeyance till 30 April. Its implementation has later deferred till 31 July, as per a labour ministry statement.

Now, the EPFO subscribers who are out of job for more than two months can file for full and final settlement of provident fund till July end.

"On the direction of Labour Minister, the said provision will now come into effect from 1 August 2016 by issue of an amended notification," the statement said.

The proposal to amend the scheme to allow all accumulations on different grounds like purchase of house, serious illness, marriage and professional education of children, has been sent for vetting by the Law Ministry.

The proposal also allows withdrawal of all accumulation by EPFO members who have joined an establishment or firm of Central or state government and became the member of contributory provident fund or old age pension under any scheme frame by them.

The unions have been demanding complete rollback of the decision tightening the PF withdrawal norms.

Earlier in February, the EPFO had amended the EPF Scheme 1952 to tighten the various norms for withdrawal of provident fund including increasing age limit for filing such claims by retiring employees to 58 years from 54 years.

Besides, the EPFO had also restricted withdrawal of PF to own contribution of subscribers and interest earned on that, if the claimant has remained unemployed for more than two months. The member would be able to withdraw employer's contribution on maturity.

Earlier norms used to allow subscribers to claim 90 percent of their accumulations for investing in the scheme after attaining the age of 55 years.

With PTI inputs
Nobody denies that India needs to think big. It needs large corporations that can stand up to the headwinds of global competition. It needs brands that the world recognises.

But the more one looks at numbers, the more one is compelled to believe that Indias backbone is its small enterprises. Yes, large firms matter. But there is an urgent need to be concerned about small-scale industries as well.

The first time the strength of Indias small and the medium got highlighted was in July 2003. That was when two scholars -- Huang Yashengm, associate professor, Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tarun Khanna, professor, Harvard Business School  began writing extensively about India and China.

They talked about how China excelled in creating a few large enterprises, while Indias strength was in the flourishing number of small and medium enterprises.

This was later elaborated on by a host of other analysts.

A couple of years ago, R Vaidyanathan, a professor from IIM-Bangalore, wrote his book India Uninc in praise of Indias micro sector. It is here that he discovers a vibrant unincorporated sector which the government often (and wrongly) refers to as the unorganised sector.

Unlike the private corporate sector, which accounts for a 30% share of Indias GDP, the unincorporated sector accounts for a bigger share of 40% (see chart).

Most of these unincorporated businesses (a term borrowed from are into services like construction, transport (excluding the railways), real estate and trade. But even here, the organised private sector accounts for just a 12.5% share, if one takes away the 40% that comes from the unincorporated sector.

Most of the workforce in this sector works on a contract basis, without the comfort of gratuity, medical reimbursement, or provident fund. That is why, the governments move to provide pension and insurance to such people at very nominal rates of premium is a welcome step.

Unlike the organised sector, this sector has to make private arrangements for capital  often paying at least 2% as interest per month. Bad debts are very few, unlike those faced by the nationalised banks.

And, as long as the politician does not intervene, even micro-lending financial institutions enjoy significantly higher debt recovery rates than nationalised banks. The moves of the government to bring them into the fold of inclusive banking is, therefore, extremely relevant  so long as they too are not spoilt by irresponsible political demands of loan waivers.

Hitherto, loans have been taken against gold, small assets, and personal standing in the community. Loans are repaid, because the collection mechanisms are far more demanding than the banks that politicians love to control. For proof, look at the way cooperative banks (mostly controlled by the political class) had to be hauled up by the RBI recently.

So understand how responsible the small sector has been, do look at the RBI chart alongside which shows this sector being responsible for the least amount of bad debts. The medium sector accounts for the largest share (20.2%) of bad and restructured debts (and this includes the likes of Bhushan steel and Kingfisher). The second largest defaulter is the large industries segment (16.3%). The smallest defaulter is the small segment with bad and restructured debts of 13.2%.

And yet, this is the sector that is often the victim of extortion  not by what is known as the conventional mafia, but by the government agencies  by sales tax inspectors, inspectors of the shops and establishments department, police, food and drug inspectors and employees at octroi-checkposts. They fleece this largely unprotected unincorporated sector.

That this sector survives, despite the exploitation, is testimony to its business savvy and innovative approach to business.

These are the unsung heroes of the Indian economy. India needs to pay more attention to them.

Read Part I of this article here.
The provident fund withdrawal issue, which has been in the spotlight since the Union Budget in February, has found some support from the government. On Monday, the labour ministry curbed the planned restriction, and said withdrawal can be allowed for housing, major medical treatment for self and family members, medical, dental and engineering education of children, and for their marriage.

The changed were made after labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya received representations from trade unions.

The relaxation has also been extended to members who have joined an establishment belonging to or under the central or state government, and become a member of contributory provident fund or old age pension. These norms will come into effect from August, a Times of India report said.

A government release said the ministry had decided to pay the full accumulations to the credit of a member, including interest up to the date of payment, if he or she fulfils any of the above-mentioned conditions, the ToI report said.

Earlier this month, retirement fund body EPFO had deferred till 30 April implementation of new norms that restrict 100 percent withdrawal of provident fund by members after unemployment of more than two months, among others.

In February, the EPFO amended the EPF Scheme 1952 to tighten the various norms for withdrawal of provident fund including increasing age limit for filing such claims by retiring employees to 58 years from 54 years.

Besides, the retirement fund body also restricted withdrawal of PF to own contribution of subscribers and interest earned on that, if the claimant has remained unemployed for more than two months. The member would be able to withdraw employers contribution on maturity.

It was stipulated that the requirement of two months unemployment will not apply in cases of women members resigning from the services for the purpose of getting married, on account of pregnancy or child birth.

According to the new norms, subscribers will not be able to claim withdrawal of PF after attaining 54 years of age. They would have to wait till attaining the age 57 years.

With PTI inputs
The NDA government has done one more U-turn on provident fund norms. On Monday, the labour ministry said withdrawal from the PF can be allowed for fund usage in housing, major medical treatment for self and family members, medical, dental and engineering education of children, and for their marriage.

The account holders/ employees were earlier restricted from withdrawing their entire PF balance until the age of 58.

Earlier this month, the EPFO had deferred until 30 April implementation of new norms that restrict withdrawal of the corpus once the subscriber remain unemployed for more than two months.

The latest development has come after a slew of flip-flops by the government, that has given rise to discontent among the middle-class. At the outset, the latest relaxation seems to be an attempt to set its record straight.

But, is it really a move which will help the investor? Harsh Roongta, a Certified Financial Planner, doesn't think so. "I don't think the government has though through how the entire retirement fund issue should be handled," he says.

Listen to Firstpost's interview with Roongta below:
BEIJING China is "positive" towards proposals to establish a military hotline with India to deal with issues along their disputed border, Defence Minister Chang Wanquan told his Indian counterpart during a meeting in Beijing, state media reported.

The two nuclear-armed neighbours have been moving to gradually ease long-existing tensions between them.

Leaders of Asia's two giants pledged last May to cool a festering border dispute, which dates back to a brief border war in 1962, though a messy territorial disagreement remains.

Chang "reacted positively towards setting up a military hotline with India on border security", state news agency Xinhua reported late on Monday, after Chang's meeting with Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar.

Chang "also suggested the two sides strengthen defence exchanges and jointly safeguard peace and tranquillity of the border area", the report added.

Xinhua cited Parrikar as saying India is ready to work with China to maintain the stability of the border.

China lays claim to more than 90,000 sq km (35,000 sq miles) ruled by New Delhi in the eastern sector of the Himalayas. India says China occupies 38,000 sq km (14,600 sq miles) of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau in the west.

India is also suspicious of China's support for its arch-rival, Pakistan.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
MOGADISHU/ROME Somalia's government said on Monday about 200 or more Somalis may have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to cross illegally to Europe, many of them teenagers, when the boat they were on capsized after leaving the Egyptian shore.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella had said earlier on Monday that several hundred people appeared to have died in a new tragedy in the Mediterranean, after unconfirmed reports spoke of up to 400 victims of capsizing near Egypt's coast.

More than 1.2 million African, Arab and Asian migrants have streamed into the European Union since the start of last year, many of them setting off from North Africa in rickety boats that are packed full of people and which struggle in choppy seas.

"We have no fixed number but it is between 200 and 300 Somalis," Somali Information Minister Mohamed Abdi Hayir told Reuters by telephone when asked about possible Somali deaths in the latest incident.

Another Somali government statement, which offered condolences, put the number at "nearly 200", saying they were mostly teenagers. It said the boat they were on had capsized after leaving Egypt.

"There is no clear number since they are not travelling legally," the minister said, adding that he understood the boat might have been carrying about 500 people, of which 200 to 300 were Somalis "and most of them had died".

He did not give a precise timing for the incident.

One year ago, an estimated 800 migrants drowned off the Libyan coast when the fishing boat they were travelling in collided with a mercantile vessel that was attempting to rescue them - the most deadly Mediterranean shipwreck in decades.

Egyptian, Italian and Greek officials had earlier been unable to confirm the report of a new sinking.

A U.N. refugee agency official told Swiss broadcaster SRF he knew of 40 survivors from what appeared to be the same incident.

"We know there are 40 survivors and that as many as 460 people may have been on the boat who sailed from Egypt," the UNHCR's Beat Schuler told the broadcaster in what it said was a report from Malta.

In an article on the Somali National News Agency (SONNA) website, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud on Monday "sent his heartfelt condolence on his behalf and on behalf of the citizens of Somalia to the families who lost their loved ones".

The president urged Somalis to stand together in helping "stop such hazardous trips to overseas".

Somalia has a large diaspora, with many Somalis in Europe and the United States, after fleeing two decades of conflict. The Western-backed government is seeking to rebuild the Horn of Africa nation but is still battling an Islamist insurgency.

Islamist al Shabaab rebels often carry out gun and bomb attacks, particularly in the capital Mogadishu, where some hardy Somalis business people are returning to from abroad to invest.

(Reporting by Edmund Blair in Nairobi, Abdi Sheikh in Mogadishu, Gavin Jones and Steve Scherer in Rome, Michele Kambas in Athens, Michael Georgy in Cairo and Michael Shields in Zurich; Editing by Alison Williams)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Amritsar: The body of Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh, who died in suspicious circumstances in a Lahore jail last week, was brought back to India on Tuesday.

Pakistani authorities handed over the body to Border Security Force (BSF) officials at the Attari-Wagah land border check post after completing necessary formalities.

Close relatives and residents of Kirpal Singh's village were present at Attari, 30 km from here, when the body was brought back to India.

Kirpal Singh, a former serviceman, had been lodged in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat prison since 1992. He died on 11 April.

Pakistani authorities had labelled him a spy and got him convicted for terror attacks inside Pakistan.

While Pakistan attributed his death to heart attack, his family has alleged he was murdered in prison. Kirpal Singh, the family has maintained, had inadvertently crossed into Pakistan and was arrested and charged with spying by Pakistan authorities.
Mumbai: Former Maharashtra deputy Chief Minister and senior NCP leader Chhagan Bhujbal, presently under judicial custody in an alleged money laundering case, was on Monday admitted to ICU in south Mumbai after he complained of severe chest pain and high blood pressure.

"He was brought in today with severe chest pain and a very high blood pressure of 180/120. Thus, we immediately shifted him to ICU. He is conscious but unstable. He will be shifted to JJ Hospital once his condition stabilises," Rohan Sequeira, Associate Professor and Head of Medicine at multi-speciality Saint George Hospital, told PTI.

Bhujbal was shifted to the government-run hospital reportedly from Arthur Road jail here where he has been lodged after his arrest last month under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

The former PWD minister and his nephew and former MP Samir Bhujbal are in judicial custody till 27 April.

The ED had filed two FIRs against Bhujbal, his son and nephew among others under the provisions of PMLA, based on Mumbai Police FIRs, to probe the Delhi-based Maharashtra Sadan construction scam and the Kalina land grabbing case.
Srinagar: Restrictions imposed in Jammu and Kashmir's Handwara town were completely lifted after six days after the four-hour curfew relaxation on Tuesday remained peaceful.

Life returned to normal as markets opened when curfew was relaxed in the morning from 8 am to noon.

"Life has returned to normal in Handwara town after six days today. It was decided to lift curfew restrictions completely from the town," a senior police officer told IANS in Srinagar.

The civil administration also removed an army bunker from the town after 20 years, using an earthmover machine to demolish the concrete bunker in Handwara Chowk.

Counter-insurgency Rashtriya Rifles soldiers had vacated the bunker last Tuesday when a mob attacked the bunker and set it ablaze partially.

Trouble had erupted in the town after wild rumours spread there last Tuesday that a school girl had been molested by a soldier while she was using a public convenience facility, near the bunker in the town square.

Five people were killed in firing by security forces in the widespread violence that engulfed Handwara and adjacent areas in Kupwara district after the molestation allegation.

The girl later deposed before the chief judicial magistrate (CJM) of Handwara that she had not been molested by anybody and that some local youth were responsible for accusing her and spreading the molestation rumour in the town.

Based on her statement, police on Monday arrested a local youth named Hilal Ahmad Bandey who the girl said had spread the rumour in the town.

Kupwara district magistrate Rajeev Rajan has suspended five lower-rung government employees in the district for stoking passions during the Handwara flare up.
New Delhi: The Indian Air Force on Tuesday came out with its indigenisation road map till 2025, highlighting the future technologies and new weapon system capabilities that it plans to induct.

Brought out in the form of a booklet, the road map aims to help the Indian domestic defence industry to frame its plans and policies.

IAF is in the process of modernising and expanding its inventory to keep up with the changing geo-political scenario and emerging threat perception, IAF chief Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha said.

He underlined that there exists a huge potential for indigenisation in the manufacturing of capital equipment and their maintenance spares.

Economical and optimal exploitation of such a potential by the Indian industry would lead to greater self reliance, he said.

Besides hi-tech equipment like propulsion technology, engine systems and missile and bombs, the IAF has also pointed out that indigenisation is much-needed in smaller parts like tyre of the aircraft, batteries, bulbs, filters, fuel oil and lubricants.

It also listed 173 requirements for maintenance of aircraft fleet and systems. However, the problem was that the annual requirement of most of the products listed was less than 30 units each.

Before the release of the booklet, Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh said that it will provide useful inputs to the industry to map their potential with the requirements of the Indian Air Force.

In his address, Singh also emphasised that the bureaucracy needs to think keeping in mind the force and others. Asked if he meant the bureaucracy was living in a cocoon, he said that he meant the overall environment.

"In defence, as well as in others areas, we have had bureaucrats being sent to jail for taking an independent decision, not necessarily on receipt of some money or the other," he said.

Singh added that they "have been sent to jail because things have been brought out in the media".

"Media pressure has become so much in certain issues, for whatever way it is motivated by the media, people have had to pay the price without actually having taken any money. So those are things that have restricted the flow of the pen of the bureaucracy, so therefore they have cocooned themselves,

protected themselves. It is not in the best interest of the country," he said.
New Delhi: Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi said on Tuesday that the government is mulling criminalising marital rape, a month after her statement in Parliament that the concept cannot be "suitably applied in the Indian context" created an uproar.

Gandhi said there is an attempt by the government to move forward on the issue.

Replying to a question on whether there is an attempt to push for criminalisation of marital rape, Gandhi said, "Now there is".

She was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an event to launch 'Beti Bachao Beti Padhao' campaign in 61 additional districts.

Gandhi expressed hope that there will be a decision soon on the issue.

Earlier, the Home Ministry had sought the Law Commission's opinion on the matter during the course of its comprehensive review of the criminal justice system.

The minister had come under fire last month over her reply in Parliament to a question on whether the government had plans to criminalise marital rape.

Gandhi had said, "It is considered that the concept of marital rape, as understood internationally, cannot be suitably applied in the Indian context due to various factors e.g. level of education/illiteracy, poverty, myriad social customs and values, religious beliefs, mindset of the society to treat marriage as a sacrament, etc."

Gandhi had later said the ministry could consider taking steps to criminalise marital rape provided there is ample proof of enough number of such complaints.
New Delhi: Government on Tuesday night made a U-turn on the Kohinoor issue saying it will make all efforts to bring back the valued diamond it had said in the Supreme Court was "neither stolen nor forcibly taken" by British rulers but given to it by erstwhile rulers of Punjab.

In a statement, the government claimed it has not yet conveyed its views to the court "contrary to what is being misrepresented" in the media.

The government statement came a day after the Solicitor General told the Supreme Court, "Kohinoor cannot be said to have been forcibly taken or stolen as it was given by the successors of Maharaja Ranjit Singh to East India Company in 1849 as compensation for helping them in the Sikh wars."

The court was hearing a PIL which sought government action for the return of over USD 200 million Kohinoor diamond from the UK.

Wishing to put on record that the news items on the issue "are not based on facts", the official release said the government reiterates its resolve to make all possible efforts to bring back the Kohinoor Diamond in an amicable manner.

The release said the factual position is that the matter is sub-judice at present and the PIL is yet to be admitted.

"The Solicitor General of India was asked to seek the views of the government of India, which have not yet been conveyed. The Solicitor General of India informed the honourable court about the history of the diamond and gave an oral statement on the basis of the existing references made available by the ASI.

"Thus, it should be reaffirmed that the government of India has not yet conveyed its views to the court, contrary to what is being misrepresented," it said.

The release also noted that the court granted six weeks time on the prayer of the Solicitor General to take instructions for making his submission in the matter.

"... With regard to the Kohinoor Diamond too, government of India remains hopeful for an amicable outcome whereby India gets back a valued piece of art with strong roots in our nation's history," it added.

"The status report on which the preliminary submission was made by the Solicitor General have references to the stand taken by Governments earlier that the Kohinoor was a gift and cannot be categorised as an object stolen.

"The material further has references to the views of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru dating back to 1956. Pandit Nehru went on record saying that there is no ground to claim this art treasure back. He also added that efforts to get the Kohinoor back would lead to difficulties," the release said.

According to the release, Nehru also said, "To exploit our good relations with some country to obtain free gifts from it of valuable articles does not seem to be desirable. On the other hand, it does seem to be desirable that foreign museums should have Indian objects of art."

Ever since Narendra Modi has taken over as Prime Minister, it said his efforts led to three significant pieces of India's history coming back home which did not affect the relations with the respective countries.

"In October 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel returned a 10th century Indian statue of Goddess Durga that was stolen in 1990 and found in 2012 at a museum in Germany.

"In April 2015, then Canadian PM Stephen Harper returned a sculpture known as the 'Parrot Lady', which dates back to almost 900 years.

"Then Australian PM Tony Abbott, on his India visit in 2014 had returned antique statues of Hindu deities that were in Australian art galleries.

"None of these gestures affected India's relations with either Canada, Germany or Australia. It was Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who as the Chief Minister got back the ashes of Shyamji Krishna Varma almost 70 years after his death," the release said.
Additional troops have been dispatched to Kashmir in the wake of the enraged demonstrations that shook Kupwara district last week. This is a depressing repeat of what happened in 2010, the last time stone-pelting demonstrations by young Kashmiris put the state on the back foot. Additional troops are likely to be as ineffective  indeed, counterproductive  as they were that year.

The tragic fact is that troop deployment seems to be the states reflexive response. When lathicharges do not work, they fire teargas shells. When that does not work, and those new troops provoke more anger, they try a water cannon. Then, they fire bullets. To the communities on which these tactics are used, these can come across as a killing spree animated by hatred and repression of that community  as it does to many Kashmiris.

The essential theme of these state responses is 'law and order'. In fact, they have little to do with the law in terms of the Constitutions objectives, only with the aim of imposing perceivable order  that is, lack of public disturbance. These responses were developed by the British, who set up Indias modern policing system. They set it up for colonial objectives. That is how Kashmiris now perceive and project them  as attempts to maintain colonisation.

Handling this sort of eruption of rebellion effectively requires responsiveness before the eruption. But that is something the state does not seem equipped, or willing, to engage in. Riot control is what it does. So, things must reach riot point before the state responds.

I am reminded of a telephone call in the late summer of 2008. There were almost daily demonstrations by irate youth in Srinagar. I was taking a walk in a Srinagar park when my mobile phone rang. It was a senior officer at the Centre whose job it was to handle Kashmir. I had met him during a discussion of my book on Kashmir, when he had said it had given him several important new perspectives. 'What is happening, he asked plaintively over the phone. 'What do we do?

I replied that I could offer no advice while the place was burning. 'Call me in the winter, I said, 'and we can talk in detail about what needs to be done. I actually expected him to call in winter. He did not.

He did call again in the summer of 2010, when the place was burning again. Youth were being killed in police and CRPF firing on an almost daily basis as the state struggled to control the situation and restore order. I realised with a sinking feeling that policymakers dont actually make policy. Nobody does. There is no policy, only those terms: 'control', 'situation' and 'order'.

If someone were trying to formulate policy, the key point to understand would be that young Kashmiris view themselves as innocent victims. They resent being viewed as 'terrorists more than almost anything. It does not help that the state sees Kashmir as 'terrorism-affected and so kept the apparatus of counterinsurgency, and repressive special laws, in place even after the previous militancy ended around 2006.

Young people who had nothing to do with that militancy resent being treated with suspicion and not being given the rights which they think Indians beyond Kashmir have. The fact to keep in mind is that the majority of Kashmirs population was born in a time of violence. Throughout their lives, they have only known violence and instability. There is a great deal of trauma and stress among them.

Given the skewed child sex ratio (CSR) in the new century, a significant majority of todays traumatised young are male. The 2011 census indicates a greater increase in the CSR in Jammu and Kashmir than in any other state. By and large, violence has inured these young men to fear  including of death. Also, this generation has been bombarded with exclusionary ideas regarding religion and society.

Since they resent the apparatus of counterinsurgency, which has given them a siege mentality since their childhood, deploying additional troops is a bad idea. It will increase their anger.

Of course, while the place is bubbling with rebellion, troop deployment appears like the only appropriate emergency response. As in 2008 and 2010, this is not the moment to engage in more appropriate ways. Those opportunities have gone. Hopefully, they will come again. That will be the time to engage, to sort out bottlenecks, ease resentment.
Attari: The body of Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh, who died under mysterious circumstances in a Pakistani jail, arrived at Attari on Tuesday in the presence of tearful family members and was handed over to Indian authorities who said it would be given to the family after a fresh post-mortem.

Kirpal's family members, including his sister Jagir Kaur, Punjab Cabinet Minister Gulzar Singh Ranike and Amritsar Deputy Commissioner Varun Roojam, besides other senior officials, were present at the Joint check post at the Wagah border to receive the body.

The body, in a coffin, was carried by porters on the Indian side even as family members showered flowers on the coffin.

The body was taken in a van to the Amritsar civil hospital for a post-mortem examination.

The post-mortem was unable to establish the cause of death, said Ashok Sharma, head of the panel that conducted the post-mortem, reported ANI. It will be established once the panel goes through report of chemical examiner and the previous post-mortem, he was quoted as saying.

The panel also did not find any signs of foul play, he said.

Kirpal body's post mortem ws already done.Some organs were missing as when postmortem is conducted certain organs are taken to test-Dr.Ashok  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

No external or internal injury found on Kirpal Singh's body-Dr. Ashok Chawla,Head of panel who conducted post mortem pic.twitter.com/sJxKQkWcHU  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

Pakistani authorities had attributed his death to heart attack, but his family has alleged he was murdered in prison.

Kirpal's nephew said that the family wants another post mortem as there are injury marks on his face and body, reported ANI.

There are injury marks on his face & body. We want another post mortem here so truth comes out-Kripal Singh's Nephew pic.twitter.com/TeteP3d2UF  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

Dalbir Kaur, sister of another Indian Sarabjit Singh, who too had died in a Pakistani jail in May 2013, was also present at Attari. An official posted at Attari border said the body would be handed over to the family for performing last rites after a postmortem examination, which is to be conducted at the "earliest".

Struggling to hold back her tears, Jagir said the family would perform Kirpal's last rites in Gurdaspur once his body was handed over to them.

Kirpal Singh had allegedly crossed Wagah border into Pakistan in 1992 and was arrested. He was subsequently sentenced to death in a serial bomb blasts case in Pakistan's Punjab province. Kirpal was found dead in his cell last Monday at Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore. A post-mortem examination had been done in Pakistan. Kirpal, from Gurdaspur, had reportedly been acquitted in the case by the Lahore High Court but his death sentence could not be commuted because of unknown reasons.

Kirpal Singh, the family has maintained, had inadvertently crossed into Pakistan and was arrested and charged with spying by Pakistan authorities.

Kirpal's family had met union home minister Rajnath Singh and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in New Delhi last week to seek immediate repatriation of his body to India.

The Punjab government has offered to extend all help and relief to Kirpal's family on the same lines as given to Sarabjit Singh, who was murdered in the same prison in Lahore in April 2013.

With inputs from agencies
Despite facing stiff opposition from pro-Hindutva groups and being harassed by caste activists in Mandya for 'falling prey' to love jihad, MBA graduates Ashitha Babu and Shakeel Ahmed exchanged vows in a closed ceremony in Mysuru on Sunday.

Apart from family and friends, policemen too attended the inter-faith wedding, particularly to monitor any untoward act against the couple from the saffron brigade that had previously opposed the couple's decision to marry.

The police, according to The New Indian Express, barricaded the entrance of the wedding hall and around 100 police personnel, including five inspectors, were deployed at different points. Police, in civilian clothes, were also deployed inside the wedding hall.

According to a report by NDTV, right-wing Hindu activists protested against the wedding outside the bride's home on 12 April, calling it "love jihad" and alleging that Shakeel, who is a Muslim, was forcing Ashitha, a Hindu, to convert to Islam by marrying her.

Since the time the two families collectively agreed to the marriage, members of Bajrang Dal and Mandya Vokkaligara Sangha opposed, claiming it was a case of love jihad.

A group of people claiming to be Bajrang Dal activists came to our house on 12 April and said they wanted to guide my daughter. They demanded that she abandon her plans to marry Shakeel. When she refused, they made some remarks and my daughter started crying, said Ashithas mother, Uma Devi on speaking to The Indian Express.

"We told Bajrang Dal activists it is not love jihad, but a marriage between children of two friends. But they were not ready to listen to us," Dr Narendra Babu, Ashitha's father, was quoted saying by The Times of India.

After the Hindu groups had spoken to the parents, they staged protests outside the residence of the girl shouting love jihad slogan. The group dispersed after police intervention.

According to a report by The Hindu, local Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) activists, terming them a case of love jihad, had launched a campaign against the families on Tuesday.

It was after police intervention that the protesters dispersed.

"Even if I get married to a Hindu guy, I have to practise traditions of his family. I'm in love with him and I'm getting happily married with the consent of our parents, " Ashitha had said, as reported by Deccan Chronicle.

The couple had been friends for 12 years before seeking the consent of their parents to get married to each other. Ashitha converted to Islam a few days before the wedding, changing her name to Shaista Sultan.

Although the relatives of the family were initially taken aback by the decision, they supported the wedding of Shaista and Shakeel later.
A juvenile justice board on Tuesday dismissed the bail plea of a minor accused in a hit-and-run case that led to the death of a 33-year-old business consultant.

According to informed sources, the juvenile justice board rejected the bail application of the minor, observing that he was a repeat offender. He had been earlier challaned in another case of rash driving.

According to a report in NDTV, the board said, after stating that the teen had been driving for two years, "Parents gave him a car, which endangered our lives. It's bad parenting."

His father was granted bail by a court on 10 April, two days after he was arrested.

Police had apprehended the minor offender on 5 April, a day after he killed Sidhharth Sharma by hitting him with his Mercedes car the previous night when the victim was crossing a road to buy eatables.

The minor was then freed on bail as he was only booked under section 304A (causing death by negligence) of the Indian Penal Code.

After an uproar and allegations that police officers were going soft on the accused, the police took a U-turn.

The boy's father was also arrested under section 304 (abetting the crime of culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of IPC for letting his minor son to drive even after knowing that he had caused an accident earlier.

Police had earlier told the court that CCTV footage showed that the minor offender was driving his car at great speed in a residential area.

According to a report in The Indian Express, the juvenile allegedly rammed the same car he killed Sidhharth Sharma with into a fruit vendor, also hitting another car in the process. This incident happened on 16 February 2015 in Delhi's Maurice Nagar area and the Delhi police had not lodged a complaint against him then, they merely let the juvenile off with a warning.

The NDTV report further stated that the juvenile had been fined twice for speeding and once for parking in a wrong spot in the last year alone. The report added that if the teen is found guilty, he would be sent to a juvenile home for two years.

With inputs from IANS
Bhubaneshwar: Odisha government today said it will provide free drinking water to urban poor households and announced earmarking Rs 300 crore for development of infrastructure for potable water.

The decision was taken at a high-level meeting presided over by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik here at a time when people across Odisha are facing acute drinking water crisis.

"The chief minister directed that about Rs 300 crore given by 13th Finance Commission to all panchayats in the state, which is now with the district administration, will be earmarked for drinking water infrastructure development," Special Relief Commissioner (SRC) P K Mohapatra said.

Patnaik directed district collectors to utilise MGNREGS and Gopabandhu Gramin Yojana funds for creation of check dam and water harvest projects in their respective areas.

He said 30 per cent of the funds provided by the 14th Finance Commission and the 4th State Finance Commission would be utilised for the development of infrastructure for drinking water.

The Chief Minister also approved the Rural Development Department's decision to cancel leave of all rural water supply and sanitation employees, including engineers, till the end of summer. Patnaik ordered verification of all water supply hot spots under the rural water supply department within seven days and asked the chief engineer concerned to submit a verification certificate by 30 April.

He also directed the departments concerned to dig one tubewell each in all 27,711 partially covered habitations in the state at a cost of Rs 195 crore. The SRCs office will release Rs 25 crore to augment water supply through pipes, tankers and additional vans to the urban areas, Mohapatra said.
New Delhi: NIA has readied fresh Letters Rogatory (LRs) to be sent to Pakistan containing the addresses of four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists who attacked the strategic Pathankot IAF base in January.

The LRs are being dispatched notwithstanding indications from the Pakistani side that it was not yet ready to receive Indian investigators to carry forward the probe in the January two attack that left seven security personnel dead. Four terrorists were also killed in the 80-hour gunbattle.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had put the pictures of the four dead terrorists on its official website and asked general public for help in identifying them.

According to official sources, the central probe agency, set up in the aftermath of 26/11 Mumbai attacks, was flooded with many emails, some of which originated from Pakistan also, giving information about the terrorists.

NIA, during its interaction with the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) of Pakistan, had sought details about the place of residence of the terrorists whose names had been shared with the visiting probe team. However, there was no response from Pakistan on the India's request.

The five-member JIT also comprising an ISI officer had visited India from 27 March to 1 April during which they visited the air base and recorded statements of 16 witnesses.

During the exercise of verification of the information gathered through emails, the NIA showed the pictures and addresses to some of the jailed terrorists of Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group lodged in jails here and got important inputs from them.

The address of Nasir Hussain, one of the terrorists, was located at Vehari, a town 100 kms from Multan in Punjab province of Pakistan. He is the son of Mohd Mansa and stays at House number WB-89, Mohalla Chak in the town.

Hussain was the Jaish terrorist who had called his mother Khayyam Babbar minutes before the terror group launched a suicide attack inside the IAF base on the intervening night of January one and two.

The other terrorist was identified as Hafiz Abu Bakar, son of Mohammed Fazil and resident of Gujranwala in Pakistan.

While Umer Farooq was stated to be son of Abdul Samad who stays in Madni Road, Mohalla Madisah, Shahdadpur in Sindh province of Pakistan, the fourth terrorist Abdul Qayum was the son of Mohamed Amin, resident of Chachar, Tehsil Pano Akil in district Sukkur of the Sindh province of Pakistan.

India has already sent Letters Rogatory to Pakistan in which it had asked for voice samples of Jaish chief Maulana Masood Azhar, his brother Abdul Rauf and Khayyam Babbar, mother of Hussain.

In the meanwhile, NIA Director General Sharad Kumar on Tuesday said his team was ready to visit Pakistan as and when there was a clearance from Islamabad.

"We have handed over all the documents sought by the JIT and I believe that the evidence handed over to Pakistan can stand scrutiny in any court of law internationally," Kumar said.

After the JIT returned home, Pakistan High Commissioner to India Abdul Basit had poured cold water on India's expectations that a team of NIA investigators would be allowed to visit Pakistan in connection with the Pathankot terror strike probe on the basis of reciprocity.

"The whole investigation is not about the question of reciprocity in my view. It is more about extending cooperation or our two countries cooperating with each other to get to the bottom of the incident," Basit had said earlier this month.

In Islamabad, Pakistan Foreign office had issued a statement about JIT's visit and said "...the witnesses belonging to the Indian security forces were not produced before it."
New Delhi: Three members of an Indian family burnt to death after a mob locked them in their house and set it on fire following rumours of their involvement in human sacrifices, police said Tuesday. Ten men have been arrested over the incident on Sunday in Jharkhand state when hundreds of villagers armed with sticks and other sharp weapons targeted the family, an officer said.

"There was a rumour that they had kidnapped children for sacrifice, which was followed by an attack," Kartik S, police chief of Lohardaga district where the incident happened, told AFP.

Five other family members were rescued from the burning house in Lohardaga, 75 kilometres from the eastern state's capital Ranchi. Kartik said the head of the family, Gowardhan Bhagat, had been accused by locals of being a sorcerer.

According to local media reports, Bhagat had been jailed many years ago, allegedly for beheading someone, fuelling fears of his involvement in ritual killings. "We don't have any evidence that he kidnapped children for sacrifice now," Kartik said, adding that police were investigating if the attack was orchestrated because of a personal grudge against Bhagat.

Some 2,097 people, mostly women, were killed in India between 2000 to 2012 after being branded witches, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

Some states including Jharkhand have introduced special laws to try to curb crimes against people accused of witchcraft.

There are also occasional reports of human sacrifices in rural and remote areas.

On Monday Delhi police rescued a kidnapped four-month-old girl and arrested three men including the infant's uncle who had allegedly sold her to a sorcerer for sacrifice. A suspected occultist last year beheaded a five-year-old boy in a ritual sacrifice in northeastern India before being lynched by angry villagers.
Raipur: Two unidentified men armed with sharp-edged weapons barged into a church in Chhattisgarh's Bastar district and allegedly set ablaze a Bible and other articles besides thrashing the pastor and his pregnant wife, police said on Tuesday.

The incident took place on Sunday evening at village Karanji Matagudi Para under Parpa police station limits.

"As per the written complaint of Pastor Deenbandhu Sameli, an FIR has been lodged in this connection. Continuous patrolling is being done in the region to nab the attackers. We are pretty sure that the culprits will be arrested soon," Bastar Superintendent of Police RN Dash told PTI.

As per the complaint, two men identified themselves as belonging to some other denomination of the Christian community and expressed their desire to pray in the church.

After entering inside the premises, they launched an attack on the pastor and poured inflammable liquid on the Holy Bible, furniture and other religious material kept inside and set them ablaze.

"After getting information about the incident, we immediately rushed to the spot and deployed a policeman for security throughout the night," Dash said.

A case under sections 295 (injuring or defiling place of worship), 392 (robbery), 452 (house-trespass after preparation for hurt), 435 (mischief by fire or explosive substance), 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt) and 34 (common intention)

of the IPC was registered against the unidentified persons, he added.

Meanwhile, president of Chhattisgarh's Christian Forum Arun Pannalal alleged that the attack was carried out by the workers of Bajrang Dal and accused police of "covering up" the incident.

"This was third attack on the religious premises of Christian community in the region. It was carried out by the goons of Bajrang dal. Police are trying to cover it up," Pannalal claimed.

The attackers were armed with a knife, hammer, sword and petrol.

After breaking locks of church premises, they barged inside and poured petrol on the Bible, other holy books, furniture and mike set and torched them, he said.

They also poured petrol on pastor Deenanath and his pregnant wife, Meena and tried to set them afire but somehow they managed to escape, Pannalal added.

Police personnel immediately reached the spot after getting report of the incident and deployed night gaurds there, he added.
India may finally get some closure on the treasured Kohinoor diamond after the the government told the Supreme Court on Monday that it was neither stolen nor was it forcible taken.

Our beef with the Brits over the Kohinoor began right after independence and 69 years later we may have reached a sensible conclusion.

The Centre has said that the Kohinoor diamond was handed over to the Queen of England as per a legal agreement. It was was given to the British by Maharaja Ranjit Singh after he was defeated in the Anglo-Sikh War of 1849.

But on what basis should the Queen return our prized diamond? And why should she return it to us?

For beginners, Pakistan also lays claims on the diamond. They believe that it was taken from the Sikh empire of Lahore. It does not belong to present-day India.

Descendants of Maharaja Ranjit Singh have claimed that the diamond is theirs and that they want it back. Jaswinder Singh Sandhanwalia, who lives in Amsterdam for instance, says what is rightfully theirs should be returned.

The Afghans also have reason to believe the Kohinoor belongs to them. A report in The Guardian from 2000 says that the Taliban had asked the Queen to give the Kohinoor back to Afghanistan as their claims state that Ranjit Singh forced Durranis to surrender it.

After Punjab was subjugated in 1849, everything that belonged to the Sikh empire was confiscated and went into the treasury of the British East India Company in Lahore  this included the Kohinoor diamond. The Queen, who was in Britain, received the Diamond in July 1850 and later modified to fit into the Queens crown.

What India has been demanding

Soon after Independence, the Indian government made a request seeking the Kohinoor diamond. They believed it was rightfully theirs but the request was made in vain. In 1953 again, during the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, India requested to have it back. However, the British for the second time refuted Indias claims and said the ownership is non-negotiable.

When Queen Elizabeth II visited India in 1997 to mark 50 years of Independence from Britain, many Indians demanded that the she return the diamond then.

In the year 2000, quite a few members of the parliament signed on a letter demanding the diamond be given back. The letter claimed that it was taken illegally. Britain, however, said that ownership of the diamond was impossible to trace as there were myriad claims over it.

Governments sensible argument

The Indian government in April 2016 said that it is not right for India to stake claims in the diamond as it was rightfully handed over to the British as per the treaty that Ranjit Singh signed.

Under the Antiquities and Art Treasure Act, 1972, the only items the Archaeological Survey of India can retrieve are those that were illegally exported out of the country and this excluded items that were taken out before independence.

The matter goes to court

The apex court heard a PIL filed by All India Human Rights and Social Justice Front which was seeking directions to the High Commissioner of United Kingdom for return of the diamond besides several other treasures.

The PIL had also made Ministry of External Affairs and Ministry of Culture, High Commissioners of UK, Pakistan and Bangladesh as parties in the case.

Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, who was appearing for the government in the court, is reported to have told the court that the 105-karat diamond, which has become a part of popular culture, was handed over to the East India Company by Punjab's Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

There is really no basis on which the Queen should return the diamond. If people still care about the diamond, it makes things pretty complex. The United Kingdom will have to return a lot of other things. As David Cameron had said during his visit to India in 2010 If you say yes to one you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty.

Lets consider a scenario where the Queen does return the diamond. The priests in Puri may want the diamond claiming that it is "Lord Jagannath's property and should be handed over by the British government". Jaswinder Singh Sandhanwalia may fly down from Amsterdam, get all the Sikhs together and start a Kohinoor revolution.

There will be war.

Basically, there is no point arguing over the ownership of 100-year-old treasure, wasting taxpayers money in securing a diamond even if we were to get it back, misplacing national pride on a piece of carbon. Present day Republic of India never owned the diamond, only historical kingdoms did, so let's move on.

With inputs from PTI
Panaji: Goa government, along with a few social outfits, is trying to bring a nomadic tribe whose traditional occupation is hunting and eating monkeys into the mainstream society.

"Its not an easy project. These people of 'Wanar-mare'(literally, monkey-hunters) tribe who have no fixed address do not even enjoy the scheduled tribe (ST) status, and therefore do not get any resultant benefits.

"They have been wandering in the forests all these years without possessing a single government document. We have started an effort to get them into the mainstream," said collector of South Goa district, Sachin Shinde.

Currently some hundred members of the tribe are camping in the Sanguem tehsil. South Goa administration, along with organisations like Dabhal Gramvikas Parishad, is working towards helping them earn a decent livelihood.

The tribe is found in the jungles of Western Ghats in Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka.

"The introduction of Forest Conservation Act made them give up their traditional hunting, and now they work in sugarcane farms," said Sachin Tendulkar, a farmer and social worker associated with Dabhal Gramvikas Parishad. Some 17 families from the tribe are also camping at Nirancal village.

"Farmers hire them as they work for relatively low wages. But they get exploited. They live in temporary huts in forested areas where they are often at the mercy of forest officers," Tendulkar said.

The attempt to rehabilitate the tribe began with the children. Youth from the village helped the officials enroll the children in government primary schools and anganwadis (nursery schools run in rural/tribal areas).

"The families were given ration cards under the National Food Security Act," he said. The members of the tribe now also have Aadhar cards and even bank accounts opened under the Jan Dhan Yojna.

"The biggest problem was that they had no electricity in their huts. When we met them, they had mobile phones, but no power to charge them and they used to pay to get the phones charged," Tendulkar said.

Organisations like Sesa Workers Union, Mineral Foundation of Goa and Rotary Club funded solar lamps for them. Goa Bagayatdar Sahakari Society Maryadit Limited, one of the oldest cooperative institutes in the state, provided school bags and umbrellas to the children.

According to Tendulkar, Wanar-mare tribe is similar to Katkaris of Maharashtra, but lack ST status.

"When we moved the proposal, questions were raised as to whether they are originally from Goa. This is a nomadic tribe, so they have no state of origin," he said.
Agartala: As his family was at its wits end to obtain 50-year-old Ranjan Saha's death certificate, the banana seller startled one and all by returning home 16 years after he had been abducted by armed militants who held him captive at their hideout in Bangladesh. He was let off for "good behaviour" as he never tried to escape.

"Since my abduction, I had been pleading with the rebels to release me as I was the lone bread earner of my (four-member) poor family. But they always became furious and tortured me," the feeble-voiced Saha told IANS.

"They made me do various type of works in their camp deep in a jungle in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) (in southeast Bangladesh). I do not know the exact name of the place. There are at least 25 other people, mostly kidnapped by the extremists, also working in the same camp," he added.

Saha was kidnapped by the extremists of the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) from Jampuijala, 35 km south of Agartala, on 18 April, 2000, along with two others. He had gone to Jampuijala to buy bananas, which he would sell in Agartala.

"The guerrillas also kidnapped at gunpoint two other traders along with me. They kept us blindfolded for more than a month as we had to trek through mountainous terrain before we reached the militant's camp in the CHT," he said.

"The abductors subsequently learnt that we would not be able to pay any ransom. Hence they made us do various types of work like cleaning and maintaining the camp, cooking and collecting water, besides other odd jobs. The two other captives who were kidnapped along with me were shifted to other unknown locations," Saha said.

"Despite my inability to do so due to ill health and hostile surroundings, I quietly continued with the hard work. The food was sometimes unpalatable. I was constantly praying to god to liberate me from this awful life for the sake of my wife, two sons and my beloved daughter," he said

According to Saha, "the militants were pleased as I never tried to run away from their camp".

"Recently, god might have heard my prayers. The militants released me one month back after giving me some money. I then went to relatives' house at Madhabpur in Habiganj district of Bangladesh. From there, clandestinely I crossed the border with the help of a Bangladeshi middleman and reached my house at Shibnagar in Agartala (last week)," Saha said.

After Saha's abduction, his family lodged a case in the Jirania police station and met a number of people, including ministers, senior police officers and other influential people in a bid to locate him.

"In 2007, we filed a case in a court here to get my father's death certificate. The case is still pending with the court," Ranjan Saha's elder son, Abhijit Saha, told IANS.

Ranjan Saha, who is now being treated at the government-run Gobind Ballabh Pant Hospital and Medical college, was upbeat about his future.

"I would re-start my business afresh after my health improves," he said.

Saha's 45-year-old wife Sumitra explained how she struggled during the past 16 years after her husband's abduction and brought up the children by working as a cook in a neighbour's house.

"I am indebted to god that my younger son Rajesh got a temporary job as a representative of a private company in Kolkata. I married off my daughter Sampa and she is happy. It is only due to god's mercy my husband returned to us," Sumitra told IANS.

According to Tripura Police documents, during the peak years of terrorism in the state between 1997 and 2014, over 2,430 people, including legislators, political leaders, traders, government employees and civilians were kidnapped by extremists, of whom 1,705 were subsequently released.

"For many years, abduction for ransom became a trade by the militants. Many people were released by the extremists after taking ransom but many people were killed as the victims' families either could not pay the money sought or did not fulfil the rebels' other demands," security and terrorism expert Manas Paul told IANS.

Members of NLFT and the All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF) undergo arms training in hideouts and covert camps in various parts of Bangladesh, which shares an 856-km border with Tripura.

Banned in 1997 by the central government, the two outfits advocate Tripura's secession from India. However, ATTF has become almost defunct as most of its cadres have surrendered.
Reports allege that the AIADMK has developed a "Facebook account switcher tool". This switcher tool is allegedly being used to switch between multiple fake accounts, which run into millions, to generate large scale positive or negative responses on social media, either in favour of the party or against their opponents. The authenticity of the leaked e-mail and related Whatsapp messages is yet to be confirmed. If this activity is indeed being conducted by the political party itself, then this will be a grave violation of the election laws of the country.

Similar allegations came up against other political parties prior to the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections. Those, however, referred to the activity of third parties, where there was no means of determining who the third parties were, or if they were real persons at all. The activity of such third parties is unregulated under election laws. The current allegations, on the other hand, refer to the activity of a political party itself. This will come directly under the purview of election laws.

Disclosure of the 'Switcher Tool'

In view of the increasing use of the internet in election campaigns, the Election Commission of India issued Instructions of the Commission with respect to use of Social Media in Election Campaigning (the Social Media Instructions) in 2013. Under the Social Media Instructions, all political candidates are bound to give information about their social media accounts, and expenditure incurred in the use and maintenance of their social media accounts. The use of a 'Facebook switcher account tool' and the expenditure incurred in acquiring it will need to be disclosed to the Election Commission under these heads. For example, the e-mail alleges that this tool was specially designed for the party. If so, the expenditure incurred in the hiring of software programmers and other technical experts for the development of such a tool will have to be disclosed. The use of such a tool without disclosure to the Election Commission will, therefore, violate election laws.

Legality of the 'Switcher Tool' Itself

The switcher tool is similar to the account switcher tool available in websites like Twitter, which allow users to switch between their multiple Twitter accounts, for example, their personal and public Twitter profiles. Facebook, however, does not provide users with an account switcher. Other Facebook account switchers, such as 'Mutli for Facebook' are available on Google Play Store. It is to be noted that the development of such a tool by a political party is not, in itself, a violation of election laws. However, the e-mail goes on to allege that Facebook was 'hacked' to create this tool. It is not clear if the hacking was done with or without the consent of Facebook. If done without Facebook's consent, this is an offence under Section 66 read with Sections 43(i) and (j) of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Unfortunately, under the Information Technology Act, only Facebook will be able to take action against such hacking. Under election laws, the Model Code of Conduct and the Representation of the People Act, 1951, give a list of 'corrupt practices' and offences, the commission of which can lead to the disqualification of a political candidate. The hacking of a website for the purpose of election campaigning is not specified among the offences listed there. Since this is a violation of the law for the purpose of elections, however, it is possible that the Election Commission will have the power to act against it.

Alleged Use of the Switcher Tool to Manage Multiple Accounts

Though the e-mail doesn't specify what accounts are being managed through it, speculations are that it is being used to manage multiple fake accounts. Under the Social Media Instructions, the political candidates have to disclose the complete list of social media accounts being used by them. This will include accounts on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia and even apps developed and used by the candidates. It is to be noted that the Instructions do not restrict the number of accounts being used by political candidates, which makes it clear that legally, a candidate can have more than one. However, every one of these accounts has to be disclosed to the Election Commission, to enable it to monitor the online activity of the candidates. The use of multiple fake accounts by a party will therefore be a clear violation of the election laws.

Use of Online Social Media Activity to Influence Public Opinion

The purpose of the switcher tool, is allegedly to better manage the use of the accounts to influence public opinion in favour of political parties. There are several laws in place to deal with attempts to influence public opinion during election campaigns. For example, Section 123(4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 punishes the publication of false statements by one political candidate about another, in an attempt to affect their election prospects. Any such use by the switcher tool will, therefore, make the political candidate liable for disqualification. Section 171G of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 punishes such a false statement made by any person. The activities of third parties will also be punishable under this law.

The Election Commission itself keeps a close watch on the interactions of political parties with the public. All political advertisements and news are monitored by the Election Commission. Traditionally, the laws relating to political advertisements and paid news refer to those published by news and media houses, for example, in newspapers, news channels, etc. The advent of social media has reduced the need for news and media houses for politicians to reach out to the masses for the spread of political propaganda. The Social Media Instructions, noting that social media websites are also electronic media, has extended the application of these laws to any advertisement or news there as well. It is not clear what the scope of political advertisement will be on social media, for example, will a tweet, or a share, or a like be treated as political advertisement? Despite this, it is clear that all such activities come under the purview of the Social Media Instructions, and any attempt to influence public opinion through these means will also make the candidate liable for disqualification.

The Social Media Instructions are a welcome first step to regulate such activities. The reported use of software by the Election Commission to monitor paid content and hate speech online is another welcome step. The Switcher tool, however, brings to light a newer form of electoral malpractice- the use of cybercrimes like hacking to further political agendas. The Election Commission needs to issue more detailed regulations regulating all political activities, overt and covert, in cyberspace.
Harivansh is a former editor of the Hindi daily Prabhat Khabar and is one of the most profound scholars from Jharkhand. Before taking over his new role as Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament from Janata Dal (U), Harivansh had earned his reputation as a field journalist who travelled across the state to connect with people.

With regard to a spate of communal violence that recently rocked the state, Harivansh shares his thoughts in an interview with Firstpost.

Q: How do you see these communal riots following the Ram Navmi festival? Is this a new trend in the state?

A: Jharkhand has always been a communally sensitive state. In the sixties, there were serious riots in Jamshedpur and Ranchi that claimed thousands of lives. Whereas in united Bihar, there was still a semblance of order.

Communal riots were sporadic not endemic. But if you look at the statistics now, 61 cases of communal violence were reported in the state ever since the new BJP regime took charge 15 months ago. This is a clear indication that either the state administration has abdicated its responsibility or that the communal elements are out of control and do not fear the law. In either case, the situation is certainly scary.

Q: Why has the situation come to such a pass? Whom do you hold responsible?

A: This is the first majority government since the formation of the new state. People voted for the BJP with high expectations. But they seemed to have lost the narrative right from the get go.

I am told that the chief ministers lack of administrative experience is coming to the fore. For instance, his choice of bureaucrats is not appreciated. Similarly, there is a visible lack of cohesion in the cabinet, where talented colleagues are being sidelined.

Q: According to you, what instigated the recent riots in Hazaribagh?

A: Hazaribagh is known for being communally sensitive and I am informed that a procession was taken out through the sensitive areas in an aggressive manner. So much so, that there a helicopter was also deployed to shower flower petals on the procession.

But what ultimately seems to have provoked the violence was the playing up of provocative CDs on a public address system. The tirade was directed against a particular community.

The most surprising part is that the administration was well aware of the circulation of these CDs and did nothing to check it. Just a day before the procession was being taken out, members of the peace committee in Hazaribagh requested the administration to keep a check on these provocative utterances, but nothing was done.

Q: What is your take on the situation in Hazaribagh?

A: I am really at a loss to understand how an administration can be so lax in dealing with a communal situation. I am now told that some more deaths have occurred in Hazaribagh.

Similarly Bokaro, which is a cosmopolitan city because of its industrialisation, has also witnessed serious clashes of the communal nature. In many parts of the state, the situation is tense.

In Bokaros case , the BJP legislator is accused of deliberately taking the procession on a wrong route to provoke riots. This cannot happen unless approved by those sitting at the top of the government.

Q: Do you hold the BJP regime, and the chief minister in particular, directly responsible for it?

A: The buck obviously stops with the chief minister and therefore the BJP. I do not intend to level any allegations on any particular individual, but there is no denying the fact that a discernible trend of stoking communal violence exists in the state to trigger social consolidation.

It is also true that the BJP has thrived on communal polarisation in Jharkhand, where it has developed a strong base. Can you imagine that one of the BJP Lok Sabha MPs from Hazaribagh, Jadunath Pandey, had earned a nickname of 'Danga (riot) Pandey'?

My worry is that the BJP regimes expedient short-term politics would compromise the long-term social interests of Jharkhand.

Q: How do you rate the performance of the government so far?

A: This government has nothing to talk about in terms of performance. It comes across as the most inefficient government, on that is losing peoples confidence by the minute.

Although there are no reports of corruption against the government, it has failed to deliver in terms of performance. They are hardly doing anything except fomenting tension. And surely that does not augur well for Jharkhand, and for the country as a whole.

We must not forget that mineral-rich Jharkhand is strategically quite important for the countrys development and 'sabka saath sabka vikas' must begin from here.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all, said Noam Chomsky.

From her public protestations, it would seem that Mamata Banerjee is an ardent believer in the pluralistic ideals that the American linguist, philosopher and social critic preaches.

For instance, last Christmas saw the West Bengal Chief Minister deliver a sermon on the need for tolerance. We must have tolerance. Everybody must respect each other. It maybe that somebody may not choose something or like something. But I cannot disrespect anyone and nobody can disrespect me. It should be a two-way process, she had said while inaugurating 'Christmas Festival' on Park Street in Kolkata.

Important words, those. Except that in Bengal, irony is never in short supply. From the bigotry shown towards Taslima Nasreen, the Kafkaesque treatment of professor Ambikesh Mahapatra or branding as 'Maoists' poor farmers or college students daring to ask questions of her, Banerjee has shown that she frequently fails to practice what she preaches. If anything, she has carried forward the Left's legacy of intolerance and has even improved on it. Ask Sanatan Dinda.

It seems strange that Dinda, an internationally acclaimed visual artist, would face such inconvenience over showing a short video installation on Kolkata flyover collapse in a state whose leader professes to be so tolerant of criticisms.

Yet the unfolding of events last week had an almost surreal quality about it. On the occasion of MF Husain's birth centenary celebration in Kolkata, Husain 100, Dinda had put up Tryst With Destiny, a short video installation which over 9.2 minutes shows raw footage of 31 March Vivekananda Road flyover collapse created from different sources including media coverage, mobile phone uploads, images of survivors and footage of the victims. Dinda's artwork has been on display as part of the exhibition which opened on 9 April.

On the evening of 12 April, however, as the video was being aired on a 52-inch screen at the Academy of Fine Arts, six policemen (among which three were in plainclothes) stormed the rarefied lawns of city's finest address for culture and stopped the exhibition, claiming that they had received a complaint from Academy's Group D staff union  who owe their allegiance to the Trinamool Congress  that an anti-government show was under way.

"When we asked the cops why they were stopping the screening, they said they had received a complaint. They pointed to one of the TMC union employees, Santosh Das, when we asked who the complainant was," The Telegraph quoted artist Debasish Mullick Chowdhury, as saying.

This, despite the fact that Dinda is known to be quite close to the ruling party, specially Banerjee. But such is the state of affairs in Bengal that even proximity to the Chief Minister cannot insure an artwork from censorship or its creator from bodily harm.

The staff union members reportedly threatened to "break the hand" of the artist if he dares to exhibit "dirty art" like this.

"I couldn't believe it. These are the same people I have tea with sitting on the same bench. Now they were judging my art and threatening me and the police were just standing there," Dinda was quoted, as saying in the report.

Though the show eventually resumed after a disruption, when the artists present at the spot screened it before the police to "prove" that there was nothing "anti-government" about it, the raid raises several questions on how cops can turn up at any pretext and whether there is space for freedom of speech and expression in the state.

The video, apart from the montage on death, also carries the promise of life. Dinda had personally visited the flyover collapse site and collected soil from the spot which he used to plant an Ashoka tree, signifying life being resurrected from death. The video shows him planting the sapling.

The TMC-backed union, however, saw in it an attempt to "defame the government in the name of artistic representation."

"He had some ulterior motive in the garb of the film show which we wanted to stop We had told members of the executive committee that the video depiction was objectionable as it amounted to running an anti-government campaign. The very first day (Saturday), we urged the committee to take it up with the artist and get the show withdrawn," The Telegraph quoted a Group D employee, as saying.

Once a pioneer city in Indian renaissance, Kolkata has long since abdicated the claim for being the country's cultural capital but still police boots on the lawns of its favourite destination for art is a new low. Some are saying this is "undeclared emergency".

"I would say we are living in time of undeclared emergency. Such a huge tragedy happened in Kolkata. The artist community was literally silent about the incident. Sanatan's work came as a resurrection of our conscience. Cops tried to even stall that! This is a grave assault on freedom of expression," film scholar Sanjay Mukhopadhyay, who was present at the exhibition, was quoted as saying by Times of India.

Following the incident, artists, thinkers and members of the academia met at a gathering last Friday at the Academy to protest government intervention in artistic freedom and to show solidarity with Dinda.

Supriya Chaudhuri, scholar and Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University, who was present at the meeting, told Firstpost on Tuesday that "though situation in Bengal is still not as bad as in many other states, nevertheless certain very worrying incidents have occurred both during the last years of the Left rule and under this present government. Some worrying signs are visible".

"Dinda is an artist. I admire his work. He has the right as an artist to create an art installation work on the collapsed flyover. I went there to show solidarity with an artist whose freedom of speech and expression has been threatened."

Worryingly enough, the browbeating of Dinda isn't the only incident to have made the headlines last week that points to an increasingly stifling atmosphere in the state.

A third-year student of Presidency University was harassed, abused and her friend was thrashed in a south Kolkata street on Friday evening because she made the "mistake" of smoking and wearing a pair of shorts.

In her FIR with Netaji Nagar police station, the girl alleged that a few persons reportedly came out of Trinamool MP and former youth affairs minister Arup Biswas's office and asked her to stop smoking.

"They insisted that I throw away the cigarette. Another middle-aged man came and started taking our photographs on his mobile phone. We were suddenly surrounded by five-six people," Times of India quoted her, as saying. Her friend, who tried to argue with the crowd, was slapped.

"Is this Delhi or Mumbai that you can wear shorts and smoke cigarettes? These things shall not be tolerated here," threatened one Kamal Ganguly, one of the six accused who was arrested on Monday. Locals say Ganguly, a TMC supporter, is often seen in rallies of TMC MP Biswas.

By wearing a pair of shorts and smoking, the Presidency University student must have unwittingly threatened the "culture and tradition" of Kolkata. It must be purely coincidental that in his seminal essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco had identified "cult of tradition" as the first sign of Fascism.
It cannot get worse than this for P Chidambaram, the most articulate and powerful minister of the UPA government. The latest revelations in the Ishrat Jahan case, assessed through an RTI by Times Now, has practically nailed him in a position from where he might not be able to retrieve himself, both as a leader and as a think tank of the Congress party.

Time will tell what legal recourse awaits the then home minister, who might have to defend his actions in a court of law. The Congress party will also have to gear up to face BJPs onslaught over the issue in Parliament, when it resumes for the second half of the budget session following the recess.

The former home and finance minister had perhaps forgotten about his own governments most valuable gift to the nation  the Right to Information act. More so, with change of regime at the Centre, his notings on critical files like Ishrat Jahan would not be beyond public scrutiny.

The official papers retrieved through an RTI clearly show that the first affidavit had followed due administrative pattern at all levels in the Ministry of Home Affairs, and was finally seen and approved by Chidambaram with his signature dated July 29, 2009.

Only recently, he had eloquently claimed that the first affidavit was filed without his approval and thus a second affidavit was submitted before the High Court in which he only made some editorial changes as a compulsive habit of all lawyers.

He said, which part of the second affidavit is wrong? I accept the responsibility for this affidavit. It is disappointing that the home secretary, who is equally responsible, wants to distance himself from this.

It was brought to my notice that the first affidavit was filed without my approval and it was being misinterpreted. It was my duty to correct the first affidavit. So we filed a supplementary affidavit after consulting the home secretary, the director of Intelligence Bureau and other officers," Chidambaram said, as per ANI.

The file notings for the two affidavits filed by the UPA government on the Ishrat case, within a span of two months between second half of July to September end 2009, prove that the controversy on the subject was largely of his and the Congress leaderships making.

Anyone with rudimentary understanding of how the government works, particularly in such sensitive matters, would know that Chidambarams change of mind within a span of about 50 days from - declaring Ishrat as a Lashkar-e-Taibas indoctrinated fidayeen operative to virtually an aspiring innocent Mumbra girl - couldnt only have come from his end.

It had to be a high stakes political decision, deliberated and cleared at the highest level of the Congress party and the UPA government.

The BJP, as any other political party under the circumstances would do, is out to milk the controversy for their own political benefits. Chidambarams noting on the file in black and white helps them showcase how malicious the Congress could become in its intent and purpose to finish their emerging political challenger from Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and make every attempt to write a political obituary for him.

The party would then relate any other issue, which the Congress opposes inside or outside the Parliament, as opposition not to the issue but to the persona of Narendra Modi.

The party also wants to clear the name of its leader in a case in which he was never accused, but was continuously targeted through various means by his political rivals.

For now, Ishrats ghost would haunt Chidambaram. Even otherwise, these are not the best times for him. The BJP leadership is currently mulling on possible actions that could be taken against Chidambaram. A political battle is already being fought in the public domain.

Union Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitaraman, known for her aggressive pitching, was specially fielded yesterday to hold a media briefing at party headquarters - 11 Ashoka Road, soon after Times Now played up the story.

Srikant Sharma, BJPs national secretary and incharge of media cell, called

Chidambarams action `rahtrahit se gadari. He said, Chidambarams actions are a classic case of betrayal of national interest. Remember, he was the countrys home minister then. The nation cant forgive a person who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, occupied office as home minister to secure internal security of the nation but was out to destroy its internal security infrastructure with a singular purpose to finish a popular chief minister who was to become the Prime Minister,

He compromised with national interests only to serve undeserving ambitions of his political masters. We will take it up politically in the Parliament when it opens next week. He will have to face consequences for his unholy deeds. I am sure for him law will take its logical course. Dont forget that these four Lakshar terrorists, including two Pakistanis killed by security agencies in an encounter, were out to assassinate Narendra Modi, he added.

There is little doubt that the ruling BJP will pursue legal course against Chidambaram. The only thing that remains to be decided is what would be the best course of action  file a case citing attempt to mislead the courts, treason or something else.

Firstpost had earlier said that the Congress had long waged its legal and political battle against Narendra Modi through the medium of Ishrat Jahan's ghost.

Historically, as a home minister, Chidambaram has shown that on critical issues relating to internal security - like Ishrat case or the menace of naxalism - he began well, but soon succumbed to his partys pressure, and began playing the party boss tune. Being an eminent lawyer he could justify his actions either way on a public platform.

In 2010, in an article published in Economic Times, Digvijay Singh had called him intellectually arrogant". Although Singh was seeking a review

of the centres aggressive naxal policy, it certainly gave an idea as to what his revered colleagues thought about him.

"I have known P Chidambaram since 1985 when we both were elected to Parliament. He is extremely intelligent, articulate, committed and a sincere politician, but extremely rigid once he makes up his mind, Singh said.

I have been a victim of his intellectual arrogance many times but we still are good friends, Singh said.

Mani Shankar Aiyar fully endorsed Singhs view on Chidamabarm saying, "Digvijay is not one hundred per cent right, he is not even one thousand per cent right, he is one lakh per cent right."

Writing for Counter Current, Trevor Selvam quoted Mani Shankar Aiyar saying, His deposition over four sessions in the witness-box has shown him up as the most incompetent minister of state for internal security (1986-89) and the most negligent as minister in charge of the investigation into Rajiv Gandhi's assassination from May 24, 1995, till his defection to the TMC on April Fool's Day, 1996.

Chidambaram has not spoken since the RTI exposed his position of half truth or even lies. He has a lot of explaining to do. He cannot afford to remain silent for long.
New Delhi: On Monday the BJP and the government launched a sharp attack on Congress over the Ishrat Jahan case, accusing it of having wanted "elimination" of Narendra Modi, a theory on which Congress President Sonia Gandhi "worked actively".

Citing a media report which claimed that the then Home Minister P Chidambaram had signed the first affidavit in the encounter case, Union Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Congress, especially Gandhi and her son Rahul, should take responsibility because Chidambaram did so as the party found it not strong enough to fight Modi politically.

"You underplayed a terror plot that could eliminate (Modi). You are clearly admitting that you cannot fight this politically. So eliminate or allow to eliminate or encourage elimination of the leader who you are mortified of fighting politically.

"...we (Congress) do everything possible in our hand to make sure that we make it appear that he is against some section, projected as if there is no terror threat against him," she told a press conference at the BJP office.

The debate, she said, cannot be confined to Chidambaram.

"Sonia Gandhi worked actively on this theory. That is why she went to town saying an encounter has happened as though there was no intelligence information stating that there was terror plot," she said.

Sitharaman added, "They wanted to quietly watch the terror plot bloom to eliminate a political opponent....a very serious fallout is the way this country's intelligence and counter intelligence have been weakened."

Union Minister Kiren Rijiju also hit out at Congress and Chidambaram, saying he could not have acted on his own to do such an "anti-national act".

"There have been some political pressure from higher ups of the Congress that such an action was taken," he told the media.

Chidambaram, he alleged, has been caught red-handed and now he cannot escape. It is not Chidambaram but the entire Congress leadership which should take the responsibility, he said.
New Delhi: Levelling serious allegations against the Congress over the Ishrat Jahan shootout case, the BJP on Monday said the Congress almost connived to get a political rival eliminated in Gujarat.

"Here is a political rival, the then chief minister of Gujarat, whom the Congress could not face politically. So they quietly saw a terror plot bloom," union minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was the then Gujarat chief minister.

"The then union home minister gave two affidavits in court. They tried to show as if there was no terror plot, as if there was no threat to Modi's life."

She said that since both of the affidavits on a single matter can't be true, the then home minister P. Chidambaram was either trying to "hide some facts or add something not germane to the case" in the submission before the court.

The BJP's outburst came after a TV channel revealed that the first affidavit, which described Ishrat Jahan as a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, was indeed signed by Chidambaram, who has been denying signing it.

However, the second affidavit said there was no conclusive evidence to suggest that Ishrat was linked to LeT.

"By politicising the Ishrat Jahan encounter case, the Congress has undermined the national security. They have weakened the entire security network," Sitharaman said, adding whether the shootout was real or fake was a secondary matter.

Mumbai college girl Ishrat Jahan and her three alleged associates Pranesh Gopinath Pilai, Amjad Ali and Jishan Johar were killed by Gujarat Police in an allegedly staged shootout on June 15, 2004.

Gujarat Police had described the four as Pakistani-controlled terrorists who came from Jammu and Kashmir to assassinate then chief minister Modi.

In Feruary, LeT operative David Headley told a Mumbai court that Ishrat Jahan was a member of the Pakistan-based terror group.
New Delhi: The Congress on Tuesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah of obstructing the judicial process by blocking the trial of accused in Ishrat Jahan's alleged staged shootout case pending in a Ahmedabad court.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah are shamelessly misleading the country and obstructing judicial process by blocking trial of accused in Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case, party spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said in a statement.

Modi government is using a web of selective news leaks, deceptive statements of its ministers and non-grant of sanction for prosecution of the accused to ensure mistrial and re-investigation through pliable investigating agencies, he added.

Surjewala also asserted that Modi and Shah need to tell 125 crore Indians about the real motive behind their desperation to shut down the trial in Ishrat Jahan case.

What is it that they (Modi and Shah) seek to hide or are scared of? They need to place these things before the nation. Modi government is relying upon patent falsehood to hide the facts of the case, he said.

The Congress party also accused the prime minister of intentionally hiding the charge sheet that was filed by the CBI in accordance with the Gujarat High Court monitored investigation.

Modi government also deliberately omits to point out that a case of murder and other offences under Indian Penal Code was registered in Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case on the direction of Division Bench of Gujarat High Court, Surjewala said.

He accused the duo of falsely hiding behind the language of pleadings before the court to ensure that no trial takes place and truth does not come out.
Chennai: Continuing her tirade against DMK president M Karunanidhi over prohibition, AIADMK supremo and Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa on Monday charged him and his party with conspiring to sell liquor through private firms and clubs and underscored her commitment for a phased rollout of the dry law in Tamil Nadu.

Addressing an election rally in Chennai, she asked why DMK, despite staging many protests demanding total prohibition, just promised enacting a law to implement dry law while giving a miss to the word total in its recently released election manifesto.

It is because Karunanidhi and DMK have no intention of bringing total prohibition. That is why they have said in their manifesto that a law will be enacted for this purpose while government will completely back away from selling liquor and TASMAC (Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation) will be disbanded.

They have conspired to sell (liquor) through private (persons) and clubs, she alleged, canvassing for votes for her party nominees of three districts for the May 16 Assembly elections. Accusing Karunanidhi of having introduced alcohol to an entire generation by relaxing the dry law in 1971, she assured her commitment to implement total prohibition in the state, albeit in a phased manner, as promised already.

She reiterated that bringing prohibition with one signature, as earlier promised by DMK, was not possible and that she will go about it by initially shrinking the working hours, cutting down on number of retail outlets and later closing bars while opening rehabilitation centres for addicts. Prohibition has taken the centre stage in this election campaign, with all political leaders including Jayalalithaa batting for the dry law.

A major revenue grosser for the state exchequer at around Rs 30,000 crore last year, alcohol sales was first nationalised by the AIADMK government in 2003. The subsequent DMK government continued with that policy. Jayalalithaa also attacked DMK on other issues, charging it with carrying out a campaign of lies vis-a-vis the power situation and the December floods unable to digest our success.

The Chief Minister ruled out any power cut in both domestic and industrial sectors even as she said Rs 117 crore had been levied as fine for power theft which was being detected by 40 groups of ex-servicemen.

Jayalalithaa charged Karunanidhi and his party with betraying Tamil Nadu on inter-state river disputes like Mullaperiyar and Cauvery with Kerala and Karnataka, respectively, besides the Sri Lankan Tamils issue and ceding of Katchatheevu islet to the island nation.

She ridiculed DMK for promising in its election manifesto to press the Centre for holding the storage level at Mullaperiyar at 142 ft as per a court direction, saying the level was already being maintained for the last two years following a Supreme Court order. Her government, despite the unprecedented rainfall in December 2015, had taken adequate precaution and therefore could avoid loss of lives in the subsequent deluge, she said. However, DMK was making false claims that sudden release of water from a city reservoir had led to over 300 deaths, she said, claiming neither was the release sudden nor was there any loss of life.

Even the Central team that took stock of the situation in the affected districts had commended her government for its prompt and quick response, she said. She targeted Karunanidhi over family politics and said thee state-run Arasu Cable TV was launched following a fight in the family (involving Maran brothers), but later stifled after they patched up.
Thiruvananthapuram: Scripting history in Kerala's electoral politics, son and daughter of a politician are contesting for the May 16 Assembly polls in the state.

K Muraleedharan and Padmaja Venugopal, son and daughter of veteran Congress leader and former Chief Minister late K Karunakaran are in the fray for the polls.

Muraleedharan, a former KPCC president, is seeking re-election from his sitting seat Vattiyoorkkavu here while his younger sister Padmaja is trying her luck from Thrissur on a Congress ticket.

The presence of the siblings has evoked the memories of Karunakaran, once regarded as the 'kingmaker' and popularly called as 'leader' by his admirers, among Congress workers.

Amidst his busy door-to-door campaigns and meetings, the 58-year-old Muraleedharan said it was not because they were children of K Karunakaran that the party had given them tickets.

"I was renominated because I am the sitting MLA of the constituency and my sister Padmaja is given tickets as our party wanted to give priority for women this time. Not only that, her performance as the KPCC General Secretary was also taken into account," Muraleedharan told PTI.

A three-time Lok Sabha member from Kohikode, Muraleedharan had defeated LDF independent Cheriyan Philip by a margin of 16,167 votes in Vattiyoorkkavu during the 2011 Assembly polls.

BJP state president Kummanom Rajasekharan and CPI(M)'s TN Seema are his main rival candidates in the constituency this time.

Claiming that there was no threat to his sitting seat from the opponents, Muraleedharan expressed confidence that his victory margin would increase this time than the 2011 election.

For Padmaja, it is her second poll outing after her defeat in 2004 Lok Sabha polls from Mukundapuram constituency.

CPI's firebrand sitting MLA from nearby Kaipamangalam segment V S Sunilkumar is the main opponent of 55-year-old Padmaja in Thrissur.

When asked about whether Karunakaran's fond memories would influence the voters, Muraleedharan said "Of course, the memories of my father will come in the minds of Congress workers and voters as me and my sister are contesting the polls together."
Jagatballavpur: Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said the more the Opposition would resort to badmouthing her and her party, the easier it would be to score spectacular success in the ongoing West Bengal Assembly polls.

"The more they will resort to badmouthing and giving bad name to us, the more Trinamool Congress will flourish," Banerjee said at an election rally in Jagatballavpur in Howrah district.

Cautioning the opposition Left Front-Congress combine and the BJP, she said "these accusations will not help. After the elections, the CPM will be demolished, Congress will not be seen and BJP, which only creates religious divide, should not even look at Bengal".

"Who are they (BJP) to lecture us?" the West Bengal chief minister said, adding that they should do their work properly at the Centre.

"Bengal is number one in 100-days' work, Kanyasree scheme and many other projects," she said claiming that the TMC government in its five-year rule had led the state on the path of all-round development.

"CPM had left the state's coffers empty and under a huge debt of Rs two lakh crore, we are doing our best to turn it around from the brink," she stated.

At an election rally in Kolkata on Sunday, Banerjee had said that she would have 'given a thought' before choosing her party candidates for the ongoing Assembly elections, if the sting operation tapes had been 'telecast earlier'.

In a sting operation by news portal Narada News, which it claimed had been done over two years from 2014, several Trinamool Congress MPs and bigwigs including state ministers were shown purportedly accepting bribes from a fictitious company.

Video footage of the sting operation, genuinity of which is yet to be verified by an independent agency, were released by Narada News a few days after Assembly elections in the state were announced.
The Hague(Netherlands): UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday strongly condemned a Taliban suicide truck bombing in central Kabul which left 30 people dead and hundreds injured.

"I would like to express my deepest condolences for the victims and their families and friends," the UN secretary general said at a press conference during a visit to The Hague.

"I condemn strongly these terrorist attacks," he said, adding "there's no justification whatsoever (for) attacking civilian people

as well as security people."

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a densely crowded Kabul neighbourhood, which came a week after the insurgents launched their annual spring offensive.

"We must fight against these terrorist attacks and the international community must be united in working together," Ban said, speaking alongside Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders.

Ban was in the Dutch city to take part in a ceremony to mark the official opening of the International Criminal Court later Tuesday, as well as celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the International Court of Justice.
Ahmedabad: The Gujarat bandh call given by Patel quota agitators failed to evoke much response in the state and passed off peacefully barring in Mehsana, where a mob torched a minister's vacant house.

A state committee of ministers, formed to negotiate with the quota agitators, held a "fruitful and positive" meeting in Gandhinagar over the demands with several leaders of the Patel community, who are working as mediators. Another round of talks will soon be held to arrive at a solution.

Police had made elaborate security arrangements in view of the state-wide bandh call given by the Sardar Patel Group (SPG) demanding reservation and immediate release of their jailed leaders. Schools, colleges, public transport and the normal life were not affected by the bandh call.

"No major incident took place on Monday. We have deployed adequate number of policemen and paramilitary forces across Gujarat today to ensure safety and security of citizens," DGP in-charge P P Pandey said.

Barring few minor incidents, the situation remained calm throughout the day, he said.

The curfew imposed on Sunday in Mehsana town after violent clashes between protesters and police, was lifted this morning and the bandh call largely went off peacefully, although Gujarat Minister of State for Home Rajni Patel's vacant home in Mehsana town was set on fire by the Patel agitators, police said.

"Unidentified men stormed into the empty house and set ablaze the furniture and other belongings. The mob also hurled stones on fire tenders trying to reach there. This is the same house which was set on fire in August last year during agitation related violence," said an official of control room.

According to police, Patel has his official house in Gandhinagar, but sometimes visit his Mehsana residence.

The ban on mobile Internet services imposed in some towns for a day on Sunday, including Ahmedabad, Surat, Rajkot and Mehsana, was till midnight.

"We had lifted curfew in Mehsana at 6 am as the situation was under control. No reports of untoward incident came during the bandh call. Mobile Internet services will remain off in the city till this midnight," Mehsana District Collector Lochan Sehra told PTI.
Even though the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls is slated only for 2017, the UP unit of BJP already seems to be ready with its first batch of nearly 200 candidates who will contest the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. The first list of about 200 candidates is likely to be announced by the end of May.

The list is coming on the heels of appointment of OBC candidate Keshav Prasad Maurya as its Uttar Pradesh president to counter Yadav and Dalit vote banks.

BJP's pro-activity may be a direct result of the ruling Samajwadi Party (SP) declaring names of 142 candidates on 25 March and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) declaring names of 80 percentage of the candidates who will contest the elections to the 403-member UP Legislative Assembly.

The first list to be announced for the 403-member Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls in 2017, is likely to have many candidates from the state's OBC population comprising Kurmi, Kohri and Kushwaha amongst others. The reasons are not hard to decipher. On one hand, the ruling Samajwadi Party (SP) has a complete hold over the Yadav community, while on the other, the Dalit population is loyal to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Therefore, the party has tried to target the rest of the OBC population through Maurya's appointment as state president.

Maurya is an OBC candidate from the Kushwaha community that has a sizeable presence of around 8% in the state. He is also a Hindutva hardliner with a long association with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).

The party leadership is fine tuning the list by getting final feedback through the ongoing Village Swaraj Abhiyan, aimed at connecting with the grass root workers at the Panchayat-level.

"The party is finalizing its poll strategy for Uttar Pradesh. We're into fine-tuning the process and working on candidates, who will contest the election, through regular meetings and feedbacks weve been receiving from ground. Announcement will be made in due course in a phased manner," a senior BJP leader said on condition of anonymity.

Maurya is known to have swung into action soon after his appointment as state BJP president to chalk out his strategy for 2017 Assembly polls, by having a series of meetings with the party members and workers of UP, and BJPs national president Amit Shah.

Immediately after getting nominated as president, Maurya had told Firstpost, Well win the 2017 Assembly pollour aim is to achieve the target of winning 265-plus seats given to us by the partys national president (Amit Shah)Ill be having meetings with the state leaders and workers, and thereafter with further discussions with the top leadership, strategy will be chalked out on how to proceed in UP.

From 14 to 24 April, we're involved in Village Swaraj Abhiyan  a fortnight-long campaign aimed at reaching out to the grass roots level in village panchayats. There are 1.2 lakh booths in the state  out of which the BJP has made its reach up to one lakh booths. Were working hard to reach out to the rest at the earliest possible, said Maurya.

Mauryas appointment as UP BJP president has relayed a positive message amongst BJP voters, especially our target group and theres an air of confidence. He will be a potential force to win over OBC voters. At this stage, nothing more can be revealed, the senior BJP leader added.

However, the BJP is keeping mum over its chief ministerial candidate, which can again come as a surprise, but backed by a strong strategy to counter SP, BSP and Congress.

The BJP seems to have been prompted to pull up its socks and aggressively move ahead by keeping Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a pivotal role during the partys grass roots level campaigning due to poll strategy being prepared for the Congress party by Prashant Kishor. He is known to have the backing of Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi.

The Congress party is yet to unfold the name of its candidates.

Weve done a fool-proof home work for 370 seats by creating a strong infrastructure of ground-level workers. In due course, names will be announced, as theres nothing hide and seek in this, a senior Congress leader remarked.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a PIL seeking quashing of the president's rule in Uttarakand and a CBI probe into the allegations of 'horse-trading' before the dismissal of the Harish Rawat-led Congress government in the hill state.

A bench of Chief Justice TS Thakur and Justice Uday Umesh Lalit, while dismissing the PIL as withdrawn, questioned the locus standi of the petitioner, advocate ML Sharma, asking him in what way he was affected by the President's rule in Uttrakhand.

Pointing out that he files a PIL at the drop of the hat, the bench asked him: "Do you belong to Uttarakhand. How are you concerned. You have to have some concern. Something should happen somewhere and Mr Sharma will file a PIL."

Holding that filing of such PILs would affect his credibility, the bench said it was not concerned with the politics that was being played in Uttarakhand.

"Whenever a situation arises, and constitution needs to be examined, we will look into it", the bench said making it clear that in the absence of a such a requirement in it would not step into political arena.

Seeking the quashing of the Presidential proclamation, Sharma had questioned how could the council of ministers recommend the imposition of the president's rule when Governor KK Paul had already directed then chief minister Harish Rawat to go for floor test on 28 March.

He had further contended that could Uttarakhand be placed under president's rule, once the governor, following the apex court constitution bench's 11 March, 1994 judgment in the SR Bommai's case, had asked Rawat to prove his majority on the floor of the assembly on 28 March.

In the Bommai case, the apex court constitution bench had held that the majority of the government could only be tested on the floor of the assembly.

The apex court had further held that it (court) could not go into the advice tendered by the council of ministers to the president but it could examine the material on which the president in exercise of the powers under the constitution's article 356 places a state under president's rule.

Sharma had said that the constitution bench had held that court can examine if there was a malafide use of power under Article 356.

He had also sought direction to the Central Bureau of Investigation to register an FIR and to investigate the role of cash and kind in the entire political imbroglio and file its report before the apex court.
Kolkata: Seven candidates contesting the third and fourth phase of ongoing West Bengal Assembly polls are illiterate.

According to an analysis of their affidavits by the West Bengal Election Watch, six contestants in the third and one in the fourth phase have declared that they are illiterate.

Another 14 candidates are 'simple literate', the report said.

Polling for the third phase will be held on 21 April and fourth phase on 25 April in which 763 candidates would test their luck in 111 seats.

In both phases 44 per cent candidates have educational qualification between Class V pass and Class XII pass. Another 33 per cent candidates are graduate or have professional degrees.
The Koh-i-Noor diamond is old. It's ancient. For perspective, remember your grandmother? It's older than her.

Turns out, other than above stated fact, everything we've known about the shiniest of all diamonds is as true as the as the Big Bang Theory.

After months of investigation by a team of 696 journalists, historians, private investigators, handwriting and diamond experts, and even psychologists from across the universe, today Firstpost can reveal the contents of secret documents received anonymously, delivered inside an old looking glass bottle.

So here it is, the real (abridged) history of Koh-i-Noor.

(Warning: The texts received have been painfully converted to contemporary English and purposefully littered with pop culture references on the instruction of our new social media expert. Also, few sequence of events have been dramatised for effect.)

250 million years ago the continents didn't exist. 200 million years ago they did.

Then men started walking the earth. They did other things too, but they also walked a lot.

One day, one of them stumbled upon an object like none other while digging a grave. It was a big grave and a one deep too.

"Jesus Christ," he exclaimed. Probably not. Jesus existed much later and he is not part of this story but a team of our dedicated interns are working on that just to be sure.

Drawn to the fat diamond like a Bhakt is drawn to Twitter, the man took it. But expanding on the metaphor, he wasn't very clever.

The word spread through the village and the man was stabbed to death at night.

His silver skin laced with his golden blood and all that.

For thousands of years, the diamond did rounds across what is now known as Asia.

The documents reveal that once a man even swallowed it to save it from getting stolen and it stayed inside him till his death.

Around the late 15th century, stories started to surface of a big diamond that was driving the Mughals crazy.

Turns out the diamond had a mind of its own. Whoever possessed it suddenly gained a sense of false entitlement and generally started be behave like an ass.

"I shall have it," said every king on the land ever.

"How 'bout I kill you?" asked Babur.

Things didn't go down very well.

Next popular owner of the diamond was Shah Jahan. The documents reveal private messages sent by him to his close aides where he said that to him the diamond was even more valuable than even Mumtaz.

The diamond also found its way to Afghanistan. But since no one cares about that region, we'll skip over that.

In early 19th Century, it was passed on to Ranjit Singh of Punjab.

"Knock-Knock."

"Whose there."

"It's the British."

Now the British have the diamond.

The contemporary narrative goes that the British kings thought that it brought luck to them and hence it was only by the female members of the family.

But the documents reveals something far more domestic behind the decision.

"He better give me that diamond or I'm leaving this house," was just one of the many conversations a certain female member of the family with her close circles.

Its 15 August, 1947.

"Give us back our diamond," said India.

"Let's just ignore them,"said the British.

"Give us back the diamond," said India again in 1957.

"Umm... no," said the British.

"Please give it back," said India in 1997 on the 50th anniversary of Independence.

"Jesus, guys, no!" said the British.

"Give it!" implored India again in 2000.

"Nooooooooooo," said the British, this time more firmly.

Ding-dong.

It's Pakistan.

"We like shiny things too."

"No Pakistan. You cannot have it," replied India.

Now, fast forward it and now the law is involved.

At this point India got nervous. "Sh*t's getting real this time," said one of the top lawmaker in a cable the day before the hearing in the Supreme Court.

Next to the utter dismay of Dan Brown who had just finished the eighth draft of his latest, the Indian government said that the diamond was given to the British and not stolen.

"Do you know how my effort it takes to come with this sh*t. Let me tell you  a lot,"said Brown when contacted by Firstpost.

But Dan is not the only one who is disappointed with India's stand.

"How can?", "But it was mine, mine!" are just a few examples how the population of India reacted generally.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the Queen called for a dinner to celebrate the occasion.

"I will never let go of you. My precioussss,"she was heard talking to herself.
Brussels: Belgium said Tuesday that more "terrorist fighters" want to return to Europe from Syria to carry out further attacks, a month after suicide bombings in Brussels killed 32 people.

"There is a lot of intelligence, for example signs that foreign terrorist fighters, combatants in Syria, want to return not just to Belgium, but to Europe to carry out an attack," Paul Van Tigchelt, the head of the government crisis centre, told RTBF television.

Tigchelt said Belgium would maintain its terror alert at level 3, the second highest, for a "terrorist threat to the whole country", adding that it meant that the threat was "still considered serious, grave and likely".

The inquiry into the 22 March Brussels bombings  which were claimed by the Islamic State jihadist group  was "being carried out in an intense way... but the danger has not yet gone," Tighchelt added.

Security was still tight at key sites such as airports, railway stations and nuclear power stations, he said, adding that public areas such as shopping malls and cinemas could also benefit from more security.

Two suicide bombers blew themselves up at Brussels airport and a third at Maalbeek metro station in the country's worst ever terror attacks.

A fourth bomber whose device did not go off, Mohamed Abrini, was arrested on 8 April in Brussels.

There have been a series of other arrests in recent weeks as Belgian police try to roll up a jihadist network linked to both the Brussels bombings and the Paris attacks in November.

Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam is awaiting extradition to France following his arrest in Brussels on 18 March.
Brasilia: Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff said on Tuesday that she is "outraged" by a vote in Congress to authorise impeachment proceedings against her and vowed to keep fighting.

In an emotional first public response to the vote on Monday, Rousseff said she would not give up now that her case has gone from the lower house to the Senate for a possible trial.

"I have strength, spirit and courage. I will not be beaten, I will not be paralysed. I will continue to fight and I will fight as I did all my life," Rousseff said in the remarks carried live on television.

The lower house voted overwhelmingly to send Rousseff to the Senate for trial on allegations that she illegally manipulated government accounts during her 2014 reelection to mask the scale of budget holes.

But Rousseff said that deputies in the house had failed to provide any evidence that she'd committed an impeachable crime, calling the process instead a "coup d'etat."

The vote was "violence in Brazil against truth, against democracy and against the democratic rule of law," she said.

The Senate is due to vote in May on whether to open a trial at which point Rousseff would be suspended. The trial could take months and if senators then voted by a two thirds majority she would be deposed.

Her vice president, Michel Temer, would take over. Rousseff branded Temer a "traitor" in her remarks, saying he had conspired against her.
BRASILIA Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff cancelled a scheduled trip to New York to participate in a climate event at the United Nations this week, two sources from the presidential palace said on Monday.

Rousseff, whom Congress voted overwhelmingly on Sunday night to impeach, cancelled her plans to take part in the signing of a climate pact hammered out by nations during a meeting in Paris in November on global warming.

Rousseff and her team were among the most active negotiators at the COP 21 climate meetings in Paris.

(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu; Writing by Reese Ewing; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

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BRASILIA Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff vowed on Monday to fight impeachment tooth-and-nail in the Senate after a heavy defeat in the lower house of Congress raised the likelihood of an end to 13 years of leftist rule in Latin America's largest economy.

In a raucous vote late on Sunday that sparked jubilation among Rousseff's foes, the opposition comfortably surpassed the two-thirds majority needed to send Brazil's first female president for trial in the Senate on charges she manipulated budget accounts.

If the Senate votes by a simple majority to accept the case next month, as is expected, Rousseff would become the first Brazilian leader to be impeached for more than 20 years.

The crisis has paralysed the government as it struggles to revive the economy from its worst recession in decades. It has also sparked a bitter struggle between Rousseff, a 68-year-old former Communist guerrilla, and her Vice President Michel Temer, 75, who would take power if she is impeached.

Addressing the nation on television, a combative Rousseff insisted that she had committed no impeachable crime and accused Temer of openly conspiring to topple her government in what she described as a 'coup'.

"While I am very saddened by this, I have the force, the spirit and the courage to fight this whole process to the end," Rousseff told the televised news conference. "This is just the beginning of the battle, which will be long and drawn out."

Rousseff stands accused of a budgetary sleight of hand employed by many elected officials in Brazil: delaying payments to state lenders in order to artificially lower the budget deficit to boost her reelection bid in 2014.

Nevertheless, opinion polls show more than 60 percent of Brazilians support impeaching Rousseff, less than two years after the leftist leader narrowly won reelection. Her popularity has been crushed by the recession and a vast graft scandal at state oil company Petrobras (PETR4.SA).

A Rousseff aide said the government would focus on clawing back support in the 81-seat Senate, where it lacks the simple majority needed to prevent the case being accepted for trial. Given that it currently has the support of only 31 senators, the aide said the situation looked "very difficult."

The government has been looking to Senate Speaker Renan Calheiros, a crucial but fickle ally of Rousseff's, to delay the Senate vote as long as possible to give it time to negotiate. [L5N17K11H]

However, Calheiros said on Monday he would remain neutral and would meet with party leaders in the Senate on Tuesday to define the calendar for the process.

PARALYSED GOVERNMENT

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators from both sides of the impeachment battle took to the streets across Brazil on Sunday in peaceful protests. Millions watched the vote live on television.

The heavy margin of defeat in Sunday's vote shocked many Workers Party insiders, who blamed treachery by allied parties. The final tally was 367 votes cast in favour of impeachment, versus 137 against, and seven abstentions. Two lawmakers did not show up to vote.

More than half the lawmakers who decided her fate on Sunday are themselves under investigation for graft, fraud or electoral crimes, according to Congresso em Foco, a prominent watchdog in Brasilia.

Claudio Couto, professor of political science at Fundacao Getulio Vargas, said that Sunday's loss dramatically weakened Rousseff's ability to strike political bargains and shore up support for her government.

"It is almost impossible the Senate will not take up the impeachment. And with her removal for up to six months, the government's power of persuasion will be dramatically diminished," he said.

Senior Workers Party figures have pledged, if necessary, to take their struggle onto the streets, raising concerns that it could seek to destabilise a future Temer government.

Despite anger at rising unemployment, the party can still rely on support among millions of working-class Brazilians, who credit its welfare programs with pulling their families out of poverty during the past decade.

The U.S. State Department voiced confidence on Monday that Brazil would navigate the political crisis democratically in accordance with the constitution.

Brazilian financial markets have rallied strongly this year after a disastrous 2015 on the prospect of a more business-friendly Temer administration.

Brazil's Bovespa stock index .BVSP shed 0.75 percent on Monday, with traders citing profit taking after it gained more than 20 percent so far in 2016. The real BRBY also weakened more than 2 percent to 3.60 per dollar after the central bank intervened to prevent a sharp rise in the currency.

Once regarded as an emerging markets powerhouse, Brazil has been hit by the end of a long commodities boom as well as political instability. It lost its coveted investment grade credit rating in December.

Fitch, which has a negative outlook on Brazil's 'BB+' sovereign rating, said it would focus on a new leader's attitude to the corruption probe and efforts to stem the steep rise in government debt.

(Additional reporting by Alonso Soto, Stephen Eisenhammer and Maaria CarolinLisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia, Guillermo Parra-Bernal in Sao Paulo and Jeb Blount in Rio de Janeiro; Writing by Daniel Flynn, Stephen Eisenhammer and Anthony Boadle; Editing by Kieran Murray, Frances Kerry and Andrew Hay)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
China is "positive" towards proposals to establish a military hotline with India to deal with issues along their disputed border, Defence Minister Chang Wanquan told his Indian counterpart during a meeting in Beijing, state media reported.

The two nuclear-armed neighbours have been moving to gradually ease long-existing tensions between them.

Leaders of Asia's two giants pledged last May to cool a festering border dispute, which dates back to a brief border war in 1962, though a messy territorial disagreement remains.

Chang "reacted positively towards setting up a military hotline with India on border security", state news agency Xinhua reported late on Monday, after Chang's meeting with Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar.

Chang "also suggested the two sides strengthen defence exchanges and jointly safeguard peace and tranquillity of the border area", the report added.

Xinhua cited Parrikar as saying India is ready to work with China to maintain the stability of the border.

China lays claim to more than 90,000 square kilometres ruled by New Delhi in the eastern sector of the Himalayas. India says China occupies 38,000 sq km (14,600 sq miles) of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau in the west.

India is also suspicious of China's support for its arch-rival, Pakistan.
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump were favoured to win their parties' U.S. presidential nominating contests in New York state on Tuesday, but voting was overshadowed by official confirmation that more than 125,000 people were missing from New York City voter rolls and reports of other irregularities.

New York City's comptroller ordered an audit of the city elections board after it confirmed the people's names had been removed from voter rolls.

"The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the Board of Elections is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient," Comptroller Scott Stringer said in a statement.

Faulty ballot scanners, late-opening polling locations and scant staffing were among the other problems that Stringer cited in a Tuesday letter to the board. He demanded swift attention.

Opinion polls in New York put Clinton, 68, a former U.S. senator from the state, ahead of Brooklyn-born U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, 74, of Vermont in the Democratic race. The state has been the scene of some of their harshest exchanges during a long campaign.

Clinton hopes to recapture the momentum she lost to Sanders, winner of seven of the last eight state-by-state nominating contests.

"Any double-digit win would really reassure everybody that the (Clinton) campaign is reaching the voters who are going to be the people in November that are going to carry her to victory," said Dan Fass, a longtime Democratic donor in Rye, New York.

Last week, after the Democratic candidates debated in Brooklyn, Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri voiced some hesitation about the double-digit margin some opinion polls were predicting.

Clinton has 1,758 of the 2,383 party convention delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination to Sanders' 1,076 delegates, according to an Associated Press tally. A total of 291 delegates are up for grabs in New York, and a big Clinton win there could make her delegate lead nearly insurmountable.

During the Democrats' July 25-28 convention, the delegates will select the party's nominee to the Nov. 8 presidential election.

In Democratic nominating contests, pledged delegates are awarded proportionate to the support a candidate receives in each state, while superdelegates, who make up a smaller proportion, can support any candidate.

TRUMP LOOKS PAST NEW YORK

Trump, 69, a New York billionaire businessman, already was looking past New York to future contests by sending Paul Manafort, who is charged with chasing the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination, to meet with lawmakers from the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

Manafort "feels that there are four or five different pathways to 1,237," Congressman Scott Desjarlais of Tennessee said, referring to the number of delegates a candidate needs to secure the Republican nomination.

Trump, front-runner for months in the Republican race, has 744 delegates, while U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, 45, of Texas has 559 and Ohio Governor John Kasich, 63, is trailing far behind with 144, according to an Associated Press count. The count includes endorsements from several delegates who are free to support the candidate of their choice.

If Trump does not secure enough delegates needed to win the Republican nomination outright at the party's July 18-21 convention in Cleveland, delegates would be allowed to switch to other candidates.

Opinion polls show Trump has a double-digit lead in New York, where the "winner takes most" primary carries 95 delegates. But a big win for Trump in the state York would not erase his vulnerabilities.

Cruz's skillful use of party rules during the primary process has angered Trump, who says the system is rigged against him. Trump remains unpopular with the Republican leaders and activists who select and serve as delegates, whereas Cruz has invested time and money courting them.

Some establishment Republicans have been alienated by Trump's more incendiary proposals, such as building a wall along the border with Mexico and slapping a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.

Trump has sought to mend fences with the recent addition of veteran political strategists such as Manafort and Rick Wiley, who will take the lead in upcoming nominating contests, according to a Republican source familiar with the campaign's operations.

Congressman Lou Barletta of Pennsylvania said Manafort told House lawmakers the Trump campaign has an "open door."

"It is good that they are reaching out to members here, to get policy ideas, and bounce ideas off," said Barletta, who has endorsed Trump.

(Additional reporting by Amanda Becker, Steve Holland, Luciana Lopez and Susan Cornwell; Writing by Amanda Becker and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Frances Kerry and Howard Goller)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Beijing: Chinese media on Tuesday highlighted Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar's remarks that Sino-India ties should not be affected by a third party even as it skirted any reference to his call to Beijing to review its stand on blocking India's efforts to get Pakistan-based JeM chief Masood Azhar banned by the UN.

The issue of Azhar, Jaish-e-Muhammad chief, was raised by External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj during her meeting with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow on Monday, while Parrikar called on China to strike a united stand with India on terrorism.

"What happened in UN is not in the right direction and they have to take a common line on terrorism which is in the interests of India and China," Parrikar had said after his meeting with Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan on Monday.

For its part, the state-run media here highlighted Parrikar's remarks to Chang that India hopes that the development of bilateral ties will not be affected by other factors including the third party.

The remarks came one week after Parrikar and US Defence Secretary Ash Carter vowed to safeguard maritime security in the region, including the South China Sea, state-run China Daily reported.

"According to observers, India is seeking to strike a balance between China and the United States in its frequent high-level meetings with Chinese officials this week," it said.

Parrikar also said that India attaches highest importance to its ties with China. As the Indian government has long been dedicated to settling border disputes with China, Parrikar's visit to the country aims to reduce tensions caused by border patrols, although the issue cannot be solved overnight, said Zhao Gancheng, director of South Asia Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies.

The border dispute will be discussed at the 19th boundary talks between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi here this week. Zhao said normal patrols on the Chinese side of the Line of Actual Control have been portrayed in the Indian press as "aggressive" incursions in the Indian territory.

"Despite a Border Defence Cooperation Agreement, its implementation is problematic," Fu Xiaoqiang, an expert on South Asian studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations told Global Times, citing media hype and the tough stance on China taken by certain Indian

politicians.

Beijing and New Delhi inked the agreement in October 2013 during ex-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to China, formulating a formal mechanism to improve security along 3488-kilometer long border.

While wrongly considering the agreement as a signal of China's acquiescence in the status quo of the disputed territories on the eastern section of the border, India has demanded fewer normal patrols by the Chinese troops in the western section, Fu noted, calling New Delhi's demands "insatiable."

The overreaction from the Indian side has cooled the peaceful climate to a certain extent, Fu said, adding that it is also one of the reasons that several exchanges between military officials from both sides have made little headway on border issues.

"As defence cooperation takes up a great part of India-US ties, India is aware that any closer collaboration with the US will keep China alert," Zhao said.

However, since India, a country that upholds an independent foreign policy and makes its foreign policies based on its own interests, is also unwilling to sour diplomatic relations with China for the US, Parrikar might take the initiative to explain the logistics support agreement, Fu said.
BRUSSELS Russian and NATO envoys are unlikely to ease the worst tensions since the Cold War very much when they meet on Wednesday in their highest-level talks on security in almost two years.

Already bridling at NATO's expansion eastwards into its old Soviet sphere of influence, the Kremlin sees the U.S.-led alliance's new deterrents as a threat. NATO believes Moscow's annexation of Crimea puts Europe's stability at risk and is modernising to defend itself against an assertive Russia.

The NATO-Russia Council, which was broken off in June 2014 after the Crimea crisis, will meet in Brussels to discuss Ukraine, Afghanistan and how to avoid military accidents that might lead to war.

"We are not afraid of dialogue," said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who will chair the talks with the alliance's 28 ambassadors and Moscow's envoy to NATO, Alexander Grushko.

While the West and Russia remain at odds over eastern Ukraine, where more than 9,000 people have been killed in separatist fighting that NATO accuses Moscow of backing, the meeting is a sign of willingness to improve relations.

Agreeing on the meeting was a breakthrough in itself after many disagreements over the agenda, NATO diplomats said.

However, the simulated attack passes of Russian warplanes near a U.S. guided missile destroyer in the Baltic Sea last week, followed by the interception of an U.S. air force plane by a Russian fighter two days later, have again strained the mood.

Stoltenberg called the Russian manoeuvres "unprofessional and unsafe behaviour" on Tuesday, saying they highlighted the need for dialogue. NATO allies worry that Russian pilots are ignoring safety precautions agreed during the Cold War.

Grushko said it was the alliance, not Moscow, that was increasing the risks of conflict in Europe.

He cited NATO's biggest modernisation since the Cold War, possible plans for a bigger NATO presence in eastern Europe, and a U.S. missile defence shield as reasons to be worried.

"Today we are facing a NATO military build-up which is completely unjustified," Grushko told reporters.

"I don't see any possibility for a qualitative improvement of our relations if NATO continues on its path of deterrence and relevant military planning."

NO IMPROVEMENT IN EUROPEAN SECURITY

Washington says the U.S. missile defence shield in Europe is not directed at Russia and is designed to shoot down any ballistic missiles that might be launched by Iran.

The United States is developing sites in Romania and in Poland, two former Soviet alllies, and may eventually hand over command and control to NATO.

Poland and the Baltic states worry about an increase in the Russian military presence in Kaliningrad, where Russia is positioning longer-range surface-to-air missiles.

NATO'S response is likely to be a small multinational force in Poland and the Baltics. It says it will respect a 1997 agreement with Russia not to station large numbers of permanent combat forces in eastern Europe.

Russia is likely to say that NATO's insistence on a "persistent", not permanent, presence is simply twisting words.

"We don't see any difference between a continuous, persistent rotation and a permanent presence," Grushko said. "The military build-up in centre of Europe will not improve European security."

(Reporting by Robin Emmott)

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Peshawar: A suicide bomber blew himself up at a government office in Pakistan's restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province today, killing one person and injuring 19 others.

The bomber exploded his suicide vest at the Excise and Taxation Office in Mardan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, about 50 km from here, District Police Officer Faisal Shahzad said.

Before the explosion, the bomber fired two shots which resulted in people, about 30 to 35 in number, scampering for safe places, the Shazad said.

The injured people were being shifted to nearby hospitals for treatment.

Police and security forces rushed to the site and cordoned off the area soon after the blast that occurred around noon.
Lahore: Two men convicted in Pakistan's biggest child sex abuse scandal in a village bordering India have been sentenced to life imprisonment by an anti-terrorism court, eight months after the scandal broke out and forced the government to pass a law to criminalise such heinous crimes.

Haseem Aamir and Faizan Majeed have also been fined Rs 300,000 each by the court here yesterday. The massive scandal surfaced in August 2015 in Punjab province's Ganda Singh village, bordering India. It was the biggest scandal of such nature in Pakistan's history.

At least 280 children were filmed being sexually abused by a gang of over 25 criminals who used the hundreds of videos to blackmail and extort money from their parents by threatening to release the videos online. More than 30 FIRs were registered against the gang.

Still, more cases relating to the scandal are pending in the court. Adnan Liaqat, counsel for Haseem and Majeed, said the ATC decision would be challenged in the Lahore High Court.

"The trial court awarded the punishment on the solitary statement of an alleged victim." The five-member joint investigation team (JIT) constituted to probe the scandal has confirmed the two accused sodomised 19 minors.

It investigated 31 FIRs, interrogated 400 people, examined 47 video clips and 72 photographs in light of the photogrammetric tests. It, however, did not find any evidence of the accused being involved in the extortion or posting of the videos and pictures on the Internet for monetary gains.

The JIT presented a chargesheet against a total of 17 suspects. Ten of them were charged with sodomy and seven with other offenses, like criminal intimidation and fraud. The team recommended dropping eight cases which were fake.

In March, the Senate passed a bill criminalising sexual assault against minors, child pornography and trafficking for the first time. Previously only the acts of rape and sodomy were punishable by law. Under the revised legislation sexual assaults are punishable by up to seven years in prison. It is however awaiting ratification by the president.
Donald Trumps foreign policy statements have irked several countries (looking at you, Mexico) and caused him to be one of the most controversial persons running for the White House this year. Yet, it seems Trump is receiving support not only from Republicans in the US, but also locals in Russia. According to a YouGov poll, Russians stated that they want Trump to win the US Presidential election  a view previously expressed by the country's President Vladimir Putin. Incidentally, Russia was the only G20 country polled that supported Trump, reported YouGov.

The YouGov survey for Handelsblatt Global Edition questioned 20,000 people in each of the G20 countries. While Russia supported Trump, it was the only country to do so. The others overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton. Trump leads Clinton by 21 points in Russia but in 15 other countries, Clinton leads Trump by more than 21 points.

Trump had in January come out in support of Putin after a British enquiry found that the Russian president had probably sanctioned the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Trump told Fox Business, In all fairness to Putin - and I'm not saying this because he says 'Trump is brilliant and leading everybody' - the fact is that he hasn't been convicted of anything. Some people say he absolutely didn't do it, according to The Telegraph.

Trumps comments came after Putin praised him during an interaction with reporters. The Political Insider reported that Putin called him a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt and that hes the absolute leader in the presidential race

Meanwhile, Mexico gave Clinton the biggest lead of 54 points. Trump has repeatedly stirred controversy by claiming that the Mexicans who come to America are rapists and that he wants to build a wall between the two countries in order to block them from coming in. To add insult to injury, he has insisted the Mexico will pay for the wall. Of course Mexico retaliated, saying the country will not do so. President Enrique Pena Nieto even compared Trump to Hitler and Mussolini, reported The Atlantic.

Meanwhile, Trumps foreign policy is ringing alarm bells around the world.

By suggesting that Nato is "obsolete" and that Japan and South Korea should acquire nuclear weapons to rid the United States of the burden of protecting those countries, Trump has called into question some of the cornerstones of US foreign policy for decades.

Current US President Barack Obama even said that he was "getting questions constantly from foreign leaders about some of the wackier suggestions that are being made". Obama said Trump "doesn't know much about foreign policy, or nuclear policy, or the Korean peninsula, or the world generally".

When Secretary of State John Kerry visited the Hiroshima atomic bomb memorial on 11 April, he described Trump's proposals to provide nuclear weapons to Japan and South Korea as an "aberration".

Some of Trump's comments  short on research but big on headline-grabbing potential  have allowed his opponents to label him unfit to be commander-in-chief.

This week, Kerry swung into action again to say that the United States must never again resort to torture. "The United States is opposed to the use of torture in any form, at any time, by any government or non-state actor." Trump has repeatedly said he supports the use of waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and "a hell of a lot worse" on terror suspects.

The world will have to wait till November to see who will be the next leader of the free world.

With inputs from AFP
When Khushwant Singh was Editor of the Illustrated Weekly at its peak he was invited to address the Bombay Gymkhana members one afternoon. Singh wore his crumpled slacks and his lightly torn towel T shirt and sandals and sauntered off to the Club even though the dress code said formal.

He was stopped from entering and then refused to give the talk since he was miffed. He came back to office and in his inimitable style decided to set up his decision to vote with the staff (and what a galaxy of stars that staff was) taking part. Perhaps because I am an army brat and dress codes have been intrinsic to my upbringing I voted against and told him I thought it was wrong of him to accept the invitation and not the dress rules. He argued back that he was the speaker and the code should not apply to him. I asked him to show the card he was sent and he did. It gave the dress code and so I stuck to my guns.

I said he showed them discourtesy. He said, they had no right to tell him how to dress, he wasnt doing a fashion show, he was giving a speech.

I would not budge.

Much the same as Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj accepted an invitation to meet Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and covered herself in a sari and a shawl of matching colours. Clumsy but courteous. That is just proper and anyone finding fault with that is being fatuous. It would be diplomatically absurd to do otherwise. What point would you possibly score by being rude? If she had removed her bindi there might have been a case for overdoing it but simply covering herself is mere good manners.

It would have served no purpose if both leaders had sat in discomfort and averted eyes and been diverted from their purpose by sartorial impoliteness.

After all, you are on their territory. If you have gone you follow the cultural norm. We do it at our level. You go to some homes you keep your shoes on. Others you take them off. Some let you smoke. Others will not. I eat with my left hand. If I visit the south I make sure I do not offend my hosts by eating with the hand that makes them ill at ease.

The operative word is offend. There is no strength in equating rudeness with courage or independence. Indias air crew land in Saudi Arabia they put on the hijab. Do we stop the commercial agreement because we dont like it. We have had scores of heads of states and royalty from around the world visit our holy places and multiple houses of worship and they accord us the grace of our code of conduct. If they have to cover their heads they do so. Barefoot? So be it. Folded hands? You bet. Sit on the floor? Yes.

If Sushma had strode in to this meeting with skin showing and a sliver of her waist exposed in a sari which part of it would have made her critics feel that she had scored a point for the flag and the country.

Ask the ones who are making this hue and cry and setting her up for ridicule what they would do and why they think good breeding is weakness.

I am a Hindu. I have never eaten beef. Would you call me to your home and cook it and serve it because you eat it.

Would I make pork sausages if I had Muslim friends come over because thats the way I am, take it or leave it. I would not.

Would I make any non veg food for my Jain friend?

Would you light up your cigarette in a home with small children? Would you chew tobacco and call for a spittoon?

End up on a question? Why do so many of us wear a tie and a shirt (and even a coat in sweltering heat) when we go to get a US or UK visa?

Echo answers why.
BRUSSELS A Swede who is a suspect in March's Brussels metro bombing is now also under suspicion for playing a role in the Paris attacks last November, Belgian newspaper De Standaard said on Tuesday.

The paper said 23-year-old Osama Krayem's DNA was found in several of the safe houses that were used by the perpetrators to prepare the Paris attacks that killed 130 people.

The newspaper cited no sources for its information.

Krayem, who was charged with murder after his arrest in Brussels last Friday, is accused of being the man seen with suicide bomber Khalid El Bakraoui minutes before he blew himself up on a metro train. Police are still searching for a rucksack Krayem was carrying that they believe may have contained a bomb.

(Reporting By Jan Strupczewski; editing by John Stonestreet)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Washington: President Barack Obama says the top-ranking US intelligence official is reviewing classified material in a September 11 report that families of attack victims and some lawmakers are demanding be made public.

Several members of the House and Senate, including House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, have joined 9/11 families in pressuring for declassification of 28 pages that are part of government documents compiled on the 9/11 attack amid speculation of a possible role by Saudi Arabia.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attack. In an interview with CBS's Charlie Rose, Obama was asked if he had read the 28 pages. "I have a sense of what's in there," he replied.

Obama also revealed that James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, "has been going through this" to ensure that whatever is made public does not damage US national security interests.

"My understanding is that he's about to complete that process," the president said. Former US Sen Robert Graham, who helped write the report that includes the 28 redacted pages, recently told CBS's "60 Minutes" the secret material could reveal possible Saudi backing for the men who hijacked airplanes, flying two into the World Trade Center in New York and another into the Pentagon.

A third hijacked plane crashed on September 11, 2001, in western Pennsylvania. Graham, a Democrat, declined to cite any details on the portion of the report that remains classified. Obama also voiced concerns about a legislative move to allow victim families to bring lawsuits against other countries believed to have provided support for attacks.

"This is a matter of how generally the United States approaches our interactions with other countries," he said. "If we open up the possibility that individuals and the United States can routinely start suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States to being continually sued by individuals in other countries."

Material from the interview was to be broadcast on "CBS This Morning" and PBS, as well as "CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley."
Canberra: Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Tuesday confirmed of calling an early election on 2 July.

On Monday, Australia's upper house, the Senate, rejected a piece of government legislation for a second time which provided Turnbull with a trigger for a so-called double dissolution election, BBC reported.

A double dissolution election is a mechanism in the Australian Constitution that allows the government to call for an election if a piece of legislation is blocked twice in the Upper House.

Turnbull said at a press conference that he intended to ask the governor general to dissolve parliament after the budget 3 May.

He said said calling the double dissolution was about "giving the people their say".

"It means it's an occasion when the House and the Senate can't agree, persistently and so then everyone goes to the polls," he said.

"And when we win the election as I believe we will, we will return and the reforms to registered organisations and the reintroduction of the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) will be made law."
Washington: A 26-year-old American woman will file a lawsuit against a Catholic Indian priest and his church in India for allegedly sexually abusing her during his posting in the US between 2004 and 2005.

The move comes in protest against the recent Vatican decision which announced Diocese of Ootacamund located in Mylapore is reinstating Joseph Jeyapaul to ministry.

Minnesota attorney Jeff Anderson will file suit on behalf of the victim in federal court that claims the Diocese of Ootacamund endangered children by reinstating Jeyapaul.

Jeyapaul who served as a priest in Crookston township of Minnesota in 2004 and 2005 was arrested in India in 2012 and extradited to the US on charges of sexually abusing two girls in a congregation.

He was later deported to India last year, after serving his sentence of one year and one day.

In a statement, advocacy group SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) announced that one of the sexual abuse survivors would sue the priest and the diocese.

"It may be the most irresponsible Vatican move we've ever seen: Catholic officials in Rome have lifted the suspension of a recently convicted predator priest. We are stunned and saddened by such blatant recklessness and callousness," Barbara Dorris of St Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, said in a statement on Tuesday.

A letter sent to Anderson and Roseau County Attorney Lisa Hanson and signed by over 500 Jeyapaul supporters in India will also be released as evidence of the public danger (nuisance) permitted by Indian Bishop and Vatican, it said.

"On 16 January, 2016, with the permission of Pope Francis, Bishop Amalraj lifted the suspension of Father Joseph Jeyapaul," the firm said, adding that in 2015, after his extradition from India, Jeyapaul plead guilty to criminal sexual conduct involving the sexual abuse of a minor girl while he worked in the Diocese of Crookston in 2005.

"Catholic officials refuse to keep this admitted sex offender away from kids, so our only hope of stopping him is to get him charged and convicted again," Dorris said.

Over the weekend, Barbara and the victim were seen distributing leaflets outside the church in Crookston to find another sex abuse survivor.

"Our goal is to find just one more victim who might be able to file criminal charges and get this proven predator behind bars," the victim told local 'Grand Forks Herald'.

The lawsuit would charge Catholic officials with creating "public nuisances" by hiding and helping predator priests.

"It was the first victim's courage that brought forward a second victim of Fr Jeyapaul. It was the second victim's courage that prodded Fr Jeyapaul to plead guilty. And we hope the courage of a third victim will get Fr Jeyapaul extradited, convicted and jailed again, so that no more innocent lives are shattered," SNAP said.

"Until he's charged and convicted again, Jeyapaul should be put in a remote, secure, independently-run treatment center far from families who have learned to trust him," it said.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's recall of Parliament to secure a July 2 election has delivered unintended and potentially damaging consequences for the Liberals, with the Senate agreeing to hold a snap inquiry into political donations which will target the dealings of Cabinet Secretary Arthur Sinodinos.

Senator Sinodinos will be compelled to give evidence to the inquiry that will investigate the Liberal party's fundraising body Free Enterprise Foundation (FEF), after Labor secured the support of the Greens and crossbenchers to pass its motion on Tuesday evening.

Senator Arthur Sinodinos was honorary treasurer of the NSW Liberals when the unlawful donations were made. Credit:Andrew Meares

The successful motions put forward by Labor senate leader Penny Wong also call for the finance and public administration references committee to examine whether the Australian Electoral Commission has sufficient powers to deal with misconduct.

The move comes after a report from the NSW electoral commission that slammed the NSW Liberal party for "concealing" the identities of illegal major donors before the 2001 election and using the FEF to "channel and disguise donations by major political donors some of whom were prohibited donors".
Doris Roberts, who played the tart-tongued, endlessly meddling mother on Everybody Loves Raymond, has died, a family spokeswoman said. She was 90.

Roberts died in her sleep, spokeswoman Janet Daily said on Monday. Daily was told of the death by Roberts' son, Michael Cannata.

The cause of death was not immediately known. Roberts had been healthy and active, Daily said.

In the last two weeks, the actress had attended a discussion on Hollywood and gender held by the SAG-AFTRA actors' guild.
A man has been arrested after allegedly spying on women through peep holes in the wall of a changing room at a public swimming pool south of Sydney.

Staff at the pool in Helensburgh, in Wollongong's northern suburbs, allegedly discovered a number of holes in the wall that overlooked the women's showers, police said.

The pool, on Walker Street, is operated by Wollongong City Council, and it will be alleged in court that council staff saw a 59-year-old peering through the holes into the changing room.

The council alerted police, who on Tuesday arrested a 59-year-old man who is understood to be from the Helensburgh area.

The man was charged with five counts of peep and pry, and was granted conditional police bail before his scheduled court appearance on May 17.
Ms Faulkner claims her husband took their children to Lebanon in May 2015 and did not let them return to Australia as promised. Earlier this month, two men abducted Noah, 3, and Lahala, 5, while they were walking along a busy street in the Hezbollah-controlled district of Hadath in Beirut's southern suburbs. A Lebanese plainclothes policeman prevents Tara Brown from looking towards journalists as she was taken from the courthouse while under arrest in Lebanon. Credit:Hussein Malla The incident was caught on CCTV. A local shopkeeper said her son witnessed the entire operation. "He said he saw people grabbing the children into a van, and the grandmother running after them pelting them with her handbag," she told Fairfax Media. Sally Faulkner with her estranged husband Ali Elamine and their daughter Lahala at birth.

Mr Elamine said his mother had suffered three internal head injuries in the altercation but was getting better. "We went to the doctor on Thursday, the bleeding in her head kind of stopped, so now it's just a matter of time before it dries up, she should be good." He said the children had complained about their mother's "rough" friends. "What do the kids want? I don't think they wanted all of this, I'll tell you that. They were happy that they saw her. They were a bit bummed that mummy's friends are strong and rough. I just told my biggest they work out a lot," he said. Mr Elamine confirmed his children wanted to see their mother and "probably" wanted to visit her in Australia but added: They're kids, they always want what they don't have at the moment, I mean you take kids to a toy store, they want the whole store." He ruled out letting them travel to Australia claiming he would not get a fair hearing in the Australian courts or media.

"Why not? I mean, are you kidding? What would you think? They have new passports, the media's on it, I'm pretty sure someone from the government's also involved," he said. This means Ms Faulkner's access to her children would likely be restricted to visits in either Lebanon or a third country, in the event a negotiation is reached. Who paid for what? One matter in dispute by the parties involved is whether Channel Nine paid for the child recovery operation to take place. Earlier on Monday, Nine's lawyer, Kamal Abu Zahar, confirmed the network had made a payment in relation to the story but insisted it was for the story itself and not for the operation.

"Channel Nine paid for the story," he told Fairfax Media. "This lady [Sally Faulkner] came to them after contracting Adam [Whittington]," he said. He said Nine's priority was the children but Mr Elamine was not actively pursuing a swift resolution. "Sally's lawyer talked to him and they were reaching something but all of a sudden Ali's lawyers said 'we're not in a hurry,'" Mr Abu Zahar said. Mr Whittington, who runs a self-styled international child recovery organisation, told News Corp he had two receipts to prove Nine paid him directly for the operation and would testify against the network. A source rubbished this and said he "was talking shit". Mr Elamine said the group appeared to be turning on each other after the operation was foiled when police arrested Ms Faulkner, her television crew, Mr Whittington and his accomplice Craig Michael a short time after the abduction and before they could make their getaway to Cyprus on a luxury yacht. "Everyone's blaming the other person for what happened," he said. Embassy officials observing negotiations

Officials from the Australian and British embassies were observing but not taking part in the negotiations, Mr Abu Zahar said. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said she was still in constant communications with her Lebanese counterpart "to receive updates, to make suggestions". "The law in Lebanon is quite different to Australian law. It's based on a French system, so there have been arrests, then an investigation and then an investigating judge determines whether charges will be laid and I understand we're at that stage of the proceedings," she told Network Ten. Ms Bishop directly addressed the custodial dispute, which preceded the events in Beirut, and said Lebanon was not signatory to the International Hague Convention which deals with child abduction. "In this case Lebanese law gives custody to the father. Australian law has given custody to the mother," she said.
Supporters of a Missouri constitutional amendment that aims to bring in $305 million a year for young children by increasing the states tobacco tax said theyve had their share of opponents, but they did not expect Washington University to be among them.

In early February, the school began actively lobbying against the Raise Your Hands for Kids initiative.

Its doing so even though 10 percent to 15 percent of the revenue from the proposed 60-cent per pack tax increase on cigarettes is targeted for hospitals and health clinics statewide, presumably including those affiliated with Washington Universitys medical school.

Proponents say the tax increase would yield more than $28 million statewide a year for screenings, preventive health care and other supports to help new mothers and young children.

Washington U. isnt the only large health-related organization to balk. Missouri Cures, a bioscience advocacy group with significant ties to WU, is also firmly against it.

Both groups say the initiative puts federally mandated protections to conduct embryonic stem-cell research in Missouri at grave risk  a charge that supporters of the ballot measure equate with paranoia.

So how did a bipartisan initiative supporting early-childhood education suddenly become equated as a threat to embryonic stem-cell research?

It all comes down to wording added to the proposal in November in hopes of bolstering the chance that the tobacco tax would pass.

The ballot measure now includes a ban on using any of the tobacco-tax money on abortion or stem-cell research.

Three different tobacco taxes have failed in Missouri, with opposition from groups like the Missouri Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association.

Within those battles have been claims that some of the new tax money would fund abortion services.

Linda Rallo, executive director of Raise Your Hands for Kids, said adding restrictions on stem-cell research and abortion was a way to stave off false claims about the proposed tax, particularly given the legislative controversy involving Planned Parenthood and fetal tissue donation.

It makes it crystal clear to voters that the funding we are raising is only going for children, Rallo said.

Political calculations

Even before the controversial funding restrictions were added, the tobacco-tax proposal limited the revenue to three areas unrelated to abortion and stem-cell research: 75 percent to 85 percent to early-childhood education; 5 percent to 10 percent to smoking cessation programs for pregnant mothers, and 10 percent to 15 percent for hospitals and health clinics.

Rallo said bans on abortion and stem-cell funding were included without objections from WU in a 2012 proposal called Proposition B, intended to raise the tobacco tax to fund, among other things, higher education.

In fact, Rallo said organizers got the idea for the funding restrictions from WU in a 2013 study undertaken by the Center for Public Health Systems Science based out of the schools George Warren Brown School of Social Work.

The study said Prop B in 2012 appeared to have lesser opposition from anti-abortion groups than a previous 2006 tobacco-tax attempt. The study alluded to the measures restriction on abortion and stem-cell funding as a possible factor.

Since mid-January, officials within WUs office of governmental affairs and the schools lobbyist in Jefferson City have been asking supporters to pull their prior endorsements of the current tobacco-tax proposal.

Hijacked

State Sen. Jill Schupp, D-Creve Coeur, was one of the supporters who was approached by WU lobbyist Jorgan Schlemeier to reconsider her position. She said Tuesday the initiative was hijacked, and she is no longer endorsing it because it threw a bone to groups against stem-cell research and anti-abortion proponents.

I think early-childhood funding is very important, but this is just a deal-breaker for me, she said. I dont know why they felt it necessary to insert this language into a bill that has nothing to do with stem-cell research or abortion.

Illinois considers raising age to buy tobacco products A measure to raise the age to buy tobacco from 18 to 21 in Illinois received initial approval

Rep. Jeremy LaFaver, D-Kansas City, was also asked by the lobbyist to rescind his endorsement. He said hes backing it because he hasnt heard a compelling reason why the funding ban is dangerous to abortion rights or bioscience. Nor, he said, should falsely tying it to partisan concerns deter a great proposal that a vast proportion of voters in Missouri are in support of.

Child advocates worry they will lose voter support for a tobacco tax that could benefit thousands of young children who currently receive no services or early education.

In 2014, Missouri dedicated $37 million of its budget to early-childhood initiatives and programs statewide. The tobacco tax is designed to bring in more than eight times that amount annually. The St. Louis region stands to gain more than $97 million if and when the tax is fully phased-in over four years.

Missouri has the lowest tobacco tax in the nation at 17 cents per pack of cigarettes. Neighboring states have significantly higher rates: from 60 cents a pack in Kentucky to $1.98 in Illinois.

In a prepared statement, WU said it supports early-childhood education, but it wont support the initiative unless the stem-cell funding restriction is removed because it is in direct conflict with Amendment 2 and erodes protections for promising medical research involving stem cells.

Donn Rubin, chairman of Missouri Cures, which led the campaign for Amendment 2, said the funding restriction encourages continual nuisance litigation and could be used by abortion opponents to cut off funding for other programs at WU that engage in stem-cell research.

This would just open the door to all the bad things we have been protecting against for the last decade, he said. There has just been a constant and unrelenting effort really led by a small few who have been obsessed with trying to overturn these research protections.

The Missouri Ethics Commission disclosed Friday that Missouri Cures donated nearly $85,000 last week to the political action committee, We Deserve Better, which opposes the tobacco-tax ballot measure.

A false conspiracy?

Rallo, of Raise Your Hands For Kids, said the group is awaiting outside legal interpretation to prove the measure would not threaten Amendment 2. She said its too late in the petition process to change the wording.

Rallo and the initiatives treasurer, Erin Brower, believe recent opposition to the measure was fueled by unfair suspicion of their groups Kansas City attorney, Eddie Greim.

Greim is a supporter of Senate Joint Resolution 39, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, that would enable businesses to turn down customers based on religious beliefs. And he has been aligned with pro-Catholic political causes.

Brower, the initiatives original executive director from Kansas City, said theres a false conspiracy theory that Greim covertly added the funding restriction. She said he was hired because he was the only attorney in Jackson County without a client conflict available to handle constitutional law for the initiative.

Rubin said, there are people on their team of consultants who have historically been in bed with those who have pursued anti-science policies for the last decade. But he declined to clarify whom.

Greim said Wednesday he has no political agenda with the initiative and is focused solely on supporting the welfare of young children.

Somebody has to approach the WU people and say, literally, what is the factual basis for this claim that it is going to harm Amendment 2, he said.

Rubin said Missouri needs to be vigilant about protecting Amendment 2 so as not to attract a black mark on Missouri as an innovation and science-friendly state.

Raise Your Hands for Kids expects to file its required petitions to put the amendment as written on the November ballot by the May 8 deadline, Rallo said.

This story has been updated with a correction to the tobacco tax rates in neighboring states.
China will widen a pilot program aimed at fighting corruption to four new cities outside the financial hub of Shanghai as it seeks to reign in the business activities of government officials' spouses and children.

The rules, put in place last year, bar spouses and children of senior officials from serving as managers, registering individual businesses or holding partnerships in the areas where a family member holds office.

The program, which initially began in the financial hub of Shanghai, will now be extended to Guangdong province, Chongqing and the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

The move follows revelations in the so-called "Panama Papers" that showed several offshore shell companies linked to family members of current and former high-ranking Chinese officials, including current Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Xi has made fighting corruption a hallmark of his government since taking office three years ago, saying it threatens the very survival of the ruling Communist Party.

Dozens of top officials in the party, the government, the military and state-owned companies have been among those targeted.
Iran's concerns about its perceived lack of sanctions relief and Syria's faltering political talks will be focal points for Secretary of State John Kerry when he sits down for talks Tuesday with his Iranian counterpart.

Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will meet in New York, at the start of a trip for Kerry that will include stops in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Iranian officials have complained that their country is not getting the sanctions relief specified in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the landmark nuclear agreement that was implemented in January.

"All of the countries should take necessary measures to remove the obstacles to the implementation of the nuclear deal," Zarif said at a Saturday news conference with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.

"We have seen the Americans' attitude, so we will put some pressure on them, so should the EU, to pave the way for cooperation between the non-U.S. banks and Iran," he added.

The U.S. has been "fulfilling" its commitment to the JCPOA, said White House spokesman John Earnest on Friday. He said giving Iran access to the U.S. financial system was "not part of the deal."

At the State Department on Monday, spokesman John Kirby acknowledged that he expects the sanctions issue to be on Tuesday's agenda for Kerry and Zarif.

"We are obviously aware of the concerns that they have expressed about the status of sanctions relief, and the secretary is very mindful that this topic will come up," he said.

Ahead of the talks, Kerry said in a speech to the pro-Israel group J Street that Iran has so far received about $3 billion as a result of the deal to constrain the Iranian nuclear program. He said that is far less than figures given by critics and reiterated that the agreement showed the power of prioritizing diplomacy.

"Despite the skeptics' most dire predictions, we are in a place that some people thought was unimaginable and others unacceptable," Kerry said.

The meeting between Kerry and Zarif also comes at a time when the U.N.-facilitated process for a political transition in Syria appears to be showing signs of fray.

Syrian setbacks

Their meeting also comes at a time when the U.N.-facilitated process for a political transition in Syria appears to be showing signs of fray.

The Syrian opposition announced that it has postponed its participation in the political talks because of what it says are the Syrian government's cease-fire violations.

The two sides have been holding indirect talks in Geneva.

Iran supports the Syrian government while the U.S. has supported the moderate opposition. But Tehran and Washington are part of the International Syria Support Group, which has been backing the process for a political transition.

After his meeting with Zarif, Kerry travels to Cairo, where he will discuss bilateral and regional issues with officials including President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

He then will join U.S. President Barack Obama in Riyadh for a Gulf Cooperation Council summit.
Turkish police detained dozens of people for their alleged financial links to U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported Monday.

The police operation, centered in Istanbul, was launched across nine provinces, and more than 100 people were taken into custody. Altogether, prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 140 people.

Among those detained are the officials of the Istanbul-based Dumankaya Construction Company and 41 employees of the Islamic lender Bank Asya, which was founded by followers of Gulen and seized by the government last year.

The probe is centered on financial support raised for Gulen's group amounting to some 50 million liras ($17 million) between 2004 and 2015.

Turkey's Organized Crimes Unit detained the suspects on charges of being a member of a terrorist organization, laundering assets acquired and terrorism finance statutes.

According to Fortune magazine, the Dumankaya Company is the 224th biggest company in Turkey.

"As has been reported by the media, on April 18, 2016, our members of the board were invited to the [Police's] Financial Department in order to be consulted for their information," the company said on its website. "The process is being followed by us."

The political conflict between the ruling AKP (the Justice and Development Party) and the Islamic Gulen movement, known as the "Hizmet" (Service) movement, began in late 2013 after a major corruption and graft investigation led by Istanbul prosecutors against four ministers became public.

Gulen history, reaction

The Gulen movement was once among President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's most enthusiastic supporters and the Gulen-affiliated media groups backed government policies.

But Gulen, 74, ran afoul of the military-backed secular government in Ankara and sought refuge in the United States.

The government accuses the Gulen movement of infiltrating the police, judiciary and political system and creating a state within a state.

Gulenists have been charged in recent years with setting up an armed terrorist group, trying to bring down the government, and wiretapping.

In December 2014, Turkish police arrested several journalists and media executives close to the Gulen movement on charges of "forming, leading and being a member of an armed terrorist organization."

Gulen followers decried Monday's detentions.

"The latest detentions and arrests of taxpaying ordinary citizens sympathetic to Hizmet movement are only the continuation of a troubling authoritarian pattern in Turkey under the leadership of President Erdogan and Prime Minister Davutoglu," the Washington, D.C.-based Turkic American Alliance (TAA), affiliated with the Gulen movement, said in a statement to VOA.

"Erdogan and his friends are intolerant of any form of dissent," the statement said. "We are extremely worried about this antidemocratic trend and call on the international community to press Ankara to respect the rights of all opposition and minority groups in Turkey in accordance with universal human rights norms and international legal commitments."
The release of the Panama Papers has fed two stereotypes about offshore investing: that it is the exclusive preserve of the rich and that its main purpose is to avoid taxes. Like most stereotypes, its accurate only in part.

In todays fraught political climate, its easy to miss the fact that investment funds listed outside the U.K. (and U.S.) help plenty of middle class people too. That isnt the image that immediately springs to mind these days or which has motivated calls for a regulatory crackdown on offshore investments. But ordinary employees of Britains largest companies, trade unions and councils also participate in offshore investing, through their pension plans.

These investments are part of the second-largest investment industry in the world, after the U.S.s, with 5.5 trillion pounds (USD7.8 trillion) under management at the end of 2014. Some 895 billion pounds of those assets are managed in funds that are domiciled offshore, a figure that grew by 16 percent between 2013 and 2014.

That isnt all casino money for hedge-fund speculators. Over a third of the U.K.s local-government pension plans allocate money to hedge funds, which are largely based offshore. According to the Alternative Investment Management Association, they generally allocate around 7 percent of their total investment portfolio to such funds.

The same goes for the private sector, where 64 percent of the top 25 U.K. corporate pension plans invest in hedge funds. Defined-benefit pension funds  which comprise most pension plans and held over 1 trillion in assets in 2013  invest around 60 billion of their assets in hedge funds.

All offshore funds are supposed to be tax neutral in that the fund itself isnt taxed but investors must pay tax in their own jurisdictions on income and capital gains. Thats not unique to island domiciles; much of the offshore allocations end up in Ireland, Luxembourg or the U.S. The Cayman Islands represent over a quarter of hedge fund domiciles. A low- or zero-tax rate on some investment funds exists in many jurisdictions (the U.K. exempts various investment companies and trusts from taxes on capital gains, for example). What defines a haven for tax-dodging is its refusal to cooperate with tax authorities to counter tax-evasion attempts.

Thats becoming less common. In 2000, the OECD took the Cayman Islands off its tax haven blacklist after the Caymans complied with higher standards of transparency. In 2009, it removed holdouts Andorra, Liechtenstein and Monaco from its list of uncooperative jurisdictions. Panama was removed in 2012, perhaps prematurely.

For the non-criminally inclined, the attraction of, say, the Cayman Islands has little to do with taxes and more to do with the benefits of lighter regulation  such as how much leverage a fund can have, or the ability to short-sell. Funds located offshore can offer more flexibility than is available to onshore managers in London, in part because the relevant laws in Britain long predate the hedge fund industrys existence. Its doubtful regulators have the appetite  and certainly they lack the resources  to regulate that industry onshore.

While the tax break for funds may seem generous, its worth bearing in mind that adding another layer of tax at the fund level would probably mean higher charges passed along to investors, with any tax benefit going to the offshore jurisdiction rather than brought home. It would not only dent the wealth of those who are able to afford more exotic investment options, it might also harm ordinary investors in employer pension plans  a major part of one of Britains strongest industries. With a whiff of British class war in the air, that common interest has been overlooked. Therese Raphael, Bloomberg
Parliament in Brazil yesterday has voted to start impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff over charges of manipulating government accounts.

The yes camp comfortably won the required two-thirds majority in the vote in the lower house in Brasilia.

The motion will now go to the upper house, the Senate, which is expected to suspend Ms Rousseff next month while it carries out a formal trial.

She denies tampering with the accounts to help secure her re-election in 2014. Her supporters describe the vote as a coup against democracy.
Taiwan says its delegation was ejected from a meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Developments steel committee after China complained, part of an apparent hardening of Beijings attitude toward the island it claims as its own territory.

Taiwan is only an observer rather than a member of the OECD due to Chinas campaign to isolate it diplomatically. It was participating as a dialogue partner in the meeting held Monday in Belgium to discuss excess steel capacity.

However, the Chinese delegation demanded the Taiwanese leave because the delegates ranks were not senior enough, Taiwans official Central News Agency said yesterday.
The Associated Press expose on slavery in Southeast Asias fishing industry, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday [US time], was born of a painstaking investigation by four reporters who documented the harsh treatment of fishermen held captive on a remote island and traced their catch to U.S. supermarkets and restaurants.

The stories, accompanied by photos and video showing caged men and a man weeping when reunited with the family he hadnt seen in 22 years, led to the release of more than 2,000 enslaved fishermen and other laborers. It came with substantial risk to the journalists, while posing thorny questions about how to spotlight the abuse without further endangering the captives.

The series, Seafood from Slaves, encompassed reporting across four countries by AP journalists Margie Mason, Robin McDowell, Martha Mendoza and Esther Htusan. Building on earlier reports of forced labor in Southeast Asias fishing industry, they worked for more than a year to delve into the harvesting and processing of inexpensive shrimp and other seafood sold in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Gathering with staffers in the organizations New York newsroom Monday, AP President Gary Pruitt and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll praised the energy and hard work required to document the slavery in detail and show how it is used to supply the food on American tables.

It was a tour de force of reporting, and I think that what really stands out about them is their determination not to stop short until they proved it in every which way, AP International Editor John Daniszewski said.

It was the APs first Pulitzer for public service. After reporting through much of 2014, McDowell and Htusan traveled to the Indonesian island of Benjina, about 1,900 miles from the countrys capital. The reporters found and talked with men held in a cage and interviewed other enslaved laborers at the towns port. Under cover of darkness, they pulled alongside a trawler to film captives describing their plight, before the reporters boat was nearly rammed by an angry security guards craft.

The laborers, poor men from Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, described how they had been lured into captivity, locked up, beaten and forced to work. They pointed the reporters to a graveyard where more than 60 workers who had died had been buried under false names.

From Benjina, the AP team relied on satellite technology to track a cargo ship carrying the slave-caught seafood to Thailand, where they watched it offloaded and trucked to cold storage plants and factories. Through interviews, surveillance and shipping records, they tracked the processed seafood to the U.S., eventually pressing suppliers and retailers including Wal-Mart and restaurant chains like Red Lobster about the labor abuses.

The reporters and their editors knew they had an explosive story. But they wrestled with whether to publish immediately and put the captives at risk, or provide information to authorities and wait until the men were safe, while risking being scooped. They decided on the latter, despite the APs longtime emphasis on reporting, not making news.

Their efforts led to the rescue and freedom of hundreds of slaves on the island and aboard ships, as well as crackdowns on Thai shrimp peeling plants staffed by captive laborers as young as 15. Mason and Htusan traveled to Myanmar to see one of the freed men reunite tearfully with his family after two decades in captivity.

McDowell said the satisfaction of seeing the laborers freed was tempered by the knowledge that many more remain enslaved. But the AP team pursued its reporting in a way that could set the stage for additional reform, she said.

I think what we intended to do from the beginning was to [] bring as much attention to the issue as possible, and that was the reason for linking it to the American dinner table, she said. Governments can put pressure on Thailand, human rights group can put pressure on them, labor rights organizations, but its not until the American companies or consumers start demanding change that you start to see change.

The Indonesian government launched a criminal inquiry soon after AP published. The series, overseen by Mary Rajkumar, APs international enterprise editor, also resulted in numerous arrests and seizures of millions of dollars in goods.

The award is the second Pulitzer for Mendoza, who was part of an AP team recognized in 2000 for The Bridge at No Gun Ri, about the mass killings of South Korean civilians by U.S. troops at the start of the Korean War.

The AP has now won 52 Pulitzers, including a 2013 award for photographs of the civil war in Syria and a 2012 investigative prize for revealing the New York Police Departments widespread spying on Muslims. Adam Geller, New York, AP
The 30th Sino-Luso International Medical Forum finished on Sunday after a three-day international medical symposium at the Landmark ICBC Centre.

The event was organized by the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST) and the Macau Healthcare Management and Promotion Association, with around 300 medical staff from public and private hospitals and clinics attending presentations conducted by medical experts from Macau, Portugal, Hong Kong, the US and Sweden.

Mario Evora, clinical director and head of the Cardiology division at Conde S. Januario General Hospital, told the Times that the forum paves the way for Macaus medical staff to discover good ideas that can be good solutions for specific health problems in the region, especially given that the academic level of participants usually is very high.

We have excellent speakers coming from abroad, and its particularly important for us in Macau because we do not have at this moment [] an academy of medicine, said Evora.

Billy Chan, vice president of the Sino-Luso International Medical Forum, emphasized the importance of up-to-date information for the professional development of health care practitioners.

He also pointed out that the symposium is an opportunity to establish cooperation and build bridges on an international level.

This particular forum is interesting because it is a multi-disciplinary approach [] this time we bring in a variety of very smart experts in the field from overseas to Macau.

Chan also revealed that the seminar would be expanded into an Asia-Pacific forum but would remain under the umbrella of the Sino-Luso International forum.

We want to see this to continue. [] So for the next one [forum] in May well be inviting people from Cambodia. People will also be coming from Belgium, the UK, outside the Portuguese-speaking countries, said Dr Chan, who is also the director of the Center of Excellence for Medical Professional Development at MUST.

Moreover, the director said that the forum will be bringing Chinese experts and government officials to Portugal for a meeting with Lusophone countries medical experts.
 You said earlier that the Portuguese Prosecutions Office is available to continue cooperating with Macau SAR and to send Portuguese magistrates to work in the territory. Will there be any limit to the number?

 That number was not defined clearly. But it is certain that for the time being and with consideration to the short number of staff that the Portuguese Prosecutions Office possesses, we cannot allow a large number of magistrates to come [to the territory].

Another of the reasons that justifies why we didnt establish a fixed ceiling is because the number available tends to be flexible. We hope that in the next 2, 3 or 4 years we would have more staff that will allow us, in case of solicitation by the MSAR Prosecutor, to consider the possibility of sending more. We will consider all the requests from the MSAR Prosecutor and we will attend to those within our own working circumstances.

 Are the magistrates currently operating in Macau going to be treated according to any transitory rule?

 Regarding those magistrates, their situation will be properly considered by the Superior Council of the Public Prosecutions Office, that is, I cant really answer clearly what is going to happen. But I can guarantee that their cases will be fairly and properly considered.

There are several factors to consider including the fulfillment of the new requirements that have now been established. The Council will consider, according to the requests received, whether it is possible to decide the permanence and continuation of service of magistrates in this situation.

 One of the areas covered in the agreement is training. How will this cooperation formally take place?

 The training area was addressed in a more generic perspective. There is mutual interest from both Prosecutions Offices and there is an availability on the Portuguese side to allow Portuguese magistrates to come [to Macau] to perform training sessions within the framework of the Centre for Legal Studies (CEJ). There is also the possibility of the Portuguese MP hosting, for periods of time (not yet set), internships with a more practical nature, namely, allowing magistrates from the MSAR MP to follow the processes and activity in Portugal.

There are several possible approaches to training, including the establishment of a protocol between the two magistrates training schools or in a more direct way through cooperation between the MPs.
Chinese police say they have arrested a woman and two men suspected in the killing of a Hong Kong-based British language instructor found dead in southern China.

Officers in the city of Shenzhen declined yesterday to elaborate on an earlier statement saying the 38-year-old woman identified by her surname Xu had killed 60-year-old Hilary St. John Bower, her boyfriend of 17 years, over a relationship dispute.

The statement said two men aged 28 and 23 assisted Xu and were arrested with her on April 8. It said the investigation was ongoing.

The British embassy in Beijing said it was supporting the family of a British national who had died in southern China and was in close contact with local investigators. No other details were given.

Bower was an English instructor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. A colleague was quoted by the citys South China Morning Post newspaper as saying Bower was anticipating a windfall from a real estate investment in Shenzhen, located just across the border from Hong Kong, although the police report said nothing about a dispute over money. He was reported missing by another girlfriend on March 30.

Bowers killing follows the poisoning death of British citizen Neil Heywood by the wife of a leading Chinese official in November 2011. The murder set off the countrys biggest political scandal in decades, leading to the downfall of high-profile communist politician Bo Xilai. AP
The 2016 Asia Pacific Regional Model European Union was held last weekend at the Hong Kong Baptist University. The event, which was co-organized by the European Union Academic Programme in Maca0 (EUAP-M) and its counterpart organization in Hong Kong (EUAP-HK), brought together 22 students to discuss the current migrant and refugee wave affecting Europe and to try to reach a set of conclusions.

As part of the event, students were required to discuss proposals and negotiate with each other, all the while staying as close to their designated countrys foreign policy as possible and seeking to secure the greatest benefit to their nation in the event of an agreement. The event was a simulation of the European Council and, as in the case of the real council, agreements are usually adopted unanimously.

The EUAP-M participated in the two-day event with three teams of two students, involving five students from the University of Macau (UM) and one from the Macau University of Science and Technology. The six students competed against other students from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand, Singapore and Thailand.

UM students Nick Wauben and Han Xiangzhi, who jointly represented Italy in the simulation, won the best team award. Meanwhile, Jose Miguel Nuno de la Rosa Ortiz, also from UM, won the best individual award for his representation of Denmark.

Also present at the simulation in a chairing capacity was Dr Stern Verhoeven of UMs Faculty of Law.

Established in 2012, the EUAP-M is the product of a partnership between UM and the Institute of European Studies of Macau, and is co-financed by the European Union (EU). It aims to raise awareness of the EU among Macaus general public and students at all levels. DB
CHINA The Defense Ministry says a military plane was dispatched to one of Chinas new man-made islands in a disputed area of the South China Sea in what is believed to be the first openly acknowledged landing of its kind.

S. KOREA The countrys president says there are signs that North Korea is preparing for a fifth nuclear bomb test amid reports of increased activity at the countrys main nuclear test site.

JAPAN The U.S. military joined relief efforts in southern Japan for areas devastated by two powerful earthquakes as local rescuers comb through debris looking for 10 people still reported missing. Authorities say at least 42 people have died and nearly 1,100 were injured in the two quakes that hit the region near Kumamoto city Thursday and Sunday.

CAMBODIA The latest crackdown on illegal logging in Cambodia is just a game and big timber traders are winning, says Ouch Leng, a former government official who has spent two decades helping poor villagers fight poaching of precious tropical forests.

AUSTRALIA Actor Johnny Depps wife Amber Heard pleads guilty to providing a false immigration document amid allegations she smuggled the couples dogs to Australia, but managed to avoid jail time over what was dubbed the war on terrier debacle.

MYANMARs de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi vowed yesterday to push for constitutional amendments to build a true democracy in the Southeast Asian country as it emerges from decades of military control. Suu Kyi made the comments in a nationally televised address to mark the start of the Buddhist new year.

INDIA New Delhi has banned chewing tobacco in an effort to lower the high incidence of mouth and throat cancers. The Delhi government ordered the prohibition of the sale, purchase and possession of all forms of chewable tobacco, saying violators can be imprisoned for up to six months and fined up to 300,000 rupees (USD4,500).

ECUADOR Rescuers pull survivors from rubble after the strongest earthquake to hit Ecuador in decades flattens buildings and buckles highways along its Pacific coast. Officials say the quake killed more than 230 people and injured hundreds.

QATAR A meeting of oil-rich countries in Qatar that had been expected to boost crude prices by freezing production falls apart as Iran stays home and vows to increase its output despite threats by Saudi Arabia. The dysfunction likely means oil prices will drop again as markets open yesterday.

SWEDENs housing minister has stepped down amid mounting questions over his contacts with Islamists and ultra-nationalists from his native Turkey. Mehmet Kaplan, a 44-year-old Green Party member and former spokesman of Swedens Muslim Council, said he has done nothing wrong but was resigning because the criticism against him was interfering with his ability to perform his job.
Zhuhai Jinwan Airport is bidding for a permit that would allow it to ease the international congestion of business jets and helicopters at nearby Hong Kong International Airport.

The Zhuhai airport, in which the Hong Kong Airport Authority owns a majority share, will aim to secure the permit by next year its general manager, Albert Yau, told the South China Morning Times (SCMP).

That would mean business jets coming from anywhere could land and offload passengers in Zhuhai directly, instead of having to wait for hours and get undesirable slots in Hong Kong, he told the newspaper.

Yau added that a short helicopter trip between the two airports  amounting to a brief 20 minutes  would also be able to transport passengers faster than the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge currently under construction and slated to open in 2018.

This would be the best solution to relieve Hong Kong airports ramp until the third runway is built, Charlie Mularski, chairman of the Asian Business Aviation Association, told the SCMP.

Though it will be cheaper for carriers to land and park in Zhuhai than in Hong Kong, they will still have to pay an administration fee of USD3,800 every time a non-

mainland aircraft crosses into Chinese airspace. Mularski says that his organization is lobbying to have this fee scrapped.

Zhuhai airport is the Pearl River Delta regions least-

used airport, holding a 66,000 square meter air show center adjacent to the airport that sits mostly empty,

and could host up to 50 large business jets. The airport currently receives no international flights.
TWIN FALLS  Idaho Power customers may see another increase on their monthly bills if the latest proposal goes through.

As the company signs more solar power contracts and anticipates to generate lower-than-average hydroelectric power, it has asked to increase its power cost adjustment rate.

Idaho Power previously filed for a fixed cost adjustment increase in March. Both adjustments are factored into the annual adjustment mechanism listed on monthly bills.

If approved by the Idaho Public Utilities Commission, both filings would add $3.48 to the average residential bill starting June 1.

The companys request last week would increase total customer payments by $17.3 million  money that can be used only to pay power supply expenses.

Itll affect customer bills to the tune of about $1.32 a month for the average residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per month, company spokeswoman Stephanie McCurdy said.

The increase is largely a result of the federal requirement for Idaho Power to contract with several more solar power providers.

We have contracted for 320 megawatts of solar power thats scheduled to come online this year, Idaho Power spokesman Brad Bowlin said.

The largest of these contracts is for 80 megawatts of solar energy near Mountain Home, he said. It takes about seven acres of solar panels to generate one megawatt of energy.

Primarily new solar contracts increased the companys power purchase agreements by $10 million over last year.

Solar power is more expensive than hydroelectric power, which is the companys largest power generation resource.

Last year, we were able to generate less hydroelectric power than we typically can, Bowlin said.

Thats because drought created low flows in the Snake River system. McCurdy said Idaho Powers biggest dams are at the end of the system.

Last years dry winter left reservoirs in the Upper Snake low by summers end. These reservoirs now need to be refilled, meaning potentially less water making its way downstream.

Were not able to use our least-cost resources as much if theres not as much water moving through them, McCurdy said.

Idaho Powers filing is subject to public review and approval by the IPUC. Copies of the application are available to the public at Idaho Power offices or online at idahopower.com and puc.idaho.gov.

If the filing is approved, customers will receive a $3.2 million revenue sharing credit, which was factored into the adjustment since the companys return on equity last year was above the 10-percent threshold, Bowlin said.

The power cost adjustment decreased in 2015 by about 47 cents for the average residential customer.

The fixed cost adjustment increase requested in March was money the company can recover for infrastructure and administrative costs after energy savings increased by 12 percent year-over-year.
STANLEY  Ninety-nine percent of the Snake River sockeye counted at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River near Portland in 2015 died before reaching Idahos Sawtooth Valley.

Unprecedented and lethally high temperatures in the Columbia, Snake and even Salmon rivers killed all but a few dozen of Idahos 4,000 adult endangered sockeye that had returned to the Columbia last June and July. Most years, more than 50 percent of the adults that survive their early life in Redfish Lake, migrate to the Pacific as juveniles and spend two years in the ocean, return to spawn.

That means the 2015 return would have been the highest in more than 50 years, had temperatures been normal.

The sockeye would have gone extinct in the 1990s if not for the successful captive broodstock program created after the fish was declared endangered in 1991.

Just 2 percent of the 475,000 Okanagon River sockeye seen at Bonneville returned to their spawning grounds in Washington. Most of both populations died in the Columbia beginning in June when the water warmed to above 68 degrees, the temperature at which salmon begin to die. It got up to 73 degrees in July.

No sockeye that reached the Columbia River after July 16 completed the trip to Idaho.

The river conditions are consistent with a warming climate, Ritchie Graves, chief of the hydropower branch of the NOAA Fisheries, told the Northwest Power and Conservation Council this month. The experience could prompt his agency to reconsider how the dams should be operated to help the fish.

Sockeye had problems at the ladders of several dams. An effort by state, federal and tribal officials to collect and truck sockeye from Lower Granite Dam to the Eagle Hatchery helped save some fish, he said.

But a quicker response by fisheries and dam managers could have reduced the losses.

We probably talked too long, Graves told the eight-member panel appointed by the governors of the four Northwest states. The management community probably needs to act more quickly.

Just 56 sockeye made the trip back to the Sawtooth Valley on their own. Another 51 were trucked to the Eagle Hatchery, but 16 of those were inadvertently captured Columbia River sockeye.

Sockeye were hurt more than other salmon because they migrate in summer, after the high flows of the spring but usually before the higher temperatures of late summer. The Columbia sockeye generally migrate a little earlier than Idahos fish, which accounted for their slightly higher survival rate, Graves said.

The impoundments actually were cooler than the temperatures of the river flowing in, he said. Sockeye that migrated naturally from Idaho to the Pacific as juveniles survived at a higher rate than those that were captured at Lower Granite and other dams and transported downriver by barge.

We do know the transportation program impedes homing ability, said Russ Kiefer, a fisheries biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

The council sets goals and makes recommendations for spending money for fish and wildlife programs from federal power revenues. Graves told the council that last years losses wont set back the program if its just a one-time event. But if its repeated three of five years or six of 10, it could reverse the recovery efforts.

Wed need to think about whether this changes the status of Snake River sockeye, Graves said.
BUHL  Police broke up a large house party early Sunday north of Buhl where 18 people were cited for underage drinking, five were arrested on outstanding warrants and one was taken to the hospital and later released.

A Twin Falls County Sheriffs deputy who was patrolling rural roads just before 2 a.m. Sunday north of Buhl found the party after noticing dozens of vehicles parked near 1339 East and 4400 North, sheriffs spokeswoman Lori Stewart said. Because there were so many people, he requested help from Buhl Police officers and Idaho State Police troopers.

When police arrived, many of the partygoers ran away, but at least 57 people between 14 and 24 years old were stopped and identified, Stewart said. Five of those people were arrested on outstanding arrest warrants, 18 were cited for underage drinking and three cars were towed.

One man appeared to be having seizures and officers were unsure if the problem was purely medical or alcohol related, Stewart said. He was flown to St. Lukes Magic Valley Center where he was treated and released.
TWIN FALLS  Prosecutors dismissed a bribery charge against a Twin Falls man because of insufficient evidence.

Joshua Edward White, 27, was stopped by Twin Falls police about 11 p.m. March 31 on Blue Lakes Boulevard on suspicion of driving under the influence. A cop wrote in his report that White admitted to drinking rubbing alcohol and offered him $1,000 if he would let him go.

White, who was released to supervision by the Idaho Department of Correction the day before he was stopped, also threatened the officer, said he was a member of the Bloods gang and told the cop he wished he had a pistol in his hand right now, court documents said. He also pantomimed shooting a gun at the first officer and later spit in another officers face and said he had HIV as well as Hepatitis A, B and C.

White was charged with the felony count of bribery along with misdemeanor counts of battery on a police officer, assault on a police officer and driving under the influence.

But Thursday, a day before his scheduled preliminary hearing on the bribery charge, prosecutors motioned to dismiss the felony, writing in the motion, there is insufficient evidence at this time to prove this charge beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury.

A judge ordered the dismissal Friday.

We looked at the reports, and the elements of bribery were not present in this case, Twin Falls County Prosecutor Grant Loebs said.

Under Idaho law, bribery is described as any benefit as consideration for a violation of a known legal duty as public servant.

If during our investigation we find the elements are there, we could refile, Loebs said. But at this point that isnt likely.

White is still charged with the three misdemeanors and pretrial conferences are scheduled for May 17 on the assault and battery charges and May 24 on the driving under the influence charge.
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TWIN FALLS  The College of Southern Idaho will see a 12 percent cost increase for health insurance next year, but employees monthly contributions will stay the same.

College trustees voted unanimously Monday to enter into contracts with health insurance providers for fiscal year 2017, which begins in July. CSI will absorb extra insurance costs.

Many businesses and public agencies are struggling with increased insurance costs  a nationwide trend.

Within the employee benefits package at CSI, our health insurance is always a very, very expensive portion of that, vice president of administration Jeff Harmon said.

Its third year of the colleges three-year contract with insurance provider Select Health.

College officials recently met with insurance representatives. Originally, Select Health said a 35 percent increase was needed to cover costs, Harmon said. But after negotiation, the company said a 17.9 percent increase was doable.

The college got the rate increase down to 12.2 percent, but with reduced benefits for employees.

Board chairman Karl Kleinkopf said when he saw information about the health insurance increase, he had questions and serious considerations. Health insurance is still a good part of the employee benefits package, he said. Weve always been proud of that.

The in-network deductible will increase $500 to $750 per person and $1,500 to $2,250 per family; the out-of-pocket maximum will increase from $3,000 to $3,500 per person and $6,000 to $7,000 per family; and medical office visits will increase from $20 to $35 and from $35 to $50 for specialists.

To help reduce expenses for employees, CSI has a partnership with St. Lukes and Select Health for a wellness incentive. Its optional for employees to participate and they can receive up to a $600 reduction per year on their health insurance costs.

It encourages employees to be involved in their own health care in significant ways  the way of the future, CSI president Jeff Fox said.

For the past year, 4 percent of CSIs health plan participants contributed to 80 percent of the costs. In total, there are 579 members in CSIs insurance pool.

During their meeting, trustees also:

Heard a campus safety update from security director Jim Munn.

CSI is a very safe campus, he said, and recent incidents have been largely helping people with medical problems and responding to minor crimes.

Also, in the last five months, 220 faculty members, staff and students have gone through active-shooter training. Disseminating emergency preparedness information has helped, Munn said. I think it brought the down the stress level.

Munn said he wants to change the campus security philosophy toward being more approachable and talking with people on campus.

As for the new constitutional carry law within city limits, it wont have an effect on CSIs campus, Munn said. The college operates under a state law that allows people with an enhanced conceal carry permit to bring a gun on campus  but not in large public event venues such as the gymnasium and Fine Arts Building, or in the Eagle Hall dormitory.

Set dorm and apartment rates for next school year, which will remain the same for students.

Theres a high occupancy rate and waiting lists for college-owned housing. Students will pay more for meal plans, though: a 3 percent increase next year. It will cover food service provider Sodexos increased costs, Harmon said.

Students will pay $40 more for the 100, 125 and 150-meal plans, and $25 more for the 200 and 250-meal plans. In total for next school year, costs will range from $950 to $1,545, depending on the number of meals.

Awarded a $192,700 bid to C2 Construction of Mountain Home to construct a horse barn on the east side of the Expo Center. Funding for the project is from the rodeo account.

Awarded a $61,490 bid to Anderson Construction of Twin Falls for a well enclosure project. Funding for the project comes from the Idaho State Division of Public Works.
TWIN FALLS  Despite barriers like high poverty rates and parents who dont speak English, young children of refugees are successfully integrating in the United States, a new national report shows.

The Migration Policy Institute  a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank  released a report in March, Young Children of Refugees in the United States: Integration Successes and Challenges.

With a few thousand refugees living in Twin Falls, the information sheds light on how some of the youngest local refugees  plus others across the country  are adjusting.

I think the kids do a pretty quick job of acclimating, said Jake Miller, who teaches at Robert Stuart Middle Schools Newcomer Center for refugee children in Twin Falls.

Children of refugees are successfully integrating and faring better in the U.S. than other immigrant groups, the report concluded.

They benefit from stable family environments and high employment rates. But they face barriers such as high poverty and their parents having low English proficiency.

The report is based on 941,000 children  ages 10 and younger  living with refugee parents in the U.S. from 2009-13.

One quarter of the children lived in households with an income below the federal poverty level, the report says. Thats higher than the general population, but lower than other immigrant groups.

That part of the report may apply to other cities, but isnt relevant in Twin Falls, said Zeze Rwasama, director of the College of Southern Idahos Refugee Center.

Most families get jobs quickly, Rwasama said, regardless of whether they speak English fluently or have skills in a particular industry.

For the most part, theyre earning living wages, he said.

To help newly-arrived refugee children, the Twin Falls School District has a newcomer center at Lincoln Elementary School and one at Robert Stuart Middle School.

As of last week, 19 students were enrolled, but that number fluctuates throughout the school year.

Once students gain enough English language skills, theyre transitioned into regular classrooms. High school students have access to a program for English language learners at Canyon Ridge High School.

Miller typically works with sixth- through ninth-graders. He had about a dozen students in his class Thursday.

A few arrived one-and-a-half weeks earlier and Miller was expecting a new student Monday. He has students from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Iran.

Some students had headphones on as they worked on computers. Others looked at writing prompts on the whiteboard, such as write about home.

Some students come to the Newcomer Center without literacy skills  even in their native language  or may have interruptions in their education.

Miller gives variations on assignments depending on each students abilities.

Most students stay in the Newcomer Center for just a quarter or semester, but some stay the maximum time of a year.

Teachers try to get students into regular classrooms quickly so they can get instruction in core content areas like English and math.

The Newcomer Center provides English immersion, but students have access to iPads and computers if they need to translate words.

The students work incredibly hard and learn quickly, Miller said. And they often have good family support.

In Twin Falls, some families are able to live off one income, leaving one parent to stay at home with the children, Rwasama said.

Local companies like ConAgra Foods, Chobani and Jerome Cheese are paying more than the minimum wage, he added.

Plus, theres a low unemployment rate in Twin Falls County  about 3.5 percent in February, according to the Idaho Department of Labor.

The other contrast is the cost of living here is very low, Rwasama said. The Refugee Center can often find two or three-bedroom apartments for between $600 and $750 per month.

Because Twin Falls lacks a city public transportation system, refugees are actually buying cars and becoming independent very fast, Rwasama said. The CSI Refugee Center also provides rides to newcomers to English classes and medical appointments.

Nationwide, more than 3 million refugees have been resettled since 1980, according to the Migration Policy Institute. CSIs Refugee Center launched in the early 1980s.

Here in Twin Falls, controversy has been swirling for a year since the Refugee Center announced it could resettle up to 300 people this year  possibly, some Syrians. Since then, no Syrians have been resettled here.

The CSI Refugee Center resettled 143 newcomers from Oct. 1 through the end of March. The majority are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but others are from Iraq, Iran, Eritrea and Sudan.

Here are other highlights of the report:

Where are the Children Born?

In total, 89 percent of young children of refugees are born in the U.S.

Languages Spoken

Nationwide, refugees who were resettled in the U.S. in 2013 spoke a total of 162 languages.

Household Demographics

In total, 82 percent of refugee children lived in two-parent households. That compares with 75 percent for other immigrant groups and 62 percent of children with U.S. born parents.

In Twin Falls, for the most part, we resettle largely two-parent households, unless a single parent has a tie here Rwasama said. Then, theyre not going to be alone because of the fact that it is very difficult in a very small town like this.

Public Benefits

Refugees initially have access to more public benefits than other immigrants, the report notes.

When refugees arrive in Twin Falls, they receive assistance  such as spending money, medical care and assistance paying rent  while they get on their feet.

The goal is to help newcomers find jobs as quickly as possible so they can become self-sufficient. The CSI Refugee Center receives federal money to provide services.
TWIN FALLS  Idaho State Universitys College of Business will offer in-person classes on the College of Southern Idaho campus starting during the fall 2016 semester.

Informational sessions are slated for Monday, April 25 and Wednesday, May 4.

On Monday, the College of Business will host an informational lunch for CSI students in the room 180 of the Hepworth Building at CSIs Twin Falls campus. Students attending the event will have the opportunity to learn more about new courses and programs offered at the ISU College of Business.

Students will also receive free lunch and a T-shirt and can enter to win an iPad.

On May 4, the College of Business will hold an open house for the Twin Falls and CSI communities. This family-friendly event will include free food for the first 100 people, live music, giveaway prizes including the iPad, and a chance to meet the ISU mascot, Benny the Bengal.

Guests can apply to attend ISU and the $50 application fee will be waived for these two events.

The four classes offered in Twin Falls will cover concepts in informatics, finance, management and accounting. Designed to accommodate non-traditional, working students, the courses will be offered in the evenings for those who are interested in staying in the Twin Falls area.

CSI graduates with an associate of science degree in business can transfer their credits, and begin courses at the ISU College of Business from Twin Falls as a junior-level student in the bachelor of business administration program.

While earning a bachelors degree from Twin Falls, students will now have four courses available to take in-person while completing the rest of the courses with a combination of online and distance learning offerings.

For more information about the classes, contact Kristine McCarty at cobadvis@isu.edu.
BOISE  The Idaho Department of Education is asking for community input in developing a state plan to implement the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

Anyone interested in participating in a working group can complete an application survey at www.surveymonkey.com/r/ESSA_Workgroups. It will be available through April 29.

The Every Student Succeeds Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama with bipartisan support Dec. 10, 2015. This new law replaces the No Child Left Behind Act.

It gives states more control over how to measure student achievement.

Since 2012, Idaho used a waiver to avoid some requirements of No Child Left Behind. It was among more than 40 U.S. states with waivers.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001  championed by President George W. Bush  was a pass-fail system based on standardized test scores.

By the 2013-14 school year, 100 percent of students were supposed to reach proficient levels. Schools were often given failing labels, even if students made academic gains.

A new accountability plan  once approved by the Idaho Board of Education  will be submitted for approval by Feb. 1, 2017 to the Department of Education.

For more information, contact Jeff Church at 208-332-6934 or jchurch@sde.idaho.gov.
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TWIN FALLS  A Republican challenger for Twin Falls County prosecuting attorney who announced Friday he was withdrawing because of a complaint filed against him by the state bar association now says hes back in the race.

Mark Guerry, the lone Republican candidate challenging incumbent Republican Grant Loebs, emailed KMVT saying he has decided to renew his campaign but that he wont be speaking to media or the public.

The station reported Guerry said he received significant, unsolicited input from his supporters to renew his campaign and that its clear to him many voters still want and deserve a choice, or even simply a protest vote, in the election of the next Twin Falls County Prosecuting Attorney.

The announcement is just the latest turn in a bizarre series of events that began to unfold late last week when Guerry abruptly withdrew from the campaign.

Guerry announced his withdrawal without explanation Friday after meeting with the Times-News editorial board but later told the newspaper in an email he was dropping out because of a complaint he received from the state bar association. Guerry said District Judge Richard Bevan filed the complaint. Bar proceedings are confidential and complaints can be made anonymously.

Friday, Bevan said he couldnt comment.

The complaint likely hinges on accusations Guerry posted on Facebook earlier this month about supposed misconduct by Bevan and Loebs.

Pressed about the accusations at the Times-News editorial board meeting, Guerry said he had no proof the accusations were true and that the postings were made in the fog of war of the campaign. He said he probably shouldnt have posted the accusations.

Its probably not a wise thing to do, Guerry told the newspaper board. Its probably not a fair thing to do.

In the interview, Guerry described several run-ins with Bevan when the judge was presiding over cases handled by Guerry.

Later in the interview, talking about the Facebook accusations, he said, My goal was not to attack Judge Bevan personally, as much as it may sound like that.

Guerry said in a Facebook post Friday he had three weeks to respond to the complaint and intended to defend himself because he believed it was a First Amendment issue.

However, I must now turn my entire attention to my defense, which will prevent me from effectively campaigning for the Office of the Prosecuting Attorney and I therefore have withdrawn from the race, Guerry wrote in an email to the Times-News Friday clarifying his withdrawal.

Ballots for Mays Republican primary election have already been printed, so Guerrys name will appear on the ballot regardless of his campaigns status, the county recorders office said.

Guerry, a Castleford resident, formally announced his candidacy in March. He previously worked for Loebs as a deputy prosecutor but has spent the bulk of his career in private practice.
TWIN FALLS  A week from Wednesday, if you need to go to City Hall, itll be at the old KeyBank building.

City staff are packing now and will make the move on Monday and Tuesday of next week, City Manager Travis Rothweiler told the City Council Monday evening. On April 27, the city will be open for business in its temporary location.

City staff are moving out of the current City Hall to free it up for construction, since it is going to be renovated into a police administrative building as part of the City Hall/public safety complex project. The former Banner furniture building on Main Avenue will be the new City Hall, and the city is leasing the former bank as a temporary headquarters during the construction. The project is expected to be done in fall 2017.

The Council also voted unanimously to approve an update to the city code regulating licenses for door-to-door salespeople. While the police do a local background check on applicants currently, the new ordinance allows police to fingerprint applicants and send the prints to the Idaho State Police to run through their database.

The changes would also allow vendors to get a three-month renewal after their initial three months of licensure is up, with a six-month cooling-off period after that. Now, vendors can get only a one-month renewal.

Violating the ordinance is a misdemeanor. City attorney Fritz Wonderlich said the city usually sees one or two cases a year of a vendor violating the code, usually discovered when someone calls the police on an overly aggressive salesperson and the police then find out the salesperson doesnt have a license.

Councilwoman Ruth Pierce encouraged Police Chief Craig Kingsbury to take steps to publicize the requirement that door-to-door salespeople have a license.

I would bet you most taxpayers in the City of Twin Falls do not realize you should be asking for a license, she said.
TWIN FALLS  The Twin Falls County Farm Bureau is hosting a candidate forum at 6 p.m. on April 28.

Candidates for state Legislature running in districts 23, 24 and 25, all three of which are at least partially in Twin Falls County, will be there, as will candidates for sheriff and county commissioner.

For county commissioner, challengers Don Hall and Jack Johnson are running against incumbents Leon Mills and George Urie, respectively, in the Republican primary. For sheriff, Cliff Katona is running against incumbent Tom Carter. In District 25, Reggy Sternes is running against incumbent Rep. Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, and in 24, Mary Bello is taking on incumbent Rep. Steve Hartgen, R-Twin Falls. In District 23, which includes part of western Twin Falls County, challenger Christy Zito is taking on Rep. Rich Wills, R-Glenns Ferry, in the GOP primary, and challengers Megan Blanksma and Justin Freeman are running against Rep. Pete Nielsen, R-Mountain Home.

The forum will be at the Twin Falls County Farm Bureau meeting room, 2732 Kimberly Road, and is open to the public.

The primary is on May 17.
This week, during a radio interview with Congressman Raul Labrador discussing his bill that would protect religious freedom nationwide, it occurred to me, or rather re-occurred to me, that we live in a nation now where invented rights are crowding out real rights.

Nobody disputes that were seeing a coming cultural melee over choosing bathrooms and bakers and photographers. Whats in dispute is exactly who is entitled to exactly what. Dismayed that the Founders failed to include any urinary rights in the Constitution, the thuggish left has taken up their unfinished business and tossing peeing in as not only part of an individuals journey of self discovery, but as a more sacred personal right than, say, the freedom to worship or the right to bear arms.

If you get in the way or show any hesitation at all, you get figuratively bashed in the face with a razor-studded tire-iron.

The militant leaders, the loudest voices in the LGBT movement, are rising to the top of the societal food chain. They have at their mercy the CEOs of influential corporations and nearly every A-list celebrity. Tolerance and inclusion, as much as they like to talk about it, are not their currency. Instead they deal in thuggish demands and the smash-mouth politics of shame, belittling and labeling as bigots anyone who dares utter a concern about restroom safety, defending traditional marriage, or simply wanting to refrain from a morally objectionable situation and stay in business.

The day is coming that simply expressing belief in the Bible or professing a Christian adherence will be observed and characterized as tacit bigotry. Were nearly there now. If simply being white is proof of some abstract concept of privilege then by the same flawed logic being Christian is fastly becoming the smoking gun of bigotry and (fill-in-the-blank)-ism. The lefts methodical deconstruction of our most basic of rights  to bear arms, to speech, to worship, to peaceably assemble, etc.  is appalling. Demolishing them is bad enough, but replacing them with invented ones is salt to the wound. For whatever reason, the Framers didnt recognize all that many individual rights. There arent that many actual rights because they dont stem simply from whims, urges and impulses.

To those who are LGBT: Live next to me. Share a workplace with me. Lets talk and have lunch and be friends. Lets even exchange Christmas cards. Lets discuss and disagree about politics like normal people. Lets go to the same sporting events and restaurants and concerts. I, honestly and truly, dont care who you sleep with or who you love. I respect you because you are a human being. Be you. Thats what America is about. Be you, but let me be me. Dont insist my wife and daughters use a restroom where their safety may be compromised. If I care about you but have a moral objection to gay marriage, dont make me bake your cake or take you pictures if I object, especially if there are plenty others willing to do so. Its all about the give and take. And it seems like its all just take.

The LGBT movement has made significant gains in recent years, both perceptually and legally. The problem is not about having a seat or two at the table, but trying to get all of the seats and brutally beating those who are getting kicked out.

The rights are few, and Ill trust Thomas Jefferson over any ideologue or bureaucrat any day to tell me what my rights are.
The number of US soldiers in Iraq will be increased by at least 217 troops according to Defense Secretary Ash Carter during a surprised visit to the country on Monday.

He said the objective is to make sure the defeat of the (Islamic State) is lasting as the troops will work with brigades and battalions close to the front lines putting Americans closer to the action.

A senior defense official hinted that the troops will be made up of advisers, force protection, logistical support and aviation support for the Apaches.

Carters statement was similar to the comments made by President Barack Obama in an interview with CBS aired on Monday. The US president said the support provided to the Iraqi government in its fight against the militants of the Islamic State has helped to continually tighten the noose. He said the Iraqis are willing to fight and gain ground as he argued that the support should continue.

Iraqi troops came under heavy criticism when they fled Ramadi as IS militants entered the city. Similar actions had taken place at the beginning of extremist groups campaign with towns deserted by Iraqi forces.

My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall, Obama said.

There are around 4087 US troops in Iraq excluding special operations personnel, some logistics workers and troops on temporary rotations.
Although its widely known that modern humans carry traces of Neanderthal DNA, a new international study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine suggests that Neanderthal Y-chromosome genes disappeared from the human genome long ago.

The study was published April 7 in The American Journal of Human Genetics, in English and in Spanish, and will be available to view for free. The senior author is Carlos Bustamante, PhD, professor of biomedical data science and of genetics at the School of Medicine, and the lead author is Fernando Mendez, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford.

The Y chromosome is one of two human sex chromosomes. Unlike the X chromosome, the Y chromosome is passed exclusively from father to son. This is the first study to examine a Neanderthal Y chromosome, Mendez said. Previous studies sequenced DNA from the fossils of Neanderthal women or from mitochondrial DNA, which is passed to children of either sex from their mother.

Other research has shown that the DNA of modern humans is from 2.5 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA, a legacy of breeding between modern humans and Neanderthals 50,000 years ago. As a result, the team was excited to find that, unlike other kinds of DNA, the Neanderthal Y chromosome DNA was apparently not passed to modern humans during this time.

Weve never observed the Neanderthal Y chromosome DNA in any human sample ever tested, Bustamante said. That doesnt prove its totally extinct, but it likely is.

Why no Neanderthal DNA?

Why is not yet clear. The Neanderthal Y chromosome genes could have simply drifted out of the human gene pool by chance over the millennia. Another possibility, said Mendez, is that Neanderthal Y chromosomes include genes that are incompatible with other human genes, and he and his colleagues have found evidence supporting this idea. Indeed, one of the Y chromosome genes that differ in Neanderthals has previously been implicated in transplant rejection when males donate organs to women.
The News in Brief

Another Georgian citizen reportedly killed in Syria



According to reports, another Georgian citizen has been killed in Syria.



According to Rustavi 2, locals in Pankisi Gorge say that 39-year-old Vakha Bugiev was killed in an air strike. According to them, Bugiev had been fighting in a terrorist group.



Vakha Bugiev lived in the village of Tsinaubani. He had a wife and three children.



According to the Pankisi residents, he went to Syria in 2015, though they claim to be unaware of how he crossed the border.

(IPN)







12 Babushara victims buried in Tbilisi



A total of 12 more bodies have been identified from the Babushara airport disaster during the 1992-1993 Abkhazian war. The bodies were buried at the Brothers Cemetery in Tbilisi on Saturday April 9, when Georgia commemorates the victims of the tragedy of 9 April 1989.



Public funerals were held at Sameba Cathedral in Tbilisi on April 8-9, where family members, relatives and others paid tribute to the victims of the tragedy in Abkhazia.



Saturday began with a public funeral at Sameba, where politicians from both the government and the opposition came to express their condolences to the families of victims.



Nine victims were buried with a military guard of honour at the Brothers Cemetery in Dighomi in northern Tbilisi. Three were buried at ancestral cemeteries. The burials were attended by the Minister of Refugees, the Mayor of Tbilisi, the Deputy Defence Minister and other politicians.



Refugee Minister Sozar Subari said that 208 bodies, which have been transferred from Abkhazia, are currently being identified.



Through the facilitation of the Red Cross, a bilateral coordination group was created to study the issue of missing people during the conflict in 1992-1993. Within the negotiations, it was decided to identify the bodies of those buried on Babushara Brothers Cemetery.



43 bodies were identified by DNA. The Refugee Ministry said two more cemeteries will be established and more than 100 bodies will be transferred in 2016.



September 22, 1993, employees of the Security Ministry left for Sukhumi to participate in the evacuation of then President Eduard Shevardnadze, but the plane exploded at Babushara Airport in Sukhumi. 92 people died.



According to official figures, more than 2,000 people are still missing from the Georgia-Abkhazia conflict of the 1990s.

(DF watch)







Sergei Lavrov to discuss the issue of Georgia with his Swiss counterpart



Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Swiss counterpart will discuss the issue of Georgia. As reported by the Russian media, the ministry's spokesman Maria Zakharova made the above-mentioned announcement.



"The Foreign Ministers will discuss a number of issues related to the implementation of the mandate given to the Swiss representations of interests of Russia in Georgia and of Georgia in the Russian Federation, Zakharova said.



Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter arrived in Moscow for a working visit on April 11.

(IPN)







Pope Francis to Visit Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan



Pope Francis will visit Georgia in late September before traveling to Azerbaijan, the Vatican press office said on April 9.



Before visiting Georgia and Azerbaijan, Pope Francis will also visit Armenia, scheduled for June 24-26, according to the Holy See press office.



Accepting the invitations from His Holiness and Beatitude Ilia II, Catholicos Patriarch of All Georgia, and the civil and religious authorities of Georgia and Azerbaijan, the Holy Father will complete his apostolic trip in the Caucasus, visiting the latter two countries from 30 September to 2 October, 2016, the Vatican press office said.



It will be the second time a pope has visited Georgia. Pope John Paul II visitedTbilisi in November 1999.



Georgias President Giorgi Margvelashvili visited the Vatican and met Pope Francis in April, 2015.



In September 2014, then-Secretary for Relations with States of the Holy See Archbishop Dominique Mamberti visited Tbilisi  the first visit Vatican foreign minister to visit Georgia in eleven years.



Before that, the Holy Sees Secretary for Relations with States, a post which at the time was held by Jean-Louis Tauran, visited Tbilisi in September 2003, to sign an interstate agreement giving the Catholic Church in Georgia legal status. But in a last-minute discussion, yielding to pressure from the Georgian Orthodox Church, the Georgian authorities made a U-turn and refused to sign the agreement. In 2011, despite protests from the Georgian Orthodox Church, the Georgian authorities adopted a law allowing religious minority groups to be registered as legal entities under public law, which, among others, was also used by several branches of the Roman Catholic Church in Georgia. The adoption of the legislation was welcomed by the Vatican.

(Civil.ge)




@PatriciaMazzei

Last week, we polled Florida Senate candidates to find out where they stood on Carnival Corp.'s plan to sail to Cuba even if Cuban-born Americans couldn't go. We found rare, bipartisan agreement against the company's decision.

But we didn't hear back from Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy of Jupiter until Monday, after Carnival reversed course and said it would accept bookings from Cuban-born Americans and postpone the May 1 cruise if Cuba doesn't change its decree.

Here's what his spokeswoman had to say:

Congressman Murphy would not support Carnival or any company discriminating against individuals based on their ethnicity or country of origin. He is glad that Carnival appears to be reversing their policy today.

The Cuban government needs to modernize its policy, or risk losing American tourism dollars.

Will there be any other issue in the campaign that will draw agreement among all the Republican and Democratic candidates?
@MichaelAuslen

Republican Senate candidate Carlos Beruff is adding to his arsenal of statewide TV ads.

A new 30-second spot -- called "Teleprompter" -- continues a familiar message from the Bradenton homebuilder's campaign: That he is an "outsider," not a politician.

"The experts want me to read a bunch of political crap off this teleprompter," he says. "Heres what I have to say. Obamas a disaster and Washington politicians are worthless."

The ad also echoes Donald Trump's basic argument: "How about we take our country back and put America first?" Beruff asks.

It's the third statewide TV ad he's launched this month.

He's running against U.S. Reps. David Jolly, R-Indian Shores, and Ron DeSantis, R-Ponte Vedra Beach, Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera and Orlando defense contractor Todd Wilcox in this August's Republican primary to replace Sen. Marco Rubio.

You can watch it in full here:
A federal court Monday rejected a claim from U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Jacksonville, that a North Florida congressional district designed to elect a black candidate violates the federal Voting Rights Act.

The ruling by a three-judge panel of the Northern District of Florida is the latest in more than four years of legal challenges over Floridas redistricting maps and is likely to bring some finality to the congressional map approved by the Florida Supreme Court last year.

Brown, joined by dozens of black voters from north and central Florida, argued that the new district's east-west configuration across the top of the state violates the federal Voting Rights Act because it dilutes the black vote and disenfranchises black voters from electing their preferred candidates.

But the court ruled that the districts configuration -- which was ordered by the Florida Supreme Court -- not only will benefit black voters in North Florida, but it also enabled the creation of District 10 in Orlando, which is "very likely" to elect the candidate of choice for 120,000 black voters there.

"The problem with Plaintiffs argument is that they simply have not produced evidence that racial-bloc voting in these other districts will defeat their candidates of choice,'' the court said.

"...In fact, what electoral evidence has been provided demonstrates the oppositethat in East-West District 5, the black-preferred candidate will prevail and in Congressional District 10, the black-preferred candidate will likely prevail more often than not."

Brown and the other plaintiffs wanted the court to prevent the map from being used to elect candidates in November, leaving candidates in limbo about what they will do.

U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham, D-Tallahassee, now could choose to challenge Brown in the district or run for a Republican-dominated District 2 also in North Florida. Several candidates, including former state Sen. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee, have already expressed an interest in running for the District 5 seat.

"I'm disappointed the Second Congressional District will be transformed from a fair, moderate district into two extreme partisan districts,'' Graham said in a statement Monday night. "Dividing Tallahassee hurts North Florida and our community. Now that the lengthy legal challenges to the maps have been completed, I will make a decision as to what's next as soon as possible. Though the maps may have changed, my commitment to public service has not."

In the 26-page ruling, the court concluded that Brown and the plaintiffs presented no convincing evidence to support their claim that the white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the black communitys preferred candidate. Instead, the court said, the new map may reduce the size of the black vote but it will not dilute it. Download Order in Brown's case

"A win is a win, regardless of the margin of victory,'' wrote Judges Robin Rosenbaum, Robert Hinkle and Mark Walker.

The court acknowledged the "appalling history and continuing legacy of racial discrimination in northeastern Florida" but said the anecdotal testimony of several local officials that blacks could not be elected to countywide offices was not enough to prove the district was invalid.

The League of Women Voters led the lawsuit to challenge the congressional map drawn by the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature, arguing that it was drawn to protect incumbents like Brown and GOP candidates, in violation of the violated the Fair Districts provisions of the state constitution.

After four-years of legal skirmishes, the Florida Supreme Court agreed with the challengers last July and concluded that the map Florida had used in the last two congressional elections was invalid. When the Legislature could not agree on a new congressional plan during a special session last August, a lower court solicited maps and choose a map drawn by the League of Women Voters.

Brown has not indicated whether she would appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
via @ChuckRabin

The Florida Supreme Court on Tuesday suspended a Miami-Dade judge who had been removed from the bench three weeks ago after appearing drunk on the bench  an incident that came on the heels of an expletive-laced outburst at a restaurant.

In a one-paragraph statement, the state high court said County Judge Jacqueline Schwartz has until May 9 to respond to the decision and argue her case against the ruling. She will continue to be paid during the suspension.

Chief Judge Bertila Soto pulled Schwartz from the bench of her Miami-Dade courtroom on March 28 after Schwartz appeared to be drunk. She has been on paid medical leave since.

Ten days prior to that incident, the judge created a ruckus at a Coconut Grove restaurant.Schwartz was at the Ergon Greek Deli and Cuisine on Grand Avenue on March 18 when she got upset at a waiter and berated him for refusing to serve her more alcohol. State investigators who recommended the suspension to the Supreme Court said Schwartz yelled at the waiter, youre a f---ing idiot, you dont know who I am.

Police were called. When they showed up, the judge called them pigs, an investigation by the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission claimed. Investigators also said Schwartz was spilling wine and slurring. The commission did its own investigation and interviewed the officer who confronted Schwartz.

More here.
@PatriciaMazzei

The scuttlebutt among Miami Republicans after the GOP selected local delegates for July's presidential convention centered around a single congressional district: What had happened in Florida's 25th?

The district spans four counties: Miami-Dade, Broward, Collier and Hendry. But only one of its three delegates, state Rep. Carlos Trujillo, hails from Miami-Dade, home to the bulk of the district's population. The other two, Steve Nesbit and Margie Nelson, come from Hendry -- which means the county with only 2 percent of district voters took 67 percent of its delegates, said Miami-Dade state committeewoman Liliana Ros, who sat on Saturday's selection board.

"Obviously Hendry was smarter than the rest of us," she said Monday.

She suggested the three counties outside Dade had joined forces to ensure representation among the delegates -- an opinion shared privately by a number of local Republicans.

"The bottom line is, the Broward people turned their back on us, and the Collier people also, and that's what happened," she said. "They talked it over, and they divided up the pie."

Delegates for each district are chosen by the three GOP leaders -- chairman, committeeman and committeewoman -- for each county. Because FL-25 covers four counties, all 12 county Republicans had a hand in the selection.

But they didn't collude to limit Dade's influence, said Republicans from Broward, Collier and Hendry.
Nothing clears up the ambiguity of Florida Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Canteras religion like having a Bar Mitzvah.

Yep, at the not-so-tender age of 42, Lopez-Cantera -- who once described himself in his house biography as Catholic -- had a Bar Mitzvah at the western wall in Jerusalem last week while traveling with the Republican Lieutenant Governors Association. The Jewish rite of passage into adulthood typically occurs at age 13, but its not unheard of for adults to have the ceremony if they didnt have one as a teenager.

Lopez-Canteras wife, Renee, and mother are Jewish, while his father is Catholic.

Lopez-Cantera brought up his Bar Mitzvah with the Miami Herald during a brief interview Monday after an event at the Jewish Community Center in Davie, where Gov. Rick Scott held a ceremonial bill signing to create a Holocaust Memorial in Tallahassee.

Lopez-Cantera told the crowd at the David Posnack Jewish Community Center in Davie that he had recently visited Israel including Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial.

After the event, the Herald asked Lopez-Cantera about how he identifies religiously.

Im Jewish, he replied, and then said that he had a Bar Mitzvah while in Jerusalem.

It definitely wasnt planned in advance, he said. He noted that his family wasnt on the tour of Israel with him.

But he said the opportunity presented itself while he was in Israel so he had the Bar Mitzvah with a Chabad rabbi. Typically those preparing for their Bar Mitzvah study for months with a tutor and a rabbi to learn how to chant a portion in Hebrew from the Torah and lead a service. But this was more of a quickie Bar Mitzvah.

We asked Lopez-Cantera what his Torah passage was and he said he didnt read from the Torah but did recite a prayer.

It was a moving experience, he said.

Its not surprising that a Chabad rabbi would perform a spontaneous Bar Mitzvah for Lopez-Cantera. Chabad, or Chabad-Lubavitch, is an Orthodox Jewish movement and is known for outreach to Jews who express interest but may be unaffiliated or didnt always have a strong Jewish identity.

A Chabad news service wrote that in 2014, Tallahassee Shliach Rabbi Schneor Oirechman has been visiting Lopez-Cantera for years, having helped him put on Tefillin during his term as Republican Majority Leader. (That refers to the pair of black leather boxes containing Hebrew parchment scrolls that men wear.)

But the politician didnt always wear his Judaism on his sleeve. Lopez-Canteras religion has been a bit of a mystery over the years.

In his official state House biography in 2010, Lopez-Cantera listed himself as Catholic. In a clerk's manual in 2012, he listed no religious affiliation.

In 2014 when he was named lieutenant governor, the Herald asked Lopez-Cantera about his religion. His reply: "I'd rather not be defined that way ... We're very spiritual." (According to Jewish law, he is a Jew because his mother is Jewish.)

But he has talked more openly about being Jewish this year.

"Now, you may not have known this from my name, Lopez-Cantera, but I'm Jewish," he said in Boca Raton earlier this month at a ceremonial signing of a bill that prohibits the state from doing business with companies that favor a boycott of Israel. "My father came from Cuba but he married a nice Jewish girl in Miami, and I followed suit and married a nice Jewish girl in Miami as well ... We keep a Jewish household and are raising our daughters Jewish."

Shoring up his Jewish cred may not get Lopez-Cantera very far at the ballot box because the vast majority of Jewish voters are Democrats (although the Orthodox lean right). But it does give him one way to differentiate himself in a crowded GOP primary that includes U.S. Reps. Ron DeSantis and David Jolly, wealthy businessman Carlos Beruff and entrepreneur Todd Wilcox. (Jolly also recently visited Israel where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.)

On the Democratic side, U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, who is Jewish, faces U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy.

About 3 percent of Floridians are Jewish, but they tend to vote in higher concentrations than other groups so the percent of primary voters who are Jewish could be in the ballpark of five to seven percent.

The Senate primary is Aug. 30, but some will start voting by mail in July.
via @DavidOvalle305

A Miami-Dade judge faces possible suspension after launching a profanity-laced tirade in a restaurant and appearing so drunk in her own courtroom that she was yanked from the bench.

You are a f---ing idiot, you dont know who I am, County Judge Jacqueline Schwartz yelled at a waiter at a Miami Greek restaurant after she was refused more alcohol, according to a state investigative report released on Monday. It also quotes the judge calling police officers pigs when they were were summoned to the restaurant on March 18.

The investigation for the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission on Monday recommended that Schwartz be suspended. Ultimately, the Florida Supreme Court will decide what, if any, punishment she deserves.

Her lawyer, Jeffrey Feiler, told the commission this month that she was not drunk but under the influence of a new prescription medication.

Schwartz has been on paid medical leave since she was sent home from the bench on March 28.

Its the second time that a state judicial oversight board has questioned Schwartzs behavior and salty language.

In December, the Florida Supreme Court scolded Schwartz after she told a store owner to go f--- yourself during a heated re-election campaign in June 2014. She was angry over an oversized campaign sign posted at the story for her opponent. She was suspended for 30 days and had to pay a $10,000 fine.

More here.

Photo credit: Roberto Koltun, el Nuevo Herald
Back pain isnt as likely as the common cold, but its close. If your back doesnt hurt right now, chances are you remember a bout with back pain in the past  eight out of 10 people have it at some time in their lives. If youre older than 30 or 40, youre even more likely to have back issues ranging from an occasional sore back to severe pain that keeps you from enjoying life.

But that doesnt mean back pain is inevitable. The National Institutes of Health and other experts agree that you can lower your risks by making a few lifestyle changes. These tips will help keep your back  and the rest of your body  healthy and strong:

Get some exercise. Being physically inactive raises your risks for back pain. Add regular aerobic activities, such as walking or bicycling, several times a week. You should also work on core strengthening exercises for your back and abdominal muscles, which help support your spine.

Being physically inactive raises your risks for back pain. Add regular aerobic activities, such as walking or bicycling, several times a week. You should also work on core strengthening exercises for your back and abdominal muscles, which help support your spine. Watch your weight. Extra pounds put extra stress on your back. Being overweight also makes it harder to get the exercise you need.

Extra pounds put extra stress on your back. Being overweight also makes it harder to get the exercise you need. Eat right. A diet rich in fruits, vegetables and whole grains helps you control your weight and also gives you the nutrients you need for strong bones. Low-fat dairy products are good sources of calcium, along with dark green, leafy vegetables. Many foods, such as breakfast cereals and dairy products, are fortified with vitamin D, which your body needs in order to absorb calcium.

A diet rich in fruits, vegetables and whole grains helps you control your weight and also gives you the nutrients you need for strong bones. Low-fat dairy products are good sources of calcium, along with dark green, leafy vegetables. Many foods, such as breakfast cereals and dairy products, are fortified with vitamin D, which your body needs in order to absorb calcium. Dont smoke. Smoking weakens your bones and increases your risks for developing osteoporosis. It also affects muscles and other tissues. Smokers are more likely than others to have low back pain.

Smoking weakens your bones and increases your risks for developing osteoporosis. It also affects muscles and other tissues. Smokers are more likely than others to have low back pain. Learn how to lift. Using the wrong muscles when lifting heavy objects is a major cause of back pain.When you need to lift something heavy or unwieldy, your best move is to get help. Whether you share the weight or lift on your own, use your leg muscles instead of your back. Keep your back straight and hold the load close to your body. Dont twist your back while lifting or holding something heavy.

Using the wrong muscles when lifting heavy objects is a major cause of back pain.When you need to lift something heavy or unwieldy, your best move is to get help. Whether you share the weight or lift on your own, use your leg muscles instead of your back. Keep your back straight and hold the load close to your body. Dont twist your back while lifting or holding something heavy. Sit and stand correctly. If you work at a desk, make your sitting position work in your favor. Adjust your chair or use a foot rest so that your feet rest on the floor with your knees slightly lower than your hips. Sit up straight and adjust the chair back, or use a pillow, to support your lower back. When standing, try not to slouch. Keep your shoulders back and relaxed, and your weight evenly distributed over both feet.

If you work at a desk, make your sitting position work in your favor. Adjust your chair or use a foot rest so that your feet rest on the floor with your knees slightly lower than your hips. Sit up straight and adjust the chair back, or use a pillow, to support your lower back. When standing, try not to slouch. Keep your shoulders back and relaxed, and your weight evenly distributed over both feet. Wear the right shoes. Wearing high heels can change the position of your spine, and over time this can lead to back pain. Try not to wear high heels regularly. Its also important to replace running shoes when they show wear. And if you stand on hard floors for long periods, wear shoes with more cushioning.

If you do develop back pain, dont go to bed to recover. Instead, rest and cut back your activities for a few days only. You can use ice on the painful area during that time, and try an over-the-counter pain reliever.Use pain as your guide to resume normal activities, and dont lift anything heavy for six weeks. Gradually start exercising after two to three weeks. Its a good idea to see a physical therapist to learn the best exercises for your back.

Most back pain goes away on its own in a few weeks. However, it sometimes signals a more serious problem. Make an appointment with your doctor if severe back pain doesnt improve with brief rest, if the pain spreads down one or both legs or causes numbness or tingling. People with osteoporosis should also see their doctor about new back pain.You should get immediate medical care if your back pain starts after a fall or injury to your back, if it causes new bowel or bladder symptoms, or if you also have a fever.

You can learn more about avoiding back pain by visiting the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons at orthoinfo.aaos.org.
Pope Francis wrote an encyclical on care of the environment that was made public in June of 2015, called Laudato Si, or Praised Be. The announcement of this long awaited document was heard around the world. Laudato Si is distinguished from other papal encyclicals in that it is addressed to the entire human family, not just to Catholics. Pope Francis acknowledges in his letter to everyone in the world that the earth is our common home. What did he say in the encyclical, this letter to the whole world?

There are six chapters, starting with a description of the problem, called What is Happening to our Common Home. He describes pollution and climate change, loss of water, loss of biodiversity, decline in the quality of human life, and global inequality. Next he discusses The Gospel of Creation, including the mystery of the universe, and the contribution of each creature to the harmony of creation. In the third chapter he outlines The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis, including the globalization of the technocratic paradigm and the crisis and effects of modern anthropocentrism. Its worth looking up those rather daunting words to better understand this broad and far-reaching document. The text is dense and full, requiring rereading and reflection.

The second half of this document addresses what we can do. The very interesting fourth chapter describes Integral Ecology with such topics as Environmental, Economic and Social Ecology; Cultural Ecology; Ecology and Daily Life; The Principle of the Common Good; and Justice Between the Generations. In this chapter Pope Francis says, We are not faced with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the underprivileged, and at the same time protecting nature.

Pope Francis goes on to call out Lines of Approach and Action including the international community, national and local policies, decision-making, politics and economy, and religions in dialogue with science. In this chapter he tries to outline the major paths of dialogue which can help us escape the spiral of self-destruction which currently engulfs us. He says highly polluting fossil fuelsneed to be progressively replaced without delay, and that The same mindset that stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty.

In the last chapter, Pope Francis addresses Ecological Education and Spirituality. Here he discusses ideas such as ecological conversion, joy and peace, civic and political love, ending with Beyond the Sun. His ambitious opening to this chapter states Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change.  A great cultural, spiritual, and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out on the long path of renewal.

Laudato Si is both inspiring and challenging, and good reading for every human alive today. It is freely available online at laudatosi.com or by audio file at villagedoings.com/wp-cafe/?page_id=505.

In honor of Earth Week, give it a read or listen, and consider how you can care for the earth, our common home.

***

Beth Schenk, PhD, MHI, RN-BC, is a nurse scientist and sustainability coordinator at Providence St. Patrick Hospital.
A Missoula man who was found with beer and drugs during a traffic stop has been charged with a felony for intent to distribute methamphetamine.

Jamarrious Deshawn Anderson, 20, was arrested Friday just before 4 a.m. after Missoula police officers stopped the car he was riding in near the intersection of Broadway and Pattee streets.

According to a court affidavit, Anderson, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, gave an officer a Montana identification card for a different name, claiming to be that person. Police were eventually able to confirm his actual identity by finding a previous arrest booking photo of Anderson.

At the time of the traffic stop, Anderson was holding a six-pack of beer, which he allegedly told an officer belonged to him, despite not being at least 21 years old at the time. When he was arrested and searched, both at the scene and at the jail, law enforcement found a digital scale, as well as a baggie with 4.8 grams of a white crystalline substance that tested positive for methamphetamine, in his pockets. The officers noted that amount of meth was typical in situations where the person was intending to distribute the drug.

Officers also found a small container with 10 plastic baggies and a glass pipe with burnt white residue inside on Andersons person, according to the affidavit. In an interview with police, Anderson allegedly said he had purchased the drugs shortly before the traffic stop and was intending to repackage and sell it.

Anderson was charged with a felony for possession of dangerous drugs with intent to distribute as well as misdemeanors for possession of drug paraphernalia, obstructing a peace officer, identity theft and possessing alcohol as a minor.

In Missoula County Justice Court on Monday, public defense attorney Susan Boyer asked that Anderson be released on his own recognizance, citing he had no prior felony criminal record and that he had been in Missoula for the past five years.

Justice of the Peace Karen Orzech acknowledged a group of nine people who showed up to support Anderson, but said with both the nature of the charges and Andersons failure to appear on a misdemeanor charge in 2014, she felt it necessary to set some level of bail, which she set at $5,000, half what prosecutors had asked for. Anderson can also be screened for pretrial supervision, but if released will be monitored for alcohol and methamphetamine.
A female kindergarten student, age 6, needs spring weather-appropriate clothing including: pants (girls' size 7), underwear (girls' size small), shirts (girls' size 7), shoes and socks (girls' size 12). Due to sanitary reasons the underwear and socks must be new and in the package; for everything else, new or gently used is wonderful. If you would like to help with this need you may either donate gently used/clean clothing items or you can donate $150 to My Student in Need and we will purchase a gift card and the teacher will take the student shopping.
BUTTE - Flabbergasted, Annie Boyd could not stop the sudden rush of tears.

Upon learning that Butte-Silver Bow County Superintendent of Schools officials secured $2,000 for her 10-year-old twin daughters to take a much-deserved vacation and help with critical medical expenses, Boyd was overcome with joy and gratitude on Monday.

I had no idea. Oh, my gosh  this is so amazing, said Boyd, a Butte native who returned from Missouri to Butte with her daughters, Brooke and Hailee when they were three months old. It was then they were diagnosed here with cystic fibrosis.

Cathy Maloney, superintendent of schools, and her assistant Donna Maesar, received two checks for $1,000 from the School Administrators of Montanas Youth Endowment Program on Monday, when they surprised Boyd with the award.

Fourth-graders at Emerson Elementary, Brooke and Hailee plan to take a long-awaited trip to Seattle and the West Coast before starting new medical treatments this summer for newly diagnosed diabetes on top of the cystic fibrosis.

When the family returned to Butte for good, the three-month-old twins were still at their birth weight of 6 pounds, 14 ounces, at risk of failure to thrive and required hospitalization.

Thats when they were diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.

They are amazing young girls, said Boyd between tears in Maloneys office. If you saw them, you wouldnt know they were sick.

At age 10, they look younger  about age 7 or 8  said Mom, adding that CF is one of those invisible diseases.

Last February the girls were hospitalized here for four weeks and eventually diagnosed with two forms of diabetes: cystic fibrosis-related diabetes and Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young (MODY).

The endowment will help with the West Coast vacation and any medical expenses that pop up.

We just want to take them on a trip before they start on their insulin and treatment, said Boyd. Insurance does not cover all of it, but the money will help.

Despite having three different types of health insurance  including Medicaid  they dont cover all the girls ongoing medical costs.

Kirk Miller, SAM director, said the Boyd girls awards were two of nine awarded throughout the state this year. Overall, $7,500 was handed out and another $2,500 went back into the ongoing endowment fund.

Miller said the fund makes a positive impact on the youth of Montana by providing financial assistance to benefit childrens health, welfare and/or education.

I knew about the award program and I knew it was a long shot, said Maloney. And I was shocked that we received it.

Maloney and Maesar sing the mothers praises. As a floater who works several BSB offices, Boyd organizes a wealth of events for her colleagues: pumpkin carving at Halloween, plus ornament and cookie exchanges at Christmas.

If anyone deserves this, it is Annie, said Maesar. She is the one who spearheads all the fun things at the courthouse. And to have all the heartache she endures, she rarely brings any of it to work.

Miller said the twins situation is an unusual one, but the endowment fulfills a long, varied wish list, nonetheless.

Applications run the gamut, from a familys home burning down, the death of a parent to a child who needs clothes.

Its really a heartfelt and wonderful thing to have an administrator recognize the need for the family, added Miller.

Maloney is a member of the Montana Association of County School Superintendents  one of six state affiliates that donate to the fund.

Meanwhile Boyd, her husband Justin Perusich, stepfather to the twins, and oldest daughter Havyn, 12, look forward to taking off Friday with the girls.

Boyd said the life expectancy for an individual with cystic fibrosis is age 37  and that only about half of those suffering from the disease make it to that age. Diabetes, too, may shorten their life spans, she added.

So time is of the essence for Brooke and Hailee, who initially wanted to visit Disneyland. But thats a more expensive trip.

Ive been saying we were going on a trip for three years now, said Boyd, laughing through the tears. Our life is unforeseen. We just want to have some fun and enjoy it.
WASHINGTON  President Obama had an intense conversation with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday in which he expressed concern on the eve of his visit to the Middle East and Europe about the fragile Syrian peace talks and increased violence in Ukraine, White House officials said.

In a strongly worded statement, the White House said that Mr. Obama had urged Mr. Putin to use his influence with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to press him to stop attacks against opposition forces and abide by his commitment to a partial cease-fire.

The so-called cessation of hostilities, brokered by Russia and the United States in February, has shown signs of crumbling in recent days, with increasing ground clashes and airstrikes. Syrian government forces have been mounting an offensive near the northern city of Aleppo, while rebel groups have reportedly made advances against government positions in the areas of Latakia in the north and Hama in the center of the country.

A statement released by the office of Mr. Putin said he had stressed the need for moderate opposition leaders in Syria to distance themselves from the Islamic State and other extremist groups.
"When we started our business, Extension connected us with resources to get the answers we needed. Thats whats so amazing about Extension: they find a way to help you get to the next step."

- Scott Hicks

Cutting Edge Meat Company

In Green County
Butte police reports

METH FOUND

A small bag of suspected methamphetamine was found in a common area of the county jail late Monday afternoon. The owner is unknown. The white substance tested positive, said police, who conduct regular searches of the facility.

SPEEDING LEADS TO ARREST

Peter Olin, 29, of Butte was see by police about 8 p.m. Monday riding a motorcycle at more than 100 mph on the 5000 block of Harrison Avenue. He was arrested on the 7600 block of Highway 2 while trying to access a storage unit. He is facing misdemeanor charges of driving with a suspended or revoke license, no registration, reckless driving, no motorcycle endorsement and criminal possession of drug paraphernalia.

STOLEN VEHICLE

Police on Monday recovered a Butte-Silver Bow County yellow 1991 GMC pickup truck Monday after it went missing with $3,000 of painting supplies from the maintenance center, 1700 Civic Center Road. Police say a locked gate and a side view mirror were damaged when the vehicle was driven away. It was found on the 2400 block of Yale Avenue.

THEFT REPORTED

A 29-year-old male reported $154 cash, a debit card and a drivers license were taken from his vehicle parked at Pinion and Harvard avenues. The theft occurred between 10 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. There was no forced entry.

WARRANT SOUGHT

Police are seeking an arrest warrant for a Butte man, 22, who allegedly assaulted a former girlfriend, 19, at her home on the 100 block of North Alabama Street on Monday. The woman reported he removed two TVs, and in response she took his car keys before he threw her to the ground and attempted to choke her.

JOYRIDE

Police cited a 16-year-old male for four misdemeanors including reckless driving and fleeing or eluding police after he allegedly took his parents vehicle on a joyride in the area of Idaho and Galena streets about 2 a.m. Tuesday.
A 46-year-old transient man suspected of breaking into an Uptown church rectory and stealing holy water last week is facing charges in Butte justice court.

At his initial appearance before Judge Ben Pezdark on Monday, Stacy Michael Trujillo was formally charged with felony burglary and misdemeanor criminal possession of drug paraphernalia.

Trujillo is being held on $20,000 bond at the Butte-Silver Bow Detention Center. A preliminary hearing was set for May 19.

Undersheriff George Skuletich said Trujillo sequestered himself inside the St. Patrick Church rectory, 102 S. Washington St., early Friday evening and called police, saying people were chasing him.

Police responded shortly after dispatch received the call about 7:30 p.m. Friday and believe Trujillo entered the church through a first-floor window.

Father Patrick Beretta said Monday that it was through his bedroom window that Trujillo gained entry. A screen was torn and the window raised. Beretta was uncertain if it was unlocked.

The parish priest was notified by police while attending a musical performance at Immaculate Conception Parish, which he called a sublime moment of music.

He (the suspect) made a really bad decision, Beretta said, adding that the break-in has left him feeling vulnerable and disturbed at a deep level.

He said he has never experienced anything like what took place Friday despite previously living in large urban areas.

Police recovered a plastic bottle of holy water and a religious medallion in Trujillos possession at the scene.

Earlier on Thursday, Trujillo had allegedly attempted to break into a room at the Lincoln Hotel on West Park Street in Uptown, Skuletich said.

During the booking process at the jail, Trujillo was found with a pipe used to smoke methamphetamine.

The undersheriff said Trujillo may have been under the influence of a drug or narcotic when he was found in the church rectory.
The power plant-sized transmission lines connecting coal-fired Colstrip Power Plant to the Pacific Northwest have attracted a new electricity generator to southeast Montana, one with a greener future.

Clearwater Energy is laying the groundwork for a wind farm near Forsyth with enough juice to power 300,000 homes. The project has been quietly in the works since 2012, but is being frequently referenced by Montanans discussing the regions energy future as Washington and Oregon abandon coal power.

At 300 megawatts, its almost 50 percent of what we already have, said Jeff Fox of Renewable Northwest, who estimates Montanas current wind energy output at 665 megawatts.

Renewable Northwest promotes the development of cheap renewable energy in the Northwest, and its no stranger to Clearwaters developer, Orion Renewable Energy Group, an Oakland, Calif., company generating wind power on the Washington-Oregon border. Orion has also in Wyoming developed two wind farms, the Foote Creek Wind Farm in Carbon County and the Wyoming Wind Energy Center near Evanston.

The Clearwater project has flown under the radar, said Orions Michael Cressner, because the company isnt a self-promoter. Conversations about Clearwater have come from third parties.

In January, when The Gazette met with Colstrip residents to discuss the social and regulatory challenges faced by coal power, Clearwater was cited more than once as a place energy workers might find jobs if part of the power complex for which the town is named had to close.

Clearwater was mentioned again last week after Montana Gov. Steve Bullock announced that he would form a working group to try to keep Colstrips most vulnerable coal turbines from being shut down if utilities, under pressure to leave Colstrip, actually exited.

Ann Hedges of the Montana Environmental Information Center told The Gazette it would be better to find a green-energy future for Colstrip instead of trying to squeeze a few more years out of the existing coal power plants. Hedges specifically cited the Clearwater project as an example of renewable energy possibilities in the Colstrip region.

Make no mistake about it, Cressner said, Clearwater is located where it is because of the transmission infrastructure serving Colstrip. Colstrip Power Plant is served by 500-kilovolt power lines and a substation big enough to accommodate Colstrip power and the 300 megawatts Clearwater would put on the energy grid.

The Bonneville Power Administration in partnership with NorthWestern Energy and other stakeholders in the transmission line serving Colstrip, have also discussed upgrading the transmission system by up to 700 megawatts. The Clearwater project is being planned to fill that extra capacity if it materializes.

The first phase of the project will cost about $500 million, Cressner said.

There will be significant numbers of jobs created in the construction phase and a smaller number in operations, Cressner said. The exact numbers will depend upon the phasing and timing of the developments we take forward, but typically you would expect well over 100 jobs during construction, and initially 10 or more long-term, full-time, jobs to manage a 300 megawatt wind farm.

Earlier this year, Clearwater posted its public notice for the first part of its project, the 70 to 95 miles of power line that will connect the wind farm to Colstrips substation. The lines are 345 kilovolt, hung from towers 90 to 200 feet tall and spaced 900 feet apart. The turbines, when the blades are at the top of their stroke, could be between 425- and 500-feet tall.

The plan is to develop the project without having to undergo the state regulatory approval process required by Montanas Major Facilities Citing Act. The Montana Legislature recently amended the citing act to allow projects to skip review, provided 75 percent of the landowners representing 75 percent of the neighboring land approved of the project. Clearwater is the first wind project to test the amendment.

Theres financial reason for landowners to participate in wind farm development, Fox said. The organization Windustry reports that as a rule of thumb, leases for wind farms run about $4,000 to $8,000 annually per turbine, or $3,000 to $4,000 per megawatt of capacity.

Cressner said Orion would like to sell wind power to Montana customers, but realizes that the Montana energy market is small and the Pacific Northwest states linked to Colstrip are sizable.

Montana has always been a tricky market to develop renewables, Cressner said. It kind of goes back to theres not as yet a huge demand for new intrastate power, much less than there has been in Oregon, Washington, or California, and even North Dakota, for the perspective.

Most of Colstrips power also is sold to customers in the Pacific Northwest.

A likely customer for Clearwater energy would be a utility, or a business like a large database company that is seeking a renewable energy source and also mindful that energy costs will at some point in the future increase.

There are a lot of very green-minded consumers, which is a big reason why wind and solar are options in these days as long-term economic development investments in renewable energy as hedge against increased energy costs, Cressner said.

The trend in wind farms is for large consumers to either contract for the power or buy the wind farm outright, according to Fox. Tech giants like Google and Apple, as well as large firms like Wal-Mart and Ikea are investing in wind energy.

In 2015, almost 60 percent of the all new wind generated capacity on the U.S. grid was wind power and about half of that was built on contract with corporate purchasers, Fox said. Thats the emerging trend.
DEER LODGE  The historic Hotel Deer Lodge, built in 1911 and considered the finest hotel in Montana at the time, is worth saving, say several engineers and historic professionals.

A local group is working to get the building restored, and at the same time create another attraction and economic development in downtown Deer Lodge.

The building is structurally sound, according to an assessment by Apex Engineering Services, Inc. of Missoula. But after many years of disuse it needs extensive rehabilitation.

To prevent further deterioration the roof has been patched, exterior trim painted and windows replaced.

The nonprofit Deer Lodge Preservation, Inc. acquired the hotel from Deer Lodge Development Group in 2014. The preservation groups president, Katherine Bair, said the priority is to replace the roof estimated to cost $200,000.

Peter Rudd, a historic specialist with SMA Architects in Helena, is preparing a Preliminary Architect Report that is crucial to procuring grants for the rehabilitation. Funding for the PAR is a $15,000 Community Development Block Grant from the Montana Department of Commerce and a Montana Main Street grant of $3,759; matching funds are a $1,200 donation from the Deer Lodge Historic Preservation board and $1,500 from Deer Lodge Preservation.

Rudd said a number of small towns, such as Whitehall, in Montana are restoring old hotels.

A long-term approach is to put the building back to work rather than haul it to the landfill.

He said people dont consider the economic problem of demolition. It will cost $400,000 to remove asbestos and other hazardous materials, and $500,000 to tear it down; so the money would be spent leaving nothing (some envision a parking lot).

Investing the money into renovation will be a big step forward, he said, and when complete will improve the value of other real estate, too.

At a commerce department workshop in Helena, the preservation group received interest and support from several state and federal agencies, Bair said. Headwaters RC&D is helpful, assisting with finding infrastructure grants and matching fund sources and grant writing.

The vision is to restore the hotel for multifunctional use -- quality hotel rooms, office spaces, rooms for meetings, classes and social events, retail shops, senior apartments, and a top quality restaurant, cafe/tea room or any other business that would benefit the residents and visitors.

Bair said a parking lot will not improve the job situation, housing, economy or encourage more visitors to spend money in Deer Lodge, but they will come to see and stay in a historic hotel.

She explained people travel the country staying in historic facilities using the website www.historichotels.org and Hotel Deer Lodge could eventually be on this list.

Donna McCarthy, owner of Quilters Corner, is already looking forward to the time when she can rent space to establish a quilt retreat in one wing of the hotel.

I love history and hate to see old buildings torn down, she said. By renting space for businesses and events, the hotel will be sustainable and will help the local economy.
For over two years, up to 60 mentally ill patients with criminal backgrounds were shoehorned into a secure wing of Montana State Hospital meant for only 32 people. The overcrowding stressed both clients and staff to near breaking points.

These patients are committed to our care by the courts. We are responsible for and dedicated to providing them therapies that will help them succeed when they move back into community settings. But with the severe overcrowding, our focus by necessity became simply keeping the patients and our staff safe. The therapeutic environment our patients needed and deserved suffered.

The Legislature knew all about the crisis. We told them about it throughout the 2015 legislative session. Gov. Bullock highlighted it  and called on the Legislature to help him fix it  in his State of the State address.

We presented the Legislature with a comprehensive plan to address the mental health needs of people in our state; everything from funding for community settings to an expansion at Warm Springs so we could more safely serve the criminally committed. However, the Legislature failed to pass a bill that would have funded infrastructure projects throughout the state, including investments in the infrastructure necessary to solve the overcrowding at the hospital.

Weve all read about the thousands of jobs that the Legislature failed to deliver  and the roads and sewer systems and other public investments that would have come had the bill passed. Few knew it would have also invested in a safer and more therapeutic environment at the state hospital. Many people were upset when the infrastructure bill failed on the last day of the session because of partisan politics. I was devastated. This was our chance to help Montanans in need and protect the hospitals workers.

And while the legislative body failed to fund construction of a building to address the census problem, they did authorize $4 million per year to staff and operate one. So we were left with staffing and funding for more space, but not the space itself.

Months after the session, we found a solution. A mere few miles from the state hospital, a private and secure facility in the town of Galen was available for lease. The Forensic Mental Health Treatment Facility can hold up to 54 patients securely. Each patient has their own bedroom. The layout gives us the opportunity to separate male from female patients, something that was not possible at the state hospital in Warm Springs. The grounds are secure, so patients can walk outside or get exercise. The proximity to the state hospital allows us to share administrative staff between the two facilities, which saves money.

Best of all, it alleviates the dangerous overcrowding problem and creates a better therapeutic environment in both facilities. Patients need to feel safe in order to receive treatment, but when youre living in a crowded environment, it naturally creates a level of irritability. The safety and security this facility provides will positively impact our ability to treat these patients.

Leasing a facility was not our first choice. But when construction of state-owned beds was denied by the Legislature, leasing became our only option. This was a creative approach that my coworkers in the Bullock administration developed and implemented to solve a very real crisis.

Together, we all came up with a solution that is good for the patients, good for the staff who care for those patients, and good for the communities that send their patients to the hospital for the acute care they need. And in the end, all politics aside, that is what truly matters.

-- John Glueckert has been the administrator of the Montana State Hospital since 2010.
MUSCATINE, Iowa A Muscatine 17-year-old has been sentenced after he pleaded guilty to one count of third-degree sexual abuse, a class C felony.

Justin Blake was sentenced to three years probation, which will include a sex offender treatment program and anger management, according to the court documents.

Blake was given deferred judgment, which means he will have the felony erased from his record if he follows the boundaries set by his probation.

According to the criminal complaint, the victim was a 13-year-old.

Emily Wenger, Muscatine Journal
MUSCATINE, Iowa  Iowa City Hospice is hosting a luncheon for all bereaved individuals in the community. The luncheon will begin at 11:30 a.m. Thursday, April 28, at Farmers Diner, 2300 Park Ave. Those who have experienced a loss and want to connect with other bereaved are invited.

Many people who are struggling with grief and loss find it helpful to have social outlets, such as this luncheon, where support is available. This luncheon provides an opportunity for bereaved to meet one another and share common experiences. Tables are reserved especially for this group and those attending will be greeted by Iowa City Hospice staff.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. In addition to pinwheels spinning around Muscatine, a representation of the happiness every child should experience, Muscatine has other opportunities to help spread awareness, prevent, and otherwise fight child abuse.

People are asked to wear blue on April 20 to show support for Muscatine child abuse prevention and post a photo to social media to be entered to win prizes using the hashtag #greatchildhoodsmuscatine.

Community involvement

My primary advice would be to get involved in the community, research shows that the more a community comes together, the more family events you have, and you take the 'it takes a village to raise a child' approach, its one of the most essential things you can do to prevent child abuse, said Kadie McCory, program manager at the Mississippi Valley Child Protection Center.

Muscatine has several opportunities for involvement, such as volunteering or donating to the Child Protection Center, Muscatine County CARES, or other organizations.

The Mississippi Valley Child Protection Center works mainly to assist in the investigation of child abuse cases, but also does training programs within the community. According to McCory, the center plans to do training for teachers in Wapello schools, and hopes to do the same in Muscatine in the future.

Muscatine County CARES, which stands for Child Abuse Response and Education System and is a member of Prevent Child Abuse Iowa, works in Muscatine to bring awareness to the issue of child abuse. The Child Abuse Council in Muscatine welcomes community members involvement.

We try to make the community aware of how to prevent child abuse, how to respond to it, if you suspect or see child abuse, and we just try to be that link to keep the community aware, Diana Broderson, a member of the Muscatine County CARES board and director of family programs at the YMCA.

For Child Abuse Prevention Month, pinwheel bouquets are placed around Muscatine, traveling posters that provide information on child abuse prevention, and a visiting guest speaker will talk to the Child Abuse Council in Muscatine.

We firmly believe that child abuse is everyones problem, and its all of our businesses to keep a watch out for the children in our community, and so its very important for our community to be involved, Broderson said.

The Department of Human Services in Muscatine as well as Muscatine County CARES work together to provide pillows and blankets for children who need to be removed from their homes, and Broderson said that is an easy way to get involved that can make a difference in a child's life.

"Oftentimes they don't have a pillow or a blanket, but we've had a great community response so now when a child gets removed from their home they have their own special bag and a brand new blanket or pillow or both, which just makes an awful situation a little but nicer for them," she said.

The Muscatine Community YMCA also has programs like the Parenting Education Program that provides information for families on parenting education with curriculum and guest speakers, and these free programs are open to all community members.

The Child Abuse Council in the Quad Cities provides outreach programs and information to help in the prevention of child abuse.

According to Prevent Child Abuse Iowa, www.pcaiowa.org, the following is a list of ways people can help:

Raise awareness among friends and family that child abuse is preventable and a cause worthy of commitment;

Spread the word to parents that services are available to help them during stressful times;

Offer parents a break from parenting;

Volunteer time to a community event dedicated to preventing child abuse;

Raise funds for local programs that provide education and support for parents.

To volunteer, donate or make pillows and blankets to DHS, or for more information, contact the Muscatine Community YMCA at 563-263-9996.

Recognizing and Reporting Child Abuse

Physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and emotional maltreatment are four types of child abuse, and according to the Child Abuse Council, they are typically found in combination. Educators and other community members can recognize signs of abuse, however, all agencies stressed that the most important thing is for a child to be believed if they report to an adult they trust.

The best thing is to tell them you believe them, its not their fault, and get them help, it is the responsibility of every adult to help children, said Angie Kindall of the Child Abuse Council.

Muscatine has had high child abuse rates in the past, and that trend continues, according to McCory.

Muscatine, in 2014, was rated 22 out of 99 counties for the rate of child abuse per child capita, so thats in the top quarter. Child abuse is happening here, its happening more frequently than 75 percent of the rest of the state, McCory said.

She also said that the most important step to take is report.

Its always better to report, when in doubt, report, McCory said.

Working together, according to Broderson, is one of the best ways to prevent child abuse in Muscatine.

We like to think that child abuse is something awful that happens in big cities, in rough neighborhoods, but child abuse is something that happens everywhere in every community, and we cant turn a blind eye to it, we all need to be aware that child abuse is a terrible thing that happens right here in our community, and the more adults have their eyes wide open and are looking out for the safety of the children the better it is for the community, Broderson said.

To report possible abuse, contact the Muscatine Police Department at 563-263-9922.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  Mayor Diana Broderson will hold her first Coffee with the Mayor at 9 a.m. Saturday, April 30, at Happy Joes, 203 Lake Park Blvd., to share information regarding several new groups that she has created since taking office Jan. 1.

All residents of Muscatine are invited.

She said she hopes to hold these informal meetings regularly to give the public an opportunity to be more involved in their local government. Coffee with the Mayor will include a short presentation regarding current events followed by a question-and-answer session.

At the first meeting, Broderson will introduce Millennial Muscatine, a proposed planning project that seeks input and guidance from the millennial generation about the future of Muscatine.

She will also introduce the Mayors Special Task Force, which is in the creation process. Members, which the mayor said will include people of different genders, political parties, ages, and socio-economic status, will look into the current form of Muscatine's local government, in addition to learning about varying forms of local government and how the individual structures function.

"With guest speakers from the Iowa League of Cities, Elected Officials, and other professionals, they will study the original charter and how it has evolved to its current form. Their purpose is to determine if the current form of the government in Muscatine is the desired form of the people ... they will solicit input from the public in their final recommendations," Broderson stated in a press release.
Plans will be discussed when the schoolhouse located at Wildcat Den State Park will be re-opened June 5 until September. Hosts for the building will need to be secured and if anyone is interested they should contact Janet Duncan at 563-263-1632 to get scheduled in. Hosting involves being at the school 1-4 p.m. Sundays and visiting with guests. Usually someone will come in who one knows and have a visit about going to school back then.
WAPELLO, Iowa  Technician level hazardous materials response will continue to be provided to Louisa County by the Muscatine Fire Department under a revised 28E agreement approved Monday by the Louisa County Board of Supervisors.

However, the revision will alter the fee system from a fixed annual payment of $1,800 to one based on a per capita fee of 25 cents, Louisa County officials said. With Louisa Countys current population of around 11,280, the annual fee will end up being around $2,820.

In a letter to the supervisors, Mike Hartman, MFD fire marshal/assistant chief, explained the per capita rate was lower than what many neighboring departments charged.

According to Hartman, Johnson County charges 50 cents; Scott County charges 75 cents; Ottumwa charges 85 cents; and Des Moines County charges $1.

In other action, the board approved a three-lot subdivision for property in Port Louisa Township formerly owned by R&L Farms. County Assessor Greg Johnson said the land had recently been sold at auction, but the split into three separate parcels had triggered the countys subdivision ordinance.

The board also agreed to abate taxes on a mobile home in the name of Richard Dingus and refund tax sales fees to Mike Klemme, after learning the mobile home had been removed from the site several years ago.

County officials had not been told the mobile home had been moved until after the unit was sold at a tax sale.

In final action, the board approved a fireworks permit for Randy Foor and an application from Windstream Iowa Communications to place cable along the west side of I Avenue in Port Louisa Township.

County Engineer Larry Roehl also reported he was continuing to work on developing specifications for separating the former county jail and a newer addition and associated office renovation work.

Roehl said there were still unanswered questions about water and sewer services, as well as potential structural issues with some of the anticipated renovation work.

He told the board he would be attending a conference next week, but anticipated having the specification ready for the boards May 3 meeting.

The board also approved $285,077 in claims.

The supervisors met Monday instead of their normal Tuesday because of staff conflicts. They will also meet at 6 p.m. April 21 at the Louisa County Complex for a public hearing on a proposed ordinance that would open most of the countys secondary road system to all-terrain/utility vehicle (ATV/UTV) traffic.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  Millennial Muscatine, a group designed to provide young people in Muscatine the opportunity to become involved in local government, is currently seeking members.

Ryan Broderson, a current MCC student and Eagle Scout, will chair Millennial Muscatine, a group created by his aunt, Mayor Diana Broderson.

Ryan stated that he plans to begin with a group of 10 young people who wish to discuss problems and solutions within the community, and said he hopes to provide a space for all young people in Muscatine to discuss current events.

"I just want to create a team that knows how to get things done but isn't too serious," Ryan said. "After those 10 people and while I'm getting those 10 people I hope that other people hear about this and want to join in."

Former Iowa State Rep. Nathan Reichert said that he experienced the positive impact of young people when he was a member of the Iowa House.

"Seeing the impact of having that diverse set of voices and really what it means to an institution and also what it means to have that perspective on laws and policies, it's invaluable," Reichert stated.

Mayor Broderson agreed, and said she is looking forward to hearing the perspectives provided by the young people in Muscatine.

"What we want Millennial Muscatine to be is a group that comes together, and comes up with a voice representative of the young people in our community, knowing full well that they're going to be the ones leading our community, that they're going to be the ones who stay here, and what would make them want to stay and be committed in our community," Mayor Broderson stated.

For more information or to become involved in Millennial Muscatine, contact Ryan Broderson at 563-571-5347 or brodersonrc@mcsdonline.org.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  The cause of the fire that destroyed the Huttig mansion has been ruled "undetermined," according to a press release from the Muscatine Fire Department.

The blaze at 315 W. Third St. on Dec. 1, 2015, gutted one of Muscatine's oldest and most unique houses. The remains of the structure were demolished by order of the insurance company and city on Dec. 3, 2015.

The press release from the fire department on April 19, 2016, stated that there was a lack of information and evidence leading to a single cuase.

If further evidence is uncovered or subsequent interviews are able to be held the cause is subject to change, the press release stated. An undetermined cause means that more than one of the other causes  accidental, natural, or incendiary  cannot be proven or not all other causes can be disproven, according to the press release. All fire cause determinations are subject to revision if additional information is found.

The 911 call came in around noon Dec. 1 for the 123-year-old structure, built by a prominent businessman of the time in Muscatine. Dave and Nyla Morrison bought the house in 1987, which included many original furnishings and fixtures  like a portrait of Mrs. Huttig on a stained-glass window, unique wood carvings and a large, custom carved dining room table and matching chairs assembled in the dining room a century earlier.

In light of the fire, the Muscatine Fire Department wanted to issue several reminders to the public:

Have properly working smoke detectors in your home. The batteries must be in place and must be fresh. Also, any detector more than 10 years old needs replaced due to the end of life of the sensor.

If there is a fire in an area, please stay away or at least at a safe distance. Your safety becomes a concern and can change our firefighting tactics if you get too close or you cross over fire lines. They are set up for your safety.

Talk to your family about planning escape routes and meeting points. Fire can spread at an incredibly fast rate, and hesitation in escape can prove deadly. Having the meeting point allows you to confirm the location of loved ones so that fire firefighters do not take unacceptable risks.

If you have information that may help investigators, please let them know. Piecing together how a fire started and developed is difficult, and often something "small" from a witness helps explain what happened. In the cause determination investigators utilize physical evidence along with fire development and witness accounts to determine how a fire started and grew. Without witness information it is sometimes difficult to explain fire behavior.

In an emergency, dial 911. For non-emergency calls to the Muscatine Fire Department, call 563-263-9233.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  Writers on the Avenue will host a spring poetry festival on Saturday, April 30, at Trinity Episcopal Church, 211 Walnut St., to conclude National Poetry Month.

The festival will include free afternoon workshops led by experienced poets, followed by an evening of readings from poetry contest winners, workshop leaders Ryan Collins and Farah Marklevits, and award-winning poet Lauren K. Alleyne.

The first workshop, The Joy of Poeming, led by Ryan Collins, will begin at 2 p.m., followed by "Climbing on, in, and around Words," led by Farah Marklevits at 3 p.m.

Seasoned and beginning poets of all ages are invited to explore words and find inspiration with the authors.

Collins is the author of "A New American Field Guide & Song Book." He is the Executive Director of the Midwest Writing Center and host of the SPECTRA Poetry Reading Series in Rock Island, Illinois, where he lives.

Marklevits has been published in "The Carolina Quarterly," "Literary Mama," "DIAGRAM," and elsewhere. Her manuscript was a finalist for Milkweed Editions's 2014 Lindquist and Vennum Prize for Poetry. She lives in Davenport.

Workshop participants will be invited to read their creations at an open mic at 5 p.m. Anyone is welcome to bring a poem appropriate for a general audience and share it at this time.

At 6 p.m., winners of Writers on the Avenues poetry contest will share their prize poems, and workshop leaders Ryan Collins and Farah Marklevits will then read from their work, to be followed by a performance by Lauren K. Alleyne.

Alleyne is the author of "Difficult Fruit" and is assistant professor of English and Poet in Residence at the University of Dubuque. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essays have been widely published and honored with many awards, and she was the recipient of a 2014 Iowa Arts Council Fellowship. She is a Cave Canem graduate and is originally from Trinidad and Tobago.

Light refreshments will be served and a play area will be available for small children. For more information, email wotamuscatine@gmail.com or call Misty Urban at 208-305-8307.

The festival is supported by a grant from the Community Foundation of Greater Muscatine and prizes are co-sponsored by Salvatores Restaurant.

Writers on the Avenue is a nonprofit organization committed to advancing the literary arts in the Muscatine area and supporting local writers. The group meets from 6 to 8 p.m. on the second Tuesday of every month in the lounge of the Student Services building at Muscatine Community College. New members are always welcome. Membership is $10 a year.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  The Muscatine RAGBRAI Housing Committee is seeking volunteers who are willing to host riders when they gather in Muscatine on Friday, July 22, on their way to the starting point for the event, as well as July 30, after their across-state ride is completed.

Guests will arrive during the afternoon or evening on Friday, July 22, and will leave early Saturday morning.

Residents would provide overnight parking for motor homes, space for tents, floor space, beds, and bathroom facilities. Hosts are expected to provide riders with a place to sleep (or camp) and access to a bathroom and shower, however, anything beyond that is up to the individual host. Hosts are not required to feed guests, entertain guests or provide them with amenities such as towels, soap or shampoo.

This is a voluntary community hospitality effort so hosts are not allowed to charge for accommodations, however, once RAGBRAI Muscatine matches guests with a host, the hosts have the final approval.

Residents can sign up to host riders or view other volunteer opportunities at www.RAGBRAIMuscatine.com, and email housing@ragbraimuscatine.com with any questions regarding housing.
Gov. Terry Branstad succeeded in implementing his wildly unpopular plan to privatize Medicaid. The state officially turned over administration of the $4.2 billion program to for-profit insurers on none other than April Fool's Day.

About 72 hours later, the governor characterized the transition as "smooth." It "went off without any major disruptions to Medicaid patients or the providers that have been serving them," he said during a press conference.

Few Iowa health providers would describe any aspect of privatization as smooth. And the extent of disruption to patients remains to be seen. No one knows whether their health insurance works until they try to use it. Hundreds of thousands of Iowans will begin doing that this month.

Understanding their experiences with managed care companies so far means relying on anecdotes, including those shared with associations, the newspaper and on social media. One Facebook post garnering much attention comes from Melissa Gentry, a physician's assistant in Oskaloosa. When she posted a message directed to "Iowa Medicaid MCOs" about an unnamed patient, she had no idea it would be shared by thousands of people.

Gentry acknowledged managed care companies were working through "kinks" in the initial days, but her patient is in no position to navigate them. He has schizophrenia. Daily life is a struggle. His medication allows him to go out in public, maintain relationships and even work part time.

"For the first time in a really long time, he feels like a worthwhile human being," wrote Gentry. "But you just said that his 'specialty medicine' has to come from your approved specialty pharmacy. So I sent his prescription to your specialty pharmacy and do you know what they told me? It will take 24-48 hours for approval from the insurance company. Once it's approved, they will call my office to set up delivery. At which point, the medication will be shipped from the pharmacy in Orlando, Florida, to my office in Oskaloosa, Iowa, which may take 5-7 days."

A week without medication can be catastrophic for someone with schizophrenia. A little paranoia may be followed by not showering, fear of eating, hallucinations and time in the hospital, wrote Gentry.

The head of the Iowa Pharmacy Association said she has heard it is taking a week or more to obtain certain drugs for some people with mental illness. "The patient then has to get a new prescription and get it through mail order," said executive vice president and CEO Kate Gainer.

Fortunately, Gentry had a sample on hand she could provide her patient. In fact, three patients in two days needed such samples. She got on the phone to get medication quickly delivered.

Amy McCoy, spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Human Services, said it didn't seem many patients are facing obstacles in obtaining drugs, and workers are quickly resolving problems. The state has a comprehensive plan to monitor compliance and outcomes going forward, she said, and hopes the news media also focuses on the "good news" stories.

Except the editorial board hasn't heard any yet.

We did, however, hear from Amie Ford of Davenport. Her 2-year-old son Brayden has cerebral palsy. He receives seven to eight hours a week of therapy, which she credits for his progress. The switch to private Medicaid has meant changing primary care providers. Based on a handbook from the insurer, she has calculated about four weeks of therapy each year will be covered. When she called the insurer to find about increasing that, she was told to check the handbook for the answer.

Kevin McNee of Marion, who receives Social Security for physical and medical disabilities, said he had received no insurance card or booklet from his private insurer by April 1  three months after privatization was originally supposed to be implemented. So he had no valid card when he went to a doctor's appointment early this month, but was told there would be no charge. A few days later, he found out the person assigned to handle his financial affairs had received the packet from the insurer at an address on file with the Social Security Administration.

"This worries me because I have no idea who or what agency passed my information along to the MCO," he said. On Thursday, McNee received in the mail a $233 bill for the April 4 doctor's appointment.

Lynne Vonderohe of Mason City has been her 28-year-old daughter's legal guardian for a decade. The state had a record of this when it managed Medicaid. But the MCO doesn't. When she called the insurer Tuesday to select a primary physician for her daughter, the insurer wouldn't talk to her. She said they wouldn't accept her guardianship orders and instead would mail a release form for her daughter to sign.

"My daughter is nonverbal and cannot legally sign any documents," Vonderohe told an editorial writer last week.

Then there are the Iowans willing to share their stories but not their names because they're embarrassed to be enrolled in Medicaid. Among them is a Des Moines woman who understands insurance after working in the industry for 25 years. She now relies on the government insurer and has repeatedly asked for a basic handbook detailing her benefits. She said she was told by both the state and the private insurer they would not mail one. Her options: printing it at the library, which would cost about $17, or downloading it onto a flash drive, which she doesn't have. She also doesn't have Internet access at home.

What other problems are Iowans encountering? How many are unable to obtain drugs or see their regular doctor? As of last week, fewer than 70 percent of health providers who had been previously serving Iowa Medicaid patients had signed contracts with all three private managed care companies, according to DHS. Lawmakers say they're hearing from dozens of constituents with problems.

But according to Iowa's governor, the transition to his "modernization" of Medicaid has been smooth. Apparently he's not talking to his constituents.

The Des Moines Register
Les emplois a Rennes sont abondants et varies. Il y a quelque chose pour tout le monde. Que vous soyez a la recherche dun emploi []
Les blattes ou cafards (Blatta orientalis) sont des insectes qui appartiennent a la famille des Blattoptera. Ils se caracterisent par leur forme allongee, leurs ailes []
Two non-executive Barclays Africa directors, Yolanda Cuba and Peter Matlare, made headlines recently after the banking group paid them in full for their duties, despite their poor board meeting attendance.

Cuba, who is the Chief Officer: Strategy and Mergers & Acquisitions at Vodacom, only made 50% of her board meetings, and 74% of her committee meetings.

In total, Cuba attended 19 of her 29 Barclays Africa meetings.

Despite her poor attendance, Barclays Africa paid Cuba R963,420 in 2015 for serving as a non-executive director.

Former Tiger Brands CEO Peter Matlare attended 7 of 10 board meetings. He was also paid in full  R457,496.

If Barclays Africas director fees are calculated as payment per meeting, their remuneration was:

Yolanda Cuba  R50,706 per meeting attended

per meeting attended Peter Matlare  R65,357 per meeting attended

Barclays Africa said in its annual report that although Cubas attendance at committee meetings was satisfactory, her attendance at board meetings was below board standards.

This was mainly due to her recent executive appointment resulting in meeting conflicts, which were not resolvable at the time, said Barclays Africa.

These will be more easily managed in future and the board is confident that Yolanda will be able to attend the requisite meetings.

The banking group said Matlares attendance at board meetings was also below standard.

Matlare, who is no longer Tiger Brands CEO, said he will be able to devote more time to Barclays Africa going forward, which includes participating in board committees.

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Cell C CEO Jose Dos Santos wants a woman to take over his position at the company when he steps down, stating that the mobile operator currently employs many good-looking women and clever women in senior positions.

Dos Santos explained his stance on empowering women in the workplace during a recent interview on CliffCentrals Leadership Platform.

He said African women have a higher tolerance level than men, something he noticed while working for Vodacom in Mozambique.

When Dos Santos came to Cell C after working for Vodacom, he said there were few female-empowerment initiatives at the company  and he promised to change that.

Women have a bitch switch

Dos Santos said Cell Cs staff complement currently sits at over 60% female, with many women at a senior executive or management level in the company.

We have good-looking women, we have clever women, we have smart women, and that has created a different environment, said Dos Santos.

I think we have to empower the female individuals. Today a lot of women are independent.

He stated that Cell Cs next CEO should be a woman.

Im hoping that one day when I step down from Cell C, a woman will be the CEO of the company. They have a different way of managing, they have a different way of engaging in meetings, it creates a different dynamic, he said.

If I can use the term on your radio station, you know women do have a bitch switch, and boy if you see two women fighting it is worse than two men.

Miss South Africa interns

Dos Santos said Cell C  which sponsors the Miss South Africa pageant  also offers all Miss SA finalist an internship for a year at the company to assist them in gaining work experience.

It brought a whole different atmosphere. Can you imagine you got 12 gorgeous women and you say four or five of them walk into your company  do you know what it does to the atmosphere in that company? The men dress better, they shave every morning.

Dos Santos said the Miss SA contestants who stay at Cell C after their internships are hardworking and loyal, and make valuable contributions to the company.

Taken out of context

Dos Santos released a statement following the interview, saying that his views on female employees were taken out of context.

As a CEO with a strong track record in the empowerment of female employees, in South Africa and in many other African countries that I have worked in, I am saddened that my stance has been taken out of context, said Dos Santos.

The comment I made when asked about women empowerment was part of a broader interview about leadership on CliffCentral. I regret my choice of words which I realise were offensive.

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The state of competitive gaming in South Africa finds itself at a crossroads. This is according to South African eSports team manager Ryan Boyes.

Boyes told MyGaming that competitive gaming is seeing increased prize-money from marketing companies for competitive gaming events.

There is also basic development done to improve the standard of eSports by organizations like the MSSA.

However, while the prize-money offered may tempt many gamers, the prize-money does not improve standards, nor does it help to grow eSports as a sport, said Boyes.

He explained that one just has to look at the performance of South Africas professional teams to see how woefully short they fall of international standards.

On the other hand, the national teams who represent South Africa with pride are currently ranked by IeSF as being 12th in the world, said Boyes.

Unless there is a general growth at grass-roots level, said Boyes, there will never be a sustainable growth in both numbers and standard in gaming in South Africa.

Thus the growth in competitive gaming in official structures is improving on a year-to-year basis, whereas the standard among the non-accredited organisations seems to be floundering, said Boyes.

South Africa versus global standards

Boyes said that, compared to the international scene, South Africa has a long way to go.

Unfortunately, we are cut off from the rest of the world competitively, due to distance and ping, Boyes said.

This means its difficult for players to get experience from a wider pool of players, like in Europe for example.

We are in the situation where, in most games, we have isolated ourselves to local servers instead of international servers due to high pings.

He said that countries like Sweden, Finland and Denmark are close enough that they can play against each other without latency concerns.

This in turn fuels rivalry and competitiveness between countries and players, which pushes players to work harder. This means the skills of players are better, he said.

MyGaming has reached out to Bravado Gaming, one of South Africas top MGOs, for their perspective on eSports in South Africa.

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Migori senator Dr. Wilfred Machage over the weekend shared a photo of himself and his twin brother, Ambassador Sospeter Machage, challenging Kenyans on Twitter to spot the difference.

The two share an uncanny resemblance that could throw away anybody who is not keen to identify the slight physical difference between the Senator and his brother.

They both have the same body frame, height and they wear spectacles. However, what distinctively separates them is the fact that Senator Machage spots sideburns while his brother does not.



With my Twin Brother Amb.Dr.Magita. #family the best thing one can ever hav #KOT can you spot the difference? ? pic.twitter.com/O1foy8FYD3  Sen.Dr. W.G Machage (@gmachage) April 17, 2016

Nominated MP Isaac Mwaura also pointed out that it was easy to spot the senator, fondly referred to as Magufuli wa Kenya, through his Magufuli shirt.



@WSMwita @gmachage very alike indeed. But I can still tell the senator inthe maghufuli shirt

 Mwaura Isaac (@MwauraIsaac1) April 18, 2016




This week, Uganda will airlift 400 cancer patients to Nairobi for treatment. This is after their only radiotherapy machine broke down.

More than 16,000 other patients who need radiotherapy care will be forced to take strong painkillers like morphine.

The 400 Ugandans will be taken care of at the Aga Khan hospital.

On face value, it may seem Kenyas cancer treatment infrastructure is much more developed than our brothers, but the situation is no better here.

Cases of machine breakdown at Kenyatta National Hospital are more frequent than we would hope for. KNH offers the only affordable treatment at Sh500 per session. Private hospitals charge upwards of Sh10,000 per session.

A radiation machine is not that expensive. A single unit costs between Sh200 and 300 million. It is therefore a shame that Uganda has 1 and Kenya has just a few.

Last year it was reported that Nigeria, a nation of 170 million people, had only 7 machines, of which 5 were faulty. So you can see its an Africa-wide problem.

What do you think? Is there hope for cancer patients? Will they continue seeking treatment in India? Do you see our governments sparing a few billions to buy adequate machines?

Is East Africas health system screwed? Take a vote.


LOS ANGELES  A UC Berkeley student who came to the U.S. as an Iraqi refugee says he was unfairly removed from a flight at Los Angeles International Airport earlier this month because a fellow passenger was alarmed by an innocent conversation he was having in Arabic.

Southwest Airlines said in a statement Sunday that the passenger, Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, was taken off the April 9 flight from Los Angeles to Oakland, California, for questioning and the plane took off while that was happening. But the airline said it has not received a direct complaint from Makhzoomi, and he has not responded to several attempts to reach him.

Makhzoomi, a 26-year-old senior at UC Berkeley, said that he was calling his uncle before the flight to tell him about a speech he had attended by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

"I was very excited about the event, so I called my uncle to tell him about it," Makhzoomi told the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/1VcaVoO).

Makhzoomi told his uncle about asking a question on the Islamic State group at the event. He said he used the phrase "inshallah," meaning "god willing," at the end of the conversation, and those things might have led to suspicion.

He said the woman sitting in front of him on the plane began staring at him. "That is when I thought, 'Oh, I hope she is not reporting me,' " Makhzoomi said.

Makhzoomi said an Arabic-speaking Southwest employee came and escorted him off the plane and asked him why he had been speaking Arabic.

Makhzoomi said he told the employee "This is what Islamophobia got this country into." Makhzoomi said that made the man angry and that was when he was told he could not get back on the plane.

The FBI in Los Angeles said in a statement that it investigated the situation by request and found no further action was necessary.

Southwest said it could not offer specific comments before talking to Makhzoomi. The airline's statement said it regrets any less-than-positive experience by a customer, but its primary focus is on safety and its crew members followed protocol. It added that the company "neither condones nor tolerates discrimination of any kind."

Makhzoomi said he was able to get book a flight on another airline and got home eight hours later than planned.

"My family and I have been through a lot, and this is just another one of the experiences I have had," he told the Times. "Human dignity is the most valuable thing in the world, not money. If they apologized, maybe it would teach them to treat people equally."
Inspired by what she calls Napa Valleys textured lifestyle, interior designer Deborah Macdonald aims to replicate a similar level of depth into the spaces she creates as president and owner of her firm Textured Design Napa.

The company name is a new one, representing an evolution that Macdonald describes as organic, from where she began in 2012 when she launched as Napa At Home.

The start of Napa At Home marked Macdonalds first time working in the world of interior design as a professional, and she began by indulging her love of textiles.

She was aware before she began that as a consumer she was limited in what fabrics she had access to, as opposed to the myriad options from which an interior designer got to choose, and she wanted to change that for herself and others.

I thought, Surely other people must be frustrated by this, too, she said

In an effort to gain access to the beautiful fabrics she wanted, Macdonald headed to High Point, North Carolina, where she attended a textile design show and said she made her first important contacts.

Upon her return and with suppliers in place who would allow her to purchase by the yard rather than the bolt, Macdonald began selling direct to clients through house parties.

I was inspired by a Longaberger party I had been to, she said of the sales method. From there, she said, her business just began to grow through word of mouth.

Its had a natural evolution. Everything thats evolved has been organic.

On March 1, Macdonald officially changed the business name from Napa At Home to Textured Design Napa as she now offers full design services in conjunction with her textile offerings.

She wrote that the name change reflects the increased breadth and sophistication of the services offered: residential, commercial, and project management.

She described her aesthetic as warm, elegant, and livable, but said she designs in all kinds of styles.

Macdonald attributes some of her growth to her love of collaboration and credits the referrals from architects, upholsterers, seamstresses, drapery manufacturers, and other artisans in the trade with whom she has worked for helping to build her business.

I feel like there is a really great space between the architect and owner where I can really add value, she explained. The designer also noted that she is very solution-driven and that has led her to expand her breadth of services and capabilities in a natural way.

Given the amount of brand equity Macdonald believed she had amassed as Napa At Home, she admitted she was a little nervous to re-brand.

However, she acknowledged that because she was doing more and more in the commercial sector, it was important to have a name that could encompass that. Along with her residential clients, Macdonalds portfolio holds projects designed for Domaine Carneros, Tank Garage Winery, Silverado Resort and Spa and Milliken Creek Inn & Spa.

The entire rebranding process from the initial concept to the announcement took a full year because, she said, I really wanted to think about what I wanted to say and what I wanted people to know about me.

Macdonald described the concept of textured as a play on the design element of using texture to create more depth and interest in a space, as well as her own perception of Napa Valley having a very textured lifestyle.

After 25 years as a corporate attorney, most of which was spent in Boston, and several more years running a nonprofit associated with breast cancer, Macdonald said she is now having a ball working in such a creative field.

She took a CAD class (Computer-Aided Design) at Napa Valley college, so she is proficient in the program and able to provide her clients with professional-looking designs of her ideas, and she also said Pinterest has made the design process easier as well.

By compiling a mood board on Pinterest, the designer said she can be much more efficient. We can really refine what the client likes and doesnt like. Thats how a concept really comes together.

With a new brand and a depth of experience she didnt have just a few years ago, Macdonald is excited for what is yet to come. Despite maintaining and enjoying a strong residential design business, she said she has really loved the commercial projects shes done and looks forward to more opportunities like that.

Whether working in residential or commercial, however, she said, The best part is finding new things. I love finding a new product or solution that no one thought of before.

Deborah Macdonald can be found at TexturedDesignNapa.com as well as in the interior design column she writes for the Napa Valley Register every other Saturday.
An early-morning five-vehicle collision on Calistoga Road brought down power lines and closed the road from Petrified Forest Road through to Badger Road in Santa Rosa, officials said.

At about 7:20 a.m. CHP officers responded to a call of a big rig collision on Calistoga Road north of Harville Road  which is about 2 miles from Highway 12  where the road makes a sweeping curve.

James McElroy, 56, of Sonoma was driving a dump truck with an additional trailer attached containing gravel. He was headed southbound on Calistoga Road and for unknown reasons the rear trailer crossed over the double yellow lines and struck a northbound sedan, the CHP said.

The impact forced the car back and into an embankment, where it overturned and hit a northbound pickup.

The front axle of the dump trucks trailer broke away, separating it from the main rig. The trailer overturned on the right embankment, and with the axle of the trailer still attached to the tow bar it struck a utility pole, causing it to fall and bring down power lines in the roadway. Two additional northbound vehicles were struck by the falling lines.

The downed lines caused a temporary black out to about 1,500 customers including Maria Carrillo High School.

Calistoga Road remained closed in both directions until about 6 p.m. from the intersection where it turns into Petrified Forest Road through to Montecito Boulevard in Santa Rosa.

The female driver of the overturned sedan, Lisa Adams, 57, of Santa Rosa, who was the only injured party in the accident, was taken to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital with minor to moderate injuries. CHP Officer Jonathon Sloat said she had surgery during the day.

Big rigs were being turned around at Montecito Road in Santa Rosa, which is a little south of Badger Road.

The driver of a Ford F250, Michael Mendoza, 57, of Santa Rosa, was trapped inside his truck when the live power lines fell on the cab. PG&E workers cut the power allowing emergency workers to free him.

Joseph Miller, 63, of Santa Rosa, and Lisa-Mei Downs, 38, also of Santa Rosa were the drivers of the other two vehicles that were struck by the falling lines. Neither were injured.

Alcohol and drugs do not appear to be a factor in the accident. CHP commercial investigation officers responded to assist and inspect the truck and trailer.
The school bus driver accused of driving under the influence of alcohol while children were aboard her vehicle was sentenced in Napa Superior Court to 300 days in jail and four years of probation.

Jaquida Parker, 24, of Vallejo pleaded no contest to six felony counts of child endangerment with the possibility of causing great bodily harm in addition to misdemeanor traffic violations for driving under the influence. She was sentenced before Judge J. Michael Byrne on Friday.

Parker was arrested on Dec. 11 following a traffic incident on Old Sonoma Road, south of Buhman Road. While driving a school bus carrying 28 children, Parker, realizing she was not on her assigned route, attempted to make a U-turn, disabling the Napa Valley Unified School District bus and blocking traffic in one lane.

The responding California Highway Patrol officer reported that Parker smelled of alcohol and had bloodshot eyes, according to the probation report. She had a blood-alcohol concentration of between .151 and .154 percent at the scene  the legal limit in California is .08 percent for motorists and .04 percent for those driving a commercial vehicle.

Parker was sentenced to serve 300 days in jail and four years probation, and was ordered to pay a $2,174 DUI fine and serve 40 hours on a work program. Between time credits and conduct credits, Parker had already served 212 days, according to court documents.

Parkers drivers license is suspended or revoked and her commercial license has been disqualified, according to the probation report.

Several parents of the children aboard the bus provided victim impact statements prior to Parkers sentencing. Some expressed their anger toward Parkers actions and how their children have been affected by the incident.

All it takes is one time, one second, and things could have been worse, the children could have lost their lives, a mother wrote. Her daughter, who was in the bus at the time, now has nightmares, is anxious about getting into vehicles, especially buses, and is afraid that something similar will happen again. It is worrisome, she wrote.

Even though many of these 11-14-year-olds were frightened, they behaved more responsibly than Ms. Parker, wrote another parent. The students were the ones to call 911, opened the emergency exit, assisted one another to exit safely and called their parents, the parent wrote.

The parents description of what the students did was verified by video footage from that day on the bus. The video showed one student who noticed that Parker was going off the route early on, and even saying Were going the wrong way.

After realizing the bus was stuck, the students proceeded to collect their belongings and take out their cellphones, presumably to call their parents. Then they got off the bus via a side emergency exit.

Not all the victim statements were angry, though. One parent, Kris Keeley, who had two children aboard the bus, expressed understanding toward Parkers actions.

Keeley wrote: The risk that my children faced when Ms. Parker drove under the influence of alcohol was unnecessary and inexcusable. Even so, I can appreciate that Ms. Parker did not intend to harm anyone that day  I forgive Ms. Parker for her poor choice. I wish her the best in her future. Everyone can make a bad decision. I believe that how you choose to live your life after a bad decision is the true measure of who you are as a human being.

So what will Parkers life look like after she serves time in jail?

Upon her release, Parker said, she plans to look for work, attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, get a sponsor and be a better person, according to the probation report. She planned on apologizing to the children and their families and realizes that she should have never put the children in that situation.

She explained what happened that day in an interview with a probation officer on March 30. Parker said that she had a glass of wine at a friends house because she was having an emotional day  it was the anniversary of her cousins death. She said that she didnt feel like she was intoxicated at the time and that it makes her sad to think about what she had done.

Parkers Auntie, Dianna Wingo Camp, said that Parker had been the main caregiver for her cousin, who was paralyzed, and that she was very upset about his passing the year earlier.

I was so shocked and disappointed when I heard about this incident; I was upset with myself that I had not called her on the days leading to the anniversary of her cousins death, she wrote in a letter to the court.

According to the probation report, Parker is at a medium risk to re-offend due to her lack of pro-social companions, lack of structured pro-social activities, substance abuse issues, and employment.

She is fortunate nobody was injured while she was driving the school bus, stated the report.
The plastic gloves were on and the teenagers were ready to roll. The always-full sushi workshop at the Napa County Library taught local youths how to make the perfect sushi rice and how to roll sushi.

Library Associate Fumiyo Whistler, a former sushi chef, led the workshop with help from Melinda Mathis, who is in charge of teen programs.

She is very, very skilled, Mathis said of Whistler, who also teaches origami, calligraphy and sewing classes at the library.

She began Fridays class in the Community Meeting Room by having the students watch her prepare rice in a rice cooker, fold the rice with a spatula, cool it down with a traditional Japanese fan and add seasoning and cooking oil.

If the rice is not right, its just really horrible, Whistler said. She explained that a rice cooker is ideal for making sushi rice since it cooks evenly and doesnt make the rice crunchy, as can happen in a stovetop pan.

Whistler then showed the students how to make two kinds of sushi rolls  maki-mono, a roll wrapped with nori (edible seaweed) and ura-maki, or inside-out sushi, which has rice on the outside of the roll.

The students prepared their sushi rolls on makisu, or bamboo placemats, wrapped in plastic so the rice wouldnt stick to them. Whistler warned the students that the inside-out roll could fit more ingredients than a maki-mono roll and to try not to overfill it.

Perfect inside-out rolls sat on plates at every table as students kept rolling more sushi. Maki-mono rolls proved to be a little more difficult.

Victor Chen, 11, had a roll that ended up looking a little like a sushi-taco. It didnt bother him, though  he wrapped another piece of nori around it and ate it like a burrito, taking large bites between sentences.

It was great, he said after tasting his creation.

His sister, Vanessa, agreed that the inside-out rolls were easier to roll, but said that if there was a larger piece of seaweed the maki-mono rolls would be able to fit more ingredients.

I think its nice that its offered at the library for free, Vanessa said of the workshop.

Emma Heun, 16, especially enjoyed the workshop. Sushi is my favorite food, she said. I have celiac disease so I cant eat a lot of things, but sushi is one of the things I can eat.

Heun, also a pescatarian  she eats fish but no other meat  said that she will definitely make sushi at home now that shes learned how and plans to research how to make other kinds of rolls as well.

She [Whistler] was very informative and she explained it really, really well, Heun said.

I thought I was going to destroy it by accident, Saoirse McArdle, 12, said of her first attempt. After making only two rolls, though, she felt that she had mastered sushi, she said.

Its so nice to see the kids so engaged, Whistler said. They look so happy and accomplished after they make sushi.

Whistler never thought that she would be teaching children how to make sushi, especially at the library.

People think sushi is something you have to go to a special sushi restaurant or grocery store (to get). But no  you can make it at home, Whistler said. Just by learning basics, you can make anything you want.

A youth sushi workshop is usually offered twice a year, once in the fall and once in the spring, Mathis said.

For more information about teen programs offered at the library, contact Mathis at melinda.mathis@countyofnapa.org or 707-259-8394.
Picketers gathered outside downtown Napas Criminal Courthouse Monday morning with signs that read: Honk 4 Cannabis, Racism alive + well in Napa and Stop raiding legal grows.

They were upset that Hakeem Mwata Brown, owner of Life Enhancement Services, a medical cannabis dispensary in Vallejo, is on trial for alleged possession of marijuana for sale and marijuana cultivation.

They said they plan on being outside the courthouse for as long as the trial lasts.

The Napa Special Investigations Bureau executed a search warrant on the 1200 block of Rimrock Drive in rural Napa County on Aug. 13, 2013, where a large marijuana grow was found.

Brown, who was on the property, claimed that the grow was part of a collective, investigators said.

According to the report filed by NSIB, evidence at the grow scene near Lake Berryessa and at Browns house in Oakland indicated otherwise.

Brown was arrested on Nov. 13, 2013, at his home in Vallejo on suspicion of possessing marijuana for sale and cultivating marijuana, according to court documents.

Browns jury trial began Monday. He is out on bail and his dispensary is still operating.

Lani Cleveland, president of the Vallejo Patients Coalition, said that it is her duty to come out and support Brown. Our dispensary owners take a lot of huge chances for us every single day just opening up, cultivating for us. Because they take those chances, its up to us to come out here and support them when things like this happen.

What theyre doing to Hakeem is outrageous. Its insane, Cleveland said.

As a patient, its my duty to come out here and support our caregivers, and Hakeem is the best of the best, said Leslie Wetsch, secretary of the Vallejo Patients Coalition. He really cares.

Hes a good man who is meticulous about following the law. He has a kid and hes a very involved father, she said. He doesnt want to do anything that would jeopardize his freedom  hes got a family.

Wetsch said that if Brown loses the trial, the only option will be for him to close his dispensary, which serves hundreds of patients.

His trial continues this week.
Dolores Mae Wainright, 84, died on April 13, 2016. She was born in Humboldt, South Dakota and moved to California with her mother when she was 12. Dolores met her husband, Richard Wainright in Oakland at Castlemont High School and they were married when she was 18. Her life was dedicated to her husband, his family  the Nichelinis, and her children. In 2003 the couple moved to St. Helena full-time from Los Gatos and in 2007, Richard passed away. Dolores was kind, loving and an ever patient wife and mother and will be greatly missed. She is survived by an aunt, Maxine Patane and family in New York, a brother, Kenneth Hartle and family, residing in South Dakota, a daughter, Roberta Oswald in St. Helena and a daughter, Cheryl Flebut and son-in-law John in Discovery Bay and grandchildren, Amanda in Modesto and Ryan in Livermore. Viewing at Morrisons in St. Helena on Pine Street on Thursday, April 21 from 10  12 with a blessing at 11:30, graveside service and reception to follow. In lieu of flowers, please make a donation in her name to the Sons of Italy Scholarship fund in care of Rose Taylor, 1322 Inglewood Avenue, St. Helena CA 94574.
A Napa man was arrested on suspicion of grand theft and possession of stolen property after police allegedly found him with a stolen bicycle.

The bicycle, valued at $9,000, was reported stolen from the Clay Street Garage on Saturday, according to Napa Police. A photo of the bicycle was distributed throughout the police department and, on Sunday, an off-duty officer saw someone riding the stolen bicycle in the area of Lincoln Avenue and Main Street.

Officers contacted the cyclist, identified as Russell Wyant Jr., 19, at home on the 1500 block of Laurel Street, where he admitted to having the bicycle, police said.

Wyant was arrested and booked at the Napa County jail on suspicion of grand theft and possession of stolen property.
New principals have been named for Northwood Elementary School and Harvest Middle School in Napa.

Sarah Knox, former assistant principal at McPherson and Canyon Oaks elementary schools, has been named principal of Northwood Elementary School starting July 1.

She will succeed Dana Page, who earlier this spring moved to the Napa Valley Unified School District human resources office. Retiree Sharyn Lindsey will complete the school year as interim principal.

Knox started her career at NVUSD as an English teacher at Napa High School in 2001.

I am eager to work closely with parents and staff to support our students, Knox said.

Knox has an English degree from UC Davis and a masters degree in Education from Touro University. She also spent a year at the University of Granada, Spain.

She and her husband, McPherson Elementary School principal Troy Knox, live in Sonoma.

Monica Ready, current assistant principal at Napa High School, has been named principal of Harvest Middle School starting in late July.

She will succeed Carlos Flores, who resigned to take a position in Palm Springs in January. Retired Napa High principal Barb Franco will complete the school year as interim principal.

Ready has been an assistant principal at Napa High School since 2013. She started her career at NVUSD in 2004 as an English teacher at Napa High School.

I am excited to be a part of the Harvest Middle School community, Ready said.

Ready has an English degree from Pepperdine University and a masters degree in Educational Leadership from Touro University.

She and her husband, NVUSD academic specialist Chris Ready, live in Napa.
BRASILIA, Brazil

Brazil president says she wont quit after impeachment vote

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff says she wont step down despite the lower Chamber of Deputies voting in favor of impeaching her.

Speaking a day after suffering a major defeat in the lower chamber of Congress, Rousseff says she will continue fighting those trying to remove her from office.

In her words, I have the energy, strength and courage to confront this injustice.

The measure to impeach Rousseff now goes to the Senate. If the Senate takes it up, she will be suspended while a trial is conducted.

Rousseff is accused of using state bank money to plug holes in the federal budget. She argues that previous presidents did similar things and stresses that she has not been charged with a crime.

MOSCOW

Obama-Putin discuss need to implement Ukraine peace deal

Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Barack Obama have spoken by telephone, and the White House says they spent much of the call discussing Ukraine, with Obama urging Putin to abide by a 2015 agreement aimed at ending the conflict.

The Kremlin readout of Mondays call stresses Putins hope that Ukraine will finally begin to take concrete steps to implement the Minsk agreement.

The cease-fire has significantly reduced fighting between government troops and Russia-backed separatists, but the political settlement that was part of the agreement hasnt been implemented.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said: Russia needs to abide by their commitments and, by doing so, they can begin to relieve some of the isolation sustained as a result of interfering with their sovereign neighbors in Ukraine.

MAROUA, Cameroon

Boko Haram still a threat months after technical victory

Here on the front line against Boko Haram, no one boasts of having technically won the war.

More than four months after Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari (moo-HAH-mah-doo boo-HAH-ree) made such a claim, the extremists still crisscross international borders, avoiding direct confrontations with U.S.-backed African forces while refocusing on soft targets like marketplaces and mosques with little to no protection.

The group may be gone from major cities, but in the countryside it poses a constant threat.

All of you who are attempting to fight this terror, the United States stands with you, said Samantha Power, Americas U.N. ambassador, making a rare visit by any foreign dignitary, let alone a U.S. Cabinet member, to this parched, dusty landscape dotted by thatched-roofed huts and meandering goats and donkeys.

LONDON

William and Kate to host Kensington Palace dinner for Obamas

President Barack Obama has a royal dinner date.

Kensington Palace says Prince William, his wife Kate and his brother Prince Harry will hold a dinner for the president and first lady Michelle Obama during the U.S. leaders visit to Britain this week.

The royals office said that their Royal Highnesses are very much looking forward to welcoming President and Mrs. Obama to Kensington Palace.

William and Kate have met the Obamas several times before, with William visiting the president in the White House during a visit to the U.S. in 2014.

The Obamas are also scheduled to have lunch with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle Friday, the day after the queens 90th birthday. The president will also hold talks with Prime Minister David Cameron during his three-day visit.

BOGOTA, Colombia

Colombia resumes anti-coca spray dropped over cancer fears

Colombia will resume using weed killer to destroy illegal coca crops less than a year after suspending its use due to cancer concerns.

Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas said Monday that instead of dumping glyphosate from American-piloted crop dusters, the herbicide will now be delivered manually by eradication crews on the ground.

President Juan Manuel Santos banning of glyphosate last year was heralded by leftists whove compared the two-decade-old program to U.S. use of Agent Orange over Vietnam.

But conservative critics warn that without glyphosate the country will soon be awash in coca.

After six straight years of declining or steady production, the amount of land under coca cultivation in Colombia jumped 39 percent in 2014 and again in 2015 to 159,000 hectares (392,000 acres), according to the U.S. government.

MEXICO CITY

Mexican volcano spews ash on nearby towns

Mexicos Popocatepetl volcano has seen a dramatic overnight explosion that sent ash blowing over the major city of Puebla directly to the east, forcing closure of the citys airport.

Officials there are urging to people to wear masks to avoid inhaling the fine grit that has covered houses and cars. It can cause respiratory problems and damage car and plane engines.

Mexicos national disaster prevention agency reports that the eruption began around 1:30 PSTMonday, hurling glowing rock as far as a mile from the crater. Ash rose nearly two miles above the crater.

About 25 million people live within 62 miles from the crater of the 17,797-foot stratovolcano. Its been periodically erupting since 1994.
Across our community there are 31 Napa Valley public schools. A drive-by tour of these facilities inevitably makes a good impression. However, many of these schools are surprisingly old. A considerable amount of school construction took place in Napa over 50 years ago, in the 1950s. However, NVUSD has its share of really old buildings. For example, Salvador Elementary's oldest building was built in 1923, and Mount George Elementary in 1936.

Construction in the 1940s included Alta Heights Elementary, the Napa Valley Language Academy (formerly Westwood Elementary) and Carneros Elementary (now Stone Bridge Charter School).

Like a great many structures in Napa, 24 of these campuses sustained damage on that eventful early morning in August of 2014. Indeed, the fault that shook us all awake runs directly through the campuses of three of our elementary schools: Napa Junction, Stone Bridge and Snow. These schools must be relocated and rebuilt.

Eleven schools need complete seismic upgrades to meet new state earthquake safety standards. And still other schools need repairs to roofs, windows, plumbing, heating, lighting and electrical systems. Voting YES on H on this June's ballot will go a long way toward returning our schools to the safe places in which we expect our children to spend their days.

For our kids and our community please vote yes on this exceptionally important issue on June 7.

Harrell G. Miller

Napa
Flora Springs The Room will celebrate the relationship between art and nature throughout April both in celebration of Earth Day and as part of Arts Council Napa Valleys Arts in April. The celebration includes an artistic installation at The Room, Imagination of the Jungle, as well as events each Saturday.

Imagination of the Jungle is an installation inspired by Henri Rousseau and created by the Baker sisters of St. Helena. This embellishes the exterior of The Room, located at 677 S. St. Helena Highway. Its on display for the entire month, with the intention of heightening community awareness and appreciation of the jungle  a place that is rich and important to our survival and that of our planet. Throughout the month The Room will also feature Earth Day artwork from Nimbus Arts artists.

The Room will also hold special events each Saturday in April. Proceeds from the events will benefit the Cheetah Conservation Fund. Cheetahs are Africas most endangered cat, extinct in 20 countries with a population dwindling due to habitat loss and illegal wildlife trade.

For details call 967-8032 or email theroom@florasprings.com.
St. Helena Elementary Schools new playground could be finished as soon as July 1, with school trustees approving a $701,000 budget last Thursday.

The playground is being designed and built by Leathers and Associates, the same contractor that build the old wooden one that had to be demolished last year because it no longer met modern school safety standards or the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The playground was highly popular not just among elementary school students, but among the wider community, which donated $120,000 toward the new structure.

Trustees thanked the community for its support, noting that $151,000 of the budget was donated by the community, including $31,000 in district-held funds and dividends from PG&E stock that were earmarked for maintenance in 1991, when local volunteers built the original playground. The budget also includes $550,000 from Measure B and C bond funds.

The new projects costs rose sharply from a budget that started at $162,500 and increased to $425,000 when members of the community pressed for a larger, custom-built structure that would be comparable to the old one. Cost estimates escalated further due to rising labor costs and the need to dispose of arsenic and copper from the old structure.

Trustees praised the latest rendering of the new playground, although they asked that a few more swings be included in the final design.

This looks and feels like the one I played on, said Trustee Alex Shantz.
The Napa Valley Vintners announced the recipients of its 2016 Napa Valley Wine List Awards at Goosecross Cellars in Yountville on Tuesday. More than 85 restaurants, from All Seasons restaurant in Calistoga to newcomer Basalt in Napa, were recognized for their emphasis on serving local wines.

The NVV started its Wine List Awards program during the economic recession to emphasize the importance of eating and drinking locally sourced products. To be recognized, each wine list must feature 50 percent or 50 selections of Napa Valley wine.

When Chef Morimoto opened the Napa restaurant, he wanted an all-California wine list with a focus on Napa," said Eduardo Dingler, beverage director of Morimoto Restaurants. "It was easy to build this list as the wines of Napa Valley are so diverse. Chef Morimoto's philosophy is when you go to Bordeaux you don't drink Chilean wine; when people travel to Napa, they want to drink Napa Valley wine.

Napa Valley is home to many extraordinary restaurants, said Emma Swain, chairwoman of the NVVs board of directors and CEO of St. Supery Estate Vineyards & Winery. When they pour our high-quality local wines every day, it creates a true community partnership."

The list of Napa Valley Wine List Award recipients is online at napavintners.com/restaurant.
The NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg, will travel to the Republic of Turkey on Wednesday, 20 April and Thursday, 21 April 2016.

The Secretary General will meet with the President, Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdorgan, the Prime Minister, Mr. Ahmet Davutoglu, the Foreign Minister, Mr. Mevlut avusoglu and the Defence Minister, Mr. Ismet Yilmaz.

Media Advisory

Thursday 21 April

10:40 (local time) Joint press point by NATO Secretary General and the Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister  Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Still and video images of the event will be available on the NATO website.

Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress and @jensstoltenberg)

The programme of the visit is subject to change, please call the NATO Press office for more information  Tel: + 32 2 707 50 41
We are going to discuss NATOs presence in the Aegean Sea when I now meet with the Defence Ministers from the European Union. And NATO has deployed six ships to the Aegean Sea. They are doing reconnaissance, surveillance and providing real-time information to the Turkish coastguard, to the Greek coastguard and also the the EU border agency Frontex. And I think that the cooperation seen in the Aegean Sea between NATO and the EU is of great importance, partly because NATO provides practical support to the efforts of the local coastguards and of the EU to manage the situation. But also because NATO provides a platform for closer cooperation for Turkey, a non-EU member, to cooperate closer with the EU and that is important in managing the situation.

Then its too early to say how we are going to address also the challenges we see in other parts of the Mediterranean. We are now transforming our maritime operation Active Endeavour into a maritime security operation and that provides also the basis for a closer cooperation with the EU in the Mediterranean in general.

How we will do that and in what ways thats too early to say.

I will just add that Im looking forward to meet the Defence Ministers of the EU. And I think that the EU Summit or Council in June and the NATO Summit in July provides a very good platform for enhanced cooperation between the EU and NATO. And we will look into how we can expand that cooperation and I think we see different areas where there is great value of NATO and the EU working together. For instance Libya. NATO stands ready to provide support to the new government of national accord. I strongly welcome the strong will in the EU to support the new government and there is a need for making sure that what we do is complementary, that we add value and that we coordinate our efforts to support the new unity government or the government of national accord in Libya. And we are in direct contact with the new Libyan government, looking into how NATO can provide support if so requested by the new government.

Then, the Aegean Sea.

There I welcome the close cooperation between NATO and the European Union and we are seeing a significant reduction in the number of migrants and refugees coming to the Greek islands. I think that shows that international efforts have an impact and the aim is to cut the lines of illegal smuggling of people. And try to find solutions so we can have a much safer and much better and well-organised situation in the whole region and in the Aegean Sea.

Hybrid warfare is another area where there is a need for enhanced cooperation between the EU and NATO. This is about threats and challenges which is a mixture of military and non-military means, covert and overt operations, so there is an obvious need for coordination between NATO and the EU.

I will also update the EU ministers on our dialogue with Russia. And tomorrow we will have the first meeting of the NATO-Russia Council since 2014 and we will address the Ukraine, the crisis in and around Ukraine, military activity, transparency, risk reductions and Afghanistan. And I think that the incidents we have seen in the Baltic Sea over the last week with the unprofessional and unsafe behavior of Russian planes close to an American ship and also close to an American plane just underlines the importance of open military lines of communications, of predictability and risk reduction. And these are among the issues we will discuss Russia tomorrow at the NATO-Russia Council.

Q & A

QUESTION: Do you expect any concrete outcome from the NATO-Russia Council tomorrow?

SECRETARY GENERAL STOLTENBERG: It is very important that we have political dialogue. Especially when times are difficult as they are now. So when the tensions are high, I think the need for open chance, for political dialogue, for predictability, for transparency is even more important. So, the main purpose of the meeting of the NATO-Russia Council tomorrow is to exchange views, is to be transparent, is to contribute to predictability. And to discuss Ukraine, the implementation if the Minsk agreements, and also to address how we can enhance the mechanisms of risk reduction related to military activities as we have seen in the Baltic Sea with the dangerous incidents we have seen there in the last week.

QUESTION: Russia sees the modernization of NATO very differently. It sees it as a threat. Do you think that its something you will discuss tomorrow?

SECRETARY GENERAL STOLTENBERG: So, we will discuss military activity. And of course I expect the Russians to say and to present their view. And that is the reason why we meet them, because we are not afraid of dialogue. Actually, we think that dialogue is more important when times are difficult, when tensions are high. And since we face some really serious challenges, now I think it is especially important that we are able to meet the Russians and expect them to express their view. We will present our view. And l would like to underline that the fact that we are now convening a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council does not mean that we are back to business as normal. We decided back in 2014 to suspend practical cooperation, and we have also implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defence since the end of the Cold War, but we have decided to keep the chance for political dialogue open and the NATO-Russia Council is one way of making sure that we have political dialogue with Russia. And NATO does not seek a new Cold War. NATO does not want a new arms raise. And what NATO has done when it comes to reinforcement of our collective defense is defensive, it is proportionate and it is a direct response to what we have seen of Russian aggressive behavior in Ukraine.

QUESTION: You mentioned possible NATOs support for the new Libyan government. What would that mean in concrete terms?

SECRETARY GENERAL STOLTENBERG: We have a mandate from our Heads of State and Government to stand ready to provide support for the new Libyan government or the government of national accord. And what we are looking into especially is capacity building, defence institutional reform, because we have seen how important it is to have these institutions in place when we try to build a more stable Libya. But of course, this is something which will only be done after requests from the new government of national accord. And we are not planning for new combat operations in Libya, so this is about supporting the government if they so request.

QUESTION: What about more warships to help with the migrant crisis?

SECRETARY GENERAL STOLTENBERG: We have six ships there now, and we are constantly assessing the need for more ships. So far we have a sufficient number of ships, but of course there are rotations, and some ships are leaving, others are coming, we will discuss how to sustain this presence. And we will of course do that in very close cooperation with Turkey, with Greece, and with the EU. So, I welcome the contributions from different NATO Allied countries and they have provided different kinds of capabilities. And what the NATO ships are doing is reconnaissance, surveillance, collecting information and then sharing this information in real time with the local coastguards, and then we have seen many examples of how, for instance, the Turkish coastguard take action based upon the information they have received from NATO ships.

QUESTION: Could the Aegean mission link up with Sophia in terms of sharing information?

SECRETARY GENERAL STOLTENBERG: I will not speculate on that because now we are focused on the Aegean and I think we have proven how NATO and the EU can work closer together, and also how NATO can bring together a non-EU state Turkey in a closer cooperation with the EU and that is of the importance itself  create a platform for coordination and cooperation. Then we have the Active Endeavour mission which we are now transforming into a Maritime Security mission and we expect that to be done by the NATO Summit in July. And whether that can create a basis for a closer cooperation with Sophia, naval mission of the EU, I will not speculate on. I think we just sit down with the EU and discuss with them how we can work together and based on the Aegean whether we can do anything more in the Mediterranean more in general.
April 15, W. Concord, MA- Concord Conservatory of Music (Juanito with special guests Jose Moreno and Barbara Martinez)

April 21, Richmond, VA- The Tin Pan

April 22, Annapolis, MD- Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts

April 26, Los Angeles, CA- The Blue Whale

April 28, Topanga Canyon, CA- Corazon Performing Arts

April 29, Occidental, CA- Occidental Center for the Arts

April 30, Mountain View, CA- Tateuchi Hall- Community School of Music and the Arts

May 1, Santa Barbara, CA  Soho Restaurant & Music Club

May 5, Austin TX (SOLO SHOW)- Cactus Cafe

May 6, Austin TX (SOLO SHOW)- 816 Congress Av., 15th floor. Presented by Austin Classical Guitar

May 7, Austin TX-(SOLO SHOW) Esquina Tango (Cultural Society of Austin)

May 26, Minneapolis, MN- The Dakota Club

May 27, Madison, WI- First Unitarian Society, Atrium Auditorium

May 28, Chicago, IL  Gary and Laura Maurer Concert Hall- Old Town School of Folk Music

May 29, South Bend, IN- Merrimans' Playhouse

June 18, Milford, PA- Kindred Spirits Arts (Trio plus Guest Barbara Martinez)

June 19, Tolland, MA- Unifier Festival

"A rising star of the Spanish guitar form."Boston GlobeJuanito Pascual New Flamenco Trio will launch a tour of 17 U.S. cities that includes the East and West Coasts and points in between such as Austin, Minneapolis, Madison, and Chicago. The group creates a unique world music experience, fusing traditional Spanish flamenco with elements of jazz, pop, and rock music, performing with passion and virtuosity.L.A. guitarist Juanito Pascual has logged countless miles in a career that has taken him from the streets of Madrid to the hallowed halls of the New England Conservatory and on to concert stages around the world. Numerous appearances in film, television, and radio have further widened his listening audience. Performing with him at are Grammy-nominated Colombian percussionistand American bassist, also graduates of the New England Conservatory.Their distinct musical backgrounds and powerful personal chemistry creates an exhilarating sound that leaves audiences spellbound.Praised as a virtuoso guitarist and composer, the Minnesota native was called one of the hottest flamenco guitarists in recent years" by NPR and a rising star of the Spanish guitar form by The Boston Globe. As a youth he traveled to Madrid to study with flamenco masters. Today his music is an organic blend of traditional and contemporary flamenco with influences ranging fromand thetoand J.S. Bach.Pascuals most recent honor was recording five tracks of music for the new film Call Me Francesco: The Pope of the People. (Daniele Luchetti directed the movie, Rodrigo de la Serna plays Pope Francis, and Spanish pianist Arturo Cardelus composed the score.) Premiered at the Vatican in December, it was screened in Hollywood on February 21. The score was named one of the Best Scores of 2015 by Movie Music UK critic Jonathan Broxton who praised Pascuals guitar performances and evocative Latin spirit that recalls the best of Astor Piazzolla. TaoDue will distribute the film worldwide. A related upcoming four-part TV drama features even more Pascua guitar work. (The guitarist made his on-screen debut in 2009, performing in the 2009 film Pink Panther 2 which featured Steve Martin and Andy Garcia.)Pascual has toured widely since the 2003 release of his debut solo recording Cosas en Comun, becoming a respected voice in flamenco music. He has performed internationally at the Panama Jazz Festival, the Eurojazz Festival in Mexico City, the Halifax Jazz Festival in Nova Scotia and Spain's Festival de Jazz de Tortosa. In the States, he has played the Tanglewood Jazz Festival, New Yorks Blue Note Jazz Club, Boston's Jordan Hall and Regattabar. He holds a bachelor of music degree in contemporary improvisation from the New England Conservatory, where he directed the summer flamenco institute for five years. He released Language of the Heart in 2009 and a self-titled album in 2014. A fourth is in the works. He is the author of the 2011 method book entitled The Total Flamenco Guitarist, published by Alfred Press.
Syunik governor in Frances Vienne, sister city of Armenias Goris, discusses implemented projects, future cooperation

Climate protesters throw mashed potatoes at Monet painting in Germany museum

There is chance for peace in Ukraine, Macron says

US, Russia defense chiefs discuss Ukraine situation for 2nd time in last few days

Turkey plans to set up 2 more military bases in northern Syria

Germany wants to use Israel UAVs to protect its key infrastructures

UK defense secretary holds phone talk with Russia counterpart

US to attempt set Russia oil price cap above $60 per barrel?

Russia, Turkey defense ministers confer about Ukraine situation

Armenia official: Terms for buying, building houses for those displaced from Artsakh have improved

Saudi Arabia forum set to draw American business leaders despite existing tensions

Iran plans to increase natural gas exports to Turkey

Iran army ground forces holding exercise in West Azarbaijan Province

Sovereignty renunciation to be punished in Armenia with 12-15 years of imprisonment, as per justice ministry draft

2 pilots killed in Russia fighter jet crash

Russia, France defense ministers discuss Ukraine

Fighter jet crashes into house in Russias Irkutsk

150 residents of 3 Karabakh settlements handed over to Azerbaijan get compensation certificates

Rishi Sunak confirms UK premier bid

Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson hold talks

Biden slammed for 'scary' long pause during interview

Elite US troops conducting exercises on Ukraine border

Iran MP: Military exercises on Azerbaijan border are decisive response to Israel

Xi Jinping elected Communist Party of China Central Committee general secretary

Armenia envoy presents credentials to Bosnia and Herzegovina Presidency chair

Hungary to approve by years end Sweden, Finland petitions to join NATO

US researchers debunk main theory for origin of life

Iranian MP: Iran will conduct military exercises wherever it deems necessary

Finnish delegation to visit Ankara to discuss NATO membership

Social media giants are likely to oppose Turkey's new law

Pastor steals $900,000 to buy stocks and car in U.S.

Lithuanian President Nauseda is named most popular politician in country

Charles III will embark on longest tour of world in history of royal family

Deputy Director of Institute of Oriental Studies of RAS: Baku's goal is that Karabakh has no Armenian population

Hurricane Roslyn in Pacific Ocean intensifies to third category

Italy's new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, begins forming government

U.S. Treasury Department records budget deficit of over $429 billion in September

Why does Baku need aggravation on border with Armenia? Skakov assesses likelihood of new aggression

Iranian Foreign Minister: I had important meeting with Pashinyan in Armenia

Johnson spotted in economy class on flight from Dominican Republic to Britain

Armenian PM and European Parliament Resident Rapporteur for Armenia discuss Karabakh situation

Authorities in Kherson urge residents to immediately leave city

Russian expert: Baku's attempts to open corridor by force will cause negative response not only from IRI or Russian

Telegraph: Britain to send about 60 old tanks to NATO base in Germany for exercises

Artak Beglaryan: You will see me in new position

Netanyahu: Iran nuclear deal could bring Russia 'hundreds of billions'

Russia and Turkey begin to develop gas hub project

PM Pashinyan discusses agenda of bilateral relations with Iranian FM

Anna Hakobyan meets Armenians in Paris

Sargsyan: Recognition of Artsakh people's right for self-determination must be reflected in legal documents

Italy's first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, sworn in

Private jet goes missing off coast of Costa Rica

Times of India: India tests nuclear-capable Agni Prime missile

Spiegel: German Foreign Minister and Defense Minister ask to allocate 2.2 billion for military aid to Kiev

Deputy PM of Armenia and Head of Sharjah Heritage Institute discuss strengthening of Armenian-Emirati relations

Biden allows participation in U.S. presidential election in 2024

Secretary of Security Council of Armenia and representatives of AIISA discuss security issues

Kakhovka reservoir increases water discharges in case of possible destruction of HPP

Pashinian's spouse: Yesterday at Elysee Palace I was received by dear Brigitte Macron

At least 15 people killed in bus-truck collision in India

Explosion at Uzbek Defense Ministry depot injures 16 people

Armenian NA Speaker receives Iranian FM: Tehran opposes obstacles on border with friendly Armenia

President Harutyunyan receives group of members of Union of Artsakh Reserve Officers NGO

Newspaper: Armenia restores diplomatic ties with Hungary?

China hit by 5.5 magnitude earthquake

Armenian Defense Ministry denies Azerbaijani report on shelling, calling it disinformation

Blinken: Moscow is not interested in stopping aggression against Ukraine

Japan and U.S. will hold joint military exercises

France withdraws from Energy Charter Treaty

CNN: White House is in talks with Elon Musk to create satellite Internet service Starlink in Iran

Baku outraged by Iran's statements and frightened by IRGC military exercises

Who are main beneficiaries of 'Zangezur' corridor?: Another anonymous article by 'Haykakan Zhamanak' newspaper

Ankara decides to stand up for Riyadh amid deteriorating relations between Saudi Arabia and U.S.

French Foreign Minister considers it vital to keep lines of communication with Russia open

Pentagon refuses to give details of conversation between Austin and Shoigu

Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin: Head of Caucasus Muslims Department again made slanderous and false statements

Erdogan denies using chemical weapons against Kurds and threatens those who dare to talk about it

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Armenia Security Council chief briefs European Parliament rapporteur on recent Azerbaijan military aggression
Naira Karapetyan, a member of the National Assembly (NA) of Armenia Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), on Tuesday delivered an address during the PACE spring session.

In her remarks, she condemned Azerbaijans most recent aggression against Armenian civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), and presented facts attesting to Azerbaijans torturing of Armenian soldiers and its war crimes.

Aside from the acts of use force contrary to the UN Charter, constituting act of Aggression, the Azerbaijani army has also carried out heavy artillery bombing on civilians and civilian objects, including using cluster ammunition and other non-discriminatory weapons, Karapetyan stated. 12-year-old child was killed and two other schoolchildren were wounded heavily in the shelling by MM-21 Grad MLRS, launched by Azerbaijani forces. Two other children, 12-year-old Vardan Andreasyan and 11-year-old Gevorg Grigoryan, were wounded heavily when a school was bombarded by Azerbaijan.

And this is not the only act of violence against civilian population during the four-day war, as it is called in Karabakh. After temporal overturn of Talish village by Azerbaijani armed forces, elderly couple was shot at home with their ears being cut off. Azerbaijani soldiers also executed 92-year-old old woman. All the killed persons were aged and reasonably infirm.

Moreover, the servicemen of Nagorno-Karabakh Defence Army, Kyaram Sloyan, Hayk Toroyan, Hrant Gharibyan were beheaded by Azerbaijani troops. Numerous photos in social network is a real evidence of cruel treatment of Azerbaijani soldiers posing with the head of Kyaram Sloyan as a trophy. Later the head was transferred to local Azerbaijani population demonstrating it as an Armenian symbol encouraging hatred and aggression towards Armenians. No action by official Baku has followed to punish the guilty. And by doing so Azerbaijan once more violets numerous international treaties.

Another episode includes torture of Prisoners of War and mutilation of bodies of 18 dead Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army soldiers, handed over to Nagorno-Karabakh authorities in presence of the representatives of the ICRC a week after the hostilities.

Yes, dear colleagues, Azerbaijan calls himself a Land of fire, and it is pure true. This is not a fire of life, of peace and democracy, but the fire of war, fire of horror, fire of death.

I strongly blame Azerbaijans escalation of hostilities against Nagorno-Karabakh. The Azerbaijani forces and armed militants have committed multiple terrorist acts against the Nagorno-Karabakh troops and the civilian population, which are defined as war crimes and crimes against humanity under the international law.

[Azerbaijan] President [Ilham] Aliyev continues defying international calls to reach a negotiated settlement that will ensure a lasting peace in the region.

The true victims of this policy are the people of Artsakh who simply want to live free, in peaceful environment, in a country where human rights and democracy are real values, and exercise their right to live, liberty and pursue to happiness!

This is not a conflict for territory, but a cardinal principle of international law of nations right to self-determination.
STRASBOURG.  Armenian delegate at PACE Samvel Farmanyan spoke about a large-scale aggression against the people of Nagorno-Karabakh unleashed by Azerbaijan during the spring session in Strasbourg.

The full text of his speech is as follows:

Terror attacks in Brussels and recent escalation over Nagorno-Karabakh conflict sent a strong and an unequivocal wake up call to all of us! People are in danger and their lives are threatened in a most barbaric way refreshing our memories of the past. We should prove that political institutions; parliaments are yet powerful enough to address these increasingly unprecedented challenges we face today. We should prove there is no compromise when it comes to the most fundamental value  the right of a human being to life.

You know well, colleagues, that Azerbaijani armed forces unleashed a large-scale aggression against the people of Nagorno-Karabakh on the entire line of contact recently and a new term has been coined already  a four-day war. Azerbaijani armed forces used deadly offensive weaponry obtained in the last 20 years in a gross breach of all international norms.

Use of force by Azerbaijan goes contrary to the key documents of international law, UN Charter, Helsinki Final Act and others. The Azerbaijani attack amounts to an act of Aggression in line with international law. Azerbaijani army targeted civilian infrastructures and peaceful population. 12-year-old Vaghinak Grigoryan was killed and two other children were wounded heavily at the schoolyard bombarded by Azeri forces. And this is not the only act of violence against civilian population. Valera and Razmela Khalapyans, an elderly couple, were shot in their home with their ears being cut off by Azerbaijani military. They also executed a 92-year-old Marousya Khalapyan and tortured 104-years old Hayka grandmother, who by the way is 6 years older than Azerbaijan itself as a country. All the killed and tortured persons were elderly and reasonably infirm.

Moreover, the servicemen of Nagorno-Karabakh Defence Army, Kyaram Sloyan, Hayk Toroyan, Hrant Gharibyan were beheaded by Azerbaijani troops. Yes, beheaded n an ISIS-style way. Numerous photos in social network are a real evidence of cruel treatment of Azerbaijani soldiers posing with the head of Kyaram Sloyan as a trophy. Later the head was transferred to local Azerbaijani population demonstrating it as a trophy encouraging hatred and aggression towards Armenians. No action by official Baku has followed to punish the guilty. By doing so Azerbaijan once more violated numerous international treaties, including the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, European Convention on Human rights, Geneva Conventions on protection of victims of war and many others. Another episode includes torture of Prisoners of War and mutilation of bodies of 18 dead Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army soldiers, handed over to Nagorno-Karabakh authorities in presence of the representatives of the IRC a week after the hostilities.

The Azerbaijani forces and armed militants have committed multiple terrorist acts against the Nagorno-Karabakh troops and the civilian population, which are defined as war crimes and crimes against humanity under the international law. Both the Azerbaijani authorities and persons who have committed military crimes must be held accountable for the breaches of the international law and the war crimes.

I call upon the Parliamentary Assembly to explicitly condemn the brutalities committed by Azerbaijani armed forces and to urge the Government of Azerbaijan to ensure proper investigation of crimes committed against Nagorno-Karabakh civilians and hors de combat. I also call the international community to take appropriate measures to prevent further grave breaches of international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international law in general.
Over the course of a millennium, spanning from the seventh century BC to the fourth century AD, would-be initiates of the Mystery Cult of the Megaloi Theoi, the Great Gods, braved a difficult pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace, a tiny island that rises up out of the Northern Aegean Sea like a beacon.

From out at sea, the pilgrims could glimpse the great buildings clustered in the valley and ridges that defined the sanctuary, but once they landed on the rugged islands northern shore, its most sacred buildings were shielded from sight.

Up through the ancient city and out its southern gate, the devout would then descend along the Sacred Way to the Propylon of Ptolemy IIthe monumental entryway perched on the sanctuarys highest pointclimbing the steps to the imposing marble building that was the portal to the mysteries within. When night fell, they would enter a narrow passage into the sanctuary, their path illuminated by the flicker of lamps and torches, to undergo closely guarded rites that would initiate them into an enviable circle of privilege and protection.

Very little was ever written about the cultone of its inviolable rules was a vow of secrecy about its ritesand the mystery that surrounds it has yet to be fully solved, although excavation and study has been performed at the site since the fifteenth century.

Considered one of the worlds foremost experts on the site, Emory art historian and archaeologist Bonna Wescoat has spent her career discovering and deciphering the fragments of what, she says, was once one of the most unique architectural collections of the Hellenistic Mediterranean in one concentrated place.

In 2015, Wescoat and her team received three grantsfrom the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Geographic Society, and the Partner University Fundsupporting work that will expand electronic access to the latest research and information on the sanctuary and the cult, further explore the unique range of architectural styles found in the sanctuary, and illuminate the area of the sanctuary that yielded the most celebrated artifact ever found at the sitethe Winged Victory of Samothrace, or the Nike.

Discovered by a French expedition to the site in 1863, it was the Nikeor at least, the story of the discovery of her right handthat first ignited Wescoats enthusiasm. As an undergraduate student at Smith College, she heard Phyllis Williams Lehmann, a renowned American archaeologist, lecture on the electrifying discovery of the missing hand in 1950.

Captivated by the story, Wescoat mustered the courage to ask the formidable Lehmann for a chance to work on an expedition to the island, but the opportunity was then open only to graduate students. It wasnt until the following year, in 1977, that Wescoat would get her chance to visit the site after finishing a year at the University of Londons Institute of Archaeology on a Marshall Scholarship.

Id never been to Greece; Id never done anything like this. Fortunately, it was not an excavating year, and I was allowed to go and help for a month, Wescoat says.

Although exciting, that first journey to the island was anything but smooth. When Wescoat arrived in the Greek port town of Alexandropoulos, there was no place for her to stay overnight; the town was filled with military troops due to the ongoing dispute with Turkey over the sovereignty of the island of Cyprus. A kind hotel owner allowed her to sleep in his office, but she was plagued by mosquitos in the swampy climate and was unable to sleep. Finally able to drift off in the small hours of the morning, she nearly overslept and had to run to catch the morning boat to Samothrace. Once aboard, she climbed into a lifeboat and fell asleep on the then-three-hour trip to the island.

Upon awakening, she saw dolphins swimming alongside the boat, leaping out of the water, and then the islandonly fifteen miles long, but more than a mile highappeared like a huge fulcrum rising out of the sea.

The island has a magical quality, says Wescoat, the memory so powerful that tears come to her eyes even decades later. This is why pilgrimage is so fascinating; it is one of the most extraordinary human experiences to travel to significant places vested in meaning.

She spent three summers at the site as an archaeological assistant before joining Emorys faculty as an assistant professor of Greek art and archaeology in 1982. From 1983 until 1988, she performed archaeological field research on the monuments of the western hill, and she has spent nearly every summer since 1997 on the island.

Since 2008, Wescoat has led an interdisciplinary team of Emory experts to build on the products of centuries of scrutinyand her own decades of workto create a better understanding of the ancient site and the rituals performed there.Wescoat says it was Emorys support, through a Collaborative Research in the Humanities grant that year from the Office of the Provost that allowed her to pull together the team from departments across campus.

That was the turning point because it gave us a leg up, at an early moment in digital technology, when we could become leaders in that field, Wescoat says. We now have a fabulous team of senior scholars and up-and-coming dynamic young professionals who bring new ideas. And, of course, the lifeblood of the project is the students; it is pure pleasure to watch their understanding and appreciation transform over the course of the season. It is exciting to work with all of the intellectual energy of multiple fields and multiple generations; that makes things come alive.

In 2012, Wescoat was named director of excavations at Samothrace, succeeding James R. McCredie, professor emeritus at New York Universitys Institute of Fine Arts, who had held the title since 1962.

In that fifty years of work, Jim McCredie expanded our understanding of the site and doubled the number of buildings we knew of. Our primary purpose now is to understand what we have, Wescoat says. We are [digitally] reconstructing buildings to understand the geology and the chronology of the development, and to figure out what happened here through archaeological means rather than through what ancient authors have said, or not said, about the site.

Wescoat received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2014 to support completion of a book, The Island of Great Gods: Samothrace and Its Sanctuary, which will focus on the dynamic interaction of place and cult, and situating it within the broader context of religious experience, political dynamics, architectural developments, and social history of the eastern Mediterranean, from the first evidence of cult activity in the seventh century BC through the Roman period.

Reconstructing the Sanctuary

In the first century AD, the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily wrote in the Library of History of the powerful draw of the cult and the sanctuary where its closely guarded rites were performed.

Fame has traveled wide of how these gods appear to mankind and bring unexpected aid to those initiates of theirs who call upon them in the midst of perils. The claim is also made that men who have taken part in the mysteries become more pious and more just and better in every respect than they were before.

Wescoat says the work of digitally resurrecting the archaeological remains of the sanctuary may not reveal the full mysteries of the cult, but may lead to deeper understanding of how the configuration of sacred buildings, architecture, and decoration helped consecrate initiates experiences.

The grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, called From the Vantage of the Victory, will support the deep investigation of the region of the sanctuary where the Winged Victory originally stood. This area, which included the theater and stoaa covered walkway used for gatheringsas well as other major votive monuments, was the celebratory heart of the sanctuary.

We are drilling into its archaeological and environmental configuration and focusing on how its particular constellation of monuments and buildings came into being, Wescoat explains. Through this research, we hope to resolve some puzzles, including the design of the precinct that originally enshrined the Winged Victory.

The location of the Victory is puzzling to Wescoat and other archaeologists because of its positioning in the sanctuary, in a small niche carved out of the hillside at the peak of the theater at the sanctuarys southernmost point. It is unclear, both from the archaeological remains at the site and the condition of the sculpture, whether it was openly displayed or sheltered within its own enclosure.

The National Geographic Society (NGS) grant emerged after National Geographic magazine approached Wescoat about a major article and exhibition on ancient Greek religion, planned for June 2016. The article will focus on mystery cults and the quest for a better life, in this world and hereafter, so the Sanctuary of the Great Gods is an ideal subject.

Apparently the magazine could not achieve the photographic imagery they wanted, so they asked if they could use our model, Wescoat says.

Created in 2011, the 3-D, animated model of the sanctuary highlights the path of the pilgrim based on the digital reconstructions of the sites architectural features, but more recent discoveries and advances in technology have rendered the model out of date. The NGS grant is allowing the team to expand and update the animations with a more naturalistic landscape around the architectural features, including vegetation and geographic features, and adding hardscaping such as distinguishing walls, pathways, roads, and other details that defined the site.

The new animation also will take viewers inside several of the buildings in the sanctuary that are unique to the site to capture the sense of space and ornamentation. We are pretty secure in knowing what these buildings looked like and when they were built. What is harder to understand is their function, Wescoat says.

Using what she calls a phenomenological approach, the team is following the path of initiates would have taken through the site to better understand the chronology of its development. These are very powerful components of place and pathway, Wescoat says. We are recreating the momentum that built as initiates entered the sanctuary and the sense of going into the Earth that they likely felt as they descended the hill into the main area. We are using the power of the place to explain certain aspects of the cult.

Rock Stars

Interested in how the unusual topography of the site contributed to the experience of initiates, Wescoat enlisted Michael Page, an expert in geospatial sciences and technology, geographer, and cartographer who holds a dual appointment in Emorys Department of Environmental Sciences and the Center for Digital Scholarship at the Woodruff Library.

Beginning in 2009, Page began a highly detailed topographic survey of the sanctuary and its surroundings to compare to older surveys performed by American, French, and Czech teams, the oldest dating back to 1867. Using robotic mounts, the team also has taken geo-referenced photographic surveys at Samothrace to inform the topographic survey, add to the historical record, and create web content for education. Last summer, Page took a drone to the site to perform flyover photography of the site.

Just the sanctuary encompasses a valley incised into an alluvial fan and cut through by three ravines. It makes for a really unique landscape with a lot of complexities, says Page, who along with the team has used detailed mapping to create the CAD models that are the basis for the 3-D animations. Pages work is an essential part of the reconstruction efforts because the island is geologically volatile and subject to earthquakes, landslides, and flooding that have altered the landscape over the centuries.

That is where geomorphology comes in, to examine what physical processes have been happening over time to change the landscape, Page says. We can see how it exists now and create a restored version of how it may have looked when it was in use.

Emory geologist William Size has identified a wide variety of rock types used in the sanctuary, and has worked with the archaeological team to create color-coded plans identifying the types of stone used in the foundation of nearly every building in the sanctuary.

It was amazing to me that they would use all of these types of rocks, but then I realized they used each type for specific purposes. Some were structurally strong rocks that could hold a lot of weight; while others were more ornamental and could be carved, or had color elements; and still others, used for pavement, had to be non-slip, Size says. It seems the ancient Greeks knew a lot about rocks and were quite smart about how they used them.

On his most recent visit to the island, Size was able to collect samples of rocks from the sanctuary to bring back to Emory for testing. Aside from the marbles used in the sanctuary, which were shipped from nearby islands and the mainland, all the rocks used on the site are native to the island. Size has identified four scattered quarries on the island where stone may have been extracted.

Step by Step

Using data collected at the site, Vicki Hertzberg, associate professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, has worked on the metrologythe study of measurements of the site. Because units of measure were not standardized before the Roman Empire, There is controversy within the Greek archaeological community as to what the standard foot unit of measurement is, so the team thought Samothrace would be an excellent site to test the hypothesis, Hertzberg says.

By examining measurements collected on the sanctuary buildings, their approximate construction dates, and the origin of the materials used, Hertzberg is analyzing both the macro scale measurements of the siteincluding building footprints and the distance along walls and between columnsand micro scale measurementssuch as the size of the notches on columns and the distinguishing characteristics of individual building stonesto try to determine how a standard unit of measure was defined in antiquity.

The team hopes the analysis of the data from Samothrace will help determine whether foot-unit measurements were set by the masons at the quarries the stones were sourced from, or if, as some theorize, there were common standards of measure.

Spreading the Word

Another focus of the project is to provide wider access to the site for scholars and the public. In addition to a comprehensive website on the teams work (www.samothrace.emory.edu), Elizabeth Hornor, the Marguerite Colville Ingram Director of Education at Emorys Michael C. Carlos Museum, has helped develop the pilot program for communicating and contextualizing this work through a virtual exhibition and blog.

The goal is really to bring this magnificent place alive on a range of levels, Wescoat says, to understand what happened on this sacred island and why it was important then and is important now.
Someday, if women toast the discovery of male oral contraceptives, they may want to lift a glass to Emory biology professor Steven L'Hernault and his worms.

L'Hernault, chair of Emory College's Department of Biology, researched sperm proteins (not male hormones) in nematode worms. He and fellow researchers were able to establish a connection between fertilization in mammals, including humans, and nematodes. It was a highly unexpected outcome, given the two animal groups last shared a common ancestor about a billion years ago.

The conclusion, which some think could eventually lead to the equivalent of "the pill" for men, provides new insights on the basic mechanics of sperm and egg fertilization. It was recently reported in the journal Current Biology.

"At the end of the day, fertilization in humans seems to share some fundamental features with fertilization in worms," L'Hernault says. "Specifically, a similar protein is found on the sperm surface in humans and worms and, if a drug could be discovered that interfered with its function, we might be able to prevent sperm from fertilizing the egg.

"The worm may offer an inexpensive way to find such a drug," he adds. "Women have borne more than their fair share in that category of contraception, so the idea is to look at what might be possible for men."

Understanding "keys" for fertilization

In mammals, such as mice and humans, this protein is called Izumo, named for a shrine in Japan where newly married couples visit seeking luck in having children.

The Izumo equivalent in worms, named SPE-45, allow s the sperm to be recognized by the egg, so that fertilization can occur. Without it, the sperm can move and do other processes normally, but they cannot fertilize the egg.

Worms with a mutation affecting SPE-45 are sterile. If you do "gene therapy" by expressing the worm SPE-45 protein in mutant worms, fertility is restored.

The challenge was to show that mammalian Izumo was functionally similar to SPE-45. L'Hernault says that he and his team of researchers worked for seven years, focusing on whether there was something specific that connected the two that allowed for fertilization.

Both SPE-45 and Izumo proteins have an Ig region that probably allows the sperm to adhere to the egg. Ig regions are widely found in many proteins of all animals, where they provide "stickiness" to proteins.

So, L'Hernault and his team took the Ig region from the mouse Izumo protein and used it to replace the Ig region in the worm SPE-45 protein, making a "hybrid" protein.

Surprisingly, this "hybrid" protein can be expressed in a worm SPE-45 mutant and it will partially restore fertility to the worm SPE-45 mutant.

In contrast, if the Ig domain from a worm skin protein is used to replace the Ig domain of the worm SPE-45 protein, this "hybrid" does not restore fertility.

In other words, not any Ig domain, with its associated "stickiness," will allow SPE-45 to fertilize an egg. It must be either the natural worm SPE-45 Ig domain or the Ig domain from a similar mammalian gene.

"One useful way to think about Ig domains is that they are all keys and, like real keys that look similar, some specifically open your house, while others only open your car," L'Hernault says. His research shows that the mouse Izumo and worm SPE-45 Ig domains are near-identical "keys."

All animals produce sperm that stick to and fertilize eggs from that species, but, generally, sperm from one animal cannot fertilize eggs from another species.

That means L'Hernault's work extends well beyond any potential connection to birth control and could provide more understanding on the basic underpinnings of fertility.

"Knowing how sperm stick to and fertilize eggs will provide key insights into what has changed and what has remained similar as animals have evolved," L'Hernault says.

In addition to L'Hernault, the team and co-authors of the paper came from his lab and include Hitoshi Nishimura, Tatsuya Tajima, Heather Skye Comstra and Elizabeth J. Gleason.
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BENGALURU: In order to break the traditional cable internet system and provide faster connectivity, Google plans a grand project to beam wireless internet services into homes across US, reports, Re/code.

This new tech will create a break-through in technology if Google outlines the process carefully. A complete wireless approach to internet connectivity will also create ripples in the broadband industry as it will have the capability to deal with last mile problem which is basically solved by arranging cable network to every location. The company also desires to shift its Fibernet innovation to the remotest of location so that a large number of homes could be associated with Internet across the globe.

Google Fiber's wired service was pitched in 2011, which gradually covered only a handful of regions in the United States. This wireless service guarantees of consistency, reliability, a sensible value point and high speed. Google Fibernet turns out to be a cutting-edge solution for the existing ISP organizations in the business sector and constrained organizations like Comcast and Time Warner Cable to improvise their service for clients to get better results.

However, senior vice president, Access and energy at Google, Craig Barratt did not comment anymore on the project, with the details like research costs and launch date unknown too. On the other hand, Facebooks finished developing its first full scale solar power fueled drone, Aquila where its main aim is to provide internet connectivity to the inaccessible areas across the world.

Read Also: Chinese Scientists Successfully Develop Embryos In Space

NASA Asks Students To Help 3D Print Expandable Habitats
WASHINGTON: To celebrate the arrival of the first expandable habitat to the International Space Station (ISS) and the launch of the first commercial 3D printer to space, NASA and non-profit ASME Foundation have launched a new "Future Engineers" challenge.

The "Think Outside the Box" challenge asks students to design an object for astronauts that can be printed within the bounds of the newest 3D printer (10 cm x 10 cm x 14 cm) on the space station but can be assembled or expanded to become larger than that box.

In space exploration, scientists and engineers often strive to make more from less.

Smaller rocket payloads are needed to save cargo space and fuel, while sustainable technologies are needed to reduce, reuse, and recycle what is brought to space.

"NASA's 'Advanced Exploration Systems Division' pioneers new approaches for rapidly developing prototype systems, demonstrating key capabilities, and validating operational concepts for future human missions beyond low-Earth orbit," the US space agency said in statement on Monday.

Two demonstrations of such pioneering space technologies include the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) and Made In Space's Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF).

BEAM, which has already been installed on the ISS, is a module made up of layers of fabric that will be expanding after it is installed.

It is designed to test and validate expandable habitat technology, paving the way for future habitats on deep space missions.

Made In Space's AMF was launched to the station on Orbital ATK's OA-6 spacecraft.

AMF is a permanent, commercial manufacturing facility, offering entities conducting research on the space station the opportunity to purchase necessary hardware in space instead of launching it.

Like its predecessor, the AMF 3D printer will also provide research that advances the long-term goal of developing off-planet manufacturing capabilities for destinations like the moon or Mars.

The "Think Outside the Box" challenge offers exciting prizes.

The junior and teenage winners will receive a trip to Las Vegas for a VIP tour of Bigelow Aerospace and the finalists will win an expedition-worthy inflatable tent from Heimplanet.

The challenge will remain open through the summer and students must submit their expandable designs by August 1.

Read Also: 'Param Kanchenjunga' Fastest Supercomputer Among Nits

Jio Consortium Announces 8,100-Km, Multi-Nation Cable System
Paleontologists find first fossil monkey in North America  but how did it get here?

Seven tiny teeth tell the story of an ancient monkey that made a 100-mile ocean crossing between North and South America into modern-day Panama  the first fossil evidence for the existence of monkeys in North America.

The find provides the oldest fossil evidence for the interchange of mammals between South and North America and challenges long-held views of South America as an island continent that evolved in isolation before the Isthmus of Panama was formed and animals began crossing between the continents about 3.5 million years ago, said Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the University of Florida campus. Study findings are detailed online today in the journal Nature.

Scientists uncovered the teeth belonging to the 21-million-year-old forest-dwelling primate during recent excavations related to the expansion of the Panama Canal. The new genus and species, dubbed Panamacebus transitus, received its name from the Latin word transit, meaning crossing.

It is somewhat of a mystery how P. transitus traveled across the sea dividing North and South America during the early Miocene. It may have swum across, but this would have required covering a distance of more than 100 miles, a difficult feat for even the most talented long-distance swimmers. Its more likely P. transitus unintentionally rafted across on mats of vegetation, much like their ancestors who probably made their way from Africa to the New World in a similar fashion, Bloch said.

The unearthing of P. transitus  which probably looked a lot like a capuchin or organ grinder monkey  adds a new chapter to the utterly bizarre history of New World monkeys, Bloch said.

Somehow they made a transoceanic journey from Africa, then they dispersed throughout South America, Bloch said. Now we see that they, as far as we know, are the only mammal that successfully crossed the early Miocene Central American Seaway into present day Panama. So how were monkeys able to do this? Hopefully future fossil discoveries will help us better understand this extraordinary history.

The ocean-faring monkey suggests the modern diversification of New World monkeys happened in the ancient tropics. The surprising discovery of the first fossil monkey from North America extends the record for the beginning of the modern diversification of New World monkeys by more than 5 million years, Bloch said.

Uncovering a monkey this old in Central America, at the southern-most point of the North American landmass, is similar in some ways to finding Homo erectus, an extinct human ancestor known only from Africa and Asia, in Australia, Bloch said

It also provides fossil evidence for a pattern previously documented by molecular scientists who have suggested for some time that a variety of animals, including amphibians, reptiles, freshwater fishes and insects made ocean crossings between North and South America during the early Miocene.

New World monkeys today are restricted to tropical forests from Brazil to southern Mexico, but during the early Miocene they were found throughout South America, including some of the continents highest latitudes. The new primate raises the question of why these monkeys are not found farther north once they crossed the seaway into Panama, said study co-author Aaron Wood, who discovered the first teeth belonging to P. transitus as a Florida Museum postdoctoral researcher in 2012.

While the fossil mammals found with P. transitus include horses, camels and squirrels that look like what paleontologists have found in the early Miocene of Mexico, Texas and Florida, the new monkey was limited to the southernmost point of the continent, said Wood, now a paleontologist with Iowa State University. The ancient South American-derived forests found in Panama were absent in northern Central America at the time, preventing monkeys from moving north, even though climate and geographic barriers like oceans did not wholly restrict their northward movements.

Bloch said maybe acorns in the northern forests just werent particularly tasty to a South American monkey used to eating tropical fruit.

But the same dense jungles that provide monkeys with the fruits and habitats they enjoy today also make it difficult to find fossils in the tropics, Bloch said.

We hope to find more monkey fossils, but time is definitely a factor, Bloch said. Were fighting against the forest that wants to grow over the rocks again. The expansion of the Panama Canal provides a once-in-a-century opportunity for these kinds of exciting discoveries. But we cant assume well always be able access these rock exposures.

Micro-CT scans of the fossil specimens are available for viewing in 3-D or for 3-D printing at the following website: http://morphosource.org/index.php

Study co-authors include Douglas Jones, Nathan Jud, Bruce MacFadden, Aldo Rincon and Emily Woodruff with the Florida Museum; David Foster with UF's Department Geological Sciences; Arianna Harrington, Duke University; Carlos Jaramillo, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama; Camilo Montes, Universidad de los Andes in Colombia; Gary Morgan, the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science; Aaron R. Wood, Iowa State University, Ames.
UF, Disney team up to protect butterflies, sea turtles

When your lifes work is protecting endangered species, progress is often marked in incremental victories. But the efforts of University of Florida researchers are taking a major leap forward through a Disney Conservation Fund initiative that aims to save threatened species from extinction.

Partners in the 10-year initiative announced today include the Jane Goodall Institute, the National Park Foundation, the National Wildlife Federation and The Nature Conservancy. UF  the only university in the network  will focus on sea turtles and butterflies.

The Reverse the Decline, Increase the Time initiative celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Disney Conservation Fund, which has contributed $40 million to projects in 115 countries since its creation. The 10-year time frame opens the door to projects with a lasting impact, said Alan Bolten, associate director of UFs Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research. With Disneys support, Bolten and the centers director, Karen Bjorndal, have mapped out a strategy to help sea turtles on both sides of the Atlantic.

It's a game changer, Bolten said. A lot of agencies are interested in short-term results. Disney really does understand the long-term time horizon for these major conservation research initiatives.

The turtle teams work focuses on five species of endangered and threatened sea turtles in Florida, working to understand and reduce threats from commercial fishing, habitat loss and climate change. Theyll gather data to help monitor populations, work to increase public awareness and partner with groups around the state to restore marine habitat and beach nesting areas. Because Florida turtles can travel thousands of miles through the ocean, the effort extends from the Azores to the Bahamas, Bjorndal said.

UFs butterfly project, led by Jaret Daniels of UFs McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, is similarly far-reaching. Along with governmental and nonprofit partners in Florida and California, Daniels is working to identify the most threatened species in both states, developing a plan for habitat restoration, captive breeding and reintroduction.

Disneys Animals, Science and Environment team will work with UF to help protect the species and their habitats, many of which are near Disney parks. Other teams will work to protect elephants, coral reefs, monkeys, great apes, sharks and rays, cranes, rhinos and tigers, while a second component of the initiative aims to increase the time kids spend in nature.

Wildlife and wild places have always been an inspiration to Disney, and we take pride in instilling that same inspiration in kids and families, said Beth Stevens, senior vice president for corporate citizenship for The Walt Disney Company. We believe that conservation and caring for the planet are more than just good ideasthey are core to who we are as a company. With the Disney Conservation Funds new initiative, it is our hope that our actions will help protect some of natures most precious habitats and ensure the health of our planet for generations to come.
Pakistan on Tuesday handed over the body of Kirpal Singh, an Indian prisoner who died in suspicious circumstances in a Lahore jail, to Indian authorities, officials said. The Border Security Force (BSF) took charge of the body at the Attari land border here, the officials said. --Indo-Asian News Service js/mr/sar ( 62 Words) 2016-04-19-14:52:05 (IANS)
Pakistani authorities handed over the body to Border Security Force (BSF) officials at the Attari-Wagah land border check post after completing necessary formalities.

Close relatives and residents of Kirpal Singh's village were present at Attari, 30 km from here, when the body was brought back to India.

Kirpal Singh, a former serviceman, had been lodged in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat prison since 1992. He died on April 11.

Pakistani authorities had labelled him a spy and got him convicted for terror attacks inside Pakistan.

While Pakistan attributed his death to heart attack, his family has alleged he was murdered in prison. Kirpal Singh, the family has maintained, had inadvertently crossed into Pakistan and was arrested and charged with spying by Pakistan authorities.

--Indo-Asian News Service js/rn/vt

( 163 Words)

2016-04-19-15:34:07 (IANS)
Sharif will reach Islamabad and chair the meeting for consultation on Panama Leaks commission, The News International reported.

The ministers will apprise Sharif of the contacts made with the opposition parties.

Sharif's legal team will brief him on the matters related to inquiry commission.

Meanwhile, talking to the media in London, Sharif said he had undergone several medical checkups and was now completely healthy.

--Indo-Asian News Service py/vt

( 101 Words)

2016-04-19-16:04:30 (IANS)
The $21 million plan includes reducing the number of mosquitoes in New York City by doubling and optimising existing mosquito traps, improving the city's testing capacity for the disease, and creating an awareness campaign for people to understand the virus and take appropriate precautions, Xinhua news agency reported.

"We take the threat of Zika virus very seriously," de Blasio said on Monday at a press conference held at New York Public Health Laboratory.

Currently 358 patients were confirmed to have contracted the disease in the US of which 40 were reported in New York.

However, none of the 40 cases were infected locally, de Blasio noted.

The specific species of mosquito that transmits the disease has not been found in the city, the mayor said, but there's a similar species that could potentially spread the virus.

The plan will also add 51 new positions to address the needs of the city, including inspectors, exterminators, disease inspectors and lab analysts.

As part of the plan, the city launched an awareness campaign dubbed "Fight Back NYC", calling on New Yorkers who are potentially infected with the virus to get tested.

The city also urged New Yorkers to remove open containers of standing water and pregnant women to use protection while having sex with a man who spent time in a Zika-affected area.

--Indo-Asian News Service ksk

( 256 Words)

2016-04-19-08:56:10 (IANS)
Governor of Maharashtra, C Vidyasagar Rao, today remarked that that there was a growing trend towards 'mechanisation' of medical profession and called upon doctors to give more importance to 'human dimension' and improved communication with patients. Speaking after releasing a book 'Preventive Measures for Cirrhosis of Lever and its Progression' authored by renowned gastroenterologist Prof Dr Sharad Shah, the Governor said growing reliance on machines, prescribing of various tests and lack of good communication was adversely affecting doctor-patient relations and called for a course correction. The Governor expressed concern over the rising incidence of cirrhosis of the liver and called for creating greater awareness among the people about liver ailments and their prevention. Speaking on the occasion, well known gastroenterologist Dr Deepak Amrapurkar said that the burden of liver cirrhosis is increasing in the country due to factors like obesity, diabetes and alcoholism. He thanked Dr Shah for describing preventive strategies for Liver Cirrhosis in simple and easy to understand language through his book. Chairman of Maharashtra Legislative Council, Ramraje Naik- Nimbalkar, Rajya Sabha MP Vijay Darda, industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla, Rajashree Birla, Harsh Goenka, Dr Farokh Udwadia and otherswere present on occasion.UNI NP SS NP RJ BL2335 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0169-689829.Xml
As his family was at its wits end to obtain 50-year-old Ranjan Saha's death certificate, the banana seller startled one and all by returning home 16 years after he had been abducted by armed militants who held him captive at their hideout in Bangladesh. He was let off for "good behaviour" as he never tried to escape. "Since my abduction, I had been pleading with the rebels to release me as I was the lone bread earner of my (four- member) poor family. But they always become furious and tortured me," the feeble-voiced Saha told IANS. "They made me do various type of works in their camp deep in a jungle in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) (in southeast Bangladesh). I do not know the exact name of the place. There are at least 25 other people, mostly kidnapped by the extremists, also working in the same camp," he added. Saha was kidnapped by the extremists of the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) from Jampuijala, 35 km south of Agartala, on April 18, 2000, along with two others. He had gone to Jampuijala to buy bananas, which he would sell in Agartala. "The guerrillas also kidnapped at gunpoint two other traders along with me. They kept us blindfolded for more than a month as we had to trek through mountainous terrain before we reached the militant's camp in the CHT," he said. "The abductors subsequently learnt that we would not be able to pay any ransom. Hence they made us do various types of work like cleaning and maintaining the camp, cooking and collecting water, besides other odd jobs. The two other captives who were kidnapped along with me were shifted to other unknown locations," Saha said. "Despite my inability to do so due to ill health and hostile surroundings, I quietly continued with the hard work. The food was sometimes unpalatable. I was constantly praying to god to liberate me from this awful life for the sake of my wife, two sons and my beloved daughter," he said According to Saha, "the militants were pleased as I never tried to run away from their camp". "Recently, god might have heard my prayers. The militants released me one month back after giving me some money. I then went to relatives' house at Madhabpur in Habiganj district of Bangladesh. From there, clandestinely I crossed the border with the help of a Bangladeshi middleman and reached my house at Shibnagar in Agartala (last week)," Saha said. After Saha's abduction, his family lodged a case in the Jirania police station and met a number of people, including ministers, senior police officers and other influential people in a bid to locate him. "In 2007, we filed a case in a court here to get my father's death certificate. The case is still pending with the court," Ranjan Saha's elder son, Abhijit Saha, told IANS. Ranjan Saha, who is now being treated at the government-run Gobind Ballabh Pant Hospital and Medical college here, was upbeat about his future. "I would re-start my business afresh after my health improves," he said. Saha's 45-year-old wife Sumitra explained how she struggled during the past 16 years after her husband's abduction and brought up the children by working as a cook in a neighbour's house. "I am indebted to god that my younger son Rajesh got a temporary job as a representative of a private company in Kolkata. I married off my daughter Sampa and she is happy. It is only due to the god's mercy my husband returned to us," Sumitra told IANS. According to Tripura Police documents, during the peak years of terrorism in the state between 1997 and 2014, over 2,430 people, including legislators, political leaders, traders, government employees and civilians were kidnapped by extremists, of whom 1,705 were subsequently released. "For many years, abduction for ransom became a trade by the militants. Many people were released by the extremists after taking ransom but many people were killed as the victims' families either could not pay the money sought or did not fulfil the rebels' other demands," security and terrorism expert Manas Paul told IANS. Members of NLFT and the All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF) undergo arms training in hideouts and covert camps in various parts of Bangladesh, which shares an 856-km border with Tripura. Banned in 1997 by the central government, the two outfits advocate Tripura's secession from India. However, ATTF has become almost defunct as most of its cadres have surrendered. (Sujit Chakraborty can be contacted at sujit.c@ians.in) --Indo-Asian News Service sc/vm/ky/tb ( 773 Words) 2016-04-19-10:50:06 (IANS)
The subject of the discussion will be 'Doing Business with Remarkable Indonesia'

Saut Siringoringo, CG of Indonesia will be the chief guest for the occassion, a release from CMIA said.

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At least six people were crushed to death and 13 others injured, some of them critically when an uncontrolled car crashed into a roadside religious function in Gauribazar area here. Police sources here today said the people were watching a religious dance when suddenly a car coming from Rudrupur crushed them in Pananha village at around 2230 hours last night. After crushing the people the car overturned. The deceased were identified as Dinesh Yadav(34), Paras (60), Kaushlaya(46), Bhubhati(60) and two others. Nine of the injured have been rushed to the Gorakhpur medical college hospital in critical condition. Police has arrested one person, who was traveling in the car and several liquor bottles were recovered from the vehicle. Meanwhile, after the incident, irate villagers blocked the Rudrupur- Gorakhpur highway demanding compensation to the family members and action against the guilty people traveling in the car.UNI XC- MB SV RK1215 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0196-690112.Xml
Tripura Chief Minister and CPI-M Politburo member Manik Sarkar today left for Kolkata to campaign in favour of CPI-M and Congress candidates in five central districts of West Bengal. Mr Sarkar and CPI-M Tripura were against the electoral alliance with the Congress in West Bengal. As a result, no party leader in Tripura had taken part in the election campaign in the first two phases. Mr Sarkar himself was against the alliance, which, he said had caused damage to the party in Tripura. More than 200 CPI-M supporters, including state committee members, had already left the party following the seat adjustment with the Congress in Bengal. Both CPI-M and Congress are directly fighting each other in Tripura and the Congress had observed a 24- hour general strike in the state demanding Mr Sarkar's resignation for his alleged involvement in the assassination of his former health minister Bimal Sinha. During his campaign in Assam, the Tripura Chief Minister had attacked the Congress severely. After Kolkata, he will proceed for campaigning in Kerala and Tamil Nadu against the Congress.UNI BB PL SV RK1250 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-690154.Xml
Defence Acquisition Council, the apex decision making body in the the Defence Ministry will take a final view on the cost of Rafale fighter jets to be procured from France, Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh today indicated. Talking to mediapersons on the sidelines of seminar on "Make in India in the IAF", the Minister said all the issues related to procurement of 36 fighter jets from Dassault Aviation of France have been resolved and the final decision is expected in the next meeting of the DAC. "Most of the hitches (which) were there had been addressed. Few things will be addressed when the matter comes up in the next DAC and I think there after road shall be clear," he said. Sources in the Defence Ministry had indicated that the cost of the deal may be to the tune of 8.9 billion dollars, which is lesser than what the French firm was pushing for. During the visit of the French President Francois Hollande, India and France had signed an inter-governmental agreement, with both sides emphasising that everything else, except the cost of the deal is to be finalised. Decision to purchase 36 combat aircraft was conveyed the French President by Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he visited France on April 10 last year. Both sides had been engaged in tough negotiations ever since with Indian side insisting on lower price of unit which was quoted initially by Dassault Aviation. UNI MK PR SV 1310 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0090-690316.Xml
Zoho Corp today announced the launch of new software that accelerates the innovation inspired by its 'Made in India. Made for the World.' ethos. The new products include Zoho AppCreator, Notebook and Zoho Writer and the new experience, Gamescope, was being introduced as a new feature in Zoho Projects. ''Together, the new deliverables celebrate the company's 20 years spent crafting software'', Zoho Corp CEO Sridhar Vembu told reporters here. He said Zoho AppCreator helps businesses create custom mobile apps for their needs and no coding experience wasrequired. Notebook is a productivity-boosting, note taking app for mobile device users. Zoho Writer is the company's online word processor, now reinvented to improve collaboration and eliminate clutter from the UI. Gamescope is a Zoho Projects feature that turns work into a game and going forward it would be extended to other Zoho applications, Mr Sridhar said. "From the operating system for businesses, we are moving on to become the operating system for work," he added. "The wide range of Zoho's product suite provides the ecosystem for people to accomplish any kind of work. We are now deepening our offerings by creating innovative software in diverse spheres'', he said.UNI GV 1320 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-690344.Xml
Expelled DMK leader andformer Union Minister M K Azhagiri today said he would not support anyone in the May 16 Tamil Nadu Assembly polls. In a brief chat with newsmen at the airport here, the prodigal son of DMK Chief M Karunanidhi, who is known for posing troubles to the party in various forms, said ''I am not going to support any one''. When pressed further on the issue, he said it would also be applicable to his supporters. The Madurai strongman and former South ZoneOrganisational Secretary of the DMK, who was expelled from the party for opposing an alliancewith DMDK led by Vijayakanth in the run up tothe 2014 Lok Sabha polls, looked annoyed whenthe media sought to press the issue further. ''Go and ask the one who said I have no links with the party'', Azhagiri, who enjoys enormousclout in the southern districts, said, in an apparent reference to his younger brother and DMK Treasurer M K Stalin, who is tipped to be the heir apparent to Mr Karunanidhi. Stalin, had said recently that (when Azhagiri called on their father Karunanidhi after a long time) the meeting had no connection with politics or the party and it was purely personal. Last week Azhagiri called on Mr Karunanidhi, the second meeting between the two in three weeks. Though he refused to disclose on what transpired at the meeting, political circles were agog with rumours that Azhagiri had met the DMK chief ina bid to have a rapproachement. He had earlier met Mr Karunanidhi on March 24,which was the first meeting between the two afterhis expulsion from the party. Though Azhagiri said he had enquired about thehealth condition of his father and Stalin alsodownplayed it saying he came to meet his fatherand that there was no politics in it, his son Dayanidhi tweeted, 'My father went to make amends with his father with absolutely no agenda in it.''UNI GV 1430 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-690470.Xml
In a spine chilling incident, a mother and her daughter were hacked to death whenthey resisted a burglary by a gang of four robbers at suburban Kundrathur early this morning. A four-year-old child also suffered a slit on the throat, but survived the attack. According to police, Vasanthi (60), lived with her daughter Thenmozhi (32) and her two grandchildrenRupashri (four) and six-month-old Gunashri at their house in Kundrathur. Thenmozhi's husband Ramaswamy was working in Dubai. Police said, Vasanthi and Thenmozhi were found deadthis morning with their throats slit and cash and gold jewellery missing from the house. The bodies were sent to Chromepet Government Hospitalfor post mortem and police have registered a case ofmurder for gain. The double murder has sent shock waves in the areaand police have formed special teams to nab the killers.UNI GV 1440 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-690504.Xml
The operation, launched a couple of months back to flush out various militants groups, including the Garo National Liberation Army and United Liberation Front of Asom, had successfully neutralised several militant cadres.

"Additional Commando Forces have been requisitioned from the Central Government to sustain these operations during the forthcoming rainy season as well," Inspector General of Police in-charge Operations, GHP Raju said.

The Meghalaya Special Commando Force SF-10 Commandos would be inducted for sustained and relentless Counter Insurgency operations for the next six months, he said.

The SF-10 Commandos are being equipped with state-of-the-art weapons and equipment to deal with militants in all-weather conditions.

Mr Raju said the Police Department, as an extension to the Operation Hillstorm 3, has initiated "rural un-employed youth reach-out programme" to identify rural youth from remote villages, who are eligible for police job, and started imparting training to them in running 5 km for male candidates and 3 km run for female candidates.

He also accused that Sohan D Shira, the military wing commander of GNLA and his band of criminals had been luring rural youth by gifting them mobiles and cash to work as informers about police movement in the rural areas. UNI RRK PL SB AS1510

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Union Minister for Science & Technology and Earth Science, Harsh Vardhan has said the Mithun (bros frontalis), could well become not only the symbol of the Naga people but exemplify the 'unity in diversity' that is India and help in strengthening the bond-ship between different communities in the country On his maiden tour of Nagaland yesterday, Dr Vardhan first visited the 'Mithun Farm' at ICAR-National Research Centre on Mithun at Jharnapani under Dimapur district and later inaugurated the Department of Bio- Technology (DBT)-funded 'Biotech Infrastructure Facility' at ICAR-NRC on Mithun complex. Dr Vardhan said the majestic 'Mithun', the emblem of Nagaland, has the potential to touch every Naga household economically and emotionally. He confessed that during his visit to the Mithun Farm, he developed a sort of "emotional bond-ship" with the Mithun, which he had seen for the first time. He said science and modern technology have the potential to solve myriad unsolved problems in the country, including health care, especially women and children, and mitigate the plight of farmers. The Union minister disclosed that it was his long felt dream to visit Nagaland, adding it has finally come true. Expressing delight in his visit, Dr Vardhan said he was "greeted with smiles" since the moment he landed in the state. The pioneer of the polio eradication project in India, Dr Harsh Vardhan gave a brief insight into how the almost impossible task became a reality although the project initially faced much opposition and was ridiculed from every angle. Dr Vardhan challenged the gathered scientists, leaders, parliamentarians and researchers to help the poor people with the help of science. Stating that people in all the places were suffering from various social and health problems, he said those problems with the help of science could be resolved. Dr Vardhan described science, which had the ability to protect or improve the quality of human life, as life science or in a wider term, biotechnology. He was all praise for the 'rasgulla' that was made from the Mithun's milk. He said Nagaland could become a popular figure across the globe through Mithun products, especially the 'rasgulla' P B Acharya. After the function, Dr. Vardhan left for Kohima and met Governor and Cabinet ministers led by Chief Minister T R Zeliang and discussed on various matters. UNI AS PL RSA AN1506 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-690323.Xml
: A three sovereign gold chain of a school teacher at Thavalkuppam was snatched by motor- cycle borne thieves today. According to police, Vijaya Banu (34) of Abishegampakkam,a teacher in a private school at Thavalkuppam was walking to her school when two persons wearing helmets came on a motor cycle. The man riding the vehicle beat Banu on her back and she fell down.All on a sudden, the pillion rider got down, snatched the chain and both of them fled the scene. Based on a complaint from Banu, thavalakuppam police registered a case and investigating.UNI PAB KVV AK 1550 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-690524.Xml
Reports reaching from the different parts in the region stated that, on this occasion, various religious cultural and social programmes, including processions, flag hoisting programmes, vehicle rallies, blood donation camps, health camps, free meals and devotional concerts were organized at various places in the region to mark this day.

In Aurangabad city, Sakal Jain Samaj (SJS) president, MLC Subhas Zambad and former school education minister Rajendra Darda unfurled the religion flag this morning at Mahaveer Chowk located near Baba petrol pumps.

Other office bearers of SJS were also present.

Palkhi, Shoba yatra were also taken out from Paithan gate area in presence of Acharya Tirthnanndiji Maharaj, Prashantkawarji, Pradnyashreeji, Uppravartini Prakashkawarji, Susilkawarji, Hempradnyashreeji and other sadhu saint along with all political parties, elected representatives and entire Jain community members.

In view of severe drought situation in the Marathwada region 25 fodder loaded trucks brought by SJS will be sent to the affected rural areas for farmers who face shortage of food for their cattles.

Apart from this SJS also provided 'Sticking machies' to the widow of farmers who committed suicide and donated cycles to their children on this occasion in a function at S B College ground.

On this occasion Palkhis, shobayatra were also taken out from different Jain temples across the city.

The police has set up adequate secutiry arrangements during the procession. UNI VKB SF AE AN1517

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Offering condolences to the victims' families, the PM tweeted: "I condemn the attack in Kabul & extend my condolences to bereaved families.

''Prayers with the injured for a speedy recovery.''

Casualties are expected to mount as the suicide attack took place in a crowded government security office. UNI SD RSA SB 1628

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: Puducherry unit of the Communist party of India (Marxist) today urged the territorial administration to prevent hoarding of essential commodities by wholesale dealers . In a statement here today, CPM Secretary Rajangam charged that the wholesale dealers are fixing the rate of commodities according to their whims and fancies before selling the same .To substantiate his claim, the CPM leader also produced a bill from a wholesale dealer at Rangapillai street here, which shows the sale of 50 kg of Black Gram at Rs.6350 at 1700 hrs on April 16 and another bill for a sale of 50 kg of black gram for Rs.7500 after one-and-a half-hour on the same day. Mr Rajangam charged that though there is official machinery to fix price and quality, no official is bothered to implement it, and because of this, the wholesale dealers are looting the public. He also wanted the food-cell to raid the godown of the particular shop and seize the hoarded commodities.UNI PAB KVV AK 1610 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-690551.Xml
: Twelve election observers,all IRS officers, formed to monitor the expenditureof the candidates contesting the May 16 Assemblypolls in Tamil Nadu, arrived in the city from New Delhi today. The team was led by senior officer Prasanjit Singh. They would conduct inspections in various places, including Coimbatore, Tiruchi, Madurai and otherplaces like Puducherry and Karaikal. They would be keeping a watch on candidates' spending, including distribution of money to thevoters. One of the prohibitions that the Election Commission (EC) has introduced was transmitting bulk SMS that were political in nature. This will come into force in the 48 hours, ending with the hours fixed for conclusion of poll. The Commission has decided that polling agents of political parties would not be allowed to leavethe polling station or substituting himself by the relieving agent after 1500 hrs, according to Tamil Nadu Chief Electoral Officer Rajesh Lakhoni. Cases have been registered against various parties for flouting EC rules and various items,including household articles, allegedly meantfor distribution to voters, were seized by thesurveillance teams.UNI GV KVV AK 1615 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-690695.Xml
Now Mr Gandhi would stay in his constituency for two days from tomorrow and make surprise inspections of the developmental works in the villages.

According to party sources here today, Mr Gandhi will reach Gauriganj tomorrow evening after he reaches Lucknow from New Delhi by a service flight at 1730 hours.

The Amethi MP will attend the post marriage reception of the son of the district Congress president Yogendra Mishra at Gaurigang tomorrow evening.

After night stay at Munshiganj guest house, Mr Gandhi will meet the local people and congress workers on April 21 morning and thereafter proceed for a surprise inspection in the villages.

Mr Gandhi, during his stay, could also visit Bhadar to meet the families of three Congress leaders who were killed in a road accident recently.

The Congress vice-president will leave for New Delhi enroute Lucknow in the evening. Earlier, Mr Gandhi was slated to inaugurate the four-day-long training programme of the chairpersons of the nyay panchayats in Gauriganj. But now the training camp has been postponed.UNI XC-MB SB AN1657

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Targeting Congress president Sonia Gandhi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday asked as to who influenced the then home minister P. Chidambaram's decision in 2009 to tweak the second affidavit in Ishrat Jahan case. "In the first affidavit filed on August 6, 2009, the government put forth that Ishrat Jahan was an LeT operative. Merely 45 days later, on September 30, the second affidavit signed by the then home minister P. Chidambaram drops this point and digresses into other details, BJP spokesman Sambit Patra said here on Tuesday. We want to know what changed in those 45 days? Who gave Chidambaram the command to change the affidavit because there is only one command centre in the Congress party and that is 10 Janpath, Patra said, referring to Congress president Sonia Gandhi's residential address. He also accused the Congress of compromising on the crucial issue of national security in order to get political mileage. Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi and P. Chidambaram could not tolerate Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, but they could tolerate terrorism, he said. Mumbai college girl Ishrat Jahan and her three alleged associates Pranesh Gopinath Pilai, Amjad Ali and Jishan Johar were killed by Gujarat Police in an allegedly staged shootout near Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004. Gujarat Police had described the four as Pakistani-controlled terrorists who came from Jammu and Kashmir to assassinate Modi, who was then the chief minister of Gujarat. In February this year, LeT operative David Headley told a Mumbai court that Ishrat Jahan was a member of the Pakistan-based terror group. --Indo-Asian News Service mak/sd/vt ( 276 Words) 2016-04-19-17:18:06 (IANS)
This assurance was given by Chief Minister Oommen Chandy to Malaparamba A U P School Protection Samithy, whose representative called on him here today.

The representatives said Mr Chandy has ordered to file government appeal in the case.

They included Bhasi Malaparamba, Adv M Jayadeep, P P Prabhakara Kurup, ward Coucillor E Prasanth Kumar, Kanangot Rajan, R K Eravil and William K. Burg (KPSTA).

A public meeting held here recently chalked out steps, including indefinite blockade stir, for the protection of the over 140- year old School and demanded government takeover and revocation of the order by the director of public instruction (DPI) to close it down.UNI PCH KVV AK1730

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Two unidentified miscreants shot at a monk in an ashram near Madhai village on Lakhnadaun-Seoni road near here, police said. The incident occurred when Swami Narayananand Maharaj was coming out from his room and getting down from the staircases at around 2100 hrs last night. The attacker ambushed behind a boundary wall and shot at the Swami but the monk shot back by firing three rounds from his revolver in which an attacker sustained injuries in his hand. However, the Swami was unhurt in the attack. The assailants managed to flee from the scene but a crude gun fell from one attacker's hand. Sub-Divisional Officer Chhote Raja Patel seized the crude gun and Swami's revolver.UNI XC-BDG SB AN1710 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0044-690609.Xml
Talking to reporters on the sidelines of the launch of the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign in 61 additional districts, the minister backtracked on her statement that criminalising marital rape could not fit into the Indian context.

Asked by reporters whether marital rape issue was being reviewed, the minister indicated ''Now there is.'' She hoped that there would be a decision soon.

The Minister had earlier said due to mindset of the society to ''treat marriage as a sacrament'',the concept of marital rape, as understood internationally, ''cannot be suitably applied in the Indian context''. She had cited a host of factors including level of education, illiteracy, poverty, social customs and values and religious beliefs.

But faced with criticism, she had then gone on to say that her ministry could consider taking steps to criminalise marital rape if provided with ample proof of sufficient number of such complaints.UNI SD RSA SB 1908

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: With several rounds of talks between the Congress and DMK leaders not making any head way in resolving the issue of identifying the constituencies each parties would contest, Congress leaders today rushed to New Delhi to apprise the high command of the prevailing situation. The Congress and DMK came to an understanding to contest the May 16 assembly elections here in alliance, in which, the congress would contest 21 and DMK nine seats. But the parties are yet to resolve the issue of identifying the constituencies each parties should contest. According to sources, the DMK's claim to have Mannadipet and Nellithoppe constituencies and the reluctancy on the part of Congress to part with the constituencies remain the problem between the parties. As continuation of the several rounds of talks between the parties, they met at the PCC office today and held talks. AICC general secretary V Narayansamy, leader of the opposition V Vaithilingam and PCC president A namasivayam, were among others on behalf of the Congress and former chief minister R V Janakiraman, and party convernor (north) S P Sivakumar, were among those on behalf of the DMK partook in the talks. The Congress agreed to leave the seats demanded by DMK in Karaikal and Puducherry (North). But, it was reluctant to part with the constituencies demanded by DMK in Puducherry (South), following which the DMK leaders were dissatisfied and decided to lodge a complaint with the party treasurer, M K Stalin, who will be passing through Puducherry to Cuddalore for electioneering. Meanwhile, Mr Narayansamy, Mr Namasivayam and Mr Vaithilingam left here for New Delhi. They are expected to apprise the Congress high command about the developments here .They would also discuss and take a decision on the candidates and schedule of party leaders for electioneering in the union territory, among other issues.UNI PAB KVV AK 1900 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-690863.Xml
Anil Chaudhry, MD & Country President, Schneider Electric India, has received the Legion of Honour, France's highest civilian award, the company said in a statement today. This award is given in recognition of outstanding contributions to French society over the course of a minimum of 20 years of one's professional career. This is an outstanding public recognition of the accomplishments of a civilian.Ambassador of France to India Franois Richier handed over the award to Mr Chaudhry at a ceremony organised at the former's residence here. Officers of French Embassy and administration officials within the Government of India, members of India Inc and Mr Chaudhry's family, and colleagues were also present on this occasion.The distinguished award, Chevalier de la Lgion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour), was presented to Anil Chaudhry for his significant and commendable contribution towards strengthening Indo-French relations through his association with French organisations since the beginning of his career. After receiving the award Mr Chaudhry, said, "It is with great honor that I receive this profound recognition given to me by the French Embassy today. The distinguished history of this award, and its long list of eminent awardees leave me humbled and tremendously inspired to live up to the noble principles this award represents." While presenting the award, Ambassador Franois Richier, said, "I am truly delighted to bestow this award on Mr Anil Chaudhry, whose remarkable acumen and vision has contributed significantly to boosting French business in India in areas essential for a country's economic development."UNI NM RSA SB 1915 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0426-691128.Xml
Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Minister Uma Bharti today said Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar owes his rise to the support of RSS. Addressing mediapersons on the sidelines of the National Seminar on Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Multipurpose Development of Water Resources and Present Challenges, she said Mr Kumar was part of the J P movement during the Emergency which was led by the Sangh. She also said it was only because of the Sangh that Nitish Kumar could become the Minister during the governments led by VP Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.She said that no one can think of wiping out the Sangh and anybody wishing so would be wiped out himself.On RJD chief Lalu Prasad's bid to project Nitish Kumar as the Prime Minister in 2019, Ms Bharti said Mr Narendra Modi was the Prime Minister of the country and he would remain so for another two to three terms, till then she said, "Nitishji should forget of becoming the PM for the next 15 to 20 years, and both Laluji and Nitishji should take care of their health till then". On a question whether the then Union Home Minister P Chidambaram let Ishrat Jahan and all those people who supported her off the hook, Ms Bharti said, Congress had always played communal politics and for them the meaning of communal politics was "politics of appeasement". ''This was an example of to what extent could the Congress go,'' she added.The Minister said to save the country from such politics, the Congress should be cleaned out from the future also. UNI RBE RSA SB 1948 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0427-691201.Xml
Firing slugs into the rival camp, Congress General Secretary and Madhya Pradesh former chief minister Digvijaya Singh today accused the BJP of polarising students in Kashmir and added that - keeping the country's interests in view the saffron party should steer clear of such a policy. "Generating discontent among pupils is worrisome and destructive for the nation," he told the press here. Mr Singh was on a visit to his native place Raghogarh. Avoiding any prediction vis--vis Assembly election results of five states, the Rajya Sabha Member only said that everything would be known on May 19. In context of the stand taken by the Centre in the Supreme Court vis--vis the Kohinoor, Mr Singh averred, "Earlier, BJP charged the Congress of not taking any initiative towards return of the diamond from the United Kingdom. Now, the BJP government is reversing its stance and saying that the gem was presented and not taken forcibly." On the political crisis in Uttarakhand, he felt that removal of elected regimes is not only unconstitutional, but also a step that weakens democracy. "Due to governmental pressure, a section of media is being parsimonious with regard to reporting the Congress' protests against the BJP dispensation's anti-people activities, though my party is expressing dissent across the country," Mr Singh said. In response to a query on Ishrat Jahan encounter, the Congress bigwig said that it appears as if BJP President Amit Shah is hell-bent on denouncing Ishrat as a terrorist, in order to save himself from the clutches of the law. Regarding a journalist being 'confined and assaulted' in Hoshangabad by the sand mafia, Mr Singh said, "A reign of terror prevails in Madhya Pradesh, where Ministers' cronies and kin are involved in unauthorised sand mining. I will myself travel to Hoshangabad this evening and expose the mafia." Describing the Centre's Gram Uday se Bharat Uday Campaign as a joke, he alleged that on one hand, the state government is snatching panchayats' rights while on the other it is talking about Gram Uday. "Heavy corruption is being perpetrated vis--vis the Simhasth Kumbh Mahaparv Mela. The state is combating a drought, but the regime is diverting funds towards frivolous expenditure relating to Simhasth. Construction work at the Mela is substandard," Mr Singh said.UNI XC-AC RJ SB RAI1832 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0044-690939.Xml
Three hardcore militants were arrested by security forces in separate operations in Assam. Based on specific information the Army launched a joint operation with Kokrajhar police in Mainaguri area in Kokrajhar district yesterday. During the operation, the joint team established an opportunity Mobile Check Post (MCP) on Mainaguri-Siyalmari road and apprehended one hardcore NDFB (S) cadre identified as Bipul Mushahary alias Bigrai Mushahary.One 7.65mm Pistol and few live rounds were recovered from the individual.In another operation on April 17, Army launched a joint operation with Chirang police in Samugaon area in Chirang district and apprehended one NDFB(S) terrorist in the wee hours next day. The individual was identified as Manjit Basumatary, who was involved in extortion and kidnappings for the banned terrorist organisation. One revolver and few live rounds were recovered from the individual.In yet another operation launched by Army in conjunction with Kokrajhar police in Bharatnagar in Kokrajhar district, one NSLA(AT) terrorist was apprehended. The individual was identified as Pranjit Tudu, who was involved in various subversive activities in the area. One pistol and few live rounds were recovered from the individual. UNI SG AKM DJK SB BD1956 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0213-691112.Xml
The Rashtriya Ulema council today alleged that Samajwadi Party has always used Muslims for their mere vote banks politics and the party has failed to honour the promises it had made to the minority community during the last Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. Rashtriya Ulema Council was formed as a protest group in the aftermath of Batla House encounter, in which two youth of Sanjarpur village of Azamgarh district were killed on September 19, 2008 at Batla House area of Jamia Nagar in Delhi. Its national president Maulana Amir Rashadi had even contested elections, including the Lok Sabha 2014 against SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav from Azamgarh. Addressing the meeting of party Chairman in the Council, Maulana Aamir Rashadi said, "Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been painted as villain among the Muslims for 2002 post Godhra riots in Gujarat, but Mulayam Singh Yadav and Akhilesh Yadav remain the messiah of the Muslims, even after over 450 communal riots during the last four-year-old regime of Samajwadi Party in UP''. Maulana Rashadi said after coming to power in UP in 2012 with the help of Muslim votes, the SP government has proved that "it's not the real well-wisher of the community". "The Supreme Court's remarks on the negligence of state government to prevent the Muzaffarnagar riots has put a stamp on this," said Maulana Rashadi.The Maulana also coined a new slogan, "Musalman Ab nahi Rahega Durban Me, Vo Rahega Ab Sarkar Me''. (Muslims will no longer be the courtiers; they will now form the government). Questioning the secular credentials of the Samajwadi party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and the chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, Maulana Rashadi said, "for the Samajwadi Party muslims were merely the vote bank and the ruling party has only cheated the muslims for its political ends ever since its inception in 1992''. Targeting the secular political parties, the Ulema council chief said, "all the so called secular parties have cheated the muslims in the cover of the secular communal divide in the electoral politics but they have never done anything substantial for the uplift of the minority community. "Some parties, particularly the Samajwadi Party, have used the Muslims as their vote bank by creating scare of the BJP among the Muslims''. The Maulana alleged that secular parties can never be the true benefactors of Muslims as these parties only use the Muslims for capturing political power by creating fear of the BJP among the Muslims. Calling for the formation of a new social coalition, comprising Muslims and upper caste Hindus, Maulana Rashadi said ''Muslims of UP would no longer be the slave of any political party and now it's not about Hindu-Muslim unity, but Muslim-Hindu Unity, where the Muslims will join hands with the upper caste Brahmins, Rajputs and Bhumihars and this coalition will wipe out the Yadav-led caste based electoral combination of Samajwadi Party''. In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the Rashtriya Ulema Council had fielded candidates in six seats -- Ambedkarnagar, Machchlishahr, Lalganj, Jaunpur, Lucknow and Kanpur. In same year in January the Ulema council had booked a train and took thousands of its supporters from Azamgarh, jaunpur, Faizabad, Aligarh, Bijnor to Delhi to protest against the central government and the Delhi police to demand judicial probe into the encounter. The Ulema Council soon transformed into a full fledged political party contesting elections in Maharashtra and UP.UNI MB CJ RJ 2042 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-691437.Xml
NTPC-Simhadri signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with AP Forest Department for conservation and protection of Olive Ridley Sea Turtles, the endangered species from extinction .

NTPC Simhadri Group General Manager P.K. Bondriya, and AP Forests Principal Chief Conservator(PCCF) S B L Misra signed the MoU at "Arnaya Bhavan" in here today.

Under the agreement, NTPC is contributing Rs 4.6 crores for five year conservation Project including inventory mapping of breeding sites of Sea Turtles, identification of nesting and breeding habitats along the shore line, and migratory routes taken by Sea Turtles, development of guidelines to safeguard and minimize turtle mortality, development of local and national cooperative and collaborative action for Sea Turtle Conservation.

The coastal beaches in Andhra Pradesh are important nesting places for the sea turtles. Sporadic nesting occurs on these beaches.

Three species have been recorded in A.P. Olive Ridley is common and Green Turtle occurs occasionally & Hawksbill was also sighted .

Speaking at the MoU signing ceremony, Bondria said that as a responsible corporate citizen NTPC shares its concern and commitment to the cause of protection of bio-diversity and conservation of sea turtles in the coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh.

While appreciating the initiative of NTPC for conservation of oLIVE Ridley Sea Turtles, Misra, said the MoU would serve as a Public Private partnership model for sea turtle conservation in the country .MORE UNI KNR KVV AK 2010

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Patna High Court today adjourned the hearing of a bunch of petitions, challenging a complete ban on the manufacture, sale and consumption of liquor in Bihar and fixed April 26 as the next date of hearing in the case. A division bench comprising Acting Chief Justice Iqbal Ahmad Ansari and Justice Samrendra Pratap Singh, adjourned the hearing of the case till April 26, after principal additional advocate general Lalit Kishore informed the court that the state government would file a counter affidavit in the case by April 22. Earlier, on April 13, the court had directed Bihar government not to take coercive action against the Manufacturers of Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) in regard to stock of IMFL supplied by them to the state beverage corporation till final order was delivered on a bunch of petitions filed in the connection. The huge stock supplied to Bihar State Beverage Corporation by liquor manufacturers remained unused as state government in its abrupt decision had imposed complete ban on sale of liquor with immediate effect on April 5. In beginning, only partial ban was imposed in Bihar with complete ban on sale of countrymade liquor in rural and urban areas while permission was given for sale of IMFL in urban areas through outlets of Bihar State Beverage Corporation. "Article 47 of the constitution empowers the government to impose complete ban on sale, manufacture and consumption of liquor," counsel for the state government had maintained on first day of hearing the case on April 13. Bihar Liquor Manufacturers' Association and Bar Operators Association had filed petitions in Patna High Court challenging the complete ban on manufacturing, sale and consumption of liquor in Bihar.UNI XC KKS RJ NS2120 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0214-691365.Xml
Juna Rajwada police today registered a case against an unidentified man for allegedly threatening to kill a city-based senior journalist for propagating that the Goddess Mahalaxmi is Ambabai and wife of Lord Shiv (Mahadev) and not to call her as 'Mahalaxmi'. Dr Desai's office of journalist Subhas K Desai received an anonymous letter, dated April 16. In the letter, the unidentified person said, "Your statement that Goddess Mahalaxmi is Ambabai and wife of Lord Shiv and not Mahalaxmi, the consort of Lord Vishnu. ...You know about one Desai (Ms Trupti Desai), who was saved by the police, but you would not get any help from the people or police and close this chapter." Following the receipt of the threat letter, Dr Desai met District Superintendent of Police Pradeep Deshpande and handed over a copy of the letter to him. Understanding the seriousness of the matter, he ordered CID officials to investigate the incident. Later in the evening, Juna Rajwada police registered a case against unidentified person under Section 507 of the Indian Penal Code. Dr Desai, who hails originally from Gargoti tehsil of this district, started his carrier as a journalist and editor of quarterly magazine 'Pranav' and 'Sinhwani'. Then, he worked as a representative of the Indian Express, Times of India, Loksatta and Press Trust of India. He has also written a book 'Ambabai Ki Mahalaxmi', the real story behind Goddess Mahalaxmi.UNI SSS SS RJ RAI2323 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0169-691582.Xml
According to CNN, the hardest-hit area was the coastal Manabi province, where about 200 people died.

The government deployed around10, 000 soldiers and 4,600 police officers to the affected areas in an attempt to send immediate aid and relief.

The troops then set up mobile hospitals and temporary shelters and search dogs were brought in to help find survivors and bodies.

The earthquake was the deadliest to hit the nation since March 1987, when a 7.2-magnitude earthquake killed 1,000 people, according to the USGS. (ANI)
The clients of CA-Jinchen included the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team, which operates China's Great Firewall.

According to Chen's LinkedIn profile, reports Financial Times, she was chief executive of CA-Jinchen, which she described as a joint venture company formed by Computer Associates International and ministry of public security of China.

With CA-Jinchen from 1999 to 2005, her role was focused on the information security industry, providing products, solutions, security applications, and comprehensive services, she wrote on her profile.

The micro-blogging site last week appointed Chen as its Greater China managing director, chief executive officer Jack Dorsey said in a tweet.

A big welcome to Twitter, @KathyChen2016! She joins us as our MD for China!, Dorsey said.

Since her appointment, Chinese Twitter users have raised eyebrows over Chen's past links to the Chinese government.

Twitter has been blocked in China since 2009. The micro-blogging site currently has over 300 million users.

--Indo-Asian News Service na/ksk

( 197 Words)

2016-04-19-10:44:07 (IANS)
US Secretary of State John Kerry will meet Iran's foreign minister in New York tomorrow to discuss implementation of the Iran nuclear deal as well as regional issues such as ending Syria's civil war, the US State Department said today.After meeting Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Kerry will visit Egypt to see Egypt's president and foreign minister and then Riyadh to join President Barack Obama at the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit, it said in a statement.REUTERS PS PR0037 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0421-689958.Xml
Dilma Rousseff is not the first Brazilian president forced to contemplate the loyalty of Renan Calheiros on the eve of her possible impeachment.Nearly 25 years ago, Calheiros, the current president of the Senate who will decide the pace of debate over Rousseff's impeachment, weighed the fate of a fellow politician from his tiny northeastern state of Alagoas: Fernando Collor de Mello.Calheiros was a key advisor in Collor's successful presidential campaign in 1989. Just three years later, his explosive revelations of government corruption to journalists and congressional investigators helped topple Collor in a corruption scandal.As the impeachment process against Rousseff moves to the Senate after winning overwhelming support in the lower house of Congress yesterday, she and her allies may look with trepidation to Calheiros, a crucial but inconsistent ally in the past year.Calheiros has resisted the rush to remove Rousseff among a large wing of his Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), throwing his support behind the idea of new general elections to settle the country's political crisis.Yet those proposals are distant and theoretical, while the decision before Calheiros is urgent. He faces intense pressure from his own party and others in the opposition to quickly set a date for a Senate vote on whether to accept impeachment charges and put Rousseff on trial.The precedent of Collor's impeachment suggests a committee will be formed to present a recommendation on whether Rousseff should be tried. This would be voted on by the full chamber within 10 parliamentary sessions - which would be in early May.The pro-impeachment camp only needs a simple majority in the Senate to open a trial, an easier hurdle than yesterday's lower house vote, which required two-thirds support.But if Calheiros delays the vote it could give Rousseff vital time to regroup, negotiate and try to swing wavering senators in her favor.Those closest to Calheiros say his shrewd sense of realpolitik, which has helped him dodge several scandals of his own, makes him reluctant to put his own judgment before the intense political currents of the day."Renan could decide the history of the country. And that's exactly what he doesn't want: to be marked as the one who dealt the final blow," said a close confidant in his home state of Alagoas, who asked not to be named. "Because if that works for him, then it's chicanery, and if it goes wrong then he's dead."Calheiros' aides did not respond to a request for comment, but the Senate leader downplayed his role to reporters today, saying he would neither rush or draw out the impeachment process but would follow the law and the constitution.A SURVIVORCalheiros, 60, is part of a group of politicians known in Brazil as the "dinosaurs", an old guard who entered politics under military rule and consolidated power after the return of democracy in the 1980s with a knack for compromise and sharp survival instincts.Born in the remote interior of Alagoas, Brazil's third poorest and most violent state, Calheiros' career has been marked by shifting allegiances.First elected to Congress in 1982, he quickly built a reputation as a power broker and has allied with every Brazilian president since Collor in 1990, even as the ruling ideology shifted to the left under the governments of Rousseff and her predecessor Luiz Incio Lula da Silva.Calheiros is also known for close escapes from corruption scandals that could have sunk a less experienced politician.One incident came in 2007, when a news magazine reported a construction company's lobbyist was paying child support for a daughter Calheiros conceived with a young journalist.Further allegations of tax fraud and improper business dealings prompted an inquiry by the Senate's ethics committee and calls for his ouster.Calheiros quit as Senate boss, taking enough heat out of the attacks to gather votes and dodge impeachment.And by 2013, he was back in charge of the Senate.When Rousseff's congressional coalition began crumbling and the movement to impeach her began last year, Calheiros came to her aid.He helped to pass crucial tax measures and delayed an audit into a breach of budgetary laws for which she will now likely be put on trial in his chamber.But colleagues in his party, the PMDB, which led the impeachment process in the lower house, believe he will not stand in the way of Rousseff being forced from power.One party leader with close ties to Vice President Michel Temer, who will replace Rousseff if she is impeached, admitted there were divisions in the PMDB but that in the face of significant political change the party sticks together.To prove the point, the source called Calheiros during the interview. "Lets move ahead together, my friend," he told Calheiros in a light-hearted phone conversation.Today, Calheiros took center stage in the impeachment saga, meeting with Rousseff and then her arch-rival, lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha, and Ricardo Lewandowski, the Supreme Court justice who would preside over a trial in the Senate.Regardless of Calheiros' own views, the political momentum is clearly with the pro-impeachment camp."I think Renan right now is watching to see who wins," Paulo Pereira da Silva, a union boss and ardent critic of Rousseff, said as votes were being cast in the lower house yesterday."But once the impeachment arrives in the Senate, he will be the first to hang her out to dry." REUTERS PS PR0146 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0421-689976.Xml
Syrian peace talks came close to collapse today, with the mainstream opposition announcing a pause in talks at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, although it agreed to keep its negotiating team in the city.The Western-backed opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) said in a letter to rebel fighters that government military advances meant a ceasefire was effectively over and it was calling a postponement in the talks.Rebels, who accuse the government of breaking the ceasefire to try to recapture the northern city of Aleppo, announced an offensive of their own, launching an assault against government forces in Latakia province on the Mediterranean coast.Opposition fighters made separate advances further east in Hama, while heavy government air strikes took place in Homs province to the south.There was "no way" the opposition could resume formal talks amid a military escalation and a worsening humanitarian situation, senior opposition negotiator Mohammad Alloush told Reuters."We want real negotiations, not farcical ones," he said, adding that the opposition had not decided whether it would continue to meet UN envoy Staffan de Mistura."When there are 70 airstrikes, and when there is mobilising of troops, when Iran sends further armed men and Russia sends a large group of rockets and unmanned planes, all this tells us that there is no real will for a political solution that ensures the safety and stability in the country," he said, naming countries that back Assad.Nevertheless, de Mistura played down the decision by the opposition delegation to stay away from his headquarters, saying his team would continue to meet the delegates elsewhere as long as they were still in town.He acknowledged that violence had become "worrisome", particularly around Aleppo, and said he would call on Moscow and Washington to meet urgently if the situation did not improve.The United States also urged Russia to use its influence to make the government stop its attacks immediately. These threatened not only the partial ceasefire but also the talks in Geneva, a US State Department official said.Last month de Mistura convened the first peace talks attended by the warring parties since the conflict began five years ago. He has come further than any envoy so far in getting President Bashar al-Assad's government and its opponents to negotiate, with the United States and Russia sponsoring a partial ceasefire since February 27 to allow the talks to take place.So far all sides have committed to some kind of political transition that would follow the war. But they still differ fundamentally on what that means, including whether it would require Assad to leave power.Assad's opponents say they cannot participate in talks as long as fighting goes on. But they are also under strong pressure not to quit altogether."If they walk away, they will be held responsible and it will be difficult to return soon," a Western diplomat said.De Mistura said the opposition delegation had told him it would "postpone" its "formal participation" in negotiations at the UN's headquarters, known as the Palais."It is one way for them to display their displeasure and concern for what they perceive to be a substantial deterioration of the humanitarian situation and a deterioration of the security environment, particularly in Aleppo," he said."They told us however their intention to remain in Geneva, in their hotel, and possibly at my own suggestion, to pursue technical discussions with myself and my team."His team would continue to meet all sides "in the Palais or anywhere else", he added, describing the format of proximity talks, in which the sides negotiate in separate rooms, as "very flexible".Both sides were "not yielding a comma" on their political demands, he acknowledged, but said that was normal in a negotiation. He would take stock of progress on Friday.HALF-SOLUTIONSThe opposition considers government attempts to recapture Aleppo as a violation of the ceasefire. The government says it is trying to capture areas held by Islamist militants who are not covered by the truce.A letter signed by unspecified "armed revolutionary factions" expressed dissatisfaction within the opposition ranks, including towards de Mistura himself: "We follow with great concern and outright rejection the moves of de Mistura, some of which show a total bias towards ... the demands of the regime and its allies."The opposition's coordinator at the Geneva talks, Riad Hijab, also said it was unacceptable for talks to go on if the government and its allies pushed on with sieges and bombing civilian areas. Only three delegates met de Mistura for talks on Monday, instead of the usual 15.One senior Western diplomat said de Mistura needed to reassure the opposition by criticising the government for violating the truce."He needs to make a public statement putting pressure on the government. It's in his interest to keep the talks alive. He needs to say that the regime isn't listening."NEW BATTLEThe Latakia and Hama assaults appeared to be part of a new battle announced by rebel groups early in the day, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said. A Syrian military source confirmed intense fighting in the area."Today they attacked in the northern Latakia countryside in several areas, in violation of the cessation of hostilities agreement, and also in the northwestern Hama countryside," the military source said.The Observatory reported that in northern Homs province heavy government air strikes killed four people, and said the death toll was expected to rise, with more people wounded.Mohamad al-Shamsi, a doctor in the Homs area, told Reuters there had been at least 10 air raids from early morning on Rastan and nearby Deir Foul and al-Houla. Schools had been evacuated and hospitals shut.Groups including factions fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army and powerful Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham said in their battle announcement they would respond "with force" against any government forces that fired on civilians.They announced the "formation of a joint operations room to begin the battle...in response to violations by the army".The Geneva talks aim to end a war that has killed more than 250,000 people, created the world's worst refugee crisis, allowed for the rise of the Islamic State group and drawn in regional powers. Russia's intervention in the conflict swayed the war in Assad's favour.REUTERS PS PR0153 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0421-689978.Xml
France signed several deals worth about 2.26 billion dollars with Egypt during a visit by French President Francois Hollande to Cairo, the French president's office said today.The deals included a satellite communications contract agreed upon following discussions between the two presidents and their defence ministries, the Elysee said.The military telecommunications satellite is expected to be build by France's Airbus Space Systems et Thales Alenia Space.French energy Engie firm said earlier that it also signed LNG and renewable energy contracts during the visit. REUTERS PS PR0555 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0137-689998.Xml
China's Foreign Ministry called for talks after Costa Rica's state-run oil company, Recope, said last week it had decided to abandon a 1.5 billion dollars refinery upgrade project it was working on with China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC).In 2009, the two firms formed a company called Soresco, with each putting in 50 million dollars. But the project has been paralysed since 2013 by Costa Rica's comptroller after complaints of conflicts of interest in the feasibility studies.Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he had noted the media reports on the issue, adding that relations had been developing well in recent years."As for individual problems that arise during our cooperation, we hope the relevant companies in both countries can continue to increase communication, understand each other's concerns and find an appropriate resolution," he told a daily news briefing, without elaborating.Later on Monday, a lawyer for Soresco said Costa Rica could face international arbitration and steep legal fees if Recope's decision stands."(Recope) is unilaterally deciding on the contract (and) will have to deal with the consequences," Soresco lawyer Enrique Rojas said in an interview, adding the contract stipulated that the London Court of International Arbitration could be called in to settle the matter.The upgrade at the Puerto Limon refinery would have boosted crude processing capacity to 65,000 barrels per day from 18,000 bpd.Costa Rica made the surprise move in 2007 of breaking off its decades-long relations with Taiwan, now recognised only by a handful of small countries, including the rest of Central America. China claims self-ruled Taiwan as a wayward province, to be brought under its control by force if needed.China lent Costa Rica nearly 400 million dollars in 2013 during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping. REUTERS PS PR0715 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0137-690010.Xml
Attackers armed with guns and grenades burst into a bar and opened fire, killing a woman and seriously wounding three other customers in Burundi's capital Bujumbura, police said.Officers said they were still investigating the motive for the attack in Ngagara neighbourhood, near a base housing police officers in charge of protecting government offices.Retaliatory attacks between President Pierre Nkurunziza's security forces and his opponents have escalated since April 2015 when he announced a disputed bid for a third term and then won re-election in July.Nkurunziza's opponents said his decision violated the constitution and a peace deal that ended the central African country's 1993-2005 civil war. The government cited a subsequent court ruling that said he could run again."Three people in civilian clothes and armed with guns and grenades burst into a bar opened fire on a group of people who were having beer there. One lady died instantly three others were serious injured," Deputy Police Spokesman Moise Nkurunziza told Reuters."If it was just robbery, they would have taken money and not killed innocent people," he added. "Let's wait the outcome of investigations."UN officials have said the crisis risks pushing Burundi back to the kind of ethnically charged conflict that characterised the war, in which 300,000 people died.About 250,000 people have fled since violence erupted, most to border camps in neighbouring Tanzania and more than 400 people have been killed in the ensuing violence, according to estimates by the UN and rights groups.A UN report seen by Reuters yesterday, said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has proposed sending between 20 and 3,000 police to Burundi, but warned that the government had indicated it would only accept 20 unarmed experts. REUTERS JW AS1500 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0364-690509.Xml
He's a successful businessman making his first foray into politics. He wants to secure the southern border with Mexico and dump global trade deals. And like Donald Trump, he wants to be the Republican establishment's worst nightmare.He's Paul Nehlen, who has emerged as a Republican rival to Paul Ryan, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, in his home district in Wisconsin. Ryan, the most powerful elected Republican in the country, is the epitome of that establishment.While many Republican operatives fear Trump's tumultuous presidential bid will hurt House and Senate races this year, a handful of candidates like Nehlen are embracing Trump's message, although not always the man himself.A loss by Ryan or another high-profile incumbent would send shockwaves through the party and could prompt fellow establishment Republicans to rethink positions on advocacy of free trade and support for immigration reform.In New Hampshire, where Trump won the nominating contest, or primary, by 20 points, Jim Rubens, a former Republican state senator who has endorsed the billionaire businessman, is attempting to unseat incumbent Senator Kelly Ayotte.In Arizona, another state Trump won, state senator Kelli Ward is challenging veteran Senator John McCain by talking up securing the border and courting voters at Trump rallies, although she has not endorsed the presidential candidate.The dynamic of outsiders challenging establishment candidates is one that has been taking place within the Republican Party for several election cycles, but in Trump, the insurgency has a new, more popular face.Beyond the races in Wisconsin, Arizona and New Hampshire, it has played out in states like Alabama, where Jonathan McConnell greeted voters outside a Trump rally in Huntsville in a bid to unseat veteran Senator Richard Shelby, and North Carolina, where Rep. Renee Elmers, facing a challenge to her seat, said she had voted for Trump in that state's presidential primary.But, unlike the anti-establishment wave that swept Tea Party-aligned lawmakers into Congress in 2010, these candidates do not appear to represent a new anti-Washington groundswell, suggesting there are limits to Trump's brand of politics, which at times runs deep against Republican orthodoxy on issues such as trade and taxes."I been surprised that there haven't been any Senate or House incumbents that have lost primaries as a result of a groundswell of support for Donald Trump or Ted Cruz," said Nathan Gonzales, an independent analyst on congressional races in Washington.Shelby, for example, soundly defeated challenger McConnell in Alabama's Republican primary race in March."Other candidates could try to replicate his message, but no one can replicate Donald Trump," Gonzales said.Still, many analysts and political operatives believe Republicans unhappy with Trump as the nominee won't vote in the general election, potentially causing Republicans to lose their congressional seats to Democratic contenders.TOP TARGETIt would be easy, to dismiss Nehlen's challenge to Ryan, who is popular among Republicans inside and outside of Wisconsin and has a large campaign warchest. A poll last month by Marquette University Law School showed him with more than an 80 percent approval rating among Wisconsin Republicans.But less than two years ago, Eric Cantor, then the No. 2 Republican in the House of Representatives, was also considered a rising Republican star. He suffered a shock defeat in the 2014 congressional elections in Virginia to an obscure conservative college professor, David Brat. Cantor, too, had looked unbeatable."That race is what reinforced in my mind this is possible," Nehlen said in an interview.Trump has frequently criticized Ryan for the 1.1 billion dollars budget deal struck with Democratic President Barack Obama last December. And Ryan's support of trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and comprehensive immigration reform is squarely at odds with Trump's positions.Nehlen said those two issues motivated him to mount his challenge to Ryan, although he stopped short of saying he embraced Trump's candidacy.Rubens, who is challenging Ayotte in New Hampshire, isn't as restrained. "I admire his independence," Rubens told Reuters.Rubens, like Trump, calls for a fence along the southern border and for doing away with so-called "birthright citizenship," a policy that grants anyone born on US soil a citizen.Ayotte, a first-term senator, was praised by conservatives when she ran in 2010 and was endorsed by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin at the height of Palin's popularity. But she earned their wrath when she backed immigration reform. She also frustrated moderates by voting against a bill that would block suspected terrorists from buying guns.Ayotte, Gonzales said, "is an example of someone who can't come out guns blazing against Donald Trump. She needs every Republican possible in the state."In Arizona, Ward is challenging McCain, the moderate who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, in a state where rancor over immigration issues runs high. Ward has said she supports Trump's claim that Mexico was sending criminals to the United States. Mexico has ridiculed the allegation.Ward has an opportunity. A poll released last month by the firm Public Policy Polling showed McCain with a 33 per cent approval rating among Republicans in Arizona. REUTERS JW AS1625 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0364-690696.Xml
The report said Ri led a delegation to attend the signing ceremony and the high-level debate on achieving sustainable development goals, but did not elaborate on the schedule of visit, Xinhua reported.

Earlier this month, the UN spokesperson's office confirmed Ri's attendance but said a meeting between Ri and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the sidelines cannot be confirmed.

More than 130 countries have confirmed to sign the Paris Agreement at the ceremony on Friday, according to the UN.

Agreed by 195 countries at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in December 2015, the Paris Agreement sets a target of keeping the global average rise in temperature below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and preferably below 1.5 degrees.

On the basis of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, developed countries agreed to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries transform their economies.

--Indo-Asian News Service py/dg

( 195 Words)

2016-04-19-18:48:10 (IANS)
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said today he and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin had agreed a framework for a deal to secure the release of Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko from a 22-year jail sentence in Russia.The sentencing of two captured Russian servicemen in Ukraine yesterday fuelled speculation that they might be swapped for Savchenko, 34, who was found guilty of involvement in the killing of two Russian journalists in 2014 during Ukraine's separatist conflict. She has denied any involvement."Yesterday I initiated a conversation with Putin and based on preliminary preparations it seems to me we have managed to agree on a certain algorithm to free Nadezhda," Poroshenko told journalists.The sentencing of the Russian soldiers "opens certain possibilities of initiating a swap. But I strongly urge no speculation about a timeframe for (her) return or future steps."In her homeland, Savchenko is a regarded as a national hero and symbol of resistance to Russia, which annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in March 2014 after a Moscow-backed president was toppled during street protests in Kiev. Russia has also backed separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.But many in Russia see her as a Ukrainian nationalist with the blood of civilians on her hands.She was captured by pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine in June 2014 at the height of fighting there between the Kiev government's forces and Russian-backed separatists.At her trial in Donetsk in Russia earlier this year she was accused of directing artillery fire that killed two Russian television journalists.Poroshenko said he had spoken to Savchenko by telephone and that she had agreed to end a hunger strike she has been observing on-and-off since late last year.Speculation that a deal might be afoot increased with the sentencing of two Russian soldiers, Alexander Alexandrov and his commander, Captain Yevgeny Yerofeyev, to 14 years in jail. The pair were captured almost a year ago in eastern Ukraine and subsequently charged with preparing "an act of terror".Russia denies sending members of its military to help the rebels and says Alexandrov and Yerofeyev had quit their special forces unit to take part in Ukraine's conflict on their own initiative.Last week Putin said he was in touch with Ukraine's leaders regarding the Savchenko case, but that "it's better not to get ahead of ourselves."Yesterday Poroshenko said Putin had agreed to grant Ukraine's Consul General in Rostov-on-Don access to Savchenko. One of her lawyers said the diplomat had visited the prisoner today.REUTERS JW NS1943 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0364-691300.Xml
Mentally ill man shot dead by police

The officer, identified as PC Ramkissoon, sustained chop wounds and also sought medical attention at the same health institution.

He was attended to and later discharged. According to a police report, at about 6 am Ramkissoon and other officers from Point Fortin Police Station responded to a report from a resident of Baptist Road who complained about the behaviour of a man occupying a dilapidated house in the area.

The man was said to be throwing stones. Upon arrival, officers observed Richards wielding a cutlass.

The elderly man is said to have approached the officers who called on him to drop the weapon. He refused and chopped PC Ramkissoon twice. Officers drew their firearms and fired several times, hitting Richards. Both he and PC Ramkissoon were rushed to the Point Fortin Area Hospital where the former later died. ASP Hunte and Sgt Corrie, along with other officers, visited the scene. Investigations are continuing
Mom arrested in daughters abortion

However, she was released after giving a statement to police.

A doctor from Chaguanas is being investigated in connection with the abortion. Last Wednesday, acting on a report, detectives visited the teens home and spoke with the 16-yearold girl about having attended a doctors office where an abortion was performed. The girl was said to be three months pregnant.

The foetus was sent to the Forensic Sciences Centre for an autopsy.

However, yesterday, Dr Valery Alexandrov, in a report submitted to the police, said an autopsy is not warranted on a foetus if it is less than 22 month old. A police report stated yesterday that they were advised that if a foetus was aborted, then an autopsy is conducted.

Section 56 of the Offences Against the Persons Act forbids a woman from using any method to destroy a child in her womb, or anyone using an instrument, to achieve same.

Police said yesterday that the investigations are ongoing, in which the doctor has already been interviewed. A file will be compiled and sent to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions for legal advice. WPC Mohan is investigating.
Two plead guilty to shallow grave murder

Allens body was found at the back of a house at Macaulay Village, Claxton Bay, buried in a makeshift grave on December 19, 2005. He was choked and stabbed with a fork in the stomach. Two men, Nigel Rodrique alias Cat, 38, and Wendell Simon, 35, both of Claxton Bay, were in 2008 committed by Senior Magistrate Marcia Ayers-Caesar, to stand trial in the High Court for Allens murder. The State had led evidence from 23 witnesses in a preliminary inquiry hearing, in which State Attorney Shabhana Shah prosecuted. Yesterday, Rodrique and Simon pleaded guilty before Justice Maria Wilson in the San Fernando High Court to murder. State Attorney Hema Soondarsingh, instructed by Kimberly Gunness, related some facts about the incident in which Allen was abducted and taken in a car to Macaulay Village. Prosecutor Soondarsingh also related how Rodrique and Simon were arrested and how they co-operated with detectives in locating the shallow grave. Attorneys Carol Anne Foderingham and Steadson Jack, represented both accused men. Wilson ordered that a bio-social report be done on both accused, as well as a Probation Officers report be submitted.

The Judge also ordered the State filed the past criminal record, if any, of both men. She adjourned the case to May 9.
Police charge two for human-trafficking

A statement from the Ministry of National Security said the duo were due to appear in Port of Spain Magistrates Court yesterday.

Police Corporal Ricardo Sealey of the Ministrys Counter Trafficking Unit (CTU) charged the suspects after receiving a report from the San Fernando Police Station in February. They are Nigel Ramai and his common-law wife Reanna Meetoo.

Ramai was charged under the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Act Chapter 12:10 for receiving a woman for the purpose of exploitation under Section 4 A (1) of the Sexual Offences Act Chapter 11:28. Ramai and Meetoo were also charged for committing grievous sexual assault on the Venezuelan national.

The TIP Act says persons found guilty of human trafficking are liable to a fine of at least $500,000 and imprisonment of at least 15 years.

The rescued Venezuelan woman brings the count of victims identified by the CTU to 30, since it was established in January 2013.

To date, 18 Trinidad and Tobago nationals have been charged for human trafficking and related offences.

If persons know or suspect human trafficking activity, they are asked to call CTUs toll-free Hotline at 800-4288 (4CTU).
Doc appeals Govt order to repay scholarship $

In an oral ruling yesterday, Justices of Appeal Allan Mendonca, Nolan Bereaux and Judith Jones allowed Dr Ryan Wellingtons appeal and set aside the orders of Justice Nadia Kangaloo.

Wellington was ordered by Kangaloo to repay over $3 million when he failed to attend the start of the civil trial brought by the Office of the Attorney General.

Presiding over the appeal were Justices of Appeal Mendonca, Bereaux and Jones, have reserved their ruling on the appeal.

Kangaloo, in March, declined to grant an adjournment to Wellingtons lawyer and entered judgment against him.

In delivering the ruling, Mendonca held that the trial judge placed too great a reliance on the trial date and failed to consider the overriding objective of the Civil Proceedings Rules which ensures that all parties were on equal footing at trial.

The appellate judges held that Wellington would have encountered some difficulties with the change of attorneys weeks before the trial and his inability to make arrangement with his new attorneys would have left him without proper representation.

Mendonca said the case warranted a short adjournment as had been sought by the scholars attorney at trial.

The Education Ministry, which filed the action against the scholarship winner, alleged that Wellington signed an agreement after being awarded an open scholarship in 2003 to obtain a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) at the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin, Ireland.

For the five years of his studies the Government paid Wellingtons tuition fees and he was given textbook and personal maintenance allowances.

Under the agreement, Wellington, as is the case with other scholars, was required to repay the Government if he failed to work in TT for the period of their foreign studies.

Kangaloo ordered that Wellington repay the $1,734,994.30 expended by the Government on his studies in addition to $1,328,764.64 in interest calculated at the rate of 7.75 percent from the date of his graduation.

The judge also ordered him to pay legal costs incurred by the State in the sum of $194,227.98.

The State was represented by attorneys Lesley Ann Lucky-Samaroo, Nadine Nabbie and Kendra Mark, while attorneys Kerwyn Garcia and Kyle Rudder appeared for Wellington.
Robocop charged with two offences

Alexis, who was jointly charged with his 25-year-old son Kerron Alexis and Imam Moilan Lynch, 52, appeared before Senior Magistrate Jo-Anne Connor in the Chaguanas First Court.

Kerron Alexis and Lynch were granted bail in the sum of $40,000.

All three were arrested on Friday last at Circular Drive, Crown Trace, Enterprise. It is alleged that they, together with other people, took part in a riot.

The charges were laid in accordance with provisions of Section 5 (4) of the Riot Act.

The trio will return to court on May 16. They were represented by attorney Keith Beckles.

The charges were laid by Cpl Basant of the Chaguanas police
Attorney: Somebody setting up this court

After two years we are no where close to solving what happened to this lady, said defence attorney Joseph Pantor in his closing address to the jury yesterday.

Pantor, who represents Anthony Dwayne Gloster at the trial, told the jury that even after two years, they still could not be sure how Naipaul-Coolman was killed and where.

And you cant be sure she was killed on the pool table. The State is not sure when she was killed. Somebody setting up this court, he said, advising the jurors that they could not convict his client unless they are sure of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Everybody snatch up this case and running with it. They are trying to make a case but have no evidence to support it, Pantor said.

Since the trial began in March 2014, prosecutors have claimed that Naipaul-Coolman was held captive in a house at Upper La Puerta, Diego Martin, before she was killed and her body disposed of.

It has been advanced by the prosecution that the Xtra Foods chief executive officer was sawed up like a piece of meat and her dismembered body disposed at sea by her kidnappers who grew frustrated that their demands for money were not being met.

Naipaul-Coolman was abducted from her home at Lange Park, Chaguanas, on December 19, 2006. A $122,000 ransom was paid by her family but she was not released and her body has never been found.

It is alleged that she was killed three days after Christmas of 2006.

But Pantor drew the jurys attention to the indictment filed against his client which indicated that Naipaul-Coolman was murdered sometime between December 18, 2006 and May 12, 2007.

The State is not sure when she was killed, he said. He also questioned testimony of Naipaul-Coolmans husband, Rennie Coolman, who said he heard a voice sounding like that of his wife in February 2007. Pantor also discredited the evidence of the prosecutions main witness, Keon Gloster, whom he described as being not normal and unreliable .

He also said the pool table was examined on two occasions by crime scene experts and no evidence that a person was killed was found, nor was there evidence of a body being cut into pieces at the unfinished red brick house at La Puerta.

In his closing remarks, Pantor told the jury that they had to come to a decision on the evidence. Come to a decision, one you can live with.

What I can tell you is that you cannot be sure this woman was killed on a pool table, he said.

Pantor referred to the evidence relating to the hole in which Naipaul- Coolmans body parts were said to have been buried before it was dug up and disposed of at sea.

There was nothing from the hole. You can conclude they had latrine holes all over the place, he said.

When the trial continues today, defence attorney Wayne Sturge is expected to begin his closing address to the jury.

Those on trial are twin brothers Shervon and Devon Peters, siblings Keida and Jamille Garcia and their older brother Anthony Dwayne Gloster, brothers Marlon and Earl Trimmingham, Ronald Armstrong, Antonio Charles and Lyndon James.

One man - Joel Fraser- was freed by presiding judge Malcolm Holdip in January, while another Allan Scanny Martins was killed in a shootout with police following his escape from prison last July.
John Doe, the human torch

According to reports, at about 4.15 am, two men were seen at Minachy Alley involved in what appeared to be a struggle.

An eyewitness is reported to have later told police that one of the men was seen dousing the other with a liquid and the victim was set on fire.

This was followed by a loud explosion.

No one went to the assistance of the victim until an hour later, by which time, he was burnt beyond recognition.

Officers of the Besson Street Police Station were contacted along with the District Medical Officer and the area was cordoned off.

The body was ordered removed to the Forensic Science Centre and, up until late yesterday, there was no positive identification. When Newsday visited the scene, no one was willing to give any information about the incident.

Officers of the Homicide Bureau are continuing investigations.

In an unrelated incident a Chaguanas man was shot dead in the living room of his home at about 10.15 am on Sunday. According to reports, Leon Goldman, 43, of Fern Drive, Edinburgh 500, was last seen by relatives at about 11 pm on Saturday. However, at about 10.15 am on Sunday, relatives were alerted to a loud explosion and on checking they discovered the front door of the house open.

In the living room they saw Goldman in a crouched position with a blood-soaked sheet around his head.
Burn your dead elsewhere

At this time please make alternative arrangements for cremation activities usually conducted at this location .

Entry onto the site will be deemed a trespass which may result in legal proceedings against such person or persons. The notice was signed: by private landowner .

However, Avocat/ San Francique North councillor Rajwantee Bullock, said the family was in the process of claiming ownership of approximately 1,000 acres of lands in the area which comprised the cremation site .

The cremation site is part of 1,000 acres that the (name called) family is claiming, Bullock told Newsday .

We have launched an investigation into whether they are the legal owners as they are claiming. We are in the process of gathering information and I think that is why they are hurriedly doing all of this, before the truth comes to light that they are not really the owners of the land, and they get as much money from the State, before the truth comes out, she said .

Bullock said she had attended a meeting at which a member of the family, threatened to close the cremation site and I told him that is bad judgment because you cannot show bad faith if an investigation is ongoing to show that you are the legitimate owner. She said the claim of ownership had been made last year and the process of acquiring the lands had begun but was stopped pending proof of ownership .

Asked what action the corporation could take should the family carry out their threat to restrict access to the site, for public cremations, Bullock said: We will have to file an injunction against them. Former works and infrastructure minister Dr Suruj Rambachan said the family could not just walk in and close the cremation site, as it had been under the control of the St Patrick County Council and later the Siparia Regional Corporation, since 1983 .

He said any claims for compensation would have to be handled by the corporation .

I dont think they (the family) officially can do that, Rambachan said, adding, that is a matter that dates back to 1983 when the site was first constructed. Rambachan pointed out that coastal erosion works, costing approximately $42 million, are currently underway to shore up the site which is in danger of falling into the sea .

Since 1983, when this cremation site was first built, over 25,000 persons have been cremated on this site so therefore there is a lot of memories for over 25,000 families on this site, so to just go and remove this site from here, you will be emotionally affecting a very important group of people in the country. Meanwhile, secretary general of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (SDMS) Satnarayan Maharaj, was of the opnion that the land had long been acquired by government .

He said if the cremation site is closed, it would place the Hindu community in South Trinidad in a predicament over cremation of deceased relatives .

There is no cremation site close by, they would have to go to Central or North Trinidad or the Rio Claro area, Maharaj said as he called on Government to intervene in the matter .
Repsol offering VSEP

The company said the offer is only for its permanent employees but excludes unionised workers; staff who have already retired from the company or submitted resignation letters before April 15; non-nationals on assignment in this country and locals on foreign assignments.

Repsol has 198 employees and 90 percent of them are locals.

Eleven permanent staff were sent home in January and contract workers were sent home in 2015. The company has said it is forced to take these measures in order to survive this period of low energy prices.
More former SSA employees threaten lawsuit

Security Field Specialist Nyron Dookeran and senior field officer Doolam Rekha yesterday, through their lawyers, issued pre-action protocol letters, challenging their dismissals from the security agency.

Last week, five former SSA directors, former director Bisnath Maharaj; former deputy director Keron Ganpat; former director of intelligence Carlton Dennie; former assistant director information and communications technology Alanzo Flemming and assistant director of administration Seukeran Singh  sent out similar letters, alleging victimisation and insisting the decision to terminate their contracts were illegal.

Rekha, who was fired on February 11, is seeking compensation in the sum of $346,680.

According to Rekha the reason given for his termination was loss of confidence and trust by the Minister of National Security in his ability to perform his duties as senior field officer.

Rekhas letter spoke of alleged racial conspiracy targeting East Indian officers of the agency.

Naturally, this is a cause for grave concern given the rather obscure reason given to my client about the alleged loss of confidence by the Minister of National Security. It will be extremely dangerous and disappointing if my client was dismissed on the basis of racial considerations as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing of East Indian employees for reasons best known to those in charge of the Agency, wrote Kent Samlal, on behalf of Rekha.

Rekha said East Indians comprised a minority in the agency and that number had been substantially whittled down even further by the recent firings.

Rekha called on the National Security Minister to explain why he suddenly lost confidence in employees at the agency.

He also said he intended to report the matter to the Equal Opportunities Commission, since according to his contract an employee had to be warned of any short comings and given an opportunity to response, improve and correct any perceived issues with his performance on the job.

Dookeran, who was also fired on the same day, is claiming $689,080 in loss of earnings and gratuity.

According to his termination letter, the minister had also lost confidence and trust in his ability to perform his duties at the agency.

He too spoke of the alleged conspiracy to rid the agency of East Indians.

Both men have given the State 21 days in which to respond to their letters.
Accident baby fighting for life at hospital

Bing Zhao Chen, 37, and the second of his three sons, four-yearold John Chen, who sustained minor injuries about their bodies, were discharged yesterday morning and are now resting at their San Fernando home. Meanwhile Chens eldest son nine- year-old Ming Bin and baby Luke remain warded.

The childrens mother Xiuxian Laing, 31, succumbed to her injuries while undergoing emergency surgery at the hospital on Saturday evening. Police reports said that at about 3 pm, Chen was driving a Nissan Wingroad near the St Joseph Village, San Fernando traffic light intersection when the vehicle collided with a Hyundai Santa Fe SUV, driven by Reshma Ramcharan, 39, proceeding in a southerly direction.

The SUV crashed into the left side of the Wingroad. Ramcharans ten year old son, Aaiden was a back seat passenger of the vehicle. The mother and son of Bedeau Street, Gasparillo sustained minor injuries and were yesterday discharged from the hospital.

When Newsday visited the Chen family home at home yesterday, a family friend said that relatives were in a state of shock. It is really, really, sad what happened, the relative said.

PC Bicanno of the Mon Repos Police Station, is continuing investigations
$58M reached since March 22

A media release from the Ministry of Planning and Development gave information on funds received.

The funds were received March 22, 2016, the media release, issued by a spokesman, said. The funds would be placed in the Treasury Suspense Account and then brought to account under the Consolidated Fund (Grants). Two Fridays ago, Rowley was asked by Caroni Central MP Dr Bhoe Tewarie to say when the farmers will be paid. Tewarie said, In light of the receipt of funds from the European Union to pay for cane farmers, could the Prime Minister indicate when will the cane farmers receive the balance of their payments? Rowley replied, It is clear that the Member for Caroni Central is not prepared to listen to the facts from the Ministry of Finance.

This matter has been addressed by the authority on Governments receipts and that is the Minister of Finance. The Minister of Finance has told the country that we have received no such funds. As of this moment speaking to you, the situation remains the same.

No funds, as implied or stated by the Member for Caroni East, have been received with respect to this matter of monies for cane farmers from the EU. Tewarie replied, I think with the best of intentions on the part of the Prime Minister that the Prime Minister is misinformed on this matter...I dont want to say that the Prime Minister is wrong. Rowley then said, I have to rely on the authorities in the Ministry of Finance and I am sitting next to the Minister of Finance.

However, the matter can be looked into in the event that  since I have been spoken to  the matter has been sent anywhere in the Government. I am not now in possession of any information that monies have been received by the Government on this matter.

If the money has been sent and it is not yet known to me or the Minister of Finance I dont know. The matter can be looked into. On Wednesday last, at a PNM meeting at Malabar, Rowley said, I understand that $52 million have come from the EU, and because they had agreed to give it to the cane farmers, we will carry out the commitment, because the word of the Government must mean something to the people of Trinidad and Tobago. While a figure of $52 million was quoted by Rowley on Wednesday, the Ministrys media release yesterday indicated the figure was $57.96 million.

The funds were received as grant resources from the EU under the Accompanying Measures for Sugar Protocol Countries Programme, the Ministry of Planning said.

The amount received is TT$57.96 million. The Ministry said a Cabinet note on the status of the payment had been submitted in February.

A note was prepared and submitted to Cabinet by the Ministry of Planning and Development in February 2016, with a Report on the status of payment of compensation packages to the Cane Farmers as a final settlement to the 2007 Transitional Payment out of the Sugar Industry, the Ministry said. This report is being considered by the Attorney General, and the Ministers of Finance and Agriculture, Land and Fisheries.
UNC hits Govt on crime

I am of the comprehensive view that crime has spiraled out of control in the past seven months, posing great danger to the welfare of our citizens, Lee asserted yesterday.

Testament to this fact is the homicide rate which averages 1.3 murders per day and is the highest in the past five years according to the Police Service. He said citizens do not feel safe to undertake their daily activities and do not properly enjoy their basic Constitutional rights to the enjoyment of life and property.

Lee accused the Government of failing to show a political will to institute strategic plans to address this grave situation, even as the population has been asked by the protective services to brace themselves for more murders, as reported this week.

He queried Minister of National Security, Edmund Dillons, recent denial of any spike in crime when asked by Opposition Leader, Kamla Persad- Bissessar.

Lee challenged, One therefore wonders if the Minister of National Security would be desirous of changing his answer given the current state of affairs?.
No charges for Learmonds surgery

Learmond and the local theatre community had been raising funds so he could undergo bypass surgery. It was reported that the surgery would cost $110,000.

In an article on Sunday, Learmond had bemoaned the fact that they had not even reached even half of the targeted amount.

The actor suffered a heart attack more than a month ago, and doctors later discovered he was suffering from high blood pressure and clogged arteries.

However, Rampersad said that Caribbean Heart Care was not charging for the surgery which is scheduled to take place on Thursday.

You know how the Trinidadian population is, I dont want anybody to think that I taking money from this guy for surgery, because I am not.

This is the EW MSC, so the Health Ministry pays for everything. His (Learmond) surgery has been approved by the Ministry for a long time and he knows that.

Maybe he is trying to get funds for some other reason, I dont know and that is not my concern.

My concern is I dont want the Ministry or anybody else to think I am taking money from this guy, Rampersad said.

However, when contacted yesterday, Learmond said he has mentioned on several occasions that the Ministry might be paying for his surgery but he was not sure.

Also, strangely enough, Learmond said he did not know that it was confirmed that he was down for surgery on Thursday and that he had been approved by the Ministry for a long time.

Thanks for letting me know, no one told me. I was kind of anxious because I was thinking it would have put me in an embarrassing situation if I had checked in and the Ministry had refused, Learmond told Newsday.
What you need to know about the Octagon Art Festival on Sunday in Ames

news
U.S. government remains indifferent as the rest of the world moves towards ban on glyphosate

Theres no denying it  an increasing number of countries have now been joining the battle against Monsanto and its products. In the Netherlands, for instance, the Dutch parliament already voted to ban the sale of glyphosate-based herbicides to private parties. Initially, Monsantos connections prevented the enactment of the proposal; however, thanks to the influence of the Party for Animals  a Dutch political party placing an emphasis on animal rights and welfare  the ban was eventually put into effect.

Glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsantos Roundup herbicide, has been linked to a variety of diseases, including headaches, skin rashes, mood changes and, of course, cancer. (For more information about this devastating disease, please visit the Natural Cancer Prevention Summit.) While the Dutch parliaments decision sets an ideal precedent for the U.S. government, it seems that Monsantos clout amongst U.S. legislators remains strong.

For instance, despite the fact that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), declared that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic to humans, Monsanto maintains that the product is safe, when used as directed by the label. Furthermore, they argue that the IARC findings are flawed, declaring in a press release that relevant, scientific data was excluded from review, among other things.

In a May 2015 episode of The Doctors, Monsanto scientist Dr. Donna Farmer even expressed her confidence in glyphosates safety for human health, stating: Ive seen those headlines and I know people have lots of questions. I am extremely, highly confident in this product as a mom and then I can back it up as a scientist.

Aside from capitalizing on her role as a mom, her statements in support of Monsanto also included mentions of how Germany has found no issues with glyphosate and how the IARC also assesses other potential health hazards, such as cellphone use and canned pickles.

Dr. Farmer stood firm in her views even when Jeffrey Smith, the author of Seeds of Deception, cited specific cases in the United States and France where courts convicted Monsanto for lying about glyphosate levels in soil, as well as the fact that the chemical has long been linked to causing problems in the endocrine system.

While more and more citizens concerned about the dangers of glyphosate are now participating in movements to undermine Monsantos influence, the United States government unfortunately remains steadfast in its decision to support the GMO-loving corporation.

In fact, up to this day, the Congress, the FDA and the Obama administration continue to ignore the clamor of millions of Americans for GMO labeling in the country. Meanwhile, numerous regions have banned the chemical, including Canada, Sri Lanka and Colombia, which recently voted to end the aerial spraying of glyphosate to kill coca plants in the fight on drugs.

Whether or not well see a total Monsanto ban in this lifetime remains to be seen.

Sources used:

NaturalNews.com

CSGlobe.com

Science.NaturalNews.com

FoodForensics.com

Submit a correction >>
The Bohai Strait Tunnel or Dalian-Yantai Tunnel project proposes the construction of an underwater tunnel to connect Dalian on the Liaodong Peninsula to Yantai on the Shandong Peninsula. Another name for the project is Cross-Bohai-Strait channel.

Crossing the Bohai Strait the tunnel would be 123 kilometers (76 mi) long, 90 kilometers (56 mi) of it under water. This would exceed the combined lengths of the two longest undersea tunnels on Earth, the Seikan Tunnel and the Channel tunnel.

The planned high speed railway would traverse Bohai Bay, connecting Dalian in the south of Liaoning province with the Shandong province city of Yantai. It will reduce travel time across Bohai Bay to a mere 40 minutes, Wang commented.

At present, a ferry ride across the bay takes about eight hours, while traveling between the two cities by vehicle means covering 1,400 kilometers of coastal roads.

A tunnel between Hong Kong-Macau-Guangzhou-Shenzhen and Zhuhai was considered but Hong Kong Macau bridge is being built instead.

This tunnel will be building experience for even longer tunnels.

The Taiwan Strait Tunnel Project is a proposed undersea tunnel to connect Pingtan in China to Hsinchu in Taiwan as part of the G3 BeijingTaipei Expressway It would be 150 kilometers long.

A tunnel could link Incheon, South Korea and Weihai of Shandong Province. They are about 340 kilometers apart.

A Bering Strait tunnel would not be as long relative to the other big tunnel projects. A Bering Strait tunnel would be about 103-kilometers (64 mi) long. The Bering strait is no deeper than 55 meters.

With the two Diomede Islands between the peninsulas, the Bering Strait could be spanned by three bridges. Two long bridges, each almost 40 kilometers (25 mi) long, would connect the mainland on each side to one island, and a third much shorter one between the two islands.
The DARPA Vertical Take-Off/Landing X-plane (VTOL x-plane) Program achieved a critical milestone as Aurora Flight Sciences subscale vehicle demonstrator successfully flew at a U.S. military facility. The flight of the subscale aircraft met an important DARPA risk reduction requirement, focusing on validation of the aerodynamic design and flight control system

The successful subscale aircraft flight was an important and exciting step for Aurora and our customer, said Tom Clancy, Auroras chief technology officer. Our designs distributed electric propulsion system involves breaking new ground with a flight control system requiring a complex set of control effectors. This first flight is an important, initial confirmation that both the flight controls and aerodynamic design are aligning with our design predictions.

The subscale aircraft weighs 325 pounds and is a 20% scale flight model of the full scale demonstrator Aurora will build for DARPA in the next 24 months. The wing and canard of the subscale vehicle utilize a hybrid structure of carbon fiber and 3D printed FDM plastics to achieve highly complex structural and aerodynamic surfaces with minimal weight. The unmanned aircraft take-off, hover and landing was controlled by Aurora personnel located in a nearby ground control station with oversight and coordination by U.S. government officials including DARPA personnel.

On March 3, 2016, DARPA announced the award of the Phase II contract for the VTOL X-Plane contract to Aurora, following a multi-year, Phase I design competition. The program seeks to develop a vertical take-off and landing demonstrator aircraft that will achieve a top sustained flight speed of 300 kt  400 kt, with 60-75% increase in hover efficiency over existing VTOL aircraft. Auroras design is for the first aircraft in aviation history to demonstrate distributed hybrid-electric propulsion using an innovative synchronous electric-drive system. Having successfully completed the subscale demonstrator flight, Auroras LightningStrike team will focus over the next year on further validation of flight control system and configuration of the full scale VTOL X-Plane demonstrator.

SOURCES  Aurora Flight Sciences, DARPA
Weather Alert

...A TORNADO WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 615 PM CDT FOR NORTHEASTERN MADISON...WAYNE...SOUTHEASTERN PIERCE AND NORTHWESTERN STANTON COUNTIES... At 553 PM CDT, a confirmed tornado was located over Norfolk, moving northeast at 75 mph. HAZARD...Damaging tornado and quarter size hail. SOURCE...Public confirmed tornado. IMPACT...Flying debris will be dangerous to those caught without shelter. Mobile homes will be damaged or destroyed. Damage to roofs, windows, and vehicles will occur. Tree damage is likely. This tornado will be near... Winside around 605 PM CDT. Other locations in the path of this tornadic thunderstorm include Carroll and Wayne. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... To repeat, a tornado is on the ground. TAKE COVER NOW! Move to a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. Avoid windows. If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris. && TORNADO...OBSERVED; MAX HAIL SIZE...1.00 IN
Mayor of Algeciras, Jose Ignacio Landaluce, chairman of the senate Foreign Affairs and Cooperation Committee, is expected this Tuesday in Morocco to boost economic and commercial ties with the North African Kingdom.

During the visit, Mr. Jose Ignacio will meet with several Moroccans officials including foreign Affairs and cooperation minister Salaheddine Mezouar and speakers of the two Chambers of Moroccan Parliament Talbi Alami and Hakim Benchamach.

Bilateral trade between Morocco and Spain increased by nearly 11 pc during the period 2004-2014, compared with the total trade exchanges which increased by 9 pc.

Spain and France are Moroccos biggest trade partners. Moroccan-Spanish relations constitute an important example of NorthSouth relations in the Mediterranean.

While economic relations between the two countries are competitive in certain areas, the broader picture is of complementary interests which are likely to grow as the development of these countries intensifies.

About 20,000 Spanish companies operating in various business sectors export their products towards Morocco. Spanish exports towards Morocco increased by 6.9 pc reaching 2.97 billion euros in 2014.

Many Spanish agricultural companies installed in Morocco due to lower labor costs and have gained competitive edge. Morocco is known internationally as one of the largest exporters of tomatoes and citrus.

Thanks to its political and economic stability, Morocco offers great investment opportunities for Spanish companies which are showing growing interest in the huge opportunities in the country.

Morocco offers Spanish businesses a gateway to other markets, mainly in Africa. It is also the first market in Africa for Spanish companies.
Lawmakers opposed to the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) Monday disrupted meeting of the internationally recognized legislature to back the unity government.

The long-waited April 18 confidence vote did not take place as deputies opposed to the GNA managed to halt the meeting said to have gathered 150 lawmakers most of whom were in favor of Prime Minister-designate Faiez Serrajs unity government.

Libya Herald reports that a handful of deputies led by Isa Al-Araibi and Talal Al-Maihub prevented their colleagues from registering for the session and entering the chamber.

In a bid to calm tensions, the Parliament which was chaired by the first two deputy-presidents; Emhemed Shouaib and Ahmaid Huma, in the absence of President Ageela Saleh accepted to form a committee of six members in favor of the GNA and six others opposed to it to coordinate a session on Tuesday.

UNSMIL Head Martin Kobler held talks with Saleh in a bid to convince him to rally voices of the MPs behind the GNA as soon as possible.

Also on Monday in a separate report, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond met with Serraj at Bu Setta naval base in Tripoli where Serraj has put up his temporary headquarters.

Hammond pledged $14.3 million help to shore up the GNA in tackling insecurity, economy, human trafficking, and public service.

Britain and its allies fully support Prime Minister Fayez Serraj and his government as they restore peace and stability to the whole of Libya. We stand ready to provide further assistance to Libya and its people, Hammond said.

UKs assistance follows that of Germany announced last week by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier who pledged 3 million in emergency aid plus a further 10 million for the Libya Stabilization Fund.

Libya is slowly rebuilding its diplomatic ties with western countries which have been flying in Tripoli to trumpet their support to the GNA and its nominal Prime Minister.

Italian, French Foreign Ministers also visited Tripoli.
Spanish security forces early Tuesday arrested a Moroccan man on the island of Mollora. The man is accused of having links with terrorist organizations.

Spanish authorities did not disclose the name of the suspect accused of coordinating possible terror attacks in Spain and across Europe. A statement by the Interior Ministry also accused the man of recruiting fighters to join Syria and Iraq. Investigations are under way to nab possible network members, authorities added in the statement.

Security level across Spain has been increased since Paris November attacks. Security forces busted in February a well organized terror cell which funneled arms and money to IS and Al-Nusra terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq.

The seven-member cell was made up one Syrian, one Moroccan and five Spaniards of Syrian, Jordanian and Moroccan origin. It was accused of dispatching arms, military equipment, bomb material, and electronic devices disguised as humanitarian shipments destined for the jihadist groups in the Middle East.

According to Spanish authorities figures, more than 82 alleged jihadists have been arrested in Spain since the beginning of 2015. 19 people in connection with jihadism have been arrested in 2016.
Believe. Photo: Bo Rader/Wichita Eagle

Supply-side economics has been about as good for the people of Kansas as human sacrifice was for the Mayans. Which is to say that both irrational prescriptions for winning the favor of higher powers (be they job creators or gods) imposed terrible costs on their respective civilizations while failing to fend off disaster. Now, even some of the Sunflower States low-priests of the supply-side faith are entertaining doubts.

Kansas governor Sam Brownback won two terms in the governors mansion preaching the virtues of cutting taxes on the rich. With the enthusiastic support of Republicans in the state legislature, Brownback slashed the top personal-income tax rate by 29 percent and eliminated all income taxes on 330,000 farmers and business owners. This largess was supposed to stimulate a frenzy of investment that would turn the Sunflower State into a conservative utopia of freedom and full employment. But, somehow, the job creators were displeased by Brownbacks offering. In 2015, job growth in Kansas was a mere 0.1 percent, even as the nations economy grew 1.9 percent. Brownback pledged to bring 100,000 new jobs to the state in his second term; as of January, he had brought 700.

Meanwhile, the states finances came to resemble those of a gambling addict. In 2015, Kansas missed its monthly revenue projections 11 times. Since November, tax collections have come in $81 million below expectations. In the last two months, Governor Brownback has cut $17 million in university funding and delayed $93 million in pension contributions for school teachers and community-college employees, while siphoning off ever more money from the states highway projects  over the past two years, more than $750 million has been diverted from infrastructure plans.

Now, as each new month brings another budget gap to be filled, even Brownbacks former champions in the state legislature are losing their faith. Per the Associated Press:

Now many of the same Republicans who helped pass Brownbacks plan are in open revolt, refusing to help the governor cut spending so he can avoid rolling back any of his signature tax measures. If Brownback wont reconsider any of the tax cuts, they say, he will have to figure out for himself how to balance the budget in the face of disappointing revenue.



Let him own it, Republican Rep. Mark Hutton said. Its his policy that put us there.

In the abstract, low taxes and small government sound pretty good to Kansas voters. But when the rubber meets the pot-hole-filled road, people would rather have a functioning public-school system than more opulent McMansions. According to the AP, Republican legislators are worried about signing on to more spending cuts in an election year, because their very conservative constituents seem to hate spending cuts (in March, Brownback enjoyed a 21 percent approval rating in the state, four points behind Barack Obama). Thus, Republican dissidents are demanding tax hikes: Specifically, they want Brownback to repeal the tax exemption for farmers and business owners to raise more than $200 million in additional, annual revenue. The conservative-leaning think tank the Tax Foundation also encourages the exemptions repeal.

Even the Tax Foundation says that Kansas' massive tax cuts have been an utter policy failure https://t.co/bfiK8hU9pl pic.twitter.com/vHKbThVmE5  Jordan Weissmann (@JHWeissmann) April 19, 2016

The governor is waiting for Wednesdays new budget projections before announcing his new plan to balance the books. But his office has indicated that higher taxes on small businesses will not be among his proposals. Brownback doesnt have to worry about Kansas voters anymore, since he is not allowed to seek a third-term in office. And on the national stage, his staunch defense of the Laffer curve may actually endear him to Republican voters, who are presently choosing between three different denominations of Brownbacks supply-side creed.
Such bravery. Photo: Mark Wilson/2016 Getty Images

Michigan governor Rick Snyder is going to great lengths to win back the publics trust. Despite the fact that his administration is likely to blame for several deaths in Flint, Michigan, after the citys water was found to contain dangerous levels of lead, Snyder has refused to resign  Thats not what Michiganders do, he told Michigan Live earlier this month. Instead, Snyder has pledged to do the unthinkable to restore his constituents faith in him: He will drink (filtered) Flint water for 30 days.

I completely understand why some Flint residents are hesitant to drink the water and I am hopeful I can alleviate some of the skepticism and mistrust by putting words to action, Snyder told the Detroit Free Press. Flint residents made it clear that they would like to see me personally drink the water, so today I am fulfilling that request.

To prove his commitment to the cause, Snyder posted multiple photos to his Twitter account of himself drinking filtered Flint water, which he took from a genuine faucet in the home of a Flint resident. Hes even said his wife will drink the water, too.

Spent time with Cheryl, a Flint resident, at her home in the city and drank filtered #Flint water with her. pic.twitter.com/MQtgILxeKv  Governor Rick Snyder (@onetoughnerd) April 18, 2016

I'll drink filtered #Flint water at work & at home for the next 30 days --> https://t.co/LPKyZQPcLk @MLive photos: https://t.co/oGNtlJAvXR  Governor Rick Snyder (@onetoughnerd) April 18, 2016

But for some reason, Flint residents dont seem impressed.

@onetoughnerd @MLive No pre-testing. Drink it from a house sixth lead supply lines. Take it with you in bottles. Then resign  Peter Richardson (@Peteelew) April 18, 2016

@onetoughnerd @MLive great to see this! Forgive me if I ask for impartial third-party verification. Also, your grandkids gotta drink it.  Cadence Cellardoor (@cobaltskky) April 18, 2016

Sorry we poisoned your kids, now watch this stunt!  Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) April 19, 2016

Perhaps their displeasure has something to do with the fact that top Snyder aides knew Flints water was unsafe up to a year before its residents did. And although some recommended testing the water, Snyders administration waited months before they acted on reports. While aides debated or ignored the problem, public-health officials estimate that as many as 8,000 children ingested water with dangerously high levels of lead.

Snyder was roundly criticized for his ineptitude during a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee; one representative called Snyder an absentee governor, and another told him to resign outright. But chugging gallons of water will totally make up for his oversights as governor, right?
Vote different. Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

New York appears to be really bad at hosting primary elections, but really good at complaining about them. Less than halfway through the hotly contested Empire State primary, social media is overflowing with reported irregularities, and one voter-protection hotline has been inundated with hundreds of distressed calls.

Were seeing a high volume of calls, which suggests this is not an election that is problem-free, Kristen Clarke, one of the organizers of the Election Protection hotline (and a fan of understatement), told ThinkProgress. Here are the seven primary problems with New Yorks big primary day:

1. Polling places didnt open on time.

The polls should be open. We don't even have an organizer at our location yet #Brooklyn #NYPrimary #NYPrimary2016 pic.twitter.com/Z7awmJRri3  Justin Crespo (@NYCrespo17) April 19, 2016

Two hours after polls are meant to open in #Brooklyn and our polling place isn't ready. #NYPrimary pic.twitter.com/58KUvKPMuU  Ben Casselman (@bencasselman) April 19, 2016

2. Voting machines are malfunctioning.

am mad as hell for my vote not being counted b/c scanner would not accept ballot Brooklyn District 30 #NYPrimary #fixit #educatevolunteers  Heide Kolb (@heidiko44) April 19, 2016

@AGSchneiderman voted at Bushwick 72/53 poll site, scanners broken. Poll worker said votes wont be counted today  Joshua M Rayner (@joshuamrayner) April 19, 2016

3. Bernie Sanders has only five delegates on New Yorks ballot, but the ballot instructs voters to select six.

Bernie Sanders supporters in New York City are reporting a befuddling wrinkle in the states primary ballots: The ballot asks voters to select any six delegates from a list of 11  which contains 6 delegates pledged to Clinton and 5 pledged for Sanders. Thus, if a Sandernista follows these instructions, they would use about 17 percent of their vote to boost a Clinton delegate.

Ballot Confusion in Brooklyn! Don't be forced to vote @HillaryClinton delegates if you are voting for @BernieSanders https://t.co/qTN5Dm3ceV  Josh Fox (@joshfoxfilm) April 19, 2016

4. Independent voters didnt realize they had to register with their preferred party last October.

The No. 1 complaint fielded by the Election Protection hotline Tuesday was about New Yorks unusually restrictive closed primary rules, ThinkProgress reports. While the deadline for new voters to register for the April primary was in March, the deadline to switch party affiliation was last October  months before voters had any clue that the New York primary would actually matter.

This oddly early registration deadline is even more troublesome in New York, which is home to vibrant third parties like the Working Families Party, which works in concert with the Democrats. With Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both pulling much of their support from independents, New Yorks tight rules could have a significant impact on tonights returns.

5. Between last November and today, 60,000 Brooklyn Democrats disappeared from the voting rolls and no one knows why.

Some of the voters being turned away for lacking party registration insist that theyve been lifelong Democrats, and so the system must have made an error. A good number of these individuals are probably frustrated independents, but there is reason to believe some genuine mistakes may have been made. According to WNYC, the number of active registered Democrats in Brooklyn dropped by 63,558 between November 2015 and April 2016. No one, not even Mayor de Blasio, understands what caused the change, which has no parallel in any other borough of the city.

6. Ben Carson is still on the Republican ballot.

The good doctor reportedly forgot to request to have his name removed from the ballot. Votes for Carson will not be counted.

I've noticed Ben Carson's name is still appearing on some NY ballots. Does anyone know why other than to keep Trump under 50%?  Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) April 19, 2016

7. Not everyone is getting stickers.
Ready for a Fight for a Future to Feel the Bern In. Photo: Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images; Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images

Outside the Hobbesian hellscape we call Twitter, the 2016 Democratic race has been fairly tame. All it takes is one glance at the Dumpster fire across the aisle to see how much uglier politics can get. Even a look in the Democrats own rear-view mirror shows the outrages of the Sanders/Clinton race to be rather tepid fare. And yet:

Yes, the '16 frontrunners have awful fav/unfavs in NBC/WSJ poll. But part of the reason is due to friendly fire pic.twitter.com/SYkITciM9Q  Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) April 19, 2016

By contrast, look at these numbers from April 2008 NBC/WSJ



Obama among HRC voters: 45-34



HRC among O voters: 45-37 https://t.co/NcMKlWeZX9  Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) April 19, 2016

Sanders has an unusually high net favorability from supporters of his primary opponent. Clinton gets unusually low marks from Bernie backers.

The 2016 Democratic race has featured fewer personal attacks than the 2008 edition but far more ideological ones. Judging from that NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the latter appear to be more divisive on the Democratic side. While Obama supporters may have resented Clinton suggesting that their candidate doesnt appeal to hardworking  white Americans, they knew that she shared the Illinois senators basic policy worldview. By contrast, Sanderss personal attacks on Clinton are premised on her ideological failings  she is not qualified for the presidency because of her interventionist foreign-policy instincts and for her participation in the corrupt campaign-finance system that allows the billionaire class to stifle democracy. The latter line of attack not only implies that Clinton is personally corruptible; it also suggests that the stakes of that personal failing are nothing less than the perpetuation of an Establishment politics that is immiserating Americas working people. The Clinton/Obama race was a nasty argument about who would be the more effective implementer of their (mostly) mutual political program. The Clinton/Sanders race is a slightly more polite argument about who is actually on the side of the people, or at least thats the argument the Vermont senator has tried to have in recent weeks.

For Sanderss core supporters, those most attached to his diagnosis of what ails our political economy, being on the wrong side of that argument is, in fact, disqualifying. The antipathy of these voters toward Clinton goes a way toward explaining her historically high unfavorability. In a CBS/New York Times poll from March, Clinton had a net unfavorable rating of -21. Assuming she maintains her significant lead over Bernie Sanders, Clinton will become the second-most-unpopular non-incumbent presidential nominee in recorded history, just behind a certain proto-fascist reality star.

The hopeful reading of the NBC/Wall Street Journal data is that once the primarys friendly fire goes quiet, Clintons popularity will enjoy a quick recovery. With Americas favorite democratic socialist stumping for her in the fall, his most skeptical supporters will stop worrying and learn to like Hillary. The pessimistic reading for the Clinton camp is that Sanderss recent attacks have sown durable divisions in the Democratic coalition that will haunt the partys standard-bearer into November.

Regardless, Democrats can console themselves with the fact that they are far more unified than the party of Lincoln. Clinton is one point underwater with Sanders voters. Trump is disliked by 71 percent of Kasich fans, and 56 percent of Cruz-ers.


Its too late for the Sanders campaign to do anything about the exclusion of independents from todays New York primary. But there are some opportunities ahead. Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Theres been plenty of bellyaching by the Bernie Sanders campaign about New Yorks closed primary system and, worse yet, its wildly retroactive deadlines for changing ones party affiliation to qualify as a primary voter (its six-months-prior-to-the-primary deadline is the most restrictive in the country, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEights Leah Libresco).

A look ahead on the calendar shows a mixed bag of rules for the remaining primaries.

After Tuesday nights results come in, the campaigns will immediately focus on the five states that hold primaries on April 26. Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania are closed primaries in which the deadlines for reregistering to change party affiliations have already passed. Semi-closed Rhode Island alone allows unaffiliated voters to participate in the party primary of their choice.

On May 3, Indiana, one of the relatively few non-southern states with no party registration at all, will hold its primary. A week later, West Virginia, another semi-closed primary state, will vote, which means independents can participate in either partys primary.

On May 17, two more closed primary states, Kentucky and Oregon, will vote. Kentucky closed off reregistration to change party affiliation in January. Oregonians still have one more week (until April 26) to register or reregister. Oregon, it should be noted, also has an all-mail-voting system, which encourages earlier participation and makes last-minute reregistration drives more difficult.

The last big batch of primaries is on June 7. Montana will have a true open primary. North Dakotas caucuses will be wide open, in that the state has no voter-registration system at all. New Jersey will allow independents to vote in its Democratic primary, but the deadlines already passed for Republicans to re-affiliate. New Mexico has a closed primary, and the deadline for reregistration to change party affiliation is on May 10.

Then theres California, the biggest prize of all, with 475 pledged delegates up for grabs. The Golden States Democratic (but not Republican) primary is open to unaffiliated voters, and all voters have until May 23 to change their party affiliation. But as a recent analysis by the Los Angeles Times shows, a significant number (probably over 300,000) of independents have mistakenly registered not as no party preference voters, as they should have, but instead as members of the American Independent Party, the ancient right-wing party that began as a vehicle for George Wallaces 1968 presidential effort.

Since California will offer Bernie Sanders his last chance to cut Hillary Clintons pledged delegates lead and impress superdelegates, I believe his people should devote as much time as possible to contacting every registered AIP voter in California and finding out if they are actually somewhere to the right of Jimmy Dean sausage or are instead feeling the Bern and need to get themselves reregistered. They have just over a month to make this happen.
Yesterday, in an instant, the popular news site the Shade Room disappeared from Facebook without explanation. The Shade Room, which tracks celebrity gossip, is the first big news service to live entirely on social media: It started as an Instagram account, before expanding onto Facebook and other platforms. It has a website, more or less as an afterthought. Which means that a disappeared Facebook page isnt just a lost source of traffic  its an entire lost arm of the publication.

According to TSRs advertising kit, the brand has more than eight million followers across all of its web platforms, which include social networks and the dedicated website. Instagram and Facebook are, by far, its most popular presences, with follower counts on both hovering in the mid-four millions.

Much of what the Shade Room does is take and compile content from elsewhere, laying its own watermark on each image. For the most part, the service uses screenshots, but, as Jezebel points out, it occasionally posts professional photos that it doesnt have the rights to, without attribution.

Angie Nwandu, who runs the Shade Room, confirmed that her Facebook page had been shut down but told the Nieman Lab that no explanation had been given (the Instagram account, which Nwandu briefly took private, is still live). A rep for Facebook later told Jezebel that TSR had violated community guidelines, but did not elaborate further.

Today, the company told CNN that the page was in trouble for repeatedly violating intellectual property rights. The move makes a bit more sense when placed next to Facebooks newly unveiled Rights Manager tool, meant to give IP holders the ability to monitor unauthorized use of their work. Facebook is cracking down on copyright violations  a huge issue that had gone largely untouched until this year.

But Rights Manager is of little comfort to the thousands of pages that have built a following upon generous interpretations of fair use  Facebook pages that could disappear in an instant for a single alleged infraction.

That swiftness with which TSRs Facebook page disappeared, and the lack of explanation that accompanied it, really encapsulate the current moment of medias relationship to platform holders. Facebooks big pitch is that by placing video and articles directly on their network, and thus the sites weighing them more heavily in the News Feed algorithm, media organizations will experience increased readership. This is, for the most part, true  participants in the Instant Articles program are seeing compelling increases in reach, as are those making a big push into video.

But that can all disappear in an instant (no pun intended) if one runs afoul of Facebooks nebulous community guidelines or practices. When companies take advantage of Facebooks platform offerings, theyre also ceding a lot of editorial control to Facebook, which has been inconsistent when it comes to enforcing its rules. (For instance, Facebook is institutionally terrified of female nipples in almost any context.)

Plus, the companys response to the Shade Room has been wildly disproportionate. Rather than take down the offending posts or warn Nwandu beforehand, Facebook removed the publications presence entirely. It plays into the medias worst anxiety toward the tech companies trying to lure them: If Facebook doesnt like something, it can just disappear it. When you run a publication on someone elses platform, you let them have the final say. For news organizations, thats never a good position to be in.
Photo: Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images

Youve likely heard about appalling rape-kit backlogs, but how about shortages in medical examiners? According to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, its pretty hard for some sexual-assault victims to get an exam in the first place.

In the six states studied  Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Oregon, and Wisconsin  there were not enough medical examiners to complete the number of sexual-assault forensic exams needed, and it was worse in rural areas. About half of all counties in Nebraska and Washington didnt have a medical examiner to complete the rape kit (which involves collecting DNA evidence, documenting any injuries, performing STD testing, and offering emergency contraception). Examiners in other Wisconsin counties were typically available on an on-call basis. And only one Colorado hospital has MEs on staff 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Study author Katherine Iritani told the Washington Post: If youre in the mountains in the winter, and youre told you have to go somewhere else, that can be a big barrier. Some victims never get tested. She said that some Colorado victims have to drive an hour to get the exam.

Victims can get a rape kit without first reporting an assault to the police; some report it later while others never do. But for those who choose to pursue criminal charges, DNA evidence increases the likelihood of prosecution. Having to travel further than the nearest hospital after a traumatic event is insult to injury given that these exams are supposed to be conducted as soon as possible after an assault and victims arent supposed to bathe or use the bathroom beforehand.

Meanwhile, theres that backlog of kits that do get collected. In September, the White House and Manhattan district attorneys office announced a joint $79 million fund to analyze kits in 27 states and also cover auditing and training in forensic best practices. (It costs about $1,000 to test a single kit.)

Of course, its one thing to test every kit, but police need the resources (and inclination) to actually investigate each case after results come back. Seems like all of these variables could affect the persistent underreporting of rape.
Retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Adm. James Winnefeld Jr. Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

A new investigative report by the Associated Press reveals that in order to prevent a Senate bill from passing that would change how the military handles cases of sexual assault, the Pentagon misled Congress by providing inaccurate and unspecific information on cases of sexual assault that theyd previously brought to trial.

This information was provided to the AP by Protect Our Defenders, a national organization that addresses the epidemic of rape and sexual assault in the military. From the AP:

Internal government records that summarized the outcomes of dozens of cases portrayed civilian district attorneys and local police forces as less willing than senior military officers to punish sex offenders. The documents buttressed the Pentagons position that stripping commanders of their authority to decide which crimes go to trial  as the Senate legislation proposes  will mean fewer victims will get justice because there will be fewer prosecutions.

But Protect Your Defenders, through an FOIA request, found that the roles civilian authorities in the cases played were described incorrectly or omitted or that details surrounding cases tried by local police or attorneys were too imprecise to be verified. Protect Our Defenders said they found no evidence that any of the cases brought to trial were done so at a commanders insistence. In 2013, the then-vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James Winnefeld Jr., told a Senate panel that if the bill passed, fewer sexual-assault cases would actually go to trial. The bill aims to strip senior officers of their responsibilities to decide whether to prosecute sexual assault cases and giv[es] that authority to seasoned military trial lawyers, the AP reports.

A spokesperson for Senator Claire McCaskill, who supports the bill, told the AP, The importance of these cases is that they show definitively that commanders dont sweep sexual assault cases under the carpet. On the contrary, the numbers continue to prove that commanders aggressively pursue courts-martial.
Shore Leave. Photo: Jim Heimann Collection/Courtesy Boyo Press

For young sailors who were shipped off to South Pacific ports during World War II, there was a waiting period known as shore leave, when they stopped in the Hawaiian islands (then an American possession) on their way to war. In local Hawaiian bars and on beaches, they drank pitchers of cheap beer and pineapple whiskey, rode motorcycles along the coastline, and occasionally fell in love.

Thirty years of photographic memorabilia from sailors who went through the waiting period are compiled in the book Shore Leave, out this month from Boyo Press. I wanted to create a portrait of what it was like for the young servicemen who found themselves in Hawaii, an exotic and strange place on their way to war, author Ryan Mungia told the Cut. The focus of the book is admittedly very specific and not meant to be a comprehensive documentation of all war workers  just sailors in Honolulu who were briefly stationed there before being deposited onto the battlefield.

Click ahead to see the dancing, beach parties, and romances.

Photo: Jim Heimann Collection/Courtesy Boyo Press

Disembarking for shore leave, Hawaii, circa 1942.

Photo: Jim Heimann Collection/Courtesy Boyo Press

Hawaiian welcome, circa 1938.

Photo: Jim Heimann Collection/Courtesy Boyo Press

Rex girls, Honolulu, circa 1935.

Photo: Jim Heimann Collection/Courtesy Boyo Press

Photo: Jim Heimann Collection/Courtesy Boyo Press

Wartime romance, Honolulu, circa 1944.

Photo: Jim Heimann Collection/Courtesy Boyo Press

USO dance, Honolulu, circa 1942.

Photo: Jim Heimann Collection/Courtesy Boyo Press

Local girls, Honolulu, circa 1944.

Photo: Jim Heimann Collection/Courtesy Boyo Press

Sightseeing tour, Hawaii, circa 1945.

Photo: Jim Heimann Collection/Courtesy Boyo Press

Arcade photo, Honolulu, circa 1942.

Photo: Jim Heimann Collection/Courtesy Boyo Press

Personalized envelope, 1945.
there are no "A-list female Asian celebrities"



(lucy liu aside because she wouldn't fit this role)



AND THERE NEVER WILL BE ANY ASIAN FEMALE A-LISTERS IF YOU KEEP GIVING OUR ROLES AWAY TO WHITE PEOPLE, YOU FUCKWEASEL. FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS.

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fucking thank you

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End post.



Also I know people are rolling their eyes cause her name keeps getting tossed around but Rinko is probably the closest thing in the U.S. to an A-list Japanese actress. Oscar nominated and starred in a summer action movie and still can't get roles that were basically tailor-made for her.

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and they use the excuse 'well i don't want her to get typecast!!!'



lmao if ONLY woc had the luxury of getting typecast as action leads. rodriguez is the closest we've come and she's always a fifth-string character

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I'd def be here for seeing Rinko Kukuchi in the role.

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THERE IT IS.

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don't waste your breath bb, he doesn't have enough cognitive ability to process this

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Lmao like, how was that a thing that came out of his Fuck ass mouth!?!?

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these assholes just cannot understand this.

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tell ha!

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this is all that needs to be said

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This. There's only a lot of A list white women because they're given chances that Asians and other woc don't get. I mean if this movies already has a huge following, I don't see how casting an unknown Asian woman would hurt their ticket sales.

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Fucking nailed it.

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lmao right?



do they think actresses just suddenly decide to be a-list one day?

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exactly. how the fuck do people not understand that

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go away and get a better haircut

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LMAO, bye. I'm glad Mr. Right flopped this month.

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so sad for my bb sam but yassssssssss @ it flopping because of this dbag

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THAT'S What he looks like. Ok. Damn, yeah, he looks like the person who wouldn't care about whitewashing or representation or would waffle around and ~pretend to be aware. Probably lurks here lbr.





"There aren't enough high profile Asian actresses to pick!" and whose fault is that...Hollywood's. So pick one who isn't. Duh. Or better yet, don't americanize this story. Don't fucking make it.



Edited at 2016-04-19 12:12 am (UTC)

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Nobody is blaming Scarlett for this mess because it isn't her fault.



and I had no idea that we are to solely blame "The System" because the studio and director and producers have no say for the white-washing and we are just supposed to leave it all like it is and not try to make a change.





This gringo and his whackass hair need to gtfo now

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She took the role, so why can't we hold her somewhat responsible? It's not like she's starved for roles or has a difficult time getting cast or any reason that might make me a little sympathetic to her taking this role. She's a part of the problem.

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mte i'm happy to hold her partially responsible. scarlett isn't hurting for roles or money. there's no reason she needed to take it.

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ia. I'm willing to be more forgiving to lesser known actresses if they do stuff like this since you basically have to take what you can get until you ~make it~, but when established ones like Scarlett accept a whitewashed role they deserve part of the blame.

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"it isn't her fault" yeah I mean she's only an actress in the most high profile superhero franchise ever.

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she may not be the one who created the system, but she benefits from it while woc suffer, she is not some innocent bystander and definitely deserves some of the blame. and idgaf if someone other white actress would have taken the role if she turned it down. too bad

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I wish people would blame Scarlett for this to a certain extent. She's an A-list actress and she wouldn't starve if she declined this role.



You can see by the choices she's making that she + her team really want to rebrand her as a action-heroine but it's kind of horrifying that they skipped right over the potential backlash and decided that she should just go ahead and take this anyway.

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we can blame scarlet to a fault, but even if she turned down the role, it would have gone to another white woman.

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"Nobody is blaming Scarlett for this mess...."



i am.



(edit: sorry my tags were wrong)



Edited at 2016-04-19 12:53 am (UTC)

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She still took the role. IA with people saying that if she turn it down, it would have just gone to another white actress but it says a lot about her character for being okay with taking it in the first place.

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I am tho, she is an A list celebrity, she doesn't need this role to be famous, this isn't a breakout role for her, yeah, the executives are more at fault but she could have refused and she didn't

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she deserves to get blamed too. she's an A list celebrity and she ain't fucking struggling for roles so it's also on her agreeing to do this shit

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i just like this video, should be added to the comments every whitewashing post.

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It pisses people off even more because a lot of people who excuse whitewashing are also John Oliver/Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert/Bill Maher stans. It makes heads explode when their white messiah also agrees with the oppressed minorities.



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Yeah like when John Oliver discussed revenge porn, but he started with online harassment and had a small clip of Anita Sarkeesian and dudebros were livid! She was just a segue to a larger topic but it didn't matter to them, he still featured her

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Omg I got into an argument with someone on here who was like HES MISSING THE POINT OF THE LAST SAMURAI

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I fucking hate your guts Max Landis. I know your stupid ass has nothing better to do than to hate read anything negative people say about you. So just know that fuck you.

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while i'm not defending scarlett here, she isn't entirely to blame. dreamworks and paramount are, because if it wasn't her it would be another white actress. isn't that what happened in ultraviolet and aeon flux? they also could have told her this was a japanese to american remake, which is what i thought they would do/many people thought, and then switched it. AGAIN, not defending her because this is terrible but to put the blame 100% on the actor is not right because paramount and dreamworks should have known WAY better by now imho. and so should scarlett too, which makes her very culpable

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That's also the excuse I read for the hunger games and lionsgate...but she's not a nobody at this point. This wouldn't be her big break.

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exactly, so this makes me so confused. i'm honestly wondering if they told her this was an american remake but idk. i doubt she'll answer any questions when the time comes to promote the film, if she promotes it at all at this point

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they also could have told her this was a japanese to american remake, which is what i thought they would do/many people thought



Isn't it still a Japanese to American remake? But that's still not an excuse because Asian-Americans exist. Especially since my guess is that they're not going to set this in Whitey McWhitesville USA but some urban metropolis where a big Asian presence would make sense.



It's like when Big Hero 6 decided they couldn't have an all-Asian cast even though the movie took place in some amalgam of Tokyo and San Francisco.

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I'm over letting actors slide. Scarlett is A-list and has her pick of roles. She's not struggling for a hit or her big break.

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he needs a hammer to the skull. he needs a hammer to the skull.

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-there are no "A-list female Asian celebrities"



oh, i wonder why, please educate me white man.

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At this point of my life, I refuse to spend anymore money on movies and studios that continue this bullshit. These are the same companies that will turn around and bemoan that streaming and torrenting are hurting their product. Yet when audience rightfully get pissed off because of shit like this, they'll claim we just don't understand~ It's lazy and racist, and I'm tired of supporting it tbh

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Honestly, same. If you don't get it and don't want to get it, you, your movie, your studio, and your talent deserve to flop.

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same. i want the whitewashing floppage to continue with this shit.

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Rainbow Dash with no self awareness.

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lmao

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Wait, how many of y'all are on here? lol

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I am constantly annoyed at this motherfucker oh my god I wish I could just adblock him from the internet. Chronicle is one of my favorite movies and nothing he says could ruin it but damn, get some awareness and empathy you froyo - mohawk motherfucker.

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Lmao this comment is everything

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Nice. I've missed seeing Michelle on screen.

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Eh. I've soured on Michelle in recent years, but I gotta see it for Todd and Julianne.

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She's very talented, but I often find her boring and kind of sad to watch.

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i love him but when will todd haynes discover the existence of people who are not white??

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I'm sure the book is great and all but this sounds like the most boring movie premise ever

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It's one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

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[ book spoiler, maybe? ] Ben and Jamie were in love with each other by the end. That "only you" passage had me feeling so many feels.



Prayer circle that they actually cast some Deaf actors as well...??? Oh shit, this is really happening?! This book was so lovely (and I am 5000% convinced thatPrayer circle that they actually cast some Deaf actors as well...???

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last I heard Todd was looking for actors who are actually deaf, so that's good :)

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It's been a minute since Michelle has been in something decent.



She seems obnoxiously precious irl, but I really enjoy her as an actor.

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I found this book to be (visually) pleasing but no clue how they're going to turn it into a movie.

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I've missed seeing her in stuff.

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I have been waiting for a Michelle Williams post so I could say I saw her in real life, but I am too late for this one. Excited for a new Todd Haynes film, though!

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lmao i watched this yesterday and i felt so bad for fanboy mark ruffalo. if you wanna talk about messy bernie stans, he's #1. bernie is such a ball buster. this was great though, and a way better encapsulation of the important microcosm new york represents and the important values it, at its best, exemplifies.



hope ontd new york is out there voting today! doesn't matter who for, just make sure you get involved. democracy depends on your participation 

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him and ezra koenig

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WOO-HOO I VOTED THIS MORNING and am wearing my sticker with Tracy Flick-like pride

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lmao this gif

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i gotta go after work, I forgot to change my old address (well I assumed it got updated, it didn't and i forgot to check) so it's gonna be a pain to go there but it'll be worth it! :)

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Good for u!!! <3

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i hate ny and our closed primary. the fact that i would have needed to change my party status over six months before the primary is bullshit. i didn't know i wanted to vote for bernie over six months ago. 



also the election board updated my mailing address, but not my residential address, wtf. so i wouldn't even be able to vote in my actual county if i could even vote.

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you didn't know you wanted to vote democrat six months ago? like even if you weren't voting for hillary, were you previously registered republican or something?

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some people register as independent. some people are removed from the voter roles or have never voted before so there are plenty of reasons.

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Some people are independent.

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no i was/am registered independent. but a lot of people also have no party affiliation.

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This Independent voter erasure, smh



/sarcasm

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Independents can vote today with a provisional ballot! Judge decides this afternoon if they'll qualify but they're opening up provisional ballots because of the fraud investigations

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Edited to add info:



INDEPENDENT VOTING

There is currently an emergency hearing on allowing independents to vote in NY. When you are at the polls and your party was switched without your consent and you were for sure a democrat, you have two options. One would be to get a court order (bring evidence) to vote on a regular ballot (If you are an independent and always have been and want to vote in the hopes that this emergency hearing passes and allows independents to vote, fill out provisional but DO NOT sign affidavit portion, that would be lying saying you are a democrat, which is perjury and voter fraud.



Edited at 2016-04-19 06:32 pm (UTC) i've heard you can vote by provisional ballot! go go go! :)Edited to add info:INDEPENDENT VOTINGThere is currently an emergency hearing on allowing independents to vote in NY. When you are at the polls and your party was switched without your consent and you were for sure a democrat, you have two options. One would be to get a court order (bring evidence) to vote on a regular ballot ( https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cf32vonWEAAVgQ2.jpg ) and the other option, should you not get a court order or there continues to be problems, get an affidavit ballot and sign the affidavit.

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isn;t berni still behind hilary in delegates votes? i keep reading different articles on how berni is still way behind and etc.



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he is about 200 delegates behind right now. He needs 56% of the remaining delegates.

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be sure to check if the delegate count in articles is including superdelegates

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194 delegates due to Hillary delegates not showing up in states like Nevada and Colorado for caucuses so he has gained more as a result.

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and Washington state convention too! He picked up another 2 there the other day

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I hope everyone who goes to vote is extra careful to make sure that their registration is correct and to fight it if they turn you away. The election laws seem really onerous.

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i've heard a few people now say this. are people having issues with voting today?? what's going on?

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Yes. Lots of issues. Poll locations opening late. Voting machines not working. Being purged from the voter rolls. It's a mess.

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not today but when i voted, me and a couple of other women almost weren't able to vote bc we weren't on the registration/roll. we only got to fight for it bc the leader of our caucus wasn't on it either lol

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i voted early morning in queens and had no problem. i think one of the voting machines was malfunctioning.

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I've also seen suggestions that if people try to turn anyone away, they should pull out their phone and film it as proof, and ask the person to repeat the reason why, in case some kind of voter fraud is happening.

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voted.  so many people at work are out right now.

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mark is the ultimate bernie bro. its honestly annoying and i had to unfollow him on twitter because of it.



anyway, cant wait for when hill wins tonight. will we have a post?

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he needs to at least come close or tie her to stay in the race. If he loses big it's pretty much over.

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He needs to come close, and I think he will, tbh.

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i think if he gets 45%-ish we're still doing pretty well (in the long run). if we won, i think hillary's camp would go into panic mode. but there are a lot of voter suppression tactics being played out, so we'll see.

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Yeah, if he won it would give him major momentum in the upcoming East Coast primaries. Things would probably start getting real dirty in that event.

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lol Mark had serious heart eyes in this

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I'm amazed so many independents weren't aware of the rules in the NY closed primary.



Anyways I fear after tonight it's the nail in the coffin for Bernie :(



Edited at 2016-04-19 04:14 pm (UTC)

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ikr. i knew this was a closed primary months ago and i dont even live in ny.

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i'm guessing it's the first election they're voting in because if you've done it before you'd already know. or unless they literally just moved here.

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idk. I'm sure that's true for some but I'm seeing a lot of it on social media from people who aren't even that young and should know better. Especially people on my FB who were passionate about Bernie long before the deadline. I'm not for this political system but it's weird that they're bringing up voter suppression and being disenfranchised in this situation imo. I think Jamelle Bouie did a good job of explaining this on Twitter today.

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not necessarily. im a registered independent and this would be my second election im eligible to vote in (and ive lived in ny my whole life). i always knew it was a closed primary, i just wasn't aware how early the deadline to change my party status was.

i didn't decide that i liked bernie until december, which was two months after the october deadline to change my party status.

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It's mathematically impossible. California is going to count more than ever at this rate

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lol same, I wish there was a 3rd dem option

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Zzzz

Overrated mysogynist angry old grandpa

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I can't when Mark talks about his ideals as a young person can grow up with you with this campaign.

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Lets hope this topic isn't as combative as the last one.



Anyway go bernie go. Hopefully he pulls off the upset.

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... well i guess that's a choice they decided to make...

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I wanted the cone bra lol

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meeeeeee too

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the photo and tweet hadn't loaded yet so i was like god damn that's the most ruthless nickname i've ever seen for rita ora 

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Lol same.

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lol mte

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can this be a thing

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LMAO

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Lmao mte

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LMFAO

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i love it

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Shit, lmmfao

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lmfao

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lmao

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What happened to the other post about this?



Also nhf the whitewashing of this role tbh.

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Lmao I like it.

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the last post about this was a MESS, yikes!

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Is that Nicole Scherzinger in your icon?

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it's from the will.i.am mona lisa video

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this icon rn

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I never saw Power Rangers before and literally the only thing I know about it is that Felicity's BFF was the Pink ranger



But of course Hollywood doesn't cast an Asian woman when given a clear opportunity

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...How did they not notice?

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LOL seriously, wtf

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Cause their default is set to white

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I think it's probably because the last time they watched it was when they were no older than 6 so they just legitimately don't remember.

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lmao right?? wtf

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There are legit people who never realized all the action sequences were just taken from the Japanese show.

I've discussed this with several friends/classmates/co-workers/etc over the years and so many of them had their minds blown by that info.

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I think she was Latina too at one point. She literally has never been Caucasian

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Seriously; I was wondering why more people weren't mad about whitewashing. O_____o But ONTD is fickle about that stuff.



(the real question is, why did it take me SO FUCKING LONG to realize that actress was dubbed and the American actors weren't really the ones in the Ranger suits; they were just splicing in old Japanese footage??? I was a dumb kid tbh)

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i wasn't allowed to watch power rangers because my mom thought it would make me violent. she thought very little of my self control

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or tried to say she's an alien, not asian.

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um what? lol it seems pretty obvious to me

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This is actually my second look thanks to the earlier vanishing post

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My post is the only one that matters tbh. Though i was surprised that it hadn't been posted earlier. More you know.gif

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What's with all the green? She looks like one of the witches in that lame Oz movie from a few years ago.

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She used to be a green ranger, until they left her for dead in a ditch. So she comes back to exact revenge on the kids.



Actually, idk

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Nnnnn

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LMAO Here I was thinking that was a reasonable and cool plot line

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I'd watch that.

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holy shit I love this

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It could be. Apparently they're trying to tie her story more directly to the rangers.

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What kind of FaceOff spotlight challenge realness

Im bummed they didn't incorporate the horns or the madonna-esque bra

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Loooolololol this is killing me, I scrolled back up and this is so damn spot on, like I love face off and find it entertaining because I'm an artist but lbr 99.9% of that shit is not actually camera ready for a big budget feature film, and this look would be "safe" to boot.. with the prosthetic she also even literally looks like that one face off model whose name I can't figure out but she has dirty blonde hair and a strong jawline and she was also a model on project runway (I remember her wearing that dress Burt made out of his boxers?) I hope you know which one I'm talking about.. anyways A+ reference

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I think i know which one, and she does!

but yeah i love faceoff too but some of those makeups really look rough.

The makeup looks like they had a 2 day challenge haha

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No thanks

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She looks more like Scorpina then Rita.

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MTE, nothing about her look is even reminiscent of Rita's character.

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I see a little Divatox in there, too.

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I see it

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What happened to the last post? It got deleted within like 5 minutes.

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Both Carla Perez and Julia Cortez (two of Rita's actresses) are Asian. Gotta throw that out there because I feel like people just google Rita's actresses' names and go, "Aha, Rita's not necessarily supposed to be Asian because two of her actresses were Latina!"



Edited at 2016-04-19 08:52 pm (UTC)

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Well Elizabeth Banks isn't Lantina either so idk how that's suppose to be any better

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I think their point is that she's not limited to a specific race/ethnicity and they extrapolate that to mean she can be ANY race/ethnicity instead of a WOC. Either way though, they're wrong. Even if their defense is that she's an alien, obviously her humanoid form is that of an Asian woman.

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Edited at 2016-04-19 10:51 pm (UTC)

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NO. Just no.

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Give it some time. It might grow on you.

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I'm mad that they have Elizabeth banks as rita in the new power rangers movie this white washed realness needs to stop.

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esp when constance could have KILLED rita repulsa

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Aww Lynn Chen! Saving Face was such a feel good film. I think it was one of the first films I watched after I accepted my queerness. Maybe I'll watch it again this weekend.

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"I think its because of the scarcity of roles. If I say this against this executive producer, maybe they wont hire me. Better to say it in private to my friends so that I get employment later.





THIS.

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Queens. And I need them to be cast in more things/everything.

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Rme at Joan Chen.



Constance remains Queen of my heart and I'm in love with Ming Na

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Yeah I'm disappointed @ Joan. But Constance and Ming Na remain faves. 

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even things like arden cho being cut abruptly from teen wolf

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I'm still finishing up the season! What happened to her character?! :(

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i love them <3



(constance and ming-na)



Edited at 2016-04-19 10:54 pm (UTC)

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Hey white ppl complaining abt #Hamilton cry me a fucking river;POC feel this every day of our lives & u have to feel it once? Boo fuckin hoo  Constance Wu (@ConstanceWu) March 31, 2016



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I'm also curious how many of those white actors who have been crying about Hamilton gave a crap about it before it became the huge success it's become. I'm sure some did, because a job's a job and some people want to be on stage no matter what. But I'm doubting that's how the majority felt. And besides, Groff is in there. Isn't that enough?

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It wasn't even a white actor that complained was it? Wasn't it just some asshole lawyer?

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omg lol she's amazing

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yaaas

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she is awesome.

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nailed it, though a lot of people will just get mad if you point this out and will just disregard the experiences and feelings of POC in an attempt to quell their cognitive dissonance on the subject...easier to remain wilfully ignorant than think it through properly, have some empathy, and change your view



Edited at 2016-04-19 10:56 pm (UTC)

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I love that she's so outspoken and courageous. Slay them!

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Oh my god, BLESS HER!!!! 

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Queen 

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lmao this is my favorite tweet ever

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i got into a conversation about whitewashing with this girl on my cheer team the other day and she legit said she didn't think it was a big deal until it affected her personally, because she's white and she'll never get to play nala in the lion king musical -__________-



also, yesss constance <33



Edited at 2016-04-19 11:35 pm (UTC)

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this is fantastic

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lmao, go in!!

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Urged young people to get into the business and write their own stories



but those white people in charge didn't create GiTS. Even if you do write your own story, the white higher ups will just try to force you to get white actors, or ones who are "racially ambiguous"

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The whole get into the business thing is a lot easier if you're white, male and related to someone in the industry





Oh I just described Max Landis how coincidental

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lmaooo



we shouldn't use his name, just call him "the famous directors son"

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Not only that, but it is expensive as fuck and is incredibly time consuming if you're doing it as a young filmmaker trying to break into the business. You really have to have a strong coalition of friends who will help shoot your movie on the weekend that you wrote yourself and are producing out of your own pocket all while having a regular job so you can pay for your project (all while just buying your friends lunch for helping out).



I have so many friends who are aspiring actors and writers and filmmakers who would want nothing more than to get into the business, but it's so hard to be successful unless you're white, male, and related to someone in the industry or have a friend of a friend who is higher up.



It's depressing as fuck and equally frustrating because it's a shitty catch-22

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exactly. if you want your story to be produced it has to either have a story that the (white male) producers can relate to and/or a cast that the (again, white male) producers would want to fuck.



else you'll need to produce the whole shebang by yourself, but which aspiring movie maker has that kinda funds?

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See, the issue with "oh let directors cast who they want for their films" is that everybody knows that most directors are old white douchebros who are all about stories that reflect them and on the off chance they create films with stories that are about women, it's almost always about a white woman. So yeah, fuck off with that....



Everything else, yassss queens 

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go after nat wolff next

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naked brothers band kid?

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People are mad he's the lead in the new Death Note movie

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yes that little fucker is headlining the death note film

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I'm so pissed they're doing Death Note :|

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Dang it. I was rooting for you Nat.

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Wasn't expecting that quote from Joan. Maybe she feels lucky/fortunate with her US success since her character on Twin Peaks was originally supposed to be white? IDK. She could've said something a little less transparent.



I love how Ming-Na and Constance are always the first to call out racism against Asians in Hollywood though.

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The Buzzfeed writer speculates it might be because she grew up in the Cultural Revolution when art was more censored during her youth/environment. So could be that. Not that it makes her opinion right (like her opinion on what censorship is), but I could see that.





Edited at 2016-04-19 10:54 pm (UTC)

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I can see that. also in a previous blog post, she had wrote how she left twin peaks because everyone was telling her not to play the dragon lady/exotic role but she regretted the decision bc it's one of her most memorable roles and fans still come up to tell her how much they love her in twin peaks. I hope she'll change her opinion tho esp since her daughters are also raised in the states instead of china

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side eyeing the fuck outta joan chen right now. -_______-

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The Buzzfeed writer speculates it might be because she grew up in the Cultural Revolution when art was more censored during her youth/environment. So could be that. Not that it makes her opinion right, but I could see that.

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I can totally see that too. It goes with what Ming-Na said, the combination of the two.

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she's iconic to me for twin peaks and saving face so I'm just super disappointed.



meh.

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But I thought Asians don't speak up about racism!



rmfe

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lol mte

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i have nightmares about how ugly that post was

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It was the worst post I have ever been a part of on her. I totally regret it, should have just gone to bed. (I should probably adopt this phrase in life)

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it was brutal

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so many people showed their asses in that post

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i mean...that's what ming na alludes to in this very post tbh

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peachie_ego i'm surprisedisn't here yet tbh

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clutchin my pearls rn tbh. Do I want to know what happened? Cos I can't with people like that 

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If you say this 3 times that annoying user who hates asians will appear and will say the same shit all over again, no la invoques por favor !



Edited at 2016-04-19 11:06 pm (UTC)

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siiiiigh at that post.

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the submissive, acquiescent model minority trope



one of the most toxic, anti-asian racist shit i've seen on ONTD yet tbh

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That was literally one of the worst posts I've seen on this site.

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first we'll take a quick look at some of the critical figures and data in the energy markets this week.

(Click to enlarge)

(Click to enlarge)

Chart of the Week

(Click to enlarge) Related: Half Of Kuwaiti Oil Production Offline After Massive Strike

 U.S. natural gas production hit another record in 2015, topping 79 billion cubic feet per day, which was an increase of 5 percent over 2014.

 Most of the growth came from five states, which account for 35 percent of the countrys natural gas production  Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Oklahoma and North Dakota.

 The top three states sit on the Marcellus and Utica shales. The Marcellus is the most prolific shale gas basin in the United States, but drillers have shifted their sights more recently to the less developed Utica shale. Marcellus production is down while Uticas is rising.

Market Movers

 Goodrich Petroleum filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, which it hope will help it eliminate $400 million in debt from its balance sheet. Goodrich is a driller in Louisiana and Mississippi.

 Eni (NYSE: E) says that it will invest 20 billion euros ($22.5 billion) in Africa over the next four years to develop the continents oil and gas. That would account for 60 percent of the companys investments.

 Kuwaits state-owned oil company said that a workers strike cut the companys oil production in half over the weekend. It is unclear how long the outage could take place, but the disruption of 1 to 2 million barrels per day (mb/d) of output could send shockwaves around the world if it lasts for any lengthy period of time.



Tuesday April 19, 2016

The Doha talks collapsed over the weekend as Saudi Arabia refused to sign on to the production freeze agreement without Iran. The events were bizarre and completely defied everyones expectations for the summit. OPEC would have been better off if it had never agreed to stage the negotiations to begin with.

Saudi Arabia backed away from the Doha talks after Iran refused to sign on. But Iran was never going to agree, so it seemed odd that Saudi Arabia tentatively agreed to a production freeze deal heading into the Doha negotiations, only to back out at the last second. Other participants, including Russia and Venezuela, had thought they were traveling to Doha to sign a deal that would be merely a formality not a debate. They certainly did not think that the meeting would end in failure. Related: Saudi Arabia Kills Doha Deal, Talks Fall Apart

Saudi Arabias hostility towards Iran was in full view as it appears that the Saudi government was willing to scuttle a very weak agreement that would involve almost no sacrifice simply to avoid handing Iran a victory through modestly higher oil prices. OPECs official announcement was that they needed more time to discuss the agreement and would reconvene at its normally scheduled meeting in Vienna in June.

A failure or a victory for Saudi Arabia? The collapse of the talks illustrate the discord within the cartel, and it is hard to imagine the group taking any controversial decisions together. With Saudi Arabia once again sticking to its strategy of pursuing market share, all OPEC members are more or less left to fend for themselves. On the one hand, this leaves OPECs credibility in tatters. On the other, since 2014, the Saudis have put a much higher priority on the strategy to fight for market share and push out high-cost oil production around the world. OPECs credibility has been less important. In that sense, Saudi Arabia is not exactly upset to see Doha fall apart. While all OPEC members could be hurt from low oil prices in the interim, the real victims will be U.S. shale companies will continue to bear the brunt of the market rebalancing, a process that is gradual but already well underway. Why save U.S. shale now? Saudi Arabia will emerge from the oil bust with its market share intact.

Shift in balance of power in Riyadh. One other interesting wrinkle is that the young Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman seems to have impressed his will upon Saudi policy. For years, Saudi Arabias oil minister Ali al-Naimi orchestrated Saudi oil strategy. Diplomatic and well-liked in western circles, al-Naimi rarely sprung surprises during negotiations. But Saudi Arabias actions over the past few days suggest that the Deputy Crown Prince now has more power, and his hostility towards Iran trumped his countrys oil strategy.

Kuwait oil offline. The markets largely shrugged off the Doha failure because more important events were transpiring in Kuwait. A strike by the countrys oil workers knocked nearly 2 million barrels of daily oil production offline, erasing the entire global glut in crude oil production in an instant. Kuwaits state-owned company said that production fell from its normal 3 mb/d to just 1.1 mb/d over the weekend. That is a massive drop off, and will have an infinitely larger impact on the oil markets than any OPEC production freeze. The government has ordered the company to replace its striking workers, but it remains to be seen how quickly production can come back. Related: 200M Barrels Of Oil Sit In Idle Tankers Waiting To Unload At Chinese Ports

Brazils lower house votes to impeach President Rousseff. On Sunday, Brazils Chamber of Deputies voted 367 to 137 to proceed with impeachment charges for President Dilma Rousseff. The Senate will vote in the next few days on whether to proceed, which could result in the President standing trial. The President is now hugely unpopular, but the issue is complex. The politicians leading the impeachment proceedings, led by House Speaker Eduardo Cunha, are also implicated in corruption. Cunha has already been hit with corruption charges, pocketing millions of dollars as part of the Petrobras scandal. He and the opposition are exploiting discontent within Brazil, and despite his own baggage, the opposition looks increasingly likely to prevail over the president. The Brazilian stock market moved up on the news.

Citigroup says bottom of commodity cycle has passed. There is growing evidence that virtually all commodities have stared at a price bottom and are groping for a return to normal, wrote Citi analysts in a new report, including Ed Morse. Led by a resurgence in market sentiment on Chinas growth, prices for a range of commodities are showing a bit of life.

Saudi Arabia threatens U.S. on 9/11 bill. Saudi Arabia said that it would sell off $750 billion in U.S. treasuries and other American assets if the U.S. Congress passes a bill under consideration that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible for any role it might have played in the 9/11 attacks. But economists argue that Saudi Arabia probably couldnt pull off such sale of assets, which could cripple the Saudi economy. Al the same, the White House has pressed Congress to kill the bill. President Obama is set to visit Saudi Arabia this week.

By Evan Kelly of Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The production freeze meeting in Doha was a no-brainer but it ended mindlessly with no action taken.

OPEC plus Russia and Mexico met yesterday to agree to do almost nothing by freezing production. Instead, they agreed to do absolutely nothing leaving everyone wondering why they even held the meeting.

All that they had to do was agree not to increase oil production above levels in January. They could have modified that to current levels. Probably, that would have ensured that oil prices remain near currently inflated levels that were created mostly by expectation of a production-freeze agreement to begin with. Related: Will China's Slowing Economy Stall The Silk Road Project?

It should have been a no-brainer because the Doha groups production is already 130,000 barrels per day less than it was in January (Figure 1). Kuwait, Qatar, Russia, Mexico, Ecuador and Indonesia are all producing slightly more than they were in January but were prepared to go back to those levels.

(Click to enlarge)

Figure 1. Doha participants March vs. January 2016 crude oil production. Source: EIA and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.

Iran is producing about 350,000 bpd more than in January and has stated its intent to raise output much higher. Everyone else is producing less or the same as in January.

But this has been clear for months. Iran called the idea of a production freeze ridiculous in February and did not even send a representative to the meeting in Doha. Related: OPEC Report Suggests Massive Oil Price Rebound

So, what was the point of the meeting?

The failure to reach any decision is consistent with OPEC meetings since the oil-price collapse began in 2014. That is because OPEC is divided along geopolitical, economic and sectarian lines. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)Saudi Arabia and the other states along the Persian Gulf not including Iran and Iraqis a reasonably unified block that controls about half of OPECs production. These are largely wealthy Sunni monarchies.

Iran and Iraq are Shia republics that are not as economically well-off as their GCC neighbors. They control about a quarter of OPECs production. Russia is allied with these countries in Syria and elsewhere and is, therefore, no friend of the GCC nations. The other OPEC members have little in common except their general economic desperation and dependency on oil revenues.

So, on one hand, the failure of the Doha meeting reflects the dysfunction of OPEC. On the other hand, this is nothing new and the prospect of failure was clear if not inevitable before the meeting took place.

We must, therefore, view the Doha meeting and production freeze idea as theater. Its the latest cliff-hanger episode of a B-rated TV melodrama designed to disappoint and even annoy but guaranteed to make you watch the next show. Related: 200M Barrels Of Oil Sit In Idle Tankers Waiting To Unload At Chinese Ports

WTI and Brent futures are down more than $1 per barrel and will almost certainly to fall lower. But exporting countries have realized a windfall for 2 months based on hope for a freeze that I called meaningless when it first surfaced. In a few weeks, they will float the idea again and prices will increase.

Eventually, there will be a production cut perhaps at the June OPEC meeting. It will probably not include Iran. What a surprise.

Anyone who thinks that OPEC no longer controls market prices needs to think again. Anyone who thinks that U.S. shale producers are the new swing producers that are showing OPEC a thing or two needs an intervention of some kind.

By Art Berman for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The mining sector in one of the worlds most important platinum, gold and coal nations is in an uproar this week. After the government surprised the industry with some controversial changes Friday.

The place is South Africa. Where the national government published a draft of a new Mining Charter for the countrys industry late last week  containing some unexpected proposed measures. Related: This Is How Oilfield Services Are Surviving Low Oil Prices

One of the biggest surprises was new rules for Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) requirements. With the government making a decisive declaration on the so-called once empowered, always empowered issue.

Heres the crux. Mining enterprises in South Africa are currently required to sell 26 percent of ownership to local BEE groups. But theres been a lot of confusion about what happens after that.

For example, what if the black empowerment group then turns around and sells its share of the mining business to a non-BEE shareholder? Is it the responsibility of the mining company to go out and sell additional percentages to new BEE groups, in order to get back above the 26 percent threshold?

Miners have argued no  saying that if they met the 26 percent requirement, things are out of their hands if the BEE partner sells. One empowered, always empowered. Related: 200M Barrels Of Oil Sit In Idle Tankers Waiting To Unload At Chinese Ports

But the proposed new mining charter disagrees. Heres what the new text prescribes:

Where a BEE partner or partners have exited, BEE contract has lapsed or the previous BEE partner has transferred shares to a non-BEE company, the mining right holder must within the three years transitional period from the date of publication of the charter review its empowerment credentials consistent with the amended 2016 mining charter.

Such a rule would put miners on the treadmill  having to constantly replace BEE shareholders if old ones exit. And thats not the only change the new rules are proposing.

The draft charter also makes new stipulations on where the 26 percent BEE ownership must go. With the new rules specifying that 5 percent overall ownership must go to mine workers (through a trust), while another 5 percent must be owned by a local community trust. Related: Will China's Slowing Economy Stall The Silk Road Project?

The new rules also increase targets for black representation in management to between 60 percent and 88 percent, from a former 40 percent. And raise requirements for sourcing capital goods from local black interests.

South African mining leaders such as Sibanye Gold immediately said that elements in the new proposal are unacceptable. With the countrys Chamber of Mines saying it will engage with the government during the 30-day comment period for the draft rules, to see what can be changed.

Watch for more developments on the acceptance or rejection of this critical document, in one of the worlds most important mining centers.

Heres to BEEing prudent

By Dave Forest

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Though a game-changing gas discovery for Israel and for the discoverer, Texas-based Noble Energy, the giant Leviathan offshore gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean has been one bureaucratic headache after another. Now reports are surfacing that the company is seeking to reduce exposure by selling 15 percent of its 40 percent interest in the project.

Noble Energy discovered the Leviathan deposit back in 2010: a field that holds an estimated 17 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and can turn Israel into not just a self-sufficient nation in energy terms, but also into a large exporter of gas. It could, were it not for legal and political issues that have put spokes in the wheels of the project since its inception.



Related: Half Of Kuwaiti Oil Production Offline After Massive Strike

Noble has partnered with Israeli energy companies Delek Group, which holds 45 percent in the project, and Ratio, with 15 percent, for the development of Leviathan. The total cost of the project has been calculated at $6.5 billion. However, the partnership between Noble and Delek has raised doubts about a budding energy monopoly that has resulted in legal opposition to the projects approval and a series of delays.

The problem, as the Israeli courts (and public) see it, is that Noble and Delek control most of Israels gas deposits. So, judges and parliamentarians have been trying to come up with ways to break the monopoly before it becomes a reality. Near the end of last year, the Israeli government struck a deal with Noble for the latter to sell 11 percent of its 36 percent holding in another huge gas field, Tamar (already producing), as one of the conditions to let the Leviathan development move forward. This was on the positive side.



Related: Canadas Oil Industry To See 62% Decline In Investment

This March, however, Israels High Court ruled against a stability clause proposed by the countrys government. The clause basically aims to appease the project participants that their investment will not go to waste, by guaranteeing returns over the next ten years. The court said the incumbent government did not have the powers to bind future governments to such an obligation. Parliament now has one year to find a better alternative, otherwise the project is unlikely to move forward at all.

Truth be told, the news comes at a time when Noble is in serious need for cash, after reporting a net loss of $2.03 billion for the last quarter of 2015.



Related: 200M Barrels Of Oil Sit In Idle Tankers Waiting To Unload At Chinese Ports

The company plans to spend $1.5 billion on exploration this year and earlier told media that it was looking to monetize some of its assets. In short, this is not the time for major investments, such as the ones that Leviathan will require. This is particularly true in light of the opposition surrounding the project and the uncertainty lingering over it with no prospects of clearing soon.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
As Russias economic downturn continues, some experts and politicians are sounding an alarm about the countrys long-term competitiveness, and are calling for increased government spending to stimulate manufacturing and bolster education. Investment in those sectors has not seemed to be a government priority of late, but there are signs that official thinking may be changing.

Russias budget deficit is projected to hit 4 percent of GDP in 2016. That, in turn, is expected to lead to a 10-percent decline in government spending this year. Given the significant costs associated with maintaining Russias (even downsized) military expedition in Syria, the reduction in spending will likely necessitate big budget cuts outside of the defense sector.



Related: Who Is To Blame For Doha's Failure?



Even in such lean times, there are some in Moscow who are saying the government needs to increase investment in strategic economic areas. Such thinking was prevalent at the Moscow Economic Forum, held in late March at Moscow State University. The forums co-chair, Konstantin Babkin, spoke about the need for greater infrastructure investment. He pointed out that global production had doubled in the last 25 years, but Russias productivity has lagged far behind the global average.



Russias state budget has been hit hard in 2016 because of the drastic fall in revenue primarily brought on by low energy prices. For more than a decade, Russian leaders have talked about diversifying the economy, and reducing the countrys dependence on energy export revenue, but they have yet to turn words into action. For example, during his first stint as Russian president in the early 2000s, Vladimir Putin pledged to create an economy of [technological] innovation in Russia. And during his interregnum as prime minister, Putin said the governments top priority was to lessen the countrys dependence on energy and raw materials exports by developing innovative industries. But official statistics indicate that the share of manufactured goods, as a percentage of Russias overall exports, has fallen significantly under Putins leadership.



Related: Half Of Kuwaiti Oil Production Offline After Massive Strike



Just about the only area where Russia has shown an ability to innovate is in the defense sector, underscored by the Russian militarys successful use of ship-launched cruise missiles during the recent Syrian campaign.



While Russias arms exports might be able to generate some revenue, the key for a revival of the economy is stimulating the civilian sector. Babkin, the Moscow forum co-chair and the leader of the Party of Action, said he is heading a petition drive for an economic blueprint, called the Charter of 2016, which advocates change in Russias economic policy in favor of rapid industrialization and a greater emphasis on economic areas where Russia has a comparative advantage.



Meanwhile, the first deputy chairman of the State Dumas Committee on Education, Oleg Smolin, is calling for a major spending increase in Russias educational infrastructure. State spending on education should rise to 5 percent of Russian GDP, Smolin urged. The OECDs Education at a Glance report for 2015 indicates that Russian spending on education in 2015 amounted to less than 3 percent of GDP. Two years earlier, according to the OECD, it stood at 4.9 percent. If more money is not spent on training future generations, Smolin contended, Russians could find themselves unable to find high-skilled, well-paying jobs, and the countrys manufactured goods could fall further behind in global markets.



Related: Canadas Oil Industry To See 62% Decline In Investment



A number of participants at the Moscow forum called attention to growing income inequality in Russian society and its associated risks and fiscal burdens. One participant made a radical suggestion that Russia should leave the World Trade Organization and introduce super taxes for the super-rich.

Although government officials did not attend the Moscow gathering, there are signs that the Kremlin is paying attention to the growing concern expressed by forum participants. On April 12, the Ministry of Industry and Trade published a draft proposal that would offer subsidies to Russian companies that stimulate the realization of the means of production. The draft is thin on specifics, and funds have not yet been allocated to cover the subsidization program. Even so, the existence of the draft subsidization plan suggests that the government is open to working with the nascent Charter of 2016 movement.

By Eurasianet

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Christian Schneider and I have been arguing on the Internet about voter ID since the stone age of blogging, back when readership was small and the cliche about pajamas was really true  I did most of my blogging back then between 5 and 6 in the morning, after all.

That linked post, from the dark recesses of 2007, was about Schneider and the rest of the local conservative commentariat (including my now-colleague here at OnMilwaukee Jessica McBride) justifying Wisconsin Republican legislators' attempts to pass a voter ID law. They didn't get that done in 2007, but eventually got it through the legislature and (mostly) through the courts. This month's big presidential primary election is the first major test of how well the law worked.

How well the law worked depends on who you ask. According to Schneider, "the voter ID debate is now over," with his side having won. On the other side, we're not so sure; the legal battles, at least, aren't over yet, something even Schneider acknowledges. And no wonder  there are potentially thousands of voters like Eddie Lee Holloway.

Holloway couldn't vote this month, not because he lacked sufficient get-up-and-go to get an ID (read his story; he lasted a lot longer than I would have!) but because the system is already stacked against the Holloways of this world, and voter ID laws simply add disenfranchisement to the list.

Schneider's point is that because Wisconsin had high turnout for an election of this kind, it's evidence that voter ID laws do not, in fact, suppress votes. As I noted here last week, two important caveats to that high turnout apply.

One is the obvious fact that primary voters are different from regular election voters: they're more likely to be engaged in their parties' politics, up on the news and imbued with other characteristics that undoubtedly correlate strongly with being the kind of person who has a drivers license or passport or other official photo ID. Sure, we had high turnout for a primary, but the 700,000 or so voters who cast ballots on April 5 are less than a quarter of those who voted in the federal elections in November 2012 or 2008, so the real test is yet to come.

The other is that for Democrats, turnout was down over 2008. Schneider doesn't acknowledge that. Holloway, for example, was a 2008 voter, and though I don't know for sure, Holloway probably didn't vote then for John McCain. Can the voter ID law account for all 100,000 missing Democratic primary votes compared to 2008? No, but we are able to say with certainty that it accounts for at least one more than zero.

More importantly, Schneider misses a big, fat, flashing neon sign of an obvious point: If voter ID laws were really intended to combat voter fraud, and this past election had both voter ID in place and record turnout levels, isn't that actually proof instead that the right's voter-fraud thesis was, is and has always been a big fat lie?

This is what Schneider and I were fighting about in 2007. Even then, it was obvious to anyone with access to actual data, rather than nightmares from the fever-swamp that is conservative media, that voter impersonation and other kinds of in-person voting fraud are vanishingly rare. Yet to listen to Schneider's side tell it  then as they did during the more recent stretch when they successfully passed the bill  every election comes with tens of thousands of fraudulent Democratic votes.

The current Republican National Committee chair, Wisconsin-rooted Reince Priebus, in 2012 claimed for example that there could be as many as 60,000 fraudulent votes cast in Wisconsin elections for Democrats. Shortly after, Wisconsin was invaded by an army of Texans, convinced by reports from right-wing media that massive Democratic voter fraud was undoubtedly real and about to happen in recall elections across the state.

Schneider, of course, is guilty of pushing the myth. What he wrote, and what I responded to, in 2007 is lost to link-rot, but available on the wayback machine. Schneider gives a hearty "well said" to a reader who emailed claims with no evidence that it's "nonsense that voter fraud isnt happening." But you don't have to go back to 2007 and the Internet's archivists to find Schneider embarrassing himself with claims of massive Democratic voter fraud.

Here he is in 2011 at National Review, for example, saying "the areas where vote fraud is most likely to occur are also those where it is least likely to end in prosecution. Vote fraud is most prevalent in big cities with large populations  which are almost uniformly represented by Democratic district attorneys." We hear you, Christian; you believe black people are the real criminals.

Hey, if you think I'm reading something racist into those two sentences, read the rest of what he wrote there at National Review. You'll see what I mean. Even the reader email from 2007, the one he called "well said," compared voter fraud to, of all possible crimes, graffiti. Wisconsin's Republicans and conservative politicians have never been shy about squarely blaming African Americans in Milwaukee for this non-existent crime of voter fraud.

So Schneider's big contention is that voter fraud not only exists, it exists most strongly in cities full of black people and policed by Democratic district attorneys. He's wrong, by the way.

Still, using Schneider's logic, the turnout in the Wisconsin April primaries should have been down in Milwaukee and Madison since all the fraudulent voters would be forced to stay home and contemplate other crimes, like tagging the local Kwik-E-Mart. Is that what happened on April 5?

Of course not! Milwaukee's turnout was even compared to 2008, and Madison's was significantly higher, even as statewide Democratic turnout was down.

Is there even a word of that in Schneider's recent column declaring the voter ID debate "over"? No. Indeed, the whole lot of them, from party chair Priebus to radio squawker Charlie Sykes to Schneider, have been starkly silent on why voter ID in this month's election didn't magically provide the long-sought evidence that Wisconsin did indeed suffer from massive past voter fraud.

It's because the fraud was never real in the first place. I've been trying to tell them that for a decade now, what with all my science and data and comprehensive studies of voting done both in Wisconsin and nationally that have never, ever  even when led by Republicans  found any kind of wide- or even narrow-spread fraudulent voting scheme that would have been stopped by voter ID laws. Not a single one.

In making the case for strict voter ID laws, Republicans and their media shills like Schneider always used to say that every fraudulent vote cancels out a legal voter, the implication being that good Republican white folk, tens of thousands of them every election, were being cheated by those criminal Democratic black voters.

If Schneider can claim, as he does at the end of his recent column, that real concern about vote suppression from strict ID laws "now sleeps with the fishes" because of high April turnout, surely the argument works the other way. Actually, in that column, Schneider even cops to the suppression of voters like Eddie Lee Holloway, so I am not sure why he is so forceful, if colloquial, in his wish to kill the truth about vote suppression.

Schneider should, instead, strap some cement shoes to all his previous work trying to convince Wisconsin and the world that voter fraud is real and send that to the bottom of the sea. And then instead we can undo this voter ID nonsense and save the vote of every Holloway in Wisconsin.
The latest

Eat, Play, Applaud: A special St. Patrick's Day celebration in Brew City

I have a little less than two months to continue to fully experience the Brew City. And with one of my favorite bands conveniently coming to Milwaukee on St. Patrick's Day, I know just the way to do it.
The latest

Milwaukee's best sandwich, 2019

In one of the tightest races of this year's poll, Bavette hopped from bronze to gold, winning the title of Milwaukee's best sandwich by 11 total votes. And that's just part of it.
Reprinted from Civil Arab

In 2008, we said, "This is the most important presidential election in a lifetime." We were wrong.

In my role as a surrogate for Bernie Sanders in his presidential run, I get to talk to voters about why they should cast their ballots for the senator from Vermont. Last week, I joined a few other Sanders' supporters to talk to students at a college on Long Island. Actress Shailene Woodley told the crowd that she's supporting Bernie because she's worried that she might never see another candidate like him in her lifetime. She's 24.

When many of us progressives voted for Barack Obama in 2008, we hoped we were electing a transformational figure. Surely, in some ways, he has been. He has talked about race in ways that no other president has (or could). He has some signature legislation to his name. And he has showed that, under certain circumstances, our country is capable of electing an African-American guy with a funny name to be its president.

On the other hand, when it has come to ending wars and altering the culture of corporate greed, President Obama, from either a lack of ability or will, has failed. As Professor Cornel West put it, we thought we were getting John Coltrane and we got Kenny G instead. In a few years (or decades maybe), when he writes his memoir, we will know the true story of the Obama administration, especially to what degree he was unable to achieve his true goals. In my dreams, the whole book is in Arabic.

But here's the thing. When Obama came around, we put our faith in him. We were optimistic he would undertake the initiatives, spoken or unspoken, that we voted him in for. We were optimistic he would change things. It might have been foolish, but it was fun. It was whimsical. It was imaginative. It was hopeful.

With Bernie, we don't have to hope. We don't have to have faith. If you like the things Bernie says, well, you're in luck, because he has been saying them for 50 years. This is perhaps the most important distinction between that 2008 campaign and the campaign of today. Bernie has always been on message, hearing and bearing the political attacks all along the way. And he hasn't wavered. When it comes to American politics, that's quite unheard of.



Many of us voted for Barack Obama because we hoped he would say and do the kind of stuff Bernie Sanders has been doing for decades. Bernie is already the Obama we hoped Obama would be. If you still believe in the things that led you to vote for President Obama in 2008, then there is only one direction today.

And when you look around, you see that Bernie engenders the same enthusiasm, passion, and diversity as Obama did in 2008. Perhaps even more. Young voters are being drawn to the political process in even larger numbers. Bernie's rallies are drawing record-breaking numbers. The sense of solidarity is real. Last Saturday, I, a Palestinian Arab American with a Christian dad and a Muslim mom, was rallying a room full of mostly Bengali Muslim Americans in a synagogue in Queens, New York, to go out and volunteer for a Jewish guy, who just met with the Catholic pope, to become president of the United States. That can only happen in America. And in 2016, that only happens in one campaign.

As I've said before, we've had a Muslim president for eight years. Now it's time for a Jewish one.

At the end of that event on Long Island, an older silver-haired gentleman, looking to be in his sixties, rose to speak. After we had spent an hour rallying up students to volunteer and canvass neighborhoods (quite successfully, I might add), he told us all, "In the beginning, Shailene told you all that she might never see a candidate like this again. Well, I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm supporting Bernie because I've never, ever, seen a politician like this."

It turns out Shailene is probably right.
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Where I've been this week (and where we all are now) The Democratic crackdown on free speech has intensified this week, with Biden reportedly warning that "conspiracy theories" concerning the election (and, presumably, much else) will not be "tolerated." Thursday, January 28, 2021The Democratic crackdown on free speech has intensified this week, with Biden reportedly warning that "conspiracy theories" concerning the election (and, presumably, much else) will not be "tolerated."

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In the bad tradition of John Kerry and Al Gore, Bernie Sanders dummies up about election theft Again -- we need to reaffirm our right to vote, and to have our votes all counted fairly and transparently, before we can get anywhere but here. Thursday, March 12, 2020Again -- we need to reaffirm our right to vote, and to have our votes all counted fairly and transparently, before we can get anywhere but here.

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Daily Inspiration  The REAL Left We on the authentic left have to stop thinking in terms of left and right, stop regarding ourselves as members of the Left Tribe, and make common cause with people all over the political spectrum who are willing to question state power and who entertain the possibility of working together to pull this country and the world back from the brink. -- Mark Crispin Miller Monday, June 25, 2018We on the authentic left have to stop thinking in terms of left and right, stop regarding ourselves as members of the Left Tribe, and make common cause with people all over the political spectrum who are willing to question state power and who entertain the possibility of working together to pull this country and the world back from the brink. -- Mark Crispin Miller

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Some Truth about the White Helmets "Assad apologists" are those who have refused to face up to Assad's outrageous record of atrocities, even in the face of all the solid evidence that the US and its allies, and the entire Western press, have not presented. That's right. If you examine that outrageous record of atrocities, looking into each and every one, you'll see the West's whole nasty case against him waft away like so much smoke, that being exactly what is. Monday, April 23, 2018"Assad apologists" are those who have refused to face up to Assad's outrageous record of atrocities, even in the face of all the solid evidence that the US and its allies, and the entire Western press, have not presented. That's right. If you examine that outrageous record of atrocities, looking into each and every one, you'll see the West's whole nasty case against him waft away like so much smoke, that being exactly what is.

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Can US elections be stolen? Yes. And here's what we can do about it. Regardless of your candidate of choice (or process of elimination), please watch and share this short video by Mark Crispin Miller, author, professor, and constantly vigilant of and reporting on the state of our elections. Friday, November 4, 2016Regardless of your candidate of choice (or process of elimination), please watch and share this short video by Mark Crispin Miller, author, professor, and constantly vigilant of and reporting on the state of our elections.

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What's the biggest scandal in de Blasio's administration? That he belongs to the developers destroying New York City Although the press observes it only now and then, that anger at our mayor is evident all over New York City, where scores of groups have mobilized to save their neighborhoods, libraries, parks, playgrounds, hospitals and other precious places from the players supporting him (and all too many other useful "liberals"). Monday, April 18, 2016Although the press observes it only now and then, that anger at our mayor is evident all over New York City, where scores of groups have mobilized to save their neighborhoods, libraries, parks, playgrounds, hospitals and other precious places from the players supporting him (and all too many other useful "liberals").

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Score One (at last!) for the Election Integrity Movement This was the first Federal election in 10 years that did not bear fingerprints of massive electronic vote shift toward the Republicans. For those of us who have been trying to raise public alarm about election theft, there was the gratification of a glimmer of recognition - finally - in the mainstream press. It was not the public vindication for which we had hoped. But perhaps it was enough to make the fraudsters blink. Friday, November 9, 2012This was the first Federal election in 10 years that did not bear fingerprints of massive electronic vote shift toward the Republicans. For those of us who have been trying to raise public alarm about election theft, there was the gratification of a glimmer of recognition - finally - in the mainstream press. It was not the public vindication for which we had hoped. But perhaps it was enough to make the fraudsters blink.

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Mark Crispin Miller Takes Issue with MoveOn "If Romney Wins..." Pitch and Why When people know the truth about election fraud, if Romney "wins,"they won't collapse into despair and guilt,as if the Christianists,abetted by the Kochs and Adelsons,have once again out-voted us (which they have never done).If people know enough (at last) to question that dramatic "win," they'll push hard for a real investigation when it matters most-after the election.That would be a triumph for American democracy itself. Thursday, November 1, 2012When people know the truth about election fraud, if Romney "wins,"they won't collapse into despair and guilt,as if the Christianists,abetted by the Kochs and Adelsons,have once again out-voted us (which they have never done).If people know enough (at last) to question that dramatic "win," they'll push hard for a real investigation when it matters most-after the election.That would be a triumph for American democracy itself.

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Rightists used election fraud to "win" in Canada--and Liberals and the press are raising hell about it!(Not like here... A very different response to election fraud by our neighbors to the North. Food for thought... Thursday, March 1, 2012A very different response to election fraud by our neighbors to the North. Food for thought...

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Scott Walker Goes To Chicago, Gets His Mic Checked! (Must-See) MUST SEE VIDEO...Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker goes to Chicago to give a speech -- and the 99% gives him one instead! Saturday, November 5, 2011MUST SEE VIDEO...Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker goes to Chicago to give a speech -- and the 99% gives him one instead!

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New Details about How Bush Stole Ohio in '04 Court discovery has revealed a contract between OH Sec of State Ken Blackwell and the late (assassinated) Mike Connell, revealing that Connell was hired to give the White House access to the computer that adds up the county vote totals for the state of Ohio. (The official Ohio SOS computer went down after midnight on election night, and was replaced by Connell's computer, with a White House link-in.) Friday, July 22, 2011Court discovery has revealed a contract between OH Sec of State Ken Blackwell and the late (assassinated) Mike Connell, revealing that Connell was hired to give the White House access to the computer that adds up the county vote totals for the state of Ohio. (The official Ohio SOS computer went down after midnight on election night, and was replaced by Connell's computer, with a White House link-in.)

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House committee votes to kill funding for the arts in US public schools Today, a bill that would deliver a devastating blow to arts in schools was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Education and the Workforce. Thursday, May 26, 2011Today, a bill that would deliver a devastating blow to arts in schools was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Education and the Workforce.

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Despite election fraud and vote suppression by the GOP, Big Labor plans to win elections (in their dreams) What's really crazy here isn't the attempt to talk about election fraud:on the contrary.What's crazy here is a celebratory article about the unions' "smart" plans for the next election---without any mention of the GOP's ferocious and successful legislative push to block as many Dem votes as possible; and also with no mention of the well-established fact that the e-voting systems used throughout the state & every other state... Monday, May 23, 2011What's really crazy here isn't the attempt to talk about election fraud:on the contrary.What's crazy here is a celebratory article about the unions' "smart" plans for the next election---without any mention of the GOP's ferocious and successful legislative push to block as many Dem votes as possible; and also with no mention of the well-established fact that the e-voting systems used throughout the state & every other state...

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Palin was shouted down in Madison, her fans outnumbered two to one, and yet the corporate media couldn't, wouldn't see i When Sarah Palin took the stage in Madison, it looked like she was trying to shout down a hurricane. That's how loud the booing was, from a crowd in which the people come to tell her off outnumbered her supporters two to one.Case in point, and as a perfect illustration of Mark Karlin's argument below, is (below that) the New York Times's supercilious coverage of La Palin's storm-tossed aria in Madison. Thursday, April 21, 2011When Sarah Palin took the stage in Madison, it looked like she was trying to shout down a hurricane. That's how loud the booing was, from a crowd in which the people come to tell her off outnumbered her supporters two to one.Case in point, and as a perfect illustration of Mark Karlin's argument below, is (below that) the New York Times's supercilious coverage of La Palin's storm-tossed aria in Madison.

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Scotland dumps e-voting for hand-counted paper ballots Having gone through the "fiasco" of e-voting in 2007--the sort of mess that the Republicans and Democrats don't seem to mind at all--Scotland will go back to voting the old-fashioned way: hand-counted paper ballots. Although that method too (of course) enables fraud, the possibilities for election theft are infinitely greater with computerized systems, as we've seen in this faltering democracy time after time. Monday, November 1, 2010Having gone through the "fiasco" of e-voting in 2007--the sort of mess that the Republicans and Democrats don't seem to mind at all--Scotland will go back to voting the old-fashioned way: hand-counted paper ballots. Although that method too (of course) enables fraud, the possibilities for election theft are infinitely greater with computerized systems, as we've seen in this faltering democracy time after time.

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Cliff Arnebeck: Ohio Chamber reneges on commitment to produce names of contributors After the hearing I was assured by Linda Woggon in the presence of Brad Smith that the she would send the information to me.I served subpoenas for the information when I did not receive anything.At 3:30 a delivery person arrived at my office with a motion to quash our subpoenas.The Chamber has returned to a policy of secrecy after 4 election cycles in which it published the names of its contributors to influence elections. Monday, November 1, 2010After the hearing I was assured by Linda Woggon in the presence of Brad Smith that the she would send the information to me.I served subpoenas for the information when I did not receive anything.At 3:30 a delivery person arrived at my office with a motion to quash our subpoenas.The Chamber has returned to a policy of secrecy after 4 election cycles in which it published the names of its contributors to influence elections.

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ABC taps Andrew Breitbart for Election Night "analysis" But it's not just Breitbart's lying per se that makes him totally unfit to speak on the results of this election (or any other). Rather, it the fundamental purpose of those lies: i.e., to disenfranchise as many citizens as possible, so as to help the GOP take power despite the will of the majority. Saturday, October 30, 2010But it's not just Breitbart's lying per se that makes him totally unfit to speak on the results of this election (or any other). Rather, it the fundamental purpose of those lies: i.e., to disenfranchise as many citizens as possible, so as to help the GOP take power despite the will of the majority.

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"Likely Voter" samples over-represent the GOP (MUST-READ) Everybody's breathlessly asserting that the Democrats are cooked, and that the Tea-Bag Party will take over Congress on Election Day. Thus the MSM and GOP apparently agree; and so we seem to hear it everywhere, and endlessly.Here Stephen Herrington points out that this scenario is based on a skewed reading of the polling numbers. Kudos, then, to Stephen Herrington for making this important point. Tuesday, October 19, 2010Everybody's breathlessly asserting that the Democrats are cooked, and that the Tea-Bag Party will take over Congress on Election Day. Thus the MSM and GOP apparently agree; and so we seem to hear it everywhere, and endlessly.Here Stephen Herrington points out that this scenario is based on a skewed reading of the polling numbers. Kudos, then, to Stephen Herrington for making this important point.

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The bogus National Exit Poll for 2008--and the NYTimes won't discuss it! Here is Charnin's powerful analysis of "official" National Exit Poll results for the 2008 election.As he makes very clear, those numbers are preposterous. Charnin finds--and,it would seem, proves--that Obama did not win the last election by some 9 million votes, but by over 20 million votes. So the people's vote for "change" was not a mere "decisive victory," as the press repeatedly asserted but a landslide pure and simple. Wednesday, October 6, 2010Here is Charnin's powerful analysis of "official" National Exit Poll results for the 2008 election.As he makes very clear, those numbers are preposterous. Charnin finds--and,it would seem, proves--that Obama did not win the last election by some 9 million votes, but by over 20 million votes. So the people's vote for "change" was not a mere "decisive victory," as the press repeatedly asserted but a landslide pure and simple.

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O'Donnell LOST in Delaware It's all quite weird,of course.But what's far weirder is the total silence on such matters by both parties and the media.Somehow the doubtfulness of Brown's "win," and now O'Donnell's, hasn't raised the faintest question as to whether the Tea-Baggers really represent electoral majorities. And so the Standard Narrative we all keep hearing now --the Tea-Party's booming, the GOP is badly split, the Democrats are in big trouble Tuesday, September 21, 2010It's all quite weird,of course.But what's far weirder is the total silence on such matters by both parties and the media.Somehow the doubtfulness of Brown's "win," and now O'Donnell's, hasn't raised the faintest question as to whether the Tea-Baggers really represent electoral majorities. And so the Standard Narrative we all keep hearing now --the Tea-Party's booming, the GOP is badly split, the Democrats are in big trouble

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Pakistans Security Determinants

19 April, 2016

By Asif Haroon Raja

India has not reconciled to the existence of Pakistan and strives to reduce it to the status of a Satellite State.



While Indian Congress preaches soft Hindutva behind the facade of secularism, BJP and other extremist Hindu groups profess hard Hindutva.



Hindu extremism in India has gained political, military as well as ideological strength and in foreseeable future fever of Hindutva is not likely to die down.



India is strategic partner of the US, Israel, Afghanistan and is the darling of the west. As such it will retain its diplomatic ascendency in next ten years if not more.



India has been trying to destabilise Pakistan since 2004 with the help of her strategic partners; and also trying to encircle it by consolidating her presence in Afghanistan, Central Asian Republics (CARs), building North-South Corridor linking Mumbai Port with Bandar Abbas; and Chabahar with Afghanistan-CARs.



India is working hard to disrupt China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), and to isolate Pakistan by tarnishing its image and spoiling its relations with Afghanistan, Iran, Gulf States and the US.



India will not compromise on Kashmir and may agree to settle Siachin, Sir Creek and water disputes if Pakistan forgets Kashmir.



Composite dialogue is meant to buy time and show to the world that India is keen to restore peace and live as friendly neighbor.



India will keep playing terrorism card, Baluchistan and Sindh cards to bleed Pakistan and keep it on the defensive.



Pakistan has remained the most allied ally of the US since mid-1950s, in practical terms the US ditched Pakistan when its support was needed the most.



After 9/11, Pakistan was declared a non-NATO ally but it was at best a tactical partner for achievement of the US short term objectives.



Pakistans nukes are an eyesore for India, Israel and USA and the massive covert war launched from Afghan soil was aimed at denuclearizing Pakistan.



War on terror beefed up with propaganda/water/drone wars was designed to make Pakistan politically



unstable, socially traumatic, economically fragile, and militarily weak so as to paralyze and exhaust it and force it to abandon its nuclear program.



Alternatively, defame Pak nuclear program and seek UN intervention for safe custody of nukes, arguing that the arsenal was liable to fall in wrong hands. Or else, execute any of the prepared contingency plans to destroy or steal nukes.



Indias Cold Start doctrine is aimed at offsetting Pakistans strategic nuclear doctrine, and executing it at a time when bulk of Pak forces had got pinned down in designated restive areas.



Afghanistan under Hamid Karzai remained aligned with India and hostile to Pakistan, thereby created two-front threat to Pakistan. Afghan Unity government has brought little change in its stance.



Sinister designs of adversaries of Pakistan received a huge setback when ISAF failed to defeat Taliban and abandoned Afghanistan in December 2014.



Turnaround of Pakistans sunk economy and its image because of better governance, financial management; brilliant successes achieved in counter terrorism have poured cold water on the sinister plans of enemies of Pakistan.



Pakistan today is looked at with admiration and respect and is in demand to help in restoring peace in Afghanistan and in Middle East.



Irrespective of apparently changed outlook of USA and the west, their objective of disabling Pakistans nuclear program, or as a minimum curtailing its minimum deterrence capability remain unchanged.



Having failed in their objectives through covert and overt operations, the adversaries are now making all out efforts to mar civil-military relations and to bring down the ruling regime so as to create chaos. Panama Leaks could be a step in that direction.



With hostile India on its east, Pakistan can ill-afford to have pro-India and anti-Pakistan regime in Kabul posing a twin threat to its security.



Till such time unity regime gets out of influence of India, reins in anti-peace elements, and cooperates with Pakistan, peace will not return in Af-Pak region.



Only joint and collaborative efforts can tackle terrorism and not blame-game.



Its to be seen whether the US after abandoning Afghanistan would forsake its declared and hidden objectives, or continues with its proxy war to pursue



its mercantile interests and to disable Pak nuclear program?



Ultimate solution to Afghan imbroglio will have to be found by the Afghans themselves. Others can at best facilitate dialogue.



Recommendations  Home Front



Nuclear might, strong army, and full coffers will neither make us a strong nation, nor will help in making us morally strong and virtuous. Each one of us will have to carry out self-accountability and put own house in order rather than finding faults in others.



Home and educational institutes being the best training centres and reformatory laboratories, should play their role to improve moral turpitude of contaminated society.



Our leaders must bridge societal divides, improve governance and social justice, restore pristine values, alleviate the problems of have-nots, integrate the divided society and consolidate home front.



This will be possible only when we cure cancer of corruption which is eating into the vitals of the country like a termite, and terrorism which is jolting the very foundations of Pakistan.



We need to reform our electoral laws, accountability, judiciary, police and our feudal mindset.



There is dire need to refurbish our moral fibre by following the righteous path as inscribed in the Quran and taught by Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).



Civil- military must remain on one page to overcome complex challenges.



Regime change or mid-term elections as professed by some in the wake of Panama Leaks will prove fatal for political stability, economic growth, fight against terrorism and ongoing projects including CPEC. The system howsoever flawed must continue while ensuring checks and balances.



Media must be disciplined and made into 4th pillar of Pakistan rather than a tool of our adversaries.



Recommendations  External Front



Rather than putting all its eggs in the US basket, Pakistan should diversify its foreign policy by building ties with Russia.



Grant of Most Favored Nation status and land access to India through Wagah border should be linked with resolution of core issues.



Pakistan should continue to convince the US and Afghan government to limit Indias role in Afghanistan since it is the chief trouble maker.



Concerted efforts be made to counter Indian propaganda in Afghanistan aimed at poisoning the minds of Afghans against Pakistan and allay their misperceptions.



Diplomatic pressure must be exerted on Iran to prevent RAW from using Iranian soil for sabotage and subversion in Baluchistan and Karachi, as has been revealed by a recently arrested RAW officer Naval Commander Kal Bhushan Yadav.



At the same time, Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project which had remained in limbo because of sanctions on Iran to be expedited and used as a means to forge closer ties with Iran.



Additionally, efforts be made to remove apprehensions of Iran over Gwadar and to make the Gwadar-Chahbahar ports supplement each others economic potential rather than becoming rivals.



Pak-Afghan and Pak-Iran security are mutually intertwined and indivisible. It is Pakistans strategic compulsion to have friendly relations with both and must strive hard for it using all its diplomatic skills.



Pakistan must further refine its Full Spectrum Deterrence to keep India deterred. Under no circumstance, tactical nuclear weapons capability achieved through short-range Nasr missiles should be bottled up.



Development of CPEC and Gwadar Port must continue with full commitment to overcome socio, politico, economic inequities and security concerns.



Pakistan should act as a bridge between the two ideological rivals  Saudi Arabia and Iran, and remove their differences.



China and Saudi Arabia are Pakistans most trusted and reliable friends. Friendship should be cemented.



Pakistan should assert and exert its geo-strategic position and significance, extract its due share and uphold its self-esteem rather than following a self-defeating policy of appeasement.



Conclusion



To conclude I would say that Pakistan has remained under the deceptive magic spell of the US for too long without any gains. Pakistan has neither become a



developed country, nor an Asian tiger, nor achieved security.



It has been ceding ground to win the friendship of India but couldnt change the mindset of Brahman rulers who have not missed any opportunity to harm Pakistan.



Unity government in Kabul is wholly in the grip of USA and India and will continue to prefer India over Pakistan.



Notwithstanding the need to maintain friendly relations with all the three, this fatal affection must not be at the cost of national interests and dignity of the nation.



Strong and united home front is the best defence against internal and external challenges. Concept of Unity in Diversity should be promoted.



Last but not least, each one of us must carry out self-analysis and self-accountability rather than of others. Those who say, Not me, Im honest is not telling the whole truth.










The Panama Leaks and Nawaz Sharif Family 19 April, 2016 By Saeed Qureshi

Related News European nationals working as spies with govt's approval: FO Related Articles South Asian Dirtiest Intelligence Game

By By Zaheerul Hassan Pakistan-Iran Sensibilities

By By Asif Haroon Raja More on this View All European nationals working as spies with govt's approval: FO

Gul slams US intelligence agencies' report on Pak A team of The International Consortium of Investigate Journalists (ICIJ) leaked the Database Documents commonly known as Panama Papers. ICIJ works for Panama Papers. Panama Papers is the largest international organization of its kind across the globe. The leaked documents involving 214000 offshore companies were researched by around 400 journalists around the world from 80 nations. The number of confidential documents researched is 1.5 million. Besides 100 media organizations including BBC, Guardian, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Falter, etc. were involved in this research. The collected information runs into 2.6 terabytes of data.



The Central actor or facilitator mentioned in the historic and unprecedented so titled Panama Leaks is Mossack Fonseca. It is a law firm of Panama that works globally to establish, manage and sell the anonymous businesses and companies to prospective interested parties.



Mossack Fonseca manages the secret assets of major banks, legal firms and asset management companies. Its shady deals also encompass industrialists, actors, the worlds rich and famous politicians, personalities, fraudsters, drug smugglers, professionals, etc. Thus the beneficiaries and clients of the Mossack Fonseca can evade taxes and and money laundering.



It prepares fake documents, creates phony directors and hides the true identity of the actual owners of the offshore businesses. In simple world it helps, in an apparent legal way, the money laundering of the black or illegitimate wealth.



Undoubtedly, it is one of the biggest and unprecedented scandals of money-laundering unearthed ever. It would be interesting to watch what action the respective governments take against the figures, companies, politicians and business cartels of their countries. Whether the Panama government or an international forum would take Mossack Fonseca to task or the respective governments would prosecute those companies and individuals whose names are in the papers.



In the wake of this mega bombshell of concealment of wealth, the Iceland's prime minister Sigmundur Davi Gunnlaugsson has resigned. There could be many more resignations in the time to come.



From Pakistan three children of the incumbent Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, namely Hasan Nawaz Sharif, Hussain Nawaz Sharif and daughter Marian Safdar have been mentioned in the Panama Leaks.



From India there are 500 industrialists, Bollywood actors, Politicians who used the service of Mossack Fonseca to hide their wealth. This list includes Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, KP Singh, Anurag Kejriwal and many others.

In Pakistan there is a massive backlash from the politicians against Nawaz Sharif and his family. Imran Khan, the Chairman of the PTI and some of his colleagues have been most aggressive vocal in this regard. They have demanded that the NAB should immediately launch an investigation into the recent revelations about Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his familys alleged offshore wealth.



In a televised address to the nation Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced to constitute a Judicial Commission to probe allegations being faced by his family members in the backdrop of Panama Papers leak.



Many politicians of the opposition have rejected this decision of Nawaz Sharif and opined that judicial commission was going to be merely an eye wash in probing the truth about the serious accusation of money laundering as leaked in Panama Papers.



Calling for prime Ministers resignation, the PTI chief has asked him to reveal to the nation how such huge sums were transferred abroad. The Chief of Jamaat-i-Islam Siraj-ul-haq has joined the chorus of bitter condemnation and scathing censure.



Besides PTI, Sheikh Rashid, the PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto, Khurshid Shah, Ayaz Amir a columnist and Sirjul-Haq the Chief of Jamat-e-Islami and among others have castigated the prime minister on formation of one man judicial commission.



It looks like a sudden bolt from the blue for Nawaz Sharif government already caught up in unbridled religious militancy and continuous and unremitting lawlessness. There could be a possibility that opposition might force either derailing the PMLN government or prime ministers resignation.



. Perhaps it is the most embarrassing and trying time for Mian Nawaz Sharif and his children although there are many other heads of states or the governments caught into this sudden whirlwind of hug scam. The allegations of the opposition members though legitimate look like a political move to accuse Nawaz Sharif personally and to replace him.



The three children of Nawaz Sharif have tried to clarify their position yet the barrage of incriminations against Sharif family seems to be bulging. Their explanation is that they had been doing their business out of Pakistan for about twenty years and their wealth was not transferred from Pakistan but earned abroad. Mariam Safdar in her press statement said that the info provided by leaks does NOT say any wrongdoing involved. Distortion is willful that a couple of media channels are using to settle scores"



It cannot be predicted how far these explanations can be effective to convince the critics and whether the storm would finally subside or not.



The writer is a senior journalist, former editor of Diplomatic Times and a former diplomat.This and other articles by the writer can also be read at his blog www.uprightopinion.com.
Sponsored by Sony

When Miami-based portrait photographer Brian Smith was asked to test the Sony G Matster Lenses, he chose a setting with color, texture and history: Mardi Gras. The annual New Orleans celebration is a photographers playground with parades, vibrant costumes and a diverse range of subjects from day to night.

 Brian Smith

Although he is best known for his portraits of big-name celebrities like Samuel L. Jackson and Anne Hathaway, Smith is also an avid shooter of lifestyle and travel photography. New Orleans provided opportunities for all of the above, from the lively nightlife on Bourbon Street to the porches of Cajun fishermen in nearby Houma, Louisiana.

Smiths camera of choice is the Sony 7R II, and, up until now, his lenses of choice were the Sony-compatible Zeiss line. With the new G Master Lenses, he had high expectations: I was hoping the new lenses would come close to matching the performance of [Zeiss lenses], he says. Armed with the FE 24-70mm F2.8 lens and FE 85mm F1.4 lens, both from Sonys new G Master series, Smith traveled to Louisiana to test them out.

 Brian Smith

We were all over Cajun country. We went everywhere we could think of to try out these lenses, Smith recalls. Smiths odyssey led him to shoot sunset portraits of jazz musician Benny Jones, Sr. in Louis Armstrong Park; Big Chief Kevin Goodman of the Flaming Arrows, decked out in full Mardi Gras Indian regalia; as well as a staged fashion shoot in the historic Lafayette Cemetery.

Smith was happy to find that the lenses autofocus was fast and accurate, while also rendering colors and skin tones faithfully. I was hoping the G Master Lenses would come close to matching the performance of Sonys Zeiss lenses, said Smith. And they exceeded my expectations. Pairing the fast autofocus with the low-light capabilities of the 7R II allowed Smith to capture nighttime portraits with only available light.

 Brian Smith

Most noticeably, according to Smith, the lenses had a smooth transition from in-focus areas to out-of-focus, a quality that Smith says made images like those of the science fiction-themed Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus parade simply look better. When you are photographing people, you want the image to be as sharp as possible, but you also want it to look beautiful, Smith explains. Beauty isnt something you typically talk about when testing lenses, but when you see the images, you can understand why I would say [that what the G Master lenses produce] are beautiful.

 Brian Smith

When Smith returned to his studio in Miami, he could see even more clearly what he had noticed in the field: the G Master images were crisp, even when he zoomed in on minor detailsand even when he had shot with a wide-open aperture. Since his New Orleans trip, Smith says the G Master lenses have become an integral part of his gear: Ive been using them on almost all of my shoots. Im very happy taking these two lenses with me and calling it a day.

For more information on G Master Lenses and Brian Smith visit sony.com/alpha.
Sprawling across 150,000 hectares, the Bialowieza forest stretches across Poland's border with Belarus

Environmental groups on Tuesday lodged a complaint with the European Commission over Poland's large-scale logging plans in the Bialowieza forest, which includes Europe's last primeval woodland.

"We risk turning this forest into a tree plantation and reducing our natural heritage into blocks of wood," Greenpeace Poland head Robert Cyglicki told reporters, alongside representatives from six other groups including the Polish branch of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Poland's Environment Minister Jan Szyszko last month gave the go ahead for the large-scale loggingdespite protests from scientists and ecologiststo combat a spruce bark beetle infestation.

"The Commission is concerned about the recent decision of the Polish authorities," EU environment spokeswoman Iris Petsa told AFP on Tuesday, adding that the institution had reached out to Warsaw and "will decide on any further steps" based on replies it received Monday.

Under the new plan, loggers will harvest more than 180,000 cubic metres (6.4 million cubic feet) of wood from non-protected areas of the forest over a decade, dwarfing previous plans to harvest 40,000 cubic metres over the same period.

The environmentalists take issue with the government's rationale, saying "the intensive wood extraction is a threat for priority habitats and species".

Poland's environment ministry gave the go ahead in March for large-scale logging in the Bialowieza forest to combat a spruce bark beetle infestation

"Contrary to what the minister of environment says, the bark beetle outbreak does not pose any threat to the habitats," Przemyslaw Chylarecki from Polish environmental group Greenmind said in the joint statement.

The groups said the logging plan, which could begin as early as this spring, violates EU conservation law.

"We cannot challenge this decision under Polish law, so complaining to the Commission is our last resort," said lawyer Agata Szafraniuk from the non-profit organisation ClientEarth.

"In the past, breaches of EU nature law have led to hefty fines and withdrawal of funding. We hope the minister will reconsider before this irreplaceable forest is lost forever."

Sprawling across 150,000 hectares (around 370,650 acres), the Bialowieza forest extends over the Polish border with Belarus, where it is entirely protected as a nature park.

Designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979, the forest is home to 20,000 animal species, including 250 types of bird and 62 species of mammals, among them Europe's largest, the bison.

Europe's tallest trees, firs towering 50 metres high (160 feet), and oaks and ashes of 40 metres, also flourish here, in an ecosystem unspoiled for more than 10 millennia.

Explore further Greenpeace protests Polish logging of Europe's last primeval forest

 2016 AFP
Methane and ethanetwo of the major components of natural gasare measured above the Caltech campus using a remote sensing instrument that utilizes the historic solar telescope located on the roof of Caltech's Linde+Robinson laboratory. Credit: David Wakely for Caltech

On October 23, 2015, the Aliso Canyon underground storage facility for natural gas in the San Fernando Valleythe fourth largest of its kind in the United Stateshad one of its wells blow out, leading to a large release of methane. The leak was not fully under control until February 11, 2016. In the interim, residents of nearby neighborhoods were sickened by the odorants added to the gas, thousands of households were displaced, and California's governor declared a state of emergency for the area. The story made international headlines; the BBC's headline, for example, read, "California methane leak 'largest in US history.'"

The leak was indeed large and undoubtedly difficult for the residents of the area. However, Caltech's Paul Wennberg says there is also a bigger picture to keep in mind: enormous methane and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions occur all the time, with troubling implications for global climate. Wennberg is Caltech's R. Stanton Avery Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Science and Engineering, executive officer for Environmental Science and Engineering, and director of the Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science.

We recently sat down with him to talk about methane emissions and how to put the Aliso Canyon event into perspective.

What was your involvement with the Aliso Canyon event?

We have a greenhouse gas remote sensing system here at Caltech that is part of TCCONthe Total Carbon Column Observing Network. The day after the Aliso Canyon leak started, we observed something really weird in the air above Pasadena. There was a large, big plume of methane and ethane gas that came over. We now know that it was from the Aliso Canyon facility. We are providing data for the final analyses of the leak.

In the past you have suggested that the methane emissions from Los Angeles are much larger than was previously included in models.

Right. Thankfully, models are now catching up as we learn more from the data.

What does the Aliso Canyon event suggest about Los Angeles's methane emissions in general?

Aliso Canyon was a very dramatic event. Everyone heard about it worldwide. The leak continued for about 100 days, and yet it only doubled the amount of methane being emitted by LA during that period. This was a tragedy for the people living next to it, who had to deal with horrible nausea and other side effects of the chemicals associated with the natural gas. But from a climate point of view, the methane leak was actually quite trivial.

There are enormous amounts of methane being released into the atmosphere globally as a result of human activity. That is certainly true of LA, but as far as climate goes, it doesn't matter whether it's released in LA or New Zealand. On the timescale that methane sticks around in the atmosphere, it gets well mixed and affects the entire planet.

How much methane is emitted per year?

About three hundred teragrams [Tg; one teragram is equivalent to one billion kilograms] of methane are emitted every year by people and the activities of people, like agriculture and energy. Los Angeles emits about 0.4 Tg. That means that of the human methane emissions, LA as a total is one part in a thousandnot nothing, but a pretty small amount.

For perspective, Aliso Canyon emitted around 0.1 Tg. It was a big event, but what it really illustrates is how big a challenge we truly face. There are many sources emitting methane into the atmosphere and they are very diffuse. Reducing them will require hard work on many, many fronts. So it's not just, "If we solve this one problem, everything will be beautiful in the world."

You could imagine the response to the Aliso Canyon leak might be that we would all of a sudden focus all of our efforts trying to prevent leaks in natural gas storage facilities. That would not be the right answer from a climate perspective.

How should people go about eliminating methane emissions?

There is not "one" fix. Each source requires a different strategy for mitigation.

First, there is fixing leaks in the pipelines and storage facilities.

Then, it turns out that ruminants like cows and sheep produce a lot of methaneprobably a third, if not more, of the human emissions. A paper about this, recently in Science, suggests that an important part of the recent increases in methane is coming from agriculture. Depending on what you feed these ruminants, they produce less methane. They eat grass, but they can't metabolize it: they have a fermenter going in their belliesa whole microbiome that breaks the grass down into smaller things like acetate that they can metabolize. Depending on the microbiome of their guts, the cows and sheep make more or less methane. And it turns out that you can manage this.

Then there are the wetlands used for rice agriculture. Methane is produced anaerobicallyin places with no oxygenby Archaea. If you have a flooded rice paddy, the methane is produced at the roots and is transpired through the rice plants into the atmosphere. Quite a few studies now show that if you can change your rice agricultural practices to allow the fields to dry periodically, the methane emissions drop hugely.

If you were able to fix all of these things what would the impact be in terms of climate change?

If we could really knock the methane emissions back to what they were before people started emitting methane, it would be a large change. It would be a half a watt per meter squared. The total global warming would drop by around 25 percent.

How does the importance of reducing methane emissions compare to the importance of reducing carbon dioxide emissions?

Globally, methane is important. It's maybe a third of the climate forcing of CO2that is, the increase in methane has contributed about one third of the total change in Earth's climate over the last 100 years. In terms of climate impact, however, the methane emissions from people in Los Angeles are absolutely dwarfed by their CO2 emissionsall of our driving, going on airplanes, and everything else that we do. Still, if we are to reduce our global warming potential and the amount of greenhouse gasses we emit to the atmosphere, methane has to be part of the equation.

We like to think that we can solve these problems by fixing singular events, but climate doesn't work that way. We're talking about the emissions of 7 billion people. If it were that this was produced by 100 events like Aliso Canyon, this would be a simple problem: we solve the 100 problems, and we're done. But it's all of us, and it's all of what we eat, it's all of the energy that we use, it's all of the miles that we drive. It's a much more complex problem.

What work is your group currently doing in terms of methane?

One of the things we've been doing is long-term monitoring. Natural gas is mostly methane (CH4) but there's also ethane (C2H6) in it and this provides a way of separating the signature of methane emitted from agriculture, which has no ethane, and emissions from natural gas, which does.

Over the last five years or so, the production of oil in the United States has increased hugely, and associated with that oil production is natural gas, and therefore methane and ethane. Traditionally, most of the ethane produced at a wellhead was pulled off and sent to the plastic industry. With the changing oil production, the market has become flooded in ethane: there's simply not enough plastic to be made. When the industry can't sell the ethane to the plastic industry, they simply leave it in the natural gas. We see this in the natural gas delivered to Los Angeles. Five years ago natural gas had about 2 percent ethane. Now it's 5 percentit's more than doubled. What we've seenand this has nothing to do with Aliso Canyonis that over the last five years, the amount of ethane in the air over Pasadena has increased.

That's important because it tells us that a significant fraction of the methane that's being released in LA is coming from natural gas brought into Los Angeles. This has been a topic of a lot of debate. Is the big methane emitter the oil production down in the Long Beach area? Is it waste treatment plants? Is it garbage dumps? What we find is that about half of all the methane emitted in this part of LA is gas that originally came in on a pipeline.

How do you know that?

We actually know from the gas company how much ethane is in the natural gas. They report this publically from one of their storage fields and this matches the ethane in samples of the natural gas coming into our buildings.

Are there other projects under way at Caltech to study methane emissions?

Christian Frankenberg [associate professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech and a JPL research scientist] has been leading an effort to build remote sensing instruments that allow imaging of methane plumes. Using small spectrometers on airplanes, he has flown over areas where you might have a lot of methane emissions and identified individual sources. Last year they were able to find individual pipelines that were leaking in Colorado and in New Mexico. They found several big leaks from pipelines and were able to tell the pipeline operators, who shut them down and fixed them.

Explore further UCI maps methane leaks across Los Angeles Basin
Everybody agrees that on geological timescales over hundreds of millions of years, tectonics control the climate, but we didnt know how to connect this, says Oliver Jagoutz. Credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT

For hundreds of millions of years, Earth's climate has remained on a fairly even keel, with some dramatic exceptions: Around 80 million years ago, the planet's temperature plummeted, along with carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The Earth eventually recovered, only to swing back into the present-day ice age 50 million years ago.

Now geologists at MIT have identified the likely cause of both ice ages, as well as a natural mechanism for carbon sequestration. Just prior to both periods, massive tectonic collisions took place near the Earth's equatora tropical zone where rocks undergo heavy weathering due to frequent rain and other environmental conditions. This weathering involves chemical reactions that absorb a large amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The dramatic drawdown of carbon dioxide cooled the atmosphere, the new study suggests, and set the planet up for two ice ages, 80 million and 50 million years ago.

"Everybody agrees that on geological timescales over hundreds of millions of years, tectonics control the climate, but we didn't know how to connect this," says Oliver Jagoutz, associate professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT. "I think we're the first ones to really link large-scale tectonic events to climate change."

Jagoutz and his colleagues, EAPS Professor Leigh Royden, and Francis McDonald of Harvard University, have published their findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Nidar Ophiolite in Northeast India is a piece of rock formed in a long-gone ocean that separated India and Eurasia. A new study suggests that when tectonic forces emplace such ophiolites onto continents at low latitude, the weathering of these rocks can pull a large amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Credit: Oliver Jagoutz

Putting the squeeze on

The two tectonic collisions that the team studied stemmed from the same event: the slow northward migration of Gondwana, a supercontinent that spanned the Southern Hemisphere from 300 million to 180 million years ago and eventually broke up to form Antarctica, South America, Africa, India, and Australia.

Around 180 million years ago, tectonic activity began to push fragments of Gondwana up toward the northern supercontinent of Eurasia, which slowly squeezed and eventually closed the Neo-Tethys Ocean, an ancient body of water lying between the supercontinents.

In previous work, Jagoutz and his colleagues developed a model to simulate the tectonic shifting that occurred in and around that ocean as Gondwana fragments were crushed against Eurasia. Through analysis of ancient rocks in today's Himalayas, the team determined a sequence of events as the continents merged.

They found that 90 million years ago, the northeastern edge of the African plate collided and slid under an oceanic plate in the Neo-Tethys Ocean, creating a chain of volcanoes. At 80 million years ago, as Africa continued advancing north, the oceanic plate was pushed further up and over the continent, exposing ocean rock to the atmosphere, while simultaneously terminating the volcanoes. Then, 50 million years ago, India merged with Eurasia in a second collision in which a different region of the oceanic plate was pushed up onto that continent.

Both collisions took place in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), an atmospheric region hovering over the Earth's equator, in which trade winds come together to generate a region of intense temperatures and rainfall.

A weathering trigger

For this new paper, the researchers wondered whether the tectonic collisions in this extremely tropical region may have played a part in pulling huge amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and triggering the ice ages.

Certain types of rock, if exposed to high heat and heavy rain, undergo chemical reactions and effectively absorb carbon dioxide, a process known as silicate weathering. These rocks include basalts and "ultramafic" rocks, which are often found within oceanic plates. If these rocks are exposed to the atmosphere in a tropical region, they can act as very efficient carbon sinks.

The team hypothesized that the two collisions, involving Africa and then India, brought basaltic and ultramafic rocks up from the oceans and onto land, creating carbon sinks 80 and 50 million years ago. Both collisions also effectively turned off carbon sources by burying volcanoes that had been emitting carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere.

To know whether such a sequence of events directly reduced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the researchers looked to weathering rates of different rock types, including granites, basalts, and ultramafics. These rates, which have been calculated by other researchers, describe the way rocks erode and take up carbon dioxide, given exposure to a certain amount of rainfall.

They then applied these weathering rates to their model's estimates of the amount of oceanic plate that was pushed up onto Africa and India, at 80 and 50 million years ago, respectively. After determining the amount of carbon dioxide sequestered by these rocks, they calculated the total amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide through time, from 100 million years ago to around 40 million years ago.

The team found that carbon dioxide dipped dramatically at precisely the time the two collisions occurred. The levels of carbon dioxide also mirrored the temperature of the oceans during this interval.

Jagoutz says one reason these two collisions had such an extreme effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide may have been the fact that each continent continued moving north, exposing new basaltic and ultramafic material, "like a bulldozer that brings fresh rock to the surface."

Interestingly, a similar process is taking place today, albeit at a smaller scale, near the island of Java. The same tectonic activity that shifted Gondwana northward more than 100 million years ago is today pushing the Australian plate north, and as a result, is piling up basaltic material on Java within the ITCZ, which Jagoutz says is "a huge carbon sink."

"What nature shows us is, if you put a lot of these rocks in the tropics, where it's hot, muggy, wet, and rains every day, and you also have the effect of removing the soil constantly by tectonics and thus exposing fresh rocks, then you have an excellent trigger for ice ages," Jagoutz says. "But the question is whether that is a mechanism that works on the timescale that is relevant for us."

"To confidently estimate the long-term fate of fossil fuel carbon in the atmosphere, we need to fully understand the dynamics of the carbon cycle and how it operates on all time scales," says Lee Kemp, professor of geosciences at Penn State University. "This study highlights an important restorative force of the carbon cycle. The 'repair mechanism' for volcanism-induced warming is the chemical weathering of the volcanic rocks themselvesa repair job that takes millions of years."

Explore further Researchers explain mystery of India's rapid move toward Eurasia 80 million years ago

More information: Oliver Jagoutz et al. Low-latitude arccontinent collision as a driver for global cooling, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2016). Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oliver Jagoutz et al. Low-latitude arccontinent collision as a driver for global cooling,(2016). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1523667113
Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Philip Schiller

Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June, the company announced.

The weeklong gathering will kick off on June 13 with a keynote presentation at which Apple will showcase its software platforms for mobile devices, smart watches, Macintosh computers and Internet television.

"With four innovative operating systems and a new, intuitive programming language powering over one billion devices worldwide, there has never been a more exciting time to bring our developer community together," Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Philip Schiller said in a statement, released on Monday.

"WWDC 2016 is going to be a landmark event for developers who are coding in Swift, and building apps and products for iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS."

Tickets for the event typically sell out quickly, but Apple said conference sessions would also be streamed live online.

Google's annual developers conference will take place in May near its main campus in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View.

Fun, functional or hip applications created by third-party developers have become major factors in the popularity of smartphones or tablets powered by rival operating systems.

Explore further Apple annual developers conference set for June

 2016 AFP
Apple on Tuesday denied providing Chinese authorities with special access to its devices, as the iPhone maker defended its position on encryption and cooperation with US law enforcement.

The company's general counsel Bruce Sewell was appearing at a US congressional hearing on encryption's impact on law enforcement, as the high-tech giant battles the government over whether it should be compelled to help authorities in criminal cases.

Sewell said he wanted to set the record straight on China in light of reports cited by officials at the hearing that the company had turned over its software instructions or "source code"which could be used to break encryptionto Beijing.

"We have not provided source code to the Chinese government," he told lawmakers.

"We have been asked by the Chinese government. We refused," he said, adding that this had happened "within the past two years."

Encryption debate renewed

The hearing was called to discuss how strong encryption is hampering law enforcement and how technology firms should respond to legitimate law enforcement requests to break encryption.

Lawmakers at the House Energy and Commerce committee said they hoped the discussion would help both sides in the debate find common ground, so that privacy can be protected while enabling law enforcement to get data its needs for criminal probes.

"I can't believe this problem is intractable," said Representative Diana DeGette. "What I want to hear... is about possible solutions going forward."

While law enforcement officials and Apple both expressed a willingness to talk, the comments appeared to show little common ground in a debate which has been raging for weeks.

The encryption issue hit a boiling point earlier this year when Apple refused to help the FBI weaken the operating system of an iPhone used by one of the shooters in last year's San Bernardino killing spree.

The government eventually withdrew the request, saying it had been able to get into the phone with help from an outside party, but similar cases are pending in the courts.

Sewell defended the company's toughened encryption for its iPhones, which can sometimes make data unreadable to authorities, even with a warrant.

"The best way we, and the technology industry, know how to protect your information is through the use of strong encryption," he said.

"Encryption today is the backbone of our cybersecurity infrastructure and provides the very best defense we have against increasingly hostile attacks."

An FBI official however repeated concerns that unbreakable encryption may help criminals and terrorists evade detection.

"We have seen case after casefrom homicides and kidnappings, to drug trafficking, financial fraud, trade secret theft, and child exploitationwhere critical evidence came from smartphones, computers, and online communications," said FBI executive assistant director Amy Hess.

"Increasingly, some technologies are prohibiting law enforcement from having access to that critical evidence."

'In the dark'

Thomas Galati, chief of intelligence for the New York City police department, expressed frustration over the default encryption for smartphones.

He said that in the six-month period from October 2015 through March of this year, "we have been locked out of 67 Apple devices lawfully seized pursuant to the investigation of 44 violent crimes."

"In the past, a phone or wiretaplegally obtained through a judgewould alert the police to drop-off points, hideouts, and target locations," he said. "Now, we are literally in the dark. Criminals know it."

But Amit Yoran, president of the security firm RSA, said law enforcement is failing to use tools available to them.

"We live in a 'golden age' of surveillance, more so than in any other point in history," he told the panel.

"In just about everything we do, we leave an incredibly insightful digital breadcrumb trail... Law enforcement has an overwhelming volume of information readily available to it, creating challenges to efficiently manage and fully leverage it."

Apple said in its most recent transparency report Monday that it received more than 30,000 data requests from law enforcement worldwide and provided some information in a majority of those cases.

 2016 AFP
his nighttime image, taken by astronauts in the International Space Station, reveals dramatic land development over one area of northeastern China. Research shows that large urban areas such as these can have dramatic impacts on regional weather and climate. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

More cars, factories, heat, and pollutionthese are some of the consequences of urbanization. Atmospheric researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that the impact of urbanization around Beijing, China, creates two opposite regional effects, both of which govern seasonal rainfall in the area. Increased atmospheric particlesprimarily from burning fossil fuelswork on clouds to decrease rainfall upwind of Beijing and increase downwind rain. Turns out this is a more powerful impact than the particles' direct effectdisrupting sunlight energy's journey to the surface.

Another urbanization consequence is caused by the increased mass of heat-absorbing streets and buildings, creating a "heat island" around the city that warms up the surrounding atmosphere. They found this effect has a greater impact on temperature than precipitation.

"Our study showed that the precipitation effect was the greater of the two urbanization impacts, through the 'indirect effect' of aerosol particles," said Dr. Yun Qian, atmospheric scientist at PNNL. "When we investigated the effects on one extreme rainfall event in the Greater Beijing Metropolitan Area, we found the urban heat island effect had less of an impact on rainfall."

China's urban population has doubled since 1990. More people in the city increases demand for services, housing, streets, and utilities. Often overlooked are changes to the environment and the atmosphere produced by removal of natural landscapes to make room for more buildings and streets.

When natural land surfaces are replaced by streets, buildings, and highways, several environmental consequences follow. Think about a hot sidewalk on a midsummer's day. These structures store and convert heat, which increases the temperature of the air and surroundings. Called an "urban heat island" this effect has far-reaching impacts on temperature and heat waves for regional weather and climate.

When natural vegetation is replaced by buildings and paved streets, the landscape is transformed into a solar sponge, storing heat and increasing evaporation rates. These significant changes alter meteorological conditions, such as wind patterns and surface temperatures. Depending on the size of the city, the urban surface temperature can be five times greater than a rural one. This phenomenon is known as the urban heat island effect. Credit: World Meteorological Organization

This rapid growth, caused by moving people from rural to urban areas, also means increased urban pollution. Beijing has experienced a dramatic increase in pollution emissions from vehicles, electrical generation, and industrial plants in the last two decades. These emissions contain many tiny particles called aerosols that increase the number of smaller cloud droplets that are much slower to form rainfall.

In this study, scientists found that between these two urbanization impacts, increased pollution particles and their influence on clouds has a greater influence over the regional climate. Understanding the effects could lead to better informed solutions for a changing climate.

In this study, the research team conducted ensemble simulations with three one-way nested domains using the WRF-Chem meteorological model coupled with a single-layer Urban Canopy Model. The model spatial resolution at 4 km can depict most clouds and cloud-aerosol interactions. They quantified the relative importance of the heat island effect and the aerosol-radiation-interaction and aerosol-cloud-interaction effects using four sets of sensitivity experiments, with 13 ensemble simulations run in each. High-resolution urban area data were derived from the NASA satellite nighttime light products, used to detect urban boundaries and density. The study obtained human-caused emission datasets of aerosols and their precursors from the Asian emission inventory and China emission inventory.

Their results show the aerosol-cloud interaction effect plays a dominant role in the region by modifying the Beijing rainfall pattern as aerosol particles suppress convection and rainfall in the upwind area and increase convection and rainfall in the downwind area.

This research was based on a single case study. Longer term studies will be necessary to capture the influence of land-cover change and atmospheric particles as they modify regional climates that have different large-scale influences. And, because the influence of aerosols may be dependent on atmospheric environmental conditions, further investigations are needed in other metropolitan areas with different weather conditions.

Explore further Pollution stifles wind, squelches rain

More information: Shi Zhong et al. A case study of urbanization impact on summer precipitation in the Greater Beijing Metropolitan Area: Urban heat island versus aerosol effects, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (2015). Journal information: Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres Shi Zhong et al. A case study of urbanization impact on summer precipitation in the Greater Beijing Metropolitan Area: Urban heat island versus aerosol effects,(2015). DOI: 10.1002/2015JD023753
CORINTH | A Corinth man was arrested Monday after he allegedly hurt a Saratoga County sheriff's deputy who had stopped him for traffic violations, police said.

Keith E. Brown, 36, of White Street, was arrested after he was stopped for driving while using a cellphone on Palmer Avenue, according to the Sheriff's Office.

Police determined his driver's license was suspended, and he fought with officers who sought to take him into custody for misdemeanor aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, officials said.

A sheriff's deputy suffered unspecified injuries that required treatment at Saratoga Hospital as well as by Jessup's Landing EMS.

Brown was charged with second-degree assault, a felony, misdemeanor resisting arrest and aggravated unlicensed operation and was issued numerous traffic tickets. He was arraigned and sent to Saratoga County Jail for lack of bail.
WATERTOWN | Following an appearance by her father over the weekend, former first daughter Chelsea Clinton was in Watertown on Monday to campaign for her mother, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 910.

The Watertown visit was among a few other stops throughout central New York, including Ithaca, Seneca Falls and Rome, to urge voters to cast their ballots for her mother in the New York presidential primary on Tuesday.

Chelsea Clinton, who is pregnant with her second child, played up her mothers accomplishments in implementing policy for children over her political career, such as the State Childrens Health Insurance Program.

She touted her mothers success in helping pass SCHIP in 1997 after the Clinton health care plan failed in 1993. Chelsea said SCHIP is a testament to her mothers ability to build consensus in Congress and that it would serve her well in working with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives should she be elected president.

Additionally, she spoke about Hillary Clintons Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters, which she introduced in Arkansas while her husband served as governor.

Chelsea Clinton also took jabs at the Republican Party, blaming the GOP for the normalization of hate speech.

Assemblywoman Addie J. Russell, D-Theresa, introduced Chelsea Clinton and called on attendees to vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary election.

Jefferson County Legislator Allen T. Drake, D-District Four, attended the event to show his support, and mirrored Chelsea Clintons earlier statements that Hillary Clinton would spur cooperation in Congress.

I think she can find common ground, he said.

For Watertown resident Shane McWayne, seeing Chelsea Clinton was a blast from the past. McWayne first saw her on stage with former President Bill Clinton in Carthage, Tennessee, during his 1992 presidential campaign.

McWayne said Chelsea Clinton was as pleasant as she was more than 20 years ago, adding that shell be throwing her support behind Hillary Clinton in this years election.

We need another Clinton in there to clean that White House up, she said.
CORINTH  The search for the school districts next superintendent has been narrowed to two finalists, the school board announced Monday.

The two people vying for the job are Corinth Middle School Principal Lisa Meade and Glens Falls High School Principal Mark Stratton.

Both are seeking to replace Daniel Starr, who is retiring at the end of the school year after 10 years of leading the district. The salary range for the position is $130,000 to $150,000.

The two finalists will each give a public presentation Thursday in the high school auditorium. Meade will present at 3:30 p.m. and Stratton will present at 4:30 p.m. All community members, parents and staff are invited to the presentations. The board will conduct final interviews.

Meade has been principal of the roughly 270-student school since 2012. In March 2015, she was named the 2015 Middle School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State.

Before taking her current position, she spent six years as Corinths director of special education. Meade has been in education since 1992 and also taught special education in the Indian Lake, Newcomb and Fort Edward school districts.

Stratton has been Glens Falls High School principal since 2008. During his time with the district, he has overseen capital projects, including integration of technology into the building. The school also changed its schedule to start later.

Before his current position leading the 600-student school, he was the assistant principal at Ballston Spa High School. Before that, he was a history teacher.

Board President Lori Baker said the two candidates were selected in an extensive process that included involvement from the board, school staff and administrators, the community, parents and students.

Corinth Board of Education is committed to selecting the most capable individual who will effectively lead the staff and students, maintain a strong community presence and build on the programs that currently exist, Baker said in a news release.

A total of 28 people served on two advisory committees that assisted in the interview process, according to BOCES District Superintendent James Dexter.
A leaked memo from the security operatives in the country last week confirmed that Ghana and Togo are the next target for Islamist militants, following high-profile attacks this year in Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast. The memo called for better border protection.

The visit by the IMF mission would have been the third review of Ghanas performance under the programme.

Leader of the IMF mission to Ghana, Joel Toujas Benarte, the country is on track so far in meeting most of the targets set under the three-year program that will see almost one billion dollars released to Ghana by 2017

So far Ghana has passed all the two reviews, resulting in the disbursement of over 300 million dollars to the country.
His suggestion comes a week after Nii Odoi died in China and his body is yet to be flown down to Ghana for interment.

Reports on Monday revealed that GAG does not have the $25,000 needed to convey his body to Ghana. His family has also been quiet about preparations towards bringing the body down.

According to David Owusu, they should cremate him and bring the ashes here in GhanaThat $25,000 can be used to do something better for the family he left behind in Ghana.
If we were Asantes and decided to have his one week celebration, it would have been only us, he sadly said.

Kwaku Adu Kumi, a journalist with Multimedia also stated that he was the thirteenth to sign the book of condolence when he visited the family on Tuesday, April 19, adding that no actor nor producer had recorded his name.

But speaking to Pulse.com.gh, Micheal Kwaku Ola, Public Relations Officer of Film Producers Association of Ghana (FIPAG), said the family has not officially informed the guild of the death of their relative.

The truth of the matter is, when you lose your loved one, you inform people. Have they informed us officially that they have lost him? They have not, he said.
According to the natives of Ghana, they will be touching down on April 26 to shoot their debut music video. They took to their twitter handle to announce their coming and showed how excited they are about it.

Being too economical with information on Hitz FM after the announcement, the hyperactive pair would not disclose the title of the song nor the album.

That will be announced by the label at the right time. For now, we cant really give out the title There has been a lot of great things happening but I think it all has to do with timing Reggie said.

The song, according to the group, is a fusion of genres.

Its a song that cuts across. You cant categorise, Bollie added.
The Center for Disease Control-USAID assisted the Association to draft the policy that sought to look at the management and independence of the laboratories.

Gyamfi said the Association was worried that the well captured document it put up with the help of the Health Ministry did not see the light of day due to some pressure of other groups.

The Association has also appealed to the Health Ministry to ensure that a Legislative Instrument is enacted to back the Legislation of the Laboratories since the act of Parliament was passed without an instrument backing it.
According to the family, they are of the belief Gregory should be placed in prison custody after his committal to the high court for the muster trial to begin.

The family is also of the belief that the high court judge has been overburdening the state prosecutors in the matter with some of his demands such as prosecution witnesses be brought in time for a speedy trial.
The MP told Joy FM the country has been robbed because persons from the bank were not DVLA employees.

As part of the Government of Ghana revenue collection agreement between the Ministry of Finance and The Trust Bank , cashiers of the bank were placed at designated collection points of the Ministries, Departments and Agencies to receive payments from its clients for services provided.

Contrary to the agreement, management of DVLA paid an amount of 82,595 to TTB cashiers as salaries even though an agreement was made that no commission should be paid for any services rendered.

Further investigations revealed that misappropriation and other irregular practices which have caused financial loss to the country, Public Accounts Committee of Parliament ordered the Acting Chief Executive of DVLA, Noble Appiah to take some measures to retrieve the monies to state coffers.

A statement from Appiah mentioned that though he is aware of the circumstance, he has taken some steps to retrieve the money from Ecobank, but all efforts proved futile.

Atta Akyea has since charged the acting Chief Executive to refer the matter to the Attorney General for the bank to be sued, he told Accra based Joy Fm.

He added this will cause the bank to return the money owed the Authority with interest.

If you enjoy illegal money you need to refund, he said.
The Assembly already has the sanitation court in place to prosecute individuals who do not adhere to sanitation laws, and have said they will continue to dredge major drains like the Korle Lagoon and the Odaw to prevent flooding and choking.
The Unit which will be headed by the president security adviser Baba Kamara was announced by the president after a quarterly meeting with Council of State members.

"In the course of time, you will find that various people are positioned in different parts of the capital and other cities. We are not looking at only Accra, we are looking at other places just to make sure that response time is very quick in the event that something like this happens, the president said.

This has been necessitated by the continuous threat of possible terror attack on Ghana after attacks on Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast this year.

The President said Ghana is relying on Intelligence from its neighbors in a collaborative efforts to ward of any attack.

One of the most important things is intelligence sharing, we are getting Intel from our neighbors from Cote DIvoire, Burkina Faso among others. We are all alert and watching if there are suspicious people.

A leaked document showing the confessions of a Malianlinked to the attacks on Ivory Coast indicated that there is a real threat against Ghana.
Our officers are doing their best. Sometimes they even go to disconnect people and they get pursued by police in some cases institutions like police if you go to collect your bills sometimes we have difficulties. They do not want you to disconnect them and they do not want to pay the bills as well, but our officers are doing their best to get our monies back, he said.There have been instances our officers will go to disconnect the police and the police will actually arrest them. The only charge is that they have not paid their bills and our officers are disconnecting them, he added.
Our officers are doing their best. Sometimes they even go to disconnect people and they get pursued by police in some cases institutions like police if you go to collect your bills sometimes we have difficulties. They do not want you to disconnect them and they do not want to pay the bills as well, but our officers are doing their best to get our monies back.

There have been instances our officers will go to disconnect the police and the police will actually arrest them. The only charge is that they have not paid their bills and our officers are disconnecting them, he said.

But in a response, the IGP has told the Public Accounts hearing on Tuesday that he is expecting an independent report on the matter from PIPS.

"I heard of it yesterday, and immediately I made a check. I have a reply to that query on my phone and I've forwarded it to my minister," he said.

According to the IGP, his investigations from the Half Assin police commander on the issue however indicated otherwise. He said there was a water shortage at the central Half Assin township, which the police in the area thought was normal, only to be told it was a disconnection exercise.

The Half Assin police, the IGP said, therefore went over to the district manager of the Half Assin water company, who subsequently reconnected their water supply.
A turret is the major component of a vessel or any floating production unit (FPSO, FPO) to which the risers coming from the seabed are connected.

Mr Buah, who was addressing the media at the Airport in Takoradi, after a visit to the oil rig, was flanked by the Country Manager of Tullow Ghana, Mr Charles Darko, the Director of Operations of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), Mr. Thomas Manu and some officials of the Petroleum Commission.

The visit afforded the Minister and the Jubilee partners, led by Tullow, the opportunity to update themselves on the progress of work on the FPSO Kwame Nkrumah vessel, following its shut down in March 20, this year for a 14-day maintenance works.

The date for the completion of the job was, however, extended for another two weeks.

Mr Buah said Tullow, as part of safety measures, had brought in three tugboats and a shuttle vessel to the facility to ensure the off-take of oil from the FPSO, when it got back on stream.

Mr. Darko affirmed Tullows readiness to partner the Government in a transparent manner, saying maintaining the integrity of the national asset was their topmost priority.

He said Tullow had pursued the highest standards of safety and it would ensure that the FPSO vessel was adequately safe and reliable.
This was confirmed by the Suhum Municipal Command Superintendent Yaaya Muchiraru in an interview with Pulse.com.gh.

As we speak now he is in cells, he revealed.

The deceased student Patience Gyamfua-Asiedu was crushed by the speeding minibus traveling from Nsawam to Suhum, in the Eastern Region.

She was knocked her down at about 8pm on Monday.

Eye witnesses say she was crossing the Accra-Kumasi highway which passes in front of her school to receive an item from her boyfriend.
As political leaders, if we have any special needs in respect of our security, the right authority to discuss it is the Inspector General of Police, president Mahama told the Council of State on Monday.

According to him, their presence in the country violated terms of their visa and that the Chief Immigration officers did the appropriate thing by deporting three South Africans.
The equipment include three sets of wall-held metal scanners, three sets of X-ray baggage scanners, 100 sets of handheld metal scanners and three sets of human body metal detectors.

Already, the Legislature has over the past months made considerable and very visible security arrangements in and around the House.

Yu Zengsheng, the visiting Chairman of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference, donated the items when called on the Speaker of Parliament, Edward Doe Adjaho, at his office in Accra.

Yu is on a four-day state visit to Ghana, after visiting Cote dIvoire and Gabon.

Speaker Adjaho, acknowledged the relationship between Ghana and China and there is the need to deepen the bilateral ties.

He said Ghana had remained a true partner of China over the years and had supported Chinas bid to remain a member of the United Nations Security Council, adding that, Ghana would continue to support the "One China" Policy.

Chairman Yu, for his part, said he was overwhelmed by the considerable progress Ghana had made over time in the areas of economy and governance, and also emphasised the need to deepen the ties.
This follows accusations by some sections of the public that the EC has plagiarized a similar logo that belongs to an educational institution in Turkey  Yedi Sistem.

The new logo which has been widely criticised by the Ghanaian populace has already been embossed on educational and other materials meant for the upcoming limited voter registration exercise.

These materials include registration forms, posters, flyers, brochures and pens.

In his response, the Deputy Chairman of the Electoral Commission (EC) in-charge of Operations, Mr. Amadu Sulley, said the the public should remain calm as concerns surrounding the new logo will be addressed at the official launch.

"Anything that the Commission is coming out with would have been discussed at the Commission meeting. So whatever it is, after the decision has been taken, as I have said and we have agreed are we going to launch it, at the launching time...we will explain the reasons behind all these things," he told Accra-based Citi FM.

The new logo has a dark-blue background and it's round in nature with round spots which are green, yellow, white, and red in colour.

These four round spots form a symmetry with four other similar spots on the background, creating an abstract image of eight people in a circle with their hands lifted.

However, some media practitioners are reported to have kicked against the new logo when it was unveiled to them at a capacity workshop organized by the EC on the November polls.
According to Mr. Akandoh, the claims by Dr. Bawumia caused fear and panic among Ghanaians.

In an interview on Accra-based Citi FM, the deputy minister said he wondered why Dr. Bawumia has failed to provide the other names of the Togolese nationals he claims are on Ghana's electoral roll.

"This is a serious matter and Ghanaians were panicking over it. So I find it difficult to understand why up till now, the BNI hasn't invited Dr. Bawumia, the National security hasn't invited Dr. Bawumia for any interrogation. If we do that, we are setting a very bad precedent for this country. Anybody at all can get up and talk anyhow and go scot free in the name of politics," he added.

In a response, the Deputy communications director of the NPP, Anthony Karbo said the NPP is unperturbed by the minister's comments, adding that "This party is utterly desperate and looking for people to hang their desperation on."

He added that at the appropriate time the party will come up with the names of the other Togolese nationals it claims are on Ghana's voters' register.

The NPP has since last year been drumming home the need for a new voters register ahead of the 2016 General elections.

According to the party, its scrutiny of the register established over 76,000 Togolese on the Ghana electoral roll.

The party later petitioned the EC over their findings.

But, the EC, in a response said In examining the identity and status of the 76,000 Togolese alleged to be on Ghanas Register, the EC found that they were all duly registered during the mass registration period in 2012. Most of the voters were registered in districts in the Volta and Northern Regions.These districts include Keta, Ketu South, Ketu North, Akatsi South, Akatsi North, Adaklu, Agotime Ziope, Ho Municipality, Kpando Municipality and Tatale/Sanguli. Our conclusion from this examination is that the voters are duly qualified under the laws of Ghana to be on Ghanas Register.
This was after their call for a new voter register was rejected by the EC in favour of a recommendation by its five-member committee.

However, there is a controversy as to what really the EC recommended as the way forward towards cleaning up the voters' register.

Even though the NPP insists the five-member panel recommended a process of validation, the EC has denied it, saying that it is mandated by law to only use the exhibition method in cleaning up the voters register.

Addressing a press conference on Tuesday, April 19, Nana Akomea, the Communications Director of the NPP said the current stance being taken by the EC is rather unfortunate.

For the avoidance of any doubt whatsoever, the NPP states unequivocally that the party fully supports the conceded option/recommendation by the EC'S own Panel of experts for cleaning the 2016 voters register, whatever the description given the process.
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This scary revelation was said to have happened in Grandi Village in Matopo, a suburb of Zimbabwe.

According to B-Metro, the 70-year-old woman, Esnath Sibanda, said she killed the village chief and made the people ill as a revenge on the community leadership because she felt they mistreated her in a disciplinary case.

According to the report, the woman was initially found stark naked, bathing on a footpath so she appeared at a traditional court where she felt the judgment was cruel.

I was summoned by the village head after a villager saw me bathing across my homestead at 2pm. I told the court that I did not know what I did was wrong. I apologised but the court was ruthless to me, Sibanda reportedly narrated.

But feeling she was not fairly treated, the alleged witch decided to take vengeance on the village by taking matters into her own hands.

I went home and wrote the village heads name and those of the other four committee members. My list of names included and . I put them in a bottle with my charms.

When my daughter-in-law found the bottle, she took it to the village head and I was summoned again for witchcraft practices. At the court I was told to vacate this area.

I really did not know my actions were unacceptable. I thought I was at liberty to do anything to protect myself, said Sibanda.

When the village head, Anderson Ndlovu, died after two weeks, the community was gripped with fear because Sibanda did not hide that she was behind his death.

Before his death, the village head stopped going to the toilet. Dorris, Nhliziyo and two others are on the same boat.

Sibanda told B-Metro that she wants forgiveness from the people but the community has vowed that she must pay a fine and be exiled from the village.
Omorokai and the others were nabbed by operatives from the Okokomaiko Police Division and another Ikeja SARS team, while taking the container for sale.

Omorokai's secret was bust when the company which owned the trailer, had put a distress call across to the police that armed robbers attacked the driver and the conductor and the truck which had a tracking device, was traced to the Okokomaiko area and the four suspects were arrested.

A source within the police informed that apart from Omorokai, three other policemen attached to the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), Ikeja, were also involved in the robbery, but had escaped from the scene.

The source said:

What happened was that four policemen, attached to SARS, Ikeja, on Saturday, waylaid the trailer carrying the container around the Abbatoir, Agege area. The trailer was heading for Sagamu in Ogun State.

The SARS policemen, led by an inspector, drove a Toyota Sienna car, and they pretended to be officers at a checkpoint. When the driver of the trailer stopped, they attacked and ordered him to get out of the trailer, and they began to drive the vehicle towards Agege to sell the container.

But the buyer in Agege was not willing. They, therefore, moved to Okokomaiko to get another buyer. It was there that the police from the Okokomaiko division arrested them.

The police also arrested three others, including a supposed buyer of the container which was laden with auto spare parts.

The police had to block the major parts of the Lagos-Badagry Expressway before the suspects could be arrested. Three police units  SARS, Safer Highways and the Okokomaiko division  were involved in the operation.

Initially, the suspects insisted they were policemen and they had seized the truck. But when they saw they were going to be exposed, they started shooting. Three of them later escaped, while Omorokai was arrested.

Three other suspects were later arrested in connection with the robbery. A sum of N30m, said to be proceeds from the sale, is with the runaway policemen.

The State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), SP Dolapo Badmos, confirmed the incident, saying that that investigation was ongoing into the matter.

We made arrests and the command is investigating the incident. I have yet to confirm if a police sergeant is among the suspects arrested.
Daily Trust gathered that Theophillus had had carnal knowledge of the girl many times, always threatening to kill her if she dared divulged her ordeal to anyone.

It was learnt that the victim lived with her parents in Enugu State and had only gone to live with Theophiuls and his family on his request some months ago. While the girl was with them, Theophilus allegedly accused her of being spiritually possessed, an allegation the wife was not opposed to.

According to a neighbour, the teenager was later ejected from the house by her aunt, alleging that her continuous presence constituted a threat to her marriage.

The girl was forced to leave the house and had to put up with a friend within the same area, the neighbour said.

It was the aunt who went to the Kubwa Police Station few days after, to lay a complaint that her niece was missing and when the friend the girl was staying with got wind of the report, she advised the girl to go to the police and turn herself in.

It was when the girl got to the station that she narrated how her uncle had been raping her repeatedly and it was on the strength of her confession that Theophilus was arrested.
Dr Eugene Uhuaba, the Public Relations Officer of NARD, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Tuesday that the associations demands had not been met.

NAN reports that NARD, had on April 4, given the government a 21-day notice to meet their demands or face an indefinite strike.

Their demands include payment of members salaries up to date and appropriate placement of members in states and federal tertiary hospitals across the nation.

Others are the reversal of sacked members in some hospitals as well as appropriate funding of residency training.

The President of NARD, Dr Muhammad Askira, had in Abuja, told newsmen that the ultimatum took effect from April 4.

"We had series of meetings and billed to have more in coming weeks. While the ultimatum still stands, collective efforts are ongoing to reach reasonable conclusions.

"The government has shown the readiness to tackle some of the issues, but we wait to complete resolution of our demands.

"But so far, we have not had any meaningful conclusions and until the ultimatum lapses, we are not going back on decisions to go on strike.
This was disclosed via a statement released by army spokesman, Colonel Sani Usman.

The leading elements of the Acting General Officer Commanding (GOC), 7 Division Nigerian Army, Brigadier General Victor Ezugwus leading convoy was about 8.30am this morning ambushed by suspected Boko Haram terrorists en-route to visit troops in Bama, Colonel Usman said.

Although one soldier lost his life and 2 others were injured, they were able to clear the ambush, killing some of the terrorists and recovered vehicle and weapons from them. The recovered items include a Toyota Hilux vehicle, 2 AK-47 rifles and several ammunitions.

The Acting GOC has continued his operational visit to Bama, while the body of the late soldier and the wounded have been evacuated to Maiduguri. The Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Yusuf Buratai has also spoken with the GOC.

The Nigerian Army wishes to reiterate its unalloyed commitment and determination to continue to clear the remnants of the Boko Haram terrorists wherever they may be hiding, he added.

The attack was however repelled by soldiers after a 10-hour battle.

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The Army Spokesman, Col. Sani Usman, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Bauchi.

Usman said troops of the 113 battalion, with aerial support from the Nigerian Air Force, successfully repelled the attack on the town and the battalion headquarters.

He said reinforcement had been sent to the unit to forestall any attacks while troops were still on the trail of the insurgents.

The spokesman said scores of the insurgents were killed in the attack while others escaped.

Usman said two officers and 22 soldiers who were wounded had been taken to Maiduguri for prompt medical attention.

"You will recall that Boko Haram terrorists attacked our troops location at Kareto this morning but were successfully repelled by our troops.

"The situation has since been brought under control and reinforcement sent to the location.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that Boko Haram insurgents attempted to enter the 113 battalion headquarters located at Kareto in an early morning attack.
Gbajabiamila also made a case for President Buhari's loan request.

Governor Fayose wrote a letter to the President of China on Thursday, April 14, 2016, asking him not to grant Nigeria any loan.

An excerpt of Gbajabiamilas letter, obtained from Punch reads: Mr. President, perhaps our governor is not fully seized on the way budgeting works at the federal level. The Federal Government of Nigeria has a three-year budget rolling plan captured under a Medium Term Expenditure Framework. The MTEF 2016-2018 has a borrowing component in which the legislature approved for the President to incur both domestic and foreign loans for the purposes of infrastructural development and deficit financing.

This MTEF was passed unanimously, by the National Assembly including the six House members and three senators from Ekiti, the governors state.

I am therefore dismayed as are many members of the National Assembly that the governor would claim that the loan sought from your government did not have parliamentary imprimatur.

It is also a fallacy that the countrys debt is being financed with 25 per cent of the Federal Governments annual budget as there is something in economic and legislative borrowing parlance called nominal debt service where a portion of borrowed monies in this case about N1.3tn stays within the countrys financial system. Such are the intricacies of national debts, aids and loans, the letter said.

The Deputy National Chairman (South) of the All Progressives Congress (APC),

See Pulse Photo-News gallery below.
The DSS subsequently handed him over to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

Reports say Dudafa fled the country when GEJs ex Aide-de-Camp (ADC), Col. Ojogbane Adegbe was arrested by the EFCC.

Adegbe and Dudafa were accused of disbursing N10bn to Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) delegates.

A source who spoke to Punch said We have arrested Dudafa. He arrived at the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos and was swiftly arrested by the DSS. He was subsequently flown down to Lagos and handed over to the EFCC.

He is in our custody as we speak and our findings will be made public in due course.

The money was diverted from the CBN to bribe or settle the PDP delegates to adopt ex-President Goodluck Jonathan for a second term.

Dudafa is expected to provide the list of beneficiaries of the largesse. All the beneficiaries will be unveiled by the EFCC and they have to refund public funds, the source said.

You will recall that the Ijaw Youth Congress (IYC) warned against what it perceives as the government's attempt to arrest former President Goodluck Jonathan.

The group also accused the EFCC of subtly laying a foundation for the former Presidents arrest.

See Pulse Photo-News gallery below.
I dont really know what would have happened to us if President Buhari did not come on board. The previous administration branded us as distant cousins. We were left to our fate, he said.

Shettima had earlier said that Jonathan did not call him to discuss the 2014 Chibok abductionuntil 19 days after the girls had been taken.

In our own case, Your Excellency, after the Chibok abduction of over 200 schoolgirls in April, 2014, it took 19 days for me to receive a call from the Presidency, Shettima said while receiving former president, Olusegun Obasanjo at the Government House in Maiduguri.

Obasanjo had earlier criticized Jonathan for failing to act immediately the girls were kidnapped.

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The National Assembly (NASS) Liason Officer of the EFCC, Mr. Suleiman Bakari, stated this when the agency representatives paid a courtesy visit to Ekweremadu.

As an Anti-Corruption Ambassador, It is therefore Your Excellency, to on behalf of my Acting chairman, Mr. Ibrahim Mustafa Magu and the entire management and staff of the EFCC, decorate you as an Anti-Corruption Ambassador and formally present this frame, as a token of our appreciation to your person and office, and as a symbol of institutional partnership between the EFCC and the National Assembly, Bakari said.

In his response, Ekweremadu called for the establishment of Special Anti-Corruption Courts to reduce the burden on regular courts and fast-track trial of corruption cases - this buttresses human right lawyers, Femi Falana's advocacy for special court for anti-corruption cases.

I have been an advocate of special courts for the trial of corruption cases and I believe that other countries, who have enacted laws establishing such, are not fools because there are benefits to be derived therefrom," Ekweremadu said.

The idea is to expedite trial to make sure that those who are involved in corruption matters will have their day in court.

When we have special courts, just as we have the National Industrial Court, such courts will do better than they are doing now. The establishment of special courts is not just something that will be done by an Act of the National Assembly.

We have to amend the constitution to bring it about under section 6, for the purpose of trying corruption cases.
Punch reports that the suspected herdsmen told the soldiers that they were on a mission to recover their stolen cows.

According to Capt. Bashir Jajira, the Assistant Director, Army public relations of the Guards Brigade, 36 of them were arrested at a checkpoint between Abuja and Nasarawa State.

Jajira also revealed that the other 56 were arrested at a checkpoint around the Abuja Airport road.

Tha National Guards spokesman said A group of 36 herdsmen in Diana Truck and Toyota Camry car with registration number Abu Kuje 994 FX and Niger SUL 541 XA were intercepted and arrested at 177 Guards Battalion location by Keffi checkpoint.

During the interrogation by troops at the checkpoint, they claimed to be going to Nasarawa Local Government in Nasarawa State.

Governor Olusegun Mimiko has also called on President Buhari to look into the continuous attacks by Fulani herdsmen across Nigeria.

Meanwhile, Igbo socio-cultural group, Ohaneze Ndi-Igbo has criticised the Department of State Services (DSS) report that accused members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) of killing over 50 suspected Fulanis and burying them in a mass graves in Abia state.

See Pulse Photo-News gallery below.
According to the News Agency Of Nigeria (NAN), about 40 armed men stormed the residence of the politician in motorcycles around 2:00a.m.

The abductors were said to have opened fire indiscriminately to scare people before taking Fammar's wives away - their whereabouts is yet to be ascertained as at press time.

In the cause of the operation, report said two vigilante group member were killed.
The group said in a statement on Monday, April 18, that President Muhammadu Buharis administration places more importance on the oil resources of the region than human lives..

While speaking in China last week, the President had said the government would treat oil vandals like Boko Haramterrorists.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, last Sunday, also said the government would establish a permanent pipeline security force.

The presidency can go ahead and set up a permanent security force, as stated by the vice president when he visited the SPDC (Shell Petroleum Development Company) Forcados Terminal, the militant group said in a statement.

We are not deterred by such threats as we are highly spirited and shall continue blowing up pipelines until the Niger Delta people are no longer marginalized by the Nigerian actors.

The group also called warned the international community, especially China, from where Buhari has just returned, not loan Nigeria any money as there will be no liters of crude oil to service the loan deal.
He made the call when a delegation of NNDC's Board of Directors, led by the Wali of Dutse, Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu, paid him a courtesy visit at his Palace in Kano on Monday.

He said that the call was necessary in order to promote socio-economic development in the region in particular and the country at large.

He added that "restoring the company's lost glory will facilitate socio-economic development in the North in particular and Nigeria as a whole.''

According to him, the task of making the company vibrant and formidable cannot be realised without the collective effort of the governors.

"The call is necessary in view of the urgent need for the governors to come together for the realisation of the desired objective," Sanusi said.

He also urged the Federal Government to come up with a blueprint that would ensure speedy industrial development in the country.

He stressed the need for the Federal Government to provide more assistance to the people of North East.

He noted that "the people of the North East are in need of more assistance from the Federal Government and it will greatly reduce their sufferings.''

Earlier in his remarks, the Chairman of the NNDC Board of Directors had told the emir that the delegation was at his palace to brief him on the activities of the company and to seek for his fatherly advice on how to move the company forward.
He also revealed that Saraki acquired some assets from the Presidential Implementation Committee on Sale of Federal Government Properties using his company name.

Reports say the rule of the committee requires an individual to only buy one property.

Wetkast said We invited the members of the Presidential Implementation Committee on Sale of Federal Government Properties. From our findings, one person is only allowed to acquire one property under the scheme. But the first defendant got three properties using his personal name and the name of his company.

No15 Mcdonald Street, Ikoyi, was got in the name of the defendants company, Tiny Tee Limited and 17, 17A and 17B were got in his personal name.

Exhibit P21 relates to Plot 2481 and 2482, Cadastrial Zone A06, Maitama, Abuja, otherwise known as 1 and 3 Targus Street, Maitama, Abuja. From Exhibit 21, they were acquired in 1993.

From Exhibit 1, under Appendix 3 (details of landed property in Nigeria), I did not see the property.

The witness also added that The defendant did not declare Plot 2481 and 2482, Cadastrial Zone A06, Maitama, Abuja, on assumption of office in 2003. Neither did I see No 1 and 3 Targus Street, Maitama, Abuja, in the asset declaration form.

Exhibit 3 is the asset declaration form in 2007. In 2007, the defendant declared 1 Targus Street, Maitama, Abuja. Number 3 was not declared.

In the asset declaration form of 2011, No. 1 Targus, Musa Yar Adua was declared. He did not declare No 3 Targus Street, Maitama.

Meanwhile, the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), John Odigie-Oyegun has revealed that the possible removal of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, might be a sacrifical change.

See Pulse Photo-News gallery below.
The largest Islamic bank in the United Arab Emirates will start operating at a time when Kenyan banks have come under closer scrutiny from the regulator because of increasing bad debts, prompting officials and analysts to conclude the sector is ripe for consolidation.

Three medium-sized and small banks have been taken over by the regulator since August last year, with the latest, Chase Bank Kenya, taken over earlier this month after a run on deposits.

In November the central bank placed a moratorium on the licensing of new commercial banks in an attempt to bring stability to an industry that has more than 40 banks.

But DIB had been in talks with the regulator before then, meaning a decision on its licence would not be affected by the moratorium, the sources said.

DIB is now awaiting the final go-ahead from Kenya's central bank, said the sources, as it has already been granted outline approval for a commercial banking licence having planned to open in Kenya last year, only to find the process had taken longer than expected.

In a statement the central bank said on Monday it was processing an application for a banking licence from DIB Bank Kenya, without elaborating.

A separate source at the central bank said DIB was one of a couple of banks expected to start operations in the country this year.

No one at DIB responded to a request for comment.

DIB has already recruited staff for its Kenyan operation, which will initially comprise three branches offering consumer, corporate and treasury services, the sources said.

Kenya will not be DIB's first foray overseas. It holds stakes in banks in Pakistan, Sudan, Jordan, Bosnia and late last year raised its stake in Bank Panin Syariah, the Indonesian sharia-compliant lender, to 39.6 percent, according to a presentation on the bank's website.
The duo will clash in a sizzling on-screen confrontation in front of millions of TV viewers across Africa, as the massive global TV hit finally makes its debut in Nigeria.

After lip syncing (or miming) to two songs of their choice, just one of them will lift the Lip Sync Battle trophy and earn the biggest bragging rights on the planet as the inaugural Lip Sync Battle champion.

The awaited African version of the global TV hit, Lip Sync Battle Africa is hosted by South African actress and TV presenter Pearl Thusi, alongside Nigerian superstar,

ALSO READ: undefined

Commenting on his appearance in the upcoming episode, Denrele said, I am going to have a lot of fun on Lip Sync Battle Africa. This is precisely the sort of thing I like to do ordinarily and I will feel right at home on that stage! My fans can expect to see Denrele at his crazy, quirky best and I think that will make the show very watchable. Too bad for Ebuka that he is coming up against me!

Ebuka added, Lip Sync Battle Africa is a bit left field for me, but I look forward to having fun on the programme. I promise everyone a fantastic time and my fans will get to see a side of me that they have never seen before, and possibly a side of me that even I have never seen before. Im really excited it looks like a lot of fun already.

ALSO READ:

Viewers can also be part of the #LSBChallenge by uploading their own personal lip sync of Dbanjs Emergency, Davidos The Sound and Yemi Alades Johnny on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #LSBChallenge.

"Lip Sync Battle Africa" premieres at 6.00pm on Saturday, April 30, on MTV Base (DStv channel 322).
This last mentioned agreement was a legitimate coup by PMB, because the intelligence was that some West African countries were going to sign before us. PMB seized the moment.

Of course, he had to apologise for our previous failures on our agreement made to part-fund four airport projects in Lagos, Kano, Abuja and Port Harcourt and the Abuja-Kaduna rail project.

The Chinese had provided their agreed part of 85 per cent but the remaining 15 per cent Nigeria did not honour during the last administration. Some of the recent revelations about financial scandals estimated at $2.1bn in the Office of the National Security Adviser alone during the last administration suggest how impactful such funds would have been in delivering these critical infrastructures; but we all know what happened.

This is why PMB is travelling. To repair our reputation severely damaged by the last government, and to assure our partners that Nigeria has changed. From there, to renegotiate an existing funding agreement to complete critical transport infrastructure.

If the seven most powerful nations stand with you, who can stand against you? I need not say more except that I can attest that PMB has been following up on these matters, and the progress on security is visible while results in the economic front will manifest soon enough.

Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed had earlier also said that Nigeria had attained near pariah status before Buhari came into office.

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It reads:

My first reaction is that the whole thing is a mockery of the South-East zone and her people, especially when one remembers that the PDP has suddenly felt that the South-East could occupy the Vice-President position for the 2019 election.

This is also coming one year after it had lost power, and it does not have the slightest chance of winning the 2019 poll. Indeed, the PDP is just making mockery of the South-East.

They are just waking up from their slumber after being out of power. The PDP never allowed the South-East to have the president, the Vice-President, the Senate President, the speaker of House of Representatives, and so on. The South-East totally lost out in the PDP government.

All the federal roads in the zone were death traps until the party was voted out of power. The second Niger Bridge became endless pit for the PDP. Some oil locations belonging to some states in the zone were taken away and given to other states outside the zone. It was a hopeless situation for the zone in PDP.

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Abaribe made the call at plenary on Thursday under a point of order.

He said he had sought clarification from the clerk of the Senate and confirmed that there was no such bill contrary to reports in the media.

Abaribe said he had received so many calls on the issue and had been accused by some of his constituents of being an absentee senator when he said the bill was not before the Senate.

"I have gotten more than 1,000 calls and this has to do with something called the Grazing Reserved Commission Bill.

"When I asked where is the information coming from, they said the information is coming from the social media.

"Mr President the last time a Grazing Reserve Commission Bill came to this Senate was in the 7th Senate and was proposed by Sen. (Zainab) Kure who is no longer in the Senate.

"So the reason why I am making this personal explanation is so that my constituents in Abia South will know that there is no such bill called Grazing Reserve Commission Bill before this Senate.

"I have taken time to ask the clerk and every other person to say where is this bill that has passed second reading and they said they also are in confusion, they have never seen such thing, he said.

The President of the Senate, Dr Bukola Saraki, who was presiding at the time, noted the observation of the senator.

Saraki later left for the Code of Conduct Tribunal for continuation of his trial and the Deputy President, Chief Ike Ekwerenmadu, took over proceedings.

The News Agency of Nigeria recalls that the online media have been awash with reports that a Grazing Reserve Bill is before the Senate and has passed second reading.
CAN which said the bill vested summary jurisdiction to try violators to Sharia and Customary Courts added that the same bill failed to specifically state who is subjected to the courts.

We can logically infer that Muslims are the ones subjected to Sharia Courts, but not so to Christians being subjected to Customary Courts. Therefore, it is indefensible for the Kaduna State Government to seek to subject Christians to jurisdiction of Customary Court," the religious body said.

While denying that most crises that have taken place in Kaduna were caused by Christian preachers, CAN added: Most various religious violence crises that took part in the past years are usually orchestrated by bigoted fellows who believe that their religion has been defamed or blasphemed and they have a duty to fight, maim, kill and destroy, all in the name of defending their religion.

Upon all this, no one have been prosecuted and convicted since the promulgation of the 1984 Edict," CAN added while rejecting the proposed representative of CAN, JNI, Police, SSS, Head of Service among others that will form the ministerial body constituted by the Governor in regulating religious activities in the State.
This is with the hopes of choosing a VC as the outgoing VC, Prof. Hayward Babale Mafuyais tenure will end on the June 20 2016.

TheNation has the list of interested candidates.

Prof. Ezekiel Best, Dean social sciences, Prof Dung Pam Sha, Director, Office of Research, Prof Audu Nanven Gambo, immediate Past Director, Centre for conflict management and peace studies, Prof Yilkur N. Lohdip, Director Academic Planning, and Prof Sebastian Maimako, dean , Management Sciences.

Prof Isaac Lar of English Dept is also interested in the post, as are Prof Umar Danfulani, immediate past Dean of Arts, Prof G. O. Akpa, former V.C, Kwararafa University, Wukari, Prof. Thomas Baba Bingel of History, Prof Andrew Haruna, current vice chancellor, Federal University Gashua, Prof Francis Ojaide of Accounting, Prof H.A Lar of Geosciences, Prof Dimis Mailafia of Economics, Prof Abraham Mallum of Education, Prof Daniel Dabi of Geography and Planning, Prof N.K. Dakum , former Dean of Medical Sciences, and a female candidate, Prof Naomi James Rugu, Director of SIWES.

Seven Candidates from other universities made up of Prof Ashom Musa of Abuja University, Prof Bala Dogo of NDA University, Prof J.S.Rabo, Prof. E.J Nwana, Prof D.I Jaja, Prof. Rasheed Jimoh Ijodda and Dr. Joseph Maangut are also in for the hot battle.

This is the highest number of candidates in the history of the 40 years old institution.

The University of Jos governing council, under the chairmanship of Chief Dr. Don Etiebet, with representatives from the university senate will conduct the interview, and announce the winner within 24 hours.

The candidates would be expected to unfold their dream plans for the University, at the interview, and panel members will ask them questions from their presentations, and issues relating to the University administration, with emphasis on the university of Jos peculiarities.
The company had completed its $1.35 million seed funding round two years ago before this new funding round from Singularity, a relatively unknown investment company.

Singularity Investments join North Base Media, CRE Venture Capital, Emergo Partners, and J.E Berman Associates on this list of Asoko Insight investors.

With Singularity we have found a strategic partner whose know-how, relationships, and understanding of Africas burgeoning data industry offers tremendous value to Asokos deepening presence in our focus markets," said Rob Withagen, Managing Director, Asoko Insights.

Singularity Investments specializes in high-growth companies operating in Africa's tech sector and is a company that provides capital to nurture early-stage or transformational companies that have scalable business models.

We see a substantial need for private business intelligence in Africa. Singularity is delighted to support Asoko Insights strong team as they build a robust platform, providing global companies with the key data and research tools necessary to make informed business decisions throughout the African market, said Principal Investment Officer at Singularity Investments, Lexi Novitske.
Full details of the acquisition have not been revealed yet, but Starta says becoming a part of Potential Group will provide a huge boost to its efforts in Africa, and give it useful leverage in the African startup scene.

What Potential Group is bringing to the table allows Starta to speed up our core operation in Africa and to leverage existing resources from Potential: growth, content, technology and money. Potential has proven experience of building high growth businesses at scale, with websites they own getting up to 5 million visitors per day. They also have significant experience of investing in and working with early stage startups. (with over 30 early stage investments in 3 years). Joining Potential will dump fuel on our fire to execute our vision faster and better, said Dotun Olowoporoku, Founder of Starta.
The Daily News reports that the American Presidential candidate's legal team has threatened the artist known as Illma Gore, with a lawsuit following the showcasing of the painting.

Gore based in Los Angeles, had reportedly painted the portrait titled, Make America Great Again, in February this year, with an even more hilarious and insulting caption:

Because no matter what is in your pants, you can still be a big prick.

The work had reportedly gone viral instantly, attracting over $141,770 worth of bids following its display in the the Maddox Gallery in Mayfair, London this month.

Speaking with The Guardian, Gore says that Trump's legal team has been trying to strip her of her artistic freedom with the lawsuit threats which she has received twice now.

I dont believe I did anything wrong. Its my work and Ill stand by it no matter what.

Gore goes on to describe other threats which have come her way apart from the legal wrangling, which include threats of rape, detailed death threats and stalkers at her home.

Surprisingly, none of these things have silenced Gore's campaign, as she reveals that she has another painting of Trump in the works, inspired by the presidential campaign arriving next week.

Gore however, insisted on keeping the dirty details under wraps, saying:

I'd ruin it if I told you now."
44-yr-old Joan Lyons married her childhood sweetheart 44-yr-old Craig, who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. She decided to shave off her hair on her wedding night as a way to raise funds for charity.

The couple who have known each other since they were 17, decided to wed after the Craig confessed that he'd been in love with Joan all his life while aboard a ferry.

The wedding was organized by some local firms after a wedding charity was posted on social media requesting the help of local businesses.

The official wedding photographer, Kimberley Struth, said she was moved by the post and decided to render her service to the couple.

It was really touching. Everyone was telling Joan that she didnt have to go through with it if she didnt want to, but she wanted to do it.

I thought it would be a really sad day but it was lovely and it wasnt at all how Id expect it to be.

There were a lot of tears but it was also a really happy event and everyone was in good spirits - after it was shaved we were all surprised because she really suited it. She looked beautiful, Struth told Liverpool Echo News.

On 15th April 2016 I will be getting married to my childhood sweetheart Craig, who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer last year.

On our wedding night, our celebration party will also serve as a fundraising event where I will complete my head shave task in his honor & to honor and support those affected by life limiting illness, the bride who is raising funds for Macmillan Cancer Support, Zoes Place hospice and Woodlands Hospice posted on her JustGiving page.
Security forces fired warning shots and teargas to deter the mostly female protesters in the town of Kidal who also ransacked and set fire to airport facilities, said a local official, witnesses and the U.N. mission in Mali, MINUSMA.

The protests appear to mark a deterioration in relations between foreign forces and the local community in Kidal, a town at the centre of a separatist movement and violence by Islamist militants, some of whom are linked to al Qaeda.

One person died and six were injured, said Ahmoudane Ag Ikmasse, who represents Kidal in the national assembly. Ikmasse said he was in the capital Bamako but was in contact with people in Kidal.

A doctor in Kidal's health centre said two died from gunshot wounds.

It was not clear why the airport was targeted or why women were the main participants in the protest.

The U.N. mission was not immediately able to confirm the death toll and it was not clear how many people were involved in the protests. A French military spokesman declined to comment.

"MINUSMA is contact with the Malian authorities and leaders of local communities as well as those from civil society, aiming to ease tensions and understanding the circumstances of the events," the mission said in a statement.

Although France drove jihadists out of key towns in 2013, they have regrouped. In November, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb attacked a luxury hotel in the capital, killing 20 people and demonstrating a reach beyond their base.
Peter Liang, a rookie who lost his badge after his February conviction, faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

Liang was patrolling the darkened stairs inside a public housing building in Brooklyn on Nov. 20, 2014, when he fired a single shot. The bullet ricocheted off a wall and struck 28-year-old Akai Gurley in the chest as he walked one floor below.

The shooting fueled nationwide protests over law enforcement's use of excessive force on minorities. But the Brooklyn case differed from many of the other high-profile incidents that helped intensify the Black Lives Matter movement. The officer, a Chinese-American, was not accused of deliberately killing Gurley.

Liang tearfully testified at trial that he did not realize the bullet had hit anyone until he went downstairs and saw Gurley's girlfriend desperately trying to revive him. The officer claimed a noise had startled him, causing his finger to slip onto the trigger and fire.

But prosecutors said he acted recklessly in drawing his weapon and discharging a round.

Gurley's family have criticized Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson for recommending no prison time. State Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun will impose the sentence.

The sentencing comes days after Chun rejected Liang's request for a new trial. Liang's lawyers argued that a juror acknowledged he had failed to disclose during jury selection that his father had been convicted of manslaughter.
Davenport has plans to add several miles of designated on-road bike lanes this spring throughout the city.

Brian Schadt, one of Davenport's three deputy public works directors, said the city is investing in the work to accommodate the influx of cyclists.

"There's quite a few people out there now who would like to see improvements in our network," he said.

Crews last week restriped portions of West 3rd and 4th streets to include 5-foot-wide bike lanes between Marquette Street and Telegraph Road.

This spring, the city plans to follow suit with a two-way left turn lane and bike lanes on both sides of the road along the following stretches:

 Tremont Avenue from 46th Street to Veterans Memorial Parkway

 Jersey Ridge Road from Kimberly Road to Jersey Meadows Drive

 46th Street from Marquette Street to Tremont Avenue

The work, which is slated to cost a little more than $206,000, will add about 6.8 miles of on-road lanes, Schadt said.

John Harrington, a member of the Quad-Cities Bicycle Club who spoke in support of the proposed trail system last year, said he's pleased to see the plans come to fruition.

The (City) Council listened to what cyclists had stood up and spoke for," he said. "Its critical to have striped lanes and its about time."

Before the work can begin on Tremont Avenue and Jersey Ridge Road, however, aldermen must approve the creation of No Parking zones on the respective streets.

On Tremont, the current No Parking zone will need to be extended from 54th Street north to Veterans Memorial Parkway to make way for the changes.

On Jersey Ridge Road, the zone will need to be extended from 46th Street north to Jersey Meadows Drive.

The second reading of the ordinance amendments is on the agenda for Davenport City Council's committee-of-the-whole meeting Wednesday.

Currently, the city has bike lanes on Marquette Street between 15th Street and Beiderbecke Drive and on Jersey Ridge Road from the Village of East Davenport to Kimberly Road.

The lanes on Marquette Street provide cyclists a protected route between the Mississippi River Trail in downtown Davenport and Duck Creek Parkway, the oldest recreational trail in the Quad-Cities.

Blake Riffel, a 25-year-old cyclist who lives at 4th and Iowa streets in downtown Davenport, said he's looking forward to hopping on a bike lane within a couple of blocks from his place.

"With all the apartment buildings down here, I think thats a huge draw for young professionals and residents," said Riffel, who also noted the safety aspects. "As a cyclist, those lanes tell you where you're supposed to be riding and let motorists know where they can expect to see bikes  thats going to be awesome."
Donations are being sought for a benefit to help a Davenport man with a rare form of liver cancer.

Tyson Hill, 29, of Davenport, has been diagnosed with Hepatocelluar Carcinoma Fibrolamellar, a rare Stage 4 cancer that has spread to his lymph nodes. He is the son of Ronald Hill of Maquoketa and Connie Hill of Eldridge.

His doctor told us its a form of liver cancer that attacks young and strong people, said Ronald Hill. Doctors dont really know much about the cancer because its so rare.

The benefit for Tysons medical expenses will be 3-8 p.m. Saturday, April 23, at United Steel Workers Local 105 Union Hall, 880 Devils Glen Road, Bettendorf.

Ronald Hill said that dozens of businesses and individuals have donated auction items. The benefit also will include food, a bake sale, raffles, silent auction, live auction and music.

For more information, call Ronald Hill at 563-652-9906.
Davenport has backed out of negotiating with a fiber-optic technology company as some aldermen complain the effort for a city-owned network has dragged on with little result.

Davenport Finance Director Brandon Wright told aldermen at a briefing Tuesday that the city will not continue working with Symmetrical Networks of Lake Oswego, Ore., because it could not agree on contract language.

Were at an impasse, Wright said.

Last month, the City Council voted unanimously on a motion authorizing staff to enter an exclusive, three-month negotiation with Symmetrical.

Alderman Bill Boom, 3rd Ward, who has advocated for a city-owned broadband network, said Symmetricals business plan was unacceptable to the city, especially a line in which the company would declare the city in default if it needed to walk away from the contract in the future.

The default language could affect the citys bond ratings, Wright said.

Meanwhile, Wright and Mayor Frank Klipsch said they have been talking with Mediacom about possibly providing Internet service for the city.

They would be interested in providing that need for those less able to afford it, Klipsch said of Mediacom.

Alderman Ray Ambrose, 4th Ward, raised doubts.

Im still very skeptical with the magnitude this thing is growing to, Ambrose said.

"We're going around and around on this and not getting very far," Alderwoman Kerri Tompkins, 8th Ward, said.

Tompkins said she wants to see results of a market study, which was another part of the resolution aldermen passed last month. The study was to determine how many residents would buy in to the network if one is available.

"I would like to see that before we spend more staff time," Tompkins said.

Klipsch said municipalities are moving toward fiber-optic technology.

Fiber is the wave of the future, Klipsch said, adding that he learned in a trip to Washington, D.C., that the U.S. Department of Defense will be investing in fiber-optic technology for the next 50 years.

If theyre investing in that, thats the way to go, Klipsch said.
DES MOINES  Three dozen Republican legislators are calling on Democratic Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller to withdraw from an effort to use consumer protection laws against energy companies and others that disagree with their positions on climate change and global warming.

While the 36 senators and representatives believe man-made climate change is certainly not settled science, their primary concern is that the effort is a potential assault on First Amendment rights of Iowa citizens and businesses that do not embrace the governments conclusion on man-made climate change.

Reps. Ralph Watts, R-Adel, and Steven Holt, R-Denison, emphasized their concerns in points of personal privilege.

Watts predicted more research will prove the alarmist claims of man-made climate change appear to be greatly exaggerated. Holt acknowledged there is disagreement whether the cause of climate change is part of a cycle that has always occurred or is caused by fossil fuels and mans carbon footprint.

However, Holt said, it is vital for this debate to continue, and dangerous to attempt to silence differences of opinion on either side.

Holt and Watts met with one of Millers staffers to discuss his participation in the effort. According to them, rather than an attempt to stifle dissent, he said the campaign is about protecting consumers from businesses that mislead the public.

The Attorney Generals Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, Holt and Watts point to the website of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the leader of the attorneys general group, which called the actions a historic state-based effort to combat climate change.

If thats the case, and not consumer protection, Watts wondered why Miller is involved.

The lawmakers concluded their letter to Miller asking him to remove himself from the coalition which has chosen a path that could threaten First Amendment rights in pursuit of climate progress.
The Scott County Board of Supervisors asked the sheriffs department on Tuesday to take another look at the list of department employees requiring 24-hour access to a county vehicle.

Supervisors recently adopted a revised take-home policy restricting 24-hour assignment of county vehicles to on-call employees, emergency responders and employees needing access to equipment in the vehicle to perform job duties. Supervisors chairman Jim Hancock expressed concern that the unchanged list of 41 sheriffs department personnel assigned 24-hour use of county vehicles was not pared down.

The inequity is clear to me, Hancock said. A lot of our employees are losing their vehicles. We had a long discussion with the sheriff to show us some kind of savings. Going to night meetings and coming back from a county building is not a valid use of a county vehicle under the policy. I cannot support the sheriffs list.

Supervisors Tom Sunderbruch and Diane Holst agreed with Hancock.

I was surprised at the number of cars requested, Sunderbruch said. The need was more than I had expected.

Holst asked the sheriffs department to trim down the list.

Were looking for some cooperation where there can be some savings, she said.

Supervisor Brinson Kinzer supported Sheriff Dennis Conards request.

The sheriff knows his department," he said. "The list meets the policy criteria.

Supervisor Carol Earnhardt asked Maj. Thomas Gibbs, chief deputy of the Sheriffs Department, if the list follows the policys defined on-call status.

Everyone on the list is subject to call out, Gibbs said. Emergencies will happen.

The 24-hour county vehicle assignment list also includes four employees from conservation and secondary roads. These positions will be considered for take-home assignment separate from the sheriffs department request.

In other business, county engineer Jon Burgstrum outlined the countys roadside vegetation management plan.

Burgstrum told supervisors the plan reduces the use of herbicides, prevents run off and erosion and supports natural wildlife habitat by planting wildflowers and native grasses along county roads. Funding for the plan comes from a federal supply of seed to counties, a grant from the state of Iowa and private-sector support.
At an Iowa Fraud Fighters luncheon earlier this week, older Quad-Citians learned how to keep their financial information safe.

Speakers addressed different areas of fraud and provided these resources:

 The toll-free number in Iowa to call to check out potential investment or insurance fraud is 877-955-1212 or go to the Insurance Commissions web site www.iid.iowa.gov.

 To check out a financial adviser's name, visit www.finra.org.

 Questions for the Iowa Attorney General will be answered at 888-777-4590 or www.IowaAttorneyGeneral.gov.

 For the Senior Health Insurance Information Program, or SHIIP, call 800-351-4664 or visit www.TheRightCallIowa.gov.

 The Iowa Department on Aging can be found at 800-532-3213 and www.IowaAging.gov.
DES MOINES  Legislation to name the Cedar Rapids Post Office to honor an eastern Iowa soldier killed in Afghanistan has won the approval of the U.S. House.

Legislation to name the post office the Sergeant First Class Terryl L. Pasker Post Office Building was approved Monday with bipartisan support, according to the measures sponsor, 1st District U.S. Rep. Rod Blum. It was co-sponsored by the other five members of the Iowa congressional delegation.

I introduced this legislation to honor the sacrifice of Sgt. 1st Class Pasker, and for the sake of his family I am glad to see this legislation pass the House in remembrance of Sgt. Pasker and also the sacrifice and service of all those who have served our country in the military, Blum said. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to put your life on the line to protect our liberty in the Armed Forces and Sgt. Pasker did so without reservation.

A native of Iowas 1st District, Pasker first enlisted in the Army in 1990, and in 1995, he joined the Iowa National Guard. He first deployed to Afghanistan from 2004 to 2005 and chose to return in 2011 with the 334th Brigade Support Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division. He and several other Iowa Guardsmen from his unit were responsible for mentoring Afghan police and military leadership. On July 9, 2011, only days before the end of his combat tour, Pasker, 39, was killed at a checkpoint in Panjshir Province, Afghanistan.

He is survived by his wife, Erica; parents, Mary and David; brother, Andrew; and two sisters, Christine and Rebecca.

Our family is grateful to Congressman Blum for his work in honoring the memory of our son, Sgt. 1st Class Terryl L. Pasker, David Pasker of Blairstown said. Naming this Post Office after Terryl ensures that his sacrifice will not be forgotten.
The "Josh or Greg" question is part of the hook to "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," but it's primarily a lens to view the four unhappy people looking for answers at the film's center.

There's Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom), fixated on the fairy tale moment that'll find her true love and solve her deep depression, even though all signs point to life not working like that. There's Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III), Rebecca's ex-boyfriend who's so worn down by his current girlfriend Valencia (Gabrielle Ruiz) not taking him seriously that he warms to a girl who'll actually listen to him, regardless of how uneasy her behavior is. There's Greg Serrano (Santino Fontana), former back-up guy and current love interest to Rebecca who's so uncomfortable with sharing his feelings that he blows every shot he gets. And there's Paula (Donna Lynne Champlin), who lives vicariously through Rebecca by planning even more extreme and invasive ways to get her and Josh together and takes it as a personal rebuke when it looks like Rebecca's going the other way on the Josh/Greg divide.

That's the opening question on the show's season finale, "Paula Needs to Get Over Josh!" Paula is outraged, claiming to have devoted her life to Rebecca (which she has), and gets the episode off to a rip-roaring start with the kiss-off number "After Everything I've Done for You." The song takes a "Chicago"-like fantasy cutaway with a black background (albeit directed by series co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna with a surer hand than Rob Marshall), with Paula wearing a bright red dress gesticulating wildly and listing all of the illegal, frightening things she's done for her surrogate daughter. She broke into Josh's old high school to make copies of his grades, blackmailed Valencia's boss to control her yoga class schedule, and so on.

Like all of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's" best numbers, it's a killer song that gets at the heart of Paula's barely-hidden sadness, the way she uses her best friend both as a way out of her disappointing love life and her frustration as a mother. She's rarely seemed happy with her husband (though he did help her break into a house that one time) or her kids, so "You're nothing without me and my creativity/I created you, you lived in my womb...I mean figuratively" hits pretty hard. Paula is cold and unresponsive to Rebecca for the rest of the episode not only because she's no longer going on an adventure with her, but because Rebecca has, to her, rejected her every move to make sure her surrogate daughter gets what she wanted.

Less heated, though still frosty, is Josh vs. Greg, with the two showing up with gifts for Rebecca while she's in the hospital for a UTI. Josh, her friend, has flowers. Greg, her sort of boyfriend, has an ironic balloon that says "She's with Jesus now," with Jesus and a unicorn on it. Greg recommends that Josh take the flowers to his actual girlfriend while Josh recommends that Greg, if he cares, actually get Rebecca flowers, even giving his to him. Greg, being an idiot, goes with the balloon, and that's par the course for him in the episode, constantly acting like a flippant jerk who doesn't care about his relationship even after his father tells him it's the wrong move and Rebecca all but sends him a written letter that she wants to be in a relationship.

Rebecca, meanwhile, gets her own relationship advice from her neighbor and Greg's ex, Heather (Vella Lovell), telling her that her pathological need for an "indescribable moment" that ties her relationship together isn't real and that she should just be upfront about how she feels. She's at least able to push Greg into taking her to Josh's sister's wedding and continues to fixate on the happily ever after storyline, remembering how she's been playing into that narrative since she was a little girl (with a flashback to a boy who wouldn't play along) and even singing her "One Indescribable Instant" song to a bird that lands by her window (hilariously subtitled: "I forgot I could fly. Peace, b----!"). While she goes shopping for earrings, Josh goes looking for engagement rings after begging Valencia to just let him propose in his own time. Their eyes meet, and there's a shared sadness between the two, an unspoken acknowledgement that their partners aren't giving them what they want.

The wedding, of course, is a disaster for Rebecca/Greg, with him jumping straight into sarcasm and mocking the inauthenticity of the surroundings (it's an Arabian theme for a Jewish/Filipino wedding, among other details) and mock-dancing several times when Rebecca sincerely asks him to dance. Bloom nails exaggerated emotions and gestures in her musical numbers and the comic set-pieces of the show, but she does some of her best work when she's giving micro-reactions to what's happening around her, slowly losing patience and giving slight hints (rubbing Greg's shoulders, softening her voice) that she wants Greg to take this seriously. But being uncomfortable with emotion and openly jealous of Josh and Rebecca's past connection (brought to mind by the sad looks Josh gives Rebecca throughout the night), he gets smashed and heckles a performance by the groomsmen.

The episode takes a more hopeful turn when Darryl (Pete Gardner), Rebecca and Paula's unfailingly enthusiastic dork of a boss, brings the two together for the wedding, resulting in an apology, a moving admission of love for each other, and a final bit of reluctant advice from Paula that Rebecca go for it with Greg. The reunion is brief but joyful; Rebecca's following scene with Greg, by comparison, is excruciating, with Greg making every bad decision possible, first leading with an apology and an expectation that they should break up, then blowing it when she does lay all cards on the table about her feelings. "This emotion stuff can be scary," Rebecca says, Bloom's eyes full and hopeful as she brings up her divorced parents and his absentee mother while suggesting things might turn out differently for them. It's a realistic moment from her, a respite from fairy tale romance that sees her recognizing the hard work that goes into a relationship and the decision to try for it. There's a brief moment where the sound goes out as Greg sees Josh across the room and he flashes back to seeing them kiss; there's a flash of recognition over his face of the fairy tale romance that Rebecca thinks she wants and the one he thinks he can provide, and he falls on the sword, supposedly selflessly, actually moronically. "I think you're cool." And then he passes out, with White Josh grabbing him to take care of him.

Meanwhile, Valencia convinces Josh's vain, annoying aunt to push Josh into proposing with a family heirloom, causing their breakup. Valencia has been the least well-rounded character of the series so far, often comically callous and mean-spirited, but when she's open about her real feelings for Josh, she's sympathetic. She's waited 15 years for Josh, through college and a move to West Covina and his kiss with Rebecca, and things still aren't moving to marriage. So they're over, and as Josh's annoying aunt takes the stage to sing her "Star Search" song, the same tune that Rebecca sang as a little girl, there's a romantic fairy tale moment that Rebecca's longed for, Josh pulling out her letter to him from camp and the two driving off for a scenic Hollywood lovemaking shot. Elsewhere, Greg, sick from drink on his couch, admits to himself that he should have said "I love you" before vomiting. Back in the car, Rebecca finally admits to Josh she moved there for him...and though she doesn't see it, he looks uneasy. That "indescribable instant" from the song has happened through months of blackmail, manipulation and all-out stalking, and it's all starting to click into place. The theme song "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" briefly plays, and we're back on uneasy ground.

In a piece for Criticwire, Sam Adams, a former editor of mine, noted that The CW's two most acclaimed shows ("Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and "Jane the Virgin," both of which he's a fan of) have a similar problem: the premises, right there in their titles, can only last for so long, and there's little room for them to evolve. I have that same concern, that "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" can only last so long (both due to its premise and it's basement-level ratings), and that there's limited room for Rebecca, Josh, Greg and Paula to go through their current hang-ups before they start running in circles. At the same time, Bloom and McKenna have shown so much ingenuity turning the show into a humorous but sophisticated look at depression and mental illness, a media deconstruction, a musical about musicals and a satisfying romantic-comedy all at once that I'm hopeful that they've still got some room to move and an end point in mind where these four finally do realize that there's no solution to the scary emotional stuff around them. There's only finding ways to deal with it and people to lean on to make life a little better.

Stray thoughts:

-Apparently the episode was written by Rene Gube, who plays Father Brah. Not my favorite character on the show, but good job with the finale, Father Brah.

-The number of times I wrote "Greg is an idiot" in my notes: 20, not including his father saying "Oh my god, you're an idiot" after he decides being the uncaring bad boy is the way to Rebecca's heart.

-Heather: "That thing you're looking for isn't anchored in real emotion. It's a script dictated to you by our society's patriarchal love narrative." Rebecca: "Did you learn that in school?" Heather: "No, it's in this month's Glamour."

-Josh's mother doesn't like Josh's aunt (her sister? Sister-in-law?) either. At her self-important introduction of her own hit song: "God, she's the worst."

-Greg in a moment of self-awareness: "I saw Justin Timberlake wear sneakers with a suit...but I'm no J-Timbo."

-I don't particularly want Rebecca to end up with either Josh or Greg at the moment, given the stuff all three have to figure out, but I'm pulling for Darryl/White Josh like you wouldn't believe.

-Once more, I cannot believe this weird, low-rated show got renewed. Can't wait for what's next.
PIERRE | The Legislatures Executive Board decided Monday the 2016 interim study topics should be nursing home and assisted living center capacity, Medicaid provider payments and early deterrence of drug abuse.

Those three subjects topped the results from the survey sent to all 105 legislators. The legislators cast votes for up to five top picks from the menu of 16 topics.

The House Commerce and Energy Committee suggested the nursing-beds and assisted living study. It received 119 points.

The Medicaid provider reimbursement topic came from Rep. Jean Hunhoff, R-Yankton, and Rep. Dick Werner, R-Huron. It scored 113.

The drug-abuse deterrence proposal, including an emphasis on methamphetamine, originated with Sen. Jim White, R-Huron. It received 103 points.

Next on the list was township government, focused on functions and financing, with 94 points.

Rep. Jim Bolin spoke up for Whites drug-abuse recommendation. Bolin, R-Canton, acknowledged he didnt use any of his five votes for it but now thought it should be the top pick.

Bolin said it could pay huge dividends for us long term and abuse has huge implications.

Others who spoke in favor included Rep. Don Haggar, R-Sioux Falls, and Sen. David Omdahl, R-Sioux Falls. I think this thing is only going to get worse before it gets better, Omdahl said.

Rep. Timothy Johns, R-Lead, said addressing drug abuse at its earliest stages should be a top priority.

Last week several legislators who serve on a criminal-sentencing oversight panel said methamphetamine is an epidemic in South Dakota.

At the same meeting Jim Seward, the governors legal counsel, announced that a methamphetamine-education effort would be starting soon in the state Department of Social Services.

Pennington County Sheriff Kevin Thom strongly emphasized to the oversight panel the problems posed by methamphetamine abuse.

The Executive Board next meets May 16, and the scope of each topic would be defined then and legislators would be assigned, based in part on their preferences, according to Sen. Gary Cammack, R-Union Center. He is the boards chairman.

Whats amazing about meth is it has no boundaries, Cammack said, adding its just as likely to be found in rural areas or cities. Its bad stuff.

The nine lawmakers who participated in the meeting in person or by telephone also directed the Legislative Research Council to prepare an issue memo on legislator compensation.

South Dakota legislators receive $6,000 per year plus travel, meal and overnight expenses for official trips. The issue paper will look at what other states do.
Eli McCauley would cast his vote in favor of moving the capital of Dakota Territory from Yankton, but he wanted something in return. That something was to have a county named after him.

The usual process of creating and organizing a county in territorial days, according to South Dakota Geographic Names edited by Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, was for the legislature to create a county by defining certain boundaries and selecting a name.

Next, the inhabitants petitioned the governor for organization. The governor then appointed three county commissioners, who in turn appointed the first county officers.

McCauley was a member of the 1883 Legislature. A bill was passed during that session to enlarge Brown County by adding townships from Edmunds, McPherson and Day counties and then dividing Brown County into four separate counties, each with a county seat.

These counties would be named McCauley, Edgerton, Inman and Brown. Alonzo Edgerton was chief justice of the territorial court; Darwin Inman was a banker and legislator from Vermillion; and Alfred Brown was a territorial legislator.

The bill would only become law upon the approval of the majority of voters in the district comprising the four proposed counties. Voters did not approve, so the counties of Edgerton, Inman and McCauley do not appear on maps.

According to the South Dakota State Historical Society, Edgerton, Inman and McCauley are but three of 44 counties that were created in South Dakota that no longer exist. Here is a look at a few more of these ghost counties.

Samuel Ashmore was a member of the Dakota Territory House of Representatives in 1872 and 1873. He was rewarded for his service by having his name attached to a plot of country on what was then the far upper Missouri River.

Ashmore County remained on the map for two years, then a new group of legislators removed Ashmores name from the map and substituted Joel Potters. It remains Potter County to this day

Downer Bramble was a leading figure in the early history of Yankton. He operated the first general wholesale business in Dakota Territory, with a branch store in Fort Pierre and a big business in the Black Hills.

The 1873 Legislature attempted to perpetuate his name in geography by naming a county in his honor. The 1879 Legislature dropped Bramble and redrew Miner Countys boundaries to embrace all that is now Miner and Sanborn counties.

James OBrien Scobey was a lawyer and legislator from Brookings. He secured Brookings as the location of a land-grant institution. A building on the campus of that land-grant institution, South Dakota State University, bears his name.

The county that was named for Scobey in 1883 is now part of Meade County. Delano County also became part of Meade County. Delano County was named for Columbus Delano, who served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior from 1870 to 1875.

Rusk County was named for Gov. Jeremiah Rusk of Wisconsin. The name was later changed to Dewey County in honor of William Dewey, Dakota Territory surveyor-general from 1873 to 1877.

William Dewey was the brother of Wisconsins first governor, Nelson Dewey, so Dewey County has connections to two Wisconsin governors.

Jayne County was created in 1862 and would have ensured that the name of Dakota Territorys first governor, William Jayne, lived on in South Dakota history. It was never organized, but remained on the map until 1871 when it was absorbed by Turner and Hutchinson counties.

While some counties were named for physical features, American Indians, military officers or animals, legislators named the majority of counties after other legislators and political officials.

Changing boundaries and honoring legislators with county names was one of the social diversions of each legislature and did little harm except perhaps to the ego of some forgotten county godfather of the times, read an article titled Dakotas Counties in the June 1, 1959, issue of the South Dakota State Historical Societys monthly bulletin The Wi-Iyohi.

However, the same article also noted that with the elimination of some counties so went some splendid names that might well have been perpetuated in South Dakota.
Since taking office in January 2015, it has become clear to me that Indian Health Service (IHS), specifically in the Great Plains Area  which covers South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa  is plagued with systematic problems affecting Native Americans in South Dakota.

Tribal members have been suffering and, in some cases, dying due to inadequate or improper health care provided by IHS. It is time for IHS to get its act together and follow through on its trust responsibility to deliver quality health care to Native Americans.

My office has begun working on an in-depth profile analysis of IHS. Were working with the Congressional Research Service and analyzing data and reports from the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Health and Human Services to find answers.

What we have found so far says a lot about why IHS is failing so miserably.

We need to understand the organization itself before we can begin to solve problems. We know though, that if we dont solve the problems at IHS, we will continue to see more examples of hospitals failing to meet basic requirements to provide safe health care, therefore losing essential services like emergency care.

The Rosebud hospitals emergency department has been on diversion  which essentially means it is shut down  for four months, forcing patients to be diverted to facilities 50 or more miles away. The Winnebago and Pine Ridge hospitals have also been cited for serious safety deficiencies.

We need to focus on why so many problems continue to occur at IHS, especially in the Great Plains Area, and why they arent getting fixed. I plan on finding answers to these questions and working with the tribes on solutions.

Earlier this year, I requested a Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing to examine a number of reports of negligence at IHS hospitals in the Great Plains Area.

We heard horrific stories of dirty or broken medical equipment, poor record-keeping, and in one inexcusable case, a woman gave birth to her baby on a bathroom floor with no nurses or doctors around to help her.

There is absolutely no excuse for hospitals not to reach basic benchmarks for providing proper health care. Tribal members have told my office that some IHS hospitals they visit are still working with outdated, inadequate and sometimes broken medical equipment.

Through our research, we have found that IHS allocates less than 0.5 percent of their total $4.8 billion budget to equipment purchases.

The Great Plains Area IHS, which operates 35 of the total 153 IHS facilities, only receives $116 million for direct care, or 2 percent of the IHS total appropriation. We also learned that IHS has more than 15,000 employees, and only 750 are identified as doctors, yet more than 3,700 employees are dedicated to Medicaid billing.

Its hard not to come to the conclusion that the IHS system is more concerned about building and protecting a bureaucracy than taking care of people. IHS has no funding formula, no consistent qualitative reporting measurements, and too many of their area directors appear to be little more than temporary employees.

Lastly, IHS spends less per capita than the Bureau of Prisons spends on each inmates health care. Looking at statistics like these makes it clear that IHS will never be able to function properly unless it undergoes major changes.

More taxpayer money wont solve the dysfunction.

Consider this: if the president proposed and congress supported doubling IHSs budget, based on IHSs current template theyd have 1,500 doctors, 7,400 bureaucrats billing Medicaid, and they would have 20,000 administration employees and only 10,700 healthcare providers.

That will solve nothing. Both systematic and financial changes need to occur.

The state of IHS and the inability to fix these decades-old problems has resulted in a federal government-initiated crisis in Indian Country.

The Great Plains Area ranks second highest in infant mortality rates among all IHS regions. We have the highest diabetes death rates, highest tuberculosis death rates and the highest alcohol-related death rates. Great Plains Area tribal members have the lowest life expectancy rate at 68.1 years, while the U.S. average is almost 10 years more at 77.7.

These statistics arent from a foreign country. These are South Dakotans and our neighbors. Frankly, all of us should expect more.

If were going to find a real plan to fix the problems at IHS, we need to fully understand the current organization. We cant rebuild or repair something until we find out what is and is not working.

I will continue working with tribal leadership, IHS administrators, Health and Human Services and others to identify key areas of reform and identify potential solutions to provide better health care to our tribal members. The current situation within IHS is unacceptable.
ELLSWORTH AIR FORCE BASE, S.D. | A teen from Ellsworth AFB received the 2016 South Dakota Boys & Girls Clubs of America's Military Youth of the Year award in March 21, 2016.

Ria Gualano, daughter of Lan Gualano, 28th Comptroller Squadron quality assurance manager, earned the award for her community outreach, leadership skills and speech presentations.

The Youth of the Year Program is the Boys & Girls Clubs premier youth recognition program for members who promote service to the Club, community, and family, as well as carry good academic performance, moral character, life goals, and poise while at the same time demonstrating public speaking ability.

"It's really motivating," Ria said. "We are taught from a young age that we can make a difference if we set our mind to it. Yet, sometimes it's hard to bring that down to Earth on a day-to-day basis and show it."

Ria strives not only for academic excellence, currently ranked #1 with the highest GPA in her Douglas High School Sophomore class, she is also involved in after-school activities, Ria's mother said. She's the type of girl who really goes after opportunities once she's set her mind to something.

In her free time, Ria enjoys writing and has already completed her first novel. She also enjoys the performing arts, to include singing and acting, and was a member of her school debate team and school musical production. She also swam competitively and was the South Dakota state champion from 2013 to 2015.

Even with a busy personal schedule, Ria supports her local community by volunteering as a swim instructor at the Rapid City YMCA. She also transcribes interviews in the oral history department in the Rapid City Public Library.

Yet there are even more goals she aims to accomplish.

"I hope to be able to inspire people in a number of ways," Ria said. "First of all through my contemporary Christian singing and songwriting. I'm also hopeful I can become a decent author. Both avenues give me an opportunity to influence how youth go about things and maybe change their perspectives."

She added she is grateful for the opportunity to represent South Dakota, but her goals do not stop there as she still plans to try to win the national MYOTY competition.

"The reason that I'm going for Military Youth of the Year is because this is a great program," Ria said. "I know that with this responsibility, I could do something good by sharing a positive message to the youth across the country."

Ria may have the chance to represent the state of South Dakota in the national Youth of the Year competition this September in Washington D.C., but she first has to compete regionally in Chicago.

"We're really grateful for our daughter," Ria's mother said. "I know a lot of parents who have troubled teenagers. As a parent, I know we sometimes want different things for our children than they want for themselves. Still, we have to restrain ourselves for the expectations we have for them and allow them to put in the effort."

Ria commented she tries to do her best in everything, and hopes to impact the world in a positive way.

"Yesterday ended with yesterday, and today started with the dawn," Ria Gualano said. "That means no matter what you have been in the past, it's not too late to restart and it's not too late to get up and make a difference."

Ria thanked the Ellsworth Youth Center for nominating her for the award.

"I love the base Youth Center," Ria said smiling. "It's definitely been a place that's shown me how to grow, become independent, confident, and helped shape who I am today."
Rapid City conference to examine causes, effects

RAPID CITY  Registration has opened for the first-ever Broken Lives: Addiction and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder conference to be held May 19-20 in Whiteclay, Neb. Jointly sponsored by the Black Hills nonprofit Roots to Wings and Nebraskan nonprofit Special Needs Advocates and Parents (SNAAP), the conference is aimed at providing education and training to teachers, social workers, law enforcement, medical professionals, legislators and community policy makers.

According to the Center for Disease Control, up to one in twenty children in the United States are affected by Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), which is caused by the consumption of alcohol during pregnancy. Services and medical costs for those affected by FASD will cost the U.S. billions over these childrens lifetime.

The conference will be held in Whiteclay, Neb., home to around a dozen residents and four liquor stores, which sold over 3.5 million beers in 2015. According to the New York Times, 25 percent of residents in Pine Ridge, which borders Whiteclay, were born with FASD in 2012.

With more than 40 years of experience, Deb Evensen, a behavior specialist and educator at Kenai Peninsula Borough School District in Alaska, will deliver the keynote. Evensen has pioneered the discovery of practical solutions for individuals with FASD and spent thousands of hours implementing those solutions in schools and communities across North America.

Other speakers include:

Frank LaMere, Four Directions Center; Activist

John A. Maisch, Director and filmmaker of Sober Indian, Dangerous Indian; Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at University of Central Oklahoma; Former Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General

Mark Garry, M.D., Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center; Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, University of South Dakota

Kari Scovel, Ph.D., Adjunct Assistant Professor, South Dakota State University; Public Education Coordinator, South Dakota Psychological Association; Consultant, Rapid City Regional Hospital for Behavioral Health and Sanford Center for Disabilities; Owner, Scoval Psychological

Jennifer Ponce, Special Projects Coordinator, DOVES Program; Sexual and Domestic Violence Advocate

Barbara Blum, Educator, Red Cloud Indian School and Pine Ridge Job Corp

The conference will also include a screening of Sober Indian, Dangerous Indian, and a post-film panel with the director and activists. Sober Indian, Dangerous Indian is a story of men and women on the Pine Ridge Reservation who have found empowerment through sobriety and those still struggling to overcome their alcohol addiction.

Nurses, educators and social workers may receive continuing education credits for attending the conference.

For more information or to register, please visit stopfasd.com/events.
HOT SPRINGS - On April 16, during the second Miss America Serves: National Day of Service, the Miss South Dakota Organizations court of 2016 titleholders aligned with Miss South Dakota, Autumn Simuneks veteran advocacy platform, 5 Stars for Serving Those Who Served, and together, intend to volunteer across the state to thank, honor and give back to our military heroes and their families. The aim is to celebrate April as the Month of the Military Child, all while volunteering and fundraising for Childrens Miracle Network Hospitals.

The South Dakota Serves team will work an extension of Autumns founded Veterans Holiday Relief Drive and partner with the South Dakota American Legion Auxiliary, to fill more than 200 Buddy Bags, delivering them to veteran outreach and emergency shelters across the state.

This project of philanthropy for those that sacrificed all for our nations freedom consists of the Miss South Dakota Serves team volunteering at shelters for the homeless and vulnerable across the state to provide food and fellowship on meal lines and tours at the ministry of The Banquet, Bishop Dudley Hospitality House and Cornerstone Rescue Mission.

The South Dakota Serves team will also be fundraising for Childrens Miracle Network Hospitals at local partnering grocery stores, and begin their non-perishable food and relief item collections for the upcoming VA2K Walk and Roll, an annual initiative to encourage fitness and support homeless Veterans.

As Autumn works with the South Dakota National Guard Child and Youth Program and the Family Volunteer Group for Air to support Governor Daugaards Executive Proclamation, and unites her 2016 Miss South Dakota Serves team, you too are encouraged to join communities throughout the state and nation to create visible salute and Sea of Purple by wearing your PURPLE on April 15th, Purple Up! For Military Kids Day to show your service of support, respect, and thanks to our military children.

Autumn is extremely grateful to the Miss America Organizations scholarship foundation for recognizing her commitment to veteran advocacy as the 2016 Jean Bartel Scholarship for Military Awareness winner, and paving the way for her collegiate and personal success.

Of the four points of the crown  service, style, scholarship and success  service and scholarship are the driving force behind her involvement with Miss America.

To support the Miss South Dakota Serves teams goal with Childrens Miracle Network Hospitals one can donate on-line at www.MissAmericaServes.com,

To learn more about the Miss South Dakota Organization, please visit misssd.org, and mark your calendar for the excitement of the 70th Anniversary Miss South Dakota pageant, June 17-18, 2016 in Hot Springs, South Dakota.

About Miss America Serves

Miss America contestants and volunteers will again join forces with their family and friends for a national day of volunteer service presented by Childrens Miracle Network Hospitals  Miss America Serves. These dedicated volunteers come together in an effort to give back to their communities while raising funds for member hospitals across the country.

Miss America Serves became a beacon for all in our inaugural event last year, as we witnessed the goodwill and generosity of our contestants efforts in their local communities, hospitals, homeless shelters, food banks, soup kitchens, pediatric wards, senior care establishments, and so many more. By the late evening of that incredible day, endless hours and heartfelt participation had made a difference in countless lives. Miss America Serves proved to be a huge success, with the combined efforts raising over $100,000 for Childrens Miracle Network Hospitals across the nation, along with Miss America state scholarships.

The Miss America Organization is thrilled once again to host a national day of service and encourage everyone to volunteer in their communities.
HOT SPRINGS  Last Tuesday, April 12, Mayor Cindy Donnell officially proclaimed April 15 as Purple Up! For Military Kids Day with an official city proclamation.

The proclamation is designed to recognize the children of those who serve in the military. When parents serve in the military, so does the entire family, including children, the proclamation says.

The proclamation is also designed to recognize the commitment, struggles and unconditional support of our troops.

The choice of purple for a color is designed to show support for all branches of the military  a blend of Army green, Air Force blue, Marine red, and Navy blue, the proclamation notes.

The proclamation urges all citizens, businesses, and government leaders to observe this day by wearing purple to salute, honor, support and thank our military children in the community, state and nation.

Miss South Dakota, Autumn Simunek, says she was the moving force behind the proclamation. After Hot Springs 4th grader Erin Osmotherly reached out to her, she requested the city-wide proclamation, and asked Harvey and Osmotherlywho has family in the military --- to accept the proclamation on her behalf.

In honor of all of our Veterans Town communitys military children, the American Legion Auxiliary, the Legion, and Legion Riders, local titleholders and Miss Poppys were also invited.
Canterbury Strings owner honored by Ovation guitar fan club

HOT SPRINGS  Last week, the sign on the door of the Canterbury String Shop, located on North River Street, said closed due to emergency circumstances. The reason was that Alison Swan, owner of Canterbury, a woman whose life has touched so many here in Hot Springs since 2006, when the shop opened, had gone into hospice care on Regional Healths Hospice House on Elk Street in Rapid City, according to her friend Jackie Gericke.

But not before Swan was recognized by the Ovation Fan Club as their Member of the Year and receiving a very special guitar plaque.

Ovation guitars began in New Hartford, Connecticut in 1967, when Charles Kaman, a helicopter pioneer, developed his first guitar and founded the company.

Kaman worked to get the vibrations out of spruce helicopter blades. When he branched into guitars, he used this experience to manufacture guitar tops, positioning Ovation as a leader in the field.

Ovation created the first acoustic guitar that could be plugged into an amp. Among those who played Ovations were: Glen Campbell, Paul Simon, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Eddie Van Halen, Alex Lifeson, Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers, Melissa Etheridge, Roger Waters and David Gilmour.

Swan, a former Ovation employee, told USA Today reporter Mike Snider that, Everyone was using them. They used to come pick them up at the factory, she said in a 2014 interview. We were all hoping that Mick (Jagger) would come.

Swan said Ovation guitars were the very first  and she believed the best  under saddle pickup, the best true acoustic electric guitar sound. Ovation guitars also had a lighter and thinner neck.

Swans father worked at Ovation, and she began working there in 1976 as a quality control inspector, a job she called wonderful the best job I ever had  other than running Canterbury.

In June of 2014, the Ovation factory, as a subsidiary of Fender guitars, closed its doors, and what many regard as a classic American guitar strummed its swan song, despite Fender continuing to manufacture Ovation-branded guitars in China, South Korea and Indonesia.

The Ovation Fan Club came about in 2001, through the efforts of Miles-Kevin Baron and Alexander Pepiak. Baron is a long-time Ovation solid body and Storm series guitar fan, and is probably the primary collector of these instruments and Ovation memorabilia in the USA. Pepiak, a huge Adamas guitar fan, also owned some rare and prototype Ovation guitars as well.

Baron said the Member of the Year award is an example of wanting to recognize members who epitomize what our community is all about.

Not only is it fans of music and fans of Ovation and Adamas guitars, he said, but some of the nicest model human beings if you will, I have ever met. I honestly dont think they could make an award large enough for all the people who likely deserve it in a given year.

Baron said the fan club is made up of people from around the world, from diverse backgrounds and beliefs.

I think its fitting that Alison got it (the award), Baron said. So often we miss the opportunity praise someone for their deeds in life while they are still alive. She used to work for Ovation, but now as a merchant, she has put so many guitars (not just Ovations) into so many hands, and with her shop being a destination of sorts, she has helped put music into so many lives.
As the mother of three sons who were members of the Sentinel High School Band when the combined Missoula high school bands marched in the Tournament of Roses Parade in 1990 and the Fiesta Bowl Parade in 1993, I was happy to learn from the April 15 Missoulian that the Hellgate band had been invited to participate in the Pearl Harbor Memorial Parade later this year. An experience like this is so valuable because each musician learns what it means to be an integral member of the whole ensemble.

I hope the Missoula community will be as supportive of the band's fundraising efforts as it was when, in 1978, for the first time, the Hellgate band marched in the Tournament of Roses Parade under the direction of Richard Erickson, and again in 1981, when the Hellgate band, under the direction of Carl Smart, joined the Sentinel and Big Sky bands to march in the Cotton Bowl Parade in Dallas, Texas. This all happened when, according to the current Hellgate band director Leon Slater, the Hellgate band program "was a really tiny, not a very good or big program."

I wish Slater could have heard the 1966 Hellgate band, led by its first director, Charles Johnson, when he conducted the band in a stunning performance of "Napoli" by Herman Bellstedt featuring young Allen Vizutti. The appreciative audience of Montana Music Educators responded with a rousing, cheering standing ovation. Since the early 1960s the Hellgate band has been comprised of hundreds of talented students whose parents and families have cajoled and encouraged them to be even more exceptional musicians. It would be wise to remember that the excellence of all the band, choir and orchestra programs in Missoula County high schools through the years is due to all of the dedicated directors who led them.

Sylvia Erickson,

Stevensville
Sagarmatha Network Pvt. Ltd. is the organization dedicated in the field of printing, publishing service since 2001. As part of media, we've been publishing Review Nepal, an English medium weekly registered at District Administration Office (DAO) Kathmandu with registration number 130-162-163 and reviewnepal.com as an online digital newspaper, with registration number 849-075-076 at Department of Informational and Broadcasting (DIB) from Kathmandu, Nepal since 2003.
Here's what the new Docking State Office Building could look like
 "The Meaning of Life in Criminal Law" | Main | Your tax dollars at work?: cost accounting for Aurora theater shooter James Holmes' failed capital trial 

April 19, 2016

Taking full stock of the Prez Clinton's punishment legacy by looking at PLRA (and AEDPA and ....)

Though I have enjoyed seeing the 1994 Clinton Crime bill getting lots and lots of attention recently (example here and here), there is so much more to legacy of the "Clinton years" to the full story of US punishment practices. This new New Republic commentary, headlined "Another Clinton-Era Law that Needs to Be Repealed: The Prison Litigation Reform Act is still trampling on prisoners' legal rights," tells another piece of the story, and here are excerpts:

Signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996 as a rider to the annual congressional appropriations bill, the PLRA laid waste to the ability of incarcerated people to bring prison officials to court for violations of their constitutional rights, whether it be racial discrimination, lack of medical care, or brutality by prison guards. The act was championed as a solution to the thousands of supposed frivolous lawsuits by prisoners, with barely any discussion by Congress about its far-reaching effects. Locked away, those in prison are easily demonized, unable to refute any exaggerations or myths created by those on the outside. One story publicly hyped by members of Congress leading up to the acts passage had a prisoner filing suit after receiving crunchy peanut butter instead of creamy. But when a federal judge researched the case later, he found that the issue wasnt about that prisoners taste in condiments, but that the prisoner had never been reimbursed after returning the item. The price of a jar of peanut butter might seem trivial to those of us on the outside, but most people in prison are poor and are often deeply in debt. Plus, many prisons overcharge for simple items (the jar of peanut butter cost $2.50, significantly more than the average cost at the time). Looking back, the PLRA did not solve a problem of frivolous litigation, rather it masked and discredited the legitimate claims of people with nowhere else to turn. Since the PLRA became law, tremendous burdens have been placed on prisoners wishing to file suit for violations of their constitutional rights. For example, one of the laws provisions forces you to go through the prisons administrative complaint procedures before bringing an actual lawsuit. This can take months. Imagine a prisoner who is in pain and in need of medical treatment, but ignored by prison staff: She must not only file her complaint with the same staff that is denying her treatment, but wait for a refusal, appeal that decision, and only after a judgment on that appeal can she then file a legal case beyond prison walls. By that time, it may be too late for a court to do anything.

As the title of this post is meant to suggestion, lots of other Clinton-era federal criminal laws and developments, particularly the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and Prez Clinton's decision to sign-on to Congress's rejection of the US Sentencing Commission's crack/powder amendment to equalize the guidelines, ought to be a continuing topic of conversation as we consider putting another Clinton in the White House this year.

Prior related posts:

April 19, 2016 at 11:15 AM | Permalink

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Use Mossad personnel to handle government misfits 

The former are effective - VERY effective 

Posted by: Docile Jim Brady  the Nemo Me  Impune Lacessit  in Oregon  | Apr 20, 2016 3:09:09 AM

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One voice has been conspicuously absent from the, yes, somehow still circulating, really rather unproductive story surrounding the above video in which a black female SF State student accuses a white student with dreadlocks of cultural appropriation. And that would be her voice. She is Bonita Tindle, and in a public Facebook post circulated by school paper the Golden Gate Xpress she claims to have received death threats and all manner of harassment in the viral video's wake.

Putting aside the video, she writes, "You can tell me that the decisions I made are right or wrong but what we need to focus on is the wrong in the response to the video. In the aftermath, I have been the subject of violence in the form of death threats, rape threats, sexual harassment, and anti-Black hate speech."

Echoing this point, the dreadlocked man, Cory Goldstein  who of course gave his own interview far earlier  even commiserates with Tindle. As he reportedly wrote, "I want to apologize to the girl in the video because no one deserves the amount of backlash she received, I want her to know that I feel where she was coming from and wish we could have talked in a more positive and loving situation."

Tindle discusses her side of the experience in full, and it's a very unhappy one. "Over the past few weeks, America has held discussions about my personal Black experience," she writes, "dancing between their own definitions of right and wrong. Over the past few weeks I had to move from my home, change my cell phone number, and disable social media accounts."

She also argues that the clip excludes an initial interaction. "He selectively edits only a portion of the encounter that contrives to cast an impression of unprovoked aggression on my part," she writes.

While Goldstein has surely undergone some backlash, and thus gets where Tindle is coming from, I find it unlikely that he has received threats of sexual harassment, or had to move and change his phone number.

But, who knows! Perhaps he'll come forward and say that he has, in fact, experienced further suffering  more criticism of his hair or appearance. That would be fitting. After all, the real appropriation in all this story, as it seems to me, is that Goldstein and the media have conveniently borrowed a narrative of oppression. She criticized his hair, and someone threatened to kill her for it, but somehow, he's the oppressed party? Now that's offensive.

Related: Video: Dreadlocked White SFSU Student Accosted For 'Cultural Appropriation'
By the time 4/20 celebrants leave their own brand of fog all over Golden Gate Park, many will have spotted a series of advertisements for a new cannabis brand, one hip to all the buzzwords usually reserved for the aisles of Whole Foods. "Craft farmers. Small batch. Sustainable." This is the kind of weed Alice Waters would be hawking, if Alice Waters hawked weed.

#Ad





The campaign, Mother Jones tells us, comes from a new cannabis collective enterprise called Flow Kana, and they've spent $200,000 on ads from buses to billboards.

"[We] are going all out," Flow Kana founder Michael Steinmetz Mishkin tells Mother Jones, who explain that getting the conditions just right for the company ahead of potential legalization could be crucial. "If we don't get this company to be massively big over the next two years... then we won't be able to compete with the bigger forces that come in," says Mishkin. He hopes smokers will take to the "California Way," per the campaign, the kind undertaken by Florida orange growers or Wisconsin cheese mongers.

"The idea with this campaign is to really showcase who we are, and in so doing create a value for customers that will trickle down for the benefit of the planet," Mishkin says, pointing to grow operations with varying environmental effects.

Furthermore, consider that Flow Kana's partners with who are already hard at work. "It's not like we have to go out and recreate these systems... We just have to leverage the people who have been doing it."

Weed has come a long way from the "wanna buy some grass" days  now, it's the Humboldt County appellation you're buying into  the Emerald Triangle way of life. Hey, just look at all these happy hippies! I'll smoke what they're smoking.

Related: Pipe Dream: Local Stoner-Rap Icon 'Berner' Fights To Formalize 4/20 On Hippie Hill
Federal prosecutors are investigating the possibility that Theranos, Inc., a blood testing startup once valued at $9 billion, misled its investors with regard to its proprietary pin-prick blood sample technology.

That was the word from the Wall Street Journal, which was echoed in a company statement to business partners published by the Business Times that also indicated the involvement of the SEC.

"Investigations by the SEC and the U.S. Attorney's Office, which began following the publication of certain news articles, are focused on requesting documents and ongoing, in addition to the CMS inspection," Theranos wrote. "The company continues to work closely with regulators and is cooperating fully with all investigations. "

Theranos has an active partnership with Walgreens in Arizona, a state where the Palo Alto-based Theranos has another lab. Now, Walgreens Boots Alliance and the New York State Department of Health have received subpoenas: Prosecutors want documents and testimony as to how the company was marketing itself and its technology. The investigation may or may not lead to an indictment and is in its early stages according to anonymous sources to the Journal.

"I feel devastated that we did not catch and fix these issues faster," Elizabeth Holmes said in an interview with Today that coincidentally aired yesterday before the news of the criminal investigation broke. "I'm the founder and CEO of this company, anything that happens in this company is my responsibility at the end of the day."

According to a letter from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Holmes faces a two-year ban from the blood testing industry if problems aren't resolved at its Newark, California lab, which could also be shut down.

Previously: CEO Of Healthcare Startup Theranos Faces 2-Year Ban From Blood Testing Biz
DES MOINES | Lawyers for the operator of the former Argosy Sioux City riverboat casino have taken what could be the final step in their case against state gambling regulators and the casino's former local partner.

The Belle of Sioux City last week filed an application for an Iowa Supreme Court review of an Iowa Court of Appeals ruling that upheld previous rulings that led to the casino's closure.

In his application, the Belle's attorney, Mark Weinhardt, of Des Moines, spelled out three grounds for the application: the Court of Appeals misinterpreted the state's casino license renewal statute, the court incorrectly and inconsistently determined the extent to which agencies are bound by their words and actions, and the court's ruling damages litigants' due process rights before state agencies.

If the Supreme Court grants the application, it would set a schedule for filing briefs. If the court denies the application, the case would be over.

"We were hopeful that the Court of Appeals decision would have been the last one, but this wasn't completely unexpected, either," said Brian Ohorilko, administrator of the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission, which regulates gambling operators.

In a unanimous decision last month, the three appeals court judges who heard the case ruled that the Argosy's incomplete gambling license renewal applications in 2012 and 2013 did not trigger protections spelled out in Iowa law and that state regulators' subsequent actions to deny the Argosy's Iowa-based operator, Belle of Sioux City, a gaming license and award a license to another applicant did not violate the Belle's right to due process.

Weinhardt, who could not be reached for comment Monday, said the Court of Appeals' ruling failed to rule on Argosy's due process claims. Weinhardt has continually argued that the IRGC had given Argosy officials inconsistent messages throughout the license-renewal process and had denied them due process by deciding to close the casino long before granting the casino operators a hearing in which to contest the decision, which ultimately led to the opening of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Sioux City.

"That is, agencies in the wake of this ruling are free to make decisions first, based upon whatever rationale they choose, and then ratify those decisions in pseudojudicial proceedings later. ... Because the Court of Appeals skirted that question, this court urgently needs to address it," Weinhardt said in the review application.

Ohorilko said the IRGC would file a resistance to Weinhardt's application by Friday's deadline. So will SCE Partners, the owners of the Hard Rock Sioux City.

"The Court of Appeals ruling was well-reasoned and the right result. None of the grounds for further review apply in this case," said Guy Cook, a Des Moines attorney representing SCE Partners.

Belle, a subsidiary of Wyomissing, Pa.-based Penn National Gaming Co., the nation's largest gaming operator, had challenged the IRGC's actions when granting a state gaming license in 2013 to the Hard Rock and Missouri River Historical Development, its local nonprofit partner, as well as subsequent judicial rulings that upheld those actions. MRHD formerly held Woodbury County's gambling license with Argosy, but a lengthy contract dispute between the two led to the IRGC's decision in April 2013 to accept bids for Woodbury County's first land-based casino.

In December 2014, Belle appealed District Judge Eliza Ovrum's Nov. 7, 2014, ruling in Polk County District Court that the IRGC had acted within its authority when it granted the gaming license to Hard Rock and MRHD. The Supreme Court transferred the case to the Court of Appeals.

The IRGC ordered the casino to close in July 2014 because it was in violation of a state law that requires casinos to partner with licensed nonprofit groups. The Argosy's license lapsed after MRHD, its then-nonprofit sponsor, refused to sign off on a license renewal application.

Ovrum upheld that IRGC decision, and the floating casino was closed July 30, 2014, two days before the $128 million Hard Rock opened in downtown Sioux City.

The Argosy boat and accompanying structures on shore have since been removed from the Missouri riverfront. The boat was sold to an Illinois shipyard.
SIOUX CITY | Incumbent U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, raised nearly $150,000 in campaign funds in the first three months of this year, dwarfing the fundraising of the only Democrat running for the 4th District seat.

Of the $149,043 that King's campaign took in during the quarter, $108,152 came from individuals, $36,000 from political action committees and $4,891 in other receipts. The campaign spent $95,172 over the period, leaving a March 31 cash balance of $172,781 heading into the final weeks before the June 7 primary.

King, a seven-term incumbent, faces a Republican challenge from state Sen. Rick Bertrand of Sioux City.

Friday marked the deadline for federal candidates to file campaign fundraising reports with the Federal Election Commission for the first quarter. Because Bertrand hasn't filed to officially become a federal candidate with the FEC, he was not required to file a report.

Democrat Kim Weaver of Sheldon raised $14,753 in the first quarter, including $11,953 from individual contributions and $2,800 from political action committees, according to the FEC. Weaver spent $12,257 during the three-month period and had $15,345 cash on hand as of March 31.

Iowa's three other incumbent congressmen, Republicans David Young and Rod Blum and Democrat Dave Loebsack, all raised more money than King during the first quarter.

Iowa congressional candidates must file one more report, called a pre-primary report, by May 26, just weeks before the June 7 primary. That report, which covers activity from April 1 to May 18, will be the first in which Bertrand will be required to publicly disclose his campaign fundraising and spending.

As a state legislative candidate with leftover campaign funds, Bertrand has the option to transfer those dollars to his federal campaign account.

Bertrand had $54,694 cash on hand in that account as of Jan. 19, the most recent filing period with the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board.

In the prior reports, covering activity through Dec. 31, Weaver had raised $28,028 and had $12,849 cash on hand. Through the end of 2015, King had $118,909 cash on hand after raising more than $397,000.

King has rarely raised large amounts of money for his re-election victories, with the notable exception coming in 2012 when he ramped up fundraising when faced with a stiff challenge from Democrat Christie Vilsack, a former Iowa first lady.
SIOUX CITY | If C.J. Williams offers the advice to never say never, it would be best to listen. He wouldn't be where he is today if he hadn't gone back on a couple things he at one time or another had sworn he'd never do.

Had he held firm on his nevers, he'd probably be sitting in a corporate board room giving legal advice to CEOs rather than presiding in a downtown Sioux City courtroom as the Northern District of Iowa's newest federal magistrate judge.

"I should learn not to listen to myself," Williams said lightheartedly while recollecting how as a law school student he swore he'd never go into criminal law. Then, as a federal prosecutor, he believed that he'd never have any interest in becoming a judge.

"I was convinced I would never want to be a judge," he said. "Judges can only rule on what's brought before the judge. The judge doesn't control litigation."

What changed his mind?

First, since joining the U.S. Attorney's Office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1997, Williams had tried dozens of cases and had risen to the position of handling complex civil and criminal cases. Perhaps the most well-known are his prosecution of Dustin Honken and Angela Johnson. Both were found guilty in trials in Sioux City and sentenced to death for the 1993 slayings of five people, including two little girls, in 1993 to cover up evidence of drug crimes.

(Johnson's sentence has since been reduced to life without parole. Honken has exhausted his appeals and awaits the setting of an execution date.)

With all that experience, Williams said he was looking for a new challenge. Plus, he thought that as an experienced attorney, it was his responsibility to consider being a judge.

"There's a certain duty for attorneys to look at serving as a judge when they reach a point when they get a certain amount of experience," he said.

As a college student, Williams never imagined having any legal experience. The Mount Pleasant, Iowa, native was studying business at the University of Iowa when he took a mandatory business law course.

"I was fascinated by the subject at the time," he said.

That led to the decision to go to law school, where he was convinced he was going into business law and would be a corporate lawyer. He remembers joking with classmates that he'd never get into criminal law.

Much like that business law class had piqued his interest in becoming a lawyer, a couple mandatory criminal law classes in law school got Williams to rethink his plans.

"That stuff I found interesting right away," he said. "I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do until I worked for Judge O'Brien."

For two years after his 1988 graduation, Williams clerked for the late Donald O'Brien, who at the time was a U.S. district judge in Sioux City and was a former U.S. attorney.

"I remember him telling me it was the greatest job he ever had," Williams said.

Williams spent five years with the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., then five years in private practice doing civil litigation. He realized that he preferred criminal prosecution and joined the U.S. Attorney's Office. He began thinking about being a judge about 10 years ago.

"As a prosecutor, I had done pretty much everything I could do," Williams said. "I'd tried complex cases. I was looking for something to continue to challenge me."

He applied twice for magistrate positions that eventually went to other judges. On his third try, Williams was chosen. He was sworn in on Feb. 16 and has moved back to Sioux City, where he had met his wife while he clerked for Judge O'Brien.

"We still have friends from back when we lived here," Williams said.

It's been an easy adjustment, he said. He's well-versed in criminal court procedure. On the civil side, he's having fun researching complex areas of civil law.

It's a career twist that Williams many years ago never would have never anticipated, but at the root of his career decisions, no matter how contrary they may have been to his earlier beliefs, is Williams' commitment to serving the public.

"What really makes me happy is public service: doing what is right and seeking justice," Williams said. "I saw my job as a federal prosecutor to do justice, and that's my job as a judge."

On that point, Williams most likely will never change his mind.
SIOUX CITY | A fundraiser for the Sanford Community Center last week drew $90,000, money that will help the agency as it continues functioning without Woodbury County money.

A year ago, the Woodbury County Board of Supervisors halted funding to many nonprofit entities, including the Sanford Center, which operates gang prevention and other programs at 1700 Geneva St.

Since that time, Sanford officials have sought other funding resources, and a charitable fundraiser at the Orpheum Theatre in the city has been held for two years. The event in 2015 drew in $131,000, and Sanford Center Director George Boykin said Monday the event this year brought in $90,000.

Boykin said he expects the total to rise to $100,000 by the end of May. He said he is grateful for the ongoing positive response by the community.

The agency's funding from the county ended on June 30, 2015, when the supervisors ceased gifts to a host of nonprofits in order to cut expenses. The Sanford Center had received county property tax money for two decades, including $186,925 in the final year.

Boykin said 2,000 school-aged children received various services in the last year.
SIOUX CITY | Traffic was slowed on northbound Interstate 29 for several hours Monday due to a semi that rolled onto its side.

Emergency personnel responded to the accident near the on ramp to I-29 from Interstate 129 at about 11:30 a.m.

The semi, which was transporting beer, lay on its side in the middle lane.

Assistant Fire Chief Robert Wilson said the driver of the semi was able to climb out of the cab and was looked at by paramedics on scene, and refused transport.

No beer was spilled.

Sioux City Police Sgt. Scott Hatting said the driver would be cited for failure to maintain control.

He was hauling a heavy load and going too fast on the on-ramp when it tipped over, Hatting said.

A tow truck was called in to begin moving the trailer to the side of the interstate to help alleviate traffic congestion.

Things are going to move pretty slow for a few hours here, Hatting said.
The Mafia, in its heyday, ran lucrative protection rackets. Pay them and your business would be kept safe from "unforeseen" threats. Don't pay them and your business might go up in smoke with you inside.

Today, things are more sophisticated.

The New York Times reports that Saudi Arabia, playing the role of Mafia extortionist, has threatened to "... sell off hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

The Saudis are estimated to hold about $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the U.S. and the concern is that they might sell them before American courts could impose a freeze. The Obama administration opposes the bill, saying it could potentially open the kingdom to lawsuits from relatives of the dead and injured. So?

Why do the Saudis oppose this bill, which enjoys bipartisan support? Could it be because, as many believe, they helped facilitate the greatest mass murder in American history? Fifteen of the 19 men involved in the terrorist plot were Saudi citizens and that country promotes the most extreme form of Islam known as Wahhabism.

Adding to the suspicion that there is more to be learned about Saudi Arabia's role are 28 pages contained in the 9-11 Commission's report censored by the Bush administration for "national security reasons." Need more? According to government documents obtained by Judicial Watch, "160 subjects of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including but not limited to members of the House of Saud and/or members of the bin Laden family fled the U.S. (on chartered planes when all other aircraft were grounded) between September 11, 2001, and September 15, 2001."

In an April 10 appearance on the CBS program "60 Minutes," former Florida Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time the report was being written, said: "I think it is implausible to believe that 19 people, most of whom didn't speak English, most of whom had never been in the United States before, many of whom didn't have a high school education, could've carried out such a complicated task without some support from within the United States."

Graham thinks the hijackers received active support and guidance from rich Saudis, Saudi charities and top members of the Saudi government.

This is a matter that is easily resolved by releasing the 28 pages. The relatives of the dead have a right to know who funded the terrorist attack that killed their loved ones. Justice demands it and if compensation is awarded, the Saudis, who have made billions from oil sales to the West, can afford it.

The intent of the Senate bill is to clarify the immunity normally given to foreign governments. It says such immunity should not apply when nations are found culpable of committing terrorist attacks that kill Americans on U.S. soil.

The Obama administration claims that weakening the immunity law could put U.S. corporations, the American government and its citizens at legal risk because other nations might retaliate with similar legislation. The difference is that U.S. citizens are not hijacking planes and committing mass murder in other countries. The bill's sponsors, notes The New York Times, "have said that the legislation is purposely drawn very narrowly -- involving only attacks on American soil -- to reduce the prospect that other nations might try to fight back."

For too long Republican and Democratic administrations have ignored the actions and teachings of Saudi Arabia, including textbooks used in Islamic schools that denigrate Jews and other "infidels" and the building of mosques that some imams are using to spread hate and recruit suicide bombers.

This bipartisan bill should pass, and if the president vetoes it, he should explain his reason to the families of the dead.
Common tax myth one is that American citizens are overtaxed. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. collects less tax revenue (about 25.7 percent) as a percentage of gross domestic product than all but three other industrial countries. Of the 34 countries, only Chile, Mexico and Korea have lower taxes as a percent of GDP.

The Scandinavian countries - Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland - have four of the eight highest tax rates. The eight highest rates ranged from Denmark's 50.9 percent to Norway's 39.1 percent. In spite of their high taxes, the four Scandinavian countries also have the highest happiness scores, according to annual studies of happiness in 156 countries. The study by the United Nations was started in 2012. Why are they happy when paying such high taxes? They have few worries and feel secure. They have access to free medical care, security, political freedom and little political corruption. Child care and education are free and students are given monthly grants for up to seven years to attend a university. If they lose their job or become ill, the state will support them. Both mother and father are given extensive time off to care for a newborn child. Annual paid vacations are provided for all.

The second myth is that U.S. corporations are overtaxed. Corporate lobbyists complain the corporate income tax rate of 35 percent is one of the highest in the world. They fail to mention that the effective corporate tax rate, the percentage of profits that corporations actually pay, is far lower because of loopholes that reduce their taxes. A 2014 study by Citizens for Tax Justice examined five years of data and found Fortune 500 companies paid an average federal effective corporate tax rate of only 19.4 percent. The same study found many large, profitable corporations paid no federal corporate income taxes at all.

We need to totally rewrite our tax code (the flat tax is not the answer). - Norm Ashby, Sioux City
DES MOINES | State park users and advocacy groups may be quizzed soon about their willingness to re-impose a fee to access the facilities as a way to help fund maintenance and improvements to Iowas park system.

A fiscal 2017 budget bill that helps fund agriculture and natural resources functions includes language calling for Department of Natural Resources officials to study the feasibility of installing electronic card reader systems at state park entrances for the exclusive purpose of allowing the department to more efficiently collect user fees from individuals who enter those areas by motor vehicle.

As part of that study, according to the House File 2454 explanation, DNR officials also are to solicit input from state park users and state park supporter groups regarding their willingness to pay additional fees to provide funding for maintenance and operations of state parks. State officials are to report their findings and recommendations to Gov. Terry Branstad and legislators by Jan. 15, 2017.

Sen. Mary Jo Wilhelm, D-Cresco, co-chair of the House-Senate agriculture and natural resources budget subcommittee, said gathering information does not necessarily equate into a future park user fee. Rep. Norlin Mommsen, R-DeWitt, the other panel co-leader, said his interest was to allow state officials to think outside the box concerning new technology applications but not to reinstate a fee to use state parks.

To me, its a dream clause, said Mommsen.

I just think there must be something with these apps and stuff that we could be utilizing that were not, he added. My intent is to let them think outside the box and just what is possible. Whatever you can think of or dream of.

Mommsen said he wanted to explore applications that could make park rangers jobs easier, streamline check-ins or improve methods for park users to make reservations at facilities around the state. He added that if Iowans are surveyed, he believed people will come back and say theyre against reinstating a state park user fee. For most people, thats such a paradigm switch, especially for Iowa.

Branstad spokesman Ben Hammes said the governor also does not support a park user fee.

Gov. Branstad values our Iowa state parks and is always looking for innovative ways to make them more accessible to Iowans, Hammes said in a statement. While imposing user fees to access our state parks has been used before and was unpopular among Iowans, Gov. Branstad remains generally opposed to the idea of imposing fees to access our state parks.

Iowa had user fees for a few years beginning in 1986, but those charges -- $2 a day or $10 a season -- were abolished because the Resource Enhancement and Protection Program (REAP) was supposed to replace them. However, that program never has received the amount of money pledged and legislators this session have proposed $16 million for REAP and $3 million for state park maintenance and operations in various fiscal 2017 budget bills.
DES MOINES | Three dozen Republican legislators are calling on Democratic Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller to withdraw from an effort to use consumer protection laws against energy companies and others that disagree with their positions on climate change and global warming.

While the 36 senators and representatives believe man-made climate change is certainly not settled science, their primary concern is that the effort is a potential assault on First Amendment rights of Iowa citizens and businesses that do not embrace the governments conclusion on man-made climate change.

Reps. Ralph Watts, R-Adel, and Steven Holt, R-Denison, emphasized their concerns remarks prepared for delivery late Monday during points of personal privilege.

In those remarks, Watts predicted more research will prove the alarmist claims of man-made climate change appear to be greatly exaggerated. Holt acknowledged there is disagreement whether the cause of climate change is part of a cycle that has always occurred or is caused by fossil fuels and mans carbon footprint.

However, Holt said, it is vital for this debate to continue, and dangerous to attempt to silence differences of opinion on either side.

Holt and Watts met with one of Millers staffers to discuss his participation in the effort. According to them, rather than an attempt to stifle dissent, he said the campaign is about protecting consumers from businesses that mislead the public.

The Attorney Generals Office acknowledged receipt of the letter, but has not opened any investigations as a result of Millers participation in the attorneys general announcement, according to a department spokesman.

However, Holt and Watts questioned why Miller is involved at all if his concern is consumer protection, not climate change. According to the leader of the attorneys general effort, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the actions are a historic state-based effort to combat climate change.

The lawmakers concluded their letter to Miller asking him to remove himself from the coalition which has chosen a path that could threaten First Amendment rights in pursuit of climate progress.
DES MOINES | April showers fell on the Statehouse Monday as storm clouds formed under the Golden Dome.

Lawmakers began a push to adjournment by debating several parts of the fiscal 2017 $7.35 billion general fund budget. Majority and minority parties agreed there wasnt much to like in status quo budgets.

Iowans deserve better than a status quo budget, Rep. Kirsten Running-Marquardt, D-Cedar Rapids, said.

However, those budgets reflect the reality we are dealing with today, said Rep. Gary Worthan, R-Storm Lake, floor manager for House File 2457, the $181.7 million Judicial Branch budget that funds the state court system. It was approved on a 53-44 vote -- with two Republicans joining Democratic opposition -- and sent to the Senate.

However, it took until 11:30 p.m. to pass the Economic Development budget because of amendments to force action on pay equity. One amendment would have prohibited adverse employment action against employees of entities receiving state funding who disclose pay and benefit information to state agencies and officials. The GOP responded with a proposed changes in the state collective bargaining law similar to what provoked a debate that spanned two days last year.

Democrats also offered an amendment to require all businesses contracting with the state to certify that they pay men and women the same for the same work.

Republicans contended pay equity has been state law since 2009 when Democrats were in the majority and passed legislation declaring it is the policy of the state to correct and, as rapidly as possible, to eliminate, discriminatory wage practices.

However, Rep. Abby Finkenauer, D-Dubuque, said her amendment was more aggressive in addressing the continuing problem. In Iowa, women earn 77 cents for every $1 men earn, she said, and African American and Latino women earn 60 cent and 55 cents, respectively, for every $1 men earn for the same work.

Its a moral issue, an ethical issue and a working families issue, Finkenauer said.

She called Republicans cowardly for avoiding a vote.

Both amendments were withdrawn without a vote and the economic development budget, HF 2455, was approved 60-36.

Across the rotunda, the Iowa Senate voted 26-24 to approve a $50.8 million administration and regulations budget bill that would pare back existing general-fund programs by about $1.1 million in fiscal 2017. Senate File 2314, which goes to the House for consideration, also would appropriate $54.2 million from other funds for administrative and regulatory functions of state government.

Earlier Monday, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed its version of the fiscal 2017 budget bills dealing with $1 billion in higher education funding, justice systems and judicial branch programs, and a $378 million non-general fund measure to finance state Department of Transportation operations including salaries and highway projects from the state road use tax fund.

The measures cleared committee on separate 13-7, party-line votes.

We had far more asks than we had money, but I believe the bill before you is fair, said Sen. Brian Schoenjahn, D-Arlington, before senators approved the higher education funding measure.

Senators also voted 50-0 to strengthen efforts to collect delinquent court debt by making changes to aid county attorneys and a private collection agency in trying to collect past-due obligations. SF 2316 now moves to the House for consideration.

Court debt -- including unpaid fines, penalties, court costs, fees, forfeited bail and surcharges -- is deemed delinquent if it is not paid within 30 days after the date it is assessed. Other obligations collected by the courts include victim restitution, court-appointed attorney fees or expenses for a public defender with restitution for victims of crime at the head of the payment priority order.

According to a report by the Legislative Services Agency, outstanding court debt has grown considerably since fiscal 1998, when it stood at $143.4 million to $682.2 million at the end of fiscal 2015.

Back in the House, Worthan said HF 2458, the Justice Systems budget, was about more than dollars and cents. He called the $748.2 million package that that includes prisons, community-based corrections, the Iowa State Patrol and Department of Public Safety, the bedrock upon which democracy is built.

Without rule of law provided through the public safety operations in the Justice Systems budget, Worthan said, there is no democracy.

It was approved 59-38.
Even small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have data they could be analyzing to make better business decisions. Business intelligence (BI) is not just for corporations and big brands now that there are ready-made solutions for data analysis.

Previously, data had to be manually pulled into spreadsheets, custom calculations had to be created, and then data was exported into graphs for analysis. Few business managers had the skills or desire and most small companies did not have data scientists or analysts.

Today, many drag-and-drop tools exist that are able to pull data automatically and analyze and display it in visual format for actionable insights. But business owners and managers still need to understand what is being analyzed in order to draw valid conclusions using these new BI tools. Employees with training or analytical minds at every level can get insights from data that is currently untapped.

How To Use Business Intelligence

We have all seen business intelligence in use without realizing that is what it was. Ecommerce enhancements that suggest related products or upsells based on what other shoppers have purchased at the same time are examples.

There are many videos on YouTube showing how to use business intelligence solutions and to understand the power of data science and predictive analytics. Use these to make better decisions and grow your business.

Business Intelligence  Defined

The convergence of big data and analytics results in actionable decisions enabled by business intelligence (BI). By starting with end goals, it is possible to use business intelligence to increase sales and profits and reduce costs and expenses.

Using Google Analytics to draw actionable conclusions is an example of business intelligence. SMBs today can go much further using a combination of suggestions from a book such as Hyper business intelligence, and new tools that analyze their existing data.

Analytics 3.0  The Future is Here

Businesses are not limited to traditional analytics platforms. New all-in-one data visualization software solutions like Datapine can pull data from multiple sources, both internal and external, into drag and drop technology allowing users to easily create interactive, custom dashboards.

Analytics 3.0 is evidenced by the way businesses provide users with the ability to personalize their BI experiences. Real-time monitoring provides users with the information they need to get an accurate overview of their businesses. Results can be displayed live in a visual interface at any time or via regularly emailed reports. Information is accessible 24/7 via a PC, mobile phone and/or a tablet.

Mobility, interactive dashboards and easy to use technology make business intelligence available to every business. One example of how to use it is to pull analytics data and sales data into a BI tool to compare external ad spend to internal sales to measure ROI.

Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics

According to The International Institute of Analytics:

There have always been three types of analytics: descriptive, which report on the past; predictive, which use models based on past data to predict the future; and prescriptive, which use models to specify optimal behaviors and actions. Analytics 3.0 includes all types, but there is an increased emphasis on prescriptive analytics.

These analytic disciplines provide awareness into the probability of a future event, recommending actions that could be taken, making them ideal for making business decisions.

Understanding Big Data  The History of Business Intelligence

Harvard Business Review provides this Analytics 3.0 review which includes more extensive information on the history of data and analytics. Here is a brief synopsis as all business owners should understand what these terms mean.

Business Intelligence  Analytics 1.0  The 1950s

During the 1950s, tools were designed to collect information and identify trends, and patterns. These tools could accomplish tasks more quickly than was humanly possible. Data analysts generally refer to this early period of business intelligence as Analytics 1.0.

The majority of the business analytics tools at that time were small, structured, internal data sources. There was limited reporting ability and batch processing operations could take several months. Before Big Data arrived, analysts essentially spent more time collecting and preparing data than they did analyzing it. This early era lasted about 50 years, eventually leading to the dawn of Big Data.

Big Data Arrives  Analytics 2.0  Mid-2000s

The mid-2000s brought with it the birth of the Internet and todays social media staples Facebook and Google. Both Google and Facebook offered new data to analyze and a new way to collect that data. Although the term Big Data did not become common until around 2010, it was clear that this new information was much different that the small data from the past.

Big Data V. Small Data  What is the Difference?

Whereas a companys own transactions and internal operations generated small data, Big Data was drawn externally, from the Net, as well as from public data projects and sources. One example of Big Data is the Human Genome Project. This new way of data collection signified the onset of Analytics 2.0.

Analytics 2.0

Once Big Data arrived, the development of new processes and technologies to assist companies in turning their collected data into profit through insight was on the fast track. New databases (NoSQL) and processing frameworks (Hadoop) were developed. The open source framework Hadoop is specifically designed to store and analyze Big Data sets. The flexibility of Hadoop makes it the perfect tool to manage unstructured data (e.g., video, voice and raw text, etc.).

See Also: 10 Awesome Tips for a Successful WordPress Ecommerce Business

Data analysts during the Analytics 2.0 period needed to be competent in information technology as well as analytics. Having these competencies prepared them for the upcoming technological advancements during Analytics 3.0.

Analytics 3.0

Analytics 3.0 is just one of the steps on the path to the future of business intelligence. The ultimate goal of business intelligence is to analyze data and boost a companys performance level by providing staff members and business owners the information they need to make better decisions.

How Business Intelligence Can Benefit SMBs

SAP offers this free white paper on how business intelligence can benefit businesses of any size. BI assists research analysts, managers and other staff members in making informed management decisions faster. It enables sales teams and employees dealing directly with the public to provide reasons for their recommendations.
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There are many fitness goals out there that we desire. Some of us want to be leaner and others wish to put on muscle mass. The thing is, for you to achieve your fitness goals, you need to
Michael Laprise worked for nine years in different roles in the theater, but for the last 16 years he has found a comfy home with Cirque du Soleil. The openly gay writer and director of Cirques new production Kurios, currently playing in the ATL, is something of a departure for the company.

The 35th Cirque production, Kurios premiered in 2014 and has been called the strongest Cirque show in years. Laprise wanted to have characters that people could relate to.

I wanted to have props  real chairs, tables. I also wanted to bring the audience closer to the cast. Little things like that, said Laprise.

He was precise in his direction but also wanted to be receptive to ideas from his cast. Its a personal show for the artists. I celebrate who they are, he said.

Laprise is aware that Cirque has a strong LGBT following and is proud of that. We have nice looking guys onstage, he laughs. But I also think its because we have such great diversity, a great feeling of needing each other. In our shows it is okay to be different. Its okay to have hair like that, to be a clown; its okay to be that size. We are all in it together.

A vital element in the show is a breathtaking moment that didnt involve acrobats. One is Comic Act, in which a young man invites a girl to his apartment  and she has to face his cat and other animals, all played by the same actor. Yet the show has its patented acrobatics as well.

Although he loves all the acts, one he is partial to  and one that was immensely challenging on a number of levels  is Acro Net. In it, artists leap into the air using a very wide net, and are caught and then flipped back up. The act is kind of a metaphor. It really speaks about the values of the show, said Laprise. With each others help, we can help someone go higher than he could ever go by himself. Its important to be there for each other.

The first time Laprise saw Cirque was as a teen with his father. He heard the shows music and went closer to examine where it was coming from. At that time, Cirque was a smaller company with little security. He was able to lift the canvas and what he saw brought him to tears.

I was from a small town, where everyone was white, middle class, wearing the same shoes. There were no blacks, no Asians, and it was very boring. He saw all sorts of people and realized that it was possible to be in a world that celebrates diversity.

There is a rainbow reference in Kurios specifically speaking to the LGBT community. He joked about that to his cast and crew. By the way guys, when we hit Moscow in a few years, this will still be in the show.

Laprise visits every city where Kurios plays, sometimes more than once. He had a great time in Atlanta on opening night and is looking forward to coming back again to celebrate the shows second anniversary. I love Atlanta, he said. I really love the vibe down there.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Columbus City Council plans to enact a ban on unnecessary travel to North Carolina in protest of that state's recently enacted law mandating which public restrooms transgender people are allowed to use.

The Columbus Dispatch reports (http://bit.ly/1VuL23i ) that Councilman Shannon Hardin plans to introduce the ordinance at a council meeting Monday. Hardin, who is openly gay, says council has been considering the ban for more than a week after Dayton and Cincinnati enacted similar legislation. Cuyahoga County, the state's largest county, has issued an executive order banning non-essential travel to North Carolina.

Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther says he supports the travel ban.

Voters in Columbus approved a charter amendment in 2014 that says the city won't discriminate or deny rights to people based on their sexual orientation.
MANILA, Philippines (AP)  The Australian ambassador and Philippine presidential candidates condemned the leading contender's remark at a campaign rally last week that he "should have been the first" to rape an Australian missionary who was assaulted and killed by prisoners in 1989.

Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte was speaking about the killings of 36-year-old Australian Jacqueline Hamill and four other missionaries during a hostage situation at a prison in his city. Soldiers stormed the prison after learning that a male hostage had been killed and female hostages were raped. All 16 convicts and five of the 15 hostages died.

"What came to my mind was they raped her, they took turns raping her," Duterte said at the rally last Tuesday. "Why did I get angry  because she was raped? Yes, that's part of the reason, but also because she was so beautiful and the mayor should have been first."

His supporters attending the rally laughed and cheered at the comments, making Duterte smile, as seen in YouTube video. But other politicians and social media users criticized the comments.

Australia's Ambassador Amanda Gorely tweeted late Sunday that "rape and murder should never be joked about or trivialized" and "violence against women and girls is unacceptable anytime, anywhere."

Senator Grace Poe, Duterte's closest rival according to recent surveys, said Monday that Duterte's comment "is distasteful and unacceptable, and reflects his disrespect for women."

"You are a crazy maniac who doesn't respect women and doesn't deserve to be president," said Vice President Jejomar Binay, another contender in the May 9 presidential election.

Former Interior Secretary and administration presidential candidate Mar Roxas said "anyone who laughs at the ultimate assault on the dignity of women should not be allowed to wield power."

Duterte has refused to apologize for his comment, saying the gutter language was uttered in anger over the killing of the hostages in 1989. But he apologized to the Filipino people because the hostage situation had turned violent and gory.

"It was said in anger, I was not joking," he said. "I said, this one, she's beautiful, like an actress, son of a bitch they beat me to her. Kill them all."

Duterte has been nicknamed "Duterte Harry" after the Clint Eastwood film character with little regard for rules. The mayor casually threatens to shoot criminals, hang them using laundry line or drown them in Manila Bay. He built a political name with his iron-fist approach to fighting crime in southern Davao city, where he has been mayor for 22 years.
Donald Trump may have to defend his penis size all over again.



A Los Angeles artist told The New York Daily News this weekend the GOP presidential frontrunner's legal team threatened her with a lawsuit over a nude portrait she made of businessman - an artwork that is not flattering to The Donald's "member."



"I don't believe I did anything wrong," Illma Gore told the newspaper. "It's my work and I'll stand by it no matter what."



Gore painted the portrait, titled "Make America Great Again," in February, long before Trump publicly discussed his penis during a Republican debate.



Her artist's statement for the piece reads: "Because no matter what is in your pants, you can still be a big prick."



The Guardian reported the piece went viral and earned bids over $140,000. It even went on display in the Maddox Gallery in Mayfair, London earlier this month.



But it's popularity apparently got the attention of Trump's legal team. Gore told The New York Daily NewsTrump's lawyers called her twice, threatening lawsuits over the painting. She also said Facebook warned of legal action for copyright violation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The artist accused Facebook, and other social media sites like Twitter and eBay, of censoring some posts because of her graphic piece.



She said the painting has also brought her "threats of rape," "detailed death threats" and stalkers at her home, according to The New York Daily News.



Nevertheless, the backlash hasn't stopped her and Gore said she feels inspired by the presidential campaign to make more art.


















Openly gay Pastor Jordan Brown wanted a cake that read LOVE WINS. He got what he asked for, but allegedly with one extra word written at the bottom  FAG.

It was just so humiliating and offensive. When I called the manager I was literally crying, Brown said to the Daily Dot.

LOVE WINS FAG. Thats not the cake I ordered, @WholeFoods and I am offended for myself & the entire #LGBT community pic.twitter.com/cuxuv6mL3G

 Jordan D Brown (@PasJordanBrown) April 18, 2016

After Brown read the cake, he made a video and complained to the source  a Whole Foods in Austin, TX. Kaplan Law Firm PLLC alleged the staff launched an investigation and found no wrongdoing among employees, according to LGBTQ Nation. After an attempt to reach out to corporate that received no response, Brown filed the lawsuit.

Whole Foods said in their statement about the incident that the staff member wrote Love Wins on the cake "as requested by the guest and that's exactly how the cake was packaged and sold at the store." The statement also said the bakery refuses orders that include language or images that are offensive, citing Whole Foods zero tolerance discrimination policy.

Brown, alongside his attorney Austin Kaplan, hope that this incident will highlight the need for improved training policies, increase employee oversight and bring awareness that anti-LGBT incidents like should not continue to happen, according to the Daily Dot
Branch classrooms from vocational schools situated near marginalised Roma communities are expensive and produce unskilled workers.

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Roma children that receive the best grades in elementary school rarely continue their studies at top secondary schools and are more often diverted to branches of vocational schools with other Roma that have been set up in their segregated communities, according to study by the Centre for Ethnic and Culture Research (CVEK).

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The teacher told me that I am smart enough to study at business college, one unnamed Roma girls says in the study. But I didnt want to be alone therefore I did not enrolled at business college. We all preferred such a school.

The idea behind branches of secondary vocational schools is that young Roma from marginalised communities get at least a low-level education instead of nothing. However, graduates can find only poorly-paid jobs or they become regular visitors of labour offices. Moreover they struggle to integrate to society because they spent their whole childhood in the settlement, according to the study.

Precitajte si tiez:

Precitajte si tiez: ETP: State could learn from our work with Roma Read more

The idea of these branches is another tool increasing social segregation and strengthening barriers between the majority population and people from marginalised communities, Zuzana Balazova of the Roma Advocacy and Research Centre in town of Skalica and the author of the study told The Slovak Spectator.

The Education Ministry meanwhile continues to back the idea saying that they are effective and do not segregate Roma.

Expensive education

There were 56 such branches run by 25 state schools in Slovakia in March 2015. A year earlier, there were 36 additional elocated branches run by private schools, according to the latest data. Many of them are placed near Roma settlements, some are run in prisons.

Classes are usually in fields like practical housekeeping or tailoring, with teachers wages topping 2,100 per month. To compare, the normal wages for grammar schools is less than 1,200.

Despite being educated by better paid teachers, only around half of young people graduating there in 2013 and 2014 as tailors or upholsterers found a job. From those who studied for forestry 64 percent is employed. Students learning the field of wood processing were more successful with only a 17 percent unemployment rate. Nearly 20 percent of those who studied practical housekeeping field are unemployed, according to CVEK study.

However, the numbers are likely even worse, the study says, explaining that for example mothers who gave a birth until May 2014 and therefore were receiving benefits for parents are not accounted for.

Politicians should reconsider whether funds spent on such education of youth is effective and beneficial for those persons and society generally, reads the CVEK analysis.

Precitajte si tiez:

Precitajte si tiez: Human rights policies still found lacking Read more

The Education Ministry responds that unemployment is common among all recent graduates, no matter the field of study.

We dont consider branch schools to be ineffective or segregating, reads the Education Ministry statement. There is complex problem of finding a job in labor market in Slovakia and it is not related only to secondary-level schools graduates.

Getting out of ghetto

One of the most important reasons for Education Ministry to support branches is the fact that they will be constructed near Roma settlements thus being more accesible for local Roma.

However, a UN Development Funds 2012 study says that only 1.8 percent of Slovak Roma claim that geographical proximity is the reason why they decided to not continue their studies after finishing elementary school. The largest portion, 29 percent, said that they lack motivation and 24 percent laimed they did not have enough funds to cover fees for studying.

If Roma had to travel for study and leave their segregated community it would increase their integration into society, according to Vlado Rafael of Eduroma, the Roma education NGO.

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It is important to know that purpose of schools is not only education but also socialisation and integration, Rafael told The Slovak Spectator.

Eduroma workers experienced that poor children from segregated communities are slow to learn right after they start to visit schools of majority. Those complications are temporary and are probably stem from culture shock children suffer, according to Rafael.

Education results and [learning] speed of Roma pupils later match others or they are even better, Rafael said, adding that also their ambitions grow and they are looking for more challenging job positions.

Using money

It is true that branch classrooms provide at least some education to Roma who would otherwise had none but they still struggle to find a job with decent salary or job at all, according to the study. On the other hand, state spends three times more money on teachers salaries in those branches.

Balazova proposes to completely cancel the whole project and to spend saved money on better preparedness of teachers at regular schools to work with those students. Those funds should be also used to cover Roma students expenses so they can study among their peers from the majority population.

The education system should provide the best possible education to anyone, she said.

Wouldnt it be more effective if youth from marginalised Roma communities just studied with non-Roma students? Balazova added.
State authorities have taken little action to eliminate discrimination.

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Human rights watchdogs welcomed the historic 2012 verdict which found that the primary school in Sarisske Michalany in Presov Region discriminated against Roma students by pushing them into classrooms separate from their non-Roma peers. But the ruling has not had the impact many expected and Roma pupils are still often segregated in Slovak schools, according to a new report by Amnesty International (AI).

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The government has not adopted efficient provisions to stop this trend, according to human rights advocates. The lack of progress comes despite the ongoing legal action initiated by the European Commission.

The Slovak government has done little to eliminate the existing discrimination and segregation of Roma children at schools, Lucia Bernatova, campaign coordinator of Amnesty International Slovensko, told The Slovak Spectator.

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Roma pupils often end in so-called special schools and classes for children with mild mental disabilities, and are placed in ethnically segregated mainstream schools and classes, AI wrote in its report.

Ombudswoman Jana Dubovcova also says she has not noticed any significant measures to eliminate segregation. Though the country changed the Education Act under the pressure of the European Commission, only time will show whether it helped, she added.

Legal action pending

The EC initiated infringement proceedings against Slovakia for breaching the prohibition of discrimination set out in the EU Racial Equality Directive in relation to the access of Roma to education in April 2015. It was only the second time the EC has launched such procedures against a member state.

The EC pointed to the problem again in a 2016 country report, claiming that young Roma often attend special schools with limited curricula and experience discrimination in education. The Roma inclusion index points to placement of more than half of Roma children in special and segregated schools or classes.

Regrettably, the situation has deteriorated over the past decade, reducing chances for Roma to complete upper secondary and higher education and so hampering their opportunities on the labour market, the EC started in its report.

The authorities, however, justified the disproportionate number of Roma in special schools and classes by alleging there is a higher prevalence of genetically determined disorders among Slovak Roma due to inbreeding, AI wrote in the report.

Moreover, the Education Ministry claimed that the state administration is not responsible for segregation at schools as they are operated by municipal authorities, reminded Vlado Rafael of the civic association EduRoma.

The EC however claimed in its further statement that the ones responsible for discrimination of Roma children and violating European directives are in the end the state authorities, Rafael told The Slovak Spectator.

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Andrej Kralik from the EC Representation in Slovakia meanwhile confirmed to The Slovak Spectator that the legal action against Slovakia is still underway. After Slovakia sent its statement to the complaints, the EC will now read it and then decide on further steps. He, however, could not specify when this will happen.

New law insufficient

In response to the ECs criticism, the Education Ministry drafted an amendment to the Education Act in June 2015 to improve the education for children with special education needs, including those coming from a socially disadvantaged environment.

The new law contained five measures. One of them stipulates that if a child comes from socially disadvantaged environment they should not automatically attend a special school. Moreover, the amendment was to prevent segregation, set rules for operation of the special classroom and set rules for benefits on pupils from socially disadvantaged environment, the SITA newswire reported at the time.

AI, however, noted that the amendment does not contain any provisions for eliminating ethnic discrimination against Roma or the segregation of children at schools. It does not prevent placement of children into separated classrooms or schools, Bernatova said.

The amendment also does not prohibit the discrimination and segregation of Roma children, she told The Slovak Spectator.

Dubovcova considers the amendment a first step. To improve the situation will require also other changes in diagnosing children before they start attending primary schools, but also in schools equipment and staff, financing and support of expert employees.

It is not only the question of the Education Act, Dubovcova told The Slovak Spectator. It requires consistent work with the public opinion and majority population in localities where these children live.

Children still separated

A 2012 UN Development Programme survey showed that 43 percent of Roma pupils in Slovak schools were in ethnically segregated classes. In the same year, the Presov Regional Court confirmed a historic verdict in a case concerning discrimination against Roma in the education system issued by a district court in January 2012, related to the primary school in Sarisske Michalany.

Yet the problems have not been solved by the verdict, as is proven by several visits AI made in 2015 to localities in the region under the High Tatras , Bernatova said.

Though the government proposed in 2013 to solve the problem of insufficient school capacities and high number of new, mostly Roma pupils by constructing container schools, this provision may only deepen the segregation, she added.

Three container schools they visited in 2015 had one thing in common: they were used exclusively by Roma pupils. One school was even built directly in a Roma settlement, Bernatova continued.

Dubovcova, however, says that though she also has information that some container schools are visited only by Roma, this could reflect a larger societal divide rather than school segregation specifically.

Lacking a definition

Rights advocates agree that the Education Act lacks the clear definition of what segregation is. They all call on the government to clearly ban the discrimination and segregation and introduce a sanction mechanism.

According to my findings, if the discrimination and segregation from the side of public administration bodies and their representatives are not sanctioned, they will still be used in practice, Dubovcova said.

EduRoma currently works on the definition of segregation and indicators for its elimination at schools, according to Rafael.

It is very important that schools know about the definition and understand it, said Bernatova.
We have to learn to fight extremism actively, not tiptoe around it, says President Andrej Kiska in an interview for the Sme daily and The Slovak Spectator. He also admits he is glad elections are over and that the rhetoric of politicians is more cultured.

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Will Marian Kotleba and the members of his party ever be invited to the presidential palace?

Definitely not. People who remember the Slovak National Uprising against the Nazis and Holocaust survivors used to sit at this table where we are doing the interview. I cannot sit here with a man who considers the uprising the saddest event in Slovakias history. I will definitely not extend an invitation to a man who talks about the Holocaust and about 60,000 Jews who had been deported from Slovakia as not being our concern because we are a Slovak nation, not a Jewish one.

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My grandfather was a partisan and during World War II he fought against people who endorsed such ideas. I dont know how I would look my children in the eye. But my attitude to Kotleba does not express my attitude to people who voted for him. I respect every citizen. That is also why I went to Krupina and its surroundings, where Kotleba got the most votes, to talk to those people, to understand what they are thinking. There has been no big surprise. People who voted for him are frustrated. They said they wait for an appointment with a neurologist up to six months.

There you see where the state is failing. A bureaucrat, paid from our money, often treats a citizen as an enemy of the state. If you dont deal with corruption, which is everywhere, frustration deepens in people, and then they show resistance. People resort to simple solutions.

Last week I also went to Lunik IX to mark the International Day of Roma. Weve got about 400,000 Roma and problems that have been unsolved for decades. One mayor once wrote on his blog: now you, politicians, show us that you can do something about it, because if you fail, it can happen that extremists will have many more votes in the next election.

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A significant group of first-time voters voted for a party that denies human rights as part of its ideology. What should be done with that?

During discussions at grammar schools in Zilina, Trnava, and in Krupina, we have always come to that question. I was very pleasantly surprised that when I explained who Kotleba really is and what ideas he promotes, students then spontaneously asked me: why dont we just ban and cancel them? They alone started asking the question how it is possible that people who praise Tiso now sit in the parliament and want to rule the country.

Solving the rise of extremism is a cross-section thing. We have discussed it with the individual ministers. I spoke to the education minister about the possibility that schooling might be failing if children arent explained the fundamental things at civic education classes. We dont teach them what democracy, freedom, human rights are. We dont teach them the basic values.

With the culture minister I discussed about the media, about the influence of the public-service media, about what we show and what we should be showing to people. I will never forget, when 20 years ago I stood in front of the barrack with children's things in Auschwitz. I will never forget that shock, that thought about how many thousands of them did not survive the concentration camp. Many students dont know what happened, we are unable to make them see it.

Im asking myself how it is possible that racist attacks occur on social networks and nobody intervenes. Can we not put things in order? We need to learn to fight against extremism. To not tip-toe around it. To say clearly that these are things that we wont tolerate in our democratic society.

President Andrej Kiska (Source: SME)

Did the results of the election surprise you?

I was surprised. During the election night my seven-year-old son fell asleep next to me, and I was sitting in front of the TV until about 3 am, since our Statistics Office failed, and I was waiting for some kind of miracle. That did not come, and the results were confirmed in the morning. Many questions arose. I travelled to Bratislava straight away and we were trying to figure out what would happen.

What does it mean for Slovakia that the one-party government is over?

The government of several parties is an advantage for our country. It gives the opportunity for mutual control, which will probably be stronger. Parties with less voter support who entered the government will try to control it, because any possible failures might significantly harm their image.

I have met all the ministers and I wished success to each of them. If the problems that I talked about arent dealt with, Im afraid the next parliamentary election might end even worse than this one.

One of the election results was the failure of standard political parties. What is the reason for that?

Its the failure to solve basic problems in the long run, which creates frustration and causes the loss of trust in democracy, allowing a very simple rise of extremist and xenophobic ideas. This is happening not just here in Slovakia. Its an extremely important phenomenon, and this government needs to realise that if there are no tangible and concrete results in four years time, the problem will only deepen. People name exactly what they mind.

Dont you miss the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) in the parliament?

Parties make it to the parliament and drop out. Thats the fate of several parties. We also had the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKU) that was once successful. The Slovak National Party (SNS) too has been through a rise and fall, now its back again. Its up to the KDH to self-reflect on how they see their role in this society.

Didnt it surprise you how quickly the new government emerged?

A bit, yes. On the other hand Im glad that the government emerged, and its good that the situation started calming down. The society was in great tension. If that tense atmosphere continued until this day, or we would have to have another election, it would polarize the society and Im afraid extremism would get a green light.

President Andrej Kiska (Source: SME)

The dominant force in the government is a party that in the past 10 years significantly shaped the development. What hope do we have that there will be improvement in key areas?

Im glad to see some of the priorities that I have stressed before the election in the programme statement. For instance health care is well anchored. I hope the education minister is aware of how important education is. I think that the justice minister is also taking things ambitiously. Im glad to see many ideas of non-governmental experts there. The fact that these points are in the programme statement means it will be relatively easy to control. In other areas, we can but wait for the results.

Judiciary is also part of the Justice Ministrys agenda. As a president you have personal experience through the conflict on appointing constitutional judges. Does the Constitutional Court need reform?

We need the Constitutional Court to be a respected, top organisation, the top of our judiciary. This court decides on fundamental issues of statehood. I only want to make sure that real experts become constitutional judges, to get really good-quality people there. That was my only condition. I insist, and will insist, on that.

We have arrived at a stalemate situation because of the way the Constitutional Court decides and the controversial stances that it issues. But I see willingness to solve it when I talk to the leaders of all parliamentary parties. I dont want to be too fast to speak, but I think that in a relatively short time there will be a solution and I believe it will be to the satisfaction of the lay and the expert public.

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Why do you hesitate to appoint Jana Lassakova and Mojmir Mamojka as constitutional judges?

Thats part of the talks with political partners.

Do you miss anything in the programme statement? Is there anything the government should stress more?

Programme statements unfortunately often feature formulations like we will stress or we would wish or it will be our priority. Such semantic constructions say nothing about what the commitment really is. So the most important thing now will be to look at the concrete steps that the individual ministers will endorse. To watch it very closely, and if any of them does not realise how serious the situation is, to speak out loud and clear.

Is there a guarantee there will be improvement in health care, given the programme, and the minister that was chosen?

Lets wait for the results. But yes, I see it as positive that there are points I also talked about as priorities.

The programme stresses changes in public administration, the value for money principle under which citizens should be getting real value, quality and accessible services, for the money they pay in taxes. Does this government have the potential to introduce something like this?

I think this is exactly how state institutions should proceed. I ask each minister to secure really good analysts. They are helpful to lead a better discussion with the finance minister who is asking what the money will be used for, what the effect would be, and why that particular amount. And the Finance Ministry does have qualified people. Every big investment should undergo real analysis. Sometimes we should not be afraid to say no  also when projects that we historically keep financing but they bring no effect are concerned.

Fighting against extremism is in the governments programme, but the radicalization of politics also happened due to politicians. How do you perceive what the government plans to do about extremism?

Im glad that the election is over and that the rhetoric of politicians suddenly is more cultured. They no longer use strong words about the migration crisis and so on. The rhetoric calmed down, and we are becoming a normal European country. Thats positive. The success of Slovakia  GDP increase, drop in unemployment rate  is closely connected with the space we are in. We are a small country with 5 million inhabitants and thats why we need to be pro-export oriented and attractive for foreign investors.

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Everything we take pride in we have thanks to being a part of the European space, the EU, and the common currency helps too. That resonates at all meetings I have with investors and politicians. That is one of the things we need to realise and we should all reflect that in our statements and attitudes towards partners in the EU, to seek problematic points and remove them so that we are stronger together. With the entire EU, with over 500 million people we can make it in this demanding world. We need friends, we need someone to lean on. That is why I see the attacks against our partners before the election, and some also after the election, as unnecessary. We have the right to speak up when we think things should be different. But we also need to seek compromises with our partners. That is one area. Another one  talking about the rise of extremism and anti-establishment  is the attacks on the basics of democracy. I really mind the strong statements of some people in politics about how politicians are not independent, that they are only controlled by oligarchs, that they only wait for a phone call from someone to be able to do anything. Thats stupid. That exactly creates the impression that democracy is not working. Attacks against the EU, against democracy, against political life, led even by the standard political parties alone, are a great service to extremism. They support groups who will say that democracy is bad and that society is falling apart, that we need to save our nation, cleanse it, and other xenophobic and extremist talk.

Dont you mind that fighting extremism at schools is covered by the nationalist SNS in the government?

I dont. I had the chance to talk to SNS chairman Andrej Danko after the elections. I closely watched his speeches before the elections and after, about their participation in government or about criticism of Kotleba, and Im convinced they will do everything to get education to a higher level.

Radicalism and extremism rise also during the refugee crisis. You said it is the moral duty of all of us to help refugees. How should that help look like?

Quotas were absolutely unfortunate, they dont work. From the start Ive been saying they are not a good solution. I think the model of how we should deal with it is the way we proceeded with the Christians from Iraq. We should be active, show good will, seek families, and keep it under control so that people linked with crime and terrorism dont make it to Slovakia. To show willingness, because we are a successful country; in the past tens of thousands of our people left and other states sheltered them and helped them. We should consider how to join this process and help.

Should the government withdraw the lawsuit against quotas that the previous government of Robert Fico filed?

I gave my view of that several times. If the government thinks it does have the arguments in favour of the lawsuit, let it file it. This government hasnt made a statement on this yet, and I will not comment on that.

How should Slovakia use its EU presidency?

Mainly to promote our country as such. A great number of people will come here to take part in various events. We should show them that we are a modern European country, an open economy, that we are a country endowed with beauties that are often undiscovered, as people tell me when I meet them abroad and show them Slovakia.
EU membership of Ukraine would bring boost for eastern Slovakia, says Miklos

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A former top reformist and finance minister in Slovakia, Ivan Miklos, will cooperate also with the next government of new Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman. He will preside over a reform-support group after he had served as an advisor to former Ukrainian finance minister Natalia Jaresko and former minister for economic development Aivaras Abromavicius. Miklos was originally offered the post of finance minister on the condition that he would accept Ukrainian citizenship. Miklos declined the offer, however, as he would have been stripped of his Slovak citizenship under the Slovak legislation had he accepted the citizenship of another state.

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Ukraines joining of the EU would mean an enormous development boost for eastern Slovakia as well, believes Miklos.

It would likely be the greatest possible stimulus for development, Miklos said at the Ukraine panel of the GLOBSEC 2016 international security forum in Bratislava on April 16 as cited by the TASR newswire. Thats not just a theory. This was shown via the experiences of western European countries that shared borders with new members, such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, when they were joining the EU.

Slovakia could help Ukraine by extending support to it during various international talks and in European institutions.

The previous official government approach (of Robert Ficos 2012-16 cabinet) was controversial, said Miklos. On one hand, we helped them with, for instance, the reverse gas flow. On the other hand, some statements of Prime Minister Fico were almost anti-Ukrainian, a fact to which the Ukrainian ambassador responded very openly at the time.

Ivan Miklos served as finance minister 2002-2006 and 2010-2012 and is viewed as the face of the economic transformation that allowed Slovakia to enter the OECD, the EU, and later the eurozone. His name is connected for instance with the introduction of the 19-percent flat tax rate, which was part of his extensive tax reform that is considered to have turned Slovakia into the Tatra tiger, as the country was labeled under the second government of Mikulas Dzurinda in 2002-2006.
An international representation recalls the history of this area.

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What is now Petrzalka, between December 1944 and March 1945, when the area belonged to Austria and was annexed to Nazi Germany, there existed the Engerau concentration camp. Now only a mass grave of Hungarian victims of the Nazi reprisals at the Petrzalka cemetery recalls the awful history.

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On April 17, Israeli Ambassador Zvi Aviner Vapni, Austrian Ambassador Helfried Carl, Hungarian Ambassador Eva Czimbalmosne Molnar, representatives of the Slovak Jewish community and others gathered at the cemetery and marked the sad events and the liquidation of the camp resulting in other deaths.

I think that it is particularly important [to recall this part of history] especially now when in many places of Europe we see signals of Anti-Semitism and Neo-Nazism, said Ambassador Zvi Aviner Vapni as reported by the RTVS. This shouldnt be tolerated. We remember our history and we teach our children about it because when they would know enough about it they will not follow these awful ideologies.

(Source: TASR)

This time also a representative of Hungary, Ambassador Eva Czimbalmosne Molnar, attended the event. Nobody from Hungary attended the event last year, the Pravda daily wrote.

Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider, co-director of the Austrian Research Agency for Post-War Justice in Vienna and Graz, who has been researching the so-called Engerau trials for years, is behind organising the commemorative event for already 16 years, Pravda wrote. She has written several books about the Engerau trials and cooperated in preparation of an exhibition about the concentration camp held in Bratislava in 2015.

It was a great mistake that we have forgotten about the Engerau trials somehow quickly, said Ambassador Carl.

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The Israeli ambassador recalled that so far people have relied upon the memories of those who survived the Holocaust and could tell their stories. But as there are gradually fewer and fewer such people, thus the responsibility for remembrance falls upon us. This is, in his opinion, why it is so important to launch museums as for example in Sered, or organise commemorative events.

(Source: TASR)

Engerau

Nazi Germany deported to Engerau about 1,700-2,000 Hungarian Jewish men in the last months of the war. They were exposed to daily terror and murder at the hands of Nazi guards. Their official task was to build the so-called Southeast Wall that was to be part of a defensive system designed to resist the advancing Soviet Army. Many died from exhaustion. A massive liquidation of prisoners took place less than one month before the end of the war. On March 30 guards murdered dozens and ordered the rest to walk 17 kilometres via Berg and Kittsee to Bad Deutsch-Altenburg. The victims were buried in a mass grave in Petrzalka. Around 1,500 prisoners set out on the journey. During the march dozens of prisoners were shot dead. From Bad Deutsch-Altenburg they were taken by ships to Mauthausen, where some of them walked to a sub-camp in Gunkirchen that the US Army liberated on May 4, 1945.
PM Robert Fico remains in hospital; Pellegrini introduced the document.

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We live in a time of growing security risks, mass migration and economic turbulence, so it was important to create a stable government that would assume responsibility for Slovakia, vice prime minister for investments Peter Pellegrini (Smer) said when presenting the government manifesto in parliament on April 18. Pellegrini was acting on behalf of Prime Minister Robert Fico, who remains in hospital allegedly due to a clogged blood vessel.

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The government manifesto is committed to European democratic traditions of freedom, human dignity and tolerance, said Pellegrini as cited by the TASR newswire. A significant role is being played by the fight against fascist ideologies and all other forms of extremism. The manifesto is a product of collaborative mature political culture that we want to continue applying.

Pellegrini noted that it was important to form a government with members who would prefer the future of our country to their particular political principles and squabble.

Representatives of stable and standard parties were aware that only mature politics can unite rightist and leftist parties and those preferentially oriented on ethnically minded voters, said Pellegrini. This is a government of a unique and historic state agreement.

After Pellergini introduced the programme statements in parliament, the session should be suspended and the document should be discussed within individual parliamentary committees. A parliamentary debate on it will start on April 19. It is expected to take several days and be followed by a vote of confidence in the form of the government manifestos approval. The ruling coalition needs at least 76 votes for the approval. The four ruling parties have 81 votes in total.

Governments programme

The cabinets programme for its four-year term approved by the cabinet last week puts accent on four broad priorities, including the fight against unemployment, regional disparities and corruption, and introduction of policies ushering in a functioning state. Among its objectives is to create 100,000 new jobs and cut the unemployment rate to under 10 percent.

The second broad priority concerns regional disparities, according to Fico.

It is true that well continue implementing the law of the least developed districts adopted as of November 1, 2015, said Fico last week, adding that the new cabinet wants to approve action plans for the least developed districts. The coalition partners  Smer, SNS, Most-Hid and Siet  want to extend the scope of this law to other districts, too.

Also, the four-member governing coalition has pledged to narrow the scope for corruption and non-transparent behaviour.

Were interested in adopting an even more efficient law on shell companies, said Fico. Furthermore, weve committed to transmit the entire Rule of Law initiative as presented by employers into the manifesto and into an action plan. We want to consistently apply the principles of open government  with the government becoming even more open to public scrutiny and public access to information.

The fourth area is a functioning state.

Here weve focused mainly on education and health care, said Fico. And, as were building on excellent economic and financial results of this country, I hereby announce that we have the ambition to put a total of 2 billion more into the Slovak education system in 2016-20, said Fico.
Parliament also refused initiative to hold a moment of silence for Tiso.

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Marian Kotleba, leader of the far-right extremist Peoples Party-Our Slovakia (LSNS), failed to become the vice-chair of the parliamentary defence and security committee when he did not receive enough support from committee members. Kotleba received only two votes  his and that of Milan Krajniak (We Are Family-Boris Kollar) during the vote on April 18, the TASR newswire reported.

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Also Martin Belusky of LSNS failed to become the vice-chair of the economic committee.

Ive abstained, said Jaroslav Baska, MP for Smer, as cited by TASR after voting in the defence and security committee. The opposition legislators have not voted for Kotleba either.

He could not say whether Smer legislators would do the same with other parliamentary committees when it comes to LSNS candidates.

Krajniak has reasoned his support of Kotleba by sticking to a pre-agreed deal.

Weve opted to stick to the agreement, said Krajniak.

Based on the agreement of parliamentary parties after the March 5 elections, LSNS should not get any parliamentary committees seats but instead of this they would have more vice-chairs. In total LSNS should fill in six vice-chairs positions.

Baska, who is also regional governor of Trencin, recalled that Kotleba has already reneged on that deal when he suggested scrapping one of the four posts of parliamentary vice-chairs.

Caucuses of opposition parties Freedom and Solidarity (SaS), OLaNO-NOVA and We Are Family will not nominate candidates for vacant vice-chair posts of parliamentary committees, caucus chairs Natalia Blahova (SaS), Richard Vasecka (OLaNO-NOVA) and Boris Kollar (We Are Family) announced on April 18. They were reacting to parliamentary committees failure to elect legislators from LSNS as committee vice-chairs.

They say that the opposition parties agreement that vice-chair posts have been reserved for LSNS representatives is still valid.

The opposition agreement is only about the division of parliamentary functions and not about mutual implicit support for individual candidates, stressed the parties. It was and will be up to individual opposition legislators consideration what position on the election of LSNS nominees they take.

No moment of silence for Tiso

Speaker of Parliament Danko did not comply with a request of Kotleba to hold a moment of silence on April 18 for all victims of judicial murders and judicial and miscarriages of justice on the occasion of the 69th anniversary of the execution of wartime Slovak state president Jozef Tiso. After opening of the session Danko said that the parliamentary body in which all parliamentary caucuses are represented will deal with this request.

Kotleba, who is a supporter of Tiso and whom President Andrej Kiska named fascist recently, reminded that on this precise day, April 18, 69 years ago, president and priest Tiso died due to a shameful judicial murder.

Jozef Tiso, president of the wartime Slovak State (1939-45), does not deserve even a brief moment of silence, Ondrej Dostal, legislator from the SaS caucus and leader of the Civic Conservative Party (OKS), said on April 14.

Such proposal must be unacceptable to any democratic politician because it is an affront to all victims of fascism and Nazism, said Dostal. Each and every one of them deserves far more respect that the head of the state co-responsible for their deaths.

Dostal pointed out that if parliament had commemorated every of the around 70,000 Slovak Jews that were sent to concentration camps by Tiso to die there, legislators would have stood in silence for 146 sessions.

Politician responsible for their deaths does not deserve a second of silence in parliament of a democratic state, emphasised Dostal.

Most-Hid caucus deems Kotlebas request to be a provocation.

This proposal does not belong to politics as Jozef Tiso is a controversial politician from a tearful era, said caucus leader Gabor Gal, adding that after the beginning of the Slovak National Uprising, Tiso agreed with the dispatch of German troops to suppress the insurgents. It is in our interest to build a civil society and not to support ideas of an extremist group.
The economic sector perceives the governments programme statement as too vague, lacking ambition and not focusing on the business sector.

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Combating unemployment, reduction of the corporate tax rate and postponement of a balanced state budget are in the economic part of the governments programme statement which the parliament is now discussing.

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Vice Prime Minister for Investments Peter Pellegrini introduced the statement, or the manifesto as the document is also called, in parliament on April 18 on behalf of Prime Minister Robert Fico, who remains in hospital due to health problems until the end of the week. It is expected that the parliamentary discussion will last several days, to be followed by a vote of confidence in the form of the government manifestos approval.

Its especially the fight against unemployment which contains ambitious goals that have been embraced by the new governing coalition, Prime Minister Robert Fico said on April 13 after the cabinet approved the document and advanced it to parliament. There is a goal to create 100,000 new jobs and squeeze the unemployment rate under 10 percent. These objectives are ambitious, but also absolutely realistic.

The programme statement, a result of negotiations between four coalition parties Smer, the Slovak National Party (SNS), Most-Hid and Siet, is divided into several sections and is aimed at strengthening social and political stability, making responses to the opportunities and disadvantages of the external environment more flexible, smoothly continuing support for the economic, social and environmental development of the country, deepening the economic, social and territorial integrity of Slovakia and strengthening the role of the state and protection of the public interest.

Targeting unemployment

While the unemployment rate was 10.09 percent in February, based on the Central Office of Labour, Social Affairs and Family (UPSVaR), the governments ambition is to reduce the jobless rate to below 10 percent. This may be a challenge as the natural rate of unemployment in Slovakia is estimated at between at 8-8.5 percent, whic means that the currently unemployed contain a large group of long-term unemployed as well as those who are actually unemployable. the governments plan, among others, is to boost employment and create 100,000 new jobs, for what it sees the current economic conditions as well suitable.

We are drawing up a new law to deal with a new outline for the arrangement of social enterprises, including positive discrimination in public procurement, said Labour Minister Jan Richter as cited by the TASR newswire, adding that the state will also focus on other disadvantaged groups  including young people and those living in socially underdeveloped communities. At the same time conditions for receiving social benefits will be made stricter in order to deal with those who are obviously unwilling to work.

When it comes to adopting measures bolstering employment, the government wants to take into account employers needs and a growing lack of qualified workers.

While during the Ficos previous term the minimum wage increased to 405 and Fico repeated several times that his plan is to have the minimum wage in Slovakia as high as 500, now the government states that any moves in this sphere must be preceded by proper discussion with social partners, i.e. representatives of employers and trade unions  the tripartite.

I do not rule out that if things go the way we have seen in the past two years, the minimum wage might even reach the threshold of 500, said Richter of the four-year horizon as cited by TASR.

Lower corporate tax

The government promises in its programme statement reduction of the corporate income tax, currently at 22 percent. While in the document it proposes to slash it to 21 percent, the SNS pushes for its reduction during the four-year term to be the lowest in the Visegrad group countries, i.e. to be lower than in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. This means that the corporate tax might be as low as 18 percent.

While the business sector welcomes the reduction, economists point to a high difference that may result between corporate and income taxes. Currently the income tax paid by employees as well as the self-employed is 19 percent, those earning 176.8-fold of the minimum subsistence level, which is now more than 35,000, pay an income tax rate of 25 percent.

Thus, also from the viewpoint of the governments plan to push down unemployment, it would make more sense to continue in reduction of payroll taxes of low-income employees, the self-employed and people working on short-term work contracts, Peter Golias of the Institute for Economic and Social Reforms (INEKO) think tank told the Pravda daily.

The government also plans to scrap the tax licenses, a measure highly criticised by the business sector, but only as of 2018, and increase the cap on flat expenditures, the portion that self-employed people can deduct from their tax base without a need to keep accounting books, extend the special tax now payed by banks also to insurance companies, reduce taxes for farmers and create a new scheme for taxation of real estate based on value.

Transport

Completion of the D1 highway connecting Bratislava with the second biggest city in Slovakia, Kosice, has become a kind of mantra in Slovakia and this goal repeats in each programme statement. This is true also for the latest one while now the goal is 2020. Experts do not see this term as realistic.

While the construction of the D1 started already in 1972, the 13-km stretch between Turany and Hubova (between Vrutky and Ruzomberok in north-eastern Slovakia) remains to be the biggest problem for completion of the highway. After a landslide in 2013 near Sutovo the state is reconsidering the final route, while a five-km tunnel Korbelka is in question too. Its construction would postpone completion of the highway far beyond 2020, the Sme daily wrote.

The government also wants to connect Slovakia by air with the most important hubs in Europe. It wants to do this by creation of a new national air carrier that should also connect Bratislava with regional airports. While all so-far national carriers have gone bankrupt in Slovakia, for now any concrete plans are not known. State support, in case it is not in line with the principles of the European Union, will be a problem.

Currently we are at the beginning of the whole process; we will introduce details in this field after the project is in process, said Transport Minister Roman Brecely (Siet) as cited by Sme.

Other changes pondered in the programme statement include possible re-introduction of state IC trains on the Bratislava-Kosice route and keeping free trains for children, students and pensioners.

While the programme statement does not set it explicitly, the government has already voiced its plans to finally adopt a brand new construction law. The previous Fico cabinet failed to do so after more than three years of preparation.

A balanced budget will come later

While the previous Fico government planned the balanced state budget already for 2018, the new government postponed this goal to 2020. Economists and other experts see this missed opportunity given the current positive economic development in Slovakia.

It [balanced budget] is only being put off, economist Vladimir Balaz from the Institute for Forecasting of the Slovak Academy of Sciences told Sme. In two years. In two years. I do not see this goal even now very realistically.

Balaz fails to see measures with which the government wants to achieve a balanced budget when the programme statement contains several measures increasing its expenditures, for example higher pensions, and reducing its revenues, for example the lower corporate tax.

Golias of INEKO sees the inability to achieve a balanced budget as a consequence of irresponsible governance since 2014 when, in spite of the positive development of the economy, the revitalisation of public finances halted in Slovakia, Sme wrote.

One of ways the government had at disposal for raising more revenues was cancelation of some state holidays, when one such day can fetch Slovakia 0.5-0.8 percent of GDP. But such a possibility was omitted from the programme statement.

The government also plans to push for a change in the law about the debt brake in order it can spend more, while Balaz believes that when the money is used sensibly, for example for the reform of education of heath care, this will be well-used money.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Elements from the initiative by Martin Filko, who drowned after his canoe capsized on the Danube River; The Best of All Possible Worlds - Value for Money in Slovak Public Policies, have become parts of the programme statement.

Filko, who elaborated the initiative with Stefan Kiss and Ludovit Odor, introduced it shortly after the March 5 elections in order for politicians to get inspired by it for the next term. In the 76-page document they explain how the way of thinking of the state should change and that politicians should not decide subjectively but on the basis of results of analyses in order the best benefit for citizens, i.e. the best ways of obtaining and spending public finances or regulation of behaviour of people and firms is being sought.

Now, based on Filkos proposal, analytical teams at ministries, the Cabinet Office as well as the Supreme Audit Office should be empowered, ensuring that decisions about usage of public finances are based on figures. The government wants to publish methodology, base data and the results of analyses. Analysts should firstly start with analysing expenditures related to health care, education and IT.

We have drawings, but we do not know whether the plane will fly, Finance Minister Peter Kazimir, under whose ministry Filkos think tank Financial Policy Institute (IFP) operates, said on April 13. Our main designer and testing pilot died, thus everything is upon us. Each activity is about people and the question is with what people we will manage to materialise this idea.

New anti-shell law

The government also promises a more effective law against shell companies that will pertain to all public resources and prevent possibility to provide undue advantages to bearers of public power.

Earlier in April Radoslav Prochazka, the head of Siet, one of four coalition parties, conditioned further operation of the coalition cabinet with exclusion of shell companies from public procurement.

If the cabinet includes any commitment in its cabinet manifesto, it will vote for meeting this commitment, Prochazka said during a radio discussion programme of the public RTVS on April 9. Otherwise, it will deprive the cabinet of the right to exist.

The law to be adopted should be based on the bill drafted by Miroslav Beblavy, former member of Siet but now an independent MP, and Lucia Zitnanska (Most-Hid), the Justice Minister in the coalition cabinet.

Beblavy noted that the anti-shell law is included into the cabinet manifesto in a 75-percent form as originally pushed through by Siet.

The key question of enforceability is approached only generally and simultaneously there is nothing said about excluding shell companies from fields related to bankruptcy and restructuring proceedings or bank regulation as Siet had proposed in its [pre-election] programme based on cases of Vahostav and J&T, said Beblavy as cited by the SITA newswire.

Slovakia already has an anti-shell law, but some see it is not effective enough. Based on the amended law on public procurement parliament adopted last September there was launched a register of final beneficiaries, i.e. real owners of companies participating in public procurement. The then-opposition criticised the bill as imperfect and required that the register pertains also to companies linked to spending of public finances not only public procurement.

Business sector is sceptical

The business sector is rather disappointed by the four-year plan when, for example, the Slovak Trade and Industry Chamber (SOPK) sees it as too vague and containing too few specific measures, while most of real issues are only suggested for debate, without any proper commitment of planning to introduce them.

For example, the programme statement lacks any measures in support of exports and specific moves to reduce bureaucracy, SOPK chairman Peter Mihok wrote in a press release. Meanwhile, innovation policies only focus on medium-sized companies linked to the automotive and electronic industries, which are both dominated by foreign investors.

There is no indication that the structure of Slovak industry should be diversified, Mihok wrote. An outline for the role of the Economy Ministry in drawing up economic strategies and business activities on the internal EU market is also absent. So, the issue of Slovakias economic competitiveness has received only marginal attention in the programme statement.

He also points out that the document does not deal with boosting the quality of education and linking it to the needs of the labour market.

The Business Alliance of Slovakia (PAS) also sees the programme statement as relatively general containing many strong statements, few practical measures and it also focuses minimally on the business environment.

The government is speaking about continuity; it plans to continue in support for economic development; but entrepreneurs experienced worsening of the business sector, corruption, judiciary, an increase in red tape during the previous term and thus if this were continued, we should have to fear the future, said Peter Kremsky, executive director of PAS as cited by SITA.

Kremsky regrets postponement of the balanced budget and also sees plans in reduction of the jobless rate and creation of new jobs as lacking ambition given the current economic growth. He welcomes scrapping of tax licenses, but would prefer this happens earlier than in 2018, reduction of the corporate tax which he would like to see it fall to 17 percent, the fight against corruption, development of regions, defining the strategy of the economic policy, preparation of the law on SMEs, support of modern industry, R&D or digitalisation of the public administration.

Let's hope that it will not remain just talk as it often happened during the last four years, said Kremsky.
An initiative should prevent conspiracy websites from receiving money from online ads.

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A team of experts will help advertisement agencies which place ads online to distinguish the websites sharing conspiracy content.

The first to report about the problem of many well-known companies in Slovakia having their campaigns advertised on these websites was the Sme daily. The problem is that these websites then receive money for displaying them and a companies reputation may be harmed.

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The advertising networks do not distinguish whether the ad is displayed on a serious website with unbiased news or websites sharing hateful and conspiring content. This can be revealed only by later scrutiny of statistics data. Yet the authors of the Konspiratori.sk project launched on April 19 hope to change this. They compiled a list of conspiracy websites, which they will exclude from ad campaigns.

The project was developed by digital agency NetSuccess, co-owned by the Petit Press publishing house, which co-owns also The Slovak Spectator.

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Advertisement systems usually filter erotic content or websites openly violating a law, Jan Urbancik, head of NetSuccess, wrote in the website. Especially conspiracy and extremist websites require more detailed scrutiny, which is the main task of our project.

The list of websites will be gradually updated and checked by a team of experts based on their own motion or someone elses report. The latter can be submitted via a form directly at Konspiratori.sk (in Slovak only).

One of the members of the 12-member expert committee is teacher and activist Juraj Smatana, who describes the project as an example of how a civic society should work.

The state preserves the freedom of speech and does not ban these websites, Smatana told Sme. Subsequently, the commercial subjects merged with people from academia and created a voluntary system where users can choose whether they want to publish their ad on such websites or not.

Among other members are political analyst Pavol Hardos, marketing specialist Juraj Mytny, head of Petit Press Alexej Fulmek, project manager of Sme David Tvrdon and editor of the Dennik N daily Filip Struharik.

The list will contain also websites sharing deceiving information and propaganda, extremist content as well as websites which do not correct the stories which proved to be untrue or which do not provide space for different opinions or mix news with opinions, Sme wrote.

If the website improves the standards, it can be removed from the list.

The initiative has already been supported by several agencies which started publishing a list of controversial websites, Konspiratori.sk wrote in the press release.
Slovak government meanwhile plans to establish its own carrier and to connect Slovakia with the most important hubs in Europe.

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Turkish Airlines will launch a regular Istanbul-Kosice line running three times a week as of June 16. The flights should leave on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.

Turkish Airlines considers Kosice as especially important due to its strategic, cultural, historic, business and tourism potential, which is key to expanding our global destination network, said Fatih Cigal, Turkish Airlines vice-president of sales for central Europe, as quoted by the TASR newswire. Were happy that were now taking this big step and connecting eastern Slovakia with the world.

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Turkish Airlines, a Star Alliance member, operates 285 routes worldwide, with many of them now becoming available for passengers flying from Kosice with convenient layovers in Istanbul.

Levend Arisoy, Turkish Airlines general manager for Slovakia, said that he even expects that the demand will prompt the carrier to introduce daily connections between Kosice and Istanbul by the end of the year.

This isnt only about Kosice. Arisoy said, as quoted by TASR.

The airlines plan to take into account several regions, including the entire eastern Slovakia (Presov, Poprad and Michalovce), Hungarys north-east around Miskolc, north-western Romania, south-eastern Poland and Ukraines Zakarpattia Oblast, Arisoy added.

The first contact with Turkish Airlines was established five years ago and since then the airport has been working intensely for four years on making Kosice an important destination, said Kosice airports deputy managing director Tomas Jancus.

Im very pleased that weve done it, Jancus said, as quoted by TASR. You can see that the dreams of small airports can also come true.

Government to support new airlines

Meanwhile, the Transport Ministry introduced its plans to found a new state air carrier in cooperation with a strategic partner and in compliance with the European Unions rules, as is written in the governments programme statement.

With such support, Transport Minister Roman Brecely (Siet) wants to secure regular flight connections between Slovakia and the most important hubs in Europe and between Bratislava and regional airports. He, however, failed to reveal more details, the Sme daily wrote.

We are currently at the beginning of the whole process, and will introduce details after drafting the project, Transport Ministry spokesperson Karolina Ducka told Sme.

The daily, however, pointed out that there already have been plans for a national air carrier. Slovak Airlines was established in 1995 and the government owned a one-third share in the firm. But the company went bankrupt in 2007 and the bankruptcy proceeding ended in 2014.
Charges in the case of the purchase of an overpriced CT device allegedly dropped for comparing the prices with the Czech Republic.

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The main reason why first deputy of general prosecutor Rene Vanek dropped charges against nine people in the case of the puchase of an overpriced computed tomography (CT) device by the hospital in Piestany (Trnava Region) was that the experts compared the price with the Czech rather than the Slovak market. This stems from the document published by the General Prosecutors Office on its website.

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It is not possible to accept the decision of experts to use the price regulation of another country as a comparative sample, reads the statement, as quoted by the Sme daily.

Read also:

Read also: Prosecutors Office drops charges in Piestany CT case Read more

The case does back to 2014 when the Piestany hospital wanted to buy a CT device for 1.6 million, though the price elsewhere was much lower. Among the accused was former head of the hospital Maria Domcekova and her two deputies, as well as three members of the hospitals board and three members of the expert committee.

Vanek referred in his reasoning to the decision of the Institute of Forensic Engineering at Zilina University to compare the devices price with the prices in the Czech Republic. The institute claimed that the damage caused by the purchase may amount to some 479,000.

With the decision, Vanek in fact approved the complaint of the accused who had claimed that they wanted to pay a price similar to the one paid by other institutions in Slovakia, as reported by Sme.

The daily, however, wrote in 2014 that the hospital in Brezno wanted to buy a similar device for 1 million cheaper.

Head of the Institute of Forensic Engineering in Zilina Gustav Kasanicky meanwhile said he disagrees with the General Prosecutors Office and stands by his expert opinion.

If I had compared it with Cambodia or North Korea, then I would probably say that they are true, Kasanicky told Sme.

They did not compare the price of the CT device for Piestany with devices on the Slovak market as when they were writing their expert opinion there was no similar device here.

We compared it with the Czech Republic because it is our closest market, Kasanicky continued, adding that the difference in the price of this type of CT device is not that big that we could say that it is absolutely somewhere else.

Also opposition MPs slammed the arguments of the prosecutor and talked about trying to sweep the case under the carpet, Sme wrote.

Lawyer Peter Kovac considers the situation in which Slovakia buys goods and services for prices several times higher than in other EU member states absurd.

I do not consider it right to limiting a definition of the relevant market under free movement of goods and services within the EU only to Slovakia, when only single-digit pieces of such CTs are sold here, Kovac told Sme.
Agriculture Minister Gabriela Matecna (SNS nominee) ordered an immediate cessation of felling trees on the Danube river island of Sihot.

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The island is a significant, strategic and the oldest (potable) water source in Slovakia. State-run forestry company Lesy SR would like to cut down 50 percent of its trees over the next decade. Its intentions were brought to light by the Dennik N daily which reported about it earlier in April.

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I instructed Lesy SRs director general to halt any activities there... however, I must openly say that this is only until we manage to find a common solution, Matecna said, as quoted by the TASR newswire.

The ministry will seek a common solution along with state water management company Bratislavska Vodarenska Spolocnost (BVS) and Bratislavas city council. It would be premature to talk about potential alternatives or particular solutions for now, Matecna added. She has already ordered an analysis of the situation and not only with regard to Lesy SR, but all the competent institutions should participate in this process.

I hope that those who have something to say to this  i.e. forestry, water-management and environmental experts  will choose a solution to the benefit of this locality, the minister added, as quoted by TASR.

Revision of the planned extent of cutting down trees in the first-degree protected zone for 2016-2025 was on the agenda of Matecnas meeting with BVS director general Zsolt Lukac on the Sihot island on April 18. Lesy SR gives rotten and damaged trees and the plan to plant new trees as the reasons for the harvesting. The ministrys priority is to preserve the environmental stability of the area so that water sources are not threatened, as reported by TASR.

Sihot has been used for water supply purposes since 1886 for Bratislavas boroughs of Karlova Ves, Devin and the Old Town. Thanks to the geological composition of its land, the quality of the water from Sihot is reportedly among the best not only in Slovakia but in all of central Europe.
The accident occurred near the Moloko Township in northern Cameroon. The Ambassador and her aides were planning to meet refugees and others displaced by regional conflict.

Vehicles in the motorcade were traveling in excess of 60mph as people lined up on the side of the road to watch. The sixth car in the convoy was unable to stop in time when a child ran onto the two-lane road.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Monday, Hammond visited Libya and held a meeting with the head of Libyas UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA), Fayez Sarraj. During the meeting the sides discussed a set of cooperation issues, including London's aid to Tripoli.

"I am clear that there is no appetite in Libya for foreign combat troops on the ground. We do not anticipate any request from the GNA for ground combat forces to take on Daesh [Arabic name for IS] or any other armed groups and we have no plans to deploy troops in such a role," Hammond said, while speaking in the House of Commons.

He added that at the same time the United Kingdom in future could provide Libya with training and technical support.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The United States has imposed sanctions on the prime minister and defense minister of the Libyan self-styled government in the capital city of Tripoli for undermining the country's stability, the US Treasury Department announced in a release on Tuesday.

"The US Department of the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today sanctioned Khalifa Ghweil (Ghweil) pursuant to a new Executive Orderwhich imposes sanctions against individuals or entities that, among other things, threaten the peace, security, or stability of Libya or obstruct or undermine the Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA)," the release said.
Besides, Colgan said he doubted that the other OPEC producers can make a freeze agreement work to their advantage without Saudi Arabia and Iran participating, both of whom are vying for market share.

"A freeze is not realistic," Colgan claimed. "Either the Saudis are being stupid or they know Iran can't freeze and are using that as an excuse not to act."

Tradition Energy Senior Analyst Gene McGillian told Sputnik the competition between Tehran and Riyadh is so intense that Saudi Arabia is willing to take a hit on price rather than lose market share to Iran, itself showing no signs of slowing down.

"The Iranians said they were going to raise production levels to 4 million barrels per day, which were their pre-sanction production levels, ever since this talk of a freeze started," McGillian explained.

In 2014, McGillian added, the Saudis and other Gulf states instituted a policy to maintain market share regardless of what happens to oil prices, and the Doha meeting shows that they are standing by this decision.

Adding to his doubts, McGillian noted, is the fact that two weeks ago Saudi Arabia and Kuwait announced they were reopening a joint oil field project that would produce 300,000 barrels of oil per day, making it hard to believe they were committed to freezing production.

Oil Price Information Service Global Head of Energy Analysis Tom Kloza told Sputnik that the Doha meeting was doomed to failure in light of the rancor between Saudi Arabia and Iran as well as the ongoing projects to boost production and exports within OPEC.

"I believe well see more Iranian oil and more Iraqi oil, with the possibility that we may get more Iraqi oil as the pipeline in Kurdistan gets back into action," Kloza suggested.

Kloza said he cannot imagine the Iranians agreeing to freeze output, given they can argue that other countries were beneficiaries for several years while Tehrans exports were limited by sanctions.

The only solution to the crisis of oversupply and falling prices is patience, Kloza claimed.
"Are segments of the US government out of control, at the State Department for example [Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs] Victoria Nuland; in the Pentagon; in the National Security Council? And are these elements aiding the pro-ISIS [Islamic State] allies in their support of ISIS?" he asked.

The role President Barack Obama appeared confused and uncertain in this situation, Walsh noted.

"Is Obama playing a duplicitous game and he is also supporting extremist forces? Is Obama striking a pose on this so as not to disturb the neoconservative/liberal interventionists and their allies or is he playing the same old games?" he asked.

US Secretary of State John Kerry in his negotiations on Syria and Ukraine with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared to want a more conciliatory foreign policy, Walsh suggested.

However, Kerry faced determined forces seeking to block him within the Obama administration, Walsh maintained.

"It appears that there is a kind of detente emerging from the Kerry-Lavrov negotiations, but we can only wonder about its success. Again there is a discernible shift toward a more pacific foreign policy since [Hillary] Clinton left [her old position as secretary of state in January 2013]," he stated.
"The market should have never had any confidence in an agreement to freeze production or that the agreement would have an effect on the market. The Iranians could have affected the market but they have been consistently loud and clear that they would not be party to it," Adam Perdue, an economist with the UH Bauer Institute for Regional Forecasting, told Sputnik.

Trends Research Institute head Gerald Celente also noted that "from the onset, Iran stated clearly that it would ramp up production following the lifting of Western sanctions," adding that Tehran did not send a single representative to the Doha meeting.

"In Doha yesterday the weight of politics was more important than common interests of some of the main players of the oil industry. By politics I mean the tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran After years of sanctions Iran wants to increase its oil production and exports and will never accept a freeze at this stage. And Saudi Arabia does not want to freeze its production if Iran is not a party to this initiative," Francis Perrin, the chairman of the French-based Energy Strategies and Policies (SPE) firm, told Sputnik.

Iran has been boosting its oil sales after a July 2015 deal with the P5+1 group of world powers, comprising Russia, the United States, China, France and the United Kingdom plus Germany, on monitoring and limiting Tehran's nuclear program in exchange for the easing of international sanctions.

Lack of Spare Capacity

The slump has been driven by the ongoing glut in oil supply, with production standing at record levels. The total output by the OPEC member states amounted to 32.182 million barrels per day in December, over half a million in excess of its 31.5-million barrel production ceiling set on December 4. Output increased to 32.3 million barrels per day in January, according to the organization.

"The putative agreement meant nothing. Outside of Iran, major oil producers do not seem to have much excess capacity to increase production in significant amounts. Therefore a freeze agreement would have just been an agreement to not do what they couldn't do [raise production]," Perdue said.

According to Perdue, as Iran consistently and strongly rejected all thoughts of a freeze on their production, "in sum, the agreement would have been an agreement to do nothing different and was always obviously going to fail."

Not Doha but Supply and Demand

"To us its more of a supply-and-demand issue rather than an agreement to freeze production. Hypothetically, in the event that oil prices dramatically dropped and there was an oil freeze agreement arranged out of desperation, the effect on the oil market, for the reasons stated above, would be temporary," Trends Research Institute's Celente said.

SPE Chairman Perrin noted that the good news for producers was that "the oil price fall is rebalancing the oil market with a little more demand and a little less supply from non-OPEC countries in 2016."
Each azoTAB molecule consists of two parts connected by nitrogen atoms. Now the fun part is that when the molecule is heated by UV light, the two parts "fold" with each other; however, when the light is removed, the molecule returns to its original condition with two parts.

In other words, using radiation scientists can make an azoTAB molecule exist in two different states.

After finding this out, Agladze and his team switched a lamp, which produces UV light, with a laser. Using a laser, scientists could manually control cardiac muscle cells in each specific point of the heart, the study said.

The study shows that Russian scientists are working on finding new ways of controlling heart cells. In the future, the discovery could assist in treating heart arrhythmia.

Arrhythmia or an irregular heartbeat is among the most common cardiac diseases. One in eight deaths in the world happens as a result of severe arrhythmia, according to Science Daily.
Beijing vowed to launch an inquiry into the case, as the school site was previously said to meet with state environmental standards, according to a report on the state China Central Television (CCTV) on Saturday.

Hundreds of Changzhou Foreign Language School students in Chinas Jiangsu province began to be ill soon after moving to the new school in the fall of 2015.

The school buildings were constructed near a decommissioned pesticide plant owned by the Changlong Company that, over time, had dumped waste just 100 meters from the school site, according to South China Morning Post.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  According to Kabulov, this year could be particularly hot due to the increased activity by the Taliban, adding that much of their forces have remained in Afghanistan and separate units are in Pakistan.

We can safely speak about the large-scale crisis that is threatening the existence of Afghan statehood, Kabulov said at a press conference in Moscow.

Russia could consider the Taliban as a non-terrorist organization if the Taliban fulfills the conditions of national reconciliation and step away from terrorism and could become a political force in the future with Afghanistans acknowledgment and the UN Security Councils approval, Kabulov said.
TOKYO (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, Blinken, Lim and Saiki met in Seoul to discuss the ongoing situation on the Korean Peninsula.

According to the KBS World Radio, the high-ranking diplomats issued a strong condemnation of North Korea's nuclear and missile activities.

The broadcaster added that Lim said that the international community should not tolerate Pyongyang's provocations and North Korea could face punishment and isolation from the international community.
BERLIN (Sputnik)  At least 28 people have been killed and nearly 330 injured in an early Tuesday suicide bombing in Kabul that Taliban has claimed.

"The bloodshed in Afghanistan must end. Therefore we need a political solution. Germany will continue to support Afghanistan in its efforts," the foreign office said.

We are appalled by the #attack in #Kabul. #GER stands firm by the side of the Afghan people & reiterates necessity of a political solution  Germany in AFG (@GermanyinAFG) 19  2016 .

The Taliban announced its annual so-called spring offensive against national and foreign security forces last week.
"The hospital had been involved in the racket since last year. The hospital's modus-operandi involved two agents who brought girls with unwanted pregnancies to the hospital. Their main target would be girls carrying babies as a result of illicit relationships or rape. The girls were made to deliver the baby, take a vow of secrecy, and the infants were then later sold off to allegedly childless couples for anything between 50,000 to 100,000 Indian rupees (US $750 to $1,500). Bhadoria and his accomplices had already sold three infants and were waiting for customers for the two infants found at the hospital at the time of raid. "

Though the hospital claimed that they sold the infants to childless couples for adoption, police are looking into the likelihood of human trafficking for the purpose of slavery and prostitution.
MEXICO CITY (Sputnik)  In February, Chevron said it planned to sell some of its Gulf of Mexico assets to focus on deep-water opportunities.

"Todays closing further demonstrates Cox Oils dedication to the Gulf of Mexico and the Outer Continental Shelf. We look forward to welcoming the more than 100 Chevron employees that will be joining our team," Chairman and Founder of Cox Oil, Brad E. Cox, said in a press release.

The acquisition package includes 19 hydrocarbons fields in outer shelf and in Louisiana state waters, 170 active wells, 70 platforms, 70 caissons and other offshore structures.
Saudi Arabia's aggressive foreign policy puts pressure on global oil prices, causing them to fall, Joukar said.

He added that although Saudi Arabia is interested in bringing oil prices up, they shouldn't be too high, because then it would be beneficial for North American shale oil producers. And Riyadh can't afford that, as it seeks to push shale oil producers out of the oil market.

At the same time, the Saudis aren't willing to lose their market share and that's why they refuse to cut down their oil production, Joukar explained.

Furthermore, by artificially keeping oil prices low Riyadh wanted to use the negative economic climate in Russia to make Moscow more cooperative. This, the Saudis hoped, would force Moscow to change its policies in Syria.

"[Riyadh] tried to include terrorist organizations into a list of Syrian opposition groups, which could participate in intra-Syrian talks. Divide into two groups: al-Nusra Front and Daesh, while simply taking Ahrar ash-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam out of the terrorist organization's list," Joukar told Sputnik.

Another thing to realize is that Saudi Arabia has a weak culture of diplomacy. If Riyadh has political disagreements with a country in one aspect, then it won't seek any cooperation with that country in other fields, even if it would benefit both countries.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko countered by saying, "Our military doctrine is purely defensive. We will never fight on someone elses territory because we are committed to a defensive military doctrine."

Lukashenko referenced the conflict in Ukraine as justification to amend the nations military doctrine. "There have never been any threats to Ukraine from our land, our territory, and never will be. We pursue the peace-loving policy and will do our best to normalize the situation in Ukraine."

Nonetheless, the other member states of CSTO, including Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan will likely disagree with the Belarusian governments textual framing of the doctrine, viewing it, instead, as a move to shirk their obligations as members of the military alliance.
CHISINAU (Sputnik)  The Moldovan Parliament declared earlier in April that direct presidential elections would be held in the country on October 30. The decision was passed by a majority vote in the legislative body.

"So that on the day of the presidential elections, early parliamentary elections are held, it is necessary to ensure the dissolution of the legislature. And this should take place no later than in August 2016," Dodon said at a press conference in the French city of Strasbourg.

From the constitutional point of view, the fastest way for the parliaments dissolution is the resignation of the government, he noted.
I was handling the renewal [of cooperation] on the first tranche and Im handling it today. We need to hold an inventory [of whats been done], and weve already done this, and we need to send the legislative [project developed by the previous Cabinet of Ministers] to the Verkhovna Rada, Kubiv said.

He said that the legislative project should be finished by May 1 so that in May the conditions of receiving the tranche could be agreed with the International Monetary Fund.
When asked what would happen to these supplies if Gazprom stopped its transit via Ukraine, Dusan Bajatovic said that in this case Serbia could switch to the Nord Stream 1 and eventually to the Nord Stream 2 pipelines.

Right now we are negotiating with the Russian side possible deliveries across the Hungarian border. In this case the cost of transit will be higher, thats why we, together with our strategic partner Gazprom, are looking for alternative routes. We also plan to latch on to the liquefied gas pipeline Gazprom is now laying to Greece via Bulgaria. What Im saying is that today there is no alternative to Russian gas where it comes to the quantity and reliability of supplies, Dusan Bajatovic added.

He also said that with European gas production going down the South Stream project would eventually be revived.

By 2035 Europe will need an additional 150 billion cubic meters of gas, which is exactly what Russia is exporting now. This means that twenty years now the Europeans will need an additional 150 billion. I hope that economic considerations will eventually prevail and it wont be long before the South Stream project of Russian gas supplies to Europe, primarily its southeastern part, is up and running again, Dusan Bajatovic said in conclusion.

In late 2014, Moscow announced the cancellation of the South Stream gas pipeline, intended to traverse the Black Sea to deliver Russian natural gas through Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Slovenia to Italy and Austria.

Following the cancellation, Russia announced plans for the Turkish Stream gas pipeline to replace the South Stream.




MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Last month, thousands of documents identifying 22,000 Daesh supporters in more than 50 countries were leaked to the UK Sky News television channel. A former Free Syrian Army convert to Daesh, who called himself Abu Hamed, allegedly handed over the data on a memory stick.

The channel said it had seen the names of five men who were detained in Copenhagen and four "detained in absentia" and they appear in Daesh files leaked to the broadcaster. One of the men apparently has links to radical groups in the United Kingdom and has been recruiting for Daesh since 2012. The channel added that there were many more Europeans named in the leaked files.

Daesh is a terrorist group that has captured large areas of Syria and Iraq, where it has proclaimed a caliphate. The group is outlawed in Russia, the United States and in several other countries.
DONETSK (Sputnik)  The leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, said Tuesday he hopes the conflict in eastern Ukraine would conclude by the end of 2016.

I hope this year, but this isnt a fact. Were trying to solve [the crisis] peacefully, Zakharchenko said.
Yarosh is convinced that by the end of 2016, Ukraine will collapse and "several quasi-states" will appear.

"Now we're talking about saving the country. I have an opportunity to see specific data provided by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine and I know that there is a pessimistic scenario which says our country will exist until the end of this year. After that we'll have several quasi-states on the territory of Ukraine," Yarosh said during an interview with the Ukrainian news portal Mir.

According to Yarosh, the fact that the Ukrainian government is still waging war in Eastern Ukraine meanwhile Kiev is engulfed in yet another political crisis, which has intensified after the resignation of Arseniy Yatsenyuk, shows the country's future isn't that bright.
In March, the Swedish Security Service warned that Russia supposedly was "conducting an information war against Sweden."

"Brainwashing campaigns occurred during World War II, the Cold War, and now we can see how they have intensified. Above all, Russia is engaged in psy-ops systematically and is investing enormous resources," warned Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist of the Socialist Democratic Party.
BRUSSELS (Sputnik)  Under the deal between Ankara and Brussels reached in March, the sides have agreed to exchange undocumented migrants that travel to EU states via the Turkish territory for refugees accommodated in Turkey. Brussels is also expected to provide Ankara with a multibillion euro financial aid package to tackle the migrant crisis, to accelerate Turkey's EU accession process and introduce a visa-free regime between Turkey and Europe within the framework of the deal.

"We are working toward visa liberalization for Turkish citizens. Turkey must now fulfill all remaining conditions so that Commission can adopt its proposals in the coming months," Juncker said at the session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

He added that the liberalization depended on a number of criteria and none of them would "be watered down in the case of Turkey."
"Turkey is a serious interlocutor. It does what is has promised and will permit no concessions on the implementation of what it has been promised. This is a mutual commitment.

"If the EU cannot take the necessary steps required of it, then of course it cannot be expected of Turkey to take these steps. I maintain my belief that, God willing, we will have the visa exemption in June. In the absence of that, then of course no one can expect Turkey to adhere to its commitment," Davutoglu said.

All Agreements Canceled Warning

His comments were echoed by Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, who said:

"The deal we struck with the EU is very clear. We want this human tragedy to end, our citizens to travel visa-free, and the Customs Union to be updated."

Cavusoglu also added on April 18, in parliament, in response to opposition criticism over the government's Syria policies, which include the deal with the EU:

"If the EU doesn't keep its word, including the migrant deal, we will cancel all agreements."

In angry exchanges in the European Parliament last week, Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and the leader of the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, said: "[Turkish President] Mr Erdogan has said that he will call off the agreement that he has made with you if he has not  within two months  the visa liberalization he requested.

"It's clear that we have put ourselves in the hands of Erdogan and of his government. I have more and more the impression that Erdogan is using poor refugees as a political weapon. That is what is happening," he said.

If Turkey is indeed shooting at Syrians, the #EUTurkey deal should be suspended immediately https://t.co/WOa8I724hx  Guy Verhofstadt (@GuyVerhofstadt) April 18, 2016

UK Independence Party(UKIP) lawmaker Nigel Farage said: "All eyes are on this Turkish deal. And I think what we see is the bosses of the EU bowing and scraping before Mr Erdogan, who gleefully walks all over you, tramples over human rights at every level."
"If your issue is you want no refugees in the UK, then your issue is not with the EU  it is with global law," Gardner said.

Over one million migrants and refugees arrived in Europe last year. Many of them reached Greece by sea from Turkey. This led to the biggest humanitarian crisis and mass movement of people since the Second World War  and even more asylum seekers are expected to arrive in the coming months.

It's time for the UK to face the facts  we're not doing enough to help the vulnerable refugees on our doorstep. pic.twitter.com/HSZ9dGg7mu  Doctors of the World (@DOTW_UK) April 14, 2016

'Brexit' or the issue of Britain's withdrawal from the European Union should not impact Britain's obligations to help refugees and migrants, yet the issue of immigration has still fed into the debate ahead of the vote on June 23rd.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who supports remaining in the EU, has suggested that refugees and migrants living in a camp in the French town of Calais could flock to England if British voters decided to leave.

French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron said it would end border controls and let thousands of migrants move on to its neighbor, if British voters backed a Brexit.
ROME (Sputnik)  According to the earlier media reports, German security services received information from their Italian colleagues that terrorists, posing as souvenir vendors, would carry out attacks at the beaches of Spain, France and Italy.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported, citing a source in country's security services, that there were no terrorist threats and Italy had not exchanged information about the attacks with Germany.

A series of coordinated Daesh attacks in Paris in November, which claimed lives of 130 people, and Brussels attacks in March, which killed 31 people, prompted EU authorities to step up security measures and enhance the exchange of information between the bloc member countries.
MOSCOW (Sputnik), Alexander Mosesov  Earlier in the day, the country's authorities said that the number of foreign fighters returning to Europe and Belgium from territories under Daesh control is rising and maintained the third threat level.

"It's up to the CUTA [Coordination Unit for Threat Assessment] who make those evaluations, those analyses. They do it continuously based on information from several partners. But we cannot for now already estimate when there will be a possibility to lower [the threat level]," the spokesperson said answering a question when the citizens of Belgium could anticipate lowering of the terrorist threat level.

Belgium raised its terror alert to the highest fourth following the March terrorist attacks in the Brussels' Zaventem airport and in the subway that killed 35 people and injured over 300. On March 24, two days after a series of deadly blasts, the Belgian crisis center lowered the national terrorist threat alert level from the fourth to the third.
The European Court of Human Rights was set up on the 21 January 1959 on the basis of Article 19 of the European Convention on Human Rights and comes under the auspices of the Council of Europe  which is not an institution of the European Union, so will not form part of the referendum on June 23.

Split Europe

However, the EU is already splitting itself apart over three issues: the migrant crisis, the Eurozone crisis and the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

The European migrant crisis which began more than four years ago, exploded the moment German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her doors were open to refugees, precipitating the biggest mass movement of people through Europe since World War 2.
DONETSK (Sputnik)  Local elections in eastern Ukraines self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic have been postponed from April 20 to July 24 of this year, the DPR Administration said Tuesday.

In October, Ukraine's regions of Donetsk and Lugansk agreed to postpone their local elections until 2016. The DPR's elections were initially scheduled for April 20.

The head of the Donetsk Peoples Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, has signed a decree on postponing the elections of the local heads. In line with the document, the day for holding local elections is moved from April 20, 2016, to July 24, 2016, the administration said.
However, he told Sputnik that not all products have geo-fencing.

"Many devices you buy on the high street do not have geo-fencing. We strongly suspect that quite a few people are building their own devices and the technology isn't infallible and it can be overridden. Although it's a good initiative, it isn't 100 percent foolproof," he told Sputnik.

DJI Releases Promised Geo-Fencing Firmware With Opt-Out Feature https://t.co/gOHexjDTLn pic.twitter.com/KDrTssvVaN  john galt (@abovfrayaerials) January 2, 2016

He said the most the CAA could do is to continue to alert all users of the correct use of drones. "Our focus is on educating the consumer."

"We know there is a small number of people who are not abiding by the rules, but in life there does seem to be some people who don't and it's up to the police to deal with those people. It is an offense and  if and when they are caught  they can be prosecuted.

"We are doing all we can working with retailers to ensure anyone buying a drone understands what the rules are and abide by them and we're really confident that the vast majority of people do that. So that's very much our focus," he told Sputnik.

Irresponsible Behavior

Craig Lippett, Chairman of the Association of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (ARPAS-UK) told Sputnik:

"If true, it's another example of irresponsible behavior by what I believe to be recreational drone users. This undermines the safe and professional operation of commercial operators. There is no oversight of their activities, although they must abide by the same regulations."

The reported incident took place at about 1,700ft (580m), which is way above recreational use.

"It's very unusual to see them up at that height. You prohibited from flying above 400 ft (121m). Why would you want to operate at 1,700ft (580m), because the amount of power it takes to get up to that height takes almost over half of the flight time, which means you haven't go the power to get down to the ground," Lippett told Sputnik.

"That, in itself, suggests that the pilot has given no real thought or planning to the actual flight. It suggests it's a recreational pilot, rather than a commercial operator."
It has been revealed that The Home Office has deported more teenagers to dangerous countries than the numbers it previously released.

This admission has led to charities and politicians discussing the decisions that are made by the Home Office and how they play a role in potentially damaging a person's life. It has also been noted that sometimes these decisions can be made without all the information and based on non-factual evidence.

Children who have grown up in the UK but came from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan, were granted temporary leave to remain. It is because of this that the Home Office can now send them back to their native countries, regardless of the fact they may not have lived there for many years.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that relations between Russia and France are developing practically in all areas despite difficulties.

"Despite all the difficulties, the relations between our countries continue to develop," Putin said at a meeting with French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in Moscow.

"We are developing these relations practically in all areas, including at the government level, in business contacts, and at the level of parliamentarians," Putin said.
Many Germans started to perceive migrants as a threat, calling for closure of national borders and stricter border controls.

At the same time, some people who have been working as volunteers in refugee shelters and have a lot of experience of dealing with migrants believe that such hatred is based on prejudices which one can get rid of by learning refugees' true stories.

In her daily work with refugees Mareike Geiling, one of the initiators of the German project "Refugees welcome" has witnessed a lot of injustice and prejudiced opinions about newcomers. Many of them have been perceived as dangerous and lazy, unwilling to integrate into the local society and coming to Germany in search of better life and job opportunities.
Krekar was released in March as the Court of Appeals canceled the previous verdict by Oslo District Court decision, in which Krekar was sentenced to one and a half years in prison for threatening the life of Halmat Goran, a fellow Kurd who had notoriously burned a copy of the Quran.

According to the Court of Appeals, the statements Krekar had made were deemed insufficient as proof of a direct threat towards Goran. However, Krekar was found liable to civil reparations and was ordered to pay 40,000 kroner (roughly 5,000 dollars) to Goran in damages.
DUNDEE (Sputnik), Mark Hirst  The GMB Scotland trade union, representing workers at the Faslane nuclear submarine base, where the Trident subs are stationed, has prepared a motion to urge the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) to reverse its opposition to Trident and back its renewal.

"The GMB has every right to be concerned about their members but what we would be saying is work with us at looking at developing plans for diversification. We are concerned about the jobs and what happens to those jobs if Trident goes, but their skills can be used in other ways," West added.

The CND chairman said GMB members were right to highlight the potential threat to their members but urged them to work with other trade unions to identify alternative ways in which the workers could retain employment.
Gazeta Polska Codziennie wrote about three Russian combat helicopters which flew over the border separating the region of Warmia and Mazury from Russias Kaliningrad region, and strayed several kilometers inside [Polish] territory.

This was stated by one of the Polish foresters, who witnessed the incident.

"I was just in the forest, when, all of a sudden, I saw three fully armed helicopters buzzing over my head. They moved from the Russian border, skimming the treetops. I could see their identification marks, the forester told the newspaper.
Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, welcomed EU support in Iran's bid to join the WTO and spoke of a new beginning in relations between the two nations.

Iran hopes that the meeting with the EU will enable it to gain financial concessions from the US.

EU ready to support Iran's WTO accession, foster investment &business cooperation. #JCPOA delivering real benefits to people #EUIran  Elzbieta Bienkowska (@EBienkowskaEU) April 16, 2016

They have requested that the EU put pressure on the US to let them into the global financial system and join the World Trade Organization.

Following the nuclear deal last year, nations like the US and EU have lifted most sanctions on Iran in return for curbs on its nuclear program.

Begining of new engagement #EUiran on a broad range of issues: economy, energy, education, human rights and more https://t.co/PquafxuZfM  Federica Mogherini (@FedericaMog) April 16, 2016

Some sanctions do remain however, and US banks are prohibited from doing business with Iran directly or indirectly because the government still accuses Tehran of supporting human rights violations and supporting terrorism.

There are also some European banks that fear falling foul of US sanctions imposed by Washington. In addition to this, Mogherini commented that the EU would continue to stand firm against the Iran's alleged human rights violations.

"Today is a new beginning in Iran and EU relations. We hope this co-operation between the Iranian nation and European Union brings about shared interests and global development," Mr Zarif said in a statement.

The White House however, pointed out last week that there was no intention of allowing Iran into the world financial institution.
New tragedy calls for EU to intervene now on the North African routes, says @giannipittella https://t.co/zAujIZbEcW #EUwakeUp  S&D Group (@TheProgressives) April 18, 2016

"The new, umpteenth, tragedy in the Mediterranean Sea demonstrated that the migration crisis is far from being solved. It was easily foreseeable, with the summer approaching and the closing of the Balkan route, that more and more migrants will attempt the perilous sea crossing from North Africa," S&D president Gianni Pittella said.

The S&D believe that time is of the essence in order to prevent further deaths.

"There is no more time to waste. Member states should make full use of the Migration Compact recently tabled by the Italian government. It should be examined as a matter of priority as it could turn out to be the very last lifeline for Europe. We call on the Foreign Council today to give a positive reaction to this."

The S&D also made reference to the death six months ago of Aylan Kurdi, who's body washed up on a Turkish beach. Stating that this tragedy should have been a wake up call and turning point for Europe, but in reality little has changed.
Schauble is said to have ignored emails  written over several years by a Venezuelan informant  saying that he had evidence of bribery at the Federal Printing Office, according to Der Spiegel magazine. An official from the office has been suspended.

Identified only as 'Alberto P.' the informant is aid to have worked for the German government's official press as a freelance sales representative in Central America and gave information both Schauble and his state undersecretary Werner Gatzer, the news magazine said.

"As I've written to you in earlier mails, I have in my possession over 30,000 mails and documents in this case. You could contact me. The door to dialogue is always open. Please don't say in future that you didn't do anything because you didn't know what happened," he is reported to have written.
"When you have people involved in crime and looking to repent, it provides fabulous material for jihad," terrorism expert Professor Paul Moorcraft told Sputnik.

The number of Muslim prisoners in jails in England and Wales has dramatically increased in the last decade. There are currently 12,328 Muslim inmates in prison accounting for almost 15 percent of inmates compared with 6,571 in 2004.

Professor Moocraft, author of 'The Jihadist Threat: The Reconquest of the West' told Sputnik the risk of radicalization of prisoners by imams is also due to "a contamination by Deobandi imams who are radicalizing inmates  not de-radicalizing them.

"Prisons are 'considered to be universities of jihadism,' " Moorcraft told Sputnik.

"The Ministry of Justice is fully aware that the people in charge of selecting the imams are dubious  but there has been so much political correctness that the issue of radicalization in jails has been ignored. It doesn't take much to look into their backgrounds."

The Times reports that 70 percent of Muslim chaplains are clerics from the Diabandi sect  a conservative movement founded 150 years ago, "dedicated to reversing British rule in India," Moorcraft told Sputnik. "They are anti-British and hostile to integration."
BAKU (Sputnik)  According to the statement, NATO representatives were also informed about responsive measures and necessary security actions taken by the Azerbaijani Armed Forces in different directions of the front line in order to prevent "destructive" Armenian actions and protect civilians.

"Head of the Military Cooperation Department of MOD Maj. Gen. Huseyn Mahmudov briefed NATO representatives, in detail, on provocative and destructive actions taken by Armenian units against Azerbaijani citizens and settlements along the front line in the first days of April," the ministry said.

The meeting in general was devoted to discussions of "Partnership Goals within the framework of 2016 Planning and Review Process." According to the ministry, the sides also discussed regional security issues, defense sector reforms, and prospects of cooperation in the area of military interoperability with NATO.
A survey conducted by TNS Sofres-OnePoint pairs politicians against leading right-wing candidates. National Front leader Marine Le Pen was found to be the overall favorite among conservative voters, largely defeating left-wing rivals as well.

Only 11% of voters want Hollande to run for reelection. Within his own Socialist party, he receives a mere 39% support. Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron would fare much better as the Socialist candidate, despite not being an official member of the party, receiving 28% approval from all French voters.

The poll shows that a number of former French leaders stand a far better chance of defeating Le Pen than the incumbent. Alain Juppe, prime minister under Jacques Chirac, is, according to many, the only candidate who could effectively defeat the National Front in the first round.
PRAGUE (Sputnik)  According to the Ceska Televize broadcaster, a group of 16 Iraqi refugees tried to leave the republic and move to Germany last week, but was stopped near the border, after which they appealed to authorities with a decision to return to Iraq.

Interior Minister Milan Chovanec promised on Tuesday that Prague would help ensure the safe return of the refugees back home as soon as possible.
BUENOS AIRES (Sputnik)  The impeachment proceedings against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is nothing but a coup attempt, Guillermo Carmona, a former chief of Argentinas foreign relations commission of the lower house, told Sputnik Monday.

Late on Sunday, Brazil's lower house lawmakers voted in favor of impeaching the president, sending the vote to the upper chamber known as the Federal Senate.

"Not resorting to the softer characteristics, I believe that this is a coup d'etat," Carmona, who is also a member of the Front for Victory faction, said.
MEXICO CITY (Sputnik)  A further 2,500 people have been injured, the deputy minister said, as quoted by the Univision news website.

Earlier figures placed the death toll at 424. Ecuador's President Rafael Correa has stated that the 7.8-magnitude earthquake has cost the country some $3 million.
Some 105 people were detained in a police raid targeting the well-known construction company Dumankaya and Bank Asya, AFP reported.

Those taken into custody include over 40 bank employees and 45 businesspeople. Two top executives of the construction firm were also among those arrested, Anadolu Agency wrote.

"Our board members were called to give a statement at the Financial Crimes Department on Monday morning," Dumankaya confirmed in a statement.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The United States will be sending hundreds more advisers along with mobile rocket launchers and Apache gunship helicopters to back up the Iraqi drive against the Mosul stronghold of the Islamic State, or Daesh, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in Baghdad.

"These are capabilities that will continue the process of accelerating the defeat of ISIL [Daesh, also known as the Islamic State]," Carter told NBC News in a televised interview on Monday evening. "We are going to accelerate this campaign every time we find an opportunity to do so."

Carter confirmed that at least 200 more US troops would be sent as advisers to the Iraqi Security Forces bringing the total number of US military still in the country.
The declaration came hours after Mohammed Alloush, the chief negotiator of Syrian opposition delegation in Geneva, called to ignore the months-long ceasefire and resume fight against the government forces.

Both the Syrian government and the opposition sides have accused one another of breaking the truce deal signed on February 27, which excluded the Daesh and al-Nusra Front terrorist groups that are operating in the east and north of the country.
HNC places blame for escalation of the situation in the country on the Syrian government, Mohammed Alloush told Sputnik.

Earlier in the day, Bashar Jaafari, the head of the Damascus delegation at the intra-Syrian talks in Geneva, told Sputnik that Riyadh-backed HNC bears responsibility for the increase of violence in Syria.

"If you count the violations [of the ceasefire] that Jaafari and [Syrian President Bashar] Assad committed than you will have about 2200. If we divide them by a minute, than we'll have two violations each hour and 70 airstrikes per day. This is escalation in Syria," Alloush said.

On February 22, Russia and the United States brokered an agreement on a ceasefire in Syria. The UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2268, endorsing the Russia-US agreement on the cessation of hostilities in Syria. The ceasefire took effect on February 27. It does not apply to terrorist groups operating in the country.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Terrorist groups in Syria, fighting against Damascus, make attempts to gain control over parts of country's territory, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday.

"We acknowledge a difficult situation in a number of Syria's settlements, where terrorist groups make attempts to regain control over these or those territories. We are certainly sure that it can not be allowed and it is impossible to stop the struggle against these terrorist organizations," Peskov told reporters.

Syria has been mired in civil war since March 2011, with government forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad fighting numerous opposition factions and extremist groups.
"We will not compromisewe will not concede to leaving our rights and principles of the Syrian revolution. We want to get rid of the corrupt government. Bashar Assad will not stay," HNC head Riad Hijab said.

HNC called on the International Syria Support Group on Monday to reassess the ceasefire regime in Syria, as well as the agreed humanitarian procedures.

"ISSG needs to gather and to reconsider humanitarian procedures that they agreed upon and to reevaluate the truce, which has ended," Hijab told reporters.

He ruled out the possibility of joining forces with other opposition groups.

"We have members who represent all the factions of Syrian geography. We will not accept to have a delegation that represents oppositions other than the HNC. Hmeymim or other names that emerge are not acceptable. They are sent by the regime."

Four delegations are taking part in the intra-Syrian talks  the delegation of the Syrian government, the HNC formed after talks in Riyadh, the opposition delegation formed after talks in Moscow, Cairo and Astana and the opposition delegation formed at the Hmeymim airbase in the country.

Bashar Jaafari, the head of the government's delegation at Geneva talks, told Sputnik on Monday that the Damascus delegation would "pray for" direct talks with the opposition once a unified delegation of all Syrian opposition forces is formed.

Earlier in the day, the Hmeymim opposition group said it had discussed the idea of reforming all the opposition delegations at Geneva talks and forming a new, unified one with China's Special Envoy for Syria.

Last week, a source at the negotiations told Sputnik that a unified delegation of opposition would be formed after the current round ended. It would include 15 members and bring together the representatives of the Riyadh-backed HNC, Moscow-Cairo-Astana group, domestic opposition formed at the Hmeymim airbase, Syrian women's council and the Kurds.

Some members of the Syrian opposition's High Negotiations Committee will remain in Geneva and hold technical talks with UN's Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura, despite the group postponing its formal participation in the intra-Syrian talks.

"We are suspending our participation in the talks. We will not have meetings at the UN Palais. But some of our brothers and sisters have work to do here. They will stay here and can have technical meetings with de Mistura at the hotels," Hijab told reporters.

"I am traveling today. Some other HNC members left Geneva yesterday, and some will do it today. Some members will stay, as I said," he added.

On Monday, HNC put on hold its participation in the intra-Syria talks, citing serious violations of the cessation of hostilities recently and worsening of the situation with humanitarian aid access.
STRASBOURG (Sputnik)  The Turkish prime minister said that Ankara has spent more than $10 billion in supporting the refugees in the country.

At the current time 2.7 million Syrian brothers and sisters are living with us now, and another 300 Iraqis and citizens of other countries, Davutoglu said during a speech before the Parliament Assembly of the Council of Europe.
MANAMA (Sputnik)  The countrys authorities consider the organization to be responsible for terrorist attacks on its territory.

"The House of Representatives agreed to issue a statement calling for a declaration of war on Hezbollah," the parliament said on its Twitter account.

Hezbollah was established in the 1980s as a paramilitary and political organization originating in Lebanon's Shiite population. The group aims to end Israel's occupation of Lebanese territory.
Afer, also known as Abu Sarya, was a close associate of the Daeshs spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, and controlled the groups operations in Mosul, according to the Security Council.

The targeted airstrike took place near Mosuls Salam Hospital.
The incident was captured on video by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, and appeared to show a man who had been apprehended and disarmed after wounding an Israeli soldier, lying on the ground. Moments later, the soldier  whose name has been withheld under a gagging order  shot the man in the head. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have been particularly vocal with regards the incident.

Warning: Extremely graphic video

"The shooting of a wounded and incapacitated person, even if they have been involved in an attack, has absolutely no justification and must be prosecuted as a potential war crime," said Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The Turkish Armed Forces retaliated Daesh attack at the Bashiqa camp in northern Iraq, where Turkish forces trained and equipped Iraqi forces to fight Islamists, Daily Sabah newspaper reported.

The newspaper added that Daesh attack caused no casualties, but the retaliatory strike killed 32 terrorists and destroyed five vehicles and three motorcycles.

On December 4, Turkey deployed about 150 troops and 25 tanks to northern Iraq reportedly to help national forces to reclaim the city of Mosul Daesh, prohibited in Russia and many other countries.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The Russian center for Syrian reconciliation at the Hmeymim airbase registered a total of seven violations of the ceasefire regime in Syria in the last 24 hours, the Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday.

"The cessation of hostilities in Syria has been respected in most of the Syrian provinces. However, a total of seven violations of the ceasefire regime have been registered in the Latakia province," the ministry said in a daily bulletin posted on its website.

On February 22, Russia and the United States brokered an agreement on a ceasefire in Syria. The UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2268, endorsing the Russia-US agreement on the cessation of hostilities in Syria. The ceasefire took effect on February 27. It does not apply to terrorist groups operating in the country.
ANKARA (Sputnik)  Up to 600 people were injured and a three-year-old girl was killed in two early March Daesh chemical attacks in the northern Iraqi township of Taza.

"The 68 Iraqi Turkmen affected by the IS [Daesh] March 9 chemical attack near Kirkuk, including three in serious condition and 21 children, have been brought from Iraq to Turkey and are being treated at the Polatli Develet Hastanesi hospital in Ankara province," the ministry said in a statement.

It noted that 20 of the 22 Iraqi Turkmen brought for medical care from the same attack on March 24 have been sent back to their homeland after undergoing treatment.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Al-Nusra Front terrorist group has intensified its combat activity in the north-east of the Latakia province, the Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday.

"We are registering the intensification of combat activities carried out by al-Nusra Front terrorists in the north-east of the Latakia province," the ministry said in a daily bulletin posted on its website.

"Twice in the past 24 hours, the terrorists launched attacks on government forces positions," the bulletin said.
Earlier on Monday, a representative of the Syrian opposition group, High Negotiations Committee, told Sputnik that a new round of talks might not yield any results.

In particular, he said that theres still a gap between the Syrian government and the countrys opposition regarding the understanding of political transition in the country.

Syrias opposition groups are not interested in a political resolution of the crisis, said Dr. Taleb Ibrahim, Deputy Director of the Damascus Center for International and Strategic Studies, in an interview with Radio Sputnik.

According to him the future of Geneva talks lies in the hands of Russia and the United States.

Syrian rebel groups were preparing for a new round of the war and we have witnessed that in nearby Aleppo, Latakia and Damascus those men dont believe in political solution, they believe only in war and they are still gambling the future of Syria as they want only power and military action in the country.

Ibrahim further spoke about how there are some countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Israel that are supporting these rebel groups in Syria and how their only aim is to topple Assad. He said that these countries just want to impede any political resolution in Syria by implementing military power in the country.

Looking at the future of this conflict, Ibrahim said that two countries can play a vital role in the resolution of Syrian conflict.

"The agreement between Russia and the United States is the most important thing."

The analyst further spoke about the role Russia and the United States play in settling the crisis in Syria.
"If we open up the possibility that individuals and the United States can routinely start suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States to being continually sued by individuals in other countries," Obama told Charlie Rose on "CBS This Morning."

The objection rests on the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity, which bars individuals from suing governments and their leaders on the grounds that it would both risk impacting diplomatic relations between countries and that it would impair the ability of governments to carry out their functions.
GENEVA (Sputnik)  Moscow is basing its Syrian strategy on the fact that the al-Nusra Front terrorist group is operating near Aleppo and urges the United States to share any information indicating otherwise, Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN Office and Other International Organizations in Geneva Alexey Borodavkin said on Tuesday.

"We are building on the fact that the al-Nusra Front is fighting Syria's armed forces near Aleppo. If someone has differing information, which is exact, with coordinates, then we once again request you to share it with us. Tell us where West-supported opposition forces that are observing the ceasefire are. If this is done, then of course, these groups will not be hit, as has been promised by Russia many times," Borodavkin told Sputnik.

Borodavkin also noted that the Syrian government army is carrying out combat operations against Daesh and al-Nusra Front jihadist groups in Syria in line with a UN resolution designating them as terrorist organizations.
The gradualistic, painfully slow, incremental efforts of the current administration undercut the principals of modern warfare, and harken back to the approach followed by the Johnson administration, David Deptula, head of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told USA Today.

Officials claim that the United States takes measures to decrease unintended casualties. Laser-guided bombs are accurate, and when attacking Daesh-operated oil wells, where civilians may be present, the Pentagon drops flyers warning of the impending attack.

In performing over 3,000 airstrikes each month, accidents happen. Since the bombing began in August 2014, over 40,000 US bombs have been dropped in the region.

The Pentagon claims 26 civilians have been killed since the beginning of the bombing, but officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, believe that number to be impossibly low.
Pro-presidential forces and the Shiite Houthi rebel movement in Yemen agreed to a ceasefire last month that came into effect at midnight on April 10.

The sides were meant to start peace talks in Kuwait on Monday. However, later in the day, the United Nations' Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, announced that the new round of intra-Yemeni talks, initially scheduled for the beginning of the week, would be postponed amid continued violence in breach of a cessation of hostilities.
"Dealing with the phenomenon of tunnels is very complex, and the state of Israel is a world leader in this field. This battle demands from us persistence, creativity, and also responsibility and good judgement," Yaalon said.

"Hamas has experienced the phenomenon of collapsing tunnels, diggers that are killed during their work and now this discovery. Nevertheless, we dont delude ourselves that Hamas will draw conclusions, cease this activity and make itself available to improve the quality of life for the citizens."

The US Congress voted in December 2015 to provide Israel with $40 million for anti-tunneling efforts. Israeli defense officials will push for another $40 million, according to sources speaking to Defense News on condition of anonymity.
In his recent speech, US Presidential hopeful Donald Trump said Europe isn't paying its "fair share" of contributions to the NATO budget and he certainly wouldn't be sad to see the military alliance dissolved.

"The foundations of NATO have dissolved. Europe's financial commitment to NATO is not credible. The willingness of the US to operate within the constraints of NATO is long gone," Friedman said, according to Business Insider.

When NATO was first founded, it had a clear mission to defend Western Europe from the Soviet Union. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, the alleged danger for Europeans was no longer there. NATO, however, continued to exist, although it was clear the military alliance had lost its raison d'etat.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Speaking to journalists before the EU Foreign Affairs Council, Stoltenberg said that NATO had a mandate from its member states to be ready to support the Libyan government, such as reforming defense institutions and capacity building.

"But of course this is something which will only be done after request from the new Government of National Accord and we are not planning for a new combat operation in Libya so this is about supporting the government if they so request," the NATO chief stressed.

In 2011, as civil war broke out in Libya, a multi-state coalition, consisting mostly of NATO members, began a military intervention in the country with the declared aim of establishing an immediate ceasefire. The operation ended with a decisive NATO victory, which led to the escalation of the conflict in the country and the subsequent killing of the country's long-standing leader, Muammar Gaddafi.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Russia is ready to consider cooperation with Somalia in the military-technical field, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday.

"I know that during your visit to Russia, you would like to talk in particular about equipping the Somali security forces with all that is necessary to fight terrorists," Lavrov said at a meeting with Somali Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke.

"Such an approach is fully consistent with the interests of the international community, in line with UN Security Council decisions, and Russia will be ready to consider a request on the matter," he added.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Mogadishu would like Moscow's support in developing the Somali economy and strengthening its armed forces, Somali Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke said Tuesday.

"Support in peacekeeping operations is one of the possible aspects of strengthening our armed forces. It is highly important for us to strengthen our law enforcement agencies to fight terrorism. Therefore, we would like to request such support from you," Sharmarke said at a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

According to the prime minister, Mogadishu would also like to ask Russia to help develop the Somali economy.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier, Russia provided Afghanistan with 10,000 Kalashnikov rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition as a gift following the Russian-Afghan security agreement.

Weve delivered [a cargo], thats enough, Kabulov told RIA Novosti when asked whether Russia would increase military deliveries to Afghanistan.

Late last year, Kabul reached out to Russia for military assistance in the fight against terrorism.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  While in Riga, the ship will host US embassy and Latvian government officials, while commanding officer Cmdr. Charles Hampton will conduct calls with local city officials, according to the US Navy.

"Strengthening alliances during the port visit to Riga demonstrates the shared commitment we have to promote safety and stability within the region, while seeking opportunities to enhance our interoperability with partners like Latvia," the statement said.
DUNDEE (Sputnik)  Currently, the Scottish Green Party, the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Scottish Labour oppose the renewal of Trident which could cost the United Kingdom between $44 billion and $240 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime. However, the SNP and Scottish Labour back only the removal of Trident out Scotland and not the decommissioning of the nuclear weapons system.

"The SNP and Scottish Labour just want to have the nuclear weapons system moved out of Scotland, but we want them to be decommissioned, taken apart so that they cannot be used anywhere or by anybody. We don't see it being a viable solution just taking the problem out of Scotland," Chapman said.

Chapman added that she urged the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) to reaffirm its opposition to Trident.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  In March, Saudi Arabia threatened to sell approximately $750 billion worth of American assets if the US Congress passes the legislation allowing families of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to sue the Saudi authorities due to denied government immunity.

"In the unlikely event that the United States were to seize or freeze a small amount of Saudi Arabia's assets, Riyadh would survive," the report stated. "The country faces a far greater threat if it fails to implement much-needed domestic economic reforms."

The Obama administration has been warning lawmakers of the potential economic fallout that could follow passing the legislation, according to media reports.
"NATO is not a threat to Russia," Ayrault said at a news conference in Moscow following talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

"I believe another [Russia-NATO Council] meeting should be held before the Warsaw conference," he said, adding that this cooperation would benefit the two countries' interests.
YEREVAN (Sputnik)  The deputy foreign ministers of the Collective Security Treaty Organizations (CSTO) member states will discuss the foreign policy coordination on Tuesday in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, the organizations press service said.

"During the consultations, it is planned to consider some conceptual documents of the CSTO, as well as the coordination of foreign policy activity of the organizations member states," the CSTO press service said in a statement.

The CSTO is an intergovernmental military alliance formed in 1992 with six members at present: Russia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Belarus, as well as two observer states  Afghanistan and Serbia.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Both Russia and the United States are permanent members of the UN Security Council, therefore, in accordance with the UN Charter they bear special responsibility for international peace and security, Antonov outlined.

"I can say that we are capable of doing much more together. I would like to say that we are ready to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as in combating other new challenges and threats. It is now upon Washington to decide how far it is ready to move on," Antonov told RT in an interview.

The Russian Defense Ministry has established good working relations with the United States, collaborating in Syria in the fight against terrorism, he noted.
The spokesman abstained from commenting on criticism by Bashar Jaafari, the head of the government's delegation against HNC over the decision to halt participation in the intra-Syrian talks in Geneva.

"I just do not want to comment on it," Makhous told Sputnik.

The Damascus delegation at the intra-Syrian talks plans to stay in Geneva as long as needed and will "respond accordingly" to the attempts of the Riyadh-backed opposition to derail the negotiations, Jaafari told Sputnik on Monday.
"De Mistura initially said 'the idea is not mine,' but then he said 'yes, it was me as well.' It is absolutely unacceptable for us regardless of the fact who said that, who proposed it," Makhous said.

On Sunday, a source in one of the Syrian opposition groups told Sputnik that appointing three deputies for the Syrian president was envisaged in the country's constitution and might be an option to put an end to the political crisis in the country.
GENEVA (Sputnik) The Syrian opposition's High Negotiations Committee does not maintain any contacts with the Moscow-Cairo opposition group and has no plans to hold meetings with it, HNC spokesman Monzer Makhous told Sputnik on Tuesday.

"We do not have any contacts with them," Makhous said answering a question whether HNC would meet with the Moscow-Cairo group.

On Monday, Bashar Jaafari, the head of the government's delegation at Geneva talks, told Sputnik that the Damascus delegation at the intra-Syrian talks would "pray for" the direct talks once a unified delegation of all Syrian opposition forces is formed.
GENEVA (Sputnik)  At the end of March round of peace talks, de Mistura made a list of 12 points with proposals on Syrias reconciliation on which parties to the intra-Syrian talks might agree.

"Basically, our amendments, and there are not many, are qualitative in nature, and we gave them to the UN envoy [de Mistura], and asked him to find out the opinion of other opposition groups involved in the negotiations in Geneva, and to give us the answers," Bashar Jaafari said.
GENEVA (Sputnik)  The group of internal Syrian opposition formed at Hmeymim base has discussed with China's Special Envoy for Syria the idea of reforming all the opposition delegations at Geneva talks and forming a new, unified one, Mais Krydee, representative of internal opposition group, told Sputnik.

"We discussed at the meeting with Chinas Special Envoy for Syria Xie Xiaoyan the idea of reforming opposition delegation so that it would include all elements. A new group must be created, to include members of all the oppositions," Krydee said.

The meeting took place on Monday. Mais Krydee and Mahmoud Marei represented the Hmeymim group.
GENEVA (Sputnik)  On Monday, the HNC put on hold its participation in the intra-Syria talks, citing serious violations of the cessation of hostilities recently and worsening of the situation with humanitarian aid access.

"We think that the international community has not put enough pressure on Damascus. We expected more pressure on the issue of forming a transitional governing body. However, the talks transformed, and instead of the progress on the humanitarian track, there has been a step back," Riyad Naasan Agha said.

Earlier on Tuesday, HNC's head at the Geneva intra-Syrian talks said that the opposition group blames Syria's government for the escalation of the situation in the country.
GENEVA (Sputnik)  On Monday, the HNC put on hold its participation in the intra-Syria talks, citing serious violations of the cessation of hostilities recently and worsening of the situation with humanitarian aid access.

"It has to be some actions from states, from Russia, to really make these talks here in Geneva succeed. We hope there will be a solution," Salem al-Meslet, HNC spokesman, told reporters.
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MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The Russian jet flyover of a US warship in the Baltic Sea encapsulates Russia's "aggressive actions," which prove Moscow's readiness to "escalate provocations," Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz said.

" we are dealing with very aggressive actions, there is no doubt. I expected such actions from the Russian side. This time it comes to stabilizing the situation in the region by increasing the security of the eastern flank of the alliance [NATO]. Russia wants to force the adoption of its point of view. It wants to impose its diktat It wants to show that it is the host of the Baltic Sea," Macierewicz said in interview with the Rzechpospolita newspaper, published on Monday.

Last week, two Russian Su-24 Fencer tactical bombers flew close to the US missile destroyer Donald Cook. The United States expressed concern over the developments through Washingtons defense attache in Moscow.
ANKARA (Sputnik)  On Thursday, the European Parliament adopted a resolution urging to separate the EU-Turkey deal on migration from the process of Ankara's accession to the bloc. The resolution also urged Turkey to progress in implementing the rule of law, freedom of expression and an independent judiciary and to end the conflict with Kurds in the country's southeast.

"On April 23, certain EU leaders are coming here, they will inspect refugee camps in Gaziantep. Will they look for answers contained in the resolution? Three million refugees are staying here instead of disturbing the Europeans, what does the resolution offer on this matter? In a period when there is positive progress taking place in various directions, the adoption of such a document is a provocative and destructive approach," Erdogan said while addressing the heads of Turkey's village administrations.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter met with the United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan to discuss counterterrorism efforts and regional security, US Department of Defense spokesperson Peter Cook said on Tuesday.

"The conversation focused on counterterrorism cooperation, instability in Iraq and Syria and countering Iran's destabilizing activities," Cook stated in a press release.
LONDON (Sputnik)  Potential exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union will allow London to regain control over such issues as intelligence, asylum rights and border control, on its own, UK Justice Secretary Michael Gove said Tuesday.

"[The European Court of Justice] can now control how we apply asylum rules, how our intelligence services monitor suspected terrorists, and whom we can deportBut if we vote to leave [from the European Union], we take back control," Gove said, as quoted by The Guardian.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  France's relations with Russia remain positive despite the turbulence in the international arena, Foreign Minister Jean Marc Ayrault said on Tuesday.

"Despite the challenges we face on the international agenda, they were always positive in different spheres  economic, scientific, cultural," Ayrault said during a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow.

Relations between Russia and the European Union member states, including France, went downhill in 2014, when Brussels joined Washington in accusing Moscow of fueling the Ukrainian crisis and imposed several rounds of sanctions as a punitive measure.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Seventy-five of the 150 lawmakers voted against the withdrawal of the deal, while 71 voted in favor of the rejection, according to the Telegraaf daily.

The rejection initiative was proposed by opposition parties, which hold 74 mandates in the Dutch House of Representatives.
The report continued that in return, Syrias government has asked Turkey to stop interfering in the Syrian conflict.

Ankara, however, still looks to replace the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad with a moderate Sunni-led administration. As a result, the negotiations between the two countries remain inconclusive.

Stratfor argued, however, that governments of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria are not interested in Kurdish independence, which could undermine the countries territorial integrity.

"With some common ground laid among Turkey, Syria and Iran in containing Kurdish autonomy, there is potential for a more substantive dialogue over a new power-sharing agreement for Syria," the report concluded.

Kurds are Syrias largest ethnic minority. The Kurdish population also lives in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Syrian Kurds say they want to be part of Syria and do not strive for independence, yet have previously called for more autonomy. In March, they declared a federal region in northern Syria. The Syrian government responded by saying that the Kurds unilateral decision had no legal power.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The decision to lift the anti-Russian sanctions in six months will depend on the results of the upcoming presidential elections in the United States as well as situations in Ukraine and Syria, President of American-Russian Chamber of Commerce Sergei Millian told Sputnik.

"The sanctions will not be lifted within the next six months, however, in six months, if there are changes in the direction of Russia's adherence to the Minsk agreements, changes to the situation in Ukraine and Syria, we may see some changes to their policy proposed by the United States and the Western Europe," Millian said on the sidelines of the ongoing Russian oil and gas industry week in Moscow.

He added that factors such as the US presidential elections in November could also influence the sanctions regime.
It seems that the US foreign policy establishment is suffering from the "Groundhog Day Syndrome": they keep doing the same things over and over again ignoring the fact that their strategy simply does not work.

This behavior prompts serious concerns, especially now that Washington is preparing to launch yet another military adventure in Libya.

"The eagerness to jump back into Libya follows a five-stage pattern that has become all too familiar since the end of the Cold War. This pattern reflects the fundamental inability of the American political system to accept the world as it actually is, rather than how policymakers prefer it to be. Without addressing this dysfunction, the United States will find itself unable to break its cycle of failure in the Middle East," Professor A. Trevor Thrall, an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, writes in his recent article for The National Interest.
BERLIN (Sputnik)  According to Merkel, it is now especially important to keep the security cooperation between Israel and Palestine, though some Israel's actions are complicating the process of political settlement.

"We, President [of Palestine Mahmoud] Abbas and me, agree that we should develop the two-state solution, even if it is difficult and has a lot of complications. Both Israeli and Palestinian peoples have the right to live in peace and safety," Merkel said at a joint press conference with Abbas.

Earlier in April, Abbas told Sputnik in an interview that he was always ready to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in order to engage in serious and meaningful negotiations that would lead to a lasting peace between Israel and Palestine.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The meeting between NATO and Russian permanent representatives is scheduled to be held April 20 in Brussels.

"We made it clear that this cannot be business as usual, or be a one-way street, and the agenda which was agreed upon for tomorrows session does not only reflect what NATO needs but also what Russia is interested in," Lavrov told a press conference.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier this month, the Ukrainian Parliament accepted Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuks resignation and appointed Parliament Speaker Volodomyr Groysman to the position.

"The key to implementation of these agreements is establishing direct dialogue between Kiev and Donbas, consolidate the special status of this region, introduce corresponding clarifications to the Ukrainian constitution and agree on modalities of local elections. We are counting on the new Ukainian government to deal with these issues more actively than the past," Lavrov told a joint press conference with his French counterpart Jean Marc Ayrault.

Ayrualt, in turn, said he believed that Kiev had to implement Minsk agreements, including on issues such as holding elections in the conflict-torn Donbas region and decentralization of power.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Several actors are trying to derail intra-Syria talks in Geneva to resolve the crisis in the country in a military fashion, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday.

"Nobody can win this war [in Syria] There are some players on the external front who cherish drams of ousting the regime using force, they are trying to do everything they can to achieve this, including attempts to trigger derailment of the intra-Syria talks," Lavrov told a press conference.

The top Russian diplomat stressed that Moscow, Washington and their partners at the International Syria Support Group (ISG) did not agree with a military resolution to the crisis. He added that Moscow would do everything in its power to prevent the military solution to the conflict from prevailing.
In order to be afloat, the fracking industry requires the oil price at 80 dollars per barrel. The current prices, on the contrary, pose a serious danger to the industry, with 50 major companies in this field having already gone bankrupt, Wolff argued.

The failure of the fracking industry will lead to serious difficulties for the US financial sector and put the country on the verge of bankruptcy.

"The question is: What would solve this problem? [] Only a sharp increase in oil prices. Why could the oil price rise? Very simple: because of the war in the Middle East, during which many oil wells will be destroyed," the expert said.

According to Wolff, developments in the Middle East should be closely monitored as the US could try to destabilize the region out of its own interests.

"The Americans have already created an enemy: IS [Islamic State]. And now we have to watch what excuses will be used to accelerate the spread of the war in the region," Wolff stated.

Wolff argued that the current oil crisis may also have negative social consequences in various countries, as many oil workers will be dismissed and social conflicts will break out. According to the expert, oil is the most popular commodity and is associated with a huge number of jobs.

"It means that now and in the future hundreds of thousands of employees will be fired," the expert stated. "The problems are always solved at the cost of the most vulnerable ones," he added.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Moscow expects the European Union to resume a full-fledged dialogue in all areas, not just on the human rights issues, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday.

"Among many sectorial dialogues we have had with the European Union, there was a dialogue on human rights. The European Union has put an end to all dialogues, and said recently that we are leaving everything else frozen, but lets talk about human rights. This is not how it works, if we are going to resume relations, let us resume them in full scale," Lavrov told a press conference.
LUGANSK (Sputnik)  Local elections in eastern Ukraines self-proclaimed Lugansk Peoples Republic (LPR) have been postponed from April 24 to July 24 of 2016, according to a decree by LPR leader Igor Plotnitsky posted on his official website on Tuesday.

To postpone the day of first elections of the local heads in designated territoriesfrom April 24, 2016, to July 24, 2016," the decree says.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The meeting of the Russian-French intergovernmental commission on economic and trade cooperation will take place before the end of 2016, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, Lavrov met with his French counterpart Jean Marc Ayrault in Moscow.

"We expect that, as our prime minsters have agreed, we will manage to hold the next meeting of the intergovernmental commission co-chaired by the heads of governments before the end of the year," Lavrov said following the meeting.
Jan Bohmermann is by now probably the most famous comedian from Germany since VW and the emissions scandal. He insulted a head of state, in this case the head of Turkey  Recep Gobble-Gobble Erdogan  who came back at Bohmermann with a defamation lawsuit and an order to Angela Merkel to put Bohmermann behind bars. Wow! Talking about not being able to take a joke. A crude joke at that, but that was all it was. A joke. George Carlin, Doug Stanhope, and Steve Hughes have a few funny answers to the question What to do if I get offended by anything at all? While Dr. Alexander Thiele (Professor for Public and European Law at Freie Universitat Berlin) delivers his professional opinion.
Then, we move on to domestic politics, with Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz once again skunking Donald Trump out of another delegate contest over the weekend, this time in Wyoming, while concerns continue to emerge among Democrats about voting hours and "mysteriously switched" voter registrations in New York state in advance of Tuesday's big Presidential Primary there.

We've got some answers to at least some of those concerns from an election official or two in NY, which may ease concerns a bitmaybeabout voting hours not beginning until noon in many counties around the state tomorrow, and about what may be happening to some of those reported party affiliation changes on voter registrations in the Empire State.

Then, BradBlog.com legal analyst Ernest A. Canning joins us with updates from two states in the fight to overturn Republicans' unlawful, unconstitutional, disenfranchising Photo ID voting restrictions both in the state of Texas and in Wisconsin where, believe it or not, we've actually got a bit of good news from the courts! Finally, Hillary Clinton's campaign undermines the Democrats' argument to overturn the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision. I explain that and much more on today's BradCast! Enjoy!
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Monday, Assads press service said that Putin had sent the Syrian leader a telegram with a message of support for him and the Syrian army.

"We never comment on the constant exchange of messages between president Putin and other heads of state. We shall not do it this time either. President Putin himself said many times that support of the Syrian Arab Republic in its fight against terrorism <> will continue," Peskov told reporters.
This opinion is fully consistent with the official position of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

Unlike Russia, China never signed up to the Missile Technology Control Regime and we are now working with our Chinese colleagues to bring all these issues in line with existing international accords. We hope to find a mutually-acceptable solution before this year is out, Roscosmos said in a press release earlier this month.

In 2014 China showed interest in producing Russian rocket engines on its territory and also in obtaining Russian knowhow in missile defense systems and the construction of heavy-duty helicopters.

In exchange, Beijing offered electronic components used in spacecraft construction, which Russia needed after the United States banned their sale to Russia as part of the international sanctions imposed on Moscow.

Russia and China are also discussing closer cooperation in space navigation (GLONASS and BeiDou), long-distance mapping of the Earths surface and lunar research.




MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The arrest was carried out as part of the special crime-prevention operation codenamed "Taxi" that began on April 5.

"A taxi driver born in Tajikistan was arrested in the central district on April 14. He has been put on an international wanted list for crimes related to the recruitment of people to participate in military operations in the ranks of Daesh," Yakunin said.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs Main Directorate for Road Traffic Safety, district Directorates of Internal Affairs, criminal experts and investigation department staff took part in the joint operation.
SIMFEROPOL (Russia), (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, law enforcement officers started a raid on the home of a Crimea.Realities employee as part of a criminal case, opened against the journalist for reportedly calling for Russia's territorial integrity to be infringed in an article.

"In this article, and in a number of other publications prepared by this media representative, there are justifications for subversive activities, which have been conducted against all Crimeans, justification for terrorist intent <> as well as calls for extremist activities. Journalists that publish their articles in various media outlets should adhere to the law and not condone terrorism or other crimes," Poklonskaya told RIA Novosti.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  In December, the ministry and the company specializing in energy management and automation, signed a Memorandum of Understanding on implementation of the special investment contract that would facilitate expansion of the company's production in Russia.

"We are looking for new spheres to investment. Our company has a positive outlook and is currently negotiating a special investment contract with the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade, that hopefully will be signed in April," he said.

Speaking about the recent investments of the company, producing electrical products at six factories it owns in Russia, Stasi noted that Schneider Electric had invested $7 million in a service center in Moscow to be launched this year as well as the company's IT-center at the Skolkovo innovation center.
Clinton and Sanders face each other in the New York State primary election on Tuesday. Though Sanders is trailing Clinton in votes and pledged delegates, he has vowed to stay in the race until the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in the US state of Pennsylvania in July.

Sanders has continuously criticized Clinton for her ties to big financial institutions and other corporations that have donated to her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, upwards of $150 million in speaking fees as well as in other donations, according to media reports.

Trump offered less certain, but still conceivable possibility for reforming bellicose US national security and foreign policies, Caldicott suggested.

"I am not sure about Trump, he makes some interesting statements sometimes. However the Republican establishment will do everything they can to thwart him  and they are the establishment!" she noted.

Trump has been increasingly complaining of the unfair political system in which a candidate can win delegates from a state without being voter for in a primary election, or can lose delegates even if he wins.

The Republican National Committee is determined to prevent Trump through winning the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the partys presidential nomination on the first ballot at the partys national convention in Cleveland, Ohio in July, Caldicott observed.

Caldicott is the author of many books, including "The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bushs Military Industrial Complex." The Smithsonian Institution has named Caldicott one of the most influential women of the 20th century.
Over the weekend, Clooney hosted two fundraising events in Clintons name. With an entry fee of $353,400, the celebrity raked in nearly $15 million.

"It is an obscene amount of money," Clooney remarked to Meet the Press on Sunday.

As limousines and police motorcades arrived to Clooneys house, his neighbor threw his own gala. Dubbed the "99% Party," the rival fundraiser, held in support of the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, charged a mere $27 for entry.

 The Hill (@thehill) April 17, 2016  Sanders Fangirl (@sandersfangirl) April 17, 2016 "Swimming pools, Movie stars, and merriment for all! This is happening right next door to Clooneys party for Hillary!" the invitation read.

The flyer also stressed that "no-one (will be) turned away for lack of funds."

The 99-percenter party was hosted by Howard Gold, whose family founded the chain of 99 Cents Only stores.

Gold handed out 1,000 dollar bills so that his guests could mockingly shower Clintons motorcade as it made its way to Clooneys estate.

 Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) April 17, 2016

Its unclear how much money the Bernie fundraiser raised, but the point was clearly made and taken.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The final chapter of the 9/11 report consisting of 28 pages reportedly claims that a Saudi diplomat at a consulate in the US state of California directly aided at least two of the 19 hijackers when they arrived in the United States.

I think I know what its going to say, Trump told Fox News. Its going to be very profound, having to do with Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabias role on the World Trade Center and the attack.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The report produced by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States shows no evidence that the government of Saudi Arabia was deliberately involved in September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said on Tuesday.

"This is the conclusion of 9/11 commissiontheir report indicates that there is no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or that senior Saudi government officials knowingly supported the 9/11 plotters," Earnest stated in a press briefing.

US media has previously reported that the official support by the Saudi government for the September 11 terrorists is allegedly detailed in 28 classified pages of the 2002 US joint congressional inquiry report into the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  At present, there are ONLY eight justices on the nations Supreme Court as the vacancy caused by the death of conservative Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has not been filled.

The possibility of a split decision along ideological lines has raised fears among some, and satisfaction among others, concerning the issue of immigration reform.

"A 4-4 tie would probably run out the clock on the Obama administration," Mehlman claimed.
Snyder, who has been under intense scrutiny and investigation following allegations that he intensely mishandled the city of Flints water crisis, took home five jugs of filtered tap water on Monday, and asserted that he will be drinking and cooking with it. He claims that he will continue to restock on subsequent trips.

Flint residents remain wary of using their water, after lead and other contaminants were found at unhealthful levels, in some cases so high that it was considered toxic waste by Environmental Protection Agency standards.

Flint residents made it clear that they would like to see me personally drink the water, so today I am fulfilling that request, the Republican governor said in a statement.
The states allege that the executive orders grant individuals a new legal status, forcing states to bear the cost of processing the new status and providing benefits.

The administration argues that immigrants receiving deferred status are not receiving additional legal privilege, but are merely being notified by the US government that, in the exercise of executive branch discretion, they will not be targeted for deportation because they are a lower priority and the United States lacks the resources to target the entire 11 million population of undocumented immigrants.

The federal district court that first heard the case ruled in favor of the states, enjoining President Obamas executive actions as unconstitutional. On appeal, the case went to the Fifth Circuit Court, which upheld the lower court ruling. The US Supreme Court will now decide whether to uphold those rulings.

On Tuesday, Loud & Clears Brian Becker sat down with immigration attorneys Alan Diamante and Zachary Wolfe to discuss the likely outcome of the case and whether the almost five million undocumented immigrants impacted by the executive order will be granted relief from deportation.

What is the impact of this case?

"On November 20, 2014, President Obama issued an executive order expanding the deferred action programs, DAPA and DACA, to grant relief from deportation to over 5 million undocumented immigrants, explained Diamante. DAPA applies to immigrant parents of US citizens and DACA applies to childhood arrivals."
The passage of the bill is welcomed by anti-pornography group Utah Coalition Against Pornography.

Weiler hopes his legislation will spread to other states, and suggests that pornography is why divorce is so common.

If you start with meth or heroin, everyone knows that's addictive, Weiler told the Atlantic. A lot of people will get kind of lured into pornography, and they don't know it may actually consume their life.

Opponents of the bill observe that the language is unnecessarily alarmist, and a product of the stigmatization of sex in the United States.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Saudi Arabia or any other nation found to be a sponsor of terrorism should have to compensate Americans who are victims of terrorist attacks, US Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch told Sputnik on Tuesday.

According to US media reports over the weekend, Saudi officials have threatened to sell off up to $750 billion in US Treasury securities if a Senate bill allowing US citizens to file suit against state sponsors of terrorism moved forward.

"I dont think Americans should not be compensated when they have been mistreated, I dont care who the country is," Hatch said when asked about the implications of the bill for US-Saudi foreign policy.
Many jumped at the chance to blast Rumsfeld for his boosterism in the lead-up to the Iraq War, others expressed sadness that they may not live to see him prosecuted for his war crimes.

Unlike many others who took to social media to complain about their tax situation on Monday, Rumsfeld wasnt met with camaraderie. Instead, the notorious snark of the twitterverse came out in full force, reminding him that there is always the possibility that there will be a flat tax, just for him, in hell.

The 83-year-old former US Secretary of Defense tweeted three times, complaining that he will likely not live to see the implementation of a flat tax in the country.

 Ben Geier (@ben_geier) April 18, 2016

Rumsfeld, as a leading architect of the Iraq War, has famously claimed that the unnecessary decimation of an entire country had, nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil. He was also involved in decision making, allowing the extrajudicial execution of several people  a war crime and in breach of the Geneva Conventions.

 Owning Fetishist (@ZackBudryk) April 18, 2016

Additionally, he is complicit in the use of torture in facilities including Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, practices which occurred while he was the Secretary of Defense.

Even the 41st US President, George H.W. Bush criticized Rumsfeld, calling him arrogant, in his recent biography.

I think he served the president badly. Ive never been that close to him anyway. [] Theres a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. Hes more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that, Bush senior wrote.
The photographers were rewarded for their coverage of the migrant crisis for the New York Times. To make their series of photographs, depicting the flood of refugees into Europe, they traveled to Macedonia, Slovenia, Serbia, the Greek island of Lesbos and Hungary.

Amid the worst migrant crisis since the World War II, the photographers managed to capture "the resolve of refugees, the perils of their journeys and the struggle of host countries to take them in," the Pulitzer website reads.

A special prize in this category was given to Thomson Reuters photographers for images on the same topic that followed the journey of refugees "across uncertain boundaries to unknown destinations."
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  NATOs activities are a threat to the national interests and security of Russia, but Moscow is always ready for dialogue, though it will not be easy, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday.

Russian-NATO relations are undoubtedly worrying right now, it would seem forgotten, but the deficit of mutual distrust has quickly returned and theres probably a triumph in mutual mistrust. We have recorded very unfriendly activities by the Alliance in increasing its potential on our borders and we believe that these activities of the Alliance pose a threat to our national interests and national security of Russia, Peskov told journalists.

Peskov said that NATOs latest activities confirm the Alliance is incapable of adapting to todays conditions and holds to its primary intentions of restraining the Russian Federation and remaining in confrontations with the Russian Federation.
In January, the UK governments arms sales statistics demonstrated that British arms companies had increased their sales to Saudi Arabia by more than 100 times over the course of last year  from contracts worth almost $13 million in April-June 2015 to $1.43 billion in July-September.

London issued $10 million worth of arms sales licenses to Riyadh in the last three months of 2015, according to the latest reported data.

The UK Defense Ministry, in a July 2015 letter to the House of Lords on the amount of assistance being provided by the United Kingdom to Riyadh in its anti-Houthi campaign in Yemen, said that the country was providing precision-guided weapons and technical support to the Saudi Air Force "as part of pre-existing arrangements."
Spring has certainly arrived, and to accommodate the numerous horses returning to the racetrack, Mohawk Racetrack will soon switch to two qualifying days a week.

Starting next week, Mohawk will be offering qualifying sessions each Monday and Friday morning. The first race for each session will head to post at 10 a.m.

The entry box for Monday qualifiers will close on Saturdays at 10:30 a.m., while entries for Friday qualifiers will be due on Wednesdays by 10:30 a.m.

Along with the qualifying dates, horsepeople are reminded that the track at Mohawk is available for training every day of the week, except on Sundays. The track will open each morning at 7 a.m. and will close at 12:30 p.m.

Upcoming qualifying dates at Mohawk appear below.

Thursday, April 21  10 a.m.

Monday, April 25  10 a.m.

Friday, April 29  10 a.m.

Monday, May 2  10 a.m.

Friday, May 6  10 a.m.

(WEG)
PJI Files Suit Over SF Promotion of Public Urination

Contact: Pacific Justice Institute, 949-422-0395



SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., April 19, 2016 /Standard Newswire/ -- Pacific Justice Institute filed suit late last week in Superior Court over San Francisco's use of tax dollars to encourage public urination.

PJI first reported on February 4 that San Francisco had constructed a semi-circular structure, known as a pissoir, at the corner of Dolores Park. The wall is about 4 feet high and is completely open at the back, with no roof or doors. Men using the hole in the ground are visible to children playing in the park, passersby on the adjacent street, sidewalk and light rail, and to residents overlooking the park.



PJI represents local disgusted residents, as well as the San Francisco Chinese Christian Union, whose members include women and the disabled who are not able to safely use a pissoir.



PJI sent a demand letter to the City and County of San Francisco more than two months ago, identifying numerous legal problems with the pissoir. In response, San Francisco offered no substantive rebuttal but disclosed documents confirming that it spent at least $15,000 on the pissoir.



Brad Dacus, president of Pacific Justice Institute, commented, "San Francisco's use of tax dollars to promote public urination is not only disgusting; it is also blatantly illegal. Officials would not and could not allow such a facility to be constructed by private businesses or residents, because it so obviously violates disability access and basic health and safety laws, to name a few. These officials are not above the law."



PJI is being assisted in this case by Seattle attorney Conrad Reynoldson, of Washington Civil & Disability Advocate, which is focused on protecting both disability rights and civil rights more broadly.
COARSEGOLD, Calif.  In a house on the top of a grassy hill in Coarsegold lives a father, a mother and two dogs who miss Benjamin Pleitez.

The 25-year-old died in Afghanistan in 2012, where Pleitez served as a medic with the Army National Guard. Back home, he also cared for pets and had dreams of one day opening a dog breeding and training kennel.

His parents are working to keep their sons dream alive. Salvador and Dianna Pleitez recently founded Docs Dogs For Vets, which will train shelter dogs to become service dogs for wounded veterans at no cost to recipients. Veterans wounds can be physical or mental/emotional, such as veterans coping with post-traumatic stress disorder. The nonprofit will adopt its first four dogs in May.

The project helps the Pleitezes cope with Benjamins death. Salvador says an accident, which remains unclear, at an Army base in Afghanistan claimed his sons life. Benjamin was deployed out of Fresno about four months prior and was awarded more than a dozen medals for his service.

I think there is some healing power in it, Salvador says of starting Docs Dogs For Vets, keeping you away from thinking the worst and knowing that you are doing something for somebody else in his honor, that its not all lost.

The Pleitezes moved from Turlock, Calif., to Coarsegold a couple of months after Benjamin died. They needed a change. They brought their sons dogs, Scarlett and Cadence, with them. Benjamin rescued the stout mutts, one black, one orange, from an animal shelter.

Benjamin taught them well, and it went beyond training, Salvador says. They seemed to have grown smarter because of him. Benjamin had worked as veterinarian assistant for a short time.

Benjamin also came to the aid of people in need off the battlefield. After Haiti was hit by a large earthquake in 2010 that killed tens of thousands, he and a friend raised money for supplies and volunteered helping people in the country for about a month.

The Pleitezes hope the dogs in the Docs Dogs For Vets program come to the rescue like their son did. They know a veteran with a service dog who wakes him when hes having a nightmare and heard an account of another veteran who decided not to kill himself because he didnt want his dog to be alone without care.

Salvador, a civil engineer, and Dianna, a former elementary school teacher, are not professional dog trainers, but they plan to enlist the help of people who are.

The dogs will go through four phases of training that will last about 10 months. The dogs first stop: Prison.

Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, Calif., has a 10-week dog training program where prisoners train shelter dogs in basic dog obedience commands under the direction of a volunteer dog trainer and a registered veterinary technician. After that, the dogs will be sent to various homes for a couple of months to get them better socialized with people and regular environments.

Finally, two phases of advanced training are expected to last a few months, when local trainers train the dogs to help with issues specific to the veterans they are matched with. Salvador says they will likely start inviting veterans to apply for a dog in late summer or fall.

Docs Dogs For Vets hopes to raise about $10,000 per dog to help fund training and veterinarian bills. A fundraiser 10K run will be held March 20 on 40 acres that the Pleitezes own in Raymond, Calif. They want to eventually have a kennel on the property, where they also plan to build a home.

Docs Dogs For Vets is also a way for the Pleitezes to help the soldiers who served with Benjamin.

I think its important for them to know that we are OK without Ben, Salvador says, that its not their fault, you know?

His father thinks Benjamin would be proud.

He would be pleased that in his honor, this is happening.
A Woodland High School social studies teacher has become the only secondary school teacher in Washington to win the James Madison Fellowship Award.

The district announced Monday that Katie Klaus won the $24,000 award, which shell put towards a masters in American history and government. Klaus hasnt decided where shell pursue her degree, according to the district.

Klaus is the second Woodland teacher to win the award since Sharon Conditt earned it in 2009. The award was based on Klauss dedication to teaching American history, extracurricular activities, an essay on the Constitution, her potential in a graduate degree program and letters of recommendation, according to a district press release.

"I wanted to become a teacher to help make a positive difference in the lives of students," Klaus said in a press release. "Most people can look back at their high school career and identify a teacher who really inspired or influenced them, and I want to be that type of teacher."

As part of the award process, Klaus will attend a month-long summer institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The James Madison Memorial Foundation was established by Congress in 1986 to improving teaching about the U.S. Constitution in secondary schools.
tech2 News Staff

As much we would want to set aside the idea of an Apple car, the number of leaks and rumours keep pushing us to believe that the company is working on something big -- most likely called 'Project Titan'. News coming from MacRumours once again states that Apple has gathered a bunch of open-minded recruits in a secret car lab in Berlin where they have been given all the freedom to think and do without boundaries and restrictions.

The news comes from a German website which claims that the Apple facility employs about 15 - 20 "top class" employees from the German automotive industry. More importantly, they have been hired as "progressive thinkers" those who have been shunned for thinking openly in their previous firms thanks to their previous employer's conservative outlook.

Adding to this are other news bits about Apple in its first attempt, skipping on the autonomous car, but going for an all-electric vehicle instead. Apart from this, there is also news about the Cupertino Giant going in for a ride sharing model similar to what BMW has achieved with its Drive Now electric car-sharing service.

Handling the manufacturing for Project Titan will be Austrian contract manufacturer Magna Steyr who is expected to take charge once the R&D stage is complete.
tech2 News Staff

Apple has been secretly talking to AAA talent from Hollywood for coming up with original TV series content similar to the success stories of Netflix and Amazon. The talks with top filmmakers and producers happened behind closed doors over the course of the Sundance Film Festival, according to a detailed report by Fast Company.

Normally, the activities of a tech giant at the film festival are accompanied by a media blitz, including public events and press releases. However, Apple silently set up what was called the "Apple Lounge" by those who attended, and discreetly interacted with the industry. The discussions were private, invite-only affair.

After the event, Apple executives in Los Angeles were being pitched with original TV series. The TV series are planned to be launched exclusively on Apple TV, as well as iTunes. Apple intends to work with the best in the industry, to create a library of high quality content that is exclusive to the Apple ecosystem. All the talks have taken place in secrecy.

There are two reasons speculated for this move. The first is that Apple cannot afford to ignore the explosive growth of Netflix and Amazon, as well as the success enjoyed by their exclusive content. The second reason is the gradual phasing out of cable TV services, which leaves a big demand for TV content that Apple is in a prime position to deliver.
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Bill Gates said that no one was an absolutist on either side of the digital privacy debate, but the co-founder of Microsoft said he supports his companys lawsuit against the US government seeking the freedom to tell customers when federal agencies have sought their data.

"There probably are some cases where (the government) should be able to go in covertly and get information about a companys email," Gates said at a Reuters Newsmaker event in Washington.

"But the position Microsoft is taking in this suit is that it should be extraordinary and it shouldnt be a matter of course that there is a gag order automatically put in, he said in an interview with Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen Adler.

The lawsuit, filed last week in federal court in Microsoft's home town of Seattle, argues that the government is violating the U.S. Constitution by preventing Microsoft from notifying thousands of customers about government requests for their emails and other documents, sometimes indefinitely.

The move comes as rival Apple is locked in a showdown with the U.S. government over access to an iPhone belonging to one of the killers in the December shooting in San Bernardino, California.

Gates said more collaboration between law enforcement and privacy advocates would help determine which legislative framework ... strikes the perfect balance on government access to private data.

I dont think there are any absolutists who think the government should be able to get everything or the government should be able to get nothing, Gates, 60, said.

The man who co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and is still held in reverence by the technology world made waves in February when he appeared to distance himself from Apple in its legal fight with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, but later clarified his comments and said that headlines suggesting he supported the FBIs position were inaccurate.

Gates, the world's richest person, also talked about the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic organization he formed in 2000, which has an endowment of more than $40 billion.

The foundation, where Gates works day to day, has focused attention in recent months on the Zika outbreak, which has been linked to thousands of suspected cases of microcephaly, a rare birth defect, in Brazil and is affecting large parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The World Health Organization declared the outbreak an international health emergency on Feb. 1. Gates said the foundation would be contributing funds to aid in the Zika fight, but did not say how much.

Private sector and governments need to work together to quickly roll out products to combat Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases, Gates said.

"Zika is a tough one," he said. "There are potential solutions. They won't come soon enough to avoid some problems in the entire hemisphere."

Reuters
tech2 News Staff

Thanks to the number of leaks and rumours, there is plenty of information to prove that Samsung is indeed working on a C series range of smartphones. While these have been in the rumour mill for long (last details come from a Zauba import listing) we now know a bit more, along with a launch date that is set for May.

After appearing in an import listing and then on Geekbench, a new report points out that the C series smartphones from Samsung will feature a metal construction and will first remain exclusive to China. However, considering that the test devices have been imported in to India, we could definitely expect the range to launched soon after.

The model number SM-C5000 that appeared on a previous import listing is also said to be accompanied by a SM-C7000 model, but details about the same are almost non-existent. Also not known for now are details about the pricing of these handsets, even though the import listing points to a Rs 13,500 price tag (before duties and taxes). Indeed, these could be a range of budget to mid-range smartphones.

So far, the SM-C5000 is expected to pack in an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 along with an Adreno 405 GPU. The device is expected to come with 4GB of RAM and is powered by Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow.
tech2 News Staff

Samsung has finally begun to roll out the Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow update for its Galaxy Note 4 users. The new update appears to be rolling out in India, Poland, Turkey and the US regions in the form of an over-the-air update.

The update is about 1.3GB in size and brings Google's Marshmallow goodness to the old road warrior. Of course Samsung has packed in TouchWiz into the same package so depending on the region, the size of the update may vary.

In terms of features, GSMArena reports that some of the Note 5's features have been included in the Note 4's update. This would include the handy Screen Off memo that lets users scribble on the display without the need to unlock the device.

As an added bonus, users of the Note 4 surprisingly also get the new icons from the Note 5 as well. TouchWiz features aside, Google's Android Marshmallow is expected to deliver a smoother, stutter-free UI that also goes easy on battery life, thanks to the Android Doze feature.

On the XDA forums, members have got their hands on the Polish version of the ROM that is also available for download and installation. The ROM will have to be installed manually using a flash tool, but this is for experienced users only. You can still click here if you want to have a go at an official Marshmallow ROM on your Galaxy Note 4.
Gas bottling plant in Ctg region planned

Staff Reporter :

Bangladesh and India have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to set up a Liquefied Petroleum Gas bottling plant in the Chittagong region.

Chairman of Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC) Mahmood Reza Khan and Chairman of Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) B Ashok signed the agreement on behalf of their respective sides in the city on Monday.

The setting up this LPG plant will fulfil the growing energy demand and ensure energy security in Bangladesh.

State Minister for Power and Energy Nasrul Hamid and Indian State Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Prodhan witnessed the signing in ceremony.

Nasrul Hamid told a briefing that the government has been working to ensure energy security of the country and has sought formal proposal from India for setting up a land-based LNG terminal for supplying gas to the South-West region of the country."

The government is also considering import at least 70mmcfd natural gas from the India State Tripura for the eastern part of the country for increasing flow of gas there, he said.

Dharmendra Prodhan, in his speech, said his country's commitment to collaborate with Bangladesh is to achieving the goal of 'Power for all' by the year 2021 as outlined in the joint statement "Notun Projonmo-Nayi disha" agreed upon during the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Bangladesh in June, 2015.

He said, "I was greatly encouraged by the positive sentiments of greater cooperation in energy sector between our two countries as expressed by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina."

Prodhan said he conveyed the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for closer and greater cooperation between the two countries, especially in the energy and power sector.

"We attach the highest importance to our relations with Bangladesh, a close neighbour with whom we share a lot in common. Our bilateral relations have never been better before as they are today. While our cooperation is very broad-based, we are simultaneously exploring new vistas of engagement," he added.

Prodhan said India has been supplying high-speed diesel from Numaligarh Refinery Ltd to Parbatipur through pipeline on a long-term sustainable basis.

"We proposed setting up of LNG terminal in Moheshkhali by Petronet LNG Ltd in expediting exploration activities by OVL in two allotted off-shore blocks near Chittagong," he said.

Prodhan also said that the MoU for handling the LPG facility symbolizes the win-win partnership as it would benefit both the countries by supplying LPG to Tripura and the North Eastern part of India and at the same time to cater to the domestic demand in Bangladesh.

He said another important contract would be signed today (Tuesday) between Engineers' India Ltd and Eastern Refinery Limited, Chittagong (ERL) for expansion of the ERL by setting up its second unit. "This again is expected to cater to the huge unmet demand of petroleum and its products in Bangladesh."

Secretary-in-charge of the Energy Division under the Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Nazimuddin Chowdhury, Indian High Commissioner in Dhaka Harsha Bardhan Sringla and concerned officials from both the countries were present on the occasion.
Child murdered in Dhaka, police suspect mother

A child has been murdered in Dhaka with a sharp weapon. His mother has been hospitalised with a slash wound on her throat. Police said mother Mukti Begum tried to commit suicide after killing 1-year-old Nehal Sadik at her home in the capitals Uttarkhan area. Uttarkhan police OC Sheikh Sirajul Islam said the boys father informed police on Monday midnight after finding his wife and son in bloody condition. The child had wound inflicted by a sharp weapon on his stomach while the mother has a slash wound on her throat, he said. Police recovered the body and sent Begum to the Dhaka Medical College Hospital, said the police officer adding that the mother was conscious while being hospitalised. It seems that Mukti (Begum) murdered her son over a family feud before trying to commit suicide, but the murder weapon is yet to be found, said OC Islam. Asked whether the father might have been involved, he said, Initial investigations do not suggest that. But we are looking into all aspects. --bdnews24.com
Khaleda to sit with BNP senior leaders tonight

UNB, Dhaka: BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia is going to sit with her party senior leaders tonight (Tuesday night) following the latest political development over the arrest of journalist Shafik Rehman in a case in connection with a conspiracy to abduct and kill Prime Ministers son Sajeeb Wazed Joy. The meeting is scheduled to start at the BNP chairpersons Gulshan office around 8:30pm, said BNP assistant office secretary Shamimur Rahman Shamim. He said some party standing committee members, vice-chairmen, chairpersons advisers and joint secretaries general will join the meeting to be held with Khaleda in the chair. Shamim also said the countrys overall situation, Union Parishad polls and the arrest of journalist Shafik Rehman are expected to come up for discussions at the meeting. On Saturday morning, detectives arrested journalist Shafik Rehman, former editor of the Bangla daily Jaijaidin, from his house. He was later put on a five-day remand in the case. Detectives also claimed that they have found the involvement of detained Amar Desh editor Mahmudur Rahman, another pro-BNP journalist, in the alleged conspiracy against Joy. On Monday, a Dhaka court fixed April 25 for hearing a petition filed by Detective Branch of police over showing Mahmudur arrested in the case. Mahmudur, who faces around 70 cases, has been in prison since he was arrested in April 2013. Earlier at a press briefing, BNP joint secretary general Ruhul Kabir Rizvi threatened that their party will take harsher programmes if Shafik Rehman is not released immediately.
Gazipur mayor Mannan suspended again

Nearly a week into the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court validated his position, the government on Tuesday suspended Gazipur City Corporation Mayor MA Mannan again. The Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development issued a notification in this regard as Senior Special Tribunal Court of Gazipur accepted a chargesheet against Mannan in a case filed with Joydebpur Police Station. Earlier on August 19 2015, the government suspended Gazipur City Corporation Mayor MA Mannan for the first time as he had been charged with criminal offences. Following the suspension order, Mannan filed a writ petition with the High Court (HC) challenging the government decision on March 31, 2016. On April 11 2016, the HC stayed for six months the governments order suspending Mayor MA Mannan. Later, the Appellate Division upheld the HC order on April 13, allowing the stay on the mayors suspension remain in place. -- Dhaka, Apr 19 (UNB)
Afghan Taliban attack central Kabul, at least 28 dead

Afghan security personnel gather at the scene after a car bomb attack in Puli Mahmood Khan neighbourhood in Kabul.

Reuters, Kabul :

A major Taliban suicide bomb and gun attack on a government security office in central Kabul during rush hour on Tuesday killed at least 28 people and wounded more than 320, a week after the militant group announced a spring offensive.

President Ashraf Ghani condemned the assault "in the strongest possible terms" in a statement from the presidential palace, only a few hundred meters away from the scene of the blast in the Afghan capital.

The insurgency led by the Afghan Taliban has gained strength since the withdrawal of most international combat troops at the end of 2014, and the Islamist group is believed to be stronger than at any point since it was driven from power by U.S.-backed local forces in 2001.

Police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi said civilians and members of the Afghan security forces were among the dead and wounded.

The brazen attack began with a suicide car bomb and security forces and militants then exchanged gunfire, Reuters witnesses near the scene said.

The Taliban said on their Pashto-language website that they had carried out the suicide bombing on "Department 10", an NDS (National Directorate of Security) unit which is responsible for protecting government ministers and VIPs.

They said a suicide car bomber blew up the main gate at the front of the office, allowing other fighters, including more suicide bombers, to enter the heavily guarded compound.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a separate statement that the attackers were engaged in a gunbattle with Afghan security forces inside the building.

It was not immediately possible to verify the details of the Taliban's claim with government officials. The Islamist group often exaggerates details of attacks against government and military targets.

A thick plume of black smoke was seen rising from the area near the sprawling U.S. embassy complex immediately after the blast.

Warning sirens blared out for some minutes from the embassy compound, which is also close to the headquarters of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission.

The U.S. embassy and the NATO mission both said they were not affected by the blast.

The Taliban announced the beginning of their spring offensive on April 12, and fighting has raged around the symbolically important northern city of Kunduz since then, although the capital had been relatively quiet.

Kunduz, Afghanistan's fifth-largest city, fell briefly to the Taliban last September in the biggest blow to Ghani's government since NATO-led forces ended their combat operations at the end of 2014.

Tuesday's blast came days after a United Nations report said urban warfare had caused a spike in the number of deaths and injuries among women and children in Afghanistan this year as the Taliban intensify their campaign against Ghani's Western-backed government.




Putin, Obama agree to assist further in cessation of hostilities in Syria

Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Barack Obama have agreed to assist further in securing a cessation of hostilities in Syria.

Reuters, Moscow :Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Barack Obama have agreed to assist further in securing a cessation of hostilities in Syria during a phone call, the Kremlin said in a statement on Monday.During the call, Putin highlighted the need for the separation of the moderate Syrian opposition from Islamic State and the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, as well as the need for the closure of Syria-Turkey border, the Kremlin said.Russia has been repeatedly raising the question of the border, across which, according to Russia, militants are crossing from Turkey into Syria.Meanwhile,the Syrian government's chief negotiator said President Bashar al-Assad's future was not up for discussion at peace talks, underlining the bleak prospects for reviving U.N.-led negotiations postponed by the opposition.Bashar Ja'afari, speaking to Lebanese TV station al Mayadeen, also said his team was pushing for an expanded government as the solution to the war - an idea rejected by the opposition fighting for five years to topple Assad.Ja'afari was reiterating the Syrian government's position as spelt out last month ahead of the latest round of talks, indicating no shift on the part of Damascus as it continues to enjoy firm military backing from Russia and Iran."In Geneva we have one mandate only to arrive at an expanded national government only, this is our mandate ... this is the goal we strive to achieve in the Geneva peace talks," Ja'afari said in comments broadcast overnight. He added that these views were relayed to U.N. Syria mediator Staffan de Mistura.Ja'afari also said Assad's fate could never be raised in peace talks nor was it a matter that any U.N.-backed political process could deliberate. "This matter (the presidency) does not fall under the jurisdiction of Geneva ... this is a Syrian-Syrian affair, Security Council or no Security Council," he said.The Western-backed Syrian mainstream opposition decided on Monday to take a pause in peace talks. It said Damascus was not serious about moving towards a U.N.-backed political process they say would bring a transitional governing body with full executive powers without Assad.A U.N. Security Council resolution in December called for the establishment of "credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance", a new constitution, and free and fair elections within 18 months.Ja'afari also said any ideas such as those floated recently by de Mistura that sought to bridge the gap between the two sides should not touch existing state institutions or the army."We won't allow any constitutional vacuum to take place. What does that mean? It means the army stays as it is and state institutions continue to function," he added.The opposition says restructuring the army and security apparatus is an essential step towards establishing a democratic Syria.Ja'afari accused the Western-backed opposition of seeking to bring about a collapse of the country and replicate the chaos seen in Iraq and Libya after Western military intervention brought down long severing authoritarian rulers."They want to repeat the experience of Libya and Iraq ... and turn Syria into a failed state," he said.
EBL signs a partnership agreement with BRAC Bank Ltd and bkash in the city recently. Under the agreement EBL will encourage their corporate clients to use Mobile Financial Services, offered by bkash, during transactions. Ali Reza Iftekhar, MD and CEO of E
Good scripts are rare in todays world: Sonakshi Sinha





In 2014, Sonakshi Sinha announced the launch of her own production house with her brothers, Luv Sinha and Kussh Sinha. Back then, the Dabangg (2010) star had said, I will support the company as an actor as well as a family member. However, since then, no movie has been announced under the banner. The reason for the same, according to Sonakshi, is the lack of good scripts.

Good scripts are rare in todays world. And honestly, with three of us involved, it often happens that if one person likes something, the other two dont, she says, laughing.

She adds, We need to reach a consensus. But, it is also good to work with your siblings, as its easier to make a point without worrying about what the other person will think.
Students of Nasirabad Govt High School in Chittagong attended in the school campaign programme of CWASA held on Monday.
Mother 'kills baby boy' in city

Staff Reporter :

A mother allegedly stabbed her 18-month old child to death at their residence in the city's Uttar Khan area on Monday night.

The deceased is Nehal Sadik, the son of Sazzad Hossain Murad, resident of Master Para area at Uttar Khan.

Police detained the mother Fahmida Meer Mukti to interrogate in this connection, police said.

Uttar Khan OC Sheikh Sirajul Islam said, "Sazzad saw his son and wife Mukti lying on the floor when he returned home around 11:30pm. On information, we recovered Nehal's body and sent Mukti to a local hospital."

He said, "The child had wound of a sharp weapon in his stomach, while the mother has a slash wound in her throat," he said.

Later, the body was sent to Dhaka Medical College Hospital for autopsy.

The OC said, "It was Mukti and Sazzad's second marriage. We are anticipating that Mukti might have killed her son and then tried to commit suicide over a family feud."

But, Mukti claimed that a woman entering their house attacked them.

Asked whether the father might have been involved, the officer said, "Initial investigations do not suggest that. But we are looking into all aspects."

The DMCH's Assistant Registrar Dr Arifin said, "She [Fahmida] is fine now. We will send her to the psychological department for a checkup tomorrow [Wednesday]."

Police recovered the body and sent Mukti to the Dhaka Medical College Hospital, said the police officer adding that the mother was conscious while being hospitalised.


Khaleda sits with party leaders

Staff Reporter :

BNP Chairperson Begum Khaleda Zia held a meeting with her party's senior leaders on Tuesday night.

Held at the BNP chairperson's Gulshan office, the meeting began at about 9:30 PM and it was continuing till filing of the report at about 10:00 PM.

The party's standing committee members, vice-chairmen, chairperson's advisers and joint secretaries general joined the meeting.

Insiders said, Khaleda Zia summoned the meeting following the latest political development over the arrest of journalist Shafik Rehman in a case in connection with a conspiracy to abduct and kill Prime Minister's son Sajeeb Wazed Joy.

The meeting sources said that the country's overall situation, Union Parishad polls and the arrest of Shafik Rehman were discussed in the meeting.
AMCL hopes to return fund in 3 months

BB claims concrete evidence

Kazi Zahidul Hasan :

Bangladesh Bank (BB) on Tuesday claimed that it has concrete evidences regarding the illicit transfer of $81 million from its reserve account maintained with the US Federal Reserve Bank.

Unidentified hackers attempted to steal almost $1 billion from the BB's account in February. While the authorities blocked most of the illicit transfers, $81 million slipped to Rizal Commercial Bank Corporation (RCBC) in the Philippines.

"We have enough evidence that the money ($81 million) was laundered through the Philippine bank. Later, it was withdrawn from the bank despite BB's request to halt the payment," BB spokesman Subhankar Saha told The New Nation on Tuesday evening. "We will also go for a lawsuit if necessary to retrieve the money from Philippines bank," he added.

The BB spokesman came up with the claim that the money was stolen from BB when the Philippines Anti-Money Laundering Council's Director General Julia Bacay-Abad on Tuesday said that the turnover of the $81 million to the Bangladesh authorities would depend on concrete evidence and a lawsuit regarding the money-laundering.

Abad, however, hoped to return the $81 million stolen fund to Bangladesh in three months once these formalities are completed.

"I hope it will only take within three months, but I am not so sure if it will take three months," Abad said in an interview in a local media after she confirmed that the Manila Regional Trial Court had issued a Provisional Assets Preservation Order, or PAPO, on the frozen funds as well as the $4.63 million earlier turned over by casino junket operator Kim Wong.

"That (PAPO) covers the money that was turned over to the AMLC for safekeeping (by Wong), including the money frozen by the AMLC by virtue of the freeze order from the Court of Appeals on 1 March," Abad said.

"The PAPO is good for 20 days and during that 20-day, the court will set the date of the summary hearing and to determine whether an Asset Preservation Order" should be issued, she explained.

She said that after three months, all the money subjected to the forfeiture proceedings filed by the AMLC can be returned immediately to the Bangladesh government, provided no opposition is filed before the court.

"I hope it will take only that long three months because we don't expect any opposition from any party. So if there is no opposition, the court will allow the AMLC to present evidence that will make the proceeding expeditious," Abad said.

The rules covering forfeiture proceedings, she said, allow any person or party -- in this case, the Bangladeshi government -- with a claim over a forfeited amount to file a verified petition with the same court that ordered the forfeiture.

"So, in other words, the Bangladesh government, which has a claim on the forfeited money, should file a verified petition with the court," Abad said. "Then the court will issue another order to return the money to the claimant."

"With the assistance of the Solicitor General, we filed the proceedings last Friday," she added.

Regarding the steps taken by the Philippines authorities, the BB spokesman Subhankar Saha said, the money-laundering scheme is under investigation by the country's Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, central bank and the AMLC.

"They are serious about the case and the Philippines AMLC has already filed criminal complaints against two Chinese businessmen who were allegedly involved in laundering of $81 million BB's stolen fund through the Philippine financial system," he said.

Besides, the authorities of RCBC also fired two of its officials for withdrawing the fund through four fake bank accounts. The officials are also facing probe by the country's Senate Blue Ribbon Committee for facilitating the release of the stolen funds. The body also conducted its 6th hearing on the money-laundering case on Tuesday.

The BB spokesperson also said that they have been maintaining close contact with the Philippines authorities to bring back the money.




Shafik Rehman`s house searched

Police claim recovery of 'confidential documents; his confession to meeting with conspirators

Staff Reporter :Police on Tuesday searched the residence of arrested journalist Shafik Rehman and claimed that they recovered 'confidential FBI documents' related to an abduction attempt on Prime Minister's son Sajeeb Ahmed Wazed Joy, from his US residence. Detective Branch (DB) of police also claimed that the senior journalist confessed to holding several meetings with those suspected to be involved in a plot to abduct and kill Sajeeb Wazed Joy.Deputy Commissioner for DB branch of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) Mashruqur Rahman Khaled said that the Eskaton Road's house of Shafik Rehman was searched on Tuesday afternoon. "Shafik Rehman has handed over some secret documents to us. The documents pertain to Joy's whereabouts in the US, which Shafik Rahman had preserved so long. The DB police seized these documents," he said. According to him, the police took Shafik Rehman with them to search his house after he had admitted to meeting with the conspirators targeting killing of Sajeeb Wazed Joy and having some documents related to the case as well.Khaled said, "During questioning in police custody, Shafik Rehman said he had received these documents from (former) FBI agent Robert Lustyik." He also said, "Shafik Rehman had said that he had information and no-one but him can find them at his home. That is why the DB police took him during the raid and seized the confidential documents."After seizing the documents from Shafik Rehman's house, Monirul Islam, additional commissioner of the DMP, at a media briefing said that during their questioning, Shafik Rehman had admitted to holding several meetings with those convicted by a US court for bribing the former FBI official to get information on Joy.Asked about Amar Desh acting editor Mahmudur Rahman's involvement in the case, Monirul Islam said that they were looking into the matter. The law enforcers have already submitted an application for Mahmudur Rahman's remand for further investigation in the case, he said."We are also investigating whether BNP chief's son Tarique Rahman and other senior party leaders were involved," he said. The family members, however, said that the DB police took Shafik Rehman to his house and seized some files and documents. "As a journalist, Shafik Rehman collected some papers related to bribing of an FBI special agent to collect information regarding a Bangladeshi political figure," said Shafik Rehman's wife Taleya Rahman, who is also former BBC journalist. On Saturday, plainclothes detectives entered his Eskaton Road's residence identifying themselves as Boishakhi television reporters "to interview him". However, before leaving with him, they told family members that they were detectives, according to his wife.Police at first denied arresting him when reporters contacted them. Later, Deputy Commissioner (Media) of DMP Maruf Hossain Sarder on Saturday admitted that detectives arrested Shafik Rehman. But he denied that the DB men posed as journalists.
What the Panama Papers mean for global development

Tharanga Yakupitiyage :

The financial secrecy and tax evasion revealed by the Panama Papers has an extraordinary human cost in developing countries and threatens the realisation of the UN's ambitious Sustainable Development Goals.

The ongoing leak - made public by media outlets including German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) - has already prompted protests and investigations around the world. The papers connect thousands of prominent figures to secretive offshore companies in 21 tax havens and reveal the inner workings of the offshore finance industry.

The documents focus on Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, with its 210,000 entities, and has led to allegations that the firm aided public officials and multinational corporations to avoid taxes. Mossack Fonseca say that media reports have misrepresented the nature of their work and its role in global financial markets.

In one case, leaked emails contained in the Panama Papers suggest that the Heritage Oil and Gas Ltd Company (HOGL), sought help from Mossack Fonseca to sidestep tax laws in Uganda. According to ICIJ, upon the sale of an oil field, the company received a tax bill of $404 million. In an effort to avoid paying the taxes, the entity fought the Ugandan courts and meanwhile tried to relocate to Mauritius, according to the leaked emails.

Mauritius has a double tax agreement with Uganda, allowing companies such as HOGL to only pay taxes in one of the two countries. In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) listed Mauritius as a preferred location for companies due to its minimal tax laws. These havens deny developing countries such as Uganda of much needed tax revenue for essential services, Oxfam's Senior Tax Policy Advisor Tatu Ilunga told IPS. "Tax havens are at the heart of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share, depriving governments - rich and poor - of the resources they need to provide vital public services and tackle rising inequality," said Ilunga. In Uganda, approximately 37 percent live on less than $1.25 per day. The East African nation also has one of the highest rates of maternal and under-five mortality rates in the world. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Uganda is one of the top ten countries that account for the majority of global maternal deaths.

In a country that lacks access to health services, HOGL's $404 million in taxes represents more than the country's health budget. Former governor of Nigeria's oil-rich Delta State James Ibori was also implicated in the Panama Papers,allegedly using Mossack Fonseca as an agent for four offshore companies in Panama and Seychelles. These entities provide anonymity, hiding true owners' names and actions and thus allowing for finances and assets to be undeclared and untaxed. Though he was detained in 2012 for diverting up to $75 million out of the country, Nigerian authorities estimate that Ibori stole and stored over $290 million in tax havens.

Like Uganda, Nigeria ranks low in health indicators, contributing to some 10 percent of global maternal, infant and child deaths. Poverty has increased in the country with 61 percent living below the poverty line, according to the most recent Nigerian Bureau of Statistics report.

The Niger Delta region in particular, despite being a significant contributor to the country's economy through oil production, remains the poorest and least developed region in Nigeria. In Ibori's Delta state alone, 45 percent of people live in poverty. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) report found that the majority of people in the region lack access to potable water, electricity, health facilities and infrastructure including roads and telecommunications.

"Have you seen any taps here?Water used to run in public taps, but that had stopped 20 years ago. We basically drink from the river and creekshygiene is secondary," a Niger Delta Resident told UNDP.

Though Ibori's stashed money represents only a slice of Nigeria's budget, it is indicative of a global and pervasive problem that goes beyond Mossack Fonseca.

Transparency International's Senior Policy Coordinator Craig Fagan told IPS: "If you think about the millions of files that have been released and the number of high profile individuals [in the Panama Papers], this is just one law firm in Panama." .

"We can be certain that there are many other law firms whether in London, Hong Kong, New York, Miami that are operating similar structures," he said.

According to Oxfam estimates, at least $18.5 trillion is hidden in tax havens worldwide. The organisation found that two thirds of this offshore wealth is hidden in European Union related tax havens while a third is in UK-linked sites where it is left undeclared and untaxed. Oxfam said that their estimate is a conservative one.

The Swiss Leaks, also released by ICIJ in 2015, revealed how over 106,000 clients from Venezuela to Sri Lanka hid more than $100 billion in Swiss HSBC bank accounts.

Another analysis from Tax Justice Network (TJN) reveals that between $21 to $32 trillion is being diverted into offshore companies.

This has enormous effects in developing countries, costing poor nations over $100 billion in lost tax revenues every year, according to Oxfam. The charity also found that tax dodging by multinational corporations alone costs the developing world between $100 billion and $160 billion per year. Added with profit shifting, approximately $250 billion and $300 billion is lost. IPS

This "missing" money could lift every person above the $1.25 per day poverty threshold three times over, according to Brookings Institution calculations.

Oxfam added that for every $1 billion lost through commercial tax evasion, 11 million people at risk across the Sahel region could have enough to eat, 400,000 midwives could be paid in Sub-Saharan Africa which has the highest maternal mortality rates, and 200 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets could be purchased to reduce child mortality from malaria.

In addition to lost development finance, Ilunga also noted to IPS that such actions have exacerbated inequality in the world, stating: "This is the same rigged system that has created the situation wherethe wealth of the richest 1% surpasses the combined wealth of the rest of the world."

Though the use offshore companies is not illegal, Ilunga asserted that the legality of such actions is precisely the issue.

"Tax dodging exists in a legal gray area with some activities clearly violating the spirit of the law even though those activities are not technically illegal. But the fact that these activities are legal is precisely the scandal we are most concerned with," Ilunga said.

Fagan told IPS that it does not matter whether it is legally acceptable to have tax avoidance schemes.

"Just because it's not illegal does not mean it is not a form of manipulation, form of corruption," he said.

Ilunga and Fagan noted that the Panama Papers are a wake-up call and urged governments to end harmful tax practices and close loopholes. They highlighted the need to institute a public registry which lists companies' true owners, where money is being earned and how much is being earned.

Ahead of the United Kingdom's anti-corruption summit to be held in May 2016, Oxfam and TJN also called on the U.K. to lead the fight by halting their large network of tax havens including in the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands.

"The anti-corruption summit provides an opportunity to dismantle the financial secrecy that threatens the [Sustainable Development Goals'] progress against poverty before it even begins," said Oxfam Policy Advisor Luke Gibson and TJN's Director of Research Alex Cobham in a briefing paper.

Cobham told IPS that though global reforms are essential, domestic stakeholders must ensure that tax revenues will be used to help meet the recently adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Included in the SDGs are commitments to reduce illicit financial flows and corruption by 2030 and to strengthen domestic resource mobilization including improving capacity for tax and revenue collection.




Drawing a new map of poverty

Bill Gates :

More people are living longer and living better than at any time in history. In the past 25 years alone, child mortality has declined by more than half. The proportion of people suffering from hunger has been cut almost as much. And countries like China and South Korea-once major recipients of development aid-have emerged as global-economic powers.

But some trends now threaten to slow this progress. In Europe, the refugee crisis and domestic security concerns are creating economic pressures that may lead wealthy governments to reduce their support for the poorest countries. In Africa and Latin America, nations that have relied on exports of natural resources are reeling from the drop in commodity prices, which in turn is reducing their ability to deliver essential services.

Development aid can't by itself make poor countries grow. That comes primarily from the hard work of citizens, governments and the private economy. But well-focused support enables developing countries to do a few really important things better: provide basic health care, increase access to education, and help subsistence farmers improve crop yields.

Yet the way that the current global-aid system measures poverty could deal a setback to countries and people on the cusp of escaping it. When the system was established after World War II, major donor countries like the U.S. and international financial institutions such as the World Bank viewed poor countries and poor people as synonymous. It made sense to use a nation's "average income" as the main factor in deciding which ones qualified for aid.

Over time, however, a new map of poverty has emerged. Today, more than 70% of the world's poorest people-those living on less than $1.90 per day-live in countries defined as middle income, according to the World Bank. Once countries cross the threshold from low-income to middle-income status, the grants and below-market loans that have helped them rise often come to an end. Countries with huge pockets of poverty like Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Ghana and Vietnam could lose as much as 40% of their development assistance in the next few years, a study sponsored by our foundation found.

For example, the average income in Nigeria is nearly twice what it is for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. Yet, more than half of Nigerians still live in extreme poverty. And although Nigeria has a higher average income than countries like Ghana and Vietnam, World Bank data indicate it ranks lower across a range of human development indicators such as life expectancy, literacy, and maternal and child mortality.

Most good governments would agree that a nation's access to development aid should taper off as it becomes better able to stand on its own. But if countries with high levels of inequality and extreme poverty lose aid too soon, good governments trying to do the right thing could find it even harder to address basic development needs and build a sustainable foundation of economic growth.

I am attending the spring meetings of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund this weekend in Washington, D.C., where adapting the aid system to account for shifting patterns of poverty will be a topic of discussion. I'm optimistic that aid experts will embrace some fresh ideas now circulating. These include broadening eligibility requirements to account for health, education, and agricultural productivity, adapting the aid system to address the needs of the poorest where they are, as well as making the transition away from aid more gradual.

Developing countries must also find creative ways to increase government revenue. Even the poorest nations today fund the large majority of essential services like health care and education. But many don't have the expertise and resources to raise more money through broad-based and effective tax collection.

One effort backed by the U.S., the U.K., Germany and more than 30 other countries will double the technical support to poor countries, helping them increase tax collection and domestic revenues. This minimal cost could significantly strengthen the efficiency, effectiveness and transparency of tax systems in poor countries.

It can be done. Rwanda-through a combination of legislation, stronger administration and more effective taxpayer registration and compliance-increased revenues by about 50% between 2001 and 2013, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found.

I've long been an advocate of development aid because I've seen the impact it can have. I'm also a realist who understands that even the wealthiest countries face political and fiscal constraints that will limit their aid in the near term.

The global community must do more to address the deep humanitarian crisis caused by the Syrian war and other devastating conflicts. But it must do so in a way that doesn't cut the most effective aid now going to the poorest countries. This includes critical support provided by the World Bank's International Development Association; the African Development Fund; and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Each deserves the multiyear funding it is seeking this year.

These institutions also need support for their efforts to adapt to the new geography of poverty. With innovative thinking, we can ensure that emerging countries with large remaining pockets of poverty aren't set back by outdated aid policies. And we can lay the foundation for more growth in the coming decades.

(Mr. Gates is co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).
Bio-metric registration will be another area of mismanagement and corruption

MEDIA reports on Tuesday said that in last three months, the mobile operators have lost 29 lakh subscribers following the introduction of re-registration of SIMs under bio-metric methods. Beginning in December last the government move apparently aims at screening out users of mobile phones without due registration now in the hands of illegal VoIP operators, criminal gangs and militant groups. It is clear that once the re-registration will become complete by the end of April the government and also the mobile phone operators will be able to know the real number of users with their detailed personal information and body-centric identifications. The decline in number of cell phone users is not the matter, what is important is unauthorized use of mobile phones must end. We hope that the new system will allow the authorities to check the misuse of cell phones in false names and identification to commit crimes. We also believe that with proper implementation of the drive the system will ensure collection of higher revenue from mobile operators without loopholes. In fact such re-registration and verification system should have come much earlier to curb illegal VoIP business which has alone cost the nation over thousands of crore taka annually. Bangladesh is the second country to introduce the bio-metric registration to ensure that the caller numbers are genuine and it can be reasonably expected that the number of crimes such as murder, extortion and cheating in the country should significantly come down now if otherwise not protected and politically sheltered. The government claims that illegal overseas calls through VoIP (Voice over International Protocol) has declined. It may be true for the time being. But in a country like ours where corruption is a flourishing business it is most likely that new way will be opened up in the name of verification. The State Bank of Bangladesh has failed to ensure proper verification of the use of modern technology and huge money has gone out of the Reserve Bank of the United States without our bank's knowledge. All round plundering is being helped in the name of bureaucratic idea of development.We can only ask the politicians to think of development in terms of service to the people. Big project for big corruption cannot go on safely.The High Court acting on a writ petition has cleared the way for bio-metric method of registration fixing proper responsibility. This is about technology and the High Court Division should not have been asked to give a judicial view on this matter. The clearance obtained from the High Court Division will not in anyway absolve the government from the responsibility of the mess this new system will create.The truth is that some bureaucrats are showing the inexperienced politicians how the country is to be seen developing fast, no matter if the people are not convinced. The people should be ignored because they are not as smarts or knowledgeable as these bureaucrats know what is good for moving forward. The politicians are not in the driving seat as because election politics has cease to meaningful.If the politicians cannot assert their leadership being responsive to the people then we are all to suffer. The politicians will make themselves redundant.
French rock legend Charlelie Couture enlists the help of some of Acadiana's finest musicians to make swamp majik on his latest release.

CharlElie Couture, center, is flanked by his producer Karim Attoumane, third from left, and members of Lost Bayou Ramblers at Dockside Studios. Couture made his upcoming record Lafayette with the help of many notable Lafayette-area musicians. Photo by Shaan Couture and Jacques Gavard

When dealing with an exotic musical legend, its tempting to introduce the figure via his/her backlog of accomplishments. Often, that comes at the expense of a thorough investigation of the artists contemporary work. With the help of a cross-generational cast of Acadianas best and brightest musicians, French rock and roll treasure CharlElie Couture is set to release one of the most playful and internationally accessible records in his catalog: an ode to the Louisiana of his childhood fantasies called Lafayette, out April 29. Couture will play many of the tracks off the record  featuring many of those same musicians  at a rare American performance at this years Festival International de Louisiane.

The recording drips with swamp water, sloshed on by the bucketful thanks to Coutures Cajun-studded sessions at Dockside Studios in Milton. Rarely does an appropriation of local flavor and talent work so well and so diversely, and rarely does the visitor get such a massive turnout of Acadiana-residing, world-class musicianship. The two-week stint featured members of Lost Bayou Ramblers, Feufollet, percussionists Roy Durand and Story Gonsoulin, chanteuse Julie Williams and legend Zachary Richard, among others.

On Stuck In The Mud, the records first single, its obvious how conversant the chameleon Couture is with Louisiana folkways. Swells of brass answer sweaty calls from Richard Comeauxs pedal steel in a dense but discernible stereo field, all anchored by the reedy breath of Chris Staffords (Feufollet) accordion work and a rollicking honky tonk piano.

Couture came to Louisiana seeking a taste of a world his mother discovered as a French teacher in post-war America, traveling between Wisconsin and Alabama.

I wanted to do it right and be legitimate, Couture told me earlier this year. I wanted to find something real respectful between these isolated French cultures. The result on the tapes is one of the best records Ive ever done.

The record is more blues than bayou boogie, leaning heavily on grimy slide guitar work and Coutures nasal drawl. But the blend of culture and instrumentation gets unity from Coutures uniquely French voicing.

The video for Stuck in the Mud, or "Debout dans la boue" in French, conjures even more familiarity thanks to appearances by local notables such as GIVERS members Josh LeBlanc and Tif Lamson, as well as Lafayette-area swamp rock shaman Hart Fortenberry.

Coutures use of Acadiana flare and imagery in the video  it could double as a stunning video brochure for the Bayou Vermilion environs that snake around Dockside  seems honest and authentically playful. Leblanc, Lamson et al tumble, dance and make face-paint of the songs titular mud, with requisite shots of cypress trees in spades. But at no point does it feel like Louisiana  specifically rural Acadiana  is simply an extra or scenery for whatever play Couture is writing. His love for the area beams in the candid and joyful photography, directed by Coutures daughter Shaan. Check it out below:

While he is not the first international artist to fetishize southern Louisiana as a trove of roots, Coutures eclectic philosophy of art makes him uniquely suited to synthesizing a new perspective on Southern folk and blues traditions. As a child of the 1960s and 1970s European rock scene, Couture breathed the ether of American roots through artists like Bob Dylan, JJ Cale and Tom Waits. Critics have long found kindred eccentricities between Waits and Couture, leading many to outright comparisons of the two.

Considering the breadth of his musical output, at present over 25 albums and 16 soundtracks in total, it's not surprising that Couture has enjoyed such illustrious comparisons, Anglo-centrism not withstanding. The man is an artistic force in the Francophone world, the sort of figure mobbed with media attention in his native country, but largely ignored by English-speaking audiences.

That anonymity has been a boon to Coutures career as a visual artist. Back in the early 2000s, Couture expatriated to New York City, establishing a gallery and studio from which he produces pop-influenced expressionism that beats in a definitively American rhythm. Hes long said in interviews that his notoriety as a musician in France had prevented him from being taken seriously a visual artist, despite decades of steady and impressive work in painting, sculpture and photography. This, of course, all sounds like press clipping mumbo jumbo, but take a look at his online gallery to see for yourself. Of particular interest to you may be his renderings of video game characters on shower curtains.

His routine reinvention is part and parcel of his work as a pioneer in the multists movement emanating from northeast France in the mid-to-late 20th century.

Multism, so-defined, is a reaction to what Couture calls specialization in the arts. Conventionally, Couture argues, artists identify by singular media. Musicians make music. Painters paint. Writers write. Couture does all three, and more, with remarkable technical proficiency. Speaking with him is opening a mind humming with ideas.

Most people think if they do one and only thing, its gonna be sufficient, Couture told me. I think if you see with two eyes you see better. You walk better with two legs. You get a three dimensional perception of life.

Coutures performance at Festival will mark only the fifth or sixth time the artist has performed his music in the United States. This year Festival has refocused its energy on its Francophone roots, opting to place Couture in the Thursday night slot, of late typically held by more well-known American acts.

He may not yet be well-known in America, but this appearance will put a legendary stamp on Festivals 30th Anniversary.

CharlElie Couture will perform at Scene Cypress Bayou International on Thursday, April 21 at 9:45 p.m.
Pre-purchase property inspection is a relatively new thing in the United Kingdom. Its not something that most people have heard about, but it has become increasingly popular over the last few years with the rise in property prices and increased demand for high quality homes.

What are the benefits of pre-purchase building inspection? What can you expect to find out when you pay someone else to inspect your home before you buy it? And what should you look for during an inspection?

Many people want to know if theyre buying a house thats been well maintained or if its had any serious problems. If youve found a place on the market that seems attractive, but then discover some issues after moving in, you may not be as excited about buying it as you thought you were.

Its important to do your due diligence when looking at properties. A lot goes into making a property appealing to potential buyers, from the landscaping to the flooring to the kitchen appliances. The same applies when inspecting a property  there are many things that need checking over to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Here are some of the benefits of performing a pre-purchase inspection:

You get to see exactly what will happen to your money

When you go shopping for a new car, youll probably be shown several different models. You might even be shown one that looks like a great value, but doesnt fit around all of the extra features that you want. When it comes time to actually buy the vehicle, however, you wont have seen how your money will be spent on it once you drive it off the showroom floor.

Likewise, when you shop for a new home, you dont really know what youre getting yourself into until you move in. In order to get a feel for whether the home youre considering is what you want, you normally have to spend quite a bit of time inside it. This allows you to learn more about everything that youre going to be spending your hard-earned cash on.

A pre-purchase building inspection gives you much the same kind of experience without having to spend thousands of dollars. Since youre paying for the service, you can expect to see exactly what youre paying for, instead of just seeing a vague idea of what you might end up with.

You find out about potential major repairs

Some buildings are very expensive to maintain, which means that owners often neglect them for the sake of saving money. While youre paying for a building inspection, youre also paying for a professional who knows how to spot signs of trouble and repair work that needs doing.

If you notice that a particular area of your new home needs fixing right away, you can call in an expert to take care of it quickly. If you find that theres something wrong with your boiler, you wont have to wait weeks for a plumber to come over and fix it. Instead, youll have access to a solution immediately.

You can save hundreds of pounds by finding out about potential problems early on

One of the biggest expenses when you first buy a home is the cost of moving in. Many people dont realize this until its too late. Buying a home involves not only paying for the actual house, but also for moving costs, furniture, and other items that have to be moved along with the home.

Having a good idea ahead of time of what youre likely to encounter can help you avoid these kinds of costs. If you know youll need to replace the plumbing system, for example, youll be able to put together a budget for the expense and plan accordingly.

You can protect your investment by finding out if the homes been well cared for

While there are plenty of people who think that houses always look better when theyre newly built, youd be surprised at how well maintained older residences can still look nice. Sometimes, though, those homes need some additional maintenance to keep them looking their best.

This could involve repairs that arent so noticeable or small improvements that you wouldnt consider otherwise. Even worse, some houses have fallen into disrepair without anyone noticing. This is why having a professional perform a building inspection prior to purchasing a home is such a big benefit.

Not only will it give you insight into the state of the property, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing youre not getting taken advantage of. As long as youre aware of the potential pitfalls, youll have less reason to worry about the state of your new home.

You can use information gathered during a building inspection to negotiate a lower price

If youre worried about buying a home because you suspect that it may need extensive renovation work, you may already have a rough idea of how much work youll need to do to bring it up to scratch. That knowledge can come in handy if you decide to buy the home.

You can use all of the details that you gather during a building inspection to present a realistic picture of what the home is worth to prospective buyers. If a potential buyer thinks that the home is worth more than what you paid for it, you can try negotiating a lower price.

You can sell your home faster and for more money

If you decide to list your home on the market soon after buying it, youll need to price it accurately in order to attract buyers. But if youve already done a thorough building inspection, youll know exactly what work is needed and what the current market conditions are.

In other words, youll be able to make a more accurate estimate of the amount of money youve invested in the home and how much its worth. If you find that youre selling your house for close to its full market value, you can use this information to convince the potential buyer that your home is worth the asking price.

Even if youre planning to stay in the home for a while before you decide to sell, the fact that you did a thorough building inspection will give you more confidence when listing it. Prospective buyers will know exactly what theyre paying for.

Your home will hold its value longer

As mentioned earlier, the value of a home depends heavily upon the condition of the building itself. If your home is in bad shape, potential buyers wont be interested in buying it. On the other hand, if youve performed a thorough building inspection and know what sort of repairs are necessary, you can offer your prospective buyer a compelling reason to invest in your property.

When you buy a home, youre essentially agreeing to have it inspected periodically to ensure that it stays in top shape. Not only does this allow you to avoid expensive repairs down the road, but it can also increase the value of your home.

You can make smart decisions about property investments

Buying real estate isnt as simple as just driving a couple of minutes to pick up a house. There are lots of considerations involved, ranging from location to cost. The same is true when youre investing in property.

If you find a house that meets all of your requirements, youll want to make sure that you have a solid understanding of where it stands with regards to the rest of the market. If you havent spent enough time researching the area, you could inadvertently end up with a bad deal.

There are lots of resources available online that can help you determine the overall level of competition in your area. They can also help you figure out if there are any properties that meet your requirements that you didnt know about.

If you own rental property, you can use the information to identify tenants who might cause damage

If you own rental property and youve noticed that certain tenants consistently cause damage, you can use the results of a building inspection to identify them. You can then contact them directly to let them know that youre watching them closely and that you dont appreciate the problem theyre causing.

They might start taking better care of their homes, which would be good news for everyone. It could also be the case that youll find out that theyre responsible for previous damages that werent caught during a previous visit.

You can make smarter decisions about hiring contractors

If youve hired contractors to build or repair your home, you might want to ask them for references. However, unless you perform a thorough building inspection, you might not know exactly what to look for.

For instance, maybe you only checked the roof for leaks or the walls for cracks. You might not have looked underneath the foundation for anything that could cause a future issue. By performing a building inspection, you can ensure that you hire reputable contractors who will be trustworthy with your money.

You can avoid purchasing a home thats in poor condition

Of course, the main benefit of structural inspections perth is that it helps you avoid purchasing a home thats in poor condition. Before you make the decision to buy a home, you should do whatever you can to find out about the state of the building.

You can also ask your realtor about what sorts of inspections are typically recommended. Some agents say that its standard practice to check the heating system, the roof, the electrical wiring, and the floors. Others will tell you that they recommend that you check the entire structure.

Either way, if you choose to hire an inspector, youll find out exactly what needs to be fixed and how much it will cost to do so.

As a result, it can be concluded that a pre-purchase building inspection is highly important for the buyers because it provides transparency regarding the current conditions of the structure. Additionally, the building owner is made aware of any upgrades or repairs that are required, which could lead to a fair deal throughout the purchasing and selling process.
President Joe Biden has decided to ban Russian oil imports, toughening the toll on Russia's economy in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine. The United States generally imports about 100,000 barrels a day from Russia, only about 5% of Russia's crude oil exports, according to Rystad Energy. Last year, roughly 8% of U.S. imports of oil and petroleum products came from Russia. Gas prices have been rising for weeks due to the conflict and in anticipation of potential sanctions on the Russian energy sector. The U.S. national average for a gallon of gasoline soared 45 cents a gallon in the past week and topped $4.06 on Monday, according to auto club AAA. Should the US ban Russian oil imports over Ukraine war?

You voted:
PINCKNEYVILLE  In June 2015, after suffering through a kidney disease for nearly 30 years, Dr. Christopher Reyes, a doctor of medicine at Pinckneyville Community Hospital, traveled to the Philippines to receive a kidney.

A month later, after years of being tethered to an oxygen tank, Diane Hutchcraft, also a Pinckneyville resident, traveled to St. Louis to receive a lung transplant.

On Thursday, April 28, as part of National Donate Life Month at Pinckneyville Community Hospital, the pair will participate in a free talk discussing their personal experiences on how organ donation changed their lives.

According to Jennifer Barbour, marketing director for Pinckneyville Community Hospital, this will be the hospital's first donor event.

In addition to encouraging individuals for registration as organ, eye, or tissue donors, the director said the purpose for the talk is to educate individuals in the community about the renewing power of donations.

Our goal is to spread the word that donation changes lives every day, she said. These remarkable life changes are made possible because someone made the decision to donate. Everyone has the power to donate life.

The talk, which will be in the Pinckneyville Community Hospital classroom, is an extension to the donor drive, which is April 14, as part of National Donate Life Month.

We had 19 people sign up to be organ and tissue donors through the Secretary of State, Barbour shared. I was pleased to hear that many of our employees, patients, and visitors were already registered.

The talk is free to the public, and will begin at 6:30 p.m.

Those interested in attending are encouraged to contact Barbour at 618-357-8898 for reservations. Reservations are requested by noon Friday, April 22.
SPRINGFIELD  Votes would be asked to change the Illinois Constitution to declare that the state should be responsible for the majority of public school funding under a measure that advanced in the state House Monday.

Republicans on a House education panel that approved the proposal on a 12-4 vote were skeptical of the idea, saying it would make it difficult to fund other budget obligations.

Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan, who is carrying the bill, told the panel of lawmakers he wants to bolster the state's constitutional language to call education a fundamental "right" instead of the current language that declares it a "goal." He said the change would strengthen the state's obligation to fund schools so they're not so reliant on property taxes.

Property taxes today make up the majority of support for public schools, Madigan said, with the state pitching in about 34 percent of the total cost. Madigan's proposal doesn't put a percentage on how much the state would be on the hook for. But he repeatedly said it would amount to at least 51 percent under the proposed language, which says the state has the "preponderant financial responsibility" to fund schools.

The amendment would be on November's ballot if three-fifths of each legislative chamber approves it. Those votes are expected to come later.

Madigan said if the change happens, "going forward, those of us who are advocating for more state support for education would have a constitutional backing for our argument."

Senate committee advances Manar's education funding reform SPRINGFIELD  The latest attempt to overhaul the way Illinois fund its public schools has ta

He also said that "education would be placed on a higher plane than other rights afforded to the citizens of this state under the constitution."

The potential for Illinois to take on a greater funding obligation for schools worried Republicans who said the state is already in dire financial straits with other responsibilities, including payments to a pension system that's in the red at more than $111 billion.

"Aren't you concerned that this language also, depending on good years or bad years, will create some very big concerns about lack of flexibility in the area of funding?" Rockford Republican Rep. Joe Sosnowski asked Madigan.

With the state in the 10th month without a budget, funding public schools has become one of the latest battle lines in the standoff between Democrats who control the Legislature and Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner.

Rauner has urged lawmakers to pass a "clean" budget bill for education to ensure schools open in the fall. Democrats are saying they first want to change the formula for funding education to make it more equitable.
Registered Illinois voters overwhelmingly support broad criminal justice reforms, and would be more likely to vote for legislators who support measures to reduce the prison population, according to a new poll released this week by the U.S. Justice Action Network, a national nonpartisan organization focused on criminal justice reform.

The poll found that voters strongly believe too many people are imprisoned as a result of mandatory minimum laws for certain crimes, and that judges should have more discretion in determining sentences.

Two-thirds of voters indicated that knowledge of their state legislators support for reform bills would make them more likely to re-elect them, while only 5 percent said it would make them less likely to re-elect them, according to the poll conducted by Fako Research & Strategies.

The poll showed voters generally shared these attitudes regardless of party affiliation, and across the state, though the poll does show some differences in attitudes between people living in northern Illinois and Southern Illinois.

SIU professor tapped to review inmate programs for effectiveness CARBONDALE  An SIU professor has been tapped by the Illinois Department of Corrections to c

In suburban Cook County and Chicago, voters were more likely to feel that the system needs a complete overhaul or major reform. For example, 75 percent of Chicago residents surveyed felt that way, and 69 percent of suburban Cook County residents, compared to 39 percent in Southern Illinois. Nineteen percent of Southern Illinois residents reported that they felt like the system is working as it is, compared to only 6 percent in both Chicago and suburban Cook County.

In Southern Illinois, 37 percent said they would like to see minor reforms, while only 11 percent felt that way in Chicago, and 18 percent in suburban Cook County.

The Justice Action Network discussed the results with media and answered questions on Monday afternoon. A broad cross-section of representatives from various advocacy and policy organizations on the left and right  ACLU of Illinois and Right on Crime, respectively  were part of the teleconference as well as Rodger Heaton, who is serving as the states Public Safety director, a position he was appointed to by Gov. Bruce Rauner.

Rauner has said he wants to reduce the prison population by 25 percent in 10 years.

Voters and lawmakers in deep Southern Illinois have historically been more likely to oppose broad-scale prison reform efforts, which likely speaks to cultural differences and economic challenges. There are about 11 state prisons and facilities in the bottom third of Illinois.

While the poll broke down the attitude of Southern Illinois voters south of Springfield, the pollsters did not look at the attitude of voters and lawmakers in prison towns. The sample size would be too small to do so, said Dave Fako, one of the pollsters.

ACLU poll: Illinois criminal justice system 'broken' The American Civil Liberties Union released a poll Thursday finding that a majority of voter

To a question about the attitudes of deep Southern Illinois residents, Heaton noted they should be aware that the prison system is presently overcrowded, and even a 25 percent reduction would not move the system to a point where the department would be looking at prison closures.

When gubernatorial administrations propose closing prisons in Southern Illinois, there is always a public outcry that follows.

Former Gov. Pat Quinn closed the Tamms Correctional Center in January 2013, and Rauner closed the Hardin County Work Camp in December. Former Gov. George Ryan's 2002 proposal to close Vienna Correctional Center was unsuccessful.
SPRINGFIELD  There are once again competing proposals to get money to public universities that have been deprived of state funding during the nearly yearlong budget standoff at the Capitol.

The House Executive Committee signed off on a plan Tuesday from Rep. Rita Mayfield, D-Waukegan, that would send a full years worth of funding to the universities hardest hit by the lack of a budget: Chicago State, Eastern Illinois, Western Illinois and Northeastern Illinois universities. Mayfield said she plans to amend the bill to add $10 million for Southern Illinois University, 5 percent of its annual state funding.

Illinois education-funding amendment gets initial OK SPRINGFIELD  Votes would be asked to change the Illinois Constitution to declare that the s

Without this funding, we will see one university close this month, Mayfield said, referring to Chicago State. Eastern and Western arent far behind, she said.

The idea is to keep the doors open until, hopefully, we get a budget this summer, Mayfield said

The total price tag of her plan is $166.3 million, and the revenue would come from forgiving repayment of money borrowed from special state funds to plug holes in last years budget.

Rep. Mike Fortner, R-West Chicago, is proposing a plan that cover one-third of annual funding to all nine public university systems and one semesters worth of grants to low-income students through the Monetary Award Program, which isnt included in Mayfields plan.

Rauner pushes for increase in performance-based higher education funding SPRINGFIELD -- While Gov. Bruce Rauner is calling for a 20 percent cut in guaranteed state s

Fortners plan would cost $558.3 million, with the revenue coming from the states education assistance fund. The fund, which gets dedicated revenue from the state income tax, gambling and other sources, is expected to have $600 million available by June 30, the end of the fiscal year.

Fortner said his stopgap plan, which has the support of Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and Sen. Pat McGuire, D-Joliet, chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee, would provide a critical piece to bridge us across until a comprehensive solution is achieved.

This plan will provide certainty for students as well as universities, he said.

This is the time of year is very important, Fortner said. This is when students are making their commitments to where they will attend next fall.

McGuire, who joined nine House Republicans at a Tuesday news conference announcing the plan, said jobs and programs have been cut at universities as a result of the budget stalemate. The next step is the possible loss of accreditation, particularly at Chicago State.

If that happens to a university, McGuire said, we might as well put a tag on the toe of that institution.

Fortners plan faces an uphill battle in the House.

JALC students, faculty fed up with budget issues CARTERVILLE  For Ashley Richardson, lack of state funding for Illinois public colleges and 

Steve Brown, a spokesman for House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, said there are two better options already on the table.

This comes in a distant third at the moment, Brown said.

In addition to Mayfields bill, theres also a $3.9 billion spending bill on Rauners desk that would authorize spending for all of higher education, including community colleges and MAP grants, and other social services that arent receiving funding due to the impasse.

Rauner has said he wont sign the bill because theres no way to pay for it.

Rep. Reggie Phillips, R-Charleston, said he supports both Mayfields and Fortners plans because Eastern Illinois is in desperate need of state money.

Im a chief co-sponsor on hers; Im a co-sponsor on his, Phillips said. Which one comes to the top, Im going to be there for.

Sen. Dale Righter, R-Mattoon, who also represents Eastern Illinois, has filed legislation similar to Fortner's. Instead of funding all universities, however, it would dole out $400 million from the education assistance fund based on need. It would also include $100 million from that fund for community colleges and $365 million from general revenue for a full year's worth of MAP grants.
Carbondale is dying. Its really that simple. Carbondale is dying because SIUC as we know it will die if the state fails to give it the funding it needs to succeed.

If you study at the university, your education is at risk. SIUC will do all it can to get you out the door before the doors close, but what will a degree be worth from a university that no longer exists, or exists in such a maimed form that its no longer recognizable?

If you work at the university, your job is at risk. Full professor, office staff, janitor, deanit doesnt matter. Youve put in years here, maybe decades, put down roots. Youre an academic? Good luck finding a job elsewhere in academia, which is a hard enough job market in the best of times. Not an academic? Well, good luck finding a job locally, with SIUC gone.

If you have another job in Carbondale, your job is at risk. As the university goes, so goes our local economy. Sure, Carbondale would survive, but at a fraction of its current size, with empty houses, empty businesses. Cairo survives too, after all.

Sure, maybe SIUC will survive as well, even if the state fails to provide anything like the funding it once did. SIUC could survive as a school one-third its former size, a school the size of Western or Eastern (at least before their cuts). We could survive as a regional university, abandoning our mission as a research university. But such a school is not likely to flourish in the poorest region of the state, the region farthest from the center of population in Chicagoland.

More than Carbondale is at stake. Illinois cant flourish without highly educated citizens and workers. Yet were destroying public higher education in this state. Yes, many students will go out of state and do just fine. But many of them wont be coming back. Others, tied to places that no longer offer access to affordable higher education, will never go to college at all. Yet we all that know higher education is more necessary than ever to succeed in the todays world. Illinois is driving its more ambitious and resourceful students to go elsewhere, and robbing those left behind of the education that could transform their lives.

We all know this, reallybut whats to be done? The state government must start funding state universities again, and fund them at a level that will allow then to do their work. Universities have been losing state funding for decades: we cant afford to view a 20% cut, the figure from the governors most recent budget proposal, as some sort of victory.

I for my part blame Governor Rauner more than the Democrats; it is undeniable that things have gotten far worse since he was elected. But maybe you differ about the governor. I cant convince you of that in 750 words.

But heres where I think we might just all agree. If you represent Southern Illinois in the General Assembly, you need to support Southern Illinois University, and our local community colleges. So if theres a bill that would provide adequate funding for public higher education, you vote for it. I dont care if its a Democratic bill or a Republican bill, if its pushed by Bruce Rauner, Michael Madigan, or by Beelzebub himself: you vote for it.

Its not enough anymore to just blame the other side. Might that get you re-elected again, with money and support from Rauner or Madigan? Maybe. Or you could represent the people who elected you. You know, weve voted for Democrats in Southern Illinois, and weve voted for Republicans. What were really looking for is people who will represent us, and our interests. Vote for us, and we will vote for you.

It really that simple. Public higher education is dying in Illinois, and its demise will bring down Carbondale with it, maim all of Southern Illinois, and do tremendous harm to the entire state. So if theres a bill that funds higher education, you vote for it. Terri Bryant, Brandon Phelps, John Bradley, David Luechtefeld, and Gary Forby, its time to vote for higher education funding. Governor Rauner, sign public education funding into law.

Tell your state representatives they need to vote for higher education. And if they wont vote for us, tell them we wont be voting for them in November.
By the next day, Bill Clinton was feeling remorse. Almost.

"Now I like and believe in protests," he explained to an audience at Penn State Behrend. "But I never thought I should drown anybody else out. ... So I did something yesterday in Philadelphia. I almost want to apologize for it, but I want to use it as an example of the danger threatening our country."

That danger, said the former president, is the inability to have respectful discussions with those with whom we disagree. "We've got to stop that in this country," he said. "We've got to listen to each other again."

The reference was to an incident April 7 wherein the 42nd president, while campaigning to help his wife Hillary become the 45th, got into a shouting match with Black Lives Matter activists in Philadelphia. Had this been a Trump rally, the protesters would have been beaten up, so we can at least be thankful the incident ended without stitches or icepacks.

Not to say it wasn't ugly. In a sometimes angry exchange, Clinton defended himself against hecklers' charges that the crime bill he signed in 1994, with its harsher sentencing, new prison construction, three strikes rule and revocation of education grants for inmates, helped fuel the mass incarceration crisis that has decimated the African-American community.

That's nothing but true, as Clinton himself acknowledged in a speech last summer before the NAACP. "I signed a bill that made the problem worse," he said. "And I want to admit it."

He should have stuck with that. Thursday's confrontation was light on contrition and long on finger wagging. Clinton reminded protesters that the bill in question was signed in an era of lurid headlines about gangs shooting children. "You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter," he shouted.

He credited the bill with dropping the nation's crime rate to historic lows, which is a dubious claim. As PolitiFact has since observed, the crime rate was already falling when the bill was enacted.

Clinton also noted that the bill was passed with the support of at least some African-American leaders. That part, at least, is true; it was also supported by his wife and her chief rival, Bernie Sanders. Even so, it would be naive to believe opportunism did not play a part in Clinton's signing the bill. After all, it gave him the perfect retort to Republicans who accused him of being "soft on crime."

Now, 22 years later, the bill is back in the news and the ex-president wants to use an argument about it as an example of political incivility? Yes, that is a gnawing concern. But if Clinton thinks it's the key takeaway from last week's confrontation, he is missing the point. It is immaterial whether he and those protesters ever apologize for talking over one another.

Who's going to apologize for all the nonviolent African-American offenders who have lost decades of their lives behind bars while white offenders who had the same records and committed the same crimes went free? Or for children sentenced to live in motherless homes and eat at fatherless tables? Or for the fact that the land of the free now has the highest incarceration rate on Earth?

Who will apologize that a community already withstanding high rates of poverty, unemployment and neglect has been hollowed out by an ill-conceived law?

Who will apologize? More importantly, who will work to change it?

That's the question for which African Americans and all voters who care about justice must demand answers. "I almost want to apologize," doesn't cut it. It's weaselly and ultimately, it's not even on topic. If he truly desires to be forthright and to engage the people his crime bill has injured, then what the ex-president needs to say should be obvious:

"I passed a bad law. Here's how Hillary will fix it."
Glory Communications Inc. has sold four radio stations, including two in The T&D Region, to New York-based Community Broadcasters.

The stations purchased by Community Broadcasters are:

WSPX 94.5 FM  Bowman

WTQS 1490 AM  Cameron

WLJI 98.3 FM  Summerton

WPDT 105.1 FM  Coward

Community Broadcasters has filed all transfer applications with the Federal Communications Commission and is awaiting final approval.

The company began operating the four signals purchased from Glory Communications on Tuesday and plans to continue the current format.

The staff will remain, although offices and studios are being consolidated with the other stations Community Broadcasters bought in Orangeburg, Florence and Sumter last year.

Ive spent nearly three decades building my career in broadcasting and am so proud of what we achieved with Glory Communications, said Alex Snipe, president and owner of Glory Communications.

Community Broadcasters is co-owned and operated by Jim Leven and Bruce Mittman in partnership with Northwood Ventures in Long Island, New York.

Knowing that Jim and Bruce are focused on being the voice of the community, Im very confident with the decision to sell these four signals to Community Broadcasting, Snipe said.

Were thrilled to support our current holdings in South Carolina with this acquisition, Leven said. In September, we doubled the size of Community Broadcasters with the purchase of Miller Communications in South Carolina, adding twelve radio stations, seven translators and three TV construction permits in Orangeburg, Sumter and Florence, South Carolina. These four new signals will continue to fill in these fast-growing markets.

The T&D Region stations purchased from Miller Communications were WGFG FM 105.1 in Branchville and WQKI FM 102.9 in Orangeburg.

In addition to their 16 signals throughout South Carolina, Community Broadcasters also owns 16 stations in Upstate New York, bringing its total holdings to 42 with plans to continue their national expansion.
Eddie Gray is no longer in the U.S. Marine Corps, but the 41-year-old continues his sacrifices for his fellow veterans.

Gray is walking across America in an effort to highlight the healthcare issues facing his brothers and sisters.

The only regret I would have had was not doing it, Gray said Monday during a stop at The T&D.

This was my idea since 1998 when I was in the Marine Corps. Over the years it has turned into something different since Iraq and Afghanistan and, of course, losing friends not only through combat but also through suicide, he said.

Gray started on his journey in Ashland, Montana, on April 3, 2008, a day before his 33rd birthday.

South Carolina is his 14th state and he doesnt plan to stop until hes circled, counter-clockwise, all of the border states in the nations contiguous mainland.

The 6-foot, 3-inch Gray, who often carries a POW/MIA flag on his 70-pound military pack, says he wants all veterans, both living and deceased, to know you are not forgotten.

Especially our younger ones who are lost, Gray said. They were living with mom and dad back home before they joined the military and now they are in the war. When they are thrown back in the real world, they dont know what to do. Suicide rates are very high for the younger vets.

Gray also suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.

The former Marine infantryman was severely injured in 2000 when a vehicle accident shattered his sternum, resulting in a numerous surgeries and a medical discharge from Camp Lejeune.

The seat belt broke my sternum, Gray said. It saved my life and killed me at the same time.

Gray says he died three times during that incident  twice on the way to the hospital and once at the hospital. He was revived every time.

I am happy it happened stateside, Gray said. If I was overseas, I probably would have died there.

After his full recovery, Gray, who is single and unmarried, began working for the U.S. Forest Service. But he felt a greater calling to embark on this walk.

And so he did around 1:29 p.m. on April 3.

Gray began his journey heading to Seattle. He faced difficulties.

There were five mountain passes I wanted to get over, Gray said. In that area in the Northwest, it snows up to May sometimes. I had to go through some blizzards through the mountain passes and I just missed an avalanche that was in Idaho.

Gray said The American Legion in Idaho provided him with a place to stay out of the snow.

In addition to blizzards, Gray has been followed by wild animals, has been sideswiped by vehicles and gotten into a scuffle with another human.

The last major vehicle I was hit by was in Texas, he said.

He has had nine arthroscopic surgeries on his knees due to the daily grind of walking. He has also had his belongings stolen.

But nothing is stopping Gray.

At each state, he visits with local politicians at capitols and troops at military bases to discuss how the nation can better care for its veterans.

While in Orangeburg, he plans to visit local officials. He also plans to visit the Orangeburg National Guard, Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion.

During his visits to various veterans hospitals and organizations, Gray says he has been able to tour and take notes about what he has experienced. He is planning to compile his experiences in a book one day with plans to give the books to those veterans organizations he has visited, such as the American Legion.

He says veterans groups have provided him clothing and food. He has also worn out a few shoes along the way. Veterans have also opened their doors and have even paid for a hotel stay.

They are supportive, he said. Most people are. People will see you walk beside the road and honk their horn.

Gray walks an average about 30 miles a day, primarily at night when it is cooler.

At one stretch in Texas, he walked for 54 hours straight and 123 miles without sleep. Gray says he walks on average about 3 miles per hour.

Texas and California are two big states, he said. It took me over a year and a half to get through California and over two years to get through Texas.

Despite the pain, Gray says he is going all the way to Maine.

He says Alaska is too far north and Hawaii ... well ... is out there.

Only one guy walked on water and it was not me, Gray said.

There is no quitting bone in my body, Gray said. The hardest part was the first week and getting my body used to it. Your body is so sore, but after your body gets used to it, it becomes mechanical.

For more information about Gray and his cause visit www.awarriorswalk.org.
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/By Azernews/

By Laman Ismayilova

The Center of Contemporary Art in Baku has opened an art exhibition of works by young artists, students of Baku Art Corner studio, Trend Life reports.

The exhibition titled "Spring inspiration" included approximately 110 paintings of 45 young artists.

The artists performed in two age groups - 4 to 8 and from 9 to 15 years.

Baku Art Corner functions with the assistance of honored artist of Azerbaijan Esmer Narimanbayova and art director of the studio, artist Safia Mirbabaeva.

Addressing the event, secretary of Artists Union of Azerbaijan, the People's Artist of Azerbaijan Agali Ibrahimov; cultural adviser at French Embassy in Azerbaijan Yoann Litterer, appraised the works presented in the venue. Bright and colorful works of artists emit energy and light.

Then, students and their parents thanked the teachers for the professional skills, pedagogical talent and to instill in children from his childhood love of art.

Paintings are presented at the exhibition in various techniques such as watercolor, pastel, acrylic, batik and oil painting.



Artists were awarded special certificates.
Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev extended condolences to Ecuadorian counterpart Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado on Apr. 18.

"We were deeply saddened by the news of heavy casualties and destructions as a result of a severe earthquake in your country," said President Aliyev.

"On behalf of the people of Azerbaijan and on my own behalf, I extend my deepest condolences to the bereaved families and loved ones of those who died, wish the injured recovery, and hope for the soonest elimination of the tragedy's consequences," the president added.
Chairman of Azerbaijan`s Supreme Court Ramiz Rzayev has today met with visiting chairman of the Supreme Court of Appeal of Turkey Ismail Rustu Cirit, chief public prosecutor Mehmet Akarca, president of the Turkish Academy of Justice Y?lmaz Akcil.





Mr. Rzayev noted that the demonstration of solidarity by Azerbaijani and Turkish presidents during the reciprocal trips and international events opened huge opportunities for the further expansion of unity in Turkic world. He hailed the relations between the judicial-legal systems of the two countries, and informed the delegation on the activity and structure of the Supreme Court.





Mr.Rzayev expressed confidence that the current visit of the Turkish delegation would contribute to the further development of cooperation between the courts of the two countries.





Ismail Rustu Cirit, in turn, highlighted the activity of the Supreme Court of Appeal, and stressed the importance of cooperation between the two countries.





Then, the Turkish delegation viewed the building of the Court.





Ismail Rustu Cirit signed the guest book.





Prior to the meeting, the Turkish delegation visited the Alley of Honors, and laid a wreath at the tomb of Azerbaijan`s national leader Heydar Aliyev.





They also put flowers at the grave of prominent ophthalmologist, academician Zarifa Aliyeva.





The Turkish delegation then visited the Alley of Martyrs to put flowers at the graves of Azerbaijani brave sons who gave their lives for the country's independence and territorial integrity.





They also visited the Eternal Flame monument and a monument to Turkish soldiers.




/By Azernews/

By Nazrin Gadimova

Although the Council of Europe has no direct mandate, the parliamentary diplomacy can help bring closer positions of parties to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Pedro Agramunt, the President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), made the remark as part of a spring session held in Strasbourg on April 18.

Addressing the event, Agramunt said the recent developments on the contact line of troops between the Armenian and Azerbaijani armies have led to numerous casualties among civilians as well.

"The territorial integrity of 47 member states [of the Council of Europe] should be respected," he added. "I condemn violence. We should be cautious to the highest extent in this matter and avoid excessive criticism."

Agramunt noted that both sides should ensure the de-escalation of the situation and stop violence.

"International law provides a legal basis for a peaceful settlement of the conflict. Armenia and Azerbaijan should fulfill their commitments under the international law and achieve a peaceful settlement to the conflict," the PACE president said, adding that this issue will remain a primary topic on the agenda of the organization.

Meanwhile, the head of the Azerbaijani delegation to PACE, Samad Seyidov believes that the timing of Armenia's criminal provocation against Azerbaijan wasn't chosen accidentally: Armenia launched military operations in a time when the West and Azerbaijan are strengthening cooperation.

"We will witness even greater tragedies if we appease the aggressor," Seyidov stressed, addressing the session.

After Armenia breached the fragile ceasefire on April 2, the international community expressed concern over the situation and urged the parties to the conflict to strictly observe the truce.

The OSCE Minsk Group, which has been the sole mediator of the conflict over the past 22 years, failed to resolve the long-lasting conflict that emerged as a result of Armenian aggression on the background of the USSRs breakup.

Armenia occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions, after laying territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor that caused a brutal war in the early 1990s.

As a result of the military aggression of Armenia, over 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed, over 4,000 are reported missing and almost 100,000 were injured, and 50,000 were disabled.

The UN Security Council has passed four resolutions on Armenian withdrawal from the Azerbaijani territory, but they have not been enforced to this day.
Inter-parliamentary cooperation to assist for finding the ways of solution of conflicts in Eurasian region said Parliament Speaker Ogtay Asadov in the first meeting of speakers of parliaments of the Eurasian countries in Moscow, Russia.





The speaker said the world faced with the challenges as the financial crisis, terrorism, climate changes, food and energy security and the cooperation among the states plays crucial role in settlement of these problems.





Mr. Asadov highlighted the importance of the inter-parliamentary diplomacy. He also said as the result of the Armenia-Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh conflict 20 percent of the Azerbaijani territories were occupied by Armenia. Azerbaijan faced with the ethnic cleansing policy; more than one million Azerbaijanis became IDPs and refugees. The international organizations, including the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly adopted the documents demanding unconditional, immediate withdrawal of Armenian Armed Forces from the Azerbaijan`s occupied lands. The OSCE Minsk Group Co-chair countries reaffirmed that status-quo is unacceptable. The conflict must be resolved soon, the speaker added.





Mr. Asadov also said Armenia refused to honour the international efforts that directed to solving the conflict. Maintaining the conflict in this situation is the main obstacle to peace and stability in the world, especially in the Southern Caucasus region.





The recent developments in the line of contacts of Armenian and Azerbaijani troops are evidence for that. Armenian armed forces shelled fire to settlements in Azerbaijani positions. Azerbaijani Armed Forces repulsed the Armenian provocation for protection of the civilians living near the contact line, The speaker said.

The meeting discussed the current state and prospects of development of cooperation in the for welfare of the Eurasian region in the 21st century.





The sitting themed "Inter-parliamentary cooperation for joint prosperity of the countries in the Eurasian region in the 21st century" was initiated by the Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation Sergey Naryshkin and Chairman of the Parliament of the Republic of Korea Chung Eui-hwa.





The event is attended by representatives of 19 countries. The agenda includes the development of inter-parliamentary dialogue, issues of expansion of cooperation in political, economic, legal and humanitarian spheres, as well as in environmental protection.





In addition, the meeting will focus on the consolidation of peace and stability in the region, countering extremism and inter-religious dialogue.




/By Azernews/

By Aynur Karimova

Baku citizens and the guests of the Pearl of the Caspian Sea will have an access to two more subway stations in the capital, which is expected to ease the daily travelling plans.

Those, who wish to travel to the regions of Azerbaijan from Baku International Bus Terminal or from the Terminal to the center of the capital, will be able to make a cheap travel by using the newly-commissioned Avtovagzal and Memar Ajami stations, which were commissioned on April 19.

President Ilham Aliyev attended the opening of Avtovagzal and Memar Ajami stations on the new violet line of Baku Metro.

Chairman of Baku Metro CJSC Zaur Huseynov informed the head of state about the conceptual development scheme of the Baku Metro lines.

The conceptual development scheme envisages expanding the existing infrastructure in phases by 2030, and creating a huge underground transport network.

Under the scheme, Baku Metro will consist of five lines, 76 stations and 119 km-long network of underground tunnels. Some 53 new metro stations will be built until 2030.

The head of state cut the ribbon symbolizing the opening of Avtovagzal station, and reviewed the conditions created here.

The station, the construction of which started in September, 2009, consists of the platform, two vestibules, eight exits, ventilation point and two pyramids.

The total length of the station is 560 meters. An elevator was installed here for persons with disabilities.

President Aliyev then arrived at Memar Ajami station by train.

The total length of the station is 168.5 meters. There are three exits and an elevator for persons with disabilities.

Functioning for about 46 years the Baku Metro is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to travel in Baku. The fare for a subway is 20 kopecks ($0.13).

It is currently over 35 kilometers long with 25 stations and the Green, Red and Purple lines.

Avtovagzal station is the first of the 12 subway stations of the Purple line, which starts from the International Bus Terminal Complex and ends at the Garachukhur district.

Opened in 1967, the Baku Metro is implementing a 20-year program for the development of the subway system.

Some subways are also planned to open in the most populated and developed cities of the country, including Sumgayit, Nakhchivan and Ganja.

On the same day, President Aliyev also attended the opening of a new administrative building of Azeravtoyol OJSC.

The large-scale repair-construction and landscaping work was carried out in the area, which occupies a total area of 1.7 hectares. Under the Decree of President Ilham Aliyev dated March 9, 2016, Azeryolservis OJSC was renamed to Azeravtoyol OJSC.

A bust of national leader Heydar Aliyev was installed in the building. There are photo stands reflecting the national leader's life and political activities, as well as President Ilham Aliyev's attention to the development of road and transport infrastructure in Azerbaijan.

The building has a canteen, 252-seat auditorium and elevators. The building was equipped with the most modern ventilation and fire protection systems.

High quality building materials were used in the construction of the building. The modern video observation and computer systems were installed here. The network of a new digital communication system was also established. The design of the roof of the building was completely renovated. The green areas were laid out in the area.




/By Azernews/

By Aynur Karimova

Azerbaijan and Turkey, the two neighboring countries and strategic partners, are keen on further developing multifaceted relations in all fronts, including in the judicial field.

A visit of a delegation led by Ismail Rustu Cirit, the Chairman of Turkey's Supreme Court of Appeal to Azerbaijan will give a new impetus to the development of judicial ties between the two countries.

Baku and Ankara believe that the successful cooperation between the judicial systems of the two countries contribute to further expansion of the bilateral ties.

This was stated at a meeting held between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and the Turkish delegation led by Ismail Rustu Cirit on April 17.

During the meeting, President Aliyev recalled with pleasure his participation in the 13th Summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation recently held in Istanbul, describing the high-level representation of the Islamic countries in this event as a manifestation of their attitude towards Turkey.

He said that his meetings with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the country's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu were fruitful.

Ismail Rustu Cirit, in turn, said the relations between the two friendly and fraternal countries are developing successfully in all areas, adding the people of Turkey appreciate this.

He also offered condolences to President Aliyev over the martyrdom of Azerbaijani servicemen in the latest developments on the line of contact of troops in the Nagorno-Karabakh, and wished those wounded the soonest possible recovery.

He said Turkey has always stood by Azerbaijan in the settlement of the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

As part of the visit, Ismail Rustu Cirit also met with Chairman of Azerbaijan's Supreme Court Ramiz Rzayev, where the sides hailed the relations between the judicial-legal systems of the two countries.

Ismail Rustu Cirit highlighted the activity of the Supreme Court of Appeal, and stressed the importance of cooperation between the two countries.

Prior to the meeting, the Turkish delegation visited the Alley of Honors, and laid a wreath at the tomb of Azerbaijan's national leader Heydar Aliyev.

They also put flowers at the grave of prominent ophthalmologist, academician Zarifa Aliyeva.

The Turkish delegation then visited the Alley of Martyrs to put flowers at the graves of Azerbaijani brave sons who gave their lives for the country's independence and territorial integrity.

They also visited the Eternal Flame monument and a monument to Turkish soldiers.

Later, Fikret Mammadov, the Justice Minister of Azerbaijan, who also serves as the Chairman of the Judicial-Legal Council, met with the Turkish delegation.

During the meeting, Mammadov expressed condolences in connection with numerous loss of human life as a result of the ruthless acts of terrorism which have occurred recently in Turkey, stressed effective cooperation between the two countries at the bilateral level, and also their continued support each other within the international organizations.

He spoke in detail about reforms in the field of justice and the judicial reforms which are carried out in Azerbaijan.

Having shown great interest to the reforms which are carried out in the judicial and legal sphere, guests have stated a wish of further expansion of bilateral ties, have noted importance for both parties of exchange of positive experience.

The Turkish delegation also had talks with Prosecutor General Zakir Garalov.
/By Azernews/

By Nazrin Gadimova

Azerbaijans National Agency for Mine Action (ANAMA) examined ??about 30,000 square meters of territories adjoining the contact line of troops of Armenian and Azerbaijani armies on April 18.

Thus, as a result of monitoring of the Garadagli village (Terter region), ANAMA has inspected the area of 16,000 square meters and found four unexploded shells, as well as five shell holes in four houses and adjacent territories. Moreover, some 8,000 squares meters were checked in Gapanli village of Terter region: the agency inspected 13 shell holes and found 13 exploded shells in the territory of two houses.

ANAMA also examined Azerbaijans Agdam, Fizuli and Goranboy regions, which suffered from Armenian shelling.

The Agencys field engineers have examined 3,000 square meters in Agdams Evoglu village (two exploded shells and two shell holes were found), 1,735 square meters in Fizulis Goradiz village (13 exploded shells and 13 shell holes were found), and 210 square meters in Goranboys Gahdud village (two exploded shells and two shell holes were found).

In general, on April 7-18, ANAMA examined 278 houses and adjacent territories, five farms and areas under crops, two military units, a cemetery and a high school, as well as eight pastures in Terter, Aghjabadi, Agdam, Fuzuli, Tovuz and Goranboy regions. The field engineers have found and detonated 137 unexploded ordnances (UXOs).

Currently, special quick reaction forces are continuing demining operations using sniffer dogs.

ANAMA has launched operations to demine areas that were subjected to the heavy bombardment as a result of Armenian provocations on the contact line of troops. Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on April 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides. However, Armenia has ignored the agreement and started violating the ceasefire again.
The EU first diplomatic delegation will be sent to Tehran in the near future, the EU Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini said.

The delegation will be based in Dutch embassy till opening the EU office in Tehran, the top European diplomat told to Iran's Tasnim news agency.

In a visit which follows last year's historic nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, Mogherini, heading a high-ranking political and economic delegation comprised of seven European commissioners arrived in Tehran, Apr. 16 and held talks with senior Iranian officials. Opening an EU office in Tehran was on the agenda of the mutual talks.

"We have decided to send first team that will be operating with the support and the help of the current presidency of the European Union, Netherlands," Mogherini said.

The mission of the future EU delegation would be mainly supporting and sustaining all the work that, the parties decided to start on re-launching dialogue and cooperation on many different sectors, she added.

Mogherini further said that the EU plans to develop dialogues on energy, economy and business presence in Iran as well as technology or transport.

"Having a presence in Tehran would be helpful to develop the cooperation in a structured way, and also would provide a support for all the business, companies and also the financial European sector that is willing to engage in Iran, providing a framework for the European engagement in the country from a technical point of view," she said.

While responding to a question about resuming banking ties with Iran, the EU diplomat said that there is no reason for European banks not to come to Iran.

"we are working very hard with all the European banks, with the financial sector in Europe to, first of all, explain that the situation has changed, as the 16th of January and all the economic and financial sanctions that were related to the nuclear program have been lifted," she said.

So the banks and the financial sector in Europe are facing a completely different situation, the top EU diplomat added.

"We have provided them with full information about the change of the situation," she said, adding the big banks maybe need a little bit of time to adjust to the new situation and adapt to the new situation, however the small banks, are coming in Iran already.

Mogherini further said that the EU is also negotiating with the US side on the issue.

"They know how much this issue is very important for us as Europeans, and again, we cannot force anyone to do anything, but we can encourage, we can reassure, we can explain that the legal provisions are now completely different from before, and that."

Iran has asked the EU to force the US to settle banking problems following the implementation of the nuclear deal. In a meeting with Mogherini in her recent Tehran visit, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran Ali Shamkhani asked the EU to confront with what he called Washington's "obstruction" of nuclear deal implementation.

He argued that the US is seeking to continue its sanctions policy against Iran and is troubling the implementation of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka nuclear deal), referring to Washington's approach as "undesirable and unconstructive". Earlier the same day, Iran's Foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, underlined that the other parties, in particular the US, should in practice fulfill their obligations under the nuclear deal.

Speaking at a joint press conference with Mogherini, Zarif said Washington should do more to remove obstacles to Iran's banking system.

Earlier, Valiollah Seif, the head of Iran's central bank, accused the US and the EU of failing to honor the JCPOA by keeping Iran locked out of the international financial system.
US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will discuss the Iranian deal as well as the situation in Syria during the meeting in New York on Tuesday, US State Department spokesperson John Kirby said on Monday, Sputnikreported.

"He'll [Kerry] go tomorrow to New York City," Kirby said. "While he is in New York, he will meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif to discuss implementation of the JCPOA and to follow up on earlier conversations regarding regional issues, including continued work of trying to get political resolution in Syria."

Kerry also plans to speak with Zarif about Tehran using its influence on Syria to move forward on a political solution in the country.

"The Secretary [Kerry] intends to raise with Foreign Minister Zarif ways in which Tehran can be more helpful going forward in the political process [in Syria]," Kirby said when asked if there was a shift underway to get Iran to use more of its leverage on Damascus to try to keep the ongoing peace talk process from unraveling.

Kirby noted that Iran does have influence on Syria and that Washington wants them to "use that influence in a constructive manner towards a political solution."
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Alkhabeer Capital, a premier asset management and investment firm based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has appointed Ahmed Ghouth as its chief executive officer.

Ammar Shata, founder of Alkhabeer Capital, will remain in his role as executive director of the company, said a statement.

Ghouth has been with Alkhabeer since the companys inception, holding a number of managerial and executive roles, it said.

He has held the post of deputy chief executive officer for more than six years, during which he contributed to executing the companys initiatives and achieving its strategic goals.

He has more than 15 years of experience in investment banking and asset management, enabling him to contribute to raising Alkhabeers performance in order to take its position as a leading asset management company.

Musaad Mohammad Aldrees, chairman, said: We are delighted that Ahmed has taken the helm at Alkhabeer Capital to lead the delivery of our long term strategy. He is well-positioned to take this leading role based on his vast experience and deep knowledge of the market.

"As our deputy CEO over the past few years, he contributed to the success of Alkhabeer in becoming one of the most important financial companies in the region.

We are confident that Ahmed has the knowledge and experience necessary for Alkhabeer to achieve further growth and development of its services and products, in spite of the current economic climate, thereby driving our companys ambitions forward.

Alkhabeer Capital has built dynamic and longstanding client relationships with a sustained and bold strategy, supported by compelling investment products and consistent returns. After 10 years of growth, we are taking steps to begin a new chapter in Alkhabeers success story," said Shata.

"Ahmed is a natural choice to support and develop the company, as we have worked closely together to deliver strong returns for our shareholders, while nurturing a positive corporate culture through which Alkhabeer has emerged as the financial institution of choice for our clients. - TradeArabia News Service
Bahrain's NBB recorded a net profit of BD17.76 million ($47.23 million) for the first quarter of 2016 compared to BD17.02 million ($45.27 million) for the same period of 2015, an increase of 4.3 per cent.



The financial results were approved at the board meeting held on April 18, chaired by the banks chairman Farouk Yousuf Khalil Almoayyed.



Expressing his satisfaction on the results, Almoayyed thanked the banks customers for their continued support and confidence in the bank while appreciating the efforts of the banks executive management team and the employees for their dedication.



Abdul Razak Abdulla Hassan Al Qassim, chief executive officer and director said: The bank has achieved healthy growth in profitability in the first quarter of 2016 backed by a steady increase in the underlying business. While the external environment remains very challenging, we will continue to focus on adding value to our customers by capitalizing on the Banks strong capital and liquidity position.



The net interest income for the three months period in 2016 was BD15.78 million ($41.97 million) compared to BD14.17 million ($37.69 million) for the corresponding period of the previous year. The increase of 11.4 percent is on account of growth in business and better yield on surplus funds.



The bank recorded a 36.1 per cent growth in loans and advances to reach BD1,097.46 million during the same period. Customer deposits as at March 31 2016 stood at BD2,216.81 million ($5,895.77 million) compared to BD2,238.22 million ($5,952.71 million) as at March 31, 2015.

The earnings per share for the three months of 2016 was 15.5 fils compared to 14.9 fils for the corresponding period of 2015, the bank said. - TradeArabia News Service
European Union countries should consider taking tougher measures against banks and tax advisers who help their clients to hide money offshore, an EU Commission paper says.



The document will be discussed at a meeting of EU finance ministers in Amsterdam on April 22-23, where tax evasion has been added to the agenda following the Panama Papers leaks.



"The Panama Papers have highlighted how certain European financial intermediaries and other providers of tax advice appear to have actively helped their clients to conceal money offshore," the document, seen by Reuters, said.



Banks are already subject to financial sanctions and a possible withdrawal of their operating licences if they breach EU anti-money laundering rules.



The Commission wants finance ministers to consider "more effective disincentives" for lenders and other tax advisers who assist in tax evasion schemes, the document said.



The EU executive is reviewing anti-money laundering rules and is expected to make legislative proposals by June.



Under consideration are also plans to increase transparency on the ultimate "beneficial" owners of companies and trusts, which often are hidden, thus allowing tax evasion.



Current rules oblige EU states to set up registers of firms' owners, but do not require public disclosures. Trusts are at the moment subject to lower transparency requirements.



"It would be worth considering whether improvements are possible to enhance accessibility of beneficial ownership registers, to clarify the registration requirements for trusts," the EU Commission paper said.



The Commission this year proposed measures to tackle tax dodging, urged large companies to reveal their tax data and called for a EU list of tax havens which should be subject to common sanctions.



Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis called on EU states to make "substantive progress" on all these issues in a letter sent to the Dutch presidency of the EU ahead of the Amsterdam finance ministers' meeting.-Reuters
Bin Faqeeh, a premier real estate investment company based in Bahrain, is set to showcase its latest and most exciting developments at the upcoming Gulf Property Show, being organized by Hilal Conferences and Exhibitions (HCE).



A boutique showcase for real estate and property developments in the region, Gulf Property Show will take place from April 26 to 28 at the Bahrain International Exhibition and Convention Center under the patronage of HRH Prince Khalifa Bin Salman Al Khalifa, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bahrain.



The event brings together the top real estate companies in an effort to attract more investors and developers through communication of the most recent development projects around the country, said the organisers.



The renowned real estate company is thrilled to unravel the latest updates about its prestigious projects that will soon be completed, it stated.



Bin Faqeeh said it is excited to inform visitors, developers and investors of the several development projects including the Layan project which is located in Durrat Marina and is a mixed-use project offering luxurious apartments and villas with a private waterpark, state-of-the-art facilities and over 30 shops and restaurants.



The high profile project will completely revamp Durrat Marina like never before thereby making it a hotspot for year-round relaxation and serve as a luxurious family getaway, said the developer.



The Bahraini developer eagerly joins this event as an ideal platform to encourage everyone everywhere to invest in Bahrain.



Bin Faqeeh strives to keep pace with the constantly changing world and invest in properties to meet the requirements and expectations of each category of our client base, remarked Nadia Bouslama, the head of marketing.



We are proud to showcase our landmark projects at the Gulf Property Show and would like to extend a warm invitation to everyone to meet with us and gain a more in-depth understanding of the properties, she stated.



Bin Faqeeh, she said, will also unravel more details about the first of the Limited 5 projects, Waterbay at Bahrain Bay.



The Waterbay project is a 10-storey building designed and developed with the most luxurious hospitality and shopping entities in mind. The stellar project is in close proximity to the upcoming premiere and luxurious Avenues Mall in Bahrain.



Finally, Bin Faqeeh will introduce yet another project, Hidd Heights in Hidd, which will have a starting price of BD26,996 ($71,017).



It consists of studios, one- and two-bedroom apartments across a total of 14 floors and is located near Prince Khalifa Park in Hidd with the perfect relaxation and fitness facilities that include a swimming pool, gymnasiums for men, gymnasiums for women, sauna and steam room.

On the upcoming show, Bin Faqeeh said it was proudly and confidently investing in the highly-anticipated The Gulf Property Show.



The event will provide the opportunity to promote Bahrain's property assets as well as regional and international opportunities for investors in commercial and residential real estate, it stated.



Bin Faqeeh works effortlessly to meet the growing property investors demands of the Middle East and other Gulf countries, as they are crucial for the growth and prosperity of Bahrain, it added.



Chairman Faisal Faqeeh said: "We strongly believe in building relationships with our clients and that has resulted in tremendous support from them right through. Our biggest achievement has been the ability to sustain clients who have been purchasing properties from us since our very first project."



"Gratitude towards our clients support and their trust in us will always be a driving force for us to keep innovating and turn their realty expectations into reality," observed the official.



"The Gulf Property Show is one such platform for us to be able to connect with our clients (potential & existing) to go that extra mile to serve their real estate interests," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
China and other major steel-producing countries failed to agree measures to tackle a global steel crisis as the sides argued over the causes of overcapacity, prompting US criticism of Beijing's approach and an angry response from Chinese officials.



A meeting of ministers and trade officials from over 30 countries, hosted by Belgium and the OECD on Monday, sought to tackle excess capacity, but concluded only that it had to be dealt with in a swift and structural way.



There were signs the spat was spreading. The United Steelworkers (USW) said on Monday it has filed a case with US regulators seeking to stem a "flood" of aluminum imports the trade unions says have damaged US producers and threatened jobs. The case is the latest move by the US aluminum industry to try and get authorities to investigate the impact of rising imports, particularly from China.



On steel, Washington pointed the finger at China over the failure of the talks, saying Beijing needed to act on overcapacity or face possible trade action from other countries.



"Unless China starts to take timely and concrete actions to reduce its excess production and capacity in industries including steel ... the fundamental structural problems in the industry will remain and affected governments - including the US - will have no alternatives other than trade action to avoid harm to their domestic industries and workers," US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and US Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a statement.



Asked what steps the Chinese government would take following the unsuccessful talks, China Commerce Ministry spokesman Shen Danyang told reporters on Tuesday: "China has already done more than enough. What more do you want us to do?"



"Steel is the food of industry, the food of economic development. At present, the major problem is that countries that need food have a poor appetite so it looks like there's too much food."



The OECD said global steelmaking capacity was 2.37 billion tonnes in 2015, but declining production meant that only 67.5 percent of that was being used, down from 70.9 percent in 2014.



Britain in particular has felt the squeeze as its largest producer Tata Steel has announced plans to pull out of the country, threatening 15,000 jobs. Last week, more than 40,000 German steel workers took to the streets to protest against dumping from China.



China, the world's top steel producer, has been ramping up exports of steel in recent years, as it battles to steer its economy into services-led growth and away from traditional manufacturing, while keeping employment levels high.



China's steel exports jumped 30 percent from a year ago to 9.98 million tonnes in March despite a slew of anti-dumping measures globally.



But blaming China for woes in the global steel industry is simply a lazy excuse for protectionism, and such finger-pointing will be counter-productive, China's official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary on Monday.



"It's more been their competitive advantage into Asian countries which has really driven that rise in exports," said Daniel Hynes, a commodity strategist at ANZ Bank. "I think that will continue and will keep those export levels relatively high despite the pressures we're seeing now."



DEEP DIVISIONS



At a news conference following Monday's meeting, deep divisions between China and other producers were clear.



Cecelia Malmstrom, the EU's trade commissioner, insisted governments should not grant subsidies that keep unviable plants running and should subject state-controlled firms to the same rules as the private sector.



China's assistant commerce minister, Zhang Ji, said China had cut 90 million tonnes of capacity and had plans to reduce it by a further 100-150 million tonnes.



"That is only 10 million tonnes less than the capacity in Europe," he said, although critics say it would still have a capacity of around 1 billion tonnes, far in excess of its needs.



China's main iron and steel body has previously acknowledged that the flood of Chinese steel product exports is damaging to the country's efforts to gain market economy status from the European Union - an important goal for Beijing as the domestic economy slows.



Li Xinchuang, the vice secretary of general of the China Iron and Steel Association, rejected the US criticisms.



"It is a totally pointless complaint from the US and it's biased against China," Li told Reuters by phone. "China's steel industry is market-based and Chinese steel products have good quality, low price and good service. The complaint on government subsidies is also crap."



Tensions have erupted between other producers, with Japan leading criticism of Indian minimum prices for imported steel at a recent World Trade Organisation meeting and Japan and South Korea coming under fire for exporting steel products cheaper than they sell them at home.



In a step by Beijing to reduce trade frictions with Washington, it has agreed to scrap some export subsidies on a range of products including steel the United States said last week. - Reuters


Henkel, a leading manufacturer of consumer goods and adhesives technologies, plans further investment and expansion in the Saudi Arabian market, a report said.



Currently, Henkel has a manufacturing plant in Riyadh that produces the majority of the laundry and home care products for this region.



The company is planning to heavily invest in its Riyadh plant during this year, which will significantly increase its manufacturing capacity and production in the coming years, Erdem Kocak, president of Henkel GCC and regional head of finance for India, Middle East and Africa (IMEA), was quoted as saying in a Saudi Gazette report.



He said that the investment will be aimed at boosting the companys output, automation systems and efficiency to create new opportunities for the business in Saudi Arabia.



In 2015, Henkel consolidated its distribution network for laundry and home care products which has allowed the company to build a stronger distribution infrastructure in the kingdom, said the report.



Kocak said that strengthening Henkels operations in the kingdom directly bolsters the companys business in the wider GCC region.



He added that looking for new business opportunities and strategic partnership agreements in the country is always at the top of the companys agenda and will play a big role in its expansion plans for the year.
SR Technics, one of the worlds leading providers of technical solutions to airlines, has signed an engine maintenance contract worth over $30 million with Pakistan's second largest airline, Airblue Limited.



The agreement runs until 2022 and covers the maintenance and overhaul of the CFM56-5B engines used on Airblues Airbus A320 fleet, said a statement from the company.



This new agreement builds on the success of a seven-year contract between the two companies for the same services, it added.



SR Technics CEO Jeremy Remacha said: We are proud to be prolonging our relationship with Airblue. This highlights our commitment to invest in long-term partnerships providing high quality and cost-effective services to our customers.



Sadia Mohammad, deputy managing director for operations at Airblue, said: Extending our existing contract by another seven years was the obvious thing to do. SR Technics has a proven track record when it comes to servicing Airblues CFM engines.



It is a record which clearly demonstrates that SR Technics provides the Swiss quality levels and safety stamp at the competitive rates that our company and our customers prize greatly, she added.  TradeArabia News Service
Custodian of the two holy mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz has urged solidarity and unity among Muslims to fight terrorism and bring about peace and security in the region.

King Salman made these remarks during a speech at the 13th Islamic Summit Conference of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation being held in Istanbul this week. The theme of the conference is "Unity and Solidarity for Justice and Peace."

"Our reality today requires us all to come together more than ever to fight the scourge of terrorism and to protect the young generation from being under its fierce attack, which aims to remove it from the logic of the true faith and be driven by those who are wreaking havoc under the name of religion," said King Salman.

"We have made a serious step in this direction to form an Islamic Military Alliance to fight terrorism, which includes 39 countries to co-ordinate all efforts through intellectual, media, financial and military initiatives based on the OIC's principles and objectives," he said.

King Salman reiterated the need and responsibility of the international community to resolve regional crises including Palestine, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

"We are required to address the Islamic nations' causes, first by finding a just solution to the Palestinian issue in accordance with the Arab peace initiative and legitimate international resolutions, and put an end to the Syrian crisis according to the decisions of Geneva 1 and Security Council resolution 2254, as well as to support the existing efforts to end the Libyan crisis," said King Salman.

"On the Yemeni cause, we support the efforts of the United Nations for the success of consultations to be held in Kuwait in implementation of Security Council resolution 2216," he said.

King Salman also called for an end to the foreign interference in the internal affairs of nations, which he said was a major cause of instability and strife.

"The suffering of the Muslim world of conflicts and crises are represented in the blatant interference in the affairs of a number of Islamic countries and the sowing seeds of discord and division," he said.

"As well as inciting sectarian strife and the use of armed militias to undermine our security and create instability so as to spread their influence and domination. That requires a strong position from us to prevent such interference and maintain the security and safety of our Muslim world," he added. - TradeArabia News Service
The World Bank and other major development banks are investing far too little in getting electric power to poor people around the globe, and should allocate at least half their energy budgets to such projects, environmental groups said.

Some 1.1 billion people, one in seven of the world's population, still lack access to electricity. New global goals agreed this year set a target for everybody to have access to "affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy" by 2030.

In a report issued as the World Bank spring meetings began in Washington DC, the Sierra Club and Oil Change International said top development banks had made little progress in their overall contribution to achieving that goal in the past two years.

"For far too long, massive centralised power plants and expanding the grid have been the default approach in addressing energy poverty - a strategy which has clearly failed to reach the world's poorest," said Alex Doukas of Oil Change International.

The African Development Bank and the Asian Development Bank dedicated the highest proportion of their energy portfolios to energy access, at just over a quarter each in the three fiscal years 2012 to 2014, according to the report.

The World Bank allocated 10 percent of its energy investment to access over that period, while the Inter-American Development Bank's share was just under six per cent, the report showed.

"There's still time to reach the world's goal of eliminating energy poverty by 2030 if these institutions act fast to rebalance their budgets toward what's needed," said Vrinda Manglik of the Sierra Club's International Climate and Energy Campaign.

As well as putting at least half of their energy funding into boosting access for the poor, they should ensure two-thirds of that money goes towards "distributed" clean energy projects, including mini-grids and off-grid power from renewable sources such as solar, wind or hydro, the groups said.

A World Bank spokesman said an additional $40 billion per year would be needed to achieve universal energy access by 2030, but multilateral development banks (MDBs) could not provide this alone, and private-sector investment would be vital.

The report also said fossil fuels "are not serving the poor".

From fiscal 2012 to 2014, only around 5 percent of funding for fossil fuel energy projects backed by the four development banks included provisions that would increase access for the poor, it said.

Centralised power production and grid expansion also overlook the poor because the grid has yet to reach many rural areas - home to 84 percent of those who lack access to electricity. In addition, grid power is often unreliable and unaffordable for poor households, the report said.

CHEAPER AND FASTER

Power for All, a global campaign bringing together business and civil society leaders, urged the development banks to speed up efforts to end energy poverty by creating dedicated funds for access to decentralised renewable energy and fast-tracking projects to implement it.

"The disproportionate MDB financial support for slow, expensive centralised power projects over fast, cost-effective decentralised renewables is perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities in development today," said campaign director Kristina Skierka.

An independent evaluation of the World Bank Group's support for electricity access from 2000 to 2014 showed that the median implementation time of its investment projects was nine years.

In comparison, decentralised systems such as solar mini-grids and solar panels on the rooftops of homes can be rolled out in just a few months at a fraction of the cost of centralised power generation, reaching far more people within a decade, according to Power for All.

The report from the Sierra Club and Oil Change International noted that, of the four MDBs, the Inter-American Development Bank spent the largest share of its energy access portfolio on off-grid and mini-grid power, at 25 per cent over the three years assessed.

But the World Bank said 57 per cent of its investment in new connections in 2015 went to off-grid solutions, and it was working to increase investment in distributed energy.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that to achieve energy access for all by 2030, 64 per cent of new investments should be allocated to mini-grids and off-grid power, the report noted.

"Energy access at its core is about enabling countries to develop. Without it, countries cannot grow, create jobs, children cannot study at night," the World Bank spokesman said.

"That's why we have to look at the full array of energy solutions - on-grid and off-grid." - Reuters
Iran is considering deals worth over $165 million with 12 domestic universities and research centres to study downstream projects in the petroleum industry, said a senior official in a report.



The development of olefins and ethylene units as well as oil and gas refineries will be taken into account in the deals, Irans Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh was quoted as saying in the Iran Daily News report, citing IRNA.



He said that Iran aims to promote technological borders of petroleum industry with the help of credited research centres in the world.



Zanganeh noted that National Petrochemical Company (NPC) is to ink a deal with a leading European firm for the construction of a propylene via methanol (PVM) unit in Iran, added the report.


Kuwait's current refinery production is between 510,000 and 520,000 barrels per day (bpd) on the second day of a strike by Kuwaiti oil workers, an official from state refiner Kuwait National Petroleum Co (KNPC) said on Monday.

Khaled Al Asousi, KNPC's deputy chief executive for support services, gave the updated figures in a message to Reuters. On Sunday, refinery production was around 520,000 bpd, down from 930,000 bpd before the strike began.

Thousands of Kuwaiti oil and gas workers are striking to protest against a government plan for public sector pay reforms, although non-Kuwaiti workers in the industry are not on strike. Unions have not said how long the walkout will last.

Kuwait Oil Co spokesman Saad Al-Azmi said on Sunday that his company had cut crude oil output to 1.1 million bpd from its normal level of about 3 million bpd. On Monday, officials had not yet given an update on the crude production level. --Reuters

Ecuador's Esmeraldas refinery still down after quake - Reuters News

QUITO: Ecuador's 110,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) Esmeraldas refinery remained down on Sunday as a precautionary measure though will likely soon restart after a major earthquake in the Opec nation that killed at least 235 people, the state oil company said.

Petroecuador said it would assess when to restart operations during the day after verifying that no infrastructure was damaged by the 7.8 magnitude quake which struck off the country's Pacific coast on Saturday.

"In the course of the day, technicians will determine the start of operations," the company said in a statement.

"The impact of the quake caused four of the 10 storage tanks to overflow and so a cleanup and recovery has begun."

Other installations were working normally, it added, and state officials said crude production was unaffected. --Reuters
The Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry has entered into an agreement with the organising committee of the World Retail Congress to host the 11th edition of the event in Dubai next year.

The 10th edition of the event concluded in Dubai, UAE and attracted more than 1,300 participants from 58 countries, said Hamad Buamim, president and chief executive officer the chamber.

The event, organised at Dubais Madinat Jumeirah, featured 60 sessions and 146 speakers.

The decision to host the annual World Retail Congress twice in a row in Dubai reflects the emirates leading status as a major global retail hub and a key driver for innovation in retail industry. Dubai offers a secure and business friendly atmosphere supported by state of the art infrastructure for both start-ups and established business houses to flourish," said Buanim.

"With its strategic location between the east and the west, Dubai is the perfect gateway for international retail entities to extend their presence in the region and beyond. I am happy that the World Retail Congress has become another major platform in Dubai that will contribute significantly to the growth of the retail sector in the region and the international level, he said.

Ian McGarrigle, chairman, World Retail Congress, said: We have been delighted with the response to the Congress being held in Dubai this year, and we have received fantastic feedback from all of our attendees.

"This year we have seen our biggest ever attendance, with the highest proportion of retailers, many of which are at CEO level, and we are excited to announce that the Congress will return to Dubai in 2017. - TradeArabia News Service
The management team for The Westin Dubai, Al Habtoor City has been announced as the hotel ramps up to open doors this summer.



The Westin Dubai will be the largest Westin hotel in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, standing 41 storeys tall on Sheikh Zayed Road with 1,004 rooms.



The team was announced by general manager Khaled Ghaleb. With a more than 20 years of experience in the hospitality industry working in award-winning luxury hotels across the UAE, Egypt and France, Ghalebs career started following a Bachelors Degree in hotel management. He joins the hotel from Starwoods Grosvenor House, A Luxury Collection Hotel in Dubai where he was the hotel manager for four years.



Ghaleb said: We are now weeks away from opening, and are extremely excited to launch The Westin Dubai, Al Habtoor City. While the hotel stays true to the Westin brand, our promise is our guests is an urban retreat of endless choices in the heart of Dubai.



Ghaleb is supported by a stellar team of experienced hospitality professionals. They include:



Daniel Kingston, hotel manager: He started with the first Westin hotel in India as front office manager in 2006. He returns to the Starwood family from Emaar Hospitality as hotel manager at Vida Downtown and Al Manzil Downtown in Dubai. Prior to that he was the pre-opening director of rooms at W Doha and part of the pre-opening task force at W Retreat & Spa Maldives.



Ruby Pande, director of housekeeping: With 15 years of experience, Pande has an excellent track record in handling large operations in flagship luxury properties. She joins from the 547 rooms and residences Grand Hyatt Mumbai where she was the executive housekeeper.



Waleed Abdellatif, director of rooms: With 20 years experience in Egypt and the US, Abdellatif has held various senior front office roles across several brands and key properties, including The St. Regis Washington and The St. Regis Monarch Beach.



Reda Sebbar, director of F&B: Sebbar has worked in hospitality in various F&B positions, with his most recent being as executive assistant manager at Adnec, Abu Dhabi.



Carl Stockenstrom, executive chef: He has worked in five-star luxury hotels and gourmet restaurants for 22 years across Europe and the Middle East. He joins from Zaya Nurai Island as EAM of culinary and F&B.



Lester DSouza, chief engineer: With 22 years of experience in hotel services and facility management, he has a strong background in electrical engineering and has been involved with several hotel pre-openings in the past.



Dara Pinke, director of human resources -complex: She has previously managed six pre-openings including the Waldorf Astoria Palm Jumeirah, which saw her win a coveted Hotelier Middle East Award in 2014.



Candice DCruz, director of marketing and PR -complex: DCruz joined Starwood in 2011 to open the regions first St Regis, The St Regis Saadiyat Island Resort, Abu Dhabi. Previously she worked with Emaar and led the marketing for Burj Khalifa, home to the Armani Hotel Dubai.



Nathalie Massabki, director of revenue - complex: She joined Starwood in 1998 and has worked across markets as diverse as Paris and Cairo. Most recently, she was area director of revenue for Starwoods seven hotels in Abu Dhabi.



Bernard Obaro, director of finance - complex: Obaro first came to Dubai in 1996 to open the Sheraton Deira. Most recently he was director of finance for Sheraton Dubai Mall of the Emirates.



Amanda Schmiege, director of spa and recreation - complex: She will overlook the Heavenly Spa by Westin, The Westin WORKOUT Fitness Studio, The Westin Family Kids Club and the hotels swimming pools. She was the general manager of The Red Door Union Square in New York before moving to Dubai last summer.



Andrew King, director of security - complex: He has spent 15 years in the British Royal Marine Commandos. He has previously held positions including head of security for Nokia MEA region, corporate director of HSE at Jumeirah Group, and director of risk at IHG Festival City.



Vises Kith, director of information technology -complex: Kith has been involved with eight pre-openings in his 11 years with Starwood, including the conversion and opening of Sheraton Dubai, Mall of the Emirates. - TradeArabia News Service






Armed Forces Officers Club and Hotel (AFOC&H) has confirmed its participation in the Arabian Travel Market (ATM) which will take place this month in Dubai.



Representing Armed Forces Officers Club and Hotel, Peter Freeman, deputy general manager, and director of sales and marketing Dulce Ortega will attend ATM.



The four-day occasion, which will run from April 25 to 28, is the leading event for the travel and tourism industry where hoteliers will market a myriad of travel options, facilities and services. AFOC&Hs participation will be under the umbrella of Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority.



Freeman said: ATM provides an efficient platform for us to market our innumerable facilities. We are excited to witness firsthand the response that the renovated property and improved services will generate. The AFOC&H team is grateful for the immense support received by guests and peers, without which we could not have facilitated our expansion and growth. We are looking forward to meeting and interacting with the travel trade professionals as well as potential buyers.



Promoting tourism for families, corporates and Mice within the capital will be the focus of AFOC&H at the ATM. The establishment which is located in short distance of hot tourist attractions, Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, Ferrari World and Saadiyat Island is ideal for families and individuals who are looking to easily access the afore mentioned destinations.



We are overjoyed that ATM is occurring right before the summer season which draws in a large number of tourists in Abu Dhabi. We are looking forward to introduce the offers and promotions we have exclusively for summer at the exhibition. Additionally, Ramadan is also an important time for family gatherings. We have special offers this year which will be announced at ATM, added Freeman. - TradeArabia News Service
In a bid to meet strong demand for branded extended-stay accommodation in Jeddah, Movenpick Hotels & Resorts has revealed plans to open its first hotel and apartment property in the Saudi Arabian city in 2017.



The Swiss hospitality firm has signed an agreement with prominent real estate and investment company, Hadia Abdul Latif Jameel Group, to manage the 164-unit Movenpick Hotel & Apartments Al Tahlia Jeddah, which will command a sought-after location on Hail Street, close to Jeddahs major commercial, financial, consular and shopping districts.



With the modern-day corporate traveller in mind, the property, part of a high-profile mixed-use development, features predominantly suites, an all-day-dining outlet, a casual fine-food Indian restaurant, a gym with two spa treatment rooms, and four meeting rooms.



Its a flexible hotel and apartment model that caters to both short- and long-stay clients, capitalising on the gap in the market for branded extended-stay accommodation, said Andreas Mattmuller, chief operating officer, Movenpick Hotels & Resorts Middle East and South Asia.



Movenpick Hotel & Apartments Al Tahlia will be strategically located next to Jameel Square, a Grade-A office building also developed by the Hadia Abdul Latif Jameel Group, that is occupied by local and multinational blue-chip corporate tenants.



This modern property with its prime location and efficient design, will provide Jeddahs growing corporate community with a fresh new concept that caters to their business and leisure needs right on their doorstep. added Osama Al Haddad, president, Hadia Abdul Latif Jameel Group.



Signing Movenpick Hotel & Apartments Al Tahlia helps to consolidate Movenpicks position as a market leader in Jeddah where the company currently operates two properties, but now has three pipelined, taking its total number of keys in the city to 923 across five hotels by 2018.



Movenpick Hotels & Resorts plans to increase its Saudi Arabia footprint by one-third, from a current 10 properties (3,907 keys) to 15 (5,204) by 2018. Upcoming projects include Movenpick Hotel City Star Jeddah, opening this year, Movenpick Residences Al Khobar (2017), Movenpick Hotel Financial District Riyadh (2017) and Movenpick Hotel Heraa Jeddah (2018). - TradeArabia News Service
Congressional hopeful Liz Cheney has raised nearly $760,0000 in campaign contributions from almost 430 people  collecting roughly 10 times more than her closest competitor in the race for Wyomings lone seat in the U.S. House.

Cheney received more than $500,000 from people who live outside of Wyoming and raised more than $200,000 from people inside Wyoming, according to a campaign finance report. She topped all of her competitors in both categories.

The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney also gave her campaign nearly $27,000.

Liz Cheneys dominant fundraising highlights her national stature and the broad network of support she enjoys among Republicans, especially for a candidate living in the countrys least populated state, and one whos never held office. But it also provides ammunition to critics whove questioned her Wyoming ties.

Many of Cheneys supporters are well-known in Republican circles.

Shes received $5,400 each from former President George Bush and his wife, Laura Bush  the maximum allowed under FEC limits. Her parents, Dick and Lynne Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Bush deputy chief of staff and senior adviser Karl Rove also donated money.

U.S. House candidates who raised or spent over $5,000 had until the end of Friday to file campaign finance reports for the first quarter of the year with the Federal Election Commission. Cheney submitted her report Friday evening after the Star-Tribunes press deadline.

Twelve people are running for Wyomings only U.S. House seat, which is open because U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis has decided not to seek re-election. Some candidates did not meet the $5,000 threshold and did not report.

Trailing Cheney are state lawmakers and fellow Republicans Leland Christensen and Tim Stubson. Christensen raised $69,080, excluding money he loaned his campaign. Stubson raised $65,140, excluding loan money.

Cheney has traveled across the country for fundraisers. Shes raised money at events featuring her father in Chicago, Washington and Denver.

This is a sign that Liz is a strong voice for Wyoming with national recognition and respect, said Bill Scarlett, the Cheney campaigns finance chairman.

Barbara Cubin, who held Wyomings seat in the U.S. House from 1995 to 2008, said that for a new candidate, raising so much money outside Wyoming is unnecessary.

The other people are not raising big dough out of state, which goes back to my point shes not really a Wyomingite, said Cubin, who is supporting Stubson.

Cheney calls Wilson home, having purchased a house there with her husband in 2012. They also have a house in Fairfax County, Virginia.

In 2013, Cheney challenged incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi. She left the race due to a family health matter.

Scarlett, Cheneys finance chairman, noted she raised more from Wyomingites than other candidates in the race.

Lizs record support from Wyoming donors illustrates strong enthusiasm for her fight to restore our freedoms, defend our constitutional rights and stop the federal overreach that threatens our way of life, he said. Wyoming has only one voice in the U.S. House of Representatives; we need to make sure it is the strongest voice possible. Liz Cheney will be that voice.

In a statement about her fundraising, the Cheney campaign noted Cubin and Lummis raised large sums outside Wyoming. They cited figures indicating Lummis collected nearly 80 percent of her donations from either political action committees or people outside the state from 2013 to 2014.

Cheney did not collect money from PACs, her campaign finance report shows.

Cubin said that incumbents tend to raise a lot of money from outside their districts. Thats because they sit on committees and subcommittees that address topics that garner national attention.

They donate money to you because your opinion matters directly to them, she said.

But Cheney isnt an incumbent, Cubin said.

Shes running not because she wants to serve the people of Wyoming but because of unbridled ambition, which was exemplified when she ran against Mike Enzi, she said.

Lummis daughter is helping Christensens campaign. But Lummis herself has said she was remaining neutral and would help whoever wins the race transition into office.

Cheneys campaign is not making an apples-to-apples comparison when citing Lummis campaign donations during the most recent campaign cycle, said Lummis spokesman Joe Spiering.

The appropriate comparison is between Liz Cheneys first quarter campaign finance filing in her first primary with Rep. Cynthia Lummis first quarter campaign finance filing in her first primary, Spiering said. In the first quarter in 2008, approximately 72 percent of Cynthia Lummis campaign funds came from either donations from people in Wyoming or from her own pocket. In contrast, less than a third of Liz Cheneys money comes from Wyoming in her first-quarter filing this year.

In that 2008 report, $56,458 came from Wyomingites and $67,016 came from Lummis personal funds. Lummis received $170,720 in total contributions.
For a time, Democrats ruled over the vast terrain that stretched from the Great Plains, across the Rocky Mountains and along the Pacific. From Texas and North Dakota, and from Oklahoma to Hawaii, a Democrat occupied all but two governors mansions in the 19 most-western states in the late 1970s.

But those states that once had long successions of Democratic governors  including Wyoming, Idaho and Utah  are now solidly Republican territory.

The shift puts Montana Gov. Steve Bullock in a rare spot in the political landscape: one of only three Democratic governors in a rural state. Across the United States, only 18 Democrats hold governorships  with eight of those seats among the 12 before voters this year.

There is a lot riding on Bullocks re-election campaign against political newcomer Republican Greg Gianforte.

Some say the Democratic Party cannot afford to lose the governors race in Montana  not just to defend its dwindling number of governorships but to also prove that it can still engage with rural America. The party is also trying to hold on to two other rural states, Vermont and West Virginia.

Politically, its important for Democrats to demonstrate that they can win in rural places, said Dave Parker, a political science professor at Montana State University.

They need to show that they can attract the allegiance of voters in rural areas to make them competitive, and demonstrate that they are not just reflective of the coasts and urban interests, Parker said. So Bullock is very symbolic because he is one of the few remaining Democrats representing a largely rural state.

In 1978, all but two of the 19 states extending from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean had Democratic governors. Today, only a third are headed by a Democrat. And among rural states in the Rockies and Great Plains, Bullock is the only remaining Democrat.

Montanans have had a long and deep affinity with the Democratic Party. Its first governor was a Democrat  and so were 15 of the states 24 governors since statehood. They also pride themselves for bucking expectations. While states around it have grown staunchly conservative, Montanas streak of independence is alive and well.

Montana is a fascinating state, not just for the gubernatorial race, said Nathan L. Gonzales, editor and publisher of the Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report. Theres an interesting dynamic, and it will be interesting to see how much cultural and social issues matter.

The separation between federal and local partisanship used to be stronger, Gonzales said, allowing Democrats to win in culturally conservative states and Republicans in socially liberal ones.

But that line is blurring.

As a result, he said, it could make it more difficult for a Democrat running in a rural state to build their own identity that is separate from the national party. It can be done, but its just becoming more difficult unless you have a strong profile.

While Democrats have been able to count on voters of color  many concentrated in urbanized states  significant numbers of white rural voters have fled the party, said Tim Marema, vice president of the Kentucky-based Center for Rural Strategies.

In places where there is a lot of land and few people, many white, rural voters have moved over time toward the Republican Party. Nationally, the Democratic Party thinks it doesnt need rural voters as much as it used to, so they tend to ignore them, Marema said.

But he warned that Republicans shouldnt take the rural vote for granted.

For now, some handicappers say Democrats are likely to hold Montana  but much of that is because Gianforte is an unknown. The Bozeman businessman, a millionaire who made a fortune in the high-tech industry, is making his first run at public office.

Democrats have fared well in Montana mainly because of a strong labor history, growing urban areas and the independent streak among Montanans. Its hard to find a Democrat in Montana who doesnt believe in the right to own guns  Bullock among them.

And until last year, Bullock led the Democratic Governors Association, which has supported him with financial donations, fundraising and campaign strategy.

There might be some national Democrats who are writing off these rural areas, said Joe Lamson, a longtime Democratic operative in Montana. But in the final analysis, there are still some folks in these areas in a pitch battle ... and theyve been in a pitch battle for a long, long time.

If more states turn red, he said, it will get harder for Democrats to win nationally.

David Hunter, whose history with Montana Democrats spans five decades, cautions against putting too much meaning on the outcome of the governors race.

Is it a bellwether for how Democrats will do in rural states? I dont think so, he said. I dont think a Bullock victory or loss says anything about our ability as a party to connect (with rural voters) nationwide or even in Montana. I really think the governors race in Montana is a local race.
CHEYENNE  A second Colorado man has pleaded guilty to a federal charge stemming from the police seizure of an unregistered Cessna airplane and over $250,000 cash two years ago in Cody.

Gilbert Wayne Wiles Jr. of Denver pleaded guilty Friday to aiding and abetting the operation of an unregistered airplane. He faces a sentence of between one and three years of probation at his June sentencing.

Before the plea, Wiles had been set to stand trial in federal court in Cheyenne starting Monday. Under the plea agreement, prosecutors will drop a charge of conspiracy to operate an unregistered airplane against him.

Cheyenne lawyer Dion Custis represents Wiles. Were able to reach a favorable agreement for him so we think its a good result, considering all the facts and circumstances, Custis said Monday.

Prosecutor Thomas Szott of the U.S. Attorneys Office in Cheyenne declined comment Monday on Wiles plea.

Prosecutors allege the assets were involved in the illegal drug trade even though prosecutors havent filed drug charges.

Pilot Scott Michael Lewis of Englewood, Colorado, pleaded guilty last Wednesday to a federal charge of operating an unregistered airplane.

Lewis faces a possible sentence of up to three years in prison, provided U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson of Cheyenne accepts his plea agreement with prosecutors at sentencing. However, Johnson remarked at last weeks hearing, This is a case where there very well may be arguments for a probationary sentence.

Federal prosecutors in Cheyenne filed criminal charges in January against Wiles and Lewis. The charges came nearly two years after authorities in Cody seized a Cessna airplane and over the cash from the men.

Prosecutors have alleged in that Wiles had purchased the Cessna plane in Texas for $130,000 cash in 2013, and instructed the seller to make out the bill of sale to a limited liability company incorporated in New Mexico. Prosecutors alleged Wiles told people who serviced the plane that he and Lewis were working for an aerial photography business.

A worker at Yellowstone Regional Airport first notified authorities that the men appeared suspicious after they landed there on Feb. 27, 2014, according to court records. The worker told police the pilot didnt radio the airport before landing and sunshades were lowered over the windows even though the plane was about to be stored in a hangar.

A police officer testified this month a suppression hearing in Cheyenne that a drug dog alerted to the plane but no drugs were found. The officer said he interpreted the dogs actions to mean the plane had been used for transporting drugs in the past. Prosecutors say officers found the cash in a hotel room the men had rented in Cody.

Prosecutors are pressing a separate civil case seeking to forfeit the cash and plane.

Lewis had asserted claims in the civil case asserting ownership of the plane and the cash while Wiles has not filed any claim. Lewis forfeited any interest in the plane under his plea agreement.
RAPID CITY, S.D.  Authorities are searching for suspects in the theft of $10,000 worth of jewelry from a popular tourist attraction in western South Dakota.

The Pennington County Sheriff's Office says employees of Wall Drug Store in Wall determined on April 13 that jewelry had been taken.

Two days later the suspects returned but fled when confronted by management. Sheriff's deputies recovered a purse the suspects left behind. Authorities also have video surveillance from the store and information on the license plate of the getaway vehicle.
A lot of noise has been made about the 19 elk killed last month by a pack of wolves in Bondurant. What has been lost throughout much of the coverage are the facts about what actually led to this extremely rare occurrence. Behind the headlines is a manmade story. To be able to understand what went down that night in Wyoming, these facts need to be understood.

To begin with, the elk in question were killed on a feedlot. Just like cattle, in Wyoming elk have feedlots as well. Picture anywhere between a few hundred to a few thousand wild elk standing around waiting to be fed. Wyoming has elk feedlots all over the place. Come winter, these feeding grounds shovel out bales of hay for the elk like they are livestock. Elk are heavily concentrated in these feedlots, fed all winter long, and have learned to just stand around waiting for their daily handouts.

So why does Wyoming feed elk in the first place? Is it because predators in the ecosystem are killing so many? No. Wyoming actually considers elk to be overpopulated. This practice was started in part to keep elk from competing with cattle back when predators across the Rocky Mountains were at their lowest numbers. In the absence of predators, elk populations exploded. Come winter, these animals would flood onto ranches in search of food, gorging themselves on stocks of hay.

When elk hunting became big business in the West, winter feeding turned into a practice similar to stocking rivers with fish. People in the West love hunting elk. Its like a religion out here. So the state feeds elk to insure higher numbers make it through the winter. In other words, elk feedlots unnaturally inflate the numbers to help sustain a population that is heavily hunted by humans.

So what has all this done to the elk? Quite simply, elk no longer act like elk. Given that these animals have grown up in a relatively predator-free environment for nearly 100 years, elk are now being forced to come to terms with the reality of predators again. And in order to survive, lesson number one is not to stand around in groups of a several thousand, in one place, for months on end waiting for handouts from humans.

So what did the wolves do? They committed what is known as surplus killing. Occasionally, when prey is so plentiful, predators will kill multiple animals in one go. Scientists state that when faced with a bonanza such as the feedlot provided, wolves may kill with the intention to return as often as that food is available. Never heard of surplus killing before? There is a reason for that. Its very rarewhich is exactly why this became a national story, and is why Wyoming Game and Fish says its a first for the agency.

The fact that many refuse to entertain is wolves are not depleting the population of elk. On the contrary, elk populations in wolf states have grown consistently since wolf reintroduction. Wolves are actually good for an elk herd  taking the easy pickings  the weak, old and infirm whereas humans take the best genes out of the herd through trophy hunting.

The other cold hard fact is that politicians, at the behest of the hunting industry, will parade that photo of the 19 elk lined up in the snow as an argument to take away federal protections for wolves. Right now in Congress there is an effort to strip away Endangered Species Act protections from wolves in Wyoming and three Midwestern states and this incident will be misused as cannon fodder in that battle.

What Wyoming intends to put in place is a plan that would allow unlimited shoot-on-sight killing of wolves across 85-percent of the state. We have been down this road before. Wyoming took control of its wolf population in 2012. In just two years, so many wolves had been killed that the Feds, under court order, had to relist them as endangered. But if the congressional legislation being considered now is made law, it will strip citizens of the right to challenge these delistings in court.

Instead of condemning these wolves for a rare act that was caused by Wyomings elk feedlot program, the state should consider how its elk management program helped create this situation to begin with. And Wyoming should improve its state wolf management measures rather than demonizing the species that helps keep elk populations healthy.

Jared Lloyd is a wildlife photographer based in Bozeman, Montana.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP)  Look out, HBO. Netflix produced more original programming than cable's premium-network leader last year, according to number provided by the two rivals. The Internet video service isn't slowing down, either, even if it risks losing subscribers to price increases that will help pay for more exclusive shows.

Since its push into original shows kicked off in earnest with the 2013 debut of "House of Cards," Netflix has hit the fast-forward button. Last year, it put out 450 hours of original programming, compared to 401 from Time Warner's HBO. This year, both companies say they expect to release roughly 600 hours of original material.

HBO, of course, is the network Netflix CEO Reed Hastings set out to emulate when his service began charting a course away from streaming TV reruns and previously released movies. Ted Sarandos, the company's head of programming, famously told GQ back in 2013 that Netflix's goal was "to become HBO faster than HBO can become us."

Netflix is aiming to put itself into "an entirely different and supreme league" from its rivals, says Tom Numan, a former TV network and studio executive who now lectures at UCLA's graduate school of theater, film and television. The company's goal, he says, is to become the first global network for original shows and movies.

With Netflix now available in 190 countries, Hastings expects Netflix to surpass 100 million subscribers next year. During a review of Netflix's results on Monday, Hastings declared the company "really excited" about the boost it expects from its growing library of exclusive programs.

Amazon.com, Hulu and other services are scrambling to catch up with their own moves into original programming. Although its own original slate is only a quarter the size of Netflix's, Amazon.com can boast that its shows won more Emmy awards last year than its rival.

Netflix is counting on a vast library of original programming to help keep subscribers on board as it faces tougher competition. Amazon, for instance, just started offering its streaming-video service for $9 a month ; previously, you had to sign up for the company's $100-a-year Prime service, which includes free shipping from its e-commerce site and other goodies.

Amazon is undercutting Netflix's $10 monthly price for its most popular video-streaming plan, as is Hulu, which charges $8. HBO charges $15 per month for a video-streaming service it launched last year to compete against Netflix.

Netflix will test the loyalty of its long-time subscribers next month when it starts to hikes their prices 25 percent, following a two-year freeze that kept rates at $8 per month. The increase will hit 17 million to 22 million U.S. subscribers, based on analyst estimates.

Original programming doesn't come cheap. The Los Gatos, California, company ended March with $12.3 billion committed to Internet streaming rights, nearly double the $5.6 billion it spend at the end of 2012. Netflix hasn't disclosed how much of that spending has gone toward original series and exclusive movies, but the percentage has been steadily increasing.

The cost of licensing and overseas expansion has whittled Netflix's profit margins. In its first-quarter results released late Monday, the company said it earned $28 million, or 6 cents per share, on revenue of nearly $2 billion. Investors, though, are far more focused the company's subscriber growth.

So far, the company has delivered. Netflix picked up an additional 6.74 million customers in the first quarter to boost its worldwide audience to 81.5 million subscribers  up from 33 million before the first season of "House of Cards." Such gains helped propel Netflix's share price, which has more than quadrupled since then, creating about $36 billion in shareholder wealth.

But the stock price dropped nearly 8 percent in extended trading late Monday after the company predicted it would only add 2.5 million subscribers in the second quarter, including a gain of 500,000 customers in the U.S. The conservative forecast reflected the anticipated loss of some longtime subscribers due to the price increase.

There's a worrisome history here. In 2011, subscribers fled when Netflix split off its DVD-by-mail operation from its burgeoning streaming business, a shift that hiked prices as much as 60 percent for some subscribers.

Netflix lost 3 percent of its U.S. subscribers at the time. A similar reaction to next month's price increase might cost it 510,000 to 660,000 subscribers in the second quarter.

Analysts think a repeat is unlikely. "I don't think you are going to see a lot of people bailing out and running for the exits," said Rosenblatt Securities analyst Martin Pyykkonen  largely because Netflix now has so many shows you can't find anywhere else.

That original programming appears to be a major draw for many subscribers. In a recent online survey of 2,500 U.S. adults conducted by Morgan Stanley, 45 percent cited it as a reason to subscribe to Netflix.

HBO, however, still has a huge advantage over Netflix in terms of prestige. Last year, HBO won 43 Emmys, more than any other TV network, while Netflix's original programs garnered just four  one less than Amazon.com.

___

AP Business Writer Ryan Nakashima in Los Angeles contributed to this story.
SAN FRANCISCO  San Francisco port officials say it could cost between $2 billion and $3 billion to secure three miles of seawall underlying the Embarcadero waterfront and prevent it from causing significant damage in the event of a major earthquake.

The Port of San Francisco released the estimate in a report last week.

The report states most of the seawall is built over weak marine clay that tends to amplify earthquake shaking, and that fill used to create land behind the seawall is subject to liquefaction, a phenomenon in which soil loses strength and behaves like a liquid.

The report finds that a moderate to major earthquake would probably push the seawall out toward San Francisco Bay, anywhere from up to a foot to several feet. The seawall protects a memorable stretch of San Francisco's waterfront from Fisherman's Wharf to AT&T Park, which is heavy with tourists, commuters and joggers.

The stretch also includes the popular Ferry Building, which survived the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, but the epicenter of that quake was 60 miles away. The magnitude of that quake was 6.9.

A working group of the United States Geological Survey concluded a 72 percent probability of a strong earthquake occurring in the region in a 30-year period between 2014 and 2043.
ALBUQUERQUE  New Mexico's soundstages are at capacity as television production ramps up in the state.

According to the New Mexico Film Office, there were recently eight TV productions filming in the state, meaning every studio in Albuquerque and Santa Fe are or were full, The Albuquerque Journal reported .

Film Office Director Nick Maniatis said this is the first time so many shows have been in New Mexico at once, bringing unprecedented money to the state.

"What's happening now is the fruits of our labor," Maniatis said. "There's a lot of hard work from the studios, the unions and the film office that has gone into making this happen."

According to the Albuquerque Film Office one week of filming a TV production funnels $1 million into the community.

The state has worked hard to attract studios and directors with a 30 percent tax rebate on all New Mexico goods and services. Director Robert Rodriguez, known for "Sin City" and Spy Kids" franchises, said when Texas incentives began to dwindle he turned to New Mexico to film "From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series," an El Rey Network production.

"It costs money to move a show, and we needed to save money," he said. "'From Dusk Till Dawn' is set in Texas and being in New Mexico would keep the Western feel to it. We heard great things from other people who have filmed here."

Albuquerque also has a strong relationship with AMC Networks after hosting television juggernaut "Breaking Bad" and later the spin-off "Better Call Saul." AMC filmed its upcoming show "Preacher" at Albuquerque Studios.

Other shows filmed in New Mexico include Netflix's "Longmire," CBS Productions' "Untitled Mars Project" for the CW, the Steven Soderbergh TV series "Godless" for Netflix and NBC's "The Night Shift."
JACKSON, Wyo.  A Wyoming school has canceled a planned appearance by a Christian abstinence advocate after an outcry from parents.

Teton County School District canceled Shelly Donahue's speech after a number of parents complained that her message is unscientific, ineffective and likely to give students a bad impression of themselves and one another, reported The Jackson Hole News & Guide .

Donahue may be best known for a demonstration in which she sticks a piece of tape to a boy's arm. She compares the tape to that of a promiscuous girl, whose tape becomes less transparent as it's shared with other peoples' arms.

Superintendent Gillian Chapman said she was surprised by the response from parents and noted that some told her they would have been glad to have their children participate in the program.

"When you're talking about sex, it's a sensitive subject," Chapman said. "Some parents don't want to talk about sex with their kids, they want someone else to talk to them."

For those who are still interested in attending, Donahue will give her presentation in the Jackson Hole High School library after class hours on Wednesday.

The program wouldn't have used tax dollars. It was offered by Turning Point Pregnancy Resource Center, an organization that offers pregnancy support with an anti-abortion message.

Parents were given the choice to opt their kids out, but several argued that Donahue's appearance in public schools seemed like an endorsement of her views.

"She has zero sex education credentials," said parent Renee Glick on Sunday. She called Donahue's lessons "fear-based and guilt-based, which is really wrong, and which is damaging."

Donahue doesn't talk about contraception, instead focusing on telling teenagers that premarital sex leads to bad physical and emotional results. She backs her claims up with Scripture but says she presents a no-religion version of the speech when necessary.

Chapman called the disagreement "healthy," but she also defended Donahue, saying that she saw one of Donahue's presentations and thought it was a worthwhile message.

"She doesn't just say 'Don't have sex,' she gives kids the language and tools they need to say it's OK not to have sex," said Chapman. "She's an excellent presenter, and what was impressive to me was how the kids responded to her and the value they took away from her presentation."
A little more than a year after it opened an office in Tucson with promises of enhancing male virility, NuMale Medical Center has closed.

The clinics office space at 5240 E. Knight Drive, Suite 100, was cleared out over the weekend, said Dev Sethi, the attorney representing landlords from Sonia Enterprises.

Sethi said his clients are disappointed that the medical practice breached its lease but are also concerned for the patients the practice and its physicians abandoned by leaving in the dark of night with no notice.

NuMale spokesman Justin Pulliam said the clinic, which did extensive local advertising, stopped seeing new patients in December and has provided services to all existing patients. No patients were abandoned, he said.

Pulliam said the clinic had a few hundred patients who have either completed their treatments or, if not, can be taken care of either remotely or by going to another NuMale clinic in another city. NuMale has clinics in 12 other cities, he said.

Theres no story here, he said. The landlord is upset because we are breaking the lease. ... Weve contacted our patients as needed. We would never abandon any patients.

When it came to Tucson last year, NuMale advertised itself as having the most state-of-the-art medical therapies that address the root causes of weight gain, erectile dysfunction, low testosterone and other mens health issues. It also offered treatments for hair loss and platelet-rich plasma treatments for male enhancement.
Area youths will get a chance to explore career opportunities  as well as potentially interview for jobs  at Pima County's sixth annual Youth Career Expo, May 4 at Tucson International Airport.

Youths from ages 16 to 24 are invited to the fair from 3 to 6 p.m. at TIA, 7250 S. Tucson Blvd.

The fair will feature employers and educators from the fields of aerospace and defense, logistics, health, bioscience, emerging technologies, infrastructure and natural and renewable resources.

The event also will feature general career information and opportunities for job shadowing, internships and employment.

Participants can choose from three two-hour sessions beginning at 3 p.m., 3:30 p.m. and 4 p.m. Youths must bring six copies of their resumes and come dressed prepared for a potential interview, to introduce themselves to an employer, and to talk about career goals.

The registration deadline is Friday, April 29. RSVP to registration@tucsonyouth.org.
Hilary Bettis. Remember her name.

Bettis multilevel script is the star of The Ghosts of Lote Bravo, which Borderlands Theater opened Saturday, April 17, in the first of a three-city rolling premiere. Two other theaters in the National New Play Network are staging the piece. Bettis, who attended Saturdays opening, will be at the opening this weekend at the Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City, Missouri.

Bettis set her play in Juarez, Mexico, which has the gruesome nickname of the capital of murdered women.

She weaves a metaphor-rich tale of the economic and social impact of maquiladoras on impoverished women, personal sacrifice for the greater good, religious and folk beliefs, survival in city ruled by brutal organized crime, and murder in a place where boots are more important than the lives of others.

Its a disturbing, grim story. However, Bettis infuses the play with happy memories, touches of humor and an overarching sense of hope.

Here are some other reasons to see The Ghosts of Lote Bravo:

The setting: Old tires, rusted metal, graffiti, a poster asking Donde Estan? (Where are they?) and rows of pink crosses with girls names scratched into them spill from the stage area onto the floor of the intimate Cabaret Theatre, upstairs at the Temple of Music and Art.

The set puts the audience in Juarez.

Precise lighting helps director Barclay Goldsmith have the actors flow easily between complex scene changes. Action shifts quickly between the present and the previous weeks and days, but there is never any confusion.

The cast: The actors are solid in their roles, helping the develop the characters and advance the story.

Ericka Quintero embraces a mothers love in her role as Juanda, whose husband was murdered and must toil in a maquiladora making T-shirts with U.S. flags on them.

She brings to the surface the conflict of her Catholic beliefs contrasted against a folk saint and the choices she must make as she tries to eke out food for her young children. Importantly, you can feel her desperation as she struggles to find her teenage daughter who doesnt come home from work one night.

Perla Vanesa Barraza turns in a powerful, spunky performance as teenage Raquel, who has a humble life dream of being a waitress serving happy people. However, she tumbles between the sheets when she must earn money to help her mother feed her younger brothers.

Barraza has a steely, tiny-but-tough strength as she faces male powers that be.

You might not recognize Alba Jaramillo in her Dia de los Muertas-like costume and makeup for her role as Santa Muerte, the folk saint who is said to bring safe delivery to the afterlife.

Jaramillo uses stiff, towering posture and a rhythmic, sarcastic tone to give Santa Muerte an immense, intense presence.

Maria Rebeca Cartes lets her vulnerability show as an older woman stuck in the maquiladora cycle.

Enrique Garcia Naranjo, wannabe skateboard star who has four teardrop tattoos, brings out the internal tenderness of a street-tough kid. Roberto Guajardo shows his comedic and dramatic chops.

Andy Gonzalez and Guillermo Jones each reflect the conflict of men who love their families and are stuck in a cycle of violence and corruption.

The Ghosts of Lote Bravo is stomach churning and may bring a tear or two to your eyes. There are blood, sorrow, profanity and interesting plot turns as it exposes ugliness that many wont want to see.

And it is a beautiful, well-written play that does what theater should  to challenge perspectives and to open new worlds to the audience.

Remember Bettis name. We should to see more from her in the future. And well savor every word.
Pima County Fair continuously pushes the envelope with its carnival food monstrosities  pickle fries, spiral cut hot dogs, pizza on a stick,  but this is completely new territory.

Over at the Fun Biz Concessions booth in the carnival area, you can now purchase a boat of deep fried nachos for $10. What is that exactly? Well, you take a bunch of Nacho Cheese Doritos and some regular corn chips, crush them up and mix them with jack cheese. Then you roll them into balls and throw them in the fryer. When the balls come out looking like crispy golden meteorites, you open the floodgates and unleash onto them a glistening river of nacho cheese.

This concept isn't entirely new. A quick Google search reveals similar absurdities like deep fried mozzarella stick nachos and deep fried nachos filled with taco meat, speared with a stick and shaped into miniature corn dogs.

But the question remains. Why? Regular nachos are extremely delicious as well as extremely unhealthy. There's a good thing going on there, and I dare say these guys have messed it up. The deep fried nacho balls are crispy on the outside, but once you cut into them they're literally a hot mess, like your little brother stomped on your bag of Taki's and you tried to salvage them by making cheesy Matzah ball soup.
ORLOSKY, John S. 69 of Tucson died on January 17, 2016 at St. Joseph's Hospital. He was born on December 11, 1946 in Patuxet, MD son of Helen and John Orlosky. He grew up in Washington, PA graduating from Washington High School, attending California State College. He served in the USAF as a Staff Sergeant. He worked for Tucson USPS until his retirement. On February 17, 1985 he married Betsy Snyder who survives. Also surviving is his son, Jeremy (Rhonda) and his granddaughter, Maialen. Also surviving are his brother, Steven Orlosky; two sisters, Helen Moran and Margie Abbas and several nephews and a niece. His hobbies included many trips and cruises with his soulmate and wife Betsy. Trapshooting, his Harley Davidson and collecting cars. His dream was to live, work and retire in Tucson. He is sadly missed by all who knew him. A Memoriam will be held in his home on Saturday, April 23, 2016 at 12:30 p.m. luncheon will be served. Arrangements by BRING'S BROADWAY CHAPEL.
It is with tremendous sadness that we announce Maria Teresa Velez, the Associate Dean of the Graduate College at the University of Arizona and a mentor to many students for more than 30 years, died on April 13, 2016 from cancer. Maria Teresa was known for her commitment to identifying and encouraging students to pursue graduate degrees, especially women and minorities. She is credited for elevating the UA nationally in minority graduate students. The UA is first in the country graduating Native American students in Ph.D. programs and eighth in graduating Latinos with doctorate degrees. In addition, Maria Teresa brought in $40 million to recruit and fund graduate students and support diversity. She developed the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Consortium (UROC) to help prepare and motivate students into graduate school. She was active in many community groups, including Las Adelitas, a women's empowerment group. Maria Teresa was born in Havana, Cuba. She fled Cuba during the Communist Revolution when she was only 14. She came to the U.S. as a refugee through the Peter Pan Program in which thousands of unaccompanied Cuban children were brought to the U.S. in the early 1960s. She arrived in Albuquerque and was placed in a foster home with Lily Lorbes and Marlene Nunez who became her two best friends. Despite not speaking English, she managed to graduate from high school at age 16 as the class valedictorian. She attended the University of New Mexico and completed her B.A. in Latin American studies in 1967. In the early 1970s she served as a Presidential Intern in Washington, DC. Later she worked for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as the Director of the Refugee Resettlement Program. She then went back to school to pursue her doctorate in psychology. She completed her dissertation on The Social Context of Mothering in 1983 from the Wright Institute in Los Angeles. In 1984 she joined the University of Arizona's Counseling and Psychological Services, eventually becoming its Director. In subsequent years she served on the faculties in the Department of Psychology, Department of Family Studies, Mexican American Studies, Women's and Gender Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies. In 1996 she entered the Graduate College as the Associate Dean. Her most recent appointment was as Director of the BLAISER program, (Border Latino & American Indian Summer Exposure to Research), with the College of Medicine. She received numerous awards and served on a number of national committees and consulted for other universities. Lastly, in addition to all of her numerous accomplishments she was a beloved mother, sister, aunt and friend. She was generous to a fault, loved her family and friends furiously, was committed to serving others, and had a pure rebel heart. Before she became ill she told her daughter, "Mija, I have done everything I wanted to do. I have lived a very full and interesting life." There are few people who at the end of their lives can say and mean this. Her passion and drive is an inspiration to us all. She will be missed by not only her family, but the thousands of people worldwide she has served over her lifetime. She is survived by her children, Damian and Mariel; step-children, Carmen, Miguel, Lucy, Carlos and Lori; sons-in-law, Nicholas Toriello and Rick Trevizo; daughters-in-law, Kandyce Velez and Miros Velez; brother, Angel Marques and sister-in-law, Ana Marques; nieces, Ana Carla and Legna; and her grandchildren Leah, Ryan, Levi and Joseph. She was preceded in death by her soul mate and loving husband Dr. Darrel Goll. We are at peace knowing she is reunited with him. A Memorial Service will be held in her honor from 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. on Friday, April 22, 2016 at the UA's Student Union Ballroom, 1303 E. University Blvd. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Dr. Maria Teresa Velez Scholarship, c/o Las Adelitas, PO Box 27716, Tucson, AZ, 85726. Arrangements by MARANA MORTUARY & CEMETERY.
If you are chomping at the bit to celebrate spring while supporting a unique nonprofit, volunteers with Equine Voices Rescue & Sanctuary have the ideal venue: the Third Annual Spring Festival to Celebrate the ASPCAs Help A Horse Day.

The event is from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at 1624 W. Dove Way in Amado.

If we were not here, more than 600 equines that we have saved would have gone to slaughter. Where else would they go if we werent here? said Karen Pomroy, the founder and executive director of Equine Voices.

Founded in 2004, the nonprofit began as a safe haven for unwanted Premarin mares and foals. Premarin or PMU  short for pregnant mares urine  is a drug produced from the conjugated estrogen in mares urine. It is commonly prescribed for hormone-replacement therapy in menopausal women and used to treat osteoporosis in men and women.

The urine is obtained from mares who are tethered in stalls throughout six months of their pregnancies to maximize urine collection; after delivering, PMU mares nurse their foals for about six months and are then reimpregnated to begin the process again. Pomroy said many people are unaware of the inhumane treatment the mares and their unwanted foals suffer.

Lots of people dont know these mares are confined in small stalls for months on end and have water withheld on a regular basis ... it is a horrific industry. They have closed all the PMU farms in the U.S., but now they outsource to countries like China. Women just need to be aware that there are natural alternatives to Premarin, and I want to educate them about the needless suffering of our companion animals, she said.

To help in this mission, she has designated Gulliver  a gentle giant  as the sanctuarys official mascot. Now age 13 and 2,000 pounds, Gulliver was one of four PMU foals slated for slaughter who made the trip from North Dakota to the ranch that Pomroy bought in Amado in 2004.

The property was the realization of her dreams after she left a corporate job in sales and marketing, spent 18 months backpacking around the world and then volunteered at a wild-horse sanctuary in California.

Backpacking around the world changed my life. I did well in the corporate world, but I was unfulfilled. The time I spent in Third World . and in retreats and Buddhist monasteries made me realize that life was short and we all have a purpose, and I wanted to fulfill that purpose, said Pomroy, who has always loved animals, particularly horses.

Horse rescue became that purpose. Over the past decade, the sanctuary has expanded to include neglected, abandoned and abused horses, burros, donkeys and mules. It currently houses 77 animals; food, veterinary and other costs average $40,000 monthly.

This is so fulfilling, but it is also difficult and stressful. We see lots of starvation cases that require medical attention. We see the worst of the worst of what people can do to animals, and that is heart-wrenching, Pomroy said.

At the other end of the spectrum are the volunteers who assist with daily operations of the working ranch, according to Pomroy.

About 150 volunteers provide assistance with tasks ranging from grooming horses and cleaning stalls to performing administrative tasks and manning the on-site gift shop.

The nonprofit is also starting a thrift shop, which is scheduled to open in September; both volunteers and donations of gently-used and new items are needed.

Volunteers are also key to staging fundraisers such as the upcoming spring festival, which is vital to promoting awareness and raising funds, said Diane Russell, event coordinator.

Russell said the event is planned in conjunction with the ASPCAs annual Help a Horse Day, in which equine rescues nationwide compete for $100,000 in grant money.

Part of the criteria will be judged on is community participation. Last year we had more than 700 people attend, and we are hoping for even more this year. We will have other rescues and nonprofits attending, and there will be opportunities to interact with horses, sponsor horses, lots of great horse demonstrations, music, food and other activities, Russell said.

Overall, it will be an amazing spring day out for families and people of all ages, Pomroy said.
The Pima County Superior Court and Bar Association will host lawyers giving free legal information at Court Night on Wednesday, April 20.

Two sessions, from 4-5:30 p.m. and 5:45-7:15 p.m. will be held at the Herbert K. Abrams Public Health Center, 3950 S. Country Club Road.

Attendees must choose one talk per session on any of three topics:

Divorce/child support/paternity/custody

Probate/guardianship/conservatorship

Debtor/creditor and landlord/tenant

Questions will be taken, but individual advice or specific cases will not be discussed at the talks. Volunteers with legal expertise will be on hand to give more specific advice and information on low or no-cost legal and professional guidance.

Spanish-speaking interpreters will also be available.
The City Council has moved the location of its Tuesday afternoon meeting in anticipation of a large turnout for its scheduled vote on the proposed Broadway widening.

The regular meeting begins at 5:30 p.m. It will be held in the Board of Supervisors hearing room in the Pima County Administration Building, 130 W. Congress St.

The Broadway widening proposal has stirred a lot of interest.

On Sunday, more than 100 people opposed to the plan rallied along the route east of downtown. A handful of supporters also attended.

The project, if approved by the council, will change the existing four-lane road between Euclid Avenue and Country Club Road to six lanes.

The afternoon meeting will be broadcast live on Channel 96 (Cox and Comcast).

Rebroadcasts of the meeting will be on Tucson 12 and at https://www.tucsonaz.gov/tv12/mayor-and-council

The councils study session, which begins at 1 p.m., will still be held in its chambers at City Hall, 255 W. Alameda St.
PHOENIX  If Arizona has a presidential primary four years from now, state lawmakers want to keep it from being the fiasco it was last month.

A provision tucked into an unrelated election bill Monday would require the states largest county to have at least one polling place for every 1,700 people eligible to turn out at the polls.

Sen. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, said that should translate to about 200 polling places. There were just 60 in last months presidential primary.

Yee said she knows something about the problem.

I had the opportunity, I suppose you can say, of waiting 5 hours in line to vote, she told Senate colleagues during floor debate. I did not cast my ballot until 12:20 in the morning.

Yee figures setting a floor on the number of places to vote, coupled with allowing the county to set up emergency polling places, should prevent a repeat performance.

She agreed to limit her proposal to Maricopa County, saying thats where the problems occurred.

The amendment to HB 2017, which still requires a roll-call vote, also allows the county recorder to designate emergency polling places for a presidential preference election.

One thing remains unclear: Whether there will, in fact, be such a vote in 2020.

The House already has approved legislation to scrap the presidential preference primary first used in 1996.

Proponents of that change, including Secretary of State Michele Reagan, said its not fair to have a statewide election paid for by taxpayers when more than a third of voters  those who are not registered with a major political party  are ineligible to cast ballots.

An identical measure has gained preliminary Senate approval.

That would allow parties to return to the system they had in place before 1996, with each having a caucus. Parties also could contract with the state to run a primary  at party expense.

But the proposal is stalled amid hints by Gov. Doug Ducey he might veto the measure.

While critical of the problems that developed in Maricopa County, the governor said he likes the idea of a statewide primary. More to the point, he thinks it should be open to political independents.

Gubernatorial press aide Daniel Scarpinato said there is precedent for such a move.

He noted that prior to 1998, only those registered with a political party could vote in the regular late-summer primary where parties nominate candidates for state, legislative and some local offices.

The law now allows an independent to choose and vote the ballot of any party having a primary.
PHOENIX  Get ready to look at campaign signs longer each election.

And new fights between candidates.

The state Senate on Monday gave preliminary approval to allowing candidates to put up their signs starting 86 days before the election. Thats nearly twice as long as now permitted.

With the primary now in late August, that means a signs could start appearing in May.

And HB 2017 also ensures that candidates who win the primary can now keep those signs in place through the November election.

But the lawmakers who depend on those signs also voted to make it a crime to obscure someone elses signs, complete with a $750 fine and four months in county jail. It even allows those offending signs to be removed.

Only thing is, no one, including the author of the legislation, could say precisely when a sign violates the law and makes the person who put it up subject to criminal penalties.

There even is a disagreement about who can legally remove a sign that may be blocking another.

Rep. David Stevens, R-Sierra Vista, said that 86-day window ahead of the primary election ensures that candidates can get the message out to those who vote early. He said ballots are mailed out 60 days ahead of each election.

But the more interesting issue is the language about obscuring someone elses ballot. Even Stevens conceded the proposed law is far from clear.

By what angle? he asked.

If youre at a corner and youre driving, it changes as you drive whether theres obstruction or not, Stevens said.

The goal, he said, is to stop one candidate from putting up a sign directly in front of that of a foe, effectively making that other persons sign useless. But Stevens said the measure now awaiting a final Senate vote is far from clear.

What if Ive got a 4-by-4 (foot) sign and someones got an 8-inch-by-12-inch sign in front of mine, he said. Is that an obstruction if you cant see a little corner?

The senators debating the House-passed measure Monday had no better luck figuring out what would be a crime.

We dont know how you define obscure, said Sen. Steve Farley, D-Tucson.

Does that mean you cover up a quarter inch of the corner? he asked. Or do you cover up the entire thing?

Sen. Jeff Dial, R-Chandler, conceded he didnt really have an answer. He suggested it might have to be handled on a case-by-case basis where youd have to be taking pictures, documenting it.

But Dial said he isnt terribly concerned that the police will be busy investigating violations, citing offenders and taking down signs.

Based on my last campaigns, Id be surprised if there was a rapid response by the police because Ive not found the police to really care when you call them to notify them about political signs, he said. The campaign may actually be over by the time we saw a response.

Stevens, however, said thats not what he intends  or even the way he said the bill is supposed to work.

My understanding is, if they put something in front of mine, I can pull it out, he said, without bothering to wait for police.
South Tucson Fire Chief Reynaldo Tapia Alvarez received the last call and the firefighters ringing of the bell Monday at the station that he lead for the last two years.

Alvarez, 52, died April 7 at Banner-University Medical Center Tucson of complications of kidney cancer, said Capt. Andy Luna, a South Tucson Fire Department spokesman.

The ceremony in Alvarezs honor was held after a funeral Mass at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church.

His casket was carried by a special fire truck of the Last Alarm Foundation in a procession from the church at 602 W. Ajo Way to the firehouse at 1601 S. Sixth Avenue.

A flag that draped his casket was presented to his widow, Suzie Alvarez, who was accompanied by their children and grandchildren, said Luna.

Alvarez, a Tucson native, graduated from Tucson High Magnet School in 1982.

He started working for the fire department in 1992, and during his 24-years there he climbed rank starting as a firefigher, then engineer, captain, battalion chief and chief, Luna said.

He was in charge of 35 firefighters, including reserves.
Gov. Doug Duceys office has ordered state health officials to produce a long-awaited study on prescription drug rates for children in the states foster care system compared with those not in the foster care system.

The Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System  known as AHCCCS, the states Medicaid agency  must produce the report by the end of May, said Daniel Scarpinato, a Ducey spokesman.

The governors office request came last week, after state Sen. Debbie Lesko, R-Peoria, asked the governors office to follow up on her requests for an updated report, which she has sought for several years.

The report will replicate a 2011 study based on 2008 data that found that Arizonas foster children were prescribed powerful psychotropic drugs 4.4 times more often than non-foster children enrolled in Medicaid. Psychotropics include antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti-anxiety drugs, mood stabilizers and ADHD drugs.

The updated study will be completed before the May deadline, Monica Coury, AHCCCS spokeswoman, said on Monday.

The Star reported last week that AHCCCS and other state health care agencies have not released an updated report comparing the prescription rates despite repeated promises to do so. A report AHCCCS did release in October only looked at the rate foster children received psychotropic medications.

The April 10 article prompted Lesko to put in a request with the Governors Office to press for the agency to produce the report, she said.

Since 2008, the states foster care population has exploded by 92 percent, leading to concern that an overwhelmed system could result in inappropriate prescribing habits.

AHCCCS has implemented several oversight measures in recent years to monitor for medication rates in the states foster care population.

Since 2013, Lesko has asked for an updated report comparing the psychotropic medication rates of foster and non-foster kids. Despite promises from AHCCCS and other state health agencies to do so, the report never materialized, she said.

Last year, Lesko said she was so frustrated by the agencys inaction that she introduced legislation that would have required AHCCCS to produce a report on the topic every other year. A House committee voted it down.

Certainly its of concern if were overprescribing to foster children, because they are the responsibility of the state, Lesko said.

The agency told the Star last month that it would release an updated report by the end of April. Two years ago, the chief medical officer of the Arizona Division of Behavioral Health Services told the Star it would produce such a report within six months.

AHCCCS has collected all the data necessary and is in the initial stages of drafting the report, said Christina Corieri, health and human services adviser for Ducey.

We review all reports that come out of our agencies and well review that one like we would any other report, Corieri said.

Lesko said she will review the report to see if any action needs to be taken based on the results. But she said its too late this session to get any legislation passed on the issue.
OPINION: "As a parent and teacher, I know the best way to address discord is to listen first and establish trust. As a neighborhood leader, I know how to work through differences by treating people with dignity and respect. As a mathematics teacher, I always taught my students that there is more than one way to solve problems," writes Theresa Riel, a candidate for the District 2 seat on the Pima Community College Governing Board.
Help India!

By IANS,

New Delhi : Minority Affairs Minister A.R. Antulay raised a storm Wednesday after saying that slain Maharashtra police officer Hemant Karkare was a victim of terrorism plus something. As the opposition bayed for his blood, his own Congress party quickly distanced itself from the remark.

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A former chief minister of Mahrashtra, Antulay made the remarks first to reporters in parliament complex saying the terrorists who ravaged Mumbai Nov 26-29 had no reason to kill Karkare, head of the Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) of Mumbai Police.

Karkare was among the security personnel who died moments after the terrorists went on a killing spree, eventually leaving over 170 Indians as well as foreigners dead. Karkare was gunned down along with his colleagues when the gunmen fired at their vehicle Nov 26 night.

Antulay suggested that Karkares death could be linked to the Malegaon bombings which he was investigating and in which Hindu radical groups are the main suspect.

Superficially speaking they (terrorists) had no reason to kill Karkare. Whether he (Karkare) was a victim of terrorism or terrorism plus something I do not know, Antulay said.

Karkare found that there are non-Muslims involved in acts terrorism in some cases. Any person going to the roots of terrorism has always been the target, he said. There is more than what meets the eye.

As opposition members pounced on Antulay for his remarks which Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesman Rajiv Pratap Rudy dubbed obnoxious, Antulay tried to retract saying he did not mean that terrorists did not kill him.

He said it needed to be found out why Karkare did not head for the Taj and Oberoi hotels, which too came under attack from the terrorists, and chose instead to go to the Cama hospital near where he got killed.

Antulay argued that the slain officer could have done better at the hotel sites.

Rudy urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to clarify if Antulays remarks were individual misdemeanour or the collective wisdom of the cabinet.

Shiv Senas Ananth Geethe accused Antulay of bringing in a needless divide when the country was trying to unite after the Mumbai carnage, for which India has blamed Pakistani terrorists.

The Congress party distanced itself from Antulay. The Congress does not accept it, said spokesman Abhishek Singhvi.

The government, official sources said, was deeply embarrassed.

Police officers across the country denounced Antulay.

Former Delhi Police chief Ved Marwah said Antulay had done injustice to the memory of a very brave officer by suggesting that his death might be linked to Malegaon blasts that has led to the arrests of Hindu radicals.
Help India!

Ahmedabad : A Gujarat bandh called by the Patel community on Monday received lukewarm response with life remaining normal across the State, including in Mehsana town, which saw clashes between the Patidars and police on Sunday.

Barring an incident in which an unoccupied house of Minister of State for Home Rajnikant Patel in Mehsana was set on fire in the afternoon by unidentified miscreants and burning of vehicle tyres in the town, there were no reports of trouble from anywhere in the State.

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Patels house in Radhe Exotica colony which was under repair, was also attacked last August during the Patel agitation as well as during another stir in November.

The agitating leaders had then said the ministers house was targeted for setting the police free on the Patel youths for repression.

Authorities lifted curfew and prohibitory orders in the town in the morning while police, State Reserve Police and Rapid Action Force remained deployed in the town and other north Gujarat towns.

Mehsana Superintendent of Police Chaitanya Mandlik said the shutdown call received no response in the district.

Police lodged complaints against 25 people for the violence on Sunday.

You can look around and see that traffic is normal, the shops are open, Mandlik told journalists.

Agitating Patel groups, who had rushed to the district jails in Mehsana and Surat to court arrest on Sunday, had clashed with police who tried to stop them.

Mobs later burnt camp offices of two state ministers, Nitin Patel and Rajnikant Patel, besides parliamentarian Jaishree Patel as well as state transport buses in Mehsana and Ahmedabad.

They also burnt a couple of government offices and blocked a state highway in Saurashtra.

The authorities had suspended mobile internet services in north Gujarat and Ahmedabad to prevent the spread of rumours and incendiary information. The ban will continue till Tuesday morning.

Mandlik said Sardar Patel Group (SPG) leader Laljibhai Patel, who was detained on Sunday, had sustained a head injury during stone-pelting by agitators and was not caned by police as claimed by him and his supporters.

He cited medical reports to say that Laljibhai Patel was hit by a stone.

Meanwhile, the Gujarat government on Monday called a meeting between a ministerial committee set up by Chief Minister Anandiben Patel and leaders of Patidar groups to chalk out a possible solution to the nine-month agitation demanding reservation for the community in government jobs and educational institutions under the Other Backward Class (OBC) category.

After the meeting that lasted for over three hours, minister Nitin Patel who heads the committee told reporters that the meeting covered a lot of ground and a settlement was on the cards.

Pointing out that measures like facilities to the farming community, expansion of educational facilities in the rural areas and many others raised by the Sardar Patel Group and Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) had already been initiated in the current budget, Patel said other issues would be discussed with Chief Minister Anandiben Patel and if necessary with the central government leaders before taking a final decision on the reservation demand.

When contacted, PAAS and SPG spokespersons Varun Patel and Purvin Patel, respectively, said those who attended the meeting had nothing to with the Patel agitation and were the hand-maidens of the government who are not interesting in a solution.

The government has done nothing but holding irrelevant meetings through the last nine months, Purvin Patel said.

Varun Patel asserted that these so-called leaders who attended the meeting were with the government and not with the community.


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Bengaluru : About 15,000 women garment workers on Monday staged a massive demonstration on the outskirts of Bengaluru, protesting change in the Provident Fund Act, which denies the right to withdraw employers contribution till 58 years.

We are protesting against the central governments move to amend the PF Act, which prevents our workers, including mostly women, to withdraw the employers contribution till they turn 58 years, Garment and Textile Workers Union leader K.R. Jayaram told reporters.

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Terming the move to deny workers their fair due as anti-labour, Jayaram said the amendment to the Employees Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952, would also make them wait till 58 years to withdraw the employers contribution though they can withdraw their contribution to PF before turning 58.

As contribution to PF is an option, workers who cannot afford monthly deduction due to inadequate salary and high cost of living, and will be entitled to only three years interest on their employers contribution, Jayaram said.

Highlighting the workers plight over their future, Jayaram said many of them were unsure of being employed after 40-50 and retained till 58 years in the unorganised sector without legal or financial protection to their welfare in old age.

With increasing automation and mechanisation, senior workers are worried about their future, as they may not get a suitable or alternative job after 40-50 years in the garment industry, Jayaram said.

Hundreds of women workers from five garment units, including Shahi Exports Ltd., Mohan Exports and Jockey, struck work at noon and marched to the Bengaluru-Chennai national highway and Bengaluru-Mysuru state highway, blocking vehicular movement and causing massive traffic jams for over four hours.

Our central trade unions will decide on April 26 our next course of agitation. We are collecting one lakh signatures of workers on a memo to the prime minister if the government does not withdraw the amendment to the PF Act, Jayaram added.

The citys Additional Commissioner of Police P. Harishekaran later said police contingents, including women constables, were rushed to the spot to disperse the workers as they were blocking the heavy vehicular traffic on the busy highways on the first working day of the week.

Our police personnel had to use force, including caning many men workers, as they were not withdrawing the road blockade on both highways, holding thousands of people to ransom on a hot working day, Harishekaran said.


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Islamic heads of more than 30 states have agreed a Ten-year plan of action in a bid to tackle extremism and security issues threatening the Islamic world.

By A Mirsab, TwoCircles.net,

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Istanbul: Over 30 heads of Islamic countries have established a Ten-Year plan of action for Islamic world and committed to create new anti-extremism centre and an international peace conference to resolve Arab-Israeli conflict.

This was agreed upon at the 13th Islamic Summit of Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) held in Istanbul on April 14-15, 2016. (OIC) is the second largest inter-governmental body after the U.N. convened Heads of State from across its 57 member states.

With leaders present included Turkish President Recep Erdogan, the King of Saudi Arabia Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, the conference saw a vast array of differing countries come together to try and establish an agreed action plan.

OIC Member states agreed to establish an Istanbul-based police cooperation and coordination center to tackle terror and other crimes. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, It would be helpful to establish a structure among member states that will strengthen and institutionalize cooperation against terror and other crimes.

The member states agreed to a series of deals  including denouncing Lebanons Shiite group Hezbollah for spreading terrorism and for destabilizing the national security of its member countries. It also included a plan to tackle rising tide of xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Muslim racism in Western countries.

Nations also agreed to establish an international peace conference to address the Israel-Palestine conflict, along with a new Islamic centre for food security to help famine stricken countries.

The conference also called on the international community and OIC Member States to support Syrian refugees and to develop resettlement programmes for Syrian refugees in order to alleviate their plights and that of the hosting States.

Iyad Madani, OIC Secretary General said, The Ten Year Program of Action will be a significant reference for us in all our OIC activities, in full coordination with the OIC Member States, bodies and institutions that have a significant role in its implementation.
Help India!

By Shalim M Hussain

As campaigning for the 2016 Assam assembly polls was gaining steam in the warm and wet spring, Sunny and his friends Hanif and Asad got caught in a trafficking ring. The three schoolboys from Kamrup (rural) district of Assam had just appeared for the Class tenth board exams and were visiting Asads mother in Hajo, a small town on the outskirts of Guwahati when they ran into Rabi and Khorshed, two labour contractors. The men were touring the villages on the periphery of Hajo recruiting boys, some as young as nine years old, for jobs in Shimla.

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The dreams they peddled were fantastic- they said that the boys would be arranged in groups of eight to ten and work in a small apple orchard, picking and packaging apples: a simple job for which they would be paid a monthly salary of 8000 rupees to remit home or dispose as they pleased. The three friends were taken in by the smooth talk of the older men, the dream of adventure and the lure of quick money. Five more boys from Hajo constituency joined them and on 19th March 2016, the group of eight accompanied by Rabi travelled in the general compartment (or as it is popularly known, the cattle class of the Indian Railways) of the Avadh Assam Express and reached Delhi to fulfill their dreams.

In the national capital they were sold to an agent Kishore for eight thousand rupees a head (although they didnt know of it just yet) and housed in a decrepit one room apartment close to the swanky New Friends Colony in South Delhi. They remained there for two days before being transported to Kashmir and left in the care of Sirji, the head of operations in Srinagar. Sirji accommodated them in his dingy office with twenty other boys (from Assam, West Bengal and Orissa) who had come before them. The boys were allowed to call home from Sirjis number while their own mobile phones were confiscated. In Delhi they could move freely on the streets and in the alleys but here once they were herded into the dark cramped room, bolted and locked from the outside, they remained in captivity all day except for a little while in the morning and afternoon when a cleaning lady came to mop the floors and cook them a simple meal of rice and dal.

Sirji disciplined the boys with a controlled use of politeness and extreme violence so that they felt that he genuinely cared for them and were also scared to cross him. However, when he lost his temper he was a wild beast- when the children understood that they had been duped and refused to work as domestic servants, he kicked Hanif in the stomach and slapped Rubul so hard that his left ear rang all night.

After two days of darkness and confinement with only a 100 watt bulb hanging from the ceiling and a younger agent to keep them company, the boys were sold to customers in Beerwa and other areas surrounding Srinagar for a sum of 20000- 22000 rupees each and set to work as domestic help. They were made to sign a bond saying that they would remain in employment for an entire year until they had paid off the debt. No money, either from the first or the second purchase was remitted to the parents of the children. Instead, the document they signed inflated their age- the three older ones who are sixteen years old and had just written their Class tenth board exams were made out to be nineteen and the youngest of the group, Wasim, who is nine years old was made out to be fourteen.

Trafficking in humans is illegal in India under the Bonded Labour Abolition Act, the Child Labour Act and the Juvenile Justice Act, along with safeguards under article 23 of the Constitution of India. It must be noted that the boys employers were educated and respectable people- Hafizs employers were both practising doctors and Asads employer was a professor of Sociology, both presumably knowledgeable of their crime. They had no moral scruples in employing the boys until nature intervened. The sudden change in weather from Assam to Delhi and then on to Kashmir had already made Hanif sick on the way to Srinagar and Sunny caught a fever during his first day of work. Fearing that the boys would not be able to cope with the weather, the employers decided to return them.

Meanwhile, the boys parents maintained regular communication with Sirji and their employers and finally managed to negotiate their release. On 28th March Asad, Hanif and Sunnys parents transferred Rs. 10,000 to Sirji as penalty for his losses and Sunny, Rubul and Wasim were allowed to leave. They arrived in Delhi on 29th March and caught a train to Assam the same night. Persistent phone calls to Sirji and the employers over the next week finally persuaded them to release the remaining boys. On the morning of April the seventh, Asad and Hanif reached Delhi and on 8th April they left for Assam, reaching home on the 10th, one day before the second and final phase of the assembly elections.

As in most instances related to trafficking, no cases have yet been filed against Sirji, Kishore or the two agents who brought the boys from Assam to Delhi. An NGO that specializes in rescuing and rehabilitating trafficked children also offered help but the parents refused, repeating over and over again that they only wanted their children back. This is not an isolated incident.

Every year, especially after the floods, poor parents in Assam send their children to work in other states where they unwittingly get trafficked. Most of the children never return home and in case they do, illiteracy, lack of legal awareness and the fact that the parents themselves are partially culpable mean that no cases are filed. At the time of writing this report, three boys from Hajo are still employed as house-servants in Kashmir along with many others from different parts of Eastern India. Hanifs parents are sharecroppers. They had a decent crop this year but since the absence of their son, the paddy has been left standing in the rain and is now utterly damaged. Their means of livelihood for the next six months is gone but at least they have their boy back and only that matters.

( Shalim M Hussain is a Research Scholar, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He can be reached at [email protected] Names have been changed to protect the children )

The article was originally published in www.nezine.com
The African Union have asked The Gambias Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Mama Fatima Singhateh to investigate the reports of the death in custody of at least three protesters - and if true - to ensure prompt arrest and prosecution of those involved in their torture-death.

Attorney General Singhateh said the protesters assembled unlawfully and argued that the security forces tried to manage the situation. The countrys Information Minister Sheriff Bojang has denied knowing of the arrest or torture of a leading senior opposition figure Solo Sandeng who has been confirmed to have died in custody after being tortured on Thursday night.

The European Union said it is particularly concerned about the fate of Mr. Solo Sandeng and other opposition politicians who took part in the protest, as well as on reports on ill-treatment of persons taken into custody, in a statement on its website.

The Gambias laws allow for peaceful assembly and do not require a permit unless where a sound amplifying system is to be used. Around the same time last year, members of the opposition UDP party had a standoff with the police at Fass, about six miles from the border town of Amdallahi in Senegal.

The African Union has asked Banjul to ensure the speedy release of all persons arrested.

Former colonial master expresses deep concerns

Whiles relations between the Gambia and its former colonial master Great Britain are at its lowest, the latters Minsiter of African Affairs James Duddridge has expressed deep concerns over allegations of excessive violence and ill treatment of those in custody.

Mr Duddridge has called on The Gambian authorities to investigate these claims in a thorough and transparent manner, ensuring that anyone responsible for any wrongdoing is held accountable and brought to justice.

The Indemnity Act protects security forces from prosecution

The Gambia passed a protection law that gives immunity to security forces who use force that results to the death of a person during the suppression of a riot, insurrection or mutiny.

The right of people to protest peacefully has been met with a consistently repressive response over the years, said Satang Nabaneh, a Gambian human rights lawyer. The current deplorable trends in the Gambia characterized by the complete disregard of the rule of law and the personalization of the state by President Jammeh over the past two decades pose a clear and present danger to national security.

The country currently carries a plethora of laws and practices by the regime that severely limits and destroys human rights and human dignity.

The last protest in Gambia was 16 years ago. Gambian rights campaigners have accused the countrys president, Yahya Jammeh and Vice President Isatou Njie-Saidy of being complicit in the killing of more than a dozen students including a Red Cross volunteer and a four-year-old child that April morning after security forces opened fire on peaceful protesters.
China, NZ envision broader FTA Updated: 2016-04-19 03:10 By Hu Yongqi(China Daily)

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) holds talks with New Zealand Prime Minister John Key in Beijing, capital of China, April 18, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

China and New Zealand will increase agricultural cooperation and upgrade their free trade agreement to further cut tariffs and boost exchanges.

Premier Li Keqiang on Monday met with New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, who will end his six-day visit on Friday.

China will work to expand trade within the framework of the FTA and create conditions to begin negotiations on broadening the agreement, Li said. China will also expand cooperation with the Oceanian partner in whole industrial chains of agricultural and animal husbandry investments, food safety and other areas, he added.

In 2004, New Zealand was the first developed country to recognize China's full market economy status, and it signed a free trade agreement with China in April 2008, which took effect six months later.

Bilateral trade has seen double-digit growth over the past eight years, and China became New Zealand's biggest export market in 2014.

Key said New Zealand will enhance cooperation with China in agriculture and animal husbandry, and will work to upgrade the FTA.

The two countries' industrial complementarity will continue to increase their trade, as China, a manufacturer, needs to import many agricultural goods from the partner, said Chen Fengying, a global economy researcher at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.
Habit of reading in China expands with mobile tech Updated: 2016-04-19 07:13 By Mei Jia(China Daily)

Passengers on a Line 2 subway train in Beijing turn to their smartphones to read books, magazines, or simply play games, to break up their journeys. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Chinese people, on average, read eight books in 2015, a small increase over previous years that may be attributed in part to mobile technology.

The Chinese Academy of Press and Publication issued its findings about reading on Mondayahead of World Book Day on Saturdayafter a survey of Chinese reading habits.

Proportion of people reading on digital platforms in China.[China Daily]

It's the academy's 13th survey since 1999. This one gathered responses from 45,911 people from 81 cities and townships in 29 regions at the provincial level. Both urban and rural areas were included. Adults and minors answered different questions. To the pleasure of many, 81 percent of Chinese under age 17 have a reading habit.

"This year, we found that the rate of Chinese adults who have a habit of reading is on the increaseto 79.6 percent. Most of them are also readers of digital content," said Wei Yushan, head of the academy.

The survey also found that 67 percent of Chinese adults hope to have reading activities or reading festivals where they live.

Advancing technology has brought rapid changes in publishing and reading. In its first year, the survey asked about internet surfing habits and found 3.7 percent doing it. In 2015, it was 70 percent.

Among the average of eight books read by Chinese people in 2015, three were in digital form. Wei said, a similar survey of French readers, who took in an average of 16.7 titles in 2014, found that only about one was an e-book.

The survey indicates that online readers' major preferences are centered on urban romance, history and fantasy.

Xu Shengguo, head of the Institute of Publishing Research under the academy, said the majority of mobile readers are attracted to that type of reading, too.

"With 52 percent of Chinese adults reading on WeChat in 2015, further innovations of reading and publishing are yet to emerge, then, the text of books will be like a portal, and everything will be available, including pictures, videos and sounds, and readers can even interact with the author," Xu said.

Chinese leaders have been promoting the idea since 2006 of building a country with avid readers.

Zhou Huilin, an official from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, said the government has invested around 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) in free e-books for migrant workers. A total of 18 billion yuan has been allocated for the building of rural libraries over the years.

"We've found that in some rural areas, where print books are not handy for purchasing or lending, people there are reading with mobile phones."
Beijing joins Shanghai in fight against nepotism Updated: 2016-04-19 07:37 By Cui Jia(China Daily)

Senior officials' spouses and children to face strict controls on links to private businesses

Spouses and children of senior officials in Beijing will soon face strict controls over their involvement in private businesses - following their counterparts in Shanghai.

This was decided on Monday when the central authorities expanded a pilot anti-corruption program to end nepotism and regulate the behavior of officials' family members.

The regulation will be expanded and become routine practice in regions including Beijing, Guangdong, Chongqing and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

This was announced by the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reform, headed by President Xi Jinping. The regulation first took effect in Shanghai in May last year.

Under the regulation passed by the Shanghai government, spouses of ministerial- and provincial-level officials are prohibited from starting companies or becoming involved in any business operations. Their children are not allowed to have businesses in Shanghai.

Han Zheng, Party chief of Shanghai, said last month that 1,802 officials had filed reports containing detailed information about their relatives' involvement in private businesses last year. Most of their relatives have since left business circles.

Ten officials were removed from their posts and 10 others were transferred to other positions as a result of the regulation. Three officials were also investigated for suspected serious disciplinary offenses, he added.

Zhu Lijia, a professor of public administration at the Chinese Academy of Governance, said, "Corruption among family members is a common form of corruption in China, which the government must put a stop to because the damage can be very severe.

"The regulation in Shanghai has effectively cut officials from the business ties created by their family members and also reduced such corruption."

Zhu said that implementing the pilot regulations in a variety of areas - including Beijing, other relatively well-developed areas and an ethnic region - can help the central government to draft a practical regulation at national level, which would be introduced in the future.
Funeral held for pioneering space scientist Updated: 2016-04-19 07:37 By China Daily(China Daily)

A funeral for Liang Sili, one of China's top space scientists, was held at Beijing's Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery on Monday.

An academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the International Academy of Astronautics, Liang died from an illness on Thursday morning at age 91.

President Xi Jinping has offered condolences to Liang's family, saying that the scientist dedicated his life to China's space program and contributed greatly to making the country a strong space power. The president said Liang was respected for his patriotism, devotion and excellent work style.

With wide-ranging achievements in research on missile and rocket control systems, Liang was considered one of the founders of China's space industry.

Born in Beijing in August 1924, Liang was the youngest son of Liang Qichao, a leading reformist who lived during the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

After graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1949, Liang returned to China and joined the then Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.

He started a career in the space sector in 1956 when he was transferred to the then Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defense, the country's first missile, rocket and spacecraft research body.

Liang helped to develop various types of ballistic missiles and launch rockets and also played an important role in establishing several key space programs.

He was elected as an academic at the International Academy of Astronautics in 1987 and at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1993.

Liang Hong (center), daughter of Liang Sili, holds a portrait of her father at his funeral at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, the main resting place for highranking revolutionary heroes and government officials, in Beijing on Monday. Liang, 91, died on Thursday from an undisclosed illness. Wang Zhuangfei / China Daily

(China Daily 04/19/2016 page3)
Man sentenced to death for leaking State secrets Updated: 2016-04-19 11:18 By Ma Chi(chinadaily.com.cn)

A screen shot shows Huang Yu, who was sentenced to death for leaking top State secrets.

A man was sentenced to death for leaking top State secrets to foreign agencies, cctv.com reported on Monday.

Huang Yu, 42, worked for an encryption research institute in Sichuan province from 1997 to 2004. In 2002, Huang was told he would be dismissed due to his poor performance in work. One day, Huang contacted a foreign spy agency online to sell the confidential information he acquired at work, and he met a foreign spy in a hotel in a Southeast Asian country in June.

During the meeting, Huang gave three electronic documents containing military secrets to the foreign spy for which he was paid $10,000 and was promised a monthly sum of $5,000 for more documents.

Since then, Huang traveled overseas regularly under the guise of attending meetings to meet the foreign spy.

Before Huang was detained in 2011, he leaked more than 150,000 materials, including 90 top State secrets, to foreign spy agencies, and earned more than $700,000.

Huang was sentenced to death on the charge of espionage. His wife, Tang, was sentenced to five years in prison, and his brother-in-law, Tan, was sentenced to three years behind bars on the charge of negligent disclosure of State secrets.

This is a just one of the many cases in recent years involving the disclosure of State and military secrets that have been reported.

In 2012, a man surnamed Tang was sentenced to 15 years in jail when he was pronounced guilty for releasing military secrets to overseas organizations.

Before Tang was detained, he was hiding in a local military command as a delivery man for more than 6 years after he received special training in 2005 in a Southeast Asian country. Tang was paid more than 200,000 yuan ($30,880) for disclosing military secrets abroad.

A senior business executive surnamed Shen was sentenced to 17 years behind bars in 2009 after he disclosed secrets about Guangdong's bottom line for inviting public bids for a nuclear power project to foreign companies.

In November 2014 a man in his mid-twenties surnamed Liao surrendered himself to police after he realized he was violating relevant laws and regulations by sending military photos abroad.

Liao began helping a foreign spy procure military secrets after he met the spy while seeking job opportunities online at the beginning of November 2014.

Liao frequently visited military ports in Zhanjiang, the western coastal city of Guangdong, and illegally took photos of local military facilities and naval vessels for the foreign spies before surrendering himself to police.

To raise public awareness of national security, April 15, 2016 was established as the country's first National Security Education Day, according to the National Security Law passed in July 2015.
The Airplane Cold :Fact and Fiction Updated: 2016-04-19 04:15 (W. Gifford-Jones M.D.)

"Did I catch this infection on the plane?" I wondered. I'm sure, like me, you have often asked yourself this same question, particularly if you've landed in a tropical paradise and a cold is the last thing you need. So what is the risk of picking up a bug on a plane and how can you avoid it? And should airlines add something to a certain door?

Dr. Jessica Nutik Zitter, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, studied 1,100 passengers travelling between San Francisco and Denver, Colorado, on planes that had newer air recirculating systems and those that use fresh air for ventilation. 21 percent of passengers aboard fresh air planes reported colds within one week, compared to 19 percent of those breathing recirculated air.

Dr. Derek Johnston, a specialist in pediatric allergy and immunology at Temple University in Philadelphia, says, "It doesn't matter if you're breathing recirculated air or fresh air. If the germs are there, you're going to get sick and it's due to confined space".

Airline officials agree the risk is proximity, and if you had 400 people sitting close together on the Trans-Siberian Railway the same number would catch colds, namely about one in five who travel in confined space.

So what can you do to avoid being the one in five that wished they had stayed home in the safety of their bed? Dr. Charles Gerba, at the University of Arizona, is an expert on what the medical community labels "fomites", namely objects that are liable to carry germs. He says the first thing to remember is that bugs are everywhere on the plane.

I always ask for an aisle seat as it's easier to get up and walk around. But Gerber says that's my first mistake as it's the seat most likely to be contaminated. Just watch people going to the bathroom and later touching every aisle seat as they steady themselves as they walk back to their seats.

Gerba relates the story of one flight. People afflicted with norovirus caused such a lineup at the bathroom the flight had to make an emergency landing. Later, a study conducted by the Center for Disease Control, showed that those sitting in aisle seats were the ones more likely to have contacted a virus.

But there is a ground zero" on every plane. The toilet, that warrants the analytical eye of a Sherlock Holmes. Next time you're on a plane do your own count, but normally there's one toilet for every 50 passengers, and on some flights one for 75. Moreover, these toilets are used by hundreds of people daily. What awaits you are fecal bacteria, norovirus, seasonal flu and the common cold.

Moreover, toilets in planes are small, making it even more difficult to perform routine hygienic measures. In fact, today with the epidemic of obesity it's hard for some people to even squeeze through the door. Add to this small sinks which makes it tedious to wash hands. Besides, Gerba cautions, even the sink may be contaminated.

Fecal bacteria can also contaminate your complimentary pillow and eating tray. In one study, Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus (MRSA), a deadly superbug, was found on 60 percent of airline trays. On a recent flight I noticed one couple cleaning their pull-down tray with Clorox wipes along with hand sanitizers.

You have to conclude that boarding a plane carries infection risks. But it's not just the fault of airlines. Humans can be their own worst enemy by failing to wash hands after a bowel movement. In one study, medical students were stationed in a public washroom during a medical convention. They reported that 50 percent of physicians left the washroom without even turning on the tap! And the convention was about infectious disease!

Here's a suggestion for airlines to help eliminate the one in five of us who develop a cold? In all my travels I've yet to see a hand sanitizer outside the plane's toilet door. Surely it would remind those who do not wash their hands to do so. It would also make my aisle seat much safer.

See the web site www.docgiff.com For comments info @docgiff.com
Judge sentences Liang to probation, community service Updated: 2016-04-20 03:45 By PAUL WELITZKIN in New York(China Daily USA)

Peter Liang (left) walks out the court after the judge sentenced him to five years of probation and 800 hours of community service. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

Ex-New York City police officer Peter Liang was sentenced to five years probation and at least 800 hours community service on Tuesday in the shooting death of an unarmed black man in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project in 2014.

New York State Supreme Court Judge Danny Chun could have sentenced Liang, 28, to up to 15 years behind bars. He reduced Liang's manslaughter conviction to criminally negligent homicide before sentencing him.

Chun basically followed the recommendation of Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, who had recommended last month that Liang be sentenced to five years of probation, with the condition that he serves six months of home confinement with electric monitoring, and 500 hours of community service. Thompson was not in the courtroom for the sentencing.

Outside the courthouse, more than 200 cops - including those from the NYPD's counterterrorism unit - were stationed and metal barricades erected to control potential clashes between Liang supporters and protesters.

In a letter to the judge last month, Thompson said that Liang's "reckless actions caused an innocent man to lose his life. There is no evidence, however, that he intended to kill or injure Akai Gurley.

"The sentence that I have requested is just and fair under the circumstances of this case. From the beginning, this tragic case has always been about justice and not about revenge," he said.

Liang was 18 months out of the police academy when he was patrolling a public housing project in Brooklyn, New York, in November 2014. He fired once and the bullet ricocheted, striking Akai Gurley, 28, who died at the scene. Liang was fired from the police department after he was convicted of manslaughter in February in the shooting.

Liang, who always dreamed of becoming a police officer, became the first New York City officer since 2005 to be convicted in a shooting in the line of duty.

Liang testified in his own defense that he was terrified and never meant to shoot anyone. Both he and his partner said they felt unqualified to help Gurley as he lay bleeding on the stairwell floor. Gurley's girlfriend gave him CPR as a neighbor yelled instructions from a 911 operator on the telephone.

Last week, Liang's attorneys sought to have the case thrown out based on juror misconduct after Michael Vargas, a juror on the panel that convicted Liang, told lawyers during the jury selection process that no one in his family had been accused of a crime. But after the verdict, he told a newspaper that his father was sent to prison for accidentally shooting a friend to death. But Chun ruled that Vargas did not intentionally lie to the court and he said the manslaughter conviction would stand.
China leads way on US adoptions Updated: 2016-04-18 07:49 By Hezi Jiang In New York And Luo Wangshu In Beijing(China Daily USA)

Foreigners attracted by efficient system and strong oversight

China remains the United States' most accessible source of adoptions from overseas, thanks to an efficient system and strong oversight of orphans, according to two experts. They spoke as the number of foreign adoptions by US families fell to the lowest level in three decades. However, 2,354 Chinese children were adopted by US citizens last year, a 15 percent increase from 2014. The figure accounted for 42 percent of all foreign adoptions in the US, according to the US Department of State. According to China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, the number of international adoptions has remained steady in recent years, with between 10 and 15 percent of children adopted by overseas families since 2009.

While foreign adoptions comprise only a small proportion of those in China - about 12 percent in 2014 - most children who are taken in by overseas homes have special needs and are adopted by families for charitable reasons, said Tong Xiaojun, head of the Children's Research Institute of China.

In contrast, Chinese adopters care more about whether the child is good-looking or how tall the child is. "If families already have a boy, they want a girl, and if they have a girl, they want a boy," she said.

"The more advanced medical and welfare systems in the West also encourage foreign families to adopt children with special needs.

"As a result, parents overseas who adopt are more capable of taking care of these children," Tong said, adding that raising special needs children is difficult for many families in China.

Michelle and Scott Morell from Allen, Texas, who have adopted three Chinese children with special needs, said they were drawn to China because the process was very clear compared with some other countries.

"There were more checks and balances in place," Michelle Morell said. "You did this, you did that, and then you were matched with the child."

Two of their boys, Luke from Shaanxi province and Ethan from Anhui, both 3, were born with gastric intestinal problems.

International adoption of baby girls from China started to slow in 2006 when there were fewer infant orphans, and the ones that were available always went for domestic adoptions first.

Shannon Phillips, promotions and outreach director at Great Wall China Adoption, a nonprofit organization that has matched more than 9,000 Chinese children with families in the US, said, "China's waiting program for a child is getting more and more popular."

Under the program, which also exists in some other countries, Chinese orphanages identify children with special needs. Many of these children are being adopted by Western families.

Chuck Johnson, president of the National Council for Adoption, based in Virginia, US, said: "China has been very innovative in identifying children with special needs. In other countries, you really don't know where kids are and you don't know their status.

"China systematically identifies special needs children faster than it did previously, and they become available for adoption. It has also allowed US agencies to partner with orphanages to find families with special needs children.

"I can talk to a family today, they can pick out their child and they will be home this time next year with the child," Phillips said.

Johnson also said the number of foreign adoptions by US families has continued to fall because some countries have been told by the US government that they must improve child welfare to meet the standards for adoption. The US has halted adoptions from Cambodia and Guatemala because of fraud.

"China has the strongest oversight for all orphans. There is a very strong authority that monitors it. Such oversight and protection ... aren't always in place in other countries," Johnson said.

He hopes the US government can do more to help developing countries that don't meet the standards to develop such safeguards.

Phillips said more US families have become open to adopting children on the waiting list.

Three years ago, it would have been something of a shock if they had matched a child over 7 years old, "but now we do that on a regular basis," she said.

Contact the writer at hezijiang@chinadailyusa.com

Clockwise fromleft:Michelle and ScottMorellwith their two adopted Chinese sons, Ethan (left) from Anhui and Luke fromShaanxi; a girl identified only asMadison (front right) and her USmother (back right) returned to Anhui looking for the girl's biologicalmother in July 2012; Beth Alpert and her adopted daughter ang Yingying also returned to Anhui at the same time looking for the girl's biologicalmother. Left: Provided To China Daily; Top Right:Bian Shipeng/ For China Daily; Bottomright:Dai Wenxue / For China Daily

(China Daily USA 04/18/2016 page1)
China's stars come out at film fest Updated: 2016-04-19 11:26 By May Zuou in Houston(China Daily)

For 10 days starting April 8, Houston had more than 100 luminaries from the Chinese film industry - producers, investors, playwrights, directors and actors - come to visit for the WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival 2016.

There were opening and closing ceremonies, receptions and smaller gatherings. On most occasions, the red carpet was laid out, not only for the stars and VIPS, but also for the regular audience members, to walk on.

Many movie fans from the local Chinese communities dressed up elaborately to attend events, walk the red carpet and pose in front of the festival's photo backdrop - privileges often reserved for stars only.

The glamorous and festive mood wasn't lost on Panorama China, the component of the festival that featured 20 Chinese films and ended with an awards ceremony held at Houston's old Majestic Theatre on Sunday night.

Panorama China opened with the screening of a biopic about late leader Deng Xiaoping - The Compact Density of Stone - and closed with the commercial feature Chronicles of Ghostly Tribe. The rest were independent films, several of which featured Chinese minorities and children. Of the 20 Chinese films, 19 won an award of one kind or another.

The festival seems to be catching on. According to Ray Jiang, chairman of Panorama China, the attendance went up dramatically compared to last year, when only five Chinese films were shown.

"Last year the seats were more empty than filled," Jiang said. "This year we've had two-to-three thousand viewers for Chinese films in total by rough estimate."

Lu Chuan, director of Chronicles of Ghostly Tribe, won the award for Best Director. Lu, who has focused on making artistic films in the past, said this was his first attempt at a commercial film. While some Hollywood "borrowing" was evident in the film, the story was well-developed, critics said, and the film was well received and praised for its epic feel.

"Commercial films are now the mainstream in the Chinese film industry. I wanted to showcase this film at this festival to reflect that reality," said Lu, adding that he plans to develop Ghostly Tribe into a franchise like Indiana Jones or Star Wars.

At Sunday's ceremony, actor Lu Qi, who played Deng Xiaoping in The Compact Density of Stone, won a career achievement award. Lisa Lu, who played a minor role in Grand Song, a well-received film featuring the Kamese songs of China's Kam ethnicity, took home a lifetime achievement award.

On accepting the award for Best Actor for his performance in A Class of One, Sun Haiying sang a tune winning applause from the audience.

Many attended the festival seeking opportunities. Coddy Byars, an actor and model based in Dallas, was at the Panorama China award ceremony.

"I would certainly like to work with China in the film industry," Byars said. "I have attended the festival in the past. This year China got involved on such a large scale, we saw many new things coming out."

Of the Chinese films he saw, his favorite was Tai Chi Pioneer. "It's not just about Tai Chi as a martial art, it's also about love and respect, and finding your true passion," he said.

The festival also produced at least one partnership. "An American distributor has decided to buy the film The Rising Star Kindergarten, (a film about the "left-behind children" in rural China) produced by Zhang Yutong and directed by Han Yi. They are negotiating the details now," said Ray Jiang.

Panorama China was helped by 50 Chinese student volunteers from the University of Houston and Rice University.

"I would like to say a big thank you to the volunteers who worked overtime for the event," Jiang said. "This was the first year we organized Panorama China. We faced a lot of challenges, and we are still exploring how to best do it, and I am confident we will do even better next year."

mayzhou@chinadailyusa.com
Chinese envoy to visit Syria Updated: 2016-04-19 22:23 (Xinhua)

BEIJING -- China's special envoy to Syria, currently in Geneva for UN talks on the Syrian conflict, will visit Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia afterwards to push for a political solution to the conflict, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on Tuesday.

Spokesperson Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing that Xie Xiaoyan is meeting with UN officials, members of the Syrian government and the opposition in Geneva during the intra-Syrian talks that resumed on April 13.

UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura is scheduled to meet with the government and opposition delegation this week.

China welcomes the peace talks in Geneva and supports De Mistura's mediation efforts, Hua said.

"China is willing to work with the relevant parties toward a political settlement to the Syrian issue," he said.
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HA NOI Viet Nam News - Iron and steel used for tyre bead wire production will enjoy a preferential import tax rate of zero per cent from May 2, the Ministry of Finance announced in a recent circular.

Tyre bead wire is used to reinforce virtually all types of pneumatic tyres for motorcycles, passenger cars and trucks, as well as off-road and farming vehicles.

Circular No 51/2016/TT-BTC specifies that the zero-per-cent rate will be applied for non-alloy iron and steel in stick, bar or roll shapes, laminated with a diameter of less than 14mm. The rate will also be applied for iron and steel wires.

The ministry gave out the preferential import duty after suggestions by steel-maker Posco Viet Nam Processing Centre Co Ltd, which is based in Nhon Trach 5 Industrial Zone in ong Nai Province.

Hai quan, an online Viet Nam Customs newspaper, reported that Posco and tyre makers in Viet Nam currently have to import non-alloy hot-laminated steel sticks with a tax rate of 3 per cent. This is because the country isnt yet able to make this product domestically.

Around 30 tyre manufacturers in Viet Nam, including Sao Vang Rubber JSC, a Nang Rubber JSC and Kumho, are seeing stiff competition from about 460 firms that import tyres from Thailand, Japan, China and Taiwan for domestic sale.

Posco proposed the import tax rate be lowered to zero per cent for the steel sticks until this material can be made in Viet Nam. This will encourage development of domestic supporting industries, the firm said.  VNS
HA NOI  Vietnamese stock markets may decline this week as lower crude prices, resulting from the disagreement between major oil producers on Sunday which may drag energy stocks down.

The benchmark VN Index on the HCM Stock Exchange on Friday inched up 0.1 per cent to finish the week at 579.86 points. The southern index gained 1.3 per cent from the previous week.

The HNX Index on the Ha Noi Stock Exchange declined very slightly on Friday to end the week at 80.26 points. The northern index remained nearly flat over the week.

Oil prices may fall further into negative territory, hitting investor confidence after major producers, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, failed to reach an agreement on freezing output to stabilise prices.

The talks broke down after Saudi Arabia said a deal would only be reached if Iran joined in, which was considered a disappointing stance, given that the other producers had already agreed to the pact.

Iran had earlier refused Saudi Arabias demand to join the deal, wanting to raise its output to pre-sanctions levels. Sanctions against the country were removed earlier this year. Irans stance had also prevented other producers from arriving at a production ceiling in December to steady prices.

Investors and traders will now have to wait until the next OPEC meeting in June to see if any progress is made on the production freeze. Crude prices are expected to reach the balance point in mid-2017, instead of mid-2016, which was earlier forecast.

US crude West Texas Intermediate (WTI) slumped 4.8 per cent to trade at US$38.43 per barrel yesterday in early trading. US crude has dropped 8.9 per cent in the last four sessions.

US crude hit a four-month high of $42.17 per barrel, an increase of nearly two-thirds from the 12-year low of $26.21 per barrel on February 11.

Meanwhile, London-traded Brent crude fell 4.3 per cent to trade at $41.27 per barrel, extending its losing streak of 7.7 per cent for a fourth day of trading.

Brent had soared 60 per cent to reach a three-month high of $44.69 per barrel last Tuesday from a record-low of $27.88 per barrel in late January.

Last week, investors could seek profits from the recent gains in energy stocks.

Among energy firms, PetroVietnam Gas Corp (GAS) jumped 5 per cent during the week, PetroVietnam Drilling and Well Service Corp (PVD) added 2.6 per cent, PetroVietnam Technical Service Corp (PVS) gained 2.5 per cent, and PetroVietnam Coating Corp (PVB) was up by 0.9 per cent.

However, investor confidence may decline as analysts have shown little faith in a possible deal between oil producers and its positive effects on the global glut. The decline in energy stocks may also erode investor confidence in other stocks, especially the blue chips that made gains last week, including Vietcombank (VCB), property developer Vingroup JSC (VIC) and insurer Bao Viet Holdings on the southern bourse, and Tien Phong Plastic JSC (NTP), An Phat Plastic and Green Environment JSC (AAA) on the northern bourse.

VCB, VIC and BVH advanced by 2.7 per cent, 9.5 per cent and 4 per cent, respectively. AAA and NTP increased by 1.2 per cent and 3.9 per cent.

Securities corps, such as HCM City Securities Corp (HCM), Sai Gon-Ha Noi Securities Corp (SHS), VNDirect Securities Corp (VND) and Bao Viet Securities Corp (BVS), also saw gains last week.

Both local markets traded nearly 192 million shares per day worth VN3.1 trillion ($137.5 million), an increase of 16.5 per cent in trading value and 12 per cent in trading volume from the previous week.  VNS
BAGHDAD  The United States will send Apache attack helicopters and more troops to Iraq, US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said in Baghdad on Monday, as the coalition weighs retaking second city Mosul from the Islamic State group.

President Barack Obama hailed the 2011 withdrawal of American troops from Iraq as a major accomplishment of his presidency, but the US has been steadily drawn back into the country since IS jihadists overran swathes of territory in 2014.

Washington heads an international coalition that is carrying out strikes against IS and also providing training and other assistance to forces fighting the jihadists in both Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

"We are going to bring in additional forces," Carter said after arriving in Baghdad on an unannounced visit.

Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis told reporters an additional 217 personnel would be deployed, bringing the official number of US troops in Iraq to 4,087.

Troops will also be authorised to advise Iraqis at the battalion and brigade level as opposed to the larger divisions, potentially exposing them to greater risks closer to the front lines.

Carter also said that the Apaches -- which can respond "quickly" and "dynamically" when needed -- will support Iraqi efforts to surround and eventually recapture Mosul from IS.

"They are being offered for the move on Mosul. It will be at the government of Iraqs discretion as to whether or not they are deployed," Davis said of the Apaches.

General Sean MacFarland, commander of the US-led operation against IS, later told reporters travelling with Carter that the US had not ruled out sending further troops at a later stage if the current boost proves insufficient.

"If the conditions are sufficiently favourable for us to go in and liberate the city (Mosul) with the forces that we have in hand, great. If they prove to be insufficient, that will be another assessment that we will make (about additional forces)," he said.

During his visit, Carter also pledged $415 million in assistance for the peshmerga forces of Iraqs autonomous Kurdish region, which are fighting IS in the north.

The region has, like Baghdad, been hit by financial difficulties from low oil prices.

Political chaos

Carters visit comes after a week of political turmoil that has been a setback for Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. The US defence chief has previously stressed the need to support the embattled premier.

Carter met with Abadi after arriving in Baghdad from the United Arab Emirates, his first stop on a Gulf tour during which he will seek to shore up support for Iraq.

He has said that "the success of the campaign against (IS) in Iraq does depend upon political and economic progress as well," and that "its important that we continue to support (Abadi)".

The premier has sought to replace the current cabinet of party-affiliated ministers with a government of technocrats, but has faced major opposition from powerful parties that rely on control of ministries for patronage and funds.

Abadis cabinet efforts were overshadowed by days of chaos in parliament, where lawmakers held a sit-in, brawled in the chamber and sought to sack the speaker.

The premier called on Monday for parliament to put aside its differences and do its job, saying he hoped a new cabinet would be approved "in the coming days".  AFP
BUENOS AIRES  Argentina made its return to international financial markets on Monday, receiving offers from investors for its sovereign bonds ahead of its first debt sale in 15 years, a government source said.

Latin Americas third-biggest economy is seeking to end 15 years of financial isolation by borrowing cash on world credit markets for the first time since a 2001 default.

"We have started to receive offers. We will know the total amount" on Tuesday, said a source in the finance ministry, who asked not to be named.

The government was hearing bids by investors ahead of the formal bond issuing process that was due to take place on Tuesday, organized by international banks.

Argentine newspaper La Nacion cited sources involved in organizing the debt auction that the government had received offers worth $67 billion -- five times the amount of bonds available.

The country is looking to boost its struggling economy and settle a 15-year lawsuit by US investment funds which its ex-president Cristina Kirchner branded as "vultures."

Now that a US court has cleared the way for Argentina to start borrowing again, the government planned to issue a reported $15 billion in medium- and long-term bonds.

"Argentina is back," said Finance Minister Alfonso Prat-Gay in Washington ahead of the sale.

Major step forward

Argentinas new conservative president Mauricio Macri has claimed the return to the international financial fold as a victory.

His opponents said poor families would bear the cost of his borrowing since public spending cuts would be imposed to pay off the debts eventually.

Macri has been scrapping Kirchners protectionist policies and opening up Argentinas diplomatic and financial ties.

The bond sale "is a major step forward," said Agustin Carstens, head of the IMF world lenders Monetary and Financial Committee, on Saturday.

"It is very good to have a country as important as Argentina putting the house in order."

He warned however that Argentines would have to endure tough economic cutbacks to stabilize the economy and public finances.

"Needless to say in the short term some measures may be difficult to digest," Carstens said in Washington.

The IMF forecasts that Argentinas economy will contract by one per cent this year and grow 2.8 percent in 2017.

Prat-Gay has given a stronger forecast of around zero growth this year and growth of up to four percent next year.

Macri on Saturday announced a series of social welfare measures that he said would help the poor cope with the cuts.

The finance ministry said it has enlisted Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JP Morgan, Santander, BBVA, Citigroup and UBS to organize the bond sale.

It has included a clause to prevent a small number of shareholders from blocking the restructuring of the debt.

That is a measure to avoid a repeat of Argentinas fight with the "holdouts," international investment funds that sued it in the US courts for full repayment after its 2001 default.

Credit rater Moodys raised Argentinas sovereign rating on Friday ahead of the bond sale.

It still ranks as a speculative investment with a "high credit risk," but less high-risk than before.  AFP
Pr esident Tran ai Quang (right) meets with Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Sar Kheng in HCM City on Sunday.  Photo VNA

HCM CITYViet Nam News - President Tran ai Quang hosted a reception for visiting Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Sar Kheng in HCM City on Sunday.

Speaking at the meeting, Deputy PM Sar Kheng, who is also Minister of Interior, conveyed greetings from the Cambodian King and Government to Quang on his election as President of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.

Sar Kheng said he hopes that President Quang will continue facilitating the collaboration between Cambodias Ministry of Interior and Viet Nams Ministry of Public Security, contributing to the two countries long-standing friendship and cooperation.

For his part, President Quang expressed his delight at the outcomes of the two ministries collaboration as well as the support of Deputy PM Sar Kheng and other Cambodian leaders for the joint works.

The president affirmed that he would work for a closer and more extensive partnership between the two ministries in the hope to maintain peace, stability and prosperity of each country and the region.  VNS
Deputy Foreign Minister Le Hoai Trung .  Photo VNA

Ha Noi Viet Nam News - Deputy Foreign Minister Le Hoai Trung and his Chinese counterpart Liu Zhenmin discussed how to boost cooperation between the two countries across the field, including border and territory issues, during their annual meetings in HCM City and Kien Giang Province on Saturday and Sunday.



The two diplomats said both countries enjoyed positive development in the bilateral comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership over the past year.

They agreed to increase high-level delegation exchanges, reinforce political trust, expand people-to-people exchanges, enhance mutually beneficial and practical collaboration, and control effectively and address satisfactorily any disputes.

The foreign deputy ministers suggested enacting necessary measures to boost two-way trade in a stable, balanced, and sustainable manner, while accelerating the progress and ensuring quality of projects on infrastructure, industrial parks and factories undertaken by Chinese firms.

They also agreed to implement effectively Chinas loans and non-refundable aid for Viet Nam, and step up win-win cooperation between Vietnamese and Chinese localities.

Deputy FM Trung thanked China for increasing the release of water to the downstream of the Mekong River to address drought and saltwater intrusion in the Mekong Delta.

He proposed the two sides continue long-term collaboration in the sustainable use and management of water resources in the Mekong River.

The two diplomats agreed to promote the role of the Viet Nam-China Land Border Joint Committee in soon reviewing the five-year implementation of documents on land border management, as well as maintaining stability, co-operation and development in the two countries shared border lines.

They candidly exchanged maritime issues and concurred to pushing ahead with the current negotiation mechanisms to carry out joint projects.

Deputy FM Trung expressed Viet Nam s deep concern over tension and consequences of recent complicated developments in the East Sea.

He reiterated the need to strictly follow agreements and common perceptions reached by leaders of the two countries Parties and States, especially the agreement on basic principles guiding the settlement of issues at sea.

He called for controlling effectively marine conflicts, avoiding actions to complicate and expand disputes, and settling disputes via peaceful means and in line with international law, particularly the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), fully implementing the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC) and soon building a Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC).  VNS
Rescue workers search the rubble in Pedernales, Ecuador on April 17, 2016 after a 7.8-magnitude quake hit the city the day before.  Photo AFP

HA NOI Viet Nam News - President Tran ai Quang and Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc yesterday extended their condolences to President of Ecuador Rafael Correa over the human and material losses caused by the April 16 earthquake.



The same day, Deputy PM and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh also conveyed his sympathy to Ecuadors FM Guillaume Long.

We hope Ecuador will overcome this difficult moment, stabilise the situation and continue to prosper, Vietnamese foreign ministry spokesperson Le Hai Binh said yesterday.

Binh also expressed sorrow at consecutive natural disasters during recent days in several countries, including the earthquake in Ecuador, which inflicted not only heavy casualties but also great material and spiritual damage on thousands of people.

The spokesperson cited reports from the Vietnamese Embassy in Chile and Ecuador which said there were no Vietnamese citizens in the affected areas.

A 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Ecuador on April 16, killing at least 272 people as of April 18, according to international media. More than 2,000 people were injured as structures tumbled during the quake and during aftershocks.

Condolences to Japan

Earlier on Saturday, PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc, and Deputy PM and FM Pham Binh Minh extended condolences to their Japanese counterparts Shinzo Abe and Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida respectively over the great loss of life and property caused by recent earthquakes in Kumamoto Prefecture and surrounding areas.

Two powerful earthquakes a day apart shook southwestern Japan, killing at least 29 people and injuring 1,500.

On April 14, the southwestern island of Kyushu was hit by a magnitude 6.5 quake that left 10 dead. Early on April 16, a magnitude 7.3 quake shook Kumamoto Prefecture on Kyushu, killing 19 people.  VNS
State President Tran ai Quang grants the Military Medal, First Class, to the Ministry of Public Security as the ministry solemnly celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Peoples Police Advisory Force in Ha Noi.  Photo VNA

HA NOI Viet Nam News - President Tran ai Quang yesterday granted the Military Medal, First Class, to the Ministry of Public Security as the ministry solemnly celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Peoples Police Advisory Force in Ha Noi.

Addressing the ceremony with the presence of President Quang, the Minister of Public Security, Senior Lieutenant-General To Lam, applauded and congratulated the outstanding feats of arms and achievements the Peoples Police advisory force have gained over the past 70 years.

In analyzing the national security protection and social safety maintenance duty in the times to come, the public security minister stressed that, first and foremost, the Peoples Police advisory force should be focused on advice about developing and implementing protection schemes and plans that guarantee complete security and safety for the coming elections of deputies to the 14th National Assembly and Peoples Councils.

In the meantime, Party Committees and leaders of police units at all levels must attach much importance to advisory work which should be regarded as an essential and regular duty, and strategic work of the sector, Lam said.

The Peoples Police advisory force needed to enhance the quality of study, synthesis, analysis, assessment and forecast of developments, concentrating on matters of great concern.

He called for the force to continue strengthening itself, deserving a central position in the instruction and management work of police leaders and commanders.

On April 18, 1946 the Minister of Home Affairs (now the Ministry of Public Security) promulgated Decree No 121/ND regulating the organisation of Vietnams police at three levels. Of note, the document necessitated an office to provide direct consultation for police leaders at each level. This is considered as an historic moment marking the official establishment of the Peoples Police advisory force. Since then, April 18 has been defined as the traditional day of the force.

In the cause for national liberation, the Peoples Police advisory force had a thorough grasp of the Partys revolutionary path, views, and principles; and fully understood, analysed, assessed and forecast situations to give advice to police leaders at all levels, contributing to the successful containing of counter-revolutionary forces and crimes, as well as fighting against intelligence and spy plots. The force proactively proposed schemes to secure revolutionary bases, and to build public order movements, and mass movements against spies and raiders.

The forces efforts and achievements made a crucial contribution to the liberation of the South and national reunification.

During the oi moi (Renewal) period, the force has worked closely with professional units and relevant bodies to proactively give advice to the Central Polices Party Committee and the Ministry of Public Security, helping to thoroughly renew police work.  VNS
A traffic accident occured in Ha Noi last weekend. A total of 83 traffic accidents have been reported nation-wide during the three-day holiday in commemoration of the Hung kings, killing 63 people and injuring another 56.  Photo dantri.com.vn

HA NOI  A total of 83 traffic accidents have been reported nation-wide during the three-day holiday in commemoration of the Hung kings, killing 63 people and injuring another 56, according to the National Traffic Safety Committee.

Traffic accidents between April 16-18 involving roadways accounted for 81 accidents, causing 62 deaths and 55 injuries. Another two accidents causing one death and one injury occurred on rail and other traffic routes.

Of note, yesterday alone witnessed 33 traffic accidents, claiming the life of 23 people and injuring 24.

Early yesterday, a five-seat taxi of the Tam Gia firm registered under the plate number 12A-034.93 was found lying upside down in a pond on inh Le Street, Lang Son City in the northern province of Lang Son.

All four people in the car were found dead. Initial investigations indicate that the car was driving on a curved section of inh Le Street on Sunday night when the driver lost control due to speeding.

Another accident yesterday morning on National Highway 1A running through Ninh Thuan Provinces Thuan Nam District killed a motorist when he carelessly crossed the road and was run over by a truck.

The motorbike rider Nguyen uc Hoa, a resident of Thuan Nam District, was killed instantly, but luckily his companion Nguyen Thai Nguyen, also living in the district, survived with only light injuries.

Yesterday afternoon, a taxi carrying three passengers crashed into a bridge edge on Ho Thi Huong Road, in the southern ong Nai Provinces Long Khanh Township. The incident killed one passenger and seriously injured another two and the driver.

In regard to handling traffic safety violations during the holiday, statistics from the committee show that traffic police dealt with nearly 3,000 violations, handing out total fines of up to VN582.8 million (US$38,000) and temporarily holding 23 automobiles and 324 motorbikes.

On expressways, traffic police dealt with 146 violations, revoking 16 driving licences and temporarily holding 14 vehicles, gathering fines worth VN118 million (US$5,300) for the State treasury. Violations involving waterway traffic amounted to 463 cases with total fines worth VN146.8 million (US$6,500).

A quick report by the Ha Noi Polices traffic police force (PC67) indicated that in Ha Noi alone there were three accidents, killing three people during the holiday.

Analyses of traffic violations show that vehicles parking and stopping illegally made up most of the cases, followed by vehicles driving in banned areas, going the wrong way, traveling in the wrong lanes and speeding through traffic lights.  VNS
HA NOI (VNS)  The Vietnamese Consulate General in Fukuoka, Japan, is actively carrying out measures to support Vietnamese nationals affected by the recent back-to-back earthquakes in Kumamoto Prefecture and its surrounding areas.

On April 14, the southwestern island of Kyushu was hit by a magnitude 6.5 quake that left 10 people dead. Early on April 16, a magnitude 7.3 quake shook Kumamoto Prefecture, killing 19 people.

There is no information on any Vietnamese casualty in the earthquakes.

The Consulate General on Sunday sent its staff to the affected areas to provide food, water and essential supplies to Vietnamese nationals, and to directly update them with information and encourage them to overcome difficulties.

The Vietnamese Embassy in Japan and the Consulate General are in contact with Japans authorised agencies and organisations of the Vietnamese community for updates on the latest information.

In Beppu City, where a large number of Vietnamese students live, the Consulate General has displayed lists online with the full names of Vietnamese nationals living in the city and the addresses of evacuation areas for better support and management.

Vietnamese nationals living in Kumamoto Prefecture, which is located on Kyushu Island, can contact the embassy for help on the phone number 080-3590-9136 or the consulate on the numbers 080-3984-6668 and 080-3904-0198.

There are some 1,600 Vietnamese people living in Kumamoto as of June 2015, according to Japans data.VNS
THUA THIEN  HUE (VNS)  A tractor collided with a bridges handrail and fell into the sandbank on the Huong River in Hue City today, killing the driver.

Nguyen Van Chin, 42, lost control of the vehicle on Da Vien Bridge and got stuck in the tractors cabin following the collision.

Authorities tried to rescue the driver, but because of his severe injuries, he died when being taken out of the cabin.

The tractor and its trailer, which contained coal that was being transported from the south to the north, were seriously damaged in the accident.

The case is being investigated.  VNS
HOI AN (VNS)  More than 1,000 tourists who were stuck yesterday on Cu Lao Cham Island in this central province were safely taken to the mainland this morning.

The chairman of the Peoples Committee in Tan Hiep Commune, Nguyen Van An, said bad weather yesterday had prevented tourists from leaving the island. The authorities had worked with tourism companies to organise rooms for the stranded tourists.

Cu Lao Cham Island is a famous tourist destination in the province, hosting some 100,000 tourists every year. Travel between the mainland and the island, however, depends on the weather, he said.

Besides this, the accretion at the Cua ai Port causes difficulties for ships, especially when level 5 or 6 winds blow.

Previously, on February 15, more than 100 residents and tourists were safely taken to the mainland.  VNS
A NANG (VNS)  The central citys ong A College and William Angliss Institute from Australia have started a personnel training programme for the hospitality, tourism and culinary arts sectors for the 2016-17 period.

Funding for the programme came from the Australian government, which provided a total of AUD250,000 (US$194,000).

Rector of ong A College Nguyen Thi Anh ao said the programme would provide a nine-month course for 80 people working in resorts, hotels and restaurants in the central region.

This is the first tourism and hospitality training programme, meeting ASEAN standards, to have been established in the central region to provide hospitality training services to the coastal central provinces.

All trainees will receive graduation certificates from William Angliss Institute, a specialist Centre for hospitality, tourism and culinary arts training and education in Australia.

Last year, ong A College also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Route Inn Group from Japan for tourism service employee training in 2018 to serve a chain of 320 hotels in Japan and Viet Nam.  VNS
A NANG (VNS)  The central citys environmental police department, along with the veterinary sub-department, seized 780kg of packaged and fresh pork fat from an illegal processing house in Lien Chieu District yesterday.

Colonel Tran Thanh Nhon said 12 bags of the processed pork fat were due to be delivered to the citys market, while 150kg of the unprocessed fat was scheduled to be fried and packed into bags.

ao Tran Quang, an employee of the processing centre, confessed that the processed pork fat was sold in markets across the city.

He said he was paid VN3 million per month to process and deliver pork fat to different markets over the past three years.

The processing centre could not present a business license, food safety certificates, or registration documents related to its hygiene.

It was one of largest illegal pork fat processing centres found in the city.

Last year, police also found 2.4 tonnes of unprocessed pork fat in an illegal processing centre in the district, 20km away from the city centre.

The police temporarily banned the production of pork fat at the site and confiscated the finished products.

Rotten chilli sauce and fake alcohol were also found in the district during a wide food-safety inspection.

The district is seen as a hot spot for many fake commodities and food production centres and for the storage of smuggled goods arriving on North-South transport lines.  VNS
The planned sale of Tata Steels European long products business to Greybull Capital will be credit-positive and it will help the Indian company lower cash burn, India Ratings has said.

However, the ratings agency expects the uncertain timelines associated with the sale of the overall loss-making UK steel business to delay the expected recovery in its credit profile. Maintenance capex in Europe would also decline significantly after the deal. The agencys rating view on the company is on a consolidated basis and the rating approach factors in a one-notch uplift for its strong operational and strategic linkages with the Tata Group.

A complete exit from the UK can translate into positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation for Tata Steels profits in the overseas operations and improve its long-term cash flow visibility, India Ratings said.

While the leverage levels are unlikely to see any direct reduction from the sale of the long products business, its Ebitda losses from Europe will be curtailed, which will facilitate a gradual de-leveraging of the company. During the nine months ended December 31, 2015, Tata Steels European operations reported an Ebitda loss of Rs 339 crore, largely on account of its loss-making UK operations.

The UK assets have a combined steelmaking capacity of 10.2 million tonnes (mt) distributed across Port Talbot (blast furnace, flat products), Scunthorpe (blast furnace, long products) and Rotherham (electric arc furnace) plants. The sale and purchase agreement Tata Steel has signed covers 4.5 mt long steel products facility at Scunthorpe and other associated long products facilities in the UK. Within Tata Steels portfolio of European assets, these facilities were the least profitable, and, hence, the divestment of these is a positive.

The European region, which includes the UK and the Netherlands, accounts for 52 per cent of Tata Steels total revenues in FY15.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has iterated its stance on auctioning all available spectrum in the 700-MHz band in an upcoming sale.

said in a response to the department of telecommunications (DoT) if all the available spectrum was put to auction it would help serve larger a subscriber base and increase data speeds.

Besides, this would result in more recurring revenue to the government in licence fees, spectrum use charges and service tax, it added. The Telecom Commission (TC), the policy-making body of the DoT, had reverted to over its recommendations on reserve prices for auction of spectrum. An internal committee of the DoT was not in favour of auctioning the entire available spectrum in the 700 MHz band, which will be sold for the first time.

STICKING TO GUNS An internal committee of the DoT was not in favour of auctioning the entire available spectrum in the 700-MHz band, which will be sold for the first time

According to the paper, the cost of delivering mobile services in the 700- MHz band is 70 per cent lower than in the 2,100-MHz band widely used for 3G telecom services

Broadband connectivity is a pillar of the Digital India programme, which can be fulfilled quickly if sufficient spectrum is made available. India is way behind in broadband penetration and Internet speed and the 700 MHz band can be critical for spreading connectivity. According to the Trai paper, the cost of delivering mobile services in the 700 MHz band is 70 per cent lower than in the 2,100 MHz band widely used for 3G telecom services.

The entire spectrum in the 700 MHz band is required to be made available for commercial use without any delay, Trai said in a letter to the DoT. It also said if a service provider was not using administratively assigned spectrum without justification, it should be taken back. The government plans a round of spectrum auction in the second half of 2016. After Trais response, the Telecom Commission will meet again to finalise its views and will send its recommendations to the Cabinet. Ratings firm ICRA expects spectrum worth Rs 60,000-80,000 crore will be sold in this auction, which will add to the sizeable debts of the industry. The auction has the potential to fetch the government Rs 5.36 lakh crore.
A trio of Nobel laureates will take part in a "humanitarian" visit to North Korea later this month, even as suspicions grow that Pyongyang is preparing to carry out a fifth nuclear test.

The Vienna-based Peace Foundation, which is organising the trip, said Monday it was an exercise in "silent diplomacy" that would focus on such topics as economic policy and medical development.

The three laureates from Norway, Britain and Israel, who won their Nobels for economics, medicine and chemistry, will give speeches and hold seminars with students at some of the North's elite schools, including Kim Il-Sung University.

"The events will not engage in rhetoric by making political statements," the foundation said in a press release.

"Listening to and engaging with the young generation of (North Korea) may be a gateway to establish a dialogue which could contribute to a wider understanding beyond and power play," added its founding Chairman, Uwe Morawetz, who has visited the North six times over the past two years to prepare the visit.

The trip is likely to be criticised in some quarters at a time, when the focus of the community is on tightening North Korea's diplomatic and economic isolation.

The April 29-May 6 dates mean the visit might also coincide with a fresh North Korean nuclear test.

South Korean President Park Geun-Hye confirmed on Monday that increased activity had been detected at the North's nuclear test site at Punggye-ri, suggesting an underground detonation could be imminent.

Numerous analysts have predicted Pyongyang may carry out a fifth test just before a rare ruling party congress next month, at which leader Kim Jong-Un is expected to take credit for pushing the country's nuclear weapons programme to new heights.

No formal date has been set for the congress, but South Korea's intelligence agency says it will likely be held May 7.

North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January, triggering the most extensive UN sanctions to date aimed at cutting funding sources for its nuclear development.

The Nobel laureates will hold a press conference in Beijing after returning from their visit.
Tea exporters from south are exploring opportunities to double their exports to Malaysia and Indonesia by joining hands with the tea industry in those countries. The exporters' organisation has signed an MoU with trade representatives in Malaysia to double exports and to create a brand which will cater both domestic and export . With Indonesian industry the exporters are exploring to see whether they can create a new blended products suitable for that country.

LOOKING TO SOUTHEAST ASIA Tea exporters from south are exploring opportunities to double their exports to Malaysia and Indonesia by joining hands with the sector in those countries

The exporters' organisation has signed an MoU with trade representatives in Malaysia

Total from south India in 2014-15 was 87.5 million kg on which around 15 per cent is exported to Malaysia and Indonesia together.

Dipak Shah, chairman, South India Tea Exporters Association (SITEA), who led the delegation on a four days visit to Malaysia and Indonesia last week, said that a MoU has been signed with the Tea Trade Association of Malaysia.

"We will work together to establish a strategic co-operative partnership to facilitate companies from the two countries to communicate and co-operate in the production, trade and investment of tea sector, develop commercial co-operation to increse the tea trade and to negotiate long term contract on the basis of mutual benefits, exchange of infrastructure, technology and others".

He said, "We may also look at creating a brand, which will cater both domestic and export markets," he said adding that the Malaysian industry have assured they would work towards doubling tea import from India in the next two years".

Currently, Malaysia imports around 7-8 million kilo grams of tea from India and major chunk of it goes from South India. Going forward also the Association expects tea from South will be higher due to various advantages like cost, quality and varieties.

Shah agreed that currently competing countries like Indonesia, Sri Lanka, China and others are enjoying around five per cent cost benefit due to duty. But many times this benefit gets nullified as tea prices in South India is competitive compared to competing countries.".

For instance, currently prices of South India is around Rs 90-100 a kg, while Indonesian tea is around Rs 120-130 a kg. The price in South India is almost Rs 200 per kg lower than the price in North India, which makes South India attractive for these countries.

The delegation also visited Indonesia and held discussion with the local industry.

Our major focus (during the discussion) has been how to work together to create an exotic blend, said Shah adding that one of the other discussion points was to create a brand and catering to international customers.

He added, the units which have EOUs in India can import tea from Indonesia and process them here and can send it back to export market. The Association has met 43 people from the tea industry in Indonesia and held discussions.

Indonesia imports between three and four million kg rom India, again major chunk of it are from South India.
U.S. to send 200 more troops to Iraq

BAGHDAD (AP)  The U.S. has agreed to deploy more than 200 additional troops to Iraq and to send eight Apache helicopters for the first time into the fight against the Islamic State group in Iraq, the first major increase in U.S. forces in nearly a year, U.S. defense officials said Monday.

The uptick in American fighting forces  and the decision to put them closer to the front lines  is designed to help Iraqi forces as they move to retake the key northern city of Mosul.

Last June the Obama administration announced that hundreds of troops would be deployed to help the Iraqis retake Ramadi  a goal they accomplished at the end of the year.

U.S. delivers aid after Japan quake

MINAMIASO, Japan (AP)  About 100,000 evacuees, some sleeping outdoors or in their cars, endured chilly weather today and another large aftershock as the death toll from Japans twin earthquakes rose to 44.

Searchers digging through landslide and building debris in a mountainous area found two bodies Monday. At least one appeared to be among the nine reported missing, according to Japanese media reports.

After daybreak today, U.S. airlifts delivered water, bread, ready-to-eat food and other emergency supplies to a the remote area of southern Japan stricken by the two powerful earthquakes.

Michigan governor to drink Flint water

LANSING, Mich. (AP)  Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder will drink Flint water at home and at work for at least a month to show to residents it is safe with the use of a faucet filter, he said Monday.

The Republican governor, who has apologized for his administrations role in the citys lead-tainted water crisis, visited a house owned by Cheryl Hill and Todd Canty that was confirmed to have high levels of lead. Snyder, who left with five gallons of filtered water, said he understands people feel if officials say the water is OK, then he should drink it, too.

What better way to help show support, said Snyder, who will get refills as needed.

For nearly 18 months, Flint residents drank and bathed with improperly treated water that had coursed through aging pipes and fixtures, scraping away lead.

Transgender bill fails in Tennessee

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)  A transgender bathroom bill in the Tennessee legislature failed Monday after the House sponsor said she was withdrawing the legislation while waiting to see how legal challenges play out in other states.

The bills demise follows intense lobbying from both supporters and opponents of the measure and questions about potential economic fallout if it were to become law.

The bill would have required all students in public schools and universities to use bathrooms and locker rooms that matched their gender at birth.

Man shoots son

for stealing food

WHITE LAKE, N.C. (AP)  Police have arrested a North Carolina man who they say shot his son in the leg for stealing food from a family member.

Ted Alan Walters, 49, of Elizabethtown found out Friday his son allegedly stole hamburger and bacon from his grandmothers freezer.

Police said Walters forced his way inside his sons home and shot the 25-year-old in the lower left leg. He told police he shot his son to teach him a lesson.

The injuries were not considered to be life threatening.
OMAHA, Neb. -- A Waterloo man who traveled to Omaha for a weekend motorcycle rally was shot and killed Saturday night.

Allen Dewayne McReynolds, 47, of Waterloo, was pronounced dead at CHI Creighton University Medical Center shortly after the 10:50 p.m. Saturday shooting. Another man, 52-year-old Victor Beatty of Omaha, was also shot and died hours later, according to Omaha police.

He was a hell of a nice guy. He rode his motorcycle, and hes stop by my house and wed sit out there in the yard, said Leon Mosley, who had lived on the same street at McReynolds. He said Reynolds was originally from Alabama, and he is survived by a wife and children.

Omaha police said they were called to gunfire in the area of 24th and Franklin streets, near the Zac Riders Motorcycle Club, and found McReynolds and Beatty, who were taken to the hospital.

The crime scene spanned several blocks. Police investigators spent nearly 12 hours at the scene but have not found any weapons, according to local media.

"During the preliminary stages of the investigation at this point, we don't have any indication what led up to the shooting in this area," Omaha Police Lt. Kyle Steffen told KETV in Omaha.

Mosley said he heard someone had stirred up trouble between the motorcycle clubs, and McReynolds happened to wearing the wrong club jacket when the shooting started.

He wasnt even involved in it, Mosley said. The guy just started shooting at the jacket. Didnt care who was in the jacket.

The investigation is ongoing, police said.
DES MOINES -- The Iowa Arts Council is seeking nominations for the Governors Arts Awards recognizing and honoring individuals, organizations and businesses in Iowa that have made a significant impact on the vitality of the arts in the state.

Nominations must be submitted by June 6 at www.iowaartscouncil.slideroom.com. Individuals may submit nominations for any or all of the following award categories: Collaboration and Partnership in the Arts; Excellence and Innovation in the Arts; Impact and Accessibility in the Arts; and Arts Learning Leadership.

The Governors Arts Awards will be presented Aug. 5 during the 2016 Iowa Arts Summit at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines. Registration is $50 per person; $35 for students and artist. A limited number of scholarships are available. For more information, visit www.iowaculture.gov.

Plate of the Union

A team of Iowa State University students finished as a runner-up winner in the 2016 Plate of the Union grassroots campaign calling for bold action to reform the nations food system. The student-driven effort netted $2,500 to the ISU participants.

A team from Ohio State University won the $5,000 grand prize while other runners-up with ISU were teams from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

The Plate of the Union is a collaborative campaign created to amplify the voice of millions of Americans who care about food and farm issues during this election season by calling on presidential candidates to reform the U.S. food system so that every American has equal access to healthy, affordable food that is fair to workers, good for the environment and keeps farmers on the land, according to organizers. For more information, www.plateoftheunion.com.

STEM tour

Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds said Monday she plans to conduct more science, technology, engineering and math school visits across Iowa to discuss the importance of giving students a world-class education in STEM. Reynolds is co-chair of the Governors STEM Advisory Council along with Dr. Chris Nelson, president and CEO of Kemin Industries. The councils over-arching goal is to increase STEM interest and achievement and to regain Iowa's historic legacy as a leader in education and workforce development. The lieutenant governor plans to hold STEM tour visits at schools in Des Moines on Thursday and in Mason City and Charles City on Friday.

Water symposium

The University of Iowas Public Policy Center will hold a symposium next month to explore the current state of Iowas drinking water and to examine the future challenges confronting water providers to deliver reliably safe drinking water to Iowans.

The June 17 event  entitled Iowas Drinking Water: Could Flint Happen Here? -- at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines is co-organized by the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination. It will include panels of water experts from academia, industry, and public-sector representatives including the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

In light of recent, high profile incidents of public health crises arising from drinking water contamination around the United States, a special focus will be placed on whether drinking water supplies in Iowa are susceptible to similar vulnerabilities experienced elsewhere. This includes a presentation by members of the Flint Water Study, who will share first-hand experiences and lessons learned from the public health crisis in Flint, Mich. Panel topics also will address other potential threats to the sustainability of Iowas drinking water supplies.
CEDAR FALLS  A City Council member Monday night said the city needs to ask state officials to help pay for reconstructing the University Avenue-Iowa Highway 58 interchange as part of the overall University Avenue reconstruction project.

City Council member Susan deBuhr voted against adding that part of University  referred to as the dog bone, where a double roundabout is proposed at the highway on- and off-ramps  to a list of projects proposed for tax increment financing as part of the unified Highway 58 Corridor Urban Renewal Plan. The council in 2012 linked the citys north and south industrial parks with the highway to create a single urban renewal district.

Council member deBuhr said she opposes tax increment financing through district property taxes for that portion of the project.

I dont think we should be paying for it, she said after the meeting. I strongly believe the Iowa DOT needs to come to the table and help pay that section.

I also question that source of money, she said, referring to tax increment financing. It doesnt lead to new housing or new economic development. But more important, I feel we need pressure to have the DOT contribute to that. I just want to keep pushing them.

Interim Community Development Director Stephanie Houk Sheetz said the city would talk to state officials about it.

What we suspect their response would be is, Youre changing the intersection. But, if there are some extra things we will certainly be diligent about having a conversation about the costs and how those are paid for, Sheetz said. Its always good to ask, and I think thats really her (deBuhrs) point, is to make sure we are asking those questions. Well see. No promises. Shes right. The ramps are not technically ours.

State officials gave the city $20 million toward the University Avenue reconstruction when it transferred jurisdiction over the road from the state to the city toward the entire $32.5 million University reconstruction project. The citys five-year capital improvements program proposes $4.6 million in tax increment financing revenues toward the project.

In other business, the council unanimously approved reapplying for the grant under the federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, or TIGER, grant program. Federal officials last fall turned down a previous $12.5 million application, but were recently told scored high and they were encouraged to reapply.

Under the reconstruction plan, University would be narrowed from six lanes to four and roundabouts would be constructed at six of its eight signalized intersections. Construction has begun on the first phase, generally between Boulder and McClain Drives in front of College Square Mall and Black Hawk Village.

The council plans a special meeting at 5:30 p.m. Monday for an update on the project
DES MOINES  April showers fell on the Statehouse Monday as storm clouds formed under the Golden Dome.

Lawmakers began a push to adjournment by debating several parts of the fiscal 2017 $7.35 billion general fund budget. Majority and minority parties agreed there wasnt much to like in status quo budgets

We know this will create some stress within the court system  but it reflects the reality we are dealing with today, floor manager Rep. Gary Worthan, R-Storm Lake, said about House File 2457, the $181.7 million Judicial Branch budget that funds the state court system. It was approved on a 53-44  with two Republicans joining Democratic opposition -- and sent to the Senate.

However, progress ground to a halt when House majority Republicans responded to a Democratic amendment to prohibit adverse employment action against employees of entities receiving state funding who disclose pay and benefit information to state agencies and officials. The GOP proposed changes in the state collective bargaining law similar to what provoked a debate that spanned two days last year.

At that point, Democrats went to caucus for and debate had not resumed more than three hours later.

Across the rotunda, the Iowa Senate voted 26-24 to approve a $50.8 million administration and regulations budget bill that would pare back existing general-fund programs by about $1.1 million in fiscal 2017. Senate File 2314, which goes to the House for consideration, also would appropriate $54.2 million from other funds for administrative and regulatory functions of state government.

Earlier Monday, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed its version of the fiscal 2017 budget bills dealing with $1 billion in higher education funding, justice systems and judicial branch programs, and a $378 million non-general fund measure to finance state Department of Transportation operations including salaries and highway projects from the state road use tax fund.

The measures cleared committee on separate 13-7, party-line votes.

We had far more asks than we had money, but I believe the bill before you is fair, said Sen. Brian Schoenjahn, D-Arlington, before senators approved the higher education funding measure.

Senators also voted 50-0 to strengthen efforts to collect delinquent court debt by making changes to aid county attorneys and a private collection agency in trying to collect past-due obligations. SF 2316 now moves to the House for consideration.

Court debt -- including unpaid fines, penalties, court costs, fees, forfeited bail and surcharges -- is deemed delinquent if it is not paid within 30 days after the date it is assessed. Other obligations collected by the courts include victim restitution, court-appointed attorney fees or expenses for a public defender with restitution for victims of crime at the head of the payment priority order.

According to a report by the Legislative Services Agency, outstanding court debt has grown considerably since fiscal 1998, when it stood at $143.4 million to $682.2 million at the end of fiscal 2015.

Back in the House, Worthan said HF 2458, the Justice Systems budget, was about more than dollars and cents. He called the $748.2 million package that that includes prisons, community-based corrections, the Iowa State Patrol and Department of Public Safety, the bedrock upon which democracy is built.

Without rule of law provided through the public safety operations in the Justice Systems budget, Worthan said, there is no democracy.
DES MOINES  Three dozen Republican legislators are calling on Democratic Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller to withdraw from an effort to use consumer protection laws against energy companies and others that disagree with their positions on climate change and global warming.

While the 36 senators and representatives believe man-made climate change is certainly not settled science, their primary concern in the effort is a potential assault on First Amendment rights of Iowa citizens and businesses that do not embrace the governments conclusion on man-made climate change.

Reps. Ralph Watts, R-Adel, and Steven Holt, R-Denison, emphasized their concerns late Monday during points of personal privilege.

In those remarks, Watts predicted more research will prove the alarmist claims of man-made climate change appear to be greatly exaggerated. Holt asserted there is disagreement whether the cause of climate change is part of a cycle that has always occurred or is caused by fossil fuels and mans carbon footprint.

However, Holt said, it is vital for this debate to continue, and dangerous to attempt to silence differences of opinion on either side.

Holt and Watts met with one of Millers staffers to discuss his participation in the effort. According to them, rather than an attempt to stifle dissent, he said the campaign is about protecting consumers from businesses that mislead the public.

The Attorney Generals Office acknowledged receipt of the letter, but has not opened any investigations as a result of Millers participation in the attorneys general announcement, according to a department spokesman.

However, Holt and Watts questioned why Miller is involved at all if his concern is consumer protection, not climate change. According to the leader of the attorneys general effort, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the actions are a historic state-based effort to combat climate change.
DES MOINES --- Rep. Rob Taylor, R-West Des Moines, made Tuesday mornings 14-mile commute to the Capitol on his 1951 Allis-Chalmers WD tractor.

Taylor said he drove the freshly painted orange tractor to the Capitol for his days work in the Legislature to honor his farmer grandfathers 84th birthday this week and all Iowa farmers, and to show that some urban legislators have rural roots.

Taylor said his drive through suburban and downtown Des Moines to the Capitol started at 7 a.m. and took roughly 80 minutes. He said a conveniently placed radar gun on a downhill slope showed his speed topping out at 12 miles per hour.

Taylor said he observed only one obscene gesture from a fellow commuter.

Taylor parked the tractor in his normal spot in the Capitol parking lot.
WATERLOO  Kyle Jensson spent nearly three decades ensuring every vote cast in Black Hawk County was counted.

But the longtime election manager has elected herself to retire Friday from the post shes held since September 1987, working in the county auditors office overseeing more than a hundred local, state and federal elections.

Its a challenging job for somebody that really likes to get into things, Jensson said. And the expectations are pretty high too.

While working to keep local elections fair and running smoothly, Jensson had to keep up with major changes in technology, voting laws and the constant effort to hire, train and retain the hundreds of temporary precinct workers necessary to pull it all off.

County Auditor Grant Veeder, who serves as commissioner of elections, said Jenssons organization skills, focus on details and dedication to the precinct workers will be hard to replace.

One of her best accomplishments was to identify temporary employees who had the aptitude and endurance to handle the intense work leading up to a general election, and to retain them from election to election, Veeder said.

She had the interests of our precinct workers at heart, he added. Even though the pay still isnt commensurate with the work, she pushed for keeping them up with the minimum wage.

An Eagle Center farm girl, Jensson answered a blind ad in 1973 and landed a job doing clerical work for Auditor Howard Gibbs. She worked as an assistant for the county Board of Supervisors before leaving in 1979 to work on tractor assembly lines at John Deere.

Jensson returned to county government in 1987, when Auditor Isabelle Frerichs hired her to oversee elections.

The lever voting machines, which the county had used since the 1950s, were so large election officials leased space from Takin Brothers, which then transported them with semi trailers to precincts on election days.

Those machines were like 600 lbs and it was real easy to have a wheel go over your foot, Jensson said. Isabelle let me bring in the (manufacturers) from Jamestown, N.Y., to go through the equipment so that from my start time I had confidence in them.

The county replaced those lever machines with optical scan voting machines in 1995, which read paper ballots filled out by voters. New scanning machines were purchased in 2005, while touch-screen ballot markers were added to the system a year later.

New voting machines were acquired this year and will be used for the first time in the June primary election. Voters will make choices on a computer screen that will print a ballot to be run through a scanner.

Youll be able to look at your ballot when it comes out, Jensson said. Weve always been very conscious of the paper trail for voters to see. The old lever machine is when you didnt know (as a voter) if it was right.

The new equipment can be transported by county crews in one or two Ryder rental trucks instead of Takin Brothers semis.

Jensson said it was a challenge adjusting to new processes, such as same-day voter registration, the Help America Vote Act, a new statewide voter registration system and satellite voting locations. A massive increase in absentee balloting also has strained the office.

But she said the most difficult job was recruiting and keeping qualified precinct officials for elections.

Its a constant challenge, always, she said. We need more precinct officials. We need younger precinct officials.

Jensson said she doesnt have firm retirement plans but has enough interests to keep her busy.

Veeder said hes advertising for a new election manager and expects to have the position filled before the primary.
DES MOINES  State park users and advocacy groups may be quizzed soon about their willingness to re-impose entrance fees to help fund Iowas park system.

A bill calls for state Department of Natural Resources officials to study installing electronic card reader systems at state park entrances to collect user fees.

Under the plan, DNR officials will solicit input from park users and supporters regarding their willingness to pay fees. State officials are to report their findings to Gov. Terry Branstad and legislators by Jan. 15, 2017.

Sen. Mary Jo Wilhelm, D-Cresco, co-chair of the House-Senate agriculture and natural resources budget subcommittee, said the information gathering did not necessarily mean park user fee, and Rep. Norlin Mommsen, R-DeWitt, the other panel co-leader, said his interest was to allow state officials to explore new technology applications, not necessarily increase fees..

I just think there must be something with these apps and stuff that we could be utilizing that were not, he added. My intent is to let them think outside the box and just what is possible. Whatever you can think of or dream of.

Mommsen said he wanted to make park rangers jobs easier, streamline check-ins and improve methods to make reservations. He added that if Iowans are surveyed, he believed people will come back and say theyre against reinstating a state park user fee. For most people, thats such a paradigm switch, especially for Iowa.

Branstad spokesman Ben Hammes said the governor also does not support a park user fee.

Iowa had user fees for a few years beginning in 1986, but those charges  $2 a day or $10 a season  were abolished because the Resource Enhancement and Protection Program was supposed to replace them. However, that program never has received the amount of money pledged. Legislators this session have proposed $16 million for REAP and $3 million for state park maintenance and operations in various fiscal 2017 budget bills.
DES MOINES  Prospects continued to dim Tuesday for agreement this session on a long-term approach to address Iowas water-quality problems.

Gov. Terry Branstad told reporters he supports a House-passed bill and hoped the Senate would at least debate the measure or offer an alternative to improve Iowas rivers and lakes.

We think it would be a mistake for the Senate to go home without debating that issue, Branstad said, and theres time to do that, and Im very hopeful that they will approve it this year.

The House plan would generate nearly half a billion dollars over 13 years by shifting money from state infrastructure projects and using money Iowans already pay on their water bills. Democrats who control the Senate contend new revenue is needed to address long-term needs.

Branstads plan to divert a portion of future sales taxes meant to fund school infrastructure to water programs has failed to garner support. A fractional sales tax increase, a commodity checkoff or an ending-balance trigger to fund water quality have little support.

Were getting ready to exit here. Theres no real consensus on what we should do to address this issue, said Sen. Joe Bolkcom, D-Iowa City, chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, said hope springs eternal even though a compromise continues to elude the Legislature and the 2016 session winds down.
WATERLOO  The city will consider giving a preference to local businesses bidding on city projects and services.

A majority of Waterloo City Council members Monday said they wanted to create a committee to draft a proposed policy giving a financial edge to local companies vying for city contracts.

We would be foolish not to at least study the issue, said Councilman Tom Lind. I think we should pursue this.

Councilmen Steve Schmitt, Bruce Jacobs and Jerome Amos Jr. joined Lind in calling for further study of a local preference policy, which would allow the city to award work to a local firm when its bid was less than a defined percentage higher than out-of-the-area companies.

Many larger cities across Iowa have local preference policies, including Cedar Rapids, Dubuque, Des Moines, Iowa City, Urbandale and West Des Moines.

Virtually every other metropolitan city in Iowa does have a local preference bidding policy, so apparently it does work, Schmitt said. The crux of this is to help our local businesses be competitive.

Im not interested in spending any more of the taxpayers money than we have to, but I am interested in helping our local businesses provide jobs, he added. Thats really the key to this.

But Welper said such a policy would increase the cost to taxpayers both directly and when out-of-town companies stop bidding. He suggested Waterloo companies could lose business in other towns if those communities retaliate.

Im happy with the way it is, Welper said. The sole purpose of the bidding process is to keep the taxes down.

Chief Financial Officer Michelle Weidner noted local preference policies cant be used on projects defined by state law as public improvements or when state and federal grant dollars are utilized.

The first thing when you decide to have a local preference policy is defining whats local, Weidner said.

That definition varies among cities with polices. Cedar Rapids defines local as any business paying property taxes or leasing a building paying property taxes in Linn County, while Dubuque defines local as being in the city limits.

Preferences also are different, ranging from 10 percent on small projects in Cedar Rapids to 1 percent in Des Moines. Iowa City gives local bidders within 5 percent of the low bid a chance to match the low bid.

Mayor Quentin Hart planned to contact council members today about setting up a committee to review the policy, ensuring it conforms with the Iowa Open Meetings Law.

Its a balance act, Hart said. On one hand we talk about economic growth and supporting our local businesses. On the other hand we talk about increased fees and raising things we purchase because it has a direct impact on our tax asking.

Jacobs raised the local preference question earlier this month when a Waterloo company was outbid by a Cedar Falls company on a roofing project. But the issue comes up periodically when local businesses are underbid by small margins.

Cedar Falls does not have a local preference policy for bidders.
WATERLOO  The Grout Museum District, 503 South St., along with Collins Community Credit Union and Texas Roadhouse is welcoming all veterans to A Night at the Museum on Tuesday.

Doors will be open from 5 to 7:30 p.m. A hot, buffet-style meal will be provided by Texas Roadhouse, free of charge for all veterans and a guest.

Following dinner, all attendees may take an evening tour of the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum and the current featured exhibit, 365 & Counting: Iowans in the Vietnam War. Re-enactors will perform in the exhibit areas throughout the evening.

Online registration is required for the meal at www.gmdistrict.org/calendar to register. Registration is not required for touring the museum.

Call 234-6357 or check www.GMDistrict.org for more information.
The great divide

BOB KAISER

CEDAR FALLS  Irreconcilable differences  two different ideologies. Lets divorce. We cant divide the land mass very well although I do have some ideas on that, because California and New York are on opposite sides of the country. Because you hate guns and warfare, well take the firearms, the cops, the NRA, our history, our flag and the military.

You can keep Oprah, Michael Moore and Rosie ODonnell; you will be responsible for finding electric vehicles large enough to move their bulk. Well keep capitalism, Wal-Mart and Wall Street and you can have the liberal judges, the ACLU and EPA.

Well keep the rednecks and Bibles and you can have NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN and Hollywood. You can make nice with Iran and Palestine and well continue to pound anyone who threatens us and provide the required security when our way of life is threatened.

We will keep our Judeo- Christian values and you can welcome Islam, Scientology and Shirley McClain. You can give free health care if you can find doctors. Well keep The National Anthem and you can have Id Like To Teach the World To Sing.

P.S., the Hollywood package must include Jane Fonda and Barbara Streisand.

Full WCA

VIRGINIA W. MILLER

WATERLOO  On April 7, some friends and I attended the current Waterloo Community Playhouse production at the Waterloo Center for the Arts. We have done this for more than 30 years.

However, the parking lot was full, and the building was alive with parents and their children (attending Culture Fest)  and we were forced to park more than two blocks away. I cannot believe both affairs were scheduled at the same time. In all the years we have belonged, we have been able to go and park in the adjoining lot. We were in danger of falling (or worse) when we returned to our lot where the car was parked at 9:45 p.m.

There are many things 90-plus people cannot do, but we all enjoy the playhouse productions very much and would like to continue to attend. However, we cannot keep attending if they continue to schedule youth productions at the same time.

GOP out of touch

PATRICK KOCH

CEDAR FALLS  The Know-Nothing Party started back in the 1850s as the precursor of the Republican Party. The party of Lincoln sure has lost its way over the years. Because of their self-made tea party radicals, they have made themselves into a party of hate, fear and racists.

For being proclaimed a religious family-based party, Ive seen little of it lately. Republicans still believe those videos of 2015 abortion films are true!? Even when proven false?

Our own out-of-touch Republican elected officials  both state and federal  still want to control womens lives by defunding Planned Parenthood because of this film. Republicans need a real reality check and try to watch or listen to something else besides their hate talk radio and the mother of all propaganda Fox News.

And to the haters who show their true colors in this paper all the time, ask yourselves what would Jesus think before you write; is that what Jesus would say?
Janesville Lions to host dinner

JANESVILLE  The Janesville Lions will host a smoked pork chop dinner Sunday at the Riviera Roose Community Center.

Serving will be from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Tickets are $9 is advance, $9.50 at the door and $3.50 for kids 5-10. Kids younger than 5 are free. Obtain advance tickets from any Janesville Lion or call 987-2064.

Denver fish fry set for Friday

DENVER  A Denver fish fry is set for 5 to 8 p.m. Friday at the Denver American Legion Hall, 161 E. Main St.

The menu includes all-you-can-eat pollock, fries, potato salad, baked beans, pasta salad, coleslaw, roll, dessert, milk and coffee.

Cost is $8 for adults, $4 for children 6-12 and free for children younger than 5.

CEDAR FALLS  Upper Cervical Health Centers will host a baked potato bar party with Dr. Kyle Troyer at 6 p.m. Friday.

UCHC will have all the fixings for the potatoes and root beer floats.

Attendees will be able to better understand how the body is able to heal itself and the importance of a proper functioning nervous system. All members of the community are welcome to attend.

For more information about this free event and to register, go to www.eventbrite.com/e/baked-potato-bar-party-tickets-24493376348 or call 266-5934.

Performance set by dance troupe

CEDAR FALLS  The Prairie Rose Middle Eastern Dance Troupe and the UNI Middle Eastern Dance Club will perform a belly dance show at 6:30 p.m. Saturday at the Cedar Falls Community Center, 528 Main St.

All are welcome, and admission to this family-friendly show is free.

The show will feature group and solo performances in a variety of styles of Middle Eastern dance. There also is an associated dance workshop in the afternoon where Emalee, an award-winning dancer from Minneapolis, will teach belly dance skills.

For more information, contact Helen Harton at harton@uni.edu or 290-7262.

Quota to install board officers

WATERLOO  Quota International of Waterloo will install a new board of officers and directors at an April 26 meeting at AEA 267, 3712 Cedar Heights Drive, Cedar Falls.

The meeting starts at 5:30 p.m.

The new board will be Gail Carter, president; Mary Sandberg, first vice president; Carol Toppin, second vice president; Monica Haag, treasurer; and Kathy Buzynski, secretary. The four directors will be Marge Maurer, Oletha ODonnell, Ginny Salkeld and Mary Twaites (as outgoing president).

Quota is a nonprofit service organization serving primarily the needs of women and children, and deaf and hard of hearing in Black Hawk and contiguous counties.

Anyone who would like to have dinner with members should call Pat Hagerstrom at 233-4635 for a reservation.

For more information, go to waterlooquota.com.
JPEC program receives award

CEDAR FALLS  The University of Northern Iowas John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center on Monday received the Student Entrepreneurship Program of the Year award presented by the International Business Innovation Association. UNI JPEC is the inaugural recipient of this international award.

The International Business Innovation Association is a nonprofit organization advocating for the advancement of global entrepreneurship and incubation. The Student Entrepreneurship Program of the Year award is presented to a program that excelled providing educational and entrepreneurial opportunities to student populations.

Mayors speech at Cunningham

WATERLOO  Mayor Quentin Hart is scheduled to deliver a State of the City Address on April 29 at the Dr. Walter Cunningham School for Excellence.

The public is invited to attend the 10 a.m. event in the school gym by entering door 2 at the northwest end of the building, 1224 Mobile St.

Hart is expected to talk about the citys successes, challenges and progress. His son, a fifth-grader at Cunningham, will introduce the mayor.

C.F. business awards slated

CEDAR FALLS  The 2016 Cedar Falls Business & Industry Appreciation and Representative Citizen Awards are scheduled for 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. April 28 at Park Place Event Centre.

Through the program, the city of Cedar Falls and Cedar Falls Utilities honor local businesses and organizations, as well as Representative Citizens of the Year.

Cost is $20. To RSVP, contact Kim Kerr at 268-5115 or kim.kerr@cedarfalls.com by Wednesday.

ROTC members to attend meet

WATERLOO  The West High School Air Force JROTC was selected by the Air Force as one of 12 schools from the Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps JROTC to receive partial funding to attend the JROTC National Drill Meet in Daytona Beach, Fla., on April 30.

Scyler Torrey, Hector Santiago, Zane Slack and Sandi Mekanovic are the four cadets on the Color Guard Team who will represent West at the meet. The cadets will compete in the Open Color Guard event against up to 40 schools from across the country.

The West cadets have been practicing since late December and have competed in five drill meets this year.

Recycled art

event planned

CEDAR FALLS  Green Project UNI, the University of Northern Iowas campus sustainability club, will host a recycled art showcase on the main floor of the Rod Library through May 13.

The showcase, Our Actions, Our Earth, aims to raise awareness for and promote environmentally-friendly or green thinking throughout the duration of Earth Month.

The centerpiece is a chain of plastic bags tied together to represent human action and awareness. It will weave through a variety of art pieces.

Teams place in physics competition

CEDAR FALLS  The University of Northern Iowa Department of Physics hosted the state Physics Competition on April 12 in the McLeod Center on the UNI campus.

Approximately 145 students from 20 different schools participated. Grinnell High School placed first, led by instructor Chris Molitor; Cedar Falls High School placed second, led by instructor Meghan Reynolds; and Decorah High School placed third, led by instructor Tim Hayes.

Individual event winners were Grinnell High School in the catapult event, led by Molitor; Cedar Falls High School in the mousetrap car event, led by Reynolds; Manson Northwest Weber High School in the bridge-building event, led by Jessica Waller; Wahlert Catholic High School of Dubuque in the soda straw arm event, led by instructor Tom Stierman; and Cedar Falls High School in the challenge problem event, led by Reynolds.
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By Stewart Naidesh

Apr. 18, 2016 | PADUCAH, KY

By Stewart Naidesh Apr. 18, 2016 | 12:17 PM | PADUCAH, KY

According to the National Network to End Domestic Violence, financial abuse is a contributing factor in 98% of all domestic violence cases. Abusers exert power and control in numerous ways, including limiting or controlling access to financial assets. This dynamic creates forced dependency and entrapment. This could occur throughout the relationship or surface when a victim attempts to leave an abuser.



In response to this chilling reality, the Allstate Foundation has awarded over 1 million dollars in 11 years to the Kentucky Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Allstate Foundation funds support KCADVs Economic Empowerment work through 15 domestic violence shelters throughout Kentucky, including Merryman House in Paducah.



I recently had the opportunity to work with domestic violence survivors at Merryman House. This experience was enlightening to the barriers survivors face to becoming financially self-sufficient and independent. Many victims are disallowed from working, are forced to quit a job, or suffer impaired job performance as an effect of ongoing trauma. Abusers may force victims to accrue debt or sign financial documents, or they may make unfavorable financial transactions in the victims name. For victims of economic abuse, it can feel overwhelming or impossible to consider the cost of independence. When a survivor has children, she may feel additional financial strain.



The Allstate Foundations funding supports individual case management, financial education classes, Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), micro loans, credit counseling, free tax preparation, and housing. Last year, 2,600 individuals received financial empowerment services using The Allstate Foundation's Moving Ahead Through Financial Management curriculum. Allstate Foundation funding has also helped 115 survivors purchase their own cars, so that they can commute to work or school.



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Stewart Naidesh is an Allstate Personal Financial Representative who resides in Paducah, KY. He specializes in helping customers protect their family's financial futures through retirement and life insurance planning. He is passionate about helping victims of domestic violence and seeks to empower, inspire and encourage them to have hope and never give up. If you have questions or would like assistance with planning your financial future, you can reach Stewart by phone at (270) 705-2805.
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By The Associated Press

Apr. 18, 2016 | WASHINGTON, DC

By The Associated Press Apr. 18, 2016 | 04:27 PM | WASHINGTON, DC

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he is ``increasingly optimistic'' that voting at the Republican National Convention in July will go to a second ballot.



The Kentucky Republican's comments seem to suggest that - although he has sought to remain publicly neutral - he does not want to see front-runner Donald Trump emerge as the GOP presidential nominee.



Trump is unlikely to amass the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination ahead of the convention in Cleveland. Voting would then proceed to a second ballot, with a majority of delegates free to vote for whomever they choose.



McConnell says he anticipates he will be a delegate, and ``on the second ballot I'll be free to do whatever I want.''



He made his comments on WHAS-TV in Louisville.


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I am giving thanks from my heart for all the donations received. I received several while I was in Ukraine fighting against the odds and getting my work done. It took all my time available in Ukraine and thus, I got behind in thanking people

No names, just a sincere thank you. You know who you are

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If youre looking to try out an online casino, there are several things that will help you make a decision. Heres what you should look for when choosing an online casino

 Are they regulated? A lot of the larger ones have licenses issued by the authorities in their respective regions, so its worth checking this first.

 Do they offer games from different software providers? Some casinos just use one software provider and limit your selection. This is fine if you like playing those types of games but you may want to check other casinos as well.

 What does their payout percentage look like? The payout rate refers to how much money you can expect to win after every bet. A high payout rate means youll be able to play more often without having to worry about losing all your money. Its also important to know the minimum and maximum bets allowed on each game. If youre going to play roulette, for example, then you probably dont want a casino with a minimum bet of less than $2.50 or even lower than that.

The players used to play the game slot online in the land based casinos in the past time. But now with time after the invention of the online casinos players play the game slot online. Online platform provide the players with the convenience in playing and even better winning. Even after keeping a good percentage of the profits, they distribute good funds to players.

 How many games do they offer? There are lots of different types of games to choose from. Roulette, blackjack and poker are some of the most popular options, but you might find slots, video pokers, video bingo and others as well. You can usually filter these games down to only show the ones that interest you best, so make sure that your list isnt too long!

 Is there a bonus offer? Many online casinos offer free bonuses as part of their welcome package  which includes new players being awarded 100% up to $10 instantly, for example. These offers are great but not everyone has access to them all the time (and some require you to deposit real money). If youd prefer to avoid paying a fee, some casinos offer no-deposit bonuses where you can get a certain amount of funds before you need to put any actual money into the account. These are usually offered alongside welcome bonuses, so make sure you read both parts of the terms and conditions carefully before signing up.

 Does it offer live dealer games? Live dealers are much preferred by many over regular virtual versions, so it pays to check this option out too. Most online casinos now offer live dealer games in addition to their regular offerings, allowing you to experience the thrill of the real thing without needing to leave home.

Now that youve got an idea of what to look for when choosing an online casino, heres some tips for making the right choice

It really comes down to personal preference. No two people are exactly alike, so everyone has an opinion on what they like and dislike about each casino. That said, here are some things to consider in order to narrow down your choices

 Popularity. Check out reviews, forums and Facebook pages to see what other people think of the casino. Also, ask around at work or friends houses who they would recommend to you. You could always take a look at the casinos website too, to see what kind of information they provide about themselves.

 Reputation. Find out what the general public thinks about the casino. Check out any customer reviews on sites like Trustpilot, Amazon and Google Play to find out more. As far as gaming goes, you can also check out the Better Business Bureau to see whether there have been any complaints against the casino.

 Security. Make sure the casino uses SSL encryption to secure its transactions, meaning that your private data stays safe during transactions. Other than that, look for security seals on the site itself and verify that theyre legitimate. You can also check out the casinos privacy policy to see how they handle confidential information.

 Payment methods. Its good to have multiple payment options available, especially if you plan to play frequently. Its also nice to find a casino that accepts cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. If youre worried about safety, you can always opt for a credit card or PayPal instead.

With all those criteria in mind, heres our top picks

Betway:

Betway is a relatively new UK casino offering online gambling to residents of the United Kingdom and European Union. They offer hundreds of games across both land based and digital platforms, with plenty of top software providers like Net Entertainment, Microgaming and Yggdrasil Gaming Network. With a generous welcome offer that gives players 100% up to 100, you really cant go wrong with Betway.

Coral Casino:

Coral Casino is operated by the same company that runs the famous Caribbean casino, Grand Reef. Like many casinos, Coral Casino offers a wide variety of games, including plenty of video slots and table games. New players can benefit from a huge 100% match bonus up to 1000, while existing customers enjoy 25% cash back on deposits made within 48 hours of opening an account.

Ladbrokes Casino:

Ladbrokes Casino is owned by the same company as the famous bookmaker that started life in 1921. With more than 500 games from leading software providers such as Amaya, NetEnt and Microgaming, you wont be disappointed by the quality of the games here. New players get a 200% match bonus up to 500, while existing customers can claim 35% cashback on their first three deposits.

Paddy Power Casino:

Paddy Power is another Irish-owned casino that operates throughout Europe. Not only does Paddy Power Casino offer traditional casino games like blackjack, roulette and slots, but it also provides a full range of sports betting, including football, tennis, boxing and horse racing. New players can receive a massive 100% match bonus up to 200, while existing customers can claim 35% cashback on their first three deposits.

William Hill Casino:

William Hill Casino is one of the biggest names in the industry, operating in Europe, Asia and North America. Founded in 1984, this online casino has more than 400 games to choose from, including slots and table games, with a wide array of software providers like WagerLogic, Big Time Gaming and Rival.

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Apr 19, 2016 | By Tess

Philip the duck, like a number of animals before him, has been given a new lease on life thanks to the kindness of a few people and the capabilities of 3D printing technologies.

Philip, a duck living in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, tragically lost his two feet due to frostbite, and after being taken in by animal lover Vicki Rabe-Harrison, who set out to help him. After unsuccessfully trying to help the duck herself, and finding that the birds quality of life was quite poor without the ability to walk properly, Rabe-Harrison made the difficult decision to have Phillip put down.

Within literally an hour of the scheduled vet appointment, Rabe-Harrison got an urgent call from Mr. Jischke, an engineering teacher at South Park Middle School, who said he was making Philip a set of plastic prosthetic feet using the schools new 3D printer. Overjoyed that Philip might yet be saved, Rabe-Harrison cancelled the vet appointment and brought Phillip to try on his new feet.

While the initial set of 3D printed flippers were not the perfect fit, Mr. Jischke and Vicki Rabe-Harrison spent the next six weeks finding better solutions, finally settling on a set of orange, fitted feed made from a flexible NinjaFlex filament that reportedly took 36 hours to print.

Philip, who was fitted with the 3D printed feet with many eager eyes watching, took to the 3D printed prosthetics rather quickly, at first stumbling but then gaining his footing. As Rabe-Harrison describes, He picked it up real fast, and Im sure hell learn to balance again and be able to waddle around with all the other ducks.

Now that he has a second chance at life, Philip has been moved to his new home on the Autumn Farm animal sanctuary, where he will continue to adjust to his new 3D printed feet. Alyssa Herbst, who runs the sanctuary along with her husband Brandon, explains, Its really important to us that we give exceptional care to each of our animals in our sanctuary.

The animal sanctuary, which is run with the help of a number of volunteers, houses many types of animals, including chickens, sheep, goats, ponies, and ducks. Philip is expected to have a safe and happy home there.

While the duck is able to walk again with the 3D printed feet made by Mr. Jischke, the Herbsts are hopeful that with the help of a college engineering department, they will find a more permanent solution for Philips feet, giving the lucky duck an even greater quality of life.

Posted in 3D Printing Application

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Apr 19, 2016 | By Tess

Sinopec Baling Petrochemical Company, one of Chinas leading oil and gas companies, has recently signed a Cooperation Framework Agreement with Farsoon High-Technology Co., Ltd., to develop and create a number of new innovative 3D printing materials, including powder elastomer materials and SLA epoxy resin, as well as new 3D printing devices. Farsoon, a total solution supplier of Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and Melting (SLM), will focus on the development of new 3D printing devices, while Sinopec Baling Petrochemical will be in charge of the development of the new 3D printing materials. Together, the companies are hoping to advance additive manufacturing technologies as well as promote innovation in the field.

In terms of the types of 3D printing materials Sinopec Baling Petrochemical will be developing, they have said they will use synthetic rubbers, epoxy resin, and a variety of nylon materials to develop a new thermoplastic elastomer. Additionally, the company will begin the research and development of a new UV curable photosensitive resin to be used in 3D printing, as well as a nylon developed for use in the automotive industry, a polyamide elastomer, epoxy curing agents, and an epoxy carbon fiber composite.

Farsoon High-Technology for its part, will work on developing new selective laser sintering 3D printers as well as services to process additive manufacturing materials. The new 3D printer technologies are being developed at Farsoons location in Changsa, Hunan, at their 32,000 square meter research and production base.

The Cooperation Framework Agreement with Farsoon comes just over a year after Sinopec chairman Fu Chenyu announced the companys five future economic growth points, the fifth of which was the development of new materials, research and exploration of 3D printing business, to create conditions for the development of 3D printing material. Now, with the recent partnership, Sinopec is addressing this fifth point of growth and will begin the development of a number of new 3D printing materials.

Sinopec has also been making other strides ahead in the 3D printing industry, as Sinopec Beijing Yanshan Petrochemical is planning the release of a cordless and portable 3D printing pen, which operates on a rechargeable, lithium battery. The 3D printing pen, being developed in collaboration with Sting3D, an FDM material development startup, will reportedly have a standby time of up to 100 minutes, and will use low-temperature materials to help prevent users from getting burnt or injured while using it.

We have little doubt that the partnership between Sinopec Baling Petrochemical and Farsoon High-Technology will help boost Chinas 3D printing market, which as a report published by the IDC recently indicated, is still dominated by foreign companies.

Posted in 3D Printing Materials

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Lucy Hughes-Hallett at The New Statesman:

This is not a book on Chernobyl, writes Svetlana Alexievich, but on the world of Chernobyl. It is not about what happened on 26 April 1986, when a nuclear reactor exploded near the border between Ukraine and Belarus. It is about an epoch that will last, like the radioactive material inside the reactors leaking ruin, for tens of thousands of years. Alexievich writes that, before the accident, War was the yardstick of horror, but at Chernobyl the history of disasters began.

Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year for her powerful works of oral history, was born in Ukraine and grew up in Belarus. The explosion took place close to her home ground. At once, people began to ask her whether she was writing about it. Others rushed out books of reportage or polemic. She hesitated. What had happened was uncanny, beyond words. There was, she writes, a moment of muteness.

Gradually, over many years, she interviewed people whose lives had been affected by the blast. Many have since died. Her book  first published in Russian in 1997 and now issued in a new translation of a revised text  is made up of their testimonies.

more here.
Eric Fair at Literary Hub:

Easter arrives. The nightmares have become more frequent. On Easter morning, I go for a run on Camp Victory. I explore a new portion of the base where the Armys 1st Cavalry Division is setting up. A large artificial hill rises out of the empty fields. This is where the workers piled the dirt to dig out the canals and lakes for Saddams palaces. Everyone says this is where Saddam Hussein buried the chemical weapons. From the top of the hill I can see the buildings and minarets of Baghdad. I hear the Muslim call to prayer and think about Sunday services at the First Presbyterian Church. I remember an organ prelude accompanied by the Philadelphia Brass, the choir processing down the aisle and singing Jesus Christ Is Risen Today. The Hallelujah Chorus from Handels Messiah. In high school, I used to attend all four Easter services before getting French-kissed in the church parking lot.

A large formation of soldiers from the 1st Cav Division reaches the top of the hill. They stop for push-ups and sit-ups. The sergeant berates the stragglers who are still making their way up the hill. His profanity is interrupted by incoming mortar rounds. We scatter over the sides of the hill and make our way back down to lower ground. I sit with other soldiers in a bunker made of large cement highway dividers. An officer says, They watch from the minarets. Fucking assholes call artillery on Easter Sunday from a fucking mosque.

more here.
"The biggest challenge for climate scientists is to convey and quantify the uncertainties around forecasts, and to help practitioners to manage that uncertainty,'' says Vasu Misra, an Assistant Professor of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Florida State University.

In his 2016 State of the City address, Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn touted the need for a comprehensive overhaul of the city's stormwater system, which includes over 600 miles of pipe.

Sixth in a series.Just north of the iconic Big Bend Power Station on Hillsborough County's southeastern shore, the Tampa Bay Desalination Plant processes millions of gallons of saltwater through a teeming maze of pumps and pipes. The final output: fresh drinking water for your tap, to the measure of up to 25 million gallons every day.Historically, the Tampa region has relied on groundwater pumping for the overwhelming majority of its drinking water. But environmental issues like saltwater intrusion and over-pumping triggered a long series of Tampa Bay "water wars'' between local governments and the state in the 1980s and 1990s.As Christopher Meindl , Associate Professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg has written, the water wars prompted the creation of a new regional water utility and, with it, a new approach to sourcing the region's drinking water. That entity, Tampa Bay Water , last year (2015) supplied an average of roughly 156 million gallons of wholesale water a day through a 2,000-square-mile water system to some 2.4 million residents living across Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties.About two thirds of the water from your tap still comes from 13 groundwater wellfields scattered across Pasco and Hillsborough counties, where nearly 200 pumps mine the Floridan aquifer. The other third is culled from surface water sources like the Alafia River during Tampa Bay's infamous summer rainstorms.The $158 million desal plant, which was the largest saltwater desalination plant in North America when it opened in 2007, provides just 1 percent of the region's water during wetter years like this one (2016). Because it's much more costly to operate, it serves as a backup for drier periods. But it could play a more important role in the future as climate change transforms the region's water supply.Today, climate change is prompting scientists and engineers at Tampa Bay Water to revisit and rethink how, where and when the region will source drinking water in the future.Tirusew Asefa, Modeling and Decision Support Manager at Tampa Bay Water, points to three particular issues that may impact the region's water supply over the coming decades: changing rainfall patterns, higher temperatures and sea level rise.To frame these challenges, Asefa poses a series of questions: "We depend on summer rainfall, 60-70 percent of which comes in just four months. Is there a shift in how we get our summer rainfall? Do we get a shorter summer season? When does it start? How do these flows change 20 or 30 years from now?''Pinning down answers to these hypotheticals is decidedly less straightforward. Over the last several years, Asefa and his colleagues have been working to ''downscale'' a range of global climate models, or GCMs, to the scale of the region's watershed. "We take nationally available climate data and adapt it to local conditions,'' he explains.These GCMs generally agree that temperatures in the Tampa Bay area will rise between two and three degrees Celsius (three and six degrees Fahrenheit) over the next half century, which could significantly alter the region's water supply. As temperatures rise, evapotranspiration -- that is, the loss of water through evaporation and plant transpiration -- also increases, Asefa says. Higher rates of evapotranspiration would leave less water for human consumption.There is less agreement among GCMs about future rainfall in the Tampa Bay area. According to one Tampa Bay Water research briefing, the projected change in rates between 2039 and 2069 varied from 22 percent less rainfall to 11 percent more.Asefa explains that these temperature and rainfall projections -- uncertainties and all -- are put into a hydrological model designed specifically for the Tampa Bay watershed. That model accounts for different natural and man-made variables, ranging from rainfall patterns to groundwater pumping and land uses.Future population growth and other changing socio-economic factors are yet another factor in building a portrait of Tampa Bay's future water supply and demand. Using economic and demographic forecasts from Moody's, Asefa and his colleagues estimate how Tampa Bay's anticipated growth will change that equation.He adds that local sea level rise is also an issue. The operations of the bay front desalination plant and at least one of Tampa Bay Water's surface water collection sites on the Alafia River could be impacted by higher saltwater sea levels.Tampa Bay Water scientists use these variables to analyze the local hydrological impacts of different global climate change scenarios, and then extrapolate how the region's water supply might change -- and what that means for the utility's day-to-day operations and long-term planning efforts.But there's still a great deal of uncertainty in the models, making it difficult to make multimillion dollar operational and planning decisions, like when and where to build a new reservoir or desalination plant."When you run these future scenarios through your own model, depending on the time and scale, you may have a different output or result that needs careful interpretation,'' Asefa says.To interpret and fine-tune those uncertainties, Tampa Bay Water has adopted a highly collaborative approach. Soon after Tampa Bay Water started to look at climate change in 2007, they elected to join the Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA), a national network of 10 of the country's largest water utilities. WUCA's members are working together to translate global climate science into regionally appropriate, actionable water management and climate adaptation insights.To date, Tampa Bay Water has collaborated with several other utilities on a number of research initiatives like PUMA, shorthand for Piloting Utility Modeling Applications. Asefa says, "PUMA is an example of how you can co-produce climateinformation in ways that are useful to your area. The idea was, how can I give feedback to climate scientists, in terms of the data I need and the parameters I use to make actionable decisions?''Today, Alison Adams, Chief Technical Officer of Tampa Bay Water, chairs WUCA. Soon after joining WUCA, she hatched the idea for a Florida-specific network, and so the Florida Water & Climate Alliance was born. Like WUCA, that organization aims to facilitate learning and dialogue between Florida water management practitioners and climate scientists to develop better longer-term decision-making tools and resources.Facilitated by the University of Florida Water Institute, the Florida Water & Climate Alliance includes seven large water utilities and three water management districts (including the Tampa Bay region's own Southwest Florida Water Management District), along with several other academic institutions, and has met quarterly since 2010.Vasu Misra, an Assistant Professor of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Florida State University, is a longstanding participant in the project. "The biggest challenge for climate scientists is to convey and quantify the uncertainties around forecasts, and to help practitioners to manage that uncertainty,'' he says."We do quite a bit of research at the university, but in order to translate it into products that can be operationalized by utilities, it is quite expensive. The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration can't do it for every utility. Utilities are always under pressure to do cost-cutting measures, so they may not be able to find funds to get tailored data when they need it to make decisions,'' he explains.That's where the Florida Water & Climate Alliance has proved useful in providing a forum for utilities and other institutions to share resources, learn together and advocate for further research."The attendees are curious and very open-minded,'' continues Misra. "We're often coming on our own dime to understand how we can match our research goals to their needs. To be frank, we don't have many such groups around the nation. At the state level, Florida is leading in terms of forming a group like this and meeting regularly. We are finding after meeting 15 times that it is a very difficult task to translate this research into products. But we are hopeful.''For Tampa Bay Water's scientists and engineers, the work of translating global climate science to local action doesn't stop at the state level. Both Adams and Asefa participated on the Tampa Bay Climate Science Advisory Panel, or CSAP, a regional group of scientists that joined forces in 2014. We explored the first outcome of CSAP's collaboration -- a set of regional sea level rise projections -- in the first feature in 83 Degrees Media's climate change series While Tampa Bay Water takes charge for most of the region's drinking water supply infrastructure, local governments are responsible for their own water infrastructure, which also include waste and stormwater systems.For communities with a large amount of aging water infrastructure, like much of the City of Tampa and Pinellas County, the increasing severity of neighborhood flooding has become a particularly hot topic of debate and action in recent months.In his 2016 State of the City address, Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn touted the need for a comprehensive overhaul of the city's stormwater system, which includes over 600 miles of pipe, for example.In Pinellas County, water management officials are responding to those challenges -- and the looming threat of climate change -- through the development of an Integrated Water Resource Management framework. That's "just sustainability, at it's most simple definition,'' says Kelli Hammer Levy, Natural Resources Division Manager, who has helped to spearhead the project.Integrated water management, she says, balances natural resources, social systems, the economy and their interconnections. "When you start to disconnect those pieces, you create problems.''Much of Pinellas County was developed before the state began to adopt more stringent environmental protections like theFlorida Air and Water Pollution Control Act of 1967, leaving entire neighborhoods -- and their infrastructure -- in areas vulnerable to flooding and other issues, according to Levy. That's left the county working to retrofit its water infrastructure in a way that minimizes floods and complies with stricter water quality standards. Sea level rise will only exacerbate these current challenges, she adds.At the same time, the county has historically divided responsibility for wastewater, stormwater and drinking water management activities across different administrative divisions. Taking an integrated approach to solving water challenges enables these groups to develop collaborative "win-win'' solutions, according to Levy.To help incorporate integrated water management principles in future projects, Pinellas County has adopted Envision, a civil infrastructure sustainability rating system developed by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure . Envision rates the community, environmental, and economic benefits of a specific project on a 60-point scale that reflects a full project lifecycle, from the design process through to long-term maintenance and upkeep.Levy points to efforts to restore the McKay Creek area in Northern Pinellas County as an example of Envision principles in action. There, Pinellas County and the City of Largo have been gradually restoring the creek's natural floodplain, which extends over more than 5,000 acres. A range of measures -- including the purchase and removal of homes along the creek -- have been undertaken over several years to reduce flooding risks, improve water quality and open up habitat for both recreation and conservation purposes.In the future, Envision and other tools like it may also help Pinellas County governments to select climate adaptation investments that offset the vulnerability of specific communities and habitats, as we highlighted in the second feature in the 83 Degrees Media climate change series From the regional scale down to individual neighborhoods, and from abstract global climate science models to on-the-ground infrastructure projects, it's clear that institutions across Tampa Bay are beginning to rethink how the region manages its water resources in light of climate change.Next week, 83 Degrees concludes this seven-part series with a look at how Floridians' perceptions of climate change are changing, why Florida's cities and regions are leading the way to a more climate resilient future, and how you can take action. Comments? Contact 83 Degrees Part 1 -- Tampa Bay Area scientists, policymakers plan for rising sea levels Part 2 -- Preparing for climate change: Pinellas County, local towns take steps to get ready Part 3 -- Is the global reinsurance industry making Florida more resilient to climate change, hurricanes? Part 4 -- Tampa Bay real estate boom and climate change: 5 big insights Part 5 -- Climate change: Across Tampa Bay, environmental organizations mobilize around sea level rise Part 6 -- Rethinking Tampa Bay's water resources as the climate changes Part 7 -- Retrofitting Tampa Bay for climate change: From understanding to action
2. "Are there any medications that I should never, ever use beyond their expiration dates?"

Yes, absolutely. Oral nitroglycerin (NTG), a medication used for angina (chest pain), may lose its potency quickly once the bottle is opened and should never be taken after the expiration date. Similarly, insulin, used to control blood sugar in those with diabetes, may stop working after its expiration date. Other drugs you need to be sure are full strength include anticonvulsants, warfarin, digoxin, thyroid preparations and oral contraceptives (see full list here).

Another must-toss once the expiration date has passed: inhalers. "They will lose potency after their expiration date," Tiemeier says. "If you're having an acute respiratory attack and your inhaler doesn't work, it could be a dangerous situation." Ditto for EpiPens; the epinephrine in auto-injectors loses its potency. As with inhalers, EpiPens are used in life-threatening situations like anaphylaxis, so using an expired one is a major health threat.

Lastly, using ophthalmic (eye) drops past their expiration date could be dangerous because of the high risk for bacterial growth. You could risk losing your vision from contaminated drops, Tiemeier says.

3. "Is a drug's expiration date the same thing as the 'use-by' date I see on my prescription vials?"

No. The expiration date is the one legally required to be on the original large container the pharmacist receives for dispensing drugs. The "discard after" or "do not use after" date on bottles or packages given to patients is often for a shorter time  generally a year after dispensing  because of safety reasons once the drug is no longer being stored at the pharmacy. Some states even require pharmacists to add this date. Drugs such as nitroglycerin and insulin have even briefer "use by" windows: nitroglycerin's is typically six months; insulin's is 28 days from the first use, says Atayee.

4. "I keep all my medications on the kitchen counter so I remember to take them, rather than in my medicine chest. Are they safe there?"

It depends. Heat and humidity can affect a drug's potency, and a small kitchen gets hot quickly when the stove or oven is being used. Ironically, the medicine cabinet in your bathroom isn't ideal for storing drugs either, particularly if the space lacks proper ventilation and gets hot and humid. "Meds need to be kept in a dry, cool place," says Atayee, who suggests using a storage box with a lid. Also important: Don't store medication in your car's glove compartment. It may seem convenient, but the temperature extremes can affect the drug's strength.
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En espanol | How worried are older adults about skyrocketing prescription drug prices? Really, really worried. A new survey by AARP of nearly 2,000 adults age 50+ finds the vast majority  81 percent  think drug prices are too high, and nearly 9 in 10 want politicians to do something about it.

Get the latest tips on protecting your health  AARP Health Newsletter

The public is making it increasingly clear that profiteering by drug companies at the expense of Americans is unacceptable. People are worried about high drug prices, and many are struggling because they cant afford their medications, said Nancy LeaMond, AARPs chief advocacy and engagement officer.

The survey is the latest in a growing chorus of outrage against unaffordable drug prices not only from patients, but also from doctors, insurers, Congress and presidential candidates.

A recent survey of about 3,000 brand-name prescription drugs found that prices more than doubled for 60 and at least quadrupled for 20 since December 2014, Bloomberg News reported. For those with diabetes, the cost of insulin has tripled in the last decade, outstripping patient annual spending on all other diabetes medications combined, a new analysis showed.
Save for life. If youre in need of inspiration, take a look at the photos on the cruise pages, add your own and make a mental vision board of where youd like to be and what youd like to be doing in your future, retired or not.

Make it automatic. Saving for anything is hard. It takes discipline. Sacrifice. So make it as easy as possible by making it automatic. As University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler told the Wall Street Journal, the best way for most people to save for retirement is through their employers savings plan, one of the greatest tax shelters for the middle class. If youre not currently in your companys savings plan, get in as soon as you can, even if your deductions start small  a percentage or 2 each year  and watch your savings grow, tax sheltered with compound interest.

Use the force. In her brilliant little new book, How to Retire with Enough Money, the economist and retirement expert Teresa Ghilarducci talks about the power of compounding. When you carry debt, the force is against you, but if you start to save even 1 percent in a smart way, the magic of compounding is your wizards assistance.

Even such modest savings can be a big help in maximizing your Social Security benefits. Any bit of money that helps you delay Social Security is a path toward retirement security, says Ghilarducci, who notes that the longer you wait, the bigger the benefit will be, up until age 70.

See also: 11 things that are cheaper in retirement

Of course, not everyone has access to a retirement plan that deducts money from your paycheck before you can spend it. But even if you dont, you can still trick yourself into saving by having your bank automatically transfer money from checking to savings every payday. And if you get a raise, increase the amount you transfer into savings. Or, once you pay off your car loan or credit card, make those monthly payments into your savings account instead.

Worldwide, only about 30 percent of us consider ourselves financially literate, but its never too late to start learning. Also, check out AARP columnist Jane Bryant Quinns latest book, How to Make Your Money Last, for advice on affording the life you want.
Rosalie Tyrrell, 69, didn't want to retire. Ever. An administrator at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital for 33 years, Tyrrell was a self-described workaholic. "I loved what I did and the people I worked with," she says. "Retire? Who would I be without my professional identity?"

Her attitude baffled her husband, Luis Puccio, now 57. In 2008, when his consulting contract  with the computer software company he'd formerly owned  expired, Puccio was abruptly thrust into retirement. For the next few years, Puccio worked odd jobs but felt adrift and ready for a change. "For me, it was obvious," says Puccio. "Even Rosalie's financial guy said we'd saved enough. Why does she insist on getting up at 5 a.m. for a 90-minute commute when we could be renting a condo in Florida?"

He didn't hide his feelings. "Lou called me at work and pestered me about coming home early or taking Fridays off," Tyrrell recalls. "I had a career  and I didn't want to leave it."

Tyrrell and Puccio could be the poster children for Out-of-Sync Retirement Syndrome: As 76 million boomers march toward what was once a generally agreed-upon "retirement age," many are poorly prepared for the conflicts unleashed when one partner retires and the other continues to toil. "Retirement can magnify preexisting problems in a marriage," says social historian Stephanie Coontz. "The decision to stop work forces you to reevaluate what you both want  and you may discover the gaps are wider than either of you thought."

Research shows that marital stress increases during the initial two years of retirement, especially when the husband retires first. "Jobs, like kids, can be buffers in a relationship," Coontz says. "Once the structure of work is gone, unresolved issues rise to the surface."

Boomers in particular may struggle with this transition. "In the past, most couples took it for granted that when one of them retired, the other would, too  and they usually faced only the husband's retirement," says sociologist Phyllis Moen, author of Encore Adulthood: Boomers on the Edge of Risk, Renewal, and Purpose. "Two-career boomers are the first generation that has had to deal with his-and-her retirements."

Indeed, fewer than 20 percent of all couples quit working in the same year. And a recent study found that 38 percent of retired couples disagree on the lifestyle they want to lead.

HOV lane for her, off-ramp for him
Venus Metals Corporation Limited (ASX:VMC) is a West Australian based Company with a focus on gold, base metals, vanadium and lithium exploration projects. The Company aims to increase shareholder value through targeted exploration success on its projects.

The Company's major gold project is the Youanmi Gold Mine, located 500km north-east of Perth. The Youanmi Gold Mine is now jointly owned by Venus Metals (30%) and Rox Resources Limited (70%); Indicated and Inferred Resource of the mine is in excess of 3 million ounces of gold.
Crusader Resources (ASX:CAS) has signed a joint-venture Shareholders Agreement and finalised the terms of associated documentation with Lepidico Ltd. The new company, to be known as Third Element Metals, is aiming to become a producer of the third element in the periodic table, namely lithium, with an immediate focus on Brazil.


Finalises Lithium Agreement with Lepidico

Perth, April 19, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Brazil-focused resource development company Crusader Resources ( ASX:CAS ) is pleased to advise the Company has signed a joint-venture Shareholders Agreement and finalised the terms of associated documentation with Lepidico Ltd ("Lepidico"). The new company, to be known as Third Element Metals, is aiming to become a producer of the third element in the periodic table, namely lithium, with an immediate focus on Brazil.



Highlights:



- Crusader Resources and Lepidico Ltd sign Shareholders Agreement to establish Third Element Metals Pty Ltd. ("Third Element Metals" or the "JV Company")



- As per the MOU announced 3 February 2016, the JV Company is to be established for the purposes of:



-- exploring for lithium and other minerals on the Manga Lithium Project and any other tenements acquired by the JV Company in Brazil and other agreed jurisdictions ("Territory");



-- mining and processing minerals extracted from tenements in the Territory using the L-Max(R) technology, to which the JV Company will hold exclusive rights in the Territory; and



-- sub-licensing the L-Max Technology to third parties for use in the Territory



- Reconnaissance mapping and sampling program over Manga completed- results expected in 2 weeks.



Under the agreement, which follows on from signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (please refer to ASX announcement dated 3 February 2016), the shareholders have agreed to establish a 50:50 strategic joint venture ("JV Company") to explore for and develop lithium resources in the Territory.



Third Element Metals will have exclusive rights to use the L-Max(R) technology, a patented technology to extract lithium from mica ores within the Territory. The company intends to develop and hold a portfolio of lithium projects and or royalty interests from sub-licencing the technology in addition to deploying it to Crusader's Manga prospect.



Crusader's Executive Director Paul Stephen commented:



"The signing of the Shareholders Agreement is a critical step in formalising our strategic relationship with Lepidico.



"While Crusader's main focus will remain on its gold and iron ore assets, specifically the development of the Juruena Gold project, the Shareholders Agreement cements our partnership with Lepidico, provides the company with exclusive rights to the L-Max(R) technology in Brazil and allows the advancement of the Manga Lithium Project through the new company structure.



Crusader is excited to be to working with Lepidico as part of this collaboration and we Iook forward to their support in making Third Element Metals a success."



Lepidico's Executive Chairman Gary Johnson commented:



"We are very excited at the opportunity that presents itself with Third Element Metals. The ability for Lepidico and Crusader to reach agreement on commercial terms shortly after the finalisation of the MOU is a testament to the strong working relationship which the two companies have already established.



"Lepidico looks forward to receiving its first sample of lithium micas from the Manga Project to conduct initial testwork on developing the L-Max(R) process for the Manga Project."



Joint Venture Company



Third Element Metals will be based at Crusader's registered office in Perth, Western Australia, and will conduct business on normal commercial terms and conditions.



The primary assets of the JV Company will be:



(i) The Manga Lithium Project



(ii) All other lithium projects as identified, licensed and/or acquired within the Territory post 3 February 2016; and



(iii) An exclusive licence of L-Max(R) for any new projects in the Territory.



The JV Company will be responsible for all holding costs (including mines department, environment, taxes, rent and work fees) for the Manga and other lithium projects in the Territory.



Work on collecting samples from Manga has already begun with results from a reconnaissance mapping program at Manga due in the next 2 weeks. The historic drill chips from Manga have been found and re-logging and sampling is underway.



Lepidico and the L-Max Technology



Lepidico is the sole owner and licensor of the L-Max technology, a metallurgical process that has the potential to commercially extract lithium and other by-products from unconventional sources at a competitive price.



Under the agreement, Lepidico will also grant licenses of any other technology it develops, which may be applied to the extraction of lithium to Third Element Metals. This includes technology relating to the extraction of lithium from lithium bearing phosphate minerals, such as amblygonite.



Lepidico developed its L-Max technology for the recovery of lithium from lithium bearing micas including lepidolite and zinnwaldite. The process also produces a range of valuable by-products including potassium sulfate (SOP), a fertilizer for application in the agricultural sector.



Manga Lithium (Sn In) Project - Goias State, Brazil (100% Crusader)



The Manga Li Project (previously explored for tin and indium) is located in the NE of Goias state, Central Brazil. Crusader first applied for the ground when exploring for tin, indium and gold mineralisation in the region during 2007 and later mapped, soil sampled, rock chipped and drilled 15 reverse circulation holes (for 1,001m. See Figure 1 in link below).



Crusader has recently conducted a reconnaissance field trip to the area and collected a number of new rock chips. During this trip, the historic RC drill chips (previously thought lost) were found and re-logging and sampling of these are underway.



Drill results for the targeted tin and indium were modest, with better results including:

(Note that lithium was not directly tested in the drilling -nor the soil sampling program)



- 32m @ 670 ppm Sn and 8.4ppm In from 34m in MNRC011



- 27m @ 577ppm Sn and 8.6ppm In from 55m in MNRC010



- 2m@ 2,025ppm Sn and 20ppm In from 10m in MNRC012



(Please see the ASX Announcement from 17 September 2008 for a full list of drill results - available on Crusader website.)



The previous rock-chip program conducted by Crusader was assayed for multi-elements and includes some significant Li20 results. Li2O grades of up to 1.3% were returned, within a zinnwaldite-rich greisen zone, proximal to the anomalous tin and indium bearing greisen. The rock chip-sampling program was undertaken targeting tin and indium and returned results up to 5% tin and 750ppm indium, noting that the tin and indium mineralisation was hosted in a different greisenised zone from the proximal zinnwaldite-rich and Li-rich muscovite greisen zones.



Crusader has recently submitted a new batch of rock-chip samples from Manga after a reconnaissance field program was completed. Results are expected within a couple of weeks and along with the RC drill chips from the 2007 campaign, (which were located during the reconnaissance and are now being re-logged), will help fast-track the exploration program at Manga.



Geological technical data reviews1 were undertaken and these described samples of zinnwaldite greisen and a li-rich muscovite greisen from Manga with results of up to 1.8% Li2O (Manga is also referred to as 'Mangabeiras or Mangabeiras Massif' see Botelho & Moura 1998 and Moura 1993- references below). These academic papers also refer to specific analysis of the zinnwaldite and the li-rich muscovite minerals (referred to as Li-phengite), with multiple analyses done on different mineral grains (from different rock samples). Results returned between 2.04% and 3.56% Li2O for the zinnwaldite and 1.55% and 2.32% Li2O for the Li-muscovite.



The literature also compares the geological setting and mineralisation style at Manga to the world-class Cinovec Sn, W, Li project in the Czech Republic, a project that has been mined for hundreds of years and is now being appraised for its lithium potential by fellow Australian listed explorer, European Metals ( ASX:EMH ).

Crusader has mapped various greisens in the area over an extensive region and drilling intersected different greisen facies. The soil sampling that was completed in 2007 was analysed with a hand-held XRF, which did not have the capacity to analyse the lithium content directly. Crusader has however, leveraging the technical experience of Lepidico, been able to use the historic XRF data to better understand the chemistry of the lithium mineralisation (based on Cinovec mineralisation style) and has been able to highlight exploration targets using certain other pathfinder elements, which are often associated with lithium mineralisation.



To view tables and figures, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/R271Y2D2





About Crusader Resources Limited





Crusader Resources Limited (ASX:CAS) is a minerals company focussed on the identification, acquisition, development and operation of projects in Brazil. Crusader believes that Brazil is a vastly underexplored country with high potential for the discovery of world class mineral deposits. The company has already acquired a diverse portfolio of projects including gold, iron ore, tin, tungsten and uranium and continues to utilise its strong networks in Brazil to identify new opportunities.

Crusader is characterised by a tight corporate structure and features an experienced board of directors who are strongly focussed on the success of the company.
ACAs library of educational tools help members improve their business practices. ACA also holds the most popular industry conferences and offers credentialing for collectors, attorneys, and more. ACAs Training Zone subscription gives agencies access to almost all of our education for one low cost.
The American Institute of CPAs has begun offering intermediate and advanced certificates to CPAs who perform single audits of governmental entities and grantees and audits of employee benefit plans.

The learning program and certificate exam aims to help auditors improve and demonstrate their competency and quality when conducting such engagements and are the latest part of the AICPAs Enhancing Audit Quality initiative.

The Department of Labor issued a critical report last year criticizing the quality of employee benefit plan audits by CPAs, and the AICPA has pledged to fix the problem (see AICPA Pushes for Auditing and Assurance Changes). The Labor Departments Employee Benefits Security Administration found serious deficiencies in 39 percent of the audits of employee benefit plans that it examined.

The AICPAs new single audit certificate programs will offer intermediate- and advanced-level certificates: Intermediate Single Audit Certificate and Advanced Single Audit Certificate.

The AICPAs employee benefit plans audit certificate programs will include one intermediate- and three advancedlevel certificates: Intermediate Employee Benefit Plans Audit Certificate; Advanced Defined Contribution Plans Audit Certificate; Advanced Defined Benefit Plans Audit Certificate; and Advanced Health and Welfare Plans Audit Certificate.

The launch of these programs helps fulfill the AICPAs goal of helping auditors of governmental entities and grantees and employee benefit plan auditors improve audit quality by demonstrating their capability and competence, said AICPA senior vice president for public practice and global alliances Susan Coffey in a statement. Nearly 80 percent of auditors who took part in a recent AICPA webinar poll expressed interest in a benefit plan audit certificate program. And we believe the certificate programs will generate the same level of enthusiasm among CPAs who are single audit specialists.

To earn each certificate, professionals will need to pass a competency-based exam. They can enter the program at either the intermediate or advanced level. The AICPA said there is no requirement to sit for the intermediate certificate exams prior to taking an advanced certificate exam. CPAs will be able to select a program for different levels of competency.

The Institute will provide digital badges to visually show the certificate holders achievement, demonstrating a commitment to quality and communicating the professionals knowledge and expertise for clients and peers to see.

The programs are based on the AICPA Competency Framework: Governmental Auditing and the AICPA Competency Framework: Employee Benefit Plan Auditing with a focus on common quality issues in audit practice. To determine which certificate level is appropriate, professionals can review the frameworks to self-assess or take sample exam questions from each level on the AICPA | CIMA Competency and Learning site.
Our weekly roundup of tax-related investment strategies and news your clients may be thinking about.

What triggers extra taxes on Baby Boomers? Retirees should expect that their Social Security retirement benefits could be subject to income tax, and are advised to consider voluntary withholding if the benefits will be taxed, according to The Detroit Free Press. They are also advised to watch out for the Net Investment Income Tax when selling stocks or property, and to consider donating to charity directly from their IRA when they turn 70-1/2, as the donation will be counted towards their required minimum distribution. Medical and dental expenses are tax deductible if they reach 65 and the costs are more than 10% of their adjusted gross income, while 401(k) withdrawals before the age of 59-1/2 can trigger a 10% penalty. -- The Detroit Free Press

Complications that arise for family members co-investing in real estate: Tax complexities arise when parents co-own real estate investments with their children, according to The Washington Post. Parents should ask crucial questions before deciding to sell the property. There are tax advantages the investor should know before making any changes. -- The Washington Post

4 investment strategies that make paying taxes optional: Clients who invest in real estate can avoid taxes on capital gains of up to $250,000 for singles or $500,000 for couples if they make the property their primary home for two of the five last years before selling it, according to USA Today. Investing in individual stocks is another good option, since they don't pay capital gains tax until they sell these investments. Income from muni bonds is also non-taxable, while Roth IRA offers tax-free withdrawals in retirement. -- USA Today

5 tax breaks for hiring new employees: Hiring new employees enables employers to claim tax breaks and reduce their tax liability, according to Small Business Trends. The Work Opportunity Credit is given to business owners who employ food stamp recipients and other groups of workers, while employers who hire workers in distressed and Indian reservation areas are eligible for the Empowerment Zone Credit and Indian Employment Credit. Employers also can claim the research credit for up to $250,000 in payroll taxes while several states also offer income tax credits for employers hiring new workers.  Small Business Trends

Alternative Minimum Tax: 3 things every client must know: Here's three things many clients don't know about the Alternative Minimum Tax, according to The Motley Fool. For one, the AMT in its current form dates back to 1982, and was originally set up to ensure that high-income taxpayers paid at least a minimum rate of tax. -- The Motley Fool
A consortium of the worlds leading independent media agencies has joined forces to launch Local Planet, a new global media agency network.

At launch, Local Planet operates in over 40 markets across the world and includes Indias Percept Media, Horizon Media in the US, the UKs the7stars, Spains Zertem Communication Group, Italys Media Italia, Germanys pilot, Frances CoSpirit MediaTrack, and Swedens Tre Kronor among its founder shareholder agencies.

Martyn Rattle, formerly Global CEO of Vizeum and Global Chief Client Officer of Aegis Media, has been named Global CEO of Local Planet. Bill Koenigsberg, President, Founder and CEO of Horizon Media, has been named Chairman of the new network.

The Local Planet network will focus on client service and media solutions on the ground and will provide its international clients with a level playing field in accessing international strategy, value, transparency, technology and talent.

All the main shareholder agencies founders and leaders will sit on the newly formed Local Planet Group Board, leveraging the talents and experience of some of the leading names in the media industry.





CoSpirit MediaTrack was a founder agency of Columbus Media International, a collective of highly respected and like-minded local, independent media agencies, sharing the same values and passion for providing clients with tailored, best-in-class, local media services and solutions, said Florian Grill, Founder and CEO of CoSpirit MediaTrack, France and Board Director, Local Planet.

Market developments and the changing needs of international clients have inspired us to evolve the Columbus model. We have, therefore, chosen an internationally experienced global CEO, supported by a senior network team, who will help us take the best of Columbus and create a genuine, globally competitive network that will appeal to a range of international clients who are looking for a different international agency partnership solution. We are, therefore, now launching Local Planet, a privately owned global media agency network, the only one of its kind, said Jose Luis de Rojas, CEO, Zertem Communications Group, Spain and Board Director, Local Planet.

We know that many international marketers are looking for an alternative to the holding company model, a more agile and service oriented solution built around their specific needs, said Martyn Rattle, Global CEO of Local Planet. The shared experiences of starting successful independent agencies from scratch are an important factor behind Local Planet and its culture. Each one of Local Planets agencies has started, grown and succeeded by fighting for and on behalf of their clients. We are now bringing that start-up, independent spirit to our global network. We are looking forward to working together with international clients in the pursuit of shared success.

The Local Planet model also allows it to offer its clients best-in-market, tailored technology and data solutions through its local and international partnerships, rather than offering a one size fits all approach.

The network agencies currently work with some of the worlds most recognisable brands, including Geico, Capital One, Nike, Ikea, Viacom, Pfizer, H&M and Kayak, among others.

Local Planet has access to more than 3,000 staff, and boasts billings in excess of $10 billion.
Hurricane Hunters promote preparedness in Caribbean, Latin America

The 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron "Hurricane Hunters" and the National Weather Service's National Hurricane Center partnered together to promote hurricane preparedness during the Caribbean Hurricane Awareness Tour (CHAT) April 9-17.



The purpose of CHAT is to raise hurricane awareness across Latin America and the Caribbean, and to maintain and expand partnerships among the NHC, U.S. Northern Command, Air Force and neighbors in the region.



The Hurricane Hunters and NHC officials stopped at four different locations during their tour; to include two in Mexico -- Cabo San Lucas and Puerto Vallarta, and two in the Caribbean -- the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.



The key to this tour is encouraging people to prepare in advance, before the next hurricane while the weather is still good, because figuring out your hurricane plan is very difficult when the hurricane is on your doorstep, said Dr. Rick Knabb, the NHC director.



Col. Frank Amodeo, commander of the 403rd Wing that oversees the 53rd WRS, said, Beyond just providing data for the National Hurricane Center, the great thing about this mission is that we are ambassadors for the United States visiting our allies, our friends and our neighbors. Were educating them not just about hurricane preparedness, but also giving them a peek at our military and our commitment to the region.



For the first leg of the tour, Hurricane Hunters and NHC officials stopped at the international airport in Cabo San Lucas to provide information to local residents and media about their missions and hurricane preparedness. Several officials from various Mexican government organizations toured the aircraft and talked with Hurricane Hunter crew members.



Amodeo spoke to the importance of the U.S. Northern Commands participation in this event.



(This mission) also entails partnering with other countries, so in addition to promoting hurricane preparedness, this is also a ready-made theater security cooperation mission, Amodeo said. So for NORTHCOM to embrace (the CHAT) and include this in their annual planning is the right thing to do.



The tour marked the first time the Hurricane Hunters and NHC members visited the British Virgin Islands since the tours began in the 1970s. Hurricane Hunters met with local government officials to discuss ways to coordinate and distribute weather data. They also provided tours of the WC-130J Super Hercules weather aircraft they fly and visited local schools to talk with students about the Hurricane Hunter mission and hurricane preparedness.



Many years ago you would see people scrambling to the stores to buy supplies just before a hurricane arrives, but you dont see that as much anymore, said Angel Crespo, the Puerto Rico Emergency Management director. The information provided by the Hurricane Hunters and National Hurricane Center helps us provide information to the people so they prepare themselves in advance for the upcoming storm season.



For 1st Lt. Leesa Froelich, a 53rd WRS aerial reconnaissance weather officer, this was her fourth year as an ARWO but her first year participating in the CHAT. She stressed the significance of these tours to the public.



These tours are very important for the public since it gives them the opportunity to see and learn about what we do, and to learn about how to prepare for when a storm comes their way, she said.
DOD identifies Airman killed in Southwest Asia

The Defense Department has identified the Airman who was killed April 15 while supporting Operation Inherent Resolve.



Airman 1st Class Nathaniel H. McDavitt, 22, of Glen Burnie, Maryland, died in Southwest Asia as a result of injuries sustained after extreme winds caused structural damage to the building in which the Airman was working.



He was assigned to the 52nd Equipment Maintenance Squadron at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany.



For more information, media may contact the 52nd Fighter Wing Public Affairs Office at 011-49-6565-61-6012.


CHIEFchat: Cody discusses WAPS





FORT GEORGE G. MEADE, Md. (AFNS)  Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force James A. Cody discussed the implementation of the Weighted Airman Promotion System changes during his most recent CHIEFchat at Defense Media Activity on Fort George G. Meade.



During his chat, he discussed the role of education in promotion, the continued relevance of testing at all enlisted levels, and the feedback he and other senior leaders have received about the changes to the system.



Education



Currently, the Community College of the Air Force degree is only mandatory to be promoted to senior master sergeant. It is masked on the master sergeant evaluation board, and board members are briefed not to consider education as a discerning factor for promotion because they may not have the entire picture.



A lot of Airmen receive education at various times, Cody said. If its not within that most recent time period that the board would be looking at ... they wouldn't see it.



When Airmen consider furthering their education, he said, its important they take into consideration how it will make them better as Airmen and more proficient at their jobs.



The sole fact that you are educated doesn't mean you're a better Airman or a better performer. It should help you perform better, and if it doesn't, well it's not as probably relevant to us, Cody said.



Testing



Cody addressed a question from social media asking if testing will ever be removed for senior NCOs going up for promotion.



While duty performance remains at the forefront of what will be considered for Airmen to be promoted, he said, its important everyone has the baseline level of knowledge thats expected of them at the their level. Thus, Airmen can expect no changes to testing requirements.



Enlisted performance reports



The decision to reduce the number of EPRs for a promotion board from ten to five has been discussed for the past several years.



Cody said when Airmen go through the board process, the board will now only look at the past five years of EPRs instead of ten, expediting the process and giving members not too much information, but enough information.



You have to perform at every grade, he said. Some people are slow starters and fast finishers. People start fast and finish up slow. We are all different. You don't want to either positively or negatively impact somebody overwhelmingly with looking so far in a career.



Feedback



With the promotion system nearing its first year with the changes, Cody said more data and feedback is needed to see where the process can be smoothed out.



The reality is, though, the feedback that were getting is really, really positive, by and large, he said. Were trying to make sure to give enough time to get all the feedback so that we have it in the right context before we start making changes.



As changes are considered, Cody encourages Airmen and commanders to ask themselves: Do we feel we promoted the right people?



If the answer is yes, then the Air Force is in a better place.



CHIEFchat is a recurring initiative, designed to give Airmen around the world a direct connection to the chief master sergeant of the Air Force. The chief received questions via video message, social media outlets and from members of a studio audience.
On Nov. 12, 2012, the trial of former Prime Minister al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi started on Monday. Mahmoudi, who served as the last prime minister in former leader Muammar Gaddafis administration from 2006 to 2011, fled to Tunisia in September 2011 after the armed rebels seized the Libyan capital of Tripoli during the unrest.
A BJP activist here on Tuesday urged Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to stop `VVIP helicopter tourism` by various state and central ministers to drought-hit areas to prevent wastage of precious water in Maharashtra.

In a letter to Fadnavis, BJP activist Dayanand Nene said over 10,000 litres of water was wasted to prepare a temporary helipad for receiving the helicopter of union Agriculture Minister Radhemohan Singh and state Agriculture Minister Eknath Khadse in Bhiwandi town of Thane on Monday.

What we saw was terribly disturbing, especially since an unprecedented 60 percent water cut has been imposed in Thane. It was all the more alarming since Bhiwandi is just 20 minutes driving distance from Thane city where there is a regular helipad, Nene said.

He and many others questioned what prevented the two VVIP from landing the chopper in Thane and then driving down by road to Bhiwandi as that would have saved such a large quantity of water in the thirsty district.

On one hand the government is trying its best to deal with drought conditions in the state with a landmark decision of supplying water through trains to Latur, on the other nobody pays attention to such colossal wastage of water during VVIP visits by helicopters, Nene said in his letter to Fadnavis.

Nene, who is also president of NGO Alert Citizens Forum of India (ACFI), said the government must issue a circular, immediately barring VVIP helicopter visits to places where there are no helipads.

They can take the helicopter to the nearest helipad point and from there drive down to their destination so that mockery of people`s misery is not made of, Nene said.

This is the second such incident in which huge quantity of water was wasted during a flying visit by VVIPs in Maharashtra.

Last Friday (April 15), Khadse came under severe fire from all quarters for wasting water during a helicopter trip to Belkund village, barely 37 km from Latur, ironically to inaugurate a new water supply scheme.

On Monday (Yesterday), Water Conservation Minister Pankaja Munde was trolled by the opposition parties for indulging in `drought tourism` and clicking selfies with a trench of a barrage Manjara, which was one additional relief to parched Latur.

Earlier, Munde had even thrown her weight as minister behind the ongoing continuous supply to liquor manufacturers in Aurangabad on grounds that stopping water to them could lead to unemployment.

However, district collector Nidhi Pandey announced a 20 percent water cut to distilleries and 10 percent cut to industries which will improve the drinking water situation in the district, a move that Fadnavis endorsed.
Bachchu Kadu an independent MLA from Achalpur has warned bureaucrats that if they fail to resolve citizens grievances then he will slap them. He has also threatened to start an agitation in this regard. Kadu has organised Janta Darbar and interacted with citizens for knowing about the problems faced by them.

He said, We will first approach the bureaucrats and urge them to address the problems faced by citizens. We will request them to look into those issues. If they fail to resolve citizenss grievances then we will slap them.

Kadu had organised a meeting with residents of Amravati which received good response from people. He received 250 complaints from residents out of which many of them were resolved on Monday itself. Kadu observed that most of the complaints were not redressed as citizens had failed to bribe officials. While some other issues remained unresolved as people did not have access to senior officials. Most of the tasks remain pending due to bureaucratic way of functioning of officials.

The common man and farmers have to run from pillar to post for meeting officials for obtaining important documents. Despite making several rounds to the office their grievances remain unresolved. Even farmers had met Kadu as they informed him about the hardships they face when they have to visit Talati office and revenue department for getting their work done. He will organise a Janta Darbar in Mumbai on April 21.

Last month Bachchu Kadu grabbed headlines when he had manhandled a deputy secretary at Mantralaya. Maharashtra government employees had assembled at the ground floor of Mantralaya to condemn this act and went on a flash strike. They alleged that Kadu had beaten up Deputy Secretary Bhausaheb Gavit. A police complaint was filed against Kadu, who is known to have roughed up employees in the past too.

Kadu is known for taking up the issues faced by the common man therefore he is very popular among the masses. He has been known for spearheading various agitations in the state. On 9th March Kadu was felicitated with Efficient MLA award, constituted in the memory of late Member of Legislative Council Madhavrao Limaye.

In 2011 Kadu had slapped Hagavane for allegedly demanding bribe from one Ankush Raut who had been shortlisted for posting as medical officer in Amravati. Raut was seeking a government order for his appointment as medical officer in Kadus constituency.
At least 28 people were killed and 327 others wounded in a Taliban suicide attack in central Kabul on Tuesday, the Afghan Health Ministry said.

Many of those wounded are in serious condition, ministry spokesman Mohammad Ismail Kawoosi told AFP.

Earlier, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, in a statement, said that several people were killed in the blast during the morning rush hour.

The attack that apparently targeted theoffices of Afghanistan`s main security agency was followed by a heavy firefight.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack near government offices, which sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing in the sky and rattled windows several kilometres (miles) away. Notably, the blast took place a week after the Taliban announced the commencement of their annual spring offensive.

(We) condemn in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Puli Mahmood Khan neighbourhood of Kabul, as a result of which many of our countrymen were martyred and wounded, Ghani said in a statement without specifying the number.

Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism, Ghani said.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed their fighters had managed to enter the offices of the National Directorate of Security, the main spy agency.

Afghan officials did not confirm that claim but intense gun battles could be heard near the NDS compound. The Taliban are generally known to exaggerate battlefield claims.

The first blast was carried out by a suicide bomber in a car and possibly one or two bombers are still resisting, Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told AFP.

The scene of the attack has been completely cordoned off by Afghan security forces. The Taliban on Tuesday last week announced the start of their spring offensive even as the government in Kabul seeks to bring them back to the negotiating table to end the drawn-out conflict.

The Taliban warned they would employ large-scale attacks on enemy positions across the country during the offensive dubbed Operation Omari in honour of the movement`s late founder Mullah Omar, whose death was announced last year.

The insurgents began the fighting season last week by targeting the northern city of Kunduz, which they briefly captured last year in a stunning setback for Afghan forces.

But officials said Afghan security forces drove Taliban fighters back from the city on Friday.

The annual spring offensive normally marks the start of the fighting season, though this past winter the lull was shorter and rebels continued to battle government forces, albeit with less intensity.

The Taliban`s resurgence has raised serious questions about Afghan forces` capacity to hold their own. An estimated 5,500 troops were killed last year, the worst-ever toll.
UPA government came under attack when Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) tabled two high-profile audit reports that could bring attention back to political corruption and misdeeds at the highest levels. The audit reports on Air India and oil exploration contracts, including the one for Reliances KG Basin were tabled in Parliament. It was in 1983 that Gas was first struck in Rajole Well No.1 when ONGC had a small office in Rajahmundry and Narsapur that was headed by Iqbal Farooqi. Since that discovery there has been no looking back. Reliance and others are late players in that area, 14 trillion cubic feet of gas by Reliance Industries in KG-DWN-98/l (KG-D6) in 2002.

The CAG report on performance of oil and gas blocks operated by firms including Reliance Industries and Cairn India was tabled in Lok Sabha. The CAG in its report has asked the Oil Ministry to review decision to allow Reliance Industries to retain entire KG-D6 block. It has also called for an indepth review of 10 contracts, including 8 awarded to Aker Group, by Reliance for developing KG-D6 finds. According to the CAG report, RIL did not relinquish 25% of Total Contract Area and violated Production Sharing Pact on KG D6. The CAG report also slammed the Directorate General Hydrocarbons (DGH) for having failed to Pursue Technical Aspects of KG DWL Block. DGH should have stopped RIL from proceeding on D6 Phase 2. In its report on RILs KGD6 contract, the CAG stated that the company notified discoveries without details and declared entire contract area as discovery area.

There was lots of noise by rival parties on Manmohans role in 2G scam, KG Basin contract, but as the new government came to power the scam is getting diluted due to the involvement of corporate firms which are close to BJP. The role of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in both the 2G scam and the allocation of the KG Basin gas contracts can be questionable but if we look at another aspect even present Prime Minister Narendra Modi too comes under scanner. On June 26, 2005, then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi announced that Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC), a State government public sector corporation, had discovered Indias biggest gas reserves in the deep waters of the Krishna Godavari (KG) river basin. He said the discovery was 20 trillion cubic feet worth Rs. 2,20,000 crore. It caught the entire nation by surprise. Officials in the Ministry of Petroleum were flummoxed by this bold claim. Modi further, in his characteristic flamboyance, promised the nation that GSPC would start production in December 2007 and make our nation energy independent. It is 2016 now, nearly 11 years since that grandiose announcement by Modi. There has been zero gas recovery from the KG basin, because there is no gas there. GSPC spent Rs. 19,700 crore during this period, ostensibly looking for the missing gas, but recovered nothing. The Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) of India has rapped the Gujarat governments blue chip Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC) for its KG basin project, which is yet to see any production of gas, a decade after then CM, Narendra Modi, declared that it had struck 20 TCF gas in the KG basin block in 2005.

The CAG noted that without any experience and expertise in exploration and production, the company acquired the blocks and then surrendered them, leading to Rs. 2,514.65 crore being written off. The company went ahead acquiring overseas blocks during 2006-10 mainly as an operator with considerably high participating interests without any experience overseas, the report said, recommending, risks associated with cost, technology and price realization be properly considered while venturing into exploration and development activities.

Out of the 64 blocks on hand as on April 1, 2011, the company surrendered 37 blocks between 2011 to 2015, and wrote off exploration expenditure worth Rs. 2514.65 crore for 29 surrendered blocks. The CAG has slammed the company for not recovering Rs.2,329.52 crore in dues from joint venture partners. The two joint venture partners are Geo Global Resources Inc and Jubilant Group. On the KG basin block, where the GSPC has invested Rs 12,249.06 crore between 2011 and 2015, has seen a huge delay in commissioning the project which was supposed to go for commercial production in 2011-12. However, the GSPC and top officials of the Gujarat government have defended the investment in the KG basin on the ground that its high temperature high pressure (HTHP) area where even British Petroleum (BP) in partnership with Reliance Industries (RIL) is struggling to produce the gas.

Inspite of such big scam Bharatiya Janata Party kept mum on the Reliance gas issue in which Mukesh Ambani is among others named in a first information report filed by the Anti-Corruption Branch of the Delhi government. Ambanis KG basin scam is one of the biggest scams in the countrys history and much bigger than any other scams. It is shocking that Modi and the BJP have remained tight-lipped on the issue. When UPA was in power BJP and CPI (M) made all allegations against Manmohan Singh and UPA when its BJP in power all of sudden KG scam became negligible.

(Any suggestions, comments or dispute with regards to this article send us on feedback@afternoonvoice.com)
Canadian airline KF Cargo has added two new air cargo services between Miami and various destinations in South America.

The airline, a subsidiary of KF Aerospace, will operate three weekly round-trip flights between Miami and Bogota and three weekly flights on a triangular route from Miami to Caracas and onto Lima.

The first flight, which arrived on April 15 and was carried out by a DC-10-30 freighter, carried thousands of flowers for the Mothers Day peak period.

Miami-Dade aviation director Emilio Gonzalez said: We proudly welcome KF Cargo to our roster of 41 all-cargo airlines, and we wish them the greatest success in their expansion to MIA and into our bustling Latin American trade routes.

As the busiest US airport for international freight and as the cargo gateway of the Americas, MIAs extensive route network and trade infrastructure continue to attract new cargo carriers.

KF Cargo is not the only Canadian airline looking to capitalise on the South American market.

Last week, Air Canada re-entered the freighter world through a partnership with Cargojet to offer services between Canada and Latin America. The service will begin in early June.

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April 18, 2016

Congress is blocking almost $160 million in US assistance as the Palestinians prepare to once again take their statehood bid to the UN Security Council later this month.

The money has been on hold since last fall as key lawmakers seek to convince the Palestinians to abandon their unilateral effort to restart stalled peace negotiations through international pressure. House foreign aid appropriations subcommittee Chairwoman Kay Granger, R-Texas, told Al-Monitor she had no immediate plans to release the aid as her panel prepares to unveil its spending priorities for the next fiscal year.

"Right now we're not giving any money to the Palestinians," Granger told Al-Monitor last week. "And there's nothing that I expect to do [to change that]."

The United States has given the Palestinians some $5 billion in bilateral economic and security assistance since the mid-1990s, making them one of the largest beneficiaries of US aid per capita, with $364 million more requested for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. The Palestinians say the assistance helps the Palestinian Authority (PA) pay its bills and provide security in the West Bank.

"We are aware of the hold on $159 [million] by Congress," the Palestinian Liberation Organization mission in Washington told Al-Monitor in an emailed statement. "We informed the administration of the grave consequences of such an irresponsible action. We understand that the administration is working with them to try to release the money. There is no reason for them to keep using these futile tactics to exert pressure on the Palestinians."

Granger's hold follows PA President Mahmoud Abbas' assertion in September that the Palestinians were no longer bound by the Oslo agreements of the 1990s. Abbas has drafted a resolution condemning Israel's settlement expansion, a possible prelude to a French-backed international peace conference starting this summer.

US lawmakers are particularly worried that the Obama administration might abandon its past opposition to "one-sided" resolutions, with 394 House members  more than 90% of all House members  signing on to a letter from Appropriations ranking member Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., to the president urging him to stay the course. Separately, two members of the House Armed Services Committee, Reps. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., and Gwen Graham, D-Fla., introduced a resolution on April 15 urging Obama to veto any Security Council resolution that "inserts the Council into the peace process, unilaterally recognizes a Palestinian state, makes declarations concerning Israeli controlled territories, or dictates terms and a timeline for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process."

Lawmakers are also increasingly taking the Palestinians to task for their perceived failure to thoroughly condemn a spate of attacks that have killed 28 Israelis and two visiting Americans over the past six months. Allegations that the Palestinians are still paying stipends to the family members of deceased or imprisoned attackers have been particularly grating.

"We helped them when there were some real peace talks. And the Israelis are the ones that asked us to help them, because they said, when you come to the bargaining table  and they're in such dire straits, then that's really a problem," Granger told Al-Monitor. "And so we did help them. They walked away. There's no serious peace talks going on. And some things we've asked of them, they haven't complied. And then there's a great deal of concern over the incitement language, and so we have no plans to [restart] the funding."

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., explicitly put the Obama administration on notice last week that it must do more to stop the alleged payments. Royce also has a hold on Palestinian aid, according to Palestinian reports.

"For some years now, you have the sense where basically there's been an inducement to pay assassins to seek out innocent people and kill them," Royce told Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Anne Patterson at an April 13 hearing on the State Department's budget request for the 2017 fiscal year. "I want us to use our considerable leverage to end that practice."

Royce said he had been led to believe that the payments were being "phased out," but later found out that the PA had simply transferred that responsibility to the PLO. Patterson said she did not mean to mislead Congress when she testified previously that the payments were ending.

"No, I didn't know. What I was basing that on was my own discussions with Palestinian members who said they had been phasing it out," she told Royce. "I totally agree with you that this is an egregious practice."

The State Department opposes an outright end to all assistance, arguing that the PA plays a key security role and that US aid is "not fungible" and goes to debt payments, not support for terrorism.

"We continue to believe that US assistance to the Palestinian Authority has played a valuable role in promoting stability and prosperity not just for the Palestinians, but for Israel as well," a State Department official told Al-Monitor. "This assistance has supported security coordination between Israel and the Palestinians, which has been instrumental in preserving security in the West Bank and Israel, and reducing threats to Israelis and Palestinians alike."

The department, however, notified Congress in the fall that it was withholding $80 million from its $370 million budget for the 2015 fiscal year, Al-Monitor reported at the time, blaming "unhelpful actions" by the Palestinians.

"Rest assured that this will be a topic of conversation with the rest of the donor community," Patterson told Royce at the hearing. "We see the Europeans and other donors all the time, and rest assured that your points will be conveyed with our full concurrence."

Editor's note: This article has been updated since its initial publication.
April 18, 2016

Ethiopias northern regions have been plagued by one of the worst droughts to face the area in decades. During a visit to one of the worst hit areas earlier on Jan. 31, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that the people of this beautiful country are facing their worst drought in 30 years. On March 24, the United Nations, along with humanitarian partners, launched a three-month campaign to aid drought-affected regions and raise awareness of the ensuing food crisis. Now some are fearing this could exacerbate the longstanding conflict between Cairo and Addis Ababa over water resources.

The Ethiopian plateau, which is one of the main sources of the Nile River, has faced frequent droughts, the worst of which occurred in 1984 and led to a famine that killed around 1 million Ethiopians. Meanwhile, climate forecast studies and reports confirmed that such recurrent waves of drought have decreased the Blue Nile flooding by up to 20% during the past years, and that Ethiopia is among the countries most vulnerable to increasing rates of drought and lack of rainfall due to climate change.

Fekahmed Negash Nuru, executive director of the Eastern Nile Technical Regional Office (ENTRO) within the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), told Al-Monitor, Ethiopia is facing a very severe drought due to El Nino, and the areas most affected by this wave are located in the north, south, northeastern and southeastern parts of the country, where rainfall disappeared during the dry season and decreased during the wet season.

The exploitation of the water resources of the Blue Nile, which is behind 85% of the Nile River flow, has topped the Ethiopian governments political agenda since the inauguration of the Renaissance Dam project in April 2011. The project will retain the flow of 79 billion cubic meters of water and has consequently been behind the conflict with Egypt. According to the latter, this step affects the amount of water flowing to the country.

Amid the inability of the political and technical negotiations to reach solutions aimed at reducing the dams impact on the flow of water to the High Dam Lake, the drought issue hit the country and constituted yet another point that could either end up pushing the two countries toward further disagreement over the river resources or toward cooperation aimed at avoiding the drought impact and jointly managing the course of the river water through the ENTRO.

Nuru said, The problems caused by drought, climate change and low rainfall will be alleviated in the event that the Ethiopian government increases its water storage. This can take place through the running of the hydraulic facilities infrastructure in the eastern Nile Basin.

He added, Sudan is currently working with Ethiopia through the NBI and the ENTRO on various strategies aimed at enhancing and increasing the stored water volumes as well as coordinating the running of the Nile dams.

The Ethiopian government is dealing with the Renaissance Dam as a political challenge and using it as a way to maintain the state of popular mobilization that started in 2011 in order to complete the construction of the dam. Despite having repeatedly pledged not to harm Egyptian interests, Ethiopia is refusing to delay filling the dam's reservoir and is sticking to its construction schedule. Also, during the latest meeting held by the foreign and water ministers in Khartoum in December 2015, Egypt refused the water storage plan until studies about the dam's effects had been completed.

The negotiations failed to reach an agreement about starting water storage in the dam, and no amounts of water will be retained without the completion of technical studies aimed at testing the effects of the dam, as is stipulated in the Declaration of Principles, a diplomatic source in the Egyptian delegation taking part in the negotiations with Ethiopia and Sudan over the dam confirmed.

The source further told Al-Monitor, Egypt's stance on the storage issue was very clear before the emergence of these serious indications, and it has not changed despite the drought.

Also, the report issued by the International Panel of Experts on the dam warned against retaining any amounts of water behind the dam during periods of drought, the source added.

With the escalation of the problem of drought and the decreasing flow in the Blue Nile and its tributaries, a Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation report reviewed by Al-Monitor said that the flow rate decline last year led to low water levels in Lake Nasser. According to the report, these water levels are expected to further decline over the coming months at a time when water is needed the most and larger amounts of water are needed from Lake Nasser amid ongoing prospects of flooding decline due to the drought in Ethiopia.

The report anticipates disruptions in the water levels of the Nile River and the main canals located within Egypt, which will adversely affect the running of drinking, irrigation and electricity stations due to low water levels in front of these stations. Meanwhile, higher water amounts aimed at dealing with these problems will affect Egypts strategic reserve in Lake Nasser.

In an interview with Al-Monitor, Regional Director of the World Meteorological Organization Hisham Abdul Ghani said, The drought that began in 2015 and will continue until this rainy season in Ethiopia may be the worst in 50 years, but the available information and data are limited to the three months to come given the absence of long-term climate forecasts.

He added, According to the recent forecasts of the Greater Horn of Africa Climate Outlook Forum [GHACOF 42], the drought might ease during the next three months, albeit at a slow rate, and rainfall during the dry season will remain lower than usual.

We cannot forecast how the rainfall in the rainy season from June to September will be, especially amid climate change, but if rain preserves this pace, then the Nile flooding will be slower than usual this year, he stressed nonetheless.

Egypt mainly relies on the flooding season to compensate for the shortfall in the strategic water reserves in Lake Nasser. Although the tripartite negotiations currently ongoing between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia have overlooked the new changes imposed by the drought, Egypt is plagued with anxiety over the unfolding of a more difficult scenario, whereby the flooding rates would continue to decline due to water being stored behind the Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia.
April 19, 2016

CAIRO  Egypt and Saudi Arabia have agreed to build a controversial bridge spanning the Red Sea that proponents say could lead Egypt out of its economic crisis.

Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced April 9 they will build a bridge that will allow for a commute time between the countries of just 20 minutes. They pointed out that the bridge will connect not only the two countries, but also the continents of Africa and Asia.

The structure, to be named the King Salman Bridge upon Sisis proposal, will accommodate road and rail traffic between an area near Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh resort and Ras Humaid in Tabuk, northern Saudi Arabia, across Tiran Island.

The part of the bridge over the sea will measure 7-10 kilometers (4-6 miles), and the structures total length will span 50 kilometers (31 miles). The bridge, to be built over seven years, will cost as much as $4 billion. Officials project the trade volume realized through the bridge will reach $200 billion per year.

The idea of a Saudi-Egyptian bridge is not new and has always been controversial. Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak rejected a similar plan in 2006; it was also rejected by Israel and Jordan for several security, tourist and economic reasons.

Retired Egyptian Maj. Gen. Reda Yacoub, who served in several governmental advisory roles, told Al-Monitor, The idea of the bridge is wrong.

The bridge will cross the Egyptian island of Tiran, which [is being] ceded to Saudi Arabia in violation of the constitution. Under the constitution, the president must safeguard the independence and territorial integrity of the nation. He added, This means that any project over the island is illegal.

He noted that Israel rejected the project in the past because it could pose a serious security threat. Any ship carrying the Israeli flag and sailing to and from the port of Eilat may be targeted from the bridge by militants who can either throw grenades or carry out suicide attacks by driving cars off the bridge onto ships.

Also, Tiran Island lies within the West Banks Area C, which is Israeli-controlled.

However, Hassan Nafaa, head of the political science department at Cairo University, told Al-Monitor, The existence of Tiran Island within Area C does not preclude construction of the bridge or violate the Camp David treaty, since there is no military presence in Area C, where the only security forces are the members of the civilian police. Israel must respect the sovereignty of both Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Gamal Abdel Gawad, external relations director at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, pointed out some considerations he said cant be overlooked. He told Al-Monitor, This bridge may not be built without security understandings being reached between Saudi Arabia and Israel and without being preceded by a political arrangement, which will most likely be sponsored by the US.

Ibrahim Ahmad, head of the international law department at Ain Shams University, told Al-Monitor, After the completion of the legal procedures in Egypt to transfer the ownership of Tiran Island to Saudi Arabia  based on the consent of the Egyptian parliament and a referendum  all of the Egyptian commitments regarding the island shall pass on to Saudi Arabia by virtue of the international inheritance rule. That means that Saudi Arabia has become a party to the Camp David treaty.

As for Jordan, its leaders believe the bridge will siphon off business from Jordans economy, according to Nabil Badr, assistant foreign minister and Egypt's former ambassador to Jordan. That concern is unfounded, he said.

Jordan fears the bridge will cause a decline in the quantity of goods and the number of passengers passing through its territory, which will impact the service-based Jordanian economy, Badr told Al-Monitor. But, in fact, this bridge will support the economy of Jordan, since the city of Haql [along the Jordanian border] will constitute a focal point for goods coming from Syria, Iraq and north Asia countries and to be transported via the bridge.

Mubaraks objections to the bridge in 2006 also were unsupported, according to Chamber of Hotels member Naji al-Arian.

This bridge will not have any negative impact on tourism in the city of Sharm el-Sheikh, as [was] alleged by Hosni Mubarak. It will not affect the tranquility and privacy of this tourist city. The bridge would be constructed between Sharm el-Sheikh and the port of Nuweiba, 10 kilometers [6 miles] away from the city of Sharm el-Sheikh, Arian said.

Among the bridges benefits, he noted: Most Arab tourists prefer traveling in SUVs and the bridge will allow them to reach Egypt in their private vehicles. The bridge will create a new type of tourism, transit tourism, which means that travelers across the bridge ... will be able to visit the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir and the pyramids to take photos. Trips to these sites often take at least three hours, which will increase the tourism resources.

Skeptics have questioned the wisdom of building a sea-spanning bridge in an earthquake-prone area. But Sabri al-Hakim, a bridge expert from Al-Azhar University, told Al-Monitor that modern technology could alleviate those concerns.

Although the bridge crosses a zone of great seismic activity, passing through the Great Rift Valley, engineering solutions may solve these obstacles, Hakim said. For example, Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world, yet it includes a large number of suspended bridges.

Saudi writer and political analyst Mohammad al-Saad, a member of the delegation that accompanied Salman to Egypt, told Al-Monitor that the bridge will make Egypt a gateway for commercial and economic activities between the Middle East and West Africa. He stressed that this project complements the new Suez Canal and will accommodate global trade trips, making Egypt a strong competitor to the port of Dubai.

Egypt stands to gain a lot economically, agreed Ibrahim Nahas, head of the political science department at King Saud University and a member of the delegation accompanying Salman.

This Saudi-Egyptian partnership will grease the wheels of the Egyptian economy. The project will reduce unemployment by creating new jobs and will enable Cairo to overcome its numerous economic crises, Nahas told Al-Monitor.
April 19, 2016

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip  A video that went viral April 5 showed what looked like collective repentance for mistakes committed by boys as young as 15 years old. These acts of repentance were organized at the Nile preparatory public school in the west of Gaza City by a preaching group affiliated with the Hamas-run Ministry of Awqaf (Endowments) and Religious Affairs.

The highly emotional scene was led by a group of bearded men preaching to young boys, who kept bowing down and wailing. Later, the men embraced the boys, who then bowed down to thank God.

During the episode, one of the preachers, none of whom were named in the video posted on YouTube, explicitly said that they have organized more than 60 such events in Gaza schools.

He was heard saying, "We did not come here to put on a theatrical performance. We came to cast out the devil from our hearts, our minds and our thinking." He was also heard describing the students sobbing and prostrating as "a wholehearted and sincere return to God."

On April 11, Islamic preacher Abdul Aziz Aoudah criticized these and other such activities by Hamas, writing on Facebook, "Repentance in Islam is an evolution of the mans spirit, raising it higher and opening the horizons of hope and the future. But what we have seen in the video, of boys repenting before preachers, achieves none of these goals."

He said that the video is offensive to Islam because it gives the impression that Islam endorses human mediation between God and his creation, leading some viewers to question how these preachers will repent.

The videos and pictures posted on the schools Facebook page stirred a fuss within the Strip and angered citizens at what many see as practices inappropriate for the students age.

Said al-Taweel, the executive director of the Bedaya Foundation for Community Development in Rafah, wondered in a Facebook post what those boys could have done to repent in this manner, saying, Most of them are still underaged and have no idea what guilt is in order to repent. Taweel also called on those responsible for these activities to pay attention to the poor people of Gaza and the problems they face because these issues are more important than repentance activities.

In a brief statement on Facebook, the school indicated that it hosted a group of preachers and organized a forum that lasted for over an hour, during which the preachers spoke to the students about the necessity of prayer, urged them to abide by [Islamic teachings] and stop committing sins, and told them how those who do not pray are punished. The school claimed the forum had a major impact in the students.

The videos seem to have been posted online for purely religious reasons, as they promote neither certain political ideas nor religious or political parties such as the Islamic State or Hamas.

The Ministry of Education holds that despite the continuous coordination between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Awqaf in Gaza, the incident was a misstep by the school principal and the preachers.

In this context, Moatasem Minawi, the director general of international relations and information at the Ministry of Education, told Al-Monitor, "Two mistakes were made. The first was an administrative mistake committed by the school principal, who directly coordinated with the preachers without the knowledge of the Ministry of Education. The second mistake was the preachers choice of the targeted group and their disregard of administrative procedures. We have dealt with this situation and contacted the Directorate of Education and the principal. We hope that the mistake is not repeated. The media has exaggerated the matter.

He stressed that none of the students were older than 15, saying, Even if the targeted category was high school students, the way these acts were performed was exaggerated  though they did not involve any intimidation, as some claimed. The crying was stirred by the emotional drama, not fear.

Yousef Farhat, the director general for Sharia education in the Ministry of Awqaf and one of the founders of organized repentance activities, told Al-Monitor that before they started in January, the ministry had decided that no such public rituals would be performed, even though he claimed they are merely an educational exercise that should not be limited to those who have sinned.

According to the guidelines governing these groups, repentance should take place between the people and God, not during festivals in front of a crowd. But what happened at the Nile school was a passionate drive by the students. It does not mean we should minimize the importance of these groups, which is a new way to preach, but they need to be reviewed to fit our era and current situation, he said.

He pointed out that the groups focus on the nature of the discourse and whether it suits the students age, educational level and gender, saying, "University is different from school, and women are different from men. Therefore, we occasionally organize workshops to evaluate the work of these groups and to address their strengths and weaknesses."

Psychologist Ehab Mousa described the repentance groups for young students as educationally wrong, telling Al-Monitor, The preachers are not better than parents in instructing the children.

He said the children cry because they get emotionally affected at this age, making it easier to guide them. He wondered, "What are these children repenting for? What are their sins? According to the applicable laws, they are minors who cannot be held accountable for their acts."

Moussa pointed out that a preacher begins such an activity, he does so out of religious faith, but he must choose the best way to guide and preach to the children, not make them repent.

Although the video shocked and angered Gaza residents, the public rituals are still being held. The organizers have published a video mocking their critics in a show of their determination to continue these activities.
April 19, 2016

The distress of 1.8 million besieged Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip less than an hours drive from central Israel does not trouble most Israelis  not to mention most of its elected officials. Few know that some 20,000 people live among the ruins of their homes damaged in Israeli bombings and that they are among some 90,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes, half of them children, according to a survey conducted from August to December 2015 by the IDP Working Group, published on April 6 in a comprehensive report issued by the UNs Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The pub-goers in Tel Aviv arent bothered by the daily power outages affecting Gazas residents for 12 hours a day and more. According to data compiled by the nongovernmental organization Gisha, in 2015 there were days that residents of Gaza only had power for three to four hours. How many Israelis know that the unemployment rate in Gaza has reached 38.4%, and more than 50% among young people?

The prevailing Israeli attitudes toward the plight of the Gaza Strips residents can be summed up thus: Anyone firing Qassam rockets at Jews deserves to suffer. And now, a politician emerged last week from the right wing of the radical right, of all places, urging Israel to improve the lot of the Strips residents. The following remarks were made by Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel from the Tkuma faction of HaBayit HaYehudi Party: They dont have any international port.  Why shouldnt they have a port? Ariel went on to address Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying, Why do you keep expressing opposition and saying, We will consider? Whats to consider? Weve been considering for 47 years.  Transfer gas to [the West Bank towns of] Nablus, Hebron, Tulkarm, Jenin. We have gas. Unconditionally. Not on condition of [Netanyahus] famous phrase  If they give [peace and quiet], they will get [economic gestures]. We are responsible for the area. Give them water.

Ariel, the West Bank settler, has not changed his stripes. Note that he was not talking about lifting the siege on Gaza, only about creating an opening to the sea. Ariels port is supposed to only serve the residents of the Gaza Strip. Merchandise arriving at the Gaza port will not be allowed passage to Nablus and Hebron in the West Bank. This will solidify the split between Gaza and the West Bank, enabling continued Israeli freedom of action and settlement in the West Bank.

Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, a close associate of the prime ministers, also displayed uncharacteristic generosity toward the residents of Gaza this past weekend. Steinitz said the political echelon was examining various ideas, such as building an artificial island off Gaza under Israeli supervision, or Gaza-bound ships that will berth in Cyprus for security inspection. These sorts of ideas that will allow us to maintain security control, Steinitz said, and ended with the punch line: And free Gaza to the world. What Steinitz meant to say was, And rid ourselves of Gaza.

More than a decade has gone by since Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, but Gaza refuses to disengage from Israel. For more than a decade, Israel has been trying to separate Gaza from the West Bank, but the two refuse to disengage from each other. The removal of the Israeli settlements and military presence from Gaza taught residents of the West Bank that the violent methods adopted by Hamas to end the Israeli occupation were more effective than the diplomatic means adopted by Fatah. As long as Israel keeps expanding its West Bank settlements and the diplomatic stalemate with the Palestinians continues, any improvement of conditions in Gaza will in turn only raise the prestige of the Hamas regime as a model to be emulated in the West Bank. According to the most recent poll (conducted between March 17 and 19) by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research headed by Khalil Shikaki, the standing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has already reached rock bottom: Two-thirds of Palestinians support his resignation. If elections for the presidency were held now, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh would not leave Abbas any hopes of holding onto office.

Senior officials in Turkey said recently that a possible lifting of the Gaza blockade by establishing a port on its coast was discussed in reconciliation talks with Israel. The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Maj. Gen. Yoav (Poli) Mordechai, made it clear in an interview he granted in February to the Saudi news website Elaf that the issue was not part of the agenda of negotiations with Turkey. The sober-minded officer knows that Hamas enjoys Turkish support and that allowing the construction of a port as a goodwill gesture to Turkey is akin to victory for an organization that does not recognize Israels right to exist  and a loss for the Palestinian Authority (PA). Thats why Mordechai stressed that if conditions are ripe in the future for understandings or agreements regarding a Gaza port, They will only be with the PA and not with the Hamas rule in Gaza.

An additional element to be considered is Egypt: Turkey and Hamas cannot reach any agreement with Israel regarding Gaza without the consent of Israels most important geopolitical neighbor. Unlike the Netanyahu government, the Abdel Fattah al-Sisi regime opposes the separation between Gaza and the West Bank. Cairo would like Gaza returned to the control of the PA under Abbas, followed by renewed negotiations with Israel or UN recognition of a Palestinian state, both based on the 1967 borders  in other words, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the Gaza Strip.

The Netanyahu governments refusal to negotiate over the future of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which would require a freeze of settlement construction, has made the Gaza blockade an Israeli problem. The continued blockade will only further exacerbate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, sharpen international criticism of Israel and damage ties with Turkey. Lifting of the blockade on Gaza without a breakthrough in diplomatic negotiations over the future of the occupation will strengthen the standing of Hamas in the West Bank, sharpen international criticism in this case, too, and damage ties with Egypt. Either way, it seems that one cannot eat the cake of the occupation and preserve Israeli interests at the same time.
April 19, 2016

NINEVAH, Iraq  At times, Kurdish Gen. Ziryan Shekhwasani accompanied Iraqi army Gen. Najim al-Jabouri to survey through binoculars the battlefield on top of al-Nasr village just a couple of kilometers away. At other times, Shekhwasani stood with his peshmerga troops looking with an air of exasperation at how his Iraqi counterparts were conducting the bloody fight against the Islamic State (IS) militants.

The two generals are the point men of their respective forces, Kurdish peshmerga and the Iraqi army, in this southeastern corner of Ninevah province, a vast area of flat plains occasionally interrupted by a hill or cut apart farther ahead by the Tigris River. Cooperation between the two generals and their forces is key in liberating Ninevah and its prized city of Mosul from IS. Yet it was not difficult to see that the relationship between the two sides is uneasy. The peshmerga here do not have an active combat role and provide more of a back-line support, but they are ready to boost up Iraqi forces in case IS attacks or those forces have to retreat. The frontline here is also close to the town of Makhmour, meaning the Kurds have a vested interest in pushing IS away from the area.

The Iraqi army units here do not seem to be up to the task, complained Shekhwasani to Al-Monitor, as he pointed to the superior US-made Humvees and other highly armored bomb-resistant military vehicles that the Iraqi units possess much to the peshmergas' disdain. The peshmerga generally have far fewer of those vehicles, and a large number of the peshmerga use unprotected SUVs or pickup trucks on the battlefields.

If we had their weapons and equipment, we would have taken the countryside of Mosul in three days, claimed the clean-shaven Shekhwasani as he was surrounded by his peshmerga troops a short distance from the Iraqi forces.

Regardless of whether such claims are credible, they show the frustration of the Kurds with their Iraqi counterparts and a willingness to point out their weaknesses while they are supposed to be partners in pushing IS out of Mosul and the surrounding areas.

When Shekhwasani complained about the Iraqi army's lack of meaningful progress, the Conquest Operation for the Liberation of Ninevah was just in its second day on March 25. Now, more than three weeks later, not only has the army not been able to push the jihadi fighters out of al-Nasr, but they had to cease all operations on April 5 after the militants carried out a heavy counterattack just hours after the Iraqi army took the village. IS militants inflicted heavy casualties on the Iraqi forces, up to 20 dead by some difficult-to-verify accounts, and pushed them out of the village as a result of the counterattack.

Expelling IS from Mosul and the broader Ninevah province has long been considered a milestone in the plans for an eventual defeat of the group. It is the largest city the extremist organization controls in its vast territory spanning western Iraq and eastern and northern Syria.

But weeks after the start of the Ninevah operation, beside the general unreadiness of the Iraqi units in Ninevah, the temporary halt also highlights that a crucial element for the success of such an operation here in Ninevah is strong cooperation between the Iraqi army, Kurdish peshmerga and local Sunni forces. Despite the existing level of cooperation among these forces, there is also a lot of distrust or sometimes just outright disdain.

The Iraqi side has been more cautious in voicing its view about how the relationship has been going. A couple of Iraqi officers that Al-Monitor spoke to during the offensive were content with the level of their relationship with the Kurdish forces.

We have high level of coordination with the peshmerga, said one Iraqi army colonel on the condition of anonymity, as he was gazing at al-Nasr village from afar.

But a junior officer said building trust would be a process. There is, of course, tension and problems, but our commanders work together, said the officer on the condition of anonymity.

Local Sunni tribal forces, who are part of the Popular Mobilization Units, also participated in the offensive on strategic al-Nasr village. The Popular Mobilization Units are mostly Shiite formations, but there are also Sunni units within the force in certain areas.

Gathering around a fellow injured Popular Mobilization Units fighter, three Sunni fighters were arguing tensely about the fight on top of the hill.

A fighter on the back of a pickup truck had jumped off his vehicle and hurt his right leg when a rocket-propelled grenade had been fired toward him. He was rushed back behind the dirt berm where the support and command units of the Iraqi and peshmerga forces were gathered.

The fighters were conflicted with regard to the way the offensive was conducted. One said, Thank God, we have a good relationship with the Iraqi army.

Another fighter jumped in, interrupting him.

The Iraqi army needs a lot of help, and if the peshmerga dont participate in the operations actively, these areas cannot be really taken, said the older fighter. Look at what is happening, he added with disappointment referring to the slow and ineffective pace of the offensive.

The relationship between the Iraqi army and the villagers in the area where the offensive is launched appears to swing between lukewarm to tense. Several displaced villagers who fled to the nearby town of Makhmour were later moved to the Dibaga Camp, as the displaced complained of a hostile attitude by Iraqi soldiers they met.

When they entered [our village], their treatment was very bad. We heard inappropriate words. They said things we cannot mention, said Hussein, a pseudonym for a young villager from Kherabardan, one of the three villages Iraqi forces have so far brought under their control. But not everyone behaved the same way toward us. Some of them were better than others, he added.

Some residents complained that the advancing Iraqi troops damaged their vehicles. Many members of Iraqi army's Division 15, which has been leading the operations in Ninevah's countryside, are Shiite. Winning the support of local Sunnis here will be an important factor in how the battle will proceed in other areas and how the residents across Ninevah will deal with the Iraqi security forces.

The Iraqi army is facing an uphill battle to take al-Nasr village and the nearby strategic town of al-Qayyara where a former Iraqi army base and airstrip are located. If anything, the track record of the Iraqi forces in the first leg of the Ninevah operation attests to the lack of those troops' readiness to tackle the task on their own and has led to rising criticism. The Iraqi government sent more army units to the Makhmour area to boost up the existing forces and probably prepare for a resumption of the offensive.

We see with our own eyes large numbers of casualties and failed plans, and [yet] we continue to encourage illusions and fantasy, wrote Atheel al-Nujaifi, Ninevah's former governor, in a Facebook post.

Nujaifi also commands a force of a few thousand Ninevah residents known as the National Mobilization for the Liberation of Ninevah. His force, in cooperation with the peshmerga and Turkish troops, took two villages north of Mosul on April 18.

Without some adjustment in the way the Iraqi army-led Ninevah offensive is going, the fight to push IS out of Ninevah might be far more arduous than expected.
April 18, 2016

In a briefing for the Israeli press April 14, a senior officer in the Southern Command reported that Hamas is busy rehabilitating its military strength. According to him, ever since the 2014 Operation Protective Edge, Hamas has been increasing its Nokhba (elite fighting unit) forces to 5,000 troops and focusing on the development of high-trajectory short-range rockets, which proved to be more efficient than the Grad rockets shot down by the Israeli air defense system Iron Dome.

Hamas is a highly intelligent enemy. They surprise me and learn their lessons very quickly, said the senior officer by way of summary.

Past experience shows that after every round of fighting with Israel, the military wing of Hamas not only improves the ordnance at its disposal, but also adapts and adjusts its doctrine of warfare.

During Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), the Hamas army had no response to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ground forces that entered the northern part of the Gaza Strip. As far as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades were concerned, the territory had been abandoned. Armed Hamas militants swapped their uniforms for civilian clothing and quickly ran for cover deep in the Gaza Strip. After the operation, Ahmed Jabari, the person considered to be acting commander of the military wing of Hamas (and who was killed by Israel in 2012, right before Operation Pillar of Defense) ordered Hamas to improve its ground capabilities so that they could withstand Israeli ground forces if and when they invaded Gaza again.

Jabari decided to dig tunnels, which would surprise the Zionist enemy, and get behind the IDF forces in any way possible. All that mattered, as far as he was concerned, was to ensure that the Gaza Strip would not be abandoned again and Hamas be left without any response.

Israel was taken by surprise when it discovered Hamas tunnel project during the course of Operation Protective Edge. Nevertheless, it also showed that the elite Nokhba forces that burst out of the tunnels, which were excavated for years beneath the localities surrounding the Gaza Strip, were too small and ineffective. Its ambushes may have been harmful to IDF troops, but the forces werent significant enough to determine the course of the campaign or deter Israel. Now, however, the senior officer said, those elite Nokhba units make up one-quarter of Hamas military forces.

Apart from expanding the Hamas ground forces, the movements military wing is developing higher trajectory rockets with a greater explosive load capacity. Hamas regards this as the answer to the Iron Dome missile defense system, which shot down most of the Grad rockets fired at Beersheba, Ashdod, Rishon Lezion, Tel Aviv and even Jerusalem during operations Pillar of Defense and Protective Edge.

There can be no doubt that militarily, what Hamas really wants is to threaten Israels major cities, but there are dreams and then there is reality. The underlying impression is that right now, the heads of the military wing have decided to focus on reality. The Grad rocket program has been abandoned, not only because of Iron Dome, but also because aid from Iran has been cut and the tunnels have suffered tremendous damage.

High-trajectory rockets have been developed in Gaza since 2001. The Qassam rocket quickly became the flagship project of Hamas military wing, creating what it considered to be a balance of deterrence. Until then, Israel could allow itself to do whatever it wanted in Gaza, but now in every military operation, it must take into account that Hamas has the option of employing a deterrent.

The Israeli media reported extensively this week about the Hamas threat as presented by the senior officer from the Southern Command. On the other hand, from Operation Cast Lead until now, Hamas' military wings considerations regarding the development of its military capacity and a change in its military doctrine were based mainly on the fear that Israel would invade Gaza and attempt to overthrow the Hamas regime.

Hamas current considerations indicate that the organization is following a doctrine of defense more than a doctrine of offense. For a long time now, the movements leadership has been relaying the message to the people of Gaza that Israel is preparing for another round of fighting. The underlying impression is that this is not some propaganda campaign intended for the people of Gaza. Hamas really is convinced that the IDF is conducting the requisite training, collecting intelligence and studying past operations all in an attempt to force change in Gaza by evicting Hamas.

One of the rules that has guided Hamas since it was founded and its military wing was established is recognition of the limits of force, or in other words, controlled violence, as scholars Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela describe it in their book, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence. This was true when Hamas operated through terrorist cells, and it is true now as well, with Hamas operating as an organized army. Now, however, Hamas is weakened and deterred. Even the most combative factors in its military wing are aware of their miserable situation. Hamas is aware that if it exceeds the threshold in provoking Israel, it will lose the campaign. That is why the strengthening of Hamas, now and in the past, is intended mainly to build up a deterrent against Israel.

Another factor that is propelling the military wing to continue expanding and strengthening itself is political. The military wing of Hamas effectively controls Gaza, and the stronger it is, the greater the status of its leadership within the overall movement.

Within the movement itself, there is an enormous power struggle underway between the military wing and a divided political wing. The same senior officer from the Southern Command came up with an original way to explain it. He said that Hamas' military commander Mohammed al-Deif turned people such as senior Hamas official and former Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh into preachers who have no influence in the mosques.

The same internal power struggle existed in the time of Jabari, who threatened the movements leaders whenever they did something that he didnt like.

Beyond all that, Hamas is also preparing for the Day of Judgment, when the movement is forced to break the siege on Gaza, after Israel or Egypt decides to tighten it.
April 18, 2016

AMMAN, Jordan  During a 2014 NATO summit in Wales, US President Barack Obama asked to speak privately with Jordans King Abdullah II. As reported in the April issue of The Atlantic, Obama was unhappy about the Hashemite monarch having criticized his Middle East policies to members of Congress, so he asked Abdullah to speak with him directly regarding any future reservations he might have, rather than voicing them to US lawmakers.

Sixteen months later, in January 2016, Abdullah bashed Obamas war against the Islamic State (IS) while emphasizing Jordans challenging geostrategic position in a briefing with members of Congress, according to a leak reported in The Guardian March 25. In what emerged as an embarrassing revelation, Jordans king rebuked his most important patron, acknowledged sending special forces to faraway lands despite potentially significant domestic opposition and disclosed Ammans robust security ties with Israel in the Syrian war.

When asked about Jordans participation in the Saudi-led coalition against terrorism, Abdullah told the congressional members that his country had only joined because it was a nonbinding effort, adding that the United States should be realistic about the alliance accomplishing anything. Saudi Arabian Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman had announced the formation of the coalition with great fanfare on Dec. 15, stressing the importance of the coalition and asserting that the alliance would coordinate the fight against extremism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Egypt.

Riyadh is one of Jordans main backers in the Gulf Corporation Council, four members of which, including Saudi Arabia, extended $5 billion in development assistance to Jordan for the period 2011 to 2016. Given Jordans significant economic challenges, including public debt at 90% of gross domestic product and 28% youth unemployment, Saudi Arabias monetary support is critical. Despite Saudi Arabias strategic importance to Amman, Abdullah raised eyebrows by ridiculing Riyadhs military initiative in front of his American hosts.

Oraib Rantawi, director of the Amman-based Quds Center for Political Studies, told Al-Monitor that Riyadh is very sensitive to criticism in the Hashemite kingdom. It is no coincidence that in April 2015, Jordanian security forces arrested journalist Jamal Ayyoub, who was eventually held for three months, for penning an article condemning not his own country, but the Saudi war in Yemen.

Noting Abdullahs divergent views on Saudi Arabia when speaking to members of Congress versus with his Gulf allies, Sean Yom, professor of political science at Temple University and a Jordanian foreign policy expert, told Al-Monitor that it is part of a delicate balancing act given the opposing interests of Ammans patrons. Yom said, The Jordanian leadership has to address its immediate interests in a way that makes the other actor feel satisfied, but that does not lead to a very consistent overall foreign policy.

While rebuking Jordans strongest traditional allies to the congressional representatives, Abdullah acknowledged his countrys close security ties with Israel, despite overwhelming domestic opposition toward the Jewish state. The Hashemite monarch noted that his countrys air force flies with Israeli military jets along the Syrian border, adding that he had personally met with the head of Mossad in Amman. In line with popular views, the Jordanian parliament accused the Israeli enemy of state terrorism in October 2015, and thousands of Jordanians routinely protest in the streets against Israels policies with regard to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. Although the Jordanian government consistently condemns or protests Israeli actions and its policies toward the Palestinians, Abdullah revealed Ammans successful security cooperation with Israel at the highest levels, not the intimacy one expects from a country that is labeled the enemy in statements from parliament.

The Jordanian leaders statements to congressional representatives in January were consistent with what he told The Atlantic in 2013, when he described his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as very strong and asserted, Our discussions have really improved.

In addition to disclosing Ammans robust security ties with Israel, the Jordanian leader revealed to congressional representatives another potentially unpopular decision  that Jordanian special forces would be deployed to Libya in the fight against IS, embedded with British troops. Abdullah also said that Jordanian forces were ready to go over the border and attack al-Shabab in Somalia.

Yom explained the unpopularity of such actions among average Jordanians, saying, The public does not like to hear that in a cash-strapped country with a refugee crisis, the government is spending dozens upon dozens if not hundreds of millions of dinars sending special forces abroad.

Adnan Abu Odeh, former Royal Court chief and ambassador to the United Nations, expressed his frustration with the Jordanian leaders secrecy about such key military decisions. He told Al-Monitor, We pay taxes to this government, and our king says we will fight the Shabab, but we dont know, neither the parliament nor the government nor anybody, he said. Abu Odeh added that sending special forces abroad to fight terrorism, even to Africa, is dangerous, as it makes Jordan a greater target for extremists across the region.

The Jordanian king traveled to Moscow last November and August to meet with President Vladimir Putin, and a few months later harshly critiqued Russias policy in Syria when he spoke to members of Congress. Abdullah said that the Russians were warned, One bullet across the agreed upon border in the south, [and] all gloves are off. As reported on March 25 in the Middle East Eye, he added that Jordan was focused on keeping the Russians in their place.

Rantawi explained that Abdullahs criticisms of Saudi Arabia, the United States and Russia stemmed from the Hashemite kingdoms challenging geostrategic position. We disagree with many in the region, Rantawi said. It is better for Jordan to not attach itself to any camp and to keep maneuvering because you cannot rely on a certain axis.

While Abdullahs criticisms, reported in the British newspaper The Guardian, could have an impact on Ammans foreign policy, Jordans top four newspapers  Al-Rai, Al-Dustur, Al-Ghad and the Jordan Times  have not covered Abdullahs statements. The week they were revealed, however, each dutifully ran articles covering Prince Hamzahs birthday. In a country with high levels of self-censorship and government pressure on the media, it is perhaps not surprising that Jordanian newspapers have steered clear of Abdullah's criticism's to limit public discussion of topics uncomfortable for the Royal Palace. Both Royal Court Media Director Khalid Dalal and Minister of State for Media Affairs Mohammad Momani declined repeated interview requests for this article.

After the kings January conversations with congressional officials, Royal Court Political Director Manar Dabbas noted that the discussions in Washington were off the record despite Abdullahs harsh attacks. Two years earlier, the US leader also confronted Abdullah after similar conversations with members of Congress in closed sessions criticizing Obama. In the age of leaks and more aggressive media, one wonders whether Jordans monarch needs to be more careful with his blunt criticism of countrys leaders as fewer conversations can be completely shielded from the press in 2016.
April 15, 2016

BEIRUT  Lebanon's illegal Internet scandal has been a hot topic since it fell under the public spotlight last month. Illegal transmission stations have been dismantled and legal and judicial investigations are ongoing. But what remains to be seen is whether the investigations will be completed to ensure the prosecution of everyone involved.

The Ministry of Telecommunication had informed the parliamentary Communications and Media Committee of legal, financial and security dangers related to companies illegally providing Internet services through fiber optic transmission stations and receivers not subject to state supervision. Following the committee's March 8 meeting, committee head Hassan Fadlallah of the Shiite Hezbollah party announced the information during a joint press conference.

Owners of an estimated seven stations have been buying bandwidth at a low price from outside the Lebanese network, specifically from Cyprus and Turkey, and then selling it to Lebanese subscribers at prices lower than the official rate, officials say.

Lebanon's Internet sector is run by the state-owned company Ogero, whose director general and general manager Abdel Moneim Youssef has more than 52 complaints, lawsuits, warrants and warnings issued against him. The Progressive Socialist Party has called for an April 20 protest against his alleged corruption.

The Communications and Media Committee has been holding weekly meetings in parallel with other security meetings to follow up on the issue. The latest meeting was held April 11 with concerned ministers and officials representing the main security services. Following that meeting, Telecommunications Minister Boutros Harb announced that four people had been arrested with the help of Cyprus on the grounds of having illegally brought communication hardware into Lebanon from Turkey. A warrant was issued for a fifth person.

Also, the public prosecutor for financial cases, Ali Ibrahim, has filed legal actions against 22 people implicated on counts of illegal installation, sale and investment, embezzlement, wasting public money and tax evasion. Investigations are underway to find the owners of the illegal stations and all involved parties. So far, Cyprus has not issued an official position on the issue.

Four huge illegal stations that were inspected and uninstalled were equipped with the latest technology devices and set up in Faqra and Eioun al-Siman.

Security sources following up on the case confirmed to Al-Monitor that ongoing investigations show a much higher number of illegal stations, some dating back to 2009, but that their owners managed to uninstall them immediately after the scandal was revealed.

The scandal came to light when a group of licensed Internet service providers (ISPs) filed a complaint Jan. 25 with the Telecommunications Ministry against 12 companies, licensed by the ministry, for allegedly selling Internet services illegally.

Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil said during a Communications and Media Committee meeting March 30 that 30% of activity in the Lebanese Internet market is illegal, causing the treasury to lose of as much as $200 million a year. A technical investigation by Ogero concurs with those figures.

Fadlallah warned that the situation exposes the Lebanese people to piracy and espionage, especially since numerous state institutions and security services - most notably the president's palace, the parliament and Lebanese army departments  have been unknowingly using the illegal systems. The ISPs they have dealt with are licensed by the Ministry of Telecommunications. However, the most dangerous implication is that these Lebanese official headquarters may have been using Internet connected to Israel, which represents a breach of state sovereignty and an act of espionage.

Many questions came up during one of the meetings about how the illegal Internet companies managed to bring in the large equipment for their stations through legitimate border crossings, airports or ports without being caught by customs officials, especially since such imports usually require Telecommunications Ministry authorization.

Other questions were also raised about how people or entities managed to install equipment to receive the Internet illegally under the nose of the security forces  hinting at a major corruption scenario.

Security sources told Al-Monitor that most of the equipment that entered Lebanon was imported into Syria, and then smuggled over land to Lebanon, and the remaining part passed customs inspection by being labeled as computer devices, which unlike communication equipment, do not require an inspection by the Ministry of Telecommunications.

The sources said that data service providers (DSPs) provide global Internet gateways, while ISPs connect their clients, whether companies or individuals, to the Internet through the DSPs licensed by Ogero that operate the landlines in Lebanon.

38 ISPs operated in Lebanon before 2014, but when Minister Boutros Harb assumed the communications portfolio this number rose to 115, since he licensed 67 new companies, the sources added.

The problem is that a number of ISPs sought to get Internet services illegally through companies in Cyprus and Turkey, at a lower cost. These licensed ISPs were thus operating through legal and illegal channels at the same time.

Ogero is entrusted with leasing access to international capacity on behalf of the government. However, the companies in question get their access lines through Cyprus and Turkey at the giveaway price of $30 each, and then resell the service in Lebanon for $100 to $150.

Who are the companies that offered discounted prices? What is their interest in all this? the sources asked before continuing, This is the security dimension of the Internet scandal. Fingers are pointed toward Israel, the enemy state of Lebanon, which of course may benefit from this and is always seeking to breach Lebanon's security and strengthen its espionage capacities over its territories. This wont be Israels first espionage attempt; back in 2009 an illegal Internet transmitting station was discovered in the mountainous Tallat al-Barouk region, and it turned out to be connected to Israel.

The latest chapter of this scandal involves an underwater cable spotted at the mouths of two rivers, Nahr al-Kalb and Nahr Ibrahim, which are roughly about 17 kilometers (10 miles) apart; Youssef revealed the presence of the cable and indicated during a parliamentary meeting that the line is used for illegally distributing Internet access. On April 12, the Lebanese army inspected the cable in the presence of Ogero technical units.

The Telecommunications Ministry issued a statement saying, The underwater cable connecting Nahr Ibrahim and Nahr el-Kalb is a fiber optic cable of a large capacity that allowed the transmission of different communication services: sound, data, Internet and images."

However, the statement added that 40 days passed between the time the news hit the media and when the cable was inspected  enough time for the violators to cover up their activity.

Ziad Aswad, a member of the Communications and Media Committee, told Al-Monitor, What is happening is wrong [on many levels], since no progress has been made on the issue. Aswad fears the corruption will not receive appropriate judicial treatment and will be covered up to hide the real culprits, whose identities are yet to be revealed.

He said the crime would only be properly dealt with before the judiciary and not the parliament, which is not performing its duties as it should.
April 19, 2016

Following the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action last year, the United States has been attempting to assure its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) allies that this will not open the way to Iranian-US rapprochement. "My view has never been that we should throw our traditional allies overboard in favor of Iran, President Barack Obama has publicly declared. In this vein, Obama is scheduled to soon arrive in Saudi Arabia, which is set to host a GCC summit, gathering the organizations other member states, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

As the fight against terror remains the highest priority for the world, the United States and the GCC continue to blame Iran for terrorism. However, the reality is that Iran is actively fighting the very terrorist groups that the UN Security Council has defined as constituting an unprecedented threat to international peace  namely the so-called Islamic State and al-Qaeda. The United States and NATO know very well the source of the ideology and funding of these groups. Obama himself recently told The Atlantic, In the 1990s, the Saudis heavily funded Wahhabist madrassas, seminaries that teach the fundamentalist version of Islam favored by the Saudi ruling family.

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton also said at the Brookings Institution last September, Much of the extremism in the world today is the direct result of policies and funding undertaken by the Saudi government and individuals. We would be foolish not to recognize that.

Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has accused US regional allies of supporting extremists in Syria in their eagerness to oust the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In light of this, the sustained knee-jerk support of the United States for some of its regional allies is bewildering. As Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stated, Certain powers, the United States in particular, are neither sincere nor serious in the campaign against terrorism.

Mistrust between Iran on the one hand and the US-GCC on the other has historically been deep  and mutual. Due to the multiple unprecedented crises raging in the region, it will be impossible to secure peace and stability without cooperation among all key regional players particularly the GCC states and Iran.

One idea that has been floated by the GCC is a possible NATO-GCC partnership. This is an imprudent approach. In fact, to pursue such a coalition with the aim of isolating Iran has been proven as a failed strategy.

The GCC is an entity that was designed to counter Iranian influence. Meanwhile, the West has for decades also done all it could in terms of coercive policies to marginalize Iran. Indeed, the GCC and Western states supported Saddam Husseins invasion of Iran in 1980, and his use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilians. Moreover, Western powers have engaged in covert war and imposed the most draconian sanctions regime against Iran. Yet the outcome of this has been that Iran has emerged as the most stable and powerful country in the region, while the GCC states are faltering in virtually every conceivable way.

Obama has contended that one option to solve regional discord is for Iran and Saudi Arabia to find a way to share the region. The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians  which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria, Iraq and Yemen  requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to nd an eective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace, he recently told The Atlantic. Riyadh has up until now rejected coming to such a settlement with Iran, even as, an Iranian official recently told Al-Monitor, the United States has sought to bolster Saudi Arabia politically and militarily in order to encourage it to reconcile with Iran  an approach that the official framed as a major US concession. In a recent op-ed blasting Obama, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, revealed that Saudi Arabias goal is in fact to be in a leadership role in the Arab and Islamic world, an aggressive ambition Faisal wants the United States to continue underwriting. It is clear that Saudi Arabia is not seeking coexistence with Iran. Rather, even as it accuses Iran of pursuing a hegemonic regional strategy, it is itself openly seeking hegemony over the entire Islamic world  a dream that is dangerously destabilizing and impossible to attain or sustain.

A realistic scenario for Obama to discuss at the upcoming GCC summit is to forgo concepts of hegemony and balance of power and instead work toward establishing a sustainable regional cooperation system that includes Iran, the GCC states and Iraq. Such a system could be modeled after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the integration Europe has experienced since the end of World War II. The mechanism to initiate the process toward realizing this system already exists. UN Security Council Resolution 598, which was adopted on July 20, 1987, and laid the basis for the end of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, requests of the UN secretary-general to examine, in consultation with Iran and Iraq and with other states of the region, measures to enhance the security and stability of the region. By adopting a new resolution, the UN Security Council can revive this mandate.

Moreover, the model that resolved the Iranian nuclear dispute can be used: negotiations mediated by the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany (P5+1). The foreign ministers of the P5+1 could negotiate with the foreign ministers of Iran, the six GCC states and Iraq on a new security structure for the Persian Gulf. They would work toward a scenario in which the two regional powerhouses  Iran and Saudi Arabia  would engage in cooperation rather than confrontation, to overcome the challenges of the post-Sykes-Picot and Cold War eras. To achieve this objective, greater flexibility in the United States relationship with the GCC as well as Iran is essential, and it would not only help end the Saudi-Iran cold war, but also the hot wars elsewhere in the region. A regional cooperation system in the Persian Gulf that regionalizes the burden of ensuring security, access to energy supplies and freedom of navigation is absolutely vital and would greatly benefit the cause of global peace and security. Now, more than ever, is the time for cooperation rather than confrontation.
April 19, 2016

With much fanfare last October, Turkey inaugurated Water of Peace, a 50-mile undersea pipeline carrying water from Turkey to the drought-stricken Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). It was a sign of Ankara's unwavering support for the enclave, which only Turkey recognizes and supports. In January, Al-Monitor reported that Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) government was pressuring the TRNC to give the water distribution and sales rights to a private monopoly and warned that this could lead to a political crisis in the TRNC.

After lengthy bargaining, Prime Ministers Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey and Omer Kalyoncu of the TRNC signed the bilateral Water Supply Agreement on March 2. Following the signing, the right-wing National Union Party (UBP), which is close to the AKP, decided to pull out of the TRNC ruling coalition because of disagreement over the distribution and revenues provisions, which it supported, and the government resigned on April 5. Turkish Cypriots had pinned much hope on this coalition, which was seen as a broad-based reconciliation government, bringing together the UBP and the left-wing Republican Turkish Party (CTP).

Two factors related to the AKP stand out in the collapse of the coalition: disagreements on how profits from the water deal would be shared and the suspension of Ankaras financial support for the TRNC in January after the two sides failed to agree on the terms of an assistance protocol. Stripped of Ankaras aid, the TRNC was hit by a financial bottleneck and failed to fully pay the salaries of public servants in March.

The Turkish Cypriot government crisis has weakened TRNC President Mustafa Akincis hand in ongoing peace negotiations with Greek Cyprus to end the islands long-standing division. The negative impact on the peace talks is likely to increase with a new, right-wing coalition having been formed April 16 that excludes the CTP, which backs reconciliation with the Greek Cypriots and the accession of Turkish Cyprus to the European Union (EU). The talks were already expected to enter a period of stagnation in the coming weeks due to parliamentary elections in Greek Cyprus scheduled for May 22.

As Akinci prepared to visit Germany April 12-13, the water agreement stood at the center of the political crisis at home. Ahead of the visit, Akinci gave UBP leader Huseyin Ozgurgun the mandate to form a new government.

The water deal imposes tough terms on the TRNC. Under the accord, Turkey pledges to supply the TRNC with 75 billion cubic meters of water annually, and the TRNC pledges to buy the entire amount. Turkey retains the right to re-sell the water to third parties, which means that if the Greek Cypriots are interested in taking water from the pipeline, they are supposed to negotiate with Ankara, not the TRNC. A private company will have exclusive monopoly rights on the distribution and sale of the water from Turkey, along with exclusive rights on the TRNCs overground and underground water resources for 34 years.

Also under the deal, the TRNC agrees not to grant royalties to other companies. If annual purchases fall below the stated amount, the TRNC pledges to pay the difference to the company. It also agrees to hand over to the company, free of charge, its existing storage facilities, distribution infrastructure and bill collection rights, along with whatever is nationalized, to build new distribution networks. The company is allowed to bring in personnel, materials and equipment without any prior permission from TRNC authorities and tax free. It also has the right to build a power plant to meet its own electricity needs and add the resulting cost to water bills.

The most crucial aspect of the deal is the absence of pricing terms, with the company allowed to fix the price according to performance. In other words, the TRNC pledges to buy 75 billion cubic meters of water at an unknown price and guarantees that it will pay whatever price the company sets.

With the agreement now facing a vote in the UBP-controlled parliament, the opposition is arguing that the AKP government is behind the UBP leaving the coalition and getting the mandate to form a new one. Trade unions see the water agreement as an AKP invasion of the TRNC. Calling on Turkish Cypriots to take to the streets, the Teachers Trade Union, the Revolutionary General Labor Trade Union and the Municipal Workers Trade Union say the deal usurps the rights not only of Turkish Cypriots, but also of their Greek co-islanders, arguing that it amounts to the islands colonization.

On the Greek Cypriot side, which joined the EU in 2004, the 34-year water monopoly the agreement creates has been similarly decried as a blow to EU norms and legislation as well as to the peace talks and efforts to create a united Cyprus federation.

Akinci, ahead of his visit to Germany, reiterated his hope for a peace deal with Greek Cyprus in 2016, but both he and the negotiations are headed for a rough patch. Following his election victory in April 2015, Akinci had angered Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by saying that Ankara should stop patronizing Turkish Cypriots and calling for a relationship of equals. With the water deal imposed on the TRNC and financial aid suspended, Erdogan and the AKP have left Akinci besieged in the peace talks with the UBP holding power.

Hovering above all this is the widespread expectation that the water monopoly rights will be granted to a pre-determined company close to the AKP through a token public tender.
The theft of a laptop containing customers' prescription data without encryption puts the health information of 1,000 people at risk.

CVS announced Monday that a laptop had been stolen from an Indianapolis vendor that contained patient information of people who have had prescriptions filled at the CVS store at 8370 Highway 31 in Calera. Information of about 1,000 people was on the laptop, CVS spokesman Mike DeAngelis said.

The laptop had been stolen on March 16. CVS learned of the theft on March 22. AL.com asked DeAngelis Tuesday morning why the company waited to announced the issue but had not yet received a response at time of publication.

Information on the laptop included patient names and in some cases addresses, telephone numbers, prescription names, numbers and dispensing dates. There was no financial information on the laptop.

The laptop was stolen from a vendor in Indianapolis and reported to the local police department. DeAngelis said he does not think an arrest has been made.

CVS said it will not disclose the name of the vendor but will continue to use them. CVS also said not encrypting patient data violated the vendor's obligations to the company and has since agreed to provide additional privacy training to its employees, including encryption training.

CVS is directly notifying patients whose information was on the laptop, and affected customers with questions can call 1-888-829-6553.

Only patients of that particular CVS are at risk - if you've never filled a prescription at that location, you're not affected. But not all customers are affected. CVS is notifying customers whose information is on the laptop.

The vendor has access to information of customers at other stores, but none of them are in Alabama, CVS said. This incident only affected the Calera store.
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Sarah, an Alabama mother of four, shops for groceries with vouchers from WIC, a supplemental food assistance program. (Anna Claire Vollers / avollers@AL.com)

New Women, Infants and Children (WIC) guidelines mean more Alabama families may qualify for benefits from the supplemental nutrition program.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published an update Jan. 25 to the poverty guidelines, which are used to determine program income eligibility requirements for the WIC and Medicaid programs.

Alabama WIC Program Director Amanda C. Martin said this year's guidelines may open up the number of participants the Alabama WIC program can serve.

"I could not begin to say how many more women, infants, or children could qualify," she told AL.com. "WIC is encouraging families to make appointments and we can do a full assessment to include income eligibility and determination of nutrition risk."

To qualify for WIC, applicants must have a gross income at or below 185 percent of the U.S. poverty income guidelines.

The new Alabama guidelines are as follows:

Family Size * Annual Month Week 1 $21,978 $1,832 $423 2 $29,637 $2,470 $570 3 $37,296 $3,108 $718 4 $44,955 $3,747 $865 5 $52,614 $4,385 $1,012

* For a pregnant woman, count each unborn baby in the family size.

For comparison, here are last year's WIC income eligibility guidelines:

Family Size * Annual Week 1 $21,775 $419 2 $29,471 $567 3 $37,167 $715 4 $44,863 $863 5 $52,559 $1,011

Martin said the Alabama WIC program's average year-to-date caseload from Oct. 1, 2015 to Feb. 29, 2016 was 130,262. In addition to the income requirements, recipients must live in Alabama and be seen by a health professional at a WIC clinic.

"If a family is not eligible for WIC, a social worker in their county could direct them to food banks or other charitable institutions that could assist them in addition to the SNAP (formerly Food Stamps) program through the Department of Human Resources," said Alabama Department of Public Health spokesman Arrol Sheehan.

WIC is available to pregnant and breastfeeding women, new mothers, as well as infants or children under the age of 5. Pregnant women and children ages 1 to 5 may buy eggs, cheese, juice, cereal, whole grain bread or brown rice, beans, peanut butter and fresh fruit and vegetables through the program.

Breastfeeding women may receive the same items as pregnant women and children, plus canned tuna or salmon, extra milk, cheese and eggs. Formula, cereal, fruits and vegetables are available to infants.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said approximately 8.3 million women, infants and children received monthly WIC benefits during fiscal year 2014. Children received more WIC benefits than infants or children each month at 4.32 million.

States reported average monthly participation just below 8.2 million per month for the first three months of fiscal 2015. The WIC program, which is funded by grants from the federal government, also provides health screening, nutrition and breastfeeding counseling, immunization screening and referral, substance abuse referral, and other services.

The initiative began in 1974 with 88,000 participants and now serves more than half of the infants in the U.S. WIC is available today in all 50 states, 34 Indian Tribal Organizations, American Samoa, District of Columbia, Guam, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

For information on WIC clinic locations or how to apply, click here.
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Imam Raed Awad, then of the Birmingham Islamic Society, left, and Rev. Conrad Sharps, then pastor at Independent Presbyterian Church, share a program during the prelude at a Community Thanksgiving Service sponsored by the Southside Faith Community in 2010 at South Highland Presbyterian Church.

(AL.com/Tamika Moore)

Raed Awad, shown in 2009 at the Hoover Crescent Islamic Center where he was imam, lived in Alabama from 2004-2011 and helped lead the Muslim community in interfaith relations.

Raed Awad, former imam or prayer leader for the Hoover Crescent Islamic Center, has died, Birmingham Islamic Society President Ashfaq Taufique announced on April 19.

"Imam Raed Awad passed away this morning in Kuala Lumpur after a long battle with health issues and recently with cancer," Taufique said in a written statement. "Please remember him in your prayers and pray for his wife and his son Ibraheem."

Awad, 56, moved to Birmingham in 2004 and left Alabama in 2011 to move to Malaysia.

"We miss him," Taufique told AL.com by phone. "I'm getting a lot of calls from interfaith community. When the Alabama Faith Council started, he was the first to represent Muslims. He helped promote understanding between our Christian and Jewish partners. That was his passion, to lead the Muslim community."

Awad was a sometimes controversial figure serving as a spokesman for the Muslim community and a leader for the Birmingham Islamic Society.

''I love this community,'' Awad said before he left. ''I love Birmingham in general and I love the Muslim community here.''

Awad was imam at the Hoover Crescent Islamic Center when it opened in 2008.

"He gave a friendly face and a friendly voice to Islam," said the Rev. Steve Jones, former pastor of Southside Baptist Church, who was friends with him. "It wasn't always met with friendliness. He believed intently in what he believed. He said he wanted to work with people and teach them about Islam, and he did."

Awad said in 2011 that his wife, Nur, whom he married in 2009, was pregnant and he wanted to return home to Malaysia. ''My wife misses her family,'' he said.

Awad had four children with his first wife, Isabella, and then helped raise two stepchildren he had with his second wife, Katy Carr, who he met in Alabama.

"My son didn't know another father," said Carr, who kept in contact with Awad after their divorce.

She said Awad ran a restaurant and catering business in Malaysia with his wife and her family.

"He seemed really happy there," Carr said. "He loved to cook. He was Chef Raed. She did beautiful pastries and cakes. He was doing lamb. He was teaching cooking classes."

Awad served from 1994 to 2000 as imam of the Masjid Al Iman mosque in Fort Lauderdale that was attended by Muslim convert Jose Padilla, who lived in Broward County from 1991 to 1998 and was arrested in 2002 at a Chicago airport on suspicion of plotting a ''dirty bomb'' attack for al-Qaida. Padilla was indicted for aiding terrorists and convicted in 2007 of conspiracy to murder.

Awad said he knew Padilla slightly but had no influence over him. Awad testified at Padilla's trial.

Awad, a Palestinian, also came under scrutiny as a fundraiser for The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which the U.S. government shut down in 2001 for its connections to the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Awad said at the time he raised funds to help Palestinian hospitals, orphanages and schools. He said he had no decision-making authority with Holy Land Foundation and never saw evidence of funds being directed to violent activities.

Awad largely overcame initial suspicion and was accepted in Birmingham as a spokesman for Muslims at numerous interfaith events, said Jones. ''Our folks loved him,'' Jones said. ''He was very engaging."

At the time he left Alabama, Awad said he hoped to work on interfaith dialogue in Malaysia, which is 60 percent Muslim, with the Buddhist, Hindu and Christian minorities there.
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Former Samford University students Jay and Katherine Wolf returned to campus on Monday night to release their new book, 'Hope Heals.'

(Photo by Greg Garrison/AL.com)

Katherine Arnold was crowned Miss Samford in 2002 and competed in the Miss Alabama Pageant.

While she was a freshman at Samford University in 2000, Katherine Arnold met her future husband, Jay Wolf.

She was crowned Miss Samford in 2002 and was second runner-up in the Miss Alabama Pageant. She and Jay married in 2004 after graduating from Samford. They moved to Malibu, Calif., where she worked as a model and auditioned for acting jobs while he attended Pepperdine University Law School.

They had a baby, James, and six months later Jay was about to graduate from law school in April 2008 when tragedy struck. Katherine Wolf, then 26, had what was initially called a brain stem stroke. She was rushed to UCLA Medical Center and underwent emergency surgery to save her life. The cause of the problem was a malformed cluster of arteries that had been there since she was born, although she never knew it before they burst. A neurosurgeon had to remove a section of her brain, half of her cerebellum, and scrape her brain stem, during a 16-hour surgery.

She was unconscious for two months, on life support for 40 days, then began a long, slow process of medical rehabilitation.

On Monday night, Katherine and Jay were back at Samford University to unveil their book, "Hope Heals: A True Story of Overwhelming Loss and an Overcoming Love," published by HarperCollins.

"We wanted to share our own story in our own voice," Katherine said. "Our ministry is encouraging people with broken hearts and broken bodies, which is everybody. Our faith is in the God who makes it all okay. What is broken by earthly standards is not broken in the kingdom of God. Ultimately, the soul is what matters, not the body. That's where true healing is. What is eternal is not this broken body."

Many of their old Samford classmates came, and others who know them from Montgomery First Baptist Church, where Jay's father has been senior pastor for more than 20 years.

"I was super-involved in everything on campus," Katherine recalled, sitting in her wheelchair as friends kept walking up to hug her.

"This is where we met, upstairs in the cafeteria," Jay said. "She sat in a seat next to me and we kept talking after everyone else left."

Jay finished his law degree, which came in handy negotiating hospital bills, Katherine said. "He is a master at knowing how to handle the hospitals," she said.

Katherine still bears the signs of her stroke. "My face is paralyzed," she said. "I can't drive. I can't walk."

But even people who don't have the outward signs of suffering may be suffering inside, she said. Even people who appear beautiful on the outside worry about their appearance, and all bodies suffer from imperfections inside and out.

"It's an important story for students in their twenties to hear," Katherine said. "All these issues I'm dealing with on the outside, we're all dealing with on the inside."

What appears to be physical perfection can turn to imperfection, suffering and death in an instant. "We're living in such a fragile world," Jay said.

"I was 26 years old," Katherine said. "I was a healthy young woman." Then, suddenly, "I was eating through a tube, I couldn't take care of my body; I couldn't even grasp what was happening."

After 11 surgeries for Katherine, they have learned to find hope in their faith, and to share it. "It's ultimately God's story, what he's doing in the world, bringing life where there should only be death," Jay said.

"We are not broken in Him, we are not crushed in Him," Katherine said.

At their wedding in Athens, Ga., where Katherine grew up, Jay's father preached a sermon based on Matthew 7, about building life on a firm spiritual foundation. "It was really prophetic," Jay said. "The storms of life are coming."

Jay and Katherine now have another child, John Nestor Wolf, who is ten months old. He was named for the gospel writer John, and for the neurosurgeon, Nestor Gonzalez, who saved Katherine's life.

"Here I am talking to you eight years later," Katherine said. "Doctors didn't think that was possible."

Samford University President Andrew Westmoreland, Vice President for University Advancement Randy Pittman and other faculty and staff turned out Monday night along with students, former students and friends inspired by Katherine's story of perseverance in the face of suffering. "We're proud of her," Pittman said. "She's an inspiration."

The Wolfs say they know there are others who need to be inspired by the hope they can give in the midst of continuing struggle and suffering.

"It's a true story of near death, but it's a true story of new life," Jay said. "We all have pain. We all have brokenness. We're hoping it forward."
A Gadsden man has been arrested for methamphetamine trafficking after police say they stopped him during a search.

Etowah County Drug Enforcement Unit Commander Randall Johnson said Richard Edmondson, 33, is being held in the Etowah County Detention Center on $75,000 cash bond.

On Thursday, agents received information that "large amounts" of meth would be delivered to the Gadsden/Rainbow City area by motorcycle, Johnson said.

Police were alerted to Edmondson's vehicle, and a Rainbow City policeman saw the motorcycle and stopped it on Alabama 77. Police found 104 grams of meth in Edmondson's jacket pocket, Johnson said.

Edmondson also currently faces a methamphetamine trafficking charge in Calhoun County, Johnson said.

Rainbow City police and the FBI North Alabama Safe Streets Task Force also took part in the case.
A man in a cowboy hat and in a pickup truck opened fire at a Blount County intersection this morning, wounding four people and damaging multiple cars and buildings.

The suspect, whose identity hasn't been released, was shot and killed by lawmen after he repeatedly fired on them, authorities said. No officers were injured.

Authorities say the man, whose identity isn't known, was involved in an earlier shooting incident in Marshall County, and opened fire again after the intersection shooting in Blount County. "He's just going around shooting,'' said Blount County sheriff's Operations Officer Tim Kent. "There's no rhyme or reason."

Kent said that the suspect changed vehicles before entering Blount County.

The Blount County shooting happened about 7 a.m. in Brooksville on Alabama 278. Kent said the gunman, in a white pickup truck, pulled up to the intersection, stuck a shotgun out of the window and began firing.

Two men and a woman inside their vehicles were wounded. They are being taken to local hospitals with injuries not believed to be life-threatening.

The gunman then fled down Rocky Hollow Road, where he started shooting again, Kent said. At least one more car was struck at that time. The earlier incident happened in Marshall County when he shot at a concrete truck, but the gunman then went back to Marshall County after the Blount County shooting and shot someone in the chest. That victim is said to be in stable condition.

Lawmen put the Blount County schools on lockdown and searched the area. They issued lookout bulletins to nearby counties, and asked everyone to be aware and take precautions.

The suspect was spotted east of Brooksville after 8 a.m. He was involved in a pursuit with Blount County and Marshall County sheriff's deputies, Snead police and Blountsville police. Authorities said he was armed with the shotgun and a handgun.

Kent said the man fired at officers during the chase, and again after he crashed his vehicle. That's when lawmen returned fire and killed him.

No officers were wounded.

Two Blount County deputies who fired at the suspect are being put on administrative leave for a few days, Kent said.

There have been no details released about the suspect or the motive in the shooting.

Deanna Morgan was working her first shift as a cashier at the Jet-Pep located at the intersection when the shooting occurred.

She said she didn't see the shooter in Blount County, but she heard a gunshot.

A woman ran into the store soon after, screaming that she had been shot, Morgan said. Morgan said the woman was covered in blood, and the owner of the store began to apply pressure with paper towels on the victim's wound.

"She just kept saying, 'Am I going to die?' And so I prayed with her," Morgan said.

The victim called her father while the store owner called police, and she was taken to a hospital by paramedics shortly after they arrived.

Morgan said that when police arrived, they told her to take cover and lock the door.

"They told me to get in the back of the store, and that someone was shooting people."

Police from Arab, Cleveland, Guntersville, and Snead assisted the Blount County Sheriff's office today.

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency is now handling the investigation.

AL.com's Ivana Hrynkiw contributed to this report.
Tallapoosa county animal cruelty .jpg

Wilburn Lee Sheridan and Lori Amanda Sheridan (TCSO)

Two Tallapoosa County residents were arrested on Monday after a horse in their care was found dead of apparent malnourishment.

Wilburn Lee Sheridan, 41 and his wife, Lori Amanda Sheridan, 38, of Flournoy Road in Dadeville are charged with aggravated cruelty to animals, according to the Tallapoosa County Sheriff's Office. The pair was placed in the Tallapoosa County Jail pending bond.

The sheriff's office received a report on Monday of a horse that had been lying in a pasture for at least two days and could not get up.

"The horse was found in the pasture and appeared to have died from severe malnourish," according to a statement from the Tallapoosa County Sheriff's Office.

Merry Hardy, of Alexander City posted images of the horse to her Facebook account on Monday afternoon.

"Another case of starving horses near Dadeville," she wrote. "This horse has been down for three days. The sheriff has been contacted but so far haven't done anything. Apparently there are more in the pasture like this one."
Jury selection is now in its second week in the case of the Georgia father accused in the 2014 hot-car death of his 22-month-old son.

So far, according to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, 16 jurors have been qualified, with at least 32 needed. That number would include 12 jurors, two alternates and nine "peremptory" challenges given to each side.

Justin Ross Harris faces charges including murder in the June 2014 death of his 22-month-old son, Cooper. Cobb County prosecutors have said the 35-year-old Harris was unhappily married and was looking for an escape.

Defense attorneys say their client, who moved from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Georgia in 2012 to work for Home Depot, was a loving father and that the death was a tragic mistake.

Jury selection began last week with 250 potential jurors, and authorities said the selection process could last up to three weeks.

Juror in tears openly sobbing about losing clients if she is selected. @HarrisTrialFOX5 #fox5atl pic.twitter.com/HZ7TRxSfNo  Aungelique Proctor (@aungeliquefox5) April 19, 2016

The AJC today reported that Harris showed "rare emotion" in court this morning. He was seen last week "fist pumping" his attorney in the courtroom.

Atlanta television station Fox 5, which has established a Twitter account just for trial coverage, @HarrisTrialFOX5, has extensively cover the jury selection process. The television station reported that one of the prospective jurors during questioning said he prefers pornography over dating because "it's cheaper." That potential juror was chosen for the jury pool.

Harris also charged with multiple counts of disseminating pornographic images to teen girls police say he was "sexting." Some of the jurors questioned admitted they had already formed an opinion on Harris' innocent or guilt.
An investigation is underway after a man died following a struggle with Bibb County lawmen.

The man's name has not yet been released, but Kevin Lawrence, the public information officer for the Bibb County Sheriff's Office, said he was a 30-year-old white male wanted on felony warrants out of Tuscaloosa County.

Two deputies were on patrol about 6:30 p.m. Friday on Alabama 219 when they spotted a vehicle on the side of the road, and it appeared to be broken down. As the deputies approached the vehicle, the passenger got out and took off running. A brief foot chase ensued in to a nearby wooded area, Lawrence said.

The deputies caught up with the fleeing man, and there was a struggle. "It took a while,'' Lawrence said. Once the man was handcuffed, he went into cardiac arrest. He was taken to Bibb County Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.

Lawrence said the investigation is ongoing by the Bibb County Sheriff's Office, the Bibb County Coroner's Office, the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences and an outside law enforcement agency that has yet been named.
Spencer Collier, the fired former head of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency whose words have ripped a hole in the administration of Gov. Robert Bentley, today filed suit against the governor, his former political adviser Rebekah Mason and others, claiming he was improperly fired and impugned.

The suit, filed this morning, names the Council for Excellent Government, the secretive 501c(4) that contributed to Mason's pay. It also names current ALEA Secretary Stan Stabler, the Bentley campaign and Mason's company, RCM Communications, among others.

The suit claims defamation of character, invasion of privacy, wrongful termination and reckless conduct, among other things. It says Collier suffered financial and personal harm, and seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

The complaint - as Collier has alleged from the beginning - says he was punished by Bentley, at the direction of Mason, because he refused to lie to the attorney general's office about prosecutorial misconduct alleged by the defense in the case of Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard.

"As a law enforcement officer, I had a duty to uphold the law and to cooperate with law enforcement investigations," Collier said. "When Governor Bentley asked me to lie to a prosecutor from the Attorney General's Office, he was asking me to commit a crime and I refused to comply with that request. That is why Governor Bentley fired me and then participated in a campaign to ruin my name and reputation."

Collier, from the day he initially made the claims, has repeatedly said he would make them under oath. The lawsuit could allow that to happen, and could force others in the case to testify under oath.

The governor's office did not immediately respond to questions about the suit.

Collier attempts to penetrate the sovereign immunity of state officials by suing the governor and Stabler personally, claiming their actions were malicious and fraudulent. He argues that Mason was not a government employee and is therefore not eligible for immunity.

The case lays out much of the same story Collier has given since he revealed the existence of the governor's explicit text messages and audio recordings he claims:

Collier said he learned of the text messages from Stabler. On April 5, 2014, Collier and Chief Ray Lewis, Stabler's supervisor, drove Bentley to a political event in Greenville and confronted Bentley about the text and recording, where Collier advised Bentley that it would be a crime if he used state resources or campaign funds to facilitate a relationship with Mason, and Bentley denied using state resources or campaign funds to facilitate the relationship.

On or about January 11, 2016, Baron Coleman -- a Montgomery radio host and lawyer -- went to the ALEA office requesting to meet with Collier. Coleman alleged that the prosecutor in the Hubbard case had illegally leaked grand jury testimony. "Under Collier's orders, ALEA investigated Coleman's allegations and concluded nothing was done wrong by the Attorney General's Office and closed the file."

Bentley told Collier to tell the Attorney General's Office that the ALEA investigation was still ongoing despite the fact that it was closed. Bentley also instructed Collier to not provide an affidavit. Collier, believing that was illegal, disobeyed Bentley's orders. "Collier, with input from his counsel and the Governor's legal advisor, provided a truthful affidavit to the Alabama Attorney General's Office," the suit states.

Bentley and Mason became furious with Collier. In a February 16 meeting in Bentley's office, "Bentley and Mason screamed at Collier and openly chastised him and his staff for not following Bentley's orders."

Bentley put Collier on medical leave "to punish him for cooperating with the Attorney General's Office and Bentley told reporters that Collier disobeyed Bentley's order to not provide an affidavit." Bentley appointed Stabler as ALEA Secretary.

Perhaps most interesting in the suit, to the people of Alabama, are the interrogatories, or questions to both Stabler and Mason. In those interrogatories, Collier asks, among many other things, about Mason's pay and employment in recent years, whether she has had a parking spot at the Capitol before or after her resignation, or a photo ID.

He asks her to describe her duties as chief political advisor, and asks who paid her, and whether she has worked for the governor in any way since her resignation. He asks that she identify everyone who contributed money to her directly and indirectly, or to her husband's company.

It asks for "any and all cell phone records, including those of 'burner phones' that (Mason) used from January 1, 2010 to present."

It asks Stabler if he saw the sexually explicit text message, which Stabler has publicly denied.

The suit also asks for the return of Collier's "Confidential File and notes that were in his desk drawer when he went out on medical leave."
An Athens man is free after posting bond following his arrest Monday, charging him with second-degree rape of a 14-year-old girl to whom he was related, according to the Limestone County sheriff's department.

Jesse Hunter Putman, 21, of Yarbrough Road was charged for an incident Sheriff Mike Blakely said occurred two years ago.

He was released from Limestone County Jail after posting a $15,000 bond.

Sheriff investigators received the report Monday through the victim's school and the Department of Human Resources. The incident allegedly occurred at the victim's residence, the sheriff's department said.
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Madison County Jail in the center of Huntsville, AL (AL.com)

Madison County Commission Chairman Dale Strong (al.com)

Dale Strong, chairman of the Madison County Commission, sent a blistering letter last month accusing Sheriff Blake Dorning of ignoring the continued lack of discipline within the "troubled Madison County Metro Jail."

Strong's letter, sent to Dorning and the other six elected commissioners, was prompted by the hiring of a new jail administrator, who Strong argues is not qualified for the position. The county is currently being sued over three deaths inside the jail and Strong argues that Dorning refuses to acknowledge the problems.

Strong's two-page letter, dated March 21, concludes with a stiff attack on the sheriff: "Your lack of understanding of the severity and consequences of what has occurred under your leadership throughout your department - with practicality no discipline and your continued arrogance to say 'we have done nothing wrong' as the lawsuits pile up, and while our insurance company continues to authorize payouts of costly settlements because of factual evidence - is baffling to say the least."

He concludes: "It appears more evident this is a pattern of repeated conduct rather than an honest mistake."

Indeed, the lawsuits have piled up as the county has settled sheriff's department cases for a revenge beatdown, for tasing a man on his front porch and for arresting a woman who would not let her estranged daughter in the home. But the multiple lawsuits over jail deaths are still making their way through court.

Plus, the FBI last year said they were looking into injuries to a restrained inmate at the jail.

Strong tells fellow commissioners that Dorning hired a new administrator, Troy Fulk, on March 9 who is not qualified.

Dorning, who limited his interactions with media in recent years, did not sit down for an interview. But he supplied several points in response, and one of those seems to suggest that Strong should butt out.

"Nowhere in the above statute (14-16-1) does it allow the County Commission to operate the jail, provide supervision, act for or be involved in the hiring of Sheriff's Office employees for the jail," reads part of the lengthy response provided by the Sheriff's Department.

Strong has said the sheriff filled the top jail job for about $65,000 a year when the commission had authorized paying far more to recruit someone with experience operating a large jail.

"I don't think he's qualified from the information I received," said Commissioner Bob Harrison of the new boss. "We're looking for someone who had considerable jail administrative experience."

Madison County Sheriff Blake Dorning (bgathany@AL.com)

Harrison told AL.com last week that the commission had told Sheriff Dorning they would pay more. "We told him up to $150,000," said Harrison.

Instead, Troy Fulk, the new administrator, was promoted from within as of March 4. He will receive $65,124.80 a year and the rank of major.

Fulk most recently had worked as a security director for a school system in Manassas, Virginia.

Fulk spent his career in law enforcement in Fairfax County, Virginia, and was in the school security position for one year before taking a job in the Madison County jail last spring.

Fulk was first hired as the jail training coordinator last March. He had been promoted to acting boss after Steve Morrison departed in December after the commissioners refused to renew his contract.

Commissioner Phil Vandiver, when asked about the letter from Strong, said promoting from within does raise questions. "We do want to make sure that in regards to the jail that we get the best people in place there."

Strong argues better qualified candidates were overlooked.

The Sheriff's Department contends that the job was published on the county web site and the American Jail Association site, as well as Monster.com. Fifty-six applicants were screened by a department captain. Three finalists were then scored by a three-member panel, which included retired Huntsville police Chief Lewis Morris.

The other finalists were another employee at the Madison County jail and an employee at a smaller jail in in New York.

Chief Deputy Dave Jernigan said Fulk scored the highest among the finalists. Fulk was finally selected through an interview with Dorning, county attorney Jeff Rich and former county attorney Julian Butler.

"His experience includes 25 plus years in law enforcement," reads the notes from the Sheriff's Department.

But the Madison County jail is a large operation, housing about 850 inmates. And Strong is unimpressed by the process and by Fulk's resume.

Strong wrote: "You selected a candidate that does not meet the criteria set forth in the job description you created, has less than one year working in a jail setting, has neither Bachelor of Science nor a Masters' degree in any field of study, very limited supervision nor managerial experience, zero financial management experience of a multi-million dollar budget and furthermore appears to have never managed more than a handful of employees during any of his previous positions."

Strong contends "the taxpayers of Madison County have been done a disservice in this so-called process orchestrated under your direction."

Sheriff Dorning, through the notes provided to AL.com, argues that the department will create a new chief financial officer position to assist in running the jail. The department also brought in an outside agency to conduct an operational assessment of the jail. The independent review will be provided to the commission and published on the web site.

But the sheriff's department on March 4 wrote to the commission to request a date to make the presentation. The sheriff's department argues that the commission has not responded.

Harrison said he was also disappointed that the sheriff used the "good ole boy" system and promoted from within instead of finding a more experienced administrator.

As for Strong's letter, Harrison said: "I thought it was a little bit incendiary, but I can understand his frustrations."

Commissioner Phil Riddick said he was not aware of the full hiring process, but that the final choice did not have the level of experience that he would have expected. "I kind of have to concur with Dale on this," said Riddick.

Updated at 4:55 p.m. with comment from Commissioner Riddick.
If you're a family looking around Alabama and trying to decide where to put down your roots, a recent ranking might be of interest.

Niche has looked at a range of factors and compiled a list of the best Alabama suburbs in which to raise a family. The factors considered included crime and safety; quality of local schools; access to libraries; housing statistics; percentage of residents between ages 35 and 44 and those 9 years and younger; and availability of childcare and grocery stores.

Here are the top 15 spots:

Mountain Brook (Jefferson County) Vestavia Hills (Jefferson County) Helena (Shelby County) Madison (Madison County) Pelham (Shelby County) Hokes Bluff (Etowah County) Hartselle (Morgan County) Taylor (Houston County) Southside (Etowah County) Saraland (Mobile County) Midland City (Dale County) Montevallo (Shelby County) Rainbow City (Etowah County) Glencoe (Etowah County) Irondale (Jefferson County)

Niche also looked at the top suburbs in the country for raising a family. None of Alabama's made the top 100. If you're curious, the best suburb in the country for raising a family is Scarsdale, New York.

FBI stripper sets off panic

A male stripper set off a panic in Frankfurt after being spotted carrying what appeared to be an assault rifle and a bullet-proof vest with the letters "FBI" on the back.

Police were deployed the city's red-light district after callers reported seeing the man.

The 30-year old man was later found at a bar where he confirmed to police that the items were part of a costume for his act.

Student removed from flight for speaking Arabic

A University of California-Berkeley student said he was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight earlier this month after he said he was overheard making a phone call in Arabic.

Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, an Iraqi refugee, was removed from the flight heading from Oakland to Los Angeles on April 6. A passenger had reportedly become concerned after he overhead the college senior making a phone call in Arabic.

Makhzoomi was later questioned by the FBI and allowed to return to the terminal after determining the phone call was nothing more than a conversation with his uncle.

Clinton's 'donkey of the decade'

Hillary Clinton has a new label for Donald Trump: "donkey of the decade."

Speaking on "The Breakfast Club" radio show in New York, Clinton said Trump's own words have earned him the title.

"He does scare me because what he is saying that he would do is wrong for our country. It is not only offensive to people and makes you cringe, but it is dangerous," Clinton said. "He is setting people against each other, he is inciting violence.

"You don't let the cancer grow bigger and bigger and bigger and then all of a sudden we wake up and we say, 'What the heck has happened to our country?' Everybody needs to be going after him," the former secretary of state said.

Clinton and Trump are both ahead in their respective party's polls in the New York primary.

Kasich gets endorsement from Roosevelt relative

The great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt is endorsing John Kasich for president.

Theodore "Ted" Roosevelt IV, a managing director in investment banking at Barclays, said he's been friends with Kasich for years. The Ohio governor visited the New York home of Roosevelt's great-grandfather earlier this month.

Roosevelt, a conservationist, said he is by far the best-qualified GOP candidate.



Until tomorrow.
David Faulkner on Feb 16.jpg

Rep. David Faulkner, R-Mountain Brook, is sponsor of a bill to require city councils to provide a 30-day notice before voting to raise their pay. (Mike Cason/mcason@al.com)

( )

The Alabama House of Representatives passed a bill today that would block a 233 percent pay raise for the Birmingham City Council passed by the council last year.

The bill, by Rep. David Faulkner, R-Mountain Brook, would require that city councils provide a 30-day notice before voting on a pay raise.

Faulkner said the Birmingham raise brought his attention to the issue, but noted that the 30-day notice requirement would apply to all cities.

"It's about transparency to the public," Faulkner said. "When you're using taxpayer funds you ought to be transparent."

Faulkner said county commissions already have the same 30-day notice requirement.

In August 2015, the Birmingham City Council

to raise the salary of council members from $15,000 to $50,000, effective after the next election in 2017.
arthur orr

Sen. Arthur Orr. (AL.com file photo)

Having a car won't prevent Alabama welfare recipients from continuing to receive benefits under a bill sponsored by Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, that includes an asset test to determine eligibility. The senator said the provision is the biggest misconception about his welfare reform bill, which would also cap the benefit at three years.

"You can still have a car and can still get welfare," Orr told AL.com. He added that children can also have a car and still receive the benefit as long as the vehicle is used to go to work.

The senator is still working on other details of the bill and said his three-year timeframe for ending benefits is open to negotiation. Alabama currently sets Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, colloquially known as welfare, at five years.

"One of the issues we have is the asset testing that several states have started using -- the time requirement of how long you can be on TANF. It's supposed to be temporary. We're at five years. Several states have lowered it," Orr said.

He said his proposed changes to benefits, which includes TANF, food stamps and Medicaid, "is certainly not meant to be punitive in any sort of shape or form," but instead to get those abusing the system off the welfare rolls. The senator said he constantly gets calls from supermarket cashiers, colleagues and constituents "complaining about people with EBT cards at the cash register buying" premium items like T-bone steaks.

Food stamps are "a program for the needy, not people with substantial assets or are earning money on a cash-only basis. So when they claim they have no income, and you can't trace it on a W-2, then look at the assets that they have," he said.

The current bill includes a provision to put a photo ID on EBT cards to prevent recipients from reselling them. Orr conceded that the photo ID requirement "can be costly" and is working with Department of Human Resources Commissioner Nancy Butler to shape the bill.

The legislation is not on the Senate calendar for Tuesday, meaning there are only seven days left in the session for the bill to be brought to the floor of both chambers and passed.

"We're working on getting an amended version to the floor," Orr said.
bentley horizontal by bob gathany huntsville.JPG

Gov. Robert Bentley issued a statement responding to a lawsuit filed by former Alabama Law Enforcement Secretary Spencer Collier.

(Bob Gathany (bgathany@al.com))

Gov. Robert Bentley issued a statement in response to a lawsuit filed today by former Alabama Law Enforcement Secretary Spencer Collier, who accused the governor and others of wrongful termination and defamation.

"Mr. Collier was terminated of his duties at ALEA for cause," Bentley said. "Once the facts and circumstances become public, I am confident that the justification for terminating him will be shown. We will aggressively defend this lawsuit."

Bentley fired Collier last month after he said an internal investigation and ALEA turned up possible misuse of state funds.

Collier said he had done nothing wrong and welcomed an investigation.

In the lawsuit today, Collier said Bentley fired him because he refused to lie to a state prosecutor about the status of an investigation related to the ethics case against House Speaker Mike Hubbard.

Bentley has denied telling any employees to lie.

Edited at 5:23 p.m. to correct headline.
house of representatives feb 9 2016 julie bennett.JPG

(Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com)

A bill that would eliminate Alabama marriage licenses could move into position to pass this week.

The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday is scheduled to consider the bill by Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Range. The Senate passed it 23-3 last month.

If the bill becomes law, marrying couples would no longer apply for a license at county probate offices.

Instead, they would file a document that would be recorded in the probate office.

The document would include an affidavit declaring that they are not already married, are not related, are legally competent and are of legal age.

Sen. Jim Hill, R-Odenville, sponsor of the bill in the House, said he expected the Judiciary Committee to approve it.

The next step would be a vote in the House. Hill said he was uncertain of the likelihood of that.

He sponsored a similar bill during the second special session last year, but it did not pass.

Hill said the purpose is to take probate judges out of the middle of the controversy over same-sex marriage.

"There are probate judges that have serious issues with issuing those licenses," Hill said. "And I think this gets us in a position where they do not have to do so."

The bill would also eliminate the requirement for a marriage ceremony.

Under current law, a marriage must be solemnized within 30 days of the license being issued. The license is voided if that does not happen.

Albritton has said the bill is an effort to calm what he said has been an uproar and confusion over marriage licenses.

After a federal judge tossed out Alabama's ban on same-sex marriages in January 2015, some Alabama probate judges refused to issue licenses to same-sex couples and some stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether.

Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that states could not prohibit gay marriage.

Montgomery County Probate Judge Steven Reed said the bill is unnecessary.

Reed said it raises legal concerns, including that it could weaken some of the documentation required to make sure a couple is legally eligible to marry.

Reed said there were philisophical concerns, too.

He said the legislation brought to mind efforts to quell changes during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, like decisions to close swimming pools and other public facilities rather than allow them to be integrated.

"I really don't understand the need for this legislation," Reed said.

Lee County Probate Judge Bill English, president of the state probate judges association, said the group is not taking a position on the bill.

The House and Senate return to work on Tuesday and are expected to meet three days this week. Eight days remain in the legislative session.

Other issues facing lawmakers:

-- Agreement between slightly different House and Senate versions of the education budget and a pay raise bill for education employees.

-- Gov. Robert Bentley's plan to borrow $800 million with a bond issue to build four new state prisons and close most of the existing ones.

-- A bill that would allocate much of a $1 billion settlement with BP for economic damages from the 2010 oil spill for road projects, with Baldwin and Mobile counties getting the largest share.

-- A bill that would reduce fees paid by payday loan customers and give them more time to repay the loans.

Updated at 4:44 p.m. on April 19 to say that probate judges association is not taking a position on the marriage license bill.
The trial of a former nonprofit CEO accused of health care fraud has now been delayed a half dozen times.

The latest delay came Tuesday when U.S. District Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein moved the trial of Jonathan Dunning, 52, from May 2 to May 23.

The ruling followed a request by Dunning's lawyer, William Athanas, who argued that the exhibit documents were voluminous and in some cases were not made available to the defense team with enough time to go through them.

"Those concerns are heightened by the expectation that the government will seek a lengthy prison sentence - possibly as high as 360 months - if the defendant is convicted," Athanas said in the motion to continue the trial. "Simply put, this is an incredibly complex case with a mountain of discovery and a great deal riding on the outcome."

The case has been marked by several lawyer changes for Dunning and a change of judge. Earllier this year Rothstein replaced Judge L. Scott Coogler. No reason was given for the switch.

Indicted under seal in November of 2014, Dunning was arrested Feb. 2, 2015. He was first scheduled to go on trial April 6, 2015.

He has pleaded not guilty to 112 counts related to health care fraud in what the government calls the diversion of $14 million in federal funds aimed at health care for the poor.

The charges include conspiracy, wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering in connection with his employment or involvement with Birmingham Health Care, Central Alabama Comprehensive Health in Tuskegee, a credit union and a string of for-profit businesses known as the Synergy Entities, according to the government.

Problems were first reported by AL.com and the Birmingham News in 2012 when it was revealed that Central Alabama Comprehensive Health and Birmingham Health Care paid more than $2 million to Dunning's private companies for contracting service, including while Dunning was CEO of the companies.

Dunning is the fourth person indicted in connection with the fraud investigation. The three others have pleaded guilty, including Birmingham Health Care's former CFO Terri Mollica.

Mollica also pleaded guilty to a related case and has been sentenced to 28 months in prison.
Official symposium held for the 500,000 people killed during 1960s communist purge, but truth still elusive for victims.

Jakarta, Indonesia  Sumini travelled from her village in Central Java to the capital to ask just one question: What did I do wrong?

Indonesian men and women in their late 60s and 70s, clearly tainted by a life of struggle, bravely grabbed their first opportunity to speak out in more than 50 years. Voices breaking with emotion, they spoke clearly and undeniably about mass killings, torture, and unlawful detentions that started in 1965.

Sumini, then 18 years old, had joined a womens organisation linked to the Communist Party because she wanted to empower female farmers. Though she survived, she spent years in prison without any trial and faced discrimination formthe rest of her life.



Dialogue held on 1960s purge

The Indonesian governments decision to open this dark chapter has been lauded by human rights advocates, but it was a long time coming. It took years of pressure from activists and the film by Joshua Oppenheimer who gave the world a gruelling inside look with the Act of Killing, but most of all the courage of thousands of survivors who never stopped fighting for justice.

Their testimonies at a government-sponsored symposium in Jakarta were fragments of a long-hidden truth. They reveal a military that was ordered to go on a murder spree in villages around the country after General Suharto took power. The Communist Party, then the second largest in the world, got the blame for a failed coup and the murder of six generals.

READ MORE: How my murdered friend became my story

A process of justice was not enough, Suharto and his troops aided by paramilitary groups, Islamic organisations, and the CIA decided to wipe out anyone remotely linked to the Communists.

Researchers estimate that at least half a million people died. As a result, Indonesia lost a whole generation of intellectuals, farmers, and social activists.

After decades of anti-communist propaganda, the killers still to this day believe they did the right thing. The massacre of 1965 is one of the worst in the 20th century and still divides Indonesians.

The government of President Joko Widodo was the first to break the silence  despite pressure from the military and conservative groups that still insist that talking to victims means giving room to communism. Just last week a discussion organised by survivors before the government symposium was forcefully broken up after threats by a radical group.

But from the start of the Jakarta symposium it was clear that the government was still not prepared to reveal the full truth. A high-ranking general active in 1965 and the governments security minister immediately denied any mass killings took place. Minister Luhut Pandjaitan estimated that fewer than 1,000 people died  a shocking statement for survivors to hear.

READ MORE: The Act of Killing and the consequences of forgetting

They had travelled from all over the country hoping to be able to hear and tell the truth. But instead of walking out angrily, most just shook their heads and continued their mission of truth-telling.



Indonesia conference to discuss communist massacres

The response showed how immune victims have become after decades of official lies, and how firmly they wanted to use this unique  and maybe only  opportunity to tell their side of the story.Their hopes for justice and a formal government apology are slim. But now the government has opened a Pandoras box.

President Joko will have to come up with a solution acceptable to all those millions of Indonesians whose rights have been denied for more than half a century.

A truth and reconciliation commission, South Africa-style, has been mentioned. But so far the government seems only interested in reconciliation  not so much in the truth.
A new method of medical consultation has been developed for the new generations who often juggle with a busy life.

For Mark Norman of London, an increasingly busy life meant that he had to find alternative means to manage his diabetes. As part of a new healthcare trend gaining popularity around the world, Norman has been using Skype to talk to his doctor for the past three years as part of a pilot programme that has been running in Newham, East London, since 2011.

I can nip out of bed, turn on my [computer], and in 30 seconds be talking to my consultant at my own leisure, the 22-year-old hotel worker says.

It was his diabetes specialist nurse at Newham University Hospital who first offered him the option of trying Skype appointments, recognising that Normans life as a psychology student at the University of East London was becoming increasingly busy.

Although initially reluctant to make the change as he had only been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes the summer before he began university, Norman has become convinced of the benefits of this consultation method.

I just wouldnt have gone to the appointments, Norman says. Juggling work, life and diabetes can be a pain. I am now in a better place to control [my diabetes] and Skype has made that easier.

The student is not the only diabetic who has benefited from the programme, which initially offered regular Skype clinics to young people but has now expanded to provide access to all age groups. Since then, patient no-shows (called DNAs  or Did Not Attend) and appointment cancellations dropped to 16 percent from up to 50 percent previously.

Norman admits there are advantages and disadvantages to the scheme: There is a lot less judgement over the internet, he said, but added that sometimes, with work, it is easier to do Skype when you know you should go in to see a doctor. This puts increased responsibility on the individual, he believes, to be honest with themselves about when they might need a physical examination.

Although the doctor-patient relationship still works well for Norman, he recognises the fact that internet consultations mean that it is possible staff wont be able to work out if patients arent coping with their illness without face-to-face interactions.

Skype consultation

Still, the overall success of the Newham clinics has prompted the National Health Service (NHS) of England to update its advice to local healthcare commissioners encouraging the use of Skype and other social media to help keep young people engaged in their diabetes treatments as they transition from child to adult services. As a result, hospitals in Derby and Southampton are already in the process of setting up remote Skype consultations.

But with the NHS undergoing unprecedented financial challenges, it is unsurprising that other health service providers are looking at the potential of expanding their use of remote consultations.

At Newham, approximately $30 for each appointment was saved in consultant time by improving the speed at which doctors can move from one patient appointment to the next. Add to this the reduction in DNAs in an NHS system that saw almost 19 million missed appointments in 2014 at a cost of around $182m for unattended general practitioner (GP) appointments alone, and the logic behind the move to go digital is clear.

WATCH: The Cure  Robots for the elderly

However, a trial of GP Skype appointments in 2014 saw low demand despite high satisfaction. Ninety-four percent of those who had a Skype consultation with their doctor said that they were satisfied or better. Despite patient satisfaction with remote appointments, plans to extend bookable Skype sessions from two a week to five were scrapped after poor demand.

Behind this mixed picture, though, lies a benefit that could drive up the use of video telemedicine. Twenty-eight percent of all those patients involved in the trial claimed to have used the service from their place of work  suggesting that attending doctor appointments during working hours is not feasible for many patients living with long-term debilitating health conditions.

The restructuring of the NHS towards offering specialist care at fewer locations, coupled with patients increased inability to accommodate appointments in their schedules suggest that this telemedicine could be the future of healthcare.

Digital engagement

Kaiser Permanente, a United States-based healthcare provider, introduced video appointments to help overcome the geographical vastness of the US, which often sees patients driving long distances to see specialists for particular ailments.

By 2018, the company is aiming to do more visits by video. Robert Pearl, Kaiser Permanente CEO, said: Video truly will replace a visit as it provides [healthcare] in a way that the person doesnt miss work.

The UK, though, with its less consumer-focused and socialised healthcare model, lags behind in technological innovation. A recent report by the Nuffield Trust found that although 88 percent of UK adults used the internet, with 71 percent connecting via a smartphone, only 2 percent of the population reported any digital engagement with the NHS.

Barnaby Perks, CEO of Psychology Online, a NHS contractor of online mental health chat services, while believing digital uptake in the NHS can be painfully slow, also thinks businesses totally underestimate the regulations surrounding healthcare, particularly those meant to protect patient records and prevent malpractice.

Perks adds that utilising telemedicine through Skype will compromise patient and provider security.

These concerns arent unfounded. A 2015 KPMG survey of 223 healthcare payers and providers found that 80 percent say that their information technology has been compromised by cyber-attacks, with close to half of providers considering themselves unprepared to prevent these attacks.

To address security issues head-on, Airedale NHS Trust developed a partnership with Involve-Visual, an audio-visual technology company, to create special tele-health hubs where qualified nurses can see and speak with patients. The service is currently available to 300 care homes and to 100 people privately  as well as being offered to prisons nationwide  all areas in which it is difficult, costly or risky to travel due to health or security reasons.

The downside is that the NHS needs to provide each person or location with a secure laptop or tablet from which to access the tele-hub. While the technology spend is significantly higher than a Skype app, the Trust cut hospital admissions by 45 percent in the first year of operation, saving hospitals close to $470,000 in the process.

Virtual clinics

The demographic of Skype users may suggest that telemedicine may become a permanent part of the NHS landscape. Psychology Online typically has a self-referring demographic of 24 to 45-year-olds. This chimes with the Newham diabetes clinic, which saw 82 percent of its under-50 patients engage in Skype sessions.

There are still reservations about relying too heavily on Skype clinics. Emma Elvin, clinical adviser at the UK charity Diabetes UK, said there is not enough data or evidence to say how [Skype clinics] should best work in practice yet, adding that more trials are necessary before this means of healthcare is able to expand to different demographics.

It would definitely need to be offered with an element of choice, she says, recognising the possibilities of no internet access, socioeconomic factors, and those patients who simply prefer face-to-face contact.

While recognising there are still unknowns around the clinical risks online consultations might bring and the diversity of its appeal, Elvin is enthusiastic about the potential that Skype clinics have to reduce the number of people who have poorly controlled diabetes  especially in teens and young adults who are often harder to reach.

In East London, Norman, as a young user of the service, agrees: Skype clinics are fantastic for most people who have grown up with the internet, he says.

For me, its as easy as pie.
On February 19, 2004, Azerbaijani Army Lieutenant Ramil Safarov took an axe and bludgeoned to death Gurgen Margaryan, an officer in the Armenian army who was asleep at the Budapest military academy where they were attending English-language courses organised by NATO. After nearly decapitating Margaryan, Safarov stabbed his corpse repeatedly in the chest. Safarov was arrested and tried in Hungarian court. In 2006, he was sentenced to life in prison.

On August 31, 2012, Ramil Safarov was extradited to Azerbaijan, where he was greeted as a hero. As an adoring crowd cheered, Safarov walked the streets of the capital draped in an Azerbaijani flag, carrying a bouquet of roses. He was pardoned by President Ilham Aliyev, promoted to the rank of major and given a new apartment and money by the Azerbaijani Defence Ministry.

I am glad to be back with the Azeri people, Safarov said. Its as if I am born again. I never lost hope of returning to my motherland and believed that the time would come when the supreme commander would resolve this question.

Warning to the West



The small petrostate of Azerbaijan has made headlines in 2012. In May, it hosted Eurovision, the annual singing competition watched by hundreds of millions around the world. As Azerbaijans government spent more than $700 million on promotion and infrastructure in an effort to put its best face forward, activists focused on alerting the world to Azerbaijans atrocious record on human rights.

Azerbaijan criticised ahead of Eurovision

Eurovision was seen as an opportunity to highlight Azerbaijans failings, with the understanding that Azerbaijans international image was of great importance to the Aliyev administration.

The Safarov case makes clear that it is not. While during Eurovision the Azerbaijani government paid lip service to democracy  Azerbaijan is not an authoritarian state  we want to prove this to the whole world an Aliyev aide told the Guardian  they have since brazenly promoted a murderer as a national hero, despite Western condemnation and a possible violation of international law.

Azerbaijani officials portray Safarovs murder of Margaryan as a capsule version of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region which Azerbaijan and Armenia have fought over for decades. The conflict led to the deaths of thousands on each side, a massive refugee crisis for Azerbaijan, and the occupation of the territory by Armenia. Safarov versus Margaryan stems from Nagorno-Karabakh and serves as its representation. Only in this version, Azerbaijan won.

Safarovs moral superiority was apparent even when he was in prison. The Armenians insults towards our people, touching upon our national feelings, forced him to take this step, said Mubariz Gurbanli, a leading member of the ruling New Azerbaijan party. Gurbanli refers to an alleged desecration of the Azerbaijani flag by Margaryan and presents Safarovs response of hacking him to death as moral and justified.

The Safarov case serves as a warning to the West that they should never underestimate the insularity of dictatorships. Dictators struggle to shield citizens from foreign influence, with the result that foreigners come to believe that their influence matters. But the desire to block out the outside world stems from paranoia more than respect and that paranoia plays out in domestic politics  politics that strengthen pride by encouraging enmity.

Azerbaijan does not care what the rest of the world thinks. No action of a foreign power  be it international media or international law  has the resonance of revenge.

When Safarov was released, Azerbaijani officials immediately proclaimed it was for the benefit of the nation. His release will raise the moral and psychological mood of the society, parliament member Zahid Oruj predicted. He was right. Since August 31, Azerbaijanis have lauded Safarov as a hero, and one of the main ways they do so is through digital media.

Unlike most authoritarian states, Azerbaijan does not censor the internet. An open internet has proven valuable for Azerbaijani officials, as it allows them to monitor citizens and publicise the punishment of dissenters in the online forums they frequent, deterring sympathisers from further activism. The Safarov case shows that the open internet is also a useful venue for the spread of nationalism rooted in bigotry, vengeance and pain.

Popular on social media

Tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis have declared their support for Safarov online. His Facebook page has over 49,000 fans. Supporters praise him in poetry, thanking God and the Aliyev regime for his return.

Convicted axe murderer welcomed in Azerbaijan

A picture of him in his regalia as major has over 2,000 likes. On the unofficial Facebook page of President Aliyev, which is followed by over 57,000 people, Safarov was made the cover photo, with a smiling Aliyev in the profile picture below.

On Twitter, jubilant Azerbaijanis tweeted their approval under the hashtag #Xo?G?ldinRamil  Welcome, Ramil.

These posts and tweets were not manufactured by the Aliyev regime. They are genuine expressions of gratitude to a man who murdered another man in his sleep.

In 2011, the government of Azerbaijan launched a propaganda campaign designed to deter citizens from using technologies that connect them with the outside world. The goal of this campaign was to strengthen nationalist sentiment while stigmatising the use of media that may further dissent.

Foreign television programmes were banned as an affront to the national mentality, while domestic television programmes showed family tragedies after young people joined Facebook and Twitter.

In March 2011, the countrys chief psychiatrist proclaimed that social media users suffer mental disorders. As a result, internet use in Azerbaijan has stagnated compared to its neighbours in the Caucasus.

The reaction to Safarov shows that such efforts may be misplaced. The government never needed to promote Safarov as a hero or denounce his detractors. Azerbaijani citizens are doing it on their own and social media is enabling their efforts, validating their veneration of a murderer through clicks and likes.

Not all Azerbaijanis agree with the adulation, but they are in the minority. With Safarov, Azerbaijan is having an online grassroots movement  a movement by Azerbaijanis and for Azerbaijanis, indifferent to international indignation.

Advocates of an open internet have long hoped that openness will augur democratic reform. But an open internet is of little benefit to activists living in a state that punishes them for using it. It is also of little consolation when the state is adept at capitalising on public agony.

The online embrace of Safarov reflects the heartache of Azerbaijans history as well as the ways digital media can strengthen dictatorship. The people spread the cause and the government reaps the glory.

Sarah Kendzior is an anthropologist who recently received her PhD from Washington University in St Louis.
The struggle for the heart of Jerusalem and for the sympathy of its visitors is still wide open.

Israeli tourism officials have been caught red-handed trying to forge history. Gone are the days when Israeli officials in Jerusalem  like the former Israeli mayor Teddy Kollek  would stress ad nauseam the citys religious and cultural mosaic pluralism and diversity.

Todays Israeli officials are throwing down the gauntlet and are attempting to deny  or greatly minimise  everything that is not Jewish in Jerusalem while highly exaggerating the citys Jewishness.





Israels actions were revealed recently when the Tourism Ministry, headed by the right-wings Yair Lavin from the Likud Party, put out a distorted map of the old city of Jerusalem.

The map highlights 57 locations in the old city of which only one Muslim site and five Christian locations are identified. The map includes some 25 so-called Jewish locations about which Israeli tour guides know nothing.

Rich Islamic heritage

The only Muslim location mentioned in the Israeli tourism map can hardly be missed. Nearly a quarter of the old city is dominated by the Haram al-Sharif or al-Aqsa mosque.

READ MORE: Middle East  death by identity

The Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary, includes Islams third holiest mosque, al-Aqsa mosque, the gold-covered Dome of the Rock, the Islamic Museum and al-Aqsa Library, as well as numerous religious and historical locations that reflect 1,400 years of continuous Islamic presence.

While the Israeli tourism map totally reduces the Islamic presence to a single entry, the Christian presence is also greatly diminished to five locations. by

Historic locations throughout the old city also point to graves and other references to the rich Islamic heritage in the city.

The mosque of Omar, which was established by the respected Islamic Caliphate in the 7th century, and is the quintessential location for inter-religious tolerance, is absent from the one-sided Israeli map.

When Caliph Omar Bin Khattab took Jerusalem in 638AD, he refused to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for fear that his followers might destroy the Christian church and he chose instead to pray outside the church where a mosque and a minaret sit, until now deep inside the Christian quarter. They stand as witness to Christian-Islamic mutual respect. Every Arab and Muslim student is taught this story of inter-religious reverence.

While the Israeli tourism map totally reduces the Islamic presence to a single entry, the Christian presence is also greatly diminished to five locations.

Jewish extremists

A Christian pilgrim of the old city would most definitely visit the 14 Stations of the Cross in the Via Dolorosa and the small chapels and churches built around them. The Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, whose towers majestically fill the Jerusalem skyline, is marked on the Israeli map, but not identified.

Of course, Jerusalem, and especially the old city, have suffered continuous Israeli attempts since the 1967 occupation to make it a Jewish city.

Huge settlement efforts have taken place throughout East Jerusalem and a concerted attempt to reduce the Palestinian population using administrative means have been documented by local and international human rights organisations.

Despite these, and the controversial shenanigans of Jewish extremists, the number of Jewish Israelis living in the old city remains under 9 percent of the old citys population.

According to the official Institute of Israeli studies statistical yearbook, of the 38,700 people living in the old city of Jerusalem in 2014 only 3,350 are Jewish Israelis. Palestinian Muslims are 29,090 (75 percent). Palestinian and Armenian Christians are twice as large as the Jewish population numbering 6,260, which amounts to 16 percent of the old citys populace.

READ MORE: Jerusalem  the ignored conflict

Yet despite this combined 91 percent population and between 14 and 21 centuries of history, Christian and Muslim holy places are relegated to a tiny minority of named locations in the Israeli tourism map.

The Israeli map was totally rejected by Palestinian and Jordanian officials, as well as by Christian and Muslim religious leaders. Jordan, whose peace agreement with Israel stipulates that the Hashemite Kingdom, whose monarch is a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammad, rejected the map.

Important to all

Jordans Tourism Minister Nayef Al-Fayez told the Washington DC-based Al-Monitor news website that the attempt to monopolise Jerusalem will not work.

The attempts to divert Jerusalem to one group or one faith is not helpful. Jerusalem is holy for the three monotheistic religions and is rich with many sites for Muslims, Christians and Jews. For us, Jerusalem is important to all, he said.

It is not clear if the one-sided tourism map will continue to be used after all the criticism. Israeli media reported that the Tourism Ministry has no plans to withdraw it and claims that the map is based on advice from tourism experts without naming them.

While the controversial map has been condemned by Jordanian and Palestinian officials as well as by religious leaders, it has yet to produce any public statement from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), the Vatican or from UNESCO.

If anything, the one-sided Israeli map proves that the struggle for the heart of Jerusalem and for the sympathy of its visitors is still wide open. This means that the opportunity to win the battle for a diverse and pluralistic Jerusalem exists. There is a clear need for this multi-religious, multi-cultural city to be reflected as such in maps and other documents.

Daoud Kuttab, an award-winning Palestinian journalist, is a former Ferris professor of journalism at Princeton University.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
UN chief demands the full restoration of the UN mission after Morocco expelled 83 civilian staffers last month.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is urging the Security Council to press Morocco to restore the UN missions role in the disputed territory of Western Sahara.

Ban warned in a report obtained by AFP news agency on Tuesday that staff cuts ordered by Rabat will weaken the MINURSO mission and can be expected to be exploited by terrorist and radical elements.

I call on the Security Council to restore and support the mandated role of MINURSO, said the report sent to the council on Monday.

The UN chief warned of a full-scale war if the peacekeeping missions mandate was not extended for another 12 months.

The risk of a rupture of the ceasefire and resumption of hostilities, with its attendant danger of escalation into full-scale war, will grow significantly in the event that MINURSO is forced to depart or finds itself unable to execute the mandate that the Security Council has set, he said.

Morocco expelled 83 civilian staffers of MINURSO a month ago and shut down a military liaison office, severely crippling operations in what was once a 500-strong mission.

READ MORE: Can the UNs row with Morocco be contained?

The move was in response to a visit by Ban to the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria during which he used the term occupation to refer to the status of Western Sahara, a term fiercely rejected by Rabat.

Bans appeal to the Security Council puts pressure on France, Senegal and Spain which have been in close contact with Morocco over the fate of MINURSO.

Council members are to vote on April 28 on whether to renew the mandate of the mission, which was established in 1991. In his report, Ban said the mission should stay on for a further 12 months, until April 2017.

The UN chief warned that downsizing MINURSO will have significant implications for the stability of the region as well as the credibility of the Security Council and United Nations peacekeeping worldwide.

Last month Rabat accused the UN chief of abandoning his neutrality, objectivity and impartiality. A huge protest was held in the Moroccan capital over Bans comments.

Morocco has regained and been administering the Western Sahara, which was formerly under Spanish colonial rule, since 1975. Rabats official stance is that it is historically part of Morocco.

Polisario Front, which seeks an independent state in the region, waged a guerrilla war until a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1991. But the two sides have been deadlocked since, particularly over a referendum on the territorys future.

A plan for regional autonomy proposed by Morocco has been rejected by Polisario as not enough.
The mothers life-support system that kept her alive for 55 days was turned off hours after the birth.

A brain-dead Polish woman has delivered a baby boy after she was kept alive for 55 days so that she could give birth.

A hospital official said on Tuesday that the premature baby showed no signs of serious complications.

Its rare to successfully maintain a pregnancy for so long, that it is at such an early stage, at 17 or 18 weeks, said Barbara Krolak-Olejnik, head of the neonatal unit at the University Hospital in the southern city of Wroclaw.

The 41-year-old mother was rushed to hospital by ambulance late last year and deemed brain-dead due to brain cancer.

Her whole family wanted us to try to save the child, Krolak-Olejnik told AFP, adding that the baby boy was born in January in the 26th week of pregnancy.

Caesarean section

It was a long 55-day battle. We doctors wanted the little man to grow as big as possible but there came a day when there was a real danger to his life, so we opted for delivery via Caesarean section.

The baby weighed just one kilogramme (2.2lb) at birth, but is now up to three kilogrammes after three months of intensive care and has just left hospital showing no complications.

But we have to be patient and wait and see how he grows, Krolak-Olejnik said, adding that the baby was being bottle-fed and breathing on his own.

The mothers life-support system was turned off hours after the birth.
Addis Ababa declares state of mourning for Gambela victims, gives no new information on fate of 100 kidnapped children.

Ethiopia has declared two days of national mourning for 208 people killed in cross-border cattle raids during which the government says more than 100 children were also kidnapped.

Parliament said in a statement carried by state media that flags would be flown at half-mast across the country, and in its foreign missions, from Wednesday.

It gave no further information about the missing children.

The raids last week happened in three districts of Gambela, in the countrys west, when attackers from neighbouring South Sudan crossed into Ethiopia.

Gambela straddles the border of the two nations and is home to more than 280,000 South Sudanese refugees fleeing a civil war that has raged for more than two years, forcing at least one million people from their homes.

READ MORE: Ethiopia attack  200 people dead, 100 children missing

Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn said on Monday that his government was working with the government in South Sudan to hunt down the attackers.

The attackers were not South Sudanese government forces or rebels, according to Hailemariam.

The atrocities committed by armed militants from South Sudans Murle tribe claimed the lives of 208 mothers and children. They also abducted 102 children, he said, giving a lower figure for the kidnappings than the 108 previously given by government officials.

Ethiopias Information Minister Getachew Reda told Al Jazeera on Sunday that the army had killed at least 60 of the attackers, and that the government was willing to pursue more across the border.

Cross-border cattle raids, often involving Murle tribesmen from South Sudans Upper Nile and Jonglei regions, are not uncommon in the area. Previous attacks, however, were much smaller in scale.

Follow Hamza Mohamed on Twitter: @Hamza_Africa
Head of PEGIDA movement is expected to appear in court over inciting racial hatred against refugees.

The founder of Germanys anti-Islam movement, PEGIDA, will appear in court on hate speech charges for branding refugees cattle and scum on social media.

Lutz Bachmann, founder of the far-right Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident movement, was charged in October with inciting racial hatred through a series of widely shared Facebook posts.





The trial on Tuesday will be held under tight security in Dresden in the former communist east, the birthplace of PEGIDA, which bitterly opposes Chancellor Angela Merkels liberal migration policy that brought more than a million asylum seekers to Germany last year.

The court said the 43-year-olds comments, which date back to 2014, also disrupted public order and constituted an attack on the dignity of refugees.

If found guilty, Bachmann could face between three months and five years in jail.

The comments were published in September 2014, shortly before PEGIDA started life as a xenophobic Facebook group.

The group initially drew just a few hundred supporters to demonstrations in Dresden before gaining strength, peaking with rallies of up to 25,000 people in early 2015.

Also on Tuesday, police arrested five people near Dresden whom they suspected of forming a far-right militant group, according to Reuters news agency. The public prosecutors office said they were preparing attacks on asylum seekers using explosives.

Criminal invaders

Bachmann has repeatedly labelled the newcomers criminal invaders while also railing against traitor politicians and the liar press, whom he blames for jointly promoting multiculturalism.

At PEGIDAs weekly rally in Dresden on Monday evening, Bachmann made no reference to his trial but hurled a barb at the row over a German comedian who has written a satirical poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Popular comic Jan Boehmermann could be convicted under the rarely enforced section 103 of the criminal code  insulting organs or representatives of foreign states.

A trained chef and head of a public relations agency, Bachmann has previously been convicted of drug, theft and assault charges.

READ MORE: Turkeys Erdogan files case against German comedian

In the late 1990s, he left Germany for South Africa to avoid a jail term, but was extradited two years later and served more than 12 months behind bars in Germany.





In the current heated political climate, the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party also made strong gains in recent state elections on the back of a protest vote against Merkels open-door policy on refugees.

This week, AfD deputy leader and member of the European parliament Beatrix von Storch described Islam as a political ideology that is incompatible with the German constitution.

Aiman Mazyek, chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, accused the party of riding a wave of Islamophobia.

It is the first time since Hitlers Germany that there is a party which discredits and existentially threatens an entire religious community, he told AFP news agency.

Germany is home to about four million Muslims, and many of the countrys most recent arrivals adhere to the faith.
Jerusalem  There is mounting evidence that Israeli ambulance crews are withholding treatment from Palestinians injured during a wave of attacks over the past six months, according to rights groups.

Physicians for Human Rights in Israel, a medical watchdog group, found that wounded Palestinians had been left untreated for as long as two hours.

In some cases, medical teams are suspected of failing to tend to the injuries of suspected attackers as revenge, in the expectation that they will die from their wounds.

In parallel, says the group, Israeli soldiers regularly deny Palestinian crews in the occupied territories access to injured Palestinians in violation of international agreements. Palestinian ambulances have been regularly fired on and paramedics attacked as they tried to reach the scene.

READ MORE: West Bank shooting: Israel does whatever it wants

Physicians for Human Rights accused Israels leading medical bodies  the Israeli Medical Association, which lays down ethical codes, and Magen David Adom, which supervises ambulance services  of ignoring the evidence it has collected of such abuses.

Israel by Mustafa

Red Cross for these violations until it is prepared to follow internationally accepted codes of conduct.]

We have seen no serious response to our complaints, no investigations, not even an attempt to meet us. They dont appear to want to give answers, Mor Efrat, a researcher for the rights group, told Al-Jazeera.

Concern that some ambulance crews are adopting a policy of denying Palestinians treatment has been heightened by the increasing role of medical teams located in illegal Jewish settlements.

These paramedics appear to be openly flouting internationally established principles of neutrality that all medical staff are supposed to observe.

In December the leaders of United Hatzalah, a settler ambulance service implicated in several cases in which Palestinians have been refused treatment, visited a leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi, Chaim Kanievsky, to receive instructions on what to do with Palestinians injured during attacks.

According to a report on the settlers website Israel National News, Kanievsky told them that if the injured Palestinian was in a life-threatening condition, they should leave him or her to die. Other rabbis have made similar calls.

The issue of Israels treatment of injured Palestinians was thrust into the spotlight late last month when a soldier from the Israeli armys medical corps was caught on video executing a badly injured Palestinian in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, aged 21, had been shot and wounded during a suspected knife attack on a checkpoint. Before the medical corps soldier, identified as Sergeant Elor Azaria, executed him by firing a bullet into his head, al-Sharif was left bleeding on the ground for more than 10 minutes.

Both army medics and two civilian ambulance teams, one of them United Hatzalah, refused to treat him. After the video was publicised, Sgt Azaria was arrested.

On Monday, an Israeli military court charged the soldier with manslaughter and inappropriate military conduct. However, there has been an outpouring of support for him, from the Israeli public, politicians and rabbis. Efrat, of Physicians for Human Rights, said the failure by both the Israeli Medical Association and Magen David Adom to speak out against abuses committed by Israeli medical staff created the climate that made possible the events in Hebron.

Leonid Eidelman, head of the Israeli Medical Association, told Al-Jazeera the criticisms were unfair and that his organisation had stated clearly that no political or personal preferences should influence treatment of wounded Palestinians.

INFOGRAPHIC: The plight of Palestinian prisoners

The criticisms of ambulance crews follow a heated debate among Israels medical authorities about whether staff should abide by the Geneva Conventions, which require them to remain neutral at all times and prioritise treatment based solely on the severity of injuries.

ZAKA, an Israeli organisation of community medical volunteers, has backed members who refuse to treat Palestinians before Israeli Jews. By contrast, Eli Bein, the head of the Magen David Adom, has said he expects ambulance staff to follow international humanitarian law.





Nonetheless, Magen David Adom has justified the failure of its paramedics to treat al-Sharif in Hebron last month, claiming they were waiting for authorisation from the Israeli army.

Army commanders told the Haaretz newspaper the claim was unfounded and was being used as a pretext for delaying treatment. The stance of the Israeli Medical Association has been equally ambivalent, according to critics.

In 2008 the Association adopted an ethical code  based on a Talmudic injunction that Charity begins at home  to treat Israelis before Palestinians. Under pressure from Physicians for Human Rights, the code was quietly revoked in December.

Doctors told the Times of Israel website that the Association was afraid of a political backlash if it publicised the change. Whatever their official positions, these bodies are not speaking out clearly against violations of medical ethics. And they are certainly not taking any action, Efrat said.

In addition to last months incident in Hebron, Physicians for Human Rights have highlighted several other clear cases of medical violations. One of the most disturbing relates to 19-year-old Muhannad Halabi, who was shot during an attack in the Old City of Jerusalem last October. Witnesses, including an Israeli medic, told the watchdog group that Halabi was left untreated for two hours before paramedics pronounced him dead.

Israeli soldiers fired stun grenades at a Palestinian crew that tried to reach him. A request from Physicians for Human Rights to Israels justice ministry to investigate the incident has gone unanswered.

READ MORE: Relative calm at al-Aqsa compound is deceiving

In a second incident, a week later in the Old City, a video shows Palestinian paramedics being beaten and pushed away as they try to reach Basel Sidr, aged 19. Their medical equipment was also damaged. Witnesses said an Israeli ambulance crew looked on for 20 minutes before a medic approached Sidr to check his pulse and declare him dead.

In another video, paramedics are shown denying treatment to Saad al-Atrash, who was shot at least six times last October by soldiers at a checkpoint in Hebron. Witnesses say he was left for half an hour lying in the street before being evacuated to hospital, where he died of his wounds. There are strong suspicions that al-Atrash was shot by a trigger-happy soldier, in what Amnesty International called an especially egregious example of unlawful killing.

In another case, last November, 21-year-old Mohammed al-Shawbaki was left untreated by three Israeli ambulance crews for 30 minutes, while a Palestinian crew was blocked from approaching.

Efrat said they had also filed complaints to the Israeli police and army about 18 incidents in the past six months where Palestinian medical teams had been prevented from caring for the wounded. Only one investigation had been opened.

Euro-Med Monitor, an international human rights group based in Geneva, has collected evidence of a further four cases where Israeli paramedics violated the Geneva Conventions by denying Palestinians treatment.

They include Ahmed Manasreh, a 13-year-old Palestinian accused of a stabbing attack in East Jerusalem last October. Videos show a Magen David Adom ambulance driving past Manasreh as he lies bleeding in the street, having earlier been run down by an Israeli vehicle.

Evidence of denial of treatment is likely to add to the pressure on two global organisations  the World Medical Association, and the International Committee of the Red Cross  to investigate the actions of their Israeli partner organisations.

A group of UK doctors launched a campaign earlier this year demanding that the World Medical Association expel the Israeli Medical Association for failing to act against Israeli doctors involved in the torture of Palestinians.

A number of reports by human rights groups suggest that, in violation of medical ethics, Israeli doctors are treating Palestinians who have been tortured in Israels prisons and interrogation centres. The documented abuses range from physical and sexual assaults.

A spokesman for the World Medical Association told Al-Jazeera it was not aware of the new allegations and would be discussing them with the Israeli Medical Association.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Magen David Adom was an independent emergency service and any issues would be addressed internally by the movement.

Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian politician and physician, said there was overwhelming evidence that Israeli ambulance crews were consistently and systematically denying treatment to wounded Palestinians.

Israel should be removed from the [International Committee of the] Red Cross for these violations until it is prepared to follow internationally accepted codes of conduct, said Barghouti.
An Israeli court has convicted an Israeli man of kidnapping and killing 16-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir after it rejected the defendants defence team plea of insanity.

The court ruled on Tuesday that Yosef Haim Ben David, 33, was sane and in control of his actions when he and his accomplices kidnapped and murdered Abu Khdeir on July 2, 2014.

Ben David was initially convicted last November of murder, kidnapping for the purpose of murder, and assault, but the court postponed the conviction until a psychological evaluation of Ben David was conducted after he claimed insanity.

Abu Khdeir was walking to his home in the Shuafat neighbourhood of East Jerusalem when he was kidnapped and forced into a car and taken to a Jerusalem forest where he was beaten and burned alive.

Ben David confessed to police that he planned to kidnap and murder an Arab.

Israel court finds two guilty over Palestinians murder

Abu Khdeirs father, Hussein, told Al Jazeera from his home in Jerusalem that although the verdict is right, it will not bring back his child.

Our hearts are broken for ever. My son Mohammed was burned once by these terrorists, but we feel that we are getting burned every day ever since we lost him, Hussein said.

He added that he and his wife had to endure almost two years of arduous court proceedings that often lasted up to eight hours in order to reach this point.

The murder of our son has changed our lives for ever. We suffer from depression and we cannot go on with our lives because we keep thinking of Mohammed and what happened to him, Hussain said.

He also accused the Israeli justice system of racism, saying it has been dragging its feet because the terrorists in this case happened to be Jewish.

He added: If Arabs were accused of terrorism, the case would have ended with conviction in two or three sessions.

Autopsy shows Palestinian teen burned alive

Lawyer for the Abu Khdeir family, Mohannad Jbara, who spoke to Al Jazeera via phone from Jerusalem, said the conviction was the right decision by the court.

We are glad that the court has finally moved to convict the defendant and agreed with our position that he should be held responsible for his horrific crime, Jbara said.

The sentencing hearing is set for May 3, according to Jbara, who expects the court to hand down a life sentence at the very minimum, as stipulated by the Israeli law, and because of the horrific nature of the crime.

Two other defendants, who were minors at the time of the crime, were convicted earlier and sentenced to 21 years and life in prison.

Jbara said that with this conviction, the court had opened the door for Abu Khdeir family members, who were designated as victims or terror under Israeli law, to petition the Israeli interior ministry to demolish the homes of the convicted Israelis, who live in the illegal Israeli settlement Adam, in the occupied West Bank.

He also plans to submit requests to the government to revoke the citizenship of the convicted Israelis, in accordance with Israeli laws.

This is an important step for the family because we want the Israeli government and justice system to treat the Palestinians who are victims of terror acts committed by Israelis as equal to what Israel considers as Palestinian acts of terrorism towards Israelis, he added.

Al Jazeera tried several times to reach officials from the Israeli government to comment on this case but no one answered the phone or email by the time of publication.

Follow Ali Younes on Twitter: @ali_reports
Effort to form unity government and end civil war thrown into limbo after return of Riek Machar is repeatedly delayed.

Juba, South Sudan  The future of South Sudan has been thrown into limbo, as the expected return of South Sudans rebel leader Riek Machar has been repeatedly delayed.

Machar was due to return to Juba on Monday to be sworn in as the first Vice President of South Sudan.

Since December 2013, South Sudan has been engulfed in a bloody civil war that has killed at least 50,000 and displaced 2.3 million people.

A peace deal signed in August between President Salvia Kiir and Machar laid the framework for peace, but it has yet to be implemented.

Machars return is widely seen as essential to forming a unity government, an important step in ending the countrys civil war.

The return of Machar is a significant moment for the future of South Sudan  The Transitional Government of National Unity provides the opportunity to unite and stabilise the country, a Western diplomat in South Sudan told Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity around the subject.

Dispute over troop numbers

Machars arrival in Juba has been delayed because of a disagreement over the number of opposition troops travelling with Machar and his chief of staff, Simon Gatwech Dual, who is under United States and United Nations sanctions.

The opposition has demanded that Dual return to Juba along with the return of Machar.

It was proposed that Dual be flown from Gambela, Ethiopia, by an Ethiopian Airlines flight that was funded by the US government, according to Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, head of foreign affairs for the SPLA-IO, the opposition faction of the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement.

Because the US cannot fund an individual under its own and UN sanctions, that plan was scrapped, Gatkuoth and other sources told Al Jazeera.

The UN mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) was then supposed to fly Dual along with 45 troops to Juba on Saturday, April 16, according to Gatkuoth.

He was ready to be flown with two helicopters to Juba, one was taking 23 [troops] and the other 22 [troops]. All of a sudden they were saying the flights were not available until April 20, Gatkuoth said over the phone from Gambela, Ethiopia.

There is no such plan with UN aircraft, said Ariane Quentier, spokeswoman for UNMISS in an email.

The opposition says that it found a good samaritan to charter a plane for Dual on Monday, before the expected arrival of Machar.

Q&A: The future peace in South Sudan

Dual was supposed to fly to Juba with 45 troops, and Machar was scheduled to arrive later with 162 troops, as part of his presidential guard, according to Gatkuoth.

None of the planes arrived on Monday, and the county has been thrust into a political waiting game.

South Sudanese Minister of Information and Broadcasting Michael Makuei Lueth said on Tuesday that Duals plane did not get clearance to land because it did not go through the proper channel. He said that Dual could only arrive with 40 troops, and Machar cannot travel with any troops.

Machars protection force is already on the ground with all of their armaments. He does not need any additional armed forces or arms in Juba, Lueth said in a statement to journalists on Tuesday.

Both parties agreed to have 1,410 troops located in Juba, Lueth said, and there are already 1,370 opposition soldiers in the capital.

Lueth said that a joint military committee between the rebels and opposition, known as JMCC, must approve the armament of the 40 troops, and be verified by a group of international monitors, CTSAMM.

As of Tuesday night, the resolution of the disagreement over the number of troops travelling with Dual and Machar is unknown, but a spokesperson for Machar said he will be arriving [In Juba] on April 20 if all goes well.
Syrian government negotiator says his side is pushing for an expanded government under Bashar al-Assads rule.

The Syrian governments chief negotiator has said that his side is pushing for an expanded administration led by President Bashar al-Assad, and that Assads own future was not up for negotiation.

The Western-backed Syrian opposition said on Monday that it was taking what it called a pause from UN-sponsored talks in Geneva aimed at ending the five-year conflict.

The opposition wants some form of transitional governing body with full executive powers  but without Assad.





But Bashar Jaafari told Lebanese TV news channel al-Mayadeen on Tuesday that a bigger government was needed to preserve the countrys existing institutions.

In Geneva, we have one mandate only: to arrive at an expanded national government. This is our mandate this is the goal we strive to achieve, Jaafari said on Tuesday.

On Monday, Jaafari accused Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar  all opposition backers  of trying to derail the talks after the rebels suspended their participation.

Read more: Syria rebels declare new offensive on government

There has been a decision  in Saudi Arabia, in Turkey and in Qatar to derail inter-Syrian decision-making, he said.

They do not want there to be a dialogue between Syrians  they want to make the Geneva negotiations fail.

Jaafari said the opposition and the countries that support it were annoyed because of the progress being made by the Syrian army on the ground.

A strained ceasefire

The UN struggled on Monday to keep the troubled talks on track, as the opposition suspended formal participation, accusing the government of repeated violations of a fragile ceasefire that has been in place since February.





The main opposition bloc in Geneva, the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), accused the government of sending a message that it did not want a political solution, but a military solution that the opposition said would destroy the country.

HNC coordinator, Riad Hijab, said during a press conference in Geneva that there could be no solution in Syria if Assad remained in power.

There is no solution in Syria if Bashar al-Assad is present. We came to Geneva for a political transition in Syria, but the government does not want a political solution because it knows such a solution is the end of the regime.

We will not be here in Geneva negotiating any more while our people are starving and living under bombardment, Syrians pay blood for time we are wasting here in Geneva. Hijab said.

WATCH: Anyone who shows the truth is an enemy

The ceasefire has been strained to breaking point, particularly around the divided city of Aleppo, with each side blaming the other for an escalation that has underlined the huge challenge facing peace talks that are currently being held in Geneva.

The ceasefire, which was supposed to buttress the talks, had reduced violence despite alleged violations on both sides.

The truce has held in most of Syria, except in the north, where it has practically collapsed. Al-Nusra Front, excluded from the agreement, is deeply rooted in the parts of northern Syria controlled by opposition forces, complicating the oversight of the truce.

But United Nations peace envoy Staffan de Mistura insisted that the ongoing round of indirect discussions, which began on April 13, would continue through the week as planned.

According to the UN, more than 250,000 people have been killed and millions have fled the country since Syrias conflict erupted in 2011.
Latin American nations lower house has voted in favour of the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff.

Thousands of protesters gathered outside Congress on Sunday, some in tears and some euphoric, as the votes were counted.

One MP dedicated his vote to a man who had tortured Rousseff under Brazils military government.

She faces accusations that she hid the extent of Brazils budget deficit during her re-election campaign in 2014.

Many who have voted against her in Congress are implicated in corruption scandals.

So is Rousseff truly a crook? Or just a scapegoat?

And if she leaves office, whats next for Brazil?

Presenter: Hazem Sika

Guests:

Joao Paulo Peixoto  Political Scientist at the University of Brasilia.

Mark Langevin  Director of the Advisory Firm BrazilWorks.

Francisco Dominguez  Head of the Latin American Studies Research Group at Middlesex University.
For the first time in nearly 20 years, the UN is holding a special session on drug policy.

Around the world, experts are questioning the conventional wisdom that says to eradicate drugs, you have to punish the people who produce and consume them.

The United States was the architect of the so-called war on drugs.

Now, a number of its states are either considering or have already legalised cannabis. Similar moves towards decriminalisation or liberalisation of drug policy are happening in Canada, Mexico and Colombia and have already happened in Uruguay and Portugal.

Is the global debate on drug policy at a turning point?

Presenter: Dareen Abughaida

Guests:

Daniel Wolfe  Director of the International Harm Reduction Development Programme at the Open Society Foundations.

Danny Kushlick  Head of External Affairs at the Transform Think-Tank, that campaigns for an end to the drug war.

Tariq Zafar  Executive Director of the Nai Zindagi Trust, rights based health and social services for people affected by drug use, HIV and Aids.
Jenna Horner prefers dead flowers.

Her studio  a subleased room in a friends Gainesville home  is full of flowers hung upside-down, pinned to twine and dried along the walls.

A chest filled with fabric collected from customers sits under a loft bed, and an easel holds works in progress an arms length away.

Her paint-covered desk is littered with scraps, prints, samples, an Apple computer and a pot of homemade paste.

The voice of Aretha Franklin vibrates from her record player and out the window through which a spring breeze makes its way inside.

The 24-year-old sees art in a different light. Dead flowers and pieces of tattered cloth can be arranged into a story that says something about the materials owner.

Part of the fun for me is kind of chasing that narrative and finding something really special, she said.

  

Horners family moved to Gainesville when she was 10.

She considers Alachua County her true home, because its where most of her memories took place.

After graduating from Kanapaha Middle School and Buchholz High School, Horner decided it was time for something new, so she moved to Orlando and attended Valencia College.

I didnt know what I wanted to do, and I wanted to explore, she said. I felt like I would learn more by going somewhere else.

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Horner quickly learned she hated the city.

She missed the small-town feel of Gainesville, where she recognized people at the grocery store and had a network of friends and family.

Im a big fan of simplicity in general  in my work and in life, she said. Being in Orlando, things were just so much more complicated. People werent very friendly, and it just felt like a very temporary place.

In 2012, she took a break from Valencia and took a summer oil painting class at Santa Fe College.

Horner learned more in one summer than she had in all her time in Orlando. Her professor, Dan Stepp, then convinced her to apply for UFs advanced painting program.

Her life changed with the opening of an acceptance letter.

From 2013 to 2014, she studied painting and perfected her passion. Her last project as a student would inspire her career to come.

I was experimenting with working with multiple materials and implementing my old things in my paintings, she said. I found when I graduated that I wanted to kind of continue experimenting.

Now, two years after graduation, Horner has made a career out of experimenting with art.

Painting with a Twist hired Horner to teach people the art of painting on canvas and drinking wine.

She also sells her work at Gainesville art markets, Artwalk and directly to customers who commission her.

Im not a 9-to-5 person, she said. I like being scattered. I feel more comfortable that way.

Molly Donovan Jenna Horner, left, shows samples of the art she is making for her yoga instructor, Samantha Jones. Horner is a Gainesville-based multimedia artist who incorporates peoples belongings into her works.

  

To Horner, art is another form of storytelling.

When local sisters lost their mother to cancer several years ago, they saved sentimental materials to help them remember.

Horner said the project is her most sentimental yet, and that she will make the sisters something that lasts forever.

Her yoga instructor, Samantha Jones, found fabric at a friends garage sale and commissioned Horner to use the material years later.

The friend was moving away, and Jones wanted something to keep them close.

I kept holding on to it for three years, Jones said. I didnt know how to get rid of it, because I liked it so much.

Horner offered to incorporate the fabric into a painting. She often uses fabric as a stencil or to add texture to paintings.

Its just kind of interesting because theres that repetition of, Its going to be in my house and Im supporting another artist by commissioning the painting, Jones said. Its sentimental to me in that way.

Creekside Community Church recently commissioned Horner to collect materials from the entire congregation and use them in a big painting for the church.

She said it will be her first time creating a materials painting for an entire community of people.

Im hoping I can find some really great stories in there, Horner said. Im collecting materials in the next couple weeks and then Im gonna get crankin on that one.

  

Molly Donovan Pictured are the dried flowers Horner has collected from customers and hung to preserve them for use in art.

Sometimes Horner struggles, but she wouldnt change a thing.

Her peers said pursuing an art degree was a waste of time and money. She said seven people enrolled in her program and less than half now work in the field full-time.

Many people, she said, quickly find out whether art should be their career or hobby.

Theres a really fine line there, and I think it comes down to discipline.

Though she didnt sell a single piece in February and her car broke down the same month, Horner said she stays optimistic.

Its tough, but I dont think Why art? has ever been a question for me, she said. Its always been, This is what I do. This is who I am.

In March, she sold 12 pieces.

Horner said she prefers to do what she loves and do it well. The future, she said, is bright.

I have definitely had moments where I have kicked a painting down a staircase, sat on the floor and cried wondering where rent would come from, she said. But even then, my brain has never even come to a place where I thought that there was something else out there for me.

@mollyidonovan

mdonovan@alligator.org

Horner examines one of her pieces in her Gainesville studio; though she makes art to sell, she also makes art for pleasure, like the piece she holds.
Since November, UFs first Latina Student Body President has donated over $5,000 of her salary to help first-generation students.

We do this job for the students, never for the perks, she said.

Access Party won the Spring 2015 election with the highest voter turnout in the last decade: 12,742 students. Access took a majority of Senate seats, a feat last accomplished in 1999, according to Alligator archives.

Joselin Padron-Rasines, who won by 124 votes, said the past year has been a challenge, both as president and in Senate.

I believe that weve definitely been a more visible administration, she said.

Her administrations term ends today.

After winning last years election, Access began implementing its platform, she said.

During Summer, Student Body Treasurer Nicholas Carre said he amended the budget, getting bipartisan approval between Access and Swamp. Padron-Rasines said her administration faced opposition since taking office.

Being an independent party in Student Government is hard because there are systematic problems, she said.

During the first weeks of office, Executive Branch agency chairs were left open for 105 days. Padron-Rasines, the vice president, the treasurer, the Senate president, the Senate pro-tempore and the Budget and Appropriations chair argued over nominations.

In the Fall, Padron-Rasines filed a case to the UF Supreme Court, stating it was unconstitutional for those members to vote twice: once during the nomination process and once during the Senate approval process. The court ruled in her favor.

Despite the tension in Senate, the three executive members made efforts to improve SG, Padron-Rasines said.

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Student Body Vice President Kevin Doan said the Health Affairs Cabinet hosted the first Mental Health Awareness Week in November to help promote on-campus student services and destigmatize mental illness.

Student Government is just doing its part to help create that culture of care, he said.

When it came to advocating for lowering graduate student fees, Padron-Rasines said she made her voice heard during Board of Trustees meetings.

Graduate students are students. Im Student Body President. Its part of my role, she said.

UFs Graduate Assistants United reached an agreement with UF for a $430 raise and a $50 fee relief in January, according to Alligator archives.

SG also successfully advocated for Norman Hall funding.

Matthew Hoeck, director of External Affairs, said SG took students to Tallahassee to advocate for the College of Educations building. UF secured $14.1 million from the Florida Legislature.

I think those kind of campaigns were very successful, and I hope that they continue, Hoeck said.

Carre and the Dean of Students Office worked to create the Gator Career Closet, from which students can borrow professional clothes.

It is set to open in Summer B, Padron-Rasines said.

SG has also established 63 gender-neutral bathrooms across campus in housing, the Reitz Union and academic buildings.

Padron-Rasines said her administration was able to better serve students by donating their salaries to the Machen Florida Opportunity Scholars Program.

The students arent there to serve your own political desires or your own political ambitions, she said. Youre in this position because students elected you to serve them.

@MelissaGomez004

mgomez@alligator.org
Animal welfare is an issue often overlooked by a vast majority of people. When consuming animal products, individuals often dont realize the suffering and pain that results from the industry. As a society, it is important for us to understand the origins of the products we consume and to place economic pressure on companies that exhibit blatant disregard for animal suffering. Together, we have the ability to effect positive change in the industry by manipulating supply and demand, a process that has proven to be tremendously effective thus far. The recent policy shifts of the Carnival Corporation and Royal Caribbean Cruises are just two examples of the power consumers have to sway the policies of large corporations.

Carnival and Royal Caribbean, two of the largest cruise service providers in the world, have recently committed to switching over to 100-percent-cage-free eggs on all of their ships within the next decade. Royal Caribbean announced in December it would complete the transition by 2022, and Carnival followed suit a few weeks later, declaring a goal date of 2025.

Cage-free eggs stray from the standard methods employed by most industrial farms, in which battery cages are used for the purpose of efficiency. Chickens in cages are kept extremely close together with very little room to move. They cannot spread their wings, nor can they lay eggs in nests. In fact, the battery cages in which these chickens have to live the entirety of their short lives are often the size of a single piece of letter-sized paper. As a result of this intensive confinement, many chickens end up pecking and biting at one another in an effort to get more space.

Although chickens are still locked inside without being able to venture outdoors in cage-free farming, this method allows the animals to stretch their wings, make nests and dust-bathe. These small improvements provide chickens with much better lives. Unfortunately, cage-free egg farming is still inherently cruel, with chicks having the tip of their beaks burned off, male chicks being killed soon after hatching and other chickens being slaughtered at a very young age. Still, by encouraging companies to make the switch, millions of chickens in the future will have a much better quality of life than those that came before.

Carnival and Royal Caribbean are now part of a growing trend of large companies that have responded to public pressure by changing their policies. Theyve joined the ranks of companies including Subway, the Costco Wholesale Corporation and Dunkin Donuts that have recently announced timelines for switching over to cage-free eggs. The cruise companies are particularly relevant to residents of Florida because their headquarters are located in the state. The proximity they have to us as businesses allows us to exert more pressure, as it is ultimately the citizens and tourists in our state who utilize their services. As can be seen in this example, we can levy tremendous pressure on the other companies that source animal products from farms that use inhumane practices. The transition from battery-cage to cage-free eggs is a step in the right direction for the egg industry, but it isnt the final step in the fight for animal rights.

As consumers, it is important to understand the influence we have in reforming industry practices, regardless of the social issue. The only way to force the hands of massive corporations is to make change financially necessary. By consuming products from businesses that are more aware of animal rights, we create a standard for all industries. And by applying continuous pressure on companies that maintain unethical policies, we can strive for progress in all industries. With consistent and organized pressure, we can persuade all companies to adopt this vital shift and ensure increased animal welfare.

Praveen Varanasi is the president of Vegan Eating for Gators and a campus coordinator for The Humane League.
Let's get this out of the way: Back in early 2015, I had a visceral, negative reaction to nail art. I was (and still am) a minimalist, and nail art was the antithesis of minimalism. This was back when glitter-and-striped patterns overpowered simple, geometric ones, and I wanted no part of it. One trip to Valley Nails in New York City later (shout-out to Misleidys), I was sporting a white-with-gold-striping-oh-my-god-who-am-I nail art. I've come a long way since then, trying out marble nails, a reverse French manicure, and now, this amazing linear nail-art design by Eda Midori, more popularly known as @ladyfancynails. Midori, who specializes in architectural, often minimal nail art (but isn't afraid of a little color, unlike me), stopped by Allure HQ to film a DIY video of a design she dreamed up on the spot.

Midori finds inspiration from designers and artists like Chromat, Richi Mnsi, Omndi, Geneva L. White, and Sasha Katz, she says. And like any good nail artist, she came armed with a reference point and an impressively steady hand, so she went to work creating this linear design freehand. "A helpful tip is to stabilize your hand by propping it on the table or a flat surface," she says. "This allows for more control over your movements." Using Essie nail polish in Birthday Suit and Urban Outfitters nail polish in White, here's how Midori executed the look:

And here are the steps:
           2005     ..        




AR's Editor Joe Shea Talks About Elections On Iranian TV Bear Stearns Saved By Fed As Lehman Bros. Falters; Major Bank

Failure Looms Over Wall Street, Sends Markets Into 200-Pt. Dive Lie Upon Lie Five Years Into the Iraq War

The Administration Still Churns Out Lies by Randolph Holhut A Small Tragedy Even at 90, As Friends Turn Cool

She Knows the Show Must Go On by Joyce Marcel I'll Take Me Imagine John Wayne or Arnold

In Heels, Silk and a Girdle by Elizabeth Andrews Sen. Nelson Calls For New Fla. Primary; Gov Crist Backs 'Do-Over' Who'll Win? Ask Spock Spock.com Engine Predicts Winners

By Site Searches; It Can be Wrong by Jay Bhatti Chatting Up The Cat God Gave Me Dominion Over Him

But I Think He's a Non-Believer by Constance Daley Death of a Thug The Life and Horrors of Suharto by Andreas Harsono ___________________________ This Just In Sierra Club: McCain Ducked All 15 Key Votes On Green Laws (AR) A Work By AR's T.S. Kerrigan Is Chosen As 'Best Poem' By Wordpress Site Murder At Mile 63

The Deadly Assault and

Bush Administration Cover-Up

by S. Eben Kirkesby

and Andreas Harsono 5427 14th St. West, Bradenton, FL 34207 $6.99 Fish Fridays! Manatee Co.'s Only 24-Hr.

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AFTER 5 YEARS, WE'RE STILL LIED TO ABOUT IRAQ by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Next week is the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And it is likely that sometime in the next couple of weeks, the 4,000th American soldier will die in Iraq. [MORE] Momentum

OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. - It's 1931, and a 14-year-old girl is standing alone on a stage. She's small and lively with dark curly hair, widespread hazel eyes, slender wrists and an open, eager face filled with the wonder of performing. Her name is Rose, and one day she will be my mother. But now she is performing an Eugene O'Neill monologue called "Before Breakfast" for a ladies' club in a wealthy suburb of Long Island. [MORE] One Woman's World

COMFORTABLE WITH MYSELF by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- I'm not sure but I think I may be socially incorrect. [MORE] On Native Ground

ENOUGH FOR A WAR, NOT FOR A PEOPLE by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Last week, the National Governors Assn. met in Washington, D.C. One of the tasks the NGA had on its agenda was to ask President Bush to increase federal spending on roads, bridges and other public works projects as a way to stimulate the economy. He rejected their pleas out of hand, claiming that infrastructure projects wouldn't offer any short-term economic boost. [MORE] Brasch Words

BEWARE THE SELF-REVERENTIAL PRESS by Walter Brasch BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Shortly before the primary votes this past week, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter called Sen. Barack Obama's surge to the Democratic nomination "inevitable." It also called for Hillary Clinton to "start her campaign for Senate majority leader." [MORE] Constance

A CONVERSATION WITH MY CAT Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Normally, when the cat starts his evening rant of meowing continuously until he makes his point, I just take it as long as I can, pick him up, and put him in the garage for the night. He doesn't want to go, but the meowing stops and I don't care if he likes it or not. [MORE] Momentum

OUT OF STRUGGLE, ART by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Here we are again at the crossroads of art and social change, having the opportunity to watch good and great films about the lives of women in support of the Women's Crisis Center. [MORE] Campaign 2008

HOW TO PREDICT SUPER TUESDAY II WINNERS? ONLINE SEARCH by Jay Bhatti NEW YORK, March 4, 2008, 7:00PM ET -- With the outcomes of the Texas, Vermont, Ohio and Rhode Island primaries to be decided tonight, how possible is it that online searching can predict who will win tonight's primaries? [MORE] One Woman's World

DON'T VOTE; IT ENCOURAGES THEM by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- Call me angry and disgusted but don't call me un-American because I won't be voting come November. [MORE] On Native Ground

BUSH AND THE KEYBOARD COMMANDOS by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As the days tick down toward the eventual departure of President George W. Bush from the White House, it's a hopeful sign that most Americans are no longer moved by his Administration's constant exploitation of terrorism for political gain. [MORE] Momentum

WHICH AMERICA DO YOU LIVE IN? by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's a little confusing. [MORE] Make My Dat

THE LAWYER THAT ATE NEW YORK by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I used to know a guy who, quite literally, didn't get hyperbole. He didn't understand exaggeration. As a result, he missed most jokes that came his way. [MORE] On Native Ground

FIDEL RETIRES: NOW THE COLD WAR IS REALLY OVER by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Maybe now, we can finally say the Cold War is over. [MORE] Make My Dat

THE LAWYER THAT ATE NEW YORK by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I used to know a guy who, quite literally, didn't get hyperbole. He didn't understand exaggeration. As a result, he missed most jokes that came his way. [MORE] One Woman's World

POLITICS IS NO PARTY by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- Are you having a hard time focusing your eyes? Do you have faint red spots all over your body? Is there a ringing in your ears and do you see wavy lines when you look at your television set? Do your hands shake when you try to hold a cup of coffee? And have you recently been forgetting what day of the week it is - or what year? [MORE] Make My Day

FOR BETTER OR WORSE ... A LOT WORSE by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Marriage: It's Only Going to Get Worse." [MORE] Constance

YOU CALL THESE RIGHTS? by Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- When you express an opinion you hope to persuade others to your point of view. It doesn't always happen but still, opinion writers try. [MORE] Momentum

THE BRIDGE WOMAN by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. - Out there in America - yes, still - is a generation of women who were born in the 1940s, raised in the 1950s, and who came to radical consciousness in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I am one of them. Hillary Clinton is one of them. [MORE] On Native Ground

OBAMA AND MY GENERATION by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I originally planned on voting for Dennis Kucinich in the Vermont Primary on March 4. [MORE] The Willies:

WARNING: THIS MEDICATION MAY MURDER YOUR FRIENDS by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla. -- You've heard the warnings, haven't you? Stop Prozac and you may take a shotgun, an Uzi or an AK-47 and mow down your family and friends, or even a whole classroom full of your fellow students. You didn't? Well, that warning is not on the bottle, but like countless mass-murder incidents before it, Friday's shootings at Northern Illinois University, as well as the Virginia Tech shootings that killed 32 last year, was probably precipitated by the effect of stopping medications that suppress anger and other powerful emotions but do not relieve the underlying cause. Isn't it time we started warning people - or stopped prescribing these medicines? [MORE] One Woman's World

DON'T KNOCK ON MY DOOR by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- I wish I could feel delight in my poet's mansion being like Grand Central Station all the time, but I can't. And I wish my place was such a place that someone would one day write: "Her door was always open and she always made you feel all fuzzy and warm in her presence. She could make a cup of coffee seem like a banquet." [MORE] Reporting: Panama

PANAMA'S VIOLENT LABOR UNREST INTENSIFIES Mark Scheinbaum PANAMA CITY, Panama, Feb, 15, 2008 -- After just one day of relative calm, wildcat construction strikes by some members of Panama's largest union flared up again Friday morning, four days after a police sniper shot one worker. More than 140 demonstrators have been injured and at least 500 arrested, authorities say. [MORE] Brasch Words

TO STIMULATE ECONOMY, BUY A CHINESE-MADE U.S. FLAG by Walter Brasch BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Walking down Main Street, pushing a grocery cart loaded with clothes, toys, and appliances was Marshbaum. Fastened to the right front corner of the cart was an American flag tied onto a three-foot ruler. [MORE] Make My Day

THE TOOTH, AND NOTHING BUT THE TOOTH by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- To commemorate the death of noted shark exploder Roy Scheider, and the "Jaws" movies that resulted in Erik never setting foot in the ocean again, we are reprinting this column from 2003. Shark Experts 0, Sharks 1 [MORE] Momentum

THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. - As I write this, it's raining ice. Maybe a half a foot of snow and ice has already landed up here in the woods of Dummerston. Our cars are encased in it, and the door to the house is blocked. The satellite dish that brings in our Internet service quit about 20 minutes ago - frozen solid. [MORE] The Willies

AMERICA TO HILLARY: GET OUT! by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 13, 2008 -- Sen. Hillary Clinton has adopted the Rudy Giuliani strategy, and it's working - for Sen. Barack Obama. It turns out to be the strategy all Democrats are seeking - an exit strategy. But it's not for Iraq. It's for her exit from the race for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination. [MORE] Constance

CONFESSIONS OF A DISAPPOINTED VOTER by Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- A week ago at just about this time, I completed an article and was about to submit it as scheduled to The American Reporter. I was feeling rather elated, ready to show up on Super Tuesday morning, firmly touch the X next to Rudy Giuliani's name and get on with my day. He was my choice; he would get my vote. [MORE] Reporting: Florida

SIERRA CLUB SET TO SUSPEND FLA. CHAPTER by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 10, 2008 -- The national Sierra Club is set to suspend its Florida chapter after years of divisive infighting, the president of the national club told Florida members in a letter delivered to some this weekend. It is the first time in its 116-year history that such a step has been considered by the club, according to news reports. [MORE] One Woman's World

PLANT A NEW WORLD THIS SPRING by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- For a little while, the men will just have to toss and turn in their fear-free-women beds. For a small space of time Hillary Clinton will just have to trudge on toward the White House without my faint applause in the background. [MORE] On Native Ground

VERMONT AND THE 5 STAGES OF CONSERVATIVE GRIEF by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- First, Vermont tried to convince the nation to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney. [MORE] Make My Day

REBEL WITHOUT A TONGUE by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Kids' brains work in amazing ways. At times, they can grasp complex concepts and make impressive discoveries. Other times, you have to wonder how we ever survived as a species. [MORE] The Willies

FOR DEMOCRATS, NOW IT'S ABOUT RACE, INCOME AND GENDER by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Feb. 6, 2008 -- It's not a good time to be a Democrat. As the Super Tuesday results demonstrated, the presidential race between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has divided the partly along clear racial, income and gender lines - the very distinctions the party has sought to erase in principle but has emphasized in its pursuit of diversity. [MORE] Momentum

SUPER TUESDAY BLUES by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Super Tuesday has come and gone and I still can't get excited about the upcoming presidential elections. [MORE] The Willies

ON THE BRINK OF HISTORY, YOUR PUSH IS NEEDED by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 5. 2008 -- I'm expecting a sea change tonight. I believe that for the first time in this nation's history we will once and forever banish racism as the deciding factor in the destiny of African-Americans, and indeed adopt diversity as our path to the future. [MORE] Campaign 2008

AT 88, EVERY VOTE REALLY COUNTS by Ted Manna DENVER, Feb. 5, 2008 -- Pearl Turner will caucus for Mitt Romney tonight in Denver. [MORE] One Woman's World

STAND BY YOUR WOMAN by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- The black vote. The gay vote. The fundamentalist vote. The Hispanic vote. [MORE] An AR Special

SUSPECTS IN BENAZIR ASSASSINATION HAVE TIES TO MUSHARRAF by Ahmar Mustikhan WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When Gordon Brown this past Monday feted coup-leader-turned-President Pervez Musharraf at 10 Downing Street, Britain's new prime minister probably didn't ask the Pakistani dictator a question that is now on many minds: Did you order the murder of Benazir Bhutto? [MORE] Momentum

TO THE VERMONT DELEGATION: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR US LATELY? by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt.  Back when President George W. Bush and Dick Vice President Dick Cheney were building up to their loathsome war in Iraq, very few people were brave enough to call the bullies' bluff. [MORE] On Native Ground

IF BUSH HAS HIS WAY, WE'LL NEVER LEAVE IRAQ by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. - In his final State of the Union address on Jan. 28, President Bush cautioned against accelerating U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq, saying that it would endanger the process that has been made over the past year. [MORE] Campaign 2008

CLASH OF COMMENTS AND PROTESTORS AT CLINTON, OBAMA RALLIES IN DENVER by Ted Manna DENVER, Feb. 1, 2008 -- At least four presidential campaigns of both partiers rolled into in Denver this week ahead of the Feb. 5 "Super Tuesday" primaries in 22 states, but it was the Democratic presidential contenders who drew the big crowds and duked it out Wednesday. If sheer numbers are any indication, Sen. Barack Obama - preceded by a buoyant and beautiful Caroline Kennedy - won the round handily. He is the overwhelming favorite to win the Colorado primary next Tuesday. [MORE] The Willies

WHY THE FLORIDA PRIMARY STINKS by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 30, 2008 -- I was with my wife and daughter driving the back way from Miami home to Bradenton when we stopped at a McDonald's in Clewiston, the only big town along the vast shore of Lake Okeechobee, the state's precious freshwater reservoir. The McDonald's had three televisions at a central seating area, each tuned to a different network, and our table was in front of CNN as the very first election results started to pour in around 7:30PM. With them, almost as counterpoint, suddenly came such an overwhelming odor of cow plop that my wife started to throw up as we all ran to the parking lot. [MORE] Passings: Suharto

DEATH OF A KEMUSU THUG by Andreas Harsono JAKARTA - A few minutes after hearing that former president Suharto had died in his hospital bed, Marco, a militia leader in downtown Jakarta, raced to Suhartos house, wearing his jungle camouflage and began guarding the Suhartos residence on Cendana Street. [MORE] Constance

I REMEMBER YOU by Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga.. -- It seems to be more often lately that the sentiment is spoken but it's always been out there: "You never get over the death of your child." This is true. But the heartfelt expressions come from some who cannot fathom the notion of losing a child; their own child is who is in their mind, not another mother's child. [MORE]
With millions of malware strains and banking Trojans seemingly hitting banks' systems every day, it's easy to get malware announcement fatigue.

But the news last week that a malicious software called GozNym successfully stole $4 million from U.S. and Canadian banks should make institutions sit up and take notice. Here's why:

It's effective and has already inflicted significant damage

The malware is targeting 22 large banks and credit unions in the U.S. and two in Canada. Large banks are targeted in the hope that randomly selected victims will have accounts at name brands. Credit unions are roped in because the Trojans are going after the digital banking platforms that many credit unions buy. Small banks also have reason for concern because cybercriminals will still steal their customers' online banking usernames and passwords and make some use of them. It has powerful backers



The malware appears to have been unleashed by organized crime.

"There might be a million malware strains, but there are only a few families that are active and dangerous and those principal malware families are owned by organized crime, so this could cause very heavy losses in online banking fraud," Limor Kessem, executive security adviser at IBM, said in an interview. IBM was the first company to identify and report on the cybercrime.

It's appealing to fraudsters because it's inexpensive and hard to detect

The software can be rented for a cheap $500 a month and it supports newer browsers like Microsoft's Windows 10 browser, Edge.

"Many cybercriminals are looking for Trojans that support Edge," said Andrew Komarov, chief intelligence officer at InfoArmor, a provider of threat intelligence consulting services.

Another key differentiator of GozNym, in his view, is the malware's advanced system for injecting code into websites.

And the malware is stealthy, according to Giovanni Vigna, co-founder and CTO of the security software company Lastline. "It really tries not being easily analyzable by existing tools," he said. "Once you identify a technique that deflects mechanisms for detection, then you have a free rein for a while until people catch up."

How It Works

All modern online banking malware (Zeus, SpyEye, Citadel, Carberp, et al.) is based on the same basic set of steps: First, upload malware onto a computer  through phishing (tricking someone into opening a malicious email attachment), getting the user to click on a malicious website link, or using a method common to GozNym attacks called drive-by download. In a drive-by download, cybercriminals infect an ad on a high-traffic website like BBC.com or CNN.com. The software can be downloaded to a user's computer just by visiting the site through the use of an exploit kit.

Fraudsters then wait until the user does some online banking, capturing their name, password and other credentials needed to carry out online banking and wire transfer fraud.

But GozNym is different from the others in that it can act as ransomware  malware that encrypts the files in a computer, then demands a ransom from the user to unlock them  as well as an online banking Trojan. The "Goz" part of the name is from Gozi, the widely used online banking Trojan, while the "Nym" comes from the ransomware Nymaim.

"Depending on the bad actor's choice, it can be used as ransomware to lock your computer or simply to upload Gozi for online banking theft," Komarov said.

GozNym also includes so-called dropper malware that can be used to deliver additional malware on the machine. This is useful because sometimes cybercriminals don't know if a computer is used for online banking. So they'll infect it with a small piece of malware, watch to see if there's banking activity, and if there is, upload the larger online banking Trojan. This helps avoid detection from any antivirus or antimalware software a bank might be using to troll for signs of Gozi.

GozNym makes nimble use of Web injection, the insertion of code into Web browsers to display messages in the user's browser that ask for their mother's maiden name, a secret challenge question or a password reset. This gives cybercriminals the additional information they need to complete a transaction, even if a bank's fraud detection software red-flags the use of stolen login credentials on a computer not associated with an account.

"The Trojan is injecting code into the screen. That means you as a user would see it as a message from your bank," Kessem said. "You would totally believe your bank is asking for that information. You suddenly get a hold screen with a timer that asks you to please enter this type of information, whatever the Trojan thinks it needs to complete the transaction, and you would think you'd only have one minute to enter information. The user gets convinced; they believe that's a legitimate message."

Some Web server protection software (such as IBM's Trusteer) will notify the bank that the Web session is infected, and that malware is trying to intercept communications from the bank.

Defense Strategy

Web server protection software is one defense against GozNym. Antimalware software is another. Another type of software, provided by Lastline, FireEye and Checkpoint, analyzes suspicious software and files in a protected environment called a sandbox, looking for well-hidden signs of malware.

Some banks give their corporate clients software that protects the computers they use for online banking from cybercriminal activity, sometimes using whitelists and blacklists to steer them away from malicious websites. Others require a hardware token that provides one-time passwords for extra authentication.

Banks can also use software that monitors online banking users' activity for signs of foul play. ThetaRay, BAE's NetReveal and IBM's Watson can ingest many kinds of data  network traffic, mobile app traffic, core banking transactions  and look for suspicious behavior that could indicate cybersecurity breaches or fraud, using pattern definition, pattern matching and anomaly detection. Such software might recognize the user is in a different time zone than normal, or is using more languages or plug-ins than normal, for instance.

Fraud detection software can watch transactions closely, looking at where money is going and any unusual behavior patterns.

"The cat-and-mouse game will never stop," Vigna said. "There's no way we could have the final solution to this. But we can get better and we can use fine-grain analysis that allows us to use their attempts to go undetected as a signal to detect them."

Editor at Large Penny Crosman welcomes feedback on her posts at penny.crosman@sourcemedia.com.


Summit State Bank in Santa Rosa, Calif., has a new chief executive.

The $513 million-asset bank said in a press release Tuesday that James Brush was also named its president. Brush, who joined Summit States board in 2009, is a business consultant who also chaired the banks loan committee.

Brush succeeded Thomas Duryea, who resigned after eight years as the banks president and CEO. Duryea was the banks chief credit officer before being named president and CEO.

Id like to thank the board  for entrusting me with setting the vision, the culture, defining a new business model and retaining the top flight banking team to create what has become the leading community bank in Sonoma County, Duryea said in the release.
Consumer banking Know Who Else Doesn't Like 'Postal Banking Lite'? The Post Office The U.S. Postal Service strongly criticized a recommendation from its inspector general that the agency expand remittances, check cashing and other banking services. The services would be potentially riskier and costlier than the impression left by IG David Williams' report, the USPS said. June 3

Law and regulation Battle Over Postal Banking Reignites The push to expand banking services at the country's post offices continues to gain momentum, though numerous questions remain about the design and scope of such an effort. July 16

WASHINGTON  Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders is backing a plan to allow the U.S. Postal Service to provide banking services.

The Vermont lawmaker called the proposal a great idea in an interview with Fusion published Wednesday. The postal agencys inspector general raised the prospect last year in a controversial white paper as a way for the USPS to help revive its troubled finances.

I want to see our post office be reinvigorated. And one of the ways that I think we can help not only the U.S. Postal Service, but help a lot of low-income peopleif you are a low-income person, it is, depending upon where you live, very difficult to find normal banking. Banks dont want you, Sanders told Fusion. And what people are forced to do is go to payday lenders who charge outrageously high interest rates. You go to check-cashing places, which rip you off.

Sanders also alluded to the idea of postal banking in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year.

During the interview, Sanders was asked if he would also support Wal-Mart Stores receiving a bank charter. But Sanders declined to discuss the idea.

Right now were focusing on the U.S. Postal Service, Sanders told Fusion.

The idea of uniting financial services with the mail system remains hotly debated on Capitol Hill, though the concept has won the support of prominent lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. The banking industry has largely opposed the move and the postal agency itself has been critical of the idea.

Our core service is delivery, not banking, an agency spokeswoman said this summer in response to a follow-up report by the inspector general. The report examined the possible benefits of offering scaled-back services, such as expanded remittances and check cashing, that wouldnt need congressional approval.
The road to the corner office now goes through the server room.

Greg Carmichael, named the next chief executive of Fifth Third Bancorp on Wednesday, took an unusual route to the top position at the $140 billion-asset lender. A former information-technology executive at General Electric and the tech and energy company Emerson Electric, he entered banking a little more than a decade ago, joining Fifth Third as chief information officer.

Though Carmichael is hardly just an IT executive anymore  he has led all Fifth Third's business lines for the past nine years as chief operating officer  it is a career path that shows the greater importance banks are placing on tech and on their tech talent.

The choice "shows us what's important for the banking industry," said David Darst, an analyst with Guggenheim Securities. "You may not see many more CIOs becoming CEOs, but you're going to see more CIOs engaged in strategy in the C-suite."

Others have blazed the trail for Carmichael. First Niagara Financial Group in Buffalo, N.Y., picked Gary Crosby  an executive who entered banking via the tech sector  as its CEO in 2013. And a few years earlier, Grayson Hall took the reins of Regions Financial in Birmingham, Ala., after a decade as the head of its tech operations and a stint running its banking group.

Analysts saw Carmichael as a likely pick to eventually succeed Kevin Kabat, who has led the Cincinnati, Ohio, company since 2007.

But the timing of the announcement caused some surprise. Kabat, just 58, will retire as CEO in November and remain executive vice chairman until April.

Fifth Third declined requests to interview Carmichael and Kabat on Wednesday.

Kabat's somewhat early retirement could suggest that he and the board decided the time was right for a jolt, as Fifth Third slowly shifts from survival to growth mode, said Marty Mosby, an analyst with Vining Sparks.

"They don't need to clean up or solve capital or liquidity problems  what they're trying do is restart the revenue-growth machine," Mosby said.

Kabat is given high marks for steering Fifth Third through the financial crisis and recession, but the company's financial performance has recently been somewhat lackluster  a reflection more of the challenges facing regional banks than Kabat's performance, analysts say.

"Anybody who was CEO during the crisis and is still standing did his job," said Paul Miller, an analyst with FBR Capital Markets.

Kabat, a veteran of more than 30 years with Fifth Third, "was very decisive in the crisis," said Scott Siefers, an analyst at Sandler O'Neill. The bank agreed to sell its Vantiv payments unit, which provided a capital buffer but left the company with fewer growth levers when the smoke cleared. And a lower stock price left Fifth Third without a strong currency to make acquisitions, which had been a means for growth before the crisis.

The bank's return on tangible common equity last year was a solid 12.1%. However, its share price has dipped more than 4% over the past year, against a 5.7% increase in the KBW Nasdaq Bank Index.

The most significant barrier to growth for Fifth Third, like other regional banks, is tight margins, said Miller.

"The economics aren't there" for many regionals, he said. "They need a steeper yield curve."

But part of the problem for Fifth Third is that it is less asset-sensitive than other regional banks, and so it stands to reap less benefit from an interest rate increase, Mosby said. Knowing that they will not be completely bailed out by a rate hike may have spurred the bank's leadership to make a change earlier rather than later, he said.

Fifth Third "has always been a company that's invested in technology," Darst said.

Carmichael, who joined Fifth Third in 2003 and added the president title in 2012, has been leading so much of the bank already that he is unlikely to change direction too dramatically as CEO. Analysts expect him to continue to focus, at least at first, on earnings growth through cost cuts, as when Fifth Third announced last month plans to close or sell 130 branches and other properties.

Having a tech-savvy CEO makes sense for a bank like Fifth Third that is trying to change its retail model away from branches and toward online banking, said Siefers. It also ties in with the increasing importance of IT systems and back-office operations coming from regulators' focus on internal controls.

It may be that the traditional path to the top positions at banks  working up through finance or lending operations  is shifting, and there may be more promotions of tech talent to top roles, observers said. It is a change that reflects banks' new priorities, even if it may surprise some old-timers.

"We're seeing more CEOs with techie backgrounds because the banks have realized that, to survive and be profitable, they will need more efficiencies," said Rod Taylor, president of the executive search firm Taylor & Co. "The day of the techie CEO is upon us."

Paul Davis contributed to this story.
One predictable element of the current Republican primaries is that each time Donald Trump's supposed inevitability is challenged, he will tell you it is because the process is unfair. He, his official spokesmen, his "unofficial" enforcers, his sycophantic "conservative media" surrogates, and his hornet's nest of online commenters, consistently greet any momentary setback with a cacophonous chorus of "rigged," "stolen," and above all "unfair."

To be fair to Trump, it is true that life really is unfair sometimes. Furthermore, it cannot be denied that political insiders beget more than their fair share of life's unfairness (such as when they seek preferential treatment in their private business dealings by buying off politicians). So we must not let the crybaby antics of a front-running sore winner obscure the possibility that the GOP primaries really are unfair. Setting aside the Great Alpha Male's congenital pouting, then, let us assess the process's fairness.

The Trumpsters claim that Colorado's caucus rules were unfair because they disenfranchised the voters of that state. On its face, this is analogous to screaming "censorship" when your sister asks you not to swear in front of her children during Christmas dinner at her house. This is not a free speech issue. It's her home; you were free not to accept her dinner invitation, and she is free to protect her children, in her home, from language she dislikes. If you accept her invitation, then you have to play by the house rules.

Similarly, a party nomination process does not represent a citizen's franchise, because it is not a vote for public office. It is the process whereby a non-governmental club chooses its candidate for public office. Members of the club who are invited to participate, and neither deceived nor defrauded out of that participation, have no grounds for claiming even a figurative disenfranchisement, regardless of whether they like the rules governing the process. In Colorado, Trump was invited, but chose not to participate actively.

In short, if you want to swear your head off on Christmas Day, host your own dinner; likewise, if you don't like a party's nominating rules, start your own party. What's stopping you? (I admit that the principle here would be clearer if American political parties were still what they once were, and what parties in some Western democracies still are: private alliances of likeminded citizen-members who pool their resources to promote causes and candidates. America's once figurative "two-party system" has devolved into a literal one, with two parties converted through legislative controls into de facto branches of state governments, rather than the private clubs they ought to be in a free republic.)

Lies, deliberate misrepresentations, and threats aside, however, what really irks the anti-Trump majority about Trump's whining is the absurdity of the frontrunner bemoaning the unfairness of a process he is winning. In truth, it would be easier and more reasonable for Trump's opponents to cite the iniquities of the nominating process as evidence that the system unfairly favors Trump.

Trump supporters will scoff at that, since their vested interest in Trump's advantage has blinded them to the many questionable rules about which "Mr. Trump" would be pouting if the shoe were on the other foot. Mark Levin has pointed out the most obvious peculiarity, namely that Trump has thus far achieved a much higher percentage of the delegates than his percentage of the popular vote. This is mainly because he happens to have won some winner-take-all states, although he has failed to reach even fifty percent of the vote in any of them.

Is it "fair" that Trump should receive all fifty delegates in South Carolina with only 32.5% of the vote, while Marco Rubio receives less than half of Minnesota's delegates though winning with 36.5% of the vote, and while Ted Cruz receives only 60% of the delegates in Kansas despite earning 48.2% of the vote?

Is it "fair" that Trump gets 100% of the delegates for 45.7% of the vote (1,077,221 votes) in Florida, while Cruz gets only 67% of the delegates for 43.8% of the vote (1,239,370 votes) in Texas, or 52% of the delegates for 45.9% of the vote in Maine?

Shouldn't other candidates be whining about the unfairness of these Trump-friendly results? No -- because they knew the rules, just as Trump knew the rules in Colorado.

Trump has benefitted from open primaries in which Democrats are, for reasons unfathomable to mere mortals, allowed to participate in a GOP nominating process. (When a private business is electing its new CEO, does it invite the boards of directors of other companies to participate in the voting?) The most obvious case was perhaps Missouri, where Trump and Cruz finished in a virtual dead heat, 40.8% to 40.6%, and yet Trump's 0.2% advantage earned him twelve extra delegates for the statewide win. Without Democrats, the popular vote would likely have gone to Cruz, resulting in a twenty-four delegate swing in Cruz's favor. (It's impossible to verify party affiliations from exit polls, but the Missouri exit poll estimates 5% of voters as Democrats, and shows Trump winning self-described "moderates" by almost two to one over Cruz.)

Whatever reasons state GOP leaders may have had for initiating the practice of open primaries, that practice has certainly favored the only literal "RINO" candidate in the field this year, a New York values progressive and long-time Democrat who has relabeled himself a conservative Republican without actually adopting conservative republicanism in principle or policy.

Shouldn't other candidates be whining about the unfairness of Trump's open primary advantage? No -- because they knew the rules, just as Trump knew the rules in Colorado.

Early voting in some states began weeks before the official primary date. Therefore, many votes were cast when Trump was garnering all the attention as the surprise frontrunner, and before candidate withdrawals, debate debacles, David Duke fudgery, and Twitter madness had clarified just how ill-prepared, ill-informed, and ill-mannered he really was. Trump won the March 5 Louisiana primary by a narrow margin, but would likely have lost without the boatload of early votes cast for him during his late February hot streak, not to mention the early votes cast for candidates no longer in the race on March 5. One must question the legitimacy of allowing indiscriminate early voting, which undermines the vetting process built into the prolonged primary schedule.

Shouldn't the other candidates be whining about the unfairness of Trump's early voting edge? No -- because they knew the rules, just as Trump knew the rules in Colorado.

Other candidates accept the rules, even rules that disadvantage them. But present Trump with a hurdle that his hit-and-run, rally-and-tweet campaign is unable to overcome, and he, along with his surrogates and fans, will scream bloody murder, slander state party officials, threaten to disclose the hotel rooms of convention delegates, and push inflammatory propaganda about "stolen" nominations.

Pat Buchanan, for instance, argues that if "Trump is robbed in Cleveland of a nomination Americans believe he won, political disillusionment, and political realignment, may be at hand." Consider the logic of that dire warning: it is robbery if Trump does not get a nomination that "Americans" (i.e., Trump supporters) believe he won. So now shattering the illusions of people who mistake their wishes for horses constitutes theft, and justifies "political disillusionment" and "realignment."

Is it any wonder much of America is sitting by passively as psychologically disturbed men who prefer to imagine themselves as women use the force of law to invade girls' bathrooms, when a purported leading advocate of "traditional values" is demanding that rules and reality bow before the delusions of personality cultists?

Sorry, but a nomination can't be stolen until someone owns it. Apparently sensing this little chink in their reasoning, Trump and his supporters have chosen to leap headlong into a preemptive war against the likely outcome in Cleveland, by attempting to persuade you that the primary process even before the convention is rigged against Trump (who happens to be winning -- go figure), and therefore that the whole primary system ought to be jettisoned immediately in favor of something "fairer," i.e., conducive to an easier Trump victory.

Sierra Rayne, a valuable writer on climate science and other issues, and a regular Trump defender here at American Thinker, makes the case forcefully:

[T]he Republican nomination process is an embarrassing joke. It's too susceptible to gamesmanship and manipulation, if not outright corruption, and that only accomplishes the task of diminishing the party's reputation among the general public.

Well, yes, perhaps that's true. Winner-take-all states, open primaries, and early voting do tend to skew both perceptions and results in ways that might be judged illegitimate. Some states yield all their delegates to candidates who earn less than a third of the popular vote, allow Democrats to determine the Republican nominee, and short-circuit the vetting process built into the prolonged primary calendar with unnecessary early voting.

And what solution does Rayne offer by way of rectifying all the "gamesmanship and manipulation, if not outright corruption"?

If the GOP is serious about actually winning a presidential election in the near future, the leadership will move to a transparent and simple mathematical model whereby popular vote percentages in each state are automatically and uniformly converted to delegate counts that cannot be altered until after the first ballot at the convention.

Apart from the fact that no one is seeking to alter first ballot bound delegates now, I don't see why state parties should have to conform to a universal method for selecting delegates, and I sympathize with some states' desires to employ rules that favor party members who are serious enough to devote hours of effort to participating fully in the party's development, while disfavoring drive-by participants. Still, I concede that a simple proportional allotment based on popular vote percentages in each state would be easy to manage. So easy, in fact, that even a mathematical simpleton like me can recalculate the delegates assigned so far according to such a method. Let's do that, shall we?

Of course, we can only use vote percentages that actually exist, so we'll have to ignore the differences between primaries and caucuses, open and closed primaries, and so on, and just use the raw percentages that we have. And in fairness to the Trumpsters, I'll even leave Colorado out of the calculation. Thousands of Colorado Republicans did indeed vote, but when Trumpsters are angry, thousands begin to look a lot like zero, so we'll let them have their little fantasy and pretend no one voted in Colorado.

Here's how I performed the calculations, so you may double-check my math for yourself. Following the primary map at Politico, I converted the exact percentage of each state's popular vote for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz into the precise number of that state's total delegates that each man would receive on a strictly proportional system, rounding upward for any decimal at or above .5, and downward for any decimal below .5.

Here is what I found.

After thirty-four primaries, counting all the state votes completed as of April 16, including D.C. but excluding Colorado and the territories, we reach the following delegate totals: Trump 554, Cruz 490.

Apparently the system is rigged after all! I could have sworn Trump was miles ahead, the race all but over, and the disenfranchised masses lighting their torches for the march on Cleveland, where Trump's rightful nomination was about to be stolen. As it turns out, on the "transparent and simple" proportional model suggested by one of American Thinker's most thoughtful Trump advocates, Trump would be less than halfway to the delegate majority, with Cruz right on his heels. The race, had this model actually been used, would have a completely different dynamic at this point. It would be a neck and neck contest between two men neither of whom had any realistic path to a first ballot majority.

Far from looking like a nominee about to have his prize stolen from him, Trump would look even more like what he already seems to be: a novelty candidate whose early plurality is fading as a huge field has pared itself down to three; whose lack of knowledge, coherence, consistency, and campaign management are becoming increasingly glaring liabilities; and whose survival in this race depends entirely on the continued presence of an already-eliminated establishment candidate (Kasich) who evidently remains in the running for no other reason than to divide the anti-Trump majority.

Proportional delegate allotment based on percentage of the popular vote in each state -- sounds reasonably fair, now that you mention it. Let's see the Trojan Trump whine his way out of that one.

(A final disclaimer in anticipation of the usual Trumpster attacks: No one paid me to write this article, I don't work for a campaign, I have no establishment connections, I'm even more Canadian than Ted Cruz -- and I'm not Jewish, so save the "Go back to writing about Israel" stuff for other authors.)
According to a report dated April 16, 2016 in the sometimes reliable Debka Special Report, Israels top political leaders and military commanders were stunned and shocked last weekend when they found out that US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed to support the return of the Golan to Syria.

If this is true, Barack Hussein Obama is plotting yet again a way to torment the Jewish state with yet another vile edict, one which clearly has nothing to do with enlightened statecraft but much more to do with evil witchcraft.

The occupant in the Oval Office cannot salivate enough at the prospect of harming Israels security and survivability. No doubt he is fulfilling a malevolent pact he has made with a cabal of Islamists and extreme leftists; both of which ideologies have satanic hatred for Israel.

With this threat hanging over the strategic territory known as the Golan Heights, it is time once again to learn its history and Biblical significance. Even as modern day Syria is convulsed in a murderous and bloody civil war with untold thousands dead and maimed; even as its tyrant, Bashir al-Assad, fights for his political and physical life; even with all this, he nevertheless spews forth his hatred of Israel and his call to take away the Golan Heights from the Jewish state.

But so do those "rebels" who are fighting him and thus remind us of the famous aphorism: better the devil you know, or better still, a plague on all your houses. Those of us who have stood on the Golan's 1,700 foot steep escarpment, are struck by its immense strategic value overlooking Israel's fertile Hula Valley and the beautiful harp-shaped lake below, called in Hebrew, Kinneret (better known as the Sea of Galilee.) But during Syria's occupation of the territory, no agriculture of any significance took place and no restoration of its terrain was ever undertaken. Instead, the Golan was a giant Syrian army artillery encampment whose sole purpose was to deliberately rain down upon Israeli farmers, fishermen and villagers an endless barrage of shells.

So what is the history of the Golan Heights and what is its overwhelming biblical significance to the reconstituted Jewish state? Perhaps we should return primarily to the biblical books of Joshua and Numbers. Before the Tribes of Israel would cross the River Jordan and enter the Promised Land, the first among them had already taken possession of territory east of the River Jordan. These were the half tribes of Manasseh, Gad, and Reuben who liberated the Bashan and Gilead from the Amorites. Biblical Bashan incorporates today's Golan Heights. Gilead is the fertile land, which lies in what is the north eastern area of today's Kingdom of Jordan:  ... a little balm, and a little honey, spices and myrrh, nuts and almonds (Gen 43:11.) It was Canaan, west of the Jordan, (including today's so-called West Bank) which would pose the formidable challenge to Joshua bin Nun, the general leading the Israelite tribes.

So it was that Moses, the Lawgiver, spoke to the children of Gad and Reuben thus: Shall your brethren go to war, and shall you sit here? (Numbers 32:6) The leaders of the two tribes replied that they would indeed send their warriors west into Canaan and fight alongside their brethren while their families would remain behind. We will build sheepfolds here for our cattle and cities for our little ones. But we ourselves will go ready armed before the children of Israel until we have brought them unto their place: and our little ones shall dwell in fenced cities because of the inhabitants of the land. We will not return unto our houses until the children of Israel have inherited every man his inheritance. (Numbers 32: 16-18)

The story of reconstituted Israel and its people is mirrored in the biblical story of those ancient ancestors. The young men and women of modern Israel have gone again and again from their homes; be they villages, towns or cities, to the borders and established communities there in times of danger and peril, just like those young men did from the biblical tribes of Gad and Reuben. The Jewish pioneers of today in Judea and Samaria  the biblical and ancestral heartland known today as the West Bank  are no different.

But the world has chosen to demonize them as obstacles to peace" and an impediment to the creation of a fraudulent Arab state to be called Palestine; a state that has never existed in all of recorded history; and certainly not as a sovereign independent Arab state. The pioneers are now called settlers and their homes and farms derisively called settlements. It matters not to the infernal chorus that sings the international siren song of hate and ignorance that these pioneers are returned to their ancestral homesteads and seek to take up their ploughshares to sow, to plant and re-possess their homeland.

But the purpose of this article is also to learn about the biblical and post biblical history of the Jewish descendants of Gad, Reuben and Manasseh. Such facts, of course, will not persuade the likes of Barack Hussein Obama as he plots and schemes. The Bashan region, now known as the Golan Heights, is a part of the biblical territory promised to the Patriarch Abraham and the people of Israel for an everlasting covenant  the Covenant of the Parts  recounted in Genesis 15. The city of Bashan was a refuge city (Deut, 4:43). During the biblical period of the Jewish Kings, a battle high on the Golan took place between King Ahab and the army of Aram. A Jewish victory occurred at the present site of Kibbutz Afik, which lies a few miles east of Lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee.

After the end of the Babylonian Exile, and during the Second Temple Period, Jews returned to their homes on the Golan. Subsequently the returnees were attacked by gentiles and Judah Maccabee brought his forces up to the Heights to defend them. At the conclusion of the Hasmonean Period, King Alexander Yannai finally re-conquered the Golan and Jews returned yet again. They rebuilt communities in central Golan, including the major cities of Banias and Susita, which formed part of the defense of the Golan.

Their residents fought heroically against the Roman legions during the Great Revolt of 135 AD, known also as the Second Uprising. It was led by the charismatic Shimon Bar Kokhba, known as the Son of a Star and a Jewish folk hero. Some 10,000 residents of Gamla alone perished fighting against Rome. Second century Jewish coins were found on the Golan after its liberation during the last days of the June, 1967 Six Day War. These ancient coins were inscribed with the words, For the Redemption of Holy Jerusalem.

In the succeeding period of the Talmudic Period, Jewish communities flourished and expanded. Archaeologists have found the remains of 34 synagogues on the Golan. Jewish life on the Golan largely ended after the defeat of the Byzantine army by Arabs from Arabia carrying the new banner of Islam and the region descended into a long period of neglect. But Jewish life returned yet again in the latter years of the 19th century when members of the Bnei Yehuda society from Safed purchased land on the Golan. In 1891, Baron Rothschild purchased around 18,000 acres in what is present day Ramat Magshimim.

The Jewish pioneers of the First Aliyah (immigration) began to farm land they had purchased in the Horan region until the Turkish Ottoman occupiers evicted them in 1898. Their land was then seized, and in 1923 the entire Golan was given away by Britain to the French Mandate over Syria and Lebanon. Zionist leaders had earlier demanded the Golan be included within the new Jewish National Home because of its immense historical roots in biblical and post-biblical Jewish history. But Jewish liberation of the ancestral land was not possible until Israel was forced to fight for its very survival during the Six Day War.

The Golan is only 60 miles from Haifa; and the slopes of Mount Hermon, the highest point in the region, are the present eyes and ears of Israel. The Golan Heights were officially annexed to Israel in 1980. But it was the left wing Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who first offered to give the Heights away in 1994. Since then, Israelis have winced at the wrenching offers made by subsequent left leaning Israeli governments and politicians who declared publicly their desire to give the entire Heights to the Syrians in return for a delusional peace. The overwhelming majority of Israelis are adamantly opposed to any such suggestion.

The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group suggested that a way out for the United States from its Iraqi imbroglio would be for Israel to give the Golan Heights away to Syria. This, it was believed by the ISG, would bring Syria into responsible nationhood and wean her away from support of the insurgents attacking Iraqi and U.S assets. Of course this was before the successes of the Surge instituted by General Petraus made such a suggestion moot. President Obama mistakenly renewed diplomatic relations with Syria as a way, he believed, of distancing the Arab dictatorship from its alliance with Iran. This was yet another delusional act by the current U.S. President whose foreign policy is in tatters.

But Obama's carrot to the Syrian dictator, should it ever be resurrected, inevitably will be the Golan Heights. Again and again, he chooses to appease Arab and Muslim tyrants and it is becoming more and more apparent that indeed he is preparing to apply brutal pressure against Israel to force it to give away yet more of its biblical patrimony. But what would such pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights mean? Bringing down the Israeli radar stations on the Hermon Massif to the valley floor below would seriously degrade any warning of future hostile Syrian attacks.

It would further hamper Israel's ability to prevent attacks upon it by Syrian forces and by Hezballah, now armed to the teeth by the Iranian mullahs and with an estimated 150,000 missiles aimed at Israel and hidden among Lebanese civilians. To put any trust in an Arab nation, especially the Iranian-backed Syrian regime, is truly mind boggling. Besides which, the so-called rebels fighting the Syrian regime have already stated that their ambition is also to take the Golan from Israel at the same time that they plan on making Syria yet another Islamic Republic and a future part of an Islamic Caliphate.

And consider this. The British colonial power gave away the Golan to Frances Syrian colony in 1923. Syria attacked Israel in 1967 and lost the Golan. Syria had occupied it for 44 years. Israels liberation of the Golan has lasted nearly 50 years. Ask yourself then, who has possessed the Golan the longest?

Any thought of being brutally forced by Obama and Putin to abandon biblical Bashan (the Golan) with its immense strategic value to such Islamist foes as exist in Syria would be a betrayal of a loyal ally of the United States and of those first Jewish ancestors on the Golan who long ago "built sheepfolds for their cattle and cities for their little ones."

Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of The Blue Hour, a collection of thirteen short stories and the acclaimed trilogy, Politicide.
For some reason April 15, Tax Day, is a peak day for my government spending site, usgovernmentspending.com. I would have thought that people would be looking at the site in the weeks before filing their tax returns.

The site has a similar experience with elections. The peak day is the day after the presidential election. You would think that concerned voters would be hungrily scouring the web for information on government waste and fraud in the weeks before the election.

It all goes to show that the voters, like the politicians and the bureaucrats, are always a day late and a dollar short. As Rush Limbaugh used to say in his Bill Clinton voice, Heh heh, the buck never got here!

In the Obama era, Rushs joke is not funny anymore.

The thing that bothers me in election season is that we are always arguing about the marginal issues. Heres what I mean. Your basic facts about government spending in the U.S. in 2016, federal, state, and local look like this:

Government Pensions: $1.3 trillion

Government Healthcare: $1.5 trillion

Government Education: $1.0 trillion

National Defense: $0.8 trillion

Government Welfare: $0.5 trillion

Everything Else: $1.6 trillion

This is the first year that education will crack a trillion. Yay, safe spaces!

Want to do something about the deficit? Then reform government pensions, starting with Social Security. Reform government healthcare, Medicare and Medicaid, instead of compounding the problem with ObamaCare. Never mind about immigrants and China; they are just a distraction.

For liberals eager to fight inequality I have an idea. Take the middle class off the government dole, and make us do our own retirement and kick in for our kids education. Then liberals would have lots of lovely money to help the poor. Only it would just enrich the fatcat providers of services to the poor.

But liberals would never do that. Because of the third rail. Dont touch grandpas Social Security, because he already paid his share, and dont touch Medicare because that would push grandma off a cliff.

How could we have come to this? Easy, because of the very nature of government.

Government is an armed minority occupying some territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its regime supporters.

It doesnt matter what government does or does not do. The only thing that matters is that the regime supporters get their checks.

In the old days the government was the king and the regime supporters his courtiers and the nobles. Everyone else was on the outside and justly suspicious of political power. But the miracle of modern government is to make everyone into a regime supporter, because everyone gets rewarded -- by Social Security, by Medicare, by free education. That makes regime supporters out of the middle class. The poor get their own tranche of goodies, and they are told that the rich millionaire Democratic politicians are Fighting for Us, and so they are regime supporters too.

Want to make a revolution? Let the middle class tell the government to take its entitlements and its taxes and put them where the sun dont shine. Then we middle-class voters will no longer be regime supporters, no longer hanging onto those government checks. Then we could truly tell the ruling class to take its government and shove it.

There is another category of person in the modern world, the regime enthusiast. I got this from lefty Brit prof Michael Mann in The Sources of Social Power. He uses the term regime enthusiast to explain 19th-century people like Prussian bureaucrats and German university professors. Today we call them liberals and SJWs. The regime enthusiasts are corrupted not just by money, but by power.

You can see why the outlook is hopeless. There is always another politician peddling some new offer of free stuff to us and recruiting new regime enthusiasts with the offer of money, power, and the love of beautiful women. You might think that all the veins of recoverable free stuff have already been mined by political prospectors, but that is not so. Along comes old-timer Bernie, and goes for the gold with free health care and free college.

But Bernies free health care and free college is nothing. How about free Assisted Living? I predict that Americas baby boomer seniors will soon demand justice for seniors and free Assisted Living. It is not just cruel and unjust to subject Americans and their families to end-of-life worries about paying for palliative and memory care and wiping out their savings. It is also gender discrimination against Gen-X women to deny them the right to follow their bliss and force them to sacrifice the best years of their lives caring for their cranky mothers.

Where will it all end? At least usgovernmentspending.com will be there to report on the royal road to fiscal ruin.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.
Will Big Brother impose mandatory treatment for individuals with climate change denial disorder? Are treatment programs for weight loss, addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex, pornography, and assorted phobias at risk of being banned by government? No way, you say.

Think again.

The U.S. Supreme Court adopted the phrase, Hecklers Veto, when it held that it is the governments duty to protect a speaker exercising his or her First Amendment right from hecklers who threaten or use violence in order to silence them. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reiterated the principle in Bible Believers v. Wayne County on Oct. 28, 2015:

The First Amendment offers sweeping protection that allows all manner of speech to enter the marketplace of ideas. This protection applies to loathsome and unpopular speech with the same force as it does to speech that is celebrated and widely accepted. The protection would be unnecessary if it only served to safeguard the majority views. In fact, it is the minority view, including expressive behavior that is deemed distasteful and highly offensive to the vast majority of people that most often needs protection under the First Amendment A review of Supreme Court precedent firmly establishes that the First Amendment does not countenance a hecklers veto.

But where do we go for protection when government goes from protector to heckler?

The powers that be are aligned against those who question official climate change orthodoxy.

Speaking of hot house gases, watch Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who is Jewish, lecture a Catholic priest for disagreeing with the Popes tweets, which Boxer affirms as climate change catechism. This follows Boxer telling a philosopher that his opinion is a toxic emission since hes not a scientist of the Popes caliber. Galileo, call your office.

President Obama decreed in his State of the Union address last January that man-made climate change, not terrorism nor ISIS, is the biggest threat to the future of the planet.

Who can forget the images of terrified Parisians, Californians, and Belgians fleeing the fury of displaced polar bears?

Polar bears, take heart. Obamas attorney general admitted to a congressional committee on March 9 that the DOJ has referred information to the FBI for possible civil actions against corporate culprits who dispute the threat of carbon emissions.

Not to be out-muscled, 17 state attorneys general are targeting private corporations for possibly misleading shareholders about climate change. The Conservative Enterprise Institute, a private think tank, announced on April 13 that it is also a government target:

Last week, an intimidation campaign led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and former Vice President Al Gore reached CEIs doors. We received a subpoena from U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker demanding CEI, a nonprofit and private organization, turn over a massive amount of documents on climate change policy work from 1997-2007, nearly 20 years ago. Needless to say, we will fight the subpoena. It is not and cannot become a crime to disagree with a government official. Somewhere along the line, dissent from orthodoxy has transformed from a uniquely American virtue to a crime. This subpoena is a blatant attack on CEIs First Amendment rights of free speech and association. It threatens the rights of anyone who holds opinions different from those with the power of the federal or state governments behind them.

Government has also become the heckler of those who provide professional counseling to minors seeking treatment for unwanted same-sex attraction, including President Obama, who announced last year that he supports efforts to ban gay conversion therapy.

Oregon, New Jersey, California and Washington, D.C. prohibit licensed therapists from counseling minors who want help overcoming unwanted same-sex attraction. Try reconciling that with the expansion of minors health care rights, as reported by the Guttmacher Institute, March 2016:

The legal ability of minors to consent to a range of sensitive health care services -- including sexual and reproductive health care, mental health services, and alcohol and drug abuse treatment -- has expanded dramatically over the past 30 years. This trend reflects the recognition that, while parental involvement in minors health care decisions is desirable, many minors will not avail themselves of important services if they are forced to involve their parents.

On the one hand, government is the nanny. On the other, government is the heckler.

First they came for the kids. On April 13, an Ohio legislator introduced a bill banning therapy for unwanted same-sex attraction  for adults. As reported by Citizens for Community Values Action of Ohio:

This bill has as its purpose to prohibit doctors, psychologists, licensed counselors, social workers or marriage and family therapists from the practice of seeking to change a person's sexual orientation, including efforts to change behaviors, gender identity, or gender expressions, or to reduce or eliminate sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward a person of the same gender. Violations of this proposed statute requires state licensing boards to impose one or more sanctions: suspend, revoke, or refuse to issue or renew the certificate, license, or registration of the professional The actions that are not prohibited by Senate Bill 74 include Counseling that does not seek to change a patient's sexual orientation.

Whatever happened to the right to self-determination? The bill permits explicit viewpoint discrimination and a host of other constitutional violations. Freedom of speech, privacy rights, freedom of association, parental rights, and, in some cases, freedom of religion are victims, as well as those who provide information and those seeking information. Instead of hecklers violence, the means of silencing counselors is a government-imposed criminal penalty and/or loss of a state counseling license.

The absurdity here is that the speech occurs in private between counselor and patient. The hecklers arent even present to be offended. Nonetheless, it must be silenced.

Which program or school of thought will the speech police target next? As Alston Chase opined, When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.

It is our freedom as Americans, particularly the freedom of speech, which generally allows us to express our views without fear of government sanction, according to the Sixth Circuit.

That depends on how one is oriented in the prevailing political climate.

Jan LaRue is Senior Legal Analyst with the American Civil Rights Union.
Senator Cruz continues to beat Mr. Trump on the ground in Wyoming and Georgia:

Despite winning its primary in a landslide, Donald Trump came up short in the battle for delegates in Georgia. Members of Georgia's Republican Party met on Saturday to elect 42 of the 72 delegates that will go to Cleveland in July for the Republican National Convention. Trump's poor showing comes as the businessman is crying foul after losing 34 pledged delegates in Colorado to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. The activists met in gatherings by congressional district and Trump loyalists were largely shut out of several districts that the businessman carried, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Each district had to chose three delegates and three alternates. But Trump's forces were shut out in several districts.

The Trump team cried "foul," but nothing foul happened. Mr. Trump is simply getting a lesson in how the parties have functioned since they were formed in the 19th century.

Mr. Trump has contributed to politicians in the past but has never taken the time to study or learn how delegates are actually selected. I guess that's what happens when you run for president on the cheap, with free media and candidate rallies. Mr. Trump does not have a staff, and it's starting to show.

Mr. Trump may also be running into another problem: he does not have a lot of Republican friends!

Mr. Trump's success so far has been based on winning primaries with 35% of the vote.

Furthermore, he called former president Bush a liar over Iraq's WMD, mocked Senator McCain's war service, and now yells that everyone who does not vote for him must be in the tank for the establishment.

Why do I get the feeling that Mr. Trump is going to have a hard time unifying the party and getting the 65 million votes he will need in November? How does he unify the party by calling everyone a crook?

P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
Notwithstanding the saving of much if its army during the evacuation of Dunkirk and its surviving the Battle of Britain the previous year, in late June of 1941, the United Kingdom was without a major ally in its fight against Nazi aggression. The Battle of the Atlantic was being fiercely waged, and ultimate victory, let alone survival, was by no means assured.

Hence, Winston Churchill welcomed the Soviet Unions anticipated entry on his side should Adolf Hitlers double-crossing of Joseph Stalin actually transpire. But that welcoming was widely opposed, and his response to that opposition produced one of his more memorable quotes: If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.

The survival of America as a constitutional republic, an economic powerhouse, and as the leader of the free world is, today, likewise not assured. Despite Rush Limbaughs much- riticized hope, President Barack Obama is not failing in his efforts to fundamentally transform America.

Mr. Obama and his putative Democratic successor have no intention of allowing victory to be snatched from their own grasp by their making of a grave error in judgment such as launching their version of an Operation Barbarossa.

They will have to be stopped by someone. They must be stopped by someone.

But who is that someone?

I do not know who that someone can be, but it is time for all of us to pick that someone  to answer todays version of Hillel the Elders question.

Im no Winston Churchill, but I have taken my position on the issue, and my plea today to those who are following the #NeverTrump bandwagon is that they reconsider their stance vis-a-vis the Devil we dont know. Otherwise the Devil we do know will certainly pick up Mr. Obamas baton and assume his current leading of his parade to perdition.

The challenge remains: name one state Mr./Ms. X can win that Romney lost in 2012.

No deus ex machina on the horizon.

Like Dante, we stand beside Virgil at that gate. Will we enter? If we do, what then?

See also: Trumps The One
The Virgin Islands Republican Party Territorial Committee meeting devolved into chaos on Saturday as the delegate selection process resulted in pushing, shoving, and punches being thrown by committee members.

Politico is reporting that there are wildly differing accounts of what happened. Indeed, there appear to be at least two assault victims.

The confused, contradictory accounts show a fractured party on the verge of a total meltdown.

Schoenbohm, who posted audio Monday of the chaotic meeting, accused Canegata of not adhering to proper procedures. A man can be heard around the 4:30-minute mark of one recording saying the entire meeting is out of order after what sounds like the chairman banging a gavel and saying out of order. [A]nd when the member objected and a Cruz volunteer that was at the meeting at the behest of the chairman put a cell phone camera in her face and then the  delegate who objected was subsequently thrown to the ground by an ardent supporter of the chairman, Schoenbohm wrote. The Ted Cruz staffer was allegedly Dennis Lennox, a Michigan-based Republican operative who spent weeks organizing the U.S. territories for Cruzs campaign but said he would support Trump. Schoenbohm added that Canegata was armed with a semiautomatic weapon at the meeting and ordered everyone out of the meeting room and threatened all that opposed him with trespass if they didn't live [sic] his private property. Brady emerged from the meeting room visibly shaken and crying, he continued. Someone called the police and demand that she be arrested even though she was the obvious victim of an assault and battery. Near the six-minute mark of the recording, a voice can be heard saying the group can reconvene in ones office. In response to the impromptu conference, the committee sent a release accusing seven members of violating party rules. By convening and participating in this illegal meeting, the rump maliciously used the name and legal identity of both the Republican Party of the Virgin Islands and the Territorial Committee to perpetrate a gross fraud, the committee said in a statement. The fact sheet doubles down on the notion that the second meeting was unlawful, as it lacked the requisite number of representatives. During this illegal meeting, the rump, at the behest of Mr. [Warren Bruce] Cole, unanimously passed a motion defaming Territorial Committee member Frederick Espinosa based on demonstrably falsehoods of a defamatory nature, the statement said. The final edit of an audio recording of the rumps illegal meeting was posted by Herb Schoenbohm, a felon convicted of fraud.

I recall the 1968 Democratic convention, where Mayor Daley's bully boys were shoving reporters and delegates alike. Senator Abraham Ribicoff famously accused Daley of using "Gestapo tactics" both in the hall and in the streets to ram through a pro-war platform for Hubert Humphrey. The floor seethed with physical confrontations between Daley supporters and McCarthy backers.

I don't see how confrontations can be avoided in a contested convention. The toxic rhetoric of both Trump and Cruz has raised the temperature of the race, and putting their supporters in such close proximity on the convention floor invites violence.

"The whole world" will be watching and judging the Republican Party. Can delegates keep their cool if Donald Trump continues to insist that the nomination is being stolen? In a word, doubtful.
President Obamas trip to Saudi Arabia this week may go a little smoother thanks to Josh Earnests signal to reporters yesterday:

The whole notion of sovereign immunity is at stake, Earnest told reporters Monday. It could put the United States, and our taxpayers, and our service members and our diplomats at significant risk, if other countries were to adopt a similar law. He added that it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which the president would sign the bill as its currently drafted.

Saudi Arabia has threatened to pull three quarters of a trillion dollars out of American investments if a bipartisan, overwhelmingly popular bill passes that would enable 9/11 victim families to sue nations whose government officials sponsored terror attacks. But it is not that threat in particular that worries Obama, but rather the specter of the United States being sued overseas for all kinds of actions, once sovereign immunity no longer becomes a bedrock principle of American foreign relations.

And that is the grown-up thing to do, no matter how sympathetic the 9/11 victim families are, and no matter how outrageous the fact that Saudi officials apparently did support the 9/11 perpetrators while they were preparing their attack.

The Saudi regime, a medieval absolute monarchy, is reprehensible on its face. It survives only because of petrodollars (now diminished well below the levels necessary to support current spending), bribery of ultra-conservative clergy with support for spreading Wahhabism worldwide, and American military support  not to mention millions of foreigners who do most of the real work of the Saudi economy, from menial tasks to high-level managerial and technical functions.

The royal family, numbering in the thousands thanks to the practice of taking multiple wives and siring as many children as possible, contains factions at odds with one another. It brutally represses its opponents when not bribing them.

The only reason to support it is the specter of Iran invading the Eastern Provinces, inhabited by Shia Muslims and containing most of the oil, and the fundamentalist clergy leading an Iran-style revolution elsewhere.

Unfortunately for Obama, his duties require him to take a position against sympathetic American victims and in favor of corrupt and disgusting foreigners. I bet he can hardly wait to get out of office.
At least one NATO country has no illusions about Russia's intentions in Eastern Europe. The Polish defense minister says Russia is preparing for "aggressive action" against NATO and that "it's time to talk about it openly."

Reuters:

Poland, a former Soviet satellite state, fears Russia is seeking to extend its influence beyond its borders after Moscow annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014 and continues to support for armed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Earlier this month, two Russian warplanes flew simulated attack passes near a U.S. guided missile destroyer which had just left the Polish port of Gdynia. A U.S. official said this was one of the most aggressive interactions between the two sides in recent memory. "So far, all Russian behavior attests to systematic preparation for aggressive action," Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz told the Rzeczpospolita daily in an interview published on Tuesday. "And it's time to talk about it openly." Warsaw will host a NATO heads of state summit in July, where it will push for an increased military presence on the alliance's eastern flank. In 2014, NATO suspended cooperation with Russia over its role the conflict in Ukraine. Russia says deployment of significant NATO forces close to its borders would violate the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act.

The 1980s are calling, but President Obama is asleep.

In "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman, the Great Powers in Europe blundered into war because they invariably misinterpreted the intentions of their opponents, as seemingly coincidental or innocuous statements and actions were seen as aggressive moves.

We're assuming that Vladimir Putin has some master plan that is unfolding before our eyes. He may, indeed, be following a script he has written himself. It's also possible that we are misinterpreting these aggressive actions, placing more emphasis on them than they deserve, making it appear that Putin is preparing for war.

The buzzing of our destroyer in the Baltic, overflying Turkish air space, continued support for Ukraine separatists, and other recent provocations may all be targets of opportunity rather than part of plan. Putin is aggressive, that's for sure. But there is no massive movement of troops to the Polish frontier or to the borders of the Baltic states. Putin is playing the long game, and if the opportunity to strike the West presents itself, holding a reasonable possibility of victory, I don't doubt for a minute that he will fail to take advantage.
Its not a good look for the convoy of a crusader against genocide to mow down a little African boy as her motorcade roars through a rural area at high speed (often exceeding 60 miles per hour on two-lane country roads), accompanied by a helicopter overhead, journalists in tow, eager for a photo op with refugees. But that was the situation facing Samantha Power yesterday in Cameroon. The Associated Press reports:

U.N. Ambassador Samantha Powers trip to Cameroons front lines in the war against Boko Haram started horrifically today as an armored jeep in her motorcade struck and killed a young boy who darted into the road. The incident occurred near the small city of Mokolo, in northern Cameroon, where Power, her aides and accompanying journalists were headed to meet refugees and others displaced by the years of brutal attacks across West Africa. All those meetings included small children.

Power, a journalist, achieved fame, academic standing, fortune, and high office by self-righteously denouncing the callousness of Western powers in the face of genocide. But since becoming Barack Obamas U.N. ambassador, she has remained in office as his administration stood by as hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in Syria, not resigning in protest. Those perks of office  like armored motorcades though impoverished areas afflicted by genocidal forces  must be hard to give up.

Powers motorcade did not even stop:

The vehicle that hit the boy initially stopped, but was ordered by American security forces to continue traveling through the unsecured area. An ambulance in the U.S. caravan immediately attended to him.

Playing the grandee, Power returned returned hours later:

Power returned to the scene of the bloody accident several hours later to meet the 7-year-old boys mother and father, while residents of his village stood solemnly on a sandy expanse.

Lest anyone think she was self-important:
The last few years, the North American International Auto Show which is held in Detroit at Cobo Hall the week after CES, has gotten the cold shoulder. With many car makers heading to Las Vegas to show off their new cars. This year, Chevy unveiled their Bolt at the show in Vegas, Ford also detailed a number of their self-driving initiatives. Leaving the NAIAS with a pretty dull show, the following week. Weve seen consumer technology and automotive technology seem to merge in recent years, and the committee behind the NAIAS is looking to change things up.

In a press release, the North American International Auto Show announced AutoMobili-D. This is going to be sort like a show within the show at Cobo Hall in Detroit. They are promising about 120,000 square feet of exhibition space for AutoMobili-D which will showcase things like autonomous driving, connected technology and even mobility. It wont just be car makers down there either, there will also be tech startups and parts suppliers showcasing their products as well. There will be a track where people can test out the autonomous driving. A topic that has become very popular as of late.

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AutoMobili-D will start off on January 8th. Thats before the press days for NAIAS, which are January 9th and 10th, followed by the Industry Preview on January 11th and the Charity benefit on the 12th before the show opens to the public on the 13th of January. AutoMobili-D will only run until January 12th. So unfortunately this wont be open to everyone, but just the press and industry insiders, who will already be at Cobo Hall on those days. This should help keep the NAIAS from fading into mediocrity in the next few years though.

In the auto industry, there are several auto shows each year. The big ones are in Detroit, New York, Geneva, Chicago and Los Angeles. Each show could argue about how big they are  both in terms of the sheer number of visitors and announcements that are made  and each of them are important. The LA Auto Show is the last one of the year in September, and always has some pretty interesting announcements made. We havent heard if the other shows will also feature something similar to AutoMobili-D, like the Detroit Auto show will be.
It is that time of year again when we start to feel a letdown  Samsung has introduced their new Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, LG has taken the wraps off its new LG G5, and even HTC just announced their newest flagship, the HTC 10. The excitement was in the air, and anticipation was running high, but now, the candles have been blown out, the cake cut, and now it feels like cleanup time and another year wait for the next party. What makes matters worse is that it is not even the end of April  we still have eight more months to go in 2016  what do we have to look forward to in the way of smartphones? The truth of the matter is, we have plenty of new Android devices to look forward to purchasing. In fact, if you are in the market for a new smartphone  and can only buy a new one every 2-3 years  then you are probably better off waiting until closer to the end of the year when you can access all of your options. Let us look at a few of the upcoming smartphones and discuss what features we would like to see on them and what to expect.

Nexus

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One of the hottest new smartphones coming our way this fall has to be the new Nexus model(s)  we say that because Google blew us away last September when they introduced two Nexus models, the lower-end Google Nexus 5X, and the high-end Huawei Nexus 6P. This was a great idea that allowed Nexus purchasers to choose a device based on their price range and desired features. The two devices were well received, but it is not known at this time whether Google will do the same thing this year or simply offer one model running the new Android N, which is only out as a Developer Preview version.

No one knows for sure which manufacturer will get the nod to produce the upcoming Nexus device(s). Google looked to HTC for the very first Nexus One in 2010, but has since used Samsung, LG (3 times), Motorola, and Huawei  rumors have it that LG is not interested and that HTC may once again produce this years Nexus smartphone. It is hard to deny the popularity of Huaweis Nexus 6P so that we could be looking at another year with two Nexus devices. Other than running the latest Android N, not much is known about its features other than it may incorporate some 3D Touch features.

Galaxy Note 6

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The next big thing from Samsung has to be the new Galaxy Note 6 and possibly a Galaxy Note Edge (we can only hope). Rumors are that Samsung may introduce it as early as July, which would make more sense before the Snapdragon 820 gets too old. Samsung may use its Exynos 8890 octa-core or an enhanced Snapdragon 820, the Snapdragon 823. Rumors are also floating around that the Note 6 will pack 6GB of RAM, and common sense tells us that the new Note will gain back its expandable memory and share the IP68 dust and water resistant rating as well. Look for the new Dual Pixel 12MP camera setup used on the current Galaxy S7/S7 Edge. There is also talk that the display will finally increase to a 5.8-inch Super AMOLED QHD display. Of course, Samsung will improve the S-Pen and software as they always do each year. With the absence of the Galaxy S7 Edge Plus model, some say this could open the door for another Note Edge version, but so far these are strictly rumors.

Moto X

If you are a Moto X flagship fan, you must be wondering, what the next generation will look like and bring to the party as far as specifications. The Chinese company, Lenovo, who purchased it from Google, owns Motorola Mobility. It will be fascinating to see their influence on the next Moto X. Lenovo has already stated that the new models (Moto G, Moto E and Moto X) will have a fingerprint sensor  which makes sense with Android Pay starting to branch out. However, beyond that, little is known about the new Moto X  there was 5-inch Moto X3 listed on the web, but it is more likely that Lenovo will stick around the 5.7-inch display used on the current Moto X Pure Edition (also known as Style outside the US.) Hopes are high that the Moto Maker will still be an option for the Moto X, allowing the user to customize and differentiate their device from other smartphones. It was last July when Motorola announced the new Moto X, so expect some leaks over the next couple of months. Lenovo has the cash to spend on the Moto brand, so we are hoping to see something special for this years Moto X flagship.

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LG V10 (2nd Gen)

While the new LG G5 is already on the market with its modular design and Snapdragon 820 chipset, let us not forget about LGs V series released last year  the LG V10. Rumors are that its successor will make its appearance later in 2016, possibly using the first ever LG chipset  the NUCLUN 2, which is manufactured based on Intels 14nm process and TSMCs 16nm FinFET node. The leak detailed one quad-core Cortex-A72 running 2.1GHz and one quad-core Cortex-A53 running at 1.5GHz and incorporating Intels cellular modem for blazing fast connectivity speeds.

When the LG V10 was released in October 2015, many were wondering what LG was thinking  an all-metal device with a dual display and great camera setupis this replacing the LG G series as their new flagship? Just this month, LG released an all-metal LG G5 with modular inserts, and we are back to wondering where the LG V10 (second gen) will fit into their mix. The new LG V10 will most likely not use the modules, will stay all stainless steel, keep the 5.7-inch QHD display, but use the new LG chipset with 4GB of RAM and expandable memory. Will it keep the dual display or switch to an always-on display and will it keep its current camera setup of dual 5MP front-facing cameras or switch to the LG G5s setup? It should be very interesting to see how LG handles this new model.

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OnePlus 3

OnePlus has confirmed that they will announce their next flagship in June, which means availability in July. It will most certainly be called the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus assures us it will sport a new design. The display will most likely stay around 5.5-inches and use an FHD resolution to keep the costs down. We hope that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 will power the OnePlus 3 and come with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage  we doubt OnePlus will add any expandable storage. If OnePlus wants the OnePlus 3 to be widely accepted in the US, it should come, at a minimum, with an NFC chip to complement the fingerprint sensor. OnePlus will most likely try to keep the price around $350 unlocked  once again, offering high quality at an affordable price.

There is a reason for continuing excitement as mid-year approaches, and while no new earth shattering processors will be released, the smartphones themselves offer reason enough to look forward to the rest of 2016. A new Galaxy Note or Note Edge, the new Nexus device(s) and new Motos from Lenovo are all reasons to celebrate.
When your company is as vast and rich as Google is, you tend to have many other companies casting objections and lawsuits in your direction. Google is fighting off its fair share of anti-competitiveness lawsuits around the world, including the European Union (EU) and up north in Canada. Google manages to win some of these lawsuits, and it looks like Canada may be one of the wins. In 2013, Canadas Competition Bureau started a case against Google based on allegations that Google engaged in anticompetitive business practices related to online search, search advertising and display advertising services in Canada. Today, they closed the investigation after concluding that Googles practices do not exclude its Canadian rivals.

Google derives most of its profits from collecting data, analyzing that data, and selling the findings to businesses that need those statics and trends to gain a competitive edge. Google is so good at what it does, it has become the worlds largest search engine. In this digital and mobile economy, the advertising landscape is constantly changing  newspaper ads are no longer as effective as they were, as we look to Google searches, social media, and mobile ads, often while we are shopping. Canadas Competition Bureau said that just because you are a large business does not necessarily mean you are breaking any laws or Acts. Growing your business can result by simply offering a product that the consumer wants. They claim that both businesses and consumers benefit with online searches and search advertising.

The Bureau considered allegations that Google continually alters its search results to exclude rivals that provide competing services  such as maps, local reviews, travel, etc. After their investigation, the Bureau concluded, Although Google frequently makes changes to the algorithm it uses to rank search results, evidence obtained over the course of the inquiry indicates that Googles changes are generally made to improve user experiences. Google does manipulate data, but only to the consumers advantage, not Googles  for instance, if Google finds out that a site is attempting to artificially increase their rankings in the search results, Google will take steps to demote them.

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Kent Walker, Google SVP and General Counsel, said in a statement. Were pleased that the Canadian Competition Bureau has decided to end its inquiry. We work hard in a competitive landscape to create a great experience for our users and help them quickly and easily find what they need from Google. The Competition Bureau concluded that if a customer is unhappy with Googles bundled or preloaded software, they can get rid of it or change it to whatever search engine they wanted  this included mobile and desktop.
Samsung has introduced quite a few smartphone this year, including their Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge flagships. These two handsets are already available for purchase all over the world, and it seems like the sales are going as planned for this Korea-based tech giant. That being said, Samsung has released some mid-range offerings as well this year as part of their Galaxy A and Galaxy J series, and it seems like theyre getting ready to introduce a whole new line of smartphones, read on.

The Samsung Galaxy C5 surfaced on GeekBench a couple of days ago, and judging by the specs shared there, the Galaxy C5 will be a mid-range handset with plenty of RAM (4GB). Well, the Galaxy C7 (SM-C7000) listing popped up recently as well, unlike the Galaxy C5, the Galaxy C7 showed its face on AnTuTu. According to the source, this smartphone will sport a fullHD (1920 x 1080) display, though we still dont know what size will that panel be, and along with that it will pack 4GB of RAM, just like the Galaxy C5. The Galaxy C7 will also ship with 32GB of internal storage, and it will be fueled by Qualcomms Snapdragon 625 64-bit octa-core processor which is accompanied by the Adreno 506 GPU for graphics. The 16-megapixel snapper will be placed on the back of this smartphone, and an 8-megapixel shooter will be available up front. Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow will come pre-installed on the Galaxy C7, and on top of it, youll be able to find Samsungs TouchWiz UI.

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The phone is also expected to pack in a fingerprint scanner which will be built into its home button, and the device will be made out of metal. 4G LTE connectivity will also be a part of this offering, and you can also expect Quick Charging to be included in this package. The Galaxy C7 will quite probably be bigger than the Galaxy C5, but we still dont know what sizes will their displays be. Either way, well let you know as soon as additional info surfaces, stay tuned.
Its the middle of the primary season for selecting a new president. What this means  for those that may not know, or dont live in the US  is that candidates are running to win the party nomination. With Donald Trump in the lead for the Republican party and Hilary Clinton in the lead for the Democratic party, before the big showdown in November. This week, the primary is being held in New York, both parties held their debates in Brooklyn last week. Results of the Primary arent out just yet, but we should hear about them later on tonight. However right now, it appears that search interest is in favor of Vermont Senator, Bernie Sanders.

Google Trends shows the trends in searches over a specific time frame. Google Trends recently put out a picture of what it looks like right now in the New York area during the primary. Bernie Sanders is commanding about 62% of searches in regards to the election, with Hilary Clinton commanding the other 38%. These are searches with the term How to vote for in them. While this may not depict how the election will turn out, when polls close later this evening, it is a pretty interesting stat for Bernie Sanders. Who is currently behind Clinton in electoral votes needed to win the nomination.

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Now on the Republican side, Google Trends shows that Donald Trump is in the lead for searches conducted in the past 24 hours. With Trump at 61%, Ted Cruz at 25% and John Kasich at 14%, which is currently the landscape for the primaries so far on the republican side. Trump has a pretty sizeable lead over Ted Cruz in electoral votes, but its still anyones game right now.

Google Trends also has some other pretty interesting stats when it comes to the primary. Including what foods users who searched for Donald Trump also searched for. This is gearing up to be one of the more interesting presidential elections in recent memory (although with them only happening every 4 years, theres not many in recent memory). If youre interested in this type of data, youll want to give Google Trends Twitter account a follow. Some real interesting data is available there.
Mobile payments have become a real thing over the past couple of years, and now that the playing field has levelled out somewhat, the major names and players have emerged. Obviously, Apple and Apple Pay  having launched before Android Pay and Samsung Pay  are right up there at the top, but both Google and Samsungs options are set to roll out in more parts of Europe and elsewhere in the next few weeks. What many users might not be aware of however, is that Chinese giant Huawei also have their own payment system, dubbed Huawei Pay, and rumor has it that the service is about to leave China any time soon.

Huawei Pay is currently only available in China, and in partnership with the Bank of China, but now there are reports that the service will be heading to Pakistan. Or at least, a report out of said country seems to reckon, anyway. The mobile payments landscape is still one thats in its infancy, and one that might finally be starting to reach maturity. Right now however, Huawei Pay is mostly seen as a me too competitor with Apple Pay  which recently went live in China, back in February  and whether or not Huawei Pay can become a global and mainstream platform remains to be seen. Should this new payments system head into the West however, users will have more choice on Android, provided Huawei open it up to non-Huawei made smartphones, unlike Samsungs Samsung Pay which is only available on select Samsung smartphones.

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Huawei Pay itself has only been available in China since March, and right now just counts the Bank of China among its supported banks and card issuers. Available on most Huawei devices from the end of 2015 onwards however, it could become a real competitor in China, as there will be more devices for it to work on, but with Apple Pay already well established and Samsung Pay becoming a big name in the West, Huawei have their work cut out for them. Not to mention the disdain with which US government officials look upon Huawei with. All of this could cast a shadow on Huawei Pays march into the West, but for now well have to wait and see on just what Huaweis plans are.
Sony has made great efforts to bring Android 6.0 Marshmallow to its product lineup in a timely manner, and furthermore, the company hasnt neglected its older models either. In fact, earlier this week the Japanese tech giant started rolling out Android 6.0 Marshmallow on more Xperia Z devices, including multiple Xperia Z2 and Xperia Z3 variants, as well as the Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet. This time around, the release is considerably wider and is not limited only to smartphones listed in the companys Beta program.

Sonys new software update schedule is quite ambitious and commendable, mainly because the company seems to want and release Android 6.0 Marshmallow on a wide range of devices, old and new, roughly at the same time. The Sony Xperia Z2 (model number D6503), the Xperia Z3 (D6603) as well as the Xperia Z3 Compact (D5803) have received Android 6.0 Marshmallow earlier this month, but the previous release was reserved only for variants and users that are involved in Sonys Beta Marshmallow program, which aims at pushing beta updates to early adopters willing to test the software and provide feedback. However, earlier this week the Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow update was officially released on multiple variants, including those who are not part of the Beta program. This includes the Sony Xperia Z2 (D6502, D6503), the Sony Xperia Z3 (D6603, D6646, D6653) and Xperia Z3 Dual (D6633), and even the Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet. In fact, both the Wi-Fi and HSPA+ Xperia Z2 Tablet models (SGP511, SGP512, SGP521) are now queued up for the Marshmallow update. Last but not least, the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact, model numbers D5803 and D5833 also seem to have received the latest software package, bumping the build number up to 23.5.A.0.570.

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As to what you can expect from Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, the update includes a brand new user interface for the camera application, enhanced privacy settings, and promises better (or rather smart) battery life thanks to the addition of Doze Mode. However, keep in mind that Doze replaces Sonys proprietary STAMINA mode, which may not yield the same results at the end of the day. In any case, Sony already confirmed that it will reintroduce STAMINA mode in a later Marshmallow build, which will most likely be released to Beta participants, first and foremost.
Google released Android 6.0 Marshmallow along with two Nexus smartphones in late 2016. Since then, we have seen a number of manufacturers rolling out the software update to their devices  and unlike the rush to provide Android Lollipop to customers, Android Marshmallow is taking longer to roll out to customers. One of the reasons for this appears to be because of carrier testing but we are seeing some movement. Only last week, T-Mobile USA released the update for the Samsung Galaxy Note 5, bringing this device up to Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. Now, a handful of days later, Americas third largest carrier has released the same update for the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+. The update is already appearing on customer devices.

Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow is the latest, non-developer preview version of Android available and brings with it a number of important new features, many of which are behind the scenes. These include Googles new power management features, Doze and App Standby, which are designed to suspend network and device activity when the handset is idle, and suspend infrequently used applications. Doze and App Standby can greatly extend the standby time of our smartphones and tablets. Other improvements with Android Marshmallow include significantly enhanced application permission controls, designed to provide users with a very granular level of control over their devices and applications running on them.

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Samsungs Galaxy S6 edge+ is one of 2015s more powerful devices and is easily capable of running Android Marshmallow well. The handset is based around a QHD, or 1440p resolution, 5.7-inch, curved AMOLED panel. Theres arguably 2015s finest chipset, the Samsung Exynos 7420, under this screen, constructed on a 14nm manufacturing process and featuring eight application cores. This System-on-Chip has access to 4 GB of RAM and the ARM Mali-T768MP8 GPU. Theres a 16MP main camera and a 5MP front facing unit. The device comes with either 32 GB or 64 GB of internal storage but no Galaxy S6 model has a MicroSD card, which was removed by Samsung. The device has an internal, non-user replaceable 3,000 mAh battery that comes with fast charging technologies.

Customers should receive the software update notification automatically, but if not can visit their device settings, then About Device, then Software Update. Its recommended to perform the software update over a Wi-Fi network with the device battery fully charged or on charge. Once complete, the update brings the Galaxy S6 edge+ up to software version G928TUVU2DPD1.
While smartwatches have been available commercially for several years now, the product category is yet to pick up steam and smartwatches, truth be told, are far from becoming must-have items circa 2016. While the usual suspects, Samsung and Apple, are the two leading names in the industry, the segment itself is having problems transcending its niche and has so far failed miserably at appealing to the mainstream consumer the way smartphones have over the past decade or so. While many in the industry had hoped that Apple releasing its own smartwatch will attract enough attention from the mainstream media to bring the product category into public consciousness, that hope dissipated quickly with many industry insiders like the CEO of Tag Heuer and Hublot, Mr. Jean-Claude Biver, lambasting the Apple Watch for being feminine and dismissed it as a plastic toy designed by student designers.

In spite of mixed reviews, initial sales of the device were said to have been along expected lines, with over 2.3 million units pre-ordered within the first few days of its announcement. However, with the passage of time, sales of the Apple Watch apparently declined considerably if various reports in the media are to be believed. With Android Wear watches also not exactly catching on like wildfire, smartwatches have continued to remain limited in their appeal and are, quite frankly, struggling to shed off their geeky image. In fact Juniper Research, in a recent report, actually summed up the travails of the industry pretty clearly when it described the sector as  a category waiting for a market. With no compelling reason to get rid of the traditional wristwatch, most people are adopting a wait-and-watch policy before putting down hundreds of dollars to get something with limited functionality and even more limited shelf-life.

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The question that now arises is a fairly simple one. How much are users willing to pay for the novelty factor now that their appetite for gaming, social media, video chat and texting is whetted by the ubiquitous smartphone that everybody and their aunties seem to carry around these days. While the answer to that question is still up in the air, demand for the smartwatch, especially the one from Apple, has taken a nosedive in recent months with no compelling apps that will force users to make that investment. While all smartwatch makers are struggling to expand the product category, Apple has been hit especially hard as the company had bet big on its watch last year. While Apple has presumably more than recouped its initial investment, the product itself continues to remain little more than a novel toy, and its success  or lack thereof  continues to be a hotly-debated topic.

Whats worse for Apple is that while it was able to sell 10.6 million units of the device in just 8 months last year, KGI Securities seems to believe that less than 7.5 million units of the device will ship this year mainly due to its dwindling popularity. That is a whopping 50% drop from around 1.3 million units per month last year to just about 625,000 units on a monthly basis this year, if those estimates do hold up in the final analysis. According to renowned Apple analyst at KGI, Mr. Ming-Chi Kuo, the lack of widespread uptake for the Apple Watch can be attributed to a number of factors, including the lack of killer apps and an underwhelming form factor. Its lack of compatibility with non-Apple devices is also one of the reasons for its lack of popularity, according to him.

Meanwhile, even as the 2nd-gen Apple Watch is expected to go into production later this year and launch alongside the iPhone 7, Mr. Kuo is not exactly optimistic about its chances in the larger scheme of things. According to him, the model will basically just bring some minor changes from the original device launched last year, so it might not exactly do much to turn things around for the Cupertino, California-based company. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel after all, and Mr. Kuo says he expects demand to pick up once the 3nd-gen Apple Watch is launched next year with more compelling apps, better connectivity and a new design that will make it look more like an actual wristwatch and perform more like a standalone, connected gadget replete with unique applications. It remains to be seen if that will indeed happen, but many electronics and technology companies around the world will be hoping that it does, as that might just kick start an entire industry desperately seeking a killer product.
Transfer balls: Spurs Harry Kane to Barcelona, Manchester United in big summer of no news

The Guardian says Bayern Munich and Real Madrid are looking to buy Tottenham striker Harry Kane. The story contains not a single fact, quote or source. It is classic transfer balls. This summer will be busy for Kane news.

The Standard says Harry Kane is the subject of renewed interest from Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. Real and Bayern are both said to be desperate to prise Kane from White Hart Lane. But Bayern, will only opt for Jane should Robert Lewandowski leave the club in the summer.

Kane earns 50,000 a week at Spurs. Surely Barcelona and Bayern will top that, reasons the Standard.

The Week chucks in another team, saying Real Madrid manager Zinedine Zidane has identified Kane as the man to lead the line next season. Youve got to love identified. It implies that Zidane has studied Kane for promotion to the big time. Kane is the Premier Leagues top scorer. Identifying his talents is marginally less tricky than looking at a puppy stood by a pile of poo and working out whodunnit.

And then theres Manchester United. Earlier in April, the Indy said Kane could regret turning down transfer. Well, so said Teddy Sheringham.

Looking at Kane flying high with Spurs, you have to wonder why he would leave the club.

Anorak

Posted: 19th, April 2016 | In: Back pages, Sports, Spurs Comments (5) | TrackBack | Permalink
(ANSA) - Rome, April 19 - LGBT travel rental website misterbnb has officially landed in Italy, sources said Tuesday.

The website founded in 2013 currently numbers 50,000 hosts in 134 countries. It began as a combination of gay travel website myGayTrip and short-term apartment rental service Sejourning, and was envisioned as a gay-friendly alternative to Airbnb. "In spite of steady growth in the short-term rental business, gay homeowners and travelers have had trouble feeling safe and welcome," the company said in a statement.

"Being gay, I can offer my guests comfortable, safe lodgings because I understand their preferences and can point them to the best places to go," said Rome homeowner Dario, 44.

"Gays want to feel welcome wherever they go," said co-founder Matthieu Jost. "misterbnb helps them find centrally located lodging at accessible prices, while allowing them to socialize and feel welcome as soon as they arrive".


(ANSA) - Herat, April 19 - Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni told Italian troops stationed in Herat, Afghanistan, that their homeland was proud of them on Tuesday, when 28 people were killed in an attack in the capital Kabul. "Italy is proud of the work that you have done," Gentiloni said. "It's an example to all the contingents in Afghanistan. After almost 15 years of Italian work, including some tragedies, the fruit is clearly visible. The challenge of terrorism is still open, but thanks to you, people are starting to live civilly again and the best conditions for the construction of peace are being created". In Kabul hundreds were injured in addition to the many people who were killed when a suicide attacker reportedly detonated a car bomb and gunmen stormed the area. The Taliban claimed responsibility.


Migrants: +4.7% arrivals, system not collapsing-Alfano Libya is root of problem, meeting minister on Friday

(ANSAmed) - ROME, APRIL 19 - "Compared to last year, this year there has been a 4.7% increase in migrant arrivals. We are therefore not in an emergency and we cannot say that there has been a collapse in the reception system". This is how Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano described the migrant situation in Italy during a programme on Canale 5.



"The root of the problem is Libya and on Friday I will meet the interior minister of the north African country to work together to ensure there are checks at the border," he said. "The Libyan government has only been installed for two weeks and time is needed for the country to stabilise. Collaboration with them could be a fundamental turning point". (ANSAmed).




Juncker: we won't water down criteria for Turkey visa waiver Commission president- Ankara must meet all remaining conditions.

(ANSAmed) - STRASBOURG, APRIL 19 - "As part of the agreement" with Ankara, "we are working towards visa liberalisation for Turkish citizens. Turkey now has to satisfy all the remaining conditions so that the EU Commission can adopt its proposal in coming months. Visa liberalisation is a matter of criteria. The criteria will not be watered down in the case of Turkey," EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said at a Council of Europe gathering attended also by Turkish Premier Ahmet Davutoglu. (ANSAmed).




Migrants: Turkey says no EU deal without end of visa system Davutoglu: 'we will not make concessions'

(ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL, MARCH 15 - "I continue to believe that we will have the visa waiver in June. If this is not the case, then certainly no-one can expect Turkey to maintain its commitments," Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said ahead of a visit to Strasbourg, referring to the deal with the EU on handling migration.



Davutoglu was speaking to journalists before leaving to meet EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in France.



"Turkey is a serious partner. It does what it promised and it will not make any concessions on that which it has been promised," Davutoglu said.




Strasbourg - European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Tuesday Turkey had no reason to launch threats to end a migration deal with the EU unless visas are issued by June. "We sealed a deal, the deal is being applied. There's no need to launch random threats," Juncker said when asked if Turkish Premier Ahmet Davutoglu had been threatening. Juncker said the Turkish premier had reminded him of the liberalisation of the visas "but there was no need". He said "I already told the assembly that it will take place "as Turkey meets the conditions, and that it what it is doing, therefore I trust it will happen on the basis of the criteria".

"As part of the agreement" with Ankara, "we are working towards visa liberalisation for Turkish citizens. Turkey now has to satisfy all the remaining conditions so that the EU Commission can adopt its proposal in coming months. Visa liberalisation is a matter of criteria. The criteria will not be watered down in the case of Turkey," EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said at a Council of Europe gathering attended also by Turkish Premier Ahmet Davutoglu.

Migrants: Turkey says no EU deal without end of visa system

"I continue to believe that we will have the visa waiver in June. If this is not the case, then certainly no-one can expect Turkey to maintain its commitments," Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said ahead of a visit to Strasbourg, referring to the deal with the EU on handling migration.

Davutoglu was speaking to journalists before leaving to meet EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in France.

"Turkey is a serious partner. It does what it promised and it will not make any concessions on that which it has been promised," Davutoglu said.
A voyage into Egyptian splendour at Pompeii Statues from Turin Egypt museum and focus on Templ

(ANSAmed) - NAPLES, APRIL 19 - Egypt is returning to Pompeii in an evocative new exhibition. From April 20, the "Palestra Grande" (Large Gymnasium) in the archaeological site will open the "Egypt Pompeii" display, which is on its second stop after beginning at the Egyptian Museum of Turin in March.



For the exhibition, curated by Massimo Osanna and Marco Fabbri with Simon Connor, the recently restored areas of the Large Gymnasium will provide a backdrop for monumental statues of the New Kingdom (16th-11th century BC), the height of splendour of Egyptian civilisation.



Highlights from Thebes, the principal religious centre of the time, include a magnificent seated statue of the Pharaoh Thutmose I (15th century BC), discovered in the temple of the God Amon in Karnak, and the seven colossal statues portraying Sekhmet (14th century BC), an Egyptian god with a mysterious lion head, who holds powers of both devastation and abundance.



The imposing granite sculptures - on exceptional loan from the permanent collection of the Egyptian Museum and enhanced by the set-up of Francesco Venezia - serve as an extraordinary testament to the world of Egyptian mythology, aside from representing the power of the pharaoh at the time of the 18th dynasty. Following the traces of Isis and from Egypt to Pompeii, the exhibition proceeds through rooms of the display, showing the so called "Aegyptiaca": artifacts and relics of ancient Egypt used in Campania from the 8th century BC as amulets. A video installation also highlights cultural exchanges, both religious and commercial, undertaken between Pompeii and Egypt from the end of the 2nd century BC. The visit ends with fragments of Pompeii frescoes portraying scenes with pygmies and exotic animals.



Visitors can also see the "untitled" art work by Nunzio (2015), an initiative fuelled by efforts to link Pompeii with contemporary art. An iconic symbol of modernity and its connection with the ancient, the work, that opens the show, investigates the expressive possibilities of matter and its relationship with light and space. Furthermore, in the archaeological area, an "Egyptian" itinerary helps visitors discover the Temple of Isis, one of the most well-conserved buildings in Pompeii, which has a dedicated app. The route also leads around numerous houses decorated with motifs inspired by Egypt, such as the House of the Pygmies, which will open to the public for the first time following restoration work.



On June 28, the Archaeological Museum of Naples will open a new section linked to the project which focuses on oriental cults and religions that were brought over from Egypt and became widespread in the Campania region and then also influenced the rest of the Italian peninsula. (ANSAmed).




BERLIN - German daily Bild reported that European beaches, in particular ones in Italy, Spain and the south of France, could be a target for Islamist suicide bombers. "Terrorism planned on our beaches!," wrote Bild citing contacts between the Italian secret services and the German ones. The report said there are fears that terrorists may disguise themselves as people hawking goods on beaches.

The information regarding this potential threat came from Africa, the report said, adding that terrorists are ready to use explosives and fire arms on European beaches. The German tabloid quoted a senior German security official as saying that: "it is possible that ISIS is conceiving a new terror dimension in this way. The beaches cannot be protected"
Geneva - Almost 179,000 migrants and refugees have arrived in Europe by sea since the start of the year, the International Organisation for Migration said Tuesday.



Almost 25,000 came to Italy, more than 153,000 to Greece, and the rest to Cyprus and Spain, the IOM said. The number of dead in the Mediterranean is 737, not including hundreds from the Horn of Africa who have drowned according to unconfirmed reports this week. Some 400 migrants, mostly Somalis, were reported to have drowned early Monday, and Somalia said 200 had drowned late Monday, but neither report has been confirmed.
ROME - The number of rescue initiatives for migrants trying to reach European coasts is growing constantly. The 'Sea-Eye' operation is set to be presented on Tuesday in Licata, Sicily. This private vessel will patrol the Mediterranean from April 20 and conduct observation and rescue missions off the Libyan coast. The aim is to find people in danger, save them from drowning and seek help.



Sea-Eye is made up of 200 people from all over Germany and other EU countries, who work for the project as volunteers. In the most affected area of the sea, the Sea-Eye will monitor the waters in search of overcrowded or damaged boats that risk capsizing. People will be supplied with life jackets and water and the boats will be replaced by rescue rafts. On board the ship there will be a first aid unit for people who have suffered serious injuries. Once a struggling boat is identified, Sea-Eye will make an SOS call to "MRCC Mediterraneo" in Rome. This year the project will require financing of about 250,000 euros. The Italian Council for Refugees (CIR) will launch a campaign on social networks to help raise funds.



The Sea-Eye initiative started in Autumn 2015, when a group of people in the city of Regensburg, led by businessman Michael Buschheuer, decided they no longer wanted to sit back and watch as refugees were dying in the Mediterranean.



Instead the organisation went out and bought an old fishing vessel, restored it and equipped it to be able to carry out search and rescue missions in the sea. (ANSAmed).
French president arrives in Jordan for official visit Hollande will visit a Syrian refugee camp

(ANSAmed) - AMMAN, APRIL 19 - French president Francois Hollande on Tuesday arrived in Jordan in an official visit where he will meet king Abdullah and top Jordanian officials to discuss the Syrian crisis and means of pushing the middle East peace process forward, officials said.



"The visit aims at discussing means of boosting ties between Jordan and France and partnership that joins the two countries in various fields, support stability and means of fighting terrorism," said a statement carried by Petra news agency.



Holland will meet king Abdullah at the royal palace in Amman and co-chair a meeting between top officials from both sides, diplomatic sources said. The French president is expected to visit a Syrian refugee camp and meet refugees as well as visit projects by French authorities to help asylum seekers in the kingdom. Both sides will also discuss the military efforts against ISIS and means of ending the crisis in Syria peacefully.



(ANSAmed).




French president meets king Abdullah in Amman Focus on regional challenges and fight to terrorism

(ANSAmed) - AMMAN, APRIL 19 - King Abdullah and French president Francois Hollande on Tuesday held talks at the royal palace in Amman on latest regional challenges and means to fight terrorism.



"Talks between the two sides focused on means to fight terrorism, and the latest developments on the Syrian crisis and regional developments as well as means to revive peace talks," said an official statement carried by Petra News agency.



Hollande where received by Abdullah at al Huseinya palace in Amman where he was granted a state reception before the two sides headed for one on one talks and later held meetings that included top officials from both sides.



The French president is visiting the kingdom as part of a regional tour to discuss means of ending the Syrian civil war and the international alliance to fight the Islamic State, according to diplomatic sources. (ANSAmed)
STRASBOURG - "As part of the agreement" with Ankara, "we are working towards visa liberalisation for Turkish citizens. Turkey now has to satisfy all the remaining conditions so that the EU Commission can adopt its proposal in coming months. Visa liberalisation is a matter of criteria. The criteria will not be watered down in the case of Turkey," EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said at a Council of Europe gathering attended also by Turkish Premier Ahmet Davutoglu.

Migrants: Turkey says no EU deal without end of visa system

"I continue to believe that we will have the visa waiver in June. If this is not the case, then certainly no-one can expect Turkey to maintain its commitments," Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said ahead of a visit to Strasbourg, referring to the deal with the EU on handling migration.

Davutoglu was speaking to journalists before leaving to meet EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in France.

"Turkey is a serious partner. It does what it promised and it will not make any concessions on that which it has been promised," Davutoglu said.

(ANSAmed).
ROME - "Compared to last year, this year there has been a 4.7% increase in migrant arrivals. We are therefore not in an emergency and we cannot say that there has been a collapse in the reception system". This is how Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano described the migrant situation in Italy during a programme on Canale 5.



"The root of the problem is Libya and on Friday I will meet the interior minister of the north African country to work together to ensure there are checks at the border," he said. "The Libyan government has only been installed for two weeks and time is needed for the country to stabilise. Collaboration with them could be a fundamental turning point".


VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis on Tuesday asked forgiveness from refugees for the "closure and indifference" with which they are "too often" treated.



"Too often we have failed to welcome you! Forgive the closure and indifference of our societies that fear the change in lifestyle and mentality that your presence requires," the pope said in a video message for the 35th anniversary of the foundation of the Jesuit-run Centro Astalli service for refugees. "(You are) treated like a burden, a problem, a cost, instead you are a gift," Francis added.



The pope has made solidarity with refugees and asylum-seekers a central theme of his papacy and on Saturday he visited the Greek island of Lesbos to show support for thousands of asylum-seekers there.



Three Syrian families including a total of six children subsequently returned with him to Italy and will be looked after by the Sant'Egidio Catholic community in Rome while their asylum applications are being processed.
Journalists and stars of TV stations Antena 3, Antena 1, Antena Stars, Euphoria and ZU have met today with the viewers in the Constitution Square. For three hours, five television journalists and celebrities you love and support have spoken about abuses the Intact stations were subjected to.

Antena 3 journalists wanted to thank in this way, live, off the TV screen, to all the viewers for their support shown in the most difficult moments.



Friday during the Special Edition with Oana Stancu Zamfir and Adrian Ursu, Antena 3 journalists along politicians have shared their experiences of today.



UPDATE 23.14: "A friend texted me today and said that when Carmen Avram spoke, the whole country cried. When Mugur Ciuvica spoke, Basescu cried too" said Felix Rache.



UPDATE 22.33:  Todays speech, on stage of Carmen Avram, I believe it is the most memorable. A person full of passion. I have seen Mihai Morar, one of the best entertainers, he and Daniel Buzdugan are probably the most listened people in Romania. People who have spoken with passion about things like freedom and accepting the different ones. For me, it is a miracle, what has happened today. We have decided to meet with people and we have done everything in 40 hours . The fact that they have come on a Friday, the city was blocked, the fact that they came during the rainy cold weather, to have so many people show up, so warm ...I am not worried that some people throw with arrows. There is a fascist zone in Romania. I have asked some colleagues to make a binder of all those sayings on the internet. They are making severe discriminations , they show the fascists they have become. I also want to give you some good news. Because today it was so great, why dont we make a bigger and better meeting next weekend? Lets do that that in Bucharest, maybe we go to Iasi, tell us where to go . We could even do this every weekend and travel the country, countrywide. All the facist will end up in the loony home  said Mihai Gadea.





UPDATE 22.25: What made me really angry is that somebody told me about the mockery conducted on Facebook against these people. Why? Those people pay taxes that are too big; their children do not have jobs. They are the people who have built Romania, who have built the cities in which those who mocked them live. They are those who supported the agriculture, and agriculture which the people they now worship have handed in to the foreigners. From this pool of people with no collagen and despicable there came a young man who told me something that really shuttered me. Do you know that from amongst ourselves , the young people who watched Antena 3 we have come to lose our friends. I believe the country is not ready for this TV station  said Carmen Avram.







UPDATE 22.19: I feel great. It is exactly what we have announced that we would do, and thats what we have done. I have also looked over the internet, they are red angry. I have also seen Mr. Tapalaga, a famous bootlicker, he tried to be ironic, he writes with his feet, obviously his irony fell short, because irony is the attribute of smart people. Therefore, they say that the people in the square were mature people, obviously, we do not make programs for the inexperienced, who go from door to door in the Old Town center. The mother of the drummer who performed in the Collective club came to me. Unfortunately he is no longer with us. She approached me wanting to thank Alessandra Stoicescu for what she has done. I was really touched by that (...) NAFA does nothing with that 60 million euros land. Why? Because it is worthless" stated Mircea Badea.





UPDATE 22.08: It seems to me that since Traian Basescu left, violence increased. He left an inheritance, I do not know how much he controls it, we can only suspect . In Poland, also, there have been attempt to suppress the media, but not of this magnitude. Basescu was a man of his word; he realized the huge power discourse had. Those in power now, love the silence. Who keeps quiet and does things? They would want all of us to keep quiet believes senator Daniel Barbu.





Alessandra Stoicescu and Maria Coman have replied to the contesters who spoke about the number of those present and about their age.

We have had as guest a 23 year- old from Slobozia. For them, he is not good, not even at 23 said Maria Coman.



They fostered the hope that people would not come. Now they are saying that older people came .You must be deranged to seek for a problem in people, who are probably interested in what I have to say Alessandra Stoicescu also said.
Blow after blow for Camelia Bogdan. The judiciary inspection is verifying eight notifications filed on her name









UPDATE 13.06  Judicial Inspection is working on no less than eight notifications concerning complaints about the activity of the judge Camelia Bogdan.

From 2012 up to now, a number of 18 complaints have been settled or rejected.

Regarding how Camelia Bogdan was paid by the Ministry of Agriculture while holding the bench in the ICA file, ministry represented as injured party in the trial, the notification was joined by another, which concerned the same issues.

-----------------------

Initial news 11.48

Judge Camelia Bogdan ins under disciplinary investigation by the Judicial Inspection of the Superior Counsel of Magistracy .

The decision was taken because there are indications that she had violated the law when she attended a seminar paid by the Ministry of Agriculture, during the time she served as judge in the Telepathy case file, the institution being represented as the injured party.

Judicial Inspection took on an ex officio investigation, in early February, ]n the case of judge Camelia Bogdan from the Bucharest Court of Appeal following information appeared in the media.

While serving as judge in the ICA case file, Camelia Bogdan received 10,000 lei from the Ministry of Agriculture, the injured party in the file and spent a two weeks stay at Poiana Brasov in the period 21 July to 2 August 2014, under a program funded by the same ministry.

A few days after returning from the stay, Judge Bogdan gave a final judgment in favor of the Ministry of Agriculture.

Subsequently, the judge Camelia Bogdan was heard in the SCM plenary after filing a professional reputation defense request in the scandal of the money received from the Ministry of Agriculture.

The SCM Plenum dismissed the professional reputation defense request filed by Camelia Bogdan. She had notified the SCM arguing that she had been subjected to a real "media lynching" by Antena 3 and World of Justice portal.








Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos said Sunday that he persuaded the Ford representatives that it is a good thing for them to continue their investment in Romania.

"We have had talks with Ford for a few weeks, months. I am confident and they could see thats a good thing to continue their investment here", said Dacian Ciolos, adding that the company representatives have certain expectations related to infrastructure Agerpres informs.

Ciolos stressed that the investments- by the Romanian business environment and by the external one - are leading to economic growth. "Growth will come from investments, both in the private sector, because the fiscal relaxation measures that have been taken should have exactly this goal - to encourage the investment of the money that was left in the private sector and which do not come into the state budget", Dacian Ciolos said.

The prime minister said he already had signals to that effect, following discussions in Germany, France and the Netherlands. "Several ministers attended a forum in London with foreign investors, with discussions about Romania (...)

The interest to come in Romania is high ", said Dacian Ciolos, adding, however, that businessmen also foster expectations related to the reduction of bureaucracy in Romania, the continuing of the fight against corruption, the need to reform the administration, budgetary stability and predictability in legislation development.

However, Ciolos stated that, unfortunately, economic growth is driven mainly by consumption. "And unfortunately it is the type of consumerism likely to increase imports and domestic production less," he added.




Frightening revelations on the Daily Summary: The children in Arges did not die because of the E.coli

The shocking allegations of a mother who lost her daughter after she got sick in Arges , in the infections wave that scandalized the whole country.

Ioana was barely a year old and died at the Marie Curie Hospital in Bucharest in February, after two days of undergoing dialysis.

The family accuses doctors that they were too quick to put her on dialysis, although the child showed signs of recovery.

According to parents, physicians havent looked for signs of other sources of illness than the hemolytic uremic syndrome. Another bacterium would have actually attacked the girl's lungs.

Little Ioana died from pneumonia.In response, doctors at Marie Curie say it is a criminal investigation following which they will make statements.

Prosecutors have started investigations on charges of manslaughter.

The grief stricken grandmother is asking for explanations as to Ioanas death.

I did not understand anything from the answers received. I still do not know what killed Ioana. Nobody told me: for this child we did everything we could. Nobody knows how these children got sick, "said Ioanas grandmother, Sunday on the Daily Summary.

Official documents show no signs of E.coli.

Ioanas grandmother spoke to the Health Minister, Patriciu Achimas-Cadariu.

 He was not able to answer to anything I have asked him. First he told me he was a doctor and that he studied at the medical school. But he could not. He seemed weak to me, the woman said.

 I asked why they did not set up a crisis cell earlier. He could not give me an answer. I asked why he did not show up at the Marie Curie hospital to see the children, because thats where they were, not in Pitesti, and he said: Madam I kept in touch, it was all under control, Ioanas grandmother said.













According to her, the Marie Curie hospital was understaffed. "The weekend killed the child and the she was treated in intensive care. There was nobody in charge of the child (...). Her mother and I spoke in vain. Nobody even noticed us. "

Who is guilty for the deaths of children suffering from hemolytic uremic syndrome?

 Nobody asked us what kind of cheese the child ate. There was no epidemiologic investigation carried out in our home(...). No measure was taken until the child could not brie the , the grandmother accused.

Asked if he thought the health system knew the truth about the death of children, she said, "they know but wont tell."

 The truth is being hidden. Several authorities are involved. Some would not lose their position and others are incapable, she accused

Ioanas mother doubt that the truth about her daughters death will ever be known.

The painful outcry of a mother who does not know why her child died: "We are treated like in the third world!"




Intact Media Group makes the following statement regarding the legal arguments for which the Trust television stations continued to operate in the buildings registered in the state ownership after 08.08.2014:



THE PRE-EMPTION RIGHT

The existence of three pending court actions calling for the recognition of the pre-emption right to purchase the two properties (Bucharest-Ploiesti no. 25-27 and Garlei No 1B), a right conferred by the provisions of GEO no. 14/2007 and GD. 731/2007. One of these actions covering the pre-emption right to purchase the building in 25-27 Bucharest-Ploiesti was tried and won. The other two actions have not yet been prosecuted.

By decision no. 1299 of 04.11.2015, the court finds valid on 08.08.2014, the lease agreement between the applicant Antena TV Group S.A. and the defendant SC Applied Research and Investment Company S.A.. The court notes the applicant's pre-emptive right to purchase the building in Bucharest-Ploiesti no. 25-27 at the price set by the evaluation committee report based on technical expertise and revaluation, pursuant to article 22 par. 8 of the rules for the application of O.G. No.14 / 2007.

Therefore, according to GO 14/2007 and the decision cited above, the evaluation and capitalization of the ICA seized buildings must be made in compliance with GEO 14/2007, which stipulates the pre-emption right to purchase by the existing tenants on 08/08/2014.

In these circumstances, the eviction notice issued by NAFA on 02/15/2016 in violation of GEO 14/2007 (which does not provide anywhere for the eviction of tenants before exercising the right of pre-emption to purchase) is, according to the group, illegal, which is why it will exercise all legal remedies against any step that is not based on the provisions of GEO 14/2007.





CORRESPONDENCE WITH STATE AUTHORITIES

The State has not yet communicated concretely to our companies that it will not lease the properties. Moreover, the last reply received from the Ministry of Finance received on January 5, 2016, says that in order to respond to our request for rent, the SGGs opinion is required and we will be informed expeditiously upon receipt of response from this organization.









Our group has not yet received a reply since then, except for the eviction notice, which, as stated above, are issued in violation of the provisions of GEO 14/2007 on regulating the manner and conditions of capitalizing the goods that became, according to the law, the states private property, the order which is the legal norm to be followed for the sale of goods which have become the state property by confiscation.

Intact Media Group complies with the law but cannot agree with the abuses. The group of more than ten people sent by NAFA to hand in a paper is a telling example in this regard. Intact Media Group pays to date its financial obligations to the Romanian state - a fundamental duty of every good citizen in a state. Our group values its country, helping, specifically, peers and communities in need. Intact Media Group has no shadow funders, and can justify, to the last penny, the money collected.



We reaffirm that we are not asking for any favors from the state authorities, but merely the observance of rights conferred by law. We believe that in - the rule of law state, plurality of views is an important prerogative under which our journalists acted over the years by comments or revelations of major corruption cases.






Romania is at the forefront of countries that observe their full commitments on nuclear safety, having a clear nuclear program and a responsible conduct, said President Klaus Iohannis Wednesday, at Cotroceni Palace before leaving for the US where he will attend the nuclear security summit, to be held in Washington.

"Unfortunately, we have all seen lately how present the terrorist threat is in Europe and around the world. The attacks that have recently rocked cities and European capitals endanger not only the physical security of our citizens, but are an attack on the values and principles we represent.

In the face of this terrorist threat, which can take on different forms, we need solidarity, responsibility and joint action. The Washington summit is dedicated to preventing nuclear terrorism by strengthening global nuclear security architecture.

I want that Romanias message be firmly heard in Washington. Romania is at the forefront of countries that fully meet their commitments on nuclear safety, having a clear nuclear program and a responsible conduct ", Klaus Iohannis stressed quoted by Agerpres .

The head of state added that representation at the highest level of Romania in the Washington Summit is "essential and in line with the role that our country assumed in security matters and with our participation in international efforts and joint action in this area ".

Iohannis said that the event in Washington is the fourth in a broader process, launched in 2010 by President Barack Obama

"Now, in 2016, along with 52 other states and leaders of relevant international organizations, we analyze what has been achieved in the past six years and decide on ways forward for advancing international agenda on nuclear safety," he noted.

The head of state stressed that Romanias attending the Washington summit is "a matter of prestige, consistency and influence."









"First, Romania re- confirms that it is an active member and in charge of the small group of countries with relevant nuclear capabilities possessing the whole nuclear fuel cycle and firmly committed to promoting global architecture of nuclear security and combating nuclear terrorism.

The participation in the Washington summit is a matter of consistency of action and national policy on nuclear safety and consistency in honoring our commitments in the wider context



Last. But not least, the influence capacity will be enhanced by the fact that Romania will be at the forefront of efforts to set up an international framework for addressing the issue of nuclear terrorism and strengthen the policy framework on nuclear safety, "said Iohannis.

The President stressed that "Romania will continue to apply in its nuclear program the highest standards of nuclear safety and will help improve international cooperation in the field".

President Klaus Iohannis will be Wednesday to Saturday in the United States, where he will attend the nuclear security summit to be held in Washington.




The Health Minister and the head of the National Health Insurance House attended this morning the fifth edition of the Health Forum debate organized every year by Intact Media Group.

The debate gathered around the same discussion table all the stakeholders within the health system, who have highlighted the main problems of the system and have tried to find solutions for patients. The debate topics ranged from the poor funding to the complete lack of some vital medication.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers have warned again and stressed that in the near future 128 drugs might disappear from the market.



All of that because the state forces them to lower their prices by over 30%.






On Thursday, the Senate held a debate on press freedom. The debate was attended by the Antena 3 representatives , who denounced the state abuses against media outlets.

"Perhaps we are not the only ones who have gone through this. I thought perhaps this is the society we live in. These have to be investigated. Who asked Sorin Blejnar, a rotten corrupt individual, who asked him to conduct these verifications and this form of repression and suppression? Then there came the National Audiovisual Council, who should have, I believe, some parliamentary committees over him exerting their control responsibilities. We have all seen a lady asking to shut down a TV outlet and we all remember that the NAC president was caught inventing complaints, against our TV channel. We had to pay huge amounts. O form of suppression is fining said Mihai Gadea, Antena 3 CEO.

Mihai Gadea has also addressed the topic of press independence, respectively the legally funded institutions, as well as those illegally financed.

 I have recently seen some individuals who were not scared because they were trained not to be scared, they were train to induce fear and terror. They were individual theoretically representing the NAFA, raiding, taking pictures and asking how they allow themselves to inhabit a states building. The press vulnerability, especially of the independent one, lets not hide it, there is an independent press, there are media institutions who struggle to get money fairly and transparently from advertising and there are press institutions financed illegally added Mihai Gadea.

Journalist Adrian Ursu noted that the Senate is one of the few institutions that try to serve the public, given that Romania is led by appointed people, not by the elected ones.

The Parliament has been forbidden the exercise of its rights. It is unacceptable for a parliamentary committed to call a chief prosecutor, in the Romania of our times, penalties are being applied to journalists and politicians, if they make any comments on the judiciary. But the judiciary can do anything. A re-balancing of these relations is needed. The Senate seems to be the only institution trying to rediscover its purpose, to become again an institution serving the people who voted them. The present Romania is no longer led by the elected, but by the self-centered and the secret police Adrian Ursu believes.
Mihai Gadea read during the Tuesday's edition of the show Daily summary, an open letter to the public opinion in Romania, but also to the head of DNA Laura Codruta Kovesi in which he draws attention to how some are trying to silence journalists and the media in general .

The content of the letter:

Wednesday, April 6, 2016, the Court of Appeal will hear the appeal in the case in which the head of DNA Laura Kovesi asked for the huge amount of 1,000,000 lei in moral damages, because during a telecast, some journalists asked questions and issued opinions absolutely normal in a democratic society to a public event commented by the entire press.

We were forced in the appearance before judge Crina Buricea from the Bucharest Court , to pay damages of 250,000 (about 60,000 euros), a colossal sum which the applicant Laura Kovesi could not justify. She admitted before the court that she cannot bring evidence in support of her damages claim. She has filed no document to prove the damages, but she was granted damages payment in an amount equivalent to that of an apartment in the capital, the highest amount ever paid in a press case file.

This was a mock trial. Judge Crina Buricea could not indicate in the sentence the evidence by which the applicant has proved our deed wrongful. Against us, a simple inspection report by SCM was used that Laura Kovesi had her reputation defended from comments published in all the media in June 2014 on the complaints made to against her and the president of the High Court of Cassation and Justice Livia Stanciu, by the inmate Sandu Anghel.

The whole sentence is but a transposition of the SCM Inspection Report for the defense of the reputation of Mrs Kovesi, a civil penalty sentence, in a court action in which our defenses did not matter, only what was written in that report. SCM is responsible by law to determine whether journalists are guilty and the SCM Inspection materials about the press are issued unilaterally, in all cases without hearing the journalists accused of having impaired the independence of the judiciary.

We note before the public that journalists are no longer judged on the evidence presented in court, but on inspection reports produced by SCM - which does not have the task of establishing liability of individuals and cannot be delivered by res judicata - when it comes to m such as the head of DNA Laura Kovesi.

We appealed against the unjust sentence in the first trial. In the first hearing of 03/23/2016 our judging was forced as urgent after we were absolutely rejected all defense evidence required.

Even the records of the trial held at the Bucharest Court  with which we intend to prove that Laura Kovesi said in the courtroom that she cannot prove that she has suffered injury - we were denied access to them, as we have been refused access to the same records all the while case was at the Bucharest Court. We have been virtually been banned access to personal files.

What fair trial can we expect in the appeal ,when no evidence has been admitted to the file and all the support documents we submitted were rejected? The journalists were ordered to pay damages even those who made no statement against applicant Kovesi.

It came as a huge surprise to see after the trial ended that one of the judges in the judges panel who rejecte all our evidence, judge Andreea Doris Tomescu used to be a DNA prosecutor and she became judge by the endorsement given by SCM, whose member used to be the applicant Laura Kovesi, during the time she served as prosecutor general.

Judge Andreea Doris Tomescu did not understand to recuse herself although it is common knowledge that the applicant Laura Kovesi, as head of DNA, attacked 2015 with an appeal for anulement the final sentence for the acquittal of Mariana Rarinca, on the grounds tha one of the appeal judes was in incompatibility for the mere fact that three years before the acquittal sentence was ruled she ha had a contradictory talk during a SCM meeting with the injured party Livia Stanciu.

The appeal for annulment was admissible in the Rarinca case on grounds of incompatibility of the judge, the reason stated, but here a case in which the head of DNA is the applicant, it is normal to undergo trial before a former DNA prosecutor whom she endorsed as a judge.





Obviously, we cannot hope for a fair trial, given that the issue of our innocence is not supported by evidence in the file, but by who judges us, justice becomes a lottery in which you have the chance or the bad luck to come across certain judges.

This open letter aims to signal a warning to the society about the way we believe we are harassed in courts by the head of DNA Laura Kovesi without taking into consideration as evidence the defense materials we have submitted nor the appearance of a fair trial.





Signed by,

Mihai Gadea

Radu Tudor

Bianca Nae

Mugur Ciuvica

Razvan Savaliuc




NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has recommended Romania to increase the budget spending for defense since the alliance should respond to growing demand for security and defense, adding that NATO is counting on Romania and Romania can count on NATO.

"I recommend Romania to increase its budget spending for defense , therefore to continue the last year's growth for the years to come. This measure is particularly important given that our countries must respond to challenges of defense in a changing world in which we have growing demand for security and defense. Romania wants to contribute to a stronger alliance which is also the best guarantee for security in Europe particularly today when we deal with the biggest security challenges during this generation.

All NATO member countries increase their troops responsiveness capabilities and we strengthen our presence in the eastern part of the alliance, presence that will become increasingly stronger as we prepare for the summit in Warsaw in July, " NATO Secretary general said Tuesday at the end of the meeting he had with Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos in Brussels.

He appreciated Romanias activity in the theaters of operations, in ensuring security in the Black Sea and in supporting NATO members countries in Eastern Europe, and he stressed that one of the alliance divisions in the south-east has become more active.



"Romania is a very popular member of our alliance actively contributing to NATO missions in Afghanistan and Kosovo and the security of the Black Sea and it provides support for Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine to help them build defense capabilities. Romania is also a host for active equipment such as NATO's Multinational South-East Division who became active in December and thus strengthens our alliance defense. Last year I visited the NATO unit in Bucharest, one of the six small bases that we operate in Central and Eastern Europe.

This base will ensure that NATO troops will deploy e in Romania quickly if needed. Romania is also host to an important part of the missile defense system in Deveselu, "said Jens Stoltenberg.



According to the Secretary General of NATO, a strong alliance is an "essential basis" of a more effective dialogue with Russia.
The Ministry of National Defense presents the annual report for 2015. The event is attended by president Klaus Iohannis and PM Dacian Ciolos.Radu Tudor, military analyst and producer of the Meeting Point show explained that, in the framework of some restless times, the Romanian Army should benefit from major investments."A restless period and complicated, with everything happening around us and in the Middle East. Changes are very important. Now there are nearly 1,000 NATO troops on Romanian territory, in at least three specific locations where the activity of the US military and allied troops is very strong and the whole of Romania is thinking of strengthening the Romanian Army with some consistent acquisitions, because our armys endowment is not good and we put our hope in the Romanian Army, the state institution with the largest share of trust. Clearly, all Romanians, the government, the parliament, everyone should support this institution, because it is the guarantor of the country's security. ""First, a message of solidarity and strong alliance within NATO should be conveyed. We have the largest security challenge of the last 25 years, coming from the Eastern border, we must strengthen our military very seriously, we must demand a stronger ally presence, we already house the NATO headquarters on Romanian territory and we must strengthen NATO s naval presence in the Black Sea. We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of being surprised by threats from the East or South. We need a high alert capacity and so far, the Romanian Army has fulfilled its tasks successfully nationally and internationally, "said Radu Tudor.
The announcement by president Iohannis, after the Summit: Romania has taken new commitments on nuclear safety





President Klaus Iohannis said on Friday in Washington that Romania has taken four new commitments on nuclear safety, including the implementation of a pilot system for detecting the movement of radioactive materials and a new contribution to the nuclear security fund of IAEA, Agerpres .ro informs.

"I have announced a number of new commitments that Romania has taken on this occasion, namely one - strengthening national capacities for criminal investigations in the nuclear field, two - improving transport of nuclear and radioactive materials by implementing a pilot screening system for the movement and transport of radioactive substances, three - developing and implementing a national training course on nuclear safety, four - new voluntary contributions to the nuclear security fund of the International Atomic energy Agency (IAEA), "the president said, after nuclear security summit.

He stated that during the summit he referred to the security challenges that the Black Sea regions is facing, pointing out that they are relevant in the framework discussions about strengthening nuclear safety an preventing nuclear terrorism.

"I think that the Black Sea region is crucial not only to regional security but also for the Euro-Atlantic area as a whole. For this reason, I advocated for the region to receive special attention in the security architecture and an intensification of strategic cooperation in this pillar, " Iohannis said.

He stressed that it is very important that Romania has a clear program and it is part of the limited group of states with relevant nuclear capabilities possessing the whole nuclear fuel cycle.

















"With the development of the complete cycle, a country can learn to create ongoing expertise necessary for each stage, from simple stages  such as mining - to the complicated issues  such as transport, use, disposal after use. Romania is one of the countries, not very many, who has this expertise "added Klaus Iohannis.

The Head of State indicated that following the summit, he agreed to a statement which focuses on the later stages of maintaining political momentum on nuclear safety. He pointed out that this statement has five action plans and initiatives enclosed dedicated to the active role of national organizations in the field of nuclear safety.

"The participating States confirmed at the highest level political their will to continue efforts in nuclear security and prevent nuclear terrorism. I believe that the messages and actions that our country expressed or reaffirmed in Washington will help maintain the international profile of the Romanian state with a responsible nuclear policy and recognized as such internationally, "said Iohannis.




The general prosecutors announce the reopening of the investigations in the Revolution case file: Documents have not been declassified





Acting General Prosecutor of Romania, Bogdan Licu, announced Tuesday afternoon, in a press statement that he has asked to reopen the prosecution proceedings in the case file of the '89 Revolution.

Bogdan Licu criticized how the events of 1989 were investigated before, showing that there were samples and supporting documents from several institutions of the Romanian state that have not been presented before the court.

"The way the investigation was conducted does not comply with the European Court of Human Rights. Searches are to be conducted on the count of genocide because there are reliable clues to that effect since the offenses of murder and murder in the first degree have become imprescriptible " said Bogdan Licu.

However, interim attorney general also said that although "prosecutors conducted a large number of procedural actions in the case", they "have not made use of a great deal of information".

"They did not take any approach to declassify the documents from the senatorial committee hearings under the circumstances were thousands of hearings were conducted in this committee, and despite the fact that SRI compiled a comprehensive document, it is not in the file of the criminal investigation nor is there any indication that any approach was taken to have it obtained, "said the acting Attorney general

According to him, most of the hearings that were conducted in this case were "synthetic and formal" and "shooters have not been identified". He also said that the ammunition that was used was not identified, nor were the weapons used to fire with.




Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos conveyed his Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte Wednesday that the Romanian society is capable of assuming "without being monitored externally" the fight against corruption and judicial independence, Agerpres reports.



"I have had today time during this lunch, to go into detail about the political situation in Romania, the economic stability that we have, about the maturation of the Romanian society which is able to take on its own, without being monitored from the outside certain responsibilities, including the fight against corruption and judicial independence. Romanian society has already shown that lately and this kind of arguments are important too in the position that our European partners will take, including regarding this kind of political decisions (- integration into the Schengen Area), "said Ciolos in his joint press conference with Mark Rutte.

The Romanian Prime Minister said, related to perception of Netherlands regarding Romania's progress on CVM and Schengen, that the high-level dialogue between the two countries is extremely important to give Romanian authorities the opportunity to better explain the realities of Romania.

"I think this kind of dialogue that has not been held for many years at a high level at prime minister level, is important because it allows us to explain what are the new realities of Romania. Often, decisions in Brussels or in some Member States are based on analyzes which are superficial and are not always based on knowledge of local realities, "said Ciolos.



In his turn, Prime Minister Mark Rutte has shown that the January CVM report of the European Commission '"found that there have been important steps" towards judicial reform and the fight against corruption.




The imminent opening was confirmed by the companys chairman, Nadir al Hammadi (pictured above) who said the facility, construction of which began last year, will have a complement of at least 12 simulators when in full utilisation with two simulators  one for an AW139 and another for the Bell 412  already purchased for start-up.

The rest of the business will be a combination of leasing some of the bays to joint ventures with some OEMs, explained Al Hammadi.

ADA plans to evolve the centre into an international hub for helicopter training. It will offer multi-product training for our own pilots, including Emirati recruits who come to us from the Armed Forces, and is available for third party training, explained Al Hammadi. Clients in the Middle East will be able to use this facility instead of going to European facilities.

The Chairman said training had been identified as a growth area for the company which this year celebrates its 40th anniversary. Another is real estate and we are planning a new company to enter this segment, said Al Hammadi. We want to consolidate our business to ensure we are sustainable. I hope the company will be up and running within six months and it will operate in the commercial real estate sector with an international approach leveraging the real estate assets the Group already has. The Chairman said the consolidation approach was identified prior to the international oil price downturn and was not in response to it but rather a long-term growth strategy.

The Chairman also confirmed that ADA is in contract negotiations for expansion into the South American and Far Eastern markets and anticipates further growth from planned expansion of its maintenance, repair and overhaul activities.

Meanwhile, the company has been celebrating an operational milestone of reaching one million hours of successful operation of its Bell Helicopter Fleet. ADA, which has been operating Bell Helicopter aircraft since 1976, now has a Bell fleet of over 44 aircraft comprising 212s and 412s that fly an average of 100 hours per day. With outstanding customer support and service maintenance we have managed to achieve an operational readiness of 100% during the past two years, said Mohamed Ibrahim Al Mazrouei, General Manager, ADA.

ADA has also issued letters of intent to buy 10 of the medium-lift Bell 525 Relentless  the worlds first commercial helicopter to incorporate fly-by-wire flight controls with the first delivery due next year immediately after the aircrafts certification. The company is Bell Helicopters largest Middle East customer.

ADA operates a fleet of 60 helicopters and four fixed-wing aircraft. It employs over 1,200 people, including 150 pilots and 283 engineers and technicians providing offshore oil support and other services worldwide, with a core focus on Abu Dhabis oil and gas production sector. Its current service offering also includes VVIP passenger transportation services, Search & Rescue services for the United Arab Emirates, crop spraying, aerial construction, seismic support, health emergency medical services in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, fire fighting in Spain and third party maintenance support.






HAVELSAN - a software and systems provider based in Ankara, Turkey - will manufacture the first domestic simulator to be used in pilot training for Boeing 737NG aircraft operated by Turkish Airlines. This device will provide both low-cost and safe training for pilots and also will be the first civil (non-military) airplane simulator to be provided by HAVELSAN.



Combining its extensive past experience in design, manufacturing, integration and maintenance of military simulators with new technologies suitable for today's rapidly changing and growing commercial airline sector, HAVELSAN will produce a Full Flight Simulator with international EASA Level-D certification. This type of simulator will provide orientation, proficiency, and refresher training at lower cost than before, while delivering the near-reality experience that is essential to effective pilot training.



After a competition and lengthy evaluation against major leading global simulator manufacturers lasting nearly a year, HAVELSAN has been awarded a contract to provide one of four new simulator types currently being purchased by Turkish Airlines. Currently Turkish Airlines operates 10 full-flight simulators at its Flight Training Centre and with the addition of these new simulators including the one manufactured by HAVELSAN the capacity will be raised to 14 simulators by the end of 2016.



This project will result in several benefits to Turkish Airlines, its customers, and to HAVELSAN. First, by reducing costs without sacrificing training quality, Turkish Airlines will continue to improve its efficiency and competitive edge in the airline market. By reducing dependency on foreign suppliers, the airline will have greater control over uncertainties that affect operations. And not least, HAVELSAN will establish itself as a true world-class provider of training solutions to the airline industry.



Simulators are one of the most effective tools available today for enhancing the quality of pilot training. Typically pilots continue to receive training on simulators in the specific types of aircraft they will operate following their basic ground courses. They graduate to flying the real aircraft only after several hours of simulator training, which can be more or less depending on the airplane type and experience of the pilot.



In addition, airline pilots are commonly required to fly on simulators as often as every 6 months to refresh and test their skills. During these sessions, pilots experience emergency scenarios under the worst weather and environmental conditions. Simulators allow pilots to practice dangerous situations, such as engine failure upon take-off, which would be too risky to practice in a real aircraft. And the skills gained are measured in the hundreds of lives potentially saved in each of the rare occasions when a pilot actually has to put those special skills to use.



HAVELSAN intends to assume a leading role in the global market for civil aviation and airline pilot training and the company sees this Boeing 737NG full-flight simulator is an important first step towards a long-term and successful relationship with the commercial airline training market.
Le CBD, cette molecule active du cannabis a aujourdhui le vent en poupe. Et cela est en grande partie du au fait quil permet...
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The [four] most appealing and most missed of 24 artworks looted from Westfries Museum in Hoorn in 2005, were revealed at a press conference by the Ukrainian secret service in Kiev on Thursday. According to reports, the 16th and 17th century paintings had been held to ransom for 50 million by a far-right Ukrainian militia.
The US Senate unanimously passed a bill intended to stem the perceived flow of illicitly removed artefacts from Syria on Wednesday, 13 April. The Protect and Preserve International Cultural Property Act had already passed Congresss lower chamber, the House of Representatives, and is headed to President Obama to be signed into law.
The Guggenheim Foundation ought to cut its losses and pull out of its Abu Dhabi misadventure.

Theres no point in trying to analyze the salvos in the latest hostilities and breakdown of talks between the Guggenheim and the Gulf Labor Coalition (GLC). In a statement on its website yesterday, the foundation blasted GLC for shift[ing] its demands on the Guggenheim beyond the reach of our influence as an arts institution, while spreading mistruths about the project and our role in it.

GLC shot back that the Guggenheim seems to be pursuing a self-destructive path, putting institutional hubrisbefore migrant labor rights. Its statement contained a thinly veiled threat of renewed protest actions at the museum:

The GLC negotiation team regrets that Guggenheim has broken off negotiations in a hostile manner. Despite our show of good faith by maintaining a moratorium on protests for a year, and despite Guggenheims own public statements about constructive dialogue, the museum has rescinded and closed the path to working with rights organizations.

For the exasperated Guggenheim, this has been a protracted, no-win war. The operating framework for its Abu Dhabi project was announced more than eight years ago. As of December 2014, when my Apollo magazine opinion piece appeared, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabis projected opening date had been pushed back to 2017 from the original target of 2012. But now, as far as I can see, theres no projected opening date on the Guggenheims or the Abu Dhabis Tourism Development & Investment Companys (TDICs) informational websites for this project.

It seems highly unlikely that the elaborate, monumental Frank Gehry-designed museum could open next year as hoped, given the Guggenheims recent admission that there are currently no workers on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and there is no construction on the site because a contractor has yet to be selected.



The delays and the seemingly intractable workers rights issues that have bedeviled this and other Abu Dhabi projects have meant huge losses in time, energy, and money spent on planning and design, with little to show for it other than a collection acquired for the planned museum. The stalled initiative has caused the Guggenheim reputational harm that will only worsen if GLC resumes its on-site protest demonstrations in New York, tempting the Guggenheim to take forceful action to stop them.

More reputational harm was done yesterday by a misleading NY Times report by Colin Moynihan, who parroted the protesters claim that most work on Saadiyat Island (where the planned Guggenheim project is located) is done by foreign migrants, who are required to pay large recruitment and transit fees [emphasis added]. A more knowledgeable, balanced report would have noted that TDICs revised Employment Practices Policy, issued last August (see pp. 12-14), includes strengthened provisions against contractors charging recruitment fees (sizable amounts charged to workers by agents recruiting a projects migrant workers). While such fees may persist, they are legally forbidden.

As I wrote here, although independent monitor PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) had, in its latest report (issued in January) found instances of workers paying recruitment fees in their home countries, .TDIC took firm measures against violators, including the imposition of financial penalties and the obligation of those contractors to reimburse the affected workers.Nevertheless, the [PwC] report noted once again that the full resolution of the recruitment and relocation cost issue is beyond TDICs direct influence and requires collaboration between relevant entities [emphasis added].

As the Guggenheims director, Richard Armstrong, has repeatedly said, the issue of recruitment fees charged to migrant workers is a very complex foreign policy question between governments.To the degree that we can influence that positively, we are trying on a daily basis.

I dont doubt the sincerity of those efforts. But they have gone on long enough. Its time for the Guggenheims leadership to face reality and withdraw from a losing battle: Their best efforts may have mitigated but have not overcome exploitative labor practices that would not be countenanced in the U.S. As suggested by the PwC report, insufficient progress has been made.

Now more than ever, what I wrote at the end of this August 2015 post rings true:

It is now increasingly clear that good intentions are not, in and of themselves, adequate antidotes for deeply entrenched, unconscionable practices.

The Guggenheim may need to send out a mayday (distress) signal on May Day, if demonstrators again attempt to occupy its flagship building on that workers rights anniversary. Instead, the foundations leadership should raise a white flag, making peace with those whose concern for humane labor practices it professes to share.
My profile of Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Threadgill, commissioned by and published in DownBeat in 2010:

Henry Threadgill exuded confidence and impatience when facing four video cameras and a standing-room-only gallery of serious listeners at the Manhattan new music performance space Roulette last October. With his flute, bass flute, alto saxophone and bass clarinet at hand and the members of his ensemble Zooid  guitarist Liberty Ellman, tuba-and-trombonist Jose Davilla, fretless bass

Roulette TV: HENRY THREADGILL // ZOOID from Roulette Intermedium on Vimeo.

guitarist Stomu Takehishi and traps drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee  stationed around him, he was about to plunge into the premier of music from his first album in eight years, This Takes Us To, Vol. 1. The cameras would capture it all for eventual cable broadcast and online viewing via Roulette TV.

Threadgills gaze was steady, his expression tight-lipped, his posture upright. Advance review copies of This Takes Us To had already created a buzz, which is why the aficionados had gathered, wondering What is Threadgill up to now?

For more than 40 years, the Chicago-born reeds specialist has ventured repeatedly beyond established frontiers of composition and improvisation. At age 65 he remains energized, astute and ambitious, ignoring musical conventions and classifications to focus on music itself. He takes nothing for granted, probes the basics and comes up with ideas as startling as his sound. He lives by example, making music to satisfy his own boundless curiosity, though he says, I play what I hope is spiritual music for the higher aspects of peoples existence.

What Threadgill and Zooid (a biological term for an organic cell that moves independently through the body its within) offered in concert was richly textured group interplay, organized pieces rife with virtuosity and passion  but few familiar touchstones such as obvious melody, chord progressions or head-solo-solo-solo-head structures. The band clearly had a plan but its goals were elusive, its comforts few, its points resistant to quick assessment. Maybe that was the point.

Each piece began airily, with Davilas softly burred or limpid tuba tones, Takeishis fretless bass guitar figures or Ellmans light-fingered plucks and strums underscored by Kavees loose, louche rhythms. Threadgill, sheet music on a stand before him, concentrated on the activity, ears perked, body sometimes bending to a passage, pleasure occasionally flitting across his face.

The other musicians gestures  layered but shifting, rather than clearly integrated or synchronized  gradually accumulated. Then Threadgill leapt in on flute or sax with short, insistent phrases, quick runs of adjacent notes or single pitches urgently repeated. He seemed like an Old Testament prophet decrying vanities and illusions from a windswept plateau. The ensemble flowed in subversion of customary instrumental hierarchy: sometimes Ellman preceded and sometimes he echoed Threadgill, sometimes he paired with Takeishi or fenced with Davila or flew off on his own. Kavee mostly maintained a steady pulse, smiling softly as if enraptured by a symphony in his head.

No song titles were announced (too bad: theyre brain-teasers) or words said except the players names. The overall ambiance was mystery, foreboding and confrontation. Im not playing to entertain, Threadgill asserted a couple of weeks later, unusually chatty over a latte at an Italian pastry shop near the apartment in New York Citys East Village where hes lived in since moving from Chicago in the late 70s. That means I dont have to play anything pretty, or something thats not challenging you. It can send you out the door, and thats fine, too, because it might stay with you and make you think of something much later. My musics not about your immediate reaction to what Im doing, but what its doing for you and to you. Thats my hope.

Since emerging in the late 1960s as one of the individualistic first generation members of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), Threadgill has continuously challenged listeners and also other musicians with his investigations of the structures, practices and implications attending jazz and contemporary composition. Hes recorded some 30 albums on major labels and tiny independents, under his own name or, in the 1970s and 80s, with the trio Air. Hes collaborated on nearly that many with AACM compatriots Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell and Douglas Ewart, as well as David Murray, Bill Laswell, Kip Hanrahan and the reggae rhythm team Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespear. Hes gained international esteem if not household-name fame or fabulous wealth, about which he doesnt much care.

Far from content or complacent, Threadgill is inherently skeptical. His self-motivated studies have resulted in unusual insights. Hes a visionary and seeker, pushing ahead to get to the bottom of things. He hasnt often explained the details of his concept, which he described as akin to serialism, using pitch intervals and freedom in their manipulation instead of single notes in a predetermined and fixed tone row. During a wide-ranging conversation, he cited Edgard Varese, Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky as inspirations. They dont negate his identity; he is a jazz musician. I dont like that term, though. Weve lost the meaning of it. So I say Im doing creative music.

The kind of music Ive been writing for a long time is modular. Like this, he demonstrated, piling two saucers on top of each other, as if crowning checkers pieces. Then he removed the top one and set it on the other side of the bottom saucer than where it had been when hed started. The coasters represented intervals, not chords (Because one of the things I went back to thinking about is What is harmony?' he asserted, and found its any three notes, not three certain notes), or episodes of written material (Because theres no rule that all you can improvise on is chord changes. We improvise on form).

See, both modules are still on the table. This one can be over here or this one can be over there. Thats a form of order. Youve got to start with some kind of order, though it doesnt really matter what order. I come into a rehearsal with this first order, which we play, and from there get to work on whats going to be the first arrangement.

Arranging these intervals is not just a process of moving things around on paper, he said. It includes interactive, spontaneous collaboration, because ideas come from the musicians about opening up or shortening sections and other processes. But all changes come about from the order of intervals Ive brought. We work through it once and then do it again, dropping what we did and starting all over.

In other words, first theres this set of intervals, then this set of intervals, then this set and so on. Everything that happens melodically, harmonically, and counterpoint-wise is a result of the intervals, which are in existence for a specified length of time. When the improvisation part comes up, the same process is applied. It creates a gravity field. If you break it by playing something that doesnt fit, you throw confusion into the air.

Im doing this so musicians wont play all the contrived stuff that theyve been taught and that theyve heard in the chord progressions people play all the time. I want my musicians to play spontaneous ideas. The only way to get them to do that is to get past the usual cues. Get rid of them, and theres nothing to depend on. No C7, no D-minor mode. All youve got is intervals.

Threadgill sat back, took a question and responded with further explication of his alternatives to standard methodology. He made sense of the sort thats more understandable when its substance is heard than when its spoken of. His logic and theory are hard to deduce from the music they produce, but the richly detailed, densely active and utterly unpredictable music that Zooid has achieved after a year in private rehearsal following a decade of initial association has compelling drive, suspense that holds ones attention and satisfactions that arrive as surprises.

There is a system and there is no system, Threadgill maintained. Its a natural language. Its not some kind of theoretical stuff. Its nothing artificial. The regular language of music is still there. I havent done anything to get rid of anything  I dont believe in that. Anything thats been very, very good you dont get rid of it. Youd have to be crazy to get rid of what works. Youre supposed to find a way to condense it, reevaluate it, give it a new look, and keep its essence so you can come in with new information. It usually takes hundreds of years to come up with something that works: This is a verb in writing, or this is a way to create shadow or perspective in drawing or painting. You keep it, but you find another way to do it. I keep everything.

Everything, for Threadgill, encompasses his history of investigations and transformations. In Air with the late drummer Steve McCall and late bassist Fred Hopkins he re-conceived customary trio strategies and abstracted pieces by Jelly Roll Morton. On X-75, his debut as a leader in 1979, Threadgill had three other winds/reeds experts, four bassists and a vocalist. In 1981 he introduced his seven-piece Sextet (later spelled with a second t), counting two traps drummers as one, and eventually added cellist Diedre Murray to pivot between the frontline of reeds/winds, cornet and trombone and the rhythm section. In the mid 80s he began employing tuba players to shore up high, middle and low registers.

He kicked off the 90s with Very Very Circus featuring two electric guitarists and two tubaists, to which he added a french horn. He lent himself to Laswell productions that flew in parts by members of Parliament/Funkadelic, vibist/arranger Karl Berger, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Brazilian songman Carlinhos Brown and the drum band Olodum. He has written for string virtuosi including the AACMs Leroy Jenkins, oud player Simon Shaheen and Chinese pipa player Wu Man, vocalists Cassandra Wilson and Asha Puthli, cylindrical Venezuelan drums and Cuban emigre drummer Dafnis Prieto, accordionist Tony Cedras, a cello trio, flute quartet, Talujon Percussion Ensemble, his own 20-piece Society Situation dance band and the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

Threadgills music is variously and sometimes simultaneously airy and lowdown, high powered and

suspended in time. His voice on alto sax has always been urgent but measured: he doesnt blow streams of notes for volcanic affect. On flute, he articulates rather huskily exactly what he intends to, nothing superfluous. This is a composer-improviser who knows his mind, and plays it. He is capable of daunting complexity, with urban blues at its core.

Every time I moved from one group to the next, my language was changing every time, he claimed. I never wrote music for the Sextett the way I wrote when I was in Air  I used completely other abilities for what I was doing with melody and form. From Air until Make a Move [his band from the 90 to 2001] is all in the range of major-minor, and it broke over into chromaticism. I didnt get out of that world until Everybodys Mouth is a Book [the first session he completed in 2001]  there are three pieces in that in the new language. Make a Move was as far as I could go with major-minor music, then I mixed in chromaticism and whatever else I could think of until I got completely over to where I am now, to a complete language that has nothing to do with that.

Threadgill credits Vareses music for his epiphany about modular development. I saw a process in what he was doing. He called it folding and enfolding. I was looking at that for about five years, I couldnt get past it. But then one day I was sitting in my house in India [Threadgill has a home in Goa], looking again, and realized theres more you can do with it. He wasnt after what I was after. He got what he wanted by taking one step, where there were actually four or five steps. I dont know if he knew about those steps, I never saw what Im doing in his music, but everything Im doing comes from that one thing he was doing, which was all he wanted to do with it. I went Ill be damned, Ive been sitting here five years and its right in my face. Ive been going one-two, when theres one-two-three-four.

Its funny: somebody tells you thats a tape recorder. We sit here with it for weeks. Then I say, I sure would like to hear the news or the ballgame on that. You say, But its a tape recorder. We never even looked to find out if that tape recorder was a radio because we accepted the fact that this was a tape recorder. Thats the way everything is.

Were told that something is something, and we stay there. We never think to erase that definition from our minds and try to see this thing anew. When I did that I discovered what the Europeans said harmony was. Any three notes. They didnt say thirds or fourths, they said any three notes. Thats what got me started, one of the ideas that helped me to develop this language. That and what I learned from Varese.

I knew from Vareses music, and Bartok and serialism that there was another way. A lot of people dont like serialism, but that doesnt matter, because it presents another order. Like if you think that theres only French, then all of a sudden  Wait a minute, theres Korean, too? If theres also Korean, there might also be Chinese or Argentinian or who knows what. Serialism, Varese, Bartok . . . I thought, Wait a minute, how many other worlds are out there that are real, that you dont have to contrive?

How do other musicians relate to his new language? Asks one who speaks it. Guitarist Ellman first came to grips with the intervallic system as a sideman on Up Popped the Two Lips, the second of two sessions Threadgill committed in 2001. Interviewed at a Brooklyn coffee shop, he said his understanding is that basically every chord has three notes, and the harmony moves among these triads  if you want to call them that. Theyre more like three-note cells, because of the way the harmony functions. Henry takes the relationships of the intervals between each note in those triads, and he can generate six chords from that family of intervals. Those intervals are also what we use in terms of motion in the harmony and to inform us in our solos. You have to look at these interval sets and use them to help develop your motifs.

In the past three or four years his compositions have become gradually more and more elaborate, with more pages, more sections and larger sections, also varying in how thematic the music is. He has a lot of different ideas about how to work with melody in terms of expanding or compressing the time, or playing one piece of a melody then jumping to another piece for improvising, then revisiting the next piece of the melody  which may be something the audience hasnt even heard yet, but we musicians know how its related, so when we come back to it we have a certain energy for how we perform that section.

Does this intervallic framework hamper improvisation?

No, Ellman said. Though the forms are very elaborate and the harmonic structure, the rhythmic ideas are very specific to Henrys written music, the intention is still as an improvised performer to interpret that music. When someones soloing, whether its you or youre accompanying someone, the information you have from your jazz background serves you really well, because youre still interpreting and using your intuition to play whats best. If Im soloing and Im using Henrys system on one of Henrys pieces, theres an interval set that I have to reference as if theres a mode that went with the chords in that particular passage. I use that as a guideline, but I dont have to only play that. Perhaps those intervals are featured more, or I use them to start an idea off of a chord tone, but then I can improvise using my ear the way any jazz musician does.

Is playing that way a lot of work?

To me its a good combination of the emotion and analytical, Ellman continued. The groove is always strong, you feel that infectious beat, and I find his melodies to be actually melodic and singable. Theyre not necessarily simple, but they are motivic.

Henrys said to me he always wants there to be ecstasy in the music, that whatever were doing we need to reach these points where its immediate and emotional, raw. Thats how to resonate with the listener and yourself  through ecstatic statement. No matter how technical the music may get, it has to have that emotion, that power, in it. For him that seems to be second nature. He puts his horn in his mouth and there he is.

What if youre in the audience and not up to all this theory? Dont worry.

You can tell whats working, Threadgill himself suggested. Youre not going to understand everything theoretically, but you know its working, and you say, How is it holding together? You know it is, you were sitting there, you heard it. It almost sounded like people were playing free, but theyre not. Its freer than playing free. Theres so much harmony and counterpoint flying all over the place  isnt there? You cant predict when cycles happen, but we are playing cycles  melody, harmony and beat are developing as a result of my process, but were improvising on form, too.

There is no such thing as free. There has to be order. Theres order in the universe. You cant escape it. You cant escape order and theres no such thing as real freedom. Yes, you get more and more free, but you have to come up with some new laws that allow you to be free, that gives you the authority and power to communicate freedom, or else youll just be running around repeating yourself in a little while. Every time you get up youre not going to have something different to say. We know about habit. If you use these words, these phrases, thats what youre going to be using until you find something to free you from that, to give you something else.

There is the freedom of the individual Threadgill has discovered and encouraged. There is the message he conveys so determinedly in his music that he has created a method of insuring those who play with him partake of it, too. Its not necessary for you to do what I do, Threadgill said. Youve got to do what you do, whats necessary for you to do, and what fits you. But you can learn something from what I do, that can inform you about what youre doing. That is the reaction he hopes for from his audience: Not that well immediate like or understand what hes doing, but that it will free us to do what only we can do.

howardmandel.com

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by Sumon Corraya

The weekly Pratibeshi celebrated its 75th anniversary on 1 April at a ceremony attended by 6 bishops, 50 priests and 3,000 faithful readers. Founded in 1941, the paper today has a circulation of 10,000. Its readership includes Muslims and Hindus who like it because it talks about religious harmony and respect for all human beings.

Dhaka (AsiaNews)  Since it was founded 75 years ago, Pratibeshi, Bangladeshs only Bengali-language Catholic Weekly, has provided its readers with a wealth of information and wisdom.

The milestone was celebrated on 1 April in Dhaka in the presence of 6 bishops, 50 priests and 3,000 faithful readers, including Hindu and Muslim readers.

One of them is Saifuddin Sabuj, a Muslim journalist. "I learnt a lot in terms of morality as well as journalism from Pratibeshi, he said about a publication he admires. Now I apply at work what the Catholic paper taught.

Pratibeshi, which means neighbour, was founded in 1941 by Fr Richard Duane Patrick, a missionary of the Holy Cross, at the Ranikhong Catholic Church in Mymensing, central Bangladesh.

Launched as a local paper, it spread quickly. Today, its headquarters are in the capital, Dhaka, with a circulation of 10,000 in 35 countries. Over the years, the paper has taken a leading role in building religious harmony.

"The weekly offers admirable service to Bangladeshis, enlightening its readers about the activities of the Church and the Vatican around the world, said the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop George Kocherry, during the ceremony. It has highlighted Christian morals, spirituality, and family values, whilst promoting evangelisation.

As a weekly, Pratibeshi has done a good job in preaching the Gospel, said Mgr Patrick D'Rozario, Archbishop of Dhaka. It has also provided a venue for writers, journalists and artists."

For Monjural Ahasan Bulbul, a well-known Muslim journalist, the paper has been a pioneer of journalism in Bangladesh, providing moral, social, and spiritual lessons, as well as promoting nation-wide events. It is rare for any publication to reach the age of 75.

"The first time I saw the weekly Pratibeshi I was at a seminar, said Palash Roy, a Hindu lawyer. After that I became a regular reader.

The weekly calls on readers to respect all religions, he added, as well as love human beings. That is different from the publications of other faiths. I like its articles and can learn from them.
by Nirmala Carvalho

The attackers remain unidentified, but are probably Hindus. They beat up the family and forced them to sing "Jai Sri Ram", or "Victory to Ram". Then they burned the church and also threw petrol on the Christians. Recently there has been a similar attack against another Pentecostal group. State applies anti-conversion law and many local councils have banned all non-Hindu religious events.

Raipur (AsiaNews) - Two unidentified criminals, but in all likelihood Hindu extremists, broke into the Pentecostal Church of Tokapal, in the Bastar in Chhattisgarh, and wildly beat the pastor and his wife who is seven months pregnant. The pastors two little children were not even spared in the attack but were pushed about forcefully. The attackers burned the church and threw gasoline on the Christians, trying to set fire to them. The pastor and his family however managed to escape.



Commenting on this latest attack to AsiaNews, Sajan K George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians, condemns "the unjustified assault on the innocent pastor, his wife and children. The tiny Pentecostal community in Chhattisgarh is under constant intimidation and threats by the henchmen of the right-wing extremist groups, who target innocent Christians even while they are saying prayers. "

The attack took place Sunday, April 17. The two attackers broke into the house within the church, armed with knife, hammer and ax. They first wildly beat the Christian family, then tore the Bible and readings, sprinkled everywhere with gasoline and set the place on fire. They also wanted to burn the pastor and his wife, who managed to save themselves by fleeing from the house.



The extremists forced Christians to sing "Jai Sri Ram" [ "Victory to the god Ram", ed].

The incident is the second episode in the space of a month in the Indian state. In mid-March a group of 20 Hindu radicals dressed with saffron headgear broke into the Pentecostal church of the village of Kachna. Shouting "Jai Sri Ram", they disrupted the prayer function, beating up the approximately 65 worshipers, including women, and destroying everything in their path.



Sajan K George's claims that the attacks are justified by accusations against the Christians of forced conversion. "India is a secular country - he continues - but in Chhattisgarh they exploit the Freedom of Religion Bill to beat up the Christians and accuse those who pray to Jesus of a criminal act ''.



The Chhattisgarh Religion Freedom Act 2006 is an anti-conversion law in force in the State, which prevents conversions from Hinduism to other religions, but not vice-versa. Also several panchayat [local councils] of Tokapal, concludes the Christian leader, "approved an ordinance, within section 129 (G) of the Chhattisgarh Panchayat Raj Act, which also bans all forms of propaganda, prayer and non-Hindu religious discourses in the villages".
JAPAN

Earthquake in Japan: displaced put in prison for their safety





About 250 residents housed in Kumamoto prison, almost untouched by the recent earthquakes and equipped with emergency generators. They will sleep in the warders gym. The death toll rises 44 and 100 thousand people are living in emergency shelters.







Kumamoto (AsiaNews) - Going to jail not to serve a sentence but to find refuge. That's what is happening in these hours to several hundred victims of the double earthquake that struck the island of Kyushu (southwest), within 48 hours on April 14 and 16 last. The Japanese authorities have decided to host some residents in Kumamoto prison, whose structure was not seriously damaged by the quake. There they will find food and water, as well as a roof to sleep under.



The prison was built in 1972 and designed to accommodate 491 people. To offer shelter to some 250 displaced persons, the authorities freed a gym used by prison staff. The Minister of Justice said that it is the first time that the institute has welcomed residents affected by an emergency. 110 people will arrive at the prison today.



The jail is the perfect place to host people in difficulty, as it has emergency generators that provide electricity and water. The displaced people will be served with the institution food stocks which are rapidly dwindling. The Minister has decided to move 28 prison employees from other provinces in Kumamoto, 18 of whom will be in charge of caring for the refugees.



The April 16 earthquake, hit at 1.25 in the night, near the city of Kumamoto, where a previous quake of magnitude 6.4 had struck. The two shocks are the strongest to rock Japan after the magnitude 9 earthquake that caused the tsunami in 2011 and the following Fukushima disaster. The confirmed deaths are 44, with at least 1,000 injured. The Red Cross, Army (Japanese and US) and police are aiding 100 thousand people living in emergency shelters, some in their own cars. The government intervention has attracted a lot of criticism from those who complain about the meager food rations that are distributed (about two rice balls for dinner head) and the lack of water and the consequent inability to wash.
by Mathias Hariyadi

Jakarta (AsiaNews) - The government's "apology must come at the end of the process. If they apologize during the conference, it is just hypocrisy. Reconciliation can be offered to the victims only when they have the full truth, said Fr. Franz Magnus-Suseno Sj, professor of philosophy and expert on communism. He was addressing the first national symposium to discuss the 1965 tragedy, when 500 thousand people, members or supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were killed. The forum opened yesterday in Central Jakarta and ends today. It involved the victims, several government ministers and former army generals: the security measures were very tight.



On September 30, 1965 some senior army officers were killed in an attempted coup by members diverted of President Sukarno body guard. The conspirators were accused of having contacts with the Communist Party and the president was deposed the following year. The subsequent rise to power of General Suharto - who ruled until 1998, supported by the United States, the CIA and Western anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese block - resulted in the slaughter of Party members and sympathizers, killed or locked up in jail, persecuted with violence and brutality. Communism was outlawed and its ideology prohibited. Many of the affiliates were sent into exile in the island-prison of Buru, without trial or defense in court.

This is the first official meeting - wanted by some members of the government  to discuss of one of the darkest chapters in Indonesian history, welcomed by activist groups who for years have been calling for justice for the relatives of the victims. In a peaceful environment, the children of the slain generals mingled with the descendants of the Communist elite.



The dictator Suharto has often defended his purges defining them as a reaction to the Communist threat and stating that only the army could prevent civil war. The words of former Minister of Security Luhut B. Panjaitan were also hotly contested. He spoke at the forum saying that the government does not need to apologize to any specific part of society, reiterating that Indonesia has the strength to leave behind one of its darkest moments.



Fr. Magnus-Suseno says the government should avoid any omission of truth in the reconstruction of the tragedy, branded as "ludicrous" the claims of the general Sintong Panjaitan during the symposium, that the number of killed or missing persons is lower than reported. According to the Jesuit priest - who attended the conference - national reconciliation can only be achieved if four points are met:



1) A clear statement by the government that affirms the reality of the massacre, condemning torture, detentions, unfair trials, and summary executions.



2) Army denials be silenced. There was no civil war: what happened was a massacre against the population, prepared by a strong anti-communist propaganda.



3) Compensation for the victims and their families.



4) The political rehabilitation of Indonesian citizens who for decades have been marginalized because they are considered affiliated with the Communist Party and those exiled.



Fr. Aloysius Purwohadiwardoyo, professor of theology at the University of Yogyakarta, thinks that the current President Yoko Widodo is the right person to achieve peace: "He has no historical connection with that past. It was the Suharto regime that carried out those horrible facts, why should this administration not continue in the peace process? ".
Iranian Minister slams the Saudi government for creating problems in issuing visas. After four days of talks, Riyadh has not yet offered a clear solution. Iranian-Saudi regional rivalry and the politicisation of visas are behind the problem.

Tehran (AsiaNews/Agencies)  Talks between Tehran and Riyadh about the upcoming pilgrimage (hajj) to Makkah have stalled over visas for Iranian nationals.

For the Iranians, Saudi Arabia is creating problems for Iranian pilgrims who want to take part in this years Hajj. Unfortunately, the Saudi government has created problems in the past few months, said Ali Jannati, Iran's Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

The escalation of tension between the two great Islamic powers, Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, seems to be continuing despite tentative signs of a thaw earlier this month over Hajj visas.

In recent days, the Saudi-Iranian row disrupted the Organisation of the Islamic Conference summit in Istanbul and the OPEC meeting in Doha.

Riyadh had raised questions about visas and Iranian pilgrims arriving on Iranian aircrafts.

After intensive negotiations, the two reached a deal on transportation. Saeed Ohadi, head of the Iranian Hajj Organisation, said that Riyadh had agreed to the transfer of Iranian pilgrims by the Islamic Republics airlines.

However, this left the visa hurdle intact. "The problem of visa issuance has not been solved yet," Ohadi said. "Saudi Arabia has not yet offered a clear solution."

Back in January, Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic relations with Iran following angry demonstrations in front of its embassy in Tehran and consulate in the north-eastern city of Mashhad over the execution in Saudi Arabia of 47 terrorists, including prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

Several Arab countries followed suit, pulling their ambassadors from Iran, including Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Sudan, sparking a political (and religious) crisis between Sunnis and Shias.

Relations between the Iran and Saudi Arabia reached an historic low in September 2015 in the wake of tragic incident during last years pilgrimage to Makkah when, according to Reuters, 2,070 people were crushed to death after two large masses of pilgrims converged at a crossroads in Mina.

Saudi Arabia claimed 769 people were killed in the incident. Iran lost 136 pilgrims plus 102 wounded, and 344 missing. One of the Iranians who died was the countrys former ambassador to Lebanon.

Tehran has blamed Saudi authorities of mismanagement and incompetence, suggesting that the incident might have been premeditated.

Hajj (pilgrimage) is one of the five pillars of Islam that every good Muslim should perform at least once in his or her lifetime.

Saudi Arabia has often used the visit to Makkah for political purposes. For example, Syrians have not been allowed to travel to the Muslim holy city for many years.
The leadership of the High Negotiations Committee (Hnc) protests the escalation of violence that has hit the country. For the opposition the government army "has worsened the situation." According to Damascus "Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey want to derail the negotiations." The United Nations mediates between the parties, although "the gap remains large".

Geneva (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The United Nations has redoubled its diplomatic efforts to save the ongoing Syrian peace talks in Geneva, Switzerland. The opposition suspended its "formal participation" in the "indirect" negotiations, in protest against the escalation of violence that hit the country in recent days, in violation of the truce. The fighting is concentrated in particular around Aleppo, the "northern capital", as confirmed in recent days to AsiaNews by the Apostolic Vicar of the Latins.

In addition, the High Negotiations Committee (Hnc), the largest rebel faction and supported by the Saudis, is no longer willing to accept the government's veto on the future of President Bashar al Assad.

According to Hnc spokesman Salem al-Meslet, "since the beginning of the talks in Geneva, the Assad regime has worsened the situation on the ground", particularly in Aleppo where the worst violence is concentrated. However, according to Msgr. Georges Abou Khazen the Nusra Front was the first to resume fighting.

For opposition leaders the talks should be put "on hold" to focus on ways to "put an end to violations of the truce" by the government. 2 thousand violations have been reported since 27 February.

The opposition, concludes Meslet, is committed to finding a political solution to the violence and pursue the path of peace through diplomacy. Therefore, despite the suspension of negotiations, the Hnc leaders remain "in Geneva, ready to enter into" serious negotiations.

Damascus representatives responded by accusing Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar - close to the opposition  of making every attempt to derail the negotiations. Their governments, says Bashar al-Jaafari, "do not want to stop the bloodshed in Syria and do not want a political solution" to a conflict which, since March 2011, has caused at least 270 thousand deaths and millions displaced, creating an unprecedented humanitarian emergency.

The Syrian government spokesman blames the opposition and the countries that support them, irritated "by the pressure exerted on the ground by the Syrian army, which in recent weeks has regained some strategic areas of cultural and historical importance, such as Palmyra.

UN special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura warns that it is necessary to continue the dialogue, which kicked off on 13 April, as scheduled. The UN delegation will meet with the opposition in their hotel in Geneva "to continue technical discussions", including the part concerning the political transition. Though, de Mistura warns, "the gap [between the parties] remains large."

In spite of the commitment of the United Nations representatives, the choice of the opposition is a blow to the hopes for peace and negotiations for a political solution that includes: a new Constitution; Presidential elections; parliamentary elections, to be completed by September 2017.

Meanwhile, the international powers are trying to save the fragile ceasefire and pressing for negotiations. In a telephone conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Barack Obama, the two leaders have reached an agreement to strengthen the cease-fire, judging it "essential" in view of a - future - lasting peace. Both insist then on the huge significance" of the talks in Switzerland under the UN aegis, the only hope of peace for the country.
Ding Cuimei and her husband, underground pastor Li Jiangong, tried to stop bulldozers. A member of the demolition team said, Bury them alive for me. I will be responsible for their lives. Whilst the clergyman was able to escape death, his wife did not. Police arrest the two members of the demolition team but has not revealed any details about the case.

Zhumadian (AsiaNews)  The wife of an underground Protestant clergyman suffocated to death after she was buried alive trying to defend her church from demolition. Her husband, who was also buried, managed to survive. The incident occurred in Zhumadian, Henan Province.

Following the incident, police opened an investigation and arrested two members of the demolition team, but did not reveal any details about the case.

According to China Aid, an NGO that monitors the situation of Christians in China, the homicide took place on 14 April. On that day, Rev Li Jiangong and his wife Ding Cuimei tried to stop bulldozers sent by a government-backed firm to tear down the Beitou Church, by stepping in front of the machines.

A developer had offered to buy the land on which the church stood but wanted the building out of the way. When the two church caretakers stood their ground, a member of the demolition team said, Bury them alive for me. I will be responsible for their lives.

Subsequently, a bulldozer shoved Li and Ding into an already dug pit and covered their bodies with soil. Crying for help, Li was able to dig his way free, but Ding suffocated before she could be rescued.

Local Christians have complained about the slowness of the rescue as well as the attitude of the police, who seem unwilling to deal with the case. Rev Li himself is under pressure from the authorities, who fear "negative publicity" after his wifes killing.

Since the Three rectification and one demolition campaign was launched in the southern province of Zhejiang, at least 1,700 crosses have been torn down. Scores of churches have also been demolished in other provinces, including Hebei, Hubei and Henan.

In Zhejiang, the campaign against the crosses and Christian buildings began in early 2013, when local Party boss Xia Baolong deemed that Wenzhou Citys skyline had "too many crosses".

Many Christians believe that the real reason behind the campaign is a desire to reduce the impact and influence of Christian communities, both official and underground, on Chinese society, which has seen a dramatic rise in conversions.
Fossil Fuels Could Be Phased Out In Ten Years

Trending News: Time To Reinvest - The Age Of Fossil Fuels Is Over

Why Is This Important?

Because it flies in the face of what most big oil and coal companies like to tell us.

Long Story Short

Fossil fuels could be phased out worldwide in a decade, a new study claims.

Long Story

Despite the leaps that have been made in clean energy, theres one thing everyone understands: fossil fuels are going to be around for a while yet. Our humongous energy-hungry economies just cant do without them. Our so the thinking goes.

But what if thats not actually true? Thats the finding of a major energy think tank in the United Kingdom, which reckons the worldwide reliance on burning fossil fuels to create energy could be phased out within a decade.

It sounds fanciful. But the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Research & Social Science studiously avoids pie-in-the-sky theories, grounding its ideas in exactly how slow previous energy transitions were: moving from wood to coal in Europe took between 96 and 160 years; electricity took 47 to 69 years.

Study: humans have caused all the global warming since 1950 | D Nuccitelli https://t.co/dNe4AypYYP #climatechange pic.twitter.com/xIlP73BYG7  Leen Boer (@LeenBoer) April 19, 2016

But Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex, believes while these transitions are important to study, they also paint an unnecessarily negative picture about the potential for the renewables that could come on-stream.

The study highlights often overlooked examples of speedier energy transitions  Ontario completely shifting away from coal between 2003 and 2014; Indonesia taking just three years to move two-thirds of the population from kerosene to LPG stoves; and France's nuclear power program, which saw supply balloon from four per cent of the electricity supply market in 1970 to 40 per cent in 1982  and outlines their commonalities: strong government intervention coupled with shifts in consumer behavior, often driven by incentives and pressure from stakeholders.

Indian energy minister says country on track for 100GW solar; new solar PV now cheaper than new coal. https://t.co/zMrwreh6w4  David Roberts (@drvox) April 18, 2016

Basically, the past transitions can be instructive but not necessarily predictive, particularly when the modern world is faced by a scarcity of resources and the threat of climate change while boasting vastly improved technological learning and capacities to innovate. "The mainstream view of energy transitions as long, protracted affairs  is not always supported by the evidence, Professor Sovacool said in a news piece on the University of Sussexs website. Moving to a new, cleaner energy system would require significant shifts in technology, political regulations, tariffs and pricing regimes, and the behavior of users and adopters.

But a lot of governments have been slow to favor renewable energy, beholden to the political might of big oil, gas and coal companies. And if these groups continue to have their interests looked after, the transition could once again take as long as those coal and electricity revolutions of the past. Left to evolve by itself  as it has largely been in the past  this can indeed take many decades, Sovacool warned.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: How is it best for governments to get involved in encouraging these sorts of transitions without picking winners?

Disrupt Your Feed: Where does nuclear power sit in the mix?

Drop This Fact: The International Energy Agency recently announced a goal of generating 26 percent of the worlds energy by renewable sources by 2020.
Jia Jia Is China's First Interactive Robot

Trending News: Meet The World's First Robot Goddess

Why Is This Important?

Because she's easy on the eyes, but she's not the greatest for conversaton.

Long Story Short

A Chinese university unveiled one of the most life-like robots we've seen yet, but as soon as she opens her mouth, it's all Terminator.

Long Story

You're in a bar and you look over to your right. A beautiful brunette is staring right at you from across the room. She smiles, shyly. Her skin looks soft. Her cheeks, rosy.

You go up and approach, armed with your greatest pickup line. But when she speaks, it's like you're talking to Siri.

Meet Jia Jia  a "robot goddess" put on display at the University of Science and Technology of China on Friday, as reported by Cnet.

Of course, you can't approach this robot goddess in a bar as I just described, yet  but you couldn't be blamed too much if you were fooled by her attractiveness. This incredibly realistic-looking robot has to be one of the most accurate androids we've seen yet, even better than the Scarlett Johansson look-alike we saw recently. But while she can nod her head, squint and react to you when you're in the room, there's still a long way to go before you'll have to ask every cute girl at the bar to show you her ID to prove she's of the human race.

Jia Jia is only capable of doing "microexpressions," has the monotone-voice of a bot, and can't laugh or cry, but she's a work progress.

"We hope to develop the robot so it has deep learning abilities," said team leader Chen Xiaoping to Xinhuanet. "We will add facial expression recognition and make it interact more deeply with people."

The creators didn't say what the robot would be used for, but it's clear what it's doing. We keep seeing robots that look more and more like attractive women, both in real life and in fictional depictions like Ex-Machina and Black Mirror  why are roboticists spending so much time on the beauty component rather than the practical applications? Why do we need to turn this incredible research into a literal sexualized object?

If you watched the video of the robot goddess above, don't you find it weird the way she's photographed like a car and not a person? We wouldn't do that type photography on any girl in public, unless it's a model or a celeb, but perhaps that's my point exactly.

I'm not saying robots need rights, I'm just saying we have to consider why so much time is spent making robots some idealized standard of beauty, rather than focusing on what it can do to help advance our society. And objectifying some idealized image of women is definitely not it.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

Would this even be news if the robot didn't have such a pretty face?

Disrupt Your Feed

At least when the robots take over, they'll be attractive.

Drop This Fact

Harvard has a robot that's teaching kids to code  now that's a practical application.
Former Corrs Chambers Westgarth partner Alex Regan and Simon Huxley, who was previously a senior associate at Allen & Overy, will both join the firms Sydney practice.Over the last 12 months, we've actively sought to grow our corporate, M&A, finance, projects and infrastructure capabilities. Alex and Simon joining is key to delivering on this strategy, Australian Finance & Projects co-head Onno Bakker told Australasian Lawyer.Regan, who joined DLA Piper this week, has experience in both Australia and the Asia Pacific region in private equity and leveraged and acquisition finance.I am thrilled to have the opportunity to add some further leveraged finance expertise to this top tier private equity capability, Regan said.Huxley, who will join DLA Piper next month, specialises in the development, project financing and acquisition of large infrastructure, energy and power projects, with particular experience advising on power and mining and resources projects.We anticipate there to be a continued focus on M&A and major projects and infrastructure activity in Australia in the next financial year, with a continued strong foreign investor interest in Australia, Bakker said.DLA Pipers Finance & Projects team in Australia is particularly busy, having recently advised St. George Bank on the financing for the acquisition of a hotel and resort portfolio across Australia, as well as financing aspects of Australia's largest IPO of 2015 for Link Group.
Hi Guys,



I need so advice. I have applied for my Citizenship and more than six months I have not received any information from DIAC. I did the interview/test in October 2015. I have tried calling but they told me there is no information yet. Is it normal? Any response would be appreciated. Thanks.
Hi all,I'm Irish, in Melbourne, and I need an activated SIM for my phone. For privacy reasons, I don't want to use my passport here to buy and activate one. Anyone heading back home want to sell me there activated SIM?Willing to pay AU$100 cash in handCheersStevie
Hello Everyone!I just wanted to introduce myself: I'm a 23 year-old Swiss citizen looking into moving to Australia in the next couple of years. I've been there three times to visit friends and family. Unfortunately, getting a work permit holding only a Swiss passport isn't as easy as I wish it was. So I'll be needing some help with visa regulations etc. I'm looking forward to meeting you guys!In the meantime... good night to you
Hi,my case is complicated but I will try to explain.In Jan 2016 my twin brother apply for student visa Subclass 573 student visa ,but on 15 Feb he received a mailed from immigration that he may fail to satisfy PIC 4020(1) because "stated No at Question 93, of your visa application form 157A especially the ones that state :  Have you or any member of your family unit included in this application ever  been charged with any offence that is currently awaiting legal action and/or been convicted of an offence in any country ( including any conviction which is now removed from official records )?"and we were in shock what happened there then we recall that my elder brother(Australia citizen) have divorce case in which his wife put a false allegation in our family which was almost ready to settle in Feb.We belive that we that case was over on 4th January when divorce was granted by lower court but according to Indian court the last third hearing should be in high court then FIR against family will be removed and that high court date was 24th FebSo,we know that we done a huge mistake by not reading the question properly,then we successfully withdraw the file from embassy.Now this was passed now currently ,unfortunately that case was not completed on 24th Feb the judge gave a date of 14 July 2016.Now I am going to apply for student visa in may or June for August intake ,we are trying over best to solve this case in May itself by going to supreme court ,but if by luck we are not going to solve this in May it going to solve in 14July in high courtSo,I just want to know if my case(FIR) was removed so still can I apply for visa by ticking YES? and giving all required document or I have to wait till FIR will be removedplease help me
Hi all, I am currently holding a visitor visa which has not arrive after 30/04/2016. I have just lodged my 820/801partner visa in paper on 15/April 2016. and the second day the acknowledged letter along the bridging visa A have sent to my email address. I would like to know when is my bridging visa A takes effects, is it take effects after the visitor must not arrive date which is 30/04/2016 or that date plus 3 month which is 30/07/2016. As my max stay is 3 month for each entry.



Thanks
Hi Guys,

I really need your kind advise on my situation,

My friend and I are on student visa 573, we are same-sex couple. We have been in relationship for more than 1 year in my home country. So now when we are in Au, can my friend change student visa to dependent (de facto) visa? Does he have to cancel his student visa before applying? And do we need to bring evidences from our home country to Au to prove true relationship for 12 month?



I really appreciate you help

Thank you in advance
SUV

TDI

By now, you all know that comic-based movies have hit rock-bottom. Each one is a 2-hour long barrage of product placement and teasers for the next two movies that will contain even more teasers... except Deadpool, that thing was awesome (we heart you Ryan Reynolds).Anyway, here's the latest commercial from Audi and it's for the Q7, an otherwise practical but slightly boring. Stealing CGI footage directly from Captain America: Civic War, the ad shows him and Black Panther chasing Bucky Barnes (the Winter Soldier) through a tunnel. Amidst all the boring gray Audis, a family in a red Audi gets caught up in the action.Here is everything we think is wrong with this commercial and/or the movie:1. Mother and father look like they are brothers2. An Audi SUV with police lights. Really?3. The SQ7 has aengine4. One kid is ginger, unlike any of his parents5. She is driving, and he gives a fudge about what his father-in-law likes on Facebook6. Unrealistic running footage7. Bad joke at the endAfter so many years of seeing Audis in superhero movies, we are beginning to wonder what the parties involved have to gain from this unnatural partnership. Captain America gets associated with the TDI people, while Audi takes center stage in a movie most adults who buy their cars will avoid.It takes a lot of effort to make a comic book. Most of the stories you know took several decades to become famous enough that Hollywood started paying attention. Likewise, Audi probably invested a good couple of billion into making the all-new Q7. But just like beans and cheese.
Tesla Motors awarded Musk with 5.27 million options tied to milestones, and Elon has already completed over 50% of them. The challenge began in 2012, and its time limit is in 2022.Until then, Musk must ensure that Tesla production is raised to 300,000 units a year, and that the Model 3 is launched on the market and delivered to customers.Another significant goal that Tesla must achieve for Musk to receive compensation is to boost the companys value by another 28%. Tesla must also maintain a 30 percent profit margin for four quarters, in the context of the 300,000-unit yearly production requirement.The goals have been strategically linked to both Tesla production and company value, to ensure that the firm will be profitable over the years and that its CEO will be appropriately rewarded.According to Automotive News , Elon Musk has achieved seven targets related to the growth of Teslas market capitalization, but only five of ten operational goals have been reached. The 2012 stock plan made by Tesla Motors allows Musk to earn 1/10 of the options for every pair of goals achieved, which enabled the CEO to receive half of his total options so far.Elon Musk has never accepted his CEO salary from Tesla in the last ten years, so these stocks will be a nice reward once the automaker becomes what the South African-born businessman dreamed it to be.Once Tesla Motors reaches all the milestones described above, Elon Musk will be rewarded with a total of $1.6 billion. Initially, he was expected to get this sum in 2022, but analysts estimate he will receive the compensation earlier.However, it has not been a smooth sail for Musk and Tesla, as the company has faced delays delivering the Model X, and the new Model 3 has an unprecedented number of reservations signed in record time, which the company must strive to build on time.
John Elkann, chairman of FCA and chosen heir of Gianni Agnelli, wrote a letter to the shareholders of Exor, an investment fund that owns 29% of FCA, highlighting the benefits of a merger with another automaker.According to previous statements made by FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne, a merger with another carmaker would bring savings of up to $10 billion a year. Initially, Marchionne was rumored to have negotiated an alliance with General Motors, but the corporation is now out of FCAs list of potential partners.The Volkswagen Group was also reportedly considered by Marchionne, but later ditched for lack of interest from the German corporation.Instead, Ford and Toyota are now seen as potential companies that could sign a partnership with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Ford representatives also denied any interest in a merger with FCA, and expressed this decision through a press release.While the merger with a big carmaker is unlikely, Marchionne believes they have a better shot at this than joining forces with the South Korean carmakers. While the latter party is influential in finance, Marchionne marked them as not interested in external partnerships.Along with significant savings in the cost of development, manufacture, and distribution, FCA is looking for a carmaker to partner with in China. Currently, the worlds largest auto market is the weakest link for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, as the Detroit Free Press notes.The Italian-American corporation will have its annual shareholder meeting next week, and Marchionne and Elkanns words might be heard again in another official context. The organization that is known now as FCA started with a courageous merger envisioned by Marchionne and accomplished through the acquisition of the Chrysler Group. Sergio Marchionne's push for such a partnership is motivated by harsh conditions on the European market and the need for several brands in the lineup for a complete overhaul.
The Gumball 3000 Foundation helps underprivileged children around the world. It is a fund that works through the Nelson Mandela's Children fund, the Tony Hawk Foundation, Wish Upon a Star, and other NPOs.Those who wish to support Team Wolfpacks fundraising efforts can do so on the Crowdrise platform. Whatever the amount you donate, Cartu promised to do his part of helping by doubling any donation submitted. As an added incentive for those who donate to the Gumball 3000 Foundation, anyone donating 50 euros (roughly $56.63) or more will receive a Team Wolfpack t-shirt to their address.The supercar Cartu will be driving from Dublin, Ireland, to Bucharest, Romania, is a Ferrari 488 Spider modified to look like the dream machine featured in the video and photo gallery below. Marchettino will keep us up to date with Team Wolfpack on their 3,000-mile (4,800-kilometer) pilgrimage. Team Wolfpack will provide prizes at each stop of the rally, including the final stop in Bucharest, the capital city of Romania.With each and every stop, the team 25 will offer attendees the chance to win prizes such as an iPhone 6s with custom carbon fiber bits and bobs with Wolfpack branding, an exclusive cap, a similarly exclusive T-shirt Wolfpack, as well as a package with Wolfpack-branded stickers and bracelets.If youre seriously lucky, you could possibly win a meeting with a member of the team, during which youll have the opportunity to see the Cartu GT3 up close and personal and be photographed with it. Pretty neat VIP experience, isnt it?Other cars Josh Cartu has driven for Team Wolfpack in the Gumball 3000 include a Novitec-prepped Ferrari 458 Spider, an F12, and a Rolls-Royce Phantom EWB. Joshs best result at the annual celebrity motor rally came in 2014 when his peeps at Wolfpack won the team prize. You can keep up with the Canadian-born gentleman driver, Ferrari club president, and entrepreneur by following his official Facebook account The Cartu GT3 won't be finished in time for the start of the 2016 Gumball 3000 Rally.All is not lost, though: a Ferrari F12tdf in blue & black livery is the replacement car.
The team of 450 investigators is probing through data obtained from more than 1,500 laptops, and they discovered that people who were aware of the fraud regarding the emissions of diesel engines used code words.According to Automotive News , the number of terms used is in the range of dozens and includes acoustic software. All of the terms were used to discuss the technology referred to as the defeat device, which deactivated emission control systems when the vehicles were not tested.A source familiar with the probe claims the investigation team is focused on approximately 20 employees. The same unnamed party stated that many of the interviewees did not provide insight over the fear of legal retaliation.At the moment, it is unclear how many Volkswagen Group employees were aware of the situation, as the inquiry has yet to be completed.Volkswagen and the other parties involved need a full report of the investigation, so they can present it to their annual shareholder meeting. This years meeting was delayed from April 21 to an unspecified date in June.Once the report is completed, the entire matter must be publicly revealed, as this is considered the only solution for the German company to regain public trust. Until this moment, Volkswagens officials have insisted that only a small group was responsible for the defeat device, but this investigation must reveal if this was true.The press is not the only party interested in discovering when Volkswagen started cheating and who made the decision, as government officials are requesting clarification on the matter as well.Stephan Weil, prime minister of the state of Lower Saxony in Germany and the representative of the companys second-largest shareholder, wants complete clarification by this month. Currently, the pressure is on the investigators, who must discover what some Volkswagen employees fail to recall.The most pressing matter is who decided that cheating was the solution and who approved the decision.
Toyota Motor Corp., Toyota Financial Services, and a Japanese insurer have formed a telematics car insurance services company that will offer "pay how you drive" insurance to encourage safer driving.

The joint venture known as Toyota Insurance Management Solutions USA, LLC (TIMS) was formed April 1, Toyota has announced. Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance Co., Ltd. has invested in the business.

The new venture will be located in Southern California near TFS U.S. headquarters and will support the development of telematics car insurance services for Toyota customers, as well as new experiences aimed at more fully satisfying customers by working in unison with dealers and distributors.

TIMS will conduct analysis of big data, and relevant marketing and promotion of the new services to help offer broader insurance options to users, according to Toyota.

Aioi Nissay Dowa and TFS will invest in the new company through their own subsidiaries in the U.S., while investment from Toyota Motor will come from Toyota Connected, Inc., which was established in the U.S. in January. The new company intends to leverage telematics data access, financial services, and telematics car insurance expertise to offer services designed to provide higher customer satisfaction.

TFS and Aioi Nissay Dowa have been jointly promoting such unified financial and insurance services around the world since the 1990s. By consolidating their experience and knowhow, the two companies now plan to start new services in the U.S.

Toyota Connected was established to contribute to Toyota Motor's global development in the connectivity and data science fields. TIMS was formed to enable a more-seamless relationship among driving data, financing options and insurance.

TIMS plans to make use of accumulated driving data obtained with appropriate consumer consent, and also plans to engage with the Toyota Research Institute, Inc., which Toyota Motor established as a research base for the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics.
Autonomous cars have become a common sight on Californian roads. More than 100 self-driving vehicles from various carmakers are being tested now on public roads each year.

Among the cars tested in California, one is different, reports The Economist. The car still has a human driver and it is not driving itself but helps in collecting data to create highly detailed maps. The maps will be used to enable self-driving cars to work autonomous.

The car that helps gathering data to create maps is nicknamed "George" by HERE, a Berlin-based mapping company owned by Daimler, Audi and BMW. George features a high-precision GPS receiver on its roof to collect the car's elevation, longitude and latitude ten times over every second of its journey.

A laser scanner calculated the car distance from some 600,000 different points, such as buildings and trees and a motion-tracking inertial system records its roll, pitch and yaw 100 times every second. At the same time, for every six meters the car moves along the road, for cameras also shoot a 360-degree panoramic image at a resolution of 96-megapixel.

George can accumulate 100 gigabytes or more of data in just one day's driving. All this information allows HERE to build up a high definition (HD) map composed of an extremely detailed three-dimensional image of ca's route.

In a press release, ABI Research explained that an essential next step toward the future of fully driverless cars is creating highly accurate, real-time maps. These maps will need to combine real-time attributes allowing temporal and positional awareness, environmental models and accuracy.

Dominique Bonte, Managing Director and Vice President at ABI Research said that in the process to design the highly detailed three dimensional maps for autonomous vehicles a crowdsourcing is very important. Automotive companies, such as HERE, can use cloud networking to crowdsource the information necessary to build real-time, highly accurate, precision maps.

The crowdsourcing model is already taking shape in the industry. HERE confirmed talks with Microsoft and Amazon. Mobileye signed collaboration agreements with Nissan, Volkswagen and General Motors.
While global auto industry leaders are gearing towards further improvement of their brands, Elon Musk's concept of another kind of transport via tubes first came to public knowledge in 2013. Three years after, what was written in black and white could now be a possibility.

Hyperloop Technologies CTO Brogan BamBrogan told an audience at the SAE World Congress in Detroit recently that his company is in the works at developing Musk's hyperloop concept, Forbes reported. The Los Angeles-based company has been one of many companies not only showing interest in the Tesla CEO's advance transport idea, but rather has been actually doing something to make it a reality.

The company also mentioned that a 3-km long tube somewhere in the Nevada desert is undergoing construction over what would end up as a primary commercial route expected to complete by 2020. Yet, a whole magnitude of work is still needed prior to its first test with live people.

The hyperloop is said to use pods which would be transported through a network of near-vacuum metal tubes going thousands of long distances. Acceleration would be made possible with an electromagnetic propel system, and the near-zero pressure inside keeps the aerodynamics to a minimum allowing the pod to travel less an added push for thousands of miles, according to the publication.

In other news, a crowdfunding campaign in the form of a beta version of a hyperloop game has been released by rLoop, according to TheVerge. Behind the said game are a team of enthusiasts and Hyperloop engineers who are hoping to raise around $66,000 and use the proceeds to complete their own prototype of the tube transport for SpaceX's Hyperloop demo later this year, after taking part in the pod design contest a few months back. The tracks where the pod entries would be tested is still undergoing completion according to SpaceX.
These floods of passiondirected by Bonnie Rotten, whom one would assume at least wore a raincoat during the shootall contain pairs of girls, with males joining them in most cases to keep things from being only a pussyfest.

The first scene, possibly the best, keeps it to two gals without guys: Zoey Monroe and Veronica Avluv. Following some mutual tease and fondling for the camera, they are then found in one anothers arms on a presumably liquid-resistant oversized chair, upon which their kissing and touching quickly evolves into some heavy-duty oral pussy playone of which results in Avluv getting a gush direct into her mouth in explicit close-up glory. Thoroughly soaked, they continue with some grinding pussy squirting, some rough solo and dual dildo play, and even more gushes that seem to keep erupting every time a toy, fingers or mouth get near or make contact with their wide-spread pussies.

Similar things happen in the remaining trio of scenes that all include a man with each pair of aquatic mermaids; just replace the dildos with the real thing.
As the Aero shows opens today in Friedrichshafen, Germany, organizers are looking for a smaller showdown about 40 exhibitorsbut a busy one. AVwebs preview of the show schedule Tuesday revealed a full day of conferences and announcements, including new product information from Continental Motors, Daher, Jeppesen and Siemens. Aeros Roland Bosch told AVweb Tuesday that one reason for the smaller number of exhibitors is that glider manufacturers display every other year and were last here in 2015. But some companies, and Diamond Aircraft is one, also attend Aero every other year, as they did when the show was held on that schedule.

For the 2016 event, we expect much focus to be on Siemens, whose ambitious programs into electric aircraft will be front and center in the main entrance hall area. Already on display is the HYPSTAIR hybrid drive project, an innovative marriage of a Rotax 914 engine with a powerful Siemens electric motor and generator set. But thats not the only hybrid on display here. A company called Eurosport Aircraft is showing another hybrid project, the Crossover, that also uses a Rotax engine plus batteries to drive a pair of electric motors in a pusher arrangement.

Another intriguing airplane that appears to come from the Siemens skunk works is an Extra 330 fitted with a 260-kW brushless DC motorthats a little over 350 HPand a giant battery pack between the conventional firewall and the electric motor. We hope to learn more details about these projects as the week progresses. Stay tuned to AVweb for regular news and video coverage.
The Senate today approved a new FAA funding bill that is widely supported by GA advocates. NBAA President Ed Bolen said the new bill provides a smart, targeted approach to funding the FAAs efforts to modernize what is already the worlds safest air-traffic control system. GAMA President Pete Bunce also said he was extremely pleased with the bill, which he said will improve aviation safety, make better use of FAA and industry resources, and bolster manufacturing competitiveness. The bill also includes the Pilots Bill of Rights 2, which would simplify medical certification for many recreational pilots. The Senate approved the bill by 95 to 3, but it still must be reconciled with the House bill, which proposes to shift control of ATC from the FAA to a not-for-profit corporation. The Senate version did not address the privatization issue.

The Senate bill does support Part 23 certification reform, Bunce said. Throughout the Congress, there is widespread agreement on the need to advance certification reform, which this bill does, Bunce said. It is time for the U.S. House of Representatives to also move forward in a bipartisan way to address certification reform, providing general aviation manufacturers, their customers, and the entire aviation community greater certainty moving forward.

AOPA President Mark Baker said the medical reform provisions in the bill would affect hundreds of thousands of pilots. Getting these reforms is vital to the entire general aviation community, he said. Add to that the fact that there are no user fees for general aviation in this bill, and there are provisions to continue research into unleaded fuels and increase grants for improvements to GA airports, and its all good news for GA.The Senate and House have until July 15, when the FAAs current authorization expires, to work out a compromise bill, which then goes to President Obama for final approval.
AWWA's Technical and Educational Council and Standards Council were established to further AWWA's charter as an international, nonprofit, scientific, and educational society. AWWA's Standards Council develops water industry standards approved by the American National Standards Institute. Key to this work are the many volunteer members of AWWA committees. Our goal is to provide you with easy access to the materials and water knowledge that are necessary for our day-to-day work.
Armenia has accused Muslim countries making up the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) of completely distorting the essence of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in response to the latest pro-Azerbaijani resolution adopted by them.

In a joint communique released after their summit in Istanbul last week, OIC member states branded Armenia an aggressor and called for more coercive measures that would help Azerbaijan restore control over Karabakh. They also blamed Yerevan for the April 2 outbreak of heavy fighting along the Armenian-Azerbaijani line of contact around the disputed territory.

Wordings included in the document at the behest of Azerbaijan and Turkey completely distort the essence of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Deputy Foreign Minister Shavarsh Kocharian said in written comments over the weekend.

The real aggressor, Azerbaijan, is portrayed as a victim, something which it will consider an endorsement of a new wave of aggression and its efforts to give the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict religious overtones, he said.

Kocharian claimed that the OIC also endorsed Turkeys and Azerbaijans provocative approaches running counter to international efforts to resolve the Karabakh conflict, which are spearheaded by the United States, Russia and France.

Both Baku and Ankara have repeatedly accused the U.S., Russian and French mediators co-chairing the OSCE Minsk Group of pro-Armenian bias. Yerevan has fiercely resisted the two Turkic allies apparent efforts to expand or change otherwise the format of Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks.

The OIC summit also approved a Turkish proposal to set up a contact group that will strive for a resolution of the Karabakh conflict sought Azerbaijan. The Armenian side is certain to strongly oppose its involvement in the Karabakh peace process.
19 April 2016 11:29 (UTC+04:00)

Azerbaijani Armed Forces have destroyed Armenian X-55 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

The UAV was destroyed while attempting to fly over the Azerbaijani positions along the frontline, Azerbaijans Defense Ministry reported on April 19.

Another Armenian drone was brought down by the Azerbaijani units on April 7, when it was performing intelligence-gathering operations.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on April 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan.

As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
19 April 2016 13:11 (UTC+04:00)

By Nazrin Gadimova

Armenia bears the responsibility for violation of the agreement on mutual repatriation of those killed during military operations on the contact line of troops.

Azerbaijans State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing People made the remark on April 18.

The chronology of events proves that responsibility for the agreements violation lies on Armenia, the commission believes.

Immediately after the Armenian media reports founding a dead body of an Azerbaijani serviceman on April 16, Baku requested the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) to clarify the issue. The ICRC confirmed the reports on the same day and the sides reached an agreement on mutual repatriation.

However, later Armenia denied the reports, saying they were mistaken and told international organizations that they do not have the body of the killed Azerbaijani serviceman.

The State Commission believes that it is unclear why the Armenian side needed twelve hours to clarify belonging of the corpse found in the battlefield.

This shows that Armenians are planning to stage another provocation and it is an example of violation of the international humanitarian law, the commission said. The organization has already urged the international organizations to demonstrate principle stand in dealing with this issue.

Earlier, Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry accused Armenia in violating the Geneva Conventions and its obligations under other international documents while refusing to return the body of the Azerbaijani soldier despite the reached agreements.

Armenia, being far from human values, exposes the corpses to torture and abuse and turns them into objects of revenge and political speculation, said Hikmet Hajiyev, the Spokesperson for the Ministry.

So far, Azerbaijans State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing People has registered 4,013 Azerbaijani citizens as missing in the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent regions of Azerbaijan. Armenia avoids giving information about these persons, mass graves and the people who can give testimony in connection with captives and hostages taken during the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

With such actions, Yerevan also ruins the life of the people who are still waiting for information about their relatives, family members and beloved ones.

For over two decades, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in conflict, which emerged over Armenia's territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor. Since a war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions.

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Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova

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19 April 2016 16:54 (UTC+04:00)

By Nazrin Gadimova

Azerbaijans National Agency for Mine Action (ANAMA) examined about 30,000 square meters of territories adjoining the contact line of troops of Armenian and Azerbaijani armies on April 18.

Thus, as a result of monitoring of the Garadagli village (Terter region), ANAMA has inspected the area of 16,000 square meters and found four unexploded shells, as well as five shell holes in four houses and adjacent territories. Moreover, some 8,000 squares meters were checked in Gapanli village of Terter region: the agency inspected 13 shell holes and found 13 exploded shells in the territory of two houses.

ANAMA also examined Azerbaijans Agdam, Fizuli and Goranboy regions, which suffered from Armenian shelling.

The Agencys field engineers have examined 3,000 square meters in Agdams Evoglu village (two exploded shells and two shell holes were found), 1,735 square meters in Fizulis Goradiz village (13 exploded shells and 13 shell holes were found), and 210 square meters in Goranboys Gahdud village (two exploded shells and two shell holes were found).

In general, on April 7-18, ANAMA examined 278 houses and adjacent territories, five farms and areas under crops, two military units, a cemetery and a high school, as well as eight pastures in Terter, Aghjabadi, Agdam, Fuzuli, Tovuz and Goranboy regions. The field engineers have found and detonated 137 unexploded ordnances (UXOs).

Currently, special quick reaction forces are continuing demining operations using sniffer dogs.

ANAMA has launched operations to demine areas that were subjected to the heavy bombardment as a result of Armenian provocations on the contact line of troops. Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on April 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides. However, Armenia has ignored the agreement and started violating the ceasefire again.

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Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova

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19 April 2016 19:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Nazrin Gadimova

Azerbaijan found and took away the corpse of a serviceman who was killed while preventing the Armenian provocations on the contact line of troops.

The body was found in the area where the search operations were carried out repeatedly, Azerbaijans Defense Ministry reported.

On April 19, the search for the Azerbaijani serviceman, who went missing on the battlefield, has been renewed with the mediation of the ICRC and the OSCE representatives," the ministry said. This gives grounds to say that the Armenian side took away the body previously, kept it for unknown reasons and did not inform either the mediators or the Azerbaijani side on this issue.

The ministry believes that the Armenian side put the corpse secretly to the same place after Azerbaijan announced about resumption of the search.

Currently, procedures are carried out to clarify the conditions, reasons and time of death of the Azerbaijani serviceman, the ministry added.

Earlier, Azerbaijan accused Armenia of violating humanitarian law while refusing to return the bodies of those killed during the hostilities.

Armenia, being far from human values, exposes the corpses to torture and abuse and turns them into objects of revenge and political speculation, Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry believes.

This issue was high on agenda of the PACE spring session held in Strasbourg on April 18. Thus, Azerbaijans MP Ganira Pashayeva said the country has many documents proving crimes committed by the Armenian side towards the Azerbaijani servicemen.

Armenia breached the fragile ceasefire on April 2.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on April 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

--

Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova

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19 April 2016 16:12 (UTC+04:00)

By Fatma Babayeva

Seasonal increase in the water levels of rivers may pose serious danger for the nearby villages in Azerbaijan.

Experts revealed the names of areas under the threat of flooding by force of increasing water levels in the rivers flowing in the northern part of the country.

The deputy director of the Geography Institute under the National Academy of Sciences, Elbrus Alizadeh said there is a risk of overflood in the northern areas of Azerbaijan.

The northern rivers such as Kusarchay, Gudyalchay, Garachay and Velvelchay may pose a particular threat for the nearby settlements, Alizade believes.

So, most villages of Gusar, Guba and Khachmaz regions which are located in the foothills and lowlands are under flood threat, he added.

The scientist also explained the reasons of the overflood happened in Tangerud River in the Lerik region in the south of the country. The flood was expected after intense rains in the region. The soil is oversaturated with moisture and does not absorb rainwater, which flows into the river causing floods.

Alizadeh stressed that despite the necessary measures are taken to reduce the likelihood of floods, they are yet to be improved.

The valleys of the rivers which pass through the settlements and can cause flooding have to be cleaned from sullage. However, only valleys of few rivers have been cleaned from silt where there is a risk of mudflows. If the valleys of the rivers are cleaned in a timely manner, then the carrying capacity of the river bed will increase, he added. In order to protect from floods, the river banks need to be strengthened, and protective concrete barriers should be constructed.

He emphasized that realization of these measures will cost ten times less than the liquidation of the damage caused by floods.

The heavy rains in the Vizezemen and Shingedulan villages in Lerik region led to overfloods on April 16, in particular, bringing a bridge in the Tebrizli village out of use.

Furthermore, heavy rains caused landslides in some parts of the region.

Now water level comprises 120-150 percent of ten-day norm in the rivers of Guba-Khachmaz region located in the Major Caucasus, 80-105 percent in the rivers of the Minor Caucasus and 20-80 percent in the rivers of the Lankaran-Astara region, reports the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources in Azerbaijan.

Three-centimeter increase of the water level was recorded in the Kura River in Giragkasman on April 18.

Some 22-centimeter increase of the water level was observed in Ganig River in Ayrichai. At the moment, water consumption comprises 159 cube meter/second, namely 95 percent. However, this figure stood at 132 cubic meters per second which was equal to 79 percent of ten-day norm in 2015.

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Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva

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19 April 2016 10:49 (UTC+04:00)

Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev extended condolences to Ecuadorian counterpart Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado on April 18.

"We were deeply saddened by the news of heavy casualties and destructions as a result of a severe earthquake in your country," President Aliyev said.

"On behalf of the people of Azerbaijan and on my own behalf, I extend my deepest condolences to the bereaved families and loved ones of those who died, wish the injured recovery, and hope for the soonest elimination of the tragedy's consequences," the president added.

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19 April 2016 14:59 (UTC+04:00)

The President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker has urged the parties of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to adhere to the ceasefire.

First of all, it is necessary to cease the fire, Juncker said while addressing the meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on April 19.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers.

The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on April 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides,

Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan.

As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

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19 April 2016 14:58 (UTC+04:00)

Inter-parliamentary cooperation will assist for finding the ways of solution of conflicts in the Eurasian region.

This was stated by Azerbaijan's Parliament Speaker Ogtay Asadov in the first meeting of speakers of parliaments of the Eurasian countries in Moscow, Russia, Azertag state news agency reports.

The speaker said the world faced with the challenges such as the financial crisis, terrorism, climate changes, food and energy security and the cooperation among the states plays crucial role in settlement of these problems.

Asadov also highlighted the importance of the inter-parliamentary diplomacy. He said as a result of the Armenia-Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, 20 percent of the Azerbaijani territories were occupied by Armenia.

Azerbaijan faced with the ethnic cleansing policy; more than one million Azerbaijanis became IDPs and refugees. The international organizations, including the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly adopted the documents demanding unconditional, immediate withdrawal of Armenian Armed Forces from the Azerbaijan`s occupied lands. The OSCE Minsk Group Co-chair countries reaffirmed that status-quo is unacceptable. The conflict must be resolved soon, the speaker added.

Asadov also said Armenia refused to honour the international efforts that directed to solving the conflict.

Maintaining the conflict in this situation is the main obstacle to peace and stability in the world, especially in the Southern Caucasus region. The recent developments in the line of contacts of Armenian and Azerbaijani troops are evidence for that. Armenian Armed Forces shelled fire to settlements in Azerbaijani positions. Azerbaijani Armed Forces repulsed the Armenian provocation for protection of the civilians living near the contact line, he said.

The meeting discussed the current state and prospects of development of cooperation in the for welfare of the Eurasian region in the 21st century.

The sitting themed "Inter-parliamentary cooperation for joint prosperity of the countries in the Eurasian region in the 21st century" was initiated by the Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation Sergey Naryshkin and Chairman of the Parliament of the Republic of Korea Chung Eui-hwa.

The event is attended by representatives of 19 countries. The agenda includes the development of inter-parliamentary dialogue, issues of expansion of cooperation in political, economic, legal and humanitarian spheres, as well as in environmental protection.

In addition, the meeting will focus on the consolidation of peace and stability in the region, countering extremism and inter-religious dialogue.

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19 April 2016 17:44 (UTC+04:00)

By Aynur Karimova

Baku citizens and the guests of the Pearl of the Caspian Sea will have an access to two more subway stations in the capital, which is expected to ease the daily travelling plans.

Those, who wish to travel to the regions of Azerbaijan from Baku International Bus Terminal or from the Terminal to the center of the capital, will be able to make a cheap travel by using the newly-commissioned Avtovagzal and Memar Ajami stations, which were commissioned on April 19.

President Ilham Aliyev attended the opening of Avtovagzal and Memar Ajami stations on the new violet line of Baku Metro.

Chairman of Baku Metro CJSC Zaur Huseynov informed the head of state about the conceptual development scheme of the Baku Metro lines.

The conceptual development scheme envisages expanding the existing infrastructure in phases by 2030, and creating a huge underground transport network.

Under the scheme, Baku Metro will consist of five lines, 76 stations and 119 km-long network of underground tunnels. Some 53 new metro stations will be built until 2030.

The head of state cut the ribbon symbolizing the opening of Avtovagzal station, and reviewed the conditions created here.

The station, the construction of which started in September, 2009, consists of the platform, two vestibules, eight exits, ventilation point and two pyramids.

The total length of the station is 560 meters. An elevator was installed here for persons with disabilities.

President Aliyev then arrived at Memar Ajami station by train.

The total length of the station is 168.5 meters. There are three exits and an elevator for persons with disabilities.

Functioning for about 46 years the Baku Metro is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to travel in Baku. The fare for a subway is 20 kopecks ($0.13).

It is currently over 35 kilometers long with 25 stations and the Green, Red and Purple lines.

Avtovagzal station is the first of the 12 subway stations of the Purple line, which starts from the International Bus Terminal Complex and ends at the Garachukhur district.

Opened in 1967, the Baku Metro is implementing a 20-year program for the development of the subway system.

Some subways are also planned to open in the most populated and developed cities of the country, including Sumgayit, Nakhchivan and Ganja.

On the same day, President Aliyev also attended the opening of a new administrative building of Azeravtoyol OJSC.

The large-scale repair-construction and landscaping work was carried out in the area, which occupies a total area of 1.7 hectares. Under the Decree of President Ilham Aliyev dated March 9, 2016, Azeryolservis OJSC was renamed to Azeravtoyol OJSC.

A bust of national leader Heydar Aliyev was installed in the building. There are photo stands reflecting the national leader's life and political activities, as well as President Ilham Aliyev's attention to the development of road and transport infrastructure in Azerbaijan.

The building has a canteen, 252-seat auditorium and elevators. The building was equipped with the most modern ventilation and fire protection systems.

High quality building materials were used in the construction of the building. The modern video observation and computer systems were installed here. The network of a new digital communication system was also established. The design of the roof of the building was completely renovated. The green areas were laid out in the area.

Aynur Karimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter @Aynur_Karimova

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19 April 2016 17:18 (UTC+04:00)

By Nazrin Gadimova

Azerbaijan has called on the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe to express an opinion over the crimes committed by Armenia towards Azerbaijan during the recent events on the contact line of troops.

Ganira Pashayeva, a member of the Azerbaijani delegation to PACE, appealed to Nils Muiznieks as part of a spring session held in Strasbourg on April 18.

"During the recent developments on the front line, Azerbaijan, respecting international law and humanitarian norms, exchanged dead bodies of the soldiers, Pashayeva said. However, we were terrified when we saw that the Armenian troops had committed inhuman acts over the returned corpses. We have many photos proving these crimes.

Muiznieks, in turn, expressed his concern over the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh and above-mentioned facts of the human rights violations.

This is a very serious matter and it is difficult to comment on it because there were very few international observers at the time of these events. Nevertheless, I understand your concern very well, and keep in touch with all the parties to resolve this issue, the Commissioner said.

Muiznieks further urged parties to the conflict to observe a humanitarian law.

"I urge the parties to put an end to the tense situation, to avoid violence and to cooperate closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as to observe humanitarian law. The more time passes, the more difficult it becomes to investigate these questions, he concluded.

After Armenia breached the fragile ceasefire on April 2, the international community voiced concern over the situation and urged the parties to the conflict to strictly observe the truce.

Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on April 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.

--

Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova

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19 April 2016 17:28 (UTC+04:00)

The Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers are expected to meet soon.

This was announced by Mariya Zakharova, the spokesperson for Russia's Foreign Ministry, at a press center in Moscow on April 19, Trend's special correspondent reports.

She said the work continues to resolve the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and talks are underway for finding compromises.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan.

As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

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19 April 2016 18:02 (UTC+04:00)

The body of Armenian serviceman, who died during the recent military operations on the contact line between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops will be handed over to the Armenian side on April 20 at 15:00 (GMT + 4 hours).

This was announced by Azerbaijan's State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing People on April 19.

The commission told Trend that this decision was made by the relevant government structures, adding that the body of the Armenian serviceman was located on April 11 on the territory under the control of Azerbaijan.

The state commission appealed to the ICRC so that it take part in the humanitarian mission and inform the Armenian side.

On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers.

The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements.



Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on April 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire.



The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan.

As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

---

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19 April 2016 19:16 (UTC+04:00)

By Nazrin Gadimova

Russia, being one of the negotiators in the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, has to help the parties to find solution and to bring closer the positions of both sides.

Maria Zakharova, the Spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry made the remark at a press center in Moscow on April 19.

"Our task is to create an appropriate atmosphere for the continuation of this work," she said.

Such an aggravation as the recent events undermines the atmosphere that helps resolve the conflict, the spokesperson stressed.

Zakharova believes that Russias goal is to bring the situation, which was thrown back, to its previous positions. The work to resolve the conflict and to find compromises is underway, she said, adding that the Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers are expected to meet soon.

The long lasting conflict was also high on the agenda of the meeting between Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin and the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, John Tefft.

Russia, which enjoys much influence on Armenia, has always been considered a key party in brokering a lasting solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Earlier, as part of annual direct line, President Putin said Russia will do everything to find a solution to the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in turn, believes that the release of the regions around Karabakh and simultaneous addressing of the issue of its status will allow unlocking the situation in the conflict zone.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan.

As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

--

Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova

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19 April 2016 13:39 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

Italy, which remains the major trade partner of Azerbaijan in Europe for the past several years, is very interested in investing in the country.



Giovanni Bella, the Vice President of the Italy-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and head of the Bella Giovanni Shipping & Trading SRL, said that Italian companies show interest to work in the Azerbaijani market.

He emphasized that the most attracting fields for the Italian businessmen are logistics, alternative energy, hardware, ecology, jewelry, construction, agriculture and agricultural complex, certification and food industry.

Bella believes that this interest is a result of the recent visit paid by an Italian business delegation to Azerbaijan.

"Representatives of 20 companies held meetings at the Azerbaijan Export and Investment Promotion Foundation (AZPROMO), where they met with the Azerbaijani Deputy Economy Minister Sevinj Hasanova, as well as at the State Agency on Alternative and Renewable Energy Sources, Tamiz Shahar JSC, and at the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources," he told Trend.

Such visits of Italian businessmen are expecting to be held in future to study the country's investment opportunities.

"Azerbaijan has a very favorable investment climate and businessmen are convinced of this personally," Bella said.

Azerbaijan and Italy actively continue their joint work in the business sphere and the southern European country ranked first in the list of Azerbaijan's foreign trade partners in Q1 2016 with trade turnover of $462.44 million.

Meanwhile, work is underway to hold an art gallery at the Ferrari store during the 2016 Formula 1 Grand Prix of Europe in Baku, said Bella, adding that permissions have already been obtained from the embassies of Azerbaijan and Italy, as well as from Ferrari's head office.

"The Bella Giovanni Shipping & Trading SRL, which is working with the Azerbaijani businessmen for 10 years already, has offered its services on execution of documents of Azerbaijan's state oil company SOCAR in Italy's territory," he explained.

Bella further went on saying that Azerbaijan can, in turn, offer Italy and other European countries its quality agriculture products.

"Azerbaijan can supply the Italian market with such products as pomegranates, nuts, and wood," he said. "For example, a glass of pomegranate juice in Italy costs five euros, it is an expensive product, and there are no such high-quality pomegranate sorts in the market as in Azerbaijan."

He emphasized that Azerbaijan could supply nuts for a number of companies, as well as wood for the furniture makers.

Bella also pointed hunting as one of the interesting purposes to attract Italian tourists.



"Our main goal is to introduce Azerbaijan's products and opportunities in Italy at an appropriate level," noted Bella.

Italy, being the largest importer of Azerbaijani goods, enjoy good relations with the country and export from Italy to Azerbaijan is also growing year by year.



Azerbaijan is the largest supplier of oil to Italy, and with the launch of the Southern Gas Corridor will supply Shah Deniz gas to this country.

The South Caucasus country has made a very important contribution to the preservation of historical heritage of Italy, funding and donating several cultural projects in this country.

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Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli

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19 April 2016 13:23 (UTC+04:00)

By Fatma Babayeva

Kazakhstans auto holding Bipek Avto - Asia Avto Group is exploring the possibility of entering the market in Azerbaijan, the holding told the media.

The delegation from the holding held talks with the Azerbaijani counterparts on this issue during their recent visit.

Bipek Avto - Asia Avto is studying development prospects in Azerbaijans auto market and having discussions on joint plans.

The holding group considers the Azerbaijani market as one of the most promising markets in the former-Soviet area despite the fact that the economic development in the country experienced some slowdown due to declining activities in oil and gas market.

The company stressed that its interest in Azerbaijani market has strategic nature.

The number of cars imported to Azerbaijan exceeded 100,000 during 2012-2013, the holding stated by assessing the prospects for the automobile market in the country.

Bipek Avto - Group is the largest holding in the automobile market of Kazakhstan.

The group includes Kazakhstans car assembly plant Asia Avto, distributor and dealer companies engaged in the sale and service provision for Lada, Skoda, Chevrolet, KIA, UAZ and Renault cars.

Earlier, the Association of Kazakhstan Auto Business announced that Kazakhstan decreased the volume of manufacturing cars and trucks during 2016.

The association indicated decrease in demand as the main reason for this decline. The number of manufactured cars in Kazakhstan reduced by 92.2 percent to 428 cars during the first quarter of 2016 as compared to the same period of 2015.

Meanwhile, the number of manufactured trucks In Kazakhstan fell by 14.2 percent to 247 trucks during the same period.

In total, Kazakhstan manufactured 12,450 cars and 1,660 trucks in 2015. Official auto dealers in the country experienced 59 percent decrease (6,991 cars) in sales for the first two months of 2016 compared to the same period of 2015.

In general, the activities in Azerbaijan auto market decelerated as well due to the decreasing purchasing power of the population. At the same time, the country is keen to expand the domestic production and encourages interior purchases within the country.

Car imports began to fall since April 2014 after Azerbaijan moved to the Euro-4 ecological standard that prohibits the import of old cars in an attempt to prevent air pollution.

According to the Euro-4 regulations, cars imported from the EU should be manufactured not prior to 2005, from the U.S. 2004, from China and Japan in 2011, from Korea 2006 and from Turkey 2009.

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Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva

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19 April 2016 18:36 (UTC+04:00)

Iran and Azerbaijan are set to start building a historical bridge on April 20, Hossein Malek, the spokesman of Iran's ICT Ministry told Trend on April 19.

Iran's ICT Minister Mahmoud Vaezi will visit Azerbaijan on April 20 for a two-day stay, which includes attending the bricklaying ceremony.

Vaezi is also the Iranian co-head of the Iran-Azerbaijan economic cooperation commission and is leading a high-ranking delegation to Azerbaijan.

The bridge is a part of the North-South international transport corridor that connects Europe to India by passing through Azerbaijan and Iran, lessening shipment time from 40 to 14 days end-to-end.

Vaezi will also discuss with Azerbaijani side the implementation of a dozen of agreements signed between the two countries during an official visit to Tehran by Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev earlier this year.

The sides will also sign two contracts during the Iranian delegation's visit, Malek said, refraining from providing details.

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19 April 2016 10:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

...She was born to bring joy to people, to make them laugh and forget their problems for a while at least, and fill them with positive energy.

Nasiba Zeynalova, brilliant actress with unbelievable talent, started to star at the very young age. Her every character conquered hearts of millions bringing the wonderful women to the peak of art.

Her each performance was a long-awaited fun for many art lovers, people loved this admirable young actress for her sincerity, unforgettable performances on the scene and excellent communication with spectators.

Queen of laughter, Masiba was truly a brilliant actress and a unique phenomenon in the history of Azerbaijani art.



By her creativity and skill Nasiba confirmed the well-known expression "there are no small parts, only small actors".

Many describe her as a woman with a strong character, and stunning look, and a woman with an amazing sense of humor and touching smile.

She is probably the only mother in law loved by almost all the nation, since many remembered Nasiba as great Azerbaijani mother in law for her remarkable role at the same name musical comedy.

Nasiba Zeynalovas contribution to the development of national cinema is so great that the actress left this world not just on any day, but namely on the National Theatre Day on March 10, 2004.

The wonderful actress who dedicated her 70-year-life to Azerbaijani art scene, starred in 40 films and performed in dozens of plays, creating unforgettable images.

The history of this remarkable actress originated from 1916, when little Nasiba was born in Baku in the family of a merchant and a talented actor Jahangir Zeynalov.

Her father played an important role in the development of Azerbaijani realistic theater, perhaps her creativity was inherited from father. Her father was a wealthy man from a noble family and always supported the actors, pay them salaries, and tried not to break up the troupe. In his estate, Zeynalov created a large hall for rehearsals and even built there a scene.

Nasiba was a late child, as her mother Husniya, could not have children for a long time. She even made a pilgrimage to the Kaaba to ask God to send her long-awaited baby. When Nasiba was finally born, doctors said that she would be a very happy girl.

However, her happiness was short-lived, as after Zeynalova lost her father at early age, the family lost everything and lived in poverty. Therefore, Nasiba had very difficult childhood and had to work since she was just 14 years old. She had to leave school to get a job.

Everything changed after the girl met famous Azerbaijani theater director Shamsi Badalbeyli, who at that time was director of the Philharmonic troupe. He could see the potential of the young girl and offered her a job.

At first her mother was against this idea, but Nasiba managed to persuade her. The talented actress also has beautiful voice. However, having worked in the Philharmonic Hall for some time, she was fired by the head of the dance group, who considered her unattractive for the stage.

Her luck finally turned around, and when she was just 21, Nasiba Zeynalova already toured around Azerbaijan as part of a traveling theater group. It was impossible not to notice the talent of this 22-year old young lady. She became the loveliest actress at the Azerbaijan State Musical Comedy Theatre. However, the actress dreamed to get an education, so she entered the Theatre College to study at the Acting Faculty in the same year.

The first attempt to make a family was unsuccessful for Nasiba, but the second turned into a real joy. Her husband, Muttalib Novruzov was a great musician, teacher, who performed in kamancha (national musical instrument) and taught mugham (national music).

Their life together was a story of friendship and love lasting for 42 years, during which Nasiba used to forget all the sorrows of the past.



Their love story worth filming, as it began with a tempestuous scene of sorting out their relationship and a slap.

The fact is that, once the two lovers were involved in the same shooting. Zeynalova was always very bright, cheerful and sociable woman. Novruzov was the jealous type, who did not like her manners to be a loud laughter. After the performance Mutallib went to the dressing room, and angrily demanded an explanation, why she was laughing so loudly with the other members of the group. She asked in surprise: "Do not I have the right to do so?" He said: No! You do not! and suddenly he slapped her, and while she was in shock from all that is happening ... he kissed her.

Thus, so rapidly, in Azerbaijani and Caucasian manner Novruzov told her about his feelings and intentions. And since then they never split up.

They loved each other so much, that after Muttalibs death Nasiba lost interest in life. Many say if not the death of her husband, she would live 120 years, since she was physically very strong and healthy and looked great, much younger than she was.



The worthy successor of the family's creative traditions has become their only son, whom she named after his father Jahangir, who is continuing his creativity as an actor in Turkey.



In respect of her son, Nasiba was sorry about the one thing, that she left him alone without siblings, referring to the fact that she had no time for thinking about the second child, because of busy schedule.

During her creative career, the actress has received numerous awards including medals, a badge of honor, and titles.

Despite the creative nature, Nasiba was 11 times elected as a member of parliament. Azerbaijani Youth Theatre, an oil tanker in the home port of Taganrog, was named in honor of this great talent.

--

Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli



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19 April 2016 15:39 (UTC+04:00)

After the fiasco of Doha oil talks, crude prices began reducing rapidly, and this trend will continue, Eldar Kasayev believes.

The representative of the expert council of the Russian Union of Oil and Gas Producers, told Trend via e-mail that the market has nothing to rely on except the groundless rhetoric of some players.

"According to these players, the OPEC oil exporters and non-OPEC member-states still will be able to come to a consolidated decision to freeze the oil production," the expert said.

Kasayev added that the April 17 meeting in Qatar demonstrated a lack of any effective dialogue in the OPEC and non-OPEC member-states format due to acute political and economic disagreements among key negotiators.

"Saudi Arabia will not assist Iran, which has been a "lump in the throat" for Saudi Arabia for a long time," he said. "The reason is that Iran prevents Saudi Arabia to hold a dominant position in the Muslim world."

The oil producers' meeting held on April 17 in Doha on oil output freeze ended without an agreement. The event was attended by representatives of 17 countries. The meeting kicked off about 6.5 hours later than the fixed time.

Reportedly, the meeting was delayed as Saudi Arabia unexpectedly said it wants all OPEC countries, including Iran to participate in the output freeze. Iran wasn't represented at the meeting.

Earlier, the country's Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zangeneh said that Iran did not participate in the process that led to the imbalance of the global oil market, and therefore does not intend to freeze the oil production.

The expert believes that the OPEC meeting to be held in summer will unlikely bring positive results, since the confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran will continue, while the attempts of Russia, Venezuela and other states to reach out to Riyadh or Tehran are doomed to fail.

"Since oil prices react to expectations, traders may well once again use the information about the upcoming meeting of oil exporters to influence the prices," the expert said.

He said that there are still no fundamental factors for the growth of prices for raw materials, while the speculative factor remains.

"The oil market will probably be unstable this year, as it was in 2015," said Kasayev. "It's not worth expecting speedy stabilization of prices. However, in the medium term, the situation will improve, and that will happen not as a result of bilateral or multilateral agreements of oil suppliers, but due to the fact that the supply will meet the demand."

World oil prices continue to decline during trading on April 19.

On April 19 morning, the June futures for Brent (North Sea) crude oil at the London-based ICE Futures exchange fell by $0.23 to $42.66 per barrel. The May futures for WTI crude oil declined by $0.4 to $39.67 per barrel as of Apr. 19 morning.

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19 April 2016 10:52 (UTC+04:00)

In the light of recent escalation of ties between Tehran and Riyadh, Swiss embassy in Tehran may issue visa for Iranian pilgrims to attend annual Hajj ritual in Saudi Arabia, an Iranian minister said.

Saying that Tehran has sent a delegation to Saudi Arabia to discuss Hajj for the current year, Iran's Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Ali Jannati has accused the Saudi government of "sabotaging" against the Islamic Republic over the past several months, Mehr news agency reported.

He further said that talks are underway to resolve visa issue for Iranian pilgrims and accused the Saudi officials of insulting Iranian pilgrims over the past years.

The crisis between Riyadh and Tehran erupted after execution of a prominent Shia cleric, Nimr al-Nimr by the Saudis on January 2.

Following the execution, angry mob stormed Saudi embassy in Tehran and consulate in Mashhad. Right after the attacks on its diplomatic missions, the Saudi Arabia said it severed ties with the Islamic Republic.

Following the closure of the Saudi mission to Tehran, Riyadh announced that Switzerland will act for its interest section in Tehran.

In a separate development on September 24, 2015, a crowd collapse caused the deaths of more than 2,000 pilgrims who were suffocated or crushed during the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mina, Mecca, making it the deadliest Hajj disaster in history.

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19 April 2016 10:24 (UTC+04:00)

The EU first diplomatic delegation will be sent to Tehran in the near future, the EU Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini said.

The delegation will be based in Dutch embassy till opening the EU office in Tehran, she told Iran's Tasnim news agency.

Mogherini, heading a high-ranking political and economic delegation of seven European commissioners arrived in Tehran on April 16 and held talks with senior Iranian officials. Opening an EU office in Tehran was on the agenda of the mutual talks.

"We have decided to send first team that will be operating with the support and the help of the current presidency of the European Union, Netherlands," Mogherini said.

The mission of the future EU delegation would be mainly supporting and sustaining all the work that, the parties decided to start on re-launching dialogue and cooperation on many different sectors, she added.

Mogherini further said that the EU plans to develop dialogues on energy, economy and business presence in Iran as well as technology or transport.

"Having a presence in Tehran would be helpful to develop the cooperation in a structured way, and also would provide a support for all the business, companies and also the financial European sector that is willing to engage in Iran, providing a framework for the European engagement in the country from a technical point of view," she added

While responding to a question about resuming banking ties with Iran, the EU diplomat said that there is no reason for European banks not to come to Iran.

"We are working very hard with all the European banks, with the financial sector in Europe to, first of all, explain that the situation has changed, as the 16th of January and all the economic and financial sanctions that were related to the nuclear program have been lifted," she said.

So the banks and the financial sector in Europe are facing a completely different situation, the top EU diplomat added.

"We have provided them with full information about the change of the situation," she said, adding the big banks maybe need a little bit of time to adjust to the new situation and adapt to the new situation, however the small banks, are coming in Iran already.

Mogherini further said that the EU is also negotiating with the US side on the issue.

"They know how much this issue is very important for us as Europeans, and again, we cannot force anyone to do anything, but we can encourage, we can reassure, we can explain that the legal provisions are now completely different from before, and that."

Iran has asked the EU to force the US to settle banking problems following the implementation of the nuclear deal. In a meeting with Mogherini in her recent Tehran visit, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran Ali Shamkhani asked the EU to confront with what he called Washington's "obstruction" of nuclear deal implementation.

He argued that the US is seeking to continue its sanctions policy against Iran and is troubling the implementation of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka nuclear deal), referring to Washington's approach as "undesirable and unconstructive". Earlier the same day, Iran's Foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, underlined that the other parties, in particular the US, should in practice fulfill their obligations under the nuclear deal.

Speaking at a joint press conference with Mogherini, Zarif said Washington should do more to remove obstacles to Iran's banking system.

Earlier, Valiollah Seif, the head of Iran's central bank, accused the US and the EU of failing to honor the JCPOA by keeping Iran locked out of the international financial system.

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19 April 2016 11:03 (UTC+04:00)

Turkmenistan and Italy have great opportunities to diversify the cooperation and implement joint projects in various fields.

This was stated by Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov during a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers, Turkmen government reported on April 18.

The president expressed satisfaction with the dynamically developing cooperation between Turkmenistan and Italy both in bilateral and multilateral formats.

The first official visit of Turkmen president to Italy in November 2009 and the working visit of Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to Turkmenistan in November 2014 gave an impetus to the interstate dialogue.

The two countries see the oil and gas sector, energy industry, construction, textile and chemical industries as the promising areas of cooperation.

Eni S.p.A, an Italian multinational oil and gas company, extended its operation in Turkmenistan for another 10 years in November 2014 under a production sharing agreement. The company is operating on a contract oil and gas area in Turkmenistan's Balkan province.

Eni also showed interest in exploration of two offshore blocks in the Turkmen part of the Caspian Sea, which have over 500 million tons of oil and 630 billion cubic meters of natural gas reserves.

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19 April 2016 11:35 (UTC+04:00)

Some 98 percent of the problems related to the fueling of Iranian aircraft in Europe have been resolved and only three stations remain problematic, said the Iran Civil Aviation Organization's CEO Farhad Parvaresh.

Iranian aircraft were banned from receiving fuel in Europe due to the sanctions that were removed this year.

Parvaresh said the International Air Transport Association is going to re-launch its booking and financial transactions systems for Iran's national airliner IranAir, IRNA news agency reported on April 18.

He also said Iran will import a number of French-made ATR airplanes within a year.

Iran's aviation was damaged a lot under the sanctions, which not only banned airplanes, but also maintenance and technology from being transferred to Iran.

The country has said it needs to buy 500 aircraft in a few years to refurbish its civil aviation fleet.

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19 April 2016 11:47 (UTC+04:00)

During last months, Iranian officials have announced several times that they are negotiating with international companies to both rent and build the floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) vessels.

It's not clear which foreign company would build the first FLNG for Iranian companies, but Roknoddin Javadi, Iran's deputy oil minister said last December that a consortium of Iranian and French companies will build Iran's first FLNG vessel to gather flaring associated gas from Forouzan (shared with Saudi Arabia) oil field to liquefy and export.

However, recently Iranian officials have said that they are negotiating with Belgium's Exmar and Norway's Golar over FLNG vessels.

An Iranian industrial source told Trend on April 18 that the latest talks for FLNG vessels are intensively focused with Golar LNG representatives.

Iran said on April 18 that a contract was signed with a domestic company to build a FLNG for gathering the flare gas so far burned at Foruzan field in southern Iran.

The contract was signed between Iran Offshore Oil Company (IOOC) and Nogam Oil and Gas Company, a subsidiary of Bank Mellat, SHANA news agency reported.

The contract's term is seven years, that is, the FLNG unit will be operational in two years and then will be used for five years.

IOOC CEO Said Hafezi said 5.7 mcm/d of gas is burned at the field.

While Nogam Oil and Gas Company has not the experience and the technology of building FLNG, it should choose a foreign company to fulfill its obligations.

Michael Webber, Senior Analyst and Managing Director of Shipping, Equipment Leasing, & Marine MLPs Equity Research told Trend that a partial lifting of sanctions clears some runway for Golar to move in, but since topside (Black & Veatch) and turbine (GE) providers are American companies (and still restricted from sending technology to Iran) any asset play would likely need to be somewhat retooled. Seems like more of a speed bump than a road block, but could kick out the time frame a bit.

"Recently a number of presses have linked Golar to an Iranian LNG project which we believe would make sense for Golar as Iran's project requirements seem to fit GLNG's skill sets, particularly the desire for an expedited speed-to-market".

He added that while Iran is a real possibility, it's important to note that some sanctions remain in place (which prohibits U.S. companies from conducting business with the country, i.e. sending U.S. technology is still prohibited), and Golar would likely need to use different turbine/topside suppliers, which wouldn't be a deal-breaker in our view, but would likely add some time.

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19 April 2016 11:55 (UTC+04:00)

Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov has signed a decree to provide customs privileges to private producers from May 1, 2016.

The document will make it possible to stimulate the local producers, protect their interests regarding the competitiveness of products.

Foreign trade contracts of legal entities of the private sector and the contracts of private entrepreneurs on the export of Turkmen products will be exempted from registration in Turkmenistan's state commodity exchange.

Currently, the private sector of Turkmenistan's economy accounts for 62.3 percent of GDP.

The volume of export from Turkmenistan (excluding the fuel and energy sphere) increased by 11 percent in the first quarter of 2016, as compared to the same period in 2015.

The volume of consumer goods imported from abroad has dropped by 18.9 percent.

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19 April 2016 14:30 (UTC+04:00)

Iran has so far seen only around $3 billion in previously frozen assets returned since it struck a nuclear deal with world powers, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said.

The extent to which Tehran stands to gain from the agreement to place its nuclear program under tight controls has been a matter of fierce debate since Iran signed the accord last year, AFP reported on April 19.

In the U.S., Republican opponents of the deal have alleged that it will allow Iran to get its hands on more than $100 billion with which it could fund "terrorism" against American allies.

Meanwhile, in Iran, officials have complained that the country has yet to see much benefit from the end of nuclear sanctions, as banks and private companies have been slow to renew ties with the former pariah.

The U.S. administration has been trying to find its way between the competing claims, insisting it has met its side of the bargain in lifting sanctions while vowing it will not tolerate Iranian backsliding.

And so Kerry, who is to meet with his Iranian counterpart Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in New York on Tuesday, hit back against critics of the deal, insisting their figures are wrong.

"Remember the debate over how much money Iran was going to get?" he said to delegates at a dinner hosted by the progressive pro-Israel group J Street.

"Sometimes you hear some of the presidential candidates putting out a mistaken figure of $155 billion. I never thought it would be that.

"Others thought it would be about $100 billion, because there was supposedly about $100 billion that was frozen and so forth," he continued.

"We calculated it to be about $55 billion, when you really take a hard look at the economy and what is happening," he said, giving the usual State Department estimate.

"Guess what folks. You know how much they have received to date? As I stand here tonight, about $3 billion."

The U.S. has not had diplomatic relations with Tehran since April 1980, but Kerry got to know Zarif while negotiating the nuclear deal, and the two speak fairly regularly.

Tuesday's meeting in New York will be the pair's first face-to-face encounter since January 16, when they met in Vienna to formally implement the accord.

Iranian officials have since begun to complain the United States has not lived up to its side of the agreement, as sanctions aimed at its missile program and financing of militias abroad have continued.

But Washington has also pointed the finger, warning that it retains the right to impose new sanctions if Iran's ballistic missile tests breach separate UN resolutions not covered by the nuclear deal.

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19 April 2016 17:12 (UTC+04:00)

By Fatma Babayeva

The results of Doha meeting held in Qatar on April 17 between OPEC member states and non-OPEC oil producers fell short of the expectations of Kazakhstan, said Rashid Zhaksylykov, chairman of the presidium of KazService Union.

Zhaksylykov made the statement during the briefing of the Central Communications Service under the President of Kazakhstan, Kazinform news agency reported on April 19.

Kazakhstan is concerned about the oil prices and its impact on the country's development, said chairman.

Zhaksylykov stressed that Doha meeting were far from the expectations of Kazakhstan as Iran disagreed to freeze its oil output.

Irans oil production stood at 500,000 barrels per day in the beginning of the year and increased up to 1.5 million barrels per day later, added Zhaksylykov.

He further emphasized that Iran intends to bring its oil production up to 4 million barrels per day by the end of the year.

There is still a hope that one more meeting will be held in a month and the attempts to stabilize the oil prices will continue, told Zhaksylykov.

In addition, Kazakhstan has already reduced the oil production in 2016. The country plans to sell 74 million tons of oil versus 80 million tons sold in 2015.

"This is a great loss," said Zhaksylykov adding that the further cut in oil output will have negative impact on the development of industrial sector, implementation of social programs and development of the regions in Kazakhstan.

The Doha gathering was the much anticipated meeting in the oil market to stabilize the prices but participants of the meeting failed to reach a deal on freezing their oil output at the volumes recorded in early 2016.

The failure of the meeting is related to the intense geopolitical relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia said it would not put a cap on the volume of oil it produces if other oil producers, particularly Iran do so. However, Tehran has no intention to freeze its oil production and did not even attend the meeting.

Overall, the meeting could not have a positive impact on tumbling oil prices. The market seems to continue suffering from global oil glut for now.

---

Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva

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19 April 2016 19:03 (UTC+04:00)

By Fatma Babayeva

Russian company LUKOIL commenced construction works of Kandym gas processing plant in Uzbekistan, representative of Uzbekneftegaz, national holding company said on April 19.

Lukoils president Vahid Alakbarov and Uzbekistans Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyayev attended the foundation laying ceremony on April 19, company representative said.

A gas processing plant with an annual production capacity of 7.819 billion cubic meters of commercial gas, 134,360 tons of stable condensate and 212,900 tons of elemental sulfur is planned to be constructed during the first phase of the complex construction and development of Kandym fields.

Construction of 77 planned wells, six multiple-well platforms, two gathering stations, gas pipeline, rotational camp and external infrastructure are also under consideration.

It provides improvement of 77 planned wells, the construction of six pads, two assembly points, the export gas pipeline, shift camp sites and.

The first phase of the project is scheduled to end in December 2018.

In 2014, LUKOIL Uzbekistan Operating Company LLC (operator of LUKOILs projects in Uzbekistan) and a consortium led by Hyundai Engineering (South Korea) signed a contract on a turnkey basis for supplying equipment, construction of a gas processing plant and development of Kandym fields which is worth to $2,662 billion.

It is the largest investment project of LUKOIL in Uzbekistan. Total amount of investments to the project is estimated at over $3 billion.

LUKOIL implements Kandym project since 2004 together with Uzbekneftegaz NHC under Kandym-Khauzak-Shady-Kungrad PSA.

Kandim group includes six gas condensate fields such as Kandym, Kuvachi-Alat, Akkum, Parsankul, Khodzi and Western Khodzi. In autumn 2007, the production commenced at Hauzak site.

In addition, LUKOIL implements South-West Hissar project in Uzbekistan. The PSA contract on this project was signed In January 2007. Investments allocated to the project will exceed $1.2 billion, and the volume of gas production will be 4.2 billion cubic meters per year. The gas production was launched at the end of 2011 within the framework of Hissar project.

Moreover, LUKOIL participates in the development of the Aral block in Uzbekistan.

Total amount of natural gas extracted under LUKOILs projects in Uzbekistan amounted to more than 32 billion cubic meters in January 2016.

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Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva

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Staff at Cooplands of Doncaster bakery firm in Lincoln have walked out, as they say they have not been paid for several weeks.

Employees at Cooplands of Doncaster, in the Carlton Centre, Lincoln, threw away produce and closed the store on 14 April in protest over the issue.

Katie Shipman, the stores manager, said she was owed 1,400 and had not been paid for five weeks.

A spokesman for Cooplands, which employs over 175 people, admitted it was in arrears, but said it hoped to resolve the matter within two months.

Shipman said: I and my staff were just fed up of being behind on our wages. We started off getting 50% of our wages every week, and then it was down to 25%, and now were only getting about 20% of our wages each week.

Its a nightmare because you cannot plan anything.

Cooplands was placed into administration in February 2015. Of the estate, 41 stores and the mobile sandwich van fleet were sold to ReSolve, the London-based corporate restructure specialist, and remained open, while 39 were closed, as were the bakery and head office in Doncaster. 303 jobs were lost in total. http://www.bakeryinfo.co.uk/news/fullstory.php/aid/14380/Cooplands_HQ_is_sold.html#sthash.PYL6y1Oe.dpuf

A spokesman for Cooplands told British Baker the company massively regrets the situation, and apologised for any hardship caused to any of its staff.

He said: We are in arrears with paying wages. However, everybody gets paid something every week and there is no suggestion that wages wont get paid.

The situation is improving as business performance improves, and within two months we expect all wages to be paid up to date.

Staff at the Lincoln shop, who say theyre owed 3,000 between them, were outraged after they were sent a note by the firm last week marked wages, information and the way it is.

"Bizarre"

It said managers dont spend their mornings flushing ten and twenty pound notes down the toilet, eating pan-fried lobster or snorting Oat So Simple through rolled up fifty pound notes.

A local solicitor described the response as bizarre, and added: I think these workers would have a good case for a claim in the small claims court or at an employment tribunal.
Due to open next month, Milk Jam is the brainchild of Manchester baking trio Claire Kelsey, Charlotte OToole and Nicky Griffiths.

Kelsey is an ice cream entrepreneur who runs Comfort Emporium; Griffiths runs Lushbrownies in the city; and OToole was supplying Harvey Nichols in Manchester with products from her company, Bakeorama.

OToole, who describes herself as a cake artist, took over the counter at the Manchester store in February, but is now focussing on her own projects. She made her name in the bakery Home Sweet Home, based in the citys Northern Quarter.

Kelsey says the three are creating something new for Manchester, with a menu of puddings that will combine their collective dessert expertise.

Milk Jam came to Kelsey as an idea while visiting traditional milk bars in America  it is a thick pouring sauce made from condensed milk.

Milk Jam is going to be playful and fun, according to Kelsey, who added: Were not going for hipster filament bulbs or throwing sprinkles and sweets at everything.

Instead, the menu is more likely to include things like beer ice cream, and pork scratchings made from mini cinnamon toasts. Theres also talk of birthday cake gelato with unicorn poo (crumbled sponge cake).

The decor, Kelsey said, is set to be vivid and very pop art inspired.

Of the longevity of the plan she said: Its not a pop-up, but were fairly sure were going for a short lease, so it can be a place for us to test our ideas and get the formula right.
Yorkshire family bakery The Topping Pie Company has baked a Queens Pie, which will be delivered to Her Majesty on 20 April.

The Royal chef at Windsor Castle will receive the Queens Pie on 20 April ahead of the monarchs actual birthday on 21 April.

The Doncaster-based bakery developed the pie from an original recipe by Maggie Topping, who took inspiration from Victorian pies. The 2.2kg Queens Pie is a three-layer combination of pork and game.

Maggie Toppings recipe teams British Red Tractor-approved pork meat with a double layer of duck breast and guinea fowl breast, marinated in mandarin orange segments, juice and orange curd, and a layer of mandarin orange, Cointreau and orange juice stuffing, topped off with mandarin orange segments.

Roger Topping, managing director of The Topping Pie Company, said: We decided to celebrate our monarchs special birthday by baking a pie to an original recipe created by my wife, Maggie, whose love of home baking really changed the landscape of our business.

We are delighted to be given permission to deliver it to The Queens chef for her to enjoy.

Earlier this month, The Topping Pie Company launched a new range.
A turnaround plan for failing schools remains a major concern for the Pinellas County School District, as well as other groups increasing involvement.



The issue also is now being targeted by a community group that says a turnaround is needed fast. In fact, the group is using just that description as its moniker, FAST (Faith and Action for Strength Together).

Group to meet tonight to discuss failing schools, suspensions

Southside St. Petersburg PTA wants more parent involvement

Meeting at Enoch Davis Center in St. Petersburg

The group hopes to take further steps in addressing failing schools in St. Petersburg and what it calls a high number of school suspensions in the county during a meeting Tuesday night.



The group also wants to target parents more than students. Today's meeting comes on the heels of Monday night's gathering to discuss educations issues countywide.



The Southside St. Petersburg PTA also is calling on all parents in the community as well as school district staff and teachers to show up for tonight's meeting.



The PTA also is searching for ways to improve parent involvement, which it says leads to failing grades and troubled students.



Tonight's meeting comes on the heels of FAST's meeting Monday night at Tropicana Field that drew about 3,000. In addition to school improvement, the group wants to address school suspensions.



"And what we're asking for is instead of an out-of-school suspension to replace it with a supervised program, where there are people in the rooms who can help the students get back on track," FAST member Linda Stoller said.

Meanwhile, the district is working on a plan to turn around five failing St. Petersburg elementary schools with predominantly minority students: Campbell Park, Fairmount Park, Lakewood, Maximo and Melrose.



Tonight's Southside St. Petersburg PTA meeting is set for 6 p.m. at the Enoch Davis Center at 1111 18th Avenue South.


A suspect wanted in a homicide in St. Petersburg has been arrested in Puerto Rico.

Juan Carlos Jimenez arrested in Puerto Rico

Victim, Shermaun Akins, found dead April 7th



Arrest warrant issued last week for suspect

An arrest warrant was issued last week for 33-year-old Juan Carlos Jimenez in the murder of Shermaun Akins.



Akins, 32, was found dead in the parking lot of the Alta Mar at Broadwater Apartments on April 7.



A teenager found Akins' body while walking to school. Akins reportedly died of upper body trauma.



Jimenez was arrested on Monday evening in the city of Toa Baja, Puerto Rico, at a family member's residence.



Jimenez will be extradited back to Pinellas County later this week by U.S. Marshals.


The next president of the Florida Senate began a "listening tour" of the state's public universities Monday by pledging to hold the line on tuition increases.

While acknowledging that Florida's state university tuition - at just over $6,000 a year for in-state undergraduates - is well below the national average, Sen. Joe Negron (R-Stuart) said the university system could grow without asking students to pay more.

"My goal is to be able to do this from revenues that the legislature has available to it and not to expect tuition increases," Negron told reporters after touring Florida State University.



Tuition remains a sensitive issue on many campuses, with faculty leaders and even some student groups advocating for significant increases as a way of attracting top instructional and research talent.

Over the past eight years, state university tuition has increased by roughly 65 percent.
The rainfall so far this year and this week, plus warm temperatures and returning sunshine soon will reunite Southeast Texans with an age-old adversary, the mosquito and the 50 or so species that are known to bedevil warm-blooded mammals.

Among those species, besides the usual salt marsh, ricefield and neighborhood varieties that spring up in birdbaths and ditches, could be the Aedes, which hitched the usual rides on ships and in cargo.
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton believes Dallas has the right to ban a controversial porn convention from setting up in a city-owned convention center, according to a legal brief filed last week.

Dallas City Council members voted in February to ban the Exxxotica porn expo from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, deeming the event unfit to occupy a publicly owned facility.

Three Expo Events, which operates Exxxotica, then sued the city in federal court, claiming that officials violated the convention's First Amendment rights.

RELATED: Police: Central Texas high school teacher's aide performed oral sex on female student at playground

In a brief with several authors filed in federal court Thursday, Paxton argues the convention center is a "commercial enterprise" and "nonpublic forum" intended to stoke economic activity and generate revenue for the city.

The city council resolution is "both viewpoint neutral and 'reasonable in light of the purpose served by the forum,'" Paxton asserts in the filing, citing prior cases.

"Attorney General Ken Paxton, on behalf of the state of Texas, is committed to promoting economic development throughout the state," Paxton said in the filing. "Essential to that goal is ensuring that governmental entities can manage their commercial enterprises without onerous and unnecessary restrictions."

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Paxton on Monday for allegedly violating federal securities law by raising almost $1 million in investor funds for a North Texas technology startup without telling investors he was being paid to solicit monies for the company.

RELATED: Oklahoma teacher of the year slapped with indecent exposure charge over nude video sent to student

Lawyers for Dallas city officials defended the vote in a sexually explicit court filing submitted to the court on March 25.

Attorneys allege that Exxxotica didn't follow through on promises made to city officials by Exxxotica representative Jeffrey Handy that patrons and convention personnel would follow state law and city ordinances governing lewd acts.

"Although Mr. Handy had represented that sexual activities, including 'the fondling or other erotic touching of genitals, pubic region, buttocks, anus or female breasts,' were prohibited at Exxxotica Dallas ... in fact, such sexual activities took place at Exxxotica Dallas, and were observed and recorded," the filing reads.

Video footage shows convention goers and employees alike "engaging in specified sexual activities," according to the city's filing. The city does not detail how it obtained the footage.

"Both the attire of the entertainers and the conduct in which they engaged is indiscernible from the typical conduct at adult cabarets and nude model studios," the response reads.

The city also said in their response that the convention in August saw criminal activity, including an attendee punching a protester and a sting targeting men seeking young or underage women who mentioned the convention in ads on Backpage.com.

The response does not detail whether the ads were actually tied to the convention itself.

RELATED: Police: Iowa man masturbated on Megabus for 3 hours because he thought 'terrified' victim enjoyed it

Lawyers for the convention and city are scheduled to appear in federal court on Monday, according to court records.

jfechter@mySA.com

Twitter: @JFreports
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Round Rock police arrested one of their own over the weekend for allegedly choking his wife until she passed out after the couple argued about her contacting her ex-husband on Facebook, court documents show.

Shane Alan Myers, 37, was booked into Williamson County Jail on Saturday and charged with assault by strangulation - family violence, according to online jail records.

Myers has been placed on administrative leave, The Austin American-Statesman reported Monday.

RELATED: Video of San Antonio middle school officer slamming female student on concrete sparks investigation

The officer's wife told police that she and Myers had been in a "disturbance" about her contact with her former husband on Saturday, according to an arrest affidavit.

After she told Myers that the contact was "such a minor thing to be so upset about," Myers broke her work-issued iPad and keyboard over his knee.

Myers' wife then began screaming  asking what would happen if she "were to break your work computer"  and began walking toward the bedroom where the computer was laying on a desk, the affidavit said.

Myers told her to "calm down because she was acting crazy" before he grabbed by her arm, police said in the affidavit.

RELATED: North Texas school police officer arrested on charges of sexual assault of child

The officer's wife turned toward Myers and pushed him back, she told police.

Myers then wrapped his arm around his wife's neck and pushed her down on the bed, according to the affidavit.

The wife bit her bottom lip as her face was pushed into the bed, she told police.

She lost consciousness and awoke on the floor next to her bed, according to the affidavit. She told police she did not know how long she was unconscious.

Evidence of makeup and blood could be seen on the comforter where her face had been, police said in the affidavit.

RELATED: Affidavit: Former South Texas police officer put gun to man's head, asked 'You know who I am?'

Myers was released from jail Saturday on a $5,000 bond.

If convicted, Myers could serve up to 10 years in prison for the third degree felony charge.

jfechter@mySA.com

Twitter: @JFreports
Northern Wyoming Surgical Center physician owners are at odds with partner West Park Hospital on how to handle ownership shares as some surgeons retire and others wish to buy-in, according to a Cody Enterprise report.

Here are five things to know about the controversy:

1. The physicians have majority ownership at the surgery center and as original owners begin retiring the partners would like to make shares available for new surgeons to buy in. The ASC opened in 2000 as a joint venture between the physician owners and West Park Hospital.

2. West Park's investment includes 40 shares in the center at $10,000 per share while the 13 combined physician owners have the remaining 60 shares. In the summer of 2015, Northern Wyoming Surgical Center's administrator asked the hospital to sell 10 to 20 shares back to the surgical center to recruit new physician owners.

3. The ASC has a six-member board that includes four physicians and two hospital representatives; the hospital representatives were hesitant to sell until the new physician buyers were disclosed and inquired whether the physician-owners would sell as well.

4. The three initial physician investors all owned 15 shares at the onset, but over time gave up between 11 and 13 shares to new investors. The operating agreement specifies any new physician brought is limited to five shares.

5. The two sides are still divided; the board decided the hospital would not sell shares at the moment but there could be future negotiations. However, the surgery center leaders anticipates another six to seven surgeons "coming to town" over the next four to five years.
Georgia surgeons are opening the Albany Surgical outpatient surgical center, according to abc.

Here are five things to know:

1. The center is the second outpatient surgery center south of Atlanta.

2. In 2008, the state of Georgia granted the physicians permission to build the center.

3. The surgery center opens on April 20, and surgeons plan to start performing procedures in May.

4. Currently, five surgeons staff the facility with two more surgeons likely joining the practice by summer.

5. Albany Surgical will be the largest outpatient surgery center in South Georgia.

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New York City-based Gramercy Surgery Center's Jeffrey Flynn has been through the trenches with the state's certificate-of-need process, and has come out equipped with the knowledge and skill-set to develop successful centers.

"After 10 years, patients still approach me about cutting corners," says Mr. Flynn, Gramercy's administrator and vice president of business development. Patients may refuse to be weighed, or want to forgo other measures that may ultimately compromise a center's license.

"If a patient wants to cut a corner, that is a patient you don't need. Your CON is your golden ticket that you have to maintain," Mr. Flynn adds.

The CON process may be a lengthy one; it could take anywhere from a handful of months to a few years. After applying for its CON in 2002, Gramercy Surgery Center opened its doors to patients four years later. The center was the last in the state to obtain a permanent license. The New York Public Health and Health Planning Council currently issues centers five-year limited licenses, and centers are required to provide as well as document charity care and Medicaid care. When filing a CON, ASC owners estimate the amount of charity care and Medicaid care the center expects to provide.

Mr. Flynn details five considerations for planners when filing a CON.

1. Hospitals: Roadblock or ally? Often, ASCs face opposition from hospitals when opening their center, as hospitals may view the center as an adversary. Gramercy Surgery Center experienced this firsthand before opening their facility in Queens. "Our application was supposed to be reviewed and we were thrown off the agenda," Mr. Flynn says. "There wasn't an answer. We had the state senator inquire why we were postponed."

Once the state senator began seeking answers, Gramercy Surgery Center's application was placed back on the next agenda. Mr. Flynn says it is imperative to call local politicians or leaders who can help move your center through the process.

However, sometimes, hospitals have legitimate concerns that a surgery center will take away their physicians and they will lose a set amount of income to the surgery center. Such complaints may be valid causes of concerns and differ greatly from hospitals underhandedly opposing an ASC's CON.

"Going through the process may be difficult," says Mr. Flynn. "You have to know what you are doing and what their concerns are."

A hospital may serve as a useful ally who can also benefit from building a relationship with an ASC. Hospitals may drive cases to the outpatient setting as reimbursement dwindles and operating expenses outweigh financial gains. Therefore, a hospital can sign a transfer agreement with a center. One hospital's executives approached Mr. Flynn about shifting cases to the center.

"Gramercy's operating room is $920 an hour to run," Mr. Flynn said. "One particular hospital system that I spoke with had an operating room that cost nearly $4,100 an hour to run."

2. Choose your landlord wisely. A building's landlord is equally important as the space itself when choosing a location for your center. Some landlords may not be willing to meet an ASC's specifications. For instance, multispecialty ASCs often require a diesel generator that may need to go on the roof.

"You are going to be high maintenance tenants," Mr. Flynn says. "However, you will be a tenant that lasts forever. When selecting a building, you have to pick a building that will be cooperative."

Real-estate is quite expensive in New York City, posing a barrier for planners. In the Northeast, an 11,300-square-foot ASC pays an average of $29.20 per square foot, according to VMG Health Multi-Specialty ASC Intellimarker. In New York City, the cost per square foot far exceeds the average.

"One center I know is paying $96 per square foot," Mr. Flynn says. "There is another center that has its lease coming up in the next year. The increase could go $120 per square foot, given its location."

Because of these exorbitant prices, buildings often can't house ASCs on their first floors. As prices change a center's real-estate options, Mr. Flynn advises seeking landlords wanting to get into medicine. "You need to find a landlord who wants medical in the building," Mr. Flynn adds. "When we opened our center, our landlords wanted to transform into medicine. We were their anchor because that was the direction they wanted to go in."

3. Exercise a business approach when adding specialties. A center may have a wealth of well-qualified and talented surgeons who want to bring certain procedures to the table, but that may not be the most successful route for an ASC.

"The biggest concern is who will be managing your center and do they know how to manage it," Mr. Flynn says. "You may have a lot of different doctors with a lot of ideas for what they want to see medically, but these have to make sense on a business level."

Having multiple specialties also makes centers an attractive option to insurance companies. "Insurance companies are not all that interested in two or three specialties," Mr. Flynn says. "You should aim to have 10 or more specialties in your business plan because the CON process is so expensive."

4. Assess your partners' character. Relationships between physicians at the center will likely determine success. A physician who holds back cases and performs them at another center may draw resentment from other physicians. Have honest and open conversations with the center's staff about how they will work together and your expectations.

If an issue  such as a legal or financial concern  prohibits one partner from moving forward in the process, planners have to go back to square one. Therefore, it is imperative to assess all partners' character competency from the beginning of the CON process before too much money or time is lost.

5. Accurately estimate charity care and stick to it. Centers have to ensure they are performing a specific number of charity and Medicaid cases, or risk losing their license. In January 2016, Surgicare of Manhattan applied for a two-year extension of its five-year license. However, the New York Public Health and Health Planning Council contemplated denying the ASC's application because it failed to fulfill a certain number of Medicaid and charity cases. The ASC estimated 4 percent of procedures would be Medicaid or charity care cases, but the department found only 1.5 percent of the center's cases was charity care and 0.03 percent was Medicaid in 2014. Before going through the CON process, planners must have a relatively extensive knowledge of what their center needs not only to open, but to stay open.

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Lawrence R. Kosinski, MD, MBA, and Joel V. Brill, MD, American Gastroenterological Association leaders, met with congressional leaders on Capitol Hill on April 13, according to an AGA report.

Here are five things to know:

1. Dr. Kosinski is an AGA practice councillor and Dr. Brill is an AGA CPT advisor.

2. They met with congressional leaders and key staff to the authorizing committees that have oversight over the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act.

3. The physicians urged Capitol Hill leaders to include specialists in alternative payment models.

4. They highlighted initiatives and frameworks that AGA has developed for common GI conditions.

5. Additionally, Dr. Kosinski discussed Project Sonar, an inflammatory bowel disease specialty medical home initiative with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois.
The Brooklyn (N.Y.) HospitalCenter plans to close on a deal to sell a 21-story medical building on its campus for more than $100 million, according to Crain's New York Business.

Bids for the property were due last week, with top offers reaching $115 million, according to the report.

The 150,000-square-foot Maynard Building holds medical offices primarily used by physicians for outpatient visits, as well as apartments for medical staff.

The Brooklyn Hospital Center plans to use the proceeds from the sale to support the development of new facilities on its campus. The 170-year-old Brooklyn Hospital Center  the borough's oldest hospital  recently outlined a 25-year plan to update and build new medical buildings. Its first project includes building a medical building at a new site to replace the Maynard Building.

The buyer of the Maynard Building will be able to build a roughly 300,000-square-foot residential tower in its place after demolishing it.

The Brooklyn Hospital Center plans to continue to lease and remain in the property until 2019. A hospital spokeswoman said the hospital will prioritize potential buyers that propose a development plan "in accordance with the neighborhood and will be a good neighbor," according to the report.
Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge, Ga., will welcome Deborah Armstrong as COO on May 2.

Ms. Armstrong has been CEO of Conyers, Ga.-based Rockdale Medical Center since 2011. While she was there, Rockdale Medical Center established a clinical affiliation with Atlanta-based Piedmont Healthcare.

Ms. Armstrong has a master's degree in healthcare policy and administration and is a fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives.
Redwood City, Calif.-based Verity Health System has named Andrei Soran COO and president.

Here are six things to know about Mr. Soran and his new position.

1. He began serving as Verity's COO April 18.

2. In his new role, he will lead Verity, formerly known as the Daughters of Charity Healthcare System, which was created last December. The system's six California facilities include: St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles, O'Connor Hospital in San Jose, Saint Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy, and Seton Medical Center and Seton Coastside in Daly City.

3. Mr. Soran has more than three decades of experience that includes leadership of financial turnarounds and strategic growth of complex medical centers across the nation.

4. Most recently, Mr. Soran was COO and executive vice president at Detroit Medical Center, which is owned by Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare.

5. At DMC, he supervised the deployment of $850 million in capital investments, including construction of new hospitals, patient towers and outpatient facilities, according to a news release.

6. Mr. Soran earned a bachelor's degree in physical therapy at Tel Aviv University in Israel and a master's degree in science of management from Boston University/Ben-Gurion University in Israel.

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Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City will have new leadership sooner than planned, according to a Crain's New York Business report.

Laurie H. Glimcher, MD, announced in February she would be leaving Weill Cornell at the end of 2016 to serve as president and CEO of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. She will leave sooner, with physician-scientist Augustine M.K. Choi, MD, taking over as interim dean of Weill Cornell Medicine and interim provost for medical affairs of Ithaca, N.Y.-based Cornell University, effective June 1.

Dr. Glimcher will continue as an adviser at Weill Cornell Medicine through Aug. 31.

Dr. Choi, who joined the Weill Cornell Medicine faculty in 2013, is the Sanford I. Weill Chairman and Professor of Medicine in the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Department of Medicine. As chairman of the department of medicine and physician-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, he leads an academic and clinical department that comprises 16 divisions and more than 1,700 faculty members, physicians and research scientists.

Jessica Bibliowicz, chairwoman of the Weill Cornell Board of Overseers, said Dr. Choi is ideally positioned to take on his new role with Weill Cornell Medicine as it moves forward.

"We are fortunate to have such a seasoned executive and physician-scientist step up to continue the institution's strong clinical, research and educational enterprises," she said in a prepared statement.

Ms. Bibliowicz and Cornell University President Emeritus Hunter Rawlings III, who will become the university's interim president April 25, will co-chair a search committee for the new dean and vice provost for medical affairs.

More articles on executive moves:

HackensackUMC names VP of clinical integration: 5 things to know

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Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) has appointed Linda Robison as a commissioner of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Broward Health, according to a Sun-Sentinel report.

Here are five things to know about Ms. Robison.

1. She is a partner in the Fort Lauderdale law firm Shutts & Bowen, and practices corporate and healthcare law.

2. She is also former chairwoman of the Florida Commission on Ethics and a former colleague of Gov. Scott's from his years practicing law in Texas.

3. In her new role, Ms. Robison will be involved in selecting a permanent replacement for the late Broward Health President and CEO Nabil El Sanadi, MD, who committed suicide in January. Pauline Grant is serving as interim president and CEO.

4. Ms. Robison's appointment comes days after David Di Pietro resigned as board chairman of Broward Health after winning a lawsuit against Gov. Scott to regain his position.

5. Ms. Robison will serve a term ending June 27, 2017, to fulfill Mr. Di Pietro's unfinished term, according to the report.

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The American College of Physicians is urging physicians to be part of the movement to curb greenhouse gas emissions because public and individuals' health depends on it.

"The [ACP] urges physicians to help combat climate change by advocating for effective climate change adaptation and mitigation policies, helping to advance a low-carbon healthcare sector and by educating communities about potential health dangers posed by climate change," ACP President Wayne Riley, MD, said in a statement. "We need to take action now to protect the health of our community's most vulnerable members  including our children, our seniors, people with chronic illnesses and the poor  because our climate is already changing and people are already being harmed."

Physicians have a responsibility to help combat climate change as it relates to human health, according to the ACP, which cites increases in respiratory and heat-related illnesses; diseases passed by insects; water-borne diseases; food and water insecurity; and behavioral health issues as potential risks.

ACP's Health and Public Policy Committee published a policy paper on the issue in Annals of Internal Medicine Tuesday that includes recommendations based on research data and input from its boards, councils and other experts in the field.

Among these recommendations, ACP asks physicians to use energy efficient strategies within their own practices and facilities  the healthcare sector is second only to the food industry in energy use  and asks physicians to educate themselves on climate change's effects on human health and how to respond to those challenges.

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The 15-minute physician's appointment is hurting healthcare, according to Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, anesthesiologist, critical care physician and senior vice president at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Pronovost, who additionally serves as a professor and director of Johns Hopkins' Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, puts the 15-minute appointment in perspective: "How would you react if you sent your sputtering car to the auto mechanic, and they stopped trying to diagnose the problem after 15 minutes? You would probably revolt if they told you that your time was up and gave back the keys."

The problem with short, timed appointments is they are detrimental to meaningful conversations between the patient and physician  the kind of conversations that get at the root causes of medical issues and lead to the development treatment plans, according to Dr. Pronovost. Perhaps the biggest issue is that the 15-minute appointment was not even born out of best practices, he wrote. Rather, it was a response to "production pressures."

Not only do short appointments starve patients of valuable care, they also put a burden on physicians and add to burnout, Dr. Pronovost wrote.

While some alternative solutions exist, such as concierge practices and direct primary care, they could also make the physician shortage worse, he wrote. Nonetheless, the industry needs to experiment and see if new models of care can help do away with the 15-minute appointment, Dr. Pronovost wrote.

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While the U.S. healthcare industry has made strides in lowering the number of adverse events, many problems still remain. And one thing could be holding the industry back from achieving the goal of zero adverse events, according to a recent JAMA article: good measures of quality and patient safety.

"The healthcare industry lacks valid patient safety measures, which are fundamental to improvement. Without these measures, the key ingredient in these efforts is missingWithout effective measurement and reporting, progress in patient safety will be arduous and slow," wrote Ashish Jha, MD, and Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, in the piece.

Dr. Jha is with the Department of Health Policy and Management of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and Dr. Pronovost is with the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality and Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.

In the JAMA piece, Drs. Jha and Pronovost provided three suggestions as to how policy makers and government agencies can improve quality measurement in healthcare, thereby furthering the goal of reducing adverse events to zero.

1. CMS can eliminate unnecessary or ineffective metrics from the programs it runs. The authors suggest cutting PSI-90 as a measure and instead focusing on the adverse events that tend to cause the most harm: adverse drug events, nosocomial infections, venous thromboembolism, pressure ulcers, falls, surgical complications and diagnostic errors.

2. CMS can also task an agency with "defining standards of what makes good measures and setting accuracy requirements before implementing measures in pay-for-performance and public reporting," the authors wrote. The agency could provide a common set of "sound" metrics.

3. Congress needs to fund research on systems engineering in the healthcare industry. "Improving safety depends on having good systems in place rather than on the efforts of individual clinicians. As such, the government  the largest payer in healthcare  needs to fund practically applicable studies on systems engineering to promote efficient, safe healthcare," the JAMA piece reads.
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The risks posed by the upcoming EU referendum may have already hit the UK economy, the Governor of the Bank of England has warned.

Addressing the House of Lords economic affairs committee yesterday, Mark Carney said there is growing uncertainty about the UKs macroeconomic outlook in the run up to June 23.

He warned that risks in the UKs economy may be beginning to "manifest" already.

A vote to leave the EU might result in an extended period of uncertainty about the economic outlook...this uncertainty would be likely to push down on demand in the short run.

And Mr Carney said a Treasury report, examining the long-term impacts of a Brexit, had been based on a sound economic process.

Chancellor George Osborne said the UK will be permanently poorer if it votes to leave the EU. The report also highlights that Northern Ireland receives more from the EU than other regions in the UK.

Meanwhile, Mr Osborne has appointed Michael Saunders to the Bank of Englands Monetary Policy Committee (MPC).

Mr Saunders, who is managing director and head of European economics at Citigroup, will take up the three-year role from August 9.

END PIECE: See page 30
Northern Ireland's economy could lose 1bn a year through the loss of Euroean Union and devolution funding in the event of a Brexit, according to an international expert in regional and urban economics

Northern Ireland's economy could lose 1bn a year through the loss of European Union and devolution funding in the event of a Brexit, according to an international expert in regional and urban economics.

Dr Leslie Budd, reader in Social Enterprise at the Open University Business School and Chair of the Urban and Regional Economics Seminar Group (URESG), also says loss of research and development (R&D) funding to Northern Ireland's university sector will inhibit all-island research on renewable energy, agri-business and sustainable fisheries.

Northern Ireland receives approximately 500m annual funding from the EU and received nearly 2.5bn between 2007 and 2013 with respect to agriculture, structural funds and the PEACE programme.

It is also projected to lose up to 500m per year in so-called Barnett Formula (devolution) Funding when it introduces a new devolved corporation tax rate of 12.5% - equivalent to the Republic's - from 2018.

"Brexit will undermine the logic of a devolved corporation tax in that the relative costs of inward investing firms in the north will rise, as Brexit will increase transactions costs, including the cost of doing business across the border," said Budd.

Budd, author of The Consequences for the Northern Ireland Economy from a United Kingdom exit from the European Union, was speaking ahead of a Brexit discussion forum hosted this Thursday by the Foundation for Fiscal Studies.

"Trade is an issue, but as 50% of EU trade is between firms, (regionally based) Global Value Chains are crucial and those linkages and spillovers across the whole of Ireland to the rest of the EU could be broken," added Budd. More than 60% of goods exported from Northern Ireland go to Europe and direct farm payments to farmers there account for almost 90% of farm income.

Some 81% of businesses want to stay in the EU, says the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry - despite high-profile political endorsements for a Brexit by First Minister Arlene Foster and Northern Ireland secretary Theresa Villiers.

Northern Ireland is more vulnerable to a Brexit than elsewhere in the UK, according to forecasters Oxford Economics.

"There is nothing based on the evidence of the past 30 years which suggests that the British Treasury at Whitehall is suddenly going to morph into a benevolent almshouse doling out largesse to Northern Ireland should we leave Europe," said Tom Kelly, chairman of the Northern Ireland Stronger in Europe campaign.

"This is Tweedledum and Tweedledee politics, which puts real people with real jobs at risk," he added.
Up to 1,000 manufacturing posts are going in Northern Ireland as job losses at giants of industry JTI Gallaher and Bombardier take effect.

Around 300 Bombardier workers have left the aerospace giant, while a further 100 have been accepted for voluntary redundancy, it has emerged.

That comes following the announcement this year that the firm is slashing more than 1,000 posts.

Its understood around 300 jobs have already gone across the Belfast operation. Those posts include contractors and casual workers.

But it's believed around 100 other staff are also in for voluntary redundancy at the company.

It comes after Bombardier announced in February it was slashing 580 jobs in Northern Ireland this year and a further 500 by the end of 2017.

It was the latest major blow to Northern Ireland's manufacturing industry and followed similar large-scale announcements, such as tyre maker Michelin which revealed it is pulling out by 2018, with the loss of 860 jobs.

And it's also understood that cigarette maker JTI Gallaher - which revealed in late 2014 that is was closing its Ballymena plant - is set to shed the bulk of its 870-strong workforce in the coming weeks.

The firm announced it was closing the Co Antrim plant entirely by early 2017.

But Stephen Kelly, chief executive of Manufacturing NI, remains positive about the demand for skilled workers here, following the latest losses.

"I'm confident, while we currently have a blip, that those people will find good, sustainable employment, if not in the short term, then in the medium to long," he said. "We are very pleased that both the DUP and Ulster Unionists have so far committed to ensuring we have competitive energy prices for large energy users, with the DUP in particular saying they will have a review of market structures.

"We would hope once a new Programme for Government is set, that we secure action to deliver prices which will make us competitive."

Outgoing Enterprise Minister Jonathan Bell commissioned a manufacturing advisory group to examine the problems facing the industry.

It pointed the finger at huge energy costs which are facing industry here, which it says are "some of the highest in Europe".

But on a more positive note, Unicorn Mouldings, a manufacturer of industrial, commercial and domestic flooring, is adding 10 new jobs after taking on Belgium firm Ecoloc.

The company currently operates from two production facilities in Lisburn and Markethill in Co Armagh.

It makes the Flexi-Tile, an interlocking PVC floor tile.

Roger Pannell, managing director, said the acquisition "strengthens the company's distribution network and affirms the position as Europe's largest manufacturer of PVC interlocking floor tiles".

"The market in this sector is growing, not just in Europe but also worldwide. By aligning all production in Northern Ireland, this indicates our commitment to the local workforce and the Northern Ireland manufacturing industry," he said.

Meanwhile, a report published by Manufacturing NI last month, and carried out by Oxford Economics, warned more than 6,000 jobs could be lost across the manufacturing sector here over the next decade as companies become more efficient and increase their use of technology.

However, the study predicted the industry itself would grow in size, despite headcount falling.

The manufacturing sector employs around 85,000 people in Northern Ireland.
David Casement QC, the joint chairman of the British Irish Commercial Bar Association, spoke before a seminar on dispute resolution in Belfast on May 6

Some of the UK and Ireland's top lawyers set to meet in Belfast to discuss the impact of changing technology and the law, including accessibility, new areas of litigation and some of the pitfalls.

The British Irish Commercial Bar Association is hosting a conference on Thursday, at the Royal Courts of Justice, looking at how opportunities created by the rise of digital media can be "harnessed to make dispute resolution more efficient and effective". But it says developments, such as online dispute resolution, can "create risks for both lawyers and clients which require careful management".

Micheal Humphreys QC, chairman of the Commercial Bar Association, said: "Just as Google is no substitute for qualified and skilled medical advice, commercial entities will always require quality advice and advocacy in order to protect their interests."

Thursday's event takes place in the Royal Courts of Justice. Speakers include the President and Justices of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger and Lord Kerr.

Meanwhile, a legacy of unresolved legal debt disputes between banks and businesses remains following the 2008 economic crash, a Northern Ireland QC has said.

But alternatives to court can be found to settle disputes, which could allow businesses to continue trading and maintain a good working relationship with their banks in the future, he added.

Earlier this year, bookmaker Gareth Graham settled his long-running dispute with vulture fund Cerberus through mediation.

David Casement QC, the joint chairman of the British Irish Commercial Bar Association, spoke before a seminar on dispute resolution in Belfast on May 6.

He said that he believed that now was the right time to hold the seminar to help settle disputes as large number remain in the system. "There is a legacy of alleged banking disputes still to be resolved, not only in Northern Ireland but also in the UK and the Republic

"Dispute resolution is an alternative to court proceedings where there is normally a winner and a loser.

"We will have an expert panel from top legal firms Cleaver Fulton Rankin, Berg and McKeever Rowan Solicitors who will address local banks, businesses, accountants and wealth managers on how to resolve disputes out of court.

"I believe that the seminar will help create a cultural shift in how banks and businesses resolve these disputes."

Mr Casement added that there were still places available for the event at Law Society House.
ABV Festival organisers Darren Nugent, Matthew Dick, Michael Kerr and Felicia Matheson, who have a new location after last years success at the Harland & Wolff drawing offices

Seamus OHara of the Carlow Brewing Company and co-founder of the Belfast Craft Beer Festival

You wait around for a new beer festival - then two come along at once.

Northern Ireland's thirst for top-end craft brews shows no sign of slowing down, with another major beer festival in Belfast this weekend.

The Belfast Craft Beer Festival in Custom House Square, from Thursday to Saturday, is the brainchild of co-founder Seamus O'Hara.

He's also the man behind the Carlow Brewing Company and the Irish Craft Beer Festival in Dublin.

"We have been doing the one in Dublin for five years and there have been more and more breweries travelling to Dublin," he said.

"We were looking at markets, Galway and Belfast, and it seemed to point to Belfast."

There are now around 25 breweries in Northern Ireland, more than 80 across the island.

And the festival will showcase around 25 breweries, cider producers and distilleries from across Ireland.

"We are hoping for around 4,000 to 5,000 people," Seamus said. "It's the first year, so we don't know. We are hoping the buzz is also interesting for the breweries and an opportunity for the trade."

Some of the breweries showcasing their best beers include the Hercules Brewing company and Knockout, from Belfast, and the Mourne Mountains Brewery, located outside Warrenpoint.

Of course, there's also the city's long-running Belfast Beer Festival, which takes place in the Ulster Hall each November.

And the ABV Festival is also returning for its second year. To beer fans, it's regarded as a bit different, bringing some of the world's best and brightest breweries to beautiful and historic buildings and backdrops.

Last year, around 1,500 enthusiasts sampled some of the best beers the UK, Ireland and further afield have to offer, in the surroundings of the former Harland & Wolff drawing offices.

But one of the organisers, Michael Kerr, is keeping this year's location under wraps - while the details are finalised.

However, he said the September festival would be located in another "wonderful, historic and old Belfast gem".

"We were absolutely blown away by the support last year, and also by the anticipation of the public on social media this year," he said.

"ABV is trying to get some of the best beers in the world, from small committed producers, and quality is at the centre of what we are doing. We will be working with some of the same food producers as last year, and some of the same breweries, but we are planning to diversify, too. Essentially, last year's was so well received, we don't want to deviate from the plan too much."

Some of the same top producers will be back. They include Belfast's Boundary, Mad Hatter from Liverpool and London's Beavertown - a brewery owned by Logan Plant, son of Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant.

The first ABV event at Harland & Wolff drawing offices last year - the final event before work begins to turn the building into a hotel - also drew brews from across the UK, with a number of special beer tastings also taking place on the SS Nomadic. The festival is organised by Michael Kerr, Co Tyrone brewer Darren Nugent, distributor Felicia Matheson and Belfast brewer Matthew Dick, co-founder of Boundary Brewing.

ABV is taking place in Belfast between September 1 and 3
What The Linen Loft could look like once its refit is completed

A former linen building in Belfast is undergoing a major refit and refurbishment as its turned into new top-end office space.

The Linen Loft, a six-storey development on Adelaide Street, was formerly known as the Ireland Brothers Building.

Built in 1905, the linen firm operated there until the Health and Social Care Board took over until the 1990s.

The building was bought by Redbay Developments in November 2014, which has taken on Bangor-based MMM Design & Build to turn the inside into grade A office space.

Aside from loft-style office space, the contractors are developing an outdoor terrace on each floor. David Wright, director of commercial property firm CBRE, which acted in the sale, said The Linen Loft is a particularly exciting development in Belfast.

He added: Due to be completed later this year, it gives a slightly different offering to either local companies interested in an expansion or an FDI keen to set up a Belfast office. We expect to see a high level of interest for this

location, with many interested parties already coming forward.

It is no secret that Belfast does not currently meet the demand for grade A office space, so a development such as this, with 28,000 sq ft available, is a lift for the office market here.

A report last year warned that Northern Ireland could lose out on attracting crucial foreign direct investment due to a lack of prime office space.

Invest NI has suggested it intervenes in the market here to help stimulate the development of new grade A office accommodation.

And it said there is limited potential for significant development over the next five years due to a lack of developer cash.

Gareth McDowell of London and Belfast-based architects McDowell+Bostock, designers of The Linen Loft, said: From the beginning there was great potential with this building.

The large number of windows and the three-metre-high ceilings made it easier to build an acutely attractive space. There is a particularly good quality of space which means light can enter the building.

Physically it is a perfect depth for light penetration on both sides and with limited structural supports, so we have a good open design layout.

The extensions on each floor which provide a roof terrace add to the feeling its an open and bright space.
London's top-flight index has reached a fresh four-month high as European markets surged on the back of rebounding oil prices and cheer over the eurozone economy.

The FTSE 100 Index rose above 6400 for the first time since early December , closing 51.8 points up to 6405.4.

Oil prices regained their poise after hefty falls in the previous session, with benchmark Brent crude up 3% to more than 44 US dollars a barrel.

The cost of crude fell sharply on Monday after a key meeting of oil producers in Qatar ended in stalemate.

Indices across Europe rallied strongly after a better-than-expected economic sentiment report for Germany and the wider eurozone, with the Dax in Frankfurt up 2.3% and France's Cac 40 1.3% ahead.

In London, commodity stocks raced to the top of the pack, with Anglo American leading the charge, up 58.9p to 752.5p, while Glencore rose 11.9p to 169.9p.

The firmer oil prices also handed a fillip to BP, which rose 2% or 7.2p to 362.9p.

Primark owner Associated British Foods enjoyed strong gains after posting a 4% rise in half-year pre-tax profits to 466 million despite a 3% drop in earnings at its fashion chain.

The company said like-for-like sales at Primark were broadly flat year on year, with warm weather across Europe hitting performance.

Shares in AB Foods rose 66p to 3413p.

Elsewhere, Saga was 2.7p higher at 200.6p after it posted a 55% surge in annual pre-tax profits to 176.2 million, although the previous year's results were hit by 50 million in costs from its 2014 stock market flotation and other debt and borrowing costs.

On an underlying basis, group earnings increased 5% to 238.8 million, boosted by an impressive performance from its cruise ship and holidays arm.

FTSE 250-listed aerospace and defence components maker Meggitt was also on the front foot, up more than 6% or 24p to 413.2p, after it said trading in its quarter to the end of March was in line with expectations, with group revenue up 1%.

Retirement home builder McCarthy & Stone saw shares fall 0.7p to 256p in the second tier despite revenues jumping by a third as it sold more properties at a higher price.

The Bournemouth-based firm said revenues stepped up 33% to 250.2 million in the six months to February 29, driven in part by a 19% jump in legal completions to 923 units.

Online property portal Zoopla saw shares rise as it stepped up the pressure on market rivals by snapping up an estate agency software firm for 75 million.

The company said the takeover of the Property Software Group (PSG) will be a "game-changer" in the industry, as it will gain access to back-office software used in 8,000 estate agency branches across the UK.

The firm has bought the business from LDC - the private equity arm of Lloyd's Banking Group - which backed a 17.8 million management buy-out by PSG from the Guardian Media Group in 2013.

Shares were up 1.7p to 279p.

The biggest risers in the FTSE 100 Index were Anglo American up 58.9p to 752.5p, Antofagasta up 34.6p to 492.8p, Glencore up 11.9p to 169.9p, and BHP Billiton up 48.1p to 964.5p.

The biggest fallers were Mediclinic International down 33p to 900.5p, Paddy Power Betfair down 195p to 9330p, TUI down 19p to 1046p, and Marks & Spencer down 7.7p to 434.8p.
Northern Ireland pizza chain Little Wing is planning to take a slice of the growing Italian cuisine markets in Great Britain and the Republic where it is eyeing potential new restaurants.

The wood-fired pizza and pasta restaurant group's plans follow rapid expansion here over the last number of years.

The business, which now has six outlets, is part of the Beannchor Group which runs a total of 45 bars and restaurants, including the five-star Merchant Hotel.

Little Wing is owned and operated by Bill Wolsey and his sons, Conall and Luke.

Managing director Luke Wolsey said Little Wing's success has "proven that this is a good business model and we have ambitious plans for growth in the coming years".

He said: "We are reviewing options for further expansion of Little Wing, with a number of sites being investigated across Northern Ireland.

"Looking to the future, we see the time arising whereby we will have reached a level of critical mass in Northern Ireland and will need to consider options.

"We are already tentatively looking at site locations in both the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain."

The first Little Wing eatery opened in Belfast's Ann Street in 2009, followed by venues on the Lisburn Road, in Ballyhackamore in east Belfast, Holywood and Bangor.

Aside from a range of interesting pizzas, which include the Tuscan - featuring pork and fennel sausage with onions, jalapenos, rocket and chilli oil - and a 24-inch pizza for those with a bigger appetite, Little Wing also serves up other Italian-inspired dishes such as lasagne and pesto pasta.

But Beannchor's Little Wing pizza business isn't the only part of the group which has plans to grow.

It's set to expand original plans for its Bullitt hotel in Belfast.

The hotel will be on the corner of Victoria Street and Ann Street, at the old Lagan House building. And now the company has bought the adjoining Annsgate House.

The first phase will see 44 new bedrooms, a ground floor cafe, bar and restaurant being built - due to open later this year.

And the second phase will add more than 30 new rooms to the development.
Owen Teale has revealed that people approach him on trains and beg him to abuse them in the style of his Game Of Thrones character.

The Welsh actor plays villain Ser Alliser Thorne in the HBO fantasy TV series, but said fans still warm to his alter ego.

He told Radio Times: "People love the character. They come up to me on the Tube and ask me to abuse them: 'Could you call me a 'bah-sted', I want to record it? Say it with real contempt'."

Teale said fans appreciate Ser Alliser is not just a panto villain.

He said: "He doesn't sit around cooking up evil plans. He thinks he knows what is right. His is a cynical, joyless version of the world - we are made from bad stuff."

The actor, 54, revealed that shooting in a quarry in the rain helps him find the darkness in his character.

"Castle Black is a permanent set filmed in this disused quarry not far from Belfast. And it rains and rains," he said.

"Once you're in the quarry you can't get to your comforts as an actor - to the caravans, to the food wagon; and they just keep you in there.

"When it rains it takes two people to put that enormous cloak on me and once it gets wet it probably weighs my own weight again, which is about 15 stone.

"So it's a bleak, horrible situation, often with me standing up to my ankles in water. But I think it helps. This is what Ser Alliser thinks the world is like."

Game Of Thrones has been a huge success critically and commercially, but Teale admitted he was not certain it would do so well.

"I didn't believe it would work in the beginning, anyway - I thought it was too unwieldy, too close on the heels of the Tolkien trilogy. But look how wrong I was," he said.

:: This week's Radio Times is on sale from Tuesday.
Game Of Thrones star Owen Teale has revealed the bleak weather in Northern Ireland, where the hit TV series is partly filmed, helps him find the darkness in his character.

The Welsh actor plays villain Ser Alliser Thorne in the HBO fantasy drama, which starts its sixth season on Sky Atlantic on Monday.

The actor revealed how shooting in Magheramorne quarry just outside Larne in the rain is far from glamorous.

"Castle Black is a permanent set filmed in this disused quarry not far from Belfast.

"And it rains and rains," he said.

"Once you're in the quarry you can't get to your comforts as an actor - to the caravans, to the food wagon; and they just keep you in there. When it rains it takes two people to put that enormous cloak on me and once it gets wet it probably weighs my own weight again, which is about 15 stone.

"So it's a bleak, horrible situation, often with me standing up to my ankles in water. But I think it helps.

"This is what Ser Alliser thinks the world is like."

The Night's Watch and The Wall, which protects the northern border of Westeros, were also built in the disused quarry, where limestone extraction ended in 1980.

A section of the side of the quarry was painted white to look like the famous ice wall.

Set designer Gemma Jackson told the Belfast Telegraph back in 2011: "We used reclaimed timber and a lot of stone and I think it worked because it was in a real quarry."

Teale said fans still warm to his alter ego.

He told the Radio Times: "People love the character. They come up to me on the Tube and ask me to abuse them: 'Could you call me a 'bah-sted', I want to record it? Say it with real contempt'."
Almost 1,000 children have missed out on nursery school places following the first round of offers

Almost 1,000 children have missed out on nursery school places following the first round of offers.

Parents were informed on Saturday whether their child had been successful.

Some 96% (22,000) of children whose parents applied for a pre-school place were offered a place in one of their preferred settings.

However, an estimated 916 children are still without a pre-school place out of the 23,000 who applied.

They still have an opportunity to get a place in the second round of offers which will be made in June, but some parents have expressed concern that their child will end up at a nursery far away from their home.

Each pre-school may use a different admissions criteria which can include whether the child has an older sibling in attendance or how close they live to the pre-school, however all give preference to children whose parents are in receipt of benefits as part of the statutory criteria require providers to give preference to children from socially disadvantaged circumstances.

PUP councillor Julie-Anne Corr-Johnston said she has been contacted by a number of parents in the ward she represents in north Belfast voicing concerns about their child not having secured a place.

She claims that four pre-schools in the area are filled to capacity, leaving local parents concerned that even if their child is offered a place at another facility, it could be some distance away.

Ms Corr-Johnston said the current system is unfair on working parents who earn minimum wage and cannot afford to transport their child to a nursery further away from their home.

Some parents from outside Belfast were also left disappointed.

Mum Deborah McAleese from Hillsborough has been left concerned after her son James did not secure a place at a pre-school despite living close to it.

"My preferred pre-school for my son James is 1.5 miles from our front door. It is a place he is familiar with and where many of his little friends from creche will be going," she said.

"But because I am not in receipt of benefits and James, as an only child, has no siblings at the school, he has not been offered a place.

"James is a very sensitive child and can find new experiences incredibly daunting so I am reluctant to send him to any of the unfamiliar pre-schools, between seven and 15 miles away, that the Education Authority advised me still have funded places available.

"I think it is unfair that my son has missed out on a pre-school place at his local school because he is an only child with working parents."

Letters on the second stage of the application process will be issued to parents on Friday, June 3.
Showing zero-tolerance of wall murals and flags which support armed groups were among proposals in the Alliance Party manifesto

Northern Ireland's main cross-community party has called for all paramilitarism to be eradicated within a decade.

Tackling racketeering and exploitation of businesses to fund organised crime and showing zero-tolerance of wall murals and flags which support armed groups were among proposals in the Alliance Party manifesto for next month's Stormont Assembly elections.

One man is dead and another critically ill following unrelated shootings in Belfast and Londonderry in recent days.

A prison officer died following a booby trap bomb explosion under his van linked to a dissident republican group calling itself the New IRA earlier this year - 18 years after the Good Friday Agreement intended to end violence.

The Alliance Party's Stephen Farry said: "There are real ongoing issues of social control, of far too many communities under the jackboot of the paramilitaries.

"Eighteen years on from Good Friday, people have the right to expect that this is long gone from our society and that we have a society based upon the rule of law and that there is no impunity in terms of how the state interacts at a grass roots level with this."

The party said it would pursue a commitment by the next power-sharing administration to tackle all paramilitary and organised crime, and would set a target that by 2025 all threats, intimidation and exclusive claims to territory would be eliminated.

It would also promote better regulation and enforcement of the law surrounding paramilitary flags, murals and bonfires.

Father-of-four Michael McGibbon, 33, was targeted by gunmen in north Belfast on Friday night after he met them - reportedly by appointment - in an alleyway.

The taxi driver was shot three times in the legs in the nationalist Ardoyne area on Friday night - 24 hours after two men came to his house to threaten him.

His wife Joanne, a nurse, tried to save him before he was taken to the city's Royal Victoria Hospital where he later died after undergoing surgery.

Another man is critically ill in hospital following an unrelated shooting in Londonderry's Creggan estate.

The incidents bore the hallmarks of the so-called punishment attacks which paramilitaries used during the Troubles to reinforce their control and terrorise communities.

Dr Farry claimed: "There are some serious issues in terms of how government does interact with this reality on the ground and for that reason we are calling for a public protocol to ensure that government agencies know how to interact in a way to recognise that this is actually a reality and how to actually break it down rather than inadvertently reinforcing it and building up the so-called authority of the de facto gatekeepers in certain communities."

Legislation to establish a commission monitoring paramilitary activity and make Assembly members commit to challenging paramilitary activity has been supported by the House of Commons after a deal was struck last year by Stormont parties.

It followed a killing by members of a Provisional IRA which many people thought no longer existed, which destabilised the powersharing administration.
What the 740-bedroom student development could look like

Construction of a 740-bedroom student accommodation complex in Belfast city centre has been granted planning permission.

Belfast City Councils Planning Committee granted permission for the construction of the massive complex on a vacant site in College Avenue.

The development, by McAleer and Rushe, will comprise 647 bedrooms and 93 studio rooms, with retail outlets on the ground floor.

Councillor Matt Garrett, Chair of the Planning Committee, said: "There is a clear need for quality, managed student accommodation in the city, as is demonstrated by the number of developments for which we have granted approval, and the number of applications still to come before us.

"However, while the Council is extremely conscious of this need, we are also keenly aware of the impact such developments are likely to have on existing communities and neighbourhoods, and therefore each application which comes before us will be scrutinized in details, with the merits and demerits carefully weighed up and decisions made accordingly."

The Committee also granted permission for conversion of the former St Malachys Convent House, on the corner of Joy Street and Sussex Place, into an apartment complex.

The development will involve the retention and renovation of the existing Victorian building, with the addition of a new extension at the rear, to provide six one-bedroom and six two-bedroom apartments.

Applications for the replacement of the Policing Museum, with a new purpose-built facility, at the PSNI headquarters at Knock, a centralised anaerobic digestion plant, with combined heat and power plant, at Airport Road West, and a new apartment block on the site of a vacant public house on the Springfield Road, were also approved.

The committee also agreed with proposals by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) to list the former rectory in the grounds of St Marks Church on the Holywood Road and the Shaftesbury Square Reformed Presbyterian Church on the Dublin Road.
Matt Lucas has voiced concern about discussions to axe BBC 3.

Sharon Osbourne was a judge on the last series of The X Factor

When Belfast IT expert Declan Higgins picked up his pencil a couple of years ago and began to draw, he had no idea that his pictures would soon become an internet phenomenon, shared by millions of people across the globe.

He'd had no training in drawing, but his lack of skill has proved to be no barrier to finding fame for what he calls his "c**p portraits".

But Declan's naive, untutored portraits have now been viewed and shared by millions of people online.

It's testament to the power of the internet - and to the IT man's marketing skills.

"About two years ago I picked up my pencil and had a go at a portrait," he told the Belfast Telegraph.

"I thought it would be funny to post the drawing on Facebook, to see if any of my Facebook friends could guess who the drawing was of.

"There was a lot of merriment and laughter about it - no one could recognise who it was."

You can see why.

He doesn't make it easy for people to figure out who the drawings are supposed to portray.

Without the captions, it would be pretty difficult to figure out who's who.

But the spare-time caricaturist had a stroke of marketing genius that has catapulted his works across the worldwide web - and brought praise and laughter from the celebrities he's profiled with his pencil.

"I gathered up around 30 drawings and then I had an idea.," he said. "I thought: I know!

"I'll post one of these on Twitter and I'll tag it to the person in the drawing."

And he hit the jackpot first time.

"The first one I tweeted was of Rob Brydon, the Welsh comedy actor.

"I tagged him, uploaded the portrait and within a few seconds he had retweeted it to about a million people. And within 24 hours I had 200 followers to my Twitter feed.

"That was last October. Since then I've been doing portraits almost every day and uploading them to social media.

"I generally pick comedians and people I think will have a witty response to the drawings."

Focusing on comics and celebs was a smart move.

While Brydon was happy to retweet his drawing, others like Marcus Brigstocke paid tribute to his efforts.

"A splendid piece, full of character, subtlety, nuance and truth - I'm flattered and appalled," said Brigstocke.

And telly controversialist Katie Hopkins said of her portrait: "I love it! Tk you - it's a distinct improvement".

#194 Devastated to say @RWitherspoon not a single follower could recognise you based on this wondrous creation. Sad pic.twitter.com/6vDkqFN53A  Crap Portraits (@Crap_Portraits) April 13, 2016

#192 Its the stunning @driverminnie Looking radiant as ever and very different to last nights @OfficialJLD pic.twitter.com/5claChYsEb  Crap Portraits (@Crap_Portraits) April 11, 2016

#191 In Crap Portraits Gallery is @DannyDeVito Hope you love it Danny DeVito. Definitively not @prodnose ! pic.twitter.com/L9fo6rawVf  Crap Portraits (@Crap_Portraits) April 9, 2016

#190 Its Art Jim but not as we know it! @WilliamShatner .. Sorry William, wish i could do better! pic.twitter.com/67IiNBDsmr  Crap Portraits (@Crap_Portraits) April 8, 2016

#189 It's a somewhat stylistic interpretation of @MrsSOsbourne - No malice intended Sharon, hope you like. pic.twitter.com/i4hK8zgRut  Crap Portraits (@Crap_Portraits) April 7, 2016

Is it really that bad ? I thought it was a passable rendition - for me at least @robbiewilliams pic.twitter.com/m2gUxqHesj  Crap Portraits (@Crap_Portraits) March 31, 2016

Declan's C**p Portraits have featured in national UK and Ireland newspapers as well as on social media sites across the internet.

The Belfast man also completed studies of Northern Ireland political figures including Sinn Fein politician Conor Murphy, Basil McCrea, and a joint portrait of First Minister Arlene Foster and her Deputy Martin McGuinness.

He has no plans to take any drawing lessons to improve his technique. "I might lose my unique selling point," he said.

"Sure, I'd like to draw better - but I'm only messing about.

"It started off being relaxing, but if it becomes too much I may get fed up with it eventually."

Asked if his newfound fame as a caricaturist would enable him to break out of the dry world of IT and make a career out of his drawings, Declan laughed and said: "What do you think?"

#172 It's @HillaryClinton , no matter how crap you think this is Hillary, its *way* better than Trump. #ItsNotTrump pic.twitter.com/91gni8Hv2q  Crap Portraits (@Crap_Portraits) March 20, 2016

#170 Ive hidden the gorgeous @ThisisDavina cunningly in this. Only @GethJones could spot it. Sorry Davina pic.twitter.com/m2fd27vF1R  Crap Portraits (@Crap_Portraits) March 18, 2016
Northern Ireland's supply of skilled workers could be permanently damaged unless the next batch of ministers support the construction industry, builders said.

Politicians need to set out a clear strategy for tackling the "housing crisis" and improve access to finance to stimulate the flagging sector, the Federation of Master Builders (FMB) warned.

Indecision and short termism has threatened confidence and the exodus of tradesmen and women to other parts of the UK looks set to continue, the lobby group claimed.

Northern Ireland director Gavin McGuire said: " If this climate prevails, the exodus of Northern Irish businesses and tradespeople to other parts of the UK will continue.

"There's a very real risk of doing permanent damage to our skills base."

He said the next administration should prioritise capital investment.

"A clear intent to follow through on major infrastructure projects must follow quickly after the election.

"Questionable decisions, such as the sudden removal of grants for companies working with renewable heat products - which left many small and medium-sized enterprises in the lurch - have to be avoided at all costs.

"We're also still waiting for the Government to deliver a proper house building strategy - the lack of which is creating further uncertainty for small building firms and forcing them to look elsewhere for work."

He said the industry accounted for around a tenth of Northern Ireland's total GDP and provided nearly one in 10 jobs - underlining the potentially damaging consequences of an ever-worsening skills drain.

"On the other hand, for every 1 invested in construction, 2.84 is generated in the wider economy, underlining the wider value of well planned investment.

"We're at an important crossroads for our sector and we hope that the next government will take the decisions necessary to back the industry which is so crucial to the wider prosperity of Northern Ireland."

Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry called on the Assembly to establish a private sector taskforce charged with creating a positive plan for manufacturing to improve competitiveness.

Most members believed manufacturing had a future, particularly in higher value products, but were concerned about the lack of targeted government policy, according to a recent survey.

Businesses were also worried about the lack of effective energy strategies to support the industry and believed addressing high energy costs should be the number one priority for the next Assembly.

The survey, which was completed by almost 300 local businesses, was conducted against the backdrop of substantial job losses recently.
Rangers and Celtic fans clashed on Sunday night in a heated dispute at George Best Belfast City Airport.

The fracas broke out after Rangers went through to the Scottish Cup final following a 5-4 sudden-death penalty shootout victory over Celtic at Hampden Park.

Onlookers watched on as security staff intervened in a bid to keep the peace.

A video posted online shows a man wearing a Celtic shirt arguing with other fans as security guards step in to separate them.

At one point a taller man dressed in a dark jumper intervenes and appears to strike out at him with his elbow.

As the man in Celtic shirt turns to face the camera he shouts for security. They are then all escorted out of the building.

It is understood that the matter has been reported to the PSNI.

It is believed that those involved in the altercation travelled on a Flybe flight from Glasgow to Belfast on Sunday evening.

One witness who was travelling with a friend on the same aircraft claimed the injured man received five stitches near his eye following the altercation.

She said tension started building aboard.

Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Video showing how the Celtic fan was struck by a mans elbow at George Best Belfast City Airport after Sundays Old Firm match Video showing how the Celtic fan was struck by a mans elbow at George Best Belfast City Airport after Sundays Old Firm match Video showing how the Celtic fan was struck by a mans elbow at George Best Belfast City Airport after Sundays Old Firm match / Facebook

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"I was on that flight and there was sectarian abuse the whole way over, it was just constant throughout the journey," she said.

"When I got off the plane I asked for police but I was told there were no police there. I was so afraid of a fight breaking out on the plane. There was music being played including the Billy Boys."

Another passenger said he was "disgusted" at the language used on board. He said: "I witnessed what happened at the airport on Sunday night and was unfortunate to be on the Flybe flight. This incident was between one Celtic supporter and at least seven Rangers supporters.

"This man suffered an onslaught of sectarian abuse from before take off until we landed.

"What I had to endure with my young son was vile and disgusting sectarianism and rather frightening.

"Perhaps questions should be put to the relevant authorities as to how this was allowed to happen, especially in the wake of the high-profile case where a transatlantic flight was diverted and a man arrested over a request for a snack yet this went unchallenged?"

Flybe said no incidents were reported during or after the flight.

A PSNI spokesman said: "Police received a report of an altercation between a number of people at Belfast City Airport around 9.30pm on Sunday April 17.

"Police attended and spoke with a number of people and enquiries are continuing."
Milk prices in Northern Ireland could be about to drop to 12 pence per litre forcing a warning that if farmers do not cut their supply they could go out of business.

With milk prices in a spiralling descent dairy farmers in Northern Ireland have been urged to cut their supply in order to regulate the market and let it recover.

Since milk quotas were abolished in the European Union in 2015 some farmers have increased their supply in order to compensate for falling prices.

However, there is too much milk on the market and supply is overwhelmingly smothering the demand, making prices crash even further.

Fair Price Farming NI has just issued a warning to local dairy farmers that if supply does not fall soon, more farmers will go out of business.

Milk prices are currently around the 16-18 pence per litre depending on who farmers are supplying their milk to.

Fair Price Farming says that price is about to fall to 12 pence per litre and if it does, will signal the end for many of the region's farm businesses.

Charlie Weir is the chairman of Fair Price Farming NI and also milks a large dairy herd in Waringstown.

He said voluntary reduction is the only way to save the industry and that farmers wouldn't need to cut supply by much to make a difference.

Mr Weir said: "We were told last week in Brussels that one local processor is going to cut its price to 12 pence per litre for June milk.

"That is certainly not sustainable to any farm business and will spell the end for some farmers.

"We see the only way to curb this devastating price fall is to cut production. I can understand farmers who increased their production to keep their cash-flow going when prices collapsed.

"However, we are now at a stage where the glut of milk is driving prices down even further and it cannot last.

"It wouldn't take a huge amount of reduction to start making a difference but we need the cuts now.

"Those farmers that are already struggling will not be able to cope for much longer if prices sink to 12 pence.

"The powers that be in Europe will not agree to mandatory reduction so it's time farmers here took control of their own destiny and reduced the supply so that the market has time to even out somewhat.

"There was a vote in Europe for voluntary reduction which was supported by 23 Member States. Only one voted against it and there were four abstentions.

"If voluntary reduction does not happen soon, it's curtains for some of us," said Mr Weir.

The Ulster Farmers Union does not agree a reduction of supply in Northern Ireland is a good idea, when other countries in Europe won't back it.

UFU president Ian Marshall said: "The UFU, along with others, recognises that supply is a problem in the dairy industry.

"However, we do not believe a supply reduction programme would be effective on a voluntary basis while others in the EU, including the Republic of Ireland, have no plans for a similar programme and indeed are continuing to increase production.

"We recognise that such a programme is in place at an EU level, but the lack of funding for a compensation scheme, and its potential limited impact, make it unattractive. We believe the uptake across the EU will be limited.

"Given the European Commission's refusal to allow a return of any form of quota system we do not believe it would allow a mandatory scheme.

"There is a widespread belief across farm lobby organisations that a voluntary initiative would be futile unless all producers and processors take it up.

"There are no guarantees prices would rise because of a supply reduction. Indeed there is a risk it would see others rush to fill the vacuum.

"EU Farm Commissioner Phil Hogan has put in place a mechanism for the industry to reduce production but this only shifts responsibility from Brussels back to the industry without any guarantee of Member State financial support or an improvement in price."
Alan Black is the sole survivor of the Kingsmill massacre

A republican informer at the heart of IRA operations in the 1970s could be called to give evidence to an inquest into a sectarian massacre, a barrister said.

Sean O'Callaghan disclosed information about IRA decision-making contained in a book about the mass shooting at Kingsmill in south Armagh, according to a lawyer for one of the 10 victims.

The textile factory workers were shot dead by the armed group after they were ambushed as they returned from work in 1976.

Their minibus was stopped and those on board asked their religion, with the sole Catholic allowed to flee.

Neil Rafferty QC said Mr O'Callaghan did not seem adverse to giving court evidence.

He said: "This is a man that was at the heart of the IRA decision-making processes in the 1970s."

The victims were stopped as they travelled along the Whitecross to Bessbrook road in rural south Armagh on January 5 1976 - one of the worst years of the Troubles. A total of 11 were shot.

Then father-of-three Alan Black was the only person to survive but was seriously wounded and spent months recovering in hospital.

The 10 who died were John Bryans, Robert Chambers, Reginald Chapman, Walter Chapman, Robert Freeburn, Joseph Lemmon, John McConville, James McWhirter, Robert Samuel Walker and Kenneth Worton.

Journalist Toby Harnden wrote a book about the IRA in south Armagh called Bandit Country: The IRA And South Armagh, thought by lawyers for the victims to contain Mr O'Callaghan's recollections on Kingsmill.

Mr Rafferty represents the family of Mr Worton and sought to hear evidence from Mr O'Callaghan directly.

He said: "Could I ask to extend a written invitation to ascertain whether or not he is prepared to give evidence?"

The attack was claimed by a little-known republican paramilitary group considered a front for the supposedly-on-ceasefire IRA.

However in 2011 the Historical Enquiries Team of independent detectives found the IRA had been responsible, targeting the workmen because of their religion.

No one has ever been convicted.

The original inquest in 1978 lasted just 30 minutes and recorded an open verdict, but after a long campaign for justice by Mr Black and victims' families, the new inquest was ordered by Northern Ireland's Attorney General, John Larkin, in 2013.

It has been listed to start at Laganside Court in Belfast on May 23.
The PSNI are appealing for witnesses

The scene in Magowan Park, Creggan, after a man was shot twice in the leg. Pic Lorcan Doherty Press Eye.

The scene in Magowan Park, Creggan, after a man was shot twice in the leg. Pic: Lorcan Doherty Press Eye.

A man is critically ill after being shot twice in the leg in Northern Ireland.

The paramilitary-style attack happened in Magowan Park in the Creggan area of Londonderry.

Police Service of Northern Ireland Inspector Alison Ferguson said: "His condition is described as critical."

Detectives are appealing for witnesses following the shooting shortly before 9pm on Monday night.

The man was shot twice in the right leg and taken to hospital.

The attack comes after another man died in a gangland-style shooting in North Belfast last week.

Dissident republicans are likely to be suspected.
Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Widow Joanne McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

PACEMAKER BELFAST 19/04/2016 Joanne McGibbon with her young daughter at the candle light vigil that was held at Holy Cross Church last night in support of her husband Michael who was murdered earlier this week

PACEMAKER BELFAST 19/04/2016 Joanne McGibbon with her young daughter at the candle light vigil that was held at Holy Cross Church last night in support of her husband Michael who was murdered earlier this week

Pacemaker Press 18/4/2016 Graffiti near The alleyway at Butler Place, Where Michael McGibbon was shot, The PSNI have said his killing carried the hallmarks of a paramilitary murder. A 34-year-old man is still being questioned. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 18/4/2016 PSNI officers in the Ardoyne area in North Belfast on Monday, As they continue their investigation into the Murder of Michael McGibbon, 33, who died after an attack in an alleyway at Butler Place, with police saying his killing carried the hallmarks of a paramilitary murder. A 34-year-old man is still being questioned. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 18/4/2016 The alleyway at Butler Place, Where Michael McGibbon was shot, The PSNI have said his killing carried the hallmarks of a paramilitary murder. A 34-year-old man is still being questioned. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 18/4/2016 PSNI officers near the Family Home (of Michael McGibbon) in the Ardoyne area in North Belfast on Monday, As they continue their investigation into the Murder of Michael McGibbon, 33, who died after an attack in an alleyway at Butler Place, with police saying his killing carried the hallmarks of a paramilitary murder. A 34-year-old man is still being questioned. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 18/4/2016 The alleyway at Butler Place, Where Michael McGibbon was shot, The PSNI have said his killing carried the hallmarks of a paramilitary murder. A 34-year-old man is still being questioned. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Seana McGibbon and joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Seana McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Widow Joanne McGibbon (centre) with her daughter Seana and Fr Gary Donegan joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Widow Joanne McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

Michael McGibbon died after being shot by dissident republicans in an alleyway

Widow Joanne McGibbon (centre) with her daughters Michaela and Seana and Fr Gary Donegan joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend.

A vigil has been held for Michael McGibbon who died after being shot in north Belfast on Friday night.

Taxi driver Mr McGibbon (33) was shot three times in the legs in an alleyway in the Ardoyne area on Friday night - 24 hours after two men came to his house to threaten him.

His wife Joanne, a nurse, tried to save him before he was taken to the city's Royal Victoria Hospital, where he later died after undergoing surgery.

Speaking at Tuesday's vigil at Holy Cross Church in Ardoyne, Joanne said: "The strength of this community will overtake anything that anyone who wants to destroy it has to do.

Expand Close Daughter of Michael McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye / Facebook

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Whatsapp Daughter of Michael McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye

"If we all stay strong, we can stop these people. They can't beat us and it's not fair that families should have to go through this. They are not judge and jury."

Rector of Holy Cross, Fr Gary Donegan, said: "We're a proud community here. A community that has suffered and endured loss like no other in the history of this country.

"We have the home of Michael in the shadow of this church, but it was people who came from the shadows who chose to take his young life.

Expand Close Widow Joanne McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye / Facebook

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Whatsapp Widow Joanne McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

"We will not let those who live in the shadows empty us of our courage.

"This young widow showed more courage, compassion and mercy than you'll ever know."

Meanwhile the Orange Order's Ligoniel lodges said that they cancelled their protest on Tuesday evening as a 'mark of respect'.

Since 2013 Orangemen have paraded daily at 7.30pm, except Sunday, from the Twaddell camp up to police lines.

The Twaddell camp was still manned but no protest took place. PUP leader Councillor Billy Hutchinson welcomed the move.

Mr Hutchinson said: "This was a terrible and cowardly murder, and my thoughts and sincerest condolences go out to the family of Michael McGibbon.

"I very much welcome the efforts by the local Ligoniel Brethren to withdraw their protest this evening as the memorial service is conducted and as a mark of respect to the victims family.

"I would like to thank all those who have been involved in efforts to bring about this gesture."

There has been a regular police presence in the Twaddell area due to the protests which the PSNI estimates to have cost over 18million over the past three years.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Widow Joanne McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Seana McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in north Belfast at the weekend. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Widow Joanne McGibbon (centre) with her daughter Seana and Fr Gary Donegan joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye / Facebook

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Whatsapp Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye

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Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster stressed the need for information in the wake of the murder of father-of-four.

Mrs Foster's appeal came as another man was targeted in a paramilitary-style attack in Londonderry last night.

It is understood he was shot in both legs in McGowan Park in the Creggan estate at around 9pm. A spokesman for the Ambulance Service said he was taken to Altnagelvin Hospital for treatment but his condition was not clear.

Mrs Foster condemned Mr McGibbon's killers and insisted people in Ardoyne held the key to securing justice for his family.

"It is really shocking to hear of such a murder, and indeed the style in which it happened," she said.

"My deepest sympathy goes to the McGibbon family. The community in and around north Belfast hold the answers for the police in this matter.

"I would appeal to them to work with the Police Service of Northern Ireland to bring these people to justice."
Police officers back in the Ardoyne estate carrying out door to door enquiries following the murder of Michael McGibbon on April 17, 2016 Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo by Kevin Scott / Presseye

Michael McGibbon died after being shot by dissident republicans in an alleyway

Murdered taxi driver Michael McGibbon may have been targeted because dissidents claimed he "made an unfavourable comment" to one of their daughters.

Detectives are investigating claims that members of the terror group agreed to "punish" the father-of-four after they accused him of making the remark to the girl while he was driving her.

Prominent north Belfast dissident republican Dee Fennell was held for questioning over the "shooting by appointment", but was released unconditionally last night.

The 34-year-old handed himself in at Musgrave Street PSNI station on Sunday after he became aware police were looking to speak with him in connection with Mr McGibbon's murder.

He and Mr McGibbon had known each other for a number of years.

The PSNI said yesterday that a motive for the murder was still under investigation.

A police source told the Belfast Telegraph that a main line of enquiry was that he had been targeted over accusations he had made a remark to "the wrong girl".

"Apparently Mr McGibbon was accused by some in the community of making unfavourable comments to the wrong young girl who happens to be the daughter of an associate of the man arrested on Sunday. So they decided to shoot him," the source said.

Mr McGibbon, a much-loved father and husband, died in his wife Joanne's arms after he was shot three times in the legs in a north Belfast alleyway on Friday night.

Senior dissident republicans had approached him on Friday afternoon as he collected his children from school and ordered him to go to the alley at Butler Place at 10pm to be shot or face exile.

Mr McGibbon, who had no criminal record and was not known to police, attended the arranged punishment shooting.

He was shot three times. One of the bullets struck an artery in his thigh and he bled to death.

First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said yesterday that those responsible for the weekend slaying were trying to bring fear onto the streets.

Mr McGibbon's killing has reignited concerns over the level of control paramilitaries still have in some communities.

The murdered man had contacted police on Thursday to say he was in fear for his life after two masked men arrived at his house.

The men asked him to come out of the house but he refused, and they told him they would return.

Police believe that a number of other people may have had a similar visit in recent weeks.

"It is very concerning that police were aware of a threat against Mr McGibbon but were not able to do anything to protect him," Policing Board member Jonathan Craig said.

"These dissidents have a lot of influence in some communities and the only way to break that is for people to come forward and tell police what they know." The DUP member added: "These thugs are freely able to operate as judge, jury and executioner."

Sinn Fein Policing Board member Gerry Kelly said: "This is a criminal gang who are killing people for no reason. All the damage they are doing is to their own community."
Donnan was remanded him into custody.

A man fighting for his life after being stabbed in west Belfast named one of his alleged attackers as he lay bleeding on the ground, a court heard.

Police also claimed Gareth Donnan followed the 51-year-old victim armed with a blood-stained hammer after injuries were inflicted at the weekend.

Donnan, 19, denies causing grievous bodily harm at a house on Vere Foster Walk described by a defence lawyer as a scene of "mayhem".

He is the second teenager to be charged in connection with the attack early on Saturday morning that has left the victim critically ill in hospital.

A detective revealed the man sustained a punctured liver and remains in a medically-induced coma after undergoing surgery three times.

He was said to have walked to his daughter's home following the stabbing, with emergency services contacted at that stage.

Donnan, of Moyard Parade in Belfast, is also accused of possessing an offensive weapon, namely a pair scissors and a hammer, and burglary with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm.

Another 19-year-old, Aidan Muir of Springhill Grove in the city, was granted bail on Monday on the same three charges.

As Donnan appeared before Belfast Magistrates' Court on Tuesday a detective constable opposed his bid to be released from custody.

She said: "The injured party is known to the defendant, he named him as he lay bleeding on the ground."

District Judge Fiona Bagnall heard the man claimed those involved were "Garzo and his mate" - an alleged reference to Donnan's nickname.

According to the detective, Donnan followed the wounded man to his daughter's house and went in carrying a blood-stained hammer.

She claimed: "He told the injured party as he lay on the ground 'You deserve it, I hope you die'."

Outlining an alleged treat, the detective added: "He (Donnan) stated... 'He's going to be in more pain for talking like that'."

The court was told the accused lives in the same area as the injured man and frequented his home for drinking sessions.

Questioned by defence solicitor Mark Austin, the detective confirmed Donnan went to police voluntarily following an alert that he was wanted.

The lawyer stressed that his client denies carrying out the attack.

He also argued that both Donnan and Muir were charged on the basis of a joint enterprise.

Mr Austin added: "It was mayhem, people don't seem to know what happened."

But Judge Bagnall refused bail to Donnan - who is also accused of criminal damage to a police CCTV camera - due to the risks of re-offending or interfering with witnesses.

She remanded him in custody to appear again by video-link on May 17.
Tourism Ireland has teamed up with actor Richard E Grant and Smooth Radio, the third largest radio brand in Britain, in a new promotion to showcase the island of Ireland to British holidaymakers this year. Tourism Ireland is working with Smooth Radio to produce a series of five short online films. PIC SHOWS: Julie Wakely, Tourism Ireland, with actor Richard E Grant, during filming at Titanic Belfast. Pic: Phil Smyth

Tourism Ireland has teamed up with actor Richard E Grant and Smooth Radio, the third largest radio brand in Britain, in a new promotion to showcase the island of Ireland to British holidaymakers this year. Tourism Ireland is working with Smooth Radio to produce a series of five short online films. PIC SHOWS: Julie Wakely, Tourism Ireland; actor Richard E Grant; and Caroline Wilson, Belfast Food Tours, during filming outside St Georges Market. Pic: Phil Smyth

Tourism Ireland has teamed up with actor Richard E Grant and Smooth Radio, the third largest radio brand in Britain, in a new promotion to showcase the island of Ireland to British holidaymakers this year. Tourism Ireland is working with Smooth Radio to produce a series of five short online films. PIC SHOWS: Julie Wakely, Tourism Ireland; Caroline Wilson, Belfast Food Tours; and actor Richard E Grant, during filming at Sawers in Belfast. Pic: Phil Smyth

Tourism Ireland has teamed up with actor Richard E Grant and Smooth Radio, the third largest radio brand in Britain, in a new promotion to showcase the island of Ireland to British holidaymakers this year. Tourism Ireland is working with Smooth Radio to produce a series of five short online films. PIC SHOWS: Actor Richard E Grant, during filming for Tourism Ireland at Titanic Belfast. Pic  Phil Smyth

Tourism Ireland has teamed up with actor Richard E Grant in a new promotion to showcase Northern Ireland to British holidaymakers this year.

Tourism Ireland is working with Smooth Radio to produce a series of short online films.

Viewers will see Richard E Grant immerse himself in Northern Ireland's culture and meet the locals, showcasing some of the many wonderful experiences on offer here, with films featuring Belfast and the Causeway Coast.

Tourism Ireland worked closely with Tourism NI, to agree the locations to feature in each film.

The campaign  which will be rolled out in two phases  will reach about 5.5 million people across Britain. The films will be promoted on the Smooth Radio website and through on-air mentions.

Tourism Ireland said Richard E Grant is a "great fit" for the Tourism Ireland campaign and their key audience of culturally curious holidaymakers.

The actor's appearances in films and TV series like Withnail and I, Downton Abbey and Hotel Secrets have cemented his popularity and made him one of the best-known faces on British television.

Tourism Irelands Deputy Head of Great Britain, Julie Wakley said: Our newest promotion has been specifically designed to highlight holidays and short breaks in Northern Ireland to our culturally curious audience in Great Britain.

"These are independent, active sightseers, who are typically looking to visit new places and expand their experience by exploring landscapes, history and culture.

"We are really excited to be working with Richard E Grant and Smooth Radio, as they are a great fit with this important demographic. This is just one element of our extensive promotional programme that we are rolling out this year  aimed at boosting travel to Northern Ireland from Great Britain during 2016.
A war of words has broken out between Arlene Foster (pictured) and Micheal Martin

A war of words has broken out between Arlene Foster and Micheal Martin (pictured)

DUP leader Arlene Foster has rejected Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin's criticism of the Stormont Executive, branding it offensive and unjustified.

At the weekend, Mr Martin urged the British and Irish governments to directly intervene in Northern Ireland, claiming a DUP/Sinn Fein "stranglehold" on the institutions had wreaked "immense damage".

First Minister Mrs Foster questioned Mr Martin's grounds for criticising political leaders north of the border when, in the Irish Republic, a government has still yet to be formed in the wake of February's General Election.

"If it wasn't so offensive it would probably be quite funny," Mrs Foster said.

"Here is a man who is part of a political jurisdiction that 53 days after a general election can't form a government, yet he spends his time making comments about a different country."

At a party Assembly election campaign event outside Titanic Belfast on Monday, Mrs Foster also responded to Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt's claim that she and Martin McGuinness were "arrogant" for characterising the race for the First Minister's job as only between the DUP and Sinn Fein.

"We don't take any votes for granted and I think if you have seen the way I have been criss-crossing the country since I became First Minister I am not taking anybody for granted," she said. "Quite the contrary, if anybody's arrogant in this race it's him (Mr Nesbitt)."

Addressing his party's annual commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising at Arbour Hill in Dublin on Sunday, Mr Martin said the British and Irish governments needed to intervene at Stormont.

"We need direct engagement by both the Irish and British governments to end the stranglehold in Stormont by two parties," he said.

"This is doing immense damage to public support for the institutions and public engagement in politics." He also called for an overhaul in the North-South bodies set up under the Good Friday Agreement.

Mrs Foster said the DUP and Sinn Fein led the last Executive because they had secured the most votes at the last Assembly election.

"It's not up to Micheal Martin to tell the people of Northern Ireland how to elect their government," she said.

Sinn Fein's Conor Murphy said Mr Martin had no credibility north of the border, noting his call to suspend power-sharing in the midst of a political crisis last year.

"Micheal Martin last year called for the suspension of the institutions in the north despite the fact that those institutions were voted for by the vast majority of the Irish people," said Mr Murphy.

"Such an approach would have shut the Northern Executive and the Assembly for a generation.

"His recent comments clearly have more to do with electoral considerations in the south and offer nothing constructive to citizens in the north.

"Micheal Martin has squandered any credibility his party had with regards to playing a positive and constructive role in the peace process with these ill-informed and ill-judged comments about the Executive and Assembly.

"If Micheal Martin and Fianna Fail are serious about contributing to the north, they should take their views to the people and stand in the upcoming Assembly election. They have refused to do this and instead prefer to snipe from the sidelines."
Former Police Ombudsman Baroness Nuala O'Loan has criticised the media in the Republic for driving an anti-Catholic agenda.

Speaking in Boston College, Baroness O'Loan said "in a country in which the media was once sympathetic to the Catholic Church, it is now aggressively hostile".

In her weekend address at the Faith in the Future: Religion in Ireland in the 21st century conference organised by the US college's centre for Irish programmes, she lambasted the Irish media.

"Papers like The Irish Times now run columns in which things are said about and imputed to Catholics which would not be tolerated in the context of Islam or Judaism, or of homosexuals or humanists," she said.

"Journalists seem, on occasion, to have abandoned the careful, nuanced use of language in favour of wild sweeping assertions which fuel the lack of understanding of what Catholicism is about, and encourage virulent anti-Catholicism."

Baroness O'Loan acknowledged that it was the media which ultimately forced the Church and State to begin to deal with child sexual abuse in Ireland.

"It became open season for the media though," she said. "This led to a situation of profound injustice, as the normal protections of the law, in terms of the assumption of innocence until guilt was proved were abandoned.

"The victim had to be believed, so the priest must be lying in his denials.

"Some were, but some weren't lying.

"Men who had done no wrong were not, and in some cases still are not, properly treated during the period of investigation." Baroness O'Loan, who was Northern Ireland's first Police Ombudsman from 1999 to 2007, is known for strongly defending her faith.

She previously resigned from the British Medical Association's medical ethics committee over its support for extending the UK abortion law here in 2014.

Baroness O'Loan, who is married to Ballymena SDLP councillor Declan O'Loan, also attended the Church of Our Lady at Harryville at the height of a loyalist protest.

The demonstrations from 1996 to 1998 were in response to nationalist objections to Orange Order parades through Dunloy, and often turned violent.

In her previous role as Police Ombudsman, Baroness O'Loan highlighted collusion between police officers and what she described as serial killers in loyalist terror groups.
The plane took off from Kerry Airport on June 16 2015

A private jet was a minute away from crashing into a mountain after pilots became confused over flight instructions, air accident investigators have found.

The Florida-registered plane was carrying three passengers and two crew when it took off from Kerry Airport on June 16 2015 on its way to Gander in Newfoundland, Canada.

A quick thinking air traffic controller in Shannon spotted the jet levelled off too low to cross the Slieve Mish mountains near the Dingle peninsula.

The jet was about 800 feet below the highest peak as it flew into clouds shortly after take-off.

Experts from the Air Accident Investigation Unit (AAIU), which classed the incident as serious, said the pilots stopped climbing contrary to advice given to them while on the runway in Kerry.

The inspectors also said the crew misinterpreted instructions for the early flight path and did not try to clarify it with air traffic controllers.

The 32-year-old captain with 4,000 flying hours told the AAIU that they were confused over what altitude they should level off at.

"As we began to climb we had some confusion as to what the altitude clearance limit was as we were unsure what level 200 meant. We levelled at 2,000 feet to ensure we didn't exceed any altitude limits," the commander told the inquiry.

As the BAe 125-800B jet, known nowadays as a Hawker, was flying over Castlemaine the pilots contacted low level operators in Shannon's air traffic control centre.

Within 30 seconds the controller had asked the pilots three times for their altitude and confirmed they were at the wrong height.

The controller warned them of the high ground ahead in the Slieve Mish mountains and ordered them to climb to 4,000 feet with disaster less than one minute away.

The AAIU investigation also revealed that special radar to closely track flights from the control tower in Kerry airport was due to be in place in mid-2014 but was still not operating a month after the incident.

It said the lack of such a monitoring system was not a factor in this incident.

But the inspectors warned that the radar was first recommended in 2010 after a previous incident out of Kerry and they had no certainty when it would be up and running.

The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) said the monitoring systems have been operating for the last two months.

"The IAA is committed to ensuring the highest levels of safety across the entire aviation system and we will ensure that all safety recommendations are implemented as expeditiously as possible," a spokesman said.

The AAIU called on the IAA to review how it monitors progress on safety recommendations in accident reports.
Luas workers have called off next weekend's strike to give negotiations a chance.

The Siptu trade union said the 48-hour tram stoppage was being cancelled unconditionally despite repeated warnings last week that the service was being threatened by an "all-out indefinite" walkout.

Drivers held a meeting on Monday where they agreed to lift the strike on Saturday and Sunday.

Siptu divisional organiser Owen Reidy said the move was designed to create a window for talks with management aimed at finding a resolution to the dispute.

"As well as this move by the drivers, the three other grades of Luas workers - traffic supervisors, revenue protection officers and revenue protection supervisors - will meet with the company tomorrow in order to clarify some issues surrounding its revised offer," he said.

Siptu has asked to meet caretaker Transport Minister Paschal Donohoe to outline workers' concerns in case a deal cannot be struck.

Since a new pay offer, brokered by industrial relations mediators, was rejected by drivers, operating company Transdev put them on protective notice and warned them they would be removed from the payroll next Monday.

Workers had hit the company with a work-to-rule and a list of strikes - five 24-hour stoppages are still in the diary for April 28 and May 4, 13, 20 and 27.

A separate four-hour stoppage is also planned for May 26.

Siptu said it would hold meetings for all its Luas members on Wednesday and Thursday to update them on talks.
Joshua Molloy (24), from Ballylinan, Co Laois was arrested by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)

The parents of the Irishman arrested in Iraq after fighting Isis in Syria say he travelled to the Middle East to help after seeing news broadcasts.

Joshua Molloy (24) from the village of Ballylinan, Co Laois, travelled to the Middle East region in April 2015 to fight against Isil with forces allied to the Kurds.

He was arrested after allegedly crossing the border from Syria to Iraq illegally.

Speaking from their home in the small village near Athy on the Laois border with Kildare, Declan and Ann Marie Molloy said their son is not a soldier or a freedom fighter, but a man with compassion and an interest in world affairs.

Anything that he ever suggested he wanted to do was positive, be it as a journalist, or with an NGO, or a charity or humanitarian group, Declan said.

Joshua joined the British Army for four years when he left school because he wanted to see the world and he wanted to be involved in it. His regiment was trained to go to Afghanistan but that didnt happen in the end.

He joined the British Army and not the Irish Army because he thought he would see more of the world and get more involved.

Declan said they were last in touch with Joshua last Sunday week, and that he was actually on his way home to Ireland when he was arrested.

There was a few of them on the border coming from Syria into Iraq and he had told us to keep in touch with the Irish consulate because there was a risk they would be picked up when they crossed, he explained.

Then last Wednesday he crossed the border and we got word from a guy out there named Mark Campbell who works with one of the charities that Joshua and two others had been arrested by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

Joshua felt very strongly about what was happening to the minority groups in the Middle East but the conflict had recently become a lot more complex with Turkey and Russia getting involved, and we think Joshua thought he had played his part and was coming home, Declan told Independent.ie.

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We feel proud on one hand because he has a drive to help people, but we are scared on the other hand. We hope he is being treated okay, he added.

We are in touch with the British consulate because they seem to be more informed about what is happening and they say they are sending some people to the jail he is in, but he has an Irish passport and we would like to see the Irish consulate push that point because it could help Joshua, Declan explained.

It is of some comfort that he has been arrested by a government rather than being held by a militant group.

Joshua is a thoughtful and sensitive guy with the best of intentions, he said.

Declan and Ann Marie said Joshua was born in the UK and spent the first 13 years of his life there before they moved back to Ireland. Declan is originally from Dublin but the family, including Joshuas younger sister, settled in Laois.

He was always a reader, reading well beyond his years, and liked to know what was going on in the world, and he was into the computers and music, just like any other lad his age, said Declan.

Over the past 18 months, hundreds of Westerners have joined Kurdish, Assyrian and other military units in the fight against Isis.

The KRG had closed the Iraq-Syria border.

According to the 'Sunday Times', the Joshua and his friends had been fighting with a Syriac Christian group, the MFS, which is allied to the Kurdish YPG in the fight against Isil.

The Department of Foreign Affairs is working with British counterparts on the case.

Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan is being kept informed on efforts to secure the release of Joshua.

Irish diplomats are understood to have decided it would be best if the British Foreign Office worked for the release of all three men.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office told Independent.ie they were engaging with officials on the ground in Iraq to secure the release of the men. Mr Flanagan will keep a watching brief on those attempts.

"We are aware of the case and we stand ready to provide consular assistance. Minister Flanagan is being kept fully informed," a Department of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said.

Irish Independent
Armed militants in Afghanistan have staged a co-ordinated assault on a key government security agency in the capital Kabul, killing at least 28 people and wounding more than 320.

The attack, including a suicide car bombing, appears to have targeted an agency providing personal protection for high-ranking government officials. The Taliban claimed responsibility.

The assault began when a suicide car bomber struck near the agency compound's gates, said Kabul police chief General Abdul Rahman Rahimi.

After the explosion, armed gunmen stormed the compound and waged a prolonged battle with government security forces.

Public health ministry spokesman Ismail Kawasi said 327 wounded, including women and children, have been brought to area hospitals.

An interior ministry statement said that dozens of civilians were killed and wounded in the attack.

"This was one of the most powerful explosions I have ever heard in my life," said Obaidullah Tarakhail, a police commander who was present when the attack began.

Mr Tarakhail said he could not see or hear anything for 20 minutes after the initial explosion.

"All around was dark and covered with thick smoke and dust," he said.

Dozens of civilian apartment buildings, houses, shops and several government buildings were damaged by the car bomb blast.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack.

Taliban insurgents have stepped up their attacks recently since announcing the start of their spring offensive last week.

President Ashraf Ghani issued a statement condemning the attack, and said it "clearly shows the enemy's defeat in face-to-face battle with Afghan security forces".

The attack in Kabul comes four days after another attack by Taliban insurgents in northern Kunduz province which was repelled by Afghan security forces.

Officials in Kunduz said that security has improved in the city and that the Taliban were defeated in other parts of the province, but operations were still under way to clear militant fighters from the rest of the province.

The Taliban held Kunduz for three days last year before being driven out by a two-week counter-offensive aided by US air strikes. It was its biggest foray into an urban area since 2001.
Only a handful of migrants are said to have survived after a boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea

More than 400 migrants, mostly from Somalia, are reported to have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea on a boat trip from Libya to Italy.

Somalia's state radio quoted the Somali Embassy in Egypt in reporting the incident.

In a joint statement from the president, prime minister and speaker of parliament in Somalia, they said 400 migrants had drowned in the capsizing. But later the Somali information minister said there was confusion over the number of casualties, which could be 200.

"It's a painful tragedy which reminds us all how important it is for us to discourage our youth from embarking on such high risk journeys," the statement said.

A Somali news website, Goobjoog News, carried an interview with Awale Warsame, who said survived the incident.

"There were 500 passengers, mostly Somalis on the boat, but only 23 people survived," he said. "Survivors, including me, had to use broken wood pieces from the capsized boat to float over waters before we were rescued.

"We had travelled from Egypt, especially Alexandria, on April 7th and the boat capsized on April 12 but we were rescued by a Filipino ship off a Greek island five days later."

Egyptian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said his office had no information and officials are checking the reports.

The Greek coast guard said it had no report of a boat sinking in the area.
The murder of Michael McGibbon forces us to rethink our easy assumptions about paramilitary shootings. The first of these is that the one who got shot probably had it coming to him. If the shooting was - as obviously - brutal and disproportionate to the routine crimes that get lumped together in the political lexicon as "anti-social behaviour", the fact remains: those who swagger and scheme in certain areas are inevitably going to attract the attention of the goons with guns.

The usual logic is that while they may not have - strictly speaking - deserved it, they brought it on themselves, had it coming.

But that crass thinking by which we have been tempted to absolve our paramilitaries fails in the face of the killing of Michael McGibbon, who was not a known criminal, who had called the police for help, who was a married man with a family, with a wife who is a nurse who struggled to save him as the blood poured out of him in an alleyway.

This one is a bit more discomfiting than the usual run and we should ask why we generally pass over the others and give them little notice. Could it be that we just don't want to contemplate how brutal our paramilitaries are?

The presumption that they are really just decent people doing their best in trying circumstances has actually permeated our political culture.

Even with the dissidents, as they are called, the republican purists who never let go of the vision of the early Provos, there is talk of how they might be reasoned with, brought into the fold, and rather less of how it would be better if they were the ones getting shot.

Our political system functions in dread of the prospect of the PSNI, or worse still the Army, shooting dead a couple of these dissidents and unnerving the entire Sinn Fein support base.

But who will argue flatly with the logic that had the gunmen who killed Michael McGibbon been intercepted and come off worse, that would have been a better outcome? We don't like to think things through as plainly as that, so we sanitise the events in our minds and in our conversations. We rationalise that these things are inevitable, probably not as bad as they seem; that they are a by-product of disaffection between communities and the police.

I had a row with a senior social worker some years ago after a radio programme in which he had said that the IRA didn't actually want to shoot people in the legs, thought it had more important things to do than to pursue "anti-social elements", joyriders and drug dealers, had a war to be getting on with and regarded these young louts as clutter on the battlefield.

Having studied that whole kneecapping culture for a book, I had concluded that this was exactly what the Provos wanted most to be doing, that it was what they expended most of their effort on and that it would be the hardest part of their campaign to give up.

Back then the rationale was that we had a "policing vacuum". The Catholic community needed paramilitary policing, by this logic, because it did not trust the RUC.

The laugh of that was that you could not find a kneecapped joyrider who had not already been arrested and processed through the courts, who had not already served time in Hydebank. Often the Provos had to wait for their release before shooting them on the alleged grounds that no one else was doing anything about them.

Which is not to say that policing was not flawed, often cynical and brutal, but hardly absent.

Now we can speculate further on why the Provos put so much into their war on criminals. We now know that they were scaling down their campaign, concentrating on "spectaculars", which required highly skilled operatives, and that they had to give the rank-and-file other things to do.

If you had joined the IRA it was in the expectation that you would get to shoot people, so you got sent out to shoot joyriders and drug dealers. But there had to be other attractions in this kind of activity when loyalists and other groups took to it so readily.

Paramilitary organisations can only function if people are afraid of them. Some may think of it more as respect than fear, but they know that the consequences are the same; annoy them and you will pay for it.

Some may think of it more as common sense than intimidation that makes them tread warily. But you are still going to get a bullet in the leg. Some will even say they deserved it.

I knew fathers who beat their own sons with hurley sticks to give them a foretaste of what they would suffer if the Provos got them.

I have spoken to people who were kneecapped and held no grudge against the men who had done it, since they were only following orders, working a system that was entrenched, "the way things are".

Guns - and the willingness to use them - give people power in their communities. And when that power is as irrevocable as the State itself you play along with it, as you play along with the man who comes to read your meter.

So, add it up: paramilitaries do this stuff because it gives them power, it gives them security and it gives the men something to do when they are not doing much else. And, worse, it implicates people outside the movement and gives them a motive to cover for them.

From the person who sees a kneecapping and walks on by to the one who, cheesed off with a noisy neighbour, a car thief or a drug dealer hanging out with the kids, goes to the local hardman to have something done - all are implicated, burdened with a secret and tempted to rationalise all the more passionately that they were right.

The cold fact is that paramilitaries have much to gain from shooting their neighbours. They have always done it and, ironically, the communities they operate in have made excuses for them when they have done it.

They have accepted that many of the victims deserved what they got, were unworthy of their pity and have lived with the delusion that it can never come to their door, because they are good citizens.

But once you concede power to the likes of the thugs who shot Michael McGibbon, your own life is overshadowed by them and you have no peace.
Cloud of Clouds delivers clear control and choice

The idea behind cloud computing is simple  you store your information in a data centre and make use of it with services over the internet. The cloud is now part of our personal lives  we use it through Apps or when were on Facebook and increasingly its becoming the focus of business strategy for Northern Irelands larger enterprises.

Over the past couple of years, the cloud market has matured. On-demand applications and services have been adopted by businesses, and that rate of adoption is set to grow exponentially over the next few years.

Companies in Northern Ireland have developed a new understanding of what the cloud is, in terms of how it can fit with their business and objectives, as well as the benefits it can bring  from cost savings and the ability to scale at speed as required, through to access to the latest applications, without the capital outlay for hardware and software, and ongoing management.

While the concept of the cloud is simple, experience teaches us that nothing in life  especially in IT  is ever that simple. A tangle of different cloud services can tie up a businesss network resources, frustrate employees and pose potential risks.

A better answer is to wrap all your multiple clouds into one single cloud that you can manage and maximize. Its an approach that BT calls the Cloud of Clouds.The perfect cloud environment is one that allows easy and secure consumption of internal services and external solutions. Not so easy in practice when you consider that you might have a whole host of cloud services from multiple suppliers, offering varying degrees of support and security. And, of course, the quality of your experience depends not on your choice of cloud services, but on the quality of your communications network.

Thats where the BT Cloud of Clouds comes in.Colin Hamill, Head of Network Enabled Services, says: Its a powerful combination of our centralised management system for integrated access to multiple cloud services, IT integration skills, global network and professional security expertise that is unique.

Were already adding to the Cloud of Clouds. For instance, were offering customers the ability to connect directly to the Microsoft Office 365 productivity suite with Microsoft ExpressRoute, enabling our customers to establish a privacy-enhanced, managed connection to Microsofts cloud-based Office 365 service, with the highly predictable performance and reliability that comes with dedicated connectivity.

Lookers plc, whose Northern Ireland operations comprise the regions biggest motor group, Charles Hurst, are moving into the cloud. They are using Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute and, says Enterprise Architect John Law, they have chosen BT to provide the infrastructure.

Our strategy is to move away from on-premise to cloud-based computing and BT is able to provide the resilient and secure connectivity we need, Law says. For us, the cloud gives us a cost-effective ability to scale up at pace, with the assurance of security, so that ultimately we deliver a better customer experience. Were delighted with the ease at which weve been able to work with BT to get it up and running.

Making the most of the cloud is becoming essential for growth-oriented enterprises in Northern Ireland. Great preparation starts now, using a Cloud of Clouds strategy that delivers real control and choice, flexibility and security all in one package.

Colin Hamill is Head of Network Enabled Services at BT Business Northern Ireland.

For further information and to contact BT Business in Northern Ireland please email enterprise.accounts@bt.com
Sunday Life News Iain Halliday leaves Newtownards Court where he faced charges of making threats to kill and assult.

One of Northern Irelands top architects has admitted assaulting a woman and damaging one of her paintings.

Helens Bay businessman Iain Halliday is best known as the designer of Belfasts luxury boutique Fitzwilliam Hotel in Great Victoria Street which opened its doors in 2009.

At Newtownards Magistrates Court on Wednesday, the shamed 57-year-old architect pleaded guilty to the three charges against him involving a woman named Kathryn Bury.

Halliday had previously denied the charges of common assault, threats to kill and criminal damage of a painting made by Ms Bury.

The incidents, which took place on September 25, 2015, were listed for contest but the matter was settled outside of court on Tuesday afternoon resulting in no witnesses needing to be called.

Changing

Halliday, from Church Road, Helens Bay first appeared in court on October 22 where he entered pleas of not guilty to all three charges.

He then returned to Newtowards Magistrates Court twice in February before changing his plea to guilty last week.

Halliday was a director/company secretary of Co. Down firm Wirefox Design Ltd, previously known as Halliday Ramsay Partnership Ltd.

According to Companies House records he resigned as a director on April 13 - the day he appeared at Ards Court to admit the charges.

Halliday Ramsay was founded in January 2000 and offers architecture, interior design, project management and planning services.

On the companys website, which is still active, Halliday Ramsay claims to work principally in the private sector on commercial, retail, leisure and residential projects ranging in value from 250,000 to 15 million.

Halliday Ramsays Northern Ireland projects have included the 11m Fitzwilliam Hotel, the 4.5m Radisson SAS hotel in Belfast and the 4m development of the Lighthouse Building at the Gasworks in Belfast.

Halliday began his career in Edinburgh in the 1980s where one of his early projects was designing a kitchen for top Tory politician Malcolm Rifkind who held various cabinet posts in the 1990s including Defence Secretary and Foreign Secretary.

In the 1990s Halliday was project director for the firm which designed Derrys Foyleside Shopping Centre.

This week an alternative version of the public realm scheme created by local architect Iain Halliday came into circulation.

In 2013 Halliday created alternative plans to Bangors 8 million public realm proposal to redevelop the coastal town close to Hallidays home.

Hallidays proposed vision, which included pedestrianising much of the town, redesigning shops, repositioning the local market and increasing parking facilities, was well received by members of North Down Borough Council and the local community.

Judge Hamill adjourned Hallidays case until May 11 to give time for pre-sentence reports to be prepared.
Updated at 1:25 p.m. ET on 2017-01-31

The government in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu has decided to provide protection to inter-community couples following a string of recent honor killings in the state.

Honor killings, in which couples are attacked because their families disapprove of their relationships over caste or religion, have emerged as a major debate in the last two decades in officially secular but historically caste-conscious India.

An April 14, 2016, High Court order directed the Tamil Nadu government to build safe shelters and set up a 24-hour helpline, among other measures, for inter-caste couples who fear for their lives.

A senior state official said Monday that the government had already begun work to implement the High Court order.

Raj Shekharan, deputy secretary of the Department of Social Welfare, told BenarNews: We have already directed our field officers to send us the data for honor killings from their respective areas. After we receive their reports, we will consult the law department and other concerned agencies before preparing a draft proposal (to address the problem).

Evidence, a Tamil Nadu-based organization working to secure rights of the Dalit community, which forms the lowest rung of the Hindu caste hierarchy, claims there have been more than 80 honor killings in the state in less than three years.

Hacked to death

Although India-specific figures are unavailable, U.N. statistics show that 1,000 of 5,000 such killings annually occur in India, a majority of them in the countrys rural pockets.

In the latest such incident, V. Sankar, a 22-year-old engineering student, was hacked to death allegedly by members of his wifes family in broad daylight in Tamil Nadus Udumalpet town last month.

Sankar, a Dalit, had married Kausalya, 19, who belongs to the upper Thevar caste, eight months before the brutal attack, which occurred in full public view and was caught on closed-circuit cameras.

Sankar and Kausalya, who was critically injured in the attack, had approached police on several occasions, citing threat to life, but no action was taken to provide them with security, Sankars brother, Vigneswaran, had told BenarNews then.

Last weeks court ruling is set to change that.

Three-month deadline

Among the courts nine-point directive, the state government has been ordered to establish a special cell in each of the states districts to ensure the safety of inter-caste couples who fear attacks from family or community members.

These cells, which have to be set up within three months, must comprise a Superintendent of Police, District Social Welfare Officer and District Adi Dravidar (Dalit) Welfare Officer, according to the directive.

The government must also create a special fund to protect inter-caste couples who elope fearing a threat to life, the court said. The fund is to be utilized for providing shelter to the couples and rehabilitating them.

A bill that calls for harsher punishment for honor crimes has been debated since 2010 but has yet to be tabled in parliament for clearance.

Legislation to take stringent action against those involved in honor killings should be brought forward, G. Ramakrishnan of the left-wing Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) told reporters recently.

Without considering the political affiliation or vote bank politics, it is the responsibility of all parties to put an end to such heinous crimes, he said.

Calls for similar setup across India

Neeraj Pandey, a lawyer in the High Court of north Indias Uttar Pradesh state, which has one of the highest rates of honor killings in the country, said a system to protect inter-caste couples should be put in place across India. agreed with Gupta.

Each day the Uttar Pradesh court hears about 80 cases pertaining to honor crimes, Pandey told BenarNews.

Soon, we will move a Public Interest Litigation seeking directions to the state government to take stringent measures to curb honor killings, he said.

This story has been rewritten following complaints about accuracy that we were unable to resolve.
Updated at 7:34 a.m. ET on 2016-04-20

Bangladesh police have arrested an opposition-backed editor on charges of conspiring to kill Prime Minister Sheikh Hasinas son and are seeking to arrest a former state minister in the same case.

Police on Saturday arrested Shafik Rehman, 81, at his home in Dhaka. Rehman edits a pro-opposition political magazine, Mouchake Dhil.

He was arrested based on evidence provided by the U.S. Department of Justice, according to Sajeeb Wazed Joy, who says he is the target of the plot.

The U.S. Department of Justice discovered Shafik Rehmans direct involvement in the plot to kidnap and kill me. They provided this evidence to our government, Joy wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday.

 I cannot disclose more, but the evidence is direct and irrefutable, he wrote.

Joy, who lives in the United States, is widely seen as Sheikh Hasinas likely successor as leader of the ruling Awami League party.

The U.S. Department of Justice initially did not respond to a BenarNews request for comment. On Tuesday a spokesman for the DOJ, Peter Carr, responded but declined comment.

FBI agent bribed

However, three people have been arrested in the United States in connection with a plot to locate and harm a prominent citizen of Bangladesh, according to a DOJ statement from September 2015.

From September 2011 to March 2012, FBI special agent Robert Lustyik and another man, Johannes Thaler, solicited bribe payments from Rizve Ahmed in exchange for Lustyiks agreement to provide confidential documents and information pertaining to a prominent citizen of Bangladesh whom Ahmed perceived to be a political rival, and whom Ahmed sought to locate and harm, the statement said.

All three men pleaded guilty and received jail terms, the statement said.

When they pled guilty in October 2014, Thaler and Ahmed admitted that they had exchanged text messages about the scheme, including one about a contract that would require Ahmed to pay a retainer of $40,000 and a monthly payment of $30,000, according to a DOJ statement dated Oct. 17, 2014.

In return, Lustyik and Thaler agreed to give [Ahmed] everything [they] ha[d] plus set up [the victim] and get the inside from the party, the earlier statement said.

Lustyik, who had access to confidential documents, got five years in jail while Thaler got 30 months and Ahmed 42 months, the DOJ said.

The Conspiracy Case

The DOJ statement did not mention Shafik Rehman.

Bangladesh police say Rehman is linked to the plot, and they further allege that its mastermind is a U.S.-based leader of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Mohammad Ullah Mamun, who is Rizve Ahmeds father.

Based on the U.S. case, the detective branch of the Dhaka police has filed a case against Mamun, according to court documents. But the case has gone no further as he is not in Bangladesh.

Shafik Rehman was not an accused in the murder conspiracy case. But the police, in the course of the investigation, detected his involvement in the scheme. So, he has been arrested, police spokesman Maruf Hossain Sarder told BenarNews.

Tyrannical

The head of the BNP and Rehmans wife, Taleya Rehman, both allege that he is a political victim.

Shafik Rehman is a courageous journalist. He is a committed journalist to uphold the truth. He has been arrested as the government failed to subjugate him. This has exposed the governments extreme tyrannical attitude, BNP chief Khaleda Zia said in a statement soon after the arrest.

Taleya Rehman told BenarNews: The allegations are completely bogus; these are politically motivated.

AHM Bazlur Rahman, chief executive officer of the Bangladesh NGO Network for Radio and Communication, said Rehman is a BNP leader more than a journalist.

Shafik Rehman was arrested on criminal charge, not for his writing. We think the cases against Mahfuz Anam involved the freedom of expression issue, but not Shafik Rehmans, he told BenarNews.

Anam, the editor of The Daily Star, the largest English-language daily in Bangladesh, is facing dozens of criminal lawsuits that began piling up shortly after Wazed lashed out at him on Facebook.

The suits were filed after Anam admitted in a TV interview in February that his paper ran unverified articles in 2007 that were fed by the military and smeared politicians with corruption allegations.

The reports led to arrests of prominent politicians, including Hasina and Zia, when Bangladesh was ruled by a military-backed caretaker government.

I demand justice, the PMs son said on Facebook in February. I want Mahfuz Anam behind bars and on trial for treason.

Second arrest sought

Police on Monday submitted a petition in court seeking permission to implicate another individual, Mahmudur Rahman, in the conspiracy case.

Rahman, a former state minister of the BNP government, is already in jail for a corruption case. According to Agence France-Presse, Rahman is the editor of the Amar Desh newspaper, which Bangladeshi authorities shut down in 2013 for allegedly inciting religious tension.

Both Shafik Rehman and Mahmudur Rahman met with conspirators in the United States to discuss the plot, Deputy General Inspector of police Monirul Islam told reporters in Dhaka.

Rahman took over the Bengali-language daily Amar Desh in 2008, but it has since been shuttered by the Awami League government for publishing what it says are unsubstantiated corruption stories implicating Wazed and other AL figures.

An earlier version of this story did not name The Daily Star, the newspaper where Mahfuz Anam is editor.
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For Immediate Release, April 18, 2016 Contact: Rebecca Sobel, WildEarth Guardians, (505) 216-6826

Mariel Nanasi, New Energy Economy, (505) 989-7262

Susan Gordon, Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment, (505) 577-8438

Eleanor Bravo, Food & Water Watch, (505) 730-8474

Taylor McKinnon, Center for Biological Diversity, (801) 300-2414

Ruth Breech, Rainforest Action Network, (415) 238-1766

Marissa Knodel, Friends of the Earth, (202) 222-0729 Groups to Obama: Keep It in the Ground, Cancel Fossil Fuel Auction in Santa Fe SANTA FE, N.M. Local, regional and national organizations sent a letter to President Obama today calling on him to keep federal fossil fuels in the ground and cancel the Bureau of Land Managements federal oil and gas auction slated for April 20 in Santa Fe, N.M., owing to concerns over runaway greenhouse gas pollution and the climate crisis. The Bureau will be auctioning more than 2,300 acres of publicly owned oil and gas in Kansas and Oklahoma to private fossil fuel corporations on Wednesday. The agency authorized this sale despite the worsening climate crisis; administrative challenges to the auction by the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and others reduced its size from 36,000 to 2,300 acres. Days away from signing the Paris climate agreements, the president says hes committed to climate leadership, said Rebecca Sobel, senior climate and energy campaigner for WildEarth Guardians. But the hypocrisy is stark  we cant avert climate catastrophe while BLM continues to auction off our public lands for fracking. The time for all of the above energy policies are over. We can't talk the talk of addressing climate change and preserving the planet for our children and lease federal land to the polluters, said Mariel Nanasi, executive director of New Energy Economy. Were out of time for delays, half-measures and all of the above energy policies, said Taylor McKinnon with the Center. Limiting temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, as the Paris climate agreement aims, requires keeping fossil fuels in the ground. President Obama should do that now by stopping new fossil fuel leases on public lands and oceans. Fossil fuel companies have made millions off public land leases while wrecking the environment, harming peoples health, violating Indigenous rights, and passing off massive clean-up costs to taxpayers. Its time for President Obama and the BLM to heed the peoples call to keep it in the ground, end the corporate giveaway, and cancel these lands sales forever. said Ruth Breech, senior campaigner for Rainforest Action Network. Todays letter states that the sale perpetuates a conflict between the Obama administrations climate goals and its all of the above energy policy by leasing federal fossil fuels that should be considered unburnable in the context of global carbon budgets. It notes that climate science makes clear that a majority of fossil fuels must be kept in the ground to avoid dangerous warming and the impacts of drought, severe wildfires, extreme weather events and global sea-level rise. Federal fossil fuels  those that the president directly controls  should be the first taken off the table. "President Obama's climate legacy depends on keeping fossil fuels in the ground, said Marissa Knodel with Friends of the Earth. With more fossil fuels leased than can be burned to avoid climate catastrophe, President Obama must put a stop to all new lease sales of public fossil fuels." In September more than 400 organizations and leaders working on the Keep It in the Ground campaign delivered a letter calling on President Obama to end new federal fossil fuel leasing following reports that doing so would keep up to 450 billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution in the ground, and that the president has the legal authority to do so now, without Congress. "The American Southwest will be among the regions hardest hit by climate change, said Eleanor Bravo of Food & Water Watch. Continuing to sell off fossil fuels from beneath our federal lands is no better than outright denial of climate science. Let's put an end to drilling, fracking and mining for publicly owned fossil fuels, and remake energy systems in the southwest based on clean, renewable solutions. The Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment is a network of groups in the Grants mining district representing communities directly impacted by uranium mining, said Susan Gordon with the Alliance. We stand with other groups today to support keeping all dirty fuels in the ground  oil, gas, coal and uranium  and we support a rapid transition to clean, renewable non-nuclear energy. Groups calling on Obama to withdraw this weeks sale include Center for Biological Diversity, Dine Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, Interfaith Worker Justice  NM, New Energy Economy, New Mexico Interfaith Power and Light, Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment (MASE), Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club and WildEarth Guardians. Hundreds of climate activists plan to rally outside of the Santa Fe auction at 8:30 on Wednesday should it go forward. Over the past several months, the Keep It in the Ground movement has resulted in increasingly large public protests at federal fossil fuel auctions in Alaska, Utah, Nevada, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Colorado and Louisiana; several have been halted due to agencies inability to accommodate crowds. To download a copy of todays letter, click here. To view a media advisory for Wednesdays Santa Fe rally, click here. Background

The American public owns nearly 650 million acres of federal public land, and more than 1.7 billion acres of Outer Continental Shelf  and the fossil fuels beneath them. Some 67 million acres of U.S. public lands are already leased to dirty fossil fuel industries, an area 55 times larger than Grand Canyon National Park containing up to 43 billion tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution. Nearly one quarter of all U.S. climate pollution already comes from burning fossil fuels from public lands. Remaining federal oil, gas, coal, oil shale and tar sands that have not been leased to industry contain up to 450 billion additional tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution. In September more than 400 organizations called on President Obama to end federal fossil fuel leasing. In November Sens. Merkley (D-Ore.), Sanders (D-Vt.) and others introduced the Keep It in the Ground Act, legislation to end new federal fossil fuel leases and cancel non-producing federal fossil fuel leases. Last month the Obama administration placed a moratorium on federal coal leasing while the Department of the Interior studies its impacts on taxpayers and the planet. Since November 2015 in response to Keep It in the Ground protests, the BLM has postponed oil and gas leasing auctions in Utah, Montana, Wyoming and Washington, D.C. Download the September Keep It in the Ground letter to President Obama. Download Grounded: The Presidents Power to Fight Climate Change, Protect Public Lands by Keeping Publicly Owned Fossil Fuels in the Ground (this report details the legal authorities with which a president can halt new federal fossil fuel leases). Download The Potential Greenhouse Gas Emissions of U.S. Federal Fossil Fuels (this report quantifies the volume and potential greenhouse gas emissions of remaining federal fossil fuels). Download The Potential Greenhouse Gas Emissions fact sheet. Download Public Lands, Private Profits (this report details the corporations profiting from climate-destroying fossil fuel extraction on public lands). Download WildEarth Guardians formal petition calling on the Department of the Interior to study for the first time ever the climate impacts of the federal oil and gas leasing program and to place a moratorium on new leasing until completed that study is completed. Download the Center for Biological Diversitys formal petition calling on the Obama administration to halt all new offshore fossil fuel leasing.
Young Stars AD Competition 2016, reportedly the first student advertising competition of its kind in the world, gives students the chance to get ahead in the advertising industry by taking part in a unique mentoring programme. It takes place in Busan, South Korea, which is one of Asia's fastest growing creative hubs.

The goal of Young Stars is to identify and develop talent from all over the world, because it is todays students who will determine the future of our industry, says Euija Lee and Hwanjin Choi, co-chairpersons at Ad Stars.

Entry requirements

Eligible participants include university/college students, with an advertising or design-related major, including those taking a temporary gap year and graduate students (excluding Ph.D. graduates). Teams must contain no more than three people.

To take part in the Young Stars AD Competition, entrants must apply as part of a team of two or three people and submit a joint-application form before Friday 29 April 2016. Each team must explain why they would like to be part of the Young Stars AD competition 2016. They should also submit a small portfolio of work, which will be judged by experts in the advertising industry.

The top 40 teams from all over the globe will then be invited to fly to Haeundae beach in Busan, where they will learn from advertising professionals and be given a project to complete, giving them a taste of what it is like to work in the fast-paced advertising industry.

To enter, go to www.adstars.org and click on Young Stars AD Competition. Each team must pay a registration fee of 100,000 KRW (approximately $85) per person.

Selected teams will be announced on the website and individually contacted on Wednesday 7 June 2016.
Digital marketing has already established itself as the fastest growing advertisement industry  it will grow 15.4% this year compared to TV which will only do 2.5%. Its easy to see why digital ad is growing so fast  people spend much longer staying online than they do watching TV, or may be reading a magazine or newspaper.

Traditionally, digital ad spending was focused on text, display and search advertising; an industry where Google Adwords has been enjoying monopoly for the last 16 years. While traditional display advertising had worked great for marketers in the early years, the same cannot be said for recent years as customers have reportedly developed a fatigue to display advertisement in general. More marketers crowding the few meaningful advertisement platforms also meant that cost for an action has kept going up.

Rise of content marketing

A screenshot of the AMEX Open Forum, one of the most successful content marketing effort till date.

Marketers for long had been dependent on advertisements to attract traffic to their landing pages to generate leads. Further follow-ups were mostly done through email marketing. Along the years, digital marketing has evolved in a few different directions, content marketing being one that holds large promise. Already an almost $200bn global industry, content marketing is well set to become a $313bn global industry by 2019, according to PQ Media.

The growth and increased importance has been triggered by the rise of the different social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, etc. each creating unique content opportunities for businesses. Marketers have realised that its extremely easy to communicate directly with customers and consumers; they now have an audience that reacts, responds and takes action and all the flows can be analysed in real time. The key is to produce valuable materials that would attract, acquire and engage a carefully targeted following.

Consumers are hungry for stories, and brands can take the opportunity to become excellent story tellers by preparing coherent, relevant content customised to every need and situation. Marketers have learnt how earned, shared and acquired media assets can be consistent sources of quality organic traffic, which when boosted with paid advertising, can become a force to be reckoned with.

Big data brings big opportunities

Big data is the massive amount of data that is being created every minute. According to McKinsey & Company, big data is well set to be the next $100bn industry. Generating, mining, storing and analysing big data for insights have become economically relevant for all businesses. Many companies have always owned big data, and with increased digitisation of business and advent of technologies such as smartphones and the internet, more and more companies now possess tremendous amount of valuable data they can analyse to discern patterns and make better decisions.

And most of the big data in this world is being generated online. Think about the number of conversations taking place on Facebook, images being shared on Instagram, videos being uploaded on Youtube, articles being published on blogs and websites. Think about the data being generated by your analytics software, CRM software, third-party data companies such as Alexa.com and Buzzsumo.com. Theres so much data around content, that it just seems like a no-brainer that big data will become an integral part of content marketing.

Use big data in content marketing

Its likely that you already have large amounts of data readily available to you through your social profiles, Google Analytics, customer records, sales receipts, support tickets and other platforms. But obviously having a vast amount of data is useless if you do not know how to harness its power. I will try to show you a few ways you can immediately put your data to use in order to enhance your content marketing efforts.

Big data can help you:

1. Create better content

Make use of big data to understand the topics you should talk about, the type of content you should create, and the platforms you should target to bring the best results. You do not necessarily have to be a programmer to reap the benefits of big data. This Kissmetric blog post shows you how to mine the titles of articles published on websites such as Marketo, HubSpot and Social Media Today using a simple web scraping tool, and then running the titles through a basic word counting tool to find out the buzz words that appear frequently in the titles.

To be honest, even thats too much to do when you want to learn more about current trends in a particular industry and convert them into content ideas. Buzzsumo is a brilliant content research tool that makes use of big data to crawl and index all the latest content that is being produced about any topic and generates corresponding performance statistics so that you know how each piece of content actually performed.

Clearvoice is another relatively new discovery tool thats going to receive a lot of appreciation from digital marketers in coming days. ClearVoice has developed an immense database of almost every author writing for almost every other publishing site on the internet. Apart from generating brilliant content insights and topic ideas, ClearVoice can also be used to find and reach out to industry influencers and ask them about content collaboration projects.

2. Analyse how your customers and prospects engage with your content

Use analytics and customer insights provided by the social media platforms you are already using. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all other major social media platforms provide accurate and detailed reports about consumer insights.

See who your audiences are, what do they like most, and what are they most interested about. See if they are responding to your call to action.

3. Measure reach and awareness

Track and measure everything. Analyze page insights to track how they are engaging with your page. When you send them to your website, track the transition with Google analytics. Use a service like bitly.com as an additional tracking if you are as paranoid as me.

Want to see if the people who actually went to your landing page fill up that email form? Use a tracking pixel. Want to be able to track this user on the long term? Use cookies.

Basically, once a customer falls into your funnel, there are a lot of ways you can track his/her movement at all stages of conversion. If you are using paid promotions, measure your ROI and cost per desired action at all steps, and see whats working for you and whats not. Gradually, associate values to all kinds of actions you want your customer to take, be it a Facebook like, a share, or a retweet, and use them as benchmark for future campaigns.

Observe people talking about your brand. Use targeted hashtags, username handles, url shorteners to track subtopics, cascade customer conversations and to track individual campaigns.

Keep track of your reach. See how your content is performing across each platform. Hootsuite is a very good social media management tool and can keep track of all these things for you.

4. Optimise the buyers journey

Gather intelligence and insights about your buyers journey. Google Analytics is a strong tool you always have in hand  use it. Connect your Analytics account with your social accounts to better track the movement of your customers to and from your website to your content channels. You could also integrate solutions like FunnelCake to develop comprehensive insights about your buyers journey in a more efficient manner.

5. Retain customers and build loyalty

Remarketing is an excellent advertisement feature that enables a marketer to display ads to a defined audience which has had past interactions with the brand. Think of the possibilities arising from being able to market fresh content to customers today who researched about the same topic just the previous day. Defining customers at each level of conversion and identifying their position on the buyers journey will enable marketers develop targeted content to drive conversion.

Marketers should take a similar approach to foster loyalty. Tracking customer conversations about the brand, identifying evangelists and loyal followers and engaging with them proactively will definitely help your content marketing efforts. Hootsuite, again, is a good tool to have if you handle a lot of social accounts.
In October 2015, the Paediatric ICU (PICU) at the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital embarked upon a R100m-plus expansion and upgrade. The building will cost R75m and ICU equipment a further R25m. Faced with a chronic shortage of paediatric Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds in Africa, the project will improve intensive care services for critically ill and injured children. The 22-bed PICU is the largest ICU for children in Africa, but simply cannot meet current demands.

With the majority of funding already secured for the building upgrade, the Childrens Hospital Trust  the official fundraisers for the Red Cross Childrens Hospital  are calling on the public to help raise the final R10m for the building between March and June. The hospital turned to advertising agency M&C Saatchi Abel to drive awareness and donations around the life-saving initiative. The agencys creative team developed a powerful campaign centred on the key insight that young children confined to Paediatric ICU essentially miss a part of their childhood.

Growing up, children learn the basics of their language and speech in a fun, healthy environment, explains Nicole Binikos, art director at M&C Saatchi Abel. However, some kids are not as fortunate as they are born with or develop chronic illnesses from a young age. This sees them spending a vast amount of their childhood in a paediatric hospital. This extreme environment becomes their foundation of learning, and sadly, these children pick up on words they shouldnt know just yet.

By driving donations towards building a bigger and better Paediatric ICU, more children can thus receive their treatment sooner and get back to simply being a kid again.

The power of language

The campaign has four key elements: an Influencer Drop and social media campaign, TVC, radio and print.

Young kids are taught the basics of language with learning tools such as alphabet blocks. The agency delivered boxes of alphabet blocks to influencers with the word tumour already spelled out. This was a great, tangible way to contrast the innocence of childhood with the horror of disease. The Red Cross Childrens hospital then invited influencers to change the word tumour to something more positive and re-tweet a pic of the new word to followers using the hashtag #GiveBackChildhood. explains Leon Kotze, copywriter.

In the carefully crafted TVC, the Red Cross War Memorial Childrens Hospital asked healthy children whether they knew what a tumour was. Predictably, none of them did. Cadi de Jager, a former patient at the hospital, gives the correct answer with ease. This contrast again reinforces the campaign message by proving the sad truth that sick kids need to get back home as quickly as possible.

Another learning technique that helps children with spelling is breaking up a word into letters to create a rhyme or verse that resembles something more fun, says Kotze. This technique is demonstrated in the radio ads where kids break up words as if to learn them, only to reveal that the words are: tumour, biopsy and dialysis.

The campaign is undoubtedly reaching South Africans  with the Red Cross War Memorial Childrens Hospital announcing in April that the R2.5m funding target for the period had already been surpassed, says Jerry Mpufane, MD of M&C Saatchi Abel Gauteng.






To build a platform of diabetes and hypertension experts across the globe, Merck has launched two awards for students across Africa and the Middle East.

Merck diabetes and hypertension awards launch

About the awards

The diabetes award was inaugurated last year in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and has grown to include Africa.

Students from medical schools in both regions will be asked to submit a concept paper aimed at improving awareness about the early detection and prevention of diabetes in their countries and to encourage their society, scientific community, local authorities, media and relevant stakeholders to think and act on the theme of Diabetes every day. The winner from each university will be awarded a one-year postgraduate diabetes diploma.

Merck has also kicked off its Hypertension Award with theme What the healthy heart needs, the winner of this award will be conferred a one-year postgraduate preventive cardiovascular medicines diploma from South Wales University.

Building healthcare capacity

"Merck plays an important role in building healthcare capacity in Africa by addressing non-communicable diseases(NCDs) focusing on rural areas, medical students and local partnership with academia, ministries of health, policy makers and governments, Belen Garijo, CEO of Merck Healthcare says.

Growing risk

Dr Dima Abd Elmannan, clinical dean of Dubai Medical Colleges states: In recent years, we have seen a rapid rise in type 2 diabetes across all age groups.

The UAE is ranked 16th worldwide, with 19,2% of the UAE population living with diabetes. These statistics indicate that the region has high risk factors for diabetes, mostly related to rising obesity rates and physical inactivity. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop accredited teaching programmes.

"Were excited about the students applications for Merck Diabetes Award, most of their ideas were very innovative and can make a change in diabetes landscape in UAE. The scientific committee decided to give the award to two applicants, the first winner was Nujood Al Shirawi, a graduate ff Dubai Medical University and currently interning as a house officer under the auspices of the Dubai Health Authority (DHA).

The other winners were two medical students in their fourth year of Dubai Medical University, Sana Laraib Daud and Zoubia Fathima.

Expanding across Africa

Dr Ahmed Reja, president of the International Diabetes Federation says: We are very happy to partner with Merck in driving their strategy to build diabetes capacity and roll out the award across Africa. The outcome in UAE was remarkable, it encouraged the students to be more innovative and take a leadership position to fight diabetes in their own country.

I am confident that the students across Africa will be equally enthusiastic to participate and present their own ideas and concepts to improve the access to diabetes healthcare solutions in their own countries he adds.

This combined diabetes and hypertension education programme will contribute towards providing guidelines and clinical practice for prevention, diagnosis and management of those diseases and their complications. The objective of this initiative is to increase the level of knowledge for medical students, Professor Eligah Ogola, vice president of Pan African Cardiology Society, explains.

Merck is planning to target more than 25,000 students by the end of 2018 expanding to more African, Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries with special focus on NCDs such as diabetes, cancer and fertility management. The programme will also kick off initiatives on building research capacity and improving supply chain in order to improve patient safety in Africa.

Click here to find out more about the Merck Capacity Advancement Programme.
Woolworths took top honours in a ranking of the commitments of SA's five biggest retailers to renewable energy compiled by environment lobby group Greenpeace Africa, while rival Shoprite Group was last.

The Department of Energys renewable energy independent power producers procurement programme has added almost 2,000MW to the grid since 2011. The programme aims to add more capacity and diversify SAs energy sector away from coal to meet its climate change pledges.

Greenpeace said companies could help to drive the market for renewable energy by making a commitment to obtain 100% of their energy from these sources.

If Woolworths sourced all its electricity from renewables, it would free up enough power for 55,000 households in SA, based on an average per-household electricity consumption of about 8,000kWh a year.

"Arguably, it is the responsibility of all major electricity users in SA to reduce consumption, and produce their own electricity from renewable energy sources, thus decreasing pressure on the grid, and reducing the need for load shedding," Greenpeace said.

Using publicly available information and interviews, Greenpeace Africa ranked SAs five biggest retail groups  Woolworths, Shoprite, Pick n Pay, Spar and Massmart  on four criteria including energy transparency, commitment to renewable energy, greenhouse gas mitigation, and lobbying for renewable energy.

No single retailer did particularly well, Greenpeace said.

On a score out of 10, Woolworths received four, being penalised partly because it did not provide Greenpeace Africa with a detailed plan on how it intended to achieve its commitment to 100% renewables by 2030.

Some of Woolworthss achievements were sourcing about 10% of its head office power from a solar installation last year, and achieving 40% energy saving in its stores compared with 2004 levels.

Massmart ranked second-highest, with 3.5, followed by Pick n Pay with three, and Spar with 1.5 Greenpeace commended Woolworths and Massmart for their transparency. They provided detailed information about their energy consumption and carbon emissions on their websites.

Shoprite received a zero score because "they have a complete lack of transparency with regards to company energy information, and have not engaged with Greenpeace Africa to provide information", the organisation said. Shoprite had not responded to a request for comment by deadline yesterday.

"Ultimately, retailers need to become champions for renewable energy to open up the market and allow renewable energy investments on a broader scale," Greenpeace Africas climate and energy campaigner, Penny-Jane Cooke, said.
There is no mention of an "old guard" in Distell's announcement that five of the executive directors on the board of its unlisted operating company will be replaced by executives who joined the firm after Richard Rushton's appointment as MD in 2013. The changes do not affect listed Distell Group's board.

Dave Carruthers, Steve Nathan and JP van der Walt, who all joined Distell in late 2014, were appointed to the board of unlisted Distell Ltd last week. Kate Rycroft was appointed as an executive director too. They replace five directors who have been with Stellenbosch-based drinks group Distell for between 12 and 40 years, three of whom are women.

The executives who resigned from the board (Caroline Snyman, Debra Ulrich, Carina Gouws, Johan Venter as well as Pieter Carolin), remain in Distells employ.

The company, which makes ciders, brandies, and Amarula Cream reported sales of R12bn in its previous financial year and R1.2bn in headline earnings.

Distell shareholder Chris Logan says the changes have been on the cards since Rushton, formerly at South African Breweries (SAB), took over the top job at a company that many felt had lost its way and was struggling to generate returns for its shareholders.

Rushtons management style, better in tune with SABs efficiency-obsessed culture than the more laid-back Stellenbosch style, is thought to be generating some tension among the groups top management. Although Rushtons efforts have not been fully reflected in bottom-line performance because of his hefty pace of investing, the Distell share price has benefited.

Carruthers, who has been appointed global marketing director, worked at SAB Africa/Asia until 2014, when he followed Rushton to Distell.

Vernon de Vries, the director of corporate and regulatory affairs, dismissed any suggestion of management tension. He said the changes were primarily due to the "revision of the companys corporate strategy" in 2014.

"Although this was an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary change, it did require an organisational redesign."
NEW YORK - Non-alcoholic beverage giant PepsiCo Inc reported on Monday a first quarter drop in profits and the sixth consecutive drop in sales blamed on a strong dollar.

PepsiCo's quarterly net income dropped to $931 million in the first three months of the year (AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan).

Quarterly net income dropped to $931 million, while revenue dropped by 2.9 percent to $11.86 billion against $11.88 billion expected by the markets. Core earnings per share was 89 cents against 81 cents as expected by analysts.

The company's performance in the first three months of the year was affected by a $373 million impairment charge related to its interests in the Tingyi-Asahi Beverages Holding group.

"Foreign exchange translation had a 4.5 percentage point unfavourable impact," and separating its Venezuela operations due to difficulties converting local currency to dollars "had a 2 percentage point unfavorable impact on reported net revenue," PepsiCo said.

The company said it was also affected by a depreciation of its assets in Russia.

The group reaffirmed its 2016 forecast of earnings per share of around $4.66, an increase of 2.0 percent compared with 2015.

"We are off to a strong start to the year and that gives us added confidence in achieving our financial objectives for 2016," said Chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi.
Retail cannibalisation is becoming a growing reality in South Africa and, until now, it has been all too easy to place the blame for this squarely at the feet of shopping centre developers. However, on closer inspection, Marius Muller, CEO of shopping centre investor Pareto, believes this retail cannibalisation is largely being driven by retailers themselves.

Marius Muller

Muller shared his views on the controversial issue at the South African Council of Shopping Centres (SACSC) Annual Research Conference, held in Sandton Central recently. He was joined by Maurice de Villiers of Woolworths and Craig Coetzee of The Spar Group in a panel discussion on retail cannibalisation moderated by executive director of MSCI Phil Barttram.

Cannibalisation refers to a situation in which a retailer opens a new store location close to an existing store. When this happens, the existing store loses customers to the new store. Retailers are usually willing to take the risk of cannibalisation if they believe the new store will also attract new customers that do not currently shop at the retailer, boosting combined sales. However, this isnt always the result.

Chasing the top line

Retail value is being eroded by retailers chasing the top line at the expense of defending what they already have, said Muller. The unchecked expansion of retailers is, in an increasing number of cases, diluting existing store sales in a significant manner. While retailers trading statements may show double-digit turnover growth, like-on-like store growth is often only low- or mid-single-digit and, in some cases, there is no growth at all.

Muller explained that shopping centre developers, investors and funders wont push the button on new schemes without a high level of retailer commitment.

Developers regularly put their projects out to the market, but there is no real way to make them work financially without retailers signing up, he explained. In the case of larger mall developments, usually the big fashion, department, and grocery retailers, all chasing market share, are the first to commit and to give impetus the project. Then, everyone else follows defensively.

Focus on profitability

When the race for market share results in cannibalisation, the consequence is ailing retailers trading at rates and rentals that they cannot stick to and the developer or landlord has to take the hit.

There is talk from retailers that they are changing the way they operate to focus on profitability instead of chasing market share. We dont see this happening though. The talk isnt translating into action, said Muller.

He warned that if someone doesnt draw the line, retailers wont achieve the profitability levels they need in their stores and will find themselves on a slippery slope, especially with the economy teetering on recession with less than 1% growth expected this year.

Muller said: In the US and China, weve seen wholesale exits from malls by retailers. Already, there are signs of blood in the local market, but we can still staunch this if retailers can just say no to new stores with a higher risk of cannibalisation.
Furniture chain Lewis will oppose a request by the National Credit Regulator that the National Consumer Tribunal order it to refund customers of its "club fees" and maintenance plans.

Photographer: Freddy MavundaImage source: BDlive

"Having considered the allegations contained in the referral along with Lewiss external legal counsel, Lewis believes that the allegations are without merit. Accordingly, Lewis has instructed its legal representatives to oppose the referral on its behalf," the retailer said in a statement on Tuesday.

On Monday, Lewis advised shareholders that the National Credit Regulator had referred it to the National Consumer Tribunal for an alleged breach of the National Credit Act.

This is not the first time the regulator has referred the Lewis Group to the tribunal. In July last year, two Lewis Group operating subsidiaries  Lewis Stores and Monarch Insurance  were referred to the tribunal for mis-selling insurance products.

In October, Lewis said it would refund R67.1m to pensioners and self-employed customers for selling them unemployment insurance. It blamed "human error" for the transgression.

Lewis said on Monday that the regulator alleged that the maintenance costs and club fees it charged customers contravened the act and people who signed up should have their money returned.

The regulator requested that the tribunal restrain Lewis Stores from selling these products in future. It also "seeks certain ancillary relief, including the imposition of an administrative fine of 10% of the annual turnover of Lewis Stores".

Lewis said a further announcement would be made as appropriate.
South32, a metals and mining company, has handed over 50 houses to the Steve Tshwete Local Municipality in Middelburg, Mpumalanga, and also announced the construction of an early childhood development centre within the municipality.

George Maseko (left) is one of the beneficiaries of the houses funded by South32. He gets officially handed keys to his new house by executive mayor of Steve Tshwete Local Municipality Mike Masina and Paul Masia who is South32 Coal South Africa vice president - Eastern Operations.

This follows South32s recent launch of the Phola community housing project, the Centre for the Disabled and a walk in business centre in eMalahleni last month.

Commenting on the handover of the houses at Rockdale in Middleburg, vice-president for Corporate Affairs, Africa at South32, Lulu Letlape, says South32s involvement in the project is to assist with reducing the backlog and shortage of housing units for beneficiaries on the Steve Tshwete Local Municipality housing waiting list.

The 50 houses that have been completed form part of Phase I of the project which has a total budget of R20m. The engagement process with local contractors for Phase II of the project has already begun and aims to start construction work on 1 July 2016. The completion of Phase II of the project (approximately 70 housing units) is expected to be in 2017.

Job creation

Letlape says the benefits to the community is the quality housing units for families which translates into human dignity. Local building contractors are being used during construction of these houses; creating jobs and economic livelihood.

In another community development project, South32 has invested R5m in the construction of an early childhood development centre that will have the capacity to cater for 220 children. The centre in Extension 4, Mhluzi, in Middelburg, will be constructed in accordance to the specifications of the Mpumalanga Department of Social Development.

Discussions are currently taking place with local contractors for various construction works. Construction is expected to commence on 30 April 2016 and completed by 30 August 2016. Equipping of facility will be completed by 30 October 2016 in time to have the centre operational in January 2017," she says.

Lastly, a business support centre was opened on 1 March 2016 in an effort to support enterprise and suppliers development in the area. This is the second business centre launched by South32 after launching the first one in the Phola community in Witbank that will assist in providing guidance and support to start-ups and existing enterprises.
A recent case in the US underlines the need to verify that social media information relates to the person in questions before decisions are made about employment.

The story of Ms R.A. of Tampa Bay, US, is a worrying example of how using social media and the web for recruitment purposes may backfire.

Ms A. applied for a full-time job as the office manager of a construction company. After meeting with representatives of the company, she was offered and accepted the position. Unluckily for Ms A., before she started work, the company checked her online activity and found a police mug shot of someone with the same name. This was enough to scare the employer off and, instead of confirming that its new employee was the same R.A., the company gave her position to somebody else. When she found out about her replacement, Ms A. had a background check performed. This background check showed that she had a clean record and was not the R.A. of the mug shot. Unfortunately for Ms A, even though she forwarded this background check to the company, as her position had already been filled, it was too late.

All too often companies and recruiters turn to social media and search engines such as Google to vet prospective employees. While these are useful tools, it is important that, when using them, employers and recruiters are mindful that the information obtained because of a search may be inaccurate, misleading and, as in the case of Ms A., may relate to someone completely different.

Verification needed

Millions of people use the web and social media platforms. It is not uncommon to come across people living in the same area, who have the same name. This could pose significant problems, unless care is taken to verify information obtained from social media and the web about prospective employees. The online world has brought everyone much closer together and the likelihood of your virtual doppelganger being found on the internet increases daily. In order to avoid cases of mistaken identity, companies should approach information gleaned on the web and social media sites with caution. Acting on this information without, at the very least, checking its accuracy is a risky practice that may result in unfairness and legal action.

In South Africa, employee would have had recourse

In South African law, once a job applicant has accepted a job offer, the employment relationship commences. Thus, had Ms A. been employed in South Africa under South African law, the companys conduct in replacing her would have amounted to a dismissal, which, given the facts, would likely have been found to be unfair.

Furthermore, companies may face claims of unfair discrimination and breach of contract should they terminate a candidates employment due to a problematic background check conducted via the web or on social media. Additionally, if the company or recruiter discloses information pertaining to the background check, the candidate may well have a claim for reputational damage.

To avoid potential claims arising out of cases of mistaken identity, companies should finalise background checks before offering employment to a candidate and check the accuracy of the information obtained before acting on it.
Branded Youth, with headline sponsor Standard Bank, has developed the Standard Bank Youth Expo to provide South African matriculants and university students with the tools needed to navigate the volatile economic environment. It will be held on 6-7 August 2016 at the Sandton Convention Centre.

Currently in South Africa, only about 15% of high school students make it to university and the youth unemployment rate rests at 63.1% - no doubt with the former influencing the latter.

Theres a greater need for brands and organizations to engage with the youth of South Africa to ensure that they are educated and empowered for the future, we therefore designed the Expo, as a platform that will fully cater to this, says Bradley Maseko, MD of Branded Youth.

The Expo will run as a career exhibition and youth conference with the aim of inspiring and assisting South Africas future leaders, entrepreneurs and all-round ambitious value-seekers by offering them access to networks, organisations and information that will have a valuable impact on their professional journeys.

Our research and the current political climate show that South African youth are concerned about their future outlook, says Motlatsi Mkalala, senior manager for youth customer financial solutions at Standard Bank South Africa. They are afraid of becoming another unemployment statistic, failed entrepreneurs or being unable to afford their tertiary tuition. The Expo will show them that this does not have to be the case. It will provide the resources necessary that can help turn dreams of future success and prosperity into reality.

Furthermore, through the expo, Standard Bank and Branded Youth aim to raise R3 million through sponsorships, exhibitor contributions, donations from the public at large including private businesses. Once achieved, the money will be donated to various tertiary institutions, so they can award bursaries to deserving students.

The fund isnt reliant on the expo, however, Mkalala continues. The public are welcome to join us in changing lives and building a better South Africa together by contributing to our crowd-funded Pay It Forward fund on the ADDaBIT - Simple Social Saving platform. For contributions to the fund, go to www.ADDaBIT.com, search fund and insert fund code ACHNZAAHUw.

The need to provide young South Africans with opportunities and access to quality tertiary education is now urgent and paramount to our nations success. If our youth move forward, the country moves forward, meaning prosperity for all in all spheres  the Expo is a step in the right direction in facilitating a better future for all, concludes Mkalala.

For more information, go to www.brandedyouth.co.za.
As organisations grow more decentralised in nature, planning will no longer happen in isolation and our strategies will need to become ever more adaptable and geared towards the present and immediate future. Constant reorientation will be key in.

In Part One of my article shifts in strategy for 2016, the focus was on the rise of the micro strategy, in this article we focus on another five key strategic shifts well see in the future.

Strategic shift #1: Small data as the missing link

One of the key industry buzz-phrases in recent years has been big data  a term which encompasses the ever-increasing volume of data available today, that is so extensive and so indefinite that it is difficult to process using traditional methodologies. Ironically, as data becomes easier (and less expensive) to acquire, it is also becoming all the more difficult for us to discern what information is worth our attention as strategists.

In the future, corporate-owned big data, on its own, will be less valuable than small data  the more immediately actionable, digestible nuggets of data, which are often owned by consumers themselves  in gaining a competitive advantage in the marketplace. This is especially relevant when one considers that competitors often have access to the same databases and information resources. Successful planning shows that, very often, big insights can come from small data!

Strategic shift #2: Paying attention to the outliers

Going forward, we can expect to see marketers and strategists making use of data and insights in unconventional ways, to drive more inspired strategic thinking and creative output. One such method takes into account the so-called outliers  the anomalies in a given dataset  rather than following the obvious trends, which are more likely to be visible to (and thus leveraged by) competitors. Although risky, this allows us to target specific niches and unserved needs that can provide a strategic edge. Aligned to this, we will also see more brands paying attention to their indirect competitors.

Dmitriy Shironosov via 123RF

Many brands are successfully using outlier insights to differentiate their propositions and/or offerings. One such manifestation of this shift was seen in the recent international launch of the McDonalds Egg White McMuffin, which tapped into the niche trend of ugly chic. While fast food brands are often notorious for cookie-cutter perfect portrayals of their offerings to consumers, McDonalds took a more authentic and honest approach by strategically making its Egg White McMuffins less than perfect and thus, perceptually, less refined or processed. The success of this launch demonstrates that strategy increasingly needs to be creative in leveraging insights that would otherwise have been overlooked. We need to remember that generic insights and plans will only yield generic outputs!

Strategic shift #3: Talking with vs. Shouting at

The days of mass marketing, which predominated in the 20th Century, are clearly behind us. However, the style of communication prevalent in that era continues to be seen in todays world. In particular, this is witnessed in the ongoing tendency of many brands to shout at their consumers in order to capture their attention. Ironically, the opposite effect often prevails in such cases  with consumers becoming more savvy and adept at blocking out, zipping and zapping overt, often irrelevant commercial messages.

Even in non-traditional channels such as digital and social media (which started with the express intent to spark connections and conversations), we have seen brands revert to shouting via intrusive mass media-esque tactics, such as Facebooks timeline ads and Twitters promoted tweets. Recent studies highlight the inherent irritation factor and often, correspondingly low click-through rates attained via these tactics  which leads one to question their effectiveness in reaching consumers and building brand equity.

The key question for strategists is thus: Where do we go from here in the digital space? Essentially, it is critical that we remain cognisant of the fact that todays consumers do not respond to being shouted at. The antidote lies in striving to get the conversations going in the market, listening to and  most importantly  talking with consumers. Aligned to this, brands will also need to ensure ongoing cultural relevance in their consumer engagement activity (even striving to position themselves as cultural influencers, where possible), ensuring that conversations are both timeous and topical.

Strategic shift #4: Overcoming the digital backlash

There is hardly a brand in existence today that has not developed some form of digital, mobile or online strategy  or, at least, recognised the need to do so. However, stemming off the preceding trend, research is increasingly pointing to the fact that digital marketing is at a crossroads in todays cluttered, saturated market. Although investment levels (including digital adspend) continue to rise year-on-year, factors such as ad blocking, commercial information overload and opt out databases are raising serious questions and concerns around the value that many brands are actually realising in cyberspace.

For contemporary strategists and creatives alike, the onus will lie onus to continue seeking out novel ways of connecting with consumers in cyberspace. For instance, the growing field of content marketing  cited as the future of marketing by 78% of chief marketing officers in a recent international study by marketing research and advisory firm Demand Metric  will become even more critical in years to come.

Strategic shift #5: The growth in connections planning

Another key buzzword in todays Sharing Economy is collaboration, which is changing the face of marketing and communications  industries in which hierarchies and siloes have often been the norm for organisations in the past. In future, more brands will move to a connections planning framework, which necessitates input from disparate data sources and coordination among various stakeholders  ranging from researchers, data experts and planners, to creative teams and even end consumers themselves  from a much earlier stage in strategic and campaign development.

In recent years, several brands (both globally and locally) have tapped into this growing trend of involving end consumers as strategic and/or creative participants. For instance, Starbucks successfully leveraged the collective knowledge of its customer base to inform new product development via its dedicated My Starbucks Idea website. The site, which invites customers to share, discuss and vote on new product or service ideas, recognises the importance of consumers custodianship in relation to their favourite brands. As per the site: You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. Whats your Starbucks idea? Revolutionary or simple  we want to hear it.

Another example of this trend is the recently launched Discovery Channel Think Tank, an initiative whereby viewers are invited to provide feedback via online research panels, effectively placing them in the driving seat in terms of shaping channel content. Similarly, when UK insurer Norwich Union relaunched under the global name Aviva, it turned to its customers to help mould the messaging during a tricky brand migration process, via an innovative, collaborative technique called Customer Councils. Together, its marketing team and customers essentially co-created the rebrand communication strategy.

So what does the future hold for strategy and strategists? In a nutshell, the continued evolution within the field of strategic planning will see a shift towards something that has been termed experience architecture: a flexible, insights-driven, interdisciplinary and collaborative approach that places the consumer experience at the core of everything we do. In order to engage consumers meaningfully  today and in the future  we thus need to remember that the age of the passive audience is over. And that increasingly, brands will turn to their target consumers for both strategic and creative inspiration.

In closing, its all about consistent and ongoing engagement  on all levels and often beyond the obvious. As organisations continue to grow more decentralised in nature, planning will no longer happen in isolation. To this end, we will need to ensure that strategy, creative and customers remain aligned (and engaged) throughout.
Last week was quite an eventful one in the world of wine and we are happy to bring you some good news from around the globe. We're so used to hearing stories of doom and gloom that it makes quite a nice change of pace to focus on the great things that are happening when nobody was paying attention.

Here goes, your weekly helping of wonderful wine news:

VinItaly toasts a booming Italian wine trade

The gist of it: When you think about wine-producing countries, Italy might not be at the top of your list, but the Italians are actually taking great strides when it comes to wine production. This week Verona hosted 55 000 industry professionals from 141 countries at an event that showcased the country's best wines. It is all a far cry from the days when Italian wine was synonymous internationally with straw-wrapped bottles of Chianti, these days the robust Italian wine industry employs a whopping 1.25 million people and produces more wine per capita than any other country.

Up an incredible 5% from 2014, exports of Italian wine climbed to a record 5.4 billion euros in 2015. The big boom in production can be ascribed to the steep increase in the demand for prosecco, which has managed to surpass Champagne as the bubbly of choice for oenophiles the world over. Complimenti Italia! Read more here.

Bonus factoid: Choose prosecco over Champagne if you are watching your weight - it has less calories per standard pour. For a better understanding of the differences between these two kinds of bubbly, have a look here.

Photo Credit: REUTERS

Douglas Green has commissioned a 1.25-million kWh rooftop solar plant

The gist of it: Dont you just love it when industry leaders make good choices and set a responsible environmental example? Lets all rise and give Douglas Green Bellingham a great big round of applause. This leading wine production company has commissioned a rooftop solar plant that will provide up to half the energy needed to make 3-million litres of wine a month.

Situated in Wellington in the Western Cape, the four roofs of the company's main bottling plant will eventually boast 2600 solar panels that will generate 1.25-million kWh in its first year (that's the rough equivalent of a small car driving from Cape Town to Johannesburg 5550 times). Douglas Green Bellingham was awarded the UK Drinks Business Green Award in 2011 and has since gone on to reduce their use of glass by 3.25-million kilograms, water consumption by 18% and energy use by 22%. Good job guys, you are making us proud! Read more here.

Bonus factoid: Support South African wineries that take their impact on the environment seriously by purchasing wines with the SWSA sticker on the neck of the bottle. Together these organisations are driving the South African wine industry's commitment to sustainable, eco-friendly production.

The World Sommelier Competition is underway in Mendoza, Argentina

Le Concours du Meilleur Sommelier du Monde is currently taking place in Argentina. The competition was first held in 1969 and the program varies each year depending on the host country. This is the first time it has been held in Argentina and the Argentine Sommelier Association has been planning for this event for almost three years.

There are 61 sommeliers taking part and South Africa is represented by Gareth Ferreira, who took top honours as the Best Sommelier in South Africa in January. The Semi-finals results will be announced on Tuesday the 19th April, just before the Finale in Mendoza. The Top three sommeliers will compete to win the ultimate title that is only awarded every three years. Keep an eye on Wine.co.za if you want to follow Gareth's progress.

Bonus factoid: Would you like to know more about the etymology of the term sommelier and how the occupation came to be? Have a read here.

This weeks Weekly Wine Wrap-Up was brought to you by Juliet Cullinan Wines. The 26th annual Juliet Cullinan Standard Bank Wine Festival will be hosted on 12 & 13 July 2016 at Summer Place, Hyde Park. Tickets are available at Webtickets from April onwards.
We chat to Georgia Barry e-commerce manager of iconic South African retail brand Cape Union Mart. Gathering insights into their three sub brands; Poetry, Old Khaki and the recently launched Tread+Miller as well as trends in the local online retail spheres.

Can you give us some background on the Cape Union Mart Group? From its birth in 1933 how has it grown over the years?

The history of Cape Union Mart dates back to 1933 when the late Philip Krawitz, grandfather of the current Chairman, founded the business on the corner of Corporation and Mostert Street in Cape Town. Cape Union Mart originated as an "Army and Navy Store" and became famous for its "everything from an anchor to a toothpick" product range.

Apart from an extensive range of merchandise, the store became known as "the friendly store" and focused on building unique relationships with its customers. Cape Union Mart was the first importer of many famous products such as Levi Jeans, Hong Kong anoraks, Norwegian socks and Gore-Tex foul weather clothing. It now proudly stocks the largest range of outdoor gear and apparel in the country.

The K-way brand is a proud product of the Cape Union Mart family. Our locally designed technical and outdoor apparel is tested globally in some of the worlds toughest environments, such as Kilimanjaro and Mount Everest, and has become a much loved brand in South Africa.

The Poetry, Old Khaki and Tread+Miller concepts have all been incubated within Cape Union Mart and have grown out of a need to better serve our customer base for all their lifestyle needs.

In a few weeks, we will celebrate 200 stores across our group!

How would you describe your business model?

Its simple: we want to deliver awesome retail experiences. We are proud to stock and sell our own brands, namely K-Way, Rare Earth, Poetry, Old Khaki and Arthur Jack. Quality and customer service are always our highest priority.

Can you give us some background on sub brands and retail outlets: Poetry, Old Khaki and Tread+Miller?

Old Khaki is a mens and womens casual brand. It was the first of the brands to branch out into a stand-alone store concept and opened its doors in 2005. It currently boasts 63 stores.

Poetry is a ladies lifestyle brand, which followed in December 2009 with the first store in Cavendish Square, and can now be found in 31 shopping centers across South Africa and Namibia.

Tread+Miller is a mens urban footwear brand, which also offers a curated collection of ladies footwear. It has been the fastest growing brand in terms of store locations with 11 across the country, having only launched end of August 2015.

Tread+Miller only just launched, what has the growth and response been like?

The growth has been phenomenally fast. Since its inception at the end of August 2015, 11 Tread+Miller stores have opened in South Africa as at the end of March 2016. Another 3 stores are scheduled to open during the month of April this year. This is indicative of a positive response from shopping centres, as this is truly a unique offering for the South African male consumer  to find a footwear destination dedicated to the style-focused man. The South African man has really loved the dedicated ranges and the shopping experience designed for him. We also launched our online store to broaden our reach and to offer our customers the opportunity to shop while we grow our brick and mortar presence. Our collection of locally produced Simon and Mary headwear has too evolved to include a selection of trilbies, mounties and classic safari style hats. We have a variety of colours in the various styles, with key winter colours being classic black and olive.

What is the biggest challenge in running online shopping stores in SA?

Building trust with our customers. Trust that their payments are secure and that their parcel will arrive. Delivery costs are also a challenge. We offer free delivery on all of our websites, and whilst this is a big motivator to purchase online, it can affect your bottom line and quickly become a large expense.

Tell us about a day in your work life.

A usual day in the office involves operational updates (order fulfillment and customer service updates); meetings with marketing across our traditional and digital areas; monitoring of daily orders and sales, as well as keeping an eye on our online dashboards for searches and trends. Everyday updates with our content and photography teams are critical, and always squeezing in some time in the morning or afternoon to do site browses!

How do you see e-commerce developing in South Africa?

South Africas tough economic climate and the rand-dollar ratio have impacted many players in the offline and online space. Consumer purchasing power is decreasing and as a result, retailers need to reconsider their value proposition.

Whilst ecommerce penetration in South Africa is still relatively low by global standards, we foresee a convergence between physical and online retail and a move towards simpler payment methods, offering customers a seamless experience across all platforms. In the future, there should be no difference between ecommerce, commerce and retail. Currently, consumers in South Africa have trepidations around delivery, security of payments online and cumbersome checkout procedures. These are the challenges that retailers need to overcome in order to earn the trust and loyalty of customers online. With the growth of smartphones, the improvements in speed and cost of access to the web, the revolution in couriers and the education of the customers, we see much opportunity!

How do you see Cape Union Mart evolving in the digital and commerce spheres?

Cape Union Mart views ecommerce as an opportunity to add value to our existing customer experience. It is an extension of our brick and mortar customer experience and our strategy is to build a seamless, omni-channel experience for our customers, irrespective of the platforms that they choose to purchase on. This single view of the customer and their experience is what we strive towards.

In future, our ecommerce sites will become a destination for customers to purchase extended ranges and sizes. Our goal is to never miss a sale in a brick and mortar store as a result of being out of stock. Our Cape Union Mart website strategy is to become a research destination for all things outdoor, whilst supporting our stores and driving our consumers interest in the outdoors.

Digital allows us the privilege of deepening our relationship with our customers and providing more personalized and relevant service and information.

www.capeunionmart.co.za
You would be forgiven for thinking that BMW would open its second biggest standalone showroom in the world dedicated purely to its performance M-division cars in a country such as Germany, the US or the UK. You would be wrong. It is, in fact, in SA - Pretoria to be more precise - and it is second only to a similar showroom in Singapore.

Ian Robertson at the new M showroom

The company even flew in Ian Robertson, member of the board of management of BMW AG responsible for sales and marketing and former boss of BMW SA, to open the new facility at Zambesi Auto.

"SA is one of the top performers in the world in terms of BMW M market share and sales," says Tim Abbott, MD of BMW Group SA. "For example, in 2015 SA was ranked fifth in the world in terms of overall BMW M market share. A total of 916 BMW M units were delivered to local customers while 1,049 M Performance units were also delivered to customers - this is an increase of more than 40% compared to 2014."

The increase in local sales reflects worldwide growth for the performance division, which saw sales in 2015 up by nearly 65% to 35,000 units along with a 16% increase in sales of M Performance models.

Some R10m was invested in the new facility by Rob Sexton and Christo Lindeque, Zambesi Auto owners. Zambesi Auto has always been a pioneering dealership in terms of the M brand within the southern hemisphere, according to the joint owners. "Our initial independent M outlet has been hugely successful. This has been proved by the sales volumes generated. Irrespective of the difficult economic times we are facing, we believe that this particular segment will continue to grow," they say.

M model expansion

That view is echoed by Robertson, who says the company is planning to expand its M models, starting with the new M2 coupe. It will also launch its first ever luxury M sedan later this year with the arrival of the M760 and Robertson promises more M products are in the pipeline.

Given the company's focus on the electric vehicle (EV) market, is Robertson also promising an electric M car? "Electrification is essential going forward and will appear across the BMW range," he says, adding: "I would not rule out an M car that fits that strategy." We can only speculate at this stage, but for now at least a pure electric M car would seem unlikely. Instead, we suspect the company will look at a plug-in hybrid setup similar to regular models like the 330e. This would offer instant torque courtesy of an electric motor, combined with a downsized petrol engine.

"M products are taking on sustainability solutions," says Robertson. " Customers want everything from an M, but want us to deliver on sustainability."

Still with electrification, Robertson says the company is ready to face the introduction of Tesla's Model 3. He says the battery technology on its existing i3 model will be upgraded later this year and the brand is also looking at a third model after the i3 and i8 which is being referred to as the i-Next in keeping with BMW's Strategy Number One Next future planning.

Government support

Robertson also added his voice to the many calling for more effort from the South African government when it comes to EVs. "We'd like to see the government be more proactive in infrastructure," he says.

Speaking of local government, Robertson is confident in both the South African and sub-Saharan markets. He says he has a lot of confidence in Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and says that in spite of the current economic and political climate, he is a "little more confident in what might happen", adding that "volatility is part of the order of the day".

That potential is one reason why the company will switch production at its Rosslyn manufacturing facility from the 3 Series to the X3 SUV. "X3 manufacturing in SA is ideal for sub-Saharan Africa. Economies (in Africa) are growing and are at healthy levels," he says, pointing out that BMW is taking a 10 to 15-year look into the future in terms of its decisions for the region.

Robertson sums up by saying: "We see good potential." Clearly that potential spans its entire line-up in the region, with more M showrooms planned as well as further plans for its EV range and the regular BMW models.

Source: Business Day
Advertising today extends far beyond the confined borders of 'Mad Men' fame. The Loeries, Africa Middle East's largest award in the communication space, now looks at every point of contact between a brand and consumers. Key examples are two new areas called Shared Value and Service Design.

The Loeries is hosting a special workshop in Johannesburg, to explain just what these new categories are all about. The workshop takes place on 20 April at 7am in Parktown North. Attendance is a must for all brands and agencies interested to hear more, and who are planning to enter their work this year. More info can be found on loeries.com.

Industry experts Marcel Rossouw from FJORD Design & Innovation and consultant Tiekie Barnard will present and give tips on entering.

In todays hypercompetitive and multi-media market, businesses have been forced to reimagine their roles and the way they interact with the world  and to use every platform available to them. This is advertising in the 21st century.

It takes craft, methods, skills and a dash of magic to connect customers with the business in sustainable ways to implement a successful Service Design programme, says Accentures Nicole Ashton.

Weve all got stories about a disastrous customer experience  whether a call centre, checkout counter or loyalty programme gone wrong. Forward thinking brands recognise that customer relationships can be built and loyalties cemented by using these connections to add value. This is what Service Design is all about: Building brand loyalty through improved customer experience.

Last year, the Gold Loerie in the Service Design category was won by Unilevers Lifebuoy for the Handle on Hygiene campaign, while Volkswagen won a silver for the Uber Test Ride.

Unilevers CCM Director, Africa, Enver Groenewald explains that Shared Value is far more than simple charity: Its about adding value in a way that benefits the shareholder and society at the same time in a sustainable way  while being fully aware of the bottom line. Its called shared value, which companies create through identifying and addressing social problems that intersect with their business, says Groenewald.

In 2015 the Safety Lab won gold in the Shared Value category for their Hope Soap  a transparent bar of soap with a small toy inside, and the only way for kids to get to the toy was to finish the soap. The aim is to create a lifetime habit of handwashing among low income children in informal settlements  and literally adding years to their lives. This is a perfect example of Doing Good while Doing Good Business.

On the effectiveness of these campaigns, Loeries CEO Andrew Human says: Its clear to see that creativity is a tool to add value and and bring about change. The Loeries serve as a source of inspiration  recognising and rewarding the best initiatives out there.

At the end of the day, advertising isnt the only thing  its everything.

Entries close on 16 May 2016. For more information, visit loeries.com.

Major Partners of the Loeries 2016

Tourism KwaZulu-Natal (TKZN), the Department of Economic Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs, KwaZulu-Natal Province (EDTEA), EThekwini Municipality  Durban Tourism, DStv Media Sales, and Gearhouse South Africa

Category Partners

Adams & Adams, ADreach, Channel O, Film & Publication Board, Google, Independent Media, JCDecaux (formerly Continental Outdoor Media), Public Relations Institute of Southern Africa (PRISA), The Times, Unilever South Africa, Woolworths, and YFM

Additional Partners and Official Suppliers

AAA School of Advertising, Antalis South Africa, Aon South Africa, Arcade Content, Backsberg, BEE Online, Brand Council SA, Clive Stewart Photography, Egg Films, First Source, Funk Productions, Gallo Images, Graphica, Grid Worldwide, Hetzner, Media Film Service, Mobile Marketing Association South Africa, Multiprint Litho, Native VML, Newsclip, Paygate, Rocketseed, Red Hot Ops, Scan Display, South African Airways, Telkom SA SOC Ltd, Tiekie Barnard Consultancy, Tsogo Sun, Vega School of Brand Leadership

Official Media Partners

Adlip.com, Between 10 & 5, Bizcommunity.com, Brandwork Nigeria, Coloribus Advertising Archive, Design Times, Film & Event Media, iDidTht.com, Music in Africa, Nex Media, The Redzone








Entries are now open for the Fairlady Woman of the Future and the Fairlady Rising Star for 2016. Fairlady, in partnership with Santam, is looking for South African female entrepreneurs who have started their own businesses - one who is established at least three years and one that has launched a new business.

The tougher things get in South Africa, the more ingenuity and determination we show. It's in our nature, says Fairlady editor Suzy Brokensha. Last year, the quality of the entrants blew us away. These women are changing the economic landscape in this country. It is exciting to acknowledge and reward them. I am so looking forward to seeing this year's entrants.

Woman of the Future Award

The Fairlady Woman of the Future 2016 award goes to an entrepreneur, 25 years or older, whose business has made it to 1001 days (basically, the first three years) and who is well on her way to creating an empire. The prize comprises R50,000 cash, a mentorship session with one of the judges, a R3,000 fashion voucher from Queenspark, a R12,500 online course from GetSmarter, a Sony Xperia Z5 Gold cellphone & Wi-Fi tablet, a wristwatch and a beauty hamper.

Donald Kau, head of corporate affairs at Santam, explains, Entrepreneurs represent one of the biggest future growth opportunities for a sustainable South African economy and we are pleased to be partnering with Fairlady on this exciting project for a second year. We are committed to walking a path with our country's entrepreneurs because we understand that the first 1000 days in businesses are statistically the hardest, so if you have made it to day 1001, you've beaten the odds.

Rising Star Award

The Fairlady Rising Star 2016 goes to an entrepreneur, between the ages of 16 and 25, whose business is older than six months but still within the first 1001 days of business.

We want to award success but we also want to award potential, which is why we include the Rising Star award, says Brokensha.

Judges

Judges include Public Protector Thuli Madonsela (also one of the key judges in 2015); media entrepreneur and international speaker Jo-Ann Strauss; TV presenter and radio host Leanne Manas; Santam executive head of brand Yegs Ramiah and Fairlady editor Suzy Brokensha.

Entries close on 17 June 2016. For more information, go to www.womenofthefuture.co.za.
Six African countries feature in the World Bank's list of the 13 economies projected to grow the fastest between 2014 and 2017. Despite the current financial turmoil, the World Bank estimated Sub-Saharan Africa's growth at 3.7% for 2015, with a slight uptick to 4.4% and 4.8% in 2016 and 2017 respectively.

Jeoff Motshoba

Theres no doubt that the African growth story remains resilient in the face both of global and continental challenges. However, in order to capitalise on our growth potential, we have to ensure that we have integrated transport solutions in place to promote regional, continental and inter-continental trade, said Jeoff Motshoba executive: Air Traffic Management, communications, navigation and surveillance at Air Traffic and Navigation Services (ATNS).

Aviation, in particular, has a critical role to play in providing the kind of infrastructure that a competitive modern economy needs.

The post-2015 UN development agenda presents a vision that seeks to achieve inclusive, people-centred, sustainable global development: the future we want. This calls for a broad approach to development, based on social justice, structural transformation, economic diversification and growth.

Air transport is a vital enabler for Africas economic growth, and Matshoba believes the industry offers huge potential. He believes that South Africa, as the continents most advanced aviation market, has the opportunity and obligation to help build this vital piece of Africas infrastructure.

Motshoba believes that two primary barriers are inhibiting the growth of African air travel: physical infrastructure and safety. The former includes both airports and fleet, and here great strides are being made as new airports are commissioned and Africas aircraft fleet gets younger.

Safety, he believes, is rightly considered to be the primary barrier facing Africas aviation industry. African aviation has long had a poor safety record, with the average number of air traffic accidents nine times higher than the global average in 2011.

However, things seem to be improving; its 2015 safety record was better than any year in the 2010-14 period.

Motshoba said that ATNS is playing a leading role in helping to improve safety by spearheading moves to create a single upper airspace management control capability for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.

By managing the regions upper airspace holistically we will not only reduce the cost of air travel, we will make it significantly safer, he said. Its one of the things mandated by the Yamoussoukro Declaration, which was signed in 1999 but which is not yet fully implemented.

The Declaration calls for the liberalisation of African skies for African airlines, and the establishment of a single African air transport market. ATNS as the lead operator of the SADC initiative is acting as advisor and liaison with the equivalent organisation in the north of Africa. This kind of integrated approach could also save money as expensive technology can be shared.

One example, would be the Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) network created and operated by ATNS, which has been providing communication services to air traffic authorities across the SADC region for the past 10 years. Egypt manages a similar service for the northern region.

Making sure that we roll out an air traffic infrastructure that makes use of the best technology is one side of the coin; the other is having a deep pool of talent with the skills needed to use that technology, Matshoba pointed out.

ATNS is playing an important role here, too, with our Aviation Training Academy being one of the continents leading trainers of the air traffic controllers and engineers of the future.

The ATNS Aviation Training Academy is IATAs regional training provider for the Africa-Indian Ocean region, and it was one of IATAs Worldwide Top Regional Training Partners in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. In addition, the Academy was named a Regional Training Centre of Excellence at the end of 2015 by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) one of only 16 globally.
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Two of the new cabinet ministers were from the National League for Democracy (NLD), one was from the Zomi Congress for Democracy (ZCD), one was from the army and the final two were non-aligned academics.

The appointments are: U Wi Kaw from the NLD as Project and Financial Minister; U Shwe Ceu from the NLD as Transport Minister; U Pau Lun Hming Than from the ZCD as Social welfare Minister; Colonel Kyaw Kyaw from the army as Security and Border Affairs Minister. The two non aligned academics given ministerial posts were Salai Isac Khin who was made Municipal and Industrial Electricity Minister and U Mang Hil Dar who was appointed as Minister for Agriculture, Forestry and Mining.

The previous government led by U Hung Ngei had nine cabinet ministers as opposed to the new NLD government, which only has six cabinet ministers.

The new Chin State Government also appointed U Sony Za Hu (aka Than Cung) as the Chin State Chief Magistrate and U Lal Tin Mang (aka David Lal Tin Mang) as the Chin State Chief Statistical Officer.

Salai Isac Khin wrote on his Facebook page on 8 April: "I will do my best to shoulder my responsibilities, but if people are disappointed in the way I carry out my duties I will be ready to leave my position and make way for others. I will work honestly for my country. At the same time I would like to invite you to help me in different ways as I have much work to do."

Edited in English by Mark Inkey for BNI
He said that the explosion took place on the morning of 5 April near Border Pillar 61 on the Burma-Bangladesh border while Rohingya villagers, who were recruited from Maungdaw North by the Burma Army and promised good wages, were working on the border fence.

Rakib, a village elder from the area said that the dead man was Tayub, age 45, and that the seriously injured men were: Mohibullah, age 24; Mohamed Rofique, age 22; Shomshu Alam, age 26; and Mohamed Jubair age 20.

According to a Burma Army aide from Buthidaung the four injured men were taken to Buthidaung Army Operation Command Headquarters where they are being treated with the help of staff from Buthidaung General Hospital. he said the victims were also interrogated by an army officer who had come from Sittwe (Akyab).

Tayub's body was taken to his village, Garata Bill (Padakah Daiwahnahli)) in Maungdaw North, Buthidaung Township and buried in the cemetery, according to Anwar from Tayub's family.

Hasu Meah, an ex-schoolteacher from Maungdaw Town said that some villagers believed that the explosion was caused by a mine laid by the Arakan Army (AA) or by the accidental detonation of a mine laid by the Burma Army.

Ahmed Hussin, a villager from nearby the explosion said: "This happened because the Arakan Army planted mines where the Rohingyas were working on the border fence."

Jalil a local youth said that no one will know exactly what happened until the injured men are released as the accident happened in a remote area deep in the forest and the only witnesses were the army and the injured Rohingyas.

The Burma Army started rebuilding the Burma-Bangladesh border fence last year and has been planting mines in the areas where it was rebuilding the fence. The Bangladeshi authorities have objected to the mine planting because it violates border agreements, but the Burmese authorities have ignored them.

Kamal,a Bangladeshi villager from Bandarban District in Bangladesh said that the Burmese government planted landmines in the border areas about 12 years ago and that the mines had killed many Bangladeshi villagers and wild animals, including elephants.

Edited in English by Mark Inkey for BNI
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I want to say it's 'better late than never,' but it's difficult to have sympathy for anyone in this story.

Republican state lawmakers in Kansas have had just about enough of the Brownback economic regime of cutting public institutions to a degree that is unconstitutional.

Things have apparently become so bad, the state GOP's top leaders in the legislature are abandoning Governor Brownback's sinking ship.

From the Associated Press:

If Brownback won't reconsider any of the tax cuts, they say, he will have to figure out for himself how to balance the budget in the face of disappointing revenue. "Let him own it," Republican Rep. Mark Hutton said. "It's his policy that put us there." [...] "We're growing weary," said Senate President Susan Wagle, a conservative Republican from Wichita. While GOP legislators still support low income taxes, "we'd prefer to see some real solutions coming from the governor's office," she said.

It's difficult to have sympathy for anyone in this story because they gave Brownback exactly what he asked for. They voted for Brownback's tax cuts. They voted to punish the state judiciary for forcing them to fund education. Republicans in the legislature have cooperated with the governor for years but now they've had a change of heart because this is an election year.

Every single senator and representative in the state legislature is up for reelection this year and their constituents are not pleased with the way things are going.

They want the governor to "own it" now that their own asses are on the line. Maybe that's the best people in Kansas can hope for.

Last month, Brownback ordered $17 million in immediate reductions to universities and earlier this month delayed $93 million in contributions to pensions for school teachers and community college employees. The state has also siphoned off more than $750 million from highway projects to other parts of the budget over the past two years.

Republicans are incapable of responsible governing.
27 March 2012 - Washington, DC - Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis meets with Senator Alejandro Garcia of Puerto Rico and Cecille Blondet, Mr. Garcia's media assistant. *Official Department of Labor Photograph*** This official Department of Labor photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, and/or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement of the Secretary, or the Department of Labor.

Puerto Rico Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla is pushing Puerto Rico legislators to let him retain the right to halt all debt payments starting July 1 as they consider legislation to amend the payment moratorium bill signed earlier this month.

On Monday morning the governor made clear he will insist on retaining flexibility about paying all types of the debt, including general obligations, according to a source in the governor's office.

The moratorium bill signed April 6 gave Garcia Padilla the authority to suspend payments on debt backed by the government, the island's Government Development Bank and other public agencies through January 2017.

On April 7 Puerto Rico Rep. Rafael Hernandez Montanez submitted a bill that would exempt the commonwealth's general obligation, guaranteed, and securitized debt from eligibility for the suspension. An example of securitized debt would be the debt of the Puerto Rico Sales Tax Finance Corp. (COFINA).

On April 8 Hernandez Montanez said the governor had promised him that if the representative voted for the debt payment moratorium bill, which he did, and if the representative got a bill through the Puerto Rico House and Senate exempting some of the debt, then he (the governor) would sign the bill.

Garcia Padilla said Monday that if July 1 arrives and Puerto Rico has not reached an agreement with its bondholders and doesn't have the money to pay the GO's, then he needs the right not to pay them, the source said.

Puerto Rico's public sector entities have about $1.9 billion in debt payments due on July 1. Included in this is $777 million in GO debt payments, according to Standard & Poor's.

The governor is seeking to change the Hernandez Montanez-sponsored amendments.

Puerto Rico's government is in tight financial circumstances. The island's public sector entities have about $70 billion in debt. The government is far behind in paying its operating bills and tax refunds and has taken a variety of steps to keep running including stopping setting aside money for the GO payment. The governor has said that he doesn't expect the GDB to have enough money to make its full debt payment on May 1. This payment has been reported as $423 million and as $433 million.

Garcia Padilla has said since November 2015 that he would prioritize giving money for the provision of essential services over the payment of the debt, including the guaranteed debt. Puerto Rico's constitution gives first claim of the government's money to the guaranteed debt.

Democratic and Republican legislators in the U.S. Congress are working on a bill that might impose a control board on Puerto Rico and allow a restructuring of the commonwealth's debt. If this were to pass, it could supersede any of the governor's plans.
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Located just 2.3 km from Malabata, Marina 2 provides accommodation in Tangier with access to a casino, a terrace, as well as a 24-hour front desk.

Hotel Chellah is situated in the heart of Tangier yet only 700 metres from the citys northern beaches. It offers air-conditioned rooms and a large outdoor swimming pool.

Located in Tangier, within 31 km of Cape Malabata and 46 km of Tanger City Mall, ONOMO Hotel Tanger Med provides accommodation with a terrace and as well as free private parking for guests who drive.

Hotel Maram is located in Tangier. Free WiFi access is available. Each room here will provide you with a private bathroom with free toiletries. Extras include a tumble dryer and cleaning products.

Dar Sultan is located in the historic quarter of Kasbah, close central Tangier. Set within a 300-year old Moroccan-style house, it is just a few hundred metres from the beach.

Offering a terrace and views of the city, Hilton Tanger City Center Hotel & Residences is located in Tangier in the Tanger-Tetouan Region. Guests can enjoy the on-site bar. The rooms include a TV.

This air-conditioned hotel is located just 1.5 km from Tangier Beach. It features a 24-hour reception with a tour desk, free Wi-Fi access and a lounge area with a TV.

Set 7 km from Cap Malabata, Appartement hotel rania in Tangier provides air-conditioned accommodation with views of the city and free WiFi.

Situated in the centre of Tangier, 2 km from the beach, this guesthouse offers an outdoor swimming pool and a view of Tangier Bay. The Grand Socco and medina are a 10-minute walk away.

Marina Bay is a beachfront property located in Tangier. It has an outdoor swimming pool. Each of the Hotel Marina Bays guest rooms has a private bathroom, air-conditioning.

Offering a restaurant, Dar Yasmine is located in Tangier. Free WiFi access is available. Each room here will provide you with a TV, air conditioning and satellite channels.

Located a 5-minute drive from Tanger train Station, Grand Mogador Sea View & Spa offers an outdoor swimming pool, a buffet and a Moroccan restaurant. It has a direct access to the beach.

Located in Tangier, within 1.3 km of Tangier Municipal Beach and 400 metres of Dar el Makhzen, Dar Essaki 1886 provides free WiFi throughout the property.

Offering an outdoor pool, Royal Tulip City center is located in Tangier. Free WiFi access is available. Each room here will provide you with a TV, a balcony and a minibar.

Offering an outdoor pool, Grand Hotel Villa de France is located in Tangier. The property is a 5-minute walk from a fitness centre, a spa and wellness centre and a tennis club.

Situated in Tangier, Palais Zahia Hotel & Spa offers rooms with air conditioning. Located around 7 km from Cap Malabata, the hotel with free WiFi. At the hotel, all rooms are fitted with a desk.

Located in the heart of the Tanger Medina, this Riad hotel is a 2-minute walk from the beach. It offers en-suite rooms and free Wi-Fi in the reception area.

Barcelo Tanger - New Opening 2022 overlooks the bay of Tangier and is opposite the beach. It enjoys a peaceful location just 25 minutes drive from the airport.

Set in Tangier, 5 minutes walk from the beach, Hilton Garden Inn Tanger City Centre features a terrace and fitness centre. All spacious rooms come with a flat-screen TV, minibar, desk.

Set in Tangier, 3.1 km from Ibn Batouta Stadium, 5 km from American Legation Museum and 5.1 km from Forbes Museum of Tangier, Sun Rise familly only offers accommodation with a balcony and free WiFi.

Hotel El Djenina is set in Tangier, 7 km from Cap Malabata and offers free WiFi throughout the property.

Dar Omar Khayam is located in Tangier, just a 5-minute walk from the beach and a 15-minute walk from the Grand Socco Square.

Set in Tangier, 1.2 km from Tangier Municipal Beach and 1.7 km from Malabata, Les Belles Residences -E- Appart Hotel offers accommodation with free WiFi, air conditioning, a restaurant and a garden.

Offering panoramic views of the Mediterranean bay, Hotel Continental is 5 minutes from the port, in the heart of the Medina.

Commission paid and other benefits may affect an accommodation's ranking. Find out more.

This is a Preferred Partner property. It is committed to providing guests with a positive experience thanks to its commendable service and good value. This property may pay Booking.com a bit more to be in this Programme.
Boasting a shared lounge and a terrace, The Gomerino Hotel is situated in Valletta, 2.5 km from Qui-Si-Sana Beach and 2.8 km from Tigne Point Beach. We stayed at The Gomerino for our last two nights in Malta (after a two week holiday) and it was the best choice. We looooved the hotel pool/spa terrace with the amazing views of the Three Cities! We were able to use the pool before checking out and flying out which we highly recommend doing. This feature alone is a reason to stay here! However, the hotel really shines in other ways too. The staff (especially Amber from Reception) are really friendly and helpful, along with Pine who are both great ambassadors for the hotel. Allison from the upper terrace really looked after us during our stay. Our room was a good size with the cute terrace and great street view (and on an upper floor as requested), comfortable bed and great air conditioning (god-send in summer). Housekeeping kept the room spotless. Breakfast was good (both a la carte and buffet combined) although I would have liked more healthier options for the buffet portion. We would also like to give a shout out to the Food & Beverage Manager on our last night. We were lucky enough to be there for an event with fireworks at night and we were given a glass of complimentary champagne with comfortable first row seats for an amazing fireworks display. All in all, it was a fantastic two nights at The Gomerino and a fitting end to an amazing holiday in Malta. Thank you to all who made our stay very special.

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Decent stopover for a few hours while flying with Copa Airlines (Panama flag carrier). Landed at 5am. Departed again at 6:30pm. Realistically I had 6am-3pm to sightsee Panama. You could also (as I did) book a hostel bed for a few hours before sightseeing Panama Canal. Call / Message ahead. The hostel staff may not be accustomed to the sight of red-eye flights travellers showing up at their doors at 6:30am, wondering why the heck this person says he/she is checking-in at that hour... Miraflores Locks (close to Panama City): 15 USD admission, with a small but good museum and a promo film on-site. There is a cafe on-site if you are inclined to sit by the balcony looking at the canal. Other than that, the old city has more things for tourists to see. Food options range from the over 20 USD menus in fancier places to the cafeteria choices under 8 USD. Surprisingly, the low-rise buildings in the old town are occasionally a wreck (roofs, windows, walls collapsed) --- it really is a lot by lot, owner by owner difference. Sights are mostly churches, old colonial buildings, a coastal park surrounded by a coastal vehicular causeway. This part of town is still more aesthetically more pleasing than other neighbourhoods mixing 2-storey houses with skyscrapers. It's really hard to fit everything from 50m away in the same photographic frame if one unit is 2-storey and the other is 20-storey. Trump tower (now renamed, apparently) is in a different part of the city. Never found out if it has an observation deck. If the answer is no, give it a miss. Note that US Dollars and Panama Balboas are used interchangeably. That is fine while you are in Panama, but the US does not take Balboas... Spend your Balboas first.

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From  28 per night

9.5 Exceptional 2 reviews

TKS place is very clean, its a new facility, with excellent customer care. Mr Brandon the property owner is excellent, and I can assure any visitors to expect the best at TKS place. I will definitely come back in the future to this place and refer my friends to TKS place. The apartment is located in a wonderful quite area, and very nice for family vacation or single travelers. It has a well equipped kitchen, warm water, DSTV, etc. All who are reading this review, consider making TKS place while you are visiting Kampala
Set in Ridgefield, 17 km from Danbury Railway Museum, The West Lane Inn offers accommodation with a shared lounge, free private parking, a garden and barbecue facilities. If you are anywhere in Fairfield County and want to be spoiled at one of the greatest inns in America, you must stay here. The accommodations are first rate but not fussy, there are so many special touches such as homemade cookies and snacks and 24/7 coffee, an included out of this world humungous breakfast cooked to order, a heating bar in the bathroom for one's towel, and maybe the best part - being next door to one of the best restaurants I've ever been to - Bernard's, and then a delightful walk into the absolutely adorable town of Ridgefield that has it all, even a wonderful hardware store. Daughter and I had a most wonderful stay. There is something else I need to mention. We were supposed to go earlier in the season but I developed vertigo the day I was to arrive. I could not get out of bed, much less drive a car. One of the owners got on the phone and told me that her husband had vertigo issues and she fully empathized. Said to not worry about paying even though this was a last minute cancellation and she certainly could have demanded it. Anytime we need a place to stay in this gorgeous neck of the woods again, we are returning to The West Lane Inn.

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Set in Falmouth, 1.9 km from Wood Neck Beach, AutoCamp Cape Cod offers accommodation with a restaurant, free private parking, free bikes and a garden. My booking at Autocamp Cape Cod was a lucky accident. I did not know about this place before I booked and took a chance on something a little unusual. I am SO GLAD I did. The location and setting are lovely, and my Airstream was absolutely heavenly. It was such an interesting and fun experience. Easily as comfortable and well appointed as any hotel room I've stayed in, and far more enjoyable. Full air conditioning; integrated bluetooth sound system; your own fully equipped bathroom including hot shower, and super-comfortable bed. Staying in the outdoors really added to the experience. Right outside your cabin you have your own fire pit. The camp has a wonderful and stylish clubhouse where you can relax and socialize. They also offer free bike rentals which is perfect for taking advantage of the beautiful Shining Seaway bike route which passes directly by the camp. From there you can easily cycle to close by Falmouth or go a bit further to the historic Woods Hole (about 6 miles), or to any of the many beaches in the area. I loved my stay here. I will be back!

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Norfolk is situated in the middle of plenty of attractions. The boardwalk at Virginia Beach is about a half hour away, and Busch gardens along with water country is less than an hour drive in the opposite direction. Theres a zoo nearby, an aquarium and multiple malls and movie theaters. Theres an endless amount of food options, groceries stores and markets if thats your thing. Everything is very easy to get to, and traffic is not TOO bad as long as you plan not to be on the road in the mid afternoon. Avoid the Hampton tunnel if you need to get somewhere quick, as you will almost always hit major traffic coming through there. Most of Norfolk is very safe and with other major cities nearby - you wont get bored staying here.

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Scientific personnels sign for handover of capusle at the landing area of the re-entry capsule of China's first retrievable microgravity satellite SJ-10 in Siziwang Banner, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, April 18, 2016. A Xinhua photo/CAS

BEIJING (BNS): The re-entry capsule of a scientific research satellite sent to space by China earlier this month has returned to Earth.



The bullet-shaped capsule from SJ-10, China's first retrievable microgravity satellite, landed at around 4:30 pm on Monday at the planned landing area in Siziwang Banner in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.



The capsule was transferred to the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), which will hand over the equipment aboard the capsule to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) for further analysis and assessment, the official Xinhua news agency reported.



The capsule separated from the orbital module of the probe about 15 minutes before its landing. The latter will remain in orbit before burning away, it said.



The SJ-10 satellite was launched by the indigenous Long March 2-D rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China's Gobi desert on April 6. During its 12-day journey in space, 19 experiments on microgravity and life sciences were carried out on board.



One of the experiments was to study early-stage development of mouse embryos in microgravity to shed light on human reproduction in space.



For that, the probe carried over 6,000 mouse embryos in a self-sufficient chamber the size of a microwave oven.



According to the pictures sent back from a high-resolution camera, the 600 embryos, which were put under the camera, developed from the 2-cell stage, an early-on embryonic cleavage stage, to blastocyst, the stage where noticeable cell differentiation occurs, around 72 hours after SJ-10's launch.



The timing was largely in line with embryonic development on Earth, according to the CAS.



This is the first reported successful development in mammalian embryos in space in the history of science, the news report said.



The 15 pieces of equipment which carried 11 experiments loaded on the capsule were in good condition after experiencing the harsh space environment and the return trip.



The probe, which focuses on energy, agriculture, health, will give a boost to the basic research on bio-engineering, new materials and life sciences, in addition to pushing forward the development of China's research on microgravity and space life sciences.




Su-25K strike fighter. A Sukhoi photo.

NEW DELHI (BNS): Russia has delivered a new batch of Sukhoi Su-25 strike fighters to Iraq, according to a news report.



Russian news agency Tass report quoting Iraqi Defence Ministry spokesman Nasir Nouri Mohammed al-Tamimi said, a batch of three Su-25 aircraft has arrived in Iraq.



The spokesman said the attack aircraft will give additional advantage to the Iraqi army in the fight against terrorist groups, including the Islamic State.



The Russian Su-25 strike fighter is designed for providing round the clock support to ground troops hitting objectives within the visibility range, as well as for attacking target-point facilities in any weather conditions, the report said.



Russia has delivered to Iraq several Su-25 strike fighters.


This video went viral on Chinese social media last week.

It shows a toddler picking up a steel pipe trying to defend his grandma from a group of Chengguan.

The Chengguan are the urban management force which clamps down on illegal street vendors, sanitation, landscaping and parking.

The toddler was captured shouting Dont touch my grandma! Go away, dont touch my grandma! repeatedly while holding a steel pipe.
Construction workers in Chinas Hebei province went to war in their high-powered machinery yesterday.

With the recent dip in the Chinese economy, it appears work in the construction industry is becoming very scarce in the country.

Local government officials believe this incident was sparked in a row between competing contractors.

The workers used the massive buckets on their bulldozers to duel as locals scrambled to get to safety.

Eventually one bulldozer was flipped dangerously onto its side during the row.

Video via Sky News

There are no details of any arrests or injuries from the incident as of this time.
Galway dairy farmer Joe Healy looks set to become the next president of Irish Farmers Association.

Voting is well underway in the election, which was prompted by the resignation of Eddie Downey last year over revelations of high pay at the top of the organisation.
Update 3.40pm: An expert witness for Indaver Ireland has said Ringaskiddy and not Bottlehill is the appropriate site for an incinerator, writes Catherine Shanahan of the Irish Examiner.

Dave Coakley, director of Coakley O'Neill Town Planning Ltd, told an oral hearing into the proposed development that Bottlehill is not zoned as an industrial area, nor is it located within a Strategic Employment Area - which Ringaskiddy is.

Mr Coakley told the An Bord Pleanala hearing in Carrigaline that Ringaskiddy benefits from closer proximity to producers of hazardous waste.

.@anbordpleanala @CHASECorkNews @IndaverIreland incinerator size scaled back by one third sez expert witness Dave Coakley #IEStaff  Catherine Shanahan (@cathshan) April 19, 2016

The hearing, which got underway this morning, arises from Indaver Ireland's third planning application for an incinerator in Ringaskiddy. The first application was made in 2001.

Update 12.30pm: It has emerged that the website on which submissions will be published at the An Bord Pleanala hearing into plans by Indaver Ireland to build an incinerator is actually owned by Indaver Ireland.

Several members of the audience objected to this revelation at the oral hearing which got underway this morning in Carrigaline Court Hotel in Co Cork.

They asked bord inspector, Derek Daly, for clarification which he is currently waiting for.

The website is ringaskiddyrrc.ie.

Indaver is planning to build a 240,000 tonnes per annum waste-to-energy facility in Ringaskiddy

Protesters refer to this being the third hearing into the proposed plant. Pictures: Denis Minihane

Update 11.30am: An application by Chase (Cork Harbour Area for a Safe Environment) for the adjournment of an oral hearing into plans for an incinerator in Ringaskiddy has been refused.

The application was made by solicitor Joe Noonan on behalf of Chase.

Mr Noonan said he was requesting the adjournment to give everyone time to see all the relevant information in relation to the planning application - that there were "dozens of areas of clarification identified which haven't been addressed".

An Bord Pleanala's Inspector Derek Daly refused the application for adjournment saying Indaver would give a response to the issues raised.

"In advance of hearing them [Indaver] I can't make a judgement on whether they've been addressed or not," Mr Daly said.

Update 10.15am: Hundreds of protesters have gathered in Carrigaline in Cork, where an oral hearing into plans to build a 160m incinerator in Ringaskiddy is getting underway.

Earlier:

An oral hearing into plans to build an incinerator in Cork will begin today.

An Bord Pleanala is set to hear from Indaver Ireland on its plans for the 240,000 tonne waste-to-energy plant in Ringaskiddy in Cork Harbour. Indaver's parent company is based in Belgium.

Indaver was refused planning permission by An Bord Pleanala (ABP) on its second outing in 2011.

The company had been granted planning permission for its initial application in 2004 but years of legal wrangling meant that permission expired. However within 14 months of the 2011 refusal, Indaver was back in pre-planning consultation with ABP with the aim of having its proposal deemed a strategic infrastructure development (SID).

Gertie O'Driscoll protests outside #ABP oral hearing on @indaverireland plans for ringaskiddy incinerator #IEStaff pic.twitter.com/8rEYt9S0WK  Catherine Shanahan (@cathshan) April 19, 2016

The company has promised to invest 300,000 a year into the community for the next 25 years if they are given the green light for the project.

The hearing gets underway this morning in Carrigaline.

Indaver managing director John Ahern previously said the company is an experienced and innovative organisation which built and runs Irelands first waste-to-energy facility in Meath.

Its been operating successfully since 2011 and treats the same sort of waste that will be accepted by the proposed development in Ringaskiddy," he said.

Chase (Cork Harbour for a Safe Environment) has fought Indavers plans for a number of years on environmental and health grounds. Residents first heard of the plan 15 years ago, and begun their campaign of opposition shortly thereafter.
A Dublin man who drank a litre of vodka and took two grams of cocaine before he knocked down a toddler in the Phoenix Park last year has been jailed for five years.

Ciaran Lane (aged 25) of Ashington Avenue, Cabra, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to dangerous driving causing the death of 23-month-old Vanessa Siatka at Ratra Triangle, Phoenix Park on April 6, 2015.

In a victim impact statement read to the court, the child's mother Katarzyna said at the time she couldnt do anything but watch as her baby was taken away from her.

For me that was the moment time and my heart stopped. The moment the car hit Vanessa it not only swept her away physically, it also took her away from us.

All I could do was run to my baby. I spoke to her; I told her I loved her and everything would be ok, Daddy was on the way. I prayed for her but as she lay on the road a small tear came from her eye and I knew in my heart that this was her last Goodbye Mammy. she said.

Our hearts are shattered, Lukasz and I. Life stopped. We did not know how to exist; how to sleep; how to eat; how to wake up. Every day is a nightmare; even to breath was difficult. I still have nightmares about the accident, they never go away. Without Vanessa we will never be the same; never as happy as we were.

Vanessas room is empty; our home is empty; our lives are empty, she said.

The court heard that Lane failed to stop after hitting the child. The car took her along the road for a few metres and she tumbled along the road before coming out from under the car.

Half an hour later Lane arrived at Cabra garda station and told gardai that he had been involved in the accident. He told gardai he was driving at a speed of 80 kph and the speed limit at the location was 50 kph.

Judge Patrick McCartan told the court this was a terrible tragedy with the horrible loss of a young life.

The judge said this tragedy was entirely avoidable and he extended his deepest condolences to the family of Vanessa Siatka.

Her family and friends come here today in search of some justice for what has occurred. It is probably the most difficult case that a judge has to deal with and this court is regretfully no stranger to these kind of cases, he said.

The judge said there was nothing the court could do to address the injustice that had been created or help rebalance matters.

My hands are tied by precedent and a higher sense of justice in that only in very exceptional cases should a maximum sentence be imposed. This case is not far from that position as it happens, said the judge.

He said the Phoenix Park was used every day of the year by the citizens of Dublin with its many attractions for young children and their families.

Easter Monday, April 6, 2015 was a particular busy day, it was a very pleasant and warm day. Anyone who used the park including the accused would know there would be children about. The evidence has established that the accused was in no position to consider the safety of others, he said.

The judge said the 26-year-old drove his motor car in the most erratic way and what occurred in the Phoenix Park was inevitable but entirely avoidable.

He said Lane was well over the limit and was using a highly stimulant drug, cocaine. The judge said Vanessa Siatka had no chance and this was as bad a dangerous driving case as he had ever encountered.

He was a father of a child of the same age and knows the value of life in that respect, he said. He said the only mitigating factor was that Vanessa Siatka was on the road.

The judge said Lane was a young man, the father of a child, he came from a young family and had entered an early guilty plea.

The judge then sentenced Lane to seven years in prison with the final two years suspended.

Having regard to what has been said about his age and that it is his first time to go to prison, I propose to suspend the last two years of sentence if he remains alcohol and drug free for a period of two years from his date of release from custody, he said.

Judge McCartan also banned Lane from driving for 20 years.

Katarzyna Plaszewska Siatka's Victim Impact Statement:

My name is Katarzyna Plaszewska Siatka. My family and friends all know me as Kasia. I am Vanessa Siatkas mammy. I want to make this statement on behalf of my husband, Lukasz Siatka, and myself.

When we became pregnant with our baby Vanessa, it was like a present from God. We were so happy as parents to be having a baby together. We began to plan our future together with our baby.

Vanessa was born on the 11th of May, 2013. That was the best day of our lives. The moment we saw Vanessa, we fell in love with her. Every single day Vanessa gave us her love; her smile; and the strength and enthusiasm to exist every day.

Vanessa made our lives complete. Vanessa was just perfect, with beautiful blue eyes, a perfect pretty face, she was just perfect. She looked just like her Daddy. Every day with Vanessa was new; we watched her learn new things; we taught her new things; and we learned from her too. We watched Vanessas personality develop.

We taught her about life; new words; new lessons every day. Vanessa was very clever, a very quick learner. Our life centered around Vanessa. Everything myself and Lukasz did in our lives was for Vanessa; was for her future.

We moved to our new home late in 2014. December that year was our first Christmas together in our new home. We picked our new home with Vanessa in mind; with our family in mind; with our future in mind.

Vanessa had her own bedroom. I remember how exited she was about moving to our new home; having her own bedroom and a new bed. Lukasz and I had lived in Ireland for over 12 years; we had made Ireland our home and we made our home here in Dublin for our familys future.

We had a very happy home and a very happy life. We always had a very open home. We have a large circle of friends, who also have young children. They would come to visit us and we would go to visit them in their homes. Vanessa made so many new friends.

She loved to go to her friends homes for parties and special occasions and they also came to us. Vanessa was a very happy and active child. She loved to go swimming; to the park or playground; or to the activity centre to play with other children.

Vanessa was a very sociable and friendly child. She would introduce herself to other children and play with them. Even children she had never met before. Every day we thought of new things to do; new surprises; new activities for Vanessa and for all of us as a family. Every day was fulfilled with activity and happiness for all of us.

We travelled a lot with Vanessa, we travelled around Ireland to show her new things; scenery; we brought her to see the mountains and the sea. We travelled to Poland with Vanessa and she met all of her family in Poland. She had a wonderful time meeting everyone.

On Easter Sunday, 2015, we had a gathering in our home with family and friends to celebrate Easter. It was a sunny nice day. Easter Monday was another beautiful sunny day in Dublin but we could never have imagined what would happen that evening.

What started out as a plan to spend my evening with Vanessa in the Phoenix Park to meet friends, play and pick flowers; ended in a nightmare. In one moment we were happy, playing and enjoying ourselves in the park; in the next moment I hear the loud music, a loud engine and everything just happened so quickly; I couldnt do anything only watch as my baby was taken away from me. For me that was the moment time and my heart stopped.

The moment the car hit Vanessa it not only swept her away physically, it also took her away from us. Although we know the paramedics and staff at Temple Street tried to save Vanessa, it was at this moment our child was taken from us. All I could do was run to my baby.

I spoke to her; I told her I loved her and everything would be ok, Daddy was on the way. I prayed for her but as she lay on the road a small tear came from her eye and I knew in my heart that this was her last Goodbye Mammy.

Our hearts were shattered, Lukasz and I. Life stopped. We did not know how to exist; how to sleep; how to eat; how to wake up. Every day is a nightmare; even to breath was difficult. I still have nightmares about the accident, they never go away.

Without Vanessa we will never be the same; never as happy as we were. Vanessas room is empty; our home is empty; our lives are empty. For the rest of our lives every day will be a challenge. Our hearts will always be broken because a part of both of us died with Vanessa, People keep telling us time is a healer-its not. Our life now is empty.

We visit Vanessas grave every day to pray; to talk to her; and to be there with her. What else can we do? Vanessa will always be in our memories but we can never see her or hold her again. Only our faith and our love and our angel Vanessa looking over us, helps us to exist.

We would like to express our thanks for the support of our friends and family; the medical staff at Temple Street Hospital; and all the members of the Garda Siochana involved in this investigation.

We thank our community, the Irish public and everyone who offered condolences, support and prayers. We would like to offer special thanks to our Family Liaison Officer, Sergeant Niall Phelan.

We hope that Vanessas death will be a strong message to everyone to never ever drink or take drugs when driving.
Detectives in the North investigating the disappearances of missing schoolgirl Arlene Arkinson were at a disadvantage because of the delay in reporting her missing, an inquest has heard.

Brian Lavery, a former Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) detective sergeant who reviewed the investigation papers for the National Crime Faculty, said there is only a small window of opportunity to gather evidence in such cases.

He said: "Once that time elapses then unfortunately you are playing catch up."

Mr Lavery was giving evidence at Belfast Coroner's Court for a second day.

Fifteen-year-old Arlene from Castlederg in Co Tyrone vanished after a night out across the border in Co Donegal in August 1994. She was last seen being driven off late at night with convicted child killer Robert Howard on August 14 1994.

However police did not receive a missing persons report until four days later, the court was told.

Kevin Rooney QC, barrister for the PSNI, said police had also been told lies by eye witnesses and that Howard had tried to throw them off the scent with a fake sighting.

The lawyer also revealed that in 1999 research showed some 96% of murdered children were killed within the first 24 hours and that 76% were actually killed within six hours of the last sighting.

The chances of a successful prosecution were also significantly reduced if there was no arrest within 48 hours and if a body was not recovered, he added.

"If that's right it looks like the report of a missing person is vital within 24 hours," said Mr Rooney during cross examination.

Mr Lavery agreed: "Absolutely, yes."

Despite the odds, Mr Lavery recommended police continue with the case against Howard adding that in 1999 he knew of eight successful prosecutions in similar circumstances.

"If it is unsolved does not mean it is unsolvable," he said.

Howard, 71, who died in prison last year, was acquitted of the Arlene's murder in 2005 by a jury which was not told of his previous conviction for killing a South London teenager several years earlier.

The hearing has been adjourned until tomorrow.
The chairman of the Housing Agency has said 34bn needs to be spent over the next 35 years on developing the region surrounding Dublin.

Dr Conor Skehan said future projects in Dublin must be undertaken with a "think big" attitude.
Rock legends Status Quo are to perform in Belfast this autumn.

The band will play at the SSE Arena on Friday October 28 as part of their Last Night of the Electrics tour.

Tickets for the show will go on sale from Friday April 22 at 9am.

The band, fronted by Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt, have said they will play a "full-throttle, no-nonsense" electric set.

Status Quo have had dozens of UK chart hits during an illustrious 48-year history.

They are perhaps best known for their hit Rockin' All Over The World, which helped kick off the memorable Live Aid concert in 1985.

The band have said that this tour will be the last to feature electric guitars.
A dentist who believed he was possessed by evil spirits stabbed a faith healer multiple times in a "dynamic assault" at a centre which claims to treat black magic.

Ashfaq Choudhry was arrested at the Tower of London not long after attacking Zakariyya Islam in September last year, where he had attempted to jump into a moat, the Old Bailey heard.

He confessed to officers and members of the public who restrained him that he had stabbed someone.

The 43-year-old had knifed Mr Islam, a father-of-three, in the stomach and heart with a 25cm blade during the assault at the Ruqya Therapy Centre in east London.

A witness reported hearing a disturbance at the centre in Greatorex Street in Whitechapel at around 6.40pm on September 14, which lasted around two or three minutes, before Mr Islam appeared and said: "Call the police, somebody stabbed me."

The 45-year-old, who was a member of East London Mosque, died around 30 minutes later.

Choudhry, of Kensington Avenue, Watford, Hertfordshire, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Some of Mr Islam's relatives wiped away tears as a statement was read on behalf of the victim's wife Roma which told of the "unimaginable emptiness" she felt at his death.

Choudhry, a father-of-two, was suffering from a severe mental illness which affected his ability to form a rational judgement and to exercise self-control, prosecutor Timothy Cray told the court.

The defendant, who had told psychiatrists he felt "worthless", became disillusioned with the medication he was on and decided to explore alternative therapies, the court heard.

The Ruqya centre provides Islamic treatment for black magic, evil eye and Jinn (evil spirit) possession, according to its website.

Choudhry visited Mr Islam at the centre, which the court heard practices a form of spiritual therapy, three weeks before the killing, and said he was told he was possessed by spirits.

Linda Strudwick, mitigating, said: "He (Choudhry) genuinely believed what he had been told, that somebody had put evil spirits into him."

After his visit to the clinic Ms Strudwick said he told others: "Look at me, look at me, I'm a monster."

Sentencing Choudhry, the judge Richard Marks QC, the Common Serjeant of London, said Mr Islam, whom he described as an "outstanding individual", had been well-intentioned in his words and actions.

Addressing the defendant, he said: "There is no doubt that he (Mr Islam) was doing what he genuinely thought was best in order to alleviate your symptoms."

Choudhry was given a hospital order under the Mental Health Act, without a time limit.
The family of journalist Steven Sotloff is suing Syria in a US court, claiming the government of President Bashar Assad provided support to Islamic State militants who carried out his beheading.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington seeks tens of millions in damages from Syria for Mr Sotloff's 2014 killing.
A 29-year-old man who might be at risk of falling victim to a form of hereditary cancer has won an "unprecedented" court fight in the UK over DNA testing with a woman he suspects is his grandmother.

David Spencer thought that his father was William Anderson - who died nearly four years ago, a court heard.

He wanted a judge to rule that a stored DNA sample taken from Mr Anderson for medical purposes before death should be tested so that he could establish his paternity.

Mr Anderson's mother, Valerie Anderson, was against the idea.

But Mr Justice Peter Jackson has ruled in Mr Spencer's favour after analysing evidence at a hearing in the Family Division of the High Court in Manchester - and said testing should take place.

Detail has emerged in a written ruling by Mr Justice Jackson published on a legal website. He named people involved but gave no indication of where they lived.

The judge said Mr Spencer's application was "apparently unprecedented" in England and Wales. He outlined family histories which had led to litigation in his ruling.

Mr Spencer said his mother, Carol Spencer, had him told that his father was Mr Anderson. Mrs Spencer had said the relationship ended when she was pregnant.

She had married another man - and he had been registered as Mr Spencer's father.

That marriage had ended and Mrs Spencer had gone on to marry a man called Spencer.

Mr Justice Jackson said Mr Anderson had been diagnosed with a form of cancer a decade ago. He said there was a history of cancer in the Anderson family.

Mr Spencer had said that, following Mr Anderson's death in 2012, Mrs Anderson had contacted him and said he could be at risk.

He had subsequently launched legal action and asked for a DNA testing order.

Mrs Anderson had opposed testing, saying her son had provided a DNA sample during the course of medical treatment and was "entitled to a high expectation of confidentiality".

Mr Justice Jackson ruled in Mr Spencer's favour.

"I have reached the conclusion that scientific testing should take place to seek to establish the paternity of Mr Spencer by using the stored DNA sample of the late Mr Anderson," said the judge.

"The overall evidence here raises the real possibility that Mr Anderson was Mr Spencer's father, he having undeniably been in a relationship with Mr Spencer's mother at the time of conception.

"It is common ground between the parties that there is a significant medical issue that turns on the possibility of a biological relationship between Mr Anderson and Mr Spencer."

The judge added: "Although it is possible that the late Mr Anderson ... might have refused to consent to testing during his lifetime, there is no particular reason to regard that as likely.

"Whether or not he would have welcomed the possibility that he was a father, it may not do justice to his memory to assume that he would have withheld his support from a young man who might have inherited a serious medical condition from him.

"The information, in the form of the DNA sample, is readily available and does not require physically intrusive investigations. In particular, it does not require exhumation, as to which particular considerations would undoubtedly arise."

He said bosses at the hospital where the DNA sample was stored did not object to testing.
French President Francois Hollande has described the suspension of Syrian peace talks as "very worrying".

Mr Hollande, who spoke during a visit to Syria's neighbour and Western ally Jordan, said the decision by a Syrian opposition delegation to halt talks in Switzerland could quickly lead to renewed fighting, more air strikes and suffering among civilians.

A complete collapse of the talks would mean "no hope," he said during a meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah II and underscored the need for a political solution to the conflict.

Jordan has been significantly affected by the fighting, which is now in its sixth year. The Syria conflict helped to give rise to Islamic State extremists, who control large areas of Syria and Iraq, which also borders Jordan.

"I know what you are facing in this area," Mr Hollande told Jordan's king. "The threat is not a virtual one, it's a real threat at your borders. We are co-operating at the military level, and our co-operation is really exceptional."

Mr Hollande was also visiting an air base in Jordan from which French aircraft have staged air strikes against IS. Jordan is also a member of the US-led military coalition against the extremists.

The kingdom, meanwhile, has absorbed more than 630,000 Syrian refugees, out of a total of close to 5 million Syrians who have fled their homeland since 2011.

Since last year, Jordan has further tightened restrictions on the entry of refugees, causing thousands to be stranded in a remote border area in the desert. Jordan's government said earlier this week that the number of Syrians waiting to be let in has reached 50,000.

Jordan has argued that its security comes first and that it can only permit Syrians to enter after careful security vetting. Human rights groups have warned that refugees endure tough conditions and have urged Jordan to carry out the vetting at better facilities in the country.

Mr Hollande said Jordan has "shown great solidarity, and there are still refugees coming from Syria fleeing the fighting around Raqqa or around Palmyra".

"You need to give them the support they need, but at the same time make sure that there are no terrorists infiltrating among the refugees," Mr Hollande added.

As for the Geneva talks, Mr Hollande said it was "very worrying to see that the negotiations have been suspended".

In Geneva, the Syrian opposition delegation said there can be no solution in Syria with President Bashar Assad in power, and called for international monitors to observe a ceasefire that has all but collapsed.
A man who teaches classes on the outdoors is in hospital after he was mauled by a bear during a mountaineering lesson in the Alaska Panhandle.

Forest Wagner, 35, of Fairbanks, Alaska, was with a group of 12 students on Mount Emmerich near Haines on Monday when he was attacked, according to University of Alaska Southeast spokeswoman Kate Bausler.

A student hiked down the mountain to get a mobile phone signal and call for help.

Mr Wagner was taken to Providence Hospital in Anchorage, according to a statement from the university.

His condition was not immediately known, but the university said he was stable.

Mr Wagner was leading a group of 11 students and two teaching assistants when he was attacked by a bear with cubs, the statement said. No students were hurt.

According to Mr Wagner's teaching schedule, he was due to come down from the mountain by Tuesday.

He has been co-ordinating and teaching in the outdoor studies programme at the university since 2006, according to his biography. He teaches rock and ice climbing, backcountry navigation, glacier travel and mountaineering.

Alaska State Troopers got a call from the Haines Police Department at about noon on Monday.

According to their report, they removed Mr Wagner from the mountain by helicopter and put him on another LifeMed helicopter before taking him to a hospital.

The bear was sighted again after the mauling, Ms Bausler said.

The students in the mountaineering class were taken down from the mountain and spent the night in Haines with another professor. Haines is about 145km north of Juneau and accessible only by air or sea.

Students were scheduled to take a ferry back to Juneau on Tuesday, Ms Bausler added.

Mr Wagner is the second man to be attacked by a bear in Alaska within days.

A 77-year-old bear hunter is recovering from injuries suffered when he was mauled by a grizzly in interior Alaska.

On Monday, troopers said hunter Glenn Bohn, of Wasilla, was attacked by the bear near Mile 68 of the Denali Highway just after 1.30pm on Friday.

The 217km road runs east to west and connects the Richardson and Parks highways east of Denali National Park.

Mr Bohn's hunting partner killed the bear. Mr Bohn was driven by snowmobile to the Denali Highway where a LifeMed Alaska helicopter flew him to a hospital in Anchorage.

Wildlife troopers, employees of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and friends of Mr Bohn removed the bear from the field on Saturday.
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Gold Coast player Steven May has been suspended for five matches for a high bump that flattened Stefan Martin at the weekend.

May appeared to run past the ball to charge directly into the Lions player in their match on Saturday, hitting his opponent in the head with his shoulder.

Martin landed flat on his back and was knocked unconscious.
They all ruled out the washing machine - a model not under recall - as the cause, but did not establish what triggered the event. Nevertheless, alarm bells were raised. Samsung had already initiated the recall of six top-loader models with a major waterproofing fault in April 2013, which would become one of Australia's largest and most costly recalls. Fire investigators examining Patricia Borg's washing machine at Samsung's headquarters. So far, 74 per cent of the 144,451 affected machines have been remedied. Of those, more than half have been repaired with the problematic "plastic bag and tape" fix, while the rest have been either replaced or refunded. After the Colyton fire, the NSW Minister responsible for Fair Trading, Victor Dominello, was planning to announce the recall of a seventh Samsung washing machine model.

The label on a unit that caught fire on November 30, 2015, in Moorebank. Model no. SW70SPWIP is one of six under recall. Credit:Fire and Rescue NSW He cancelled those plans when the three inconclusive reports were delivered, all ruling out the machine as the cause. But Fairfax Media can reveal questions have been raised about the findings of two of the reports and why Samsung, based on Ms Borg's account, felt the need to remove the machine. The laundry of Ms Borg's home after the fire on March 18, 2016. The multibillion-dollar company disputes Ms Borg's version of events. Samsung says it only became aware of the incident three days after the fire, on Monday, March 21, when Fair Trading made contact.

Further, it claims a meeting with Ms Borg was arranged at the property that Monday at 2.30pm. At that meeting, according to Samsung, she gave her permission for the company to take the machine away. But Ms Borg says that meeting never took place. "While on site, Ms [Borg] also provided approval for the washing machine to be removed from the property by Samsung's technicians for further analysis. Given the late time of day, the unit was then stored overnight at the technicians' secure warehouse and delivered directly to Samsung's headquarters the following day," a spokesman said. But Fairfax Media has spoken with an employee at J&B Realty who said she inspected the property about midday that Monday. That would be before the time Samsung says it removed the machine. The employee said she expected to see the machine, but it was missing. "I was doing my routine check of the property, knowing it was uninhabitable," said the employee who asked not to be named. "That's when I noticed the washing machine wasn't there." Samsung acknowledges the fire-damaged machine was stored at its Homebush headquarters for several days. It says its electrical engineer examined the washing machine on Sunday, March 27, and Monday, March 28.

Eleven days after the Colyton fire, and the day after Samsung dismantled the machine, experts from Fire and Rescue NSW and Fair Trading arrived at Samsung's offices to also examine the machine. Samsung's investigation concluded the machine was not the cause of the fire. But it would not share its report with Fairfax Media. Both FRNSW and Fair Trading's investigations could not determine the cause of the fire. They both provided copies of their reports which ruled out the machine as the origin. Peter Hart, a forensic electrical engineer with 20 years of experience, scrutinised the two reports for Fairfax Media and said the machine could not be ruled out as the cause of the fire. "Not all electrical faults result in molten metal and yet fire investigators often base their fire opinions about whether melting of wire occurred or not ... The evidence of electrical tracking at connections can be destroyed by the fire and so the wrong conclusions can be drawn," he said.

Judging from the reports, Dr Hart said the only evident source of energy for this fire was the live electrical system inside the machine. After also looking at the Fair Trading-commissioned investigation, Dr Hart said: "I think that the assessment of the investigators indicates the difficulty that they had interpreting the fire damage to the electrical wiring components." Superintendent Jeremy Fewtrell from FRNSW, said the fact Samsung had pulled apart the machine the day before its examination, did not impair its investigator's ability to make a proper assessment of the machine. "Based on the burn patterns observed and with the absence of electrical arcing within the machine's wiring, it was determined that the fire had not started in the machine," he said. "The investigator's inspection of the laundry did not identify any alternate ignition sources hence the report not making any solid conclusions about how the fire started."

A Fair Trading spokesperson said it became aware of the Colyton fire on Monday, March 21, and notified Samsung. She added Ms Borg agreed for the machine to be collected on the day. "Fair Trading was concerned to ensure there was thorough and expert examination of the machine and commissioned an independent expert electrical engineer with expertise in forensic examination of electrical equipment," she said. "That forensic examination and report concluded that 'the Samsung washing machine did not cause the fire'. It has no concerns with the process involved in the Samsung or FRNSW investigations or the respective reports." Samsung urges consumers who may be affected by the recall to visit samsung.com/au/washingmachinerecall or call 1800 239 655.
Is there any justification for a royal commission into the conduct of the banks? Is it just a political stunt? All royal commissions are called for political reasons and many are stunts, in the sense that their primary objective is just to bring particular issues into the public spotlight.

To me, the best justification for an inquiry into the banks is that they still don't seem to have got the message. They've been caught treating their customers badly, but so far they've shown little sign of contrition - sorry about the few bad apples, but I didn't know - and little willingness to make amends.

For years they've been locked in a race to maximise profits. They've put profits and executive bonuses ahead of the interests of their customers, and seem keen to resume profit maximising as soon as the fuss declines.

Reports of the banks threatening to campaign against Labor for proposing the inquiry suggest they see this as being about political might rather than moral behaviour.
For democracy to function it is essential that we have a free and fearless press and journalists  as the eyes and ears of our community  must be courageous enough to pursue their endeavours "without fear or favour".

As you can imagine, being "fearless" is not all that it is cracked up to be. There are times when you wish you could look the other way.

Only this week I received an email from a member of one of the nation's most dangerous and corrupt families: "We will not rest until you are behind bars," he warned. "Justice is coming. Hope you've got a good lawyer." But then you remind yourself that unless journalists keep a watchful eye over those who wield power, the principles of integrity, transparency, accountability and decency  the principles that society values  could wither and die.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. In an interview with Armenpress, chairman of the Urartu Armenian-Czech Union Alexander Sargsyan said that the Armenian community of Czech Republic is going to appeal to the EU in order for it to reconsider its position and approach towards properly assessing the Genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 against Armenians.

Already 5 years the April 24 Committee is active in the Czech Republic and is coordinating the April 24 programs. This year, the Genocide commemorative events will take place from April 22-24. A wreath laying ceremony will take place in the city of Jihlava, followed by a liturgy and candlelight vigil in the Holy Spirit Church. Events will also take place in Brno.

On April 24 commemorative events are scheduled to take place in Prague.

Our main message is that nothing has been forgotten even after 101 years from the Genocide. The Armenian Nation is demanding. The 101st year is not the end, but a new beginning, Alexander Sarsgyan said. A letter will be submitted to the Turkish Embassy in Prague, and they will appeal to the EU office to properly assess the Genocide.
One-hundred-and-one years after the landings at Gallipoli, it is time the mythologising about Australia's role in the First World War ended.

Many of the things we have come to believe about Gallipoli - for example, that Australians bore the brunt of the casualties - are untrue.

There is much of which we can be truly proud in the Anzac legacy. The desire to embellish history is unnecessary and unworthy. Credit:Michelle Smith

Worse still, some of our misunderstandings are the result of the fevered jingoism of authors such as Peter FitzSimons. A rollicking good yarn they might be, but a fair representation of history is another matter.

This is a shame, because there is much of which we can be truly proud in the Anzac legacy. The sad desire to embellish history is unnecessary and unworthy.
The most pristine stretch of the Great Barrier Reef is worst-affected by an extensive coral bleaching event, aerial and underwater surveys reveal.

About 93 per cent of the reef has been impacted by the current event, with "patchy" bleaching from north to south along its 2300km length.

Within the 1000km stretch north of Port Douglas, 81 per cent of the 522 reefs surveyed by researchers falls into the most severe category of bleaching and only less than one per cent is untouched.

"It is a special place and now it's really, really damaged," says Professor Terry Hughes, convenor of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. The Press Service of the NKR Defense Army (DA) informed Armenpress that Azerbaijan violated the ceasefire agreement last night more than 80 times.

The NKR DA statement reads: Azerbaijan violated the ceasefire agreement along the entire line of contact more than 80 times by firing different caliber weapons during the night of April 18-19. In the direction of Hadrut the Azerbaijani forces also fired AGS-17 grenade launchers (3 shells).

The DA forces remained committed to the ceasefire agreement and took necessary measures for the reliable defense of military positions along the line of contact.
Speculation the Baird government is preparing to privatise more of Sydney's mass transit system has been revived after bureaucrats refused to release nearly 100 documents on the subject by declaring them cabinet in confidence.

The refusal raises questions about whether the government, already reaping the benefits of a multi-billion dollar sale of state electricity assets, is planning to change the operation of the state's public transport services.

Labor sought from the government correspondence including reports, briefing notes and emails that related to options to privatise or outsource parts of NSW Trains and Sydney's trains and buses.

Officials at NSW Treasury records found 97 documents relating to privatisation. But they declined to release them under freedom of information laws because of an "overriding public interest against disclosure".
The first police officer to take command of the scene at the Lindt cafe siege says police were correct not to storm the building in the first hours because it could have triggered a bomb explosion.

Superintendent Allan Sicard was acting as the Sydney City Local Area Commander when the siege began about 9.40am on December 15, 2014. After hearing reports about the unfolding situation on the police radio, he arrived at Martin Place and took over as forward commander.

He remained in charge of the scene until the incident was formally declared a terrorist incident at midday.
About lunchtime Tuesday, just like thousands of times before, experienced surgeon Ross Crawford scrubbed in, pulled on the gloves and made the first incision for a hip surgery.

But for the first time in Australia, he and his surgical team had a robotic helper the orthopaedic professor hailed as an important step toward a medical revolution.

Before the surgery, a CT scan of the woman in her 60s waiting for the total hip replacement was sent to a lab in the US to layout the "route" for the operation to take, which Professor Crawford reviewed.

Apart from taking about half an hour longer as a precaution, the surgery was expected to proceed mostly as normal, with the robot's role simply to make sure he kept inside the lines.
First it was Uncle Ho then Uncle Bia Hoi now Brisbane's most embattled restaurant has changed its name again.

The East Street Vietnamese street food-inspired restaurant now goes by the name Aunty Oh.

The initial name change from Uncle Ho to Uncle Bia Hoi came after more than 100 people from the Brisbane Vietnamese community protested outside the restaurant over the glorification of Vietnamese dictator Ho Chi Minh.

Restaurant owner Anna Demirbek posted on Instagram that day that she had received death threats and threats to burn the business down forcing her to close for the day.
They came, they got a good behaviour bond, they made an awkward video, they left.

Amber Heard and Johnny Depp's bizarre and entertaining jaunt to the Gold Coast is over, ending the war on terriers that has captivated the nation's attention for almost a year.

The pair arrived on the Gold Coast on Sunday afternoon ahead of recording one of the strangest apology videos a celebrity has ever conjured.

On Monday they pushed through a media swarm to face magistrate Bernadette Callaghan over a charge of falsifying an immigration document.
Cairns MP Rob Pyne has accused Deputy Premier Jackie Trad of calling him a "disloyal c---" as well as acting in an "angry, threatening and intimidating" manner towards him.

A month after Ms Trad denied she had "bullied" Mr Pyne, admitting only to "robust" conversations while referring herself to the Ethics Committee over the matter, Mr Pyne added his own complaint for the committee to review.

Former Labor MP Rob Pyne has accused Jackie Trad of "very heated and outright abusive" behaviour during a phone conversation. Credit:Chris Hyde

Detailing his dealings with Ms Trad during his time in the Labor Party after raising concerns over how local government complaints were dealt with, Mr Pyne has accused Ms Trad of "very heated and outright abusive" behaviour during a phone conversation.

"During this conversation the Deputy Premier called me a 'disloyal c---' on at least two occasions and this was delivered forcefully and intentionally," he said in his complaint, tabled in Parliament on Tuesday.
It already had the support of the two Katter Party MPs, who had previously attempted their own private member's bill to increase the number of electorates.

MP Rob Pyne looks set to vote in favour of more Qld electorates. Credit:Chris Hyde

Whether or not Queenslanders see an increase in the number of state electorates will come down to one MP.

The Katter's had also previously supported the LNP in their previous bid to do the same thing.

That leaves Thursday's vote resting on Labor-turned-independent MP Rob Pyne, who sided with the LNP to pass the motion to bring the bill before the House.

Speaking to Fairfax Media, Mr Pyne said his concern was what was best for Queenslanders.

"I do have concerns that a re-distribution on 89 seats will lead to a loss of a seat in far North Queensland and we can't have someone in Ravenshoe have to go to Mount Isa to see their MP," he said.

"It is about democracy at the end of the day. And I will be looking at whether this has the potential to improve representation for regional Queensland. At the moment, I am leaning towards it."
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. The Defense Ministry of Armenia informs that Azerbaijan made 18 ceasefire violations in the northeastern part of Armeni-Azerbaijan state border, Armenpress was informed by the Department of Information and Public Relations of the Ministry.

The Defense Ministry statement reads: 18 ceasefire violations were registered during the night of April 18-19 in the northeastern direction of Armenia-Azerbaijan state border. Azerbaijan fired irregular shots from various caliber weapons and sniper rifles at Armenian positions.

The Armenian Armed Forces exercised restraint and conducted response actions only in case of strict necessity and confidently continue monitoring the border situation.

According to the statement of the Nagorno Karabakh Defense Army the situation in the line of contact of Nagorno Karabakh-Azerbaijani opposing forces remained the same during the night of April 18-19. Azerbaijan violated the ceasefire agreement more than 80 times along the entire line of contact and fired with different caliber weapons. Azerbaijani armed forces also fired AGS-17 type grenade launcher (3 shells) in the southeastern direction (Hadrut).

The DA forces remained committed to the ceasefire agreement and took necessary measures for the reliable defense of military positions along the line of contact.
Police are hunting for an attacker who stabbed a man in the chest at a home north of Brisbane.

The victim, aged in his 30s, was taken to hospital in a stable condition after being stabbed at a Caboolture home about 2am on Wednesday.

The victim was taken to hospital in a stable condition after being stabbed at a Caboolture home. Credit:Harrison Saragossi

The dog squad was brought in to track the offender, but he remains on the run.

A crime scene has been set up at the Kipling Street property.
A Cairns-based consortium would have hired sacked Queensland Nickel employees had it been awarded a $500 million shipbuilding defence contract.

The federal government is facing a backlash from Queensland MPs after West Australian shipbuilder Austal was awarded the tender to build patrol boats that will ultimately end up in the Pacific Ocean.

BSE Maritime Solutions owner Justin Parer was part of the Cairns consortium that spent two years and millions of dollars working on its shipbuilding tender. Credit:CPOIS David Connolly

BSE Maritime Solutions owner Justin Parer was part of the Cairns consortium that spent two years and millions of dollars working on its tender and says he only learned the bid had been unsuccessful through a television news report.

"I understand sometimes this is the way of things," he told ABC radio.
A newborn girl has lost her mother, her dad is without his wife and the State Coroner is investigating after a tragic death during childbirth at a Queensland hospital.

Amanda Sheppard died at Rockhampton Hospital on Monday after delivering her first child, a baby daughter named Willa.

A friend who set up a Go Fund Me page to support Mrs Sheppard's husband, Glynn, said the mother had been booked in for a caesarean section but died of complications.

"This day was supposed to be one of the best and happiest days of their lives and instead she has now left her beloved husband and brand new baby girl behind," she wrote.
Four men have been arrested over an alleged violent gang attack on a security guard at a Chadstone shop.

Police allege a man tried to leave the unnamed store without paying for something on April 3 when the security guard intervened.



"It is alleged that all four men then assaulted the security officer and another staff member, causing injuries," a police spokesperson said.

Four men have been arrested over the alleged attack.

A Mt Waverley man, 24, and a Bentleigh East man, 23, have been charged and remanded in custody to appear in Melbourne Magistrate's Court on May 3.

A 19-year-old Oakleigh man and a man from Doncaster, also 19, were charged and bailed to appear in court on July 13.


YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. President Obama called Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 18 for what the White House said was an "intense" conversation about the breakdown of the cease-fire in Syria, Armenpress reports citing USATODAY.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the purpose of the call was to "make the case to President Putin that he should use his influence with the Assad regime to live up to the commitments that they've made in the context of the cessation of hostilities."

The call came as fighting escalated along Syria's border with Turkey, with Syrian government forces and the U.S.-backed opposition renewing their fighting after a seven-week cease fire.

In its account of the presidential phone call, the Kremlin news service said the two leaders agreed on the importance of upholding the cease-fire and giving the peace talks a chance. But Putin also suggested to Obama that the U.S.-supported moderate opposition has close ties to terrorist groups in Syria.

The Russians also made a point of noting that the phone call was made at Obama's initiative.

Obama and Putin also discussed Ukraine. The White House said Obama "urged President Putin to take steps to end the significant uptick in fighting in eastern Ukraine." But the Kremlin said it's up to the new Ukrainian government to live up to its end of the 2015 Minsk agreements.

One topic that did not come up: The recent incidents of Russian planes "buzzing" U.S. ships in the Baltic Sea.

"These kinds of incidents, while provocative and concerning, are not particularly unusual," Earnest said. He said the United States had protested the flight tactics through the military attache at the U.S. embassy in Moscow.
The 29-year-old film academy graduate has close to 11 million followers on Weibo, and her videos have amassed some 50 million views online. Venture capitalists last month backed her to the tune of 12 million yuan ($2.4 million), expecting to cash in on lucrative advertising spots as her hits continued to soar.

Papi Jiang has rocketed to fame in recent months, with her series of humorous videos offering irreverent observations on everyday life proving an unprecedented internet sensation.

Beijing: China has long policed its internet and media with rigour to weed out politically sensitive information and other elements it deems unsavoury or subversive. But the ever-expanding quest to tighten controls has claimed some surprising new victims: including child television stars and a hugely popular online personality.

But on Monday the government's media regulator abruptly ordered her videos offline, due to her use of "coarse language", following "reports from the public and evaluations by experts". The videos can be uploaded again when the coarse language had been removed and unspecified "regulations" were adhered to.

Screenshot from a Papi Jiang video.

It comes only a day after the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) said it would ban the children of famous entertainers appearing on television, to prevent the manufacture  and potential exploitation  of child stars.

The ban appeared directed at stemming the explosion of dozens of copy-cat shows riding on the coat-tails of the wildly popular reality television show, 'Where Are We Going, Dad?', which attracts close to 100 million viewers per episode. The show, which sees celebrity fathers perform a series of light-hearted challenges while bonding with their sons or daughters, made a cameo visit to Western Australia last season.

Fans of Papi Jiang speculated on social media that the real reason she fell foul of authorities was her impression of former leader Jiang Zemin, replete with large glasses. Her other sketches also often include cutting parodies of Chinese society, such as the plastic materialism of wealthy Shanghai socialites, and the incessant pressure on young women to get married.
Havana: Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro delivered a valedictory speech on Tuesday to the Communist Party he put in power a half-century ago, telling party members he would soon die and exhorting them to help his ideas survive.

"I'll be 90 years old soon," Mr Castro said in his most extensive public appearance in years. "Soon I'll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervour and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we need to fight without truce to obtain them."

Mr Castro spoke as the government announced that his brother Raul will retain the Cuban Communist Party's highest post alongside his hardline second-in-command.

That announcement and Fidel Castro's speech together delivered a resounding message that the island's revolutionary generation will remain in control even as its members age and die, relations with the United States are normalised, and popular dissatisfaction grows over the country's economic performance.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. Emergency workers in Ecuador urgently dug through massive heaps of rubble on April 18 looking for survivors of the monstrous earthquake, Armenpress reports citing USATODAY.

Ecuador Security Minister Cesar Navas said the death toll had risen to 413. President Rafael Correa toured the overwhelmed Verdi Cervallos Regional Hospital in Portoviejo, comforting patients and assessing the hospital's ability to cope with the disaster.

Though tragedies are huge, the Ecuadorian peoples spirits are bigger, Correa told the Andes news service.

Luis Moya, physician at Verni Cevallos, told Andes that physicians had come from other provinces to help with the wounded, most of whom were injured by falling debris.

"It is a drama that is living," Moya said. "There are times you feel helpless."

The magnitude-7.8 temblor struck Saturday night; its epicenter was the sleepy fishing village of Muisne. The quake and more than 100 aftershocks rattled cities hundreds of miles away, knocking out electricity, water and communications to scores of communities.
In the wake of an ASIC investigation, former company director Steven William Hill has been sentenced to two years and nine months in jail, with a minimum of one year and nine months to be served before he is eligible for parole.It was alleged that between January 2006 and February 2007, Hill, through Hill Stephens & Associates Pty Ltd and International Finance Consortium (Aust) Pty Ltd, induced investors to pay approximately $618,000 to acquire interests in a 'house and land' property development in Queensland.Hill was found guilty in March of fraudulently misappropriating $281,000 of the invested funds, which were directed to company bank accounts to make payments to Hill and other third parties. Hill was found guilty on six counts of fraudulent misappropriation after a four-week trial at Sydney Crown Court.Mr Hill's actions betrayed the trust of his investors and caused them significant financial harm, said ASIC commissioner Greg Tanzer. Today's sentence showed such behaviour will not be tolerated.One of Hills victims, who wishes only to be known as Sarah, said, He's shown no remorse, basically, and admitted to no guilt, so I think other people, like the jury, finding him guilty is finally closure to it.It's taken away the security of myself, the security for my family  like other options that might have been available where you can utilise your super later on in life  that's all gone.ASIC found that Hill reviewed the financial circumstances of investors, recommended they set up a self-managed superannuation fund ( SMSF ) for investment, referred investors to a solicitor to establish an SMSF, elicited establishment fees and instructed investors to deposit their funds to his company bank accounts. Hill advised investors their funds would be used as 'seed capital' in a number of Queensland-based property developments he was facilitating. Hill advised investors that they would receive returns of 10-30% per annum, however, unknown to the investors, funds paid were not invested in the property developments as originally advised by Mr Hill.He was subsequently charged with eight counts of fraudulent misappropriation in June 2013. In March 2015, Hill was ordered to stand trial on seven counts of fraudulent misappropriation before his conviction in March of this year. Hill was found not guilty of one charge of fraudulently misappropriating $150,000.
Latest News NAB reveals six market megatrends for brokers More opportunities for investors, first home buyers

Firstmac shifts up a gear on auto loans National sales manager appointed to pursue growing market

New data from SQM Research has found there are 27,000 distressed properties for sale in Australia  largely down to death, divorce or vendors desperate to sell.An implication of the report is that significant bargains could be on offer for buyers, thanks to forced sales, reduced prices and the removal of reserve prices as banks and other financial institutions aim to recoup their losses.Queenslands Gold Coast came out as the most concentrated region for distressed sales, with SQM owner Louis Christopher putting this down to apartments being purchased by buyers who cannot be contacted by lenders or who may be living overseas.However, this should not set off alarm bells for the Gold Coast real estate industry, says Gold Coast mortgage broker Brad Kirwan, who has not noticed a discernable proliferation in distressed properties.He told Australian Broker, I havent seen any noticeable increase. On the Gold Coast you always see the odd luxury home or apartment being marketed as Mortgagee in Possession but this is fairly normal  normally a business owner who has gone broke.I specialise in helping people with credit issues, either purchasing or trying to refinance, and there has been little or no enquiry from the Gold Coast, whereas I receive upwards of five calls or emails a day from other parts of the country.The report found that distressed properties are also on the rise in mining towns where apartment supply is outstripping demand as a result of mine closures and the drop in mineral prices.The increase in distressed properties has the potential to be a double-edged sword for brokers  with those who deal with foreign buyers particularly vulnerable.Kirwan added, If a brokers sole type of business was in securing foreign investors to purchase apartments, and the properties are sold or repossessed, then that brokers trail book would take a hit, also reducing the underlying value of the brokers business.On the other side, if there are more properties for sale then obviously there is an opportunity for a broker to get involved and secure the finance for the purchaser.
Latest News NAB reveals six market megatrends for brokers More opportunities for investors, first home buyers

Firstmac shifts up a gear on auto loans National sales manager appointed to pursue growing market

The Workplace Gender Equality Agency is calling for submissions from employers on employee gender, including people they hire, promote and those who resign.Private sector employers with more than 100 employees are required to submit a report to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency between 1 April and 31 May each year, relating to the preceding 12-month period, says Amber Sharp, Partner with Marque Lawyers.This year, some additional questions have been included relating to number of appointments, promotions and resignations by gender, as well as number of employees who didnt return after parental leave, Sharp says.Sharp says employers will also be quizzed on whether the positions were managerial and whether they were part-time or full-time roles.It is hoped the new data will shed light on the reasons for gender imbalances in the workforce.The new data could also provide insights into what actions employers should take to improve the representation and participation of women in the workforce, Sharp says.The report requires answering questions on six gender equality indicators:1. Gender composition of the workforce2. Gender composition of governing bodies3. Equal remuneration between women and men4. Availability and utility of employment terms, conditions and practices relating to flexible working arrangements supporting employees with family or caring responsibilities5. Consultation with employees on issues concerning gendering equality in the workplace6. Sex-based harassment and discriminationSharp says businesses which fail to comply will be named and shamed.A list is published on the WGEA website, and WGEA may name non-compliant employers in a report to the Minister, she says.Further, non-compliance can render the employer ineligible under Commonwealth and state procurement conditions.While companies that employ fewer than 100 people are off the reporting hook, Sharp says regardless of reporting obligations, gender should never inform recruitment or remuneration decisions.
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You might be a douchebag.In the new comedy How To Tell Youre a Douchebag, debuting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on April 23, a womanizing blogger navigates Brooklyns new-fashioned, sexually liberated dating scene. Many young people can identify, at least in part, with the characters less-than-savory behavior, says the movies writer and director, and the film can help them to curb their douchey activities.

As momentarily ashamed as someone might be, it never gets too dark or pedantic, but I think quietly everyone has that moment when they say Oh f, Ive treated someone like that,  Tahir Jetter said. Both men and women have said the movie made them more aware of when theyve been less than considerate with people, so its refreshing to hear that.

The films main character, Ray Livingstone, chronicles his chauvinistic dating adventures a cringeworthy blog titled Occasionally Dating Black Women, which Jetter created in reality, filling it with blog posts such as If Youre Such a Feminist, Why I Gotta Pay, and Therapy Is For Wusses.

Livingstone thinks he deserves it all  until he meets a woman who does have it all, who shuts him down by pointing out his douche-ness. A seemingly irrational romance blooms, until his Don Juan-like past catches up with him.

Jetter, who defected to Los Angeles earlier this year after eight years in Brooklyn, wrote the script after a fizzled romantic pursuit spurred him to examine his own shortcomings.

I thought that it was kind of important to memorialize this point in my life of being a total asshole, he said. I felt like I was having a watershed moment in how to evaluate my behavior.

He also analyzed the Brooklyn dating scene, which is ground zero for 21st century-style romance, he said  heavily influenced by social media, free-spirited, and distinctly non-traditional.

In the age of social media, because we have so much access to people  really a never-ending catalogue of people and interactions to engage in  it feels a little less precious to meet someone, he said. The sort of cultural morals of the past  if we sleep together, then we stay together  arent really there anymore.

The film is showing at Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the New Voices In Black Cinema series, and he hopes the film will help spur conversations about unhealthy dating habits in the black community.

And yes, there are a lot of douchebags in Brooklyn, but the borough has it better than Jetters new home across the country, he said.

In New York you have a certain intellectual douche, a cultural douche, he said, while in Los Angeles theres a more narcissistic douche that roams ubiquitously here.

How To Tell Youre a Douchebag at the Peter Jay Sharp Building at BAM [30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, www.bam.org, (718) 6364100]. April 23 at 7 pm. $14.

Reach reporter Dennis Lynch at (718) 2602508 or e-mail him at dlync h@cng local.com .
latest news

October 3, 2022

Dee Gambit

Hundreds  if not thousands  of new and returning TV shows and movies are released every month  your options of what to watch are endless. Variety, they say is ...
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. Zhirayr Reisyan has been elected to the Syrian Parliament. During his first interview with Armenpress, Reisyan said that the Armenian community of Syria wants a more strengthened cooperation between Armenia and Syria.

When asked how he achieved success at the election despite the heated competition among the candidates, Reisyan said that it is due to the unity of the Armenian community. He said that all sides of the Armenian community decided to focus on one candidate, and that this is a serious matter of national unity.

- Which issues are considered as priority that you will push forward in the parliament?

- Firstly, according to the Syrian legislation the MP is the Syrian peoples MP, and not a minoritys MP. Of course, we as Syrian Armenians shall attach our national visions to this. But firstly we need to consider that the elected candidate is the MP of the Syrian people and is representing the interests of the Syrian people.

- Nevertheless which issues are priorities?

- I can mention a few important points. The first, of course is connected to the Syrian people, regarding to what extent we can provide people-MP connection. Regarding this issue we planned to create an MP office so that the people can present and apply their issues.

Another priority is collaborating with other MPs for the issue of recovering Aleppo. Today it is a disaster city with the number of damages and losses. Enormous lootings took place, all of this need to be recovered. A huge work has to be done.

- What projects have you planned for strengthening Armenia-Syria cooperation?

- As a Syrian-Armenian MP, of course internal national issues are also important for me. I want to strengthen the cooperation between Armenia and Syria. This process should be aimed towards the interest of both nations in the industrial, educational and other fields. Armenia is a friendly nation for Syria, so a wide range of cooperation is planned.

Speaking about the Armenian Genocide position of Syria, Reisyan said that the Syrian people are always talking about this. He stressed the political importance of the Syrian Governments recognition of the Armenian Genocide. He reminded that last year the Syrian Parliament honored the Armenian Genocide victims with a moment of silence. Reisyan expressed hope to further develop the process of recognition.

Syria itself is the witness of the Armenian Genocide. There are many places, like Deir Ezzor, where massacres took place. As an example I can point out the Margate region. A hill is located there which is till this day full of remains. Years ago this site was declared as the Hill of Armenian Genocide victims. Residents say that the Margate name derives from the Armenian Genocide, which is translated as place, where are buried,  Reisyan said.
Websites aren't telling full story on tobacco product risks

The evidence to date does not come close to establishing that there would be a loss to public health from making this information widely available from credible sources. 

BUFFALO, N.Y.  Millions of people visit the websites of the Mayo Clinic, American Cancer Society and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others, seeking authoritative health information. But are they receiving it?

When it comes to learning about the differences in risk among certain types of nicotine products, many government websites are actually misleading or under-informing the public, according to two researchers who analyzed the content of numerous health websites.

This "information quarantine" in turn helps explain the woeful lack of public knowledge about relative risks, violating basic consumer rights as well as the public health principles of individual rights and health literacy, the researchers say.



Writing in the International Journal of Drug Policy, Lynn Kozlowski of the University at Buffalo and David Sweanor of the University of Ottawa point out that many websites omit information showing that products such as e-cigarettes, smokeless tobacco and snus are far less harmful than traditional cigarettes.

Public health ethics always has a concern to avoid any net harm to population health, explains Kozlowski, professor of community health and health behavior at UB and the papers lead author.

The fear has been that much safer tobacco and nicotine products like snus, smokeless tobacco and vape will possibly cause a net loss to public health because more people will use these products and these products may lead to cigarette use. This fear, however, is not based on actual evidence and cannot be used to suppress or otherwise keep the public uninformed of what is clearly known about the lower risks of these products, adds Kozlowski, PhD, one of the worlds leading researchers on smoking behavior.

An information quarantine functions similarly to a medical quarantine  think of your favorite zombie movie or television show in which the infected person is secluded from everyone else to protect the overall public. In order to justify a quarantine, there has to be clear evidence that the need to protect population health should overrule personal autonomy.

In the case of providing information on differential health risks of nicotine products, The evidence to date does not come close to establishing that there would be a loss to public health from making this information widely available from credible sources, Kozlowski says.

Kozlowski and Sweanor reviewed several major health websites  including the CDC, Mayo Clinic, American Cancer Society, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the National Cancer Institute  and found three types of examples of information on smokeless tobacco, but no-to-modest efforts to inform consumers of the significantly lower risks compared to cigarettes for lifelong users, the researchers write.

In fact, they found that the Mayo Clinic perpetuated a misrepresentation discovered in 2003  erroneously informing visitors that smokeless tobacco was as dangerous as cigarettes. The day after the article was released, the Mayo Clinic removed the headline, replacing it with the still misleading statement that smokeless tobacco was not a safe product.

People can only make as good a decision as the information available to them allows, said Sweanor, an adjunct professor in the University of Ottawas Faculty of Law who has spearheaded the development of world-leading tobacco control initiatives in Canada since the early 1980s.

The public is dramatically misinformed about the relative risks of substitutable tobacco and nicotine products. The risk differentials are huge, but this is simply not known by a vast majority of those whose lives are at risk, adds Sweanor.

England has an example of a website  Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)  that gets it right on vaping, the researchers said. A briefing posted on the site specifically states: Compared to tobacco products, electronic cigarettes are significantly safer.

In their paper, the researchers note that information on comparative risks is common for other products and activities, like over-the-counter medicines and even safety ratings of vehicles.

They argue that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the sale of tobacco products, isnt doing its part to inform consumers of important differences in harm among tobacco products.

To illustrate their point, Kozlowski and Sweanor use the example that if one type of alcoholic beverage caused 3 in 5 regular users to die prematurely  as is the case with smoking traditional cigarettes  while another caused massively fewer deaths, consumers would want to know which product was the safer alternative.

It would be scandalous, even criminal, to keep such facts from consumers, the researchers write. Yet, such facts are being kept from adult consumers of legal tobacco/nicotine products, either by not informing or actively misinforming consumers. It is as if tobacco consumers were blindfolded and not allowed to see dramatic differences in harm from different products.
The latest statistical bulletin published by the Timber Trade Federation (TTF) reveals a strong start to 2016 for timber and panels trade.

Import volume in the UK in the first month of 2016 reached 756,000 m3 with a 1.6% increase compared to December 2015. The result was similar to the one registered in January 2015, but better than each of the January volumes since 2008 with the exception of 2014.

The 2016 start continues buoyant market trends experienced throughout the year 2015, as shown by the Source of Supply section of TTF Bulletin. China and Brazil, in particular, keep growing their share of UK timber and panels market. The first country has increased its penetration of the UK market with hardwood plywood, while Brazil has achieved a similar domination of the softwood plywood imports.

The 2015 overall share of timber and panels imported by the UK from Europe was 84.9%, 0.5% lower than 2014. A similar drop affected North American share of supply (-0.2%) as well as Africa, Middle East and Oceania (-0.2%). Conversely, 2015 saw an increase of supply from Asia (+0.5%) - mainly due to the growth of hardwood plywood from China - and Central & South America (+0.4%), fed by Brazilian exports of softwood plywood.

Nick Boulton, head of technical and trade at TTF, said: These statistics show a continued positive trend for the UK timber trade. It is interesting to see growth of Softwood plywood imports from Brazil, where the major manufacturers have made significant investment in strong third party Quality Assurance for their products enabling UK buyers to have greater confidence in their purchases. We will be addressing this theme with future TTF projects.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock/ smereka
UK racking specialist Filplastic has completed a contract to help PGR Timber launch a new flagship depot. The depot, in Brentwood, Essex, consists of a trade counter and shop, warehouse and timber yard, and is situated on Hubert Road in the town.

Filplastic supplied shelving and baskets for the shop, A-frame racking for the warehouse and pallet and cantilever racking for the timber yard, in a contract worth around 70,000. The new depot is the sixth in PGR Timbers network, which includes Egham in Surrey, Romford, Harold Hill, Basildon and Rayleigh, all in Essex. PGR Timbers managing director, Phil Kruse, described the Brentwood depot as very impressive, thanks in part to Filplastics design and installation work.

It is the third time the two companies have worked together, with Filplastic supplying racking to PGR Timbers depots in Egham and Romford. Mr Kruse said: We chose to work with Filplastic for a third time because the company ticks so many of our boxes. Their experience in the builders merchant sector means they buy into our vision of how we want our depots to look and function, and help us turn that into a reality.

Were extremely pleased with how the new depot has turned out, and Filplastic has played a big part in that.

Work started on the Brentwood depot in October and was completed in January. The branch opened to trade and retail customers earlier this month. Graham Matthews, of Filplastic, said the Yorkshire business was delighted to have worked with PGR Timber again as the two companies had built up a great, ongoing relationship.

He said: PGR Timber is a well-run and very ambitious company that is really well known in its heartland of Essex. We won this work through a tendering process and were extremely pleased to have been appointed because, having worked for the company before, we knew it be a great project to be involved in.

The finished depot is fantastic and gives tradespeople and DIYers in Brentwood a greater choice of where to buy their building supplies.
1mg, a health tech start-up, announced that it had raised Rs 100 crore from Maverick Capital Ventures, Sequoia India and the Omidiyar Network. The company uses an offline network of pharmacies to sell prescription, over-the-counter drugs and e-diagnostics, which lend clarity to test results.

The firm plans to use capital infusion to grow its reach from 13 to 30 cities. 1mg, which was primarily a metro-centric company, will see its network grow to tier-2 cities such as Surat, Kanpur and Lucknow, among others.

"This money will be invested, among other things, in verticals, such as homecare and paediatrics, lend harmony to our current offerings," said Gaurav Agarwal, chief technology officer and co-founder, 1mg. The company claims it has around five million app downloads and one million unique consumers who use its services every month.

Online pharmacies have been coming under flak and their legitimacy has been questioned, especially due to the sale of prescription drugs.

"We have a stringent verification system. The prescription has to be uploaded on the platform, the script will be digitised and then verified by the pharmacy fulfilling the prescription," said Agarwal. An algorithm designed by the company then analyses the legitimacy of the script. "If you try to fudge a prescription, our algo will catch it and the order will not be fulfilled," he added.

He added the company does not sell "habit forming drugs", which have very stringent verification processes. He explained that the prescription should be stamped and kept on record for a period of time. But, several non-habit forming drugs, too, need physical verification.

"We typically use the pharmacy's logistics network to deliver some of our medicines and that is when some of the checks happen as well," said Agarwal.

The company also ruled out that it would come under pressure from pharmacies that have been calling for a ban of websites such as 1mg.

"We are on the right side of the pharmacies. We are not taking away their business but adding to it," Agarwal added.

1mg also said that while it increases the business of pharmacies, it helps customers reduce their bills.

"Our app allows customers to access knowledge about substitutes that can often save 80-90 per cent on healthcare bills. Our e-diagnostics service aims to bring a similar transparency to the lab tests market," said Prashant Tandon, CEO and co-founder of 1mg.

The company has previously raised funding from Sequoia India, Omidyar Network, Kae Capital and Intel Capital as part of HealthKart and was spun off in February 2015.
Chennai-headquartered Apollo Hospitals is planning to invest close to Rs 600 crore to raise its bedcount across the country to 9,000 by the end of FY17 from the current 8,400 directly owned by Apollo.



The hospital group is also planning to start an advanced cardiac care facility in Ahmedabad with an investment of around Rs 60 crore, and it intends to have 10 such centers across India.

Sangita Reddy, joint managing director of Apollo Hospitals Group, said here today: "While we are close to starting a complete heart hospital in the city in joint venture with Cardio Vascular Heart Foundation, we are also considering 10 more locations across India where we could have similar facilities."



However, Reddy did not wish to comment on the investment planned on the same saying that it would vary based on the project.

The 70-100 bed facility coming up at Ahmedabad would be equipped with the latest technology, like the 320-slice CT machine, which Apollo claimed was the first in Gujarat. This is Apollo's effort to move closer to the patients as its hospital is located at the outskirts of Ahmedabad closer to Gandhinagar, and patients from the city find it difficult to access during emergencies. Apollo has invested close to Rs 400 crore in its Gandhinagar facility so far.

Apollo conducts 40,000 heart surgeries every year and over 70,000 angioplasties. Reddy further added that till date there have been no heart transplants in Gujarat done by Apollo. There was a need to have a central organ doners' body that would monitor the distribution of organs received from donors to member hospitals etc. "States like Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Delhi have such central bodies which are run with the help of the state governments that help in distribution of the organs collected from donors. Such a centralised database boosts organ transplantation programmes," she said.

The Group is also in process of increasing the bedcount directly under Apollo to 9,000 by the end of this fiscal that would entail an investment of Rs 600 crore. "We are planning to raise the bedcount to 9000 this fiscal, and an investment of Rs 600 crore is earmarked for the same," informed K Hari Prasad, president, Hospitals division, Apollo Hospitals.

Its Navi Mumbai facility, a 500-bed tertiary care hospital is almost ready.
The early signs of the crisis at Kingfisher Airlines were felt in 2009, although the final blow came only in 2012. In November 2009, the now-defunct airline laid off nearly 100 pilots. At the same time, it also reported a net loss for the second quarter, indicating all was not well with the carrier that had set out to create new benchmarks for service standards in India.

By the middle of 2012, it was clear the airline was in deep trouble. Its shares had tumbled to an all-time low, its aircraft had been repossessed for non-payment of lease rentals and a consortium of banks, led by the State Bank of India, had turned down its request for a Rs 200-crore working capital loan.

As the airline's dues for user charges to airport authorities mounted, by October its journey was all but over; it was grounded and its permit cancelled.

In a bid to recover its money, SBI, the lead banker in a consortium of 17 banks that extended loans worth Rs 9,000 crore to the airline, said the bank was trying to do everything possible to find a solution.

Yet, SBI has been in the process of recovering the dues for over four years now, with little success. To top it all, the consortium has been accused of going easy on Kingfisher Airlines and its promoter, .

Anil Sinha, the chief of the Central Bureau of Investigation, has accused the banks of not acting promptly in filing a complaint against Mallya to stop him from leaving the country. Mallya left the country on March 2 and is currently in London.

"Despite our repeated requests, the banks did not file a complaint with CBI," Sinha said. He added that CBI had to register the case on its own initiative. "The question is that the undue delay in identifying and reporting such a fraud has jeopardised the cause of justice to the offender's benefits, giving him the opportunity to divert funds and destroy evidence," he said.

Settlement offer

This perception that banks lacked the courage to take on Mallya is at the heart of their refusal to accept an offer from him early this month to partially settle the outstanding amount. They are now demanding that the liquor baron appear in person for further negotiations.

So far Mallya has offered Rs 4,000 crore and an additional Rs 2,000 crore on the settlement of a legal case after negotiating through a video-conference from London. Of course, this amount is way short of the total outstanding. An SBI executive involved in the case says the settlement offer does not even include the principal amount which is pegged at over Rs 5,000 crore.

There are also other factors behind banks rejecting the offer. "It is not just about making an offer with a better amount. Mallya has to disclose what assets are on the table, how liquid they are and the time line of the repayment," says the SBI executive on condition on anonymity. Both the banks and Mallya have been tight-lipped about the details.

A sticking point in the deal is the Rs 2,000 crore that Mallya has promised to the banks. It relates to a lawsuit filed by Kingfisher Airlines in 2013 before a court in Bangalore against a company for allegedly supplying defective engines for its aircraft. As the outcome of the case is still to be decided, bankers say this is money is not assured.

As far as defaults go, the Kingfisher-Mallya case stands out for many reasons. Normally, banks do not move against promoters as their are seen as separate legal entities. As of today, the number of cases filed by banks against defaulters has crossed 12,000 and the sum due has reached over Rs 1.86 lakh crore, according to data from credit rating agency Cibil. Mallya, unlike others, had given a personal guarantee for a part of the loans. Further, there are allegations of loan money having been routed through tax havens abroad for purchase of personal assets.

The Enforcement Directorate told a prevention of money laundering court in Mumbai that close to half of the Rs 900 crore loan from IDBI bank was diverted to purchase properties abroad. The court issued an arrest warrant against Mallya on Monday.

An United Breweries group spokesperson has vehemently denied any wrongdoing. "We are shocked at the allegations made by the Enforcement Department. Multiple investigations have been going on since July 2015 and this allegation has never been made. In order to explain foreign exchange remittances, all of which have been fully accounted for, we will provide full details in the next few days," he said.

Lawyers expect Mallya to challenge this warrant and more details about what happened to the loan would emerge during the course of these proceedings.

THE STORY SO FAR 2010: Kingfisher Airlines gets a lifeline in the form of a restructuring package for loans worth Rs 6,000 crore

Kingfisher Airlines gets a lifeline in the form of a restructuring package for loans worth Rs 6,000 crore 2012: As the airlines performance falters, lenders order fresh revival plan with extended repayment period

As the airlines performance falters, lenders order fresh revival plan with extended repayment period 2013: Lenders begin to recall loans

Lenders begin to recall loans 2014: The airlines loan is treated as non-performing assets

* United Bank of India declares Kingfisher Airline a wilful defaulter

The airlines loan is treated as non-performing assets * United Bank of India declares Kingfisher Airline a wilful defaulter 2015: Lenders begin recovery process

State Bank of India and Punjab National Bank declare the airline and its promoter, Vijay Mallya, as wilful defaulters

Lenders begin recovery process State Bank of India and Punjab National Bank declare the airline and its promoter, Vijay Mallya, as wilful defaulters 2016: Lenders put the airlines headquarters in Mumbai on the block

* Approach the Supreme Court with a plea to restrain Vijay Mallya

Mallya still has a formidable personal fortune. However, the ownership of these assets are entangled in multiple corporate entities and trust structures, which are difficult to comprehend. It is also believed his personal properties are jointly owned by the he floated overseas. Media reports have talked about houses on both coasts of America, South Africa, London and even an island in the Mediterranean. He is also said to have owned luxury yachts and jets. Some of which have been sold off since.

The Supreme Court has asked for a list of assets owned by Mallya and his immediate relatives. This list is likely to give a clearer picture.

According to BSE data, Mallya owns about 8.08 per cent stake in United Breweries. But, most of these shares are pledged with lenders. controlled by him hold another 22.6 per cent in United Breweries. This stake itself is worth about Rs 6,000 crore. Even accounting for about half of this, which is pledged to lenders, he would still be left with Rs 3,000 crore worth of unencumbered United Breweries shares.

To an extent, it is his personal fortune that has crystallised the opinion of banks against him, with many of them, including SBI, rushing to tag him and two of his companies, United Breweries and Kingfisher Airlines, as 'wilful defaulters' in recent months.

The case is also unique because a host of other investigative agencies, such as the Enforcement Directorate, the Income Tax authorities, the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Serious Fraud Investigations Office have now got involved in the investigations. From bumping up valuation of the airline for more loans to diverting money meant for the airline for other purposes, new angles have emerged in the Kingfisher saga.

Protecting public money

By refusing the offer made by Mallya, SBI and others not only stand a chance to drive a hard bargain on the settlement terms, but also make amends for being "lax" in dealing with him earlier.

Although SBI has refuted any charges of laxity, its progress so far has been lacklustre in recovering the dues. While it has sold Mallya's shares in United Breweries, there has been no meaningful recovery from other assets pledged by him.

Last year, SBI put Kingfisher Airlines's headquarters in Mumbai on the block, but the auction failed to get even a single bid. The airline's brands and trademarks have also not found any takers so far.

Banks have now filed an application before the Goa bench of the Bombay High Court for permission to seize the Kingfisher Villa in Candolim. The Kingfisher Villa, named after United Breweries's popular beer brand, is part of the collaterals pledged by Mallya.

While banks are in favour of a negotiated settlement, they don't want to take Mallya at his word. As he faces a huge trust deficit with shareholders, employees and courts, they want him to be present in person during meetings to make sure he is making "bonafide gestures."



"There should be face-to-face communication between the airline and lenders and banks should be cautious not to allow delay tactics from Mallya," says the SBI official.

The public interest in the case has put banks under pressure too. "This settlement is being dealt in the most transparent manner due to pressure from the public. So we have a stake in getting the maximum amount in dues through negotiations," says an IDBI Bank official.
Indias largest venture capital (VC) firm Sequoia Capital India on Tuesday confirmed that its offices were searched by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to probe its investments in Tamil Nadu-based eye and dental care chain .

According to Sequoia, it first came to know of a regulatory investigation into through a newspaper article on September 17, 2015. V T Bharadwaj, managing director of Sequoia Capital India Advisors, who was Sequoia Capital Indias nominee on the board of directors, demanded that the Vasan Healthcare management conduct a thorough investigation into the allegations, the VC added. Subsequently, Bharadwaj resigned from the Vasan Healthcare board on November 18, 2015, Sequoia stated.

Vasan Healthcare officials were not reachable for their comments.

Sequoia Capital India has fully supported the regulatory investigation, has adopted a policy of complete transparency and full compliance with that investigation, and continues to dutifully respond to all inquiries received to date. During the course of this investigation, the Sequoia Capital India team has met the ED officials multiple times and has answered every query placed before us. We adopted the same approach during the EDs visit to our offices, the statement added.

Vasan Healthcare, once a jewel in the crown of marquee VC funds Sequoia Capital India Advisors and GIC Pte Ltd (formerly Government of Singapore Investment Corporation), fell from grace after investigators began questioning fund diversions from the company to businesses held by Karti Chidambaram, son of former finance minister P Chidambaram.

Sequoia Capital had earlier subscribed Rs 100 crore worth of Vasan Healthcare preference shares. However, in 2010-11, it bought 30,000 shares of Vasan Healthcare at Rs 7,500 a unit from Advantage Strategic Consulting, which is also under the ED scanner for suspected foreign exchange violations.

Vasan Healthcare had earlier sold shares to Advantage Strategic Consulting allegedly at a discounted price. Advantage Strategic was under the scanner of ED in connection with the Aircel-Maxis deal. Majority of the stake of Advantage Strategic was later acquired by Ausbridge Holdings, where Karti Chidambaram was a director. I have no idea about it. I have no comments to offer, Karti Chidambaram said on Tuesday.

Contrary to media reports, Sequoia Capital India has absolutely no association with like Aircel or Maxis. Our only connection to the ED visit is that Sequoia Capital India is a minority investor in Vasan, which is one out of the 100-plus investments made in India over the last 10 years, Sequoia added.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. Ombudsman of Armenia Arman Tatoyan appealed to the Prosecutor General regarding the April 17 Armenian regional election violations.

As Armenpress was informed by the Ombudsmans Office, the Rapid Response Department conducted research of media publications. 14 publications were registered regarding the Hrazdan elections, which are connected to violations in polling stations.

The violations include voting on behalf of another person, obstruction of reporters activity, privacy violations, bribery, etc.
on Monday announced that the Bay of Bengal Gateway's subsea cable network spread over 8,100 km was operational.

The network has been built by six telcos to handle high bandwidth demands of emerging technologies and applications. The system is a direct trunk connection between Barka in Oman and Penang in Malaysia. The network is owned by Dialog Axiata of Sri Lanka, Etisalat, Omantel, Infocomm, Telekom Malaysia and Vodafone. Construction of the system began in May 2013. The cable system will provide an alternate route to Europe by avoiding the congested Malacca Straits and other routes prone to cable cuts. The system has a wide terrestrial network that will enhance its reliability. The Bay of Bengal Gateway will have two landing stations in India - Vodafone will use Mumbai and Jio will use Chennai. Currently, Jio uses other subsea networks for its data traffic like SMW4, IMEWE, Europe India Gateway and Bharti's i2i. With BBG, Jio will be able to cut its reliance on other submarine networks.

The Bay of Bengal Gateway uses advanced fibre optic technology that allows capacity to be increased without submarine intervention. The initial capacity of the system is nine terabytes per second. The network connects to Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia with existing terrestrial and subsea cable systems.

owns and operates the cable landing facility at Chennai. "It offers not just direct connectivity in and out of India through Chennai and Mumbai but also acts as a state-of-the-art extension to Jio's core network," said Mathew Oommen, president, Reliance Jio. "This connectivity brings international content hubs closer to our customers." Three other Indian have invested in subsea cable networks.

Reliance Globalcom's undersea cable system spans 65,000 km and is integrated with Reliance Communications' optic fibre network in India. Tata Communications' global network comprises 206,356 km of terrestrial network fibre and over 500,000 km of subsea cable along with a trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific data transfer capacity of one terabyte per second. Bharti's i2i has a submarine telecommunications cable connecting India with Singapore, spanning 3,200 km with a landing point in Chennai.

Tata Communications owns 3 cable landing stations, each in Mumbai, Chennai and Kochi

Reliance Globalcom owns the Versova

Cable Landing Station in Mumbai

Cable Landing Station in Mumbai Bharti Airtel owns three cable landing stations, two in Chennai and one in Mumbai

Sify Technologies owns a cable landing station in Mumbai

BSNL owns its first international submarine cable connecting India and Sri Lanka and its cable landing station in Tuticorin. The Digha Cable Landing Station in West Bengal was also approved in May 2011 by DoT, for a submarine cable project between India and Southeast Asia

Reliance Globalcom's undersea cable system spans 65,000 km. It is seamlessly integrated with Reliance Communications' optic fibre network in India

Tata Communications' global network comprises major ownership in 206,356 km of terrestrial network fibre and over 500,000 km of subsea cable along with a trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific data transfer capacity of one Tbps

Bharti's i2i has a submarine cable connecting India with Singapore, spanning 3,200 km, with a design capacity of 8.4 Tbps, and a landing point in Chennai

Bay of Bengal Gateway, built by a consortium of six telcos, is a submarine cable system spread over 8,100 km, with multiple landing points across West Asia, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka and Singapore

Sources: Companies, Submarine Cable Networks
The Tata group has deferred its share conversion option in Ltd by a year after the talks between the group and its equity partner NTT Docomo on the buyback of latters 26.5 per cent stake failed to make headway. The share conversion is important for the Tata group to implement its restructuring plan for the loss-making telecom company, which includes a possible merger with another player.

The CCPS (compulsorily convertible non-cumulative preference shares) Series I will now be converted into shares by early next year, by when the company expects more clarity on the buyback plan, according to a banker. The CCPS were issued by in two tranches since January 2014 and it raised Rs 4,500 crore to repay its loans to Indian banks and invest in buying spectrum.

Since January 2015, the Tata group has been locked in arbitration negotiations with NTT Docomo in the London Court of International Arbitration over the valuation of shares. Till both the come to an agreement, Tata groups holding company, Tata Sons, cannot increase its stake in the company or merge it with Telenor, with whom it had earlier initiated talks, the banker added.

An email sent to Tata Teleservices on Monday did not elicit any response.

The bone of contention between NTT Docomo and Tatas is the valuation of Tata Tele shares. Docomo is insisting on a Rs 58 a share valuation for Tata Teleservices according to its 2009 agreement whereas Tata Sons is offering only Rs 23.34 a share, according to a valuation done by Price Waterhouse (PW). The total valuation of Tata Tele, according to PW, works out to Rs 11,000 crore compared to the pre-agreed valuation of Rs 27,000 crore for the entire company.

According to a plan prepared by Tata Teleservices, the company is expected to break even in the June quarter as its operating performance improved in FY16 backed by reduction in termination charges, scaling down of operations in loss-making circles, network optimisation after re-deployment of cell sites from loss-making circles, and stringent cost control measures. Tata Teles operating margins, which stood at 12 per cent during FY15, improved to 19 per cent during the first half of FY16, according to an analysis by rating firm CRISIL. Another positive for the company in recent times was the sale of its 20 per cent stake in telecom tower firm Viom Networks for Rs 2,800 crore to American Towers announced in October last year. The proceeds of the sale is expected this quarter and the company is planning to use the proceeds to fund its capital expenditure and repay its debt, which touched Rs 32,500 crore as of March 2015.

The Japanese company had earlier threatened to foreclose Tata Sons assets if the Tatas fail to honour a commitment to buy back its shares. Docomo had said the foreclosure action with respect to the assets of Tata Sons could be taken by a court in India, after a ruling by the London Court of International Arbitration. The matter is currently pending.
Techwave Consulting Inc, a US-based IT services and solutions company with its global delivery centre (GDC) in Hyderabad, has acquired UK-based digital services and solutions provider Tech Advaita, besides signing a definitive agreement to acquire a Hungarian SAP services firm, together for $4 million (around Rs 26.5 crore).

"We have chalked out our roadmap for significant growth through expansion of our global client base and strategic acquisitions to achieve a revenue target of $100 million by the end of this financial year, with the acquisitions adding up to $8 million to our revenues," Damodar Rao Gummadapu, chief executive officer of Techwave, said in a statement on Tuesday.

The company is looking forward to continuing its growth trajectory by investing heavily in ISMAC (Internet of Things, social media, mobile, analytics and cloud) and digital solutions. Techwave will soon be foraying into the Asia-Pacific region, he added.

The mid-tier IT services company has already crossed the $5-million revenue mark. It has recently increased its headcount to 1,500 from a little over 500 professional last year.

According to Gummadapu, Tech Advaita brings in strong expertise across e-commerce (SAP Hybris, Oracle Commerce), web technologies and content management.

"Combined with Techwave's established practices, this acquisition positions the company for leadership in addressing the fast-growing digital services market. The acquisition adds 40 more employees to Techwave's growing team of over 700 employees at its GDC," he said.

In addition to providing global support to Techwave's clients across the globe, the Hyderabad location enables remote infrastructure management (RIM) services using integrated monitoring facility built at the GDC.
Aiming to ramp up capacity of the idle aluminium smelter lying within its product specific Special Economic Zone (SEZ), Vedanta has sought extension of the formal approval for the SEZ beyond May 22 this year.

The Board of Approvals (BoA) under Union commerce and industry ministry will consider Vedanta's case for extension at its ensuing meeting on April 28. The development commissioner at Falta SEZ has already recommended Vedanta's case for extension.

The SEZ meant for manufacture and export of aluminium, is located at Bhurkamunda village near Jharsuguda, close to the site of its standalone aluminium smelting facility. Formal approval to the SEZ was granted on May 22, 2007 and since then, it has been granted six extensions.

The board had approved the establishment of the 1.25 million tonne per annum (mtpa) aluminium smelter at an estimated cost of Rs 14500 crore.

The SEZ has already started trial run production and currently running with less than 10 per cent of rated capacity. The company used to get raw material and consumables procured from domestic as well as foreign market.

however, has kicked off the ramp up of the SEZ smelter. It aims to commission two potlines of the smelter, achieving a capacity of 0.6 mtpa by the end of this fiscal.

Vedanta owns two aluminium smelting facilities at Jharsuguda.

While the standalone smelter of 0.5 million tonne per annum (mtpa) is running at full capacity, the other smelting unit of 1.25 mtpa capacity, within its product specific SEZ, was running at depleted capacity for want of power.

The company has already invested Rs 13,000 crore on the smelter complex at Jharsuguda. Commissioning of the SEZ facility promised to boost the local economy by generating business potential worth Rs 15,000 crore every year. Direct and indirect employment opportunities for nearly 12,000 persons are set to be created.

In 2015-16, Vedanta logged four-fold jump in aluminium production at its second smelter from 19000 tonne to 76,000 tonne. Vedanta's overall aluminium output moved up five per cent from 0.87 million tonne (mt) to 0.92 mt by the end of 2015-16.

Alumina production from Vedanta's Lanjigarh refinery was marginally down one per cent last fiscal to 0.97 mt as one stream was under shutdown for want of bauxite. Vedanta has approval to expand Lanjigarh refinery to four mtpa and it would be ramped up in phases on further visibility of bauxite sources, the company said in a statement.

In 2015-16, Vedanta imported around one million tonne of alumina and the imports are going to escalate this fiscal with the company going for ramp up in smelter capacities.
Fast food lovers will now be able to bite into a Wendy's burger for only Rs 49, as the world's third largest burger chain drops prices to shore up sales. The vegetarian variant will be available for Rs 39.

Till now, foodies had to shell out at least Rs 100 to get a bite of the burger. For vegetarians, the pocket pinch was slightly less at Rs 59. For bigger and better burgers, one had to pay Rs 150-200.

Rivals McDonald's, the largest burger chain in the world, and Burger King, second-largest, also have value meals in India, a key market for them. One can get a McDonald's burger for as low as Rs 25 and a Burger King one for Rs 35.

Kentucky Fried Chicken, which specialises in  as its name suggests  fried chicken, sells burgers for a minimum of Rs 29.

Wendy's management feels low-priced burgers will get them more customers. Jasper Reid, director, Sierra Nevada Restaurants, the master franchisee of Wendy's in India, said the brand's entry into low-price range will give it access to a new set of customers. "It is not just about price, but about the quality you offer. What we are giving is table service, crockery, food that is made to order," he said.

Sanjay Chhabra, a director at Sierra Nevada Restaurants, said the new price points will effectively increase the offerings from Wendy's below Rs 100.

"Earlier, we had three vegetarian (burger) offerings below Rs 100 (at Rs 59, Rs 79 and Rs 89). We now have five. One can get a burger for Rs 39, Rs 59, Rs 79, Rs 89 and Rs 99. In non-vegetarian, on the other hand, we will have three offerings below Rs 100 now (Rs 49, Rs 79 and Rs 99), which is, in my view, a good way to navigate consumers," he said.

The layered pricing below the Rs 100-mark, claim experts, is intended to arrest lower same-store sales growth that has hit the financial performance of most food-service players in recent quarters.

Wendy's opened its fourth outlet in the Delhi-NCR region this week. Plans include stepping into Mumbai later this year. Bengaluru and Punjab will come later.

Listed players such as Jubilant FoodWorks, master franchisee of Dominos Pizza and Dunkin Donuts, and Westlife Development, the operator of McDonalds in west and south India, have had their same-store sales growth for the December 2015 quarter at two per cent and 3.2 per cent, respectively  much lower than the double-digit growth they saw a few years ago.

Yum! Brands, which operates KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell in India, has seen it same-store sales growth decline to 13 per cent in the December 2015 quarter, its ninth straight quarter of decline.

The March 2016 quarter, according to analysts, is expected to be no different as consumers cutback on discretionary spends.

Abneesh Roy, associate director, research, institutional equities, Edelweiss, in a recent report, said, In our view, delayed recovery in same-store sales growth over medium term seems not just cyclical but structural. Revival remains challenging for the entire quick-service restaurant space though our long-term view remains positive.
The controversy over one of Indias long-cherished treasures, the 105-carat Kohinoor diamond, may finally achieve some official, if not emotional, closure with the Indian government deciding not to stake its claim to the famed rock because "it was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away".

The return of to India has been a long-standing demand, with many claiming that the diamond was taken forcibly. The fight to get back the diamond has been ongoing since India's independence. Business Standard takes a look at the legend of the Kohinoor diamond, which has become a symbol for India's past riches, and their plunder by successive rulers.

Ownership of the diamond



After the subjugation of Punjab in 1849 by British forces, the properties of the Sikh Empire were confiscated. The Kohinoor was transferred to the treasury of the British East India Company in Lahore. The diamond was shipped to Britain and was handed to Queen Victoria in July 1850. It was cut to improve its brilliance and was mounted into Queen Victorias crown. The diamond now sits in the Tower of London along with the Crown Jewels.

People of India have longed for the return of Kohinoor for years. Many Indians demanded the return of the diamond when Elizabeth II made a state visit to India to mark the 50th anniversary of India's independence from Britain in 1997.

The Indian government, believing the gem was rightfully theirs, made the first demand for the return of the soon after independence. A second request followed in 1953, the year of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Each time, the British government refuted the claims, saying that ownership was non-negotiable.

In 2000, several members of the Indian Parliament signed a letter calling for the diamond to be given back to India, claiming it was taken illegally. British officials said that a variety of claims meant it was impossible to establish the gem's original owner.

A similar demand was made during UK Prime Minister David Camerons visit to India, to which he responded that he doesnt believe in "returnism".

Cameron said that it is not the right approach to return the diamond to India and said, "If you say yes to one you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty. I am afraid to say, it is going to have to stay put."



What the Indian government has to say



On April 18, 2016, the government of India said that India should not stake claim to the diamond. According to a report by India Today, Centre's counsel, Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, told the apex court that the 105.602 carats diamond was handed over to the East India Company by Maharaja Ranjit Singh after he lost in the 1849 Sikh War.

Kumar cited a 43-year-old law that does not allow the government to bring back antiquities taken out of the country before independence. Under the provisions of the Antiquities and Art Treasure Act, 1972, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) takes up the issue of retrieval of only such antiquities as have been illegally exported out of the country.

The matter finally goes to court



A petition was filed by All India Human Rights and Social Justice Front in the Supreme Court, asking the Centre to disclose its stand on bringing back the diamond. The petition had said that the government was not making efforts to bring the diamond back.

Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, appearing for the government, said this was the stand of the Culture Ministry.

Chief Justice T S Thakur asked the Centre if it wants the case to be dismissed as they would face a problem in the future when putting forward any legitimate claim.

Who owns the diamond, anyway?



It is not just India that is claiming ownership of the diamond; the list includes Pakistan and Aghanistan, too.
Veteran Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan, who was announced as the government's choice for brand ambassador of the 'Incredible India' campaign earlier this year, is still waiting on an official confirmation. Sources say that the delay could have been caused by appearance of Bachchan's name in the 'Panama Papers' controversy, reports NDTV.

Earlier this month, The Indian Express carried a report based on a massive data leak of Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, revealing offshore accounts of over 500 Indians. Bachchan's name surfaced in this leak, as the director of four shipping companies, registered in British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas, in the 1990s.

Bachchan however clarified his stand, denying any connection with the mentioned companies and stated that his name might have been "misused".

He said, I do not know any of the companies referred to by Indian Express  Sea Bulk Shipping Company Ltd, Lady Shipping Ltd, Treasure Shipping Ltd, and Tramp Shipping Ltd. I have never been a director of any of the above stated companies. It is possible that my name has been misused."

"I have paid all my taxes including on monies spent by me overseas. Monies that I have remitted overseas have been in compliance with law, including remittances through Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS), after paying Indian taxes. In any event the news report in Indian Express does not even suggest any illegality on my part," his statement added.

The link between Bachchan and the 'Panama Papers' list however was not taken lightly by the Congress, who demanded that he be taken down as Maharashtra's ambassador for the Save Tiger project.

The party also demanded the Bachchan's removal from the advisory panel on the development of part of Bandra Kurla Complex as an International Finance and Services Centre.

and actress Priyanka Chopra were both announced as choices for brand ambassador of the 'Incredible India' campaign in January this year, after the ouster of actor Aamir Khan, post his 'intolerance' comments.
Over 10,000 garment workers across Bengaluru came on streets to protest against the move by the Employee Provident Fund Organisation to restrict employees from withdrawing their entire contribution to the provident fund till the age of 58. Protesters burnt three buses and police resorted to lathi charge and firing tear gas shells to disperse the protesting workers, majority of who were women.

Over six lakh workers are employed in garment factories in Karnataka, of which four lakh people work in Bengaluru.

"This was a spontanous protest by workers. They are worried that their life savings will be lost," said K R Jayaram, President of the Garment and Textile Workers Union (GATWU). Police lathi charged protesting garment workers in Bengaluru (Photo: Saggere Radhakrishna)

On Monday, thousands of technology workers got stuck in busy traffic on the electronics city road and on Mysore road when workers took to the streets.

GATWU and other unions have called for a meeting on April 26 to decide on the next course of action. Average salaries for garment workers is less than Rs 10,000 a month and the PF is the only savings for them, he said.

Even as workers took to streets in Bengaluru, the on Tuesday came with an amendment that money can be withdrawn for emergency purposes. It stated that a subscriber can withdraw his or her entire savings for housing purpose, treatment of himself/herself or family members suffering from TB (tuberculosis), leprosy, paralysis, cancer or undergoing heart operation, marriage of children as well as professional education (medical, engineering, dental) of children.

"Even the employer's contribution is part of the salary package of the employee. EPF is a kind of an insurance for workers and if you are unsure of withdrawing it for an emergency, it is a big blow for them," said an industry executive who does not want to be identified.
About 30,000 garment workers took to the streets here against a move by the Employee Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) to restrict them from withdrawing their entire contribution to the provident fund till the age of 58.

The move aimed at encouraging long-term savings has been put on hold by the Centre after protests turned violent in Bengaluru. The has deferred the decision on tightening of norms for provident fund withdrawal after facing protest from trade unions.

Rioteers in Bengaluru burned vehicles at a police station and damaged over 50 buses across the city. Police firing left two persons hurt, including a college girl, while several workers were injured in a lathi charge by policemen. Eight policemen were injured in mob attacks.

Traffic crawled in busy areas as protesting workers blocked the highways to Chennai and Mumbai demanding a rollback.

Bengaluru is home to Page Industries, makers of Jockey brand garments, and the Blackstone-owned Gokaldas Exports. The city produces garments for Marks and Spencer, Tommy Hilfiger and Van Heusen.

Bengaluru employs nearly 500,000 people in the garments industry, nearly 95 per cent of them women. The average wages of garment workers are Rs 6,000- 8,000, according to the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC).

"Half of the garment workers are not covered by provident fund (PF) or Employees State Insurance Act. The garment industry has the highest turnover of employees," said Supriya RoyChowdhury, professor at the ISEC who has worked on garment workers issues.

The majority of workers are young women. A substantial number want to take out their PF money for marriage or children's education," she added.

Garment industry workers also had serious health issues, forcing many of them out of work, said Kala Sreedhar, a professor at ISEC.

Business in the city has been affected by the workers protest, which began on Monday. Over 10,000 workers have taken to the streets against the government move.

"Industries have lost over Rs 30 crore a day," said Tallam R Dwarakanath, president of the Federation of Karnataka Chambers of Commerce and Industry. "There should have been better communication to these workers about the benefit of the PF order," he added.

Union Minister for Fertilisers Ananth Kumar, a parliamentarian from south Bengaluru, pleaded with protesters saying their rights would be respected. Karnatakas Home Minister G Parameshwar asked workers not to indulge in violence.

Trade unions have called for a meeting on April 26 to decide on their course of action. "This was a spontaneous protest by workers. They are worried that their life savings will be lost," said KR Jayaram, president of the Garment and Textile Workers Union.
Accusing erstwhile UPA regime of compromising security to achieve its political interest in case, BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad today said former Union Home minister P Chidambaram was resorting to falsehood by claiming he was not aware of the first affidavit.

"Mr Chidambaram has spoken a blatant lie that he was not aware of the first affidavit. Now it is in public domain that he approved the first affidavit and also approved the second affidavit as well," he said.

"What was the first affidavit? The first affidavit was was part of a terrorist module and action was taken, including some terrorists across the border. The first affidavit said it was a serious terrorist threat and there is no need for a CBI inquiry," the Union minister said.

"In the second affidavit, Chidambaram was very keen to pursue that bypassing the consultations with then home secretary. It is stated that CBI inquiry can be done. It has two purpose, demoralise the security forces and somehow frame Amit Shah and Narendra Modi. It was part of a design to frame Amit Shah and Narendra Modi in case," he said.

"Ishrat was claimed as LeT mole by the Lashkar-e-Taiba website. And even (David) Headley in his deposition has confirmed that. Therefore, Congress party needs to explain why security was sought to be compromised for political reasons," Prasad said.

BJP raked up the 2004 Ishrat case accusing Congress of having underplayed "a terror plot" against the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi because it was "mortified" of fighting him politically.

The saffron fusillade came after a media report said the then Union Home Minister P Chidambaram had signed the first affidavit in the encounter case, which he had reportedly denied earlier.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. April 24th, 1916, was the foundation moment of an Irish State. At the opposite end of Europe, what Pope Francis has described as the first genocide of the 20th century began in Constantinople on April 24th, 1915, Armenpress reports, The Irish Times periodical publishes an article entitled An Irishmans Diary on the Armenian Genocide.

The author of the article Brendan O Cathaoir writes that Turkification policy cost the lives of more than half of the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Hundreds of thousands of people died along the way, of starvation and disease, and from attacks by brigands and death squads. Later the leader of Germany Hitler told his generals what happened with Armenians stating: Who speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? He was trying with such means to tell his generals that they would have the same impunity allowed to the Turkish government for what had befallen the Armenians.

The author writes that today Turkey threatens to close air bases to countries such as the US and the Great Britain if they use the G-word.

Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity as its official religion. Armenians mourn not only the genocide but also the loss of a cultural heritage accumulated over 3,000 years of recorded history. As a measure of restorative justice, Ireland should join the 20 national parliaments that recognize this crime against humanity as genocide, the author concluded.
The Union government has moved to distance itself from a controversial appointment, as the Panama leaks are being probed and film star Amitabh Bachchan is one of the names linked to those accounts. Bachchan had in a tweet denied any involvement.

In January 2016, officials in the tourism ministry had told media that Amitabh Bachchan and Priyanka Chopra would represent Incredible India, a campaign to promote the country as a tourism destination. As a formal announcement was awaited at that point, officials did not want to be quoted.

They had pointed out on January 27, that this would be the first instance of the government directly dealing with a celebrity for brand endorsement without the involvement of a marketing or advertising agency. The duration of appointment was also fixedfor three years till 2019. Not just that, sources in the government also said both actors had agreed to be mascots for the campaign without any fee, like Aamir Khan had done before.

Cut to April 2016, and the tourism ministry is speaking in a different voice, mostly off the record, again. Their latest version is that the process of selecting a creative/marketing agency is currently on as the term of contract with the previous one ended recently. Khan, who was the face of the Incredible India campaign for 10 years, was replaced following a controversial comment on rising intolerance in India. Khan was selected through creative agency McCann Worldwide.

On whether the government had decided not to have Bachchan as brand ambassador following his alleged links with the Panama controversy, ministry officials said, It is up to the creative agencies to select a brand ambassador. It is not the job of any government. They said the process for selecting the agency was now on.

The ministry of tourism was supposed to sign an agreement with the two actors by February, officials had said in January. But, theres no deal as the selected agencies will decide, they point out now.

Bachchan, already brand ambassador of Gujarat tourism, was said to be Prime Minister Narendra Modis choice as the new face for Incredible India.

Amitabh Kant, who was then secretary at the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion had defended the governments stand to replace Khan. He had said Khan had damaged the brand identity of the country with his remarks.

The government may indeed have a view on appointing Bachchan in the same role, when the film stars name is embroiled in a controversy. As people in the know said, it is always the client who decides the brand ambassador.
The Tirupur Exporters' Association (TEA) urged the Centre to repeal an amendment to the saying the agitation in Bengaluru against this could spread to Tirupur.

In a letter to Union Minister of State for Labour Bandaru Dattatreya, TEA reminded the minister of earlier warnings that the notification has created a lot of ripples in Tirupur. The cluster employs around 400,000 workers. There are reports of unrest at three factories and migrant workers protested against the management. It was a herculean task for managements to calm workers.

Employment in the sector is next only to agriculture, and a lot of people would be affected if there are any untoward incidents.

"We are more concerned about the meeting of delivery schedule as per the commitment given to buyers and any deviation from this will not only affect the financial side but also credibility and there is a possibility of losing future orders," he said.

The association requested the minister to act immediately to withdraw the amendment instead of deferring implementation for three months.
Amid fresh claims on the role of former Home Minister P Chidambaram in the case, Congress alleged there were deliberate attempts being made to dilute the basic issue of fake encounters.

"The issue was whether it was a fake or genuine encounter. The court has held that it was a fake encounter... Now reports are being planted to dilute the main issue," party spokesman Shakeel Ahmed said.

He further said that both the judicial magistrate and high court had held that the case of was a fake encounter.

Reports had it claiming that an affidavit describing Ishrat as a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative was signed by Chidambaram when he the home minister.

Ahmed's remarks came in retaliation, as BJP launched a sharp attack on Congress over the case, accusing it of "encouraging the elimination" of Narendra Modi.

Citing a media report which claimed Chidambaram had signed the first affidavit, Union minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Congress, especially Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, should take responsibility because Chidambaram did so as the party found it not strong enough to fight Modi politically.

Recent claims by former home secretary G K Pillai, former undersecretary in the home ministry RVS Mani, and former joint director Rajendra Kumar on the deposition by LeT operative David Headley suggested that an affidavit was filed on the basis of inputs from Maharashtra and Gujarat Police besides the Intelligence Bureau where it was said that the 19-year-old girl from Mumbai outskirts but it was ignored in the second affidavit.

A second affidavit, which officials claimed to have been drafted by Chidambaram, said there was no conclusive evidence to prove that Ishrat was a terrorist.
The Tirupur Exporters' Association has warned the centre that Bengaluru garment agitation may spread to the textile industry in Tirupur, affecting exports and foreign exchange, if the amendment is not withdrawn.

In a letter to Union Minister of State for Labour and Employment Bandaru Dattatreya, the association said that it has represented to the minister earlier that the notification issued on February 10, 2016, has created a lot of ripples in Tirupur knitwear garment cluster.

The cluster employs 4 lakh workers directly, out of which, 70% are women.

A Sakthivel, TEA President, said, "We are shocked to note that the workers employed with garment factories in Bangalore have resorted to strike yesterday and today, agitating over the amendments made through the controversial notification and we apprehend that this may spread to Tirupur also in due course of the time which will totally affect not only the export but also the foreign exchange earned by the garment sectors."

Sakhtivel said the problem has already started in three garment factories in Tirupur and the workers from North India protested against the management over the amendment.

"We are more concerned about the meeting of delivery schedule as per the commitment given to buyer and any deviation from this will not only affect the financial side but also the reliable supplier crediability in the eyes of buyer and there is a possibility of losing the future orders," he said.

The association requested the minister to take immediate action to withdraw the controversial amendment made in the provident fund scheme, instead of deferring for three months relaxation period, mainly to protect workers and exports.

"We apprehend that any late decision may create unwanted incidents in Tirupur garment units also," concluded the letter.

If things fail to turn in their favour, a lot of people will be affected, majority being women workers.
Eastern Uttar Pradesh lags far behind the western parts of the state in terms of infrastructure - the main hurdle that is holding back the growth of industry there. Entrepreneurs say that a special package like the one that was offered to Uttarakhand is needed. S N Jhunjhunwala, Managing Director, JVL Agro Industries, located in eastern UP, speaks to Siddharth Kalhans. Edited excerpts:



How do you see industry coming up in eastern UP, and what needs to be done to boost this process?



Not much has been done here, or you can say a lot still needs to be done. Eastern UP is a backward region and there are not many industrial townships here. If there are a few, they do not have infrastructure facilities like Kanpur, Ghaziabad, Noida and western UP. Road connectivity is still a big issue in most of parts of eastern UP. Though the new expressway called the Samajwadi Poorvanchanal Expressway will improve conditions, there is need for more attention and focus.

Is Bihar posing a great challenge for eastern UP? According to recent reports industries from eastern UP are shifting there.



True, Bihar is an option before us and in the recent past we have been attracted by Bihar's policies and facilities. Entrepreneurs get many rebates, sops and incentives in Bihar. Recently, many industries from east UP shifted there. I myself set up a food processing plant in Bihar. Dehri-on-Son in Bihar, adjacent to Varanasi, is becoming a hub for solvent extraction, food processing and rice milling. In Bihar there are many incentives in commercial taxes, besides cash subsidy.

What steps should the UP government take?



We have spoken to the state government many times. I have myself handed over booklets containing the policies of the Bihar government and asked officials to frame policies like those. The government has to consider this. To remove the backwardness of eastern UP at least facilities like those given to Uttarakhand should be provided and cash incentives should be given. While looking at industrial development in UP and figures of growth, separate out western UP and then you will get the real picture. Areas that have made progress are moving further ahead, and the backward areas are regressing. This anomaly needs to be removed.

What are the possibilities of industrial growth in east UP?



Cheap and ample manpower is our asset. Today, the maximum amount of manpower in the entire country leaves this region, which can be stopped by setting up industries here. This region can get the maximum benefit from the Skill Development Mission. Only if we provide employment to our youth by providing them with skills right here, will the production cost be reduced putting eastern UP on the path of development. The Union government will have to come forward to help develop eastern UP.

What kind of help do eastern UP's entrepreneurs seek from the Union government?



Until now we haven't seen any benefit resulting from Varanasi being the parliamentary constituency of the prime minister. Yes, it has come into the limelight and a few schemes have been announced, but this has not yielded any results. In fact, will power from both the Centre and state government is needed to initiate all-round development. Only then can things be changed.

There has been talk of creating a special economic zone in eastern UP.



The Union government had made announcements regarding the SEZ, and that gave us a ray of hope. Now the situation has changed and the climate is not favourable for SEZs in the entire country. The Union government has brought them under the income tax net. Even my company had planned a SEZ in eastern UP. We have not denotified it yet, like others. Recently, it has been heard that the state and the Union government are willing to give some sops to SEZs. But it is a fact that SEZs are no longer as lucrative as they were earlier.

What is the situation of the traditional industries of eastern UP?



None of them is performing well these days. Whether you talk about the silk industry or the carpet industry, every industry has problems of its own. They have their set of demands and their problems. All these industries are facing stiff competition. Machine-made products are growing and the demand for handmade products is falling. This new trend may result in an increase in volumes but it has created unemployment.
The central government has set up a committee to examine the Punjab governments claim of Rs 20,000 crore in foodgrain dues.

The committee, to be headed by P K Jha, additional secretary, Department of Food and Public Distribution, will have officials from the Food Corporation of India (FCI), finance ministry, and the Punjab government. The panel will examine if Punjabs claims are tenable or not. While a decision is yet to be taken, FCI sources say the amount the Centre owes the state cant be higher than Rs 5,000-7,000 crore.

The claims by Punjab are not tenable. Only a portion of it may be correct, said a senior official from FCI. The person added that any loss incurred by the Punjab government from selling damaged food grains at lower cost is unlikely to be borne by the central government. He also said that the costs incurred by the state on account of carrying and forwarding charges for paddy sent to mills would have to be authenticated before settling.

UNDER LENS The central government has set up a committee to examine the Punjab governments claim of Rs 20,000 crore in foodgrain dues



The panel will have officials from the Food Corporation of India, finance ministry, and Punjab government

Jayant Sinha, Union minister of state for finance, is said to be in constant discussions with the Reserve Bank of India, the banks, as well as officials of the expenditure and financial services departments.

Around 30 banks, led by State Bank of India (SBI), had extended loans of Rs 12,000 crore to the state for its foodgrain procurement programme.

Officials aware of the deliberations admitted that there was a lack of clarity on whether these banks should classify the outstanding dues as non-performing assets (NPAs) before they continue lending for Punjabs foodgrain procurement.

They said that a decision regarding this matter would be taken by the end of the week.

Sinha had said in Mumbai on Monday that the Centre was working with the regulator, lenders, and stakeholders to find a solution. State Bank of India (SBI) chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya had also said on the same day that RBI had asked lenders, including SBI, to make provisions for foodgrain loans extended in Punjab. She, however, declined to elaborate on the exposure and the status of provisions.

Asked about RBIs letter to banks to make higher provisions, Sinha had said the issue raised by RBI was correct from a regulatory standpoint, while banks explanation that loans for foodgrain procurement were sovereign in nature and, hence, did not require to be classified as NPAs was also correct.

Punjab Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal visited New Delhi on Monday and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and food minister Ram Vilas Paswan. According to a press release by the Punjab government dated April 18, Badal sought an immediate release of cash credit limit (CCL) worth Rs 20,094 crore to enable the state government to make timely payment to farmers for wheat procurement.

Badal apprised Modi that inordinate delay in CCL clearance would jeopardise the ongoing procurement operations. This, he said, could lead to disaffection in the farming community, which might lead to law and order complications, the press release noted.

Badal assured Modi and Paswan that the wheat payment crisis would be resolved soon and that the position of wheat stock in papers and at the godown level would also be reconciled. Officials said that Punjab produces bill to the Centre three years after procurement while other states do so after one year.

The Centre has set up a procurement target of 30 million tonnes for the 2016-17 marketing year starting this month. The wheat procurement has already started and the state has purchased about three million tonnes as on April 17. Punjab and Haryana contribute in a big way to the central pool.
Under fire from trade unions, the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has rolled back its decision to tighten provident fund (PF) withdrawal norms.

This is the second rollback in EPFO withdrawal norms. Earlier, the government was forced to reverse the Budget proposal to tax 60 per cent of the PF corpus at the time of withdrawal, following widespread protests.

Considering the representations received from various quarters and after consultations with the various stakeholders, the government has decided to withdraw the February 10 notification with immediate effect, the labour ministry stated.

Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya announced the roll back in Hyderabad on Tuesday, hours after saying the implementation of the new norms was put on hold till July 31.

In February, EPFO had issued a notification saying the employers contribution to the PF corpus could be withdrawn only after the employee turns 58 years of age.

According to EPFO rules, 12 per cent of an employees salary goes as contribution to PF along with a matching contribution from the employer.

Earlier, subscribers could claim 90 per cent of their PF corpus at 54 years.

Following protests from trade unions, the government also proposed to allow full withdrawal of PF certain grounds such as purchase of a house, serious illness, marriage, and professional education of children. The labour ministry has now referred the matter to the law ministry for clearance.

Now that the February notification has been rolled back, workers can withdraw the entire amount from the provident fund as per existing provisions of the EPF Scheme, 1952, including the employers share of 3.67 per cent, the labour ministry said.

The labour minister, though, defended the February amendment saying it was done in workers interest. The objective was to provide a minimum social security to the workers at the time of retirement. It was noticed that 80 per cent of the claims settled by EPFO belonged to premature withdrawal of funds, treating the PF accounts as savings accounts, and not a social security instrument.



Firstly, it was a decision taken in haste and the government failed to inform the workers accordingly. Todays (Tuesdays) decision should have been taken long back avoiding all the unfortunate incidents across the country, said A K Padmanabhan, president of CITU and member of EPFOs Central Board of Trustees.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. A rally started from the Republican Square of Yerevan to support Armenian philanthropist Levon Hayrapetyan. As Armenpress reports, the participants of the rally will move to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They will present their demands there, then they will move to the Embassy of Russia in Armenia.

The participants of the rally will give a letter to the Embassy where they call the Russian authorities to give freedom to the great philanthropist Levon Hayrapetyan. One of therlly participants Smbat Rostomyan said to journalists that it is his duty to participate in this rally.

I know what role Levon Hayrapetyan has had in the strengthening of the relations between Artsakh and Armenia, and the Armenian-Russian relations as well. We today will give a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia and the Embassy of Russia where we call to change the preventive measure against Levon Hayrapetyan taking into account the fact that he has serious health problems. We think that it is very cruel and unfair decision by the Russian court, he said.

Moscow's Zamoskvoretsky District Court sentenced Armenian businessman Levon Hayrapetyan to 4 years imprisonment. The court took a decision to find Levon Hayrapetyan guilty for frauding $700 thousand by the 4th point of 159th article of the Russian criminal code. According to the investigation, along with lawyer Sergei Antonov, Levon Hayrapetyan took 700 thousand dollars from ex-senator Igor Izmestyevs mother, in order to mitigate her sons conviction. However, in any case he could not have influenced the sentence.
The Agra-Lucknow Expressway, an ambitious project of the Uttar Pradesh government, is set to change the state's developmental scenario. Its extension from Lucknow to Ghazipur will also make transportation from one corner of the state to the other cheaper and faster, boosting business. The state government is also attracting investment in the tourism sector. Navneet Sehgal, CEO, UP Expressways Industrial Development Authority and Principal Secretary, Tourism, speaks to Siddharth Kalhans on initiatives taken by the state government to boost investment in expressways and tourism. Edited excerpts:



How are expressways helping in the development of UP?



The Yamuna Expressway joined the Agra-Lucknow Expressway and will now go up to Ghazipur via Lucknow, paving the way for development of the state. This will be the largest expressway in any state in India. After the completion of these expressways, going from one corner of UP to another will become much easier and this will boost industrial investment as well as job creation. Expressways will play a major role in the development of the state. The mantra given by our chief minister is 'double the speed and triple the growth'. These expressways will transform this mantra into reality.

When will the Agra-Lucknow Expressway be completed and what projects are coming up on both sides?



I expect it to be completed by October this year. The biggest achievement of this project was that there was no dispute with the farmers in acquiring land for it. Today there is not a single case pending in any court. The state government preferred to purchase the land by dealing directly with the farmers. They got a better price and posed no problem. It was a win-win situation for both farmers and the state government. Farmers agreed to give the land and the government took no time in paying them. This paved way for speedy construction and this is the first project in the recent past where work will be completed much before the deadline.

As far as development on both sides of the expressway is concerned, three modern mandis will be constructed and work has begun on the project. Besides, a film city will come up along it near Bangarmau in Unnao. The film city will be constructed through the private public partnership (PPP) mode and the state government has signed a MoU for it. Land has been identified and work will soon begin on this project. Also, there are possibilities of new townships and industrial cities on both sides of this expressway. Institutional plots will also be developed here.

Will the same model be adopted for the Lucknow-Ghazipur Expressway?



We will follow the same model for the Samajwadi Poorvanchal Expressway and successfully complete the task very soon. We will negotiate directly with the farmers and land will be purchased through mutual consent. Farmers will be paid four times the market rate for the land. The state government will try its best to start construction of this project by September this year. Construction of this expressway will also be on the EPC mode, which has been successful in the Agra-Lucknow Expressway.

What are the plans to attract investment in the tourism sector?



In the new tourism policy the state government has made good on the announcement to boost investment in this sector. Sops and rebates are being offered to investors. Those making new investments will be given incentives along with a cash subsidy. The state government has already announced a policy for heritage hotels and many old buildings are now turning themselves into heritage hotels. Agra-Lucknow-Varanasi will be joined through the Heritage Arc. The state government is also focusing on eco-tourism. Chambal, Dudhwa, Katerniaghat and Agra's Bird Sanctuary are on the state government's map.

What initiatives have been taken to provide better facilities to poor tourists and senior citizens?



The state government is working on a pro-poor tourism project and at the same time initiatives are being taken for senior citizens. In almost all places of religious importance, work is on to improve community services for poor tourists. So far, 4,000 senior citizens have been sent on Samajwadi Shrawan Yatras, in which all expenses are being borne by the state government and people are selected from every district of the state. Our plan is to organise this yatra every month from now on, with at least 1,000 senior citizens getting a chance to travel. So far we have sent people to Hardwar, Ajmer, Pushkar, Tirupati and Puri, and we will also be sending a group to Mumbai's Siddhi Vinayak Temple.

Tourists wanting to travel to smaller cities have problems.



We are going to provide air connectivity to smaller cities in the state very soon. Plans are ready and smaller cities like Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Agra, Allahabad and Meerut will be provided with air connectivity through PPP mode. In the first stage five cities will have this facility, where state government will rope in private airlines. This will be of great help to tourists.

What has happened to the plan for selling state-owned hotels and motels to private players?



Instead of selling these hotels and motels, the state government has started improving facilities and repairing them. The state government is also trying to hand over hotels and motels which are closed or in bad shape to private players to run. Our aim is to provide quality living facilities to tourists at an affordable cost. Very soon, in all the places of tourist importance the state government will have good hotels, motels and guest houses.
Under fire from trade unions, the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has rolled back its decision to tighten provident fund (PF) withdrawal norms.

This is the second rollback in EPFO withdrawal norms. Earlier, the government was forced to reverse the Budget proposal to tax 60 per cent of the PF corpus at the time of withdrawal, following widespread protests.

"Considering the representations received from various quarters and after consultations with the various stakeholders, the government has decided to withdraw the February 10 notification with immediate effect," the labour ministry stated.

Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya announced the roll back in Hyderabad on Tuesday, hours after saying the implementation of the new norms was put on hold till July 31.

In February, EPFO had issued a notification saying the employer's contribution to the PF corpus could be withdrawn only after the employee turns 58 years of age.

According to EPFO rules, 12 per cent of an employee's salary goes as contribution to PF along with a matching contribution from the employer.



ALSO READ: Kejriwal takes aim at Modi

Earlier, subscribers could claim 90 per cent of their PF corpus at 54 years.

Following protests from trade unions, the government also proposed to allow full withdrawal of PF certain grounds such as purchase of a house, serious illness, marriage, and professional education of children. The labour ministry has now referred the matter to the law ministry for clearance.

Now that the February notification has been rolled back, "workers can withdraw the entire amount from the provident fund as per existing provisions of the EPF Scheme, 1952, including the employers' share of 3.67 per cent", the labour ministry said.

The labour minister, though, defended the February amendment saying it was done in workers' interest. "The objective was to provide a minimum social security to the workers at the time of retirement. It was noticed that 80 per cent of the claims settled by EPFO belonged to premature withdrawal of funds, treating the PF accounts as savings accounts, and not a social security instrument."



"Firstly, it was a decision taken in haste and the government failed to inform the workers accordingly. Today's (Tuesday's) decision should have been taken long back avoiding all the unfortunate incidents across the country," said A K Padmanabhan, president of CITU and member of EPFO's Central Board of Trustees.
The government has identified 7,500 cases related to service tax and Customs it plans to withdraw from tribunals and high courts.

These cases are where the disputed tax is below the threshold set in December at Rs 10 lakh for the Customs Excise & Service Tax Appellate Tribunal (CESTAT) and Rs 15 lakh for high courts.

The Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) has started filing applications with the tribunals and high courts seeking withdrawal of the cases. The step was taken to make the tax regime non-adversarial, with a focus on quality rather than meeting collection targets, officials said.

"We have begun the process of withdrawing cases. We have identified approximately 7,500 cases in the CESTAT and the high courts. Now, it is up to the judicial bodies to allow the withdrawal," said an official.

The CESTAT is an independent appeals forum against orders passed by commissioners of customs and excise relating to service tax, customs and central excise.

The department, however, is not seeking withdrawal of cases from the Supreme Court. "We are not touching the Supreme Court because cases at that level are few and most relate to matters of law," the official added. The move is expected to clear the litigation backlog. Already, about 75 per cent of cases are settled in favour of taxpayers.

"The move will help reduce congestion at tribunals and high courts. But the answer lies in increasing the number of benches and having more members," said Saloni Roy, a senior partner at Deloitte.

The CBEC is also periodically instructing tax officials to issue notices based on merit alone."We are sensitising the staff that notices should be strictly according to the law. We are training them on how to issue legally sound notices and orders. We have also withdrawn the vigilance order that caused fear among tax officials. Now they can decide cases on merit," another official said.

The CBEC has instructed zonal chief commissioners and principal commissioners to hold monthly or bi-monthly meetings with all the adjudicating and appellate authorities in their zones and advise them on how to pass orders.

Besides, training is being imparted on the qualities of a good adjudication order, advocacy, interpretation of statutes as well as drafting of laws.

Pre-notice consultation at the level of principal commissioner and commissioner has been made mandatory in all cases where the tax involved is above Rs 50 lakh.

The government has also come out with a new appraisal system for tax officials in which the focus will be on the quality of orders issued. The move is aimed at discouraging taxmen from issuing frivolous tax demands.

The performance of assessing officers will also be measured for quality of assessment, pace of disposal, and efforts made towards widening the tax base rather than meeting the annual collection targets.

EASING OUT
Acknowledging that a lot needs to be done for drug regulation, V K Subburaj, secretary, Department of Pharmaceuticals, said the Indian drug control system is the weakest at present.

"Our drug controller system is probably the weakest today. The government is taking various steps to strengthen the quality mechanism. Not only this, the government is increasing the awareness that all (companies) should move towards high quality parameters," he said on Tuesday. The secretary was addressing the National Pharmaceutical Conclave organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

"Health department is already focusing on the quality. It is increasing the number of drug inspectors. It is also increasing the drug controller staff, which is bare minimum right now," the secretary said. To ensure the drug quality, the government banned 344 fixed drug combinations (FDCs) on March 10, after an expert panel found that these drugs lacked therapeutic justification and posed various health risks. More than 100 companies, affected by this decision, moved to the Delhi High Court, which stayed this ban till the next decision. Currently, the court is hearing arguments of both sides.

"Today, only 15 per cent of the products are World Health Organization certified. This should move to at least 50 per cent. If that jumps takes place, people can export such products easily. Consequently, India would get a name as a quality drug manufacturing destination," Subburaj added.

He also said he is trying to revive public sector undertakings (PSUs) of the sector for the past two-three years.

"Our decision-making system is so diverse that I want to revive them, our ministers want to revive them, but somebody in the finance department says don'tsomeone in the planning commission (NITI Aayog) would say no," he added.

He believes just like some PSUs, which are already functioning well, the others would also function well provided there is 'a continuous monitoring'.

In another session of the conclave, S Eswara Reddy, joint drugs controller, said it will look into the issue of big companies launching their drug products via small companies (subsidiaries) without central drug controller's approval. Moreover, he reiterated central government's stand that state drug regulators approved the fixed dose combinations (FDCs) without asking the central regulator.

PHARMA WOES
Odisha will have as many as 1,900 BPO (business processing outsourcing) seats under a Government of India scheme aimed to promote BPO activities in the country.

"The state has been allotted 1,900 seats to be created under the India BPO promotion scheme. The Government of India will reimburse up to 50 per cent of one-time expenditure on admissible items with a cap of Rs one lakh per seat", said an official.

The scheme is aimed at generation of employment in all small cities in the country. However, cities like Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Bengaluru and NCR region are excluded from the scheme.

One entrepreneur can bid for a minimum of 100 seats when the request for proposal (RFP) is floated, added the official.

Under the Digital India programme, the Union government has approved the scheme for employment generation and balanced growth of information technology (IT) and ITes (IT enabled services) in each state. It aims at incentivizing establishment of 48300 seats in respect of BPO operations across the country.

The department of electronics and information technology (Deity) is likely to implement this scheme through the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI).

The opening of BPOs is likely to give a boost to state IT and ITes sectors as the state government is also planning a similar scheme that will lead to sprouting of BPO centres in the state. The state department for electronics and IT department is also in the process of formulating the guidelines for the scheme at the state level.

Initially 5,000-10,000 seats will be created at the locations where STPI stations are operating. These locations are Bhubaneswar, Balasore, Rourkela and Berhampur.

The proposed scheme will help achieve the employment generation target included in the state ICT (information and communication technology) policy 2014, said the official. The ICT policy aims to create direct employment for 60,000 professionals in 800 IT/ITes/ESDM (electronic system design and manufacturing) units.

According to reports, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Kolkata and Jaipur along with Bhubaneswar, Cochin, Visakhapatnam, Thiruvananthapuram, Chandigarh and Indore are fast emerging as new destinations for business process management (BPM), a synonym to BPO industry.
The Punjab government on Tuesday claimed that Reserve Bank of India will soon lift ban on cash credit limit by banks for food procurement as State has shared data with lenders on outstanding stocks for reconciliation.

Punjab deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal said state CM Prakash Singh Badal met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi on Tuesday to discuss the issue of freeze on the cash credit limit imposed by RBI.

Senior public sector bank executive said lenders' will process statistics (given by state government) on outstanding stocks to weed out gaps.

Modi at meeting with Badal assured state that the matching of accounts would take place simultaneously and the CCL would be issued by the Reserve Bank of India. This would ensure that procurement of wheat crop happens without any hurdle, the Deputy CM said in a statement.

Since the year 1997, the accounts of Punjab government and FCI have not been matched, due to which there has been some confusion regarding the matter he said.

Banks give credit limits to state government for procurement against the outstanding food stock. After detection of shortfall in outstanding stocks, RBI asked banks to make provision for this. It gave leeway to banks to make provisions for the extent of shortfall rather than entire credit exposure.

RBI also imposed curb on credit limits.

Some thirty-odd bankers led by State Bank of India, which are staring at heavy losses to the tune of Rs 12,000 crore due to shortfall in Punjab, met on Tuesday to discuss all options, including to stop lending to the state government.

The foodgrain worth Rs 20,000 crore are missing from the Food Corporation of India's godowns in Punjab, which the state claimed to have procured after taking loans from the banks.

Farmers receive payment through cheques with in 72 hrs of grain procurement in Punjab. But this season due to delay in CC limit by the banks payment has been delayed. Procurement commences for wheat from April 1 but picks pace after Baisakhi 13 April.

Annual expenditure on grain procurement for central pool is close to Rs 40,000 Cr in Punjab and is largest in any state in the country.
Uttar Pradesh, with its bustling population of over 200 million (the most among India's states), is often likened to a country in itself. Primarily an agrarian economy, the state is endowed with some of the most fertile land in the country. Many of its principal towns are famous for their unique traditional industrial clusters - Varanasi (zari and silk), Bhadohi (carpets), Lucknow (chikan), Kanpur (leather), Agra (footwear, leather), Aligarh (locks), Moradabad (brassware) and Meerut (sports goods).

UP houses over three million micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) - roughly 12 per cent of India's MSME might. The sector contributes 50 per cent of UP's gross state domestic product and employs, directly and indirectly, 40 million people.

The growth in population and the migration of rural folk to urban areas in search of employment has been posing challenges for the government in terms of improving urban infrastructure and creating new jobs in the public and private sectors. The rising demand for energy is another area of concern, in addition to ensuring agricultural prosperity for food security and sustenance of rural folk.

In this backdrop, Business Standard recently organised the sixth edition of 'Samriddhi' in Lucknow to discuss the agenda for faster economic and infrastructure development in UP. The select gathering comprised industrialists, bankers, economists, government officials, senior private sector executives and other experts.

Inaugurating the conclave, the chief guest, UP Public Works Department Minister Shivpal Singh Yadav, claimed that the pro-industry initiatives taken by the current government had improved the ease of doing business.

He said setting up new industrial units had become much easier, even as he reminded the audience of the unlimited business potential in UP owing to the large consumer market.

"The ruling Samajwadi Party government has delivered on the front of welfare of masses and paved the way for the composite development of UP. Today, big industrial houses are investing here and actively partnering and cooperating in this ongoing process," he underlined.

To buttress his point, he referred to the new Revenue Code implemented in the state, which has eased the process of land acquisition for industrial and infrastructure projects.

In his address, UP Planning Commission Member Prof Sudhir Panwar said proper synergy between agriculture and industry could multiply growth in the farm sector. Seven per cent of the state's population was associated with agriculture, he said, with five million farmers' households engaged in growing sugarcane alone.

"The agricultural sector has huge potential and several agro clusters already exist in the stateI wonder why the industry has still not taken to the UP agro processing sector. The private sector must realise that governments cannot run industry and they have an unlimited potential to harness," he added.

He further suggested that the MSME sector could benefit from the huge tourism potential in the state by foraying into the souvenir business. "Tourists normally buy souvenirs for keepsake and memories when they return after visiting a famous tourist spot. This segment is still unexplored by industry."



The inaugural session was followed by a panel discussion comprising senior bureaucrats, an industrialist and a banker, on various aspects of the development of UP.

The panelists included UP Agricultural Production Commissioner (APC) Pravir Kumar; UP Expressway Industrial Development Authority (UPEIDA) Chairman and CEO Navneet Sehgal; Principal Secretary, Industries, Mahesh Kumar Gupta; UP State Industrial Development Corporation (UPSIDC) MD Manoj Singh; Jet Knitwears Private Limited MD Balram Narula and Union Bank of India (UBI) General Manager L D Rewatkar.

Pravir Kumar said despite being a landlocked state, UP had been working towards capitalising on its strengths for speedier economic and agricultural progress.

"We have skilled manpower, fertile swathes of land and the state makes a significant contribution to India in terms of annual agricultural production. However, we need industries for value addition to the agricultural sector to increase farm income and to check pilferage," he said.

He added that almost 25-30 per cent of the state's farm production was wasted due to inadequate pre- and post-harvest techniques and infrastructure. "Mere ramping up of agricultural production will not deliver the goods to farmers, unless their incomes go up in the same proportion with support from industry in terms of food processing and agro value addition."



Gupta said the new expressways being built by the state government would provide faster connectivity throughout the state and encourage industries to move beyond Noida and Greater Noida in search of investment opportunities.

"The industrial areas of Kanpur and Naini (Allahabad), which have been facing tough times in the past several years, are being revived, while new industrial hubs are also being developed," he said, and referred to the proposed Perfume Park in Kannauj, Plastics Park in Auriya and Lucknow IT City.

He maintained that poor road connectivity had been the main factor that had prevented industries from setting up units in the remote areas of the state. "The proposed new expressways will resolve this lacuna for good."



Meanwhile, Sehgal underlined that the various road projects in the state were progressing at a fast pace and meeting their timelines. Singh said UPSIDC had acquired 4,200 acres of land in UP and notified an additional 176,000 acres for future industrial and cluster development. The state was targeting 22 per cent growth in the manufacturing sector, he said.

The central government had also allowed the Special Economic Zone in Moradabad to be developed as a multi-product manufacturing cluster, which makes it more attractive and viable, he said.

"Over the last three-and-a-half years, about 1,560 new units facilitated by UPSIDC have reached the production stage, of which only 15-20 per cent are located in the Noida and Greater Noida region," he added.

Projects worth about Rs 40,000 crore are currently in the pipeline under UPSIDC, including a Rs 9,500 crore GAIL project and the Rs 15,000 crore Mathura Refinery expansion project.

Narula urged the UP government to help the MSME sector and suggested simplification of rules pertaining to clearances and no objection certificates. Industrial units were still compelled to take clearances from 27 departments, he said.

"The state government has proposed that new investment proposals of over Rs 50 crore would be routed through the single window clearance system. But, what about the investment proposals of less than Rs 50 crore," he asked, adding that MSMEs were probably not a focus area for the government. Getting bank credit, he said, was still difficult for industrialists.
The Uttar Pradesh government is keen to promote industry and attract investment, and has been announcing sops and rebates. The state's small and medium entrepreneurs have been demanding more rebates and facilities, emphasising that they should be accorded the same priority as the big industrialists, and their problem should be resolved. Lucknow entrepreneur Balram Narula, Managing Director, Jet Knitwears Private Limited, who participated in 'Samriddhi 2016', speaks to Siddharth Kalhans about the problems of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Edited excerpts:



You have been raising issues affecting the MSME sector from various platforms. What are the main problems of this sector and what kind of support does it need from the state government?



In Uttar Pradesh a MSME has to do the rounds of 27 departments to get the necessary approvals for setting up a new unit or venture. Only after this hectic exercise can we start our project. How can a new entrant start his project in UP and hope to flourish? Even if he succeeds in starting a business, he has to then go through the same process if he wants to expand the business. How can one concentrate on business if he is supposed to do the rounds of government departments all the time?



But the state government has announced various sops and rebates for industry, besides easing up on the formalities.



All this has been done for the big industries only. In this state the sops and rebates are being given to those investing Rs 100 or Rs 200 crore, and they are welcomed. For them all norms are eased, but the MSME sector is not getting all these concessions. Ideally, the smaller units should be given a single window clearance facility first, because the maximum number of industries is being set up in the MSME sector. Contrary to this, only a few select industries, and especially the big industries, are getting the maximum facilities.

The state government is running the skill development mission in a big way. Is this helping the MSME sector?



So far the MSME sector has not got any special benefit from the skill development mission. When a skilled worker in the MSME sector leaves his job the problem of a replacement comes up before us. The state government should start focused programmes under the skill development mission which could help in meeting the requirement of people in the MSME sector. Take the example of the hosiery industry. As of now no programme is being run under this mission that could provide us with trained workers.

Is this the reason why towns like Tirupur are far ahead of UP in the hosiery industry?



To a large extent this is true. The hosiery industry of Kanpur has never felt that the government is doing something for them. The entire industry, including my company, has achieved this progress on its own and we are posing a challenge to Tirupur. I am waiting for an invitation from the state government to discuss the challenges facing the hosiery industry, and if these are resolved we will be far ahead of Tirupur.

But the government has started a dialogue with the MSME sector.



I praise the present UP government for this. At least a dialogue has begun. For the last two to three years Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has been coming to our Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise Conclaves. We have submitted a charter of demands to him and apprised him about the problems faced by the MSME sector. On some issues work has begun, which is a big movement forward. I expect this to continue. The process of dialogue should not be stopped if there is any change of regime.

Rationalisation of taxes has always been a big issue for the MSME sector. Has something concrete been done in this regard?



There are many issues as far as taxes are concerned. In many cases you will see that taxes on a product made by the MSME sector in a neighbouring state is five per cent, while in UP it is 12 per cent. Such things promote illegal work. I would request the government to at least create a level playing field. The state government should also think about our social security.

What kind of social security does the MSME sector want from the state government?



We want the state government to provide social security for the MSME sector, and if this requires that some tax is increased, entrepreneurs are ready to pay. If the state government increases taxes on the MSME sector by 0.25 per cent and the money generated is used for providing social security we would be happy to pay it. Those paying higher taxes should be given more benefits and those who pay lower tax should be given less benefits. If such an initiative is taken, UP will be first state to have such a wonderful scheme.
The micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) sector in Uttar Pradesh received a total investment of about Rs 13,000 crore during the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007-12). The MSME sector contributes 60 per cent of the state's annual industrial output, employs 9.2 million people and generates economic activity worth Rs 120,000 crore annually. At present, UP is home to almost 4.4 million MSMEs, including 4.2 million unregistered units.

The state government's thrust on industrial development had resulted in the establishment of about 166,000 MSMEs, with a total investment of over Rs 13,000 crore and the creation of 850,000 job opportunities during the Eleventh Plan period, Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) said in a recent study titled MSME sector in Uttar Pradesh, which was jointly conducted with the Thought Arbitrage Research Institute (TARI).

UP had made significant progress in promoting the growth of MSMEs through the creation of a supportive environment and policy framework to enable the sector to achieve higher levels of production, exports and employment, Assocham Secretary General D S Rawat said while releasing the study in Lucknow.

The implementation of the Infrastructure and Industrial Investment Policy 2012 by the Akhilesh Yadav government led to the establishment of over 45,000 MSMEs with a total investment of Rs 3,000 crore and new jobs for half a million people in 2013-14. However, there has been a fall in MSME investments since 2012-13 owing to the macro-economic slowdown and a gradual shift from manufacturing to the services sector, which requires lower investments.

Repair and servicing industries accounted for a one-fourth share in key MSME industries in UP, followed by miscellaneous manufacturing (15 per cent), food products (15 per cent), hosiery and garments (11 per cent).

In terms of region-wise composition of MSMEs, Western UP accounted had the lion's share with 50 per cent of the MSMEs in the state, followed by eastern UP (28 per cent), central UP (16 per cent) and Bundelkhand (six per cent).

MSMEs play a crucial role in providing large-scale employment at lower capital cost, promoting industrialisation in rural and backward areas, reducing regional imbalances and assuring equitable distribution of national income and wealth. Besides, the MSME sector is the second largest employment generator after agriculture in UP, employing over 9.2 million people across the state. However, 90 per cent of these are employed with unregistered MSME entities.

Shortage of working capital, lack of technology support, internal structural issues, a heavy interest burden, obsolete plant and machinery, shortage of resources and a dearth of manpower are key challenges faced by MSMEs in UP. The government should involve industry players, academic institutions and field experts to assist sick MSMEs in reviving their businesses, which would also lead to utilisation of assets and capacity already created, the Assocham study suggested.

UP has region- and product-specific traditional MSME hubs and clusters across the state - Varanasi (for zari and silk), Bhadohi (carpets), Lucknow (chikan), Kanpur (leather), Agra (footwear, leather), Aligarh (locks), Moradabad (brassware) and Meerut (sports goods), among others.

To support the MSME sector, UP has finalised its own start-up policy to promote the start-up culture and entrepreneurship in the state. UP Information Technology & Start-Up Policy 2016 is aimed at facilitating the coming up of both small and large information technology and IT-enabled services ventures through the provision of incentives and the establishment of a supportive policy framework.

States such as Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Kerala and Chhattisgarh have already set out their respective start-up policies or are in the process of doing so, to promote their budding entrepreneurs.

Under the proposed policy, UP will promote start-ups through the INFUSE model (Incubators-FUnd of Funds-Startup Entrepreneurs), wherein it will provide financial support to incubators, start-ups and venture capitalists. The government will create an initial corpus or seed fund of Rs 100 crore to promote incubators and mobilise start-ups.

However, funds will not be invested directly in a start-up, but injected into Venture Capital (VC) funds approved by the Securities and Exchange Board of India. For UP-based start-ups, the state government will contribute 25 per cent of the money invested by the VC.

The corpus will be professionally managed like a private equity (PE)/venture fund and a permanent fund manager is to be appointed to manage the funds granted by the government, according to the policy draft. The policy has trifurcated UP into three tiers. Tier-I includes Noida and Greater Noida. Tier-II comprises Lucknow, Agra, Kanpur, Allahabad, Meerut, Varanasi and other cities with a population of more over million, including the Agra-Greater Noida Yamuna Expressway region. Tier-III includes cities with a population of less than two million.

An Empowered Committee under the chairmanship of the chief secretary will monitor the implementation of the policy. It will comprise senior bureaucrats and principal secretaries of the departments of information technology, finance, planning, small industries, commercial tax, energy, transport, revenue and housing.

In a survey on 'Ease of Doing Business' conducted by the World Bank Group in collaboration with KPMG and the Confederation of Indian Industry, UP had stood 10th in the rankings, which were topped by Gujarat and followed by Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand.
Instead of focusing on existing investment hubs like Noida, Greater Noida, Ghaziabad and Western UP, the government of Uttar Pradesh is working on making conditions in the eastern and central parts of the state more conducive for industry. The state government is making it easier to start a new businesses, paving the way for new investments. It is improving infrastructure facilities and carrying out reforms in the power sector - to augment generation and boost transmission efficiencies - at the same time initiating changes in policies and offering incentives to attract new investments. Mahesh Gupta, Principal Secretary, Industrial Development, government of UP, discusses the state government's plans and strategies with Siddharth Kalhans. Edited excerpts:



Instead of Noida, Greater Noida, Ghaziabad and western UP, the state government is developing eastern and central UP as new industrial hubs. What is the progress to date?



Traditionally, industries have mostly developed in Noida, Greater Noida, Ghaziabad and western UP. The remaining parts of the state, such as eastern UP and other areas, are not well developed. Now the state government is working to develop the eastern and central parts of UP to attract more industries and bring in investment. The state government is planning to set up new industrial townships in these areas. Take the example of the Trans Ganga Industrial Township in Unnao and Saraswati Township in Naini, Allahabad, in this regard. Besides, the Expressways and Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridors (EDFC) will also boost investment in the state. Work is now on to allot industrial plots in Trans Ganga and Saraswati industrial townships. More entrepreneurs are coming to set up industries in both places.

Besides these two industrial townships, the IT City of Lucknow (which is being developed by HCL), Perfume Park in Kannauj, Plastics City in Auraiyya, Leather Cluster in Kanpur, and Food Park in Bareilly are some of the mega projects where big investments will come in the days to come. Besides these on both sides of the Agra-Lucknow Expressway and Samajwadi Poorvanchal Expressway, new industrial projects will come up. In the days ahead the industrial scene in UP will be different.

What benefits will result from the EDFC passing through UP?



Uttar Pradesh will get the maximum benefit of the EDFC. A total of 18 stations will fall under the EDFC in the state and on both sides there will be great opportunities for industrial development. The UP State Industrial Development Corporation (UPSIDC) has declared five km on either side as the industrial zone. This has boosted chances of industrial development in the area. We are going to construct the first greenfield railway station in this zone near Kanpur and industries like chemicals, cement, fertiliser and others will come up here.

Power supply plays an important role in the survival and growth of industry. How will the state government tackle this problem?



The present government has taken several initiatives in this regard, which has started showing results now. The initiatives taken to improve the generation and transmission sector will surely yield results. The state government is working on creating industrial feeders, which is showing results. There have been additions to the generation capacity in the recent past. In the last year alone the privately owned Lalitpur power project and two units of Anpara D have started generation. Similarly, a lot of investments are being made in the transmission sector also. By announcing the solar policy we are promoting green energy also and many projects are coming up in this sector. I can assure you that by 2017, UP will be a power-surplus state.

How is the 'Ease of Doing Business' project helping entrepreneurs?



The state government has enjoyed major success on this project. It has made doing business in UP easier now. Under this formula the formalities required from the pollution, power, commercial tax, urban development and various other departments can be obtained in a more simplified manner. We have placed the data base online, which is of great help to industry. Now the revenue maps are available online, which makes it easier to set up an industry. For the first time, the single window clearance system is actually working on the ground.

Udyog Bandhu has been active for a long time but industry is not very satisfied with it.



The state government has given more teeth to the Udyog Bandhu now. Many formalities can be carried out online by simply filing a customer application form (CAF) on the portal of Udyog Bandhu. The portal solves many problems of industries. At a single point, many fees can be deposited online through cash, chalan, credit or debit cards. The officers deputed at the Udyog Bandhu are ready to listen to every problem of entrepreneurs.

The MSME sector has many problems. How will you address them?



It is not so now. In many cases the problems of the MSME sector have been heard and solved within no time. It is true that we have been seeking investments above Rs 50 crore in the priority sector and some sops and rebates have been extended to them, but at the same time the state government is trying seriously to reduce this limit. Very soon investments of lesser amount will get the same benefits. We are in constant touch with MSMEs and addressing their problems. After all, the MSME sector generates the maximum amount of employment in Uttar Pradesh and no government can forget this. There has been regular communication with the MSME sector in the state.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. The Defense Ministry of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic announced that Defense Army serviceman Gevorg G. Gevorgyan was mortally wounded by the Azerbaijani fire, Armenpress was informed by the Pres Service of NKR Defense Army.

NKR Defense Armys statement reads: On April 19 at 09:50 Defense Army serviceman Gevorg G. Gevorgyan (born in 1996) was mortally wounded by the adversarys fire in one of the military units of the Defense Army located in the southern direction. The investigation is underway to check the details of the case.

The NKR Defense Ministry shares the grief of the loss and expresses its support to killed servicemans family members, relatives and friends.
Over the last decade, banks have transformed themselves from brick-and-mortar entities to include anytime-anywhere banking through the use of computers and smartphones. Union Bank of India (UBI), one of the country's largest public sector banks, has a wide presence in Uttar Pradesh, in both urban and rural areas. UBI General Manager L D Rewatkar speaks to Virendra Singh Rawat about the bank's future plans in the state. Edited excerpts:



Indian banks are plagued by non-performing assets and are making provisions to write them off and start afresh. What is the status of UBI in Uttar Pradesh?



Growing NPAs in the banking industry are causing concern to all bankers. The reasons are many but asset quality is the top reason for such a poor performance. The other reasons for high stressed assets are the global slowdown, fall in domestic demand, policy logjam, disputed contracts, poor credit appraisal, weak risk management, all debt-no equity, promoters chasing quick growth, a number of large projects having run into difficulty, step-down entities, high leverage, etc.

Although the position of stressed assets is crucial in our economy, in UP, our bank is in a better position compared to its peers. Our NPAs have come down from 5.08 per cent (March 2015) to 4.97 per cent (December 2015). Besides, we have not written off any loan other than agricultural advances, that too through a scheme announced by the Centre.

How is UBI performing in the area of financial inclusion, which mandates commercial banks to open no-frills accounts?



We have done fairly well in financial inclusion. In the initial stages, we had opened accounts in seven districts of UP, allotted to us as lead districts, namely Jaunpur, Ghazipur, Azamgarh, Mau, Chandauli, Sant Ravidas Nagar and Varanasi, through carpet coverage of villages with population of 2,000 and above. Thereafter, no-frills accounts were also opened in villages of other districts allotted to us. After the implementation of Jan Dhan Yojana, we have opened over two million accounts in UP. Besides, we are providing financial services in 6,940 villages allotted to us.

Can you throw some light on UBI's current branch network in UP and its expansion plans over the next 12 months?



Union Bank had 922 branches in UP as of end-December 2015, of which 674 branches are located in rural and semi-urban centres. We opened nine 10 new branches by March 2016. With this, our total number of branches in UP increased to 932. During the current fiscal, our endeavour will be to increase this tally to 1,000.

UP has been bifurcated into two zones for administrative efficiency and proper control. Eastern UP is under the field general manager's office, Varanasi, comprising six regional offices - Varanasi, Azamgarh, Ghazipur, Jaunpur, Allahabad and Gorakhpur. Central and western UP and Uttarakhand are under the control of field general manager's office, Lucknow, comprising five regional offices - Agra, Kanpur, Lucknow, Meerut and Dehra Dun.

Within these 932 branches, there are nine service branches which look after back office operations and eight Union Loan Points, which exclusively cater to the retail loan portfolio. Besides, we have 11 currency chests, a Staff Training Centre, zonal audit office and zonal vigilance cell. At the special State Level Bankers' Committee (SLBC) meeting convened in January 2013, the Reserve Bank of India Governor had referred to the shortage of 3,000 bank branches in UP according to population ratio. Later, SLBC allotted centres for opening of branches to all banks. We were allotted 204 centres for opening branches and we opened 234 branches in the state.

The state government has been urging banks to increase their credit exposure in the priority sectors. What is the credit deposit ratio (CDR) of Union Bank in UP and how does it compare with other large banks?



The credit exposure of banks in UP under the priority sector is not at the desired level. The issue is regularly discussed at the SLBC meetings by the government and the RBI, while banks are directed to improve their exposure under the priority sector.

In view of the low CDR in various districts, SLBC had formed a sub-committee under UBI in 2010 to look into reasons and suggest correctives. Owing to sustained efforts, the CDR of all banks put together as of December 2015 was 55.51 per cent. All banks are putting in their best efforts to further improve the CDR, so that the desired level as per the expectations of RBI and the state government is achieved. The sub-committee selected 16 districts with CDR of less than 40 per cent for review in March 2015, which came down to 12 in December 2015. There are only five districts with CDR of less than 30 per cent in UP, and efforts are on to get them to quickening their pace of credit growth, so that they also contribute in increasing the CDR.

Our CDR in UP has gone up from 53.73 per cent (March 2015) to 55.29 per cent as of December 2015. Our CDR is slightly lower than the overall CDR of all banks, because in four out of five districts where the CDR is less than 30 per cent, we are the lead bank. These four districts - Jaunpur, Ghazipur, Azamgarh and Mau - do not have scope for financing other than agriculture. However, there is still great scope for improvement. The positive factor is that our market share in both deposits and advances has gone up, from 4.40 per cent to 4.70 per cent and from 4.35 per cent to 4.89 per cent respectively.

The RBI has issued banking licences to new financial services entities. How is Union Bank gearing up for the competition in the near future from these new banks, which have so far been working in the rural areas in the microfinance space?



RBI has given its nod to some financial services entities for setting up banking business in the country and these new banks will definitely have their expansion programmes in UP also. As many as 17,570 branches of 46 banks are operating in UP and our bank also a strong presence with 932 branches. There already is stiff competition among banks, and opening of branches by these new banks will definitely add to it. The only way to counter the competition posed by these new banks is through creating delight for the customer, which will prompt him to keep coming back to us for all his financial needs.

Proactive measures will be taken to implement, monitor and deliver excellent customer service, which will reinforce our customer's faith in our tag line, 'Good People to Bank With', and inspire him to exclaim, 'Best People to Bank With'. Moreover, we have the human resources and the technology to back our endeavour, which can be termed as among the best in the industry.

UBI has bagged six banking technology awards from the Indian Banks Association - Best Technology Bank of the Year; Best use of Digital Channels and Technologies; Best Use of Technology to Enhance Customer Experience; Best Risk Management, Fraud and Cyber Security; Best Financial Inclusion Technology Initiatives; and Best Payment Initiatives.

What is the business size of Union Bank of India in UP?



The total business of Union Bank in UP has gone up from Rs 69,047 crore (March 2015) to Rs 73,968 crore (December 2015), registering a growth of 7.13 per cent.

Mobile commerce is a new and growing segment for both mobile phone companies and banks. The segment holds tremendous untapped business opportunities in terms of low-value payments for services. What is Union Bank's road map?



Union Bank is one of the best banks from the technology point of view. We have the U-Mobile facility and Interbank Money PAYMENT SYSTEM (IMPS). With the help of U-Mobile and IMPS, customers can transfer funds to any person or organisation. We have E-cash through which our customers can make cash payments to non-customers also by using mobile numbers and ATMs. Our bank has launched one of the latest products, Digi-purse, in which any person (non-customers also) can download the application from Google Play Store in his/her mobile and make utility payments/bill payments and purchases of up to Rs 10,000 per month.

All these services are free of cost so far. We provide services like mobile passbook, stop payment instruction, cheque book issue, etc through mobile banking. We have introduced a scheme - 'Union Selfie' - a mobile app-based scheme, through which anyone can open an account of their choice without visiting a branch. UBI is alive to the situation and has introduced many schemes under this segment, with many more to come in future.
They seek him here, they seek him there; those Trinamoolis seek him everywhere. Except that its not just the rivals, even Marxist party workers have been left high and dry by the absence of the elusive pimpernel of Bengal politics, .
Housing Development Corporation (HDFC) on Tuesday informed the stock exchanges that it has in-principle agreed to sell up to 10 per cent of its stake in Standard Life through offer for sale.

Lifes board of directors approved taking steps to initiate the initial public offer (IPO) process.

This would be the first life insurance company in the country to be listed.

The insurer was waiting for a nod from Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB), which had referred its foreign direct investment (FDI) hike proposal in Life to Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA).

The board of directors of HDFC Life approved taking steps to initiate the process for an initial public offer (IPO) by way of offer for sale by the Corporation, up to 10 per cent of the paid-up and issued equity share capital of HDFC Life, said HDFC in a stock exchange notification.

The IPO is subject to relevant regulatory approvals including that of Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India, Securities & Exchange Board of India among others.

On April 1, Housing Development Corporation had informed the exchanges that it completed the sale of its nine per cent stake in HDFC Life to Standard Life. This deal was announced in August 2015.

The foreign partner is taking its stake up to 35 per cent from 26 per cent in HDFC Life. The value of the nine per cent stake is Rs 1,705 crore valuing the company at Rs 18,951.4 crore.

HDFC Life is a joint venture between HDFC and Standard Life Plc, a provider of financial services in the UK. Standard Life (Mauritius Holding) Ltd holds 26 per cent stake in the joint venture.

In 2000, HDFC and Standard Life launched a joint venture, HDFC Life, which was the first private life insurance company to be granted a licence to operate in India.

As per a company statement, HDFC Life posted net profit of Rs 818 crore for the year ended March 31, 2016, showing a growth of 4.2 per cent compared to previous financial year.

New business premium grew by 18.1 per cent to Rs 6,487 crore in FY16 compared to Rs 5,492 crore collected in the previous financial year.

HDFC Lifes total premiums collected grew by 10 per cent to Rs 16,313 crore in FY16 from Rs 14,830 crore in in FY15.

The insurer also recently completed incorporation of its wholly-owned subsidiary in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) called the HDFC International Life and Re Company Limited (HILRCL).

HILRCL would initially offer reinsurance capacity to ceding insurers and may also foray into directly underwriting insurance contracts subject to receipt of necessary approvals.
Regulatory and Development Authority of India(IRDAI) is likely to clear the applications filed by the overseas reinsurance companies to open their branches in India in another 3-4 months time.

IRDAI chairman T S Vijayan on Tuesday said four foreign reinsurers had filed applications to open their branches and they have been processing those applications.

"I think it will take another 3-4 months to clear(the applications). May be we will be finalising the decision by next board meeting," Vijayan said in response to a question in this regard on the sidelines of the Awareness day.

In March last year the Indian Parliament has passed the Laws (Amendments) Bill, also paving the way for opening of branches by reinsurers from outside India.

According to Vijayan, Swiss Re, Lloyds, Munich Re and Hanover Re have already filed their applications to open their branches in the country. Vijayan believes that the entry of these reinsurers will help Indian insurance companies to access the global capital. The foreign reinsurance players will have to retain 50 percent of the premium in India, he said.

Meanwhile, the IRDAI chairman said in the current year the insurance sector was likely to do even better on the back of good monsoons forecasts. He said both life and general insurance sectors achieved a double digit growth in the last financial year while the health insurance registered between 35-40 per cent growth in premium collections.

"Though the final numbers are yet to come, the general insurance sector collected a premium of Rs 96,000-odd crore last year while the first year premium collection by life insurance sector was about Rs 1.36 lakh crore," he said.

Earlier in his address Vijayan said the compensation being awarded by courts in insurance claim litigations were growing higher and higher and it will have an impact on the premiums.
The Government of India wishes to put on record that certain items appearing in the press regarding the Kohinoor Diamond are not based on facts. .

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The Government of India further reiterates its resolve to make all possible efforts to bring back the Kohinoor Diamond in an amicable manner. .

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The factual position is that the matter is sub judice at present. A PIL has been filed in the Honourable Supreme Court that is yet to be admitted. .

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The Solicitor General of India was asked to seek the views of the Government of India, which have not yet been conveyed. The Solicitor General of India informed the Honourable Court about the history of the diamond and gave an oral statement on the basis of the existing references made available by the ASI. Thus, it should be reaffirmed that the Government of India has not yet conveyed its views to the court, contrary to what is being misrepresented. The Court granted six weeks time on the prayer of the Solicitor General to take instructions for making his submission in the matter. .

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The status report on which the preliminary submission was made by the Solicitor General have references to the stand taken by Governments earlier that the Kohinoor was a gift and cannot be categorized as an object stolen. The material further has references to the views of Indias 1st Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru dating back to 1956. Pandit Nehru went on record saying that there is no ground to claim this art treasure back. He also added that efforts to get the Kohinoor back would lead to difficulties. .

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Pandit Nehru also said, To exploit our good relations with some country to obtain free gifts from it of valuable articles does not seem to be desirable. On the other hand, it does seem to be desirable that foreign museums should have Indian objects of art." .

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It may be added that ever since he has taken over as PM, Shri Narendra Modis efforts led to three significant pieces of Indias history coming back home. In October 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel returned a 10th century Indian statue of Goddess Durga that was stolen in 1990 and found in 2012 at a museum in Germany. In April 2015, then Canadian PM Stephen Harper returned a sculpture known as the Parrot Lady, which dates back to almost 900 years. Then Australian PM Tony Abbott, on his India visit in 2014 had returned antique statues of Hindu deities that were in Australian art galleries. None of these gestures affected Indias relations with either Canada, Germany or Australia. It was Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who as the Chief Minister got back the ashes of Shyamji Krishna Varma almost 70 years after his death. .

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Thus, with regard to the Kohinoor Diamond too, Government of India remains hopeful for an amicable outcome whereby India gets back a valued piece of art with strong roots in our nations history. .

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First Meeting of All India Handloom Board held Government is committed to develop and promote handloom sector: Textiles Minister Government has chalked out a new strategy for revival and resurgence of handloom industry: Minister India Handloom Brand launched to regain consumer confidence: Shri Santosh Kumar Gangwar India Handloom Brand registration granted to 170 handloom producing agencies and weavers in 41 product categories: Minister Government has significantly expanded its support to handloom clusters: Minister New model of credit for handloom sector introduced, to be implemented all over India: Shri Santosh Kumar Gangwar Handloom weavers to receive enhanced insurance coverage, now under national social security schemes: Minister Textiles Minister launches handloom weaver information system for more effective implementation of handloom schemes We are working with a vision to increase the wages of skilled handloom weavers to the level of Rs. 500/- per day. Our major interventions will be to cover five lakh weavers in MUDRA Scheme in next three years and also to take up 300 more block level clusters for development. We are also aiming to enhance handloom exports from about Rs. 2,500 crore to Rs. 4,500 crore in next three years. - - Union Textiles Minister and Chairman, All India Handloom Board, Shri Santosh Kumar Gangwar at the first meeting of the Board, on 19th April, 2016 The first meeting of the recently constituted All India Handloom Board was held in New Delhi, on 19th April, 2016. The Chairman and Union Textiles Minister, Shri Santosh Kumar Gangwar gave an overview of the various initiatives being taken by the Government for the development of the sector. Our vision is to increase the income of Handloom weavers to 500 rupees per day: Minister @santoshgangwar pic.twitter.com/kCu4aX2azv Ministry of Textiles (@TexMinIndia) April 19, 2016 The Minister conveyed to the Board members that the Government under the leadership of Honble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi is implementing a newly chalked out strategy for revival and resurgence of the handloom industry. Shri Gangwar said that the new strategy for revival of the handloom industry has the core objective of increasing the earnings of handloom weavers through skill upgradation, loom upgradation, availability of good quality raw material at cheaper rates, availability of adequate credit facilities, product design and development and branding for effective marketing. Shri Gangwar recalled Governments declaration of 7th August as National Handloom Day, as a mark of recognition and respect for the contribution of millions of handloom weavers across the country to our economy as well as to the rich culture and tradition. The first National Handloom Day was celebrated all over the country and at the main function in Chennai, Honble Prime Minister was himself the Chief Guest. He said that to give a new identity to handloom industry, the India Handloom Brand too was launched by the Honble Prime Minister on the occasion. The Textiles Minister said that the new strategy is demand-driven, so that production can be made according to consumer preferences. He said that the most important initiative in this regard has been the launch of India Handloom Brand, aimed at regaining consumer confidence, through quality endorsement in terms of authenticity, azo-free dyes, and fast colours. He informed that India Handloom Brand registration has so far been granted to 170 handloom producing agencies and weavers in 41 product categories. Shri Gangwar said that this is being supported through a comprehensive marketing campaign. He said that India Handloom brand producers have reported a sale of more than Rs.15 crore within a period of about four months. A marketing research study is also being undertaken. The Minister also spoke of the open door e-commerce policy framework. He added that more buyer-seller meets would be held, to strengthen marketing linkages. The Minister said that on the supply side, the Government has significantly expanded its support to handloom clusters, in terms of Common Facility Centres (CFCs), skill upgradation, assistance for loom upgradation and effective project management through services of full time Cluster Development Executives and competent designers. Shri Gangwar recalled that the amount sanctioned for mega clusters in year 2015-16 was highest ever, at Rs. 37.11 crore; further, a record number of 175 block level clusters have been sanctioned in 21 states. The Minister said that a block level cluster can avail financial assistance up to Rs. 2.00 crore.

He also highlighted the increased assistance given during FY 2015-16, in terms of skill upgradation, technology upgradation and CFCs. The Textiles Minister said that the budget utilization for handloom sector in the year 2015-16 was Rs. 591 crore, which is 25% higher than the previous year.
India has urged the developed world to declare its enhanced action plan for the second period of Kyoto Protocol. Speaking on the eve of his departure for New York for the signing of Paris Climate Change Agreement, Minister of State (Independent Charge) of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Shri Prakash Javadekar, said here today, that mobilising $100 billion is still at the stage of discussion and no concrete action plan has been laid out. Shri Javadekar said that India has levied a Clean Environment Cess of $6 (Rs. 400) per tonne on coal. The Minister added that if the developed world follows India in taxing its coal production, $100 billion can be raised. He also said that the developed world must provide technological support to the developing nations in the fight against Climate Change. Shri Javadekar will also attend the meeting of Major Economies Forum on April 23-24, 2016. .

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The Minister highlighted that India is leading by example on mitigation and adaptation. Laying out the details of Indias action on Climate Change after the Paris Agreement, Shri Javadekar said that 175 GigaWatt of Renewable Energy has been targeted by 2022, out of which 40 GW Renewable Energy capacity has been achieved by March 2016. He pointed out that the Government has decided to leapfrog from Bharat Stage IV (BS-IV) to Bharat Stage VI (BS-VI) emission norms by April 1, 2020, thereby skipping BS-V emission norms altogether. The Government has taken a decision to promote blending of ethanol with petrol and its use as an alternative fuel and has also taken a decision to tax SUVs and diesel vehicles", Shri Javadekar added. Shri Javadekar also said that 93 million LED bulbs have been distributed till April 12, 2016. This has resulted in energy savings of more than 33.3 million kWh every day .

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Emphasising the initiatives taken by the government on adaptation front, the Minister stated that farmers can get their inefficient agricultural pumps sets free of cost replaced with energy efficient pumps. Some of the other initiatives taken by the Government include - Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana to improve water use efficiency, sustainable agriculture and efficient water use. .

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Speaking on the issue of pollution of lakes in Bengaluru, Shri Javadekar said that the Ministry has issued directions under section 5 and section 18 of Environment Protection Act on pollution of lakes in Bengaluru. The Minister said that the Centre has extended an assistance of Rs. 800 crore under AMRUT scheme for cleaning up the lakes in Bengaluru. Out of this, Rs. 500 crore is for laying down a 74 kms trunk sewage pipeline. He also said that Rs 162 crore have been provided to construct 4 Sewage Treatment Plant (STPs) in Bellandur lake. The Minister stated that 1280 MLDs of sewage is generated per day in Bengaluru, while the capacity to treat sewage is 721 MLD. Out of this, 600 MLD of sewage is actually treated. He also pointed out that of the 520 STPs, 137 STPs are non-functional. .

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The Environment Minister said that the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority Bill have been received. Some of the suggestions have been incorporated and the Bill will be placed in the Parliament in the next session. .

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PM condemns the attack in Kabul; extends condolences to the bereaved families

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The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi has condemned the attack in Kabul. The Prime Minister has extended condolences to the bereaved families. .

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"I condemn the attack in Kabul and extend my condolences to bereaved families. Prayers with the injured for a speedy recovery", the Prime Minister said..

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A conference of Chief Administrative Officers (CAOs) of Construction Organizations of all Zonal Railways was held yesterday i.e. on 18.04.2016 in Rail Bhawan to take stock of the achievements of 2015-16 and to review the targeted projects for the year 2016-17. The conference was addressed by Shri Suresh Prabhu, Minister for Railways and Shri Manoj Sinha, Minister of State for Railways. .

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While addressing the CAOs, Minister of Railways expressed his satisfaction and appreciation for the good work done by the Construction engineers of Indian Railways. He was introduced to each officer by Shri V.K.Gupta, Member Engineering. He congratulated the entire team led by Shri Gupta for achieving the best ever performance of project commissioning during the year, as Indian Railways commissioned over 2800 km of Broad Gauge track in 2015-16 which is over 40% more than the previous years achievement of 1983 km. Shri Prabhu was also full of praise for the engineers for fund utilization on the projects as Indian Railways Capex reached an all time high to over Rs 93000 crores during the year which is over 60% higher than the last year. He, however, cautioned the CAOs not to be complacent, as peoples expectations from Railways have further increased with achievement of these ambitious targets as Capex for 2016-17 has been pegged at Rs 1.21 lakh crores. .

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Shri Manoj Sinha, Minister of State for Railways also appreciated the important role played by Construction engineers for development of rail infrastructure in the country. Speaking on the occasion, he specifically appreciated engineers from Northeast Frontier Railway for bringing 3 States viz. Tripura, Manipur and Mizoram on the Broad Gauge map of the country during 2015-16. He also congratulated the engineers for commissioning of two Mega-bridges across river Ganga at Patna and Munger which have integrated the railway networks of North and South Bihar. .

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AKS/DK
The Minister of Women and Child Development Smt Maneka Sanjay Gandhi formally launched the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao programme of the Government for additional 61 districts in 11 States/ UTs with low CSR today. The scheme was launched at a high level conference attended by State Principal Secretaries of Departments of WCD/Social Welfare, Education and Health; Deputy Commissioners/Collectors and District Magistrates from the new 61 BBBP Districts in New Delhi today. BBBP is already operational in select 100 districts of the country with low child sex ratio. .

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Addressing the participants, Smt. Maneka Gandhi said that BBBP was launched by the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi on 22nd January, 2015 and the program has proved very successful. The credit for the good performance goes to the Deputy Commissioners/Collectors and District Magistrates who have implemented it with enthusiasm by introducing several innovative actions, the Minister added. It is as a result of all these efforts that an increasing trend in Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB) is visible in 49% of the BBBP districts in the first year of the scheme itself, Smt Maneka Gandhi said. .

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The WCD Minister highlighted the commendable initiatives taken by the States of Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir, Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh, Jalgaon district of Maharashtra, Gomati in Tripura among others for their commitment to the cause of empowerment of the girl child. Introducing BBBP to the new districts, Smt Maneka Gandhi said that the goal is to improve SRB by a minimum of ten points per year and gradually bring it at par within five years. Some of the deliverables of the scheme include reducing school dropout rate for girls, 100% institutional deliveries, Gudda-Guddi Boards in every village, safety and security for girls/women, close monitoring of PC&PNDT Act, toilet facility for girls in school among others, the Minister explained. .

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Secretary, WCD, Shri V. Somasundaran highlighted the need for mobilization of the community to make BBBP a collective effort in order to sustain the programme over a long term basis. He explained that a community outreach is being institutionalized through 303 Village Convergence and Facilitation Service (VCFS) centers across the country, to facilitate convergence on womens issues and benefits available to them. He also highlighted the need for frequent monitoring and scrutiny of Sex Ratio at Birth to keep the scheme on track. .

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The Deputy Commissioners/Collectors and District Magistrates from select districts of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir shared their journey of successful implementation of the scheme on-ground and the various innovative interventions, they have undertaken like celebration of birth of girl child, display of birth statistics through digital Guddi Gudda boards, oath taking ceremonies, linking of birth of girl child with Sukanya Samriddhi accounts, plantation drives through involvement of urban local bodies, sealing of unregistered ultrasonography machines etc. .

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Experience sharing in working sessions provided meaningful inputs especially for the new 61 districts where multi-sectoral interventions are being extended. .

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Earlier, the Minister visited the walk through exhibition gallery at the venue, showcasing the journey of the scheme. A booklet titled Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao- A Journey So Far" was also released by Smt Maneka Sanjay Gandhi on the occasion. This booklet contains innovative local interventions undertaken in the past year in various districts. .

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Representatives of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Ministry of Human Resource Development as well as UN bodies and CSO agencies also attended the conference. .

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YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. The European Union is concerned over the situation of Armenias borders, the one of which is closed and the other is under fire, Armenpress reports, the head of the EU delegation to Armenia, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Piotr Switalski said this on April 19 during the conference devoted to launch of the Funding in the areas of migration and border mamagement program. Later referring to the question by journalists what the EU does to eliminate that concern, Ambassador Piotr Switalski said: First of all, we should work towards the peaceful settlement of Nagorno Karabakh conflict, then we should normalize the relations between Armenia and Turkey which will benefit the Armenian nation a lot".

He believes that Armenias economy will progress when it has peaceful and open borders. It will contribute to the development of infrastructures and the involvement of a large number of tourists in the country. Last week I was in Tavush. Several European country representatives do not recommend tourists to visit the Armenias northern border since it is very close to the Azerbaijani border, however, this place is one of the beautiful places of Armenia which can be very attractive for many tourists. The opening of the border with Turkey will further strengthen trade and contacts between people. If the residents of Gyumri will be able to travel to Kars, then easily come back to Gyumri, it will bring huge incomes to Armenia, the EU official noted.

Piotr Switalski highlighted that the European Union has allocated money for projects for the establishment of relations between Armenian and Azerbaijani nations, however, this process is very difficult to make true politically. There are certain prejudices, however at the same time we are ready to conduct more intensive steps to achieve success in this process. We also have a long-term projects that we are ready to continue: it relates to the normalization of relations between Armenia and Turkey, said the EU official. He stated that the success of the EU is based on solidarity and expressed the hope that one day solidarity will also be established in this region. Solidairty is a part of European identity, and if this region wants to be a part of the Europe, here also this solidarity should be established. Armenians and Azerbaijanis should be ready for the peaceful settlement of the conflict, the head of the EU delegation to Armenia concluded.
Textiles Minister launches Eco Friendly Jute Bag initiative in Delhi Mother Dairy to offer jute bags to customers at all Mother Dairy/Safal outlets in Delhi - NCR It is well-known that the indiscriminate use of polythene bags is one contributor to the pollution problem in the national capital. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has on multiple occasions, tried to ban use of plastic carry bags in Delhi. However, we find these plastic carry bags continue to be used commonly. Residents of Delhi now have a choice and can themselves restrict use of plastic bags by using eco-friendly, biodegradable and low-cost jute bags. Mother Dairy, National Jute Board (NJB) and Birds Jute & Exports Ltd. (BJEL) have joined hands in this green venture, to provide attractive, low cost jute bags at the thousand-odd booths of Mother Dairy/Safal in Delhi NCR. The venture is promoted by NJB, bags are manufactured by BJEL and supplied to Mother Dairy for distribution at its booths. The formal launch of the scheme has been done today i.e. 19th April 2016, by the Union Textiles Minister Shri Santosh Kumar Gangwar. Through this scheme, one can purchase ones daily requirement of perishables from reliable outlets of Mother Dairy and Safal, along with the option of buying environment friendly, attractive, low cost jute bags too. Available in the price range of Rs 25/- to Rs. 35/-, these bags are strong, washable and can be used several times over, making them cost effective. These bags are provided at Mother Dairy and Safal outlets by Birds Jute & Exports Limited (BJEL), a PSU under the administrative control of Ministry of Textiles, Government of India. The Textiles Minister had launched Common Facility Centre Scheme of the National Lute Board on 1st September, 2015 at Kolkata, under which 5 CFCs were to be set up.

Out of the five CFCs, two CFCs at Hoogly & 24 Parganas are being run by BJEL under which different Women Self Help Groups (WSHGs)/ micro entrepreneurs manufacture Jute Diversified Products. The Mother Dairy jute bags will provide such WSHGs a regular market and sustained means of livelihood.
China and other major steel-producing countries failed to agree measures to tackle a global steel crisis as the sides argued over the causes of overcapacity, prompting US criticism of Beijing's approach and an angry response from Chinese officials.

A meeting of ministers and trade officials from over 30 countries, hosted by Belgium and the OECD on Monday, sought to tackle excess capacity, but concluded only that it had to be dealt with in a swift and structural way.

ON THE EDGE Tata Steel has plans to pull out of Britain threatening 15,000 jobs

More than 40,000 German steel workers took to the streets to protest dumping from China

The OECD said global steelmaking capacity was 2.37 bn tonnes in 2015, but nly 67.5 % being used, from 70.9% in 2014

Washington pointed the finger at China over the failure of the talks, saying Beijing needed to act on overcapacity or face possible trade action from other countries.

Unless China starts to take timely and concrete actions to reduce its excess production and capacity in industries including steel ... the fundamental structural problems in the industry will remain and affected governments  including the United States  will have no alternatives other than trade action to avoid harm to their domestic industries and workers, US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and US Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a statement.

Asked what steps the Chinese government would take following the unsuccessful talks, China Commerce Ministry spokesman Shen Danyang told reporters on Tuesday: China has already done more than enough. What more do you want us to do? Steel is the food of industry, the food of economic development. At present, the major problem is that countries that need food have a poor appetite so it looks like theres too much food.



The OECD said global steelmaking capacity was 2.37 billion tonnes in 2015, but declining production meant that only 67.5 per cent of that was being used, down from 70.9 per cent in 2014.

Britain in particular has felt the squeeze as its largest producer Tata Steel has announced plans to pull out of the country, threatening 15,000 jobs. Last week, more than 40,000 German steel workers took to the streets to protest against dumping from China.

China, the world's top steel producer, has been ramping up exports of steel in recent years, as it battles to steer its into services-led growth and away from traditional manufacturing, while keeping employment levels high.

China's steel exports jumped 30 per cent from a year ago to 9.98 million tonnes in March despite a slew of anti-dumping measures globally.

But blaming China for woes in the global steel industry is simply a lazy excuse for protectionism, and such finger-pointing will be counter-productive, China's official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary on Monday.

It's more been their competitive advantage into Asian countries which has really driven that rise in exports, said Daniel Hynes, a commodity strategist at ANZ Bank. I think that will continue and will keep those export levels relatively high despite the pressures we're seeing now.



At a news conference following Monday's meeting, deep divisions between China and other producers were clear.

Cecelia Malmstrom, the EU's trade commissioner, insisted governments should not grant subsidies that keep unviable plants running and should subject state-controlled firms to the same rules as the private sector.

China's assistant commerce minister, Zhang Ji, said China had cut 90 million tonnes of capacity and had plans to reduce it by a further 100-150 million tonnes.

That is only 10 million tonnes less than the capacity in Europe, he said, although critics say it would still have a capacity of around 1 billion tonnes, far in excess of its needs.

China's main iron and steel body has previously acknowledged that the flood of Chinese steel product exports is damaging to the country's efforts to gain market status from the European Union - an important goal for Beijing as the domestic slows.

Li Xinchuang, the vice secretary of general of the China Iron and Steel Association, rejected the US criticisms.

It is a totally pointless complaint from the US and it's biased against China, Li told Reuters by phone. China's steel industry is market-based and Chinese steel products have good quality, low price and good service. The complaint on government subsidies is also crap.



Tensions have erupted between other producers, with Japan leading criticism of Indian minimum prices for imported steel at a recent World Trade Organisation meeting and Japan and South Korea coming under fire for exporting steel products cheaper than they sell them at home.

In a step by Beijing to reduce trade frictions with Washington, it has agreed to scrap some export subsidies on a range of products including steel the United States said last week.

But there were signs the spat was spreading. The United Steelworkers (USW) said on Monday it has filed a case with US regulators seeking to stem a flood of aluminium imports the trade unions says have damaged US producers and threatened jobs.

The case is the latest move by the US aluminium industry to try and get authorities to investigate the impact of rising imports, particularly from China.
An Asia Pacific study by human resources firm Korn Ferry and the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School's Centre for Governance, Institutions and Organisations (CGIO), revealed that with greater female representation in the boardroom tend to be more profitable, but women still remain under-represented across Asia Pacific boards, with most countries showing little or no progress.

India has made significant progress in broadening female representation across companies, according to the study. there reported an increase in female board representation from 7.3 per cent to 8.6 per cent in 2014. The Company Act, which required all listed to have at least one woman on the board, has helped enable this broadening female representation.

According to the findings, three countries in the Asia Pacific region, namely Australia, India and Malaysia, showed significant improvement in broadening women representation on boards across the companies.

Australia continues to be the best performing country in the region. With 21.9 per cent female board members among the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)-listed companies, it is the only economy in this survey with over 20 per cent of women on boards.

Navnit Singh, Chairman and Managing Director of India for Korn Ferry explained, "When we speak of board diversity and steps to improve the landscape, there is no doubt that the Government has a very crucial role to play in this scheme of things. Most countries reviewed in this study showed little or no improvement. However, India, Australia and Malaysia have recently seen regulatory action or governmental support for promoting board diversity. This is why you can see a +1.3 per cent change in India."

The study, Building Diversity in Asia Pacific Boardrooms, is the fourth in the Korn Ferry Diversity Scorecard series and examined the largest 100 publicly listed companies' 2014 annual reports in ten Asia Pacific economies: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea. Based on the findings, firms with at least 10 per cent of female board members delivered a 14.9 per cent return on equity (ROE) in 2014 compared to just 12.6 per cent for those without.

Despite a compelling business case for board diversity, the increase in gender board diversity continues at a slow pace. Women make up 10.2 per cent of all directors in this latest study, up from 9.4 per cent in 2013 and 8 per cent in 2012. Only three out of ten countries showed substantial improvement.

The study said that Asia Pacific falls far behind benchmark global economies such as the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union. For the region to reach parity with these markets, it would require another decade of growth at the current pace.

However, it said that all-male boards are no longer a majority in the region with a significant drop from 53.2 per cent in 2012 to 39 per cent in 2014. This large decrease indicates that boards recognised the need for gender diversity. However, the study said that they still lag far behind Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 companies; there are no longer any all-male FTSE 100 boards.

Most of the countries reviewed showed little or no improvement in gender diversity, with the exception of Australia, Malaysia and India. These three countries also saw regulatory action or governmental support for promoting board diversity. Malaysia saw the largest year-on-year increase in female representation, from 8.3 per cent to 12.5 per cent, reflecting the success of its governmental programmes to increase gender diversity.
When Chris Hemsworth got to know his four-year-old daughter's demand, it gave him bit of a shock.

The 32-year-old actor said in a recent interview that his daughter India Rose is quite envious of her two-year-old twin brothers at the moment, reports News.com.au.

The 'Thor' star said that she came to him one day and said that she wants one of those things that Sasha and Tristan have.

When Hemsworth asked what she meant, she said the things in between the legs that he has. He told him that girls have breasts, but she was adamant about getting a penis.

Hemsworth then replied, "I was like ...Ya know what, you can be whatever you want to be.
After Kangana Ranaut's lawyers lashed out at Hrithik Roshan and his team saying that they are misleading the media, Hrithik's lawyer has given out his statement.

The 48-year-old actor's lawyer recently counter-accused the 'Queen' star's team for giving one too many statements to the media and not actually recording an official statement.

He said, "Instead of giving so many media statements they should record one official statement with the cyber-crime cell which will really help the investigation."

"They are clearly more interested in media wars than anything else. The entire process of investigation is stalled because they haven't officially recorded their statement with the authorities," his statement further read.
Despite impeachment defeat in the lower house, Brazil's embattled President Dilma Rousseff has said she has done nothing wrong, adding that she would fight to maintain power.

"I believe in democracy. I will fight, like I have always done in my life. This is not the beginning of the end - it's the beginning of the fight," the Guardian quoted her as saying.

As the opposition celebrated Sunday's vote and prepared for a new administration under Vice-President Michel Temer, Rousseff clearly singled out Temer for criticism and said that he had "openly conspired" against her.

She repeatedly pledged not to step down.

"My mandate is not for me, it's for 54 million who voted for me ... this is a fight for Brazil, for democracy," she said.

However, the Opposition remains poised to give Brazil its first centre-right government in more than 13 years.

The lawmakers in the lower house of Congress voted in favour of sending an impeachment motion against her to the upper house.

Rousseff is accused of manipulating government accounts, which she clearly denies.

Meanwhile, the Senate will now have to decide whether to start an impeachment trial against her or not. The Senators are expected to vote on the matter early next month.

If the senators vote in favour of the trial, Rousseff will be suspended from office while the trial is under way and Vice-President Temer will become acting president for the duration of her suspension.
In a bid to improve border management and avoid frequent stand-off between the two armies, India and China are mulling setting up a hotline between the military headquarters of both the countries.

According to reports, China has reacted positively towards setting up a military hotline with India.

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, who is Beijing, met Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan yesterday and held discussions on improving border management through a new round of confidence building measures (CBMs) with him.

"The Chinese have returned the draft of the memorandum on establishing a hotline between the two military headquarters. The issue should be closed within one or two months," media reports quoted Parrikar as saying after the meeting.

Parrikar, who is presently on a five-day visit to China, is the first Indian Defence Minister to visit the country after A.K. Antony in 2013. He will also be meeting the top Chinese military officials.

Parrikar arrived at Shanghai yesterday, accompanied by a delegation which included senior officials from the Defence Ministry and from the Army and Navy.
India has signed an MoU with Mauritius on cooperation in the field of traditional system of medicine and homoeopathy.

The MoU was signed during the recent visit of Minster of State for AYUSH (Independent Charge) and Health and Family Welfare Shripad Yesso Naik to Mauritius.

This MoU will promote cooperation in the field of traditional system of health and medicine between the two countries which already share these traditions due to our unique historical and cultural ties.

It envisages exchange of experts, supply of traditional medicinal substances, joint research and development and recognition of the traditional systems of health and medicine in both countries. It also aims at promotion and popularization of the diverse Indian traditional systems which fall under AYUSH.

The agreement will be of immense importance to both countries, considering their shared cultural heritage. The Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa Rigpa and Homoeopathy (AYUSH) as a part of its mandate to propagate Indian systems of medicine globally has entered into MoUs with China, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, Hungary, Bangladesh and Nepal.

The financial resources necessary to conduct research, training courses, meetings and deputations of experts will be met from the existing allocated budget and existing plan schemes of AYUSH.

Both India and Mauritius share several cultural, historical, linguistic and literary similarities, traditional medicine including medicinal plants are promising areas which need to be further explored and can prove to be mutually beneficial to the people of the two countries.

The Government of Mauritius also has a long history of traditional medicine in common with India and both countries shares a common culture with respect to the ayurvedic system of medicine.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University in Katra is the only varsity in the country which gets funded by the poor and pilgrims, who come to the holy shrine in Jammu and Kashmir.

"The universities in our country normally get funded by the taxpayers' money, but this is the only university as an exception which is built through the contribution of many pilgrims, poor, who came to Mata Vaishno Devi temple," Prime Minister Modi said while speaking at the fifth convocation of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University.

"Let's pledge that we will do something for the poor because it was a poor pilgrim, who contributed to build this university," he added.

Advising the students to be content with their achievements rather than regretting the failures, Prime Minister Modi urged the students to recall the contribution of their parents.

"You may have thought of so much in your childhood, but things might not have worked out. Forget that and instead think of what you have achieved," he said.

Prime Minister Modi further said the person, who knows what lies ahead in life doesn't need to depend on others.

He said India is scaling new heights of progress, adding the nation has huge possibilities to achieve much more with such a youthful population.

"This is a century of knowledge and whenever there has been an era of knowledge, India has showed the way to world," he added.

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Modi inaugurated Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Narayana Superspeciality Hospital at Kakryal near Katra.

Jammu and Kashmir Governor NN Vohra, the chairman of the Shrine Board and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti were also present on the occasion.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. Robin Forestier-Walker, who is a freelance journalist based in Tbilisi, wrote a long article entitled Nagorno Karabakh: Who won the media war? where he spoke about the difficulties of journalists faced in Azerbaijan and the media war between the Armenian-Azerbaijani opposing forces in the line of contact during the 4-day war. As Armenpress reports citing Eurasianet.org news site, the author of the article stated that the abilities of journalists to cover the conflict depended on which part of the border they were working.

The author notes that many foreign journalists were able to enter Karabakh via Armenia unhindered and quickly obtain accreditation upon arrival in the main city, Stepanakert. Local de facto officials held daily press briefings, including question and answer sessions. Armenias public television station offered free satellite link-ups and journalists were able to travel independently in civilian vehicles outside the frontline areas.

Each morning, de-facto Karabakhi defense and local officials offered reporters escorted trips to frontline villages, such as Talish or Martuni the journalist writes.

On the other side of the divide, journalists found it tougher going. Azerbaijan maintains a strict policy of controlling media access, especially to areas close to the frontlines. It also has a history of denying visas to journalists who previously have traveled without Bakus consent to Karabakh, the author says.

The author of the article notes that Azerbaijan boasts considerable experience hosting international media spectaculars. Yet, a representative of one international media outlet who managed to cover the conflict from the Azerbaijani side found the governments press management skills during the Karabakh flare-up to be lacking. Speaking to EurasiaNet.org on condition of anonymity, the journalist described a grueling, rapid-fire press tour that took journalists from Baku to the frontline as shambolic.

The international journalists there found themselves being filmed as much as doing the filming,. Azerbaijani TV crews were making a story about us, the journalist said



Daylight was fading by the time cameramen stopped filming at the first location, he continued. And by the time we'd driven two or more hours to the next place, it was pitch black. Not great for TV cameras, the journalist told.



The author also stated that some journalists who entered Azerbaijan were detained or deported. "For intsnace, security officials in Azerbaijan held and questioned a television crew from Georgias Rustavi2 for several hours because they did not have accreditation. After intervention by Georgian and Azerbaijani diplomats, the crew was able to continue reporting. A group from Russias LifeNews channel was expelled for lack of accreditation and allegedly spreading claims, also featured in Armenian media, that Azerbaijan was using Islamic State terrorists against Armenian and Karabakhi forces the author of the article says.
OrderZapp, a recently launched food-ordering app is all set to offer authentic Devgad mangoes to its users this summer season. The app has partnered with Devgad Mangoes Co-operative Ltd, a 28-year-old co-operative, encompassing 700 farmers from Devgad Taluka, to provide the same.

OrderZapp will exclusively distribute unique, handpicked and natural mangoes, which are ripened using traditional methods like hay, blanket etc. There will be no usage of carbide, ethylene or hormones in these mangoes, thus making it safe for consumption.

The first order placed will be delivered for free and from the second order there will be a minimal cost of Rs. 30 per delivery, across Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai.

Devgad Mangoes Cooperative Ltd. is the largest and oldest co-operative society with an aim to benefit all farmers. With this step OrderZapp takes a step closer in their mission towards empowering farmers amidst today's socio-economic concern of increasing farmer suicides.

Sharing their views on the same, the spokesperson from OrderZapp said, "We are very glad to offer authentic Devgad mangoes to our users. We hope this step of ours will help the farmers get a larger and newer buyer base. We look forward to provide similar exclusive products in the near future too."

Speaking on behalf of the Devgad Mangoes Co-operative Ltd., Omkar M Sapre Advisory Member of Board and Chief Marketing Officer said, "We are glad to partner with OrderZapp for distributing authentic Devgad mangoes this year. With consumer shopping patterns now shifting to digital mediums, it is essential to adapt newer ways of approaching them. Reaching out to consumers is more exciting and personal through OrderZapp."

OrderZapp is an app based company, which brings the best of Mumbai to your door step. It provides access to products over 1000 local stores in Mumbai in various categories like sweets, snacks, cakes, dairy products, health food, home and beauty amongst others.
At least ten people have been injured in a suicide blast targeting Pakistan's Mardan Excise and Taxation Department on Tuesday.

The explosion took place following a sound of gunfire coming from within the building, police officials said, reports Dawn.

While the injured have been rushed to the District Headquarters Hospital in Mardan, the rescue teams have reached the explosion site to take control of the situation.

District Police Office (DPO) Faisal Shahzad confirmed that at least 10 people were injured and more casualties are feared.

Meanwhile, emergency has been imposed in the area.

The Excise and Taxation Department is located in Mardan's Cantonment Area on Mall Road, which is a busy location.

A similar blast last year hit the National Database and Registration Authority office in the city, killing at least 26 people and injuring 50 others.
President Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday extended his greeting to the nation on the occasion of Mahavir Jayanti and called on the citizens to resolve to spread Bhagwan Mahavira's teachings of ahimsa, compassion, love and expressed hope that this festival may inspire all to adopt non-violence in thought and life.

Echoing similar sentiments, Vice President Hamid Ansari said that through his teachings of non-violence and compassion, Bhagwan Mahavir showed an enlightened path for happiness and progress of humanity.

"On this auspicious occasion, let us commit ourselves for building a peaceful, harmonious and just society," he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also wished the nation calling on everyone to recall the pure thoughts and ideals of Lord Mahavir and reaffirm the commitment towards a harmonious and peaceful society.

Mahavir Jayanti, also known as Mahavir Janma Kalyanak, is the most important religious holiday for Jains as it celebrates the birth of Mahavira, twenty-fourth and the last Tirthankara (Teaching God) of the present time cycle.

Ahimsa rallies preaching the Mahavira's message of Ahi?sa are taken out on this day.
With Indian agriculture remaining a worrisome sector and services doing rather well, it is manufacturing that can create the quantum of jobs needed to accommodate urban migration and help the country grow faster, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said.

"As a share of our GDP, the manufacturing sector over the years has shrunk to around 15%. Our services sector is fairly robust, grows annually at around 9-10% and is expanding rapidly. It is not a sector that seriously worries us," he said.

"Agriculture obviously is the most worrisome sector of the Indian economy. With just 15% contribution to the GDP, you have around 55% of the population in agriculture. That's where really the stress in the Indian economy is," the minister told the Asian Society here.

"Over the next few decades, we need to have a very large section of population  underemployed in agriculture  getting out of agriculture and getting absorbed in other segments. Obviously, manufacturing is where large jobs are," he said.

"I don't think this is an opportunity we can afford to miss," he added.

Outlining the "Make in India" initiative of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the reason behind such focus on manufacturing and the steps being taken towards the goal, Jaitley said that this was the area that could help India transform into a developed nation.

"That's why the concentration and every policy initiative we have been taking in this regard has been in the direction of strengthening the economy, and more particularly, on impacting on our manufacturing sector itself," he said in his 40-minute speech.

Nonetheless, he said, there has been a significant transformation in India in the past few years.

"What was being referred to as 'policy paralysis', is now referred to as the 'bright spot'," he said, alluding to the description India has been accorded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), meetings of which Jaitley had attended in Washington before arriving here.

"I've belief given the global standards in a slowed environment, India is doing significantly well. But given our own standards and expectations  of being able to grow faster, eradicate poverty and transform into a developed country  we probably can do a little better," he said.

Under the Make in India initiative, launched in 2014, Jaitley said that the country has embarked on an ambitious programme to create jobs for millions of its citizens, who together comprise the world's second-largest population of nearly 1.3 billion people.

He said that infrastructure development was central to such a plan and cited the examples of highways, where as many as 233 projects were underway with a target of 30 kilometre per day, and investments in airports to operationalise a couple of hundred of them of World War II vintage.

On the global economy, Jaitley expressed his concern over the "firewalls" countries have created amid slow recovery, with little signs as to how soon the situation would improve.

"If you were to ask me 'how's the global situation', I think it's grim and worrisome. What will be the state of play a year or two years from now, I don't think anybody has been able for sure to hazard even a significant guess," he said.
At least 12 people were killed on Tuesday in government airstrikes against areas in the rebel-held province of Idlib in northwestern Syria, a monitor group reported.

The strikes targeted the town of Kafr-Nubbol in the countryside of the Ma'arat al-Numan area in Idlib countryside, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The London-based watchdog group said tens of people were wounded, adding that the death toll could likely rise due to the large number of critically wounded people and those still stuck under the rubble.

The airstrikes came apparently in response to the wide-scale offensives by the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front on key government-controlled areas in the countryside of the coastal city of Latakia and the central province of Hama.

A Syrian military source told Xinhua on Tuesday that the military forces managed to repel the attacks, scoring more progress against the Al-Qaeda-linked groups in the countryside of Latakia.

The escalation of tension on ground reflects the tension taking place among the Syrian delegates to the Geneva peace talks on Syria crisis.

The opposition representatives in Geneva talks are calling for suspending the talks, citing the lack of progress.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Tuesday confirmed the calling of an early election on July 2.

On Monday, Australia's upper house, the Senate, rejected a piece of government legislation for a second time which provided Turnbull with a trigger for a so-called double dissolution election, BBC reported.

A double dissolution election is a mechanism in the Australian constitution that allows the government to call for an election if a piece of legislation is blocked twice in the upper house.

Turnbull said at a press conference that he intended to ask the governor general to dissolve parliament after the budget May 3.

He said said calling the double dissolution was about "giving the people their say".

"It means it's an occasion when the House and the Senate can't agree, persistently and so then everyone goes to the polls," he said.

And when we win the election as I believe we will, we will return and the reforms to registered organisations and the reintroduction of the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) will be made law."
Top leaders in Canada's Ontario province led by Premier Kathleen Wynne joined the Sikh community in celebrating Baisakhi at the Ontario legislative assembly.

For the first time, the Sikh holy book Guru Granth Sahib was brought to the assembly here on Monday to celebrate Baisakhi and the Sikh Heritage Month.

Wynne and her cabinet ministers joined the Sikhs as 'kirtan' was performed and prayers recited to mark the birthday of the Khalsa in April 1699.

The Sikh community's saffron flag Nishan Sahib was also hoisted outside the assembly building to mark the day.

"It is the first time in the history of Ontario that the holy Guru Granth Sahib has been brought inside the legislative assembly building, and the Sikh flag Nishan Sahib installed to mark Baisakhi day.

"It is a proud day for Sikhs in Canada," said Indian-Canadian politician and former Ontario transportation minister Harinder Takhar at the Baisakhi reception at the assembly building Queen's Park.

Baisakhi is the harvest festival of Punjab, which also marks the Punjabi new year.

Dressed in salwar-kameez and with her head covered, Premier Wynne praised the Sikh community for integrating into Canada's multicultural society while still maintaining its rich heritage.

She said she was very happy that the Sikh holy scripture was brought to the assembly for the first time and it created an atmosphere of peace inside the house.

Such events "should happen more often" to create an atmosphere of peace and harmony so that more productive work can be done by assembly members.

Wynne, who visited India in February, stressed that her visit was as much about promoting business as connecting with people.

She lauded the hospitality and warmth extended to her wherever she went in India.

Recalling her visit to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, she said it was a very beautiful and serene place.

She said she was overwhelmed by the sense of volunteerism at the Golden Temple.

In a lighter vein, she said India was a place where so much news happens and travels very quickly.

"There are so many newspapers I wonder how they read them all," she said.

As her picture of making chapatis at the langar (community kitchen) at the Golden Temple was splashed in the media across India, she said wherever she went after that, people would say: "You were the one who was making chapatis."

The Ontario premier praised the decision of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to apologise for the Komagata Maru event of 1914 to rectify past mistakes.

She said her own party legislator Vic Dhillon will move a motion in the Ontario assembly on the Komagata Maru apology and ensure that no future immigrants are ever discriminated against in Canada.

(Gurmukh Singh can be contacted at gurmukh100@gmail.com)
Maverick striker Mario Balotelli has ruled out his return to Liverpool and has expressed his desire to stay with Italian giants AC Milan.

The Italy international is currently on loan to Milan from former English champions Liverpool where he endured a miserable 2014-15 season. He has struggled to make it to the starting XI at Milan as well, but has shown much better form in the last two Serie A matches.

"When it comes to my future, I want to stay with Milan because I wasn't happy at Liverpool and I don't want to return there. And plus, Milan has the money. I've been doing well in my last two games, there are another six for me to prove myself," Balotelli was quoted as saying by Gazzetta dello Sport.

"I feel in good shape physically at last and am relaxed," he added.

The 25-year-old centre forward, who has played 33 times for Italy, is also linked to a possible move to French club Monaco. According to InsportPlus, Balotelli has had a meeting with Monaco president Dmitry Rybolovlev, and is considering a transfer to the Ligue 1 outfit if a permanent move to Milan does not materialise.
Bell ringers will attempt to set a world record at Britain's largest church, Liverpool Cathedral, on Thursday on Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday.

The team of seven ringers will ring the world's heaviest peal of bells, a task that involves ringing the six heaviest bells for almost five hours.

The attempt comes 65 years after the Queen, as a young Princess Elizabeth, visited the cathedral to officially signal the first ever ringing of the bells in 1951, reports Xinhua news agency.

Once the ringing starts, the team will have to continue through a range of over 5,000 changes, without a break or allowing a handover to other ringers.

The biggest bell, a tenor called Emmanuel, weighs four tonnes, measures almost 2.5 meters in both diameter and height, and will take two ringers to operate. The six bells together weight almost 13,000 kg.

Len Mitchell, of the Cathedral Guild of Change Ringers, told Xinhua: "We are looking forward to this challenge on the Queen's birthday, especially as she started the first ever peal of the bells just a year before she became our Queen."

Although the bells were installed in the cathedral tower in the 1930s, because of World War II they remained silent and were not rung until November 17, 1951. The Queen and Prince Philip arrived on an ocean liner after a tour to Canada, and she came to Liverpool to "open" the bells at the cathedral.

"We have a peal of 13 bells in the cathedral, the heaviest set of bells in the world. As the bell chamber is 220 feet above ground level, they are also the highest set of bells in the world."

He explained the style of ringing they carry out as "traditional English ringing," meaning each bell turns full circle at 360 degrees.

It is a physically demanding job for the ringers, even more so when it involves the six heaviest bells, he said, adding that what they were attempting had never been done before.

"There are strict rules governing our attempt, such as the number of changes without a break, and we reckon it will take almost five hours without a break. Once we start we have to continue. If one person stops, the attempt comes to an end," Mitchell said.

Mitchell said around the world there are 6,000 sets of bells, mostly in church towers, but around 97 percent of the bells are in Britain.

The cathedral has a rarely rung the 14th bell, the Great George, traditionally used on solemn occasions such as the death of a monarch. It weighs more than 14 tonnes and is the third biggest bell in the British Isles.
The Nigerian Army on Tuesday confirmed an ambush on the convoy of the acting General Officer Commanding (GOC), 7 Division, Brigadier-General Victor Ezugwu in the restive city of Maiduguri.

Spokesperson for the Army, Col. Sani Usman, said in a statement that the ambush occurred in Bama at 8:30 a.m while the military chief was on his way to visit troops location in the area, according to Xinhua.

Usman said although one soldier was killed and two others got injured, the troops were able to survive the ambush, killing some of the Boko Haram terrorists in the process.

He said a Toyota Hilux vehicle and some weapons were recovered from the terrorists.

The spokesperson said the acting GOC had since continued his operational visit to Bama, while the body of the late soldier along with the wounded soldiers had been evacuated to Maiduguri.

Usman said the Nigerian Army remained committed and determined to continue to clear the remnants of the Boko Haram terrorists from the area.

Suspected terrorists on Monday attempted to enter the 113 battalion headquarters located at Kareto in an early morning attack.

Troops of the 113 battalion, with aerial support from the Nigerian Air Force, successfully repelled the attack on the town and the battalion headquarters.

The military had recently cleared many hideouts of the insurgents in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa including their purported spiritual headquarters at the Alagarno forest.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of International Economic Integartion and Reforms of the Republic of Armenia Vache Gabrielyan, who is in a working visit to the Federal Republic of Germany, participated in the 4th annual East Forum Berlin, Armenpress was informed about this by the Department of Infromation and Public Relations of the Armenian Government.

Vache Gabrileyan spoke about the Armenia-Eurasian Economic Union and Armenia-European Union relations stating that Armenia, having a rich experience of cooperation with the EU, can be a unique bridge within the relations of the EU and the Eurasian Economic Union.

Deputy Prime Minister noted that Armenia can be considered as a model of dialogue between the European Union and other member states of regional economic unions.
Actor Dev Patel, who essays the role of late Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in "The Man Who Knew Infinity", found it difficult to break down complex mathematical formulas while shooting for the film.

To make Dev understand his character better, Japanese-American mathematician Ken Ono was hired by the producers to help him around.

"I was involved because they wanted to get their mathematics right and before I knew it, I was on the sets in England, helping out with so many different things. It was, of course, difficult to explain how to be a mathematician to someone who is not a mathematician," Ono said in a statement.

"My favourite scene in the film is where Dev Patel completes a complex mathematical formula on the blackboard and one can see that he has done it in real time. My challenge was to select a formula that he could remember easily and complete it in the sequence," Ono added.

Written and directed by Matthew Brown, "The Man Who Knew Infinity", which also stars Jeremy Irons, Devika Bhise, Stephen Fry, Toby Jones and Arundhati Nag, is slated to release on April 29 in India.

Though Ramanujan had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.

He passed away at the age of 32 in 1920.
A court in West Bengal's North 24 Parganas district on Tuesday awarded death penalty to eight people convicted for the abduction and murder of a 21-year-old college student known for opposing hooch dens.

The body of Sourav Chowdhury, chopped to pieces, was found beside the railway track between Duttapukur and Bamongachi stations in the district in July 2014, days after he had started campaigning against hooch dens in the area.

The court on April 15 had convicted 12 people -- nine for abduction and murder -- and three others for harbouring the criminals.

While eight of the nine convicted for murder have been given the death penalty, another convict was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The death penalty awarded to the eight convicts is subject to confirmation by the Calcutta High Court.

The three others found guilty of harbouring the criminals have been sentenced to five years rigorous imprisonment.

In all, 13 people were charge-sheeted by police for the gruesome incident, of which one was acquitted by the court.

Sourav's family expressed happiness at the verdict.

"We have been hoping death for all those who had killed my brother. I thank police and the judiciary for acting swiftly in the case," said his brother Sandip.
The fifth edition of India Kids Fashion Week (IKFW), a three-day fashion extravaganza for children, will be held in Mumbai and Gurgaon beginning from June 3.

The shows will be held from June 3-5 at the Phoenix Market City here and from June 17-19 at Ambience Mall, Gurgaon.

The selections for children for the event are going to be held here between April 23-24 and in Gurgaon on May 14-15. Selections will be open for children between 4-14 years of age.

The 2016 edition of IKFW will be a 360-degree event that will see buyers from India as well as participation from retailers across Middle East and Asia.

All the brands and designers participating in the mega show will get an opportunity to establish their presence and reach out to a wider audience by displaying their collections, including apparels and accessories.

"Indian designers are trying their best to fill the void in the segment of kids' fashion. While we already have participation from renowned designers and brands, several talented, up and coming designers are also showing keen interest in India Kids Fashion Week as it will give them a platform to evolve and widen their reach," said Manoj Mahla, director, Craftworld Events.

Speaking on the occasion, Deepak Choudhary, director and CEO, Event Capital, said: "Understanding the potential for kidswear market in India, many international brands have created a strong foothold in the country. We wish to give further impetus to this space with the latest edition of our highly successful fashion show, India Kids Fashion Week."
Rome, April 19 April (IANS/AKI) The Islamic State jihadist group is planning massacres of tourists vacationing on Europe's Mediterranean coast this summer, German tabloid Bild reported Tuesday, citing Italian and German intelligence chiefs.

IS will deploy suicide bombers and gunmen disguised as beach hawkers and plant bombs beneath sunbeds at Italian, Spanish and French resorts, taking advantage of lax security, according to Bild.

Germany's BND intelligence service learned of the terror plans from its Italian counterpart, which was informed of the plot by a "credible" source in Africa, the daily said.

The threat stems from the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram, whose leadership has allied itself with IS and plans to use sympathisers to carry out attacks on crowded, unguarded beachfronts, Bild said.

"It is understood that regular African travellers to Europe, who so far have disguised their loyalty to the fanatics will be activated for the murder campaign," the daily said.

"It could be a whole new dimension of terror. Holiday beaches cannot be protected," Bild cited an unnamed high-ranking official as saying.

African hawkers travel to Europe regularly to work selling ice creams, drinks and snacks and beach accessories at Spanish, French and Italian resorts in the Mediterranean and are issued with visas and documents.

Contacted by Adnkronos, Italian security sources denied concrete intelligence existed that IS was plotting attacks like those it claimed at the popular Tunisian beach resort of Sousse, where 38 tourists were shot dead last June.

"This report is baseless. It is a fanciful scenario and there is no evidence to indicate plots of this kind are being hatched," the sources said.

--IANS/AKI

rn/vm
Director Gautham Ramachandran describes the scripting process of his maiden, yet-untitled Tamil directorial featuring popular Malayalam actor Nivin Pauly as one "hell of a writing session".

"In June 2015, we had set up an office in Chennai, and since then we've been working on the script. It took us nearly 40 drafts over a period of nine months to finally lock the script. It was one crazy, hell of a writing session," Gautham told IANS.

The team, however, is very happy with the final draft of the script.

"The effort we have put in has paid off," says the lawyer-turned-filmmaker, admitting that they couldn't have pulled it off without Nivin's contribution.

"Till a few days ago, we were making changes to the script. Nivin was very actively involved in the scripting stage and he's the sort of actor who has a great eye for details and understands all the appreciation moments of a scene," he said, adding that Nivin doesn't stop until he gets what he wants from a project.

Explaining about Nivin's involvement, Gautham shared: "While working on the last draft, recently, Nivin sat through one whole day -- from morning to night -- and finalised everything. My team was shocked by his commitment and his passion towards the project".

The film was speculated to be made in Tamil and Malayalam as a bilingual, but Gautham, a former associate of filmmaker Mysskin, denied such reports.

"Nivin insisted we make the film only in Tamil. We were supposed to work in the past and back then he gave me an option to work in Malayalam. However, I wasn't comfortable. So. Nivin suggested we wait for the right project to work in Tamil," he said, adding that they've known each other for about four years.

"After 'Neram', I had run a few ideas past him. We didn't get the right platform to collaborate these last few years, but this time almost all the departments fell in place for this project," said Gautham.

The film is based on critically-acclaimed Kannada thriller "Ulidavaru Kandanthe".

"We've taken a few elements from the original and weaved a new story around it. It's not a frame-to-frame remake. Since the director of that movie is a close friend, we decided to buy the remake rights and adapt it," he said.

Contrary to rumours, Varalaxmi Sarath Kumar is not the leading lady. The makers have a few options including a newcomer.

The project will go on the floors from mid-May, and the technical crew features mostly Gautham's close friends.

Cinematographer Pandi Kumar was his roommate in film institute, while editor Atul, art director Jaya and music composer Ajaneesh Loknath are his pals.

The film's producers, Anand Kumar and Vinod Shornur, are Nivin's close friends.
Actor James Franco felt "trapped" by acting.

Franco returned to education in 2006 when he enrolled in UCLA in California as an English major and has subsequently studied and taught a number of other courses, and admits one of the reasons he went back to school was to branch out creatively, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

"One of the reasons that I went back to school -- and then many schools -- was that when I only had acting, I felt trapped," Franco told New York magazine.

"I think that's how a lot of people feel in a lot of professions. When I went to Yale for my Ph.D. in literature, I had fellow students -- great students, writing incredible papers -- come up to me and say, "I'm so jealous of you. I'm writing this paper. If I get it published, 50 people will read it," he added.
"Game of Thrones" actors Alfie Allen, Iwan Rheon and Michael McElhatton will make an appearance on American late night show "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" to talk about the forthcoming sixth season of the hugely popular fantasy series and spill some beans on what the fans should expect from it.

The "Game of Thrones" actors will appear on the show on Thursday and, by the look of it, the upcoming episode is expected to remove the veil from many secrets, clarify rumours, read a statement.

The series is inspired by novelist George R.R. Martin's bestselling series and tells the story of families vying for a throne.

The episode of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" with the "Game of Thrones" actors will beam in India on Star World and Star World HD on Thursday.

Popular actor Kumail Nanjiani from "Silicon Valley" will also make an appearance on the next episode of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on Friday.
Main opposition Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) on Tuesday called for a shutdown in Jharkhand state on May 14 to protest against the domicile policy.

The decision to call for a shutdown was taken at a JMM meeting on Monday evening.

"The rights of the Moolvasi (indigenous residents) have been snatched in the domicile policy. The BJP government, led by Raghubar Das, has shown a dictatorial attitude. They want to divide people in the name of the domicile policy," Hemant Soren, former chief minister and JMM leader, told reporters here on Tuesday.

According to the policy, which the state government announced on April 7 and notified on Monday, any person living in the state for 30 years will be deemed a 'Jharkhandi,' a permanent resident, and receive full benefits of such a status.

Also to be deemed a 'Jharkhandi' would be a person born in the state who has passed his class 10 schooling in Jharkhand and a person or their ancestor having figured in the land records.

The BJP-led coalition government also announced a recruitment policy according to which local people and local languages will be given preference over others in hiring people for the third and fourth-grade jobs.

The domicile policy has been opposed by JMM and other opposition parties. The BJP's alliance partner All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU) has also found fault with the policy.

The JMM said only the last land records should be the criterion for the domicile. The AJSU has objected to equating the criterion of last land record with that of class 10 qualification.

JMM sources said the party is also considering calling for a protest action on April 24 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in Jharkhand and will address the Gram Panchayats (village councils) across the country.
The British royal family will host US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at a dinner at Kensington Palace on Friday, said a tweet posted on the palace's verified account.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge -- Prince William and Kate Middleton -- as well as Prince Harry will greet the couple, the tweet said on Monday.

Barack and Michelle Obama will celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's 90th birthday on Thursday with lunch at Windsor Palace on Friday followed by dinner at Kensington Palace the same day.

"Their Royal Highnesses are very much looking forward to welcoming President and Mrs. Obama to Kensington Palace," said a statement on the palace's Twitter account.

The two couples have met before, while Michelle Obama and Prince Harry have collaborated on the Invictus Games, a paralympic-style multisport competition for veterans.

The Obamas' stops at the two palaces are part of a scheduled diplomatic visit to Britain, Saudi Arabia and Germany.

Barack Obama will also join a press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, where he is expected to urge British voters to cast their ballots to stay in the EU in a referendum set for June.

Cameron has championed the movement to stay in the EU, while some of his political allies, such as London Mayor Boris Johnson, have urged citizens to vote to leave the EU.

The debate has heightened in the wake of terrorist attacks in Brussels and Paris during the past year.

Prince William and Kate Middleton were returning from a whirlwind tour of India, where they visited wildlife centres, orphanages and attractions such as Taj Mahal where William's mother, Princess Diana, posed for photographs decades ago.

Their trip aroused a bit of controversy as some critics accused the royal couple of remaining silent on issues associated with British colonialism and its legacy, which they contended continue to plague India even now, almost seven decades after the country got independence.
The body of Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh, who died in suspicious circumstances in a Lahore jail last week, was brought back to India on Tuesday.

Pakistani authorities handed over the body to Border Security Force (BSF) officials at the Attari-Wagah land border check post after completing necessary formalities.

Close relatives and residents of Kirpal Singh's village were present at Attari, 30 km from here, when the body was brought back to India.

Kirpal Singh, a former serviceman, had been lodged in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat prison since 1992. He died on April 11.

Pakistani authorities had labelled him a spy and got him convicted for terror attacks inside Pakistan.

While Pakistan attributed his death to heart attack, his family has alleged he was murdered in prison. Kirpal Singh, the family has maintained, had inadvertently crossed into Pakistan and was arrested and charged with spying by Pakistan authorities.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. Azerbaijan, which was trying to hide from the public the information about hundreds of servicemen who were eliminated as a result of military aggression against the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, finally confessed the loss of its colonel.

Armenpress reports citing the Azerbaijani media, the Press Service of the Azerbaijan Defense Ministry announced about the death of the lieutenant-colonel in the armed forces Syanan Tahir oglu Akhundov stating that he allegedly died as a result of violations of security operations.

It is important to note that Azerbaijan confessed the loss of its colonel after Facebook user Habib Muntazir posted information about the killing of three servicemen and one wounded in the Facebook social network.

Such kind of behavior of social network users helps the adversary to get information about the Azerbaijani armed forces and simplifies their activities in many cases, the statement of the Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan reads, accusing Muntazir of publicizing the state secret.

In his turn, Habib Muntazir in an interview with Meydan TV said that the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry works very slowly and deliberately hides the information on the loss of soldiers from the public.

Although two weeks have passed after the events of April 1-5, the Defense Ministry has not released the names and the number of any killed serviceman, whereas the adversary releases all information about its losses in the media and social networks. As a results, the Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan is obliged to release the information after they are being published in social networks which shows the inability of the Ministry. However, it will be better that the Defense Ministry from time to time announces about its losses rather than to leave the public to follow the adversary media. Azerbaijani people rather trusts Habib Muntazir than the Defense Ministry. The evidence of this is the number of users reading his information which reaches to 1110, whereas in case of Defense Ministry the number of users reaches to 149, said Muntazir.

Beside, the Press Service of the Azerbaijan Defense Ministry clearly stated that the information about the killed and wounded servicemen in the line of contact, their personal information and military professions are considered as state secret, while several users of various social networks collect and disseminate this information.

Azerbaijani Meydan TV channel conducted its own research in social networks. Based on that research, the TV channel on April 11 announced about more than hundred killed and more than 500 wounded servicemen during the military operations on April 1-5.

On April 1-5 as a result of the crushing counterattacks by the Armenian side against the military aggressions towards the Nagorno Karabakh, Azerbaijan lost 2 helicopters, 24 tanks, 3 infantry fighting vehicles, 7 UAVs, 1 21-MM multiple rocket launcher system (Grad). During military operations 500 Azerbaijani soldiers and militants have been eliminated, nearly 2000 are wounded.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday reached out to the youth of the troubled Jammu and Kashmir, which he said represented a "mini India", and urged them to "dream to do something and not to become someone" as he dedicated a super specialty hospital to the people of the state.

"The 21st Century belongs to those who have the power of knowledge," Modi said later, addressing the 5th Convocation of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University near Jammu city.

He inaugurated the 250-bedded super specialty state-of-the-art hospital set up by the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board. The nearly Rs.300 crore hospital is located at Kakryal near Katra -- the town at the base of the famed hill shrine.

The facility has some 20 different streams of medicine and surgery, including cardiology, cardio-thoracic surgery, neurology, neuro surgery, nephrology, according to the shrine board.

It is fully equipped with state-of-the-art computerised diagnostic and treatment equipment, including Linear Accelerator, Brachy Therapy, Gamma Camera and MRI.

Governor N.N. Vohra, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh, union Minister of State in the PMO Jitendra Singh and state Health Minister Bali Bhagat were present when Modi opened the hospital.

Addressing the students of the university later, Modi wished them "all the best, specially to the girls who won laurels here".

"There is a mini-India in Jammu and Kashmir. Dream to do something and not to become someone."

He said that India was reaching new levels in development and "with 800 million youths, India can achieve more heights."

"Let's pledge that we will do something for poor."

Modi's visit to the state comes as parts of the Kashmir Valley have been under siege after deadly clashes between protestors and security forces left at least five people dead.

Tension continues to simmer under the surface of relative calm in several towns and villages in north Kashmir amid a strict curfew and heavy deployment of police and paramilitary forces.
Megastar Amitabh Bachchan says that he has never been approached to be Brand Ambassador for the 'Incredible India' campaign contrary to media reports that his name might be put on hold after the Panama Papers leak.

"There have been queries from the media regarding my being Brand Ambassador for 'Atulya Bharat' (Incredible India). I wish to state that I have not been formally approached for this position. The speculation of the media regarding its discontinuance is, therefore, not relevant as far as I am concerned," said a statement released on behalf of Amitabh Bachchan.

The "Panama Papers" -- based on an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and over 100 other news organisations around the world -- is a global list revealing offshore links of over 500 Indians, including Big B and his daughter-in-law Aishwarya.

In India, The Indian Express daily newspaper released pages of the investigation reports alleging, among other names, that Amitabh and Aishwarya were directors in companies in Panama.

The megastar says that those who are asking for his feedback on Panama Papers leak can send their queries to the Government of India (GOI) for clarification.

"On the Panama disclosures, I wish to state that queries continue to be sent to me by the media. I would humbly request them to kindly direct these to the GOI where I, as a law abiding citizen, have already sent, and shall continue to send, my responses.

"I stand by my earlier statement on the 'misuse of my name' in the matter and in any event the press reports do not disclose any illegal act committed by me," the statement said.
US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed Syria and Ukraine over phone, the White House said.

Obama on Monday shared his concern over the status of a cease-fire agreement, known as the Cessation of Hostilities in Syria between the government and the opposition parties, Xinhua news agency quoted the White House as saying in a statement.

The two presidents also "committed to intensify their efforts to shore up the Cessation of Hostilities" and agreed on the need to end attacks by all parties.

The US and Russia agreed on a plan for a cease-fire in Syria that began on February 27.

The cessation of hostilities was largely envisaged in Munich on February 12 during a meeting of the International Syrian Support Group, which is co-chaired by the US and Russia.

The group is composed of the Arab League, the European Union, the UN, and 17 other countries.

On Ukraine, Obama urged Putin to "take steps" to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine and stressed the importance to move forward with full implementation of the Minsk agreements.
A 42-year-old woman succumbed to her burn injuries on Tuesday, taking the toll in a fire incident in the capital to four.

The woman, Meenakshi, was admitted along with 22 other injured people to Safdarjung Hospital after a fire broke out due to a cylinder explosion at a building in Bhagwan Nagar Colony in south Delhi around 8.20 p.m. on Monday night.

Police said Meenakshi succumbed to her injuries around 3 a.m. on Tuesday.

Three people, including a woman and two children, were burnt to death in the fire.

A police officer said that three of the 22 injured are still in critical condition, while seven are being treated in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) with over 60 percent burn injuries.

"The fire broke out due to an electrical short circuit on the first floor of the building which led to a cylinder explosion. The fire soon spread to other two floors of the building within minutes," the officer said.

In another fire incident on Monday, three people, including a woman, were killed while 11 others received burn injuries in a fire that broke out after a cylinder explosion in a residential building in East Delhi's Gandhi Nagar.

Police said the fire started from the house of Sanjay Kashyap, an advocate, where some labourers were cooking food on the second floor of the house.

The walls of the house in which the cylinder exploded and one opposite it collapsed under the impact of the explosion, police added.
Pakistan on Tuesday condemned the terrorist attack in Kabul that left over 200 people injured.

"We extend our heartfelt sympathies and condolences to those who have lost their loved ones and pray for an early recovery of the injured," Xinhua cited the foreign ministry as saying.

Pakistani government condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestations and expresses solidarity with the government and brotherly people of Afghanistan in their hour of grief.

Over 200 people were injured in the suicide bombing in Kabul near the Afghan presidential office. However, the exact number of casualties was not reported immediately.

The bombing targeted Special Security Unit tasked for protecting VIPs.

The Taliban militant group claimed responsibility for the attack.
Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif is scheduled to visit Russia at the end of April to attend an international security conference.

Asif will discuss bilateral military technical cooperation with Russian officials as part of the visit, the Pakistani Ambassador to Russia Qazi Khalilullah said on Tuesday, reports Sputnik news agency.

"The defence minister will attend the security conference (in Moscow). He will discuss issues of military-technical cooperation with the Russian side," Khalilullah said.
Activists of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) rights group on Tuesday staged a protest outside a store of Italian luxury fashion brand Prada in Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur for using ostrich leather to make bags.

Three PETA protestors stood outside the shop and held life-size cutouts with the images of ostriches reproduced on one side, and the messages "Prada: Accessories to Murder" and "Bag the Cruel Ostrich Leather" printed on signs, EFE news reported.

The action followed an announcement by PETA on Monday the notifying media of their demonstration by saying: "PETA's life-size 'ostriches' want their skin back and will therefore stand guard outside the store at Pavilion Kuala Lumpur."

The release goes on to detail PETA's investigation into the harsh treatment of ostriches in South Africa, where one-year-old birds are "turned upside down in a stunner, are ejected to have their throats slit and have their feathers plucked out, creating the bumpy-textured skin in Prada's handbags and store sofas".
US-based ISKCON devotees have started an online petition demanding a probe into the death of a former US airman and Hare Krishna devotee Caitanya Holt, who died in mysterious circumstances in a Goa village in January.

The petition, started by Mississippi-based Lila Grenham, a former associate of Holt, has also warned of canvassing against Goa as a tourism destination, if the probe is not undertaken by the state authorities in Goa seriously.

"We are calling on the US Consul General in Mumbai, Thomas L. Vajda, to demand an investigation into Chai's (Caitanya) murder and to acknowledge the general lawlessness in Goa that has led to the deaths of many tourists and locals alike," says Grenham in her online petition, which has 413 backers.

She also claimed that Holt may have been a victim of a powerful drug mafia operating in the coastal state.

Grenham's petition is part of the #JusticeforCaitanya campaign, which had started in January soon after Goa Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar dismissed reports of foul play in his death.

Ohio-born Caitanya Holt died on January 12 reportedly after choking on mud in the paddy field in Korgao village, 25 km from Panaji, as he was chased by the villagers and police after being allegedly mistaken for a thief.

It was also reported by the media that Holt was beaten up.

A subsequent post-mortem examination conducted in the presence of the US embassy officials and an ISKCON member deputed by Holt's family, revealed that he died of asphyxia caused by choking on sludge.

Non-fatal injuries were also acknowledged in the autopsy conducted by a panel of forensic doctors of Goa Medical College, who have sent the viscera obtained from the remains for further forensic examination to a central laboratory. Four months since, results of the examination are still awaited.

It is this delay that has irked Caitanya's friends. Grenham also expressed unhappiness over the manner in which the US Consulate in Mumbai has followed up on the issue.

"So far, the US Consulate in Mumbai has failed to investigate -- or even acknowledge -- the extremely disturbing circumstances surrounding Chai's murder, so I created this petition calling on Consul General Thomas L. Vajda to take action," Grenham says in the petition.

In a recent interaction with IANS, a senior official attached to the US Consulate said that ever since the incident, they had been in constant touch with Goa Police, seeking follow-up on the case.

"We have been following up on this case with local police. However, it is up to the Indian authorities to investigate the case," the official said on condition of anonymity.
President Pranab Mukherjee, Vice President Hamid Ansari and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday greeted the nation on Mahavir Jayanti.

The President in his message asked the people to spread Lord Mahavir's teachings of ahimsa, compassion, love and right conduct within India and across the world.

"Let us on this day resolve to spread Lord Mahavira's teachings of ahimsa, compassion, love and right conduct far and wide, within our country and across the world. May this festival inspire all of us to adopt non-violence in our thought and life," the President said.

Vice President Ansari, in his message, said: "Through his teachings of non-violence and compassion Lord Mahavir showed an enlightened path for happiness and progress of humanity. On this auspicious occasion, let us commit ourselves for building a peaceful, harmonious and just society."

Prime Minister Modi said: "On Mahavir Jayanti, we recall the pure thoughts and ideals of Lord Mahavir and reaffirm our commitment towards a harmonious and peaceful society."
Conrad Sangma, the younger son of former Lok Sabha speaker Purno Sangma, is likely to contest the bypoll to Tura Lok Sabha seat in Meghalaya, necessitated by the death of his father and sitting MP last month, party sources said on Tuesday.

Conrad Sangma will stand on a ticket of his father's National People's Party (NPP), according to the sources.

Though a party meeting is scheduled to be held on April 22 to select its candidate for the seat, it is learnt that Conrad, a former Meghalaya legislator, is most likely to be given the ticket. Conrad's elder brother, James Sangma, is a sitting lawmaker in the northeastern state.

Before Purno Sangma, who won the seat in the 2014 general elections, the Tura constituency was represented by his daughter Agatha Sangma, who was a union minister in the UPA-II government.

Bypolls to the Tura parliamentary constituency and nine assembly constituencies in seven states will be held on May 16, the Election Commission announced on Tuesday.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. First Deputy Defense Minister of Armenia Davit Tonoyan met with Ambassador Gunter Bechler, Special Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office for the South Caucasus on April 19. The interlocutors discussed the large-scale military operation unleashed by Azerbaijan against NKR and issues referring to the current situation on the contact line during the meeting. Armenpress was informed about this from the press service of the Defense Ministry of Armenia.

Davit Tonoyan introduced to Ambassador Bechler the process of the military operations in the period of April 2-5, the current situation in the contact line as well as brief information of the war crimes committed by Azerbaijani armed forces against Armenian civilians and servicemen, stating that the Armenian side will undertake measures to give international legal assessments to the mentioned crimes.

It was particularly stated that the verbal agreements for the restoration of the ceasefire are not respected by Azerbaijan, due to which the Armenian side has suffered numerous casualties, to which the NKR Defense Army is forced to toughly retaliate.

In this context, the role of the OSCE in terms of alleviating the tension, as well as the reinforcement of the ceasefire regime by investing mechanisms investigating incidents is of key importance.
Most roadblocks in the negotiations between France and India for the sale of 36 Rafale fighters have been addressed and the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) will soon take up the matter, Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh said on Tuesday.

"There are a few things which need to be addressed. The matter will possibly come up before the DAC in its next meeting. Thereafter, I think, the road will be clear," the minister said on the sidelines of a seminar on 'Make in India' for the Indian Air Force.

Asked about the cost issues that kept the deal from finalisation, the minister said: "The country can progress only if the country is safe and protected."

Singh said both the Rafale and the indigenous light combat aircraft Tejas are needed for the country's defence.

According to sources, India and France have come closer to finalising the deal for 36 Rafales that India wants to buy and an agreement on the price may be reached soon.

A major sticking point in the deal is the price of the jets, known to be one of the most expensive in the world. India has been trying to bring down the sale price of the jets.

While it has not been revealed if an agreement has been struck on how much India would pay, attempts had been on to bring the price down to under eight billion euros or Rs.6,000 crore for 36 Rafales.

In January, both sides signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the purchase during French President Francois Hollande's visit to India.

Meanwhile, Singh on Tuesday released a booklet on 'Indigenisation Roadmap for the Indian Air Force' and said it would provide useful inputs to the defence industry to map its potential with the IAF requirements.

The seminar was jointly organised by the IAF and Confederation of India Industry.

The IAF chief, Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha, meanwhile said there is a "huge potential" for indigenisation in manufacture of capital equipment and spares.

"The IAF is in the process of modernising and expanding its inventory to keep up with the changing geo-political scenario and emerging threat perception.

"There exists a huge potential for indigenisation in the manufacture of capital equipment and maintenance spares. Economical and optimal exploitation of such potential by the Indian industry would lead to greater self-reliance," Raha said.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh is down with fever after attending public meetings in West Bengal.

The home minister, who was in Bengal to campaign for the BJP for the ongoing assembly election, fall ill after returning from there.

Union Minister for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Uma Bharti said at a public gathering on Tuesday that the home minister was supposed to attend a seminar with her but could not come as he had fever.
Union Minister Uma Bharti on Tuesday said that the apprehensions that reservations for the weaker sections of society would be slowly withdrawn by the BJP-led NDA government were "baseless" and the system will continue.

"The fear that reservation (provided under the constitution) would go during our rule is baseless," the minister for water resources, river development and Ganga rejuvenation said while addressing a seminar on 'Multi-purpose development of water resources and present challenges' here.

She said as there were great disparities in Indian society, people from the weaker section would always need special attention and it could be ensured only by giving them reservation in government jobs and educational institutions.

Bharti praised Dalit icon Bhimrao Ambedkar, who campaigned against social discrimination and played a very significant role in drafting independent India's constitution, saying many political parties never wanted Ambedkar's ideology to grow and were also not in favour of giving him his due place in the country's history.

She said people like Ambedkar, who fought against all odds and went on to achieve so much, would always continue to inspire generations, and not figures like Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student of the Hyderabad University who committed suicide in January.

She, however, said such incidents were a "cause of concern and shameful" for everybody.

Bharti, calling for a water revolution in the country, announced that 100 villages, inhabited by the downtrodden and weakest of the weaker sections, will be selected under 'Jal Gram' scheme for water conservation.

"I have discussed it with my team and we plan to provide water to villages where Dalits are in majority," she said, adding that the Modi government was committed to fix all water problems of the country.

She directed officials of the Central Water Commission and other allied agencies in her ministry to visit every block of drought-affected areas in the country to chalk out a detailed plan to face the challenge.

The minister also referred to little known contributions of Ambedkar in the water resources sector and said her ministry was thinking of celebrating Ambedkar's birth anniversary as 'Jal Divas' from next year.

Speaking on the occasion, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Minister Ramvilas Paswan also praised Ambedkar.

Union Social Justice and Empowerment Minister Thawar Chand Gehlot and ministers of state Sanwar Lal Jat and Hansraj Gangaram Ahir were among those who attended the seminar.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has expressed indignation after the lower house of parliament voted to open an impeachment process against her.

The process lacked legal basis and she did not commit the crime of fiscal irresponsibility of which she has been accused, said Rousseff on Monday.

The Rousseff government claimed that the fiscal manoeuvres of which she is accused did not constitute a crime of fiscal irresponsibility and that the impeachment process resulting from that basis is, in fact, a coup attempt, Xinhua reported.

Rousseff said she was disappointed at the fact that the actual accusation was not discussed during the entire session in the chamber of deputies.

"Injustice always occurs when the defence process is smashed and when, in an absurd manner, first someone is accused of something that is not a crime, and then no one refers to the problem," she said.

Rousseff claimed that the fiscal manoeuvres were practiced by past presidents too and were never considered illegal.

"I feel indignation and injustice... Those acts were based in technical reports and none of them directly benefits me. These are not acts through which I got rich illicitly," she said.

As the chamber opened the impeachment process on Sunday, it will then head to the Senate.

From the moment the Senate accepts the impeachment process, Rousseff is temporarily removed and Vice President Michel Temer becomes interim president.

He is considered one of the masterminds of the impeachment process.
Democratic Party candidate Senator Bernie Sanders made his pitch to New Yorkers one last time ahead of the crucial New York primaries on Tuesday.

"My experience has been, in this campaign so far, that we win when the turnout is high. We lose when the turnout is low. Tomorrow (Tuesday), let us all do everything we can to make sure that New York State has the largest turnout in a Democratic primary in its history," the Vermont senator said while addressing a crowd in Queens on Monday evening.

"Tomorrow, New York State can help take this country a giant step forward for the political revolution. Let's do it," the New York Observer daily quoted Sanders as saying.

Democrat front-runner Hillary Clinton has the vast majority of the state's institutional support and endorsements, and leads Sanders in New York.

She is expected to beat Sanders on Tuesday, but if Sanders can come close to Clinton, the establishment choice and New York's former senator, he will likely claim a moral victory, the daily said.

Despite Sanders's optimistic pitch to the crowd, he will not be in New York when the state's results come in -- he is heading to Pennsylvania instead.

Clinton, meanwhile, will host an election night event in Manhattan.

While addressing the rally, Sanders yet again called on Clinton to release the transcripts of paid speeches she gave to Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs.

"I will release all of the transcripts of all of the speeches that I have given behind closed doors to Wall Street. Are you ready?" he asked, adding "Here they are: None."
Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif condemned the deadliest suicide attack on Tuesday in Kabul and called for coordinated approach with Afghanistan to counter the common threat.

Taliban claimed the responsibility for the attack on a sub office of the Afghan intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security.

Kabul Police Chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi told reporters that death toll has risen to 28 while 327 others wounded.

Nawaz Sharif sent condolences to President Ashraf Ghani over the human losses in what he called as the "heinous terrorist attack in Kabul".

"On behalf of the people and the Government of Pakistan and my own behalf, I strongly condemn this brutal act and offer my heartfelt condolences to Your Excellency and the bereaved families, " Sharif said.

He said such incidents continue to remind us that the scourge of terrorism remains a major threat to peace and stability of the two countries, societies and the region.

"It serves as a tool for perpetuation of senseless violence in our societies inflicting immense pain and suffering to the people. Eliminating this menace requires firm resolve as well as coordinated approach on our part," the Pakistan prime minister said.

Afghan officials say the powerful blast also destroyed several buildings around the site. It shattered windows of dozens of buildings and smashed the glasses of the buildings at the nearby business district.
Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on Tuesday told authorities to submit a report over the sudden power cuts in parts of the country during the traditional New Year.

Sri Lanka celebrated its traditional Sinhala and Tamil New Year this week. But many complained that they were faced with power outages despite an assurance from the government of uninterrupted power supply during the New Year season, Xinhua reported.

Wickremesinghe had informed relevant authorities to provide a complete report regarding the matter.

Sri Lanka's power sector has been facing a crisis, with three nationwide power failures reported since September last year.

The latest breakdown saw a power cut of for more than seven hours, the longest power failure to be reported in Sri Lanka in 20 years.

It occurred due to an explosion in an electricity transformer in the outskirts of the capital which prompted authorities to initiate a probe.

Days later, another substation in Kotugoda, in the suburbs of the capital, caught fire after exploding, plunging parts of the country into darkness.

Experts from Germany arrived in the country last month to inspect the two transformers which caught fire and the reasons which led to the power failures.

The government has announced that it would seek assistance and support from China to operate the country's main power plant.
A Taiwanese delegation on Tuesday travelled to China to negotiate the release of the 45 nationals deported from Kenya to Beijing for alleged telecommunications fraud.

The delegation, comprising officials from Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, the Straits Exchange Foundation, the justice ministry and the department of criminal investigation is hoping to meet the detainees and get more details about the accusations and negotiate with Chinese authorities before they return to Taiwan on Friday, EFE news reported.

The ministry of foreign affairs of Taiwan had earlier called the deportation "extrajudicial abduction" and the opposition had strongly criticised China and the policy of the government, currently controlled by the Kuomintang Party.

Through the delegation, Taiwan is seeking to ensure that the rights of its citizens are respected and that the trial is held in Taiwan, although most observers in the country predict they will be tried in China, but may be allowed to serve their sentences in Taiwan subsequently.

Taiwan claims jurisdiction over its citizens while China, which does not recognise the island's independence and considers it a renegade province within its borders, says it has jurisdiction in the case because the fraud victims were residents of mainland China.
There would be trashcans and toilets in Indian cities at intervals of 500 metres under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban), its director, Praveen Prakash, has said, noting that steps were also being taken to penalise offenders for spitting and littering.

"The mission has gathered pace since its launch (on October 2, 2014) and will achieve all its targets," Prakash told IANS in an interview.

"Our target is to provide dustbins and toilets after every 500 metres (in urban areas). We will also focus on creating awareness among the masses," he said, adding: "The government is contemplating imposing penalties so that people practise the rules on cleanliness."

Prakash, however, said that the penalties would be imposed only after adequate infrastructure was in place and awareness is created among people.

The fines will be gradually imposed after studying the impact in smaller areas.

"It will be enforced in a ward first, then 10 wards and later in the entire city," he said, adding that penalties for cleanliness-related violations were the norm in much of the developed world and also in city states like Singapore.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Mission seeking to achieve its targets by Oct 2, 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.

The Mission seeks to construct 10.4 million individual household toilets and 508,000 community and public toilets, as also ensure 100 percent scientific disposal of municipal solid waste in 4,041 designated towns.

It also seeks elimination of open defecation and eradication of manual scavenging.

Prakash, an Indian Administrative officer of the Andhra Pradesh cadre, admitted that the pace of implementing the Mission had been slow in its first year.

"The pace of work was slow in the first year since we were focussed on making policies and removing administrative shortcomings. We are confident of fulfilling the targets by October 2, 2019," he said.

Prakash, who also apprises the Prime Minister's Office on developments concerning the mission, said that the task was tough but achievable.

"I feel only 15 percent work took place in this area (achieving total sanitation) in the last about 65 years and we have a target of doing the rest of the work in five years. I am confident of achieving this target within the given time frame," he said.

Prakash said that an effort was being made to bring about behavioural changes among people through self-help groups.

"Governance of local bodies also needs to be reformed. We are working hard in this direction too," Prakash added.

He said that private players were also being involved in the sanitation drive.

"Private players are being involved in processes such as conversion of waste to compost," he said.

He also took a dig at those criticising the Mission.

"We have already constructed 1.2 million toilets and are working at fast pace. Those criticising us should wait till 2019. We will answer them then," he said.

(Brajendra Nath Singh can be contacted at brajendra.s@ians.in)
Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar left for Kolkata on Tuesday to campaign for the CPI-M in the West Bengal assembly elections.

"Sarkar will address several election rallies in North 24 Parganas and Hooghly districts" over three days starting on Tuesday, a Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader told IANS.

Sarkar, who campaigned for the Left parties in Assam too, would later campaign in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

The 68-year-old has been the Tripura chief minister for over 18 years.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. The latest terror attacks in Brussels and the drastic escalation of the situation in Nagorno Karabakh conflict zone are a signal for all of us to sober up and realize that human lives are under threat and that the barbaric incidents refresh peoples memories of the past. Armenpress reports member of the Armenian delegation to the PACE Samvel Farmanyan told about this in his speech given at the PACE plenary session. We must prove that the political institutions and parliaments are still able to withstand the challenges we face today. We must prove that there can be no reciprocal concessions when we speak about a more fundamental value: peoples right to live, Farmanyan said.

The MP reminded his colleges that recently Azerbaijan waged a large-scale aggression against the people of Nagorno Karabakh along the entire contact line, which engendered a new term called 4-day war. He stated that the Azerbaijani army made use of deadly offensive weapons, grossly violating all the international norms. Use of force by Azerbaijan contradicts the basic international legal documents such as the UN charter, Helsinki Final Act and so on. The Azerbaijani army deliberately targeted civilians. 12-year old Vaghinak Grigoryan was killed, two other children were injured as a result of shelling the school by Azerbaijani armed forces. And this was not the only case of violence against civilians. Valera and Razmela Khalapyans, the elderly couple, were killed in their house. Azerbaijani soldiers cut off their ears. They also killed Marusya Khalapyan, 92, as well as mutilated another elderly woman, 104-year old Hayka, who, by the way, is 6 years older than Azerbaijan as a state. Killed and mutilated people were elderly people, the MP said.

Farmanyan added that servicemen of the NKR Defense Army, Kyaram Sloyan, Hayk Toroyan and Hrant Gharibyan were beheaded by Azerbaijani troops. Yes, they were beheaded, with the same handwriting as the Islamic State terrorist organization does. The photos circulated in social network are the real evidence of the brutal treatment of Azerbaijani soldiers. Later, the soldiers who had beheaded Kyaram Sloyan, displayed the head to the civilians of Azerbaijan, encouraging aggression and hatred towards Armenians. Official Baku took no measures to punish those responsible for the crime. By doing so Azerbaijan once more violated numerous international treaties, including the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, European Convention on Human rights, Geneva Conventions on protection of victims of war and many others. Another episode includes torture of Prisoners of War and mutilation of bodies of 18 dead Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army soldiers, handed over to Nagorno-Karabakh authorities in presence of the representatives of the IRC a week after the hostilities.

The Azerbaijani forces and armed militants have committed multiple terrorist acts against the Nagorno-Karabakh troops and the civilian population, which are defined as war crimes and crimes against humanity under the international law. Both the Azerbaijani authorities and persons who have committed military crimes must be held accountable for the breaches of the international law and the war crimes.

I call upon the Parliamentary Assembly to explicitly condemn the brutalities committed by Azerbaijani armed forces and to urge the Government of Azerbaijan to ensure proper investigation of crimes committed against Nagorno-Karabakh civilians and hors de combat. I also call the international community to take appropriate measures to prevent further grave breaches of international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international law in general, Farmanyan said.
Madhya Pradesh police has seized a truck carrying 21 tonnes of explosive Ammonium Nitrate in this district, police said on Tuesday.

"A truck that hit another vehicle on Monday evening aroused our suspicion. We searched it and found 21 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate. The driver could not explain why such a large quantity of explosive was being transported," police officer Rajendra Tripathi told IANS.

The explosive was being moved from Mumbai to Singrauli district in Madhya Pradesh, he said.

The driver has been taken into custody, Tripathi said.
A top US diplomat has expressed her "great sorrow" after a vehicle in her convoy struck and killed a young boy during an official visit to Cameroon.

US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power was travelling to a refugee camp in northern Cameroon when the child was struck on Monday, she said hours later in Maroua, capital of the country's Far North Region.

The 8-year-old boy crossed the road without looking near the city of Mokolo, Cameroon's Ministry of Defence said, citing local journalists travelling with the convoy.

The ambassador was not in the car that struck the boy, the ministry said.

The child received immediate care from an ambulance travelling with the group but died shortly afterward, Power said.

The diplomat said she and other US and Cameroonian officials visited the boy's family following the accident to "offer our profound condolences and to express our grief and heartbreak over what the family is going through".

Power was travelling with US Department of Defence and US Agency for International Development officials on a weeklong trip to Cameroon, Chad and Nigeria to underline American support for the campaign against Islamist terror group Boko Haram.
Appreciating the Narendra Modi government's initiatives to make India investor-friendly, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Nisha Desai Biswal on Tuesday said US investment in India would be doubled if policies were liberalised further.

Delivering a talk on "US-India Economic Relations" here, Biswal said the Barack Obama administration supports the Modi government's programmes such as 'Make in India' and 'Start Up India'.

"The Indian government is working hard to make it (India) more investor-friendly," she remarked, saying that the country would need "huge foreign investment" as urbanisation was taking place very fast.

"When we talk about India's economic growth, we essentially talk about its urbanisation," she said.

Biswal, an Indian-American who was born in Gujarat and later shifted to the US, also expressed satisfaction on the overall relations between the two nations, and said both were "large vocal democracies".

"US' direct investment in India has already surpassed what we invested in China," she said, adding that the two countries were capable enough to work out differences to ensure better economic growth for their people.

Biswal said India's economy has the potential to drive the economy of the entire world.

She praised the heads of both the governments, saying meetings between Modi and Obama have helped both the nations come closer.
Actress Catherine Tresa, known for her work in films like "Madras" and "Rudhramadevi", says she felt a lot of positive vibes while working on forthcoming Telugu actioner "Sarrainodu".

"Right from the beginning, there was positivity on the sets of this project. It was a lovely vibe. This is the best experience I've had on a Telugu project," Catherine told IANS.

In the film, she plays a legislator, and her look was completely designed by director Boyapati Srinu.

"My director did the most of the homework. As an MLA, you are expected to look and dress in a certain way. He didn't want it to be formulaic, yet kept the look authentic. He had such a grip on the character, he even chose the jewellery and costumes," she said.

Ask her why she chose to play a legislator, a role usually offered to senior heroines, Catherine said she likes to do "different" things.

"I easily get bored when I have to play the same kind of roles. This role is just as old as me. I really liked the vision my director had for this character, which is quite different from anything I've done so far," she said, adding she thoroughly enjoyed playing the character.

"If I don't enjoy the role I play, how will audience enjoy it," she asked.

The film stars Allu Arjun and this is Catherine's second film with him.

Having worked with Arjun three years ago in "Iddarammayilatho", she feels he has evolved as an actor.

"You learn and grow with every film. In the case of Arjun, I think he has evolved as a performer. While he has mostly played stylish and classy roles, he plays a character with a lot of mass appeal in this film," she said, adding it was a delight to match steps with him.

"When you dance with Arjun, the bar is set so high that you need to really push yourself to match up to him. Nevertheless, it's always fun to dance with him," she added.

Also starring Rakul Preet Singh and Aadi Pinisetty, the film is slated to release on Friday.
The editorial, " gets hit" (April 18), is just the kind of public admonition needed from the media whenever an Indian company operating internationally veers from the straight and narrow. When the company in question is an iconic one like TCS, the need to do so is even more.

is not one of hundreds of small-time operators in the software industry; it is a symbol of India's success internationally. That it has been fined almost a billion dollars by a US court hurts not only the company's finances but also national pride. It means there is wrongdoing on the part of the company, intentional or not.

The company's declaration that it did not derive any benefit from downloaded documents is little consolation for the stakeholders - in the larger sense, the entire nation. has gone on record saying the fine would definitely be reduced and, in any case, it would appeal. Arguably, this is tacit admission of a wrongdoing; the extent is irrelevant.

That several Indian companies have been fined by the US reflects badly on our controls and corporate governance. Or, is it a case of the influential US business lobby going to great lengths to protect its turf?



Whatever the reality - and it should emerge soon - the Tata brass have their work cut out for the next few months to get to the bottom of the case and tighten TCS' controls, weed out the guilty and reassure its customers in the US and elsewhere of its integrity and credibility.

Krishan Kalra Gurgaon

can be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to:The Editor, Business StandardNehru House, 4 Bahadur Shah Zafar MargNew Delhi 110 002Fax: (011) 23720201E-mail: letters@bsmail.in
According to recent data released by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), banks in India lent 32 per cent of the total credit extended by them and raised 40 per cent of the years deposits in just one fortnight. The aggregate amount of deposits was Rs 97.2 lakh crore on April 1  a jump of Rs 3.4 lakh crore over that of the previous fortnight, which comprised a large part of the last fortnight of FY16. The amount of credit extended was Rs 73 lakh crore  a surge of Rs 2.4 lakh crore during the fortnight. Are these not magical numbers?



What should one call this phenomenon? This is observed in the banking business every year at the beginning of a new fiscal. Everybody, including the banking regulator, is aware of the phenomenon, euphemistically called window dressing in the banking world. It is nothing but dressing up or down the real data. The practice obscures the actual state of Indias financial sector.

Banks encourage companies to avail of short-term loans or goad customers to draw down on credit lines at the end of the fiscal year. The excess cash is parked in their current accounts and that automatically boosts deposit data. All the entries are reversed within a fortnight. With the RBIs focus on current and savings accounts growth, banks even encourage customers to encash their term deposits prematurely and park the funds in current/savings accounts. Customers are compensated during the year through reduced commission on their other businesses such as remittances, and also through other means.

Arguably, CEOs are often aware of this practice and may even encourage it. The impressive/unimpressive data helps such CEOs showcase their performance during their tenure at the bank. If a CEO has just taken over, he/she might project a dismal performance. The CEO gets the scope to publish better data in subsequent quarters. A CEO retiring after the end of the fiscal year will likely project a robust performance.

While window dressing is a common accounting practice in industry, it is quite pernicious in the financial sector because of the absence of realness or a commodity-based business. The banking regulator merely issues a routine warning through an administrative circular every year around the time a fiscal year is ending.

K V Rao Bengaluru

can be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to:The Editor, Business StandardNehru House, 4 Bahadur Shah Zafar MargNew Delhi 110 002Fax: (011) 23720201E-mail: letters@bsmail.in
It has been the constant lament of chief justices that the Budget allocations for the judiciary are far from adequate. They have variously put it at 0.2 to 0.4 per cent of the Budget. Even the social sector, like health and education, which has been neglected for decades, gets more from the Budget. Defence gets around 10 per cent, though the country has not seen a war in nearly half a century. The railway has a separate Budget. But the judiciary has remained the Cinderella of Budget-makers all along, though several finance ministers came from the legal profession. When the backlog of cases was rising steeply over the years and has now crossed 31 million, there is no explanation for this egregious neglect of the third arm of the state.
One is never so sharply reminded that India is a Union of incredibly disparate states as during the run-up to Assembly elections. But that reminder is particularly sharp this year, as the four big states of West Bengal, Kerala, Assam and Tamil Nadu  in addition to Puducherry  prepare for new administrations. Maybe its because none of these are part of the Hindi belt; and although a national party is in power, or a strong contender, in at least three of them  Kerala, West Bengal and Assam  they are nevertheless independent satrapies even by the standards of our fractured politics. But most importantly, perhaps, they each of them have blazoned independent economic paths of late. And this is a crucial part of the challenges that bedevil current thinking about economic policy  thinking which continues to have a Delhi-centric focus.
Saudi Arabia and Iran are playing politics with oil. Their bickering was the main factor behind the collapse of a deal on April 17 to freeze output, despite many of Opec's (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) 13 oil-producing members supporting an agreement with producers outside the group to boost prices. The Middle East's oldest rivals in Tehran and Riyadh now pose a risk to the stability of global energy markets.

has so far proved a poor arbiter of the feud, which is ultimately about who is top dog in the Middle East. Critics argue the group is a cartel, which adjusts oil supplies to suit the political motives of its most powerful members and not the needs of the market. In its current form they have a point.

Opec's power to influence prices is largely due to the vast oil production of its largest member, Saudi Arabia. With the ability to pump 12.5 million barrels per day of crude - enough to meet about 13 per cent of world demand -the kingdom has the loudest voice within the group. The cartel's lack of executive authority has allowed the kingdom's inexperienced but powerful Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to play politics with oil by blocking a deal in Doha on April 17 unless Iran cooperated.

In its current form, the organisation is too dependent on decisions taken in Riyadh instead of its secretariat in Vienna. But if reformed, expanded and handed greater powers the organisation could take the politics out of oil and act as the global policeman that the petroleum industry lacks.

Instead of being a talking shop, which sets vague, non-binding guidelines for the production of about a third of the world's crude, should set robust targets. That might make its efforts to maintain quotas and set production limits more effective at managing the boom/bust cycle of the oil industry.

The group also needs authority. Its secretary general lacks the power to impose significant punitive fines, or enforce agreements. Members retain sovereign rights to determine their own oil policies regardless of decisions. It would be better if this power was binding, like that of the banking sector's Financial Stability Board.

Saudi and Iran are welcome to bicker. But given the threats from shale and non-Opec members like Russia, they'd be better off doing so in a cartel with a reinforced core.
THE THIRD WAVE

An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future

Steve Case

Simon & Schuster

240 pages; Rs 499



"I met Jobs to discuss the music business about a year before he launched the iPod," writes Steve Case in his latest book, The Third Wave. "The two of us sat in a dark corner of a quiet San Francisco sushi restaurant, hoping that nobody would recognise us." He then goes on to recount how Jobs solved the problem of getting enough music companies to put their content on the iTunes website that supported the iPod. "He approached the music companies and told them not to worry, that iTunes only worked with Macintosh, which at the time had a meagre two per cent market share. Apple pitched iTunes as a risk-free laboratory for the record labels, the opportunity for the industry to test a different model - a model other than litigating piracy.Had Jobs been more frank about his ambition - that he was aiming for a billion users - he likely wouldn't have gotten the licenses".

Mr Case's book is filled with such insightful scenes that describe how the modern online industry was put together. The iPod case illustrates one of his theories about success as a start-up - that forging partnerships with key players in the ecosystem is the critical to success. In other words, however brilliant a piece of hardware the iPod was, without the range of music on its companion website, iTunes, it would have perished. And making the music available meant persuading the established music industry giants that the iPod would not only be not a threat but would help them sell more music.

Mr Case was in the middle of the action in the early 1990s when companies like Apple and Microsoft were being formed. He was the founder of America Online (AOL), an early provider of online services years before Google and Facebook and such others were born. His master coup was when he engineered in January 2000, at the peak of the dotcom mania, a merger between his AOL and the media colossus Time Warner. Wall Street analysts went into high-gear enthusiasm about this deal: Time Warner would get access to the tens of millions of AOL's online subscribers and AOL, in turn, would get access not only to the enormous array of content that the Time Warner media empire had, plus access to their cable network. All they needed to do was the simple task of adding the appropriate "user-interface" layer that would blend the two company's offerings. Unfortunately, in less than six months after this giant merger, the dotcom bubble burst, the US economy dived into a recession, advertising dollars completely evaporated and AOL was forced to take a goodwill write-off of nearly $99 billion, an astonishing sum even by the dreadful standards of that period.

In his accounting, the period that led up to the merger of his company AOL with Time Warner was the First Wave of the internet. In that period the companies which achieved success were those that built the hardware, software and networks that made up the pipes that made it possible to access the internet. There was CISCO, which built the routers, boxes that connected different networks that carried internet traffic. Then there was Microsoft whose Windows software made it possible for us to interact with our personal computers. Finally, there were the telecom companies, literally hundreds of them, who owned the wires that carried internet traffic from our PCs to websites that we all flocked to.

This First Wave, says Mr Case, was followed by hundreds if not thousands of companies that made up the Second Wave. There were search engines by the dozens of which Google emerged as a winner in the English-speaking world, at least. These helped us all negotiate through the tens of thousands of websites that had by then emerged. Then came the Shopping Sites, again tens of thousands of them, of which companies like Amazon (in the United States), Alibaba (China) and Rakuten (Japan) emerged as leaders. Finally there were myriad social networking sites of which Facebook emerged a winner. This era also saw the emergence of innovative devices like the iPhone and Android, which by today has eclipsed the previously ubiquitous personal computer.

Mr Case says that this Second Wave phase is about to end. The Third Wave, he predicts, is an era when "internet-enabled" will start to sound as ludicrous as the term "electricity-enabled". Entrepreneurs and companies of this Third Wave will have to attack different problems and solve them differently from the earlier two waves if they have to succeed. For instance, he believes that the top three industries that will come under attack in the Third Wave are healthcare (fitness trackers are early examples), education ("an online marketplace where teachers can buy and sell lesson plans") and food ("imagine an oven that refuses to cook questionable meat"). His book has many examples of Third Wave companies and their strategies.

His ultimate tip to entrepreneurs in the Third Wave: "let's worry a little less about out net worth and a little more about our net impact".
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. We value the life of any soldier and officer, while Azerbaijanis are ready to sacrifice hundreds, even thousands of soldiers to satisfy their political aspirations. Armenpress reports President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan told about this in his speech at one of the regiments of Artsakh, after awarding a number of servicemen. They educate their soldiers in other way, they take it as normal when their soldiers cut off the ears of their adversary, meaning our soldiers and officers, as well as when their special units, I cannot call the soldiers, cut off the ears of 90 year-old killed elderly. Such an education cannot lead to good. It is a style of behavior resembling terrorists, Armenpress reports, Serzh Sargsyan saying, adding that Armenians are afraid of only one thing: living without freedom and dignity.

President Sargsyan also stated that the Armenian soldier once again demonstrated in front of everyone who the Armenian soldier is and who the soldier of the Motherland is. Whenever there is a necessity to fight, you transform into the most disciplined, the most prudent and the most combat ready soldiers. Years ago I said that if we are forced into a war, todays soldiers and officers will fight no less bravely than their fathers, grandfathers and elder friends did. You demonstrated that you are much more combat ready, much braver, and unyielding. Times change and the methods of wars change, but moral values remain the same. Remain the same and win. A soldier has nothing to say to his adversary, a soldier tells whatever he want to tell his adversary in the battlefield, and long live all of you, all our soldiers and officers, who managed to deliver their pledge to the adversary, the President said.

He mentioned that no Armenian soldier or officer abandoned his position during those dreadful days. How not to be proud of a soldier, who firing out all the bullets and being injured, explodes a grenade so as to take with him the adversarys soldier? How not to name a soldier who destroys a helicopter by a grenade launcher a quick-witted one? How not to be proud of a soldier who destroys 5 adversary tanks in the battlefield? You fulfilled and continue to fulfill you responsibilities properly. Unfortunately, war is a very cruel thing. Not everyone can see the results of his work in his earthly life, as well as how people get proud of them. Glory to our soldiers and officers who died during these days. Glory to all those who died during these 25 years for the sake of our freedom and independence. Long live, soldiers of the Motherland. I have no slight doubt that all of us, each of us in his place, will fulfill the duties of the soldier of the Motherland, duties, which are sacred. I wish you safe service, though these words are not so serious in times of war. Glory to your parents, glory to the families were you were born and educated, glory to your teachers. I am thankful to you, the President concluded.
The case, which once hung like an albatross around then chief minister Narendra Modi's neck, has become a stick for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to beat the Congress with.

The BJP on Monday levelled serious allegations against the Congress in the shootout case, saying that the Congress had tried to use the case to get a political rival, who it could not otherwise overcome, eliminated. The ruling party did not pull any punches and said that Congress president Sonia Gandhi "worked actively" to make it look like there was no terrorism-related threat to Modi's life.

Union Minister Nirmala Sitharaman took aim at the Congress matriarch and party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, saying that they should take responsibility for the alleged actions of then home minister P Chidambaram in the case.

Read more from our special coverage on "ISHRAT JAHAN"

Sitharaman was citing a media report which claimed that the Chidambaram, in his capacity as Union home minister, had signed the first affidavit in the encounter case.

The then United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government had submitted two affidavits. The first said that the four persons, including Jahan, who were killed in an alleged fake encounter were terrorists, while the second stated that there was no conclusive evidence. Both affidavits were filed within two months of each other, in 2009.

G K Pillai, the then home secretary, had in February claimed that Chidambaram had recalled the file a month after the original affidavit was filed in the court, which had described Ishrat and her slain aides as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives.

"You underplayed a terror plot that could eliminate (Modi). You are clearly admitting that you cannot fight this politically. So eliminate or allow to eliminate or encourage elimination of the leader who you are mortified of fighting politically," Sitharaman said. She didn't stop there, adding, "They (Congress) wanted to quietly watch the terror plot bloom to eliminate a political opponent....A very serious fallout is the way this country's intelligence and counter intelligence have been weakened."

Sitharaman's allegations, however, are nothing new.

In March this year, the BJP had alleged that the decision to change the affidavit in the case was taken at the "political level", involving Chidambaram, then prime minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi.

Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu had also alleged that the Central Bureau of Investigation was misused by the then UPA government to harass its political opponent and "defame" the then Gujarat chief minister Modi.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh had also alleged that the Congress had tried to use the incident to "defame" Modi.

Singh and Naidu's remarks came in the backdrop of former under secretary (Internal Security) in the Union home ministry RVS Mani's allegation that the changes in the second affidavit "were made at the political level by the then UPA government" and that he was "tortured" to sign it.

Since February, when Pakistani-American terrorist David Coleman Headley told a special court that Jahan was an operative of terror outfit LeT, the issue has only seen more allegations and counter-allegations come out.

Congress sticks to its guns

Reacting to the latest allegations made by the BJP, Congress hit back by saying that there were deliberate attempts being made to dilute the basic issue of fake encounters.

"The issue was whether it was a fake or genuine encounter. The court has held that it was a fake encounter... Now reports are being planted to dilute the main issue," Congress spokesman Shakeel Ahmed said.

Congress has not budged from its stand on the issue in the last few months.

Reacting to Pillai's allegations, the then law minister Veerappa Moily had justified the UPA government's decision to file a second affidavit in the case and criticised Pillai for distancing himself from it.

"Here is a home secretary who disowns his responsibility today. I think (this is) highly condemnable," said Moily, during whose tenure as law minister the controversial second affidavit was filed.

Defending Chidamabaram, Moily had tried to bring up the veracity of the encounter and said, "You bring them, arrest them and in the custody you shoot them down. It is unknown in international law or in our own law." Not stopping there, Moily had added that "People can have weak memory. That was a period when there was a series of encounters which are unknown in the history of any state".
The BJP and the government today launched a sharp attack on Congress over the case, accusing it of having wanted the "elimination" of Narendra Modi, a theory on which Congress President Sonia Gandhi "worked actively".

Citing a media report which claimed that the then Home Minister P Chidambaram had signed the first affidavit in the encounter case, Union Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Congress, especially Gandhi and her son Rahul, should take responsibility because Chidambaram did so as the party found it not strong enough to fight Modi politically.

"You underplayed a terror plot that could eliminate (Modi). You are clearly admitting that you cannot fight this politically. So eliminate or allow to eliminate or encourage elimination of the leader who you are mortified of fighting politically," she said.

"...We (Congress) do everything possible in our hand to make sure that we make it appear that he is against some section, projected as if there is no terror threat against him," she told a press conference at the BJP office.

The debate, she said, cannot be confined to Chidambaram.

"Sonia Gandhi worked actively on this theory. That is why she went to town saying an encounter has happened as though there was no intelligence information stating that there was terror plot," she said.

Sitharaman added, "They wanted to quietly watch the terror plot bloom to eliminate a political opponent....A very serious fallout is the way this country's intelligence and counter intelligence have been weakened."



Union Minister Kiren Rijiju also hit out at Congress and Chidambaram, saying he could not have acted on his own to do such an "anti- act".

"There have been some political pressure from higher ups of the Congress that such an action was taken," he told the media.

Chidambaram, he alleged, has been caught red-handed and now he cannot escape. It is not Chidambaram but the entire Congress leadership which should take the responsibility, he said.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has for long pointed out how several Congress leaders are yet to be punished for their alleged role in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 or even the several cases of suspected fake encounters approved by successive Congress governments at the Centre and in states. In contrast, the BJPs Gujarat government, earlier led by Narendra Modi, has been hounded for the anti-Muslim riots of 2002 as well as the fake encounter of 2004.

The BJP has cleverly exploited this analogy to paint the Congress and the intelligentsia that supports the party as the villains, while Modi and BJP President Amit Shah as victims. In the case of Ishrat Jahan, the BJP has alleged that it was a conspiracy hatched by Congress President Sonia Gandhi and executed by then Home Minister P Chidambaram to target Modi.

That at least two probes, including one by the Central Bureau of Investigation, found the encounter to be staged is quickly brushed aside. The probe had drilled holes in the Gujarat police theory of Ishrat, a Mumbai college student, being a Lashkar operative. The Congress, given its low credibility currently, has struggled to put forth its point of view.

Read more from our special coverage on "ISHRAT JAHAN"

The BJP, at least since mid-February, has effectively used the issue to put the Congress leadership on the defensive. It has kept up the heat on the issue ever since Lashkar-e-Tayyeba operative David Coleman Headley suggested that he had heard about Ishrat Jahan, the 19-year-old girl who was gunned down by Gujarat police in June 2004.

The BJP raised the issue just before and during the first half of the Budget session. It came in handy to blunt the Congress attack at a time when its ministers like Bandaru Dattatreya and Smriti Irani were facing flak from the Opposition for having purportedly pushed Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula to suicide.

The BJP again anticipates a difficult Parliament session that starts on April 25. It is sure to get embarrassed on its decision to impose Presidents Rule in Uttarakhand, and could even lose the vote in the Rajya Sabha on the issue. This is the backdrop in which it has tried to rake up the Ishrat Jahan case again.





ALSO READ: Ishrat Jahan case: BJP asks Sonia Gandhi to take responsibility

On Monday, union minister Nirmala Sitharaman, citing media reports, said it was now conclusively proven that Home Minister P Chidambaram had signed the first affidavit that his ministry had submitted in a Gujarat court in 2009. The first affidavit was the Home Ministrys response in the case filed by Ishrats mother and had claimed Ishrat to be a Lashkar operative.

The court found the circumstances of Ishrats encounter dubious, rapped the Home Ministry and asked for a second affidavit. On this occasion, Chidambaram paid more attention to the affidavit and also found that there was no evidence against Ishrat beyond a claim made by a Pakistani website of uncertain provenance, but that too after the news of the encounter.

Sitharaman alleged that the Congress wanted the political elimination of Modi by using the Ishrat case. She claimed that Sonia Gandhi was behind the plot. Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju said the Chidambarams signature on the first affidavit was proof that he was of a different view but was forced to changed it.

The BJP insinuations aside, there is little new as far as the evidence brought forth. It is nobodys case that Chidambaram didnt sign the first affidavit. The facts in the public domain and the probes also suggest that Ishrats encounter was staged.

But the BJP is cleverly trying to use the controversy for its advantage yet again before a tricky Parliament session.
Two persons, including a woman, died in separate accidents here, police said today.

A 35-year-old woman died after being hit by a car in Loni area here.

Rekha, a resident of Raghyunathpuri was crossing the road yesterday morning along with her seven-year-old son when she was hit by a speeding car, SHO Virender Yadav said.

She was rushed to a nearby hospital where she succumbed to her injuries.

The car has been seized and the minor driver taken into custody.

Police are trying to ascertain the age of the accused based on the claim of his father.

In the other incident, a man died and two others were severely injured after two trucks collided with each other at GT road in Sahibabad here.

The victims were rushed to the hospital where the driver, Mukesh succumbed to his injuries.

His body has been sent for post-mortem and investigation is underway, police added.
Nigeria's army has said that 24 soldiers had been wounded as troops repelled Boko Haram insurgents who attacked the military in northeast Borno state.

"So far our troops had two officers and 22 soldiers wounded in action. All of them have been evacuated to military hospital (in) Maiduguri where they are receiving treatment," the army said in a statement yesterday.

Boko Haram militants had attacked troops in the town of Kareto before they were repelled, it said.

"The troops successfully repelled the attack and killed quite a number of the terrorists," the statement added. It did not indicate any deaths among the troops.

The Boko Haram insurgency has claimed an estimated 20,000 lives since 2009 in its bid for a hardline Islamic state in northeast Nigeria.
Three policemen have been killed and eight others injured in Egypt when a police vehicle was attacked by a rocket-propelled grenade in the restive North Sinai governorate, the Interior ministry said today.

The injured policemen were transferred to a nearby hospital while security forces combed the area for the attackers, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Three policemen have been killed and eight others injured in Egypt after the police vehicle was attacked by a rocket-propelled grenade in Shiekh Zwayed, it said without specifying the timing of the attack.

Egypt's North Sinai has witnessed many violent attacks by militants since the January, 2011 revolution that toppled the ex-president Hosni Mubarak.

The attacks targeting police and military increased after the ouster of Islamist ex-president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by military following massive protests against his rule.

Over 700 security personnel have been reported killed since then.

The military has launched security campaigns in the area, arrested suspects and demolished houses that belong to terrorists, including those facilitating tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip.
Three traffic police personnel were arrested after they allegedly took a 25-year-old man into custody following a scuffle and tried to sexually assault him at a traffic police station in north Delhi's Sabzi Mandi area, police said today.

The arrested personnel have been identified as assistant sub-inspector Balwant and constables Raju Kumar and Bharat.

At least three other accused personnel involved in the case are absconding, a police official said.

A case under Sections 323 (causing hurt), 343 (wrongful confinement for three or more days), 365 (abduction with intent secret or wrongful confinement) and 377/511 (attempt to commit unnatural sex) of IPC has been registered in connection with the matter, the official said today.

"While the constables were sent to 14 days judicial custody by a court, the ASI was granted bail," DCP (North) Madhur Verma said.

According to police, a group of traffic officials stopped the complainant, a delivery van driver, for entering into a no-entry zone in north Delhi's Pulbangash area on April 16 evening, following which they entered into a heated argument.

The complainant claimed that the traffic personnel demanded bribe of Rs 1,000 but he called up his employer who instructed him to pay the penalty amount instead.

An argument broke out after the man started recording a mobile video protesting against the officials being lenient to other motorists for the same offence.

A scuffle ensued and the complainant allegedly broke their challan machine. The infuriated policemen then overpowered the man and took him to the traffic police station adjacent to the Sabzi Mandi Police Station.

There they allegedly took off his clothes and thrashed him for hours. The incident came to light yesterday when the complainant's family members finally tracked him and found him lying at the traffic police station in a half-naked state.

The complainant also alleged that the officials tried to sexually assault him by asking him to perform sexual acts on one of their colleagues. The allegations are being verified, an official said.

Police was informed and a case was registered on the basis of the victim's complaint. The traffic personnel were arrested immediately, he added.
A four-year old girl was seriously injured after falling from a moving train near Gangarampur in South Dinajpur district, a district official said.

Bristhi Tudu sustained serious injuries yesterday as she leaned against the bolted emergency door of the Balurghat-Howrah train and fell on the tracks as the door suddenly opened, he said.

Tudu was rushed to Gangrampur Sub-divisional hospital after she was rescued from the tracks by her family members and others as the train stopped.

The train, not moving at high speed, had left Malancha and was on way to Gangarampur when the freak mishap occurred.

Bristhi was on way to Howrah with her father Ranjit Tudu and mother Moon Tudu.

The minor has been shifted to Malda Medical College and Hospital early today with the hospital sources saying that her condition was serious.
Senior IAS officer A Ajith Kumar was today appointed as Kerala-based Rubber Board's chairman, a post lying vacant for over a year and a half.

The appointment comes less than a month ahead of Assembly polls due in the southern state on May 16.

The Appointments Committee of Cabinet has approved the appointment of Kumar,a 1994 batch IAS officer of Kerala cadre, to the post of chairman, Rubber Board, Kottayam, an order issued by Department of personnel and Training said.

He has been appointed for a period up to May 31, 2018, which is the date of his superannuation, it said.

The post has been lying vacant since August 2014.

The vacancy has been a political issue in the state. Congress had late last month criticised the Union government for not appointing a full time Board chairman.

"The post of Chairman has been lying vacant since August 2014. There is no full time secretary or head for the extension department in the Rubber Board," senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh had said in a statement.

Ramesh had then denounced the Union governments policy for the rubber sector, saying India has become a large importer of natural rubber due to poor investments in the Rubber Board.

Polls in 140 Assembly constituencies in Kerala are scheduled to be held on May 16.
Apple today denied providing Chinese authorities with special access to its devices, as the iPhone maker defended its position on encryption and cooperation with US law enforcement.

The company's general counsel Bruce Sewell was appearing at a US congressional hearing on encryption's impact on law enforcement, as the high-tech giant battles the government over whether it should be compelled to help authorities in criminal cases.

Sewell said he wanted to set the record straight on China in light of reports cited by officials at the hearing that the company had turned over its software instructions or "source code" -- which could be used to break encryption -- to Beijing.

"We have not provided source code to the Chinese government," he told lawmakers.

"We have been asked by the Chinese government. We refused," he said, adding that this had happened "within the past two years."



The hearing was called to discuss how strong encryption is hampering law enforcement and how technology firms should respond to legitimate law enforcement requests to break encryption.

Lawmakers at the House Energy and Commerce committee said they hoped the discussion would help both sides in the debate find common ground, so that privacy can be protected while enabling law enforcement to get data its needs for criminal probes.

"I can't believe this problem is intractable," said Representative Diana DeGette. "What I want to hear... Is about possible solutions going forward."



While law enforcement officials and Apple both expressed a willingness to talk, the comments appeared to show little common ground in a debate which has been raging for weeks.

The encryption issue hit a boiling point earlier this year when Apple refused to help the FBI weaken the operating system of an iPhone used by one of the shooters in last year's San Bernardino killing spree.

The government eventually withdrew the request, saying it had been able to get into the phone with help from an outside party, but similar cases are pending in the courts.

Sewell defended the company's toughened encryption for its iPhones, which can sometimes make data unreadable to authorities, even with a warrant.

"The best way we, and the technology industry, know how to protect your information is through the use of strong encryption," he said.

"Encryption today is the backbone of our cybersecurity infrastructure and provides the very best defense we have against increasingly hostile attacks.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. On April 19, the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia Eduard Sharmazanov, who is in the Russian Federation on a working visit, took part in the first conference of the heads of the parliaments of the Eurasian countries entitled The Inter-Parliamentary Cooperation for the Benefit of the Joint Welfare of the Eurasian Regional Countries in the 21stCentury. As Armenpress was informed from the Public Relations and Media Department of the National Assembly of Armenia, the National Assembly Vice President delivered a speech, particularly noting:

Distinguished attendees, our meeting takes place in the hard conditions of finding ends over a number of fundamental problems.

I would like to draw your attention to the NK conflict, where during the night of April 1-2 the Azerbaijani side carried out large-scale provoking military operations along the whole Line of Contact, using the whole complex of armaments, including the banned military equipment, which resulted in numerous casualties also among the civilians. The large-scale attack unleashed by Azerbaijan on Nagorno Karabakh violates the trilateral unlimited-term agreement of 1994 on the ceasefire and termination of military operations signed by Azerbaijan, Nagorno Karabakh, as well as the agreement on strengthening ceasefire regime of 1995.

Such criminal provocation shows that Azerbaijan puts itself out of international law, rejects the calls of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair countries, as well as the international community on non-use of force and confidence-building measures. Azerbaijan, as an initiator of the growth of this tension and bears the whole responsibility of the escalation of the situation. Here Turkeys one-sided, criminal position, which evidently defends and encourages such inhuman actions is extremely dangerous. All this shows that Turkey continues remaining one of the threats for the regional stability.

Dear Colleagues,

The Republic of Armenia is based on the universal principles and norms of international law, giving priority to the diplomatic methods of conflict settlement and the principles of peaceful settlement of crisis situations.

We suppose that our colleagues will raise their voice of protest against the military settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. We shall realize that the Nagorno Karabakh people have the right to live peacefully, freely and independently like the citizens of the states of the Eurasian region. Thus, the Artsakh people responded No pasaranto Azerbaijans aggression.

We call on everybody to fight consolidated against darkness, barbarism, and hatred. The international community shall consolidate efforts for eradicating terrorism and the circumstances borne from that".
Apple received some 30,000 data requests from law enforcement agencies globally in the second half of 2015, and provided information in a majority of cases, the company's latest transparency report showed.

In the report released late yesterday, Apple said it provided some data in 80 percent of the 4,000 request from US law enforcement agencies in the July-December period.

The comes with Apple at the center of a controversy over whether it can be compelled to help authorities decrypt devices where only the user has encryption "keys."



The issue hit a boiling point last month when Apple refused to help the FBI weaken the operation system of an iPhone used by one of the shooters in last year's San Bernardino killing spree. The government eventually withdrew the request, but similar cases are pending in the courts.

The latest report from Apple showed a total of 30,687 law enforcement requests from authorities around the world, involving more than 167,000 devices. That compared to some 26,000 requests in the prior six-month period affecting more than 360,000 devices.

Apple said it provided at least some data in 63 per cent of the cases in its Asia-Pacific region and 52 percent of the cases in the region that includes Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, and 80 per cent for Latin America and North America.

"When we receive an account request from law enforcement requesting a customer's personal information, we will notify the customer a request concerning their personal data was made unless we are explicitly prohibited from doing so," the report noted, adding that some exceptions are made "for extreme situations when we believe disclosing information could put a child or other person in serious danger."



Apple said that any government agency "must get a search warrant" and that "our legal team carefully reviews" each one.

"We only comply with information requests once we are satisfied that the request is valid and appropriate, and then we deliver the narrowest possible set of information," the report said.

The report showed Apple received the largest number of request from the region which includes Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India, or more than 30 countries. The total number of requests in the second half of 2015 was 19,322, with more than 11,000 coming from Germany.

The Asia-Pacific region including 11 countries accounted for 7,300 requests, including some 3,000 from Australia, more than 1,900 from Singapore and some 1,000 from China.
A college student and Iraqi refugee yanked from a Southwest Airlines flight after mentioning a terrorist group's name during a phone conversation in Arabic says he was degraded and humiliated and wants a public apology.

Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, who arrived in the US in 2010 as an Iraqi refugee, was removed from the April 9 flight from Los Angeles to Oakland, California, after the airline said another Arabic-speaking passenger reported hearing him say something that alarmed her.

The airline said in a statement that it regretted what occurred, but under federal regulations it had no alternative but to remove Makhzoomi.

"To be honest with you, I really was intimidated," Makhzoomi told The Associated Press yesterday. "It was an overwhelming process. They made me feel as if I were guilty."



He was released after being interrogated by Los Angeles International Airport police and FBI agents who, according to Makhzoomi, asked him about his thoughts on martyrdom. He said he angrily told them he had no interest in such matters, and they eventually believed him.

"The statement he made was not illegal, there was nothing that involved threats or anything like that, so he was released," airport police Officer Rob Pendregon said.

The 26-year-old University of California, Berkeley, senior said his troubles began as he was excitedly telling his uncle in Baghdad that he was on his way home after attending a speech by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

He said most of the conversation was mundane, covering subjects like who was there and what the food was like, but at one point he noted someone posed a question about the Islamic State group.

When he noticed a woman in the next row staring at him he told his uncle he'd call back later, adding he ended the conversation with the phrase "inshallah," meaning "God willing."



Two minutes later, he said, a Southwest employee approached and told him he'd have to leave the plane. In the terminal he said the man, accompanied by three police officers, told him he should have known better than to speak in Arabic on an airplane, given how it might rattle people these days.

"I said, 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that,' " he said he replied.

The FBI was called, he said, after the employee blamed him for delaying the flight and he responded, "No, I think this is what Islamophobia got this country into."



After being released he was told he couldn't return home on a Southwest flight and his ticket was refunded.

"We would like the opportunity to speak with Makhzoomi further about his experience and have reached out to him several times," the airline said in a statement.
Two unidentified men armed with sharp-edged weapons barged into a church in Chhattisgarh's Bastar district and allegedly set a Bible and other articles on fire, besides thrashing the pastor and his pregnant wife, local police said Tuesday.

The incident took place on Sunday evening at village Karanji Matagudi Para under Parpa police station limits.

"As per the written complaint of Pastor Deenbandhu Sameli, an FIR has been lodged in this connection. Continuous patrolling is being done in the region to nab the attackers. We are pretty sure that the culprits will be arrested soon," Bastar Superintendent of Police RN Dash said.

"After getting information about the incident, we immediately rushed to the spot and deployed a policeman for security throughout the night," Dash said.

A case under sections 295 (injuring or defiling place of worship), 392 (robbery), 452 (house-trespass after preparation for hurt), 435 (mischief by fire or explosive substance), 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt) and 34 (common intention) of the IPC was registered against the unidentified persons, he added.

As per the complaint, two men identified themselves as belonging to a different denomination of the Christian community and expressed their desire to pray in the church.

After entering the premises, they attacked the pastor and poured inflammable liquid on the Holy Bible, furniture and other religious material kept inside and set them on fire.

President of Chhattisgarh's Christian Forum Arun Pannalal alleged the attackers also poured petrol on the pastor and his pregnant wife Meena and tried to burn them alive but that they somehow managed to escape.

Pannalal also alleged that the attack was carried out by the workers of Bajrang Dal and accused the police of "covering up" the incident.

"This was third attack on the religious premises of Christian community in the region. It was carried out by the goons of Bajrang dal. Police are trying to cover it up," he claimed.

Police personnel immediately reached the spot after getting report of the incident and deployed night guards there, he added.
Aluminium maker Balco will re-start production of rolled products at its Korba mill in Chhattisgarh by July, 11 months after it shut down rolling operations due to steep fall in prices of the metal.

The metal company, a part of Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta Ltd, expects normal production to start from July 15. Balco in August last had announced shutting down of rolling mill in Korba due to "steep fall" in the prices besides dumping from China and falling margins.

"Balco CEO Ramesh Nair announced today that Balco's Sheet Rolling Shop Unit (SRS) will reopen shortly. The announcement was made after Nair's meeting with the office bearers of all the working labour unions in Balco," the company said in a statement today.

A religious ceremony has been planned for April 22 in the premises of SRS. After the ceremony, a special team will inspect the premises, which will help make the strategy to enable SRS to become a profitable unit, it added.

After a thorough inspection of the machines and after completion of maintenance, the machines will be taken into operation from the July 1, 2016. It is expected that normal production will happen from the July 15," Balco said.

While announcing the closure of rolling business at Korba in August, the company had said that the move would result in loss of around 1,000 direct and indirect jobs.

Mining conglomerate Vedanta Ltd, earlier Sesa Sterlite, holds 51 per cent stake in Bharat Aluminium Company (Balco), while the remaining is held by the government. It produces about 30,000 tonnes per annum of rolled products like aluminium sheets and coils.
Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) and a Gujjar body today came out in support of Patidar leader Hardik Patel, demanding dropping of sedition charges against him and his immediate release from the jail.

BKU leader Rishipal Ambawat, while addressing a press conference said, on May 10, a rally will be organised in Lucknow demanding dropping of sedition charges and release of Hardik.

An invitation has been sent to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to join the rally.

Addressing the conference under the aegis of Patel Navnirman Sena (PNS), Ambawat said,"We will be holding a rally under the banner of Bharatiya Kisan Union to demand the release of Hardik Patel, who has been languishing in jail for the last 6 months.

"We have also invited Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee (West Bengal Chief Minister) and (Indian Lok Dal leader) Abhay Chautala to be a part of it," he said.

Himmat Singh Gujjar, spokesperson for Rajasthan Gujjar Arakshan Andolan Samiti (RGAAS), alleged that BJP governments in Gujarat and at the Centre were "harassing" people of the community.

"It's been over six months that our leader Hardik Patel is in jail over sedition charges. Why don't you prove the charges? I have also been slapped with a sedition charge, but then prove it. We also want the sedition charge against our leaders to be dropped," Gujjar said.

He said preparations are on for a Gujjar mahapanchyat in Rajasthan in support of Patel, but did not give any detail of the proposed event.

PNS General Secretary Akhilesh Katiyar attacked the BJP governments at the Centre and in Gujarat saying that the Patel community is not even allowed to protest.

"Those who protest are charged with the sedition. You deny us permission to organise a rally. The Gujarat government says that there was no permission. But why a permission is required if the purpose of our protest is to court arrest," Katiyar said.

Hardik was booked by Gujarat Police under sedition charges for his alleged comments on instigating a community youth to kill policemen instead of committing suicide. He was later arrested in the case.

To demand his release, the Patidar community had organised protests in Gujarat on Sunday, which turned violent.
The bodies of a man and a woman, aged in their 20s, were found on railway tracks near a crossing at southwest Delhi's Shahbad Mohammadpur village today.

The identities of the two, suspected to be a couple, could not be ascertained yet. The two were holding hands, with their fingers interlocked, a police official said.

From preliminary investigation, it appears that they committed suicide together by coming in front of a speeding train but no suicide note was recovered from the spot, a senior police official said.

While the head of the deceased man was found severed from the body, the woman's body had multiple injuries, including a deep wound on the head. The bodies were spotted by a railway employee.

People in the area have not been able to identify the two, which suggests that they were not from the locality. All police stations in Delhi-NCR have been informed about the matter, the official said, adding that an inquest has been initiated into the matter.
The body of a 50-year-old Indian national, who died at a Pakistani jail under mysterious circumstances last week after languishing in the prison for nearly 25 years on spying charges, was handed over to Indian authorities today after a post-mortem.

Kirpal Singh had allegedly crossed Wagah border into Pakistan in 1992 and was arrested.

He was subsequently sentenced to death in a serial bomb blasts case in Pakistan's Punjab province.

Kirpal was found dead in his cell last Monday at Kot Lakhpat Jail here.

Post-mortem on the body has been done. The mortal remains have been handed over to Indian authorities and Dr Piyush Singh, the First Secretary in the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, will escort the body, a source said.

Kirpal from Gurdaspur had reportedly been acquitted of the bomb blast charges by the Lahore High Court but his death sentence could not be commuted because of unknown reasons.
Brazil's President said today that she is "outraged" by a vote in Congress to authorise impeachment proceedings against her and vowed to keep fighting.

In an emotional first public response to the vote on yesterday, Rousseff said she would not give up now that her case has gone from the lower house to the Senate for a possible trial.

"I have strength, spirit and courage. I will not be beaten, I will not be paralysed. I will continue to fight and I will fight as I did all my life," Rousseff said in the remarks carried live on television.

The lower house voted overwhelmingly to send Rousseff to the Senate for trial on allegations that she illegally manipulated government accounts during her 2014 re-election to mask the scale of budget holes.

But Rousseff said that deputies in the house had failed to provide any evidence that she'd committed an impeachable crime, calling the process instead a "coup d'etat."



The vote was "violence in Brazil against truth, against democracy and against the democratic rule of law," she said.

The Senate is due to vote in May on whether to open a trial at which point Rousseff would be suspended. The trial could take months and if senators then voted by a two thirds majority she would be deposed.

Her vice president, Michel Temer, would take over. Rousseff branded Temer a "traitor" in her remarks, saying he had conspired against her.
Police in Peru have found the body of a British tourist who went missing in early April during a solo hike in the Andes near Cuzco two days before his 29th birthday.

Authorities have said that Harry Corder Greaves' body was found by police and volunteers in a 40-meter-deep crevasse on territory of the Paru Paru indigenous group.

Corder Greaves, from northern Wales, had not been seen since April 7.

He told friends he wanted to spend the day by himself on a mountain. His family has described him as an experienced outdoorsman and skilled furniture maker.

Each year, Cuzco receives more than 1.6 million foreign tourists who use the city as a base to explore the Incan ruins of Macchu Pichu.
Campaigning for the third phase of West Bengal assembly election, which will see a part of the metropolis go to the polls, ended this evening.

Over 1.37 crore electorate will decide the fate of 418 candidates, including 34 women, in 62 seats spread across Murshidabad, Nadia, Burdwan districts and north Kolkata on April 21.

A total of 1,37,42,000 voters, of them 65,79,218 women will exercise their franchise in 16,461 polling stations from 7 AM to 6 PM on the day, election office sources said.

Trinamool Congress, Left-Congress alliance and BJP have put up a fight in all the seats. Key contestants in this phase include Trinamool Congress ministers Shashi Panja and Sadhan Pande, BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha, five-time Congress MLA Md Sohrab, CPI-M MLA Anisur Rahman and retired IPS officer Nazrul Islam.

TMC has been facing the heat with its supremo and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee showcaused by Election Commission over an alleged violation of the model code of conduct.

EC has also transferred a number of IAS and IPS officers including Kolkata police commissioner Rajeev Kumar.

Banerjee has been critical of the EC alleging that transfers have been made at the behest of BJP leaders.

BJP in its turn tried to make it an issue and Prime Minister Narendra Modi attacked her during a rally saying that she was "fighting" with the EC and questioned why the state chief secretary replied to a showcause issued to her by it.

Anubrata Mondal, Birbhum district president of TMC known to be close to Banerjee, has been under the EC's glare ever since the election began earlier this month.

Already under 24/7 surveillance by a videographer, local magistrate and a contingent of 10 central force personnel, Mondal had ventured out of his constituency despite specific orders from the EC. As a result an FIR was filed against him.

BJP has been banking on the charisma of its national leaders like Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh and HRD Minister Smriti Irani who held election meetings during this phase.

The scorching summer sun and the heatwave in several districts is adding to the poll heat. In the metropolis where voting will be held in seven constituencies, the weatherman has forecast 41 degrees C on polling day.

In north Kolkata, the recent tragedy of Vivekananda road



flyover collapse which left 26 people dead on March 31 is an election issue.

In his campaign trail, Rajnath Singh raised the issue of fake currency, infiltration and cow smuggling at the Indo-Bangladesh border in the state.

Congress Vice-president Rahul Gandhi attacked both TMC and BJP for not taking action against culprits involved in Saradha scam and black money laundering.

Under pressure due to the Narada sting, Banerjee said she would have "given a thought" before choosing her party candidates for the ongoing assembly elections had the video tapes been telecast earlier.

Former minister Humayun Kabir, who was expelled from Trinamool Congress for making anti-party statements, is in the fray from Rejinagar seat as an independent.

Murshidabad district, a Congress stronghold, will see five-time Congress MLA and former minister Abu Hena in the fray at Lalgola, while party MLA Manoj Chakraborty is in the ring from Baharampur.

Former investment banker Mahua Moitra, who left her lucrative job as vice-president of JP Morgan in London in 2008, will fight on a TMC ticket from Karimpur seat in Nadia district.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. Permanent Representative of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic to the USA Robert Avetisyan delivered a speech on April 15 at a panel discussion on the Caucasus Flashpoint: The Nagorno Karabakh Conflict in Context, held in the Institute of World Politics, Washington, DC. As Armenpress was informed from the press service of NKR MFA, the discussion was dedicated to the large-scale military aggression unleashed by Azerbaijan against Artsakh in early April.

In his speech, the NKR representative briefed on the recent developments and their consequences. He emphasized the importance of Artsakhs return to the negotiation table as an equal party and the need for the international recognition of the NKR.

Regional expert Peter Debbins, who worked in Azerbaijan as a consultant in the defense sphere in 2005, also delivered a speech at the discussion.

Peter Debbins presented his observations regarding Azerbaijans energy reserves, the difficult economic situation, the countrys defense spending and social problems.

At the end of the event, the speakers answered the questions of the participants.

Armenian and foreign diplomats, representatives of the Institute, experts, journalists and members of the Armenian community of America participated in the event, which was organized and moderated by founder of the Global Research Center Vilen Khlghatyan.
The Government of India and National Socialist Council of Nagaland, under the leadership of N Kitovi Zhimomi and M B Neokpao Konyak have mutually agreed to extend the Cease Fire Agreement by another year with effect from April 28.

The agreement, extended till April 27, 2017, aims to bring lasting peace in the state of Nagaland with the involvement of Naga people, stated an agreement signed between the Centre and GPRN/NSCN.

While the Centre was represented by Satyendra Garg, Joint Secretary of Ministry of Home Affairs, North East Division, GPRN/NSCN was represented by Jack Zhimomi and Chenyum Konyak yesterday in New Delhi.

The signatories also agreed that the ceasefire will adhere to Ceasefire Ground Rules (CFGR) as mutually decided and signed by the two sides. The CFGR will subject to mutual review and amendment with the involvement of both the parties.
Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy has launched a new website to update his voters about his daily schedules, tour programmes and various government schemes.

Chandy launched the personal site in view of the existing code of conduct in the state as part of the May 16 Assembly polls.

He could not upload details of the development schemes on his official website because of the code of conduct, the Chief Minister's office said today.

Besides the government programmes, the bilingual website also carries videos and photos of various events attended by the Chief Minister and articles by and about him.

It also has a detailed personal and political profile of Chandy, who is seeking his 11th stint to the state Assembly from his home constituency Puthuppally in Kottayam in the upcoming polls.

The tech-savvy Chandy has been active on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Marxist veteran and state opposition leader V S Achutanandan also joined the cyber world recently by launching his own website and opening Facebook and Twitter accounts to connect with voters.
Taking suo-moto action in the city- based Maple Group's "misleading" newspaper advertisements of a cheap housing scheme, police today registered a case of cheating against three senior executives of the construction firm and other staff members.

The Maple Group had recently published advertisements to promote its scheme promising a one-bedroom-hall kitchen flat for just Rs 5,00,000 on the outskirts of Pune.

"After the state government issued a notice to the Maple Group, we had also shot off a letter to the developer and sought credentials of the project. However, we did not get any reply, which prompted us to lodge a complaint against the group suo-moto," said Tushar Doshi, Deputy Commissioner of police.

The case has been registered under 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property), 417 (cheating), 120 (B) (criminal conspiracy) and 34 (common intention) of IPC against group's CMD Sachin Agarwal, MD Navin Agarwal, Sales Manager Priyanka Agarwal and other officials.

Doshi said that in their probe so far, they have found that the advertisements, carrying pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Pune Guardian Minister Girish Bapat in newspaper advertisement while announcing their housing project titled 'Maharashtra Housing Day' were "misleading and false" in nature.

"Since, the scheme looked fishy, we decided to take suo- moto action in this connection and a case was today registered in this regard," he said.

The complaint, filed at Shivajinagar police station, said, "Through the misleading advertisement in the newspapers, the suspects tried to cheat people by promising apartments at Rs 5 lakh and collected non-refundable amount."



Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) and Mission Director of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) have already issued a notice to the group and asked them to withdraw the controversial advertisements, stop collection of money from people and refund it to the people from whom the money has been collected.

The advertisements gave an impression that it was a part of Pradhan Mantri Aawas Yojana. However, the state government yesterday clarified that Maple Group's project was not linked in any manner with the Central or state government schemes.
A top Chinese official has appealed to peoplenot to interpret the recent seismic activity seen in the world as posing a greater risk for quake-prone China.

Pan Huaiwen, director of the China Earthquake Networks Center (CENC) told the media here thatthere have been 37 instances in the world where a series of earthquakes above 7.0 magnitude struck in such close succession since 1900.

Of those, only three were followed by a major quake in China, state-run Xinhua agency quoted him as saying.

Therefore, Pan said, this round of major quakes, statistically, has no correlation with China being subjected to greater risk.

Since 2004, earthquakes above 8.0 magnitude have been more frequent when compared to the relatively "calm period" since the 1960s.

This active period will last for a while, Jiang Haikun, a CENC forecaster said.

Pan suggested that China should invest greater efforts in building strong houses to withstand potential quakes.

"Quakes do not kill people, poor buildings do," he said.

China is subject to frequent earthquakes with heavy casualty and economic losses, Pan said, adding the nation should stay prepared for earthquakes in terms of seismic surveillance and disaster reduction, the most effective being strengthening buildings.

Pan recalled the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan, a 7.8-magnitude one, that killed 242,000 people, saying shabby construction due to poor economic conditions back then and low disaster-reduction awareness were to blame.

Now, as China makes great headway in economic development and catches up in disaster prevention and reduction, Pan said the country should put greater resources in strengthening buildings and other preparatory measures.

The last few days since April 10 saw a 7.5-magnitude earthquake in Ecuador, a 7.3-magnitude one in Japan, a 7.2-magnitude one in Myanmar, and a 7.1-magnitude one in Afghanistan.
Blamed for dumping its excess steel overseas, China today refuted the criticism for triggering an international steel crisis and tried to lay the responsibility instead on a weak global demand and the economic slowdown.

"The bulk of our steel products are consumed domestically. China does not subsidise its products to promote exports," Ministry of Commerce (MoC) spokesperson Shen Danyang said.

"The government has taken action to address steel overcapacity. Notable progress has been made," Shen told reporters here adding that China will continue to expand domestic consumption of steel products.

China, the world's top steel producer, has increased steel exports in recent years. Its steel exports jumped 30 per cent to 9.98 million tonnes in March from a year ago - despite a number of anti-dumping measures implemented globally.

The dumping of China's excess capacity overseas amid allegations that it subsidises its loss-making steel companies has led to a global glut.

Last week, tens of thousands of German steel workers hit the street, demanding more measures against the dumping of cheap Chinese imports and greater job protection.

Britain's largest steel producer Tata Steel has announced plans to pull out of the country, threatening 15,000 jobs. The Tata Steel crisis was also blamed on China for flooding the market with products at artificially low prices.

According to Shen, overcapacity is a problem for all steel-producing countries, and it is a common challenge that needs to be addressed by all countries together.

Officials from nearly 30 countries and international organisations met in Brussels, Belgium, yesterday to discuss the challenge overcapacity poses to the global steel industry.

"This shared problem needs to be tackled with shared efforts," a position paper disseminated by the Chinese delegation during the meeting said adding that it was incorrect to blame international trade for the difficulties.

"Frequent use of trade remedy measures and other import- restrictive measures is not addressing the root cause of global steel overcapacity," state-run Xinhua agency quoted the paper as saying.

China shut down outdated facilities with a production capacity of over 90 million tonnes from 2011 to 2015.

In the coming five years, China will continue to reduce crude steel capacity by 100 million to 150 million tonnes.
Chinese media on Tuesday highlighted Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar's remarks that Sino-India ties should not be affected by a third party even as it skirted any reference to his call to Beijing to review its stand on blocking India's efforts to get Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar banned by the UN.

The issue of Azhar, JeM chief, was raised by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj during her meeting with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow on Monday, while Parrikar called on to strike a united stand with India on terrorism.

"What happened in UN is not in the right direction and they have to take a common line on terrorism which is in the interests of India and China," Parrikar had said after his meeting with Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan on Monday.

Read more from our special coverage on "CHINA"

For its part, the state-run media here highlighted Parrikar's remarks to Chang that India hopes that the development of bilateral ties will not be affected by other factors, including any third party.

The remarks came one week after Parrikar and US Defence Secretary Ash Carter vowed to safeguard maritime security in the region, including the South Sea, state-run ' Daily' reported.

"According to observers, India is seeking to strike a balance between China and the United States in its frequent high-level meetings with Chinese officials this week," it said.

Parrikar also said India attaches highest importance to its ties with China.

As the Indian government has long been dedicated to settling border disputes with China, Parrikar's visit to the country aims to reduce tensions caused by border patrols, although the issue cannot be solved overnight, said Zhao Gancheng, director of South Asia Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for Studies.

The border dispute will be discussed at the 19th boundary talks between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi here this week.

Zhao said normal patrols on the Chinese side of the Line of Actual Control have been portrayed in the Indian press as "aggressive" incursions in the Indian territory.

"Despite a Border Defence Cooperation Agreement, its implementation is problematic," Fu Xiaoqiang, an expert on South Asian studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary Relations told Global Times, citing media hype and the tough stance on China taken by certain Indian politicians.

Beijing and New Delhi inked the agreement in October 2013 during ex-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to China, formulating a formal mechanism to improve security along 3488-kilometre long border.

While wrongly considering the agreement as a signal of China's acquiescence in the status quo of the disputed territories on the eastern section of the border, India has demanded fewer normal patrols by the Chinese troops in the western section, Fu noted, calling New Delhi's demands "insatiable".

The overreaction from the Indian side has cooled the peaceful climate to a certain extent, Fu said, adding that it is also one of the reasons that several exchanges between military officials from both sides have made little headway on border issues.

"As defence cooperation takes up a great part of India-US ties, India isaware that any closer collaboration with the US will keep China alert," Zhao said.

However, since India, a country that upholds an independent foreign policy and makes its foreign policies based on its own interests, is also unwilling to sour diplomatic relations with China for the US, Parrikar might take the initiative to explain the logistics support agreement, Fu said.
Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy is yet to launch his formal campaign in Puthupally, from where he is seeking a 11th term in state Assembly in the May 16 elections, but Congress workers are already confident of his victory with an impressive margin.

Though Chandy is busy with election conventions of the ruling Congress-led UDF, his presence can be felt in every nook and cranny of this constituency which he is credited with nurturing and where he regularly conducted 'people's durbar'.

This town in Kottayam district is considered his pocket borough as Chandy is the only Congress leader in the state who have been elected 10 times in a row to the Assembly from the same constituency.

It is a usual practise of Chandy, popularly known as 'Kunjunju' among his supporters, to be in Puthupally on Sundays for the durbar, if he has no other important official engagements.

"This has been his practise for the last several years whether he is in the ruling side or in opposition. His affection for his constituency is so deep that he would never miss a chance to be in Puthupally despite his hectic schedule," said P T Chacko, a close associate of Chandy.

People's darbar is a miniature version of his popular 'Mass Contact' programme where he used to receive petitions from people personally and take on-the-spot decisions.

The innovative statewide programme, which he conducted thrice during the present UDF term, had earned him UN recognition.

"At the darbar, at least 500-600 people used to come early morning and it used to continue till afternoon," Chacko said.

"His victory is assured. We are working for increasing the margin of 33,255 votes in 2011 polls. There is no need to introduce the candidate to voters. Every person in the constituency knows him very well," Biju, a Congress worker said.

UDF convention in the constituency is scheduled to be inaugurated by Kerala Congress (M) supremo and former Finance Minister K M Mani on April 20.

A shrewd strategist with the man-next-door image, 73-year-old Chandy has been a key player in Kerala Congress for over four decades.

Chandy was just 26-years-old when he became MLA for the first time from Puthupally in 1970 and he never looked back.

Since then, he has been a frontline soldier of Congress



in Kerala and has worked hard to build the party a mass political force side-by-side with his seniors A K Antony and Vayalar Ravi.

However, despite being a major player and serving as a minister in several UDF governments, Chandy had to wait till 2004 to emerge as Chief Minister following the resignation of Antony owning moral responsibility for the combine's near-washout in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls.

He even strikes a chord with children.

"Children sometimes call him by his name Oommen Chandy when he moves around the constituency. A smiling Chief Minister goes and warmly hugs them," Biju said.

"Wherever he goes, youngsters circle him and seek permission to take a selfie with him. The Chief Minister obliges them with a smile," Biju added.

To challenge Chandy this time, CPI(M)-led LDF has roped in Students Federation of India state president 25-year-old Jaick C Thomas.

LDF's calculation is that allegations of corruption against him, especially connected to solar and bar bribery scam, would turn the political wind in their favour.

"I have already completed one round of campaign in the constituency and the second round will end in two-days time," Jaick said.

"I am getting very good response especially from youth. The focus of my campaign is on corruption in the UDF government and a vote for change," he said.

BJP has fielded its Vice-President George Kurian, who is also the General Secretary of the party's Minority Morcha.

The constituency consists of eight panchayats - UDF is ruling in seven and LDF in one with the support of an independent.

Total number of voters is 1,70,763 out of which 87,240 are women.

In the 2011 polls, Chandy garnered 69,922 votes which is 59.74 votes of the total votes polled. His CPI(M) rival Suja Susan George got 36,667 votes and BJP candidate P Sunilkumar 6,679 votes.
Union Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today asked institutes like IIFT to meaningfully contribute to the debate over free trade agreements and also suggest ways to enhance India's trade competitiveness.

Speaking at the 50th convocation of the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), the minister said it is time now for such centres to be far more proactive, assertive and contribute in trade-related matters.

"Give inputs to the existing narrative of what is happening in the global trade or international business... Get into the details and see what we can do in the next few years. Tell us how India is positioned and how Indian industry is positioned in terms of linking with the global value chains," she said.

The minister requested the faculty and the students to contribute more on these issues.

"Activities of IIFT or the Centre for WTO Studies, Centre for SMEs should make a proactive contribution... It is this which is critical to policy-making and with due respect, it is this which I find somewhat absent," she added.

The remarks assume significance as the country's exports slumped to a 5-year low of USD 261 billion in 2015-16. The exports have been in the negative zone since December 2014.

The commerce ministry has recently held a brain-storming session with experts and academicians on exports and free trade agreements.

Sitharaman clarified that the country's exports are falling in value terms, not in volume.

"The narrative is constantly that why exports are falling for 15th or 16th month consecutively. Demand is slowing, as a result our exports are falling, but can this narrative be more mature... What exactly is contributing to the quantum fall?" she wondered.

"Can we look at why the FTAs are really not contributing to India... The narrative is going on without much of a substance... MBAs and PhD (students) should add to the debate," the minister added.

For 2015-16, exports fell 15.8 per cent to a 5-year low of USD 261.13 billion due to weak global demand and low commodity prices.

Imports went down by 15.28 per cent to USD 379.6 billion in 2015-16, leaving a trade deficit of USD 118.45 billion. The trade gap stood at USD 137.69 billion in 2014-15.
AAP-led Delhi government today withdrew from the Supreme Court its plea seeking setting up of a larger bench in the High Court to decide the issue of interpretation of Article 239AA which deals with the powers of Lieutenant Governor on the governance of the national capital.

"Learned senior counsel for the petitioner(s) seeks leave to withdraw the special leave petitions. Permission granted. Accordingly, the special leave petitions are dismissed as withdrawn," a bench comprising justices V Gopala Gowda and Arun Mishra said.

Delhi government withdrew the plea after the apex court observed that the division bench of the High Court is already hearing the matter on day-to-day basis.

Earlier, the High Court had refused to set up a larger bench to decide the contentious issue with regard to the powers of the LG and the city government.

Delhi government had moved an application in a pending case contending that since the issue "involves interpretation of the Constitution" and "raises substantial question of law of great public importance", a larger bench of the High Court should hear the matter.

It had said the Centre was trying to interpret Article 239AA to mean that Union government is the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi and "if that interpretation is accepted, then a democratically elected government will be reduced to zero".

It had argued that its two notifications, issued in 2014 and 2015, were only clarificatory in nature as there was a "deadlock" between the Delhi government and the LG.

A total of eleven cases arising out of the spat between the LG and the Delhi government, are being heard together by the bench headed by the Chief Justice.

The Delhi government on May 28 last year had approached the high court challenging the Centre's notification of May 21 giving LG absolute powers to appoint bureaucrats in the city.

It had also challenged the July 23, 2014 notification limiting ACB jurisdiction to Delhi government officials only.
were already in an evolutionary decline tens of millions of years before the massive meteorite impact that finally wiped them out 66 million years ago, a new ground-breaking study has found.

The findings provide a revolution in the understanding of dinosaur evolution, researchers said.

Palaeontologists previously thought that were flourishing right up until they were wiped out by a massive meteorite impact 66 million years ago.

By using a sophisticated statistical analysis in conjunction with information from the fossil record, researchers at the Universities of Reading and Bristol in the UK showed that dinosaur species were going extinct at a faster pace than new ones were emerging from 50 million years before the meteorite hit.

While the decline in species numbers over time was effectively ubiquitous among all dinosaur groups, their patterns of species loss were different, researchers said.

For instance, the long-necked giant sauropod were in the fastest decline, whereas theropods, the group of dinosaurs that include the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex, were in a more gradual decline.

"While the asteroid impact is still the prime candidate for the dinosaurs' final disappearance, it is clear that they were already past their prime in an evolutionary sense," said Dr Manabu Sakamoto, from the University of Reading, who led the study.

"Our work is ground-breaking in that, once again, it will change our understanding of the fate of these mighty creatures. While a sudden apocalypse may have been the final nail in the coffin, something else had already been preventing dinosaurs from evolving new species as fast as old species were dying out.

"This suggests that for tens of millions of years before their ultimate demise, dinosaurs were beginning to lose their edge as the dominant species on Earth," said Sakamoto.

"All the evidence shows that the dinosaurs, which had already been around, dominating terrestrial ecosystems for 150 million years, somehow lost the ability to speciate fast enough. This was likely to have contributed to their inability to recover from the environmental crisis caused by the impact," said Mike Benton from the University of Bristol.

It is thought that a giant asteroid's impact with Earth 66 million years ago threw up millions of tonnes of dust, blacking out the Sun, causing short-term global cooling and widespread loss of vegetation.

This ecological disaster meant that large animals reliant on the abundance of plants died out, along with the predators that fed on them.

The new research suggests that other factors, such as the break-up of continental land masses, sustained volcanic activity and other ecological factors, may possibly have influenced the gradual decline of dinosaurs.

This observed decline in dinosaurs would have had implications for other groups of species.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. Not supporting Nagorno Karabakh or Armenia means to support the Soviet cruel ethnic policy. Member of European People's Party, Czech by nationality, MEP Jaromir Stetina had expressed such a viewpoint back on April 13 during a discussion held at the European Parliament. Armenpress took an interview from the MEP about his visit to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh and Karabakh conflict.

At the discussion on Nagorno Karabakh at the European Parliament you firmly supported Nagorno Karabakh. What resulted in such a firm opinion?

Of course, my personal experience also played a role. I have been in Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh from the start of the conflict when Karabakh committee was in charge. Mr. Polyanichko had a high position in Karabakh at that time, and once he personally arrested me and expelled from Karabakh, but we, as reporters (Jaromir Stetina was one of the most prominent military reporters of the Czech Republic-edit.) were able to find ways to return. It is the main reason of my opinion, as I was able to catch the main reasons of the conflict.

In your announcement you mentioned that supporting Azerbaijan can be viewed as support to Bolshevik policy of 1920s. Why did you come to that opinion?

I stated that because I am afraid that the thesis that Armenia and Azerbaijan are equally guilty of the conflict expands in Europe. Everyone forgets that everything started from Bolshevik era, when the Soviet Union came into existence and Moscow took Karabakh from Armenia and handed to Azerbaijan based on the principle divide and rule. It was an old imperial policy of Moscow. If I did not support Armenia and Karabakh it would mean that I accept those methods.

It is already a long time there are talks about mechanisms investigating ceasefire violations. What do you think, what steps must be taken to ensure the effectiveness of those mechanisms?

I heard about the discussions over this issue when Rome and Minsk conferences were organized over Karabakh issue. The OSCE did not make enough efforts to realize them. Karabkh authorities waited and waited and later decided that they will deal with the issue on their own and stand for the protection of their country.

What do you think, why Azerbaijan decided that now is the proper time to launch military operations against Nagorno Karabakh?

Of course, there are many reasons, both political and economic, but one of the main reasons is that Aliyev decided to take a step which is often called in Russia small victorious war. Dictators often do so. If a dictator faces hardships inside his country, it is necessary to wage a war and win it. Aliyev failed in implementing that idea. Maybe he had in mind that Blitzkrieg" triumph, but it did not come into reality.

How do you assess the respond of the international community to those developments? Were they adequate?

I believe the international community, including the EU were not tough enough. They even respond to developments in Ukraine mildly, as the Syrian conflict has eclipsed everything, and Karabakh is too far away and has no direct impact on Europe and the migrant issue. I assure you that if hundreds of thousands migrants arrived in Europe from this region, everybody would be much more interested in Karabakh.

Do you think that the EU has real levers to influence that issue?

Federica Mogherini was in the center of attention at the European Parliament. She stated a key sentence: Nagorno Karabakh conflict has no military solution. I do not want what connotation she wanted to stress, but it is the truth. One of the reasons that it is impposible to settle the conflict by military means is that Nagorno Karabakh has won that war and it has become a citadel that remains for already 20 years. I believe all attempts to claim sovereignty over Karabakh by force will wreck. I visited Aghdam a few years ago and I saw the fortifications there, it is like the Maginot Line, which will be too difficult to take by military means. If the policy of putting a sign of parity between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the situation formed after 1990s will continue. Karabakh has to protect itself.

What do you think, which are the reasons of that parity-policy? Why does not the international community often see the reality?

I believe Armenias geopolitical position has had an impact there, and due to that position Armenia signed the agreement of membership to the Eurasian Economic Union in Moscow. I understand that, but there are people, politicians in Europe who do not understand that nuance. It reminds me of Europes policy towards Ukraine, where economic benefits prevail over political state of affairs. If in this case there are European politicians who are afraid of Moscow, there are some who are afraid of Baku.

We witnessed in this war how Azerbaijanis mutilate the bodies of the killed, cut off ears of civilians and behead soldiers. What would you say about conducting such a war by Azerbaijan?

War is not breakfast in kindergarten. War is a tough and cruel thing. The spiral of hatred in such conditions often begins to rotate, but it should not be forgotten who starts to rotate it.

As you know Turkey, which is a member of the Minsk Group engaged in Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement, vigorously supports Azerbaijan. How would you comment on this reality?

This situation is a good point to understand Turkish policy. Turkey reveals its cards behaving that way. Turkey supported Azerbaijan back in 1990s as well. There is information that today Azerbaijan uses not only Russian and Israeli weapons, but also Turkish. In principle, we understand that Turkey overtly behaves as Azerbaijans ally.

Interview conducted by Armen Ghazaryan
Police today summoned directors of the pharmaceutical company, from whose godown ephedrine drug worth Rs 2,000 crore was seized last week, and claimed to have identified the man linked to the firm who was allegedly operating a drug trafficking racket.

Talking to reporters here, Thane Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh said the directors of Avon Life Sciences company, have been called for questioning with respect to the seizure of 18.5 tonnes of ephedrine from their factory at Chincholi in Solapur, around 400km from here, late last week.

However, Singh did not disclose the dates of their appearance for questioning.

Police have claimed that the confiscated recreational drug is worth Rs 2,000 crore in the international market. Thane's Anti-Narcotics Cell (ANC) raided the factory after arresting a Nigerian from the city on April 10 with 500 grams of ephedrine.

Five persons, including the factory's manager, were arrested in connection with the illegal stocking of ephedrine, used for sniffing and also to manufacture mephedrone powder, a party drug.

Singh said a man identified as Punit, was specifically brought in by the management to run the drug trafficking racket from the factory.

Punit played the main role in the entire racket and was assisted by two others-Kishore Rathod and Jai Mukhi. All three are absconding and a search has been launched for them, the police officer said.

Punit and Kishore had links in foreign countries and carried the drug from Solapur to Ahmedabad and after processing, sent it out of India, he said.

The trio had made more than 30 trips abroad in the last one year, Singh said.

The IPS officer said more than 10 tonnes of the drug were found to have been concealed behind the factory.

In reply to a question, he said police had definite information that the firm's management had specifically appointed Punit in the factory. Hence, it can be said the management had a role in the racket.

However, the extent of their involvement will be known only after the arrest of Punit and others, he said.

"We have alerted the airports and authorities at other exit routes to prevent the trio's escape from the country," the Thane police chief said.

Avon had yesterday denied any wrongdoing and claimed it has valid licences and statutory registrations for making, stocking and selling all products manufactured at its Solapur unit.
Union minister and BJP leader Pon Radhakrishnan today alleged that the Election Commission was "silent" on complaints against the ruling AIADMK.

"The functioning of the EC has created the doubt, if it was biased to the ruling party," he told reporters at the airport here, but did not elaborate.

On the fishermen and Sri Lankan Tamils' issue, he said political parties talk about these issues only during the elections.

On the other hand Prime Minister Narendra Modi "is taking several steps for the benefit of the Sri lankan Tamils and fishermen," he said, adding, the PM would come to Tamil Nadu for campaigning.

He claimed that MDMK chief Vaiko had formed the People's Welfare Front only to "help" DMK or AIADMK to come to power.
Facing protest, the government today kept in abeyance for three more months the proposed move to bar withdrawal of employer's contribution to the provident fund corpus until the employee attains the age of 58 years.

"The notification (tightening PF withdrawal norms) will be kept in abeyance for three months till July 31, 2016. We will discuss this issue with the stakeholders," Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya told reporters.

His announcement comes in the midst of protest by labour unions in several parts of the country against the bar on withdrawing employer's contribution from the PF money.

People have also launched online campaign against the decision, which was to be implemented from February 10 but was later put on hold till April 30.

Police yesterday lathicharged a crowd of garment factory workers protesting against the amendment to the EPF Act.

Dattatreya said a meeting of the Central Board of Trustee would be called "to see how best the employers' contribution to EPF (3.67% of basic wages) can be utilised for workers."



The Labour Ministry is also contemplating permitting withdrawal of all accumulations by Employees' Provident Fund Organisation's (EPFO) subscribers on grounds like purchase of house, serious illness, marriage and professional education of children. The matter has been referred to Law Ministry for clearance.

In February, the ministry had issued a notification restricting 100% withdrawal of provident fund by members after unemployment of more than two months, among others.

Following the concerns raised by trade unions and other stakeholders, the ministry decided to keep the notification in abeyance till April 30. Its implementation has been again deferred till July 31, as per a Labour Ministry statement.

Now, the subscribers who are out of job for more than two months can file for full and final settlement of provident fund till July end.

"On the direction of Labour Minister, the said provision will now come into effect from August 1, 2016 by issue of an amended notification," the statement said.

The proposal to amend the scheme to allow all accumulations on different grounds like purchase of house, serious illness, marriage and professional education of children, has been sent for vetting by the Law Ministry.

The proposal also allows withdrawal of all accumulation by members who have joined an establishment or firm of central or state government and became the member of contributory provident fund or old age pension under any scheme frame by them.

The unions have been demanding complete rollback of the decision tightening the PF withdrawal norms.

Earlier in February, the had amended the EPF Scheme 1952 to tighten the various norms for withdrawal of provident fund including increasing age limit for filing such claims by retiring employees to 58 years from 54 years.

Besides, the EPFO had also restricted withdrawal of PF to own contribution of subscribers and interest earned on that, if the claimant has remained unemployed for more than two months. The member would be able to withdraw employer's contribution on maturity.

It was stipulated that the requirement of two months' unemployment will not apply in cases of women members resigning from the services for the purpose of getting married, on account of pregnancy or child birth.

According to the new norms, subscribers will not be able to claim withdrawal of PF after attaining 54 years of age. They would have to wait till attaining the age 57 years.

As per the earlier norms, subscribers were allowed to claim 90 per cent of their accumulations in their PF account at the age of 54 years and their claims were settled just one year before their retirement.

As per experts, the earlier clause was relevant because there were establishments where retirement age was 55 years or 56 years. But this will create a problem in private as well as public sector where people opt for voluntary retirement.

In another change, EPFO had made it mandatory to wait till attaining the age of 57 for claiming PF withdrawal for transferring that to the Life Insurance Corporation of India for investment in Varishtha Pension Bima Yojana.

Earlier norms used to allow subscribers to claim 90 per cent of their accumulations for investing in the scheme after attaining the age of 55 years.
Kamal Swaroop's take on the high- pitched 2014 Narendra Modi-Arvind Kejriwal poll battle in Varanasi has been denied the nod by Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT) as it felt the documentary may cause "communal disharmony".

The makers, who had approached FCAT after censor board refused to certify "Battle for Banaras", are now planning to move the High Court.

"After having viewed the film and having heard the parties, we are of the opinion that the CBFC was justified in refusing to grant certificate for exhibition of the film for the reasons that the theme of the film was full of hate/ inflammatory speeches given by all the leaders of the political parties and it tries to divide people on caste and communal lines and derogatory remarks have been made against the individuals," FCAT said in its judgement.

"The release of the film may cause not only communal disharmony but also disharmony among the members of different castes and communities. It clearly violates the guidelines for certification for films of public exhibition... The appeal is accordingly dismissed," the judgement said.

When contacted, the documentary's producer Manu Kumaran said, "We vehemently disagree with the tribunal's decision. We will take this to the High Court to protect our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression."



Shot over a period of 44 days during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, "Battle for Banaras" is a behind-the-scene look at the high-octane poll battle in Modi's parliamentary constituency.
"Spring Breakers" star James Franco reveals he returned to education in 2006 because he felt "trapped" by acting.

Franco, 37, enrolled in UCLA in California as an English major and has subsequently studied and taught a number of other courses, and admits one of the reasons he went back to school was to branch out creatively, reported Female First.

"One of the reasons that I went back to school -- and then many schools -- was that when I only had acting, I felt trapped," he said.

"I think that's how a lot of people feel in a lot of professions. "When I went to Yale for my PhD in literature, I had fellow students -- great students, writing incredible papers -- come up to me and say, "I'm so jealous of you. I'm writing this paper. If I get it published, 50 people will read it.
Coral bleaching has been detected in Sydney Harbour for the first time, Australian scientists said today, blaming the damaging phenomenon also found in the Great Barrier Reef on warming sea-surface temperatures.

Aerial surveys of the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef off Queensland's coast last month revealed the worst bleaching on record along a 1,000-kilometre (600-mile) stretch of the site's pristine north.

Now marine biologists from two Sydney universities have discovered "paled coral colonies during routine monitoring at a number of locations in Sydney Harbour".

The scientists estimated around 45 percent of corals in some locations in the harbour have been bleached.

Bleaching occurs when abnormal environmental conditions, such as warmer sea temperatures, cause corals to expel tiny photosynthetic algae, draining them of their colour.

"It's enough to cause us quite a bit of concern. This is the first time it's been observed at Sydney Harbour," Matthew Nitschke of University of Technology Sydney (UTS) told AFP.

"It (the bleaching) is slightly different in Sydney Harbour, so we don't reach as high temperatures as we do in the Great Barrier Reef, but we still have reached a high temperature for Sydney Harbour."



UTS' Samantha Goyen said scientists studying the corals did not expect to see "such a rapid change in their physiology".

"They appear to have bleached in a matter of weeks," she added in a statement.

The monitoring data compiled by the researchers, who also include experts from Macquarie University, showed that waters in Sydney Harbour had reached 26.5 degrees Celsius (79.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The average temperature for this time of year is 24-24.5 degrees Celsius, Nitschke said.

With water temperatures dipping down to 23 degrees before the southern hemisphere winter begins, the scientists were hopeful the corals would recover from the bleaching in two to three months or longer.

But they cautioned the phenomenon was making marine invertebrates more susceptible to other stresses including disease.

Scientists said in findings published in the journal Science last week that a further rise of as little as 0.5 degrees Celsius could cause reef bleaching to spread dramatically.

The Great Barrier Reef -- the world's biggest coral reef ecosystem -- is under pressure from the threat of climate change, as well as farming run-off, development and the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish.

Nitschke said it was too early to tell if the Sydney Harbour bleaching was linked to climate change, with further monitoring needed.

"If this happens again in the absence of an El Nino event, then it's a clear sign of this being attributable to global climate change," he said.
A gang of four persons, including a minor boy, were arrested today in connection with four separate cases of murder and attempted murder in Kalyan here, police said.

The incidents took place in Kalyan's Khadakpada and Shahad areas in the last fortnight and the four accused were held in the wee hours, Thane Police Commissioner Parambir Singh told a press conference.

The names of three persons were given as Niteen Waghe (19) Nitesh alias Nitya Bhoir (20) and Ravindra alias Ravi Waghe (20). All of them were tribals and belonged to Kalyan.

Acting on a tip-off, a team of local police and crime branch apprehended the accused from Kalyan, the officer said, adding, the minor operated the gang.

A big sword, one laptop, a mobile handset and a golden chain has been recovered from them.

The gang was accused of allegedly attacking two watchmen on April 4 and injuring them. In a similar incident, they attacked another watchman on the intervening night of April 9-10 and allegedly killed him.

In a third incident, a 22-year-old woman was allegedly assaulted and decamped with her mobile, laptop and gold chain.

Cases were registered in all the incidents, the officer said, adding, they are investigating if the woman was sexually assaulted by the juvenile in the third case.
Goa government along with a few social outfits, is trying to bring a nomadic tribe whose traditional occupation is hunting and eating monkeys into the mainstream society.

"Its not an easy project. These people of 'Wanar-mare' (literally, monkey-hunters) tribe who have no fixed address do not even enjoy the scheduled tribe (ST) status, and therefore do not get any resultant benefits.

"They have been wandering in the forests all these years without possessing a single government document. We have started an effort to get them into the mainstream," said collector of South Goa district, Sachin Shinde.

Currently some hundred members of the tribe are camping in the Sanguem tehsil. South Goa administration, along with organisations like Dabhal Gramvikas Parishad, is working towards helping them earn a decent livelihood.

The tribe is found in the jungles of Western Ghats in Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka.

"The introduction of Forest Conservation Act made them give up their traditional hunting, and now they work in sugarcane farms," said Sachin Tendulkar, a farmer and social worker associated with Dabhal Gramvikas Parishad.

Some 17 families from the tribe are also camping at Nirancal village.

"Farmers hire them as they work for relatively low wages. But they get exploited. They live in temporary huts in forested areas where they are often at the mercy of forest officers," Tendulkar said.

The attempt to rehabilitate the tribe began with the



children. Youth from the village helped the officials enroll the children in government primary schools and anganwadis (nursery schools run in rural/tribal areas).

"The families were given ration cards under the National Food Security Act," he said. The members of the tribe now also have Aadhar cards and even bank accounts opened under the Jan Dhan Yojna.

"The biggest problem was that they had no electricity in their huts. When we met them, they had mobile phones, but no power to charge them and they used to pay to get the phones charged," Tendulkar said.

Organisations like Sesa Workers Union, Mineral Foundation of Goa and Rotary Club funded solar lamps for them. Goa Bagayatdar Sahakari Society Maryadit Limited, one of the oldest cooperative institutes in the state, provided school bags and umbrellas to the children.

According to Tendulkar, Wanar-mare tribe is similar to Katkaris of Maharashtra, but they don't have ST status (unlike the Katkaris).

"When we moved the proposal, questions were raised as to whether they are originally from Goa. This is a nomadic tribe, so they have no state of origin," he said.
Pakistan government relaxed the rules to allow former military dictator Pervez Musharraf to go abroad, a special court hearing the high treason case against him was told today.

Musharraf, 72, was allowed in February to go to the UAE for medical treatment, angering the special three-member tribunal hearing the case against him for suspending the constitution in 2007.

If found guilty, he can be sent to the gallows.

Maj Gen (retd.) Rashid Qureshi, who had given surety bonds for Musharraf's bail in the case, in an application said that the federal government failed to use powers to restrict the movement of the accused, the Dawn reported.

Qureshi insisted that he was not solely responsible for regulating the movement of his former boss, and the government was also involved in it.

"Exit from Pakistan (Control) Rules 2010 provide a complete mechanism for the situation, which needs to restrict movement of any person from going abroad," it said.

However, the federal government did not invoke the relevant provisions of the rules to stop Musharraf from leaving the country, the application claimed.

It noted that the superior judiciary "did not put any restriction on the movement of the accused in spite of having full and complete knowledge of the order of the special court".

In February, the court had summoned Musharraf to record his statement, but he left Pakistan the following month after the government removed his name from the exit control list.

Qurehi said that he "is a retired army officer who stood surety in consideration of sympathy, kindness and fear of God and he has not gained any monetary benefit from the accused (Gen Musharraf) in any manner whatsoever. He has no other income but only limited resources including the property he rendered as the bond of the accused."



He requested the court not to forfeit the property he had pledged as surety bond for the accused.

During proceedings on March 31, the special court had remarked that in case Musharraf did not appear, the court may order the surety bond as forfeit.

The defence team also filed another application, asking it to dispense with the personal attendance of Musharraf, saying he would return after his recovery.
Urging the industry to boost ethanol production, the government has said it is ready to purchase the entire output.

The development comes in the wake of the government making compulsory blending 10 per cent ethanol with petrol.

"Government is ready to purchase the entire quantity of ethanol produced by the industry. It could think of ways for economically viable production of ethanol," Union Road Transport, Highways and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari told ethanol producers.

Chairing a meeting of Indian Federation of Green Energy, the minister said ethanol could be a game changer as it is economically viable and environment-friendly.

He said the industry could find ways and means for boosting the production through molasses, bagass, corn or other means and the government was ready to buy the entire produce.

Citing the example of flex-fuel cars in Brazil, Gadkari said India was also on the way to promote such vehicles as this could minimise pollution.

"Under Ethanol Blending programme (EBP), the central government has scaled up blending targets from 5 per cent to 10 per cent to promote blending of ethanol with petrol and its use as alternative fuel," the government has said last year.

It has said the production cost of ethanol produced through C-heavy route from molasses is Rs 36.2 per litre.

The production of ethanol is linked to the production of molasses which is a byproduct during the production of sugar.

Parliament was recently informed that the government is also providing soft loans of up to 40 per cent of the project cost to sugar mills for setting up ethanol projects.

To augment supplies of ethanol to oil marketing companies (OMCs) under EBP, the policy for procurement of ethanol has been modified to smoothen the entire ethanol supply chain to provide remunerative price of ethanol.
The government is working on the recommendations of Katoch Committee in order to reduce import of bulk drugs.

"We are working on the recommendations...We have also taken note of other suggestions we have received. The aim is to reduce dependency on imports," Minister of State for Chemicals and Fertilisers Hansraj Gangaram Ahir told reporters here today.

The government will go ahead with the mega parks for bulk drugs, he added.

Ahir was speaking on the sidelines of 13th Pharmaceutical Conclave organised by industry body CII in partnership with Department of Pharmaceuticals.

The government had earlier said "it is examining the recommendations of the committee which has recommended establishment of mega parks for APIs with common facilities".

Many state governments have shown interest in setting up bulk drug manufacturing units and soon the country will have many such hubs, Pharmaceuticals Secretary V K Subburaj said.

This will reduce the capital expenditure on production of bulk drugs, he added.

The government had set up a committee headed by Secretary, Health Research, V M Katoch to suggest ways to reduce dependency on bulk drug imports from China.
Minister for Science and Earth Sciences Harsh Vardhan today said the approach of science has to be people-centric and the comman man should not remain deprieved of its benefits.

"Common people should not remain deprived of the benefits of science," Vardhan said while launching the Department of Biotechnology, DBT, under Government of India funded Twinning Network Program on Chemical Ecology of North East Region with Bangalore-based scientists here.

Stressing on the intellectual acumen of young minds of the region, the Union minister said their coming together would produce dramatic results in meeting objectives of organic farming which is the need of the hour.

He also underlined the need for fostering better coordination and support among science professionals.

Twinning Network Program on Chemical Ecology is a new collaborative and interdisciplinary programme in Chemical Ecology between institutions in the NER and partners in Bangalore.

This platform aims to provide a strong stimulus to ongoing research in the NER, while building enduring research and training links with partner institutions in Bangalore.

Vardhan, who was in the state as part of his two-day maiden visit, last evening inaugurated DBT funded Biotech Infrastructure Facility at ICAR-National Research Centre on Mithun at Jharnapani, Medziphema under Dimapur district.

In his address at ICAR, Vardhan said it had been his long cherished dream to visit Nagaland which finally came true.

"I have this strong conviction that science has the potential to solve many problems faced by our country even after 69 years of Independence," he said.

Lauding the research and allied activities of ICAR-NRC on



Mithun, Vardhan said he tasted the Mithun rasgulla (rasgulla made from mithun milk) for the first time and felt like he was savouring the best sweet in his life.

Vardhan assured that he would promptly look into the request of ICAR-NRC for setting up of rasgulla manufacturing unit and discuss the matter with Nagaland Governor and Chief Minister.

Vardhan paid a visit to the DBT Healthcare Laboratory and Research Centre at Naga Hospital Authority Kohima and Naga Model Village before leaving for New Delhi from Dimapur later today.

During his stay in Kohima, Vardhan also called on Governor P B Acharya at Raj Bhavan and Chief Minister T R Zeliang.

Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director for World



Health Organisation's South-East Asia Regional Office in New Delhi, asserts "We need to ensure that our efforts and investment over the years to eradicate polio do not go waste. Globally, polio transmission is at its lowest ever levels. However, the risk of importation of the polio virus into all polio-free areas persists."



Interestingly the survey also reflects the dichotomy of the country.

"Over-nutrition continues to be a health issue for adults. At least 3 in 10 women are overweight or obese in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Puducherry, and Tamil Nadu," the survey reports.

When air pollution both indoor and outdoor has been dominating the headlines, the survey finds that "only 18 per cent of households in Bihar use of clean cooking fuel, which reduces the risk of respiratory illness and pollution".

The 13 states covered in the NFHS-4 survey include Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Goa, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Tripura, Uttarakhand, West Bengal, the two Union Territories of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Puducherry. Rest of states will be covered in phases and finally about 570,000 households will be surveyed.

Among the other gains the health ministry reports that after the last round of National Family Health Survey in 2005-06, infant mortality has declined in all first phase States/Union Territories for which trend data are available.

All 15 States/Union Territories have rates below 51 deaths per 1,000 live births, although there is considerable variation among the States/Union Territories.

Infant mortality rates range from a low of 10 in Andaman and Nicobar Islands to a high of 51 deaths per 1000 live births in Madhya Pradesh. Better care for women during pregnancy and childbirth contributes to reduction of maternal deaths and improved child survival.

There is huge unmet challenge in health stares India as the country aspires to become a developed country at the earliest.
Wheat arrival in the grain markets of Haryana during the current procurement season touched 48,76,910 tonnes.

In comparison, only 9,44,520 tonnes of wheat had arrived in the 'mandis' during the corresponding period last year, a spokesman of the State's Food and Supplies Department said here today.

He said that the procurement process was running smoothly in the mandis of the state.

The spokesman also said that out of the total arrival, 48,76,660 tonnes have been purchased by the government procurement agencies at Minimum Support Price.

Giving details of the wheat procured by government agencies, he said that more than 13.23 lakh tonnes of wheat has been procured by Food and Supplies Department, whereas HAFED has purchased 16.76 lakh MT of wheat.

He said that Food Corporation of India has purchased 5.40 lakh tonnes of wheat, Haryana Agro Industries Corporation has purchased 4.41 lakh tonnes, and 8.93 lakh tonnes of wheat have been procured by Haryana Warehousing Corporation.

He said that apart from this, 250 tonnes of wheat have been procured by traders.

Sirsa district was leading in wheat arrival where more than 5.52 lakh tonnes have so far arrived in the mandis. District Karnal has recorded arrival of more than 5.41 lakh tonnes followed by district Kaithal with more than 5.26 lakh tonnes of the crop arrival.
The Madras High Court has imposed a cost of Rs 7,500 on the Tamil Nadu government for not complying with court orders on Olive Ridley turtle conservation and setting up an external agency to study the matter.

The court had earlier taken up an article published in a English daily highlighting the mass death of endangered Olive Ridley turtles on Chennai's beaches as suo motu PIL and issued notice to the government.

After going through the report filed by the court appointed amicus curiae, Advocate T Mohan, the First Bench, comprising Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice S Vaidyanathan said the government had failed to appoint an external agency and file a comprehensive report, as directed by the court three months ago.

Pulling up the government, the court said, "The state government is in breach of our order dated January 28, 2016, having done nothing till the anvil of the hearing for carrying out an audit by a non-governmental organisation working in the field of turtle conservation."



The court reminded that it had directed government to make available a report from an NGO three days before the present hearing date but it has failed to do so.

"Documents show that it is only vide letter dated April 7, 2016 that consent of the Trust for Environmental Education was sought to be obtained."



"We consider it fit to penalise the state government for the inaction," the bench said and directed the government to deposit the amount to the mediation and conciliation centre in two weeks.

The bench after adjourning the matter to July 11 directed that the NGO's report be placed three days prior to the above date.

In his memo to the bench, the amicus curiae, who had gone through the counter filed on behalf of government, which stated that turtle mortality had come down compared to previous years, said there was no data on turtle mortality and nesting.
A powerful Taliban car bomb followed by a fierce firefight left many people dead or wounded in Kabul today, the Afghan president said, a week after the insurgents launched their annual spring offensive.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack near government offices, which sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing in the sky and rattled windows several kilometres (miles) away.

The brazen assault in a densely packed neighbourhood marks the first major Taliban attack in the Afghan capital since the insurgents announced the start of this year's fighting season.

"(We) condemn in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Puli Mahmood Khan neighbourhood of Kabul, as a result of which many of our countrymen were martyred and wounded," Ghani said in a statement without specifying the number.

The Afghan health ministry said at least 208 wounded people were rushed to hospital but did not specify any fatalities.

"Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism," Ghani said.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed their fighters had managed to enter the offices of the National Directorate of Security, the main spy agency.

Afghan officials did not confirm that claim but intense gun battles could be heard near the NDS compound. The Taliban are generally known to exaggerate battlefield claims.

"The first blast was carried out by a suicide bomber in a car and possibly one or two bombers are still resisting," interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told AFP.

"The scene of the attack has been completely cordoned off by Afghan security forces."



The Taliban today last week announced the start of their "spring offensive" even as the government in Kabul seeks to bring them back to the negotiating table to end the drawn-out conflict.

The Taliban warned they would "employ large-scale attacks on enemy positions across the country" during the offensive dubbed Operation Omari in honour of the movement's late founder Mullah Omar, whose death was announced last year.

The insurgents began the fighting season last week by targeting the northern city of Kunduz, which they briefly captured last year in a stunning setback for Afghan forces.

But officials said Afghan security forces drove Taliban fighters back from the city on Friday.
Innovative projects with a "high societal impact" are set to be showcased at the 12th edition of the annual IIT Delhi 'Open House' scheduled to begin here on April 23.

From a hip protective device for the elderly, diagram books for blind students to a system of better drainage systems in Delhi, 'Open House 2016' will have over 500 research projects and 80 demo projects on display for the visitors.

"The idea of IIT Open House is to identify projects where a new product or technology is created with high societal impact. We are going to connect with agricultural and healthcare institutions and would like to work on multi-disciplinary projects offering societal benefits," V Ramgopal Rao, who assumed office as the premier institute's Director two days ago, said.

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) is expecting over 40,000 school students to visit the exposition.

The institute has been working towards providing aid to the visually-impaired for quite sometime now and had come up in the past with technology-driven devices like the blind cane, that have shown positive results.

Their latest project focuses on providing blind students access to non-visual representations of diagrams and figures in subjects like maths, science, economics and geography, in tactile form at an affordable cost.

Prof M Balakrishnan, who is guiding the project, said it uses the process of thermoforming with durable PVC sheets as opposed to the more expensive swell paper or the less durable embossing, while using 3D printing technology.

"Thermoforming lies between embossing and swell technology. While embossing might be economical, it is less durable and prone to wear and tear. Swell technology is expensive with each paper costing Rs 100. With thermoforming, more durable diagrams are created at a nominal price of Rs 10-Rs 15 per sheet," Renu Kaushik and Vibha Chaudhury, who are working as research scholars for the project, said.

The team has been working with NCERT to bring out a map book for Upper Primary grades in blind schools.

They have also brought out science and maths textbooks for ninth grade and economics textbook for the eleventh grade, besides a Yoga book for the Iyengar society that can be used by visually impaired individuals to practise yoga.

Rao also emphasised on the need for tech-based



initiatives and said that it will be among one of the primary areas of focus for the years to come.

"I have seen that a lot of start ups are coming up but there are hardly any tech-based start-ups. We have to focus on tech and tech-incubation is what we will focus on in the next few years," he said.

Another project offering a high societal impact is 'Preparation of Master Plan of Drainage for NCT of Delhi' that was awarded to IIT-D by Delhi government to formulate the master drainage plan for the city by 2021.

The team, lead by A K Gosain, studied the existing natural drainage system, urban storm and waste water systems and evaluated their water carrying capacities.

The city has been divided into three areas: trans-Yamuna region, South Delhi and Najafgarh area and region wise guidelines have been prepared to rehabilitate and augment the storm water management system.

Satish Kumar and Dhanya C T, who are working on Gosain's research team said "We found that although the existing drainage is not inadequate, the drains are choked. The drains that are meant to carry rainfall are carrying sewage. People are building homes over the drains which leads to flooding of the upstream."



According to the team, the first draft of the plan was submitted in February and the project is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

IIT Delhi's 'Open House' is open and free for public. While demonstrations will close by 2 pm the laboratory will stay open for visitors till 4 pm.
French President Francois Hollande today said that the Syrian opposition's decision to suspend participation in peace talks was "worrying", as he offered to support Jordan in dealing with refugees fleeing the five-year conflict.

Speaking a day after Syria's main opposition announced its formal participation in peace negotiations in Geneva was on hold, Hollande said he was concerned that a ceasefire that has dramatically reduced fighting across Syria might not last.

"If the truce is broken, fighting will restart, and civilians will flee once again. There will be no hope," Hollande said after talks with Jordan's King Abdullah II.

"For Jordan, what's happening in Geneva is very important. The suspension of talks is worrying."



Yesterday a collection of key Syrian rebel groups announced an armed response to what it said were "violations" of the ceasefire deal by pro-regime forces as violence mounted around second city Aleppo.

Hollande, who visited Cairo yesterday, has said that everything needed to be done in order to ensure the cessation of hostilities holds.

He has been on a regional tour to countries affected by war, during which he announced 100 million euros ($113 million) to Lebanon to help with the mass influx of Syrians escaping violence.

In Jordan, home to more than 630,000 displaced Syrians, the president discussed the refugee crisis as well as the fight against the Islamic State group.

The jihadists were recently forced from the ancient city of Palmyra but still control swathes of Syria, including its de facto capital Raqa.

"There are still refugees coming from Syria after fleeing fighting around Raqa and Palmyra. We need to support them but also ensure that terrorism isn't brought with them," Hollande said.

Jordan, which is part of a US-led coalition battling IS in Syria and Iraq, has struggled to cope with the numbers of Syrians seeking refuge in the kingdom.
The Indian Air Force today came out with its indigenisation road map till 2025, highlighting the future technologies and new weapon system capabilities that it plans to induct.

Brought out in the form of a booklet, the road map aims to help the Indian domestic defence industry to frame its plans and policies.

IAF is in the process of modernising and expanding its inventory to keep up with the changing geo-political scenario and emerging threat perception, IAF chief Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha said.

He underlined that there exists a huge potential for indigenisation in the manufacturing of capital equipment and their maintenance spares.

Economical and optimal exploitation of such a potential by the Indian industry would lead to greater self reliance, he said.

Besides hi-tech equipment like propulsion technology, engine systems and missile and bombs, the IAF has also pointed out that indigenisation is much-needed in smaller parts like tyre of the aircraft, batteries, bulbs, filters, fuel oil and lubricants.

It also listed 173 requirements for maintenance of aircraft fleet and systems. However, the problem was that the annual requirement of most of the products listed was less than 30 units each.

Before the release of the booklet, Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh said it will provide useful inputs to the industry to map their potential with the requirements of the Indian Air Force.

In his address, Singh also emphasised that the bureaucracy needs to think keeping in mind the force and others.

Asked if he meant the bureaucracy was living in a cocoon, he said he meant the overall environment.

"In defence, as well as in others areas, we have had bureaucrats being sent to jail for taking an independent decision, not necessarily on receipt of some money or the other," he said.

Singh added that they "have been sent to jail because things have been brought out in the media".

"Media pressure has become so much in certain issues, for whatever way it is motivated by the media, people have had to pay the price without actually having taken any money. So those are things that have restricted the flow of the pen of the bureaucracy, so therefore they have cocooned themselves, protected themselves. It is not in the best interest of the country," he said.
Imams appointed for prisons in Britain routinely distribute extremist literature among Muslim inmates, a leaked report claimed today.

Areview of the country's prison system, ordered by UK justice minister Michael Gove last year, found extremist pamphlets and CDs in more than 10 jails in November.

"It uncovered misogynistic and homophobic leaflets, hate tracts encouraging the murder of apostates and ultra- conservative Islamic literature preaching contempt for basic British values," The Times reported.

The material was kept on bookshelves in prison chaplaincy rooms where it was available for anybody to come in and pick up, the paper reported, citing a Whitehall source.

The review, led by former senior UK Home Office official Ian Acheson, has not yet been cleared for publication.

The paper saidthe ministry is awaiting clearance from the Prime Minister's office to publish the report.

Imams at several jails also encouraged prisoners to raise funds for Islamic charities with links to international terrorism, according to the review.

It warned that lax controls and failings at a senior level of the prison service had created a breeding ground for Islamist radicalisation, the paper said.

Jails in England and Wales held 12,328 Muslim inmates at the start of this year, of whom 131 were convicted terrorists and a further 1,000 were deemed vulnerable to radicalisation.

Muslims make up 4.8 per cent of the UK's prison population but 14.5 per cent of prisoners.

About 100 Muslim chaplains or imams are employed full- time in jails on salaries of up to 40,000 pounds a year.

The extremism review began in September 2015 and the 40,000-word report with 69 recommendations was presented to the justice secretary's office last month.
Women are still underrepresented across Asia Pacific boards but three countries including India have displayed significant improvement in broadening women representation on boards, says a Korn Ferry report.

According to a study by Korn Ferry and the National University of Singapore Business School's Centre for Governance, Institutions and Organisations, companies with greater female representation in the boardroom tend to be more profitable, but women still remain underrepresented across Asia Pacific boards.

According to the findings, three countries in the Asia Pacific region, Australia, India and Malaysia, showed significant improvement in broadening women representation on boards across the companies.

On India, the report said: "India has made significant progress in broadening female representation across companies. Companies there reported an increase in female board representation from 7.3 per cent to 8.6 per cent in 2014."



"The Company Act, which required all listed companies to have at least one woman on the board, has helped enable this broadening female representation," it added.

The study, titled 'Building Diversity in Asia Pacific Boardrooms', examined the largest 100 publicly listed firms' 2014 annual reports in 10 Asia Pacific economies: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea.

"Most countries reviewed in this study showed little or no improvement. However, India, Australia and Malaysia have seen regulatory action or governmental support for promoting board diversity. This is why you can see a 1.3 per cent change in India," Navnit Singh, Chairman and Managing Director of India for Korn Ferry International said.

The report noted Asia Pacific still lags substantially behind major economies.

"Asia Pacific falls far behind benchmark global economies such as the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union. For the region to reach parity with these markets, it would require another decade of growth at the current pace," the report said.

All male boards are no longer a majority in Asia Pacific region with a significant drop from 53.2 per cent in 2012 to 39.0 per cent in 2014. However, they still lag far behind Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 companies; there are no longer any all-male FTSE 100 boards.
What more is there to fight when corruption and the manipulation of state institutions are so compromised in this country; and in a bright daylight and right under our noses?

But we cant do anything. Not even the military can do anything. Its a situation where the gate of a cage of wild cats has been opened and the mice are taking cover. True believers of democracy like our next-door friend Australia could not even step up with a comment.

IT IS now public knowledge and every good thinking Papua New Guinean is well-aware of it. The people think the prime minister is using the police commissioner to pervert the course of justice in our beautiful country, Papua New Guinea.

The PNG Police Commissioners actions and media release has the fingerprints of the Prime Minister all over. The importation of the words used by the Prime Minister and the way they are effected by the Commissioner echo the PMs voice  John Steward

If it was a gun-battle against any tribe or nation, I am sure Papua New Guineans would raise their hands to fight  and we would fight like hell.

But the war against corruption is more than a gun-battle and it has taken its toll of us so much that our frontliners, the Damaru-Koim team, have been stripped of their shields, arms and bullets. They are exhausted and worn out.

It has come to a point where evil has superseded the powers of righteousness.

So, for a moment, let evil laugh and celebrate the suffocation, suppression and perversion of the cause of justice.

But when justice again takes its stand, we will walk straight into the hideaway of the evil doers, revealing every secret of their ill-formed plans.

When justice is finally restored, celebrations will be seen in every city and village throughout the country. The mass of our eight million souls will celebrate.

The babies will give cries of joy. The children will clap and jump. Fathers and mothers will smile with hope. The old will mumble with tears.

The time will come when justice will stand tall with no fear and peace roam the airwaves of this beautiful Niugini island  the only country on the planet beautified with the unique dances, plumes, colours and rarity of the Bird of Paradise.

This is meant to be the Island of Paradise with the Bird of Paradise  the national crest and emblem is not a mistake. I love you Papua New Guinea  God bless you!
India and Mauritius have signed an agreement for cooperation in the field of traditional medicine and homeopathy, a move which will help both the nations to conduct joint research and exchange experts in these fields.

The MoU, signed during the recent visit of Minister of State for AYUSH Shripad Yesso Naik to Mauritius, will promote cooperation in the field of traditional system of health and medicine between the two countries which already share these traditions due to their "unique historical and cultural ties".

The agreement envisages exchange of experts, supply of traditional medicinal substances, joint research and development and recognition of the traditional systems of health and medicine in both countries, the ministry said in a statement.

"It also aims at promotion and popularisation of the various Indian traditional systems which fall under AYUSH," it said.

Terming the agreement to be of "immense importance" to both countries, the ministry said that as a part of its mandate to propagate Indian systems of medicine globally, AYUSH has also entered into MoUs with China, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, Hungary, Bangladesh and Nepal.

"The financial resources necessary to conduct research, training courses, meetings and deputations of experts will be met from the existing allocated budget and existing plan schemes of AYUSH.

"Both India and Mauritius share several cultural, historical, linguistic and literary similarities, traditional medicine including medicinal plants are promising areas which need to be further explored and can prove to be mutually beneficial to the people of the two countries," the statement said.

It said that Mauritius also has a long history of traditional medicine and both countries share a common culture with respect to the ayurvedic system of medicine.

"Moreover, there are a large number of medicinal plants, particularly those found in the tropical region and are common to the two countries given similar geo-climatic factors," it added.
India may insist on a written commitment for the visit of a NIA team to Pakistan to probe the terror attack in Pathankot airbase following indications that it may not be averse to such a visit.

Official sources said the Home Ministry will ask the External Affairs Ministry to seek a written commitment from Pakistan on the National Investigation Agency team's visit whenever the next bilateral engagement takes place.

Investigators have found that Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar, his brother Abdul Rauf and two other individuals - Kasif Jaan and Shahid Latif - were the main conspirators of the January 2 attack on the strategic airbase and India will insist access to all of them whenever NIA will visit Pakistan.

Sources said so far there have been no indication of any "insider hand" in the Pathankot incident and it was planned and executed by Pakistan-based JeM only, sources said.

Pakistan Prime Minister's Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz yesterday indicated that his country may consider such a request.

On whether NIA team will be allowed to visit Pakistan in connection with Pathankot attack probe, Aziz said, "Once the stage is reached...India makes a request and then we will see".

Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju yesterday said the government was hopeful that a team of NIA will soon visit Pakistan to gather evidence in connection with the Pathankot terror attack.

"We are hopeful that a team of NIA will visit Pakistan soon," he said.

Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit had indicated last fortnight that Indian investigators may not be allowed to visit Pakistan to pursue the probe in connection with the Pathankot attack.

However, India countered it by saying that before the visit of a Pakistani Joint Investigation Team here last month, both sides had agreed that it would be on the basis of reciprocity.
At least six persons, including an Indian-American woman, were killed in "historic" flash flooding here, submerging of scores of subdivisions and several major interstate highways and forcing the closure of schools.

Sunita Singh, 47, senior electrical engineer at Bechtel Oil & Gas was found dead in her car, while rushing to her work yesterday.

It looked like she and others were trying to get to work when she was trapped in flood waters, an official said.

Sunita' is survived by her husband and 15-year-old son.

Her husband Rajiv Singh said that she called around 6:50 AM and said she was in trouble, but immediately thought help was on her way. But that did not happen and she was found later dead in her car.

One of the victims was found in a submerged 18-wheeler cab on the N Beltway 8 frontage road near the Hardy Toll Road. Two others were found in separate vehicles.

In Waller County, a 56-year-old Royal ISD teacher was found inside a submerged vehicle off Adams Flat Road.

More than 470 flights were cancelled at Bush Intercontinental and Hobby Airport in the morning hours.

An overnight storm dumped between 8 and 16 inches of water on the area. The heavy rainfall also closed local schools, knocked out power for more than 121,000 residents, cancelled flights and made many roadways impassable.

More than 1,200 high water rescues have been reported by Houston and Harris County officials.

Officials in Harris County havedeclared a disaster areaand estimate at least 1,000 homes have already been flooded.

More than halfthe watersheds in Harris County are experiencing significant flooding, withleast onecresting above its estimated 500-year flood mark, a new all-time record.

The local National Weather Service (NWS) has warned residents not to travel "unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order."



About 120,000 homesare without power, and school and transit systems are shut down across the region.

"Houston is in the midst of an unbelievable deluge, with already more rainfall in a single day than any hurricane to ever hit the hurricane-prone city. The flooding is "historic", NWS said in a statement.

The City of Houston closed city offices, including municipal courts, and has told non-essential employees to stay home for the day.
Indian Maritime University has signed memorandum of understanding with four universities from UK, Russia, and Bangladesh as part of facilitating cooperation between the varsities.

Indian Maritime University senior officials exchanged documents with the representatives of various Universities in the presence of Union Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari at the recently held Maritime India Summit in Mumbai, an official release here said.

Indian Maritime University signed MoUs with Plymouth University (United Kingdom), Admiral G I Nevelskoi Maritime State University (Russia), Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers (London) and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Maritime University (Dhaka).

The aim of the MoUs was in facilitating co-operation between the universities on faculty and student exchange, taking up joint post-graduate programmes, scientific and technological research, among others.

As part of providing opportunities for candidates from Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Indian Maritime University signed another MoU with the Andaman and Nicobar Administration.

The MoU allows students from Port Blair to take up Common Entrance Test conducted for admissions to Maritime University programmes, it said.
US President Barack Obama said he expects Iraq's second city Mosul to be retaken from the Islamic State group "eventually".

Obama's comments in an interview with CBS yesterday came on the same day that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Washington would send Apache attack helicopters and more troops to Iraq. "As we see the Iraqis willing to fight and gaining ground, let's make sure that we're providing them more support," Obama said.

"We're not doing the fighting ourselves, but when we provide training, when we provide special forces who are backing them up, when we are gaining intelligence - working with the coalitions that we have - what we've seen is that we can continually tighten the noose," he added.

"My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall."



Mosul, in northern Iraq, was overrun during a jihadist offensive in June 2014 and has become an IS stronghold.

Washington heads an international coalition that is carrying out strikes against IS and also providing training and other assistance to forces fighting the jihadists in both Iraq and neighboring Syria.

Carter, on an unannounced trip to Baghdad, said the Apaches being sent to Iraq will support Iraqi efforts to surround and eventually recapture Mosul.

Iraqi forces have begun preparatory operations in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, but the actual assault to retake the city is not expected for months, and possibly not until next year.
Embattled Iraqi parliament speaker Salim al-Juburi said today parliament sessions would be suspended "until further notice" after a week of turmoil during which lawmakers brawled and sought to sack him.

Some MPs voted last week to remove Juburi and elected Adnan al-Janabi as his interim replacement, meaning there are now two claimants to the speakership.

Juburi insists the vote to sack him and his deputies was invalid because the session lacked the necessary quorum, but his opponents are seeking to move ahead with selecting replacements.

"I announce the suspension of sessions... Of the Iraqi parliament until further notice," Juburi said in a statement.

But Janabi has called for a session to be held on Thursday, so MPs may still meet without Juburi's leadership.

Juburi's decision was taken to "preserve the reputation of parliament" and prevent it from being "a place for conflict", he said.

There has been plenty of conflict in parliament over the past week: lawmakers held an overnight sit-in and threw punches in the chamber, as well as seeking to sack Juburi.

The turmoil began with disagreement over two proposed cabinet line-ups presented by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, but shifted to calls for Juburi to go.

Abadi has sought to replace the cabinet of party-affiliated ministers with a government of technocrats, but has faced significant opposition from powerful political parties that rely on control of ministries for patronage and funds.

Both the United States and the United Nations have warned that the political crisis could distract from efforts to combat the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group, which overran large areas of Iraq in 2014.
ISIS is viewing Britain's EU referendum with "great interest" and is likely planning an attack in the UK to persuade people to vote for exiting the powerful bloc, a jihadi-turned British spy has claimed.

Aimen Dean, who once swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden in person, said Islamist extremists in al-Qaeda and ISIS would see the UK's departure from the European Union as a first step in the destruction of the grouping, which they see as a successor to the Roman Empire.

Whatever the Islamic State can do to break up that empire is justifiable to them, said the former jihadist, who became disillusioned with al-Qaeda in 1998 and acted as double agent until 2006, when his name was revealed in a book.

The recent attacks in Brussels and Paris are also part of a strategy to destroy non-Islamic institutions and states and provoke conflict between Muslim and non-Muslims in the Middle East, Dean told the Time magazine.

ISIS views Britain's European Union referendum in June with "great interest" and is likely planning an attack in the UK which would persuade voters to leave the EU, he said.

"If the referendum result leads to the UK leaving the EU, ISIS will take credit for having struck the first significant blow against the EU which it sees as representing the nations that carried out crusades against Muslim states for control of the Holy Lands between 1089 and 1390," he said.

Dean, 38, was brought up in Saudi Arabia but embarked on his first jihad in 1994 to fight with Bosnian Muslims against Serb nationalists in the former Yugoslavia. From there he went to Afghanistan where his Islamic education impressed aides of Osama.

Dean's transformation came after the 1998 al-Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which left 224 dead -- all but 12 were local civilians.

He disagreed with al-Qaeda's justification for killing civilians and went from al-Qaeda activist to "betrayer", with the help of the secret services of Qatar and then the UK.

Dean, who advises both public and private sectors on terrorism from his base in Dubai, also claims that a civil war within Muslim communities is driving the west towards further Middle East conflict.

He said Muslim communities worldwide are in conflict, similar to the wars of the Reformation in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, he said.

"The West is the side casualty," Dean said.
Bangladesh police today claimed to have found evidence about links of two detained pro-opposition senior journalists to abduction and murder plot of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's son in the US.

"Journalist Shafik Rehman has admitted that he held several meetings with those who hatched the plot to abduct and kill him (Hasina's son Sajib Wajed Joy)," police spokesman Monirul Islam told reporters.

Rehman, 81, an editor and adviser to ex-premier Khaleda Zia, was detained over what was termed a plot to kill Joy. He was quizzed by police for the second consecutive day today under a five-day remand order since his arrest on Saturday.

Islam said police also found links of opposition BNP mouthpiece Amar Desh editor Mahmudur Rahman, 62, who is in jail since 2013 under several other charges, in the plot and "legal procedure is underway to secure a court order for him to be remanded in our custody for interrogation."



Another official familiar with the investigation said police recovered several "confidential documents" of FBI about the plot during a search at Rehman's house.

"Rehman himself handed those (FBI) papers to us as we led him to his house under our custody after he admitted his links to the US-based plotters," police Detective Branch's deputy commissioner Mashruqur Rahman Khaled told newsmen.

Rehman, a TV anchor who was previously the editor of daily Jai Jai Din and currently runs fun weekly Mouchake Dhil, is regarded as a top intellectual aide of Zia whose BNP is now the key-opposition outside parliament as it declined to contest the 2014 general elections under Hasina's premiership.

The developments came a day after Hasina said her government would definitely take actions against those who would be found involved in her the plot.

In 2015, a New York court convicted US-based BNP leader Mahmud Ullah Mamun's son Rizvi Ahmed Caesar for bribing former FBI agent Robert Lustyik to get information about Joy's activities in the US.

According to media reports, middleman Johannes Thaler and the FBI agent were convicted by the US court after Caesar had admitted that he intended to 'scare,' 'kidnap' and 'hurt' Joy.

The allegations say some top leaders of the BNP and its allies met in the UK, the US and in the capital's Paltan and other parts of the country before September 2012 and conspired to abduct and kill Joy.

Meanwhile, BNP condemned Rehman's arrest and demanded his immediate release with its secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir saying the government arrested him to divert peoples' attention from its numerous failures.'



"The incident proves that there is no democracy in the country and nobody has the right to express his free opinion," Alamgir said.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has condemned the terrorist attack in a bus in Jerusalem which left at least 21 people injured.

"Our thoughts tonight are with the 21 innocent men and women and their families," Kerry said yesterday during a function hosted by the Israeli advocacy group J Street.

"This certainly bears all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack and we condemn it in the strongest possible terms. These outrages are solely determine to instill fear. They will never succeed in intimidating the Israeli people," Kerry said.

"What this tragedy also does is it also underscores the importance of ending this conflict," he said in his remarks.

A bomb blast ripped through a bus and sparked a fire, in Jerusalem yesterday wounding at least 21 pepole.
The body of Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh, who died under mysterious circumstances in a Pakistani jail, arrived here today in the presence of tearful family members and handed over to Indian authorities who said it would be given to them after a fresh post-mortem.

Kirpal's family members, including his sister Jagir Kaur, Punjab Cabinet Minister Gulzar Singh Ranike and Amritsar Deputy Commissioner Varun Roojam, besides other senior officials, were present at the Joint check post at the Wagah border to receive the body.

Dalbir Kaur, sister of another Indian Sarabjit Singh, who too had died in a Pakistani jail in May 2013, was also present.

An official posted at Attari border said the body would be handed over to the family for performing last rites after a postmortem examination, which is to be conducted at the "earliest".

Struggling to hold back her tears, Jagir said the family would perform Kirpal's last rites in Gurdaspur once his body was handed over to them.

Kirpal Singh had allegedly crossed Wagah border into Pakistan in 1992 and was arrested.

He was subsequently sentenced to death in a serial bomb blasts case in Pakistan's Punjab province.

Kirpal was found dead in his cell last Monday at Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore.

A post-mortem examination had been done in Pakistan.

Kirpal, from Gurdaspur, had reportedly been acquitted in the case by the Lahore High Court but his death sentence could not be commuted because of unknown reasons.
Mr Baki accused the suspended fraud squad officers of insubordination and circumventing police procedures by not keeping him informed of the fraud case.

After being the subject of a stay order since 2014, the investigation resumed two weeks ago, prompting last weeks arrests of the prime minister's lawyer, the attorney-general and a Supreme Court judge.

Sir Arnold Amet was commenting on Mr Bakis suspension of anti-fraud detectives who had been investigating a major case implicating prime minister Peter O'Neill.

A FORMER Papua New Guinea chief justice has told Radio New Zealand International that police commissioner Gary Bakis claim that he needed to give approval for any fraud squad investigation was flawed.

"Fraud squad officers, detectives, criminal investigators are all mandated under the constitution and laws to continue their investigations, Sir Arnold said.

They don't need to get the commissioner's signature and authority in every instance of their investigation. That's flawed. This commissioner has been appointed by this prime minister and they are trying to corrupt the process."

Sir Arnold Amet said the court had continuously upheld the officers responsibility and due process.

Meanwhile, the Australian government has maintained its extraordinary silence on events which have been undermining PNGs rule of law, much to the discomfort of many Papua New Guineans.

In a situation where the rule of law triumph and the Constitution are being undermined, the Australian government has remained strangely mute.

It has not even sought to offer cautionary advice in a scenario where influence can be exercised, words spoken and positions taken. It seems Australia is no better than a fair weather friend that restricts itself to silence when trouble strikes.

There is a view growing amongst Papua New Guinea watchers in Australia that our nearest neighbour is sliding inexorably to a point where it will be governed by a group of oligarchs who will operate only in their own interests.

Fears are being expressed that nest years national election will be conducted in circumstances that will be neither free nor fair.

Grave concerns are also held about a national economy that has declined to a point where some domestic banks are said to be taking extraordinary risks to prop up PNG government spending.

In other news, PNG Blogs reports that the National Court refused an application filed by Peter ONeill and the National Executive Council to adjourn the hearing of two notices of motion relating to the legal representation of the Task Force Sweep Team chairman Sam Koim.

Desmond Kipa, from Twivey Lawyers, told the court that lawyer Tiffany Twivey (pictured on left of photo) was in charge of the two motions and could not be available in court as an outcome of her arrest a week ago.

Ms Twivey stated in an affidavit that she was locked up at the National Fraud and Anti-Corruption interview room on Monday last week for about 14 hours with no electricity and water, which affected her physically and psychologically.

A medical certificate was submitted to the court indicating Ms Twivey was not fit for work.

Justice Collin Makail, in refusing the application, said every person was subjected to such conditions in the police stations. Thats the reality in PNG, Justice Makail said.

Why would Twiveys situation be treated different from others? What happened to Twivey was a reality, which will be experienced by everyone, he said.
Lord Mahavir was a great environmentalist and to conserve the environment he travelled across the country for over 42 years, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said today.

Speaking on the occasion of 'Mahavir Jayanti' at a function at Chitnis Park stadium here, he said Lord Mahavir has taught us to control our speech and mind.

"Instead of fighting with our own, we should fight our evil qualities," he said quoting Lord Mahavir.

The Chief Minister also said the state government has taken the initiative of celebrating 'Mangitungi Mahahotsav' in Nashik district and has sanctioned Rs 100 crore for the purpose. Of this, Rs 40 crore has already been spent.

For the first time such a celebration is being organised by the Maharashtra government, he added.

Fadnavis lauded the contribution of the Jain community saying it "had a major share in overall economy of the country".
A Malaysian has been arrested for trying to smuggle more than half a tonne of cannabis into his country across Thailand's southern border, police said today.

It was the latest major bust on a well-worn smuggling route.

Mohd Nizam Bin Ishak, 34, was stopped on Monday while driving a truck with fake Malaysian licence plates at a border checkpoint at Sadao in Thailand's province of Songkhla.

Investigators said they found 520 kilograms of marijuana worth around USD 440,000 hidden under furniture in the back of the truck.

"The suspect confessed to the trafficking charge and said he was hired for 1,000 ringgit ($257) to transport marijuana from Hat Yai (in Songkhla) to a warehouse in Kuala Lumpur," police Lieutenant General Rawat Klinkasorn said in a statement.

The suspect also allegedly confessed to taking drugs along the same route on previous occasions.

Thailand is both a producer and major transit hub for drugs.

Much of the regional drug manufacturing takes place in the Golden Triangle, a remote border area where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet.

Major General Chartee Paisarnsilp, divisional commander of the narcotics suppression police, told AFP the cannabis came from a neighbouring country but declined to say which.

Thai police last month announced a major bust involving a Malaysian gang allegedly smuggling millions of dollars of heroin and methamphetamine between the two countries by train.

So far 21 Malaysians have been arrested for links to that operation.

Drugs usually sell for a significantly higher price in Muslim-majority Malaysia, making it a tempting prospect for criminals.

Police forces in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Malaysia often announce drug smuggling busts that usually catch mules or low-paid members of criminal gangs.

But arrests of cartel leaders and kingpins are much rarer, with many of the region's biggest players staying in business for decades.
Manipur Chief Minister O Ibobi Singh has made an appeal to the insurgents to come for talks.

"If there is a problem, there must be a solution," Singh was quoted as saying in a release issued by the CM's secretariat today.

Singh made the appeal at an event organised by the Art of Living, Manipur Chapter yesterday.

Founder of the Art of Living, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, who was present at the programme, also urged the Chief Minister to ask the insurgents to come to the negotiating table.

"Running in the forest will not solve problems," the spiritual guru said.

Before his departure from Imphal this morning, Ravi Shankar told reporters that 20 seats will be reserved for Manipuri students in the Odisha-based Sri Sri University.
Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) activists today demonstrated in front of the office of a city-based developer firm which "fraudulently" advertised about one bedroom flats for Rs five lakh each as part of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna.

The activists entered the corporate office of Maple at Shivajinagar and stopped the booking for the low-cost flats which were still going on despite the government ordering a probe into the company's scheme.

"The MNS workers led by Ajay Shinde raised slogans at Maple's office and tore the posters of the scheme. None of the activists have been arrested," an official at the city police control room said.

The advertisement, which was published last week, carried the photographs of the Prime Minster, the Maharashtra Chief Minister and Guardian Minister of Pune Girish Bapat.

The dream budget flats, promised to be built on the outskirts of Pune, attracted a large number of people who thronged the offices of the developer firm for enrollment by depositing a non-refundable amount of Rs 1,145.

Maharashtra state director of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna Nirmalkumar Deshmukh has directed MHADA to initiate action against the firm for misrepresenting the project as part of the government-approved low-cost housing scheme.

Bapat, who ordered a collector level inquiry into the episode, has dissociated himself from the firm saying that his photograph and name was published by Maple without his consent.
Prime Minister is expected to visit the US on June 7 and 8, a bipartisan group of four top American lawmakers said today and asked the Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan to invite him for a joint meeting of the Congress.

There has been no official announcement from either the White House or the Prime Minister's Office in New Delhi.

"Indian Prime Minister is expected to visit Washington on June 7 and 8 of this year," Congressmen Ed Royce, Eliot Engel, George Holding and Ami Bera said in a letter to Ryan.

Royce is Chairman of the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee and Engel is its Ranking Member. Holding and Bera are Co-Chairs of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans.

"Given the depth of our relationship with India across a range of areas -- defence, humanitarian and disaster relief, space cooperation, conservation, and innovation, -- we believe this is an ideal opportunity for the Congress to hear directly from the Prime Minister," they said.

"Therefore, we ask that you invite Prime Minister Modi to address a Joint Meeting of Congress. It is our understanding that if invited, the Prime Minister would accept," the four lawmaker said in their letter dated April 19, a copy of which was released to the press.

The bipartisan group of Congressmen said the US partnership with India is based on a foundation of shared values, including the rule of law, electoral democracy, and religious pluralism.

"This renewed partnership has found champions in the leadership of both parties, including both President Clinton and President George W Bush, and has been further emboldened in the United States by a strong, proud, and growing Indian-American diaspora," the letter said.

Observing that US-India relationship has seen significant growth, the Congressmen said the US President Barack Obama has visited India twice, and Modi reciprocated with two trips of his own to the United States.

"Our two countries have signed a defense framework agreement to increase military cooperation and the civilian nuclear agreement, signed in 2008, will result in the construction of nuclear power plants in India," the letter said.

"Additionally, the United States and India are forging closer ties to address humanitarian crises, such as the aftermath of the earthquake in Nepal, in the renewable energies sector, and in space exploration. It is no wonder that the partnership has been characterised as the defining partnership of the 21st century," it said.

"The US-India relationship consistently garners strong bipartisan support. Inviting Prime Minister Modi to address a Joint Meeting will allow Congress to express support for this special global partnership," the four top American lawmakers said.
More rockets hit a Turkish town on the Syrian border today, wounding at least three people, a day after five were killed by fire from an area of Syria controlled by jihadists, a Turkish government official said.

In the last few weeks, Islamic State (IS) jihadists have repeatedly fired rockets at Kilis, the only town in Turkey where refugees from Syria's five-year conflict now outnumber local Turks.

"Three rockets slammed into three different spots in the centre of Kilis, one in an empty field, one near a school and another near a mosque," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The official said the rocket fire left three people lightly injured while the strikes caused a fire to break out one of the houses.

Four Syrian children are now confirmed to have been killed in the strikes by Katyusha-type rockets yesterday on Kilis, along with a Syrian shepherd, the CNN-Turk and NTV channels reported.

The death toll from yesterday's rocket strikes rose to five on Tuesday after another Syrian child died in hospital, reports said.

The children were killed when a rocket ripped through a three-storey building where nine Syrian families had been living, state-run agency Anatolia said.

The children had lost their fathers in the war at home and had come to Turkey with their mothers around two years ago, it added.

At least 11 people have now been killed so far in strikes on Kilis from Syria but this was the heaviest toll recorded so far in a single day.

Last week, Kilis residents held protests over the inability of local authorities to protect them, prompting a visit by Turkey's powerful spy chief Hakan Fidan.

The government has promised to compensate the material losses sustained by the residents by the strikes from Syria.

Turkey has responded to each of the strikes on Kilis by destroying the launching positions of the jihadists with howitzer fire.

Turkish officials have repeatedly lauded the hospitality of people in Kilis towards Syrians as an example of how Turks are hosting the 2.7 million Syrians who have fled their country's civil war to Turkey.
Most of the hitches in the multi-billion Euro deal for 36 fighter planes have been addressed and the remaining ones will be cleared in the next meeting of the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh said on Tuesday.

The meeting of the DAC, the apex body of the defence ministry for procurement, is likely to take place on April 21, a day after Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar arrives here from his visit to China.

Hoping that the deal would be inked soon, Indian Air Force (IAF) Chief Arup Raha said, "It is at a very advanced stage."

Singh told reporters here, "I can only tell you this that most of the hitches that were there have been addressed. A few (remaining) issues will be addressed, when possibly the matter comes up before DAC. They shall be addressed in the next DAC. And thereafter I think the road shall be clear."

He was asked as to when the deal is likely to be signed.

When the same question was put to Air Chief Marshal Raha on the sidelines of an IAF seminar, he said, "We have seen so many years go past. How can I give an assurance? But it is in a very advanced stage."

The junior defence minister brushed aside a suggestion that at least six indigenously made Light Combat Aircraft Tejas can be bought for the price of one plane, saying both the aircraft were totally different in nature and that IAF needed both.

India and France could firm up the order for the purchase of 36 Rafale combat planes as both the countries have managed to narrow down their differences over pricing.

The development comes nearly four months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Francois Hollande signed a memorandum of understanding to purchase 36 Rafale aircraft.

The Indian side has been negotiating hard to bring down the price, with Parrikar refusing to buckle under pressure even as questions were raised about the delay in signing of the contract.

Sources said that the price for 36 Rafales, according to the United Progressive Alliance government's tender, keeping the cost escalation and dollar rate in mind, comes to a little over Rs 65,000 crore.

This includes the cost involved in making changes India has sought in the aircraft, including Israeli helmet-mounted display and some specific weaponry.

"The effort is to bring down the price to less than Euros 8 billion (Rs 59,000 crore)," the sources said.

The final deal may be clinched by May-end.
India and France have resolved most of the "hitches" in the multi-billion Euro Rafale deal and the remaining issues will be cleared in the next DAC meet, scheduled to be held on Thursday, Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh said today.

He also defended the cost of the aircraft when a reporter questioned the estimated Rs 65,000 crore deal at a time when some people in the country were eating "rotis made of grass", saying without the nation being secure, even that would not be possible.

The meeting of the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), the apex body of the Defence Ministry for procurement, is likely to take place on April 21, a day after Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar arrives here from his visit to China.

Hoping that the Rafale deal would be inked soon, Indian Air Force Chief Arup Raha said, "It is at a very advanced stage."



"I can only tell you this that most of the hitches that were there, have been addressed. A few (remaining) issues will be addressed, when possibly the matter comes up before DAC. They shall be addressed in the next DAC. And thereafter I think the road shall be clear," Singh told reporters here.

He was asked as to when the deal is likely to be signed.

When the same question was put to Air Chief Marshal Raha on the sidelines of an IAF seminar, he said, "We have seen so many years go past. How can I give an assurance? But it is in a very advanced stage."



The junior defence minister brushed aside a suggestion that at least six indigenously made Light Combat Aircraft Tejas can be bought for the price of one Rafale plane, saying the two aircraft were totally different in nature and that IAF needed both.

Asked by a TV reporter as to how the government can justify the price of Rafales at a time when people in some parts of the country are "eating rotis made of grass", Singh said development can happen only when the borders and the sky over the country is safe.

"Development can happen in a country only when the borders are safe and when the sky over the country is safe. And if that security is not there, rotis made of grass also cannot be eaten.

"Hence, Rafale is needed, this is a different kind of aircraft. LCA is a different kind of aircraft. Both are needed," he said, adding that efforts are being taken to ensure that money allocated for defence is spent judiciously to ensure that the air force is made stronger.

India and France could firm up the order for the purchase



of 36 Rafale combat planes they have managed to narrow down their differences over pricing.

The development comes nearly four months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Francois Hollande signed a memorandum of agreement for aircraft's purchase..

The Indian side has been negotiating hard to bring down the price, with Parrikar refusing to buckle under pressure even as questions were raised about the delay in signing of the contract.

Sources said the price for 36 Rafales, as per the UPA government's tender, keeping the cost escalation and dollar rate in mind, comes to a little over Rs 65,000 crore.

This includes the cost involved in making changes India has sought in the aircraft, including Israeli helmet-mounted display and some specific weaponry.

"The effort is to bring down the price to less than Euros 8 billion (Rs 59,000 crore)," the sources said.

The final deal may be clinched by May-end.
A British Muslim father of Algerian descent has lost a court battle with his England-born wife on whether to circumcise their sons according to Islamic principles.

The boys, aged six and four, had been the subject UK high court dispute after their parents disagreed over whether to have them circumcised.

Their father, who has lived in England for 15 years, argued that it would be in the children's best interests to circumcise them in accordance with his "Muslim practice and religious beliefs".

Their mother, however, wanted to wait until the boys were "competent to give consent".

"First and foremost, this is a once and for all, irreversible procedure. There is no guarantee that these boys will wish to continue to observe the Muslim faith with the devotion demonstrated by their father," Justice Roberts said in her ruling.

The details of the case emerged yesterday after a ruling by Roberts.

The judge said no one involved could be identified, but she said the man and woman were both in their mid-30s and now separated.

The couple met in 2006 and lived together in London.

They went through an Islamic ceremony for marriage in 2009 before the boys were born.

But then in July 2012 the mother fled the flat with the boys following violent attacks on her by the father, according to reports.

"Just as the father is passionate in his cause and the reasons for circumcision, the mother is resolutely opposed to it at this point," the judge said, adding that she was simply "deferring" the decision until the boys can make their own choice.
Unless it is stopped, North Korea will eventually acquire intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities, the four-star general selected to lead US forces in South Korea told lawmakers today.

Speaking at his nomination hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Vincent Brooks warned that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un was determined to build rockets that could one day reach as far as the United States.

"It's very clear through the parades that they've done, what systems they have and some of the attempted launches that ... Over time, I believe we're going to see them acquire these capabilities if they're not stopped," Brooks said.

Senator John McCain, who chairs the committee, asked Brooks how concerned he was about the "immaturity and unpredictability of the rotund ruler in Pyongyang."



"I'm very concerned about the direction he's going, and it's evident that he's not yet deterred from his pursuit," Brooks responded.

"If confirmed, I intend to be a close partner with the Republic of Korea to make sure they're ready."



The US military has kept a huge contingent of troops in South Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

The two Koreas technically remain at war, because the conflict ended in an armistice instead of a peace treaty.

Currently, about 28,500 US troops are stationed in South Korea, and the two forces have very close military ties and continually conduct joint training.

Brooks also voiced concern about North Korea's pursuit of building submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

"While they have not been successful, this is like watching someone ride a bike and falling off of it, but eventually they could become a BMX champion," he said.

The Pentagon is confident it has adequate missile defenses to protect against a threat from North Korea, but officials have watched with increasing alarm as Kim pushes forward with his nuclear tests and missile program.

Pyongyang last week conducted a test of what appeared to be a medium-range missile, but the rocket suffered a catastrophic failure on launch.

Washington and Seoul are discussing the deployment to South Korea of a sophisticated THAAD system -- Theater High Altitude Area Defense System -- to protect against ballistic missiles from the North.

McCain indicated that the committee would move forward with Brooks's nomination.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is hoping to win 95 delegates in the New York primary Tuesday night.

But it won't be easy.

For the Democratic and Republican primaries, New York awards most of its delegates based on how candidates perform in each of the state's 27 congressional districts.

There are 247 delegates up for grabs in the Democratic primary. Republicans will compete for 95 delegates.

Here is how delegates will be awarded in the New York Democratic and Republican presidential primaries:

DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY

The delegates will be awarded proportionally based on how Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders perform in each congressional district. There are 163 delegates up for grabs in the 27 districts. Most districts have six or seven delegates on the line. A few have five.

Democrats will use a formula to determine how many delegates a candidate wins in each congressional district. To receive any delegates, a candidate must receive at least 15 percent of the vote in a district.

An additional 84 delegates will be awarded based on the statewide result. Again, to receive any delegates, a candidate must get at least 15 percent of the vote.

Clinton is favored to win the New York primary, but Sanders will win some delegates. What will be interesting to watch is how many votes he can pick up in upstate New York, where Clinton's campaign spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks.

REPUBLICAN PRIMARY

Republican candidates Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Donald Trump will compete for 81 delegates in New York's 27 congressional districts. If a candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, he'll win all three delegates in a congressional district.

If two or three candidates each receive at least 20 percent of the vote in a district, the delegates will be split. (If it's two candidates reaching that threshold, the top vote-getter will receive two delegates. The runner-up will get one.)

The statewide winner will get an additional 14 delegates if they receive more than 50 percent of the overall tally.

If the top vote-getter doesn't hit the 50 percent mark, the delegates will be proportionally awarded to the candidates who received at least 20 percent of the vote.

The question is whether Trump, a Manhattan real estate mogul, can sweep the state's 95 delegates. It won't be easy to reach the 50 percent mark in each congressional district. Trump should fare well in western New York, where he enjoys strong support from U.S. Rep. Chris Collins, a Buffalo-area congressman, and Buffalo businessman Carl Paladino, who ran for governor in 2010.

But what about the rest of the state? Central New York is one of the few places in the state that hosted all three GOP presidential candidates. In fact, Kasich made two stops in the region before the primary.

Trump will get a much-needed win Tuesday night. But he needs delegates, not a feel-good moment. Winning all 95 delegates would give him a major boost.
Nagaland Chief Secretary Pankaj Kumar has become the first Ambassador for Girl Child (AFGC) under the Centre's Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) project, officials said today.

Kumar also released the AFGC badge during a meeting of various head of departments yesterday, they said.

The BBBP project was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year to address the issue of decline in Child Sex Ratio, while AFGC is the brain child of Nagaland State Resource Centre for Women.

Under the 'Ambassador Scholarship' programme, officers of various departments will have the opportunity to support a girl child in realising her dreams, Secretary of State Resource Centre for Women Daisy Mezhur said.

Every AFGC will provide one under privileged girl child the chance to live a better life besides contributing towards quality education of such girls.

Under this scheme, one can also speak about the importance of girl child and her education in every relevant platforms, she added.
A National Conference MLA today alleged he was "harassed" by Jammu and Kashmir police prompting party chief Omar Abdullah to condemn the incident, and demanded strict action against the police officials.

The incident happened yesterday in Jammu when Abdul Majid Larmi's vehicle was stopped after the police received a PCR call about a person holding an AK-47 assault rifle in a vehicle who turned out to be the personal security officer of the MLA.

"Upon reaching Jammu at 7.30 PM, I was stopped by a police team at Bakshi Nagar with a Sub-Inspector inquiring about our identities", Larmi claimed, adding once he introduced himself as an MLA and other occupants as his PSO and driver, the officer kept asking about parentage and other questions.

The MLA from HumshaliBugh constituency alleged that police ignored their identity cards and kept them virtually under confinement for 45 minutes.

The police, however, denied the allegations levelled by the National Conference leader.

"Someone called up and informed us that a person with a black jacket was holding an AK 47 assault weapon in a vehicle. We flashed the vehicle number and the vehicle was intercepted near GMC Jammu", SHO Bakshi Nagar Ashwani Kumar said.

He said after questioning it was found that the person was the personal security officer (PSO) of the MLA who was wearing a black jacket on his uniform.

"We asked the PSO to remove the jacket as it was sending a wrong signal amongst the common people and after that we let them go. There is no question of any harassment or illegal confinement of anybody", the SHO said.

The issue prompted anger from the party's working president Omar Abdullah who attacked the state government for "illegitimately harassing legislators".

"This is a clear case of brazen contempt and disrespect being shown towards the Legislative Assembly and does not bode well for the institutions of democracy in the state," he said in a statement in Srinagar.

The priorities of our chief minister and the State government are clear and evident and sadly it seems they would much rather focus their attention on of the principal opposition party rather than deliver on their promises," he said.

Meanwhile the party's provincial president, Devender Singh Rana said a privilege motion will be moved in the state assembly and legal recourse will be taken to punish the guilty.
Nepal government has decided to observe September 20 as the national day to mark the promulgation of the country's new constitution last year.

Nepal on September 20, 2015 promulgated its new constitution. The constitution was endorsed through 85 per cent of the votes in the 601-member Constituent Assembly despite boycott by Madhesi parties.

The decision was made during a cabinet meeting, said minister for Information and communication Sher Dhan Rai.

"There will be Government holiday on that day. As the constitution of 2015 has institutionalised the achievements of the Peoples Movement of 2006, the day constitution was promulgated will be observed as the national day, said minister Rai.

The government has scrapped holiday on Loktantra Diwas, which falls on Baishakh 11 or April 23.
Senior Bihar BJP leader Sushil Modi today alleged there has been a spurt in the state's crime graph since the Mahagathbandhan government came to power and charged Chief Minister Nitish Kumar with "ignoring" governance in "pursuance" of his national ambition.

"... Criminals have been merrily committing crimes, including murder, and even court premises are not safe from such elements," he told reporters on the sidelines of 'Janata Durbar' at his official residence.

He alleged the CM has everything else in his mind except governance, while the state grapples with "deteriorating" law and order situation.

"Kumar has compromised on governance issues in pursuance of his national ambition (of becoming prime minister one day)," he said.

Kumar had recently called for a wider Opposition unity to defeat BJP in 2019 Lok Sabha poll.

"It is high time the Chief Minister makes a choice between taking responsibility of law and order and government, for which the people of Bihar had given him a landslide, or leave the post to fulfil his national ambition on a full-time basis," the senior BJP leader said.

If Kumar feels his national ambitions are more pressing then he should vacate the Chief Minister's post in favour his deputy Tejaswi Yadav and it will be fitting that the leader of the party with largest number of seats in the Grand Alliance - that is RJD - rules the state, the former deputy CM said.

He also criticised Kumar for "burdening" Bihar police with the responsibility of ensuring implementation of prohibition saying they already have "their plates full" as they are tackling "deteriorating" law and order situation.

Referring to the murder of RJD's Saharsa district chief and death of an RJD MLA's sister in Bhojpur district for resisting eve-teasing recently, he said even ruling party leaders and their kin "do not feel safe".

The senior BJP leader demanded ban on sale of liqour in army canteens as well as tobacco products in consistent with prohibition.

Taking strong umbrage of Kumar's attack on the RSS and proposing to make the country "Sangh-mukt", Modi released a May 13, 2006 photograph of the CM showing him attending a function in Patna to mark RSS leader M S Golwalkar's birth centenary.
A New York police officer will not serve any jail time for killing an unarmed black man, after a judge today downgraded his manslaughter conviction to criminally negligent homicide.

Peter Liang, a rookie officer who had been on the job just months at the time of the November 2014 killing, was sentenced to five years probation and 800 hours of community service, the prosecutor's office said.

Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old father of one, was killed by a bullet that ricocheted off the wall in a darkened stairwell of a public housing apartment block in Brooklyn.

His death, along with others of unarmed black men at the hands of American police officers, sparked nationwide protests and fueled debate about police tactics and allegations of institutional racism.

Liang is "a convicted felon" who has "forfeited his career as a police officer and must now always live with the fact that he recklessly caused Mr Gurley's death," said Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson.

The Chinese-American officer was found guilty of manslaughter by a jury in February and had faced up a maximum sentence of 15 years. The maximum sentence for criminally negligent homicide is three years.

The trial was a rare case of a US police officer criminally charged for opening fire, but departments across the country have come under heightened scrutiny over the shootings of unarmed people, many of them black.

Liang testified that his gun went off accidentally and that he didn't realize someone was below him in the stairwell.

Brooklyn prosecutors had not sought jail time for Liang, saying that while he acted recklessly there was no evidence he intended to kill or injure Gurley.

But they disagreed with the judge's decision to downgrade Liang's manslaughter conviction.

"While our sentencing recommendation was fair under the unique circumstances of this case, we respectfully disagree with the judge's decision to reduce the jury's verdict and will fight to reverse it on appeal," said Thompson.

The United States has been gripped by protests denouncing police tactics since the high-profile deaths of two other unarmed black men at the hands of law enforcement in the summer of 2014.
States ruled by parties other than BJP voiced their reservations about various provisions of the contentious enemy property amendment Bill at a meeting of the Rajya Sabha Select Committee today.

BJP-ruled states, however, strongly favoured the Bill which seeks to guard against claims of succession or transfer of 'enemy' properties belonging to those who had migrated to Pakistan and China after the wars, sources said.

The meeting, called to seek views of Chief Secretaries/ representatives of state and Union Territory governments, saw Bihar, Kerala, Assam and some other states expressing reservations about various provisions of the Bill.

According to the sources, the most vocal protest came from the Nitish Kumar-ruled Bihar, while representatives of Congress-ruled Kerala and Assam said it will be "very difficult" to implement the law.

Many states said it was "not a good law" as it makes "even an Indian citizen enemy" by not recognising his succession rights.

Of the 15-odd states whose representatives appeared before the panel, almost half of them raised concerns about the Bill, particularly its retrospective application which will make null and void any transaction of enemy property even if it was done before the new Bill comes into force.

"It applies retrospectively to the property of all who left the country. Even if their heirs remained in India and are citizens of the country, the succession law will not apply to them and will have no right to such properties.

"Moreover, if someone or more than one persons have already bought such properties in last over 30 years, all such transactions will be declared null and void. This is a contentious Bill. It will be very difficult to implement," said a panel member from the Opposition camp.

The government, with an aim to find new enemy properties, has begun a survey in five states -- Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Delhi -- for identification of movable and immovable assets once held by people who had migrated to Pakistan.

The survey was ordered before the Enemy Property (Amendment and Validation) Bill, 2016, which sought to amend the Enemy Property Act, 1968, as passed by Lok Sabha, was referred to the Rajya Sabha Select Committee on March 15 for detailed scrutiny. Since the Bill could not be passed, an ordinance on it had to be re-promulgated recently.

As per the amendment Bill, once an enemy property is vested in the Custodian, it shall continue to be vested in him as enemy property irrespective of whether the enemy, enemy subject or enemy firm has ceased to be an enemy due to reasons such as death etc.

The government, through these proposed amendments, wants



to ensure that the law of succession does not apply to enemy property; that there cannot be transfer of any property vested in the Custodian by an enemy or enemy subject or enemy firm and that the Custodian shall preserve the enemy property till it is disposed of in accordance with law.

The amendments are aimed at plugging some loopholes in the Act and to ensure enemy properties do not revert to the enemy subject or enemy firm.

The panel, headed by BJP MP Bhupendra Yadav, asked members of the panel belonging to various parties to submit their amendments, if any, on April 23. The panel will hold clause-wise discussion on April 25, the day the budget session of Parliament resumes.

Though the panel has been tasked to scrutinise the Bill and submit its report in the opening week of the session, there are indications that it may to have to seek extension as a number of Opposition MPs in the panel today cautioned against "hurrying" on the issue.

The committee is rushing against time as the session comes to a close on May 13.

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, Custodian of Enemy Properties for India Utpal Chakraborty, officers from the Home Ministry and Law Ministry and a large number of experts and stakeholders have already recorded their views with the panel.

The central government had designated some properties belonging to nationals of Pakistan and China as "enemy properties" during the 1962, 1965 and 1971 conflicts. It vested these properties in the 'Custodian of Enemy Property for India', an office instituted under the central government.

Enemy properties in Mumbai under the jurisdiction of Custodian include Rs 310 crore worth fixed deposits, treasury bill and government stock, Rs 177.6 crore worth bank balance and Rs 37.54 lakh gold and silver jewellery as on December 31, 2015.

It is believed there are several thousand crores of rupees worth of 'enemy properties' spread across the country.

At an earlier meeting, the panel had asked the states to give their suggestions on the Bill in writing and called their Chief Secretaries but most of the states sent junior officers.

Some states sent only their Resident Commissioners based in Delhi, to which the panel members had taken strong objection.
Gujarat limped back to normalcy today after violence during the Patel quota stir on Sunday and subsequent bandh as the ruling BJP and Opposition Congress indulged in a blame game over the current phase of unrest in the State which goes to polls next year.

Officials said no untoward incident took place in Gujarat today, prompting police to lift mobile Internet ban in Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Surat and Mehsana districts this morning.

A war of words broke out between BJP and Congress each blaming the other for the current state of affairs in Gujarat arising out of the latest phase of the Patel quota agitation launched to seek reservation for the community members under OBC category.

Health Minister and Government spokesperson Nitin Patel accused Congress of inciting the protesters to resort to violence so as to keep the quota issue alive till the 2017 Assembly elections.

Congress refuted the allegation and expressed sympathy for the agitators.

Referring to stone pelting and violent clashes between Patel agitators and police at Mehsana two days back during a 'Jail Bharo' (fill the jail) rally, Nitin claimed Congress- backed elements egged on the rioters.

"Most of the agitators were against any violence and announced they will only court arrest in a peaceful manner. But, some Congress-backed elements started hurling stones and incited others for violence. We know that Congress was behind this act," alleged the Minister.

"When Government and quota agitators are engaged in talks to arrive at a solution, Congress is deliberately trying to stall the peace process as they want to drag the issue till the 2017 Assembly polls to gain political mileage," he said.

However, senior Congress leader Shankersinh Vaghela claimed violence occurred due to the "adamant" attitude of the BJP Government.

"Congress was nowhere involved in the quota agitation or in the violence. It is happening because Government is not ready to listen to the agitators. However, we do support their cause as everyone has a right to agitate and raise their demands," said Vaghela, a former Chief Minister.

On Sunday, police and quota agitators came face to face in Mehsana, where members of Sardar Patel Group (SPG) led by its chief Lalji Patel gathered for 'Jail Bharo' programme.

In the stone pelting and subsequent action by police, Lalji sustained head injury. He is being treated at a Mehsana- based private hospital, said police.

Sporadic incidents of violence were reported during the 'Gujarat Bandh' yesterday. In Mehsana, which saw maximum violence on Sunday, 19 people have been arrested on charges of rioting and arson, police said.

(Reopens BOM8)



A mob set ablaze the house of state Home Minister Rajni Patel in Mehsana yesterday.

Meanwhile, a large posse of police personnel has been deployed in and around the hospital where Lalji is being treated.

"We have arrested 19 people in Mehsana. Due to security reasons, we have deployed police force in and outside the hospital where Lalji is being treated.

"As he is also one of the accused (of rioting), we will take a call on arresting him after taking the opinion of doctors," said Mehsana Superintendent of Police Chaitanya Mandlik.
State-owned power producer NTPC has signed a pact with IIT Kanpur for research and development in the areas such as renewables, automation and power system engineering.

"NTPC and IIT Kanpur have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for research and development in the areas of mutual interest such as power system engineering, real time digital simulations, smart grid, computational sciences, grid connectivity of renewables and micro grids, sensor, robotics and automation in Delhi," the company said in a statement.

Joint R&D projects will also be taken up for developing new technologies, process and product in the field of optimisation and efficiency improvements, among others, by the two organisations, it said.

The MoU was signed by NTPC-NETRA Executive Director R K Srivastava and IIT Kanpur, Dean (R&D), Amalendu Chandra, it added.

NTPC had added 2,255 MW capacity in 2015-16 fiscal, taking its total electricity generation capability to 46,653 MW.

The company has set a target of adding 11,900 MW capacity during the current Plan period ending in 2016-17.

NTPC aims to build generation capacity of 128 GW by 2032, with a lot more emphasis on renewable energy.
US President Barack Obama has nominated Indian-American Geeta Pasi, a career foreign service officer, as the country's next envoy to Chad.

Pasi, who served as US Ambassador to Djibouti from 2011 to 2014, is a career member of the Foreign Service, Class of Minister-Counsellor. She is at present the Director of the Office of Career Development and Assignments in the Bureau of Human Resources at the Department of State.

Announcement for Pasi's nomination as the next US envoy to the central African nation of Chad came along with several other appointments to key administration post.

"I am pleased to announce that these experienced and committed individuals have decided to serve our country. I look forward to working with them," Obama said in a statement issued by the White House yesterday.

Pasi was also the Director of the Office of East African Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs from 2009 to 2011, Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Dhaka, from 2006 to 2009, and Deputy Principal Officer at the US Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany from 2003 to 2006.

Since joining the Foreign Service in 1988, Pasi has also served at posts in Cameroon, Ghana, India and Romania.

Pasi received her BA from Duke University and a MA in French Studies from New York University.
US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama would dine with British Queen Elizabeth II during his upcoming travel to England, the White House has said.

"As part of the President's upcoming travel to the UK, First Lady Michelle Obama will join President Obama for a private lunch hosted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh at Windsor Castle on April 22," the White House Press Secretary, Josh Earnest said.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry will host the 54-year-old President and Michelle for a private dinner at Kensington Palace that evening, he said.

As previously announced, the President's visit will also include a bilateral meeting and joint press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron at Number 10 Downing Street.

"The visit will allow the President to coordinate on today's most pressing international challenges with one of our closest allies and to offer his gratitude to the British Government and people for their stalwart partnership with his Administration and the American people throughout his Presidency," Earnest said.
A Cayuga County teen is raising awareness for animals needs in her community as part of achieving her Girl Scout Gold Award.

Amy DeForge, of Ira, is donating pet oxygen masks to the Cato Fire Department to educate the community on the needs of animals that have been in house fires.

"Donating these masks to a local fire department will make it so smoke inhalation can be properly treated in the animals affected by it," DeForge said in a news release. "It will also comfort the owners of these pets by knowing the Cato Fire Department has the equipment needed to help at all times."

The Cato-Meridian High School senior will demonstrate the masks at the department's open house at 10 a.m. Sunday, April 24, as she works to earn the highest award in Girl Scouts. The Gold Award requires at least 80 hours of time spent on an issue in the community as well as creating a lasting positive effect.

"It is my hope that I can inspire more people to want to do good in their communities and to get involved in helping to bring awareness to the need of pet oxygen masks," DeForge said.
Britain's Royals will this week host US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle at two separate events, during which the Obamas will dine with the Queen and the younger royals Prince William and wife Kate.

Obama and Michelle will attend a private lunch hosted by Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle on Friday, a day after her 90th birthday on April 21, before joining William and Kate for an informal dinner at their home in London the same day.

"Their Royal Highnesses are very much looking forward to welcoming President and Mrs Obama to Kensington Palace," a Kensington Palace spokesperson said.

William, the Duke of Cambridge, last met Obama in the Oval Office in 2014 and extended a personal invitation to him. The Obamas had met the Queen and Prince Philip during their state visit to the UK in 2011.

Michelle is believed to have struck a close association with the British monarch since she ignored protocol to put her arm around the Queen during an official visit in 2009.

Obama will arrive in London on the evening of the Queen's birthday on Thursday and leave on Sunday.

The US President will be in the UK as part of a tour of Saudi Arabia and Germany.

Obama is widely expected to deliver a strong anti-Brexit message during his stay. There is also speculation that the June 23 European Union (EU) referendum could come up during his conversations with the Queen.

The referendum is to decide on Britain's possible exit from the European Union, dubbed 'Brexit.'



In Washington, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the visit will allow President Obama to coordinate on today's most pressing international challenges with "one of our closest allies.
Pakistan today strongly condemned the terrorist attack in Afghanistan's capital Kabul which killed at least 28 people and wounded more than 300 others.

"We extend our heartfelt sympathies and condolences to those who have lost their loved ones and pray for an early recovery of the injured," Foreign Office (FO) said in a statement.

Pakistan strongly condemns the attack, it said.

"Pakistan condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestations and expresses solidarity with the government and brotherly people of Afghanistan in their hour of grief and struggle against terrorism," it further said.
A replica of one of the most iconic monuments destroyed by Islamic State (IS) jihadists in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra was unveiled in London's Trafalgar Square.

The six-metre (20 feet) tall scale recreation of the Triumphal Arch is made of Egyptian marble and was carved in the northern Italian region of Tuscany using precision digital technology such as 3D modelling.

The project is the brainchild of the Oxford-based Institute of Digital Technology (IDA), a joint venture between a group of international academics.

"If something can be rebuilt in this fashion, then those images of things being blown up and destroyed forever, that's undercut," IDA director Roger Michel told AFP after the replica was revealed in front of a crowd of several hundred people.

"Part of what we're doing is to send the message that things that have been destroyed can be replaced and that act of destruction is not final," he added.

Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site northeast of Damascus known as the "Pearl of the Desert", was taken back by the Russian-backed Syrian army from IS fighters last month.

The city was a major tourist destination before the Syrian conflict erupted in 2011, known for its ancient ruins, colonnaded streets and 2,000-year-old temples.

IS seized Palmyra last year and beheaded its 82-year-old former antiquities chief three months later.

The jihadists destroyed some of the city's most striking monuments and used the ancient amphitheatre as a venue for public executions.

The remains of the Triumphal Arch, dating back to the era of Roman Emperor Severus in the third century, are now scattered on the ground, with only the two columns that once sustained the central crown still standing.

Experts are divided on whether the ancient ruins can be restored.

Syria's antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim has said the job could be done in five years but Annie Sartre-Fauriat, a member of a UNESCO group of Syrian heritage experts has voiced doubts.

Abdulkarim repeated his appeal for international assistance for the restoration at Tuesday's event in London and suggested that the replica arch could go on display in the modern city of Palmyra.

"We need you, we need the international community," he said.

London Mayor Boris Johnson, who spoke at the unveiling ceremony, told the crowd that they were "here in a spirit of defiance of the barbarians who destroyed the original".
NIA has readied fresh Letters Rogatory (LRs) to be sent to Pakistan containing the addresses of four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists who attacked the strategic Pathankot IAF base in January.

The LRs are being despatched notwithstanding indications from the Pakistani side that it was not yet ready to receive Indian investigators to carry forward the probe in the January two attack that left seven security personnel dead. Four terrorists were also killed in the 80-hour gunbattle.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had put the pictures of the four dead terrorists on its official website and asked general public for help in identifying them.

According to official sources, the central probe agency, set up in the aftermath of 26/11 Mumbai attacks, was flooded with many emails, some of which originated from Pakistan also, giving information about the terrorists.

NIA, during its interaction with the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) of Pakistan, had sought details about the place of residence of the terrorists whose names had been shared with the visiting probe team. However, there was no response from Pakistan on the India's request.

The five-member JIT also comprising an ISI officer had visited India from March 27 to April one during which they visited the air base and recorded statements of 16 witnesses.

During the exercise of verification of the information gathered through emails, the NIA showed the pictures and addresses to some of the jailed terrorists of Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group lodged in jails here and got important inputs from them.
Bike taxi operator Rapido today said it has received funding from a set of investors, including Hero MotoCorp Chairman Pawan Munjal and Google India head Rajan Anandan.

The company has raised pre-series A round of funding led by Munjal, AdvantEdge Partners, Astarc Ventures and Tesellate Ventures, among others, Rapido said in a statement.

"Rapido is a commendable initiative and has the potential to generate significant employment, besides making convenient motorised transport accessible to the masses. With their strong background and passion, I believe that the founders of Rapido are well positioned to deliver on their promise," Munjal, who invested in his personal capacity, said.

Other investors include Anupam Mittal, founder and CEO of People group; Smile Group Partners; Ankit Nagori, ex CBO, Flipkart, and Kunal Khattar, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Carnation Auto, it added.

The company, however, did not disclose financial details.

"The funds will be deployed for Rapido's expansion into other cities and building up the team," Rapido co-founder Aravind Sanka said.

At the moment, the company has a fleet of over 400 bikes across Bangalore, Gurgaon and Delhi. The number is set to touch 1,000 over the next two months, Sanka disclosed.

"Our investors will contribute not only by infusing capital but by sharing expertise in scaling the business," he added.
A health foundation and a city- based umbrella business body have signed an agreement for organising capacity building programmes for skilling healthcare professionals especially in areas of chronic diseases and prevention of non-communicable siseases.

The Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) and PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PHDCCI) signed the five-year MoU aimed at augmenting the Centre's 'Skill India' flagship project and also to create a robust and vibrant eco-system for quality skill development in healthcare sector.

The MoU signed by President of PHDCCI Mahesh Gupta and President of PHFI K Srinath Reddy, will undertake country-wide initiatives for training workshops for industry, government (central and state) and MNCs on important public health issues, with a special focus on non-communicable diseases.

"The Indian healthcare sector today is growing at a brisk pace and this MoU comes at a time when the Skill India movement is looking at bringing about convergence," Gupta said.

Pointing out the major constraints faced by healthcare professionals, Gupta said this sector in India is "suffering" with overworked professionals as there is a severe shortage of staff.

The skill development workshops can be used across India to scale up and get this workforce to be competent in healthcare space.

According to the most recent figures reported in the World Health Statistics 2011, the density of doctors in India is 6 for a population of 10,000, while that of nurses and midwives is 13 per 10,000 population.

India has a doctor-to-population ratio of 0.5:1000 in comparison to 0.3 in Thailand, 0.4 in Sri Lanka, 1.6 in China, 5.4 in the UK, and 5.5 in the United States of America.

PHFI in its 2012 report estimated a shortage of 6.4 million allied health professionals in the country. The report highlighted the gap in both sheer number of professionals of various specialties as well as the quality of skills acquired by the graduating students from several hundreds of institutions across the country.
Pianist Vijay Iyer warmly embraced trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith after the world premiere of their collaborative suite, "A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke," at the newly opened The Met Breuer a piece inspired by the late Indian visual artist Nasreen Mohamedi whose works were exhibited several floors below.

The moment underscored Iyer's belief that "music can help transcend differences." The performance brought together two musicians of different generations and backgrounds: the 44-year-old Iyer, the son of Indian immigrants who grew up in upstate New York, and the 74-year-old Smith, whose roots are in the Mississippi Delta.

On their recently released studio recording of the suite and in the live performance, the two displayed an uncanny telepathy. Smith covered a full range on trumpet from whispered breaths to loud bursts, with Iyer switching smoothly from acoustic to electric piano and occasionally creating electronic sounds on a laptop.

Iyer has an unlikely back story for a musician who's been voted jazz artist of the year in Downbeat magazine's critics poll, received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, and is a professor in Harvard's music department.

Largely self-taught on piano, he majored in physics and mathematics at Yale. At age 23, while pursuing his doctorate in physics at Berkeley, he took the risky decision to become a professional musician to his parents' bewilderment. He later received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. From Berkeley focusing on music and embodied cognition, or how the human body perceives music.

"I was a bit of a later bloomer and had a lot of catching up to do," said Iyer.

Iyer was inspired and encouraged by musicians like Anthony Braxton and Smith, who were involved in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, formed in the mid-'60s by musicians who mixed avant-garde jazz, contemporary and world music.

"Vijay is a sincere, creative artist, a very generous human being who is well-attuned to human feelings and emotions," said Smith, a 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his civil rights opus "Ten Freedom Summers."



Iyer played in Smith's Golden Quartet from 2005-2010 - an experience he says "stretched me in a way that I hadn't really been before." They first performed as a duet in January 2015 and decided to make a record.

After Iyer became the 2015-16 artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curators introduced him to Mohamedi's work ahead of an exhibition opening The Met Breuer, a center for the museum's modern art program in the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The Punjab Police today filed a challan against Shiv Lal Doda accused in the infamous Bhim Tank murder case here in a local court here.

Shiv Lal Doda's challan was presented in the court of judicial magistrate, Abohar, after investigation, while the challans of 25 other accused had already been presented.

SSP, Fazilka, Narinder Bhargav said this case was investigated by a special investigation team (SIT) led by DIG, Ferozepur Range and comprising SSP Fazilka, SP (Hqrs), Bathinda, and SP, Abohar.

On December 11 last year, Bhim Tank and his associate, Gurjant Singh, were attacked with sharp-edged weapons at Shiv Lal Doda's farmhouse in Ramsara, where they had gone to resolve a conflict with another group.

Bhim, whose limbs were chopped off, later died at a hospital in Amritsar.

Gurjant, whose limbs were also severed in the attack, is still recuperating from his injuries.

An FIR under verious sections of IPC and of SC/ST Act was registered at Bahavwala police station in connection with the murder of Bhim Tank and inflicting serious injuries to one Gurjant Singh in December last year.

All the 26 accused who were involved in the brutal murder of Bhim Tank were arrested.

Two police officials had been suspended for dereliction of duty.

Liquor baron Shiv Lal Doda had surrendered before the SSP Fazilka and was remanded to police custody.
Strongly backing the Make in India initiative, the US today said transparency, predictability and legal certainty of policies will help double American investments in India.

"We believe that the US FDI could double if India continues to liberalise its investment regime.

"That could mean more US firms bringing their comparative advantages in technology, expertise, and capital, creating more jobs, skills, and growth," US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Nisha Desai Biswal said here at an event.

She was speaking on 'US investing in India's growth' at the event organised by the University of Chicago's New Delhi centre.

Biswal said the US strongly supports Prime Minister Modi's 'Make in India' campaign, "but companies involved in global manufacturing need transparency, predictability, and legal certainty".

India is working on some important reforms to make it a more attractive destination for FDI, including the announcement of the single-window clearance process for foreign investors, she said.

"What I think has happened in the last two years is a real concerted effort by two countries to find ways to address those challenges," Biswal said, responding to a query on India-US Solar case in WTO.

"There would definitely be challenges when you have two economies that are large and as complex. There would be space where we don't agree, where we take areas of disagreements and seek some sort of resolution, some sort of arbitration."



"According to data compiled by the US Treasury, our companies now invest more in Indian equities -- over USD 12 billion in 2015 -- than they do in China. According to the US-India Business Council, US firms invested over USD 15 billion in India in the last two years and will reportedly sign deals worth another USD 27 billion over the next two years," she added.

India received USD 3.5 billion FDI during April-December 2015.

Noting that US companies believe that India will be one of the 21th century's great growth stories, Biswal felt that a high-standard bilateral investment treaty (BIT) will send an important signal to US investors that India is open to business.
President Pranab Mukherjee today greeted people on the eve of Mahavir Jayanti saying the festival will inspire everyone to adopt non-violence in their thought and life.

"Let us on this day resolve to spread Bhagwan Mahavira's teachings of ahimsa, compassion, love and right conduct far and wide, within our country and across the world.

"May this festival inspire all of us to adopt non-violence in our thought and life," he said in a message.

The President extended his greetings and good wishes to all citizens in India and abroad.
A Waterloo man is facing charges following a police chase Monday on Interstate 490 near Rochester.

The New York State Police said a trooper attempted to stop Steven Foulkrod, 24, for a traffic violation. Foulkrod didn't pull over and led the trooper on a chase that ended off I-490 on Harwood Lane in East Rochester, police said.

Foulkrod and a woman who was a passenger in his vehicle fled the scene on foot.

The state police used a helicopter and K-9 unit to locate Foulkrod. He has been charged with driving while intoxicated, first-degree aggravated unlicensed operation, reckless driving and several traffic violations.

The woman was still on the loose Tuesday, police said.

Foulkrod was arraigned in Town of Victor Court and remanded to the Ontario County Jail on $10,000 bail or $20,000 bond.
In a spurt of violence, garment workers, protesting the new Provident Fund rules, set afire several vehicles and attacked a police station here today, forcing the government to revoke the amendment.

The spontaneous stir, with no trade union leading it, spun out of control on the second day as protesters went on rampage pelting stones at Hebbagodi police station and torching seized vehicles parked there.

Thousands of workers took to the streets at different places in the city, particularly Hebbagodi near Electronics City, an IT hub.

Police said they had to resort to lathicharge and fire teargas shells to disperse violent protesters.

Additional Commissioner of Police (East-Bengaluru City) Harishekaran, who visited the spot, said police have rounded up about 25 persons in connection with the incident.

Officials said about 25 policemen, including an Assistant Commissioner of Police, suffered injuries in the violence and they are undergoing treatment at a hospital.

At least two Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation buses and one of Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation have been set on fire, they said.

The agitation began yesterday when police resorted to "mild" lathicharge to control a "mob" of garment workers who pelted stones, injuring four police personnel.

Workers opposing amendment to Employees Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act have expressed fear that the new rule would take away their right over the employer's contribution of provident fund till they attain 58 years.

Buckling under protests, government today revoked the order tightening rules for withdrawal of provident fund money, hours after deciding to keep it in abeyance for three more months.

"The notification issued on 10th February, 2016 is cancelled. Now the old system will continue," Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya told a press conference in Hyderabad.

Earlier in the day in New Delhi, the Minister had said, "The notification (tightening PF withdrawal norms) will be kept in abeyance for three months till July 31, 2016. We will discuss this issue with the stakeholders.
Attacking Trinamool Congress on the issue of corruption, Union IT and Communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad today accused party supremo Mamata Banerjee of "patronising corruption".

"Mamata Banerjee had emerged as an icon of probity nad integrity after her movements in Singur, Nandigram. She had become a symbol of honesty. But it is matter of sorrow that after ruling Bengal for five years, which saw scams from Saradha to Narada and syndicated corruption, she has turned from an icon of probity to patron of corruption," Prasad told reporters here.

Prasad also countered Banerjee's claim that she would have "given a thought" before choosing her party candidates for the assembly elections, if the Narada sting operation tapes had been "telecast earlier".

"There is a difference between the Cup and the lip. The Narada sting video came into public long back and there was still lot of time. Madan Mitra is in prison, then why did he get a ticket," Parsad asked.

Banerjee had stated that she was waiting for the report of the (internal) investigation into the sting and said if anyone in the party was found guilty action would be taken.

Turning to the issue of chief secretary giving reply to the Election Commission's showcause notice to Banerjee, Parsad said that it was not at all acceptable.

Banerjee had stated yesterday, "Reply was sought (by EC) from me as Chief Minister. Whether I give the reply or the chief secretary, it was not an issue. If they sought reply from me as Trinamool Congress leader I would have given reply from the party".
Security forces conducting operations in Left Wing Extremism (LWE) affected states have been directed to be extra vigilant in view of enhanced IED attacks and an all-time high recovery of over 5,000 kg of the deadly bombs in these areas.

With back-to-back incidents of security forces personnel and civilians being targeted by using these bombs in the affected states in the recent past, central security agencies and the operations command of the CRPF have ordered a "strict observance" of operating procedures, usage of sniffer dogs, absolute discard of vehicles and effective gathering of intelligence every time a patrol goes out or an operation is executed.

A report prepared by these agencies states that as many as 1,702 Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) weighing about 5,908 kgs have been recovered from the LWE-affected states last year.

The report, accessed by PTI, states that during 2014, only 523 IEDs were recovered and they weighed about half of what was recovered in 2015.

What has worried the security establishment is the fact that fatal injuries and casualties have occurred to the troops of central forces like the Central Reserve Police Force, Border Security Force and those from state police units.

"Gun battles are reducing between security forces and Naxals. It has been analysed that Maoist cadres are low on weapons and obviously no match with the security forces when it comes to fire power. Hence, IED attacks of the deadly variety are increasing," a senior official working in the anti-Naxal operations domain said.

While 19 troops lost their lives in the line of duty due to IED blasts and 67 got injured (with six amputations) in 2014, the next year saw three personnel getting killed and 47 injured (three personnel had to undergo amputation).

"Maoists have elevated IED warfare on the security forces using a cocktail of command wire IEDs to victim operated IEDs to radio controlled ones. They are capable of launching rocket attacks on camps of security forces, blowing mine proof vehicles apart and creating a minefield for targeting a foot patrol. So, wherever the forces are in conflict zones they can be targeted," the report said.

The official added, "Now, in the first about four months



of this year, we are witnessing a spurt in IED related casualties and injuries again. While nine personnel lost their lives, 13 have been injured and two had to undergo amputation during this time period. About 250 such improvised bombs have been recovered this year."



The last year, the data said, also witnessed the recovery of the highest number of detonators -- at 20,871 -- used to trigger these IEDs. In 2014, the numbers were a mere 6,643.

"An advisory has been issued again to the forces keeping in mind the spurt in these incidents. Every week, such incidents are happening with the maximum being reported from Bastar area of Chhattisgarh. Not only personnel of the security forces, civilians have also become a target of these deadly kill devices," the official said.

The CRPF, mainstay for anti-Naxal operations in the country, has recently admitted that it has witnessed a smart technique of planting these IEDs deep inside 'pucca' roads with Maoists creating 'fox holes and tunnels' to plant these bombs.

One such technique of planting IEDs claimed the lives of seven of its men who were travelling in an un-marked vehicle in order to transport a cooler for a force dog in Chhattisgarh.

In 2015, a total of 41 such incidents of IED explosions took place which was the highest in the last five years, the data said.

In order to buttress the threat level of IEDs, the advisory specifically talks about two incidents where a 7-year-old girl and a woman were killed in Chhattisgarh's Sukma due to IED blasts thereby underlining the fact that even civilians are not safe from the impact of these bombs.
Russia's independent election watchdog Golos said today it had been fined a whopping 1.2 million rubles for violating controversial legislation forcing non-governmental organisations to carry a "foreign agent" tag.

Supporters and fellow rights activists said the fine - equivalent to USD 18,300 or 16,150 euros - is believed to be the largest ever imposed on a Russian organisation for violating the notorious law and comes ahead of parliamentary polls in September.

Following unprecedented protests against his decade-long rule, President Vladimir Putin in 2012 signed off on a law that requires non-governmental organisations which receive foreign funding to register with the authorities as "foreign agents".

The legislation has caused huge concern among Russian NGOs that say the law has been designed to stigmatise them in the eyes of everyday Russians, and many organisations said they would not comply.

Grigory Melkonyants of Golos said the organisation had been fined following a request from the justice ministry because some materials posted on its website did not carry an appropriate tag.

Golos representatives had not been invited to take part in a court hearing last week, Melkonyants added, saying that their lawyer would contest the decision.

He said Golos had asked the justice ministry three times to remove it from a list of foreign agents but had been refused every time. The vote monitor has been repeatedly harassed and fined in the past.

Oleg Orlov of Memorial, one of Europe's most respected human rights organisations, said the aim of the authorities was to "eliminate" Golos which has exposed numerous electoral violations in the past.

"It is obviously a directive from the above," he said, referring to a decision to slap the fine on the monitor.

"The authorities are preparing to commit falsifications. Why do they need anyone to watch over them?"



The September elections come as Russia is facing a prolonged economic crisis due in part to the plunge in oil prices and Western sanctions over the Kremlin's role in Ukraine.

Putin has warned that "foreign enemies" were seeking to disrupt the elections and tasked the FSB security service with preventing any interference.
Scripting history in Kerala's electoral politics, son and daughter of a politician are contesting for the May 16 Assembly polls in the state.

K Muraleedharan and Padmaja Venugopal, son and daughter of veteran Congress leader and former Chief Minister late K Karunakaran are in the fray for the polls.

Muraleedharan, a former KPCC president, is seeking re-election from his sitting seat Vattiyoorkkavu here while his younger sister Padmaja is trying her luck from Thrissur on a Congress ticket.

The presence of the siblings has evoked the memories of Karunakaran, once regarded as the 'kingmaker' and popularly called as 'leader' by his admirers, among Congress workers.

Amidst his busy door-to-door campaigns and meetings, the 58-year-old Muraleedharan said it was not because they were children of K Karunakaran that the party had given them tickets.

"I was renominated because I amthe sitting MLA of the constituency and my sister Padmaja is given tickets as our party wanted to give priority for women this time. Not only that, her performance as the KPCC General Secretary was also taken into account," Muraleedharan told PTI.

A three-time Lok Sabha member from Kohikode, Muraleedharan had defeated LDF independent Cheriyan Philip by a margin of 16,167 votes in Vattiyoorkkavu during the 2011 Assembly polls.

BJP state president Kummanom Rajasekharan and CPI(M)'s T N Seema are his main rival candidates in the constituency this time.

Claiming that there was no threat to his sitting seat from the opponents, Muraleedharan expressed confidence that his victory margin would increase this time than the 2011 election.

For Padmaja, it is her second poll outing after her defeat in 2004 Lok Sabha polls from Mukundapuram constituency.

CPI's firebrand sitting MLA from nearby Kaipamangalam segment V S Sunilkumar is the main opponent of 55-year-old Padmaja in Thrissur.

When asked about whether Karunakaran's fond memories would influence the voters, Muraleedharan said "Of course, the memories of my father will come in the minds of Congress workers and voters as me and my sister are contesting the polls together.
The condition of a 60-year-old Sikh priest, who was seriously injured in an explosion at a gurdwara in the German city of Essen has improved and he is now out of danger, police said today.

The priest was among three persons who were hurt when an explosive device went off in the entrance hall of the Gurdwara Nanaksar at the end of a wedding ceremony on Saturday.

Most of the wedding guests had left the gurdwara to attend a reception in a nearby hall, but several persons were still inside the temple when the device exploded.

He has been undergoing treatment at a hospital in Essen where he was admitted soon after the explosion.

The injuries of two other men were not so serious and they could attend the wedding reception after receiving treatment from emergency medical teams arrived at the gurdwara, a police spokesman told PTI.

He said the explosion was "certainly an attack", but it is too early to say what kind of explosive device was used or how it was detonated as the forensic analysis and other investigations are still continuing.

So far there are no indications of any terrorist link, but the investigations are being conducted "in all directions," police said.

Meanwhile, police have received new information that a hooded man dressed in black, who is suspected of throwing the explosive device into the gurdwara, was seen by some people as he ran away from the temple without his head dress.

According to eyewitnesses, he has the appearance of a person from the Mediterranean region or North Africa and the investigators are now searching for him, the spokesman said.

The spokesman said he could not confirm some media reports that the head dress of the man was recovered by police and it is being subjected to DNA analysis.
Southern states, at the first regional consultation meeting with the NITI Aayog, have agreed with the premier policy think-tank that the poverty line needs to be used for tracking progress of schemes on the ground and should be de-hyphenated from benefits.

The agreement reflected views of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Lakshadweep in their meeting with the NITI Aayog's Task Force on Elimination of Poverty in India held in Hyderabad today, a press statement said.

"On the issue of use of the poverty line, participating states agreed with NITI Aayog to employ it for tracking progress in poverty reduction and not to link it with poverty alleviation programmes that require identification of the poor," it said.

The states highlighted some of the best practices that have been successful in mitigating poverty. For one, the mid-day meal scheme in Tamil Nadu under Akshaya Patra received much attention.

There was unanimity on raising nutrition awareness -- both among children at the school level through text books and adults through an information campaign.

The participating states expressed concern about availability of drinking water in their respective areas and wanted the NITI Aayog to take remedial measures.

At the first meeting of the governing council held on February 8, 2015, it was decided to constitute a task force on elimination of poverty in India under the chairmanship of NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Dr Arvind Panagariya. It was also decided that each state will constitute parallel task forces on poverty elimination as well.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today left for home after winding up her four-day two-nation tour to Iran and Russia.

"Dasvidaniya Moscow! After a productive visit to Iran and Russia, EAM @SushmaSwaraj departs for Delhi," External Affair Ministry Spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted.

In Iran, Swaraj called on President Hassan Rouhani and held talks with her Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif, besides meeting with Supreme Leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei's Advisor Ali Akbar Velayati and deliberated on a range of issues.

During the meeting, Rouhani assured Swaraj that his country can be a "reliable partner" for India's energy needs. The two nations also decided to significantly expand engagements in their overall ties, particularly in oil and gas sectors.

In Moscow, the Minister attended the Foreign Ministers meeting of RIC (Russia-India-China).

During the meeting the three nations vowed to deepen cooperation in combating terrorism and pitched for setting up of a broad counter-terrorist front with the UN playing a central role.

She also held talks with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

She also had a meeting with Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Dmitryi Rogozin.
Shankaracharya of Dwarka Peeth Swaroopanand Saraswati today waded into yet another controversy with comments that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj's choice of clothes during her Iran visit delivered a "blow" to India's prestige.

Swaroopanand said Swaraj chose to wear outfits that catered to Iranian sensibilities but neglected India's tradition.

"Swaraj wrote outfits in Iran which followed the Iranian tradition and went against our own traditions. She thus delivered a blow to India's prestige abroad," he said.

He compared Swaraj with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who always wore clothes that reflected her "Indianness" during foreign visits.

"Unlike her, Indira Gandhi on her foreign visits took great care to ensure that her Indianness reflects in her clothes and conduct," the Shankaracharya said.

Known to court controversies, Swami had recently said entry of women into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra would lead to increase in crimes like rape against them.
Armed militants in Afghanistan staged a coordinated assault on a key government security agency in the capital today, wounding nearly 200 people.

The Taliban has claimed responsibility.

The attack, including a suicide car bombing, appears to have targeted an agency similar to the US Secret Service, providing personal protection for high-ranking government officials.

Ismail Kawasi, spokesman for the Public Health Ministry, said so far 198 wounded people have been brought to area hospitals.

Sediq Sediqqi, spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, said Tuesday that the suicide attack was followed by an assault by armed militants. The area has been surrounded by government forces and dozens of ambulances have rushed to the scene.

"Security forces are in a fight with an unknown number of armed insurgents right now," Mohammad Afzel, a police officer at the site of the attack, told The Associated Press.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack, and said that a number of their fighters were currently inside the compound battling with security forces.

Taliban insurgents have stepped up their attacks recently since announcing the start of their spring offensive last week.

President Ashraf Ghani issued a statement condemning the attack and saying it, "clearly shows the enemy's defeat in face-to-face battle with Afghan security forces.
The Leader of Opposition in Sri Lankan Parliament and the chief of the main Tamil party TNA has criticised the government's proposed project to build 65,000 houses in the Northern and Eastern provinces, citing its high-cost and unsuitable construction material.

In a letter to President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, R Sampanthan said that the proposed homes pre-fabricated of steel would not suit the tropical climate of the areas.

"The project is offering 65,000 homes when the need is for over 135,000 houses," Sampanthan, the leader of Tamil National Alliance (TNA), said.

"The cost per house provided by the contractor Arcelor-Mittal, an Indian and French outfit is too high. They can be built 2-3 times lower than the current 2.1 million Sri Lankan rupees quoted," he argued.

"On behalf of the Tamil people I urge the government not to waste this opportunity. If the government is committed to reconciliationthen its action must reflect that," Sampanthan said underlining the need to build homes in the area devastated by over three decades of a conflict.

President Maithripala Sirisena had earlier taken a decision to review the project after concerns were raised over the project.

Meanwhile, Sampanthan came under fire for his comments that there was a good chance of Tamils winning a federal solution in the current Constitution-making process.

"This statement shows that Tamil leaders are still living in the past," Nishantha Sri Warnasinghe of the Sinhala majority nationalist JHU, who is also a Sirisena advisor, told reporters.

"Federalism is no solution," he said.
Thailand has requested India to deport a Bhutanese woman detained in New Delhi for her alleged involvement in a drug trafficking network, that also includes Indians, after a gang member's body was found in a suitcase in a canal here.

Sonam Zam is among seven foreigners wanted for their suspected involvement in the death of a Bhutanese man, whose body was found in a suitcase in the canal here this month.

A large quantity of crystal methamphetamine was found in the stomach of the dead man. Police believe he was trying to smuggle the drugs in condoms that burst and killed him.

The seven suspects are from Bhutan, India and Nepal.

According to a letter sent to the Indian embassy here, Sonam fled Thailand for Delhi on April 7 on a Thai Airways International flight.

Indian Embassy sources confirmed to PTI that the letter had been received.

The letter said Thai authorities had immediately contacted Indian officials to stop the woman and send her back to Bangkok for prosecution.

Bureau commissioner Nathathorn Prousoontorn said yesterday that Indian immigration officers apprehended the suspect on arrival in Delhi. Nathathorn said he has contacted the relevant authorities to send her back to Thailand.

However, Bhutanese authorities were later contacted by their Indian counterparts about the arrest and Bhutan's Foreign Ministry opposed her handover saying the woman has denied the smuggling allegation, Nathathorn said.

"Such opposition is natural and it is their right," he said. "The suspect is still in custody in India and we are waiting on how India deals with the issue."



It was the first time Bhutanese and Nepalese drug traffickers had been detected in Thailand, the Bangkok Post reported citing the police.
Thermal power plants in Maharashtra, barring the one at Parli, are not facing any closure crisis due to water scarcity, state BJP spokesperson Vishwas Pathak said here today.

"There is adequate water supply to all the thermal power plants in the state and there is no need to worry as power generation would not be affected in the state," Pathak told reporters here during an informal chat.

To a question, Pathak said the state was planning to provide water supply to Parli from Nanded by laying a pipeline of over 120 kms, adding that it was the only possible solution to overcome the water crisis in Parli thermal power plant.

Pathak said the state was generating 16,000 MW power and had 100 MW surplus power in hand.

The state has signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) for 24,000 MW and 17,000 MW was operative, he said.

The state will gradually switch to renewable energy in a phased manner, he added.

Pathak also defended agriculture solar pump procurement by the Maharashtra government and refuted allegations of purchase at a higher price as compared to Gujarat.

Replying to a question referring to media reports that the state has incurred a loss of Rs 200 crore on purchase of agriculture solar pumps, Pathak said a two-member expert team was sent to Gujarat for a factual study and found no truth in the allegations.

"Our purchases were transparent," he asserted.

On creation of Vidarbha and BJP's commitment to the cause of separate statehood, Pathak said the party will take take an appropriate decision at an appropriate time.

The time is yet to come, he said.
Three civilians and one Islamist gunmen were killed during a car chase and shootout in the Somali capital Mogadishu today, police and witnesses said.

Two civilians were killed during a drive-by shooting by Shebab militants in central Mogadishu while a third died when the car later exploded after police gave chase firing their weapons.

One Shebab gunmen was killed and two more are on the run, according to police.

"A Shebab gunman was killed by police after he killed a civilian. Another civilian was killed after the car the assailants were riding in detonated," said police official Ibrahim Mohamed.

The third civilian victim died later of gunshot wounds.

The attackers' car blew up near a market in the Yaqshid district of northern Mogadishu.

"I saw the dead bodies of a woman and one of the gunmen who was riding in the car. He was shot after exchanging fire with police. Their car exploded after they abandoned it during the fighting," said witness Dahir Abdulaziz.

Somalia's Al-Qaeda aligned militants were pushed out of the capital in 2011 but continue to carry out attacks on military, political and civilian targets aimed at undermining the internationally-backed government.
A previously unseen document warning the Titanic of "wreckage" on its scheduled route will be auctioned in the UK after 104 years and may sell for an estimated 15,000 pounds.

Captain Edward Smith was given the document on the bridge of the liner before it left Southampton for its ill-fated maiden voyage to New York.

It is thought that the note must have been handed back to the messenger, as it was not on the ship when it sank after hitting an iceberg, the 'Mirror' reported.

The creased and lined note appears as though it had been screwed up into a ball before it was flattened back out when its significance was realised.

It ended up in the offices of lawyers hired to represent White Star Line, the company which owned the Titanic, for the multiple compensation cases.

In the report, the obstacle mentioned was the mast of a submerged wreck in the Atlantic. The warning gave its coordinates so that it could be avoided by the Captain.

The document has been made available for sale at auctioneers Henry Aldridge and Son for an estimated 15,000 pounds.

"The obstruction was not an iceberg which did for Titanic but the mast of a wreck that had been reported by the Rotterdam, a Dutch liner that had travelled from New York," said Andrew Aldridge from Henry Aldridge and Son.

The document was acquired many years ago by an American collector of Titanic relics and he is now selling it on April 23 in the UK.

The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912 after colliding with an iceberg, resulting in the loss of more than 1,500 lives.
US Republican frontrunner Donald Trump's new top campaign aide Paul Manafort lobbied for a group charged for operating as a front for Pakistan's powerful spy agency ISI and received $700,000 from it, a media report has said.

The company of Paul Manafort, who was recently hired by Trump campaign as its convention manager allegedly received $700,000 from the Kashmiri American Council (KAC) between 1990 and 1995, Yahoo News reported.

The money was received by Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, which was Manafort's lobbying firm.

Ghulam Nabi Fai, the head of Kashmiri American Council, was sentenced by a US court for two years of imprisonment on charges of receiving money from ISI and working on its behalf.

The fund $700,000 was part of the $4 million given by ISI to Kashmiri American Council, as alleged by federal prosecutors during court proceeding.

The ISI has denied the allegations. The US Government never charged Manafort, who was registered as a lobbyist.

Manafort during a trip to Islamabad in 1994 presented plans to influence members of Congress to back Pakistan's case for a plebiscite for Kashmir, the report said.

The report quotes an unnamed former Pakistani official, who was part of that meeting.

Internal budget documents obtained by the FBI show plans by the Kashmiri American Council to spend $80,000 to $100,000 a year on campaign contributions to members of Congress, it said.

"There is no way Manafort didn't know that Pakistan was involved with the KAC," the former official said was quoted as saying by the report.

The Trump Campaign did not respond to questions sent on the allegations against Manafort.
Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton today looked set for solidifying their presidential front-runner status after suffering a series of losses recently as polling began in the potentially game-changing New York state primary.

All the presidential hopefulspacked in back-to-back campaign stops, making final pitches before voters ahead of the crucial primary election.

Democratic contenders Clinton and Bernie Sanders and their Republican rivals Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich toured across the state holding rallies and meeting voters yesterday, seeking to solidify their positions.

At stake are 291 Democratic delegatesand 95 for Republicans.

68-year-old Clinton, the New York senator for eight years, is leading the delegate count with 1,307, while Sanders has 1,094 delegates. The one who clinches 2,383 delegates in all wins the party's nomination.

Clinton is trying to end a seven state winning streak for 74-year-old Sanders in this primary.

A total of 1,237 delegates are needed to sew up the Republican nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Trump, 69, leads in the total delegate count with 743, followed by Cruz with 543 and Kasich with 144.

Trump, who has faced defeats at the hands of Cruz recently, is desperately trying to get enough delegates to avoid a contested convention this summer.

For Trump, a win in New York would be his first since he won the Arizona Primary on March 22.

A new NBC New York/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll shows Trump will garner 54 per cent of the Republican primary voters. Ohio Governor Kasich is expected to come in second, instead of Cruz.

On the Democratic side, Clinton has a double-digit lead over her competitor Vermont Senator Sanders.

However, nationally, Republican presidential front-runner Trump has the support of a record 40 per cent Republican voters while Clinton is engaged in a tough contest with Sanders, according to a latest poll.

Trump has the support of 40 per cent of the Republican primary voters and is followed closely by Senator Cruz with 35 per cent and Ohio Governor John Kasich with 24 per cent, according to a latest opinion poll by NBC and The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic party, Sanders (46.3 per cent) has all but eliminated Clinton's (47.7 per cent) primary polling lead, it said.

While Trump would need as many votes as possible, he will not be getting two from his own family.

Since only registered voters from participating parties may vote, Trump's children Eric and Ivanka Trumpmissed the deadline to register with a political party, making them ineligible to cast ballots for the billionaire businessman.

Clinton sought support of the minorities and women doing her various stops across the city.

(Reopens FGN 40)



"Whether it's Chinese government policy in the past, for one child and forced abortions and sterilisation, or the policies of the communist regime in Romania, with forced childbearing, we cannot, we must not, ever let governments and politicians make those decisions," Clinton told her supporters.

"And as long as I'm around, we never will," she said.

Sanders called on New Yorkers to come out and vote, saying he needs their support to achieve job growth and hold corporations who ship jobs abroad accountable.

"My experience has been, in this campaign so far, is that we win when the turnout is high. We lose when the turnout is low. Tomorrow, let us all do everything we can to make sure that New York State has the largest turnout in a Democratic primary in its history," Sanders told a cheering crowd in Long Island City.

"Tomorrow, New York State can help take this country a giant step forward for the political revolution. Let's do it.

"I just want to say a word to thank all of you for the courage to stand up for justice and against corporate greed," Sanders said.

"We will not tolerate large profitable corporations sending jobs to low-wage countries, throwing American workers out on the street, cutting back on health care benefits, and then paying their CEO USD 18 million a year," he said.
Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump has support of a record 40% Republican voters while his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton is engaged in a tough national contest with Senator Bernie Sanders, according to a latest poll.

Trump has the support of 40% of the Republican primary voters and is followed closely by Senator Ted Cruz with 35% and Ohio Governor John Kasich with 24%, according to a latest opinion poll by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic party, Sanders (46.3%) has all but eliminated Clinton's (47.7%) primary polling lead, it said.

However given the advantage Clinton has in the delegate count, it would be a tough task for Sanders to prevent the former Secretary of State from becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.

"As she is finishing this primary, she is not gaining strength. The cracks are showing, and she is losing strength," said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey with Democrat Fred Yang.

However, in a hypothetical match-up Clinton defeats Trump with 50% to 39%.
Two men convicted in Pakistan's biggest child sex abuse scandal in a village bordering India have been sentenced to life imprisonment by an anti-terrorism court, eight months after the scandal broke out and forced the government to pass a law to criminalise such heinous crimes.

Haseem Aamir and Faizan Majeed have also been fined Rs 300,000 each by the court here yesterday.

The massive scandal surfaced in August 2015 in Punjab province's Ganda Singh village, bordering India. It was the biggest scandal of such nature in Pakistan's history.

At least 280 children were filmed being sexually abused by a gang of over 25 criminals who used the hundreds of videos to blackmail and extort money from their parents by threatening to release the videos online.

More than 30 FIRs were registered against the gang. Still, more cases relating to the scandal are pending in the court.

Adnan Liaqat, counsel for Haseem and Majeed, said the ATC decision would be challenged in the Lahore High Court. "The trial court awarded the punishment on the solitary statement of an alleged victim."



The five-member joint investigation team (JIT) constituted to probe the scandal has confirmed the two accused sodomised 19 minors.

Itinvestigated 31 FIRs, interrogated 400 people, examined 47 video clips and 72 photographs in light of the photogrammetric tests.

It, however, did not find any evidence of the accused being involved in the extortion or posting of the videos and pictures on the Internet for monetary gains.

The JIT presented a chargesheet against a total of 17 suspects. Ten of them were charged with sodomy and seven with other offenses, like criminal intimidation and fraud.

The team recommended dropping eight cases which were fake.

In March, the Senate passed a bill criminalising sexual assault against minors, child pornography and trafficking for the first time. Previously only the acts of rape and sodomy were punishable by law.

Under the revised legislation sexual assaults are punishable by up to seven years in prison. It is however awaiting ratification by the president.
Two persons were taken into custody for allegedly damaging the car of AIADMK MP Anwar Raja and attempting to assault him at Tagachimadam here, where about 900fishermen were observing a day's fast demanding the release of boats belonging to Tamil Nadu fishermen, seized by Sri Lankan navy, police said.

As soon as Raja arrived at the venue to address them, the two, allegedly in an inebriated mood, rushed at Raja and tried to assault him.

The fishermen however prevented the two from attacking Raja, police said.

The windscreen of the car was totally broken in the attack.

The fishermen expressed regret for th incident, police said.

Raja said AIDMK always stood with the fishermen.

The fishermen also wanted compensation for the boats that had been totally damaged without maintenanace after the seizure by the Lankan Navay.

Hey wanted the Indian and Sri Lankan governments to hold talks and allow the fishermen to fish in the traditional areas of fishing in Palk Strait.
The United Nations (UN) was struggling to keep troubled peace negotiations on track, as the opposition suspended its "formal participation" in the talks in protest at escalating violence on the ground.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Barack Obama meanwhile agreed to help strengthen a fragile ceasefire in Syria, seen as essential to paving the way towards a lasting deal to end the bloodshed.

With fighting surging around Syria's second city Aleppo and negotiations in Geneva stalled over the fate of President Bashar al-Assad, the opposition said they had had enough.

Read more from our special coverage on "SYRIA"

"Since these talks began in Geneva, the Assad regime has worsened the situation on the ground," Salem al-Meslet of the main opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) said in a statement.

The group said the talks must be placed on "brief hold in order to end the Assad regime's truce violations", accusing the regime of more than 2,000 violations of the ceasefire since it began on February 27.

"The HNC remains fully committed to the political process and establishing peace through diplomacy," Meslet said. "We remain in Geneva ready to engage in serious talks," he added.

HNC coordinator Riad Hijab said earlier it was "unacceptable" for the negotiations to continue while Assad's regime continues to "bombard and starve civilians" in .

The regime responded by accusing Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar  all backers of the opposition  of seeking to derail the negotiations.

"The Saudi, Turkish and Qatari sponsors do not want to stop the bloodbath in and do not want a political solution in Syria," the regime's lead negotiator in Geneva, Bashar al-Jaafari, said in an interview late Monday with Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen.

Jaafari added that the opposition and the countries that support it are "annoyed because of the progress being made by the Syrian army on the ground".

But UN peace envoy Staffan de Mistura insisted the ongoing round of indirect discussions, which began on April 13, would continue through the week as planned.

The HNC may continue to meet UN staff at their hotel "to pursue technical discussions", including on a political transition in Syria, de Mistura said.

The UN envoy stressed that the indirect talks format  which has seen the HNC and Assad's representatives meet separately with UN mediators  created flexibility to continue the discussions.

But the opposition's announcement is a clear blow to the already precarious negotiations aimed at achieving political transition, a new constitution, and presidential and parliamentary elections by September 2017.

The landmark ceasefire negotiated by Russia and the US in February dramatically curtailed violence across much of Syria, raising hopes that a lasting deal could be struck to end the five-year civil war.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon today strongly condemned a Taliban suicide truck bombing in central Kabul which left 30 people dead and hundreds injured.

"I would like to express my deepest condolences for the victims and their families and friends," the UN secretary general said at a press conference during a visit to The Hague.

"I condemn strongly these terrorist attacks," he said, adding "there's no justification whatsoever (for) attacking civilian people as well as security people."



The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a densely crowded Kabul neighbourhood, which came a week after the insurgents launched their annual spring offensive.

"We must fight against these terrorist attacks and the international community must be united in working together," Ban said, speaking alongside Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders.

Ban was in the Dutch city to take part in a ceremony to mark the official opening of the International Criminal Court later Tuesday, as well as celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the International Court of Justice.
Union Minister Sripad Naik was admitted to a hospital in Goa after his blood pressure shot up and has been discharged today.

The AYUSH Minister was admitted to a government-run hospital in Ponda town last night after he felt uneasy at his ancestral house in Madkai village, family members said.

Pradip Shinkre, Medical Superintendent of the government hospital in Ponda told PTI that Naik was discharged this morning.

Now, the Minister is visiting the Goa Medical College (GMC) to undergo a few tests, he added.

"Naik's blood pressure shot up following which the doctors advised him to get admitted," family members added.

The 64-year-old MP, who represents North Goa Lok Sabha constituency, was scheduled to fly to New Delhi yesterday.

Naik, is a senior BJP leader from the coastal state and has been representing the constituency for over two decades.

IRF had come under the scanner of various security



agencies after one of the terrorists involved in the Dhaka cafe attack on July 1 last allegedly posted on social media that they had been inspired by Naik's speeches.

In addition, some young men from Mumbai's suburbs, who had left their home to join the Islamic State in 2016, also allegedly said they were inspired by the preacher.

Maharashtra Police has also registered criminal cases against Naik for his alleged involvement in radicalisation of youths and luring them into terror activities.

Naik also transferred IRF's foreign funds to Peace TV for making "objectionable" programmes. Most of the programmes, which were made in India, contained alleged hate speeches of Naik, who had reportedly "urged all Muslims to be terrorists" through Peace TV, the sources said.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has also registered a criminal case against Naik and IRF under money laundering laws.
US-based Magzter Inc, a digital magazine newsstand, plans to raise around USD 30 million (about Rs 195 crore) towards series C funding to finance its expansion plans.

"We have raised USD 3 million and USD 10 million as part of series A & B funding, respectively, and now looking at raising around USD 30 million through series C to fund our growth plans," Magzter Inc President and co-founder Vijay Radhakrishnan told PTI here.

Radhakrishnan along with another Indian-origin entrepreneur Girish Ramdas founded Magzter Inc in 2011.

All leading publishing houses from India and abroad are available on Magzter and company hopes to reach out to Indians subscribers through its online advertising platform, Radhakrishnan said adding the firm is targeting an annual revenue of USD 100 million from advertising within next three years.

Magzter also announced the creation of an ad network for the magazine titles inside its iOS and Android mobile apps. It will enable advertisers to reach out to millions of potential customers by showcasing interactive advertisements inside the most sought after digital magazines.

The magazine newsstand offers to its 28.5 million digital consumers more than 7,800 magazines from over 3,000 publishers, out which 1,800 are Indian, he said.

The New York-headquartered Magzter has its local offices in Chennai, London, Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Mexico City and Singapore, and will soon be expanding to other countries, he said.

"Magzter has recently partnered with SPH, Singapore for advertising business and the latter will be representing Magzter in Singapore and South East Asia," he informed.

MD of SPH Magazines, Joseph Lee said: "We are excited to represent Magzter in Singapore region to get advertisers onboard. Magzter has developed an excellent advertising platform for digital magazines and we were privileged to use it for the last 3 months...
Theranos, a startup that touted a revolutionary new way to test blood, has revealed it is under scrutiny by US civil and criminal authorities.

Investigations by the US Attorney's Office and the Securities and Exchange Commission are ongoing, with documents being requested from the California-based company, Theranos told partners in a memo, a copy of which was obtained by AFP on Monday.

"In the past, we have generally not commented on the specifics of these inquiries out of deference to our regulators and in light of specific requests for confidentiality," the memo read.

"However, in light of consistent press attention in this area we want you to hear about them from us."



The Wall Street Journal on Monday cited unnamed sources as saying that federal prosecutors are investigating whether Theranos misled investors and regulators about its technology and its operations.

"The company continues to work closely with regulators and is cooperating fully with all investigations," a Theranos spokesperson told AFP.

Investigations into Theranos by departments of health in the states of Pennsylvania and Arizona, as well as by the US Food and Drug Administration, have been successfully closed, the startup said in the memo.

"The investigations by the SEC and the US Attorney's Office, which began following the publication of certain articles, are focused on requesting documents and ongoing," Theranos said.

Elizabeth Holmes took the crown of youngest "self-made" woman billionaire thanks to revolutionary blood tests touted by the Silicon Valley startup.

She has been on the defensive for months after reports questioning whether Theranos has indeed delivered a revolutionary new way to test blood.

Media outlets knocking her from her pedestal had previously praised the 31-year-old as a visionary along the lines of Apple's famed co-founder Steve Jobs.

She was only 19 when she founded Theranos in 2003, launching it with money her parents had set aside for her education.

Theranos touts a new way of testing that uses far less blood and delivers faster results at much lower cost than traditional methods in US labs.
A 26-year-old American woman will file a lawsuit against a Catholic Indian priest and his church in India for allegedly sexually abusing her during his posting in the US between 2004 and 2005.

The move comes in protest against the recent Vatican decision which announced Diocese of Ootacamund located in Mylapore is reinstating Joseph Jeyapaul to ministry.

Minnesota attorney Jeff Anderson will file suit on behalf of the victim in federal court that claims the Diocese of Ootacamund endangered children by reinstating Jeyapaul.

Jeyapaul who served as a priest in Crookston townshipof Minnesota in 2004 and 2005 was arrested in India in 2012 and extradited to the US on charges of sexually abusing two girls in a congregation.

He was later deported to India last year, after serving his sentence of one year and one day.

In a statement, advocacy group SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) announced that one of the sexual abuse survivors would sue the priest and the diocese.

"It may be the most irresponsible Vatican move we've ever seen: Catholic officials in Rome have lifted the suspension of a recently convicted predator priest. We are stunned and saddened by such blatant recklessness and callousness," Barbara Dorris of St Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, said in a statement today.

A letter sent to Anderson and Roseau County Attorney Lisa Hanson and signed by over 500 Jeyapaul supporters in India will also be released as evidence of the public danger (nuisance) permitted by Indian Bishop and Vatican, it said.

"On January 16, 2016, with the permission of Pope Francis, Bishop Amalraj lifted the suspension of Father Joseph Jeyapaul," the firm said, adding that in 2015, after his extradition from India, Jeyapaul plead guilty to criminal sexual conduct involving the sexual abuse of a minor girl while he worked in the Diocese of Crookston in 2005.

"Catholic officials refuse to keep this admitted sex offender away from kids, so our only hope of stopping him is to get him charged and convicted again," Dorris said.

Over the weekend, Barbara and the victim were seen distributing leaflets outside the church in Crookston to find another sex abuse survivor.

"Our goal is to find just one more victim who might be able to file criminal charges and get this proven predator behind bars," the victim told local 'Grand Forks Herald'.

The lawsuit would charge Catholic officials with creating "public nuisances" by hiding and helping predator priests.

"It was the first victim's courage that brought forward a second victim of Fr Jeyapaul. It was the second victim's courage that prodded Fr Jeyapaul to plead guilty. And we hope the courage of a third victim will get Fr Jeyapaul extradited, convicted and jailed again, so that no more innocent lives are shattered," SNAP said.

"Until he's charged and convicted again, Jeyapaul should be put in a remote, secure, independently-run treatment center far from families who have learned to trust him," it said.
A US waste management company has announced to create 120 new back office jobs including data entry, analysis and invoice generation in India in the next few years.

Arizona Waste Management company officials said the decision would not only save money but it is also based on the high quality of back-end jobs its Indian employees have been doing for the last few years.

"As part of our efforts to optimise our back office processing functions, we'll be transitioning over the next few years approximately 120 non customer-facing back office roles including data entry, analysis and invoice generation - to our office in Indore," Janette Micelli, spokesman of Waste Management company said.

The company, headquartered in Houston, Texas, currently has approximately 250 employees performing a variety of information technology and back office processing functions in Indore.

The "additional positions will be located in our office there," Micelle said.

"Our team located in our Indore office - at less than one per cent of our total employee population - is a very small percentage of our overall employee base," she said.

"Our Waste Management team members in Indore are highly qualified, produce quality work and help the company realise efficiencies related to back office processes," she added.

The company first opened its back office in Indore in late 2011 and since then it has been increasing its presence there.

According to local media reports an average transactional processor costs USD 45,000 in the US compared to just USD 10,000 in India.

In the last two years the company has reduced its global workforce of 40,600 by 2,100 as its annual revenue decline from USD 14 billion in 2013 to USD 13 billion in 2015.

"These are always difficult decisions, and we're doing what we can to encourage affected employees to apply for other available positions within the company," Micelli said.

The move will likely result in a lower cost for labour with demonstrably improved efficiency and better quality.
The US will send 217 additional troops to Iraq, hours after reports that American and Kurdish forces had killed a senior Islamic State fighter south of Mosul.

With the addition on new troops, the number of US troops in the country would increase from 3,870 to 4,087, the Pentagon said.

This does not include temporary troops. The announcement was made by the US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter during an unannounced visit to Iraq.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that the President's instructions to his national security team have consistently been to look for opportunities to reinforce those elements of US campaign that are showing some progress.

"And the announcements that Secretary (Ashton) Carter made earlier yesterday are consistent with that instruction from the President, and these enhancements are consistent with recommendations that the President received from his military advisors," he said.

"Iraq is a sovereign nation, and making decisions like retaking Mosul from ISIL (Islamic State) will be decisions that are made by the Iraqi government," he said.

"What the US has sought to do at every turn is to support our partners in Iraq as they implement a political strategy to unite the country, but also as they carry out a military strategy to drive ISIL out of those areas of Iraq where they have encroached," Earnest said.

Senator John McCain welcomed the decision.

"While the deployment of an additional 217 US troops to fight ISIL is welcome, this is yet another example of the kind of grudging incrementalism that rarely wins wars, but could certainly lose one," he said.

"This deployment is also representative of the increasing operational demands imposed upon our military that are not funded in the President's already inadequate defense budget request. Continuing to ask our military to do more with less is irresponsible and is placing the lives of our service members at increased risk," McCain said.
executives should voluntarily forego their bonuses for moral reasons given the massive engine-rigging scandal, the head of the works council at the embattled German carmaker said in a newspaper interview on Tuesday.

"This is also about morals," Bernd Osterloh told the business daily Handelsblatt.

Nevertheless, he was aware that "waiving the bonuses for ethical reasons is primarily a voluntary matter for the executive board," Osterloh added.

Public debate is currently raging in Germany over whether top executives at should be paid generous bonuses.

At the centre of the controversy is the question whether VW executives are entitled to the performance-related bonuses for 2015.

The group's chief executive Matthias Mueller had been quick to prescribe belt-tightening to the carmaker's 600,000-strong workforce in the wake of the global scandal that erupted six months ago when it emerged that VW had installed emissions-cheating software into 11 million diesel engines worldwide.

The costs of the scandal are still incalculable but are expected to run into many billions of euros (dollars) as a result of fines and lawsuits.

VW, which is expected to post a loss running into many billions of euros for 2015, could also announce a waiver in the dividend payout to shareholders for the first time since the early 1980s.

Last week, VW announced that its top executives were willing to accept "sharp reductions" in their annual bonuses.

The details will be agreed at a supervisory board on Friday and published in VW's annual report on April 28, the carmaker indicated.
India has made "significant improvement" in broadening female representation on the boards of top 100 listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, said a study released here on Tuesday.

According to the joint study, titled "Building Diversity in Asia Pacific Boardrooms", female board representation increased from 7.3% in 2013 to 8.6% in 2014.

It was 5.8% in 2012 and is estimated at 12% for 2015.

"Three countries in the Asia Pacific region, namely Australia, India and Malaysia, showed significant improvement in broadening representation on boards across the . A combination of government initiatives has contributed to the increase in these countries," the study said.

"Indian companies, for instance, have been swift to respond to the Company Act by drawing on their existing networks," said the joint study by Korn Ferry, a global people advisory, and National University of Singapore Business School's Centre for Governance Institution and Organisation (CGIO).

The Company Act, which required all listed to have at least one woman on the board, has helped enable this broadening female representation, said the study.

India's corporate boards without has decreased from 44% in 2013 to 29% in 2014.

The highest number of female board members, at 17.5%, were in the telecommunication services, followed by 11.6% in information technology and 9.6% in financials, the study said.

The lowest, at 4.9%, was in industrials.

Speaking to reporters at the study launch, Korn Ferry managing director Alicia Yi said, "regulatory and government push has increased representation" in the Indian corporate boardrooms.

She described it as a significant development in women empowerment in India.

Women make up 10.2% of the directors in companies across 10 Asia Pacific economies covered by the study, up from 9.4% in 2013 and 8% in 2012, the study said.

Female board members in Australia increased from 18.6% in 2013 to 21.9% in 2014.

In Malaysia, women in boardrooms increased from 8.3% in 2013 to 12.5% in 2014, driven by the government set target of having 30% by this year.
World governments at a UN meeting on the global drug problem were urged today to move away from repression, abolish the death penalty for drug offenses and step up treatment.

In the first such meeting in nearly 20 years, the UN General Assembly adopted a document that marks a shift away from the "war on drugs" launched in the 1970s, with its heavy-handed approach centered on law enforcement and criminalization.

"Drug policies that focus almost exclusively on the use of the criminal justice system need to be broadened. They need to be broadened by embracing a public health approach," said World Health Organization (WHO) director Margaret Chan, drawing applause.

The three-day special session was requested by Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala, which have felt the brunt of the war on drugs with an explosion of crime and violence.

Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto said the fight against drugs must be seen from a "human rights perspective" and warned that harsh penalties for drug use "create a vicious cycle of marginalisation and crime."



Saying that his country had paid a "high price" for failed global drug policies, he also backed calls for decriminalizing marijuana use for medical and scientific purposes.

Delegates from the European Union, Switzerland, Brazil, Costa Rica and Uruguay, among others, called for abolishing capital punishment for convicted drug felons, a practice widely used by China, Iran and Indonesia.

Indonesia's delegate drew jeers when he declared that the use of the death penalty was a matter for individual states to decide, in a statement backed by Singapore, Saudi Arabia, China, Iran and Pakistan, among other countries.

The document adopted at the session makes no reference to the death penalty but calls on government to "promote proportionate national sentencing policies... Whereby the severity of penalties is proportionate to the gravity of offenses."



Pakistan said it was gravely concerned by the trend toward legalising the use of marijuana and other drugs.

Uruguay became the first county to fully legalize marijuana in 2013 and Canada is among countries looking at a similar measure.

"This would give a fillip to drug demand, thus igniting the supply chain having direct fallouts on our region," Pakistan's Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan warned.

"We have dreamed of a drug-free society rather than a drug-tolerant society," he said.

China's Public Security Minister Guo Shengkun agreed: "Any form of legalization of narcotics should be resolutely opposed.
Clashes between Yemeni loyalist forces and rebels have killed 13 fighters, military sources said today, after UN-brokered peace talks were delayed with warring parties trading blame for truce violations.

The fighting erupted late yesterday in Marib province, east of the rebel-held Yemeni capital Sanaa, despite pledges by all warring parties to commit to a ceasefire that came into effect on April 11.

Five soldiers loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and eight rebels were killed in the clashes which continued intermittently through Tuesday, the pro-government military sources said.

They said the fighting erupted when the Iran-backed Huthi rebels and their allies tried to capture positions held by loyalist troops.

AFP could not independently confirm the toll.

Sporadic fighting was also reported in other areas, including Nahm northeast of Sanaa and in the southwestern province of Taez.

Pro-Hadi chief-of-staff General Mohammed Ali al-Maqdishi accused the rebels of "not respecting" the April 11 ceasefire which he said his forces were committed to.

"The truce is still holding based on orders from our political leadership," said Al-Maqdishi.

The rebels meanwhile accused loyalist forces of launching attacks and dispatching reinforcements to several provinces, in a statement on their sabanews.Net website.

They also said warplanes belonging to the Saudi-led coalition, which has intervened militarily in support of loyalists since March last year, flew sorties over several areas of Yemen despite the ceasefire.

Yesterday, the Yemeni government and rebels were due to start a new round of peace talks in Kuwait but they were delayed after the insurgents failed to show up over alleged Saudi truce violations.

In a Facebook statement today, rebel spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam said "we affirm our continued commitment to dialogue... And this is why our demand from the first day was for talks to be held in an atmosphere of calm, peace, and stability."



"But unfortunately, since April 11, the aggression hadn't stopped and the air strikes have continued on several areas," he said.
The European arm of Tata Steel said it was in talks with as many as 190 suitors for the sale of its UK units after they led to losses totalling nearly $3 billion.

The company also announced some leadership changes in the UK operations and said Bimlendra Jha, an executive committee member of its European operations, will be the chief executive of Tata Steel UK.

"Today's announcement by Tata Steel Europe will ensure the full focus on the vital tasks that lie ahead of Tata Steel UK," the company said.

"To deliver greater clarity for all key stakeholders such as employees, customers and suppliers, it is important for the new team to seek all credible options in a time bound manner."

The company also made a disclosure regarding the asset sale in UK.

"Over the last seven days, the advisers to Tata Steel Europe have begun initial exploration of interest in Tata Steel's UK operations reaching out to 190 potential financial and industrial investors worldwide," it said.

"More detailed information sharing will commence this week as the process moves into the confidential phase."

The company has also appointed Standard Chartered Bank as an additional adviser to the process to ensure the coverage and reach of the universe of potential buyers, especially to Asia and Far East.

Tata Steel had announced on April 11 that KPMG will be its principal advisor.

The announcement of the UK asset sale came after Tata Steel suffered $3 billion in losses in UK operations, some 10 years after it had forayed into Europe by acquiring Anglo-Dutch Corus for over $8.1 billion.


The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has refused to budge from its stand on auctioning the entire spectrum available in the 700 MHz band in upcoming sale on the ground that holding back part of the airwaves would result in an irreversible loss to the government.

The sectoral regulator has also stuck to its methodology used for the pricing of 700 MHz band, for which it had proposed a base price that is four times of 1,800 MHz band. Trai had recommended a record high base price of Rs 1,485 crore per megahertz for the 700 MHz band, which will be auctioned for the first time. Spectrum in the band is considered more economical for providing telephony services compared with other bands like, 900 MHz or 1,800 MHz.

ALSO READ: Cabinet nod to liberalise spectrum at Trai rates; RCom gains

The department of telecom (DoT) had asked Trai on whether the auction could be split in two phases as there may not be enough demand due to higher quantity of airwaves and also telecom companies rolling out networks using spectrum bought in 2014 and 2015. Leading telcos have also requested the regulator and the government to defer sale of 700 MHz spectrum saying that the ecosystem for providing services in this band is not developed and sale would lead to underutilisation of the spectrum for several years and block crucial funds of the telecom industry.

However, Trai said that DoT's presumption that the demand for the spectrum may be less in the forthcoming auctions may not be entirely correct as subscriber base has widened and traffic has increased manifold particularly data traffic.

Trai said it is of the view that holding back some of the spectrum in the 700 MHz from this auction and selling it later would lead to non- utilisation of this scarce natural resource for that period and it would turn into an irreversible loss.
A new survey released today by PwC estimates that the average cost of fraud to an organisation in Ireland is now 1.7m, up from 498,000 in 2014.

The Irish Economic Crime survey shows that more than one in three Irish organisations (34%) experienced economic crime in the last two years, up from a quarter (26%) two years ago.

The most prevalent economic crimes reported were asset misappropriation (53%), followed by cybercrime (44%), accounting fraud (18%) and money laundering (15%).

The study included over 6,000 participants in 115 countries including over 100 in Ireland.

Nearly half (44%) of organisations in Ireland who reported economic crime suffered a cyber attack in the last two years. This has almost doubled since 2012 (25%) and is substantially higher than the global results (32%).

Of those affected by cybercrime in Ireland, nearly one in five (18%) incurred losses of between 92k and 4.6m (Global: 13%).

PwC Advisory Leader, Ciaran Kelly commented, "Too few companies are adapting their risk assessments and control frameworks fast enough. Action on economic crime is not the responsibility of one person or a team, it must be embedded within an organisations culture."

Commissioner of the Garda Siochana, Noirin OSullivan added, "The research highlights the need for vigilance on the part of companies and individuals in their commercial dealings. With cybercrime becoming so common, it is even more essential that they continue to access crime prevention advice to avoid becoming the victims of fraud. The involvement of law enforcement agencies at an early stage acts as a major deterrent. This study also provides insight into how organisations can protect themselves, their businesses and their property from fraud and cybercrime."

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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Enterprise Rent-A-Car have today opened a new city centre branch on Russell Street, Dublin 1 beside Croke Park.

The company is expanding the business in Ireland and recently relocated its head office to larger premises within the IDA Business and Technology Park. The company also plans to open and relocate a number of its branches to larger premises across Ireland within the next six months.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car has been operating in Ireland since 1997 and employs more than 200 staff in its 25 branches.

It was also announced today that Enterprise Rent-A-Car will offer a weekend special rate of 19.16 to cover rental on the weekend of the 23rd April to celebrate the relocation and opening of the new Russell Street branch.

Managing Director at Enterprise Rent-A-Car Ireland, George OConnor says, "This important date also marks the centenary anniversary and the stadium plans to host a 1916 commemorative event on the same day."

He added, "Our new Russell street branch sits in the shadows of the iconic stadium  a landmark which witnessed this historic period of time and we are delighted to be in a position to offer this very special rate marking the centenary, to those looking to make the most of the festivities, be it in Croke Park, around the city or further afield."

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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Failte Ireland have today announced they are seeking nominations for emerging food champions to join their Food Tourism Development Network.

The Food Tourism Development Network was established by Failte Ireland in 2012 to find emerging food champions with a resounding passion and belief in Irish food and who actively influence and shape the future of Irish cuisine and food tourism in their region.

Already, twenty one food champions have participated in the initiative and have contributed to encouraging more people to stop, spend and stay longer in their local tourism regions while at the same time further developing Irelands overall food tourism reputation.

Nominees will be selected, representing a mixed group of owner/managers of food service businesses who are members of wider food tourism communities.

Head of Food Tourism with Failte Ireland, John Mulcahy says, "We are looking for individuals that have a resounding passion and belief in Irish food. We are seeking innovative leaders that have a commitment and drive to actively influence and further shape the future of Irish cuisine and food tourism locally."

Source: www.businessworld.ie

About us
Here at Business World, we support a diverse range of clients. We aim to support their corporate message and improve their SEO qualities.

Supporting clients in the retail sector in Ireland, we can see the diverse ways that companies get their message across. Some are extremely successful, whereas others leave a lot to be desired.

Getting the right tone, content and platform for your corporate message is key to engaging customers, providing an insight into your business and remaining on the front page of Google.

Message across

Some recent, innovative ways that companies get their message across include;

Irish / American tech pioneer Intercom announced last week $50 million in funding, bringing the total funding raised to date to $116 million. The official company announcement came from Intercom CEO Eoghan McCabe in the form of a vlog (video-blog), a definite move away from a standard press release! The vlog generated a large deal of interest in the national press.

Another Irish tech innovator, Slack, announced 80 new jobs for Ireland this week. Like Intercom they have a broad range of innovative ways of getting their message across. Something that Slack has done very well to promote themselves was to produce a podcast, something that is pretty rare in the Irish retail space. The podcast incorporates stories on working at slack, stories on work and office culture, teamwork and innovation in the work place. This is a great way to get their message out in a unique platform.

Advertising

From these two examples, we can see that a companys message (advert) can be successfully communicated in none traditional ways.

This advertising has expanded and reached into corporate news, blogs, vlogs and podcasts as opposed to straight forward paid for adverts. Essentially these companies have used success stories to promote their brand in the marketplace.

Match your audience

To get your corporate message across it isnt necessary to produce a vlog or podcast, but writing a strong blog or original news articles can get your message out there. Once the message is published it can be used across multiple platforms as a tool to promote your products or services.

Here at Business World, we create content for a wide range of clients across news feeds, blogs and editorial articles.
Topaz yesterday announced the launch of a brand new service station in Citywest, Co. Dublin. The opening of the new Topaz City Avenue station has created 18 new jobs for the local area which is located at Citywest Avenue in the Citywest Business Campus.

The overall investment in the new City Avenue totals 3 million and this comes at a time when the company have also invested heavily in their staff. In the last 18 months alone Topaz have invested half a million in team training and development.

Furthermore, a similar investment of 3 million and the creation of 10 new jobs is also planned for a forecourt that will service the residents of Ballysimon, Co. Limerick and the surrounding locality. Officially launching on Wednesday 20th April, the redeveloped site at Ballysimon will like City Avenue feature free Wi-Fi access, comfortable cafe seating, a healthy food offering, Ad Blue pumps and hand crafted barista coffee.

Speaking at the launch yesterday, Topaz Managing Director, Niall Anderton said, "Today is a very significant day for Topaz with the addition of 28 new team members to our 2,000 strong staff across Ireland. It also signifies our continued intent to lead the Irish forecourt industry not only in terms of investment but also our offering."

Source: www.businessworld.ie
Streaming video service Netflix Inc forecast U.S. and international subscriptions would grow at a slower pace than Wall Street expected this quarter, sending its shares tumbling 8 percent in after-hours trading on Monday.

Netflix said it expected to add about 500,000 customers in the United States in the second quarter that ends in June, compared with Wall Street targets of 586,000, according to FactSet StreetAccount. The forecast includes a "modest impact" from the beginning of a price increase for its monthly movie and TV subscription service, the company said.

The company known for its original shows including "Orange is the New Black" and "House of Cards" said it expected to add about 2 million subscribers in markets outside the United States, versus analyst expectations of 3.5 million, according to FactSet. It also reported results for the first quarter, when subscriptions outpaced its own target.

Netflix is prone to large stock price swings as investors bet on the possible success of its mission to redefine television viewing around the world.

The company's long-term results depend in large part on how fast and profitably it expands. Netflix has launched in almost every country in the world, at a substantial cost, and now faces the task of adapting the service to different markets and cultures as competitors also rush in.

In January, Netflix went live in more than 130 countries, a huge global push by Chief Executive Reed Hastings to counter slowing growth in the United States.

Netflix said its forecast for fewer international additions than the prior year was due to tough comparisons with the year-ago period when it had launched in Australia and New Zealand.

Netflix also said it expected to increase its spending on movie and TV content from about $5 billion in 2016 to more than $6 billion in 2017.

From January through March, Netflix added 6.7 million subscribers, bringing its worldwide total to 81.5 million. (Reuters)

Source; www.businessworld.ie
International Business Machines Corp (IBM) reported its worst quarterly revenue in 14 years as results from newer businesses including cloud and mobile computing failed to offset declines in its traditional businesses, sending shares down nearly 5 percent in extended trading.

Revenue of the world's largest technology services company fell 4.6 percent to $18.68 billion in the first quarter, but beat analysts' average estimate of $18.29 billion.

It was the 16th straight quarter of revenue decline for IBM.

Under Chief Executive Ginni Rometty, IBM has been moving toward areas such as cloud-based services, security software and data analytics, while trimming its traditional hardware business by exiting low-margin businesses.

However, revenue in the company's newer businesses is failing to make up for declines in its traditional segments.



Revenue from "strategic imperatives," which includes cloud and mobile computing, data analytics, social and security software, rose about 14 percent in the first quarter.

But revenue from the services and hardware segments fell 4.3 percent and 21.8 percent, respectively, in the quarter.

The company maintained its full-year adjusted earnings guidance of at least $13.50 per share. Analysts on average were expecting $13.55, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. (Reuters)

Source; www.businessworld.ie
LOGAN  The Cache Chamber of Commerce will host former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. at an international trade fireside of Saturday May 6th. Sandy Emile, the Chambers president and CEO said the event will give the local business community the opportunity to hear about internal issues and their relation to Utah businesses.

The state has done some very aggressive things to help businesses do business internationally, she said. And hes going to talk about what the downturned economy and the Chinese markets means for American businesses, and particularly businesses here in Northern Utah. Hes going to talk about our expansion of our technology businesses.

In addition to serving as governor, Huntsman has been an ambassador, a deputy trade representative and he launched global trade negotiations that guided the accession of China into the World Trade Organization.

Emile said the event will be a moderated discussion with questions submitted by local attendees and presented by the World Trade Center Utah.
Jason Relopez appears in 1st District Court for a sentencing hearing on Tuesday afternoon in Logan.

LOGAN  A judge has further postponed the sentencing for Jason Relopez, the 27-year-old former Utah State University student and Sigma Chi fraternity member, who previously pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting two students.

Relopez appeared in 1st District Court Tuesday morning, a week after Judge Brian Cannell said he would allow the defendant to back out of a previous plea deal because of an invalid psycho/sexual test result. He explained that he couldnt rely on the evaluation that found Relopez was a low-to-moderate risk of committing another assault.

The test was central to the plea deal Relopez accepted in February, pleading guilty to one charge of attempted rape, a first-degree felony and one charge of attempted forcible sexual abuse, amended to a third-degree felony.

Previously, prosecutors had called the evaluation inconclusive, while defense attorney Shannon Demler argued that prosecutors were simply trying to back out of the deal because they didnt like the results.

During Tuesdays status conference, Demler told the court he had spoken to Relopez about withdrawing his plea and proceeding to trial. He asked Judge Cannell for additional time to discuss the matter further.

Relopez was arrested last year after a woman claimed he raped her multiple times while she was attending a party at the Sigma Chi fraternity house, near USU. A second victim later reported also being sexually assaulted by him a year before, while the two were doing homework in her residence. He remains in the Cache County Jail.

Judge Cannell ordered Relopez to appear again in court May 24 for a pre-trial conference.

<hr /><p style=text-align: center;>will@cvradio.com
LOGAN  A judge has ordered a North Logan family to give attorneys access to a four-wheeler that is considered evidence in an ATV/vehicle accident that sent two boys to the hospital last summer.

Defense attorney Brad Bearnson, who is representing Erin Milligan, told 1st District Court Judge Thomas Willmore that he had received police reports about the July 29th accident. He went onto say though, the family of some of the victims were not cooperating to allow him to look at the four-wheeler.

The four boys were riding the ATV along a canal road in North Logan when they came upon a Ford F-250 truck, driven by Milligan. The boys said as he got closer, he sped up, striking the ATV and pushing it into the canal, partially pinning one of the boys underneath. He and one other boy were transported to Logan Regional Hospital with internal injuries, lacerations, scrapes and an ankle injury. Both were later transported to Primary Childrens Medical Center, one by Air-Med helicopter.

Milligan was charged with reckless endangerment, a class A misdemeanor and reckless driving, a class B misdemeanor.

During Mondays hearing, prosecutor Jacob Gordon said he had no problem with the defense inspecting the four-wheeler. Bearnson said the family was following the advice of their personal attorney in not allowing it to be looked at.

Judge Willmore signed a motion, granting the inspection. He threatened to have law enforcement seize the ATV from the family if they continued to play any more games. He also ordered Milligan to appear again May 23rd for another pre-trial conference.

<hr /><p style=text-align: center;>will@cvradio.com
Central Asian nations consider the development of alternative regional transport communications important aspects of their national economic and political strategy, and the republics have become active participants in various international projects to promote economic cooperation with different countries and regions of the world. The development of internal Central Asian communication networks in general, and Uzbekistan in particular, gives the possibility of extending not only national communications, but also broaden networks in Central Asia. The Angren-Pap rail project is very important for national connectivity and for increased international communication. Different international experiences in economic transformation are relevant for Central Asias regional connectivity.

BACKGROUND: The contemporary Central Asian nations  Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, as well as Afghanistan  consider the development of alternative regional transportation and communication arteries as important to their national and regional strategy. The various initiatives in this regard gradually result in the revival of the Great Silk Road, and the development of new transport communication toward the east, west, south and north. Some priorities for the countries in the region include the development of transport corridors to seaports and international markets, as well as the construction of oil and gas pipelines. The countries also strive to provide efficient functioning of these routes, as well as developing alternative routes that provide redundancy. In the last two decades, a number of international transport and energy projects have been implemented. The development of transport communications in Central Asia is not only an economic, but also a political issue; there is also the influence of internal and external factors.

Since 1990, practically all Central Asian republics have worked to develop internal highways and railways to avoid reliance on neighboring countries for connections between different parts of their country. In addition, they have developed bilateral communication links. This stands in contrast to the Soviet period, when connecting points within a union republic frequently required road and rail networks that crossed into neighboring republics territory.

In the past two decades, Uzbekistan has constructed new highways and railways in order to modernize its infrastructure and increase its national and international transport communications. Several new large-scale national railway infrastructure projects have been implemented, including the Navoi-Uchkuduk-Sultanuvaystag railway with a length of 341 km and the Tashguzar-Boysun-Kumkurgan railway with a length of 220 km. These projects allow direct connections between different regions of Uzbekistan without needing to transit Turkmen territory, and these networks can also be used for Central Asian regional and international trade.

It is well known that the Ferghana Valley is the most densely populated area in Central Asia and is administratively divided between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. During the Soviet era, highway and the railway networks connecting the regions in the Valley belonging to Uzbekistan with the rest of the republic crossed the territory of Tajikistan. But in the 1990s, due to the civil war in Tajikistan, passenger trains were phased out  and for a number of reasons, these rail connections have never fully functioned even after the end of that war. Since that time, it has been strategically very important for Uzbekistan to have safe and reliable infrastructure for transportation and communication between the Ferghana Valley and the rest of the country.

IMPLICATIONS: Over 10 million people  over a third of the countrys population  live in the Namangan, Ferghana and Andijan regions of Uzbekistan. Against this background, it should be no surprise that the new railway project connecting Angren in the Tashkent region and Pap in the Namangan region is regarded as very important to Uzbekistans national strategy of internal connectivity. This project allows a considerable reduction of transportation expenses and increases the carrying capacity between Andijan, Ferghana, Namangan and other regions of Uzbekistan. The Angren-Pap line is only 123 kilometers long, but it crosses high mountainous areas, including areas with an elevation above 2000 meters, and is thus quite expensive. The cost of the Angren-Pap project is over $1.6 billion, and its construction has been made possible through a variety of sources. This includes more than $1 billion from "Uzbekistan Temir Yollari" (Uzbekistan Railways) and Uzbekistans National Reconstruction and Development Fund. A loan of an additional $350 million was secured from Chinas EximBank, while the World Bank provided $195 million.

In June 2013, construction started, and by March 2016 more than ten new bridges and seven railway stations had been constructed, as well as a 19.1 kilometer long tunnel under the Kamchik pass built by a Chinese company, the China Railway Tunnel Group. The tunnel reportedly ranks eighth in the world by complexity of construction, and thirteenth by length.

The construction of the railway tracks on this line is carried out by "Uzbekistan Temir Yollari," and the rail line is scheduled to be operational in summer 2016. The company predicts 600,000 passengers and about 4-6 million tons of goods annually during the first year of operation.

While this railway will go a long way toward improving transportation inside Uzbekistans borders, it is not sufficient, and there are considerable needs for the whole of the Ferghana Valley in terms of railroads and highways. This obviously includes Tajikistans transit potential. Moreover, the Valley is important for the development of trade and communication links between China and Central Asia. A highway connecting Kashgar, Osh, and Andijan has been constructed, but the implementation of a railroad similarly connecting China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan has come to face difficulties. The states have yet to formulate a common policy, and their positions diverge. Nevertheless, this project would connect well with the Angren-Pap railroad.

The development of strong transport corridors in the Ferghana Valley, including highways and potentially railroads connecting China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are part and parcel of the development of new routes linking the region to Asia and Europe. The synergies with existing and developing projects are potentially significant: for example, the improvement of connections between Central Asia and Afghanistan would contribute towards the future economic recovery of Afghanistan. Moreover, the development of transport communications between Central Asian countries and South and East Asia also are linked to this. These include connections such as Uzbekistan-Afghanistan-Iran, Uzbekistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan, and Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan-Iran-Oman-Qatar. Central Asian states, as well as Japan, the Republic of Korea and other countries believe that strong cooperation will contribute to closer trade ties, economic and investment relations between Eurasia, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region. At the same time prospective plans for new transportation projects will depend on the balance of global, regional, interregional and national interests in the implementation of projects.

CONCLUSIONS: Uzbekistan, like other Central Asian republics, considers the development of alternative regional transport communications to be important to its national and regional strategy. Today's Central Asian states have become active participants in various projects to promote economic cooperation with countries of Europe and Asia. The Angren-Pap rail project has been developed on the basis of multiple partnerships, and will prove important for national connectivity and as well as for increased international communication. A well-developed regional transport system in the Ferghana Valley, and Central Asia in general, will increase the potential for regional interconnectivity as well as provide a good opportunity to develop international networks and trade, including cultural and eco-tourism and the Valley. At the same time, the project shows the need to target investments more widely with a view toward the reconstruction, modernization, and upgrading of the highways and railways; to develop cooperation in the sphere of customs convention and legislations within Central Asia, while simultaneously paying attention to security challenges. The states of Central Asia are gradually integrating into the world economy, but the volume of mutual trade within the region remains low and further growth is needed.

AUTHOR'S BIO: Mirzokhid Rakhimov, Ph.D., is a Visiting Fulbright scholar at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, based in Washington D.C. He is the Head of the Department of Contemporary History and International Relations of the Institute of History of the Academy of Science of Uzbekistan.

Image Attribution: www.railwaygazette.com, accessed on April 19, 2016
Map of the Week: Netflix 'aint so chill

Published on April 19, 2016

Story by Cafebabel

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Netflix has cracked down on the use of VPNs and other get-arounds to prevent users from viewing content not licensed in their country. As most places outside of the US get a raw deal when it comes to content, we ask which European countries get the best value for money from the service. Who gets the biggest House of Cards and who's left all on their Jessica Jones?

The latest Netflix security push aims to rend the service as unbreakable as Kimmy Schmidt. Fed up of its customers using clever technological fixes to access US only content, the streaming service is trying to put a stop to the practice of using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and other methods of fooling their servers.

The American video-streaming giant recently expanded its consumer base to include a further 130 countries, including  for example  Serbia, Russia and Poland. The total is now up to 190, though the service still isn't available in China, or places subject to "U.S. government restrictions on American companies"  Syria, North Korea and Crimea.

However, access to content can hugely vary around the world, due to countries' individual licensing and copywrite laws. In January 2016, the website finder.com compiled a list of how each country shapes up. At the time, the American version of the site licensed far more than the rest of the world  5750 different film or TV titles. If you live in the British Virgin Islands, not only will you enjoy the tax haven's financial benefits, you'll also have one of the next biggest Netflix libraries  3608 viewing options.

In Europe, Ireland comes out on top, offering its citizens 2963 titles via the streaming service. It's closely followed by Lithuania, far outstripping its Baltic neighbours with 2937 productions on offer. Bringing up the rear we have poor Albania, whose 233 available titles don't leave much opportunity for a lengthy session of Netflix and chill.

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Source: see finder.com for the full report. Data for Cyprus, Montenegro and Kosovo unavailable.

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This article is part of our Map of the Week series: charting the stats that matter to Europe, one map at a time.

Story by Cafebabel
Brexit: The view from Britains most Eurosceptic town

Published on April 19, 2016

Story by Alex Fargier

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In the east London suburb of Romford, the local council has become the first to declare itself in favour of the UK pulling out of the European Union. Yet the generational divide is still clearly visible when it comes to a potential Brexit. A local perspective from the "most Eurosceptic" town in the country.

Romford: an east London suburb without much claim to fame save for its "wild Saturday nightlife" and local residents strong regional accent. It is, however, steeped in history: its market was first held in the 1240s with permission from Henry III, at a time when sheep were the traded commodity. As London expanded the area has inevitably transformed, but since 2004 it's the EUs expansion that's been changing Romford.

The local park now welcomes more people than it used to speaking different European languages. Local supermarket aisles now feature Polish dairy products and types of bread unknown to the area in the early 2000s. Romfords market offers more exotic foodstuffs than ever before.

Romfords MP Andrew Rosindell makes it clear hes "not against people from other countries coming to live in the UK". However, the constituency is also a safe Conservative seat  in 2010 winning by a majority of more than 35%. Interestingly however, in the last election the Tories dropped 10% to the benefit of the Eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP).

On the 29th of January, Romfords town hall voted to back the campaign to take the UK out of the EU. As Britains first local authority to do so, it sent a strong message. Rosindell firmly backs the "Vote Leave" campaign. When interviewed, he said that "the problem with the EU at the moment is that you cannot refuse anyone from the EU". Despite professing to believe that "the idea of European co-operation is a very good idea", he thinks this should only be done "on a bilateral basis".

Cafebabel heads to the high street

Do people in Romford feel the same way about Brexit? Conducting a straw poll of under 30s in Romfords town centre is an interesting exercise in and of itself: the majority of young people surveyed had foreign accents, and most who had time to respond supported the status quo.

John (22) was originally a student from outside the EU. Having lots of European friends, he says he would probably vote to stay in the EU, but doesnt yet know if he will.

Sigalli (18), an economics student, is a bit more clued up. She cites the UKs current account and balance of payments deficit as useful aids to help decide whether to stay in or out. For her, "staying inside the EU has more economic benefits than staying outside".

But economic arguments dont stick with everyone. Gurjeet (33), of Indian heritage, cites her experience of Indian visa requirements. Compared to this, she doesnt think it would be so bad for UK citizens to travel to Europe even in the case of a Brexit. According to her, "most people go once a year, twice a year for their Christmas holiday or summer break" so that "unless its a business thing, its not going to affect the average person".

Nicole (24), a social therapist, and Mary (25), a project officer, both thought that the UK would "still have immigration problems" and "less benefits" if it left the EU and that trade would suffer because of the impact on imports.

According to our findings, it seems to be the case that a generational divide separates opinion even in Conservative Romford  as it does nationally. In February a YouGov poll showed 75% of under-25s would vote to remain, while close to 70% of over-65s would prefer to leave. Because of differences in voter turnout, three pensioners will vote for every two voters under 25. The UKs "EasyJet generation" may have a lot of persuading to do especially in Romford.

In brief: The four major issues concerning Brexiteers

Immigration: That 500 million Europeans have the automatic right to come and claim benefits in Britain  a deliberately provocative argument that implies Europeans are lazy, dont have enough state support and all want to live in Britain. For Europhiles, that fellow British citizens should imply such things can be quite embarrassing.

Security: That freedom of movement makes Britain less secure. Awfully, recent terrorist atrocities have bolstered this argument. However, it doesnt take into account the possibility that terrorist sleeper cells could also be present in the UK or Internet accessibility to radicalising websites. The implementation of the European Arrest Warrant suggests the EU has actually improved security.

Trade: Brexiteers regard the EUs institutions as unresponsive and find their bureacracy asphyxiating for business, viewing bilateral trade deals outside the EU as holding greater potential. However, previous trade deals have taken years to broker. The impact of an exit would create uncertainty that trade with developing economies wouldnt be able to offset given that China, India and Brazil combined receive barely more than 5% of British exports, whilst the EU receives 44.6%.

Law: The sovereignty of the UKs courts. Currently, the European Court of Justice has the final word on EU law. However, since EU law supersedes national law, and because some of its past rulings have been controversial, it hasnt inspired confidence in everyone.

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This article was published by a cafebabel writer based in London.

Story by Alex Fargier
COURTNEY SACCO/CALLER-TIMES Homes in the Hillcrest neighborhood in the 1500 block of Van Loan Avenue, photographed Thursday, March 31, 2016.

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By Kirsten Crow of the Caller-Times

Getting involved in the community and in the political realm will be key moving forward, Hillcrest neighborhood advocates told residents Monday night.

Dozens of people filled the Coles School and Education Center Auditorium to hear updates at the meeting of the Citizens Alliance for Fairness and Progress, a grassroots group that has represented the area neighborhood, particularly in discussions about the construction of the replacement Harbor Bridge.

Residents were urged by citizens alliance members to participate in a now-forming Citizens Advisory Board, related to the bridge project. It is expected to have its first meeting May 12, citizens alliance members said.

Several neighborhood representatives also plan to attend the City Council meeting Tuesday, when it is anticipated the council will hear an update on the replacement Harbor Bridge.

Twitter: @CallerCrow
Contributed Port officials say construction of the span that will replace the Harbor Bridge could get underway as early as mid-April. The project is expected to take about five years to complete.

SHARE CHRIS RAMIREZ/CALLER-TIMES Del Richardson, CEO of Del Richardson & Associates, tells the Port Authority on Tuesday, April 19, she is prepared to meet with Hillcrest residents. The port hired her company in March to coordinate a program that will relocate residents and buy properties in the neighborhood to make way for the Harbor Bridge replacement project.

By Chris Ramirez of the Caller-Times

The Harbor Bridge, the wavy span that has become the calling card of Corpus Christi, will be erased from the city's skyline by this time five years from now, says the company hired to construct its replacement.

Port of Corpus Christi commissioners on Tuesday were introduced to the contractors hired to replace the aging Harbor Bridge and relocate residents whose homes will be affected by the construction.

Lorette Williams, of Flatiron/Dragados LLC, unveiled a more detailed timeline of the project. The company was selected last year by the Texas Department of Transportation for a design-build contract to construct a new bridge connecting the city's Northside with North Beach.

Ground breaking for the project is slated to begin in the summer, along with construction of the Interstate 37 interchange, Williams said.

Construction is expected to continue five years, until late spring of 2020.

It's then that work to demolish the Harbor Bridge will get underway, Williams said. Barring the unforeseen, the Harbor Bridge will be removed by the spring 2021, Williams said.

With its distinctive Napoleon hat-style look, the metal bowstring Harbor Bridge was built in the 1950s. Transportation officials want to replace it with a taller, wider and modern cable-stayed bridge. Flatiron/Dragados has been involved in 31 cable-stayed bridge projects worldwide, including nine in the United States. When complete, the replacement bridge will be the longest of its kind in the nation, measuring 1,655 feet at its main span.

It also will have a higher clearance  205 feet above the water, compared with 138 feet today. Williams said its planned shared-use path will be wider for pedestrians, and will include an extended observation area, or belvedere, with telescopes and curved benches.

"We wanted to make it an experience people who will use the bridge," Williams said.

Replacement of the bridge is slated to cost $898 million. Port commissioners in December authorized up to $20 million to buy properties in the Hillcrest neighborhood and to relocate residents who want to move.

It will be the job of Del Richardson & Associates to inform those wanting to leave the historically black enclave of their options. Port officials hired the company in March to a three-year contract.

Del Richardson, who started her consultant firm in Inglewood, California, in the 1980s, told port commissioners she was committed to the program and to doing what she can for residents.

In all, 506 Hillcrest properties could be eligible for the program.

"We're just looking forward to meeting a lot of people, hearing their concerns and trying to help them through the process," Richardson said.

Twitter: @Caller_ChrisRam

IN OTHER BUSINESS:

The Port of Corpus Christi Commission:

Voted to give a contract to Division 16 Construction Co. for security improvements to Oil Dock 14. The port received a grant from the U.S.

Department of Homeland Security for various projects, which included dock security improvements. The dock is under construction, and the project includes installing a guard inspection station with canopy, fencing and surveillance cameras. Division 16, based in Corpus Christi, submitted the lowest bid during a competitive bidding period that ended last month. The contract is for $647,399.

Awarded a 24-month contract for $150,000 for J.M. Davidson for corrosion protection of equipment and buildings at the ports Bulk Terminal. J.M. Davidson, which has offices in Corpus Christi, Aransas Pass and Pearland, submitted the lowest bid during a competitive bidder period earlier this month.

Authorized port staff to issue a request for proposal for a dry bulk commodity market study. The port wants to examine commodities potential use as it develops an overall master plan for its Bulk Terminal.




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By Beatriz Alvarado of the Caller-Times

An Instagram post seen by Tuloso-Midway ISD Superintendent Sue Nelson prompted the suspension of four longtime district teachers and several students who went on a trip to Hawaii together, she said.

"This is a world of social media," she said. "It's got its good points and its bad points."

The teachers, who have all been employed by the district more than 10 years, were suspended with pay Wednesday after an investigation by the district's personnel department was initiated by Nelson, she said. Nelson declined to detail the photo and declined to say if the group in the photo were engaged in illegal activity when photographed.

The educators, who are all women, will not be terminated and are expected to return to work after the investigation is complete, likely by Thursday, Nelson said.

"There will be students suspended this week," she added.

Nelson said 29 Tuloso-Midway High School students who are members of the Discovery Club and teachers were on a school-sponsored trip to Hawaii when the photo was taken. The club is an interdisciplinary project focused on teaching outside the classroom. They visited Hawaii for a geography lesson, Nelson said.

Nelson did not say how many students are or will be suspended pending a complete investigation. Suspension lengths and other consequences for students, like not being allowed to attend prom, will vary, she said.

Those involved in the incident captured in the photo do not face any criminal charges, she added.

Twitter: @CallerBetty
The New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NYSCADV) has unbelievably and inexcusably issued a memo opposing the creation of potentially life-saving violent criminal registries like one that would be created under the Domestic Violence Prevention Act  commonly known as Brittanys Law. Families and communities deserve to know if there is a violent felon living nearby, and that information is crucial for those who may be in a relationship with someone who has a history of violence.

Brittanys Law would create a registry of violent felony offenders similar to the sex offender registry established by Megans Law. Brittanys Law has passed the Senate six times with overwhelming bipartisan support. Despite Majority sponsorship in the Assembly, Brittanys Law (A.1833, Gunther) has yet to advance to the floor for a vote. The law is named after Brittany Passalacqua, a 12-year-old girl from Geneva who was murdered in 2009, along with her mother, Helen Buchel, by a man previously incarcerated for violently assaulting his infant daughter.

The NYSCADVs contention the registry would be too expensive is offensive. Further, its claim that limiting registries to convicted criminals would disproportionately target minorities, while also overlooking instances of violence that went unreported, is grossly off base. Convicted, violent felons are given constitutionally mandated due process and their inclusion on a registry is a fair and appropriate extension of the criminal justice systems purpose to protect the people.

Lastly, the NYSCADVs ludicrous assertion that a registry puts victims in more danger by inciting retaliation by those on the registry shows an astonishing deafness to the most basic principles of public safety, transparency and accountability. Criminals must be held responsible for their actions, and by informing those in close proximity to violent felons that there is a potentially dangerous situation afoot, we give them a necessary tool to prevent further instances of violence. The NYSCADVs disregard for common sense and the core tenets of our justice system are frightening.

NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMS RIGHTS WEEK

April 10 to April 16 was National Crime Victims Rights Week, and I urge all New Yorkers to take time to reflect on the horrific emotional and physical damage that violent crime victims face. Before we debate the merits of any piece of legislation we must understand the toll violence takes. All good policy begins with empathy and compassion.

Please join me in my push to make our communities safer with legislation like Brittanys Law. It is a practical, common-sense step toward ending violence and with the continued support of legislators from both the Assembly and Senate, both the Majority and Minority, and the people of New York who are sick of stories like Brittanys, we can make this law.

What do you think? I want to hear from you. Send me your feedback, suggestions and ideas regarding this or any other issue facing New York State. You can always contact my district office at (315) 781-2030, email me at kolbb@assembly.state.ny.us, find me by searching for Assemblyman Brian Kolb on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter.
SHARE CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Woodsboro school officials say a mold inspection at Woodsboro Elementary School that called for remediation in June 2014 wasn't presented to the school board as it should have been. A laboratory was among the areas intended for mold removal. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Woodsboro school officials say a mold inspection at Woodsboro Elementary School that called for remediation in June 2014 wasn't presented to the school board as it should have been. Classroom 20 was among the areas intended for mold removal.

By Beatriz Alvarado of the Caller-Times

A June 2014 mold inspection at Woodsboro Elementary School that called for remediation wasn't presented to the school board as it should have been, superintendent Jeff Dyer said.

That allowed the mold to spread during the last year and a half.

The inspection called for the removal of 500 square feet of drywall and 132 square feet of flooring from a lab and a room at the school, according to the report obtained by Caller-Times through an open records request.

Former Woodsboro superintendent Steven Self tendered his resignation Sept. 15, according to reports. Dyer was hired as the district's new superintendent Dec. 15. Self could not be reached for comment Monday.

"To my knowledge, he was the only person to have seen the report," Dyer said. "The report was never brought to the board."

The portion of the building that was inspected hasn't been occupied by students in several years because of structural problems, Dyer said. Air quality samples taken this month of a hallway connecting the vacant rooms to other rooms detected levels of mold higher than the accepted range. The district on Thursday shut down a portion of the school, and 69 students were relocated to other classrooms.

Jason Jones, whose 8- and 12-year-old girls attend the Woodsboro schools, said this year he was advised by a doctor treating his children to remove them from the schools. They were experiencing symptoms of exposure to mycotoxins specific to fungi Stachybotrys and Aspergillus, noted in high levels in the 2014 inspection report. Urine samples showed concentrations 30 times greater than the limit considered harmful to their health, he said.

The children experienced abnormally low white blood cell counts, decreased immune function and lymphadenopathy, a disease affecting the lymph nodes, according to a March email to Dyer from Jones' doctor, Dr. Shreenath Doctor.

He and five other Woodsboro parents signed a petition to have the doctor address the school board about the findings, Jones said. About 30 parents reached out to Jones after the building was closed last week. Parents said several children experienced allergy-like symptoms similar to those of his girls', Jones said.

"What we are hearing is that for years kids (were experiencing less of the symptoms) during the summer," he said.

In the March email, Doctor states, "I was appalled and taken aback by the condition of the area that was evaluated in 2014, was shocked at the results and even more so that the area has neither been addressed nor remediated as was recommended."

The more than $30,000 remediation of the building is being considered by the board. Jones and parents are asking all schools in the district undergo a health hazard evaluation.

"We would like to be totally mold free, but I don't know if that's realistic," Dyer said. "The best we can do is keep it at low levels."

Dyer said Monday he was not aware of any children exposed to hazardous levels of the mold cited in the 2014 report. When asked about the email from Doctor, Dyer said he could not comment, citing Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protections. Children were mentioned by name in the email, he said.

Twitter: @CallerBetty
COURTNEY SACCO/CALLER-TIMES The Corpus Christi Fire Department battles a house fire in the 1400 block of Melbourne Drive.

SHARE COURTNEY SACCO/CALLER-TIMES The Corpus Christi Fire Department battles a house fire in the 1400 block of Melbourne Drive. COURTNEY SACCO/CALLER-TIMES The Corpus Christi Fire Department battles a house fire in the 1400 block of Melbourne Drive.

By Julie Garcia of the Caller-Times

A cluttered house that caught fire will need to be checked periodically by firefighters so it does not flare back up.

About 5:30 p.m. Monday, the Corpus Christi Fire Department arrived in the 1400 block of Melbourne Drive for an active fire. An hour later, the firefighters continued to put out smoke in the two-story home.

Battalion Chief David Saenz said fire investigators would be on scene for a while because of the rainy conditions and cluttered condition of the house.

He was not sure where in the house the fire started.

Two residents were home when the fire broke out, but got out safely. Saenz said the first story of the home was likely not salvageable, but that the second floor might be.

Twitter: @Caller_Jules
GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES

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By Julie Garcia of the Caller-Times

A man was taken to Christus Spohn Hospital Memorial after police said he illegally crossed the street and was struck by a car.

About 6:30 a.m. Monday, the man was walking across the 1500 block of Airline Road without using a crosswalk, said Senior Officer Travis Pace. A man driving a vehicle said he didn't see the person walking across the road.

Since the man didn't use a crosswalk, the driver likely will not face any criminal charges. As of 10 a.m. Tuesday, investigators were still trying to identify the pedestrian. Pace did not know his condition Tuesday morning.

Twitter: @Caller_Jules
KIRSTEN CROW/CALLER-TIMES FILE A city notice is caught on the edge of a fence outside a vacant apartment complex on Gordon Street in February. The City Council on Tuesday upheld a previous ruling by the Building Standards Board to demolish the apartments at 625 Gordon St.

By Kirsten Crow of the Caller-Times

The Gordon Street apartments should be demolished, the City Council said Tuesday.

In a special meeting, the council voted without dissent to uphold a previous ruling by the city's Building Standards Board to tear down the vacant, 42-unit structure at 625 Gordon St.

The meeting was rare. Building Standards Board cases don't typically reach the level of City Council.

City officials have said the empty apartment complex is not adequately secured and has been the site of multiple safety hazards, including arsons. The city has spent at least $24,000 in federal grant funding for basic maintenance of the property, including boarding up windows and doors, according to city documents.

The apartments are owned by Gen Shibayama, of Corpus Christi Note Acquisitions. Attorney Tim Dowling represented the company at the appeal Tuesday, contending that the structures should not be demolished.

Last fall, the owner erected a chain-link fence around the property's perimeter.

Documents filed by Dowling state the owner was unaware of the extent of the apartments' disrepair until after he purchased the property. The complex has cosmetic issues, but is structurally sound and should not be demolished, Dowling told the council: Shibayama's goal is to rehabilitate the property into affordable housing.

Twitter: @CallerCrow
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In fairness to Gov. Greg Abbott, it's doubtful that his tendency to hand out plum appointments to non-Hispanic whites indicates an aversion to diversity. Like fellow Republican and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Abbott is married to a Hispanic woman. Who could forget his 2014 election campaign ads featuring his Hispanic mother-in-law? Also, his first appointee was Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos to Texas Secretary of State  a score for geographic as well as ethnic diversity.

Nevertheless, 75 percent of Abbott's appointees are non-Hispanic whites, according to The Associated Press. That's about the same as his predecessors Rick Perry and George W. Bush. The late Gov. Ann Richards' appointments were 67 percent white, which shows that even Texas' last Democratic governor appointed an overwhelming majority of whites.

However, some perspective is in order. In Richards' case, the mitigating perspective is that she was done with making gubernatorial appointments more than 20 years ago, when the demographic trend of rapid Hispanic population growth, while apparent, wasn't nearly as far along. So there's plenty to be said for Richards' 8-percentage-point diversity gain on the three governors who followed her.

The key perspective on all of these governors is that the lack of ethnic diversity in their appointments resulted not from an intent to discriminate against ethnicities, but from an intent to discriminate in favor of their sugar mamas and daddies. Abbott, a husband, son-in-law and father of Hispanic women, didn't set out to leave out Hispanic women in his appointments. Likewise, George W. Bush, a brother-in-law and uncle to Hispanics, was moved by the same color that moved all of these governors to appoint as they did  green (or gold, for those who prefer that metaphoric color to represent money).

Whenever a governor announces appointments, our tendency as an editorial board is to look first not for racial or ethnic diversity but for Corpus Christi and nearby cities as the appointees' hometowns. That's how we tend to score newsworthiness and victories.

Thus, we were pleased when Perry appointed Austin lawyer Bech Bruun, who grew up here and whose father practices law here, to the Texas Water Development Board. We were pleased again last year when Abbott named him chairman. We were aware that the reason for those decisions was not expertise in hydrology, maleness of gender or paleness of complexion. Bruun is well-connected. While that is at least a partial explanation for his initial appointment, gaining the chairmanship is an indicator that Perry's appointment was a good one. Also, Bruun, while not a scientist, brought a background in the politics of water, having worked for the Brazos River Authority.

Bruun's credentials notwithstanding, a system based heavily on spoils has a bad whiff to it. Ideally a governor would seek the best plumbers and cosmetologists to serve on state plumbing and cosmetology boards and commissions and the like, with an eye toward achieving ethnic, gender, age and geographic diversity among the most qualified. A plumber or cosmetologist's loyalty and generosity to the governor's political party should be incidental or, better yet, coincidental.

Ideally, the reward to a governor's big donors would be their satisfaction of knowing that he or she chose the best-qualified people for the appointed positions, not brother- and sister-in-law quid pro quo. That's an idealism heard on campaign trails but not post-inauguration.

Abbott is part of a familiar system. It shouldn't be condoned. It also shouldn't be condemned as intentionally discriminatory. But its outcome, however unintentional, is unfair. Abbott is less than halfway through his term. He will have opportunities to do better than his predecessors and, thus far, himself.
Dentsu Digital Inc is a standalone company under Dentsu Inc. Operations will begin in July 2016, led by Toshiya Oyama as CEO and Yoshito Maruoka as COO. It is expected to have a staff of 600.

It will absorb Dentsus Digital Marketing Division and subsidiaries Dentsu e-marketing One and Nextage Dentsu. The former focuses on customer and channel strategy, the latter on performance marketing.

A statement from Dentsu noted that the growth of digital technology means companies that previously thought in terms of individual marketing processes are looking to integrate them to maximise effectiveness and efficiency.

TV still accounts for the bulk of Japanese advertising spend and Dentsus revenues. But the company acknowledged that online media is catching up.

Japanese advertising-spend figures released by Dentsu in February 2016 put spending on TV at 1.81 trillion yen (US$16.6 billion) and online at 1.02 trillion yen (US$9.35 billion) including media and advertising production.

Dentsu pointed to IT consulting, big data analytics and ecommerce support as important growth areas. Dentsu Digital will work with other group companies to offer consulting and platform development.

The company listed experience design, marketing automation, content marketing, CRM and artificial intelligence/Internet of Things-related technology among the services Dentsu Digital will provide.

The new entity will be part of Dentsus Tokyo headquarters.
Nothing encapsulates 1950s Americana more than the trusty ol' jukebox.

To launch Krispy Kremes new American Classics range, Digital Arts Network and Eleven have teamed up and created a custom donut box that doubles as a jukebox.

The limited-edition box comes with a built-in Bluetooth speaker, intended for enjoying some exclusive Spotify playlists. Each American Classics flavour also comes with its own original theme tune, written and recorded in a Sydney studio.

The four new donutsThe Big Apple Pie, Peanut Butter Jelly Time, Coconut Cream Pie and Campfire Smoresare inspired by some of the more memorable flavour combinations to come out of the USA.

Andrew McGuigan, CEO of Krispy Kreme Australia, said the inspiration behind the four new flavours was American vintage with a modern twist.

Weve been working with songwriters and Spotify to make sure its not only the taste buds which are in for a treatbut the ears too, he said. You can not only taste the Classics, but hear them as well!

The brand is inviting donut-lovers to flip up the lid, grab a phone and select their favourite donut playlist to be transported into another era.

Ad Nut would certainly like to get furry paws on this jukebox-inspired box of sugar, though human friends say donuts are not good eating for squirrel-kind.

If true, then Ad Nut will have to make do bopping furry head to some 1950s-esque music, while contemplating the health risks of consuming these delicious-looking treats.

Ad Nut likes how neatly everything fits together in this campaign, from the jukebox design to the integrated audio experience courtesy of the in-box speaker and the use of Spotify playlists to set the right donut-eating mood.

Humans get to have all the fun.

CREDITS

Advertising agency: Digital Arts Network

Digital creative director: Russ Tucker

Writer: Chloe Saintilan

Art director: Andrew Torrisi

Designer: Raz Djamaluddin

Developer: Rob Harris

Editor: Etienne Ancelet

Account manager: Gemma Heyes

Producer: Gemma Heyes, Jonathan Pitcher

PR agency: Eleven

Senior account director: Fiona Milliken

Account director: Tom Cummings

Senior account manager: Claire Verlander

Production company: Square Solutions Pty Ltd (JukeBox)

DP: Kit Baker

Krispy Kreme Australia

Marketing manager: Aude Parichot

Digital manager: Russell Schulman

Brand manager: Jon Owen
Ad Nut is understandably incensed by all hairless beasts who choose to slay furry creatures for the fun of it. So the dark humour behind this prank suits Ad Nut down to the furry toes.

The move to "stop hunters breeding" for the sheer purpose of mocking them would likely backfire on just about any entity except PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). The outspoken organisation is already known for its controversial marketing stunts and, compared to its red-paint-flinging past, this is mild. But one has to admire the long-game PETA played in marketing this product for months before jumping out of the proverbial trees and shouting "AH HAH! GOT YOU!"

Of course, Ad Nut knows the campaign was more about generating publicity, awareness and humiliating hunters than it was realistically about exterminating bush-crawlers through prophylactics, but Ad Nut appreciates the idea.

They say:

Erick Rosa, executive creative director, MullenLowe Singapore:

With this idea, we bring the conversation back to the forefront. PETA is a bold, courageous and amazing partner; they not only championed the idea, but worked with us hand in hand from day one to effectively market HUNTSMAN as a brand with real purpose.

CREDITS

Client: PETA - Ingrid Newkirk, Ashley Fruno

Agency: MullenLowe Singapore

Executive Creative Director: Erick Rosa

Art Directors: Fabio Santos, Martin Coppola

Copy: Guy Lewis

Production: Jonathan Gerard

Account team: Gonzalo Olivera, Fan Yang, Cara Fong

Editor: Adam Snyder

Illustrator: Natasha Hellegouarch

Animation: Emoxis

Sound design: Neon

Web design: Leandro Reis
My faith in mankind was restored. I work at Hunter's Diner and did the opening shift on Saturday, April 2. Between 7 and 8 a.m. a lady was having breakfast and she was proudly displaying her Navy coat and hat. A couple of gentlemen stopped at her table and asked her if she was in the Navy. Yes, was her reply and they thanked her for her service. Then they came to the register and paid it forward. They paid her bill and went on their way. This is how it all began.

She then paid for a man at the counter, who in turn paid for another person. One couple paid for another couple who had a young man on crutches. Since this was a family of three, they paid it forward, buying a couple's breakfast, plus a lady at the counter. They said they were a family of three so needed to pay for three.

Now it split and we had people paying it forward double. One lady paid for a man because he was wearing a Fleming Fire Department shirt. One man in an Army jacket explained how you can tell if the person is really in the military; they will always remove their hat at the table.

What a great morning we had. One couple didn't know how this was working so they left the money on the table for their paid bill, which I applied forward to another table.

Two men gave me a credit card and said charge $20 on the card and apply it forward to the next table not paid. We kept this going the entire morning and it ended finally at noon.

I certainly didn't know all the people involved in our Pay It Forward morning, but want to say thank you to everyone who took part and made it a total success.

I am proud to say I got to wait on you folks, and know you are all special people. Thank you.

Sandi Mettler

Auburn
| BY Lynchy |

If youre international ad site Little Black Book getting a feel of a local ad industry, a good place to start would be with the associations representing the companies that make up the local market.

The Communications Council in Australia and the Communication Agencies Association of New Zealand (CAANZ) protect and fight for the ad industry and the issues affecting it in their respective markets.
| BY Ricki Green |

Isobar has today announced it has won the social media business for Moose Toys.

This work will involve taking the reins of the global sensation Shopkins as well as delivering new and exciting brands across Australia and the US in 2016. Isobar will be helping Moose use social media to interact with people all across the world.

Moose is an Australian company, based in Melbourne, with a fast growing global footprint  its now the fourth largest toy manufacturer in the US and Australia.

Shopkins a collectible toy range launched in 2014, are miniature characters based on everyday products you would find at the grocery store. The brand has grown to be the number one selling item in the US last year and to date has sold over 240 million characters worldwide.

Popular among parents and kids alike, Shopkins has become a global phenomenon. Now in its fourth series release with its low entry price-point and excellent distribution, Shopkins has set a new benchmark for the collectibles toy category.

Says Belinda Gruebner, marketing director Moose Toys: Our Shopkins fans are not only highly active across all social channels, they are amongst the best at creating innovative content. Isobar has joined the team at the perfect time to help consolidate our position on Shopkins and ensure we are rewarding our fans with rich and engaging content.

Isobar will be pivotal in setting our global social strategy not only for Shopkins but for two important new brands this year.

Isobars remit will be in the complete strategy, content creation, community management and paid media execution of the business social media accounts.

Says Konrad Spilva, CEO, Isobar Group ANZ: At Isobar we place a strong emphasis on how and why people interact with brands. We see social media as a pivotal experience, especially for a brand like Shopkins, where an evolving narrative is central to its continuing success.

We are excited to be working with such an energetic and dynamic Australian company and look forward to supporting them in their mission of making children happy.
| BY Ricki Green |

Lexus Australia has stepped forward with the launch of its NX campaign, the next iteration of its For those who dare to step forward positioning, via M&C Saatchi.

This narrative weaves in the inspiring story of Sydney Dance Companys award-winning performer David Mack to showcase the new luxury NX range.

Lexus has a proud history of supporting those who are courageous enough to follow their heart and Mack perfectly encapsulates this attitude. The campaign creative focuses on the parallel themes of Macks journey in taking the bold steps necessary to have the life he does today and Lexus brand tenet to celebrate those who dare to step forward.

Mack shares Lexus passion to be bold and follow your own path. Originating from a small Australian town, he quickly realised his desire for a career in dance  a path that faced all sorts of challenges and barriers. Mack knew that to change his story, he needed to completely change his environment. Today, he is one of the Companys most renowned dancers.

Says Mack: Growing up, I was an athlete, a runner. However, I knew in my heart what I really wanted to do was be a dancer despite what others may have thought. I made a decision to make this happen for myself.

The campaign also signifies a new sponsorship between Lexus and Sydney Dance Company that continues the luxury car marques commitment to supporting emerging arts talent. In particular artists passionately committed to breaking through in their respective fields in line with Lexus As their story is our story ethos.

The Sydney Dance Company partnership will see Lexus support the path of aspiring dancers in their pre-professional year, giving them the resources to help them breakthrough.

The program echoes Lexus continued support of Design and Film via The Lexus Design Awards and the global Lexus Short Film competition and the Lexus Australia Short Film Fellowship in partnership with Sydney Film Festival.

Says Adrian Weimers, corporate manager, Lexus Australia: David Macks experience truly embodies the Lexus brand and mindset that goes into the development of our vehicles. Were delighted to collaborate with him. His story is our story as we take the bold steps needed crafting the best vehicle for our customers.

Says Andy Dilallo, chief creative officer, M&C Saatchi Sydney: Late last year we had the worlds best wing suit pilot Jeb Corliss jumping from a plane to launch Lexus For those who dare to step forward positioning  an obvious act of bravery that was ideal for making a big splash. To evolve the story and showcase Lexus authentic new depth of attitude we wanted a more internal commitment to making brave decisions and David Mack was the perfect person for this.

The campaign launched with a 30-second spot that went live across TV, cinema and digital on Sunday 17 April, alongside a number of social content films and activations.

The filming took place in Sydney on 17 and 18 March, 2016.

Chief Creative Officer  Andy Dilallo

Creative Director  Chris Little

Creative Director  Andy Flemming

Strategy Director  Michael Sinclair

Group Head  Nick Russo

Senior Account Director  Lauren Trace

Senior TV Producer  Lill Ireland

Director  Patrick Fileti

Production company  Collider

Post production  Alt.vfx

Media Agency  The Media Store

Corporate Manager  Sales & Operations, Lexus Australia  Adrian Weimers
NAVARINO  State Agriculture Commissioner Richard A. Ball had to leave his own tractor in Schoharie County on Monday to award a Climate Resilient Farming Grant to the Annables of Smith Hollow Farm.

Frankly, it's an honor for me to work for you, Ball said. The Annables have been stewards of their environment for a long time, five generations.

Fourth-generation farmer Dan Annable spoke on behalf of himself and his brother John, who are now managing the farm, before a gathering of about three-dozen state officials and dignitaries, family members and friends. The grant will be used to rebuild the dam, to recreate a pond and associated wetlands, repairing the storm water and sediment trap for the brook that is on the 22-acre property that was once called Panther Hollow in Onondaga Valley, on Smith Hollow Road, Navarino.

That pond is what the state refers to as a retention basin. Its waters pass through other area farms before emptying into Otisco Lake, which supplies water to approximately 100,000 people in the region.

Dan Annable said this was the third try at the grant process, with Onondaga County Soil and Water being the lead agency. This project isn't really going to benefit their farming.

We (farmers) are the good stewards of the land  we really wanted to get this taken care of, if we can do something like this and help other people out that satisfies us, Annable said.

This is one of two Onondaga County projects funded by the EPA titled the Climate Resilient Farming Grant Program announced by the state in 2015. There are 11 projects in five regions of the state. Onondaga County Soil and Water District's share is $102,127 with the Smith Hollow Farm receiving approximately $46,000.

As the name suggests, it is money to help control issues due to climate change. Specifically, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the promotion of energy savings and to mitigate water and soil quality concerns.

Farmers alone do not have the ability to adapt and change their farms to meet the new and more extreme variations in weather; we need expertise and money to accomplish it. New York is leading the country in these initiatives, said Dale Stein the Chairman of the Soil and Water Conservation Committee, who is also a dairy farmer in western New York.

There's a level of commitment about agriculture that we haven't seen, especially here in the Central Region, Ball said. When the governor first called me and asked me to take on this role as commissioner, our conversation revolved around growing the upstate economy and the role that agriculture could play in order for that to happen.

Ball said that since 2012 the state has invested nearly $3 billion in the region's economy.

What has been interesting and heartwarming for me, is that agriculture has been front and center, he said

The Upstate Revitalization Initiative plan in this region is called CNY Rising. URI is investing $500 million to incentivize businesses in the area, Ball said, with agriculture as the focus of this plan, focusing on food processing, craft beverage growth and the dairy industry.

Michael P. Hoffman, the executive director of Cornell University's Cornell Institute for Climate Change & Agriculture, spoke to the issue of climate change and how it is directly effecting agriculture.

We have longer summers, warmer winters and more pest, he said. Lot's of challenges.

His institute is developing frost risk, growing and irrigation tools for farmers. It also acts as a listening agency, What are farmers' needs, he said. Rain is coming in events.
Monday, April 18, 2016 at 9:22PM

Netflix is pushing TV technology to the max for its original shows. The streaming service giant is quietly updating its original series with high dynamic range streaming support starting with the first season of Marco Polo. This promises better contrast ratio and color accuracy. They plan to bring it soon to Daredevil, too. To access HDR content, you'll need to be subscribed to Netflix's most expensive tier, the $11.99 per month Ultra HD option, and an HDR-equipped TV.

Source: The Verge
Tuesday, April 19, 2016 at 8:53AM

Pioneering car rental marketplace Turo announces today its launch into Canada, marking its first expansion outside of the US. Empowering Canadians to turn their idle cars into earning engines and inject more personality and value into the car rental experience, Turo is the first peer-to-peer car rental company in Canada.

Putting Canadas 23 million vehicles to better use, Turo allows car owners to offset the cost of car ownership by renting their idle vehicles to pre-approved travellers, while helping travellers find the perfect vehicle for their next adventure. Cars rented on Turo typically cost 30 per cent less than traditional car rentals. Members of the Turo community pay no membership fees, and each trip is backed by Turos leading trust and safety protections, including $2 million in auto liability insurance and 24-hour roadside assistance.

"This is a significant milestone in our history; our first international launch and the opportunity to make car ownership and travel in Canada more accessible," said Turo CEO, Andre Haddad. "The average compact car costs $9,500 per year to maintain. For the first time, Canadians can earn money from their cars and help fuel travellers' adventures, all while being part of a vibrant community. It's a significant step towards realizing our mission of putting the world's one billion cars to better use."

Customers of Intact Financial Corporations two largest brands, Intact Insurance and belairdirect, are eligible to list their vehicles on the Turo platform. Both insurance providers have modified their guidelines to allow customers to join the Turo community.

Were excited to offer Intact Insurance and belairdirect customers Canadas first peer-to-peer car rental insurance option. Turos rental platform will offer consumers greater choice, said Karim Hirji, Senior Vice-President, International & Ventures, Intact Financial Corporation. As a customer-driven organization, Intact remains committed to designing unique insurance products to meet the evolving needs of Canadians.

Turo operates in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec and will expand its marketplace nationally. At launch, Intact Insurance and belairdirect personal lines automobile policyholders will be eligible to list their cars on this new peer-to-peer car rental marketplace. Customers must speak to their broker or agent before participating. Turo is working to prompt other Canadian insurers to allow their policyholders to enjoy the benefits of renting out their cars on the marketplace as well.

Turo, founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, has grown to operate in over 2,500 cities and 300 airports in North America and has safely facilitated over 1 million rental days to date. The average active US member makes USD $600 per month renting out a car in the marketplace.
"My colleagues and I are delighted that ANU has publicly committed to supporting Asian languages in the long term. We are looking forward to working with ANU management to really develop our role as the national Asian language provider for Australia and beyond, and we want to strengthen the university's excellent reputation. Of course our relief is tempered by concern about potential cuts to other areas."
Your digital subscription includes access to content from all our websites in your region. Access unlimited news content and The Canberra Times app. Premium subscribers also enjoy interactive puzzles and access to the digital version of our print edition - Today's Paper.
During the hearing May said he did not mean to hit Martin high and only realised he had done so when other Brisbane players went after him, pushing and shoving, and he then watched the replay.
I love Flagstaff, but one thing I miss about living east of the Mississippi is the abundance of fireflies. Nothing makes a summer night more magical than the flashing lights of these insects calling to one another.

Fireflies are an example of double misnaming. First of all, they are beetles, not flies. Second, the light they make is not fire; it comes from a different kind of chemical reaction. Fireflies take oxygen into special cells in an organ underneath the abdomen and combine it with a chemical called luciferin to produce light with almost no heat. Fireflies control the flow of oxygen into their abdomens to create flashing patterns that are species-specific.

The flashing by fireflies is a courtship display. Males produce a specific temporal sequence of flashes that attracts females of their own species. If interested, females respond with flashes of their own after a short time delay that is unique to each species. Its that characteristic delay that allows a male to identify a member of his own species.

Typically, females prefer conspicuous malesthose who flash faster or who produce longer-lasting flashes. Unfortunately for males, the flashes that make them most attractive to females also make males more vulnerable to a certain type of predator. These particular predators are themselves female fireflies and they use trickery to find each meal.

In order to fool males of another species, they mimic the flashes made by the female of that species. This draws the males in, but when they approach what they think is a willing mate, they are instead faced with a predator who eats them. These deadly and deceptive females are called femmes fatales.

Though we miss out on all this drama by living in the west, any longing for the eastern United States is misplaced. It makes more sense to yearn to see the fireflies in Thailand, home of the worlds most glorious firefly display. For hours each night, massive numbers of these insects congregate in trees along rivers and flash in synchronous bursts about every two-thirds of a second. Even though each firefly can only see the 100 or so insects closest to it, thousands upon thousands of fireflies synchronize their flashes. Areas of synchronization extend for a tenth of a mile or more. Scientists who have brought fireflies to their hotel rooms have observed that they begin by flashing out of sync, but within minutes, they are perfectly synchronized.

The how and why of firefly flash synchrony may seem complex, but in some ways its very simple. How? Males synchronize by cuing off of their nearest neighbors. That means that they can time things perfectly even without a leader and without being able to see every individual in the group. Why? Males synchronize because females respond 10 to 20 times more often to males who are flashing in synchrony than to males who are out of sync. That means that if males were NOT N Sync with each other, they would be told, Bye Bye Bye.
Three college students who first met while attending a Catholic high school in Florida have launched a scholarship fund to help others experience faithful Catholic education at a Newman Guide college. As we went off to different colleges, we kept in touch and found time to catch up whenever we returned []
PHOENIX -- Get ready to look at campaign signs longer each election.

And new fights between candidates.

The state Senate on Monday gave preliminary approval to allowing candidates to put up their signs starting 86 days before the election. That's nearly twice as long as now permitted.

With the primary now in late August, that means a signs could start sprouting in May.

And HB 2017 also ensures that candidates who win the primary can now keep those signs in place through the November election.

But the lawmakers who depend on those signs also voted to make it a crime to "obscure'' someone else's signs, complete with a $750 fine and four months in county jail. It even allows those offending signs to be removed.

Only thing is, no one, including the author of the legislation, could say precisely when a sign violates the law and makes the person who put it up subject to criminal penalties.

There even is a disagreement about who can legally remove a sign that may be blocking another.

Rep. David Stevens, R-Sierra Vista, said that 86-day window ahead of the primary election ensures that candidates can get the message out to those who vote early. He said ballots are mailed out 60 days ahead of each election.

But the more interesting issue is the language about obscuring someone else's ballot. Even Stevens conceded the proposed law is far from clear.

"By what angle?'' he asked.

"If you're at a corner and you're driving, it changes as you drive whether there's obstruction or not,'' Stevens said.

The goal, he said, is to stop one candidate from putting up a sign directly in front of that of a foe, effectively making that other person's sign useless. But Stevens said the measure now awaiting a final Senate vote is far from clear.

"What if I've got a 4 by 4 (foot) sign and someone's got an 8-inch by 12-inch sign in front of mine,'' he said. "Is that an obstruction if you can't see a little corner?''

The senators debating the House-passed measure on Monday had no better luck figuring out what would be a crime.

"We don't know how you define 'obscure','' said Sen. Steve Farley, D-Tucson.

"Does that mean you cover up a quarter inch of the corner?'' he asked. "Or do you cover up the entire thing?''

Sen. Jeff Dial, R-Chandler, conceded he didn't really have an answer. He suggested it might have to be handled on a case-by-case basis "where you'd have to be taking pictures, documenting it.''

But Dial said he isn't terribly concerned that the police will be busy investigating violations, citing offenders and taking down signs.

"Based on my last campaigns, I'd be surprised if there was a rapid response by the police because I've not found the police to really care when you call them to notify them about political signs,'' he said. "The campaign may actually be over by the time we saw a response.''

Stevens, however, said that's not what he intends -- or even the way he said the bill is supposed to work.

"My understanding is, if they put something in front of mine, I can pull it out,'' he said, without bothering to wait for police.

The spat over campaign signs is more than academic.

During the 2014 Republican primary race for treasurer, Jeff DeWit charged that campaign workers for Hugh Hallman were deliberately placing Hallman's signs in front of his. Hallman issued a denial and gave out a phone number to call if DeWit's campaign has a problem or question about sign placement.
Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact.

Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here.

Care2 Stands With: humanitarians, animal lovers, feminists, rabble-rousers, nature-buffs, creatives, the naturally curious, and people who really love to do the right thing.

You are our people. You Care. We Care2.
Applications are invited by Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Vadodara for admission to Master of Technology (M.Tech) in Computer Science & Engineering and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) in Engineering, Sciences and Humanities and Social Sciences programmes.

Admissions are offered for the academic session 2016.

Eligibility Criteria:

M.Tech Programme: Candidates with B.Tech/ B.E in CS, IT, EC and related areas or M.Sc in CS/IT/ STAT/ MATH can apply. The aggregate marks in the qualifying degree should not be less than 60% or equivalent.

Ph.D in Engineering Programmes: Candidates should have:

M.Tech/ME in CS/IT/ECE or related areas OR

M.Sc Applied Mathematics/Computer Science and related areas, exceptional candidates with B.E/B.Tech in relevant areas are also eligible to apply

Ph.D in Science Programmes: Candidates must have:

M.Tech. Material Science/ Nano-Technology/ Applied Optics/ Engineering Physics/ Scientific Computing, M.Sc. in Mathematics/ Physics/ Statistics/ Electronics/ Computer Science and related areas OR

Exceptional candidates with B.E/B.Tech in relevant areas can also apply

Ph.D in Humanities and Social Sciences Programme: Candidates should have completed M.A/M.Phil in Linguistics/ English and other related areas.

How to Apply?



To apply online (for M.Tech program) candidates should visit the official website

Click Here to obtain the application ((Ph.D programme)

Application fees (non refundable) Rs 1000/- should be paid by the candidates

Selection Procedure:

M.Tech Programme: Candidates will be shortlisted for the written/interview based on their academic record and GATE score.

Ph.D Programme: Selection of candidates is based on their performance in written exam, followed by an interview. (The written exam aims to test candidate's basic comprehension on the subject)

Important Dates:

Last date to submit application: May 27, 2016

M.Tech Programme:

Announcement of short listed candidates: May 30, 2016

Date of written and/or interviews: June 20 and June 21, 2016

Announcement of Results: June 24, 2016.

Ph.D Programme:
The Board of Intermediate Education Andhra Pradesh (BIEAP) has announced the inter results 2016 for first and second year examination.

Students who had appeared for the intermediate examination should visit the official website to check their scores.

How to check the results?

Log on to the official website

Search for the live links on the page 'AP Intermediate First Year Result' and click on it

In the new window that opens, enter your hall ticket number in the space provided and submit

The result will be displayed on the screen, take a print out of the same and keep it for future reference

Around 14 lakh students appeared for the intermediate examination in Andhra Pradesh.

About BIEAP:

The Board of Intermediate Education (BIE) regulates and supervises the system of Intermediate education. The board executes and governs various activities including devising the courses of study, prescribing syllabus, conducting examinations, granting affiliations to colleges and, providing direction, support and leadership for all educational institutions under its jurisdiction.

Also Read:
New Delhi, 19 April, 2016: Deakin University, Australia has announced three 100% tuition fee waiver Scholarships for meritorious Indian students under its Vice Chancellor Meritorious Scholarship for India.

The Vice Chancellor Meritorious Scholarship is a part of an initiative of Deakin named 'Changing Lives', with an objective to support deserving students with estimable academic history and holistic achievements for studies onshore at Deakin University, Australia with a view of giving back to India the skills and experience which would make an impact to its growing society.

The inaugural edition of the scholarship in 2015 received over 500 applications and two Indian students were selected for the award. This year in May 2016, Deakin University is offering three 100% tuition fee waiver scholarships to meritorious applicants from India.The total value of the Deakin University Vice Chancellor Scholarship in offer is up to INR 1.8 Crores.

The scholarships are available for Post Graduate Studies and Under Graduate Studies in the field of Creative Arts, Health, Sports, Engineering and Business Analytics.

Speaking about the scholarship, Ravneet Pawha, Executive Director (South Asia) at Deakin University said, "We are thrilled to announce the Vice Chancellor Meritorious Scholarship for Indian Students. There are scores of smart young people in India who deserve an opportunity to provethemselves and we are hoping that this scholarship will give them the right window."

The criterion to apply for the scholarships is based on academic and extra-curricular achievements while studying. Applicants need to demonstrate high level of academic merit -80% plus in Class Twelve and Bachelor Degree.

Selection for the Deakin Vice Chancellor Meritorious Scholarships is a rigorous, three-stage process consisting of application review, semifinal interviews, and on-campus final selection activities. The selection process is absolutely transparent.

The last date to apply is Tuesday 10th May 2016.

For Further Information, please visit the Official Website of Deakin University, Australia.
A Peoria man accused in an elaborate plot to buy and sell methamphetamine pleaded guilty to two charges in Coconino County Superior Court.

Thomas Rye, 36, initially faced 13 charges, including money laundering, possession of a deadly weapon, possession of a dangerous drug, conspiracy to traffic in stolen property and conspiracy to transport or sell dangerous drugs. He pleaded guilty Monday to one count of attempted transportation of dangerous drugs for sale and one count of misconduct involving weapons for possession of a weapon by a prohibited possessor.

According to court documents, Rye conspired with four other people to finance a drug ring by stealing tools and cash from out-of-state construction and electrical companies.

The defendant, Thomas Warren Rye, discussed a plan with his codefendants () to transport stolen tools and cash from the state of Kansas to Arizona and to use the cash and proceeds from the stolen tools to purchase methamphetamine, said prosecutor Aaron Lumpkin. Under this conspiracy, the methamphetamine was transported from Phoenix to be sold.

Highway Patrol officers stopped Ryes truck for an unspecified traffic violation in Coconino County Jan. 6. He was unable to provide a valid drivers license.

He also had a handgun despite being a prohibited possessor due to three prior felony convictions, including a 2012 Maricopa County arrest for possession of dangerous drugs. Officers impounded his vehicle. Inside, they found tools and $11,700.

They turned out to have been stolen from three companies in Kansas.

At this same time, co-defendants Samuel Below and Daniel Thomas were also traveling within Coconino County in a separate vehicle which was also carrying cash to purchase methamphetamine as part of this conspiracy, Lumpkin said.

Both men were later arrested by federal law enforcement after returning to Kansas.

After his arrest Jan. 6, Rye was booked into the Coconino County Detention Facility in Flagstaff. The jails phone system recorded multiple conversations between Rye and two additional co-defendants, Crystal Zepperi and Aaron Wagle. According to the prosecution, Zepperi talked about past and new methamphetamine sales. The three also discussed how they could get money.

The plan was formulated by the defendant to have Crystal Zepperi and Aaron Wagle come to Arizona to attempt to retrieve the stolen tools and $6,000 in cash, which they believed was still inside the dashboard of the truck the defendant was driving, Lumpkin said.

Zepperi and Wagle were arrested Jan. 20 when they showed up at the DPS impound lot in Flagstaff.

All these events which were planned and coordinated by the defendant and his four co-defendants () were a substantial step in a coordinated plan designed to culminate in the purchase of methamphetamine in Arizona and subsequent transport of the methamphetamine for sale, Lumpkin said.

Under the plea deal, Rye has agreed to serve 6.5 years in prison for the drug charge and four years of probation for the weapon possession charge. If he violates his probation, however, he could be sentenced to up to 3.75 additional years in prison. Rye and his co-defendants will have to pay up to $50,000 in restitution to the victims. Sentencing is scheduled for May 16 in Coconino County Superior Court, Division One.
Chennai: Applications for admission to medical colleges (MBBS and BDS courses) in Tamil Nadu for 2016-17 session will be issued from May 9, 2016.

The Directorate of Medical Education (DME) on tuesday announced that students can visit the official website to download the application form.

Important Dates:

Last date to download application form: May 26, 2016 (till 5 pm)

The last date to submit the filled in application form is May 27, 2016 and candidates are requested to submit the same before 5 pm to DME along with a demand draft of Rs 500/-

Date of declaration of merit list: June 15, 2016

Classes commence on: August 1, 2016

Speaking to reporters, Director of Medical Education R Vimala said, "A total number of 2,655 seats are available across the 20 government medical colleges of which the state quota comes up to 2,257 seats while the remaining 398 seats are allotted under the all-India quota (15%)".

However, 1,010 seats are available in the 8 self-financing colleges, of which 595 seats are reserved under the state quota.

Whereas in ESIC Medical College, Chennai 65 out of 100 seats will be made available under the state quota.

Also Read:
University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Bengaluru has released a notification on the recruitment happening. UAS, Bengaluru is looking out for 105 librarian, Professor, Associate Professor and Assistant Professor posts. To know more about pay scale, eligibility, how to apply, selection procedure and important dates scroll down.

Notification details

No.AO/RT/11/53/Current Posts/Librarian/2016-17

Name of the Post & Number of Posts

Professor: 16 posts

Associate Professor: 30 posts

Librarian: 1 post

Assistant Professor: 58 posts

Who is Eligible for the UAS, Bengaluru Job?

Qualification: Candidates interested to apply for the above post must be qualified as per the organisations requirement. Qualification becomes manadatory to test the skills and their perseverance in doing a certain job.

To know more about the Qualification, Experience and Pay Scale in detail log on to the Official Website of University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Bengaluru OR look in to the notification details.

Age Limit:

The candidates should be minimum of 18 years of age.

Application Fee:

For Professor/Associate Professor (General): Rs.1000/-

For Professor/Associate Professor(SC/ST): Rs.700/-

For Librarian (General): Rs.1500/-

For Librarian (SC/ST): RS.1000/-

For Assistant Professor (General): Rs.750/-

For Assistant Professor (SC/ST): Rs.500/-

How Candidates are Selected for UAS, Bengaluru Job?

Applicants will be selected based on performance in the Personal Interview organised by University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Bangalore.

How to Apply for the UAS, Bengaluru Job?

Candidates who are interested to apply for the above mentioned jobs must see that they are eligible for this job. Once they find themselves eligible they can apply for this job through post in a prescribed format. Do not forget to send the applications along with other necessary documents.

The address where the applications need to be sent is, The Administrative Officer, University of Agricultural Sciences, GKVK, Bengaluru: 560065.

Important Dates to Apply for UAS, Bengaluru Job:

Last date for submission of the application form: May 16, 2016.

Also Read:
You can thank Sammy Elbastawesy and Mahmood Nabilsi for our latest mystery scoop shots of a disguised prototype sedan wearing what looks to be Michigan license plates. Sammy told Carscoops in an email message that it could be a 2015 Chevrolet Cruze tester, but were not so sure about that.

The reason why were hesitant is that, in the dozen or so cell-phones pictures that Mahmood took on a California highway, the sedan model looks like it could be a category up from the Cruze in terms of exterior dimensions, which would place in the mid-size segment.

To help you out in your quest to discovering the answer to what brand and model this car may be, well advise you start looking for prototypes with similar camouflage designs to potentially narrow down the automakers(s), and then look for matching styling cues such as the roof and window line, exterior mirrors and alloy wheel designs.

We salute Sammy and Mahmood for the scoop shots!

PHOTO GALLERY
According to meteorologists, some 18 in or over 45 cm of rain fell on the city of Houston on Monday alone, resulting in floods that even reached historic levels.



Among the downpours casualties, in both people as well as property, was this Honda Insight and its owner, who for some reason drove straight through the flooded underpass thinking that the water wouldnt actually be too deep.

Needless to say, he was wrong and eventually had to abandon his vehicle and literally swim to safety where a news crew gave him some assistance.

The situation is dire, which is why Texas Governor Gred Abbot declared a state of emergency in Houston, where 70,000 people were left without power, and 1,200 people needed actual rescuing.

The National Weather Service has been actively warning people that should they encounter flooded roads, they should immediately turn around. Other helpful tips include staying away from river banks, floodwaters, using a stick to determine water depth and looking for high ground.

They also mention that just 6 inches (15 cm) of moving water can knock a person off their feet, while one foot (30 cm) of water can stall a vehicle, whereas 2 feet (60 cm) are enough to sweep the car away entirely.

VIDEO
Seat now lets users configure their very own its first-ever SUV via an online configurator.



Offered in two grades, Style and XCellence, the Ateca starts from 19,690 ($22,250) in Spain for the entry-level version with a 1.0-liter TSI petrol engine, in FWD guise, producing 115 PS (113 HP), while the cheapest TDI, is the 1.6-liter with 115 PS (113 HP) and will set you back 22,370 ($25,280).

All-wheel drive versions start at 26,890 ($30,390), on the 2.0-liter TDI mill, and if you go for the better equipped XCellence trim, youll have to pay from 24,550 ($27,745), for the 1.4-liter TSI with 115 PS and up to 33,790 ($38,190) for the range-topping 2.0-liter TDI, with 190 PS (187 HP) that comes with a 7-speed DSG dual-clutch automatic.

The 2017 Ateca comes with a choice of 12 exterior colors, including the trendy Blanco Nevada (white) or the Naranja Samoa (orange) seen on the model displayed in Geneva, which both cost 572 ($645), joined by the 18-inch wheels in two different patterns or the larger 19-inch Exclusive. Check the black leather upholstery on the list, sat-nav, automatic parallel and perpendicular parking, rearview camera, adaptive cruise control and other features and you are looking at 42,739 ($48,300).

Better be careful with those boxes then. Choose wisely, for when resale time comes, most of those fancy options will make no difference in the used car market.

PHOTO GALLERY
Its ruggedness, off-road ability and simplicity made the Jeep Willys an icon in World War II and after peace was declared, in 1945, it wasnt long until some of the vehicles were taken into private hands.



The initial design was created by Karl Probst, under contract to the American Bantam Company, but since the company couldnt mass-produce the Willys in the numbers demanded by the US government, contracts were awarded to the Ford Motor Company and, mostly, to Willys-Overland of Toledo, Ohio.

Produced on May 20, 1942, under British contract for the war, this Willys Jeep MB still keeps its factory-quality paint and cloth interior, which is well worn, but its said to be in usable condition. It comes with a 60 HP, M38A1 four-cylinder engine, 3-speed manual transmission with 2-speed rear transfer case, four-wheel drive and accessories that include light switch on the dashboard and instrument panel, full folding top with side curtains, rear-mounted spare wheel, jerry can and spotlight.

The military vehicle needs proper restoration in order to return to its former glory, but if youre up to the job, the 1942 Willys Jeep will go under the hammer at RMSothebys Monaco auction, on May 14.

PHOTO GALLERY
The following editorial appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, April 15:

The link between the Zika virus and microcephaly in babies was confirmed last week by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the latest in a series of increasingly troubling revelations about the mosquito-borne disease.

First, its not just mosquito-borne; it can also be passed among humans via sexual contact. Thats alarming because an outbreak can really get rolling when a pathogen can spread without the help of animals or insects. Since symptoms are so mild, if present at all, many carriers of the virus may pass it along without realizing they were infected.

The more scientists learn about Zika, the worse the news gets for the next generation. It is a factor in premature birth, blindness and other defects in babies when their mothers are infected during pregnancy. And the mosquito responsible for most of the spread of the infection ranges more widely in the U.S. than thought just weeks ago: 30 states rather than just 12. As the CDCs Anne Schuchat put it last week: This virus seems to be a bit scarier than we initially thought.

Yes, it certainly is. Zika infections are mounting quickly in the Americas (more than 800 have been reported on U.S. turf alone, about half in Puerto Rico), and those numbers are sure to explode once mosquito season gets going. More federal funding is crucial to vaccine development and other programs to stop the virus spread.

The new information about Zika should weigh heavily on Congress when it decides whether to allocate $1.9 billion in emergency funding, as requested by the CDC and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Lawmakers balked when President Barack Obama first asked for the money in February. But that was before we understood just how insidious this seemingly mild-mannered flavivirus can be.

Kerrys visit shows fragility of Iraq

The following editorial appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Wednesday, April 13:

Secretary of State John Kerrys visit to Iraq last week underlined the folly of continued U.S. involvement there, 13 years after Americas second invasion.

The United States still has 4,000 troops in Iraq, nearly five years after President George W. Bush agreed with the then-Iraqi government that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn by the end of 2011. President Barack Obama pledged to end the war in Iraq as part of his 2008 election campaign, a promise he has not fulfilled, bending to pressure from the Pentagon and Washingtons other advocates of a continued U.S. military presence.

In principle, U.S. troops are in Iraq in the context of advising and supplying Iraqi armed forces, not in a combat role. However, it emerged last month that U.S. Marines maintain an independent fire base in northern Iraq and are expected to play a critical role in carrying out the plan of Iraqi forces to free Mosul, the countrys second-largest city, from Islamic State control. The IS has held Mosul since June 2014.

The Iraqi government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has its own problems, considered largely to be a result of the actions of its Shiite Muslim leadership in monopolizing authority in Baghdad, excluding the 35-percent Sunni Muslims who ruled the country from 1932 to the U.S. invasion in 2003. That piece of unwise religious discrimination is bad enough in itself, but it is joined by serious pushing and shoving among the Shiites themselves.

Muqtada al-Sadr, a figure from the period of U.S. occupation who caused a lot of trouble back then, has now invaded the fortified Green Zone, which includes the American Embassy as well as significant parts of the Iraqi government, in pursuit of his goals. He wants more political influence than he has already and has set up a tent inside the Green Zone, which the predominantly Shiite Iraqi armed forces did not prevent him from doing.

The Abadi government that the United States supports now faces Sadrs Shiite Mahdi Army, the forces of the Islamic State and the remnants of al-Qaida in Iraq, as well as the increasingly independent, heavily U.S.-armed secessionist Kurds in the north. The hard question to answer is why America is still there, holding the bag. Maybe Kerry has figured it out.

In America, the worst campaign to run is unopposed

The following editorial was written by Bloomberg View editors:

You cant beat somebody with nobody. As political adages go, that one has proved durable and true. However, if Americas relentless march toward blue-state-red-state polarization continues, nobody may become an increasingly common option on voter ballots.

Four states lack a major-party competitor for current U.S. Senate races, the Smart Politics blog at the University of Minnesotas Humphrey Institute of Public Policy reported this week. Democrats have yet to field a candidate in Alaska or Oklahoma, and Republicans have blank slates in Hawaii and Vermont.

The paucity of candidates in these states is no great surprise. In Oklahoma, Democrats have failed to break 30 percent in the past three Senate contests. Hawaii Republicans, for their part, have lost 16 consecutive Senate races, usually capturing less than 40 percent of the vote.

This lack of opposition reinforces the partisan divide in Washington. For many members of Congress, the threat of a primary opponent is more real than the prospect of a robust general-election challenge.

Its bad enough that polarization squeezes competition out of a system thats designed to encourage it. But if parties fail to field a candidate, especially in statewide races for U.S. Senate, the electorate is denied even the potential for genuine debate. Its hard to challenge conventional wisdom, lazy assumptions or party dogma if theres no one on the opposite side to make the case.

You dont need to summon Britains finest hour or Dewey Defeats Truman to appreciate that democracy sometimes requires faith in the long shot. American political parties represent the whole of the nation. (When they fail to, the results are profoundly ugly.) They should field qualified candidates for every seat in the House of Representatives and, certainly, the Senate  and make sure those candidates have the resources to make their appeals to voters.

Should you need a license to sell caskets?

The following editorial appeared in The Orange County Register on Wednesday, April 13:

Should you need a government license to sell a box or a cloth? Alabama sure thinks so, but only if it affects the business of funeral directors.

Shelia Champion just wanted to offer a cheaper and more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional funerals and cemeteries, which cost $7,000 to $10,000 on average, so she opened The Good Earth Burial Ground in Hazel Green, Ala. Her cemetery is primarily an untended forest and burial there must be made using biodegradable caskets and shrouds, including those she sells for a fraction of what people usually pay for a casket, in order to return the remains to earth quickly and naturally.

But in Alabama, only licensed funeral directors can sell funeral merchandise such as caskets, shrouds and urns. In order to satisfy the licensing requirements, Champion would have to spend at least one year in mortuary school learning things totally irrelevant to her business, such as embalming, plus two years as an apprentice, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a funeral home, since funeral merchandise may only be sold from a state-licensed funeral establishment. She potentially faces thousands of dollars in fines and a year in jail for violating the law.

So Champion and the Institute for Justice are suing the state over its arbitrary and protectionist law. IJ previously scored a victory for a group of Benedictine monks when it got a similar casket-selling license law thrown out in Louisiana.

A casket is just a box, and the law does not even require one for burial, IJ attorney Renee Flaherty said in a statement. There is no legitimate health or safety reason to license casket sellers.

Added Champion, It makes no sense to limit casket, shroud and urn sales to Alabama licensed funeral directors when I could sew up a dress for someone and charge for it, but calling it a shroud would make it illegal.

As in this case, occupational licensing laws are rarely about protecting public safety, and far more often are about protecting the profits of licensed practitioners by shielding them from competition. These restrictions on economic liberty should be buried.

As military rule gives way in Myanmar, eyes are on the prisoners

The following editorial appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Monday, April 11:

Myanmars new government, installed through elections in November, has begun spring housecleaning by beginning to free the countrys political prisoners.

The first wave freed were students, jailed more than a year ago for protesting modifications by the then military government to higher education that the students saw as infringements on academic freedom. Their public complaints, supported by Buddhist monks, were deemed anti-government protests and they were imprisoned. The new government, headed by President U Htin Kyaw and led by Aung San Suu Kyi, newly named state counselor acting as an equivalent prime minister, has made the freeing of political prisoners its leading item of business.

Suu Kyis National League for Democracy triumphed with 77 percent of the vote in what were relatively free elections. They were held under a constitution that still gave a disproportionate amount of influence in the form of seats in the parliament and the guarantee of ministerial posts to the Myanmar military. So far, however, the constrained military has not interfered with the NLD governments exercise of power.

Former President U Thein Sein, an ex-general, in a typically Myanmar move shed his military role and was ordained as a Buddhist monk.

There remain in Myanmar prisons at least 526 other prisoners, deemed political, jailed by previous military regimes. It will be a valid test of the credibility of political change in the country to see whether the new government will be able to free them as well without interference by the military.

The United States and the rest of the world will be watching closely.
Photo: District of Lake Country

The District of Lake Country has reached an agreement with Shaw to provide free Wi-Fi to residents.

The partnership is similar to one already in place in both Kelowna and West Kelowna. It will allow for free Shaw Go Wi-Fi guest access, plus complimentary access to Shaw subscribers.

Access points will be installed within the municipality over the coming months, including the town centre, municipal hall and public parks.

Free Wi-Fi access throughout Lake Countrys public spaces will be a benefit to residents and visitors, said Mayor James Baker.

The collaboration between Shaw and the district represents a positive step in Lake Countrys ongoing efforts to be a connected, progressive and innovative community. Council views Shaw Go Wi-Fi as another important service being offered to residents  with the added benefit of being provided at no cost to the municipality.

Residents and visitors to the Okanagan Valley region can access the Shaw Go Wi-Fi network on their Wi-Fi enabled devices by selecting ShawGuest from the list of available Wi-Fi settings and following the on-screen instructions to connect.

There is no cost to the municipality for the service.
Photo: Nicholas Johansen

The Fat Cat is coming back.

The annual childrens festival will take place on June 10 and 11, and organizers are looking for help to make the event a success.

It is the 26th year the Interior Savings Fat Cat Children's Festival is taking place and Marlene Fenton, chairwoman of the volunteer board says it takes all year to plan.

However, now it is time to ramp things up and we are calling on the community to get involved and help put on an incredible show for the kids  and their families, she said.

Here are some ways you can get involved:

Adopt-a-Class: Your donation of $250 will send a deserving group of elementary-school aged children to take part in the festival and enjoy many of its experiences for free. You may choose to designate the class or school you would like to adopt, or we have list of under-serviced schools that would love to participate, but cant because of financial restrictions.

Your donation of $250 will send a deserving group of elementary-school aged children to take part in the festival and enjoy many of its experiences for free. You may choose to designate the class or school you would like to adopt, or we have list of under-serviced schools that would love to participate, but cant because of financial restrictions. Activity Station: Run an interactive activity station  high profile and high returns with kids smiling faces all festival long.

Run an interactive activity station  high profile and high returns with kids smiling faces all festival long. Volunteer: There are opportunities  from information booths to craft stations to festival set-up and take-down.

There are opportunities  from information booths to craft stations to festival set-up and take-down. Join the Parade

The theme for this year is "Fat Cat the Okanagan Explorer" said Dorothee Birker, artistic director for the festival.

"We are paying homage to the incredible region we get to live in and are encouraging families to get out, enjoy active play and discover the many things our community has to offer. That's why we are calling on the community to come and get out and involved  run an activity station or join the parade ... or get your staff together for a great team building activity and come volunteer. It is hugely rewarding to be a part of this amazing festival."

This year the festival will start at 8 a.m. and run until 2 p.m. on June 10 and is open to schools, children who are home-schooled and the general public. Families with younger kids can explore the new Toddler Town.

On the Saturday the Fat Cat Childrens Festival Parade will take place at 10 a.m. along Cawston Avenue to Waterfront Park. Then from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. there will be stage performances, more street performers and more hands-on activities.

Application forms to get involved are all available online at fatcatfestival.ca or by contacting Dorothee Birker for more information at [email protected] or 250-860-4911.
Photo: UBCO

Four UBC Okanagan researchers have been recognized as some of the top research talent in Canada.

Professor John Braun and assistant professors Joshua Brinkerhoff, Liwei Wang and Wesley Zandberg will collectively see their research supported by $500,000 of Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) funding.

UBC as a whole was awarded $1.55 million of a $20 million total investment in research infrastructure across 33 Canadian universities. The announcement was made by MP Harjit Sajjan at an event held Monday at UBCs Vancouver campus.

This investment by CFI is a testament to the quality of research taking place at UBC Okanagan, said Deborah Buszard, UBC deputy vice-chancellor and principal of the Okanagan campus. This funding will allow our researchers to take their projects to the next level and help the campus continue to attract the best and brightest to the Okanagan.

Braun, a statistician, was awarded $67,423 for a data visualization library that will have applications for wildfire science.

Brinkerhoff, an engineering researcher who studies the behaviour of fluid flow in engines, the environment and the human body, was awarded $124,971 to create an advanced computing facility to study fluid flows in natural gas infrastructure and natural-gas fueled vehicles.

Wang, an electrical engineering researcher, was awarded $121,874 for the creation of a flexible power transmission laboratory for renewable energy.

Zandberg, a chemistry researcher, was awarded $250,000 toward a centre for plant glycoscience (the study of complex carbohydrates) and biotechnology.

We are delighted that the superb research being performed at the Okanagan campus of UBC has been recognized with these four awards. says Dr. Phil Barker, vice-principal research. This campus is on an amazing trajectory and the research intensity of the Kelowna campus continues to grow rapidly. This is an exciting place to be.
Photo: The Canadian Press

Millions of people watched anxiously Monday as the U.S. Supreme Court began a landmark immigration case  one with deep political consequences and arguably deeper human ones.

The stakes were especially personal for people who arrived in buses for the first day of legal arguments in a case pitting the Obama administration against conservative states.

Miguel Zavala was sitting in front of the court building. The 16-year-old's dad is fighting deportation. If his father is deported, the teen says, the whole family will probably follow its primary breadwinner to Mexico.

That would create a particular challenge for Zavala: "I barely speak Spanish.

"If that happens I'm not going to go to college."

Zavala and his younger brother were both born in Michigan. He says he's getting great marks and wants to be a doctor. Their dad is an auto body-shop worker  who entered the U.S. illegally 17 years ago, on foot, across the Mexican border.

With immigration reforms going nowhere in Congress, President Barack Obama introduced different executive actions. One would excuse parents of American citizens from deportation and grant them legal work papers. Obama's actions would bring predictability to many of the 11 million people believed to be in the country illegally.

Most Republican state governments have united to challenge his actions. They won in a Texas court  which ruled that the president was acting illegally.

The case is now before a potentially deadlocked Supreme Court, reduced to eight members by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Should the justices split 4-4, the Texas ruling would stand.

The legal debates's as old as the country itself. It's about how much power a U.S. president has. Under the Constitution, the president simply executes the laws that Congress passes.

But what if Congress is arguably unclear? The Obama administration says lawmakers have neither modernized the immigration law; nor have they provided the customs agency with the necessary funds to enforce the old one.

So Obama's argument is that he's setting priorities  and in this case he says he chooses to let law-abiding families stay, while he works on deporting criminals.

In the first day of hearings, the conservative justices sparred over that issue. They asked: How could these migrants be law-abiding if they break the law simply by being in the U.S.?

Erica Soto said she's more interested in the human questions.

"There are families who wake up every morning in fear that they could possibly not be with their families at the end of the day," said the Michigan woman, who is a U.S. citizen, but was on one of the protest buses.

"This is what we're fighting for."

She noted the irony of her location.

Protesters were sandwiched between the Supreme Court and the U.S. Congress  the building in the left is dealing with the issue, because the one on the right has been deadlocked for years.

After the 2012 election, the then-Democrat-run Senate passed an amnesty bill with the help of some Republicans. It might have been adopted in the House of Representatives, but Republicans there were bitterly divided and prevented a vote. Now it's a major presidential election issue.

Jorge Rivera can't vote in this election. He's becoming a citizen, but expects to miss the deadline that would have allowed him to vote against Donald Trump.

His path to a normal life began in 1990 with the last amnesty bill. He'd come to visit his sister in California by train and bus, realized his life would be better there and never left.

It was a difficult start. His mother died in Mexico; he couldn't leave the country for the funeral. Getting official papers later was a relief  it allowed him to start running his satellite-dish-installation business.

Rivera hired a few employees. He now runs a small, web-based radio station. He also plans to change his first name to George  like the first president Bush who gave him amnesty.

"It's easier for you guys," he tells a reporter.

"I want to make it easier for you guys."
Photo: The Canadian Press

Jordan's prime minister on Monday said his government has decided to call off a plan to install surveillance cameras at Jerusalem's most sensitive holy site, derailing a U.S.-brokered pact to ease tensions at the volatile hilltop compound.

The decision came just days before the Jewish holiday of Passover  a time of increased activity at the site. The spot is revered by Jews, who refer to it as the Temple Mount, and Muslims, who call it the Noble Sanctuary. It has been a frequent scene of violence in the past.

In a deal brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Jordan offered to install the cameras last fall after clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces.

The Palestinians had accused Israel of secretly plotting to take over the site  a charge Israel strongly denies  while Israel pointed to videos showing Palestinian protesters using the mosque as cover while throwing stones and firecrackers at police. The idea was that transparency by both sides would help ease tensions.

But the plan quickly ran into trouble, with the Palestinians objecting to Israeli demands to place cameras inside the mosque. The Palestinians also said that Israel would use the cameras to spy on them.

Jordan's prime minister, Abdullah Ensour, told the state-run Petra News Agency that Jordan was calling off the plan due to Palestinian concerns.

"We were surprised since we announced our intention to carry out the project by the reactions of some of our brothers in Palestine who were skeptical about the project," he said. "We have found that this project is no longer enjoying a consensus, and it might be controversial. Therefore we have decided to stop implementing it."

The Jordanian decision could deal an embarrassing blow to Kerry, who had hailed the deal when it was announced in October and pushed behind the scenes in recent months for the sides to wrap it up.

In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby said it's "unfortunate" that Jordan decided to call off the plan to install the surveillance cameras. He could not say whether Kerry had any plans to revisit the idea with Jordanian authorities.

"We still see the value in the use of cameras," Kirby told reporters.

"I can't tell you at this time that we're going to you know, be assertive in terms of trying to have it revisited," he said. "But it doesn't mean that we've changed our minds with respect to the value of that as a tool to increase transparency.

There was no immediate reaction from Israel.

But the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem affairs, Adnan Husseini, said "I think it's a wise decision and we are with any decision taken by Jordan, I think Jordan studied the issue wisely and took all the issues into consideration until they reached this wise decision."

The site is revered by Jews as the location where the biblical Temples once stood. Today, it is home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. Under a decades-old arrangement, Jews are allowed to visit the site, but not pray there. Increased visits to the compound last fall by Jewish nationalists, coupled with some restrictions on Muslim access, set off clashes that quickly escalated into months of violence across Israel and the West Bank.
Photo: Wayne Moore - Castanet

There's some movement around the site of what will be Kelowna's newest downtown hotel.

Work crews were out Monday preparing the Metro Central building at Water Street and Queensway Avenue for demolition.

Yellow construction fencing went up around the building while crews begin framing around the building.

Workers said the framing is part of the process to collect asbestos from the building before it can be torn down.

It's expected to take a few weeks to complete the asbestos remediation. Actual demolition is expected to take place in early May.

The site will be converted to surface parking for the balance of spring and summer.

Actual construction of the 26-storey hotel isn't expected to begin until later this summer or early fall.

Construction has been delayed because some elements of the design had not been finalized in time for a March construction start.

The hotel, being constructed by Edmonton-based Westcorp, is situated on what was the Willow Inn site.
Photo: The Canadian Press

A family spokeswoman says that "Everybody Loves Raymond" star Doris Roberts has died. She was 90.

Spokeswoman Janet Daily said Monday that Roberts died overnight in her sleep in Los Angeles. Daily was told of the death by Roberts' son, Michael Cannata.

Daily didn't know the cause of Roberts' death but said the veteran actress had been healthy and active.

Roberts played the meddlesome mother to Ray Romano's character on the long-running CBS sitcom.
Photo: Contributed

UPDATE: 10:25 p.m.

Patricia Hanson-Johnson has been found, say Kamloops RCMP.

ORIGINAL

Police in Kamloops are asking for the publics assistance in locating Patricia Hanson-Johnson.

The 20-year-old woman was last seen on April 17, about 8:50 p.m., on the North Shore.

According to Cpl. Jodi Shelkie, friends and family are concerned about Hanson-Johnson as she is not answering her cell phone nor has she been in contact with them.

Hanson-Johnson goes by the name Tricia and is described as:

Caucasian

20 years old

Five feet five inches tall

110 pounds

Brown hair short on both sides with longer, spiky, orange hair on the top.

If you have seen Hanson-Johnson or know where she is, please contact the Kamloops RCMP at 250-828-3000.
Photo: Google Maps

An Alaska outdoor studies assistant professor was mauled by a bear Monday while teaching a mountaineering class near Haines, according to a University of Alaska Southeast spokeswoman.

Alaska State Troopers say Forest Wagner was with a group of 12 students on Mount Emmerich when he was attacked.

They learned of the attack after another student hiked down the mountain to get cell reception and call for help.

University of Alaska Southeast spokeswoman Katie Bausler says the students are off of the mountain and staying with another faculty member in Haines.

Troopers' spokeswoman Megan Peters says in an email to the Associated Press that the 35-year-old Wagner was being transported to an Anchorage hospital. His condition wasn't immediately known.

___

Original story:

An Alaska man has been mauled by a bear, according to Alaska State Troopers.

Troopers' spokeswoman Megan Peters says in an email to The Associated Press that 35-year-old Forest Wagner, of Fairbanks, has been transported to an Anchorage hospital.

His condition wasn't immediately known.

About a dozen students at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau were taking part in a mountaineering class on Mount Emmerich, near Haines, on Monday when the mauling occurred, according to troopers. The university website lists a Forest Wagner as an assistant professor of outdoor studies.

Troopers say a student hiked down the mountain to find cell reception to alert authorities. Wagner was taken off the mountain by a rescue helicopter and then taken by a medical helicopter to Anchorage.

Troopers say the bear was seen again after the mauling, and the university arranged for other students to get off the mountain.
Photo: Nicholas Johansen

Richter Street was closed near Rowcliffe Avenue Tuesday morning after two vehicles collided.

A silver Subaru was crossing Richter Street in the eastbound direction when it was struck by a black Chevrolet Cobalt.

Emergency Health Services was at the scene checking on the two drivers involved in the crash.

The elderly driver of the Subaru was shaken up but appeared fine. The driver of the Chevrolet reportedly suffered some whiplash, but was not taken to the hospital.

The Kelowna Fire Department was on scene, cleaning up the debris from both cars.
Photo: James Jansen

Communities across the province broke decades-old temperature records as a hot-weather, high-pressure system swept the province, Monday.

According to Environment Canada, the Kelowna area maxed out at 26.9 C, breaking the 116-year-old record of 22.2 set in 1900.

Vernon clocked in at 26.4 C, breaking the previous record set in 1962 of 24.4 C.

Penticton saw a high of 27.3 C, breaking the old record of 26.7 C set in 1962.

It was even warmer in Osoyoos, coming in at 27.6 C, just breaking the old record of 27.2 C, also set in 1962.

Kamloops peaked at 29.9 C, breaking the record of 28.9 C from that same year.

Merritt was also baking at 28.8 C, breaking 1983's mark of 23 C.

At the coast, Vancouver hit 25.3 C, breaking its 1962 record of 22.2 C.

A very strong ridge of high pressure shattered dozens of maximum temperature records throughout B.C.," Environment Canada said on its website. The ridge will remain very strong through Tuesday and so more records are expected to fall.

Check out the list below for the rest of the records broken across the province on Monday.

100 Mile House Area

New Record Of 21.1

Old Record Of 20.0 Set In 1983

Abbotsford Area

New Record Of 29.0

Old Record Of 25.0 Set In 1962

Agassiz Area

New Record Of 28.6

Old Record Of 27.2 Set In 1934

Blue River Area

New Record Of 24.2

Old Record Of 20.1 Set In 1983

Campbell River Area

New Record Of 20.6

Old Record Of 19.4 Set In 1983

Castlegar Area

New Record Of 27.1

Old Record Of 26.7 Set In 1962

Chetwynd Area

New Record Of 26.8

Old Record Of 23.8 Set In 2010

Clinton Area

New Record Of 21.1

Old Record Of 16.3 Set In 2010

Dawson Creek Area

New Record Of 29.5

Old Record Of 23.9 Set In 1926

Estevan Point Area

New Record Of 16.3

Old Record Of 15.6 Set In 1934

Fort Nelson Area

New Record Of 26.7

Old Record Of 18.7 Set In 1991

Fort St. John Area

New Record Of 28.5

Old Record Of 19.1 Set In 2010

Hope Area

New Record Of 28.2

Old Record Of 26.1 Set In 1962

Lilloet Area

New Record Of 27.9

Old Record Of 25.0 Set In 1962

Lytton Area

New Record Of 30.6

Old Record Of 27.2 Set In 1934

Mackenzie Area

New Record Of 21.4

Old Record Of 18.8 Set In 1991

Malahat Area

New Record Of 24.5

Old Record Of 21.6 Set In 2008

Muncho Lake Area

New Record Of 17.9

Old Record Of 16.0 Set In 1991

Nakusp Area

New Record Of 22.5

Old Record Of 21.7 Set In 1915

Nanaimo Area

New Record Of 25.1

Old Record Of 21.7 Set In 1934

Pemberton Area

New Record Of 27.5

Old Record Of 26.1 Set In 1915

Pitt Meadows Area

New Record Of 29.8

Old Record Of 25.0 Set In 1962

Powell River Area

New Record Of 24.5

Old Record Of 21.1 Set In 1962

Prince George Area

New Record Of 25.1

Old Record Of 21.1 Set In 1913

Princeton Area

New Record Of 28.3

Old Record Of 25.6 Set In 1910

Puntzi Mountain Area

New Record Of 25.6

Old Record Of 17.6 Set In 1999

Quesnel Area

New Record Of 27.1

Old Record Of 23.3 Set In 1897

Revelstoke Area

New Record Of 24.6

Old Record Of 23.9 Set In 1943

Salmon Arm Area

New Record Of 26.4

Old Record Of 26.1 Set In 1962

Sandspit Area

New Record Of 11.7

Old Record Of 11.6 Set In 1990

Sechelt Area

New Record Of 24.5

Old Record Of 18.9 Set In 1956

Sparwood Area

New Record Of 22.2

Old Record Of 20.7 Set In 1999

Squamish Area

New Record Of 28.1

Old Record Of 23.0 Set In 1994

Summerland Area

New Record Of 27.3

Old Record Of 26.1 Set In 1962

Tatlayoko Lake Area

New Record Of 22.6

Old Record Of 21.1 Set In 1934

Tetsa River Area

New Record Of 22.2

Old Record Of 15.0 Set In 1990

Tofino Area

New Record Of 19.3

Old Record Of 18.9 Set In 1939

Victoria Area

New Record Of 24.3

Old Record Of 19.4 Set In 1934

Victoria Harbour Area

New Record Of 20.0

Old Record Of 17.8 Set In 1897

Whistler Area

New Record Of 25.2

Old Record Of 21.1 Set In 1962

White Rock Area

New Record Of 23.7

Old Record Of 23.3 Set In 1939

Williams Lake Area
I do find it a bit confusing as why bike lanes are placed in main through ways, where you know fully well that a larger vehicle can be very close to swiping or even taking you out.

I would have to say that the city road planners should seriously take a better look at the bike lanes and separate them from the main flow of traffic. Many of the lanes do have space available to incorporate a lane with some adjustments to be taken. Then we could get some vehicle reduction happening.

Phillip Bohn
As the person who had to create a social media storm in order for BC Hydro to rescue the cat in Princeton, this video enraged me.

The cat wasn't up just any pole, it was up a 60ft, 138,000 volt live electricity pole. Anyone besides trained individuals with special equipment could end up dead trying to find ways to do it themselves.

The owner was out there everyday coaxing it with food. There were mattresses laid down in case it wanted to jump.

I don't think that the full information was given to the people interviewed and it makes me angry.

No one besides the hydro company was allowed to do the job. All of the supporters in the town, and from the Twitter support worldwide, were willing to pitch in a pay for the cost, but thankfully the company chose to cover the costs.

It wasn't just a cat up a telephone pole or a tree, it was up a very dangerous pole so the rescue was very complicated.

Natalia Bosley
Photo: Vancouver Aquarium

A green sea turtle rescued from British Columbia's frigid ocean this winter is on his way back to warmer waters.

The turtle, dubbed Comber by Vancouver Aquarium staff, was found on a remote beach on the west coast of Vancouver Island in January, suffering from hypothermia so severe that it was difficult to tell if the animal was alive.

Comber was brought to the Vancouver Aquarium's Marine Mammal Rescue Centre, where staff slowly warmed him while using an ultrasound to keep track of his heartbeats.

Aquarium staff say the 35-kilogram turtle responded to treatment quickly and is now ready to begin a long journey back to the wild, starting with a trip to the border Wednesday, where he'll be picked up by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Comber, who staff estimate is between 12 and 20 years old, will be taken to SeaWorld San Diego to finish his rehabilitation and once water temperatures off the coast of California are warm enough, he and a number of other rescued turtles will be released.

Green sea turtles are listed as endangered world wide and are usually found in the waters off Mexico and Hawaii.
Photo: Harry

A Sicamous man lost his life on Friday in a crash near Malakwa, east of Sicamous, on the Trans-Canada Highway.

According to RCMP Traffic Services, a pickup truck and a scooter collided on Friday, April 15, on Highway 1 near Old Frontage Road.

Police say the deceased driver was a 59-year-old man from Sicamous.

A local man who lives nearby the accident scene said he saw a group of people trying to give the man CPR, before emergency personnel arrived.

The driver of the truck remained on scene and co-operated with police.

The accident is still under investigation.
Photo: UrosPoteko

RCMP in Chilliwack have raided a marijuana dispensary.

One person was taken into custody and later released by police following the raid at the local store.

The raid stemmed from a report received by police on March 11 of alleged illegal cannabis sales at a shop in the 46000 block of 5th Avenue.

Cpl. Mike Rail said officers from the Chilliwack RCMP Crime Reduction Unit (CRU) conducted surveillance and covertly gathered evidence.

On April 5 at about 5:20 p.m., police executed a search warrant, and marijuana, store records and cash were seized by officers.

Chilliwack CRU officers are continuing to pursue their ... investigation of the transactions conducted by the stores proprietors. After a thorough investigation has been completed, the evidence collected will be reviewed by investigators to determine whether police will be submitting all circumstances of the investigation in a report to federal Crown counsel for their assessment of Controlled Drug and Substance Act charges, said Rail.
If you have just started your journey in an online casino or are looking for a new site to play,...
Pakistan: Builders hit out against high cement prices

ICR Newsroom By 19 April 2016

The Chairman of Pakistans Association of Builders and Developers (ABAD), Hanif Gonar, has accused the countrys cement manufacturers of keeping prices artificially high.

In a report in the Daily Times, Mr Gonar pointed to recent statements by the head of the All Pakistan Cement Manufacturers Association, Muhammad Ali Tabba, who claimed that taxes on gas and coal meant the industry was unable to reduce it charges.

This was not the case, the ABAD chairman, insisted. He claimed that the cement industry was exempt from infrastructure development surcharges on gas and noted that the international price of coal had fallen steeply over the last eight years.

While cement in neighbouring India was PKR292 (US$2.80) for a 50kg bag, the comparable price in Pakistan was at least PKR500 (US$4.77).

Mr Gonar said: "We at ABAD also want to provide low-cost houses to people so that they can have their dream houses at least once in life time, but claimed that high prices for construction materials made this impossible.

Published under
Tangshan Jidong Cement begins work on 7200tpd plant

ICR Newsroom By 19 April 2016

Tangshan Jidong Cement, a state enterprise with domestically listed shares, has begun work on a large 7200tpd (2.4Mt) cement plant.



Construction of the Jidong plant in Heilongjiang province is a windfall for the local community. A plant this size will bring prestige, tax revenue and employment.

The cement industry, however, is in despair at the new arrival. It's totally unreasonable," laments an executive at the China Cement Association. Jidong, which reported losses of US$260m last year as cement prices plunged, didn't respond to questions, said The Wall Street Journal.



A recent report by the European Chamber of Commerce in China said that despite efforts by the central government to reduce cement overcapacity, the measures have so far only managed to slow down the rate at which the problem is expanding." About one quarter of China's cement capacity is idle, claims The Wall Street Journal.

Published under
Tanzania: Tanga Cement Co looks to cut costs with rail deal

ICR Newsroom By 19 April 2016

The Tanga Cement Company has signed a deal with Tanzania Railway Ltd to transport 35,000t of cement a month to Mwanza and Kigoma.

The deal would see the state rail company ship 15,000t to Mwanza on Lake Victoria and 20,000t to Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika. Both destinations are remote from cement producing regions and as a consequence currently pay high prices for cement.

Tanzanias Citizen newspaper reports that cement prices in the two cities are between US$7.76 and US$8.76 per bag. This compare to an average of around $7 a bag for the country as a whole. It is hoped that shipping cement by rail will allow prices to fall.

Published under
Roast beef and mashed potatoes were on the menu and information about Beatrice Public Schools was on the agenda at the Beatrice Senior Center meeting Thursday evening.

BPS administrators and Board of Education members, along with about 100 Beatrice senior citizens attended the meal and meeting.

The meeting was the third of its kind this year, organized by BPS in an effort to share general information with the public, answer questions and get feedback.

BPS Superintendent Pat Nauroth explained to the audience how BPS is funded, the districts 2014 purchase of land just north of Beatrice High School and potential options the district is considering as it faces aging and crowded elementary and preschool facilities.

Currently, Beatrice Community Preschool students are taught at three locations  Paddock Lane Elementary School, Cedar Elementary School and Southeast Community College-Beatrice. BPS board members said its a priority to move all preschoolers to one facility.

The four BPS elementary schools are 60 years old, in need of major repairs and are tight on space.

We need to do something, Nauroth said. We need a plan B for our facilities.

For the first time publicly, Nauroth shared potential options in how to address the concerns of the facilities.

Three different options all included the conversion of one of the four elementary schools into a preschool.

One option would be to disperse the elementary students from that school throughout the other three schools.

A second option would transform the other three elementary schools into grade level buildings  kindergarten and first grade in one building, second and third grade in another, and fourth and fifth in the last building.

The third option would move all of the students from the fourth school to Paddock Lane, which would require some shifting of special education programs.

Im not saying those are the (only) options, Nauroth said on Friday. Im saying, here are some we thought of. There are other options, Im sure. Were just trying to start the conversation with the community. ... Were throwing it out there and asking people what they think.

The board pitched a bond issue to the public last year that would have paid for a newly built, single-site elementary school. The school would have housed preschoolers through fifth graders and would have been located on land owned by the district just north of Beatrice High School. About 60 percent of voters turned down the idea at the polls in September.

Nauroth also mentioned at the meeting the option of running another bond issue.

I thought it was a very good presentation, said Doug Horrocks on Thursday evening. Im concerned that something needs to be done and we cant wait too long.

Horrocks said he supports the idea of the single-site elementary facility.

I think it there are endless possibilities out there, he said. As for the clusters of grade levels split in different buildings, he said, Id rather not see it, but if it has to happen, then it has to happen.

Velma Willet said the presentation was very thorough.

Its hard to know whether they should build or not build, Willet said. I think they know better than the public.

Nauroth spoke for 15 minutes and opened the remaining time to questions.

In response to one question, Nauroth said that while the proposed single-site facility had a price tag of $34 million, the cost to remodel all four elementary schools was about $40 million.

There are things we did 60 years ago that we might not do now, Nauroth said of the buildings, citing security concerns and the fact that none of the four schools have cafeterias.

The district spends about $100,000 annually to transport food from the high school to the four elementary schools each day.

These community meetings have arisen out of the School and Community Committee, Nauroth said.

The committee is made up of BPS board members Janet Byars, Nancy Sedlacek and Lisa Pieper, who were also at the meeting. The group talks regularly to staff members inside schools, but they wanted to reach out to community members as well, Nauroth said.

I think its good to get out and do this, Nauroth said. Its good to get out and talk. Its not just about the elementary facility, even though thats on a lot of peoples minds. Its everything. Its taxes, curriculum. Its a way to get out and get people information.

No other community meetings are scheduled at this time, but Nauroth expects more this year.

First off, we hope to do something at all four buildings, Nauroth said of future meetings. We need to talk to parents. ... We may also look at potential survey options. Then, from a community standpoint, well speak at local groups like Rotary and Kiwanis.

Nauroth said the district will continue to gather feedback and share information with the public this year.

The board wants a plan in place in how to move this forward by next year, he said, referring to moving all preschoolers under one roof. I would guess that by December 2016, we would have that plan in place.

Nauroth said he was appreciative of the groups listening and asking good questions at the meeting on Thursday. He said the seniors were able to share pieces of history with him about the schools that is hard for him to otherwise learn.
Beatrice Fire and Rescue Captain Jeremy Seggerman was given a Medal of Honor from Chief Brian Daake on Monday for his actions during a December fire.

Six other firefighters and EMT personnel were given Challenge Coins during Monday's City Council meeting for the rescue that likely saved the life of a Beatrice resident and two cats.

On behalf of the City Council and the city of Beatrice, we would like to thank you for your dedication and service above self, Mayor Stan Wirth told the firefighters, followed by a standing ovation from those in attendance.

The awards stem from a Dec. 24 fire at 1700 Park St., according to a press release from Beatrice Fire and Rescue. A total of 13 firefighters responded to the scene.

Upon arrival, the firefighters encountered smoke coming from one apartment and were told a resident was still inside, the press release states.

Seggerman gained access to the apartment and found and rescued the unconscious occupant, Wirth told the council on Monday. The resident was taken by ambulance to Beatrice Community Hospital and later transferred to University of Nebraska Medical Center. Wirth said that person is now living in Omaha and doing just fine.

Off-duty firefighter Tom Moody provided immediate assistance to the occupant and firefighter Julie Fisher rescued two animals inside, Wirth told the council. Firefighter/EMT Lonnie Litterick, Fisher, and Moody were recognized for their quick response and actions in controlling the flames from spreading to the rest of the building.

The fire caused significant damage to the bedroom and the whole apartment had smoke damage, Chief Daake said.

This doesnt happen very often, but when it does we definitely need to make sure we recognize those when its accomplished, Daake told the council.

Daake later commented this was the first Medal of Honor hes handed out as chief, as there hasnt been a similar situation since the early 1990s.

The Nebraska State Fire Marshalls office determined the fire was caused by improper handling of smoking material, the Beatrice Fire and Rescue press release states.
LINCOLN -- The number of filibusters this session that needed a vote to stop them was record-breaking.

Twenty-four. The highest number ever.

"It has been very difficult," Speaker Galen Hadley said last week.

It was astounding, really, by any measure when compared to previous years. The next highest number was last year's 14, which was also a record-breaker, by two.

The momentous trend skyward started in 2012, coincidentally when Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers returned to the Legislature. But you can only blame it on Chambers indirectly.

"I want to make it absolutely clear that I don't blame Sen. Chambers for this increase in filibusters," Hadley said. "But as he has always said, he's a good teacher.

"Newer senators are really learning from the master."

The idea of a filibuster is to protect the minority party from the majority party running roughshod over them.

But in recent years, Hadley said, senators have gone from trying to protect the minority to just trying to stop a particular bill.

"I think we're becoming more of what I would call a 33-vote legislature," Hadley said. "If a bill has any significant opposition, that opposition is going to require the body to get 33 votes to pass the bill."

That is concerning, he said, if it becomes more and more common. "We're just going to have tougher times getting things done," he said.

Before 1992, no permanent rule existed that allowed for cloture motions, which are made to stop a filibuster and vote on a bill. But in 1991, after two sessions of long debates on abortion bills, the Rules Committee put forth a change to limit debate.

It allowed for eight hours at all three stages of debate, and 12 hours on appropriations bills before a priority cloture motion could be brought.

Then-Sen. Don Wesely of Lincoln opposed the rule, saying he was proud the Nebraska Legislature had never taken the step to shut off the voice of the people. When you limit debate, he said, you limit ideas. And stretching those ideas into something workable could take hours, even days of discussion.

Then-Sen. Scott Moore said if eight hours of debate wasn't enough to form a legitimate idea, senators needed to hone their skills.

"I happen to think it's wrong when a very, very small minority of two to three people can hold this body up and keep things from happening," he said in debate on the rule change.

Lincoln Sen. Chris Beutler also favored the rule change. Without it, he said, the Legislature would be at the whim of the minority.

Previous to the rule change, senators were allowed to file a motion to suspend the rules and move to advance a bill without further debate. But it could only be addressed after all amendments that were filed were debated. And it was really no rule at all, Beutler said, in the hands of someone set on killing a bill.

Chambers opposed the rule change, saying extended debate could be used to make a bad bill better. And Sen. Brad Ashford said he was vehemently opposed.

"It's an open process, and we should talk and we should talk and we should talk, if need be, about issues that are important to the people of this state," Ashford said.

The rule change passed on a 29-12 vote, without a filibuster, although not because it wasn't suggested.

And the eight-hour requirement was removed from the rules in 2002.

For three years after the cloture rule for filibusters was instituted, their use remained low. And until last year, they averaged about four a year, with a low of one and a high of 12.

This year, 18 bills and one resolution for a constitutional amendment were filibustered, five of them twice. Nine of those bills ultimately passed, 10 failed when 33 votes could not be mustered.

The speaker announced before the session that first-round debate would be limited to six hours, rather than eight. He saved the Legislature 16 hours of debate time with the decision.

But he said he would be loathe to reduce the number of hours on second and final debates.

His goal to allow all priority bills to see debate and resolution was not successful. Four that made it to the floor didn't reach a vote. They were bills dealing with referrals to licensed acupuncturists; dental assistants and dental hygienists; car insurance; and experimental drugs.

Despite the hours of filibuster time taken, the Legislature was able to get some important things done, passing legislation that will have a long-term effect on the state, said longtime lobbyist Walt Radcliffe.

Those included Omaha area learning community funding (LB1067, Sullivan), the roads infrastructure bank (LB960, Smith), the wind energy bill (LB824, McCollister) and a less-heralded but nonetheless important Niobrara River management plan (LB1038, Davis).

Those included Omaha area learning community funding (LB1067, Sullivan), the roads infrastructure bank (LB960, Smith), the wind energy bill (LB824, McCollister) and a less-heralded but nonetheless important Niobrara River management plan (LB1038, Davis).

"That's quite a bit of stuff," he said.

And yes, some things didn't get done: Medicaid expansion, winner-take-all presidential electors.

"I think not doing Medicaid will have a lasting effect on Nebraska, I do, in a negative way," he said.

Many state legislatures have some type of rules to limit debate or limit the time each senator can speak on a bill.

Most of the 10 states surrounding Nebraska don't use the filibuster much to stall debates or block passage of a bill, according to information from the Council of State Governments.

Nebraska seems to be unique among these middle-of-the-country states.

Hadley's advice to the next speaker: Explore whether the time for each round of a filibuster is right, or even if he or she wants to have set hours, and whether 33 votes is the right number to stop debate. It takes only 30 to override a governor's veto.

Radcliffe said he remembers a telephone deregulation bill in 1986 that passed on a 25-24 vote.

"You couldn't pass anything 25-24, you couldn't pass something 29-20 today," he said.

"I don't think filibusters are a terrible thing. I just think it needs to be contained a little bit."

About eight years was spent on the dental hygiene bill, that didn't get a vote, Radcliffe said.

"That's just too bad that that much work went into something they didn't get to," he said.
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TECUMSEH -- Tecumseh State Correctional Institution employees trying to move an inmate into a holding cell Sunday had to subdue him with pepper spray.

"During the move, he became combative and staff used pepper spray to gain compliance," Nebraska Department of Correctional Services spokesman Andrew Nystrom said in response to a query about the incident.

He said the officers were checked out and were not hurt.

Corrections Director Scott Frakes said earlier his month that in an effort to be more transparent he'd decided to notify the media whenever assaults of staff happen and the department has issued several such notifications.

But Nystrom said the Sunday incident didn't rise to that level.

"I can tell you this incident shouldn't be compared to some of the incidents recently," he said in an email. "So much so, that I'm not planning on putting together a release.

"It is important to keep in mind 'assault,' when it deals with inmates at our facilities, does not necessarily mean a physical altercation, or a fight, took place."

But he also said the inmate in question will have assault charges added to an already long prison sentence.

Inmate assaults of corrections officers at Nebraska prisons increased threefold in a recent three-year period.
Gov. Pete Ricketts on Monday vetoed redistricting reform legislation designed to distance state senators from the politically volatile process of drawing new congressional and legislative districts following each U.S. census.

His veto sets the stage for a day of confrontation in the Legislature on Wednesday, its 60th and final day in session this year.

Already on the agenda is a motion to override the governor's veto of a bill (LB947) to allow young undocumented immigrants who have been granted lawful presence in the United States to acquire professional and commercial licenses to work in Nebraska.

In advance of that battle, the Lincoln, Greater Omaha and Nebraska chambers of commerce urged state senators to override Ricketts' veto, arguing that the bill "makes economic sense ... at a time when Nebraska is working hard to attract more skilled, educated workers."

"Giving people who have been educated in our state and who have earned advanced degrees and certificates the ability to work is in the long-term interest of Nebraska's economy and communities," the chambers said in a joint statement.

The 28,000-member Nebraska State Education Association also encouraged senators to override the veto, suggesting that "our state's future is brighter when we allow hard-working young people to follow their career dreams and practice their chosen professions right here in our state."

In announcing Monday's veto of the redistricting reform bill (LB580), the governor said a proposed new citizens commission would be "highly likely to be (composed of) party insiders who know how to draw districts to favor their friends and political allies," opening the process to "political cronyism."

The commission would be composed of five members of the party that won the most recent gubernatorial election and four members of the other party.

Redistricting plans recommended by the commission would be aired at public hearings throughout the state before being submitted to the Legislature for its approval or disapproval.

In his veto message to the Legislature, Ricketts argued that the bill "violates several provisions of Nebraska's Constitution."

Supporters of the measure -- a product of several years of cooperative negotiation by Sen. John Murante of Gretna, a Republican, and Sen. Heath Mello of Omaha, a Democrat -- have said the proposal actually would distance redistricting from elected officeholders, political parties and partisan influence.

In 2011, following the most recent U.S. census, Republican Gov. Dave Heineman was actively engaged in the process of drawing new congressional districts to benefit his party, several senators said during debate on the bill.

And senators themselves were often seeking political advantage in drawing maps defining their own legislative districts five years ago, supporters of the bill said.

The bill cleared its final test on a 29-15 vote; 30 votes would be required to override the governor's veto.

Murante said he is "evaluating the governor's veto message and will determine the proper course of action shortly."

Meanwhile, the governor asked Nebraskans to urge their state senators to uphold his veto of the immigrant workers bill during his monthly radio call-in show.

Ricketts told one caller he has been "talking to a lot of senators (about) Sen. Mello's amnesty bill."

Mello is the sponsor of LB947, which applies to so-called DACA youth who were granted lawful presence by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive action taken by President Barack Obama.

Most of the DACA youth were brought to the United States by their parents illegally when they were young children and most of those affected by the bill grew up in Nebraska and went to school here.

Ricketts also vetoed some funding Monday for a pair of bills addressing state Department of Correctional Services rulemaking (LB867A) and the proposed new statewide 911 system (LB938A), arguing there were some incorrect figures.

And the governor raised the prospect of another potential veto during his radio show.

Ricketts said he is taking "a good strong look" at a bill (LB824) that would remove some regulatory barriers to development of wind energy in Nebraska.

"I've not decided on that bill," the governor said.
The newest member of the Court of Criminal Appeals was confirmed Monday night during a joint session of the Tennessee General Assembly. J. Ross Dyer of Memphis became the first CCA judge to go through the confirmation process enacted earlier this year.Judge Dyer, 43, was appointed by Gov. Bill Haslam March 31. He replaces Roger Page, who became a Tennessee Supreme Court Justice. Judge Dyer has been the Shelby County Attorney since 2014.Judge Dyer comes from three generations of lawyers and judges.His grandfather Ross W. Dyer was a justice on the Tennessee Supreme Court, appointed in 1961 and served as its chief justice from 1969-1974.I cannot think of a better way to follow the lessons I was taught and fulfill a life-long dream than to give back to the citizens of Tennessee by serving as a judge, wrote Judge Dyer in his application for the post.Judge Dyer received his law degree from the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in 1998 and a bachelors degree in business administration with a minor in economics from Millsaps College in 1995.Judge Dyer and his wife, Amy, have a daughter, Mary Elizabeth.
In the process of electron holography, the electron beam in the microscope is split in two. One part serves as a reference; the second is directed through the sample and collects information about its magnetic structure. Both electron beams together create an interference pattern containing the information in an encrypted form. Analysis of the recorded hologram is necessary to allow conclusions to be drawn about the magnetic fields in the specimen.

Magnetic nanovortices in magnetite minerals are reliable witnesses of the earth's history, as revealed by the first high-resolution studies of these structures undertaken by scientists from Germany and the United Kingdom. The magnetic structures are built during the cooling of molten rock and reflect the earth's magnetic field at the time of their formation. The vortices are unexpectedly resilient to temperature fluctuations, as electron holographic experiments in Julich have verified. These results are an important step in improving our understanding of the history of the earth's magnetic field, its core and plate tectonics.



The earth's magnetic field performs important functions: it protects us, for example, from charged particles from space and enables migratory birds, bees, and other animals to navigate. However, it is not stable, and constantly changes its intensity and state. Several times in the past it has even reversed its polarity  the north and south poles have changed places. Scientists in the area of paleomagnetism use magnetic minerals to investigate the history of the earth's magnetic field and its formation from molten metal flowing within the earth's core, the so-called geodynamo. Furthermore, the movement of continental plates can be monitored with the aid of such rocks.

In the course of millions of years, these minerals could often have been exposed to immense temperature fluctuations, due to extreme climate change or volcanic activity, for instance. How well do the magnetic structures survive such temperature fluctuations and how reliable is the information gained from them? An international research team has now studied this question for the first time at ultra-high resolution on samples of magnetite, the mineral dominating the magnetic properties in the earth's crust. "It is only in a small part of naturally occurring magnetite that magnetic structures known for being very stable with respect to temperature fluctuations are found," explains Dr. Trevor Almeida of Imperial College London. "Far more common are tiny magnetic vortices. Their stability could not be demonstrated until now."

Together with colleagues from Forschungszentrum Julich, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Nottingham, Almeida has studied the magnetic vortices in magnetite nanocrystals. As the structures are so tiny  each grain is only about the size of a virus  there is only one method with which the nanovortices can directly be observed while they are heated up and cooled down: "A special high-resolution electron microscope at the Ernst Ruska-Centre (ER-C) in Julich is capable of making magnetic fields on the nanoscale holographically visible," explains Almeida. "In this way, images of field lines are produced almost like using iron filings around a bar magnet to make its magnetic field visible, but with a resolution in the nanometre range."

The experiments in Julich showed that although the magnetic vortices alter in strength and direction when heated up, they go back to their original state as they cool down. "Therefore magnetite rocks, which carry signs of temperature fluctuations, are indeed a reliable source of information about the history of the earth," enthuses Almeida.

"Electron holography has made it possible for us to gain a completely new insight into the magnetic behaviour of magnetite," emphasized Prof. Rafal Dunin-Borkowski, Director at the ER-C and at the Peter Grunberg Institute in Julich. As an expert in electron holography, he works with his Julich team on further improving the resolution of this technique and in providing German and international scientists the necessary infrastructure to perform this type of study. "Weak magnetic fields in nanocrystals don't just play a role in paleomagnetism. In information technology, for instance, electron holograms can also be of use to help to push back the physical limits of data storage and processing."
Google is warning you to watch out for, well, Google.

As of Tuesday morning, the search giant's own Safe Browsing tool labels "google.com" as "partially dangerous." The tool, which automatically scans "billions of URLs per day looking for unsafe websites," cites "google.com" for some potentially scary problems.

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"Some pages on this website install malware on visitors' computers," the Safe Browsing Site Status page warned, adding that "[a]ttackers on this site might try to trick you to download software or steal your information."

Google declined to comment on the site's status by Tuesday afternoon, but those ominous warnings likely don't mean that visiting "google.com" itself is dangerous. Instead, they suggest that some people have used Google services to host or link to something malicious, so the tool is flagging the whole domain as a little risky.

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"Users sometimes post bad content on websites that are normally safe," the page explained.

It's not clear how long google.com has been flagged as "partially dangerous," although some reddit users noticed it Tuesday -- the same day the Site Status page says its information was last updated. A flurry of blog posts from last November suggest google.com was also flagged with the dubious distinction back then.

But google.com is far from alone. Several other major sites that thrive on user-generated content are also listed as "partially dangerous" by Safe Browsing at the moment, including "tumblr.com" and popular code sharing site "github.com." The vast majority of things posted on all those sites are probably fine, but the nature of Safe Browsing's scans dings them for any bad apples it finds.

In fact, the problems the scans flag may already be fixed because Safe Browsing doesn't monitor in real time: According to the service's FAQ, webmasters can request their site be rescanned once problems have been dealt with, and the site's status will typically update within 24 hours if everything looks clean.
WASHINGTON  A top education official said Wednesday that the 16,000 former Corinthian Colleges students who saw their campuses abruptly close this week will automatically have their federal student loans discharged  but only if they agree to forgo any credits they earned at the schools.

Ted Mitchell, Education Department undersecretary, said the department is bound by statute and regulation on how it handles such a case when a student's school closes.

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"You can have the credits you paid for or you can relinquish the credits if you want the money back .... Students can have one or the other, but not both," Mitchell told The Associated Press.

Corinthian, a large chain of for-profit colleges that nearly collapsed last summer amid fraud allegations, shuttered its 28 remaining ground campuses this week, about two weeks after the Education Department announced it was fining it $30 million for misrepresentation.

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The closures left students at campuses in California and a few other states struggling to decide whether to have the credits they've already earned transferred to another school or to try to get their federal loans forgiven. Already, some other for-profit schools have sought to recruit these students, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., has criticized the department for making a list of areas schools available that included some for-profit schools that face investigations.

If all the thousands of students file a claim related to the closures, the cost to taxpayers would be about $215 million, Mitchell said.

Ultimately, though the potential cost to taxpayers related to the collapse of Corinthian could reach the billions. Many former students have filed "defense to repayment" claims with the department, using a previously little- known part of the law that allows students to have their loans forgiven if they were the victim of fraud.

That's the path being taken by a group of former Corinthian students, who have gone on a student loan strike and say they will not repay the debt. Many of these students attended a Corinthian school years earlier or studied on campuses that were sold instead of closed. As a result, they don't qualify for student loan relief under the federal closed-school provisions.

They say they feel like the degree they earned is worthless, and the Education Department should have done a better job protecting them.

Mitchell said the department is committed to reviewing the "defense to repayment" claims to set up a system to handle those that meet the criteria spelled out in the law, such as showing that a state law was violated in connection to their education. The department hasn't said what parameters would be used to determine who would qualify, but Mitchell said the department plans to make its intentions available next week.

"We want to make sure that borrowers who can successfully make their claims get their discharge," Mitchell said.

Mitchell said the department won't make value judgments on other schools as it seeks to help the former Corinthian students make new arrangements. It provided the students with a list of other programs, including community colleges, within a 25-mile radius that had similar programs. He said the California community college system has also stepped in to offer assistance, which the department has encouraged.

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"From the beginning, we have done everything that we have done with students foremost in our minds and students' ability to pursue a high quality education that helps them move on in their lives academically and economically," Mitchell said.

In a blog post, Noah Black, vice president of public affairs for the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, said the idea that the former Corinthian students affected by closures this week should give up their credits they've earned "reflects a separation from reality."

"To start back at zero is an insult to their hard work and shows a lack of understanding of the opportunity cost borne by these students, many of whom are working, raising a family, and going to school," Black said.

At one time, Corinthian, based in Santa Ana, California, was one of the country's largest for-profit chains, operating Everest College, HealdCollege and WyoTech, online and physical campuses. About 72,000 students attended last summer.

The Education Department has said Corinthian failed to provide adequate paperwork and comply with requests to address concerns about company practices, including allegations of falsifying job placement data in marketing and altering grades and attendance records. The schools also faced action by attorneys general in several states.

Associated Press
FILE - In this May 6, 2010 file photo, Stephen Mara, of Quattro M Securities, works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, in New York. If U.S. authorities are correct, Navinder Singh Sarao, helped set off the "flash crash" that day, raising fears that it's not just big banks and hedge funds that can create chaos on exchanges and wipe out the savings of ordinary investors. (AP photo, Henny Ray Abrams)

New York  He operated from a modest suburban London home he shared with his parents, far from the city's glamorous financial center. He used off-the-shelf software anyone can buy.

Yet, if U.S. authorities are correct, Navinder Singh Sarao, 36, managed to send a jolt of fear through the world's markets by helping to set off the 2010 "flash crash," in which the Dow Jones average plunged 600 points in less than seven minutes.

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Just how big a role he played has been hotly debated since the federal complaint was unsealed earlier this week, but the idea that a little-known investor had even a small part is deeply troubling, say traders and market experts.

"If this guy can do it," asks finance professor James Angel of Georgetown University, "who else is doing it?"

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In an age of rapidly advancing computer power, the fear is that it's not just big banks and hedge funds that can create chaos on exchanges and wipe out the savings of millions of ordinary investors. Someone working from home might be able to do it, too.

"The risks are coming from the small guys who are under the radar," says Irene Aldridge, managing partner of research firm ABLE Alpha Trading and an expert in the kind of high-speed computerized trading that Sarao did. "The regulators don't have the real-time tools to monitor them."

Sarao allegedly employed a ruse called spoofing, a bluffing technique in which traders try to manipulate the price of stocks or other assets by making fake trades to create the impression they want to sell when they really want to buy, or vice versa.

Eric Scott Hunsader, founder of Nanex, a provider of financial data that has documented what it claims are cases of blatant spoofing, says the practice is widespread  in stocks and bonds, oil and gold, cotton and coffee. He says bluffing is turning markets into a lawless Wild West, despite efforts by trading firms to fight back with software that can sniff out the false trades.

If the allegations against him are true, Sarao may rank among the best of this new breed of bluffers.

His feat was impressive because of the target of his alleged bluffing  investors in E-Mini S&P 500 futures, which are financial contracts that allow you to bet on the rise and fall of the Standard and Poor's 500 stock index. Passing off a fake trade like that as real, much less moving prices, isn't easy, because E-Mini is one of the most widely traded, transparent and scrutinized markets in the world.

"Everyone is watching it," says Manoj Narang, former CEO of Tradeworx, a high-frequency trading firm.

A key to spoofing is placing large orders to sell or buy without ever executing them. Since other traders can see your orders, a large one to sell might convince them prices are likely to head down. One to buy might make them think prices are likely to rise. So they will often mimic your order, which moves prices up or down, as if you had sold or bought yourself.

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Next, you cancel your order, and do the opposite  buying at the new, artificially lower price or selling at the new higher one.

The advent of high-frequency trading firms has added a level of sophistication and speed to this bluffing technique.

Using computers to sift through news articles, social media feeds and other data in split seconds, these firms are able to snatch tiny, fleeting profits that mere mortals can't spot. The firms can also bluff fast, sending a series of sell orders, for instance, then canceling them as the price moves down and replacing them with new orders  all within thousandths of a second.

The complaint against Sarao says it was just this sort of lightning-fast spoofing, called dynamic layering, that allowed him to make nearly $880,000 on May 6, 2010, the day of the flash crash.

His computer sent a series of orders to sell E-Mini futures. Then, as their prices moved, his computer changed or replaced those orders in rapid succession  a stunning 19,000 times in less than 2 hours before it canceled all of them, according to the complaint. Sarao's offers to sell were so numerous that at one point they represented at least one-fifth of all orders to sell E-Mini futures from around the world.

"This is the equivalent of an elephant coming to a tea party," says Nanex's Hunsader. "It's hard not to spot."

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Stocks lost $1 trillion in value during the flash crash. The market bounced back by the close of trading, but the breadth and speed of the drop rattled investors and regulators alike.

British-born Sarao, a former bank employee and Brunel University student, is charged with fraud, commodities manipulation and other offenses. He was arrested in London on Tuesday and indicated in court that he will fight extradition to the U.S.

In court, his lawyer said the arrest came as a "bolt from the blue" to Sarao. The attorney did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Between 2010 and 2014, Sarao earned $40 million on E-Mini trading alone, according to authorities, though the complaint doesn't say how much of that was through allegedly illegal trades.

Narang, the former high-speed trading executive, casts doubt on that figure, noting that the complaint doesn't list Sarao's losses, just his winnings.

He also says Sarao's allegedly bogus sell orders were often too far from the prevailing prices for traders to take seriously. In fact, Narang wonders if Sarao played much of a role at all in the flash crash.

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Larry Tabb, CEO of financial markets consultancy TABB Group, has his doubts, too: "I don't think that what he was doing on a normal day would have any impact on the markets." A regulatory review after the flash crash found that the market was vulnerable to a plunge that day because a computerized selling program at a mutual fund had run amok.

Whatever Sarao's role, regulators are clearly worried.

Spoofing was prohibited by the Dodd-Frank law in 2010, the Wall Street overhaul enacted after the financial crisis. But what is spoofing and what is legitimate trading is sometimes hard to pin down. Traders cancel orders all the time because of new information. It's the intent to fool others, not the canceling itself, that is illegal.

Still, regulators are starting to crack down. In January, a Canadian trader was arrested on spoofing charges. That followed charges against a New Jersey trader who allegedly made $1.5 million entering false trades in the gold, soybean oil and copper markets.

The criminal charges are not coming fast enough, though, for Nanex's Hunsader, who thinks spoofing is rampant and far too easy to pull off. After all, if Sarao really did help crash the market, he asks, why not "a terrorist cell or someone with deeper pockets?"

Associated Press
Wilson's pay package put him 331 times above the average U.S. worker's salary in 2014. Thomas Wilson, president and chief executive officer of Allstate, in their offices in downtown Chicago, Friday, April 11, 2008. (Alex Garcia, Chicago Tribune)

Top executives at Illinois' biggest public companies got bigger raises in 2014 than their peers nationally.

Median pay for the chief executives of 100 large Illinois companies was $5.7 million in 2014, up 13 percent from the prior year.

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Nationally among Standard & Poor's 500 companies, median pay increased 0.8 percent to $10.6 million, according to Equilar, a provider of executive compensation data.

Aaron Boyd, Equilar's governance research director, has this theory: Illinois' list includes many smaller companies that took longer to rebound from the economic crisis than the bigger companies that make up the S&P 500. The S&P 500 companies began making hefty hikes to their executive pay as long ago as 2010, he said.

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In 2014, five Illinois executives took home more than $20 million. That's one more than the previous year.

Those clearing $10 million in total compensation: 22 executives, up from 17 the previous year.

Pay rose for more than half of the executives on the list.

One factor for the jump  changes in the value of pensions  is largely outside the control of companies, Boyd said.

"Those numbers have gone up, are pretty high, and in some cases have contributed to 40 percent to 50 percent of the increase in total pay," Boyd said. In fact, some publications' reviews of 2014 executive compensation have stripped out the pension-related numbers, he said.

Standard & Poor's 500 companies contributed an average $1.5 million to their CEOs' pensions in their fiscal 2014, up from $550,000 in 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg in late March. Among the factors is a change in mortality rates, with the Society of Actuaries saying last year that Americans are expected to live two years longer than previously estimated.

AbbVie's Richard Gonzalez, for example, had total compensation of $22 million, $5 million of which was due to a change in pension values. In contrast, in 2013, the change in pension values accounted for only $42,000 of his $18 million in total compensation.

The highest-paid Illinois executive was once again Boeing's James McNerney, who had total pay of $28.9 million.

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Executives who didn't crack the top 5 in 2013 but did in 2014: the CEOs of AbbVie, Mondelez and Tribune Media.

Tribune Media's Peter Liguori was the only media executive in the top 10 in Illinois.

Nationally, in Equilar's analysis of S&P 500 CEOs, media executives took six of the top 10 spots.

About a dozen Illinois executives got raises even as their stock prices were down for the year.

Less than 10 percent of the executives on the Illinois list were women, with the most highly paid being Irene Rosenfeld of Mondelez.

Nationally, for the first time since 2011, a female executive  Marissa Mayer of Yahoo  made the list as one of the top 10 highest-paid CEOs, with total compensation of $42.1 million, Equilar said.

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Of 340 established executives on the S&P 500 list, 16 were women, Equilar said.

The average raise for the Illinois group was 7.2 percent, to $7.3 million.

Among those seeing drops in pay were executives at General Growth, Discover and Motorola Solutions.

Tribune reporter Robert Channick contributed.

byerak@tribpub.com

Twitter @beckyyerak
Accretive Health has overhauled its board of directors as the company seeks to move beyond a checkered history of financial errors and questionable debt-collection practices.

The Chicago company said in a securities filing Wednesday that four people resigned from the board in the last week, including former Chairman J. Michael Cline and Mary Tolan, former CEO. Three others who served on the audit committee will not run for re-election at the company's annual shareholders meeting in August.

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The seven directors make up more than half of the 13-member board. The company said the board has added five directors, increasing the size of the group to 14. When the three directors leave in August, the board will shrink to 11 members.

Accretive said in a statement that the departing directors devoted significant time and energy to the company and have opted to resign for personal reasons and professional commitments.

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The board shake-up comes a few months after Accretive restated financial results for 2011, 2012 and 2013. The company did not properly book revenue or expenses for certain contracts.

As the company worked to clean up its financial statements, it was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange last year. Accretive also hired a new CEO last year, Emad Rizk, its third in two years.

Tolan started Accretive in 2003 and was bankrolled by Cline's private equity firm. The company is a billing consultant to hospitals and physician groups.

Troubles started in 2011 when an employee's unencrypted laptop was stolen, putting health data on 23,500 patients in Minnesota at risk.

That incident set off a broader investigation of the company by Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson, who in January 2012 accused Accretive of aggressive patient collection practices and of violating federal patient protection laws.

Accretive settled the lawsuit in July 2012 without admitting wrongdoing and paid a $2.5 million fine. In 2013, Tolan was replaced as CEO by Stephen Schuckenbrock, but she remained on the board.

The company will hold its first annual meeting in three years in August. At that time, directors Steven Kaplan, Stanley Logan and Mark Wolfson will step down. Directors Arthur Spiegel and Schuckenbrock resigned May 15 and May 18, respectively.

The new directors are Michael Hammond, a health care investment banker; Dr. Arthur Klein, president of a hospital group; Amir Dan Rubin, CEO of an academic hospital; Charles Ditkoff, a health care attorney; and Lawrence Leisure, managing director of a Chicago Pacific Founders, a private equity firm that Tolan started.

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asachdev@tribpub.com

Twitter @ameetsachdev
DALLAS  The wave of consolidation that swept the U.S. airline industry has markedly reduced competition at many of the nation's major airports, and passengers appear to be paying the price in higher fares and fees, an Associated Press analysis has found.



Over the past decade, mega-mergers reduced nine large U.S. airlines to four  American, United, Delta and Southwest  with the result that travelers are increasingly finding their home airport dominated by just one or two players.



Over the same period, domestic airfares rose faster than inflation, and analysts believe one leading factor is the decline in competitive pressure.



"Airlines aren't going at each other like they used to," said Mike Boyd, an aviation consultant frequently hired by airports. "They have their turf, and they very rarely go to the mattresses with one another."



At 40 of the 100 largest U.S. airports, a single airline controls a majority of the market, as measured by the number of seats for sale, up from 34 airports a decade earlier. At 93 of the top 100, one or two airlines control a majority of the seats, an increase from 78 airports, according to AP's analysis of data from Diio, an airline-schedule tracking service.



Overall, domestic fares climbed 5 percent over the past 10 years, after adjusting for inflation. And that doesn't include the $25 checked bag fee and other add-on charges that many fliers now pay.



To be sure, other factors have contributed to higher fares, among them a stronger economy, longer average flight distances and, for most of the past few years, some of the highest fuel prices in history. However, analysts believe consolidation freed airlines to charge more.



The strategy is paying off: In the past two years, U.S. airlines made a record $19.7 billion in profits, even though air travel is growing only modestly.



The airlines' main trade group, Airlines for America, said the fare increases reflect stronger demand for travel and are not solely a result of the mergers. The group noted that airlines have used their profits to buy new jets and update airport facilities.



American Airlines CEO Doug Parker rejected the notion that consolidation has hurt travelers.



"We have increased flying out of each of our hubs," Parker said. "We want to expand. That's good for consumers, not bad."



The Justice Department notified the four largest airlines on June 30 that it is investigating whether they are colluding to drive up fares by limiting the availability of flights and seats. Those four control more than 80 percent of the U.S. market.



There was a time  before deregulation in 1978  when fliers had even fewer choices and paid higher fares than they do now. Back then, the U.S. government controlled which airlines flew to which cities and how much they could charge. Competition intensified in the 1980s. As new airlines entered the market, fares dropped precipitously.



After 9/11 and the recession that hit immediately afterward, major airlines were in financial shambles. Several restructured through bankruptcy, and a wave of deals starting in 2008 led to the combinations of Delta and Northwest, United and Continental, Southwest and AirTran, and American and US Airways.



Justice Department antitrust regulators let the deals go through but forced airlines in a few cases to give up some of their spots at key airports to try to encourage competition.



Still, "the airline industry is less competitive now than it used to be," said Seth Kaplan, managing partner of industry newsletter Airline Weekly. "Some of us used to have eight or nine airlines to choose from. Now we have maybe four or five, just as we have four or five cellphone companies to choose from."



The mergers have altered the competitive landscape at airports big and small.



 In Indianapolis, the two leading airlines controlled just 37 percent of the seats a decade ago, and domestic fares were 9 percent below the national average. Then the city's main airline, ATA, went bankrupt and was bought by Southwest, and its No. 2 carrier, Northwest, was absorbed by Delta. Now two airlines control 56 percent of the seats, and airfares are 6 percent above the national average.



 The Dayton, Ohio, airport was served by 10 airlines in 2005, and fares were 5 percent below average. Today, just four airlines fly there and prices are almost 10 percent above average.



 Big hub airports aren't immune. In 2005, US Airways controlled nearly 66 percent of the seats in Philadelphia. Now that US Airways has merged with American, the combined airline has 77 percent of the seats. Airfare has gone from 4 percent below average to 10 percent above it.



 Delta's hold on Atlanta, the world's busiest airport, increased during that same period from 78 percent of seats to just over 80 percent. At the same time, low-cost AirTran merged into Southwest and reduced flights there. Domestic airfares at the airport went from nearly 6 percent below average to 11 percent above.



 Some cities are actually seeing lower fares than they did a decade ago. Prices in Denver were once 5.6 percent higher than the national average. Now that United's market share there has dropped to 41 percent from 56 percent, fares are almost 15 percent lower than the rest of the country.



Recent deals indicate the big airlines intend to stick to a strategy of dominating one airport and forgoing marginal service elsewhere.



For instance, United announced in June that it will abandon Kennedy Airport and move its dwindling number of JFK flights to New Jersey's Newark airport, where it already controls 68 percent of the seats. At the same time, if regulators go along, Delta will further shrink its small presence at Newark and take over United's share at JFK, where Delta is already top dog.



One of the few competitive battles is taking place in Seattle, where Delta is mounting a fierce challenge to longtime No. 1 Alaska Airlines. Delta is building Seattle into a gateway to Asia and adding flights on domestic routes long dominated by Alaska. Seattle-based Alaska has responded by adding service.



The average fare at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was $377 in the third quarter of 2014, $18 below the national average.





Associated Press
Some airlines are attempting to restrict access to their fare and schedule information, channeling consumers away from third-party websites and toward their own proprietary sites, according to the Travel Technology Association. (Lawrence K. Ho, MCT)

The value of consumers being able to shop for airfares at comparison websites is $6.7 billion per year, which shows the danger of airlines potentially pulling their fares and schedules from those sites, according to a recent study sponsored by Travel Technology Association, an industry organization representing online travel agencies.

The study, the latest salvo in ongoing tension between airlines and third-party distributors, suggested leisure ticket prices could rise by more than 11 percent, or $30 on an average airfare, if airlines pulled their fares from third-party travel sites.

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"At a time when independent, transparent comparison shopping is most needed, some airlines are attempting to restrict access to their fare and schedule information, reduce the ability of consumers to easily compare prices, and drive travelers to their own websites, which do not offer price comparisons with other airlines," said author of the study Fiona Scott Morton, a former deputy assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice and current economics professor at Yale University.

The study cited Delta Air Lines, in particular, for cutting off a number of comparison sites, including TripAdvisor, Hipmunk and FareCompare. Last August, American Airlines temporarily withdrew its fares and schedules from websites operated by Chicago-based Orbitz Worldwide after a contract dispute, potentially over booking fees the airline pays to the online travel agency. Southwest Airlines, the largest carrier at Midway International Airport, has long kept its fares and schedules off third-party websites.

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Airlines pulling fares from online travel agencies and so-called metasearch sites, such as Kayak, would create a bigger hassle for consumers trying to compare prices and could stunt competition, the report said.

However, airline industry group Airlines for America said consumers' ability to access detailed price-comparison information, unseen in other industries, is not going to change.

"The notion that the U.S. airline industry, which enplanes over 700 million passengers a year, is going to allow the various distribution channels that facilitate those customers' purchases of its services to dry up is nonsensical," Airlines for America spokeswoman Jean Medina said.

Still, responding to the study, the Business Travel Coalition called on the U.S. Department of Transportation to investigate the issue, which it called "the latest anti-competitive and anti-consumer airline initiative." It noted recent mergers of mega-carriers have given them outsized market power to funnel consumers into their own booking websites instead of third-party sites.

"With fewer airlines, the direct channel has become much more dominant, and now this fortified market position can be used to muscle out competition," the coalition said in a statement. It said that if one of the big three airlines  American, United and Delta  pulls fares from an online travel agency, the agency could lose 20 percent of the industrywide fare inventory. If another pulls out, that would force the travel agency out of business, it said.

"Strong, independent distributors are necessary to keep the airlines honest on their own websites and in their offerings elsewhere to consumers," said coalition founder Kevin Mitchell. Comparison sites "uniquely provide consumers with the comparison-shopping tools that keep pricing discipline in the system," he said.

Report: Rebanking means delays

Airlines changing their schedules to group flights closer together during the day, as has happened recently at O'Hare International Airport, could lead to more flight delays, a study found.

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The two largest carriers at O'Hare, United Airlines and American Airlines, both in March "rebanked" their schedules at the airport, grouping flights in tighter time frames to create better flight connections for passengers in an effort to boost revenue.

Rebanking creates alternating periods of bustle and calm in the airport and on the runways.

However, regional airlines, which largely ferry passengers to and from mega-carrier hubs, would be affected most by rebanking, and passengers could suffer from delays, according to a study by masFlight, an aviation data company. Rebanking results in longer turnaround times for aircraft and longer taxi time before takeoff, it found when studying numbers from March and April and comparing them to last year.

"Increased delays translate into the kinds of hassles that deter people from flying. That, in turn, can cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars," said masFlight President Tulinda Larsen.

However, the report did not find an impact on airline on-time performance yet, saying the true test will be the busy summer travel season when flight traffic increases and thunderstorms become an issue.

O'Hare airport already suffers from lousy on-time rates, often the worst in the country among large airports, according to monthly data from the U.S. Department of Transportation. In March, the overall on-time departure rate at O'Hare was 74.2 percent, below the average of 77.7 percent for the 29 largest airports. However, unlike in many months, O'Hare in March was not the worst in the nation for on-time departures or arrivals.

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Representatives from United and American have said rebanking might actually help their on-time rates because delays early in the day are less likely to cascade through the remainder of the day. Those airlines are also flying larger planes but fewer of them, somewhat cutting down on air traffic control congestion.

Nicest flight attendants?

A recent poll by Airfarewatchdog.com showed major airlines ranked poorly for having nice flight attendants.

The survey of 2,800 travelers showed 25 percent said Virgin America had the nicest flight attendants, followed by Hawaiian Airlines and Southwest Airlines. Among the dozen airlines in the poll, US Airways, American and United ranked last, each garnering just 1 percent of the vote. Delta Air Lines was slightly higher, at 3 percent.

More generally, Airfarewatchdog ranked United and American last among nine domestic carriers on overall performance, based on such criteria as on-time arrivals, mishandled bags and customer satisfaction. First was Alaska Airlines, followed by Virgin America, Delta, JetBlue and Southwest. American, including merged US Airways, and United even ranked lower than ultra-discounters Frontier and Spirit.

"Our survey shows again this year that consumers prefer smaller niche airlines," said Airfarewatchdog founder George Hobica.

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United updates app

United Airlines recently released a new version of its mobile app.

New features include signing in to frequent-flier accounts with Touch ID fingerprint identification on Apple devices. The app update also allows use of FareLock, United's option to place a fare on hold for an additional price and decide later whether to purchase the ticket. It also includes additional options for sorting and using filters while searching for flights and allows saving of previous searches.

United said an upcoming version will allow credit card scanning for quicker payment.

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Twitter @spendingsmart
A plane soars over Higgins Roads near River Road as it prepares to land at O'hare International Airport. (JIM PRISCHING)

The Obama administration proposed Wednesday to regulate aircraft emissions in much the same way as power plants, saying they are a threat to human health because they contain pollutants that help cause global warming.

Using its authority under The Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency finding of endangerment to human health clears the way for possible U.S. adoption of international emissions standards.

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The International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, a U.N. agency, has been working for several years on developing global aircraft emissions standards for the first time. Final agreement on those standards is expected in February of next year.

U.S. regulations would apply only to large planes like airliners and cargo jets and turboprop aircraft, and not to smaller jet aircraft, piston-engine planes, helicopters or military aircraft.

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While negotiations on the standards are still underway, they aren't expected to go into effect until 2020 or afterward, and possibly as late as 2025, say environmentalists following the matter.

The ICAO standards are also not expected to apply to airliners in service today or those that might be purchased before the effective date, said Vera Pardee, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. The center is one of several environmental groups that sued the EPA to force the agency to issue its finding that emissions endanger public health.

Airlines typically fly planes for 20 years or more before replacing them. That means it's likely to be decades before planes that meet the anticipated global standards are in widespread use.

Airline emissions account for about 2 percent of total annual global greenhouse gas emissions. That sounds small, but it's nearly as much as the emissions produced by Germany, the sixth-greatest greenhouse gas producing country, according to a study released last year by The International Council on Clean Transportation, an environmental group with offices in the U.S. and Germany.

Aircraft manufacturers have already made significant strides in increasing fuel efficiency. Since the early years of the jet age in the 1960s, the fuel efficiency of airliners has increased 70 percent, according to Boeing. There's plenty of incentive to be as efficient as possible: Fuel typically vies with labor as airlines' greatest expense.

The U.S. airline industry has a set a target of an average annual improvement in fuel efficiency of 1.5 percent, and so far has been successful in meeting that goal, said Nancy Young, vice president for environmental affairs at Airlines for America, trade association for major carriers.

Alaska, Frontier and Spirit airlines were tied for most fuel-efficient U.S. airlines, the study found. The least fuel efficient was American, which operates a fleet of MD-80 airliners, an older design that is being phased out.

Changes in the operating strategies of airlines in recent years have also contributed to greater efficiency. Airlines are packing more people into fewer flights.

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However, global aviation emissions are rising because there is more air travel overall. U.S. airlines, which include several of the world's largest carriers, account for about 29 percent of global airline carbon emissions if both domestic and international flights are included.

The world's two largest aircraft makers have recently introduced into service more fuel-efficient planes designed for long-distance international routes  the Boeing 787 and the Airbus A350.

Airlines, aircraft makers and the Federal Aviation Administration have also been working with biofuels companies to develop alternatives to jet fuel that could potentially reduce the aviation's industry's vulnerability to the ups and downs of oil supplies and prices, as well as reduce carbon emissions.

"We're not dragging our feet," said Tim Neale, a spokesman for Boeing. "We're hard at work on lighter airplanes, and GE is hard at work on more efficient engines. And we're working a lot of these operational issues with the carriers so they operate the planes more efficiently."

Boeing and airline industry officials say they support ICAO's effort to develop a single global standard, since airlines fly globally. But Pardee said environmentalists hope that if the ICAO standard turns out to be weak, the EPA will move forward with stronger standards for U.S. airlines.

Associated Press
Aon Centers current owner and the firm hired to sell the building have planted seeds in the minds of potential buyers that the property might be able to accommodate an observation deck. (Chris Sweda, Chicago Tribune)

Chicago could someday have a third skyscraper observatory to rival those at Willis Tower and John Hancock Center.

Aon Center's current owner and the firm hired to sell the building have planted seeds in the minds of potential buyers that the property might be able to accommodate an observation deck, an attraction known to generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue. The Willis Tower Skydeck, for example, posted about $25 million in admissions revenues in 2014.

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Aon Center's owner, Atlanta-based Piedmont Office Realty Trust, was asked recently how the sales process for the building was going. Its top executive mentioned some potential "creative" enhancements, including an observatory.

"We're getting very good activity levels," Piedmont Chief Executive Don Miller told analysts in an April earnings call.

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"The combination of a long-term lease, really stable rent roll, with some upside in the income stream and some creative plays you can make  whether it's residential or an observatory or something like that  drives us to believe that we're more optimistic than we've been in quite some time that it will clear," Miller said.

The possibilities for generating more revenue from the city's third-tallest building are also being floated by Chicago-based JLL, hired to sell the property for Piedmont Office, according to a source. News that some potential buyers were considering an observation deck was first reported by Crain's Chicago Business.

Two landmark Chicago buildings already have observatories. Willis Tower, Chicago's tallest building, also has the Ledge, glass boxes that jut out more than 4 feet from the Skydeck. The city's fourth-tallest building, Hancock Center, also has the Tilt, which offers downward-facing views from 1,000 feet up, according to its website.

Aon's proximity to Millennium Park, Maggie Daley Park, Buckingham Fountain, Navy Pier and Michigan Avenue could make its observation deck more enticing to tourists than Willis Tower's, said the source.

But no plans, renderings or feasibility studies have been done about adding an observation deck to the building, the source said, noting that potential Aon Center buyers have expressed interest but no concrete plans to execute idea.

Bids for the building so far are "well above" $650 million, the source said.

Can Trump Tower, Chicago's second-tallest building, be far behind in wanting an observation deck?

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Work continues at the future Billy Reid store at 845 W. Randolph St. on May 1, 2015. The retailer is set to open this month. (Phil Velasquez, Chicago Tribune)

Luxury lifestyle brand Billy Reid is on track to open its first Chicago store this month in the Fulton Market district, the first major soft goods retailer to plant a flag in the rapidly transforming neighborhood.

Billy Reid, which will sell men's and women's clothing and accessories at 845 W. Randolph St., searched for nearly six years for a Chicago location before settling on the area best known for its well-regarded restaurants, the company said.

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The brand, headquartered in Florence, Ala., has "strong ties to cultural communities outside the realm of fashion," it said, so "opening a store in a neighborhood known less for retail and more for its top-tier hospitality offerings ... seemed like an obvious choice."

The Chicago store, squeezed between Indian restaurant Jaipur and an office building, is the brand's 12th in the U.S. and its first in the Midwest. It is scheduled to open to the public in mid-May, though some people will get an early taste of the new shop at an event it is co-hosting Monday during the James Beard Awards.

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"There are a handful of brands that exist that have the DNA that allow them to be the first in the market and still be successful," said Todd Siegel, first vice president with brokerage CBRE, counting Billy Reid among them. "They cultivate a following that allows for their consumer base to seek them out."

Billy Reid, a Louisiana native who in 2012 won the "menswear designer of the year" award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, has been building his eponymous brand since 2004, when he relaunched the business after a three-year hiatus. His original brand, called William Reid, operated from 1998 to 2001.

Reid said in a news release that the vibe of the West Loop's Fulton Market district reminded him of New York City's Bowery neighborhood, where he also has a store.

"We really like hanging out in the neighborhood, and ultimately that's the right mindset for us to adopt when we're looking for a place," said Reid, whose website describes his brand as a "modern approach to American work wear and cultured Southern dandyism."

Items include $95 triple-washed chino shorts in "Arabian spice" and a $995 suede dress. A $395 pair of Oxford lace-up shoes made of calf hide and patent leather is on sale for $199.

The 2,000-square-foot split-level store is going into a 1920s-era building that once housed Andrews Paper Co. It will "maintain the unique raw architectural elements original to the space, but with Reid's touch of mixing modern, residential charm and uniquely repurposed materials," the company said.

One unique design feature will be a brass and crystal light installation made in collaboration with Swarovski and graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Though the West Loop's Fulton Market and Randolph Street corridors have been bustling with restaurants and bars for years, and heavy development is converting the area into a hub for office workers and families rather than the meatpackers and food wholesalers that have been there for decades, soft goods retailers have been slow to arrive.

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Recent deals suggest that might change soon. Last month a venture led by Madison Capital, a New York investor with a history of retail developments, bought four buildings along Fulton Market and Carpenter Street from meatpacker Economy Packing.

CBRE's Siegel said Billy Reid's opening will likely encourage brands with similar audiences to enter the neighborhood, which he likens to New York's Gansevoort meatpacking district circa 2001.

The Fulton Market district is unique for retail because it promises strong daytime traffic as a cascade of office space begins to open, including the highly anticipated openings of Google's Chicago headquarters and co-working space WeWork, Siegel said. That's on top of its established restaurant and residential populations and a nascent hotel scene providing nighttime and weekend traffic. Soho House opened last year and developers recently received City Hall approval to build an Ace Hotel.

With many of the warehouse-to-office conversions drawing technology, venture capital and advertising firms, the neighborhood will be busy with young people with large disposable incomes, Siegel said.

"It's going to be a feeding frenzy," Siegel said. "I anticipate retail rent growth will go up 20 percent in the next 12 to 18 months."

Alison Grant is watching with anticipation.

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Grant is Midwest sales director for Aesthetic Movement, a creative consultancy and product design firm that since 2010 has operated a wholesale showroom at 170 N. Sangamon St.

Observing the changes of the neighborhood, the firm in December transformed part of its showroom space into a retail store selling varied wares  including jewelry, textiles, tableware and stationery  directly to consumers. A neon sign that says This is a Test hangs over the checkout area.

Grant said she has been pleasantly surprised by the foot traffic. She adjusted the store's hours to open an hour earlier, at 11 a.m., after she discovered shoppers were waiting for it to open in the morning.

With the arrival of Billy Reid, she said, "I'm really excited to see what happens."

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Twitter @alexiaer
Boeing on Tuesday announced that CEO Jim McNerney, who led the aerospace giant for the past decade, will step down July 1. His successor is chief operating officer Dennis A. Muilenburg, who joined the company as an intern 30 years ago.



McNerney, 65, endured the woes and successes of the launch of Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner aircraft, which suffered from production delays and a worldwide grounding in 2013, only to later be lauded for its fuel efficiency and customer-pleasing features.



He also led the Chicago-based company, which had nearly $91 billion in revenue last year, during a new era of prosperity in worldwide commercial airplane sales for Boeing and declining sales to the U.S. military. Boeing turns 100 years old next year.



McNerney will remain chairman of Boeing's board of directors, where he has served since 2001. He will remain a Boeing employee through February "to ensure a smooth transition of his CEO responsibilities to Muilenburg," the company said, adding that he will also continue advocating on behalf of Boeing, including in Washington, D.C.



Boeing didn't say the move was part of a succession plan, but McNerney had reached Boeing's mandatory retirement age of 65. The company said he had "made priorities of succession planning and leadership development at the outset of his tenure."



McNerney earned $28.9 million in 2014 and was the highest-paid CEO of a public company in the Chicago region, according to a recent Tribune analysis.



Muilenburg, 51, has been COO since 2013.



"Dennis is an extremely capable, experienced and respected leader with an immense passion for our company, our people, and our products and services," McNerney said in a statement. "As CEO, Dennis will bring a rich combination of management skills, customer focus, business and engineering acumen, a can-do spirit and the will to win. With a deep appreciation of our past accomplishments, and the energy and skill to drive those to come, he is well suited to lead our very talented Boeing team into its second century."



Muilenburg said in a statement that he's taking over at a time when Boeing is "financially strong and well-positioned in our markets."



"As we continue to drive the benefits of integrating our enterprise skills, capabilities and experience  what we call operating as 'One Boeing'  we will find new and better ways to engage and inspire employees, deliver innovation that drives customer success, and produce results to fuel future growth and prosperity for all our stakeholders," Muilenburg said.



McNerney was elected Boeing chairman, president and chief executive in 2005.



During his tenure, the company recaptured the global lead in commercial airplane deliveries from rival Airbus "with steady increases in production and a comprehensive update of its product line," the company said. Commercial jets now account for about 70 percent of the company's revenue; most of the remainder came from its military and space operations. The company maintained a strong position in defense markets despite a downturn in U.S. military spending.



Boeing's financial performance improved under McNerney, with revenue rising 73 percent to a record $90.8 billion last year from $52.5 billion in 2004, the year before he became CEO, the company said, adding that order backlogs and earnings per share tripled over the period.



McNerney helped Boeing recover from missteps that started before his tenure. The 787 carbon-fiber composite jet was assembled from parts manufactured around the globe, then assembled by Boeing. Never before had the company handed over so much control of its production to outsiders, and the budget-saving measure ended up creating headaches, delays and expensive cost overruns.



The 787 was grounded for 100 days in 2013 by aviation regulators worldwide because of overheating onboard batteries, a problem that regulators say has been fixed.



Under McNerney, Boeing also moved some of its production away from unionized workers in the Seattle area to non-union ones in South Carolina.



Outside the 787, the company has kept to safe bets. Instead of developing new commercial airliners, it has tweaked its existing offerings  stretching fuselages to accommodate more passengers and altering existing airframes to accommodate new, more fuel-efficient engines.



Muilenburg formerly served as president and CEO of Boeing's defense business, headquartered in St. Louis. Before that, he was president of the unit's Global Services & Support business, and he led Boeing's Combat Systems division.



He joined Boeing's engineering ranks as an intern in Seattle in 1985.



Associated Press contributed.

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Career Education, a Schaumburg-based higher education company, said Wednesday that it will close or sell all of its schools except its two largest, amid a government crackdown on for-profit colleges that leave students with useless degrees and a lot of debt.

The downsizing of the company will result in layoffs, but Career Education did not provide specifics about the number of job reductions. The company said it expects to incur $20 million to $25 million in severance costs.

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Career Education said it will begin shutting down 14 Sanford-Brown campuses and the school's online program. According to the company's annual report, Sanford-Brown, which offers health-related programs, does not have any campuses in the Chicago area. The schools will no longer accept new students, and current students will be allowed to complete their studies during the shutdown process, which can take 18 months or longer.

In addition, the company said it plans to sell Briarcliffe College in New York, Brooks Institute in California and Missouri College. Those schools and Sanford-Brown have about 8,600 students, the company said.

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The company said declining student enrollments and financial losses at those schools combined with regulatory pressures led to the decision close or sell the campuses.

"The decisions we made today were very difficult," Ron McCray, chairman and interim CEO, said on a conference call with analysts. "We know it will affect our students, faculty and support staff. ... However, these are steps we needed to take."

After years of explosive growth, Career Education and other for-profit schools are shrinking fast. In the fall of 2010, more than 118,000 students were enrolled at Career Education schools, according to a U.S. Senate report.

In the first quarter of this year, the company said it had 43,300 students. Its two largest schools, Colorado Technical University and American InterContinental University, which the company will continue to operate, have 33,800 students. Those two schools are focused on online programs.

The economy, negative publicity and more aggressive marketing from traditional universities have contributed to declining enrollments at for-profit colleges.

Critics of for-profit schools say declining enrollments are a good thing because the schools derive most of their revenue from federal financial aid programs. For example, in 2010, Career Education reported 81.5 percent of its revenue from federal student loans, not including tuition assistance for military veterans.

The 2012 Senate report also found that the company had a high rate of student loan default, with 21.6 percent of students defaulting within three years.

In 2012, Career Education said it would close 23 campuses and eliminate 900 jobs. In December, the company said it would sell its 16 Le Cordon Bleu culinary schools. In March, the company said it would wind down operations at the Harrington College of Design in Chicago.

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In the latest restructuring, Career Education expects to record $40 million to $50 million in one-time expenses, including severance and the costs to exit leases.

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Chobani founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya says he will join some of the worlds richest individuals in pledging to give away at least half his wealth, which has been estimated at $1.41 billion. (Mark Von Holden, AP)

NEW YORK  Chobani founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya says he will join some of the world's richest individuals in pledging to give away at least half his wealth, which has been estimated at $1.41 billion.

The Turkish-born yogurt entrepreneur is making the commitment as part of The Giving Pledge, which was created by Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The effort asks billionaires to commit to giving away more than half their wealth during their lifetimes or in their wills.

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The group notes the pledge is a "moral commitment," rather than a legal contract. It says that by asking people to make public pledges, it hopes to generate conversations about philanthropy.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Ulukaya said he plans to devote his philanthropic efforts to helping refugees around the world. He said he has set up a website for a foundation, called Tent, which he plans to fund over time. He said Tent's activities will include raising awareness about refugee situations and helping provide relief on issues like education and health care.

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The 43-year-old Ulukaya had already pledged last year to donate $2 million for refugees fleeing violence in his homeland, with initial donations being made to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. At the time, he said he wanted to bring attention to people caught up in fighting along the Iraq and Syria borders with Turkey, a region targeted by the militant Islamic State group.

In a draft of a letter declaring his pledge, Ulukaya said he was inspired by watching his mother "give to those who needed it" and that he had always planned to donate most of what he had.

Ulukaya said he became interested in The Giving Pledge because he liked the idea of being able to tap into the knowledge of other philanthropists. Among those the group says have taken similar pledges are entrepreneur Elon Musk, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens.

A representative for The Giving Pledge did not respond when asked when this year's pledges would be announced.

Initially, Ulukaya said Tent will be housed in Chobani's office in New York City. He dismissed the notion that the effort would take away from his time at Chobani, noting that his charitable activities so far haven't interfered with his responsibilities.

"It's enough time to do all of it. I don't believe that you need to leave your business to do social good," he said.

Since its founding in 2007, Chobani has helped drive the surging popularity of Greek yogurt, which is thicker and has more protein than traditional supermarket yogurt. More recently, however, it has been facing tougher competition from bigger companies like General Mills, which has been more aggressively pushing Greek varieties of its Yoplait yogurt.

Last year, Chobani said it secured $750 million in financing from private equity firm TPG Capital when it was facing a cash crunch. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Chobani is expected to name a new CEO in coming months as part of the deal with TPG. But Ulukaya said he doesn't plan to step away from his role anytime soon.

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"I am the CEO, and I will decide if I'm not going to be the CEO one day. But that's totally my decision," he said.

Forbes has estimated Ulukaya's wealth at $1.4 billion this year. Ulukaya is divorced with no children.

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Since taking the helm of Claires 14 months ago, Beatrice Lafon has tried to help the company regain its footing as queen of tweens with a strategy that involves both a return to its core strengths and an embrace of the vastly changed ways girls shop. (Michael Noble Jr., Chicago Tribune)

Claire's, the mall staple and prolific ear piercer, has in its sprawling Hoffman Estates headquarters a "wall of fame" with the celebrities who have trusted it with their earlobes.

Brooke Shields, pierced in Scottsdale, Ariz., 1994. Jennifer Hudson, Calumet City, 2014. MC Hammer, Las Vegas, 2003.

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So famous is Claire's for its ear piercing that the accessories retailer historically hasn't done much to promote the service, CEO Beatrice Lafon said  and that's one of the things she's changing as she works to right the company's rocky fortunes.

"Usually people focus on what you're not good at and try to fix it," said Lafon, who has been called a turnaround specialist in the European trade press. "That's not how I work. I look at what you're good at to make it excellent."

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Since taking the helm of Claire's 14 months ago, Lafon, previously president of Claire's Europe, has tried to help Claire's regain its footing as queen of tweens with a strategy that involves both a return to its core strengths and an embrace of the vastly changed ways girls shop.

Among her major initiatives: refocusing products to cater to the under-12 group that traditionally was a strong audience for Claire's, and opening Claire's-branded concession shops inside Toys R Us stores to reduce its reliance on mall traffic.

Lafon faces an uphill battle littered with challenges that have hurt many retailers that serve the young and fickle, including competition from popular fast-fashion chains and shifting priorities that have diverted teen dollars from sparkly bangles to sleek tech gadgets.

On top of that, Claire's has a substantial debt load that makes it all the more pressing that it improve its performance. Claire's, which was taken private in a highly leveraged $3.1 billion buyout by private equity firm Apollo Global Management in 2007, has $2.4 billion in debt, with a maturity coming due in 2017.

Lafon said the 2017 maturities are small in the total debt structure and the company is profitable. The company, which in late 2013 had begun steps for an initial public offering, has put aside those ambitions for now while it focuses on improving its numbers.

Standard and Poor's in April downgraded Claire's corporate credit rating to CCC, meaning the company is vulnerable and dependent on favorable business conditions to meet its financial commitments. Claire's should seek refinancing next year before the $259.6 million in senior secured notes become current, but it may have difficulty doing so if its performance doesn't improve, said Mariola Borysiak, associate director at Standard and Poor's. If it can't refinance, she said, it may face restructuring. Her outlook is negative.

Claire's, which reported revenues of $1.49 billion last year, earlier this month announced a disappointing quarter after a tough year. Its first-quarter revenues dropped 9.4 percent, while sales at existing stores, which excludes the effect of newly opened or closed locations, declined 1.9 percent in North America and 3.6 percent in Europe. Its net loss narrowed to $35.4 million from $38.1 million the prior year. Operating income improved.

Average transaction value declined. Claire's juggles 8,500 SKUs, which stands for stock-keeping units (aka product) with an average price of $6.02. The average transaction value in fiscal 2014 was $15.53.

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The financial difficulties have stemmed from a number of factors, including unfavorable foreign currency exchange rates in Europe, lost sales from inventory that got held up in the West Coast port slowdown and the unpredictable impact of crazes. Its European results, in particular, could not match the big sales boost last year from the mad rush for Fun Weevz, kits of colorful mini-rubber bands that weave together to make jewelry.

"We would have loved for it to become the Lego for little girls, but it did not," Lafon said. "It might be another 10 years before another craze comes along."

In addition, jewelry, which makes up more than half of Claire's sales, hasn't been in high demand since 2012, part of the nature of the fashion cycle. To offset the downtrends, Lafon is introducing new categories. A few that tested successfully in the first quarter, and that she plans to expand to more stores, include candy, bath and body, and room decor.

Lafon, who has launched new promotional strategies, refreshed product assortments and decluttered store presentations, said consumer signals in the last few months point to the business getting healthier.

"I can't wait for the numbers to prove it," she said.

Lafon, 55, talked in a conference room at Claire's headquarters wearing an elegant Max Mara dress and a blonde ponytail of fake hair, so seamlessly blended into her own that you wouldn't have known it if she hadn't pointed it out.

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"We have to wear our hair," laughed Lafon, a native of southern France, who also wore chandelier earrings and a large flower-shaped ring from the company's stores.

A petite woman with an easy smile, Lafon had been leading Claire's Europe from its UK headquarters for three years when she was tapped to take over for former CEO James Fielding, who resigned after two years. The company did not give a reason for his departure.

Lafon said she hesitated "for maybe three seconds" before she made up her mind.

"I don't take on a role if I don't think I can make a success of it," said Lafon, who counts among her proudest successes her short stint as CEO of discount British department store TJ Hughes, where she was brought on to sell the struggling company and did so in 12 weeks.

In addition, as a divorced mom of a young son, Lafon had to uproot from their home in England.

Lafon and her son, now 8, settled into a home in Kenilworth with the two full-time nannies who have lived with them for five years. Lafon, who calls herself a high-energy and decisive person, described a work-packed schedule, leaving her with four hours of sleep a night, and frequent travel around the globe to visit stores and suppliers.

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Claire's, as of the start of May, had 2,983 company-owned stores and 443 franchises in 47 markets worldwide.

When she took the reins, Lafon said the most immediate challenge was consolidating the three business units  Claire's North America, Claire's Europe and Icing, the company's brand for 20-something women.

"For me it was like Groundhog Day," Lafon said. "I would have three meetings with three different teams, where two-thirds of what I was seeing or looking at was what I had just done in the previous meeting." All of the senior management, buying and merchandising is now centralized in Hoffman Estates. More than 100 jobs were cut, she said.

With the realignment, Claire's next year plans to launch four distinct collections for its four distinct target age groups: 3 to 6, 6 to 12, 12 to 18 and, at Icing, 18 to 35.

Also a priority was to open new sales channels. Claire's has stores in 90 percent of U.S. malls, which have seen fewer footsteps as shoppers are pulled online.

Claire's is on track to open 450 branded shop-in-shops this year, half of them in the U.S. in Toys R Us stores and the other half in Europe in several retail chains. It also is experimenting with selling its items wholesale to retailers and is investing in its e-commerce and mobile selling platforms, including developing an app, after being late to the online game.

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Claire's slow adoption of an e-commerce site, which didn't launch in North America until 2011 and in Europe until 2013, stemmed from the thinking that their young customers don't have credit cards and therefore don't buy online, Lafon said. But what the company failed to appreciate is that online is where those young customers spend much of their time and it was necessary to be there and on social media to communicate with them, she said.

"We were failing to reinvent ourselves for the 21st century, failing to change with the times, and quite frankly got left behind by the customer," she said.

As part of its efforts to be cool again, Claire's recently announced a back-to-school campaign featuring YouTube stars Alli Simpson and Teala Dunn, who together have 2.5 million Instagram followers, in partnership with AwesomenessTV, a teen-focused media company majority owned by DreamWorks Animation. (Former CEO Fielding became head of retail at AwesomenessTV following his departure from Claire's, which Lafon said is coincidence.)

Claire's, which dates back 54 years to a Florida wig shop, for decades grew through acquisitions of other accessories companies in the U.S. and abroad, and by the '90s its fluorescent scrunchies and body glitter were ingrained in the teen fashion conscience.

The recession that hit just after Claire's purchase in 2007 by Apollo took its toll, and like many of its retail peers Claire's saw sales slide during the economic downturn and slow recovery. But a few strategic missteps may have worsened the situation, Lafon said.

For example, the company shifted the focus away from the under-12 age group that had been Claire's core audience and tried to appeal to an older teen market, Lafon said. It filled stores with more handbags and leather goods and fewer licensed products, candy, makeup kits and small novelties for little girls.

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"It was a risky strategy," Lafon said, "because it was moving away from our core and our heritage and moving into a space where there was a lot of competition. Who doesn't service the 16- to 18-year-old today?"

In addition, Lafon said, Claire's, whose tag line is "Where getting ready is half the fun," had stopped having fun.

"We became very dry, very structured, not who we are," she said.

Restoring Claire's fun, through joyful employees and joyful products, is part of Lafon's strategy to turn Claire's around.

A successful product for Claire's, which designs 90 percent of its merchandise in-house, has to have four factors, of which Lafon revealed one: "It makes me smile."

Analysts who follow Claire's hope Lafon's strategies start to bear fruit so they can smile too. Evan Mann, an analyst at Gimme Credit who has been optimistic about its prospects, is watchful.

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"If these things don't gain traction in the second or third quarter," Mann said, "I'm going to be worried."

aelejalderuiz@tribpub.com

Twitter @alexiaer
Former President Bill Clinton, center-left, and daughter Chelsea Clinton, center-right, are shown around a herb garden by pupils and staff of the Farasi Lane Primary School in Nairobi, Kenya Friday, May 1, 2015. (Ben Curtis / AP)

Former President Bill Clinton is publicly musing about his life in a future Clinton administration, saying he would consider stepping down from the foundation that he founded more than a decade ago, if his wife wins the White House.

But he doesn't plan to stop giving the high-priced speeches to private corporations, foreign governments, and non-profit organizations that have been a mainstay of his post-presidential life. "I gotta pay our bills," he said, in an interview aired Monday on NBC's "Today" show. "And I also give a lot of it to the foundation every year."

Clinton's remarks come as his wife's presidential campaign grapples with criticism that foreign entities traded donations to the family charity for favors at the State Department, then headed by Hillary Rodham Clinton . Hundreds of paid speeches given by Clinton , which can command as much as $500,000 or more per appearance, have also come under attack from Republican opponents.

Bill Clinton has largely stayed on the sidelines during the early weeks of his wife's presidential bid, opting to focus on his foundation work instead of visiting early primary states with his wife. His decision to reenter the political fray reflects concerns that the intense scrutiny -- and Republican attacks -- on the family charity is having a negative impact on Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations. An Associated Press-GfK poll released last week found that more than six in 10 independents agreed that "honest" was not the best word to describe the second-time presidential candidate.

"Bill Clinton is saying what Hillary Clinton has said on many occasions: just trust us, just trust us. And unfortunately trust is earned through transparency, and I think they have not been particularly transparent on a whole host of things," said Republican Carly Fiorina, a former technology CEO who announced her presidential candidacy on Monday.

The Republican organization America Rising released a web video on Monday that uses footage of Clinton's confirmation hearings for secretary of State to raise questions about her integrity. The video uses 2009 footage of Clinton saying "there is not an inherent conflict of interest in any of my husband's work at all," juxtaposed with a list of foreign countries that have donated to the foundation.

Speaking during a nine-day tour of Clinton Foundation projects in Africa with his daughter, Chelsea, Clinton defended his foundation, saying there's nothing "sinister" about getting wealthy people to help poor people in developing countries.

"There's been a very deliberate attempt to take the foundation down," Clinton said. "And there's almost no new fact that's known now that wasn't known when she ran for president the first time."

Bill Clinton said 90 percent of donors give $100 or less. But over half of the donors giving $5 million or more are foreign, including foreign governments. Under pressure, the foundation recently announced it will only take money from six Western countries.

"It's an acknowledgment that we're going to come as close as we can during her presidential campaign to following the rules we followed when she became secretary of state," he said.

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He added: "I don't think that I did anything that was against the interest of the United States."

Associated Press
SALT LAKE CITY  A federal appeals court ruling has cleared the way for discount contact lens retailers to drop prices while a legal battle is waged between the state of Utah and manufacturers who want to impose minimum prices on their products.

The decision handed down from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver on Friday comes after three of the nation's largest contact lens manufacturers sued to halt a hotly contested law.

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Supporters, including Utah-based discount seller 1-800 Contacts, say the newly enacted legislation bans price fixing for contact lenses. But opponents, including Alcon Laboratories, Johnson & Johnson and Bausch & Lomb, say it's a brazen overreach that allows discount sellers to violate interstate commerce regulations and skirt industry price standards.

Utah's attorney general has said the companies are wrongly driving up prices, and the law is a legitimate antitrust measure designed to enhance competition and help customers. Attorney General Sean Reyes' office didn't have a comment on the decision Friday.

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The ruling allows the law to go into effect while a legal battle over the measure works its way through the courts. The appeals court did agree to fast-track the case and new briefs are due in the case later this month.

Donna Lorenson, a spokeswoman for Alcon, says the company is "extremely disappointed" and maintains the law violates interstate commerce rules.

Johnson & Johnson spokeswoman Carol Goodrich says the company is moving ahead with the appeal and the minimum prices are legal.

Bausch & Lomb representatives didn't respond to emails seeking comment.

Utah's Legislature passed the measure backed by 1-800 Contacts amid increasingly bitter pricing battles in the industry. While many contact lens sales come from eye doctors, discounters have been making inroads in recent years, and now 1-800 Contacts is now one of the nation's largest lens retailers.

Company officials said in a statement that they plan to drop prices in the wake of the ruling, calling it "another victory in the ongoing battle to lower prices to consumers of contact lenses" in a statement.

The Utah measure bans pricing programs started by manufacturers who threatened to yank their products from resellers whose prices dipped too low. Lawmakers deny the legislation was written to specifically benefit 1-800 Contacts.

The contact lens makers that dominate the market say the price minimums protect eye doctors from being undercut by sellers who don't offer the same expertise, but the pricing policies have also been scrutinized by Congress, consumer advocates and others.

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Associated Press
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Nebraska is proud to be the home of Offutt Air Force Base. As the headquarters of STRATCOM, the Air Force Weather Agency, as well as the 55th Wing, the base plays a critical role in defending our nation from threats across the globe. For almost a century, Offutt has helped to protect our nation, and it has served as an important component of our states economy and also the local economies of the communities near it.

Over the years, the Department of Defense has made significant investments in Offutt and built the base into the national asset that it is today. Since arriving in the U.S. Senate, I have used my position on the Armed Services Committee to advance the urgent repair and replacement of the bases runway. Replacing the runway will extend the life of this investment into the future and ensure the nation will continue to reap the benefits Offutt has to offer.

Throughout the runway replacement process, I have worked closely with Offutt leadership and top Air Force officials at the Pentagon to ensure this project moves forward. In fact, this month, I met with the Air Force Secretary, Deborah Lee James, at the Pentagon. It was a productive meeting, and we had the opportunity to discuss Offutts runway and the progress they are making.

I am happy to report that during our meeting, Secretary James reinforced that the Air Force remains on track and is fully committed to moving forward. This is great news for Nebraska and the communities of Omaha and Bellevue.

Currently, the Air Force is evaluating different options for repairing Offutts runway. These alternatives represent a balancing act between three variables: the cost of the project, the length of time to complete it, and the number of years the repair will add to the life of the runway. During construction of the runway, the bases air traffic will operate out of Lincoln.

In the Senate, I have worked to include provisions for the runway into the fiscal year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act. Through my leadership of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities subcommittee, I helped draft this important legislation, which authorizes funding for our military and sets policy priorities for the Department of Defense. Securing this funding was critical to advancing the runway project, since it requires an in-depth study before taking further action.

I also had the opportunity to meet this month with the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Mark Welsh. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Welsh serves as a military adviser to the president, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council. In our meeting at his personal residence in Fort Myer, Virginia, we discussed the runway replacement, as well as other issues related to the 55th Wing and STRATCOM.

I am pleased to see the progress we are making to ensure Offutt remains a world-class military installation. We expect a decision in the coming months regarding the full scope and scale of this project. As we await the final plan on Offutts runway, I will continue to work directly with the secretary of the Air Force and leaders at Offutt to ensure they receive the appropriate funding and resources for this very important project.

Thank you for participating in the democratic process. I look forward to visiting with you again next week.
Dr. Tim Ekhlassi performs an eye exam on patient Edgar Reina-Isaza in the Ophthalmology Clinic at Stroger Hospital in Chicago on Tuesday July 7, 2015. The Cook County Health and Hospitals System's revenue, including Cook County tax dollars, exceeded expenses by $14.1 million, according to audited financial statements for the year ended Nov. 30. (Nancy Stone, Chicago Tribune)

The Affordable Care Act has provided a booster shot to the Cook County Health and Hospitals System, what county officials hope is the beginning of the road to financial well-being.

The public health system's revenue, including Cook County tax dollars, exceeded expenses by $14.1 million, according to audited financial statements for the year ended Nov. 30.

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That's not much income for a system with nearly $1.5 billion in revenue in fiscal 2014, but it was a landmark year. The cash-strapped organization has been a drain on Cook County and its taxpayers for years.

Doug Elwell, deputy chief executive officer of finance and strategy, said he couldn't remember the last time yearly revenues were greater than expenses. "We'd have to go back to the archives."

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Another achievement: For the first time, the county health care system had more insured patients than uninsured. That means the system was paid for a majority of the care it provided last year.

The positive results are the product of the county's new insurance plan for Medicaid recipients that has brought in a significant amount of federal dollars and some much needed stability to the public health system.

The health plan, called CountyCare, also has brought an influx of new patients. With about 180,000 members, CountyCare is the second-largest Medicaid managed care program in the Chicago area, according to the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services.

But like a new business experiencing the first taste of success, the health system is confronted with challenges. The cost of patient care rose 46 percent last year, in part because the system cared for a lot of new patients that had untreated chronic conditions.

Health officials acknowledge that the system's long-term fiscal health will depend on how well it controls costs while also investing in new equipment and facilities to improve the patient experience. The system spent $2.4 million, for example, on new beds at its two hospitals, Stroger and Provident.

"We have reason to smile a little bit," Elwell said. "But it's not a reason to rest on our laurels. We have lots of work to do."

One of the big projects is the creation of a call center and centralized scheduling system, a response to one of the biggest patient complaints: calls that aren't answered or returned in a timely fashion.

The introduction of CountyCare also has afforded county officials the opportunity to make ambitious plans. On the drawing board is a massive redevelopment of the Stroger medical campus that would create a new outpatient center and physician offices and reuse of the historic Cook County Hospital building, vacant since 2002.

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The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, has brought dramatic change to hospital systems nationwide. With millions newly insured either through exchanges or the expansion of Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, the number of uninsured admissions has declined and saved hospitals hundreds of millions of dollars in charity care.

But there is still much financial uncertainty in the industry. The health care law has pushed hospitals away from the traditional fee-for-service payment system, in which doctors and hospitals generally are paid for each test and procedure they perform.

Hospitals are now rewarded for limiting the volume of patients who are re-admitted and avoiding unnecessary tests and procedures.

The Cook County health system, one of the largest public hospital systems in the nation, has long been the safety net for the low-income, uninsured population in the Chicago area. Because many patients can't pay for medical care, the system has had hundreds of millions in operating losses year after year. In addition to running two hospitals and 16 outpatient clinics, the system also serves the Cook County jail population and oversees the public health department.

In 2012, the county took the first steps toward shoring up its finances. At the time, an estimated 330,000 adults in Cook County were eligible for the ACA's Medicaid expansion. The health system launched a pilot program to get a jump-start in enrolling Medicaid recipients into a managed care plan.

Between February 2013 and February 2014, more than 82,000 adults signed up for CountyCare. The health system advertised the program in newspapers and on posters, held community outreach events and partnered with the Cook County Sheriff's Office to enroll inmates.

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Also in 2014, the state began shifting its existing Medicaid recipients to managed care, boosting CountyCare's enrollment. As a result, 63.5 percent of county patients were insured last year, up from 45 percent before Obamacare, health officials said. The number of uninsured declined to 32.3 percent in the first four months of 2015, they added.

"This is a transformation for the organization," said Dr. John Jay Shannon, CEO of Cook County Health. "Our uncompensated care went from north of $500 million in 2013 to $340 million in 2014."

Many of the newly insured were already patients being treated by the health system without compensation. In the first year of the CountyCare pilot program, the health system received a net of $314.50 per member per month. Starting in 2014, the health system began receiving $632 per patient per month.

For all of fiscal 2014, revenue from CountyCare totaled $656 million, more than half of the system's operating revenue of $1.26 billion.

Because of the additional revenue from CountyCare, the system relied less on tax dollars. Its "non-operating" revenue, which includes property and cigarette taxes, decreased by $73.5 million from the prior year, to $227.7 million.

Excluding the revenue from taxes, the health system had an operating loss of $213.6 million. But the operating loss shrank by $180.7 million.

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The improving financial picture has not gone unrecognized. Marti Smith, an official with National Nurses Organizing Committee, said starting the Medicaid pilot program was "visionary."

"We believe in public health systems," Smith said. "We're hoping that this move will secure them financially for years to come."

Her union last month reached a tentative agreement with Cook County Health on a five-year contract for more than 1,200 nurses. But increasing staffing and building capacity are necessary to serve the influx of patients, Smith said.

"It used to be that when you were poor you had to go to Cook County," Smith said. "Now if they don't get good care and timely care, they can go elsewhere."

asachdev@tribpub.com

Twitter @ameetsachdev
Doug Diemoz of Restoration Hardware is the new CEO of Crate and Barrel. (Crate and Barrel)

Crate and Barrel has named Doug Diemoz as its new CEO, the Northbrook-based home furnishings retailer announced Thursday.

Diemoz is currently chief development officer for California-based Restoration Hardware. He will start his new role with Crate and Barrel on Aug. 1.

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"Doug is a great cultural fit for our brands," Neela Montgomery, head of the Crate and Barrel board, said in a statement. "I am confident that he will promote change that builds on the heritage of our brands."

A 20-year retail veteran, Diemoz joined Restoration Hardware in March 2014. He was responsible for developing and leading the company's global expansion efforts and emerging businesses. Previously, he was with MEXX, Williams-Sonoma and Gap.

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Diemoz, 47, fills the void at Crate and Barrel after the August resignation of Sascha Bopp, who had been CEO since 2012. Adrian Mitchell, Crate and Barrel's chief operating officer and chief financial officer, has been interim CEO during the search for Bopp's replacement.

"I am excited to continue the legacy of such an iconic brand and help lead the future growth and success of the company," Diemoz said in a statement.

Crate and Barrel was founded in 1962 by Gordon Segal and his wife, Carole, after they returned from their honeymoon on St. Thomas with a trove of hard-to-find European bowls and flatware. They set up shop in Chicago's Old Town and gradually built a national chain.

In 1998, Segal sold a majority stake to Otto Group, a privately held German retailer that now owns 100 percent of Crate and Barrel. Segal stayed on as CEO until 2008, when he was succeeded by Barbara Turf.

Bopp was plucked by Otto Group from Primondo, a multichannel retailer based in his native Germany.

The retailer has 128 stores worldwide, including Crate and Barrel, CB2 and The Land of Nod, a children's furniture store. It operates stores throughout the U.S. and Canada, and has opened international franchises in the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Singapore, Turkey, Russia and the Philippines.

Crate and Barrel recorded total sales of about $1.38 billion, down 0.3 percent, for the year ending February 2014. The privately held company declined to disclose updated sales figures for the most recent fiscal year.

rchannick@tribpub.com

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Twitter @RobertChannick
A woman walks through the door of a CVS drugstore in New York on June 4, 2015. Four former employees of CVS's loss prevention division have filed a lawsuit against the drugstore chain alleging that they were told to racial profile black and Hispanic customers for shoplifting in New York. (JUSTIN LANE, EPA)

NEW YORK  Four former CVS theft investigators say their supervisors ordered them to target minority shoppers in some New York City stores, according to a federal lawsuit filed against the nation's second-largest drugstore chain.



The former employees said that supervisors routinely told them to racially profile black and Hispanic shoppers even when there was no indication that those people might steal. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, states that the supervisors never gave similar instructions regarding white shoppers.



The complaint, which seeks class status, claims CVS intentionally targets and racially profiles shoppers based on the "ill-founded institutional belief ... minority customers are criminals and thieves."



CVS spokeswoman Carolyn Castel said in an email that the company doesn't tolerate discrimination and is shocked by the allegations.



"CVS Health has firm nondiscrimination policies that it rigorously enforces," she wrote. "We serve all communities and we do not tolerate any policy or practice that discriminates against any group."



The plaintiffs said that they were subjected to increased scrutiny within weeks of complaining about the procedures, and they were eventually fired.



The plaintiffs are all either black or Hispanic.





CVS Health Corp., based in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, runs 7,800 drugstores, a total that trails only Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.

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Associated Press
In the shadow of Greenwich's 02 Arena  the futuristic dome originally built as London's showpiece for the Millennium  what looks like a picnic cooler on wheels zips among groups of gawking children. This little delivery robot, designed to autonomously navigate sidewalks, not roads, later this year will begin making deliveries from local businesses direct to customers.

In doing so, it may just conquer e-commerce's final frontier: the Last Mile, the least efficient and most problematic step in the delivery process.

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"Thirty to forty percent of the cost of delivery comes in the last mile," says Allan Martinson, the chief operating officer of Starship Technologies, the company building this robot. The venture is the brainchild of Ahti Heinla, one of Skype's original developers, and is backed by billionaire Skype co-founder and tech investor Janus Friis.

The little delivery robots designed by Starship and a competing U.S. startup called Dispatch are the BB-8s and Wall-E's of e-commerce. These scrappy droids are up against tech's strongest forces. Amazon is testing airborne drones, as are Wal-Mart and Google. Google has also sought patents for a driverless truck that would carry an array of storage lockers that unlock with a text message. And Uber is deploying drivers for food delivery, a concept that could be expanded to other products. And don't forget incumbents from Federal Express and UPS to government postal services.

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While Starship's robot may be first to market, victory isn't assured. The droids have limitations, with economic viability confined urban areas. Drones have a higher sticker price and bigger regulatory hurdles to surmount, but may prove less expensive on a per-mile basis. And for the foreseeable future, some logistics experts say, humans still have the edge over any sci-fi inspired contenders.

Heinla, a tall, gaunt Estonian with shaggy blond hair and the disheveled look of an engineer for whom form matters more than fashion, says delivery droids have their advantages. Smaller robots are easier and cheaper to build. Because Starship's droid weighs less than 35 pounds and travels slowly, it's less likely to cause damage. There are no spinning rotorblades that could cause injury, unlike drones.

Most importantly it travels on sidewalks not roads, which simplifies getting regulatory approval to operate. Starship robots have already covered more than 1,900 miles in Britain, Germany, Belgium, Estonia and the U.S., with more than 50,000 miles planned this year. In comparison, drones are being tested in highly controlled environments, with commercial deliveries on hold until regulators work out safety, liability, air rights and privacy issues. Autonomous vehicles are so far only allowed limited tests on public roads.

"We've tested it in snow, slush, ice and rain - you name it," Martinson says. In the U.S., Starship is testing its robot in Fayetteville, Arkansas, about 35 miles from Wal-Mart's Bentonville headquarters, in conjunction with an innovation lab at the University of Arkansas named after the family of Wal-Mart chief executive Doug McMillon. This has lead to speculation the giant retailer may be interested in the little robot. Wal-Mart's 415C Lab, an internal unit investigating various disruptive technologies, has said it is monitoring the testing program. Starship won't comment on a possible tie-up with Wal-Mart. But Martinson says he expects the first e-commerce customers to start using the robots later this year.

San Francisco-based Dispatch, which was founded by former computer scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is backed by Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, is also testing its own ground drone called Carry.

Gur Kimchi, the Amazon executive in charge of its Prime Air drone project, says they considered delivery robots and driverless trucks too. But Amazon decided drones were a better bet. "The other options cannot guarantee very fast, very economic and very safe delivery," he says. Drones, he says, can serve a range of rural, suburban and even urban environments - while delivery robots work best only in urban areas. And autonomous trucks or delivery drivers only add to already congested roads, he says.

Kimchi says that Amazon's drones, which can carry up to five pounds for 15 miles at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour, will cover 80 percent to 90 percent of its shipments. "It is a surprisingly large subset of our selection," he says. In a May 2015 analysis by investment research firm ARK Invest, analyst Tasha Keeney estimated that by using drones, Amazon could reduce its delivery costs to less than $1 per package, or as little as 10 cents per mile.

To ensure safety, drones have "sense and avoid" technology that will steer clear of obstacles  or potential hazards  including even the family dog. "If the drone cannot make the delivery safely it is programmed to abort and fly back home," Kimchi says.

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Without a clear regulatory framework, Amazon can't start using its drones commercially. So the company has proposed that a segment of airspace between 200 and 400 feet be reserved for autonomous drones with sophisticated collision avoidance and safety features, while lower-tech craft be restricted to the airspace beneath 200 feet, which is about the height of an 18-story building. Manned aircraft would stay above 500 feet, or about the height of the Washington Monument.

So far this type of regulation doesn't exist anywhere, and it's anyone's guess how soon it might. "I am generally impatient and would love to get into the market," Kimchi says, adding that he thinks the regulatory framework will be in place "in much less than 10 years."

This uncertainty is why Burton White, a consultant at Chainanalytics, an Atlanta-based logistics consultant, says retailers should wait for a shakeout. "This is still the wild west," he says. "Automation and drones are something to keep your eye on but they are further out."

Because population density is the biggest factor in determining Last Mile costs, there may not be one solution. In crowded cities a network of bicycle couriers might be the best option, White says, while in rural areas drones may be most efficient. Starship says its ideal delivery area isn't as densely populated as a city like New York or London, which have more than 5,000 households per square mile. But many suburbs and smaller cities, like Montreal or Copenhagen, are in Starship's target zone.

Heinla had long been interested in robots, even competing in a NASA competition to make a robot that could bring back soil samples from Mars missions. But in 2014, Heinla had his Last Mile eureka moment. "I knew it was technically possible to build a small robot that would still go fast enough, that you wouldn't need a big vehicle to do the job that is done by big vehicles today," he says.

Because small robots are less expensive to build than trucks or drones, Starship anticipates leasing them to local shopkeepers, essentially "robot delivery as a service," says Martinson, the chief operating officer. With a target delivery cost of $1.40 to $4.20 (1 to 3) per delivery, the robots will allow these businesses, which have often been shut out of e-commerce by high delivery costs, to begin selling online, he says. A business might break even on a robot if it did just 15 deliveries a day, he says.

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Starship's prototype design will deliver up to 20 pounds of goods, traveling 4 mph. "It's basically designed to carry the equivalent of three good-sized bags of groceries," Martinson says. Because the robot has a simple cargo hold, customers could use the robot to return items to the retailer. An electronic lock keeps cargo safe en route; the robot's ability to transmit its current location and live video feed from its cameras is designed to deter thieves.

The company has planned the robots to cover deliveries within a three-mile radius of a central logistics hub, navigating using a 3G GPS signal. Nine cameras provide a fly-eye view of its environment, and sensors help avoid tree roots, toddlers and dog waste. A human can drive remotely if the robot encounters trouble.

With its current battery design, the little robot can operate for more than two hours continuously before needing a recharge or fresh battery pack. Martinson says the company chose a relatively low-capacity battery to save weight but might consider a longer-life one later.

In its trials so far, Martinson estimates that the Starship robots have encountered some 120,000 pedestrians, including thousands of children. So far, no one has tried to abuse it. "Children are curious but they love it," he says.

Starship co-founder Friis says that people of all ages seem to greet the small machine with a sense of awe. "It is really amazing but people seem to have an instant emotional connection to the robot," he says. Emotional connection? Just try delivering that with a drone.

Bloomberg
Demand for diamonds in the U.S., the biggest market, is under pressure as consumers' appetite for other products is growing faster. (ABEL URIBE, CHICAGO TRIBUNE)

LONDON  What makes a diamond valuable? History shows a slick marketing team and a killer tagline help.

"A Diamond is Forever," voted the best slogan of the 20th century by Advertising Age, helped De Beers convince people for almost 70 years that it's worth parting with two months' salary for a gem. Yet the end of its monopoly a decade ago blunted its role as the industry's marketing edge.

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Challenged by Michael Kors handbags, iPads and vintage Bordeaux, gem producers including De Beers, Rio Tinto Group and Russia's OAO Alrosa last month formed the Diamond Producers Association to ensure a new generation views the jewels as the ultimate luxury and expression of romance. At stake is the future of the $80 billion diamond market as other luxury goods, especially in the U.S., show faster growth.

"Millennials are no less interested in love than the generation before, but we need to make sure they continue to see diamonds as the expression of that," said Stephen Lussier, head of marketing at De Beers. "We don't want to look back five years from now and say we have a problem."

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Demand for diamonds in the U.S., the biggest market, is under pressure as consumers' appetite for other products is growing faster. From 2004 to 2013, the luxury electronics sector registered annual growth of almost 14 percent, while fine wines and champagnes increased 11 percent. Demand for luxury jewelry rose just 1.9 percent, trailing high-end beauty products, tobacco and watches over that period.

The association will target its three-year $18 million budget at advertising to a younger demographic known as millennials or generation Y, said Lussier, who expects the funds to "significantly" increase as more industry players contribute. Once the association is established, it will hunt for an agency to front the campaign, he said.

De Beers, founded on South Africa's giant Kimberley mine and built up under the imperialist Cecil Rhodes, saw its influence spread across the continent after Ernest Oppenheimer seized control of the company in the 1920s. The company struck secret deals to buy gems from the former Soviet Union and at its zenith controlled about 90 percent of the world's diamonds.

The company, dubbed the last empire, also assumed responsibility for promoting the gems. While the unit of Anglo American Plc remains the biggest producer, it has switched to branding its own jewels as its market share dropped to 30 percent.

Diamond marketing has continued since the decline of the monopoly. Producers such as De Beers, Rio and Dominion Diamond Corp. have fought for market share by branding their own stones, rather than promoting the established cultural imperative for diamonds built up over three generations. For De Beers the vehicle was "Forevermark," and the company will relaunch the "A diamond is forever" tagline to promote its jewels this Christmas, Lussier said.

Still, when De Beers cut its marketing budget by half to about $100 million a year through the 2000s, that left a void that has threatened to undermine the appeal of diamonds.

"We've got a new generation of consumers, the millennials," said Anish Aggarwal, a partner at the Antwerp- based industry consulting company Gemdax. "The industry cannot take for granted that the millennial consumer will automatically want to choose diamonds."

For the biggest diamond miners, that's starting to hit home.

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"We want to look at people who aren't in the market yet, but whose attitudes are open to shaping," said Lussier. "You need to grab their attention and make sure they don't spend their money on something else."

Bloomberg
Those who like to indulge in a good omelet or quiche at the local cafe should prepare to pay a little more  if it's even on the menu.

Restaurants are struggling to deal with higher egg prices and an inability to get enough eggs and egg products in the midst of a shortage brought about by a bird flu virus that wiped out millions of chickens on commercial farms this spring. Some restaurants are pulling especially eggy dishes off menus while others are contemplating raising prices until the supply returns to normal.

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Getting eggs from a smaller, local producer  which have largely been spared from the outbreak  has not protected Omaha restaurant owner Nick Bartholomew and other independently-owned eateries. His supplier's inventory has dwindled to meet demand and production is down because of testing by federal safety officials. And the restaurant's overall production costs have gone up by 15 percent in recent weeks, so he says he'll have to raise prices soon.

"We're now having to use three or four different producers and call around to different chicken farms to see what is available and when it will be available," said Bartholomew, whose restaurant, Over Easy, serves breakfast and lunch with a focus on local ingredients. The restaurant has already taken strata  an egg casserole similar to quiche  off the menu.

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The H5N2 avian flu virus began showing up in Midwest commercial turkey and chicken farms this spring. To date, 48 million turkeys and chickens have died or were euthanized to prevent the virus from spreading further. The frequency of new cases has slowed dramatically in most states, though agriculture officials said last week that an Iowa chicken farm with 1 million egg-layers tested positive for the virus.

Because of the egg crisis, the U.S. Department of Agriculture lowered its forecast for table egg production this year to 6.9 billion dozen, a 5.3 percent drop from 2014. By late May, the price for a dozen Midwest large eggs had soared 120 percent from their mid-April, pre-bird flu prices to $2.62, industry analyst group Urner Barry said.

Prices began falling last week, but officials say it could take up to two years to return to normal production.

"The best-case scenario, we're talking about a year before the availability is more robust," said John Howeth, the American Egg Board's senior vice president in charge of food service and egg product marketing.

At Hi-Way Diner in Lincoln, Nebraska, owner Scott Walker said the surge in costs may force him to pass it along to his customers. The restaurant includes two eggs with every breakfast order, and offers an optional third egg for free. That comes out to more than 5,000 eggs a week, and the price per case has more than doubled to $37 since mid-April.

"I'm absorbing it right now, but I am due for a price increase," Walker said.

A popular breakfast spot for more than 20 years in Des Moines, Iowa, is contemplating a surcharge of 50 cents to $1 to each of their egg-heavy dishes because cases have rocketed from $18 to $40 in just a few weeks.

"It's costing us between $400 and $500 a week," Waveland Cafe owner David "Stoney" Stone said.

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It's not just independent restaurants being affected, either. Restaurant chains, which typically have set-price contracts for food supplies, have seen those deals rescinded.

"Our contracts have been nullified until this is cleared up and the supply gets back on track," said Amy Rhoads, vice president of licensing and human relations for the parent company of Littleton, Colorado-based Le Peep restaurants, which has 54 restaurants in 12 states.

Nearly every Le Peep menu item includes eggs. There are no plans to change that, Rhoads said, because eggs are "so much a part of who and what we are." But the shortage is raising the chain's costs significantly, and as a result, their prices are going up.

The uncertainty of how long the shortage will last is what's most disconcerting for restaurant owners, Rhoads said: "It's one of those things that, when you don't know how bad it's going to get or when the end is in sight."

Associated Press
NEW YORK  The CEOs of government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are getting large raises, to about $4 million a year, as the government relaxes rules that were imposed on the companies after they suffered big losses and were bailed out.

In forms filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, the companies disclosed that Fannie Mae CEO Timothy Mayopoulous and Freddie Mac CEO Donald Layton will get annual base salaries of $750,000 each, $2.1 million in fixed deferred compensation and $1.2 million in at-risk deferred salary. It does not include bonuses. Their pay had been capped at $600,000 a year.

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The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees the companies, said the new plans take CEO performance into account and defer compensation so the executives stay with the companies. It said Mayopoulos and Layton will be paid less than most CEOs at similar companies.

Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican who heads the Senate Banking Committee, called the regulators' approval of the raises "inappropriate and irresponsible."

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"As long as American taxpayers continue to serve as the backstop for Fannie and Freddie, FHFA should make decisions that protect taxpayers instead of ones that expose them to further risk," Shelby said in a statement.

Shelby is a longtime critic of Fannie and Freddie, and he has proposed legislation to reshape the housing finance system and wind down the two mortgage giants. The bill was approved by the Banking Committee last year.

A Democratic member of the banking panel, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, also criticized the regulators' decision, saying it appears to signal "a return to business as usual."

The compensation limits were imposed in 2012, shortly before the two men became CEOs of their respective companies. At that time, Fannie and Freddie had been in government conservatorship for more than three years, as they had suffered losses on risky mortgages in the housing market bust. Even after the $170 billion taxpayer bailout, their top management stayed well-compensated, leading to criticism of both the companies and the FHFA.

The gradual recovery of the housing market in recent years has made Fannie and Freddie profitable again, and they have fully repaid their government bailouts.

Officially known as Federal National Mortgage Association and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee about half of all U.S. mortgages, worth about $5 trillion. Along with other federal agencies, they back roughly 90 percent of new home loans. The companies don't directly make loans to borrowers. Instead they buy mortgages from lenders, package them as bonds, guarantee them against default and sell them to investors. That helps make loans available.

The FHFA allowed the companies to propose new compensation plans in May with the goal of helping them keep their CEOS, set up succession plans, and maintain continuity in management. The proposals had to include pay-for-performance aspects, couldn't include bonuses, and couldn't be higher than the 25th percentile for CEOs of comparable companies.

Freddie Mac said Wednesday that Mayopoulos' compensation is still substantially below that level.

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In 2011 Fannie Mae CEO Michael Williams was paid $5.3 million and Edward Haldeman Jr. of Freddie Mac was paid $3.8 million. According to a government report, median pay for nearly 2,000 senior managers at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exceeded $200,000 that year, and 12 executives got $35.4 million in salary and bonuses in 2009 and 2010. The report also said the FHFA didn't do an adequate job of monitoring pay.

Fannie Mae headquarters are in Washington, D.C., and Freddie Mac is based in McLean, Virginia.

Associated Press
Fast food workers and labor activists rally outside a McDonalds on Jackson Avenue as part of the Fight for $15 movement on Wednesday, April 15, 2015. The movement is turning its attention to franchisees. (E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune)

Labor organizers are opening a new front in their campaign for a $15-an-hour wage for fast-food workers with a push to mobilize an unusual ally: franchisees.

The Service Employees International Union on Thursday launched a website in hopes of building a national network of fast-food franchisees who want stronger protections for their businesses. The push has the potential to create more unrest within the ranks for companies like McDonald's, which are already dealing with ongoing demonstrations calling for higher pay and a union for workers.

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The International Franchise Association, which represents franchisers like McDonald's, Subway and Wendy's, said in a statement that franchisees indicate "incredibly high satisfaction rates." It noted that data from the Federal Trade Commission shows franchisees renew their contracts at "an extremely high rate."

Even before Thursday's announcement from the SEIU, the International Franchise Association released data to suggest that the majority of franchisees are satisfied. The IFA pointed to figures including a study released by franchise market research firm Franchise Business Review showing 78.6 percent of franchisees said they would recommend their franchise brand to others. The IFA also said that the franchise industry is growing at a faster rate than the overall economy.

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Support from the SEIU, the nation's second-largest union, could nevertheless give franchisee advocates more clout in changing what they say is an imbalance of power. Franchisee advocates say they're at the mercy of companies that can strip them of their livelihoods if they step out of line or speak out against corporate decisions.

Still, the push by the SEIU marks an uneasy alliance, since franchisees are often small-business owners who oppose unions.

"It's an odd relationship, let's face it," said Keith Miller, a Subway franchisee in Sacramento, Calif., and head of the Coalition of Franchisee Associations, which is working with the SEIU on the effort.

Miller added franchisees may not be able to raise pay for workers even if they wanted to, given the cost pressures they're put under from companies on matters like value menus.

The SEIU's outreach to franchisees is just the latest move in a campaign to win pay of $15 an hour and a union for fast-food workers. The effort began in late 2012 and involves a range of tactics intended to build pressure on McDonald's, including demonstrations in a growing number of cities and multiple lawsuits on behalf of workers in the U.S. and abroad.

The efforts have been complicated by the franchising model that dominates the fast-food industry, however. McDonald's, for instance, has more than 3,000 franchisees in the U.S. who run about 90 percent of its more than 14,300 locations. A representative for McDonald's did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In exchange for paying a variety of fees and following certain operational guidelines, franchisees get to become business owners with proven brands. But the arrangement can lead to natural tensions; franchisees may not agree with decisions by the company on matters like new menu prices or remodeling investments.

One memorable public spat was when Burger King franchisees sued the company in 2009 over a $1 double cheeseburger they said they were losing money on. The suit was eventually settled after a new owner took over the company and worked to mend relations with franchisees.

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In the meantime, the SEIU is also trying to upend the position by McDonald's that the company is not responsible for employment decisions at franchised locations. The move is seen potentially easing the way for negotiating on behalf of workers across an entire chain, rather than dealing with a patchwork of franchisees.

The National Labor Relations Board's general counsel said last year that McDonald's could be named as a "joint employer" with its franchisees in charges filed by worker groups over alleged labor violations. The hearing on the case began last month and is expected to be a lengthy legal battle.

Underscoring the complexity of the partnership between franchisees and the union, Miller of the Coalition of Franchisee Associations said during a conference call with reporters that his group was "not comfortable with that (joint employer) ruling at all."

Miller said no McDonald's franchisees have joined his group, which counts 16 member associations including ones that represent franchisees from Burger King, Domino's and Dunkin' Donuts.

Chicago Tribune reporter Jessica Wohl contributed.
Ashish Oza, Buffalo Grove, checks out used textbooks at Follett's E2 bookstore on Wednesday, August 28, 2002. in Champaign at the University of Illinois. (ROBIN SCHOLZ, Associated Press)

Follett said Thursday that it acquired the retail division of Nebraska Book Co., boosting the Westchester-based company's portfolio of college bookstores to nearly 1,200 locations.

In purchasing the assets and inventory of Nebraska Book Co., known as Neebo and including 211 on- and off-campus stores, Follett cements its ranking as the nation's largest operator of college bookstores. Its closest competitor, Barnes & Noble, has about 715 locations.

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Follett did not disclose terms of the deal.

The acquisition, completed Thursday, will expand Follett's university reach, including large campuses like Illinois State University.

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It also reaffirms Follett's stance that a presence on campus is the key to luring students, parents and college alumni in search of everything from textbooks and sweatshirts to toothpaste, according to President and CEO Ray Griffith. "It's our sweet spot," he said.

Griffith, a Follett board member, was appointed president and CEO in May.

The deal comes at a time when the two oldest players in the college store business, Follett and Barnes & Noble, are battling Amazon for market share in the $10 billion college retail market. On average, students spent nearly $700 each on books and supplies last fall, according to the National Association of College Stores, an industry group.

Neebo's business has struggled. The company reported a loss of more than $16.5 million in the nine months that ended Dec. 31, according to company documents.

Griffith, however, is undeterred, saying that Follett will pick up additional sales and profits by adding Neebo's stores and inventory to its roster. "It's a double-digit growth avenue for us," he said. "We believe that we are the best operators of on- and off-campus bookstores in America, and we know how to do it," he said.

For example, Griffith noted the company's buy-online-and-pick-up-in-store option for college consumers in need of quick supplies. "We're aware of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but this is where we excel and we can connect," he said.

To keep up with the competition, Griffith added that Follett is trying out new concepts to discover what campus customers want most, including a service that offers book delivery to consumers at a location of their choice within hours of an order.

In addition to its higher education and college bookstore business, Follett, which is a $2.6 billion privately held company, also offers educational materials in the K-12 level. A Follett spokeswoman declined to disclose the company's financial performance.

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Lincoln, Neb.-based Nebraska Book Co. will continue to maintain its other businesses that include buying and selling textbooks and providing software and services to independent college retailers.

crshropshire@tribpub.com

Twitter @corilyns
Yuquencie Vasquez cleans a client's belongings in the ServiceMaster DSI franchise in Downers Grove. The franchise now has offices in four states and employs about 360 people. Such franchisees have been dragged into the Fight for $15 battle. (James C. Svehla, Chicago Tribune)

Every time the Veldman brothers attempted to grow their franchise, Ron Veldman said, a fight with corporate ensued. The franchiser said "no" to expanding the business into cleaning and repairing homes damaged by fire or flood. It said "no" to packing and storing customers' clothes and furniture. And it said "no" to owning a dry cleaning store.

"Our corporation fought us every step of the way," said Veldman, a partner with his brother and others in a Downers Grove-based franchise that has grown to about $58 million in annual sales.

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The fights went on for most of the 1980s, with ServiceMaster Global arguing that the expansion ideas were not in line with the company's core business of cleaning carpets and upholstery, Veldman said. But Veldman and his brother successfully convinced ServiceMaster that the new businesses made sense. Sometimes, Veldman said, all it took was showing ServiceMaster its cut of the new businesses, which at the time was 10 percent of sales.

"They never sued us because we paid fees," said Veldman, whose ServiceMaster DSI franchise now has offices in four states and employs about 360 people.

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Franchisees like Veldman have been dragged into the Fight for $15 battle, portrayed as little more than corporate puppets in how they operate and pay their employees. But increasingly some franchisees are railing against that perception, saying they are independent business owners who make their own decisions on hiring and firing and how much they pay employees. During the early years of the franchise, Veldman said, he handpicked employees. Today, he said, he relies on managers to find new talent.

"I don't need the corporation to have more control," said Veldman, who earlier this month participated in a roundtable discussion in Kankakee with Democratic U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly of Matteson. The session, one of a half-dozen slated with lawmakers around the country, was aimed at trying to halt an expansion of the standard used by the National Labor Relations Board to determine when a corporation shares responsibility for workers employed by a third party, such as a franchisee.

Unions  including the Service Employees International Union, which is funding the Fight for $15 campaign  are the main force behind the push to broaden the joint-employer standard at the NLRB and other federal agencies. They've also filed lawsuits related to the issue in federal courts and have won some battles along the way. Two years ago, for example, a California federal judge found Wal-Mart shared responsibility for warehouse workers employed by a staffing agency hired by a Wal-Mart subcontractor. The ruling allowed the warehouse workers to name Wal-Mart as a defendant in a lawsuit.

The joint-employer issue gained momentum last year when the NLRB's general counsel issued complaints against McDonald's and its franchisees as joint employers without explicitly defining his reasons for that decision. Details are expected to emerge in hearings to be held around the country later this year.

In a separate case, the five-member NLRB also is considering an argument from its general counsel to broaden the joint-employer standard from having direct control over working conditions to exercising indirect and potential control over working conditions.

Franchisees worry the board will ultimately endorse the expanded standard and are studying memorandums from the general counsel's office that might provide clarity over what constitutes a joint employer. One released earlier this month outlines why Freshii, a more than 100-store restaurant chain with outlets in Chicago, is not considered a joint employer with its franchisees.

NLRB Associate General Counsel Barry Kearney wrote in the memo that Freshii doesn't require its franchisees to follow its guidance on how to calculate labor costs or how to hire and schedule employees. And although people can apply for jobs through Freshii's website, individual franchisees are exclusively responsible for hiring their staff, Kearney wrote.

Kearney also noted that a Freshii's franchisee testified he typically hired employees through word of mouth or through Craigslist ads. The same franchisee increased and decreased wages without seeking approval from Freshii, Kearney added.

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Freshii provides franchisees with an employee handbook, but not all franchisees use it. And even though franchisees must use hardware and software approved by Freshii, not all of them use the same technology.

Kearney concluded that Freshii does not "significantly influence the working conditions" of its franchisees' employees and the company is therefore not a joint employer under the current standard or the one proposed by the general counsel.

Freshii founder and CEO Matthew Corrin wrote in an email that his company recognizes the distinction between a franchise brand and ownership of a particular location. "The role of Freshii HQ  the franchiser is to be brand innovators, brand marketers, brand advisers and business consultants," Corrin said.

It's not clear how McDonald's relationship with its franchisees differs from that of Freshii or other franchisers in the eyes of the NLRB's general counsel, but he has said McDonald's coordinated response to the Fight for $15 campaign indicates the company shares responsibility for its franchisees' employees.

McDonald's has said it had the right to engage in coordinated actions to protect the integrity of its brand, but it maintains that 90 percent of its stores are independent franchisee owner-operators who set their own policies and wages while adhering to corporate standards on food preparation and restaurant design.

Attorneys representing the workers say McDonald's monitors and decides the minute-to-minute working conditions of employees at all stores, thus making it a joint employer. Further proof, they say, is that McDonald's response to workers' calls for $15 an hour wages resulted in threats, intimidation, cutbacks and firings.

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As the various cases make their way through the NLRB process, some franchisees are telling their own stories of being independent to distinguish themselves from being labeled joint employers.

Veldman said he, like many franchise owners, started as a front-line worker. He said he cleaned carpets and upholstery with his brother, who bought the franchise in 1978. About a year later, Veldman said he borrowed $30,000 from his grandmother and bought a dry cleaning store to augment his brother's dry cleaning services. They merged the businesses a few years later.

To illustrate the independence of his business, Veldman tells of how, during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, he rushed to Mississippi to help keep open a hospital with about 120 patients. He trucked in water, ice, other supplies and generators.

After the hurricane hit, the crew, mostly subcontractors, fixed windows and walls and dried flooded areas. At nights, they emptied toilets. The workers slept on bunks set up in a parking lot, where Veldman also stationed washers and dryers to keep uniforms clean.

Had he listened to the corporation when they told him to quit expanding his business, Veldman said, he would have been limited to cleaning carpets instead of helping keep open a hospital in the aftermath of a hurricane. His story, he said, shows he's an entrepreneur, an independent business owner who happens to own a franchise.

acancino@tribpub.com

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Twitter @WriterAlejandra
The discussion at the International Franchise Association in Chicago came off as a call to arms: Panelists warned that franchisees have brushed off the Fight for $15 campaign as a McDonald's problem when it could destroy their businesses.

The panelists, consisting of two lawyers, a professor and a franchisee, all urged franchisees to align themselves in fighting claims that franchisers and franchisees share employment responsibility.

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Attending the conference were hundreds of lawyers representing the Oak Brook-based hamburger giant, but also firms such as Culver's, Ben & Jerry's, Corner Bakery and Big Boy Restaurants International.

Michael Lotito, a California attorney who specializes in combating union organizing campaigns, said he expects small franchisees to spend so much money fighting organizing efforts that their workers will be forced out of business, eaten up by legal fees. He said he knows of one franchisee that has spent more than $250,000, so far.

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This is why the union campaign isn't just a McDonald's problem, Lotito said.

Lotito also predicted that the National Labor Relations Board will agree with its general counsel that McDonald's is a joint employer with its franchisees. It will be a long, hard fought battle that franchisees will initially lose at the NLRB, the lawyer said.

He said he expects the issue will, perhaps in a decade, reach the Supreme Court, where it would be overturned after finding the NLRB had overreached in its definition of joint employer. But by then, Lotito said, many franchisees will be long gone.

David Sherwyn, director of the Cornell Institute for Hospitality Labor and Employment Relations at Cornell University, said there's confusion on what steps to take because the NLRB's general counsel didn't spell out his reasoning for calling McDonald's a joint employer. As a result, no one can say with certainty what kinds of controls between a franchiser and a franchisee qualify them as a joint employers.

Lotito said he knows of franchisers who don't know what to write in franchise agreements that are expiring to protect themselves from being dragged into the joint employer fight. He added that that might lead some franchisers to choose not to renew contracts with small franchisees.

Norman Leon, a Chicago attorney at law firm DLA Piper, said franchisers should be asking themselves if they really need all the controls spelled out in the franchise agreements.

Controls can range from the type of uniform worn to the colors on restaurant walls to the menu typography.

A good rule of thumb, Leon said, is to ask whether a franchiser will pull the plug if a point in an agreement was violated. If the answer is no, then it shouldn't be on the franchise agreement.

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Leon also suggested to the audience, mostly lawyers, that they should ask their clients to remove trademarks from paychecks and human resources websites. He also said franchisers need to be careful about technology provided to franchisees. If it is determining hours and wages, then that software ought to be reeled back, Leon said.

Aziz Hashim, owner of 35 franchises tied to multiple chains in Georgia, California and Toronto, said the franchise business model has to be questioned.

"Do we believe franchisees are sufficiently independent?" he asked.

He encouraged other franchisees to reach out to their employees and ask them what they think of the union campaign. Hashim said if franchisees talked to their workers they might find they are happy. He also said they should make employees aware of opportunities for advancement.

Hashim said the fight against unionization won't be won with money but with a comprehensive media message to change the industry's image.

It has been ingrained in operator's minds that customers shouldn't know the difference between a company-owned store and those run by franchisees, Hashim said. He encouraged franchisees to share their stories of starting out earning minimum wages or how they kept open their stores to save jobs during the Great Recession.

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"We have to win hearts and minds here," Hashim said.

Last year, the NLRB's general counsel agreed with the joint-employer designation and issued 19 complaints against McDonald's and franchisees. The first hearing on the case took place in March. Additional hearings are expected this month.

Hundreds of worker complaints accuse McDonald's and some of its franchisees of labor law violations against employees who participated in protests beginning in 2012. Those complaints allege McDonald's is a joint-employer, sharing responsibility for the workers and the violations.

Lotito said it isn't a surprise that unions are trying to force employers to recognize them. Union membership in the private sector continues to decline, falling to 6.6 percent last year from 6.7 percent in 2013. Membership peaked in the 1950s at around 35 percent.

Lotito said membership declines are a serious problem for unions because without new members there is no money to participate in the political process.

Sherwyn said organizing a franchisee's operations, spread over different locations, is difficult. So unions are launching corporate campaigns with the goal of pushing the company to recognize the union without an election. In this case, the campaign, backed by the Service Employees International Union, is using the NLRB, to achieve that goal, Sherwyn said.

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acancino@TribPub.com

Twitter @WriterAlejandra
A controversial plan to landmark the Fulton Market meatpacking district cleared the City Council's buildings committee on Thursday, June 25, 2015, with the 1000 W. Washington Lofts building removed from the district at the alderman's request.

A controversial plan to landmark the Fulton Market meatpacking district cleared the City Council's buildings committee Thursday, with one large building removed from the district at the alderman's request.

The block-long building at 1001 W. Randolph St., also known as the 1000 W. Washington Lofts, had been among 88 buildings designated "contributing" to the proposed historic market district, meaning they couldn't be demolished and must abide by design standards regulated by the Landmarks Commission.

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Ald. Walter Burnett, whose 27th Ward includes the proposed district, had voiced his support for the landmark proposal last month just before the Landmarks Commission voted to recommend it. But a representative from his office told the committee Thursday that the alderman supported an amended proposal that excluded that building from the district. A reason was not given. Burnett could not be reached for comment Thursday.

With little discussion, the Committee on Zoning, Landmark and Building Standards unanimously approved the amended proposal to create a landmark district along about seven blocks of Fulton Market, six blocks of Randolph Street and two blocks of Lake Street, which the city has said is intended to preserve the industrial character of the city's oldest market district in the face of intense development.

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The matter now heads to the City Council for a final vote, likely at its July 29 meeting.

Patti Mocco, president of the 1000 W. Washington Lofts condo association, said she was "pleasantly surprised" to hear that the building had been removed from the district.

The condo association, which represents 180 units, had approached Burnett a year ago with concerns that the designation would make it more expensive to do building repairs or complicate the efforts of owners with roof rights to build roof decks, Mocco said, though she hasn't met with him recently.

The building, which according to city documents used to house a Kennedy-Nabisco bakery dating to 1884, is one of two buildings in the condo complex; the other building was not in the original proposed designation.

Eleanor Gorski, the city's director of historic preservation, said the removal of the building was at the alderman's request. The historical significance of the district lies with the grouping of buildings rather than a single property, and "we still have other examples of this in the district," she said. In addition, she said, because it is a condo building that was rehabbed in the 1980s, it runs less risk of a developer buying and demolishing it.

The landmark proposal has drawn vociferous opposition from many property owners and business owners in the neighborhood, which continues to function as an active wholesale food market even as more families and office workers move in. When the city asked property owners for consent, it received 106 objections and five votes in favor. Sixty-three forms were not returned.

Critics worry that development restrictions could hurt property values and make it harder for them to make changes to their buildings, and they object to some buildings being landmarked while neighboring properties are not. At a public hearing before the Landmarks Commission in April, a line of property owners asked that their buildings be removed from the district.

None of those opponents were present at Thursday's committee meeting, which put the landmark proposal to its agenda on Tuesday as an addendum.

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Roger Romanelli, executive director of the Randolph Fulton Market Association, which represents many of the meatpackers in the area and has been a leading critic of the landmark proposal, said he had no knowledge of the meeting and found it disappointing that more notice wasn't given.

"We're calling on the full City Council to reject the committee's vote and bring the proposal back to the drawing board," Romanelli said. As for the exclusion of 1001 W. Randolph St. from the district, "we're waiting to understand the justification," he said.

Representatives from historical preservation groups Preservation Chicago and Landmarks Illinois, who testified at the meeting, said they strongly support the proposal, as the "industrial authenticity" has attracted new investment to the area.

Ald. Danny Solis, who chairs the buildings committee, agreed.

"It's making Chicago a much better city, very vibrant, very economically stable," he said.

The proposed district now includes 141 properties and 86 "contributing" buildings. Another building, a three-flat at 160 N. Halsted St., was removed from the district after its owner gave tearful testimony at the Landmarks Commission public hearing about the hardships the restrictions could cause her family.

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aelejalderuiz@tribpub.com

Twitter @alexiaer
Anne Dias Griffin and Ken Griffin attend a gala for the Whitney Museum of American Art at Skylight at Moynihan Station in New York. (Amanda Gordon, Bloomberg)

Anne Dias Griffin's "pit bull" lawyer has withdrawn from the team representing her in the divorce filed last year by her billionaire husband, court records show.

Robert Cohen, a New York divorce lawyer who has represented such celebrities as Christie Brinkley and Uma Thurman, said in a statement Friday that he continues "to advise Anne and remain very supportive, but the logistics are such that she needs a Chicago litigation team."

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Dias Griffin is the Chicago money manager whose multibillionaire husband, Citadel founder Ken Griffin, filed for divorce in July.

Cohen, once called the "pit bull" of divorce lawyers by the New York Post, spoke on Dias Griffin's behalf immediately after her husband filed for divorce.

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On April 8, Cook County Circuit Judge Grace Dickler granted Cohen "leave to withdraw his appearance filed on behalf of Anne Dias Griffin."

byerak@tribpub.com

Twitter @beckyerak
Who's Hannah? And what's a bretzel?

If you can't answer these questions, you likely haven't been to Hannah's Bretzel, a self-described "uber" sandwich, salad and soup shop with a pronounced organic and green bent. Florian Pfahler opened his first Hannah's Bretzel shop in May 2005 at 180 W. Washington St.

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Since then, it's grown to five locations. But it's been two years since Pfahler opened a restaurant. He plans to add three more Chicago locations within a year.

So what about that name? Hailing from Stuttgart, Germany, Pfahler spent a dozen years in other jobs, including six at Leo Burnett, Pfahler decided to open a sandwich shop named after his older daughter, Hannah, and the "bretzel" or pretzel bread he enjoyed in Germany.

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The chain's most popular sandwich is the Hannah's Club, which includes organic turkey, nitrate-free bacon, Gruyere cheese, avocado, tomatoes, red onions and romaine lettuce on an organic bretzel baguette. The menu also includes the Ella's salad, named after Pfahler's younger daughter, with ingredients such as kale, mozzarella, asparagus and cashews. Hannah's has two Mini Coopers for catering deliveries and Pfahler said the third delivery car is likely to be electric.

Pfahler sat down with the Chicago Tribune to discuss his private company's "interesting and very fun" first 10 years and what's next. The following was edited for length and clarity.

Q: You were thinking about expansion a few years ago but still have five locations. What happened?

A: The gluten-free trend happened, and we are obviously a very gluten-based business. Whenever you have societal changes like this you want to put the brakes on and figure it out. We had to retool our menu.

Q: When did you see the gluten-free trend having an affect on your business?

A: It started in the second quarter of 2012. Typically, business increases 15 to 20 percent going from winter into the summer months. We didn't see that growth happening, so we thought that was strange. There wasn't a ton of gluten-free chatter in the market at the time. I shop at Whole Foods and you'd suddenly see an entire section becoming gluten-free and friends start talking about gluten-free and it dawns on you that it probably has to do with that. It became a full-blown lifestyle. You can't fight a trend like that. You make yourself approachable for somebody who wants to live a gluten-reduced lifestyle. So we added three salads and soups, and created a smaller bread called Wecken after a German word for roll.

Q: Talk about the decision to use organic and green food and other products 10 years ago. Now, many chains are doing similar things.

A: I think nobody does it as deep as we do. We have an organic guarantee on the wall. We commit to a list of items that is always organic. Making a commitment to all organic fruit was an issue, we ran into problems of sourcing. When we did a fruit cup we often had just one item because our vendor just had organic pineapples. Customers were saying they want more variety. Our apples and our strawberries are always organic but with other fruit we give ourselves room. It's important to have transparency.

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Q: Which has a higher value to you, organic or local?

A: That's a personal decision. For me, organic. Because ultimately, when I put it in my body I would like it to have as little substances on there as possible and be as true to nature as possible. The definition of local in a country as large as the United States could mean gathering food from hundreds of miles away. When I visit Bavaria, there's a country food restaurant where they get everything locally. Everything from trout to beer comes from a 15-mile radius.

Q: What are your growth plans?

A: We're going to grow a little faster over the coming years. But the growth won't be exponential. Why does everything need to be 500 stores or 1,000 or 2,000? We signed a lease at 227 W. Monroe St. We plan to open there by July or August. We're also looking for two more locations we hope to open within a year, possibly in Streeterville and another location in the Loop. I see room for two or three more locations in the Loop. Today, one needs to be closer to the customer or you risk losing customers to other restaurants they pass along the way. The market has become quite sophisticated.

Q: What do you see out in the next three to five years?

A: If we succeed raising additional capital, an East Coast location would be next. I think Washington is saturated with fast casual concepts. My gut probably leads toward Manhattan.

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Q: Are you making any changes to the menu?

A: We're hosting a contest for students from Le Cordon Bleu and Kendall College to come up with new sandwiches. Next month, three students from each school will participate in a final with five judges including myself and Beverly Kim from the restaurant Parachute. The winner will get $1,000 and have his or her sandwich featured on the menu for three months.

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Twitter @jessicawohl
ST. LOUIS  Illinois farmers have planted more soybeans and less corn this year, a new federal report showed Tuesday, yet they've been menaced by the wettest June on record.



The 10.1 million acres of soybeans planted is up from with 9.8 million last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said, while corn acreage is 11.8 million, down from 11.9 million.



Nationwide, a record 85.1 million acres of soybeans have been planted, up 2 percent from last year. Planted corn acres are the lowest since 2010 at 88.9 million acres.



The statewide rainfall average as of Tuesday was 9.37 inches, the most of any June according to records dating to 1895, Illinois state climatologist Jim Angel told The Associated Press. It's also the most rain the state has seen in any month since 9.62 inches in September 1926.



It's remarkable, Angel said, in that the excess moisture spared no part of the state, "with some pockets through the roof."



Near Chester in southwestern Illinois, about 60 miles southeast of St. Louis, 62-year-old Steve Stallman said all the excess rainfall in recent weeks  more than 15 inches  has made this the most challenging spring he's had has a farmer.



Rain kept him from planting about 10 percent of his 300 acres of corn, and he's yet to plant two-thirds of his 600 soybean acres. Of the soybeans he did manage to get in, he's had to replant about half of them because the moisture crimped their emergence.



His fields are muddy quagmires, leading to his four-wheel-drive wheat combine and grain trucks getting stuck.



"They're talking about the weather pattern staying the same for another seven to 10 days," with the prospect of more rain, he lamented Tuesday. "It's very disheartening. There are days this is depressing, no doubt about it.



"But farmers are generally eternal optimists, and you have to experience bad times once in a while to appreciate the good."



With 2,100 acres of corn and 2,200 of soybeans near Decatur in central Illinois, David Brown said the June slog is a contrast to what he called last year's perfect conditions that accounted for bountiful corn yields around his turf.



The fledgling corn crops appear to be in good shape but aren't likely to match last year's showing, he said.



"I can't see out across the corn right now," he said. "This would be a good year to have a drone to fly across the field to see what we get."





Associated Press
Efforts to recoup public funds on behalf of suburban governments and agencies who were victims of alleged fraud involving government-backed loans are facing new delays.

But the recovery process will be more transparent.

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The local governments are participants in the Illinois Metropolitan Investment Fund, called IMET for short, which lost $50.4 million last year in an investment involving government-backed loans. Federal authorities have accused Nikesh Patel, the Florida man behind the loans, of defrauding investors.

In a related lawsuit, Patel agreed to turn over residential and commercial properties and other assets to help IMET and other investors recoup their losses. His most valuable assets are five hotels, which are currently overseen by a court-appointed receiver.

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The receiver was exclusively negotiating the sale of the hotels to a Florida real estate company, and a lawyer representing IMET told the newspaper in March that a deal could close this month. But negotiations with the potential buyer broke down, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The receiver has since hired Hospitality Real Estate Counselors, a hotel broker, and Auction.com to sell the five properties separately in an online auction scheduled to start July 20.

The auction is a positive development, said Eric Patt, village attorney for Glenview, who also represents a group of IMET participants.

"This auction process was one our group of municipal investors has been advocating for some time," Patt said. "Our hope is that selling off the properties individually and at auction will result in a better return for investors."

Randall Lending, IMET's attorney, said he expects the marketing efforts to attract a large pool of potential buyers for the hotels.

Three of the hotels are in Orlando, one is in Saddle Brook, N.J., and the fifth is in Peoria. Only one is open for business. The rest were in various stages of renovation when Patel was arrested, and work was stopped, said Paul Sexton, a vice president at Hospitality Real Estate Counselors.

Sexton said his company has traded a handful of properties on Auction.com.

"The one thing the site does extremely well is it conducts a very wide public process," Sexton said. "It will be an open, transparent process so everyone knows what's going on."

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IMET was one of 11 participants that invested in 25 loans issued by Orlando, Fla.-based First Farmers Financial, one of Patel's companies, according to documents in the suit filed in Chicago. The value of the loans was about $180 million. The loans were packaged into a repurchase agreement sold by Pennant Management, a Milwaukee-based investment manager.

IMET hired Pennant in 2012 to help diversify its investment portfolio, which is supposed to invest in safe, liquid, short-term debt such as government bonds and certificates of deposits. The $50.4 million loss represented less than 3 percent of IMET's total assets, but the loss rocked municipal treasurers who entrusted taxpayer dollars with the fund.

More than 200 public bodies in the Chicago area, including school districts, libraries, park districts, community colleges and police and fire pension funds, were invested with IMET when the fund disclosed the alleged fraud to participants in October. Thirteen investors, including Glenview, lost more than $1 million each.

IMET has said that Pennant investigated First Farmers and Patel before buying the loans, which were said to be guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in case of default. But according to the criminal complaint against Patel, the USDA has no record of any such loans.

Patel was arrested on charges of loan fraud Sept. 30, and later released on a $100,000 bond.

Pennant, which sued Patel and related companies over the loans, alleges that he used the loan proceeds to buy hotels and other commercial and residential real estate. Some of those assets have been liquidated. IMET so far has recovered $2.5 million, or 5 percent of its loss, on behalf of participants.

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WASHINGTON  IRS investigators believe the identity thieves who stole the personal tax information of more than 100,000 taxpayers from an IRS website are part of a sophisticated criminal operation based in Russia, two officials told the Associated Press.

The information was stolen as part of an elaborate scheme to claim fraudulent tax refunds, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told reporters. Koskinen declined to say where the crime originated.

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But two officials briefed on the matter said Wednesday the IRS believes the criminals were in Russia, based on computer data about who accessed the information. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing investigation.

The revelation highlights the global reach of many cyber criminals. And it's not the first time the IRS has been targeted by identity thieves based overseas.

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In 2012, the IRS sent a total of 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds went to a lone address in Shanghai, according to a report by the agency's inspector general. The IRS has since added safeguards to prevent similar schemes, but the criminals are innovating as well.

The information was taken from an IRS website called "Get Transcript," where taxpayers can get tax returns and other tax filings from previous years. In order to access the information, the thieves cleared a security screen that required detailed knowledge about each taxpayer, including their Social Security number, date of birth, tax filing status and street address.

The IRS believes the criminals originally obtained this information from other sources. They were accessing the IRS website to get even more information about the taxpayers, which would help them claim fraudulent tax refunds in the future, Koskinen said.

"We're confident that these are not amateurs," Koskinen said. "These actually are organized crime syndicates that not only we but everybody in the financial industry are dealing with."

Congress is demanding answers about how identity thieves were able to steal the information.

The Senate Finance Committee has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday. Koskinen and J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, are scheduled to testify.

"When the federal government fails to protect private and confidential taxpayer information, Congress must act," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Finance Committee. "Taxpayers deserve to know what happened at the IRS regarding the data theft, and this hearing will be the first step of many that the committee takes to determine what happened and how the government can prevent such attacks from happening again."

The IRS said it is notifying taxpayers whose information was accessed. The IRS is providing them with credit monitoring services.

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The IRS has launched a criminal investigation, and the inspector general is also investigating.

Associated Press
Visitors take in the view from the 94th-floor observatory at the John Hancock Center. The stadium seating is part of the revamp of the observatory. (Terrence Antonio James, Chicago Tribune)

A revamp of the John Hancock Center observatory represents the latest salvo in the intensifying aerial battle for visitors being waged by Hancock, Willis and Trump towers.

John Hancock's observatory  renamed 360 Chicago  has been spruced up and the wait for the elevators to the 94th floor made more inviting in an effort to double the number of visitors over the next five years.

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Willis also plans renovations for its Chicago Skydeck that it declined to reveal.

"We are planning a major upgrade of the retail and the observation deck, but it is too early to go into specifics yet," said Peter Rose, senior managing director in charge of public affairs at Blackstone Group, which recently bought the tower.

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The Chicago Skydeck and 360 Chicago are fighting it out 1,000 feet or so above city streets.

Not to be outdone, Trump Tower said it has refreshed the food and bar menu at its 16th floor lounge and aims to boost the number of guests to 90,000 this year from 74,185 last spring/summer.

Changes at John Hancock include the ground floor. Before, visitors lined up and waited for their 40-second elevator ride to the observatory. Now they can watch a short historical video about Chicago and look at photos showcasing city neighborhoods, culture and history. There's also background audio of city sounds like "L" trains, jazz and the Bud Billiken Parade.

Gina Schwieger, a senior director at Respiratory Health Association, said the interactive features in the lobby "appeal to lots of your senses  visuals, sounds and feelings." Jason Lesniewicz, cultural tourism manager at Choose Chicago, was thrilled with the emphasis on city neighborhoods. Attractions like this add to what Chicago has to offer, he said. Both attended a special preview Tuesday evening ahead of a public opening Wednesday.

On the 94th floor, visitors can sit back on new stadium benches to watch the sunset while having food and drinks from the revamped restaurant.

"It is more sophisticated. Before, it was just plain," said Michael Weber, 51, a director at Kodak Alaris EIS Inc., in Orlando, Fla. "It's much more comfortable and inviting than it used to be," he said while seated at the stadium benches.

Nichole Williamson, general manager at 360 Chicago, said the observation area attracts between 4,000 and 5,000 visitors a day during the peak seasons in spring, summer and holidays.

"We see our numbers growing,'' Williamson said. "Our goal is to offer dynamic experiences, and have something for everybody."

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The majority of guests are repeat visitors from the Midwest, and about a quarter come from China, Canada, U.K., France and Germany, Williamson said.

The ground-floor exhibit aims to give school groups and summer camps an educational yet fun experience. It's also meant to encourage the Midwestern repeaters to explore the neighborhoods. The photos depict Bronzeville, Bucktown, Hyde Park, Lakeview, Logan Square, Old Town, Pilsen, Wicker Park and Wrigleyville.

Also new at the observatory is a space for special events. A two-hour package ranges from $1,000 for up to 30 guests (off-peak) to $8,000 (both peak and off-peak) to lease the entire 94th floor.

Williamson said the enhancements mark the last phase of a three-year project that started when Paris-based Montparnasse 56 Group bought the observatory in 2012.

She declined to say how much the renovations cost.

The entry fee to the observatory is $19, with a separate charge of $7 for Tilt, the booths that extend out from the building and lean 30 degrees, offering downward views 1,030 feet above the city.

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Williamson said 35 percent of visitors add on Tilt, which was introduced in May 2014.

Tickets are $19.50 for Skydeck Chicago, 1,353 feet up on the 103rd floor of Willis Tower, which is aiming to draw 1.6 million visitors by the end of this year. There's no extra charge for the Ledge, glass boxes that extend 4.3 feet out.

Blackstone Group, a New York-based private equity real estate investor, in March agreed to buy Willis Tower for an estimated $1.3 billion.

Skydeck also has a private events area, on the 99th floor. Rates start at $3,500 for a morning event for up to three hours.

There's VIP lunches on the 99th floor and Chicago-style pizza on the 103rd floor.

Terrace at Trump, on the 16th floor, charges $100 per person for a guaranteed seat.

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"This year's Terrace menu is out of this world," representatives for Trump Tower said, adding that there will be offerings of creative cocktails given that it's the only restaurant in Chicago "with its own sugar cane machine."

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Twitter @herbling
Many of Kraft's top leaders, including Chief Financial Officer James Kehoe, will leave the food maker soon after it combines with H.J. Heinz, the companies said Monday.

Heinz announced its plan to buy Northfield-based Kraft in March. Kraft shareholders are set to vote on the deal Wednesday.

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The companies announced back in March that Heinz CEO Bernardo Hees would become CEO of the proposed Kraft Heinz Co. On Monday, they announced a number of other executives who will join Hees' team at the combined company, which is set to have offices in Pittsburgh and the Chicago area.

Heinz CFO Paulo Basilio is set to become CFO. Kehoe, who just came back to Kraft in March, will depart once the deal closes or within 30 days, Kraft and Heinz said in a joint statement.

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Once the deal closes, some of Heinz's top executives will remain in roles similar to those they were given in June 2013, when Heinz was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital. There are some Kraft executives in the mix, though many of the leadership roles are being filled by Heinz executives.

3G, a private equity firm known for deep cost cutting, linked up with Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway in 2013 to buy Heinz. The companies have not yet said how many jobs in all will be eliminated as part of the combination. At Heinz, more than 7,000 jobs  about 20 percent of the workforce  were eliminated in the 18 months after it was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway and 3G.

Matt Hill, zone president of Heinz Europe since June 2013, will become zone president of Europe at Kraft Heinz. Emin Mammadov will become zone president of Russia, India and Middle East, Turkey and Africa. He was named zone president of Heinz Russia, Turkey, and Middle East and Africa in June 2013. Eduardo Pelleissone, who joined Heinz in July 2013 as head of operations, will become executive vice president of global operations. Marcos Romaneiro, zone president of Heinz Asia Pacific since June 2014, will be zone president of Asia Pacific. Francisco Sa, zone president of Heinz Latin America since June 2014, will be zone president of Latin America at Kraft Heinz.

George Zoghbi, who has been at Kraft since 2007 and has been its chief operating officer since February, will be COO of U.S. commercial business, leading five commercial business units.

A number of executives will report to Zoghbi, including Heinz's Eduardo Luz, who will become president of the U.S. ketchup, condiments, sauces, dressings and frozen business. Kraft's Joe Fragnito will become president of the U.S. beverages and snack nuts business. Kraft's Howard Friedman will be president of the U.S. cheese and dairy business. Mark Magnesen, who was named president of Kraft's Oscar Mayer division in March, will become president of the U.S. meat business. Kraft's Tom Lopez will be president of the U.S. meal solutions and desserts business.

Heinz did not say who will be running the Canada business, which will now become its own zone, reporting directly to Hees. Chris Kempczinski, Kraft's executive vice president of growth initiatives and president of international, will stay until September, helping with the Canada integration and the rollout of Kraft brands outside North America.

Kraft's Nina Barton, most recently vice president of marketing for coffee, will become senior vice president of marketing innovation, research and development.

Other Kraft executives leaving once the deal closes or within 30 days are: Kim Rucker, executive vice president of corporate and legal affairs, general counsel and corporate secretary; Robert Gorski, executive vice president of integrated supply chain; Jane Hilk, chief marketing officer and president of beverages and snack nuts; Dave Ciesinski, president of meal solutions; Fred Paglia, president of foodservice and U.S. growth channels; and Chuck Davis, executive vice president of research, development, quality and innovation.

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Diane Johnson May, executive vice president of human resources at Kraft, will leave in December after 35 years with the company. The companies also said Tom Corley, executive vice president of U.S. sales at Kraft, will work with Sergio Nahuz, head of U.S. sales, until November.

The companies said back in March that Heinz Chairman Alex Behring will become chairman of Kraft Heinz, while Kraft Chairman and CEO John Cahill will be vice chairman and chair of an operations and strategy committee of the board.

Michael Mullen, who joined Heinz in 1998, is set to become senior vice president of corporate and government affairs. Jim Savina, who joined Kraft in 2013 and was chief compliance officer, will be general counsel and corporate secretary of Kraft Heinz.

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The Cook County Land Bank Authority has identified 13 city neighborhoods and 13 west and south suburbs where it will aggressively buy vacant, abandoned single-family homes and small multifamily buildings and hold them, waiting for a buyer. (Michael Tercha, Chicago Tribune)

Humboldt Park is in. So are East Garfield Park and Woodlawn in Chicago and suburbs like Maywood, Matteson and South Holland.

The Cook County Land Bank Authority has identified 13 city neighborhoods and 13 west and south suburbs where it will aggressively buy vacant, abandoned single-family homes and small multifamily buildings and hold them, waiting for a buyer.

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But other Chicago neighborhoods hard hit by the nation's housing crisis are out. North and South Lawndale, Englewood and West Ridge are not going to get focused attention and investment from the land bank because there is "too much to overcome," said Rob Rose, the land bank's new executive director.

"We have to take calculated risks," Rose said during a meeting of the land bank authority's board Thursday. "We're going to do it in places where there is market demand. Weaker areas need more than the land bank can provide right now."

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In some communities, the organization may partner with a local organizations but it will not go after properties on its own. It will not focus its budget on buying properties that already are part of the South Suburban Land and Development Authority. Also left off the list are communities that are recovering on their own and don't need the land bank's assistance.

Working with researchers, the land bank looked for areas where it believes people want to live and are willing to invest their savings as homeowners. Among the factors it looked for were shrinking residential vacancy rates, rising purchase prices and mortgage activity and community involvement.

Within the city, the communities the land bank has tagged as transitional, meaning there is potential for improvement, are all on the West, Southwest or South sides. They are Auburn Gresham, Austin, Chatham, Chicago Lawn, East Garfield Park, Gage Park, Grand Boulevard, Greater Grand Crossing, Humboldt Park, South Shore, Washington Heights, Washington Park and Woodlawn. Of the estimated 33,000 vacant abandoned lots and homes in the city, 41 percent are in those 13 neighborhoods.

Seven of those communities already are part of the city's Micro Market Recovery Program, an initiative designed to rehab vacant residential buildings and attract residents.

Suburban communities identified are Bellwood, Burbank, Chicago Ridge, County Club Hills, Forest Park, Matteson, Maywood, Melrose Park, Olympia Fields, Posen, Riverdale, South Holland and Stone Park. Those suburbs have 30 percent of the estimated 27,600 vacant, abandoned lots and properties in suburban Cook County.

Separately, the land bank, which has funding of $4.8 million, also is moving forward with two other initiatives. With funding from the Illinois Housing Development Authority, it has worked with community groups to identify abandoned properties that will be razed in Woodlawn, Englewood, Chicago Heights and Riverdale.

It also has bought 25 tax-delinquent properties through the county's scavenger sale as a test case of its initiative to acquire parcels that it thinks would be attractive to developers if it were not for delinquent property taxes.

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Illinois is having trouble finding a bank or financial services company to process the large amounts of cash it anticipates receiving for taxes and fees from the new medical marijuana industry. Illinois State Treasurer Mike Frerichs' office received no response to an official solicitation published in the fall of 2014, so Frerichs, above, has started a formal process to find out why. (Seth Perlman, AP)

CHICAGO  The state of Illinois is having trouble finding a bank or financial services company to process the large amounts of cash it anticipates receiving for taxes and fees from the new medical marijuana industry.

The state treasurer's office received no response to an official solicitation published last fall, so Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs has started a formal process to find out why.

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Potential bidders may not have known about the opportunity or may be concerned about legal questions, industry experts said. Such caution may stem from uncertainties specific to Illinois  including the marijuana pilot program's 2017 expiration date and so-far low patient numbers, said Michael Mayes, CEO of Quantum 9, a Chicago-based marijuana industry consultant.

"It may not be a good investment," Mayes said.

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Marijuana is regulated and legal in about half the states, at least for medical purposes. The industry tends to operate with cash only. Banks are wary because the federal government considers marijuana an illegal drug.

The U.S. Treasury Department has issued guidance intended to clarify that financial institutions can offer services to businesses that sell marijuana, but industry advocates say most banks are still reluctant to do so for fear of prosecution.

The Illinois treasurer is asking the financial industry for feedback on a new draft of its request for proposals by June 29.

An armored car services requirement already has been deleted because it was "believed to be a deterrent to proposals," according to documents posted on the treasurer's website. The treasurer wants to know whether armored car services should be provided by a different vendor, instead of under the cash processing contract, the documents say.

"We're dealing with an industry we are not familiar with. It's new and it involves a lot of cash," said Greg Rivara, a spokesman for the treasurer's office. The request for information "allows us to get guidance from the banking industry on what possibilities are out there." The process allows potential vendors to comment without eliminating them as bidders, Rivara said.

Several state agencies will be receiving cash payments from marijuana growers and dispensaries. The payments will include a 7 percent tax on commercial growers, ordinary payroll and income taxes, annual fees and filing fees.

Colorado, which has approved recreational and medical marijuana, uses Chase Bank for all tax revenue collections, according to a spokesman for the state's Department of Revenue. The money is then sent to the state treasurer's office.

Some experts believe banks eventually will step forward in Illinois.

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"I admire what Illinois is trying to do. It sounds like they'll revise (the solicitation) to meet the needs of the financial industry," said Troy Dayton, CEO of ArcView Market Research, a California consulting company, that has predicted the Illinois cannabis market could eventually expand to $36 million when it gets off the ground in 2016.

Far fewer patients have signed up than projected; only 2,500 have been approved at last count. The pilot program was originally set to expire at the end of 2017, and dispensaries could begin selling marijuana later this year.

The Legislature has sent Gov. Bruce Rauner a bill to extend the program, but the governor hasn't said whether he will sign it. The legislation would extend the program to four years after dispensary sales begin.

Associated Press
Robert Gibbs, McDonald's new communications chief, has a full agenda as he prepares to bring some much-needed shine back to the Golden Arches, and now there is one more issue vying for his attention: when the company chooses to run its commercials.

Parents Television Council, which issues advisories on appropriate television programming for children, is stepping up its effort to get McDonald's to stop running commercials during Fox's "Family Guy." The cartoon, which was created by Seth MacFarlane, centers on the fictional Griffin family and airs Sunday nights.

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The show carries a TV-14 rating and sometimes includes suggestive dialogue about sexual issues. According to a review by Parents Television Council, McDonald's commercials often run during episodes that include jokes about sexually violating children.

So the group turned to one of its board members, Gary Lesser, to reach out to the incoming communications chief about McDonald's decision to advertise during "Family Guy," which debuted in 1999 and has averaged about 6 million viewers in each of the last two seasons, according to Nielsen. Lesser, a lawyer and Democratic donor from Florida, sent a letter to Gibbs on June 11, just two days after McDonald's announced his appointment as global chief communications officer.

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Industry watchers saw the appointment of Gibbs, former press secretary for President Barack Obama, as recognition inside McDonald's that it needed to search outside of its ranks of longtime executives to help newly installed CEO Steve Easterbrook turn McDonald's into what he is calling "a modern, progressive burger company."

Gibbs and his team must handle issues like McDonald's prolonged sales slump. Also in the spotlight: everything from McDonald's relationships with franchisees, restaurant worker wages and the health of its food, along with stepped-up competition from smaller rivals.

"I've never seen a company not be able to catch a break more than McDonald's of late," said Peter Shankman, a customer service and marketing consultant, alluding to one of the chain's famous former slogans, "You Deserve a Break Today." "When a company is down like that, everybody is going to find something to give them (a hard time) about."

Parents Television Council, a 20-year-old member-supported group, is centering its debate with McDonald's on choosing to advertise during shows that it finds less than family-friendly, particularly "Family Guy."

On June 11, Lesser sent a letter to Gibbs congratulating him on his new role and urging McDonald's to stop running its commercials during "Family Guy." "How can a company that sells Happy Meals to children use its media dollars to sponsor jokes about sexually assaulting children?" Lesser writes in the letter, which was reviewed by the Chicago Tribune.

Lesser called his letter to Gibbs "an attempt to really start a dialogue we think can be constructive for McDonald's." He said he believes Gibbs' work at the White House may help him "grasp the issues of what type of message" McDonald's is sending to the country by airing its commercials during certain shows and thinks he is the best executive at the company who could be what he called "an agent of change."

Shankman, author of books like "Zombie Loyalists: Using Great Service to Create Rabid Fans," suggested that McDonald's should keep advertising during shows like "Family Guy." As he sees it, people watching such programming do not think of the commercials as damaging to the brand. He also said that McDonald's should instead attack other issues, such as stemming its sales declines.

"There is a huge user base, a younger user base, that watches 'Family Guy' and eats McDonald's," Shankman said. "If you stop reaching those people you're cutting off your nose to spite your face."

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Parents Television Council used to include McDonald's in its list of top advertisers, but it hasn't been on its best-of list since 2007. In May 2014, Parents Television Council singled McDonald's out as the top sponsor of sexual content, suggestive dialogue and foul language, based on its research of broadcast television programs.

Gibbs is not the only McDonald's executive currently targeted by the Parents Television Council. In May, the group began a campaign asking people to send letters to U.S. Chief Marketing Officer Deborah Wahl to show her they are disturbed to see the company's commercials airing during "Family Guy."

"Content like that seen on Family Guy does not reflect well on the McDonald's brand, and continued association with this kind of content will make me think twice about doing business with McDonalds," the group wrote in a form letter to Wahl available on its website.

Oak Brook-based McDonald's did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Hundreds of protesters calling for $15 an hour marched to McDonald's headquarters in Oak Brook, IL ahead of the company's annual shareholder meeting. (AP) (Chicago Tribune)

After marching to McDonald's Oak Brook campus Thursday morning, 10 protesters from a crowd of more than 1,000 were allowed on McDonald's property to deliver a petition with more than 1 million signatures calling for $15-per-hour wages for the company's front-line workers.

"We want a fair share," workers chanted.

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The latest union-backed protest came the morning of McDonald's annual meeting with shareholders, which started at 9 a.m. and was largely peaceful. Shareholders peppered executives with questions about issues including what they call predatory marketing tactics, such as having Ronald McDonald appear at school functions.

"Ronald's here to stay," CEO Steve Easterbrook told shareholders.

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Earlier, the 10 protestors delivering the petition spent about 30 minutes talking to company representatives who accepted the document.

Upon returning to the crowd, protesters clapped and wooed.

"We told our story. It was so amazing. It was powerful," Adriana Alvarez, 23, told fellow protesters.

She said she told the men that workers need $15 and a union.

"We will be back," protesters chanted.

Since joining the Fight for $15 campaign last year, Alvarez said her hourly wage at a McDonald's on Cicero Avenue has jumped by $1.75 to $10.50 per hour.

However, the single mother of a 3-year-old boy said that as her wages increase, costs are also rising. For example, she said, state budget cuts affected a subsidy she receives for child care.

Keandra Guilmant of Minneapolis said she's struggling to support her family and pay her bills on the $8.25 an hour she makes at McDonald's.

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"We deserve what we are fighting for," Guilmant said.

McDonald's called Thursday's protest "the latest instance in an $80 million publicity campaign organized and paid for by the Service Employees International Union and its members. As has been the case in earlier protests, very few McDonald's or independent franchisee employees are participating."

The smaller protest follows a demonstration Wednesday with about 2,000 people, including McDonald's workers from as far away as Kansas City, Mo., and New York City.

McDonald's has been under consistent pressure to improve performance. Thursday's annual meeting was the first under Easterbrook, who took the helm March 1. Easterbrook's goal is to turn McDonald's into a "modern, progressive burger company."

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, on Wednesday called on McDonald's to share more of its profits.

In addition to boosting pay at company-owned stores, McDonald's has vowed to increase education benefits across all U.S. restaurants. Activists say the moves don't go far enough. Fight for $15 is demanding raises across the chain.

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Vivian Hardin, who works for Church's Chicken in Atlanta, brought her 4-year-old son to the protest because she wants him to know she's fighting for a better future. He walked quietly alongside his mother with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, Superman style.

McDonald's also finds itself battling complaints of labor law violations filed in state and federal courts and with federal agencies. SEIU alleges McDonald's shares responsibility for employees with franchisees as a joint-employer.

The burger giant maintains franchisees are independent owner-operators setting their own policies and wages while adhering to corporate standards on food preparation and restaurant design.

The movement's push to increase wages has led to victories in cities including Chicago, which is raising its hourly minimum wage from $8.25 to $10 on July 1 and to $13 by mid-2019. On Tuesday, Los Angeles voted to increase its $9 per hour minimum wage to $15 by 2020.

Felipe Mujica, 54, said he woke up at 4 a.m. Thursday to join the march. He said he's worked at a McDonald's on Milwaukee and Western for 32 years and makes $8.95 per hour.

Mujica joined the Fight for 15 about six months ago. It's the first time in his life, he said, he feels motivated to speak up for better wages and working conditions. He's fueled, he said, by victories in other states, including this week's decision in Los Angeles.

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Chicago Tribune reporter Jessica Wohl contributed

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Phoebe Elder, who worked at Google for nine years, puts shoes on her daughter Hannah, 2, at their Glenview home on April 13, 2016, as her son Jacob, 4, peeks from behind her. Elder left Google to be a stay-at-home mom, but now has signed up with The Mom Project to do project-based work. (Chris Walker / Chicago Tribune)

After nine years at Google, Phoebe Elder quit in July to stay home with her two kids. Relieved to get off the hamster wheel of juggling a demanding job and family time, Elder, who lives in Glenview, also feared losing the independence of having her own paycheck and the notoriously tough task of returning to work after a career break.

The Mom Project, a new Chicago-based startup, aims to help women like Elder keep a foot in the door while fulfilling companies' project-based needs.

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"I'm not looking to fully return to the workforce at this moment, but I would love the opportunity to do something to stay relevant," said Elder, 34, who has signed up to be part of The Mom Project's talent network.

The Mom Project, which launched early this month, is a digital marketplace connecting career breakers with companies that need educated and experienced people for temporary projects, permanent posts or to fill in when an employee goes on maternity leave  dubbed a "maternityship," said Allison Robinson, founder and CEO.

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Allison Robinson founded The Mom Project, a Chicago-based online marketplace connecting stay-at-home moms with career opportunities. (Krystyn Johnson / The Mom Project)

The Mom Project is a for-profit company that collects fees from companies that use its service. It does not charge the moms.

Robinson, who lives in Wicker Park, started the company during her own maternity leave from Procter & Gamble, where she works in enterprise sales and marketing strategy. She was struck by a statistic she read in Harvard Business Review that showed 43 percent of highly skilled women with children voluntarily leave their jobs, and connected that with broader trends of businesses desiring a flexible workforce that they can bring in and out as they need.

In addition, as more companies roll out generous parental-leave policies in an effort to attract and retain talented employees, they must figure out how to cover that gap.

"This is helping to engender the rise of a more independent workforce," said Robinson, who is in the midst of a 12-month partially paid maternity leave from P&G.

Robinson said she has recruited several hundred women, most in the Chicago area, through professional and alumni associations to join the talent network. Candidates must have an undergraduate degree and five years of professional experience, and must undergo an interview with a talent manager. More than half of the recruits have a master's degree or higher.

The Mom Project is now in talks with companies, including major corporations as well as smaller businesses, to get them to sign on. Robinson said she is in the final stages of placing candidates into 10 project opportunities, which typically pay $30,000 to $60,000, depending on the role and length.

For example, an advertising agency that needs someone to fill a 20-hour-a-week project management role for six months is offering $40,000, Robinson said. The Mom Project, which functions like an Airbnb for hand-selected talent, connects the candidates with the work opportunity, handles the terms of employment and processes the payments.

Career interruptions to care for kids or other family members are a top reason women lag far behind men in senior leadership positions, pay and other metrics of success. About a quarter of prime-age adults who are not working consider themselves homemakers, almost all of them are women and the majority say they want to go back to work now or someday, according to a 2014 survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, The New York Times and CBS News. But most say they would prefer part-time work.

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Elder, who transferred to Google's Chicago offices from California three years ago to be closer to family in New York, said she and her husband tried various child care options so that she could keep working. But she felt sad a lot as she missed out on the day-to-day of her kids being little. They are now 2 and 4.

Elder hopes to return to work at some point to add to the family's finances as she and her husband prepare to send the kids to college. She jumped at the opportunity when Robinson found her through LinkedIn and told her about The Mom Project.

Elder's LinkedIn profile lists more than a decade of sales and advertising experience at companies ranging from Hearst to YouTube to Google, where most recently she managed a team of brand specialists for its digital media campaigns  and, at the top, her most recent vocation: stay-at-home mom.

"I didn't want to fall off the Earth," she said.

That her stay-at-home status could be an asset rather than a liability reflects a shift in thinking.

Phil Perkins, CEO of Rocket Wagon, a digital product development agency in the West Loop, said he connected with Robinson at a networking event for Chicago startups and has been in talks with The Mom Project for the last three weeks about signing a contract.

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His company, which launched a year ago and has 20 employees, is looking for help with content strategy and marketing efforts as it tries to tell its story, and Perkins is eager to dig into any pool to find the best talent.

He has been impressed with the caliber of candidates The Mom Project has brought him so far.

"It's hard to find people," Perkins said. "This is a unique set of circumstances for people who are very accomplished professionally."

And how about stay-at-home dads?

Robinson said that while the company is focused on recruiting women, "The Mom Project is an equal opportunity platform that welcomes any person who identifies with our mission and goals and we currently have several men in our talent network."

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Exterior photo of the Mondelez International factory and distribution center at 7300 S. Kedzie Avenue in Chicago on Wednesday, May 13, 2015. It was formerly know as the Nasbico plant, as seen in the name on the building. (Terrence Antonio James, Chicago Tribune)

Mondelez International CEO Irene Rosenfeld told shareholders Wednesday no decisions have been made on whether the snack-maker's Chicago bakery will gain $130 million in new investment, plans that also include hundreds of job cuts.

During prepared remarks at the company's annual meeting, Rosenfeld said Mondelez is focusing on reducing costs, improving productivity and investing for growth. The Deerfield-based manufacturer announced last week that the company is weighing whether to add four high-speed, state-of-the-art manufacturing lines in Chicago or at a new facility in Salinas, Mexico.

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Either way, Mondelez plans to shut down older lines at its Chicago bakery. If it adds new capacity to the plant, at 7300 S. Kedzie, Mondelez would cut about 300 jobs in Chicago. If it adds capacity in Mexico, Chicago stands to lose 600 jobs.

The Chicago bakery currently employs more than 1,200 workers. Many of them are represented by unions, which met with Mondelez on Friday to discuss the plans.

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In response to a shareholder question, Rosenfeld said the opportunity to improve margins is probably greatest in North America, compared with other markets around the world. The Chicago bakery, which opened as a Nabisco plant in the 1950s, will continue to be an important part of its manufacturing network, she said, regardless of whether it wins the new investment.

Along with Oreo and Chips Ahoy! cookies, the bakery makes Ritz and Premium crackers.

Another shareholder pressed Rosenfeld on the bakery's operation, asking how product supply would be affected by the upcoming changes. Rosenfeld told her that supply actually would be enhanced because of the new lines.

The shareholder, Noa Polish, noted after the meeting that she's owned Mondelez shares since her 9th birthday, when she asked for, and received, a stake in the company. Now 11, she said her favorite Mondelez product is the Oreo.

She said she learned about the job cuts at the plant from her mother. While she wants officials to do what's best for the company, she said she hopes they consider employees who will be losing jobs.

"I trust that what they're doing is right,'' she said.

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One of the busiest dining-out days of the year is Mother's Day, and there are more restaurants gearing up for Sunday's onslaught than there's room or time to list. Suffice it to say that any restaurant you have in mind is almost certainly doing something. For example ...
Mondelez said it will lay off half of its 1,200 employees in its bakery on Chicago's Southwest Side after deciding to make a major investment in a Mexico plant rather than its long-standing facility here. (Terrence Antonio James, Chicago Tribune)

A worker at Chicago's Nabisco plant reached out to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and President Barack Obama on Friday, asking for their help to keep hundreds of jobs in Chicago rather than seeing the work go to Mexico.

Last month, Mondelez International told union officials representing more than 1,200 workers at its Chicago bakery that it plans to shut down nine of the 16 lines at the facility. It also wants to install four state-of-the-art production lines but said it would cost much more to put them in Chicago than at the company's new facility in Salinas, Mexico.

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Deerfield-based Mondelez said adding the four manufacturing lines in Chicago would cost the company over $46 million more in annualized operating costs and capital expense than it would in Mexico. If the company adds capacity in Mexico, Chicago stands to lose about 600 jobs. If it adds capacity to the Chicago bakery, Mondelez would still cut about 300 jobs here.

The Chicago bakery, at 7300 S. Kedzie Ave., has been in operation since the 1950s and is the company's largest U.S. bakery. Mondelez opened its facility in Salinas in 2014.

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"The economic impact on Chicago and Illinois would be significant when you consider all of the lost spending and tax income that would be associated with such a significant job loss," John Kehoe Jr., shop chairman for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, wrote in the letter to Emanuel, which was shared with the Chicago Tribune. He expressed similar concerns in his letter to Obama.

"These production lines of the future are not just critical for our future here at the Bakery, but they are also essential in illustrating to the world that we can keep successful companies here in America," Kehoe wrote. He said the letters have just under 700 signatures.

Three unions  the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) and the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE)  met with Mondelez on May 15. Now they are trying to figure out whether they can reduce costs enough to get the new lines installed in Chicago.

The unions were to meet with Ald. Derrick Curtis about the situation this week, but the newly installed 18th Ward alderman postponed that meeting, union officials said. Curtis could not be reached for comment.

Mondelez said Friday that it has received requests for further information from two of the unions, the IAM and IUOE, and its labor relations team plans to respond to those requests. The company said it has not heard from the BCTGM for more information. The majority of the employees at the facility are members of BCTGM.

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Paula Robinson, president of the Black Metropolis National Heritage Area Commission, shown here in April. She said she would ask City Hall to replace any parkland lost to the library at the former Michael Reese Hospital's site in Bronzeville. That land is owned by the city. (Anthony Souffle, Chicago Tribune)

As the Chicago businessman charged with overseeing site selection of the Obama presidential library expressed satisfaction Wednesday with the progress of local bids, a prominent South Side activist said the project offers an opportunity to negotiate for community needs.

The University of Chicago, long seen as the front-runner for the library and museum, on Tuesday released details of two potential sites for the library: one in western Jackson Park, south of the Museum of Science and Industry, and the other in western Washington Park.

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About 20 acres of parkland is in play at each site. The University of Illinois at Chicago also is vying for the project.

People are urging protests, said Paula Robinson, president of the Black Metropolis National Heritage Area Commission, which includes Washington Park. "And I'm telling them, 'It's not that kind of party anymore.'" In addition to recovering the parkland acres, "where's the broadband access? Where's the grocery store?"

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U. of C.'s plan to tap parkland is sure to spark protests from preservationists who believe the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed lands should be kept as is. That's sparking some deja vu for many South Siders who fought against a plan to put a temporary stadium for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2016 Olympics in Washington Park. Chicago lost that bid.

"You just don't, as far as I'm concerned, start tweaking with parkland," said Delmarie Cobb, a South Side political consultant.

"It sets a bad precedent. That's why I worked against the Olympics. The better location (for the Obama library) would have been  I don't understand why we couldn't all get together and advocate for the old Michael Reese Hospital site."

Robinson, who led a failed bid to have the Obama presidential library built on the Michael Reese land, said she would ask City Hall to replace any parkland lost to the library at the former hospital's 48-acre site in Bronzeville. That land is owned by the city.

"As a tourism organization, do we want the Obama library and the community benefits that come with it? Yes," Robinson said.

"But those benefits are not our immediate issue. We want help in expanding broadband technology and luring a grocery store."

Public debate over the library accelerated last week after sources close to the foundation controlling the site selection said U. of C.'s bid, which faces stiff competition from Columbia University in New York, was lacking because of a failure to get land-control issues addressed.

A land-transfer plan was required in bid documents due last month, and whatever U. of C. outlined there  its bid remains secret  remained unfinished.

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Meanwhile, a source said a series of expected leadership changes at UIC in the coming year, including a new chancellor, system president and system board chair, would generate uncertainty.

Bidders have heeded the warning as Martin Nesbitt, the private equity executive overseeing the library selection process, said Wednesday that all four finalists  UIC, U. of C., Columbia and the University of Hawaii  were "working to address the concerns." He declined to say what those concerns were as they pertained to Columbia and Hawaii.

"We think University of Chicago's decision to release more information shows that they are moving energetically to engage with the community and put forth the strongest proposal they can," Nesbitt said. "Just as UIC has worked to address any concerns."

Nesbitt said the goal is for every bidder to have the "best possible proposal" on paper before they're presented to the president and first lady. That will happen "as soon as the bids are in shape enough, to the best point they can be in."

A decision is expected by the end of March.

Cassandra Francis, president of Friends of the Parks, said the organization supports building the library west of Washington Park on 11 acres of nonparkland and UIC proposals.

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"The only proposed University of Chicago sites are surrounded by controversy," Francis said. "What a disappointment that they have risked our opportunity to host this great institution."

A Washington Park location already has the backing of Ald. Will Burns, whose 4th Ward includes 22 acres of parkland at issue. His support is critical to winning the necessary City Council approval for any transfer of parkland to City Hall control.

"It's way too early to panic about 20 acres of park district property going to the library bid," Burns said Wednesday.

"It's a weird thing on the South Side  there are complaints that we don't get the same as other neighborhoods. This is an opportunity to have a game changer in our backyard. It would foster economic development in a part of the city that is struggling  I'm speaking specifically about Washington Park."

Historically, communities in this part of the South Side have held tight to invisible boundaries, Burns said. There were neighborhoods that struggled with violence and development right beside neighborhoods, such as Hyde Park, that were more prosperous.

In recent years, those boundaries have eased as the region has developed.

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"The downside is you are using park land, but there is room in the parks," said Andrea Zopp, CEO of the Chicago Urban League and an adviser to the U. of C. library bid.

"If you are thoughtful about the proposal and how it is built, in the long run it will benefit the community."

But animosity, particularly toward the University of Chicago, remains.

"We want U. of C. to recognize that as they have crossed (South) Cottage Grove (Avenue)," the eastern border of Washington Park, "they need to respect the fact there has been a long-term planning effort going on," Robinson said. "Washington Park is part of Bronzeville; it's part of a heritage area. ... (They can't be) trying to annex Woodlawn and Washington Park with Hyde Park."

It is difficult to find much vocal opposition to the library from people who live on the South Side, said Shirley Newsome, president of the South East Chicago Commission, who also serves on the U. of C.'s library advisory committee.

Unlike the Olympics, which garnered opposition, this project isn't about outsiders, Newsome said.

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"We are talking about one of our own," Newsome said. "The Olympics  as it relates to the African-American community  was not ours.

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"The president is viewed as 'our' president," she said. "'Our' meaning the people of the Southeast Side of Chicago."

Plus, no one wants to lose the library to another city, Newsome argued.

"We have to remember the parks belong to the people,'' she said. "And the people are sophisticated enough to make a decision as to whether or not they want to see the presidential library located into these park sites as opposed to us losing it to New York or Hawaii."

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RALEIGH Has North Carolina become a state of extremes?Based on recent events, and lots of recent handwringing, you might think so. You might think there was no feasible way for Republicans and Democrats to work together on matters of public concern. But your conclusion would be a hasty one.For one thing, the flip in partisan control of the North Carolina General Assembly in 2010 and the governor's office in 2012 didn't bring to an end some prior golden age of good feelings and cooperation. Democrats and Republicans disagreed a lot during the lengthy period Democrats ruled the roost. And since 2010, there have actually been significant policies enacted with truly bipartisan support.A good example would be a major rewrite of the state's transportation-funding formulas in 2013. A top priority of Gov. Pat McCrory, the new formulas shift around lots of money for roads and infrastructure. Some communities will gain. Others will lose. I thought the changes were wise but also destined to be highly controversial and hard to pass. I was wrong. Almost every legislator supported them.It is certainly true that much of the new Republican majority's agenda - including tax cuts, regulatory reforms, changes in unemployment insurance, and a host of other measures - has drawn strong opposition from most Democrats. But when previous Democratic governors and legislatures were raising taxes, imposing new regulations, and expanding government benefits, most Republicans opposed them. I don't recall as many complaints about extremism back then from the state's media outlets and political class.I will say that during these previous periods of political conflict in Raleigh, the debate was more civil and constructive than we often witness today. I won't fault one side or the other for this phenomenon, however. I think it reflects in part a national decline in civil discourse and in part the fact that North Carolina Republicans are still getting used to the idea of being in power, while North Carolina Democrats are still getting used to the idea of being out of power.As far as North Carolina voters are concerned, there are persistent divides in partisan affiliation and ideology. That doesn't mean voters have become more extreme. I recently compiled an extensive set of survey data from several organizations that regularly study our state's electorate: the Civitas Institute, Public Policy Polling, Elon University, High Point University, and Survey USA (which conducts automated polling for a variety of clients, including the media).Accounting for differences in methodology, sampling, and question wording, I was able to build a rough model of the North Carolina electorate. Generally speaking, about a third of registered voters identify as Democrats, about a third identify as Republicans, and the remaining third say they are neither. Of that latter independent group, most actually vote Republican or Democrat most of the time, so the true "swing vote" averages about 10 percent. If you add in independents with partisan leanings, party preference during the last several months of polling averages 45 percent Republican and 45 percent Democratic. Can't get more evenly balanced.While most of those GOP-leaning voters are conservative and a significant number of the Democratic-leaning voters are liberals, the terms don't tell you much about polarization and extremism. In fact, most of the pollsters break the labels up into subcategories. Voters who say they are "very" or "extremely" conservative make up about 16 percent of North Carolina's electorate. Voters identifying as "very" or "extremely" liberal average about 7 percent.Even if you ignore voter self-identification and use positions on issues to identify ideological extremes, you will find that the vast majority of voters - and elected officials, for that matter - don't meet the definition. The largest single group of voters on the Right is best described as "somewhat conservative." The largest group on the Left is best described as "slightly liberal."I'm a fan of spirited debate, and have been known to partake from time to time. I also think there is room for cooperation on key issues. North Carolinians are perfectly capable of doing both.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel introduces Ginger Evans as the new commissioner of aviation for the City of Chicago during a press conference at Chicago O'Hare International Airport on Sunday, May 10, 2015. Behind him left for right are: Tom Villanueva, Ray LaHood, Ginger Evans and Kate Gebo. Evans replaces Rosemarie Andolino who departed last November. (Stacey Wescott, Chicago Tribune)

Despite celebrating the arrival of Middle East airlines at O'Hare International Airport, one as recently as last summer, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has joined the chorus of politicians calling for a federal investigation into whether three of those airlines are receiving illegal subsidies from their governments.

The three largest U.S. carriers, Chicago-based United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines have banded together in protest. They released a report in March claiming Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways  all known for superior, even luxurious, service  have received $42 billion in illegal subsidies over the past decade. They have asked the U.S. government to seek talks with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to resolve what they see as violations of so-called Open Skies policies with those nations and to stop Gulf carriers from adding more flights to the U.S.

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The foreign carriers deny the accusations and have lashed back against the U.S. airlines' relentless campaign.

Earlier this week Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker denied that his state-owned airline receives illegal subsidies and referred to U.S. airlines as offering "crap service" and being "greedy."

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Etihad on Thursday released a report detailing what it calls $71.5 billion in government and court-sanctioned benefits and concessions U.S. airlines have received, including bankruptcy protection and pension fund "bailouts." U.S. airlines have said those don't count as subsidies.

Emanuel entered the fray with a letter earlier this month addressed to Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx and Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.

"I strongly believe that every airline flying into O'Hare must play by the same set of rules, but currently, that's not what is happening," Emanuel said in the May 6 letter. "The three major U.S. airlines employ over 25,000 people in the Chicago area, while the Gulf carriers employ less than 50. Standing by American carriers means standing by hardworking Americans ... Left unchecked, these disruptions to the international economy will harm the U.S. aviation industry, leading to service reductions in important hub markets like Chicago and a loss of good American jobs."

The letter stands in stark contrast to the gushing welcome two of those carriers received recently from Emanuel's administration. Emirates began service just last August, and its first commercial flight to O'Hare received a water-canon salute  a celebratory dousing of the plane with water from airport fire trucks.

Emanuel and then-aviation commissioner Rosemarie Andolino welcomed Emirates, calling its arrival "an exciting announcement for Chicago and for our airportsExpanding Chicago's connectivity to the growing Middle East is a high priority for us, and we look forward to working with Emirates as part of our plan to enhance Chicago's leading role in the global aviation system," Andolino said.

The city said the addition of Emirates service alone would generate $200 million in "annual economic activity and further the mayor's goal of Chicago hosting 55 million visitors by 2020," the city claimed.

Qatar Airways received similar praise when it started flights from O'Hare in 2013. Etihad began flying from O'Hare before Emanuel took office.

Emanuel in his letter acknowledged the discrepancy.

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"In the past, I welcomed the expansion of Qatar and Emirates to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and while I continue to encourage international airlines to bring their flights and passengers to our city, I have serious concerns about the unfair government subsidies and benefits the Middle East carriers have received and the impact on the U.S. airlines."

Jill Zuckman, chief spokeswoman for the airlines' lobbying effort Partnership for Open & Fair Skies, welcomed the support.

"We applaud Mayor Emanuel for standing up for American workers and asking the Obama administration to keep our skies open and competitive," she said. "As a tireless advocate for the people of Chicago, Mayor Emanuel understands the impact these unfair government subsidies have on aviation service in and out of Chicago and the jobs of 25,000 Chicagoans employed by United, American and Delta airlines."

Sen. Dick Durbin in mid-April was among the first prominent politicians to support the U.S. airlines' position, saying "the ramifications of these subsidies will be particularly felt in Illinois, which is home to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport."

In his own letter to the U.S. secretaries of transportation and state, Durbin wrote that "unfair competition by foreign subsidized airlines has the potential to overwhelm U.S. carriers on key international routes and cause air service cuts and job losses as U.S. carriers are forced to exit these routes."

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Randhurst Village in Mount Prospect is an example of the successful redevelopment of a decaying American mall. (Chris Walker, Chicago Tribune)

The new owner of Randhurst Village plans to expand the shopping center, with an eye on restaurants, furniture stores, fashion retailers and arts-and-crafts stores.

DLC Management, based in Tarrytown, N.Y., closed a deal for the 1 million-square-foot property in Mount Prospect on Thursday. Financial terms of the acquisition from a joint venture that included JPMorgan Chase were not disclosed.

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Adam Ifshin, DLC's president and chief executive officer, said one of the reasons he was attracted to the shopping center is that it has vacant land parcels that can be developed, as well as an office building that can be turned into apartments and more retail.

Randhurst Village is an example of the successful redevelopment of a decaying American mall. Once an enclosed mall, which was built in 1962, Randhurst has been turned into an open-air shopping center. Tenants include Costco, Jewel-Osco, Home Depot, Carson Pirie Scott and an AMC movie theater. Ifshin said the center is 92 percent leased.

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"The chance to do more development and lease more space created a compelling opportunity for us," he said.

Randhurst Village is the largest asset in DLC's portfolio. The company owns more than 20 million square feet of shopping centers nationally, including centers in Oak Brook, Oak Lawn and Elgin.

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He's the great-grandson of a U.S. president, the grandson of a former U.S. senator and presidential hopeful, and the cousin of a two-term Ohio governor.

But John Taft, 60, has no desire himself to sustain another political dynasty.

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"My legacy is wonderful," said Taft, the great-grandson of President William Howard Taft and the chief executive of RBC Wealth Management in the United States. "It has influenced my choices in life, but you have to be careful to make decisions based on who you are rather than what your legacy tells you to do."

Taft said he's "not wired to be an effective politician in the world today."

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"I'm wired to make a difference in the world, but being a business leader and being civically engaged is how I can make the biggest impact," he said.

Earlier this year Taft published his second book, "A Force for Good: How Enlightened Finance Can Restore Faith in Capitalism." It includes about 20 essays by such leaders as Vanguard Group founder John Bogle, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Sheila Bair, and former Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Schapiro. It addresses such topics as creating a stable retirement system, rebuilding investor trust, and using investment strategies that help protect the environment. Taft wrote the introduction and edited the book.

Taft visited Chicago in early May to give a keynote speech at the annual meeting of the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment.

"Society still wants growth that creates jobs, growth that increases our collective standards of living, and growth that helps pay down the historically high levels of debt we've accumulated during a decades-long 'debt super cycle' that's now coming to an end," Taft told the association, whose members are concerned about how their investments affect the environment and society.

"But we no longer want growth at any and all costs," he said. "We want growth that is balanced and sustainable, growth that doesn't degrade the environment to the point where human life is threatened."

RBC Wealth Management is the retail brokerage arm of RBC, which stands for Royal Bank of Canada. It has 126 employees in the Chicago area, including in the wealth-management unit that Taft runs. RBC Wealth Management has five branches in the Chicago area. They are in Chicago, Orland Park, Winnetka, Buffalo Grove and Oakbrook Terrace.

"Our game plan is to grow slowly and organically" in Chicago, Taft said earlier in an interview. "As we find quality advisers we add them to branches wherever they are." He said RBC's Chicago presence is "as strong as it has been in a long time," and it's an important market for the brokerage because of its size and wealth. In the Chicago area, it considers its major competition to include big wire houses and larger regional firms.

John Taft, who grew up in New Haven, Conn., spent seven years as a journalist and was working as a reporter in Massachusetts covering the rebuilding of Lowell when urban redevelopment captured his interest and he decided to make it a profession.

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He moved to Minnesota to be closer to the family of his first wife, now deceased, and went to work in public finance for investment bank Piper Jaffray, where he helped governments like the city of St. Paul, Minn., finance public projects. Taft did that for 10 years, and took a couple of years out to work for the mayor.

Then he went to work for a municipal bond company whose Minneapolis-based institutional asset management arm was sold 15 years ago to RBC, which is how Taft ended up there.

John Taft lives in Minneapolis with his second wife, a French-Canadian who was the former head of private banking for RBC. She left her "country, job and hairdresser to come to the United States and marry" him, he said.

Taft's oldest daughter was a convertible bond trader who is now starting her own business that handles the "graphic display of quantitative information." Another daughter works for Microsoft. He has a son finishing his master's at Northwestern and is going back to Minnesota to work.

In the workplace, Taft promotes policies that are friendly to gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans-gendered employees. He has also spoken out against efforts to define marriage solely as a union between a man and a woman. Taft has a personal interest in the issue, as one of his daughters is a lesbian.

Taft also has two brothers: one is a minister and the other does day-trading from his retirement account in Massachusetts.

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Has the nation seen its last Taft in politics?

"Maybe not the last, but there is no identifiable successor to the Taft lineage" in politics, he said.

byerak@tribpub.com

Twitter: @beckyyerak
A shareholder class action lawsuit has been filed against Sears Holdings alleging the company's plan to sell its prime real estate holdings to a trust controlled by CEO Eddie Lampert would strip the struggling retailer of one of its last remaining valuable assets, leaving it a debt-laden, money-losing renter in its own stores.

The proposed $2.5 billion sale, the suit says, will benefit Lampert at the expense of shareholders and hasten the demise of Sears, once a quintessential American retailer.

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"The proposed transaction is a financially and structurally unfair deal," the lawsuit says. "Sears and its stockholders would receive a severely inadequate cash payment that the defendant Lampert-controlled company may use to cover operating losses and debt obligations for another year or so, before stockholders are left holding the bag in an insolvency widely viewed as inevitable if the proposed transaction occurs."

The proposed transaction would sell 254 Sears stores to Seritage Growth Properties, a real estate investment trust created by Sears Holdings. Lampert, a hedge fund billionaire who owns 49 percent of Sears Holdings, would control both the Hoffman Estates-based retailer and the newly formed REIT. The transaction is expected to close this month, with Seritage leasing the stores back to Sears at a cost of $150 million to the retailer in the first year.

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The lawsuit, filed late Friday in Delaware Chancery Court, names Lampert, Sears Holdings, Sears board members and Seritage as defendants. It seeks to stop the proposed transaction, saying the $2.5 billion purchase price is a "paltry" amount that in the face of ongoing operating losses makes imminent insolvency a likely outcome for Sears.

"The complaint contains numerous factual misstatements and is legally without merit," Chris Brathwaite, a Sears spokesman, said in a statement. "The company plans to contest it vigorously and believes the proposed real estate investment trust transaction will provide substantial benefits to Sears Holdings and its shareholders."

The suit was brought on behalf of Sears shareholder John Solak by Robbins Arroyo, a San Diego-based law firm.

Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail research and consulting firm, was not surprised that the proposed sale-leaseback transaction would concern existing Sears shareholders, given Lampert's controlling interest in both the buyer and seller. "Shareholders don't want to be played for chumps," Johnson said. "They're rightfully guarding their interests."

The retailer has seen its sales decline since Lampert combined Sears and Kmart in an $11 billion deal in 2005. The company reported losses of $1.7 billion last year, with revenue declining nearly 14 percent to $31.2 billion.

Sears Holdings closed 234 stores last year. At the end of its fiscal year Jan. 31, Sears Holdings operated 1,725 stores, including Sears, Kmart and Sears Auto Centers, 684 of them in properties it owns. That's down from 3,949 stores at the end of its 2010 fiscal year.

In recent years, the company has spun off assets including Orchard Supply Hardware and Sears Hometown and Outlet stores, as well as Wisconsin-based Lands End, one of the few bright spots in the Sears Holdings portfolio.

The proposed sale, announced April 1, would transfer some of the best-performing Sears and Kmart stores to the real estate trust, the lawsuit says. As part of the transaction, the REIT has the right to capture half of the store space in the properties to rent to other tenants, shrinking the footprint of Sears and Kmart stores. Consumer electronics may disappear from some stores as they get smaller.

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Twitter @RobertChannick
NEW YORK  American cities are enticed by the economic growth and services that "sharing economy" companies such as Airbnb, Uber and Lyft can offer, but officials are anxious about safety in a largely unregulated realm, a city advocacy group found in a study released Wednesday.



Nearly three-quarters of city leaders said they want to see the "sharing" sector grow, according to National League of Cities survey responses from 245 leaders of municipalities large and small.



Yet nearly two-thirds said they were concerned about the safety of using apps and websites that let everyday people rent out rooms, arrange car rides and provide other services to strangers. More than half the cities said they imposed no rules on "sharing" players, though their traditional counterparts  like hotels and taxi companies  often are regulated.



"Cities are welcoming" the rise of the sharing economy, said Brooks Rainwater, one of the study's co-authors. "But at the same time, because it's upending traditional service providers and regulatory environments, it's causing some level of consternation."



Still, "cities are learning how to work with these companies," and vice versa, he said.



Companies say they're safety-conscious contributors' to cities' economies.



A look the findings:





The study:

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The Washington-based cities league included some sharing-economy questions in a broader economic survey sent this year to top elected officials in 986 cities; 245 responded.

The "sharing" or "peer-to-peer" economy can refer to services as varied as co-working spaces and short-term bike-rental programs. The report, like the regulatory debate so far, focuses on "home-sharing" players such as Airbnb and "ride-sharing" companies such as Uber and Lyft.

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The backstory:

Many cities are grappling with whether or how to regulate and tax the burgeoning "sharing" sector.

New York taxi regulators, for example, are weighing whether to make ride-hailing services submit data on their trips. Portland, Oregon, is experimenting with allowing ride-hailing companies while deregulating its existing cab industry.

San Francisco agreed last year to permit some home-as-hotel rentals but is now contemplating further limits. Meanwhile, some lawmakers want to expand a squad that investigates complaints about such rentals in New York, where it's largely illegal to rent out an entire apartment short-term.

What cities like about "sharing":

While 71 percent of cities said they supported sharing-economy growth, leaders embrace ride-hailing apps more readily than short-term home rentals, by 66 percent to 44 percent.

In general, cities see the biggest benefits as improved services (rated No. 1 one by 22 percent) and economic expansion (20 percent). Smaller numbers cited entrepreneurship, efficiency, tourism and constituents' enthusiasm.

What cities are worried about:

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Sixty-one percent of cities said safety was their top concern about peer-to-peer services. Just 10 percent or fewer named any other potential problem, including effects on established industries, lost tax revenue and workforce issues.

What "sharing economy" players have to say:

Sharing-sphere companies say they fuel local economies by giving consumers new options and are committed to making them safe. San Francisco-based Airbnb says its service brings tourist dollars into neighborhoods beyond the beaten hotel track, among other benefits.

San Francisco-based Lyft says it conducts criminal background checks of drivers, staffs a round-the-clock safety hotline and has worked on regulations with about 30 cities and states. Austin, Texas-based short-term rental marketplace HomeAway points to its various security guidelines and guarantees, plus owners' vested interest in keeping up their properties. "Cities should not fear for the safety of their community," co-founder Carl Shepherd said in a statement.

Associated Press
Ever since airlines instituted fees in 2008 for checked bags, passengers have tried anything to avoid paying the extra for a flight. That usually means stuffing everything possible into a carry-on bag that won't fit into cramped overhead bins. (AP) (Chicago Tribune)

NEW YORK  Millions of fliers might soon want to buy new carry-on suitcases.

Global airlines announced Tuesday a new guideline that recommends shrinking carry-on bags, in an effort to free up space in packed overhead bins.

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The guideline, which is not binding, means that many existing bags currently in compliance with airline rules would not be given preferential treatment in the boarding process. While details of how the guideline will be implemented are murky, and could vary from airline to airline, it raises the possibility that many fliers would be forced to check their favorite carry-on bag.

Fliers might ultimately need to buy smaller suitcases or pay a fee to check their bags, typically $25 each way.

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The recommendation by the International Air Transport Association suggests an "optimal" carry-on size at 21.5 inches tall by 13.5 inches wide by 7.5 inches deep. That's smaller than the current maximum size allowed by many airlines. For instance, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines all currently allow bags up to 22 inches by 14 inches by 9 inches  although gate agents don't always enforce those more-generous measurements.

"Once again, the airlines find a way to make their problem the passenger's problem  and an expensive problem at that," said travel industry consultant Henry Harteveldt. The lack of overhead space is due to airlines cramming too many seats on planes and charging passengers to check their suitcases, he said.

Airlines around the globe have varying standards  different enough that a carry-on bag that is acceptable to one airline isn't allowed in the cabin of another. The airline trade group says the new guideline will not necessarily replace each airline's rules on bag size, but gives them a uniform measurement that "will help iron out inconsistencies."

Charlie Leocha, a consumer advocate and co-founder of Travelers United, said if enough airlines adopt these guidelines it will be great for travelers to at least know what size bag is acceptable on multiple airlines. However, Leocha measured his own carry-on bag Tuesday one that he has traveled with for more than a decade and never struggled to fit into an overhead bin  to find out that it doesn't comply with the new suggested size.

"Are the airlines are cahoots with the baggage manufactures? It just seems crazy," he said.

Many bags already marketed as carry-on compliant actually aren't.

For instance, for $56.99 Walmart sells the Rockland Luggage Sonic 20" ABS Spinner Carry On. The big is the right height and width but is one inch too deep for current U.S. airline rules. Macy's sells a Samsonite Silhouette Sphere bag for $460 that is marketed as meeting "carry-on requirements for most major airlines" but the bag is 15 inches wide, one inch too large.

Theoretically, if airlines follow this guideline "everyone should have a chance to store their carry-on bags on board aircraft of 120 seats or larger," the trade group said. Today, it's typical for the last 20 or so passengers to board to be forced to check their bags at the gate because the bins are already full.

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Nine major international airlines will soon introduce the guideline into their operations. Chris Goater, a spokesman for the transport association, said they are: Avianca, Azul, Caribbean Airlines, Cathay Pacific, China Eastern, China Southern, Emirates, Lufthansa and Qatar.

"It's certainly not mandatory," Goater said.

No U.S. airlines have yet signed on, but Goater expects more carriers to quickly do so. The suggested size was just unveiled publicly Tuesday at a meeting of global airline CEOs in Miami.

The airlines said they are working with several large luggage manufacturers including Samsonite, Delsey and Tumi but none have yet signed on. Bags with new labels, designating them as "Cabin OK," are expected to be in stores by the end of the year.

Airline consultant Robert Mann said that if airlines did a better job of handling checked luggage, passengers wouldn't bring so many on the plane and fight for overhead bin space. Those $25 bag fees don't help either.

"They literally create a disincentive to play their game," Mann said.

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In the end, Mann said airlines will do very little  regardless of bag size  to separate frequent business travelers who account for the bulk of their revenue from their suitcases.

Associated Press
Keelin Berry brings food to a table at Smokey Bones in Mount Prospect on Thursday, July 9, 2015, for a family and friends event. The restaurant officially opens on Monday, July 13. (Jose M. Osorio, Chicago Tribune)

Smokey Bones is staging what its CEO is calling a "rebirth" in its second attempt to grow into a national casual dining chain.

The name Smokey Bones Bar & Grill might be familiar to some, but the vibe has changed. Its newest location, which opens Monday in Mount Prospect, has sleek booths, wood beams and more of an industrial look than the "rustic, whispering pines feel" the chain started with, according to CEO Christopher Artinian.

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Smokey Bones first opened in 1999 as part of Darden Restaurants, better known for chains like Red Lobster. Darden hoped to develop Smokey Bones into a national brand but by 2007 decided to sell the chain and focus on growing its other restaurants. Darden shut 54 locations  including ones in Aurora, Champaign and Schaumburg  and sold the remaining 73 to Sun Capital Partners for about $80 million. Sun Capital, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based private equity group, invests in a variety of businesses including other restaurant chains like Bar Louie, Boston Market, Friendly's and Johnny Rockets.

Now Smokey Bones is moving ahead with a revitalization that began before Artinian came on board as CEO in 2012. Artinian's background suggests diners are in for a more upscale experience. After all, he got into the restaurant business at Morton's, working his way up and ultimately serving as the steak restaurant's CEO from 2010 until 2012.

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Artinian readily admits that Smokey Bones was not going to thrive with barbecue alone. For one thing, regional barbecue tastes are well defined in much of the country. Plus, even if people like barbecue, they tend to treat themselves to it less often than they go to other types of restaurants.

"We're not going to win the race just at barbecue," Artinian said. "While barbecue is a great trend, we like to say it just really doesn't define us. It's certainly the basis of our roots."

So the chain broadened the menu. Ribs and smoked chicken wings are still mainstays, but the lineup now includes a wider variety of meals like salads, and more signature drinks. The company also added Ziosk tablets at each table. They're not meant to eliminate waitstaff, Artinian said, but to let people reorder drinks and play some games. Diners can also pay with credit cards on the device.

The Peabody, Mass., location that opened in March was the company's first new restaurant in more than eight years and quickly became one of the top five performers in the chain, Artinian said. Now it is returning to the Chicago area with a 6,500-square-foot spot in Randhurst Village, the redeveloped Randhurst Mall location in Mount Prospect, followed by a third opening this year in Pennsylvania.

For now, the company's growth is focused where it already has some operations. Artinian expects to open four to six more restaurants in 2016, possibly including another one in the Chicago market. Ultimately he thinks the chain could have hundreds of locations. But after seeing other chains struggle, including Smokey Bones itself, Artinian is leading with caution.

"We're taking a very disciplined approach to how we grow the business to ensure that we are opening restaurants correctly and that we're executing at a high level before we really accelerate growth," he said. "There's no reason why, theoretically, there's not a Smokey Bones in every market across the country."

Smokey Bones is the third-largest chain in the full-service barbecue segment behind Famous Dave's and Sonny's BBQ. Its sales rose 2.5 percent to $178.2 million in 2014, data from Technomic show. Overall, sales in that segment rose 3.1 percent last year, while the number of restaurants grew 3.7 percent to 922, according to Technomic.

The average patron spends $20, including food and drinks. Alcohol used to account for less than 5 percent of the sales mix and is now about 20 percent of sales, Artinian said. Dinner is still the busiest time, but the late-night business is growing at a double-digit clip.

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One area of concern for Artinian and other casual dining operators is lunch. Chains like Chipotle and Shake Shack are rapidly expanding to lure diners for faster meals.

"Casual dining is in a fight right now, there's no doubt," Artinian said.

Smokey Bones' location in Mount Prospect shows the pressure in the industry. Full-service restaurants nearby include Blackfinn and e+o Food and Drink, both just across the street. Other restaurants in the shopping area include Buffalo Wild Wings and Five Guys. Plus an Outback Steakhouse is under construction.

jwohl@tribpub.com

Twitter @jessicawohl
Food Network host and longtime Spam fan Sunny Anderson hosts the kick-off of the Spamerican National Food Truck Tour on April 15, 2015, in Los Angeles. She appears at the Taste of Chicago on Friday, July 10, to whip up coconut Spam spears with spicy pineapple chutney, a recipe she created to take the sometimes maligned meat mashup to new culinary heights. (Spam)

Spam, Spam, Spam, wonderful Spam.

Famously parodied by British comedy troupe Monty Python, Spam is likely not at the top of the must-eat list for Taste of Chicago visitors this weekend.

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But the makers of the enduring canned, precooked ham product are looking to win over new foodie fans during the five-day event with a food truck, free samples and some unique recipes cooked up by celebrity chefs.

Food Network host and longtime Spam fan Sunny Anderson is appearing at the Taste on Friday to whip up coconut Spam spears with spicy pineapple chutney, a recipe she created to take the sometimes maligned meat mashup to new culinary heights.

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"When you grew up with Spam, there's a lot of recipes that people slide it into," Anderson said. "It's really delicious."

Other samples at the Taste will include Spam musubi croissants, musubi tacos and Spam fries. Chicago chef Kevin Hickey will be with the Spam truck Sunday afternoon to demo his own recipe  a Spam and jack cheese sandwich.

Chicago is the last stop of a national tour for the Spam truck, which spanned 12 cities over three months. While it was the first-ever road trip for the truck, the venerable Hormel product is certainly well traveled.

It was introduced in 1937, and more than 100 million pounds of Spam were shipped overseas during World War II to feed Allied troops. That helped Spam become a culinary staple around the world in places like Hawaii, where its popularity has never waned.

Hormel has sold 7 billion cans of Spam worldwide, attesting to its widespread appeal.

Often dismissed as a mystery meat, Spam is made with two cuts of pork, salt, water, potato starch, sugar and sodium nitrite. Contrary to popular belief, it does not have an eternal shelf life  there is an actual "best by" date stamped on the can.

"It's got six ingredients," Anderson said. "There's no mystery what's flavorful about it. It's been around for ages. It's a constant pantry item for people."

Though Monty Python has been singing its praises since a seminal 1970s television skit, Spam still gets a bad name in some quarters. Inspiring the name for unsolicited email probably doesn't help Spam's reputation, but Anderson is suggesting that uninitiated visitors to Grant Park this weekend take a taste.

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"I think it's fear of the unknown, and in food, I practice never having that," she said. "If there's something to try, I'm trying it. You put it in front of me and I'm going to eat it."

rchannick@tribpub.com

Twitter @RobertChannick
NEW YORK  Tourists on holiday in Greece offered advice to others Monday: Bring extra euros.



Several reported having some anxious moments over the weekend thanks to empty ATMs and merchants refusing credit cards, but the inconveniences eased as ATMs were replenished Monday.



"We were finally able to get cash out of an ATM today, thankfully, since we are running out of euros we got in the U.S.," said Anthony Adornato, a college professor from Syracuse, New York, heading from Athens to the island of Kea with three other Americans. "We thought we would have to start rationing, but luckily found an ATM that worked after two days of having no luck with others."



They'd tried five ATMs before finding one with cash, and many merchants had refused to take their credit cards.



Richard Joplin, a realtor in Austin, Texas, arrived in Athens Monday with his two daughters for a 10-day holiday. "So far we have only been inconvenienced with restaurants and cabs only wanting cash," he said. "I brought euros with me for that reason." But he didn't bring enough to last the trip, and hoped he'd be able to use credit cards and ATMs later in the trip.



But others reported no problems. "So far so good because we've only been here for a day and came with a lot of euros," said Chloe O'Brien, 21, of New York City, traveling with her grandma and two aunts to Athens and Mykonos.



Laura Simoes, visiting Kefalonia from New Hampshire, said she had "neither seen, nor felt, any impact from the economic crisis. ... Nearly every market, restaurant, etcetera has taken our credit card and never suggested they'd rather have cash."



Greeks can only withdraw 60 euros ($67) per account daily from banks, but the limits do not apply to foreigners.



The tour group company smarTours, which is sending several groups to Greece in a few weeks, is not seeing cancellations and is simply advising clients to bring euros.



"It is our understanding that our various suppliers are preparing for shortages of goods by stocking up," said smarTours co-CEO Greg Geronemus. "At this time, we do not believe that travelers are at risk, but this is a fluid situation and we are monitoring it very closely."



The Tauck tour company currently has a cruise group finishing up with three nights in Athens. "We were in touch with our hotel and our tour director earlier today, and both report that daily life is going on normally," said spokesman Tom Armstrong.



Jim Christoforidis, a doctor in Chicago who was born in Greece and who's planning to travel there later this summer with his wife to visit family, said they'll "probably withdraw a substantial amount of euros" to bring. The biggest issue, he said, will be safeguarding the cash.



"Because we'll be staying with family, it's less of a concern," he said. "But we've heard stories of people staying in hotels dealing with theft."



Nikolitsa Katsoulias, of Ottawa, Canada, who is planning a trip with her fiance the last two weeks of July to Athens, Corfu and Zakynthos, booked the trip on a credit card that allows cancellations of airfare and other prepaid travel, "but we decided to go ahead with our plans anyway. After speaking to family in Greece, they advised us to bring extra euros with us and not to worry. We are going to take a leap of faith and trust that we will still enjoy our two weeks with the possibility that we may hit some bumps along the way."



Travelers with standard trip insurance probably are not covered if they elect to cancel a trip simply because of economic turmoil. "A traveler would need a covered reason to cancel and economic events are not covered explicitly in our U.S. travel insurance plans," said Luke Hilty, global head of travel products at AIG. "If someone has a cancel for any reason policy, they would likely have some coverage under that provision."



Newlywed Gina Cherwin, who works in public relations in New York, planned a honeymoon in Greece with her husband for September. "We looked at each other this morning and said, 'Here we've been planning for six months the trip of a lifetime and what if we aren't able to go?'"



Because their wedding gifts were mostly contributions to the honeymoon, most of the trip is prepaid. "I was looking forward to doing my part to bolster the economy and eat all the amazing food and see all the amazing sights," she said. "Hopefully this is a short-term crisis."



Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
It has been far too many years since the Woke theology interlaced its canons within the fabric of the Indoctrination Realm, so it is nigh time to ask: Does this Representative Republic continue, as a functioning society of a self-governed people, by contending with the unusual, self absorbed dictates of the Woke, and their vast array of Victimhood scenarios?

Yes, the Religion of Woke must continue; there are so many groups of underprivileged, underserved, a direct result of unrelenting Inequity; they deserve everything.

No; the Woke fools must be toppled from their self-anointed pedestal; a functioning society of a good Constitutional people cannot withstand this level of "existential" favoritism as it exists now.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with Jesse Ruiz, interim Chicago Public Schools CEO, right, speaks to the media on July 1. (Nancy Stone, Chicago Tribune)

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools officials would have you think the financial catastrophe they face can be entirely blamed on a scapegoat named Springfield.

"We wouldn't be here if Springfield were prioritizing education funding," CPS interim CEO Jesse Ruiz said Thursday, as Chicago Teachers Union members at City Hall protested $200 million in budget cuts.

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"These cuts would not be necessary if Springfield was doing its job," Emanuel said Wednesday as he proposed a rescue plan.

"Chicago teachers, Chicago taxpayers and Chicago kids are being treated as second-class citizens by the state of Illinois.  Our kids and teachers deserve better from political leaders," Emanuel said.

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Gentlemen, stop.

The problems facing Chicago schools were not created by Springfield. They were created over two decades by Chicago school administrators and school board members, by people who were appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Own it.

The key decisions that created this financial mess were orchestrated by Chicago officials  often, yes, abetted by Springfield politicians.

In 1995, Chicago school officials convinced the legislature to let CPS skip contributions to the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund for a decade. The pensions were flush at the time. The stock market was roaring. Guess what happened when the stock market stopped roaring.

Even as CPS skipped pension payments, it developed an addiction to borrowing. A 2013 Tribune investigation of CPS' finances showed the district had borrowed more than $10 billion through general obligation bonds since 1996, and $1.5 billion of that went to schools that were less than 60 percent full. Example: Roughly a quarter of unrestricted state aid CPS received in 2011 went to pay down debt, not to resources for kids. That percentage dedicated to debt continues to rise.

From 2003 through 2007, when school board President David Vitale was chief administrative officer, CPS engaged in risky debt financing practices, more aggressively than any other school system in the country. The Tribune reported last week that the gambles could cost CPS as much as $228 million; the district has set aside only $174 million to cover those costs.

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An Ernst & Young report released two weeks ago pointed out that CPS has sustained $500 million operating deficits the past four years. Last year, the school board counted on 14 months of revenue to balance a 12-month budget. It was a terrible financial gimmick, but it postponed this reckoning until after this year's mayoral election.

Springfield was a willing accomplice to some of the disastrous decisions of recent decades. But what the schools face today falls squarely on the actions of city and CPS leaders.

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Emanuel and his school board  he appoints the members  are angry that lawmakers of late have refused to bail out Chicago schools. Emanuel in 2013 sought to extend a partial pension holiday for CPS, but the Illinois House killed the bid after then-Gov. Pat Quinn threatened to veto it.

If the Chicago schools can avoid insolvency  a huge "if"  Springfield will be part of the solution. There's talk of changing the school aid formula, which could benefit CPS. There's talk of the state putting money into the Chicago Teachers Retirement Fund, which would benefit CPS. Emanuel and school board officials have good reason to pursue those changes.

But even if Springfield fulfilled every request from the mayor and the school board, CPS would still face a massive deficit.

So city taxpayers face a likely property tax hike. The school board is making $200 million in budget cuts and will probably have to make more. The teachers are being asked to make a much bigger contribution to their pensions. And the school board is orchestrating even more borrowing.

Chicago blaming Springfield? Like Bonnie blaming Clyde.
Chicago Public Schools officials will not offer teachers an additional year on their current contract, saying the district cannot afford a built-in 3 percent pay hike.

"We were optimistic that solutions to the Board's structural financial challenges would have been achieved by now and a well-deserved increase for CPS staff would have been possible," interim district chief Jesse Ruiz wrote in a letter to Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis on Thursday. "Regrettably that is not the case."

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The district's decision means negotiations will continue to replace a deal that expires June 30.

"In the coming weeks, we hope to work with you on the most pressing fiscal issue facing CPS  the continued inequity in pension funding," Ruiz wrote. "CPS students and Chicago taxpayers continue to carry the burden of this inequity, and it has come at a great cost. In the coming weeks, we hope you will join us in Springfield on working to reform this inequity."

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Under a provision in the current agreement, the Chicago Board of Education could have proposed an extension of the existing contract through June 30, 2016, with a minimum 3 percent pay boost. The union would have had 30 days to accept or reject such an offer.

The 3 percent hike would have cost the district an additional $105 million, according to district spokesman Bill McCaffrey.

In the letter to the CTU, Ruiz wrote: "Our financial challenges are well known, and while the Board of Education recognizes that CPS teachers and staff have worked extremely hard during the last three years, and our students have achieved great academic success as a result of these efforts, the Board unfortunately cannot extend this contract."

The CTU's Lewis said the district's move shows how little teachers are valued by the district. She also poked at the scandal enveloping CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who is on paid leave amid a federal investigation into a $20.5 million no-bid contract the district gave to a firm for which she formerly worked.

"It would have behooved the Board to offer a fourth year of the contract, because in light of recent events, that's a group that needs as much good news as possible right now," Lewis said in a statement.

"By refusing to offer a 3 percent raise, the Board is clearly letting educators know that it doesn't place even a modicum of value on the work done in schools every day for the children and families of the city of Chicago."

Lewis called the district's financial muddle a problem of its own making, citing the contract to SUPES Academy that has interested federal investigators as well as overruns on a janitorial contract.

While Lewis' statement indicated the union would have been happy to accept an extension, CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey earlier this week said leadership wasn't sure it would go for one if it were offered.

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"Money is not our membership's biggest concern right now," Sharkey said.

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The union's current contract was reached after a seven-day strike in 2012. Talks this time around were slowed by the runoff election between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, Lewis' hand-picked candidate.

The union used the election to air contract demands that included limits to class sizes, increases in teacher preparation time, a reduction of paperwork mandates and additional school counselors and nurses.

Decades of borrowing and delayed pension payments have put the district in a $1.1 billion hole. The district is faced with an array of difficult options that are playing out against Gov. Bruce Rauner's efforts to rein in pension obligations and labor unions.

Sharkey said a pay increase isn't necessarily the primary issue if teachers are faced with layoffs, additional school closings or diminishing resources.

"If the district has no money to put a counselor in a school where a half-dozen kids get shot, or not enough money to have the counselor who's there actually counsel, then they don't have the money for a 3 percent raise, do they?" he said.

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Twitter @PerezJr
In the first dramatic ritual of his installation as Chicago's next archbishop, Blase Cupich on Monday night will knock on the front doors of Holy Name Cathedral, where predecessor Cardinal Francis George, auxiliary bishops, and other civic and religious leaders will wait to greet him.

Cupich will be installed as Chicago's ninth archbishop Tuesday. But celebrations and rituals begin Monday and end Wednesday, with morning and evening prayer services. All of the services will take place at Holy Name. Attendance is limited to those who received invitations and tickets.

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At the 7 p.m. ceremony, called the Rite of Reception, George will preside over the liturgy of the word and Cupich will deliver the homily. Prior to the service, there will be a procession of parish representatives.

"This is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years," said Todd Williamson, director of divine worship for the Chicago Archdiocese. "What it comes from is the bishop knocking with his crosier (staff)."

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Cupich will pound with a rubber mallet. Monsignor Dan Mayall, Holy Names' pastor and rector, along with George and the auxiliary bishops of the archdiocese will open the doors to welcome him. Once inside, Cupich will receive the archdiocesan stole, or mantle, and a small replica of the cathedral's custom-made wooden crucifix, which he will kiss and use to bless those there to greet him.

After processing up to the sanctuary, civic leaders including Gov. Pat Quinn, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Croatia's consul general in Chicago, Jelena Grcic-Polic, will file up to shake his hand. (Cupich is Croatian-American.) Leaders from other religious traditions also will welcome Cupich to the archdiocese, including Bishop Demetrios of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, Rabbi Herman Schaalman of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and Chicago Episcopal Bishop Jeffrey Lee.

More than 80 members of the Cupich family will attend the ceremony, seated near the front.

"We don't see these rites every day," Williamson said. "They're small, but major in the life of the diocese."

Monday's reception is one of the most symbolic, he added. "There's a knock to be let in, to be received. Like any knock on the door, you want that door to be opened to you."

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The governor's plan to withhold state money that helps poor residents pay their electric and gas bills was met with concern and resistance Thursday at a hearing in Chicago.

Seniors, people with disabilities and parents of young children shared stories of hardship at the Loop hearing, saying in written or oral testimony that they rely on the money to heat and cool their homes during frigid Illinois winters and sweltering summers. The program, they said, also helps preserve basic decencies such as the ability to cook, refrigerate food, wash clothes and take a hot shower.

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"We live in a state that experiences, at times, some severe weather conditions, so it is a health and safety issue," said Dalitso Sulamoyo, president and CEO of the Illinois Association of Community Action Agencies, which represents those that administer the low-income energy assistance program.

The move comes as part of the evolving budget drama that has consumed the state. Gov. Bruce Rauner announced plans earlier this month to suspend the state-funded portion of the program July 1 as part of a sweeping proposal of spending cuts that included programs that help the poor with child care costs and help the elderly stay out of nursing homes.

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The Republican governor has billed the cuts as a way to show how he will deal with a deficit-ridden Democratic state budget that has yet to reach his desk. They also represent an attempt to pressure some Democratic lawmakers to agree to the pro-business, anti-union agenda he has made a condition of getting a budget agreement.

Democrats have approved a spending plan that is at least $3 billion short. Rauner's office said in a statement that the suspension of the state portion of the low-income energy assistance program "is one step the administration is taking to build reserves."

The program, which helped lower energy bills for about 400,000 Illinois households last year, is funded through federal dollars and state fees that are collected from Illinois utility customers.

Participating utilities include Commonwealth Edison and Peoples Gas, which distribute electricity and gas to Chicago customers.

Residential customers pay a 48-cent monthly fee on their electric bills and gas bills. Commercial and industrial customers are charged a usage-based fee. In total, the state program has pulled in $90 to $95 million a year, representing about a third of the program's funding, according to the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, which distributes the money to community agencies.

Although utility customers will continue to pay fees every month, that money will now be held by the state, "in the event they need to be reallocated to fill the massive budget hole in the Madigan-Cullerton budget," department spokeswoman Lyndsey Walters said.

That reallocation, however, would require legislative approval.

"What good does it do to suspend this when you can't use it without our authorization?" Democratic Sen. Terry Link of Waukegan asked Michael Hoffman, the chief operating officer of the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, during the hearing. "You're trying to hold a political hammer over our heads."

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Hoffman said that the length and nature of the suspension would depend on budget negotiations, adding at a later point that none of the proposed cuts were being taken lightly or without regard to impact.

"We are suspending the money at the direction of the Governor's office in order to maintain flexibility," Hoffman said.

At the same time, Republican Sen. Matt Murphy of Palatine questioned how the move was substantively different from a Senate bill that lawmakers agreed to earlier this year that would have allowed the governor to sweep money from dozens of state funds, including the energy assistance fund.

That effort was later put on hold.

The state created supplemental funding for the energy assistance program in the late '90s, finding that low-income households will forgo payments on their utilities if they are unable to also afford necessities such as food, shelter and medical care. Utility customers absorb the cost of unpaid bills through higher rates.

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The program, which Sulamoyo said is broke because of higher demand, will still receive about $165 to $170 million from the federal government. But that will not be until October or November.

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Sulamoyo said the elimination in state funding could jeopardize efforts this summer to help keep air conditioners running and will likely delay enrollment in the fall, possibly leaving vulnerable residents without heat this winter. As it is, the program is only able to cover 38 percent of eligible Illinois households, according to Sulamoyo.

The program serves households that are at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty guideline. For a family of four that would mean a yearly income up to about $36,000, Sulamoyo said.

Lillian Drummond, 93, a community activist who benefits from the energy assistance program, said she relies on it to supplement her fixed income. Drummond said she has helped others who have struggled to keep their gas and electricity running, sometimes having to choose between those services and buying medicine or food.

"It's easy for those of you to say cut programs that support low-income households, if you have never had to walk in their shoes," Drummond said. "Being a senior is scary (if) you're on a fixed income."

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SPRINGFIELD  As Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democrats who control the General Assembly dig in for a summer of battling over the budget, the pressure points to cut a deal before state services are interrupted remain many weeks away.

Democrats have passed a spending plan, but so far they're refusing to send it to Rauner out of fears he'd veto it. Democrats acknowledge their version is more than $3 billion short, and Rauner has strongly criticized them for what he says is trying to force a tax increase without first making changes. Before discussing a tax hike, the governor wants lawmakers to approve a series of his plans that would make it harder for workers to win workers' compensation claims, limit big-dollar damage awards in civil lawsuits and scale back the influence of labor unions.

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The new state financial year starts July 1, and without a budget agreement, Rauner has no spending authority to keep state government running. But a shutdown wouldn't happen right away  the more important deadline comes in mid-July when the Illinois comptroller is scheduled to issue the first government worker paychecks.

If a budget isn't in place by then, many legal questions arise about whether the comptroller's office has the authority to cut checks or if a court order would be required to spend the money, as employee unions have pursued in past budget standoffs.

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The next cliff comes Aug. 10, when state aid payments to schools are scheduled to go out. While school districts with extra cash on hand could likely operate without state funding, a worst-case scenario could lead to some poorer schools unable to open their doors when classes start.

"Between the middle of July and middle of August, there will be significant budget pressure to continue to operate the state's core services," said Rep. Ron Sandack, R-Downers Grove. "It wouldn't surprise me if we saw severe downsizing, temporary layoffs or permanent layoffs."

Also swirling in the budget mire is a $634 million pension payment that Chicago Public Schools must make June 30. Some lawmakers question whether the city can make good on the bill or if the state will have to pony up some cash to help or make other changes to ease the burden. Asked whether CPS has the money to cover that payment, a district spokesman could not provide an answer either Friday or Monday.

Rauner has said his office is working on a contingency plan and weighing "all possible scenarios" should the budget quagmire stretch on for months. But he declined to go into detail during a Sunday news conference, saying he was "optimistic" a deal could be reached to avert a shutdown. A spokesman for Republican Comptroller Leslie Munger, who was appointed by Rauner in January, was unable to provide more information Monday.

Some expenditures are automatic and won't be caught up in the back and forth, chief among them the annual payment for employee pensions as well as debt payments. Federal consent decrees also ensure that most operations in the state's child welfare agency would continue.

All of this is hardly uncharted territory in Illinois, where lawmakers have now gone into overtime nine times in the last quarter-century. Past gridlock saw the state operate without a finished budget for months. The longest stretch came in 2007, when then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich went to battle against fellow Democrats to push for a major increase in education spending and a massive expansion of state-subsidized health care. House Speaker Michael Madigan favored a smaller budget.

That year, lawmakers sent the governor a one-month temporary budget. A permanent one wasn't signed until Aug. 23. School districts received their payments several days late but largely were unaffected by the delay, according to state education officials. Some banks offered interest-free loans for districts that didn't have the cash to operate without state money. A similar temporary budget was enacted to pay worker salaries during nearly eight weeks of overtime under Blagojevich in 2004.

Rauner has indicated he's ready for a lengthy battle and is prepared to take his fight to the people, which is expected to take the form of a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign that could begin within days. Madigan already has compared Rauner to Blagojevich in how the new governor deals with the General Assembly. Rauner, meanwhile, counters that the one constant in the state's budget turmoil is Madigan.

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The personal attacks indicate a resolution isn't likely to happen any time soon, even as Madigan has House members returning to the Capitol on Thursday. At this point, coming back to town has less to do with hashing out an agreement than giving Democrats a venue to lash out at Rauner over the expected attack ads.

On Monday, Rauner used the absence of lawmakers at the Capitol to propel his public-relations campaign through a series of one-on-one interviews with television and radio stations across the state. The governor continued to bash the Democrats for "working for the political class" rather than the middle class, and he singled out Madigan, whose law firm is one of the city's most successful commercial property tax-appeals firms.

"You look at the property taxes. We basically, us and New Jersey, have the highest property taxes in America. I wonder who makes money from high property taxes? I wonder? You know what? Do a little homework and people will figure it out," Rauner told WGN-AM 720. "The insiders are the ones benefiting in Illinois, the political class: Speaker Madigan, (Senate) President (John) Cullerton, their allies, and that's what we've got to change."

Rauner also indicated that the fate of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's wish list, including a bill to revamp a payment schedule to avoid the full force of a $550 million increase in police and fire pensions, is part of the overall budget negotiations. Rauner said Emanuel should be part of the negotiations with top lawmakers, but the Republican governor stopped short of saying he would veto the mayor's pension bill that has passed both chambers and is on hold as part of the stalemate.

"We need to stop kicking the can down the road on our pensions, No. 1. And No. 2, we need to come together and meet on a bipartisan basis to discuss true structural change to the pensions that are fair to employees but also more affordable to taxpayers. And that's critical. We're going to focus on that this month," the governor told WBEZ-FM 91.5.

Rauner acknowledged his need "to get our message out to the people of Illinois" but repeatedly declined to discuss his coming TV ad campaign. "Speculating about the future on messaging is not productive right now," he said.

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The tense political situation, coupled with the state's multibillion-dollar deficit, has left some lawmakers with little hope that even stopgap budget measures could be worked out.

"One-month budgets have been done in the past, but the circumstances are very different," said Sen. Heather Steans, D-Chicago. "We're dealing with less revenue, there's been a change in dynamics. It doesn't mean it can't be done, but it's more of a problem."

Republican Sen. Matt Murphy of Palatine said the focus so far has remained on crafting a complete budget, and that it's up to Democrats to compromise "sooner rather than later."

"The piecemeal approach hasn't been something that we've been talking about," Murphy said. "I really feel like the ball is in (the Democrats') court at this point."

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A Cullerton spokeswoman said Senate Democrats are trying to craft legislation that might pave the way for a compromise, namely on Rauner's push to freeze property taxes and enact workers' compensation reform. Whether that can be done before the start of the new budget year is unclear.

"These are things that were on the table before they declared that negotiations were over, and we will keep working on them and bring a counter-proposal," Cullerton spokeswoman Rikeesha Phelon said.

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Others say there's no need to consider a temporary budget because lawmakers already approved one, and it's now up to Rauner to manage it as he sees fit.

"We have a budget that passed," Madigan spokesman Steve Brown said.

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The Illinois Supreme Court's decision to toss out the state's pension reform law dealt a triple blow to Mayor Rahm Emanuel's difficult task of shoring up Chicago's shaky finances.

First, the ruling could nullify pension deals the mayor struck last year with unions representing the city's laborers and municipal workers, sending Emanuel back to the bargaining table.

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Second, the decision weakens Emanuel's negotiating position as he seeks pension concessions from Chicago police and fire unions, since the court made clear that public employees' retirement benefits cannot be diminished once they've been granted.

And third, the ruling adds another major problem to a stack that's already piled high at the Capitol, leaving less political oxygen as Emanuel tries to breathe life into his wish list of multiple fixes for City Hall and Chicago Public Schools pensions that includes a city-owned casino.

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While Emanuel already privately had braced top City Hall aides for the possibility of such a state Supreme Court ruling, the decision thickens the financial fog that hangs over the start of the mayor's second term next week.

Ald. Patrick O'Connor, Emanuel's City Council floor leader, said "we kind of assume" the court ruling will undermine the changes to the city's pension agreements with laborers and municipal workers. The ruling is "not what we wanted, but it's what we expected, so we just have to go to Plan B," said O'Connor, 40th.

"Basically the court is saying you can solve it, but the only way you can solve it is by throwing more money at it, and that's just not in the cards," O'Connor said. "The real issue is we're talking about amounts of money no taxing and revenue gets close to, in what's available to us, so there really needs to be a rethinking in how this gets done. So, it's going to be an interesting year."

Existing pension deals

Despite his ally's acknowledgment that the city likely will have to rework the laborers and municipal worker pension deals, Emanuel publicly sought to keep hope alive that the 2014 law he passed might meet a different fate.

The mayor's argument was spelled out by Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton. In an interview Friday, the city's top attorney argued the changes enhance retirement benefits because absent the reforms, both pension systems would become insolvent and the funds simply would be unable to pay full benefits to retired workers.

"Our legislation does not diminish or impair," Patton said, noting it requires the city to dramatically step up city contributions to the funds. "It's just the opposite. It preserves and protects."

"Our argument is that this bill overwhelmingly benefits the participants in these plans," Patton added. "There's no question that they are better off with this legislation than they were without it."

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The city pension measure reduced and in some years eliminated cost-of-living adjustments. It also requires workers to pay more toward their retirements, while the state pension law actually reduced those contributions by a small amount. In exchange for the cost-of-living reductions and increased employee contributions, the city agreed to raise the amount it puts into the pension funds until it hits $473 million a year in 2020. Of that amount, $250 million would likely come from increased taxes.

But those changes to the city pension systems are being challenged in court by some unions and retirees, and their arguments are essentially the same as the ones made in the state case: the Illinois Constitution prohibits those reductions in benefits. The state Supreme Court ruling held that protection as absolute, no matter what financial woes the government faces, potentially dealing Emanuel's pension law a fatal blow as City Hall fights the challenge in court.

The Supreme Court ruling "makes clear that the statutes' change which eliminates the automatic increases in some years and slices them in half in others is not constitutional," said Clint Krislov, who has sued the city on behalf of retired workers affected by the changes, referring to the reductions in cost-of-living adjustments. "We'll ask the court to just rule that way."

Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, said it's clear the ruling weakens City Hall's case.

"There's no room for the city of Chicago to continue down the path that focuses on benefit reductions," Martire said. "You cannot do that."

Police, fire, teacher pensions

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Negotiations to put the city's police and fire pension funds on the path to solvency mostly had been on hold pending the Supreme Court's decision on the state's reforms.

Now, those talks will prove more difficult for Emanuel, with the police and fire unions now having the clear upper hand. Chicago faces a $550 million increase in payments next year to police and fire pension funds, part of a state law that required increased contributions from the city so the retirement accounts would be 90 percent funded by 2040.

"What the Illinois Supreme Court ruling makes clear is what everyone has known for some time: Government employers are not in a very strong position when they say they need relief from a problem they created by not funding pensions," said Martin Malin, a professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law.

The mayor will likely be sitting across the table from police and fire union leaders whose members are in no mood to give in, Malin said. "Depending on what they want to do," he said, "it certainly seems likely (union leaders) will be hearing from members who don't see a need to make concessions."

Thomas Ryan, president of Firefighters Unions Local 2, declined to discuss possible ways to fix the pensions or when the sides might meet to discuss the situation. "This takes us back to square one," said Ryan, whose union backed Emanuel for re-election. "Now that we know the final answer, I think it's a chance for everyone to regroup and figure out how to move forward."

Dean Angelo, president of Fraternal Order of Police Union Local 7, issued a statement saying he wasn't surprised by the court decision but did not respond to questions about what impact the ruling would have on negotiations.

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In addition to City Hall pensions, the retirement fund for public school teachers also is woefully short after years of deferred payments from the Chicago Board of Education that state lawmakers allowed. As a result, CPS is facing steep increases in the payments it must make to fund teacher pensions under state law. Even so, the teacher pensions would not be 90 percent funded until 2054.

"Clearly the law of the land, the Supreme Court, says that avenue for quote-unquote reform is off-limits according to the constitution," Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey said Friday, in a dig at Emanuel's oft-used term for pension concessions. "They're going to need to look elsewhere in order to try to find solutions."

Springfield solutions?

As he tries to avoid major tax increases, there is a less painful political path Emanuel could pursue: Pushing pension payments off even further into the future.

Because the increased police, fire and teacher pension payments are required by state law, Emanuel could ask lawmakers to delay the steep jump in payments. So instead of having to come up with $550 million next year for police and fire pensions, the city would have to come up with a lesser amount and make up the difference down the road.

Ald. Will Burns, a top Emanuel ally, said extending the ramped up payments is one of the few options the city and state lawmakers are left with after the court ruling.

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"I think ultimately, we're going to have to find revenue as a city to pay into the pension systems, but the ramp that was created as a function of state law is not protected by the Illinois Constitution," said Burns, 4th. "We need to do the ramp to get to 90 percent funding, but do it in such a way that we don't bankrupt the city, we don't imperil critical programs while we maintain our obligation to our pensioners."

Before Friday's ruling, Emanuel already faced the daunting task of persuading lawmakers to help solidify Chicago's finances while grappling with the state's own budget woes and a new governor pursuing a pro-business, anti-union and austerity agenda.

Now, there will be even more Capitol commotion for Emanuel to cut through as the General Assembly will be back to square one in finding a way to alleviate its own massive pension hole, which approaches $105 billion. Emanuel already had sought a city-owned casino to help pay for the police and fire pensions and major changes in how education is funded in the state to free up more tax revenue to aid CPS' budget woes.

On Friday, the mayor acknowledged that it's "not an illegitimate short-term" concern that the pension ruling is likely to pull the focus in Springfield away from Chicago issues he hopes to push through the legislature.

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Emanuel will be lobbying lawmakers at a time when Chicago has seen its creditworthiness plummeting to just two notches above junk status, the result of the city's $20 billion pension shortfall and borrowing practices that the mayor has said he'll change. Bond rating agencies have warned of further damage to the city's financial condition if the courts reject the city's pension changes.

When Moody's Investors Service in February lowered the city's debt rating, it stated that a further downgrade could be caused by a ruling of "the Illinois Supreme Court that the state of Illinois' pension reform package is unconstitutional, which, depending on the court's rationale, could increase the risk that the city's own pension reform would be overturned."

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After the ruling Friday, Moody's issued a statement saying that analysts were reviewing the decision to assess "its potential impact on the credit condition of the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago, public universities, and other Illinois municipalities and school districts."

Chicago Tribune's Juan Perez Jr. contributed.

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Senate President John Cullerton, right, seen here with House Speaker Michael Madigan on Feb. 4, 2015, is revising his proposed pension reform plan. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune)

SPRINGFIELD  Lawmakers returned to the Capitol on Tuesday facing renewed pressure to overhaul the state's employee pension system after the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a law aimed at sharply curbing benefits, with Senate President John Cullerton proposing an updated version of a plan he floated two years ago.

While details are still being worked out, Cullerton's plan amounts to giving government workers a choice between keeping more generous yearly cost-of-living increases or continuing to count pay raises in calculating their retirement benefits.

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Cullerton, D-Chicago, said he planned to approach Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and legislative leaders with a broad outline in an effort to build support to pass the legislation during the final weeks of the spring session that's scheduled to end May 31.

It's a tight timeline and the proposal faces numerous political hurdles, but the effort demonstrates what's at stake as lawmakers seek to rein in $105 billion in pension debt that has led to ballooning yearly payments and forced cuts in other state programs to cover the cost.

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"We wasted two years with an unconstitutional bill that saved us zero," Cullerton said in an interview Tuesday, referring to the law the state's high court tossed out Friday. "We all know what zero is."

The proposal emerged the same day Democratic Speaker Michael Madigan convened the entire House for a hearing that pushed back on changes Rauner wants to limit big-dollar lawsuit damage awards as part of his pro-business, anti-union agenda.

Cullerton's pension plan is aimed at working around a clause in the Illinois Constitution that says once someone is in a retirement system, they've entered into "an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired."

It's that clause on which unions based their legal challenge of the pension changes lawmakers approved in 2013, arguing that the language amounts to an ironclad guarantee that pension benefits cannot be cut. The state Supreme Court sided with workers, saying the state's dire budget troubles do not trump the constitution.

Justices appeared to offer little in the way of a path forward other than requiring the state to pay up, but Cullerton contends the ruling left open the possibility for changes to be made based on a theory in contract law called "consideration." Under that theory, Cullerton says, benefits can be scaled back, but only if workers agree to the changes and are given something in return.

As such, the plan Cullerton floated Tuesday calls for giving employees a choice about their retirement benefits. Under the first scenario, a worker could choose to not have future pay increases factored into their pensions. In exchange, they would receive an annual 3 percent compounded cost-of-living pay increase. If they chose to count pay raises toward their pensions, workers would receive lower annual cost-of-living increases that are not compounded over time.

It's a revamped version of a Cullerton proposal that passed the Senate in 2013 with union support that would have allowed employees and retirees to choose between compounded cost-of-living increases or health care benefits. That measure was never called for a vote in the House, as critics argued it would save about a third of the more sweeping proposal that ultimately became law but was struck down last week.

Changes to health care aren't on the table this time around, a nod to a state Supreme Court ruling last summer that all but spelled out the fate of the larger pension bill when justices declared that subsidized health care premiums for retired state employees are protected under the Illinois Constitution.

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Cullerton estimates his latest plan could save the state about $1 billion a year, a fraction of the pension system's overall debt, but savings he says could be spent elsewhere. Cullerton pitched the idea Tuesday before a group of lawmakers and Rauner officials examining the pension idea, but overall support remains unclear.

"We'll keep the Supreme Court decision close by," said Madigan spokesman Steve Brown. "It's an important topic that can't be ignored."

A Rauner spokesman declined to comment specifically on Cullerton's proposal, saying "the governor has his own pension plan but recognizes that he will need to work with the General Assembly to fix our pension problems, which he believes should include a constitutional referendum."

Rauner has proposed allowing veteran state workers to keep the current benefits they've earned through a certain date, then move them into a lower-paying benefit plan created for newer state workers. To survive a legal challenge, the governor wants lawmakers to put on the ballot a proposed constitutional amendment to clarify that future retirement benefits could be changed.

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Still, questions remain about whether a change in the constitution could be applied to current state workers. Even if lawmakers put the amendment on the ballot and voters approved it, such a change could take years to implement and would do little to address the state's pressing budget problems.

Sen. Bill Brady, R-Bloomington, said Rauner's plan would bring about more savings than the one put forth by Cullerton but said lawmakers may need to pass several plans in order to see which would withstand any legal tests. "You can do both and see which survives, if that's possible," said Brady, who sits on the pension overhaul group.

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Still, Brady acknowledged the difficulties ahead for any pension proposal as Rauner works to strike a sweeping budget deal that also incorporates everything from an overhaul to pensions and workers' compensation insurance to scaling back union powers.

"It all ties into the budget, the budget all ties into long-term economic growth and that all ties into workplace reforms," Brady said. "It's all got to be one, big, master plan because it's all one, big reorganization of the state's economic viability."

One piece of that larger plan was under scrutiny in the House Tuesday as Madigan summoned the chamber for a six-hour hearing on the state's civil lawsuit system. Rauner wants to limit avenues for multimillion-dollar damage awards in civil cases, something that has long been on the wish list of business groups. Madigan and his Democratic caucus, registering their reluctance, invited almost a dozen victims of medical malpractice and corporate negligence to give testimony in support of the current system. Business groups were excluded from the hearing.

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An American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union member wears a protest message on his shirt while rallying against the proposed pension legislation outside the at the Illinois Capitol in Springfield on May 23, 2012. (Seth Perlman, AP)

The Illinois Supreme Court's decision to strike down an attempt at pension reform has many saying Illinois has no choice but to raise taxes.

The state's pension system is underfunded by more than $100 billion, and beyond repair. When it comes to reforming the system, lawmakers' hands are tied. On Friday the court ruled that the retirement benefits offered on current workers' first day of employment can never be changed; only new hires can earn retirement benefits differently.

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So if changes can't be made, here is what Gov. Bruce Rauner should do: Lay off the entire state workforce, and close the pension system. Work with the General Assembly to open a different retirement plan for newly hired government workers, modeled after the nation's most popular retirement vehicle: the 401(k). Then offer to rehire state workers under the new retirement plan.

It won't be easy, and it won't happen overnight.

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State laws will need to be changed. Pension benefits earned to date will need to be paid.

The government unions will file lawsuits, and the legality of this strategy will be challenged. Understandably, some workers will turn down the new deal. Daily operations of state government will be disrupted  and potentially result in a government shutdown.

But even if all those things happen, the ultimate outcome will be better than what's ahead if the state does nothing.

In fact, a government shutdown might be exactly what Illinois needs.

The state's pension system isn't the only facet that's broken. Day-to-day operations across state government are completely dysfunctional. For example:

At the Illinois Department of Corrections there are no punch clocks or electronic systems for tracking how many hours employees work. Corrections workers keep track of their own hours worked and then submit for payment  basically on the honor system. Last year taxpayers paid more than $70 million in overtime and comp time to corrections workers. A recent auditor general report found rampant overtime abuse in the agency  likely because hours worked are tracked manually.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the government union representing workers in the Department of Human Services, has filed numerous grievances complaining that the agency is understaffed. In one grievance, a union representative wrote, "Workers are popping more pills than ever just to get through the day."

Several years ago, DHS began offering welfare recipients the opportunity to intern at department offices around the state. It seemed like a win-win: extra hands at the office while helping people in need. But in the same complaint about being understaffed, the union complained that these welfare recipients were taking away work opportunities from dues-paying AFSCME members.

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Illinois ranks last among the 50 states in a lot of things. But it even takes Illinois longer than any other state to count up how "last" it is because of its broken and disjointed accounting systems. Across Illinois state government, there are more than 260 accounting systems  many of which don't communicate with one another or feed to one central state system. These disjointed systems mean it takes the state comptroller almost a full year to review the state's finances across different agencies.

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In 2011, the state attempted to calculate how much it costs to keep so many accounting systems. But even computing the cost of operating all these accounting systems was too difficult, so the best estimate the auditor general could come up with is $24 million to operate about half of the systems.

In recent years, the state has attempted to save money by limiting the number of individual water bottles and water coolers bought for state offices. Many of these buildings have drinking fountains in the hall, so water coolers or individual bottles are unnecessary. But these savings never happened. Why? After AFSCME complained, an arbitrator sided with the union. The reason was appalling: It wasn't because of health or safety concerns, or because there was anything wrong with the water from the fountains, or even a lack of water fountains. The arbitrator said that because the bottled water had been provided in the past, it could not be taken away. (Apparently bottled water, like pensions, cannot be diminished or impaired.)

In the next few weeks, politicians will use Friday's court ruling as impetus to raise taxes. But putting more money into state government will just feed these problems, not fix them.

The best evidence that more taxes will not work is the past four years. Illinoisans were paying higher taxes and the state's pension debt continued to grow. All of the dysfunction in day-to-day operations festered.

The suggestion to lay off the entire state government workforce and endure a government shutdown might seem jarring. But it's really quite simple: If we cannot afford the retirement benefits offered and we're not allowed to change them, then we cannot afford to keep these workers on the payroll. Doing nothing puts lavish retirements in front of everything else state government is supposed to do.

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The only crazy proposal is thinking that more taxes  the approach politicians have taken for years  will somehow yield better results this time around.

Diana Sroka Rickert is a writer with the Illinois Policy Institute. The opinions in this essay are her own.
Kanye West remained still for 90 minutes on Monday. It was remarkable feat of willpower, a once-in-a-lifetime performance, certainly some kind of record. West  aka Yeezy, aka Ye, aka the Louis Vuitton Don, aka, fashion designer, filmmaker, wannabe architect, reluctant reality TV participant, stage crasher, president basher, instigator, headline maker, Chicagoan and ball of energy  stood patiently at the Auditorium Theatre for more than 30 minutes as 900 graduating students of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago filed slowly into their seats for commencement. Then he sat, for another hour, as SAIC provost Elissa Tenny introduced SAIC president Walter Massey, who introduced the dean of student affairs, who introduced gallery owner John Corbett, who introduced German painter Albert Oehlen 

West sat the whole time, not speaking, not interrupting or reaching for a microphone.

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He listened.

He smiled. He rubbed his legs. He smiled more, applauded when appropriate, adjusted his black graduation robe, leveled the mortar board on his head. And then, when it was time to receive his honorary doctorate 

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He was humble.

Even funny.

He stepped to the microphone, then stepped abruptly backstage, then stepped to the podium again and jokingly apologized for a lifetime of the things he has said: "I'm sorry, that was just my opinion." He added he was nervous: "I felt my nerves a bit. I don't feel that feeling a lot. The nerves of humility and modesty when being honored, a humanization of a reality of being recognized. All I thought as I sat (in the audience), kind of shaking a little bit, is I need to get rid of that feeling, I need to not be nervous." Then, switching gears  as he did repeatedly in his five-minute, notes-free speech: "This honor is going to make your lives easier, for two reasons: You don't have to defend me as much! And I'm going to make all of our lives easier."

He did not explain.

He took long pauses.

The room was silent as he spoke. Addressing the controversy that has swirled around SAIC's decision to honor him, he said, somewhat disjointedly but sincerely: "When I was giving a lecture at Oxford, I brought up this school. Because I went on a mission to create in other spaces  apparel, film, performance  but it would have been easier to have just said I had a degree at the Art Institute of Chicago!"

To be fair, by the time SAIC commencement actually happened, it'd been a long weekend.

On Sunday he performed an impromptu song at the United Center during a first quarter timeout at the Bulls game. Then he gave an hourlong lecture/Q&A at the SAIC, to a group of 400 students who packed a school auditorium, each of their tickets describing him as "an interdisciplinary artist whose work provokes cultural discourse by reflecting a realism of the street." Some students agreed: He seemed a little nervous then, too. At one point he'd invited them to shout their questions at him. "Can I give you a hug?" "When are you going to open a school?" "What does Chicago mean to you?" "Can we hang out later?" "Do you wanna build a snowman?"

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He answered the last one.

"I say I wanna build a snowman because I want Bob Iger, the head of Disney, to invest in my ideas. Not one idea, not a good idea, or even a bad idea  a series of them. But just in my ideas  I feel Disney should have an art fund that completely supports all of the artists and  I feel there should be a responsibility."

If he was all over the place during his lecture, at graduation he was mostly immobile, sitting between Lisa Wainwright, dean of faculty and vice president of academic affairs, and artist/SAIC professor Nick Cave. Being the last honoree, alphabetically speaking  the others being Oehlen, Art Institute president Douglas Druick, gallery owner Rhona Hoffman and philanthropist/artist Janet Byrne Neiman  the tension was there, the elephant in the room waited. The lights in the auditorium cast a soft yellow haze, and extra security stood sentinel at the edges of the stage; West leaned forward in his white chair, seated in the front row facing the audience  a little like Fashion Week, but without runway models to draw away attention.

In the weeks before commencement, loud contingent of students and alumni made it clear they did not want him at graduation. But Monday, at the ceremony, the reaction to West was positive, even grateful: Rob Bondgren, dean of continuing studies, said "As an alum myself, I thought that if art students don't understand why he is worthy of being recognized, then they're not getting the degree I got." Dave Pauldine, of Elmhurst, whose daughter was graduating, said the school had sent thoughtful letters to parents explaining the decision to honor West, "and I think they made a thoughtful, smart case for him as an artist. I think it was some of the kids who seemed more surprised by this than the parents, to be honest."

Kenrick McFarlane, part of the graduating class, stood in the back of the auditorium waiting for his parents. He said: "Not everyone loved Jesus at first. Not everyone loves Yeezus. That's how I see it."

West did not descend to the podium. Cave offered a short introduction ("his visionary and ambitious career is a true reflection of the creative spirit") and then West strode across the stage and was draped by Massey in the traditional academic stole. He grinned big and said: "I am a pop artist. So my medium is public opinion and the world is my canvas."

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He said: "'I'm sorry' is something that you can use a lot. It gives you the opportunity to give your opinion, apologize for it, and give your opinion again. People say 'You shouldn't have to be sorry for your opinions ...'" And, alluding to the Hurricane Katrina telethon moment when he said "George Bush doesn't care about black people," he said: "George Bush  has some very cool self-portraits. I didn't know he was an artist!"

Then he walked off.

So quickly Massey waved him back to collect his degree. Then West took a breather, hugged the academics and artists beside him, and darted off the stage to catch a plane  Dr. West left the building.
CFO Lois Scott, left, Ald. Edward Burke, 14th and Marla Kaiden, Chief Administrative Officer for the Committee on Finance Chicago City Council answer questions during a finance committee meeting in February 2014. (Nancy Stone, Chicago Tribune)

Just as Mayor Rahm Emanuel heads into a second term facing a sea of financial woes, his Chief Financial Officer Lois Scott announced Friday that she's leaving City Hall.

Scott solidified herself as a trusted aide whom Emanuel leaned on to navigate the city's mounting debt and unfunded pension liabilities, but she also has overseen the mayor's largely unsuccessful effort to attract private investment to projects through his Chicago Infrastructure Trust.

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"Despite facing a litany of financial challenges from my very first day on the job, I am proud of the gains we have made in building a stronger financial foundation for Chicago's future," Scott said in a statement. "It has been a privilege to serve with a world-class team and at such a critical time for our city."

Scott did not respond to a request for an interview. She informed her staff Friday that she would be leaving May 20.

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Scott's departure comes after Emanuel announced earlier this week that he will take steps to eliminate or phase out city borrowing practices that have long been criticized by financial experts. But City Hall still faces ballooning pension payments starting next year that could trigger significant tax increases and service cuts.

During her tenure at City Hall, Scott came under fire after former Comptroller Amer Ahmad was indicted in 2013 a few weeks after abruptly resigning. Ahmad, who fled to Pakistan, later was charged and pleaded guilty to running a kickback scheme in Ohio when he served as that state's deputy treasurer.

Scott made an initial recommendation in 2011 that Emanuel hire Ahmad. In 2013, the Tribune reported that Scott had close business ties to Ahmad as part of a revolving-door relationship involving her private bond consulting firm, City Hall and former Ohio Treasurer Kevin Boyce. In Ohio, Ahmad granted Scott's then-private bond consulting firm $165,000 in state business, and in Chicago, Scott selected a firm employing Boyce for hundreds of thousands of dollars in city work once he no longer was Ohio's treasurer. Ahmad was at the center of meetings involving both, the Tribune reported.

Scott has served as the city's CFO since Emanuel took office in May 2011.

"When I asked Lois Scott to serve as my chief financial officer, I asked her to stay for one year but she ended up staying for four," Emanuel said in a statement. "That kind of commitment to going above and beyond for the residents of Chicago has been the hallmark of her tenure."

Scott's departure marks the latest shake-up at the top of Emanuel's administration as he enters a second term. Chief of staff Lisa Schrader also has announced her departure, and Emanuel has tapped Chicago Transit Authority President Forrest Claypool to replace her.

Chicago Tribune's Bill Ruthhart contributed.

hdardick@tribpub.com

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Twitter @ReporterHal
House Speaker Michael Madigan, left, and Senate President John Cullerton are plotting to pass a budget for the coming fiscal year thats $3 billion in the red, then tar the governor for making the necessary cuts. (Seth Perlman, AP)

"Democrats in the legislature, both the House and the Senate, will offer a spending plan that's consistent with our view of what the state of Illinois should do for Illinoisans who need the government to be helpful to them. We will publicly acknowledge that we don't have the money to pay for this budget."

 Michael Madigan, May 25, 2015

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House Speaker Michael Madigan joined the Illinois legislature 44 years and four months ago. Senate President John Cullerton arrived 36 years and four months ago. During their nearly 81 years, the Chicago Democrats engineered, sponsored and voted for pension giveaways, chronic overspending and tax laws that broke Illinois. The consequence of these failures? Remarkably, they have not resigned to, um, spend more time with their families. Instead they behave, and talk, as if they are righteous stewards.

And Gov. Bruce Rauner, the guy Madigan and Cullerton are always vilifying? He got to Springfield just four months ago. Having played no role in creating the devastated Illinois of Madigan and Cullerton, Rauner has had to trim spending to correct the diabolically unbalanced budget that Madigan and Cullerton passed last spring for the fiscal year that ends June 30. Headline writers keep using the phrase "Rauner budget cuts" not because it tells the story, but because it's more economical than: "Budget cuts you can blame on Mike Madigan and John Cullerton, who tried to placate angry voters before the 2014 election by appropriating gazillions of tax dollars that they knew Illinois never, ever, would collect."

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We revisit that deceit because Madigan and his trailing indicator Cullerton appear to be plotting similar mischief for the fiscal year that starts July 1. Madigan says Democrats will pass a budget that's at least $3 billion short, and will keep fighting reforms to how government operates  reforms that, as campaign proposals, got Rauner elected to office. Put another way: At a time when voters demanded changes to the status quo, Madigan says there will be no change to how Illinois does business.

So if passage this week of yet another unbalanced budget foreshadows even more savage cuts, don't howl at the guy who's new to Springfield. He isn't crafting the Madigan-Cullerton budget slash 2.0 any more than he crafted the Madigan-Cullerton budget slash 1.0.

Howl instead at the men who've spent nearly 81 years using the legislature as their playpen. High taxes? Lousy jobs climate? Billions of dollars in unpaid bills? Spending money they know doesn't exist? Enormous taxpayer debts? Yes, it's amazing what you can do in 81 years if your mission is to use other people's tax dollars to reward your friends and keep yourself in power.

The Democrats' evident strategy is to hand Rauner a massively unbalanced budget, force him to make billions in unpopular spending cuts and coerce him to accept a big tax increase.

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Huh? We know voters aren't dumb enough to be misled about budget slash 2.0 precisely because those voters weren't dumb enough to be misled by budget slash 1.0. This isn't some low-information yesteryear that Madigan and Cullerton fondly recall; Illinoisans understand that they have a financial crisis and a $100 billion-plus unfunded pension liability because their politicians played this game of trying to spend nonexistent money.

The surprise here is that certain appropriators who were publicly embarrassed by their roles in last year's failed gambit are willing to be embarrassed again by playing roles in this year's gambit.

Do the appropriators  do any Democrats  want to vote yet again for an intentionally unbalanced budget? Their constituents are likely to react not with lengthy debates about the governor's pluses and minuses, but with piercing questions such as, "You did that again?"

Oh  there's one more surprise: Madigan's petulance Monday when he essentially declared, I'm for the status quo in Illinois. Because it's working so well.

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Hmm. One of the guys who got us here says he's determined to keep us here.

We can't speculate whether Madigan is rattled by the $34 million in campaign cash that Rauner and his allies now control  10 times the $3.4 million that Madigan and Cullerton control. Maybe something else explains Madigan's rant.

That war chest does give Rauner an option Madigan and Cullerton never have faced: He can spend the summer, autumn and pre-election 2016 explaining to Illinois voters that, even though Democratic legislators won't repair the sorry reality of state government, he was elected to repair it, and he will.
House Speaker Michael Madigan watches the results board during a vote June 4, 2015, on a Democratic workers compensation bill. The measure, which Gov. Bruce Rauner said represented a setback for Illinois, passed 63-39 with no GOP support. (Justin L. Fowler, State Journal-Register)

"The out-of-balance budget you passed keeps level funding for the (Democrat-run) General Assembly, the (Democratic) attorney general and the (Democratic) secretary of state while cutting the (Republican) governor and the (Republican) comptroller by 10 percent. We are willing to do our part  why won't you?"

 Richard Goldberg, Gov. Bruce Rauner's deputy chief of staff, to majority Democrats on an Illinois House appropriations committee, June 4, 2015

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Good question, Mr. Goldberg, and we offer an answer straight from the escalating war for Illinois, a mighty struggle between yesterday and tomorrow:

This state's failed yesterday stands humiliated by its debts, its unemployment, its pension fiasco and all the rest. But the architects of that yesterday still can try to thwart a better tomorrow  an Illinois that competes for jobs, that balances budgets, that chooses political leaders who look out for the public interest.

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We hope two creators of that sorry yesterday  House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton  don't defeat a rookie governor who demands real reforms before he signs off on a budget. And we aren't alone:

Reform and budget negotiations should not be separated, as Madigan wants. There's no better time to discuss one because it affects the other. ... You don't have to buy into everything Rauner wants to acknowledge that Illinois must change to have a competitive economy in the 21st century.

 Rockford Register Star

As that realization spreads among voters, the Democratic leaders cling to their tattered playbook: Obstruct, obfuscate, change the subject. Madigan tried to pass off as reform a workers' compensation proposal that any fair-minded citizen would dismiss as a sop to his check-writing pals, the trial lawyers. And members of Cullerton's caucus, looking oblivious to the fact that Illinois is broke and employers are fleeing, floated their "ambitious economic agenda"  tuition-free community college, a new higher education tax credit, mandated sick time pay, five annual increases in the state minimum wage ... as if to wheedle, "Voters, ignore our mess. Look over here at all we want to give you!"

Who is the real champion of the middle class? A legislature seemingly bent on playing the same old game that has driven Illinois into the ground? Or a governor who really has no enthusiasm for cutting heat subsidies for the poor, and who is prepared to raise taxes when all is said and done, but who understands that Illinois is in desperate need of more fundamental reform?

 Chicago Sun-Times

Expect this legislative showboating to continue as the Democratic leaders try to portray themselves as eager compromisers. Madigan publicly admitted that Democrats "don't have the money to pay for this budget." The two leaders also fiercely oppose term limits, tort reform and Rauner's other proposals. While the governor has narrowed his agenda, the leaders have only hardened their silos and intensified their attacks.

(B)y most accounts Rauner moved far more than Madigan & Co. did in this session, which in the latter case is to say not at all.

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 Peoria Journal Star

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The Democrats' strategy is to have citizens who rely on state money pressure the governor to spend and tax more  but not to cut government overhead or enact reforms that might attract new employers. Yet Rauner isn't buckling. Instead, he has told his Cabinet members that they must prepare their agencies for "the very real possibility" that as of July 1 they'll have to operate without a budget. He also announced what his office says are $400 million in spending cuts, a down payment on making state government's expenditures match its income. Owing to fixes of the intentionally unbalanced budget that Madigan and Cullerton passed in 2014, Rauner's office expects the current fiscal year to conclude June 30 with its budget in balance. As for the next fiscal year: "With the upcoming Madigan-Cullerton budget deficit more than double that of last year, a midyear solution is not a possibility this time. The administration must immediately begin taking steps to manage state spending," the governor's office said Tuesday. "... Many additional steps will be announced as they are finalized."

Illinois can't continue as it has for decades. Deficit spending to feed an entrenched influential class can't persist. Don't take it from us. The voters spoke loud and clear last year when they ousted former Gov. Pat Quinn.

 The Southern Illinoisan, Carbondale

Not that Madigan, Cullerton and others beholden to that entrenched influential class will easily admit the mayhem they've wrought, or accept the stark consequences: The people of this state voted for a new direction. The Greek philosopher Diogenes, searching for an honest pol, could scour Springfield and not hear the words, "All in all, my tenure has been just a disaster for Illinois."

Illinois is at a crossroads. Will it change its fiscally irresponsible ways or cling desperately to a status quo approach that has reduced it to effective bankruptcy. A big, potentially ugly fight looms, but it's a fight worth having.

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 The News-Gazette, Champaign

Yes, the war for Illinois is worth having. May the failed yesterday that got us here yield to a competitive, thriving tomorrow.
Senator Mark Kirk speaks with job recruiters at his job fair at Harper College in Palatine. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)

WASHINGTON   Facing a tough campaign almost three years after a stroke, Republican U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk says he is running for re-election in 2016 "come hell or high water."

Kirk's bravado comes despite a second-term path lined with numerous political obstacles. Illinois remains largely a Democratic state, a tilt that typically becomes more pronounced in a presidential year. And his Democratic challenger could be U.S. Rep. Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War hero with a compelling personal story and ability to raise money nationally.

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Still, knocking off an incumbent is usually a heavy lift, and as a social moderate and fiscal conservative from the suburbs, Kirk fits into the winning formula for a Republican running statewide in Illinois. During his current term, the Highland Park lawmaker has tried to carve out a niche as a foreign policy expert who serves his home state in part by building a bipartisan relationship with Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, the state's senior senator.

Democrats are trying to rebound from losing the Senate in last month's midterm elections, and the Illinois race figures into that equation. Analysts identify three first-term Republicans from Democratic states as chances for pickups in two years: Kirk, Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.

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A new analysis on the website of Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, rated the Illinois Senate race as a tossup. The Cook Political Report issued early 2016 ratings Friday saying the U.S. Senate race in Illinois "leaned Republican."

A re-election bid would test the health of Kirk, 55, who underwent almost a year of rehabilitation after his January 2012 stroke and uses a wheelchair or walks with a four-pronged cane. His speech remains a bit halting.

Since the stroke, Kirk at times has made some eyebrow-raising comments.

Last week he condemned Democratic staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee as "little zombies" reaching up from their "political graves" in describing the panel's report on the CIA's harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects.

Last year he suggested to reporters that the 18,000-strong Gangster Disciples street gang should be arrested in a "mass pickup."

Several months later, Kirk said he did a "ride-along" with Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood and the senator noted that a "guy got popped" while they were on patrol. McCarthy later explained that it was a nonfatal, gang-related shooting and that the victim did not cooperate with police.

Duckworth, who lost both her legs in the Iraq War in 2004, has medical issues, too, and likewise uses a cane or wheelchair to get around. She gave birth to her first child last month, leading insiders to wonder how that may affect her decision-making about a Senate race.

Duckworth has not ruled out challenging Kirk, a source close to her said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "She is considering it," he said.

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Already, Kirk has suggested Duckworth would fail if she gave the race a go.

"To fight and lose a Senate race against Kirk is a terrible start to a career," Kirk said, referring to himself in the third person in an interview The Hill published Nov. 21.

Another potential general election foe is Democratic U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, but a spokeswoman declined to comment on whether he aspires to the Senate.

Both Duckworth and Foster comfortably won re-election to their suburban congressional seats last month, competing on a legislative map Illinois Democrats drew. Duckworth, who lost her first House bid in 2006, prevailed in 2012. Foster is set to start his third full term after winning a special election and general election in 2008, losing in 2010 and staging a comeback in 2012.

Duckworth, 46, from Hoffman Estates, had more than $1 million in her campaign fund as of Nov. 24 and Foster, 59, from Naperville, had $1.1 million then, reports show. Kirk's campaign treasury stood at $1.5 million to start October.

Kirk spent nearly 10 years in the House before succeeding Democratic Sen. Roland Burris, the controversial appointee named by then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich to fill the seat that became vacant when Barack Obama first won the White House in 2008. Blagojevich, convicted of corruption charges, is now in federal prison.

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In 2010, Kirk beat scandal-damaged Democrat Alexi Giannoulias, then state treasurer, by less than 2 percentage points  about 60,000 votes out of more than 3.7 million cast. That was a nonpresidential year, however, while 2016 will feature an open-seat presidential contest in which Democrats tend to be more mobilized than in midterm elections.

Kirk could face a primary challenge from a more conservative candidate, though he easily turned aside such opposition in 2010.

This fall, Kirk was noticeably absent from the Senate contest in which Republican state Sen. Jim Oberweis lost to Democrat Durbin, who won a fourth term with 53.55 percent of the ballots to Oberweis' 42.69 percent.

Kirk told the Tribune recently that he was a "bit surprised" by Oberweis' weak showing, as it happened in what he said was "the middle of a Democratic implosion."

Noting that Illinois generally is an "overwhelmingly Democratic state," Kirk said Republicans who prevail statewide are like him and Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner: moderate on social issues and conservative on fiscal matters and national security.

Rauner, however, had to raise at $67.1 million, much of it his own money, to get 50 percent of the vote and defeat Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, who got 46 percent. Unlike Rauner, Kirk can't dip into his own wallet to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

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Wayne Steger, a political scientist at DePaul University, predicted that Democrats would try to prevent Kirk's re-election by painting him as a conservative. But in Steger's view, Kirk's moderate, independent leanings will make him a "tough candidate to beat."

That suggests to him that Kirk's health will emerge as an issue. "It's obviously going to be hard to attack him," Steger said, "but those attacks are going to come in the form of questioning whether he's up to the task."

For now, potential candidates are making phone calls  and calculations. Those who jump in can start raising money, but they won't be able to start collecting signatures until next Sept. 1.

kskiba@tribpub.com

Twitter @KatherineSkiba
Des Plaines

The following items were taken from Des Plaines police reports.

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Kristen Renner, 49, of Des Plaines, was charged June 19 with battery to a peace officer and criminal trespass in the 1500 block of Miner Street. Renner also was charged June 29 with battery and resisting a police officer in the same block.

Gregory Nickles, 37, of Des Plaines, was charged June 21 with aggravated driving under the influence, driving with a revoked driver's license, driving or actual physical control of a vehicle when under the influence of alcohol, operating a vehicle with expired registration, operating an uninsured vehicle and failure to yield to merging traffic. He was stopped in the 1500 block of Everett Avenue.

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An iPhone 5 was stolen June 24 from a counter at a convenience store at Forest Avenue and Wolf Road after it was left there.

Someone rummaged through the glove compartment of a vehicle parked June 24 and 25 in the 100 block of North Sixth Avenue. Nothing was taken.

A Pennsylvania license plate was stolen from a vehicle parked in the 600 block of Northwest Highway between June 24 and June 25.

Cash totaling $200 was stolen from the glove compartment of an unlocked vehicle parked in a lot in the 2400 block of East Dempster Street on June 26.

Two windows on the east side of a residence in the 1400 block of Perry Street were broken on June 26.

A vehicle parked at Evergreen and Graceland avenues was scratched on the passenger's side from the front bumper to the rear quarter panel between June 27 and June 28.

A black leather purse containing a temporary visitors driver's license, an iPhone 5, a Social Security card, a Chase debit card, a U.S. Immigration work permit and approximately $100 in cash was stolen from an unlocked vehicle parked in a driveway in the 700 block of Hanbury Drive between June 24 and June 25.

Mary Ann Gaul, 36, of Des Plaines, was charged June 25 with two counts of disorderly conduct in the 800 block of East Oakton Street.

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A three-foot tall statue and a white flower stand were stolen from the front yard of a residence in the 1300 block of Carol Lane between June 25 and June 26.

Someone broke into a house in the 1000 block of West Villa Drive and rummaged through a bedroom dresser. The intruder gained access June 26 through a partially open window and exited through a rear patio door. Nothing was taken.

Two power tools and an Intoxalock breath-alcohol ignition interlock system were stolen from an unlocked vehicle parked in a driveway in the 100 block of Princeton Street between June 26 and June 27.

The driver's side window and windshield of vehicle parked in the 1300 block of Forest Avenue were broken between June 26 and June 27.

A Samsung tablet was stolen from a vehicle with a partially opened window. The vehicle was parked in a lot in the 1100 block of Elmhurst Road on June 27.

Cash totaling $5,000 was stolen from a lockbox at a bank in the 1500 block of South Lee Street between Jan. 1 and June 27.

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Gregor Kelly, 49, was charged June 28 with trespassing and resisting a peace officer at a school in the 1700 block of South Wolf Road.

A Garmin GPS, 20 CDs and $3 in coins were stolen from an unlocked vehicle parked in a driveway in the 1700 block of Wicke Avenue between June 28 and June 29. A second vehicle was rummaged through, but nothing was taken.

Gambling chips worth $2,600 were stolen from a restroom stall at a casino in the 3000 block of South River Road after they were left there on June 27.

A bicycle was stolen from an unlocked garage in the 1400 block of Willow Avenue on June 27.

A black wallet containing miscellaneous cards and receipts and a second black wallet containing an Illinois driver's license, Illinois Firearm Owner Identification card, two credit cards and $21 in cash were stolen from a vehicle parked in a driveway in the 1600 block of Wicke Avenue between June 28 and June 29.

A phone charger, bracelet and change were stolen from an unlocked vehicle parked in a driveway in the 1600 block of Stockton Avenue between June 28 and June 29.

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A Panasonic razor, three packs of cigarettes and a pair of reading glasses were stolen from a vehicle parked in a driveway in the 1600 block of Wicke Avenue on June 29.

Gas valued at $52.58 was stolen from a gas station in the 800 block of Elmhurst Road on June 29.

A locked bicycle was stolen from a school in the 1700 block of South Wolf Road on June 29.

The driver's side rear view mirror of a vehicle parked in the 1900 block of Webster Lane was broken on June 29.

A set of dealer license plates were stolen from an auto sales business in the 800 block of Rand Road between May 8 and June 29. The owner of the business was not aware of the theft until receiving red light camera citations in the mail.

An iPhone was stolen from the southwest section of Lake Park in the 1100 block of Howard Avenue after it was left there on June 29.

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Ivaylo Kirov, 27, of Des Plaines, was charged June 30 with disorderly conduct in the 2000 block of South Pine Street. Kirov was also charged July 1 with criminal damage to state-supported property in the 1400 block of Miner Street.

Alexander Sandoval, 25, of Park Ridge, was charged June 30 with reckless driving, possession of cannabis, possession of drug paraphernalia, operating an uninsured motor vehicle, driving with a revoked license, improper use of registration and improper turn at intersection in the 1500 block of East Touhy Avenue.

Someone was seen pulling open the door of a vehicle parked in an alley in the 1400 block of Willow Avenue before fleeing on a bicycle on June 30.

Gaines is a freelance reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

triblocaltips@tribpub.com
On Nov. 4, 2008, Barack Obama strode onstage to accept his election as the nation's first African-American president. His first words: "Hello, Chicago!"

That historic moment, beamed worldwide from a victory rally in Grant Park, signaled to the world that Obama belongs to this city. The notion that Obama's presidential library might go elsewhere ought to be unthinkable.

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But the city's two bids are in trouble. The foundation that will decide where the multimillion-dollar facility will be built isn't happy with either proposal.

The University of Illinois at Chicago's plan to build the library and museum on the city's West Side is worrisome because of pending leadership changes, we're told. Those concerns shouldn't be hard to address. But the University of Chicago's proposal to build on the South Side  where Obama began his political career, taught, and still owns a home  has always seemed the easier sell. And it has big problems.

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The U. of C. wouldn't share its proposal with the public before the bids were submitted last month. Guess why? Because the university wants to build the library on land it doesn't own. Its proposal reportedly named three possible sites, all of them involving land belonging to the Chicago Park District, including a site on the lakefront.

This is no way for the U. of C. to treat its neighbors. The university clearly expected resistance to its plan and chose to duck it instead of asking the community for buy-in. Why build the library on park land when there's so much vacant property on the South Side? We suspect the university has no good answer to that question.

So instead of building public support for its plan  or working to find a site that would be acceptable to the community  the U. of C. plowed ahead with what now looks like an attempted land grab.

But foundation officials balked at the proposal. They hope to make a decision by March. There's no room in their timeline for a lengthy battle over real estate. And there are no such problems with the bids from New York's Columbia University, where Obama earned his undergraduate degree, or the University of Hawaii, in his birthplace of Honolulu.

With Columbia suddenly and embarrassingly regarded as the front-runner to host the Obama library, it falls to Mayor Rahm Emanuel to rescue Chicago's bid.

First thing Monday, mayoral sources announced that the lakefront option, which was sure to invite a lawsuit from preservationists, was off the table. Next week, the Chicago Park District will hold two public forums to discuss the transfer of park land to City Hall to facilitate the bid.

Before those meetings, the U. of C. will finally release the maps of its two remaining sites  one in Washington Park, near the Garfield Boulevard Green Line stop, and one in western Jackson Park, south of the Museum of Science and Industry.

The right way to do this would have been to unveil the proposals and seek public input before submitting a bid. But it's not too late to listen. We hope Emanuel isn't just going through the motions before signing off on a plan in which the community's voice is an afterthought.

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It's hard to imagine a project that could mean more to Chicago's South Side. Writing in our pages in November, esteemed historian, educator and civil rights activist Timuel Black called the proposed library "a symbol of the possible."

"We are not simply proud that President Obama started his political career here, or that Michelle Obama was raised here and returned as a community leader, though we are proud of all that," he wrote. "The library belongs here because it is no accident that our first African-American president rose to prominence from Chicago's South Side."

Yes, the Obama presidential library belongs here. It's always been ours to lose. Let's hope we haven't blown it.
Early morning sunlight shines on the University of Chicago near Washington Park, a possible future home of the Barack Obama presidential library. (Anthony Souffle, Chicago Tribune)

SPRINGFIELD  State lawmakers on Thursday quickly approved a measure aimed at providing legal protections for Mayor Rahm Emanuel's efforts to build President Barack Obama's presidential library and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

The legislation clarifies that the city has the ability to build the facilities on parkland, including "formerly submerged land"  a provision aimed at thwarting a central aspect of a lawsuit from park preservationists who argue the land the George Lucas museum would be built on is a protected waterway.

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Friends of the Parks said Thursday that the measure "will not solve the legal problem for the Lucas museum or the presidential library." The group filed a federal lawsuit in November, contending the plans for the Lucas museum between Soldier Field and McCormick Place violate the state's public trust doctrine and also are a violation of due process and equal protection clauses.

"It is deeply troubling that our mayor and state public officials are trying to use the Obama Library as a shield to sneak the Lucas Museum on to Lake Michigan," the group said in a statement.

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"It basically authorizes the City to run a mall up and down the Lake so long as they call it a museum. It is a complete blank check to abdicate the legal duty of protecting the Lake for the people of this State and for generations to come," Friends of the Parks said.

The state measure surfaced at the Capitol late Wednesday and zoomed out of the Senate and House in less than 24 hours. The bill goes to Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, whose office on Thursday continued to decline to comment on whether he'll sign it into law.

The Senate approved the legislation 39-13.

"This bill, if passed, would send a strong message to the selection committee that ... there won't be any obstacles to the library being built on parkland," said sponsoring Sen. Kwame Raoul, a Chicago Democrat who holds Obama's former state Senate seat.

Jonathan Masur, a University of Chicago law professor, said that if the law changes the public trust aspect of the lawsuit, Friends of the Parks' case could be in trouble.

"If this legislation passes, that would really hurt these efforts to block the museum, and it would put the museum on the fast track," Masur said.

The argument that the Lucas museum plans violate the public trust doctrine is the strongest aspect of the case, Masur said. The other areas of the lawsuit that would not be affected by any changes to state law, the violation of due process and equal protection claims, "are very weak," he said.

Masur said that if a legislature changes a law, it can cancel or nullify any pending lawsuit related to that law, as long as it is not a contract.

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But Nadav Shoked, a law professor at Northwestern University, said "this doesn't mean Friends in the Parks is dead in the water." The group, Shoked said, could still claim the public trust doctrine is based on federal law or the Illinois Constitution, which would not be affected by the legislative measure.

Shoked said he thinks the measure was aimed primarily at clearing the path for the Obama library, and that inserting language beneficial for the Lucas plans was easy enough. But he said the language about submerged land may have been added to thwart a similarly styled lawsuit from preservationists if the Obama library is headed for Jackson Park, which also has lake frontage.

A spokeswoman for the Lucas museum had no comment on the developments.

The Chicago Park District and the city argue they do not need state approval for the Lucas museum. In a filing last week in the case, the park district argues that a judge cannot "supersede and negate the legislative authority of the City Council," which would need to vote on a zoning amendment if the museum were to be built along the lakefront at the current proposed site.

A federal judge recently allowed the Lucas museum lawsuit to advance, which raised questions about whether the Obama library could face similar obstacles.

Sen. Matt Murphy, R-Palatine, said he supported efforts to secure the Obama library in Chicago but raised concerns about changes to clear the way for construction of the Lucas museum along the lakefront. Murphy argued the museum's proposed location near Soldier Field could mean the Bears lose rights to parking lots used by fans for tailgating.

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"This bill will invite a new lawsuit in all likelihood from the Chicago Bears," Murphy said. "This bill is going to substantially impact their ability to park and tailgate at Soldier Field in the manner that they have in the past."

Raoul countered that the bill says nothing about the parking lots. "This is not about the Bears," Raoul said.

The House then voted 94-16.

"Ensuring that President Obama's library is sited in Illinois is a priority," said House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago. "For more than one year, I have worked to make Illinois proposals more attractive and competitive. Today's vote enhances those proposals and clarifies this is a proper use of parkland for this truly historic institution. I believe that this will be a destination for visitors from every corner of the globe and will be a depository of documents and artifacts from a transformational presidency."

But Rep. Ann Williams, D-Chicago, said she worried the measure could threaten the openness of the lakefront by effectively greenlighting future building proposals without considering them on a one-by-one basis.

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"I'm concerned that it will create a slippery slope and open our beautiful lakefront up to development and pet projects," said Williams, who voted against the proposal.

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Following the approval, Emanuel's office released a statement saying approval "will provide further reassurance for the Barack Obama Foundation to choose the president's hometown as the site of the Barack Obama Presidential Library and Museum." Obama is expected to make an announcement on his library location in the coming weeks.

O'Connell reported from Chicago.

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One of the essential questions of the organic movement is, "What foods are worthy of the USDA 'organic' label?"

The legal definition of the word is hammered down in semi-annual meetings, one of which was held last week, that involve a federal advisory board and people working in the organic industry.

But who, exactly, is that?

Increasingly, the answer is representatives of large food companies.

The boom in organic food has boosted sales over $32 billion annually and has led some of the nation's biggest food companies - General Mills, Coca-Cola, Perdue, Kellogg - to acquire or take stakes in smaller organic outfits.

People within the industry debate whether the entrance of the big companies could tarnish the ideals of a movement opposed to the conventional foods those firms produce. Moreover, some worry that shoppers may be too easily fooled into thinking that some of the quaintly named organic labels, now owned by a big conventional company, is still managed by its organic founders.

"Some of these big companies go out of their way to hide their ties to the organic labels," said Phil Howard, an associate professor at Michigan State University, who has tracked the changes, and provided them to The Washington Post. "They know that consumers tend to be skeptical of the corporations, that a person who buys organic is often someone looking for an alternative to conventional food."

Howard says the influx of money from conventional food companies has brought good and bad.

"It's easier than ever to access foods," he said, "and the prices have come down. On the other hand, there is continual pressure to weaken the national organic standards to increase profits - and the big companies have the clout to do that."

Whole Foods plans store geared toward millennials

To be sure, attendees at the semi-annual meetings that define organic still include plenty of small farmers. But the large conventional companies have a presence, too, and within the industry, the value of the transformation is debated.

Myra Goodman, who with her husband founded the major organic label Earthbound Farm in 1984, argued in a TED talk last year that the growth has benefited everyone. She spoke just a few months after it was announced that Earthbound Farm would be sold to dairy producer WhiteWave Foods for $600 million.

"We don't want organic to be an exclusive club," she told the audience. "The benefits of organic farming are just too huge."

Noting that only about 4 percent of food sales go to organic products, she said that "the organic industry is way too small."

"Sadly, less than 1 percent of our farmland is organic - that means about 99 percent is still awash in conventional agricultural chemicals," she said.

Others, however, have warned that the arrival of conventional food companies could change the industry.

Advertising mascots are the stars of new Chicago exhibit

Nature's Path, a large family-run label, is one of the largest organic companies to continue to rebuff corporate investors. Arjan Stephens, the son of the founders and a company vice president, said the family has been dismayed at times by the acquisition of organic brands by conventional food companies.

"We have witnessed the sale of numerous organic brands to big food and have also seen how many of those brands have struggled to retain their soul," he said. "While we support the growth of the organic industry, the purchase of many independent brands has come at a price. . . . [T]he long-term effect often comes with a diluted product line, a change in company values . . . and decisions based solely on profits not people."
Are consumers right to think that organic food is safer and healthier?

It seems like a straightforward question, especially for Miles McEvoy, the chief of the National Organic Program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's the section of the USDA that champions organic farming practices and defines which foods deserve the coveted organic label.

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But in an interview Wednesday, McEvoy wouldn't speculate about any health benefits of organic food, saying the question wasn't "relevant" to the role of the National Organic Program. Nor would he say whether growing consumer demand for organics reflects broader skepticism of conventional U.S. agriculture.

The 57-year-old veteran of the movement, however, was willing to talk specifics about how his group decides which foods get the label.

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McEvoy came to the USDA in 2009 after 20 years leading the organic program in Washington state. This week, he was in La Jolla, California, attending a meeting of the federal advisory board on organics. And although he steered away from the health question, he did hold forth on other topics, including animal treatment and whether consumers can trust "organic" imported food from China and other countries.

Here are excerpts, lightly edited for clarity:

Q: The sales of products certified by the USDA as organic have more than doubled over the past 10 years to more than $30 billion annually. Why are Americans increasingly buying organic? What do they find wrong with the conventional way of farming?

A: Well, I can't really respond to that. I can just say that sales are increasing dramatically  over double-digit growth each year. Even during the recession, there was growth in the organic market. . . . There's been an increase in basically every sector of organic food. Organic is about 5 percent of U.S. food sales. In some areas it's much higher than that. Over 12 percent of fruits and vegetables are organic at this point.

There is an interest in organics around the world. Organic markets are expanding in Korea, in China, in India, in the European Union.

I think it's just an interest in quality food. Organic is one of those quality food products that America produces. It has certain production practices that resonate with consumers and they feel good about it.

Q: Lots of consumers buy food with the organic label because they think the food is healthier and safer than conventional. Are they correct?

A: Again, I am not going to be able to respond to that. It's just not . . . we are a regulatory program that regulates the organic label, to ensure that anything that has that label meets the requirements.

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[Note: He later expanded in an email: "The question is not relevant to the role of the National Organic Program. I can say that organic farmers and producers provide consumers additional food options. The National Organic Program supports the continued growth of the organic community by developing clear standards, enforcing a level playing field, and expanding trade opportunities to create new markets for U.S. organic businesses."]

Q: At least some organic consumers buy organic because they think organic farmers provide better conditions for their animals. You are currently working on some new animal welfare regulations. What changes are needed?

A: The organic livestock standards already include a number of animal welfare provisions. The requirements are that you have to care for the health and welfare of the animals. You can't use some of those allopathic products  like antibiotics and hormones. An organic livestock producer really has to care for their animals because they don't have the same kind of medicines or interventions. They rely on good welfare so that the animals are healthy.

The National Organic Standards Board [the federal advisory board meeting this week] put together a recommendation after many years of work. It expands on those existing animal welfare provisions.

The most controversial part of the recommendation is around [a requirement for] outdoor access for poultry. There is [already] a requirement that the birds have year-round outdoor access, but there is no specificity in the current regulations  in terms of space. Because of that there is a wide range of practices.

Q: The Cornucopia Institute took aerial photographs last year showing some facilities without any cows out or chickens out on a perfectly nice day. [The group accused the farmers of violating requirements that organic livestock get out to pasture.] Does that worry you?

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A: No, it doesn't worry me. We have a complaint process. Anyone who thinks that there's been a violation of the standards can file a complaint. Those photos were part of a complaint from Cornucopia. They are under review. Our initial review is that those photos were taken at a point in time. It really doesn't indicate one thing or another.

The [organic] certification process is incredibly rigorous . . . you have an inspector that's going out and verifying. They're on the ground, they're looking at the animals, ensuring that they're getting outdoor access, looking at the records, they're doing unannounced inspections, they're taking samples, they're auditing the feed records.

A photo maybe is an indication that something else needs to be looked at but it does not in any way compare to the intense rigorous certification process.

Q: The international production of organic foods has also increased, and the United States is now importing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of agricultural products that are certified by the USDA as organic. Why should a U.S. consumer believe that a product from China or Mexico or Colombia is organic?

A: It's the same inspection and certification process in Colombia or China or Mexico as it is in the United States. All the certifying agents [inspectors] are accredited by USDA. Every step in the process  the farms are certified, the packing shed is certified, the distributors are certified  and they're audited.

We conduct audits of these certifiers all over the world. We do dozens of audits in foreign countries every year.

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Q: You run the government side of this $30 billion-plus industry with a $9 million budget. One of the ways the government keeps costs down is that you have the farmer or food company pay for their organic certification. The inspectors are often private companies. Is there an inherent conflict of interest if you are hiring your own inspector? If so, how does the system guard against that?

A: The ag industry is really set up around user fees. Its very common for . . . the business that is meeting a standard be paying for inspection and certification services. The system falls under international norms of accreditation and certification. There are a number of different criteria that we have to meet as the accreditor and the certifier has to meet as the certifier. Those things are audited on an ongoing basis. It includes conflict-of-interest provisions and transparency in terms of the fee structure. We ensure that there are no conflicts of interest that the certifiers have when they conduct these inspections.
State lawmakers return to Springfield on Tuesday with ruling Democrats planning a renewed attack on Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, who has revived his campaign-style tour to push a pro-business, anti-union agenda that's been a sticking point in the ongoing budget standoff at the Capitol.

State government is still without a budget deal for the year that begins July 1 after the General Assembly blew past a scheduled May 31 adjournment deadline. Democrats who control both legislative chambers passed a spending plan that is at least $3 billion short, which Rauner said he couldn't sign. The governor has held out the possibility that he'd approve a tax hike to help balance the budget, but only if lawmakers first agree to five items on his agenda, which Democrats largely oppose.

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Democrats spent much of May publicly rejecting Rauner's ideas on the House and Senate floor, despite the rookie governor's earlier attempt to build support during a prolonged road trip throughout the state. They continued that effort last week as House Democrats passed their own proposed changes to the workers' compensation system -- one of the items on Rauner's legislative wish list -- without incorporating the changes Rauner wants.

A Senate committee will take up that legislation Tuesday, shortly before the entire chamber convenes for a hearing on another Rauner priority: freezing local property taxes.

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Senate President John Cullerton called the hearing to focus attention on the link between property taxes and funding for schools and other local services, including fire and park districts, a Cullerton aide said.

The hearing, referred to in the Capitol as a "committee of the whole," will offer a venue for Democrats to demonstrate their political opposition to Rauner's agenda, which also includes making changes to civil lawsuit damage awards, municipal collective bargaining and public works contracting.

House Speaker Michael Madigan has also called his chamber back to the Capitol. A House committee is scheduled to take up legislation on property taxes, while another will continue its probe of the Rauner administration's decision to pay education czar Beth Purvis' $250,000 salary out of the human services agency that Rauner has targeted for deep cuts. That topic sparked a heated exchange last week between Rauner administration aides and Democratic lawmakers, with the Rauner team saying Democrats were being sexist in their inquiry into Purvis' pay.

Democrats invited Purvis to testify at Tuesday's hearing, according to Madigan spokesman Steve Brown. A Rauner spokesman would not say whether Purvis would accept the offer.

Rauner kicked off the week with a revival of his "turnaround" tour, which had the governor in dozens of Illinois towns and cities earlier this year. On Monday, Rauner visited two downstate locations -- a Harley-Davidson dealership in Marion and a farm store in Belleville -- to deliver his turnaround speech for the first time in a month. At each stop, he was greeted by union opponents who shouted and waved signs opposing his proposals.

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SPRINGFIELD  House Democrats on Thursday stood united in advancing a temporary, one-month budget to keep core services of government operating amid the threat of a partial government shutdown, but the move was largely symbolic as Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner already warned he would not sign the measure.

The action at the Capitol came amid a pair of contradictory court rulings on whether state workers could be paid next week that left the issue a murky legal mess. A Downstate judge ordered Comptroller Leslie Munger to pay workers in full, and she said she would start processing payroll. That ruling came shortly after an appellate court in Chicago, considering a separate case, told Munger to hold off on sending out the checks.

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The developments Thursday are the latest amid an ongoing stalemate that has left state government without full spending authority since July 1. The impasse is the result of the deep partisan divide. On one side is Rauner, who is pushing a broader agenda to help businesses and curb union power, and on the other are Democrats pushing back against the plans they say will hurt the working class.

Under the partial budget plan House Democrats approved on a 71-19 vote, money would be directed to sensitive areas such as health care for the poor, meals for the elderly, addiction treatment and monitoring nuclear facilities. But most other things would go unfunded, including programs that would serve those with autism as well as breast and cervical cancer screenings.

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The political gamesmanship that's marked the six-week overtime session was on full display Thursday as House Democrats amended the stopgap measure to also include 30 days of pay for state workers. Rauner had promised employees they would continue to receive paychecks during the impasse but was dealt a blow earlier this week when a Cook County judge ruled the state did not have the authority to spend the money without a budget in place.

Adding the paycheck provision Thursday was an attempt to pressure Rauner into signing the bill, but the measure still needs Senate approval, and senators don't return to Springfield until next week. Rauner could use his veto powers to strip everything from the bill but the portion that would restore worker pay, but Democrats could use their veto-proof supermajorities to override those changes.

All of it is a continuation of the blame game, as both sides try to paint the other as the reason for the state's dysfunction.

Democrats argue Rauner is at fault for workers not getting paid after he vetoed the spending plan they sent him. Rauner contends the budget Democrats sent him was $4 billion out of balance and designed to force a tax increase. The governor has said he won't consider raising taxes without first winning portions of his economic agenda, which Democrats dismiss as "nonbudgetary" items designed to hold the budget process hostage.

"It leaves the governor with a choice, a very difficult choice," said Rep. Frank Mautino, D-Spring Valley. "Do you let the institutions of the state of Illinois fail in pursuit of something that may be important but not the fundamental responsibility of this body, which is to ensure state operations for the neediest continue?"

Republicans balked, labeling the temporary budget as a "faux" plan the governor would not approve.

"We're seeing the song and dance over there right now," said Rep. C.D. Davidsmeyer, R-Jacksonville. "You are voting for a bill the governor will veto and state employee pay will be in limbo."

But House Speaker Michael Madigan countered that the governor could change his mind, saying "if you follow the governor's actions day by day, there's a lot of U-turns."

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As the House moved ahead on the short-term budget, courts in Chicago and Downstate delivered competing rulings on whether state worker paychecks should go out Wednesday.

St. Clair County Judge Robert LeChien ruled Thursday that employees should be paid in full while the budget impasse plays out. Munger, the comptroller, said that allows her to start processing payroll.

But that ruling contradicted a Tuesday decision in Cook County, where a judge ordered the state to pay workers only the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage absent a budget. Munger's office argued that was impossible to do because of the complexity of the state's antiquated payroll systems, and appealed the decision.

On Thursday, an appellate court in Chicago said the comptroller should hold off on issuing any paychecks while it considers the case.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office said it would review whether to appeal the St. Clair judge's ruling after its attorneys had argued that paying state workers in full would violate the Illinois Constitution, which leaves it to the legislature and governor to decide how state money should be spent.

"What is clear at this point is that this is going to continue to play itself out in court, which makes it absolutely imperative that the governor and legislature do their jobs and enact a budget," said Natalie Bauer, a spokeswoman for Lisa Madigan's office.

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Even without a full budget, state government is fumbling along. Rauner removed some of the immediate pressure to strike a deal by signing the portion of the budget that would funnel money to schools so they open on time. State law also requires that some payments go out even if a budget isn't in place, including dollars to pay employee pension costs and paychecks for lawmakers. A federal judge this week also ordered the state to continue to fund the state's child welfare agency.

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But the heat is on for those who rely on government services, and the pain is expected to be particularly acute at agencies that care for the state's elderly, disabled and addicted. Those nonprofits rely largely on state money and have seen funding repeatedly slashed in recent years, a situation they argue makes it more difficult for them to stay afloat during the impasse.

In his attempt to win approval of his agenda, Rauner has tried to go around Madigan. On Wednesday, Rauner sought to demonstrate he is working with other Democrats, including Senate President John Cullerton and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, by unveiling a sweeping public employee pension overhaul that includes some of their ideas.

But Democrats so far have presented a unified front against what Madigan labeled as Rauner's "divide and conquer" effort.

"We don't always agree on everything, but we are basically a united group," Madigan said Thursday. "And I would say to the governor that I don't think his strategy is going to work."

Chicago Tribune's Bill Ruthhart contributed. Geiger and Ruthhart reported from Chicago.

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Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan proposed a measure that would have put a question on the November 2016 ballot asking voters to amend the Illinois Constitution to impose an extra 3-percentage-point income tax on those who make more than $1 million a year. (Abel Uribe, Chicago Tribune)

SPRINGFIELD  Democratic Speaker Michael Madigan's effort to ask voters to approve a measure to impose higher income taxes on millionaires failed in the House on Thursday, but provides the powerful Southwest Side politician ammunition to attack Republicans in next year's legislative campaigns.

The proposal needed 71 "yes" votes to pass, but received just 68. But now there's a roll call, and Madigan's Illinois Democratic Party could send out mailers criticizing Republicans who voted against the idea. Democrats already have sent out attack ads against Republicans who did not vote in favor of a property tax freeze last week.

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Under Madigan's measure, a question would have been put on the November 2016 ballot asking voters to amend the Illinois Constitution to impose an extra 3-percentage-point income tax on those who make more than $1 million a year. Madigan first pushed the concept last year, but it failed to get enough support. Instead, he led efforts to put a similar advisory question on the November 2014 ballot, which voters approved by a wide margin.

Madigan estimated the proposal would generate $1 billion a year to be used for education, but the money wouldn't be coming until 2017 --- too late to help with this year's $6.6 billion budget shortfall that threatens major spending cuts.

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Rep. Ron Sandack, R-Downers Grove, took the opportunity Thursday to quiz Madigan about past votes by lawmakers that added to the state's poor financial shape, including decisions to borrow money to make pension payments or skip payments altogether.

"Now, essentially the problem makers wish to be the problem solvers by asking taxpayers to come out of their pockets yet again without doing the real work necessary to solve our state's financial problems," said Sandack, who argued the tax would encourage high earners to leave the state.



Madigan said he had "no reason to disagree with your version of history" but said he was offering voters the chance to raise more money for local schools, which districts could use to ease their pension obligations.



"This simply says that for those that have done well in this state, we're going to ask you to provide a little more help for the state so our future children can do better in life," Madigan said.



The measure is viewed as a direct attack against Gov. Bruce Rauner, who used his personal fortune amassed as a venture capitalist to mount his successful bid for the state's top office.



The action unfolded just hours after Rauner, who has largely been out of the public eye this week as a May 31 deadline to pass a budget approaches, had an opinion piece published in a Springfield newspaper warning that legislators may be forced to stick around the Capitol this summer if they don't embrace his agenda.

Rauner has sought to leverage the budget-making process to win sweeping changes, including tougher union rules and lowering operating costs for businesses, saying he'd consider the possibility of a tax increase if lawmakers gave him what he wants.

But Democrats who control the legislature have so far refused to go along, with House Speaker Michael Madigan orchestrating a series of test votes to publicly reject key Rauner proposals, including steep cuts to human services and right-to-work rules that would limit how unions collect dues.

Indeed, Rauner's opinion piece in the State Journal-Register comes as the House is scheduled to consider two more issues on Rauner's wish list -- changes to workers' compensation insurance for employees hurt on the job and an overhaul to the civil lawsuit system to limit multimillion-dollar judgments, which is known as tort reform. Republicans have decried the House votes as political stunts meant to embarrass the new chief executive, while Democrats argue the governor should not hold the budget process hostage to his agenda.

In his opinion piece Thursday, Rauner acknowledged he was the "new guy" in Springfield, saying he may not be familiar with how things have been done in the past but that keeps him "idealistic and hopeful."

"I'm not jaded or cynical about what we can accomplish to make Illinois great again," he wrote. "But I've grown concerned by what I've seen in the legislature during the past few weeks. We're approaching the end of the regular legislative session with no apparent long-term solution to the state's budget, pension and economic mess.

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"It's time to focus on what's really going on and what we must change now. Illinois needs a turnaround. The public understands that, but it appears many state elected officials do not," he continued.

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Rauner did not name names in his piece, nor did he offer much in the way of specifics on which issues he's willing to trade. Getting an opinion piece published also allowed Rauner to avoid questions from journalists. The last time Rauner took questions from reporters was a week ago, as he has gone into a sort of bunker mode ahead of the session's scheduled conclusion. His predecessor, Democrat Pat Quinn, sometimes did the same thing.

The rookie governor ended with a warning that he won't give up easily, saying legislators should be prepared to work into their summer break if they don't embrace his ideas.

"If legislators are willing to reform how we do business, they will find me an eager partner," he wrote. "If they are not, then they should expect a very long extra session because I will keep fighting for major reforms that will grow jobs and help properly fund services by shrinking waste inside government."

Rauner also controls a $20 million pot of campaign cash that he could use to help lawmakers who support his agenda or attack those who do not. Last week, he doled out $400,000 to all Republican lawmakers, contributions that come as he's asked for unity from his party as he fights for his agenda.

Democrats were quick to dismiss the letter as proof that Rauner still has much to learn about how to work with lawmakers, not simply dictate what they should do.

"It demonstrates that he still has this 'my way or the highway' mentality," said Rep. Christian Mitchell, D-Chicago. "You would hope by now that more would have been learned."
Lee's version (which is being co-written by Kevin Willmott, a filmmaker out of the University of Kansas) would purportedly update the action and set it in Chicago. If you're familiar with the original play, this concept doesn't seem outlandish. Or irresponsible in its treatment of violence. But how many people are indeed familiar with this Aristophanes work? It's far from obscure but it's not necessarily widely known and hasn't been produced in Chicago for at least 10 years, if not longer.
Gov. Bruce Rauner is proving to be quite adept at skirting responsibility for the current Statehouse impasse and impending government shutdown.

He has relentlessly painted himself as the good guy, even to the point of blatantly abandoning his previous stances.

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For instance, the Republican governor has righteously slammed the Democrats' "unconstitutional" unbalanced budget, even though his proposed budget was also billions of dollars out of balance.

Rauner trashed that Democratic budget even after signing the part that funded the public schools, thereby ensuring that he avoids blame if the schools don't open on time.

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Rauner warned in April that the state had no money to bail out Chicago, then offered $200 million a year in "found money" for the Chicago Public Schools to keep it from going belly up.

Rauner often refers to the state employee union AFSCME as "AFSCAMMY" and told the Chicago Tribune editorial board that the crisis of a state fiscal meltdown "creates opportunity" to get his non-budget issues passed.

But last week he pledged to work arm in arm with the unions to make sure that those poor state workers got their paychecks  even though the lack of a budget means there is no legal appropriation to do so.

He's a clever dude, willing to say about anything to shift the focus off of him and on to the Democrats.

Rauner said last week via an email to state employees that he hadn't heard any response to his newly proposed compromises on his non-budget demands which he wants resolved before he will even talk about the budget.

But Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, had been working with the governor on workers' compensation, a property tax freeze and other issues, and many of Rauner's "new" compromises weren't new at all.

The Democrats have responded by pushing a proposal that they hope will help give them an edge on the governor. The Senate Democrats last week used their large veto-proof majority to pass a bill to fund a few "essential" state operations for one month at a cost of $2.26 billion.

The legislation includes money for expenses such as sex offender GPS tracking, community care programs for the elderly, the Illinois Emergency Management Agency's monitoring of nuclear sites and its natural disaster response, along with operational funds for veterans' homes, the Illinois State Police, the Illinois School for the Deaf, the Illinois School for the Visually Impaired, the Illinois National Guard and group homes, foster homes and protective services run by the Department of Children and Family Services.

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That's not an easy bill to vote against. The TV commercials write themselves. But zero Republicans voted for it.

The House Democrats, who have a smaller majority than their Senate counterparts, couldn't pass the bill because they didn't have all of their members in the chamber, but they still got Republicans on record as opposing it.

House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, told reporters that he had heard that at least two House Republicans were willing to vote to keep the government from totally shutting down. But the House GOP leadership said Rauner had placed a very large "brick" on the bill, and the Republicans complied with his wishes, as they almost always have done since Rauner's inauguration.

That constant compliance is starting to have a price.

Rauner met with the House Republican Caucus last week to thank them for sticking with him throughout the spring legislative session and to ask them for more support during the current overtime session.

Rauner thanked them for voting "present" at his request on controversial bills that could get them in hot water with constituents. He was politely reminded, however, that they actually voted "no" on quite a few bills, including the education funding bill that the governor wound up signing into law.

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Nobody enjoys getting the rug pulled out from under them, so the House Republicans have a right to be a little ticked off.

Some believe that the Democrats hope to drive so many wedges between legislative Republicans and Rauner that eventually the legislators will rise up and demand a resolution.

A revolt from below is highly unlikely, however. Rauner is Illinois' first Republican governor in a dozen years, so Republican lawmakers truly want to help him succeed. Plus, the governor is sitting on an unlimited supply of campaign money, and they want that cash for next year's elections  and they don't want any of it used against them.

Even so, it wouldn't hurt if the more reasonable Republican lawmakers finally find the courage to suggest a way out of this mess.

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com
Gov. Bruce Rauner had several House Republicans over to the governor's mansion last week to ask them to vote "present" when the House Democrats' called their right-to-work bill the following day.

Right-to-work laws allow union members to not pay for any of their union's services, even though unions are required by federal law to service all their members. The laws can cripple unions, which may help businesses, and they tend to drive down wages for working folks.

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Why would the Democrats bring an anti-union bill to the House floor? Various reasons.

One is that they are strongly opposed to the idea, and the governor has pushed it so forcefully that they wanted to finally get the issue off the table by killing it. They also wanted to put the Republicans in a tight spot of choosing between voting with Rauner or their friends in organized labor.

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Anyway, the governor's push last week was resisted by a few Republicans, even after House GOP Leader Jim Durkin, R-Western Springs, demanded that they stick with the governor and vote "present."

Several eventually relented, and Rauner reportedly said they would be free to vote "no" when a "real" bill is presented. But he urged them to stick together and hit their yellow buttons to protest Speaker Michael Madigan's ploy to put them all on the hot seat.

It probably didn't hurt that Rauner contributed a grand total of $400,000 earlier in the week to what his staff said was every Republican legislator.

The meeting at the mansion was often tense, insiders say, although there was reportedly a moment of levity when one of the governor's beloved dogs made a doo-doo in front of legislators while Rauner was giving his pitch.

Believe it or not, quite a few unions in Illinois have spent years wooing Republican legislators. The Illinois Education Association has a strong presence in suburbia and downstate, and the union has long endorsed a significant number of GOP candidates  including in Tier One races against Democrats.

Getting on the IEA's wrong side can be a hazard to one's political health, which is one reason why so many Republican legislators were nervous over the right-to-work vote.

The IEA sent House Republicans a message last week.

"We expect a 'no' vote," one IEA lobbyist said. "Show that you are supportive of the middle class. A vote to the contrary, and they will have to explain themselves to our members."

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The Republicans pleaded their case that the right-to-work bill was mainly political theater designed to make them look bad. But the IEA and other unions wouldn't budge, leaving legislators to choose between Rauner (and his tens of millions of dollars in campaign cash) and their union allies.

Illinois AFL-CIO president Mike Carrigan said "anything but a solid 'no' vote" will "not be tolerated and will be considered as an inexcusable vote against labor."

Carrigan also specifically warned that "present" votes weren't acceptable and neither was skipping the vote, adding that "House member absences will be reviewed with suspicious eyes."

In the end, only one Republican sided openly with the unions and Democrats by voting "no" on the bill, Rep. Raymond Poe, of Springfield. Four union-friendly Republicans didn't vote at all (Reps. John Anthony, Bill Mitchell, Michael McAuliffe and John Cabello). A few others didn't vote, either, but that likely had more to do with the process and/or their relationships with their party leaders than anything else.

Some Republicans with past union ties voted with the governor. Rep. Dwight Kay, R-Glen Carbon, for instance, was endorsed by the IEA for the first time last year, but he voted "present."

One of Rauner's main goals is to split the Republican Party from all union ties. If the unions follow through with their threats, some of those ties will most certainly be broken.

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And the Republicans aren't the ones that the unions have to be worried about. The House Black Caucus sent a clear message to trade unions during the debate that they need to start admitting more minorities or they'll face retaliation.

Rauner has attempted to peel off black and Latino legislators from labor by playing up the historic "whiteness" of the trade unions and promising affirmative action-style reforms.

In remarks planned in advance with other Black Caucus members, Rep. Ken Dunkin, D-Chicago, said during debate that the issue of racial diversity within the trade unions must be addressed soon or trouble could arise. Almost all minority legislators stood during his speech and stared at the gallery where labor leaders were seated.

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com
I recently obtained a document distributed by Gov. Bruce Rauner's office detailing the membership lists and meeting times and locations of the secret state legislative "working groups."

The governor's office has insisted that not only should legislators dummy up about what goes on at the groups' meetings  which are designed to forge compromises on the governor's "Turnaround Agenda"  but also that outsiders should not even know the membership of the groups or when and where they're getting together.

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That's pretty ridiculous, if you ask me. Many moons ago, I began writing about private legislative caucus meetings. That didn't endear me to the powers that be, but I thought the meetings were too important to the Statehouse process to ignore.

I still think that, although caucus meetings are somewhat less important these days. So, I exerted a bit of effort and eventually got the governor's document.

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The working group assigned to achieve an agreement on a potential tax increase is so secret that its very existence would not be confirmed by its members whom I contacted. Legislators were reportedly warned by Rauner's office that if any word leaked about the group then Rauner would refuse to increase taxes.

Yep, he's a control freak.

The group was nicknamed "Vegas" by some of its members because what happens in the group is supposed to stay in the group. It's official name is listed as "HOLD" on the governor's document. It's apparently not an acronym.

"They were that afraid to put things in writing," explained one source. "So just 'hold' this slot open."

I kid you not.

Republican state Reps. Patricia Bellock and David Leitch are on the HOLD group as well as Democratic Rep. John Bradley. Senate Democrats Heather Steans and Toi Hutchinson are also on the super-secret group, as are Republican Sens. Pam Althoff and Karen McConnaughay.

The governor's top staff abruptly shut down a HOLD meeting last week, calling House Speaker Michael Madigan's unilateral advancement of a budget bill a "hostile action."

The "Economic Growth" working group will tackle issues such as workers' compensation insurance, Rauner's idea of local right-to-work zones, tort reform and the minimum wage. Democratic Reps. Jay Hoffman and Art Turner; Republican Reps. Mike Tryon, David Leitch and Dwight Kay; Democratic Sens. Kimberly Lightford and Kwame Raoul; and Republican Sens. Matt Murphy and Jim Oberweis are in the group. Some initial progress is being made on workers' comp reform, I'm told.

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The "Taxpayer Protection" working group discusses issues such as the governor's proposed property tax freeze. Members were told that Rauner's initial bargaining position is a permanent freeze. Democratic Sens. Gary Forby and Andy Manar are on the working group as well as Republican Sens. Dan Duffy and Chris Nybo. Democratic Reps. John Bradley and Barbara Flynn Currie and GOP Reps. David Harris and Ed Sullivan are also in this group.

I wrote recently about the "Transforming Government" group, which featured the Democratic throwdown with the governor's staff over a legislative term-limits constitutional amendment. It's also dealing with implementing Rauner's executive order on state worker ethics and banning public-employee union contributions to the executive branch. Democratic Reps. Lou Lang and Elgie Sims. Republican Reps. Norine Hammond and Chad Hays. Democratic Sen. Don Harmon and Republican Sens. Darin LaHood and Chapin Rose are in the group.

The governor wants to move current state employees and teachers out of their "Tier 1" pension plan into a "Tier 2" plan that provides far fewer benefits. His "Pension Reform" working group consists of Democratic Rep. Elaine Nekritz, Senate Democrat Daniel Biss, House Republicans Tom Morrison and Ron Sandack and Senate Republicans Bill Brady and Pam Althoff.

Rauner has been promising a major road and mass transit construction program since his campaign. The "Capital Plan" working group members are Senate Democrats John Sullivan and Marty Sandoval, Republican Sens. Dave Syverson and Karen McConnaughay, House Democrats Bob Rita and Christian Mitchell and House Republicans Norine Hammond and Ed Sullivan. They didn't get much done at their last meeting because the governor refused to talk about how to pay for it.

The "Budget Implementation" working group is huge. The last meeting was attended by 38 people, including all legislative appropriations committee chairs. Getting things accomplished with a group that size could be difficult.

The "Unemployment Insurance" working group will use an "agreed bill" process to find a way to bring down employer costs. Republican Sens. Sue Rezin and Kyle McCarter are serving on the group, as is Democratic Sen. Terry Link and Democratic Rep. Jay Hoffman along with House Republicans John Anthony and Dwight Kay.

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OK, the members are now all out in the open. Can we stop with all the crazy secrecy now, please?

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com
WASHINGTON  It is nearly axiomatic that presidential elections tend to shine a harsh light on conservative Christians, inasmuch as they are viewed as the Republican Party's base and are, therefore, deemed fair game.

Of course, religious folks come in a variety of stripes, checks and polka dots. Many are Democrats. But it is the members of the Christian right  evangelicals and Catholics, especially  who every four years are treated to the sneers of lefties, academics, proud atheists and certain, but not all, media.

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Roger Ailes' Fox News has succeeded in no small part because he doesn't treat Christians as though they're Darwin's missing link.

Fortunately for Western civilization, Christianity has survived worse insults. Lately, conservative Christians in the country that codified freedom of religion have been placed on the defensive. Often viewed as obstructionists to progress, a secular world wonders: What's wrong with those people? Why can't they just get with the program?

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Why can't the Little Sisters of the Poor suck it up and sign off on the Affordable Care Act's demand that their insurance policy include contraception funding? Ditto Hobby Lobby, the family-owned retailer that prevailed in its Supreme Court fight to not fund insurance covering contraception that destroys embryos.

Hobby Lobby detractors argued that the company was trying to impose its religious beliefs on others. In fact, the family was resisting the government's insistence that they render those beliefs unto Caesar. (The U.S. Supreme Court granted the Little Sisters an injunction that protects them from enforcement while they appeal a federal court ruling.)

These issues, I'll admit, can seem arcane and are tiresome at times. But I'm convinced, as prominent lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr agreed during a debate last year on these two cases, that the state should always go to extra lengths to protect religious liberty whenever possible.

If only more Democrats and Republicans were as agreeable.

Recent history and more-recent comments by the likeliest presidential candidates make it clear, however, that Democrats and Republicans will take very different approaches in future state/religion entanglements.

If Hillary Clinton becomes president, she has more or less promised that the state's interests will crush the individual's as necessary to advance women's rights. Giving a fiery speech last month at Tina Brown's "Women in the World Summit," Clinton plainly said, "Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed" so that women can have unfettered access to "reproductive health care and safe childbirth."

One would like to imagine that Clinton was speaking only about primitive cultures where children are forced into marriage and childbearing or where genital cutting is common.

But we know that she also meant religious conservatives closer to home whose beliefs get in the way. She explicitly criticized Hobby Lobby for not paying for its employees' contraception.

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By contrast, Jeb Bush, who will become the GOP nominee if Republicans are smart, assumed a much different tone and direction in his recent commencement address at Liberty University.

"How strange, in our own time, to hear Christianity spoken of as some sort of backward and oppressive force," he said. "It's a depressing fact that when some people think of Christianity and of Judeo-Christian values, they think of something static, narrow and outdated. ... I cannot think of any more subversive moral idea ever loosed on the world than 'the last shall be first, and the first last.'"

He also spoke of what our world would have been like without the "unalloyed compassion, such genuine love, such thorough altruism," as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described Christianity.

It would be defined, Bush said, by "power without restraint, conflict without reconciliation, oppression without deliverance, corruption without reformation, tragedy without renewal."

In a culture more attuned to the grits 'n' gravy style of a Mike Huckabee, it is rare to hear Christianity discussed in such elevated terms. Indeed, Huckabee can be expected to go after Bush as a blue-blooded elite who can't relate to everyday Americans. Well, yee-haw, one can hardly wait.

But I suspect that even conservative Southern Christians, who can absorb more than one-syllable words, might appreciate hearing their beliefs so eloquently described as by Bush.

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To be fair, Clinton likely would have reframed her comments  and maybe even her beliefs and accent  had she been speaking to a Christian audience. But her spoken words can't be deleted and her thinking is clear  religious beliefs have to be changed.

Or else what, pray tell?

Kathleen Parker is a Washington Post columnist.
"When I got home I found out my little brother was hooked on crack cocaine. Can you believe that? He's just 17, and he's hooked on crack," my seatmate said as he popped open a can of Miller High Life that was stashed in a bag under his seat
SPRINGFIELD  "We need taller interns," a statehouse wag told me during my first year covering the Illinois Capitol.

I was a bit perplexed. After all, at 6 feet, 4 inches, I've never considered myself too short.

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This was in 1988, and the need was for someone tall enough to peer into a high window of the governor's office and tell the assembled reporters what was going on during a meeting between House Speaker Michael Madigan and then-Gov. Jim Thompson.

I was too short to get the job done.

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It's a rite of May in Springfield that the legislative leaders gather at private meetings and negotiate agreements on the state budget and assorted other legislation.

And Madigan, D-Chicago, has always been a power broker in those sessions.

This year, Gov. Bruce Rauner has instituted what he calls "working groups," where a variety of legislators, not just the leaders, are included in private discussions.

That apparently doesn't sit too well with Madigan or Senate President John Cullerton.

"If the governor is serious about the changes he is proposing, the right thing to do now is for us to bring these issues into the open and have a constructive and open discussion, vote and see what steps need to be taken from there," Madigan said.

Underlings for both Madigan and Cullerton, D-Chicago, have been more critical of the meetings.

As a journalist, I don't like closed-door meetings of public officials. I never have. I didn't like it when Madigan and other legislative leaders were having them with past governors.

Over the years, as a statehouse reporter, I've spent countless hours camped outside the governor's office waiting for Madigan to emerge.

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So I'm not keen on the current working groups keeping out the press and the public from some extremely important discussions at a time of financial crisis for Illinois.

Pardon my radical view, but public policy should be formulated in public.

Voters should know what sort of political horse trading is taking place, and be able to weigh in, before a major deal takes place.

That said, it is the height of hypocrisy for Madigan to condemn the meetings of these working groups for being held in private.

He has been conducting secret negotiations with governors since before some members of the General Assembly were born. And he annually promotes a legislative process about as transparent as a slab of concrete.

Sure, there are legislative committees and debates. But Madigan, as the longtime and powerful speaker, pulls the strings and decides if and when bills will be called for a vote.

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It's hardly a transparent process. But Madigan says he wants more transparency.

What next? Hugh Hefner condemns promiscuity? Michael Vick joins PETA? Rod Blagojevich calls for reform and renewal?

Michael Madigan condemning government secrecy?

Give me a break.

Scott Reeder is a veteran statehouse reporter and a journalist with the Illinois News Network, a project of the Illinois Policy Institute. He can be reached at sreeder@illinoispolicy.org
Sink your teeth into the chicken sandwiches at Big City Chicken, or order by the piece. (Anjali M. PInto )

Big City Chicken, the fried chicken concept hatched by Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises and M Burgers Chef Tim Hockett, opened today in Navy Piers food court, so I went to check it out at lunch. The food  crispy and moist chicken, skinny and golden fries  seemed to fly smoothly to customers. My biggest squawks were the absence of trays to transport food from counter to table and that the root beer float promised on the very small menu wasnt available.

You can order fried chicken in 2, 3 or 8 pieces ($5.99, $7.99, $19.99), with a choice of white or dark and original or spicy. The original was delicately flavored and didn't distract from that crunchy brown skin. If you're looking for heat, try the spicy fried chicken sandwich ($6.49), which had more fire than the individual pieces.

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Chicken strips, in a five-piece order ($8.99 with fries) were crunchier than the usual "fingers." I suspect they will appeal as much to adults as to kids. Dipping sauces include the usual suspects  ranch, barbecue, honey mustard, spicy buffalo, ketchup  plus a fun sriracha mayo. You get a choice of one with your chicken order; an extra sauce cost me 50 cents.

Skinny french fries ($2.99), my favorite style, are non greasy and reasonably crisp. The cheese fries ($3.99) were exactly that, fries topped with squirts of that yellow-orange melted cheese often paired with nachos. The chili fries ($3.99) add slices of pickled jalapeno.

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This eatery, which shares a long counter with LEYE neighbors Big Bowl Chinese Express and Frankie's Pizza by the Slice, greets you with a colorful chicken head sign and gleaming white glazed tiles on the counter front and walls. A window offers a peek into the rear kitchen.

Seating is what you'd expect in such a setting: Basic tables and chairs set is a rather utilitarian space. It's not an area made for lingering nor is it meant to be. This is a nice pit stop at which to refuel before heading back to Navy Pier's many attractions.

Big City Chicken, Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand St., 312-546-7440. Open 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday.

wdaley@tribpub.com

Twitter @billdaley
Who says you can't have a burger for breakfast? At The Fountainhead in North Center, Saturday's noon to 2:30 p.m. "blunch" (described on the menu as "lunch with breakfast, rather than the other way around") brings a juicy, half-pound Slagel Farms beef patty smothered in smoked gouda, Nueske's bacon and a fried egg, all bundled inside a warm brioche bun and served with home fries ($16). If you're usually ravenous earlier than noon, try the restaurant's more traditional Sunday brunch, during which the burger  this time made with Hook's cheddar and presented with a side of homemade ketchup and your choice of duck fat home fries or potato latke  begins rolling out at 10 a.m. Either version turns all the more mouthwatering with one of the bar's ice-cold craft beers to wash it down. 1970 W. Montrose Ave., 773-697-8204, http://www.fountainheadchicago.com.

Leah Pickett is a freelance writer.
Let's face it, guys: Father's Day ain't Mother's Day. Mother's Day is one of the two busiest Sundays on the restaurant calendar (Easter is the other); Father's Day is above average, maybe. That means far fewer restaurants are going all-out they way they did in May. Still, these 10 spots are delivering deals and events on June 21:
At Luella's, creamy she-crab soup made from a broth of lobster, mussels and crab roe is poured tableside over a toast wedge and garnished with black and red tobiko. (Chris Sweda, Chicago Tribune)

A restaurant that brands itself Southern is like a restaurant that calls itself Mediterranean: The label represents less a geography and more a reductive idea. For Yankees with only vague notions of The South, Southern cooking gets boiled down to a series of cliches: uncomplicated, oozing of comfort, down home, stick-to-your-ribs and so forth.

It speaks then to the sophistication of Chicago's dining scene that we can support subgenres of Southern cuisine. We're lucky to have among us Big Jones (historical Southern), Analogue (Creole with Cajun touches), Carriage House (Carolina Lowcountry), Leghorn Chicken (Nashville), Heaven on Seven (Louisiana) and MacArthur's (soul).

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But don't conclude a catchall Southern restaurant is a bad thing. Have you ever seen Wishbone on a Sunday morning? The Southern in Bucktown on a Friday night? In the same vein, two new North Side restaurants  Luella's Southern Kitchen and Pearl's Southern Comfort  supply broad-base cooking of the American South. Meats get smoked. Catfish gets fried. Macaroni gets cheesed. You get the idea.

Luella's Southern Kitchen

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This spot in Lincoln Square is my favorite of the two, a restaurant serving a greatest-hits-of-the-South menu over a soundtrack of '60s soul and rhythm and blues. Its chef, Darnell Reed, spent 18 years cooking for Hilton hotels locally, mainly formal banquets. But he name-checks Belly Shack in Logan Square as one of his favorite restaurants. It's not hard to see the influence: Both are counter service restaurants serving food not associated with counter service restaurants.

The plating work, for one, is more impressive. Microgreens adorn several dishes. Symmetry soothes the eye. A creamy she-crab soup comes from a broth of lobster, mussels and crab roe, then is poured tableside over a toast wedge and garnished with black and red tobiko.

What's more telling are the subtle hallmarks of a seasoned chef. I found the fry work at Luella's particularly impressive: Cornmeal batter fits snugly around green tomato slices, greaseless to the touch. This is the sign of a cook blessed with good timing. Buttermilk fried boneless chicken thighs are also expertly prepared, paragons of juicy crispness, served three to an order atop yeasty Belgian waffles and drizzled with bourbon maple syrup. (The beignets were duds, but that's less to do with the frying than the dough's dense consistency.)

At other restaurants across town, many Southern-inspired dishes are just that: dishes inspired by the South but not necessarily tasting of the South. Luella's shrimp and grits are transportative, bringing me back to Mr. B's Bistro in New Orleans' French Quarter. It's the Creole interpretation of barbecued shrimp  not actually barbecued, but grilled or pan-fried and served in a left arm-numbingly rich sauce of Worcestershire and butter. I'd like to drink a hot mug of this sauce every morning. Luella's grits, too, are cooked as creamy as bechamel.

Pearl's Southern Comfort

I used to live two blocks from Pearl's Southern Comfort's location in Edgewater, and in the not too distant past, the dining scene along Broadway was sad. Pearl's looks different from just about every restaurant within a four-block radius: Broodingly dark, with decorative mirrored windows and chandeliers, a sort of plantation chic with obligatory whiskey signs. While Pearl's is young and still ironing out kinks, I consider it a net positive for the neighborhood.

For reasons of optimism, consider its pedigree. Its chef is Dan Finelli, who comes from the fine-dining world via Sixteen and Sepia. Jonathan Zaragoza, the talented young chef formerly of Masa Azul, is on board. And Pearl's owner, Danny Beck, is the man behind Lakeview's Toons, which has long defied my expectations of bro-ish bar food. (Its Italian sausage chili is great.)

Toons' reputation for solid chicken wings carries over to Pearl's, where smoked-then-fried wings are paired with Alabama white sauce  think the creamy tang of coleslaw dressing. The crawfish cheesecake is downright strange but ultimately fulfilling, a chilled spread shaped into a cheesecake wedge, plunked down over a Creole mustard remoulade.

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Where the restaurant could use improvement is its barbecue program. Smoke doesn't penetrate fully into meats, and where it does, it's drowned out by a thick slather of barbecue sauce. Balance is also an issue in the jambalaya, which is so tomato-heavy the dish is borderline acidic.

It's when the preparation is simple that Finelli's fine-dining background comes through. Aspiring cooks should check out the technique on the blackened catfish, pan-fried exquisitely while retaining considerable moistness. And a shoutout to Annie Beck, a Culinary Institute of America-trained pastry chef who wowed me with a four-star Nutter Butter pie that was sweet, creamy, salty, smooth and crunchy.

Perhaps the dish most indicative of Pearl's intentions is its Jazz Fest Crawfish Monica. Cajun-spiced Parmesan cream sauce fills nooks of rotini pasta, embedded with hunks of crawfish meat. It's mac and cheese for grown-ups with Mardi Gras beads slung. It's a dish rooted in New Orleans, yes, but it also bears broader Southern traits, ones that represent less a geography and more an idea  uncomplicated, oozing of comfort, down home, stick-to-your-ribs and so forth.

kpang@tribpub.com

Twitter @pang

Luella's Southern Kitchen

4609 N. Lincoln Ave.

773-961-8196

luellassouthernkitchen.com

Closed Monday

Recommended dishes: Chicken and waffles, gumbo, shrimp and grits, BBQ brisket mac and cheese

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Pearl's Southern Comfort

5352 N. Broadway

773-754-7419

pearlschicago.com

Closed Monday



Recommended dishes: Smoked wings, boudin balls, crawfish Monica, Nutter Butter pie, Sazerac
As for the art matches  well, these are six works I've just seen for the first time, by artists with whom I'm unfamiliar. Suffice it to say, you may indeed discern exuberance within Ruben Leyva's "Magic Act," which appears to be narrated by an anthropomorphic zucchini (I'm not the ideal art museum date); comfort in Paula Pia Martinez's almost pastoral untitled composition that looks (to me) like an intimate couple protected by a tree with heart-shaped leaves; an almost sacred sense of wonder in Filemon Santiago's depiction of the joys of the table (I think) and surprise in Rufino Tamayo's "El Grito" (The Cry), which depicts a human figure in black and white, save for bright-red hands and tongue (I might have paired this piece with an exceptionally spicy dish).
Claudia Dubon cleans the front window of the new Ghirardelli store minutes before opening in the Wrigley Building on Saturday at 830 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago. (Abel Uribe, Chicago Tribune)

Another taste of the San Francisco chocolatier Ghirardelli is arriving in Chicago this weekend, this one boasting a chocolate-making station and a chocolate-covered fruit and nut bar.

Ghirardelli Chocolate Co. announced in January its plan to move into the historic Wrigley Building at the base of the Magnificent Mile. The flagship chocolate and ice cream shop opening was slated for Memorial Day weekend, then pushed back to June 26. Finally, after more delays with permitting, the store is expected to open its doors to the public Saturday.

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The new two-floor 7,000-square-foot space  filled with bags of chocolate squares, chocolate tins, an ice cream sundae bar, a chocolate-making station and more  is only a few blocks from Chicago's first Ghirardelli outpost at 830 N. Michigan Ave., which opened about 20 years ago. More than 100 new employees have been brought in to run the latest chocolate and ice cream shop.

Ghirardelli will soon sandwich both ends of the bustling shopping thoroughfare. "You can't miss Ghirardelli in Chicago," marketing director Kym Hough said as she stood at the entryway to the nearly opened location Friday afternoon. She called the Wrigley Building a "destination landmark building" that fits with the company's brand and goal to expand to a more tourist-friendly location closer to the city's museums and other attractions further south.

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The latest store will be the largest store nationwide with 100 seats sprinkled throughout a second level and a ground-floor patio filled with tables and deep blue umbrellas. The Michigan Avenue entrance, in the recently renovated plaza courtyard, opens to piles of chocolate squares to pick and mix, tins of more chocolate goodies and other retail products. Free samples will be offered when customers walk inside. Find Chicago-themed souvenirs among the large photographs of San Francisco scenes and sights along the walls.

The staircase to the upper level opens to a wall of windows overlooking the street, the Michigan Avenue Bridge and Chicago River. At the ice cream bar customers can order scoops of chocolate ice cream and other flavors ($4.25 for a single scoop), shakes (starting at $6.50), floats (starting at $6.25 for a small), brownies ($4.95), coffee and hot cocoa ($4.25 for a small), and plenty of other sweet options.

Special to this location is the "Chocolatier" chocolate making station, where a chocolate chef will create goodies in front of customers from a spigot flowing with melted chocolate. The original San Francisco and Boston's Faneuil Hall locations are the only other spots to take in the chocolate-making experience. Look for a Chicago custom mold in the coming months, along with DIY class sessions.

Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. >

The chocolate-covered fruit and nut bar is another special addition to the Wrigley location. Only at the main San Francisco store can chocolate aficionados mix and match their own bag of chocolate covered cashews, almonds, cherries, blueberries, espresso beans and nine other flavors ($9.95 per pound).

Starting on Saturday (and lasting until the store's official grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony July 22), a specialty Chicago sundae will be offered: chocolate chip ice cream, hot fudge and a Ghirardelli Colossal Cookie, topped with whipped cream, caramel and, of course, a cherry.

As to nearby competition across the street  Dylan's Candy Bar opened late last year  Hough said she isn't worried; the stores have different focuses. Dylan's is about discovering different types of candies from around the world, while Ghirardelli revolves solely around chocolate, from "bean to bar," she added.

Both the Wrigley Building and chocolate company can trace their roots to earlier days of sweets and treats. The Wrigley Building, built in 1921 and completed in 1924 with the addition of the adjoining North Tower, was the headquarters for chewing gum company Wrigley until 2012. Wrigley is now owned by Mars Inc., makers of chocolate bars and other sugary items. After the sale, the Wrigley Building went through its own transformation, a renovation of its street-level plaza and the addition of new tenants for its retail spaces, including Walgreens and Peet's Coffee & Tea.

The building's newest tenant, whose retail lease was managed in January by CONLON Commercial, has an even deeper history. During the California Gold Rush, Italian national Domingo Ghirardelli moved to the states and started selling supplies, confections and chocolate specialty items to luxury-starved miners with plenty of gold dust to spend. In 1852 he opened a confectionary shop in San Francisco, which eventually became the world famous Ghirardelli Chocolate Co. Originally a San Francisco destination, the San Leandro, Calif.,-based company has grown to more than 23 locations nationwide.

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Ghirardelli Chocolate, Wrigley Building, 400 N. Michigan, #100, next to the Peet's Coffee and Tea on the ground floor plaza of the South Tower. Open 10 a.m to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday.

alekach@tribpub.com
This past weekend I spent 48 hours in Canada. At 1 a.m. on a Saturday, in my hotel several kilometers from Niagara Falls, I found myself hungry. Typical. The hotel restaurant was closed, even room service, and the concierge woefully suggested the vending machine.

"Or," he said, "there's the 24-hour McDonald's across the street."

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The reason I didn't dismiss the suggestion immediately: This was a Canadian McDonald's. Each McDonald's location caters to its country's taste, so you might find a fried shrimp burger in Japan, or chicken porridge in Malaysia. How would the Canucks represent Canada's food traditions? Like seeing a dead moose on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway, I became weirdly fascinated.

Luck of lucks! McDonald's Canada is in the midst of a promotion called "Great Canadian Taste Adventure." Each week the chain unveils a new menu item inspired by some region of Canada. There was a maple and bacon poutine from Quebec, a chocolate Nanaimo bar based on the dessert originating from British Columbia, and the Alberta-inspired "Western BBQ Burger" using "beef raised in Western Canada."

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But the most idiosyncratic menu item  and the one Americans might consider most far-fetched for McDonald's  was the McLobster.

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I ordered one. For diplomacy. For a better understanding of our friendly neighbors to the north.

Even the Canadian government calls lobsters Canada's "most valuable seafood export." So ordering a McLobster apparently transports you to the pages of The Shipping News. "Tap your toes to the sound of the fiddle and embrace the salty sea air of the east coast," the ad copy reads. A vicarious trip will set you back $7.99 Canadian, about $6.51 U.S.

It came in a roll that was more hot dog bun than split-top. The bread was toasted lightly around the periphery, but otherwise stale. The cool filling had shredded lettuce and diced celery, heavy on mayonnaise spiked with lemon flavoring. There was so much mayo it was hard to judge the quality of the lobster chunks and claw meat without wiping away the sauce. Once you did, though, it tasted recognizably of lobster  though not the sweetness of a meat freshly shucked and chilled.

The problem: The bread was subpar, which is 45 percent of what constitutes a decent lobster roll. There was too much mayo. But I would scoop out the filling, dash on some hot sauce and a squeeze of lemon, and happily spoon this on saltine crackers.

(To be clear, the McLobster once appeared stateside, albeit short-lived. The sandwich was sold in the 1990s in New England McDonald's, according to my colleague Bill Daley. Back then it sold for $3.99.)

The McLobster is served at Canadian McDonald's until June 30. You probably don't need it in your life. It shouldn't be a reason to cross the border, even though the American dollar is strong. I had a way tastier burger and poutine at a Toronto-based chain called Big Smoke Burger. But the novelty of a McDonald's serving lobster is interesting, even if just on an anthropological level.

kpang@tribpub.com

Twitter @pang
These are dark days for KFC's once-dominant chicken empire. After five years of crumbling sales, the extra crispy mega-chain, which in 2012 lost its throne as America's top chicken seller to Chick-fil-A, now makes less money than eateries half its size, like Applebee's and Panera Bread.

Now, 75 years after "Colonel" Harland Sanders first served his original recipe at a six-seat dining table in rural Kentucky, the chain is betting $185 million on a massive, bizarre turnaround campaign in hopes of winning a seat again at the fast-food table.

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The chain is blasting out TV ads, offering new Southern-style grub and remodeling some of its 4,300 stores with humanized touches, like boards they say will name the regional farm where their chickens came from.

Perhaps KFC's biggest gamble: Reviving the long-dead visage of Colonel Sanders himself, "the brand's greatest asset," with a handful of increasingly odd "web, broadcast, social media and in-store experiences."

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"Young people all have this idea that everyone can be a star on social media. Well, the Colonel was the consummate American showman," said Kevin Hochman, KFC's chief marketing officer. "People see him as an old person, because we haven't talked about him in a while. But he was the person with bling before bling was even a word."

In the United States, KFC has joined other once-infallible fast-food kings, like McDonald's, in seeing a drop-off in business from buyers increasingly lured to fast-casual, advertised-fresuh outposts like Chipotle Mexican Grill. In China, the chain (and others) has seen sales disappear amid worries over the Avian flu.

It has struggled against small-but-growing rivals like Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen and Bojangles' Famous Chicken 'n Biscuits, which debuted on the stock market this month, and faces new competition from upstarts like classy burger joint Shake Shack, whose shares climbed this week after it filed a trademark application for "Chicken Shack."

But KFC's biggest loss so far has been in its Cersei-Margaery-style battle with Chick-fil-A, its younger Southern rival. After eclipsing KFC in 2012, the cult favorite known for its boneless chicken sandwiches ran with the prize, making $1 billion more in the United States than KFC did last year.

But KFC has big backing from its owner, Yum Brands, the $40 billion fast-food colossus behind Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. And executives say it has the name, history and nostalgia they're hoping will win Americans back.

Over the next few years, KFC will redo its packaging, uniforms and dining decor in red-and-white stripes, which executives call a throw-back to the classic look of carnival tents. The chain will also expand its menu, offering Southern-ish fare like barbecue baked beans with slow-pulled chicken alongside a river of ranch-like Finger Lickin' Good Sauce.

In a world of health-food hype, the chain is doubling down on its fried-chicken bucket, which Hochman called a "shareable innovative package" that still gets about three-quarters of its sales from parents with kids at the table.

"Many families see our bucket meals as home-meal replacements," Hochman said. "They may want to cut corners, but they want to know the people who are making their meals aren't cutting corners."

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Unlike its fast-food competitors  Wendy's with its veggie burgers, McDonald's with its kale  none of KFC's rebranding promises touch on a shift toward healthier cuisine. Instead, the chain will continue to trumpet its heaping helpings of extra-crispy yardbird, buttery biscuits and gravy-flooded mashed-potato bowls. (One new package design includes the quote, "There are few problems a bucket of fried chicken can't solve.")

The chain also will try and get people to think less about trouble spots in its history of poultry farming  including a scandal last year involving a tainted meat supply  and think more about its chicken "traceability." Promotional spots will say KFC's chickens come in raw from regional farms and are hand-breaded and fried before leaving the kitchen.

"The new healthy is really about real food: I know where the chickens are from, how they're prepared, that it's done the proper way," Hochman said. "We're very on trend with that."

Amid all these changes, KFC has yet to announce any shift on one of the biggest issues in modern farming: The use of chicken raised by antibiotics. McDonald's said in March it would phase out the chicken due to worries over deadly, treatment-resistant "superbugs." This week, Wal-Mart became the first major retailer to ask its farmers and meat producers to limit their antibiotic use.

To market these changes, KFC tapped Saturday Night Live alum Darrell Hammond to resurrect a live-action version of Colonel Sanders, who has not been seen on TV in 20 years, in ads that will launch next week.

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On Tuesday, @KFC tweeted a "State of Kentucky Fried Chicken Address," in which Hammond's Colonel wheezes and drawls his way through all the changes he's missed before declaring, "I'm back, America." (Of cargo pants, he declares, "You seen these pants? That's too many pockets.")

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In real life, the Indiana-born Sanders worked a parade of odd jobs before franchising KFC, which he sold to a group of investors in 1964 for $2 million. (Sanders died in 1980, and the chain made $4.2 billion last year in the U.S. alone.)

KFC hopes to play that story for laughs, launching a Web site, the Hall of Colonels, that plays out Sanders' history. One still highlights a gas-station gunfight that has spread (spuriously) across the web.

The chain also unveiled an offbeat, 8-bit-style web game, ColonelQuest, that plays like a dark acid trip of Sanders' life. In one level full of bouncing babies, the player, as Sanders' "amateur obstetrician," is told to "catch as many babies as you can so the Colonel won't get sued for malpractice!"

It's not the only way KFC is trying to hook young eaters: An ad campaign in Germany includes a tray liner that can be used as a Bluetooth keyboard for a smartphone. Those stores are part of KFC's growing global enterprise: The chain now has 7,300 international outposts, 3,000 more than it has back home.

But KFC draws the line at comparing its rebranding to that of McDonald's, the fellow global fast-food titan now going through its own turnaround. In the company's view, Sanders is far removed from the legacy of Ronald McDonald.

"This is much more than a mascot," Hochman said. "He was literally the greatest chicken salesman in the world."
A bill expected to boost the state's beer production is headed to the governor's desk after passing the Illinois House on Tuesday.

The House signed off on the bill 87-20 after the Senate passed it late last month. Gov. Bruce Rauner will have 60 days to sign, veto or amend the bill from the time it's sent to him.

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"We're excited," said John Barley, co-founder of Solemn Oath Brewery and the president of the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild, which negotiated the bill with the Associated Beer Distributors of Illinois.

"We've had no indication from the governor's office that this won't be signed. It's good for beer in Illinois, good for brewers, consumers and the distributorships."

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The legislation allows breweries to make up to 120,000 barrels of beer per year  more than most breweries in the state now make  while operating as many as three retail facilities, such as brewpubs or taprooms.

Current law, which has been cobbled together over years of negotiations, limits brewers to 30,000 barrels of annual production if they own multiple types of breweries, and had knocked fast-growing breweries like Revolution Brewing from compliance.

For more background on the bill, click here.

jbnoel@tribune.com

Twitter @joshbnoel
Hugo Jimenez loads cans of beer on a pallet at Revolution Brewing's production facility in 2014. The brewery would benefit from the proposed law on increasing production limits. (Chris Walker, Chicago Tribune)

Revolution Brewing is one of the nation's fastest-growing breweries, but its blistering growth has knocked it out of compliance with Illinois' liquor law.

The problem: Revolution's massive production brewery on Kedzie Avenue, and its brewpub on Milwaukee Avenue, constitute two different types of brewing facilities. State law currently says that cross-ownership of various types of breweries  meaning a production brewery and a brewpub  is only legal for breweries that make less than 30,000 barrels of beer per year.

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Because Revolution surged past 50,000 barrels of production last year, the brewery has operated outside the letter of the state's liquor laws.

"We've been taking a lot of risk and investing a lot of money with an unclear future," Revolution founder Josh Deth said. "But we didn't slow down because we felt good about our chances for a change in the law."

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That change seems poised to arrive. In an agreement hailed by both sides that negotiated it  brewers and distributors  an updated law is expected to come before the Illinois General Assembly this week that clears up a patchwork of rules that brewers have long criticized as stymieing growth and innovation. The new legislation would allow a brewer to make 120,000 barrels of beer per year  well more than almost every brewery in Chicago  while operating as many as three retail facilities, such as brewpubs and taprooms. Current law, which has been cobbled together over years of negotiations, limits brewers to 30,000 barrels of production if they own multiple types of breweries.

"A lot of people stand to benefit," Deth said. "This creates flexibility brewers need for innovative business models."

John Barley, co-founder of Solemn Oath Brewery and the president of the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild, hailed the pending legislation, saying that it "will allow for a lot of very cool customer-friendly concepts that we haven't seen in the state of Illinois that are happening across the country."

Retail beer location comes in various forms in other states, such as Stone Brewing Co.'s retail shops in the San Diego and Los Angeles areas that feature a combination of tasting rooms, growler filling stations and merchandise for sale  even though beer isn't brewed at most of them. A production brewery would be hesitant to open such shops  or even a brewpub, as Solemn Oath plans to do in Chicago  if it wasn't able to grow past 30,000 barrels a year, Barley said.

The legislation was hammered out after close to a year of negotiation between the Craft Brewers Guild (representing people who make beer in Illinois) and the Associated Beer Distributors of Illinois (which represents the businesses that distribute that beer to bars, stores and restaurants). Both sides admit that their relationship has not always been productive, resulting in the patchwork of laws that brewers have said restrained their ability to grow.

Both also agree that the compromise was helped by a change in the conversation; whereas brewers had long made the right to self-distribute their primary issue  something the distributors wanted to rein in  explosive growth in the industry has changed the brewers' interest more toward the ability to grow. The new legislation doesn't touch the amount of beer that breweries are able to self-distribute: up to 7,500 barrels, provided that it is a brewery that makes less than 30,000 barrels annually. Breweries making more than 30,000 barrels cannot self-distribute.

Barley said it was important to the Brewers Guild for small breweries to be able to self-distribute, but that their interest has changed.

"It's really about allowing this industry to grow in a way that we see the market pushing for it  cross-tier ownership of brewpubs and production breweries," he said.

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Bob Myers, president of the Associated Beer Distributors of Illinois, called the legislation a long-term fix between the sometimes-dueling interests of the people who make beer and the distributors whose role in selling that beer is codified by the state's three-tier system. That system prohibits breweries from both making and selling their own beer (with the exception of in a tap room or brewpub, and those who qualify for self-distribution).

"We were obviously concerned about preserving the three-tier system," Myers said. "On the other hand, we also want to sell more beer. We want to elevate breweries to a level where they can explode while maintaining that three-tier system. This is a bill that's pro-small business and pro-craft beer."

Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, D-Chicago, who is the House chief sponsor of the measure, said she expects a vote and successful passage this week.

"All parties are very, very happy with this and it reflects the market," she said, adding that it is important for legislators to modernize food and drink regulations "in a way that's both consumer and business friendly."

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"We have to conform to what the public wants and what the market is telling us," she said.

The law that stands to be changed thwarted a plan by St. Louis' Schlafly brewery to enter the Chicago market last year by opening a brewpub in the West Loop. The problem, as ruled by the Illinois Liquor Control Commission, was that Schlafly made more than 30,000 barrels of beer per year. Dan Kopman, a co-founder of the 24-year-old brewery, said the ruling was deeply frustrating, and forced Schlafly to change tactics and distribute in the traditional manner  bottles, cans and kegs  instead.

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"There's no doubt about it," Kopman said. "But for those of us who were here at the beginning of craft beer in the 1980s and '90s, overcoming legal and legislative hurdles has always been part of the industry. If we got overly frustrated about these barriers back in the '80s and '90s, none of us would be here today."

Because Schlafly has begun distributing beer in Chicago, the plan for a brewpub is on hold even if the updated law allows for it.

"This is great progress, but now we're going to have a 120,000-barrel limit to consider," Kopman said. "So does the law answer the ultimate question? If we go back and consider a brewpub in Chicago and we sign a lease, what happens if we get over 120,000 barrels?"

jbnoel@tribune.com

Twitter @joshbnoel
Abe Conlon's Fat Rice is high on the must-go list of more than one visiting restaurant critic. "I'll be happily standing in line again, says Bill Addison, restaurant editor/national critic, Eater, about his desire for a repeat visit. (Phil Velasquez, Chicago Tribune)

If you were a hungry restaurant critic flying into Chicago for arguably the biggest culinary event of the year, where would you eat?

Over the next few days, the James Beard Foundation Awards ceremony at the Lyric Opera's Civic Opera House, which takes place Monday, is drawing to Chicago all sorts of food establishment types, from celebrity chefs to successful restaurateurs to cooking show stars to esteemed writers and editors. And you just know they are going to be hungry  especially the restaurant critics among them.

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This curious journalist (full disclosure: I am a judge for the journalism and restaurant awards) wants to know where they're going. So, I asked some current and past members of the Beard's Restaurant and Chef Awards subcommittee where they're dying to eat. Here's what they shared, via email and Facebook messages:

Bill Addison, restaurant editor/national critic, Eater

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"I've been dreaming all year of the dinner I had at Fat Rice last August. I admire the ways that chef-owners Adrienne Lo and Abraham Conlon crisscross influences along the global spice routes, how Chinese char siu pork and Portuguese smoked sausage can show up in the same dish. I'll be happily standing in line again."

Tina Antolini, host and producer of Gravy, the podcast of the Southern Foodways Alliance

"I'm intrigued by Fat Rice and its following of Portuguese influences around the world. I hope to get there. And I think some ribs from Big Jones are going to be part of my visit  just checking in on Southern food in Illinois."

Michael Bauer, editor at large, restaurant critic, San Francisco Chronicle

"Of course I'm fascinated by Alinea but I've been there, and I'd love to go to Next but know it's sold out. I always have to go to Frontera Grill so I'm sure I'll be there for lunch. I also love Blackbird but have been there several times. I will also go to Boka and Nico Osteria. Not only have I heard great things about Erling Bower, but he's (former Chronicle staffer) Olivia Wu's son and I'm excited to see what he's doing."

Providence Cicero, restaurant critic and food writer, Seattle Times

"Three days isn't long enough to hit all the places I'd like to try. Topolobampo is high on my list. As many times as I've been to Chicago I've somehow never gotten there. I'd like to revisit Blackbird now that Dana Cree (formerly in Seattle) is doing her fabulous desserts there. Beyond that, I'll be looking for a good Italian beef sandwich and I might just check out Lou Malnati's. (I have a Chicago friend who carries on about both."

John T. Edge, director, Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi

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"I'm headed to Big Jones for Sunday brunch. Already know what I want to order: Eugene's Breakfast in Mobile, Circa 1930. That's beautifully evocative menu writing. Bonus is, I love catfish for breakfast. I'm also very interested in Honey Butter Fried Chicken. Any place that lavishes that much attention on thighs, a too-often unsung part of the bird, gets my business."

Rick Nelson, restaurant critic, Minneapolis Star Tribune

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"I'm having Sunday brunch at North Pond because three of my favorite people in the world asked me to join them, and who wouldn't want to spend a spring afternoon in that company, in the middle of gorgeous Lincoln Park, seated in that lovely room and lapping up Bruce Sherman's cooking? And dinner that evening is Alinea, because, hello, it's Alinea."

Patricia Sharpe, food editor and restaurant critic, Texas Monthly

"I always want to try what's new to see if Texas is ahead of or behind the curve. I chose C Chicago for that reason. They have a former Le Bernardin sous chef, and that was a draw too. If I can make a reservation at Girl & the Goat, I'll do that too. Where else you gonna get duck tongues?"

S. Irene Virbila, wine and food columnist, Los Angeles Times

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"I'm excited that the after party will be at Topolobampo. I ate there years ago and loved it. I've made a couple of reservations and also plan on dropping into some places for lunch or appetizers. I did get a reservation at Parachute, nominated for best new restaurant. I'll be dropping into the Aviary for drinks when the bar hosts Maison Premiere from Brooklyn. I had so many restaurants where I wanted to dine and catch up: I'm afraid I can't get to them all. I did get a res at Blackbird, but will have to save Grace for another time. I'm meeting up with some Chicago friends to hit some more classic and casual spots, probably for breakfast or lunch."

wdaley@tribune.com

Twitter: @billdaley
After 50 years, Geja's Cafe (340 W. Armitage Ave., 773-281-9101) is about to get a new owner.

John Davis, who opened Geja's as a wine and cheese shop in Old Town before moving to Lincoln Park, is selling the restaurant to his longtime managing partner, Jeff Lawler.

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"It's about time, you know," Davis said. "Everything has its season. Jeff is really committed to the restaurant; he'll be running it in the same vein, which gives me a little comfort."

It would be a massive understatement to call this a smooth transition. Lawler has been with the restaurant for 21 years, and has been the de facto owner since Davis moved to Park City, UT, six years ago.

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But Friday it became official; all the papers have been signed.

"To be the owner of this restaurant, and to take it another 25 years to its 75th anniversary, is a blessing," Lawler said. "It's truly an honor."

Geja's Cafe is famous for its fondue menu, particularly its chocolate fondue, and its extraordinarily deep wine list. Dimly lit and designed with couples in mind, Geja's has topped lists of Chicago's most romantic restaurants for decades.

The restaurant is also famous for the number of people who have gotten engaged there, a tradition Lawler is eager to continue.

"What I love the most are the engagements," he said. "There have been more than 300 engagements that I've personally orchestrated, and it humbles me every time."

The deterioration of the Old Town neighborhood at the end of the '60s led Davis to relocate in 1971. That stretch of Armitage Avenue was a bit different than it is today.

"The street was a little seedy," Davis recalled. "The Town Theater, which is now the Park West, was where 'Deep Throat' premiered. But I had a feeling it was going to be a good street; I kinda got lucky."

Once in Lincoln Park, he said, "It was apparent we wouldn't survive as a wine and cheese shop. That's when we expanded into the full fondue restaurant."

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Davis' experience with fondue? Laughable.

"I'd been to Europe," he said, "so I had a little exposure. But it took a lot of experimentation. At first, we also had a variety of cooked dishes, but it was diluting the concept; eventually we got rid of all those, and that's when it became really popular.

"(The late chef) Louis Szathmary (of The Bakery in Chicago) always said, 'Be Famous for Something,'" Davis said. "So we became famous for fondue and our wines, and that's all we needed."

There will be a 50th anniversary party on June 27, to which more than 50 married couples who got engaged at Geja's have been invited. There will be an honorary luncheon, followed by, Lawler said, "The ceremonial passing of the Golden Fondue Fork."

Phil Vettel is a Tribune critic.

pvettel@tribpub.com

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Rick Bayless, who here is shown demonstrating one of his guacamole recipes during Printers Row Lit Fest in 2013, is back this year, cooking from his latest "More Mexican Everyday." (John J. Kim, Chicago Tribune)

Chefs and authors will share their favorite recipes and stories on the Good Eating stage at this year's Printers Row Lit Fest, from debut cookbooks to those following a string of previous tomes. Ask the questions you've always harbored about wine pairings at expert Bill St. John's event, or watch chef Rick Bayless mix flavors when he demonstrates a recipe from his most recent Mexican cookbook. Local chefs like Tony Quartaro, from Formento's, will demonstrate recipes under the tent, and authors will also appear to discuss books like legendary New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton's "1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die."

Plus, meet Chicago Tribune staffers for the Good Eating section, such as writers Judy Hevrdejs and Bill Daley, and editor Joe Gray, who will host discussions.

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Peruse the full schedule below for all Good Eating events, which will take place in a tent at Dearborn and Harrison streets. For a full list of Lit Fest events, go to http://www.printersrowlitfest.org.

SATURDAY

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10:30 to 11 a.m

Food writer Summer Miller will demonstrate a recipe from "New Prairie Kitchen," her book about meals and farmers, chefs and artisans in the Great Plains states. Miller's writing has appeared in Saveur, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Edible Omaha, Edible Feast, Nebraska Life, Omaha Magazine, and the Reader. She blogs at scaldedmilk.com .

11:15 to 11:45 a.m.

Carlos Gaytan, chef and owner of Michelin star-winning restaurant Mexique, will do a cooking demonstration. Gaytan is a former "Top Chef Masters" contestant and previously worked in restaurants including Bistro Margot. He opened Mexique in 2008, applying French cooking techniques to roots of traditional Mexican cuisine.

12 to 12:30 p.m.

Rick Tramonto will demonstrate a recipe and discuss his book "Scars of a Chef: The Searing Story of a Top Chef Marked Forever by the Grit and Grace of Life in the Kitchen." The book recounts his childhood, including supporting the family after his father went to prison, and finding success  and challenges  through opening four-star spot Tru. Tramonto is a James Beard award-winning chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, father and husband.

12:45 to 1:15 p.m.

Chef and restaurateur Rick Bayless will cook a recipe from his most recent book, "More Mexican Everyday," which includes vegetable dishes and flavorings. His nine cookbooks include "Mexican Kitchen," which won the Julia Child IACP cookbook of the year award in 1996, and his fourth book, "Mexico-One Plate at a Time" which won the James Beard Best International Cookbook of the Year award in 2001. Bayless is chef/co-owner of Frontera Grill, Xoco, Topolobampo and more Chicago restaurants.

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1:30 to 2:15 p.m.

Mimi Sheraton, author of "1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die," will appear in conversation with Chicago Tribune food writer Bill Daley. Mimi Sheraton is a journalist, restaurant critic, lecturer, IACP and James Beard Award-winning cookbook author. She has written for The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Food & Wine, Smithsonian and more.

2:30 to 3:15 p.m.

The Tribune's longtime former test kitchen director, JeanMarie Brownson, will demonstrate a recipe from her upcoming book, "Dinner at Home" that collects recipes from years of her biweekly column of the same name for Good Eating. She will also cook from the just-released "Summer Cooking," a book from the Tribune's kitchen-tested recipes for picnics, patios and grilling. Brownson is a co-owner of Frontera Foods, Inc., along with chef Rick Bayless. "Dinner at Home" will be published in November.

3:30 to 4:15 p.m.

Join Lagunitas founder Tony Magee, author of "So You Want To Start a Brewery?" in conversation with Tribune beer writer Josh Noel, for a discussion about building one of the nation's largest craft breweries, the increasingly competitive beer industry and where it is heading. Magee is the founder and CEO of Lagunitas Brewing Co., which has breweries in Chicago and Petaluma, Calif.

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SUNDAY

10 to 10:45 a.m.

Join Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, reporter William Lee and editor Trevor Jensen for conversation and caffeine, which will be provided by Peet's Coffee. This event packed the tent last year. Arrive early.

11 to 11:30 a.m.

Chicago food writer and cooking teacher Anupy Singla will demonstrate a recipe from her latest, "Indian for Everyone," which emphasizes that any cook can successfully try to cook Indian food. Singla formerly authored "Vegan Indian Cooking" and "The Indian Slow Cooker." She's founder and CEO of Indian as Apple Pie, a company that creates and sells custom spice blends and unique home goods, Singla was formerly an on-air TV reporter for CLTV News and Bloomberg TV.

11:45 a.m. to 12:15P.M.

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Tony Quartaro, chef and partner of Formento's, will perform a cooking demonstration. Quartaro started with B. Hospitality Co., where he spent time in both The Bristol and Balena before opening Formento's in 2015, and winning three stars from Tribune restaurant critic Phil Vettel. Quartaro has worked on both coasts before moving to Chicago, and his passions include whole-animal butchery and making pasta.

12:30 to 1:15 p.m.

Wine writer and teacher Bill St. John will speak about the complexities of wine and food pairing. St. John, who has written and taught about wine for more than 40 years, is Good Eating's wine columnist, writing the weekly Uncorked and How to Pair Wine features.

1:30 to 2 p.m.

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Paul Fehribach will cook a recipe from his book "The Big Jones Cookbook," about regional Southern dishes beyond fried chicken and biscuits. Fehribach is the co-owner and executive chef of Big Jones, a nationally acclaimed restaurant in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood that grounds its Southern cooking in the history of the region.

2:15 to 3 p.m.

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Join the city's best bartenders with RedEye staffers for "Summer Cocktailing with RedEye's Best Bartenders," featuring Dan Rook, Sarah VonderHaar, Stephanie Rabiola, Carlos Matias III and Charles Joly. RedEye food and drink writers Lisa Arnett and Heather Schroering will moderate the panel.

3:15 to 3:45 p.m.

Chicago-based author and culinary historian Colleen Taylor Sen will speak with Tribune food writer Judy Hevrdejs about her most recent book, "Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India," which details the history through images, poetry and ancient recipe. Sen writes about street food and South Asian cuisine. Her previous books include "Curry: A Global History," "Food Culture in India" and "Pakoras, Paneer, Pappadums: A Guide to Indian Restaurant Menus."

4 to 4:30 p.m.

Maureen Abood will demonstrate a recipe from her book "Rose Water and Orange Blossoms: Fresh & Classic Recipes from my Lebanese Kitchen," which offers recipes from her Lebanese-American heritage and life in Michigan. Her recipes are paired with personal stories of family, food and memories.
Mack Sevier, perhaps the most well-regarded practitioner of South Side Chicago-style barbecue, has died at age 70.

He died June 1 at Holy Cross Hospital hospice from a combination of ailments, his wife Shirley said, including heart and kidney failure.

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Sevier, who manned the pits at Barbara Ann's and Uncle John's BBQ, achieved renown for acquiring a trait that eludes many pitmasters: consistency. His cooking attracted national media, including a segment on "Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmern" on the Travel Channel.

In a part of town where the bulk of restaurants today are fast food chains, barbecue shacks remain South Side Chicago's most original and important culinary contribution. Sevier smoked rib tips and hot links in a manner rarely seen outside Chicago  inside a four-sided plexiglass box known as an aquarium smoker. It's a notoriously finicky style of cooking, a trapeze act of balancing live fire and indirect heat, that's reliant less on a set time and more on look, touch and pure gut feel.

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Mack Albert Sevier was born in Augusta, Ark., on June 24, 1944, one of five brothers and a sister, the son of a mother who was both a homemaker and a restaurant cook. Sevier left home the day he graduated from high school. He headed first to St. Louis, found out he didn't care for the city and then headed farther north. In the 1960s he settled in Chicago, where he would remain the rest of his life.

Upon arriving, Sevier plied his trade as a butcher, working for nearly a decade at a meatpacking company. (It was here, perhaps, that Sevier built the strength for his herculean handshake. His hands were the size of ham hocks.) He went on to open a butcher shop at 7113 S. State St. in 1971. Sevier named the shop for one of his beloved motorcycles  Honda Poultry & Meats  and only because his other bike, a Harley-Davidson, would have been too long of a name.

Sevier provided meats for many restaurants in the area, including barbecue shops and Harold's Chicken Shack. It was his familiarity with restaurateurs  and his affection for backyard barbecuing  that enticed Sevier to take a job as an apprentice pitmaster when he left the butcher business in the late 1980s. Sevier worked for restaurateur Argie B. Collins, whose Mumbo Bar-B-Que sauce proved so successful it was stocked on supermarket shelves across Chicago.

Sevier went on to reopen Barbara Ann's BBQ at 76th and Cottage Grove, which had been shuttered. Soon his work with a smoker built a reputation beyond his South Side community. More and more non-African-American customers showed up at the shop at Greater Grand Crossing. Business at Barbara Ann's boomed after a number of glowing write-ups in the media, and according to Sevier, that was when his landlord saw it was opportune to raise the rent. The dispute couldn't be settled, so Sevier left to open his own barbecue shack.

Uncle John's BBQ, at 69th and Calumet, was where Sevier sealed his reputation as a master of South Side Chicago barbecue.

His hot links in particular were second-to-none, a proprietary recipe of coarse ground pork, sage and red chili flakes that was smoked, then flash fried to a crackly exterior. (It was once described as an "adult dinner version of a breakfast sausage.")

"Mack was an artist, and his medium was fire and meat. He was capable of great subtlety," said Gary Wiviott, pitmaster at Barn & Company in Lincoln Park and a longtime friend of Sevier's. "I'd always said the best pitmaster in the city was Mack Sevier, and the best barbecue was Uncle John's."

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By 2013, after nearly eight years of operating Uncle John's, Sevier's health was declining to the point that the restaurant and hospital became his first and second homes. At age 68, Sevier finally retired.

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"He was working hurt all the time. He was going back and forth from the hospital," said Shirley Sevier. "It affected him because he was a man used to doing things, a workaholic."

Barbecuing never went away, even in his retirement. Sevier cooked for summer church picnics and at fundraisers, and consulted with friends who wanted to open under the Uncle John's banner (the name continues today at stores in Richton Park, and at 82nd and Cottage Grove in the Dat Donut space). Sevier's stepdaughter also opened a barbecue restaurant at 47th Street and Vincennes called Uncle J's Bar-B-Que, and that is where Sevier's aquarium smoker from Uncle John's resides today.

"He had a good heart. He believed in giving back to the neighborhood. He used to give away free picnics and watermelons when we still had the butcher shop," said Shirley Sevier. "He was a great father. And he was a loving husband."

Shirley and Mack Sevier were married for 49 years.

Visitation is Friday 11:30 a.m. with services at noon at Gatling Chapel, 10133 S. Halsted St.

kpang@tribpub.com

Twitter @pang
Gregory Edwards of Chicago tastes the turkey leg from Manny's Cafeteria and Delicatessen at the Taste of Chicago. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

Conspicuously absent from the list of participants in this year's Taste of Chicago (running July 8-12 in Grant Park) is Manny's Cafeteria and Delicatessen, which for several years has produced one of Taste's most iconic dishes, the barbecued turkey leg.

A massive amount of protein smothered in a tangy tomato-based barbecue sauce, the turkey leg has been one of Taste's most popular items for more than 30 years.

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The prospect of going without is unsettling, but fear not: Miller's Pub, a first-time Taste participant, is proudly shouldering the hot, sticky burden.

Why no Manny's? "We're doing some major remodeling," said owner Ken Raskin, "and the design took much, much longer than anticipated. When it was time to commit to Taste [the deadline was months ago], I couldn't be sure whether my kitchen would be able to handle the extra volume. So we decided to take a year off."

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The barbecued turkey leg made its first appearance at Taste of Chicago in 1981, when Tim McGivern, at the time the owner of Great Godfrey Daniels in Skokie, introduced the item, and an annual legend was born.

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Great Godfrey Daniels closed in late 1996, but McGivern nevertheless was back at Taste the following year with the turkey leg, partnering with Helen's Restaurant. When Helen's closed following the 2009 Taste of Chicago, McGivern partnered with Manny's in 2010 and 2011.

Citing health problems related to knee and back surgery, McGivern stepped away from Taste in 2012 and 2013. But by 2014, the turkey legs were back, under the Manny's banner.

Miller's Pub will be the turkey-leg vendor this year, but McGivern, now 65, will consult, as he did with Manny's. "It's still his equipment being used," said Raskin, "and still the same supplier. It shouldn't be anything but a smooth transition."

Whew.

Phil Vettel is a Tribune critic.

pvettel@tribpub.com

Twitter @philvettel
The room was dim enough to not quite discern the contents of the grill tray. But in the candlelight, one could make out its outline in slabs, links and chunks. The appropriate collective noun here would be a juggernaut of beef. Around us were none of the formalities of a Chicago steakhouse. No pressed suits. No mahogany bars. No maitre'd butter, no maitre'd. Tonight, we would scale the steak peaks and eat our way down.

By our strict Chicago definition, the steaks at Wicker Park's Folklore are steaks by technicality, presented without the precise, trimmed-by-a-band saw fussiness of its Rush Street equivalents. Chicago steakhouses have forever been a genre with an immutable template, of Caesar salads and Key lime pies as the Count Basie Orchestra plays. Folklore, meanwhile, is an Argentine steakhouse by way of Italy, operating defiantly within city limits.

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The Argentina-Italy connection is a strong bond, its highest-profile ambassador being Pope Francis, born in Buenos Aires to Piedmontese parents. During World War II, Argentina was the destination for a large Italian diaspora. In food, the influence is indelible. Unlike in many parts of Latin America, pasta is the preferred starch over rice in Argentina, transliterated into Spanish spellings  gnocchi, for example, becomes noqui. You'll find provoleta at Folklore  provolone cheese with red peppers and oregano grilled to a crusty edge  a dish that might as well be served on Taylor Street. Same goes for Milanesa Napolitana, a breaded beef cutlet baked with ham, mozzarella and tomato sauce.

Where Argentina flexes its culinary muscle is with beef, much of it raised by cattle-ranching gauchos on the vast expanse of grassland called the Pampas. So the Argentine mania for steak is one relatable to Chicagoans.

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Folklore isn't the knee-jerk answer when Chicagoans think of Argentine steakhouses; that would be Tango Sur, the BYOB grill going on 20 years in Lakeview. But both are owned by the same family  the Di Sapios  with nearly identical menus. Patriarch Rodolfo Di Sapio also heads El Mercado, a butcher shop and grocery next door to Tango Sur that supplies meats to both restaurants. The advantage with Folklore, which opened in 2009, is its roomier space, a larger kitchen for more dish specials, and most importantly for this stretch of Division Street, a liquor license. It satisfies the requirements within a Wicker Park ZIP code: Folklore might claim the most stylishly subterranean dining room in town with its labyrinth of light fixtures made from pipes. You're reminded how steaks and cowboy culture are intertwined, with Argentine horse tack hung from the brick wall.

The dark mood lighting makes the foreign beef cuts even more unfamiliar. Flap meat (vacio) comes from the bottom sirloin and is shaped like a runners' baton, lean with a flank-steak chew. Morcilla is a dark and intimidating blood sausage, the texture of sloppy Joe meat but with a pleasant spiced flavor minus the iron aftertaste. Short ribs are cut in the three-boned Korean style that resembles a shoe insert. These are the most flavor-dense and indulgent of the lot, only because they're streaked with so much marbled fat my left arm numbs just picturing it. Delicious? Oh yes. But here's a case when five small bites  as concentrated and intense as beef tastes  might be enough.

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The most compelling reason to try an Argentine steakhouse is to settle a debate. Is chimichurri the best accompanying sauce for grilled beef? Better than bearnaise or red wine demi glace? I am leaning toward yes. It's a sauce that's first cousin to Italian salsa verde, sharing a bloodline of parsley, garlic, vinegar and oil. A murky dollop of chimichurri turns a slice of steak slick, tart and grassy; the sauce is cool against the warm beef. It also leaves a haunting garlic linger for the deviant among us (this reporter is a card-carrying member). It's not far off from a bistecca alla fiorentina. I especially love dunking the grilled-then-baked beef sweetbreads into the chimichurri, which can form into a dangerous habit (it comes alive further with a squeeze of lemon). If crispy beef tendon nuggets existed, they would resemble this.

All the cuts identified thus far  we haven't even mentioned the bratwurstlike chorizo  come on that parrillada grill tray. The steak is preceded by a lifeless salad of lettuce, out-of-season tomatoes and thick rings of raw onions. I stomached a few leaves and pushed it out of the way with a tinge of guilt.

Really, it's about that tray with the staggering amount of meat. It's also $40 for two, which, considering a bone-in sirloin for one at Gibson's starts at $5 more, proves that Chicago steakhouses aren't exclusive to suits with black credit cards.

kpang@tribpub.com

Twitter @pang

Folklore

2100 W. Division St.

773-292-1600

folklorechicago.com

Check average for two (without drinks): $55

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Recommended dishes: Ham and cheese empanada, provoleta, parrillada para dos
Executive chef Raul Flores holds some fresh eggs at Wilberry Pancakes and Cafe on E. Randolph St. in Chicago Tuesday. The outbreak of bird flu has decimated America's egg supply. (Phil Velasquez, Chicago Tribune)

With egg shortages making headlines almost daily, what's the home cook to do for breakfast besides limiting the number of scrambled eggs and omelets they make? And what about all the cakes, cookies and souffles where eggs work as a binder or aerator or...?

Remain calm. The simplest solution to the morning egg may be to cut back on the number of eggs used (say, two instead of four) then amp up the volume of scrambled eggs or an omelet with meat (chopped ham, crumbled bacon), cheese or chopped vegetables (onions, mushrooms, potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, etc.).

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Of course, there are other solutions. Check a vegan cookbook and you'll find all sorts of alternatives to eggs: tofu, flax or chia seeds and egg replacer powder among them.

Chef Adam Sobel, in his book, "Street Vegan" (Clarkson Potter) explains: "Egg replacer powder is a commercially available mixture of different starches. Several brands (such as Bob's Red Mill and Ener-G) make egg replacer powders containing tapioca starch, potato starch and sometimes arrowroot. When whisked rapidly together with liquid, the starches become an aerated foam which can behave like egg whites in baking recipes."

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Here are a couple eggless recipes. They have not been tested in the Tribune's test kitchen.

Almond milk French toast

Makes: 4 servings

Adapted from "Street Vegan" by Adam Sobel. He serves the French toast with roasted almonds and a sauce of raspberries and grapefruit.

1 1/4 cups almond milk

1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

3 tablespoons each: maple syrup, oat flour

1 teaspoon vanilla

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1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

3 tablespoons coconut oil

8 slices bread, gluten-free if desired, sliced on a diagonal

Garnishes: fresh raspberries, mint leaves, confectioners sugar

1 Whisk together almond milk, cinnamon, maple syrup, oat flour, vanilla, salt and olive oil in medium bowl.

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2 Melt about 1 1 /2 teaspoons coconut oil in a skillet over medium heat. Soak a piece of bread in the batter, letting excess liquid drain back into the bowl. Immediately transfer bread to skillet; fry on each side about 4 minutes or until golden brown. Continue cooking remaining bread, adding more coconut oil as needed.

3 Serve garnished with raspberries, mint leaves and confectioners sugar.

Silky chocolate mousse

Makes: 8 servings

Chef Roberto Martin, author of "Roberto's New Vegan Cooking" (Da Capo Press), uses tofu in place of eggs in quiche and in this recipe for chocolate mousse.

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1 block silken tofu, liquid drained

3/4 cup organic white sugar

1 cup raw blanched cashews, soaked overnight and drained

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12 ounces semisweet baking chocolate

4 ounces vegan butter

1 In a food processor, puree tofu and sugar until smooth; place in a medium bowl. Place soaked and drained cashews in the food processor bowl (no need to clean it yet) and 1 cup water; puree until smooth. Periodcally scrape down the sides of the bowl. Using a rubber spatula, press the cashew puree through a fine mesh strainer into the tofu mixture to remove any un-pureed nuts.

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2 Melt chocolate and vegan butter in the microwave in a glass bowl in 30 second intervals. Stir chocolate with a rubber spatula to ensure it is melted and smooth. Stir chocolate into tofu mixture until smooth. Cover; chill at least 30 minutes.

3 When mixture is firm and cold, whip with a hand mixer until it achieves a mousse-like texture. Serve garnished with chocolate shavings.

jhevrdejs@tribpub

Twitter @judytrib
It's all too easy to fall into a rut of chicken, fish, beef, repeat. Switch things up with a lamb dish anyone can make at home  simply mix ground lamb with a few spices, form into meatballs and fry in a skillet. Pair with a homemade sour cream-yogurt mixture and any of the three wines below; a high-acid white will cut the yogurt sauce nicely, while a strong red complements the gamey lamb.

MAKE THIS

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Lamb meatballs in yogurt sauce

In a bowl, stir together 1 small onion, minced; 1/2 cup minced parsley; 2 eggs, beaten; 1 teaspoon salt; and 1/2 teaspoon each pepper, cumin and cinnamon. Mix in 1 1/2 pounds ground lamb until blended. Form mixture into 1 1/2-inch meatballs. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Fry meatballs in batches until golden brown and cooked through, 5 minutes. Transfer to paper-towel-lined plate. Pour out all but 1 tablespoon of the fat from pan. Add 1 cup chicken broth. Heat to boil; cook to reduce slightly, 2 minutes. Stir in 1 cup sour cream. Simmer 1 minute. Stir in 1 cup yogurt. Season with salt and pepper. Return meatballs to pan; simmer until hot, 1-2 minutes. Serve with warm pita and garnished with almonds and paprika. Makes: 6 servings

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Recipe by Kristin Eddy

DRINK THIS

Pairings by sommelier Rachael Lowe of Spiaggia, as told to Michael Austin:

2012 Kofererhof riesling, Alto Adige, Valle Isarco, Italy: At 700 feet elevation, the focus at this vineyard is on high-acid whites. In this wine, aromas of peach, white flower, spice and lemon intermingle with a stony minerality and high acidity that will cut through the yogurt sauce. Also, the wine's spice will nicely balance the cumin and cinnamon.

2013 Carol Shelton Monga Zin zinfandel, Cucamonga Valley, California: A pioneering woman in her field, Shelton, who studied at the University of California at Davis, makes zinfandels that are expressive, balanced and structured, with red fruit such as macerated red raspberries and cherries, and a touch of spice. The fleshy fruit character of this wine will stand up perfectly to the lamb, while the natural spice of the grape will mirror the spices in the mix beautifully.

2013 Anima Negra AN/2, Vi de la Terra Mallorca, Balearic Islands, Spain: Two self-taught locals founded this winery in 1994. This red wine is a blend of local varieties callet and monte negro, plus a touch of syrah. Aged in mixed barrels of French and (a smaller portion of) American oak, its flavors  dried strawberry, cassis, a hint of smoke, dried herbs and anise  will complement the parsley, cinnamon and gamey lamb.

Twitter @pour_man
PERSONNEL MOVES: Greg Wade, the head baker at Little Goat Bread, will now be leading the bread program for One Off Hospitality. As part of the move, One Off (Blackbird, Avec, Publican, Big Star et al.) will relocate its baking operations from Publican Quality Meat's basement to a new larger space around the corner on Lake Street, next to Northwestern Cutlery. This new bakery won't be retail for the time being, but expect to see an expanded bread menu at PQM.

Said Wade: "Stephanie (Izard) was interested in unique flavor combinations, and doing breads in a new way. What I'm planning to do for One Off is really stripping that all away, bringing grains and fermentation to the forefront. It's giving respect to what we've been doing as bakers for centuries."

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Wade, a Milwaukee native, starts at One Off on June 16. Before that, he'll spend a week soaking up knowledge by working at San Francisco's famed Tartine Bakery.

TICKETS VS. RESERVATIONS: Nick Kokonas is co-owner of Alinea, Next and The Aviary, but has perhaps made the greatest impact in the restaurant industry with his proprietary ticketing system. On Alinea's blog, Kokonas makes a compelling argument (read: advertisement) for why tickets are a safer financial bet for restaurants than traditional reservations. In short: customers who don't show up for reservations kill the bottom line. Pre-paid tickets makes the problem null and void. I'm oversimplifying his study terribly, so just read this instead.

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HOLE IN MY HEART: Today is National Doughnut Day. Did you know it was established in Chicago by the Salvation Army in 1938? This USA Today story, quoting a Salvation Army spokesman, said National Doughnut Day was a way to "raise money for social service ministries during the Depression."

kpang@tribune.com

Twitter @pang
Lightly sweet and bitter -- these are the initial flavors imparted by Glazed and Infused's IPDoughnut (India pale doughnut). The limited edition confection is being offered in conjunction with Chicago Craft Beer Week, and they're selling out quickly.

"On the very first day of having the doughnuts, we sold out at about 8 a.m.," said Brandi Bosco, who has worked at its Wicker Park location for more than a year. "And every day since then, the longest we'll have them is probably like 9 or 10."

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The soft, hand-cut, yeast-raised ring is more bread-like than cake, and not sugary. What lends it its sweetness is the Maris Otter malted barley glaze. The doughnuts are generously sprinkled with green bits of Cascade hops powder, which imparts the sharp undertones in the flavor profile. The hops and barley ingredients are key components of India pale ale beer, from which the doughnut is inspired. And while the doughnut doesn't actually taste like beer per se, the hops bite is reminiscent of the lingering pungency of an IPA.

The IPDoughnuts are $3 each, or $16 for the cleverly named 6 pack.

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"It's special," Bosco said. "People are buying them (by the) fives and tens, ... because we only have them for a week."

The IPDoughnuts' run ends on Sunday corresponding with the closing day of Chicago Craft Beer Week. They're available at all Glazed and Infused locations, including West Loop (813 W. Fulton), River North (30 E. Hubbard St.), Wicker Park (1576 N Milwaukee Ave.), Streeterville (201 E. Delaware Place), Lincoln Park (939 W. Armitage Ave.) and the Loop (222 N. LaSalle St.). For more information, call 312-226-5556.

For more Craft Beer Week events, see beer writer Josh Noel's recommendations.
The James Beard Foundation Awards are a foodie Oscars  but the founding father's original take on cooking is an eye-opener. (Abel Uribe, Chicago Tribune)

James Beard came from Portland, Ore. Which is culturally prescient. He had his pretensions; his first book extolled the value of pint-sized cocktail-party creations. But the man also liked to camp. He retained fond memories of pulling shellfish from the Pacific with his parents, cooking chowders and salmon over open fires on Oregon beaches. He would always claim he liked the smell and feel of a meal cooked outdoors the best.

He never gave up slumming.

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Fittingly then, the foodie revolution, of which Beard was a pioneer, gave us both Chipotle and Charlie Trotter, our contemporary predilection for both high and low, the austere and the gluttonous. And so when I think of the James Beard Awards, the Oscars of the food world  which are Monday night, and in Chicago for the first time in the ceremony's 25-year history  I think of Italian beef and Alinea co-existing in the same city.

I think of the nominated chefs and restaurants  Parachute, pastry chef Dana Cree of Blackbird, the rich-people food at Grace  and how I would blow-off culinary innovation any day for a good pizza. But I also think of how I live at a time when I can get a memorable meal either way, and Beard came out of a long period in American history  i.e., every year before 1970  when sophisticated food was code for "French cuisine" and generally you could pick between eating smartly or merely putting more food into your mouth.

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I think about this because the other day an editor dropped an old James Beard cookbook on my desk.

He told me to take a look and write some of my thoughts. It was Beard's second cookbook, published in 1941, the follow-up to his canape extravaganza. It's out of print now, and probably should be. The title is "Cook It Outdoors," and it is, Beard Awards-speaking, a kind of reminder to set aside our foodie pretensions.

It is Beard version 1.2.

It is a useful wet towel on this, the eve of foodie nirvana.

The Beard Foundation describes "Cook It Outdoors" on its website as the "first serious work on outdoor cooking," a foundational work for the rise of the backyard barbecuer. It is also sexist and vaguely racist and certainly offensive. I have never seen the word "jellied" used so much in all of my life. "Old English Apple Sauce" (1 can of apple sauce, half a cup of horseradish, mixed thoroughly) anyone? Another recipe is "If You Should Run Over An Old Hen." This is not ironic, only practical.The point, essentially, is that you should eat without fuss, but you should eat with character. Which should sound familiar to anyone eating in Logan Square tonight.

After a lengthy introduction to the backyard pit in all its possibilities  he includes schematics for a stone fireplace you can build in your backyard if you're a not a fan of these newfangled metal BBQers  he steers the hearty male chef though several chapters of stews and ragouts and planked steaks and chickens that do not even call for inserting a can of beer, a still relatively new invention in 1941. The recipes are brief and easy and primed not for nuance but a kind of primal-ism that wouldn't be out of place in a gastro-pub.

A tone-deaf gastro-pub.

"Outdoor cooking is man's work and man-sized menus and portions should be the rule," Beard writes. Pioneering cook Jeanne Owen "has probably done more to rescue her sex from cooking oblivion than any other woman..." But also, he suggests a nice cheese plate for your favorite Mad Man. A selection of hamburger recipes, however, are so forward thinking, it's not a stretch to imagine his "Pascal" burger (mutton, lamb kidneys, bacon) as the inspiration for Daniel Boulud's $35 braised short rib-foie gras burger.

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But in this world, salad is a "cult" dish. And picnics a "cult" pastime. "Potatoes in the Ashes" are simply potatoes placed under the ashes of a backyard fire and baked. "Ham Steak Supreme" is ham in a casserole dish, dressed with garlic, one bottle of cabernet and the explicit understanding that you will not "be afraid to go on with your drinking." It is Beard very early, when the possibility of a Guy Fieri was still science fiction.

cborrelli@tribune.com

IN THE BEGINNING

James Beard's BBQ bible tastes like 1941 until Beard finalist Tanya Baker gets her hands on it.

Sure, Boarding House executive chef Tanya Baker got a chuckle out of our challenge: Update a recipe from James Beard's 1941 cookbook for manly barbecuers. Then Baker, a Rising Star Chef of the Year finalist at this year's James Beard Foundation Awards, got down to business  and transformed a classic from the dusty pages of Beard's ''Cook it Outdoors'' into a modern wonder. Her Lamb two ways with spring vegetables re-interprets Beard with "more delicate touches and a bit of freshness" she says. We say we'll have what she's having.

Lamb two ways with spring vegetables

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Serves 2

For the braised lamb shank:

1 lamb shank

1small onion, diced

5 cloves garlic, smashed

1carrot, diced

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1 stalk celery, diced

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 1/2 cups red wine

4 cups vegetable stock

Salt and pepper to taste

For the grilled lamb chops:

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4 double cut lamb chops

For the spring vegetables:

12 pearl onions, peeled

1bunch baby carrots, tops trimmed off and reserved for later use

2 cups English peas, shelled

1/2 stick butter

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1. Generously season the lamb shank with salt and pepper. Heat oil in a Dutch oven to high, add the lamb shank and brown on all sides. Remove and set aside.

2. Add onion, garlic, carrot and celery to the Dutch oven. Cook and stir vegetables until lightly browned. Add wine to the pot; deglaze, scraping to free browned bits from the bottom. When wine is reduced by half, add stock; heat to a gentle boil.

3. Turn off heat and return the lamb shank to the pot. Cover pot and place in a pre-heated 300 degree oven. Bake about 4 hours or until meat falls off the bone. Let cool, then strain the liquid and discard the vegetables. Break the meat into small pieces and set aside . Return the liquid to the pot. Bring to a boil and reduce by half.

4. Season lamb chops on both sides with salt and pepper. Grill on a barbecue or grill pan over medium-high heat on each side for about 2 minutes. Set aside.

5. Blanch each type of vegetable individually in salted boiling water for about 1 minute, (carrot will take about 2 minutes) remove and immediately shock them in an ice bath and pat dry.

6. Saute vegetables with butter in a pan over medium high heat about 3 minutes, salt to taste.

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7. Place a hefty spoonful of the spring vegetables at the center of each plate. Top with the braised lamb shank pieces. Stand the chops so the bones cross. Sauce the meat and the plate with the reduced braising liquid. Finish with a pinch of sea salt.
"My grandmother used to make these, she would even send my grandfather to a shop in Charlestown to buy the mints," Kinney told me in an email. "But then the mints got harder and harder to find.After she passed away a number of years ago, I made it my mission to try to recreate these cookies.I found the original recipe online, but finding a proper mint replacement proved to be a challenge.Trader Joe's used to make these mint UFO's, and they were a good substitute, but then they were no longer sold.Now I use Wilton's Chocolate Mint Candy Melts. There are a decent substitute, although I prefer the UFOs.I have tried a few other chocolate bars, but they were not as good as the Wilton's."
Lemon cream is layered over strawberry perserves (or roasted strawberries) and topped with fresh berries in a chiffon pie recipe from Baker Miller Bakery & Millhouse in Chicago. (Michael Tercha, Chicago Tribune)

Is there a more beautiful harbinger of summer than the strawberry?

Heart-shaped and crimson, these green-topped gems are one of our most-beloved fruits.

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Unless, of course, you're a baker.

"Strawberries are the bane of my existence," says Dave Miller, who co-owns Chicago's celebrated Baker Miller Bakery & Millhouse with his wife, Megan. "Every day, strawberries are different. That is the struggle of the day. They're the hardest berry to work with."

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Some batches of strawberries have more moisture, some less. Some are candy-sweet, others border on bland. Professional bakers can't waste time and money on soggy muffins one day and dry ones the next. So, Miller and others have discovered some tricks to tame the devilishly red berry  especially timely with the first crop showing up at farmers markets this week.

First off, start thinking of a single strawberry as two different products  the fruit and the juice.

"That allows you to control the moisture," Miller says.

At Baker Miller, strawberries get put on a raised rack before being roasted in a 450-degree oven for 20 minutes. They emerge extra-sweet and slightly charred, and their juice can be used separately.

Just as a chef might "cook" fresh seafood with lime juice when making ceviche, a baker can "cook" strawberries with sugar. James Beard Award-winning cookbook author Rose Levy Beranbaum likes this method when working with both fresh and frozen strawberries. It's another way of separating the fruit from its juice.

"I'm big on concentrating things down," Beranbaum says. "I don't like to cook the fruit; I cook the juices and combine the two."

Similarly, turn the fresh strawberries into jam and use that jam in baked goods (or even in the whipped cream recipe below), she says.

Miller is at work on a strawberry muffin recipe that uses strawberry jam to control the recipe's moisture content. The shop also makes a popular strawberry chiffon pie that includes roasted strawberries and reduced strawberry syrup, as well as a strawberry pie with both roasted and uncooked strawberries.

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Bakers should also be sure to clean strawberries properly before using them, he says. That means first picking off the leaves, then using a paring knife to carve out the center.

"That's the watery part," Miller says. "That's how my grandma did it."

Strawberry chiffon pie

Prep: 30 minutes

Cook: 10 minutes

Makes: 6 servings

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Adapted from Baker Miller Bakery & Millhouse. You will have enough lemon cream to make two pies. Leftover lemon cream can be frozen, or spread on toast. For the preserves, you can use the recipe provided here, or your own favorite version. Or try the roasted strawberries tossed with their syrup, see method.

Lemon cream:

7 ounces lemon juice

3 eggs

2 egg yolks

3/4 cup sugar

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1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon lemon zest

1 cup cold butter, cubed

For the pie:

1 cup heavy whipping cream

1 cup homemade or other high-quality strawberry preserves

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1 prepared 9-inch graham cracker pie crust

1 For the lemon cream, heat lemon juice in a double boiler. When juice is too hot to touch, whisk together the eggs, yolks, sugar and salt. Slowly pour the hot lemon juice into the egg mixture while whisking vigorously.

2 Return the mixture back to the double boiler; cook, whisking constantly, until it reaches 180 degrees. Cover the surface with plastic wrap and set aside.

3 Chop lemon zest with a pinch of sugar, smearing it against the cutting board with the side of your knife until it releases its oils and darkens.

4 Once the lemon cream has cooled to 140 degrees, whisk in the butter, 1 tablespoon at a time, using an egg beater or a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment. Beat until smooth and creamy. Strain the lemon cream-butter mixture. Stir in the zest. Cover and refrigerate.

5 Once the lemon cream has cooled completely, beat the heavy cream to stiff peaks. Gently fold 1 1/2 cups of lemon cream into the whipped cream.

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6 To assemble the pie, spread the strawberry preserves into the bottom of the prepared pie crust. Top with the lemon chiffon filling. Chill for 2 hours or overnight before serving. Serve topped with fresh strawberries.

Nutrition information per serving: 645 calories, 42 g fat, 22 g saturated fat, 173 mg cholesterol, 66 g carbohydrates, 5 g protein, 313 mg sodium, 1 g fiber

Roasted strawberries: Place hulled strawberries (2 pints or 3 pints) on a rack placed inside a rimmed baking sheet. If the strawberries are large, you may want to cut them in half. Roast in the oven at 450 degrees, 20 minutes. The berries should emerge extra-sweet and slightly charred; continue roasting for 10 to 20 minutes if they are not done. Pour off the juice and reserve to use separately for syrups, etc.

Strawberry shortcake with syrup and strawberry jam whipped cream

In "The Baking Bible," Rose Levy Beranbaum details a complex dessert that is like strawberry shortcake, but made with genoise, a sponge cake, baked in a special mold. We've taken two of her elements, the strawberry Grand Marnier syrup and strawberry jam whipped cream, to use with traditional shortcake.

Strawberry Grand Marnier syrup

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Prep: 10 minutes, plus sitting time

Cook: 5 minutes

Makes: about 1 cup

Adapted from "The Baking Bible," Rose Levy Beranbaum.

10 ounces no-sugar-added frozen strawberries

2 tablespoons plus 1/3 cup sugar

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1 teaspoon lemon juice, freshly squeezed

 cup Grand Marnier (or substitute  cup water plus 1 teaspoon orange extract)

1 Macerate the frozen strawberries in a medium bowl with 2 tablespoons sugar and the lemon juice. Toss to coat. Let sit until sugar dissolves.

2 Transfer to a strainer over a bowl. Cover with plastic wrap; let drain for about 8 hours. Gently press down on the strawberries to extract more syrup until you have about 2/3 cup.

3 In a small saucepan, stir the syrup and remaining 1/3 cup sugar until moistened. Simmer over low heat, stirring constantly, until sugar dissolves. Cover and remove from heat. Cool completely. Stir in the Grand Marnier.

Nutrition information per tablespoon: 38 calories, 0 g fat, 0 g saturated fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 8 g carbohydrates, 0 g protein, 0 mg sodium, 0 g fiber

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Strawberry jam whipped cream

Prep: 15 minutes

Makes: 2 1/2 cups

Adapted from "The Baking Bible," Rose Levy Beranbaum. You can use the strawberry jewels (see recipe) here, if you puree them and strain out the seeds.

1 cup heavy whipping cream

 cup seedless strawberry jam

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2 tablespoons powdered sugar

Chill the bowl of a stand mixer and whisk attachment, at least 15 minutes. (Alternately use a hand mixer and another bowl.) Whip the cream until it just starts to thicken. Add jam and beat until stiff peaks form. Sprinkle sugar over cream and combine.

Nutrition information per tablespoon: 46 calories, 2 g fat, 1 g saturated fat, 8 mg cholesterol, 7 g carbohydrates, 0 g protein, 2 mg sodium, 0 g fiber

Shortcake

Prep: 20 minutes

Bake: 12-15 minutes

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Makes: 7 shortcakes

Recipe from Tribune food stylist Corrine Kozlak.

2 2/3 cups cake flour

1/4 cup sugar

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

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1 teaspoon salt

10 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 cup heavy whipping cream

Turbinado sugar

Fresh strawberries, sliced, macerated with sugar, or roasted berries and syrup

1 Heat oven to 425 degrees. In the bowl of a food processor, fitted with a steel blade, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Pulse to combine. Add the chilled butter; process until crumbly. While machine is running, add the cream through the feed tube, stopping just before the dough forms a ball. Save a little of the cream to brush on top of the shortcakes.

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2 Transfer dough to a floured surface. With lightly floured fingers, pat and or roll dough to an even -inch thick. Cut into six 3-inch circles; reroll the scraps and cut one more. Transfer rounds to a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Brush tops with remaining cream; sprinkle with Turbinado sugar. Bake, 12-15 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

3 To assemble, split the shortcakes. Spoon some strawberry Grand Marnier syrup over the cut side of the bottom half. Cover with fresh berries or roasted berries tossed with some of their syrup. Top with the top of the shortcakes. Dollop with strawberry jam whipped cream. Drizzle with more syrup.

Nutrition information per shortcake: 443 calories, 29 g fat, 18 g saturated fat, 91 mg cholesterol, 44 g carbohydrates, 5 g protein, 736 mg sodium, 1 g fiber

Strawberry jewels

Prep: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Stand: 12 hours

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Cook: 40 minutes

Makes: 12 half-pint jars or 6 pint jars

This recipe from Tribune archives is adapted from "Perfect Preserves," by Nora Carey. The consistency is more like spoon fruit that a classic jam, wrote former Tribune food writer Robin Mather in explaining her recipe. It works well in baking applications, such as with the whipped cream and the chiffon pie.

5 cups sugar

5 pounds strawberries, hulled (about 3 1/3 quarts, depending on the berries' size)

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

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1. Sprinkle 1 cup sugar over half of the strawberries in a large, shallow bowl. Add remaining strawberries; sprinkle with another cup of sugar. Cover; let strawberries stand overnight.

2. Transfer the berry mixture to a colander set over a Dutch oven; let the juices drain into the pan, reserving the berries. Stir the remaining 3 cups sugar into the pan; cook the juice mixture over low heat, stirring, until sugar dissolves, about 5 minutes.

3. Raise heat to high. Heat to a hard boil; add reserved strawberries and lemon juice. Boil mixture, 5 minutes. Transfer the berries with a slotted spoon to the colander set over a bowl.

4. Boil the syrup 10 minutes, or until it is reduced slightly. Measure any strawberry juices that have accumulated in the bowl; add them to the boiling syrup. Continue boiling to reduce the mixture by the amount added.

5. Add the berries to the syrup once again; boil 5 minutes, or until mixture reaches jellying point on a candy thermometer at 220 degrees. (To test without a thermometer, place a tablespoon of the juices on a cold plate and chill for a few minutes. If the mixture is firm enough to remain divided when a finger is pushed through the center, it has reached the jellying point.)

6. Spoon jam into sterilized jars; place in a boiling water bath. Process 10 minutes in boiling water bath.

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Nutrition information per tablespoon: 24 calories, 0 g fat, 0 g saturated fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 6 g carbohydrates, 0 g protein, 0 mg sodium, 0 g fiber
Leftovers don't have to look or taste like leftovers anymore, listlessly plopped from doggie bag to plate with possibly a quick zap in the microwave. Smartly use those leavings, whether from restaurant meals or takeout chow to create something new and delicious. In so doing, you'll even be making your country proud.

Worried that people who eat out more often, especially fast food, are more likely to be overweight or obese, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's ChooseMyPlate.gov program urges, among other suggestions, that one avoid oversize portions. "Take home half of your meal," the program's website urges.

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And you'll be helping chip away at a growing food problem. The idea of transforming food that would otherwise go to waste into something delicious has been in the news of late. The conversation has ranged from chef Dan Barber's transformation of his Blue Hill restaurant in New York into wastED, a pop-up focused on turning trimmings often discarded into dinner, to the book "American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It)" by Jonathan Bloom.

And, of course, there's also the question of taste.

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"Sometimes the leftovers come out better,'' says Jacques Pepin, the Madison, Conn.-based star chef, cookbook author and television cooking show host who over a long career has turned kitchen frugality into a delicious art. "There's always something you can do with it."

Take the recipe for rice pudding from his newest book slated for publication in October, "Jacques Pepin Heart & Soul in the Kitchen" (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35). It's made with leftover Chinese restaurant rice. And a pudding is just one thing you can do; Pepin uses it in stir-fries and in soup. It's that kind of open-minded use of leftovers that can make for some eye-opening moments in the kitchen.

"Rarely do I make a dish where I don't look at it and think of it as a leftover,'' Pepin says, noting that too many people look once and don't know what to do. "People waste food all the time."

Here are some ideas, so you don't have to waste leftovers anymore.

Fried chicken

Turn cold pieces of fast-food fried chicken into a salad. Kevin Pang, my Chicago Tribune colleague, offers this: Cube the chicken, toss with mayonnaise, preferably the Japanese Kewpie brand, Sriracha sauce and fresh lime juice. Wing the proportions to suit your taste. Add cubes of green apple, peeled or unpeeled, and 1-inch pieces of fresh green onion.

Italian sausage, kielbasa, hot dogs

Slice into rounds, then arrange atop a frozen pizza and bake; drop into an escarole soup, a Louisiana jambalaya, a New England-style corn chowder or a mound of sauerkraut.

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Gyro or shawarma meat

Turn those slices into a salad, based on one from Australian chef Matt Wilkinson in his new cookbook, "Mr. Wilkinson's Well-Dressed Salads" (Black Dog & Leventhal, $27.95). He calls for leftover roast leg of lamb, but gyro leftovers work well too. For Wilkinson's salad, mix together 1 large grated carrot, torn pieces of fresh mint, parsley and cilantro leaves; a little toasted coconut; and raisins. Toss with "a splash of good white wine vinegar and some plain yogurt," he says. Serve the salad over the meat slices, accompanied by grilled bread.

Pepper steak

Slice meat thinly, reheat in a skillet or microwave, stuff into a split baguette or sandwich roll lined with lettuce. Garnish with fresh cilantro sprigs, chopped onion and Sriracha sauce.

Rice

Make Pepin's rice pudding, adapted from his upcoming book: Heat 2 cups cooked white rice and 3 1/2 cups milk to a boil in an ovenproof saucepan. Cover; bake at 350 degrees, 30 minutes; the rice should be very creamy. Stir in 1/2 cup dried cherries or cranberries, 1/3 cup maple syrup, 2 teaspoons grated lime zest, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1/4 cup sugar and 1/2 cup sour cream. Let cool. Serve with a blueberry sauce, if you like: Heat 1 pint small blueberries and 1/3 cup sugar to a boil in a saucepan, stirring occasionally. Boil, 1-2 minutes. Cool before using.

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Also consider: Stir rice into a large quantity of water, and make the rice porridge known as congee; garnish with cilantro sprigs, diced chilies, leftover roast chicken or pork. Or make fried rice: Stir-fry with beaten egg, minced green onion and garlic, salt and some leftover cooked vegetables  peas, chopped red or green pepper, diced carrots.

Tortillas and tortilla chips

Use soft tortillas to make quesadillas: Spoon whatever filling you have on hand  sliced cheese, leftover roast beef, pork or chicken, cooked vegetables  onto the tortillas; fold in half. Heat over medium heat until the filling is hot and the tortillas are lightly toasted on both sides (turn carefully). Other ideas: Thinly slice tortillas into strips, toast in a dry skillet and use as a topping for chicken soup or salad. With tortilla chips, make these chilaquiles, adapted from Tribune Newspapers writer Russ Parsons' recipe: Stir 8 beaten eggs into some chopped onion and poblano that you've sauteed. Don't stir. After eggs begin to set, stir in 2 cups roughly broken up tortilla chips. Season with salt. Once eggs are nearly set, stir in some grated cheese (Cotija, jack, Chihuahua). Finish cooking; serve with more cheese, topped with chopped cilantro, salsa, sour cream.

Vegetables

Chop up cooked vegetables, suggests Wilkinson, and turn them into croquettes or vegetable hash; or mix with cheese, and make a savory pie topping. What's a croquette? Think of it kinda like a meatball. Bind finely chopped vegetables with beaten egg, a little milk, maybe some flour, and form into balls. Roll the balls in breadcrumbs and fry until golden. Also: Puree chopped cooked vegetables into a soup base of vegetable or chicken stock, with or without cream or milk; fold into a frittata or omelet; toss into your own homemade fried rice.

wdaley@tribpub.com

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Twitter @billdaley

Tips to take away when ordering out

Whether you're phoning the local Chinese takeout, picking up dinner at the supermarket or considering your next meal based on what's in that swanky restaurant doggie bag just delivered to your table, here are tips for getting the most meal for your money.

1. One delivery, two meals. I love Chinese food, and I can eat it often. So, when ordering delivery, I tend to order extra food  an additional entree, a container of soup  so I can make a second meal a day or so later without having to pay a second delivery charge. OK, we're only talking a couple of dollars, but if you order Chinese takeout as often as I order Chinese takeout, it can add up over a year. I do have a plan in ordering, though. I eat the items that don't store well right away, things like pot stickers or shrimp curry. Dishes that can hold a day or two in the refrigerator, such as hot-and-sour soup or Sichuan-style green beans, are enjoyed later. Another bonus in ordering two meals at one time? Some restaurants will give you a freebie  an appetizer, logo teacup or T-shirt, a couple of oranges even  if your purchase hits a certain dollar amount.

2. Order wisely. Recognize the limitations of delivery or takeout from a restaurant or supermarket. Foods that need to stay piping hot or super-crunchy or have to be eaten immediately, items like fried chicken or spring rolls or samosas, tend to wilt when packed in containers, because steam can build up on the way to your home. Some restaurants will punch a hole in the container to let the steam escape, but I don't think that works too well  and there's the risk of spillage. Securely packaged wet items, such as stews, curries and saucy barbecue, seem to hold up the best in terms of flavor and texture  and they're easy to reheat in the microwave if they have cooled on the ride.

3. Pizza puzzles. Nothing beats a pie straight out of a pizzeria's oven. The crust is crisp, the cheese melted and bubbling, the aroma irresistible. To me, pizza at home never has that dramatic spark. Still, I make do. If the pizza arrives too cool or if I'm eating it the next day out of the refrigerator, I place the pie on a baking sheet, stick it into a cold oven, and set the temperature for 350 degrees. When the oven bell bings telling me the temperature has been reached, I take the pizza out of the oven. It's hot enough to eat, and the crust is crisp. Alternatively, you can take a tip from a friend of mine who microwaves the leftover pizza to take off the chill, then crisps up the crust for a few minutes in a hot, dry skillet.

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4. Mind temperatures. For maximum food safety, keep cold things cold, hot things hot, and perishable foods at room temperature no more than 2 hours. Plan your grocery trip so you can pick up prepared foods as you finish shopping. Factor the trip home from the market or the restaurant. If ordering food in, ask how long the delivery will take and, if in doubt, how will the restaurant make sure your food is at the proper temperature. I, for one, wouldn't order sushi in a heat wave without some sort of guarantee it will be truly chilled on arrival. (Now, be realistic here; don't start cross-examining the restaurant worker on the telephone during the dinner rush. Call earlier in the day when business is slow.)
Brush up on your Negroni skills (be that making them or drinking them) with Gary Regan's new book. Pictured: the Mela D'Alba cocktail, made with Laird's apple brandy. (E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune)

It's hard to imagine a 150-page book devoted to a single cocktail  until you realize how many stories there are to tell about the Negroni, a classic drink made with gin, vermouth and Campari.

Take, for example, the cocktail's origin tale. In 1919, Count Camillo Negroni, an Italian-turned-expat-rodeo-cowboy, walked in to Caffe Casoni, his favorite Florentine bar, and asked the barkeep to serve him a higher proof variation of the popular Americano (Campari, sweet vermouth and soda)  hold the soda, substitute gin. Here, the legend of the Negroni was born, writes Gary "Gaz" Regan in his new book, The Negroni: Drinking to La Dolce Vita, With Recipes & Lore.

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Regan is just the man to tell these stories. A New York City bartender for 20 years after his emigration from the U.K., Regan started writing about drinks in 1990 and his cocktail blog is followed by thousands. Regan also leads the popular professional bartending workshop "Cocktails in the Country," held each year in upstate New York.

"The Negroni is a cocktail bartenders love to make," Regan says. "It's a drink you give people who think they don't like Campari, who think they don't like gin, and they love it. It makes the bartender look really good."

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Regan crowd-sourced Negroni recipes and variations from his deep pool of bartending buddies and compiled the results in The Negroni. He allowed a broad range of departures from the original three ingredients  recipes in the "New Negronis" chapter include serrano chile-infused Chartreuse, mescal, and raw eggs  but these curveballs form an exciting collection of drinks that illustrate the tricks, turns and techniques of modern mixology. Said egg, for instance, appears in a drink called a Knickroni, submitted by Boston bartender Fred Yarm. The yolk gets layered on top of the vermouth and Campari, and is topped with gin and the frothed white.

Other exciting variations lie in a chapter titled "Edible Negroni," which includes a recipe for the famed Negroni slushy from Chicago's hipster mecca, Parson's Chicken & Fish. Instructions to make this perfect cooler in the blender may keep many folks off that crowded patio and home by the A/C this summer.

Regan devotes a section to bottle- and barrel-aged cocktails, an adaptation that suits the Negroni particularly well, as aging allows the vermouth to meld beautifully with the mellowing gin and Campari over time. The first recipe below, adapted from Tony Conigliaro of London's 69 Colebrooke Row, makes it easy to serve the classic aperitivo to a crowd any time. The next, from Andrew Friedman of Liberty in Seattle, uses an American classic, Laird's apple brandy, to create a Negroni he calls "wonderfully different."

Regan himself favors just a slight variation on the classic  his "gin-heavy" Negroni calls for a 3-1-1 ratio of gin to vermouth to Campari. Count Negroni would approve.

Futterman is a freelance writer.

Bottle-aged Negroni

From "The Negroni" by Gary Regan, who obtained the tecipe from Tony Conigliaro of London's 69 Colebrooke Row. Conigliaro says in the book that aging the drink mellows the flavors: "The different spirits combine on a molecular level and come together beautifully."



Makes: 76 ounces

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Serves: About 25

1 (750 ml) bottle gin

1 (750 ml) bottle Campari

1 (750 ml) bottle sweet vermouth

Stir all ingredients together in a large container. Decant back into original bottles, re-labeled. Store out of direct sunlight for at least one month, but best after six months.

When ready to drink, serve over ice with an orange twist.

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Mela D'Alba

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Makes: 1 cocktail

From "The Negroni" by Gary Regan, who obtained the recipe from Andrew Friedman of Liberty in Seattle. We like that this drink combines an old American brand, Laird's, with Italian spirits for an Italian-American take.

2 ounces Laird's Bonded apple brandy

1 ounce sweet vermouth

1 ounce Campari

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1 lemon twist, for garnish

Stir all ingredients with ice in a double old-fashioned glass. Garnish with lemon twist.
Single pot still whiskey is the next bottle you'll want on your shelf. (E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune)

Robust, grain-forward and creamy  meet the spirits that are reshaping Ireland's whiskey landscape, and the single distillery behind them.

No, the distillery isn't some startup or craft producer. Instead, it's New Midleton, the mammoth, ultramodern producer owned by the subsidiary that makes Jameson, French liquor giant Pernod Ricard's Irish Distillers. The spirits: single pot still whiskeys.

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New Midleton seeks to return Irish whiskey to its roots by producing the historic style, which is made by distilling malted and unmalted barley three times in copper pot stills. Single malt whiskeys use only malted barley; the addition of unmalted makes the whiskey deeper, spicier and funkier. (Before 2011, the style was referred to as pure pot still; regulators forced the change because they didn't want a whiskey labeled "pure.")

But until just a few years ago you couldn't get a single single pot still whiskey in the United States.

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Then came Redbreast. While there are a number of variations, the most common version is Redbreast 12 year. Remarkably complex and a little spicy, with notes of fruitcake, toffee, gingerbread and coconut, the whiskey almost immediately won accolades. And it attracted a passionate following, particularly in the United States, which accounts for half of Redbreast's worldwide sales, says Patrick Caulfield, senior brand manager for Irish Distillers. "Redbreast was the first time that we were able to show the range of Irish whiskey."

And it now has company  whiskeys that are rather distinct from Redbreast. Irish Distillers last year released Green Spot in the United States for the first time. While Green Spot had long been available in Ireland, it has always been a limited-release whiskey aimed at those who appreciate the whiskey's ripe green fruit notes that meld with vanilla and nutmeg notes, Caulfield says.

Then Yellow Spot, the older sibling to Green Spot, followed earlier this year. Like Green Spot, Yellow Spot had never been available in the United States and hadn't been produced since the 1960s. After Yellow Spot is aged in bourbon and sherry casks, it is matured in casks that previously held Malaga wine. The method gives the whiskey vanilla and sweet fruit notes, in addition to green apple, spice and nutmeg.

Green Spot and Yellow Spot are light, while Redbreast is heavier. But all three are complex, smooth and interesting.

The resurgence of single pot still whiskey was a long time coming. But it's long overdue.

Zak Stambor is a freelance writer.
LAS VEGAS  Blues legend B.B. King was in hospice care Friday at his home in Las Vegas, according to a longtime business associate with legal control over his affairs.

The 89-year-old musician posted thanks on his official website for fans' well-wishes and prayers after he returned home from a brief hospitalization, said Laverne Toney, King's longtime business manager and current power-of-attorney.

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"Mr. King is where he wishes to be," Toney said. "He's always told me he doesn't want to be in a hospital. He wants to be at home."

An ambulance was summoned Thursday after what Las Vegas police Officer Jesse Roybal characterized as a domestic dispute over medical care. No arrests were made, and Roybal said no criminal complaint was filed.

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Toney disputed reports by celebrity website TMZ citing one of King's daughters as saying she called police because she was upset about her father's condition and that he had suffered a minor heart attack. Efforts by the Associated Press to reach the daughter, Patty King, were not immediately successful.

Paramedics checked King's heart rhythm, and he was treated at the hospital for complications of high blood pressure and diabetes, Toney said. King was diagnosed with diabetes decades ago.

Roybal confirmed that police received a report on Nov. 16 claiming abuse at the house. No charges have been filed, and the police spokesman said details of the investigation were not immediately available.

King's hospitalization was the second in a month. He posted a similar message to fans when he returned home April 7.

He canceled the final shows of his 2014 tour last October after falling ill in Chicago.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer has released more than 50 albums and sold millions of records worldwide.

His guitar, famously named Lucille, has soared and wailed in songs ranging from "Every Day I Have the Blues" to "When Love Comes to Town" to "The Thrill is Gone."

In September 1970, King recorded one of his most revered albums in Chicago, "Live in Cook County Jail," which topped the R&B chart. It documented a typically fierce King performance, a mix of improvisation and tightly scripted classics.

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He has been a frequent performer in Chicago, headlining everything from the Chicago Blues Fest in 2008 to clubs such as House of Blues. He fell ill after a performance at House of Blues last year and canceled a series of concert dates because of dehydration and exhaustion.

At Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival at a sold-out Toyota Park in Bridgeview, in 2007, King passed the torch to the next generation of blues guitar players. After performing a leering "Rock Me Baby" and a scarifying "The Thrill is Gone," he raised a cup to his fans: "When they lay me off to rest, may the last voices I hear be yours."

King has been a mentor to countless musicians, including Clapton, and has been looked upon as a kindly godfather figure by many Chicago blues guitarists, including the late Hubert Sumlin, who accompanied King on stage at the Crossroads festival, and Buddy Guy, who once described King as the "last blues legend standing."

Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot and Associated Press contributed.


Reporting from New York  Hillary Clinton decisively won New York's Democratic primary Tuesday over Sen. Bernie Sanders in what could prove to be a pivotal contest, scoring a double-digit victory that essentially foreclosed her rival's last, best opportunity to win the nomination.

Sanders had vowed to win the state and had outspent Clinton significantly here. In the end, however, she was the one who emerged with the win in the state she represented in the Senate for eight years. She will add heavily to her already formidable lead over her rival in delegates to this summer's Democratic nominating convention.

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"We have won in every region of the country from the north to the south to the east to the west, but this one's personal," Clinton said to supporters in New York City. "The race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch, and victory is in sight."

Clinton made little mention of Sanders in the speech, other than to reach out to his backers following a particularly contentious period in the race during which the Vermont senator made an energetic, and at times bitter, effort to overtake the front-runner.

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"To all the people who supported Sen. Sanders, I believe there is much more that unites us than divides us," Clinton said.

Sanders was clearly deflated by the loss. As the votes were counted, he flew home to Vermont, avoiding reporters other than to declare at a short, impromptu news conference at the Burlington airport that he needed to "take a day off" to "recharge."

Pro-Clinton operatives began stepping up pressure on Sanders to withdraw from the race before polling places had even closed. The Vermonter's campaign aides, however, gave no indication of changing plans. Sanders himself said he was not planning to drop out.

Sanders had hoped New York would show he had made inroads with the nonwhite and women voters crucial to victory. But exit polls showed only 25% of blacks and 37% of Latinos supporting him, a crippling blow in a party that depends heavily on minority voters.

Over the last two weeks of intense campaigning here, New York lived up to its reputation for political brawling. The two candidates who, through much of the race, had worked to sidestep the personal insults and bitter attacks that have dominated the Republican contest showed little restraint in the Empire State. The stakes had become too high to risk taking the high road.

The Clinton campaign had grown increasingly anxious as voting approached. Sanders had racked up wins in smaller states recently, amassing victories in seven of the last eight that voted. Those victories gave Sanders a fundraising boost that supported his ability to outgun Clinton on the air here and unsettled the front-runner at a time she was looking to "wrap up" the nomination, as she put it at one campaign event.

Her campaign's attacks were unusually sharp, as she seized on a poor performance by Sanders early in the month in an interview with the New York Daily News editorial board to question whether he was ready to be president.

The implications angered Sanders, whose roots on the streets of working-class Brooklyn began to show as he energetically hit back  over and over. At large rallies, at news conferences and in television interviews he lashed out at his rival, suggesting her vote for the war in Iraq, her millions of dollars in speaking fees and campaign support from Wall Street, and her support of international trade deals should disqualify her from being the nominee.

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The bitterness of the race did not seem to bother New York voters, many of whom have seen much worse. Asked in an exit poll if the campaign had "energized" or "divided" the Democratic Party, only about 3 in 10 primary voters said they thought the party had been divided while nearly 7 in 10 said it had been energized. The exit poll was conducted by Edison Research for the Associated Press and the major television networks.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 16 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton acknowledges supporters after her victory in New York. (Justin Lane / European Pressphoto Agency)

New York Republicans were far more pessimistic than Democrats, with 58% saying they thought the campaign had divided their party.

Most New York Democrats signaled they would support the nominee even if it is not the candidate they voted for Tuesday. Only 14% of Democrats in the exit poll said they would not support Clinton if she is on the ballot, and only 18% said they would not support Sanders. Eight years ago, when Clinton and then-Sen. Barack Obama ran against each other, exit polls in some states showed nearly 3 in 10 voters saying they would not vote for the Democratic nominee if their candidate lost. After the primary, that division healed quickly.

More than 7 in 10 Democratic voters, including a significant share of Sanders' backers, said they expected Clinton would win the nomination.

Yet party unity was clearly not yet high on the agenda of the candidates while they battled over turf both considered home.

By the time the two met on stage at a massive debate hall at the Brooklyn Navy Yard last week, they did not even try to contain their disdain for each other. Sanders was caustic as he tore into the massive speaking fees Clinton has collected from Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions.

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Clinton antagonized him by bringing up the Daily News again, suggesting he had revealed himself in his interview to be startlingly misinformed and unprepared on even the core issue of his campaign, financial industry regulation.

In between the mutual attacks, Clinton campaigned as energetically in New York as she has anywhere in this race. There were days when she and former President Bill Clinton each stopped at multiple block parties in minority neighborhoods, where local political leaders they have known for years helped them rally crowds, and, in least one case, dance to salsa music.

Yet Sanders, a relative newcomer to New York politics, had his own advantages among the youngest and most liberal parts of the state's electorate. Throngs of supporters mobbed his rallies in the South Bronx and in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. The Vermont senator with the thick New York accent had no trouble blending into the city's unique political scene.

Brooklyn, though, ultimately went big for Clinton. Even neighborhoods that are known hotbeds of hipsters and leftists that make up the core of Sanders' base ended up favoring Clinton.

The Sanders campaign now must decide whether to prolong its acrimonious rivalry with the front-runner or shift its approach. A continuation of the hostilities risks antagonizing Clinton further and thus diminishing the influence Sanders might have in steering the direction of the party. The Clinton campaign is eager for a cease-fire, worried about the bruises continued sparring could leave.

By the time voters arrived at the polls on Tuesday, some resented all the hostility. But they had different ideas about who was to blame.

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"He's getting nasty," Millie Margiotta, 86, said of Sanders, as she entered a polling station in Midtown Manhattan. "That's totally unnecessary. That makes me angry."

That is not how Phoebe Abramowitz, 31, a counselor, saw it. She went to cast her ballot for Sanders, inspired by the campaign the insurgent has run. She will vote for Clinton if she wins the nomination, she said, but not with gusto.

"I've always been, like, 'I hope I don't have to vote for Hillary,'" Abramowitz said.

Down in Manhattan's West Village neighborhood, another thirtysomething voter who had been feeling the Bern ultimately cast a ballot for Clinton. Tim Petrella, a 31-year-old owner of a software company, had made up his mind Tuesday morning.

"The thing that turned me was the Daily News interview he gave," Petrella said. "It became pretty clear he was a little light on some of the details."

This being New York, it is not just the candidates who clashed often. The voters also did, especially in hotbeds of activism like the West Village.

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Asked whom she was voting for, Deborah Soffel, a 59-year-old who works for a nonprofit focused on school nutrition, brought her voice to a whisper before acknowledging it was Clinton.

"It's getting very contentious, so I tread lightly," Soffel said, with a smile.

evan.halper@latimes.com

chris.megerian @latimes.com

Times staff writers Mark Z. Barabak in New York and Kate Linthicum in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

For more on Campaign 2016, follow @evanhalper

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Maybe you recall the Verizon commercial that follows a young girl as she's growing up. Samantha takes a keen interest in activities like wading in a stream and building a rocket ship; activities that explore science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

Yet she's discouraged from pursuing those interests by the folks around her with comments like "Why don't you hand that to your brother" or "Don't get your dress dirty." It concludes with a thoughtful question: Isn't it time we told her she's pretty brilliant, too?

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Not only does the commercial tug at your heart strings but it ends with an alarming statistic that 66 percent of fourth-grade girls say they like science and math, but only 18 percent of all college engineering majors are female.

Not long ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation's Center for Women in Business surveyed STEM leaders from around the country about what can be done to attract, retain, and advance more women and girls to STEM education and careers.

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Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson said, "Sparking a girl's interest in STEM at an early age significantly increases the odds that she will pursue a STEM career."

Stanford University's Vivek Wadhwa agreed that "It starts with childhood. Girls have to be encouraged by their parents to take an interest in STEM fields."

GoldieBlox's CEO Debbie Sterling says to "Introduce girls to STEM at an early age through toys and media that make it fun and accessible."

Girls Who Code Founder Reshma Saujani thinks we need to "Make technology cool for girls."

Lockheed Martin, Georgetown University and BSA | The Software Alliance did just that as they joined forces to sponsor the inaugural Washington, D.C., Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program. They brought together 60 young women from the region for seven weeks of intensive instruction in computing skills, ranging from mobile app development to web design to robotics.

If you know a young woman who is interested in Chicago's program next summer, you can get information here.
Hours after images of burned buildings and rioting in Baltimore dominated national news broadcasts, Chicago police announced they will be hosting a round of neighborhood meetings to discuss trust and communications with residents.

In a Tuesday news release, Superintendent Garry McCarthy did not mention any specific incidents but made a reference to the "national discussion" going on about the relationship between police and residents in cities across the country. The so-called outreach tour aims to "build and sustain trust," according to the department.

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Clergy and residents on the department's advisory councils will help lead the sessions, but no timetable was announced.

The announcement came a week after a Cook County judge acquitted a white Chicago police detective on a legal technicality of an involuntary manslaughter charge in the fatal off-duty shooting of Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old black woman, drawing outrage in the African-American community.
The Lake County coroner has classified the death of a 17-year-old teen shot by Zion police as a homicide, a determination that is separate from whether the shooting was justified, officials said Tuesday.

Justus Howell of Waukegan was shot twice in the back on April 4, allegedly after trying to buy a gun from another man and then running from police, authorities have said.

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Lake County State's Attorney Mike Nerheim said that the autopsy ruling was expected, as the definition of "homicide" includes the killing of a person by another person.

"The question that remains is whether this is a justifiable homicide," Nerheim said Tuesday. "This determination hinges on a complete evaluation of the facts and circumstances surrounding the incident. For those purposes, an independent investigation is necessary."

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The Lake County Major Crime Task Force is investigating and sharing information with the FBI, which, at the request of local authorities, is monitoring the case.

Once the investigation is complete, "all of the facts and evidence will be reviewed to determine whether or not criminal charges are warranted" Nerheim said.

The autopsy report, released Tuesday, also showed that Howell had marijuana and a small amount of alcohol in his system, according to Coroner Thomas Rudd. The amount of marijuana was equivalent to Howell having smoked a joint within two hours of his death, Rudd said. Howell's blood alcohol level was 0.03, below the legal amount for an adult to drive.

"It's irrelevant what was found," said Al Rogers, serving as Howell's family spokesman. "Our focus is the completion of the full report. The one concern I have is, did they test the police officer to see if he had substance abuse or alcohol in his system?

"We are not going to sit idly by and allow anyone to make this kid anything other than a young man aspiring to grow into adulthood," Rogers added. "Clearly, there was a lot of wrong that happened that day. But thus far, all we have heard is the suspected wrongdoing of this young man."

The family, which has contacted a lawyer, is going to wait for the outcome of the investigation, he said.

Rogers then spoke about the investigation, saying the comments reflected his own opinion and that he was not speaking for Howell's family: "The African-American community in Zion has no respect or trust for the Lake County Major Crime Task Force."

Rogers cited the case of Darrin Hanna, who died in 2011 after he was beaten by North Chicago police. Then-Lake County State's Attorney Michael Waller decided in 2012 not to press charges against the officers involved, though that decision came after an investigation by Illinois State Police, not the Major Crime Task Force.

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He compared the scenario to other cities across the country grappling with the deaths of black teens at the hands of police. "In Baltimore as in Zion, there doesn't appear to be a good relationship between the police and the African-American community. That sets the stage for what we see here in Zion."

lblack@tribpub.com
A Chicago man accused of murdering a woman in her Evanston apartment nearly 24 years ago was found guilty by a Cook County judge Thursday, police announced in a press release.

Cook County Circuit Court Judge Jeffrey Warnick found Jimmie Dunlap, 45, guilty in a bench trial at the Skokie Court House, Evanston police said in a release, with sentencing to take place May 24.

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On April 23, 1992, Deondra Dawson was discovered brutally murdered in her apartment in the 600 block of Sherman Avenue from multiple stab wounds, said Cmndr. Joseph Dugan, department spokesperson.

Her 4-year-old son was discovered in the apartment unharmed, he said.

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An autopsy later revealed that Dawson had been stabbed at least 34 times and sustained multiple wounds to her head, trunk and extremities, as well as a collapsed lung from a stab wound and multiple brain hemorrhages from head trauma. Dawson also suffered extensive lacerations and abrasions, and a human bite mark on her cheek, according to a press release from the Cook County state's attorney's office.

The charges against Dunlap were brought as result of an investigation by the Cook County State's Attorney's Cold Case Unit and the Evanston Police Department.

Detectives had gone over case files numerous times over the years following the murder, police officials said.

In 2010, they took another look at the case based on changes in DNA testing and the homicide's solvability factors.

This time Dawson's name came up as a match when the department submitted the swabs to the Illinois State Police Crime Lab.

Daywatch Weekdays Start each day with Chicago Tribune editors' top story picks, delivered to your inbox. >

Police Chief Richard Eddington talked about the case at a 2nd Ward meeting in Evanston Thursday night.

He noted the "exceptional work" of the evidence technicians on the murder scene, singling out Cmndr. Steven Goldenberg, who was the head evidence technician on the case at the time.

Goldenberg's work, collecting DNA and blood samples from multiple places "got us to these results,'' said Eddington following Dunlap's arrest.

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Detective Aaron Wernick also worked diligently to bring closure to the case once the offender was identified, the chief said.

The conviction underscored a "continuing commitment to victims that we take very seriously," he told those in attendance.

Dunlap was charged with first degree murder on May 29, 2013, he said.

The first names of both Dunlap and Dawson were spelled incorrectly in earlier versions of this story.
The Rev. James Dokos attends a court hearing in his criminal case July 18, 2014, in Milwaukee. Dokos, who formerly led Sts. Peter and Paul Greek Orthodox Church in Glenview, is accused of mishandling the trust fund of a Milwaukee church while he was the priest there. (Abel Uribe, Chicago Tribune)

A priest who rebelled against his superiors in the Chicago Greek Orthodox Church by supporting his parish's pursuit of a criminal investigation into another clergy member will leave his position at the end of June.

The Rev. Angelo Artemas, who formerly led Sts. Peter and Paul Greek Orthodox Church in Glenview, confirmed that he was recently released from his duties at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Milwaukee "after two years of frustration" and will join a parish based out of Atlanta.

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"After two years of fighting for this parish  I have given up," said Artemas, after informing congregants of his pending departure.

The priest said he and his congregation have been under intense pressure from leaders of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago since members of his Milwaukee church raised concerns in 2013 about their former priest, the Rev. James Dokos.

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Dokos, who also served at Sts. Peter and Paul, was eventually charged with felony theft over his alleged mishandling of a $1.2 million trust fund that was left to the Milwaukee church. He is awaiting trial.

The criminal charge against Dokos, a Chicago resident, came only after metropolis leaders determined in their own initial investigation that no trust fund money was misspent. They also ousted the parish council president of the Glenview church when he requested that Dokos be placed on leave until the criminal probe was completed.

Officials in the metropolis said Artemas was not forced to resign and noted that he had requested reassignment before.

Artemas acknowledged that he had been denied three requests in the past three years to return to the Chicago area.

"When I was told by email by (Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos) that there is not a future for (me) at metropolis in Chicago, I saw the writing on the wall," Artemas said.

Metropolis leaders said in a statement released earlier this year that they "never intimidated, threatened or harassed anyone. ... The assignment of Parish Priests (is) an internal matter of the Church."

Artemas, who lives in Northbrook, said he initially agreed to change places with Dokos, 63, who was a longtime pastor at Annunciation before he was transferred to Sts. Peter and Paul in 2012. Artemas had served more than 10 years at Sts. Peter and Paul. Artemas said he was told that Dokos wanted to move closer to where his wife worked, and that metropolis leaders suggested the change would be "good for both of us."

When he arrived, he said, he realized the church was in much worse financial condition than he had been told. The church has defaulted on its mortgage and cannot afford his salary, he said.

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Both churches are among 58 parishes in several Midwestern states overseen by the Metropolis of Chicago, all part of a larger archdiocese based in New York.

After Dokos left Milwaukee, church members there discovered alleged irregularities in how he spent a trust fund created by longtime parishioners that he controlled. Dokos is accused of improperly writing checks for tens of thousands of dollars from the fund to benefit himself, friends and family and to pay his personal credit card bills, according to a criminal complaint filed in Milwaukee.

His trial is scheduled in October.

Controversy stemming from the Dokos case has attracted national interest on Greek Orthodox websites and led to an online petition calling for metropolis leaders to step down. Some Glenview parishioners  including a member of the parish's stewardship committee  blame decreased membership and waning contributions to Sts. Peter and Paul on the ongoing scandal.

"The removal of (Father) Angelo and his replacement with Fr. James Dokos by (Bishop Demetrios) has caused irreparable and immeasurable harm to my parish," George Karcazes wrote in a letter to the editor published recently in The National Herald, a Greek Orthodox newspaper.

Karcazes stated that 54 families left the church  40 of them as a direct result of the Dokos scandal  and that contributions dropped by about $255,000 during the two years Dokos served there.

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As a result of the letter, Karcazes has been asked to step down from his position as a member of the stewardship committee by the current parish priest, the Rev. Panagiotis Boznos, Karcazes said.

In 2013, Annunciation's parish council, whose members include Artemas and congregants, began to raise concerns about Dokos' handling of the trust fund. Milwaukee authorities eventually brought charges against Dokos, alleging that he improperly spent more than $100,000 from the fund on himself, family members and gifts to other church officials and to pay his personal credit card bills.

The metropolis's investigation "reached the conclusion" that the funds were used in accordance with the trust fund provisions and its benefactor, according to a letter Demetrios wrote to Annunciation leaders. Annunciation officials then contacted the Milwaukee district attorney's office, resulting in an investigation that heightened tensions between metropolis leaders and members of both the Milwaukee and Glenview churches.

Records show Dokos wrote checks from the fund to other church leaders, including Bishop Demetrios, who received $6,700. The bishop has described the money as gifts given as part of Greek Orthodox tradition.

Last July, Milwaukee officials formally charged Dokos with felony theft in Milwaukee.

The Dokos case has served as a lightning rod for critics of Demetrios and his superior, Metropolitan Iakovos.

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An online petition, listing more than 600 signatories including Artemas and several other priests, asks for the New York archbishop to remove the Chicago bishop from his position and seek the retirement of Iakovos.

The Rev. William Christy, who recently retired from part-time ministerial work at Sts. Peter and Paul, is among those who signed the petition.

"I think of the bishop and all the checks he signed and deposited. There is no way he can think that is OK to do that," Christy said. "There has not been one word from Bishop Demetrios on what did he do with all those thousands of dollars of checks he cashed. Did he return them?"

Demetrios was traveling in Greece and could not be reached. Metropolis representatives were not available to respond to the question of whether the bishop, who has not be accused of any wrongdoing, returned the money he received from Dokos.

A week before Greek Orthodox Easter, the metropolis posted a letter on its website in support of Iakovos and Demetrios that was attributed to the priests in the metropolis.

"There were a lot of things that were circulating," said the letter's author, the Rev. John Ketchum of Racine, Wis."We felt if we didn't say something, if we were silent, then we were agreeing (with the criticism of the leaders). We felt we needed to put forward our love and support for Metropolitan Iakovos and Bishop Demetrios."

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lblack@tribpub.com

Twitter @LisaBChiTrib
Gary  Gary police are investigating two separate overnight shootings that left two men dead. A suspect is in custody in one of the shootings.

Deonte Ballard, 22, was shot at his home in the 1200 block of Aetna St., in the Aetna neighborhood.

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An investigation team from the Lake County coroner's office was dispatched just after 11 p.m. Ballard was pronounced dead at the scene at 11:59 p.m., according to a news release from the coroner's office.

Detectives Cpl. Edward Gonzalez and James Bond are investigating.

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Detective Alexander Jones, meanwhile, is investigating the shooting of George Blackmon Jr., 58. Blackmon was shot at about 1 a.m. at his home in the 1600 block of W. 10th St., in Gary's Tolleston neighborhood. He died about an hour later at Methodist Hospital Northlake.

A suspect in the shooting was arrested while driving a van with his wife and three children in White County, going south on Interstate 65, police said.

Sgt. Thomas Decanter, a Gary police spokesman, said the two men knew each other, but their relationship is unclear. He said it appears the two were arguing over money when the suspect pulled out a weapon and shot Blackmon. The suspect is in custody at the Lake County Jail pending charges Monday by the Lake County prosecutor's office.

Lake County police Deputy Chief Dan Murchek coordinated with state police and a cell phone provider to ping the suspect's cell phone, which led to his apprehension by Indiana state troopers. Lake County police returned the suspect to Gary and escorted the suspect's wife and three children  ages 6 and younger  back to Lake County, where the van was seized for evidence.

Carrie Napoleon is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Cozell and Damon Thomas sat on the bleachers in the 21st Century Charter School gym and joined the sea of applause for the school's 31 graduating seniors, including their daughter Devan.

The Gary school called the May 14 event "signing day." It's a celebration because all 31 seniors in the Class of 2015 have been accepted to college, many with dual credits.

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The kids wore black commencement gowns with the T-shirt of their chosen college underneath. As their name was called, they strolled or danced through a balloon archway and revealed their selection.

Outside the school, located on a blight-ravaged downtown street, signs of congratulations for each senior lined the walkway.

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Devan Thomas, 18, will graduate June 6 and enter Purdue University Calumet in the fall as a junior.

While at 21st Century, the school paid her tuition at Ivy Tech Community College, and she earned an associate's degree.

"I don't even know how to put it in words," said Cozell Thomas of her daughter's accomplishment. "I'm so very proud of her. She sacrificed a lot of weekends."

The state established charter schools 13 years ago, in part, to provide alternatives like this in poor communities. Yet, data shows they struggle academically as much as their public school counterparts. An analysis last year by the Indianapolis Star, showed the failure rate for charters has more than doubled in the past five years. In all, 53 percent received a D or F last year, compared to 23 percent in 2010.

Charters must make the grade under trying conditions and typically with less money. The clock starts ticking on a charter's five-year lifespan the day school opens. If the school's performance flounders, it could lose its charter.

Those factors have led to the shuffling of administrators, changing in education management operators and the wholesale elimination of some grade levels in Gary.

In 2014, four Gary charters posted D grades, while one  Charter School of the Dunes  received an F. In 2013, charter authorizer Ball State University revoked the Miller school's charter. Calumet College of St. Joseph tossed the school a life line by taking over its charter, but dumped its founder and its principal. It also decided to close the high school. The school's seniors who graduate Thursday will be its first and last.

Also in 2013, Ball State yanked the charter of Lead College Preparatory Academy. It decided to close.

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Meanwhile, Thea Bowman Leadership Academy survived a rocky year and received a one-year provisional charter renewal from Ball State. Its first principal, Gwen Adell, resigned as chief administration officer, along with two principals.

Thea Bowman interim president Ben Clement said the school is ending its relationship this month with American Quality Schools, an education management company. The Leona Group LLC is the school's new education manager, he said.

Former Gary Community School Corp. teacher and spokeswoman Sarita Stevens has been appointed as principal at the middle and high school.

Clement said curriculum will be more robust and an additional Saturday program called Bowman University will offer dual credit classes and enrichment courses.

"What happens is over time, you start to figure things out. You tweak the programs, we want to continue to improve," he said.

Kevin Teasley, the founder and CEO of the GEO Foundation that operates 21st Century and the Gary Middle College, blamed his school's D grade on what he called a "flawed" grading system.

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"Essentially, charter schools are set up to serve at-risk students... We have kids coming in on a regular basis way below grade level." Teasley said 21st Century's academic growth has been steady, but only performance is measured. "Every year it gets better, I'm not happy we got a D. It's the system we have to deal with. Lets do better."

While charter schools have detractors, their biggest supporters hold seats in the GOP-dominated General Assembly that's pumping more money into the schools.

This year, the General Assembly approved the Charter and Innovation Network School grant program that gives charters $500 in additional per pupil money if they're high-performing. That means the school must receive an A, B, or C on the state's grading system. Schools that receive D's or F's can also receive the money, if they are performing as well, or better than the nearest non-charter public school.

Additional legislation allows charters to receive loans from the Common School Fund for up to $5 million.

On this signing day, Devan wore a black and gold Purdue T-shirt as she huddled with Ariel Craft, 18, who also received an Ivy Tech associate's degree. She wore a purple and gold University of Northern Iowa T-shirt that gave her a full scholarship.

Cozell Thomas says she has no regrets about sending her daughter to 21st Century.

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"From day one, we knew about the dual credits," she said of the Ivy Tech connection.

Carole Carlson can be reached at ccarlson@post-trib.com

Twitter: @ccwriterPT

Gary's charter 2014 grades

Charter School of the Dunes  F

Thea Bowman Leadership Academy  D

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Gary Lighthouse Charter School  D

21st Century Charter School  D

Aspire Charter Academy  D

Gary Middle College  no grade given
Safiya Johnson, with the Admissions Office from the University of Chicago, talks to Jamal Harmon about the many opportunities at the university in Gary on May 12, 2015. (Jim Karczewski, Post-Tribune)

GARY  The city's reputation as an urban area is such that local school officials are taking steps to ensure that academically-qualified students are not overlooked by top universities in search of future classes of students.

The Gary Community Schools Corp. and the Pathways to College program held a college fair Tuesday at West Side and Wirt-Emerson high schools, giving admissions officials from schools ranging from Smith College and Wesleyan University to Indiana University Northwest and Ivy Tech Community College a chance to meet the academic finest of Gary's school system.

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"We don't want someone to not have a chance to go to.college because they didn't know about opportunities for an education," said Judith Griffin, president of the Pathways to College program that advises would-be students about the process of college applications and seeking financial aid.

Similar efforts have been held in urban areas such as Detroit and Newark, N.J., but she said this is a first for the Gary school system.

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Although she said people should realize the students are academically qualified. "We're not putting them in college. They're going it themselves," said Griffin, at Wirt-Emerson.

Cheryl Pruitt, the Gary schools superintendent, said the effort is to.provide the same type of counseling and advice that students in wealthier high school districts would receive.

"Some of our students may go.on to the top schools, while others may want to stay closer to home," she said "This is about offering choices."

Luis Donado, an assistant director of recruiting for Michigan State University, said coming to an urban community like Gary benefits the Lansing, Mich.-based school.

"We want a diverse enrollment, and we want people from all the surrounding states," he said.

While Kathryn Andersen of admissions at University of Notre Dame said officials there want to make sure that all qualified students are found, regardless of where they come from. "We want to help students find the right college for them," she said.

For their part, the students partaking in Tuesday's program were interested in finding schools with academic programs that interest them.

"I'd like to be a veterinarian and I'm looking for the right school," said sophomore Shania Guise, who admitted to a leaning toward Notre Dame.

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While Chris Neighbors, a junior who was born in Chicago but now lives in Gary, admitted a desire to cross back over the state line to the University of Chicago.

Gregory Tejeda is a freelance reporter.
"There are no bad boys. There is only bad environment, bad training, bad example, bad thinking."

 Father Edward J. Flanagan, founder of Boys Town

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While heading south for Onarga, Ill., and passing by the city I was born in, I couldn't help but whisper Chicagoan Steve Goodman's wistful lyrics "... All along the southbound odyssey, the train rolls out of Kankakee, ridin' past the houses, farms and fields. Passin' trains that have no names, freight yards full of old black men, the graveyards of the rusted automobiles ... ."

But it wasn't automobiles or trains that I wanted to talk to Ken Rapier about. It was planes, and more.

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Rapier, 67, was born and raised on Chicago's South Side. He still lives there but has a summer place in Hobart. He is a retired pilot who flew commercial, corporate and charter flights.

Rapier, a member of the Dodo chapter of Tuskegee Airmen, is a co-recipient of the Chanute Prize for Team Innovation because of the group's involvement with the Experimental Aircraft Association's Young Eagle flight program.

I sat in on Rapier's presentation at Onarga Academy, which included the short film "Who Says Black Men Can't Fly?" to the students at Onarga Academy. I interviewed him immediately after he finished up a Q&A session with the students.

***

Flight school?

"Southwest College for aviation," he said. "I also earned an electronics degree from Olive-Harvey College and a liberal arts degree from Governor's State."

The Young Eagles?

"The Young Eagles' program is an EAA program the Chicago Dodo chapter partners with. It offers youngsters between the ages of 8 and 17 free introductory flights. The Chicago Dodo chapter offers this on the second Saturday of every month at the Gary/Chicago Airport. The object of the program is not only introductory flights, but giving the youngsters an opportunity that they might not have had, particularly with inner city kids and other underprivileged kids. The chances of those kids being in a small airplane are slim to none."

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Continue, please.

"We want these kids to get involved in aviation because it's a completely different world and the opportunities are endless. More than 10,000 Young Eagles have flown. The Young Eagle program is run by volunteers. I've been involved since 1994."

Why is the Chicago chapter of Tuskegee Airmen Inc. called the Dodos?

"Because it's named after the dodo bird. The dodo became extinct because it lost its ability to fly. After World War II, even though all the Tuskegee Airmen had proven themselves to be superior pilots, none of them were given the opportunity to use their skills in the field of commercial aviation. The Tuskegee Airmen thought they were going to become extinct because they had lost their ability to fly.

"I was the first non-World War II veteran to become a member of the Chicago Dodo chapter. We want to let everybody know, as long as the new generation members are around, the Tuskegee Airmen will never become extinct."

Ken, I've yet to see the film "Red Tails." Tell me more about the Tuskegee Airmen.

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"There were 992 Tuskegee Airmen who graduated from flight school, 450 of them became fighter pilots and the remainder became bomber pilots. They had the highest aptitude scores of any people who trained at Chanute (Air Force Base in Rantoul, Ill., about a half-hour drive south of Onarga). The 332nd Fighter Group (Tuskegee Airmen) would eventually be sent to Tuskegee, Ala. The fighter pilots were activated into combat. The bomber pilots were not activated into combat because the war ended."

Were any of the fighter pilots killed in combat?

"Yes, 66 of them. The fighter pilots were flying bomber escort. The thing about the Tuskegee Airmen was they would escort the men in the bombers to their targets and then escort them as far they could toward home. Other fighter pilot units, once they got to the target, would leave the bombers to their own resources to get back home.

"That's why the bomber pilots started calling the Tuskegee Airmen 'The Red-Tailed Angels.' The bombers would see these P-51s with the red tails on the horizon and they knew those guys were going to stay with them, that they were gonna get back home. What they didn't know was those Red-Tailed Angels were black men."

Ken, as you know, Gary's Quentin Smith, a former Tuskegee Airman, has passed on. I believe it was Smith in that film you showed today who said while traveling by train, the German POWs were treated better than the Tuskegee Airmen.

"That is correct. There were times when the Tuskegee Airmen had to get off the train and reboard onto the coal cars while the German prisoners were placed in the nice cars. The Tuskegee Airmen's motto was 'With courage and determination, you can overcome adversity.'"

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During your presentation you mentioned the commander of the Tuskegee Airmen.

"Benjamin O. Davis Jr. He finished at the top of his class at West Point. During the entire four years at the Academy, Davis was shunned by his classmates by giving him the 'silent treatment.' He never had a roommate. He ate alone.

"Davis would go on to receive the Silver Star for a strafing run in Austria and the Distinguished Flying Cross for a bomber escort to Munich on June 9, 1944."

Just three days after D-Day.

"That is correct."

***

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I figured Onarga Academy was akin to Culver Military Academy, and at one time it was. Today, Onarga Academy serves adolescent males, ages 11 to 20, who have exhibited problematic sexual behavior, family relationship issues, patterns of abusive behavior, chemical health issues, lack of empathy, cognitive distortions and trauma-based mental health issues. In other words, those boys had been kicked around a bit.

There were about 70 of them  half white, half black  in attendance while Rapier spoke. They live at Onarga Academy. It's their home.

Rapier nailed it. They loved him. I'll testify to that. And those boys were well-mannered, attentive and asked pertinent questions about the Tuskegee Airmen and aviation in general.

With courage and determination, you can overcome adversity.

Jeff Manes is a freelance columnist.

Learn more

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For more information or to make reservations for a free plane ride call the Tuskegee Airmen Young Eagles at (773) 602-2880.
Washington Township High School freshmen, from left, Haley Clark, Katie Wilgus, Kortney Wilgus and Sydney Yagelski present a report on Orville Redenbacher to U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky on Tuesday, May 12, 2015 at the school. (Michael Gard, Post-Tribune)

WASHINGTON TWP.  Washington Township High School students who presented class projects to their teachers Tuesday got a little extra scrutiny from U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Merrillville.

In all, Visclosky took part in eight student presentations covering an array of topics, from geocache searches featuring history lessons on Valparaiso University's law school and popcorn maven Orville Redenbacher to plans for revitalizing the community.

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"At first I was kind of nervous answering (questions from Visclosky), then I thought, 'Wait, we know this,'" said freshman Katie Wilgus, who, with three fellow freshmen, presented the Redenbacher geocache search.

"We were confident with our answers," agreed Haley Clark, who also worked on the Redenbacher project with classmates Kortney Wilgus and Sydney Yagelski.

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For the last five years, students at the high school have taken on "project-based learning assignments" instead of tests, said Jen Kwiatkowski, chair of the school's English department.

"We give them a real world scenario and have community leaders assess how they've done," she said.

All of the students at the school presented their projects April 30 and May 1, she said, and teachers selected those with the best projects to present to Visclosky.

When freshmen Bobby Walker, Tyler Stump, Luke Orshonsky and Ryan McCormack presented their idea for a geocache search that would reveal the history of the VU law school, Visclosky was curious about how the teens selected their topic.

"It was really important early on," Bobby said, noting the school's early commitments to both diversity and keeping the price reasonable so students of all means could attend. "It's the 39th oldest law school in the country."

Visclosky asked Katie and her group about when Redenbacher first moved to Valparaiso and why. The teens explained he met future business partner Charlie Bowman at Purdue University, and they came to Valparaiso because it was Bowman's hometown, as well as a growing area with the agricultural background to grow popcorn.

"And a lot of people eat it, and it's near Chicago," a larger market, Visclosky chimed in, before expressing appreciation for the paper microwave "bowl" of popcorn the students put on his table. "Thank you for breakfast."

Amy Lavalley is a freelance reporter.
David Rorex, left, and Dorian Rorex Jr. show off the food they collected for Catholic Charities Saturday afternoon. The boys are also collecting signatures to have the corner of Ninth and Gerry in Gary renamed for their father, Dorian Rorex Sr., who was killed in the line of duty while working for the Gary Police Department. (Michelle L. Quinn, Post-Tribune)

GARY  Deborah Richardson couldn't look at her nephews when she walked up to 504 Broadway Saturday afternoon.

The boys, David and Dorian Rorex Jr., wore their shirts with "ROREX" prominently on the back and "Our Dads (sic) Life Mattered/ EOW 1-5-98."

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As they approached Broadway drivers asking them to sign the petition for the city to honor their late father, former Gary Police Department Det. Dorian Rorex Sr., she teared up.

"These young men always keeping their dad in their hearts " Richardson said before tearing up again. "I couldn't even speak to them."

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David, 18, and Dorian, 17, combined the petition drive with a food drive to benefit Catholic Charities. On Tuesday, they will present the food they collected to the organization.

But while collecting food is important  the boys enjoy doing charity work, their mom, Linda Carrillo, said  getting their dad memorialized by the city is their big goal before David heads off to the University of Southern Indiana.

They even have the corner all picked out: Ninth Avenue and Gerry Street.

"Their dad was from Tolleston, and I'm from Ambridge, but we both went to West Side (High School)," Carrillo said. "And even though I hope the boys come back here when their done with school, they might not, so it'll be nice for them (to have something) to come back to."

The boys don't remember much at all about Dorian Sr., who was killed in the line of duty in pursuit of a drug suspect in 1998. David was only 10 months old, and Carrillo was still pregnant with Dorian Jr.

"We were preparing for David's first birthday. Dorian was going to dress up as Barney because David loved Barney so much," Carrillo said. "And I was on dispatch when the call came in."

But they hear the stories and are so inspired by their dad that they've often considered following in his footsteps into law enforcement.

"I tell my mom I'm going to do it, but she's all, 'Nah,' " Dorian said. "I'll probably be an electrician instead."

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Carrillo said they've talked to Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson about renaming Ninth and Gerry in Rorex Sr.'s honor, and they feel she is receptive to the idea. She said the mayor would help fast-track the petition once the signatures are gathered.

The Rorex boys will continue the petition drive at Fourth and Broadway in the next few weeks.

Quinn is a freelance reporter.
Darren Vann, 47, of Gary, was sentenced in May to life in prison for the murders of seven women. (Lake County Sheriff's Department)

CROWN POINT  Darren Deon Vann, who faces the death penalty if convicted of murder in the strangulation deaths of two women, must provide a handwriting sample to compare to a letter his attorney said he wrote to Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter.

Vann appeared in court Wednesday before Lake Superior Court Judge Diane Ross Boswell, who formally advised him of the death sentence request filed April 17, when Vann wasn't present.

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Vann said that he was aware of the filing and that he knew the two murder cases filed against him would be heard during one jury trial.

Boswell also ordered Vann to provide a handwriting sample requested by prosecutors to compare to a letter that lead counsel Teresa Hollandsworth said her client wrote. At the hearing last month, Hollandsworth said Vann's letter questioned whether Carter would follow through with the death penalty filing. The letter has not been made public, and a gag order prevents individuals involved in the case from discussing it publicly outside the courtroom.

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Prosecutors may use the letter during rebuttal testimony if Vann goes to trial and is convicted, Deputy Prosecutor Michelle Jatkiewicz said.

Vann, 44, has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, murder in perpetration of a robbery and robbery resulting in serious bodily injury in the Oct. 17 strangulation death of Afrikka Hardy, 19, of Chicago, and Anith Jones, 35, of Merrillville, whose body was found Oct. 18, covered with tires and teddy bears in an abandoned house at 421 E. 43rd Ave., Gary.

The judge also granted a request by prosecutors to prohibit the Lake County coroner's office from releasing any information on autopsies of five other women Vann is suspected of killing. Those victims are Sonya Billingsley, 53, of Gary; Tanya Gatlin, 27, of Highland; Teaira Batey, 28, of Gary; Tracy Martin, 41, of Gary; and Kristine Williams, 36, of Gary.

In light of the death penalty filing last month, Boswell canceled Vann's June 22 jury trial and said she would schedule a new jury trial at Vann's next court hearing on May 22.

Ruth Ann Krause is a freelance reporter.
The eighth-grader fidgeted nervously during an impromptu meeting with the principal of Haven Middle School in Evanston just before the start of first semester.

While classmates and teachers had long known the student as a girl, the 13-year-old actually identified as a boy and was starting to make that transition. He explained that he's transgender and asked to be called Avery from now on instead of Sarah, the name on his birth certificate.

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Principal Kathleen Roberson commended him for his bravery and openness. Avery was shocked.

"I don't think I've ever really heard about a positive reaction from a school," he recalled. "I was so scared she was going to be like 'no, you can't do that.' "

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Avery Kaplan is Haven's first openly transgender student, so he, his supportive mother and Roberson crafted a plan. It included staffwide diversity training, specific instruction on transgender issues for his core teachers, meetings with the school psychologist and  at his request  a private space where he felt comfortable changing clothes for physical education class.

Schools across the Chicago area and the nation are grappling with these kinds of decisions as they address the needs of students who don't fit typical gender norms, with policies spanning a spectrum of tolerance and support. While there are no definitive statistics on transgender students in the Chicago area, about 0.5 percent of adults identify as transgender, according to a Massachusetts phone survey published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2012.

Chicago Public Schools in October adopted its first guidelines for supporting transgender and gender non-conforming students. It includes affirming the right of students to wear clothing, attend classes and use names and pronouns that reflect the gender they identify with; restroom and locker room use are determined on a case-by-case basis. CPS spokeswoman Lauren Huffman said all schools will be trained on the guidelines.

But sometimes even well-meaning educators can go awry. East Aurora School District officials about two years ago approved anti-discrimination rules that included allowing transgender students to use locker rooms and bathrooms of their identified gender, but rescinded it just days later in the wake of community backlash. The policy was pulled on Spirit Day, a day when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender supporters wear purple to take a stand against bullying, though school officials said the timing was coincidental.

And nationally, the LGBT community was livid when Kentucky lawmakers recently attempted to pass legislation that would have forced transgender students to use separate single-stall bathrooms and locker rooms while barring them from facilities that correlate with their gender identity, though the bill died in March.

While this relatively new area of school policy can be controversial, advocates for transgender youth stress that school support is critical to the safety and emotional health of this group often referred to as the minority within the LGBT community.

"Take away the politics or the emotions people might feel about transgender individuals and let's boil it down to something that I think every parent can understand," said Dr. Robert Garofalo, pediatrician and co-director of the Gender and Sex Development Program at Lurie Children's Hospital. "And that's that every child deserves to go to school in a safe and nurturing environment."

Two diplomas

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As for Avery, he said he's more excited to go to school since coming out. He walks more confidently through the halls of Haven this year, his blond hair cut short and swept to the side, his gray eyes framed by unisex glasses.

When a few classmates have made rude inquiries about his gender or questioned why he's singing with the boys in the school play, Avery said he simply responds "because I am a boy." Close friends who dubbed themselves the Avery Defense Squad are quick to correct anyone who addresses him with the wrong pronoun or his former name.

He started the year using single-stall bathrooms that are open to anyone at school but recently began going to the boys restroom, which he said hasn't been an issue.

And Haven formed its first gay-straight alliance this year. Co-sponsor and school psychologist Allina Nikolopoulou said Avery was the catalyst for the club, which now has about a dozen consistent members.

"Avery has been very thoughtful in helping us transition as well," Roberson said. "I think we had more anxiety at the beginning of the year, just not knowing. As soon as we got into it a month or so, Avery is just Avery."

The one glitch came in the fall, when he was proud to make the honor roll but dismayed to read his old name, Sarah, on the certificate.

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"I felt a little rejected," he said.

He was gratified that school officials fixed the problem when he made the honor roll again in March. And Roberson said he will receive two diplomas when he graduates in June  one with the old name because it's still his legal identity, the other honoring him as Avery.

"This year is the first year that I transitioned; I kind of want to remember that," he said. "And now I'll have a diploma with my name on it."

The pronoun cup

Teachers and administrators milled around the hallways during a break at a seminar in Naperville in late February, chatting about everything from single-stall bathrooms to appropriate pronouns to gender-neutral uniforms.

The conference, called "A Day in the Life of Transgender Students," explored policies and cultural changes to promote transgender inclusion in elementary, middle and high school, sponsored by the Naperville Community Network for Professionals Serving LGBT Youth. It was the third-annual seminar of its kind, attended by roughly 150 educators from 23 school districts in DuPage, Kane, Cook and McHenry counties.

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A kindergarten teacher asked for advice on how to respond when parents would ask whether a student was a boy or a girl, because the child was consistently bucking gender stereotypes. One participant lamented how even innocuously starting the day with "hello boys and girls" can be rough for kids who aren't sure where they fit.

A west suburban mom spoke of her son who is now in college, noting that it was a third-grade teacher who persuaded the mom to stop forcing her son to wear "girl" clothes, and it was a fifth-grade teacher who explained to her that her child was transgender.

"You educate the parents as you educate the kids," she said. "You are the front line."

Then a student spoke of the pain of living in a body that seemed foreign.

Adam Beaty, a junior at Naperville North, came out at school last year. He said he contemplated switching schools to make a clean break, but he decided to stay after a transgender friend at another school reported being bullied so badly that he dropped out.

In an interview at his Naperville home, Adam said he's glad he stayed. He found a strong ally in his school nurse. After he came out, he said she took a little paper cup and labeled it a "pronoun cup," agreeing to pay him a dollar for every time she messed up and called Adam "she" or "her."

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"It wasn't like she cared about the money," he said. "I didn't care about the money. It was just the fact that she realized it was so important."

Adam used to wear an elastic binder that flattened his chest before he had "top surgery," the surgical removal of breast tissue, in December. When the binder's constriction caused him too much pain to run the mile in gym class, he said the nurse understood and wrote him an excuse note.

He's had his name legally changed. His voice is deep due to regular testosterone injections; his brown hair is cut short and a scruff of beard lines his jaw.

Blue and pink

Adam said sometimes he's had to be his own advocate, like the day he said an administrator told him he couldn't use the boys restroom because another student felt uncomfortable.

"I told him 'I'm going to use the guys' bathroom.' And they just kind of stepped off," he said, adding that no one has reproached him since.

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Spokeswoman Michelle Fregoso said school officials weren't aware of the circumstances of that incident. She said the school doesn't have a policy on the matter, but decisions are made on a case-by-case basis. She added that the district hosted a speaker to talk to staff last month about transgender youth, and staff members have had previous training on LGBT issues.

"Accommodations are made by working with students and their families for the best, most appropriate outcome given the circumstance," she said. "Our objective is always for all our students to have a supportive environment in our schools."

The Illinois Human Rights Act protects students from discrimination based on gender identity, but there hasn't been a case in Illinois that specifically addresses bathroom and locker room use, so the law needs clarification, said Owen Daniel-McCarter, policy and advocacy director of the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance.

But Daniel-McCarter believes that under the act students should be allowed to use the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity and cites a 2014 Maine Supreme Court case that ruled a public school discriminated against a transgender girl by barring her from using the girls bathroom and requiring her to use a unisex staff restroom.

In Illinois, about 80 percent of adults who expressed a transgender identity or gender non-conformity reported harassment in school, and 33 percent said they were physically assaulted in school, according the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Ten percent of survey respondents said harassment was so severe that it led them to leave a K-12 school or higher education.

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Adam said he's lost some close friends since coming out  including one who started calling him "It."

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"A lot of people avoided me," he said. "They just didn't want to have to deal with it, so they didn't."

But his mother, Liza Beaty, pointed out that he's also gained "a truer class" of friends.

Adam has a girlfriend now. They've been dating for about four months. He said his gender identity isn't really a big deal in their relationship.

"As a society, we're so programmed to think in pink or blue," he said. "It's so hard to break out of those binaries and realize there's more than that."

eleventis@tribpub.com

Twitter @angie_leventis
Shamiya Adams was sitting on a bedroom floor in her best friend's home, making s'mores after an evening of practicing a dance routine, when the shot ripped through the house in Garfield Park.

The bullet crashed through the wall of the bedroom and struck the 11-year-old in the head. She was rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital, where family kept an overnight vigil until the girl was pronounced dead at 7:33 a.m. today.

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"They came out and told us she wasn't going to make it," Shamiya's grandmother said. "Oh, my God."

As the night wore on, about 40 people joined hands outside the hospital, forming a circle and praying.

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"Just be with us, God. We need you now," one woman pleaded as a black SUV filled with police rolled past. "We need you now like never before."

Thirteen hours later, as police searched for the gunman, marshmallows and Hershey bars were still spread out on the bed, remnants of a summer sleepover turned tragic.

Traces of the girl's blood could be seen just beneath a stuffed Tweety Bird doll hanging from the bedroom wall at the home in the 3900 block of West Gladys Avenue, where she was shot about 9:35 p.m.

"Everybody was in the room," said Aaron Hill, who lives at the house but said he wasn't there at the time of the shooting. "They were just doing their girlie things. They heard shots and a bullet came through the window."

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Hill said Shamiya was best friends with one of his younger daughters. She had a "big smile," he said while choking back tears on his porch in East Garfield Park, just a couple blocks from the Eisenhower Expressway.

At the hospital, community activist Andrew Holmes urged the public to call authorities with information about the shooting. "We don't want these perpetrators on the street to rest nowhere tonight."

Earlier, a 12-year-old girl was wounded, one of more than 20 people wounded over 12 hours Friday and early Saturday in Chicago.

The girl, along with a 33-year-old woman and a 44-year-old man, were attacked in the 700 block of North Ridgeway Avenue about 3:30 p.m., police said. The girl suffered a graze wound to the foot, and the woman suffered a non-life-threatening gunshot wound above her right eye.

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Their conditions were stabilized at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital, said Chicago Police Department News Affairs Offier Veejay Zala. The man suffered a graze wound to the right calf and declined medical treatment, Zala said.



The victims told police they were approached by someone they didn't know, who fired shots at them.



In other shootings:



 A 30-year-old man was killed in the Austin neighborhood about 3 a.m. He was found in the front seat of a car, shot in the neck, back and shoulder in an alley next to Laramie Avenue just north of Madison Street. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The man was later identified as Brandon Wilson, of the first block of North Latrobe Avenue, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office. He was pronounced dead at the scene at 3:55 a.m.



 Someone shot a 35-year-old man in the 7200 block of South Emerald Avenue in the Englewood neighborhood about 3 a.m. He was wounded in the leg and taken to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, police said. Police said the man was on a sidewalk when someone opened fire from inside a passing dark vehicle.



 A 15-year-old boy was shot in the West Englewood neighborhood about 12:50 a.m. He was sitting in a parked car, in the 7000 block of South Winchester Avenue, when someone in a passing white van opened fire, police said. The boy was taken to Holy Cross Hospital with an arm wound.



 A 19-year-old man was in serious condition after someone shot him in a Lawndale neighborhood alley about 12:20 a.m. He was shot in an alley east of the 1200 block of South Christiana Avenue and ran around the corner onto 13th Street, where police found him bleeding from a wound to his back. He was taken in serious condition to Mount Sinai Hospital, police said.



 Two men, 24 and 33, were shot about 12:10 a.m. in the 500 block of East 71st Street in the Grand Crossing neighborhood. The younger man was shot in the abdomen and taken to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County while the older was taken to University of Chicago Hospital with a foot wound. The two told the police they "heard shots and felt pain."



 Four men were shot in the 1300 block of North Mason Avenue in the North Austin neighborhood about 11:30 p.m. All four took themselves to hospitals.



A 24-year-old man was shot in the arm and went to West Suburban Medical Center.



A 33-year-old man with foot and knee wounds, and a 31-year-old man with an arm wound, also went to West Suburban Medical Center.



The fourth man, 30, walked into Oak Park Hospital with a foot wound. The 33-year-old was later transferred to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County.



 Three people were wounded on the 4000 block of West Maypole Avenue in the West Garfield Park neighborhood about 11:30 p.m. One walked into Mount Sinai Hospital, one was dropped off at a fire station on Maypole, and the third was taken to the hospital, police said.



A 15-year-old boy was shot in the leg and a 32-year-old suffered a graze wound, police said. The two were taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, along with a 22-year-old man who was went to Mount Sinai Hospital on his own.



 About 11:20 p.m. someone shot a 25-year-old man in the ankle near Haddon Street and Long Avenue on the West Side. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital. Police said he had been sitting on a porch when two men approached and at least one started shooting.



 A 38-year-old man suffered a gunshot wound to the eye in the 7600 block of South Drexel Boulevard about 11:05 p.m., police said, citing preliminary information. He was listed in stable condition at Advocate Christ Medical Center.



 A 15-year-old boy was shot in the 11800 block of South Yale Avenue about 10:30 p.m. He suffered wounds to the arm and foot and his condition was stabilized at Roseland Community Hospital. He was outside when someone walked up and shot him, police said.



 A 26-year-old man was shot near Armitage and Lamon avenues about 10:50 p.m. The man suffered gunshot wounds to the shoulder, abdomen and leg. He was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in serious condition.



He was standing on the block when someone drove up in a light-colored car. The 26-year-old and the man in the car exchanged words. The man in the car got out and started shooting, police said. The man who shot the 26-year-old fled the scene.



 About 5:50 p.m., a 33-year-old man was wounded in both legs in the 3800 block of West Wabansia Avenue, Zala said. The man walked into the St. Elizabeth campus of Sts. Mary and Elizabeth Medical Center, although he was possibly transferred to Stroger.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com | Twitter: @ChicagoBreaking
Nathan Goldbaum, of the Chicago Teachers Union, posts fliers on a wall before CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey holds a news briefing in response to an announcement regarding Chicago Public Schools layoffs and proposed budget cuts Wednesday, July 1, 2015, at CTU headquarters. (John J. Kim, Chicago Tribune)

Mayor Rahm Emanuel's efforts to avert even larger school cuts hit a roadblock Friday when the teachers pension fund declined to give Chicago Public Schools an extension on a half-billion dollars in upcoming payments.

CPS, which is set to release individual school budgets for the coming year to principals next week, was already planning on $200 million in cuts as it struggles to close an estimated $1 billion deficit. City and school officials had hoped to avoid more pain by delaying $500 million in 2016 pension payments until 2017.

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But the Chicago Teachers' Pension Fund  its coffers barely half-full after years of underfunding by CPS  ultimately rejected the idea. In a joint statement released late Friday, the district and the pension fund said they had reached a "mutual agreement to end discussions."

"We have concluded that alternative options will need to be explored in order to resolve CPS' budget deficit while providing security for our members," said the fund's executive director, Charles Burbridge.

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City and school officials declined to say how the district will handle another year facing a huge pension payment. In a plea to pension board members last week, CPS chief administrator Tim Cawley said that without an extension, the district could face more layoffs, increases in class size and "really devastating cuts to our schools."

But school officials released a statement saying that they are looking for ways to balance the budget for the coming school year "with a goal of maintaining current class sizes." The statement described the district's financial position as "dire."

With the start of school less than two months away, CPS has yet to approve a 2016 budget or tell principals how much they'll have to spend for their schools. Emanuel said last week that CPS would eliminate 1,400 positions and make other spending reductions in order to cut $200 million in the coming year.

The mayor also said that school will start on time and that classroom sizes will not increase. Most of the layoffs, the district said, will affect support staff and not teachers.

How much more will have to be cut for CPS to close its budget gap  originally projected at $1 billion  could become clearer once budgets go out to principals. CPS officials said that would happen Monday.

Emanuel and district officials have maintained that help from the state is needed to address the district's budget woes. In the joint statement released Friday, CPS interim CEO Jesse Ruiz said that "CPS is committed to exploring all options on the table to resolve its structural deficit while working with its partners in Springfield on a solution to the district's significant financial challenges."

When school officials pitched the idea of putting off the bulk of the $700 million 2016 pension payment at the July 1 pension board meeting, they were reeling from a defeat in Springfield over another attempt at pension relief. State lawmakers did not approve a requested delay in CPS' 2015 pension payment, forcing the district to complete a $634 million pension payment June 30.

But after decades of underfunding, including a full 10 years when former Mayor Richard M. Daley paid nothing into the teachers pension fund, pension board members were skeptical. CPS' current budget-busting pension payments are a direct result of its failure to make its past pension contributions in full. Putting off $500 million in 2016 pension contributions would have left the district owing $1.2 billion in 2017.

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"I'm concerned about, are we going to get played here?" Jay Rehak, pension board president and a teacher at Whitney Young Magnet High School, said at the July 1 meeting. "I don't want to be played."

Pension board members eventually approved a measure that "expressed support for the principles" of CPS' proposal but put off making a final decision.

Emanuel spokeswoman Kelley Quinn said negotiations broke down because the pension fund "started asking for things that were outside the scope of modifying the pension payment." She declined to say what those things were.

hgillers@tribpub.com
Damond Dawson was "goofing around" with his brother and other relatives and friends, rapping and shooting video in Foster Park when two gunmen opened fire early Tuesday, killing Dawson and wounding four others, according to police and relatives.



"Basically like an ambush," said Dawson's aunt, Angela Mathis-Tate, 44. "One coming west of the park and one coming south."



The shooting happened around 2:20 a.m. as Dawson, 23, and a small group were "rapping around (taking) selfies with their phones" at Foster Park at 1440 W. 84th St., according to relatives.



Dawson was shot once in the back of the head and collapsed in the middle of the park, between a building and a playground. He was pronounced dead on the scene.



A 19-year-old woman was shot twice in the groin area and was taken in serious condition to Advocate Christ Medical Center. Three other men took themselves to the same hospital: a 20-year-old man shot nine times in the leg and shoulder, a 25-year-old man grazed in the leg and an 18-year-old man grazed in the back. Their conditions were stabilized.





Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 8 Damond Dawson, 23, inset, was fatally shot and four others were wounded when two gunmen opened fire while the group was filming a video April 19, 2016, at Foster Park on Chicago's South Side. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

The men are all related, according to Mathis-Tate. Dawson's brother was shot, and the other two men are brothers who are Dawson's second cousins.



"They were very close," Mathis-Tate said. "It was like they were all brothers. They just hung out together, go to parties together, go to clubs."



Some witnesses said the group was staging a party scene for a video titled "Two Tecs and a 50 Shot," but Mathis-Tate said they were just having some fun in the park.



"He was really, you know, just goofing around, playing like he could rap a little bit," she said. "He wasn't no rapper. He was a newcomer just trying to say some lyrics." He sometimes went by the name "Thugga," according to family and friends.



Foster Park is trouble at night when gang members feud with those on the other side of Ashland Avenue, Mathis-Tate said.





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Damond Dawson, 23, was killed in a shooting April 19, 2016, in the 1400 block of West 84th Street near Foster Park. (Courtesy of family)

"It's always drama up there. Nothing but drama  I told my nephew, please don't be going up to that park," she said. "They say, 'We're not, we're not,' and that's what they always tell us."



The area is particularly dangerous for young men, she said.



"It's a good neighborhood for kids, not teenagers," she said. "It's not good for boys 13 through their 30s. Maybe even 40s. These guys, it's madness. It has finally struck my home."



Mathis-Tate and her sister, Dawson's mother, went to Advocate Christ Medical Center hoping Dawson had survived. When they found out his body was still at the park, his mother froze.



"She wasn't blinking, she wasn't saying anything," Mathis-Tate said. "I said, 'You've got to get strong, you've got to get strong.'"

She was so distraught that they called a doctor out from the hospital to make sure she was OK. "She was going into shock," Mathis-Tate said. "She's got six boys, and now she's only got five."



Dawson was a "loving nephew" who didn't bother anyone, Mathis-Tate said.



"People out here (are) just shooting people, other kids, for no reason," she said. "It doesn't mean anything to them but 'oh yeah, let's get this person.'  They don't have no concern for life anymore."



At least eight other people were wounded in shootings on the West and South sides from midmorning Monday through early Tuesday, police said.



 At about 6:10 a.m. Tuesday, an 18-year-old man was shot in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, according to preliminary information from police. He was hit in both legs and the torso and went to Stroger Hospital from the 3400 block of West Chicago Avenue. His condition was stabilized.



 At 3 a.m., a 17-year-old boy was shot in the Belmont Central neighborhood, police said. He was shot in the left calf and right thigh. He went to Community First Medical Center and his condition was stabilized. He had been shot in the 5600 block of West Schubert Avenue.

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 At 12:05 a.m., a 24-year-old man was critically wounded in South Austin. He was in the 5500 block of West Congress Parkway when he was shot in the chest and abdomen and grazed in the leg. He was listed in critical condition at Loyola University Medical Center.



 At about 9 p.m., a 30-year-old woman took herself to the hospital after being grazed in the head by a bullet in West Garfield Park. She told investigators she was in the 4300 block of West Wilcox Street when someone fired shots from a passing van. She got herself to Stroger Hospital and her condition was stabilized.



 At 7:35 p.m., a 19-year-old man was shot on a porch in South Shore, said Officer Veejay Zala, a police spokesman. He was sitting on a back porch in the 7200 block of South Bennett Avenue when someone fired shots, hitting him in the left leg. He went to Northwestern Memorial Hospital and his condition was stabilized.



 About 6:05 p.m. a man and a woman were shot in the Homan Square Neighborhood, said Officer Kevin Quaid, a police spokesman. The two were on the sidewalk in the 3500 block of West Polk Street when someone they later told police they didn't recognize opened fire.



A 28-year-old man was shot nine times and taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in critical condition. A 26-year-old woman was shot once in the buttocks and was taken to Mount Sinai in good condition.



 Earlier, a 22-year-old man was wounded Monday morning in a shooting on the South Side in the city's Park Manor neighborhood.



The shooting happened about 9 a.m. in the 500 block of East 72nd Street, said Officer Nicole Trainor, a Chicago police spokeswoman. The man suffered a gunshot wound to the leg and was taken in good condition to St. Bernard Hospital, Trainor said.
In one of the largest civil health-care fraud judgments in Chicago history, a federal judge Friday ordered the one-time owner of Edgewater Medical Center to pay more than $60 million for his role in engineering a massive fraud scheme to bilk government health programs.

U.S. District Judge John Darrah ordered Peter Rogan of Valparaiso, Ind., to pay $64.2 million in damages and penalties, saying he had a key role in engineering an elaborate kickback scheme that paid doctors and others to admit patients for unnecessary care from the mid-1990s through 2000.

"This is the largest civil fraud judgment--not even just health care--in this office," said Linda Wawzenski, deputy chief of the civil division of the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago. "We are pleased with the ruling. The judge found that the government's witnesses were credible, even those that are currently serving jail time, and he found that Mr. Rogan was not credible."

While four doctors and a vice president went to prison in a health-care fraud investigation that led to the shuttering of Edgewater Medical Center in 2002, Rogan faced no criminal charges.

Five who worked at the hospital pleaded guilty for their roles in luring homeless or elderly people and others into the North Side hospital at 5700 N. Ashland Ave. for medical care they did not need.

During the three-week civil trial in April, government attorneys called the case "a long-overdue day of reckoning for Mr. Rogan."

In his 64-page opinion and order Darrah said Rogan knew of the scheme and made efforts to conceal his role, citing conversations Rogan had that were taped by physicians cooperating with the FBI. Rogan told his fellow managers he "smelled a rat" and said he would be on guard when talking to physicians he believed were taping his conversations, the judge's order says.

"The evidence at trial demonstrated that Peter Rogan knowingly and for the purpose of obtaining reimbursement from the government caused Edgewater to submit numerous false claims," Darrah said in his order.

Neither Rogan nor his attorneys, Neil Holmen and Joseph Spiegler of Chicago law firm Winston & Strawn, could be reached Friday night for comment.

In earlier interviews and court proceedings Rogan has refused to take any of the blame for the collapse of a hospital that critics say has cost taxpayers tens of millions and a French bank more than $50 million.

Rogan, 60, quietly turned around Edgewater Medical Center in the early 1990s and, along the way, made himself millions on various deals tied to owning and selling the facility and then maintaining a paid management role with it.

A one-time health-care consultant at the former Ernst & Whinney, later Ernst & Young, Rogan bought Edgewater in 1989 for $1 million plus assumption of nearly $10 million in debt and liabilities. Edgewater's board wanted to get out from under the hospital's troubles and sold it to Rogan, who ran it as his own for-profit hospital for six years.

In 1994 Rogan sold the hospital to California-based, not-for-profit Permian Health Care Inc. for $35 million. Of that, public records show, Rogan got $31 million. In court his lawyers said he got more than $10 million.

Rogan and his lawyers did not deny he made a lot of money. In fact, the lawyers said, because he made so much money he had no reason to be involved with a fraud scheme at the facility.
A man fighting a deportation case has taken sanctuary in a South Side church as a last resort to stay with his family in the United States.

Jose Juan Federico Moreno, 34, said he has lived in Bolingbrook for 16 years. He has five children, ages 2 to 14, who are all American citizens. Until a few days ago, he worked at a furniture moving company. Now, he is staying at University Church in Hyde Park, hoping to be shielded from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

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Churches, along with schools and hospitals, are among the "sensitive locations" where ICE policy states its officers do not carry out arrests, searches and other immigration enforcement actions.

Moreno, who ICE identified as Jose Juan Moreno-Anguino, became the subject of deportation proceedings in 2009, when he was convicted of aggravated DUI, the agency said in a statement. He was ordered to leave the U.S. and return to his home country of Mexico by an immigration judge in November 2012, according to ICE. His appeal was dismissed in January 2014.

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"I made a mistake in 2009," Moreno said through a Spanish interpreter. "I've demonstrated deep regret for that mistake. When that happened I took classes and I paid all my fines, but it's because of that mistake that for the last seven years ICE has been trying to break me apart from my family."

Moreno said he was told in March he had until last Friday to "self-deport" and return to Mexico voluntarily, effectively separating from his wife and children. Supporters rallied around him, circulating a petition to let him stay and calling for ICE to review the case again. The date came and went, and Moreno sought help from University Church.

"Right now what I'm focusing on is continuing to fight through sanctuary to try to stay with my family," he said.

Moreno is now considered an immigration fugitive, ICE said.

At the church Monday, Moreno was surrounded by his children, who scampered shyly throughout a bare room containing a bed, a desk and a couch.

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"It's been very frustrating," Moreno's wife, Berenice Alonzo, said through an interpreter. "Even when he's still in Chicago, we don't have him at home."

Alonzo, who also lacks U.S. resident status, said she wants to bring the kids to visit as often as possible but doesn't want to disrupt their routine and their school schedules.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday over President Barack Obama's expanded deferred-action programs that would shield the parents of U.S. citizens from deportation. Alonzo said she believes she would qualify for the program, which has been on hold amid court hearings.

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Moreno said he just hopes to continue providing for his children without the threat of separation, or being forced to move them to Mexico.

"The thought of moving my children from this country to Mexico, which is a country with a lot of violence and insecurity, filled me with angst and anxiety," he said. "I felt awful. I felt a lot of fear."

jkuang@tribpub.com

Twitter @jeannekuang
Twice as a teenager, Chris Reed woke up gasping for air after being chemically revived from overdoses involving heroin.

The second close call shook Reed out of his descent into alcohol and drug addiction. Now 24, the McHenry County resident has children, a regular job and runs an addiction recovery program and a sober bar.

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Without naloxone, a counter-acting agent that reverses the effects of opioid overdoses, it's unlikely this happy chapter in Reed's life would have been possible.

Reed, in fact, says he would be dead if he had not been injected with the life-saving drug.

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Looking back on those haunting moments, Reed said he can't remember slipping out of consciousness.

"You don't know it, you just kind of pass out. When you are overdosing you are not aware of anything," Reed said.

But he definitely remembers waking up.

"It was really intense. I was trying to catch my breath for like three minutes because my heart had stopped beating," Reed said. "It was like when you get the wind knocked out of you."

After years of struggling with drugs, Reed entered a 12-step program, and says he has been clean and sober since September 2009.

"A big part of my brain believed I really needed it. Like water and air," Reed said. "It was clear it was not working, but there was an equal amount of my mind that said no way I can live without it."

Now that he has found his way out, he is helping to inspire others to follow his lead.

Reed applauded efforts in Lake County where naloxone has been provided to police officers, recovery centers and family members of people struggling with addiction.

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"The more people who have it, the more people receive it who won't die from an overdose," he said.

He said he admires Lake County State's Attorney Michael Nerheim and other local politicians, including state Sen. Melinda Bush, D-Grayslake, "for having the guts,"to support making naloxone available despite the stigma surrounding heroin and other opiates.

Police officers have been credited with using naloxone to save the lives of more than 20 people in Lake County since last fall when 32 police departments joined a free program that spread the antidote across the county.

Over the July 4 weekend alone, five people were saved from heroin overdoses in Buffalo Grove, Island Lake, Lake Zurich and Grayslake.

"We usually have three saves a month and we had five in two days," said Bill Gentes, project coordinator for the Lake County Underage Drinking and Drug Prevention Task Force.

Officers were trained on how to use naloxone through the efforts of the Lake County Opioid Initiative.

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The initiative now boasts hundreds of law enforcement, government, business, treatment agency and individual members, but Nerheim was one of its four founders.

Although Reed was able to leave drugs behind, it was quite a struggle, he said.

At 14 years old, he started drinking and smoking marijuana, and by high school was chasing more serious highs from psychedelics, cocaine and prescription drugs. By junior year, he was introduced to heroin, and remembers running off to vomit after taking it before a family dinner in 2008. He was then nodding off and falling asleep during dinner.

"But this is what I was looking for  escape," Reed said. "From then, it was on."

And eventually, "on" included heroin and Xanax, a notoriously deadly combination.

In September 2009, Reed suffered his first overdose. He was fortunate that the people he was with dropped him off at an immediate care center in Algonquin, where medical staff rushed outside and revived him with naloxone.

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"I remember waking up on the pavement trying to catch my breath," he said.

"I got out and I went right back to it the day after," Reed added.

Soon after, he overdosed again. And he survived again.

Through the help of a 12-step program, he has been sober since Sept. 20, 2009, he said. Now Reed focuses on helping others do the same.

Reed opened and operates New Addictions Recovery Services, as well as his sober bar, "The Other Side," in Crystal Lake. He has many people from Lake County who stop by the bar regularly to enjoy music and non-alcoholic drinks.

Chelsea Laliberte, who lost her brother Alex "Lali" Laliberte in December 2008 to an overdose, said she has nothing but praise for Reed, who she considers a friend and comrade in helping to reach out to those with addiction crises.

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Chelsea went on to become co-founder of the Lake County Opioid Initiative.

"I'm confident I wouldn't be providing some of the services we provide without him," said Laliberte, who runs a free naloxone walk-in clinic on the border of Lake and Cook counties to help prevent opiate overdoses. "He just wants to help. I believe it keeps him sober."

Reed won't argue with that.

He said that providing recovery help to those in need has given him a purpose that makes leaving drugs behind and living a new life possible.

In addition to becoming an authorized naloxone trainer and opening his recovery service, Laliberte said Reed "goes into very harrowing situations and pulls people out."

She said that she and Reed spend hours on the phone helping to provide addiction services for those who need them. Between the two addiction service facilities run by Reed and Laliberte, their addiction recovery help and naloxone education and distribution services now help residents of Lake, Cook and McHenry counties.

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"It's our duty and we're honored to do it," Laliberte said.

JRNewton@tribpub.com

Twitter @jimnewton5

Ready to help

Chris Reed's sober bar, "The Other Side," and his New Addictions Recovery Services are located at 93 E. Berkshire Drive in Crystal Lake. The sober bar is open from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Everyone is welcome at both facilities and those who want more information can call Reed at 847-307-1143.

Chelsea Laliberte's Live4Lali clinic's initial weekly hours are from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. Monday and Wednesday and Saturdays from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.

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The Live4Lali clinic provides free training and naloxone kits to opiate users and their families, having gained the authorization to do so through the Illinois Department of Alcohol and Substance Abuse.

Laliberte said the clinic is open to everyone, but is specifically targeting the populations of Lake County and northwest Cook County.

For more information on the group, visit Live4Lali on Facebook or call at 844.LV4.LALI. The group depends on donations to cover much of its expenses. Tax-deductible donations may be made at http://www.live4lali.org.
In the three humbling years since Mel Reynolds fell under the glare of state and then federal prosecutors, the once-promising congressman had been steadfast in his denials of charges ranging from sexual misconduct to campaign fraud.

But for a brief moment Tuesday, the normally defiant Reynolds was apologetic.

"I have made mistakes," a weary-looking Reynolds said in a emotional plea for leniency before U.S. District Judge Charles Norgle during his sentencing on bank- and campaign-fraud charges.

"What mistakes have you made?" queried Norgle.

Reynolds, bearded and dressed in a prison-issue orange jumpsuit, answered: "I have not followed the law when it comes to my campaign (for Congress), when it comes to the way I dealt with banks, and I have made mistakes as it relates to putting myself in the position to hurt my family."

Norgle, despite objections from Reynolds' attorneys, continued: "Have you broken the law?"

"Yes, I have," said Reynolds to the judge who would a short while later sentence him to 6 1/2 years in federal prison.

It was a revealing moment, perhaps especially so for the government prosecutors who won convictions in April on 15 of 16 fraud counts that accused Reynolds of illegally raising campaign cash and defrauding banks out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"This is the first time that he has ever come close to apologizing or admitting what he did," said Assistant U.S. Atty. Jerome Krulewitch, who refused to speculate about what effect Reynolds' statements might have on the appeal his attorneys have vowed to pursue. "I think he finally admitted that he violated the law."

Krulewitch also was quick to cast doubt on Reynolds' sudden contriteness. "It's difficult, with his history, to believe Mr. Reynolds at this point," he said. "I'm sure if it's convenient for him. He may back off that."

Reynolds, in prison since October 1995 after being convicted of state sex and misconduct charges, was convicted April 16 in the federal case.

Among other things, a jury found him guilty of concealing as much as $275,000 in liabilities to illegally obtain six bank loans totaling $150,000.

He also was convicted of hiding the fact that he illegally used borrowed funds to make a down payment on a $310,000 home in Dolton, laundering more than $90,000 in union contributions through three political ward organizations, and enlisting numerous staffers to illegally cash at least $164,000 in campaign-contribution checks at currency exchanges and banks.

Reynolds was acquitted on one count charging him with mortgage fraud because the loan application wasn't signed.

Lawyer William Hooks said the appeal will be based on the grounds that Norgle "overstepped the bounds of a judge and moved into advocacy."

Hooks also took a swipe at prosecutors, arguing the U.S. attorney's office was more interested in the "persecution" of Reynolds--who grew up poor in the South but became a Rhodes scholar and a rising star on Capitol Hill--than on the prosecution of real criminals.

Krulewitch sternly denied that assertion, saying that any attempt by Reynolds or his attorneys to portray Reynolds as being "picked on . . . really deprecates the seriousness of his offenses."

Reynolds, who will complete his state prison term in January, originally faced from 63 to 78 months in the federal case under sentencing guidelines. Norgle agreed that Reynolds had committed a litany of obstruction-of-justice violations--including perjury, the shredding of documents and intimidation of a witness--and boosted the sentencing range to 78 to 97 months.

"The defendant's wounds here are self-inflicted," Norgle said. "He has yet to accept true responsibility for what he has done."

Still, Norgle came down on the low end of the sentencing range, ordering Reynolds imprisoned for 78 months to be followed by 5 years of supervised release and fines. The remaining 6 months of Reynolds' state sentence will be served concurrently with his newly imposed federal term. Federal sentencing guidelines stipulate that Reynolds must serve at least 85 percent of the 78-month sentence.

The defense had argued that Reynolds could still be a positive contributor to society and was the chief hope for his estranged wife, Marisol, and their two children now living on public aid in Boston.

Marisol Reynolds remained loyal to her beleaguered husband throughout the state trial, despite hours of tawdry tapes and witness testimony that ultimately convicted him of having sexual relations with a 15-year-old campaign volunteer.

But Marisol Reynolds subsequently accused her husband of physical and mental abuse and agreed to cooperate with federal investigators in exchange for a plea agreement on charges that she was involved in the fraud scheme.

A sentencing date for Marisol Reynolds, who has since filed for divorce, has not been set.

Meanwhile, in a somewhat bizarre twist during Tuesday's hearing, Norgle disclosed a letter in which Reynolds claimed to have knowledge of a plot by other federal inmates to kill the judge.

The letter was submitted as part of the defense's case for a more lenient sentence. The defense had hoped its contents would not be disclosed in court-- to protect Reynolds from retribution, they said--but Norgle chose to read it out loud.

Prosecutors dismissed the supposed plot as a desperate ploy by Reynolds to win a more favorable sentence.

"My mistakes have caused deep hurt and in particular have caused embarrassment and humiliation to my mother," said Reynolds, who waved at family and friends as he left the courtroom.

"I will one day make her proud of me again."
Nearly two years ago, Mel Reynolds clutched his wife as he strode from the Criminal Courts Building, his once-promising political career crushed by his conviction on titillating sexual misconduct charges.

On Wednesday, moments after the jury foreman announced to an emotionless Reynolds that he was guilty on 15 of 16 federal counts of bank and campaign fraud, he waved to his supporters in the courtroom, his mother and a sister, and was led away by marshals.

Marisol Reynolds, his wife, is no longer at his side. Last November, a couple of weeks after he and Marisol were indicted on the federal charges, she reversed her once-staunch support, pleading guilty and alleging Reynolds beat her and coerced her into aiding in the fraud. She later filed for divorce.

Prosecutors didn't call Marisol at Reynolds' federal trial. But, armed with a wealth of documents and dozens of witnesses, including former close campaign associates, they didn't need to.

Once hopeful of being released from prison early next January after serving about half of his 5-year sentence for the state conviction, Reynolds, 45, now faces the prospect of spending another five or more years in federal prison.

Reynolds was alone in another way throughout the trial.

Confronted by a mountain of government evidence, the defense tried to counter with one witness: Reynolds, who spent five days on the stand, including a grueling cross-examination.

Reynolds offered excuse after excuse and tried to shift responsibility to what he claimed were unethical bankers and thieving ex-campaign staffers, leaving the jury unimpressed.

After listening to 16 days of testimony and argument, the seven-man, five-woman jury deliberated less than four hours to convict Reynolds on all but one count.

"The defense took a gamble," said the foreman, Chuck Hampton, 38, of Will County, who is manager of a fast-food restaurant. "They laid all their chips on Mel Reynolds' credibility, and he didn't have any, so they lost."

"Reynolds didn't impress me at all," agreed another juror, Albert Johnson, 43, a custodian from the West Side. "He seemed to be making up some things as he was going along."

Reynolds is scheduled to return to court Friday to face contempt allegations.

According to prosecutors, Reynolds allegedly mouthed "son of a bitch" to Stephen Perencevich, a former top legislative aide, as Perencevich sat on the witness stand while the lawyers and judge conferred to the side. Perencevich testified he witnessed Reynolds shred several campaign checks that had been subpoenaed by investigators.

Reynolds' lawyers, William Hooks and Robert Loeb, vowed to appeal the conviction.

They accused U.S. District Judge Charles Norgle Sr. of erring by blocking them from bringing out the banks' alleged misconduct and forcing the trial to proceed just days after Hooks joined the case. Reynolds had shed a series of lawyers before Hooks entered the case at the last minute.

After the verdict, Hooks took an apparent swipe at Norgle by telling reporters, "I can beat two prosecutors, but I can't beat three."

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jerome Krulewitch and Kathleen Murdock expressed confidence the appeal won't succeed. Krulewitch said the judge properly let Reynolds detail his conversations with the bankers, but the policies of the banks were irrelevant to his crimes.

The jury acquitted Reynolds on one count charging him with mortgage fraud because the loan application wasn't signed.

But he was convicted of concealing as much as $275,000 in liabilities to obtain six loans totaling $150,000. He also hid the fact that he illegally used borrowed funds to make a down payment on a $310,000 home in Dolton.

When one banker demanded documentation for his finances, Reynolds sent a letter falsely claiming two bank loans totaling $45,000 were the campaign's responsibility and not his, prosecutors said. A campaign volunteer's name was listed on the letter as "executive campaign manager" and her signature forged.

In addition, Reynolds was convicted of laundering more than $90,000 in union contributions through three political ward organizations he controlled. The money should have been used for voter registration, but instead ended up used in his campaign.

Reynolds also enlisted numerous staffers to illegally cash at least $164,000 in campaign contribution checks at currency exchanges and banks, making the money impossible to trace.

A lot of that money was pocketed by Reynolds and used for personal expenses, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Scott Lassar told reporters, but authorities are unsure how much because the money wasn't properly reported.

In a strategic decision, prosecutors, loath to call a relative of a defendant as a witness, chose not to put Marisol Reynolds on the stand, though she was prepared to implicate her estranged husband.

The most compelling moments in the trial came when Reynolds, a former Rhodes scholar who attended Harvard and has a degree from Oxford University, spent five days testifying.

After fielding friendly questions from his own lawyer for four days, he went toe-to-toe with Krulewitch during nearly five hours of cross-examination.

He never backed down, but was forced into calling dozens of government witnesses liars. Those included high-level bankers who wooed the prominent congressman; several longtime campaign staffers whom he accused of embezzlement; and even a soft-spoken cousin, John Reynolds, and former close friends such as James Dyson, a local union official.

"The only thing he's changed more than his attorneys is his story," John P. Johnson, the FBI's administrative special agent in charge in Chicago, said of Reynolds after the verdict. "It's a classic case of greed."
"You blew it."

With those words, Criminal Judge Fred Suria Jr. sentenced a still defiant U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds to 5 years in prison Thursday for having sex with a 16-year-old girl and trying to sabotage the case against him.

"You had a job for life," Suria declared. "You could have done all these things. What did you do? You blew it . . . You threw it all away."

After a sentencing hearing that lasted more than four hours, Suria imposed a shorter prison term than Reynolds and his defense team had anticipated and ordered Reynolds to surrender to prison authorities at 9:30 a.m. next Thursday. The prosecution had asked for 15 years in prison.

The sentence-4 years for a charge of criminal sexual assault to be followed by a year for obstruction of justice-came after Reynolds, 43, rose and addressed Suria and the packed courtroom in a 47-minute speech where he blamed his predicament on the "animals" in the media, a vindictive prosecutor and racism in general.

He blamed himself for bringing shame to his wife and his mother, but continued to deny that he ever had sex with Beverly Heard or that he ever tried to obstruct justice.

In asking for a longer prison term, lead prosecutor Andrea Zopp had warned Suria earlier in the proceeding that Reynolds would attempt to shift the blame to others.

"He has a complete inability to take responsibility for his own conduct," said Zopp, angrily pacing in front of Suria. "It doesn't matter who gets hurt. What's important is that he doesn't have to answer for what he did. He'd use anybody he could, as long as he didn't have to answer for his conduct. Using anything and anybody who got in his way."

Reynolds began his statement with a recitation of his mercurial rise from a childhood of poverty in Mound Bayou, Miss., to a seat in Congress.

"I'm proud of my life in its totality," he declared. "I'm not proud of the weakness I exhibited in this case. I am deeply sorry for letting people down.

"I'm going to stand with my family, and my family is going to stand with me," he continued.

From the third row of the courtroom, came the sharp words of his wife, Marisol. "All right," she snapped.

Without a blink, Reynolds thundered on, as if he were on the floor of Congress instead of in a criminal courtoom.

"When they shackle me like they shackled my slave ancestors and take me off to jail," he declared as his gaze swept across the prosecutors' table and the crowded gallery, "nobody in this room will see me crawl. Ever."

It was a day that overflowed with rhetoric, as prosecutor Zopp unleashed a fury born of more than a year's work on a pressure-cooker of a case.

She dismissed the notion that Reynolds should be excused from his conduct because Heard, the now 19-year-old woman who came to authorities in June 1994 to say she had a sexual relationship with Reynolds when she was 16, had been promiscuous before meeting the congressman.

"She could be the most sexually active teenager in Chicago, Cook County," Zopp said. "But it doesn't make it right. It's irrelevant. What's relevant is what he did.

"He preyed on the fact that she was messed up, that she was open to the idea of sex . . . He turned her into a hooker, judge. He had her in his office, handing her money, parading her around in lingerie."

"This man has a sexual interest in teenagers," Zopp said. "That's what the evidence showed, and he will do it again. It's him-he's the problem."

"You have to say to this defendant and to this community: `This is wrong. It's terribly wrong.' "

But Reynolds, who has said he will resign from the House of Representatives effective Sunday, delivered an arm-waving tirade, in which he again refused to admit any criminal wrongdoing.

He ripped State's Atty. Jack O'Malley for unfairly prosecuting him, trying to make a comparison between the handling of his case with that of Gregory Becker, a white police officer indicted Wednesday on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a homeless black man.

According to Reynolds, the fact that he had no preliminary hearing before a judge before he was indicted while Becker did, demonstrated that his race was a prime factor in his case.

"You're in a fool's paradise if you think race doesn't play a role in this prosecution, because it does," Reynolds said.

The claim brought a sharp dissent from Suria. "No matter who we are or where we live, there is bias and prejudice," the judge said. "We in the U.S. have played the race card so often that people believe race is the sole reason for bias and prejudice.

"It is not.

"This case is not about race. This case is not about politics. This case is about whether or not a defendant committed a crime," Suria said. "It does so happen that the defendant is black. It does so happen that the prosecutor (Zopp) is black. It does so happen that the victim is black.

"What does matter in this court is whether or not the crime has been committed."

He noted that Reynolds, who was convicted Aug. 22, had broken vows and oaths he had taken as a man, as a father, and "the promise and oath you took when you took your oath of office."

"Lust," Suria declared, his words cloaked in disgust. "For some it's greed. For some it's lust and for some it's both.

"I think of all the things you could have done for education," Suria said. "I think of all these kids who are going to be going into gangs because you weren't there to help them."

Suria imposed the mandatory minimum 4-year sentence on the sex charge, another 4-year term on a charge of solicitation of child pornography to be served concurrently and the consecutive 1-year sentence for obstruction of justice.

"I have four children and the fifth is the law," Suria said. "I cannot tolerate what took place in this case."

He denied a request from defense attorneys to allow Reynolds to remain free on bond and out of prison while the conviction is appealed. Their next option is to make the same request before the Illinois Appellate Court, but they fear that motion might not be heard before the surrender date.

After the hearing, Zopp and co-prosecutor Colleen Hyland said they intended to drop additional obstruction-of-justice charges in a second indictment against Reynolds.

Before Reynolds spoke, one of his attorneys, Edward Genson, pleaded for leniency.

"This was not a murder, this was not an act of violence," he told Suria. "Nobody was hurt. There was no money lost. Four years is not only a minimum, it's too much."

"He's a man who has been raked through the coals like no other in Cook County," Genson said. "He's been the object of routines on late-night talk shows. He's been forced to resign, forced into financial ruin. Everything he has done has been investigated by every agency known to man.

"How would you feel if the darkest secrets you had were broadcast on the front page on a daily basis?" Genson asked.

"He knew that once the words (on tape-recorded conversations with Heard) were heard in open court, his life would be over."
State Comptroller Leslie Geissler Munger holds a news conference to discuss the effect of the continuing budget impasse on state finances at the Thompson Center on Sept. 9, 2015, in Chicago. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

SPRINGFIELD  A day after the Republican state comptroller announced paychecks would be delayed due to the budget impasse, Democratic lawmakers dismissed it as a political ploy and pondered how they'll make ends meet.

Comptroller Leslie Geissler Munger contends there isn't enough money to cover the $1.3 million a month it costs to pay lawmakers and statewide officials. And so her office will continue to process lawmakers' paychecks, but officials won't get the money right away because the payments will be added to the state's multibillion backlog of unpaid bills.

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That's the same pile where invoices from hundreds of service providers that do everything from care for the elderly to supply state prisons have languished for months awaiting payment.

Munger, who faces a special election in November to keep the post she was appointed to by Gov. Bruce Rauner, said she hopes forcing lawmakers to share in that pain could spur a resolution to the impasse. The state has operated without a budget since last July as Rauner and Democrats who control the legislature remain locked in an ideological battle over the governor's pro-business, anti-union agenda he's tied to a larger budget deal.

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On Monday, a top deputy of House Speaker Michael Madigan said he expects little to change, blasting the move as a way for Munger to get publicity. Munger faces Democrat Susana Mendoza, the Chicago city clerk backed by Madigan.

"I don't think anybody's fazed by it. What we have to do, we will do," said Democratic Rep. Lou Lang of Skokie, an attorney. "She has a difficult re-election ahead of her and she's looking for every chance she can get to get her name in the paper. It's what we all do in the political world, but it should just be called what it is."

The 177 legislators receive a base salary of $67,836, but most earn thousands more in stipends by holding Democratic or Republican leadership positions, or acting as chairman of various committees.

Serving as a lawmaker is considered a part-time job, but some are better positioned to go without pay than others. Many of the legislative leaders have lucrative law practices of financially successful spouses, while for some rank-and-file, a state paycheck is their only income. Given the political dynamics of the issue, few were willing to publicly complain Monday.

"I'll do what the families in my districts have done over the last year. Lean on the credit cards, lean on friends and family," said Rep. Will Guzzardi, D-Chicago. "My girlfriend will have to take me out to dinner every once and a while. It'll be tough, but it's tough all over."

Rep. Jaime Andrade, D-Chicago, said his legislative salary is his family's only source of income.

"At least I know I might get a check down the line, but I have residents who know they will never get a check," Andrade said. "For me, this might be a difficult situation, but for others it's worse."

Democratic Sen. Heather Steans of Chicago said "anything that puts pressure on is a good idea. I think it was probably a good idea 10 months ago too."

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Rep. David McSweeney, a Republican from Barrington Hills who introduced legislation to freeze lawmaker pay during the impasse, supported Munger's move.

"We should be working on a budget around the clock now. Every day that goes by, the budget deficit's increasing. Social services are getting decimated. And our credit rating is getting downgraded. We need to do our jobs," he said. "It's not a question of motivation, it's the right thing to do. We shouldn't get paid until we get a budget. We should get in line."

Munger said Monday that she had not heard complaints from lawmakers since she announced the decision.

"I think a lot of people think it's a good idea," Munger said. "Maybe it should have been done sooner. But honestly, I had to make sure that I could do this legally."

cbott@tribpub.com

kgeiger@tribpub.com
5 Rabbit Cerveceria, a craft brewery in Chicago, has pulled its beer from the Trump Tower, citing Donald Trump's derogatory comments toward Mexican-American immigrants. (Meg Theno, Chicago Tribune)

Donald Trump had a harshly critical message for Mexican immigrants while announcing his bid for the presidency two weeks ago, and now 5 Rabbit Cerveceria has one for Trump.

The Bedford Park brewery said it is pulling out from a beer partnership with the Trump Hotel Chicago's mezzanine-level bar, Rebar, after the sentiment Trump expressed during his June 16 speech: "(Mexico is) sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

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5 Rabbit founder Andres Araya said the brewery made an easy drinking golden ale for Rebar that was to be available exclusively at the Trump building throughout summer. It has been on tap for at least a month, he said.

However, 5 Rabbit will redirect the approximately 50 remaining kegs to various Chicago bars with the name "Chinga tu Pelo," which translates to "(Expletive) Your Hair." A Trump reference? Seems a safe bet.

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"We shouldn't be having this conversation," Araya said. "We shouldn't have to be proving a point."

"Many of the comments he's made recently really strike a chord directly at us as Latin American immigrants, and it's just something you can't let slide," said Araya, a native of Costa Rica. "Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but that doesn't mean we need to do business with people who have that point of view. It goes against everything we represent as business owners."

Araya said many bars were interested in carrying the beer as a sign of solidarity with the decision. The beer will be on tap at Fischman Liquors and Tavern, Kuma's Corner, Standard Market Grill, Riverview Tavern, The Bar on Buena and The Green Lady among others, Araya said.

In a related decision, NBCUniversal said Monday it also would cut ties with Trump, and no longer air the Miss USA or Miss Universe pageants, which have been jointly owned by Trump and the television network.

jbnoel@tribpub.com

Twitter @joshbnoel
People hang out in the main quad area at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Anxiety is the No. 1 mental health concern presented by students to counseling centers at American college campuses, according to a recent study. (Erin Hooley, Chicago Tribune)

For six months when I was in college, I just couldn't sleep.

I dreaded going to bed; I knew I would wake up minutes later drenched in sweat, running tomorrow's to-do list through my head.

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My bed became the enemy. I was overworked, overtired, overbooked. I didn't have time for sleep.

But when I looked at other students who had as much or more work than I did, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. How did these people sleep at night?

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So I would call my parents for advice. I was looking for some comfort, a subtle nod that I was doing the right thing. All I usually got, though, was a "You'll be fine, honey."

And I'm grateful for it.

Anxiety is the No. 1 mental health concern presented by students to counseling centers at American college campuses, according to a recent study of more than 100,000 students by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State University. Anxiety pushed past the former reigning champ, depression.

The study asked clinicians at college counseling centers to list students' top mental health concerns. Anxiety disorders and generalized anxiety were lumped together as one. They swept the board, outstripping stress, relationship problems and academic performance.

The cause? Some psychologists are pointing their fingers toward parents.

Dan Jones, director of counseling and psychological services at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., told The New York Times on May 27 that "a lot (of students) are coming to school who don't have the resilience of previous generations. They can't tolerate discomfort or having to struggle. A primary symptom is worrying, and they don't have the ability to soothe themselves."

So, parents, own up.

I am a recent college graduate, and I saw students arrive at college unprepared for their new freedom and flexibility. They turned up with poor time-management skills and relied on support from home to make decisions of all sizes. The moment unhappiness or uncertainty struck, it was either a phone call to mom or an appointment at the counseling center.

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Colleges have been forced to become pseudo-parents, offering freshmen seminar classes that teach students how to use their time and create feasible schedules.

In French, there are two words for what young people learn: l'instruction and l'education. L'instruction is what students learn in school. L'education, however, is what they learn at home. Life education  that's what we're missing here.

American schools (and their counseling centers) are burdened with teaching students what they should have learned at home. That's not their job. Schools engage and challenge; they shouldn't have to coddle too.

Parents need to step it up when their kids are young. Give them the skills needed to be successful, well-organized adults. Then, after high school graduation, slip into the background.

I know, I know  technology makes it so easy for parents to virtually go to college with their children. But back off on Facebook. Lay off the texting. Nix the weekly phone and Skype calls.

Instead, encourage kids to fly the coop. Show them respect by instilling the sense of responsibility that being an adult affords.

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For students who have diagnosed anxiety disorders, this is a different battle. Many of them come to college on medication and need strong support from family and mental health professionals.

But for the rest who wander into a college mental health center burned out from finals and a full schedule, let them struggle. Flounder. Fall.

Because, just as my parents assured me, they will be fine. A little bit of anxiety is just part of life.

Next time your college student calls for advice, just tell him or her to get some sleep.

Elizabeth Greiwe is the Chicago Tribune's Editorial Board coordinator.
A program is handed out before the funeral of Cynthia Hurd, 54, at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 27, 2015. (Joe Raedle, Getty Images)

He sat among them for nearly an hour before he opened fire, a young white man in a historic black church in Charleston, S.C.

Twelve worshipers had gathered for the regular Wednesday night Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. They welcomed the stranger in the back of the church, invited him to join in the discussion. He came and sat beside the pastor.

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Then he rose and announced that he had come "to shoot black people." And he did.

Only three survived, including a 5-year-old girl who played dead and a woman who says the gunman told her, "I'm going to spare you so you can tell them what happened."

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Tell them what happened? There are no words.

"To have a horrible hateful person go into the church and kill people there to pray and worship with each other is something that is beyond any comprehension and is not explained," said Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr.

It's the work, he said, of "a hateful and deranged mind."

Fourteen hours after the shootings, Dylann Storm Roof, 21, of Lexington, S.C., was arrested uneventfully during a traffic stop in North Carolina.

His record shows only minor arrests for trespassing and drug possession. The FBI in Columbia, S.C., says he had not been on their radar.

On Facebook, Roof is pictured sitting on a car with an ornamental license plate featuring a Confederate flag. In another photo, he wears a jacket decorated with the flags of two former white supremacist regimes, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and apartheid-era South Africa.

The U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and the United States Attorney's Office for South Carolina have opened a hate crime investigation.

The church targeted by the gunman is a potent symbol of African-American struggle and resilience. Known locally as "Mother Emanuel," it is the oldest AME church in the South and home to the oldest black congregation south of Baltimore. It sits in the heart of Charleston's downtown tourist district.

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Founded in 1816, the church was burned to the ground in 1822 because it was believed to be the meeting place for conspirators of a failed slave rebellion. It was rebuilt in 1834, but a law prohibiting blacks from worshipping without white supervision forced parishioners to meet secretly until after the Civil War. The church was badly damaged by an earthquake in 1886 and rebuilt in 1891.

That Victorian-era sanctuary remains today, including the original altar, communion rail and pews.

There, amid the bowed heads of worshipers, a young man sat quietly Wednesday, planning their slaughter. Among the victims was the pastor, Clementa Pinckney, a state senator and civil rights activist described by a fellow lawmaker as the "conscience of the General Assembly."

In the days ahead we'll probably learn if mental illness had any role in this assault. We'll learn more about how the shooter obtained a gun. For now, we're left with unfathomable tragedy and a stunning expression of pure hate.

Pinckney's cousin told NBC News that a survivor of the shooting quoted the gunman as saying, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."

With that he began firing a semiautomatic handgun, pausing to reload several times. Six women and three men were killed.

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He had come "to shoot black people." They had come to pray.
In a free society, expression of that sort is protected. So it's not surprising that the flag can be seen in many places in the South. But it is jarring to be reminded that it still flies at the state capitol of South Carolina. There, it's justified as a tribute to the state's Civil War heritage and history.
The United States on Thursday tagged Iran and Cuba as serial human rights abusers even as the Obama administration accelerates attempts to improve relations with both countries.

Days before the resumption of nuclear talks with Tehran and weeks before the expected reopening of embassies in Washington and Havana, the State Department castigated Iran and Cuba, along with many other nations, as violators of basic freedoms in 2014 in its annual human rights reports.

Last week, the administration also criticized Iran for its "undiminished" support for terrorism in 2014. Cuba was also identified as a "state sponsor of terrorism" in 2014, although it was removed from that list this year.

"Engagement is not the same thing as endorsement," said Tom Malinowski, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, whose office prepared the reports.

Administration officials have defended their outreach to Cuba as an effort to improve the human rights situation in the country after decades of isolating the communist nation through an embargo and strict penalties. The U.S. and Cuba hope to reopen embassies in their respective capitals in mid-July.

"Our opening to Cuba ... was designed because we felt that the new policy is better suited to promoting human rights in Cuba than the old policy," Malinowski told reporters. "We very firmly believe that in the long run ... this is going to put us in a much stronger position to promote human rights and to stand by civil society on the island."

On Iran, officials have said the nuclear negotiations, set to resume this weekend in Vienna against a June 30 deadline for a deal, are not intended to address other issues the U.S. has with Iran's behavior, including its support for terrorism and its record on human rights. But they said they have said that a nuclear deal could open the door to a broader rapprochement with Iran that might include those elements of concern.

Malinowski said Iran's rights abuses would remain an issue of concern no matter what happens in Vienna.

The reports accused Iran of "severely restricting" multiple civil liberties and taking few, if any, steps to punish abusers.

"Iran continued to severely restrict civil liberties, including the freedoms of assembly, speech, religion, and press, and to execute citizens at the second highest rate in the world after legal proceedings that frequently didn't respect Iran's own constitutional guarantee to due process or international legal norms," the State Department said.

It said that other Iranian violations included disappearances; cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; politically motivated violence and repression; lack of an independent judiciary; legal discrimination; violence against women, ethnic and religious minorities, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons; incitement to anti-Semitism; and trafficking in persons.

On Cuba, the human rights reports said the Havana government continued to use threats and intimidation to suppress peaceful dissent in 2014. Cuban officials were accused of carrying out "most human rights abuses" at the direction of their superiors.

Although Cuba released 53 political prisoners as part of the normalization process with the United States, the reports noted that Cuban activists in 2014 had recorded the highest number of arbitrary arrests of dissidents in the past five years. Cuba in 2014 has indicated it will expand internet and telecommunications access, but, according to the reports, it "continued to block its citizens' access to uncensored, independent information in general."

Other Cuban rights abuses mentioned in the reports include the abridgement of the ability of citizens to change the government; use of government threats; extrajudicial physical assault; intimidation; violent government-organized counter-protests against peaceful dissent; and harassment and detentions to prevent free expression and peaceful assembly.

The reports cover 199 countries and detail rights violations in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe among others.

Associated Press
Donald Trump speaks with media at the City Club of Chicago following his speech to a sold-out crowd on June 29, 2015. (Antonio Perez, Chicago Tribune)

Businessman Donald Trump brought his nascent bid for the Republican presidential nomination to town Monday, warning that crime in Chicago is "out of control" and hurting the city's image worldwide.

His appearance before the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board and for a speech at the City Club of Chicago came the same day NBC announced it was cutting ties with Trump, star of the long-running reality television program "Celebrity Apprentice." The network cited his remarks from his presidential kickoff speech earlier this month that Latino immigration brings drugs, crime and rapists to the United States.

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Trump stood by those comments during the editorial board visit, adding, "I have many friends in Mexico. I have great relationships in Mexico."

But much of his remarks to the Tribune focused on crime in Chicago, which he said is damaging the city's reputation.

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"Crime in Chicago is out of control and I will tell you, outside of Chicago, it's a huge negative and a huge talking point, a huge negative for Chicago," he said.

"You've got to stop it. You're not going to stop it by being nice. You're going to stop it by being one tough son of a bitch," Trump said.

Trump acknowledged there have been cases of police brutality but said he believed police today are not as tough as when he was growing up in the mid-1960s.

"You need tough cookies. These are tough kids. These are not babies. These are tough, tough kids. If they saw you walking down the street, they wouldn't give a damn about you," he said. "You can't be so gentle with these people."

"I'm a big fan of the police, but I think the police now are afraid to act. They're afraid to be tough."

He recalled how police dealt with gangs when he was in his late teens in the mid-1960s, when he said he and his father would regularly visit a White Castle in Brooklyn.

"They were very good," he said of the well-known burgers. "I don't know if they're even still around."

Trump said gangs would inhabit the restaurant "and these cops would walk in there and they had sticks in those days and they'd break up those gangs and those gang members were petrified of those guys. Petrified," Trump said.

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"You have some rough cops, but the cops aren't so rough today, to put it mildly, OK? And today the kids are shouting at the cops and calling them all sorts of names and laughing at them like it's a joke. Different world.

"Today if the cops ever did that they'd have 'em arrested and given the electric chair," Trump said. "They didn't do wrong. They were just forceful. They were strong. And today it's not even politically correct to say that."

However, Trump said, business at his namesake hotel property along the Chicago River has not been affected by any negative impressions of crime in the city.

Trump addressed a wide range of topics with characteristic bombast and sarcasm.

He was critical of the Illinois economy but also criticized the economies of two states headed by potential rivals for the Republican nomination, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, as a "disaster." Still, he contended taxes in Chicago were too high and driving away business.

Trump also derided politicians as "all talk, no action."

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"Nobody knows politicians better than I do. I give a lot of money to Democrats, as a businessperson. For instance, I give to everybody. Everybody loves me, you know? They all love me," Trump said.

He had kind words, though, for one Democrat from Illinois, disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who did a stint on "Celebrity Apprentice" in 2010 before he was convicted and sentenced to 14 years behind bars on federal corruption charges stemming in part from attempts to sell a U.S. Senate seat.

"It was good having him on. I found him to be, I can only speak for myself, I found him to be a very nice guy. Not sophisticated. Had little knowledge of computers and things and you know we found that out.  We found him to be very nice," Trump told the editorial board. "Now, he was under a lot of pressure at that point.

"I think that's an awfully tough sentence that he got for what supposedly he did," Trump added. "Because what he did is what politicians do all the time and make deals."

But Trump wouldn't say whether he would pardon Blagojevich if he were president, saying he didn't have enough information about his crimes.

Outside the City Club, dozens of people protested across the street during his luncheon speech, waving American flags and holding signs reading "Hate speech is not presidential," "Trump go home" and other slogans. Trump came into the event through the kitchen, avoiding the protesters.

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After his City Club talk, Trump said he wasn't surprised about NBC's moves to separate itself from him as well as dropping the Trump-produced Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants. NBC's move came after the Spanish-language network Univision announced last week it was dropping the pageants because of the comments.

Trump told reporters he wouldn't apologize for his immigration comments.

"There's no apology, because what I said was right," he said.

jebyrne@tribpub.com

rap30@aol.com
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump met on Monday with the Tribune Editorial Board. Here are six points he made.

1. I will be honest. I think you have to take care of your crime situation. I'm talking as an outsider but who has a big stake in Chicago. So maybe I can see it even better than you can, because sometimes you have to be an outsider to see it. It's all over the world that Chicago's like the crime capital of the world. I read that somebody said  it just stuck with me  that Chicago is more dangerous than Afghanistan. That's a hell of a quote. Now, I don't know if it is. But when you look at all these kids being killed on a daily basis, it hurts Chicago very badly. What would I do about it? I'd be so tough. You maybe have to go after stop-and-frisk stuff. These are not babies. These are tough, tough kids. You've got to stop it. You're not going to stop it by being nice.

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2. I don't know Bruce (Rauner) but I do respect Rahm. I gave him a contribution because his brother is a great friend of mine  Ari, king of Hollywood. I love Ari. And Ari asked me to give him a contribution. I like Rahm very much.

3. I'm in second place and not far behind (Jeb) Bush, who I think is a person that doesn't have what it takes to be a great president. I don't think he has the strength or the stamina. I don't think he has the aptitude to be a great president. And I think it's just going to be more of the same. With that being said, he's a nice person. I'm not sure that matters this time because people are so tired of incompetent that I think this is going to be an election based on competence more than anything.

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4. I think it is tough, what happened to (Rod Blagojevich). I don't know him well, other than he was on "The Apprentice," because he was a semi-celebrity who was good. Actually, it was good having him on. I found him to be a very nice guy. Not sophisticated. Had a little knowledge of computers and things. What he did is what politicians do all the time. They make deals. I'll do this, and I'll do that. I've gotta be taken care of in some way. I haven't heard the name since he left "The Apprentice." I thought it was a really tough sentence for what he did. Frankly, when I read about him, he just sounds stupid more than anything else. I mean, how stupid can you be?

5. I would double up the sanctions (on Iran), triple up the sanctions, get them to the table. It almost looks like we're begging to make a deal. The United States looks like a total beggar. A bad deal is worse than no deal by a factor of 10. They talk about global warming is our biggest threat. The global warming we have to worry about is nuclear warming. That's the global warming. You have a lot of mad men out there. We can't let Iran have a weapon.

6. (I admire) my father, who passed away. I loved Ronald Reagan. I worked with Ronald Reagan. I was a young guy, and he knew me and he liked me. I really think that he had something special. He had an ability to make you feel good about the country. I have great respect for Barack Obama, because when you think of his life and when you think of what he's done, it's something I respect. The thing I'm most disappointed about  I mean we disagree on policy  I thought he'd be a great cheerleader for the country. I thought that he would be somebody that would really unite people. I think (Angela) Merkel in Germany, she's done an amazing job. She's really the leader. As a woman, she's done a fantastic job in Germany, keeping it all together. Their economy is going great; they're doing very well. She's a great representative for women.

Click here to watch Donald Trump's full interview in front of the Tribune Editorial Board.
More pertinent is that NAFTA didn't impede, and most likely fostered, the longest economic expansion in U.S. history  which lasted until 2001 and created 21 million jobs. If Americans were asked, "Would you like to have an economy like the one we had in the years after NAFTA?" they would be divided between those saying "yes" and those saying "hell, yes."
Donald Trump speaks with media at the City Club of Chicago following his speech to a sold-out crowd on June 29, 2015. (Antonio Perez, Chicago Tribune)

If Donald Trump were writing this column, it would be the finest newspaper column in the history of journalism.

Anyone who thought otherwise would be a dope and a loser and would know nothing about column writing. The piece would be amazing  period  and it would probably win a Pulitzer.

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If it didn't win a Pulitzer, it would be because those crooks on the Pulitzer committee don't know what they're talking about, and Trump would know that fact because he has some very wealthy friends who know all about how the Pulitzer committee works. He wouldn't want to name those friends, but he would say that he knows them and they're very well-placed and they tell him it's all a crock.

Sadly, Trump is not writing this column. You're stuck with me, just as I was stuck with Trump for an hour Monday morning as he met with the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board and talked about everything from his success to his incredible success.

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I've poked fun at the GOP presidential candidate quite a bit over the years because he says ridiculous things and is quite fun to poke, but in meeting him I had hoped to learn something more, to get a feel for the man who  either accidentally or brilliantly  has made himself such a caricature of the rich and powerful.

He's taller than I expected, affable and skilled at commanding a room. Much of what he boasts about relates to his self-proclaimed ability to make deals, and it's not hard to imagine him as a frustratingly tough negotiator.

Were I to stop there  or if I were to go on and praise his slick wit and bold plans for governing  Trump would likely adore this column, tweet it out to his 3 million Twitter followers and declare me a real pro and one of the rare journalists who gets things right.

If I transition into some critical comments  as I'm about to  the real estate mogul will likely either ignore the column completely or let his Twitter followers know that I'm a hack and a phony who knows nothing.

And that's the problem with Mr. Trump. There's no middle ground. There's not even ground on the far opposite side of him. There's only his ground, and it's the best ground anyone has ever had the pleasure of standing on because nobody knows ground like he does. He'll probably build a fantastic hotel on that ground  top-of-the-line.

During his meeting at the newspaper, Trump touched on everything from ISIS to Iran to violence in Chicago. He talked immigration, noting there are some "rough hombres" coming across the border. (Hours after the meeting, NBC announced it was severing its business relationship with Trump due to derogatory comments he made about immigrants during a recent speech that launched his campaign.)

But the main thing Trump talked about was Trump.

"I did very well."

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"I buy many things."

"Nobody knows politicians better than I do."

"I get along with everybody."

"Nobody knows Hillary like I do."

"I get the biggest crowds, I get the biggest receptions."

"I'm going to do very well, that's what I do in life."

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A perpetual motion machine is a device that can run forever without an external energy source. Such a machine is impossible  things like friction will inevitably slow it down  but it's fun to think about.

Trump is a perpetual confidence machine. He runs endlessly on the absolute conviction that he's right about everything. It seems impossible. You'd think some form of criticism would eventually slow him down, but Trump's perpetual confidence machine is impervious to criticism.

That's a bit scary to think about.

Like him or not, Trump has made a lot of money and garnered a lot of fame by perpetually believing he's the smartest guy in the room.

He's like the Little Engine that Could if instead of saying, "I think I can" the Little Engine said, "I absolutely can, there's no question about it, and I'll do it better than any other engine in history. Screw you."

That Little Engine is now running for president, with money and a devoted fan base that already has him polling second behind former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in New Hampshire.

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Trump remains a huge long shot in the presidential race, of course, but good luck telling that to him. He sees his competitors as weak or as "copycats" trying to steal his ideas.

This, Trump said, will be "an election of competence." And that means he will win, because the perpetual confidence machine in his head identifies Trump as competent beyond compare.

I'd like to say that's farcical, but consider what has just happened: Trump spoke, I listened, I wrote and now you've devoted precious moments of your life reading this column.

It seems the only smart one in that scenario might be the Donald himself.

Maybe I should have let him write the column after all. I'm sure it would have been much, much better.

rhuppke@tribpub.com
As a center for agriculture, manufacturing and services, Illinois is a state with a lot of exports  and even more export potential. International trade is a major part of our economy. So it's not surprising that a president from here would push to expand trade opportunities by negotiating with other countries to open up their markets.

It is a bit surprising, though, that Barack Obama has so little support from his own party in his home state. Several Illinois Democrats in the U.S. House have come out against a bill granting him what's known as trade promotion authority. Others are on the fence.

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The president needs that power to complete a Trans-Pacific Partnership accord with 11 other countries, which many Democrats also aren't crazy about. Even Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and normally a strong Obama ally, has yet to endorse TPA. His Republican counterpart, Mark Kirk, supports it.

Rep. Tammy Duckworth, who has announced she'll run against Kirk in 2016, opposes giving Obama trade promotion authority. Duckworth wants to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate, yet she wants to block a measure that would be an economic boon for her state.

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One conspicuous Democratic supporter is Rep. Mike Quigley, whose district sweeps from the Chicago lakefront west to take in O'Hare International Airport before veering south to Oak Brook and Hinsdale. He has come out strongly in favor of both TPA and TPP, because he thinks opening up trade abroad is vital to the prosperity of American companies and their workers. "We're only 5 percent of the world's population, and if we just trade among ourselves, we won't do very well," he told us.

It is a powerful argument. As the Obama administration notes, Asia has 525 million middle-class consumers, a number expected to reach 2.7 billion in the next 15 years. If American firms don't get more access to those buyers, companies based in other countries are likely to. "Standing on the sidelines while trade deals are being negotiated will not grow the economy," argues Quigley.

Illinois members of Congress who oppose international trade expansion put protectionist fears ahead of their citizens' clear interests. Illinois stands to gain more than most states. Goods exported from Illinois, says the Illinois Business Roundtable, "have grown more than three times faster than state GDP since 2003." More than 1 in 5 jobs here depend on exports or imports, and in the past decade, jobs in those companies grew 7.5 times faster than overall employment.

Illinois is famous for large companies that do a lot of business abroad, such as Abbott Laboratories, Caterpillar, Boeing and Archer Daniels Midland. But they have no monopoly on exporting. Some 23,000 Illinois firms, most of them small or medium-sized, have sales abroad.

"There are those who tell me the deal only helps Wall Street," says Quigley, "but it also helps my side streets." He's heard from at least a dozen companies in his district that support the Pacific trade deal "because it will grow the economy and create jobs locally," he says.

Illinois farmers have customers around the world. Only one state exports more corn and soybeans. Illinois beef and pork producers will benefit if Asian countries cut tariffs and other barriers, allowing their consumers to eat more American protein. The administration also hopes to pry open foreign markets for American services, from consulting to insurance. Illinois' service exports are easy to overlook, but they've grown by 63 percent since 2006.

What is often overlooked in the debate is that the U.S. market is already unusually open, with very low tariffs that make it easy for foreign firms to sell here. The administration goal is eliminating the higher tariffs imposed in other countries, which penalize American firms. The goal is to bring most of them down to zero.

The Land of Lincoln also has a stake in attracting and keeping foreign investment. More than 270,000 people in Illinois work for foreign-owned businesses, and more trade connections abroad would help create jobs that the state badly needs.

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Globalization is woven into our economic fabric, and Illinois can prosper by making the most of the opportunities offered by freer trade.

Those Illinois members of Congress who refuse to give President Obama the authority to negotiate the Pacific trade deal stand in the way of their president, their state and their nation.
Conservative fears are finally coming true.

Back when President Barack Obama was deporting large numbers of undocumented immigrants  409,849 individuals in 2012  conservatives presented an alternate reality. "The federal government has reached a point now where virtually no one is being deported, except those convicted of serious crimes," Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., an arch immigration foe, said in June 2013.

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The conservative nightmare extended beyond the administration's allegedly cushy treatment of undocumented immigrants already settled in the U.S. Some conservatives, including Sessions, characterized Obama's border control as a policy of "open borders." (The plural of border is always a curious usage; none of these critics seems the least bit concerned about the Canadian frontier.) The lawless brown hordes streaming unchecked over the border and settling into a life of ease have been a recurring source of angst for some conservatives.

In reality, the U.S. population of undocumented immigrants was about 12 million in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center, widely regarded as the most accurate source. By 2012, the number had fallen to about 11 million. In a mathematical miracle, all those people streaming north through "open borders" led to a net decrease in undocumented immigrants in the country.

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In his first term, Obama had hoped that aggressive deportations and strong border security would earn the confidence of conservatives, enabling Congress to pass a comprehensive fix to immigration. In 2013, 14 Republicans helped push immigration reform through the Senate. But in the House, the legislation fell before the thrashing sounds of recrimination and crazy. According to Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, the reason House Republicans were incapable of passing immigration reform legislation was "widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws."

Last November, Obama put flesh on the conservative bogeyman. A Nov. 20, 2014, Department of Homeland Security memorandum narrowed the categories of immigrants targeted for deportation, citing criminals, potential terrorists and recent border crossers. The memo advises:

"Nothing in this memorandum should be construed to prohibit or discourage the apprehension, detention, or removal of aliens unlawfully in the United States who are not identified as priorities herein. However, resources should be dedicated, to the greatest degree possible, to the removal of aliens described in the priorities set forth above, commensurate with the level of prioritization identified."

As The Washington Post reported in a superb story last week, the Department of Homeland Security is rapidly retreating from deporting law-abiding undocumented immigrants from the nation's interior. "We are making it clear that we should not expend our limited resources on deporting those who have been here for years, have committed no serious crimes and have, in effect, become integrated members of our society," DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told an audience at Rice University last month. "These people are here, they live among us, and they are not going away."

The southern border is still relatively secure  more so than at any time in history. But Johnson's "integration" language marks a new era. According to the Post, the administration is on track to deport almost half as many people  229,000  this year as in 2012.

The immigration security bureaucracy is notoriously independent-minded; agents in the field may not be as lenient with settled immigrants as their bosses in Washington would like. But Obama has clearly given up on both legislation and Republicans, and the president who was once called "deporter in chief" by immigration activists appears to have had enough of deportations too. Those who cross the border and are caught will still be sent back. But the typical undocumented immigrant has been living in the U.S. for a decade or more. Obama seems intent on making it as easy as possible for those immigrants to stay.

Donald Trump's squawking on Mexicans roiled the Republican presidential field in late June and dominated the news. It took a while for leading candidates, including the most pro-immigration voices in the field, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, to repudiate Trump. (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose inability to nail down an immigration stance has become comical, never quite got there.)

The 2016 Republican nominee for president will almost certainly not make a fuss about deportation policy, regardless of past positions. In all likelihood, facing a difficult road with Hispanic and Asian voters, he will support legalization of long-settled undocumented immigrants. Citizenship remains an unsettled question. But the era of deportation is coming to an end.

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Bloomberg

Francis Wilkinson writes on politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg View.
An escaped inmate was in surprisingly good shape for a man who spent three weeks on the run in the woods of upstate New York  well-fed, clean and dressed for the elements  before he was killed by authorities, a coroner said Sunday.

Richard Matt, one of two convicted murderers who broke out of a maximum-security prison near the Canadian border, was shot three times in the head when he was confronted by authorities on Friday, according to autopsy results released by police.

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Matt was carrying a 20-gauge shotgun when he was shot during an encounter with Border Patrol agents about 30 miles west of the prison he escaped from with David Sweat on June 6, authorities said. Matt  who once vowed never to be taken alive  died of severe skull fractures and brain injuries, according to an autopsy.

A coroner who attended Matt's autopsy told The Associated Press that the inmate had been eating and drinking well during his time on the run and was protected from the elements by heavy boots, camouflage pants and a dark green jacket.

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Matt may have even showered and shaved at some point, according to Franklin County Coroner Brian Langdon, who was present for the autopsy.

"He looked clean and well-kept," Langdon said. "He wasn't sleeping in any cave or anything like that for three weeks, that's for sure."

The autopsy found Matt did have bug bites on his legs, blisters and minor abrasions that would be expected for someone who had been living in the woods, police said.

Langdon said the contents of Matt's stomach would be analyzed and said he couldn't speculate about when or what Matt's last meal had been. Toxicology reports expected in a couple of weeks would show whether there was alcohol in his system, he said.

"I would say he was in very good condition, physically," Langdon said.

The manhunt broke open Friday afternoon when a person towing a camper heard a loud noise and thought a tire had blown. Finding there was no flat, the driver drove 8 miles before looking again and finding a bullet hole in the trailer. A tactical team responding to the scene of the shot smelled gunpowder inside a cabin and saw evidence that someone had fled out the back door.

A noise  perhaps a cough  ultimately did Matt in. A Border Patrol team discovered Matt, who was shot after failing to heed a command to raise his hands.

Matt, who turned 49 the day before he died, was serving 25 years to life for the killing and dismemberment of his former boss.

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Sweat, 35, was serving a sentence of life without parole in the killing of a sheriff's deputy in Broome County in 2002. Investigators believe he may also be armed.

Matt and Sweat used power tools to saw through a steel cell wall and several steel steam pipes, bashed a hole through a 2-foot-thick brick wall, squirmed through pipes and emerged from a manhole outside the prison. Two prison workers have been charged.

Associated Press
On Monday, I started the work week off right, by signing two bipartisan trade bills into law. They'll help level the playing field for American workers and businesses, boost our economic ties with lower-income countries, and give our workers the job training and support they need to succeed in a rapidly changing world.

We should be building on that progress. Instead, just two days after I signed those two trade bills, Congress is taking a step backward.

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As of Tuesday, the authorization for the U.S. Export-Import Bank, or "Ex-Im," expires. The bank's sole mission is to support American jobs by increasing our exports. That's it. It helps small businesses go global. It helps American entrepreneurs take that next step. It costs taxpayers nothing  all of its money comes from its own operations. In fact, it generates money for the taxpayer. That's how cost-effective it is.

Ex-Im has provided support to businesses and boosted exports in all 50 states, as a state-by-state analysis my administration put out Monday shows. Over the last six years, Ex-Im supported $5 billion of exports from 322 businesses in Illinois. But because Congress has failed to act, the bank's mandate is running out. That means it'll lose the authority to finance new exports in the future. Starting Wednesday, businesses that need additional help shipping their made-in-America products around the globe will lose that help. And that means lost sales, lost customers, and lost opportunities.

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Other countries aren't going to just stop competing when Ex-Im lapses. There are 85 export credit agencies just like the Ex-Im Bank around the world. They're all fighting for sales and export-backed jobs. They're doing everything they can to help their businesses compete and win. Why wouldn't we do the same?

Here's why this matters. Over the past five years, we've worked hard to open new markets for our businesses, and as a result, more American goods are being sold around the world than ever before. Last year, we had record exports for the fifth straight year. And exports support nearly 11.7 million American jobs  1.8 million more than when I took office  so by increasing exports, we're helping put more Americans to work. Plus, export-supported jobs are good jobs. They pay, on average, up to 18 percent more. That's more money in people's pockets, more breathing room for families, and more customers for American businesses.

These numbers speak for themselves. We should be doing everything we can to create more opportunities for American businesses to sell to the world. That's what high-standard trade agreements  like the ones I am negotiating in the Asia-Pacific region  will do. And that's what the Ex-Im Bank does every day.

Past Congresses have reauthorized Ex-Im 16 times. They've always done it with support from both parties. And the past 13 presidents have supported the bank, too. It really shouldn't be any different this time. The good news is, the support in Congress is there. Strong majorities of Democrats and Republicans have said they'd vote to reauthorize the bank. Congressional leaders just need to call a vote. That's all it'll take to get the Export-Import Bank back on track.

Members of Congress are home this week. So if you're a small business owner  or an employee of a large business that depends on financing to sell in new markets and create new jobs  tell your senators to quit treating your business like it's expendable. Tell your representative to stop the delays. It's time for Congress to do its job, and keep America's exports growing.

Small business owners have had to overcome a lot these past few years. So have America's workers. But through their grit and determination  and with help from our economic policies  we've seen more businesses reopen their doors, more people get back to work, more American goods sold around the world. Small business owners say that they're more optimistic than they've been in years. They're ready to keep growing and hiring. Washington should not stand in their way.

Barack Obama is president of the United States.
Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racial hate crimes, described the attack to the Los Angeles Times as a "hate crime by someone who feels threatened by our country's changing demographics and the increasing prominence of African-Americans in public life." Indeed, some people hate you when you don't do well enough  and they hate you even more when they think you're doing too well.
De Blasio rankled police again when he said during a recent discussion of the Garner case that he had counseled his biracial son to be wary and deferential if he was stopped by police. It is the sort of talk that is delivered by many parents, but with a special urgency for kids who are most likely to fit the racial profiles that police may use, consciously or unconsciously.
Author Judy Blume speaks about her new book, In the Unlikely Event, her first novel for adults in 17 years, at BookCon in New York May 31. The novel was inspired by a historical incident, when three planes crashed over eight weeks in Blumes hometown of Elizabeth, N.J., in the 1950s. (Kathy Willens, AP)

Judy Blume's latest novel, "In the Unlikely Event"  her first book for adults in 17 years  orbits around a series of horrifying plane crashes that took place in her hometown of Elizabeth, N.J., in the early 1950s. The book almost didn't take off. Blume remembered scant details of the tragedies, and despite being a prolific author herself (coming-of-age stories such as "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret," "Just as Long as We're Together" and "Tiger Eyes" remain hugely influential for legions of young readers), it never occurred to her to use them as the backdrop of a novel. To write "In the Unlikely Event," she reconnected with old friends, tapped into other people's memories and dove headlong into research.

The result is a novel full of pitch-perfect period details and very Blume-ian character development. I spoke with Blume over the phone from San Francisco, as she was getting ready to speak at the Bay Area Book Festival. Following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

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Q: At a recent book event, you said it's possible that this story had been stewing for 46 years.

A: Well, somebody told me the other night that's how long I've been writing. I mean, it's been in me since I was 14  for all that time. And I can't imagine why I never thought about writing it.

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Q: Did you ever feel like, maybe I can't take on a story this big? Or did it strike you as an interesting challenge to write about actual historical events?

A: I never, ever thought about it until I was hit over the head by that moment of "Oh my God. I've got the story. It takes place in the '50s, and I have to tell it." It came like no other book has ever come to me. It came with three families, structure . Of course, you know, it took five years to write it (laughing), but it came very quickly and then evolved very slowly. I had to do a lot of research.

Q: In your acknowledgments, you say you referenced everything from articles on microfiche to blog posts to one-on-one conversations with old school friends. Even though you already had characters in mind, did that change as your research deepened? Did it introduce new characters?

A: It did. Many, many new characters and many moments came from the research. And I'm so grateful to those reporters who were there (at the scene)  from the moment a woman who's lying on the ground and in pain goes, "Please girlie, loosen my girdle." I don't think I would've thought of that. That was so perfect. I also got so many details from talking to my friends, the people I grew up with who I'm still in touch with. Each of them had one memory and each one of those memories became a moment or a scene or a very important character. Mrs. Barnes came from a memory that a friend's wife had.

Q: Growing up, did you have a journalistic eye, like your character Miri?

A: No, I was not like Miri in that way. But I do think every fiction writer is an observer. I did watch and listen. The stories that were rolling around in my head were mostly imaginary.

Q: You really capture so vividly the details of the time. Was it ever difficult to make sure these brand names and such complemented, rather than overwhelmed, the narrative?

A: It's interesting, because my husband has written nonfiction, and I have a lot of friends who write nonfiction, and I kept raving about the research: "Oh, this is so much fun! I love research!" They told me, "Yes, research is wonderful, but then you still have to write the book." I had heard often from my husband that sometimes an author can get carried away with the research, that you read a book and think, "This author couldn't bear to leave out anything."

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I think that for me the details of the time were just part of my life, they were inside of me. I didn't have to research things like angora sweaters and who was singing what, and what we were wearing, and the lipstick. I knew all of that first-hand.

Q: Someone described the number of characters in this book as rivaling Tolstoy. How did you balance all these interweaving storylines?

A: I wrote the first draft of part one, but then I had to stop for two years to make the movie of "Tiger Eyes" (her 1981 young-adult novel). Then I came back and wrote a first draft of the rest of the book. When I looked back at all, I realized that the rest of the book was so, so much better than part one. I write like 20 drafts, literally, and I really struggled with getting part one right. That was the hardest thing. Sometimes when I meet people, I say to them, "Don't worry about all that's happening in part one. You don't need to keep flipping back and wondering who is who. Just keep reading and I promise you it will all come together." At one point, I wanted to put a chart (of characters) in the book, and my editor laughed at me. She just said, "This is not a Russian novel! Trust your readers. They will manage to keep it straight."

Q: It takes some finesse to get in specific historical details without it seeming like a history lesson, and also subtlety, in terms of how you convey information about how who's related to whom.

A: I don't think about that when I'm writing. But I needed in part one to introduce their lives before the crashes. I needed to get to that first crash as quickly as I could without cheating on the character development.

Q: What was it like to sift through old news stories to capture these terrible events?

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A: Now it would all be on television. But there was no real television.  I had to rely on the accounts of journalists. It was important to me to keep the actual colorful writing about the crashes in the book: "The plane broken cleanly in half like a swollen cream puff"  that was Angelo Baglivo (of the Newark Evening News); an "angry wounded bird"  that was Melville Shapiro (of the Elizabeth Daily Journal). I don't write descriptive prose. That's not what I can do. It was through these writers that I was able to describe what happened.

Q: The book features an article written by the character Henry that explains the truth behind these plane crashes. It was striking to read a story written in a style so different than what we would read in today's era. It seems media now attempt to find meaning in tragedy even before all the facts are known.

A: The Henry Ammerman in the book who wrote that story is lying next to me on the bed right now. He's my husband, George Cooper. I had all the newspaper stories and was going to (reprint) them as they were, but they came with bylines so I couldn't  even though the reporters are no longer living, sadly, and the newspapers are now defunct. They had to be combined and revised. When I learned this, I was up to my ears in revisions of the novel, and I said, "I can't do that and meet my deadline." And George stepped up to the plate as he always does and said, "I can be your Henry Ammerman." So that wrap-up story you mentioned, that didn't come from any newspaper  that was all Henry. We call George "Hank" now. (Laughs) Hank did a wonderful job!

Q: Many of your books, and this one, so vividly convey nostalgia. There's that line of Miri's near the end, "She loves the idea of the kids they were, the sweetness between them." It's a kind of throughline among all your young-adult titles. The difference is that here you have all these moments of people coming and going and reconnecting as they age, and it shows how, despite the past, life does go on.

A: I grew up sitting shiva. When somebody dies, you sit around the house for a week and relatives would come and bring you food. My father was the youngest of seven siblings and nobody lived to be 60. So we were always sitting shiva. He always took me on his lap and said, "Life goes on" and "Life is for the living." Terrible things happen, but I love what Henry says to Miri when she asks something along the lines of "Is it worth it?" And he says, "Yes, it is. It's worth it."

Laura Pearson is a Chicago-based journalist specializing in arts and culture.

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"In the Unlikely Event"

By Judy Blume, Knopf, 405 pages, $27.95

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Blume will discuss "In the Unlikely Event" with Tribune columnist Heidi Stevens at a joint Printers Row-Chicago Humanities Festival Wednesday. For details visit www.chicagohumanities.org.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker announces to supporters and news media gathered at the Waukesha County Expo Center that he will seek the Republican nomination for president on July 13 in Waukesha, Wis. (Scott Olson, Getty Images)

On Monday, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker officially became Republican presidential candidate No. 15.

First, he came out with a campaign video that was more amber waves of grain and fruited plains than about the candidate, but he made his point that he is a conservative who will "fight and win for the American people."

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Then, in the late afternoon, he made his formal announcement from a stage in suburban Milwaukee, with a call for "fresh leadership" and "big, bold ideas from outside of Washington."

The question is whether he can be heard above the din of 14 other candidates, and over the roar of one Republican in particular: Donald Trump, who has stolen a march on his rivals since his own announcement June 16.

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Walker may be able to sell himself as an establishment Republican candidate with the same kind of base-pleasing views as Trump, but with a less bombastic self-presentation. On the surface, you couldn't ask for two more different candidates than the real estate mogul and the preacher's son.

Trump is, well, Trump. Walker, on the other hand, is genial, affable and low-key. As a teenager, he filled in for his father delivering the Sunday sermons and flipped hamburgers at McDonald's. He quit college, as he explained it to his parents, to make sure there was money to send his younger brother. Democrats who worked with him over the years admit how pleasant he is.

This is where the contrast between Walker and Trump ends and the similarities begin. In his political life, Walker has tried to bring about the America that Trump says we need. He did so first as an assemblyman (calling for a harsh "truth in sentencing" law, prison privatization, and voter-ID laws) and then as Milwaukee county executive (making cuts to spending on parks and public transit, and focusing on making life better in the suburbs rather than helping those in the city). By the time he left that post, Milwaukee had the nation's second-highest black poverty rate and an unemployment rate almost four times higher for blacks than for whites.

He was elected governor with high turnout among his white base. His first act was to bust the public unions and give businesses a tax break. The idea of alternatives to prison  adopted by some Republicans  has no appeal in Wisconsin, which has the highest rate of black males behind bars of any state.

A release of e-mails ordered by a court that convicted a group of Walker aides for violating campaign laws revealed a casual racism and homophobia. The messages from the era when Walker was county executive were circulated on a secret router (shades of Hillary Clinton). One referred to dogs that should qualify for welfare because they were "mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can't speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddys are."

Walker's former deputy chief of staff, Kelly Rindfleisch, forwarded it, adding, "hilarious" and "so true." Last year, Walker's deputy finance director sent out tweets making reference to "half-breeds" and one in which she vowed to "choke that illegal mex cleaning in the library."

Trump and Walker aren't that far apart on many issues, just on how they express them. Trump appeals to very conservative Republicans, tea party supporters and older, white suburban voters, the most likely to turn out in the early nominating contests. These voters also are Walker's base. Some of the same sentiments that inspire Trump animate Walker, but the Wisconsin governor expresses them in his boy-next-door way and in his policies. Democrats were at first shocked by how conservatively Walker governed after running a bland campaign. He took on labor, pushed draconian spending cuts with no tax increases, refused Medicaid funds, expanded school choice, and tilted toward business interests, including a plan to help the Milwaukee Bucks build a new stadium. State Sen. Bob Jauch, D, told the National Journal that the soft-spoken Walker "has an altar boy's appearance, but Darth Vader writes his policies."

Walker's strength comes from surviving a recall, getting re-elected in a bluish state, an impressive fundraising record with a $37 million haul during his recall campaign, and an appeal to hard-core conservatives without looking mean.

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More recently, Walker also has taken harder line in other areas: criticizing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants as amnesty, condemning leniency for so-called dreamers and supporting a constitutional amendment that would throw gay marriage back to the states. His conservatism has catapulted him to the top of some polls in neighboring Iowa and he's spoken of in the same breath as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, only with impressive chops as a sitting governor (that's until John Kasich of Ohio, with his 30-point reelection win, gets in later this month). The latest Economist-YouGov poll puts Trump at the head of the Republican pack -- his favorability among Republicans jumped to 49 percent this month from 38 percent in June. Trump's numbers are twice as high as Walker's in the latest Fox poll.

Trump has shown how hungry people are for a return to an older America. We'll see whether he gets to fill that appetite at the first debate or if the Boy Scout does.

Bloomberg

Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg View columnist.
More than two dozen awards worth more than $124 million were made to companies, some with ties to donors, without a formal staff review by the underwriting department of Gov. Scott Walker's economic development agency. (Morry Gash, AP)

More than two dozen awards worth more than $124 million were made to companies without a formal staff review by the underwriting department of Gov. Scott Walker's economic development agency, it reported Friday.

Documents detailing the awards were made public late Friday afternoon in advance of a Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation board meeting on July 20 to discuss one troubled unsecured loan that went to a failing company owned by a Walker donor.

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The Republican Walker, who is expected to formally launch a presidential campaign in mid-July, has been hounded by troubles with the quasi-private jobs agency he created shortly after taking office in 2011.

An internal review released Friday showed that WEDC gave out 27 award contracts to 24 companies between July 2011 and June 2013 without staff review, which WEDC said was not required at the time. Those were discovered during a review of 371 awards WEDC made in its first two years of operation.

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Walker's spokeswoman Jocelyn Webster said the governor would review the documents to prepare for the discussion at the July 20 board meeting.

Rep. Peter Barca, the Assembly's Democratic leader, called the situation "outrageous." He said there are many unanswered questions about how many loans were approved over underwriters' objections.

"I am not at all confident we have even a fraction of the troubling details board members need in order to carry out our fiduciary responsibility," he said. "This is yet another example of how senior WEDC officials have kept the board and Wisconsin taxpayers in the dark about serious problems surrounding the governor's jobs agency."

Some of the companies on the list are owned or affiliated with donors to Walker's political campaigns.

Kenneth C. Stock, the chief executive of KCS International, a luxury boat builder in Oconto, donated $8,500 to Walker. Members of the Sonnentag family, which owns County Materials, have donated at least $36,000 to Walker. Laona-based WD Parket LLC, is a fifth-generation company run by the Connor family, longtime Republican donors.

The three highest un-reviewed awards all came through the enterprise zone program. The largest, $62.5 million, went to Kohl's Department Stores for an expansion of its corporate headquarters on June 28, 2012, for a project that was expected to create 3,000 jobs but that has created just 473 so far.

The next highest was $18 million to Kestrel Aircraft Company for an expected 665 jobs, but just 24 have been created. The third highest was $15 million to Plexus Corp. to create 350 jobs, but none have been created, according to a tally provided by WEDC.

Of the 27 awards, just over 6,100 jobs were expected to be created, but to date only about 2,100 have been. Nearly 8,900 jobs have been retained, according to WEDC. The projects made about $490 million in investment, the report said.

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One of the 27 unsecured awards was a $500,000 loan to the now-defunct Milwaukee construction company Building Committee Inc. that was collapsing at the time and created no jobs. That was among several loans questioned by state auditors that led Walker in May to call for scrapping the loan program.

The loan to BCI came after its owner William Minahan had given Walker's 2010 gubernatorial campaign a last-minute $10,000 donation on Election Day  the maximum individual contribution.

A memo from Jake Kuester, the vice president of credit and risk at WEDC, outlined what he called an "extensive review" of all awards the agency made worth more than $200,000 during its first two years in operation.

Kuester said employees of the former Department of Commerce, which WEDC replaced, said it was an "acceptable practice" for the secretary of the agency to approve an award with no formal written staff review "when the need to be flexible and reactive to a business's needs warranted it. That practice was carried forward into WEDC during its early days."

In July 2013, the WEDC board approved a new policy that included requiring a written review on all program awards. Since then, WEDC says it has approved more than 760 awards, all of which were reviewed by staff.

Associated Press
Scott Walker, who formally entered the 2016 presidential race Monday, is where he has been for months. Along with Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, he's one of the three most likely to win the Republican nomination.

After a brief surge early this year, the Wisconsin governor hasn't moved any further ahead. He remains potentially formidable. He offers plenty for any faction of conservatives to get excited about, without appearing to have an overly divisive or extremist reputation  and, therefore, may not scare off Republicans who care most about winning in November 2016.

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Conservative writer Philip Klein wrote last week that the presidential nomination fight will be a true test of tea party conservatives: "If Republicans choose a legacy candidate such as Bush, or a champion of big government such as John Kasich, it would be a fatal blow to the tea party. It would mean that whatever the influence the movement has or had, it could never hope to break the highest glass ceiling."

That's wrong. A faction can be important within a party even if a candidate outside its ranks captures the presidential nomination. Had Mitt Romney been elected in 2012, for example, he would have governed as an opponent of the health care act because of tea party and other conservative influence in the Republican Party, regardless of his record in Massachusetts and his personal views (whatever they really are) on health care policy.

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Still, Klein is correct that a Bush or Kasich nomination would be a setback for the tea party, in no small part because both candidates have specifically spoken out against some of its priorities and attitudes.

What Klein leaves out is what tea partyers and other conservatives should be doing if they really want influence in their party. The true test is whether they can settle on a viable candidate (such as Walker, among other options) and avoid the distractions out there. They failed utterly in 2012, falling in and out of love with Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain. They are off to a bad start this time, chasing after Ben Carson and Donald Trump.

Sometimes, of course, supporting a protest candidate who isn't going to win the nomination makes sense. True libertarians were not wrong to support Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012, even though Paul had little chance of winning. Their policy preferences were simply in the minority in the party, and Paul's campaign was, potentially at least, an avenue for finding new support. But getting excited about no-chance candidates when there are strong alternatives isn't going to do conservatives any good.

Unless, of course, the whole purpose of the tea party movement is affect, not action. In that case, the hard work of sorting through Walker, Rubio and other plausible nominees  and of working hard to extract as many promises from those candidates as possible on what policies they will adhere to  is beside the point.

If that's true, no one should expect tea partyers to have any important influence on the Republican Party in the future  beyond forcing its candidates to update their birther jokes to whatever gets them revved up about Hillary Clinton. If all they want is style, then that's all they'll get.

Bloomberg

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist covering U.S. politics.
As it is, though, those lawmakers and citizens who oppose giving the president trade promotion authority have nothing to worry about. They get to show their disgust with free trade while enjoying all its bounty. If Obama doesn't get the deal with 11 Pacific nations he has been negotiating, we won't lose the benefits of existing imports. We just won't get the benefits of additional commerce.
Wanda Freeman can see in her mind's eye several former students who could have turned out just like that emissary of ancient hatred who killed nine black people in a Charleston church last week.

But she also sees many more who left her classroom with a different perspective.

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At 60, Mrs. Freeman  as I've always known her  just retired after 34 years of teaching. She was my eighth-grade English teacher in Myrtle Beach, S.C. A black woman, she taught about race and identity from her experience. She challenged, provoked and inspired us to know ourselves and to embrace our differences.

There are a handful of English teachers to whom I'll always feel indebted for nurturing my love of the written word. She's one of them.

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Once when she wasn't looking, some idiot kid scrawled the N-word on a photo of her but misspelled it like the African country: "NIGER."

"Idiot" is my word; Mrs. Freeman would say "culturally challenged."

With humor and grace, Mrs. Freeman led her students in a cheer that probably wouldn't fly in today's classroom.

"I said, 'Give me an N!" she chuckled. "If they were going to write that word, I thought they should at least know how to spell it correctly."

Mrs. Freeman was able to change some minds that were filled with racist rhetoric passed down through generations. She did it by promoting open conversations on difficult topics, a practice that's become increasingly rare. She listened to students explain what the Confederate flag meant to them and to their heritage. And then she told them what it meant to her. Give and take.

"I could see kids loved me as a human being, despite the fact that their some of their parents would tell them otherwise about people of different races," she said.

But in more recent years, as teachers have been under more pressure to chase test scores and bow to political correctness, Mrs. Freeman said her fire for teaching "cooled to embers."

Her classroom was no longer an open forum.

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"When you can't have conversations like that," she said, "we're always going to be in a horrible place."

And that brings us back to the heinous act committed in Charleston, just a two-hour drive from where I grew up. That physical distance belies the closeness that people all over the Palmetto State feel for Charleston.

As a young man I spent a summer in Charleston, pedaling tourists around in a rickshaw. When those magnificent summer thunderstorms rolled in, we took refuge under the shelter of the open-air market, not far from where slaves used to be sold like livestock. At times, the ghosts of our past feel very present.

I called Mrs. Freeman, after not having talked with her for close to 20 years, to get her perspective but also hoping she'd validate mine. I was upset by how some national commentary was portraying South Carolina. I've been gone a long time, but it didn't sound like the place I remembered. Sure, there was racism, but white and black people also loved each other in a way not commonly found in other parts of the country.

She listened politely. Then she set me straight.

"This young man was just doing what a lot of people would like to do," Freeman said. "South Carolina has come a long way, but South Carolina hasn't come far enough."

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Mrs. Freeman was pained by the killing, but she wasn't shocked. Since a biracial president was elected, she said, there's been a revival of racism in the South simmering its way to an angry boil. As one example, she pointed to when Rep. Joe Wilson, a Republican congressman representing South Carolina, shouted "You lie!" at the president during a health care address.

For that unprecedented act of disrespect toward a president, Wilson was hailed as a hero by many in the South, Mrs. Freeman said.

"When President Obama was elected, it seems like the ugly head of racism just jumped out of the cage," she said.

That's not specific to the South, said Bernard Powers, a history professor and expert on African-American history at the College of Charleston. Beyond the 2009 outburst from the congressman, he said, there have been "racial overtones" in political attacks on immigration reform and voting rights that directly affect minorities.

"I am not sure what (the shooting) says about race relations in South Carolina, in particular," Powers said, "but it says something about the racial climate that's been fostered throughout the country since the election of Barack Obama."

The "We've got to take our country back" mantra has grown louder, he said.

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But from whom? And to what end?

At this point, taking down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds  as Gov. Nikki Haley proposed Monday  could have a more "aggravating effect" than a healing one, Powers said, though it represents the former republic that relied on "racial subordination" as one of its key tenets.

"We do need to use this as a learning opportunity about how this fellow really embodied what (the Confederate flag) stood for historically," Powers said.

A flag representing that great falsehood belongs in a museum, not in front of the statehouse, Mrs. Freeman said.

I'd be more inclined to relegate it to the dust heap of history. But my opinion matters next to nothing compared with those of the thousands of people who marched hand in hand Sunday over the bridge spanning the Cooper River, from Mount Pleasant to Charleston, in a powerful show of support for the Emanuel AME Church.

That was the South Carolina that I remember.

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Race in the South is complicated. So too right here in Chicago, where systemic injustices perpetuate poverty and crime on the South and West sides. But talking about it openly, like we used to do in Mrs. Freeman's class, might be the surest path to change.

Looked at another way, it's the least we could do.

We could start by saying their names out loud:

Sharonda Coleman-Singleton

DePayne Middleton Doctor

Cynthia Hurd

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Susie Jackson

Ethel Lance

Clementa Pinckney

Tywanza Sanders

Daniel Simmons

Myra Thompson.

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gtrotter@tribpub.com

Twitter GregTrotterTrib
Donald Trump is forcing the rest of the GOP presidential field to talk about our broken immigration system, ready or not. (Jim Cole, AP)

"What can be simpler or more accurately stated? The Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc."

GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump, Your Next President (he says)

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Say what you will about The Donald's unapologetic immigrant bashing: At least you know where he stands. Better still, he's forcing the rest of the GOP presidential field to talk about our broken immigration system, ready or not.

Many of the candidates have been wary of staking out a position on an issue that has divided Americans for decades. Too bad.

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The trick for Republicans is to appeal to their conservative base in the primary season without alienating the Latinos who are increasingly important in November. In 2012, Barack Obama got more than 70 percent of the Latino vote.

The takeaway from that election, supposedly, was that Republicans needed to get serious about immigration reform, including addressing the status of the 11 million  no, it's not 34 million, Mr. Trump  who are in the country illegally.

But here we are at the dawn of another presidential election cycle with no solution in sight, and a lot of ducking and weaving from candidates who don't want to take a position now that could hurt them later.

There's no ambiguity in Trump's stance, and so far it hasn't hurt him in the polls. (His business dealings are another matter.) On Thursday, for example, an Economist/YouGov poll had Trump first among 16 candidates, with 15 percent of the GOP vote nationwide.

That emboldened the hardliners to chime in when Trump blamed lax border security for the murder of a San Francisco woman. The man accused of shooting her had slipped into the country from Mexico and had been sent back five times.

To Trump, that's more evidence that the U.S. is a "dumping ground" for Mexico's most violent criminals. He's promised to build an "impenetrable" wall along the border, and send Mexico the bill.

The candidates have been careful to distance themselves from Trump's inflammatory remarks  "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists" while calling for more border security or stricter enforcement of existing laws.

Some have focused on the role of "sanctuary cities," such as San Francisco (and Chicago), where local law enforcement officials do not routinely detain undocumented immigrants for the feds. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry both called for withholding federal funding from cities with sanctuary policies.

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You don't have to agree with Trump to welcome a discussion that will help sort the throw-them-all-out candidates from the ones who recognize that a broader fix is in order.

The last thing Republicans need is a replay of the 2012 primaries, in which one candidate (Herman Cain) called for a 20-foot electrified border fence and another (Perry) was scorned for suggesting that kids who were brought to the U.S. by their parents ought to be allowed to stay and go to college.

Mitt Romney, the eventual nominee, favored a policy harsh enough to encourage undocumented immigrants to "self-deport." Look what that got him.

You need a score card to keep up with the shifting positions of this year's candidates.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was one of the authors of an excellent bipartisan measure that passed the Senate in 2013. The bill balanced border security with a more flexible visa system and a path to earned citizenship for most undocumented immigrants. But Rubio backed away from that approach, which got nowhere in the House.

Bush proposed a legal status short of earned citizenship as part of a comprehensive fix in his 2013 book, "Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution." Before and after that, he favored a path to citizenship.

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It's frankly hard to tell where either of them stands at the moment, though we'd argue that they've both been in the ballpark most of the time. We'd also argue that flexibility isn't such a bad thing if it gets us to a solution.

Compromise is one thing. Waffling is another. How are voters supposed to tell the difference?

Republicans have to find a way forward on immigration reform. The candidate who can make that happen is the one who's willing to grab the megaphone from Trump, and lead.

Follow the Tribune Editorial Board on Twitter @Trib_ed_board and Facebook
Khairuldeen Makhzoomi works in his office in Berkeley, Calif., Monday, April 18, 2016. A University of California Berkeley student who came to the U.S. as an Iraqi refugee says he was unfairly removed from a flight at Los Angeles International Airport earlier this month because a fellow passenger was alarmed by an innocent conversation he was having in Arabic. (Haven Daley, AP)

"If you see something, say something," the Department of Homeland Security tells us.

Problem is, a lot of folks probably need a little coaching on what "something" is.

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"Something" is not someone on an airplane who made a phone call in Arabic.

College student Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, 26, was booted off his Southwest Airlines flight in California this month because a woman sitting nearby was freaked out hearing him speak Arabic when he made a quick call to his uncle before takeoff.

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A UC Berkeley student who says he was pulled off a Southwest flight and questioned by police and the FBI after a passenger overheard him speaking in Arabic says he wants a public apology. April 18, 2016. (AP) (Associated Press)

That is speaking another language. It is not terrorism.

"Something" is also not a student who made a clock and tried to show it to his science teacher.

Ninth-grader Ahmed Mohamed, 14, was interrogated, handcuffed and arrested at a high school in Texas for bringing his homemade digital clock to school last fall  teachers thought it might be a bomb.

That is a Muslim kid being smart and awesomely geeky. It is not terrorism.

What's even scarier is the "something" that was part of a leaked TSA checklist that made the rounds recently, which included such gems as "arrives late for flight," "increased perspiration," "increased breathing rate" or "excessive fidgeting." That describes just about every parent who has ever flown anywhere with small children.

So what, exactly, is a real "something"?

"If someone is talking about violence, that is a clear signal," said Rizwan Jaka, chairman of the board at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Virginia, better known as the ADAMS Center.

The center is pretty big into finding and reporting real "somethings."

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The FBI's Washington Field Office just gave the center a leadership award for its work with the federal agency.

"We believe we are partners and not suspects," Jaka said. "We all have a shared concern for national security. We want to have a safe country and a safe community."

They partner with the FBI, holding meetings and seminars and letting agents and parents shake hands, so they know each other.

Because for them, "See something, say something" is about much more than reporting people for speaking Arabic on a phone or looking or acting different.

See, the rules are different for Muslims. All Catholics aren't expected to condemn pedophile priests and Christians aren't expected to voice their outrage  over and over  at the burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan.

And last I checked, the FBI hasn't held town meetings and meet-and-greets at churches throughout the country following any of the 19 attacks over the past 15 years by people who identify as Christian.

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But Muslims must make a huge show of loudly and constantly apologizing for all terrorist acts done by people claiming to be Muslim. And they must be super-vigilant in reporting anything suspicious.

And they are.

About 40 percent of tips  the "largest single source of initial information"  about suspected terrorists in the Muslim community come from Muslims, according to a study by Duke University and the University of North Carolina.

This is the solid evidence, not suspicions, that demand action.

"If someone is talking about doing a crime, that is something," Jaka said.

"For parents," Jaka went on carefully, because this is a touchy something, "young people who say they might want to travel alone"  especially if there is talk of supporting a cause  is probably a pretty big "something."

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This isn't new for parents.

Generations of kids have rebelled, and generations of parents have had to figure out if sullen behavior and late nights out mean teendom or something nefarious, such as membership in a gang.

Today's Muslim parents are asked to take it a step further and report their teen's teenly behavior to the feds.

That's what Sal Shafi did in California. The tech executive had been worried about his 22-year-old son's flirtation with radical ideas and obsession with the suffering of Syrians, he told the New York Times.

At the urging of "See something, say something" slogans, Shafi called federal investigators, and last summer, after tapping Adam Shafi's phone, they raided the family's home and arrested the son.

Not all parents would be willing to do that. Shafi doesn't believe his son would have committed a terrorist act, and he has had doubts about whether he did the right thing in calling authorities.

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And yet, America's approximately 3 million Muslims are being asked again and again to monitor each other.

And not just by Donald Trump.

Earlier this year, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson went to Dearborn, Mich., to ask its significant Muslim population for help.

"We find ourselves in a new phase in the global terrorist threat, which requires a new ... type of response," Johnson said to the audience and to the Detroit Free Press. "We now deal with the prospect of terror-inspired attacks by those who are here in our homeland, through the use of the Internet, through the use of social media ... publications like (al-Qaida's) Inspire magazine."

And he asked the Muslims of Dearborn: "If you see something, say something."

So non-Muslims? This is the kind of stuff the whole "See something, say something" thing is about.

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Recruitment by radicals, violent ideas, criminal acts  those are real somethings.

Wearing a hijab, speaking or writing Arabic, or being Muslim is simply being American. It's time we learn the difference.

Washington Post

Petula Dvorak is a Washington Post columnist.
Retiree Bob Lapp spent his career working in the healthcare industry, first as a hospital administrator and later as a consultant. The Medicare fraud he saw left him incensed. "What really got me is so much money is wasted on fraud," he says. "Billions of dollars are wasted on healthcare fraud every year, and that's money that could do much more good going to the right people."

For the past five years, Lapp, 72, has been a volunteer with the Senior Medicare Patrol (SMP) at Age Options in Oak Park. Lapp travels to meet with seniors groups in the region he covers, north suburban Cook County.

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"Our main drive is this: Protect, detect and report," says Lapp.

All Medicare fraud has the same goal: to illegitimately collect money from Medicare, says Courtney Hedderman, associate state director for advocacy and outreach with AARP Illinois. Medicare fraud takes several forms, she says.

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One is phantom billing. "The medical provider bills Medicare for procedures that were never performed, unnecessary procedures or unnecessary diagnostic testing," she says. "It may also involve billing for equipment that isn't needed, is inappropriate or is said to be new when in fact it's used."

Another form of Medicare fraud concerns patient billing, Hedderman says. In this instance, a patient is in on the scam, provides his or her Medicare number to a provider, claims to have received a procedure or equipment that really was unneeded, and gets a kickback. Far more common is patient billing that involves lost or stolen Medicare numbers that are appropriated and used by fraudsters.

Another manifestation of Medicare fraud involves "upcoding and unbundling," Hedderman says. In this scenario, charges are inflated by using billing codes that indicate a patient received more sophisticated services or procedures than in fact he or she needed, she reports.

Senior Medicare patrol

The SMP program is a national program run through the Administration for Community Living, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare. All 50 states, as well as Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Guam have SMPs.

In Illinois, the SMP is Oak Park-based Age Options, the area agency on aging for suburban Cook County.

"Our mission is providing Medicare beneficiaries with outreach and education revolving around the messages 'protect, detect and report,'" says Jason Echols, healthcare consumer protection coordinator overseeing the Illinois Senior Medicare Patrol.

The most prevalent fraud in Illinois involves home health care, he adds. An older individual is called and asked whether he or she needs help around the home, or would like a visit from a nurse.

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"Who would say no?" Echols asks. "What they're after is your Medicare number. When you provide the number, you may never hear from them again. Instead, the fraudulent home health agency bills Medicare claiming to have helped you. In some instances, they may have come to your home. But they haven't offered the skilled care in the home they claim to have provided."

On occasion, the older adult involved later really does need skilled home care prescribed by her doctor. But Medicare tells her that services can't be provided because skilled home care already is being delivered, Echols says.

"It can take a year or more to get that kind of thing resolved," he adds.

Combating fraud

If you're a Medicare recipient, you have several ways to protect yourself and the health care system from fraud. First, Hedderman says, don't carry your Medicare card with you. Make a photocopy of it and black out the last 4 digits of your Medicare number. You may need your real card the first time you visit a provider but showing the photocopy shouldn't be a problem for subsequent visits, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Second, call Medicare at 800-MEDICARE and request an itemized Medicare Summary Notice statement. "That will literally show any provider that billed under your name," Hedderman says. "That is the first stop in determining whether there was something billed under your name that is incorrect."

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The third and final step is reporting any suspected fraud, she adds. Illinois residents can call Age Options at 800-699-9043 and ask for the Illinois SMP, Echols says. You can also call Medicare directly at 800-MEDICARE, Hedderman advises.

"Efforts to crack down on Medicare fraud will not only help beneficiaries of Medicare, but ultimately save that system and the health system overall billions and billions of dollars a year," she says.
An East Aurora School District 131 board member has started a petition calling for School Board President Annette Johnson's resignation.

John Laesch, who tried to oust Johnson during board elections earlier this month, said he urged Johnson to resign before starting the petition. He called Johnson a "legal liability."

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Johnson said before a scheduled meeting Monday night meeting she would not be resigning, and said Laesch "threatened" her.

The petition, which had about 80 signatures as of 6:30 p.m. Monday, comes as Laesch posted a recording online that showed "Board President Johnson screaming and verbally assaulting staff members," according to an online copy of the petition. He received the recording via text message, and doesn't know who sent it, he said.

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He said he asked Johnson to make a decision about resigning by 5 p.m. Sunday, and posted the audio when she did not resign.

"If she treats our staff like that, we are opening ourselves up to a lawsuit," he said. "It's inappropriate and unprofessional."

Johnson said she took part in the conversation depicted in the recording, but it was a 2012 "private meeting," and the recording was made "illegally." She said she thought the tape was "enhanced."

"I'm tired of being made the villain by everyone because I am sitting there, yeah, I am passionate about the district," she said.

Laesch voted for Johnson as board president during the 2015 board elections, but said he has since met with people and groups and seen Johnson's behavior and "how she operates."

When the board selected new leadership in early April, Laesch worked unsuccessfully to find an alternative to Johnson as board president.

Now, he said, the petition is one way to get community support for her resignation.

"The community needs to stand up and say they're not going to tolerate this," he said. "And this is one way to get the community's support. This is really all I've got left."

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Johnson said she thought the volumes on the recording were raised and questioned the timing of the recording's end. She said no one informed her that the meeting would be recorded, which is illegal.

"This was at a time when the district was under a lot of issues," she said, citing previous concerns with district credit card use and insurance.

Johnson raised concerns about Laesch's performance as a board member and his attendance at meetings. She said she addresses issues in the district, and feels she is sometimes "a lightning rod."

She said problems with the district's insurance, which she mentions in the recording, took money away from everyone with a stake in the district.

"As far as I'm concerned I have always protected the taxpayer dollars," she said. "I have throngs of supporters that support me because they know that I have protected the taxpayer dollars."

Laesch said incidents similar to the recorded meeting continue to happen in the district, and the recording should be a wake-up call to other board members.

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"If they're adults that care about the district, this will change their opinions," he said.

sfreishtat@tribpub.com

Twitter @srfreish
A plan for a hotel and event center on Harvester Drive is one step away from approval in Burr Ridge.

The proposed 101-room Hampton Inn and 17,030-foot The Falls event center, a location for weddings, banquets and other events, will be considered by the Burr Ridge Village Board at its meeting at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Village Hall, 7660 County Line Rd.

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Members of the village's Plan Commission recommended approval of the project by a 5-2 vote April 18. Members Luisa Hoch and Robert Grela voted against plan, citing concerns about the proposal being short of required parking.

John Neubauer, corporate general manager of The Falls Event Center LLC, estimated that the $20 million project would mean $100 million to the local economy over 10 years and create 1,000 full-time jobs between construction work and staffing of the hotel and event center.

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As proposed, the center would share 811 parking spaces with the two office buildings already part of the planned unit development.

"We will calculate what cars are coming to the facility," Neubauer said. "It's fine that people are going to bring cars. That's going to be covered by the hotel and The Falls. People have to agree to parking requirements or they will breach their contract."

He said bigger weekday events might need to bus people to and from the facility.

Neubauer noted that most of The Falls' events will be weekday evenings and weekends when the adjacent office buildings are vacant, freeing up those parking spots for the event center's use.

In order to appease Plan Commission members' concerns about a shortage of parking during normal working hours, The Falls agreed to not have events with more than 350 people from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays.

Doug Pollack, the village's community development director, said the event center would be able to have 378 people at weekday daytime events under the village existing zoning regulations.

The building has an occupancy limit of 811, but Neubauer said that The Falls would never be near that figure and that the facility is geared for events of up to 400 people.

Neubauer said The Falls' existing facilities in California and Arizona function just fine with far fewer parking spaces than the Burr Ridge facility will have.

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"In Elk Grove, Calif., we have 270 parking spaces for two buildings of 27,000 square feet," Neubauer said. "Here, we will have 800 parking spaces for 17,000 square feet of space."

Grela said he was intrigued by the hotel and event center for the property, but couldn't get beyond The Falls being 100 parking spaces below requirements.

"I have a lot of concern," Grela said. "This proposal is tremendously, and I would say that in capital letters, tremendously deficient in parking."

Resident Mark Toma said hotels don't bring anything positive to a community, noting that the hotel/motel tax money they generate cannot even be used to pay for police who have to answer additional calls because of the facilities. He cited that in 2012, the village had one rape, one assault and four auto thefts that occurred at Burr Ridge hotels.

"I see nothing that hotels bring, except headaches," Toma said.

Kevin Beese is a freelance writer for Pioneer Press.
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Martha Griffin, owner of Marthas Kitchen Gourmet Popcorn and Sweet Shop, passes out samples of her popcorn creations which includes grape and homemade caramel at the Downtown Elgin Harvest Market. (Gloria Casas, The Courier-News)

Eager little hands reach out to grab a kernel of popcorn in a colorful purple hue even before Martha Griffin could refill the sample cup.

The little boy tried a few of Griffin's unique popcorn flavors  which include bacon cheddar and her newest creation, peanut butter caramel with chocolate drizzle  at the Downtown Elgin Harvest Market on a recent Thursday.

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Martha's Kitchen Gourmet Popcorn and Sweet Shop is one of the returning vendors at the market, in its 16th year. There are some changes this year, including a new mix of vendors, live music and more food trucks, said Jamey Bouwmeester, Harvest Market Manager for the Downtown Neighborhood Association.

"People are starting to realize it is a destination," Bouwmeester said. "It's a place to come have lunch, shop and hear live music. It's not just a market. I think people want a bit of an experience."

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Change is good for a market, said Bouwmeester, who is in his first year as manager. Last winter, the Harvest Market lost some vendors, about 40 percent, so he had to do a lot of recruiting in the spring. There are more food trucks and music. New vendors include Blue Box Cafe, offering local roast coffee, he said. There are now two cheese vendors and two meat vendors, each creating synergy, he said. They fill in the gaps for each other, he said.

Pierre Jabeneau, owner of La Spiceria, returned to the market after a year absence. He is there every other Thursday with spice mixes that he develops personally, like blood orange pepper, a Tuscan blend and a mole spice rub. He works with a spice house from Indiana to develop and package his creations. La Spiceria also carries spices you would not find in grocery stores, he said.

The Harvest Market is well-run, has a lot of community support and is in a good location, Jabeneau said. He feels the market has a pleasant spot near the Fox River and Fox River Trail.

He finds that a lot of towns now want a farmers' market, but markets can becomes "diluted" with growers who may not be local, he said, adding "you want a true food market."

Elgin's Harvest Market pulls in different types of vendors, like Jabeneau and Griffin.

Griffin is a professional chef who graduated from Elgin Community College's culinary program in 2005. She hopes to open a food truck but, for now, works part time as a school bus driver in Palatine and has her popcorn stand every week at the market.

Her newest flavor is peanut butter caramel with chocolate. "I was making cookies yesterday and I was like, I can make this into popcorn," she said.

She makes the caramel by scratch, something she learned from her grandmother growing up in the south. Her grandmother always made caramel cake, Griffin said.

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Her best sellers are the mixed caramel and cheddar cheese, caramel and bacon cheddar flavor, she said. Other unique flavors are BBQ cheddar, flaming hot cheddar and grape. She can make any popcorn as hot as you like, she said, adding she once made habanero flavored popcorn for a customer. He said the habanero flavor wasn't hot. "Then why is your face turning red?" she asked him.

Customers come from all over the area to the Elgin market for her popcorn. She enjoys the Elgin market because customers can use debit cards to get tokens and Link cards can also be used, with BMO Harris offering up to an additional $20 to spend at the market for Link card customers.

Downtown Elgin Harvest Market has a good atmosphere with activities for children and a camaraderie among vendors, Griffin said. She worked in the corporate world for 33 years then decided to reinvent herself, enrolling in culinary school. Griffin tells everyone to follow their passion, then work won't seem like work, she said.

The Harvest Market is located at 200 N. Grove Ave. and is open every Thursday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The market is holding "HM in the PM," an indoor market, once again held at the Grand Victoria Casino pavilion, 250 S. Grove Ave., from 4 to 7 p.m. The dates for "HM in the PM" are: July 16, August 20 and September 17.

Gloria Casas is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
A group of religious and community leaders from Evanston and beyond say the state's budget impasse coupled with funding cuts has had a devastating impact on human service agencies and the individuals who rely on them. But they argue they have a solution that would restore lost funding and solve the state's fiscal woes.

Community Renewal Society (CRS), a progressive faith-based organization comprised of various religious institutions and their members, hosted a town hall meeting at the First Congregational Church of Evanston last Saturday to urge members to call on state legislators to support a bill that would place a referendum on the November ballot. The referendum would ask voters to approve a constitutional amendment to replace the state's flat income tax with a graduated system that would require those who make more money to pay higher tax rates.

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Individuals in Illinois currently pay a state income tax rate of 3.75 percent, which dropped from 5 percent in January last year after a temporary increase expired.

"We're looking at 10 months now and going on a second year without a budget," said Rev. Ron Howell of Metropolitan Community Church. "Last year's budget deficit was over $6 billion. We're looking at no end to the impasse in Springfield and that's why organizations like CRS and folks like you are important to really tell our legislators to get behind some type of solution that will dig us out of a hole that has really been building up for many years."

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CRS representatives argued that a graduated income tax set at the right rates would produce enough revenue to adequately fund the state's education, health care, human and public safety services.

Sue Loellbach, director of development for Evanston-based Connections for the Homeless, a nonprofit that helps individuals and families who are homeless or in danger of becoming so, said she learned last July that her organization would lose nearly 10 percent of its operating budgets due to cuts in state funding.

She said she believes Gov. Bruce Rauner's administration introduced the cuts as "an experiment to see how many social service agencies can survive with less money."

Although the nonprofit is still operating, "we are a lesser organization than what we were before the cuts," Loellbach said. For example, she said, the organization has had to end its homelessness prevention program which served people at risk of losing their housing.

"With a small grant of $2,000 or $3,000, we helped them pay whatever their arrearages were and provided them with case management," she said. "All the prevention money is gone and we have not received any since February 2015, which means there are probably 500 or 600 families who have become homeless because of this."

She said she's particularly concerned about the long-term impact, because the longer someone is homeless, the more difficult it becomes for them to get into a stable housing situation. She said a single homeless person costs taxpayers about $50,000 in police and emergency medical services per year.

As a result of the budget impasse and the funding cuts to social service agencies, Rev. Ann Rosewall of the First Congregational Church of Evanston said more of her time is now taken up by individuals in dire need of mental health care.

She said religious leaders are "not trained in counseling and mental health and psychiatric diagnostic processes and things like that."

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"We do a basic assessment and refer out, and now there's no place to refer to," Rosewall said. "We have professionals in the pastorate who are inadequately providing services to people who need so much more."

The implementation of a graduated tax rate would provide the revenue necessary to restore funding to programs like Connections for the Homeless, solve the state's structural deficit and "spur the economy by putting money in the pockets of low and middle class Illinoisans," said Dennis Wilson of the Unitarian Church of Evanston.

He said the current flat tax system is unfair because poorer individuals are required to pay a larger portion of their income in taxes than do the state's wealthiest residents.

"In democracies, your tax policy needs to burden the rich and relieve the poor, and Illinois' tax policy does exactly the opposite," Wilson said.

He said affirmative votes from three-fifths of legislators in both the House and Senate are needed to approve the bill authorizing the referendum in November. The deadline to get the constitutional amendment question on the ballot is May 7, Wilson said.

Lee V. Gaines is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
By Kyle Freeman

Senior Associate, International Business Advisory

Dezan Shira & Associates, Tianjin Office

In addition to the benefits of starting a business in Chinas Free Trade Zones (FTZs), there are a number of other considerations that prospective investors should take into account when choosing their investment locations. It should be noted that while the majority of the FTZs are well connected by transport, they are not close to any sort of prominent commercial or residential areas. For example, the Nansha area of the Guangdong FTZ is connected to a major port and railway, but it is around an hour away from any major shopping or living areas in Guangzhou.

In other words, investments that sell wholesale to other areas of China, or export goods abroad, will be well served in all of the FTZs. However, businesses that require interaction with the general public will have to choose their location carefully for an FTZ investment to be worthwhile.

Intellectual Property Protection

Free Trade Zones have their own separate three in one intellectual property offices, covering patents, trademarks and copyright, which can resolve and enforce copyright disputes. The extent to which this will strengthen IP protection over the long term remains to be seen, but in the short term, it will cut down on time dealing with IP related government bureaucracy.

RELATED: Business Advisory Services from Dezan Shira & Associates

Industrial Clusters

The economic efficiencies of being in a cluster are difficult to generalize, but potentially immense. Each area of the FTZs has its own stated aim for specific industries, and each sub-area of the FTZs has its own individual cluster of industries.

Cross Border Financing: HK and Taiwan

The Fujian and Guangdong FTZs have policies designed to increase economic integration with Hong Kong and Taiwan. One of the most promising areas involves cross border financing: parent companies based in Hong Kong with a subsidiary in these FTZs, for instance, can issue RMB denominated bonds in China, creating unique benefits for Hong Kong and Taiwan businesses.

Shanghais Visa Policies

Shanghai has sought to lessen restrictions for foreigners seeking visa or residence permits, particularly within its Free Trade Zone. Foreign qualified individuals can now receive employment offers by Shanghai FTZ companies via electronic invitation, and will be provided port visas upon arrival. Under the new regulations, companies based in the Shanghai FTZ may also arrange exit and entry proceedings directly with Chinas Exit and Entry Bureau.

Customs and Value Added Tax Cuts

VAT is only applied once a product leaves an FTZ, and not to transactions that occur between companies in the FTZ itself. Moreover, goods that are imported into the four FTZs are not subject to customs duties, though they are subject to duties once they leave the FTZs. This could bring immense value to companies that are linked to a wider, global supply chain.



This article is an excerpt from the January and February issue of China Briefing Magazine, titled A Guide to Chinas Free Trade Zones . In this issue of China Briefing magazine, we examine Chinas four Free Trade Zones and discuss the differences and strengths that exist in each of them. We begin by providing an introduction to the FTZs, and then take an in-depth look at the market access conditions, registration procedures and tax environments of each. Finally, we highlight some of the key considerations that foreign companies should be aware of when choosing an FTZ to invest in.

An Introduction to Doing Business in China 2015

Doing Business in China 2015 is designed to introduce the fundamentals of investing in China. Compiled by the professionals at Dezan Shira & Associates, this comprehensive guide is ideal not only for businesses looking to enter the Chinese market, but also for companies that already have a presence here and want to keep up-to-date with the most recent and relevant policy changes.

Selling, Sourcing and E-Commerce in China 2016 (First Edition)

This guide, produced in collaboration with the experts at Dezan Shira & Associates, provides a comprehensive analysis of all these aspects of commerce in China. It discusses how foreign companies can best go about sourcing products from China; how foreign retailers can set up operations on the ground to sell directly to the countrys massive consumer class; and finally details how foreign enterprises can access Chinas lucrative yet ostensibly complex e-commerce market.

Importing and Exporting in China: a Guide for Trading Companies

In this issue of China Briefing, we discuss the latest import and export trends in China, and analyze the ways in which a foreign company in China can properly prepare for the import/export process. With import taxes and duties adding a significant cost burden, we explain how this system works in China, and highlight some of the tax incentives that the Chinese government has put in place to help stimulate trade.
A leading orchestra from the Chinese mainland arrived in Taiwan on Monday for a five-day tour with classic works for the island's residents.

The 21-member troupe of the China Broadcasting National Orchestra, comprises renowned soloists such as virtuoso of traditional Chinese Banhu, Jiang Kemei and suona player Zhou Dongchao, who enjoy great popularity among folk music lovers across the Taiwan Strait.

From April 19 to 23, the mainland artists will hold concerts in Taoyuan,Taichung, Taipei, Hsinchu and Changhua in the island.

Each member will perform his or her classic works, said Zhang Gaoxiang, head of the orchestra.

"We rearranged the classics to highlight the uniqueness of traditional instruments and meanwhile embody contemporary language to adapt to the aesthetics of our era," he said at a press conference held in Taipei.

According to Gao, there has been close exchange in folk music across the Strait. Since the end of 1980s, many students from Taiwan have come to the mainland to study folk music.

"The Chinese folk music is the common cultural heritage for both sides of the Strait, which contains our cultural root," said Gao."The close exchange will push the flourishing of folk music."

"It will be an important show worthy of learning by folk music lovers in Taiwan," said Chen Tscheng-hsiung, a famous conductor in the island, at the conference.
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A cluster of residential buildings are under construction in Shijiazhuang, capital of north China's Hebei Province, on Feb. 17, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

China's land costs continued climbing in the first quarter with prices in top-tier cities surging the most amid a heating up property market.

Prices of land for residential use jumped 1.27 percent during January-March from the previous quarter, while prices of land for industrial development increased 0.73 percent, according to the Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR).

In general, land prices increased 0.96 percent, 0.22 percentage points higher than those recorded in the previous quarter.

Zhao Song, director of the land price division of the China Land Surveying and Planning Institute of the MLR, said top-tier cities led the increase, with residential land costs surging rapidly.

Second-tier cities followed suit, and third-tier cities have seen prices stabilizing, he noted.

Latest home price data suggested an uneven recovery in China's housing market, with prices in first-tier cities such as Shenzhen and Beijing soaring while those in some smaller cities are still under pressure.

Zhao Song said the frenzied market in the top-tier cities have sped up the land price increase in other parts of the country.

To cool down the sizzling property market, a number of local municipal governments have released tightening measures including raising the down payment requirement and putting stricter lines on obtaining mortgages.
A view at the Smederevo Steel Mill in Smederevo, Serbia on April 18, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

Chinese company Hebei Iron and Steel Group, or HBIS, has signed an agreement to buy a loss-making Serbian steel plant in the city of Smederevo.

The 52 million US dollar agreement was signed on Monday with the Serbian government, who had been struggling for years to find a buyer.

HBIS President Yu Yong says that the Group's planned investments in the next five years will turn the factory into one of the most competitive in Europe.

"We are happy to enable investments for this steel company by using our new technology in production. We are sure that we are competent enough that we will build Smederevo into a new complex for steel production with improved equipment and better quality of products. We will make Smederevo a modern project for international cooperation between China and Central and Eastern Europe."

Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic says the deal is important for his country, which is in great need for foreign investment.

US Steel ran the company from 2002-2012, before reselling it to the Serbian state for a symbolic price of 1 US dollar, due to losses.

HBIS plans to invest at least 300 million euros in the steel mill.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key on Monday expressed optimism about China's economic transition, saying the growth of the Chinese economy is still very considerable.

The Chinese leadership has many options to guide the world's second largest economy through its transition. said Key, who is on an official visit to China.

Still going strong

"China's economy has been growing rapidly for 20 to 30 years, but on a much smaller base," Key said during a conversation with Chinese entrepreneurs in Beijing, noting that although growth rate has slowed, it is "on a much, much higher base, so the economic growth each year is still very considerable."

According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, the Chinese economy grew 6.7 percent year on year in the first quarter, narrowing from the previous quarter's 6.8 percent, but in line with market expectations and remained within the government's targeted range of between 6.5 and 7 percent for 2016.

"I think what you've seen in the Chinese economy," said Key, is "the transition and the make-up of the economy from much export-oriented to much more import, services-based economy."

He added that he believed the Chinese banking system, which is facing some stress, is still strong and robust.

According to the Chinese government, services sector has expanded to 56.9 percent of the Chinese economy.

Key is upbeat about China's transition from a "heavy industrialized, manufacturing base" to a "far more knowledge-based, services-based economy, where it's more based on internal consumption."

He believed that the Chinese leadership has at its disposal a wide range of options to allow the economy to transition through the change.

"You need just give it some time," said Key.

Key made the remarks during a luncheon hosted by China Entrepreneur Club with Chinese business leaders, including Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi, and some 70 others.

A very long-term player

Key, who has brought a 40-person business delegation with him with an eye to further tapping into the Chinese market, said New Zealand is interested in becoming a "very long-term player in China."

"Since the signing of the free trade agreement between New Zealand and China in 2008, the commercial activities between our two countries are going from strength to strength," said Key, adding that New Zealand has sold a great deal of food and base products to China, and is increasingly more active in the services sector.

According to New Zealand press reports, exports of goods to China account for 15 percent of New Zealand's total exports of goods. More than a fifth of all the country's dairy export dollars earned are from China. Growth in goods exports to China also accounted for more than 50 percent of the growth in New Zealand's total exports in 2007-2012.

Jiang Sheng, general manager of Sino-Europe project at Zhisland, a networking site for business leaders affiliated with China Entrepreneur Club, which hosted the prime minister, commented that the New Zealand side is not only eyeing the Chinese market, but is also interested in investment opportunities and bringing Chinese investment to New Zealand.

"There are enormous opportunities in each others' market for foreign direct investment. We have seen China growing rapidly as an investor in a great many sectors in New Zealand," said Key.

The prime minister is also excited about how China's online retail platforms are bringing products into households across the China, saying "when we look at platforms like Alibaba, it represents the ultimate opportunity to bring products and services from New Zealand directly to a platforms of consumers here in China."

27 tons of honey and 50,000 oysters

The urge to promote trade and cooperation is by no means one-way. In a Q&A session with the prime minister, Alibaba founder Jack Ma said New Zealand products are enjoying huge success in China, and in one week of promotion last year, Tmall, an online retail platform of Alibaba, sold over 27 tons of honey and 50,000 oysters, 72 hours from ocean to plate, directly from New Zealand.

"My family has bought a lot of oysters and scampis" from New Zealand, Ma told reporters about what he has bought.

"New Zealand is a very unique country," Ma said in a keynote speech at the luncheon, noting that he is enthusiastic not only about bringing healthy New Zealand food products to China, but also trying to bring the country's environment protection technology and ideas to China.

"Chinese people buy products from New Zealand. They are actually buying fresh air, water and soil from there, and share its wholesomeness," said Ma.

After the luncheon, Alibaba signed an MoU with the New Zealand side to deepen bilateral cooperation.
China's deepening reforms must be "people-centric" and just, President Xi Jinping said at a meeting of the Leading Group for Overall Reform on Monday.

"A people-centric approach should be implemented in all areas of development, addressing people's demands and concerns, and giving them more tangible benefits," Xi said.

The president, also head of the leading group, was joined at the meeting by deputy heads Li Keqiang, Liu Yunshan and Zhang Gaoli, as well as other senior officials.

The meeting approved a document regulating business operations by family members of officials, a practice which has been extended to Beijing, Guangdong, Chongqing and Xinjiang on the basis of a trial in Shanghai.

Also approved were regulations on management of civil servants, regulations on administration of private schools, and regulations on the protection of judges and prosecutors, among others.

Attendees to the meeting said regulating the business activities of officials' spouses, children and children's spouses is a key effort to comprehensively and strictly govern the Party.

It was agreed at the meeting that dividing public servants into professional and administrative categories will make the management of civil servants more efficient and scientific.

The meeting approved the guidelines on the promotion of family doctors. It was agreed that establishing such a system will move more medical resources to the grassroots level and help achieve the goal of providing basic health services for everyone.

The elderly, patients of chronic diseases and mental health illness, would-be mothers, children, the disabled, among other groups, will be among the first to have their own contracted family doctors, according to the meeting.

The meeting approved the guidelines on speeding up the establishment of a social credit system. The attendees agreed that credit related information should be disclosed and shared across agencies and localities, so that an across-the-board mechanism can be established to punish the discredited and award the credit-worthy.

The meeting approved the guidelines on strengthening the party's presence in private schools, the regulations on the registrations of private schools, and the regulations on the supervision and administration of for-profit private schools.

According to a statement released after the meeting, measures to protect judicial staff while they perform their duties should be strictly enforced. No group or individual should be allowed to request judges or prosecutors do things outside their duties.

"Judges and prosecutors can only be transferred, dismissed or demoted in accordance with legal procedures and based on legal reasons, and acts obstructing judicial activities or harming judicial staff and their next of kin with violence will be severely punished," the statement said.

The statement stressed that the core for supply-side structural reform and the overall reform is innovation and their ultimate goal is to create a new economic growth mechanism, calling for reform measures to push forward the progress in cutting overcapacity, de-stocking, de-leveraging.

While highlighting reforms for state-owned enterprises and the fiscal and taxation system, the statement said reform in social aspects that can improve people's livelihoods must be concretely implemented, citing employment, education, income and health.

"Focusing on people's diversified demands, we should advance reforms that will demand less from the people and give more to them, so that we may improve people's livelihood and relieve their concerns," the statement said.
The returning capsule from SJ-10, China's first microgravity satellite, landed safely at 4:30 pm on Monday in Siziwang Banner, in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

The recoverable capsule of China's first microgravity satellite, SJ-10, landed safely on Earth on Monday, marking a step forward in the country's space science research.[Photo/Xinhua]

Resembling the shape of a bullet, the SJ-10 modules carried 19 experimental loads that sought to shed light on microgravity and bioscience. Eleven of the experimental loads were aboard the returning capsule following its 12 days in orbit. The other eight will remain in orbit for a few more days aboard SJ-10's orbital module.

"The returning capsule brought back nine bioscience experimental loads and two microgravity experimental loads," said Duan Enkui, deputy chief designer of scientific application systems on SJ-10 and a professor at the Institute of Zoology affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "So far, all the experiments are going well, and some have already produced surprising achievements."

On Sunday, Duan's team announced that high-resolution images sent back from the satellite enabled scientists to prove that early-stage mouse embryos could develop fully into blastocysts. It was the first time such an experiment had been successfully conducted.

"Embryonic development starts from a single-cell fertilized egg, which divides into two cells, four cells, eight cells, ... until it forms a blastocyst that can be implanted in the womb," he said.

"Now, we have proved that this important process of embryonic development is possible in a space environment. Maybe, next time, if we have a returning capsule that stays in orbit for three or four days, we will actually be able to transfer the blastocysts into females and see the birth of space mice."

The embryos completed the whole development process within four days of the launch, but the returning capsule had to spend 12 days carrying out other experiments before it could head back to Earth. So scientists used chemicals to fix the developed blastocysts so they could carry out further analysis after their recovery.

Scientists collected data from other experiments during the 12 days in orbit.

For example, they lit organic glass and polyethylene materials inside one of the experimental loads and received data and images related to the burning process.

The experiment is aimed at understanding the risk of fire on manned spacecraft.

According to Wang Shuangfeng, an assistant researcher from the Institute of Mechanics affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the person in charge of the burning experiment, the combustion process in the weightlessness environment of space is different to that on the ground.

"We have to figure out the fireproof properties of nonmetal materials so as to draw up usage standards and prevention protocols to ensure astronauts' safety," Wang said.

After the recovery of the returning capsule, more in-orbit experiments will be conducted, including larger scale combustion tests.

Hu Wenrui, the chief scientist for the SJ-10 project and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the recoverable capsule gives China an advantage in microgravity research.

"With the recoverable capsule, we can carry out some higher-risk experiments in the orbital module after we recover the experimental loads from the other experiments," Hu said.

Microgravity experiments are normally carried out in various space facilities, such as space stations, shuttles, research rockets and orbiting satellites.

So far, only China and Russia have launched recoverable satellites.

"Now, we are researching the possibility of producing reusable satellites, and I hope we can make some progress during the 13th Five-Year Plan," he said, referring to the 2016-20 blueprint.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday called for coordinated development of cyberspace security and informatization as well as breakthroughs in core Internet technology.

Xi, also head of the central Internet security and informatization leading group, made the remarks while presiding over a symposium on the topic.

Security is a prerequisite for Internet development, and development will also safeguard Internet security, Xi said.

Stressing a correct outlook on cybersecurity, Xi urged accelerated development of a system to protect key information infrastructure and ensure online security.

Internet defense capabilities should be enhanced, Xi said, adding that securing the online environment is a common responsibility for all of society and requires commitment from the government, enterprises, social organizations and all netizens.

He also called on the industry to achieve more breakthroughs in core Internet technology.

"More personnel, material and financial resources should be put toward research and development of core and strategically important technologies," the president said.

He called on entrepreneurs, scholars, scientists and technicians in the industry to work together toward the goal.

"New technology is the achievement of civilization and we will never resist its development as long as it helps improve productivity and the people's lives," Xi said.

The leading group's deputy heads Li Keqiang and Liu Yunshan also attended the symposium.
Rescue teams in Ecuador intensified efforts on Monday to rescue people and find bodies trapped in the rubble caused by Saturday night's 7.8-magnitude earthquake, which has left at least 413 people dead and 2,068 injured.

Image provided by Public News Agency of Ecuador and South America ANDES shows people organizing relief supplies to be transported to the affected areas by the earthquake in a collecion center installed at the Ministry of Economic and Social Inclusion (MIES, for its acronym in Spanish), in the city of Quito, Ecuador, on April 18, 2016.[Photo/Xinhua]

Two days after the devastating disaster, soldiers, firefighters and police units assisted rescue teams to find those still alive with help of trained dogs.

The epicenter of the earthquake, the strongest in the country since 1979, was located between the northern coastal provinces of Manabi and Esmeraldas.

Rescue efforts were primarily focused on the towns of Pedernales, Manta, Portoviejo and Tarqui, all in Manabi, where international rescue crews were needed to step up efforts.

The country's Security Minister, Cesar Navas, told the Ecuavisa TV station that living people were still being rescued in Manta, without giving a number.

"Rescue teams are working tirelessly to find people, we have not lost hope to find more alive," he said, adding that teams from Venezuela and Colombia had already arrived and that help from Peru, Chile, Mexico and other countries was on the way.

Rescuer Angel Moreira, head of the Manta firefighter department, told the press that four people had been found in recent hours, although one later died.

President Rafael Correa, who was visiting Portoviejo, Manabi's provincial capital, said that open-air shelters had been deployed to care for those having lost their houses.

"We are not far over 24 hours from the disaster, these people want to sleep outside," Correa told the press in Portoviejo.

Hundreds of people were currently sleeping outside in squares and streets, due to fears of more aftershocks in coastal areas.

Much of Manabi province was still without water and power.

"The problem is that many cables have fallen. This can be dangerous and we cannot provide energy everywhere. Water treatment plants are also without power, which means there is no water. We are facing a serious problem," Correa said.
Angola today announced a major push against the ivory trade, pledging to close one of the largest domestic ivory markets in the world and implement tougher border and screening controls.

The Southern African nation also promised to fulfill its commitments under the UN Environment Programme-hosted Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), including stepping up its efforts to implement its National Ivory Action Plan.

The tough new stance comes as Angola firms up plans to play global host to World Environment Day (WED) on June 5th. This years WED, organized by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), is themed on tackling the illegal trade in wildlife, and aims to mobilize global action around the issue.

Speaking at a meeting of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment in Cairo, Angolas Environment Minister Maria de Fatima Jardim said, The Commission Against Environmental Crimes has presented a decree banning the sale of ivory and ivory artifacts in Angola and we are deploying a wildlife crime unit at Luandas international airport. We are determined to end the trade in ivory and build a new Angola, in which both people and our unique species can thrive.

As a signal of its intent, Angola has also joined twelve other nations as a signatory to the Elephant Protection Initiative (EPI), which focuses on protecting African elephants through measures such as closing domestic markets. Angola aims to end all domestic trading in ivory, undertake a robust inventory of its stockpile and commit to its destruction before World Environment Day.

UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said, The illegal trade in wildlife destroys ecosystems and livelihoods, compromises rule of law and national security, and undermines sustainable development. In the last few years we have seen strong steps to combat this scourge, including the first UN resolution on wildlife trafficking. Angolas commitments are another milestone and send a powerful message to poachers, and the international criminal networks that back them, that they have no future.

Angola has already begun engaging with traders in Luandas Benfica market, where large amounts of carved ivory are on sale amidst stalls that also sell legal souvenirs to foreign visitors.

We have informed traders of our intention to halt ivory sales in Benfica market, but we must take care to ensure we do not drive the trade underground, making it more difficult to eradicate, said Abias Huongo, Director of the National Institute for Biodiversity and Conservation Areas.

In late 2015, Angola hosted the International Conference of the Africa Prosecutors Association. The resulting Cuando-Cubando Declaration calls for strengthened international cooperation within the framework of CITES. As part of this activity, under the World Environment Day platform, Angola will look to engage foreign businesses in making pledges to drive change.

African elephant populations continue to face a very real and immediate threat to their survival from unacceptably high levels of poaching for their ivory, including in Angola, said John E. Scanlon, CITES Secretary-General. We are pleased to see the progress being been made on the ground in implementing Angolas National Ivory Action Plan (NIAP).

Winning the fight against elephant poaching and the smuggling of ivory will depend upon the front line actions taken across range, transit and destination states, and we welcome the additional measures being taken by Angola to bring these highly destructive wildlife crimes to an end.

Little is known about the size of Angola's remaining elephant population, which historically lived in the southeast of the country. However, the results of recent surveys, due to be released in the coming months, are anticipated to confirm heavy population declines during Angolas decades-long civil war.

WEDthe single biggest day for positive action on the environment worldwideis this year themed around the illegal trade in wildlife to prompt further awareness and action to combat illegal trade in CITES-protected species.

The number of elephants killed in Africa has exceeded 20,000 a year out of a projected population of 420,000 to 650,000. But with reports that 100,000 elephants were killed in just a three-year period between 2010 and 2012, the population figures may now in fact be lower.

Figures released on World Wildlife Day (March 3rd) by CITES, based on its Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) programme, found that the most serious levels of poaching were recorded in Central and West Africa. Forest elephants in that region have declined by over 60 per cent in a decade.

A troubling upward trend in elephant poaching was, for the first time, observed in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, where populations were formerly thought to be securehighlighting that enforcement must be combined with global action on demand to ensure poaching is stamped out.

For rhinos, poaching has seen a steady increase in the last ten years. In South Africa alone, rhino poaching increased by about 9,000 per cent between 2007 and 2015. Last year, 1,175 rhinos were poached in the country  roughly one rhino every eight hours.

Other measures to reverse the trend include the African Elephant Action Plan, developed under CITES and implemented through the UNEP-hosted African Elephant Fund, and developing an Electronic Permits Information Exchange System to reduce the likelihood of corruption.

To find out more about World Environment Day, and pledge an activity, please visit web.unep.org/wed/
 Flash

People dressed as Uncle Sam and statue of Liberty for sale take part in a rally against Money Politics at the west lawn of Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., the United States, on April 17, 2016. [Xinhua/Yin Bogu]

More than 1,200 people have been arrested at the U.S. Capitol during eight-day protests against big money in politics, police said.

Protest organizers put the number at about 1,300, including some 300 detained on the Capitol's east front steps on Monday alone, the final day of the demonstrations attended by thousands of people from all over the United States.

Most of the arrested were charged with unlawful crowding and obstruction and released later on the scene, said the Capitol police, who had voiced three warnings before beginning to round protesters up.

Among them are actress Rosario Dawson and Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig, who ran for president for this cycle. They were briefly detained on Friday.

The protesters, chanting "money out, people in" among other slogans, denounced laws making it more difficult to vote and urged the U.S. Congress to pass legislation which would ensure all Americans have a fair voice in the poll.

Many of them held up signs protesting the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in the Citizens United case, which is believed to have opened the door for the rise of newer super PACs (political action committees).

Under the ruling, the super PACs can raise unlimited amounts from virtually any source and contributed to corporate influence in campaigns.

"Our democracy should be about big ideas, not big checks," said Dan Smith with U.S. Public Interest Research Group, one of the over 260 groups that supported the protests outside the Capitol Hill.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has also criticized that billions of dollars from the wealthiest people in America are already flooding the political process.

"The situation has become so absurd that super PACs, which theoretically operate independently of the actual candidates, have more money and more influence over campaigns than the candidates themselves," said Sanders in the campaign.

A report from the New York Times last October said half of the then 176 million dollars raised by presidential candidates came from 158 U.S. families, noting that such a degree of concentration has never been seen since the 1970s.

A 2014 Princeton University study indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

As Americans' worries about big money in politics have intensified, analysts warn that the growing influence of big money in the elections will not only erode democracy, but also worsen social disparity.
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Banners are seen in front of the Capitol during a rally against Money Politics in Washington D.C., the United States, on April 17, 2016. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

The power of money in politics, a lingering grave concern in U.S. presidential elections, has triggered a dramatic turn of events during the weekend as protesters took to the streets to voice their anger.

Public fury was apparent when actor and director George Clooney and his wife Amal hosted a stellar fundraiser Saturday evening in support of Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton in Los Angeles, California. Tickets to the event, which was attended by about 150 supporters, started at 33,400 U.S. dollars.

Just outside the venue of the event, supporters of Clinton's Democratic nomination rival Bernie Sanders lined the street. Once Clinton's motorcade arrived, they held high slogans that read "Feel the Bern! Only $27."

Sanders has bought time to run an ad spot called "$27" on Los Angeles stations to contrast the average contribution to his campaign to that of some high-dollar events for Clinton.

Some Sanders supporters held signs that read "Goldman Sach's loves Hillary," in reference to a top investment bank, and some showered dollar notes on the motorcade of Clinton in an apparent jibe.

Clinton has set a target of raising 2.5 billion dollars for her presidential campaign. The two fundraisers hosted by Clooney, on Friday and Saturday respectively, have put in at least 15 million U.S. dollars for her, according to local media estimates.

Back in 2012, a fundraiser hosted by Clooney for Barack Obama with even more expensive tickets raised roughly the same amount.

"A lot of democrats are concerned about campaign finance, and she's slapping them in the face by continuing to hold these overpriced star-studded fundraisers," said a netizen who goes by the name "Poodle."

In a surprising turn of events, Clooney "broke ranks" over campaign financing by condemning the big sum of money in the presidential election.

"We had some protestors last night when we pulled up in San Francisco and they're right to protest. They are absolutely right. It is an obscene amount of money," he said in excerpts of an interview with NBC News.

"It's ridiculous that we should have this kind of money in politics. I agree completely," he said in the interview to be aired on Sunday.

Sanders has the support of many who described themselves as among the "99 percent," a reference to the belief that the country is run by only the 1 percent at the top, and sang songs like "This Land is Your Land."

Ironically, while taking a jibe at Clinton's zooming success with the super rich and star donors, Sanders has the support of a long list of stars, too, and is not very far behind Clinton thanks to crowd-funding. His campaign has asked donors to each contribute small amounts.

Most of the money has not gone directly into the campaigns, but into outside groups like super PACs (political action committees), or political fundraising organizations allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals and corporations. Third-party advertising and communication are common tactics used to work-around rules on political donation.

Nationwide protest

Ordinary voters are increasingly frustrated as the presidential elections have turned into a game of the rich and widened the social divide, sparking a week-long protest in Washington and nationwide demonstrations on Friday.

In Washington, police arrested 142 members of a liberal group called Democracy Spring denouncing the influence of special interests in politics.

Public anger went beyond the streets.

"Money is controlling politics and standing in our way," said the website of www.represent.us, a U.S. movement that has been in the spotlight recently as an increasing number of angry voters protested the influence of big money in politics. The website simply called such practices "corruption."

"Hillary is part of the elite on the Democratic side, and is no different from the elite on the Republican side. The problem with this attitude is you feel obligated to these donors because of their money," an Internet user commented on the website of ABC News.

There are good reasons to be worried. Studies in the past have confirmed a correlation between the fundraising ability of candidates and their chances of success in elections in the United States.

Another reason for the public to be worried is that the donations to the presidential hopefuls have been seen as political investments with good returns. Lobbyist groups have allowed the donors to wield huge influence over policy-making directly or indirectly.

Clinton has raised 33 million dollars in the first quarter of this year, including 1.5 million from lobbyists who have represented such corporate giants as Wal-Mart, oil firms BP and ExxonMobil, according to figures and declaration forms released on Friday.

Presidential hopeful Sanders has even called for overturning Citizen United, a 2010 Supreme Court decision that removed restrictions on unlimited outside spending in presidential contests.

However, the candidates running for the White House obviously can not afford cutting their fundraising activities.

Observers say that as much as the candidates decry money in politics, they are also pragmatic and do not want to cede the money race to their competitors.
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Embattled Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said on Monday she was "indignant" at the "betrayal" against her and vowed to continue her fight against impeachment.

Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff reacts during a news conference at Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, April 18, 2016. [Photo/China Daily]

In her first speech since losing an impeachment vote in the Chamber of Deputies or the lower house of parliament, Rousseff said: "This is not the beginning of the end. We are beginning a long fight."

"They are torturing my dreams and my rights but they cannot hope to see me off, because democracy is always on the right side of history," she said in the speech delivered live on television,.

"This fight will not just be for my mandate. I will also fight for the 54 million votes I received," she vowed.

"This is a fight by all Brazilians for democracy. Without democracy, there will be no economic growth, there will be no job creation, social programs will not be maintained," she added.

The head of state blasted the lower house for treating her differently from previous presidents for so-called "fiscal irregularities."

Rousseff's opponents said she delayed payments to state banks to artificially improve the appearance of public accounts during her 2014 re-election campaign.

"This was done by other presidents before me and these were never called illegal or criminal acts," Rousseff said.

Rousseff was particularly scathing Vice President Michel Temer from the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) which quit the ruling coalition on March 29, saying it was "startling" that a vice president would actively conspire against a sitting president.

Rousseff also confirmed that she had instructed the attorney general to question the validity of the impeachment process at the Supreme Court while she is also preparing her potential defense in the Senate.

"We will use every instrument to exercise our right to defense," she said.

Rousseff did not rule out the possibility of asking the Congress to bring forward presidential elections, currently set for 2018, to later this year.

On Sunday, the Chamber of Deputies voted 367-146 to endorse impeachment against Rousseff, passing the matter to the Senate.

Should the Senate decide within 24 days to begin an impeachment trial, Rousseff will have to step aside for 180 days for the trial to proceed. Vice President Temer will then take over as interim president.
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Libya's parliament on Monday failed to hold a session to vote on granting approval to the UN-backed government of national accord.

Monday's session was supposed to discuss granting confidence to the government and amendment to the constitutional declaration. Parliament Speaker, Agila Saleh, held a long closed-door meeting with his two deputies, as the rest of the members waited for the session to begin, media reports said.

Several media reports also said that there was tension in the session. However, head of the parliament's media department denied. Also, a spokesman for the parliament refuted reports circulating around about the postponement of Monday's session to next Monday.

No official statement was issued regarding a new date for the voting session.

The appointment of the government of national accord was based on a UN-sponsored peace agreement signed by Libya's political rivals in order to end the country's political division.

Martin Kopler, UN Special Envoy to Libya, said on Sunday he would meet with the Speaker of the parliament in order "to encourage all to follow this way, to endorse the Government of National Accord."
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An Afghan security vehicle patrols at the attack site as the gunfight is still underway in Kabul, April 19, 2016. At least 40 people were wounded after a deadly blast and ensuing gunfight rocked near the Afghan presidential palace on Tuesday, a health official told Xinhua. (Xinhua/Jawid Omid)

Death toll has risen to 28 while 327 others wounded in Kabul deadly bombing, officials said on Tuesday.

"The latest information says that 28 people were killed by Tuesday's terrorist attack in Kabul," Kabul Police Chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi told reporters near the site.

The powerful suicide car bombing and ensuing gun firing took place at 08:50 a.m. local time (04:20 GMT) in Pul-e-Mahmood Khan locality next to Presidential Palace and Defense Ministry compound.

"The obvious target of the attack was a compound jointly running by a sub office of National Directorate of Security (NDS) or intelligence agency and Government VIP Protection Directorate of Presidential Palace," a security source told Xinhua anonymously.

The building is in the area where a big mosque, Kabul sport stadium and several government office buildings are located, he said.

"As of 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, seven killed and 327 injured were admitted to Public Health Ministry hospitals," the ministry said in a statement, adding that the number of casualties may further go up.

The blast also destroyed several buildings around the site. It shattered windows of dozens of buildings and smashed the glasses of the buildings at the nearby business district.

Dozens of the injured who sustained injuries by shrapnel and flying glasses remained in critical conditions, according to the health officials.

The Taliban militant group has claimed responsibility for the blast shortly after the attack.

Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah strongly condemned the attack.
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China on Tuesday blasted Japan over its claims that a new collection of documents "proved" its sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying made the remarks in response to recent reports covering the claim by the Japanese government that it had collected 750 pieces of documents showing the Diaoyu Islands were an integral part of Japan's territory.

"Although Japan tried its utmost to find some supportive documents, which were taken out of context, it can never change the fact that China has sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands," Hua said.

Hua stressed that the Diaoyu Island and affiliated islets are part of China's inherent territory, a fact supported by historical and jurisprudential evidence.

Prior to the first Sino-Japanese War, maps by Western countries widely described the Diaoyu Islands as belonging to China, she said.

Japan colonized Taiwan and its affiliated islands, including the Diaoyu Islands, after the Sino-Japanese war in 1894, and the Diaoyu Islands were given back to China following international legal instruments after the World War II, Hua said.
Ding Cuimei suffocated after being

buried alive. (Photo: China Aid)

China Aid

Reported in Chinese by Qiao Nong. Translated by Carolyn Song. Written in English by Brynne Lawrence.

(Zhumadian, HenanApril 18, 2016) Two members of a church demolition team in Chinas central Henan province buried a house church leader and his wife alive on Thursday when they tried to prevent the destruction of their church. Though the church leader managed to escape, the wife had suffocated to death by the time she was freed.

On April 14, a government-backed company dispatched personnel to bulldoze Beitou Church in Zhumadian, Henan province, after a local developer wished to take control of the churchs valuable property. Li Jiangong, the person in charge of the church, and his wife, Ding Cuimei, stepped in front of the machinery in an attempt to stop the demolition.

Bury them alive for me, a member of the demolition team said. I will be responsible for their lives.

Subsequently, a bulldozer shoved Li and Ding into a pit and covered their bodies with soil. Crying for help, Li was able to dig his way free, but Ding suffocated before she could be rescued.

On April 17, a China Aid reporter conducted a phone interview with an officer from the local police station, who stated that the two perpetrators from the demolition team are currently criminally detained while a criminal investigation team from the public security bureau reviews their case. The officer refused to disclose their alleged crimes.

According to local Christians, the various government departments managing the area did not show up to oversee the demolition. Li himself reported that police took an uncommonly long time to arrive at the scene after a report of the murder was filed.

Bulldozing and burying alive Ding Cuimei, a peaceful and devout Christian woman, was a cruel, murderous act, China Aid president Bob Fu said. This case is a serious violation of the rights to life, religious freedom and rule of law. The Chinese authorities should immediately hold those murderers accountable and take concrete measures to protect the religious freedom of this house churchs members.

Because of widespread media attention, government personnel are already pressuring Li not to disclose the details of the case. Meanwhile, Li is urging the justice system to examine the motive and circumstances behind his wifes murder.

A video showing the extent of the demolition can be seen below.





China Aid exposes abuses, such as those experienced by Li Jiangong and Ding Cuimei, in order to promote religious freedom and rule of law in China.

China Aid Contacts

Rachel Ritchie, English Media Director

Cell: (432) 553-1080 | Office: 1+ (888) 889-7757 | Other: (432) 689-6985

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.chinaaid.org
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A Chinese netizen browses the website of xinhuanet.com of Xinhua News Agency in Tianjin, China, June 26 2014.[Photo/IC]

Nearly three years after it first submitted an application for an initial public offering, media giant Xinhua Net Co Ltd is close to realizing its plan for the IPO in the A-share market to raise 1.5 billion yuan ($231.6 million).

According to a statement from the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the agency will review the company's application on April 20. If the review goes well, Xinhua Net will receive the greenlight for the IPO.

According to its preliminary prospectus, the company will issue 51.9 million shares to raise 1.5 billion yuan for setting up an information service cloud platform, mobile internet operating system, big-data analysis program and online education. Its lead underwriter is China International Capital Corp Ltd.

Zhai Changxin, vice-president of China Cultural Industrial Investment Fund, said the IPO is significant in the media industry.

"We look good on Xinhua Net's development because it is an influential official media website in China backed by Xinhua News Agency and has accumulated a huge number of users," said Zhai. "It also pays attention to business innovation, which gives investors a lot of expectation."

Xinhua News Agency, which holds 82.5 percent shares of Xinhua Net, is China's official news agency and employs more than 6,000 journalists worldwide. Xinhua Net is the main publishing platform of the Xinhua News Agency.

According to Zhai, it's also a good time for Xinhua Net to go public because China's economy is turning good and the registration-based IPO system is not likely to be carried out this year.

"I believe Xinhua Net will be popular in the Chinese capital market," said Zhai.

Market competition and profit models can be challenges for media companies including Xinhua Net, said a senior analyst specializing in technology, media and telecom sectors at a leading Chinese fund management company who declined to be named.

"Internet companies' profit models can change quickly along with users' demand, so Xinhua Net should always understand the market trend and meet users' demand," he said.

After People.cn Co Ltd went public in 2012, Xinhua Net submitted an IPO application to the CSRC in 2013. The following year, the regulator suspended IPOs as it cracked down on fraud and misconduct among advisers. Xinhua Net then reapplied in 2014.

The closing price of People.cn on Monday was 18.64 yuan per share, up 5.25 percent compared with Friday's closing.

The revenue of People.cn in 2015 totaled 1.6 billion yuan, increasing 1.3 percent year-on-year. Its net profit totaled 274 million yuan, down 17 percent year-on-year.

The advertisement revenue of People.cn totaled 727 million yuan last year, increasing 27.2 percent year-on-year.
Two foreign visitors to the ongoing China Import and Export Fair, held in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, look at electronics on display. LIN GUIYAN / FOR CHINA DAILY

Chinese-made products on display at the Canton Fair are taking on a new and trendy image thanks to the introduction of cutting-edge technologies such as virtual reality.

One of the most crowded stands at the consumer electronics and information products pavilion displays two gaming machines, which are said to use "9-D virtual-reality" technology.

The stand has had a constant stream of visitors every day since the first phase of the fairofficially known as the China Import and Export Fairkicked off on Friday in Guangzhou, Guangdong province.

Visitors can enjoy the thrilling experience of riding a rollercoaster and firing a rifle on a battlefield, wearing a VR headset, standing on a moving pad and holding a toy rifle.

Liang Xingmei, a sales manager of game machines' maker, Guangzhou Zhuoyuan Machinery Co, said that the number of orders her company has received at the Canton Fair this year has increased at least 30 percent compared with the previous session of the fair in October.

The company was founded as a manufacturer of hydraulic systems 16 years ago and entered the multi-dimensional gaming business around 2009, and released virtual-reality simulators last year.

It displayed its VR simulators at the fair for the first time during the autumn session last year and expected a greater boom in transactions this year.

"We are one of the few Chinese companies that can make a full set of VR simulators rather than offering a headset only," Liang said.

"Virtual reality is the hottest technology in consumer electronics and the Canton Fair needs such new products to maintain its appeal to overseas buyers," Liang said.

Malik Imran, marketing director of Imar International, a trading company based in Pakistan, has attended the Canton Fair for five consecutive years and said that he is excited to see "something new".

"I came to the fair looking for machinery products but found the VR simulators quite attractive. I think they will have a market in Dubai," Imran said, adding that he would visit the company's factory in Guangzhou's Panyu district for further negotiations on the deals.

"The fair may lose its appeal if it just plays the card of competitive prices and doesn't offer something new," he said.

Organizers of the Canton Fair have been stepping up their efforts in recent years to explore new fields such as new energy, pet goods and outdoor spa facilities.

Wu Maorong, a salesperson from Shenzhen SAMTECH Co Ltd, agreed that it is important for Chinese manufacturers to keep up with the latest trends in the international market and make good use of the Canton Fair to promote their products.

The stand of Wu's company also has VR headsets on display and has attracted many visitors from Europe, the United States, South America and Southeast Asian countries, Wu said.
A worker fills up a car with fuel at a gas station in Huaibei city, East China's Anhui province, Sept 2, 2015. Xie Zhengyi / for China Daily

Asia's largest refiner China Petroleum & Chemical Corp, known as Sinopec, is pushing big into a market-oriented transformation with the launch of the country's largest online industrial supply system on Monday, teaming up with e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

It is the latest in a string of moves by State-owned enterprises to diversify their business and enhance profitability.

The online industrial product systemwww.epec.comused to be Sinopec's internal procurement platform, but the company decided to open up its access to the public as part of a restructuring amid weak oil prices.

Alibaba provides services to Sinopec in terms of internet safety, big data and technology upgrading.

Wang Yubing, president of Sinopec's procurement division, said the company plans to build the platform into an industrial version of Taobao.com, the country's largest online shopping marketplace, owned by Alibaba.

"The market value of online retail business rose to about 3 trillion yuan ($463 billion), but the market potential for online sales of industrial products is much larger than that," he said in Beijing, expecting the transaction value on the platform to reach 500 billion yuan.

Currently, 90 percent of the transaction of the platform came from Sinopec, but Wang said more companies will join the purchasing system since it will reduce their sourcing budget and increase the efficiency.

"This platform will benefit not only large industrial enterprises but also those small and medium-sized companies through sharing our resources in suppliers and experience in supply chain management, because it will optimize their sourcing process and reduce the procurement cost," said Jiao Fangzheng, Sinopec's deputy general manager.

The platform provides a huge array of products from more than 60 industries, including coal, steel, petrochemical and oil equipment, the company said.

Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, said that it is a great attempt, but it may take quite a long time to make the platform a real success.

"All the talk about the reform and transformation is good, but the bottom line is driven by domestic demand," he said.

He said compared with the online retailing business, which faces end users, price is more transparent for online industrial sales, making less of a difference for companies to source online and offline.

"All the kinds of industrial companies are facing the same kind of problemweak demand and slowing economy, if that doesn't change, I don't see how the online industrial sales will surge," he added.

Sinopec is not the only company that tries to restructure the marketing business. In March, China National Petroleum Corp signed a strategic agreement with Alibaba on online payment and on sharing user information.
High rise residential flats are under construction in the southern city of Shenzhen, September 11, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

BEIJING - China's land costs continued climbing in the first quarter with prices in top-tier cities surging the most amid a heating up property market.

Prices of land for residential use jumped 1.27 percent during January-March from the previous quarter, while prices of land for industrial development increased 0.73 percent, according to the Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR).

In general, land prices increased 0.96 percent, 0.22 percentage points higher than those recorded in the previous quarter.

Zhao Song, director of the land price division of the China Land Surveying and Planning Institute of the MLR, said top-tier cities led the increase, with residential land costs surging rapidly.

Second-tier cities followed suit, and third-tier cities have seen prices stabilizing, he noted.

Latest home price data suggested an uneven recovery in China's housing market, with prices in first-tier cities such as Shenzhen and Beijing soaring while those in some smaller cities are still under pressure.

Zhao Song said the frenzied market in the top-tier cities have sped up the land price increase in other parts of the country.

To cool down the sizzling property market, a number of local municipal governments have released tightening measures including raising the down payment requirement and putting stricter lines on obtaining mortgages.
A train pulls into a station in Luoyang city, Henan province, June 30, 2015. [Photo / IC]

China Railway Corp Group, the country's railway service provider, which is fighting a dramatic slump in profits, plans to build a number of rail logistics centers in Anhui and Shandong provinces to support transportation of household appliances and diversify its business.

The new logistics centers are expected to be established in the home appliances-producing areas such as Hefei and Wuhu in Anhui, after CRC clinched a deal with Qingdao-based home appliances maker Haier Group, according to CRC.

Under the deal, CRC will provide designated freight trains and tailored multi-modal logistics services for Haier to help the company with domestic and international rail deliveries.

The railway giant is also in talks with Hisense Group, another Qingdao-based home appliances manufacturer.

CRC reported that its sales totaled 657.77 billion yuan ($101.49 billion) between January and September last year, with its profit in the period down 174.11 percent year-on-year. The company said its losses were mainly caused by fast-growing road transportation and an overall decline in rail goods transportation.

"In the past, we mainly transported our products by road, but through cooperation with CRC, we will connect road and railway transportation as a whole, and provide consumers with integrated delivery services," said Zhou Yunjie, rotating president of Haier.

Zhou added Haier hopes to analyze how to provide better logistics service with CRC, including computerization of transportation and warehouse management, as well as mechanization.

The cooperation goes further than mere collaboration between transport and manufacturing enterprises, but focuses on the users' experience, according to Haier.

Zhang Yanbin, assistant director of All View Cloud, a Beijing-based consultancy specializing in home appliances, said: "Haier could reduce its logistics costs and transport its goods to destinations more quickly by virtue of CRC's transportation advantages."

Zhao Jian, a professor of rail logistics at Beijing Jiaotong University, said CRC's move was to a certain extent forced by financial losses in the past few years, as well as by efforts to reform State-owned enterprises to ensure stable growth in a slowing economy.

Eager to enhance their earning abilities, China National Petroleum Corp and China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corp signed a partnership agreement last month to strengthen sales cooperation.

Under the deal, the two companies will cooperate closely in products, marketing, membership communication and public welfare as well as in a new business based on the principle of mutually beneficial resource-sharing.

Xiao Yaqing, head of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, said that SOEs should face the pressures of a slowing economy and find new ways of generating profit. "Reforms of SOEs will mainly be pushed forward through diversified business development, mergers and acquisitions, instead of bankruptcies, and protecting the interests of employees will be a major task in the next step of reform," he said.

China Merchants Group, a State-owned conglomerate based in Hong Kong, acquired Sinotrans & CSC Holdings Co, the nation's second-largest shipping company by fleet size last month, in a bid to optimize shipping and logistics resources, as well as enhancing the country's energy security.
Guests watch as fireworks explode over Sleeping Beauty Castle at Hong Kong Disneyland during the 10th anniversary ceremony in Hong Kong, China, September 11, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

The Hong Kong Disneyland has laid off some of its employees following reports it has been losing money due to declining tourist arrivals.

Oriental Daily on Friday cited a tipoff from an employee of the theme park's food and beverage division, saying about 100 people had been laid off by the park, 20 of them from the division.

The report said that the mass layoffs involved management and support personnel from different divisions, including catering, hotels and attractions.

A spokesperson for the theme park told China Daily that the layoffs were a result of merging various job positions to make the park more efficient.

"We regularly make operational adjustments to ensure we deliver great guest and cast experiences in the most efficient way possible in order to pave the way for future development," she said.

But she refused to disclose how many people have consented to the dismissal by agreement, only stressing that it was less than 100 people as reported by the media.

It was reported that some of those being dismissed have served the park for more than 10 years and were informed on the morning of Friday. They were reportedly told to leave immediately after signing a confidentiality agreement that guaranteed 10 months' salary as a severance package.

The spokesperson confirmed that a few of those who were dismissed had worked for the park for more than 10 years, while a few of them were in high-ranking management.

Refusing to call it a massive layoff, she said that it was not a large number of people when viewed in the context of the roughly 5,000 employees the park hired.

In March, Disneyland's former managing director Andrew Kam stepped down after the park recorded a HK$148 million ($19 million) net loss in 2015. The loss was attributed to the drastic drop of 20 percent in the city's total mainland arrivals, who make up some 40 percent of the park's visitors. The impending opening of the new Disneyland in Shanghai might also have contributed to the drop in visitors.

Kam, who assumed the post in 2008 when the park recorded a deficit of up to HK$1 billion, had led the park in turning that deficit into gains in only two years. The park notched up a HK$242 million net profit in 2013.
BEIJING - New Zealand Prime Minister John Key on Monday expressed optimism about China's economic transition, saying the growth of the Chinese economy is still very considerable.

The Chinese leadership has many options to guide the world's second largest economy through its transition. said Key, who is on an official visit to China.

Still going strong

"China's economy has been growing rapidly for 20 to 30 years, but on a much smaller base," Key said during a conversation with Chinese entrepreneurs in Beijing, noting that although growth rate has slowed, it is "on a much, much higher base, so the economic growth each year is still very considerable."

According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, the Chinese economy grew 6.7 percent year on year in the first quarter, narrowing from the previous quarter's 6.8 percent, but in line with market expectations and remained within the government's targeted range of between 6.5 and 7 percent for 2016.

"I think what you've seen in the Chinese economy," said Key, is "the transition and the make-up of the economy from much export-oriented to much more import, services-based economy."

He added that he believed the Chinese banking system, which is facing some stress, is still strong and robust.

According to the Chinese government, services sector has expanded to 56.9 percent of the Chinese economy.

Key is upbeat about China's transition from a "heavy industrialized, manufacturing base" to a "far more knowledge-based, services-based economy, where it's more based on internal consumption."

He believed that the Chinese leadership has at its disposal a wide range of options to allow the economy to transition through the change.

"You need just give it some time," said Key.

Key made the remarks during a luncheon hosted by China Entrepreneur Club with Chinese business leaders, including Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi, and some 70 others.

A very long-term player

Key, who has brought a 40-person business delegation with him with an eye to further tapping into the Chinese market, said New Zealand is interested in becoming a "very long-term player in China."

"Since the signing of the free trade agreement between New Zealand and China in 2008, the commercial activities between our two countries are going from strength to strength," said Key, adding that New Zealand has sold a great deal of food and base products to China, and is increasingly more active in the services sector.

According to New Zealand press reports, exports of goods to China account for 15 percent of New Zealand's total exports of goods. More than a fifth of all the country's dairy export dollars earned are from China. Growth in goods exports to China also accounted for more than 50 percent of the growth in New Zealand's total exports in 2007-2012.

Jiang Sheng, general manager of Sino-Europe project at Zhisland, a networking site for business leaders affiliated with China Entrepreneur Club, which hosted the prime minister, commented that the New Zealand side is not only eyeing the Chinese market, but is also interested in investment opportunities and bringing Chinese investment to New Zealand.

"There are enormous opportunities in each others' market for foreign direct investment. We have seen China growing rapidly as an investor in a great many sectors in New Zealand," said Key.

The prime minister is also excited about how China's online retail platforms are bringing products into households across the China, saying "when we look at platforms like Alibaba, it represents the ultimate opportunity to bring products and services from New Zealand directly to a platforms of consumers here in China."

27 tons of honey and 50,000 oysters

The urge to promote trade and cooperation is by no means one-way. In a Q&A session with the prime minister, Alibaba founder Jack Ma said New Zealand products are enjoying huge success in China, and in one week of promotion last year, Tmall, an online retail platform of Alibaba, sold over 27 tons of honey and 50,000 oysters, 72 hours from ocean to plate, directly from New Zealand.

"My family has bought a lot of oysters and scampis" from New Zealand, Ma told reporters about what he has bought.

"New Zealand is a very unique country," Ma said in a keynote speech at the luncheon, noting that he is enthusiastic not only about bringing healthy New Zealand food products to China, but also trying to bring the country's environment protection technology and ideas to China.

"Chinese people buy products from New Zealand. They are actually buying fresh air, water and soil from there, and share its wholesomeness," said Ma.

After the luncheon, Alibaba signed an MoU with the New Zealand side to deepen bilateral cooperation.
NAIROBI - Kenya will extend its tourism marketing reach in China to woo more visitors, the country's tourism agency said Monday.

Kenya Tourism Board (KTB) acting CEO, Jacinta Nzioka-Mbithi, told Xinhua that their previous marketing efforts had been concentrated in the Chinese capital Beijing.

But now they are targeting more Chinese cities.

"We will soon roll out a program to target the second-tier cities that are not well familiar with Kenya as a tourism destination," Nzioka-Mbithi said.

According to the KTB, around 29,000 Chinese tourists visited Kenya in 2015, down from 33,000 the previous year.

The decline was attributed to the outbreak of Ebola epidemic in West Africa, which affected Kenya's overall international arrivals.

"However the decline of Chinese tourists was less when compared to key source markets of the US and Europe," Nzioka-Mbithi said.

She put the number of Chinese tourists expected to visit Kenya this year at more than 35,000, as the country has seen an increase in tourists so far this year.

"The tourists arrivals for the first three months of the year have improved by an average of 18 percent compared to last year."

The official also noted the high spending from Chinese tourists in Kenya.

"We are educating our tourism sector on how to develop products that cater for the Chinese tourists," she said.

In 2011, Kenya attracted 1.8 million tourists, the highest in history, while last year it drew 1.2 million.

The Kenyan government has been trying to revive the tourism industry after terror attacks staged by Somalia-based Al-Shabaab militants in recent years kept visitors away.

"The government has invested heavily in security and so we are optimistic that the tourism sector will recover," Nzioka-Mbithi said.
BEIJING - China said it hopes India can strictly follow the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules on its anti-dumping investigation into Chinese iron and steel exports on Monday.

An official with the Ministry of Commerce said in an online notice that China always advocates prudent, restrained and lawful measures in employing trade remedy instruments.

Steel overcapacity is a worldwide problem which requires joint effort from all countries, the official said. Trade protection measures could not solve the problem and will hinder normal international trade orders.

Since mid-April, India has successively conducted anti-dumping investigations against Chinese steel imports including hot-rolled steel coils and stainless steel plates.

China always encourages its steel companies to tackle trade problems through cooperation with overseas competitors, the official said.
CAIRO - The number of Chinese tourists in Egypt is growing steadily and rapidly, Samy Mahmoud, head of Egypt's General Authority for Tourism Promotion told Xinhua.

"In 2014 we had almost 64,000 Chinese tourists, but by the end of 2015 we had over 125,000 visitors from China," Mahmoud said in an interview with Xinhua.

The official expected that the number will rise to 200,000 in 2016 as almost 15 regular and charter flights come to Cairo, Luxor and Hurghada per week.

Mahmoud revealed that his authority contacted the Chinese ambassador to Cairo and asked him to work on allowing Chinese airlines work in Egypt, adding "it will be a great chance to the Chinese airlines to work in the Egyptian market."

He said that most of Chinese tourists go to classic areas such as the Giza pyramids, the Egyptian Museum and Upper Egypt's ancient temples.

The official said there are many travel agencies in Egypt working with the Chinese tourism operators, adding there are many offers for Chinese tourists, especially after the charter flights started.

"I can say that one week costs around $700, and I think such a price is good for Chinese people," he said.

Tourism in Egypt was dealt a heavy blow following the Russian airplane crash in North Sinai in October, after which several countries, including Britain and Russia, suspended their flights to Egypt.

The North African country is striving to revive the ailing tourism industry. However, anti-government terror attacks by Islamist militants have led many countries to warn their residents of traveling to Egypt.

Since the 2011 uprising that toppled former long-time leader Hosni Mubarak, Egypt has descended into political, economic and social chaos, causing recession to its tourism industry, one of the main sources of the country's national income and foreign currency reserves.

Meanwhile, the official said the visit of the Chinese President Xi Jinping to Egypt in general and to Luxor in particular "sent a positive message to our friends in China," he said.

"Egypt is safe and everything is under control. This encourages Chinese to visit Egypt," the official added.

He also expected that tourism will partly recover as of October this year and the industry will revive again by 2017.

Mahmoud said the government is working hard these days to breathe life into the ailing tourism industry through promotional campaigns inside and outside Egypt.

"We have launched a campaign to promote tourism in 14 European and Arab countries," he said, adding "we have also commenced an initiative to promote domestic tourism."

He revealed that the Arab market is very promising as the number of Arab tourists in Egypt has increased in January and February this year.

"There is a 45 percent increase compared to the same period last year," he indicated.

Although many European countries stopped tourist flocks into Egypt recently, he said, there are some European countries that have started sending tourists to Egypt.

"The numbers of tourists from Ukraine and Poland are convincing good so far. We have also started to attract tourists from India and Japan," Mahmoud said.

The peak of tourism in Egypt was in 2010, he stated, as 14.7 million tourists visited the county, providing revenues of nearly $12.5 billion.

"But after the revolutions in 2011 and 2013, numbers of tourists have started to reduce. By the end of 2015, the number of tourists stood at 12.2 millions providing around $6.2 billion," he said.

As part of reviving and maintaining the tourism industry in the country, Mahmoud believes that sources of tourism should be diversified.

"We have relied for a long period of time on four or five markets that brought about 70 to 75 percent of tourists. But after the crash of the Russian airplane, most of these countries banned their citizens from visiting Egypt, causing huge losses to us," he explained.

He said his target this year is to attract nine million tourists, adding the government's target plan is to attract 20 million tourists by 2020.

"I expect the revenues in 2020 will be around $25 billion. I hope that the current good security situation in the tourist areas would be a message that Egypt is safe," he said.

"My message to everyone is that Egyptian airports are well secured, tourist areas are highly safe," he concluded.
A Thai customs official holds handbags with fake brand names at Thai Customs headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand, Jan 16, 2015.[Photo/Xinhua]

PARIS - Imports of counterfeit and pirated goods are worth nearly half a trillion dollars a year, or around 2.5 percent of global imports, with US, Italian and French brands the hardest hit and many of the proceeds going to organized crime, according to a new report published Monday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the EU's Intellectual Property Office.

The report puts the value of imported fake goods worldwide at $461 billion in 2013, compared with total imports in world trade of $17.9 trillion.

In a previous 2008 OECD study, fake goods accounted for up to 1.9 percent of global imports.

"The findings of this new report contradict the image that counterfeiters only hurt big companies and luxury goods manufacturers. They take advantage of our trust in trademarks and brand names to undermine economies and endanger lives," said OECD Deputy Secretary-General Doug Frantz, launching the report with EUIPO executive director Antonio Campinos.

Fake products crop up in everything from handbags and perfumes to machine parts and chemicals. Footwear is the most-copied item though trademarks are infringed even on strawberries and bananas. Counterfeiting also produces knockoffs that endanger lives -- auto parts that fail, pharmaceuticals that make people sick, toys that harm children, baby formula that provides no nourishment and medical instruments that deliver false readings.

The top countries whose companies had their intellectual property rights infringed in the 2011-13 seizures were the United States, whose brands or patents were affected by 20 percent of the knock-offs, then Italy with 15 percent, and France and Switzerland with 12 percent each. Japan and Germany stood at 8 percent each while China was affected by 1 percent.

Postal parcels are the top method of shipping bogus goods, accounting for 62 percent of seizures over 2011-13, reflecting the growing importance of online commerce in international trade.
The cultural trade section of the fourth China Beijing International Fair for Trade in Services, to be held from May 28 to June 1, will promote international cultural cooperation and financing, the organizer said.

At a recent news conference in Beijing, the organizer said the cultural trade section will include a finance meeting, exhibitions and forums.

Foreign and domestic financial institutions, including French bank BNP Paribas and Bank of China, have been invited to help major cultural projects receive financing. Many trade promotion organizations were also invited, they said.

At the fair's cultural services trade section, the second international cultural trade forum, slated for May 29, will gather government officials, experts and scholars to discuss national policies on foreign cultural trade. Companies will also share their experiences in exports and creating cultural products.

The international exhibition area will include a display of Hungarian folk costumes and present cultural shows from Australia, Brazil and Russia.

The China Beijing International Fair for Trade in Services covers 12 service fields, such as culture and sports, communications, construction, tourism and education.
Yu Yong, president of China's HeSteel Group (HBIS), and Serbian Economy Minister Zeljko Sertic show the contract after the signing ceremony in Smederevo, Serbia, April 18, 2016. Under the contract, HBIS will buy the Smederevo Steel Mill of Serbia at 46 million euros. [Photo/Xinhua]

SMEDEREVO, Serbia - The contract for the sale of Serbia's sole steel mill was signed between representatives of Serbian government and Chinese HeSteel Group (HBIS) at a ceremony in the city of Smederevo on Monday.

The deal worth 46 million euros was concluded here between HBIS President Yu Yong and Serbian economy minister Zeljko Sertic in the presence of Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, diplomats from the Chinese embassy to Serbia, representatives of HBIS and thousands of workers of the steel mill.

Yu Yong said after the signing that HeSteel Group's planned investments in the next five years will turn the factory in Smederevo into one of the most competitive in Europe.

"HBIS is certain that it can employ all of the current workers in the new factory," he said, promising technical improvements and market expansion.

"We are confident that we will turn the steel mill in Smederevo in a modern complex, with advanced technology, equipment, raised level of environmental protection and good working conditions. Our aim will be to turn Smederevo into one of the most competitive steel mills in Europe," Yu said.

Smederevo steel mill was founded in 1913, and after it went bankrupt in 2003, it was sold to US Steel for the price of $23 million. Serbia became the owner of the steel mill once again in 2012 when the investor from the United States withdrew and the country bought the factory back.

After the departure of US steel, the country was looking for a new investor, while the company's 5,000 workers were sent to a paid leave until April 2013 when the furnaces of the steel mill in Smederevo started operating again with limited capacity.

HBIS was the sole competitor at a tender which finished on April 6, and bought the factory for 46 million euros.

According to the contract, the Chinese company plans to invest at least 300 million euros in the steel mill.

Vucic said that the deal between the Serbian government and HBIS was reached after long and hard negotiations, and that the sales of the Smederevo steel mill presents an important day for Serbia and thousands of workers.

"I'm happy and proud to be here. Many meetings were held concerning this steel mill -- from Washington and Tel Aviv to London," Vucic said, adding that Serbian public company was saved from being shut down with the help of Chinese investors.

On April 6, Vucic announced that the sale of the steel mill in Smederevo will have a major influence on the growth of Serbian GDP which will exceed the planned 1.75 percent, "while next year it can reach from 3.5 to 4 percent, which would bring Serbia closer to the EU standard."

Charge d'Affaires of the Embassy of China to Serbia Lu Shan said the deal was yet another improvement of bilateral relations between Serbia and China.

"Today is an important day for relations between Serbia and China, especially in economic terms," Lu said, concluding that the strategic partnership between the two countries rose to a higher level.
BEIJING - The Ministry of Commerce (MOC) Tuesday slammed the accusation that China was to blame for global steel overcapacity, saying that weak global demand and the economic slowdown were the true culprits.

"The bulk of our steel products are consumed domestically. China does not subsidize its products to promote exports," said MOC spokesperson Shen Danyang at a news conference.

Last week, tens of thousands of German steel workers went on strike over steel products from China, while Indian steel giant Tata's decision to close mills in Britain saw the media blame China for flooding the market with products at artificially low prices.

"The government has taken action to address steel overcapacity. Notable progress has been made," said Shen, adding that China will continue to expand domestic consumption of steel products.

China, a major producer, consumer, and trader of steel, shut down outdated facilities with total production capacity of over 90 million tonnes from 2011 to 2015.

In the coming five years, China will continue to reduce crude steel capacity by 100 million to 150 million tons.

According to Shen, overcapacity is a problem for all steel-producing countries in the world, and it is a common challenge that needs to be addressed by all countries together.

Officials from nearly 30 countries and international organizations met in Brussels, Belgium, on Monday to discuss the challenge excess capacity poses to the global steel industry.

"This shared problem needs to be tackled with shared efforts," said a position paper disseminated by the Chinese delegation during the meeting, adding that it was incorrect to blame international trade for the difficulties.

"Frequent use of trade remedy measures and other import-restrictive measures is not addressing the root cause of global steel overcapacity," said the paper.

China champions free and open international trade for the steel industry, it noted.
Shanghai Gold Exchange launched a renminbi-denominated benchmark price in Shanghai on April 19, 2016. [Photo/China Daily]

The Shanghai Gold Exchange, the world's largest physical gold exchange, launched a yuan-denominated benchmark price on Tuesday in Shanghai, a measure that will benefit both China's domestic gold market and the global precious metals market.

SGE said in a circular that the launch of the Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price will be useful as it adequately reflects the gold supply and demand in China, and represents the price trend of China's gold market.

Shanghai Gold is gold ingots with the standard weight of one kilogram and a fineness of no lower than 999.9, delivered in Shanghai, and traded via SGE price trading platform. It is quoted in yuan per gram, and settled via the SGE platform.

"At present, China's gold derivatives market is lacking in an authoritative and equitable gold benchmark price which is denominated in renminbi. The launch of Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price will facilitate the development of China's gold derivatives market which will also have a big impact on the price of gold related financial products, wealth management products and derivatives," the circular said.

Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price follows the principle which allows all orders executed on the SGE price trading platform. The benchmark price is determined when price and volume reach the balance during the auction period on the SGE price trading system.

Experts said the Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price will play a significant role in the global gold market.

According to David Marsh, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, the yuan-denominated gold benchmark offered by SGE is a necessary addition to the international gold market and should make the pricing of physical gold more open to the play of market forces.
WARREN - A handover ceremony was held on monday after Chinese private Wanfeng Technology Group had acquired all stakes of US industrial robot manufacturer Paslin for 300 million dollars.

The acquisition gives Wanfeng access to the advanced automated welding technology and clients that Paslin has developed over the past 80 years, and gives Paslin access to the huge market of China.

It will also create another 150 jobs in 2016 for Michigan. Paslin's managerial level and over 800 employees will retain their jobs.

Chen Ailian, board chairman of the Zhejiang-headquartered company, said at the ceremony that with the participation of Paslin, "(Wanfeng's) robot industry will soon exceed 10 billion dollars in terms of the production scale."

"Wanfeng's acquisition is a win-win," noted Wu Jinhua, CEO of Wanfeng.

Wang Yong, China's deputy counsel general in Chicago, congratulated the city of Warren on attracting a large amount of investment from China, saying "this will bring great benefits to the local economy and the local people."

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder said that the acquisition "is a wonderful win for all of us."

"Let's keep this going," he said.

For Michigan State Senator Steven Bieda, Wanfeng's acquisition unleashed "a new chapter on the journey of Paslin in Michigan."

"We live in a global economy, and we have a lot of interests in common ... integrated economy and investing in companies in both countries make a lot of sense," he said.

Established in 1937, Paslin is the world's leading supplier of welding robot application system and arc welding system. It is also expert at special welding and resistance spot welding, and provides automation system solutions to the US auto and heavy-duty industries.

Founded in 1994, Wanfeng has businesses in such fields as auto parts manufacturing, robot and intelligent equipment, magnesium alloy and financial investment, with annual sales of $3 billion.

In 2013, the company purchased Meridian Canada, the world's leading supplier of magnesium alloy auto parts. The purchase led to a 10-fold growth in the latter's yield in two years.

The state of Michigan enjoys a good business relationship with China.
BEIJING - China's service outsourcing industry expanded at a faster pace in the first quarter (Q1) of 2016 despite a slowing economy, data from the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) showed Tuesday.

Chinese companies inked service outsourcing contracts worth $33.9 billion, up 25.4 percent year on year, MOC spokesperson Shen Danyang told a press conference.

The growth rate accelerated from the 7.5 percent increase recorded in the first two months of the year.

Among the deals were offshore service outsourcing contracts valued at 156.3 billion yuan ($24.1 billion), jumping 44.6 percent year on year, compared with a 28.5 percent rise in the January-February period.

Cooperation in service outsourcing with the Republic of Korea saw quicker growth, with contract value surging 43.8 percent from a year earlier, Shen said.

Outsourcing of information technology-related contracts accounted for 52.2 percent of all deals fulfilled in Q1, rising 16.2 percent year on year.

Contracts carried out with countries included in the Belt and Road initiative rose 5.9 percent in value, a milder increase than in the first two months, Shen told reporters.

China's service outsourcing sector was described by the State Council as a "green industry" that will be a new engine for tertiary industry and a boon to increasing employment.
A father and his daughter take part in the riddle-guessing contest at a KFC outlet in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, during this year's Lantern Festival. SHA LANG /CHINA DAILY

Report says the deal could value the company at up to $8 billion

A consortium backed by sovereign fund China Investment Corp has expressed interest in buying a majority stake in Yum Brands Inc's China business, which runs more than 7,100 KFC and Pizza Hut eateries across the country, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

KKR & Co, a firm reported to be in the consortium, said in an e-mail to China Daily that it was "unable to comment on market speculation".

The investor group, which also includes Baring Private Equity Asia, is conducting due diligence on the unit, the report said. A deal could value Yum China at $7 billion to $8 billion, Bloomberg quoted unnamed sources as saying.

Yum told China Daily: "We continue to make good progress since we announced the transaction separating Yum and Yum China into two powerful, independent, focused growth companies. We will provide updates on the transaction at appropriate times and we won't comment on rumors or speculation."

A majority purchase by the CIC consortium would give a domestic entity control of a leading fast-food chain in the Chinese market for the first time. Such a deal would also provide the Louisville, Kentucky-based Yum with cash that could be used to fund a dividend and its planned share buyback, as well as help reduce exposure to a business with shrinking market share.

The China-backed investor group is interested in buying as much as 100 percent of Yum China. Yum is considering all options, though it may still decide to pursue the sale of a minority stake or proceed with a previously announced tax-free spinoff of the business, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The company isn't currently running a formal sale process.

Jason Yu, general manager of Kantar Worldpanel China, said for CIC, it can benefit from the scale and presence of Yum in China to extract more value by reviewing the costs and identify key value drivers or restructuring the business. This will deliver longer-term return for the sovereign wealth fund, Yu said.

"I believe they can still extract value from a troubled business unit. If they can help them reset the business strategy, focus and portfolio, they can benefit from the recovery."

He said Yum can gain from the financial resources provided by CIC and other private equity companies to upgrade their stores and innovate their offers as well as expand their portfolios to more cities in China.

"The cash support will provide much needed resources while they don't have compromise on short-term investor pressure," said Yu.

Yum bowed to activist-investor pressure in October and agreed to separate its China business from its US operations. Hedge fund manager Keith Meister, a protege of billionaire Carl Icahn, said Yum's Asian market could be better served with a more focused business.

China accounted for about 53 percent of Yum's revenue last year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Yum's China division contributed 57 percent of the company's overall revenue and 54 percent of its operating profit in the latest quarter.

Despite its leading position, Yum has seen its market share continuously drop from 39.8 percent in 2012 to 32.7 in 2013, 28.3 in 2014 and 23.9 percent in 2015.

The second-largest fast-food chain in China, McDonald's Corp, has seen its shares decline from 14.9 percent in 2012 to 13.8 percent in 2015. Ting Hsin International Group is in the third place, according to Euromonitor International.

Last month, McDonald's China announced it was on the lookout for strategic investment partners in the mainland to help it open another 1,000 restaurants by 2020. The Chinese mainland is the company's third-largest market after the United States and Japan.

Bloomberg contributed to this story
GAC Motor launched a C-class sedan, the GA8, on April 16, 2016.[Provided to China Daily]

As the world's largest carmaking and consuming market, China is capable of becoming a superpower in the research and development of world-class vehicles, according to an industry insider.

Chinese homegrown vehicles have long been labeled as "poor in quality and cheap in price" both at home and abroad due to the industry's focus on the low-end sector.

But Wu Song, general manager of GAC Motor Ltd, a Chinese carmaker, said the market should brace for a new trend, featuring improvements both in quality and design of homegrown vehicles.

"An increased focus on research has helped open a new era for Chinese automobile brands, which are capable of producing high-end luxury cars that are as good as foreign brands," said Wu.

Wu's remarks came after GAC Motor, which was founded in 2008 in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, launched a C-class sedan, the GA8, on Saturday, aiming to tap the high-end market dominated by foreign brands.

The GA8 is based on the company's C-class platform, which has been built with huge investment in the past five years, according to Wu.

"Introduction of the GA8 will change the Chinese car market, in which domestic carmakers should be playing a leading role in the near future," said Wu.

Under the C-class platform, two more high-end varietiesthe seven-seat SUV GS8 and the MPV GM8will be launched later this year.

"The C-class research and development platform will help increase efficiency in producing new models and boost profits. It shows China's capability of making luxury carsa trend that we are positioned to follow in the future," Wu said.

The GA8, which targets business people and government officials, is priced between 169,800 yuan ($26,200) and 299,800 yuan, about half the price of the Audi A6.

"Following tremendous change in the domestic car market, more business people and government officials would look for Chinese brands with reasonable prices and high quality," said Wu.

In March, GAC Motor unveiled the 235T GS4 and GA6, featuring the company's Ti power technologies. Driven by the sales of the GS4, GAC Motor sold 79,400 cars in the first quarter of this year, a 171 percent increase over the same period in 2015.

Fuelled by the booming domestic SUV market, Chinese carmakers sold more than 2.55 million vehicles in the first quarter of 2016, an 11.1 percent year-on-year increase, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

Along with the improved design and quality, Chinese homegrown manufacturers should also boost efforts to promote brands, according to Zhang Zhiyong, a Beijing-based automobile columnist.
Chery's corporate logo is seen in a car at a service center in Caracas May 25, 2015.[Photo/Agencies]

HEFEI - Chinese automaker Chery and Japanese electronics manufacturer Yaskawa have formed a new joint venture as the former is seeking to develop more key parts for new energy vehicles.

The 300-million-yuan ($46 million) joint venture, based in Wuhu in East China's Anhui province will see Chery and Yaskawa contribute 45 and 40 percent of the investment, Chery said on Monday. The remaining 15 percent comes from State-owned Wuhu Construction Investment Co.

The joint venture will focus on designing new energy vehicle parts including motors, controllers and drive systems, and it will aim to produce 50,000 sets of these parts each year from September 2017. It is eyeing a full production capacity of 100,000 sets eventually.

Chery has previously announced a target of tripling its new energy vehicle production capacity from the current 40,000 by 2017.
Changan Automobile's driverless cars run on No 107 National Highway, April 16, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING - A successful 2,000-km (1,240 miles) road test is just the beginning of an exciting journey for China's self-driving cars.

Two driverless cars, produced by Changan Automobile, left the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing on Tuesday and arrived in Beijing on Saturday -- China's first long-distance test of autonomous vehicles.

The vehicles succeeded in driving a safe distance from other cars, changing lanes, overtaking as well as some other automatic maneuvers during the five-day test.

"The cars ran up to 120 km per hour on the highway, and adapted to the changing road surface," said Li Yusheng, chief engineer of the project.

There is still room for improvement, Li said.

When driving in small tunnels with dim or no light inside, the cars were slower to respond, said Kong Zhouwei, a tester.

"It was difficult for in-vehicle cameras to recognize the road markings when the external light changed," Kong said. "We will look into laser radar techniques to address this issue."

The designers said a driver was still needed in a few road sections and at gas stations. In addition, trucks that were wider than the lane also posed challenges for the driverless cars.

"This is the sort of real-time information and data that we could not possibly captured in a lab environment," Kong told Xinhua.

Tan Benhong, deputy director of Changan Automobile Engineering & Research Institute, said they would improve the car's systems based on the results of the test.

According to Li, the sensory system needs to be optimized for cars to better respond to changes in light, the lane-line recognition software needs to be tweaked so it takes larger or irregularly-shaped vehicles into consideration, while the sign recognition function must be able to read broken or stained traffic signs.

"The user interface could be more user-friendly for passengers," Li added.

Changan plans to put driverless cars produced exclusively for highway travel into commercial use in 2018, and realize mass production for driverless cars capable of running in complicated urban streets by 2025.

Worldwide, at least 18 companies are developing autonomous cars, including BMW, Audi and Toyota. China's contenders include auto makers BAIC group, GAC Group, SAIC Motor, Changan and BYD.

Some countries have been developing autonomous vehicles for two to three decades, while China's research only began half a decade ago, said Xie Fei, vice-president of China Automotive Engineering Research Institute.

"Those with the most advanced technology and reliable products will lead the industry. The next ten years will be an exciting period," Xie said.
A visitor experiences a facial-recognition device at Ant Financial's stand at an internet finance expo in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. LONG WEI / FOR CHINA DAILY

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's finance affiliate is planning an initial public offering on Shanghai's main board in what could be China's highest IPO valuation since 2010, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group Co has been profitable for three years, enabling it to meet the listing requirements, and may begin the process as soon as this year, the people said, requesting not to be named because the matter is private.

The owner of Alipay, the mainland's most popular payments system, prefers a dual listing with Hong Kong if it gets regulatory approval, the people said.

Ant Financial, which is controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, dominates payments on China's biggest e-commerce platforms through Alipay and also manages Yu'ebao, the nation's largest money-market fund.

The company is currently targeting a private round of fundraising for at least $3.5 billion at a valuation of about $60 billion, people familiar with the matter said in April.

Ant Financial declined to comment in an e-mailed reply.

China's stock listing rules require companies to be profitable for at least three years and accumulate a profit of more than 30 million yuan ($6.29 million).

The entities also need to generate accumulated cash flow of at least 50 million yuan, or post a total of 300 million yuan for revenue in the latest three years, according to the regulations.

Ant Financial meets those measures, said the people, who have direct knowledge of its earnings. The people didn't say how much the company would seek to raise or at what valuation it would have at listing.

An IPO at a $60 billion valuation would be the biggest on the mainland since Agricultural Bank of China Ltd listed in Shanghai in 2010.

Ma, China's second-richest man according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, said last year he was open to a Hong Kong listing if regulators welcomed it.

Alibaba's own plans to list in Hong Kong in 2014 were derailed because the city wouldn't waive a ban on multiple share-class structures and the e-commerce operator instead held a record IPO in New York.

Alibaba is entitled to about one-third of Ant Financial's stake with regulatory approval, according to a 2014 filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Alibaba has perpetual rights to 37.5 percent of the finance arm's pretax earnings until it acquires the stake, the filing said.

Ant Financial paid Alibaba 502 million yuan in the December quarter, compared with 411 million yuan a year earlier, according to an Alibaba filing. That implies Ant Financial had pretax profit of at least 1.3 billion yuan for the period. The company posted net income of 333 million yuan in 2011, according to filings from the local branch of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce.

An alternative option would be for Alibaba to receive a one-time payment equivalent to 37.5 percent of the value of Ant Financial determined prior to its IPO, which would amount to at least $22.5 billion based on its current valuation.
Sabastian Thrun, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Udacity, addresses a press conference during the launch of Android Nanodegree in India, in Bangalore on September 21, 2015. [Photo/VCG]

BEIJING - Silicon Valley-based online education provider Udacity announced its entry into China on Monday, hoping to tap into the rising demands for talent among the country's tech companies.

Udacity, which features training courses designed by tech giants like Google and Facebook, launched its Chinese-language website to make all of its 132 courses available to Chinese learners. It has also teamed up with Chinese tech firms, including video streaming provider Youku Tudou, ride-hailing app Didi, e-commerce giant JD.com and Sina Corp, which owns Chinese microblog Sina Weibo, to roll out localized vocational projects.

Udacity CEO Sabestian Thrun said the company built its initial success by catering to the "huge thirst for talent in Silicon Valley." Its platform features courses and projects designed by tech firms to teach skills much-needed in the tech circle, from building artificial intelligence to designing Android apps.

The company is eyeing the expanding market for tech startups in China. Despite millions of new college graduates every year in China, putting much pressures on the employment, Thrun said Chinese tech firms are still desperate to find employees that have mastered the latest technologies.

"There are many great universities teaching great things, but there are still huge needs that are unmet today," Thrun said, adding that traditional college education has limited capacity to accept more students and teach the latest technologies.

China's promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship has brought a startup boom, with the number of the country's new enterprises jumping 21.6 percent year on year to 4.4 million in 2015, or about 12,000 new companies opened every day.

"China has a much bigger market and a rapidly growing economy with enormous talents we'd like to reach and educate," Thrun said.

Udacity is the latest US online education provider to enter into China's job training market, following a similar move by Coursera, a leading provider of massive open online courses (MOOC).

Last year, Coursera launched a project to invite Chinese companies to design projects for its students in a bid to develop MOOCs into a job recruitment channel. Coursera CEO Rick Levin said there had been an increasing demand for career-related online courses globally.

Udacity started in 2012 as a MOOC provider, but Thrun said the low completion rate of such courses had prompted them to swift to a more career-based education. He said many companies, eager to recruit tech talent, have happily endorsed their cause by joining in the design of courses and offering internships and positions to top performers.

"Udacity is giving the companies a chance to be in the driver seat of the education to shape education first-hand," Thrun said.
Actor and singer Wu Yifan, or Kris Wu, poses during a photo shoot for Portrait magazine. [Photo/Xinhua]
Passengers on a Line 2 subway train in Beijing turn to their smartphones to read books, magazines, or simply play games, to break up their journeys. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The industry is now worth $1.4 billion as the online reading craze tempts the big Internet players to move into the sector

It's a Monday morning and the Beijing subway train is packed. Liu Chang squeezes into a carriage and takes out her smartphone to read the latest chapter of an engrossing Chinese novel.

"I love to read books, but it's difficult to read them on a crowded train," said Liu, 24, a computer programmer.

"Mobile reading apps make it possible for me to read wherever I am."

They are also cheap. In the past month, Liu has read three e-books, Good Kittens, Silent Confession and China Emerging: 1978-2008 during her daily one-hour subway trips to work. The total cost came to just 15 yuan ($2.4).

This is far cheaper than paying 90 yuan for three hard copy versions from a book store. "One of the big reasons I like reading them online is that they are cheap," she said.

Liu is not alone in her passion for e-books. Smartphones and tablets are becoming pocket libraries for millions of avid readers here.

Last year, nearly 52 percent of Chinese consumers, aged 18 and older, used mobile smartphones to read books, magazines or newspapers, according to a national report by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication. That was up 10 percentage points compared with 2013.

Naturally, this online boom has created considerable commercial opportunities.

Analysys International, an Internet consultancy and research company based in Beijing, reported that revenue from the mobile reading market here has soared.

The industry showed a 41 percent increase last year to 8.8 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) compared with the same period in 2013.

"Since a growing number of people are now turning to smartphones (and tablets) to read books, the market will grow into an industry of 15 billion yuan in 2017," Yao Haifeng, an analyst at Analysys International, said.

With this sort of money to be made, online companies are scrambling to move into the industry and satisfy consumer demand for e-books.

In April, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd launched a literature unit as the company officially entered the marketplace.

A month later, it signed a deal with Sina Corp, owner of Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like social networking service, and Changjiang Publishing and Media Co to expand its Internet presence.
Firemen work after an earthquake struck off Ecuador's Pacific coast, at Tarqui neighborhood in Manta, April 17, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

PEDERNALES, Ecuador - The death toll from Ecuador's biggest earthquake in decades soared to 262 on Sunday as survivors cobbled together makeshift coffins to bury loved ones, lined up for water and sought shelter beside the rubble of their shattered homes.

The 7.8 magnitude quake struck off the Pacific coast on Saturday and was felt around the Andean nation of 16 million people, causing panic as far away as the highland capital Quito and destroying buildings, bridges and roads.

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa rushed home from a trip to Italy to supervise the emergency. "The immediate priority is to rescue people in the rubble," he said on Twitter.

"Everything can be rebuilt but lives cannot be recovered and that's what hurts the most," Correa told state radio.

The government said 262 people were killed and up to 2,500 injured, according to the latest tallies on Sunday evening.

Coastal areas nearest the epicenter were hit hardest, especially Pedernales, a rustic tourist spot with beaches and palm trees now laden with debris from pastel-colored houses.

Dazed residents recounted a violent shake, followed by a sudden collapse of buildings that trapped people in wreckage.

"You could hear people screaming from the rubble," Agustin Robles said as he waited in a line of 40 people for water outside a stadium in Pedernales. "There was a pharmacy where people were stuck and we couldn't do anything."

Authorities said there were more than 160 aftershocks, mainly in the Pedernales area. A state of emergency was declared in six provinces.

The quake has piled pain on the economy of OPEC's smallest member, already reeling from low oil prices, with economic growth this year projected at near-zero.
BET's Chief Executive Neil Strowger (middle) with delegation from Wenzhou Xinzhi Education Technology Company. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Wenzhou Bohunt International School, a new Sino-UK hybrid school for Chinese students who will be taught a Bohunt-style curriculum and take GCSE and A Level examinations, is scheduled to open in 2018.

The announcement was made today by Wenzhou Xinzhi Education Company and Bohunt Education Trust (BET). BET has existing schools in the South of England including, one of the schools is Bohunt Liphook, a top performing state schools in the UK. Wenzhou Bohunt International School will become the first English state school to run a school in China.

This relationship will allow the trust to offer its innovative educational approach to Chinese students and continue its collaboration with Chinese teachers to benefit British and Chinese students. The school aims at opening up exchange opportunities for its UK staff and students.

The partnership came following BET's increasing profile as one of UK's leading education trusts for delivering Mandarin courses as well as its appearance in the 2015 BBC series titled 'Are Our Kids Tough Enough?'.

BET has a longstanding Mandarin program that offers immersion teaching where students learn a third of the curriculum in the language.

Neil Strowger, Chief Executive of Bohunt Education Trust, said collaboration has always underpinned the philosophy at Bohunt.

"It is one of the reasons we decided to take part in the Chinese School series. Our experience of the series further emphasized the importance of working and learning with others to deliver the very best education. This is exactly what this partnership is all about," said Strowger.

"Preparing students to be active participants in our global economy has always been a key part of our vision. This is why we have made languages and Mandarin in particular  a central part of our offer, and we are pleased at this latest development which will benefit young people in both the UK and China."

Staff will be recruited locally in China, as well as in the UK. BET will provide teacher training and recruitment support. They plan to play an advisory role for the building design and develop teaching materials along with the school's curriculum.

BET already hosts exchanges for its students with Chinese schools and runs the first state secondary school in the country to teach all of its students Mandarin.

As the trust grows in the UK, it hopes to further grow its Chinese collaborations to provide unparalleled opportunities for UK and Chinese staff and students.
Senior officials' spouses and children to face strict controls on links to private businesses

Spouses and children of senior officials in Beijing will soon face strict controls over their involvement in private businesses - following their counterparts in Shanghai.

This was decided on Monday when the central authorities expanded a pilot anti-corruption program to end nepotism and regulate the behavior of officials' family members.

The regulation will be expanded and become routine practice in regions including Beijing, Guangdong, Chongqing and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

This was announced by the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reform, headed by President Xi Jinping. The regulation first took effect in Shanghai in May last year.

Under the regulation passed by the Shanghai government, spouses of ministerial- and provincial-level officials are prohibited from starting companies or becoming involved in any business operations. Their children are not allowed to have businesses in Shanghai.

Han Zheng, Party chief of Shanghai, said last month that 1,802 officials had filed reports containing detailed information about their relatives' involvement in private businesses last year. Most of their relatives have since left business circles.

Ten officials were removed from their posts and 10 others were transferred to other positions as a result of the regulation. Three officials were also investigated for suspected serious disciplinary offenses, he added.

Zhu Lijia, a professor of public administration at the Chinese Academy of Governance, said, "Corruption among family members is a common form of corruption in China, which the government must put a stop to because the damage can be very severe.

"The regulation in Shanghai has effectively cut officials from the business ties created by their family members and also reduced such corruption."

Zhu said that implementing the pilot regulations in a variety of areas - including Beijing, other relatively well-developed areas and an ethnic region - can help the central government to draft a practical regulation at national level, which would be introduced in the future.
Liang Hong (center), daughter of Liang Sili, holds a portrait of her father at his funeral at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, the main resting place for highranking revolutionary heroes and government officials, in Beijing on April 18, 2016. Liang, 91, died on April 14 from an undisclosed illness. [Photo by Wang Zhuangfei/China Daily]

A funeral for Liang Sili, one of China's top space scientists, was held at Beijing's Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery on Monday.

An academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the International Academy of Astronautics, Liang died from an illness on Thursday morning at age 91.

President Xi Jinping has offered condolences to Liang's family, saying that the scientist dedicated his life to China's space program and contributed greatly to making the country a strong space power. The president said Liang was respected for his patriotism, devotion and excellent work style.

With wide-ranging achievements in research on missile and rocket control systems, Liang was considered one of the founders of China's space industry.

Born in Beijing in August 1924, Liang was the youngest son of Liang Qichao, a leading reformist who lived during the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

After graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1949, Liang returned to China and joined the then Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.

He started a career in the space sector in 1956 when he was transferred to the then Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defense, the country's first missile, rocket and spacecraft research body.

Liang helped to develop various types of ballistic missiles and launch rockets and also played an important role in establishing several key space programs.

He was elected as an academic at the International Academy of Astronautics in 1987 and at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1993.


A joint investigation team was formed on Monday to look into pollution-related illnesses among students at Changzhou Foreign Language School in Jiangsu province.

The team was setup by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the provincial government.

Of 641 students examined at hospitals, 493 have been diagnosed with diseases and conditions related to pollution, including dermatitis, bronchitis and blood abnormalities. Some were found to have leukemia and lymphoma.

The investigation team has traveled to Changzhou and will release its findings to the public as soon as possible. The Changzhou government has also formed an investigation team.

According to the Changzhou authorities, parents and the school hired professional testing organizations in late March to check the quality of indoor air, soil and groundwater. The results showed that all met national standards.

The school said that all of its 2,451 students - except for four asking to be transferred, three calling in sick and one on leave of absence - have attended classes regularly. Only three of its 210 teachers have called in sick.

A notice issued by the Changzhou government on Monday said: "The supervision of the public is welcomed. We'll investigate carefully and deal with the problem according to the law."

However, many parents have doubts over environmental conditions at the school and have forbidden their children from eating any food or drinking water that it provides.

Wan Ling, the mother of a 13-year-old student, said: "I now send lunch to my son every working day. ... So many students cannot get sick at the same time without a reason."
Police guard confiscated cocaine weighing 400.5 kilograms seized in a major crackdown on an international drugtrafficking chain controlled by Hong Kong residents. [Photo provided To China Daily]

A major international drug-trafficking chain that police say was controlled by Hong Kong residents has been busted after a crackdown on cross-border drug gangs this month.

A total of 400.5 kilograms of cocaine from South America estimated to be worth more than 334 million yuan ($51.6 million) was seized following the crackdown, according to Deng Jianwei, director of drug enforcement at the Guangdong Department of Public Security.

It was the first time such a large amount of cocaine had been seized in Guangdong in recent years, Deng told a news conference in Shenzhen on Monday. Deng said he believed Guangdong was not the cocaine's final destination.

"This indicates foreign traffickers are using Guangdong, which has advanced transportation networks, as a major transit center to distribute drugs to other nations and regions," Deng said.

Nine suspects, including five Hong Kong residents, were detained following the crackdown.

"Hong Kong and Taiwan residents have been key members of major cross-border drug gangs involved in significant cases busted in Guangdong in recent years," Deng said. "Hong Kong and Taiwan residents control major drug sales channels and major drug customers around the world."

Last year, Guangdong police detained at least 200 Hong Kong residents and 70 from Taiwan after cracking down on major cross-border drug cases, he added.

Deng Guangsheng, deputy director of drug enforcement at Shenzhen Public Security Bureau, said a special task force was set up to investigate the case in late March after local police reported domestic and overseas drug traffickers were bringing cocaine into Guangdong.


A restaurant owner in Central China's Henan province was allegedly beaten to death by a gang of four, including at least 2 government officials, who had dined in his restaurant Saturday, Huashang Newspaper reported on Monday.

A land resources director and a relative of his, a procuratorate staff member, and a self-claimed officer from the agriculture bureau who has not been identified yet, dined on Saturday afternoon at Li Jinming's restaurant in Nanzhao county, Central China's Henan province, according to the report.

Clash broke out after the four refused to pay in cash after the meal and demanded to sign the bill in the name of the government, but were rejected, according to the victim's son Li Xiangyang.

"Our staff declined their request because they were unfamiliar faces, and my father stepped in and gave a further no as the owner of the restaurant after they started to smash tableware and beat our waiters," Li Xiangyang said.

Two of them then attacked Li Jinming on his neck, face and belly until dragged away by others, shows CCTV footage of the scene. Li fell and died right on the spot.

The diners had had a lot of drink during the meal and even clashed with the police later when they were trying to take the attackers under control, a witness surnamed Wang said.

Local authorities have confirmed the case and said further investigation is underway.

My father was a CPC member and also a deputy to People's Congress of Nanzhao County; He resented such embezzlement of public funds for dinners with families, Li Xiangyang told reporters.
A psychiatric evaluation has been ordered for a 20-year-old freshman at Sichuan Normal University who is accused of killing his roommate.

Teng Gang allegedly used a kitchen knife to stab fellow student Lu Haiqing, 20, more than 50 times before decapitating him in a dormitory of the university's Chenglong campus in the Longquanyi district of Chengdu, Sichuan province.

Teng, who is said to have a history of mental illness, was detained at around 11.50 pm on March 27.

According to a report in China Youth Daily, the pair had been arguing the day before Lu's death.

A statement released by Teng's parents said their son was known to self-harm and had recently expressed suicidal thoughts.

The results of the psychiatric evaluation are expected by early next month, according to the father Teng Zongwu, deputy chief of Baiyin Prison's finance section in Gansu.
The death of an 11-year-old girl after what authorities said was a two-hour beating by her father to "educate" her about responsible behavior, shows the need to educate parents and provide more support for left-behind children, experts say.

The father, a 36-year-old migrant worker surnamed Han, visited his daughter earlier this month in Hanzhong, Shaanxi province, and found that she had stayed out all night. He wanted to discipline her, according to the police.

"He beat her to make clear that what she had done was wrong," said Chen Hanping, deputy police chief at the Hantai branch of the Hanzhong Public Security Bureau last week.

Han turned himself in and confessed, according to a police statement on Thursday. He was subsequently detained. Authorities are awaiting approval for a formal arrest.

The case "is a typical example showing that parents need to communicate and manage their left-behind children," said Du Juan, deputy director of a psychological counseling center in Xi'an, the provincial capital.

"The father wanted to correct her bad habits, but made wrong choices, which caused the tragedy," Du said.

The girl had been living with her stepmother.

Han told the police that after two hours of beating his daughter on April 4, he noticed that she appeared to be dying. So he took her to a hospital, but doctors told him she was dead when she arrived.

The story Han told to the police included basic elements often found in cases of left-behind children. The girl once lived with her father's parents in his hometown in Henan province because he had no time to look after her. When told of behavioral problems, he said he brought her to live with him and his wife, her stepmother, for a time.

"I found that she had some bad habits such as lying and not studying hard, and I took her with me two years ago in order to correct her and better educate her," Han told the police. When that failed, Han sent her to live in another place with the stepmother.

Han's neighbors claimed her father often beat her, the police said. His harsh discipline resulted in some academic improvement, according to one teacher who didn't want to be named.

After the beating death came to light, the Hanzhong education bureau issued a notice urging schools to provide support for children who suffer from family violence.

In 2015, there were more than 61 million left-behind children in rural areas of the country  nearly four in 10.

A survey on left-behind children made by China Youth Research Center in April 2014, showed that some left-behind children suffered mental health problems and that living away from parents for extended periods resulted in emotional indifference, a sense of inferiority, withdrawal and low initiative.
A screen shot shows Huang Yu, who was sentenced to death for leaking top State secrets.

A man was sentenced to death for leaking top State secrets to foreign agencies, cctv.com reported on Monday.

Huang Yu, 42, worked for an encryption research institute in Sichuan province from 1997 to 2004. In 2002, Huang was told he would be dismissed due to his poor performance in work.



One day, Huang contacted a foreign spy agency online to sell the confidential information he acquired at work, and he met a foreign spy in a hotel in a Southeast Asian country in June.

During the meeting, Huang gave three electronic documents containing military secrets to the foreign spy for which he was paid $10,000 and was promised a monthly sum of $5,000 for more documents.

Since then, Huang traveled overseas regularly under the guise of attending meetings to meet the foreign spy.

Before Huang was detained in 2011, he leaked more than 150,000 materials, including 90 top State secrets, to foreign spy agencies, and earned more than $700,000.

Huang was sentenced to death on the charge of espionage. His wife, Tang, was sentenced to five years in prison, and his brother-in-law, Tan, was sentenced to three years behind bars on the charge of negligent disclosure of State secrets.

This is a just one of the many cases in recent years involving the disclosure of State and military secrets that have been reported.

In 2012, a man surnamed Tang was sentenced to 15 years in jail when he was pronounced guilty for releasing military secrets to overseas organizations.

Before Tang was detained, he was hiding in a local military command as a delivery man for more than 6 years after he received special training in 2005 in a Southeast Asian country. Tang was paid more than 200,000 yuan ($30,880) for disclosing military secrets abroad.

A senior business executive surnamed Shen was sentenced to 17 years behind bars in 2009 after he disclosed secrets about Guangdong's bottom line for inviting public bids for a nuclear power project to foreign companies.

In November 2014 a man in his mid-twenties surnamed Liao surrendered himself to police after he realized he was violating relevant laws and regulations by sending military photos abroad.

Liao began helping a foreign spy procure military secrets after he met the spy while seeking job opportunities online at the beginning of November 2014.

Liao frequently visited military ports in Zhanjiang, the western coastal city of Guangdong, and illegally took photos of local military facilities and naval vessels for the foreign spies before surrendering himself to police.

To raise public awareness of national security, April 15, 2016 was established as the country's first National Security Education Day, according to the National Security Law passed in July 2015.
The huge tubular slide that generated a whirlwind on social media earlier this year has been put on trial run at a shopping mall in Shanghai's Pudong New Area.

The 20-meter-tall steel slide, put in place by the Shanghai-Hong Kong New World Department Store on Pujian Road, opened to some of the store's customers from Monday, sending them from the fifth floor to the ground in just 16 seconds.

It is part of the store's efforts to woo customers, said Tang Yan, the store's manager."Its safety index is much higher than the programs of an amusement park."

China Daily's reporter was among the first group to try out the slide, finding that the speed picked up quickly before slowing down at a moderate slope close to the end of it.

Customers were required to use the slide one by one, and wrap their legs in cotton bags to avoid injury from the abrasion.

They were also asked to cross their arms in front of their chest as staff members helped them slide down at the entrance and helped them up near the exit.

Currently the facility is open only to the store's VIP members at three time slots on work days. Users should be aged between 7 and 60, and should be 1.3 to 1.9 meters tall.

They should also be unafraid of heights and free from medical conditions such as heart disease.
Shanghai will require companies that offer food ordering and delivery through online platforms to sign a contract committing to unified standards of service.

The commitment, drawn up by the Shanghai food market watchdog, requires vendors to display their latest food operating license and prepare food safely. The watchdog will keep a copy of the signed agreements to hold members to account, according to the draft of the Shanghai Food Safety Law and Regulations that was recently submitted to the municipal legislative body for discussion.

"It will be the first time that the rapidly developing online food ordering market has been brought under control through legislation in Shanghai," said Gu Zhenhua, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Food and Drug Administration. "All the vendors must register with their real name with the platforms and the platforms need to verify the qualifications of the vendors."

Gu said those who do not cooperate or who fail to live up to expectations will face consequences.

"Once a platform finds a vendor has violated the terms, it must suspend cooperation with the vendor and report the incident to the watchdog. Otherwise, the platform will also be held accountable."

Food ordering and delivery apps have been booming in recent years. Statistics from Analysys International, a Beijing-based internet consultancy company, show the country's online food ordering and delivery transactions were worth more than 45 billion yuan ($7 billion) in 2015, which was three times higher than in the previous year. The largest players  Ele.me, Meituan Takeout, and Baidu Takeout  are backed respectively by the country's internet leaders Alibaba, Tencent Holdings Ltd and Baidu Inc.

Meanwhile, complaints are rising. Statistics from the Shanghai Consumer Rights Protection Council show that, in the first half of last year, 200 complaints were received about the sector, which was a year-on-year increase of 138 percent. The complaints mainly centered on problematic food quality, delayed delivery and false advertising.

Liu Jiaxiu, a deputy to the municipal legislative body, said the sector is sorely in need of more control.

"There's so much to do with online food ordering and delivery," Liu said. "A law was unveiled in 2011 but the sector has experienced major strides since and nearly 90 percent of the terms in the law are in need of revision."

Under the draft, sellers without qualified cold-chain logistics networks will be banned from delivering cold dishes, uncooked food, pastries, cakes, and sushi that require cold storage.

The local food market watchdog earlier this year established a team specializing in overseeing online food ordering and delivery platforms and the vendors that sell food through the platforms. More than 33,000 unlicensed active vendors were driven out of the online market.

Ele.me, which offers online food ordering and delivery in more than 30 cities nationwide, said it has already launched offline verification for all the vendors that have joined the platform.

"We promise to assist consumers in safeguarding their rights," said Liu Yaliang, a public relations officer with Ele.me. "In the near future, we plan to unveil a compensation policy in which we'll compensate consumers first, before the vendor verifies the problem reported by the consumer took place, in case consumers encounter food safety problems when making a purchase on our platform."

Distinctive rules in food safety laws in different provinces and municipalities

1 Yunnan

Highly toxic farm chemicals are prohibited from being sold and used in tea plantations, scenic spots, nature reserves, wildlife habitats and other key areas specified by the provincial government.

2 Chongqing

Those who hold family banquets in rural regions must report information, including the time of the meal, number of participants, condition of the venue, list of the dishes, and the chef's health status to the village government at least two days ahead of the banquet. The organizer of the banquet must then keep a sample of each dish in a refrigerator for at least 48 hours after the event.

3 Zhejiang

Small workshops are prohibited from manufacturing food products, including dairy products, canned food, jelly, and those designed for special groups, such as infants, young children, the elderly and pregnant women.
Participants discuss NGO's role in Asian development cooperation during the seminar in Beijing, April 19, 2016. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

China is encouraging its non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to play a wider role in global issues such as climate change, counter-terrorism, poverty alleviation and food security, according to a senior commerce ministry official.

Xiao Fenghuai, deputy director general of the ministry's China International Center for Economic and Technical Exchanges, said NGOs should act as an important agent of China's "soft power" and contribute an effective Chinese voice on global governance.

He was speaking in Beijing at a two-day international seminar on the role of non-governmental bodies, entitled "Non-State Actors in Asian Development Cooperation: The Role of Non-governmental Organizations".

Xiao noted that, with their increasing impact and growing agenda, NGOs had become a significant force in tackling global issues.

He said China is gradually moving away from a government-oriented approach on foreign aid and is trying to bring more non-governmental organizations into the field.

China had about 662,000 registered NGOs by the end of 2015, of which 516  or less than one per cent  were involved in foreign relations issues.

The April 19-20 seminar is jointly hosted by the China Association for NGO Cooperation (CANGO), the Korea Development Institute, the Asia Foundation, and Australia's Foreign Affairs and Trade Department.

Some 30 senior officials from Chinese NGOs are attending, along with representatives of NGOs and international organizations from 10 other countries, including Japan, the United States and Australia.

Topics include history and the role of civil society in development cooperation in Asia and the institutional framework for civil society activities.
BEIJING -- The Communist Party of China (CPC)'s top anti-graft body on Tuesday said 9,361 officials were reprimanded for violating austerity rules in the first three months this year.

Those punished, including four ministerial-level officials, were involved in 8,788 cases, the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said in a report posted on its website.

In March alone, 2,701 officials were reprimanded in 2,672 cases, the report said.
BEIJING -- The Chinese minister of environmental protection on Tuesday hailed the country's sound nuclear safety record but called for enhanced regulation in the future.

Addressing a nuclear-themed work conference here in Beijing, environment minister Chen Jining said China's nuclear facilities operated in a safe and stable state throughout the 12th Five-Year Plan period, referring to the five years between 2011 and 2015.

None of the nuclear power generating units in the country suffered events or accidents rated above Level 2 under the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, he said.

Nonetheless, the minister noted that the development of nuclear energy and nuclear technologies is picking up pace at the moment, adding that risks stemming from old nuclear facilities remain.

He urged authorities to step up nuclear supervision and regulation in the 13th Five-Year Plan period.
President urges tolerance, faster work on cyber-law

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also head of the central Internet security and informatization leading group, presides over a symposium on cyberspace security and informatization in Beijing, capital of China, April 19, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

President Xi Jinping called on Tuesday for "more tolerance and patience" toward netizens and welcomed online criticism, "whether mild or fierce", as long as it arises from goodwill.

Xi made the remarks at a rare high-profile meeting as the country's 700 million internet users get more say in social governance and public events.

The president also urged speeding up legislation of a cyber-law, improving legal supervision and preventing risks caused by the internet.

The government should take constructive advice from netizens, help those who are in difficulties and explain to those who don't understand the situation, Xi said. Netizens' complaints should be addressed quickly, and wrong online attitudes should be corrected.

Government officials should get close to the people through the internet, listen to online public opinions and suggestions, and answer the public's concerns in a positive manner, he said.

The meeting was attended by entrepreneurs of internet giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, experts on media research and officials of internet management.

Premier Li Keqiang and senior publicity official Liu Yunshan, both on the seven-member Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, attended the meeting as deputy leaders of the central internet security and informatization leading group. The group, headed by Xi, was established in February 2014.

During the meeting, Xi talked with 10 representatives from colleges, companies and government departments and heard their suggestions on cybersecurity, core technology and public opinions.

Noting China's large number of internet users, Xi said that cyberspace should be regulated to make it a clean place for netizens, especially adolescents.
A CCTV grab shows the arm of a sick student.

Administrator defends planning process, says proper steps were taken before move

The principal of Changzhou Foreign Languages School in Jiangsu province, where hundreds of students fell ill, dismissed reports claiming the school was responsible.

The school was built next to a site where former factories reportedly dumped toxic chemicals.

So far, about 500 students have reportedly been diagnosed with illnesses, including cancer, linked to toxic groundwater and soil on land adjacent to the school.

The brownfield site had previously housed three chemical plants that were demolished before the school was built.

China Central Television reported on Sunday that many students suffered adverse reactions and came down with diseases starting in December after the new campus opened in September. Some reportedly had lymphoma, leukemia and other blood abnormalities.

But Cao Hui, the principal, denied that the school is connected to the students' illnesses and claims indoor air quality, soil and groundwater were all inspected by professional organizations and met national standards.

"The student with lymphoma showed symptoms in late July, before we moved to the new campus," Cao said.

"Another student that China Central Television says was diagnosed with leukemia has not been found at the school."

Cao said stringent inspections were carried out before students relocated.

"We asked the Changzhou Environment Science Institute to inspect indoor air quality before the new campus was put into use," Cao said. "The result showed that the quality met national standards. The drinking water at the school was also checked by the local health and epidemic-prevention departments.

"We called the local government and educational bureau immediately after noticing a strange smell in the air in December.

"We have formed an emergency team to guarantee the health of our students and teachers."

The Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Jiangsu provincial government have set up a joint investigation team to look into health issues at the school.

The CCTV report speculated that high concentrations of toxic chemicals may be the reason for the spate of illnesses.

The chemicals reportedly found in groundwater and soil at the site include chlorobenzene, carbon tetrachloride, and carbofuran, which are known for their serious health effects, including cancer, as well as for their environmental impacts.

The school has around 2,400 students on a 153-acre campus.

According to the CCTV report, an environmental evaluation conducted before construction began suggested pollution was serious and advised that schools, housing or other public facilities should not be constructed on the site.
A visitor looks at an Easter egg on display at Beijing's Palace Museum. [Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

It is a fantasy trip. A centuries-old imperial palace in China is temporarily decorated like a Russian palace.

Gold Easter eggs as well as precious articles belonging to the Romanovs are placed here.

Last week, Faberge Revealed, which displays 234 of the finest Russian objects from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, normally housed in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the United States, went on display at the Meridian Gate Gallery in Beijing's Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City. The exhibition runs through July 17.

According to Alex Nyerges, director of VMFA, Peter Karl Faberge (1846-1920) is considered one of the world's most refined jewelers.

"The array of enameled picture frames, clocks, cigarette cases and cane handles ... still evoke the same fascination that they did when they were first displayed in the windows of Faberge's showrooms in St. Petersburg, Moscow and London," says Nyerges.
A visitor looks at the calligraphic works on display at the Weng Tonghe show in Beijing. [Photo by Wang Kaihao/China Daily]

He was a renowned calligrapher and Confucian scholar, who was also involved in politics in imperial China.

More than a century after Weng Tonghe (1830-1904) is said to have been sacked from office as a minister by Empress Dowager Cixi after they fell out over a campaign, his personal belongings return to Beijing in the form of an exhibition tour of the city.

Titled Specific Artifact Exhibition of Two Emperors' Tutors, Weng Tonghe, and the Weng Family, the show opened in the Beijing Stone Carving Art Museum last week as part of a four-stop tour.

It runs through May 10.

More than 70 sets of exhibits, including calligraphy works, porcelain collections and a memorial to the throne, borrowed from Changshu Museum in Jiangsu province, reflect his life.

Born in East China's Changshu city, Weng, an influential figure in Chinese history, was the teacher of Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) emperors Tongzhi and Guangxu, and became a politician. He was in charge of several ministries in the Qing Dynasty, including as head of a diplomatic agency and revenues.

"He was a microcosm of figures in Chinese history who worked for the country's revival," says Wang Dan, director of Beijing Stone Carving Museum. "The exhibition is also a look at the Qing Dynasty history through Weng's eyes."

After Weng left his office in Beijing, he returned to his hometown and focused on studying ancient Chinese calligraphy. He lived there until his death.

"That is why a complete set of his personal belongings was left in Changshu," says Qian Ke, deputy head of the cultural relics department at Changshu Museum.

All the exhibits on display in Beijing are original pieces rather than replicas, and some have never been seen in public before, says Qian.
China Film Co., Ltd. on Monday announced cooperation with the US-based Paramount Pictures in production and distribution during the sixth Beijing International Film Festival.

La Peikang, chairman of China Film Co., Ltd., said the company hopes to learn from Paramount and combine Hollywood's mature business model and technology with Chinese culture, talent and market.

The company also aimed to explore new space in project financing, development, co-production and marketing so as to make quality films that cater to the tastes of audiences from both China, the United States and the world over, La added.

Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount Pictures, expressed his hope that the two sides will strengthen cooperation in various business sections including production, distribution and animated films.

Related:
[Photo provided to China Daily]

Chinese people, on average, read eight books in 2015, a small increase over previous years that may be attributed in part to mobile technology.

The Chinese Academy of Press and Publication issued its findings about reading on Mondayahead of World Book Day on Saturdayafter a survey of Chinese reading habits.

It's the academy's 13th survey since 1999. This one gathered responses from 45,911 people from 81 cities and townships in 29 regions at the provincial level. Both urban and rural areas were included. Adults and minors answered different questions. To the pleasure of many, 81 percent of Chinese under age 17 have a reading habit.

"This year, we found that the rate of Chinese adults who have a habit of reading is on the increaseto 79.6 percent. Most of them are also readers of digital content," said Wei Yushan, head of the academy.

The survey also found that 67 percent of Chinese adults hope to have reading activities or reading festivals where they live.

Advancing technology has brought rapid changes in publishing and reading. In its first year, the survey asked about internet surfing habits and found 3.7 percent doing it. In 2015, it was 70 percent.

Among the average of eight books read by Chinese people in 2015, three were in digital form. Wei said, a similar survey of French readers, who took in an average of 16.7 titles in 2014, found that only about one was an e-book.

The survey indicates that online readers' major preferences are centered on urban romance, history and fantasy.

Xu Shengguo, head of the Institute of Publishing Research under the academy, said the majority of mobile readers are attracted to that type of reading, too.

"With 52 percent of Chinese adults reading on WeChat in 2015, further innovations of reading and publishing are yet to emerge, then, the text of books will be like a portal, and everything will be available, including pictures, videos and sounds, and readers can even interact with the author," Xu said.

Chinese leaders have been promoting the idea since 2006 of building a country with avid readers.

Zhou Huilin, an official from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, said the government has invested around 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) in free e-books for migrant workers. A total of 18 billion yuan has been allocated for the building of rural libraries over the years.

"We've found that in some rural areas, where print books are not handy for purchasing or lending, people there are reading with mobile phones."
American director and actress Natalie Portman attends a forum in Beijing on April 17. [Photo/China.org.cn]

American director and actress Natalie Portman said her new film A Tale of Love and Darkness is universal and will appeal to everyone, including Chinese audiences.

Portman was in Beijing to attend the 6th Beijing International Film Festival, which runs from April 16 to April 23. A Tale of Love and Darkness had its Asian premiere at the China Film Archive's theater; all 600 tickets for the film were sold out in 10 seconds online.

The film is based on the memoir of Amos Oz, an Israeli writer and journalist. The plot is set during the British Mandate and the first days of the state of Israel, focusing on the relationship between young Oz and his mother and on his first steps as a writer.

The Academy Award winner said the story is about human nature and can be appreciated and enjoyed by everyone.

The project spent eight years in preparation and then went into actual filming and production for another two years. Throughout that time, the project was in constant flux and Portman repeatedly crafted the film script until it was ready. An Israeli immigrant to America, she felt a strong connection to the story, which made her remember her childhood and family, and thought the theme of the story, the issue of immigration, was universal.

Natalie Portman also revealed that she was learning Hebrew again for her role in the film.

The actress said the actress-to-director process was not easy for her, but she still found it interesting and enjoyed the learning process.

Portman added that she prefers to push herself rather than staying in the safe zone; she has decided to participate in Jackie, a biopic of Jacqueline Kennedy, and turned down an offer from the makers of Thor 3.

Related:
Anthony Russo and Joseph Russo pose at the Beijing International Film Festival red carpet. [Photo/VCG]

The Russo brothers, American film and television directors, together with Anthem Pictures film producing company, signed an agreement of a strategic partnership with Beijing Culture media company in Beijing on Monday.

"As story tellers, we seek out great opportunities to tell stories, and to be artistically invigorated by other filmmakers," said Joseph V. Russo.

"There are a lot of good Chinese filmmakers, emerging filmmakers who are inspiring us. We're very excited to work with emerging as well as well established and well-respected directors," the television director said.

As introduced by Song Ge, president of Beijing Culture media company, the partnership aims to converge global film creation and production resources, providing strong support for Chinese film production.

Chinese director Wu Jing, who is currently working on the movie Wolf Warriors 2, was present at the signing ceremony together with actress Li Xiaoran and actor Shi Xiaolong.

According to Zhang Miao, a general manager at Beijing Culture, Wu will collaborate with Beijing Culture for Wolf Warriors 2. "Imagine what we will get from a co-production of kung fu star and Hollywood superhero movie producers," Zhang said at the ceremony.

The Russo brothers, Anthony Russo and Joseph V. Russo, are American film and television directors. They are known for their superhero film Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War. They will be directing the two Avengers: Infinite War films.
[2016-04-23 06:23]

As the concept of VR, or virtual reality, has been one of the most talked about in the worldwide entertainment industry, VR films might be the next revolutionary point that changes people's lifestyle.
Zhang Jinhao performs his own choreography, Dying Swan, at the English National Ballet's emerging dancer competition in 2015. Provided to China Daily

A Chinese-born dancer took ballet when another class was filled, and he learned his life's goal from another unexpected turn of events

That Zhang Jinhao finds himself on stage, living out his love of ballet, is one of the little wonders of life.

He performs from the heart, and clearly this is his life's work.

"It's about feeling the details of every gesture, feeling the emotions and personality of the character I dance, and trying to understand what he is like and what he is trying to communicate," says the 20-year-old rising star of the English National Ballet.

Zhang, who started studying ballet at the age of 4, has won international acclaim, including winning the English National Ballet's emerging dancer competition last year.

He grew up in Dalian, Liaoning province, and started starting ballet by accident. "When I was young, I was very thin and did not eat meals properly, so my mother wanted me to do more exercise. She took me to enroll in a kung fu class, but sadly the class was filled."

The teacher in charge of registration told Zhang's mother that the difference between kung fu and ballet is small, and urged Zhang to try ballet instead.

He joined the English National Ballet in 2014. On stage, he wins his audience over with the perfection of his technique and his ability to create true and believable characters, be it a wealthy boss, a loyal servant or a beautiful swan.

In conversation, his youthful liveliness and passion for the profession shows through strongly, while his 185 centimeter, muscular body commands respect.

Sitting down for an interview in a small office above his rehearsal studio, he elegantly moves his head, hands and feet in the air to demonstrate how concepts like love, promise and suicide are acted out in ballet. Suddenly, these soundless movements seem to vividly describe what writers have attempted to convey for generations.

A favorite role is Basilio in Don Quixote, which is a ballet originally choreographed in 1869, based on episodes taken from the famous Spanish novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.

When competing in Prix de Lausanne in 2013, Zhang performed the passionate dance of a proud Basilio as he is about to get married. The fast-moving excerpt, lasting for just over a minute on stage, consists of jumps and turns, and paints a cheerful and lively picture representative of Spanish culture. Zhang has loved this dance since high school and prefers the technical and artistic challenges required of the Basilio character, who is more of a free spirit.

Despite years of practice, Zhang felt nervous when he competed in Prix de Lausanne, which turned out to be a life-changing opportunity for him when he won a scholarship to study at the English National Ballet School as a result. In addition to the importance of the competition was the technical challenge of the 3.5 degree stage slope.

"I was so, so nervous," Zhang recalls. "I knew that many dancers actually fell when they landed on their tiptoes after a jump because of this slope, so I dared not to think about the slope when I was on stage."

To overcome this fear, he instead forced himself to forget about the stage, to focus on Basilio's joyful feelings in that particular marriage, to think about Basilio's beautiful bride, and to enjoy himself. "I did it, and I didn't make a single mistake."

Zhang fell in love with ballet immediately when he tried it, and he recollects his childhood encounter with ballet with fondness. "I was the only boy in a class full of girls, and they teased me about it. On the one hand I was embarrassed, but at the same time I enjoyed the attention for being able to stand out."

After four years, it was time for Zhang to choose the path of becoming a professional ballet dancer. "I chose it. But at the age of 8, I did not know what being a professional ballet dancer meant at all," he says.

As a professional dancer, Zhang joined the school affiliated with the Liaoning Ballet, where he trained for six years before starting his undergraduate degree in ballet at Shanghai Tongji University.

The glamorous milestones of Zhang's ballet career came one after other, but one big disappointment taught Zhang how much he really loves ballet.

In 2013, right after his success at the Prix de Lausanne, he continued to train for another international competition in Moscow. "I was not taking any rest, and pushed my body to the extreme of what it could bear. I was tired and didn't look after myself properly."

Zhang had never had a problem with discipline and just kept pushing himself. Just before the competition, he landed on the back of his foot in a jump during a rehearsal and fractured a bone.

For the next four months, Zhang lay on a bed unable to move his foot. "I was disappointed and frustrated. I was scared that I may not be able to dance again after the plaster was taken off."

Those days were the darkest in his memory, where he experienced intense grief and self-doubt. Then came his epiphany. "I realized that I could not live without ballet. I never knew how much I loved ballet until then."

Zhang is now working toward his next goal, which is to eventually perform lead roles at the English National Ballet. "Every performance is a new challenge because I have to do my best to give the audience the best experience."

cecily.liu@mail.chinadailyuk.com
20 fraud suspects from Taiwan arrive in Taoyuan airport in Taiwan on Friday, April 15, 2016 after being deported from Malaysia. [Photo/IC]

Kenya's recent repatriation to the Chinese mainland of 45 telecommunication fraud suspects from Taiwan has triggered a fierce outcry across the island, with some, including "president-elect" Tsai Ing-wen, arguing "the mainland has no right to handle the repatriation case on behalf of Taiwan", and others asking for "the most solemn protest to be filed".

However, following Taiwan judiciary's recognition of the mainland's right of jurisdiction over the case, the outcry has subsided, with some suggesting that "since Taiwan cannot properly handle the fraud case, it should transfer it to the mainland".

Some on the island have attempted to interpret the case as the mainland trying to dwarf Taiwan and used it as an opportunity to manipulate public opinion. But given that most of victims are mainland residents, the mainland enjoys the right of jurisdiction over the case.

Others have argued that since the mainland has sent a total of 446 Taiwan suspects to the island over the past six years under a pact to jointly fight crimes and promote judicial assistance, it can also send the fraud suspects to the island. In saying this, they have ignored the fact that Taiwan has failed to offer evidence that these suspects were already declared fugitives.

Those convicted of telecom fraud have a record of being given lenient punishments in Taiwan, with less than 10 percent returned to the island having been extended criminal penalties. The weak punishments have caused more and more people to engage in such illegal activities. Accompanying the booming telecom fraud sector on the island are the huge economic losses sustained by families and enterprises on the other side of the Straits.

Any attempt to politicize the case will only set up barriers to cross-Straits exchanges and alienate the island from the mainland.--Beijing News
Hong Kong's Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying (R) is greeted by a Minnie Mouse mascot (C) as he attends the opening ceremony of Grizzly Gulch, the largest themed area in Hong Kong Disneyland's expansion. [Photo/Agencies]

Hong Kong Disneyland Resort announced it was laying off around 100 employees on Friday. The theme park reported a loss of about HK$150 million last year, and visitor numbers dropped by almost 10 percent to 6.8 million, with a 23-percent decline in mainland tourists visiting the park. Shanghai Disney Resort, which is three times the size of Hong Kong Disneyland, is due to open on June 16. Hong Kong will have to make greater efforts to attract mainland tourists, Global Times commented on Monday:

Hong Kong Disneyland will face even greater challenges, as the tourism industry in Hong Kong is still experiencing a downturn. In stark contrast, Shanghai Disney Resort looks set to become the most popular theme park worldwide, with tickets sold out in advance for the first three months after its opening.

As far as Hong Kong is concerned, it shouldn't put all its eggs in one basket and rely on mainland tourists. It is located close to the mainland, which is one of its advantages. While the Shanghai theme park is likely to attract a lot of visitors from northern and central China, people in the Pearl River Delta and neighboring areas will likely still visit Hong Kong.

We must not equate the opening of Shanghai Disney Resort with a death sentence for Hong Kong Disneyland.

The fall in the number of mainland visitors to Hong Kong is partially due to the impression that Hong Kong is not welcoming of them. Hong Kong should make efforts to address this issue if it wants to compete with the mainland's developing domestic tourism industry.
WANG XIAOYING/CHINA DAILY

A rather remarkable turnaround has occurred in China. For a country famous for having the most comprehensive sets of policies designed to limit births, it is now introducing new policies to support parents who have a second childfrom a planned tax relief to possible extension of maternity leave and expansion of free education.

For some time now, studies have observed family planning officials in some large cities actively encouraging couples to take advantage of their rights to have a second child. In this way, local governments could become ever more proactive in designing policies to support couples to have a second child.

Governments across the Asia-Pacific region have been introducing increasingly far-reaching policies in recent years to support and encourage childbearing in an attempt to stem extremely rapid aging resulting from very low fertility rates. Perhaps the most expansive and famous is in Singapore. Elsewhere, policies to support childbearing both financially and in terms of childcare and parental leave have been introduced in Japan and the Republic of Korea.

Yet in each of these settings fertility has stayed resolutely low; not least in Singapore which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. This is because the financial subsidies simply do not come close to offsetting the high costs of childbearing in these countries.

Costs are further exaggerated by expectations of huge investment in education and other activities, sometimes called "education fever". These policies are also not able to adequately address some of the more fundamental reasons for limiting family sizes, such as fragile employment and the "triple burden" placed on women to work and take primary responsibility for both children and elderly parents.

There is now a broad agreement that it is not just the one-child policy which pushed-and kept-fertility down in China. As such, just changing the policy is likely to have only a limited impact.

Assuming, though, that many of the other reasons for low fertility are common to both China and elsewhere in Asia, and given the limited success in other countries and regions in turning birth rates around, we might question how effective policies to support childbearing will be at increasing the Chinese fertility rate.

This, I think, misses the point. If the new policies were set out to encourage childbearing in order to achieve certain key population "goals", then they may well not succeed. But the language of the new policy announcement does not appear to suggest this. In a break from the "old" way of talking about family planning, the "new" language is much more about "supporting" than "encouraging".

This is not just semantics. If the new policies are designed to support citizens to be able to meet their aspirations in terms of family, work and life, then their success should be judged on this rather than the birth rate in years to come.

Switching from the world's most restrictive family planning regime to offering incentives for childbirth is a remarkable turnaround. But it may well be that the truly revolutionary aspect of this policy change is the switch from "shaping" citizens' actions to meet the needs of the nation toward "supporting and enabling" them to meet their own personal aspirations.

The author is an associate professor of social policy, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford.
"The government should continue to tilt more key universities' seats to students from poverty-stricken regions and the countryside, so as to let more of them receive quality education, and obtain upward social mobility in fair competition," Premier Li Keqiang said in a meeting on education reform on Friday in Beijing.

The wide income gap between urban and rural areas and excessive concentration of education resources in cities reduce the opportunities for students from rural areas and poor families to attend key universities.

Last year, the average personal income of urban residents was 2.73 times more than the average income of rural residents.

About 300 million farmers work and live in cities, but it remains difficult for their children to go to local schools, and most of them can only sit the national college entrance exam in their rural hometowns, where the threshold for entering key universities is much higher than in big cities.

Last year, students from rural areas accounted for more than 40 percent of the total number of students enrolled in Chinese universities. But the proportion was much lower in the key universities. Last year, only 19 percent of Peking University's freshmen came from the countryside.
A worker at a steel company in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, in January 2015. [Photo/China Daily]

Blaming other countries is always an easy, surefire way for politicians to whip up a storm over domestic economic woes, but finger-pointing and protectionism are counter-productive to remedying those woes.

Last week, tens of thousands of German steel workers went on strike over steel products from China, while Indian steel giant Tata's decision to close mills in the United Kingdom saw a media flurry of accusations that China had flooded the market with products at artificially lowered prices.

It may seem reasonable at first to put the blame on China. But on closer inspection it is clearly just a lame and lazy excuse for protectionism.

Although China produces nearly half of the world's steel, the majority of its products are consumed domestically, and its exports to the UK and Germany account for only a small fraction of the two countries' imports, both in volume and sales.

Moreover, steel products from China are mostly of low added value, such as ordinary steel rods and plates, which many European countries no longer make and have to import anyway.

In fact, plenty of jobs have been created thanks to inexpensive Chinese steel products, as European companies buy these products and then use them to make goods they export.

It should be noted that overcapacity is a global challenge amid a sluggish world economy, and that China has been one of the countries hardest hit.

China has reduced its steel production capacity by 90 million tons over the past three years, and it plans to cut another 100 to 150 million tons of crude steel capacity over the next five years. And the massive layoff of workers is a great challenge.

The problem may be more marked for European countries due to union forces that keep their labor costs much higher than in many other countries. However, the last thing the world needs is a trade war over this issue. Far more jobs will be lost than gained if protectionism prevails.

The West's doubts and objections to China's market economy status might make it easier for them to accuse China of dumping products and justify the imposing of tariffs, but that won't solve the problem.

The way forward for global steelmakers is innovation and collaboration. High-end steel products are still in great demand despite the production glut, and cross-market cooperation can help allocate resources in an efficient and mutually beneficial manner.

It is time for the finger-pointing to stop, and instead, constructive reforms should be rolled out to improve competitiveness to ensure the sustainable growth of the steel sector.--Xinhua News Agency




China's Global Newspaper





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A view of the beautiful scenery in Hanxianyan. [Photo/huichang.gov.cn]

Huichang county, with picturesque scenery, lies in the southeast of Ganzhou city in East Chinas Jiangxi province.

Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong once went to Huichang and praised the countys scenery as exceptionally beautiful.

The county covers an area of 2,722 square kilometers, with a population of 510,000 people. It is widely known as one of the old revolutionary bases, which made a great contribution to the foundation of the Peoples Republic of China.
Director Lu Chuan (right) accepts the Best Director award from Hunter Todd, founder and president of WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, as Panorama China chairman Ray Jiang (left) and organizer Dan Qi look on. "I hope you will become the next Steven Spielberg," Todd told Lu. [Photo by May Zhou/China Daily USA]

For 10 days starting April 8, Houstonhad more than 100luminaries from the Chinese film industry  producers, investors, playwrights, directors and actors come to visit for the WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival 2016.

There were opening and closing ceremonies, receptions and smaller gatherings. On most occasions, the red carpet was laid out, not only for the stars and VIPS, but also for the regular audience members, to walk on.

Many movie fans from the local Chinese communities dressed upelaborately to attend events, walk the red carpet and pose in front of the festival's photo backdrop privileges often reserved for stars only.

The glamorousand festive mood wasn't lost on Panorama China, the component of the festival that featured 20 Chinese films and ended with an awards ceremony held at Houston's oldMajestic Theatreon Sunday night.

Panorama China opened with the screening of a biopic aboutlate leader Deng Xiaoping  The Compact Density of Stone  and closed withthe commercial featureChronicles of Ghostly Tribe. The restwere independent films, several of which featured Chinese minorities and children. Of the 20 Chinese films, 19 won an award of one kind or another.

The festival seems to be catching on.According to Ray Jiang, chairman of Panorama China, the attendance went up dramatically compared to last year, when only five Chinese films were shown.

"Last year the seats were more empty than filled," Jiang said. "This year we've had two-to-three thousand viewers for Chinese films in total by rough estimate."

Lu Chuan, director of Chronicles of Ghostly Tribe, won the award for Best Director. Lu, who has focused on making artistic films in the past, said this was his firstattempt ata commercial film. While some Hollywood "borrowing"was evident in the film, the story was well-developed, critics said, and the film was well received and praised for its epic feel.

"Commercial films are now the mainstream in the Chinese film industry. I wanted to showcase this film at this festival to reflect that reality," said Lu, adding that he plans to develop Ghostly Tribe into a franchise like Indiana Jones or Star Wars.

At Sunday's ceremony, actor Lu Qi, who played Deng Xiaoping inThe Compact Density of Stone, won a career achievement award. Lisa Lu, who played a minor role in Grand Song, a well-received film featuring the Kamese songs of China's Kam ethnicity, took home a lifetime achievement award.

On accepting the award for Best Actor for his performance in A Class of One,Sun Haiyingsang a few bars of a popular tune winning applause from the audience.

Many attended the festival seeking opportunities. CoddyByars, an actor and model based in Dallas, was at the Panorama China award ceremony.

"I would certainly like to work with China in the film industry," Byars said. "I have attended the festival in the past. This year China got involved on such a large scale, we saw many new things coming out."

Of the Chinese films he saw, Byars said his favorite was Tai Chi Pioneer. "It's not just about Tai Chi as a martial art, it's also about love and respect, and finding your true passion," he said.

The festival also produced at least one partnership. "An American distributor has decided to buy the film The Rising Star Kindergarten, (a film about the "left-behind children" in rural China) produced by Zhang Yutong and directed by Han Yi. They are negotiating the details now," said Ray Jiang.

Panorama Chinawas helped by 50 Chinese student volunteers from the University of Houston and Rice University.

"I would like to say a big thank you to the volunteers who worked overtime for the event," Jiang said. "This was the first year we organized Panorama China. We faced a lot of challenges, and we are still exploring how to best do it, and I am confident we will do even better next year."
There is no scarcity of compelling stories about entrepreneurship in the Bay Area.

And behind legends, fame and fortunes, we need to recognize and acknowledge the contributions and sacrifices foreign-born tech professionals have made to make America strong.

Last week, I conducted an informal survey among my friends of Chinese and Indian heritage who work at leading tech companies.

One particular question I asked, purely out of curiosity, was: What is your dinner time? I've been led to understand that one of the perks Silicon Valley tech firms take great pride in providing their employees is free meals.

The feedback I got, however, only reminded me of the famous saying: "Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."

Here is a list of dinner times at a few unicorn or well-established firms: Employees at Facebook can start to eat at 5:45 pm; Airbnb at 6; Google at 6:30; Apple at 7; and Uber not until 8:15 pm.

Ride-sharing app Uber has dominated its industry since its inception in 2009 and was recently valued at $51 billion. But competition from home and abroad  Lyft and Curb in the US; Didi and Kuaidi in China; Grab in Malaysia and Ola in India  is fierce.

With some of those dinner times, I can't help but wonder how late those employees with families and young children will get home?

Probably no one would argue that a nation's overall competitiveness relies heavily on the quality and quantity of its most talented people. As a result, public and private sectors the world over vie with each other using tempting salary and benefit packages to identify and lure exceptional pros.

In the US, the technology sector in particular faces a severe talent shortage which obstructs its continuous development, according to a recent Gartner report.

The White House said there were more than half a million IT job openings to date, a rapidly increasing demand for techies who are able to design, develop and deliver solutions rapidly and repeatedly.

By 2020, there will be 1.4 million computer engineering job openings, according to the US Department of Labor. And American universities and colleges are unlikely to graduate enough qualified students to fill even 30 percent of those slots.

Over the years, corporate America has been able to sponsor foreign-born workers to apply for H-1B visas and let the highly-skilled from overseas fill the gaps in the workforce.

US businesses use the H-1B program to employ foreign workers in occupations that require highly specialized knowledge in fields such as science, engineering and computer programming, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services Agency (USCIS).

Each year, the federal government mandates a cap of 65,000 general H-1B visas and 20,000 H-1B visas for those holding degrees of a master's or above. The availability can be exhausted within a few days of the window opening.

This makeshift practice in the US has already stoked a debate over the merits of hiring foreign people at the expense of American citizens who need decent, high-paying jobs. But is the sentiment legitimate and true?

During the filing period last year, the USCIS received almost 233,000 H-1B applications. On April 7, the agency announced that it reached the H1-B cap in both categories and used a computer-generated lottery system to randomly select the petitions.

"The 15-day processing period plus waiting for the lottery outcome is an ordeal for any client," said Lihua Tan, an immigration attorney with Chugh law firm. "I've witnessed too many joys and sorrows. If not awarded the H1-B visa, the affected will lose his or her job and have to leave America."

Moreover, being granted the H1-B work permit does not guarantee a happy-ending, said Tan. The common practice for tech giants is to use cheap labor on demand and suppress their wages.

Ron Hira, a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute, said tech employers hold the work permits through this program, and that gives the company extraordinary leverage over a foreign worker and limits their mobility. Companies can pay $30,000 a year less to a worker on an H-1B visa that remains valid for six years.

According to the Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, foreign-born workers dominate tech sector employment, holding 67 percent of Silicon Valley's computer and math jobs, 61 percent of architectural and engineering jobs, 49 percent of jobs in the natural sciences and 41 percent of medical and health services jobs.

Silicon Valley is well known for being the epicenter of invention and innovation but it should not be the land of a ruthless and unethical business culture. Hopefully, those engineers at Uber can join their families for dinner and kiss their children goodnight.

Contact the writer at junechang@chinadailyusa.com.
Banners are seen in front of the Capitol during a rally against Money Politics in Washington DC, the United States, on April 17, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

WASHINGTON - What brings Americans from across the country to the capital city this spring is -- in addition to the iconic cherry blossom -- disgust with money's role in politics.

Over the past week, American voters' anger and frustration were on full display on the Capitol Hill, where thousands of activists held rallies and staged sit-ins to protest big money in politics and barriers to voting.

Chanting slogans "money out, people in" and "one person, one vote," demonstrators who felt disenfranchised denounced the campaign finance system that they believed favors interests of big donors over the needs of the public.

On Monday, the final day of the protests, about 300 demonstrators were taken into custody, bringing the total number of arrests to more than 1,200.

The demonstration is one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in Washington's history, according to Adam Eichen, deputy director of communications for Democracy Spring, a coalition of more than 100 groups that organized the protests.

"This is a big story," Eichen told Xinhua. "This is unprecedented actions, according to Capitol police."

However, the week-long protests received extremely minimal coverage in US mainstream cable news. They devoted merely 30 seconds to the massive arrests on April 11, according to The Intercept, a US investigative news website.

"I think it's a mistake on their (cable news) side," said Eichen. "It's really a shame that the cable news and big outlets did not cover us because this was people trying to make their voice heard."

"If the Congress is not listening, (and) neither is the media, then we are running into trouble here about how to get the words out," he said.

The protest epitomizes the wide-ranging dissatisfaction of the American public. Forty-two percent of adults in the country rated dealing with money in politics a top priority for the president and Congress, according to a January survey by the Pew Research Center, up from 28 percent four years ago.

The influence of the wealthy on politics, though long-standing, emerged as one of the key issues in this year's presidential campaign.

Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who has made it a central theme of his campaign, has gained considerable support from people who believe the system is rigged against them.

During the current campaign cycle, billions of dollars from the wealthiest people in this country are already flooding the political process, said Sanders, calling the campaign finance system "corrupt."

Republican candidate Donald Trump has also criticized the influence of large campaign contributions in his run for the White House. The billionaire real estate mogul has said he cannot be bought.

In another protest against money in politics, Sanders supporters showered Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's motorcade in 1,000 single-dollar bills when the former secretary of state drove to a fundraiser with actor George Clooney and his wife Amal in Los Angeles on Saturday.

For two seats at the head table with Clinton, a couple must contribute or raise a whopping 353,400 US dollars. Single tickets cost 33,400.

Clooney, in an interview aired Sunday, admitted that it is "an obscene amount of money."

"The Sanders campaign when they talk about it is absolutely right. It's ridiculous that we should have this kind of money in politics. I agree, completely," Clooney said.
UNITED NATIONS - The UN Security Council on Monday condemned the killing of a UN peacekeeper in the Central African Republic (CAR), calling on the CAR government to "investigate this attack and hold the perpetrators to account."

The peacekeeper from the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) was killed by unknown gunmen on Sunday in the town of Rafai in Mbomou prefecture in the CAR.

"The members of the Security Council condemned in the strongest terms all attacks and provocations against MINUSCA by armed groups," said a statement issued to the press here by the 15-nation UN body.

"They reiterated that attacks against peacekeepers may constitute war crimes and reminded all parties of their obligations under international humanitarian law," the statement said.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L), Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (C) and Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj attend the 14th Meeting of the Foreign Ministers of China, Russia and India, in Moscow, capital of Russia, on April 18, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

MOSCOW - Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday suggested that China, Russia and India expand cooperation so that the three-party mechanism will play a bigger role in global affairs.

Wang, who is visiting Moscow attending the 14th trilateral meeting of foreign ministers, made the remarks when he had a meeting with his Russian and Indian counterparts Monday.

The ever-changing global and regional circumstances have underlined the need for closer communication among the three countries and more contributions from them to the settlement of complicated hot-button issues, said Wang.

As the world's major emerging markets, Wang said, China, Russia and India established the cooperative mechanism not only out of the trend of multi-polarity, but also the need for common progress, which is helpful to create a more positive environment for the development of developing countries.

The Chinese foreign minister also said to put into full play their potential, the three nations should make more efforts to reform their economic structure, encourage innovation and transform industrial patterns, which will further promote their cooperation in all areas, from politics to economy and trade, and then to security and culture,

On global economic governance, Wang called for gaining more say for emerging markets through frameworks of the Group of 20 and BRICS, saying that China is ready to take the opportunity of this year's G20 summit to be held in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang province, to exchange views with Russia and India on new ways to speed up world economic recovery. BRICS groups Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Based on mutual understanding and trust, the three parties agreed to keep working together to fight against such evils as terrorism, piracy, and illegal drug smuggling, while facilitating the political solutions to regional hot-button issues, particularly the crises in Syria and Ukraine, as well as the peace process in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

The Chinese diplomat stressed that cooperation among Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi is an open mechanism, not targeting any third party and having no intention to ally to confront others.

The trilateral mechanism will continue to play a positive and constructive role in improving global stability and regional development, and to promote democracy of international relations, Wang said.
Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves with former US Representative Gabby Giffords on stage at a "Women for Hillary" campaign rally in the Manhattan borough of New York City, US, April 18, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

NEW YORK - US Democratic and Republican candidates engaged in a final frenzy of campaigning on Monday, one day before New York state voters render their verdict and potentially bring some order to the chaotic 2016 presidential race.

Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, the national front-runners, were favored to win their respective primaries in the state that both call home.

Victories would be a tonic for both of them following a series of losses. In recent weeks, US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has outclassed Clinton in nominating contests. On the Republican side, US Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Trump's closest challenger, has outmaneuvered the billionaire businessman in the fight for delegates to the Republican National Convention that will pick the party's nominee.

By the end of Monday - the last official day of campaigning before voting in the primaries begins - tens of thousands of New Yorkers will have heard the candidates' closing pitches.

At St. John's Riverside Hospital in Yonkers just north of New York City, Clinton spoke to doctors, nurses and others at a hospital cafeteria, asking for their votes and taking a jab at Cruz's dismissal earlier in the campaign of "New York values."

"I think New York's values are America's values," she told the crowd.

New York's primaries are expected to be the most decisive in decades in the selection of the Republican and Democratic candidates for November's general election.

The question for Trump is whether he will make a clean sweep of all 95 Republican delegates at stake by earning the majority of votes in all 27 congressional districts in the state.

Total victory in New York would help the real estate magnate avoid the prospect of seeing the nomination wrested from him at the party's July 18-21 convention in Cleveland if he arrives without a clear majority of at least 1,237 delegates. In that scenario, another candidate could win on a second or subsequent ballot.
CANBERRA - Pieces of debris "almost certainly" from missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 will be shipped back to Malaysia this week after undergoing careful examination by Australia's Transport Safety Bureau.

In a statement released by the Joint Agency Coordination Center (JACC) -- the body in charge of Australia's investigation into MH370 -- the pieces of debris found in Mozambique would be heading back to Malaysia, while debris found in South Africa last month would undergo further testing.

A spokesperson from the ATSB said after arriving in Australia last week, the new debris, including the piece with the Rolls Royce logo (thought to be from an engine cowling) had undergone a series of tests in order to link it to the missing Boeing 777.

"The two other items -- the South Africa piece with the Rolls Royce logo and the Rodrigues Island piece -- were brought to the ATSB laboratories on April 13," the spokesman said on Tuesday.

"Investigators from the ATSB and the Malaysian authorities are currently examining those two pieces for details which would serve to identify them as coming from a Boeing 777, and in particular for any details which might serve to link the debris as coming from MH370."

The pieces heading to Malaysia this week were earlier this year determined to "almost certainly" be from MH370, and were deemed to be from a flap track fairing segment and a horizontal stabilizer panel segment.

MH370 was a scheduled passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, which went missing with 239 people on board on March 8, 2014.
Actor Johnny Depp (R) and wife Amber Heard arrive at the Southport Magistrates Court on Australia's Gold Coast, April 18, 2016. Hollywood actor Johnny Depp's wife, actress Amber Heard, appeared in the Queensland court Monday charged with illegally smuggling the couple's Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, into the country on a private jet while Depp was shooting a Pirates of the Caribbean movie last year. [Photo/Agencies]

CANBERRA - A video of renowned actor Johnny Depp and wife Amber Heard apologizing for smuggling undeclared dogs into Australia has gone viral overnight, but has copped a backlash for looking similar to a hostage video.

Australia's Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce released the video on Monday evening as part of the couple's punishment for bringing the dogs into Australia without alerting authorities, and on Tuesday defended the decision to film and release the "bizarre and uncomfortable" apology.

"The court determines the punishment of the court, so I'm not going to start being in contempt of court," Joyce told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Tuesday.

The video was highly criticized on social media, with many users likening the limp performance of Depp in the video to that of being in a hostage situation, while some - including Joyce - were disappointed in the actor's "performance".

"I don't think he'll get an academy award for his performance," Joyce, who personally filmed the video, said.

"(But) as far as me directing this atrocious movie, even I could have done a little better than that."

The Agriculture Minister also used the virality of the video to highlight the strict biosecurity laws which Australians and tourists must abide by.

"At the end of it we've got a message that is going all around the world right now, it's going off 'like a frog in a sock' telling people that if you come into this nation and you don't obey our laws, you're in trouble," Joyce said.

Heard and Depp, who flew to Australia with terriers Pistol and Boo last year, failed to declare their dogs on their arrival cards.

At the time, Joyce threatened to have the canines "put down" unless they were promptly returned to the United States, while the owners were both charged.

Depp and Heard were given a good behavior bond by the courts on Monday and were also ordered to film the video as part of their punishment.
BEIJING -- China's special envoy to Syria, currently in Geneva for UN talks on the Syrian conflict, will visit Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia afterwards to push for a political solution to the conflict, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on Tuesday.

Spokesperson Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing that Xie Xiaoyan is meeting with UN officials, members of the Syrian government and the opposition in Geneva during the intra-Syrian talks that resumed on April 13.

UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura is scheduled to meet with the government and opposition delegation this week.

China welcomes the peace talks in Geneva and supports De Mistura's mediation efforts, Hua said.

"China is willing to work with the relevant parties toward a political settlement to the Syrian issue," he said.
This satellite image shows the Yongshu Jiao of China's Nansha Islands. [Photo/Xinhua]

Russia opposes actions "internationalizing the South China Sea issue" and favors direct negotiation between the countries involved, as China aims to uphold "the authority of the law" by rejecting unilateral arbitration.

The show of support came as a tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague prepares to issue a ruling, expected in late May or early June, in Manila's sovereignty case against China. The tribunal was established in 2014 at Manila's request, and China has rejected the arbitration process since the request was filed.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, while meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow on Monday, said Moscow supports direct negotiation by countries directly involved to resolve disputes.

According to a Foreign Ministry media release on Tuesday, Wang told Lavrov that Beijing's rejection of the Philippines' unilaterally proposed arbitration case is a move meant to "uphold the dignity and authority of the law".

"Both China and Russia should remain alert against behavior abusing the mechanism of compulsory arbitration," said Wang, who visited Moscow to attend the 14th meeting of foreign ministers of China, Russia and India.

On Monday, Wang said China is "entitled to choose by itself, in accordance with relevant laws, ways for resolving disputes".

Reuters noted that the court has no powers of enforcement and its rulings have been ignored before.

Wu Shicun, president of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, said that the tribunal "has triggered concerns over it assertively expanding its realm of jurisdiction as well as its impartiality".

Wu said the Philippines and Western supporters, including the United States, are attempting to force China into a corner, and the disputes "will not be resolved by the arbitration, but will flare up and worsen".

Reuters and Xinhua contributed to this story.

zhangyunbi@chinadaily.com.cn
Migrants sit in a rubber dinghy during a rescue operation by SOS Mediterranee ship Aquarius off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa in this handout received April 18, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

GENEVA -- Some 178,882 maritime migrants and refugees have reached Europe through April 13 this year while 737 have died attempting to do so, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said Tuesday.

The bulk of these arrivals has taken place in Greece, a country which has seen 153,625 people reach its shores since Jan. 1.

The IOM indicated that in the first three months of this year, close to 1,500 sea-borne migrants were reaching the southern European nation every day.

This number has significantly dropped over the last 10 days however, with fewer than 70 refugees and migrants arriving on a daily basis.

Italy, for its part, has seen 24,581 migrants enter its territory by sea, while 648 and 28 migrants have arrived in Spain and Cyprus respectively.

To date, 376 individuals have lost their lives crossing the Eastern Mediterranean route separating Turkey and Greece.

A further 356 people have died on the central Mediterranean passage separating North Africa and Italy, while five migrants have drowned on the Western Mediterranean and West African routes.
Our China lawyers are getting a new wave of American (and one European) companies contacting us about having fallen victim to what we call the China bank switch scam. The amounts lost have ranged from $22,000 to $285,000.

Our general response to these is as follows:

I am sorry this has happened to you, especially since your chances of getting back all of your money are very low.

If you were to retain us, we would charge you by the hour to do the following:

1. Work with your insurance broker and your insurance company to see if it will cover you for this loss. This is usually your best chance of recovering all that you have lost. We can help by explaining how these scams happen and why you are entitled to coverage under your policy, if that is indeed the case.

2. Try to get some monetary contribution from your Chinese supplier by letting it know it was their computer system the scammer hacked and therefore it should pay at least some of your loss. This works maybe half the time in getting maybe half the money back, usually over time. Much will depend on your existing relationship with your Chinese supplier and on what it perceives its future relationship with you will be. If you have already corresponded with your supplier regarding this situation, we will want to examine that correspondence.

3. Try to determine if there is any chance to recover anything from the perpetrator. This is a very expensive and time-consuming process and it makes sense only when you have lost a lot of money.

The bank switch scam is the most common, most pernicious and most difficult to detect China scam of which I am aware, and it just unrelentingly keeps happening. And even though the business relationship is between a Chinese company and a Western company, the perpetrator of the scam oftentimes is in Nigeria or in some country other than China.

This scam usually involves your regular Chinese supplier asking you to make a payment or payments to a new bank account, though it sometimes can involve your very first payment to a new Chinese supplier. Then even after you make the payment or payments, your China supplier insists you still owe it the full amount (oftentimes with added fees) because it never received your payment. When you explain to your China supplier that you in fact did pay it, your supplier points out that the bank account to which you sent the funds is not theirs and that you still owe the money.

This all happened because your Chinese supplier got hacked, either by someone outside or within the company and you indeed have yet to pay it. Or maybe it was you who got hacked.

I wish I had some new method of preventing this scam (just as I wish everyone who does business internationally would read this post so this scam never happens again). But I must resort to saying what we have been saying all along.

We are constantly writing about this scam on here in an effort (failing, Im afraid) to prevent it from happening again. This is a scam that can happen to YOU. We have seen many smart, worldly, sophisticated companies of all sizes get caught up in this scam.

I am writing this post today not just because our China attorneys are again getting a bunch of China bank scam emails and phone calls, but also because a loyal reader sent me a great article, entitled, Mattel fought elusive cyber-thieves to get $3M out of China, regarding how this happened to Mattel and how, by acting quickly Mattel was able to get its money back.

The article starts by setting the scene of how it was that Mattel sent $3 million dollars to a scammers bank account:

The email seemed unremarkable: a routine request by Mattel Inc.s chief executive for a new vendor payment to China.

It was well-timed, arriving on Thursday, April 30, during a tumultuous period for the Los-Angeles based maker of Barbie dolls. Barbie was bombing, particularly overseas, and the CEO, Christopher Sinclair, had officially taken over only that month. Mattel had fired his predecessor.

The finance executive who got the note was naturally eager to please her new boss. She double-checked protocol. Fund transfers required approval from two high-ranking managers. She qualified and so did the CEO, according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter. He declined to reveal the finance executives name.

Satisfied, the executive wired over $3 million to the Bank of Wenzhou, in China.

Hours later, she mentioned the payment to Sinclair.

But he hadnt made any such request.

Realizing it had been duped, Mattel acted quickly by calling their U.S. bank, the police and the FBI, all of whom told Mattel it was out of luck because the money is already in China.

Note that this version of the scam is a bit different than that I outlined above. This is a variant known as the fake CEO or fake president scam, and it is  not surprisingly  more commonly experienced by massive companies than by SMEs:

Mattels millions were swept up in a tide of dirty money that passes through China and that Western police are only beginning to understand. The scam the company fell victim to  known as the fake CEO or fake president scam  has cost companies, many of them American, over $1.8 billion, according to the FBI. Most of the stolen money passes through banks in China or Hong Kong, the FBI said.

China has become a popular destination for such scammed funds because cooperation between U.S. and China law enforcement is so weak. The criminals attacking Mattel in this instance had the $3 million sent to Wenzhou, a gritty enclave on Chinas eastern coast that is emerging as a significant transit point in global money laundering networks. The city is the destination for 90 percent of the funds stolen through fake CEO scams in Europe, according to an intelligence memo reviewed by the AP. Wenzhou city officials declined to comment.

Mattel quickly notified Chinese police, who quickly launched a criminal investigation, according to a letter from Mattel thanking Chinese authorities, which was obtained by the AP:

When the Bank of Wenzhou opened the following Monday, a China-based anti-fraud executive from Mattel strode past the sculpted lions that flank the entrance to the banks headquarters, marched upstairs to the International Business Department and presented a letter from the FBI, according to two people familiar with the investigation who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Chinese police froze the account that very morning. Two days later, on May 6, Mattel got its money back, according to the letter.

Mattel wrote that the Wenzhou police showed a great sense of responsibility and enforcement capability.

We hereby reiterate our appreciation, Mattel wrote. We also hope that this case can pave the way for future international cooperation in fighting similar transnational crimes.

* * * *

Its still not clear who was behind the scam.

What can you do to prevent it from happening to you? The following:

1. Get to know your suppliers who speak English (if you dont speak Chinese) and get your suppliers landline phone numbers as that cannot be hacked. Call if you have any concerns.

2. Get your suppliers bank account information in advance and ask them to refer to bank account information document on their invoices, rather than listing out full bank details every time.

3. Ask your suppliers to fax you their invoice and make sure the sending fax number belongs to your suppliers company.

4. Do a first small wire to confirm the account.

5. Have a special procedure for confirming the company name. Note also that paying a Chinese company in mainland China is safer for you than paying them overseas, be it Hong Kong, Taiwan or anywhere else.

6. Have a special procedure for confirming bank account changes. Follow the same procedure as point 5, but also call several people in the company. They will understand your attitude if you tell them you are worried about the different bank account scam  they are also a victim when it happens to their customers.

7. Have an internal procedure for confirming all payments over a certain amount.

Above all else, be careful. Distrust and verify.
(Photo : Getty Images) Apple's new MacBook Pro 2016 could hit the market by June..

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The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2016 (WWC) on June 3 is expected to see the announcement of the new MacBook Pro 2016. The company is said to be also preparing to release two new ultra-thin MacBook products in the second quarter of this year.



There are rumors that the 12-inch MacBook Air 2016 could hit the market this June as well. The 2016 MacBook Pro models are said to be slimmer than their predecessors, just like the MacBook Air. Apple is speculated to kill the MacBook Air brand and replace it with the ultra-thin MacBook Pro 2016 devices. The new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro 2016 variants are expected to cost about $1,500 and $2,800, respectively.



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The MacBook Pro 2016 devices could be powered by a 6th gen Intel Skylake chipset, which is believed to enhance the laptop's battery performance to up to nine hours. Rumor has it that Apple will include an OLED display equipped with Retina Display technology and other key features such as Siri for Mac, a USB Type-C, dual band Wi-Fi ac and Touch ID fingerprint scanner.



The MacBook Pro 2016 variants are expected to sport Thunderbolt 3 which can transfer data with a speed of up to 40 GB per second. In terms of graphics, Apple could include support for an external graphics card so users can enjoy enhanced graphics without having to spend more money. Based on an Apple patent application, it is likely that the company could also introduce a new touch-screen keyboard to the MacBook Pro 2016, indicating a force-sensitive input structure which includes a customizable trackpad and keyboard.



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Tagsapple, MacBook Pro 2016, MacBook Pro 2016 Release Date, MacBook Pro 2016 specs, MacBook Pro 2016 Features, MacBook Pro 2016 Price
(Photo : Reuters) Mike Vernal will start working at Sequoia in May, focusing on consumer and developer tech.

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Mike Vernal, one of Facebooks top executives, is leaving the company to join Sequoia Capital to be the firms newest partner.



Facebook's Search, Local, and Developer Products executive has been serving the social media giant for eight years now. As head of search, Vernals responsibility was to overlook one of the big efforts on Facebook's 10-year road map, which will pit the company against search superpower Google. Before joining Facebook, Vernal spent nearly six years at Microsoft, as product manager first and development lead later on.



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The company said it does not plan to replace Vernal, and the product teams will continue to be run by their individual leaders. In addition, Facebook mentioned that he has been an integral part of the team and they are happy to see him climb another step in his career.



The former Facebook executive contributes to Facebooks efforts to turn its search function into more of a resource for people to find public posts about current events, instead of just a place to find friends profiles. Leaving the company came after Facebooks annual developer conference in San Francisco that discussed the companys 10-year vision, chat bots, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.



Vernal will now join 10 other partners in Sequoias Menlo Park office. Vernal is the first partner added since the departure of Michael Goguen, a longtime partner who left last month following a lawsuit filed by a former exotic dancer alleging abuse and breach of contract.



You dont recruit people like Mike. They choose you. His experience scaling engineering, product and design teams at Facebook will be invaluable to Sequoia founders working to build similarly transformative companies, said Sequoia partner Bryan Schreier.



Vernal will start working at Sequoia in May with founders across a broad range of start-up companies, with a focus on consumer and developer tech.



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TagsFacebook, Mike Vernal, Sequoia Capital, social media, Facebooks annual developer conference
(Photo : Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images) House fires (like the one pictured) caused a building to collapse, killing a family of four people in China.

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A family of four were killed in Shanghai's Huangpu District early Tuesday after a fire caused their home to collapse.



Two adults and two children aged 13 and 10 were found dead after firefighters arrived at the scene, the Huangpu District government reported said on its official Weibo account. The fire happened at 2 in the morning and caused a four-storey residential building to collapse.



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The family reportedly lived inside the four-storey building which was found to be an illegal extension to a two-storey structure located in Dongjie street in Shanghai. The cause of the fire remains unknown.



People within the vicinity told ThePaper that the four additional storeys were built about four years ago. Supports for adjacent structures have been added following this incident, as well as safety checks that required evacuating residents, said the government.



House Fires



In another place in China, a man killed himself after setting his own house on fire, reports Business Standard. The house, located in Guangdong province, was set on fire by the man after having quarrels with his family. The incident was caught on a 42-second video.



The man who took the video, identified only as Li, was blamed for not helping the fire victim. In his defense, Li said that he tried to rescue the man but failed as he was too far to reach.



Investigations on the incident revealed that the man died as a result of his own act of arson.



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Tagshouse fires, Dongjie, Huangpu, arson, Evacuation
(Photo : Getty Images) The United States has protested against China's landing of a military aircraft on a newly-built airstrip on the disputed Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea.

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The United States slammed China on Monday after the latter landed a military jet at a newly-built airstrip on the disputed Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea.



Lu Kang, spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry, explained the military aircraft landed on the island to airlift three sick civilian workers to a hospital in Hainan island on Sunday.



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The US military, however, slammed Beijing and refused to accept its alibi, questioning why it had to use a military jet instead of a civilian one if indeed the flight mission was for a humanitarian purpose.



Fiery Cross Reef



"We're aware that a Chinese military aircraft landed at Fiery Cross Reef on Sunday in what China described as a humanitarian operation to evacuate three ill workers," Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said.



"It is unclear why the Chinese used a military aircraft, as opposed to a civilian one, " he pointed out.



China has dismissed the US' protest, saying its latest landing on the runway was part of a rescue mission and was it carried out in it's own territory.



Man-made islands



The United States has criticized China for its construction of man-made islands in areas also being claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei in the South China Sea.



The US said Beijing continues to build artificial islands in waters, which are thousands of miles from the mainland.



US military officials have expressed concern particularly about the Fiery Cross Reef, one of the man-made islands constructed by China, after Beijing built an airstrip large enough to accommodate military aircrafts.



US military officials are unsure on whether this is the first time a Chinese military jet has landed on the newly-built airstrip on the Fiery Cross Reef.



China completed construction of the airstrip last year on the reclaimed island which stretches up to 1.8 miles. So far, two civilian test flights have been conducted on the runway this year.



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TagsFiery Cross Reef, South China Sea, military jet landing, humanitarian operation, Pentagon, us military, Chinese Foreign Ministry
(Photo : Julian Herbert/Getty Images) Hailstones the size of eggs (pictured) reportedly caused havoc in different areas in southern China.

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Four Chinese nationals were killed as hailstones the size of eggs rained down in Southern China.



Hunan province was hit by extreme weather conditions characterized by rain, hail storms and strong winds over the weekend. Hailstones as big as eggs rained down on the province and affected more than 380,000 people.



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Four of the people in the province were killed by the extreme weather while about 5,000 people have been forced to evacuate and look for safer refuge. More than 900 houses had been destroyed.



Local media outlets recording the devastation reported that the large hailstones were also able to break through home roofs and laminated car windows. To date, the government is still assessing the total amount of damage. Neighboring areas Guilin and Liuzhou, both in the Guangxi region, were also affected by the torrential outpours.



Guizhou province also experienced egg-sized hailstones in the first week of April, severely damaging houses, vehicles, and crops. Guizhou. Dozens of civilians were admitted to local hospitals due to head injuries from the solid blocks of ice.



Weather Forecast



The China Meteorological Administration alerted the public of more severe weather conditions on Sunday that it will continue for days until Wednesday.



The National Meteorological Center said that provinces Hunan, Guangdong, Fujian and Guizhou will be seeing strong winds and hailstorms while a rainfall of up to 120 milliliters is expected in parts of Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.



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Tagshailstones, Hunan, Guizhou, Guangxi, China Meteorological Administration
(Photo : YouTube) The new Xiaomi Max smartphone could hit the market as soon as next month.

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Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi could be planning to release the Xiaomi Max next month.



The new Xiaomi Max smartphone is reported to have a larger 6.4-inch screen; this means that the price is likely to be higher. Recently, Xiaomi's latest flagship phone called the Mi 5 was released with a starting price of $410. It has been suggested that the price tag of the Xiaomi Max is closer to what the Xiaomi Mi 5 could be.



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The device is expected to have an improved display screen, possibly bringing major improvements such as the QHD display. Rumors indicate that the Xiaomi Max smartphone could come with a Snapdragon 820 processor on board, similar to the chipset in the Mi 5 that was unveiled earlier this year.



Since the Xiaomi Mi 5 Pro smartphone comes with 4 GB of RAM, the Max smartphone is expected to sport perhaps 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB built-in memory. In terms of the design of the device, the Xiaomi Max smartphone is likely to be similar to the Xiaomi Note smartphone and could feature capacitive buttons.



During the 2016 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Xiaomi unveiled a unique feature for its flagship smartphones. The Chinese company introduced a new camera system with image stabilization yet unseen in the smartphone world. There are speculations that Xiaomi's upcoming device will be equipped with this new technology.



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TagsXiaomi, Xiaomi Smartphone, xiaomi max, china, Xiaomi News
(Photo : YouTube) The Lenovo Moto G4 and Lenovo Moto G4 Plus could be officially released by Lenovo this July.

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Chinese smartphone and laptop manufacturer Lenovo seems to be planning to release another powerful device as a leaked image of the company's upcoming device suggests. The company's upcoming device is dubbed as Moto G4, and it is said to have a major fingerprint sensor upgrade.



The flagship 'Moto G' has always been a significant smartphone model for Motorola (now Lenovo), since it offers impressive mid-range specifications at a very affordable price. One of the leaked images of the new Moto G4 spotted online shows that the upcoming device will feature a square-shaped home button on the front panel.



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The images also show that the G4 smartphone is equipped with a microphone hole on the left side of the home button (Microphones are usually placed at the bottom edge of a handset). There are some speculations that the said Microphone hole could be for an LED notification light instead.



The second leaked photo of the device provides the first look at the Moto G4's back panel. The G4's back panel appears to be completely smooth, instead of the previous generation's lined texture and rough surface. The dimpled "M" logo is also imprinted on the back part.



The images show that the top module of the camera appears to be a sensor with a dual-LED flash. Unfortunately, the Lenovo's Moto G4 specs have not yet been revealed by the company, but it is believed that there will be a G4 Plus soon, which will be the successor to the Lenovo G4 smartphone.



Speaking of the G4 Plus smartphone, the handheld device features a 5.5-inches display screen. Rumors also suggest that G4 Plus smartphone will have a 16-megapixel camera instead of a 13-megapixel one. It is believed that the Lenovo Moto G4 and Lenovo Moto G4 Plus will be formally announced by Lenovo this coming July.



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(Photo : Getty Images/ Drew Angerer) China's civil affair bureau has been sued after denying a same sex couple a marriage certificate.

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A civil affairs bureau in Central China received a lawsuit on Wednesday, April 13 after it refused to grant Sun Wenlin and his partner, Hu Minliang, a marriage certificate.



Shi Fulong, the couple's lawyer, was not surprised by the ruling but was bewildered by how the judgment was made under four hours.



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Shi contended that Sun and Hu should be granted marriage since there is no law that specifically bans people with the same sex from marrying. Sun Wenlin, defended himself saying that the laws focuses on the legality of marriage between a man and a woman, but does not necessarily imply the proscription of marriage between the same sexes.



"Though it was dismissed by the court in Changsha, China's first legal challenge to a law limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples has galvanized numerous hundreds of young Chinese gay rights supporters who gathered at the courthouse, some of them waving small rainbow flags," Sun said.



He said that the lawsuit came at a time when awareness about LGBT issues emerged, adding that "but once you knock on the door, you can knock on it for a second and third time, and there's a chance the door will finally open someday."



Shi also defended the couple saying that if the law is incapable of bringing equality and justice, the law should be changed. "It goes against the spirit of the laws of the People's Republic of China," he said.



After the dismissal of the case, the couple was made to pay a small fee of $7 for the court costs. With high spirits, the couple still plans to appeal even after their petition was turned down in the court proceeding.



According to government officials, China does not support same-sex marriage and that rule is not about to change.



"I hope I can pave the way as far and wide as possible so that people who want to do the same will see how much we have tried and what possibilities there can be," Sun said.



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60 diversely conservative ministers endorsing Trump meet him before NY primary 19 April, 2016 by Tobin Perry , |

NEW YORK CITY (Christian Examiner)A day before the New York presidential primaries, a coalition of 60 conservative ministers who support Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump met with the candidate as part of his National Diversity Coalition for Trump.

Seattle-area evangelist Eric Cowley, who organized the group of pastors, has been collecting e-mails and letters from 100 pastors and ministers endorsing Trump since last November.

The list includes a variety of family members of the ministers, as well. Cowley's wife, Gillian, and daughter, Jessica, appear on the list and count among the 100. Both serve as "ministers" in Cowley's work. Others on the list are five from New Creation Church in Houston, Texas, and two from the Full Gospel Business Fellowship of America. Some are identified as "African-American" and "North American Indian."

According to an article on Time.com, Cowley's decision to back Trump is spiritually motivated.

"As I prayed about it, what dropped into my heart ... was a Scripture in the Bible, 'They strained over gnats and they swallowed camels,'" Cowley told Time. He went on to note that Christians should be more concerned by issues of substance rather than Trump's past "indiscretions."

When Cowley sent into the campaign his list of endorsements for Trump, he also provided a copy of his campaign strategy manual, which he has used to fill stadiums of people overseas that respond to his message.

The pastor sees some of his own work in Trump's self-financing of his campaign. Cowley has self-financed evangelistic missions in Africa.

Trump's support among evangelicals has largely stumped pundits in 2016. Though twice-divorced and with a seemingly recent conversion to the moral and cultural issues that have shaped the conservative Christian vote since at least 1980, he has gotten broad evangelical supportincluding the endorsements of several high-profile Christian leaders.

"Trump does not need the come-to-Jesus conversion long required of American politicians to have the ideal testimony for prosperity believers. His economic success is the truest sign of God's blessing."

There have been a variety of cases made for his success in the evangelical worldincluding the possibility that he is reaching mostly nominal evangelicals. A recent Washington Post article noted that while Trump has won 36 percent of the white, evangelical vote in the 20 state primaries or caucuses where exit polls had been conducted up until that point, his support has dropped significantly among more active churchgoers.

Yet Ed Stetzer noted of the Washington Post piece that even among the most devout evangelicals, Trump is the most popular Republican candidate. Stetzer suggests that while "it's a myth to say all evangelicals are for Trump, it's also a myth to say that evangelicals are not for Trump."

Time has previously reported on another segment of the evangelical community that has latched on to the real-estate mogul. Time says Trump has built a strong following among "prosperity pastors," those who teach that God wants to give people better health and more wealth.

Time noted that prosperity preachers' focus on winning and success syncs with Trump's own ideology.

"Trump does not need the come-to-Jesus conversion long required of American politicians to have the ideal testimony for prosperity believers," Elizabeth Dias of Time reported. "His economic success is the truest sign of God's blessing. It even frees Trump's supporters to accept what would traditionally be seen as evangelical failings: his three marriages, past support for abortion, and public refusal to ask for forgiveness."
North American evangelicals respond to Ecuador earthquake 18 April, 2016 by Tobin Perry , |

MANABI PROVINCE, Ecuador (Christian Examiner)North American evangelicals are responding to a devastating weekend earthquake in the small South American country of Ecuador.

The 7.8 magnitude earthquakethe worst in nearly three decadeskilled at least 272 people, according to CNN. At least 2,527 people are injured or missing. The government has already declared a state of emergency for all six of its coastal provincesGuayas, Manabi, Santo Domingo, Los Rios, Esmeraldas and Galapagos.

According to a press release by Samaritan's Purse, the North Carolina-based relief ministry has personnel on the ground in the country and a team of seven staff members on the way to help.

"The earthquake in Ecuador last night has caused incredible destruction. We're responding so that we can show the people there the love of Christ and help relieve their suffering. Please keep them in your prayers," said Samaritan's Purse President Franklin Graham in the release.

Samaritan's Purse notes that the needs for medical assistance and clean drinking water are "urgent." The organization says it is prepared to respond to both needs along with providing much-needed shelter for those impacted.

"The earthquake in Ecuador last night has caused incredible destruction. We're responding so that we can show the people there the love of Christ and help relieve their suffering. Please keep them in your prayers."

World Vision, based in Federal Way, Wash., is working in Esmeraldas and Manabi provinces to provide emergency kits, temporary shelter and "child-friendly places" for families impacted by the earthquake. They also note that they are working with local emergency shelters to provide relief to the most vulnerable of those impacted.

World Vision's national director in Ecuador, Jose Luis Ochoa, said in Sunday's release that they are particularly concerned about children and "ensuring their needs are met."

"This is the worst earthquake to strike Ecuador since 1987, when 1,000 people were killed. It was a truly terrifying event felt across the country," Ochoa said. "The people of Ecuador spent a night worried about further shocks and today finding out about the extent of the damage."

Baptist Global Response, the international responders for Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, says that its area director is currently assessing the situation with national partners in Ecuador. They will determine when and if disaster relief teams may be necessary. If they determine Baptist volunteers are needed, the first teams will likely be comprised of nationals from Ecuador.

A Portland-area Christian school had a team of students studying in Ecuador as the earthquake hit. On Sunday Greater Portland Christian School reported on Facebook that all of its students were safe. Since the country's airport in Manta was still open, the students would follow the original return plans.

"We are all fine but one church family lost the house they were building," the team wrote on Facebook. "When the kids saw them at the church last night, they took up an impromptu offering for the family. It was their own idea, and the family was very grateful."

They also noted that the local Ecuadorian church where they are at is praying for God to bring revival to the country. They asked their families to pray for that as well.

CNN reports that the earthquake's death toll is expected to rise in the coming days. Ecuador has deployed 10,000 soldiers and 4,600 police officers to the impacted area. Rescue efforts are focused on trying to find people buried in the rubble.

"The first hours are crucial," President Rafael Correa said Sunday night. "We're finding signs of life in the rubble. We're giving this priority. After, we'll work to find and recover bodies."
Tax churches into oblivion, atheist says Guest Reviewer | 19 April, 2016 by Michael Foust

LOS ANGELES (Christian Examiner)  Outspoken atheist/agnostic Bill Maher says Christianity and other religions should be taxed, not simply because he believes it's fair but also because he thinks it would contribute to their demise.

"There are 300,000 religious congregations in this country that pay no tax  no federal, state or local. No income, sales or property tax. And they own $600 billion in property," Maher said during a diatribe April 15 on HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher."

"Almost a quarter of us are being forced to subsidize a myth that we're not buying into. Why am I subsidizing their Sunday morning hobby? They don't subsidize mine," he said, as the television picture showed a shot of him near a marijuana bong.

Maher then implied that religion is similar to cigarettes and other vices the government taxes.

"If we levy taxes  sin taxes, they call them  on things that are bad to get them to stop doing them, why, in heaven's name, don't we tax religion?" he asked. "A sexist, homophobic magic act that's been used to justify everything from genital mutilation to genocide. You want to raise the tax on tobacco so kids don't get cancer, OK. But let's put one on Sunday School so they don't get stupid."

Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal organization that defends religious liberty in courts nationwide, argues in an essay on its website that there are multiple reasons churches should be exempt from taxes, including the great benefit they provide society.

"Churches minister to the poor and needy in the community, provide numerous social services for the downtrodden among us, and reach out to the 'least of these' in thousands of different ways," ADF says. "The social benefit theory justifies tax exemption for churches as a kind of bargain  churches provide needed services, so they are entitled to tax exemption."

Then there are "intangible" benefits, ADF says  "things like reduced crime rates resulting from transformed lives, suicides prevented when people surrender to Christ, and people with destructive behavioral patterns that harm the community changing into hard-working and virtuous citizens who contribute to the well-being of the community."

In 2010 a University of Pennsylvania professor co-led a study of 12 churches in Philadelphia and found they provided $50,577,098 in annual economic benefits.

"In fact, churches provide more social services and intangible benefits to the community than they would ever pay in taxes," ADF argues. "It makes no sense to tax churches because the tax dollars taken from the church reduce the amount of benefits it can provide to the community. In a very real sense, taxing churches harms society."

But there also is a "constitutional reason" why churches should not be taxed, ADF says.

"Churches were exempt from the very first time the tax code was passed at the federal level, and have remained exempt in every iteration of the tax code ever since. Every state in America also exempts churches from property taxes," ADF says. "That makes sense when you stop and think about it. As the Supreme Court said in a very early case, 'The power to tax involves the power to control.' Taxation is, in essence, a very strong assertion of control by a sovereign over its subjects. Exempting churches is a way to ensure that the state cannot control churches."
Transgender teen prevails in Title IX discrimination suit over boys bathroom use Editorial Staff | 19 April, 2016 by Joni B. Hannigan

RICHMOND, Va. (Christian Examiner)  A policy preventing transgender student, Gavin Grimm, from using a boys restroom at his Virginia high school is discriminatory, a federal appeals court today ruled, overturning a prior decision to reject Grimm's discrimination claim.

The ruling may set a precedent for transgender-bathroom related lawsuits in other states, including North Carolina.

Gavin Grimm, who was born female, but now self-identifies as a female, filed a sex discrimination claim when barred from using the bathroom at the high school after the school received complaints and adopted a policy requiring students to use restrooms corresponding with their biological gender.

The Obama administration filed a friend of the court brief to support Grimm's claim in Federal Court.

A panel of three-judges of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court ruled the Gloucester County School Board policy is discriminatory, according to the Associated Press.

Reuters reported it is the first time Title IX has been succesfully used to claim discrimination in a transgender case.

The case is being remanded to the district court to reheard.

The court's decision is said to establish legal precedent in five states in the 4th Circuit, which includes North Carolina. The states faces a lawsuit over a newly established law requiring students to use public bathrooms which correspond to the gender identified on their birth certificate.
Saudi Arabia has warned of selling $750 billion worth of American assets if Congress approves a bill that would allow 9/11 victims to sue the kingdom over suspicions of supporting the attacks, as first reported by the New York Times.

If the bill is passed, it will extend nations' jurisdiction past their sovereign borders, making the countries liable to be sued by each other.

Secretary of State John Kerry had earlier said that the bill, if passed, could also "expose the United States of America to lawsuits and take away our sovereign immunity and create a terrible precedent."

The Obama administration is now pushing the Congress to block the bill, cautioning the senators of the severe economic and diplomatic fallout.

The bill was co-sponsored by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and John Cornyn (R-Texas), and permits families of 9/11 victims to file lawsuits against foreign governments suspected to be involved in the attacks.

Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi Foreign Minister, told the US government that the country will sell treasury securities and other assets before they can be frozen by any impending lawsuits.

Former Florida Senator Bob Graham who co-chairs the 9/11 congressional committee said that he was "outraged but not surprised" by Saudi government's threat.

The threat comes ahead of President Obama's meeting with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud in Riyadh on Wednesday.

Fifteen out of 19 men who hijacked four planes and collided into the US targets in 2001 were Saudi citizens, although no connection was established between the attackers and government of the kingdom.

A US commission that had investigated the attacks also concluded that there was no involvement of Saudi government. However, another 28-page commission report on 9/11 attacks remains classified, and was rumored to have shown the kingdom's links with the terrorists.

Saudi officials urged the US government to release the documents in 2003, so that they could have a chance to defend themselves against the claims. But the Bush administration did not disclose the documents on grounds of national security. Obama continued with the same policy during his presidency.

The president is expected to take a decision on declassifying the documents in the next two months.

Graham said that he anticipates the declassification of the US commission report on 9/11 by June, which may name two Saudi government officials living in US to have provided assistance to the attackers. The 9/11 bill, if approved, would take away immunity from foreign governments if their officials are found to be complacent in the terrorist attacks on US soil.

A senior administration official spoke with CNN about the possibility of the President vetoing the legislation, saying that "rather than entertain a hypothetical, we believe there needs to be more careful consideration of the potential unintended consequences of its enactment before proceeding with legislation."
Hundreds of mostly Korean American college students from over 50 different churches in Southern California gathered at New Life Community Church in Artesia from April 15-16 for the fourth annual SOLA Conference, a conference for collegians co-hosted by several Korean American and Korean immigrant churches.

The turnout of some 450 students and about 50 pastors makes this years conference the largest in its history. College students from many major Korean American churches (the term being used broadly to refer to churches that have a majority of Korean American staff and congregants) including Living Hope Community Church, Gospel Life Mission Church, Sovereign Grace LA, Christ Central of Southern California, and Good News Chapel, as well as English congregations of Korean immigrant churches including Bethel Church, Oriental Mission Church, LA Open Doors Church, New Life Vision Church, Good Stewards Church, and All Nations Church, were seen in attendance.

This year, in accordance with the theme Light After Darkness, the scope of the conference focused much on the hope and victory that is found in the gospel in the midst of the shame, hurts, challenges, obstacles, and failures that all people deal with in life.

Chris Brown, one of the senior pastors at North Coast Church and one who has had years of experience ministering to college students and young adults through his ministry at Azusa Pacific University, said that such a theme is particularly poignant as college students today have to deal with a lot more than the college students from 40 years ago, due to the accessibility that they have to all kinds of information.

Brown said that Christians must not run away from, nor blame others for, those broken aspects of life, but face and accept the truth about themselves, as he addressed the collegians during the first session of the conference. Just as Jesus brought to light the truth about the Samaritan woman who had five husbands (John 4), Jesus wants to deal with those painful aspects of each person, Brown said.

He will cross every racial, gender, political line to deal with it, he said.

Jesus said that we must worship in spirit and in truth, he explained, adding, Jesus is saying, You wont be able to worship Me spiritually unless we go there.

Alex Choi, the senior pastor of Sovereign Grace LA, emphasized that Jesus himself experienced deep pain while on earth.

Because of what he went through, he can understand our pain, Choi said, an idea which was echoed by Harold Kim, the senior pastor of Christ Central of Southern California.

If you feel like you fall again, and again, and again, remember that Jesus got beat down again, and again, and again  but he got up, Kim said, and so will every Christian.

Kim, who spoke during the last session on the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead, also emphasized the power of God, the love of God, and the glory of God that is revealed through brokenness.

Jesus raising of Lazarus from the dead reveals his power, Kim said, and it also reveals his love for Lazarus as Jesus risked his own life to go to Lazarus and raise him from the dead. But in response to just those two factors  the power and love of God  some may still have lingering questions, Kim said.

If God is powerful and loving, then why does he allow pain? Jesus, why did you let Lazarus even die in the first place? Kim posed.

He pointed out that though Jesus had the power to stop Lazarus from dying, he chose to wait instead, that Gods glory would be revealed and that even more people would see and be in awe of God.

"Because Jesus is all powerful and supremely loving, he let [Lazarus] die," Kim said, "to bring about an even greater revelation of God."

Also in accordance with the theme, many of the breakout sessions at the conference featured topics such as understanding how past pains shape Gods future plans; understanding how the gospel takes away shame; discerning ones calling from ones life experiences; and creating a structure to be more focused in following Christ in the midst of a distracting world, among others.

Meanwhile, about 50 pastors also attended the conference, and a luncheon panel for the pastors was also a part of the event, during which Harold Kim, Alex Choi, and Julius Kim, the dean of students at Westminster Seminary Escondido and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church, shared their insights and experiences from ministering in their respective contexts.

A seminar exclusively for women was also featured during the conference, during which Christine Yi Suh, the assistant director for spiritual formation and care at Pepperdine University, shared her experiences, thoughts, and strategies in trying to thrive in her discipleship to Christ in the midst of the busyness of life.

The conference was co-hosted by seven local churches, including Good News Chapel, All Nations Community Church, Gospel Life Mission Church, Good Stewards Church, Christ Central of Southern California, Living Hope Community Church, and New Life Vision Church.
A majority of Americans side with Little Sisters of the Poor on the contraceptive mandate issue, and say that the nuns were treated "unfairly" by the federal government, according to a Marist Poll survey.

The US Supreme Court is hearing the arguments of both the US Department of Health and Human Services and from the Little Sisters to decide if the Catholic charity needs to comply with mandate, or if they can be simply exempted.

A majority of 53 percent adults in the survey said that birth control mandate accommodation currently provided to the charity was "unfair," while another 32 percent thought it was "fair."

Little Sisters is leading in public support by a 21-point margin as per the poll, in which 1,020 Americans were surveyed over telephone between April 8 and 12.

The result also showed a marked difference of opinion between Republican supporters and Democratic-leaning respondents. While 63 percent of Republicans thought that the process required by government is unfair to the nuns, only 44 percent of Democrats said so.

Among the genders, both men and women appeared to have similar views, with 53 percent men and 52 percent women finding the contraceptive mandate requirement unfair.

The charity feels that this requirement makes them complacent in the act of distributing the drugs, which is against their deeply held beliefs.

After about one week from the first hearing of the case in Supreme Court on March 23, the court asked both sides to submit additional filings to propose a provision of health care plan that will not involve Little Sisters. The first round of briefs were filed on April 12, and the next one is expected to be filed April 20.

"It is not reasonable for the government to demand that some - and only some - religious employers engage in activity that is totally unnecessary to the government's stated purpose of providing elective and morally problematic drugs to employees," Carl Anderson of Knights of Columbus, which sponsored the survey, said in a statement.

"Such action doesn't just violate the rights of employers like the Little Sisters, it is also at odds with the American people's understanding of basic fairness and our long-standing commitment to protecting the deeply-held beliefs of every American - especially when those beliefs are the minority view."
High School authorities in Middleton, Wisconsin, are trying to shut down a voluntary off-campus program called "Jesus Lunch" for students, which is offered once a week by a group of Christian moms.

The school said that they were opposing the program because it was "divisive", offered "free food," and was not qualified in food handling standards.

Students are allowed to eat lunch outside the school. In 2014, a group of moms began meeting their children at a nearby local park for lunch, where they would impart inspirational messages to their kids. With time, the program grew to have about 500 students.

"We show up every week just to show the love of Jesus," one parent named Beth Williams told Fox News. "Our mission statement for Jesus Lunch is 'food for the body, nutrition for the soul.'"

A video posted online about the event briefly described the event where participation is voluntary.

"What makes this even more amazing is that while we provide the lunches, it's the students who bring their friends and discuss a different biblical topic each week among themselves. It is entirely voluntary," the video said.

Principal Stephen Plank suggested that the motive of the gathering was been seen in a negative light by many students.

"Many students have conveyed to us their concern about a group offering free food to incentivize participation in a religious event on campus," he told News8000.com. "The result of which has a divisive impact on our learning community."

District Administrator Don Johnson and Plank wrote a letter to parents that the local park cannot be considered public property because it was being leased by the city, so was part of the school - and the school cannot let them use it for activities not organized through set rules.

"The parents contend that it is their First Amendment Right to provide free food and hold a religiously oriented event on this property during school hours," the administrators wrote. "The District believes that we have jurisdiction of this leased property, which is part of our campus."

At one of the lunches, Williams, who is also one of the organizers of the event, gave the school officials a letter from the City of Middleton and a lease agreement to use the park.

"Case law is very clear about that," Phillip Stamman, an attorney representing the mothers said. "The public park can be leased to another public entity, but it's a non-exclusive lease. It's not fenced off and it's still open to the public. Because of that the laws associated with the First Amendment still apply."

The principal of the school also said that some students were so unhappy with the event that they would contemplate leaving school early on the day of "Jesus Lunch."

"There are some students that when they know this day is coming, they will leave school early," Plank said. "We have some students that staff will find sitting in the hallway crying."

The police has become involved in the issue, and will remain present at all the "Jesus Lunches" to avoid any unforeseen clashes between the opponents.

"Their true motivation is clear - it's the religious speech (they object to)," said Stamman, and added that school authorities tried to take the help of local police to remove the parents from the park, but police declined to do that.

Police Chief Charles Foulke wrote on the department's Facebook page "Reasonable people differ over the interpretation of the wording of the lease. I'm not worried about reasonable people, but I am concerned about unreasonable people, people who are using this issue for their own purposes and who are beginning to threaten good people on either side of this issue. ... Please do not assume that our presence in any way indicates a preference for any side in this issue other than to preserve the peace and allow people to exercise their 1st Amendment rights. ..."
Awkward is the new normal, or even the new cool. Over the past several years, a young, self-deprecating generation has declared everything awkward: their favorite TV characters, family photos, uncomfortable interactions, themselves. Socially awkward, thats so awkward, and that awkward moment when have surged in Google trends as common (and overused) catchphrases.

But for Sammy Rhodes, awkward isnt merely a buzzword to claim. The college minister knows awkwardness at its deepest and darkest. Hes lived it personallyincluding when a 2013 controversy over his popular Twitter presence as @prodigalsam pushed him offline and into an identity crisis.

Rhodes, the dad and seminary grad who leads Reformed University Fellowship at the University of South Carolina, returned to Twitter the following year with a new sense of self. He went on to write about Gods power in unbearable times in This Is Awkward (Thomas Nelson, 2016).

Awkwardness is an invitation to be found. Its an invitation to vulnerability, and vulnerability is where intimacy and connection are born. Its also an invitation to throw yourself on the grace that makes vulnerability possible at all, he writes. At the end of the day, awkward people are the only kind of people God loves; because awkward people are the only kind of people there are.

Last month, Rhodes spoke with another Christian humorist who knows the trials of Twitter pressure and the struggle of starting again, Jon Acuffauthor of the book Do Over. A condensed version of their conversation appears below.

1
Joyce Meyer Conference Tour 2016 Comes to Dallas

Free conference with New York Times bestselling author Joyce Meyer



May 5-7, 2016 at the Dr. Pepper Arena



Collecting Backpacks and School Supplies for the military family organization, They Serve 2



Contact: Lori Potter, Joyce Meyer Ministries, 860-460-7993, LPotter@joycemeyer.org



DALLAS, April 19, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- Thousands of men and women will gather at the Joyce Meyer Conference coming to Dallas, Texas on May 5-7, 2016, located at 2601 Avenue of the Stars, Frisco Texas. Conference attendees will come together to hear author and speaker Joyce Meyer share a unique message each session. There is no charge for each of the four sessions. Special musical guest Anthony Evans will also be there.



Sessions start at:

7 p.m. on Thursday

10 a.m. & 7 p.m. on Friday

10:00 a.m. on Saturday

Doors open 2 hours prior to each session



Interpretation for the deaf and hard of hearing as well as Spanish translation will be provided. This section will be reserved until 30 minutes before the start of each session.



Multiply Hope, an outreach of Joyce Meyer Ministries that benefits the local area by mobilizing conference attendees to help the community, will be supporting They Serve 2 with donations of backpacks and school supplies. These items will be collected at the conference and distributed locally to families in need.



For arrangements to cover this event, contact Lori Potter at LPotter@joycemeyer.org.



For all conference details, contact Joyce Meyer Ministries at (866) 733-5692 or visit joycemeyer.org/conference.



About Joyce Meyer Ministries

Joyce Meyer Ministries (JMM) is an international nonprofit organization that focuses on reaching people through media with a potential audience of 4.5 billion people. Impacting lives around the world, through its outreach arm, Hand of Hope, JMM provides life-changing global humanitarian and missions relief. In 2015, JMM provided more than 31.9 million meals supporting feeding centers in 33 countries and free medical care to over 225,000 people in multiple remote areas. JMM also provides support for 27 childrens homes globally and provides a host of other disaster, missions and humanitarian aid. JMM also operates the Dream Center, an inner-city church and outreach center in North St. Louis. Please visit www.joycemeyer.org.
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Local Television News Show Features Book Author and Speaker to Discuss Supernatural Healing from Her Book, 'Supernatural Is Normal' In the midst of many illnesses and death, is there still hope for miracles? Author, A. Michele Mundy says there is because she has witnessed them



Contact: Michele Mundy, 662-312-3660



COLUMBUS, Miss., April 19, 2016 /



After the passing of her 36 year-old brother from diabetes complications in August 2015 and her father ten years earlier from similar complications, the Mississippi native said her own experiences of grief and healing inspired her to help others use their authority to receive healing on this side of Heaven.



"Too many people are claiming sicknesses by saying, 'my lupus, my illness' and things of that nature, and I've seen lots of miracles take place because people have learned forgiveness and all kinds of spiritual issues that are connected to sickness," said Mundy.



Based from various scriptures in the bible, the book discusses matters of the heart, tongue and mind, how to change them and offers solutions to healing. Mundy also shares testimonies of angels and miracles she witnessed in others and in her own life. Years earlier, she used music as the stage of healing for her father, but it wasn't until 2012 that she learned how to pray for healing. By February 2016, she published her first book as a platform to encourage people to see there is still hope for miracles, how believers are connected to Heaven and that supernatural healing starts with mindset and the tongue.



"Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof." (Proverbs 18:21)



Supernatural Is Normal is offered on Amazon and is reaching many people worldwide. Its readers reportedly experienced a breakthrough described as "a load off the shoulders" and some have left five-star reviews and testimonials. Many more are receiving revelation that God's Supernatural is normal.



For more information about the book, visit the Amazon page:

Share Tweet Contact: Michele Mundy, 662-312-3660COLUMBUS, Miss., April 19, 2016 / Christian Newswire / -- WCBI local news show, "Sunrise" featured author, evangelist and songwriter, A. Michele Mundy to discuss supernatural healing and the release of her book, Supernatural Is Normal  How To Receive Healing, Wholeness and Success. Mundy was scheduled to speak at a Sisterhood event the following Sunday on the subject, and sat down with news anchor, Steve Schill and Ebenezer Church Brotherhood president, James Lenoir.After the passing of her 36 year-old brother from diabetes complications in August 2015 and her father ten years earlier from similar complications, the Mississippi native said her own experiences of grief and healing inspired her to help others use their authority to receive healing on this side of Heaven."Too many people are claiming sicknesses by saying, 'my lupus, my illness' and things of that nature, and I've seen lots of miracles take place because people have learned forgiveness and all kinds of spiritual issues that are connected to sickness," said Mundy.Based from various scriptures in the bible, the book discusses matters of the heart, tongue and mind, how to change them and offers solutions to healing. Mundy also shares testimonies of angels and miracles she witnessed in others and in her own life. Years earlier, she used music as the stage of healing for her father, but it wasn't until 2012 that she learned how to pray for healing. By February 2016, she published her first book as a platform to encourage people to see there is still hope for miracles, how believers are connected to Heaven and that supernatural healing starts with mindset and the tongue."Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof." (Proverbs 18:21)Supernatural Is Normal is offered on Amazon and is reaching many people worldwide. Its readers reportedly experienced a breakthrough described as "a load off the shoulders" and some have left five-star reviews and testimonials. Many more are receiving revelation that God's Supernatural is normal.For more information about the book, visit the Amazon page: www.amazon.com/Supernatural-Normal-Wholeness-supernatural-Christianity-ebook/dp/B01CPUW6MM or visit the website, www.supernaturallynormal.com
U.S. Must Act to Stop Genocide, Support Peace and Ensure Equality for Survivors Carl Anderson gives testimony before Lantos Commission



Contact: Andrew Walther, 203-824-5412, andrew.walther@kofc.org; Joseph Cullen, 203-800-4923, joseph.cullen@kofc.org; both with Knights of Columbus



WASHINGTON, April 19, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- In addition to helping stop the genocide of Christians and others now taking place in the Middle East, the United States must act to prevent its recurrence and to assure the future of the affected communities, according to testimony offered to members of Congress by Carl Anderson, CEO of the Knights of Columbus.



"Their future affects not only the fates of Christianity and other minority religions in Iraq and Syria," said Carl Anderson, testifying before Congress' Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on April 19. "It also implicates the national security of the United States."



In the wake of Secretary of State John Kerry's March 17 declaration that a genocide is taking place, Anderson, whose organization produced a nearly 300-page report for the State Department on the ongoing genocide, recommended that U.S. policymakers follow up on the designation by focusing on five key areas.



First, as lands are liberated, he said, proper planning must be in place to assist those evicted by ISIS and those who will flee the military actions that liberate lands under its control. Genocide victims who wish to return to their home areas should be helped to do so.



Second, Anderson argued that genocide survivors who wish to come to the United States must not be put at the back of the line. Of the 1,366 Syrian refugees admitted to this country in 2016, fewer than 3 percent came from the groups targeted for genocide.



"It is wrong to exclude those who faced genocide  often on the basis of bureaucratic oversight," said Anderson.



In his third recommendation for policymakers, Anderson said Christians and other minorities who wish to remain in Iraq and Syria should also be able to do so.



"The United States cannot help defeat ISIS without defeating its genocidal antecedents  the malignant idea that discrimination and second-class status are the lot of religious minorities, and that those who offend Islam, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, must be eliminated," he said.



"If [Christians and other religious minorities] disappear, pluralism and stability leave with them," said Anderson. "Iraq and Syria will at best become unstable majoritarian tyrannies."



Anderson's fourth point was that American legal concepts of equal protection, free speech, freedom of the press and assembly, and the free exercise of religion were critical to achieving real pluralism in the region. He pointed out that such principles were also contained in the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.



"Finally, we must help create the interpersonal relationships that bind society together," said Anderson, who cited Northern Ireland and South Africa as places where deep divisions gave way to peaceful reconciliation. A spirit of forgiveness already articulated by the Christians of the Middle East could form the basis for a commission of reconciliation and mercy, according to Anderson.



"Peace, equality and stability, rather than religious terrorism and genocide, can be the legacy of these countries and of our involvement there," said Anderson. "Our leadership can help these societies, the Middle East and the security of the American people."

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home World Catholic Church in Uruguay apologizes for 20-year-old sexual abuse cases

The Roman Catholic Church in Uruguay has issued a public apology on Thursday, April 14, for the sexual abuse committed by priests to three teenagers two decades ago.

The letter issued by the church, as quoted by Christian Today, reads: "We all know how, unfortunately, acts like these have been denounced for years in several countries, but they can never be justified within the church."

The letter reportedly says that the priests should be held responsible before "God and the courts." ABC News further reports that the church feels "pain and shame" because of the "abhorent acts committed by people who had promised to serve God and neighbor."

According to Auxiliary Bishop Milton Troccoli of Montevideo, spokesman for the Episcopal Conference, the incidents happened about 20 years ago but they received complaints only in 2015. They conducted investigations, after which one man was removed from priesthood while another left the service. The third victim reportedly no longer wishes to pursue the case.

However, the cases could no longer be taken to court since the statutes of limitations have already expired.

As the scandal broke, the Episcopal Conference of Uruguay decided to put up a hotline so people can report any abuse from priests that might occur.

The Catholic church has been embroiled in numerous allegations of sexual abuse by priests. In a 2004 survey conducted by the Associated Press, the researchers found out that since the '50s, 1,341 members of the clergy were accused of child molestation. At the time, only 80 of 195 U.S. churches responded to the survey.

In 2009, a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See's permanent observer to the United Nations in Geneva, said, "From available research we now know that in the last 50 years somewhere between 1.5% and 5% of the Catholic clergy has been involved in sexual abuse cases."

Of the priests who were involved in sexual abuse cases, the report says, 80 to 90 percent were cases ephebophilia or homosexual attraction to adolescent males, and the clergymen reportedly engaged sexually with boys aged between 11 and 17 years.
Body of missing Florida priest found

A 71-year-old priest who had been missing since last week has been found dead in Georgia, according to authorities.

The body of Father Rene Robert was found in a wooded area four miles off a highway in Georgia, according to St Johns County Sherriff David Shoar.

The sole suspect, 28-year-old Steven James Murray, led the authorities to the priest's body in a short police chase.

He was arrested on Wednesday night in Aiken SC with numerous weapons in the Roman Catholic Priest's car.

Murray is likely to be charged with first-degree murder and kidnapping, according to Shoar.

The motive is yet to be determined, but it has transpired that the priest had been trying to help Murray after he was recently released from jail. Murray was described as a "career criminal".

Authorities believe Robert, originally from Florida, was killed on April 12, the last day he was seen alive.

Shoar said that he and the investigators had finished a "huge part" of the case against Murray, but that there was still plenty of work to be done.

Shoar, who described Robert as a dear friend, said this is the most intense case he had been part of in 35 years.

"I just really wish we had better news tonight," he said.

Since Robert's disappearance last week, a number of prayer vigils have been held.

"Father Rene was such a loving person and he would do anything for anybody and most people would say the same thing and the fact that he was trying to help somebody and that person took advantage of him, that's what hurts the most," Linda Bertino of the St Bonaventure Secular Franciscan Fraternity, said at a vigil.
Christian fitness instructor killed in Texas church

A Christian woman was killed in a church in Texas on Monday morning by a man dressed in SWAT gear, according to police.

Terri (Missy) Bevers, a fitness instructor, was found at approximately 5:00 AM by people planning to attend her fitness class Camp Gladiator at the Creekside Church of Christ, according to the Midloathian Police Department.

A man with a helmet, gloves and heavy vest with "POLICE" written on it was caught on camera footage inside the church just before Bevers, 43, arrived, according to Police Chief Carl Smith.

"His intent was to look like a police officer," said Smith.

There was no footage of the attack itself.

Detectives said they did not see a weapon on the suspect in the video, apart from a tool he used to smash windows.

"She was actually found by one of the boot camp participants who got there a little bit early and waited outside for a while until others got there," police spokesperson Captain John Spann told WFAA.com.

"They went in the building where they located her."

The motive for her killing is not known.

"We are exploring all possibilities," said Smith at a news conference.

"It certainly is a strange occurrence for a church to be burglarised this time of morning," he said. "It's just and odd, random situation."

Bevers was described by a friend to WFAA.com as "a woman of God who loved her husband, children and friends".
Christian pastor sues Whole Foods in anti-gay cake row

The pastor of a nondenominational Christian church in Texas is embroiled in a bizarre row with the Whole Foods grocery chain over an offensive message on a cake supplied by one of its stores.

Jordan Brown, who is gay and the founder of the Church of Open Doors, ordered a cake and asked for the slogan 'Love Wins' to be written on it. However, he claims he noticed on his way home that an employee had added an offensive word to the lettering.

However, when he complained to the store it denied responsibility. It said its employee "wrote 'Love Wins' at the top of the cake as requested by the guest, and that's exactly how the cake was packaged and sold at the store."

The Whole Foods statement added: "We stand behind our bakery team member, who is part of the LGBTQ community, and the additional team members from the store, who confirmed the cake was decorated with only the message 'Love Wins.'"

Brown's lawyer called the statement "outrageous." "My client doesn't have blue icing in his house. This is not a hoax. He received the cake this way, and Whole Foods' response doesn't help us," said lawyer Austin Kaplan.

Brown is suing the company for emotional distress and for failing to respond adequately to his complaint.

In his lawsuit he says that after originally apologising and offering to replace the cake and terminate the employee responsible, a Whole Foods employee telephoned him and said an investigation had revealed nothing wrong.

The lawsuit says that Whole Foods' conduct was "extreme and outrageous  so outrageous in character and degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency and be regarded as atrocious and intolerable in a civilized community". Brown is seeking damages and costs.
Christian woman bulldozed and killed during church demolition protest

A pastor's wife was killed after being buried while protesting the destruction of a church in China, according to a human rights organisation.

China Aid said that Ding Cuimei suffocated to death when she and her husband, church leader Li Jiangong, stepped in front of a bulldozer in an attempt to stop the demolition on April 14.

The bulldozer reportedly pushed the two into a pit, where they were covered in soil. Li was able to escape, but Ding was killed.

The incident took place at Beitou Church in Zhumadian, in China's central Henan province.

Founder and president of China Aid, Bob Fu, denounced Ding's death as a "serious violation of the rights to life, religious freedom and rule of law".

"Bulldozing and burying alive Ding Cuimei, a peaceful and devout Christian woman, was a cruel, murderous act," he said.

"The Chinese authorities should immediately hold those murderers accountable and take concrete measures to protect the religious freedom of this house church's members."

According to China Aid, police said they are investigating the incident and two members of the demolition team have been detained.

The Communist Party is believed to be becoming progressively more suspicious of the influence of Christianity, which is experiencing significant growth in China. Up to 1,700 churches have been demolished or had their crosses removed in Zhejiang province to the east of Henan, and a significant number of pastors and human rights lawyers have been arrested and imprisoned.

Activists believe that Zhejiang is being used by the government as a test-ground, and fear that anti-Christian measures may soon be rolled out in other provinces.

In November, five church leaders were arrested in Henan over accusations they were involved in cult practices.
Elderly Christian woman caned in Indonesia for breaking sharia law

A 60-year-old Christian woman was publicly caned in the Banda Aceh province of Indonesia after being found guilty of violating sharia law.

According to a report by Quartz, the woman was found to be in violation of the sharia rule against the selling of alcohol, and was sentenced to public caning.

The woman was whipped using a rattan cane thirty times in front of hundreds of spectators, some of whom yelled at her and took videos.

Sharia regulations applied only to Muslims until bylaws were passed in the country last year, which expanded their coverage to non-Muslims.

Based on the report, she was the first non-Muslim to be subjected to the punishment for breaking sharia law after the bylaw took effect. Prior to the bylaw, the predomintly Muslim populated area of Aceh was the only province in Indonesia to implement sharia law as a means for the government to quell its problems with a separatist insurgency.

"This is the first case of a non-Muslim being punished under Islamic criminal bylaw," Lili Suparli, a senior official at the Central Aceh prosecutor's office, acknowledged in an interview.

Last year, before the approval of the bylaw, one of the major concerns raised by those opposed to it was how it would affect non-Muslims.

However, officials assured that implementing the bylaw would not have any negative impact on members of other faiths.

"The fact is that Muslims in Aceh do tolerate religious freedom and we can coexist without any problems. We don't want to raise the impression that Islamic law in Aceh infringes on the rights of non-Muslims... It doesn't [force] sharia law on non-Muslims because they are free to observe their own faiths and beliefs," Teungku Faisal Ali, head of the provincial chapter of the influential Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, said last year in an interview with Benar News.
Genocide declaration would save lives: UK Coptic bishop enters the debate over ISIS atrocities

A declaration of genocide by MPs this week would protect lives and allow for a co-ordinated international response to the atrocities being committed by Islamic State in the Middle East.

This is according to Bishop Angaelos, the general bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the UK who issued a statement ahead of a House of Commons debate on Wednesday afternoon. The intervention comes as the debate's motion received support from MPs of all major parties.

Among UK church leaders, Bishop Angaelos has been the most outspoken advocate for the declaration of genocide against Christians, Yazidis and other minorities. He was heavily involved in the successful campaign to persuade US secretary of state John Kerry to use the term in relation to atrocities committed against Yazidis and Christians.

In a statement issued on Tuesday he said he would "pray for wisdom for all those taking part in the debate".

He continued: "If the British Parliament recognises these violations as genocide, along with other parliamentary bodies around the world, this will allow an essential co-ordinated approach across the international community for the protection of the sanctity and dignity of God-given human life."

Ultimately, he added, the solution lay in a "realisation of the value of every life".

Angaelos' carefully worded statement is enough to set him apart from leaders in the Church of England and Catholic Church in England and Wales who have not yet used the world genocide.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the most senior Catholic in Britain, said he found the term difficult because "genocide seems to suggest a single target. Whereas what we are seeing in the Middle East has multiple religious targets and multiple ethnic targets."

Both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York have avoided the term as well. Rt Rev Paul Butler, Bishop of Durham, told Christian Today it was "complicated" as many Muslims had been killed too.

MPs from all major parties have announced their support for the motion which will form the basis of a backbench business debate after Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday afternoon. The Christian Tory MP Fiona Bruce will introduce the debate and she will be supported by, among others, Labour's faith envoy Stephen Timms MP and chair of Christians on the Left Jonathan Reynolds MP.

As a backbench debate, there may not be a vote at the end. If there is a vote it will not be binding on the government although a strong vote in favour of the motion would pile on pressure to act. More than 38 MPs have put their names down in support of the motion.
How old is the Bible?

Recent analysis of pottery fragments by researchers at Tel Aviv University caused a spate of headlines along the lines of "The Bible is much older than we thought."

The researchers claim the discovery that inscriptions, dated to around 600 BCE, were written by at least six different authors indicates literacy was more common than previously recognised.

"In other words, the entire army apparatus, from high-ranking officials to humble vice-quartermasters of small desert outposts, was literate," the study concluded.

"The results indicate that in this remote fort literacy had spread throughout the military hierarchy, down to the quartermaster and probably even below that rank. This implies that an educational infrastructure that could support the composition of literary texts in Judah already existed before the destruction of the first Temple."

Essentially the study says literacy was widespread earlier than originally thought so the Bible could have been written earlier than had been thought until now. No new evidence from biblical texts themselves can verify this claim and some commentators think the evidence doesn't support such a sweeping conclusion.

But just how old do we think the Bible is?

Dating the New Testament is relatively uncontroversial and nearly all scholars agree the texts were completed by somewhere in the mid second century.

Similarly the dating of most of the prophets is relatively straightforward. Most scholars would agree books such as Jeremiah, Ezekial and Isaiah were written around the time of the fall of Jerusalem and the immediate aftermath. There are different views on the precise datings of the prophet writings and to what extent they were revised in later centuries. There are also numerous questions that surroud whether David wrote the Psalms attributed to him and whether Solomon wrote Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. But none of these arguments are particularly controversial. Although some Christians find the thought of challenging traditional understandings of authorship uncomfortable, there is no reason it should be.

What is more challenging is the dating of the first five books of the Bible, known as the Pentateuch. Tradition has held Moses wrote Genesis  Deuteronomy and points to biblical references such as "the book of Moses" (Mk 12.26) and "the law of Moses, which he had written" (Josh 8.32) to support this belief.

Conservative theologians have tended to hold to this tradition, although the academic consensus is against them.



In the 19th century a theory known as the documentary theory arose which posited the Pentateuch was compiled from around four different sources. This school of thought suggests Moses was not the author. Rather the texts were a collection of different traditions put together after the Jews returned from exile as they sought to understand their own history and identity. This means the texts would have been compiled around the fourth to fifth century BCE.

Some commentators have suggested the Mosaic tradition is making a comeback in academic schools although there is little evidence to support this.

It is important to stress that one can be a Christian and a firm believer in biblical authority without holding to the view Moses wrote the Pentateuch. We do not know who wrote Job, Hebrews or many other books in both the New and Old Testaments. That does not mean the lack of obvious authorship means a lack of inspiration. The same is true for Genesis to Deuteronomy. Just because we may not be sure Moses wrote those texts, it does not mean we cannot believe God speaks to us through them.

But which theory you decide to hold on to will determine how old you think the biblical texts are. Moses is believed to have lived sometime around 1,300 BCE so if you hold to Mosaic authorship, the first five books of the Bible would have originated from somewhere around this time.

If however you think the documentary theory is more reasonable, the Pentateuch would have been compiled around the fourth or fifth century BCE. It is important to remember that even though the documentary theory suggests the texts were compiled and written down around this time, they originated from oral traditions dating back much earlier.

So how old is the Bible? It depends who you think wrote the Pentateuch. If you think it is Moses, these particular texts are over 3,000 years old. If you think the Pentateuch was put together later on, the texts are probably around 2,500 years old along with the prophets' writings.

Despite this the Old Testament as a collection was not put together until much later. Scholars differ on when the texts were placed together as a canon but common suggestions put it around the second or third century BCE.

Your own understanding of who wrote the texts will influence how old you think they are. Neither position makes one a better Christian. In fact scholars will debate the datings and authors of texts until the end of time. What is far more important is how the texts are used and applied to influence are lives today.
Indiana pastor says ex-prisoners are more discriminated against than LGBTQ community

A Christian pastor is opposing a proposed human rights ordinance in Valparaiso, Indiana, which seeks to address the alleged bias being experienced by the LGBTQ community.

The proposed ordinance from the Human Relations Council is expected to be an updated version of a 2011 human rights ordinance in the city.

It seeks to include protections for sexual orientation and gender identity, reports the Chicago Tribune.

According to the Council's head Heath Carter, records from 2005 to 2009 point to a rise in reports of discrimination experienced by members of the LGBTQ community which have left them feeling unwelcome in the city. In particular, there are claims that members of the LGBTQ have found it harder to acquire housing or jobs.

The draft ordinance prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, colour and sex among other things.

While members of the LGBTQ community have expressed support for the ordinance, Heartland Christian Center Pastor Phil Willingham said there were others in the community facing greater discrimination.

He said he saw no evidence of discrimination against the LGBTQ community in Valparaiso and that instead, evangelical Christians will be adversely affected by the ordinance as they may be sanctioned for opting not to provide services based on their religious beliefs, reported NWI Times.

"I want to see the ordinance to go away. I've personally not seen any evidence to see an ordinance like this is needed," he said.

He also questioned the claim that finding housing or jobs is more difficult for members of the LGBTQ community.

"We have far more men and women coming out of local prison and jail system that cannot get jobs or housing because of a perception than any of the LGBTQ+ community," he said.
Iraqi priest saves thousands of 'priceless' ancient manuscripts from ISIS

An Iraqi priest has been named a hero after he rescued thousands of 'priceless' ancient manuscripts as ISIS invaded his village.

Father Najeeb Michael fled to Irbil from his village of Qaraqosh, South East of Mosul, 10 days before ISIS invaded, accompanied by as many people as could fit in his car and more than 1,000 manuscripts.

"It was the night of August 6, 2014, a very dangerous and sad day and night when many thousands of people left Mosul and also Qaraqosh," he told VOAnews.com.

"This night I left Qaraqosh just two hours before Daesh came and occupied Qaraqosh, and I bring with me thousands of manuscripts in my car," he said.

The manuscripts, some of which were over 1,000 years old, related to astrology, theology and philosophy.

"The manuscripts rescued by Father Najeeb are as important for the history of Iraq's culture as any museum object or archaeological site," said Mike Albin, a US-based Arab world specialist.

"His heroism in rescuing the manuscripts and his organisational skill in preserving them are a priceless contribution to the preservation of mankind's cultural heritage," he added.

The rescued items, which include paintings from local churches, are now kept safely in Irbil.

"I felt we were in a dangerous situation and IS will attack us, that's why... I chose a big truck and put everything inside, many thousands of manuscripts, and also many thousands of documentation and archiving and precious things, and I take it out of danger," Najeeb said.

He, alongside some of his students, are currently in the process of digitalising these historical pages in order to preserve the Christian heritage of Iraq.
ISIS demolishes 2,000-year-old 'Gate of God' in ancient city of Nineveh in Iraq

The Islamic State (ISIS) has destroyed another 2,000-year-old archaeological treasure in the ancient city of Nineveh, according to United Press International (UPI).

The Mashqi Gate, also known as "Gate of God" in Nineveh near Mosul, was reportedly demolished by the terror group with the use of military equipment.

The British Institute for the Study of Iraq and the Baghdad Antiquities Department both confirmed the demolition of the ancient structure by the extremist group, the Independent reports.

"ISIS views tombs they destroy as sacrilegious and a return to paganism," Syrian antiquities chief Abdul Maamoun Abdulkarim said, as quoted by the ARA News.

Unconfirmed reports also mentioned that the group was dismantling the walls of Nineveh and selling separate stone blocks.

Nineveh was once the largest city in the world dating back to the 7th century B.C. during the reign of King Sennacherib, WND reports.

According to biblical records, the ancient city was synonymous with "wickedness."

The Mashqi Gate was also mentioned in the Bible. It was said to have been excavated in the 1960s and subsequently restored. It was one of the many grand gates that protected the Assyrian city, history books say.

The destruction of the gate is the latest in ISIS' campaign of cultural vandalism.

Earlier, the extremist group also destroyed other archaeological sites in Iraq and Syria, using explosives and bulldozers, while salvaging for sale on the black market items more easily transported.

Among the sites demolished were those in the Assyrian city of Nimrud, including the winged bull, and those in the Mosul National Museum. The vandalism of Mosul's museum done by the militants was reportedly shown in a propaganda footage released in February 2015.

In Mosul's library, the extremist group burned more than 100,000 old books and manuscripts that were reported to be among UNESCO's historical rarities, reports WND.

Although only recently been forced out of Palmyra, Syria, the extremist group also left in ruins the iconic Temple of Bel, the Arch of Triumph and the Temple Baalshamin in August 2015.
ISIS-destroyed Palmyra arch recreated in London's Trafalgar Square

A replica of an ancient arch destroyed by ISIS in Syria has been unveiled in London's Trafalgar Square today.

The Arch of Triumph in Palmyra was targeted by jihadists when they overran the city  a UNESCO world heritage site  in May last year. Militants blew up a number of important historic and religious monuments, including the Temple of Bel, which was originally consecrated to a Mesopotamian god but later served as a church and a mosque.

Palmyra was recaptured by Syrian government forces in March, and officials have pledged to rebuild the city.

The erection of the arch in London today was watched by hundreds of onlookers, who mayor Boris Johnson said were gathered "in defiance of the barbarians" in the Middle East.

"Daesh [ISIS] and other terrorist organisations seek to destroy democracy and obliterate history through the appalling acts of terrorism and murder they commit around the world," he said.

"I'm very proud that the Institute of Digital Archaeology is bringing the first monumental scale reconstruction of Palmyra's Triumphal Arch to London in a stand against this violence and in the quest to share the experience of this irreplaceable artefact with as many people as possible. Antiquities like this belong to all mankind and it is imperative that we all strive to safeguard our common heritage."

Maamoun Abdelkarim, Syria's director of antiquities, said the replica, made using 3D technology, was an "action of solidarity".

"The life of the Syrian people rests on their cultural identity, and Palmyra represents one of the most unique and exceptional cultural heritage sites, not just in Syria but the whole world," he added.

"We know that the plans to restore Palmyra to its former glory are grand, but they can be realised if the task is treated as a global mission."

The arch is on display as part of World Heritage Week, and will be moved around the world after three days in London.

Wonder of technology recreate wonder of world #Palmyra in #TrafalgarSq today declaring support for #culturalheritage pic.twitter.com/Dl3XtzuMLs  David Burrowes (@davidburrowesmp) April 19, 2016

A Vine tour of the recreated Palmyra Arch in London's Trafalgar Square https://t.co/C8taNZm1lB pic.twitter.com/Asy8JvxLYD  Mashable (@mashable) April 19, 2016
Legalising assisted suicide will 'hide killing with euphemisms,' Canada's Catholic leader says

A Catholic leader in Canada has warned that the upcoming legislation to legalise assisted suicide and euthanasia will "threaten the vulnerable and the conscience of those who oppose it."

Archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal Thomas Collins, also cautioned that legalising assisted suicide will "hide killing with euphemisms," the Catholic News Agency (CNA) reports.

On Thursday, Canada took a significant step towards allowing dying people to seek medical help to end their lives by passing a bill legalising doctor-assisted suicide and euthanasia under the federal criminal code.

Some Canadians have expressed reservations based on deeply held religious beliefs, but recent polling shows an overwhelming majority  85 percentsupport the right to die, according to Toronto's CBC News.

"We're all deeply concerned that this is a sad day for Canada," the cardinal told CNA on Thursday.

Although people see assisted suicide as a "simple solution," he said they will only begin to realise that "this is not the way to go."

"The very people who are most involved in helping people by the bedside while they are dying or while they are suffering are the ones most opposed to killing those entrusted in their care," said Collins.

The cardinal has been lobbying against the legalisation of the bill, suggesting to the government to "provide palliative care" for every Canadian, greater support for those with mental illness and help for those tempted to suicide" instead of providing ways to hasten death.

He earlier said that it is unfair for the government to force doctors at publicly funded hospitals to act against their conscience.

He added that it is "religious discrimination" to force the medical people to do it, according to CBC News.

In a video posted earlier this week on YouTube, Collins called on the federal government "to protect the vulnerable and those who care for them."

"Dying is simply not the same as being killed," he said, adding that "it is never justified for them to kill."

On Tuesday, Cardinal Collins said opponents of legalisation, including Evangelical Protestants, Jews, Muslims and the Salvation Army will hold a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the Canadian capital to press the government anew to respect the sanctity of life.

The gathering would say to Parliament: "Thus far and no further. This is just not right. It's not right," he said, characterising the effort as "the ecumenism of practical love."
Pegida founder in racial hatred trial after calling refugees 'filth'

The founder of German anti-Islam group Pegida will appear in court today facing charges of inciting hatred in October 2015.

Lutz Bachmann, 43, has been accused of inciting racial hatred in Facebook posts, allegedly calling refugees "scumbags, "filth" and "cattle".

The trial will take place in Dresden, the founding city of the Pegida movement.

Bachmann could face up to five years in prison if he is found guilty.

He has claimed the trial is politically motivated, and wore large, rectangular dark glasses as he addressed the crowd outside the court, apparently in protest against German censorship.

A supporter of Bachmann outside the court carried a banner reading: "Shame on you! Acquit Bachmann".

Pegida  an acronym for "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident"  has been gaining popularity in recent months both in Germany and internationally.

It organises mass protest across Germany and in other countries, protesting for the expulsion of refugees and a closing of borders to Muslims refugees and migrants.

The court says Bachmann "disrupted public order" through his comments, which equated to an "attack on the dignity" of refugees.

Separately, police have arrested five suspects accused of attacking migrant hostels and plotting anti-immigrant terror.
Radicalisation in UK prisons: Islamic extremist literature 'routinely' passed out to inmates

A leaked report has revealed that extremist literature is being routinely given out to inmates by Muslim chaplains in UK prisons.

The Times today reported that a review commissioned by Justice Secretary Michael Gove found Islamist pamphlets and CDs and homophobic and misogynistic literature in more than 10 prisons in November.

Materials that preached "contempt for basic British values" and encouraged the murder of apostates (Muslims who leave or reject Islam) were kept on bookshelves in chaplaincy rooms, the report said. They were freely available for inmates to pick up.

Chaplains at a number of prisons also reportedly encouraged inmates to raise money for Islamic charities with links to terrorism.

The review said that many Muslim prison chaplains were not equipped to deal with radicalisation, "sometimes because they lacked the capability but often because they didn't have the will".

According to The Times, the review found that "lax controls and failings at a senior level of the prison service had created a breeding ground for Islamist radicalisation."

The leak follows reports last month that Ahtsham Ali, the Muslim advisor to the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), oversaw the appointment of around 140 prison imams who studied a fundamentalist interpretation of Sunni Islam.

Members of the Deobandi sect are taught a very conservative ideology. According to The Times, the movement's leading seminary in Britain teaches contempt for "disbelievers", and urges followers not to try to integrate into British society.

However, chief executive of NOMS, Michael Spurr, has defended the movement. In a letter to governors, he said Ofsted believes the seminary to promote "fundamental British values such as democracy, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths".

At the start of 2016, there were 12,328 Muslim prisoners in England and Wales, 1,000 of whom were deemed vulnerable to radicalisation.
Several dead as huge Taliban suicide attack hits Kabul

The Taliban have claimed responsibility for a huge explosion in the Afghan capital Kabul on Tuesday morning.

Several people have died and more than 200 wounded after a suicide attacker detonated a car bomb. Gunfire was ongoing between security forces and the militants at midday Kabul time (0830 BST), according to Reuters witnesses at the scene.

The militant group launched the attack in the height of the morning rush hour. It comes a week after it said it was launching a "spring offensive" and warned of "large-scale attacks". The explosion targeted the office of Afghanistan's main security agency.

President Ashraf Ghani condemned the attack "in the strongest possible terms" in a statement from the presidential palace, only a few hundred meters away from the scene of the blast in central Kabul.

"Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism," said the President.

Pictures showed windows blown out at the front of an office that houses a National Directorate of Security (NDS) unit.

The Health Ministry said civilians and members of the Afghan security forces were among those caught in the attack, and several people had been killed and more than 200 wounded.

Those casualty numbers were expected to rise, said ministry spokesman Ismail Kawosi.

The Taliban announced the beginning of their spring offensive on April 12, and fighting has raged around the symbolically important northern city of Kunduz since then, although the capital had been relatively quiet.

Kunduz, Afghanistan's fifth-largest city, fell briefly to the Taliban last September in the biggest blow to Ghani's government since NATO-led forces ended their combat operations at the end of 2014.

The Taliban said on their Pashto-language website that they had carried out the suicide bombing on "Department 10", an NDS unit which is responsible for protecting government ministers and VIPs.

They said a suicide car bomber blew up the main gate at the front of the office, allowing other fighters, including more suicide bombers, to enter the heavily guarded compound. These reports are as yet uncomfirmed.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a separate statement that the attackers were engaged in a gun battle with Afghan security forces inside the building.

It was not immediately possible to verify the details of the Taliban's claim with government officials. The Islamist group often exaggerates details of attacks against government and military targets.

The Taliban-led insurgency has gained strength since the withdrawal of most international combat troops, and the Taliban are believed to be stronger than at any point since they were driven from power by US-backed forces in 2001.

Additional reporting from Reuters.
Sex abuse survivor to sue diocese that has reinstated priest

A survivor of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest who has been reinstated by the Vatican is to sue the priest's diocese.

The New York Daily News reported that Megan Peterson's attorney Jeff Anderson is to file a federal lawsuit against the diocese in India.

Anderson will claim in the suit that the Ootacamund diocese has endangered children by reinstating Father Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul.

Peterson, who says she was a choir member and altar server aged just 14 when she was first raped by the priest in his parish office, told the Daily News in February that she believed the decision to reinstate Jeyapaul gave the paedophile priest a green light to molest children in his native India.

Jeyapaul, who fled to India in 2010 after he was charged with assaulting Peterson and another girl, was arrested in 2012 by Interpol and extradited. He pleaded guilty to sexual assault of the second girl in a plea deal.

He was sentenced to a year in prison but released soon after the deal was reached because of time in jail awaiting trial. He returned to India last year and appealed to return to the ministry. The Congregation for the Doctrine approved this in January.

Barbara Dorris of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said: "It may be the most irresponsible Vatican move we've ever seen: Catholic officials in Rome have lifted the suspension of a recently convicted predator priest. We are stunned and saddened by such blatant recklessness and callousness. But we're grateful that one of the priest's victims is filing a new lawsuit, using a new approach, to try and protect kids from this admitted child molesting cleric."

She added: "We hope more victims start to use it. Something new and more must be done to prod Catholic bishops to better safeguard the vulnerable and to stop enabling heinous child sex crimes."

She acccused the Vatican of "incredible recklessness and callousness".

She said: "It was Megan Peterson's courage that brought forward a second victim of Father Jeyapaul. It was the second victim's courage that prodded Father Jeyapaul to plead guilty. And we hope the courage of a third victim will get Father Jeyapaul extradited, convicted and jailed again, so that no more innocent lives are shattered."
Texas parents say 'Our God is Bigger' after Bible verse removed from school website

Parents of students in Texas are buying "Our God is Bigger" t-shirts after a school was forced to delete a Bible verse from its website following a complaint from an atheist group.

The Troup Independent School District removed the 1 Samuel 17:48 verse that says, "As Goliath moved closer to attack, David quickly ran out to meet him," from its website after it received a complaint from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) last January.

"It is well settled that public schools may not advance or promote religion. No public school may urge religious viewpoints on students by granting special status to a religious text like the bible," FFRF staff attorney Sam Grover told school superintendent Stuart Bird.

FFRF said by quoting the Bible on its website, the school "unconstitutionally lends its power and prestige to Christianity" to exclude non-Christians.

As a result, a group of parents has organised and printed T-shirts that carry the message "Our God is Bigger" as their response to FFRF.

Brittany Taylor, who has two kids at the school, has joined other parents in the project.

"We support our school fully; they kind of had their hands tied in the situation. We wanted to fight back for them," she told KYTX.

Student Jesse Calley, a 7th grader, said, "I'm hoping that we get to put it back up because everybody should have freedom of religion."

The parents are planning to send photos of the kids wearing the t-shirts to FFRF.

"It will be in our children's hearts and they will not stop praising God because a group told them to," said Taylor.

She said nobody expected that the issue would become big "and everyone is excited and this town is uniting."

"We have gotten a lot of support from other towns and people on Facebook letting us know that they're proud to see us standing up for what we believe in and our kids standing up for what they believe in," she added.
The Queen at 90: She deserves more than patronising fondness

The Queen at 90. There will be a few calls for her abdication and the removal of the monarchy. But I imagine they will be drowned out.

Such is the popularity of the Queen that even republicans will grudgingly admit she has done a good job. And a few will bemoan how awful Charles will be.

The monarchy is the ultimate institution. Nothing screams establishment and old-school more than the red coats and bearskin hats outside Buckingham Palace. This is the age of complete suspicion of the institution. Repeated child abuse scandals have wreaked havoc in the Catholic Church and are in the process of emerging in the Church of England. Politicians misdemeanour's are now so commonplace they sometimes do not even make the news.

It says something about the Queen's popularity that in this age of mistrust in the institution, Elizabeth II is a national treasure.

But I think there is something deeper than just our affection for the Queen.

Born on April 21, 1926 she has seen more change in her lifetime than nearly any other monarch in history. Since she became Queen on the 6 February 1952, she has worked with 12 Prime Ministers and countless secretaries of state.

There is something endurably comforting in that. That despite all the hype and whirlwind of elections, economic boom and bust, the massive cultural shifts, the Queen remains constant.

Yes, progress is good. But so are tradition and stability. The practice of looking back. The practice of pausing to remember the past before plunging on. History matters. And the monarchy forces that upon us.

You cannot witness the changing of the guard or the Queen's Speech in Parliament without thinking how absurdly archaic it is. It forces us to reflect on how many years this has gone on for. It brings alive the past in a way that does not prevent change but perhaps slows it. It forces change to be methodicial and reflective in a way that is healthy.

And as the Queen reminds us of our past, it reminds us of our identity. Britain would be very different if we did not have the monarchs. The 'British values' agenda is a desperate attempt to rekindle some kind of national identity. We are no longer fighting the French or the Germans so what does it mean now to be British? The monarchy takes us some way to answering that question.

Our love for the Queen should, I hope, extend beyond the gratitude for an extra bank holiday and a Grandmother-esque fondness. The monarchy offers us tradition and the ultimate British institution: two things we should treasure dearly.
Wafer 'bleeds' in Polish church: Genuine miracle or hoax?

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Legnica in Poland has made an extraordinary claim about a "eucharistic miracle".

During a Christmas Day mass in 2013 a consecrated wafer or Host fell on the floor at the Church of St Jack. It was, according to Catholic practice, picked up and put in a water-filled container or 'vasculum' to dissolve. However, red stains were noticed in the water and the former bishop, Stefan Cichy, set up a commission to investigate.

Reports say that a fragment of the wafer was sent to the Department of Forensic Medicine in Szczecin, which according to the current bishop, Zbigniew Kiernikowski, concluded: "In the histopathological image, the fragments of tissue have been found containing the fragmented parts of the cross striated muscle." The tissue is "most similar to the heart muscle with alterations that often appear during the agony. The genetic researches indicate the human origin of the tissue."

In other words, a bit of wafer turns out to be human heart muscle that's been subjected to stress and pain.

So what on earth is going on here?

The story relates, of course, to the Catholic belief in transubstantiation  that the bread and wine of communion become in a literal sense the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ at the moment of consecration. While the 'accidents'  the outward form of bread and wine  remain unchanged, the substance or inner reality of the elements has changed. So the 'miracle' involves the manifestation of this inner reality to human senses.

And, of course, 'eucharistic miracles' have been known before; the blood of St Januarius in Naples is said to liquify a few times a year, while it's claimed that an 8th-century miracle in which the Host changed to flesh and blood has been validated by modern science.

Protestants hold a range of views on what happens at communion, from the pure memorialism associated with the Reformer Zwingli to 'high' doctrines of the Real Presence. But they all reject the doctrine of transubstantiation, which in the times of persecution was often the test which decided whether someone would live or be burned at the stake. So most Protestants  and many Catholics  are going to approach a claim like this with a good deal of scepticism.

In principle, of course, God is God and if He wants to perform a miracle like this he can. But it is, on the face of it, exceedingly unlikely that in this case He has.

It's no reflection on the bishop to suggest that other explanations  ranging from fraud to a genuine mistake by someone or other  are more likely. And without impugning the Church's motives, the bishop is also reported as saying he will instruct the parish church to "prepare a suitable place for a display of the Relic so that the faithful could give it the proper adoration". He is obviously preparing for a stream of pilgrims bringing doubtless much-needed income.

And it has to be said that the Church has form here. Such manifestations of the divine have always drawn the faithful to worship (and if Protestants are tempted to dismiss such things as superstition, they might like to consider the drawing power of 'signs and wonders' churches and charismatic megachurch pastors). But one of the things that drove the English Reformation of the 16th century was the exposure of many relics of the saints as money-making frauds. When Henry VIII's commissioners went round examining the monasteries they found extraordinary practices. At Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire, the monks claimed they had some of Christ's blood in a bottle, but that only people whose sins had been forgiven could see it. Thousands of pilgrims flocked there and knelt in front of it  some successfully, some not, depending on the size of their donations.

The commissioners found the bottle was clear on one side and opaque on the other. A monk told them: "You see, my lords, when a rich penitent appears, we turn the vessel on the thick side; that, you know, opens his heart and his purse."

At Boxley in Kent there was a crucifix which winked and nodded if an offering was accepted. If it was too small, it turned away in disgust. The commissioners found the wires pulled by the priests behind the scenes. The image was taken to the king, who said: "I do not know whether I ought not to weep rather than laugh, on seeing how the poor people of England have been fooled for so many centuries." The 'Black Book' in which the evidence against the monasteries was recorded was destroyed in the realm of the Catholic Queen Mary, for obvious reasons.

So what about the 'miracle' of Legnica?

If the reports are correct, it's perplexing; but we might conclude that an explanation requires the talents of a sleuth rather than of a theologian. On the other hand: if the church does become a site of pilgrimage, we should hope and pray that the faithful have a genuine encounter with the risen Christ  and are not too disappointed if the story falls apart.

Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
Wife of jailed Christian human rights activist speaks of power of God

The wife of a jailed Christian human rights activist has shared how she has relied on the powers of God during her darkest challenges.

Speaking to LA Times, Vu Minh Khanh, wife of imprisoned Nguyen Van Dai, shared her reliance on God as she travels across America to advocate for her husband's release.

Nguyen, a lawyer and blogger, was abused and imprisoned by the communist government in Hanoi after arranging to meet with European Union representatives to research human rights.

En route to this meeting in December, undercover police officers stopped him and took him back to his house, where he was monitored by cameras.

They confiscated three computers and USB sticks and later charged Nguyen with "conducting propaganda against the state".

Since his imprisonment four months ago, he has not been allowed contact with family and his requests for a lawyer have been declined, said Vu.

Vu is determined that Americans and others "outside our community... know his work, his cause".

"Now that I'm here in this country, I realise even more how much people suffer in my country," she said.

"How else can you describe it when you don't have basic rights?"

Nguyen founded the Committee for Human Rights in Vietnam, travelling across the country educating young people in human rights.

Vu, who had to sneak out of Vietman in order to visit the United States, told LA Times about the centrality of her faith in coping with her situation:

"I think and believe in the powers of God. If I become frail, it weakens the purpose," she said.

"Dai always tells me: 'We want to live a life with meaning  not just for us but for those around us.' That's why we continue to do what we do."

Nguyen was jailed previously in May 2008 and sentenced to five years in prison under the same propaganda charges. He was released to house arrest in 2011 for another four years.
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The rain was still falling Monday as home, auto and business owners jumped on the phone with their insurance companies.

State Farm, which has 3.4 million automobile policies in Texas, said it received hundreds of flooded-vehicle claims, mostly from Harris, Montgomery and Fort Bend counties. The carrier said it is sending additional catastrophe response workers to the area to deal with the deluge.

"Our claims team have been deployed to the area to begin assisting our customers," spokesman Chris Pilcic said in an email. "Our first priority is taking care of our customers' needs as quickly as possible."

Farmers Insurance reported receiving more than 400 flood claims for homes and businesses in the Houston area. It already has many adjusters in Texas handling hail damage from other storms, and these adjusters will now be handling flooded vehicles, too.

Allstate, which insures more than 150,000 automobiles and more than 90,000 houses in the greater Houston area, also is providing "additional resources" to the region.

"Due to severe weather across the state, we will continue to be assessing the needs of each location and providing additional support to help our customers recover quickly," spokeswoman Kristen Freis said in an email.

With so many people filing claims at the same time, Houstonians will have to be patient.

"It's going to take a while for everybody to be reached," said Mark Hanna, spokesman for the Insurance Council of Texas.

For flooding damages to be covered under insurance policies, cars generally need comprehensive coverage and houses need to be insured through the National Flood Insurance Program. A typical home-owners insurance policy does not cover flooding.

There are 120,989 National Flood Insurance Program policies in Houston and 230,694 in Harris County.

For flooded homes, Hanna said it's important to tear out carpet and dry up floors. If it's sunny, put damaged items outside to dry. Otherwise, use water vacuums, mops and towels to dry items as quickly as possible to prevent mold.

Don't throw anything away or start major home repairs before an insurance adjuster has examined the property. It's also important to document damages with pictures and notes. These steps will help the adjuster make an accurate assessment and make sure homeowners get the money they're owed.

For vehicles, do not start an engine that has been submerged, because that could cause additional damage. Instead, call the insurance company, which will send someone to examine the vehicle or tow it somewhere to be examined.

In both scenarios, Hanna recommends calling insurance companies as quickly as possible.

"You just have a lot of people who are all in bad shape at one time," he said. "The quicker you can call in  the quicker someone's going to be able to reach you."
Photo courtesy of the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship

TriFusion Devices from Texas A&M University won nearly $400,000 in cash and prizes as the grand prize winner of the 2016 Rice Business Plan Competition.

A total of $1.69 million  the largest prize amount in the competition's history  was awarded during the annual event billed as the world's richest and largest student startup competition.
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The body of a 43-year-old woman was found early Tuesday morning in a car submerged in a flooded ditch in north Harris County, bringing the death toll to six locally after storms raked the Houston region.

Authorities were alerted at 4 a.m. about a car underwater in a drainage ditch in the 1800 block of Briarcreek near Old Ranch Road, said Harris County Precinct Four Constable Mark Herman.

When crews pulled the car from the water, they saw the woman inside, dead. The car, Herman added, was filled with water.

It appears, Herman said, the woman was driving on the flooded street, missed a turn and plunged into the rain-swollen gully.

The road is near Cypress Creek, which has spilled over its banks and forced evacuations Tuesday at several apartment complexes, a motel and an assisted-living facility as resident flee floodwaters.

The woman's death is added to five others in the Houston area and one each in Waller County and Austin counties as thunderstorms pounded the region Monday.

Meanwhile, some freeways and neighborhood streets remained underwater Tuesday morning, a day after thunderstorms hammered Houston for hours, leaving flooded homes and swollen bayous in addition to the reported deaths.

Although floodwaters had drained off much of the area by dawn Tuesday, driving some streets was still dangerous due to fallen branches and other debris left behind.

And more flooding may be possible as another round of thunderstorms is likely to move into the region Tuesday, said Scott Overpeck, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

INCREDIBLE PHOTOS: Abandoned, flooded freeways show eerie side of Houston

Overpeck said the storms could drop up to 3 inches of rain in the area, which was drenched in some spots with 17 inches of rainfall Monday. The additional rain could make more flooding possible.

"With all the flooding we've had, even with that much rain there could be problems," Overpeck said.

A Flash Food Watch remains in effect through 7 a.m. Wednesday for much of southeastern Texas, including Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery and Waller counties.

STAY INFORMED: Check the live radar on our weather page

Overpeck said the storms will likely develop along the coast and move inland late in the morning. A 30 percent chance of rain is possible in the morning, increasing to 60 percent by afternoon.

Rain chances continue for the next few days. A 70 percent chance of rainfall is possible Wednesday, while on Thursday, there's a 60 percent chance of thunderstorms.

Threat of more rain has prompted Harris County officials to cancel jury service Tuesday, but most courts will be open for other business. Municipal court is open but Tuesday's jury trials are cancelled and jurors are excused.

Floodwaters from Monday's deluge still blocked dozens of freeways Tuesday and may make the morning commute a headache for some drivers. Overpeck said drivers should use caution on roadways in low-lying areas where flooding continues. Motorists are warned not to drive through standing water.

Harris County officials are monitoring weather conditions and keeping an eye of flooded creeks and bayous. They fear more rain could increase flooding in waterways swollen to over capacity. Crews, they added, were evacuating people from flooded areas Tuesday and are working against the clock before more rain may move into the area, creating the danger for worse flooding.

"We're under the gun for another five to six inches through Friday," said Francisco Sanchez, spokesman for the Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

CHECK TRAFFIC: See how Tuesday's road closures could affect your drive

The Houston Fire Department rescued hundreds of people from floodwaters Monday, usually motorists trapped in their cars on flooded roadways, but reported only one water rescue about 5 a.m. Tuesday morning on Baker Cypress Road in far west Houston.

Among the the closed freeways are the Grand Parkway -North in both directions at Stockdick School Road, Beltway 8-North eastbound at the Hardy Toll Road, The Grand Parkway-North in both directions at FM 2920 and at Bouderaux Road, southbound Tomball Parkway at Holderrieth and northbound U.S. 59 at Loop 573.

SCHOOL CLOSURES: University of Houston and other major school districts will remain closed

High water has also been recorded on the West Loop frontage road in both directions at N. Braeswood, the Eastex Freeway frontage road in both directions at Lee Road and northbound Tomball Parkway at Holderrieth.

Monday's deadly thunderstorms dumped a historic amount of rain. Northwest Harris County was among the hardest areas, recording between about 8 inches and 17 inches of rainfall. Other spots in Harris County received between about 5 inches and 10 inches of rain.

STORMS TURN DEADLY: At least 5 dead in Houston-area flood disaster

The heavy rainfall left 13 of Harris County's 22 creeks and waterways out of their banks. Five people reportedly died during the storms. Homes along swollen bayous and other areas flooded, forcing residents to flee.

The storms knocked out power to more than about 120,000 people in the region, CenterPoint Energy reported. By about 6 a.m Tuesday, power had been restored to all about about 11,000 customers.
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Residents at two northwest Harris County apartment complexes, an assisted-living facility and guests at a motel were evacuated Tuesday as floodwaters from a nearby swollen creek rose around them.

The evacuations began about 12:15 a.m. in the 9000 block of Cypresswood near Cypress Creek after heavy rainfall Monday sent the waterway spilling over its banks, according to Harris County fire officials.

About 11:20 a.m. Tuesday, rescue crews also were called to Atria Cypresswood at 6611 Cypresswood, as floodwaters from rising Cypress Creek threatened the assisted-living facility. Crews had boats and high-profile trucks to take the elderly residents to safety.

MORE RAIN: Flooding possible as thunderstorms hit Houston area again

At the apartment complexes and motel, officials said, the parking lots and the streets near them were impassable for passenger cars and a few inches of floodwaters had seeped into ground-floor units. Cypress Creek was as much as 6 feet over its banks.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said CyFair and Rosenberg Volunteer Firefighters were among many crews that were helping evacuating people along Cypress Creek. The creek is cresting after water from deluges in Waller County caused it to swell, and overflow, sending a "sheet of water" down toward the Katy area, Emmett said.

The evacuation was voluntary, officials said, with those requesting help being taken to safety. Up to about 200 people may need help.

Firefighters ferried people in boats and high-profile trucks through the floodwaters to higher ground. No injuries have been reported. So far, no shelter has been prepared for the evacuees, but officials are planning possible temporary aid for them.

STAY INFORMED: Check the live radar on our weather page

Mikka Gorden said she clambored into a rescue boat with her dog, a long-haired dachshund named Bear, and was taken to safety. Gorden said floodwaters crept toward her apartment complex, Cypress Commons, during the thunderstorms Monday, but the water began to recede later that night. However, when she looked out her window hours before dawn Tuesday the floodwaters had grown and surrounded the buildings.

"It was like a lake," Gorden said.

Gorden said at least 2 feet of water swamped ground-floor apartments and about 4 feet of water rose around her car in a garage. Some cars in the parking lot appeared to be floating.

"I'm thankful no one was hurt," Gorden said. "Things can be replaced, people can't."

Gorden said despite the hardship, the residents seemed upbeat.

"Everybody was OK," she said.

Meteorologists with the National Weather Service said more flooding is possible Tuesday when another round of thunderstorms moves into the Houston region. A Flash Flood Watch is in effect until 7 a.m. Wednesday.

Northwest Harris County was one of the hardest hit areas in Monday's deluge. More than 17 inches of rain fell in much of the area. Creeks and bayous, including White Oak Bayou, flooded.

Harris County officials hope to convince residents that even though the rain has stopped briefly Tuesday, the threat of flooding remains, said Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the Harris County Flood Control District.

Linder said flood water from hard hit areas in Waller County are just now making their way into creeks and bayous in Harris County, swelling them beyond their banks.

Cypress Creek between Tomball Parkway and the Northwest Freeway as well as Spring Creek along Interstate 45 at the county line with Montgomery County are in danger of even more serious flooding. Residents in the those areas need to take precautions to avoid or leave flooded or flood-prone spots.

"Just because the rain has stopped," Lindner said, "doesn't mean the flood threat has gone."

Very little rain fell overnight in Harris County, according to the Harris County Flood Control District's map of rainfall totals.

Between midnight and 6 a.m., most gauges registered zero rainfall. The highest reported amount was 0.12 inches on Sims Bayou at Texas 288.

Looking at 12-hour totals between 6 p.m. Monday and 6 a.m. Tuesday, many gauges still reported zero. A few more showed 0.12 inches, including Briar Branch at Campbell Road and Harris Gully at South McGregor Way.

Chronicle reporter Mihir Zaveri contributed to this arcticle
A suspected drunk driver has been accused in a chain-reaction traffic crash that left a 25-year-old man dead earlier this month in west Houston.

Hamza Khalid Paracha, 24, is charged with intoxication manslaughter in the wreck that occurred about 3:45 a.m. Sunday at 2900 Texas 6 North, according to the Houston Police Department.
For the first time in recent memory, denim was permitted inside of the River Oaks Country Club. Members balked at Tuesday's steady stream of 430 "BEAR the Load with Love Luncheon" attendees all dressed in their spring denim best as dictated by co-chairs Mary-Charles Davis and Mary Lynn Mannon's pink and indigo invitation.

The playful theme carried over into the decor motif, graciously underwritten by Swift + Company and executed by In Any Event's Niki Smith, which featured fuschia denim centerpieces and a spring fashion backdrop. Per instructions to "show your jeanerosity," lunch-goers donated children's denim upon check-in resulting in a towering pyramid of tiny Levi's dungarees and mini GapKids jackets.

"Those jeans are for children who've never had anything new," explained mistress of ceremonies Lisa Maloksy. Be A Resource for Child Protective Services' kids has provided aid for abused and neglected youth since 1997. The organization founded by three local women served 600-700 children during its first year on a $7,000 budget; today the non-profit operates on $1.5 million annually and expects to touch the lives of 12,000 youth in 2016.

"I think we've seen a lot of examples lately of neighbors helping neighbors on the news," said board chair Betsy Mercer of the recent flood coverage. "That's what we're doing here because all of these kids live in Harris County."

She then surprised the county's executive director of protective services, George Ford, with a gift certificate for custom made boots to commemorate his impending retirement; Ford played an integral role in establishing BEAR 19 years ago.

"Children are like pancakes, you should throw the first two away," quipped author and former columnist Louise Bayless Parsley of her own three kids with husband Bob Parsley. "But seriously, no one wants to throw away a child, and yet many children feel thrown away. For them, chaos is the norm."

The humorous featured speaker went on to share that CPS picks up 20 Houston children every day who are being "over-disciplined" or from adults who "refuse to accept parental responsibility."

The audience responded generously and raised more than $300,000 towards stocking BEAR necessities rooms with new clothes and other supplies. Ninety percent of all proceeds go directly to the non-profit due to a unique public/private partnership with Harris County and the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.
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It's Tuesday night, and Bollywood dance instructor Mahesh Mahbubani's Sugar Land studio is packed.

To music with female vocals and a throbbing beat, 22 preteens spin, twist and pop their hips on the dance floor as moms fill benches and chairs along a wall.

"Dancing is using all of your body, not just your upper body and face!" Mahbubani yells.

It was an extra rehearsal for Naach studio's second annual spring performance at Miller Outdoor Theatre in Houston, about 20 miles from the studio, which is off Williams Trace Boulevard between a cafe serving Indian food and a Montessori school.

More Information 'Bollywood Broadway' What: Naach, a Sugar Land dance studio, will stage an outdoor Bollywood-style performance in Houston. When: 8:15 p.m. April 24 Where: Miller Outdoor Theatre, 600 Hermann Park Drive Cost: Tickets and parking are free. Details: naachhouston.com See More Collapse

Mahbubani, 52, was trained in ballet and contemporary dance in Spain and England, but his true passion is the Bollywood style he grew up watching on television and performing in his parents' Bombay living room.

So, in 2012 he opened Naach, which is the Hindi word for dance, determining it would have a Bollywood focus.

Dance for Mahbubani is more than performances and perfecting steps. His goal is to foster confidence in his students.

"My calling was to empower people through dance," Mahbubani said, explaining why he left India in 2007 to open a Houston-area studio.

Before he left India, he made a living choreographing television commercials, music videos and the occasional movie that featured Bollywood stars.

So far, Mahbubani's goal seems to be coming true.

He started with about 60 pupils and now has 120, ranging in age from 3 to middle-aged moms who join with their children.

The studio offers five levels of dance based on age, each split into performing or recreational groups, plus a Bollywood-inspired workout class and contemporary dance classes.

Mahbubani is creative director for the studio's performances and has written 2-hour productions with plots that involve love stories.

This year, it'll be a different.

The concept for the show, which is almost 1 hours long, will be "Bollywood Broadway" because Bollywood, with its drama, costumes and dance, is India's equivalent of musical theater, Mahbubani said.

The music and dance will still be characteristic of India's Bollywood style, but in the spirit of a Broadway show.

And though he called out his students by name when they repeatedly messed up a step, Mahbubani encouraged those who were doing well as they ran through their numbers for the performance a third time that night.

"You have it," he said to one student. "Be confident."

Nihal Kulkaril, an 8-year-old third-grader at Austin Parkway Elementary, isn't worried about the upcoming performance.

"It's hard, but if you practice more, it's going to get better," he said.

Mahbubani was shy growing up and gained confidence through studying dance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. That's why he's so invested in instilling it in his students, he said.

He keeps them going during class with seemingly endless energy.

"I always think of him as a big kid," said Nirju Tailor, 27, one of his students, who also helps him teach some classes.

Mahbubani telephones his seven faculty on a regular basis, pumped up because of a performance or idea.

Another student turned instructor, Star Gilani, 23, said that if she doesn't hear from him every few days, she's pretty sure there's something wrong.

Mahbubani's newest idea is starting a nonprofit community arts program, called Moksh, to help him do more community outreach events.

He has the name approved, and is waiting for 501c3 approval.

In the meantime, Mahbubani has been teaching Bollywood-inspired workout classes to residents, some of whom are in their 80s, at the Sugar Land Senior Citizens Center.

He hopes this April's performance will get his audience members grooving.

"I just want them to be inspired to dance." Mahbubani said.
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Two propositions on the May 7 ballot in Richmond could change the way its commission represents residents.

Proposition 1 would increase the number of city commissioners - what other cities call city council members - from two to four. Proposition 2 would have commissioners elected to represent districts.

Richmond resident and commission candidate Tres Davis successfully submitted a petition to get the propositions on the ballot. He claims that some residents haven't been represented in city government, including minority voters from neighborhoods such as North Richmond.

The 2010 U.S. Census listed Richmond with 11,679 residents, of which about 55 percent were identified as Hispanic or Latino, about 25 percent as non-Hispanic white and almost 18 percent as black.

"The lower economic group and the minorities in the city have always been underrepresented," he said.

Davis, a behavior teacher for elementary students in Alvin ISD and who is black, ran unsuccessfully for commissioner in 2015.

Davis' petition was among five calling for potential ballot propositions that he submitted to the city since last spring for authorization to collect signatures. He received approval to circulate all but only sought signatures for the one pertaining to propositions 1 and 2.

A committee appointed by the mayor and commissioners to review the city charter pushed back against Davis' use of petitions.

"It just appeared the city staff was being continually bombarded with (requests for petition review) and that some individuals were trying to run the city through the petition process," said Michael Scherer, who chaired the charter committee.

If voters approve Proposition 1, Richmond's government would be more like those of similarly sized cities, said Bennett Sandlin, executive director of the Texas Municipal League, a nonprofit that provides services to and advocates for Texas cities and city officials.

In Richmond's commission-manager form of government, the city manager conducts day-to-day city operations under the watch of elected officials. That's the most common style of government among Texas cities with their own charters, Sandlin said.

Unique in Texas?

But Richmond is likely the only city in Texas with a charter that has just two commissioners, Sandlin added. Most Texas cities have between four and six.

Richmond has had two commissioners for as long as Mayor Evalyn Moore can remember.

The city has operated at its own pace in other ways as well.

Before Moore was appointed mayor in 2013, her husband, Hilmar Moore, was in the position for 63 years before dying in office.

Voters re-elected her to another three-year term in 2014. While Moore won't say whether she plans to run again, she said she enjoys the job.

Richmond didn't get its own charter until 2013, even though it had the required 5,000 residents by 1970. The city was incorporated in 1837.

Last fall, the mayor and commissioners appointed the charter review committee to consider if changes were needed.

The advisory group did not discuss increasing the number of city commissioners because by the time it got to the topic, members knew Davis' initiative would make it on the ballot, Scherer said.

The committee's recommendations came as Davis submitted his proposed petitions to the city for review. One of Davis' proposals that didn't make it to circulation for signatures would have demanded a recall election for Moore on grounds of claimed incompetency and failure to represent all communities in the city.

The committee's only recommended changes were to raise the bar on what is required for a petition to either put an initiative or referendum on the ballot or to initiate a recall election. These resulted in two other propositions in the May 7 election.

Richmond's charter states that to get an initiative or referendum on the ballot, a resident must gather whichever is greater - 150 signatures or a number of names equaling 30 percent of the vote total from the city's previous general election.

Based on the charter review commission's recommendations, Ballot Proposition 3, which pertains to petitioning for an initiative or referendum, and Proposition 4, which relates to petitions for recall elections, would change the part of the formula based on number of signatures to require 300 names.

Scherer said of propositions 3 and 4, "If you have more than 1,000 votes cast at the last election, we didn't change anything. This would only apply in a situation where less than a thousand votes were cast."

But voter turnout in Fort Bend County tends to be low.

Richmond's most recent general election last May drew only 435 voters. That puts the 30 percent requirement at about 130 signatures, which is fewer than the 150 required by the other threshold.

Davis got 168 signatures, which wouldn't have made the cut if a minimum of 300 names had been required last fall.

Before having its own charter, Richmond followed Texas general law, under which it is very unusual for residents to submit a petition to change a city's number of elected representatives, Sandlin said.

The dispute over whether to increase the number of commissioners came after the death of Commissioner Glen Gilmore this month and a gridlocked special meeting on April 11.

Moore and remaining City Commissioner Jesse Torres failed to agree on a candidate to finish Gilmore's term, which the city charter requires them to do within 30 days of the position's vacancy.

"I think you're being unreasonable," Torres said to Moore after she asked the city's attorney the consequences of not filling the spot. "I think we need to accept someone."

Gilmore's seat is up for election on May 7 and is sought by three candidates: Davis, Barry Beard and Carlos Garcia.

Torres refused to support any of the six candidates Moore proposed to fill the seat to finish Gilmore's term, which would have ended shortly after the May 7 election, and Moore did the same for the candidate Torres recommended. The vote between Moore and Torres would have to be unanimous to appoint a new commissioner. If they don't agree, citizens could take them to court to compel them to agree, City Attorney Gary Smith said at the meeting.

Torres, who is a former Lamar Consolidated Independent School District trustee, was indicted last month on charges of conspiracy to commit bribery, engaging in organized activity, fabrication of physical evidence and tampering with a government record with intent to defraud. Details are limited about the charges, which came after a six-month investigation into claims of bribery between Lamar CISD trustees and local construction companies. Torres will continue to serve in office unless convicted, Moore said.

Torres ran on a platform of increasing the number of commissioners and creating single-member districts and said he still supports both.

Moore said she won't publicly voice her opinion of either.

Said Moore: "It's going to be up to the citizens of Richmond and I respect their judgment."

Early voting for the May 7 General Election begins April 25 and will continue until May 3. For more information: fortbendvotes.org.
Fort Bend County Precinct 3 Commissioner Andy Meyers says a badly needed project to extend Katy's Cane Island Parkway to FM 1463 has been delayed.

Meyers is negotiating with Hilcorp Energy Co. to move an oil-and-gas drill site and pipeline in the area because it is in the way of the planned route.

The extension, which would be near the Firethorne community, would also pass through three properties, two of which contain houses. The county and owners are far apart in negotiations, Meyers said.

Now, he is hoping to complete the road by the end of 2017.

"It's essential that we have another connection to Interstate 10 because the traffic on (FM 1463) is getting horrendous," Meyers said.

In 2015, 16,000 cars traveled FM 1463 daily, Meyers said, citing information from the Texas Department of Transportation.

The county needs to purchase small parts of each property that don't include the houses. One owner refuses to sell any land and another has not accepted an undisclosed offer by the county, Meyers said. The third is seeking $1 million more than the county's offer.

The three property owners could not be reached for comment. They have asked the county to move the planned route west, according to Meyers, but he said that doing so would take the road into other properties and multiple wetland areas.

The county will be forced to use eminent domain, a legal process that gives governments the right to forcefully acquire private property for public use while providing compensation.

"Nobody wants a major road next to their house; so I totally understand. That's why we tried to negotiate," Meyers said. "They're angry with me. But I still have to provide some kind of relief for (FM 1463), and this is the only alternative I can come up with."

The county and Hilcorp are discussing where the drill site and pipelines should be relocated. Meyers said he's confident an agreement will be reached.

Justin Furnance, director of external affairs at Hilcorp, said in an email that the company has no comment on the issue.

The extension will cost more than $5 million to build, of which the county will pay an approximate $3.5 million from 2013 bond funds. Other cash will come from the city of Katy, which will contribute $1 million because it shares a portion of the proposed route for the road, and area developer Bruce Grover.

Other delays have hindered the project. The county spent six months resolving how to narrow the road's footprint over wetlands.

When completed, the extension will extend almost 1 miles in two lanes north from FM 1463 to the Cane Island overpass on the interstate, which feeds into Katy's new master-planned community, Cane Island. Meyers said the road will eventually include four lanes.

The overpass opened in March following months of its own delays as the city awaited approval from the state for the project and dealt with inclement weather, City Administrator Byron Hebert said.

The 1,100-acre Cane Island development had a grand opening in March. It includes a three-acre entrance lake with seven 30-foot waterfalls and an amenities village that has a two-story fitness center, yoga studio, pools, conservatory, theater and cafe. It will hold more than 2,000 homes when completed.

The planned county road "should help with mobility," Hebert said. "It would also provide a way for commuters to go through Cane Island."
When 15-year-old Emily Nguyen, a sophomore at Klein Oak High School, discovered the local nonprofit Giving Gown Foundation, she decided to call immediately to find out how she could help.

"I have a bunch of dresses that I wear one time and then never do anything with," she said. "They just sit in my closet."

Nguyen assumed she was not the only one in this position. "There are probably thousands of girls out there that have dresses in their closet they only wear one time, too," she said. "I figured I could put those dresses to use."

Earlier in the year, Nguyen had started a club on campus called RAKE, which stands for Random Acts of Kindness Etc.

More Information More details Phone: 713-304-7725 Web: givinggown.org Email: contact@givinggown.org Want to help? Financial donations can be made to the Giving Gown Foundation, c/o Bammel Church of Christ, at 2700 Cypress Creek Parkway, Houston TX 77068. See More Collapse

She thought that her club would be the ideal vehicle to help the Giving Gown Foundation, which provides opportunities for young women in the area to attend prom, regardless of their ability to buy a dress for the occasion.

Throughout March, members of RAKE collected dresses, jewelry and shoes to donate to the group and also added drawstring bags of toiletries for recipients. They delivered all the items to the Giving Gown Foundation in time for the group's annual give-away, Boutique Day, which was held in early April.

Thanks to Nguyen's efforts and hundreds of others like her who donated dresses and time to the nonprofit, many high school girls will be able to attend prom, who otherwise would not have made it due to the cost of dresses and accessories.

JoAnn Trchalek founded the Giving Gown Foundation in 2008.

Registration to participate in the program starts in December of each year. The Giving Gown Foundation sends information throughout the community, focusing on schools.

The girls pick a day to come in and work one-on-one with a volunteer, who helps them assemble the whole prom ensemble  dress, shoes, purse, a make-up kit and jewelry. The Bammel Church of Christ located on 1960 donated space to serve as a boutique for the foundation.

Cassie Miller became director of operations for the Giving Gown Foundation four years ago. She started out as a volunteer.

"I came for a two-hour shift and ended up staying for the entire day," she said. "Then, I came back the next day. I just got sucked in."

Miller said that the dress is only part of the nonprofit's purpose. "It's so hard to be a teenager," she said. "There are unrealistic expectations for beauty and wealth. We really want the girls to know they are beautiful just the way they are."

Miller said MW Cleaners collects dresses year-round throughout the community. This year, the nonprofit was able to serve 1,100 girls.

"We pair them with personal shoppers who guide them through the boutique," Miller said. "What's important to us is that they get the attention and one-on-one care."

Miller explained that prom can cost hundreds of dollars to attend. "We don't want anyone to struggle to go to prom," she said.

The Giving Gown Foundation hosts fundraisers and accepts donations year round. The group accepts new or like-new formals and is especially in need of plus sizes. It also accepts jewelry, shoes, handbags and unopened cosmetics, including samples.

A few schools in the area have made dedicated efforts to help the Giving Gown Foundation, including Klein Forest High School, which collected 130 dresses for the cause.

Other schools have followed the Giving Gown model and started their own events, including Klein High School, where the student council guided the effort.

"We're doing basically what Giving Gown does, but we're just doing it locally at our school," the club's sponsor Misty Kroon said. "There are a lot of girls who stress about prom dresses. They just want to feel pretty, and we want to take the financial burden from the girls so they can have that senior experience and have fun."

Kroon said the school will continue collecting dresses until prom and then start requesting donations for homecoming.

DeWanda Richard, student council sponsor at Spring High School, has been collecting dresses since January and will continue through the end of April.

"There are students out there who need a dress," she said. "We just want to make sure to provide them with that and make it as comfortable an experience as possible."

Susan Bates, associate principal at Klein Collins, serves as prom fairy godmother for her school.

"Teachers bring me dresses; kids bring me dresses," she said. "We get dresses from all over the place. It's like a village, and everyone helps."

She also collects shoes and purses and brings in make-up artists, floral arrangers and manicurists for girls in need.

Teachers, counselors and other students alert Bates of candidates for the program - girls who might miss prom for financial reasons. She then dives in to assist them in whatever ways necessary, including purchasing prom tickets.

Bates will be helping students up until the day of prom.

"For some of these kids, this is the only chance they get to dress up," she said. "I don't think anybody should miss prom. If they can't go because they can't afford a dress or tickets ... well, that should never happen."
The 249 Partnership has ushered in the next phase of development linking the first phase of the Tomball Tollway project from Harris County to Montgomery County by early 2019.

Rob Maxwell, vice president of the transportation division for Jones and Carter and one of three Tomball area representatives on the 249 Partnership, provided an update about the project at the group's annual meeting recently in Magnolia.

"The design on the Harris County side is about 60 percent complete, and design on the Montgomery County side is about 30 percent complete," he said. "They are staggered this way so that when we let them for construction, (the design) will be finished at about the same time."

The second phase is a 1.6-mile stretch that begins at FM 2920 and continues across Spring Creek into Montgomery County.

Once the entire project is completed, motorists will be able to travel non-stop from Tomball and connect with Texas 6 in Navasota.

The design on the second segment, which is projected at more than $120 million, began last summer, with adjustments to the plan presented for public input during a meeting hosted at Lone Star College-Tomball in December.

Those changes included the addition of exit ramps between Brown Road and Hardin Store Road in Montgomery County, new main lanes over Spring Creek, as well as elevated roads and bridges between Brown Road and Baker Road, and another at Zion Road.

The Montgomery County segment, which will pick up at Spring Creek and continue to FM 1774 in Pinehurst, is estimated at $30 million.

Both projects are expected to be completed by the start of 2019.

"Things are going full speed ahead," Maxwell added. "But if you'd have asked me two years ago if things were going to happen this fast, I would have kind of been doubtful, but a lot of good people are moving things in the right direction."

In February, James Baker, director of transportation in the Houston region for Halff Engineers, shared an update with members of the Greater Tomball Area Chamber of Commerce transportation committee on the planning and progress of both projects.

"It's probably an ideal project because Harris County is building all that infrastructure up to Spring Creek, and then the Texas Department of Transportation is carrying it north of us, so this was the perfect project for them to get into the business of project development for toll roads," Baker said in reference to Montgomery County and its new toll road authority.

In April 2015, HCTRA opened the first phase of the Tomball Tollway between Spring-Cypress Road and FM 2920.

The 6.7-mile segment cost $73 million to build and logged 7.9 million transactions in all of 2015.

Since its opening in April 2015, the Tomball Tollway has recorded more than eight million vehicles through its gantries.

It's believed the second phase will attract just as much traffic when it is finally completed within the next two years.

That was a concern early in the process when residents worried the tollway would steer economic development away from the city. Lamar Casparis, who represents Tomball on the 249 Partnership, said residents and city leaders found the tollway spurred development.

"If people want to get through, can get through so our streets are not congested with traffic," he said. "The toll road helps people get through town and we had to give them a reason to stop."

Magnolia officials, who are concerned that Texas 249 will loop around the city instead of going straight through, have had many of those same discussions, and are planning for what may come as developers begin looking forward to 2019.

Already, plans to develop nearly a dozen subdivisions in and around Magnolia are beginning to take shape.

"You'd be amazed at the difference that the announcement of the 249 (expansion) has made to Magnolia," said Magnolia City Administrator Paul Mendes. "Just about everything is based on when Texas 249 (construction) is starting. They are all waiting to see that dirt getting turned and they are all going to start laying out their roads."

As a result, Mendes added that developers are looking ahead to the completion of the segment and that there were likely be more announcements for retail, commercial and residential development throughout 2016 and into 2017.

"This has opened a tremendous amount of interest in development around Magnolia," Mendes said. "It's very much like Tomball. If folks want to come to Magnolia, they will come because there is something here they want."
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Crews responded to reports of a body being pulled from a flooded SUV in the Galleria area on Tuesday evening.

The body, near the Westpark Tollway and Loop 610, will go to the medical examiner's office for confirmation. There are no further details at this time.

Earlier Tuesday, Harris County's medical examiner on Tuesday released the identity of one of the eight victims believed killed in Monday's floods.

Pedro Rascon Morales, 60, was found in the cab of an 18-wheeler in a flooded portion of roadway in the 800 block of North Sam Houston Parkway East. He is believed to have died about 3 p.m. Monday.

READ MORE: Death toll increases as more storms loom

The specific cause of death remains pending, as do the causes of death for four other people also found dead in flooded roadways in Harris County and a man found dead in Waller County.

Morales and two other men, and two women, were found in their vehicles, according to the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, the agency responsible for conducting county autopsies.

RISING WATERS: More flooding possible as reservoirs

Two of the people - a man in an SUV and a woman in a sedan - died about 3 p.m. at the Westpark Tollway exit ramp to Loop 610 South at U.S. Highway 59. Another man who drove into the water at the ramp is still missing and presumed dead.

Earlier Monday, a man was found dead in floodwaters about 9:25 a.m. in the 17400 block of Imperial Valley Drive.

DRAMATIC RESCUE: Rising waters lead to dramatic scenes in northwest Harris County

And in Waller County, a teacher with the Royal Independent School District was found dead in his vehicle about 11:30 p.m. Sunday in Brookshire, officials said.

Charles Odum, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at the junior high, was apparently trying to help his parents evacuate Sunday night when he apparently got into trouble, according to Royal school Superintendent Ryan Steele.

Odum had worked in Royal ISD for about six years, Steele said. He is survived by a wife and two children  a daughter who attends Royal High School and a son who graduated.

"He loved Texas history  loved being able to impart that history onto the kids," Steele said. "He's the type who would do anything for you. He did the clocks at our games. He always had a presence so the kids knew that he cared about them."

The coroner's office did not release details on a woman found dead early Tuesday in north Harris County.

The body of the 43-year-old woman was found in a car submerged in a flooded ditch in the 1800 block of Briarcreek near Old Ranch Road, said Harris County Precinct Four Constable Mark Herman. Authorities had been alerted at 4 a.m. about a car underwater in the drainage ditch.

Details were likewise not released about another fatality was reported in Austin County.
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A motorist made a deadly decision about 6 a.m. Monday to slip around a wrecker blocking traffic along a flood-choked section of a Westpark Tollway exit near the West Loop and drove straight into fast-rising waters.

Several hours later, the body of the driver - and any possible passengers - still had not been recovered.

"We can't even see the car," said Capt. Terry Allbritton with the Harris County Precinct 5 Constable's Office.

The car was somewhere in about 17 feet of water on a section of the Westpark Tollway exit ramp running beneath the Southwest Freeway, authorities said.

The driver was one of at least three people who died early Monday because of floodwaters around that area. Authorities confirmed two of the motorists died after each drove into the waters along the West Loop northbound on-ramp near Westpark Drive.

DRAMATIC PHOTOS: Greenspoint, horses, rescues and other memorable flood images

Allbritton said after authorities began receiving reports of rising waters they shut down the Westpark Tollway ramp leading to Post Oak with the wrecker blocking the off ramp and began diverting drivers onto Westpark Drive. But the motorist went around the wrecker.

"For whatever reason, the driver decided to squeeze between the wrecker and the wall," Allbritton said.

The driver of the tow truck ran after the car, making noises to warn the motorist about the hazards ahead. He even plunged into the dark water in a rescue attempt.

"The car went under (the water) way too fast," Allbritton said. "He (the wrecker driver) was lucky to get back out of the water himself. He didn't have a life vest or rope or anything."

A Houston police dive team made multiple attempts to recover the driver without success. Authorities said the equipment brought in to help pump out the flood water made the situation unsafe for the divers.

"It's a small area but it's very deep and there's nowhere for the water to go," Allbritton said.
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On April 18, 2016 the city of Houston and the surrounding areas were inundated with deadly flooding that choked major arteries.

The areas around Buffalo Bayou and White Oak Bayou saw plenty of fast-moving waters spill out onto the streets.

Downtowners spent the Monday morning hours surveying the floodwaters near the Spaghetti Warehouse, where water was moving rapidly out of Buffalo Bayou's banks at the entrance ramp for I-45.

Jim Pirtle, who owns nightlife haunt notsuoH off Main Street, was one of those watching the rapids.

RELATED: Photographer Andy Hemingway's captures Houston's flooded, abandoned freeways

"I've never seen rapids, like serious white water," Pirtle said. "Allison was worse though."

Many people were bringing up the historical floodwaters that Tropical Storm Allison left behind in 2001.

One of the employees at Spaghetti Warehouse, Damond Hughes, sat and watched that downtown institution's steel grease trap float away during the flooding, leaving a smelly slick in the water.

"I seriously doubt anyone will be coming to eat with us today," Hughes said. Most offices and businesses downtown were closed Monday after officials warned Houstonians to stay away from the intense flooding in the area.

Robert Gordon and Lisa Lemble, both from Ann Arbor, Michigan, attended this past weekend's Houston Astros-Detroit Tigers series at Minute Maid Park. They donned rain gear to come out and look at the flooding near the University of Houston-Downtown, just north of their Hotel Icon hotel room.

"This is something I've never seen before," Gordon said. "We're going to find something to eat and make the best of it and chill." They had a Delta Airlines flight out of Bush Intercontinental Airport to worry about catching.

RELATED: Houston readers share photos of neighborhood flooding, destruction

Garner and Kat McCulloch had the day off together and were surveying the floodwaters near the White Oak Bayou Greenway Trail.

Ive been in Houston for a long time but I have never seen the bayous quite like this. Its kind of bananas, said Garner McCulloch. They drove over from the Montrose area in their Toyota FJ Cruiser. Kat said that her art room flooded earlier in the day.

"All of my artworks are watercolors now," she joked.

Brian Gutierrez, 24, had an unexpected day off from work. He and his father-in-law were on the overpass off Quitman Street and I-45 doing what most people with the day off were doing: gawking at water.

He was thankful that the flooding didnt hit their nearby apartment complex.

"It's like the water came out of nowhere," Gutierrez said.
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The Department of Justice is urging a federal judge in Houston that U.S. courts do indeed have jurisdiction over an Australian man charged with sneaking ISIS terror recruits across Turkey to Syria.

Mohamed Zuhbi is accused of having helped Asher Khan, of Spring, and another Texan on their journeys to join the terrorist group that is at war with the United States.

While Zuhbi remains a fugitive, Khan was arrested last year by FBI agents after he returned to Texas and the other Texan, identified by the initials SRG, is believed to have been killed in battle.

Zuhbi and Khan are charged with being part of a conspiracy to provide material support to ISIS.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, who has a history of challenging prosecutors, ordered that they explain to him how the court has authority over Zuhbi, who has apparently never been to the United States.

In a 19-page response filed recently at the federal courthouse in Houston, prosecutors contend that as long as one of the three persons was in the United States during part of the alleged conspiracy, the court case meets the legal standard for being prosecuted here.

Congress has found that "international terrorism is a serious and deadly problem that threatens the vital interests of the United States," notes the court papers filed by prosecutors. "Congress made clear that this country is not to "be used as a staging ground for those who seek to commit acts of terrorism against persons in other countries," it continues.

The case stretches back to January 2014 when Khan was temporarily living in Australia and allegedly recruited SRG, who was living in South Texas, to join him in becoming a fighter for ISIS.

SRG has been identified in court papers as Sixto Garcia, of McAllen.

Khan then also asked Zuhbi through "electronic communication" for help reaching Syria. Zuhbi allegedly gave Khan instructions, including his cellular phone number, and said they should meet in Turkey.

Once in Turkey, Khan opted out of joining ISIS. He flew to Texas after prosecutors contend he was tricked by his family into returning to be by the side of his sick mother.

But while back in Texas, Khan allegedly later communicated with Zuhbi in order to introduce him to SRG, who was still ready to join ISIS.

In August 2014, SRG allegedly told Khan he had connected with ISIS and attended training camps. In December of that year, SRG's mother was told her son had died while fighting.

Khan's lawyer, Thomas Berg, said the federal government could learn from Khan and perhaps use him to help the United States, rather than trying to lock him away for decades.

"We have broached this with the government," Berg has said. "Why not sit down with us, talk, and maybe you will learn something that is helpful about how to turn other people away?"

The FBI contends it first learned of Khan in October 2014 while they were investigating SRG's Facebook page, which allegedly included several photos of SRG dressed in camouflage and holding an AK-47 rifle, according to court papers.
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Heavy flooding Monday took Houston by surprise.

The thunderstorms that roared over Houston killed at least eight people. Gov. Greg Abbott made a disaster declaration as floodwaters wreaked havoc on countless homes and vehicles and paralyzed the city.

Schools and businesses were shut down for the day. Some ISDs remained closed as the week carried on.

Residents were forced to stay in overnight shelters provided by the city. The storm damage was even recognized by the IRS. The region was granted an extension for tax filings because of the disruption caused by the Tax Day floods.

The city also saw many acts of heroism. Emergency responders made more than 1,000 water rescues. At one ranch, more than 70 tethered horses were rescued by men and women geared up with life jackets and wet suits. Even a helpless armadillo was saved by a man after the waters of Greens Bayou ran out of its banks.

RAW VIDEO: Drowning horses fight for survival in floodwaters

Dramatic events like these were all captured by Houston Chronicle photographers. Click through the slideshow above to see the editor's top picks from Monday's historic floods.
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Reservoirs in northwest Harris County are expected to continue rising Tuesday approaching record highs  even without more rain  which may result in more flooded thoroughfares.

And creeks in the area aren't expected to drain for several days.

Eldridge, Barker-Cypress and Clays roads are predicted to go under water as Addicks Reservoir fills up. The same goes for Westheimer Parkway in the Barker Reservoir.

READ MORE: Residents rescued from floodwaters in NW Harris County

Extreme rainfall on Sunday and Monday led to significant swelling of the Addicks and Barker reservoirs, according to a report late Monday from the Harris County Flood Control District.

As those basins rise, "roadways that run through them are threatened," a news release said. "State Highway 6 through the Addicks Reservoir is underwater and will remain so for several days."

The previous Addicks cresting record was 97.46 feet in March 1992. Its height is forecast to exceed 102 feet this week, the flood control district reported. Barker hit its highest recorded height, 93.60 feet, the same month 24 years ago, but it's predicted to reach 95.5 feet this week.

DEADLY WATERS: At least 5 dead in Houston-area floods

Galveston district officials of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have "dispatched teams to monitor the dams to ensure the integrity," the release noted.

A relatively dry Monday allowed several of the county's 13 creeks and bayous that flooded to crest and start to recede.

Cypress Creek and Addicks Reservoir tributaries, among the hardest hit in northwest Harris, remain high "and will probably stay that way for a few days while storm water continues to drain through those channels," the release said.

SCHOOLS: UH, HISD and more shutdown as flood waters linger

The runoff also is predicted to impact the San Jacinto River near U.S. 59, an emptying point for Spring and Cypress creeks.

The National Weather Service is predicting that the San Jacinto's west fork will crest near Porter at nearly 35 feet Wednesday morning and remain at flood stage through Thursday morning. Some 60 residents were evacuated from the Cumberland Estates subdivision, which is just east of the river.

"It's not as bad as 1994," when the river crested at 41 feet in a historic flood, said Montgomery County Commissioner Jim Clark, whose precinct includes Porter. "But it's pretty bad."

At Sheldon, the river measured 14.4 feet  flood stage is 10 feet  and was expected to rise to 16 feet tomorrow, creating problems for the Highlands and Banana Bend areas.

In Liberty County, officials were closely watching the Trinity River, which has flooded homes in the past, most recently following major storms last May. The river was expected to crest near Liberty at roughly 29 feet Wednesday night.

"We're watching the river," he said. "The numbers right now don't concern me a lot unless we get more rain or they increase the outflow from the (Lake Livingston) dam."

There have been no evacuations so far.

The Fort Bend County city of Simonton on Tuesday issued a voluntary evacuation notice as the Brazos River continues to rise following Monday's heavy rains.

The Brazos reached an all-time high of 123.4 feet at the San Felipe gauge at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday. That's about 2 feet higher than the crest of the river following storms last May.

Mayor Daniel McJunkin said the evacuation notice was a precautionary measure, particularly for the elderly and families with young children. The city is located almost entirely within the 100-year floodplain of the Brazos River.

"Evacuation is a hard word," McJunkin said. "But there isn't a soft way to say leave."

The National Weather Service is forecasting that water level will drop below flood stage tomorrow.

The gauge is located about 20 miles upstream of Simonton, which has about 850 residents. Those needing assistance are advised to call Simonton City Hall at 281-533-9809.

Rainfall this week has reached more than 17 inches in some areas of northwest Harris and Waller counties. Flood-affected communities include Tomball, Klein, Spring, Jersey Village, Greenspoint, Aldine and Meyerland.

Most schools were closed for a second day on Tuesday, with officials citing regional mobility affected by impassable roads as the reason.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said preliminary estimates for damage from the storm should be available later today.

He said the water from Cypress Creek was causing flooding along Mayde Creek and Bear Creek, and also making its way into Addicks Reservoir.

"Anybody who's behind the dam will see water at least in their streets," he said.

Emmett said the forecast doesn't "look bad" but could still generate a similar series of storms that caused the heavy downpour of Sunday night and Monday morning.

Emmett said a shelter at Jersey Village still hadn't been set up yet, though would likely be operational later today for people who are being evacuated from along Cypress Creek.

FORECAST: Threat of more thunderstorms lingers over area

The flood control district's "Watch Team" is stationed at the Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management to monitor rainfall and bayou levels as well as alert the public and officials of areas that are or could be affected by flooding.

Residents in at least 110 Harris County subdivisions have contacted officials about water in their homes.

Others are urged to report house flooding by going here or calling the flood control district's phone bank at 713-684-4000.
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SAN ANTONIO  A San Antonio Police Department officer died Tuesday morning while on duty in his patrol vehicle in an apparent suicide on the far East Side.

SAPD spokesperson Romana Lopez said the officer is a 10-year veteran of the force who has not been named but was an overnight patrol officer assigned to the East Side.

SAPD confirmed Wednesday morning the officer's identity as Steven Franco.

According to police, Franco was dispatched to a patrol-by around 5 a.m. Those types of calls do not require officers to respond to dispatchers and it is unclear whether he communicated with dispatchers after that point.

His body, in full uniform, was found around 7:30 a.m. when additional officers were sent to Loop 410 and Port Entry to check on him after he did not return to the police substation at the end of his shift, police said.

SEE MORE: Lanes reopen after crashes snarl morning commute on U.S. 281

The officer's vehicle is pulled slightly off the road on the two-lane Port Entry roadway, which is a dead-end street feeding off Loop 410 and is less than a mile long.

One side of the road is flanked by fenced-in area with large steel shipping containers.

SAPD spokesman Officer Douglas Greene said the wound was apparently self-inflicted, though authorities are still investigating the incident and what led up to it.

RELATED: San Antonio officer found dead in apparent suicide at police headquarters garage

At least two other SAPD officer died in suicides last year, according to San Antonio Express-News archives.

Officer Bryan Moen, a 13-year-veteran of the department was found dead at Public Safety Headquarters in April, and Capt. Michael Gorhum died in August in La Vernia.

Text "NEWS" to 72727 to sign up for breaking news from mySA

mdwilson@express-news.net

Twitter: @MDWilsonSA
A 31-year-old Odessa woman was arrested Friday for alleged inappropriately sexual interactions with three young girls and for placing them in harms way during an alleged drunken driving incident, according to court documents.

Kimberly Thompson was charged with four counts of indecency with a child  one charge was a second-degree felony and the remaining three were third-degree felonies  and three state jail felony charges of endangering a child.

RELATED: Texas police arrest suspect after ring stolen from corpse

Three girls  aged 9, 11 and 12  made an outcry of sexual assault on March 10. They told police that Thompson, their fathers common-law wife, exposed her vagina to the girls and tried to make them smell her genitalia during the incident. She tried to shove at least one of the girls faces into her vagina in the process, according to an arrest affidavit obtained by mySA.com.

One of the girls also stated that Thompson allegedly was watching videos of a sexual nature and started breathing heavily and grabbed one girls thigh and breast with her hand. She also allegedly forced one girl to touch her breasts over her clothes with her hand, according to the affidavit.

RELATED: Records: West Texas missionary admitted to sexually assaulting 11 boys at African orphanage

Investigation determined that Thompson had made all three girls get into a vehicle with her while she was intoxicated and had them sit on her lap and steer the vehicle while it was in motion.

Thompson was drinking alcohol at the time of the alleged event. While one of the girls was steering the vehicle, it crashed into a stop sign. The girl steering the vehicle at the time was not wearing a seat belt, according to the affidavit.

The Ector County Sheriffs Office said she was being held Tuesday at the Ector County Detention Center on bonds totaling $82,500.

RELATED: San Antonio man jailed in Odessa, accused of shooting two cops

If convicted, Thompson faces up to 20 years in prison for the second-degree felony, up to 10 years each for the third-degree felony charges and up to two years each for the state jail felony charges.

twhite@mysa.com

Twitter: @tylerlwhite
-- The Chrons main story on the deadly storms that wreaked havoc on southeast Texas, by Mike Morris, Mihir Zaveri, and Mike Tolson. Authorities said at least five people drowned as a result of this storm, which was another reminder of the vulnerability of the broad South Texas coastal plain where water can rise quickly, especially so at dipping highway underpasses, but often drains at an achingly slow pace.

The powerful storm sent an estimated 240 billion gallons of water into more than a dozen creeks and bayous, and eventually into more than 1,000 buildings and homes. Near the Waller County line, Harris County officials recorded a high of 17.6 inches of rain. Much of the northwest swath received over 15 inches in 24 hours. 

While officials hope the worst of the weather has passed, the National Weather Service put the chance of additional showers and thunderstorms Tuesday at 70-80 percent. More rain is likely into Thursday.

>> MORE: Gov. Greg Abbott announced late Monday afternoon he has signed a disaster declaration for the Houston area because of powerful thunderstorms that led to several fatalities, damaged hundreds of homes and paralyzed the region.

-- High court sharply divided by Obama immigration plan, by the Chrons Lomi Kriel and Kevin Diaz. The eight justices appeared split across ideological lines with the four liberal appointees seeming to indicate they support the president's plan while the conservative justices questioned the limits of his executive powers. A decision, expected in June, could be the most important related to immigration in decades and comes at the height of a presidential campaign where it has been one of the defining issues. 

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, seen as the two most likely conservative appointees to side with the liberal wing and allow the program to proceed, pressed U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Monday on whether Texas would suffer if the plan is implemented and how far the president's power extends.

-- From our partners at Quorum Report: House Speaker Joe Straus on Monday announced three appointments to the Sunset Advisory Commission, including Rep. Larry Gonzales, R-Round Rock, as the panel's new Chair.

We will be rolling out in the next few months recommendations we feel make Texas government more accountable, transparent and efficient, Gonzales said. I look forward to the publics input when we hold public meetings later this year. Representatives Dan Flynn, R-Van, and Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, were also appointed on Monday. Straus also named William Meadows of Fort Worth as the House's public appointee.

-- How New York will be won, by Politicos Steven Shepard. Two New Yorks are voting on Tuesday. In the Democratic presidential primary, about half the vote will come from New York Citys Five Boroughs  a percentage that increases to nearly three-quarters of the vote when the entire New York media market is included.

By contrast, the city accounted for only 13 percent of the votes in the 2012 Republican primary. And of the 34 counties across the state where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats (out of 62), only one  Putnam County  is located near New York City.

But with Donald Trump in a pitched effort to lock down a majority of delegates before Julys Republican convention  and the bulk of New York's GOP delegates distributed by congressional district  suddenly the overwhelmingly Democratic New York City districts take on outsized importance since they award the same number of delegates as the redder Upstate districts.

CAPITOL DAYBOOK

HOUSE:

10:00 a.m.:

Appropriations [ E1.030 ]

SPEED READ

Uresti urges county to sue over leaking storage tanks, Houston Chronicle

Years later, benefits from state subsidy to Chevron hard to find, Texas Tribune

Urban woes regularly spill onto UT campus, Texas Tribune

Cruz: Contested convention could fracture GOP, Politico

Romney: Trump will win if both Cruz and Kasich stay in, Politico

Psychiatrist in infamous East Texas widow murder: Bernie Tiede snapped after years of abuse, The Dallas Morning News

Texas Muslims slam Sen. Ted Cruz and staff for refusing to meet with them, The Dallas Morning News

Trump has slip of tongue discussing 9/11 at Buffalo rally, Associated Press

Schreiner University will have new president in 2017, San Antonio Express-News

Thank Great Recession for home price stability, Houston Chronicle

QUOTE TO NOTE

Its very close to my heart  because I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen down on 7-Eleven, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down, and I saw the greatest people Ive ever seen in action.

-- Donald Trump at a Buffalo, New York, rally on Monday



RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE

-- BACK STORY: Trump staffers face threat of blacklist, by Politicos Ken Vogel and Shane Goldmacher. It may be unenforceable, but the push to stigmatize Trumps aides, advisers and vendors is among the last remaining pieces of ammunition available to a Republican establishment that has tried just about everything else to block the billionaire from taking over of the GOP. And, critically, it has complicated Trumps efforts in recent weeks to hire top-tier operatives, according to sources familiar with Trumps campaign.

-- Clinton and Trump hope NY primary cements from front-runner status, by WashPosts Jose DelReal and Juliet Eilperin . Polls have shown both front-runners ahead by double-digit margins in Tuesdays New York primary. A big win for Trump would bring him closer to securing an outright majority of Republican delegates  an outcome that remains in jeopardy and has prompted rival Ted Cruz to mount a spirited campaign to force a contested convention. For Clinton, a victory would give her a boost of momentum and perhaps a new mandate to more openly pivot her campaign to prepare for the general election. Unlike Trump, Clinton is so far ahead in the delegate count against Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) that it has become close to impossible for him to catch up.

-- Potential GOP convention fight puts older hands in sudden demand, by NYTs Jeremy Peters. Political campaigns are often viewed as a young persons game, especially in an era in which digitally savvy, data-fixated strategists track the behavior of millions of voters nationwide and target them with increasing sophistication and precision.

But this year, as Republicans face the prospect of a contested convention, the party is turning to its oldest hands, who learned how to fight over delegates using walkie-talkies, loose-leaf notebooks and quick-footed young pages.

The graying delegate wranglers like Mr. Spencer have a rare and suddenly sought-after skill: They understand the arcane rules and complicated interpersonal dynamics that can persuade often unpredictable state delegates to back a candidate for president.
The summers final Live on the Waterfront concert was held Wednesday evening at Prince Arthurs Landing. The popular series in Thunder Bay has completed nine weekly shows that began on July 13. Wednesdays concert was unique as it was held one hour later in the evening to mesh with the 10 p.
Will the anti-cop Left please figure out what it wants? For more than a decade, activists have demanded the end of proactive policing, claiming that it was racist. Pedestrian stopsotherwise known as stop, question, and friskwere attacked as a bigoted oppression of minority communities. In March 2015, for example, the ACLU of Illinois accused the Chicago Police Department of targeting minorities because stops are disproportionately concentrated in the black community.

Equally vilified was Broken Windows policing, which responds to low-level offenses such as graffiti, disorderly conduct, and turnstile jumping. Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King launched a petition after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder meet with local black and brown youth across the country who are dealing with Zero Tolerance and Broken Windows policing.

Well, the police got the message. In response to the incessant accusations of racism and the heightened hostility in the streets that has followed the Michael Brown shooting, officers have pulled back from making investigatory stops and enforcing low-level offenses in many urban areas. As a result, violent crime in cities with large black populations has shot uphomicides in the largest 50 cities rose nearly 17 percent in 2015. And the Left is once again denouncing the policethis time for not doing enough policing. King now accuses police in Chicago of not doing their job, as a result of which people are dying. Stops in Chicago are down nearly 90 percent this year through the end of March, compared with the same period in 2015; shootings were up 78 percent and homicides up 62 percent through April 10. Over 100 people were shot in the first ten days of 2016. King scoffs at the suggestion that a new 70-question street-stop form imposed on the CPD by the ACLU is partly responsible for the drop-off in engagement. If American police refuse to do their jobs [i.e., make stops] when more paperwork is required, he retorts, its symptomatic of an entirely broken system in need of an overhaul. This is the same King who as recently as October fumed that nothing happening in this country appears to be slowing [the police] down.

Lets examine the dilemma imposed on cops by activists like King. On March 25, two groups of youths were fighting on a street corner on Chicagos West Side. If Chicago officers had dispersed them and questioned anyone who seemed to be harboring a gun, a Black Lives Matter sympathizer would have seen only racial harassment. The ACLU would have logged any documented stops into its stop database in preparation for its next racial profiling lawsuit; the Justice Department, which is now investigating the Chicago Police Department for racism, would have also tallied the stops as evidence of bias. But the police did not move in on March 25, and one of the teens started shooting at his rivals. The gunslinger hit 13-year-old Zarriel Trotter, an innocent bystander; the bullet entered Trotters back near his spine and punctured his intestines. As of early April, the police were still searching for the shooter. It gets scarier out here every day, a classmate of Zarriels told the Chicago Tribune. Young people in Chicago cant go outside without knowing whether they will be the next person fired at.

The Shaun King who petitioned Eric Holder to end Broken Windows policing might argue that officers should overlook such outbreaks of disorder in minority neighborhoods, but many of their law-abiding residents desperately want the cops to intervene. Last summer, I attended a police-community meeting in the 41st Precinct of the South Bronx; residents complained to their precinct commander about large groups of youths hanging out on corners, a plea made time and again in similar police-community meetings. Theres too much fighting, one woman said. There was more than 100 kids the other day; they beat on a girl about 14 years old. Another man asked: Why are they hanging out in crowds on the corners? No one does anything about it. Cant you arrest them for loitering? A middle-aged man wondered: Do truant officers exist anymore? If cops ignore such heartfelt requests for public order because the activists tell them that it would be oppressive to respond, they will betray the very people who need them the most.

In April, another outbreak of street disorder in Coney Island, Brooklyn, resulted in the death of a 17-year-old girl. TaJae Warner had tried to protect her brother from a group of girls gathered outside her apartment building who were threatening to kill him; one of the girls knocked Warner unconscious. Warner died four days later after being taken off life support. We are killing each other, this is not normal, a community activist said at the scene of the assault, later posting on Facebook: A 17-year-old girl was attacked by people who looked just like her. Black Lives Matter. If parents and other authority figures are unable to control such violence, it will fall to the police to do so.

King and other activists might answer that the cops should just concentrate on making an arrest after a shooting has already occured. That reactive style of policing dominated law enforcement until the early 1990s, when the New York Police Department embraced data-driven, proactive policing. The NYPDs revolutionary new philosophy held that the police could prevent felony crime by reducing low-level lawlessness and intervening in suspicious conduct; that philosophy spread nationwide and ushered in a record-breaking 20-year national crime drop, now at risk in urban areas.

Moreover, making post hoc arrests for shootings and homicides has gotten even harder in the wake of the incessant Black Lives Matter refrain that the cops are racist killers. Thanks to the no-snitching ethic, lack of witness and victim cooperation was already the biggest impediment to solving violent crime in the inner city; that uncooperativeness has worsened over the last year and a half. In November, Chicago gang members lured a nine-year-old boy into an alley and murdered him in retaliation against his gangbanger father. The father refused to help with the investigation. Black Lives Matter ideology has also chilled informal interactions that could lead to an arrest. I feel like I cant talk to anybody because someone might accuse me of violating their civil rights, a South Side patrol officer told the Chicago Tribune in February.

Chicago had a harbinger of its current depolicing situation in 2012. Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy had disbanded a city-wide, anti-gang task force that advocates had criticized for allegedly making too many stops in minority neighborhoods. Homicides soared, ultimately reaching 500 that year. South Side residents begged for the reconstitution of the task force and the resumption of stops. We have had enough, the grandmother of a murder victim told the Telegraph, afraid to give her name for fear of retribution. The older folks are terrified. We need the police to crack down on them. Responsibly yes, but forcefully. A local city councilman, Willie Cochran, said that his constituents wanted a more aggressive force engaging these terrorists on the streets. His community was ready to stand by the police in the face of complaints about racial profiling, Cochran added. McCarthy reconstituted the unit in 2013 and the shooting epidemic cooled. (This connection between depolicing and crime has been repeatedly confirmed empirically, most recently in a study of Justice Department police consent decrees.)

The activists standard charge against cops in the post-Ferguson era is that they are peevishly refusing to do their jobs in childish protest against mere public scrutiny. This anodyne formulation whitewashes what has been going on in the streets as a result of the sometimes-violent agitation against them. Cops are routinely cursed and screamed at; sometimes bottles and rocks are thrown. In my 19 years in law enforcement, I havent seen this kind of hatred toward the police, a Chicago cop who works on the South Side tells me. People want to fight you. Fuck the police. We dont have to listen, they say. Resistance to arrest is up, cops across the country report, and officers are getting injured. Officers worry about becoming the latest racist cop-of-the-week on CNN if their use of force against a resisting suspect, however justified, goes viral.

That officers would reduce their engagement under such a tsunami of hatred is both understandable and inevitable. Policing is political. If the press, the political elites, and media-amplified advocates are relentlessly sending the message that proactive policing is bigoted, the cops will eventually do less of it. This is not unprofessional conduct; it is how policing legitimacy is calibrated. The only puzzle is why the activists are so surprised and angered that officers are backing off; such a retreat is precisely what they have been demanding.

The crime situation in Chicago is unlikely to turn around any time soon. The departments stop activity is now being monitored by the same Illinois ACLU that in March deemed the departments stop rates discriminatory because they did not match Chicagos population ratios. Blacks were 72 percent of all stop subjects in a four-month period in 2014, according to the ACLU, though blacks constitute only 32 percent of the citys population. Last week, a Police Accountability Task Force appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel used the same population benchmark to declare that the department has no regard for the sanctity of black lives: blacks made up 74 percent of all police shooting victims, lethal and non-lethal, between 2008 and 2015, according to the Task Force; whites made up 8 percent of police shooting victims, though they, too, comprise roughly a third of Chicagos population.

This flawed methodology for benchmarking police actionscomparing them to population ratiosignores the incidence of crime. Between 1991 and 2011 (the latest years for which such data are publicly available) blacks made up between 82 percent and 70 percent of all murder offenders. Whites made up between 3.5 percent and 5 percent of all murder offenders. Shooting and robbery disparities are likely greater. Drive-by shootings are simply not happening in white neighborhoods. If police want to save lives (and they do), they are going to be more heavily deployed in minority areas. Once there, they will more frequently interact with violent criminals, armed suspects, and those resisting arrestall situations which can lead to officer use of force. And the more resistance that an officer encounters, the more likely he is to escalate his own use of force, even to the point of gunfire.

The Police Accountability Task Force report did make a useful call for more tactical training of officersthough finding funding for such training will be difficult if the reports gratuitous new police inspector-general position is also created. As the Task Force implies, there undoubtedly are Chicago police officers who drastically need an attitude tune-up in courtesy and respect; if they cannot shed their hardened, disrespectful demeanors, they shouldnt be on patrol. But the reports groundless denunciations of the department as systemically racist, coupled with the ACLUs ignorant monitoring of the departments stop activity, all but guarantee that officers will hesitate to engage with suspects. And as long as that hesitation continues, more black lives will be tragically lost.

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
Peste 300 de liceene s-au inscris in Startup School si sunt gata sa invete bazele antreprenoriatului tehnologic. Vezi cum a fost la evenimentul de lansare a programului national de educatie antreprenoriala
Forget BuzzFeeds watermelon. The more apt commentary on media today came in the form of Mondays Pulitzer Prize announcements, streamed to the masses through Facebook Live.

Many news organizations have been built on and broken by Facebooks algorithm in recent years, and now those same outlets have cut out the unforgiving middleman and begun publishing directly onto the social network. Look no further than BuzzFeeds rubber band-aided execution of a watermelon this month, which drew 800,000 concurrent viewers on Facebook Live, to see the platforms reach. Such an audience for mindlessthough, in some ways, also geniusinternet #content is equal parts awesome and demoralizing.

Theres wariness in some corners of the industry that publishers are willfully relinquishing their means of publication. Its impossible to say whether this sort of partnership with outside platforms will amount to something of a Faustian bargain. Nevertheless, its ironically fitting that the Pulitzer announcement also found its way onto Facebook users timelines. The stream drew nearly 10,000 viewers at one pointnot watermelon numbers, but certainly a step forward for making the world-renowned brand more accessible to those not on Media Twitter or the Columbia University campus. Perhaps next year the school can add exploding fruit to the live-streamed festivities.

Here are three more takeaways from Mondays Prize announcements, the complete rundown of which can be found here:

Beginning of an era

Last year was the first in which magazines could vie for Pulitzers, and The New Yorker on Monday became the first to actually bring home an awardtwo, to be exact. TV critic Emily Nussbaum earned the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, while Kathryn Schulzs piece on Californias Cascadia faultline took the award for Feature Writing. Godspeed to anyone who tries to challenge The New Yorker in that latter category going forward.

Hot damn. I won a goddamn Pulitzer. Thank you to this wonderful magazine for letting me mouth off & think out loud. Sign up for CJR 's daily email  emily nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) April 18, 2016

The Tampa Bay Times punches above its weight

The papers top-shelf work on a segregated school system got the nod for Local Reporting and was a finalist in the Public Service category. That investigation has already inspired a slate of policy changes, illustrating the potential for civic good in local accountability work. The Times and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune together drew the Investigative Reporting award, meanwhile, for their collaborative efforts to probe Florida mental hospitals. The Times proved once again why it has a sterling track record in enterprise reporting.

Its special to work for a paper that wins a @PulitzerPrize. How about a paper that wins 2 in one year? @TB_Times pic.twitter.com/3ikfmf0O3Y  Josh Solomon (@Josh_Solomon15) April 18, 2016

No place like home

Regional and local newspapers dominated the Breaking News category: The Los Angeles Times won for its coverage of the San Bernardino terrorist attacks and aftermath; The Baltimore Sun was a finalist for coverage of the Freddie Gray killing and protests; and the Post and Courier was also a runner-up for its response to the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. In each case, the stories grew much larger than the horrible events that triggered them. The newspapers performances show the importance of community knowledge within media institutions, especially during fast-moving breaking news situations. Its one of the few areas in which local outlets have a leg up on the national news organizations that come parachuting in.

The moment you hear youve won a Pulitzer. Congrats to the @LATimes newsroom. https://t.co/sOc6MVfORA pic.twitter.com/JoIjjSztcy  Alexandra Manzano (@AliManzano) April 18, 2016

Full list of winners

Public Service  Associated Press

Breaking News Reporting  Los Angeles Times Staff

Investigative Reporting  Leonora LaPeter Anton and Anthony Cormier of the Tampa Bay Times and Michael Braga of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Explanatory Reporting  T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project

Local Reporting  Michael LaForgia, Cara Fitzpatrick, and Lisa Gartner of the Tampa Bay Times

National Reporting  The Washington Post Staff

International Reporting  Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times

Feature Writing  Kathryn Schulz of The New Yorker

Commentary  Farah Stockman of The Boston Globe

Criticism  Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker

Editorial Writing  John Hackworth of Sun Newspapers, Charlotte Harbor, Florida

Editorial Cartooning  Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee

Breaking News Photography

Feature Photography  Jessica Rinaldi of The Boston Globe

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

David Uberti is a writer in New York. He was previously a media reporter for Gizmodo Media Group and a staff writer for CJR. Follow him on Twitter @DavidUberti.
The phenomenon of the Republican presidential frontrunner has convulsed the media class for almost a year now. Donald Trump has defied every expectation and shown himself impervious to the scientific laws of politics.

His relationship to the media will be marveled about long after the instant histories of the 2016 election are forgotten. The typical campaign as a rule coddles the boys and girls on the bus, keeping them fed and adequately wi-fied and occasionally offering up the candidate for casual off-the-record discussions. Trump gives them nothing, and in public he herds his media corps into enclosures where they can be ridiculed from the stage and treated like zoo animals by his supporters. He blandly dismisses his policy pratfalls in the face of all but the most determined questioners. He even went eye to eye with Fox News, and the channel blinked. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox and the New York Post, presumably allowed his flagship tabloid to endorse Trump as todays New York primary approached.

Having come to this point, the media has turned to self-examinationdid news coverage create the man? Did the man create the news coverage?

But theres one complicated Media vs. Trump story playing out thats been overlooked. I speak of the media coverage of the Trump protests that have disrupted many of his appearances and, somewhat regrettably, they leave me having to stand up for Donald Trump. Why? Because the First Amendment does not take sides, not even against pumpkin-haired, nonsense-spewing, bloviating demagogues.

I was once part of the Beltway media elite, now transplanted to Arizona. Maybe its because Im far from the center of the media action, but to me this particular coverage is distinctive in two ways. One, the media is having a material effect on the race. And two, its on the wrong side. It is the most unfair thing that this decidedly unfair man has suffered.

Sign up for CJR 's daily email

The violence at the large Trump events took hold as a dominant theme in the campaign narrative in February and March. His rallies grew increasingly vulnerable to disruption. Protesters went in with the crowds unobtrusively, but would then shout and interrupt once Trump took the stage. The protesters were duly shouted down by Trump backers before being taken out by security. This process had a certain summer camp feel to it, early on, but after a while the ejections grew more peremptory. Fights sometimes broke out before security guards got to the protesters. In a few cases, protesters were set upon by Trump fans without warning, even though theyd been silenced and contained. Some of these instances were serious, as when an African-American Black Lives Matter protester was punched and kicked at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama. There is also disturbing footage of an extravagantly mustachioed older guy at a rally in North Carolina who, spotting a protester being led out by security, ran over and savagely punched the guy in the face without warning or cause. (The now infamous sucker-punch video got all the attention, but theres actually a much worse incident, involving a bearded protester in an American flag shirt being led out of a rally. A Trump supporter, without provocation, runs over to punch and kick the man a half-dozen times before being arrested. In this case, the attacker was African American, the protester white.)

Such occurrences are disgusting and should be prosecuted, as they are. But look over this running total of violent events published in Slate, for example, and you notice first of all that the overall number is quite lowthe magazine has 13and next that some of them are pretty warm beer. (One is A Trump security official and Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski appeared to grab and pull a protester at [a] Tucson rally.*) I poked around and couldnt find a more comprehensive list or any incidents not on Slates list, though there certainly might be some out there.

The sucker-punch incident was on March 9; two days later, the issue climaxed when Trump abruptly cancelled a rally in Chicago after the crowd was massively infiltrated by protesters. (A CNN report said that at least five sections in the arena were filled with opponents.) Attendees were sent home, and scattered violence marked the blocks around the venue as everyone dispersed.

The media has been oohing and aahing about violence at Donald Trump rallies ever since. Search for the words violence trump rally under the Google news tab and you get some two million hits. Trump hasnt helped himself by refusing to outright condemn the incidents, instead pugnaciously saying he might provide legal help to those arrested.

On TV, the words variations of the phrase violence at Donald Trump rallies were recited over and over, typically uttered by various news show hosts in a solemn manner, with a furrowed brow and a look of concern, or perhaps a slow shake of the head.

Some commentators went farther. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC called the spectacles playing out a classic political strongman tactic that we are used to seeing in other countries but not our own. She went on to explain what to her mind was really going on: Political events are generated to bring violence at the edges into the center, so that violence at these events, which may start organically, is in effect spotlit and encouraged to the point where it becomes something that is legitimately out of control of anyone. And then the spectacle of political violence is itself seen as something that is a problem that needs to be solved by this strongman character who incited the initial incidents in the first place.  Trying to gin up political violence for its electoral utility is inarguably what were seeing here. 

Its somewhat hard to parse her ponderous language, but shes saying that the Trump campaign was ginning up the violence, and then was in turn using the spectacle of it as an excuse for a crackdown, led by Trump himself.

One sentiment you almost never hear outside of Fox News itself was that, by any standard of American political discourse, however objectionable one might find Trumps rhetoric, the protesters are in the wrong. The Trump events themselves are peaceful; they were being disrupted by outsiders making it impossible to hear the candidate that voters showed up to see.

Ah, but what about the protesters free speech rights? Well, what is it exactly the protesters are targeting? These were people coming out to hear a candidate for public office. Its often overlooked, but the First Amendment also protects the rights of peaceable assembly. Again, you can disagree with Trumps rhetoric, but he has a right to share it publicly and those gathered have a right to hear it. A selective enforcement of the Constitution that lets opponents of the speech silence it plainly violates the documents spirit.

You might have heard how a Trump appearance outside of Phoenix with wacko local sheriff Joe Arpaio was sabotaged. This rally was held at a suburb with only one route in from Phoenix proper. Ingenious protesters sealed off the bottleneck effectively, creating an hours-long traffic jam. I went to a different Trump appearance that morning. He was doing a public taping with Sean Hannity, the Fox News host. I was with a friend, a local GOP operative. He got us pulled first into the VIP section and thenthrillinglyup on stage, sitting behind the host and the candidate. I got a good look at the crowd, which might have numbered five hundred. There were a dozen or so folks there, including a couple of red-faced, bellowing guys on each side of us, who were a little  disturbingly overexcited. Another fifth of the crowdbabbling, incoherentwas plainly off its rocker. (This group included the candidate and his interlocutor.) But there wasnt any violence, because there werent any protesters. Are some Donald Trump fans racists? Seems like it. Are a lot of them pretty dumb? Theres evidence of that, yes. But I dont remember the asterisk in the Bill of Rights that precludes its protections from bozos and poltroons.

Watching the primary play out in Arizona was interesting. I grew up here, to parents who balanced their enthusiastic support for luminaries like Goldwater and Nixon with grimier interest in the John Birch Society and similar groups. (I remember my father yanking the seatbelts out of a new truck; Jimmy Carter wasnt going to tell him he had to use seatbelts!) Im going to go out on a limb and say I suspect that were they alive today theyd be moderate to enthusiastic Trump supporters. If theyd gone to a Trump appearance and had it been disrupted (as many have been) or canceled (as the rally in Chicago was), or if they werent even able to get there because protesters had blocked the only road into the town, theyd be mad and rightly so.

Trump didnt tell his supporters to go burn down a mosque, or punch a Black Lives Matter protester. The violent incidents are ignited by the provocations of the protesters themselves. That brings us back to Maddow and her appalling remarks. Her unspoken but plain reference is to the tactics some fascist leaders have taken, where minor or even invented incidents by a targeted minority are used to justify violent crackdowns. If either side was using political disruption to, as Lenin might say, heighten contradictions, it was the protestors. They went in to provoke, and then ran away pointing fingers at the supposed violence. Trumps rhetoric after the incidents hasnt helped any, but from his perspective hes the aggrieved party.

Lets turn it around and say the Black Lives Matter movement had caught on and was holding an ever-larger series of rallies around the countryrallies that were becoming increasingly disrupted by racists waving Confederate flags.

I dont think the coverage would have been the sameRachel Maddows perspective on the events would certainly have come from a different place, I suspectand I think that if there had been footage of an elderly black gentleman sucker-punching a guy carrying a Stars and Bars the commentary on that would have been oddly supportive.

Instead, the medias obsessive attachment to violence at Donald Trump rallies decisively stunted Trumps momentum. The big rallies all but disappeared. While he continued to speak defiantly about the issue, it was clear that the campaign was changing tactics. A few weeks of punishing news coverage later, Trump got his comeuppance in Wisconsin, which still may yet turn out to have been the turning point in the race.

I take the point that people in elected positions have power and a platform to speak and speak plainly should face whatever protests manifest themselves. That said, is a successful protest one that silences a voice? A few years ago I went to an unusual appearance here in town by Arpaio, who through clever PR moves keeps getting re-elected despite well-documented scandals in virtually every part of his work. Like Trump, hes a master at swanning through press inquiries. This event was different; he was being questioned by journalism professors at ASUs Cronkite School, on stage in a controlled environment. We might have seen Arpaio pinned down. But it got interrupted by a bunch of chanting immigration activists. Arpaio, unperturbed, sat patiently, but when it became apparent that the organizers of the event werent going to take control of it, he got up and left. In this case, the protestors moves were plainly counterproductive, but the point should be made that, even if that werent the case, they were still in the wrong.

And sure, Trump does deserve it in a way. He doesnt share many commonly held conventions regarding fairness, context, perspective, or the truth generally. Hes made several proposals that violate the spirit if not the letter of the Bill of Rights, and the statements hes made about the actions of some of his creepier supporters have been irresponsible at best.

But whatever his buffoonish pronouncements, Donald Trump is in a zone that deserves protection; hes trying to run for office and wants to make his case. Theres a process in place to oppose him; its called an election. Do we really want disruptive, free speech-shattering protests part of our political process? If Trump doesnt get the nomination, his supporters could well decide, not without justification, that since his campaign had been sabotaged they might well embark on similar activities. At minimum, a lingering resentment will forever give his adherents a dim but justified sense that theyve been screwed. If you dont like his ideas, vote for someone else. But if the people opposing him cant get their message out without using anti-American tacticsand if we in the media dont call them on itwe all cede the high ground. Is our democracy so weak it cant handle Donald Trump?

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Bill Wyman is the former arts editor of NPR and Salon.com. Follow him @hitsville.
When President Obama made his historic visit to Cuba last month, the US media followed. At a joint press conference on March 21 with Cuban president Raul Castro, Obama called on CNNs Jim Acosta, who asked the Cuban leader if he would be willing to release political prisoners. A flustered Castro sputtered and demanded a list of those imprisoned. Obama directed a knowing wink at the assembled journalists.

Obamas implication was that by maneuvering to force Castro to respond live in front of the Cuban people and the world, he had bolstered the power of the press. Indeed, one of the key goals of Obamas Havana trip was to create more space for critical expression in a country that until recently was one of worlds most censored. Among the 13 dissidents Obama invited to meet with him at the US Embassy in Havana on March 22 were several independent journalists. He insisted that his joint news conference with Castro be broadcast live.

While its too early to assess the overall impact of Obamas visit, it seems the right moment to ask a more basic question: Has anything changed for journalists on the island in the month since Obama departed?

Miriam Leiva, an independent journalists and blogger who met with Obama, sees the presidential visit as accelerating trends already under way. The Cuban government is losing credibility day after day, Leiva noted by phone from Miami, where she was visiting relatives. President Castro made many promises and has not been able to fulfill those promises.

Leiva has been a leading voice of independent journalism in Cuba since 2003, when her husband, economist turned journalist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, was arrested as part of a sweeping crackdown known as the Black Spring. Espinosa Chepe was released after two years due to poor health (he died of a liver ailment in 2013). But many of those detained along with him were not freed until 2010, in a deal brokered by the Spanish government and the Cuban Catholic Church.

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By far the favored strategy employed by the Cuban government against dissident journalists has been organized stigmatization and isolation. Independent journalists have been confronted by screaming mobs, denounced in the state media, and relentlessly tracked by state security.

That is why Leiva is so heartened by the fact that her neighbors now greet her in the street and even occasionally read her stories, which are distributed by email. People are now more open, they feel less fear, she says. We ourselves have gained spaces.

Indeed, Cubas media landscape is no longer static. While the stale state media predominates, there are over 3,000 blogs. Some espouse dissidence and resistance; others express support for the government and the Communist Party while highlighting shortcomings by local officials. I wanted something small that wouldnt be seen as a threat by the state media, said blogger Elaine Diaz Rodriguez in a recent CPJ report. Diaz was the first Cuban journalists to receive a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University.

For Yoani Sanchezanother leader in the independent mediaObamas visit had tremendous symbolic value. When Obama arrived in Havana in the middle of a rainstorm, he carried his own umbrella. Cuban functionaries had aides hold theirs. Obama is youthful; Cubas leadership is decrepit. Obama is black; Cubas leadership is white (despite the fact that Cuba is a majority black country); Obama shows off his family; Cuban leaders hide theirs.

Speaking this weekend at the International Symposium of Online Journalism, an annual media confab in Austin, Sanchez said the primary impetus for change in Cuba has been technology. Only 5 percent of the Cuban population has access to the internet (according to Sanchez; other sources say its higher). Cubans must use creative means to access information, including emailed PDFs and flash drives, which are easy to hide and distribute. More recently, Cubans have been flocking to a handful of expensive WiFi hotspots set up around Havana.

We thought the Cuban people would take to the streets to topple the government, but instead they have done so to get online, Sanchez quipped.

Sanchez, who started out posting an irreverent personal blog, is now essentially a publisher. She employs a regular staff that puts out a online newspaper, 14YMedio, that provides comprehensive coverage of daily events. Im worried less about who will be our next president, and more about who will our next citizens, Sanchez explained. As citizens become empowered, they need more information to make decisions. We want to be the newspaper of the Cuban transition.

While the changing environment for news and information in Cuba is exciting, it is important to keep in mind that is still for the most part taking place within limits set by the Cuban Communist Party, which while no longer monolithic, is still firmly in control. Its reasons for opening Cuba are complex, but they are largely dictated by pragmatic concerns and a desire for self-preservation.

Even as it ceded the limelight briefly to Obama during his trip, the government made a point of consistently affirming the limits of dissent. Dissidents were roughed up and detained prior to and following Obamas visit; the state media, which operates in accordance with Communist Party dictates, published identical headlines; Fidel Castro lashed out at Obama as soon as he departed the island; the Communist Party Congress, which ends today and will set the stage for transition from nearly six decades of rule by the Castro brothers, has been a particularly opaque affair, even by Cuban standards. Raul Castro emphatically rejected new reforms during his opening speech, which only state media were invited to cover.

In visiting Havana, the gambit for Obama was that his mere presence could accelerate the opening in Cuba; the gambit for Raul Castro was that he could gain international credibility and legitimacy without making political concessions. With his press conference wink, Obama implied that he had gotten the upper hand, but that is far from clear. While the press conference showed that Raul Castro doesnt like answering tough questions, there is no real evidence that he will be forced to do so again anytime soon.

After all, as 14YMedio photojournalist Luz Escobar pointed out, no independent Cuban reporters were present. Cuba continues to be hostile for journalists she says. What gives me hope is the changing attitudes of the Cuban people.

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Joel Simon is a fellow at Tow Center for Digital Journalism. His next book is The Infodemic: How Censorship Made the World Sicker and Less Free co-authored with Robert Mahoney.
Greenlands massive ice sheet this week started melting freakishly early thanks to a weather system that brought unseasonably warm temperatures and rain, scientists say.

While this record early melt is mostly from natural weather on top of overall global warming, scientists say they are concerned about what it means when the melt season kicks in this summer. This however could be temporary.

On Monday and Tuesday, about 12 percent of the ice sheet surface area  656,000 square miles or 1.7 million square kilometers  showed signs of melting ice, according to Peter Langen, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute. It smashed record for early melting by more than three weeks.

Thats normal for late May not mid-April, Langen said.

Normally, no ice should be melting in Greenland at this time of year. Before now, the earliest Greenland had more than 10 percent surface area melting was on May 5, back in 1990. Even in 2012, when 97 percent of Greenland experienced melt, it didnt have such an early and extensive melt.

Langen said the amount of melt now is not the issue, timing is: Its nothing for July, its huge for April.

Its disturbing, Langen said. Something like this wipes out all kinds of records, you cant help but go this could be a sign of things were going to see more often in the future.

Whats causing this weeks unusual melt is a weather system that is bringing warm temperatures to Greenland and funneling lots of warmer-than-normal rain up from the south, Langen said. The rain and the above freezing temperatures help melt the ice.

Greenlands capital, Nuuk, reached 62 degrees (16.6 degrees Celsius) on Monday, smashing the April record high temperature by 6.5 degrees. Inland at Kangerlussuaq, it was 64 degrees (17.8 degrees Celsius), warmer than St. Louis and San Francisco.

Langen and other scientists said this is part of a natural weather system, but man-made climate change has worsened this. Tom Mote of the University of Georgia said had this natural event happened 20 or 30 years ago it wouldnt have been as bad as it is now because the air is warmer overall and carries more rain that melts the ice faster.

Things are getting more extreme and theyre getting more common, said NASA ice scientist Walt Meier. Were seeing that with Greenland and this is an indication of that.

This kind of freakish warm spell is another piece in the puzzle, Meier said. One freakish thing every once in a while you might expect. But were getting these things more often and thats an indication of climate change.

Langen said the measurements are based on scores of observations from monitors on the ice fed into a computer simulation. NASA normally measures melt with a satellite, but there are problems with the instruments, Meier said. Still, Mote said the satellite, if correct, showed on Monday conditions similar to what Denmark is reporting.

Greenland ice sheet melting is one of the more visible and key signs of man-made global warming from the burning of fossil fuels because it is causing seas to rise, putting coastal areas at risk, Meier said.

If the entire Greenland ice sheet melted, which would take centuries, it could add 20 feet or more to global sea level, Meier said. But within the next century, Greenland ice melt alone could raise sea level by a couple feet, he said.

The concern is things are moving faster than we thought, Meier said.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Chubbs Wikoff Appointed CNA AVP, Management Liability Zone Leader

CNA appointed Mike Wikoff assistant vice president, Management Liability Zone leader for the Central Zone. In this role, Wikoff is responsible for providing overall Public and Private Company management liability underwriting expertise for customers in the Central Zone, which includes the Arkansas, Austin, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Minneapolis and Oklahoma Branches.

He reports to Greg Vezzosi, senior vice president and Central Zone officer, and is based in Denver, Colorado.

Wikoff joins CNA from Chubb, where he held territory management roles over the past 12 years in both Financial Institutions and Management Liability. Prior to this role, heworked in the banking industry where he developed his deep knowledge of Financial Institutions before launching his underwriting career.

Berkshire Hathaways Gen Re CEO Retiring

The head of one of Berkshire Hathaways biggest insurance companies is retiring.

Spokeswoman Sue Johnson said Tuesday that Gen Re CEO Tad Montross will retire at the end of 2016.

The way Berkshires large reinsurance company is managed will change after Montross retirement. Montross currently reports directly to Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett, but his successor will report to Ajit Jain, who already runs another reinsurance unit at Berkshire.

Jain will also choose the next CEO of Stamford, Connecticut, based Gen Re.

Many investors who follow Berkshire say Jain is one of the leading candidates to eventually succeed Buffett as CEO.

Buffett regularly praises Jains ability to evaluate insurance risks and generate underwriting profits, but Berkshire has never named its internal candidates to succeed the 85-year-old Buffett.

Richardson Elected President and CEO of ACG

Joseph J. Richardson Jr. was elected by ACGs board of directors as president and chief executive officer of the more than 9 million member organization, according to The Auto Club Group (ACG), the second largest AAA Club in North America. He succeeds Charles H. Podowski who recently retired after a successful 17-year career.

In a strategic effort to ensure a smooth leadership change, a seamless transition was planned and executed over the past nine months during which Richardson worked side-by-side with Podowski and other senior officers to understand the companys values, priorities and business practices. Town hall meetings were held across the companys 11-state territory as a way to help him get acquainted with ACGs more than 8,000 employees. Richardson gradually assumed responsibilities for all business lines and departments within the organization.

Richardson is a third generation insurance executive who brings more than 30 years of experience in the property and casualty insurance, life insurance, financial services and roadside assistance industries. He has worked in multiple senior executive positions with Allstate Insurance Company and Farmers Insurance Group. Richardson most recently served as president and head of Distribution for Farmers where he led countrywide strategy and field operations and expanded the Farmers brand into new markets. Prior to his position at Farmers, he held the position of executive vice president at Allstate.

Richardson serves on the boards of directors of Business Leaders for Michigan, Michigan Department of Insurance and Financial Services (DIFS).

Swiss Re Restructures US Property & Casualty Markets

Swiss Re Americas announced a new structure and leaders for the companys US Property & Casualty markets. The new structure will have three managing director positions focused on the US Property & Casualty markets:

President of US P&C  Regional & National Keith Wolfe will continue to lead the Regional & National team, and he will assume the role of president of Swiss Reinsurance America Corporation. In this new capacity, he will be responsible for all legal entity management, rating agency and regulatory interaction on behalf of the flagship reinsurance carrier.

President of US P&C  Large Clients Seth Ruff will lead the Divisional Client Executives team, which is responsible for the overall relationships with Large clients. In addition, he will lead Swiss Res Client Market Underwriters, who handle the brokered treaty business for both Large and Global clients. He will assume the role of president of Swiss Re Underwriters Agency Inc. Ruff has been with Swiss Re for 15 years in a variety of roles, most recently as head of P&C Structured Solutions, US Broker, Canada and Latin America.

Head of P&C Facultative Ute Michaelsen will lead all Facultative teams direct and brokered in the US and Canada. She has held a number of roles with Swiss Re over the past 19 years, most prominently as divisional client executive for Large clients, and more recently as broker executive for Swiss Re Underwriters Agency Inc.

All three US Property & Casualty market leaders will report to Smith and all appointments are effective May 2.

The Associated Press contributed to this content.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Critics of how prescription painkillers are administered in the U.S. are calling on health officials to phase out hospital procedures and questionnaires used to manage pain.

They say the current system inadvertently encourages the overprescribing of addictive drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin, fueling an epidemic of overdoses tied to the opioid medications. Deaths linked to misuse and abuse of prescription opioids increased to nearly 19,000 in 2014, the highest figure on record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than five dozen nonprofit groups and medical experts sent a letter Wednesday to the Joint Commission, a nonprofit agency that accredits U.S. hospitals, asking it to revisit its standards for pain management. Only hospitals that have been accredited can receive payments from government plans like Medicare and Medicaid, making the groups standards highly influential.

The letter specifically takes issue with guidelines instructing doctors to ask patients to assess their pain.

The Pain Management Standards foster dangerous pain control practices, the endpoint of which is often the inappropriate provision of opioids with disastrous adverse consequences for individuals, families and communities, states the letter, which is co-signed by health commissioners from Vermont, Pennsylvania, Alaska and Rhode Island.

The Chicago-based Joint Commission rejected the idea that its standards push clinicians to prescribe opioids. Instead, the group said its standards require doctors to assess patients for pain and manage it.

The standards do not require the use of drugs to manage a patients pain; and when a drug is appropriate, the standards do not specify which drug should be prescribed, it said.

The group also stressed that it does not view pain as a vital sign, a medical mantra often debated by pain specialists and their critics.

Beginning in the 1990s, pain specialists and patient groups encouraged doctors to treat pain a vital sign that should be routinely monitored, alongside biological measures like body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure.

All pain was viewed as being bad and so it pushed providers too often to over-prescribe opioids, said Dr. Michael Carome of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, one of the groups signing the letter.

Wednesdays effort was spearheaded by Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, which advocates for alternative treatments to opioids, including non-opioid pain relievers, physical therapy and psychotherapy. The group is funded by Phoenix House, a nonprofit chain of addiction treatment centers.

The same coalition filed a petition Wednesday with the federal agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid, the government health programs for the elderly, disabled and poor. The letter asks that officials eliminate certain pain-related questions from patient-satisfaction questionnaires, such as: During this hospital stay, how often was your pain well controlled?

The groups argue that such questions inadvertently encourage aggressive use of painkillers to maintain high patient-satisfaction metrics.

Aggressive management of pain should not be equated with quality health care as it can result in unhelpful and unsafe treatment, states the petition, which calls on the government to release a proposal for a new questionnaire within 90 days.

Last week a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation that would eliminate the connection between pain survey questions and the payment rates hospitals receive from Medicare. The bill is sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Companies that drill for oil and gas in U.S. waters should be required to work more closely with rig workers and regulators, as they do in Norway and the United Kingdom, to reduce the risk of accidents, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board says.

The board investigates major industrial accidents. It is concluding a long-running probe into the catastrophic blowout of a BP well six years ago in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers and injured many others. The out-of-control leak also dumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico

The agency issued its safety recommendations Wednesday afternoon.

On Thursday the Obama administration was planning to issue a final rule to improve the safety of offshore oil drilling equipment. Federal investigators blamed a faulty blowout preventer for the 2010 spill and called for stronger regulations of equipment that prevents oil and gas from rushing to the surface.

Industry officials have complained that the proposed changes would cost billions of dollars more than projected.

Regulators have forced the industry to comply with a new set of safety management rules, but the CSB called this performance-based protocol weak. It also said the regulations fail to cover contractors, a major segment in offshore work.

What were worried about is how do we make the industry do what theyre putting on paper, said Cheryl MacKenzie, a CSB investigator.

She said safety gaps could be filled by giving the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement  the offshore regulator  more power to challenge companies and verify that they are doing what they said they would do.

CSB also recommended getting workers more involved in safety decisions, for instance by letting workers elect worker representatives to be part of discussions over safety.

These are the people who have their hands on the equipment, MacKenzie said. They need to be involved  This is not a CSB tenet, this is a well-known concept.

The CSB report said there were lessons to learn from places like Norway and the United Kingdom.

In a statement, Vanessa Allen Sutherland, the CSB chairwoman, called on the industry and the federal government to take a tripartite approach where workers, companies and regulators are entwined in improving safety.

Ultimately, this will require a culture shift for everyone, Sutherland said.

Ken Arnold, an expert on offshore drilling and member of the National Academy of Engineering, said the industry, through an American Petroleum Institute committee, is looking at revising the industrys safety standards. He said more oversight of contractors is being considered.

However, he questioned the practicality of some of the CSBs recommendations.

For instance, he said U.S. offshore workers are not unionized and are culturally anti-union. He said it would be difficult to duplicate the safety regimes of Norway and the U.K.

In the U.S. we have a system that is a blame culture, he said. Norway and the U.K. have a culture of working with industry to make things better rather than focus on who to blame. We have to work within the culture of the United States.

He added that since the BP disaster BSEE, the offshore regulator, has set up a system for whistleblowers to alert regulators to problems.

He said the U.S. offshore industry is making progress on safety.

Were working on the human factor, were working on worker-involvement more and more in each organization; were working on corporate governance to understand the role the corporation has here, he said. They all need to be worked on and we will never stop working on them. They can always be improved.

(Kevin Freking contributed material from Washington, D.C.)

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
In a flood, nature can steal everything: lives and homes, delicate Christmas ornaments, a favorite flannel shirt, a special fishing hole.

The historic rains and floods that battered South Carolina in October claimed 19 lives, destroyed more than $1 billion dollars in homes and property, and left thousands struggling to recoup.

Many in the region are still trying to regain their balance. Here are a few of their stories.

___

Bruce Guignards ancestors have been in South Carolina since the 1730s. Five feet of water swept through his Lake Katherine home last October, but that wont push him anywhere else. The neighborhood was his stomping grounds as a child, he says, and he wants to pass that link along to his grandchildren.

Hes lifting his house up one story to meet flood standards. He says that has a bright side: a concrete floor underneath where the children can roller skate.

For his family, once-lost treasures do turn up: His wife Claudias plastic tub of cherished Christmas ornaments was found intact, buried in a mound of silt after it floated over a dam about a mile away.

___

From the floods came lasting images of damage. In some areas hit hard, major roads have reopened, schoolchildren are back in class and clean water is restored to residents. But pockets of destruction remain along the Gills Creek waterway. Columbia city Councilman Moe Baddourah calls it ground zero for the floods. Baddourah once ran a restaurant in the area and said hes worried about property values plummeting and entire sectors losing residents. This city saw lots of love during the recovery, he said. But we still have a rough road ahead.

___

A raccoon found here, a mass of copper wire checked there. Columbia police Patrolman Michael Thompson keeps his eyes open for wildlife as well as thieves as he patrols homes stripped to wooden skeletons after the floods.

Volunteering to work on his days off, Thompson says repeat visits help him recognize returning residents as well as contractors licensed for home repairs. His says the patrols deter those who might do even more damage to homes through thefts or vandalism.

___

Rachel Larratts small bungalow was knocked off its foundation from the force of floodwaters and 2 feet of rain that cascaded through her neighborhood above Gills Creek in southwest Columbia. Nearly everything she had was ruined.

Instead of moping, Larratt got active: She founded a nonprofit foundation to help people manage the process of seeking assistance to relocate, and selling or repairing damaged homes. She set up a warehouse distribution site, where flood victims get household and personal items free of charge, and organized volunteers to help clear the flood-damaged creek.

___

Warning: Four large water moccasins inside! the door reads on a home near Gills Creek. It is one of the estimated 1,600 homes in the central Richland County area hit by the floods. Many residents are waiting to see whether they can get federal assistance to lift their homes or demolish them, or perhaps start over somewhere else. If demolished, the home site must be turned into green space  not built on again.

___

More than 102,000 South Carolina residents registered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of the floods. Every day, Delwander Brewer tries to make life easier for a few of them.

Brewer works in the Columbia warehouse stocked with donated supplies  clothing, cleaning items, mattresses, toothbrushes. Brewer says people still come in daily. I didnt realize so many people still needed help, she said. On the first day I began working here, I just cried. It helps you realize just how blessed you are.

___

Over the days of rain, residential ponds and lakes that dot suburban neighborhoods around Columbia filled up like a cup, says Erich Miarka, the director of the Gills Creek Watershed Association. The watershed drains about 47,000 acres in the heart of the state. About three dozen dams in the state gave way, crumbling roads built atop them and devastating neighborhoods downstream. At the height of the disaster, 541 roads were closed. State transportation officials say 48 roads are still closed, uncertain of repairs to the many dams they once traversed.

___

Miarka, who has helped organize volunteers cleaning the battered Gills Creek watershed, surveys what remains of an earthen dam that once held back Cary Lake in the community of Arcadia Lakes. Homeowners are trying to figure out how to repair the dam so the Department of Transportation can fix the road. Miarka says the cost of fixing the dam alone might carry a $1 million price tag, and homeowners are hoping for state or federal assistance with the bill. Repairs to dams and roads in the region may take years.

___

For Roosevelt Durham, floodwaters have calmed enough to let him get back to a favorite fishing spot along Gills Creek. It gives me peace of mind, he said.

The water had risen well above the roadway behind him, collapsing buildings and flooding nearby homes and businesses. On a recent sunny afternoon, Durham had already caught about seven bream. He fishes for them daily and cooks them up in a pan with onions and bell peppers  I can eat it every day, he said.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Vacant house where dog was buried.JPG

A dog was found strangled and buried in the backyard of this vacant home in the 1100 block of Johnston Street in Akron.

(Adam Ferrise, cleveland.com)

AKRON, Ohio -- An Akron man is accused of strangling a 2-year-old pit bull and burying it in the backyard of a neighboring vacant home.

Adrian Ogg, 36, is charged with animal cruelty, a first-degree misdemeanor. A warrant was issued Monday for his arrest. He is not in police custody.

Ogg on Friday dragged the pit bull, named Rocco, down a flight of stairs at his home because it was misbehaving while he cooked, according to police reports.

The dog belonged to Ogg's 61-year-old godfather who also lives at the home in the 400 block of Bruner Street.

The 61-year-old man told police that he took his daughter to softball practice and returned home to find Rocco missing. Both he and Ogg scoured the neighborhood looking for the dog.

Ogg told police that the dog ran from the home through their backyard, police reports say.

A witness told police that they saw Ogg drag Rocco from the home by his choker collar.

Ogg and the 61-year-old man argued after they couldn't find the dog. Ogg told police the 61-year-old man threatened to shoot him. The 61-year-old man told police he doesn't own a gun.

Ogg agreed to leave the home for the night. Akron police searched for the dog and for a burial site but initially found neither.

Officers on Sunday went back to the neighborhood and found Rocco in a shallow grave in the backyard of a vacant home in the 1100 block of Johnston Street. The yard is adjacent to Ogg's backyard.

The dog died of apparent strangulation, according to police reports.

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Summit County Juvenile Court and Detention Center.JPG

A 17-year-old boy is accused of breaking into a home while the owners slept.

(File photo)

AKRON, Ohio -- A 17-year-old boy is accused of breaking into a home early Tuesday, then fleeing when the homeowner saw him in the hallway.

Akron police said they arrested the teen after tracking the cellphone he's accused of stealing about 2 a.m. in the 800 block of Cascade Mills Drive.

The 29-year-old homeowner reported that he heard a noise in the downstairs bedroom of his home. He looked in the hallway and saw the teen with a gun, according to police reports.

The man went back to his room to get his gun. When he returned, the teen was gone, according to police.

Officers arrived and found items taken from the home littered in neighbors' yards leading west.

The 29-year-old man and a 36-year-old man in the home used their computer to track a cellphone that was stolen. The program showed the cellphone was at a home on Fess Avenue.

Police found the teen hiding in the backyard of a home on Fess Avenue. The teen ran and officers caught him after a short chase, police said.

The teen was taken to the Summit County Juvenile Detention Center, where he is charged with burglary, obstructing official business and breaking curfew.

Officers reported the teen stole the cellphone, a tablet computer, two notebooks, $15, watches, a phone charger and a wallet. All the items were found and given back to the owners, police reports say.

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Fire on Towpath Trail

This bridge on the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath Trail was set on fire.

(Summit Metro Parks)

AKRON, Ohio -- An arsonist set fire to a bridge on the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath Trail.

Firefighters were called about 6 a.m. Tuesday to the bridge in the 300 block of West Wilbeth Road, according to a Summit Metro Parks spokeswoman.

Akron firefighters extinguished the blaze. Arson investigators found an accelerant on the bridge, leading investigators to believe someone intentionally set the fire.

They also found a burned propane tank near the bridge.

Officials haven't yet determined how much it will cost to replace the bridge. The bridge will remain closed until it's repaired, officials said.

Firefighters and Metro Parks rangers are investigating a link between that fire and another fire early Tuesday on Wilbeth Road.

Someone set a utility police on fire with propane about an hour before, the spokesperson said. It was not on Metro Parks property.

Investigators do not have a suspect.

Anyone with information about the fire is being asked to call the Summit Metro Park Rangers at 330-867-5511

If you'd like to comment on this story, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section.
MACEDONIA, Ohio -- A Cleveland man is accused of leading Macedonia police on a high-speed chase that lasted more than 17 miles and ended in a crash at a Cleveland high school.

Shakur Ali, 59, is charged with failing to comply with police, resisting arrest, obstructing official business and driving without a valid license. His bond was set at $25,000 at his initial court appearance on Tuesday.

His passenger, Terzi Addison, 51, pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges of resisting arrest, obstructing official business, criminal damaging. Addison, a former Cuyahoga County probation officer, will be sentenced Friday by Stow Municipal Court Judge Lisa Coates.

Macedonia police tried to stop Ali's 2003 Ford Taurus about 10:30 p.m. Monday on Interstate 271 northbound because of several traffic and equipment violations, according to police reports.

Ali pumped his brakes and sped off on Interstate 271 northbound. He eventually got on the westbound lane of Interstate 480 westbound and took the Lee Road exit. Ali ran a red light on the off-ramp and drove onto McCracken Road.

The chase wound through the neighborhoods around Lee Road.

It lasted 18 minutes and reached speeds of more than 100 miles per hour. He drove through red lights and stop signs at intersections and swerved across the highway.

Ali crashed into the main entrance gate at John F. Kennedy High School on Harvard Road. Both he and Addison ran from the car after the crash.

Officers ordered them to stop but both kept running. Macedonia officers used a stun gun on Ali to no effect. Officers chased him across Harvard and wrestled with him, according to police reports.

An officer again used the stun gun. The officer was intertwined with the stun gun's wires and also shocked himself. The officer was then able to handcuff Ali, police reports say.

Another officer chased after Addison. He used a stun gun on her back and she fell to the ground. She kept fighting with the officer and a Warrensville Heights police officer that was helping Macedonia police.

Addison kept fighting with the officers, who used the stun gun for a second time, according to police reports. They placed her in two sets of handcuffs, police reports say.

She made herself dead weight so officers had to carry her to the cruiser, police reports say.

She broke a door handle in the police cruiser, officers said. Police found two crack pipes in her purse. Addison later told police she smoked crack earlier in the day, police reports say.

Addison was treated and released at the Cleveland Clinic branch in Twinsburg after she complained of head and rib pain. Addison was taken from the Macedonia City Jail back to the Cleveland Clinic on Tuesday after complaining of other health issues, police said.

Addison was a county probation officer for about 10 years until 1999, when she was caught stealing from people on probation and under her supervision. She stole $2,975 from eight people. She was sentenced to eight months in prison.

Addison has since been convicted of several drug possession charges.

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WESTLAKE, Ohio -- Trade lip gloss and cosmetics for tractor-trailers.

A company connected to All Pro Freight Systems, Inc., of Avon bought the Bonne Bell headquarters complex in Westlake on Monday, in a deal that will shift 150 jobs from one West Side suburb to another.

All Pro, a privately owned distribution and trucking business, will move its corporate offices to Westlake in late 2016 or early 2017, after renovating the longtime Bonne Bell property at 1006-1008 Crocker Road. The company already is using distribution space at the 170,000-square-foot building, which sits on nearly 19 acres not far from Interstate 90.

"To be in the center of Westlake with a trucking and warehousing operation, with the great highway access, was too great an opportunity to pass up," said Chris Haas, All Pro's president and chief executive officer.

Real estate records show that an affiliate of Haas Holdings paid just shy of $4.6 million for the property this week. The sale marked the end of an era for the Bonne Bell Co., a family-owned cosmetics business that opened the manufacturing facility in 1976.

Bonne Bell, best known for its Lip Smacker lip-gloss line, was founded in Cleveland in 1927 and had its main offices in Lakewood for decades.

In early 2015, the family-run company announced that it would sell the Lip Smacker brand and its eponymous line of business to Markwins International Corp., a competitor based in California. In the wake of that announcement, Bonne Bell laid off workers in Westlake and emptied out parts of its well-known building.

But Bonne Bell didn't go out of business.

The company, which has other product lines, still occupies roughly 30,000 square feet of offices and distribution space on Crocker Road. As part of the deal with Haas, the Bell family can stick around for a year or longer, though the company's trajectory is unclear.

Bonne Bell didn't respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

"We're not forcing them out, and if they leave we'll just replace them," Haas said of Bonne Bell, adding that he has known members of the Bell family for years.

All Pro will soak up the manufacturing and distribution space first and move into the former Bonne Bell offices, about 22,000 square feet, later. Haas said his company, which owns its real estate, currently occupies 8,500 square feet of offices in Avon and has leased out all of the adjacent distribution space.

He's in no rush to move his offices, but he needs more room to house his own trucks and goods that need to be stored and shipped. All Pro employs 100 or so drivers, on top of 50 office workers, and has annual revenues of $50 million.

The company handles local, regional and nationwide freight services for customers including Cleveland-area manufacturers. Through affiliates of Haas Holdings, All Pro controls nearly 1 million square feet of warehouse and distribution facilities in Ohio and Florida. Strong demand for that space has left Haas with little room for his own fleet and daily business.

The Westlake acquisition not only gives All Pro immediate wiggle room but also offers long-term opportunities for growth. Haas believes he could expand the distribution operations by 100,000 square feet, by tacking new construction onto the existing building. That's not something he plans to do right away, but it's on his mind.

"There aren't a lot of 20-acre plots sitting in the middle of Westlake, I can tell you that," he said.

As for the Avon property, Haas is shelving plans for an expansion there. He expects to rent out All Pro's current offices after the company moves to Westlake.

All Pro has not asked for incentives from Westlake, to assist with the move or renovations of the Bonne Bell complex.

"It's an iconic building on the West Side," Mike Petrigan of the Newmark Grubb Knight Frank brokerage, which represented Haas in the transaction, said of the Crocker Road facility. "There's a cross-country track around the building. A lot of high-school teams used that track over the years. The building has a great history for the Bell family and Bonne Bell. For Chris, it fits his real estate portfolio perfectly."

Kevin Kelly of Cushman & Wakefield/Cresco Real Estate represented the seller. He said Bonne Bell fielded half a dozen offers before concluding the deal with Haas.

"Chris has the vision to see what to do with the property," Kelly said. "That kind of acreage in that location in a city like Westlake is very valuable."
Getting the word out

Cuyahoga County voters will be able to check in electronically in 2017 when electronic poll books are introduced in precincts.

(Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Cuyahoga County plans to begin checking in voters with electronic poll books in 2017, and one of two vendors vying for the contract caused major issues in November in Cincinnati.

Equipment from Tenex Software Solutions led to delays and people being wrongly told they weren't registered in the November election in Hamilton County. Problems included lack of training and equipment issues, according to a report sent to Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted.

See the report below or click here if on a mobile device.

Next month, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections is holding a mock election for poll workers, staff and selected community members to try out poll books from Tenex and KNOWiNK.

The board is expected to choose a company June 8, said director Pat McDonald.

The Tenex problems have been resolved and the March primary election went smoothly, said Tenex president and CEO Ravi Kallem.

"In retrospect everybody thought it was ready to go (in November)," Kellem said Tuesday. "There was an extensive amount of testing and nothing was rushed."

McDonald said he was aware of the issues.

The county staff rated Tenex as a finalist based on references, usability, functionality and technical support, McDonald wrote in an email.

Unlike in Hamilton County, Cuyahoga plans to phase in the software during primary and special elections before launching them countywide in November 2017.

The state authorized money for counties to buy electronic poll books, which will replace the large, paper rosters of registered voters at each voting location.

An e-poll book typically provides one or more of the following functions:
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- With plenty of great places to eat at Progressive Field, you can satisfy almost any craving. We pride ourselves on our local cuisine, and the roster of Cleveland-exclusive vendors at the Field reflects it.

You've likely heard about the three new additions for you to choose from while watching the Tribe: Cleveland Pickle, Happy Dog and Ohio City Burrito. Put a face to the flavors as we meet the people behind these local favorites. We talk to Josh & Kiaran Kabat (Cleveland Pickle), Sean Watterson (Happy Dog) and Raymond Pizzuli (Ohio City Burrito) about their recommendations and hopes for this upcoming season.
FAIRVIEW PARK, Ohio - After a four-month search, Fairview Park has a new economic development and public service director.

Shawn Leininger, currently a Bluffton, South Carolina, resident as well as assistant town manager and executive director of the Bluffton Public Development Corporation, will join Fairvew Park Mayor Eileen Patton's administration beginning May 16. City council voted 4-0 Monday evening to approve the mayoral appointment. Council representatives Brian McDonough, Paul Wojnar and Peggy Cleary were not in attendance.

"He certainly has the experience in both service and development, but more importantly, he has the enthusiasm and the drive for economic development," Patton said in an e-mail. "His experience both in Ohio and South Carolina makes him an ideal candidate to work with our service department and the public works projects we have ongoing."

Leininger spoke by phone from Bluffton during an interview following Monday's meeting. He laughed when asked why he would leave the sunny climes of South Carolina to move to the Cleveland area.

"I'm from Ohio originally, so Ohio is home to me," Leininger said. "We love it here in South Carolina, but we miss family and being close to the friends and family that we left behind, so this is an opportunity to get back to them. Fairview Park itself is a wonderful community."

He added he is excited to help Fairview Park and "work with the community to develop businesses and improve infrastructure."

Leininger has more than 15 years of experience in municipal planning and development, including management positions in the Ohio cities of Powell and Delaware. He graduated The Ohio State University in 2001 with a master's degree in city and regional planning and has various planning industry affiliations, including with the American Institute of Certified Planners.

"I'm excited to be part of the community, and I look forward to meeting everyone," Leininger said.
Sunnyslope car 1.jpeg

Maple Heights detectives believe a man wanted for questioning in connection with a fatal shooting left the area in this 2000 GMC Jimmy.

(Maple Heights police)

Maple Heights detectives are searching for this man in connection with a Monday shooting that left a 22-year-old man dead.

MAPLE HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Detectives are searching for a man in connection with a shooting that left another man dead Monday in Maple Heights, police said.

Ernest Swift, 22, died after being shot about 10:30 a.m. outside the Sunnyslope Apartments on Sunnyslope Road, police said.

Swift was pronounced dead after being taken to University Hospitals Bedford Medical Center.

Officers were investigating a report of shots fired when they found Swift shortly after 10:30 a.m. on the ground outside the apartments, police said.

Witnesses said another man left the area in a maroon and silver 2000 GMC Jimmy with the Ohio license plate number GKU6856, police said.

The man is wanted for questioning in connection with the shooting, police said.

Detectives released surveillance videos of the man and the car on Monday evening.

No arrests have been made. The investigation is ongoing.

Anyone with information is being asked to call the Maple Heights Detective Bureau at 216-587-9624 or email detectives@mhpd-ohio.com.

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Collinwood Rec Center gun

A 16-year-old Akron boy has been charged after police said he threw this .22-caliber handgun during a foot chase in front of the Collinwood Recreation Center in Cleveland.

(Steve Loomis)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 16-year-old Akron teenager has been charged with felony assault after police said he tossed a loaded handgun during a foot chase with police outside a city recreation center.

The boy appeared in Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court Monday, where he pleaded not guilty to aggravated assault and obstruction of justice charges in the Saturday evening incident.

A security guard at Lakeshore Beach Apartments saw four teenagers passing the handgun back and forth outside his office door, according to a police report.

A teenager wearing a red bandana, whom police later identified as the Akron boy, took the gun, and the teenagers walked away along Lakeshore Boulevard, the guard told police.

The guard told dispatchers that he couldn't tell if the gun was real or fake, the report says. Dispatchers relayed that information to officers, who spotted the teenagers walking on the west end of the Collinwood Recreation Center, the report says.

Officers ordered the teens to stop walking. Three of the teens hesitated, but the boy in the red bandana kept walking away, the report says. When an officer ordered him to stop, he started running, the report says.

Police gave chase. During the pursuit, the boy pulled the gun from his waistband and ran with it in his hand for about 25 feet, the report says. He then threw it onto the ground next to the sidewalk in front of the Collinwood Recreation Center.

Officers caught the boy at the apartment complex across from the center, the report says. The other three teens got away.

The gun, a long-barreled Ruger .22-caliber pistol, was loaded with four bullets in the magazine, the report says.

The 16-year-old boy was arrested and held in the juvenile detention center over the weekend, according to court records. A summons was sent to his home in Akron.

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police officers.jpg

Cleveland police detectives are investigating a shooting outside an East Side bar that left one man wounded.

(File photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland police are investigating an attempted robbery and shooting at an East Side bar that left one man injured.

The shooting, one of three in the city overnight, occurred about 2:20 a.m. Monday outside Kirkman's Double Exposure at the corner of East 93rd Street and Manor Avenue.

Detectives are still piecing together the events that led to the shooting, and weren't able to talk to the victim immediately due to his injuries, according to a Cleveland police report.

The 38-year-old man's wife gave investigators the following account based on conversations with two of her husband's friends who witnessed the shooting:

The three men were leaving the bar and getting into their truck when a group of unidentified men walked up to them. The strangers demanded money.

The man's friend refused and one of the robbers drew a gun and began shooting into the truck.

A bullet went through 38-year-old man's hand and struck his hip. The shooter ran.

The man started driving to the hospital, but passed out behind the wheel. The man's friends called his wife, who drove him to MetroHealth.

Fourth District detectives are trying to contact witnesses and to obtain surveillance footage, the report says.

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crime scene.png

Cleveland police are investigating a shooting Sunday night on the city's West Side.

(File photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland police are investigating after a man said he was shot while he stopped to urinate at a vacant home in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood.

The 40-year-old victim was hospitalized after the shooting about 7:20 p.m. near the corner of West 25th Street and Meyer Avenue, according to a Cleveland police report.

Police haven't made any arrests.

The man told investigators his friend was driving him to the Lake Shore Feed and Seed pet shop on Clark Avenue near West 52nd Street, reports show. The man had to urinate and his friend pulled over.

The man started to walk to the side of a vacant house when two strangers approached him, police said. One of the men said, "you know what this is," and pulled a gun from his waistband.

The victim tried to slap the gun away, but the gunman shot him in the leg, reports show. The victim ran away as the shooter fired two more times and missed.

The man then walked to MetroHealth, about a half a mile from the scene of the shooting, police said. A MetroHealth police officer picked him up near the entrance of the hospital and took him to the emergency room.

Second District detectives are investigating.

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Saud Alajmi

Saud Alajmi, 61, has been charged with abduction after police accused him of trapping a maid inside the bathroom in his room at the InterContinental Suites Hotel Sunday.

(Cleveland police)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 61-year-old Kuwaiti man is charged with abduction after police said he trapped a maid in the bathroom of his room at the InterContinental Suites Hotel Cleveland.

Saud Alajmi, of Kuwait City was released from city jail Monday night after he posted 10 percent of his $50,000 arrest bond. He did not enter a plea at his initial appearance Tuesday morning.

The maid told police that she was cleaning the bathroom in room 301 at the hotel on the Cleveland Clinic's main campus at 4 p.m. Sunday, according to court records.

Alajmi came into the bathroom, grabbed her arm and shut the door behind him, according to court records.

The maid opened the door, but Alajmi shut it again, and told her he wanted to have sex with her, records say. She eventually escaped and called police.

Officers arrested Alajmi Sunday at the hotel.

Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Charles Patton set Alajmi's bond by phone Monday night. Patton ordered Alajmi to hand over his passport and have no contact with the maid.

The case was sent to a Cuyahoga County grand jury.

Alajmi's attorney, Leif Christman, declined to comment on the case, but said his client traveled to Cleveland on a personal matter.

The InterContinental Suites' director of sales and marketing, Craig Campbell, said the hotel takes the safety of its guests and workers "very seriously" and that hotel officials are cooperating with the investigation.

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case.jpg

Case Western Reserve University police are investigating thefts from multiple university research grants.

(Case Western Reserve University)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Authorities are investigating a former MetroHealth Systems employee suspected of stealing money from several Case Western Reserve University research grants.

The 52-year-old Cleveland woman, who reportedly managed several of the university's research grants, hasn't been charged with any crimes in the ongoing investigation.

The woman has since resigned from her job as a business research analyst, MetroHealth spokeswoman Rita Andolsen said Tuesday.

CWRU police launched the investigation March 17 after the MetroHealth police department notified the university of their suspicions, according to a CWRU police report.

The woman stopped showing up to work that day, Andolsen said. She was placed on administrative leave and later submitted her resignation to her supervisor.

The university would not answer any questions on the investigation, including how much money was involved. A spokesman released the following statement:

"Case Western Reserve is complying fully with law enforcement and federal authorities involved in this matter. The university cannot comment further on an ongoing investigation."

Cleveland FBI spokeswoman Vicki Anderson said she can't comment on the agency's involvement in any investigation.

MetroHealth is a primary teaching hospital for Case Western University School of Medicine and provides clinical training for medical students, according to the hospital's website.

CWRU and MetroHealth often collaborate on medical research and all of the hospital's active physician staff hold faculty appointments at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, the site says.

Editor's note: This story was updated after a hospital spokeswoman confirmed that the employee resigned from her job at the hospital.

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Cleveland police car stock

Cleveland police found a gun, two bullet casings and a wounded man at a Hough shopping plaza Monday night.

(File photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A man was shot outside a shopping plaza in Cleveland's Hough neighborhood Monday night.

Officers patrolling near East 88th Street and Superior Avenue heard several gunshots, police said.

The officers pulled up to the shopping plaza, and a man walked up to their car and told them that someone shot him in the right hip.

Police said there were several men standing outside a store in the plaza when the shooting occurred, and they scattered.

Officers found a 9mm handgun and two bullet casings at the scene, police said.

Police did not release a description of the shooter.

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CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Kathryn Schulz, a staff writer for The New Yorker, didn't need 140 characters to express her joy at winning a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing -- "Holy freakin' moly" said her initial tweet.

This undated photo provided by Columbia University shows the Pulitzer Prize winner for Feature Writing, Kathryn Schulz of The New Yorker, announced Monday, April 18, 2016, at Columbia University in New York. (Columbia University via AP)

That was followed Monday by a long series of thank you's to the Pulitzer committee, her sources and her editors on her story, "The Really Big One," about the looming threat an earthquake from the Cascadia subduction zone poses to the Northwest.

Schulz, who graduated from Brown University, was born and raised in Shaker Heights. Her father, a retired lawyer and former head of the Cleveland Bar Association, and her mother a retired French teacher, still live in the area.

Cleveland.com talked with Schulz about the Pulitzer win, growing up in Shaker Heights and what it's like writing about something that hasn't happened yet.

Where were you when you heard the news?

It was Sunday evening, about 8:30 or 9 o'clock at night and I got a phone call from my editor ... I looked at my cell phone ringing and saw his name there and I was on deadline and I thought "Oh my gosh, I can't believe they're bothering me on a Sunday night about whether I'm done with this piece or not!

... It's been crazy in the best possible way. It's lovely, people are so generous. For me, honestly, the biggest pleasure was being able to call and tell my parents ... They taught me to write, and they've been incredibly supportive of me as a writer.

How did you initially find out about the Cascadia subduction zone?

I heard about it from a relative of mine who lives in Portland. It was striking to me as one of those rare cases as a journalist where you know you've been handed an incredible story.

Understanding the subduction zone and how the earthquake would work is pretty complex, and at one point in the story you tell the reader how to act it out with their hands. How did you choose to explain the information?

To me, that's both the challenge and real pleasure of science writing, trying to figure how you can convey this often quite complex and often technical information and in a way that's vivid and also accurate.

You can refer to the actual movement of the plates and the geology, but there's something that remains fundamentally abstract about that ... It just somehow made sense to do it that way. I wish I could say it was the result of some long deep profound thought process about craft and science and writing, but no, it was just what came to mind when I was struggling to explain this thing.

What was the response like from the people who would be affected by the future earthquake?

Some people were truly blindsided even within the region, but a lot of people had a kind of baseline level of information, and probably also some helpful baseline denial going on to make it possible to live there and not really think about it. For the most part I would say the response was really wonderful in the sense that people took it seriously.

There was a real sense that people took in the information and decided to act on it and as a journalist, or at least for this journalist, the kind of work that I do, it's quite rare to get to feel that way, that you write something that actually makes their lives a little bit safer.

You're from Shaker Heights. Were you involved in journalism in high school there?

I was on our high school paper, the Shakerite. Oddly enough at the time I was responsible for kind of the graphic design and layout elements of the newspaper. I wish I could tell you I meant to be a journalist from the day I was born. I think I did always know I was going to write but I came to journalism later through my involvement in my high school paper; I had this funny sideways way through graphic design there.

... I got an incredible, incredible education from my parents but also from the Shaker schools. I had unbelievable writing teachers and history teachers and I mean, almost everyone who I worked with from elementary school on made a difference. (They) championed me as a writer, made the world big and interesting and worth reporting on and taught me to ask questions about it and I'm incredibly grateful.

To read Schulz's story, "The Really Big One", click here.

Read more: Shaker Heights grad Wesley Lowery wins Pulitzer Prize at 25
Drugmaker AstraZeneca has held internal talks about a bid for cancer treatment maker Medivation but has yet to make a formal offer, the Sunday Times reported, citing sources.



AstraZeneca has been looking at Medivation for the past six months and is looking very closely at making an offer, the newspaper said, citing sources and a senior health care banker.

In March, Reuters reported that Medivation had been working with investment bank JPMorgan Chase to handle interest from other companies in a potential acquisition, but it had no plans to sell itself.

San Francisco based-Medivation, which has a market capitalization of $8.4 billion, focuses on cancer treatment drugs.

Less than a week ago, the company rebuffed a takeover bid from French drugmaker Sanofi, Bloomberg reported.

AstraZeneca and Medivation said they do not comment on rumors or speculation.
"The idea that Russia was going to make a pact with the Saudis to keep oil frozen at these levels was a total fantasy. The Russians have no excess capacity," Cramer said.

The United States is pumping about 1 million barrels a day less than when it was at its high. With U.S. on the decline, Cramer expects oil production to drop to 8.6 million by year end from the 9.6 million produced in 2015. Meanwhile, the Saudis have produced about 10.1 million barrels a day.

"I think the misinformation about oil is so legion these days that a vast majority of analysts and pundits got this whole oil minister meeting dead wrong from the very outset," the " Mad Money " host said.

Jim Cramer says the rebound in oil never had anything to do with Doha. It is blatantly obvious that it was always about supply and demand.

Two workers stand before the backdrop of an oil pump, while silhouetted against the sunset.

However, the Saudis have as much as 1 million barrels a day in excess capacity. Thus, Cramer added that Saudi Arabia could directly offset the production decline of the U.S.

Iran can produce approximately 600,000 more barrels per day by year end. That quantity could tip the scales and send oil on the decline again. However, the International Energy Agency anticipates that consumption will increase by 1.2 million additional barrels per day in 2016.

Read more from Mad Money with Jim Cramer

Cramer Remix: Forget it, OPEC is broken

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Cramer's tax day showdown: Intuit vs. H&R Block

Thus, with the U.S. cutting production by 1 million barrels, Saudis increasing production by 1 million barrels, Iranians increasing production by 600,000, and demand going up by 1.2 million  that leaves the world short 600,000 barrels a day.

"Hence why the price of crude wasn't totally annihilated today even though there was no production freeze out of Doha weekend, something that was never going to happen anyway," Cramer said.

Cramer added that he thinks Saudi Arabia has three goals: First, to keep Iran from increasing production too fast by discouraging higher pricing. Second, it wants to prevent the U.S. from producing so much oil that it loses market share.

The third goal is to generate enough money to fund both national expenses and a war against Yemen. If oil falls too much, Saudi Arabia won't have enough cash.

"We have equilibrium right here in the high $30s, low $40s. As the year goes on it is possible that we could get tightened supply because U.S. production drops off even more at these prices," Cramer said.

Cramer dismissed the idea that oil could go lower from its current level, because that would assume that Saudi Arabia does not care about its own budget, and it does.

"All of this talk about a production freeze was just that, talk. The Saudis  not the U.S., not Russia, not Iran  control the price of oil. They like it right here," Cramer said.

Ultimately, Saudi Arabia has chosen the price of oil, and it likes the current levels. So, get used to these prices, Cramer warned. They are mandated by the only country on earth with enough capacity.
Federal prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's office and the SEC are investigating blood-testing start-up Theranos over whether it misled investors, sources told The Wall Street Journal Monday.



Clients like Walgreens were subpoenaed about how Theranos described its technologies and progress to investors and government officials, the Journal reported. These early subpoenas do not indicate that prosecutors are actively seeking indictment, the Journal reported, though misleading government officials is a crime.

"The company continues to work closely with regulators and is cooperating fully with all investigations," Theranos spokeswomanBrooke Buchanan told CNBC.






watch now

One of the world's largest electronics manufacturers, Flex, is betting on wearables technology to create new opportunities for growth, its chief executive officer told CNBC.

Flex , which was previously known as Flextronics, provides the technology that powers wearable devices from makers such as Fitbit . Speaking to CNBC's "Managing Asia", Flex's Mike McNamara said that entailed making sure the device was durable, waterproof, could absorb shock, was able to connect wirelessly and more.

From simple fitness bands that track day-to-day activities to devices that can simulate a virtual environment, the applications for wearable technology are endless.

An exhibitor displays a 3Plus Activity Tracker for a photograph during ShowStoppers at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada on Jan. 6, 2016. Activity trackers have become one of the most popular forms of wearable devices today, collecting a host of data about the wearer. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

McNamara said these new, connected technologies were enabling traditional companies to come up with new business models.

One example he cited was the evolution of digital healthcare technology, with the emergence of fitness trackers.

These trackers monitor the wearer's heart rate, the number of steps that have been taken throughout the day and the number of calories expended, among other things. They allow the wearer to then analyze the data to get a better understanding of how their body progressed throughout the day. "We work very, very hard for wearable technology," he said. "We try to work on the underlying core process technologies that enables wearables to happen."





Data from IDC showed worldwide shipments of wearable devices were expected to reach 110 million by the end of 2016, a 38.2 percent increase over the previous year. In a media release in March, IDC said a combination of an expanding line up of vendors and fast-growing consumer awareness would see demand "generate double-digit growth throughout the 2015-2020 forecast period."

For 2020, IDC predicts 237.1 million wearable devices will be shipped.

The expansion of wearable technology puts pressure on companies operating in the space to innovate, according to McNamara.

"The burden is on our customers to constantly innovate," he said, highlighting the importance of creating new value. "They have this new data, this new technology, new innovation ... what do they do with it to actually create value?"




Vijay Mallya, chairman of UB Group. Mark Thompson | Getty Images

Indian liquor baron Vijay Mallya has rejected investigators' allegations that $64 million loaned to his defunct Kingfisher Airlines was redirected into the purchase of foreign assets abroad, before the carrier's collapse. Officials from India's financial crimes unit urged judges to issue a warrant for Mr Mallya's arrest during a special court hearing on Saturday, where they accused the once high-flying businessman of improperly using half of a 2009 loan granted by India's state-owned IDBI Bank to the airline. A spokesperson for Mr Mallya last night "strenuously denied" the charges by India's Enforcement Directorate, which alleged he had used the funds to purchase properties abroad. "We are shocked at the allegation," Sumanto Bhattacharya, a spokesman for Mr Mallya's private holding company, the UB Group, said. "The audited accounts of Kingfisher Airlines . . . show all foreign exchange transactions, which includes funds borrowed from IDBI Bank used for legitimate business purposes only."



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The statement said the UB Group would provide "full details" of foreign exchange remittances in the coming days. It also said the demand for a warrant for the arrest of Mr Mallya  whose precise whereabouts have not been publicly disclosed  was "erroneous and unjustified".

Mr Mallya, once known as the "king of good times", is locked in a bitter battle with a consortium of Indian banks, led by the State Bank of India, over the repayment of $1.3 billion in unpaid debts, and accumulated interest, left by the 2012 collapse of his Kingfisher Airlines. More from the Financial Times :



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1MDB dispute intensifies as Abu Dhabi ends relationship

Bill Gates hits out at protectionist rhetoric in US elections Last month, Mr Mallya left India for the UK, just as Kingfisher Airlines' creditors were appealing to the courts to bar him from travelling abroad in an attempt to step up the pressure on him to reach a settlement with the banks. India's foreign ministry on Friday announced it was suspending his diplomatic passport immediately, on the request of the Enforcement Directorate, which has been investigating whether loans extended to Kingfisher Airlines had been misused and contributed to the carrier's collapse.


West Texas Intermediate futures for May gained 3.3 percent on Wednesday to settle at $41.08 per barrel. June futures were up 3.1 percent, to $42.47 per barrel. May futures expire Wednesday.

"It shows things can shift fast ... there was a working assumption on Friday that no production would be offline," said Helima Croft, global head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets.

The unanticipated strike in Kuwait took about 1.5 million barrels out of daily production, according to reports. Workers went on strike because of pay and benefit cuts. The world overproduces upward of 1.5 million barrels a day.

The three-day strike was ended Tuesday evening, according to a Reuters report. While analysts had expected a quick end to the strike, they say it does send a message to other producing nations that have implemented austerity as a result of falling oil prices.

Striking Kuwaiti oil workers significantly disrupted oil production, temporarily halting production of about the same amount of crude that the world is oversupplying each day.

"Eventually all these workers' strikes get resolved. It's just a matter of time. I think it is kind of indicative of a broader symptom of a low-price environment, especially for the workers of national oil companies, where there's sometimes a disconnect between salaries and the market price," said Michael Cohen, head of energy commodities research at Barclays.

"Whether it's Pemex or Petrobras or Aramco, there's going to be implications of the low-price environment for all those workers and they're going to want to be shielded from the low market price. From our perspective, we see the level of unrest becoming more elevated in the summer months, particularly in the Middle East if prices stay very low," said Cohen.



Read MoreForget Doha, oil oversupply gone this year: Hamm

He said even Saudi Arabia, where the government keeps tight control, could see unrest in the eastern region which is home to the country's minority Shiite population. The Saudi royal family is Sunni Muslim.

"Labor unrest has been mitigated by a steady flow of money. When that money is sopped up or used for things like defense spending, people get upset," he said.

Cohen said the market has been ignoring geopolitical events due to the large surplus of crude in the world, but he's been warning that that could change.

Croft expected the strike to be settled quickly. But she does expect other leaders in the region to take note.



"Kuwait is a country with an active assertive parliament, and they have active street protests. What I think about Kuwait, is does this turn into a broader protest against austerity," Croft said. She said the fact that Kuwait does have a more-open society where citizens can freely protest, provides it a sort of escape valve.

Read MoreOil is falling, but U.S. keeps pumpinghere's why

Oil prices Tuesday defied expectations, surging on the Kuwait strike instead of dropping after the weekend's failed meeting of crude-producing nations. Oil was lower after the report and also after a new report showing a bigger U.S. inventory build.

If there had been an agreement between the OPEC and non-OPEC producers in Doha, Qatar, this past weekend, crude output would have been frozen but not cut. Still, analysts had expected a deal to provide bullish support for prices which had been rising for weeks ahead of the meeting.

Societe Generale's global head of oil market research, Michael Wittner, said the market focus will be on supply. He expects a sub-$40 price for oil in the second quarter, with $38 per barrel for Brent and $36 for WTI.

But Wittner said there could be disturbances in other countries beyond Kuwait.

"We had another force majeure in Nigeria. We're now up to 0.4 million barrels a day of slight sweet offline in Nigeria," he said.
Anheuser-Busch InBev , the brewer which is in the process of acquiring rival SABMiller , said it accepted an offer from Japan's Asahi Group for Peroni and a group of other SAB beer brands.

AB InBev said Asahi's acquisition of the brands was conditional on the successful closing of its takeover of SAB.

Asahi Group had said in February that it was in exclusive talks to buy SAB's Peroni, Grolsch and Meantime beer brands for 2.55 billion euros ($2.9 billion), as it looks to offset slow growth in its home market.

The sale is part of AB InBev's plan to secure antitrust approval for its $100 billion-plus takeover of SAB, agreed last year.

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A protestor holds up an iPhone that reads, 'No Entry' outside of the the Apple store on 5th Avenue on February 23, 2016 in New York City. Getty Images

This isn't the first time Apple has pushed back against the idea that it has given other countries special access to its software, as it and other tech companies clash with governments around the world for control over information. "Apple has never made user data, whether stored on the iPhone or in iCloud, more technologically accessible to any country's government," Apple software chief Craig Federighi said in a March declaration filed in the case over the iPhone used by San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook. "Apple has also not provided any government with its proprietary iOS source code."

U.S. law enforcement officials at Tuesday's hearing said they need help from the technology industry to combat what they describe as a growing number of criminals who are hiding under the cover of encryption built into common devices and applications. "Evidence that once would have been stored in a file cabinet or a notebook is now archived in an email or a text message," said Thomas Galati, chief of intelligence for the New York City Police Department, at the hearing's first panel.



"The same exact information that would solve a murder, catch a rapist, or prevent a mass shooting is now stored in that device." Galati said that the NYPD seized 67 Apple devices between last October and March in 44 criminal investigations, including 10 homicides, two rapes and the shooting of two police officers.

"In every case, we have the 'file cabinet,' as it were, and the legal authority to open it, but we lack the technical ability to do so because encryption protects the contents of those 67 Apple devices," Galati said.

For years, even as computer technology took off, encryption remained difficult to use, and mostly remained in the hands of cryptographers and government agencies. Relaxed export controls in the early 2000s and advances in technology have made encryption a protection that is increasingly taken for granted, as people buy updated iPhones and use messaging services like WhatsApp that have built-in encryption to manage who can access data.

The debate gained new life after the FBI sought a court order in February to compel Apple to bypass security features on an iPhone 5C used by San Bernardino shooter Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people in December. Apple resisted the order, and the government ultimately dropped the case, saying that it had bought a product from a third party that helped it get data off the device.



Amy Hess, executive assistant director for the FBI's science and technology branch, and other law enforcement witnesses said they need assistance from the technology companies to figure out a way around the challenges posed by encryption. But experts in security and cryptography have pushed back, saying the access that the FBI and police want would endanger the security of many other devices. "The state of computer and network security today can really only be characterized as a national crisis," said security research Matt Blaze, who testified on the hearing's second panel. "We need all the help we can get to secure our national infrastructure across the board."

Blaze, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, played a key role in the "crypto wars" of the late 1990s when he exposed a flaw in the NSA-designed "Clipper chip," which the government had wanted to use to provide law enforcement access to encrypted communications. Popular messaging service WhatsApp, which has over 1 billion users, and its parent company Facebook declined an invitation to testify at Tuesday's hearing. WhatsApp uses encryption so that even the company cannot tell what's being said in messages sent over the service.

"We respect the important role the committee plays in examining these issues and their impact on privacy and security," a spokesperson for WhatsApp and Facebook said. "While we are unable to participate in this hearing, we will continue to be engaged on this important issue."


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The Obama administration hasn't been able to eliminate the "carried interest" tax break for hedge fund managers, but Vice President Joe Biden called it "not sustainable" and predicted the next president will succeed. The tax break allows certain compensation for hedge fund managers, among others, to be taxed at lower capital gains rates rather than ordinary income. "There's no justification," Biden said in an interview with CNBC, and the White House has asked Congress to close the loophole.

Joe Biden speaks with CNBC's John Harwood. Sophie Bearman | CNBC

The administration hasn't won on the issue, Biden said, because its crowded agenda has never permitted sustained focus on it.

"We haven't had the clear space to do nothing but talk about how unfair the tax system is as it relates to the tax expenditures, loopholes we want to eliminate," he said. "And consequently what happens is a lot of people can go home, if you're a Republican, and say, 'These Democrats are just going after business.' "

Indeed, when the administration first sought to close the loophole, one major Wall Street figure, Steve Schwarzman, likened its approach to business to Hitler's invasion of Poland. Schwarzman subsequently apologized.

Biden laughed off the comparison, saying, "I'd say it's like us liberating death camps."




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ABOARD AMTRAK ACELA #2166  Joe Biden has been an influential figure in American politics for more than four decades. He won a U.S. Senate seat from Delaware in 1972, and took office the following year despite losing his wife and young daughter to a post-election auto accident. Biden rose to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he presided over the explosive Supreme Court confirmation fights over Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, and later the Foreign Relations Committee. He unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and again in 2008, when Barack Obama tapped him as his running mate.

The 73-year-old vice president considered a third try for the presidency this year. But he bowed out of the race after losing his son Beau Biden, himself a rising Delaware politician, to brain cancer last year.

He sat down with me for an interview aboard a Washington-to-Wilmington Amtrak train, part of his daily commute while serving in the Senate, to reflect on his career, the 2016 debate and the future of American politics. What follows is a condensed, edited transcript of the conversation.

Joe Biden speaks with CNBC's John Harwood. Sophie Bearman | CNBC

HARWOOD: So George H.W. Bush was weak, Dan Quayle was dumb, Al Gore was wooden, Dick Cheney was Darth Vader. Do you feel sympathy for those guys, having done this for seven years? And are you comfortable with Goofy Uncle Joe? BIDEN: No, I'm not comfortable with Goofy Uncle Joe. But one of the things that's important to know  and one of the reasons why, when I first got asked about this job I said no  is there is no inherent power in being vice president.

And so when the president asked me to consider this again  and I said yes  he said, "What do you want?" I said, "I want to be the last guy in the room." Every assignment he's given me, I've not had to check back. I ran the Recovery Act  beginning, middle and end. I did the Iraq thing.

And by the way, the so-called Goofy Uncle Joe  if you notice, I beat every Republican in every poll when they thought I was running. You notice that my favorability was higher than anybody that's running for office in either party.





HARWOOD: As you reflect on the span of your career, both in the Senate and in the administration, what do you think of as things that you and your peers got done, succeeded at? And what do you think you haven't gotten done, left on the table? BIDEN: Back in the '70s, we ended that damn war. That's why I ran, the Vietnam War. We really did begin to put America back together again in terms of how divided it was. We began to roll out a foreign policy that was more rational.

We focused on education. We provided for more opportunity to get access to college. And maybe the biggest change was the work that I'm proud to be part of (in) changing the circumstances for women in America.

We had about eight atom bombs dropped on our desk. It took us the auto recovery, it took us Dodd-Frank, it took us the Recovery Act, it took us all those God-awful difficult things we had to do, including raising the top rate for the wealthiest Americas so there's $600 billion more income now  it took us five years to get that done. Vice Presdent Joe Biden responding to criticism that the administration has played small ball.

HARWOOD: But here's one thing you guys haven't gotten done. And I don't mean you specifically, the whole political system. The stagnation of middle class incomes began shortly after you came to the Senate. How do you feel about the failure of our political system to do that?

BIDEN: I feel that is a failure.

HARWOOD: On your side, Bernie Sanders is pointing to that stagnation in middle class income. And the argument that he's making is that you guys have done some good things, but you've been playing small ball. That we're not thinking big enough, and that we can't have fundamental change. Do you plead guilty to playing small ball in this administration?

BIDEN: No. Here's what I plead guilty to. We had about eight atom bombs dropped on our desk. It took us the auto recovery, it took us Dodd-Frank, it took us the Recovery Act, it took us all those God-awful difficult things we had to do, including raising the top rate for the wealthiest Americas so there's $600 billion more income now  it took us five years to get that done.

HARWOOD: When you hear (Sanders) say Dodd-Frank didn't go far enough, break up the banks; not just free community college, free college; bigger tax increases, bigger programs  is that just campaign talk that can't possibly be realized?

BIDEN: No, it can be. It can be. But what I don't see enough of is the explanation of how to do that. But I do think that Bernie has raised a very legitimate issue that has consequences beyond the way Bernie talks about it. We have maybe 24 percent, 24.1 percent of all the income in America earned by 1 percent of the people. That hasn't happened since 1922, I believe.

You look out and I used to think, when things were tough, you'd look out at night, going home, and you'd see people in their dining rooms or in their kitchens, and I used to wonder what they're thinking. Because this is sort of a middle-class path. It's been literally my lifeline between Wilmington and Washington. Biden on 40 years of commuting on Amtrak.

HARWOOD: Forty years, good times and bad, you rode this train both ways. What has it meant to your life? BIDEN: It's basically meant everything in my life. Everyone from the guy at the shoeshine stand to the ticket folks, they became my friends and my family.

And you look out and I used to think, when things were tough, you'd look out at night, going home, and you'd see people in their dining rooms or in their kitchens, and I used to wonder what they're thinking. Because this is sort of a middle-class path. It's been literally my lifeline between Wilmington and Washington.



HARWOOD: You guys have tried consistently through the administration to tax what they call carried interest as ordinary income. When you started doing that, a big Wall Street guy, Steve Schwarzman, said the Obama administration's like Hitler invading Poland. How do you react to criticism like that? And I would note: You guys haven't been able to get it done.

BIDEN: I'd say it's like us liberating death camps. The truth of the matter is, there's no justification for a hedge fund paying at 15-17 percent. There's just no justification. Everyone from Warren Buffett 

HARWOOD: Why haven't you been able to get it done?

BIDEN: Two reasons. I kid the president, "Mr. President, everything's landed on your desk but locusts." We haven't had the clear space to do nothing but talk about how unfair the tax system is as it relates to the tax expenditures, loopholes we want to eliminate.

And consequently what happens is a lot of people can go home, if you're a Republican, and say, "These Democrats are just going after business." Well, if I sit here and explain to everyone  I don't have to, your camera crew and everybody's really bright  and I say, "Well, let me tell you what carried interest is, this means that you're paying at 30 percent, they're paying at 17 percent, and some of them made $1 billion. Twenty-eight made $1 billion." Think that's fair?

They'll say, "Well, maybe, if they do something super special with that $1 billion that makes it why they should be rewarded." They're playing with other people's money. If you take a risk to start a business and you make money, you pay less taxes  because you took a risk. Well, that's because you used your own money.

HARWOOD: You see the next president winning on that? (Donald) Trump said he wants to get rid of it.

BIDEN: Yes. It's not going to be sustainable. But every time we started to focus on our budget, and we're talking about how we really want to focus on the unfair elements of the tax expenditures, then along comes Zika. I mean, literally.

It's not an excuse. My father used to have an expression, "Never complain, never explain." Well, there is a context here. The context is that the first five years of this administration have been essentially just figuring out how do we keep us from going over the cliff? How do we get us back up and running?



HARWOOD: Another thing about how perspectives change over time. Bobby Rush, member of Congress, said the other day, "I'm ashamed that I voted for the '94 crime bill." Are you ashamed of that bill?

BIDEN: Not at all. And in fact, I drafted the bill, as you remember.

We talk about this mostly in terms of Black Lives Matter. Black lives really do matter, but the problem is institutional racism in America. That's the overarching problem that still exists. And we should be talking about it, and looking at the legacy of racism in housing and in jobs and so on. Having said that, take a look at the crime bill. Of the money in the crime bill, the vast majority went to reducing sentences, diverting people from going to jail for drug offenses into what I came up with: the drug courts. Providing for boot camps instead of sending people to prison so you didn't relearn whatever the bad thing that got you there in the first place. Put 100,000 cops on the street.

When community policing was working, neighborhoods were not only safer but they were more harmonious. The reason why the cops originally opposed my 100,000 cops, this community policing piece, is because it's high intensive and it means they've got to get out of their cars. So they literally got out of their cars and learned who owned the local drugstore, the local neighborhood bar, whatever.

And they were engaged in the neighborhood, which built confidence so that the African-American woman, living in a corner alone where the drug deal's going down in front of her house, literally used to have your phone number as a cop. She'd call you and say, "John, they're out in front of my house. But you're not giving me away, right, John?" And he didn't. So we had enormous success.

Now what's happened is we've cut the funding 85 percent. We're going through Baltimore now. Look at the areas we're going through here. I'll lay you 8-to-5, the Baltimore Police Department is considerably smaller than it was in 1985.

There are things I would change. I opposed, for example, the carjacking provision that the administration wanted in. But by and large, what it really did: It restored American cities.





I presided over more Supreme Court nominees than anybody living. Every single person who got nominated got a hearing. Everyone got a vote in committee. Even the ones who weren't voted out of committee, which required a majority vote to get out, I insisted they go to the floor to get a vote. Liberals were mad at me at that time because they said we could block (a nominee) in committee. Biden on whether the Supreme Court justice nomination is broken.

HARWOOD: You guys are hung up on the Garland (Supreme Court) nomination right now.

BIDEN: Yeah, we are.

HARWOOD: Some people say this is evidence of this nomination process being broken. Bork, Thomas  do you feel responsible at all for helping break it?

BIDEN: Not at all. What we did in Bork and Thomas  and there's a couple law review articles I wrote at the time  Haynsworth and Carswell before that, when they went after folks they'd used to always say it's on ethical grounds when they were really, legitimately opposed to the ideological component.

The reason why there's a Federalist Society is that there are strict constructionists, and there are those who think it's a living Constitution, to oversimplify. So all I did was to say, "You can vote. The Senate has a right to vote against someone based upon if they think they're misinterpreting the Constitution."

I presided over more Supreme Court nominees than anybody living. Every single person who got nominated got a hearing. Everyone got a vote in committee. Even the ones who weren't voted out of committee, which required a majority vote to get out, I insisted they go to the floor to get a vote. Liberals were mad at me at that time because they said we could block (a nominee) in committee.

But the Constitution says the Senate shall advise and consent. Everyone got a vote on the Senate floor, even those we could have blocked by a filibuster, because it says the Senate shall advise and consent and not use Senate rules to avoid the intent of the Constitution.





HARWOOD: You gave a speech at Gridiron (dinner) and said politics were broken. Do you think that politics are broken equally in both parties? Because I think if you asked President Obama, he would say, "Look at the Republican nominating process. It's more broken over there."

BIDEN: I think both parties are responsible. But I really do think it started most on the right within the Republican Party. Remember when the Gingrich revolution happened, and all those new guys came? And then a lot of those guys got elected to Senate. They ran against the institution. I'm not making a value judgment  they ran against the institution. Hard to make it work when you run against it, talk about how bad it is.

And two of my Republican colleagues, very senior, said, "The crazies are coming." The people who thought that the Senate role was no different than the House. They were essentially the same institution, should operate the same.

But here's what has happened. Democrats and Republicans, and you saw it in the way some Democrats went after George W. Bush. I learned a lesson early on when I came on the floor one day going to a meeting with the majority leader. I was there four months. Jesse Helms was excoriating Ted Kennedy and Bob Dole for the precursor legislation to Americans with Disabilities Act.

I walked in for my weekly meeting with the majority leader, Senator Mansfield. In retrospect he was taking my pulse to see how I was doing. And he said, "What's the matter, Joe?" And I just ripped into Jesse Helms. I said, "He has no social redeeming value, this guy."

And he looked at me and he said, "Joe, what would you say if I told you Jesse and Dot Helms two years ago sitting in their living room in December and read an advertisement in the Raleigh paper, a picture of a young man in braces up to his hips, both legs, with crutches, saying, "All I want for Christmas is someone to love me and adopt me." What would you say, Joe, if I told you they adopted that young man?

I said, "I'd feel like a jerk." He looked at me, he said  and I've never violated it since  "Joe, it's always appropriate to question another man's judgment. It's never appropriate to question their motive because you don't know what it is."

If I question your motive, we can never get to a compromise. That's what's happened in American politics.

HARWOOD: One thing I think annoys people about politicians is those who don't feel that they can say what they really think. You've not suffered from that in the past.

BIDEN: No. I've made a lot of mistakes.

HARWOOD: Hillary Clinton is opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Is it not perfectly obvious to you that she's for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and wants it to pass, but feels she can't say that in a Democratic primary?

BIDEN: I just said I'm not going to question people's motives. I'll take her at her word, and she changed her mind. Or that what ended up being the TPP, she doesn't like.





He talked about what kind of father he thought I was. He talked about the sacrifice Beau had made, when he knew he didn't have to go to Iraq. And he talked about what kind of man Beau was. He knew him. Everybody wants to be nice, and they were. But this was so pointed and personal that I called him, and wrote him. And, matter of fact, I wrote him another letter not long ago when I was going over some mail, just to tell him how much it meant. So I have great respect for Bob. Biden on a letter former critic, one-time Defense Secretary Robert Gates, wrote him after his son Beau's death.
Pop star Taylor Swift and Google's YouTube are behind the continued complaints from music artists who believe they are not being paid enough by streaming services, the chief executive of Deezer told CNBC on Tuesday.

Deezer is a French music streaming service that has about 6 million subscribers and offers a paid 9.99 euro ($11.30) a month subscription plan.

Streaming services have been hit with controversy over the amount they pay artists. But Deezer's founder said that it's actually video platforms like YouTube which are responsible for the small remuneration that artists receive.

"When you look at services like YouTube, which has a massive distribution, (it) pays less than we are even paying to the music labels in terms of revenues. There are other issues we need to fix first in order to help the artist," Hans-Holger Albrecht, CEO of Deezer, told CNBC.

"I think we should close the value gap between YouTube and what they pay and us  If Taylor Swift doesn't want to go on streaming but stays on YouTube, it doesn't help us."

Albrecht was referring to the 2014 incident in which pop megastar Taylor Swift, pulled her albums from rival service Spotify. Her music is still on Apple Music, however.

Google did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
Cliff Robbins, founder Blue Harbor Group Adam Jeffery | CNBC

When you invest in a company for two years or more, you need to invest in the management team, an activist investor told CNBC's "Power Lunch" Tuesday. When deciding whether to invest in agricultural equipment maker AGCO , for instance, it was crucial to spend time with the CEO, Martin Richenhagen, and get to know his record, said Cliff Robbins, CEO of Blue Harbour Group, which manages capital for institutional investors like endowments and pension funds.

"We came to the conclusion that this gentleman was the type of man we'd want to back," Robbins said. "[He's] looking for ways to win. Right now, while business is a little soft, he's working on his margin profile, as he should be, to improve the margins in the business. I think he's open-minded to buying back stock, and he knows he has a very strategic asset, as well."

Robbins spoke from the 13D Monitor Active-Passive Investor Summit in New York City, which focuses on shareholder activism. Blue Harbour, known for its philosophy of finding undervalued public companies and unlocking value without resorting to proxy fights, has been vocal about activist positions in mid-cap companies like Investors Bancorp . Read More Activist unveils bank investment


When the world's super rich feel as if they're under fire, Trent Kimball is there to help.

Kimball serves as CEO of Texas Armoring, a San Antonio-based company that transforms refined luxury rides into rolling fortresses. Once the armored cars roll off the line, they can withstand landmines, grenades and a shower of bullets from an AK-47.

"Our clients want to protect against mainly kidnapping for ransom," Kimball told CNBC's "Secret Lives of the Super Rich." "Some of the clients also are trying to protect against assassination."

Just how reliable is Texas Armoring's work? For a demonstration, Kimball had an employee shoot an AK-47 into one of the company's anti-ballistic windshields  with Kimball standing behind it. None of the bullets made it through.
The General Secretary of UNI Global Union told CNBC on Tuesday that having just returned from a trip to South America, he is "very worried about the situation" in Brazil.

Philip Jennings, referring to the ongoing impeachment proceedings of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, said the feeling on the ground was that "the political stability we have enjoyed there is about to be shattered."



Brazilian leader Rousseff is accused of manipulating budget accounts. Her government, the Workers' Party, has also been tainted by a corruption scandal involving Brazil's state oil company Petrobras. She denies any wrongdoing.



However, Jennings praised Rousseff's party, saying that it had lifted millions of people out of poverty. "My sense was this economy was being managed very well until this political crisis," said Jennings.



He said that particularly in Brazil, there is the sense "that this is a very modern coup" and it is "not clear who is untouched by scandal."


On June 23, all eyes will be on the U.K. as Britons decide whether they want to stay in the European Union (EU) or end their membership with the economic and political bloc.

Christopher Furlong | Getty Images News | Getty Images

As the day draws closer, CNBC's "Europe Needs Swagger" special report looks at what key sectors have been saying about a "Brexit", and what it would possibly mean for them.



Science

More than 150 fellows of the Royal Society, including Stephen Hawking and three Nobel laureates signed their names to a letter in March, which outlined why the U.K. science sector benefited from its EU membership. "If the UK leaves the EU and there is a loss of freedom of movement of scientists between the UK and Europe, it will be a disaster for UK science and universities," the letter reads.

In the letter received by The Times, academics went on to add that increased funding had greatly aided U.K. and European scientific research, adding that many of the industry's "best researchers" come from continental Europe.



Banks

The Bank of England has made sure it stays out of the political debate, telling CNBC it would not be offering a comment on its stance. Minutes from the central bank's latest policy meeting last Thursday said however that a vote to leave might result in "an extended period of uncertainty about the economic outlook", such as on its export growth. A vote to leave could have an impact on other areas such as the exchange rate and labor market regulation, the institution added.



Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Chief executives from a number of top European banks, including Credit Suisse and HSBC , have been more forward with their remarks, saying that the U.K. would be "better off" in a reformed EU.

Barclays CEO Jes Staley told CNBC exclusively in March that staying as part of the EU would be "the best thing for Barclays customers" and corporate clients. Not all leading figures in the finance and insurance sector want the U.K. to stay in the EU, however. In a letter published by the Vote Leave campaign, business leaders such as HSBC's ex-chief Michael Geoghegan; Vault Capital's founder; and CompareGroup Ltd's founder; said they would back the pro-exit campaign. The campaign also noted that a recent YouGov poll showed that only 14 percent of 1,002 small and medium-sized businesses surveyed saw the EU as making it easier for their business to hire employees.

Retail

The impact of Britain leaving the EU could be "phenomenal" on businesses, due to uncertainty, the CEO of a U.K. lingerie brand explained to CNBC in February. "From a business perspective: it's for growth, I mean who wouldn't want to have access to 500 million potential customers and trade freely throughout the EU," Jacqueline Gold, Ann Summers CEO said.

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"Looking at my own business, it takes time to set up partnerships, to build trust.  (A possible Brexit could mean) increased costs, increased workload and indeed my main concern is the uncertainty and the impact that it would have on the consumer, which wouldn't just be a one-off," Gold added. In February, around 200 business leaders signed a letter  received by The Times  saying a "Brexit" would put the U.K. "economy at risk", with companies needing "unrestricted access" to the European market so they can invest, create jobs and inevitably to grow. Retail bosses who said they were pro-EU, came from the likes of Asda, Diageo , Ann Summers, Burberry and Kurt Geiger. In March, some 250 business leaders signed a letter supporting the "Vote Leave" campaign. Retail bosses listed included the chairs of pub chain JD Wetherspoon and cafe chain Patisserie Valerie. In addition, John Mills, the chairman of consumer products company, JML Group, told CNBC in March that the EU was a "very expensive club" for the U.K. to be in.

Technology

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Leading tech organizations have examined the "Brexit" topic, with many surveys  such as those from Silicon Valley Bank, Tech London Advocates, and Coadec  showing that most start-ups want the U.K. to remain in the EU. "It would be a huge travesty if we fall out with the EU," Alex Depledge, Coadec's chairman, told CNBC in March, adding that for the U.K. to have anything comparable to the U.S., it needs the EU and its 500 million consumers and businesses. Depledge went on to add that it would be a bad idea to withdraw, as it could "seriously hurt" digital businesses, with a Coadec survey showing 81 percent of tech start-up respondents wanted to stay. In that survey, those wanting to remain believed that access to the single market, free labor movement and harmonized regulations overshadowed the concerns surrounding Europe.

Travel and Tourism

In March, travel industry body ABTA, released a report with help from Deloitte on what a "Brexit" would mean for British travel. Results suggest there could be a number of negative impacts if the U.K. left, such as effects on the sector's employment, the strength of U.K. sterling , and potentially even increased costs for the British travelling consumer.

Matt Cardy | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Looking at the results, ABTA's CEO Mark Tanzer said the potential risks didn't match with an equal upside for travelers, saying a leave would lead to "uncertainties" for the U.K. The U.K.'s official tourism agency, VisitBritain told CNBC it wouldn't speculate on the debate's outcome. In a statement, the firm added that visitors from the EU account for over two-thirds of Britain's visitor numbers, providing just less than 50 percent of spending.

Agriculture

"(The U.K.'s) EU membership benefits the UK food and farming industry by giving easy access to the world's largest single market of 500 million consumers, which accounts for 60% of our food and drink exports worth 11.5 billion," a spokesperson from the U.K. government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), said in a statement, emailed to CNBC. "The single market brings significant investment and jobs to the UK and means our businesses have a level playing field with common standards on welfare, safety and labelling. British farming is stronger, safer and better off in a reformed European Union."
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China on Tuesday launched a yuan-denominated gold price fix in its bid to become a price maker in a market dominated by London and New York. Listed on the Shanghai Gold Exchange, the benchmark price is derived from a 1 kg-contract and was set at 256.92 yuan ($39.70) a gram on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The price will be set twice a day. China is the world's largest gold producer and jostles with India for the tag of the biggest consumer of the precious metal globally.

Eighteen institutions including top Chinese banks such as Bank of China and ICBC, as well as Standard Chartered and ANZ will join the benchmark fixing. The yuan gold fix will come up against the London Bullion Market Association's spot benchmark set twice a day with 12 participants. Swiss trading house MKS' chairman Marwan Shakarchi said China's growing consumption of gold supports the set-up of the fix.

"To have a benchmark price in renminbi ... will help both consumers and producers in this part of the world," said Shakarchi. MKS is one of the 18 trading members of the yuan gold benchmark.
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A consortium backed by China's sovereign wealth fund is in talks to buy Yum Brands ' mainland unit, which includes KFC and Pizza Hut outlets across the country, Bloomberg News has reported. The China Investment Corp-backed group, which includes private equity firms KKR & Co and Baring Private Equity Asia, was doing due diligence on the business, which could be valued at $7 billion to $8 billion, according to the report citing "people with knowledge of the matter." Keith Meister, a Yum board member and activist investor, told CNBC's "Squawk Alley" that he doesn't know what inspired the valuation number. "I think people probably confused the revenue of the business with the value of the business. That's the revenue. This is a business is worth a multiple of that in my opinion," Meister said Tuesday.

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"My sense is the Yum board will do the right thing. I will tell you as a large shareholder, the Yum board selling this business for $7 or $8 billion is not the right thing, and I don't think there's anyone who would disagree about that," Meister said.

Yum has more than 7,100 outlets in China and plans to open a further 600 this year, according to the fast food company's website. In March, Reuters reported that KKR was interested in a minority stake in the Chinese business, as were China-based private equity firm Hopu Investments and Singapore's statement investment fund, Temasek. Also in March, The Wall Street Journal, which broke the news of the potential deal, reported that Baring Private Equity Asia was looking at the business. To read the full Bloomberg report, click here
"Troughs give you sustained moves. We have had number cut after number cut after number cut from all of these bedraggled banking, mineral, mining and machinery companies. Now the fun part  raising numbers  begins, so don't be too quick to sell," the " Mad Money " host said.

A trough indicates that the numbers for a company have finally bottomed, which was a major reason for stocks to rally recently.

Stocks are not hitting a top, and they are not hitting a bottom. For Jim Cramer, they are in a trough.

A stock that rallies after that putrid quarter is a stock that says, look at me, the worst is over, get on board because we're ready to roll up river.

At first glance, Goldman Sachs reported a number that was absolutely hideous to Cramer on Tuesday. Given that Goldman had fewer employees and expenses reigned in, Cramer could only conclude that there was a ton of employees doing a lot of work.

In pre-market trading, the stock plummeted. After the opening bell, the stock began its upward ascent.

Read more from Mad Money with Jim Cramer

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"A stock that rallies after that putrid quarter is a stock that says, look at me, the worst is over, get on board because we're ready to roll up river," Cramer said.

Even after Cramer did his homework and looked at all of the earnings models, listened to the conference call and studied each individual division, he concluded that the stock was in a trough and would do better next time around.

"Or if you want to put it another way, Goldman Sachs has been down so long it looks like up to me," he said.

And it wasn't just the banks. The mineral and mining stocks were rolling up a river, too. Alcoa kicked off earnings season with a miss, but now the stock has roared back and brought the group with it.

Cramer pointed to the rally stemming from the Baltic freight index  which he uses to measure emerging markets like China  which has been a giant flashing green light lately.

Where is all the money coming from?

It is pouring out from safety stocks, consumer packaged goods and utilities. It has also flown from the high flying growth stocks like cybersecurity and cloud plays.

"China is coming back and the financial playing field is becoming more hospitable, you better believe the money is not done flooding into the trough," Cramer said.

That means get ready for numbers to be raised and stocks to rally, possibly even further than Cramer thought just a few short months ago.
If analysts at Credit Suisse are right, Instagram is about to turn into a cash cow for Facebook .

In a note published Monday, the firm estimated that Instagram will rake in more than triple its 2012 purchase price of $1 billion. Credit Suisse expects the mobile photo-sharing app to contribute $572.5 million for the first quarter and a whopping $3.2 billion for 2016.
Earnings are likely the key to whether the U.S. stock market rally continues. Three Dow stocks report earnings this morning: UnitedHealth (UNH), Goldman Sachs (GS), and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ). (CNBC)

IBM (IBM), also a Dow stock, was sharply lower in premarket trading. While beating estimates on earnings and revenue in the first three months of the year, revenue declined for the 16th straight quarter. (CNBC)

Netflix (NFLX) beat estimates on earnings, with revenue matching forecasts. But shares of the video-streaming service were plummeting in the premarket, after the firm issued weaker subscriber guidance. (CNBC)

Yahoo (YHOO) has gotten bids for its assets from Yellow Pages parent YP Holdings, private equity firm TPG, and Verizon (VZ), according to various media reports. Yahoo reports earnings after the bell this afternoon. (USA Today)

Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) accepted a $2.9 billion offer from Japan's Asahi for Peroni and other beer brands owned by SABMiller. The sale was a regulatory condition of Anheuser-Busch's $100 billion purchase SABMiller. (Reuters)

Federal prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into whether blood-testing startup Theranos misled investors about the state of its technology and operations, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

Target (TGT) has started raising employee wages to a minimum of $10 per hour, the second hike in a year. The discount retailer is matching a move made earlier this year by rival Wal-Mart (WMT). (Reuters)



Competing on home turf, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, both front-runners with big leads in state polls, hoped to emerge victorious from today's delegate-rich presidential primaries in New York. (AP)

Vice President Joe Biden, who decided not to challenge Clinton and run for president, shared with CNBC reflections on his career, thoughts on the 2016 race, and the future of American politics.
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Think you can continue to work as you age? The answer may depend on your profession. People in so-called blue-collar occupations are significantly more likely to retire early than those with office jobs that require less physical strength. That reality informs debates over how to shore up finances of the Social Security system. Some experts argue that raising the retirement age would save money, yet critics counter that it would hurt lower-income workers more than higher-income employees who are better able to afford to wait to collect benefits. Maybe so. However, a recent study from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College found a more nuanced reality: A surprising number of office jobs also requires skills that are highly susceptible to age-related decline. The researchers' ranking of different jobs' susceptibility was a loose predictor of when people were likely to retire early.

"If you are going to worry about one group of workers, blue collar workers are the ones to worry about, but there are some white collar workers who are going to have more difficulty, too," said Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, a research economist at the center and an author of the study. In fact, dancers have the greatest difficulty working later in life, more than farmers, roofers and iron workers, the researchers found.

Early retirement is the norm rather than the exception, according to research by JPMorgan Asset Management. While two-thirds of current workers want to continue working until at least age 65, fewer than 1 in 4 current retirees actually managed to do so, the researchers found. The biggest reason people retired early was a health problem or disability. However, the disappearance of traditional pensions may have amplified workers' desire to stay employed, because for many the biggest determinant of financial security in retirement is the amount in their 401(k) plan accounts. "It's getting more and more important for workers to work longer," Sanzenbacher said. Not only that, early retirees may feel compelled to claim Social Security benefits earlier, and lose out on the increase in benefits that occurs every year from ages 62 to 70.

Clearly, a physically demanding job can become harder to perform with age. But certain skills that are important for some highly skilled jobs may also fade over time, and those are what the center's researchers identified and weighed into a measure of susceptibility to early retirement. For example, in terms of sensory abilities, speech does not decline significantly with age, and hearing tends to change only slightly before age 70. But the ability to identify where a sound is coming from can diminish much earlier, and jobs requiring that ability will become more challenging. Cognitive abilities that depend on knowledge accumulated over time decline relatively slowly. But so-called fluid cognitive abilities, like reaction time and working memory, which depend on laying down new information, tend to deteriorate. So jobs that require the latter are harder to do later in life. That may explain why an earlier study of cognition found that financial decision-making ability improves up to about age 53 and then declines.

The Boston College center's findings contain some surprises. Nurses are more susceptible to age-related decline than prepress technicians, for example. And commodities and securities traders, who need to quickly process and react to new information all the time, are less susceptible to the declines of age than some surgeons.

"The notion that all white-collar workers can work longer or that all blue-collar workers cannot is too simplistic,'' the researchers concluded.
The latest data from Europe's largest economy Germany on Tuesday showed that while economic sentiment is improving, economic slowdowns and political risks elsewhere are a "burden" for the country's export industry, the main driver of Germany's growth.

The ZEW institute's latest Indicator of Economic Sentiment rose for the second month in a row in April with the index gaining 6.9 points from the previous month, to total 11.2 points. The index showed that investor morale had risen far more than expected in April, surpassing a Reuters consensus forecast of 8.0.

However, the survey of 225 German analysts and investors conducted between April 4-18 showed that their assessment of the current situation in Germany was worsening, with the gauge falling by 3.0 points to 47.7 points.



ZEW's head of research said the data was influenced by better economic data from China but that the world's second largest economy still posed a risk to Germany's export-driven growth.


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With a little over two months to go before UK referendum on its membership of the European Union (EU), politicians and business leaders on both sides of the debate are accusing each other of "appalling," "ridiculous" and "absurd" scare tactics to sway voters. The political debate over whether the U.K. should stay within or leave the 28-member political and economic bloc is becoming increasingly heated and polls suggest a tight race between the Leave and Remain vote. The referendum has split the country's political establishment with politicians from the main parties joining competing campaign groups "Vote Leave" and "Britain stronger in Europe." Immigration, EU laws and regulations and the cost of the U.K.'s membership of the EU are all key issues in the debate. Read More EU Referendum: Official campaigns kick off

Luke Johnson, chairman of Patisserie Valerie and one of several business leaders who are backing a "Brexit" (for the U.K. to leave the EU), told CNBC that he was worried that Brussels  a byword for the EU's institutions  was a threat to the U.K.'s sovereignty.

"Obviously Britain will always remain part of Europe, it is a question of whether we remain part of the EU, which is a large bureaucracy run out of Brussels and Strasbourg," Johnson told CNBC.



Westend61/Getty Images

"I worry that it is a growing threat to our democracy, I think that we lack control over our own borders, I worry that with ever closer union we will be forced at some point into the euro zone which is clearly a failed project," he said.



'Absurd' scare tactics

"Vote Leave" is backed by several prominent politicians, including London mayor Boris Johnson and Justice Secretary Michael Gove, both members of the Conservative party whose leader and Prime Minister David Cameron, is campaigning to stay in a reformed EU.

On Monday, Conservative Finance Minister George Osborne issued a 200-page document warning that the U.K. would be "permanently poorer" outside the EU. According to the document, each U.K. household could be the equivalent of 4,300 worse off by 2030 - a 6 percent reduction in the U.K. economy. Later, Osborne defended the Treasury's latest analysis that after Leave campaigners said the figures were "absurd." Justice Secretary Michael Gove delivered a response to Osborne's document on Tuesday in which he accused Remain campaigners of treating people like "mere children." During his speech in London, he also accused the Stay camp of conjuring up "bogeymen" and making dire predictions about the consequences of leaving the EU. "The City of London would become a ghost town, our manufacturing industries would be sanctioned more punitively than even communist North Korea, decades would pass before a single British Land Rover or Mr Kipling cake could ever again be sold in France and in the meantime our farmers would have been driven from the land by poverty worse than the potato famine," Gove joked. Patisserie Valerie's Johnson, who has a variety of business interests in the U.K., said that "scare tactics" were being used by the pro-EU camp and that he believed certain costs of living would decrease rather than rise, as Remain campaigners believe. "The truth of the matter is actually food costs in this country would almost certainly fall if we left the EU because they create huge barriers so that high-cost producers within the EU have special preferencethe idea that if we were no longer part of the single market everything would go up in cost is simply an error." The pro-EU camp has united some unlikely bedfellows too with Prime Minister Cameron and the opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn both in the Remain camp. Corbyn, a strident detractor of the EU over the years, declared last week that he supports the Remain campaign but critics said his endorsement of staying in the bloc was half-hearted.

'Appalling and ridiculous'
The maker of the world's most popular mobile operating system says it's now more secure than ever.

Google released its second annual Android Security Report on Tuesday detailing how the company protects over a billion Android devices.



Specifically, last year Google performed over 400 million checks of devices per day for security issues. According to the report, it helped find and wipe over 200,000 lost or stolen devices per day and checked over 6 billion installed applications per day for malware.



"I hate to be negative, but there's a lot of different potential threats that we have to think about and build protections for," Adrian Ludwig, head of Android Security, told CNBC.

Google is investing more every year in Android's security team both in terms of people and computational resources, Ludwig said. Through Google's Vulnerability Rewards Program, for example, Android paid security researchers and hackers more than $200,000 to fix more than 100 vulnerabilities.



The challenge lies in the sophistication of today's security attacks.

"I don't think threats are getting worse," Ludwig said. "I think the attacks are getting more sophisticated, but the defenses are probably moving even faster than the attacks, in the mobile space at any rate. "
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Lego CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp has told CNBC that China offers "a unique opportunity for growth," claiming that his firm is well-positioned to become the country's number one toy brand. His comments come as the Danish toymaker prepares to step up its operations in China. Lego will open its largest retail store in the world near Shanghai later this year and is due to complete work on its first Chinese factory in 2017. The toymaker faces a myriad of challenges as it tries to grow sales in the world's second-largest economy. Lego sparked controversy back in 2015 when it refused to sell in bulk to dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, with critics accusing the company of not wanting to wrong-foot the Chinese government.



A Lego brick figurine of Emmet Brickowoski, a character from 'The Lego Movie', stands in the reception area at the headquarters of Lego A/S in Billund, Denmark. Freya Ingrid Morales | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Rebuffing those claims, the Lego CEO gave his explanation for why Ai Weiwei's original sales request was denied, saying: "We've seen people building concentration camps out of Lego and pictures of the Prophet Muhammad." "We noticed a huge sensitivity to so-called 'political topics' and in this case one of our staff members in Australia found the purpose suggested by Ai Weiwei was too sensitive and so the order was refused," he added. Lego has since changed its policy and no longer requires customers buying in bulk to specify how they're going to use their bricks. Political sensitivities aside, Lego is aware it needs to bridge cultural divides to gain market share in China. A key part of Lego's appeal for western parents is its educational value. However, the concept of "learning through play" isn't so well-established in China. In a bid to change attitudes, the Lego Foundation is pouring millions of Danish krone into research focusing on the cognitive benefits of play. The foundation funds "Lego professors" and is partnering with a leading Chinese university "to support creativity and play in Chinese schools," according to a press release in January.
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Vice President Joe Biden defended the 1994 crime bill  which has become a liability in the 2016 Democratic presidential race  as having "restored American cities."

The vice president, a principal author of that Clinton-era bill while a senator, pointed specifically to stepped-up "community policing" enabled by the bill's funding for 100,000 additional cops nationwide.

Joe Biden speaks with CNBC's John Harwood. Sophie Bearman | CNBC

"When community policing was working, neighborhoods were not only safer but they were more harmonious," Biden said in a CNBC interview. "They were engaged in the neighborhood, which built confidence so that the African-American woman, living in a corner alone where the drug deal's going down in front of her house, literally used to have your phone number as a cop. She'd call you and say, "John, they're out in front of my house. But you're not giving me away, right, John?" And he didn't. So we had enormous success." Amid falling crime rates, he added, "Now what's happened is we've cut the funding 85 percent."

Critics say the law's sentencing mandates have resulted in excessive incarceration rates, especially for black men. The vice president said the fundamental problem remains "institutional racism" and its legacy in housing, employment and other realms. "There are things I would change," he said. "But, by and large, what it really did: It restored American cities."




Crude oil prices tumbled as much as 5 percent on Monday after the Doha "no deal," but staged a turnaround later in the session and traded higher on Tuesday.



Analysts attributed the rebound to the start of an open-ended oil workers' strike in Kuwait over the weekend that reportedly involves around 7,000 employees. The government-owned Kuwait Oil Company tweeted on April 17 that crude production had fallen to around 1.1 million barrels per day (mb/d) as a result.

The country typically produces 2.86 mb/d, according to OPEC, of which Kuwait is a member.

Kuwait Oil Company tweet

"The strike has had the effect of blunting some of the downward momentum in crude oil resulting from the failure of major oil exporters to reach an agreement on a production freeze in Doha yesterday. But a quick resolution of the strike could result in another selloff," Coline Schep and Greg Priddy, analysts at risk consultancy Eurasia Group, said in a report on Monday.



and WTI crude futures traded higher at 7 a.m. ET on Tuesday by around 1.8 percent and 1.4 percent respectively. Both were above the psychologically important $40 per barrel mark, which light crude fell below on Sunday.

The oil workers are striking because the Kuwaiti government plans to cut or freeze their wages and benefits in line with pending public sector salary reforms, according to Eurasia.
New Yorkers voters in Tuesday's primary are likely to do two things: cool off Bernie Sanders and vault Donald Trump back into front-runner status. The biggest question of the day on both sides is how big the blowouts will be. On the Democratic side, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leads in the polls by an average of nearly 12 points. Sanders oddly claims that the polls are both wrong and that it doesn't really matter if he wins New York.

A worker places a sign ahead of the opening of a polling station during the New York State presidential primaries on April 19, 2016 in Chappaqua, New York. Eduardo Munoz | AFP | Getty Images

Sanders may wish this to be true. But it isn't. Clinton currently has 1,758 of the 2,383 delegates she needs to lock down the Democratic nomination with super delegates included. Excluding super delegates, which Sanders claims he can flip to his side, Clinton is still up by 244. In New York, 291 Democratic delegates are at stake Tuesday. If Clinton wins by around 10 points, she will likely move ahead of Sanders by another 25 or so pledged delegates. That would mean Sanders would need to win around 70 percent of the remaining delegates and Clinton would need just 30 percent. There is pretty much no scenario  barring some major political catastrophe  in which Sanders would dominate the remaining states in such a way.



So if the polls hold and Clinton wins New York by a comfortable margin, the Democratic race will be effectively over, though Sanders is not going to concede and will continue to inflict political damage on the Democratic front-runner. At some point, Sanders will come under heavy pressure from the party to get out of the race. But that won't happen on Tuesday, especially if Sanders shocks the world and makes the race close. If Sanders somehow pulls out a win, the Democratic race will descend into chaos. On the Republican side, it's all about the district-by-district delegate math. Trump currently leads with 744 delegates to 558 for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and 144 for Ohio Governor John Kasich. Kasich still trails Florida Sen. Marco Rubio who has 171 delegates even though he dropped out weeks ago. Trump hopes to take 85 of the 95 GOP delegates at stake in New York on Tuesday. To do that he will have to top 50 percent statewide and in as many of the state's congressional districts as possible. Kasich and Cruz are hoping to snatch at least a few delegates in New York by keeping Trump below 50 percent, especially in Manhattan. Every delegates matters for Trump because he has little room for error if he hopes to hit 1,237 delegates and avoid a contested convention in Cleveland. Cruz has dominated Trump in securing friendly delegates so multiple ballots at the convention could strongly favor the conservative Texas senator. If Trump takes 85 of New York's delegates he would need to win around 57 percent of the remaining delegates to hit his magic number before Cleveland. That is by no means a lock but many of the remaining states in the Northeast favor Trump. And the real estate magnate leads by around 10 percent in most California polls ahead of the June 7 primary. The Golden State, which is among the last to vote, awards most of its 172 delegates to the statewide winner.

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Many large companies put their advertising contracts up for review in 2015, adding to pressure on the big agencies who are grappling with a shift from traditional TV-based advertising to online.

French advertising giant Publicis on Tuesday reported organic sales growth of 2.9 percent for the first quarter, beating its own estimate, but remained cautious about the quarters ahead.

Chief Executive Maurice Lev told CNBC that he expected the impact of losses from the 2015 media account reviews to be felt in the second and third quarters mostly. While he expects a good 2016, he forecast a much better 2017. He did not expect the same kind of contract review in 2016 as witnessed in 2015.



"We have been quite fortunate with a few very good acquisitions of accounts," Levy said of the first quarter. The company's 2014 acquisition of Sapient had also helped the company's results.



The group said 55 percent of its revenue now came from digital, a figure Levy expects will be "slightly above 60 percent" by the end of 2018.

The impact of digitization leading to very serious transformation of clients' business models, he said. As a result, the group needed to offer "a kind of alchemy" of consulting, technology and creative services, he said.

"We are very confident about the future of our services and the fact that we are lagging behind since two years is neither a surprise nor a very big concern," he said, citing a transformation that is underway at the company as a key reason.

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The new "Captain America" movie is en route to one of the best openings in the history of Marvel Comics films, according to pre-release tracking obtained by Variety.

"Captain America: Civil War" could be the fourth film in history to reach a $200 million debut, analysts told Hollywood trade magazine Variety. Right now, it is tracking to open between $175 million and $180 million, according to Variety.
One way to measure the success of a proxy fight is to look at the percentage of clashes that end in the investor getting some or all of what it wants from the company.

If the proxy fight makes it to a vote (in Yahoo's case, that would be this summer), the dissident (in this case, Starboard) may win all or part of the vote. The proxy fight also could be split, with just a fraction of the director nominees elected or solicited votes approved. The effort may not even make it to a vote if the activists accept a formal settlement or concessions, which are also counted as a victory for the activist in the FactSet data.

Activists are winning more often in recent years, with nearly 80 percent of proxy fights ending in victory so far this year. That's up from less than half in the early 2000s, according to a look at the data over the past 15 years.
Jeff Smith, CEO of activist fund Starboard Value, said he is preparing to potentially pick up the pieces of a broken Yahoo . Speaking with CNBC on Tuesday morning from 13D Monitor's Active-Passive Investor Summit in New York City, Smith explained that he has launched a proxy fight for Yahoo in case its board is unable to do what needs to be done.

"They're going to feel the pressure to make sure they're doing the right thing for the shareholders in order to not get to the result of a change of board members," Smith said. "But we need to protect ourselves because if we get to the annual meeting and the company has not moved forward as they're supposed to  there's a question here as it relates to capability and credibility of the board members and management team in terms of running the process." "If we get to the end, and they haven't been successful as it relates to getting the company sold  the core business sold  well we're going to need to pick up the pieces," he added.

Jeff Smith, chief executive officer and chief investment officer of Starboard Value LP. Chris Goodney | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The ideal outcome for Yahoo, Smith told CNBC, is for its core business to sell for "the highest possible price that they can get," but he declined to say how much he thought that should be. "The nice thing about this asset is it's a sought-after asset with one of the most recognized brands in the world, a billion unique users, unbelievable properties," Smith said. "If you look at the fundamentals, somebody could easily pay $3 billion, $4 billion, $5 billion, $8 billion, $10 billion-plus for this asset if they cared enough for it  it depends on what they're going to do with it." Starboard has been pushing since 2014 for big changes at flagging tech giant Yahoo, launching a proxy fight in March to remove its entire board. The fund has been critical of Yahoo's attempt to turn around its core business, and has called for its CEO, Marissa Mayer, to leave the board along with the other sitting members. Still, Smith has said he sees "a lot of opportunity" in Yahoo.

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Smith said he is hoping to settle with Yahoo, but his firm needs "to get enough representation on the board where we can feel comfortable that we're going to be able to work with the board members in good faith to provide that same capability and credibility in the board room."

He added that such an agreement would need to be based on building "trust" between his firm and the management and current board. But that trust isn't there yet, he said, adding that the board members "seem to be" approaching the sale process seriously, "but you don't know." "There have been cases with this management team and this board where they've said they are going to do things over the last several years and then they didn't follow through," he said, listing the proposed monetization of Yahoo Japan, real estate and intellectual property as examples.
Foreigners could ultimately determine whether Britain leaves the European Union (EU), with as many as 1.3 million Commonwealth citizens eligible to vote in the upcoming referendum. General election rules have been applied to the June 23 'Brexit' referendum, meaning that while Europeans won't be able to cast a ballot, a number of Commonwealth citizens living in the U.K. will qualify to vote. Commonwealth citizens include those hailing from one of the 53 former member states of the bygone British Empire, including Canada, Jamaica, Kenya, New Zealand, Nigeria and Dominica.



Peter Macdiarmid - Getty Images

The U.K. is set to hold the vote on Thursday, June 23. The ballot is set to ask: "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" Voters will be asked to choose one of two options: "Remain a member of the European Union" or "Leave the European Union." British and Irish citizens, as well as U.K. expats who have lived abroad for less than 15 years, will also be able to vote. No other EU citizens  except those from Malta, Cyprus and Ireland  will be eligible. All voters must be 18 or older. The long-standing voting rules haven't gone without criticism. "It is a clear anomaly that those who are not British citizens should have a vote in the future of Britain," Lord Green, the founder of the campaign group Migration Watch UK, told CNBC by phone on Tuesday. "Of course we are not opposed to Commonwealth citizens who are also British citizens having a vote. But if they are not yet British or have decided not to become British it is surely wrong that they should be able to."

The latest calculations by Migration Watch UK put the total number of Commonwealth citizens potentially eligible to vote in the referendum at 1.3 million. About 341,000 Irish nationals may also qualify, they told CNBC by email on Tuesday. Neither the Electoral Commission nor the U.K.'s Office for National Statistics (ONS) were able to confirm this figure, telling CNBC that electoral registration data for general elections doesn't break down by nationality. Similarly, the ONS did not have a total figure for Commonwealth citizens in its latest census data.

British Prime Minister David Cameron (R) attends a meeting with and European Council President Donald Tusk (L) and European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker (C) during a European Union leaders summit addressing the talks about the so-called Brexit and the migrants crisis in Brussels on February 19, 2016. Yves Herman | AFP | Getty Images
Cusomers get information from a reception desk at a UnitedHealthcare store Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

If you signed up for a UnitedHealth Group plan on an Obamacare exchange for 2016, don't count on renewing your coverage next year if you live in Connecticut, Michigan, or dozens of other states. The nation's largest insurer said it is pulling out of the individual exchange business in 2017, in all but a few markets. "Next year, we will remain in only a handful of states," UnitedHeath CEO Stephen Hemsley said on the company's earnings conference call Monday. "We continue to remain an advocate for more stable and sustainable approaches to serving this market and those who rely on it for care." United first sounded the alarm about its Affordable Care Act participation five months ago, projecting more than $1 billion in ACA losses for 2015-2016. Part of the problem was that its Obamacare members had more health issues and required more medical services and prescriptions than members in its other insurance units. United officials say that trend hasn't changed.



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Former insurance executive Robert Laszewski says UnitedHealth is only making money in about nine states, out of nearly three dozen where it participates. It's no surprise that they're pulling back sharply, yet maintaining a toehold in the market. "Getting out of the exchanges almost means you're getting out of the individual health insurance business," said insurance consultant Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates. "This is ultimately going to be a 20 to 30 million person market, when it ultimately gets fixed." Executives on the United earnings conference call did not offer market-specific details about their Obamacare plans for next year. They have confirmed that they'll pull out Arkansas, Georgia and Michigan. Officials in Connecticut say the insurer will also exit their state exchange in 2017.

"United Healthcare has a Connecticut footprint, they have been a good partner and we are pleased that they were among the first to join the exchange," said Access Health CT CEO Jim Wadleigh in a statement, adding that the state will provide United clients with guidance in the Fall.

"The team at Access Health CT is dedicated to making this transition as smooth as possible as their customers re-enter the marketplace in 2017," Wadleigh said.

Leerink analyst Ana Gupte outlined some other possible exits in a note to clients, highlighting five states which accounted for nearly half of United's exchange losses in 2015: Florida, North Carolina, New York, Alabama and Louisiana.

The big question is how it will impact consumers. A Kaiser family foundation analysis found that United's sharp pullback from the exchanges next year, could boost rates an additional 1 percent. Still the insurer's departure would still leave the majority in Obamacare exchanges  88 percent  with more than one option. Roughly 11 percent of market would have just one insurer, compared to 2 percent now.
The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note , which moves inversely to its price, moved higher to 1.78 percent, while the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond was higher at 2.5907 percent.

U.S. sovereign bond prices moved lower Tuesday as investors opted for riskier assets on the back of rising oil prices.

Oil prices staged a turnaround Tuesday, as attention shifted to a Kuwaiti oil worker strike that was putting pressure on global supply, with the country's production drawn down from around 2.8 million barrels per day to 1.5 million.

That comes after a lower close for both WTI and Brent in the previous session, OPEC and non-OPEC producers failed to secure a supply freeze at a meeting in Doha.

U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures snapped a four-day losing streak, settling at $41.08, up 3 percent.

March housing start data showed an 8.8 percent decline, while building permits fell 7.7 percent. Building permit figures were forecast to show a 1.7 percent rise to 1.2 million.
The "XO" Nation, however, is more than just a solidarity movement. It's a strategic, humanizing strategy. Sometimes, we just need to prove that, for as tough as we are, we're also compassionate. Because let's face it, the world is both ready for and threatened by strong women. We use "XO" when we need to because sometimes we just need to remind people that although we just came out swinging a sledgehammer, we're good people and we care. It signals that we will use our influence to assist colleagues in the marketplace to help. Count on me to lend a hand.



Arianna Huffington is among those who signs her email "XO." And many of us do, too, both in email and on social media. Embellishing a post with #xoxo is a commonplace way to show support.

It's even becoming de rigueur to the point that men are getting into the act, signing off "XO" as proof of their congeniality. Could it be that women are changing the rules of corporate communication? Are we changing the script for everyone?
Netflix shares are getting slammed Tuesday, but the smart money might be getting ready to binge on the streaming media company's shares. Analysts say the situation at Netflix is not all that bad and suggest the 10-percent-plus drop since Friday's close may be the latest of many post-earnings buying opportunities. If you don't trust Wall Street analysts, consider Carl Icahn, who once made billions on his well-timed trade after mass hysteria about Netflix's future.



Netflix original, The Killing Stephanie De Sakutin | AFP | Getty Images

Netflix reported after Monday's close that it beat analysts' projections for first-quarter profit, earning $27.7 million, or 6 cents a share, as sales rose 24 percent to $1.96 billion, narrowly missing forecasts of $1.97 billion. But what got the market's attention was a cut in Netflix's second-quarter guidance for new-customer signups outside the United States. Instead of the 3.4 million new non-U.S. customers the market expected, Los Gatos, California-based Netflix told investors to expect about 2 million, on a base of 34.5 million internationally and 81.5 million, including Americans. But Wall Street analysts are telling clients that this is a Netflix movie we've seen before: The challenges of forecasting the growth in Netflix's business have always led to booms and busts in the shares. "While many investors may consider bailing on the Netflix story today (which reminds us of the investor narrative in October 2014, as the stock was plunging following [third-quarter]), we continue to believe Netflix is on track to pass 100 million subscribers globally in early 2017 and reach 150 million subscribers globally by the end of 2020," BTIG Research analyst Rich Greenfield wrote in a blog post. "If anything, Netflix's success in driving penetration in the most competitive media market in the world, the U.S., strengthens our confidence in their ability to execute globally."

That 21 percent 2014 drop isn't the only one. Netflix also dropped 23 percent after the second quarter of 2010's earnings came out. And they were hit hard during the market's bout of fear about junk bonds and China last fall, losing more than a third of their value and touching bottom at $79.95 on Feb. 8. Icahn made an estimated $2 billion fortune playing this Netflix trade, buying in at a $58 low (pre-stock split) in 2012, after its plans to go international and sacrifice profits for global expansion led to a major pullback in shares. He sold the last of the roughly 5.5 million shares he had acquired last year. The progress of Netflix's business has been much steadier and will continue to be, argued RBC Capital analyst Mark Mahaney. He said shares can double from here by 2019  his 12-month target price is $140  as annual profits reach $10 a share.

"There were fundamental negatives here. But we believe they are likely to be timing-related," Mahaney wrote. "We continue to believe that Netflix's value proposition has universal appeal  as demonstrated by its success in North America, Latin America and Western Europe."

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Mahaney echoed an argument Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made in a video interview Monday evening  that Netflix's expansion in Asia is going slower than forecast, in part because nearly all of its content is in English and its payment systems rely on internationally known credit card systems, like Visa and MasterCard.

"In most of those countries, we've yet to see our full potential," Hastings said. "We're only in English, and only with international credit cards. Over the next couple of years, we'll see more opportunity.'' Even with the lower guidance, the pace of international customer growth for the first half as a whole will still be 30 percent higher than in 2015, BTIG's Greenfield said, in part because Netflix is entering a large number of countries at once.

The question is how profitably that can happen, and how soon. Morgan Stanley's Ben Swinburne cut his 2016 estimates for international growth but made only minor changes to estimates for next year, saying Netflix will solve its start-up problems overseas, as it has before, in markets like the United Kingdom and Brazil. The quarter is also likely to be slower than expected because the first quarter was stronger than forecast, with 600,000 of 8 million broadband homes in Australia and New Zealand buying Netflix as soon as it became available there, leaving fewer people to sign up between April 1 and June, Swinburne said.



The larger issue is that Netflix still has to prove it can make local-language original content that sells in markets across the world, he said. On the plus side, the 2.2 million new domestic subscribers in the quarter suggest that threats to Netflix from Amazon.com's Prime video service, which also has a long slate of original programs, is not dire, he said.

"Much of this year has been spent debating how rapidly the U.S. business will fade, and the [first-quarter] results have to some extent put that concern to bed," Swinburne said. "The international bear case  essentially the 'what works in the U.S. doesn't work elsewhere' concern  is back in focus." The argument about Netflix is always about whether its growth and its reported operating profits are more important than its continual losses on the cash flow line as it spends to expand into new countries and develop its own programming. The argument resembles the one about Amazon.com , where growth usually convinces the company to redouble spending to pursue even more. And now Netflix is linked directly with Amazon.


ENDICOTT, N.Y.  Pyramid Business Systems, Inc., a provider of information-technology (IT) services, has opened its new corporate offices in building 257-1 on the Huron campus at 1093 Clark St. in Endicott.

Pyramid started operations in the new location on April 1, Bob Ash, president and founder of Pyramid Business Systems, said in an email response to a BJNN inquiry.

The firm previously operated in the Visions Federal Credit Union building at 3301 Country Club Rd. in Endwell for 26 years, Ash said in the email.

Pyramid Business Systems employs 12 people.

The company is humbled to be working on the same campus which gave birth to IBM many years ago, Ash said in the companys release.

Our loyal clients are the main reason we have grown so much over the past 26 years. We have upgraded our facilities to accommodate this growth and to better serve our customers. This move also underscores our commitment to provide the best work environment for our dedicated staff, said Ash.

Pyramid Business Systems has been providing IT-support services to organizations throughout upstate New York and Northern Pennsylvania since 1989.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com
DeWITT, N.Y.  The founder and CEO of yogurt-maker Chobani is one of two executives that the Manufacturers Association of Central New York (MACNY) will add to its Wall of Fame next month.

Hamdi Ulukaya PHOTO CREDIT: The Manufacturers Association of Central New York

Both Hamdi Ulukaya and Jim Beckman, president of Crucible Industries LLC, will accept their awards at MACNYs 103rd annual dinner on May 19 at the Oncenter, MACNY said in a news release.

The organization will recognize both men with plaques on the Manufacturers Wall of Fame at MACNY headquarters in DeWitt.

Since purchasing a yogurt plant in 2005, Ulukaya has led Norwichbased Chobani to become the top-selling Greek yogurt brand in the United States.

Jim Beckman PHOTO CREDIT: The Manufacturers Association of Central New York

Beckman has served as president of Geddesbased Crucible Industries since 2009. He was instrumental in guiding the company to financial health during and following the economic recession, MACNY said.

The Wall of Fame selection committee is pleased to honor Ulukaya and Beckman with induction into the Manufacturers Wall of Fame, Randy Wolken, president of MACNY, said in the release.

Manufacturing has long been a cornerstone of Central New York, and the leadership of Jim and Hamdi has strengthened the health of our regional sector. I would like to congratulate both Jim and Hamdi on their induction, and I look forward to honoring their achievements and commitment alongside members of the manufacturing community, said Wolken.

Ulukaya and Beckman will represent the 16th class inducted into the Manufacturers Wall of Fame, joining a prestigious group of manufacturing leaders who have been honored since the Wall of Fames inception in 2001.

The Manufacturers Wall of Fame celebrates individuals who have demonstrated long-term dedication to manufacturing in upstate New York.

MACNY plans to recognize previous inductees for their lifetime achievements during its annual dinner.

Aminy Audi, chairman and CEO of Manliusbased L. & J.G. Stickley, is the events keynote speaker. Audi will talk about the companys history; the struggles and challenges it overcame; and what brought the company to where it is today, according to the MACNY news release.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com
The second of three Proof 20 coins in a series from the Austrian Mint honoring composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is scheduled for release May 11.

The second coin in a series of three celebrating the life of musician and composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is scheduled for release on May 11.

The Proof silver 20 coin is part of the A Life in Three Acts program from the Austrian Mint in Vienna.

The second coin, titled Amade, as he liked to be called, focuses on his adult life.

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The obverse of the coin depicts a three-quarters portrait of Mozart wearing an elaborately embroidered jacket over one of his signature ruffled shirts. The second name of Mozarts three-part signature, Amade, is depicted overlaid on his right shoulder.

This side of the coin was based on a portrait painted by Barbara Krafft in 1819, 28 years after his untimely death at the age of 35.

The obverse of the coin was designed and engraved by Austrian Mint engraver Herbert Waehner. It also bears the face value 20 EURO and the country of issue, REPUBLIK OSTERREICH (meaning the Republic of Austria), as well as the year of issue, 2016.

The reverse of the coin depicts a scene from the opera Don Giovanni. This opera is about a young man, a murderer, who had little respect for the social mores of the time. Don Giovanni (or Don Juan) refused to admit to his sins and so ends up in hell. The opera premiered in Prague in 1787.

Austrian Mint engraver Helmut Andexlinger designed and engraved the reverse.

The first issue in the program, titled Wolfgang: The Wunderkind, was released Sept. 9, 2015, and the final issue, titled Mozart: The Legend, is due for release Sept. 7, 2016.

Each .900 fine silver coin weighs 20 grams and has a mintage limit of 50,000 pieces.

The coins are individually housed in a capsule, accompanied by an individual box and a numbered certificate of authenticity.

Collectors in the United States and Canada may buy the coin from the Austrian Mint website.

Visit American Precious Metals Exchanges website.

Downies in Australia may be reached online.
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Wildfire levels Wooldridge amid rash of natural cover blazes

The Wooldridge fire was the most severe in a rash of natural cover blazes in mid-Missouri since Friday, including multiple in Columbia.
Best of Business 2022: Learn Who Won Our 15th Annual Reader Poll

Local professionals chose their favorite business and professional services, products, healthcare, dining and more. Find out who their top picks are.
John Currence's Israeli grain salad at Le Bon Appetit. (Photo by Jennifer Biggs)

Go Eat If you want personality, you gotta #GoMemphis SHARE

By Jennifer Biggs of The Commercial Appeal

It was a food-filled festival this weekend, with Rajun Cajun, Bourbon and Bacon and Le Bon Appetit. I made it to LBA, chef Kelly English's every-other-year event with the Le Bonheur Club.

The food was crazy good.

The lead photo is of one of my favorite dishes of the night, a salad of barley, sorghum (the grain, not the syrup), red onion, pomegranate and a spicy yogurt dressing; Oxford chef John Currence picked it the inspiration during a recent trip to Israel.

At the first Le Bon Appetit, Phillip Lopez of New Orleans served a dish of avocado "dipping dots" with tuna and it was superb and inventive. This time he made boudin, topped it with jalapeno marmalade and fried chicken cotton candy.

John Besh from New Orleans was in the house. I was a little star struck, I have to admit.

But this was the guy that had most everyone else mooning: Aaron Sanchez. Here he's with Dr. Sylvia Richey.

The Blackberry Farm table was set up beautifully with big charcuterie platters, wheels of cheese, and a fabulous pork cheek, ramp and grits dish.

On Friday night, Central BBQ catered a party for the chefs and invited guests. Here Central co-owner Craig Blondis points out the bits in the foot of a red wattler hog (you can't tell by this point, but you could see the wattles beneath his jowls when the head was still attached).
April 22, 2016 - Judge Larry Potter announces his intent to deliberate before giving a written ruling on arguments during a hearing Tuesday morning in Environmental Court on the constitutionality of the Dixie Homes Murda Gang/47 Neighborhood Crips and the FAM Mob gang injunctions. (Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)

SHARE April 22, 2016 - Joe McKnight (left) and Earnest Williams listen to arguments Tuesday morning during a hearing in Environmental Court on the constitutionality of the Dixie Homes Murda Gang/47 Neighborhood Crips and the FAM Mob gang injunctions. (Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal) April 22, 2016 - Assistant District Attorney Colin Campbell (right) defends the state's injunctions against members of the Dixie Homes Murda Gang/47 Neighborhood Crips and the FAM Mob on Tuesday morning during a hearing in Environmental Court. (Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)

By Katie Fretland of The Commercial Appeal

Environmental Court Judge Larry Potter heard arguments Tuesday over the constitutionality of injunctions that restrict alleged gang members from publicly associating with each other in court-ordered safety zones.

Lawyers for two men who were served orders against Memphis gangs argue the injunctions are overly broad, vague and violate the men's constitutional rights, while Assistant District Attorney Colin Campbell said the orders are a way for citizens to take back their communities from gangs.

Assistant Public Defender Barbara Sidelnik represents Earnest Williams, who law enforcement observed standing on a porch associating with others in an alleged violation of the Dixie Homes Murda Gang/47 Neighborhood Crips injunction.

She argued the order unfairly allows Williams to be arrested for standing next to a person who is subject to the order, even if his conduct does nothing to further the activities of the gang and they are standing on private property.

"It needs to be tied to gang-related conduct and activities that are in furtherance of the gang," Sidelnik said. "Me sitting at a family barbecue in the public view, or me associating with my brother in someone's backyard, possibly mine, where you can see me standing with him, that is not in furtherance of the gang."

Williams' brother is also enjoined in the same injunction order, which creates a burden on Williams' free association with a member of his family in public, Sidelnik said.

Campbell said family members coming together for the purpose of criminal activity is not constitutionally protected conduct.

"Should a gang who often find familial relationships within the gang, because brothers influence other brothers, should they have a right to come together and terrorize a neighborhood, and then just say, 'Oh we're family, the law can't address us?" Campbell said. "'We're going to do whatever we want in our neighborhood to whoever we want and you can't do anything about it because we happen to have the same DNA.' That defies all common sense and all logic."

Potter said he will consider the matter and render a decision at a later date.

The Tennessee legislature included gangs in the state's nuisance statute in 2009. There are six safety zones in Memphis: Riverside, Dixie Homes, Greenbriar, Ridgecrest and two in Binghamton. The order in Williams' case against the Dixie Homes Murda Gang/47 Neighborhood Crips covers an area bounded by Jackson Avenue to the north, Danny Thomas Boulevard to the west, Poplar Avenue to the south and Interstate 40/240 to the east.

Part of the injunction prohibits members of the gang from "standing, sitting, walking, driving, gathering, or appearing anywhere in public view or anyplace accessible to the public" with each other, with an exception for going to school or a place of worship. There are also prohibitions against selling, possessing or using illegal drugs, having dangerous weapons or graffiti tools, possessing alcohol and trespassing.

Violating the injunction is a C misdemeanor punishable by 30 days in jail, a maximum $50 fine, or both.

In the case of Williams, detectives observed him May 6, 2015, standing on a front porch in the 800 block of Faxon Avenue with three other men, including Steve Nelson who the state alleged to have a leadership role in the gang. Two people were standing across the street. They were "associating" with each other in public while in the safety zone in violation of the injunction, according to an affidavit.

Nelson called the injunction discriminatory, and said he never admitted gang affiliation.

"It's really racial profiling," he told The Commercial Appeal.

In December 2014, the state declared two Frayser apartment complexes, Ridgecrest and Greenbriar, to be safety zones where members of the FAM Mob cannot associate in public. Joe McKnight became subject to the injunction, wrote attorney Joseph Crone. McKnight was served the order and summoned to appear in court Jan. 12, 2016.

"The State has provided no proof that Joe McKnight has associated with the FAM Mob Gang or that he is anyway a member," Crone wrote.

Campbell said he will offer evidence that McKnight is in the gang.

"We're not there yet until we get through the Constitutional issues," Campbell said.

Following the Environmental Court hearing Tuesday, McKnight denied affiliation with the FAM Mob, and voiced confusion about being summoned to court in connection with the group.

"I'm trying to figure out myself what's going on," he said.
By Yolanda Jones of The Commercial Appeal

Memphis police are investigating after a 51-year-old man was found shot to death on a South Memphis street early Monday morning.

Officers responded to a shots fired call at 12:10 a.m. in the 1400 block of Woodward Street. Officers found Willie Pressley with multiple gunshot wounds; he was pronounced dead on the scene.

No arrests have been made yet, police said.
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By The Commercial Appeal

A Memphis Police officer has been relieved of duty pending an investigation after a woman claimed the officer sexually assaulted her, MPD said Monday.

Police responded at 11:15 a.m. Saturday to a complaint on G.E. Patterson in the South Main area Downtown, where a 26-year-old woman told them that an on-duty officer had made inappropriate sexual contact with her as she left the Purple Haze nightclub earlier that morning.

No arrest has been made, no charges have been filed and the officer's name was not released Monday as police continued to investigate.
January 15, 2016 - Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland discusses the need to delay the implementation of body cameras for MPD at a press conference. (Nikki Boertman/The Commercial Appeal)

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By Ryan Poe of The Commercial Appeal

The city's budget is, as chief financial officer Brian Collins put it in an interview last week, "where the rubber meets the road" for Mayor Jim Strickland.

Strickland has spoken in broad language about how he'll tackle the city's issues with crime, a police officer shortage, and several large capital projects, but the 2016-17 fiscal year budget will be the public's first look at how those words translate into dollars.

Here are five of the problem areas Strickland has to deal with in his first budget, which has taken the past year to put together:

1. Crime. This is the issue that likely won Strickland his election last year against incumbent mayor A C Wharton. But since Strickland took over in January, he and police director Mike Rallings have faced a shortage of roughly 400 police officers, an unusually high major violent crime rate, and delays in a rollout of police body cameras and 911 dispatchers. Expect Strickland to increase the police department's budget, and for more money to go to crime fighting.

2. Pay. After pay and benefits cuts, employee morale is low. Several unions have already settled with the city for pay increases, including the Memphis Police Association, but others are headed for City Council impasse committees. Last year, council members scrapped the impasse process and negotiated directly with the unions, and it's possible that if Strickland hasn't done as much for employees as council members think, that could happen again.

3. Projects. The city is expected to have several big projects in its capital budget, including a large-scale radio replacement project, police body cameras infrastructure, and new buses for the Memphis Area Transit Authority. But it'll be just as interesting to see what's not in the capital budget. Strickland has said he doesn't plan on launching the big development projects that former Housing & Community Development Director Robert Lipscomb was known for, so don't expect a new Fairgrounds. Also, Engineering says it has enough money to complete the work already started on the Elvis Presley Boulevard improvements in Whitehaven, so don't expect to see the city ask for the last, $17.5 million piece of capital funding for the project yet.

4. Reorganization. Shortly after his arrival, Strickland reorganized the city's divisions under six "chiefs," and that reorganization will play out on the pages of the budget this year. Expect a big increase to the budget for the Executive Division, which will include libraries, among other new functions, and a big decrease in the budget of Parks & Neighborhoods. The changes could come with cuts and perhaps greater efficiency, but Strickland said recently that he expects the changes will mostly be on paper.

5. Pension. Like his predecessor, Strickland has until 2020 by state law to begin ponying up the city's annual required contribution (ARC) to the pension fund. Strickland may get there this year, which means the city would have to continue paying the pension ARC from now on. The ARC can vary widely  from $58 million, like in 2016, up to $85 million in the future, according to Collins. But meeting the ARC would give the city long-term savings for the fund  not something many cities can boast. That could continue to strengthen the city's economic outlook, which bond rating agencies recently upgraded from "negative," Collins said.

Strickland will present the budget to City Council in its 3:30 p.m. meeting in the council chamber in City Hall, 125 N. Main. Next week, the council will begin holding budget hearings once a week on Tuesdays, and will have until June 30 to approve the budget as amended.
April 1, 2016 - A environmental scientist with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation who requested to not be named launches a boat into McKellar Lake before heading out to do water tests. The city of Memphis is facing up to $10 million in repair costs and possibly environmental fees after a damaged sewage pipe on Thursday began pouring up to 50 million gallons of untreated wastewater per day into a tributary of the Mississippi River. (Brad Vest/The Commercial Appeal)

By Ryan Poe of The Commercial Appeal

Memphis may be fined by as much as $477,000 following a massive spill of raw sewage into a tributary of McKellar Lake, Public Works Director Robert Knecht said Tuesday.

The city is estimating that the leak took 10 days to repair, and that the city could be fined up to $37,500 per day for violating the Clean Water Act, up to $10,000 per day for violating a state discharge permit, and $2,000 for violating its sewer overflow consent degree.

The city hasn't received any notices of fines, Knecht said.

On March 31, after heavy rainfall eroded the soil under a pipe in Southwest Memphis, the city discovered a leak that was spilling up to 50 million gallons of sewage per day into Cypress Creek before a bypass pipe was installed April 7.

A leak in the bypass pipe was repaired the next day, but not before spilling up to 1,000 more gallons of waste.

The sewage spill may have killed thousands of fish, a spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation said in the week after the leak. Knecht said the fish were mostly carp, which could be considered if fines are assessed.

"The majority of the fish that were killed were an invasive species," Knecht said.

Knecht said the city continues to monitor McKellar Lake's E. coli levels. He said some areas are improving faster than expected, and could be reopened to the public soon.

The city will work to replace the pipe over the next three months, he said. The total cost of the repairs are expected to range from $8 million to $10 million.
SHARE (Clockwise from upper left) George Flinn, Brian Kelsey, Mark Luttrell, David Kustoff

By Michael Collins of The Commercial Appeal

WASHINGTON  Memphis radiologist George Flinn has the most money on hand for the GOP primary to replace U.S. Rep. Stephen Fincher, but state Sen. Brian Kelsey has actually raised the most so far.

Flinn, a former Shelby County commissioner and multi-millionaire who owns radio stations, loaned his congressional campaign $2.7 million, according to records on file with the Federal Election Commission.

Flinn also transferred into his campaign committee another $231,000 that had been leftover from his unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate in 2014. He has spent $212,000, leaving him with $2.7 million in the bank at the end of March  more than six times as much as Kelsey, his closest competitor.

Asked if he intends to self-fund his campaign, Flinn said he would put more of his own money into the race if needed, but that he also intended to raise money from other sources.

"We'll put up whatever it takes to get our message out to the people," he said.

Kelsey's campaign raised $439,000 during the first three months of the year in the race for the 8th Congressional District, which takes in parts of Shelby County and 14 other counties in West Tennessee.

"Sen. Kelsey is humbled by the incredible support shown so far," campaign manager Brock Densel said. "It shows that, above all, his proven conservative record is resonating with people throughout the 8th District."

Most of Kelsey's contributions "have come from Sen. Kelsey speaking with supporters one-on-one," Densel said. "When people hear about his record of leadership on issues important to West Tennesseans, he is someone they want to support."

Former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff has raised nearly $320,000  almost all of it from individual contributions. Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell raised $145,000, all from individual donors.

Luttrell said he got a late start fund-raising because he didn't jump into the race until the end of February, more than three weeks after Fincher announced his retirement and Flinn, Kelsey and Kustoff had all entered the race.

"I'm satisfied with where we are now, based upon the amount of time we've been in the campaign," said Luttrell, who ranked as the early favorite in a poll released in March.

Thirteen Republicans, four Democrats and five independents are all running to succeed Fincher, a Crockett County Republican who has served three two-year terms.

Other GOP candidates who reported raising money are Jackson businessman and political consultant Brad Greer, $104,000; Shelby County Register of Deeds Thomas F. Leatherwood, $36,000; Collierville businessman David Maldonado, $5,000; and retired Navy pilot John Mills, $5,000.

None of the Democratic or independent candidates reported raising any money.

The primary is Aug. 4.
December 9, 2015 - The entrance to the DNA storage room and office space during a media tour of Memphis' new $1 million, state-of-the art sexual assault evidence storage facility. (Nikki Boertman/The Commercial Appeal)

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By Ryan Poe of The Commercial Appeal

Memphis has completed analysis of nearly half of the more than 12,000 police sexual assault kits that sat untested in storage for years, City Council members were told Tuesday.

Memphis Police have completed analysis of 6,055 kits, according to a report by the Sexual Assault Kit Task Force to the council. Another 3,378 kits, or 27 percent, are at the lab awaiting testing, and 2,491 kits, or 24 percent, need additional analysis.

Police have closed 83 percent of the investigations that have been opened as a result of the kit tests, according to the task force. In the case of 23 percent of the cases, that was because the crimes had passed the statute of limitations.
June 17, 2015 - Shelby County Attorney Ross Dyer speaks during a meeting of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners' Budget and Finance Committee to approve the county's operating budget for fiscal year 2016. (Brandon Dill/Special to The Commercial Appeal)

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By Richard Locker of The Commercial Appeal

NASHVILLE  The state legislature confirmed Gov. Bill Haslam's appointment of Memphis lawyer J. Ross Dyer to the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals' West Tennessee division Monday evening.

Dyer, 43, who has been the chief counsel for Shelby County government since 2014, replaces Roger Page on the 12-member state appeals court. Haslam announced his selection of Dyer on March 31.

The Court of Criminal Appeals hears appeals in criminal cases from the trial courts. Its 12 judges sit in panels of three, primarily in Jackson, Nashville and Knoxville. Appeals from the Court of Criminal Appeals go to the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Dyer, his wife Amy and daughter Mary Elizabeth were present at the House for a joint House-Senate session where his appointment was confirmed in a roll call vote of the members of both chambers, but was not offered an opportunity to address the full chamber.

Prior to become Shelby County attorney, he was senior counsel and managing attorney for state attorney general's Memphis office from 2004-2014. He had previously worked in the AG's criminal justice division in Nashville office from 1998-2004.

Dyer received his law degree from Samford University in Birmingham in 1998 and a bachelor's degree in business administration from Millsaps College in 1995.

Senate Minority Leader Lee Harris, D-Memphis, said he believes Dyer has "significant professional experience that would make him suitable for this important public role" but also expressed concern about what he called a "significant error in judgment" by Dyer as county attorney in advising county officials not to share with the public a disparity study on contracting by Shelby County government.

"The report was paid for with public dollars and concerned a topic of public importance. ... Further, the nominee advised the County Commission to only discuss the study in a private session because as I understand it, the nominee considered the disparity report to be a privileged document," Harris said.

He also said he encourages the governor to make appointments "that reflect the diversity of perspectives that we see across the state. The governor has made four appointments to the Court of Criminal Appeals and three of the four have been former prosecutors and all four have been men."

Dyer's grandfather Ross W. Dyer was a justice on the Tennessee Supreme Court, appointed in 1961 and its chief justice from 1969 to 1974.
Sun 11 Nov 07 -- Photo by Mike Brown. Paulette Holt, from Carson, CA, clasps her bible during the opening of the Order of Divine Worship at the FedEx Forum on Sunday.

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By Richard Locker of The Commercial Appeal

NASHVILLE  The House sponsor of the bill designating the Bible as the "official state book" of Tennessee served formal notice on the House floor Monday night that he will try to override Gov. Bill Haslam's veto of the bill.

Under House rules, the House cannot act on the override attempt until at least 8 p.m. Tuesday  24 hours after Rep. Jerry Sexton, R-Bean Station, announced on the House floor his intentions to resurrect his controversial bill.

It appeared briefly that Sexton would attempt to suspend the House rules in order to vote on the override attempt on the spot. That would have required a two-thirds vote of the House membership  at least 66 of the 99 House members. After a brief discussion with House leaders and clerks, Sexton said he would yield to the 24-hour rule.

The General Assembly is working toward adjournment this week and both the House and Senate are meeting long hours to work through their backlogs of bills. It won't be known until late Tuesday whether the House will be in floor session on Tuesday evening or whether the override attempt will occur Wednesday.

Sexton expressed some concern that the Senate  where the Bible bill passed with only two votes to spare  could adjourn for the year before the 24 hours is up. The state constitution requires the House to act on a veto override first because it was the first of the two chambers to pass the bill.

However, if the House overrides the veto, the Senate could vote on the override immediately, with no public-notice delay.

Overriding the veto takes only the same simple majority of the membership of each chamber that it takes to pass legislation in the first place  50 votes in the House and 17 votes in the 33-member Senate.

Haslam vetoed the bill Thursday, saying he believes it "trivializes" the Bible and noting that the state attorney general has opined that it violates both the U.S. and Tennessee constitutions.
Sen. Frank Nicely, R-Strawberry Plains, center, walks between demonstrators opposed to immigration restrictions outside the Senate Chamber on Monday, Feb. 22, 2016, in Nashville, Tenn. The state Senate has passed a resolution on a 27-5 vote directing Tennessee's attorney general to mount a legal challenge to the federal refugee resettlement program. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

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By Sheila Burke, The Tennessean

NASHVILLE  A resolution that would order Tennessee to sue the federal government over its refugee resettlement program passed Monday in the state House. Senate counterparts previously approved the resolution and would only have to agree to a change that would allow a private law firm to sue on behalf of the state before the measure becomes law.

Gov. Bill Haslam cannot veto it because it is a resolution and not a bill.

Immigrant rights groups condemned the proposal after the vote, saying the true intention of the measure was to stop or limit Muslim refugee resettlement in Tennessee. They also said the state would appear unwelcoming.

"We are disappointed but not surprised by the House of Representatives' vote today," said Stephanie Teatro, co-executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.

She added in her statement, "The passage of this resolution, and the litigation that will follow, puts Tennessee on the wrong side of history."

Fears about refugee resettlement in Tennessee were heightened after last November's terrorist attacks in Paris. Aside from security concerns, some lawmakers have argued that the refugee program leaves states without a say about who comes in and forces them to foot the bill for the education, health and other taxpayer-funded services provided to the refugees.

The states of Texas and Alabama have sued the federal government over the refugee rights program.

The resolution was sponsored by Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey.

Some lawmakers raised concerns during debate about letting private legal firms step in to sue on behalf of the Tennessee, even if it is for free, as opposed to getting the state attorney general to do the legal work.

"I understand this is a well-intended resolution, but I think this goes down a very dangerous path, essentially opening up our government to whatever band of activist lawyer happens to roll along and want to conduct so-called free litigation for us," said Mike Stewart, D-Nashville.

But Rep. Terri Lynn Weaver, a Lancaster Republican who supports the resolution, said the measure was necessary because federal government overreach with the program.

"We have no say what happens in our borders," Weaver said. "We are not consulted."

Teatro, of the immigrant and refugee rights group, has previously said there about 1,600 refugees resettled in the state each year with about 1,100 of them moving into Nashville.
Barney Sellers/The Commercial Appeal files Brother Lambert Thomas (left), president of Christian Brothers College, was presented the Man of the Year Award on April 19, 1955, by the Memphis Notre Dame Club, with its president, Joe Signaigo (right), in charge. The Rev. Alfred F. Mendez, placement director at Notre Dame, addressed a dinner meeting on the crisis in higher education.

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April 19

25 years ago: 1991

Two Memphis-area Piggly Wiggly stores closed and a third changed hands Thursday, leaving an estimated 225 people without jobs and some shoppers without their favorite grocery stores. Malone & Hyde, the wholesale food distributor and owner of the Piggly Wiggly chain, took over the three stores from Metro Market Inc. after the grocery store operator failed to meet its financial obligations. Shoppers at the Piggly Wiggly supermarkets on Winchester near Mendenhall and on Elvis Presley in Whitehaven found locked doors on Thursday and signs promising to "reopen soon under new ownership." Malone & Hyde said both are for sale.

50 years ago: 1966

SANTA MONICA, Calif.  Britain's Julie Christie, the jet set swinger of "Darling," and Lee Marvin, the alcoholic gunslinger of "Cat Ballou," were named the top film performers of 1965 at the 38th Motion Picture Academy awards Monday night. "The Sound of Music," song-filled romance of the Von Trapp family, was chosen best film of the year. It scored four other Oscars, including one for Robert Wise's direction. Shelley Winters, the brutal, slatternly mother of "A Patch of Blue," won the best supporting actress Oscar. The statuette for best supporting actor went to Martin Balsam, as the patient, understanding brother in "A Thousand Clowns."

75 years ago: 1941

Eager to study and observe the working of metropolitan newspapers, the Mid-South's high school journalists converged on Memphis yesterday for the eighth annual convention of the Mississippi Valley Press Association.

100 years ago: 1916

WASHINGTON  President Wilson will lay the German submarine crisis before a joint session of Congress tomorrow. He is expected to inform Congress of his conviction that friendly relations cannot continue in light of continued violations of American rights on the high seas.

125 years ago: 1891

HOT SPRINGS, Ark.  Travel to the springs is decreasing and the arrivals are less numerous than the departures. During the past week about 2,000 visitors left. This leaves about 4,000.
Stadium requests for Memphis will test of Strickland's Nashville bonds

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland wants money for new stadiums. The ask will test his bonds in Nashville.
January 17, 2013 - Visitors gather in the gallery in the ornate, domed Mississippi House chamber, to view the gaveling in of a recent session. (Stan Carroll/The Commercial Appeal)

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By Jeff Amy, Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss.  Seven Democrats provided the crucial votes Monday in the Mississippi House of Representatives to approve $415 million in tax cuts over 12 years.

The House voted 73-44 Monday to approve a House-Senate agreement on Senate Bill 2858, sending it to the Senate for consideration there. The Senate, which is likely to approve the measure, faced a Monday night deadline for consideration.

The agreement would phase out Mississippi's $260-million-a-year corporate franchise tax, a long-held goal of manufacturers, bankers and other business groups. It would also cut $145 million in income taxes, raising the threshold for paying state income taxes to $10,000. Anyone making that much would get a $150-a-year cut. Those reductions would begin in 2018.

Finally, Mississippi would lower taxes on self-employment, cutting $10.2 million over three years beginning in 2017.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jeff Smith, R-Columbus, told House members during debate that Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves was unlikely to allow senators to approve a bill calling for the state to borrow $250 million for construction projects if the House didn't approve the tax cut. Reeves has been pushing for a tax cut, including the elimination of the franchise tax, for two years, and the tax cut and bond bill got linked during negotiations between the chambers, with House members seeking more borrowing but shying away from tax cuts, while Reeves took the opposite position.

"If we go home without doing something for our colleges and universities, we're being negligent, and this is something I think we need to reluctantly do," Smith said.

Democrats questioned the wisdom of approving tax cuts while revenues were declining. Lawmakers approved more than $350 million in business tax reductions during the previous four-year term, and business tax collections are already projected to fall $150 million from last year to 2017.

The first year of the franchise tax cut will leave only 245 businesses paying that state levy on capital, Smith said.

Like most other proposed income tax cuts, benefits would flow most to high-earning households. Projections from the liberal-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy show the lowest-earning 20 percent of taxpayers, making $16,000 or less, would save an average of $14 a year. Those earning in the top 95 percent to 99 percent of households, with incomes from $156,000 to $324,000, would collect an average of $271 a year. That's in part because high-income households are more likely to have two earners.
March 4, 2016 - Germantown police. (Brandon Dill/Special to The Commercial Appeal)

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By Jane Roberts of The Commercial Appeal

Germantown police arrested a juvenile male who fled after the stolen Mustang he was in crashed at Riverdale Road and New Riverdale on Sunday.

Two other occupants fled on foot after the wreck. Police searched the area unsuccessfully for more than two hours with a the help of the Shelby County Sheriff's Office K-9 Unit.

The incident started around 12:20 p.m. when a police officer noticed the window tint on vehicle seemed darker than the legal limit. The car was traveling west on Poplar near Willey Road.

The officer ran a check on the license. The 2007 red Mustang, registered to Michael Taylor of Memphis, was stolen, according to the police report.

The officer attempted a traffic stop with lights on at Oak Run and Hunters Hill Cove. The driver fled at high speed, eventually crashing into a street sign and stop sign at Riverdale and New Riverdale.

The male suspect, 15, was charged with having stolen property valued between $10,000 and $60,000, and two counts of evading arrest.

He was released to his father. Police are still looking for the other two suspects.
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By Eugene Robinson

WASHINGTON  For decades, the Republican Party gave voters the impression that they get to pick the presidential nominee. The much-weakened GOP establishment theoretically has the power to choose someone else  but not, I believe, the strength of purpose to do it.

The author of this dilemma is, of course, Donald Trump. After a two-week pause in the primary schedule, Trump  a Manhattan icon  is expected to romp in New York today and capture the lion's share of the state's 95 convention delegates. Polls show he is also likely to post big wins the following week, on April 26, in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

The bigger his victory margins, the closer Trump can come to securing the 1,237 delegates he needs, thus making all the "contested convention" machinations moot. But it seems likely that he will fall short. Let's say, for argument's sake, he gets to the convention with about 1,100 delegates  far more than rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich. What happens then?

The Cruz campaign has worked tirelessly, and quite successfully, to ensure that as many delegates as possible are Cruz supporters, even if they are pledged to vote for Trump on the convention's first ballot, which presumably would be inconclusive. In subsequent rounds of voting, those delegates would be free to switch to Cruz  and ultimately give him the nomination.

To pull this off, however, Cruz would need the support, or at least the acquiescence, of party insiders  who dislike Cruz almost as much as Trump. Many leading Republicans believe, in fact, that Cruz, with his hard-right views, would be an even surer loser in November than the unpredictable Trump, who is unburdened by philosophy.

I have heard veterans of GOP smoke-filled rooms make the argument this way: If the party is going to incur the wrath of primary voters and caucus-goers by nominating someone other than Trump, why pick a candidate who will most likely lose to Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee? Why not pick someone who has a fighting chance with independents, such as Kasich? Or even a "white knight" such as House Speaker Paul Ryan (who made clear last week that he does not want the nomination)?

I have also heard prominent Republicans argue that the convention delegates will have what amounts to a fiduciary duty to choose a candidate who is fit to serve as president. Trump's volatile temperament and ignorance of policy, according to this view, make him ineligible.

And then there's the political calculation. Some GOP graybeards believe the party is unlikely to capture the White House with any nominee. But Trump's massive unpopularity with the wider electorate  a recent Associated Press poll of registered voters found that 63 percent said they would never vote for him  could threaten the party's Senate and House majorities. Cruz, Kasich or a white knight might lose without dragging the rest of the ticket down with them.

All of this is fascinating to ponder, at least for those who love politics. But I wouldn't bet on any of these scenarios. I believe that if Trump comes anywhere close to a delegate majority, the party leadership caves and he gets the nomination.

Trump would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what's coming. In recent speeches, he has staked out the position that the candidate who comes to the convention with the biggest number of delegates should be the nominee, period. Polls show that a majority of Republicans agree with the helmet-haired billionaire. It turns out that once you tell people they get to choose their standard-bearer, they don't take kindly to being patted on the head and told to go sit in the corner.

Trump's newly hired convention manager, GOP veteran Paul Manafort, accused the Cruz campaign of using "Gestapo tactics" to steal delegates. Trump said Sunday that, gee, he sure hopes there's no violence in Cleveland if the party establishment tries to take the nomination away from him. Not that he would ever suggest such a thing, of course.

As I said, all of this is moot if Trump wins a delegate majority outright. But if he narrowly misses the magic number, I don't believe the debilitated establishment can muster the solidarity to deny him. At this point, I'm afraid, the GOP is much more Trump's party than theirs.

Contact Eugene Robinson at eugenerobinson@washpost.com.
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By Greg Jaffe and Griff Witte

For someone who preaches the importance of diplomacy and outreach, even to longtime enemies, President Obama can be awfully tough on his friends.

In recent months, he has offended most of the United States' Persian Gulf allies. "All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats," he joked privately, according to a recent profile in the Atlantic magazine. Publicly, he has said he "weeps" for Saudi and Kuwaiti children.

The United States' European allies, he complains, have grown too dependent on American firepower to keep them safe.

Even the United Kingdom, a U.S. "special" partner, has received criticism. Obama seemed to blame the postwar chaos in Libya on British Prime Minister David Cameron, who he said "became distracted by other things" and didn't do enough to bring order to the fractious country.

In the next several weeks, Obama will take a series of overseas trips to firm up U.S. alliances and help set the president's foreign policy legacy. The first of the trips begins today with stops in Saudi Arabia, Great Britain and Germany, where the president will tackle an ambitious agenda that includes battling the Islamic State, constraining Iran, sustaining support for sanctions against Russia and warding off a British exit from the European Union.

One big challenge for Obama will be squaring the careful diplomatic rhetoric that's a standard, and frequently stultifying, part of all presidential visits with his tougher, more honest language from interviews back home.

"Leaders are going to have to deal with that dichotomy," said Heather Conley, a former State Department official and a Europe analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "and I don't believe it's going to be very easy."

Even before he became president, Obama introduced himself to the world as a multilateralist who aimed to solve the thorny problems of the 21st century collaboratively. "True partnership and true progress . . . require allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other," Obama told adoring crowds in Berlin in 2008.

He followed up that speech one year later in Cairo by quoting verses from the Quran, acknowledging America's mistakes and calling for a new partnership with the Muslim world "based upon mutual interest and mutual respect."

Seven years later, the soaring, optimistic language of those early speeches has long since been subsumed by the messy reality of war and diplomacy. Obama has not been able to forge a close rapport with many world leaders.

The president's cold-eyed view was apparent last year after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly by two militant gunmen. World leaders from Germany, France and the United Kingdom marched through the streets of Paris with longtime adversaries such as the Israeli prime minister and the head of the Palestinian Authority. No senior official from the United States marched with the European leaders, prompting a rare apology from the White House.

"I've never heard that Obama has a personal relationship with any of them," said Xenia Wickett, head of the Americas program at the London-based think tank Chatham House. "It is neither hot nor cold. There is no personal relationship."

For Britons especially, that's a break from a long history of starry-eyed relationships between leaders across the Atlantic. Roosevelt and Churchill. Reagan and Thatcher. Bush and Blair. Obama, the mixed-race child of a single mother, and Cameron, a stockbroker's son with royal lineage, have never had the same kind of personal chemistry.

Obama's cool relations with European leaders is partly a product of his style  even in Washington, the president is known for his frosty relationship with fellow Democrats and big donors. He disdains neediness and sometimes struggles to empathize with allies. It's also a product of an era in which Western leaders have been focused inwardly on domestic politics.

"Who are Cameron's close relationships with? Who are Merkel's? Or Hollande's?" Wickett asked, referring to the British, German and French leaders. "We're just not as focused on one another in the same way that we might have been historically."

One big question is whether Obama's lack of personal ties to his fellow world leaders is hindering his foreign policy. The primary cause of the strain between Obama and Arab allies is rooted in big differences over how to deal with the collapse of autocratic governments and huge refugee flows.

The United States' Gulf allies have lambasted Obama for not doing enough to confront Iranian aggression or to stop Syria's bloody civil war. "This policy has led to increased chaos and bloodshed," Nawaf Obaid, special counselor to the Saudi ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2011 to 2015, wrote earlier this week in the National Interest magazine.

The president's tough, and unprecedented, critique of longtime Arab allies has not helped in the search for common ground. Nor has the bitter and divisive presidential campaign in which all of the major Republican presidential candidates have called for barring the refugees of Syria or other majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States.

"It's clear that the president's cerebral, dispassionate approach isn't well-suited to the Gulf leaders," said Perry Cammack, a former State Department official in the Obama administration and associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The end of the Obama administration can't come quickly enough for these leaders."

In Europe, where Obama remains popular with the public, his tough-love approach has been less of a handicap. A Pew Research Center survey last year showed that about three-quarters or more of voters across France, Germany and Britain trusted Obama to do the right thing - a lofty status that is down only slightly from his first year in office.

Often, Obama seems a bit bored by issues on the continent. Still, Europeans like Obama's deliberative, rational, technocratic style. "He looks and smells like a European," Wickett said.

When Obama appeared to lash out at Cameron in the Atlantic magazine piece, saying the British leader had become "distracted" after the Western air campaign in Libya, the remarks fed a few days of headlines in Britain.

But the controversy quickly faded, and the close cooperation between the two governments moved forward without a hiccup. "The so-called special relationship isn't about how Thatcher and Reagan get on," said Walter Ladwig, a professor at King's College London. "When you get under the hood of intelligence networks, for instance, in some respects the British and American operations are inseparable. And that kind of cooperation continues irrespective of whether Barack and Dave are grilling hot dogs together."

Still, when Obama is standing with the Saudi king, the British prime minister or the German chancellor, talking about their countries' enduring alliance, it's possible that some may be thinking back to an interview the president did late last year with comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

"How many world leaders do you think are just completely out of their mind?" Seinfeld asked Obama.

"A sizable percentage," the president replied without missing a beat. "Some of these people, you meet them, you'll just be chatting and you look in the eyes and go, 'Oh, this guy's gone.'"

Greg Jaffe and Griff Witte are reporters for The Washington Post.
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By Jackson Diehl

Shortly after the fall of Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, to the Islamic State in June 2014, a delegation of senior officials from Iraqi Kurdistan visited Washington with a troubling question: Fromwhere, they asked, would the force come to retake the city? The Iraqi army was too shattered, and the Kurds were too weak, and outside powers such as Turkey and the United States were unwilling to commit ground forces.

A lot has happened in the nearly two years since then. Among other things, the Obama administration has retrained nearly 20,000 Iraqi troops, dispatched some 5,000 U.S. trainers, Marines and special operationsforces to the area, and launched more than 11,000 combat air sorties against Islamic State targets. Yet when another delegation of senior Kurdish officials circulated through Washington last week, their question about Mosul was unchanged: Who is going to do this?

"We heard a plan is close to being drawn up" for retaking the city, said Qubad Talabani, deputy prime minister of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, who recently met in Baghdad with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and the senior U.S. commander in the theater, Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland. "But we got a sense there are gaping holes in that plan."

U.S. officials have lately been talking up what they say has been the growing momentum of the war against the Islamic State. They say President Obama, who has repeatedly called it his top priority, has asked for an "acceleration" of the campaign.

To listen to the Kurds, however, is to appreciate the towering obstacles that still must be overcome before the two most important cities held by the jihadists, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, can be retaken. Missing is not just adequate numbers of forces, but also funding, political leadership and that most elusive of goods in the Middle East: a workable vision of what happens the day after the bad guys are dispatched.

It doesn't help that Iraq is suffering through an economic and fiscal crisis caused by the drop in oil prices and yet another political emergency in Baghdad, where a besieged Abadi has been trying without success to introduce a new cabinet. Those upheavals have left Kurdistan, an autonomous region, broke: Its fighters, the peshmerga, have not been paid in three months. Talabani was in Washington in part to appeal for U.S. financial aid, without which the Kurdish forces probably could not be mobilized for a Mosul offensive. The Kurds asked for $200 million a month; the Pentagon suggested $50 million.

No White House decision on funding the Kurds has been made. Even if the money is forthcoming, the question remains: Who will conduct the street-by-street combat Mosul will require? The terrorists have built defensive berms across the city, seeded mines and IEDs and, the Kurds say, loaded mustard gas into artillery shells. An assaulting force might confront the chemical attacks that U.S. troops expected but never faced in 2003.

Iraqi army forces quickly faltered last month when they tried to begin clearing operations near the city of Makhmour, about 70 miles south of Mosul. That's when 200 U.S. Marines were secretly sent to the area to establish a "fire base" with artillery. Even with that support, the Iraqis have managed to take only a handful of villages. "We all know the Iraqi army is not ready yet," Falah Bakir, Kurdistan's chief of foreign relations, told a group of Post journalists.

The Pentagon is now talking about establishing more fire bases on the way to Mosul, and sources say hundreds more special operationsforces and other troops may be deployed as the campaign unfolds. Commanders hope that thousands of Sunni tribesmen being trained as security forces can be used to secure the liberated city. But that still raises the question of whether Iraqi Shiite militias backed by Iran will be allowed to join the assault, as they are pressing to do. If so, they may plunge into sectarian bloodletting with the Sunni population.

Such complexities probably explain why Abadi and MacFarland have yet to show a completed campaign plan to the Kurds. Even more remote is a strategy for postwar governance in Mosul and other Sunni-populated areas that would supplant the Islamic State with something the local population would support. Talabani reckons a Sunni jurisdiction inside a federal Iraq might be an answer, but there's no sign that the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, its allies in Iran or even the Sunnis themselves would agree to it.

All this points to a stark bottom line: There will be no liberation of Mosul in 2016. The Islamic State will outlive the U.S. administration whose lapses in Syria and Iraq helped to create it. It will be the ugliest piece of Barack Obama's legacy.

Jackson Diehl is deputy editorial page editor for The Washington Post.
Former Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude used to call Liam Maxwell the man who checks the homework.

First as an advisor to Maude, then as government CTO, Maxwell was responsible for making sure Whitehall IT buyers did what they were told and writing their report card when they didnt. He was never afraid to tell them there was room for improvement.

Given the power to veto IT purchases by approving departmental technology spending, Maxwell rooted out the knee-jerk practice of giving huge, mega-outsourcing deals to a small number of large and inefficient system integrators. His mobile phone became famous for the What is the user need? sticker on its back, which he would brandish at errant IT buyers during meetings.

It was an essential task, and Maxwell was very good at it. Thanks largely to him, we can hope we have broken once and for all the oligopoly of IT suppliers that dominated government technology and sucked out billions of taxpayer pounds every year for little return.

He is moving to become the UKs first national technology advisor, responsible for co-ordinating policy and plans across Whitehall to grow the digital economy and attract tech companies and investment into the country. Its a huge and important role  one that Computer Weekly and others have called for on many occasions to give a high-level focus to the growth of a digital Britain.

With his move, the Government Digital Service (GDS) has now completed almost a clean sweep of departures among many of its key pre-election leaders.

Maxwell follows GDS chief Mike Bracken, deputy director Tom Loosemore, director of strategy Russell Davies, design director Ben Terrett, transformation director Mike Beaven, deputy CTO Magnus Falk and G-Cloud head Tony Singleton out of the door of Aviation House, the GDS HQ opposite Holborn tube station in London.

When Bracken announced his departure last summer  closely followed by a co-ordinated mass resignation involving Loosemore, Davies and Terrett that left a bad feeling among some of those that remained  it raised inevitable questions about the direction of digital government and the future of GDS.

Bracken effectively secured GDSs immediate future before he left at the end of September  his business case for the government as a platform (GaaP) strategy helping to secure a 450m budget from chancellor George Osborne.

But Maxwells departure comes at a time when questions still linger around GDS, prompted in part by the continued absence of a business plan for spending that 450m pot, which was originally meant to be published in December last year.

Maxwell leaving GDS is not as seismic a shock as when Bracken quit, however. Insiders suggest that Maxwell had been operating increasingly at arms length from the rest of GDS for some time, with key lieutenants like deputy CTO Andy Beale and director of common technology services Iain Patterson fronting the work.

In recent months it has seemed at times that there are two camps around GDS. There are those who support Maxwell and point to his achievements in enforcing spending controls, open standards, and technology governance as key to the 599m savings attributed to GDS by government auditors.

Then there is the digital camp  the proponents of Brackens legacy who point out how digital has become central to the transformation of Whitehall departments and is at the heart of public sector and civil service reform in the years to come.

In truth, both have of course played a huge part  and in many respects, both probably moved on at the right time, having put their own strengths to the best use.

Bracken was the visionary who sold the concept of digital government and helped embed digital and agile thinking and skills into Whitehall.

Maxwell was the bulldog who bashed heads together and stopped the plainly stupid and destructive technology purchasing habits of the past.

GDS now is becoming a more collaborative partner  a supporter of departments rather than the agent of change; a setter of standards and governance rather than an enforcer to stop bad practices. It could be argued (and both camps have) that Bracken and Maxwells strengths are not so well suited to this next phase of GDSs development.

Maxwell will be looked back on as the right man for the right time in government technology. He came into Whitehall initially as an advisor to Francis Maude, who in turn provided the political muscle that allowed Maxwell to become the destroyer of old ways.

Inevitably though, being the person who says no means you fall out with people along the way. Many are the tales from government insiders citing arguments and breakdowns in relationships.

Maxwell was forced to bear the brunt of the highest-profile example of such a breakdown as senior responsible owner for the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) digital service when it collapsed in March 2015. He was later labelled Mr Fancypants by MP Richard Bacon during a Public Accounts Committee hearing that revealed personal rifts and counter-productive behaviours between RPA and GDS staff.

Maxwell admitted to the committee that he is not a conciliatory person when there are issues to be resolved.

For all his achievements, there will be people happy to see Maxwells back as he leaves GDS  a fact that Maxwell himself would probably acknowledge in private. But he is respected by ministers  he was close to Maude even before the Tories came to power as part of the Coalition government, and he is close t o Maudes successor, Matt Hancock, too. As a former Tory local councillor  and ex-IT manager of Eton College  Maxwell understands the political classes.

In an interview with Computer Weekly soon after he quit last year, Bracken made a prescient observation about Maxwells strengths: Liam is a brilliant figurehead for technology policy. I cant think of anyone better to advise ministers on encryption, the digital single market, or to accompany ministers on international visits. Liam is brilliant at those.

Bracken was unwittingly writing the job description for Maxwells new role as national technology advisor in that one statement nine months ago.

So now Maxwell goes from checking the homework of government IT buyers to checking the homework of government digital economy policy. If he shakes up a few people along the way, good for him. If he brings positive changes in policy and planning as a result, then good for us.
Google won approval last week to begin testing innovative 3.5 GHz wireless capabilities by using antennas on light poles and other structures in eight areas of Kansas City, Mo.

It will be the first large-scale test of its kind in the nation, following a framework created by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) a year ago for the new Citizens Broadband Radio Service, which uses 3.5GHz spectrum and allows for dynamic spectrum sharing.

The test could last up to 18 months and result in fast, short-range wireless connections to serve areas not reached by Google Fiber. FCC officials have called the 3.5GHz band the "innovation band," noting it could evolve into a new flavor of Wi-Fi or even an LTE Unlicensed band.

The commercial potential for the 3.5GHz band is large, both for Google and for its customers. "Yes, 3.5GHz is pretty innovative and could help Google create a city wide broadband network in KC," said Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics.

Google could use the service in many ways, although new smartphones and tablets would require 3.5GHz antennas for access to the band. However, a simple dongle inserted into a laptop's USB port could provide a 3.5GHz antenna, Entner noted.

Theoretically, wireless speeds of up to 300Mbps could be supported, compared to many 4G LTE average speeds of just 10Mbps to 20Mbps, Entner said. The 3.5GHz spectrum could also be used by Internet of Things devices for wireless connections.

Google Fiber first installed 1Gbps Internet connections in homes in the Kansas City area in 2012 and now reaches businesses on both the Kansas and Missouri sides of the metro area. Google won't divulge how many subscribers it has.

"If Google is successful in the 3.5GHz test and goes on to provide commercial services, KC will become the most wirelessly connected gigabit region to benefit from new advanced wireless services," Assistant City Manager Rick Usher said in an interview.

The Kansas City, Mo. City Council voted last Thursday 11-2 to approve the use of city poles to support antennas in eight neighborhoods, including a downtown location near Google offices.

Google will receive from the city a discounted use rate of $45 per light pole, per year for attaching antennas during the trial. Afterwards, Google will pay $540 per pole per year, should it actually create a commercial service with the technology, according to city documents.

Google wouldn't comment Monday beyond the presentation it gave last week to city officials. The 3.5GHz testing is part of the Access organization under Alphabet, the name for the umbrella organization created by Google last year. The KC 3.5GHz testing is separate from Project Fi, which is an Android service introduced a year ago that combines Wi-Fi and wireless services for customers.

Even though the 3.5GHz test is separate from Project Fi, some analysts said the two could eventually be combined.

Google won approval from the FCC last year to do an experimental 3.5GHz wireless test. The company has also claimed its testing shows that both LTE and Wi-Fi network can work alongside radar systems used by the U.S. Navy in the 3.5GHz band. Google had performed the tests to prove the spectrum could be shared by various users; the FCC has required that technology be used to establish a priority for the defense networks.

Google defended the use of shared spectrum in a blog last year.

In its presentation to Kansas City officials, Google said it chose the city for the test because the area "understands technology and innovation" and has been an "excellent" partner.

Usher said a side benefit of commercialized 3.5GHz could be cheaper wireless service to lower-income residents who rely heavily on smartphone access to the Internet. "Shared spectrum in the 3.5GHz space has the potential to reduce costs and assist in our efforts to erase the digital divide in KC," Usher said.

"Wireless connectivity is a critical element of smart city success due to the massive amount of data generated and utilized in the networks," he said.

Last year, Sprint, which is located in Overland Park, Kans., announced it is financing a $9 million free Wi-Fi zone along a new 2.2-mile streetcar route in downtown that opens May 6.

Smart city initiatives like those in Kansas City are being launched in many cities nationally. In a separate announcement Monday, AT&T and Miami-Dade County announced a partnership to bring technology innovations for smart lighting, public transportation and to reduce traffic and preserve natural resources.

AT&T previously announced a smart city partnership with Atlanta, among other communities.

Last week, Verizon said it would provide fiber optic connections to homes and businesses in Boston and conduct a traffic safety technology pilot on a busy city thoroughfare there.
Neither humans nor A.I. has proven overwhelmingly successful at maintaining cybersecurity on their own, so why not see what happens when you combine the two? That's exactly the premise of a new project from MIT, and it's achieved some impressive results.

Researchers from MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and machine-learning startup PatternEx have developed a new platform called A.I.2 that can detect 85 percent of attacks. It also reduces the number of "false positives" -- nonthreats mistakenly identified as threats -- by a factor of five, the researchers said.

The system was tested on 3.6 billion pieces of data generated by millions of users over a period of three months. The researchers presented a paper summarizing the project earlier this month at the IEEE International Conference on Big Data Security.

"You can think about the system as a virtual analyst," said CSAIL research scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni, who developed A.I.2 with Ignacio Arnaldo, a chief data scientist at PatternEx and a former CSAIL postdoc. "It continuously generates new models that it can refine in as little as a few hours, meaning it can improve its detection rates significantly and rapidly."

Even as fears abound regarding the job-replacing potential of artificial intelligence, it's becoming increasingly apparent that combining A.I. with human insight can deliver much better results than either side could produce alone. Just last week, for example, Spare5 released a new platform that applies a combination of human insight and machine learning to help companies make sense of unstructured data.

In the world of cybersecurity, human-driven techniques typically rely on rules created by living experts and therefore miss any attacks that dont match the rules. Machine-learning approaches, on the other hand, rely on anomaly detection, which tends to trigger false positives that create distrust of the system and still end up having to be investigated by humans.

Creating cybersecurity systems that merge human and computer-based approaches isn't easy, though, partly because of the challenge of manually labeling cybersecurity data for the algorithms. For many tasks, such as visual recognition, labeling is just a matter of enlisting a few human volunteers on a crowdsourcing site like Amazon Mechanical Turk, but not many workers have the skills needed to apply labels like "DDOS" or "exfiltration attacks," Veeramachaneni said. "You need security experts."

Experts, meanwhile, tend to be short on time. Recognizing that constraint, A.I.2 uses machine learning first to find the most important potential problems; only then does it show the top events to analysts for labeling. On day one of its training, A.I.2 picks the 200 "most abnormal" events using unsupervised machine learning and gives them to the human expert, MIT explained. Those analysts then confirm which events are actual attacks, and the system incorporates that feedback into its models for the next set of data.

As the system improves over time, the number of events analysts must evaluate is reduced dramatically, MIT said.

"The more attacks the system detects, the more analyst feedback it receives, which in turn improves the accuracy of future predictions," Veeramachaneni says. "That human-machine interaction creates a beautiful, cascading effect."
Transporting information from one place to another is a key part of any computing platform, and now researchers have figured out a way to make it possible in the quantum world.

To prove their point, they demonstrated what's known as perfect state transfer on a photonic qubit that's entangled with another qubit at a different location.

In traditional computing, numbers are represented by either 0s or 1s. Quantum computing relies on atomic-scale quantum bits, or qubits, that can be simultaneously 0 and 1 -- a state known as superposition. Quantum bits can also become "entangled" so that they are dependent on one another even across distances.

Today's microprocessors use data buses to route bits of information to and from memory. Transferring quantum information is trickier, because quantum states are so fragile -- try to move a qubit, and the quantum state may change.

To test out their approach, the researchers in this study turned to particles of light. Hailing from RMIT University in Australia, Italy's National Research Council, and China's South University of Science and Technology, the scientists used a technique by which quantum information is encoded in such particles, also known as photons.

Using an experimental setup with multiple "waveguide" tubes, they tried to relocate the data among locations while achieving perfect state transfer, preserving the delicate quantum state of entanglement. In their tests, the researchers were able to perform the procedure while preserving the encoded quantum state with an average fidelity of 97.1 percent.

Ultimately, the discovery could pave the way for a quantum data bus and bring quantum computing closer to reality, they said. Quantum computers could have much higher performance than today's systems.

"Quantum computers promise to solve vital tasks that are currently unmanageable on today's standard computers," said Alberto Peruzzo, director of RMIT's Quantum Photonics Laboratory. "It could make the critical difference for discovering new drugs, developing a perfectly secure quantum Internet and even improving facial recognition.''

The research was published Monday in Nature Communications.
Technology vendors and law enforcement agencies need to look for a compromise that allows police to gain access to encrypted devices during criminal investigations, lawmakers say.

Many tech vendors and privacy advocates have suggested there is no available compromise between strong security for device users and police access to encrypted communications. But members of a congressional committee on Tuesday pushed both sides in the ongoing encryption debate to look again for a possible middle ground.

As Apple and the FBI continue to argue in court about whether the company should assist the agency with unlocking iPhones, "it's time to begin a new chapter in this battle, one which I hope can ultimately bring some resolution to the war," said Representative Tim Murphy, a Pennsylvania Republican.

Many lawmakers see both sides of the issue, with encryption protecting consumers' personal information but also allowing criminals to hide their activities, Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, said during a hearing of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight subcommittee.

Tech companies and privacy advocates haven't offered constructive solutions to the problem, DeGette said. "I think many of these arguments are valid, but I've only heard what we should not do, not what we should do collectively to address this problem," she said.

While Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell testified during Tuesday's hearing, Facebook and WhatsApp declined to send employees to appear, DeGette noted.

"It's hard to solve a problem when the key players won't show up for this discussion," she said. "Relying on Congress to, on its own, pass legislation in a very complex situation such as this is a very blunt instrument at best."

DeGette and Representative Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat, suggested the FBI could pump up its technical expertise so that it doesn't have to rely on tech vendors or outside security experts to crack encryption and other security measures.

"Enhancing the government's technical capability is one potential solution that does not mandate backdoors," DeGette said.

But it's unlikely that the FBI can hire the experts it needs to keep up with new encryption services that continue to roll out, said Amy Hess, the FBI's executive assistant director for science and technology. Instead, in some cases, the FBI will hire outside hackers to attempt to break into phones, she said.

"Technology is changing very rapidly," Hess said. "We live in such an advanced age of technology development, and to keep up with that, we do require the services of specialized skills that we can only get through private industry."

As an alternative, tech vendors should go back to security services where they hold the encryption keys of their users' devices, suggested Charles Cohen, commander of the Office of Intelligence and Investigative Technologies in the Indiana State Police.

When Apple and other tech vendors held user encryption keys, there were no reports of major breaches, Cohen said. "Essentially, what happened since is, Apple solved a problem that doesn't exist," he said.

Apple and Google are making decisions on their own about law enforcement issues by enabling encryption by default on their smartphones, added Thomas Galati, chief of the Intelligence Bureau in the New York City Police Department.

Between October and March, the NYPD was locked out of more than 100 encrypted devices, including 67 Apple devices, used by criminal suspects in murders, rapes, and other cases, Galati said.

Law enforcement agencies are left in a "precarious position" not created by elected officials or U.S. law, he added. "Instead, it is created and controlled by corporations like Apple and Google, who have taken it upon themselves to decide who can access information in criminal investigations," Galati said.

But mandating encryption workarounds will lead to security problems for device users, said Apple's Sewell. "Our digital devices, indeed our entire digital lives, are increasingly and persistently under siege from attackers," he said. "This quest for access fuels a multibillion-dollar covert world of thieves, hackers, and crooks."
A key issue raised by labor unions in their weeklong strike against Verizon is the offshoring of work. The unions say Verizon has plans to send more jobs overseas. Verizon isn't saying what it is doing in this respect, but there is a paper trail of documents filed by its employees that point to offshoring.

The union contends that Verizon wants, in a labor contract, to shift more jobs to contractors. Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers are on strike.

"They want the ability to contract work -- as much as 50% -- the great majority of that is offshore," said Marilyn Irwin, president of the Washington area Communications Workers of America Local 2108. CWA is one of the unions involved in the strike.

This complaint is getting attention in the presidential race, including from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is seeking the Democratic nomination.

"They want to outsource decent paying jobs," Sanders said at the Verizon picket line. Earlier this month, Sanders said Verizon wants to move call center jobs out of the country to places "where people will be paid pennies an hour."

Sander's criticisms of Verizon prompted a response by Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam in a blog post.

"Contrary to Sen. Sanders's contention," wrote McAdam, the proposal that Verizon is making to the union does "not call for mass layoffs or shipping jobs overseas. Rather, we've asked for more flexibility in routing calls and consolidating some of our call centers, some of which employ a handful of people."

Despite repeated attempts, Verizon did not respond to requests for comment.

Over the past several years, Verizon workers have been filing applications with the U.S. Labor Department for Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) benefits. Employees who believe they have lost their jobs as a result of offshore outsourcing can file for benefits that include extended unemployment and educational help.

Verizon workers in multiple states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, New York and North Carolina, have filed claims. These can be filed by state labor officials or affected employees. A minimum of three affected workers must file the application, which, if approved, can make other affected employees at a worksite eligible for benefits as well.

For instance, in Lake Mary, Florida, employees wrote on their TAA application: "Verizon has been in the process of moving all production for all products off shore for the last few years. We were notified in April [2015] that all the remaining VOIP Order Management was being moved to Manila. Two VOIP order managers had been sent to Manila to train the new group.  My group also had to train the offshore group to take over our job function. HR told me this was a massive layoff!"

In Texas, requests for benefits from employees have stated that "work was outsourced" to Manila. The employees said 20 workers lost their jobs.

In North Carolina, workers also cited Manila, and said 11 jobs were lost in that state.

A New York, a TAA petition filed by IT workers said: "Due to a reduction in force, our jobs were eliminated. However, the function continues offshore."
Since 1975, we have already sent the staggering sum of over half a trillion pounds to Brussels. If we vote stay we will send about another 200 billion to Brussels over the next decade.

It is also important to recognise that our rebate is not a permanent and unalterable feature of our membership anchored in the treaties. Its a negotiated settlement  which has had to be re-negotiated before  and which could be eroded, whittled away or rendered less and less significant in future negotiations. One of the reasons we have the rebate is fear Britain might leave. Once weve voted to stay then it will be open season on that sum.

Once we vote to leave we decide the terms of trade

So the process and pace of change is in our hands. There is no arbitrary deadline which we must meet to secure our future  and indeed no arbitrary existing model which we have to accept in order to prosper.

It has been argued that the moment Britain votes to leave a process known as Article 50 is triggered whereby the clock starts ticking and every aspect of any new arrangement with the EU must be concluded within 2 years of that vote being recorded  or else

But there is no requirement for that to occur  quite the opposite.

Logically, in the days after a Vote to Leave the Prime Minister would discuss the way ahead with the Cabinet and consult Parliament before taking any significant step.

Preliminary, informal, conversations would take place with the EU to explore how best to proceed.

It would not be in any nations interest artificially to accelerate the process and no responsible government would hit the start button on a two-year legal process without preparing appropriately.

Nor would it be in anyones interest to hurry parliamentary processes.

We can set the pace.

We will repeal the 1972 European Communities Act, which automatically gives EU law legal force. But we can change it on our terms at a time of our choosing.

After we establish full legal independence we can then decide which EU-inspired rules and regulations we want to keep, which we want to repeal and which we wish to modify.

Britain continues in the free trade area

There is a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey that all European nations have access to, regardless of whether they are in or out of the euro or EU. After we vote to leave we will stay in this zone. The suggestion that Bosnia, Serbia, Albania and the Ukraine would stay part of this free trade area  and Britain would be on the outside with just Belarus  is as credible as Jean-Claude Juncker joining UKIP.

Agreeing to maintain this continental free trade zone is the simple course and emphatically in everyones interests.

We will take back control of immigration

We could also benefit economically from control of immigration.

At the moment any EU citizen can come to the UK to settle, work, claim benefits and use the NHS. We have no proper control over whether that individuals presence here is economically beneficial, conducive to the public good or in our national interest. We cannot effectively screen new arrivals for qualifications, extremist connections or past criminality. We have given away control over how we implement the vital 1951 UN Convention on asylum to the European court. We cannot even deport convicted murderers.

Further, there are five more countries  Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey  in the queue to join the EU  and the European Commission, as we have just experienced ourselves during the recent negotiation process, regards free movement as an inviolable principle of EU membership.

Yesterdays report from the Treasury is an official admission from the IN campaign that if we vote to stay in the EU then immigration will continue to increase by hundreds of thousands year on year. Over 250,000 people came to Britain from Europe last year. As long as we are in the EU we cannot control our borders and cannot develop an immigration policy which is both truly humane and in our long term economic interests.

It is bad enough that we have to maintain an open door to EU nationals  from the shores of Sicily to the borders of the Ukraine  its also the case that as the price of EU membership, we have to impose stricter limitations on individuals from other nations whom we might actively want to welcome.

Whether its family members from Commonwealth countries, the top doctors and scientists who would enhance the operation of the NHS or the technicians and innovators who could power growth, we have to put them at the back of the queue behind any one whos granted citizenship by any other EU country.

I think we would benefit as a country if we had a more effective and humane immigration policy, allowing us to take the people who would benefit us economically, offering refuge to those genuinely in need, and saying no to others.

And my ambition is not a Utopian ideal  its an Australian reality.

Instead of a European open-door migration policy we could  if a future Government wanted it  have an Australian points-based migration policy. We could emulate that countrys admirable record of taking in genuine refugees, giving a welcome to hard-working new citizens and building a successful multi-racial society without giving into people-smugglers, illegal migration or subversion of our borders.

So leaving could mean control over new trade deals, control over how we can help developing nations, control over economic rules, control over how billions currently spent by others could be spent, control over our borders, control over who uses the NHS and control over who can make their home here.

No-one arguing that we should Vote Leave wants us to reduce the amount we give to our farmers or our scientists. Indeed some of us believe we should give more. The only British citizens we want to deprive of European funding are our MEPs. Wed like to liberate them to flourish in the private sector.

Better for Europe

Leaving would also bring another significant  and under-appreciated  benefit. It would lead to the reform of the European Union.

At different points In campaigners like to argue either that Brexit would lead to EU nations using their massive muscle to punish us, or that Brexit would lead to contagion and the collapse of Europe  just as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union collapsed following secession from those unions.

Manifestly both cannot be true. An EU without the UK cannot simultaneously be a super-charged leviathan bent on revenge and a crumbling Tower of Babel riven by conflict.

But both points have a grain of truth. There will be anger amongst some in European elites. Not because the UK is destined for a bleak, impoverished future on the outside. No, quite the opposite.

What will enrage, and disorientate, EU elites is the UKs success outside the Union. Regaining control over our laws, taxes and borders and forging new trade deals while also shedding unnecessary regulation will enhance our competitive advantage over other EU nations. Our superior growth rate, and better growth prospects, will only strengthen. Our attractiveness to inward investors and our influence on the world stage will only grow.

But while this might provoke both angst and even resentment among EU elites, the UKs success will send a very different message to the EUs peoples. They will see that a different Europe is possible. It is possible to regain democratic control of your own country and currency, to trade and co-operate with other EU nations without surrendering fundamental sovereignty to a remote and unelected bureaucracy. And, by following that path, your people are richer, your influence for good greater, your future brighter.

So  yes there will be contagion if Britain leaves the EU. But what will be catching is democracy. There will be a new demand for more effective institutions to enable the more flexible kind of international cooperation we will need as technological and economic forces transform the world.

We know  from repeated referenda on the continent and in Ireland  that the peoples of the EU are profoundly unhappy with the European project. We also know that the framers of that project  Monnet and Schumann  hoped to advance integration by getting round democracy and never submitting their full vision to the verdict of voters. That approach has characterised the behaviour of EU leaders ever since. But that approach could not, and will not, survive the assertion of deep democratic principle that would be the British people voting to leave.

Our vote to Leave will liberate and strengthen those voices across the EU calling for a different future  those demanding the devolution of powers back from Brussels and desperate for a progressive alternative.

For Greeks who have had to endure dreadful austerity measures, in order to secure bailouts from Brussels, which then go to pay off bankers demanding their due, a different Europe will be a liberation.

For Spanish families whose children have had to endure years of joblessness and for whom a home and children of their own is a desperately distant prospect, a different Europe will be a liberation.

For Portuguese citizens who have had to endure cuts to health, welfare and public services as the price of EU policies, a different Europe will be a liberation.

For Italians whose elected Government was dismissed by Brussels fiat, for Danes whose opt-out from the Maastricht Treaty has been repeatedly overridden by the European Court, for Poles whose hard-won independence has been eroded by the European Commission, a different Europe will be a liberation.

For Britain, voting to leave will be a galvanising, liberating, empowering moment of patriotic renewal.

We will have rejected the depressing and pessimistic vision advanced by In campaigners that Britain is too small and weak and the British people too hapless and pathetic to manage their own affairs and choose their own future.

But for Europe, Britain voting to leave will be the beginning of something potentially even more exciting  the democratic liberation of a whole Continent.

If we vote to leave we will have  in the words of a former British Prime Minister  saved our country by our exertions and Europe by our example.

We will have confirmed that we believe our best days lie ahead, that we believe our children can build a better future, that this countrys instincts and institutions, its people and its principles, are capable not just of making our society freer, fairer and richer but also once more of setting an inspirational example to the world. It is a noble ambition and one I hope this country will unite behind in the weeks to come.
We are told by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that leaving the EU would be a disaster for the nation on every front  supposedly being outside the EU would threaten our security, our economy, our NHS and all manner of other things.

And yet, that hasnt always been their view. Before and during the renegotiation with the EU, they were happy to regularly suggest that if Brussels failed to meet their demands, then they ruled nothing out, ie they might be willing to support a Leave vote. Doing so wasnt a one-off slip of the tongue, it was a deliberate message, communicated for over a year on television, in print and in front of Select Committees. Here are seven examples of when Cameron or Osborne said it:

Cameron on 3rd January 2015:

The Prime Minister  marking the effective start of the General Election campaign with an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday  declared just days before a meeting in London with German Chancellor Angela Merkel: If I dont get what is needed I rule nothing out.

Cameron on 8th June 2015:

Mr Cameron on Monday said that he would rule nothing out in what appeared to be a message to eurosceptic Tories that he could still consider campaigning for Britain to leave the EU.

Cameron speaking to Andrew Marr on 4th October 2015:

If I dont get what I want, then I rule nothing out.

Osborne on 3rd November 2015:

Asked if he could imaging [sic] calling for the UK to leave the EU, if he did not get what he wanted, he said: We dont rule anything out.

Cameron on 8th November 2015:

If we cant reach such an agreement, and if Britains concerns were to be met with a deaf ear, which I do not believe will happen, then we will have to think again about whether this European Union is right for us. As I have said before  I rule nothing out.

Osborne on 1st December 2015:

We choose our language carefully. We have said that we rule nothing out. If you rule nothing out, you rule nothing out.

And Cameron on 3rd February 2016:

Let me say again, if we cant secure these changes I rule nothing out.

It was a clear message that if the Governments demands werent met, they were willing to back Leaving the EU. (Of course, they werent in fact met  even the limited manifesto commitments made a year ago were far tougher than the eventual deal which was delivered.)

But leave the eventual deal aside for a moment. What were Cameron and Osborne saying in all those quotes listed above? That if the EU didnt agree to some small changes on welfare rules, they would be willing to consider leaving.

Surely they would never have done so over a relatively small issue if the reality of Brexit was as disastrous as they now suggest? Nothing has changed to suddenly make Leaving a drastically worse prospect than it was a few months ago  their past comments make todays claims ring hollow.
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Have you ever thought it is a wise idea to sleep without underwear on your bed at night? If your answer is "no" then it is time you should start thinking about it since wearing undies at night may affect fertility in men and cause infection in women.

Though sleeping nude, even without underwear in summer sounds weird, it turns out that letting your genitals breathe could do a lot for your health and well-being. We sweat a lot in summer and the undergarments make it worse, particularly if they don't absorb the sweat.

Sweat happens to be a perfect breeding ground for microbes. Bacteria and yeast grow well in sweat and the temperature in summer is most suited for the growth of these organisms. This will result in irritation and skin infection and women that experience hot flushes during menopause suffer a great deal of this problem.

"I tell my patients to sleep without underwear. If the area is constantly covered, especially by fabric that's not moisture wicking or absorbent, then moisture collects, creating the perfect breeding ground for bacteria or yeast," said American gynecologist Dr Alyssa Dweck, reported Mirror.

Dr Shirley McQuade, Medical Director of Dublin's Well Woman Centre explained that men going to bed with briefs or boxers is equally a bad idea. She added that scrotum is present outside men's body on a purpose.

Scrotum cannot tolerate the temperature of human body and an increase in temperature would largely affect the production of sperm. Decrease in the sperm count is directly linked to fertility in men.

That being the case, wearing undies to bed impact fertility in men as well as cause sweat related discomforts. Men are also advised not to wear lycra and tight fitting undergarments during gym and other physical activities.

"Wearing underwear to bed can cause problems for women in that the temperature is increased and the circulation is low which can allow for bacteria and yeast to thrive causing problems," noted McQuade, while discussing how underwear at night affect women's health, according to Independent.

"It isn't just underwear either. Wearing tight lycra while working out can also be a cause of recurring infections in women and I would always advise them to wear loose clothing while at the gym and cotton underwear," she said.

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A material made of elastomer which is not just pliable but can also manage to self-heal has been regarded by its researchers to be an upfront candidate as an artificial muscle.

The brainstorming took place at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California headed by Professor Zhenan Bao of the university's College of Chemical Engineering. This development has been regarded by Bao and his colleagues as a valuable proponent in the field of prosthetics and robotics, according to Science Magazine.

The experiment showcased the synthesized material undergoing run-throughs in its capacity for elasticity until its breaking point. After hitting the 45-inch capacity in a clamping machine, the researchers settled on a manual approach by holding both ends of the elastomer with their hands by while moving away from each other in opposite directions. Eventually, they managed to stretch the synthesized material to more than 8 feet or 100 inches.

"In our case, the goal was not to make the best artificial muscle, but rather to develop new materials design rules for stretchable and self-healing materials,"Bao pointed it out.

"Artificial muscle is one potential application for our materials," the professor optimistically added.

They also applied an electrical current to the elastomer which made the material twitch in the movement akin to a muscle. Upon jolting the elastomer, they noticed a swift 2% increased of the material but it returned to its original size after the current was turned off. With this discovery, this polymer could be the next step in the manufacture of synthetic muscles essential for the movement of artificial limbs. Furthermore, their next course of action could be to promote the synthetic material as a pressure or strain sensor due to its reaction with an electrical current.

The research had a two-year run and was overseen by Bao with contributions visiting academic Cheng-Hui Li, Chao Wang of the University of California, Riverside, and Christoph Keplinger of University of Colorado, Boulder.

In related news, the University of Reading has produced a supramolecular polyurethane which is by some way stimulated by the human blood clotting system which could jumpstart the medical trend of self-healing bandages, according to UPI.
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Stem cells are believed to hold the key for treatment of various diseases and ailments and is considered as the biggest hope of present day as well as future medicine. Researchers have constantly been trying to make use of the formidable stem cells towards intervention of many complicated medical conditions and one of the recent ones include regeneration of spinal cord fibers for the treatment of spinal injuries.

Spinal injury is devastating since the mobility of the human body is completely controlled by the spinal cord. Spinal cord helps in managing our weight and holds our body upright as well as controls the movement of our arms and limbs. The nerves that connect our arms and limbs to brain pass through the spinal cord and any injury would extensively damage our mobility.

The corticospinal tract (CST) in the spinal cord is of great importance since this is the region where nerve fibers that originate from brain travel through the brain stem and pass through the spinal cord. These fibers control all the motor functions of the body and any damage caused to them could result in paralysis, according to Consumer Affair.

By far stem cells were used in the treatment of regeneration of severed nerve fibers but only when the connective tissues of the region remained intact. When there was big gaps or breakage in the connective tissues regeneration of nerve fibers with the help of stem cells wasn't possible.

To resolve the issue researchers from Hokkaido University in Japan alongside a team of international scientists extracted neural progenitor cells from mice and developed them into spinal cord tissue. They were then implanted into the severed spinal cord of mice, reported NDTV.

Regeneration of nerve fibers was observed after implant and the mice were able to show movements in their forelimbs. The investigators also tried grafting of human neural stem cells into the severed spinal cord of mice and found that regeneration was possible across different species.

"The success of this current trial, reported in Nature Medicine, is promising for the future treatment of humans with severe spinal cord injuries. But much work remains to be done before it can be translated into clinical treatments. Further research is required to determine the best cell type to be used for grafting and for establishing safe grafting methods," noted Science Daily.

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Companies normally require employees and workers to render 8 hours of work five times a week. That has of course changed nowadays and does not include overtime work.

The working hours fluctuate, particularly for the ones holding higher positing in companies. Ideally, their minds are subject to extensive cognitive thinking which may have certain limits as far as efficiency is concerned.

With that in mind, do companies really draw out the best from employees by squeezing the ideas from their brains as often they can in a work week? If this study published at the Melbourne Institute Worker Paper series is to be believed, such may not necessarily hold true.

People who normally hold the managerial and higher positions are likely to be aged 40 and up though there are some who make their way up the corporate ladder due with outstanding performance. But the study offers an interesting take, particularly in the area of drawing out the best from people aged 40 and above.

Researchers claim to have found the optimal cognitive performance for the workers in that age bracket and the results were a three-day work week which technically categorizes them as part-time employees.

This was after about 3,000 men and 3,500 women were invited in Australia to participate in a series of cognitive tests as their work habits were analyzed.

In the end it was found that people aged 40 and above working 25 hours weekly did better compared to the ones working 55 hours a week. While companies are likely to scoff this claim, it could be something worth considering if the retirement age is raised at some point in the future.

According to Professor Colin McKenzie from Keio University, the retirement age could eventually be raised soon in certain countries in an effort to delay the turn to pension benefits. If so, such could see elder folks working until the later stages of their life  as long as they can and want to.

"The degree of intellectual stimulation may depend on working hours. Work can be a double-edged sword, in that it can stimulate brain activity, but at the same time long working hours can cause fatigue and stress, which potentially damage cognitive functions, says McKenzie.

If so the three-day work week could be a possible recourse by companies though the age group where it could apply may be more than the 40-year-old mark.

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Beyond Constitutional Realm: Article 356

By Afroz Alam

19 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org

While following the Congress footsteps, BJP government has imposed Presidents rule in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Historically, instead of being used only in times of grave constitutional crises, Article 356 has been randomly invoked to suit the purpose of ruling party at the Centre. This randomness not only creates a deep crisis of constitutionalism but also lead us to a situation rightly called undemocratic and authoritarian. It was the first invocation of Article 356 in the year 1951 against Punjab that set the tone of its subsequent misuse. The very provision haunted the health of Indian democracy 126 times like a living monster. It is mostly because of themisuse of Article 356, K.C. Wheareargued that what makes one doubt that the Constitution of India is strictly and fully federal, however, are the powers of intervention in the affairs of the States given by the Constitution to the Central Government and Parliament.

Similar apprehensions were raised by S.L. Saksena, H.V. Kamath, P.S. Deshmukh and Pandit H.N. Kunzru on the floor of the Constituent Assembly regarding the provisions (then Article 278 and 278A) dealing with Presidents rule.In the opinion of S.L. Saksena these provisions were far too sweeping, thus having the potential to reduce provincial autonomy to a farce. H.V. Kamath foresaw the possible end of democracy in India in the form of a Hitler-like takeover by the Union Government. These provisions were unfederal in the eyes of P.S. Deshmukh. The strongest opposition came from PanditHridayNathKunzru who believed that the power to redress bad government should rest with the electors and they should be made to feel their responsibilities. G.B. Pant supported the argument of Kunzru and joined him in submitting an amendment to delete the provision dealing with Presidents rule.

But none of these opinions were given due consideration. A.K. Ayyar, K. Sanathanam and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar powerfully defended these provisions. For Ayyar, these provisions were not so horrific as it might appear. The raison detre of these provisions would be the grave and difficult times facing the nation. While expressing hope in Centre working impartially, Sanathanam argued that in cases where government in a state could not be carried on, the Union would see to it that the legislature was dissolved and new elections held, thus giving the province a second chance to manage its own affairs before the Union intervened. Dr.Ambedkar was in total agreement of Ayyar and Sanathanam and thus rejected the contention of those who were opposing the provisions dealing with Presidents rule. He was of the view that: I may say that I do not altogether deny that there is a possibility of these articles being abused or employed for political purposes. But that objection applies to every part of the Constitution which gives power to the Centre to override the Provinces. In fact, I share the sentiments expressed by my honourable friend Mr Gupte yesterday that the proper thing we ought to expect is that such Articles will never be called into operation and that they would remain a dead letter.Ambedkar also said that before assuming its functions, the first thing the President will do would be to issue a mere warning to a province that has erred, that things were not happening in the way in which they were intended to happen in the Constitution.... and then order an election, thus allowing the people of the province to settle matters by themselves.But sadly the ways ruling parties at centre invoke Article 356 simply turn the assurances of Dr. Ambedkar and other members of the constituent Assembly meaningless.

The very spirit of cooperative federalism appear to have been mortgaged when the BJP run Central government has successfully placed Uttarakhand under President rule and the Assembly was kept under suspended animation on grounds of breakdown of governance at a time when the Harish Rawat government was about to prove its majority on the floor of the Assembly. Seemingly, BJP appeared to have made necessary preparations in advance like Arunachal Pradesh to impose Presidents rule in the situation of 9 rebellious MLAs of the Congress disqualified by the Speaker using Anti-defection laws.

The classical anti-norm of either my government, or no government was adopted. BJP engineered an emergency like situation calling Uttarakhand a textbook example of breakdown of governance while citing the passing of Appropriation Bill without a division of vote. Written reports were received from Governor K.K. Paul stating the volatility of political situation and possibility of pandemonium during the scheduled day of trust vote. Prime Minister had to cut short his visit to Assam to convene an emergency meeting of the cabinet at night to advise President to proclaim President Rule in Uttarakhand. Everything in haste!

Before assenting to the advice of government which appear mala fide in first instance, the President should have acted independentlyto preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and the law of India as made part of his oath underArticle 60 of our constitution. As a responsible Executive of the State, President should have returned the Cabinets recommendation to Proclaim Presidents rule for reconsideration using his power under Article 74(1) as it has been responsibly exercised by the former President K.R. Narayanan in the case such recommendation to invoke Article 356 in Uttar Pradesh in 1997. But nothing of this sort happened. President has consented to impose Presidents rule in Uttarakhand.

In circumstances where the President is unwilling to refuse the Council of Ministers advice even for once, such proclamation will always be used as procedural device at the hand of ruling party against the states run by the opposition. The most recent example is Arunachal Pradesh where the situations were more or less similar when President Rule was declared. Interestingly enough, Speaker and Governors are also working beyond their constitutional mandate. There is clear but unique contest between Governor and the Speaker to act as the agent of the Centre and state respectively. It point towards a new trend that party loyalties are getting precedence over the discharge of constitutional duties. It is certainly disappointing to see how flouting of democratic decency is fast becoming the norm in our country.

Over the last six and half decades we have grown morepartisan, politically and otherwise. As a result the constitutional principles, parliamentary decency and federal values become less effective. The political parties including Congress and BJP have been in death match to demonise each other and habitually putting the blame on other side. But thats only part of the problem. The more destructive problem is the way ruling parties engage in political machinations of Article 356 to stymie the opposition and thus causing constitutional gridlock. In fact each event or acts are looked upon with a prism of simplistic duality, which trivializes everything. But what is interesting is to note that both Congress and BJP have managed to create a mostly unbroken set of uniform policies at the expense of democratic principles and without bothering about we the people.

When political parties are rhetorically and theoretically at odd with one another, it is only Supreme Courtwhich can provide meaningful interventions in such cases to restore the faith of people in the idea of constitutionalism. The Supreme Court did its best to restrain the misuse of Article 356 initially by carving out narrowly subtle space for judicial review in its seven-judge bench decision in the State of Rajasthan v. Union of India, 1977 and later subjecting the proclamation of Article 356 to judicial review on mala fide ground in the nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court in S.R. Bommai v. Union of India, 1994. In the State of Rajasthan v. Union of India judgment, Justices P.N. Bhagwati and A.C. Gupta brilliantly questioned the holy sanctity of the Presidential rule by stating that merely because a question has a political complexion, that by itself is no ground why the Court should shrink from performing its duty under the Constitution if it raises an issue of constitutional determination. ... merely because a question has a political colour, the Court cannot fold its hands in despair and declare judicial hands off. In Bommai case the Supreme Court argued that Article 356 can be invoked only in cases where non-compliance with the Constitution is of such a nature that it results in situations which create an impasse and are not capable of being remedied and where governance of the State has become impossible. But, surprisingly, in this case the apex Court failed to extend the scope of judicial review to inquire into the truth and correctness of the basic facts relied upon to support the proclamation of Presidential rule. Similarly, in 2006 judgment of the Supreme Court in Rameshwar Prasad and Others v. Union of India failed to give immediate relief to the state concerned despite upholding the constitutional principles set in earlier cases.

In an entirely new development, Uttarakhand High Court initially came out with the idea of organising floor test under the supervision of its own Registrar-General and later stayed it due to certain constitutional questions. But it was the second instance when judiciary came out with the idea of floor test. Earlier it happened in the case of Uttar Pradesh in 1998 when Supreme Court ordered composite floor test. But in the recent case of Uttarakhand, the High Court should have first declared the President rule unconstitutional and taken note of 9 disqualified MLAs under Anti-defection laws before ordering floor test.

The need of the hour is new judicial pro-activism. It will establish welcoming trends. First, this effective and timely relief will certainly guard Article 356 from further misuse. It will also set strong and clear legal position based on sound legal reasoningpertaining to Presidential rule. Second, the recommendation of Sarkaria Commission will actually be judicially achieved which says that Article 356 must be used very sparingly, in extreme cases, as a measure of last resort, when all the other alternatives fail to prevent or rectify a breakdown of constitutional machinery in the state.Third, the very recourse to compulsory floor test will discourage 'floor-crossing' and defections. Finally, the excessive intervention of the Centre in the domain of state using Governor will be drastically reduced. The autonomy of the states will not be easily sacrificed and consequently federal character of India will not be hold in absolute abeyance.

Afroz Alam, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad E-mail: afrozalam2@gmail.com








The Lids Off The Petri Dish (Includes A Packaged Meal)

By Priti Gulati Cox

19 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org

East Meets Worst

Back in 2014, Narendra Modis slogan in his ultimately successful campaign for the prime ministership of India was Achhe Din Aane Wale Hain (Good Days Are Coming.) His partythe right-wing BJPsomehow won a majority on its own with an unprecedentedly low vote share of only 31%.

That victory has ejaculated blobs of orange rage with RSS (BJPs parent organization) and its hindutva-heavies at the core. Theyre hurriedly quashing any voices or actions of assertion and inclusion that might raise their heads anywhere along the spectrum of students, Dalits, Muslims and other minority communities, across the country and in occupied Kashmir.

At the same time and closer to home, Donald Trumps slogan Make America Great Again is making its rounds and mobilizing a previously non-organized political support base. Meanwhile, the #NeverTrump establishment is ignoring the possibility that thanks to them, someone even more mainstream and dangerous than the current orange-coiffed frontrunner might end up as strangelovian commander-in-chief.

Theres a common pattern in the histories of the two countries that birthed these two candidates with such similar sounding, thoroughly hollow campaign slogans. Hollow, because our histories are also populated by generations of the excluded. So what Trump and Modi really meant to say was, Make America Great Again But Not for You, and Achhe Din Aane Wale Hain Magar Tumhare Liye Nahin.

Look at the slogans as club sandwiches. Think of the slice of bread at the bottom as the colonial times that set things in motion; the meat in the middle as the neoliberal period and its trail of destruction, layered with todays increasingly unsettling leanings among certain sections of the population toward hate, nationalism, nativism, hindutva, and evangelical extremism; and the top bread slice as Islamophobia. Bite into one of these sandwiches and you begin the process of digesting the weight of the two ominous campaign slogans . . . and heeeeerrrrres Johnny.

Malice in Trumpistan

In their 2012 book Its Even Worse Than It Looks, Political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote that the Republican Party is essentially broken and that it has drifted radically in the direction of an insurgent outlier  ideologically extreme. In an October 2015 interview, Republicans Gone Wild, Ornstein told Francis Wilkinson that, A few months back, Barney Frank said to us that perhaps the next book we do should be titled Its Even Worse Than It Was When We Said Its Even Worse Than It Looks.

So, how bad is it? Trumps support network is built on middle aged white, blue-collar working class Americans. Many of them are gun-happy, nativist, extremist evangelical Christians who have all along been left out of the neoliberal profiteering agenda. Theyre driven by a sense of isolation, fear and hatred, with many of them dying in large numbers from gun suicides, alcoholism, and drug (predominantly opiate) addiction. Barbara Ehrenreich, founding editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, also refers to them as the Dead, White and Blue.

These folks flocking to Trump rallies in the primaries need someone weaker than themselves upon whom to vent their anger and frustration, so theyre turning on other minoritieswomen, immigrants, Latinos, blacks, Sikhs, Muslims, etc. with Trump cheering them on, labeling his followers with a Nixon-era term The Silent Majority.

The only difference is that the humans making up the so-called Silent Majority have not yet processed the reality that in the bigger scheme of things, and in the designs of the moneyed, corporate and powerful elite, Trump included, they have always been a part and parcel of the shock-absorber generation. The GOP front-runner is just using their vulnerability to his own narcissistic advantage. In fact, Trump is so narcissistic that he even interrupts himself.

One supporter said, I mean, it seems like we really go overboard to make sure all these other nationalities nowadays and colors have their fair shake of it, but no ones looking out for the white guy anymore, and that they suffer from reverse discrimination. The hands that are holding up the signs that say, All Lives Matter are perhaps projecting their own newfound white angst, and this anger seems to be misdirected toward others like themselves instead of our presidential candidates and the whole political system in general.

And, amidst all thats unfolding around us, Ehrenreich is so right to add that its easy for the liberal intelligentsia to feel righteous in their disgust for lower-class white racism, but the college-educated elite that produces the intelligentsia is in trouble too..Whole professions have fallen on hard times.

Malice in Modistan

An interesting parallel mutating in the shadows of Achhe Din and Make America Great Again is how this smorgasbord of hate, rage, fear, dissent, rallying shouts of Jai Bhim.Lal Salaam, and clamor for equality and justice among the various shock-absorber generations of various hues and levels of poverty and isolation are playing out in relation to each other and their place in history. In both countries, those in power have preyed upon and monopolized resources and communities both within their own borders and outside them. And in both countries, some oppressed communities have, in turn, preyed upon those who are even more oppressed.

Since there is nothing whiter than white and nothing more upper-caste than upper-caste, almost everyone under the ideological grip of whiteism or casteism is feeling some sort of social/political/economic isolation, with many acting against their own self-interests and taking shelter, even participating in, their leaders violent and greedy machinations at a local level, and in the most disturbing ways imaginable.

Annihilation is a loaded word, its meaning depending on who applies it, when, and to what end. For example, the Native American population of what is today Trumpistan were annihilated by the imperialist Europeans, and those who survived were relegated to reservations. In the years that followed, annihilation was augmented by racism, McCarthyism, xenophobia, islamophobia, wars on terror, wars on women, bigotry, and anti-immigration.

But annihilation has another side. Arguably the most legitimate grounds for it were laid out by one of Indias most radical thinkers, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who in 1936 wrote a seminal speech that delivered a deadly critique of Hinduism. Titled Annihilation of Caste, it was meant to be read to a mild, upper-caste, reformist Hindu group. But they never heard him deliver it, because they found its contents too unbearable. Perhaps because it held a mirror too close to their upper-caste souls.

In Modistan, my ancestral invading Aryans, and subsequently the disciples of Brahmanism, co-opted the lands indigenous population, furthering the slow, deliberate annihilation of a peoples mind, body, and spirit, sowing the first seeds of casteism and exploitation.

In the process, they have instituted a different kind of reservation: a kind of affirmative action system that puts a semantic twist on the Native Americans history, reserving government jobs and publicly funded colleges for disadvantaged groupspositions through which the beneficiaries can expect to effect exactly no change. But those Aryan policies didnt just drop out of thin air. They were put there in place by design.

With the ever-evolving (and revolving) exclusion that the ideology of casteism entailed, with the horrific and hurried violence of the RSS regime thats being carried out today, we come full circle, to a place unfamiliar to Westerners who still regard Hinduism as an oasis of nonviolence, yoga and vegetarianism.

Most Hindus believe that we are living in Kali Yuga: the End Times, when Shudras (the lowest of the four castes, Indias version of Trumpistas) perceive that they have access to some power and assertion and bring on a clash between the haves and have-nots that results in universal destruction.

The lid coming off this petri dish has exposed the implosion of a system driven by imperialism, racism, casteism, religious extremism and capitalism, with more and more of the worlds species, people of all shapes and sizes, hues, and gender affiliations, waking up to find themselves included in the exclusion pile. What happens next is anybodys guess.

One Pound Capitalism, a Pinch of Democracy, and Trumpapatti Orange is the New Orange

One Pound Capitalism, a Pinch of Democracy is a series that brings to our dinner tables some meals that expose the extreme consequences of neoliberal policies that are wrecking the planet, and the daily lives of many around the world. The type and quantity of each ingredient used and the presentation of a meal is determined by choosing key statistics and points that are embedded in the issue being conveyed and converting that to a measurement or meal design. Indeed, there may be a dish or two that tastes somewhat strange, with an ingredient or two out of whack. But thats intentional.

The box-meal featured here thats designed around our off-the-spectrum politics is called Trumpapatti Orange is the New Orange (the brand name) Machaironi and Cheese Dinner with Modi Keshar Sauce.Please click here to view more images of this project, and here are some quotes that inspired its design:

Hey, hey. Ho, ho. All the muslims have to go!

Rs 5 lakh reward for cutting off Kanhaiya Kumars tongue, Rs 11 lakh for his life.

We worship Lord Ganesha (Ganapati.) There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephants head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.

But [Modis] hair style, which used to go sideways, went slicked with straight-back comb-over on Thursday.A politician seeking to make a name for himself should create a characteristic hair style and stick to it for the rest of his life.

I am not a believer, and I will, unless somebody can prove something to me, I believe theres weather. I believe theres change, and I believe it goes up and it goes down, and it goes up again.We need unpredictability in this country.but, I have a good chance of winning. I dont want the enemies and even our allies to know exactly what Im thinking.You know what, were checker players and we dont play well.wouldnt it be nice if we could surprise them and knock the hell out of them.That was the beginning of China, that was the beginning of India, when India.by the way, India is doing great. Nobody talks about it. And I have big jobs going up in India. But India is doing great.GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

The latest budget speech perpetuates a chronic blindness to basic social needs. Children are not mentioned at all and nor are (say) nutrition, social security or maternity entitlements.

The Sanskrit word for hair is kesh, and saffron is kesar.

Priti Gulati Cox is an interdisciplinary artist, and a local coordinator for the peace and justice organization CODEPINK. She lives in Salina, Kansas, and can be reached at p.g@cox.net. Please click here to see more of her work.






Transformation: A Student-Led Mass Political Movement

By William John Cox



19 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org

The 2016 presidential race is evolving into one of the most exciting (and dangerous) political events in American history. With an avowed socialist challenging the New Democrats and a narcissist billionaire confronting the establishment Republicans there will be, undoubtedly, tens of millions of disgruntled voters following the election.

If Hillary Clinton manages to secure the Democratic nomination, millions of unhappyprimarily youngsupporters of Bernie Sanders will be looking for a cause. If Donald Trump loses in the primary, or is defeated in the general, his angry followers will be ready to revolt. If no candidate obtains a majority vote in the Electoral College, and the president and vice president are selected by Congress, the entire electorate will be marginalizedand thoroughly disgusted.

United by the willful failure of their government to respond to their needs, all of these people are being primed to take action. What can be done to mobilize and energize the anger and discontent of the People for effective political change? Young people around the world have been at the vanguard of recent mass political movements. Are the students of America willing and capable of leading a peaceful uprising in the United States to compel the constitutional changes required to transform their government?

Around the World. One of the most amazing things to come out of the Colombian civil war was the Children's Mandate, an election in support of peace organized by the children of a nation being torn apart by war. Starting with a gathering of just 26 young people, 2.7 million children voted on October 25, 1996 for 12 basic rights including justice, a clean environment, peace, love, and family. One year later, the children were joined by 10 million adults who voted for peace.

Commencing in Tunisia, the Arab Spring youth movement swept through the Middle East between 2010 and 2012, resulting in changes in the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. A number of other nations in the region also experienced massive protests.

Although Western governments played a role in its instigation, the Ukrainian revolution in February 2014 commenced with massive protests against the government and led to a near civil war before the government capitulated and its leadership fled the country. The new government immediately sought closer ties with the European Union, and Russia began a process of destabilization that continues to this day.

Following England's surrender of its territorial rights to Hong Kong in 1997, the city-state was accorded a special status allowing it to retain its laws, currency, and local government, while the People's Republic of China assumed responsibility for military and diplomatic affairs. Differences over the nomination process for its legislative council and chief executive led to a massive youth-led peaceful movement in 2014. Organized by students, the Umbrella Revolution occupied the city center and defied the Chinese government for more than two months.

Most recently, on Sunday March 13, 2016, 3.5 million Brazilians participated in anti-government rallies across the nation seeking the ouster of the current president and arrest of the previous leader. Confronted with a deep economic recession and widespread political corruption, the spontaneous protests were diverse and consisted of a broad range of people fed up with their "horrible" government. Would such a protest movement be possible in the United States?

Back in the U.S.A. Commencing in America and England and spreading throughout the Western world, the counterculture of the Sixties brought beneficial social and political changes in the United Statesmany of which are now being challenged and reversed by the economic and political elite that has seized power in America. Primarily focused on its opposition to the war in Vietnam, the counterculture insurgency mostly involved disaffected middle-class young people who were disenchanted with the direction of the nation and its government. In addition to substantial improvements including Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, Voters' Rights Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Consumer Protection Safety Commission, the movement also forced the end of the military draft in 1973.

Most amazing, for purposes of this paper, was the 26th Amendment in 1971 which lowered the voting age to 18. Having built momentum throughout the Sixties, the proposal to allow 18-year-olds to vote in all national elections was passed by Congress on March 23, 1971. The Amendment was sent to the states and ratified four months later.

The illusion of prosperity resulting from Reaganomics, the arrival of the "Me" and "Gen-X" generations, and general disinterest in government all contributed to an overall decline in political involvement, particularly by young people. This began to change during the presidential election of 2004, when Vermont Governor Howard Dean challenged Senator John Kerry, the establishment candidate, for the Democratic nomination. Although he failed to secure the nomination, Dean pioneered Internet-based fund raising from small donors and net-roots organizingwhich Barack Obama took advantage of four years later in his campaign.

Democratic victories for the White House and Congress in 2008 contributed to the rise of the Tea Party, which initially opposed Obama's plan to provide financial aid to bankrupt homeowners. The ultra-conservative grassroots movement organized opposition to the entire administration agenda and began to influence the election of local, state, and federal Republicans. Current presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz is a darling of the Tea Party.

Inspired by the Arab Spring movement and concerned about social and economic inequality, primarily progressive young people began to "occupy" public places around the world in 2011. The best known of these in the United States was Zuccotti Park in New York City, and within months there were occupations in many American cities and towns. Committed to nonviolence and united by the slogan, "We are the 99%," the struggle relied on emerging web technologies and social media to spread its message; however, there was an aversion to any structured organization. Relying on "participatory democracy," working groups considered most issues, and decisions were collectively made by the general assembly at each location. A primary criticism of the movement was the absence of clearly defined goals, and, without leadership, most occupations ended within a few months.

Although the Tea Party and Occupy movements never gained significant political traction on their own, both have had an influence on the 2016 presidential election, particularly the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Each in their own way, using both the new and old media, have organized campaigns that challenge the established political parties.

The 2016 Campaign. Previously an independent who caucused with the Democratic Party, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders became a candidate in the Democratic primary as a Democratic Socialist determined to focus attention on the failures of militarism and big business to address the true needs of the nation. Initially believed to have a role only in pressuring Hillary Clintonthe establishment candidatetoward more progressive positions, Sanders' campaign made full use of the organizational structure pioneered by Howard Dean, and the Internet funding strategies of Barack Obama, to create a highly effective national campaign. Eschewing contributions from political action committees, lobbyists, corporations, and financial institutions, Sanders is now consistently raising more money than Clinton, primarily in small amounts from millions of individual donors. While Clinton has a lead in the delegate count, particularly when the establishment super delegates are included, Sanders has at this point won eight of the last nine primaries and is leading in national polls. Continued success could force a brokered convention in Philadelphia during the last week of July. At the minimum, we can expect a massive demonstration of support for Sanders and the principles he has espoused, both inside and outside the convention.

Self-proclaimed billionaire Donald Trump may have launched his candidacy as a protestmore likely to improve his business "brand"but the ability of the huckster to manipulate the 24-hour news cycle has excited millions of Republican, Democratic, and Independent voters who are attracted to an authoritarian candidate who promises he can fix everything if elected. Although he has no clearly defined policy positions on domestic or foreign affairs and he says whatever pops into his mind on any given subject, Trump is currently leading in the delegate count. His momentum may have been checked by Cruz's recent wins in Wisconsin, Colorado, and Wyominglargely as the result of a massive Republican establishment effort to "Dump Trump." Continued success of the effort may lead to a brokered convention in Cleveland during the third week of July in which an alternative, such as House Speaker Paul Ryan, may end up with the nomination.

Depending on the outcome of the primaries and conventions, there is a real possibility of third party or independent candidates attracting enough popular votes in the general election to deny any candidate a majority in the Electoral College. In that case the election will be decided by Congress, with the House of Representatives choosing the president and the Senate selecting the vice president. Depending on the contemporaneous congressional elections, there could be a Republican majority in the House and a Democratic majority in the Senate leading to the two executives being from opposing parties. Who can save the United States from this mess?

The Millennials. The future belongs to the young people. They are the ones who will have to cope with the toxic economic, environmental, militaristic, and social issues they are inheriting. These massive problems will still be there tomorrowif reasonable solutions continue to be opposed and defeated by the corporate and wealthy elite.

The 2008 election was the first presidential campaign where the participation of young people made a significant difference. Thousands of young Americans enthusiastically turned out for Barack Obama, and more than two-thirds of voters under the age of 30 supported him. With older voters split between the two major parties, the youth vote made a difference in the states where the popular vote was close. The Pew Research Center determined that:

Young voters are more diverse racially and ethnically than older voters and more secular in their religious orientation. These characteristics, as well as the climate in which they have come of age politically, incline them not only toward Democratic Party affiliation but also toward greater support of activist government, greater opposition to the war in Iraq, less social conservatism, and a greater willingness to describe themselves as liberal politically.

In 2008, 45 percent of young people have registered Democratic and 26 percent registered Republican. Today, half of all young people consider themselves to be political independents. Almost one-third do not believe there is "a great deal of difference in what Republicans and Democrats stand for." Young people are approximately 14 percent of the voting population, and they are more interested in the actual issuesrather than the corrupt proposals of political parties and their corporate-approved candidates.

Members of the "Me" and "Gen-X" generations have become parents and grandparents, and as their children and grandchildren are entering adulthood, we are finding the attitudes and practices of the new "Millennial" generation (born 1982-2003) to be significantly different.

Millennials have grown up with smartphones, texting, computers, email, the Internet, and social networking. They are master communicators and active participants in the new mediathey are connected and online all the time. They are ethnically diverse, are more empathetic, and have a better understanding of the perspective of others. Millennials have a greater concern for the well-being of their friends, their communities, and the environment. They are positive about their own futures and that of their country.

In spite of everything that is going wrong, young people still trust in the American Dream. The Pew Charitable Trust found 58 percent of young adults believed they would more easily improve their conditions than their parents had, and 88 percent thought it possible to improve one's financial condition, even during a recession. They are confident, but the challenge they face is perhaps greater than any preceding generation.

In one of the most massive shifts of financial obligation in the history of the United States, the generally free undergraduate education previously provided by most states began to dramatically shift in the Eighties to the students themselves. The states slowed or eliminated funding for higher education, as the institutions drastically increased their fees. Today, the only option available to most working- and middle-class students is the borrowing of large sums of money which will have to be paid back from their future earnings. Student loan debt now exceeds $1.2 trillionwhich is more than the Nation's total credit card debt. Students entering an increasingly limited, low-paying, job market commence their careers owing an average of $25,000.

Burdened by the debt of student loans, and awakening to the discovery that their college degrees only qualify many of them for jobs behind the counters of rental car companies, the question is whether these young people of today will look up from the screens of their smartphones and take action to secure their tomorrows.

The Millenials have been given the confidence since infancy to play a leadership role in a social and political movement that will transform and reorient the government of the United States toward the society that elects it. Will their government evolve to protect them and their childrenas they venture forth into a future that could be either tragic or magnificent beyond their wildest nightmares and most glorious dreams?

Voting in America. Only one in three eligible voters cast a ballot in the 2014 midterm federal elections for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Since, in most cases, candidates were elected by approximately half of all votes cast in their elections, the winners actually received the support of about 15 percent of eligible voters. This does not even include unregistered citizens. It can hardly be considered a mandate for the senators or representatives to do anythingand they haven't.

There may be a moral duty to vote in a free society, but, unlike some other countries, Americans are not legally obligated to vote. Many conservatives believe voting should be a privilege to be earned, and they are not reluctant to impose onerous conditions to suppress voting. Most progressives believe voting is a right, and they oppose restrictions placed on registration and voting.

Voting in a free society has to be more than a privilege, which can be granted or taken away at the whim of government. By definition, voting is an integral part of a republican form of government, and, if a government is to be free and democratic, voting not only has to be a right, but it has to be effective as well.

Not one of the founders of the United States believed the Constitution was perfect, and all believed it could and should be amended as necessary. The failure of the Constitution to specifically provide a right to vote and its abdication of voting rights to the states has resulted in the destructive political practices currently undermining the Nation. The government is no longer representative of those who elect it, nor is it the government the American People consented to. If the Republic is to survive, its constitution must empower the People who elect it.

The United States Voters' Rights Amendment. There are a number of contemporary issues relating to voting, all of which have generated their own constituencies for reform. Inasmuch as most of these issues involve constitutional questions, activists face almost insurmountable obstacles in getting Congress to enact amendment legislation and convincing a sufficient number of states to ratify the amendment. The Equal Rights [for women] Amendment is an example. First introduced in Congress in 1923, the Amendment was finally enacted and sent to the states for ratification in 1972. It has yet to be ratified.

A majority of voters are alarmed by the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which extended constitutional personhood rights for corporations. The Move To Amend organization is at the forefront of the effort to change the Constitution to eliminate the personhood rights of corporations and the equation of money and free speech. Assuming the success of Move to Amend and the ultimate ratification of its proposed Amendment, there would remain many other unresolved issues relating to the voting power of Americans.

The United States Voters' Rights Amendment (USVRA) is a voters' bill of rightsin that it remedies the most destructive practices that have eroded the tenuous voting rights allowed to the People by Congress and the states. It is, however, far more than a set of constitutional amendments that would curtail these anti-democratic practices.

Ratification of the USVRAand the movement that forces it to happenwould create a dramatic transformation of the United States government into finally becoming a true representative democracy. The USVRA would reorient the government to the People and their society, and it would provide the means to make the government work for their benefit.

The USVRA not only guarantees the individual right to vote, but it includes other provisions that ensure the votes cast by the People are effective in defining what they want their government to do and how they want it done. These include defining equal rights for women; maximizing voter participation and prohibiting the suppression of voting; eliminating corporate personhood; controlling campaign contributions; guaranteeing freedom of the press; public funding of elections; prohibiting gerrymandering; increasing congressional representation; improving political education and public information; articulating policy issues; deciding policy issues by voting; eliminating the Electoral College; curtailing lobbying; and prohibiting conflicts of interest.

The purpose of the USVRA is not to change the personal political beliefs of anyone. Rather, it's goal is to provide individuals of every political persuasion with the knowledge and means to arrive at logical conclusions, effectively communicate their thinking, and to persuade others of the validity of their convictions. Far more powerfulultimately than holding a gun, the physical act of voting is a dramatic and irresistible force for freedom.

A successful transformation of the government will require a mass, nonpartisan movement sufficient to overcome and defeat the formidable forces arrayed against any effort to diminish or eliminate the current monopoly of power. As an alternative to violence, what is needed is a peaceful evolution, rather than a violent revolution. Undoubtedly, the process of transformation will be arduous, but for now, let us consider how one would go about creating the massive political movement required to effectively achieve a modification of the government.

Amending the Constitution. Those who are experienced in political organizing believe the best plan is to keep the issues very simple. The political theory is that any increase in the number of issues raised is followed by a commensurate rise in the number of people who will find something to oppose. For example, the organizers of the Move to Amendment campaign initially considered including the basic right to votein addition to the elimination of corporate personhood and the equation of money and free speech. They decided to limit the number of issues to increase support and to reduce opposition.

Move to Amend is a good example of the traditional approach to promoting a constitutional amendment. Once the organizers researched and formulated the language required to reverse the effect of Citizens United, they began to build a movement. The organization's website is dedicated to fund raising, the sale of merchandise, soliciting new members and coalition organizations, community meetings, obtaining resolutions from municipal councils and legislative support, local ballot measures, and circulating a petition to Congress to amend the Constitution. The organization has been active for more than five years, it has been endorsed by hundreds of progressive organizations, and the We the People Amendment has been introduced in the House of Representatives; however, it has yet to obtain 500,000 signatures on its petitionits current goal. Its proposed amendments are included in the USVRA.

Progress along the path to a constitutional amendment, such as We the People, is very slow. It took 45 years for the Equal Rights Amendment for women to be passed by Congress after it was first introduced, and it failed to be ratified within its seven year ratification period. Now renamed the Women's Equality Amendment, it has been reintroduced into every subsequent Congress; however, it has yet to be passed. Since the United States will never achieve effective voting rights so long as more than half of its people do not have equal rights, the Women's Equality Amendment is included in the USVRA.

Confronted as they are by life-threatening environmental, economic, militaristic, and personal freedom issues, the people of the United States do not have time to slowly amend its constitution, issue by issue, to achieve effective voting rights. Given the growing power of corporations and the economic elite in America, the window of opportunity to compel a nonviolent transformation of the government is closing, as power is increasingly concentrated in the plutocracy.

The present electoral crisis, however, presents a golden opportunity. There is a tremendous potential inherent in a political awakening provided by the Occupy and Tea Party movements; the outlier campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump; and the emerging ability of the Internet and social media to organize and motivate a broad spectrum of social and political interests. As Thomas Paine once said, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now."

Thomas Paine also believed, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected." The latent power of voting is the only force which can correct the present abuses of governmental power and force the government to work for the benefit of the people. That power, however, is subverted by the current voting process and its coverage by the mass media. The right to voteeffectivelyis the single issue that has the potential to unify every single American in a mass movement, and the USVRA provides a solid structure for that effort.

Given the right and power to formulate their own political policy and to elect those they believe will best effectuate their policy, American voters will be able, finally, to take charge of their own destiny. Moreover, they can once again provide a government worthy of being emulated by others around the world.

Increasingly powerless in the political process, the People of the United States have to find common groundin spite of the fact that the political parties and the corporate media seek to divide and polarize them on a variety of misleading and confusing issues. If the USVRA can serve as the instrument to transform the government, how should the movement to achieve its success be organized and led? What would be the best way to bring about a peaceful transformation of the government?

Inspiration can be found in the drive to lower the voting age to 18 during the Sixties and early Seventies. As a result of the military draft, thousands of young men were suffering horrific injuries and deaths in the unpopular Vietnam Warthe continuation of which was driven more by domestic party politics than national security. The 26th Amendment was ratified only four months after being passed by Congress!

The all-volunteer military has eliminated, to a certain extent, the motivation for young people to participate in the political process to avoid becoming cannon fodder in unpopular and unnecessary wars. The reality of impending environmental and economic collapse, however, and the imminent threat of militarization and curtailment of freedom can serve to unite young peopleif they are made aware of the dangers and they receive support and encouragement.

Educating the Movement. Those who teach know best the limitations, ambitions, and potential of America's young people. It is probably true that many of the least educated are irrevocably disinterested; however, students who value their education are certainly more politically informed, concerned, and motivated. The most fertile fields in which to plant the seeds of a mass political movement are the campuses of high schools, community colleges, colleges, and universities of America. It is there, particularly in the law schools and other graduate programs, where the essential leadership will come to fruition. These students know, understand, and make good use of the Internet and social media. They are the critical mass for a peaceful political evolution.

These young people must; however, receive direction, and it is there that those who teach have a duty and responsibility to become involved. Not only is the availability and provision of a quality education one of the most critical political issues facing the Nation, the current presidential race demonstrates the manner in which educational failures have consequences in partisan politics. Donald Trump takes pride in the fact that his largest group of supporters are poorly educatedhalf of his voters have a high school education or less. Repeated polls show that those who are better educated are much more likely to identify with progressive ideals and are better prepared to accept change.

Teachers are not supposed to have or demonstrate a political agenda in the classroom; however, the USVRA is a nonpartisan proposal that has the potential to empower young people of every political persuasion. Irrespective of politics, teachers are not serving their students if they fail to teach critical thinking and leadership skills. What, if anything, the students do with what they learn, including the USVRA, is their choice.

While it is questionable whether a student-led, mass political movement is possible in the United States, an equally good question is how should a movement be launched? In addition to adult knowledge and wisdom, these young people need the benefit of professionally-trained creative thinking and inspired direction.

Students United. Can anyone predict the ultimate outcome of a small group of students who organize a Youth for the Voters' Rights Amendment (Y4VRA) Association on a single college campus? The ultimate connectivity of just a few students to their "friends," and the friends of their friends, on the social media and around the world, has infinite potential for social and political change.

Rebel communication during the Revolutionary War was maintained by Committees of Correspondence in most colonial towns. Spreading from a core of determined student activists, it is not difficult to imagine the establishment of Committees on every campus in America to communicate with each other and to provide a base for local activities. Drawing on the political netroots experience gained during the last decade, non-partisan goals could be defined and national coordination organized. Mono-focused on achieving the constitutional right to cast effective votes, and cognizant of the transformative effect such a right would create throughout the political process, students could direct their attention (and questions) to every candidate for elective office in the Nation. Forced to take a stand, politicians of every persuasion would find it difficulteven impossibleto avoid taking a position in support of increased democracy and more effective representation. To do otherwise would invite defeat.

With the creative resources available on every college campus, viral videos could be filmed, local communities organized, celebrity and political endorsements obtained, and every aspect of social media mobilized in the effort to peacefully transform the United States government into one that actually represents the People who elect it.

Adopting as a standard the incredibly rapid enactment and ratification of the 18-year-old-voting amendment in 1971, there is no compelling reason why the USVRA could not be passed by Congress and ratified by the states within one election cycle, rather than the decades that have been required for other amendments.

With the enactment of the USVRA, Lincoln's vision could become a realitytruly a government, of, by, and for the People. Imagine a government that nurtures those who elect itand the attraction such a government would have for the peoples of other countries. Imagine the potential of a civilization in which every child has equal access to nutrition, health care, and education. Imagine limitless opportunities for future generations. Imagine that dreams can come true if we truly believe in the power of liberty and have the freedom to express it.

If in fact the USVRA has the inherent potential to unify a national, nonpartisan, political movement, and if the People of the United States are prepared to bring about a transformation of their own government, all that is required is a catalyst to bring these elements together. Will the students of America be the spark that ignites the evolution? Answering that question is the most important test the current generation of students will ever have to take, and the grade they earn will be forever marked in the annals of human civilization.

William John Cox is a retired public interest lawyer. His new book, "Transforming America: A Voters' Bill of Rights" presents the United States Voters' Rights Amendment. He can be reached through his website, http://www.williamjohncox.com








Ending The War On Terriers: Pistol, Boo And Judging Hollywood

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

19 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org

At the end of it weve got a message that is going all around the world right now, its going off like a frog in a sock telling people that if you come to this nation and you dont obey our laws, youre in trouble. Barnaby Joyce, ABC News, Apr 19, 2016

Johnny Depp was happy to feign ice cool, valium laced casualness when talking about it last year. His pet Yorkshire terriers, named Pistol and Boo, have been the ongoing subject of disagreement with the bio-security minded Australian authorities. Their interest in the canines was sparked last year when Amber Heard, his wife, attempted an act of smuggling into the country via private jet. Husband Depp was engaged with yet another Pirates of the Caribbean project, and wife Heard did not deem it fitting to worry about the myriad quarantine regulations that characterise Australias border controls. The dogs were none the wiser.

In September last year, Depp, when cast a question on whether he was going to take his dogs for a gondola ride in Venice, answered with dismissive aplomb: I killed my dogs and ate them, under direct orders of some kind of, I dont know, sweaty, big-gutted man from Australia.

As easy as it is to be dismissive of Australias paunchy current deputy prime minister, crimson-red from sun, stress, and a suggestion of imbibing, a serious note prevails. Barnaby Joyce should not be cast aside as a relic of a provincial backwater indifferent to the fine lines of the law. If anything, he has come across as a crafted caricature, noisy about the egalitarian nature of the Australian spirit in the face of Yankee rough riding. This is Hollywood getting all too cute.

The ecological wars fought in Australia tend to be of a savage sort, cruel, merciless and genocidal in intensity and tendency. The fears are always the same: agro-economic threats, and the assault on biodiversity (more a secondary matter).

It is not necessarily that Australias quarantine and border controls are sensible, well-informed or decently applied. Feverish and arbitrary, they reveal a quotidian manner when it comes to concern about porous borders: some will be allowed through, while others wont. By in large, they are determined to makes sure as few species and agents get through on their watch.

The premise is purely sovereign and patriotic: if we are going to destroy a country with unseen and undetected bacteria or viral phenomena, then let us be the ones to introduce it. Let Australian scientists and sagacious wise men and women of agriculture and the biosecurity field introduce the next malignant strain against resilient rabbits, or the next technique of destruction for the Indian Mynah Bird. Such killing and destruction is entirely a matter of Queen and country.

The overview by Joyce, who uttered his comments in the holy position of agriculture minister, was unvarnished in its simplicity. In foreign presses, such a statement would come across as almost childish. There is a process if you want to bring animals: you get the permits, they go into quarantine and then you can have them. Exemptions for the sexiest man alive twice would be corrosive to the rule of law  or at the very least the rule of quarantine.

Much of this sounds mindlessly corrosive, but Depp and Heard had to make their case clear. Hollywood had come up against an ecological test. And however egalitarian Joyce may claim to be in the business, the standards towards the dream factory are different to those afforded an asylum seeker who arrives by boat, or the Chinese visitor replete with swallow nests.

Some get the accommodation of a cruel detention centre, or a savagely punitive fine; wealthy actors, playing on innocence and a lack of malice, fare better. This is exactly what Heard and Depp found: feign and dissimulate in recording a video of apology for their actions, and get off virtually scot-free. Australia is a wonderful island with a treasure trove of unique plants, animals and species, begins Heard.

Depp then chimes in: It has to be protected. What follows is a half-baked effort at condescending anthropology: Australians are just as unique, both warm and direct When you disrespect Australian law they will tell you firmly.

Joyces response to this act of cinematic idiosyncrasy? What I can say is although I dont think hell get an academy award for his performance, the fact that he did it he looked like he was auditioning for the Godfather.

In what has become a prolonged episode of fancy and fame, Joyce dotted his interviews during the day with suggestions on how he might have actually filmed the effort more appropriately. Joyce the environmental protector had become a pseudo-director. Do it again Johnny, do it with gusto mate, a little gusto. To the Sunrise show on Channel Seven, he observed that Depp should rise to the camera.

An otherwise serious biosecurity matter that might have seen a ten year prison sentence had become cinematically farcical. No conviction was recorded against Heards name, despite her admission to one charge of falsifying border protection documents in smuggling the dogs into the country. The worst she had to deal with was a one-month good behaviour bond. As Joyce had to observe after the ruling, The court determines the punishment of the court so Im not going to start being in contempt of court. Thus ended the war on terriers.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com






Ajit Doval Briefing Against Principle Of Natural Justice And Equality Before The Law

By Anurag Modi

19 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org



OPEN LETTER TO My Lords of SUPREME COURT

To

The Chief Justice of India,

And brother

Judges,

Supreme Court of India

Respected Sir,

The national security has, already, become a tool, in the hands of state and its vigilante groups, to stifle dissent; the mob is incited and activists and members of Adivasi, Dalit and Muslim community are being hounded out. Despite your explicit order of protection, Kanhaiya, a president of JNU was attacked by members of one such vigilante group in the Patiala House Court, in Delhi, with all impunity.



In the name of internal security, the Chhattisgarh state has been turned into exclusive war-zone; where: adivasi are either killed or implicated in false cases; women are raped; lawyers, journalists and activists helping them are either jailed or hounded out. At this juncture, your briefing with National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, would further worsen the situation; our apprehensions are not unfounded.



While, you were busy in having closed door briefing with Mr. Ajit Doval, at your retreat place, in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, lot was happening on the ground in the name of internal security: known researcher and activist, Ms. Bela Bhatia - who, has co-authored a report on this issue, for planning commission, with Mr. Doval; Journalist Malini Subarmaniam - who has been reporting from this internal war zone area in Chhattisgarh; women lawyers of, Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group - who have been providing valuable legal aid to Adivasi victims of states fake encounter and cooked up cases, were all hounded by state and its vigilante group out of Jagdalpur, in Chhattisgarh.



Moreover, your briefing would set a wrong precedent; as it is against the principle natural justice and equality before the law.

I am sure, you all must be aware of the fact that, the state, to which Mr. Doval represents, is one of the litigant party in all such matters of internal and external security; as a result thousands of Adivasi have been rotting in the jails of Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkhand and Maharashtra. Similarly, members of the minority community are facing many cases of alleged terrorism; though, now it has also been established that, many of them were tried on trump up charges and cooked up evidence.



Further to this, the State, already, has stated position on the matter of internal security; it considers that the struggles of the Adivasi going on in Chhattisgarh state as the biggest internal security threats.



Non Naxal districts of the country are no better: being an activists working in adivasi area of Madhya Pradesh for over 25 years, I myself have been witness to many Adivasi hamlets being burnt down by authorities in Betul, Harda and Khandwa Districts of Madhya Pradesh, as they demanded their legitimate rights over the forest. In this region - even after 68 years of Independence - the lowest rung forest officer, the Beat Guard, of the forest department; who is the state authority for Adivasi, is still addressed as Maharaj by Adivasi. Irony of the matter is, while those guilty officers of the state are moving freely, we the activists, along with Adivasi, have been facing more than hundred cases on trumped up charges for peacefully pressing for their legitimate rights over forest. We had, already, approached you, through PIL, but despite you having agreed to forge a new tool to deal with this, the implementing M. P. state has frustrated it.



I am sorry to mention that, the members of Adivasi community have no idea, who you people are? About judiciary and courts, what they know of is: when state authority is tired of harassing them or, they have stopped fearing them anymore, the authorities send them to the magistrate for further harassment. For them nothing much has changed with the independence; the lower judiciary still acts as extended arms of the state.



For example: in criminal trial no 2561/07, at JMFC court Betul, constituted out of the Preliminary Offence Report (POR) No 370/07, dated 19/06/07, 13 minors and 30 adults Adivasi men and women were prosecuted even without being the accused in the case; the trial went on for 8 long years, before they all were acquitted.

I must end with the painful fact that, Adivasi is one of the only communities, which has been, still, fighting for their share of Azadi with the successive states- be it: Maratha; British or, Independent Indian State. Irrespective of the ideology, they are driven by; be it of Bullet or Ballot (violent or non-violent), they are not in rebel to overthrow the Indian State; unfortunately, their desperation for their share of freedom has been taken as a rebel by the state. They never believed in controlling or ruling somebody elses life by set of their principles, but dont allow someone else to control their life, either. So, the matter is not as much of internal security, as it is of mutual trust.

The state, has failed in its duty to provide sense of equal citizenship and co-existence to the members of Adivasi and Minority community. And, I am afraid; your briefing will further alienate them.

I hope, my lords, will soon have briefing organized by the members and activists representing Adivasi and the minority community; else, you would be dubbed as a partisan; at least, in acts if not in intentions,

Anurag Modi

Activist, Shramik Adivasi Sangathn, Samajwadi Jan Parishad

sasbetul@yahoo.com










US-Russia Tensions Flare In Baltic Sea

By Jordan Shilton

18 April, 2016

WSWS.org

The Pentagon announced Saturday that it was filing a formal complaint with the Russian Defense Ministry and US Secretary of State John Kerry threatened retaliatory action after two incidents involving US and Russian forces in the Baltic Sea.

The Pentagon alleged that a Russian SU-27 fighter jet flew within 50 feet of a US reconnaissance plane in international airspace on April 14, and that a Russian jet and helicopter buzzed the Navy destroyer USS Donald Cook as it was conducting military exercises with Poland in the Baltic two days earlier.

The two incidents demonstrate once again that Washingtons aggressive military build-up throughout Eastern Europe, in close collaboration with its NATO allies, has brought the entire region to the brink of war between nuclear powers. The Obama administration seized on the Ukraine crisis provoked by a Western-sponsored coup in Kiev in 2014 to massively expand its military presence in Eastern Europe, so as to encircle and isolate Russia in a region stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea.

While the intensification of US military operations on Russian borders represents an act of aggression, the latest incident also demonstrates the bankruptcy of Moscows response. The Kremlin oligarchy, which came to power by plundering state resources in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, is resorting to a military build-up and the encouragement of reactionary Russian nationalism. Conditions are so tense that a miscalculation by either side or even an accident could serve as the trigger for a conflict that could quickly escalate to include the use of nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State Kerry admitted as much this past week, when he responded to the USS Donald Cook incident by bluntly declaring that the US would have been within its rights to shoot the Russian jet down. Washingtons top diplomat labeled the alleged behavior of the jet as reckless and provocative, while the Pentagon called Thursdays interception of the spy plane as an erratic and aggressive act.

Moscow denied the allegations, claiming in a statement that in the case of the spy plane, the Russian Air Force had detected over the Baltic ocean an unidentified aerial target rapidly approaching the Russian border. Spokesman Igor Konashenkov stated that the actions of the Russian aircraft were in accordance with international standards for the use of air space.

Confrontations between NATO and Russian aircraft over the Baltic are becoming routine. According to a January report from United Press International, NATO jets scrambled at least 160 times in 2015 to intercept Russian jets in the Baltic. This figure was a 14 percent rise from 2014.

The pace of such incidents is likely to rise dramatically in the immediate period ahead. The Obama administration has announced a quadrupling of defense spending for Europe for 2017 to $3.4 billion. The increase will finance the sending of an additional three brigades. A further 16,500 soldiers will be in permanent rotation throughout Eastern Europe, from the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuaniato whom Obama in September 2014 issued a guarantee of US support in the event of conflict with Russiato Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the Black Sea states of Romania and Bulgaria.

In this, Washington is aligning itself with virulently right-wing, anti-Russian regimes whose reckless policies could provide the spark that ignites the ongoing standoff.

In comments to the Globsec security forum on the weekend, Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski proclaimed Russia to be a greater threat to world peace than the Islamic State. He urged NATO to permanently deploy troops to Poland to protect its eastern border, vowing that he would make an appeal to that end at the NATO summit scheduled to take place in Warsaw in July. By all evidence, Russias activity is a sort of existential threat because this activity can destroy countries, Waszczykowski asserted.

Romania, another NATO member, is pushing for the Warsaw summit to adopt a plan for a permanent NATO naval presence in the Black Sea. Romanias defense minister, Mihnea Motoc, said earlier this month on a visit to Georgia that he would be in favor of an enhanced partnership between NATO members Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey and would-be members Georgia and Ukraine to establish a Black Sea fleet. Motoc said in an interview that the proposed fleet would be open to NATO members who dont border the Black Sea, yet are constantly present in Black Sea ports and take part in exercisesfirst of all, to the United States.

At the NATO summit in Wales in September 2014, the alliance committed to have all members spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on their militaries, and agreed the creation of a rapid response force for eastern Europe that has since been expanded to enable tens of thousands of troops to be deployed anywhere within the alliances territory in a matter of days.

The lead article in Sundays edition of the New York Times underscored the fact that potential conflicts for which such forces are being prepared would likely involve the deployment of nuclear weapons. In what it described as a revival of the Cold War, the Times described Washington, Russia and China as being engaged in an arms race to develop a new class of small-scale nuclear weapons with capabilities to bypass traditional missile defense shields.

There is an objective significance to the fact that the Times, Americas newspaper of record, has published a front-page article bringing to light a development that has long been the subject of in-depth analysis by US think tanks. A report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments published earlier this year was entitled Rethinking Armageddon: scenario planning in the second nuclear age, reflecting the fact that policymaking circles are considering the practicalities of how to fight and win a military conflict with nuclear weapons.

Since President Obamas 2010 promise not to pursue new nuclear weapons programs, Washington has announced an additional $1 trillion in funding for the modernization of the US nuclear arsenal. The Times article provides information on the types of weaponry being developed, including a new weapon called a hypersonic glide vehicle. Such weapons, which the US will begin flight-testing next year, could render missile defenses all but useless, the Times noted.

At the conclusion of the biennial nuclear summit in Washington at the end of last month, to which Russia refused to send representatives, Obama expressed concern about ramping up new and more deadly and more effective systems that end up leading to a whole new escalation of the arms race.

A second Times article published over the weekend on the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad makes all too clear that the plans for the deployment of nuclear weapons have moved well beyond the realm of speculation. The Russian territory, located on the southeast corner of the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Poland, was described in testimony to Congress by NATO Commander Gen. Phillip Breedlove in February as a very militarized piece of property that was capable of repelling attacks by air, land or sea.

The six years since Obamas empty pledge to reduce nuclear weapons have seen a vast intensification of US-led aggressive military operations aimed at consolidating American hegemony and weakening Russia and China in key geostrategic regions. As part of the ongoing bombardment of Iraq and Syria, carried out under the pretext of combating terrorism, Washington recently sent nuclear-capable B52 bombers to its Middle East bases, bringing them well within range of Iran and Russia itself.








Truth Is The First Casualty Of War: Nagorno-Karabakh And Media Misinformation

By Jirair Tutunjian

19 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org

A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it. Tom Stoppard (Night and Day)

The Crimean War, in mid-19th century, introduced the world to the cardigan, the raglan jersey, and the balaclava headdress. It also introduced a new profession: the foreign correspondent. And almost immediately after the war the axiom truth is the first casualty of war was born because of the falsehoods spread by foreign correspondents on both sides, not to mention Tennysons overheated and wrong-headed poem.

Since then, as in any other profession, there have been capable and honest foreign correspondents and reporters who have been incompetent, ignorant or propaganda tools of their nation or their employers. Ernest Hemingway, a giant of American literature, didnt hesitate to color his coverage of the Spanish Civil War with propaganda for the side he favoured. A British daily reported that the Americans had been victorious at Pearl Harbor. Countless American foreign correspondents beat the Pentagon drum during the Vietnam War. More recently, embedded American journalists reported how the US forces had liberated Iraq.

Foreign correspondents can be notoriously uninformed and cavalier about the countrys they report on: for example, the Middle East foreign correspondents of Western media who speak Arabic are as rare as atheists in Mecca. Most Western correspondents thus depend on local minders and a dubious local media to report whats happening. The situation has worsened in recent years as Western media have closed news bureaus around the globe and lone correspondents cover whole continents. This has given rise to the airport reporter... the journalist who flies in to a hot spot for a few days and covers complicated conflicts with a few hundred words then flies away to chase another conflict.

Considering the deteriorating condition of the profession, its no surprise that many of its practitioners did a shabby job in reporting on the early April fighting between Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh). As usual, East vs. West friction, national and corporate interests (Azeri oil more precious than Armenian blood), carelessness and sheer ignorance played a part in their coverage. And as on other occasions, the conflict was often covered in Manichean terms.

Heres how the anti-Armenian or indifferent foreign correspondents and commentators reported the war between Azerbaijan and Artsakh.

Rather than point out that the fighting erupted because Azeri forces had attacked Armenian positions, hostile-to-the-Armenians journalists wrote of violence and shooting on both sides.

They said both the Armenians and the Azeris spent enormous sums of building their armed forces without mentioning that what Armenia spends is a pittance of what petro-rich Azerbaijan spends. In the past decade Baku has invested $20 billion in its armed forces while the annual Azeri defense budget equals Armenias total national budget. The journalists also didnt mention that impoverished Armenia has no interest in war and is forced to invest in its military in a failed attempt to keep up with the Azerbaijan martial profligacy. The equivalency was jarring.

The foreign correspondents talked vaguely of numerous casualties on both sides thus hiding the fact that the invading Azeris, who made the surprise attack and were better armed than Artsakh Armenians, suffered far greater losses in personnel and in weapons.

The foreign correspondents in many instances failed to mention that three Armenian soldiers were beheaded, and several unarmed and aged Armenian men were killed and mutilated in their homes. Perhaps the foreign correspondents didnt want to suggest proximity in Azeri and ISIS attitude and behaviour. Such a comparison would have painted the Azeris in pitch black and their leadership as war criminals.

The journalists wrote that prior to the recent fight there was almost daily shootings across the contact line. However, they didnt mention that almost in all cases the Azeris had initiated the shooting, forcing the Armenians to retaliate. They also didnt mention that no month has passed in recent years without Azeri President Ilham Aliev or one of his senior military officers threatening to invade Artsakh.

While they occasionally talked about Azeri drones, many foreign correspondents omitted the fact that these very effective weapons, called Harop, were all imported from Israel. That country manufactures 40% of the worlds drones. Mentioning Israeli complicity would have been a no-no in the Western media. In one instance one of these drones killed seven Armenian civilians in a bus.

To hide the David and Goliath aspect of the April fighting, these same journalists didnt mention that the Artsakh fighters achieved victory without reinforcements from Armenia.

Although Azeri forces achieved very little in their costly blitzkrieg, correspondents who were anti-Armenian exaggerated the importance of the several hillocks the Azeris managed to take from the Armenian side.

The anti-Armenian media didnt mention the heroism of young Armenian soldiers who downed helicopter and drone with rudimentary weapons.

Not to offend Turkey, these same foreign correspondents failed to mention Erdogans and Davutoglus incitement for war against tiny Armenia. The correspondents also didnt mention that the Azeri defense minister had threatened to bomb civilians in Stepanagerd.

To depict the Armenians as the foe, the journalists made sure to mention that Russia had a military base in Armenia. Of course, they didnt say that Armenia was not only blockaded by the Turkbeijan Twins but was also threatened by 700,000-plus Turkish army, the second largest in NATO. In other words, the Russian military presence in Armenia is largely symbolic.

Some reporters even falsified the fighting in the 90s by claiming that the Azeris had fought the Armenians of Artsakh and Armenia, in addition to Russian soldiers. Not only did the Russian stop Armenians from advancing but the Azeris had hired Ukrainian pilots ($1,000 per bombing mission) in addition to having brought Pakistani, Mujahideen, Taliban and other Islamic fighters to attack the small Armenian army.

To portray Azerbaijan as peace-loving some journalists said that Baku had cut its military budget by 40%. They didnt say that Baku was forced to do so because of the collapse of the oil market Azerbaijan depends on to stay afloat.

Another way of hitting the Armenian sidein a subtle wayis to call them armed separatists who illegally control 20% of Azerbaijan and Artsakh a breakaway region, occupier and enclave. The use of ethnic to describe Artsakh Armenians is another gimmick. An ethnic group is by definition a minority. Artsakh residents are not ethnics. They are a nation--a nation which has lived in Artsakh for nearly 3,000 years. They are the settled indigenous inhabitants. The Azeris are the interloping Turkic/Tatar nomads. The reason Artsakh Armenians wrested the region from Azerbaijan during the collapse of the Soviet Union was because Joseph Stalin had given Armenian Artsakh to Azerbaijan to please Turkey, Azerbaijans older brother.

To divert the readers attention from the crux of the conflict, some journalists opined that President Serge Sarkissian of Armenia needs a victory on the battlefield to improve his chances of continuing his reign past 2018. The same correspondent said Sarkissian is prepared to follow any Moscow directives where the now tense Turkey-Russia relations are concerned. In other words, nasty and belligerent Armenia threatens NATO. Of course no mention of the various NATO bases in Turkey, the establishment of a NATO base in Nakhichevan (another territory taken from Armenia by Stalin and given to Azerbaijan) and Israeli access to Azeri airfields across from northern Iran.

In one instance a foreign correspondent wrote: The number of incidents along the Armenian-Azeri line increased over the past year. On the Azeri side there is a civilian population that has not left its homes. They are subjected to Armenian fire, which is sometimes aimed at them one-hundred or more times a day. No mention that the incidents were ALWAYS started by the Azeris.

The same reporter ended his misleading report with: Now that Azerbaijan has proved its military superiority, there is a chance for real diplomatic communication that could lead to an agreement. By this reporters estimation, war is peace, petrol is a cleaning agent, and corrupt, dictatorial and belligerent Baby Aliyev is a modern Simon Bolivar.

Orwellianism is alive and well.



Jirair Tutunjian is a Canadian-Armenian journalist.






SHARE Linda Bennett MIKE LAWRENCE / COURIER & PRESS University of Southern Indiana President Linda Bennett is surprised as Evansville Rotary Club members Donna Leader and Randy Wheeler select her as the recipient of the Rotary Club of Evansville Civic Award for 2015. MIKE LAWRENCE / COURIER & PRESS Linda Bennett, president of the University of Southern Indiana, addresses the audience after receiving the Rotary Club of Evansville Civic Award for 2015 on Tuesday. MIKE LAWRENCE / COURIER & PRESS Well-wishers line up to greet University of Southern Indiana president Linda Bennett after she received the 2015 Rotary Club of Evansville Civic Award during Tuesday's meeting at the Tropicana conference center.

By John Martin of the Courier and Press

University of Southern Indiana President Linda Bennett had been nominated multiple times for the Rotary Club of Evansville's annual Civic Award, and this year, the club decided it was time for her campus and community leadership to be celebrated.

Bennett on Tuesday joined her two predecessors at USI  Ray Hoops (2004) and David Rice (1985)  as recipients of the honor, which has been given since 1927.

"Members of her faculty were so passionate that she deserved this award," said Pepper Mulherin, chairman of the Civic Award selection panel. "Her contributions to our community are more than significant. I think she's a transformational leader."

Bennett became USI president in July 2009 after serving as provost and vice president for Academic Affairs since 2003. In her first year as president, Bennett established USI's first-ever strategic plan, and in March, the Board of Trustees approved an update to that plan.

Its three planks include excellence in learning for the entire USI community; access and opportunity by design; and purposeful and sustainable growth. The plan strives for total enrollment to grow from 11,000 to 15,000 by 2025  a figure that includes on-campus and online students, as well as dual-credit students spread across 27 area high schools.

Bennett in November announced that USI's capital campaign had reached its $50 million goal ahead of schedule. The campaign started in 2011, and gifts have topped $55 million.

Rotarians strive to make the award a surprise for the recipient, and in Bennett's case, they succeeded. As in past years, Randy Wheeler and Donna Leader were asked to wander around the club's meeting room at Tropicana Evansville, "looking for" the winner.

Wheeler and Leader strolled the room apart from one another, coming together upon reaching Bennett's table. The room broke into applause, and a video praised Bennett's work at USI and her commitment to a lengthy list of community organizations.

"I'm overwhelmed," Bennett said. "I get up every morning, go to campus and work with an amazing team of people. And nothing happens without those folks around me."

Bennett advised those who are concerned about the future to visit USI and talk with students.

"The future is bright," she said. "There's so much they are doing to lift each other up, and they are so optimistic. If we understand that, then we have a great confidence in the future."

A professor of political science, Bennett has taught courses in Introduction to American Politics for USI students and has more than 25 years of teaching experience. She came to USI from Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, where she served from 1999-2003 as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of political science.

From 1996-99, she was chair of the Department of Political Science and professor of political science at Northern Kentucky University. From 1983-96, she taught at Wittenberg University in Ohio, chairing the Department of Political Science in her final two years.

The Cincinnati native earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in political science from the University of Cincinnati.

"You managed to catch me completely by surprise," said Bennett, who will be honored with a Rotary Club billboard for the year to come. "I am so grateful that Steve (her husband) and I found this community. We have come to love this community, much like my beloved Cincinnati."
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By Richard Gootee of the Courier and Press

A crash Tuesday morning involving a dump truck on U.S. 41 in Knox County killed one person.

Indiana State Police identified the man as Derek Kelly, 38, from Vincennes. According to a state police news release, Kelly was in a 2011 Mazda car going north on U.S. 41 when the Indiana Department of Transportation dump truck pulled in front of him at the Industrial Drive intersection. Kelly was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in Vincennes but died from the injuries sustained in the crash.

The crash happened just before 7 a.m. EDT

The driver of the dump truck, Raigen Bailey, 22, was taken to the hospital for treatment. She was released later Tuesday morning.

Investigators believe Bailey, a Farmersburg, Indiana, resident, stopped at the stop sign at the intersection but did not see Kelly's car and pulled in front of the vehicle as she was crossing the highway to turn into the southbound lanes, according to the news release.

State police said the crash remains under investigation.
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By Shannon Hall of the Courier and Press

When Elizabeth Shinnerl's son started middle school, he tried taking the bus. The 11-year-old had to start waiting in his driveway at 6:30 a.m.

"He was missing the bus more than he was making the bus," Shinnerl said.

Shinnerl was one of the parents who spoke in favor of a later start time for Warrick County schools. The Warrick County School Board had a hearing Monday evening about starting and ending school 30 minutes later.

The three high schools start classes currently start about 7:30 a.m.

"About 60 percent of the school year, kids are waiting for the bus or at school before the sun comes up," Schinnerl said.

Superintendent Brad Schneider said the board just wants to hear people's thoughts about a later start time. The matter could be brought to the board in late May or early July.

Sue Watson said her family moved to Indiana two years ago from Virginia, where they had a later start time. Her daughter has often said that she wishes she could start school later.

"She said it's hard to be the proper student she wants to be," Watson said.

But if the school does implement a later start time, it shouldn't allow more time for clubs and sport groups to meet., Watson said.

"That's not the purpose," she said.

Kristi Held, Warrick County Teacher Association president, said the association isn't for or against a later start time. She did raise concerns about how a time change would affect lunch during a two-hour delay.

She also said it would shorten the time students have with family after school and make less time for them to do homework. She said she spoke to some teachers who support it as well as others who were on the fence.

"We support the best practices for our students," she said.

A survey will go online this week for parents and teachers to have their voices heard.

The board also voted to take no disciplinary action against administrators at a Warrick County elementary school.

According to the board, the Indiana State Police and the Warrick County Prosecutor's Office didn't find any wrongdoing from the administrators. Parents had come to several recent meetings to levy myriad accusations.
Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, hugs his wife Heidi, during a primary night campaign event, Tuesday, April 5, 2016, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

By Staff Report, john.martin@courierpress.com / @ECPjohnmartin

Heidi Cruz, the wife of Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, will visit the candidate's Evansville campaign headquarters at 9 a.m. Friday, according to the Cruz campaign.

Heidi Cruz will greet campaign volunteers during her visit.

She also will be a guest at Thursday night's Right to Life of Southwest Indiana banquet, but she is not a speaker at the event.

The appearance comes on the heels of a stop by the candidate's father, Rafael Cruz, at Boeke Road Baptist Church on Saturday.

___

CANVASS PODCAST: Indiana Primary Election Preview
RED OAK, IA - NOVEMBER 04: Voters fill in their ballots on election day at the Red Oak Fire Department November 4, 2014 in Red Oak, Iowa. According to the polls, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joni Ernst is in a neck-and-neck race with Democratic candidate Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA), and the election in Iowa could decide which party controls the U.S. Senate. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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By Staff And Wire Reports

INDIANAPOLIS  With record early-voting numbers already reached, Indiana election officials don't expect the momentum to let up ahead of the state's May 3 primary election.

About 31,000 people had cast ballots in-person as of Monday since early voting began April 5, according to the Indiana Secretary of State's Office. That's nearly double the number of early voters during the same period in 2012.

Vanderburgh County officials report that 1,146 early votes have been cast as of early Tuesday afternoon. Warrick County reports 380 early votes cast. About 250 early votes have been cast in Posey County.

CANVASS PODCAST: Indiana Primary Election Preview

Indiana is expected to play a pivotal role in this year's presidential nominating contest, despite the state's late primary. Some efforts by campaigns and election offices say early voting will save people time instead of waiting in line during election day, but election officials say the large pre-election turnout is mostly due to the closely contested presidential races in both the Democrat and Republican fields.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, is challenging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, while the Republican nod pits business giant Donald Trump against Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Several statewide primaries also may prove to be tight races, with the state Senate's top leaders facing challengers and two open congressional seats being fought over by several current public officials.

"It's been busy," said Russell Hollis, deputy director for the Marion County Election Board. "I do think having contested primaries on both sides of the aisle has a lot to do with it."

In Marion County, there have been nearly twice as many people voting in-person daily than there were in 2012. The county has also seen more activity than the 2008 election, which was the last time the presidential race did not include an incumbent. In Indiana, Clinton beat now-President Barack Obama.

While the turnout may be difficult to predict, Hollis said the upward trend may continue unless someone drops out of the presidential race.

It's not just in-person early voting, either: The state has received about 20,000 absentee ballots so far, nearly 3,000 more than 2012.

Debra Walker, president of the Association of the Clerks of the Circuit Courts of Indiana, said she doesn't expect it to slow down.

"The presidential election especially when it is an open seat, always brings out a lot of voters," Walker said. "With Indiana playing such a big role this year, I think that people will realize that their vote will count."
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Stefan Jansen joined Amazon Web Services in 2013 after a two-decade IT career including channel roles at EDS Australia and Microsoft.

Journey

After finishing my business degree at university in The Netherlands, I was attracted to the rapid innovation happening in the IT sector. When I migrated to Australia in 2001, I quickly moved into a channel-type position and have had various similar roles over the years.

I was the first channel alliance manager at EDS outside head office. I then worked at an alliance level at Microsoft where I had the honour of implementing new models around cloud services in the early days. I also worked on ERP and CRM services.

I grew up in a small retail family and I pride myself on being able to understand what a partner needs.

Launch of the partner program

Like Amazon, AWS innovates rapidly. Our platform added 700 new features and functions last year, and 95 percent of that came from customer feedback. The channel business is evolving at the same rate and is also based on customer feedback. When I joined AWS two-and-a-half years ago, the channel program was young. We are now launching new features and functions to the program almost daily.

Program elements

If you want to be customer-centric, you need to offer customers services in the easiest, fastest ways possible. We have changed the way we allocate resources. Many of our channel team is in the field. Our AWS marketplace is removing the heavy lifting for customers to procure software running on AWS. In terms of joint engagement, we have no conflict between direct and indirect. Our direct sales force works hand-in-hand with our partners.

Margins in cloud

The conversation is not about margin per se. That is the wrong conversation. It is about how you can add value on top of a platform that is becoming so broad and available on a global scale. It is changing the traditional linear vendor-distributor-reseller model.

Types of partners

We have technology partners and consulting partners. Think about technology partners more as startups. They start building their solution on top of the AWS platform, then we turn them into a partner model, supporting them in customer engagements. We all know about someone like an Atlassian being one of our most successful ISVs, but also think about MYOB and Xero.

Consulting partners include high-end influencers like Deloitte and PwC as well as large system integrators like Datacom and SMS.

Lets not forget our born-in-the-cloud partners. Their businesses are set up in a way that requires the same high level of agility and specialisation that our customers are asking for, such as security or DevOps. Companies like Versent didnt really exist a few years ago, yet they have built a very successful business off the back of the cloud.

Then there are the established MSPs like Bulletproof, Melbourne IT and Base2Services. We were excited to share the recent announcement about Rackspace now offering their [fanatical support on AWS in Australia].

Partner Summit

The Partner Summit is a half-day event for AWS partners. It is ideal if you are new or have been around for a long time and want to become a partner. We are excited to have Terry Wise, our global VP for channel and alliances, here. He has been running the channel business since day one..

Lessons learned

If there is one lesson Ive learned, its to never lose sight of the end customer. In a channel role, the biggest pitfall is becoming too obsessed with driving outcomes related to programs. Those are very important assets for ourselves and for the channel. They are enablers, and we at AWS continue to invest but never lose sight of the end customer.

CRN and iTnews are exclusive media partners of the 2016 AWS Summit. Make sure to drop by our stand at the conference, which takes place on 27-28 April at the Horden Pavilion in Sydney. The AWS Partner Summit is on 26 April at the Sofitel Wentworth.

RESUME
La Trobe University is hunting an IT managed services provider to help the institution ditch its data centres.

The university's chief information officer, Peter Nikoletatos, explained that his department was currently in a tender process looking for a supplier to take over its infrastructure.

"We don't want to manage any data centres  we want to have that completely managed by a third party."

Nikoletatos envisages a future where La Trobe's IT team is more focused on transformational projects, not keeping the lights on. He wants to move "away from something that adds absolutely zero value to the business and that is all about implementation of IT, and switch them over to application of IT".

The university is embracing SaaS, though Nikoletatos said many legacy applications will continue to run out of a managed data centre.

"Where it makes sense, where our core applications are quite mature and our providers are doing software as a service  that makes a lot of things easy for us. You do the whole platform and infrastructure and application bundled together."

He predicted "the top 30 applications, they will migrate to the SaaS model".

"We have been public about our work with SAP in this space. We were the first customer globally to put SAP's Simple Finance in the cloud," he said.

"But that is a top 30 application. While that is quite mature, there are another 600 applications that operate in the university that need a home. For us to maintain tin, to buy servers and compute and maintain infrastructure in data centres, we have to have a capital demand-driven model.

"That predisposes that we will get capital each year  enough to refresh at regular intervals. What typically happens is you can't rely on your capital funding being consistent over time. You may need it, but it may not be a great time for the institution. Their priorities might be elsewhere.

"We are tending to sweat assets further and that of course increases our error rate  and that is a problem that I don't need," Nikoletatos said.

Nikoletatos made the comments at last month's Cisco Live, then also spoke at the CRN Pipeline summit in Melbourne last week along with a panel of leading IT buyers.

La Trobe is not alone in looking for an MSP to take over infrastructure to free up the internal team to focus more closely on transformation and business-driven projects. Last year, CRN reported how Flight Centre had chosen service provider Interactive to take over its data centre for similar reasons.
Former Hitachi Data Systems Asia Pacific chief technology officer Adrian De Luca has joined Amazon Web Services after 17 years at HDS.

De Luca joined AWS as Asia Pacific head of partner and ecosystems solution architecture, according to LinkedIn.

While at HDS, De Luca held several important roles such as storage software director for Australia and later Asia Pacific, and pre-sales and chief technology officer for ANZ. He became chief technology officer in 2013.

Both AWS and HDS declined CRN's requests for comment.

De Luca is not the only former HDS figure to appear at AWS  Simon Elisha has rejoined the cloud giant as head of solution architecture for the public sector for Australia and New Zealand. Elisha previously worked for AWS between 2011 and 2014 as principal solution architect, according to LinkedIn.

Both De Luca and Elisha worked together at HDS between 2005 and 2010.

Elisha has 25 years' experience in the IT industry. He worked for PwC, Symantec, Hitachi, Cisco and Pivotal where he was chief technology officer of field engineering for Australia and New Zealand.
The receivers of electronics reseller Dick Smith has announced all the remaining 195 Australian stores would close permanently by 3 May.

Ferrier Hodgson, appointed in January as receivers, has been closing the network of physical stores progressively since 25 February, resulting in the loss of 2,460 jobs in Australia.

The first batch of closure dates, for 35 outlets, were announced on 30 March. Another 53 stores were revealed last week to shut between 23 and 26 April.

In a short statement, Ferrier Hodgson today said that the remaining 195 shops would close between 27 April and 3 May.

The electronics reseller went into both voluntary administration and receivership on 5 January, unable to cope with a reported debt of $390 million. Only 14 months ago, Dick Smith was celebrating a $56.8 million year-on-year increase in revenue to hit $693.8 million for the half-year to 31 December 2014, with net profit up $25 million to $25.2 million.

Dick Smith established his eponymous brand in 1968 as a car radio installation business in Sydney. The entrepreneur sold his share to Woolworths in 1982, with the supermarket giant selling it to Anchorage Capital Partners in 2012. The business floated on the ASX in 2013.

Anchorage Capital Partners this month denied any wrongdoing in the management of the business in its submission to a senate enquiry into the collapse of Australian retailers.

The Dick Smith name will live on as an online shop, after Kogan acquired selected assets in March.
Blockchain for entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector: challenges and opportunities - May 15, 2020 4:00 PM CEST

Blockchain for Agriculture webinar

Are you an entrepreneur in African, the Caribbean and Pacific countries and interested in blockchain? Do you want to know if and in which conditions you can leverage on blockchain to offer meaningful services to potential clients in the agricultural sector and beyond? This webinar organised by the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in the framework its AgriHack and Blockchain projects, and in partnership with Blockchain Workspace in the Netherlands will discuss these questions. Apart from insights from three invited experts, experiences of an ACP entrepreneur investing in Blockchain will be shared. Other entrepreneurs from the audience may have the opportunity to briefly share their experiences as well. The session will be held in English only. With George Maina, founder of Shamba Records & Once Sync Limited (Kenya); Henk van Cann and Erwin Overstegen, both co-founder of the training firm Blockchain Workspace (bcws.io); and Ken Lohento (CTA)
BETHEL  Police investigating a hang-up call to 911 from a Governors Lane home heard a gunshot just as they arrived at the scene of what turned out to be a murder-suicide, according to a just-unsealed search warrant.

Officers rang the doorbell twice and heard what they described as a pop,  police reported in the warrant, which the state Superior Court in Danbury unsealed last week.

One officer then knocked on the door, but got no answer. Both officers went inside, where they heard a female voice calling for help in the kitchen.

The woman, Anh Cristofalo, would be the only survivor of a triple shooting that rocked the quiet Bethel neighborhood on March 25.

Police said her brother, Thai Pham, used a makeshift gun that Friday afternoon to kill his sisters husband, Charles Cristofalo, and injure her before turning it on himself.

Cristofalo, the 76-year-old homeowner who had been trying to evict his brother-in-law, was pronounced dead in his bedroom, police said.

Pham, 56, was taken to the hospital, where doctors determined he was brain-dead, court records show. He died the next day.

Anh Cristofalo, 68, suffered a cervical spine injury and underwent surgery the day of the shooting, according to the warrant.

The document shows the woman was found on the kitchen floor, bleeding from her head. Her brother was found in his bedroom, which he rented for $450 a month, according to court records.

A lawsuit filed last summer by Charles Cristofalo states that Pham had failed to pay his rent for six months. The tenant, who moved in with his sister and brother-in-law in 1994, was initially given two months to leave the housem but the two parties agreed last fall that Pham could stay until March 25  the day of the shooting.

Authorities have yet to confirm that eviction battle was the motive for the shooting. Police Chief Jeffrey Finch did not return a call seeking comment.

Also during the search that day, police found two .22 caliber shell casings in a hallway as well .22 caliber ammunition and a .22 caliber makeshift zip gun in Phams room, the warrant shows. Police have not described the weapon, but they have said it included parts of actual guns.

Court records indicate Cristofalo also had several firearms in the house, including two rifles.

The Connecticut State Police Major Crime Squad is assisting Bethel with the probe.

noliveira@newstimes.com, 203-731-3411, @olivnelson
BRIDGEPORT  One man was killed and another was questioned by police after a car crash at Barnum Avenue and Pembroke Street Monday afternoon.

City officials said the crash took place at around 4:30 p.m., moments after police attempted to stop a speeding motorist, who then plowed into another vehicle.

Av Harris, a spokesman for Mayor Joe Ganim, said 20-year-old Geraldo Maldonado, of Bridgeport, was driving south in a Saturn on Pembroke Street, very fast, and that Bridgeport Police had just turned on the flashing lights and were attempting to pull the car over.

Police Chief Armando Perez said officers had seen Maldonado blow through a number of intersections without stopping where required before before the police pursuit began.

Harris said the Saturn plowed into a Chevrolet Trailblazer, flipping the westbound SUV over and launching the driver, 22-year-old David Anthony Anderson of Seymour, out of the vehicle. Police and firefighters rushed to the scene but Anderson died of his injuries.

Perez said Anderson had not been wearing a seatbelt and sustained massive head injuries.

It was a tragic thing  it was all speed, the chief said.

Maldonado ran from the scene, Perez said, but was tracked and caught with the help of police dogs. Perez said police first throught Maldonado had a passenger with him at the time of the crash, because aribags on both sides of the Saturn deployed. But police later determined Maldonado had been alone, the chief said.

Maldonado admitted he was the driver, (and that) he was high on whatever substance he was on, Perez said. Hes cooperating.

He was treated and released from Bridgeport Hospital for unspecified injuries, Harris said. While an investigation was ongoing Tuesday, no charges had been filed, and Maldonado was not being held by police.

We know who is he; he lives up in the North End of the city, Perez said. Hes known to us  hes not a flight risk.
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HARTFORD  A rift blew open Tuesday between Democratic leaders of the General Assembly and the governor over the states budget crisis, threatening a political meltdown with two weeks to go in the legislative session.

The four Democratic leaders skipped a morning meeting on the projected $922 million budget deficit in Gov. Dannl P. Malloys office with House Minority Leader Themis Klarides and Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano. The Republicans said it was an embarrassment to the budget negotiation process.

I thought the whole idea of these meetings was to have conversations, said Fasano, R-North Haven, after emerging from from the Democratic governors Capitol office. Here we are, in the infancy of conversations, and they refuse to participate.

Klarides, R-Derby, said recent weekly meetings in Malloys office have been aimed at developing a framework for compromise.

They made the decision to not be in the room, which was I think is an irresponsible decision on their part, Klarides said. We go in there because its our job to go in and figure out what we can get from it, meaning, Can we agree on something? 

Malloy, speaking to reporters in his office, said lawmakers have to rise to the budget problems.

I dont feel jilted, he said. I think its really hard adjusting to a new economic reality. Its very hard, and they have big constituencies.

Malloy opposes borrowing, raising taxes or using the states $400 million emergency reserves.

The governor said Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey, D-Hamden, was having a bad day last week when he called the governors proposed cuts to local education, hospitals and municipal aid a hit list.

Outside the House chamber Tuesday afternoon, Sharkey denied the governors assessment, charging that the spending document Malloy issued last week, a rewritten form of the budget he proposed in February, included unacceptable slashes to municipal aid, local schools and hospitals.

It only transfers the cost of government onto local government, Sharkey said, also criticizing a proposal for the governor to take greater control over state budgeting authority. It felt somewhat like a poke in the eye to members of the House and Senate, both Democrats and Republicans.

While Sharkey and Malloy said there was nothing personal, they continued to disagree on how to tackle the deficit in the $19 billion budget set to take effect July 1. Sharkey and House Majority Leader Joe Aresimowicz, D-Berlin, said they do not intend to participate in other budget talks with the governor until the April tax-revenue projections come out next week, just days before the May 4 adjournment deadline

They remained optimistic that the budget can be finalized before the May 4 adjournment deadline.

After the 20-minute sit-down with the governor, Fasano and Klarides said they expect to participate in another closed-door session with Malloy on Thursday.

Senate President Pro Tempore Martin M. Looney said in a statement that majority leaders are preparing budget legislation that they can present to Malloy, who could sign it, veto it, or let it become law without his signature.

Democrats in the General Assembly are working on a $920 million plan, and further talks would not be productive until we have specifics to reach that number, Looney, D-New Haven, said in a 2 p.m. statement. We are willing to work in good faith with Republicans and the governor to balance our budget. Republicans want to have it both ways. They criticize Democrats but are content to sit in meeting after meeting without a plan of their own.

Meanwhile, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities on Tuesday began airing a new TV ad campaign aimed at preserving municipal aid to avoid local increases in property taxes. The $80,000 ad campaign will air 350 30-second spots on WFSB CH. 3, WVIT CH. 30, WTIC-FOX 61, WTNH Ch. 8 and Cable News12.

kdixon@ctpost.com
BRIDGEPORT - The former emergency manager at Bridgeport Hospital, accused of forcibly administering enemas to at least four men and secretly photographing a dozen others, was arraigned Tuesday.

Glancing nervously around the courtroom, Barry Barkinsky stood before Superior Court Judge William Holden as Assistant States Attorney Stephanie Damiani asked the judge to impose orders on the 62-year-old defendant to keep him away from his alleged victims.

Do you have any firearms and ammunition? Holden asked Barkinsky, who immediately turned his attention to the judge.

Yes, I do, Barkinsky responded.

More News Bridgeport Hospital official charged with sexually assaulting...

You are ordered to surrender all of them immediately or you will be facing another charge, the judge continued. You are ordered to stay away from the homes of these individuals, do not contact them by any of the means available.

Damiani then asked the judge for a continuance so that her office can do further investigation in the case and Holden continued it to May 25.

Both Barkinsky and his lawyer, Ralph Romano, declined comment as they left the Golden Hill Street courthouse.

Barkinsky, of Franklin Street, Stamford, who had also been teaching at the Bridgeport Hospital nursing school until hospital officials said they fired him after learning about the police investigation, is charged with four counts of fourth-degree sexual assault and 10 counts of voyeurism.

He is free on $100,000 bond.

Police said when they confronted Barkinsky he admitted the allegations and turned over 2,181 photographs he had secretly taken of at least a dozen men while he had them naked on a table performing a medical procedure on them.

On Dec. 8, 2015, police said they were contacted by a 22-year-old local man who complained he had been sexually assaulted and secretly photographed by Barkinsky.

Police said the victim told them he had enrolled in the EMT course at the nursing school in 2013 and Barkinsky was one of his instructors. At some point Barkinsky noticed the man was having back trouble and offered to give him weekly chiropractic treatments in an office in the nursing school, police said. During each treatment Barkinsky would have the man lie naked on a table and Barkinsky would begin by thoroughly examining the mans genitals with his hands, police said.

He (the victim) though Barkinsky had an unorthodox approach to medicine and didnt question anything, police said.

During one of the treatments the victim told police he heard a camera shutter sound and was concerned Barkinsky was photographing his naked backside.

On Nov.24, 2015, police said during an enema session the victim looked behind him to say something and did catch Barkinsky photographing him with his cell phone. Later, police said the victim secretly photographed Barkinsky photographing him as he lay naked on the table. They said the victim turned the photo over to them.

Police said when Lt. Chris LaMaine confronted Barkinsky and asked him if he would make a statement, Barkinsky blurted, I might as well because youre going to see the pictures anyways. They said he then turned over the photographs of a dozen naked men all undergoing enema procedures and admitted the procedures had not been consensual.

Police said they later contacted 10 of the men in the photographs, three others who complained they had been sexually assaulted by Barkinsky in a hospital office. All said they were unaware Barkinsky had been photographing them, police said.

In Barkinskys Stamford apartment police said they found various paddles used for sexual fetishes along with a large cache of medical supplies including enema equipment that was mounted on a pole in Barkinskys bedroom. There was also a lot of fetish-type literature including one entitled, The doctor will spank you now.
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Australia's political Uncertainty Caused Reduced Demand for the 'Aussie'

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Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudleys comments yesterday afternoon have supressed support for the US Dollar (currency : USD) during todays session. The US policymaker noted in a speech that the US Federal Reserves,monetary policy adjustments are likely to be gradual and cautious, as we continue to face significant uncertainties and the headwinds to growth from the financial crisis have not fully abated.The suggestion that the worlds premier economy may be heading for a period of turbulence caused investors to move against the Buck, seeing the Pound Sterling US Dollar exchange rate surge back above the 1.4000 GBP USD threshold  the pair had started out the day in the lower part of the 1.4200s.Futures markets now factor-in an 83% likelihood that the US Federal Reserve will maintain its benchmark lending rate at its current level of 0.50% at its June meeting. A surprise increase at this policy get-together would therefore trigger strong support for the Greenback.Elsewhere, the Australian Dollar (currency : AUD) has experienced volatile trading today following political developments Down Under. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has pre-announced overnight that he is set to call a snap double General Election; he told the media yesterday that,'my intention is after the budget, at an appropriate time after the budget has been delivered, I will be asking the Governor-General to dissolve both houses of the Parliament for an election which I expect to be held on the 2nd of July.'The Pound Aussie exchange rate began the session close to its intraday low of 1.8352 GBP AUD before climbing to close to the 1.8500 threshold. However, analysts forecast that with the UK European Union In / Out Referendum still over two months away, and with global commodities prices continuing to improve, the short-to medium outlook for the Sterling Aussie exchange rate remains neutral to negative.

International Money Transfer? Ask our resident FX expert a money transfer question or try John's new, free, no-obligation personal service! ,where he helps every step of the way, ensuring you get the best exchange rates on your currency requirements.

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Berlin, Windber and North Star bring plenty of momentum into Week 10

Check out what we learned in Week 9 of the high school football season across Somerset County.
Women of ages 20 to 24 give birth more than any other age not just in Shelby County, but through Tennessee.

BAILEY CLARK Women of ages 20 to 24 give birth more than any other age not just in Shelby County, but through Tennessee.

Katie Woodling ended her shift and walked toward the entrance of the restaurant.

Before the 22-year-old waitress could open the door, her 18-month-old son was waddling inside.

Woodlingas parents watched the baby while she worked, but were dropping him back off to her before she had even left her workplace.

Women in Shelby County, Tennessee, are becoming mothers earlier in life compared to women nationwide.

At the same time, a higher percentage of women in the United States give birth in their thirties, when they are likely to be more financially stable, than women in Shelby County.

A little more than 17.1 percent of women nationwide gave birth in their twenties, while 17.7 percent of women in Shelby County became mothers, according to the 2015 U.S. Census Bureau.

When it comes to women giving birth in their thirties, only 11.1 percent of women did in Shelby County compared to 16.1 percent nationwide.

Young women who have unplanned pregnancies can struggle with financial aid, emotional support and life-long partnerships.

aI never planned on when I was going to have a baby, but I always knew I wanted one young,a Woodling said.

She got pregnant at the age of 20. She and her boyfriend Chris did not plan on having a baby so soon into their relationship.

Woodling does not having many complaints about having her baby boy early in her life, other than a few personal reasons.

aI did miss out on my 21st birthday, and thatas something I think everyone looks forward to,a Woodling said. aI was six months pregnant and had a glass of red wine.a

Aside from missing social outings, Woodling has not completed her college career.

Balancing motherhood and school is the hardest part thus far into her life. Studies show that women having children in their early twenties can have healthier pregnancies and babies.

There are higher risks to both mother and baby when women get pregnant in their thirties. Women of ages 20 to 24 give birth more than any other age not just in Shelby County, but through Tennessee.

Memphisa free birth control foundation, A Step Ahead, helps provide women within Shelby County addresses with free birth control.

The foundation was started almost five years ago by judge Claudia Haltom. Haltom found in her 17 years of being a juvenile judge that none of her clients took the pill on time and lead young mothers to having to give up their children.

It was never intentional. Reasons like the insurance being cut off or domestic lence situations would sabotage it and would basically set the women up for failure.

aThey are young and didnat have the financial or family support,a Katy Langston, the Director of Marketing and Development of the foundation said.

Langston said A Step Ahead covers all costs of clinical visits, pap smears, STI check-ups, pregnancy tests and IUD birth control injections.

Free transportation is provided to and from clinics if patients need it. Birth control pills are not included, only intrauterine devices.

The foundation reported that women are 20 times more likely to become pregnant in one year if they are using contraceptives like pills, patches or rings rather than the IUDs.

Langston said the foundation will cover costs for any woman with a Shelby County address.

aThe teen birth rate has declined for the last seven years,a Langston said. aAges 20-25 has been historically the age group where we see the most patients.a

Savannah McBroom was 21 when she got pregnant.

aMy friends werenat on the same level as I was so I felt alone,a McBroom said.

McBroom and her boyfriend at the time, now husband, were slightly nervous when they got the news of being pregnant.

But the young mother-to-be was looking forward to being able to keep up physically with her baby and grow together.

While attending the University of Memphis while she was pregnant, she faced difficulties. Attendance was a challenge because she was sick for almost half her pregnancy.

Going to class was hard because McBroom adidnat feel like getting up and going to class.a

McBroom, now 23, likes being able to work from home and spend time with her 9-month-old daughter Everley. Financial troubles do not cause much threat to the McBroom family yet because Everley is still breastfeeding.

aBreastfeeding is free. But when you add up diapers, clothes, and doctor bills, babies get expensive,a McBroom said. aOne good thing about having my daughter young was that I could handle things,a McBroom said. aMy body bounced back pretty quickly.a

Langston said women of 20 to 25 are at a very fertile age. Most clients have had a previous pregnancy, and therefore bringing in another child can induce even more issues upon the mother.

These situations are factoring into poverty rates. Langston and her co-workers want to aid women of all ages to allow them to plan a safe, smart life for their children.

They provide to women whether they just want to wait a year or have a baby and then get back on birth control to space out births. A Step Ahead foundation is promptly promoting planned-parenthood and safe sex.

The foundations workers want to help women live a successful and meaningful life without having to worry about motherhood before they are stable enough to do so.

aOur main goal to creating a more successful life for all women, no matter their situation. We want women to be as happy as they can be and have a family when they are ready to,a Langston said.
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Employing a blizzard of spurious statistics and some truly cataclysmic economic forecasts, George Osborne did his best yesterday to terrify the British people into sticking with the EU.

This was not merely Project Fear, it was Project Apocalypse.

The Chancellor claimed Brexit would make every UK household permanently poorer to the tune of 4,300 a year, the economy would shrink by a disastrous six per cent, and a tax increase of 8p in the pound would be needed to plug a massive hole in government finances.

By 2030 there would be 36billion a year less to spend on public services, house prices would collapse, manufacturing would be decimated, countless jobs lost and the NHS cut to the bone.

George Osborne, pictured with Environment Secretary Liz Truss, said leaving the EU would make UK households 'permanently poorer'

A split with Brussels would create an extraordinary self-inflicted wound and anyone who couldnt see this must be economically illiterate. These, Mr Osborne said, were the facts.

They are of course, nothing of the sort. Based on a 200-page dossier compiled by the Treasury, they are little more than a concoction of massaged figures and wild assumptions about the state of the British and European economies 14 years from now  tendentious and biased assertions masquerading as truth.

How on earth can the Chancellor claim to know what the British economy will be like in 2030? In 2010, he predicted that the deficit would be cancelled out by 2015, yet we are still borrowing 75billion a year.

If he can get a five-year forecast so wrong, why should we trust his crystal ball gazing over a much longer period?

And why does Mr Osborne not mention the downside of belonging to the EU? The 350million-a-week subscription fee, loss of sovereignty, dilution of law-making powers and unfettered migration from other member countries.

The Treasury figures are based on the assumption that migration will average 185,000 a year between now and 2030  a total of 2.5million new migrants over the 14 years.

But a vote for Brexit would mean we could start reducing that influx almost overnight. We might even achieve David Camerons ambition of reducing net migration to the tens of thousands.

Unsurprisingly, the Osborne dossier has brought a furious reaction from Eurosceptic Tory MPs, with one describing it as completely worthless.

The Chancellor's 200-page report on the effects of Brexit has drawn fierce criticism from Eurosceptics

And Justice Secretary Michael Gove accused Remain campaigners of treating people like children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night.

After the fiasco of wasting 9million on sending leaflets to every household extolling the virtues of EU membership, isnt this dossier just another example of the Government using the levers of power and taxpayers money in a flagrant bid to rig the referendum?

The Mail has great respect for Mr Osbornes record as Chancellor but this farrago is simply beneath him.

He should heed Mr Goves words and stop treating us all like idiots.

End of cheats charter

In overturning the gagging order which prevents newspapers from identifying a married celebrity who engaged in a threesome with another couple, the Appeal Court exercised welcome common sense.

The mans name has been all over the internet for weeks and Lord Justice Jackson ruled that it was not the business of the courts to ban people from saying that which is common knowledge.

The case may now go to the Supreme Court but counsel for the cheat said yesterdays ruling signalled the death of celebrity privacy injunctions.
The Queen started her reign with 32 realms. Now she has 16. Whilst the palace maintains an outward calm about such things, behind the scenes things are very different

David Cameron looks set to mark the Queen's 90th birthday year by presiding over the loss of at least two of her thrones.

Barbados has already announced legislation to ditch the Queen this year, with Jamaica looking to beat Barbados to it, and Antigua watching developments closely.

The Queen started her reign with 32 realms. Now she has 16. Whilst the palace maintains an outward calm about such things, behind the scenes things are very different.

A gentlemen's agreement (from the 2002 Golden Jubilee) that no other realm would ditch the monarch until the end of this reign is unravelling fast.

One of the larger nations, most likely Australia, could go sooner rather than later. The domino effect could leave a future King Charles with very little left to reign over.

A very English Scandal, a new book about Jeremy Thorpe's curious acquittal in 1979 of ordering the killing of his homosexual lover Norman Scott reveals the former Liberal leader was so delusional he thought he deserved a seat in the House of Lords.

Refused by Lib Dem leader Lord Steel, he asked Peter Mandelson in 1998 to persuade PM Tony Blair to nominate him as one of his peers. Blair refused.

Mick Jagger's money-making enthusiasm extends to the 22 entrance fee for the Rolling Stones exhibition at the King's Road art gallery of Charles Saatchi, pictured.

This seems to contravene Saatchi's mission statement, when the venue opened in 2008, pledging free admission to all shows.

Asked for an explanation last night Saatchi quoted Jagger's song: 'You can't always get what you want.'

Mick Jagger's money-making enthusiasm extends to the 22 entrance fee for the Rolling Stones exhibition at the King's Road art gallery of Charles Saatchi, pictured

Prince William and his wife did not travel lightly on their recent Indian odyssey.

For a couple who have spoken about not needing an army of staff, they took 11 flunkeys with them including a stylist, a hairdresser, two private secretaries and, inevitably, three press officers. They also had the extensive resources of the British High Commission to support them.

The tour costs won't appear in the annual reports until next year, although accessing the data may be tricky.

The revamped royal website isn't allowing access to the royal household accounts  surely a temporary glitch?

Meanwhile, Corbyn as Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition has a tricky diary date on Thursday having to make a Commons speech in praise of the monarch on her birthday.

It might be an occasion for republican-minded Jeremy to don his red jacket, which he pointedly wore in the chamber when a sombre Commons was marking the death of the Queen Mother.

With a white shirt and blue tie it should make him look suitably patriotic.

Good Morning Britain presenter Piers Morgan, 51, locked horns with Hacked Off campaigner Evan Harris, 50, on ITV yesterday and subsequently contacted the former Lib Dem MP on Twitter, remarking: 'Enjoyed our chat... you were just as odious, irritating, agenda-fuelled and absurdly hypocritical as I hoped. Come back soon.'

Turbans off to Oman ruler Qaboos Bin Said, who has backed camel beauty contests.

According to social anthropologist Prof Dawn Chatty, Oman's tribes like camels to be handsome. The criteria they deploy is a mystery though.

Ms Chatty muses: 'Is it the length of eyelashes or fullness of lips? Or large eyes? Slimness of ankle? Curvature of cheeks? Smoothness of fur?'

Qaboos could put us in the picture, I feel sure.
A 73-year-old woman has demonstrated that you're never too old to be proud of your figure - after posing for photographs in just a bikini.

Nora, from Stoke Newington, London, took part in the shoot with photographer Emily Stein despite a lifetime of regarding herself as 'plain'.

But stripping off to pose in sensual lingerie made the Czech-born 'housewife' feel confident about her figure for the first time in her life.

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Nora, 73, has proven that you're never too old to be proud of your figure - after posing for photos in just a bikini

In the photo series, Nora shows off her versatility in a range of stylish and daring outfits - from a modest knee-length fur coat to slinky lime lingerie. she proved you don't have to be young to have body confidence

As even in her youth, the glamorous pensioner, who is a dead ringer for Debbie Harry, saw herself as unremarkable looking.

Speaking to It's Nice That the photographer said: 'Nora has never been able to see or appreciate how attractive she is.

'Showing me photographs of her younger gorgeous self  telling me "look, I'm plain," it struck me as such a shame that no matter what we look like we are all so critical of ourselves, and even at 73 Nora is no more at peace with how she looks.'

In the photo series, called Hello, I'm Nora, she shows off her versatility in a range of stylish and daring outfits - from a modest knee-length fur coat to slinky lime lingerie.

Nora flaunts her youthful looks and body in matching lingerie. Photographer Emily Stein said: 'Nora has never been able to see or appreciate how attractive she is and always thought of herself as "plain"'

The 73-year-old admitted that the photo shoot gave her the body confidence that she has lacked all her life

The pensioner is no stranger to art and, originally based in Prague, she worked as a conceptual architect at the national gallery

Nora even posed outside for a number of the shots.

But the pensioner is no stranger to art and, originally based in Prague, she worked as a conceptual architect at the national gallery.

She left her position there when she moved to the UK with her third husband.

Nora poses with a cigarette and rollers in her hair. She has faced a lot of heartbreak throughout her life and was even homeless when she broke up with her third husband

She has since married an architectural and furniture designer, and enjoys a relaxed lifestyle as a housewife

However, Nora's story didn't have a happy ending and instead the couple separated and she ended up homeless.

But speaking to the magazine, Nora admitted that she didn't let this keep her down.

She said: 'Since my first marriage and birth of my daughter when I was 19, l have adhered to a fundamentally self-reliant philosophy of responsibility and respect for all living creatures.

Nora said that she has never felt the need to follow the crowd and has always been fiercely independent

Ms Stein hopes her work will make Nora feel more body confident and at ease with herself

'I have never felt the inclination to belong to, participate in or follow any social, political or professional club, institute and/or circle.'

And she has since married an architectural and furniture designer, and become a housewife.

Despite this, Ms Stein hopes her work will make Nora feel more at ease with herself.
GO WITH THE FLOW IN ICELAND

Waterfalls, glacial rivers, lagoons, serene fjords, steaming hot springs, piping geysers and lava caves will capture your imagination in Iceland

Waterfalls, glacial rivers, lagoons, serene fjords, steaming hot springs, piping geysers and lava caves will capture your imagination on a magical drive along Icelands 828-mile Ring Road.

Insider Tip: Dip into the sulphurous nature baths in Myvatn, a nature reserve in north east Iceland.

Details: Circumnavigate the island on this 14-day summer trip including B&B accommodation, flights and car rental for 1,701pp, discover-theworld.co.uk.

COAST THE OCEAN ROAD IN OZ

The 12 apostles  towering limestone stacks off the coast  are just one of the astounding sights you could see in Australia

The 12 apostles  towering limestone stacks off the coast  are just one of the astounding sights on the 150-mile Great Ocean Road in Victoria, on Australias south-east coast.

Insider Tip: The Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village in Warrnambool, a recreation of a 19th-century seaport.

Details: Bridge & Wickers tailor-make a ten-night trip from 2,245pp. Price includes flights, accommodation with breakfast and car rental, bridgeandwickers.co.uk.

DODGE HAWAIIS VOLCANOS

Hawaii has one of the most active volcanoes in the world, Kilauea, which has been erupting since 1983

Hawaii has one of the most active volcanoes in the world, Kilauea, which has been erupting since 1983.

Insider tip: Watch the sunrise or set from Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano. Youll drive from sea level to the summit at 14,000ft, ifa.hawaii.edu.
The Australian now has more than 500,000 fans on Instagram

She has impersonated celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Justin Bieber

Do you ever look at celebrity Instagram accounts and marvel at the perfectly posed and artificial photos they post?

Australian comedian Celeste Barber does, and has now dedicated her own Instagram account to doing hilarious recreations of celebrity photos.

Having previously recreated photos including Kim Kardashian's famous nude selfie, she's been at it again with the a new round of copycat posts.

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Very flexible: Comedian Celeste Barber posts photos recreating celebrity Instagram shots

Brooding: The Australian copies poses from celebrities like Justin Bieber (above) with hilarious results

Stop the selfie: No one is safe from Ms Barbers satirical posts, not even queens of social media the Kardashians

Ms Barber has a laugh recreating a recent post by Victoria Beckham, where Beckham reclines on a lounge with her leg in the air.

'It's amazing what you can do in culottes...those ballet classes are paying off!' Beckham captioned her photo.

The comedian also took her own version of the snap, posing with her leg high in the air with a pained look on her face.

'Don't you hate it when your doing your nails in and you get a CRAMP!?!?' Ms Barber captioned her snap.

Blonde ambition: Ms Barber has recreated photos by a range of celebrities, including donning a wig to look like dancer Maddy Ziegler (above)

Rising star: The comedian has been posting the comparison shots since 2015, and has more than 500,000 followers on Instagram now

In other posts, the comedian and actress recreated a Maddy Ziegler photo of the dancer posed with her arms and legs stretched out in a star shape.

Wearing a beige leotard and blonde wig, Ms Barber tried her hand at the shot, calling her attempt 'Holding it all together'.

The Sydney-based woman has also recently spoofed Instagram posts by Justin Bieber, Khloe Kardashian and Gigi Hadid.

Food forever: She's spoofed Kylie Jenner selfies, opting for a McDonald's hashbrown in her mouth instead of hair (above)

Putting it all out there: The Kardashian/Jenner clan are regularly featured in the comedian's spoofs

Picture perfect: Previously Ms Barber has recreated a Jessica Simpson shot by showing what you really look like when your head is stuck out the window (above)

Previously, Ms Barber has posted side-splitting pictures of recreations of photos by celebrities like Jessica Simpson, who posted an arty black-and-white snap of herself with her head stuck out of a car window.

In another well-liked snap, the comedian recreated a Kylie Jenner selfie where the social media star had her hair in her mouth. Ms Barber decided that for her photo, a hashbrown was a better prop.
His team won the final on Monday night by an impressive 185 points

The University Challenge contestant, whose amusing facial expressions won him a legion of fans on Twitter, was more animated than ever as his team won the final.

Oscar Powell, from Peterhouse, Cambridge, stole the show as his team took on St John's College Oxford, shooting to victory by an impressive 185 points in a historic third consecutive win for Cambridge.

But it was the contestant's extravagant responses to Jeremy Paxman's questions which impressed fans with Oscar, originally from York, sending Twitter into a frenzy.

Oscar Powell, from Peterhouse, Cambridge, stole the show with an array of animated expressions as his team took on St John's College Oxford in the show's final by an impressive 185 points

Oscar Powell, originally from York, drove Twitter users into a frenzy during the show and prompted tweets such as 'Powell for president'

The student pulls a variety of faces when asked tricky questions, or while thinking about what the correct answer might be.

His animated responses include scrunching up his eyebrows, pouting, blowing his cheeks out and looking puzzled.

Using the hashtags #university challenge and #powell, Twitter users expressed their appreciation for Oscar's range of facial expressions.

@nadiawiseman wrote: 'Powell's face is so wonderful. He really takes you on a journey.'

He pulls the faces, which involve scrunching up his eyebrows, pouting, blowing his cheeks out and looking puzzled, when asked questions that he is unsure of the answers to

Oscar has pulled his trademark expressive faces throughout Peterhouse College's appearances on University Challenge - prompting hilarity on Twitter

Oscar originally stole the show in an episode airing in December 2015 with an array of animated expressions as his team took on St George's, London, in the quarter finals

The contestant, who studies Geological Sciences at the university, helped his team soar to a convincing victory with his in-depth knowledge of all things geology

User @freakinjax simply said: 'Nailing it'.

@RevRichardColes said: 'POWELL FOR PRESIDENT OF EVERYTHING'.

@sgfsmith1 simply observed that 'Some people appear completely unlike themselves when they're on television. Oscar Power is not one of those people.'

Oscar originally won fans with his exaggerated looks after an episode in December last year where his team took on St George's, London, in the quarter finals.

The contestant, who studies Geological Sciences at the university, helped his team soar to a convincing victory with his in-depth knowledge of all things geology.

The most amusing moment came during the music round when the two teams had to guess Je Taime by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin.

As the music played, Powell could be seen scratching his head, chewing his fingers and sticking out his tongue as he desperately tried to remember the artist.
'I force feed myself leaving me with reflux for hours,' she wrote at the time

During the pregnancy, Ms Tucci kept a blog to reveal her struggles

She said she was not at all prepared for how 'full on' experience would be

A mother who gave birth to quintuplets in just two minutes has described how she felt as if her 'body was shutting down' during the pregnancy.

Kim Tucci, 26, and her husband Vaughn, both from Perth, welcomed the five new children to their growing brood in January - a son, Keith, and four daughters - Ali, Penelope, Tiffany and Beatrix.

Speaking to Channel Nine's 60 Minutes, Ms Tucci said she was not at all prepared for how 'full on' the experience would be and her fears after giving birth at just 30 weeks.

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A mother who gave birth to quintuplets in just two minutes has described how she felt as if her 'body was shutting down' during the pregnancy

Kim Tucci, 26, and her husband Vaughn, both from Perth, welcomed the five new children to their growing brood in January - a son, Keith, and four daughters - Ali, Penelope, Tiffany and Beatrix.

'I literally felt like my body was shutting down,' Ms Tucci told the program, which will air on Sunday night.

Ms Tucci, who has a nine-year-old son from a previous marriage and two daughters with her husband Vaughn, fell naturally pregnant with quintuplets while trying for a boy with her husband and documented the highs and lows of her pregnancy since receiving the news, Woman's Day reported.

The expecting mother wrote about her struggles with back pain, 12 bathroom trips a night and consuming the recommended 6,000 calories a day to feed her five babies.

'I'm struggling to eat and force feed myself leaving me with reflux for hours,' she wrote on her blog Surprised With Five.

'I can't tolerate a lot of dairy and I can't keep protein drinks down, I'm starting to lose weight when I really need to be gaining it.'

Her online posts about dealing with pain, nausea, changes to her body and going to the bathroom 12 times a night, amassed a following of more than 123,000 people  most of them mums who share their own personal stories.

'It's getting harder as each day passes to push through the pain, every part of my body aches and sleeping is becoming very painful,' she said.

'No amount of pillows are helping support my back and belly. Sometime I get so upset that I just want to throw my hands up and give in!'

'I literally felt like my body was shutting down,' Ms Tucci told the program

Ms Tucci, who has a nine-year-old son from a previous marriage and two daughters with her husband Vaughn, fell naturally pregnant with the quintuplets (pictured) while trying for a boy

The expecting mother wrote about her struggles with back pain, 12 bathroom trips a night and consuming the recommended 6,000 calories a day to feed her five babies

Speaking to Channel Nine's 60 Minutes, Ms Tucci said she was not at all prepared for how 'full on' the experience would be and her fears after giving birth at just 30 weeks

When she asked to use another sonogram machine so she could have a clearer view of the babies, her world was turned upside-down when the doctor found five separate heart beats

'I have a lot of stretch marks now, dealing with such a huge change in my body is hard. My husband always reminds me I should wear my stripes with pride and that I should be proud of them and what my body has achieved.'

At 24 weeks along, photographer Erin Elizabeth took photos of the expecting mum to commemorate her journey.

The images became a hit on Mrs Tucci's website and Ms Elizabeth's social media.

Mrs Tucci was admitted to the hospital on a few occasions for minor issues but all five of the children were born healthy.

Mrs Tucci and her husband began trying for their third and final child together last year with the hope of having a son to complete their family.

After finding out in July that Ms Tucci was pregnant, the couple was ecstatic to be told by their doctor that they were having twins.

Mrs Tucci and her husband began trying for their third and final child together last year with the hope of having a son to complete their family

Mrs Tucci was admitted to the hospital on a few occasions for minor issues but all five of the children were born healthy

'I have a lot of stretch marks now, dealing with such a huge change in my body is hard. My husband always reminds me I should wear my stripes with pride and that I should be proud of them and what my body has achieved'

'I WAS SO EXCITED!! TWINS!!! I was excited at the possibility of twins but absolutely nothing on this earth could have prepared me for what happened next,' Ms Tucci said.

When she asked to use another sonogram machine so she could have a clearer view of the babies, her world was turned upside-down when the doctor found five separate heart beats.

'My legs start [sic] to shake uncontrollably and all I can do is laugh.. The sonographer then told me the term for 5 is QUINTUPLETS!!' she continued.

'I called my husband from the ultrasound room but I don't think he believed me at first. He quickly drove down. I could see the excitement in his face he told me 'We can do this'.'

Ms Tucci said it has started to kick in what a big change this will be for her family.

'I have only just really embraced this pregnancy and what it will mean for my family, the last few days has been a reality check that it's all really happening!'

'It's hard to accept life will change forever and my small family will be HUGE all in one hit,' she said.

The expecting mother wrote about her struggles with back pain, 12 bathroom trips a night and consuming the recommended 6,000 calories a day to feed her five babies
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Prince William and Prince Harry showed that the force is with them as they engaged in a brotherly duel with a pair of light sabers as they toured the set of Star Wars at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.

The pair admitted that they are huge fans of the legendary Star Wars films as they toured the set of the latest installment in the franchise - Episode VIII.

Harry looked bemused, however, as his light saber turned red as he switched it on and asked his brother plaintively: 'Why do I always have to be the baddy?'

Harry was seen getting a rather hairy hug from the hirsute Chewbacca, the legendary Wookiee warrior

The wookie was clearly in a huggy mood and broke with royal protocol to embrace the prince

It's Duke Skywalker: Princes Harry and William duelled with light sabers today at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire on a visit to the set of Star Wars

Then in his best menacing voice, he added; 'Come on, let's dance.'

Teased by his younger brother at his less than enthusiastic moves, William growled in return: 'We can do this later outside.'

Harry replied: 'My godson would love one of these - your son would love one of these.'

The highlight of their hour-long visit was getting the chance to fight each other with the film's legendary light-sabers as well as meeting Luke Skywalker himself -Mark Hamill - Chewbacca and new characters Finn and Rey.

William admitted that he was 'total geek' when it came to the films and he and Harry couldn't hide their delight as they got to pose with Hamill and Chewbacca, played by Joonas Suotamo, who at seven foot six in his costume towered over the two princes who are both six foot plus.

Harry even got a bear hug from 'Chewie' , as did William - leading Hamill to remark: 'If I went towards royalty with my arms outstretched I would get arrested - but there's something about a Wookie that means you just wanted to be hugged.'

The original Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill (left) joked that he'd probably get arrested if he tried to hug a royal, after both brothers were embraced by Chewbacca

He must be good at Droidspeak: William smiled delightedly as he chatted with BB-8 droid, a new character from Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens

The princes started off their tour of the studio in the Creature Effects room - which has between 30 and 100 staff working on putting together some of the remarkable characters seen in the film - with actress Daisy Ridley, who plays led character Rey in the new trilogy.

They met a life-sized R2D2 and marvelled at staff as they painstakingly worked on Chewbacca's head.

William chatted with supervisor Maria Cork who was carefully restyling the Wookie's hair; each single thread is sewn onto the head separately.

'It's just amazing the detail in it, it really is,' said William as he bent down to get a closer look. 'It's so realistic.'

Prince Harry takes a closer look at a robotic mask. Both princes were impressed by the amazingly realistic creations they encountered during their tour of the studio

The brothers were introduced to CP30 during their tour of the studio

William adopts a similar pose as he has his photo taken with a golden C3P0

William couldn't resist reaching out to stroke the lifelike creature, promoting the for once responsible Harry to shout: 'Whoooa, don't touch that! He's sacred! We must keep Chewie like he is.'

The pair then spotted a chillingly realistic latex mask of Daisy's face which is worn by her stunt double.

'Where's Daisy, come here Daisy,' William called. 'This is just uncanny. It's a good look, eh?'

William gaped as the mask was pulled off its stand, saying: 'That's just unbelievable. Amazing.'

Daisy later admitted that the mask 'really freaked her out'.

Harry was introduced to Chewbacca by Star Wars newcomer John Boyega, 24, from Peckham, south east London, who plays Finn, a reformed Stormtrooper

Prince William is shown props, including Chewbacca's crossbow by the Star Wars creative team

The pair were then taken by electric buggy across the lot to the weapons and props area where they were shown round by Mark Rocca, head of prop making.

With blasters, cannons and lightsabers, the brothers, both of whom have served in the military, were in their element.

Harry made a beeline for a storm troopers' gun, which swivelled around as it shot.

The prince tried to replicate the move but the gun collapsed, leaving Harry wailing: 'Have I broken it? Have I broken it?'

'And here's one we made earlier,' teased his unsympathetic brother.

The Duke of Cambridge also enjoyed a chat with Chewbacca although it's not clear if they were conversing in the Wookiee language

Chewbacca, played by Joonas Suotamo, stands at seven foot six in his costume and towered over the two princes

Royal visit: (left to right) Mark Hamill, director Rian Johnson, Prince Harry, Prince William, John Boyega, producer Ram Bergman, Chewbacca, Daisy Ridley and Kathleen Kennedy, President of Lucasfilm

The prince asked senior prop maker Rob Seex: 'So did you get into this because you were obsessed when you were a kid? ' as he picked up a 'First Order' blaster, used by the 'baddies' in the first film of the new trilogy, The Force Awakens.

Unfortunately the gun spectacularly misfired.

'Why is it everything I touch breaks?' said Harry, only half laughing.

'It will take them weeks to mend,' admonished William.

William was asked which was the hardest weapon to make and was shown a 'First Order' pistol, each one of which is made from hundreds of pieces.

'Are there replicas for kids now?' asked Harry, possibly with his nephew, Prince George, in mind.

'When the actors are running around are these the only sounds they hear? It must be quite difficult to get into character.'

Trained pilot Prince Harry sits in an A-wing fighter as he talks to Mark Hamill, the original Luke Skywalker

The Duke of Cambridge shares a joke with John Boyega, who was one of last year's breakout stars thanks to his role in Star Wars Episode VII

Daisy Ridley and John Boyega catch up while Prince Harry quizzes Chewbacca

Turning to the most famous weapons in the film, the light sabers, William asked for Daisy's help as 'you would know what to do'.

'They have been able to make it lighter as they were really heavy,' she said.

Harry asked: 'When you get the hang of it presumably you can do anything with it,though?'

The brothers were invited to pick up a lightsaber each and started off fighting rather gingerly.

'They don't break, really they don't,' they were told, and encouraged to hit harder.

'I think Adam Driver who plays Kylo Ren broke quite a few, but I don't think I broke any,' Daisy said.

The royal brothers showed off their competitive side as they duelled with light sabers

Harry appeared to be getting the better of his brother as they battled with light sabers

'Why am I always the baddy?' Asked Harry. 'Are you scared?' retorted William.

Urging his brother not to hit so hard, William said: 'This is where we get into a massive fight.'

'Can everyone make some sound effects,' asked Harry, getting into character.

William said to Daisy: 'To keep up with this you have to learn a lot of moves presumably. How long do you have to train before you can film?

She replied: 'Three months. Because I never really did anything before workout-wise, so you really need the strength to hold it. And then you learn the skills.'

The pair were then driven to the costume department where a corridor was filled with models wearing some of the character's most famous outfits including Han Solo, C3PO and Kylo Ren.

Prince Harry exchanges a hairy handshake with Chewbacca during a behind the scenes tour of the Star Wars set

Prince William is introduced to the original Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill, who last night tweeted about his excitement ahead of the royal visit

Turning to a model of new character Maz Kanata, William exclaimed: 'It looks as if she is about to say something to you. And I can't believe I am standing next to a headless Han Solo.'

William also chatted with some of the many seamstresses, dyers and specialists who make the hundreds of costumes needed for each film

HOW STAR WARS BECAME A HIT FOR THE UK FILM INDUSTRY The royal engagement is aimed at recognising the wealth of British creative talent involved in the production of the Star Wars films, a spokesperson from Kensington Palace said. British set decorator Roger Christian created the original lightsabers and its Oscar-winning costume designs were by John Mollo. The London Symphony Orchestra also helped record the score at the Abbey Road Studios in London. The Force Awakens - the seventh installment of the series, which was released at the end of last year - saw the return of original cast members Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Hamill and was the highest grossing film of all time in the UK. The royals' guide for the visit was British actress Daisy Ridley, 24, who was a virtual unknown when she secured one of the most hotly coveted roles in cinema as Rey in the first installment of the new trilogy released last year, Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens. They were also welcomed by John Boyega, 24, another British newcomer from Peckham, south east London, who plays Finn, a reformed Stormtrooper. Advertisement

'You should be really proud. They are amazing. What is the hardest challenge?' he asked.

Working in the heat of Abu Dhabi, where some scenes are filmed, was the reply.

Finally the brothers got driven to one of the sets to meet some of the characters where family favourite Chewbacca scooped both William and Harry into a massive bear-hug.

You are that big, marvelled William as he craned his head upwards and spoke to actor Joonas Suotamo, a Finish-born, American educated former basketball player.

The character answered back in Wookie speak , a mixture of grunts and growls. Youre not allowed to talk? asked the prince.

Harry quickly moved in for his hug too. Ahh, he was heard to say as he snuggled up to the character.

How big are you? Seven feet? he marvelled.

Why are you not a basketball player? 

I was! came the reply.

So you went from a career playing basketball to Star Wars? Good career move! joked the prince.

Actor Mark Hamill later joked: If I went towards royalty with my arms outstretched I would get arrested  but theres something about a Wookie that means you just want to be hugged.

Hamill was on good form, calling England a second home after filming the first three Star Wars movies in the UK as a young man.

He asked William: Now that I have you here I should ask something that probably only you can answer. So when I found out that Leia was my sister and she was a princess, I wondered does that make me royalty? No it doesnt! Carrie [Fisher] snapped, instantly! Shes very possessive of that title.

I think youve got a good chance, said William diplomatically.

Oh you are so kind. Lovely. That gives me such great hope, replied Hamill. Not only does it make me happy but it will drive Carrie up the wall!

So do you want to ask me about the film? If anyone can get spoilers out of us its you. You could command us!

I wouldnt do that to everyone, replied the prince.

Turning to Harry, who was waiting to say hello, Hamill said: Im thrilled to be a fake pilot meeting a real pilot.

The Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry grin with delight as they come face-to-face with a model of actress Daisy Ridley's head during a visit to the set of the new Star Wars film at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire

Princes William and Harry admitted today that they were huge fans of the legendary Star Wars films as they toured the set of the latest installment in the franchise. Their tour guide for the visit will be British actress Daisy Ridley, 24, (pictured)

Its shocking when you meet real pilots and how many of them ask me questions about how I fly these things. Over the years I have been invited into so many cockpits and you dont want to say anything. I always make an effort.

The princes were hugely entertained by the films new droid character BB-8, which scuttled mischievously around their feet.

Awesome, laughed William, as he chatted to Peckham-born actor John Boyega, who plays lead character Finn and had hurried over after a mornings filming.

Hes got more dialogue than I do, joked Mark Hamill.

Wheres BB-8?  asked William, bending down to speak to the droid.

Is there someone very small in there? Have you been filming or have you been chilling out. Can you do another spin for us? Or a head bow?

Harry added: I want to find the guy operating it. Hes brilliant.

The royals are shown the mask of Chewbacca with Daisy Ridley, 24, who stars as Rey. She was a virtual unknown when she secured one of the most hotly coveted roles in cinema

William asked Boyega how the filming had been going.

Good, no dramas except for the ones on the film, he laughed.

Helicopter pilot Harry also couldnt resist jumping into one of the planes on the set.

Top speed? he asked Hamill.

This is probably a spoiler but I dont fly one of these things in the [new] film, replied the actor.

Harry also cheekily asked Chewbacca what he had in the bag he wears slung over his hip, the contents of which are rather like the Queens handbag- much guessed at but never entirely known.

In this case it was actually a couple of lollipops, left over from when a group of terminally-ill children were treated to a set visit.

Chewbacca (left) and R2D2 (right) are just some of the models of iconic characters that the royals will come face to face with

The lucky princes will also be given a private sneak preview of the set of Star Wars: Episode VIII and meet Mark Hamill, who plays Luke Skywalker, director Rian Johnson and other cast members

William and Harry on their tour of the creative studios. They are set to met John Boyega, 24, another British newcomer from Peckham, south east London, who plays Finn, a reformed Stormtrooper

William, who has just returned from an official visit to India and Bhutan, looked animated as he asked questions during the tour

As Harry got another Wookie hug he couldnt resist making Chewbaccas famous growling sounds and got patted on his back by the character for his efforts.

Before they left the prince posed for pictures with the crew before going off to enjoy a private tour of the rest of the set of the new film, which is under wraps to the public.

Speaking after their meeting, Daisy Ridley joked about the princes geekiness when it came to the films.

The minute you see someone with a lightsaber you just think youre one of us, she said.

Hamill added: Its unsettling when you see grown men, policemen or anyone in a position of authority melt and turn into an eight year old boy or girl when they ask you: What was it like working with a Wookie.

Following the visit the princes will prepare to join the Duchess of Cambridge on Friday in hosting US president Barack Obama and first lady Michelle (pictured with Prince Harry last year) for dinner

Obama and the First Lady Michelle (pictured here with the Duchess in 2011) will dine at Kensington Palace after joining the Queen for lunch at Windsor Castle - the day after her 90th birthday celebrations

Did you see Harry jumping into the cockpit like that? I asked him how it compared to the real thing and he said oh this is luxurious with the leg room. In the real things your knees up to here but in this you have room to stretch out. 

He added: This is a homecoming for me. The first time I visited England was when I came to film the first Star Wars films, having grown up watching Peter Sellers, the Beatles, the British invasion. It was a thrill to come. And then to come back all these years later. They could have done them anywhere but this really does have some resonance for me. My son was born here in St Johns Wood, he has a British passport. 

John Boyega remarked: They were really surprised how much wads real [as opposed to CGI]. They probably thought it was all going to be green screen.

Daisy Ridley added: They were really freaked out by the [mask of] my face. To be honest I was freaked out the first time I saw it. 

Hamill spoke glowingly of his young co-stars saying there wasnt a weak link in the bunch.

I went to the first read through and I thought youre kidding me, Im asking them for advice.

Daisy Ridley added: There is a real family atmosphere on set, everyone thinks it is put on but its so real.

The princes were issued a joint invitation to tour the set, William in his role as President of BAFTA but, surprisingly, given the three of them toured the set of the Harry Potter franchise together, the Duchess of Cambridge was not present.
For many high school students being left dateless for senior prom would be a disaster.

But one student came up with an innovative way of including her fiance when he told her he could not make her prom because he would be overseas serving in the US Air Force.

Instead of going alone or enlisting the help of a friend to accompany her, Lexi Akerson, 17, from Lawton, Michigan, created a life-size cutout of Brandon Turner, 20, who is stationed in England.

Two-dimensional: Lexi Akerson, 17, pictured right, took a cardboard cutout of her fiance Brandon Turner, 20, left, to senior prom after he was unable to attend in person

Flat: Brandon, whose cutout is pictured with Lexi at her prom left and right, could not make it because he was in England where he is station with the US Air Force

Young love: The student from Lawton, Michigan, pictured with her fiance, came up with a novel solution so that she did not have to go alone

Lexi even danced with the cutout of her boyfriend, who she has been dating for three years, at the prom at Lawton Community Center.

Brandon, who is a civil engineer, has been away for two years. Lexi plans to move to England to be with him after her graduation next month, which he is able to attend, and they are getting married on June 2.

She said she was upset that he could not make prom but then she came up with the idea of the cut-out.

She said friends found it 'hilarious' when she arrived at prom with the cardboard cutout.

Lexi, who plans to become a nurse, told Daily Mail Online: 'It was upsetting/sad because it was my last time at prom, and i went to his senior prom.

Joker: Lexi, pictured with her 'date' said her friends found it 'hilarious' when she turned up with the cutout

Silent date: Lexi, far right, posed for pictures with friends, left, and her cardboard fiance

Lone ranger: Lexi, pictured left and right, is moving to England after graduation to join her fiance

Flag-bearer: Lexi, pictured last year, is getting married to Brandon in June

Besotted: Lexi, pictured with Brandon, said they may be young to be getting married but that they are in love

'I came up with the idea by joking around with my friends i should take a Fat Head of him to prom sense he cannot make it.

'But my friends reactions were hilarious, they loved the idea, and thought it was adorable. Especially the parents loved it sense he couldn't be apart of prom, yet he was still here with me...

'I am planning on moving with him over to England two weeks after i graduate, and my career goal is to be a nurse then get into heart surgery.'

Speaking about their wedding, Lexi, who enjoys doing sports, said: 'We are young, but we love each other.'

History: The couple, pictured, met in middle school and started dating in high school

Match: Lexi, pictured with Brandon, said she used to 'pick on him' for being short before he had a growth spurt and grew four inches taller than her

Ambition: Lexi, pictured, said her career goal is to become a nurse and to be involved in heart operations

The couple met in middle school when Lexi was in the sixth grade and Brandon was in the eighth grade but it was not until high school that they started dating.

She said she used to 'pick on him' for being short before he had a growth spurt and grew four inches taller than her.

She said: 'We started dating when he was a freshmen in Lawton High school and i was a seventh grader in middle school.
, she opened the brand's runway show in Milan, and has starred in several of its past campaigns

Fendi teased the star of its upcoming Fall 2016 campaign on Snapchat today, featuring a clip of a model hidden behind the dog filter.

But let's face it  Fendi's not fooling anyone, least of all that model's mother. Kris Jenner took to Instagram to repost a picture of her daughter Kendall as a dog, applauding her for the fashionable gig.

'Beyond proud...This is amazing, @kendalljenner,' she wrote, earning nearly 70,000 likes in just an hour.

And the model is... Kendall Jenner appeared in a Snapchat and Instagram photo from Fendi, teasing her as the star of its upcoming Fall 2016 campaign

Proud mom: Kendall's mom Kris Jenner shared her excitement over her daughter's gig

Total pro: The 20-year-old also modeled the collection for the brand's fashion week show

In the photo, the 20-year-old has doggy ears, a snout, and a lolling tongue. She's rocking an intense smoky eye, and her nails are painted black to match.

She's also holding up one the brand's Fendirumi charms, which can be used to adorn bags or keychains  and of which, the star admitted to People StyleWatch, she owns about 15.

The one she's holding in the photo costs $1,500, but there are several varieties which can cost as little as $400.

'I have like a section in my closet for all my purses, so they're like connected to different purses. They're not just sitting on their own,' she explained.

A big deal: She opened the show, which took place in Milan in February

Playing favorites: Kendall has modeled on Fendi's runways in the past, and has become a favorite of designer Karl Lagerfeld

Collector: The star is a fan of the brand's charms, of which she has about 15

Kendall has actually worked with the designer on several occasions before, walking in Fendi fashion shows and starring in past campaigns.

She also modeled the very season of Fendi clothes that will appear her upcoming campaign on the Milan runway in February, where she had the honor of opening the show wearing thigh-high blue boots, a navy jacket, and a fur collar.

She is, of course, a personal favorite of Karl Lagerfeld, the creative director behind both Fendi and Chanel.

'I think she's great and modern and the girl of the moment,' he said while the two shot the Spring/Summer 2015 campaign.

No surprise: This is not Kendall's first Fendi campaign, though the brand is drumming up suspense online

Fendi fan: Kendall said designer Karl made her shy at first, because she's a huge fan and finds him 'so cool'

'At first I was shy with him, 'cause I'm a big fan, and then I think I got a little more comfortable,' Kendall chimed in. ''I love him, he's cool, he's an inspiration, and his work is amazing.'

The whole family has a close relationship with the designer, though Kendall is the only one who has worked with him to promote both Fendi and Chanel.
The Swedish Royal Family have released the first picture of the newborn Prince of Sweden.

The image shows the proud parents - Prince Carl Philip and his wife Princess Sofia - and their baby boy at Danderyd's Hospital in Stockholm the day after his birth.

The newborn prince, whose name will be revealed by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in an official ceremony on Thursday, can be seen asleep in a baby carrier.

Happy family: Princess Sofia and Prince Carl Philip of Sweden smile as they leave the hospital with their newborn son on Wednesday afternoon

'The Prince family have now left the hospital and are at home at Drottningholm's Castle. Everyone is well and look forward to this time together,' the Swedish Royal Family wrote on its Facebook page.

Marshal of the Realm Svante Lindqvist announced the arrival in a brief statement on Tuesday saying: 'Both mother and child are in good health,' Lindqvist said.

Although the official statement did not include the sex of the child sources have revealed that the couple have had a son.

According to People Sweden's Royal Palace revealed in a statement: 'Princess Sofia gave birth to a healthy and prosperous child on Tuesday, April 19 at 6:25 p.m. Both mother and child are doing well,' adding that the baby weighed in at 7lbs 9oz. and was 19.3 inches long.

The baby, born in Danderyds hospital outside Stockholm, is the Swedish couple's first child and is fifth in line to the throne.

It is thought the royal couple waited until today to find out if they were expecting a girl or a boy.

Although a name is yet to be decided on sources have revealed that they have welcomed a baby boy. Pictured: The couple during Sofia's pregnancy

The happy couple, who married last June in the royal palace's chapel (pictured), first announced their pregnancy in a Facebook status in October last year

Princess Sofia was also careful to keep her cards close to her chest when it came to baby names.

When she quizzed about the subject at a fundraiser for her charity Project Playground, she said: 'We are keeping that to ourselves.'

Prince Carl Philip, 36, and Princess Sofia, 31, shared the happy news of the pregnancy last year via an official statement released on Facebook.

'We are so happy and excited to announce that we are expecting our first child. We are very much looking forward to it,' it read.

The couple's baby comes at an exciting time for the Swedish royal family who have recently welcomed a new baby, Prince Oscar Carl Olof.

Sofia's sister-in-law Crown Princess Victoria, sister of Prince Carl Philip, gave birth to her second child in March.

Former glamour model Sofia Hellqvist married the prince last June. The elegant brunette is known for her infectious gap-toothed smile and easygoing ways.

Sofia and Carl Philip dated for five years before walking down the aisle and now live together in the upmarket Djurgarden district of Stockholm.

Sweden's Princess Sofia has today become a mother after giving birth to her and Prince Carl Philip's first child

The couple's baby comes at an exciting time for the Swedish royal family who have recently welcomed a new baby, Prince Oscar Carl Olof (pregnant Sofia and Carl Philip pictured in Stockholm last month)

Carl Philip and Sofia married in the royal palace's chapel, with the bride wearing a lace wedding dress created by local designer Ida Sjostedt.

SWEDISH ROYAL FAMILY TREE King Carl XVI Gustaf, 69, who has reigned since 1973, is married to Queen Silvia, 66. Crown Princess Victoria is their elder daughter. She married Prince Daniel in 2010 and the couple have two children, four-year-old Princess Estelle and new arrival Prince Oscar. The King and Queen's only son is Prince Carl Philip, who is married to Princess Sofia - a former model and reality TV contestant. Princess Madeleine is their youngest daughter and is wed to Christopher O'Neill, an American stockbroker. The pair have two children Princess Leonore and Prince Nicolas. Advertisement

But thanks to Princess Sofia's reality TV and glamour modelling past, Carl Philip's choice of wife initially proved controversial.

The now Duchess of Varmland's first shoot aged 20 saw her posing topless in a pair of camouflage print bikini bottoms and clutching a snake to preserve her modesty.

Unsurprisingly, when news of Carl Philip's new relationship emerged in 2010, the Swedish Royal Family were initially put 'on the defensive' as sources revealed at the time.

Since then, however, Sofia has gone out of her way to tone down her image.
Queen Letizia of Spain is know for adding a pop of colour to her outfits but this evening she still managed to turn heads when she stepped out in an all black ensemble.

The Spanish royal opted for loose tailored trousers and a black tweed waistcoat with eyelet detailing as she attended the Gran Angular and El Barco De Vapor literature awards at Casa de Correos in Madrid.

Letizia, 43, accesorised her elegant outfit with sleek straight hair and a pair of classic diamond earrings.

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The Spanish royal opted for loose tailored trousers and a black tweed waistcoat with eyelet detailing for the event in Madrid

The mother-of-two was seen smiling as talented authors received prizes for their work at this evening's awards.

Letizia attended the event without her husband King Felipe VI and instead was seated with President of Madrid Community, Cristina Cifuentes.

The Spanish royal was invited to present the prestigious award to the winner and gave a short speech on stage.

Literature appears to be playing a large part in Letizia's life of late.

Queen Letizia looked elegant in an all black ensemble today as she attended the Gran Angular and El Barco De Vapor literature awards at Casa de Correos, Spain

The former journalist walked on stage and made a short speech ahead of the presentation

The former-journalist marked 400 years since the death of the famous Spanish novelist and playwright Miguel de Cervantes less than a week ago.

The official anniversary falls on 22 April with a programme of special exhibitions and activities planned in the coming weeks.

Last month the royal couple were shown around the exhibition, titled 'Miguel de Cervantes: the Myth of Life,' at the National Library in Madrid.

Cervantes, who died in 1616, is best known for penning Don Quixote, considered a classic of Western literature and one of the best works of fiction ever written.

The exhibition will be open to the public until May 22, exploring the man, the face and the myth.

The Spanish royal was not joined by her husband Kinf Felipe VI and instead Gran Angular and El Barco De Vapor literature awards at Casa de Correos

Letizia could be seen presenting the prestigious award to a winner on stage at tonight's ceremony
Mitch Hunter was just 21 when a car he was in smashed into a 10,000-volt electrical pylon 15 years ago.

He pushed the female passenger next to him out of harm's way. As he did, a near-lethal force of electricity surged up his foot, through his body, and out of his face.

Within five minutes the former soldier was unrecognizable.

Despite undergoing more than 20 initial corrective operations - grafting skin from his legs, arms and back - children would still scream at the sight of him in the street.

In a desperate bid to regain some normalcy in his life, Indiana-based Hunter submitted himself to become one of the first people in the world to receive a face transplant in 2011.

Five years later, now 35, the father-of-three has spoken out to describe his incredible recovery, insisting he has never felt better.

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Astonishing: Mitch Hunter pictured before his car crash (left) as a 20-year-old army private; after the crash that mutilated his face in 2001, but before his transplant (center); five years after the 2011 transplant (right)

'It made me stronger': Now 35, with three children (son Clayton, pictured), Hunter has spoken out to describe his incredible recovery, insisting he has never felt better

'I feel just as healthy as I did when I was 21, and I feel great,' Hunter told WISHTV8 in an interview at his Speedway home on Monday, as he sat with his son and twin daughters who were all born before the procedure.

'I look back on it as something that made me stronger,' he said.

'I mean, yeah, I'd like to have my leg and my face back, but without that happening I wouldn't be who I am today.'

Hunter was in a car with his friend and his friend's girlfriend along a North Carolina highway when the friend lost control of the wheel and plowed into a pylon.

The girlfriend jumped out the car, was struck by one of the fallen lines, and as Hunter pushed her out of harm's way it made an electrical connection. Electricity flowed through his arm which was grounded by touching the car.

For five minutes, 10,000 volts pumped through his body, exiting through his hand and face. Most of it went to his face.

But Hunter has no recollection of those traumatic 300 seconds.

'People tell me that I'm fortunate that I don't remember [the accident] because it would probably cause a lot of pain,' he explains.

At first, he and his girlfriend simply tried to get on with their lives and his recovery, as doctors carried out the only kind of skin-graft surgeries available at the time.

But eventually, Hunter decided it wasn't enough. His girlfriend Katarina got pregnant, and he couldn't imagine his own child afraid of his face, so he sought out new innovations in the medical world.

Horrific: This is Hunter's face after the car he was in plowed into an electrical pylon. For five minutes, 10,000 volts pumped through his body, exiting through his hand and face. Most of it went out of his face

A team of 30 doctors at Boston's Brigham Hospital worked for more than 14 hours to fully attach the new face

He needed micro-vascular surgery to connect the two main arteries to the new face, allowing his heart to start supplying it with blood. The operation replaced his nose, eyelids, lips, facial animation muscles and nerves

'Imagine walking into a room and like falling, and everybody noticing. That's how it was every time I walked in a room because of the way my face looked.'

There had only been two successful face transplants in America, and 10 in the world.

After a series of screening tests, Boston's Brigham & Women's Hospital gave Hunter the go-ahead, and set about finding a donor.

Then began the more than 30 procedures to complete the operation.

He needed micro-vascular surgery to connect the two main arteries to the new face, allowing his heart to start supplying it with blood.

A team of 30 doctors worked for more than 14 hours to fully attach the new face.

The operation replaced Hunter's nose, eyelids, lips, facial animation muscles and the nerves that power them and provide sensation.

It took five months for the swelling to subside and the true traits of his facial features to emerge.

It took five months for the swelling to subside and the true traits of his facial features to emerge

Five years on, he has grown a beard, and only has minor traces of disfigurement around his eyes, which Boston doctors are still working on. But despite plenty more healthcare to come, he has never been happier

Transformation: Hunter looks healthy and unrecognizable from the moment his face melted from electricity

Five years on, he has managed to grow a beard, and only has minor traces of disfigurement around his eyes, which Boston doctors are still working on.

But despite plenty more healthcare to come, Hunter has never been happier.

'It's a lot easier to go out in public, I will tell you that,' he admitted.

Now, even the simple sensation of a breeze on his face is something he cherishes.

'Hot, cold, pain, tickle, rubbing my beard, someone kissing my face  I can feel everything.

'I think it's an amazing journey. I mean, it's been a hard journey.
A drug that could reverse Alzheimers disease within a week is set to be given to people for the first time.

Jabs of the IL-33 protein rapidly restored memory to mice whose brains had been ravaged by an Alzheimers-like illness.

The results were so exciting that the Glasgow University researchers hope to test the drug on people this year.

Glasgow University researchers hope to test jabs of the IL-33 protein on humans after discovering the drug rapidly restored memory to mice whose brains had been ravaged by Alzheimers (file picture, posed by model)

And a new, much-needed treatment could be on the market in only five years.

Researcher Eddy Liew said that while what works on mice doesnt always work on people, he is cautiously optimistic that IL-33 will be a success.

Alzheimers and other forms of dementia affect some 850,000 Britons, with one new case every three minutes. Existing drugs are of limited benefit and the disease soon takes its course.

IL-33 is made in the body, with the highest levels in the brain and spinal cord. With research showing that Alzheimers patients are low in the protein, Professor Liew set out to see if boosting levels could be beneficial.

SKIN CANCER BREAKTHROUGH Nearly a quarter of patients with advanced skin cancer saw their tumours wiped out after taking a breakthrough new treatment. The results, revealed yesterday at an American Association for Cancer Research meeting, give hope of an effective treatment for the 14,500 people diagnosed with malignant melanoma in Britain each year. Patients are usually expected to live for only a few months. But 69 per cent of those given a combination of two immunotherapy drugs  which harness the bodys immune system and use it to attack cancer  survived for two years, according to a trial of 142 patients. And 22 per cent had no detectable tumours remaining. The treatments are already available on the NHS individually. But campaigners face a battle to get the combination approved on the NHS, because a years treatment of both drugs currently costs 131,400. Lead researcher Dr Stephen Hodi, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the US, called the breakthrough promising. Advertisement

Mice genetically engineered to develop memory loss were given jabs of the protein and put through a range of tests.

These showed memory to return to normal in seven to ten days, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports. Excitingly, it worked in mice with advanced disease as well as in the creatures at the early stages of memory loss.

And levels of beta amyloid, the toxic compound that clogs up the brain of Alzheimers sufferers and kills cells, halved within just two days.

Professor Liew, who collaborated with colleagues in Hong Kong, believes IL-33 activates immune cells capable of gobbling up the compound. It also dampens the inflammation that helps fuel the formation of new supplies of beta amyloid.

The professor, who has spent 15 years studying the protein, said that just as diabetics are given insulin to boost their flagging supplies, Alzheimers patients could be given booster shots of IL-33. He said: It is wonderful stuff. Sometimes, I think it is too good to be true. There have been enough false breakthroughs in the medical field to caution us not to hold our breath until rigorous trials have been done.

If we dont know in five years time whether it works, Ill be disappointed.

Dr James Pickett, of the Alzheimers Society, said: With an ageing population and no new dementia drugs in over a decade, the need to find treatments that can slow or stop disease progression is greater than ever.
Next week's junior doctor strike could be averted if Jeremy Hunt removes his threat to impose a controversial new pay deal, the British Medical Association has announced

The first full walkout in the history of the NHS could be called off if Jeremy Hunt removes his threat to impose a controversial new pay deal, the British Medical Association has announced.

The doctors union will cancel next week's planned industrial action, due to begin at 8am on Tuesday and last until 5pm Wednesday if the Health Secretary makes the concession.

For previous strikes, junior doctors have provided emergency care cover, but for the first time ever they will even withdraw emergency care if the action goes ahead.

The bitter dispute centres around making junior doctors work more weekend shifts for what they say is lower rates of pay, particularly on Saturdays.

But speaking yesterday, Mr Hunt insisted there would be 'no retreat' on his plans, which he insists are vital for introducing a seven-day NHS.

He said NHS negotiators had concluded there was no prospect of progress on the outstanding issue around Saturday pay.

And should junior doctors walk out, maternity units, intensive care units and emergency departments will be at 'most risk', he warned.

So far, more than 24,500 operations have been cancelled during the four strikes since December last year.

Dr Johann Malawana, BMA junior doctor committee chair, warned that the Government's decision to impose a contract on junior doctors was 'tremendously damaging'.

He has requested a meeting with Jeremy Hunt before next week's action.

In a statement, Dr Johann Malawana, BMA junior doctor committee chair, said the strike could be called off if Mr Hunt agrees to lift the threat of imposition.

He said: 'This is a clear offer in a bid to avert industrial action. Simply put, if the Government agrees to lift the imposition, junior doctors will call of next week's action.

The long running dispute has seen picket lines outside Parliament and a wave of strike action by junior doctors since January. The strike is due to escalate next week when emergency care is withdrawn for the first time

The Green Wing cast donned scrubs to join the picket line at the most recent strike earlier this month, pictured.S o far, more than 24,500 operations have been cancelled since December last year

Jeremy Hunt, pictured making his statement in Parliament yesterday, has insisted he will press on with plans to impose the new contract on junior doctors

He continued: 'With preparations underway for the first full-walk out of doctors in this country, the Government cannot continue to stick its head in the sand.

'It must now listen to the many voices raising concerns about its mishandled plans and do what it has refused to for far too long: put patients first, get back around the table and end this dispute through talks.'

In a letter to Mr Hunt, Dr Malawana said the 'imposition of this contract is tremendously damaging to the morale of junior doctors and medical students and has resulted in a complete breakdown of trust between doctors and the Government'.

He said the resolution to the strike lies 'squarely in [Jeremy Hunt's] hands', adding: 'I believe that your decision in February to give up on negotiations and impose a contract, reiterated in the House of Commons yesterday, marks a watershed in relations with the profession.

So far, more than 24,500 operations have been cancelled during the four strikes since December last year. Pictured are junior doctors at a picket line outside St Thomas' Hospital, Westminster

Opponents have said there is uncertainty over whether Mr Hunt has the legal right to force trainees to accept new terms and conditions. Mr Hunt faced claims he had misled Parliament after legal letters suggested the contract would not in fact apply to every junior doctor straight away

'But I am happy to meet or discuss this offer with you at any time between now and the start of next weeks industrial action.'

Yesterday in the Commons Mr Hunt was repeatedly asked whether he has the power as Health Secretary to impose a new contract and insisted he was 'acting within the law'.

This is a clear offer in a bid to avert industrial action. Simply put, if the Government agrees to lift the imposition, junior doctors will call of next week's action Dr Johann Malawana, BMA junior doctor committee chair

Opponents have said there is uncertainty over whether Mr Hunt has the legal right to force trainees to accept new terms and conditions.

He faced claims he had misled Parliament after legal letters suggested the contract would not in fact apply to every junior doctor straight away.

However, Mr Hunt told MPs the new contract would filter through to all new junior doctors - which means all hospital doctors below consultant level - over time.

NHS foundation trusts do have the freedom to introduce new contracts of their own but none of them choose to do so, he said.

Responding to questions from Labour, Mr Hunt said: 'Yes, we are imposing a new contract and we are doing it with the greatest of regret because the BMA refused to talk over three years, with three independent processes.'

He said the full walk-out is a bridge the NHS has 'never crossed before' but added that 'no-one wants there to be any kind of tragedy'.

MailOnline has contacted the Department of Health for a response.
A 17-year-old girl who was unable to eat and could barely walk was found to have a hairball weighing 2.2lbs in her stomach.

The teenager, known only as Komal, arrived at Shree Hospital in Pune, western India, last Saturday complaining of a severe stomach ache.

She had completely lost her appetite and was too ill to walk.

Doctors discovered she had a history of trichotillomania - a condition where people pull out their own hair and trichophagia - where they eat the hair that has been pulled out.

She had been chewing on her hair for five years - and had swallowed so much she had started to vomit every time she ate.

A 17-year-old girl called Komal came to hospital unable to eat and barely able to walk. Doctors discovered she had a hairball weighing 2.2lbs in her stomach and removed it in an operation

Dr Shreehari Dhole-Patil, the surgeon who performed the operation (centre) quizzed Komal over her hair-eating habit. She revealed she had been swallowing her own locks since she was 12 but had kept it a secret

Unaware of her hair-eating habit, her parents had taken her to a myriad of doctors hoping they could help explain why she couldn't eat and was constantly vomiting.

But each time they were told her sickness was due to a gynaecological problem and was sent home with medicines which did little to ease her stomach pain.

Eventually, she was in so much agony her parents rushed her to hospital.

There, CT scans revealed a 2lb mass of hair in her stomach, which had caused a large lesion.

She was diagnosed with Rapunzel syndrome, a rare condition in which a hairball (called a trichobezar) is found in the stomach, with its tail in the colon.

The syndrome is rare, with less than 120 cases reported in the medical literature, and almost always affects young women, according to doctors writing in the journal BMJ Case Reports.

Doctors immediately carried out surgery to remove the 17cm wide giant mass of hair.

Komal had swallowed so much hair she had no appetite and would vomit every time she ate. It took doctors an hour and a half to remove the hairball from her stomach and bowel

Dr Shreehari Dhole-Patil, the surgeon who performed the operation, said: 'Komal had approached us along with her father.

'She said she had acute stomach ache from last three years but had no clue why it was happening.

'We carried couple of tests and during gastrointestinal examinations it was found there was a tumor of 17 by 14 centimetres and at its border there were thin black coloured thread-like hairs.

'It took us an hour and a half to retrieve the hairball. She is doing well now.'

It took us an hour and a half to retrieve the hairball Dr Shreehari Dhole-Patil, surgeon at Shree Hospital in Pune, western India

After the surgery, Dr Dhole-Patil asked Komal about her affliction, and the teenager confessed she had been swallowing her own hair since the age of 12.

She also told her shocked parents she used to secretly chew on her locks while watching TV.

The girl's father said: 'For the last three years, we had thought she had some gynaecological problem as told to us by doctors.

'We even spent 5,000 on various tests and medicines but no doctor could see the hairball in stomach.

'While we are shocked to learn that our daughter had this condition, we are relieved to know she is fine now.'

He added he will take his daughter to see a psychologist for counselling to help her overcome her strange addiction.
Charlize Theron's son developed a crush on her The Huntsman: Winters War co-star Emily Blunt

Actress Charlize Theron has said her four-year-old son, Jackson, developed a crush on her The Huntsman: Winters War co-star Emily Blunt, while spending time on the set, during filming.

The two stars play rival sisters in the film, which serves as a prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman.

My son is in love with her, Theron told Extra TV.

He thinks shes, like, the most beautiful princess ever. Yeah, its crazy. I didnt even exist, he was just like, Ahhh, shes a princess. Im like, Im a queen.

Jackson also enjoyed watching his mom on set, especially during her more villainous moments.

He was watching her close-up and she was really going for it, like, and the intensity, and it was just one of those heightened scenes, Blunt said.

Jackson was watching her close up and he went, Oooh, Mama's spicy, the actress added.

I have no idea where he even came up with that word choice, Theron said while laughing.

Blunt also is a mom, to two  year-old daughter Hazel and her second child is on the way.

Blunt revealed that Hazel isn't really ready to be a big sister yet.

-contactmusic.com

Guns N' Roses frontman to tour with AC/DC

Guns N Roses frontman Axl Rose has a new gig lined up: He'll be singing with AC/DC.

The Australian rockers announced on Saturday that Rose will step in for Brian Johnson, who had to bow out from touring due to hearing issues.

The statement issued read: AC/DC band members would like to thank Brian Johnson for his contributions and dedication to the band throughout the years.

We wish him all the best with his hearing issues and future ventures. We understand Brian's decision to stop touring. -hollywoodreporter.com

Secrets of the Butterfly's trip

Each fall, monarch butterflies across Canada and the US turn their orange, black and white-mottled wings toward the Rio Grande and migrate over 2,000 miles to the relative warmth of central Mexico.

This journey continues even as monarch numbers have plummeted due to loss of their sole larval food source - milkweed.
Vijay Mallya is wanted back in India over the alleged misuse of an IDBI loan of Rs 950 crore

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) will seek an Interpol arrest warrant against Vijay Mallya based on an open-dated non-bailable warrant (NBW) issued by a special court in India on Monday.

The arrest warrant is the latest chapter in the money laundering case linked to Mallya's alleged misuse of an IDBI loan for Rs 950 crore.

According to news agency PTI, officials said that the agency will soon write to the global police body through the Indian nodal office of the Central Bureau of Investigation to request a Red Corner Notice (RCN) be issued against Mallya.

With the non-bailable warrant and the recent suspension of Mallyas passport, the government is exploring the possibility of his deportation to India.

Officials say efforts are on to ensure that he can be deported as the government does not want to get into the extradition process, which will delay things further.

Mallya failed to appear before the ED even after the agency summoned him three times.

The 60-year-old industrialist, who is in the UK after leaving India on March 2, had sought time till May to depose before ED officials.

Officials said that as the NBW is open-dated, the agency is expected to undertake action according to set procedures in this regard. These involve sending it to the person concerned, and in case of no response, asking Interpol to red flag him.

An RCN, according to Interpol, is issued to seek the location and arrest of wanted persons with a view to extradition or similar lawful action in a criminal case probe.

The ED wants Mallya to join the probe personally in connection with the criminal investigation under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in the alleged Rs 950 crore IDBI loan fraud case.

The Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court also rejected the application moved by the now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines (KFA), challenging the EDs claim that Rs 430 crore was siphoned off from the Rs 950-crore loan and used to acquire properties abroad.

Earlier in the day, KFA moved a fresh application in court terming the EDs claim false, and saying it was incorrect that its owner Mallya had siphoned off Rs 430 crore.

The ED sought an NBW against Mallya in connection with the money laundering probe.

The agency also showed the court an envelope which it said contained details of money in Mallyas overseas accounts.

KFA pleaded that the court should await a detailed explanation of how the proceeds of the loan were used, with supporting documentary evidence, before passing any order on the ED's application seeking an NBW.
India is facing an escalating burden of eye disorders among children.

Data from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) has revealed that one in four children seen by the ophthalmic department at the government hospital, suffers from either strabismus - misaligned eyes - or amblyopia - known as 'lazy eye' - and is referred to the squint clinic.

The information comes at a time when the Union Health Ministry is working on a Vision 2020 plan to combat the spate of eye disorders in the country.

Data has revealed that one in four children seen by the ophthalmic department of a government hospital suffers from either misaligned or 'lazy' eyes

The data came out through a study of over 25,000 patients at the Dr Rajendra Prasad Centre for Ophthalmic Sciences, AIIMS.

Strabismus is a condition that interferes with binocular vision because it prevents a person from fixing both eyes on the same point - the eyes do not properly align with each other.

Amblyopia is a disorder in which an eye fails to achieve normal visual acuity even with prescription eyeglasses or contact lenses. It begins during infancy and early childhood. In most cases, only one eye is affected.

Of the nearly 5,000 children aged 12 years and below, over 60 per cent had amblyopia, while in the age group of six years and below, nearly 85 per cent suffer from the condition.

This is significantly more than the trend observed in the general paediatric population, where the prevalence of amblyopia in these age groups hovers around just one per cent.

Among younger children, the burden of amblyopia and strabismus was 84.4 per cent and 26.6 per cent, respectively.

Among the referred patients, strabismus was noted in 84.6 per cent.

Strabismus and amblyopia affect a sizeable proportion of patients who come to the ophthalmology department. A significantly higher burden is present in the paediatric population. The majority of the cases of strabismus do not merit tertiary level eye care, said Dr Rohit Saxena from AIIMS, who is the author of the research study published in the latest issue of Indian Journal of Community Medicine.

There is a need to improve paediatric eye care at a secondary level to reduce the immense burden on tertiary referral centres.

Saxena said both strabismus and amblyopia affect children in the early years and subsequently result in vision loss and impaired binocular function.

While these have not been disorders under the spotlight of Indias national programme for control of blindness, they have been given due attention in the recent thrust on paediatric ophthalmology in the Vision 2020 initiative, he said.

Doctors say amblyopia can be easily managed at primary or secondary-level clinics and does not routinely require a tertiary-level referral.

They maintain that these problems are either genetic or aggravated due to parents' ignorance.
Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar has pressed the Chinese military leadership on border transgressions, stressing the need to resume the process of clarifying the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Parrikar, who met his Chinese counterpart General Chang Wanquan at the PLA headquarters in Beijing, also conveyed India's displeasure at China blocking the listing of Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar at the UN Security Council sanctions committee, expressing that "what happened in the UN was not the right direction that they have taken on terrorism, because having a common line is in the interest of India and China both".

A similar message was conveyed by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj when she met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the Russia-India-China trilateral in Moscow.

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar has pressed the Chinese military leadership on border transgressions, stressing the need to resume the process of clarifying the Line of Actual Control

The focus of the defence minister's visit was, however, the boundary issue and ensuring stability along the undemarcated LAC.

While India has been pressing China to resume the process of clarifying the LAC, where differing perceptions in certain areas have led to what Indian officials describe as "transgressions", Beijing has been reluctant.

China has viewed the LAC clarification as a diversion from the boundary talks, the nineteenth round of which will be held on Wednesday when NSA Ajit Doval travels to Beijing.

We are insisting it should be done in order to really ensure a very stable border. Because all the issues take place because of perception, he told reporters.

Both sides did agree to increased confidence-building measures, including adding new border personnel meeting points.

After two new points in Daulet Beg Oldie in Ladakh, and Kibithu in Arunachal were opened last year, they are looking at a sixth point in the middle sector.

Parrikar described the process of "actual marking" the LAC as "one of the preconditions of smooth border operations".

Without that, everything goes by perceptions which has caused problems sometimes, he noted.

Parrikar said both sides moved closer to opening hotlines between military commands to enable faster handling of any incidents.

China officially responded to a draft memorandum put forward by India and the issue now appears close to being finally settled, officials said.

Earlier, Parrikar was given a grand welcome at the Ba Yi building, the PLA's sprawling headquarters in Beijing west of Tiananmen Square.

Parrikar and Chang inspected a guard of honour before heading into the building for talks.

On Tuesday, the defence minister will meet Chinese Premier Li Keqiang before travelling to Chengdu as one of the first visiting foreign officials to see the PLA's new headquarters of its recently set-up Western Theatre Command, which is in charge of the entire India border.

While the main focus of Parrikars talks on Monday was on enhancing border management, the defence minister also raised issues that have recently emerged as prickly differences in ties.

On China's infrastructure projects in PoK, Parrikar said India has made its stand very clear and expressed its strong reservations to Chinese activity in PoK.
The Supreme Court on Monday slammed the Mumbai police for delaying the reopening of dance bars in Mumbai.

The Court criticised the police for coming up with one pretext or other to prolong implementation of the order issued on 15 October, 2015, under which it must grant licences to nearly 800 dance bars to reopen across Maharashtra.

It summoned the Deputy Commissioner of Police concerned to seek an explanation.

The Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra is angry that no action has been taken by police for six months, despite a court order

A bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra was angry that nothing has been done six months after the order has been passed.

More specifically, no action has been taken even after the order that was issued again on 2 March, 2016, when the dance bars complied with certain modified conditions like putting up a railing around the dancing stage, and installing CCTVs at the entrance.

What triggered the fresh round of confrontation was a new Act brought out recently by the licensing authority, the Mumbai Police. It includes a list of what will count as obscenity, which can lead to the cancellation of a bars licence.

The police had latched on to the court order on 15 October, 2015, which - while lifting the ban on dance bars - had given them full power to crack down on indecent and obscene performances.

The new rules, which are yet to be notified, say: Nothing will be permitted which arouses the prurient interest of the audience, consists of a sexual act, lascivious movements, gestures for the purpose of sexual propositioning or indicating the availability of sexual access to the dancer or in the course of which the dancer exposes her genitals or if a female is topless.

As the bench questioned the new rules and definition of obscenity, Additional Solicitor General Pinky Anand, appearing for the Centre, said: We have only said dance cannot be obscene.

The bench then retorted: That is what we have also said. Obscenity is anyway prohibited under section 292 of the IPC. What is there to bring in a new Act? When will you comply with our previous orders? Dance bar is not like liquor trade. Dance bars are permissible subject to certain regulations.

Senior advocate Jayant Bhushan, appearing for the Indian Hotel and Restaurant Association, alleged that Maharashtra has not complied with the direction to grant licences to dance bar-owners within ten days after they complied with the modifications.

He also urged the court to summon the responsible officer.

They gave us licences and took it back within two days, Bhushan contended.
City fat cats have fought back against the public outcry over their mega salaries.

A shareholder spring began last week when almost 60 per cent of BP investors voted against the 13.9million pay package of chief executive Bob Dudley when the company made record losses for 2015.

Appearing in public yesterday for the first time since the outcry, he rejected calls that his pay was too high.

Asked by the Mail whether his pay was justified, Dudley said: When you look at it carefully, my pay and bonus is less this year than last year.

Defiant: BP Bob Dudley, left, defended his 13.9m salary claiming it was 'less this year than last year', while Centrica ceo Iain Conn, right, fought off a revolt after a year which saw the firm record losses of 857m

He said the total had been skewed by pension payments: Just look at the facts.

Asked if he had considered giving up the cash he made clear he had not.

Dudleys fightback came as Iain Conn, boss of Centrica, fought off a revolt over his pay deal of 3million for 2015, after a year in which the British Gas owner recorded losses of 857million.

Conns pay was approved by the majority of stakeholders, but the 53-year-old did not escape unscathed.

Shareholder John Farmer said: Over the past seven years shareholder returns have been a paltry 20 per cent but the chief executive is receiving some 3million, including a 636,000 recruitment incentive.

To applause from other investors, he described Conns performance as woeful and criticised Centricas scattergun approach to its strategy, urging: You can do better than this.

Conn, who joined Centrica in 2015, shrugged off criticism after the meeting and said his pay was nowhere near the maximum.

He suggested Centricas remuneration policy had better backing than that of BP, his former employer.

Youre never going to get 100 per cent approval in this day and age, he said. But certainly its a different outcome to other companies we all know. The vote reflects the confidence of our shareholders that the right thing is being done.

Centrica (down 1.6 per cent or 3.7p to 234.6p) saw 15 per cent of its proxy voters oppose the companys pay policy, after 33 per cent voted it down last year.

70m man: WPP bossMartin Sorrell

Anger has been growing at the scale of chief executive pay with a number of huge remuneration deals likely to come under the spotlight over the next few weeks.

Mark Cutifani, boss of miner Anglo American, is likely to face a revolt over his 3.4million salary on Thursday. And as shareholders see the success of investors at other annual meetings, it is likely to spur on more to vote down corporate greed.

Martin Sorrell, boss and founder of advertising giant WPP, is also likely to come under fire. His pay is expected to hit 70million this year, when the company reveals the figure in its annual report next week.

The WPP (up 0.18 per cent or 3p to 1662p) boss joined the fightback of the bosses yesterday, and said: I make no apologies for success.

I continue to hold [shares] in the company, so every time the company does well, I benefit, he told CNBC.

The fact is, those [pay] plans were put in place, they were voted on, they were approved. The only reason the plans have resulted in what theyve resulted in is because the company has done well.

Next week MPs will grill members of the BPs (down 0.04 per cent or 0.15p to 355.8p) board about whether Dudleys pay is justified.

More shareholder protests could still be yet to come, with Anglo American (up 2.26 per cent or 15.3p to 693.6p) shareholders set to meet on Thursday, and Shire (up 1.13 per cent or 48p to 4295p) on April 28.
Black gold? An exploratory well-head at the site in Horse Hill, Surrey

GATWICK GUSHER The company behind plans to extract oil from the ground around Gatwick Airport has increased its stake in the venture.

UK Oil & Gas Investments has snapped up a larger stake in the Horse Hill oil exploration company, near Gatwick airport, to 27.3 per cent.

It has paid 1.8million in cash and shares for Angus Energys 7.8 per cent stake.

UKOG has carried out tests at Horse Hill  nicknamed the Gatwick Gusher following claims last year of large amounts of oil under the Weald basin area.

UKOG shares fell 6.82 per cent or 0.15p to 2.05p.

STANDARD BID Career civil servant Sir Paul Tucker has emerged as a leading candidate to help run one of the Citys biggest banks.

The former Bank of England deputy governor is being considered as chairman of Standard Chartered.

Tucker, a senior fellow at the University of Harvard, would replace John Peace who pledged to quit as part of a boardroom clear-out after shareholders demanded change at the bank.

HSBC BOSSES Boss Stuart Gulliver is set to stand down within two years as part of a management shake-up. A successor for chairman Douglas Flint is expected to be named by 2017, and they will lead the search for a chief executive.

Sources said Henri de Castries, who leads insurance giant Axa, was hotly tipped to replace Flint.

MILITARY DEAL Maintenance firm Interserve has won a 230million contract to manage six airfields used by the US military in Britain.

The five-year partnership starts in November 2016 and has brought together a number of engineering and maintenance contracts at the sites under the control of one main contractor. Interserve shares increased 0.74 per cent or 3p to 409.4p.

POWER ON Aggreko, which rents equipment providing power to festivals, building projects and other remote locations, has won a three-year supply contract.

Despite this shares fell 0.46 per cent or 5p to 1074p after its Power Solutions business signed the contract to provide 200MW of diesel-fuelled power in Zimbabwe.

SAVERS ROCKED Investment firm Charles Stanley saw its asset book shrink by 3.8 per cent to 20.5billion in the year to April as the world was rocked by volatile markets.

Revenues at the 300-year-old company fell 5.4 per cent to 141.5million.
China has stoked fury by accusing the West of lazy and lame excuses over the steel crisis.

The Peoples Republic is being blamed for causing a global plunge in steel prices by dumping excess supply around the world.

Indian-owned Tata Steel put its UK steel assets up for sale last week placing thousands of jobs at its Port Talbot side at risk after it was revealed the plant could no longer compete.

Britains steel industry has been devastated by cheap imported steel, mainly from China. Lower growth has left China with excess steel and it has been exporting this to Europe.

Oversupply: China has stoked fury by accusing the West of lazy and lame excuses over the steel crisis

Yesterday Chinas official news agency used the start of a two-day crisis summit to say it was understandable to believe that China, as the worlds largest steel producer, was the cause of the problems.

However, it said, upon closer inspection its just a lame and lazy excuse for protectionism.

As the talks got underway, China was immediately blamed for failing to help find a solution to the problem.

The Chinese government refused to put its name to a joint communique that was supposed to agree levels of over-capacity and set out targets to reduce the glut. Sources say that talks have reached an impasse.

Gareth Stace, director of UK Steel, said: What we needed to see at the meeting was an agreement by national governments to take short term, detailed actions to help address the steel sector crisis.

However, having agreed what the problems are we appear to be no closer to finding international action to put in place solutions.

This is a global problem which requires a global solution to remove current over-capacity and time is a luxury we dont have.

'In Europe we have already been through very painful restructuring and must now look to others, including China, to take the same radical action.

Meanwhile, Tata said it had expressions of interest from 190 potential financial and industrial investors worldwide and has hired Standard Chartered to run the sale process.
Deutsche Boerse is seeking to take over the London Stock Exchange in a deal worth around 21bn

A row has erupted over a takeover of the London Stock Exchange after bosses behind the bid appeared to suggest its headquarters could move to Germany.

Deutsche Boerse is seeking to take over the 215-year-old institution in a deal worth around 21billion.

Both sides insist it will be a merger of equals but the German firms shareholders will get a 54.4 per cent controlling stake, profits will be reported in euros and Deutsche head Carsten Kengeter will be chief executive.

Critics were told the new company would be based in the City rather than Deutsches Frankfurt home.

But in a German newspaper interview, Kengeter said the terms could change if Britain voted to leave the EU.

Sources at both Deutsche and the LSE have since strongly denied the group could be based abroad, saying its London location was non-negotiable.

However, there is increasing pressure for a rethink from Frankfurt politicians who see it as a major prize.
Stella and Budweiser brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev has agreed a 2billion deal to sell European lagers Peroni and Grolsch to Japan's Asahi in a move aimed at smoothing its takeover of SABMiller.

The disposals will help ease regulatory concerns over AB-InBev's 71billion takeover of the FTSE 100-listed brewing firm - which is expected to go through in the second half of this year.

Japanese brewer Asahi - known for its Super Dry beer - will buy Peroni, Grolsch and London's Meantime brewery as part of the deal. It will also gets its hands on SABMiller's Italian, Dutch and British operations - which make and distribute the brands.

Asahi will not, however, receive global rights for the beers in the United States.

Cheers: The disposals are conditional on the successful closing of AB InBev's takeover of SAB and will mark the largest Japanese beverage acquisition since Suntory's takeover of US spirits maker Beam in 2014

Asahi first tabled its offer for the beers in February and the firms have since been in exclusive talks.

The deal marks Asahi's biggest-ever acquisition and the largest Japanese deal in the beverage industry since Suntory's $16billion takeover of US spirits maker Beam in 2014.

Buying Peroni and Grolsch will allow Asahi to tap into growth outside a declining Japanese lager market, where it has a 38 per cent share.

It also underlines Japanese companies' ambitious plans for growth outside their home market.

Last year, Japan Tobacco snapped up the cigarette assets from US rival Reynolds for $5billion, while publisher Nikkei bought the Financial Times from Pearson for $1.3billion.

In this case, Asahi darted to the bar ahead of the maker of Chang beer, Thai Beverages, and a handful of private equity buyers.

Asahi said when unveiling its initial offer in February that it had been looking to grow internationally 'for some time', adding that it hoped the deal would help the group 'expand its growth platform in Europe and become a global player with a distinct position'.

Expansion plans: When unveiling its initial offer for Peroni and Grolsch in February, Asahi said that it had been looking to grow internationally 'for some time'

AB-InBev said today: 'We have now accepted Asahi's binding offer to acquire the Peroni, Grolsch and Meantime brands and related businesses (excluding certain US rights), after completion of the relevant employee information and consultation processes applicable to a potential sale.'

The Belgian giant also confirmed that today's deal 'is conditional on the successful closing of the recommended acquisition of SABMiller by AB InBev in November 2015.... which requires the approval by the European Commission of Asahi as a purchaser of the Business.'

AB-InBev's takeover of SABMiller marks the largest takeover of a UK-based firm as well as the fourth biggest in global corporate history.

By selling Peroni and Grolsch, AB-Inbev had wanted to 'proactively address' any potential regulatory issues in its takeover of SAB.

AB-InBev has already announced the sale of SABMiller's US joint venture, with partner Molson Coors agreeing to buy the remaining 58 per cent stake in MillerCoors for 7.9billion.

SAB has invested heavily in Peroni in recent years, marketing the brand across Europe and America to help cement the lager as a global brand, alongside Grolsch.

Meanwhile, a sale of the Meantime brewery in Greenwich will bring to a close a brief spell under SAB's ownership, having only been bought by the group last May.

SAB, which was founded in South Africa, snapped Meantime up under plans to tap into the burgeoning UK craft beer market.
Budget fashion retailer Primark has suffered a 3 per cent dip in half-year profits after a warm winter hit demand for clothes.

Despite the dip in profits, the clothing retailer owned by Associated British Foods saw sales increase by 5 per cent to 2.6billion.

As a group, AB Foods suffered a 2 per cent drop in sales to 6.1billion, with its sugar business seeing only marginal improvements.

Profits: Primark suffered a 3 per cent dip in half-year profits

Like-for-like sales at Primark remained flat, but the retailer's 'selling space expansion' continues, the group said.

It added that trading at its two US Primark stores has been 'encouraging', confirming it plans to opens six more outlets in the country this year.

Taking into account the group's performance as a whole, AB Foods said it's full-year trading outlook remains unchanged.

But, the group said it expects to see a 'marginal decline' in adjusted earnings per share for the year.

Despite the dip in overall revenues, the group's half year profits increased 4 per cent to 466million.

The company said the movement in exchange rates held back profit, both in the translation of overseas revenues and profits and, significantly, in the transaction effect on the margin at Primark and its sugar business.

Revenues: As a group, AB Foods suffered a per cent dip in half year revenues

George Weston, chief executive at AB Foods, said: 'These results demonstrate underlying progress for all of our businesses in the period despite currency.

'Good buying and selling space expansion continued at Primark, cost reduction and performance improvements contributed to a better result at Sugar, profits were well ahead at Ingredients, and profit margins improved at Grocery and Agriculture.'

The group claimed the EU referendum has caused 'uncertainty' among businesses, but pointed out that it carries out 'little cross-border trading' with the rest of the EU.

The group's board has declared an interim dividend of 10.3p per share, an increase of 3 per cent on last year.

Shares in AB Foods, majority owned by the family of chief executive George Weston, have increased by 12 per cent over the last three months.

This morning, shares in AB Foods are up 2.51 per cent or 84.00p to 3,431.00p.
Rio Tinto has cut its 2017 production guidance from its iron ore mines due to a delay in the rollout of its driverless trains.

The miner has trimmed its target for the ore used to make steel to between 330 million and 340 million tonnes next year, from 350 million tonnes previously, because of delays with its new train system called AutoHaul.

Rio's new $518million train plan has been under development since 2012.

Mixed bag: Rio Tinto is sticking with its targeted iron ore output guidance for this year, but has trimmed its forecasts for 2017 because of delays with its new train system called AutoHaul

Nevertheless shares in Rio ticked up this session after it reassured nervous investors that it expects to produce 350 million tonnes of iron ore globally this year, an increase from 328 million tonnes in 2015.

Guidance for its other commodities - including alumina, bauxite, coal and copper - were also kept unchanged.

Shares by midday were 2 per cent, or 35.5p higher, at 2,304.0p. Rio rival's BHP Billiton and Anglo American were also making gains - buoyed by a oil price rebound post the disastrous talks in Doha over the weekend.

Guidance aside, the world's No. 2 iron ore miner continues to run its mines at full tilt despite a global supply glut amid slower Chinese industrial growth.

It posted an 11 per cent rise in first quarter iron ore shipments, climbing to 80.8 million tonnes from 72.5 million compared to last year.

But tonnage was down from 91.3 million tonnes in the preceding quarter due to a cyclone that interrupted shipments in late January.

From its key Pilbara iron ore operations in Western Australia, Rio produced 79.9 million tonnes and had total sales of 76.7 million tonnes.

Outgoing chief executive Sam Walsh has stubbornly defied calls for supply restraints until markets and prices are more stable.

Walsh believes any curtailment would simply open the door for competitors to fill the void and do little to lower supply and elevate prices.

Walsh, who last week tipped a second-half contraction in iron ore prices, said in the trading statement: 'We continue to experience volatility in commodity prices across all markets.'

He added: 'In the face of a testing external environment, our focus remains on delivering further cost and productivity improvements, disciplined capital management and maximising free cash flow, to ensure that Rio Tinto remains strong.'

Spot iron ore prices hit record lows in December, but prices have since climbed to hit $60.36 a tonne earlier this week.

Perversely, the disruptions to iron ore supplies that took place during the first quarter are now helping bolster the commodity's price.

Mike van Dulken, analyst at Accendo Markets, said: 'The supply disruption that held back quarter one production is serving to shore up commodity prices which rebounded strongly in quarter one from depressed lows on hopes that the worst of the global supply glut might be behind us, with a knock on for shore prices.

'Even managements comments about continued commodity price volatility are falling on deaf ears with traders now almost immune to the bigger swings we have become accustomed to over the last 12 months.'

But there could be further trouble down the line, with Citigroup analysts predicting a decline in iron ore prices in the second half of 2016 due to continued oversupply.

The bank sees iron ore averaging $45 a tonne in 2016, $39 in 2017 and $38 in 2018.
Actress Amy Schumer made headlines recently when she left the bar staff at a New York City theater a $1,000 tip on top of her $77 drinks order.

But as wait staff know all too well, a tip that generous is a rarity in the world of customer service and it can often be a battle to even get a 20 per cent gratuity - just ask the yachties looking after billionaire guests aboard the $11million luxury yacht vacationing around the Mediterranean in the debut season of Bravo's Below Deck Mediterranean.

Here, seven staff have unashamedly revealed to DailyMail.com the craziest things they have ever done for tips...

Crocodile tears

Harriet, 23, works at a pancake house while auditioning for theater roles and says when she desperately needed more cash for her security deposit on a Manhattan apartment she decided to turn on the waterworks.

'Because the menu price items are so low, even if a customer does tip 20 per cent I still don't make that much in gratuity,' she explains.

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Acting the part: Harriet, 23, works at a pancake house and said when she desperately needed more cash for her security deposit on a Manhattan apartment she decided to turn on the waterworks (stock photo)

'So as an actress, one day I just decided to use my skills and make myself look a bit upset and teary when I served a customer. It actually worked - my tip did seem higher.

'Some days if I felt like I couldn't get into the "zone", I would splash a tiny bit of water under my eyes and it looked like I had been crying.

'Customers would look at me and feel so awkward - I could tell as they would give me a side-eye and then when I walked away, have a quick chat if they were dining with someone. I think it made them feel so uncomfortable that they just signed the receipt and got out.

'I only did it for like a week because I was worried regulars would realize and my game would be up, but it really did work. And I like to think it kinda helped my acting skills!'

Lying for my boss

'I was working as a ski instructor in Canada, but I needed work for the summer months so I took a job with my uncle's rich neighbor and his wife on their yacht as a chef,' says Chris, 30.

'The couple were not the life and soul of the party so it was not as exciting as I hoped it would be, but the most amusing part was when I had to lie to the owner's wife.

'She didn't like him drinking because of his health and one night, when she was asleep, he stayed up and drank loads of whiskey. Like, so much I am surprised he did not fall overboard.

'The next day he suggested I tell his wife I had drunk it and obviously when she asked me, I insisted I had.

'They were a really generous couple and didn't really care if the staff drank their spirits, but I felt awkward. The husband gave me a tip for my lying services - I think it was a few $50 bills.

'But the worst thing was, after that the wife kept pouring me whiskey and I am not a fan.'

Fake accent

Recruitment consultant Andrew, 29, worked at corporate events as a bartender and waiter across San Francisco during his college years and says he noticed his Irish colleague always seemed to get more tips than him.

'So one day when this drunk dude was talking to me, I decided to pretend I was Irish - he seemed to believe me so I carried it on at the next event I worked,' Andrew explains.

Faking it: Andrew, 29, worked as a bartender during college and says he noticed his Irish colleague always seemed to get more tips than him - so he decided to adopt an Irish accent too (stock photo)

'Changing my California accent to Irish really upped my tips - it actually was super fun as it made events go quicker too.

'I went to Dublin when I was 17 with high school so I just pretended I was from there - at least I could imagine it when I told people.

'My boss knew I was not Irish, but he didn't care as long as I didn't drop my tray of drinks.

'I still do the accent every now and then just for fun - although I am getting a bit rusty now.'

Showing some skin

Part-time waitress Charlie, 27, said she always makes sure she wears low-cut tops and short skirts to get tips if she is working at weddings in Houston, Texas.

'I know it's a total cliche, but it really works to get tips from both men and woman.

'I think both sexes just think I look good and people are attracted to good-looking people - either way I have definitely noticed a difference in the bills they put on the bar.

'And the guests have usually been drinking - that helps.'

Playing the sympathy card: Carlos, 37, is a mobile hair stylist and insists mentioning his failed love life is a sure way to increase his gratuity (stock photo)

Love life woes

Carlos, 37, is a mobile hair stylist in LA and insists dropping his failed love life into a chat with a client is a sure way to increase his gratuity.

'My customers are usually pretty fluid - they fly into the city for a weekend and want a blow out and then I never see them again so it is perfect for me to lie.

'If I get a new customer we chat for a bit and I ask them where they live and stuff like that.

'Then I drop in where I live and say my living situation is kind of changing as my girlfriend just dumped me and she is moving out that day.

'Sometimes it does get a bit awkward as they go a bit quiet, but usually they say they are sorry and I tell them I will be fine - then I drop in that I am just going to have to work out how to pay the rent on my own.

'I am nearly 99 per cent sure it has upped my gratuity - clients feel kinda bad I am cutting their hair as my girlfriend moves out so I think they just whack out their wallets.

'By the way, I didn't just come up with the idea on my own - it did actually happen to me when my ex left and the client reacted so well when I told them and tipped me pretty good so I thought why not carry it on?'

Human contact

Jemma, 24, works at an Italian restaurant in New York City while attending night school to learn Spanish and says she has a fail-safe guide to getting tips.

'I always introduce myself by name and then lightly touch a customer on the shoulder or arm when I double check their order.

'I then compliment them on their outfit - with ladies I go for: "That's a super-cute wallet or jewelry".

'With guys it can be trickier - usually sneakers are safest unless they are super-gross, so then I say something like: "I love your card holder, where did you get it? I want to get my brother one."'

Flattery gets you everywhere

Alison, 34, works at a well-known national underwear store and earns commission on the sales she makes.

'I find flattery gets you everywhere - I measure women for their bras and always tell them how fab they look,' she says.

'Because our sizes tend to come up small I usually bump up their cup size too - and they love it - skinny girls think they have bigger boobs than they realized and usually make a purchase.

'Or for women with big boobs anyway, I say how great their figure is and how tiny their waist is.
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The smiles on their faces and the innocent look in their eyes mask the horror hundreds of children living in a Syrian orphanage have witnessed in their short lives.

Some staying at the sprawling pink brick compound have seen their fathers being slaughtered in front of them and most have run for cover as barrel bombs fell from the skies.

The traumatised children, all of whom have lost their fathers and many whose mothers have also died, live together at Atmeh refugee camp in Idlib, close to the Turkish border.

Smile: Australian photographer Jake Simkin took this photo of a young girl who has grown up during Syria's bloody five-year civil war

Unsettled: The children in this picture are among the 6.6million Syrians who have been internally displaced by the violence in their country

Refugees: A boy raises his fingers in a peace sign at the orphanage on the Syrian border, which is home to hundreds of children

Orphanage: A young boy sits on a wall at the sprawling pink-brick facility inside Atmeh refugee camp, close to the Syria-Turkey border

Innocent: A girl wearing a pink dress poses for a photo behind a large plate of food she will share with other children at the orphanage

Camp: The pink-brick orphanage on the Turkey-Syria border is home to hundreds of children, all of whom have lost their fathers

Safe: Young children play among the pink-brick buildings they now call home after their properties were destroyed by barrel bombs

Australian photographer Jake Simkin, who has been travelling around Syria since the start of the five-year civil war, has shared a series of stunning images taken during his visit to the orphanage with MailOnline.

'The children have gone through terrifying things  from barrel bombs to starvation to execution,' the 36-year-old told MailOnline. 'Some children have talked about their fathers being killed in front of them by regime soldiers.

Some told me about the bombs and how they lost their house and family, and being inside their home while it was being destroyed. Some children have told me about starvation - they had no food and have stunted growth.'

In autumn, the photographer set off on a tense three-hour drive from Aleppo to the refugee camp in the hills alongside two NGO workers.

Experiences: Jake Simkin said some children living at the camp had seen their fathers killed and had to run for cover when bombs fell

Playing: A grinning boy wearing a red jumper holds onto the side of a truck at the red-brick orphanage in Atmeh refugee camp in Syria

Playground: Children run and play between the red-brick buildings during Jake Simkin's visit to the refugee camp in northern Syria

Loss: All of the children living at the orphanage at the refugee camp have lost their fathers and some of their mothers have died as well

Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, held checkpoints along the road and at each stop Mr Simkin was quizzed on his background.

The children have gone through terrifying things  from barrel bombs to starvation to execution. Photographer Jake Simkin

He grew increasingly nervous until he arrived at the camp, where he would help cook for some 400 children each day.

Although the facility runs alongside the Turkish border, it is home to some 80,000 people who are too poor to pay for a journey to Europe or are determined to stay in their homeland.

Among the basic structures in the enormous refugee camp is the pink orphanage, where children disguised their suffering by smiling when Mr Simkin pulled out his camera.

He pictured them wearing clothes bearing English slogans such as 'Rock Princess' and 'Pretty Girls' and playing together among the ramshackle buildings.

Some were barefoot and can be seen queuing for food provided by volunteers like Mr Simkin, while one grinning boy raises his fingers in a peace sign.

Inquisitive: A girl wearing no shoes peers behind Mr Simkin as he takes a photograph as the sun goes down on the Turkey-Syria border

Care: A volunteer bends down to hug one of the children living at the orphanage inside the refugee camp, which is home to 80,000 people

Families: Around 100 mothers who are unable to provide for their children after the deaths of their husbands also live at the orphanage

Friends: Two boys wearing clothes bearing English slogans pose for a photograph. They cannot afford to make the journey to Europe

All of the children have lost their fathers,' Mr Simkin said ahead of another visit to the country. 'When you talk to people, they say its mainly Assad (President Bashar al-Assad) who has killed them. Some have been displaced by ISIS.

Syrias children have now lived through more than five years of conflict, paying the price for a war waged by adults. Caroline Anning, Save the Children

'The kids tell you their homes have been barrel bombed.'

The photographer explained that some children suffer from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after living through the horrors of war.

I had a lot of problems with a few children but I worked out it was because of extreme trauma,' he said. 'It's really hard to work with them and there is no psychiatric care.'

Some 100 mothers who are unable to provide for their sons and daughters following the deaths of their husbands also live at the facility and take unaccompanied children under their wing.

People have made the camp into their homes,' Mr Simkin said. 'They feel safe there. I talked to some of the mothers, they dont have the money to flee to Germany. They dont have that sort of luxury  its the poorest that stay in Syria.'

Some 4.8 million Syrians have been forced to leave the country, according to the United Nations. But for many, paying thousands of pounds to people traffickers to smuggle them into Europe is not an option. In total, 6.6m Syrians have been internally displaced by the violence.

Shade: Two children huddle against a wall in the enormous Syrian refugee camp close to the country's northern border with Turkey

Home: The orphanage is situated within Atmeh refugee camp on the Syria-Turkey border, where whole families, not just orphans live

Happy: A boy carrying a large plate of food and a drink in a plastic bag smiles widely for the camera during Mr Simkin's visit to the camp

Playground: Two children play on the top of an old truck. The boy rests his bare feet on the smashed windscreen of the damaged vehicle

Dinner: A young girl, no older than five, wearing a spotty dress, struggles to hold a large plate of food she will enjoy with her family

Young and old: An elderly woman with a tattoo on her forehead sits on a pile of rocks next to a young boy inside Atmeh refugee camp

Australian photographer Jake Simkin shared these images taken during his visit to the orphanage with MailOnline

An estimated 11.5 per cent of the country's population has been killed or injured since the violence broke out in March 2011, according to the Syrian Centre for Policy Research. That is 470,000 deaths and 1.9m wounded, and life expectancy fell by 15 years to 55 between 2010 and 2015.

Caroline Anning, humanitarian media manager at Save the Children, which works with youths in northern Syria, told MailOnline: 'Syrias children have now lived through more than five years of conflict, paying the price for a war waged by adults.

'Nearly six million children have been forced to flee their homes, the majority of them moving to other areas inside Syria. They have seen things that children should never have to experience, including air strikes and shelling, the deaths of close family members and the destruction of their homes.

'They and their families also face a daily struggle to survive, with deadly shortages of food, clean water, medicines and fuel for electricity in many areas.

'Our partners work in northern Syria to try to help children recover from what they have experienced and support families with some of the basics of daily life, from free healthcare to food baskets.'

Philip Winkle, communication and reporting officer for the Maram Foundation, an organisation which helps refugees and runs a childcare centre close to the border, told MailOnline: 'These children have witnessed anything and everything that no person of any age should have to.

Peace: In total, 6.6million Syrians have been internally displaced by the violence, including this boy who raises two fingers in a peace sign

Refugee camp: The camp is home to some 80,000 people who are too poor to pay for a journey to Europe or are determined to stay

Transport: A teenager rides a motorbike through the muddy pathways in the refugee camp, which runs alongside the Syria-Turkey border

Young: 'Syrias children have now lived through more than five years of conflict, paying the price for a war waged by adults,' said Caroline Anning, humanitarian media manager at Save the Children

Handouts: A man standing on the back of a white truck gives out bags to children waiting inside the refugee camp on the border

'Many children have witnessed the loss of their parents, their loved ones, and certainly the loss of their home and country. In some ways, many must deal with the uncertainty of what will be there for them when the conflict is over as well.

'We are constantly hearing of how this conflict continues to displace children. Most recently, the siege placed on Aleppo created a massive influx of children and other IDPs (internally displaced persons) in northwestern Syria.'

However, there is a sense of community at the orphanage, Mr Simkin said, adding: 'They feel like Syria is their home - they are very proud of their country.

The mothers are quite hopeful about returning home. They say it could take years, decades, but they will go home.

Aid: Save the Children is among the charities working with youngsters in Syria who have been displaced by the country's civil war

Living together: There is a sense of community at the orphanage and mothers who live there take unacomanied children under their wing

Hopeful: The mothers living with the children at the orphanage say they one day hope to return home, even if it takes decades

War: 'Syrias children have now lived through more than five years of conflict, paying the price for a war waged by adults,' Caroline Anning, Save the Childrens humanitarian media manager, said

Left behind: 4.8 million Syrians have been forced to leave the country while 6.6m others have been internally displaced by the violence
In her glamour modelling heyday, Stephanie Hudson enjoyed the dubious distinction of being one of Britains first Page 3 twins, with her sister Samantha.

They were crowned The Boobie Twins.

She also made an appearance in an American soft porn TV series, Hotel Erotica.

Stephanie Hudson, who has revealed she enjoyed a two-year relationship with John Whittingdale, was one of Britains first Page 3 twins and also starred in American soft porn TV series, Hotel Erotica. She is pictured above in the dark blue underwear

Broadcast on a cable channel, and still available to buy online as a DVD, it centred on the sexual escapades of guests at the fictitious beachfront Blue Hotel.

In one episode, Stephanie plays a postal worker who has a threesome with a male character and another woman.

Before she and her sister sought fame in the US, Stephanie landed a small part in a Lynda La Plante Channel 4 drama, The Killer Net.

In one episode of Hotel Erotica, Stephanie (left) plays a postal worker who has a threesome with a male character and another woman. The DVD is pictured (right)

The married ex-Page 3 model has revealed Culture Secretary John Whittingdale (pictured together) showed her highly-sensitive documents to show off as he worked on his Ministerial Red Box over breakfast during their relationship

Stephanie, from Malvern, Worcestershire, said: I went to America more to become an actress, as I wanted to make it big in Hollywood.

'My favourite actress is Emma Thompson, and I wanted to become as successful as her.
Fishermen were left stunned when they caught this bizarre creature of the deep during a fishing trip in Thailand.

Video captured aboard the boat shows the large fish writhing around after it was captured in the fishermen's net.

With razor-sharp teeth and a pale, eel-like body, footage of the animal has now gone viral, leaving viewers baffled as they attempt to guess what species it could be.

Fishermen were left stunned when they caught this bizarre creature of the deep during a fishing trip in Thailand

Video captured aboard the boat shows the large fish writhing around after it was captured in the fishermen's net

In the clip, the fish can be seen squirming and even clamping its gasping jaws around the stick.

Despite being pulled from the sea, the fish survives the ordeal, opening its mouth each time it is poked by the crew aboard the boat.

New and bizarre creatures are often found dwelling in the deepest depths of the ocean, where light cannot penetrate - giving them a number of bizarre features, from webbed arms to needle-like teeth.

With razor-sharp teeth and a pale, eel-like body, footage of the animal has now gone viral, leaving viewers baffled as they attempt to guess what species it could be

Just days earlier, fishermen had a shock when they caught an extremely rare deepwater shark in a Japanese village.

The five-metre megamouth shark was snared on Friday in fishing nets five kilometres from the Owase Port in Mie Prefecture, Central Japan.

Images show the fishermen holding open the enormous jaws of the deep sea dweller, which weighed a ton.
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Paris was bathed in colour today as thousands of people ran along the banks of the Seine to the Eiffel Tower through bright clouds of powder.

The French capital's Colour Run 2016 is less about speed with the emphasis on fun instead of timings on the 5km course.

Participants can run or walk the route as fast or slow as they want and the only rule is that they must wear white.

Each kilometre of the course was split up into colour sections where volunteers throw coloured powder 100% natural cornstarch base over the runners, who are encouraged to cross the finish line as colorful as possible.

'It's a pretty original idea - it makes a change from just going for a run by yourself,' one fun runner told AFP.

'Paris has always been a beautiful city, but it's even more beautiful today,' another participant told the news agency.

Runner Rita Kuri posted footage of runners gleefully diving headfirst into puffs of shocking pink power.

This is the third time the event has been held in Paris and another run will be held in Marseilles in October.

After the run more than 30,000 participants were treated to a concert where they reveled in the sunshine.

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Paris was bathed in colour as thousands of people ran along the banks of the Seine to the Eiffel Tower through bright clouds of powder

The French capital's Colour Run 2016 is less about speed - the emphasis is on fun instead of timings on the 5km course

Participants can run or walk the route as fast or slow as they want and the only rule is that they must wear white

Each kilometre is split into colour sections where volunteers throw coloured powder made from natural cornstarch base over the runners

Participants are encouraged to cross the finish line as colorful as possible during the ultimate five kilometre fun run

This is the third time the event has been held in Paris and another run will be held in Marseilles in October

For one day only the French capital was bathed in clouds of edible coloured powder thanks to the run held by Sephora
A New York man is suing his ex-fiancee because she ended their engagement but hasn't returned her $30,000 ring.

Philip Langer, 45, proposed to Ashley Jae Chesler, 43, just three months after the couple met at a Manhattan bar.

The engagement ring he proposed with featured a 2.52-carat diamond surrounded by 34 rubies and another 55 smaller diamonds, according to court papers

Philip Langer (right), 45, claims that his ex-fiancee, Ashley Jae Chesler (left), 43, won't return the 2.52-carat diamond ring he proposed to her with, even though she broke off the engagement months ago.

Langer proposed to Chesler just three months after the couple met at a Manhattan bar. The $30,000 engagement ring he proposed with featured a 2.52 carat diamond surrounded by 34 rubies and another 55 smaller diamonds

The custom-made ring cost $30,000, according to The New York Post.

Chesler called off engagement months ago, but she has yet to return the flashy ring to her former fiance. The exact date in which Chesler ended the relationship is unknown.

Langer claims in court papers that Chesler is required by state law to return the ring to him.

He wants a judge to force Chesler to give him the ring or pay him the $30,000 it cost to make the ring.

According to her LinkedIn page, Chesler attended Colorado State University for broadcast journalism. She now works as a business development executive.

Langer's occupation is unknown.

Chesler called off engagement months ago, but she has yet to return the flashy ring to her former fiance. The exact date in which Chesler ended the relationship is unknown
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This is the remarkable moment a stranded shark had to be rescued after washing up on a popular swimming beach in Victoria.

The shark, believed to be a Mako, was found washed up at Port Fairy's East Beach, west of Melbourne, late on Sunday afternoon.

Several beachgoers bravely tried to drag the shark back into the water, but were forced to call for help from Fisheries Victoria to rescue the animal.

'We tried pulling it back out into the ocean, but it was too heavy and snappy,' bystander Tymeka Wilson told the ABC.

Shortly after, two Fisheries Victoria were pictured dragging the shark back into the ocean. The remarkable rescue was captured by Wildlife Victoria animal rescuer Erin Gundry.

'It was amazing to be right up close with it, but I'm glad I wasn't the one in the water with it,' Ms Morrison said. 'The guys from Fisheries were able to get it back out in the water and we're hoping for the best.'

Mako sharks are only small in size but they are known to attack aggressively and the fastest of the shark species.

Port Fairy's East Beach has been the location of several shark sightings in recent years.

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A stranded shark, believed to be a Mako, had to be rescued on Sunday after it washed up at Port Fairy's East Beach in Victoria

Shocked beachgoers found the stranded shark on Sunday afternoon and initially tried to drag the animal back into the water

Witnesses on the beach say the shark was heavy and snappy when they tried to drag it back into the water

Beachgoers were forced to call for help from Fisheries Victoria to rescue the animal after initially struggling to drag the animal back in

The remarkable rescue was captured by Wildlife Victoria animal rescuer Erin Gundry

Mako sharks are easily identified due to their mean-looking teeth, which are visible even when their mouths are shut

Mako sharks, which are the fastest of the species, are often referred to as a smaller version of a great white shark

This species of shark is found across the world and are known to attack aggresively

Port Fairy's East Beach, which is where this shark was found, has been the location of several shark sightings in recent years

Rescuers were able to stabilise the aggressive shark before guiding it back into the ocean on Sunday

Two Fisheries Victoria employees were pictured dragging the shark back into the ocean after bystanders called for help
Kevin Rudd has played down his and Helen Clark's chances of becoming United Nations secretary-general, joking he would have a better shot if his surname was 'Ruddovich'.

The former Australian prime minister also refused to address Foreign Minister Julie Bishop's recent comments that he has been visiting world leaders to express interest in the UN's top job.

'That is a statement she made, and I didn't,' Mr Rudd said in an interview with India's The Hindu newspaper.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd (pictured) has played down his chances of becoming United Nations secretary-general

Mr Rudd has not officially announced he will run for secretary-general, but he has not ruled out eventually making a bid.

The UN Security Council traditionally rotates between regions when choosing a new UN boss and the general consensus is eastern Europe is next up.

'Well my own view is that we are likely to have a UN secretary-general from East Europe this time, and that view hasn't changed,' Mr Rudd said.

'Last I looked, my name is not Ruddovich.'

Mr Rudd (pictured speaking in China last year) joked he would have a better chance at being named secretary-general if his name was 'Ruddovich'

The UN Security Council traditionally rotates between regions when choosing a new UN boss and the general consensus is eastern Europe is next up (stock image)

Mr Rudd also said former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark (left) is an unlikely candidate for the UN top job

The UN took the unprecedented step last week of inviting the nine official candidates to attend two-hour public question-and-answer sessions at the organisation's headquarters in New York.

Former New Zealand prime minister Ms Clark, considered a frontrunner for the job, had her turn on Thursday.

The final selection process will be held behind closed doors in the UN Security Council, with the five permanent members - US, Britain, China, France, Russia - holding veto power.

'My own view is that we are likely to have a UN secretary-general from East Europe this time, and that view hasn't changed,' Mr Rudd said. 'Last I looked, my name is not Ruddovich'

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd described New Zealand's Helen Clark as a 'strong candidate' if the UN cannot agree on a choice from eastern Europe

There is also a strong push for the next secretary-general to be a woman, but Mr Rudd played down Ms Clark's chances.

'As I said, it is my firm belief that this time we will have a UNSG (UN secretary-general) chief from East Europe,' Mr Rudd said.

'As for Helen, I think she will be a strong candidate if we cannot find agreement between the P-5 and the other members of the Security Council on an East European candidate.

The UN took the unprecedented step last week of inviting the nine official candidates to attend two-hour public question-and-answer sessions at the organisation's headquarters in New York (stock image)

The final selection process for secretary-general will be held behind closed doors in the UN Security Council, with the five permanent members - US, Britain, China, France, Russia - holding veto power (stock image)

Current secretary-general Ban Ki-moon's (pictured) term expires at the end of 2016

'I've known Helen for a long time, she's a very capable person and strong PM of New Zealand as well as a strong internationalist.'

UN watchers predict Mr Rudd is waiting in the wings and will make a run if the current candidates are ruled out.
A Queensland police officer has been charged with two counts of rape and one count of assault and suspended from duty.

The 23-year-old constable from the Northern Police Region, was arrested and suspended from duty on Sunday reported the ABC.

A woman is said to have come forward with a complaint against the man on Saturday morning.

A 23-year-old police officer has been charged with two counts of rape and one count of assault and suspended from duty

The man is appearing in Brisbane Magistrates Court on Monday.

A police spokesperson said: 'The investigation and arrest has been conducted by members of the Ethical Standards Command'.
Dozens of African migrants have reportedly drowned after a boat carrying 400 people capsized in the Mediterranean Sea.

Most of the 400 migrants aboard the boat were fleeing from Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea and had been hoping to reach Italy.

Somali media reports say that rescue workers have only managed to save 29 passengers from the waters after the shocking incident.

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Migrants pictured aboard a dinghy boat yesterday as they are approached by the SOS Mediterranee's ship Aquarius, background

Migrants are pictured disembarking the ship in Italy after being rescued from the open sea by the Aquarius

Over 400 migrants are thought to have drowned, the Somali ambassador in Egypt told BBC Arabic.

Meanwhile a boat carrying around 130 migrants from Libya was rescued by the Aquarius in the Mediterranean yesterday.

It is thought up to 27 drowned but 108 were saved and taken to Lampedusa harbor in Italy, where they received medical treatment.

Social media users have claimed that the boat had started its journey in Egypt with Italy being its intended destination, a route favoured by many smugglers.

Photographs of a handwritten list of victims names have been uploaded on to social media by several Somali speaking users.

Several of the migrants received medical attention when they reached land in Lampedusa, Italy
This is the awkward moment Governor-General Peter Cosgrove snubbed Labor deputy leader Tanya Plibersek as she went in for a handshake.

Sir Peter was greeting the leaders of the major parties on Monday after formally recalling Parliament.

He shook hands with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and deputy PM Barnaby Joyce before striding over to greet Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

But he ignored Ms Plibersek when she, too, extended her hand.

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Deputy Labor leader reaches out her hand to greet Governor-General Peter Cosgrove...

But after shaking Mr Shorten's hand, Sir Peter turned past Ms Plibersek and marched onwards

Ms Plibersek was left looking embarrassed after the vice-regal snub

She shot a look at her colleagues as they erupted in heckles, with one crying out: 'Know your place!'

A surprised Ms Plibersek shot an amused look to her colleagues as Sir Peter marched onward without a second thought.

'Tanya, know your place!' a backbencher heckled.

The ABC reported Sir Peter was not thought to have breached protocol.

The Governor-General is only required to shake hands with the Prime Minister, Senate leader and Opposition leader at a joint sitting, the broadcaster reported.

Regardless, he shook Mr Joyce's hand.

A spokesman for Ms Plibersek told Daily Mail Australia Sir Peter had called her.

But he would not disclose what he said.

'Ms Pliberseks position is that no apology is necessary, and that the whole things a storm in a teacup,' the spokesman said.

Sir Peter had greeted PM Malcolm Turnbull, deputy PM Barnaby Joyce and Labor leader Bill Shorten

But Ms Plibersek was left embarrassed when he failed to hold her outstretched hand

The Labor deputy leader pulls a face after being snubbed by the Governor-General

All 150 members of Parliament attended a rare joint session of Parliament on Monday.

The Prime Minister prorogued Parliament mid-session so it could consider the government's Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) reforms.

A double-dissolution election will be held on July 2 if the legislation fails to pass.
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Rescuers pulled three people out alive more than 32 hours after they were trapped in the rubble of a shopping centre that was flattened the earthquake on Ecuador's coast.

Televised images of the dramatic pre-dawn rescue in the port city of Manta gave Ecuadoreans hope that some of the dozens of people still unaccounted for might yet be found even as the death toll from Saturday's 7.8-magnitude quake rose to 413.

An American and two Canadians were among those confirmed dead from the worst quake to hit Ecuador in decades.

To reach the survivors trapped between the floor and roof of the collapsed shopping center in Manta, firefighters cut a nearly 2-foot (70cm) hole through concrete then pulled a woman out head first.

A group of firefighters applauded as she emerged from the debris, disoriented, caked in dust and complaining of pain but otherwise in good health.

Rescued! In a day marked by the gloom of a growing death toll, at least one story of hope emerged Monday as search teams combed rubble for survivors days after a powerful earthquake shook Ecuador's Pacific coast

To reach the survivors trapped between the floor and roof of the collapsed shopping center in Manta, firefighters cut a nearly 2-foot (70-centimeter) hole through concrete. They pulled this women out first

Televised images of the dramatic pre-dawn rescue in the port city of Manta gave Ecuadoreans hope that some of the dozens of people still unaccounted for might yet be found

Rescuers pulled three people out alive Monday after they had been trapped for more than 32 hours

Firefighters say that in total, eight people were rescued from the site in the past 24 hours

There are good reasons to believe more people will be found alive in the coming hours as more rescue workers arrive

Later, at the same site, about 50 rescuers working with sniffer dogs, hydraulic jacks and a drill managed to free another woman and a young man.

All three were rushed in ambulances to a nearby hospital. In total, eight people were rescued from the site in the past 24 hours, said Angel Moreira, the firefighter coordinating the effort.

Authorities had hoped to save another woman whose legs were pinned by a heavy concrete slab. They were working to free her when they were forced to abandon the effort during an aftershock.

When they returned the debris pile had moved and the woman was dead, Moreira said.

An aerial view of Pedernales, one of Ecuador's worst-hit towns, taken Monday, two days after a 7.8-magnitude quake hit the country

Collapsed: In some areas, power cables were strewn across city streets as electricity in many neighborhoods remained down

Flattened: Aerial views of the region show dozens of homes and building reduced to rubble by the 7.8-magnitude earthquake

Rescuers and desperate families clawed through the rubble to pull out survivors of the earthquake that has killed at least 413 people

In the towns of Pedernales (above), Manta and Portoviejo, the stench of rotting bodies filled the air among heaps of rubble and metal

The US has offered help but so far President Rafael Correa, a strong critic of US foreign policy in Latin America, hasn't responded publicly

Rebuilding the destroyed areas will probably cost billions of dollars, President Rafael Correa said during a visit to Pedernales (above)

In Pedernales (above), Mayor Gabriel Alcivar estimated there were hundreds of dead buried under the rubble of collapsed hotels

Christian Rivera, the head of emergency services for the capital, Quito, said that depending on the circumstances a person without serious injuries can survive up to a week under the rubble.

'After that, there's a quick decline... and the rescuer's work becomes very difficult,' he said.

Still, there are good reasons to believe more people will be found alive in the coming hours as some 450 rescue workers from Spain, Peru, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, and elsewhere reached the most-affected areas along the Pacific coast.

The U.S. has also offered assistance but so far President Rafael Correa, a strong critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, has yet to respond publicly.

Correa, upon arriving in Manta late Sunday, said that the priority remains finding survivors.

A bulldozer moves rubble after an earthquake in Portoviejo, Ecuador

Framed family photos sit on a couch at a house damaged by the 7.8-magnitude earthquake, in La Chorrera

A flatten car is lifted from rubble caused by the earthquake. Rescuers and aid from all over the world are flooding into Ecuador as survivors start a second day in towns flattened by the Saturday night quake

Rubble from a collapsed building lays on the ground in Tarqui, the business district of Manta, Ecuador. The Saturday night quake left a trail of ruin along the country's normally placid Pacific Ocean coast

A destroyed house is seen in Pedernales, Ecuador. The quake was the strongest since 1979, flattening buildings, buckling highways along its Pacific coast and killing hundreds

People carry a body to the morgue after an earthquake in Portoviejo, Ecuador. At least 350 people died and thousands are homeless. President Rafael Correa said early Monday that the death toll would surely rise

'Our grief is very large, the tragedy is very large, but we'll find the way to move forward,' the Ecuadorean leader said, adding that the quake was the worst to hit the country since a 1949 earthquake in the Andean city of Ambato that took more than 5,000 lives.

'If our pain is immense, still larger is the spirt of our people.'

Manta, a thriving port city, was among the hardest-hit areas. Power cables were strewn across city streets as electricity in many neighborhoods remained down.

Among the many building that were flattened was a control tower at the airport that was home to U.S. anti-narcotics missions in South America until Correa kicked the Americans out.

As rescuers scrambled through the ruins near the epicenter, in some cases digging with their hands to look for survivors, humanitarian aid began trickling in.

Rescue workers search a collapsed building in Manta, Ecuador. The quake killed hundreds and spread panic as it collapsed homes

Rescuers pulled survivors from the rubble Sunday after the strongest earthquake to hit Ecuador in decades flattened buildings and buckled highways along its Pacific coast on Saturday night

People search a collapsed building in Portoviejo, Ecuador, Sunday April 17, 2016. A magnitude-7.8 quake, the strongest since 1979

Paramedics transfer an injured person after an earthquake in Portoviejo. The Spanish Red Cross says in a statement that there is no official estimate yet on the number of affected people

More than 3,000 packages of food and nearly 8,000 sleeping kits were delivered Sunday.

The quake knocked out power in many areas along the coast and some who fled to higher ground fearing a tsunami had no home to return to or feared structures still standing might collapse. The country's Geophysics Institute said it recorded 230 aftershocks as of Sunday night.

Spain's Red Cross said as many as 5,000 people may need temporary housing after the quake destroyed homes, and 100,000 may need some sort of aid.

State Department spokesman John Kirby didn't identify the American who was killed but said the U.S. government will work with Ecuadorean authorities to locate and ensure the well-being of all Americans. The area of pristine beaches where the quake struck is popular with American tourists and expat retirees.

Aggravating matters were reports of looting, including in Manta, where 180 prisoners from a nearby prison escaped amid the tumult. Authorities said some 20 inmates were recaptured and others returned voluntarily.

Vehicles from a car dealership hang on a precipice caused by an earthquake induced landslide in Portoviejo
A small plane with two people aboard crashed just short of the runway as it tried to land at the Catalina Airport in California.

Fire crews responded to the accident and confirmed that the two people survived the crash.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department deployed two helicopters to assist in the rescue.

A small plane (pictured) with two people aboard crashed just short of the runway as it tried to land at the Catalina Airport in California

Fire crews responded to the accident and confirmed that the two people survived the crash. The Los Angeles County Fire Department deployed two helicopters to assist in the rescue. Pictured is one of the victims with rescuers

One person was ejected during the crash near Airport in the Sky, supervising fire dispatcher Ed Pickett told the Los Angeles Times.

A second person, who was trapped under the plane, was later rescued and both victims were taken to a hospital via helicopter, said Kyle Sanford of the fire department.

The LAFD said they were both taken by helicopter to a Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Information regarding the extent of their injuries hasn't been released.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the plane is a Cessna 172.

FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said the plane that had taken off from Long Beach Airport crashed under unknown circumstances at about 4.30pm Sunday.

The FAA and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash.

A second person, who was trapped under the plane, was later rescued and both victims were taken to a hospital via helicopter, said Kyle Sanford of the fire department. Pictured is a rescuer being lowered from helicopter to help the injured people
Onlookers hold their breath as they watch valiant effort before cheering

Video footage has captured the moment a man risked his life to save a dog hanging from the balcony of a high-rise apartment.

The clip shows the man climbing from his balcony on the floor below the stricken dog as stunned onlookers hold their breath.

The black and white dog can be seen sliding further down the exterior wall of the high-rise apartment block - about to plunge several hundred feet to the ground below.

People in the apartment on the floor below can be seen attempting to use a broom to usher the dog back inside

One lucky dog: The dog slides further and further down the wall and could plunge several hundred feet to the ground below at any second

People in the apartment on the floor below can be seen attempting to use a broom to usher the dog back inside, however this proves unsuccessful.

The man can then be seen perilously climbing from his balcony, scaling the wall in a bid to reach the canine.

After several nail-biting moments, he reaches the balcony above and hoists himself up, before grabbing the dog's collar and pulling the animal to safety.

The dog's life hangs in the balance - so the have-a-go hero begins his terrifying rescue effort

Onlookers witnessing the tense and valiant rescue in Colombia can be heard gasping as the daredevil climbs out.

However once he and the dog are both safe, people can be heard cheering and applauding him.

The video has now gone viral, having amassed more than two million views on Facebook.

Viewers watching the footage online have praised the hero, with one writing: 'When he climbed up onto the other balcony I found myself holding my breath.'

Those witnessing the tense and valiant rescue in Colombia can be heard gasping as the daredevil climbs out

The camera pans down to the ground below to show just how high the apartment is - as the man scales the wall to reach the stricken dog

Another added: 'That was amazing. Also I think I'm having a panic attack,' while one viewer said: 'Knowing my luck I would have fallen down and plummeted to my death without even reaching the dog.'

People also said the video restored their faith in humanity: 'So many props to that Good Samaritan. Jeez my heart was racing - that poor thing.

'I wonder how long it was there before someone even noticed. That guy deserves a medal.'

The man reaches the upper floor balcony (left) before grabbing the dog's collar and yanking it to safety
Al-Qaeda have identified two Australian members who died during a drone strike in Yemen in 2013.

Abu Salama Al-Australi, who is thought to be Christopher Harvard from Townsville, and Abu Suhayb Al-Australi, a New Zealand dual citizen known as Muslim bin John, were traveling in a convoy of cars on November 19 when they were killed, according to The Courier Mail.

The two men were believed to have kidnapped westerners and held them for ransom, the Mail said.

Al-Qaeda have identified two Australian members, including Abu Salama Al-Australi (pictured), who is thought to be Christopher Harvard from Townsville, that were killed in a drone strike by the US in 2013 in Yemen

Al-Qaeda identified the two men in a propaganda video titled 'Harvest of Spies 3', which was released on the group's Twitter.

The group claims in the video that they executed two 'spies' who gave information to the US so they could carry out the bombing.

It is believed the 'spies' planted microchips on the cars so the military could track them.

The attack also killed nine Yemenis, two Saudis and two Egyptians, they claim, the Mail said.
Most puppies stay in the safe confines of their home, sheltered by their owners for the first few months of their lives.

But Louna isn't like most puppies. The adventurous four-month-old Samoyed from Thonon, France, visited the beach for the first time on Sunday.

And boy, did she love it.

Louna, four months, spent time at the beach in France over the weekend

She discovered shellfish, lapped at the water and dug in the sand at Thonon

The young pup dug holes and rolled around in the sand in utter delight, dirtying her snow white fur.

After a brief period of exploration, the dog was seen approaching the water, before running away from an incoming wave and barking at it.

She was also particularly interested in the shellfish. The puppy pushed and snapped at it as though she were playing with another dog.

This isn't Louna's first brush with online fame. The Samoyed has her own Instagram account, full of photos and videos of the canine exploring the world around her, and features heavily on her owners' YouTube account.

The Samoyed breed originates in Siberia, and they have been used in the past to pull sledges on Arctic and Antarctic expeditions - so the cool Sunday weather would have proved a treat for young Louna.

In her short life, the young pup has seen mountains, forest, and water, all documented on the social media accounts of her owners

Her owner Romain told MailOnline: 'Louna was overwhelmed with joy when she discovered the beach.

'She rolled all over the sand and played with all kinds of shellfish. It's quite funny to watch her dig in the sand and bark, as she wants us to dig with her.'

He said of all the places they had taken young Louna, her favourite was 'snow, no doubt about it' - a reflection on her Nordic roots.

She lapped at the water, before jumping back and barking at the incoming wave
A 911 caller who reported a man with a BB gun for waving a rifle in an Ohio Walmart, prompting his fatal shooting by police, will not face charges.

Ronald Ritchie told authorities in August 2014 that John Crawford III, 22, was waving a gun and pointing it at people inside a store in Beavercreek, near Dayton.

Police shot and killed Crawford moments later. Ritchie told investigators he thought the firearm was real, but Crawford was actually holding a BB gun.

A grand jury found that the shooting was justified, prosecutor Mark Piepmeier said Monday.

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Ronald Ritchie (left) called 911 and said John Crawford III (right), 22, was waving a rifle and pointing it at people in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, in 2014. Police fatally shot Crawford, who was actually holding a BB gun

A group of residents had filed a complaint with a judge, asking her to review the case.

Fairborn Municipal Court Judge Beth Root reviewed the filings, including surveillance video synchronized with the 911 recording, and ruled there was sufficient evidence to prosecute Ritchie for misdemeanor making false alarms.

She then referred the case for further review by a prosecutor.

Piepmeier in turn presented the shooting case to a grand jury, which had authority to bring charges against Ritchie if they thought it was warranted.

'I don't find any evidence that Mr. Ritchie knew any of the information he was providing was false,' Piepmeier wrote in a court filing Monday.

One of the filers, Dayton area activist Bomani Moyenda, said he thinks the prosecutor ignored video segments that indicate Crawford wasn't doing what the caller described at certain moments.

'There's just no semblance of justice anywhere at all,' said Moyenda, who added he'll consider whether there are any other legal avenues to push the matter further.

Another filer said he was appalled by Piepmeier's ruling.

'I don't know how anybody could view that videotape and believe the caller was acting in good faith,' said Roi Qualls, a software engineer from Yellow Springs. 'He said things that just weren't true.'

Piepmeier has handled some of Ohio's biggest cases, including a deadly 1993 prison riot and cases involving excessive force by police, but the filers were upset he was the prosecutor appointed to review the 911 caller's role.

They noted that after the grand jury's decision he had publicly described Ritchie as someone 'trying to be a good citizen.'

Ritchie, of Riverside, was the only person to call 911 before shots were fired at the store. He reported a man walking around waving an apparent rifle and 'pointing it at people'.

The next day, he told authorities the man didn't point the firearm but swung it around and flashed the muzzle at children.

An attorney for Crawford's relatives, who sued the officers, has said they hold police responsible for what happened.

Police said they believed Crawford had a real weapon and didn't respond to commands to put it down, something the soundless video can't corroborate.

The shooting remains under review by the US Department of Justice.
Joshua was taken to the hospital with non life-threatening injuries

Told officers the food theft had 'pushed him over the edge' and he wanted to teach his son a lesson

Said Joshua, of White Lake, North Carolina, had taken thousands of dollars from his property

Ted Alan Walters, 49, shot his 25-year-old son Joshua in the leg Saturday according to police

A man shot his 25-year-old son for taking food from his grandmother's fridge in an attempt to teach him a lesson against theft, police said.

Ted Alan Walters, 49, shot his son Joshua in the lower left leg on Saturday after forcing entry into his house in White Lake, North Carolina, the Fayetteville Observer reported.

He said he had discovered the previous day that his son had stolen hamburger and bacon from thus grandmother's fridge.

Walters told officers that his son had taken thousands of dollars from his property in the past months and that the food theft had 'pushed him over the edge'.

Ted Alan Walters (left), 49, shot his 25-year-old son Joshua (right) in the lower left leg Saturday in an attempt to teach him against theft. He said Joshua took hamburger and bacon from his grandmother's freezer

The father, of Elizabethtown, drove to his son's house and shot him in the lower left leg.

Joshua was taken to the hospital with injuries considered non life-threatening, White Lake lieutenant Mike Salmon said.

Walters has been charged with first-degree burglary and assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury.

He remains jailed under a $50,000 bond.

'I did not want to kill my son,' Walters told officers. 'I just want him to have a reminder each time he takes a step while he is stealing someone else's belongings.'
Donald Trump said he doesn't plan to woo delegates with his luxury clubs and jets in order to ensure additional support at the Republican National Convention.

'Look, nobody has better toys than I do,' he told reporters at a stop on Staten Island yesterday, according to the New York Times.

'You're basically buying these people,' Trump continued. 'You're basically saying 'Delegate, listen, we're going to send you to Mar-a-Lago on a Boeing 757, you're going to use the spa, you're going to this, you're going to that, we want your vote.'

'That's a corrupt system,' Trump added.

It may be 'corrupt' in Trump's mind, but the Washington Post looked into how much delegates could be bought and some legal experts suggested that a campaign could cover an all-expenses-paid trip to meet campaign staff at a luxury resort like Trump's Mar-a-Lago.

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Donald Trump, talking to reporters on Staten Island yesterday, said that while he has the best 'toys,' he won't spoil Republican National Convention delegates because the system is 'corrupt'

Donald Trump could shower Republican delegates with travel and lodging at his exclusive Mar-a-Lago resort - but he said he won't do it

Donald Trump has used his Palm Beach property, Mar-a-Lago, as the backdrop of campaign events, but won't use the property to woo Republican National Convention delegates

While Donald Trump has arrived on his personal plane to talk to supporters, he won't use the 757 to get additional support from convention delegates

Donald Trump could legally shuttle around delegates in his own private 757, but he told reporters yesterday on Staten Island that he wouldn't do it

The Post reported that under regulations established in the 1980s, delegates aren't allowed to take money from corporations, labor unions, federal contractor or foreign nationals, but an individual donor can bankroll their elections to get selected to go to the conventions.

This includes money that would go toward travel and leisure.

While a contribution from an individual to a delegate doesn't have to be disclosed, it can't have been made in coordination with a campaign or as an effort by that individual to bolster the chances of an individual candidate.

'It's almost like we need a campaign finance system for delegates,' Gregory Carlson, a 27-year-old who wasn't successful in becoming a Colorado delegate, told the Post. 'This is why we need to put serious thought into this and who are immune to being paid off with below-board messages.'

Trump, who's won the most primaries thus far, but as of late keeps getting routed by Cruz in getting supporters selected as delegates told reporters that he hopes the frustration with this system doesn't turn violent at the convention.

'And I don't think it will,' he said. 'But I will say this: It's a rigged system. It's a crooked system. It's 100 percent crooked,' Trump said.

In a separate interview with the Washington Post, Trump noted how he wanted to see more pizzazz at the July confab, blasting the 2012 event as 'the single most boring convention I've ever seen.

'It's very important to put some showbiz into a convention, otherwise people are going to fall asleep,' Trump told the Post last week.

He recalled that 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney had made the last convention even duller by failing to air a convention video that starred Trump delivering his trademark Apprentice line to an actor portraying President Barack Obama.

In 2012, the most Hollywood moment came courtesy of actor Clint Eastwood who spent nearly 12 minutes talking to an empty chair that was supposed to represent President Barack Obama

Other GOP convention mainstays include actor Jon Voight (left), pictured at the GOP 2012 convention, and actor Stephen Baldwin (right), pictured at the 2008 convention though he attended the 2012 convention too

'I said, 'Barack Hussein Obama, you're fired!'' Trump recalled. 'But [the Romney campaign] never played it. They thought it was too controversial. Stupid people. The cinematographer said it was one of the best things he ever did.'

Four years ago in Tampa, the Republican National Convention followed tradition and filled time with GOP standard-bearers in the majority of speaking slots.

The one bit of Hollywood spice was a nearly 12-minute-long meandering speech delivered by actor Clint Eastwood, who spent a good chunk of his time talking to an empty chair and pretending that it was President Obama.

The entire first day of convention programming was canceled due to a storms, which was when Trump's video was supposed to be played, according to an NBC News report from the time.

As far as other celebrity guests, actor Jon Voight showed up to the Florida confab.

Stephen Baldwin, the least-famous, most-conservative of the acting brothers was also on hand.

While outside the security gates more raucous events  headlined by Kid Rock, Journey and the super group Camp Freddy  occurred.

'We don't have the people who know how to put showbiz into the convention,' Trump complained to the Post

Kid Rock, shown here performing at a rally for Mitt Romney, was tapped during the 2012 Republican National Convention to play a show outside the official venues

So what would Trump bring to the table?

Likely some more interesting guests.

He told the Post he'd like to see other business people and other notables in speaking slots rather than the typical crowd of Republicans.

When asked by the Post journalists if he would include, say, rising Republican star Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina who put her weight behind Florida Sen. Marco Rubio days before her state's pivotal primary and then later backed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Trump gave a not-so-much.

'Nikki Haley would not be my first choice,' the billionaire noted.

But the veteran of both pageants and reality TV won't be able to make these decisions himself, even if he earns the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the convention, as plans are left up to chairman Reince Priebus and the Republican National Committee.

And because of Trump's precarious position as the longtime frontrunner who may not quite have enough delegates to be the outright nominee, those associated with other campaigns suggested restraint.

Rep. Steve King, the national co-chairman of Cruz's campaign told the Post that 'the [convention] program should be set by a balanced mix of the candidates and the RNC ... You don't wan tto give Trump a blank check to run the convention.'

Ohio Gov. John Kasich's chief strategist John Weaver said Trump shouldn't be able to decide anything because he's not the nominee.
A Republican political strategist sued Donald Trump, his presidential campaign and his embattled campaign manager Corey Lewandowski for defamation on Monday, demanding $4 million for a torrent of public criticism after they claimed she became anti-Trump because they refused to hire her.

Cheri Jacobus says in her lawsuit in New York that she attended informational meetings about a communications director job last summer but pulled out of consideration after Lewandowski became unhinged.

Months later when she was critical of the billionaire's presidential campaign, Trump tweeted that she was gushing sour grapes and that she 'begged us for a job. We said no and she went hostile. A real dummy!'

In a second tweet he called her 'really dumb. Begged my people for a job. Turned her down twice and she went hostile. Major loser, zero credibility!'

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SUING FOR $4 MILLION: Cheri Jacobus filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump, his campaign manager and his campaign organization on Monday, claiming they defamed her with a phony claim that she was a disgruntled job-seeker

HE CAN AFFORD THE LAWYERS: Trump (right) and Lewandowski (left) could be dragged through an embarrassing election-year case

TWITTER FIGHT: Trump and Jacobus went toe-to-toe on with tweets in February

Jacobus, 56, had become reliably anti-Trump by the wintertime, urging the Republican National Committee in a tweet to 'kick Trump out.'

She also denounced Trump in late January on the Fox News Channel program 'The Kelly File.' the following morning on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe,' Lewandowski offered an explanation of why.

'This is the same person who came to the office on multiple occasions trying to get a job from the Trump campaign,' he claimed, 'and when she wasnt hired she was clearly upset by that.'

Jacobus says she never applied for a job or asked for one, deciding to bail on the process because of 'boorish behavior by Lewandowski,' including a boast that he had berated Fox anchor Megyn Kelly.

She has produced messages from Jim Dornan, then an aide to Trump, requesting two meetings with her, but hasn't offered proof of what happened there.

'You're a liar. I have messages from your campaign asking me for two meetings,' she tweeted at Trump.

She also included in her court papers an email indicating what her salary might have been, though,  she wanted between $18,000 and $19,000 per month  leaving open the question of whether or not she was asking to be hired.

The social media spat, Jacobus says in her lawsuit, resulted in an avalanche of Trump-defending Twitter trolls including some who called her a 'whore,' a 'bitch' and 'nutcakes.'

COREY'S QUARRY? Lewandowski claimed on MSNBC that Jacobus 'came to the office on multiple occasions trying to get a job from the Trump campaign, and when she wasnt hired she was clearly upset by that'

NOT A FAN: Jacobus has gone to war with Trump in the past but the question is why

NASTY: One Twitter user portrayed Jacobus as a puppet being controlled by Jeb Bush and suggested he was paying her to attack The Donald

ANTISEMITIC: Another tweeted insult came in the form of a depiction of Trump exterminating Jacobus, who wrote for a Jewish newspaper, in a gas chamber

Some vicious online enemies, according to the lawsuit, portrayed her as 'an appropriate victim for rape and sexual assault' including 'images of Jacobus bent over naked being raped from behind.'

Others mocked-up unflattering Photoshopped images of her including a cartoon showing Trump pushing a button to execute her in a gas chamber.

Jacobus has been a longtime contributor to Jewish World Review.

The Trump campaign pushed back against the legal action on Monday night, saying in a statement: 'This is just another frivolous lawsuit and an attempt to gain notoriety at the expense of Donald Trump.'

TROLLING: Pro-Trump forces on Twitter hammered Jacobus after she criticized the billionaire front-runner and he claimed she was a sour-grapes unsuccessful job applicant

Jacobus has appeared on television to discuss the Trump political phenomenon many times, including one broadcast where she defended him against charges of racism and others where she hammered him for questioning Arizona Sen. John McCain's war heroism.

But the backlash from Team Trump, she claims, cost her dearly in exposure.

'Bookings on cable news and opinion programs were cancelled, and requests for new bookings all but dried up,' she alleges in her suit.

'She became "damaged goods," persona non grata, demoted from a network regular who appeared on news outlets such as FOX, FOX Business News and CNN several times a week during the presidential campaign season to complete oblivion, with almost no television appearances whatsoever.'
A leak of post-Budget advertising scripts has revealed Malcolm Turnbull's government will promise $16 billion in savings by cracking down on superannuation tax concessions and tax avoidance by multi-nationals.

Labor has seized on the leaked advertising which was due to be aired after the May 3 federal budget, claiming it's a deliberate internal attempt to destabilise Prime Minister Turnbull's leadership.

Sky News says it's seen the key statements of a script for the government's taxpayer-funded television and radio advertisements, which have already been filmed.

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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (pictured) will promise up to $16 billion in savings after the May 3 budget, according to leaked documents

Treasurer Scott Morrison (pictured) will hand down his first Budget on May 3 in which he is expected to announce a crackdown on superannuation tax concessions and tax avoidance by multinationals

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten (pictured) has described the leaking of advertising scripts for the May 3 Budget as an act of 'internal sabotage' against Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (pictured) has threatened a double-dissolution, which could place all members and senators up for election on July 2 after his bid to reinstate the construction watchdog was blocked

The statements include $16 billion in savings over the four years under changes to superannuation and multinational tax.

Shadow Finance Minister Tony Burke said the post-budget ads are part of the coalition's re-election strategy because none of the measures will have been implemented before parliament is dissolved.

'None of what they're talking about in those ads is information for the public that is going to happen,' he told ABC radio on Tuesday.

Mr Burke believes the ads should be paid by the Liberal Party, not the taxpayer.

Frontbench colleague Jim Chalmers said the revelation was humiliating for the government.

'If it is (a genuine leak) it shows the serious dysfunction and chaos at the heart of the Turnbull government,' he said.

Deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop admitted the government was constrained in what it could offer voters in the May 3 budget.

'We're still having to manage the complete incompetence of a Labor government in handling the nation's finances,' she told reporters in Canberra.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten later described the leak as an act of 'internal sabotage'.

Cabinet minister Michaelia Cash refused to confirm the report, telling Sky News it was merely that.

Mr Turnbull said in March that Governor-General Peter Cosgrove (pictured) gave him permission to call for a double-dissolution if the House of Representatives and the Senate continue to disagree on an ABCC bill

Mr Turnbull now has the two triggers he wants to be able to ask the Governor-General Peter Cosgrove to dissolve both houses of parliament for an election on July 2.

The prime minister needs to make that call by May 11 but before then, parliament will sit for at least one week so that Mr Morrison can deliver the budget and Mr Shorten can give his reply speech.

Once the Governor-General issues writs for an election, the government is in caretaker mode meaning it can't make decisions without the acquiescence of the opposition.

All 150 MPs and 76 senators will face the voters.

Senators will be elected under new rules approved by parliament in March.

Voters only need to number six boxes above the line or 12 below the line on their ballot paper.

To win majority government, either party needs to win 76 seats in the House of Representatives.

The Coalition will go into the election holding 90 lower house seats; Labor has 55.

Labor needs to gain 21 seats on a swing of 4.3 per cent from the 2013 election to win majority government.




Chris Grayling, pictured, became the first Cabinet minister to campaign with UKIP leader Nigel Farage for Britain to leave the EU

Commons leader Chris Grayling and Nigel Farage last night buried Brexit rivalry and joined forces for the first time in a major drive to leave Europe.

Signalling an end to infighting among Brexit campaigners, they took to the stage in Stoke-on-Trent to unite against an overbearing European Union.

Mr Grayling became the first Cabinet minister to share a stage with the Ukip leader on the referendum campaign at the Grassroots Out (GO) rally  the unofficial campaign group fighting for Britain to leave Europe.

He used the platform to warn Britain faced a tidal wave of new laws from the European Union and claimed the country would be subjected to a relentless march of Europeanisation if it remains part of the bloc.

Speaking about the united front, he said: I have campaigned vigorously against Nigel Farage and Ukip at elections  but in our desire to leave the European Union we are united.

He has as long a track record in fighting to leave the EU as anyone in this country, andtonight we stand side by side and for the next few weeks we have a common purpose for our country.

He said he was also standing alongside Labour MP Kate Hoey, saying: This is, after all, a campaign that is about people and not about party.

Thats why I am standing tonight as a Conservative Cabinet Minister alongside two people who would normally be firm adversaries politically.

He said he and Ms Hoey had previously fought from opposite sides of the political spectrum on Europe.

He said: A decade ago we fought together from opposite sides of the political spectrum against EU plans to regulate our complementary healthcare sector being Europeanised, and against the creation of European standard vitamin pills.

In normal times we remain political opponents. But tonight we reprise that partnership against an overbearing European Union.

Mr Farage added: All those who want the United Kingdom to leave the European Union will Im sure welcome Chris Graylings approach of co-operating cross-party and cross-group. This is a very positive signal for the campaign ahead.

Mr Grayling used the platform to warn Britain faced a tidal wave of new laws from the European Union if the UK did not vote to leave.

Mr Farage and Mr Grayling appeared on stage in Stoke-on-Trent warning Britain will face a 'tidal wave' of new laws from the EU unless the public vote to leave in the referendum

He said not to be deceived by the vow of silence taken by Brussels bureaucrats - because they had a locker full of new plans for after the June 23 referendum.

If Britain votes to remain, the door of the locker would be opened wide the day after, and the country would be part of a relentless march of Europeanisation.

The Tory Cabinet minister said: Things may seem a bit quiet in Brussels at the moment. There dont seem to be many new laws being brought forward.

But dont be deceived. Its not a sign that they have suddenly seen the light. Theyre holding it all back until weve voted, in the hope that we wont realise that there is another tidal wave of more Europe heading our way.

A vote to remain isnt a vote for things the way they are today. Its a vote to be part of a relentless march of Europeanisation, with us less and less able to decide whats good for Britain.

The Commissions locker is full of new ideas and new plans. If we vote to remain, the door of that locker will be opened wide the day after.

Their joint appearance came after a wealthy businessman threatened to trigger a legal challenge over Brexit campaign funding but then ditched the plan.

Arron Banks, chairman of Leave.EU, supported the failed application by the GO group to become the lead Out campaigners in the run-up to poll.

Mr Banks consulted lawyers about seeking a judicial review after rival Vote Leave was designated the lead campaigner  giving it access to millions of pounds of public funding.

He said it could have held up the EU referendum from June until October.
Similar sized sets can cost 9,000 but can be bought for as little as 1,000

You might think he would measure his success by his glittering career or, perhaps, by his reputation for incisive journalism.

But it seems that Justin Webb has another marker by which he gauges his standing among his peers, the size of his television, revealing he has just bought a 65-inch set.

The Today presenter, 55, has ignored the snobs who look down on TV viewers, including his wife, Sarah, who is who is standing by her class principles and sticking with a good book over the lures of technology.

Radio 4 presenter Justin Webb (pictured here with his dog, Toffee) is the proud owner of a brand-new giant 65in screen  which has been installed in its very own room. And while he is delighted, his wife, he says, is far from impressed

He also admitted that his actions are a far cry from the views of his parents, who hired their first colour TV because they were unsure it would catch on and hid it behind an armchair lest the neighbours see.

However, such is Mr Webbs infatuation with his new gadget that he has given it its own room, dubbed simply the TV room, and proudly taken his place among the ranks of the flatscreen brigade.

But his wife  who was away in America at the time of the purchase  is less than impressed, while his three children are, at best, begrudingly supportive. He branded the disdain for large TVs as the last refuge of the snob.

He writes in The Radio Times: So weve become socially reduced by this 65-inch thing. But utterly hooked. Even my teenage children, who have no interest in TV (at least not in broadcast versions), have grudgingly conceded that its, well, big.

And my wife Sarah? Well, she came home from America and ordered a novel from Amazon. I would like to say she was last seen in what the kids and I call the TV Room, watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians and drinking cooking sherry.

'But a class division has opened up within the family (or been reinforced perhaps) and Sarah is holding out. But she has another business trip planned soon. And I have sub-woofers on my list.

It was once your profession, the make of your car or perhaps your postcode that were the key signs of how well you were keeping up with the Joneses. However, Mr Webb argues that your TV is now far more telling.

Webb, 55, who waited until his wife Sarah was away on business in the US before he joined the ranks of the flatscreen brigade, believes disdain for large TVs is the last refuge of the snob

He said: [Buying the TV is] a moment of triumph but a moment, too, of recognition that this decision is nothing like the replacement of a radio or a washing machine.

'Even if Id traded in our ten-year-old people carrier for a downpayment on an E-type Jaguar, the move wouldnt have been so freighted with social and cultural baggage.

Its not a box any more but a sleek wall covering Justin Webb

For just as patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, TV, in Britain, is the last refuge of the snob.

'Not whats on. That battle is long since won, with all but the most eccentric admitting theres intellectually stimulating fare to be found on TV.

No, the issue isnt the content; its the box. The actual box divides us still. Even though in my case (and perhaps yours) its not a box any more but a sleek wall covering, a window into a scalpel-sharp world of eye-lacerating colour and vertiginous, death-defying [spectacles].

He added: The box  the actual TV you own  says something about you in a way that other stuff does not.

However, he admitted there is still a cadre of people who are otherwise fully modern that feel theres something horrid about a room arranged around a screen.
The owner of a newly opened barber shop which had the words 'f**k off dog' spray painted across it within a few days of the store opening said he was 'disgusted and upset' over the incident.

Bilal El Mohamed, 24, owner of Cutting Edge Barber Shop in Unanderra in Wollongong south of Sydney, was alerted to the graffiti on Sunday morning, just five days after the store opened.

'My cousin, who lives in the area was driving past and he saw the graffiti, gave me call, we both went down and had a look,' Mr El Mohamed told Daily Mail Australia.

Cutting Edge Barber shop in Unanderra in Wollongong was vandalised at the weekend with the words 'f**k off dog' spray painted in black across the shopfront

Owner Bilal El Mohamed (left) was alerted to the graffiti on Sunday morning, just a few days after he opened the shop for the first time

'It was spread across my whole shop frontage which is three windows wide. And I've got some signage on the side of the shop and they sprayed the signage too.'

The 24-year-old said he believes the attack was racially motivated, as many of his and family had been at the shop helping him set up for the past eight weeks.

'We've sat here and we've tried to think about why.. the tag itself wasn't a signature so to say, it was more a message.

'The only thing we can think of is someone has seen us here, and my sister and family have been here and they wear scarves, I've got a beard,' Mr El Mohamed said.

Friend Omar Nemer (right) was last year abused by people online urging others to boycott businesses run by Muslims

Mr Nemer (getting his beard trimmed, right) posted to Facebook about the attack

Signs on the side of the shop were also graffitied in what Mr El Mohamed believes to be a racially motivated attack on his shop

Friend Omar Nemer, who was last year abused online by people urging others to boycott businesses run by Muslims, also thinks the attack may have been Islamaphobic.

'Yes he grows a beard, yes he is a practicing Muslim, but he still pays his taxes, eats, sleeps just like everyone else,' Mr Nemer wrote in an impassioned Facebook post.

'A lot of people do come to the salon who do practice Islam as well, you know who wear the hijab,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

Mr El Mohamed said he was 'disgusted and upset' when he found out his shop had been graffitied.

'At the end of the day you spend all that time building your shop, I've been dreaming about opening this shop for a long time.

Mr El Mohamed (left) urged the people who vandalised his shop to 'come down, get a free haircut and have a friendly disucssion'

'If we're good even to those who are bad maybe some of that goodness will rub off on them', he said

'Luckily I've got good friends, good family and good cousins - a whole group of boys helped me scrub it off,' the shop owner revealed.

Mr El Mohamed also had a message for those responsible for the vandalism.

'My message is: Come, down, get yourself a free haircut, I'll make you look sharper than you've ever looked', he said.

'Whatever the reason I'm sure we can have a friendly discussion about it.

'There's no need to make things worse, at the end of the day it's a small minority that have these thoughts.
Kathleen Capitano (pictured), 24, from Shallotte, North Carolina, has been charged trying to have sex with a 13-year-old boy

A North Carolina teacher has been charged with attempting to have sex with a 13-year-old former student from Northern Virginia.

Kathleen Capitano, 24, from McLean, Virginia has been charged with four felony counts of using communication systems to facilitate an offense against a child, according to Fairfax County Police.

Capitano, who now lives in Shallotte, North Carolina, arrived at a hotel in Herndon, Virginia, on Saturday around 1pm with the intentions of meeting the boy and having sex with him.

But police were already there waiting for her after they were alerted to her online activity.

Police said they met with the child and his parents prior to her arrival.

She was immediately arrested.

Police say she first met him in while working as a student teacher at Coates Elementary in Herndon.

Fairfax County Public Schools spokesman John Torre confirmed that Capitano was an intern teacher in 2014-15.

North Carolina Brunswick County schools spokeswoman Jessica Swencki said Capitano has been placed on paid leave from her job as a math teacher at Shallotte Middle School.

Her Facebook page says that she attended George Mason University, where she received her degree in elementary education.

The page also says she used to work at the university located in Fairfax, Virginia.

Police say she is being held on a no-bond status.
A pregnant mother and her four-year-old son who were pricked by a needle in a McDonald's bathroom are considering legal action against the fast food giant.

Amanda Van Der Veen was 17 weeks pregnant and eating with her son Aspen on November 7, when she claims he pricked his hand on a needle he picked up in the disabled bathroom, which had a sharps container, at the King Street restaurant in Newcastle, 162kms north of Sydney.

Now the Aberglasslyn mother is considering suing the fast food giant, claiming the company failed in its duty of care by not removing the needle and not providing an adequate response to the incident, the Newcastle Herald reported.

Amanda Van Der Veen, with Kaleisha, four weeks, and Aspen have been left traumatised after Amanda and Aspen were pricked by a needle at McDonald's

Amanda (right) and her husband Matthew Van Der Veen on their wedding day in 2013

Mrs Van Der Veen's motherly instincts forced her to grab the needle from her son, which also pierced her hand.

'I just got this overwhelming, devastated feeling,' she told the Newcastle Herald.

'This could have anything in it, I could get a disease - what about the baby?'

Mrs Van Der Veen and her son were taken to the bathroom to wash their hands and the store manager took her details for an incident report.

She said she was shaking, crying and physically sick before she was taken to John Hunter Hospital for testing and was told that she was unlikely to be infected by a disease.

'This event has changed everything,' she told the Herald.

'I'm housebound, I don't use public bathrooms and I have my third appointment with a psychologist coming up. I'm unlikely to return to my job as a lab technician'.

Amanda and her four-year-old son were pricked by a needle in the disabled toilet of this McDonald's on King Street in Newcastle

Following the incident, Mrs Van Der Veen made numerous attempts to contact the fast food chain's head office and store manager to no avail.

She criticised McDonald's for calling her back only last week, five months after the November incident.

'We tried to reach out and get help but felt so alone', she told Newcastle Herald.

'We will be going back to our solicitor'.

Mrs Van Der Veen said she was later admitted to hospital due to mental health concerns after she was unable to inject herself with insulin for her gestational diabetes.

A McDonald's spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia that 'any incident of this nature is not acceptable'.

'Our restaurant was in contact with the customer on a number of occasions following the incident in November; but we certainly apologise if the customer feels she has not been appropriately supported, we have again reached out to offer any further assistance we can.'
A Texas mother of three was found dead on Monday morning inside of a church where she teaches a fitness class.

CCTV reveals that a suspect wearing police SWAT gear walked through the hallways prior to Terri 'Missy' Bevers, 45, being found dead by one of her Camp Gladiator fitness class participants at around 5:00 a.m.

Police they found evidence of forced entry at the Creekside Church in Midlothian which leads them to believe that Bevers may have walked in on a robbery, according to CBS.

Dead: A Texas mother of three, Terri 'Missy' Bevers, was found dead on Monday morning inside of a church where she teaches a fitness class

Caught on camera: CCTV reveals that a suspect wearing police SWAT gear walked through the hallways prior to the discovery of Bevers' body

Costume: 'He is designed to look like a police officer, his intent was to look like a police officer,' said Midlothian PD Chief Carl Smith of the unknown suspect who was spotted on cameras at around 3:50 a.m

'He is designed to look like a police officer, his intent was to look like a police officer,' said Midlothian PD Chief Carl Smith of the unknown suspect who was spotted on cameras at around 3:50 a.m., according to Fox.

Bevers was first seen at the church at 4:20 a.m.

No items appear to have been taken from the church but there is significant damage.

'We are exploring all possibilities,' says Chief Smith.

'Its just an odd random situation that they would happen to come into a building thats being burglarized on a Monday morning but all scenarios are on the table right now.'

'We want to offer our heartfelt condolences to the family of the victim,' said Chief Smith to CBS.

'This is a tragic event for all involved, including our community.'

Bevers is survived by her three children ages 8, 13 and 15. Police have not said how she was killed.

No leADS: Police do not currently have any leads on the suspect seen walkingh through the church on the day of Bevers' death
Was arrested and police expect to charge the man over the

Then led police on pursuit before crashing into a tree at Nora Hill

Stabbed women with a machete at a caravan park on NSW's south coast

A man is under police guard in a Sydney hospital after he allegedly stabbed two women with a machete at a caravan park before leading police on a high speed car chase.

The women, aged 25 and 37, suffered stab wounds to the head and arms in the attack on Monday night at Lake Conjola Entrance Tourist Park on New South Wales south coast.

The younger woman also has injuries to her buttocks and legs and both are in a stable condition in Shoalhaven Hospital.

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A man is under police guard in a Sydney hospital after he allegedly stabbed two women with a machete at a caravan park before leading police on a high speed car chase (pictured)

The caravan park was packed with families on school holidays.

Following a tip-off police initiated the chase of a white Nissan van heading north on the Princes Highway at Tomerong about 9.20pm that was abandoned because of safety concerns.

Twenty minutes later the van was found crashed into a tree at Nowra Hill and the male driver, 31, was arrested.

The women, aged 25 and 37, suffered stab wounds to the head and arms in the attack on Monday night at Lake Conjola Entrance Tourist Park (pictured) on New South Wales south coast.

He was taken to St George Hospital for treatment to internal injuries but they are not believed to be life-threatening.

Police said crime scenes have been established at the caravan park and crash site and they expect the man will be charged over the incident.
It may look like a scene from the next Transformers movie, but in fact, its a window into China's fiercely competitive construction industry.

Footage has surfaced showing two rival construction firms battling it out last Saturday in the middle of a dusty road in Northern Chinas Hebei province, reports Sky News.

The bulldozers can be seen ramming into one another causing two of them to topple over, in what was reportedly an argument between rival companies competing for business.

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Two rival construction companies have been filmed battling it out in the middle of the road in Hebei province

Incredible footage from the scene shows the demolition derby-esque showdown which resulted in several injuries

The group of bulldozers repeatedly ram into one another causing two of the vehicles to topple over

One driver flees his bulldozer after it was toppled over by another vehicle from a rival company

The incredible scenes show several cars speeding away from the demolition derby-esque showdown, as thick clouds of dust are blown into the air.

One driver flees his fallen bulldozer as another one of the vehicles - presumably from the same company - attempts to push it back upright.

Local government spokesperson Xu Feng revealed the companies were competing for business but said details about injuries and arrests could not be disclosed as the matter is being investigated.

But images have surfaced showing police lining up a number of people, and Reuters is reporting that several people were injured during the bizarre street fight.

Chinas construction industry is in dire straits and it is reported that growth is down by two-thirds from its peak 10 years ago.

Real estate construction accounts for a massive quarter of the countrys economy, and the slump has brought on a flood of layoffs in the steel, glass and cement sectors of the industry.

Several cars can be seen speeding away from the scene as thick clouds of dust are blown into the air

A government spokesperson said details about injuries and arrests could not be disclosed as the matter is being investigated

But images have surfaced showing police lining up a number of people at the scene
A woman from Iowa is hoping the public will help her track down her birth mother.

Megan Hejlik, 30, of Sheffield was adopted and is now trying to find her birth parents.

After posting a photo of herself holding a sign on Facebook asking for help saying 'Help me find my family', the post has been shared more than 8,900 times and collected dozens of supportive comments.

Plea for help: Megan Hejlik, 30, posted her plea for help onto Facebook and was flooded with support

Helping hands: Comments have flooded into her Facebook posting offering her prayers and luck, promising to share her request in Arizona or Canada, telling her that her birth mother would be lucky to know her

'I thought a handful of people might share it, but not this many,'Megan told KIMT.

'I have always known I was adopted, but as of a couple of years ago I have gotten really curious about my family history, my family health history, things like that,' she says. 'I always wondered what it would be like to find and meet her,'

'I can't imagine the emotional journey that this must be for you!' one user wrote. 'Prayers to you and your family as you search for your birth family! Good luck!' added another.

'Please keep us all updated on your Journey!!! We'd love to hear how it all turns out for you!!!' wrote another user.

On the lookout: Finding answers has become more important to Megan given her profession. She works as a nurse at Mercy Medical CenterNorth Iowa, the same hospital where she was born

Happy family: Megan is married to Ryan and has two sons, Ethan, 10, and Renner, 3

Megan only had a limited amount of information to hand, but all of it is on her handwritten sign.

She was born April 28, 1985 at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Mason City, Iowa.

Her mother, who was about 16 at the time, named her Vanessa.

Megan is hoping that enough people will share her story so that it will reach someone who may have information.

She asks anyone with details to contact her at adoptedgirl04281985@yahoo.com.

Megan says she loves her adoptive parents, Jack and Cheryl Enoo, who adopted her shortly after she was born.

She says she knows that the choice her biological mom made at the time, 30 years ago, was for the best.

Poolside: Megan's posting has been shared more than 9,000 times since it was posted last week

Lovely pair: Megan has her own family now, including husband Ryan, but is searching for her own biological roots

Finding answers has become more important to her given her profession. She works as a nurse at Mercy Medical CenterNorth Iowa, the same hospital where she was born.

'One of my goals was to look for my family history just to kind of find out more about myself,' Megan said to ABC News. 'I turned to online search with no luck and then I decided to do a poster.'

She says that if she finds her real mom, she would to develop a friendship with her, but more than anything she is looking for closure.

'I can't imagine being 15, 16 and having a baby,' Megan said of her mother to ABC.

'I think she did the best thing for me, giving be a better chance at life through adoption. I just want to let her know that there's no hard feelings. I think it's great what she did, honestly.'

Speaking to KWQC, she said that the post has not brought any real leads so far.
Market traders were left speechless when a council banned them from handing out traditional red roses on St Georges Day.

Stallholders were told the blooms could not be given to members of the public because they were the official Labour Party logo.

Council officials in Stockport, Greater Manchester, said that because St Georges Day on April 23 fell within the period of purdah before upcoming local elections, handing out the flowers would breach impartiality rules.

Council officials in Stockport, Greater Manchester, said that because St Georges Day on April 23 fell within the period of purdah before upcoming local elections, handing out roses would breach impartiality rules

John OMara, from the Stockport branch of the National Market Traders Federation, said traders wanted to distribute the roses as a way of thanking customers who had supported them throughout the past year and was a show of patriotism.

He said: People dont associate the red rose with Labour on the day - its St Georges Day, and thats the only reason we want to do it.

Trader Mostafa Rezvani added: I think the 100 roses that we were going to give out is not going to make a great difference for the Labour Party in Stockport.

Stockport Market has been running for more than 750 years, with independent traders now selling goods inside a building operated by the council.

Shopper Sarah Reid, 35, said: Ive never heard of anything more preposterous than telling flower stallholders they cant hand out red roses because it breaks election rules.

Stallholders were told the blooms could not be given to members of the public because they were the official Labour Party logo

When I heard about the ban all my friends thought it was a late April Fools Day prank but when it turns out to be real then you have to worry for the sanity of those people that think up these rules.

Pensioner Edward Ellis, 72, added: I really cant believe the idiocy of the people who are meant to govern us. You couldnt make this stuff up.

St Georges Day falls within purdah, the period between an election being announced and polling day, during which time local authorities are not allowed to engage in activities or make announcements which could give an advantage to one party over others.

St Georges Day falls within purdah, the period between an election being announced and polling day, during which time local authorities are not allowed to engage in activities or make announcements which could give an advantage to one party over others

But after traders complained, market officials reached a compromise with the council, which will allow them to distribute the flowers outside the market hall.

Mr OMara said: It was silly. If the council hadnt mentioned it, it wouldnt have been a problem, but we did resolve it. It was just because were in purdah.

Stockport Council is not controlled by any one political party but is dominated by the Liberal Democrats.

A spokesman for the local authority said: The council will always try to support initiatives from businesses in the market place and the surrounding area which try to improve the use and perception of this beautiful part of our town.
The bosses of one of Britain's biggest smoke alarm makers have lost millions of pounds over dodgy batteries that make the safety devices beep for no apparent reason.

Sprue Aegis, whose products are sold by High Street giants including Tesco and B&Q, yesterday revealed that batteries fitted to some of its smoke alarms were faulty.

As a result, the 'chirp' that warns the battery is running low sounds early, to the irritation of families across the country.

The company, which also supplies the UK Fire and Rescue Service and British Gas, is now expecting a surge in claims from furious customers who bought smoke alarms with a guaranteed lifespan.

Sprue Aegis, whose products are sold by High Street giants including Tesco and B&Q, yesterday revealed that batteries fitted to some of its smoke alarms were faulty

Shares in Sprue Aegis more than halved in value yesterday  crashing 54.2 per cent to 122.5p  costing its bosses over 9million.

Executive chairman Graham Whitworth, 62, saw the value of hits 7.3 per cent holding in the company fall from 8.9million to 4.1million  a loss of 4.8million.

The 6.5 per cent stake held by 44-year-old managing director Nick Rutter, who set up the company in 1998, sank from 8million to 3.7million  a loss of 4.3million.

The slump in the share price knocked a total of 66.5million off the value of the company.

City commentator David Buik, an analyst at stock broker Panmure Gordon, said: 'Anyone with a smoke alarm knows just how annoying it can be when it beeps for no apparent reason. Manufacturers have now been hit in the pocket  and hard.'

Families in Britain are recommended to fit smoke alarms in every room except bathrooms.

In an unexpected statement to the stock market yesterday, the company said a fault in batteries provided by one of its suppliers 'may cause a premature low battering warning chirp' in some of the smoke alarms it sells in the UK and in Europe

Sprue Aegis makes a range of home safety devices such as smoke and heat alarms and carbon monoxide detectors under brands including First Alert, FireAngel, AngelEye and Sona.

In an unexpected statement to the stock market yesterday, the company said a fault in batteries provided by one of its suppliers 'may cause a premature low battering warning chirp' in some of the smoke alarms it sells in the UK and in Europe.

The company refused to say how many smoke alarms have been affected but sources said it was 'a very small number'.

The company insisted the smoke alarms still worked, adding: 'This is not a safety critical issue.'

But it increased the money set aside to cover claims from customers whose faulty smoke alarms are still under warranty from 5.5million to 6.8million.

Coventry-based Sprue Aegis added that profits for 2015 are now expected to be 7.3million rather than 12.1million.

'I am deeply disappointed about the impact this issue is having and I wish to reassure customers that the company takes the quality of all its products very seriously,' said Mr Whitworth.

The company also issued a warning about its business on the Continent, voicing concern over 'challenging trading conditions' in France and 'weaker sales' in Germany.

It said it now expects to book revenues of 55million and profits of 1.9million this year, down from 88.3million and 7.3million last year.
Queenslanders are prepared to fork out $550,000 for a four-bedder

Australia's ideal home has four bedrooms and two bathrooms with a price tag of $650,000.

A survey of more than 100 people done by realestate.com.au revealed what Australians were looking for when they are buying a new home.

The average Australian dream home would also have a land size of 665sqm and two garage spaces.

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Australia's ideal home has four bedrooms and two bathrooms with a price tag of $650,000. Above is a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Glenwood - a suburb of Sydney

A survey of more than 100 people done by realestate.com.au revealed what Australians were looking for when they are buying a new home

The new research, that examined more than 28,000 listings, found a house would get more interest if they were close to shops, schools or public transport.

House hunters in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia had the same expectations as the average Australian.

But those in NSW and WA are prepared to pay more for their dream home, with new owners willing to pay $895,000 and $700,000 for a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home respectively.

In Queensland, potential homeowners were prepared to fork out $550,000.

House hunters in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia had the same expectations as the average Australian

But those in NSW and WA allowed more leeway in price when it came to their dream home, with new home owners willing to pay $895,000 and $700,000 for a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home

Meanwhile South Australians and Victorians wanted smaller homes than their interstate counterparts.

In SA, home buyers were looking for three-bedroom, two-bedroom and two-garage dwellings for $479,000.

The same applied to Victorians - but they were willing to pay $620,000.

STATE BY STATE: WHAT ARE AUSTRALIAN HOMEBUYERS' IDEAL HOMES? Australia New South Wales Queensland South Australia Tasmania Victoria Western Australia Property type House House House House House House Median number of bedrooms 4 4 4 3 3 3 4 Median number of bathrooms 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 Median number of garage spaces 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 Median price $650,000 $895,000 $550,000 $479,000 $389,000 $620,000 $700,000 Median land size 665sqm 645sqm 681sqm 683sqm 750sqm 661sqm 660sqm

In Tasmania expectations were even lower, with house hunters looking out for a three-bedroom, one-bathroom and one-garage home for $389,000.

Data for the territories were not included as they had low house listing numbers.

Realestate.com.au's parent company is REA Group and its chief economist Nerida Conisbee said the research showed Australian property buyers were 'an aspirational lot' as they were looking for houses with more bedrooms on bigger blocks.

Unlike those in South Australians, Victorians were willing to pay $620,000 for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home

This one in Ringwood - a suburb of Melbourne - also has two garage spaces

One of the bedrooms inside the Ringwood home

On average, home buyers are willing to pay $100,000 more than the worth of their current homes to get what they want, according to chief economist Nerida Conisbee

'On average, home buyers are willing to pay $100,000 more than the worth of their current homes to get what they want,' Ms Conisbee said.

'The ideal house for most buyers on realestate.com.au contains four bedrooms and two bathrooms and has a two car garage.

'This is bigger than the average Australian home which has 3.1 bedrooms according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.'

Ms Conisbee said people's idea of a dream home was reflected in their reasons for moving.

'ABS data shows 43.6 per cent of Australian home owners are dissatisfied with their homes because they are too small. Only 5 per cent of households state that their homes are too large,' she said.

In Queensland, potential homeowners were prepared to fork out $550,000

This Forest Lake home in Brisbane looks over a lake and has four bedrooms and two bathrooms

This home has four bedrooms and an alfresco dining area with lake views

Ms Conisbee added Sydneysiders were willing to sacrifice land size but wanted a larger home on that block

'Home buyers are also looking for relatively large land sizes... [and] buyers are after bigger homes on bigger lots and they are willing to pay for it.'

Ms Conisbee added Sydneysiders were willing to sacrifice land size but wanted a larger home on that block.

The economist said data also showed distance from the city centre did not matter.

'Surprisingly, given the popularity of inner urban locations, houses with close proximity to the city aren't necessarily part of the appeal of the ideal home,' she said.

'This finding suggests that as long as a location has a high level of amenity in terms of shops, schools and transport, the geographical proximity to the city is not important.
A Queensland teenager has been granted bail after being exposed as the alleged leader of a sexting ring in which he is accused of threatening to 'rape and kill' a fellow student if he didn't send him nude selfies.

The teen, now 18, is facing a total of 23 charges including four counts of stalking, three counts of involving children in making child porn, distributing child porn and indecent treatment of children.

It's alleged the teen made the threats against students while he was attending a Brisbane state secondary school, reported The Daily Telegraph.

The Queensland teenager, now 18, is facing a string of charges in the District Court and Children's Court for stalking, involving children in making child porn, distributing child porn and indecent treatment of children (stock image)

He is alleged to have committed dozens of child porn offences against numerous victims over a number of years.

The Supreme Court heard the teen committed the offences against five boys aged from 13 to 17 years over a five-year period using SnapChat, messaging app Kik and Facebook.

The teen was on bail for 19 other offences dating back to 2014, when he allegedly committed the offences against the 14-year-old boy in June 2015.

The court heard the boy used a smartphone registered in his Dad's name to send messages to the 14-year-old, who was allegedly one of his previous victims, using messaging app KiK between June 4 and 6.

The texts read: 'I want (photos) now. You have 24 hours or Ill rape you nd (SIC) kill you'.

He allegedly told the 14-year-old to ' meet me today at 4.30 at the field across from the hall' and ordered the victim to 'send me a nude (selfie)  or Ill f**king kill you bitch'.

The Brisbane District Court heard the teen allegedly threatened a 14-year-old student in June 2015, saying if he didn't send him naked selfies he would 'rape and kill him' (stock image)

The teen sent the messages while he was banned from using the internet, which was part of his bail conditions when he was released on 13 charges in October 2014.

He currently faces 13 charges before the District Court and six charges before the Children's Court, related to offences allegedly committed when he was aged between 14 and 16 years old.

The numerous offences include the teen allegedly pestering a 13-year-old schoolmate in July 2014 to send him indecent naked photos of himself.

The 13-year-old 'felt pressured and scared' so he took three photos with his iPad and sent them to the other teen's SnapChat, who distributed them to other students, including a 13-year-old.

Another former classmate of the boy told police the teen propositioned him for sex in the school toilets three years ago.

Paediatrician Dr Anthony Leslie told the court said the teen 'would have trouble in prison' because he has 'gender identity issues and compulsive behaviours' due to a 'chromosomal anomaly'

The boy spent nearly three weeks in prison after he was remanded on February 24 following a police raid on his home in Brisbane.

But on March 10 Supreme Court Chief Justice Catherine Holmes granted him bail on strict conditions.

This was despite DPP solicitor Amanda Robinson telling the court the boy was 'an unacceptable risk of reoffending if released on bail' for a second time.

The teen's barrister, Julie Sharp, told the court in March that he was on the autism spectrum.

Paediatrician Dr Anthony Leslie said the boy 'would have trouble in prison' because he has 'gender identity issues and compulsive behaviours' due to a 'chromosomal anomaly'.

Ms Robinson, for the DPP, told the court the boys behaviour towards vulnerable students from a school in Brisbane's inner southeastern suburbs was 'persistent  obsessive, relentless and revolting'.

The court heard the Queensland Police Service first spoke to the boy in December 2013 when he was 16 years old, and he admitted making sexual advances to his classmate and sending photos of himself to the student via Facebook.
Thousands of patients face struggling to see their GP during next week's strike by junior doctors.

Surgeries in some areas of England have been told not to book routine appointments to ensure they are freed up for emergencies.

In one region covering millions of patients, practices have been urged to stop scheduling slots for four days.

Thousands of patients face struggling to see their GP during next week's strike by junior doctors. Surgeries in some areas of England have been told not to book routine appointments to ensure they are freed up for emergencies (stock photograph)

Junior doctors are set to stage the first all-out strike in NHS history on Tuesday and Wednesday next week. They will withdraw all care between 8am and 5pm, walking out of all wards including A&E and intensive care.

The strike will cause the most disruption for hospitals  but GP surgeries in many areas are cancelling routine appointments to make sure they are available for emergencies.

In Yorkshire and the Humber, which covers 5.3million patients, surgeries have been told by clinical commissioning groups and NHS England not to book any more appointments from April 26 to 29. A letter about the strike  uncovered by GPs' magazine Pulse  says this is to 'mitigate the impact of the industrial action'.

In Birmingham, senior GPs from the local medical committee recently issued a memo telling surgeries to consider 'reducing the volume' of routine appointments on strike days.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has told the junior doctors' union to allow them to return to work if particular hospital departments are suddenly overwhelmed

During the four previous 'emergency-only' strikes, many practices also cancelled non-urgent consultations of their own accord. One surgery in Salisbury, Wiltshire, asked patients via its website to 'be thoughtful' by not asking for an appointment.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has told the junior doctors' union to allow them to return to work if particular hospital departments are suddenly overwhelmed. He said he hoped the British Medical Association would co-operate as 'no-one wants there to be any kind of tragedy'.

Consultants and nurses will be expected to provide cover during the walk-out. However last week, the NHS's top doctor Professor Bruce Keogh warned the strike was 'reckless' and the Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies said it would risk lives.

The row centres on the controversial new contract aimed at making junior doctors work more weekend shifts for lower rates of pay. This week, Mr Hunt was accused of backtracking on threats to 'impose' it, with leaked letters suggesting the Health Secretary had softened his language and had switched to the word 'introduce'.

Labour said the change of tack demonstrated the policy was in 'complete disarray'  but Mr Hunt denied this in the Commons yesterday and said the contract would be imposed from August as planned.

He was later asked by Tory MP Sarah Wollaston whether patients would be 'safe' on strike days.

Mr Hunt replied: 'The departments at most risk are emergency, maternity and intensive care. So I hope that the BMA will co-operate as we identify where we think gaps might be... and will then help us plug the gaps with junior doctors. In the end no one wants there to be any kind of tragedy.'
Bill would require all students in public schools and universities to use bathrooms and locker rooms that matched their gender at birth

Rep Susan Lynn, who sponsored bill, said there's issues that need to be worked out because of a potential lawsuit that could come if bill passes

Rep Susan Lynn (pictured) sponsored the bill in the House, but said she needed to tweak the legislation before bringing it back up again next year

A transgender bathroom bill in the Tennessee legislature failed Monday after the House sponsor said she was withdrawing the legislation while waiting to see how legal challenges play out in other states that have passed similar measures.

The bill's demise follows intense lobbying from both supporters and opponents of the measure and questions about potential economic fallout if it were to become law.

Rep Susan Lynn, the Mount Juliet Republican who sponsored the bill in the House, said she needed to tweak the legislation before bringing it back up again next year.

'There's definitely some issues we need to work out,' Lynn said. 'We know as soon as this bill passes, we're going to be sued.

'So if we're going to be heading into a lawsuit, we want to make sure we have the strongest position possible.'

The bill would have required all students in public schools and universities to use bathrooms and locker rooms that matched their gender at birth.

Supporters said it would have protected the privacy of students. Opponents called it discriminatory.

The bill would have required all students in public schools and universities to use bathrooms and locker rooms that matched their gender at birth. Several prominent figures have called on the country music industry to speak out against Tennessee's anti-LGBT bills. Pictured is President/CEO Sarah Kate Ellis speaking

Transgender high school student Henry Seaton, speaks at the Tennessee Equality Project & GLAAD at DoubleTree. He said: 'I feel singled out, and I feel stigmatized'

Lynn had amended the bill so students who objected could be given an alternative, but opponents said it was still hurtful toward transgender students.

She pulled the measure the same day that a religious coalition of the Family Action Council of Tennessee and about 30 pastors urged lawmakers earlier in the day to stand strong in the face of intense opposition.

They asked lawmakers to ignore the 'false prophesies of economic gloom and doom' and outside corporations and instead listen to churchgoers, parents and voters in Tennessee.

David Fowler, the president of Family Action Council of Tennessee, blamed the bill's failure on 'consistent opposition from the governor's office and others.'

'We join the thousands of parents across the state who are profoundly disappointed that at this point in the process Rep. Lynn has decided not to proceed with a bill that would have simply protected the privacy of the children they have entrusted to our public schools,' Fowler said in a statement.

Henry Seaton, a senior at Beech High School in Hendersonville and a transgender student, said he couldn't understand why lawmakers were targeting people like him now.

'I feel singled out, and I feel stigmatized,' Seaton said earlier in the day.

Tennessee's proposal is part of a wave of legislation across the country that opponents say is discriminatory toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Lynn had amended the bill so students who objected could be given an alternative, but opponents said it was still hurtful toward transgender students

Tennessee's proposal is part of a wave of legislation across the country that opponents say is discriminatory toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people

The head of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBT civil rights organization, hailed the bill's death and urged legislators not to bring it up again

The head of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBT civil rights organization, hailed the bill's death and urged legislators not to bring it up again.

'Tennessee lawmakers were wise to learn from the mistakes of North Carolina and Mississippi and halt this cruel legislation that would have only worsened the marginalization and harassment transgender students already face on a daily basis,' HRC President Chad Griffin said.

The state's attorney general had issued an opinion saying that the state risked losing federal education funds if the measure became law, putting more than $1.3 billion at risk. There was also a backlash from the business community.

The leaders of 60 businesses, including the chief executives of Williams-Sonoma, Hilton Worldwide and T-Mobile, signed a letter last week that asked Tennessee lawmakers to reject the bathroom bill, saying it is discriminatory.

Tennessee Gov Bill Haslam, who said he had received calls and emails from a number of business people about the measure, had raised concerns that the state could lose education funding if the measure were to ever become law.

Lynn said she had spoken to Haslam before yanking the bill.

'We've had conversations about it,' Lynn said. 'And those conversations had to do with timing, had to do with strategy, and had to do with some outstanding issues we probably need to address in the legislation.'

She said she still supports the measure.
Businesses across the UK were last night accused of 'dodging' the national living wage and making a mockery of George Osborne's plans to give Britain a pay rise

Businesses across the UK were last night accused of 'dodging' the national living wage and making a mockery of George Osborne's plans to give Britain a pay rise.

The owner of Ginsters pasties yesterday added its name to a growing list of firms to cut staff perks to help pay for a hike in basic salaries.

Other firms which have come under fire for slashing benefits include B&Q, Morrisons, Waitrose, Caffe Nero and food chain Eat.

During a fiery debate in the House of Commons, Labour MP Joan Ryan said firms which 'deliberately circumvent' the living wage should be fined as she revealed that Bradgate Bakery - which makes the pasties and savoury slices- is abolishing double pay for staff working on Sundays.

She said the Leicester-based firm, which is part of food manufacturer Samworth Brothers and also owns Soreen malt loaf - has written to 5,000 staff informing of the changes.

Ms Ryan said: 'Bradgate workers were sold a lie  they were told their pay was increasing but what they have given with one hand they are taking with another.'

The MP for Enfield North said this will mean production-line staff on minimum wage who were paid 13.40 last month for Sunday shifts will be paid 9 an hour by 2019.

Radical reforms introduced on April 1 have forced firms to give staff on minimum wage a 50p pay rise.

The changes mean all workers aged 25 and over must be paid at least 7.20 an hour, instead of 6.70. The living wage is set to rise to 9 an hour by 2019.

The changes were hailed by the chancellor and campaign groups as a pay rise for millions of low paid workers.

But business groups have warned the policy will backfire and cause firms to slash jobs, cut back on overtime and get rid of other perks.

The warnings appear to have been well founded as the cost cutting measures taken by a string of firms have been exposed.

Food chain Eat has stopped paying staff for their half an hour lunch breaks, while Caffe Nero has stopped giving employees free food and drink at lunch.

Labour MPs yesterday claimed that some companies are also cutting their wage bills by handing overtime to younger staff aged under 25 as they do not qualify for the living wage.

Ms Ryan reserved her most scathing attack for DIY retailer B&Q which has slashed pay for staff working on Sundays and bank holidays.

The owner of Ginsters pasties yesterday added its name to a growing list of firms to cut staff perks to help pay for a hike in basic salaries. Other firms which have come under fire for slashing benefits include B&Q (pictured), Morrisons, Waitrose, Caffe Nero and food chain Eat

She said: 'It's clearly totally wrong that any company should be cutting wages on the back of the living wage.

'If a company as well known and big as B&Q can do it, everyone can. B&Q has been particularly thoughtless in its treatment of staff.'

She added: 'There should be penalties for employers that deliberately circumvent the living wage in this way.'

Labour MP Siobhan Mcdonagh called the commons debate after B&Q faced a backlash from its employees.

Tory MP Philip Davies yesterday defended businesses and warned that the living wage would inevitably lead to job cuts

More than 136,000 people signed a petition urging the retailer to reverse the cuts.

It has buckled under pressure and pledged to compensate staff so they do no lose out over the next two years.

Ms McDonagh was unable to attend the commons debate as she broke her hip at the weekend.

Tory MP Philip Davies yesterday defended businesses and warned that the living wage would inevitably lead to job cuts.

He said: 'My honourable friend is making the mistaken assumption that every employer is some rich baron living in a huge mansion in the country and driving a Bentley.

Many businesses don't earn the living wage themselves  she berates them yet many of them are working desperately long hours to keep paying their staff.'

He added: 'If you put up the cost of employment you will find less people employed. That' s just an economic fact.'

The Treasury's independent watchdog the Office for Budget Responsibility has warned that the living wage could lead to the loss of 60,000 jobs and four million working hours a week.
None of his students were hurt and one of them hiked down the mountain to call for help after the attack

His condition wasn't available but the university said he was stable

Wagner, an associate professor of outdoor studies at the University of Alaska Southeast, was taken to the hospital by helicopter

Forest Wagner (pictured), 35, was mauled by a bear while on a trip in the mountains near Haines, Alaska

An outdoor studies teacher was mauled by a bear during an outing with his students in the mountains of Alaska.

Forest Wagner, 35, an associate professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, was leading a mountaineering class on Mount Emmerich, near Haines, when the bear attacked him on Monday, the university said.

One of his students hiked down the mountain to get cell reception and call for help. Wagner was taken to the hospital by helicopter.

Officials wouldn't immediately confirm his condition but the university said he was stable.

Wagner, who teaches rock and ice climbing, backcountry navigation, glacier travel and mountaineering, was accompanied by 11 students and two teaching assistants at the time of the attack, the university said.

All of the students escaped unhurt and have left the mountain.

They are spending the night in Haines with another professor and will take a ferry to Juneau, where the campus is located, on Tuesday.

Troopers said the bear, which had cubs, was seen against after the mauling.

According to Wagner's teaching schedule, he was scheduled to come off the mountain by Tuesday.

Alaska State Troopers got a call from the Haines Police Department around noon in Monday.

According to their report, they removed Wagner from the mountain by helicopter and transferred him to a LifeMed helicopter before taking him to the hospital in Anchorage.

Wagner, who also works as a mountain guide, has been coordinating and teaching in the outdoor studies program at the university since 2006.

He is also enrolled as a graduate student in northern studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
She has gained herself a cult following since her first appearance on the BBC quiz show last year.

So last night fans were thrilled to see Hannah Woods  famous for her 'killer' eyebrows - lead her team to victory in a heated grand final against their Oxbridge rivals.

The team, from Peterhouse College, Cambridge, took an early lead and eventually secured the title over St John's College, Oxford, by an impressive 185 points in an historic third consecutive win for Cambridge.

University Challenge fans were thrilled to see Cambridge's Hannah Woods - famous for her killer eyebrows - lead her team to victory in the grand final against their Oxbridge rivals. She is pictured receiving the award

Her fame has resulted in plenty of attention for the PhD student, who has had a Valentine's Day card, a marriage proposal and a bottle of gin in the post thanks to her looks, above with her team and Jeremy Paxman

It was the first time a woman has been on the winning team since 2013, when the University of Manchester clinched the title.

Miss Woods' facial expressions have particularly impressed admirers over the series  many of whom refer to the 'killer arch' of her eyebrows.

The PhD student recently revealed that she has been flooded with gifts  and even a marriage proposal  from fans ahead of last night's hotly-anticipated grand final.

Miss Woods' team-mate Oscar Powell has also received a great deal of social media attention, with many fans saying they will miss his 'ridiculous' set of facial expressions, often likened to Mr Bean.

Mr Powell's animated reactions have included sticking out his tongue, pulling his mouth wide open and scrunching up his nose.

Hannah Woods, captain of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, became the star of the show thanks to her one raised eyebrow. She said she has been inundated with gifts from admirers and has even received a proposal

Miss Woods (pictured) led Peterhouse to glory against a St John's, Oxford team on University Challenge

Nadia Wiseman tweeted: 'Powell's face is so wonderful. He really takes you on a journey.#universitychallenge'

Commenting on the result, host Jeremy Paxman, said: 'You can do much better than that St John's as we've seen in many a previous match, but someone has got to win, and Peterhouse, that was a storming performance. Another storming performance from you.'

Presenting the trophy was mathematician and Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, Marcus du Sautoy.

He said: 'I thought it was a phenomenal performance. But I am really impressed by how many maths questions there were.

'You're probably cursing the fact that there's a mathematician giving away the trophy, there were so many.'

Miss Woods' team-mate Oscar Powell (pictured) has also received a great deal of social media attention, with many fans saying they will miss his 'ridiculous' set of facial expressions, often likened to those of Mr Bean

Many took to Twitter to congratulate the Cambridge team. Kevin Newman wrote: 'Ladies & Gentleman, raise your glasses and an eyebrow to Hannah Woods & Peterhouse #winners #universitychallenge.'

Charlie Clegg of St John's College also became a hit over the series after jumping in fright at the sound of a colleague's buzzer, sparking delighted comments online.

Author Patrick Ness tweeted: 'Caught University Challenge. Congrats to Peterhouse! And captain Hannah Woods, who does intelligent exasperation better than anyone I know.'

Michael Dowling wrote on Twitter: 'I think oscar powell deserves his own television program #universitychallenge.'
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says he expects to send Australians to the polls on July 2.

But Mr Turnbull said he will wait until the budget is delivered on May 3 before making the final call on a double dissolution election.

'My intention is after the budget, at an appropriate time after the budget has been delivered, I will be asking the Governor-General to dissolve both houses of the Parliament for an election which I expect to be held on the 2nd of July', the prime minister said on Tuesday.

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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (pictured) has threatened to call for a double-dissolution, which could place all members and senators up for election on July 2

The last day Mr Turnbull can call a double-dissolution is May 11 - just a week after the budget is due to be delivered.

A double dissolution means all 226 seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate will be up for grabs - something that will favor the Liberal-National coalition and the Labor party over minor parties because it means the quota of votes needed to win a senate seat is greater.

Mr Turnbull was handed the double dissolution trigger when the Senate voted against a number of government bills which aim to re-establish the construction watchdog, the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC).

Earlier this year, Mr Turnbull vowed to use a second rejection of the bills as a trigger for a double-dissolution election on July 2.

MPs and senators were recalled to Canberra by Governor-General Peter Cosgrove on Monday, after parliament was prorogued in a constitutional move not used for 40 years to consider the bills.

Parliament was given three weeks to consider the bills. If the legislation is defeated, voters will be headed to the polling booths in July - provided Mr Turnbull keeps to his word.

Mr Turnbull said in March that Governor-General Peter Cosgrove (pictured) gave him permission to call for a double-dissolution if the House of Representatives and the Senate continue to disagree on an ABCC bill

Independent senators John Madigan and Jacqui Lambie ruled out support while Motoring Enthusiast Ricky Muir said he didn't see much point continuing the debate given the government's unwillingness to consider his proposed amendments.

'If the government won't even consider what I believe to be reasonable amendments at least worthy of debate in this chamber then let's get this bill as it's presented to a vote.

'Then the government can proceed with what it wants, an early election.'

Senator Lambie said there was a high probability the bills would be defeated, insisting she wasn't afraid of an early election.

'My vote will never be influenced by threats from this prime minister of a double-dissolution election.'

Senator Madigan said the proposed Australian Building and Construction Commission would be granted coercive powers not even available to police, while construction workers would be left with fewer rights than an alleged murderer.

Independent senator Glenn Lazarus has previously indicated he won't support the legislation as it stands.

The House and Senate vetoed an ABCC bill on Monday for the second time. Independent senator Jacqui Lambie (pictured) ruled out support

Motoring Enthusiast Ricky Muir (pictured) said he didn't see much point continuing the debate given the government's unwillingness to consider his proposed amendments

Independent senator Glenn Lazarus (pictured) has previously indicated he won't support the legislation as it stands

With Labor and the Greens opposed, the legislation needs the support of six of the eight crossbenchers to pass.

Independent senator Nick Xenophon said the Senate was fast headed for a vote on the ABCC.

'The government will get what it has been really secretly or not so secretly wishing for and that is for a double dissolution trigger,' he told reporters.

Labor accused Mr Turnbull of misleading the governor-general over his reasons for proroguing parliament, using 'propaganda' to justify restoring the ABCC.

Mr Turnbull's claim the ABCC would lead to improved productivity was a 'complete untruth', based on discredited reports and figures from 'cash for comment' consultancy firms, senior Labor senator Doug Cameron said.

On Monday, several senators said they will not be supporting the bill. The point of the election is to allow Australian voters to break the deadlock

Independent senator Nick Xenophon said the Senate was fast headed for a vote on the ABCC

'The prime minister misled the governor-general and he knows it.'

The bills robbed construction workers of basic human rights and put their lives in danger, he said, with evidence showing a rise in workplace deaths when the commission was established by the Howard government.

The Senate has also been asked to reconsider the government's registered organisations bill, which is already an early election trigger having been rejected several times.
body was found in a home in the Geelong suburb of Norlane

A woman has been found dead after an anonymous male caller alerted police from a blood-stained public telephone down the street.

Some of the woman's family have been told of her death, but she has yet to be formally identified.

Her body was found in a house on Robin Ave house in the Geelong suburb of Norlane.

Victoria Police are seeking information about an anonymous call that alerted police about 11.36am from a pay phone about 100m from the house where the woman was found.

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An anonymous male caller alerted police from a blood-stained public telephone (pictured) 100m down the street

The phone box appeared to have blood stains on the panel above the phone and the cord of the handset, the site is now being treated as a secondary crime scene

Senior Sergeant McIntyre urged the anonymous male caller to come forward and make himself known to police. Adding there was nothing to suggest he had anything to do with the death of the woman

Senior Sergeant Stephen McIntyre refused to comment on the woman's injuries or if she lived at the house.

He said they would not know the cause of death until a post mortem examination was conducted on Tuesday: 'Until such time as the post mortem has been conducted we're going to continue to treat the matter as suspicious,' he said.

Senior Sergeant McIntyre was asked about the bloodstains at the phone box and the anonymous male caller that alerted police to the death: 'We haven't identified that male. So at this point in time, I'd like to ask him to come forward and make himself known to police,' he said.

'There's nothing to suggest he had anything to do with the death of this woman and it may very well be that he is just someone coming to visit and found the dead person and contacted police.'

The phone box appeared to have blood stains on the panel above the phone and the cord of the handset, the site is now being treated as a secondary crime scene.

Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or submit a confidential crime report at www.crimestoppersvic.com.au

Victoria Police are seeking information about anonymous call that alerted police at about 11.36am from a pay phone 100m down the street from where the woman was found

Forensic police are pictured here, taking photos of the house on Robin Ave where the woman was found

Senior Sergeant McIntyre refused to comment on the woman's injuries or if she lived at the house
The school informed parents of the children and police are investigating

The other girl struggled to pull her away from him and they escaped

He allegedly grabbed one of them and started pushing himself against her

The man was reportedly holding his undone pants up as they walked over

The two girls were going to the toilet when they were allegedly attacked

Two young girls were sexually assaulted by a man who was lurking in the corridor of a Melbourne primary school, police allege.

Two nine-year-old students at Laburnum Primary were going to the toilet when they were allegedly attacked by a man who grabbed one of the girls as he exposed himself at around 11.30am on Monday, 3AW radio and The Age reported.

The school, in Blackburn, informed parents that an unwanted adult was on school grounds near the Year 4 portables next to Black's Walk Reserve.

Two nine-year-old girls were sexually assaulted by a man who was lurking in the corridor of a Melbourne primary school, police allege

Two nine-year-old students at Laburnum Primary School in Blackburn were going to the toilet when they were allegedly attacked by a man who grabbed one of the girls as he exposed himself at around 11.30am on Monday

The man was reportedly holding his undone pants up as the two girls walked towards the bathroom.

As they turned to run, he allegedly grabbed one of them and started pushing himself against her, with the other girl struggling to pull her away from him, 3AW radio reported.

After they managed to escape, they reportedly ran to the classroom and told their teachers.

The school said police were notified immediately and attended the scene.

'The Departments Emergency Management Services were also contacted immediately and interim procedures have been put in place to enhance student safety.

Detective Acting Sergeant Rosemary Eden, of the Box Hill sexual offences and child abuse investigation team told 3AW radio that police were searching for a man of Asian appearance wearing a dark, long-sleeved top with dark, tracksuit pants and white Adidas runners.

She is uncertain whether schools around the area have been warned.

The school later informed the parents of the children who were involved in the incident.

The matter is still being investigated.

Anyone with any information about the incident is asked to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
The father of the two children involved in the 60 Minutes botched child abduction in Lebanon has spoken out, saying 'if the tables were turned I'd be called a terrorist and shot on the spot'.

Ali Elamine told 3AW his estranged wife, Sally Faulkner, veteran journalist Tara Brown and her television crew had not acted lawfully.

'They came into our country. They have done something illegal,' he said.

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Ali Elamine (left) with his lawyer outside the courthouse after Monday's appearance by Tara Brown and his ex-wife, Sally Faulkner, said 'if the tables were turned I'd be called a terrorist and shot on the spot'

Mr Elamine (pictured with his two children, Lahela and Noah) told 3AW if the same thing happened in Australia he would be called a terrorist and shot

'If the tables were turned, if I were to show up in Australia trying to kidnap someone ... I would have probably been shot on the spot, called a terrorist.'

Mr Elamine said it was up to prosecutors, not him, to decide if any charges should be dropped.

'It's all in the prosecutors' hands,' he said on Tuesday.

Mr Elamine was speaking after his estranged wife and 60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown appeared again before a judge in Beirut on Monday.

Ms Faulkner's lawyer had said before the hearing that she had offered to drop her claim for sole custody of Lahela, 5, and Noah, 3, if Mr Elamine dropped the abduction charges.

But Mr Elamine had indicated this was unlikely.

On Monday, 60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown is pictured being forced into a police car in handcuffs as she was taken back to a Lebanese jail. She was expected to appear in court but the case was adjourned

Judge Rami Abdullah told reporters the matter would be adjourned until noon on Wednesday

Judge Rami Abdullah again stressed the seriousness of the charges the defendants were facing

Brown (right) and Sally Faulkner were pictured being led away in handcuffs from the Beirut court after the hearing was postponed

Lebanese authorities sought to shield Faulkner (left) and Brown (right), ordering reporters into a stairway before leading them down a hallway out of sight

Closed-door negotiations over the fate of Ms Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew were held in Beirut before judge Rami Abdullah, who adjourned the talks until Wednesday.

'This is the demand of the lawyers... to allow for negotiations,' the judge said in his office at the end of Monday's proceedings, at which Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner briefly appeared.

Again, he stressed the seriousness of the charges the defendants were facing.

'This is not a custody case,' Judge Abdullah said.

'They are charged with kidnapping two kids.'

Dramatic photographs have shown the moment Brown was forced into a police car in handcuffs before being taken back to a Lebanese jail.

Brown (pictured) was led into a judge's chambers in handcuffs on Monday over the failed bid to snatch the Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner's two children from her estranged husband's family

Wearing a black top Brown appeared calm as she was led away from Baabda Court in Beirut before she was put into a car by police officers

The father of the two children, Ali Elamine (above), involved in the 60 Minutes botched child abduction in Lebanon has spoken out, saying 'if the tables were turned I'd be called a terrorist and shot on the spot'

A policeman holds the back of Brown's hair as he puts her into the car on Monday

Wearing a black top, she looked dishevelled as she was manhandled by police who pushed her head down as she climbed into a car outside Baabda Court in Beirut.

It was the first time the presenter has been pictured since her arrest in Beirut on April 7, as she has spent almost two weeks in prison with her crew and Ms Faulkner.

But it was the third time the women had appeared in court following their arrest earlier this month after a 'child recovery' team snatched Ms Faulkner's two young children from a Beirut street as they were walking with their Lebanese grandmother.

The children were returned to their father soon after and the 60 Minutes team in Lebanon to film the operation - Ms Brown, Benjamin Williamson, David Ballment and Stephen Rice - were arrested.

Along with Ms Faulkner, they have been in jail in Beirut ever since.

Mr Elamine, was on the defensive when he arrived at the Baabda Palace of Justice on Monday, indicating he was not prepared to drop charges against his wife.

To do so, he said, would lead to the release of the Nine Network news team who filmed the 'child recovery' operation and those who carried it out.

Brown was pictured being forced into a police car before she was taken back to prison

Brown was pictured being escorted by police officers from the court in Beirut

Reporter Tara Brown (pictured) has been detained on kidnapping charges with a 60 Minutes crew that filmed the 'child abduction' of Sally Faulkner's two children in Lebanon on April 7

Sally Faulkner (pictured) travelled to Lebanon to retrieve her children, Noah, four, and Lahela, six

'The way they are trying to push for this is that if Sally [Faulkner] goes out on bail, they all get out,' the 32-year-old said as he prepared to meet Judge Abdullah.

'That is how I am seeing it as an outsider ... They are pushing for Sal's release and everyone else gets a green card.'

Nine had 'dropped the ball by getting involved in family matters' and now 'everyone is blaming the other for what happened', he added.

Negotiations had been progressing between lawyers for Ms Faulkner and Mr Elamine when 'suddenly Mr Elamine's lawyer said 'we are not in a hurry''.

Mr Elamine's lawyer said no deal had been reached between the couple but denied the Lebanese-American father was seeking a compensation payout.

'There is no agreement. Ali wants his kids, no matter what price he has to pay,' lawyer Hussein Barjawi told News Corp.

When asked whether Mr Elamine was seeking a financial payout, he said: 'It's all rumours. There is no compensation at all.'

Mr Elamine admitted his children 'probably' wanted to be with their mother but hardened his stance against 60 Minutes

Adam Whittington, (pictured) the chief planner of the 60 Minutes botched 'child abduction' in Lebanon, said on Sunday that he can prove Channel Nine paid him more than $115,000 for the snatch

A prison van believed to be carrying those accused of the botched kidnapping attempt in Lebanon arrived at Beirut's Baabda court on Monday

Ms Faulkner's claims her children Noah and Lahela were taken to Lebanon by her estranged husband Ali Elamine (pictured with Noah and Lahela) in 2015 and he refused to bring them back

It was reported that Mr Elamine said he would drop the charges against Ms Faulker if she agreed he could have sole custody

Ghassan Mughaghab (pictured), the lawyer for Brisbane woman Sally Faulkner, said negotiations between Mr Elamine and Ms Faulkner had broken down

A lawyer for Network Nine, Kamal Aboudaher, said the TV channel had not offered any financial compensation to Mr Elamine to try to resolve the issue.

'We didn't exchange any offer with Ali regarding funds,' he said outside the court.

Mr Elamine earlier claimed he was still married to Ms Faulkner and that he secured custody in June 2015.

But he conceded that the two young children 'probably' wanted to be with their mother.

'They're kids, they always want what they don't have. When you take kids to a toy store they want the whole store,' he said, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

'Am I open [to letting the children travel to Australia?] I'm not 100 per cent sure about that,' he said.

The two others facing charges are believed to be members of the child-recovery agency hired for the operation - Britons Craig Michael and Adam Whittington.

For the past two weeks, Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner have been held at Baabda Central Women's Prison (pictured)

The prison is a grim, overcrowded block housing mostly murderers and drug dealers with up to 20 women per cell

'It will help everybody, I think. It will help everybody': Ms Faulkner's lawyer says that if Mr Elamine drops the personal kidnapping charges against her, it will have a favourable flow-on effect for the whole team

Sally Faulkner's lawyer has reportedly said she was paid for by the Nine Network and had used money given to her by 60 Minutes to the child recovery agency, Child Abduction Recovery International

Veteran journalist Stephen Rice (left), David Ballment (centre) and Benjamin Williamson (right) are also in custody in Lebanon

All involved are facing charges of kidnapping and being members of a criminal gang, which can attract maximum sentences of up to three years and 10 years respectively.

In her only interview on the matter so far, Ms Faulkner told The Australian on Friday she was doing well behind bars at Baabda Central Women's Prison in south-eastern Beirut.

'Please tell my mum and dad how well I am and also [husband] Brendan and my in-laws,' she said. Ms Brown is also behind bars at the prison.

'I am fine but my loved ones need to know that.'

The Channel Nine TV crew was planning to film Faulkner's attempt to retrieve her children Noah, three, and Lahela, five, from her ex-husband Ali Elamine, who she claims kept them in Lebanon without her permission.

Prosecutors had earlier claimed they had a signed statement from a member of the recovery team saying Nine had paid $115,000 for the operation.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has told The Project that she is in 'constant contact' with her Lebanese counterpart, Gebran Bassil, regarding the case.

CCTV footage supplied by Lebanese authorities appeared to show the bungled kidnapping earlier this week




A rapist who threatened to kill the families of his victims has lost a bid to appeal his conviction.

Melbournes Noureldin Darwish, who is morbidly obese and has reportedly been binge eating in jail since being put behind bars in 2013, spun a web of deceit to terrify his victims and force them to repeatedly have sex with him.

The 29-year-old man's bid for an early release at the Victorian Court of Appeal was declined after reports emerged he was being bullied in jail, reports the Herald Sun.

In an exclusive interview with Daily Mail Australia Darwish's father, Maged, said his son's weight had ballooned behind bars from the prison food and he now weight around 150kg.

'He is in Port Phillip prison. He has many problems, health problems and others in jail,' Mr Darwish said

Noureldin Darwish repeatedly raped one of his victims, both young women, and crushed the 17-year-old beneath his massive frame.

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Morbidly obese rapist Noureldin Darwish (pictured) who crushed his victims with his 150kg frame and threatened to kill their families with help from the Egyptian mafia or his cocaine kingpin connections has lost a bid to appeal his conviction

The 29-year-old Darwish (above, centre) claimed he owned a string of strip clubs and claimed he was Ali, an Islamic terrorist with links to Osama Bin Laden and the Egyptian Mafia, or Fernando, an international drug lord

Originally sentenced to more than 12 years with a non parole period of eight, Darwish wanted more time to lodge an appeal but the judges said he had no real chance of success and dismissed it, The Age reported.

Darwish, who weighs 150kg and is also incontinent, told his victims he was as an international drug lord, a multi-millionaire businessman and that he knew where Osama bin Laden was living.

Both of his victims  one of whom was a 17-year-old schoolgirl - said they were crushed by his weight after he repeatedly raped them.

He met his schoolgirl victim at Flinders St Station after offering her drugs for sexual favours in September 2010.

Noureldin Darwish (pictured) told Daily Mail Australia from prison on Tuesday that he was 'innocent and I've been framed' for two violent and threatening rapes for which he was sentenced to more than 12 years jail

Nourelin Darwish, 29, has had 'many many problems' while incarcerated in Port Phillip prison (pictured) his father told Daily Mail Australia

The unemployed Egyptian immigrant, who has an intellectual disability, was sentenced to a maximum of 12 years and three months imprisonment in 2013 for the rape of two young women.

She refused and gave Darwish a false name but he later contacted her on her mobile and told her she had to meet him.

He met with her at a hotel, told her he had a gun and then raped her repeatedly before telling her he would kill her family if she told the police.

Noureldin Darwish, 29, (picturde, left, and above right an image from his Facebook page) has reportedly been binge eating in Port Phillip prison in Victoria

Morbidly obese rapist Noureldin Darwish had a bid to appeal his sentence at the Victorian Supreme Court (pictured) denied this week

Darwish met his second victim, who was 23, in June 2011, after she rejected a job offer at one of his fictitious strip clubs.

Darwish told her he was an international cocaine importer and threatened to kill her family while making her watch if she did not comply.

He forced the victim to make several graphic videos and have unprotected sex with him on a number of occasions.

Judge Gabriele Cannon said both victims were left with psychological injuries.

She said while Darwish was mentally impaired there was extensive planning involved in his acts.

He was found guilty of 13 counts of rape, three counts of making threats to kill and two counts of false imprisonment. Darwish has also been placed on the sex offenders register for life.

Darwish met one of his victims at Flinders St Station (pictured) before he raped her and threatened to kill her family if she told the police

Calling from Port Phillip prison on Tuesday, Noureldin Darwish told Daily Mail Australia 'I am inncocent and I am going to prove my innocence. I've been framed.'

His father Maged claimed his son had been a victim of a jealous girlfriend and had 'a lot of problems in jail'.

Maged Darwish said he and his son, who had been born in Cairo, were the only two members of his immediate family in Australia.

Mr Darwish, a trained accountant, said his son's health problems were not being properly addressed in jail and that he needed to find a lawyer to help him.
The airline share price has suffered following the announcement

Fewer than anticipated have been flying due to job confidence

Flights are expected to drop in price as airlines compete for customers

Travellers can expect cheaper airfares following the announcement Qantas will cut capacity growth as airlines fight for customers.

The airline on Monday announced it would reduce the planned number of domestic flights on both Qantas and Jetstar in response to softening demand.

But the reduction in the number of seats is expected to accompany a fall in prices, as consumer demands falls and competition increases between airlines including Virgin and Tiger.

'There are certainly going to be cheaper fares across the board,' aviation and airline specialist Geoffrey Thomas told Daily Mail Australia.

'Over the next couple of months, I think you'll see some really good fares in the marketplace.'

Flights are expected to drop in price after Qantas announced it will cut capacity growth as airlines fight for customers (stock image)

Mr Thomas said Monday's announcement the airline would cut capacity growth is 'flagging that things are slowing up a little bit, which always means cheaper fares for consumers' because airlines will be 'looking to aggressively fill those seats'.

'It'll be good for consumers,' the editor-in-chief of Airline Ratings' Asia Pacific Bureau said.

He said both domestic and international flights 'will certainly be more competitive than they have been'.

However, he said prices had already been dropping in recent months.

Mr Thomas said one reason why passenger numbers were falling was is because a rising number of people were fearing they may lose their jobs.

'The problem [for airlines] is the 20 to 30 per cent of the population who think they might lose their job. Those people aren't flying,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'If people are concerned they're going to lose their job, they decide: "Instead of going on that trip, we'll cancel it". Or: "Instead of going to Los Angeles, we'll go to Hong Kong [because] it's cheaper".'

The airline on Monday announced it would reduce the planned number of domestic flights on both Qantas and Jetstar in response to softening demand (stock image)

Another reason why fewer people than expected were flying is in anticipation of the federal election, Mr Thomas said.

The economy waits in 'suspended animation' as people put off buying decisions to see which party is elected to government  because it could dictate the state of the economy, jobs, and disposable income.

For this reason, Mr Thomas expected the next few months leading up to the election to be cheapest for purchasing flights.

He said airlines would likely 'stimulate demand' for flights by driving down the price for deals 'too good to miss'.

Neil Hansford from Hansford Consulting told Daily Mail Australia he believes flight tickets will either remain the same price or decrease following the announcement.

Mr Thomas stressed Qantas was still 'forecasting growth, just not as strong as they originally thought'.

Instead of increasing capacity on domestic flights by about two per cent during April, May and June, Qantas said they instead expect to grow 75 per cent less  at just 0.5 per cent.

'Some softness in demand, related to the upcoming federal election and a recent drop in consumer confidence in Australia, began to emerge over the peak Easter and school holiday period in late March and continued to be seen in forward bookings,' the statement read.

Qantas had a turbulent day on the stock market on Monday following the announcement.

Its share price was down 9.5 per cent to $3.68 at 11am on Monday.

By 12.35pm on Tuesday, the Qantas share price had dropped further to $3.55.

Qantas had a turbulent day on the stock market on Monday following the announcement (stock image)

Its share price was down 9.5 per cent to $3.68 at 11am on Monday. By 12.35pm on Tuesday, the Qantas share price had dropped further to $3.55 (stock image)
A Catholic missionary nun from Northern Ireland who was teaching trainees how to play guitar at a school in Ecuador was among those killed in the country's deadliest earthquake in decades.

Sister Clare Theresa Crockett, 33, from Derry, was found dead among the debris in the coastal town of Playa Prieta following the 7.8-magnitude tremor quake which has killed at least 413 and injured thousands more.

Crockett had been teaching trainee nuns how to play guitar when the earthquake hit on Saturday, her religious congregation said. The bodies of three trainee nuns and two girls were also recovered.

Paying tribute to Crockett, her family said in a statement last night: 'We lost our daughter, sister and aunt Sister Clare Theresa Crockett as a result of the earthquake in Ecuador.

Sister Clare Theresa Crockett, 33, from Derry, Northern Ireland, was found dead among the debris in the coastal town of Playa Prieta following the 7.8-magnitude earthquake which devastated Ecuador on Saturday

Crockett had been teaching trainee nuns how to play guitar when the earthquake hit on Saturday, her religious congregation said. The bodies of three trainee nuns and two girls were also recovered yesterday afternoon

'She was situated in a school in Playa Prieta with the Home of the Mother Order. At this difficult time we would ask for privacy.'

Her cousin Emmet Doyle added: 'She was a superstar'.

Crockett, who featured in a movie about the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre as a teenager, gave up her acting career to join a religious order and work as a missionary around the world.

She had worked for the Catholic Home of the Mother Order in Ecuador for the last 15 years.

Fellow nun Sister Therese Ryan was dramatically saved by rescue teams who pulled her from the rubble along with four others yesterday.

Her friend, Sister Kristin Tenreiro, said she would be remembered for her smile and positive work.

'She gave herself to God and to the poor and the needy,' she said. 'I will remember her with a huge smile on her face, singing, writing songs and I will remember her jokes.'

On BBC Radio Foyle, Father Roland Colhoun from Derry, who had known Crockett since her teenage years, said the news of her death had devastated everyone who knew her and the wider community.

'We'll remember her with such affection,' he said.

Paying tribute to Crockett, her family said in a statement: 'We lost our daughter, sister and aunt Sister Clare Theresa Crockett as a result of the earthquake.' She had worked for the Catholic Home of the Mother Order

Crockett, who featured in a movie about the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre as a teenager, gave up her acting career to join a religious order 15 years ago and has since been working as a missionary around the world

Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster and Irish Foreign Minister Charlie Flanagan also paid tribute, along with local MP Mark Durkan.

'Derry's heartfelt sympathy goes out to all of the victims of the Ecuador earthquake - as people of the city always respond with solidarity and charity to natural disasters and other crises in the world,' he said.

'That humanitarian response will be more poignant as we know that a young Derry woman who dedicated her life to the service of others has lost her life in this tragedy.

Earlier yesterday, rescuers pulled three people out of the rubble alive after they had been trapped under a collapsed shopping centre for more than 32 hours.

Televised images of the dramatic pre-dawn rescue in the port city of Manta gave Ecuadoreans hope that some of the dozens of people still unaccounted for might yet be found even as the death toll from Saturday's quake rose to 413.

An American and two Canadians were among those confirmed dead from the worst quake to hit Ecuador in decades.

To reach the survivors trapped between the floor and roof of the collapsed shopping centre in Manta, firefighters cut a two-foot hole through concrete before pulling a woman out head first. A group of firefighters applauded as she emerged from the debris, disoriented, caked in dust and complaining of pain but otherwise in good health.

Later, at the same site, about 50 rescuers working with sniffer dogs, hydraulic jacks and a drill managed to free another woman and a young man. All three were rushed in ambulances to a nearby hospital. In total, eight people have been rescued from the site in the past 24 hours, according to firefighter Angel Moreira.

Sister Crockett had worked for the Catholic Home of the Mother Order in Ecuador (above) for the last 15 years

An air force soldier stands guard in front of buildings which were brought down by the earthquake in Manta, Ecuador. The 7.8-magnitude tremor quake has killed at least 413 people so far and injured thousands more

Authorities had hoped to save another woman whose legs were pinned by a heavy concrete slab. They were working to free her when they were forced to abandon the effort during an aftershock. When they returned the debris pile had moved and the woman was dead, Moreira said.

Christian Rivera, the head of emergency services for the capital, Quito, said that depending on the circumstances a person without serious injuries can survive up to a week under the rubble.

'After that, there's a quick decline ... and the rescuers' work becomes very difficult,' he said.

Still, there are good reasons to believe more people will be found alive in the coming hours as some 450 rescue workers from Spain, Peru, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, and elsewhere reached the most-affected areas along the Pacific coast. The U.S. has also offered assistance but so far President Rafael Correa, a strong critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, has yet to respond publicly.

Correa, upon arriving in Manta on Sunday night, said that the priority remains finding survivors.

'Our grief is very large, the tragedy is very large, but we'll find the way to move forward,' the Ecuadorean leader said, adding that the quake was the worst to hit the country since a 1949 earthquake in the Andean city of Ambato that took more than 5,000 lives. 'If our pain is immense, still larger is the spirit of our people.'

Manta, a thriving port city, was among the hardest-hit areas. Power cables were strewn across city streets as electricity in many neighbourhoods remained down. Among the many buildings that were flattened was a control tower at the airport that was home to U.S. anti-narcotics missions in South America until Correa kicked U.S. officials out.

Power cables were strewn across city streets as electricity in many neighbourhoods remained down following Saturday's earthquake. Pictured: One of the thousands of buildings destroyed by the quake in Pedernales

More than 3,000 packages of food and nearly 8,000 sleeping kits have been delivered to Ecuador to help

As well as Sister Crockett from Northern Ireland, an American and two Canadians were also among those confirmed dead from the worst earthquake to hit Ecuador in decades. Pictured: The aftermath in Manta

As rescuers scrambled through the ruins near the epicentre, in some cases digging with their hands to look for survivors, humanitarian aid began trickling in. More than 3,000 packages of food and nearly 8,000 sleeping kits were delivered on Sunday.

The quake knocked out power in many areas along the coast and some who fled to higher ground fearing a tsunami had no home to return to or feared structures still standing might collapse. The country's Geophysics Institute said it recorded 230 aftershocks as of Sunday night.

Spain's Red Cross said as many as 5,000 people may need temporary housing after the quake destroyed homes, and 100,000 may need some sort of aid.

State Department spokesman John Kirby didn't identify the American who was killed but said the U.S. government will work with Ecuadorean authorities to locate and ensure the well-being of all Americans. The area of pristine beaches where the quake struck is popular with American tourists and expat retirees.
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After patiently hiding in the treetops awaiting its prime opportunity to swoop, this is the dramatic moment a keen short-toed snake eagle launched its offensive on an unsuspecting cobra.

The large bird, which usually feasts on smaller reptiles, spotted a potential meal slithering around in the grass and prepared to swoop in on its prey in woodland just outside of Bangalore, India.

However, instead of successfully managing to startle the large cobra, the eagle ended up getting somewhat of a shock when the snake reared up in anger and launched its own mid-air strike.

After patiently hiding in the treetops awaiting its prime opportunity to swoop, the short-toed snake eagle launched its offensive on an unsuspecting cobra as it slithered around in the grass near Bangalore, India

The large eagle, which usually feasts on smaller reptiles, spotted a potential meal slithering around in the grass and swooped on its prey - but got a shock when the cobra reared up and launched its very own strike

Amateur photographer Vikram Ramesh caught the dramatic moment the snake launched up out of the grass and prepared to strike the eagle in mid-air. He said the two animals then began to fight for around 10 minutes

Dramatic pictures, taken by amateur photographer Vikram Ramesh, caught the moment the deadly snake reared up and lunged towards the eagle, forcing the savvy bird to swerve away from its fangs.

The eagle had already taken steps to surprise its unsuspecting victim, hiding out in a tree until the perfect moment for it to dive in, although the duel between the two predators lasted for over 10 minutes.

While usually the eagle  which has a reputation for killing cobras and is nicknamed the 'snake slayer' - would have won the fight, this time it left disappointed thanks to the level of confrontation it faced.

Mr Ramesh said: 'It was great to see the eagle swoop down on its prey, it was so quick and graceful, but deadly at the same time.

While usually the eagle  which has a reputation for killing cobras and is nicknamed the 'snake slayer' - would have won the fight, this time it left disappointed thanks to the level of confrontation it faced from the cobra

The large eagle had already taken steps to surprise its unsuspecting victim, hiding out in a tree until the perfect moment for it to dive in, although the duel between the two predators lasted for over 10 minutes

Having lost the battle, the short-toed snake eagle returned to its treetop - no doubt seeking out its next victim as it scanned the grass

'I thought that it would be over really quickly, but the cobra put up a stiff fight and the two of them were countering each other for at least 10 minutes.

'I think the eagle, despite its reputation, realised after a while that it probably wasn't going to be making a meal out of this particular snake and fluttered off to find easier pickings.
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The first time retired Olympic swimmer Eamon Sullivan and his fiancee, Naomi Bass, stepped into their North Perth home they knew it was the home for them.

Sullivan and Ms Bass moved into the four-bedroom, two-bathroom property earlier this year and have already made it their own with their three dogs - Harriet, Duke and Baxter.

'As soon as we walked in and saw the space, the backyard and the modern kitchen, and everything really done up, it was just perfect and we made an offer on the first day,' Sullivan told realestate.com.au.

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The first time retired Oympic swimmer Eamon Sullivan and his lawyer fiancee, Naomi Bass, stepped into their North Perth home they knew it was the house for them

The house is in close proximity their local cafe and boasted a large backyard for their dogs

The young couple want to raise a family in their new $1.2million pad

Real estate agents at Paragon Property in North Perth sold the house to the couple

'What I love about this house is it's sort of a mix of old and new. We saw photos of what it used to look like compared to what it looks like now and it's got its characteristics of the high ceilings, some of the old ceilings, the low archways, but it's in a new and more modern way. That's really what I love about it.'

The young couple, who want to raise a family in their new $1.12 million pad, said its size was a big factor in their decision as well as its close proximity to their local cafe.

'We want to have a family in the next few years so we've got plenty of space [at this house],' Ms Bass, a lawyer, said.

There is also room in the house for Sullivan to finally hang up his swimming memorabilia, which he has never put on display.

The champion swimmer, who won two silvers and one bronze at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, said he felt it was time after he retired from the sport in 2014.

'Over the years, I've always had [the memorabilia] tucked away and in a drawer,' Sullivan said.

'Now that I'm retired I'm now sort of in that reflective period especially with the Olympics coming up.'

And of course, the former Olympian-turned-restaurateur wanted enough space to add a swimming pool to the property.

There is also room in the house for Sullivan to finally hang up his swimming memorabilia (right), which he had not displayed before. On the left are some homewares around the house

One of the four bedrooms inside the couple's North Perth home

The couple's house is a mix of modern and vintage fixtures (left), including a brown leather couch and a mock marble coffee table (right)

Sullivan wants to add a backyard swimming pool to the home. He grew up with one and remembers the times fondly

Sullivan and Ms Bass moved into the four-bedroom, two-bathroom property earlier this year and have already made it their own with their three dogs - Harriet, Duke and Baxter (pictured)

'The one thing from my childhood that I want to get in the home here would be pool. I grew up with a backyard pool,' Sullivan said.

'I spent so much time, my sister and I, playing in there and actually did a little swimming now and then. Just having that freedom when it's hot to jump in a cold pool is something we want.

'My career sort of started with the backyard pool. I think I was two years old and I was on my little tricycle and at that time you didn't need pool fences.

'A plane was flying over above and everyone looked up [at it] and I've ridden straight into the pool and sunk to the bottom.

'It was from them I started doing swimming lessons.'

Sullivan was very particular about the house-hunting process, with Ms Bass saying he would take his time before forming an opinion about the home

The couple got engaged last year after Sullivan proposed to Ms Bass in Japan

The home has frosted windows and a wooden fence separating the footpath. On the right is the couple's dining room

Sullivan and his fiancee had previously lived in Sydney but made his way back to his hometown and selling his east coast home in 2009

The couple's home is an eclectic mix of modern and vintage homewares, with their dining room featuring a long wooden table with white woven chairs.

Their living room has a 1970s vibe with a brown leather couch, a mock marble coffee table and a multi-coloured, zig-zag patterned rug.

Sullivan was very particular about the house-hunting process, with Ms Bass saying he would take his time before forming an opinion about the home.

'Eamon started a new rule that I wasn't allowed to talk to him until he looked through the whole house,' she said.

'Otherwise I'd walk through and say, "We could do this here and we could do this here", and he said, "Could we just look at this one and just not say anything until I've had the opportunity to look?"

Sullivan previously lived in Sydney, purchasing a home on the east coast in 2009, but the swimmer made his way back to his hometown in 2012 and sold his NSW home in 2015, according to Perth Now.
A former police officer convicted in the shooting death of an unarmed man in a darkened stairwell was spared prison on Tuesday, and a judge reduced his manslaughter conviction to a lesser charge.

Peter Liang was sentenced to five years' probation and 800 hours of community service in the 2014 shooting of Akai Gurley, who was walking down a stairway in a Brooklyn public housing complex when the rookie officer fired a bullet into the dark - by accident after being startled, he said. The bullet ricocheted and killed Gurley, 28.

'Given the defendant's background and how remorseful he is, it would not be necessary to incarcerate the defendant to have a just sentence in this case,' Brooklyn state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun said in sentencing Liang, also 28.

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Peter Liang (leaving court, left and right) was sentenced to five years of probation and 800 hours of community service as he was sentenced for killing 28-year-old Akai Gurley on Tuesday

A jury had convicted him in February of a manslaughter charge carrying up to 15 years in prison.

But Chun on Tuesday reduced the offense to criminally negligent homicide, which carries up to four years in prison.

Both prosecutors and defense lawyers on Tuesday urged Chun not to hold Liang responsible for the actions of other officers.

'This simply is not a case of police brutality,' said Assistant District Attorney Joseph Alexis. 'From the beginning until now, this prosecution has always been about justice; it's not about revenge.'

District Attorney Kenneth Thompson skipped the sentencing. His office had recommended five years of probation, six months of home confinement and 500 hours of community service.

Liang was patrolling a stairway in a Brooklyn public housing complex in 2014 when he heard a sound that startled him and he accidentally fired his gun - hitting Gurley (pictured), father of a young daughter

Melissa Butler, Akai Gurley's girlfriend who was with him at the time of his death, cries as she is escorted out of the courtroom by Assemblyman Charles Barron in New York on Tuesday

Activists protest against the non-prison sentence received by former New York Police Officer Peter Liang for manslaughter in the killing of Akai Gurley, outside a Brooklyn courthouse in New York on Tuesday

Some members of Gurley's family said they felt betrayed by prosecutor's recommendation and had hoped Chun would sentence Liang to prison anyway.

In a victim-impact statement, the girlfriend who was with him at the time of the shooting told Liang that 'you took a piece of me, you took a piece of my heart'.

'Akai took his last breath and died in my hands,' Melissa Butler said. 'Im suffering while you still have your life.'

Kimberly Bollinger, the mother of Gurley's young daughter, also spoke and said: 'I will never forget the words of [Mayor Bill] de Blasio when he said [Gurley] should still be alive.'

The shooting happened in a year of debate nationwide about police killings of black men.

Activists have looked to Liang's trial as a counterweight to cases in which grand juries have declined to indict officers, including the cases of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York.

Like Gurley, Brown and Garner were black and unarmed. Liang is Chinese-American.

In this Jan. 29, 2015 file photo, Kimberly Ballinger, the mother of Gurley's daughter, holds a news conference in New York

Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson cautioned that Liang's case shouldn't be commingled with others.

But relatives of other New Yorkers killed in police encounters had joined Gurley's family outside court during the trial to call for police accountability.

Meanwhile, Liang's supporters have said he has been made a scapegoat for past injustices.

Chinese-American activists even organized their own protests, claiming Liang was serving as a scapegoat for police misconduct.

An additional 200 police officers were stationed outside of court today in case there were any flare ups between Liang supporters and Gurley supporters.

The missteps made by Liang after the shooting were on display during the trial, including that he failed to aid the bleeding Gurley as the dying man's girlfriend frantically performed CPR.

A neighbor called out instructions delivered from a 911 operator on the phone.

Liang and his partner, who wasn't charged and testified during the trial, said they didn't help because they weren't well-trained.

The admissions prompted an internal investigation into training by Commissioner William Bratton.
A 71-year-old Florida Roman Catholic priest missing since last week has been found dead in Georgia, police said Monday night.

The body of the Rev. Rene Wayne Robert was found in Waynesboro after the man arrested while driving the priest's car led police there, St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar said at a news conference.

Steven James Murray, 28, was arrested Wednesday night in Aiken, S.C., with numerous weapons in the St. Augustine-based priest's car.

Arrest: The body of the Rev. Rene Wayne Robert (left) was found in Georgia after Steven James Murray (right), 28, who was driving the priest's car led police to his corpse

Shoar said he expects Murray will be charged with first-degree murder and kidnapping.

The sheriff said motive was unclear at this point but the Franciscan priest had tried to help Murray, who the sheriff characterized as a 'career criminal,' after he was recently released from jail.

Investigators think Robert was killed April 10, the last night he was seen.

A cause of death has yet to be determined, but Shoar said 'it was obvious he was the victim of homicidal violence.'

An emotional Shoar called Robert a dear friend and described the investigation as the most intense of his career.

'I just really wish we had better news tonight,' he said.

Murray has been charged with aggravated fleeing and attempting to elude related to his arrest.

Aiken County Sheriff's spokesman Eric Abdullah wrote in a statement that deputies and U.S. marshals responded to Murray's last known location Wednesday afternoon.

As they approached the 2012 blue Toyota Corolla with Florida license plates, Murray drove away and crashed into a tree, then fled on foot, Abdullah wrote. Bloodhounds and a helicopter tracked Murray down and he was arrested, according to the statement.
Police did not storm the Lindt Cafe earlier in the December 2014 siege over fears gunman Man Haron Monis had a bomb, it has been revealed.

Superintendent Allan Sicard told the Sydney siege inquest on Tuesday time could sometimes negate the risks faced by hostages.

He was the acting Sydney City Local Area commander during the ordeal, a role that had him leading the forward command in the early hours of the December 2014 siege.

Superintendent Allan Sicard (left, in 2008) told the Sydney siege inquest on Tuesday he did not instruct police to enter the Lindt Cafe during the early hours over fears Man Monis had a bomb

Man Haron Monis held 18 people hostage during the during the terrifying 16-hour standoff in 2014

Superintendent Sicard said there were no triggers to implement the emergency plan when he was in charge

'In the two hours I was there, the incident never escalated to a level that I thought we needed to implement an emergency action plan,' he said.

Triggers for the emergency plan, he understood, were the death or serious injury of a hostage, or the imminent threat of either of those.

During questioning by Gabrielle Bashir, who is representing the family of cafe manager Tori Johnson who was killed by Monis, Superintendent Sicard admitted the fatal shooting of a victim would be a failure by police to protect that person.

However he also said there were other considerations including the suspected bomb and safety of others in the cafe.

'In the cold context of the question I would say we haven't protected that person but there are multiple other people in that room that have to be taken into consideration as well,' he said.

He said if police charged in during those two hours and killed Man Haron Monis, it might have caused the suspected explosive devices to go off, unnecessarily killing hostages.

Terrified hostages were seen sprinting from the cafe at the end of the siege in 2014

Jieun Bae was pictured running towards waiting police as she fled the scene of the Sydney cafe siege

Earlier on Tuesday he told the inquest he didn't initially consider the siege to be an event of 'violent extremism'.

As he saw it, police were dealing with one man with a shotgun, a believed explosive device and a flag purporting to represent Islamic State.

'Our response was pretty well, in the first two hours, what I would do anyway in response to that sort of incident,' Supt Sicard said.

The siege was later classified as a terrorist incident after an application by police.

Senior NSW Police are continuing to give evidence to the inquest on Tuesday about police management of the December 2014 siege.

The force is expected to make an application to the State Coroner on Tuesday for all evidence from senior officers and those who stormed the Lindt cafe to be heard in secret

Police only initiated the Emergency Action Plan and stormed the cafe after Tori Johnson (left) was shot dead in the back of the head at 2.13am on December 16. Barrister Katrina Dawson (right) was hit by a police bullet

Monis took control of the Lindt Cafe shortly before 10am on December 15, prompting a siege that lasted more than 16 hours

Earlier it was reported a police sniper asked for permission to take a 'kill shot' at Sydney siege gunman Man Haron Monis seven hours before the two hostages were killed.

NSW Police is fighting to keep this and other revelations about police involvement and tactics under wraps during the inquest in an attempt to protect their 'methodology'.

The force was expected to make an application to the State Coroner on Tuesday for all evidence from senior officers and those who stormed the Lindt cafe to be heard in secret.

The Daily Telegraph revealed that one of the three snipers believed he could fatally shoot Monis at 7.30pm on 15 December 2014 and asked if he could take the shot.

But senior officers refused the request and instead decided to continue with a policy to negotiate with the extremist who held 18 hostages during the terrifying 16-hour standoff.

Police only initiated the Emergency Action Plan and stormed the cafe after Tori Johnson was shot dead in the back of the head at 2.13am on December 16.

Barrister Katrina Dawson, 38, was then fatally struck by six fragments of police bullets when the siege reached its bloody end.
A man has been seriously injured after an explosion next to a pub owned by AFL superstar Dane Swan.

The construction worker was at a property next to the Albion Hotel in South Melbourne, working on a gas tank or pipe when the accident took place about 12:30pm on Thursday, 3AW Radio reports.

He was rushed to The Alfred Hospital with burns to his chest, where he remains in a serious condition.

A construction worker was hospitalised after an explosion at a building site next to a pub owned by Collingwood star Dane Swan (pictured, with his partner Taylor Wilson)

A man has been seriously injured after an explosion next to the Albion Hotel in South Melbourne on Tuesday afternoon (pictured)

Collingwood Magpies superstar Dane Swan (pictured) is a co-owner of the Albion Hotel, where the explosion took place

A witness said he heard a 'significant' blast while working about 300 metres away, according to The Age.

The Albion Hotel - owned by Swan, former Melbourne Storm players Robbie Kearns and Danny Williams, gym operator Mark Armstrong and nightclub promoter Ben Vague - is currently undergoing renovations after it was targetted in an arson attack last October.

More than 70 firefighters were called to tackle the massive blaze last October, after nearby construction workers said they saw two men wearing balaclavas enter the pub and allegedly punch a worker in the face, just before the fire started.

'The fire has extended to all three levels and surrounding buildings are being evacuated,' the Metropolitan Fire Board said at the time.

It is believed the injured man is a construction worker and was near a gas pipe or tank before the explosion

The Albion Hotel was the target of a massive arson attack in October last year (pictured)

'There are also concerns about the structural integrity of the building with cracks appearing in some walls.'

The Albion Hotel was just weeks away from reopening after substantial renovations when the arson attack took place.

Swan has played 258 games for Collingwood, but his 2016 season was put in serious doubt after suffering a leg injury just seconds into the first game of the year.

More than 70 firefighters were called to tackle the massive blaze that significantly damaged the pub last year

Nearby construction workers said they saw two men wearing balaclavas enter the pub and allegedly punch a worker in the face just before the fire started last year
It comes just a week after Taliban announced the start of spring offensive, vowing an escalation of terror attacks

President Ashraf Ghani condemned attack 'in strongest possible terms' from palace few hundred metres from blast

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Taliban militants attacked an office of Afghanistan's main security agency with a suicide car bomb and gunfire on Tuesday, killing at least 30 people and wounding over 320 in their first assault on the capital since declaring a spring offensive.

President Ashraf Ghani condemned the attack 'in the strongest possible terms' in a statement from the presidential palace, just a few hundred metres away from the scene of the blast in central Kabul.

The area has been surrounded by government forces and dozens of ambulances have rushed to the scene.

Witness said the attack began with a suicide car bomb during the height of the morning rush hour and security forces and militants then exchanged gunfire.

Pictures showed windows blown out at the front of an office that houses a National Directorate of Security (NDS) unit.

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Afghan soldiers inspect the site of a suicide car bomb and gun attack that targeted the office of Afghanistan's security agency in Kabul

Pictures showed windows blown out and crumbling masonry at the front of an office that houses a National Directorate of Security unit

A man stands inside his damaged shop near the scene of a Taliban bomb blast that targeted the Ministry of Defense in Kabul, Afghanistan

The Health Ministry said civilians and members of the Afghan security forces were among those caught in the attack, and several people had been killed and more than 200 wounded.

Those casualty numbers were expected to rise, said ministry spokesman Ismail Kawosi.

The Taliban announced the beginning of their spring offensive on April 12, and fighting has raged around the symbolically important northern city of Kunduz since then, although the capital had been relatively quiet.

Kunduz, Afghanistan's fifth-largest city, fell briefly to the Taliban last September in the biggest blow to Ghani's government since NATO-led forces ended their combat operations at the end of 2014.

A wounded Afghan is treated at a hospital after a Taliban-claimed suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan

Afghan health workers move a wounded Afghan at a hospital after a Taliban-claimed suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan

The Taliban said on their Pashto-language website that they had carried out the suicide bombing on 'Department 10', an NDS unit which is responsible for protecting government ministers and VIPs.

They said a suicide car bomber blew up the main gate at the front of the office, allowing other fighters, including more suicide bombers, to enter the heavily guarded compound.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a separate statement that the attackers were engaged in a gunbattle with Afghan security forces inside the building.

It was not immediately possible to verify the details of the Taliban's claim with government officials. The Islamist group often exaggerates details of attacks against government and military targets.

Afghan soldiers respond to a Taliban-claimed suicide attack that targeted an office of Afghanistan's main security agency in Kabul

On alert: An Afghan soldier takes up position in central Kabul. Taliban insurgents have stepped up their attacks against the security forces since announcing the start of their spring offensive last week

Afghan security forces secure the area after a suicide bomb and gun attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, which has been claimed by the Taliban

The Taliban-led insurgency has gained strength since the withdrawal of most international combat troops, and the Taliban are believed to be stronger than at any point since they were driven from power by U.S.-backed forces in 2001.

A thick plume of black smoke was seen rising from the area near the sprawling U.S. embassy complex in the centre of Kabul immediately after the blast.

Warning sirens blared out for some minutes from the embassy compound, which is also close to the headquarters of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission.

The U.S. embassy and the NATO mission both said they were not affected by the blast.

An Afghan security force soldier responds to a Taliban-claimed suicide attack in the capital Kabul
Eight students have staged a naked protest after it was revealed the University of Melbourne would continue to invest in the fossil fuel industry.

The students climbed onto the roof of the Old Quad building at 10am on Tuesday and stripped off their clothes to reveal the message 'drop your assets' painted onto their bare backs and buttocks.

The group is protesting against the university's administration after it was revealed that it would continue to invest in the fossil fuel industry.

Eight students have staged a naked protest after it was revealed the University of Melbourne would continue to invest in the fossil fuel industry

The students climbed onto the roof of the Old Quad building at 10am on Tuesday and stripped off their clothes to reveal the message 'drop your assets' painted onto their bare backs and buttocks

'We've had to be courageous and we're showing the University everything we've got,' said Master of Environment student Anastasia Gramatakos.

'It's now their turn to show us what they've got - to show some courage and take action against the fossil fuel industry.'

They remained on the building's roof for 10 minutes before security asked them to leave.

The student group Fossil Free MU launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign in June 2013.

The nude students held a banner that read: 'No sustainability without divestment' on the roof of the Old Quad

In three years of campaigning, the students have held referendums, rallies, and forums to engage students, staff and the university council to promote divestment.

Since late 2015, the group have been engaging with the University's Sustainability Executive to push for divestment via formal pathways.

But in a meeting conducted last Thursday between Fossil Free MU members and Chief Financial Officer Alan Tait, Mr Tait reiterated the university's stance that they would not be committing to divestment.

'Rapid divestment from fossil fuels is a crucial step on the pathway to a safe climate future,' said Professor John Wiseman, Deputy Director of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute.

The group is protesting against the university's administration after it was revealed that it would continue to invest in the fossil fuel industry

'Divestment from fossil fuels is therefore an urgent ethical and financial responsibility for all Australian investors and institutions  including universities.'

The current campaign is part of a national fossil fuel divestment effort that is taking place at seven universities across the country, including the Australian National University, The University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland, the Queensland University of Technology, The University of Sydney, and Monash University.

Two universities, the University of Sydney and the Australian National University, have already made partial divestment commitments, and Swinburne University is in the process of seeking an investment fund that can provide a fossil free portfolio.

The student group Fossil Free MU launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign in June 2013 at the University of Melbourne (pictured)
A mother has won $50 million from a hospital six years after a doctor left her with irreperable wounds during a natural childbirth.

Llaulin Cruz, 38, has had permanent bladder issues, forcing her to wear panty liners every waking hour, since delivering her daughter in 2009 at St Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, New York.

It means she can't have sex with her husband, struggles to work, and endures hours of pain a day.

A jury heard her obstetrician Dr Michael Ihemaguba carried on ordering Cruz to push long after her newborn had crowned during the birth six years ago.

He then made a surgical incision in her vagina, an episiotomy, which is advised against by the US obstetricians board. And the jury heard he did not properly stitch up the wound.

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Llaulin Cruz (left) has won $50 million in compensation six years after being wounded in childbirth. A court heard her obstetrician Dr Michael Ihemaguba (right) made a surgical incision that never healed. Cruz, 38, is pictured during one of the 12 operations she has undergone in the years since to repair her pelvic region

Now, Cruz (pictured at a press conference after winning her trial on Monday) can't have sex with her husband, struggles to work, and endures hours of pain a day. She says she has to wear panty liners every waking hour

Cruz, pictured with her husband and their two children. It could take years to receive their $50 million payout

WHAT IS AN EPISIOTOMY? An episiotomy is a surgical cut made in the perineum - the muscular space between the vagina and the anus. The procedure was common until the 1990s, when studies began to suggest the operation could create more problems than resolutions. Today, American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises against episiotomies, saying there is no concrete evidence the procedure provides any relief to the pelvic region during childbirth. Studies suggest natural tears recover more quickly than surgical ones. Advertisement

Unaware of the botched wound, Cruz got pregnant again a year later, and it ripped when she gave birth naturally. In the six years since, she has had more than 12 operations to repair the tear.

On Monday, after a month-long jury trial, Cruz was awarded $40 million for future pain and damage, and $10 million for past suffering.

Dr Ihemaguba was deemed 90 per cent responsible for the damage.

The jury also blamed the midwife of the second birth, Gloria Murray, for not noticing the extent of Cruz's vaginal wounds.

Speaking after the verdict, Cruz told reporters she was glad of the victory, but insists nothing can make up for the damage.

'Most of the time I'm having sharp pain in my private area,' Cruz, who hails from the Dominic Republic, told reporters in a press conference filmed by NBC.

'I'm always going to be in pain, always have a problem going to the bathroom. Be like that the rest of my life.'

The injuries, she explained, have affected her ability to work and ruined her sex life with her husband.

She told the New York Daily News: 'We don't have any sexual relationship at all. There's just too much pain.'

Dr Ihemaguba, who is still a licensed medic but has not worked since 2014 due to a spinal injury, dismissed the jury's verdict as 'emotional'.

He insists he performed the episiotomy after he detected that the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby girl's neck.

And he maintains he adequately stitched up the incision, and that Cruz did not complain about it.

An episiotomy is a surgical cut made in the perineum - the muscular space between the vagina and the anus.

Unaware of the botched wound, Cruz (pictured with her kids) got pregnant again a year later, and it ripped again when she gave birth naturally. In the six years since, she has had more than 12 operations to repair the tear

Cruz's attorney Edward Sanocki said it will likely be at least two years until she receives any of her award from Dr Ihemaguba, midwife Murray, and St Barnabas Hospital (file image pictured)

The procedure was common until the 1990s, when studies began to suggest the operation could create more problems than resolutions.

Today, American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises against episiotomies, saying there is no concrete evidence the procedure provides any relief to the pelvic region during childbirth.

Studies suggest natural tears recover more quickly than surgical ones.
Smashed by the 43C heat he quickly became

A British documentary film crew hunting for deadly animals on a remote Australian island got more than they bargained for when they found a castaway fisherman stranded by the rocks.

Jeremy Wade of Animal Planet's 'River Monsters' was exploring the waters of Barranyi North Island, an uninhabitable cluster of islands 750 kilometres south-east of Darwin, for the 'giant grouper' fish.

But as his five-man crew drove through the crocodile-infested waters they spotted a bright-blue cooler box floating in the water.

Intrigued, they headed towards it, only to see a half-naked man emerge out of a cave waving his arms wildly in the air.

A British documentary film crew found a castaway fisherman stranded on Barranyi North Island

The crew initially spotted a cooler box floating in the crocodile-infested waters, but a man emerged out of a nearby cave waving his arms in the air

The man, known only as Tremine, told the crew he had left his boat to hunt for oysters but quickly became disoriented in the heat

The man, a roofer from Borroloola in the Northern Territory known only as Tremine, had lost track of where his boat was after leaving it to dig for oysters a few days earlier.

Smashed by temperatures in excess of 43C (109F), Tremine had quickly became disoriented and landlocked, severely dehydrated and too weak to explore for fresh water or food. He was 60 miles form the nearest township.

'With every hour that passed his chances of survival diminished,' Mr Wade said. 'One more day on the beach and he would have died.' He said the man was yelling, 'Give me a drink, give me a drink.'

Stephen Shearman, director of the episode 'Death Down Under,' told Inside Edition that Tremine was just hours from dying when they found him. He said 'this guy' with no clothes on came running out of the cave waving his arms.

'He had said his last prayer ... He was prepared to die and meet his maker,' Mr Shearman said.

'Everything was fine, and within two to three hours, everything wasn't really fine at all,' Shearman said. 'In his own words, he was 'preparing to die'.'

The film crew's director said the man was just hours from dying of dehydration when they found him

Tremine spent the night in the film crew's lodge and was rehydrated and right to go home the next day

Tremine, who was known personally by the film crew's local tour guide, was an experienced fisherman who regularly made the trip to the region.

Mr Shearman said that Tremine had then spent the night with the crew in their lodge, and was rehydrated and fit to return home the next day - with nothing more than a bruised ego.

'He's given up smoking, but he's promised God he's going to start smoking again. If he had a lighter, he'd be able to cook, and he'd have a fire,' Shearman said light-heartedly.

Jeremy Wade, the host of Animal Planet's 'River Monsters,' is renowned for dealing with deadly creatures
was chasing a ball in a park in Perth

A pet dog was washed down an uncovered stormwater drain in front of his distraught 11-year-old owner in Perth on Monday night.

The chocolate Labrador named Rochester was chasing a ball at about 8pm in Cliff Sadlier Reserve, in the western suburb of Daglish.

He ran towards the uncovered drain and was washed down it, reported WA Today.

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Rochester, a chocolate Labrador, was chasing a ball in a park in Perth on Monday night when he was washed down a drain

Water Corporation Perth regional manager, Garth Walter, said they received a call from a City of Subiaco ranger to report the missing dog.

The Water Corporation visited the park an hour later and searched for the dog in the drain without success.

'We returned the following day and worked through to Thursday night, undertaking an extensive search of more than five kilometres of drain, which included 1.2 kilometres of specialised CCTV inspections,' Mr Walter said.

'Our drains are either fenced or have screens installed on inlet and outlet points to prevent people and animals from entering them.

'This section of drain in Cliff Sadlier Reserve is not fenced, as it was designed to be integrated into the surrounding park land, but it did have a safety screen installed.

'However, at some point the screen has been removed by an unknown party.

'On Tuesday morning, a temporary grid mesh was installed over the inlet to ensure community safety.'

Mr Walter said the community's safety was the top priority and they were taking a number of steps to prevent it from recurring.

'For this location, we will re-install the safety screen and install a barrier fence around the immediate section of the drain,' he said.

The Bureau of Meteorology said Monday night was the most rainfall Perth has experienced in a single night since August.

The drain in Cliff Sadlier Reserve, a park in the western suburbs of Perth is usually covered by a screen which was missing at the time

The Water Corporation said the screen had been removed by an unknown party and they were looking into it

Along with rangers from The City of Subiaco, the Water Corporation searched 5km of drain and checked CCTV footage but could not locate the missing dog

A temporary grid mesh screen was installed over the stormwater drain opening until the safety screen is reinstalled

The family are reportedly devastated at the loss of their pet, with flowers, notes and a stuffed today left near the park drain
The co-founders of Ben & Jerry's have been arrested at the U.S. Capitol as part of ongoing protests in Washington about the role of money in politics.

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were among approximately 300 people who were arrested Monday as part of protests by a group called Democracy Awakening.

The Vermont-based ice cream company's website says the purpose of the protests is to make sure everyone's voice is heard 'and that power in this country is returned to the people.'

'If you care about something, you have to be willing to risk it all - your reputation, your values, your business - for the greater good,' the statement said.

Vermont ice cream entrepreneurs Ben Cohen, left, and Jerry Greenfield, right, were arrested on Monday for taking part in a protest against big money in politics. Pictured above at the Monday demonstration

Video shows the moment Ben Cohen (left) was arrested at the scene and then released

Greenfield is seen center leaving the capitol on Thursday after his arrest. Ben & Jerry plan to stump for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in Delaware on Tuesday

Cohen said in a separate statement that 'the history of our country is that nothing happens until people start putting their bodies on the line and risk getting arrested.'

Actress Rosario Dawson and Harvard Professor Larry Lessig were also arrested.

The group has been protesting at the Capitol since April 11, resulting in the arrest of more than 1,200.

The group's main concerns is getting President Obama's Supreme Court nominee appointed so that the Citizen's United decision can be overturned.

The company posted this picture to their Instagram account on Monday, explaining Democracy Awakening's goals for voter reform

The decision resulted in the expansion of voting rights for corporations.

The group also wishes to restore protections against voter discrimination and to enact a form of small-donor campaign funding.

U.S. Capitol Police say those arrested were charged with crowding, obstructing or incommoding, which is unlawful demonstration activity.

They were processed on the scene and released.

On Tuesday, Ben & Jerry plan to stump for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in Delaware.
Two more possible pieces arrived in Canberra for testing last Wednesday

Code 67EB' and words NO STEP on debris proved they were from MH370

Unique stencil codes used by Malaysia airlines prove almost certainly that two pieces of aircraft debris found in Mozambique are from missing flight MH370.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has concluded the two parts - a flap track fairing and a segment of the horizontal stabilizer - were from the doomed plane, which disappeared on March 8 2014 with 239 people aboard.

The flap track fairing was found by South African teenager Liam Lotter while holidaying with his family in Mozambique in late December, while a US blogger found the stabiliser in February.

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Unique stencil codes (pictured) used by Malaysia airlines have proven almost certainly that two pieces of aircraft debris found in Mozambique are from missing flight MH370

Missing flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing

Lotter's family took the piece home to South Africa and only realised the significance of their find after another piece of debris was found by Blaine Gibson on a sandbank off Mozambique about three months later.

The US blogger and lawyer found the section of horizontal stabiliser while on a global mission to find answers for MH370 families in February.

The report revealed that the code 67EB' and the words NO STEP written on the debris provided near undeniable evidence that they were from the Boeing 777.

The flap track fairing was found by South African teenager Liam Lotter (pictured) while holidaying with his family in Mozambique in late December

The report stated that the first piece had been re-painted, which was consistent with Malaysia Airlines maintenance records.

The 676EB stencil font and colour was not original from manufacture, but instead conformed to that developed and used by Malaysia Airlines during painting operations, reads the report.

The second piece had stencilling that was consistent with Malaysia Airlines.

The second part was primarily identified from images showing the materials, construction and NO STEP stencil, as a segment of a Boeing 777 RH horizontal stabilizer panel

The second part was primarily identified from images showing the materials, construction and NO STEP stencil, as a segment of a Boeing 777 RH horizontal stabilizer panel.

An ASTB spokesperson said that two further items including a possible piece of cabin found on Rodrigues Island and an engine part with a Rolls Royce logo found in South Africa arrived in Canberra for testing last Wednesday.

'Investigators from the ATSB and the Malaysian authorities are currently examining those two pieces for details which would serve to identify them as coming from a Boeing 777, and in particular for any details which might serve to link the debris as coming from MH370.'

Missing flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

An ASTB spokesperson said that two further items including a possible piece of cabin and an engine part with a Rolls Royce logo (pictured) found in South Africa arrived in Canberra for testing last Wednesday
Two men have been found guilty of the murder of asylum seeker Reza Barati (pictured)

Two men have been found guilty of the murder of asylum seeker Reza Barati at the Manus Island detention centre two years ago.

The Papua New Guinea National Court sentenced Joshua Kavulia and Louie Efi to 10 years, with five suspended, the ABC reports.

Mr Barati, 23, from Iran, died after riots inside the Australian-run detention centre on February 17, 2014.

Sentencing trial judge Nicholas Kirriwom said the pair received a lower sentence because other people were involved but had not been charged, the ABC reported.

At least 69 other people were injured in the incident.

Then immigration minister Scott Morrison initially called the riot a disturbance that had caused minor damage.

Details subsequently emerged that PNG locals, riot police and the centre's own security guards had invaded the compound and begun beating refugees.

Kaluvia, a Salvation Army worker at the detention centre, was on the run for five months before his arrest.

The Papua New Guinea National Court sentenced Joshua Kavulia and Louie Efi to 10 years, with five suspended, over the death on Manus Island (stock image)

A report by former senior public servant Robert Cornall found Mr Barati died after being hit from behind with a heavy stick.

A Senate inquiry blamed the riots on delays in processing asylum seeker claims.

Then immigration minister Scott Morrison initially called the riot a disturbance that had caused minor damage.

Details subsequently emerged that PNG locals, riot police and the centre's own security guards had invaded the compound and begun beating refugees.

Mr Barati, 23, from Iran, died after riots inside the Australian-run detention centre on February 17, 2014 (stock image)

Kaluvia, a Salvation Army worker at the detention centre, was on the run for five months before his arrest.

A report by former senior public servant Robert Cornall found Mr Barati died after being hit from behind with a heavy stick.
A mother-of-three has been suffering constant pain since she had breasts implants at a clinic accused of knocking out patients without their consent using 'dangerously high doses' of drugs.

Narelle Bayon had breasts implants at Sydney's The Cosmetic Institute, which claims to be Australia's largest cosmetic surgery provider.

However, the mother-of-three has come forward to claim she'll suffer permanent pain and pins and needles for the rest of her life over the botched job, ABC reports.

The Cosmetic Institute denied to Daily Mail Australia they've received a complaint from Ms Bayon.

Mother-of-three Narelle Bayon claims she has suffered 'constant pain' since getting breast implants at a Sydney The Cosmetic Institute

She claims to have been told the implant has caused neurological damage with it 'pushing on the nerves in my arm' because the pocket cut in her left breast was too small

'In my arm, there's constant pain, it's like a burning. As soon as I elevate my arm, my arm goes numb,' Ms Bayon told ABC. 'It just tingles.

'The pain is permanent.'

She claims to have been told the implant has caused neurological damage with it 'pushing on the nerves in my arm' because the pocket cut in her left breast was too small.

She said aside from being 'sore' and 'tired' from the physical injury she said 'burns' around her neck, Ms Bayon has also suffered psychologically.

'I wish I never went there. Simple as that. I wish I never went to The Cosmetic Institute,' she told ABC.

The company has denied Ms Bayon complained to them in a statement to Daily Mail Australia.

The same cosmetic surgery provider came under fire on Tuesday following an investigation by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission (The Cosmetic Institute clinic pictured)

The cut-price cosmetic clinics offer a flat rate for breast implants at $5,990  or on a payment plan of $5 a day

Ms Bayon said aside from being 'sore' and 'tired' from the physical injury she said 'burns' around her neck, Ms Bayon has also suffered psychologically

'I wish I never went there. Simple as that. I wish I never went to The Cosmetic Institute,' she told ABC

'The patient complaint ... has not been raised with TCI. We would work with the patient to resolve this situation,' the statement said.

'The simple option is to remove the implant, which would have been offered if she had consulted with her surgeon or TCI.'

The same cosmetic surgery provider came under fire on Tuesday following an investigation by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC).

In September last year, Yahoo 7 reported Ms Bayon was joining a planned class action through law firm Turner Freeman.

The company has denied Ms Bayon (left) complained to them in a statement to Daily Mail Australia

More than 100 former clients had been speaking with partner and medical negligence expert Sally Gleeson over claims they were misled or left scarred. It is unclear whether the planned class action has been ditched, resolved, or is continuing.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Sally Gleeson and Narrelle Bayon for comment.

Ms Gleeson wrote in a statement at the time the clinics have 'left a trail of victims, some of whom have been left grossly disfigured and scarred for life'.

Findings from the HCCC report were published by the ABC on Tuesday, finding dangerously high doses of drugs were administered to patients  at a life-threatening rate.

'In my arm, there's constant pain, it's like a burning. As soon as I elevate my arm, my arm goes numb,' Ms Bayon told ABC

She said aside from being 'sore' and 'tired' from the physical injury she said 'burns' around her neck, Ms Bayon has also suffered psychologically

The HCCC report said six patients receiving breast implants at the surgeries in the past 12 months had suffered complications including cardiac arrest, seizures and rapid heartbeat.

'Adrenaline was used routinely [with local anaesthetic agents] ... at well above the accepted upper limit of safe dosage,' the report found.

The HCCC report also found doses had not been adjusted to the weight of patients.

The anaesthetic was so strong patients were put 'under a general anaesthetic' despite not giving consent to be put asleep, the report found according to the ABC.

ABC reported the clinics were only licensed only to provide 'conscious sedation'.

In a statement provided to Daily Mail Australia, The Cosmetic Institute said 'no such anaesthetic cocktails' were given.

'...All anaesthetics were provided by Australian registered anaesthetists,' the statement said.

'Out of 14,000 patients treated at that time, just 33 were under general anaesthetic.

'TCI has reviewed its procedures to ensure safe upper limits for adrenaline and local anaesthetic usage.'

In September last year, Yahoo 7 reported Ms Bayon (pictured) was joining a planned class action through law firm Turner Freeman

The statement also said they were reviewing consent forms, which have always been in place.

As of last year, their procedures are now performed at Concord Private Hospital in western Sydney and in a Southport, Queensland private hospital.

'I wish I never went there. Simple as that. I wish I never went to The Cosmetic Institute,' Ms Bayon told ABC

The Cosmetic Institute now claims on its website to be 'equipped' to provide general anaesthetic.

'Our facilities are internationally accredited and all procedures are performed at our licensed private hospitals, which are equipped to offer general anaesthetic,' the website reads.

The Cosmetic Institute statement said the clinics had previously resolved issues addressed by HCCC.

'TCI will ensure that all recommendations from the HCCC report not already implemented are addressed within the three-month period required by the Commission,' the statement said.

In November, former General Manager David Segal resigned. He denied any wrong-doing to Yahoo 7.

The cut-price cosmetic clinics offer a flat rate for breast implants at $5,990  or on a payment plan of $5 a day.




German and Italian intelligence 'informed on plans by source in Africa'

Man arrested on the island of Majorca in connection to ISIS terror cell

Spanish police arrested a Moroccan man on the island of Majorca today on suspicion of having close links to Islamist militants.

Video footage has emerged of the man, who was not named, being snatched by masked security officers and led away in broad daylight with his face covered with a grey top.

The suspect is also accused of recruiting fighters to join forces in Syria and Iraq and of being in charge of commissioning potential attacks in Spain and across Europe, the ministry said.

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Two masked Spanish police officers escort the arrested man in Palma de Mallorca earlier this morning

German media reports that ISIS is sending jihadists to pretend to sell refreshments before detonating suicide vests and bombs buried under sun loungers at Spanish, French and Italian resorts

Video footage has emerged of the man, who was not named, being snatched by masked security officers and led away in broad daylight with his face covered with a grey top

The terror suspect was bundled into the back of a small black car after being seized earlier this morning

A team of 15 Spanish police officers were involved in the raid on the apartment in the Son Gotleu district of Palma early this morning.

The news comes it was revealed ISIS is planning terror attacks across Europe this summer, targeting holidaying tourists by posing as ice cream and T-shirt sellers.

German media reports that ISIS is sending jihadists to pretend to sell refreshments before detonating suicide vests and bombs buried under sun loungers at Spanish, French and Italian resorts.

The BND - Germany's equivalent of MI6 - learned from its Italian counterpart of the ISIS plots to bring bloodshed to holiday resorts, popular daily newspaper BILD said on Tuesday.

According to the report the Italians were informed of the terror plans from a credible source in Africa.

They say the would-be killers had formed 'concrete plans' to pose as refugees serving tourists with drinks and snacks or hawking beach accessories and T-shirts.

The suspect is also accused of recruiting fighters to join forces in Syria and Iraq and of being in charge of commissioning potential attacks in Spain and across Europe, the ministry said

Police officers carry out several boxes of evidence after raiding the flat in Majorca, Spain

The Moroccan man has not been named but is believed to be 26 and is accused of being a recruiter for ISIS

A team of 15 Spanish police officers were involved in the raid on the apartment in the Son Gotleu district of Palma early this morning

BILD said the plans involve the use of automatic weapons on crowded waterfronts, suicide bombings and explosive devices buried in sand beneath sun loungers.

ISIS, which is squeezed financially as the international coalition ranged against it in the Middle East hampers its movement and military actions, is looking for more soft targets in the west and came up with the holiday bombing campaign.

According to BILD the beaches which intelligence chiefs say are definitely targeted include resorts in southern France, the Costa del Sol in Spain and both coasts in Italy.

The newspaper quotes a high ranking official: 'It could be a whole new dimension of terror. Holiday beaches cannot be protected.' Last year 38 people, 30 of them British, died when a gunman opened fire on a beach in Tunisia.

Threat: ISIS is sending jihadists to pretend to sell refreshments before detonating suicide vests and bombs buried under sun loungers at Spanish, French and Italian resorts, including Costa Del Sol in Spain (pictured)

Attack: Tourists lay flowers outside the Imperial Marhaba Hotel, in the popular tourist resort of al-Sousse, Tunisia, where 38 people were killed, including 30 UK nationals, in an attack last June

The threat stems from Boko Haram, the terror group from Nigeria which has allied itself with Isis and co-operates with the leadership at a high level. It is understood that regular African travellers to Europe, who so far have disguised their loyalty to the fanatics, will be activated for the murder campaign.

Seck Pouye, police chief of the Senegalese town of Saly, said: 'These people travel regularly to Italy and other places with visas and documents. They are not illegal because they are viewed as business people and traders. That is what makes them so dangerous.'
A Chinese man has been sentenced to death for leaking more than 150,000 classified documents to an unidentified foreign power, state television said today.

The computer technician from Sichuan, named as Huang Yu, worked for a government department which handled state secrets, but was sacked for being a bad employee, the report said.

Filled with anger, he messaged a 'foreign spy organisation' on the internet and offered to sell documents he had obtained while working for his former employer, who gladly took him up on his offer and so began their relationship, it added.

Soldiers take positions to stand guard outside of the Chinese Parliament known as the Great Hall of the People. A Chinese computer expert has been sentenced to death for leaking state secrets after giving a foreign power 150,000 classified documents in revenge after being sacked for reportedly being a bad employee

Meeting in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, Huang eventually handed over 150,000 documents, covering secrets ranging from everything from the ruling Communist Party to military and financial issues, the report said.

But as he was no longer employed, he began to run out of documents to provide, and so targeted his wife and brother-in-law who also worked for government departments handling state secrets, state television said.

In the end, his frequent travel and sudden unexplained wealth caught up with him and in 2011 he was arrested, and then sentenced to death, it added.

The report did not say when or if the execution had happened, or where he was tried.

China's state secrets law is notoriously broad, covering everything from industry data to the exact birth dates of state leaders.

President Xi Jinping (pictured) has overseen a sweeping revamp of the security apparatus aimed at combating threats both at home and abroad. But new security laws he passed, or wants to pass, have alarmed the West, including the counterterrorism law and a draft cyber security law, amidst a renewed crackdown on dissent

Information can also be labelled a state secret retroactively.

President Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping revamp of the security apparatus, aimed at combating threats both at home and abroad.

But new security laws he has passed, or wants to pass, have alarmed Western governments, including the counterterrorism law and a draft cyber security law, amidst a renewed crackdown on dissent.

The cyber security and counterterrorism laws codify sweeping powers for the government to combat perceived threats, from widespread censorship to heightened control over certain technologies.

Critics of the counterterrorism legislation, for one, say it could be interpreted in such a way that even non-violent dissidents could fall within its definition of terrorism.
Two brothers wanted in the disappearance and presumed slayings of a Washington state couple may be heading for the Mexican border, authorities said Tuesday.

Detectives found a red Volkswagen that had been driven by 53-year-old John Blaine Reed and his brother, 49-year-old Tony Clyde Reed, in Phoenix.

But they said the suspects had since taken a 2002 gold Acura 32T with Arizona plate BNN-9968. A license plate reader captured that plate near Calexico, California, on Monday, the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office said.

The brothers are wanted in the disappearance of John Reed's former neighbors, 45-year-old Patrick Shunn and his wife, 46-year-old Monique Patenaude, who were reported missing one week ago.

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John Reed, 53 (left) who is being hunted over the disappearance of his Washington neighbors along with brother Tony (right), was involved in an 'ongoing and constant' dispute with the pair before they vanished

Patrick Shunn and Monique Patenaude had reported Reed to the police after 'he threatened to assault or shoot them if they didn't leave him alone' according to an affidavit for a search of Reed's property

Investigators say they found evidence the couple was killed, and teams were searching a wooded 23-square-mile area around their home near Oso, 50 miles north-northeast of Seattle, for their bodies.

'The exact location of the Reed brothers is unknown, but there is reason to believe they may be trying to flee to Mexico,' the sheriff's office said in an email Tuesday. It described them as convicted felons who should be considered armed and dangerous.

Reed was involved in an 'ongoing and constant' dispute with neighbors Shunn and Patenaude that had lasted for years, police previously said.

In recent weeks tensions between Reed and the couple had reached a peak after they reported him to authorities for squatting on a piece of land he used to own, but sold to the county.

On another occasion Reed 'reportedly stated he would shoot or assault them if they didnt leave' when he found them trimming brush between along their shared driveway.

Shunn and Patenaude, who shared a common driveway with Reed, had long been wary about raising the temper of their neighbor, the Seattle Times reports.

Two years ago Shunn and Patenaude filed a complaint over alleged harassment and threats made by neighbors.

Reed was not named in that lawsuit, according to a former lawyer for the couple, because they did not want to risk angering him.

'They weren't looking forward to any kind of conflict with Mr. Reed,' lawyer Thomas Adams said Monday. 'They didn't want to provoke any kind of an issue with him.'

The neighbors had also got involved in a dispute over a condemned property that Reed had been forced to sell to the county following a deadly landslide in the area in 2014.

Reed said he had no intention of moving off the land he had occupied for 18 years following the slip, but had worried it would be condemned if local authorities didn't repair his driveway.

Deputies were told that Reed threatened Federal Emergency Management Agency workers over the issue, and spoke about 'driving his truck through the building and taking everyone out with him.'

The property was eventually condemned, and on March 31 Reed was forced to sell it to the county, shortly before Patenaude reported him for continuing to squat there.

Police are still hunting for John Reed along with his brother, 49-year-old ex-con Tony Reed, in connection with the disappearance of Shunn and Patenaude.

The pair were reported missing a week ago in what police described as 'suspicious and unusual' behavior, before their vehicles were discovered crashed in a wooded area around four miles from their home on Thursday.

Police told the Times that the vehicles appeared to have been driven or pushed over an embankment before being partially concealed with cut branches.

At the top of the embankment, investigators found a new tarp spread out over a mound covered with cut branches and debris, an affidavit states.

Tensions between Shunn and Patenaude and Reed had come to a head in recent weeks after Patenaude reported him to the police for squatting on a piece of land he used to own near their property in Arlington

Shunn and Patenaude went missing a week ago before their wrecked cars were found in woods around four miles from their home and police announced they believed the pair had been killed

CCTV footage taken from near Reed's home implicated him in dumping the vehicles, police have said, as they continue hunting for him and his brother

Officers later discovered an Ace Hardware bag, an ax, rubber gloves, tarps, posts and other items around the same area.

Detectives searched Reed's property on Saturday and found 'red stains, which appeared to be dried blood' on the bathtub and a pair of coveralls that also appeared stained with blood.

Officers also found two rifles, ammunition, and gloves, a tarp and posts similar to those recovered near the couples vehicles.

Investigators have also obtained CCTV footage from a property close to where the couple's vehicles were discovered showing them being driven towards the site at 3:31am on April 12, hours after the couple were last spotted.

A red Toyota pickup, believed to belong to Reed, was then seen driving up the same lane shortly afterwards with what appeared to be a post in the back.

Authorities say they found that vehicle parked at the Ellensburg home of Reed's parents on Saturday, but added that the suspects' location is still unknown.

Police have described the men, both former convicts, as 'armed and dangerous'.

John Reed has been cited for a number of mostly minor offenses, including driving without a license and collecting wood without a permit, for which he was fined $87.

He served five years on Department of Corrections supervision in the late 1990s for attempting to elude police in Whatcom County.
Rachel Tyquin (pictured), 44, was found dead in a quiet street in Sunbury, north-west Melbourne on Saturday

A woman who allegedly stabbed her neighbour to death on a suburban street over a parking spot has briefly faced court.

Eva Whitecross, 53, was charged with murdering 44-year-old fitness instructor Rachel Tyquin after her body was found on a nature strip not far from her Sunbury house in Melbourne's north-west on Saturday morning.

The Melbourne Magistrate's Court heard police need more time to prepare evidence and according to Prosecutor Susanna Locke, 'there is a high volume of material in relation to family history'.

Whitecross spent less than five minutes in the dock on Tuesday as police discussed security vision they obtained, Ten News reported.

Investigators are planning to take statements from neighbours and the Sunbury community.

Whitecross is due to appear before the court again on September 13.

Asked if there were any custody management issues, her lawyer said Whitecross had an injury.

Post-mortem results would take about 15 weeks and there was significant CCTV footage to be examined, Ms Locke told the court.

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Eva Whitecross, 53, was charged with murdering Ms Tyquin after her body was found on a nature strip not far from her Sunbury house

A woman who reportedly lives across the road from Ms Tyquin, 53, handed herself into police shortly after and was charged with murder in the evening

The accused murderer, who is 53 years old, had her silver Subaru Forester kept as evidence outside Sunbury Police Station

Whitecross did not apply for bail and is due to appear before the court again on September 13.

Emergency services were called to the quiet one-way Sunbury street at about 7.30am on Saturday, but Ms Tyquin was pronounced deceased at the scene, according to Victoria Police.

Whitecross reportedly handed herself in to police a short time later and was interviewed by police for several hours.

She was charged with murder just after 7.30pm on Saturday night.

Victoria Police have not revealed the exact cause of death, although Ms Tyquin was reportedly killed while walking to work on Saturday morning.

Victoria Police have not revealed the exact cause of death, although Ms Tyquin was reportedly killed while walking to work on Saturday morning
Education Secretary calls for Conservative colleagues to 'step back from the brink' of civil war

Michael Gove has insisted the EU could crumble like the Soviet Union if Britain chooses to leave - urging voters to 'liberate' the continent.

The Justice Secretary said the UK had a chance to restore 'democracy' and control immigration in the referendum on June 23, dismissing fears that the country would be punished economically for abandoning the union.

The emotional appeal came in a speech as Tory infighting on the issue grew increasingly bitter.

Conservative backbenchers accused George Osborne in the Commons of 'disgraceful' behaviour by publishing a dossier making apocalyptic predictions about Britain's long-term prospects outside the EU.

The Treasury is due to publish another assessment of the immediate impact in the last month of the campaign.

Mr Gove warned that the country was being held 'hostage' by Brussels and rebuked David Cameron for treating the public like 'children'.

He insisted the UK would be better off outside the European single market, arguing that major players like Germany and France would ensure we could still trade freely.

He also dismissed the EU's current representative on the World Trade Organisation as a 'sociology lecturer from Sweden'.

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Justice Secretary Michael Gove delivers his speech on what Britain could look like after leaving the EU

'At different points In campaigners like to argue either that Brexit would lead to EU nations using their massive muscle to punish us, or that Brexit would lead to contagion and the collapse of Europe - just as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union collapsed following secession from those unions,' Mr Gove told the audience in London.

'Manifestly both cannot be true. An EU without the UK cannot simultaneously be a super-charged leviathan bent on revenge and a crumbling Tower of Babel riven by conflict.

'The UK's success will send a very different message to the EU's peoples. They will see that a different Europe is possible.

'It is possible to regain democratic control of your own country and currency, to trade and co-operate with other EU nations without surrendering fundamental sovereignty to a remote and unelected bureaucracy.

'And, by following that path, your people are richer, your influence for good greater, your future brighter.

SIR COVER-UP UNDER FIRE OVER 500,000 EU EMAILS Britain's top civil servant was accused of constitutional vandalism last night as it emerged he is plotting to distribute pro-EU propaganda to half a million public officials. Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, is working on plans to use internal email systems to bombard border guards, prison staff and HMRC workers with a message detailing why Britain should remain tied to Brussels. The email will prompt comparisons to the Prime Ministers leaflets sent to all households, costing 9.3 million. Sir Jeremy, who is dubbed Sir Cover-Up thanks to his attitude to the publics right to know, also wants to launch a campaign to encourage civil servants to register to vote. The scheme has outraged some Cabinet Office staff, with one source telling the Daily Mail: Is there no constitutional vandalism to which Sir Cover-Up will not stoop? Its time for the Director of Ethics to get a grip and stop this biased behaviour before Heywood destroys what little credibility the Civil Service has left. Last night Bernard Jenkin, the Tory chairman of the Commons public administration committee, said: This again raises very serious questions about what we mean by Civil Service impartiality. Advertisement

'Our vote to Leave will liberate and strengthen those voices across the EU calling for a different future - those demanding the devolution of powers back from Brussels and desperate for a progressive alternative.

'But for Europe, Britain voting to leave will be the beginning of something potentially even more exciting - the democratic liberation of a whole continent.'

Deriding the 'Project Fear' approach of the Remain campaign, Mr Gove suggested they had recruited in horror writer Stephen King to drafted their script.

'The City of London would become a ghost down, our manufacturing industries would be sanctioned more punitively than even communist North Korea, decades would pass before a single British Land Rover or Mr Kipling cake could ever again be sold in France and in the meantime our farmers would have been driven from the land by poverty worse than the Potato Famine,' he said.

'To cap it all, an alliance of Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, emboldened by our weakness, would, like some geopolitical equivalent of the Penguin, Catwoman and the Joker, be liberated to spread chaos worldwide and subvert our democracy.'

He added: 'The idea that if Britain voted to leave the European Union we would instantly become some sort of hermit kingdom  a North Atlantic North Korea, only without that country's fund of international good will  it's a fantasy, it's a phantom, it's a great grotesque patronising and preposterous Peter Mandelsonian conceit, that imagines that the people of this country are mere children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night.'

The intervention came as:

Former foreign secretary Lord Hague lashed out at Boris Johnson for criticising Barack Obama's expected pro-EU intervention.

Tory election guru Sir Lynton Crosby said the government's controversial 9million 'propaganda' mailshot appeared to be swinging the campaign in the Prime Minister's favour.

Education Secretary Nicky Morgan appealed for colleagues to 'step back from the brink' of civil war over the EU.

Earlier Mr Gove had been unusually given three minutes of uninterrupted airtime on the BBC Radio 4's flagship Today programme to make his case for Brexit.

He used it to accuse the Remain campaign, led by Mr Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, of portraying the public as 'hapless and feckless'.

'Britain's a great country. It's the world's fifth largest economy with the world's best armed forces, best health service and best broadcaster,' he said.

THE 'EX-SOCIOLOGY LECTURER' WHO SPEAKS FOR THE EU ON TRADE EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom represents the grouping on the WTO Justice Secretary Michael Gove dismissed the EU's representative on the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as an 'ex-sociology lecturer from Sweden'. He was referring to Cecilia Malmstrom, who leads on trade issues for the European Commission. Although EU states technically still have WTO seats in their own right, in practice they rely on Ms Malmstrom to stand up for their collective interests. The married mother-of-two became trade commissioner under commission president Jean-Claude Juncker in 2014, having previously served in the home affairs brief for four years. Before that she was minister for EU affairs in the Swedish government and vice-president of the Swedish Liberal Party, according to her biography on the commission website. In 1998-1999 she was senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Goteborg University, where she received a PhD in Political Science. Advertisement

'We're first in the world for soft power, thanks to our language, culture and creativity. And yet the In camp try to suggest that we're too small and too weak, and our people are too hapless and feckless to succeed without Jean-Claude Juncker looking after us.

'That's a deeply pessimistic and negative vision. Britain could do better. We're a uniquely inventive nation and our greatest invention is representative democracy - the principle that the people who run our county should be chosen by us and can be kicked out by us. That's why it's time to take back control.'

Mr Gove also made a pointed reference to the controversial dossier published by the Treasury yesterday, which included an assumption the government will fail to hit its target for cutting immigration.

He said the report amounted to an 'official admission from the In campaign that if we vote to stay in the EU then immigration will continue to increase by hundreds of thousands year on year'.

'Instead of a European open-door migration policy we could - if a future Government wanted it - have an Australian points-based migration policy,' he said. 'We could emulate that country's admirable record of taking in genuine refugees, giving a welcome to hard- working new citizens and building a successful multi-racial society without giving into people-smugglers, illegal migration or subversion of our borders.

Mr Gove rejected the idea that Britain would emulate any of the existing models for relations with the EU after leaving. The Treasury analysis published yesterday considered Norway-style membership of the European Economic Area, a Canadian-style trade deal, and Russia-style membership of the WTO.

But the Justice Secretary insisted the UK was in a position to forge an entirely different model outside the single market. and restoring control over our borders.

'We'd be part of a European free trade area. It's already the case there's a European free trade area that extends from Iceland to the Russian border. The only country in the European land mass outside that is Belarus,' he said.

'We would be part of that and we would be able to benefit also by being able to take back control of our seat on the World Trade Organization. At the moment Britain is represented on the WTO by the EU single representative, an ex-sociology lecturer from Sweden.

Mr Gove and London Mayor Boris Johnson arrive in Downing Street today for a meeting of Prime Minister David Cameron's political Cabinet

'I'd like to see a Briton on the WTO determining trade policy. More than that I would like to see trade barriers that we've erected in the EU against developing nations come down.'

Ministers have spent a decade resisting a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, a non-EU institution, that inmates should vote.

Mr Gove said the European Court of Justice was now threatening to make a toxic intervention on the issue, which could leave us with no option but to comply.

Mr Gove went on to say: 'The Remain campaign want us to believe that Britain is beaten and broken. It treats people like mere children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night.'

He also mocked the Prime Minister's renegotiation with Brussels, saying it has made 'no difference and will not stop the next EU power grab'.

The Treasury's Brexit dossier assumed net migration to Britain will fall 'towards' 185,000 by 2021 - still well above David Cameron's target of 100,000. But officials also argued that leaving the EU would not cut numbers

He warned that a Remain vote would lead to 'transfer of powers over tax and the financial system, so we are less able to guard against a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis, and the transfer of powers over the heart of our legal system'.

'If we vote Remain, British taxpayers will be paying ever-higher bills for years to come as the EU uses its growing power,' Mr Gove will claim.

Eurosceptic MPs have conceded that it is hard to see how the Tory party will heal following the referendum on June 23.

One backbencher dubbed the Treasury dossier 'Project Utter Cr**', while others described it as shameful and accused Mr Osborne of pretending he had a 'crystal ball'.

OSBORNE JEERED BY MPS AS HE DEFENDS 'DODGY DOSSIER' IN COMMONS George Osborne faces questions in the House George Osborne has been jeered by Tories as he defended the Treasury's apocalyptic assessment of Brexit risks. The Chancellor denied that leaving the EU would reduce immigration as he faced repeated attacks from MPs during his regular questions session in the Commons. Kettering MP Philip Hollobone complained that the analysis was only fit for the BBC's popular children's programme Jackanory. 'In the disgracefully dodgy document published by the Treasury yesterday, which frankly is worthy of the children's programme Jackanory, the immigration figures suggest that there will be three million immigrants to this country by 2030, placing you in clear breach of the Conservative manifesto commitment to reduce immigration to tens of thousands per year,' he said. 'What is your response to that accusation?' Mr Osborne insisted there would be an 'economic crisis' if the UK votes to leave the EU on June 23. One of Mr Osborne's Treasury ministers, David Gauke, stepped in to deflect the jibes at his boss, insisting a 'large number' of experts agreed with the 'direction' of the assessment. Responding to Tory Stewart Jackson branding the report a 'dodgy dossier', Mr Osborne said: 'The public want facts and information.' Christchurch MP Christopher Chope worked a reference to the document into a question about housebuilding. 'How is having net migration of an additional three million people going to help first-time buyers find a home?' he said. The Chancellor replied: 'We have the products to help first-time buyers in this country afford housing but I would make this observation on migration: You cannot have access to the single market without accepting free movement of people. 'It is an absolutely clear principle that has been made very starkly clear to this country by Germany and France and is internationally accepted. 'If you want access to the single market you have to accept free movement of people.' After its assessment of the longer-term impacts of Brexit, the Treasury is due to publish another dossier on the short term effects in the last month of the campaign. Advertisement

Speaking during Treasury questions in the Commons today, Kettering MP Philip Hollobone described the report as 'disgraceful' and 'worth of the children's programme Jackanory'.

After its assessment of the longer-term impacts of Brexit, the Treasury is due to publish another dossier on the short term effects in the last month of the campaign.

London Mayor Mr Johnson branded Mr Cameron and senior Remain campaigners the 'Gerald Ratners' of politics over the weekend - because they were trying to sell a 'cr**' product.

He also said President Obama would be 'hypocritical' if, as expected, he argues during a visit this week that Britain should stay in the EU. Mr Johnson said the US would never accept a similar erosion of its sovereignty.

But Lord Hague said it was a 'bit rich' of Mr Johnson to say Mr Obama should not express a view.

'I would note that British leaders and commentators do not hesitate to hold forth on the foreign policy of the United States: a policy supported by David Cameron, attacked by Jeremy Corbyn, and denounced or questioned by many others with regard to the Middle East, defence spending, drone strikes, the handling of Cuba and scores of other issues. Our Parliament has even held a debate on the deficiencies of Donald Trump,' he wrote in the Daily Telegraph.

'So it would be a bit rich for us, opining as we do on every aspect of America's relations with other states, to turn all precious and sensitive when American leaders comment on ours.

His intervention comes only days after his fellow Out supporter, Boris Johnson, labelled David Cameron and his allies the 'Gerald Ratners' of British politics  trying to push an EU project that they know is 'c**p'

'Secondly, I would advise that the President has the right wherever he is to explain what is in the interests of the United States of America.

'And since the US is our one indispensable ally, our biggest single trading partner and the ultimate guarantor of our security, its interests matter to everyone in Britain whether we like it or not.'

Last night Education Secretary Mrs Morgan, who supports the UK staying in, warned against allowing the debate to tear the Conservative Party apart.

'We need to step back from the brink and take a long hard look at ourselves,' she said, 'Yes, let's debate our EU membership but let's keep that debate on the issues and, above all, let's not undermine the work that this government is doing to deliver real social justice.'

Sir Lynton Crosby, who masterminded the party's general election victory, suggested the government's 9million pro-EU 'propaganda' mailshot could be swinging the referendum battle in Mr Cameron's favour.

The Prime Minister was showing 'urgency' while the Leave camp appeared 'divided', he said.

Sir Lynton - an Australian who was knighted for services to politics and has also run campaigns for Mr Johnson - said an ORB poll showed 'further improvement' in the position of Remain.

He said the In campaign had gained three points, while Leave had lost five - meaning Britain would vote 52 per cent to 43 per cent to stay in the EU if the referendum was held today.

Mr Johnson was among senior Tory figures attending a meeting of the political Cabinet in Downing Street today.

There is speculation that Mr Cameron could offer Mr Gove the post of Deputy Prime Minister as an act of conciliation after the referendum.
The court heard the boy woke on the floor with Aulsebrook raping him

He allegedly lured the boy to his office with video games and drugged him

A Catholic priest working at a notorious Salesian College in the late 1980s enticed a Year 7 student into his office with computer games then raped him on the floor.

Michael Scott Aulsebrook, 60, of Traralgon, has been found guilty of one count of rape after he fought the charge in the Victorian County Court.

During his trial, the jury heard Aulsebrook invited the boy into his office after lights-out with an offer to play on his computer, then gave his victim a soft drink that had been spiked with a sedative.

Michael Aulsebrook, 60, has pleaded not guilty to raping a year 7 boarding student in 1988 during his time as a boarding co-ordinator at Salesian College Rupertswood in the Victorian County Court

The boy woke up on the floor as Aulsebrook was raping him and pushing his face into the floor.

"He felt a large amount of pain," prosecutor Andrew Grant said during the trial.

Afterwards, Aulsebrook said to the boy: "Get out of my sight. You disgust me".

The now-unemployed man invited the boy to play computer games several more times, but the student refused.

Aulsebrook has also pleaded guilty to three counts of indecent assault.

One of these was also committed while he was employed at Salesian College Rupertswood in Sunbury in 1988.

A Catholic priest invited an 11-year-old student into his office to play computer games, then gave him a soft drink spiked with a sedative and raped him on the floor, a court has heard.

Michael Aulsebrook, 60, pleaded not guilty to raping a year 7 boarding student in 1988 during his time as a boarding co-ordinator at Salesian College Rupertswood in Sunbury, north-west of Melbourne.

The Victorian County Court heard the priest invited the young student to play video games in his office after lights out when he allegedly gave him a soft drink laced with sedatives.

Prosecutor Andrew Grant told the court on Tuesday that the victim woke up on the floor of the office while Aulsebrook was raping him before he said: 'Get out of my sight. You disgust me.

'He felt a large amount of pain,' Mr Grant told the court.

'The accused was pushing (the victim's) face into the floor.'

He said the young boy left the office and sat on the roof of a building for three hours before before going to bed afraid and in pain, The Age reported.

The Victorian County Court (pictured) heard the priest invited the young student to play video games in his office after lights out when he allegedly gave him a soft drink laced with sedatives

Aulsebrook allegedly invited the boy to come and play games several more times, but he refused and told his grandfather what happened and left before the end of the school year.

According to the Herald Sun, he was asked to leave for behavioural reasons.

The jury heard a police interview from 2012 where Aulsebrook told officers he didn't have any games on his computer in his office

He reportedly claimed that he did not allow any students to use his officer computer and wrote the allegations off as 'absolutely rubbish'.

Prosecutor Andrew Grant told the court on Tuesday that the victim woke up on the floor of an office at Salesian College Rupertwood (pictured) while Aulsebrook was raping him

Defence barrister Megan Tittensor told jurors they needed to keep an open mind and put aside publicity surrounding the Catholic church.

'It has no bearing on this case,' she said.

'Consider how difficult it would be to defend yourself following an allegation this many years later.'

Ms Tittensor said Aulsebrook emphatically denied the charge.

The court is yet to hear evidence from the victim.
Paris and Brussels attacks bomb maker Najim Laachraoui was a key member of the ISIS gang which imprisoned British and American hostages before handing them over to executioner Jihadi John.

Belgian terrorist Laachraoui, 24, was one of two suicide bombers who attacked Brussels Airport last month. He was also involved in making at least two of the explosive devices used to attack the Bataclan concert hall and the Stade de France in Paris last year.

Now it has emerged that Laachraoui may have known British terrorist Jihadi John as he was once part of the jihadi cell who first imprisoned American journalist James Foley and British photojournalist John Cantlie in northern Syria in 2013.

Bomb maker: Belgian terrorist Najim Laachraoui, 24, (left and right) was one of two suicide bombers who attacked Brussels Airport. He was also involved in making at least two of the explosive devices used in the November Paris attacks

Executioner: Laachraoui was a key member of the ISIS gang which imprisoned hostages before handing them over to executioner Jihadi John (pictured)

Laachraoui's group later handed over both men to Jihadi John, real name Mohammed Emwazi, who executed Foley and several other Westerners in the summer of 2014. Cantlie is still thought to be a prisoner of the Islamic State.

According to the latest edition of the terror group's online magazine, Dabiq, Laachraoui was recruited by a senior IS terrorist called Amr al-Absi with whom ISIS claim he worked closely in northern Syria and more significantly, was responsible for capturing and imprisoning Western hostages.

Absi later became one of the first foreign jihadi leaders to pledge allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

In the propaganda magazine, ISIS describes Laachraoui, referred to as Abu Idris, as 'very intelligent' and also one of the first to pledge allegiance to Baghdadi in Syria in 2013.

The article read: 'He began to train in order to realise his dream of returning to Europe to avenge the Muslims of Iraq and Sham (Syria) for the constant bombing by crusader warplanes.

'Upon completing his training, he traveled the long road to France to execute his operation. It was Abu Idris who prepared the explosives for the two raids in Paris and Brussels.'

The three bomb attacks at the airport and metro station in Brussels killed 32 people, and 130 died in the atrocities in Paris in November.

Killed: Mohammed Emwazi executed American journalist James Foley (pictured) and several other Westerners in 2014

Prisoner: British photojournalist John Cantlie is still thought to be a prisoner of the Islamic State terror group. He is pictured here in an ISIS propaganda video

Security sources say that it is possible that Emwazi and other members of the so-called Beatles, the name given to the British group who tortured the Western hostages, may have known Laachraoui at this time.

Certainly there was at least one British fighter among the largely Belgian contingent who carried brutal torture on Foley, Cantlie and another German prisoner.

If true, it raises the worrying possibility that British terrorists may be deeply linked to the European cell that has already carried devastating attacks against France and Belgium.

Emwazi was killed in a drone strike in Syria on November 12 last year. The following day Laachraoui and his gang launched their attacks on Paris killing 130 civilians.

It has also been reported that Belgium investigators have obtained a taped conversation between Laachraoui and a 'foreign contact' in which Britain was also mentioned.

Last Friday Britain's security services made five arrests in Birmingham and Gatwick Airport - all believed to be linked to Laachraoui's terror gang.

The arrests have raised concerns that there is a terrorist cell at large, sent from Syria, that could be targeting the UK.

Brussels: Laachraoui was one of two suicide bombers who attacked Brussels Airport (pictured) last month

Paris: Laachraoui was also involved in making at least two of the explosive devices used to attack the Bataclan concert hall and the Stade de France in Paris (pictured)

According to ISIS, Laachraoui had joined the Mujahideen Shura Council, which had become a focus for Western jihadis, including Britons, travelling to Syria to fight President Bashar Al Assad in 2013.

A large number of these foreign fighters left to join ISIS when Baghdadi took charge in northern Syria.
A group of women who filed a $11million racial discrimination complaint after being removed from a train during a wine tour have reached a settlement.

The 11-strong party, which included 10 African-Americans, were ordered off the Napa Valley vintage trip last August after other passengers allegedly complained they were being too loud.

They filed a lawsuit asking for $1m each after claiming they were humiliated and discriminated against by staff who told them several times to lower their voices.

Their lawyer yesterday revealed they have come to an 'amicable settlement' six months after filing the lawsuit at the U.S. District Court in northern California.

A group of women who filed a $11million racial discrimination complaint after being removed from a train during a wine tour have reached a settlement. Members of the group are pictured (left) on the train and (right) after being forced to gather their belongings and get off the train

Tira McDonald (left), one of the plaintiffs filing a racial discrimination lawsuit over their ejection from the Napa Valley Wine Train in August, speaks at a news conference. Also pictured (left to right) are attorney Waukeen Q. McCoy and plaintiffs Linda Carlson, Lisa Johnson, Sandra Jamerson and Allisa Carr

Waukeen McCoy, who did not disclose the terms of the settlement, said: 'We hope that other businesses learn from this case and implement diversity and sensitivity training for employees.'

Train company officials could not be immediately reached for comment.

The women, who are members of a book club called Sisters on the Reading Edge, boarded the train in Napa on August 22.

They claimed they were having a good time, laughing and chatting with other passengers when they were approached by the train manager, who asked them to lower their voices.

The manager reportedly also returned a second time and warned the women that they would be removed from the train.

Their women were finally escorted off the train when it reached St Helena. They were met by police from the Napa Valley Railroad.

The women, who are all from the same book club, had been hoping to enjoy a day of food and wine

Their lawyer yesterday revealed they have come to an 'amicable settlement' six months after filing the lawsuit at the U.S. District Court in northern California. Above, the women wait on the train (left) before being met by police (right)

The company refunded their $124 fares and also provided a vehicle to pick the women up to transport them back to Napa - but the women insisted they had not done anything wrong.

Their complaint said: 'African-American adults are more likely to be shushed at, stared at and kicked out of places where white people perceive that they do not fit.'

The lawsuit also accused the company of defamation and libel for publishing an inaccurate social media post describing the women as being verbally and physically abusive to other passengers.

The post, which also said it was 'necessary' to get police involved, was later removed.

Plaintiffs Ms Johnson (left) hugs Deborah Neal before announcing they were going to file a lawsuit against the train company

Ms Carlson (center) speaks between Dininne Neal (left) and Ms Johnson (right) during a news conference last year

Their complaint said: 'African-American adults are more likely to be shushed at, stared at and kicked out of places where white people perceive that they do not fit.' Above, Ms Johnson at a news conference

Two of the women claimed they were fired from their jobs because of the defamatory statement made by the train company, according to the complaint.

Before the lawsuit was filed, Anthony Giaccio, chief executive of the company, issued a public apology along with a pledge to offer staff diversity training and host the women as guests on the train.

The free future trip for themselves plus 39 friends in a private car would have been worth more than $6,200, according to fare prices at the time.

But the women said publicly the response was not sufficient to erase the humiliating experience of being forced off the train and met by police.

The company's actions prompted widespread anger on social media with one witness saying she truly believed the situation was 'discrimination'

The train has run as a tourist attraction since 1864 and offers dining services to passengers as the antique train cuts through scenic vineyards, the company says on its website

The company's actions prompted widespread anger on social media.

One witness, only known as Danielle from Seattle, wrote: 'I watched in disbelief as staff harassed a group of people who were merely drinking wine and laughing.

'I'd like to think it wasn't a racially motivated act but given the fact that other, non-black guests were behaving in the same way and not removed, I can only conclude that it was discrimination.'
Rikki Neave, six, was last seen leaving his home in Peterborough to go to school on November 28 1994

Cold case detectives investigating the murder of a six-year-old boy found strangled in woodland more than 20 years ago arrested a 35-year-old man yesterday.

Rikki Neave was last seen leaving his home on the Welland estate in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, to go to school on November 28 1994.

His naked body was found in nearby woodland the following day and a post-mortem examination found he had been strangled.

Rikki's clothes - including grey school trousers, a jacket and a white shirt - were later found in a dustbin yards from the wooded area.

If the man - arrested on suspicion of murder - carried out the attack, he would have been a child aged 13 at the time of the incident.

A police spokesman said: 'He is currently in custody at a police station in Cambridgeshire.'

Rikki's mother Ruth Neave, 47, was charged with her son's murder but was later found not guilty by a jury at Northampton Crown Court.

She admitted child neglect and cruelty and was sentenced to seven years in prison

Her husband Gary Rogers, 55, yesterday said the couple were left 'speechless and numb' when two liaison officers knocked on their door to say they had made an arrest this morning.

Father and son: Rikki, whose body was found in woodland in 1994, is pictured with his father Trevor Harvey

Rikki (left) was found in woodland near his home in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, on November 29 1994. His mother Ruth Neave, 47, was initially arrested (right) and charged with his murder - but was later cleared by a jury

Speaking from a hotel in March, Cambridgeshire - just miles from where Rikki was killed - he revealed he and his wife heard a knock at the door at 6.55am.

Mr Rogers, who is Ruth's full-time carer, said: 'At five to seven in the morning, to have two liaison officers standing on your doorstep after being woken up by them is a shock.

'They said "we need to come in and talk to Ruth". They very nicely insisted to come in, it was a case of "we do need to come in".

'So we got her out of bed quickly, put the dogs in the kitchen and went and sat down.

'They sat us down in the front room and told us straight away they had made an arrest within the last five to ten minutes.'

Gary Rogers (left) revealed he and his wife Ruth (right) were left 'speechless' and 'numb' when two liaison officers knocked on their door at 6.55am this morning to make them aware of the arrest

The couple, who live in Cambridgeshire, revealed they do not know who has been arrested.

Ms Neaves declined to speak, instead nominating her husband to comment for her, but looked sombre throughout while wearing black sunglasses to cover her eyes.

Mr Rogers added: 'All they told us is that it's a man in his 30s from Peterborough.

'We always hoped this day would come. We are speechless and numb, but it's a good day.'

Ruth Neave (left) and husband Gary Rogers (right) pictured last year after police announced they were re-opening the investigation into the youngster's death

The pair were not told if the suspect was arrested before or if he was known to the police previously.

Speaking about the moments just after they were told the news, Mr Rogers said: 'We just sat and looked at each other.

'It was surreal, that's the word I've been looking for all day, it was surreal.

'I always knew if I could get people to listen to the evidence which I've got in the files - we would get here.'

Ruth Neave (right), the mother of murdered schoolboy Rikki Neave, was photographed at his funeral near Kings Lynn, Norfolk, on February 14 1995. She was cleared of his murder at Northampton Crown Court

The couple hope advances in technology will help the investigation.

Mr Rogers said: 'The police are using 3D imaging, for the first time ever.

'They are able to take an image of the area at the time and regress it back to a point of time.'

This enables the police to recreate the woodland were Rikki was discovered and the shops where he was last seen.

Mr Rogers added: 'Our reaction this morning was total shock. We didn't know this was coming. This has come straight out of the blue for us.'

Mr Rogers met Ms Neaves eight years ago at Histon Football Club and the pair paid 600 for the police's case file on Rikki's death to review the investigation themselves.

Rikki's childhood best friend, who was eight at the time he was killed, yesterday said the news of an arrest has given her new hope.

Sarah Louise McCormick, 29, said: 'To wake up to the news of someone being arrested for the murder gives us all new hope that now hopefully justice will be done this time round so Rikki can finally rest in peace.

'My childhood best friend Rikki and his family will now hopefully get the justice for his murder.

'Miss and love you Rikki, more than words can say, always in my heart forever and always.'

Sarah and Rikki used to play together most days and she was with him the day before he went missing.

Detectives from Cambridgeshire Police re-launched a fresh investigation into the murder inquiry last year following pressure from Ms Neave, who argued that her son's killer remains at large.

The new investigation found four possible sightings of Rikki on the day he was murdered, including two boys who were seen walking out of the woods where his body was found.

Police then released an artist's impression of the pair, who were teenagers at the time, because they wanted to speak to them in connection with the murder of the six-year-old.

The case involving Ms Neave's arrest caused a national outcry in 1995 after details of the horrific abuse Rikki suffered at his mother's hands became public.

She was once dubbed the UK's most evil mother after she admitted charges of causing child cruelty to Rikki and his two sisters, Rebecca, then eight, and Rochelle, three.

She was initially charged with Rikki's murder, plus five counts of child cruelty between 1986 and 1994, and a further drugs charge, but she denied them all at first.

Ms Neave later changed her plea to admit all of the charges expect allegation that she killed her son.

During the murder trial, the court heard Neave had a fascination with killers and their minds, and that she had pleaded with social workers to take her son into care.

Mr Rogers (left) who is Ruth's full-time carer, said: 'At five to seven in the morning, to have two liaison officers standing on your doorstep after being woken up by them is a shock. Ruth (right) declined to speak today and nominated her husband to comment for her

Jurors heard Ms Neave said Rikki was in danger if he stayed at home, and one social worker reported witnessing her threatening to 'hang her son from the ceiling'.

Another social worker said Neave threatened to kill her son the day before he was reported missing, and a witness reported seeing her walk 'hurriedly' towards the spot where his body was found on the day he went missing.

Lawyers for the defence said during the trial that a sex attacker who had not been found could have been responsible for Rikki's death.

They told the court that another child was attacked and tied to a tree five months before Rikki died, and said that a 10-year-old girl said she had seen the boy alive after he had been reported missing.

Ms Neave was photographed holding Rikki as a baby in the late 1980s. She was accused of killing her son, but was cleared by a jury. She admitted she wasn't a 'perfect mother'

Ms Neave was cleared of murdering her son, but jailed for seven years for cruelty to Rikki, her daughter Rebecca, and one other child.

Following her release from prison in 2000, she and her husband Gary Rogers fought a bitter campaign to have the murder inquiry re-opened.

Ms Neave called a press conference in 2014 to urge the force to reopen their investigation.

She said at the time: 'I loved Rikki, he was a wonderful child.

'For the last 20 years, I have been going through living hell from the public opinion of me caused by all the lies.'

During the murder trial, jurors heard Ms Neave (right) said Rikki (left) was in was in danger if he stayed at home, and one social worker reported witnessing her threatening to 'hang her son from the ceiling'

Ms Neave added: 'I wasn't a perfect mother but I never hurt my children and I should never have admitted to those offences.

'All I want now is justice and for his killers to be caught.

'I know people out there think I'm a murderer but I'm determined to prove that somebody else did this to my boy.'

Speaking after it was re-launched in June 2015, she said: 'We've waited for far too long for this day.

'I am longing for the moment someone tells me they've found the person who murdered my son.

'My son died and that is unforgivable. The torment and heartache I have suffered in all these years needs to be put to bed properly for Rikki's sake as well as mine.'

The scene in Peterborough Cambridgeshire in 1994 where six year old Rikki Neave was killed

Ms Neave added: 'It is torture for me, as I wake, as I go to bed - it's heart-wrenching and I am barely coping with all of this.

'All we want is justice for my little Rikki. I have been waiting for this for so long it kills me.

'There are a load of disturbing factors surrounding the case and I feel confident the police have been investigating every single one of them.

'I simply want the truth to come out.'

The arrest comes after officers methodically built a timeline of Rikki's last movements which resulted in a BBC Crimewatch reconstruction at the end of last year.

Speaking on the eve of the 21st anniversary of his death Detective Chief Inspector Richard Wall from Cambridgeshire Police said: 'We have had an overwhelming response from the public and have built a strong timeline of Rikki's last movements.

'Even 21 years on people still remember clearly the events leading up to Rikki's death and I would urge people to continue to come to us with any information they have.

'At the time of Rikki's death we know that drug use was common place on the estate and are keen to hear from any professionals who may have been helping people and given information about the murder.

'We are confident that we are closing in on those responsible for Rikki's death and it is only a matter of time before we have that vital breakthrough that leads us to them.'

A 10,000 reward is being offered to anyone who provides information which leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible to Crimestoppers.

RUTH NEAVE: THE MOTHER'S TRIAL THAT SHOCKED THE NATION Northampton Crown Court heard allegations of terrible abuse dished out to Rikki, pictured, by his mother Northampton Crown Court heard heard how Rikki's mother called police on 28 November 1994 when the child failed to come home from Welland Primary School and still hadn't returned home by 6pm that night. The court heard how the youngster was found strangled and stripped naked in woodland near his home at around midday the next day by PC Thomas Graham. Rikki's clothes, including his grey school trousers, white shirt and jacket, were found in a bin just 150 yards from his body. Initially charged with Rikki's murder, plus five counts of child cruelty between 1986 and 1994, and a further drugs charge, Neave denied them all at first. She later changed her plea to admit all the charges bar that of murder. Prosecutors told the jury that Rikki was killed in a sacrifice by his mother, who had an interest in the occult and black magic. James Hunt QC told the court the child's body was found in a pose mirrored in books found in her home. It was also alleged that Neave had a fascination with murderers and their minds, and told neighbours on the Welland estate that she was a high priestess of the occult who dabbled in black magic. Jurors heard that she had pleaded with social workers to take her son into care, saying he was in danger if he stayed at home, and one social worker reported witnessing her threatening to 'hang her son from the ceiling'. Another social worker said Neave threatened to kill her son the day before he was reported missing, and a witness reported seeing her walk 'hurriedly' towards the spot where his body was found on the day he went missing. Lawyers for the defence said a sex attacker who had not been found could have been responsible for Rikki's death. They told the court that another child was attacked and tied to a tree five months before Rikki died, and said that a 10-year-old girl said she had seen the boy alive after he had been reported missing. Neave was cleared of murdering her son, but jailed for seven years for cruelty to Rikki, her daughter Rebecca, and one other child. Advertisement

In November last year police released an artist's impression of two people they wanted to speak to in connection with the murder of six-year-old Rikki Neave

Rikki had been on social services 'at risk' register and there had been a history of abuse by Ms Neave.

Speaking in 2014, Ms Neave said that her other children, who were all taken into care and later adopted, had been 'brainwashed' against her and had frozen her out of their lives. She is no longer in contact with them.

She said: 'If they want to talk to me, they know where I am. I will prove that I should never have been accused of cruelty.'

His mother also insisted she could not have been his murderer and added: 'I am not the murderer, never was, and never could have been.

'My son's murderer remains at large.'

Neighbours on the Welland Estate in Peterborough where the Neaves lived (pictured) said Rikki's mother punched and kicked him. She was jailed for seven years after admitted five charges of child cruelty

Ms Neave, 47, was photographed visiting the spot where her son's body was found in 1994

Her neighbours living next to her in Peterborough at the time said they heard her little boy once shout 'I love you Mummy, I love you Mummy' after she gripped him round the throat.

The jury sitting at her murder trial heard Rikki, aged three at the time, would be outside his house at midnight, barefoot in his pyjamas, and left to cry until social services were called.

It was alleged his mother wrote 'IDIOT' in green pen on his forehead, dangled him over a bridge by his feet, and squirted washing up liquid in his mouth.

Jailing her for seven years, the judge, Mr Justice Popplewell, said he had 'rarely come across a case of such persistent and systematic cruelty'.

The mother-of-four left her old home on the Welland estate in Peterborough in 2000, where neighbours reported seeing her punch, kick and scream abuse at her son, for a new start in Cambridge, 40 miles away.

Anyone with information about Rikki's death should contact police on 01480 425882, email operation.mansell@cambs.pnn.police.uk or contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
Now US Attorney's Office is investigating if Theranos misled investors and regulators about its technology and its operations

But firm was challenged over claims they relied on widely available commercial equipment

Federal investigators are launching a criminal probe into Theranos - a Silicon Valley startup that touted a revolutionary new way to test blood.

The US Attorney's Office and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether the health care firm misled investors and regulators about its technology and its operations.

Theranos have addressed the investigations for the first time in a memo to the company's partners.

'The investigations by the SEC and the US Attorney's Office, which began following the publication of certain news articles, are focused on requesting documents and ongoing,' it said.

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Federal investigators are launching a criminal probe into Theranos - a Silicon Valley startup that touted a revolutionary new way to test blood (pictured is CEO Elizabeth Holmes)

Late last year the Wall Street Journal published articles questioning the reliability of Theranos technology and the veracity of the startup's claims.

Theranos was accused of using widely available commercial equipment - debunking the firm's claims of 'revolutionary' testing.

The company and its boss have since publicly defended Theranos and stood by its innovations.

In the memo to the partners, the firm said: 'In the past, we have generally not commented on the specifics of these inquiries out of deference to our regulators and in light of specific requests for confidentiality.

'However, in light of consistent press attention in this area we want you to hear about them from us.'

New system: Theranos developed software that allowed blood tests to be performed using a 'micro-sample', needing just a drop of blood taken from a person with a finger prick

A Theranos spokesman added that they were continuing 'to work closely with regulators and is cooperating fully with all investigations.'

Earlier this year, US regulators warned Theranos in a letter that Holmes could face a temporary ban from being in the blood-testing business due to potentially dangerous problems found at its lab in Northern California.

Federal prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into whether Theranos Inc. misled investors about the state of its technology and operations, according to people familiar with the matter.

Investigations into Theranos by departments of health in the states of Pennsylvania and Arizona, as well as by the US Food and Drug Administration, have been successfully closed, the startup said in the memo.

'The investigations by the SEC and the US Attorney's Office, which began following the publication of certain news articles, are focused on requesting documents and ongoing,' Theranos said.

Revolutionary: The CEO of diagnostic center Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, 31, is the brains behind a $9 billion company that has changed the medical landscape by developing a new method to run blood tests

Elizabeth Holmes took the crown of youngest 'self-made' woman billionaire thanks to revolutionary blood tests touted by the Silicon Valley startup.

She has been on the defensive for months after news reports questioning whether Theranos has indeed delivered a revolutionary new way to test blood.

Media outlets knocking her from her pedestal had previously praised the 31-year-old as a visionary along the lines of Apple's famed co-founder Steve Jobs.

She was only 19 when she founded Theranos in 2003, launching it with money her parents had set aside for her education.

With a major fear of needles, she decided the current system for testing blood - implemented in the 1960s - was archaic, expensive, painful and slow.

Holmes endeavored to change that method and develop a way that would eradicate the need for vials of blood to be taken and for blood tests to have to take place at the doctors or a lab.

The new way of testing that uses far less blood and delivers faster results at much lower cost than traditional methods in US labs, according to Theranos.

Working mostly in secret for the last 12 years, her company, Theranos, is now valued at more than $9 billion and, according to Holmes, is changing people's lives.

Partnered with Walgreens, the flagship Theranos Wellness Center is based in Palo Alto, California, and the firm has since opened scores of centers inside Walgreens around Phoenix.

Patients are able to walk into the stores, have their finger pricked, and get blood results within hours.

Holmes was the youngest self-made woman on this years Forbes 400 rich list. Shes owns 50 per cent of Theranos, and has a net worth of about $4.5 billion.

Holmes has a team of influential backers behind her company.
Supreme Court judges have agreed to hear the argument for a final appeal from a married celebrity who wants to keep his threesome with another couple under wraps.

The star - who used a now-scrapped gagging order to hide his threesome with another couple - lodged another appeal to keep his identity secret earlier today.

The love cheat filed his defence to the Supreme Court this morning who decided this afternoon to hold the leave appeal on Thursday morning at 9.30am.

During that hearing the Supreme Court will hear the star's lawyers' arguments for a final appeal hearing - if they agree to it there will be a full appeal hearing.

Yesterday Court of Appeal judges ruled his gagging order should be lifted because his name is now 'common knowledge' and 'circulating on the internet' along with details of his sex life.

But the interim injunction preventing the naming of the celebrity which was granted by the Court of Appeal will remain in place until the conclusion of the Supreme Court hearing.

At the end of the hearing the Supreme Court will decide whether to continue that injunction.

The married celebrity had group sex with another couple after asking if they were 'up for a three-way' and was also offered the chance to have sex in a paddling pool filled with olive oil.

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Court case: Lord Justice Jackson, left yesterday, decided to lift an injunction brought by a celebrity who had a threesome with another couple. The star lodged another appeal at the Supreme Court to keep his identity secret earlier today

Argument: Desmond Browne, QC for the star, admitted: 'The judgment may be treated as the death of the celebrity privacy'.

The star's identity has been revealed to millions across America, China, Europe, on social media and even in Scottish newspapers but not in England and Wales.

Explaining the decision to overturn the gagging order Lord Justice Jackson said the star's name is 'now so widespread that confidentiality has probably been lost' - citing a MailOnline survey revealing one in five people claimed to know his identity.

But the star was allowed to make a final appeal to the Supreme Court - the highest court in the land - meaning the gagging order remains in place until the final appeal hearing on Thursday.

After the ruling Desmond Browne QC, for the celebrity, said: 'The judgment may be treated as the death of the celebrity privacy'.

WHAT WE CAN REPORT ABOUT THE STAR AND HIS 'THREESOME' 2008: The star, named as PJS in court papers and married to fellow celebrity YMA, meets future lover, known as AB. 2009: The celebrity and AB start having 'occasional sexual encounters'. December 2011: The star sends a text asking AB if his partner, known as CD, is 'up for a three-way'. AB said that CD was and the three met for a threesome and had group sex. January 2016: AB and CD approached the editor of the Sun on Sunday. They told the editor about their earlier sexual encounters with the claimant. The editor proposed to publish the story. January 14 2016: The newspaper's lawyers contacted the star's representatives and informed them of the position. The claimant says that any publication of AB's and CD's story would be an invasion of privacy and tried to get an injunction to stop the story. The High Court refused the man's initial application to muzzle the Press because his infidelity contradicted his public portrayal of marital commitment. He appealed and was given anonymity. March: The Court of Appeal overruled that decision after hearing from the household name that naming him would devastating for him and could harm his children. April 18: The Court of Appeal overturns the gagging order - but the star says he will appeal to the Supreme Court, meaning the injunction remains in place. Advertisement

Experts believe that yesterday's ruling, if upheld, could spell the end of the celebrity injunction in the internet age.

The judges agreed that stories naming star 'PJS' and describing his extramarital sex would continue to 'pop up' - and 'as one is taken down, another will appear'.

The celebrity had forced Google to remove dozens of links to stories and blogs about his threesome.

The celebrity's children - which the anonymity order was meant to protect - should not be used as a 'trump card', the judge added.

Lord Justice Jackson said: 'Whether or not the court grants the injunction, it is inevitable that the two children will in due course learn about these matters.

'Much of the harm which the injunction was intended to prevent has already occurred.'

He added: 'The court should not make orders which are ineffective. It is, in my view, inappropriate for the court to ban people from saying that which is common knowledge.'

Lord Justice Jackson, Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Simon all agreed that the star's identity has become widely known worldwide so the injunction should no longer stand.

Lord Justice Jackson told the court: 'In the last two weeks the material the subject of the court's order has become widely known by reason of overseas publications and materials circulating on the internet.

'The relatives, friends and business contacts of PJS all know perfectly well what it is alleged that PJS has been doing.

'There have been numerous headlines such as 'celebrity love cheat' and 'Gag celeb couple alleged to have had a threesome'.

'Many readers know to whom that refers.'

He added: 'If the interim injunction stands, newspaper articles will continue to appear ... calling upon PJS to identify himself. Websites discussing the story will continue to pop up. As one is taken down, another will appear.

'That substantially affects the balance of Article Eight rights against Article Ten rights. It also reduces the likelihood of the claimant obtaining a permanent injunction when the case comes to trial.

'For the reasons set out in the judgment which we now hand down, and subject to any stay which the claimant may seek pending appeal, this court will set aside the injunction previously granted'.

Ruling: Lord Justice Jackson (centre), Lady Justice King (left) and Lord Justice Simon (right) delivered their judgement dressed in the civil gown, along with yellow bands to illustrate their status as Appeal Court judges

Lawyers for the celebrity - PJS - instantly asked appeal judges to give them permission to take the case to the Supreme Court.

The three appeal judges refused permission for the man to appeal to the Supreme Court through them - but he has the right to appeal directly.

Lord Justice Jackson said: 'We consider this is a matter for the Supreme Court to decide.'

He announced: 'We grant a stay until 1pm on Wednesday. The effect of that stay is that the injunction will remain in place until then.'

The judge said 'the claimant ought, in our view' to be able to lodge his application for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court by 10am today.

Experts have said that the case has now probably cost those involved 1million.

Mark Stevens, a solicitor specialising in privacy and media law at Howard Kennedy, told BBC News: 'This was a close call judicially right from the beginning as to whether or not they got a privacy injunction.

He added: 'The judges have said 'we won't undertake an exercise in futility' but they are confronting a very, very important issue.

INTERNET NOW TRUMPS 'HUMAN RIGHTS OF STARS', EXPERTS SAY Human rights legislation used by celebrities to claim privacy is being trumped by the internet, experts said on yesterday's judgment. Michael Gardner, a partner at law firm Wedlake Bell, said: 'This injunction is now hanging by a thread after the Court of Appeal ruling. 'Under English law, anyone with knowledge of the injunction who publishes the real name could potentially face imprisonment for contempt of court. 'That is very hard to justify when the information is freely available to so many millions of people around the world - and now very substantial numbers within the UK.' He added: 'The Human Rights Act has given celebrities rights they did not have previously to keep the lid on aspects of their private lives. But the internet has had the effect of making these rights very hard to police.' Lawyer Mark Stephens, a media law specialist at law firm Howard Kennedy, went on: 'We have to remember this was judicially a marginal call, with the first court going one way and the second - the Court of Appeal - going another. 'Since that second decision we have had two intervening facts. 'One is that it has been learned that the source spoke not only to The Sun On Sunday but also to an American publication prior to the injunction, and secondly the information has been made widely available in publications and online outside England and Wales, and given the porous border the information is now so widely known within England and Wales that continuing the order would be an exercise in futility.' Advertisement

'How do you deal with maintaining a private life - and the Court of Appeal have said, 'we think that this should have stayed private' - how do you deal with that in this current era?

'Of course that's a matter of enormous importance, and what's being argued about at the moment is whether or not that should go off to the Supreme Court, the highest court of appeal that we have, for them to render their minds onto this really difficult topic.'

Asked how much each side has already spent on the case, Mr Stevens replied: 'We must be up to half a million already, and I would think we're going to hit a million before long.'

On Friday a judge who imposed a draconian gagging order to protect the cheating celebrity conceded that a MailOnline survey may prove his identity is already available to 'anyone'.

Lord Justice Jackson also said that the widespread reporting of the case abroad and online meant the married man's children  who the injunction is also meant to shield  will find out 'sooner or later.'

Details of the threesome with another couple have already been published across the globe  including in Scotland  and sparked an internet frenzy.

But an anonymity order bans newspapers in England and Wales naming those involved.

A snapshot survey by MailOnline this week indicated that one in five people already knew the name of the celebrity, who can only be referred to as PJS.

Desmond Browne QC, for PJS, showed judges a copy of the article as evidence that a 'substantial' number of people were still unaware of his identity and that the injunction should remain.

But the argument backfired when Lord Justice Jackson interjected and told him: 'The point is that anyone who is interested can find out...

'The one in five are only the ones who are interested. Those who are interested already know.'

Lord Justice Simon also told the court that the 'one in five' figure was a 'not insignificant number'.

The couple involved in the threesome with the celebrity approached the Sun on Sunday earlier this year offering to tell their story.

The High Court refused the man's initial application to muzzle the Press because his infidelity contradicted his public portrayal of marital commitment.

But the Court of Appeal overruled that decision after hearing that naming him would devastating for him and could harm his children.

The gag is being challenged at the Court of Appeal (pictured) , meaning the ban could be overturned and the celebrity unmasked

Despite this it has now been published in the US, Scotland, Italy China Italy, Spain and by a British blogger, the Court of Appeal heard.

Lord Justice Jackson said regardless of whether the injunction was lifted, the widespread reporting of it meant that 'sooner or later the children will learn about this'.

Mr Browne also accused the Daily Mail of attempting to ridicule the court with a series of articles claiming 'the law is ass' for granting the anonymity order.

MORE THAN HALF OF PEOPLE KNOW IDENTITIES OF CELEBRITY INVOLVED More than half of people know the identity of the celebrity involved in the extramarital threesome story, a survey found. The poll by YouGov, which had about 3,000 respondents by midday, revealed that 54 per cent of people knew the name of the star - and his famous spouse. A further 38 per cent admitted they did not know who the couple were, while 8 per cent said they did not know enough about the story. The results come a week after a poll by MailOnline revealed eight out of 40 people asked on a London street believed they could name who was involved despite the ban. Advertisement

Gavin Millar QC, for the Sun on Sunday, said the story is not going away and compared it to the privacy debate surrounding Culture Secretary John Whittingdale's relationship with a dominatrix which was made public this week.

He said: 'The injunction no longer serves its intended purpose.

'The information is no longer private in the way it was when the order was made.

'The relevant parts of the order no longer prevent the public accessing the information in this jurisdiction.'

Twitter, Instagram posts and Google searches following publication of the story in the US meant the celebrity became 'readily and swiftly identifiable', the QC said.

Mr Millar argued the identities of PJS, and his spouse, known as YMA, 'continues to be extensively published'.

The gagging order had been widely criticised by freedom of speech campaigners and Tory MP Philip Davies said it was a 'farce'.

Former Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, who previously named Ryan Giggs in parliament when he was granted a similar order, said the English legal system was in danger of looking 'silly' if the new injunction remains.

'This isn't a secret any more,' he said

'We have a situation where information has been published in the USA, in Ireland and in Scotland. People can find it on the internetIt must be lifted.'
Sweden's Deputy Prime Minister has come under fire after branding the September 11 terror attacks 'accidents'.

Asa Romson made the comments during an interview on Tuesday, regarding the recent resignation of Sweden's Minister for Housing and IT after he compared Israel to Nazi Germany.

Romson, 44, of coalition partner the Green Party, commended Mehmet Kaplan on his work with young Muslims during 'tough situations like at the 11 September accidents'.

Controversial comments: Sweden's Deputy Prime Minister Asa Romson, 44, referred to the 9/11 terrorist attacks as 'The 11 September accidents'

Kaplan, also of the Green Party, resigned Monday after likening Israel's treatment of Palestinians to the persecution of Jews in by the Nazis before and during the Second World War.

Romson said: 'He [Kaplan] has been chairman for Swedish Young Muslims in tough situations like around the September 11 accidents and similar.'

The September 11 attacks, also referred to as 9/11, were the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in modern history.

Islamist terrorist network Al-Qaeda launched four co-ordinated attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, claiming the lives of 2,996 people (including the 19 hijackers).

Shortly after her interview on SVT on Tuesday morning, debate exploded on social networks, with the Deputy PM becoming the top trending topic on Twitter in the Scandinavian nation.

Gaffe prone: Romson, pictured with fellow Green Party leader Gustav Fridolin, left, and Prime Minister Stefan Loefven, has previously compared the migration crisis in the Mediterranean to Auschwitz

While some online commentators have settled for criticising her comments, others have called for her resignation.

Romson later defended her comment, saying: 'The "accident" [of 9/11] is that we ended up with a very harsh debate on integration and how society grows with different religions side by side, and the discrimination that followed.

'Of course, the attack on New York on 11th September 2001 is one of the biggest attacks, terror-actions and assaults on the peaceful and democratic world we have seen in modern times. I have no other opinion on this matter.'

This is only the most recent controversial branding to come from the gaffe-prone Swedish Deputy Prime Minister

Hours after the attacks in Paris on November 13, where 130 people were killed and 352 injured by ISIS terrorists, Romson tweeted: The very serious events in Paris right now can obstruct the climate change summit in December when more than 100 heads of state have planned on taking part.'

Last May, she faced international criticism after comparing the situation in the Mediterranean in the wake of the European migration crisis to World War II Nazi death camps.

Speaking during a live party leader debate Romson said: 'We are turning the Mediterranean into the new Auschwitz.'

About 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed in Auschwitz during the Second World War.
Donald Trump's field director has resigned after a new staffer was hired and installed as his boss in a shakeup of the Republican presidential hopeful's finances and campaign strategy.

Stuart Jolly, Trump's national field director, handed in his resignation yesterday after a meeting at the weekend discussing overhauls to the team.

A close friend of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Jolly was part of the team which carried Trump from an outsider to the position of potential Republican nominee.

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Stuart Jolly, a member of Donald Trump's tight-knit team and a close friend of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski (pictured), has resigned after he was handed a new boss in a shakeup of staffers

Trump has also handed his new employees a $20million war chest in a bid to win New York and California

However, the changes - which included installing Paul Manafort and Rick Wiley into positions above Jolly - are alienating long-time loyal staffers, Politico reported.

It comes as Trump authorized his new lieutenants a budget of $20million for upcoming key contests in the states of New York today and California in June.

Jolly told CNN he resigned on his own accord, denying he was pushed out or asked to leave.

He said: 'I don't want to hurt Mr. Trump and I certainly don't want to hurt Corey. You gotta love and respect the people you work for.

'Things were changing so I'm going to give them an opportunity. I would obviously have less input.'

A source told Politico that Jolly had refused to work with Wiley, who was hired as political director and comes from having managed Scott Walker's failed bid for the nomination.

'Stuart is the only guy who has worked with the field staff, and they are loyal to him. He is the only guy who understands how this works.

'It is going to be a huge shock when he leaves.

Jolly is a long-time ally of Lewandowski, who retained the support of Mr Trump after a case of criminal battery was opened amid allegations his grabbed a reporter by the arm.
A toe-curling video has emerged of Francois Hollande trying desperately not to react as the Egyptian national army band played a disastrous rendition of the French national anthem.

The French President stood motionless and kept a straight face for two minutes as he endured a painfully out of tune version of the Marseillaise at the start of his official visit to Egypt.

Footage shows the 61-year-old standing on a platform and watching as the military brass band butchered one of the world's best known national anthems.

Toe-curling footage shows Francois Hollande trying desperately not to react as the Egyptian national army band played a disastrous rendition of the French national anthem

Footage shows the 61-year-old standing on a platform and watching as the military brass band (pictured) butchered one of the world's best known national anthems

Hollande arrived in Cairo on Sunday for a two-day visit seen as a boost for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, with security and economic cooperation on the table.

A beaming Sisi greeted the French president at Cairo airport, live footage on state television showed.

He brought a delegation of business leaders in tow, and he and Sisi are expected to also discuss Middle East crises including the war against ISIS and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The French President stood motionless and kept a straight face for two minutes as he endured a painfully out of tune version of the Marseillaise at the start of his official visit to Egypt

The question of human rights will be in the background. Hollande has been among Sisi's strongest supporters in Europe, since the former army chief overthrew his Islamist predecessor and launched a bloody crackdown on protesters in 2013.

France has already signed major arms contracts with Egypt since, and Hollande and his delegation are expected to agree economic deals throughout the visit.
An ocean photographer has captured the 'majestic' beauty of one of the sea's greatest predators  the great white shark.

Seascape photographer Warren Keelan, from Wollongong, dove deep into the water near the Neptune Islands in South Australia two weeks ago to capture the massive creatures as they glided through the water.

'I've been surfing my whole life and diving and fishing and seen numerous sharks in the water. I shoot the ocean almost every day of my life on the surface  I've always had a fascination with what's below the surface,' Mr Keelan told Daily Mail Australia.

Ocean photographer Warren Keelan dove into the water near the Neptune Islands in South Australia two weeks ago to capture the beauty of one of the ocean's greatest predators (pictured)

Mr Keelan, who has been surfing for more than 20 years, said the increase in technology has led increased people's fear of the great white shark

Despite the public perception that great whites are 'fearsome and deathly eaters,' Mr Keelan said he wasn't scared to enter the water.

'I don't see how people could be scared they're big creatures with teeth but they're just majestic and very, very graceful, but also powerful, cunning and intelligent,' he said.

The sharks travel to the Neptune Islands to feed on fur seals that breed along the South Australian coastline, Mr Keelan said.

Mr Keelan and his friend were placed into a cage big enough to fit six or seven people that floated in the water.

'It's quite surreal, when you go to a zoo it's humans that are looking at animals but it was almost reversed,' he said.

'I've always had a fascination with what's below the surface,' Mr Keelan

The great whites were very curious about who was watching them from the metal cage.

'They'll look at you as you wave - they're very responsive and intelligent,' he said.

Me Keelan said people's fear of great whites has increased with the continued expansion of technology.

'Twenty years ago when I was in the water surfing, the internet and mobile phones werent a thing. If you saw a shark five kilometres down the road, little or no one would know about it,' he said, adding that everyone has a phone to capture the moment now.

The great whites were very curious about who was watching them from the metal cage, Mr Keelan said (pictured in the cage)

'Theres a hype created around there being a lot more sharks, which there may in fact well be due to commercial fishing and global warming, at the same time technology means that more people are going to hear about it faster.'

People should face their fears by getting in the water themselves, he said.
A paranormal investigator claims to have caught on camera what could be the spirits of seven dead monks returning after being awoken during a ghost hunting vigil.

Full-time ghost hunter Lee Roberts, 39, was keeping an eye on CCTV camera while a group of investigators held a vigil on Friday night at grade-II listed building The Village in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire.

The group held hands and called out for spirits to show themselves as well using an Ouija board, but did not realise that anything had happened until Mr Roberts showed them CCTV of a swirling mist that appeared only moments later.

Eerie footage shows swirling mist circling around The Village in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire - which ghost-hunters believe is the spirits of seven dead monks

The unexplained mist was caught on CCTV while a group of ghost-hunters held a vigil in the historic building

Mr Roberts believes the mist could be the spirit of seven monks. Legend has it that the 19th century building is based where an old barn once stood that monks used to hide out in, and that seven died there when the barn was set on fire and burnt to the ground.

The father-of-four claims he has done ghost hunts at the site for two years and never seen the mist appear until after the vigil and it has not reappeared since.

Mr Roberts has been unable to explain the mist and has ruled out smoke, drafts and dust as possible causes.

Mr Roberts, from Sutton-in-Ashfield, said: 'I'm very scientific minded and I'm usually able to explain nine out of 10 "ghost sightings! or pictures I see through natural means, however I simply can't explain this one.

'Some people are saying it is smoke or something from outside, however smoking and vaping is banned in the building so I know it wasn't that and there are no windows down there so there was nothing coming in. Also, smoke doesn't move like that - it was moving very oddly. Bizarre really.

The ghost-hunters have dismissed claims that the mist could be due to someone vaping an e-cigarette inside the building

The Village is believed to be on the site of an old barn where seven monks lost their lives in a fire, according to local legend

'What is even stranger is that the vigil team did not see it while they were there, even when it was appearing on the CCTV.

Ghost hunter Lee Roberts has hosted paranormal vigils at The Village over the past few years

'Some have claimed it could be an air phenomenon that the building has, however I have been investigating that place for two years and have never seen this before or since. It appeared moments after the vigil finished, came in waves for about an hour and then disappeared.

'Others have said it looks like spirits walking around or the first manifestations of something such as a ghost or poltergeist.

'It reminds me of the mist that appears in the Poltergeist film. It's very excited to catch this on camera. I get sent a lot of footage that turns out to have a simply explanation but this is one of the first we have seen where we can't explain it.

'It's right there in front of your eyes, which is fantastic to capture. I was over the moon with the footage.

'To have this story of the seven monks and then this appear on camera, the two things together is really exciting. Put the two together and it's pretty odd.

'It was very, very eerie down there that night. People commented on it. It did feel like there were things around us watching.'

The group went into the area just through the door visible in the footage around 9.30pm, according to Lee, and began holding hands and calling out to anyone present to show themselves.

Mr Roberts is a full-time paranormal investigator, and is pictured here on one of his vigils

The Village is a popular ghost-hunting venue both for serious paranormal investigators and for stag and hen parties

Lee, who then saw the mist appear only minutes later, said: 'When I showed the group the footage some of them were really freaked out and even refused to go back in there.

'Others thought it was really interesting and went into the room to see if they could see it, but despite it still appearing on the CCTV, there was nothing there.

'We are going to be investigating and watching the venue closely over the coming weeks but I don't know if we'll ever see it again.'

The venue is currently used as an activity centre for children and can also be booked for hen parties and stag dos, as well as being used by the Village Paranormal Events group.

Jo Phillips from Asylum666 Paranormal Events was one of those involved in the vigil when the mist was spotted.

The mum-of-two from Coventry said: 'Quite a few of the ladies in our group felt very uneasy once inside the room. It was a little bit odd in there.

Mr Roberts said he can normally explain away 'ghostly' photos and videos, but has been unable to find an explanation for the swirling mist

'I did not know the stories about the monks because I prefer not to know the history before we go into a place, however a few of us did report sensations of fire, including myself.

'We were just in the back of the room when the footage was taken but we did not see anything with the naked eye. We have never seen anything like this before.

'It's the way the mist comes and then suddenly goes like that, which really makes you wonder what it could be.

'I don't jump to any paranormal explanations as it is only mist, it's not like we saw a ghost. However I just can't think of a logical explanation for it.
A venom expert has revealed ingesting a redback spider is more harmful to human than its potentially deadly bite.

This week Woolworths took some of their broccoli off the shelves after redback spiders were found lurking in the vegetable foliage by up to three separate customers.

Billie Weir is a venomous creatures expert for the South Australian Museum, she says ingesting a redback spider, dead or alive could be deadly.

The pain would be quite severe, Ms Weir said.

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Dee Nott, from the Gold Coast, was horrified to find a large, deadly redback spider on the broccoli she had just purchased on Saturday from Woolworths (pictured)

The extent of a persons reaction to ingesting a redback spider would depend on their age and any pre-existing medical conditions.

The reaction would be similar to a bite from the deadly spider, but more severe because there would be more venom in a whole spider than in a single bite.

Ms Weir says symptom onset would be slower when ingesting the spider than from a bite but the effect would remain the same.

You have an 8hr risk of venom activity including tachycardia and hypertension arise from pain and muscle tension.

The venom breaks down nerve cells in the body which is why the victim experiences such extreme pain.

Ms Nott said she was washing the broccoli in the sink when she saw the dark black spider with bright red dot on its back (pictured)

Both ingesting and being bitten by a redback spider requires hospitalisation and an antivenom depending on the severity of the symptoms.

Broccoli from three suppliers were taken from stores in Queensland and New South Wales as a safety precaution, but the supermarket chain says produce levels won't be impacted because they have many suppliers.

'We take customer concerns about food safety and quality very seriously. Supply of this batch of product has been temporarily suspended while we work closely with three of our Queensland suppliers to ensure we are receiving the best quality produce,' a Woolworths spokesman told Daily Mail Australia.

The stock was taken off the shelf after a number of complaints from consumers who found the deadly spiders in their vegetables.

Maurice Wilson is one of the customers who found a spider in their broccoli said the creature 'lunged' at his finger as he cut the vegetable, the Brisbane Times reports.

'I noticed a little black, but I continued to cut through it and I noticed this thing lunged out at my finger and I thought, 'What the hell?',' Mr Wilson said.

When he contacted the store at Runaway Bay where he purchased the product they apologised and gave him a $20 voucher, Woolworths head office then followed up on the complaint and gave him an additional $30 gift card.

Mr Wilson came forward after reports emerged of a woman in the Gold Coast who also found a redback spider in her broccoli.

Ms Nott posted a photo of the redback to Woolworth's Facebook out of frustration and said 'the good news is that [she] is alive and well this morning'

Dee Nott posted a photo of the redback, which she said was now frozen, to Woolworth's Facebook out of frustration.

'Hi team Woolworths. I just had a nasty surprise - a live redback spider in my broccoli purchased today at your Runaway Bay store. I am lucky it did not bite me as I washed it. I plan to take in the critter (now frozen) and my receipt tomorrow. I thought I should mention it in case there is an infestation,' Ms Nott wrote.

The morning after she posted the initial photo, Ms Nott followed up with the grocery store chain with a second picture.

Woolworths is no stranger to customer's finding unexpected and unpleasant surprises in their food

'The good news is that I am alive and well this morning. Woolworths - please pm me re this matter ASAP,' she said.

Store representatives soon responded, asking Ms Natt to provide her information so they can follow up on the incident, which they said they are 'taking it very seriously.'

The second picture shows how large the redback spider is and the web it has weaved onto the broccoli stem.

Woolworths is no stranger to customer's finding unexpected and unpleasant surprises in their food.

In February a woman in Brisbane found a snail on the side of a head of lettuce and another woman discovered a massive huntsman spider moving around inside a pre-packaged lettuce mix.

The same month, a shopper shamed the supermarket giant after an apparent discovery of a dead mouse inside her 'washed & ready to eat' spinach bag.

Woolworths will be working with the suppliers involved to ensure their produce is spider free before it returns to the shelf.

According to suppliers the spiders being found in the broccoli is due to an integrated pest management system.

The system uses bugs like spiders to reduce pests and the need of insecticide. The producer said customers 'can be rest assured that not a lot of pesticides went into that product'.

In February a woman discovered a massive huntsman spider moving around inside a pre-packaged lettuce mix (pictured)
A four-month-old baby girl died on a flight from London to Hong Kong after a medical emergency that forced the plane to divert to Kazakhstan.

Her parents raised the alarm after finding their daughter unconscious on a Cathay Pacific Airways plane while flying to visit relatives in China.

A passenger, who is a nurse, stepped in to give the baby first aid as the pilot made an emergency landing at Almaty Airport in Kazakhstan where paramedics were on standby.

Mid-air tragedy: A four-month-old baby girl died on a Cathay Pacific flight from London to Hong Kong after a medical emergency that forced the plane to divert to Kazakhstan (file picture)

However, the infant, named as Jasmine by Chinese media, was confirmed dead at the airport on Sunday.

Her devastated parents made the torturous decision to continue their journey to Hong Kong with their daughter.

Passengers said the parents were 'emotionally distraught' for the rest of the flight.

The couple  a French father, 32, and a Chinese-French mother, 36  had been planning to take a transfer flight to Changsha in Chinas Hunan province from Hong Kong to visit relatives.

Preliminary tests by doctors from the Airport Medical Centre and the Port Health Office in Hong Kong found nothing suspicious, it was reported by Apple Daily.

Diverted: A passenger, who is a nurse, stepped in to give the baby first aid as the pilot made an emergency landing at Almaty Airport in Kazakhstan (above, file picture) where paramedics were on standby

The baby is believed to have suffered from a gastrointestinal disorder before boarding the plane at Heathrow and drank milk while on board.

A post-mortem will be carried out to determine the cause of death.

Two years ago, a baby died after being born prematurely Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to New York.

The woman went into labour some hours after the Boeing 777-300 took off from Hong Kong, forcing the plane to divert to Japan.
A Los Angeles high school has opened the first gender-neutral restroom in the nation's second-largest school district in a move geared toward accommodating transgender students.

Santee Education Complex converted a second-floor girls' restroom after the campus Gay Straight Alliance gathered some 700 signatures on a petition calling for the change.

It comes amid a heated national debate over transgender rights after North Carolina's governor signed into law a measure barring transgender people from using bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

A sign outside the gender neutral bathroom in the LA high school states it is available for 'everyone'

Monique Garcia, 17, walks past what is the first gender-neutral restroom in the Los Angeles school district

A student walks out of the gender neutral restroom which was created after a petition calling for it received 700 signatures

'Our students who advocated for the gender-neutral restrooms are the real heroes this valuable experience allowed them to develop leadership skills that will prepare them for college and career,' Santee Principal Martin Gomez said in a statement.

Elise Hill, a spokesman for the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, which runs Santee, said that it was believed to be the first gender-neutral school restroom in a public school in the state and among only a few nationwide.

Los Angeles Unified School District is the second largest U.S. public school district, with more than 1,000 schools and educational centers, plus 53 affiliated charter schools.

So-called 'bathroom bills' like the one passed in North Carolina have fueled debate about privacy, religious freedom and equal rights.

They have also drawn stern reactions from major corporations and entertainers who call them discriminatory.

North Carolina Republican Governor Pat McCrory earlier this week tweaked his the law with an executive order, adding protections against discrimination for state employees based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Companies such as PayPal Holdings and Deutsche Bank have halted plans to add jobs in the state after McCrory and top Republican lawmakers said they would not repeal the measure.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, has signed an anti-discrimination order protecting the rights of gay and transgender state employees and employees of state contractors.
Maggie the Kelpie, an Australian dog that was thought to be the oldest in the world, has died at the age of 30 leaving her owner devastated.

She was the best friend of Victorian dairy farmer Brian McLaren who confirmed the news, saying that Maggie passed away peacefully on Sunday night.

The beloved dog was still wandering around the dairy in Woolsthorpe, west of Melbourne, and growling at cats in the weeks before her death.

But Mr McLaren said that the Kelpie, who was more than 200 in dog years, went downhill in her last two days.

Maggie the Kelpie, an Australian dog that was thought to be the oldest in the world, has died at the age of 30 leaving her owner devastated

Maggie the Kelpie, an Australian dog that was thought to be the oldest in the world, has died at the age of 30 leaving her owner Brian McLaren (pictured) devastated

'She was 30 years old, she was still going along nicely last week, she was walking from the dairy to the office and growling at the cats and all that sort of thing,' Mr McLaren told the Weekly Times.

'She just went downhill in two days and I said yesterday morning when I went home for lunch ... 'She hasn't got long now'.

'I'm sad, but I'm pleased she went the way she went.'

Maggie has already been buried beside the McLaren's other dog in a marked grave under a pine tree.

Mr McLaren said that the Kelpie, who was approaching her third century in human years, went downhill in her last two days

The beloved dog was still wandering around the dairy in Woolsthorpe, west of Melbourne, and growling at cats in the weeks before her death

'We were great mates, it is a bit sad,' he said.

Maggie was a contender for the oldest dog in the world, but Mr McLaren lost the original paperwork for the dog, meaning that her age could not be independently verified.

The Western District owner previously spoke about the fact that his youngest son, Liam, was four years old when they bought Kelpie Maggie as a young pup. Liam is now 34.

Officially, the title of the oldest dog in the world still belongs to Bluey, an Australian cattle-dog from Rochester in Victoria, which reached 29 years and five months.
Four siblings separated after their mother died in a house fire have been reunited over a fish and chip dinner almost 75 years later.

The three sisters and one brother - who met up in Sheffield - were all aged under five when their mother passed away and they spent most of their lives living with grandparents or adoptive families.

Before 1982, adopted children could not look for their siblings but once the law was changed the search began for Maureen Coleman, 79, Chris Clay, 78, Mavis Clarke and Trevor Forshaw, both 76.

Back together: Mavis Clarke and Trevor Forshaw, both 76, Maureen Coleman, 79, and Chris Clay, 78, have been reunited in Sheffield over a fish and chip dinner almost 75 years after their mother died in a house fire

Reunion: The three sisters and one brother - who met up in Sheffield - were all aged under five when their mother passed away and they spent most of their lives living with grandparents or adoptive families

After a number of unsuccessful research attempts, Mr Forshaw from Derby found the Genes Reunited website. He said: If you had a family name, date of birth and place, you could get a list.

This gave me family tree and that led me back to one sister, Maureen. We met a fortnight later and got to know each other.

He discovered that Ms Coleman and Ms Clarke had already been in touch and soon the three siblings had met up. However that left Ms Clay, and the trio struggled to locate her.

Mr Forshaw said: We just couldnt find her. I posted a note on a forum and eventually had an email in September. The writer said she was aware of my sister.

Tracked down: Mr Forshaw (left, with his adoptive parents) had struggled to locate Ms Clay (right, as a child)

In her youth: Mr Forshaw discovered that Ms Coleman (front, pictured aged 18 in Blackpool) had already been in touch with Ms Clarke - and soon the three siblings met up

I emailed and we then spoke on the phone to Chris. Ironically, she lives only 20 minutes drive away from me and Maureen is only half an hour away.

We were all within 40 miles of each other for so many years Trevor Forshaw

Mavis lives just short of Rotherham. We were all within 40 miles of each other for so many years.

The close locations of all four siblings led to them being in the same room for the first time in 74 years and four months.

The only hint of sadness was the absence of their eldest brother, Arnold, who had sadly died when he was 36.

Mr Forshaw said: We had a bottle of wine and fish and chips so it was a really good celebration. It was really good.
A South Korean fried chicken restaurant has been ordered to pay more than 8,500 for calling itself Louis Vuitton.

The owner, identified only by his surname Kim, had called his restaurant in the capital Seoul, 'Louis Vuiton Dak' - a play on the word 'tongdak' which means whole chicken in Korean.

He also ran up a logo very similar to that of the French fashion house and had it printed on his napkins and fried chicken take-away cartons.

A South Korean fried chicken restaurant has been ordered to pay more than 8,500 after using the luxury Louis Vuitton brand name (file picture)

Louis Vuitton filed a suit in September last year, saying the use of the company's name to sell fried chicken was damaging to the brand.

A district court in Seoul agreed and in October ordered Kim to desist and threatened a 500,000 won-per-day fine for non-compliance.

Kim responded by tinkering with the restaurant name and came up with 'chaLouisvui tondak'.

The chicken shop owner also ran up a logo very similar to that of the French fashion house (file picture) and had it printed on his napkins and fried chicken take-away cartons

He unsuccessfully argued that this was different enough to comply with the court ruling.

Louis Vuitton complained again and this week the court ordered Kim to pay the fashion house 14.5 million won for the 29 days that the amended name was displayed.
The government's 9million pro-EU 'propaganda' mailshot could be swinging the referendum battle in David Cameron's favour, the Tories' election guru has said.

Sir Lynton Crosby, who masterminded the party's general election victory, also said the Prime Minister was showing 'urgency' while the Leave camp appeared 'divided'.

The comments by such a respected figure, who has also run campaigns for Brexit-supporting London Mayor Boris Johnson, will spark concerns among those pushing for the UK to quit.

Mr Cameron's decision to spend public money on the leaflets met with a furious response from his own benches, with accusations he was trying to skew the result of the ballot.

The claim came as Justice Secretary Michael Gove attacked Mr Cameron and senior Remain figures for treating the public like 'children'.

Tory election strategist Sir Lynton Crosby said the government's EU mailshot could be swinging the campaign

He warned that Britain is being held 'hostage' by Brussels and insisted the UK would be better off outside the European single market - arguing that major players like Germany and France would ensure we could still trade freely.

He also dismissed the EU's current representative on the World Trade Organisation as a 'sociology lecturer from Sweden'.

In other developments today:

Former foreign secretary Lord Hague lashed out at Boris Johnson for criticising Barack Obama's expected pro-EU intervention.

Tory election guru Sir Lynton Crosby said the government's controversial 9million 'propaganda' mailshot appeared to be swinging the campaign in the Prime Minister's favour.

Education Secretary Nicky Morgan appealed for colleagues to 'step back from the brink' of civil war over the EU.

Mr Gove's coments in a keynote speech come only days after his fellow Out supporter, Boris Johnson, labelled David Cameron and his allies the Gerald Ratners of British politics  trying to push an EU project that they know is c**p.

'At different points In campaigners like to argue either that Brexit would lead to EU nations using their massive muscle to punish us, or that Brexit would lead to contagion and the collapse of Europe - just as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union collapsed following secession from those unions,' Mr Gove told the audience in London.

'Manifestly both cannot be true. An EU without the UK cannot simultaneously be a super-charged leviathan bent on revenge and a crumbling Tower of Babel riven by conflict.

'The UK's success will send a very different message to the EU's peoples. They will see that a different Europe is possible.

'It is possible to regain democratic control of your own country and currency, to trade and co-operate with other EU nations without surrendering fundamental sovereignty to a remote and unelected bureaucracy.

'And, by following that path, your people are richer, your influence for good greater, your future brighter.

Before his speech, The Justice Secretary was unusually given three minutes of uninterrupted airtime on the flagship programme to make his case for Brexit.

He used it to accuse the Remain campaign, led by Mr Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, of portraying the public as 'hapless and feckless'.

Britains a great country. Its the worlds fifth largest economy with the worlds best armed forces, best health service and best broadcaster,' he said.

Were first in the world for soft power, thanks to our language, culture and creativity. And yet the In camp try to suggest that were too small and too weak, and our people are too hapless and feckless to succeed without Jean-Claude Juncker looking after us.

Thats a deeply pessimistic and negative vision. Britain could do better. Were a uniquely inventive nation and our greatest invention is representative democracy - the principle that the people who run our county should be chosen by us and can be kicked out by us. Thats why its time to take back control.

I'd like to see a Britain on the WTO determining trade policy. More than that I would like to see trade barriers that we've erected in the EU against developing nations come down.

Later Mr Gove argued that  for all the dire warnings  a vote to remain inside the Brussels club is the real danger.

Justice Secretary Michael Gove, left, and Boris Johnson arrive for a meeting of the political Cabinet in Downing Street today

Mr Gove said: If we vote to remain, the EUs bosses and bureaucrats will take that as carte blanche to continue taking more power and money away from Britain.

Well be told by Brussels to shut up and suck it up. Well have no influence and will be outvoted. The eurozone countries have a permanent and unstoppable majority allowing them to set the agenda and overrule British interests.

The Justice Secretary also warned that, if Britain remains inside the EU, the European Court of Justice could ultimately force Britain to give prisoners the vote.

Last night Education Secretary Mrs Morgan, who supports the UK staying in, warned against allowing the debate to tear the party apart.

'We need to step back from the brink and take a long hard look at ourselves,' she said, 'Yes, let's debate our EU membership but let's keep that debate on the issues and, above all, let's not undermine the work that this government is doing to deliver real social justice.'

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Sir Lynton - an Australian who was knighted for services to politics - said an ORB poll showed 'further improvement' in the position of Remain.

THE 'EX-SOCIOLOGY LECTURER' WHO SPEAKS FOR THE EU ON TRADE EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom represents the grouping on the WTO Justice Secretary Michael Gove dismissed the EU's representative on the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as an 'ex-sociology lecturer from Sweden'. He was referring to Cecilia Malmstrom, who leads on trade issues for the European Commission. Although EU states technically still have WTO seats in their own right, in practice they rely on Ms Malmstrom to stand up for their collective interests. The married mother-of-two became trade commissioner under commission president Jean-Claude Juncker in 2014, having previously served in the home affairs brief for four years. Before that she was minister for EU affairs in the Swedish government and vice-president of the Swedish Liberal Party, according to her biography on the commission website. In 1998-1999 she was senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Goteborg University, where she received a PhD in Political Science. Advertisement

He said the In campaign had gained three points, while Leave had lost five - meaning Britain would vote 52 per cent to 43 per cent to stay in the EU if the referendum was held today.

'The Remain campaign has also persuaded more voters of the case for staying in the EU, he said.

'Greater voter contact from the Remain campaign and public perceptions of their performance could be directly related.

'The proportion of those saying Remain is running the better campaign has increased by 5 points to 39 per cent while those saying the same of the Leave campaign has fallen by 10 points to 25 per cent.

'Equally, those saying they have heard the most from the Remain campaign has increased by 12 points to 44 per cent, while those saying the same of the Leave campaign has again fallen by 10 points to 25 per cent.

'It is possible that these positive changes in campaign activity metrics have been driven by the booklet that the Government sent to every household in the UK.

'It may also be a derivative effect of the contrast between David Cameron's demonstrated urgency and focus on the outcome, and infighting between various Leave factions over which campaign should receive the official designation.'

Mr Johnson was who attended a meeting of the political Cabinet in Downing Street this morning.

OSBORNE JEERED BY MPS AS HE DEFENDS 'DODGY DOSSIER' IN COMMONS George Osborne faces questions in the House George Osborne has been jeered by Tories as he defended the Treasury's apocalyptic assessment of Brexit risks. The Chancellor denied that leaving the EU would reduce immigration as he faced repeated attacks from MPs during his regular questions session in the Commons. Kettering MP Philip Hollobone complained that the analysis was only fit for the BBC's popular children's programme Jackanory. 'In the disgracefully dodgy document published by the Treasury yesterday, which frankly is worthy of the children's programme Jackanory, the immigration figures suggest that there will be three million immigrants to this country by 2030, placing you in clear breach of the Conservative manifesto commitment to reduce immigration to tens of thousands per year,' he said. 'What is your response to that accusation?' Mr Osborne insisted there would be an 'economic crisis' if the UK votes to leave the EU on June 23. One of Mr Osborne's Treasury ministers, David Gauke, stepped in to deflect the jibes at his boss, insisting a 'large number' of experts agreed with the 'direction' of the assessment. Responding to Tory Stewart Jackson branding the report a 'dodgy dossier', Mr Osborne said: 'The public want facts and information.' Christchurch MP Christopher Chope worked a reference to the document into a question about housebuilding. 'How is having net migration of an additional three million people going to help first-time buyers find a home?' he said. The Chancellor replied: 'We have the products to help first-time buyers in this country afford housing but I would make this observation on migration: You cannot have access to the single market without accepting free movement of people. 'It is an absolutely clear principle that has been made very starkly clear to this country by Germany and France and is internationally accepted. 'If you want access to the single market you have to accept free movement of people.' After its assessment of the longer-term impacts of Brexit, the Treasury is due to publish another dossier on the short term effects in the last month of the campaign. Advertisement
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This is the tiny hedgehog who has taken Instagram by storm because of his 'vampire teeth'.

African pygmy hedgehog Huff, from Utah, shot to fame after his owner Carolyn noticed he appeared to have a cheeky smile.

His Instagram account, which was set up in February, has now racked up around 1,800 followers, with images including Huff 'helping' with baking, 'posing' in a popcorn pot and 'wearing' sunglasses.

This is the tiny hedgehog called Huff who has taken picture sharing site Instagram by storm because of his 'vampire teeth'

African pygmy hedgehog Huff, from Utah, shot to fame after his owner Carolyn noticed he appeared to have a cheeky smile

Carolyn revealed she always tries to snap Huff pulling funny faces but claimed it takes time to get the perfect shot. She often has to bribe him with worms.

She said: 'He doesn't ever smile on his own, I'm just sneaky in how I take his pictures. He's a grump and gets anxious if I keep him out too long but he has his good days.

'When I take pictures of Huff I just try to find the best way to show him off and keep him happy with bribes of mill worms.

'Hedgehogs have the best expressions when they are yawning or eating but if I can get pictures of him during those I consider myself lucky.'

His Instagram account, which was set up in February, has now racked up nearly 2,000 followers with each photograph getting hundreds of 'likes'

Some of the images are taken outside, such as the two above which show Huff wrapped in coloured material and at the park with his owner

Carolyn revealed she always tries to snap Huff pulling funny faces but claimed it takes time to get the perfect shot and she often has to bribe him with worms

The hilarious account describes itself as 'the reluctant adventures of a (mostly) happy little hedgehog in Utah'.

Carolyn took Huff home after his previous owner returned him having only fed him apples, she said.

She added that sharing pictures of Huff, whose full name is Hodge Huffington, makes her smile as she struggles with seasonal depression.

She said: 'I had always thought hedgehogs were cute but had never seen one in person.. I was browsing pets for sale in my area and saw Huff's cute grumpy face and I couldn't resist.

The hilarious Instagram account describes itself as 'the reluctant adventures of a (mostly) happy little hedgehog in Utah'

Some photographs contain props including an 'every day I'm hustlin'' sign (left) and a small treehouse (right), which was used in an outdoor shot

Carolyn said: 'Hedgehogs have the best expressions when they are yawning or eating but if I can get pictures of him during those I consider myself lucky'

'He's great, a lot of time I'll take him out to cuddle with me while I watch TV or he'll go with me to the park.

'He likes falling asleep in one of my old shirts - that has now become his shirt - and running on his wheel.

'I set up the Instagram account a few months ago because living in Utah, I struggle with seasonal depression and wanted to do something that made not only myself smile but other people smile as well.

'What better way to do that than cute pictures of a hedgehog?'

Carolyn revealed sharing pictures of Huff, whose full name is Hodge Huffington, makes her smile as she struggles with seasonal depression
It is costing Australian taxpayers almost $1,500 a night to house a single person at the detention centre on Christmas Island  the same amount it costs to stay in some of the country's most luxurious hotel suites.

A bunk bed in a dorm of 16 people and 'rubbish' food costs $1,458 a night for each of the 167 men detained at the facility on the island, which sits just off of the coast of Indonesia, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

It costs taxpayers $243,000 a day to house all of the men.

A bunk bed in a dorm of 16 people and 'rubbish' food costs Australian taxpayers $1,458 a night for each of the 167 men at the detention centre on Christmas Island (pictured) - equal to a night in a five-star hotel

For close to the same cost you can rent the Crown Towers Premier Club Suite in Melbourne (pictured)

Or you can spend a night in he presidential suite at the Sir Standford Hotel in Sydney (pictured)

For close to the same cost, you can rent the presidential suite at the Sir Standford Hotel in Sydney for a night, or take in panoramic views of Melbourne from the Crown Towers Premier Club Suite.

The presidential suite overlooks leafy Macquarie Street and features two lounge rooms, a bar and a mahogany writing desk, a fireplace and a Steinway Grand piano.

It also features a split-level bedroom with a king bed and a separate dressing room.

On the other hand, the detention centre is said to be a 'one out of 10'  a long way from the five star hotels that are equal in cost

'The food is absolutely rubbish. You'd get mainly curry  curried beef, curried pasta. It's worse than hospital food, there is nothing to chew on,' a former detainee told Fairfax Media

The dorms themselves have a small window but are 'very dirty,' he said

The premier suite in Melbourne is 70 square metres that overlooks the city skyline and features a large bathroom with two vanities and a tub.

Two large lounge chairs are position in front of the windows in the living area, which is separated from the bedroom.

On the other hand, the detention centre is said to be a 'one out of 10'  a long way from the five star hotels that are equal in cost.

'The food is absolutely rubbish. You'd get mainly curry  curried beef, curried pasta. It's worse than hospital food, there is nothing to chew on,' a former detainee told Fairfax Media.

The dorms themselves have a small window but are 'very dirty,' he said.
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A hungry elephant demanded food from terrified tourists on safari - and nearly sent them flying when it tried to reach inside their vehicle.

The cheeky tusker stuck his trunk inside a broken-down truck while begging for treats at Yala National Park in Sri Lanka.

Photographer Sidath Wanaguru captured the extraordinary moment from a vehicle travelling in convoy behind.

There are an estimated 6,000 elephants in Sri Lanka but they are an endangered species as humans increasingly encroach into their habitats.

Unlike their African cousins, only an estimated seven per cent of Asian elephants have tusks and in Sri Lanka the percentage is believed to be even lower so these tourists were a tad unlucky to come across one.

Mr Wanaguru, 36, said: 'No-one was harmed but the guests were terrified due to the sheer size of the elephant and because they were helpless to getting away due to breaking down.'

These tourists got more than they bargained for when they went on an elephant safari in the Yala National Park in southern Sri Lanka. Their truck broke down, leaving them at the mercy of the boisterous tusker

The tourists were terrified as the beast poked its giant tusks into the vehicle and rummaged around with its trunk in a bid to find some tasty morsels

Thankfully nobody was hurt in the incident. Most African elephants have tusks but only a small minority of their Asians do so these tourists were unfortunate to be ambushed by one that did

The dramatic footage was captured in Yala National Park in southern Sri Lanka. It is not far from the port city of Hambantota, which is being developed by the Chinese

The broken down truck was in a convoy of tourist vehicles and the unforgettable incident was captured on their cameras. Those in the vehicle were less inclined to take snaps

Photographer Sidath Wanaguru was following behind and was able to capture the elephant ambush on a long lens. The beast eventually wandered off into the jungle

In the West elephants are considered cute and harmless but in the wild they are anything but. They have been known to go on the rampage in Thailand, India and China and are dangerous because of their sheer size
Former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has been labelled a 'cheap date' amid accusations he bedded his mistress in rundown Albany hotels while away on business.

The former speaker is due to be sentenced in a few weeks for his $5million corruption case, which this week revealed the identities of the two women he was sleeping with.

One is former beauty queen Janele Hyer-Spencer, a blonde motorcycle enthusiast who allegedly got two state jobs thanks to Silver.

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The women Sheldon Silver is alleged to have had affairs with are beauty queen Janele Hyer-Spencer (left) and ruthless lobbyist Patricia Lynch, it has emerged

Love rat? Silver (pictured leaving court on Thursday), 72, and his wife Rosa have been married for 49 years and have four adult children

The other, the New York Post reported, is Patricia Lynch - a lobbyist who wielded considerable influence and who went on to launch her own PR firm.

Today the paper quoted a source who described Silver's liasons while on state business in Albany as the 'worst kept secret in politics'.

They said: 'Shelly would stay at [cheap Albany hotels] when he was up there doing state business. She [Hyer-Spencer] was seen leaving his room on a number of occasions.

It was claimed he chose cheap hotels such as the Red Carpet Inn because he was a 'penny pincher'.

'Hes a cheap date on someone elses dime,' the source added.

Court documents claim that one of the women 'lobbied the defendant on a regular basis on behalf of clients who had business before the State' and that Silver 'used his official position to recommend a job with the State' for the other woman.

U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni agreed to unseal the documents on Thursday because she said she would be considering the reports of these affairs when sentencing Silver.

Silver was convicted in November of trading favors to enrich himself and then lying about it while Speaker of the New York State Assembly.

Silver, 72, and his wife Rosa have been married for 49 years and have four adult children.

But the claims suggest the disgraced politician was cheating on his wife for at least part of their marriage.

Lynch was Silver's communications chief for six years before branching off to start her PR firm.

While she represented MSG, Silver blocked the West Side Stadium development that Lynch's client opposed.

Hyer-Spencer, who owns a Yamaha V-star motorbike, allegedly got an $84,000 job with New York's Education Department with the help of Silver

Court documents revealed just weeks before the former Speaker of the New York State Assembly will be sentenced in his $5million corruption case have identified the two women as Lynch (left) and Hyer-Spencer

Hyer-Spencer, who owns a Yamaha V-star motorbike, got an $84,000 job with New York's Education Department with the help of Silver, according to the Post.

She then moved to State Island Family Court as a magistrate and has pocketed a further $99,600.

This move suggests she is part of 'the Shelly Silver witness-protection program', former chief judge of the Court of Appeals Jonathan Lippman said.

Sources told the Post that Silver and Lynch were spotted kissing in an elevator at the Democratic Convention in 2000.

The former Speaker had adjoining hotel rooms with Hyer-Spencer during a trip to Israel that same year, and were also seen acting 'defensive' in a hotel lobby in Puerto Rico, the source said.

Investigators managed to record a private conversation between Silver and a lobbyist - thought to be Lynch - at one point during their affair.

During that conversation the woman 'told the defendant that she urgently had been trying to see him because a reporter had called legislators inquiring about whether State legislators were having "affairs".'

Silver then tells the woman: 'I don't think he caught us.' However, he expressed concerns about the two getting caught after members of the press had asked for him to release his 'travel and campaign finance records'.

In this same conversation, the woman complains about the treatment she has been receiving from a member of Silver's staff while she was lobbying the office on behalf of a client.

The second woman was the only person recommended by Silver and his office for a job 'over which he exercised a particularly high level of control'.

He also had a second cell phone he used to communicate with that woman.

Silver allegedly had adjoining hotel rooms with Hyer-Spencer (pictured) during a trip to Israel in 2000, and were also seen acting 'defensive' in a hotel lobby in Puerto Rico, a source said

Silver is facing a lengthy prison sentence next month, and his defense had hoped that by pointing out his high moral character they might be able to get a reduced sentence for their client.

He could be sentenced to as much as 100 years behind bars.

His lawyers fought against the release of the documents saying, they could make it difficult for Silver if he were granted an appeal. But Judge Caproni did not agree, saying: 'This otherwise personal and embarrassing conduct does, however, have public ramifications.'

The prosecution had originally planned to use their evidence of the affairs during Silver's trial last year if any witnesses spoke about his character or if he took the stand, neither of which happened during the proceedings.

Silver served as leader of the state Assembly from 1994 through to early 2015, losing his job following his arrest in January of last year.

Prosecutors said Silver traded his office for $4million in kickbacks from a cancer researcher and real estate developers and earned an additional $1million through investments.

Silver did not testify during his trial and called no witnesses.

Dr Robert Taub told jurors he steered numerous patients with asbestos-related cancer to Silver's law firm, enabling the legislator to pocket $3million in referral fees.

Meanwhile, testimony and evidence revealed that Silver caused $500,000 in taxpayer funds to go to Taub's research projects and helped his son and daughter get a job and an internship.
Court case: The secret threesome star still cannot be named in England and Wales - but an Australian site has now revealed his name

Millions in Australia can now read the name of the star using a gagging order to hide his threesome - but the 'farcical' ban in the UK continues today.

A major Australian website has revealed exactly who the household name is and lurid claims of the group sex he had with another couple.

The star's identity has already been revealed to millions across America, China, Europe, on social media and even in Scottish newspapers but not in England and Wales.

The UK injunction was rendered pointless after widespread online and global reporting of his identity and details of his threesome with another couple, the Court of Appeal ruled yesterday.

But a ban on publishing his name remains in place until a final hearing at the Supreme Court on Thursday when judges will decide whether or not permission to appeal should be granted.

The celebrity, who has a famous spouse, was told he must foot the bill for his own spiralling legal costs and those of the newspaper which he blocked from publishing the story. Legal sources said the total bill for both sides was around 1million.

Legal experts said yesterday's landmark ruling at the Appeal Court showed how celebrities using human rights legislation to claim privacy was becoming an exercise in futility because of the internet. Giving his judgment, Lord Justice Jackson said the mans relatives, friends and business contacts and anyone else who wanted to find out would all by now know perfectly well about his affair.

He said: 'Websites discussing the story will continue to pop up. As one is taken down, another will appear.

Also, tweets and various forms of social networking ensured the material circulated freely.

The celebritys children  who the anonymity order was meant to protect  should not be used as a trump card, the judge added. Lord Justice Jackson said: Whether or not the court grants the injunction, it is inevitable that the two children will in due course learn about these matters.

The court should not make orders which are ineffective. It is in my view inappropriate  some may use a stronger term  for the court to ban people from saying that which is common knowledge.

Court case: Lord Justice Jackson, left yesterday, decided to lift an injunction brought by the star and Desmond Browne, QC for the star, admitted: 'The judgment may be treated as the death of the celebrity privacy'

The couple involved in the threesome with the celebrity approached the Sun on Sunday at the end of last year offering to tell their story. The High Court refused an initial application to muzzle the press because the infidelity contradicted his public portrayal of marital commitment. But the Court of Appeal overruled that decision after hearing claims that naming him would be devastating for him.

WHAT WE CAN REPORT ABOUT THE STAR AND HIS 'THREESOME' 2008: The star, named as PJS in court papers and married to fellow celebrity YMA, meets future lover, known as AB. 2009: The celebrity and AB start having 'occasional sexual encounters'. December 2011: The star sends a text asking AB if his partner, known as CD, is 'up for a three-way'. AB said that CD was and the three met for a threesome and had group sex. January 2016: AB and CD approached the editor of the Sun on Sunday. They told the editor about their earlier sexual encounters with the claimant. The editor proposed to publish the story. January 14 2016: The newspaper's lawyers contacted the star's representatives and informed them of the position. The claimant says that any publication of AB's and CD's story would be an invasion of privacy and tried to get an injunction to stop the story. The High Court refused the man's initial application to muzzle the Press because his infidelity contradicted his public portrayal of marital commitment. He appealed and was given anonymity. March: The Court of Appeal overruled that decision after hearing from the household name that naming him would devastating for him and could harm his children. April 18: The Court of Appeal overturns the gagging order - but the star says he will appeal to the Supreme Court, meaning the injunction remains in place. Advertisement

However, the newspaper challenged that decision after extensive details about the threesome were later published by a magazine in the US  which is not covered by the order  sparking an internet frenzy.

Lord Justice Jackson cited a MailOnline survey showing a fifth of people on the streets of England already know the name of the celebrity despite the injunction.

Attempts by the celebritys lawyers to monitor the internet, social networks and ordering Google to remove online reports identifying him were a hopeless task, he said.

The judge added: There are many people who have no interest in the sex lives of celebrities. But those who are will by now have read press reports of this case. They will have had no difficulty in finding out.

Requesting the right to appeal to the Supreme Court, Desmond Browne QC, for the celebrity, said: The judgment may be treated as the death of the celebrity privacy injunction. The three appeal judges refused permission for the man to appeal to the Supreme Court through them, but said he has the right to appeal directly.

Michael Gardner, a partner at law firm Wedlake Bell, said: The Human Rights Act has given celebrities rights to keep the lid on their private lives. But the internet has had the effect of making these rights very hard to police. He added: This injunction is now hanging by a thread. Under English law, anyone who publishes the name could potentially face imprisonment for contempt of court.

That is very hard to justify when the information is freely available to millions of people around the world  and now substantial numbers within the UK.

Media lawyer Mark Stephens said the appeal judges had effectively said they would not undertake an exercise in futility, and that while injunctions might work for Z-list stars, they were harder for anyone with an international fan base.

If you are a global brand, you have to deal with the law as you find it, he said. You cant take this Little England approach that once youve got an injunction in London thats it for the rest of the world. In that respect he was augur of his own misfortune.
George Osborne's pro-EU Treasury document was dismissed by accountants as 'gobbledygook' today.

The Chancellor published a 200-page dossier yesterday setting out the economic costs of leaving the Brussels club.

But it was filled with algebra formulas that Brexit campaigners said made 'no sense at all' and branded 'George's equivalent of Dave's dodgy dossier'.

Opponents said the 'complicated' mathematics was a cynical attempt to confuse and scare voters into voting to remain in the EU and was 'propaganda at its worst'.

George Osborne's Treasury document was dismissed as 'gobbledygook' by Brexit campaigners today

The Chancellor published a 200-page document yesterday setting out the economic costs of leaving the Brussels club

Mr Osborne presented the series of Treasury forecasts along with three fellow pro-EU Cabinet ministers, warning that Britain's economy could be 6 per cent smaller than predicted if it leaves the EU, which he said would make households 4,300 a year worse off by 2030.

Tory MP Peter Bone, a fellow of The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, told MailOnline: 'I've studied the document closely and we have an accountancy term for the document: its called gobbledygook.'

He accused the In campaign of bombarding voters with 'weird and wonderful sums' that 'don't bare any detailed scrutiny whatsoever'.

The leading Brexit campaigner added: 'If you say a lie and repeat it enough times then people believe it - it's like Nick Clegg and his three million jobs will be lost claim.

Opponents said the 'complicated' mathematics was a cynical attempt to confuse and scare voters into voting to remain in the EU and was 'propaganda at its worst'

'There's absolutely no basis and it's completely foundless but because they say it over and over again as if it's a fact, people start to believe it and that's what this Project Fear is about.'

Mr Bone added: You can make any assumption about the future and produce any result you want and producing complicated formulas and saying this looks very important and must be right because the Government says so and isnt this complicated  thats what theyre relying on, theres just no basis for it.

Vote Leave campaigners have compared yesterday's Treasury document to David Cameron's controversial decision to send a 16-page leaflet to every household in the country setting out the Government's case for staying in the EU.

The Treasury's report setting out the case for Britain staying in the EU was laden with algebra formulas (pictured) that Brexit campaigners said made 'no sense at all'

It cost the taxpayer 9.3million but Out campaigners predicted the cost of tasking civil servants with preparing the 200-page Treasury document would be much larger. 'Its Georges equivalent of Daves dodgy dossier,' Mr Bone said.

They have demanded the independent Office for Budget Responsibility produce EU reports in the future and not the Government.

BREXIT TORIES SAVAGE OSBORNE OVER HIS 3M MIGRANTS CLANGER Tory MPs tore into George Osborne last night over a pro-EU dossier that says migration will add three million to the population. They accused the Chancellor of making unbelievable claims that families would be hammered and the nation left permanently poorer by leaving the Brussels club. Ministers and two former chancellors said he was treating voters like children with doom-laden warnings about the perils of Brexit. Michael Gove will today intensify the bitter row by insisting Mr Osborne and the Prime Minister are effectively giving up on a key pledge to cut migration to the tens of thousands. A series of forecasts published by the Treasury yesterday on why Britain is better off inside the EU rely on a huge population increase by 2030. The row erupted after Mr Osborne warned that Brexit would create an extraordinary self-inflicted wound and accused the Leave camp of being economically illiterate. The Chancellor also published predictions in the event of the UK voting out on June 23. He claimed the most likely scenario was that, like Canada, we would have to strike a series of trade deals with the EU that would hit productivity and exports. As a result, he said, GDP  the total size of the economy  would be around 6 per cent lower by 2030. The Treasury says this is the equivalent of having 36billion less to spend on public services  or 8p on the basic rate of income tax. However, officials were forced to admit that these calculations were based on immigration continuing to run at near-record levels. The assumption is that, between now and 2030, net migration will be almost three million. From 2021 onward, it will be 185,000 every year  shattering the Tory promise to reduce it to the tens of thousands. For the next five years, it will be even higher. The admission plays directly into the hands of the Leave campaign, which says that only by quitting the EU can Britain regain control of its borders. Ministers and former chancellors ridiculed the forecasts  pointing out the Treasury has an appalling track record. Advertisement

Fellow Eurosceptic Andrew Bridgen said: 'If we are now running Government via algebra then presumably we can look forward to DEFRA issuing cod-ratic equations to describe the impact of EU fisheries policy.

'Its ironic seeing that the EU have not had their accounts signed off for nearly two decades that we are using algebra to assess the impact when the EU cannot even make numbers add up.'

He added: 'Perhaps the Treasury could release the formulas that they used to take us into the ERM to see how they compare.'

Figures in the Treasury document forecasting that net migration will rise by an additional three million to the population by 2030 humiliated Mr Osborne.

It is an admission that the Tory election pledge to cut net migration to the tens of thousands will be broken as it predicts 185,000 more migrants will come to the UK than leave from 2021 onwards.

Tory MPs tore into the Chancellor last night, with the admission playing directly into the hands of the Leave campaign, which says that only by quitting the EU can Britain regain control of its borders.

Mr Osborne set out three alternatives for Brexit and presented economic models for each one.

He said that if Britain seeks a trade deal similar to Canada - an option championed by Boris Johnson - the economy would shrink by 6.2 per cent by 2030 - the equivalent of 4,300 per household.

But other alternatives could see households lose as much as 5,200 per year, according to the Treasury.

The best economic option would be to follow a Norway-style approach, the dossier said, which would see Britain retaining membership of the European Economic Area but would result in GDP falling by 3.8 per cent or 2,600 per household.

But Ministers and former chancellors ridiculed the forecasts  pointing out the Treasury has an appalling track record.

Andrea Leadsom, an energy minister and former Treasury minister, said: If Remain campaigners insist on talking down the economy then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That it is an unpatriotic thing to do.

She said such long-range predictions were worthless. Tory MP Peter Bone said at a Grassroots Out rally in Stoke: Last week we had Daves dodgy dossier, now weve got Georges dodgy dossier.

London mayor Boris Johnson said: The Treasury has not been totally successful in all its economic forecasts, lets be honest.

Nigel Lawson described the Treasury document as a piece of propaganda and scaremongering.

The strongest attack came from Justice Secretary Michael Gove, a close friend of Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne.

He accused them of treating voters like children with doom-laden warnings about the perils of Brexit.

ARE YOUR NEIGHBOURS IN OR OUT? THE MAP THAT SHOWS HOW BRITAIN'S COASTAL REGIONS ARE LEADING THE CHARGE FOR BREXIT Britain's coastal towns are leading the charge for Brexit, while areas with large numbers of graduates are backing the UK remaining in the EU, new analysis has revealed. A major study of voting records from polling experts shows how each local authority is likely to vote in June's EU referendum. Land-locked South Staffordshire has the highest proportion of Brexit supporters but most of the other areas with high support for leaving the EU are on England's coast, including Boston, Kings Lynn and Tendring, which includes Ukip's only constituency of Clacton. The more Eurosceptic an area, the darker the shading, with the lightest areas showing the most pro-EU local authorities Former Industrial areas in the West Midlands also revealed a high proportion of Brexit supporters. Meanwhile the areas with the highest support for staying in the EU include towns with a large population of young people and graduates. These areas include Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Edinburgh and Brighton, while the most pro-EU authority in the country is the inner-London borough of Lambeth. The more Eurosceptic an area, the darker the shading on the map, with the lightest areas showing the most pro-EU local authorities. The graph - drawn up by academics at the University of Bristol - was based on responses from 60,000 people in YouGov polls, census data and results from the 2014 European Parliament elections and last summer's General Election. It attempted to work out how people are likely to vote based on their age, educational qualifications and where they live. As expected, Scottish and Welsh voters are among the most pro-EU voters in the UK. Voters with fewer qualifications are less likely to vote to stay in the EU than those with degrees, according to the study The analysis confirmed assumptions that the older the voter, the more likely they are to vote to leave the EU. In a stark contrast, the oldest voters are on average three times more likely to vote for Brexit than the youngest voters. The analysis also found 'substantial differences' over how middle-aged and older people will vote depending on their educational qualifications. Voters with fewer qualifications are less likely to vote to stay in the EU than those with degrees, according to the study. Bristol academics Professor Ron Johnston, Professor Kelwyn Jones and David Manley wrote: 'Our map of the percentage support for Brexit according to this model shows some very clear geographical patterning. 'At one extreme are the two clusters of local authorities where support for leaving the EU is very low  in almost all of London and most of Scotland. 'Against this, the areas with most support for Brexit are concentrated along much of England's east coast plus some of the older industrial areas (notably in Yorkshire and the West Midlands), with pockets along the south coast too (mainly local authorities with large retired populations).' Advertisement

Mouth open, he nodded like Blakey from On The Buses: QUENTIN LETTS on Osborne's big speech

George Osborne and friends said yesterday this was a time for transparency, clarity, public understanding.

Let me be clear, gasped Mr Osborne, narrowing his eyes with that hollandaise-curdling sideways glower he has.

Let us be clear? Try this for size from his Treasurys EU membership analysis, a 200-page Whitehall wail at the thought British voters might vote to leave the elites grand project.

Annex 76 informs us: In (IFDIijt) = alphaij + alpha Xijt + beta1EU2ijt + beta2EUmijt + beta3FTAt + epsilonijt.

Chancellor George Osborne with Liz Truss, left, and Amber Rudd, right, at his speech on the EU

Or as we say in Herefordshire In = cowpats + EU collywobbles + Osborne resorting to frantic flannel because the public may finally have had its bellyful of Brussels.

Mr Osborne was making his big speech offering facts and information about the EU, complete with a graph about trade openness.

To make it he sloped off to a Government-funded science park somewhere in the west of England.

Only in the final minutes before his speech was the actual address disclosed to an untrusted outside world.

You cant be too careful. There are people out there with minds of their own. The maniacs.

My invitation to this chi-chi event having gone missing, I bring you an eye-witness account, assembled in the manner of one of those TV crime show re-enactments.

A man answering the Chancellors description was seen entering the National Composites Centre near Bristol circa 10am.

Mr Osborne has produced a 200-page dossier outlining how much it would cost the UK if it left the EU

We cannot be entirely sure it was Mr Osborne but he had that faintly constipated gait and spoke in the metallic honk associated with our gauche finance minister.

With him, three accomplices: Liz Truss, Amber Rudd and Stephen Crabb, ministers for Environment, Energy and Work & Pensions respectively.

The National Composite Centre is where boffins develop high-tech aeronautical devices and lightweight materials. Lightweight materials? Did they mean Miss Truss?

Osbo had arrived hot from a Radio 4 interview in which he had declined to say Boris Johnsons name, instead referring to the swashbuckling Brexiteer only as the Mayor of London.

Gordon Brown used to do weirdly petty things like that, too.

He burped back some indigestion and said, queasily, its great to be here at the brilliant National Composites Centre and to be joined by my colleagues Liz, Stephen and Amber.

The Chancellor's performance was compared to the character Blakey from On The Buses by Quentin Letts

Each stood at a lectern, gameshow-style. Each would duly blurt forth a few scripted words.

Miss Truss, gazing at the TV camera like a hungry spaniel, managed to claim Britain outside the EU would lose sovereignty. A novel argument, I think we can say.

As she spoke she made various gestures with her left hand  a chopping motion and then another when she joined the tips of her thumb and forefinger, as though holding the tip of a medium-bore sausage. Perhaps she, too, was thinking of Boris.

Mr Crabb, who had borrowed Noel Edmonds beard, also said he was going to be absolutely clear. Good-oh.

He claimed that international rules would prevent us charging different countries different import duties.

Miss Rudd, ferocious in librarian spectacles, said we were not Canada. Mr Osborne, realising the cameras were on him, did some open-mouthed nodding like Blakey from On The Buses.

Beside the four of them was a big sign with a map of Britain and a figure saying 4,300 a year  allegedly the cost to each household if we tell the European Commission where to go. Oh come off it.

Mr Osborne repeated his belief that people must have facts  hence HM Treasurys compilation of these rock-solid, incontestable, true-as-Ronnie-Biggs claims.

The analysis was sober and serious and it predicted what was going to happen in 2030.

Having looked at it, you may wonder if its authors were quite as sober as Mr Osborne claimed.

It talks of dummy variables and gravity model specification and FDI inflows and exogenous instruments and Iteratively Weighted Least Squares which give a low weight to observations that generate high residuals.
A collection of rags found at the bottom of the North Sea has been revealed to contain a luxurious wardrobe which may have belonged to one of Charles I's female courtiers.

Divers off the coast of the Netherlands found the treasure, which came from a shipwreck, after it was exposed by a storm which washed away silt that had covered it for four centuries.

When they separated the items, they realised that they had discovered one remarkably well-preserved dress as well as a book linking the find to the Stuart dynasty.

Discovery: This gown was found by divers off the coast of the Dutch island of Texel in August 2014

Delicate: The silk fabric, gold and silver thread and intricate design, all preserved for 400 years, suggest that it must have been owned by a wealthy individual

Noble: Researchers have suggested that the gown - whose extraordinary details are pictured here - was owned by Jane Ker, the Countess of Roxburghe

And now researchers have found a letter which proves that one of the ships carrying the retinue of Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, to Holland in 1642 sank in the same area as the new discovery.

They have been able to make a tentative suggestion that the gown could have belonged to Jane Ker, Countess of Roxburghe, a controversial Catholic adviser to the queen who accompanied her on the voyage in the early years of the English Civil War.

Divers from the Dutch island of Texel frequently stumble upon old shipwrecks because the area was used by vessels as a safe harbour while they were ploughing the North Sea, and many got in trouble while entering or leaving the region.

They first found the Stuart haul in August 2014, shortly after the treasure was uncovered from the silt due to turbulent conditions.

Royals: The find was linked to the court of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, both pictured here in portraits by Anthony van Dyck

Queen: Henrietta Maria had travelled to the Netherlands to pawn royal jewels in order to raise money

Link: This Bible with the stamp of the Stuart crest showed that the shipwreck had royal connections

Wealth: This velvet purse is one of many items found by divers in the North Sea shipwreck

WAR WHICH TORE ENGLAND APART The English Civil War, fought between the pro-royal 'Cavaliers' and the rebel 'Roundheads', led to the execution of Charles I and the temporary abolition of the monarchy. It began in 1642 following a series of fierce disagreements between the king and Parliament about which side had the right to exercise political power. The Roundheads, led by the Puritan general Oliver Cromwell, managed to capture Charles and in 1649 he was put to death for treason. Cromwell was declared Lord Protector, and when he died in 1658 he was replaced by his son Richard - the two men are the only people other than a king or queen to be the head of state in England. By 1660, Richard Cromwell had lost the confidence of the army and the dead king's son took the throne as Charles II, ushering in the period known as the Restoration. Advertisement

Rob van Eerden, the project leader, told The Times that among the divers' discovery was 'this muddy bunch of rags'.

But when they examined it closer, they realised that the 'rags' were in fact made up of several antique dresses, including one which is nearly intact.

One Dutch expert said that the dress was the first complete item of clothing from the era to have been found in the country.

The dresses were made of silk and embroidered with silver and gold thread, implying that they must have been owned by wealthy and powerful people.

Other items discovered in the haul included boots, a comb and a velvet purse - all items likely to have come from the wardrobe of a noblewoman.

One clue was a Bible stamped with the arms of the Stuart family, suggesting that the owner was not just aristocratic but must have had close connections to the royal dynasty.

Location: This map shows how the discovery was made near Texel island, off the Dutch coast

Artefacts: Among the discoveries made were a pair of boots, left, and a metal ornament, right

Beauty: A wooden comb used for grooming had been preserved in the silt at the bottom of the sea

Owner: The items are thought to have belonged to Jane Ker, Countess of Roxburghe, pictured

Yesterday scientists unearthed a letter linking the haul to Henrietta Maria's Dutch expedition, which came after the start of the uprising which would result in her husband's execution.

The queen went to the Netherlands in early 1642 in order to pawn off the family's jewels so she could raise money for Charles I's fight against the Roundhead rebels.

She travelled in a convoy of 12 ships, of which one was lost - the vessel containing some of the queen's silver, as well as the Countess of Roxburghe's wardrobe.

Jane Ker was a Scottish noble who was close to Charles I's mother Anne and encouraged her to continue in her Catholic faith despite Britain being by now firmly Protestant.

She was banished from court in 1617 and failed in one attempt to rejoin the royal household because of her religion - but when Henrietta Maria was in trouble, she relied on the wily courtier to accompany her to the Netherlands.

Lost: All of the objects, including this plate, were sunk during a storm in 1642

Unique: Another intricate object from the haul, described as one of the best ever found in the Netherlands

Fleet: The ship which sank was part of a convoy of ships which would have looked like these ones

The queen stayed in Holland for a year before returning to England where she landed in Yorkshire and joined the Civil War campaign.

She went into exile in France in 1644, and did not return to England until her son Charles II was restored to the throne after the death of Oliver Cromwell and the fall of his regime.

The treasures which have been linked to her voyage are now on display in the Kaap Skil museum on Texel, where they will stay for a month before being examined fully by archaeologists.
These shocking pictures claim to show an ISIS prisoner being thrown to his death from a roof after being accused of engaging in sodomy in Iraq.

The images show the captive being held over the edge of a high-rise building by a group of masked militants as a crowd including young children watch on from the ground.

He is then pushed off, falling 100ft on to the concrete below.

Seconds from death: An ISIS prisoner is held over the edge of a high-rise building by a group of masked militants after being accused of engaging in sodomy in Iraq

Capital punishment: The captive is then pushed off, falling 100ft onto the concrete below

Notorious for their gruesome methods of killing, ISIS reserves one of its most brutal for suspected homosexuals.

Videos it has released show masked militants dangling men over the precipices of buildings by their legs to drop them head-first or tossing them over the edge.

As of last December, at least 36 men in Syria and Iraq have been killed by ISIS militants on charges of sodomy, according to the New York-based OutRight Action International.

However its Middle East and North Africa coordinator, Hossein Alizadeh, said it was not possible to confirm the sexual orientation of the victims.

Gruesome spectagtor sport: A crowd including young children watch on from the ground

A militant speaks to the crowd. Often the charges are laid against prisoners before their death

The fear of a horrific death among gay men under ISIS rule is further compounded by their isolation in a deeply conservative society that largely shuns them.

Many Muslims consider homosexuality to be sinful.

Gay men are haunted constantly by the possibility that someone, perhaps even a relative, will betray them to the militants  whether to curry favour with ISIS or simply out of hatred for their sexual orientation.

ISIS group fighters sometimes torture suspected homosexuals to reveal their friends' names and search their laptops and mobile phones.

Even among ISIS opponents, gays find little sympathy. Some in the public who might be shocked by other ISIS atrocities say killings of gays is justified.
For more of the latest news and updates from North Korea visit www.dailymail.co.uk/northkorea

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These photographs lifts the veil on the public transport system in the capital of the secretive dictatorship of North Korea; the Pyongyang Metro.

The Pyongyang Metro is located 361ft underground, making it the deepest located metro system in the world - conveniently doubling as a nuclear bunker.

The trains are old carriages from Germany which were bought up by North Korea in 1999 as they were heading for the scrap heap. Pyongyang now claims the trains were built in North Korea, but despite attempts to conceal their origin, some old graffiti tags can be seen on the carriages.

The metro stations in Pyongyang are not named after their geographic locations, but have names set to remind the citizens of the 'socialist revolution', such as Comrade, Red Star, Glory and Complete Victory.

The photographs have been taken by Australian traveller Elliott Davies, a software developer from Hobart, Tasmania, who chronicles his experiences in North Korea on his blog.

'During my visit to North Korea, I was part of the first ever group of foreigners given access to all stations across both lines of the Pyongyang Metro,' he writes.

'This may sound mundane, but the previously restricted Pyongyang Metro is surely one of the most mysterious, yet beautiful transit systems on earth, each station uniquely themed in ultra-nationalism, parading North Koreas revolutionary goals and achievements to impressionable commuters.

'In many ways, its a small museum, most of which formerly hidden from outside eyes and subsequently shrouded in conspiracy theories.'

Going underground: This is Puhung Station, on Pyongyang Metro's Chollima line. The mural to the back is entitled The Great Leader Kim Il-Sung Among Workers

'The Pyongyang Metro is the deepest metro system in the world at more than 360ft below ground, conveniently doubling as a nuclear bunker, just in case. Its an almost four-minute descent to reach the train platforms, and, to the top and bottom of the escalators, the hallways are protected by thick steel blast doors,' Mr Davies explains

Dear leaders: Portraits of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il - father and grandfather of current dictator Kim Jong-Un - can be sen in every train carriage on the Pyongyang Metro

'Low-hanging chandeliers did their best to brighten most stations; however, the tube was pitch black, and the trains themselves were very dark inside, some had flickering lights, and the doors were manually operated. Train attendants at each station moved in a purposeful, militaristic manner similar to that of the Pyongyang traffic ladies, raising their paddles each time the train arrived or departed'

'Inside the crowded, screeching tubes of trains, oil, and axle grease of the outside world, the metro walls usually remind us why graffiti is rightfully illegal. In North Korea, graffiti carries harsh, unspeakable punishment. In 2011, graffiti denouncing Kim Jong-Il found in a college sent the capital city of Pyongyang into literal lockdown, the regime refusing to sell train tickets until the culprit was found. In my time inside North Korea over sixteen days, I did not spot one single instance of graffiti or defacement'

'This mosaic is a celebration of the Workers Party of Korea. Kim Il-Sung, noticeably more detailed than his peers, unveils the inspiring, revolutionary outcome of their hardline commitment. Banners translate to: Hurray to our outstandingly wise leader, Kim Il-Sung! and Hurray to the founding of the Workers Party of Korea!'

'This is Yonggwang Station, decorated with 262ft-long murals on each wall'

'An electronic board on the Chollima line (red). Pressing one of the stations along the bottom lights up your route. Im standing at the terminus, Puhung Station. Here you can see clearly how far they previously allowed foreigners, literally one station to the right and then back. Today we visited both lines, beginning to end'

Time to go: 'Walking out of Chonsung Station, to fireworks and flowers, spotlights and smiles'

Honouring the nation: Samhung Station is an overall celebration of Kim Il-Sungs Three Revolutions  the Ideological, Technical and Cultural aspects of North Korea

Long journey: 'Catching the train with some Pyongyang locals, taking what I thought to be a subtle snap, only to discover the only thing that was subtle was my ability to take a subtle snap. Commuters were nothing but polite, offering up seats to the elderly and even to us as foreigners. Im unsure whether this was normality, or just for us'

'It may be a minor detail, but the way men stand, up straight with their hands interlocked behind their backs became a mannerism I found only synonymous to this extent in North Korea'

'Hwanggumbol Station, or Golden Soil Station, has platforms suitably celebrating the agriculture and farming industry. North Koreas model of self-sufficiency relies upon cooperative farming to feed its people'
The grandmother who tried to claim a 33million Lotto prize has finally found a winning ticket after she helped draw a charity raffle.

Susanne Hinte, from Worcester, gained nationwide notoriety when she claimed her ticket for a record-breaking Lotto draw in January had been destroyed in the wash.

Camelot were unable to verify the numbers and she lost her bid when the real winner, who chose to stay anonymous, came forward.

Grandmother-of-four Hinte, 48, spoke about the episode when she helped host a local charity event in the West Midlands this week.

Susanne Hinte, who once thought she had won the lottery, drew tickets at a charity raffle this week

Hinte joked about the episode, saying during the raffle: 'This one hasn't been through the washing machine'

She took to the stage at the event in Cradley Heath, to raise money for Cancer Research UK and The Mary Stevens Hospice.

Describing the evening, her agent Barry Tomes said: 'When she drew the first ticket and said "This one hasn't been through the washing machine", the whole place was in uproar.

'The response was amazing. Nobody said a bad word to her and she got a lot of support.'

In January, Hinte tried to claim the joint Lotto prize after Camelot revealed the winning 33million ticket was bought in her home town of Worcester.

She is currently on trial accused of stealing a purse from the home of an elderly woman she met on her way to a blind date with an online Romeo.

Susanne, who denies the theft, appeared at Birmingham Magistrates Court earlier this month but her trial was adjourned until May.

She is also rumoured to have been in talks to appear on the next series of Celebrity Big Brother.
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An intrepid photographer has scoured the planet snapping people and their pets.

French photographer Eric Lafforgue, 52, travelled everywhere from Easter Island to North Korea to capture on camera mankind's love for animals.

Taken over a period of ten years, each picture gives the viewer a glimpse into the types of pets people choose to own and the relationships they forge with them.

Just outside the ancient city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia this man feeds wild hyenas. The animals come out at night and pluck meat off the end of a fork he holds in his mouth. The tradition dates back to the days when food was left outside the city walls so the animals would not be tempted to attack livestock

Snakes, and especially pythons, are revered in the city of Ouidah in Benin. They owe their sacred status to an 18th century tale about the defeated King Kpasse who was saved from marauding Ghezo warriors when dozens of pythons began swarming out of the jungle

A young boy with his bright green pet lizard in Penang, Malaysia. Lizards in Malaysia vary in size from tiny geckos to the giant Asian water monitor, which can grow to more than six feet in length. Some lizards end up being shipped to Hong Kong where they are dried and used as a cure from anything from asthma to impotence

In Saudi Arabia the art of falconry dates back thousands of years. This man in Sakakah in Al Jawf province purchased this fine specimen for $20,000 (13,900). Mr Lafforgue said: 'You cannot imagine how sweet he was with his falcon, you need to have seen his face when he freed it to fly, he was praying to see the falcon back on his hand'

This man in Zeila, Somaliland is holding a baby camel on his back while the animal's mother looks on in the background. Mr Lafforgue said: 'The baby was just born and could not walk yet. As the sun was down the man had to carry it on the village as the hyenas could have eaten it at night. So he had to walk with it on his shoulders for a kilometre.' Somaliland, a former British colony, is a country not recognised by most of the world but more stable than its southern neighbour Somalia, from which it broke away

A little boy clutches a cage containing a songbird in Vietnam. Breeding songbirds and training them to sing is a popular pastime in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, and the record price obtained for a songbird was 80million dong (3,000)

Describing the animal in this photo, Mr Lafforgue said: 'The baboon in the Dassanech tribe in Ethiopia was incredible, the tribe give them some necklaces, bracelets, and a bandanna. It will quickly become big and will become very dangerous, so it's impossible to keep in a village.'

This little boy in Panama shows no interest in the parrots eating a banana under his hammock. Mr Lafforgue said: 'Every country has its own tradition. For example, in the Panama tribes, the parrots are like the dogs for us in Europe.'

These oxen are used to pull an fisherman's cart in Ngapali, Myanmar. Mr Lafforgue said: 'In many trips I realised that in any place I visited, there was always animals. Animals to work, as pets, or as a danger for the humans. I never saw any violence toward the animal in any of the countries I visited, the animals is part of the life of the people to work, feed them and carry them. It is a great lesson of life, you need to take care of the animal to survive'

On the wide open steppes of Central Asia people have been handling animals, particularly horses, since long before Genghis Khan's Mongol hordes began rampaging into China and Russia. This by is holding a young colt by the bridle in a village near Song Kol Lake in Kyrgyzstan

A family from the Himba tribe in Namibia ride a donkey in Namibia. There are only 50,000 Himba people in Namibia and Angola. They breed sheep, goats and cattle and the women cover themselves in a special red ochre cream, which offers protection from the sun. Another cultural peculiarity is that Himba women are not allowed to wash with water but instead bathe in smoke

This young girl was photographed in Myanmar carrying a puppy. Her face is covered with thanaka cream, a tradition which is common among women and girls in Myanmar, which was previously known as Burma

A teenage boy rides a donkey in the village of Oncocua in southern Angola. Horses, donkeys, camels and even elephants have been ridden by humans for thousands of years. They are used for sport and have of course been used in warfare since ancient times

A young boy in Ethiopia's Omo Valley holds up two chickens. Keeping poultry is common in the Omo Valley but they tend to be bred for the dinner table rather than as pets

Young men on horses follow colourfully clad women up a hill to the Q'oyllur Rit'i (Lord Star of Snow) festival in Peru's Sinkara Valley. The festival takes place in May 5,000 metres up in the mountains. Horses and mules are common in the Andes and have become used to the altitude and reduced levels of oxygen

Women in Angola's Mucubal tribe, are famous for the way they dress. This woman is wearing a form of head-dress known as an ompota. The Mucubal are pastoralists who care for their cattle and goats and, like their distant cousins the Masai, rely on them for milk, meat and blood

A voodoo priest in the town of Bohicon in Benin holds a chameleon on the back of his hand. Bohicon is famous for a voodoo market where any number of creatures, both alive and dead, can be bought for use in magical ceremonies which predate Christianity
The father at the centre of 60 Minutes child abduction case was tipped off about the plot after his associates saw the TV crew scoping out the school walking route, according to reports.

Ali Elamine, 32, is believed to have been told about his estranged wife Sally Faulkner's arrival in Lebanon as soon as she stepped off the plane.

He was bombarded with calls immediately after his children Lahela, 5, and Noah, 3, were snatched from his mother's care on a Beirut street and smuggled away into a car on April 6.

It has emerged that a suspicious car was spotted surveying the route that the children walked back from school just two days before the failed abduction, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The father at the centre of 60 Minutes child abduction, Ali Elamine (pictured), was tipped off about the plot after his associates saw the TV crew scoping out the school walking route

He was bombarded with calls immediately after his children Lahela, 5, and Noah, 3, (pictured) were snatched from his mother's care on a Beirut street and smuggled away into a car on April 6

Mr Elamine, 32, is believed to have been told about his estranged wife Sally Faulkner's (pictured) arrival in Lebanon as soon as she stepped off the plane

Speaking outside the Baabda Palace of Justice on Monday, Mr Elamine said that communication between him and Ms Faulkner stopped because he believed she was trying to 'track us down'.

When asked whether he knew about her plan to bring her children back to Australia, he said: 'I knew, yeah'.

'That's why communication stopped, 'cos I see it wasn't a pure side of communications, it was more trying to track us down and how we move.'

It has been reported that Mr Elamine cut off communications with Ms Faulkner after discovering emails on the family iPad exposing her plans.

On Monday, 60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown is pictured being forced into a police car in handcuffs as she was taken back to a Lebanese jail. She was expected to appear in court but the case was adjourned

Judge Rami Abdullah told reporters the matter would be adjourned until noon on Wednesday

Judge Rami Abdullah again stressed the seriousness of the charges the defendants were facing

Ms Faulkner's lawyer has claimed that the Brisbane mother sent 150 emails to Mr Elamine which went unanswered.

Fairfax reported that it was this lack of contact which prompted her to hire Adam Whittington's child recovery agency to retrieve her children from Lebanon.

Police were able to track down the 60 Minutes crew, including veteran reporter Tara Brown, after Ms Faulkner sent Mr Elamine a message confirming that the children were safe with her.

Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner, who have spent almost two weeks in jail, made a brief appearance before a judge in Beirut on Monday, but the hearing was postponed.

They were sent back to prison for at least two more days along with 60 Minutes producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment.

Before the hearing, Mr Elamine insisted that he would press charges on 'everyone involved'.

He told 3AW that his estranged wife and the TV crew had not acted lawfully, saying 'if the tables were turned I'd be called a terrorist and shot on the spot'.

Brown (right) and Sally Faulkner were pictured being led away in handcuffs from the Beirut court after the hearing was postponed

Lebanese authorities sought to shield Faulkner (left) and Brown (right), ordering reporters into a stairway before leading them down a hallway out of sight

'They came into our country. They have done something illegal,' he said.

'If the tables were turned, if I were to show up in Australia trying to kidnap someone ... I would have probably been shot on the spot, called a terrorist.'

Mr Elamine said it was up to prosecutors, not him, to decide if any charges should be dropped.

'It's all in the prosecutors' hands,' he said on Tuesday.

Ms Faulkner's lawyer had said before the hearing that she had offered to drop her claim for sole custody of Lahela, 5, and Noah, 3, if Mr Elamine dropped the abduction charges.

But Mr Elamine had indicated this was unlikely.

Closed-door negotiations over the fate of Ms Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew were held in Beirut before judge Rami Abdullah, who adjourned the talks until Wednesday.

'This is the demand of the lawyers... to allow for negotiations,' the judge said in his office at the end of Monday's proceedings, at which Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner briefly appeared.

Again, he stressed the seriousness of the charges the defendants were facing.

'This is not a custody case,' Judge Abdullah said.

'They are charged with kidnapping two kids.'

Dramatic photographs have shown the moment Brown was forced into a police car in handcuffs before being taken back to a Lebanese jail.

Brown (pictured) was led into a judge's chambers in handcuffs on Monday over the failed bid to snatch the Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner's two children from her estranged husband's family

Wearing a black top Brown appeared calm as she was led away from Baabda Court in Beirut before she was put into a car by police officers

The father of the two children, Ali Elamine (above), involved in the 60 Minutes botched child abduction in Lebanon has spoken out, saying 'if the tables were turned I'd be called a terrorist and shot on the spot'

A policeman holds the back of Brown's hair as he puts her into the car on Monday

Wearing a black top, she looked dishevelled as she was manhandled by police who pushed her head down as she climbed into a car outside Baabda Court in Beirut.

It was the first time the presenter has been pictured since her arrest in Beirut on April 7, as she has spent almost two weeks in prison with her crew and Ms Faulkner.

But it was the third time the women had appeared in court following their arrest earlier this month after a 'child recovery' team snatched Ms Faulkner's two young children from a Beirut street as they were walking with their Lebanese grandmother.

The children were returned to their father soon after and the 60 Minutes team in Lebanon to film the operation - Ms Brown, Benjamin Williamson, David Ballment and Stephen Rice - were arrested.

Along with Ms Faulkner, they have been in jail in Beirut ever since.

Mr Elamine, was on the defensive when he arrived at the Baabda Palace of Justice on Monday, indicating he was not prepared to drop charges against his wife.

To do so, he said, would lead to the release of the Nine Network news team who filmed the 'child recovery' operation and those who carried it out.

Brown was pictured being forced into a police car before she was taken back to prison

Brown was pictured being escorted by police officers from the court in Beirut

Reporter Tara Brown (pictured) has been detained on kidnapping charges with a 60 Minutes crew that filmed the 'child abduction' of Sally Faulkner's two children in Lebanon on April 7

'The way they are trying to push for this is that if Sally [Faulkner] goes out on bail, they all get out,' the 32-year-old said as he prepared to meet Judge Abdullah.

'That is how I am seeing it as an outsider ... They are pushing for Sal's release and everyone else gets a green card.'

Nine had 'dropped the ball by getting involved in family matters' and now 'everyone is blaming the other for what happened', he added.

Negotiations had been progressing between lawyers for Ms Faulkner and Mr Elamine when 'suddenly Mr Elamine's lawyer said 'we are not in a hurry''.

Mr Elamine's lawyer said no deal had been reached between the couple but denied the Lebanese-American father was seeking a compensation payout.

'There is no agreement. Ali wants his kids, no matter what price he has to pay,' lawyer Hussein Barjawi told News Corp.

When asked whether Mr Elamine was seeking a financial payout, he said: 'It's all rumours. There is no compensation at all.'

Mr Elamine admitted his children 'probably' wanted to be with their mother but hardened his stance against 60 Minutes

Adam Whittington, (pictured) the chief planner of the 60 Minutes botched 'child abduction' in Lebanon, said on Sunday that he can prove Channel Nine paid him more than $115,000 for the snatch

A prison van believed to be carrying those accused of the botched kidnapping attempt in Lebanon arrived at Beirut's Baabda court on Monday

Ms Faulkner's claims her children Noah and Lahela were taken to Lebanon by her estranged husband Ali Elamine (pictured with Noah and Lahela) in 2015 and he refused to bring them back

It was reported that Mr Elamine said he would drop the charges against Ms Faulker if she agreed he could have sole custody

Ghassan Mughaghab (pictured), the lawyer for Brisbane woman Sally Faulkner, said negotiations between Mr Elamine and Ms Faulkner had broken down

A lawyer for Network Nine, Kamal Aboudaher, said the TV channel had not offered any financial compensation to Mr Elamine to try to resolve the issue.

'We didn't exchange any offer with Ali regarding funds,' he said outside the court.

Mr Elamine earlier claimed he was still married to Ms Faulkner and that he secured custody in June 2015.

But he conceded that the two young children 'probably' wanted to be with their mother.

'They're kids, they always want what they don't have. When you take kids to a toy store they want the whole store,' he said, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

'Am I open [to letting the children travel to Australia?] I'm not 100 per cent sure about that,' he said.

The two others facing charges are believed to be members of the child-recovery agency hired for the operation - Britons Craig Michael and Adam Whittington.

For the past two weeks, Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner have been held at Baabda Central Women's Prison (pictured)

The prison is a grim, overcrowded block housing mostly murderers and drug dealers with up to 20 women per cell

'It will help everybody, I think. It will help everybody': Ms Faulkner's lawyer says that if Mr Elamine drops the personal kidnapping charges against her, it will have a favourable flow-on effect for the whole team

Sally Faulkner's lawyer has reportedly said she was paid for by the Nine Network and had used money given to her by 60 Minutes to the child recovery agency, Child Abduction Recovery International

Veteran journalist Stephen Rice (left), David Ballment (centre) and Benjamin Williamson (right) are also in custody in Lebanon

All involved are facing charges of kidnapping and being members of a criminal gang, which can attract maximum sentences of up to three years and 10 years respectively.

In her only interview on the matter so far, Ms Faulkner told The Australian on Friday she was doing well behind bars at Baabda Central Women's Prison in south-eastern Beirut.

'Please tell my mum and dad how well I am and also [husband] Brendan and my in-laws,' she said. Ms Brown is also behind bars at the prison.

'I am fine but my loved ones need to know that.'

The Channel Nine TV crew was planning to film Faulkner's attempt to retrieve her children Noah, three, and Lahela, five, from her ex-husband Ali Elamine, who she claims kept them in Lebanon without her permission.

Prosecutors had earlier claimed they had a signed statement from a member of the recovery team saying Nine had paid $115,000 for the operation.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has told The Project that she is in 'constant contact' with her Lebanese counterpart, Gebran Bassil, regarding the case.




Tragic: Sarah Jane Hankins killed herself while awaiting trial for allegedly attacking her father-in-law

A mother killed herself three days before she was due to appear in court accused of assaulting her elderly father-in-law, an inquest heard today.

School kitchen assistant Sarah Jane Hankins, 47, was terrified of spending time in prison if she was convicted of attacking Geoffrey Hankins, 81.

She was found hanged in the bedroom of the family home in Bulford, Wiltshire in November last year after she had plunged into depression over the upcoming court case.

Wiltshire and Swindon Coroner's Court heard that Geoffrey Hankins had allegedly beaten his daughter-in-law after she and her husband moved in to his home following the death of his wife.

Mrs Hankins was arrested following a fight with him in March 2015 and spent the night in a police cell, subsequently being charged with assault.

Her case was not scheduled to be heard until eight months after the arrest, and it was later delayed by another two weeks.

Her mother Patricia Taylor told the court the experience had sent her into a spiral of depression that ended in her suicide on November 16, three days before the case was to resume.

Following her death her husband Gary criticised the Crown Prosecution Service for pressing ahead with the charges, calling them 'a shambles'.

Mrs Taylor said: 'In 2010 Sarah and Gary sold their property and moved in with Gary's father, following the death of his mother.

'Over the five years she lived there I saw a marked change in her behaviour. Her father-in-law was violent and abusive towards her. She said she had been beaten by him on a number of occasions.

'She had become terrified of him to the point where she was scared to spend time alone with him.

'When she was arrested for allegedly assaulting him it had a profound effect on her mental health. She had been losing weight and was having trouble sleeping.

'They left that address and moved in with me. She was kept on bail for such a long time that her mental state started to suffer. After she was charged the stress was too much for her to cope with.

'When she had been arrested she had spent the night in a cell and she was terrified of having to do it again. Sadly with everything going on, this had been coming for a long time.'

The court heard that Mrs Hankins tried to kill herself twice in a single day earlier in 2015, only to be stopped by her husband.

Mr Hankins said that on the night that she died, he was sleeping on the living room sofa rather than in their bed because their nine-year marriage was 'on ice'.

He found her lifeless body when he went upstairs to let the couple's two pet dogs out of the bedroom in the morning.

Bereaved: Mrs Hankins' husband Gary pictured outside her inquest in Salisbury, Wiltshire today

Leon Taylor, Mrs Hankins' son, told the court he had heard Mr Hankins cry out, 'Oh God Sarah, no,' but stayed in his bedroom because he 'knew what he would find'.

Paramedics and police officers rushed to the property but Mrs Hankins was pronounced dead.

Shortly afterwards, Mr Hankins discovered he had a Facebook message from his wife saying she was sorry and that she was going to join her late father, who had died a short while before.

The court was told Mrs Hankins had been assessed by mental health workers but she had denied to them that she was having suicidal tendencies.

Following Mrs Hankins' death Mr Hankins criticised the decision to charge her for the alleged assault on his father.

He said: 'It should never have gone to court, she should never have been prosecuted. She was just a beautiful person. I think the CPS are a shambles, they did not do their job properly.'

Mr Hankins said his father had assaulted Mrs Hankins on several occasions, but his wife did not want to report the abuse.

Recording a verdict of suicide, Ian Singleton, deputy coroner for Wiltshire and Swindon, said: 'Apart from the text message she sent to her husband, nothing Sarah had done was indicative that she was going to take her own life.

'Undoubtedly she was preoccupied with the impending court case and was concerned with what people would think of her.'
Former head of British Libyan Embassy warns intervention will hinder new Libyan government rather than help it

But 1,000 UK troops could be sent to train Libyan forces without MPs vote

He says there's 'no appetite' in Libya for foreign intervention

But he says UK could be called upon to help provide military help in future

Foreign Secretary says he doesn't expect a request for naval and air support in the short term

Britain could send planes and warships to Libya to help defeat ISIS, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said today.

He said the UK is willing to help support the fragile Libyan government to provide air or naval support but said he did not expect a request from the new prime minister Fayez al Sarraj in the short term.

Mr Hammond promised MPs he would seek their approval before sending such support to Libya, which has been reigned by chaos since British air strikes helped oust Colonel Gaddafi in the 'Arab Spring' in 2011.

And he ruled out sending combat troops into the war-ravaged country after being warned this morning that any kind of military intervention by the West risked 'adding fuel to the fire'.

Philip Hammond (pictured in the Commons today) has ruled out sending combat troops into Libya after being warned today that any kind of military intervention by the West risked 'adding fuel to the fire' in the war-ravaged country

Fresh from his surprise visit to Libya yesterday, Mr Hammond told MPs today that 'now is the time to move against' ISIS, which has seized a long stretch of coastline along the Mediterranean.

'I can envisage prime minister Sarraj, if his government is successful, being able to muster enough ground forces to mount an attack on the Daesh [Isis] stronghold around the coastal port of Sirte,' he told MPs.

'It is certainly the case [that] the Libyans will not be able to develop either naval or air assets in any reasonable period to support such an operation, and it is quite possible they would seek military support from outside.'

But he insisted there was 'no appetite' in Libya for foreign combat troops on the ground. Instead, up to 1,000 British troops could be sent to help train and support government troops.

The north African country has been reigned by chaos since the 'Arab Spring' in 2011, opening up a vacuum for militias to exploit, with ISIS seizing a long stretch of coastline along the Mediterranean. Above, an ISIS car bomb that targeted a security post in Misrata, 200km from Tripoli, last week

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond (left) meets Fayez-al-Sarraj (right), the new prime minister of the new national unity government of Libya in a surprise visit to the war-ravaged country yesterday

While promising MPs a vote on any move to deploy ground troops, he insisted it was 'not appropriate' to consult MPs on current plans to deploy troops in a training and technical role.

He revealed that Britain currently has 16 such training deployments across the world and he has said British troops could be sent to Libya as part of a 6,000-strong Italian-led deployment.

Mr Hammond estimated around 3,000 ISIS fighters were currently in Libya, suggesting the terrorist group was using their base in the country 'as a bolthole if they find their freedom of manoeuvre is coming under intolerable pressure in Syria'.

He said: 'There are many pointers that now is the time to move against them in Libya while they are relatively thin on the ground and their operation is in a holding phase.

Philip Hammond (pictured) today committed 10million in further assistance to the struggling GNA, which was only established last month

Air Vice Marshal Edward Stringer will fly to Rome to tell commanders the UK could deploy up to 1,000 troops to the war-ravaged country to help defeat Islamic State (IS)

'The principal route of access to Libya for Islamic State was by sea and the Libyans are struggling to control that access with their resources.'

The Foreign Secretary ruled out sending combat troops to Libya in the House of Commons today after Joe Walker-Cousins, former head of the British Embassy in Libya, warned that military intervention would endanger Libya's new government rather than help it.

He told the BBC: 'The country is weaponised to an extent that has never been seen before and we're trying to push some sort of representative government in an environment where any group, if they don't like what's happening, will be able to pick up arms and use them to effect.'

Reporting to MPs after making his first visit to Libya yesterday, when he met the country's new prime minister Fayez al Sarraj in Tripoli, Mr Hammond said there had been 'no specific request at this stage' for military assistance from overseas.

Mr Sarraj had stressed he wanted to pursue a 'Libyan-driven approach' to restoring stability and security in the country, Mr Hammond added.

Mr Hammond told MPs today: 'We do not anticipate any requests from the GNA for ground combat forces to take on Daesh [also known as ISIS] or any other armed groups and we have no plans to deploy troops in such a role.

'I will of course keep the House informed of any plans we develop in the future in response to requests from the Libyan government.

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond reassured MPs that they would be asked to approve any move to send British troops into the north African country in a combat role

Philip Hammond (pictured second from left) visited members of Libya's new UN-backed national unity government in an unannounced trip yesterday

'But the type of mission that we currently envisage would be focused on providing training and technical support away from any frontline operations.

'The House would of course be consulted were the Government to decide at any point that it wanted to insert ground forces or any forces in a combat role in Libya.

'We do not envisage that happening in the current circumstances.'

But he added: 'We currently have 16 permanent training deployments around the world and it's not appropriate that the House is consulted on such a deployment as if it were a combat deployment.'

Mr Hammond made an unannounced visit to Libya yesterday as officials drew up plans to offer troops to help Libya's new Government of National Accord (GNA) in its fight against ISIS.

His visit - designed to shore up support for Libya's new UN-backed national unity government - appeared to pave the way for fresh British military intervention just five years after UK air strikes helped oust Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi.

As UK defence chiefs step up plans to support Libya's under-threat unity government, Air Vice Marshal Edward Stringer was due to fly to Rome to tell commanders the UK could deploy up to 1,000 troops to support a 6,000 strong, Italian-led force in the country.

They could be deployed on the ground to protect key buildings, such as hospitals, banks and even the port, although officials insisted they would not be in a combat role.

A defence source said: 'It is not clear yet whether this would be behind the wire or not'. This means they could be deployed to hostile areas.

He said they had 'not ruled out' the option of putting troops in the cities in a security-protection role.

Yesterday Mr Hammond met Fayez al Sarraj, the prime minister of the new nine-strong GNA administration that is seeking to unite Libya after years of civil war.

Mr Hammond's visit was not made public until he arrived for security reasons. He met Mr Sarraj in the heavily protected naval base in Tripoli, Libya's capital.

His visit follows similar visits by Italian, French and German foreign ministers, while the British ambassador returned to the city for the first time since most foreign embassies pulled out in 2014 as it was considered too dangerous to remain.

Mr Hammond said the UK was committing 10million in further assistance to the struggling GNA, which was only established last month.

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond (right) made an unannounced visit to Libya yesterday, where he met the new prime minister Fayez al Sarraj (left) in Tripoli

The additional money includes 1.8million for counter-terrorism and 1.5million for combating the people traffickers smuggling migrants across the Mediterranean into Europe via Libya.

Speaking during his visit yesterday, Mr Hammond said: 'Britain and its allies fully support Prime Minister Fayez Serraj and his government as they restore peace and stability to the whole of Libya. We stand ready to provide further assistance to Libya and its people,' he said.

'Britain is at the forefront of the international community's efforts to stabilise Libya and is committing an extra 10 million to help the government of national accord strengthen political institutions, the economy, security, and justice.

'This fund builds on our existing support to Libya of 12 million last year for development and humanitarian assistance.

'I welcome the continued efforts of Prime Minister Fayez Serraj and members of the presidency council to make progress on security, rebuilding the economy and restoring public services for the benefit of all Libyans.'

Around 100 British special forces troops are already in Libya helping to protect its current leadership and advising local forces on fighting the increasing IS presence in the country.

But there have been growing signs in recent weeks that Nato is gearing up for a much larger intervention in Libya. British and American intelligence offivers are reportedly giving tribal leaders 'suitcases of cash' to stop them opposing an international ground force.

Rescuers help people in the sea after a boat carrying some dozens migrants crashed into rocks as they tried to enter the Italian port of Pantelleria

Other missions in the works include bombing Islamic State fighters, training Libyan troops, combating people smugglers and disarming militias - all of which could include British forces.

Crispin Blunt, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said the deployment of UK troops without any clear plan would 'almost certainly make things worse'.

He said: 'The idea that you could put a training force of that size in the country and it would not be seen as Western intervention is the view of someone living on cloud cuckoo land.

'We would find ourselves a target for those who wish the West ill.

'Unless there is a clear policy objective explaining how troops would deliver the desired outcome, it will almost certainly make things worse.'

Under current plans, they would be part of an Italian-led force of 6,000 soldiers that would help to restore peace in Libya, which has descended into chaos since the European-led overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.

A UN-brokered ceasefire has allowed the formation of a 'unity' government intended to replace the two warring administrations - one in Tripoli and the other in Tobruk - that have arisen in the last few years.

Fresh intervention would be highly controversial given the criticism that has been made of European leaders, including David Cameron, for failing to plan for post-war reconstruction in Libya after 2011.

Around 100 British special forces troops are already in Libya helping to protect its current leadership and advising local forces on fighting the increasing IS presence in the country

Air Vice Marshal Stringer was due to meet with his Italian and French counterparts this coming Thursday at a so-called 'force sensing conference' where they will cover topics such as Libya and ISIS

President Barack Obama described the European action as a 's*** show', and said his own failure to get more involved has been the biggest regret of his term in office.

Air Vice Marshal Stringer was due to meet with his Italian and French counterparts this coming Thursday at a so-called 'force sensing conference' where they will cover topics such as Libya.

The official offer of assistance - likely to be around 1,000 British troops - will not be made until a later meeting.

EU countries are waiting for Libya's unity government to make a request for help before any western troops are sent to help stem the flow of migrants and bolster security in the region.

Currently Britain has one ship, HMS Richmond, in the Mediterranean Sea trying to stop the smuggling gangs profiting from the migrant crisis in Libya.

But EU countries are under pressure to do more to stop the flow of migrants to Europe amid warnings another 800,000 people are waiting to catch a boat to Italy.

Currently Britain has one ship, HMS Richmond, in the Mediterranean Sea trying to stop the smuggling gangs profiting from the migrant crisis in Libya

EU countries are under pressure to do more to stop the flow of migrants to Europe amid warnings another 800,000 people are waiting to catch a boat to Italy

An MOD spokesperson said: 'The UK continues to work with international partners on how best to support the new Libyan government.

'All planning has been focussed on training Libyan Security Forces to provide their own security to the Government and Libyan people.

'No decisions have been made about the future deployment of any British military forces.'

They could be deployed on the ground to protect key buildings, such as hospitals, banks and even the port, although officials insisted they would not be in a combat role.

A defence source said: 'It is not clear yet whether this would be behind the wire or not'. This means they could be deployed to hostile areas.

He said they had 'not ruled out' the option of putting troops in the cities in a security-protection role.
Multimillionaire philanthropist and motivational speaker Tony Robbins has donated $24,000 to a 100-year-old California woman who was evicted from her apartment earlier this month.

After learning of Evelyn Heller's plight in the news, Robbins has promised to pay her $1,000 a month for the next two years in an effort to keep her from facing homelessness.

Social workers have also helped Heller find a new apartment in La Quinta after she lost her eviction trial two weeks ago and police were set to force her out any day now, The Desert Sun reported.

Multimillionaire philanthropist and motivational speaker Tony Robbins (pictured in November 2014) has donated $24,000 to a 100-year-old California woman who was evicted from her apartment earlier this month

On Twitter he wrote, 'I hope this inspires us all to remember we can do so much more,' in reference to his kind gesture

'I wanted her to not have to worry forever,' Robbins, who has a long history of charitable giving, told the newspaper of his donation to Heller.

'At this stage in her life, it's a joy for me to give her that sense of stability and security.'

His donation comes in response to learning of her circumstances in a Desert Sun story published on April 2.

'I knew I wanted to help her,' he said of when he learned of her story in the newspaper.

'Something always can be done, it's just a matter of people caring enough to do it.'

Her story in the newspaper also drew in offers from several individuals offering small donations to helping her to move or finding her a place to live, according to the Desert Sun.

A Georgia man even offered to let her live in his spare bedroom free of charge while a local nursing home said she could skip their waiting list.

Now no longer facing a life on the streets, Heller is thankful for the unexpected help.

'I'm grateful. What more can I say?' she told the newspaper. 'Strangers have been wonderful to me. That's the story.'

100-year-old Evelyn Heller from Palm Desert was lost her eviction trial two weeks ago. She represented herself during the trial at County of Riverside Courthouse in Palm Springs (pictured)

On April 1, the Palm Desert woman was evicted after her landlord claimed she was too noisy fighting with her daughter and had two weeks to vacate the space, the Desert Sun reported.

Deep Canyon Desert LLC's reason for the eviction was because of frequent noisy verbal disputes between the great-grandmother and her daughter, according to the newspaper.

Heller was also accused of having an apartment that was in 'deplorable conditions,' the Desert Sun quoted an apartment complex manager as saying.

During her eviction trial, she represented herself and the centenarian was ordered 'to pay $616 in prorated rent and more than $800 in court and attorney's fees,' according the newspaper.

She was unable to hear the judge's ruling, and was later informed of what happened by a deputy, according to the Desert Sun.

When learning of the ruling she said, ''What? What kind of ridiculous thing is that? But I don't have any money.'

Deep Canyon Desert LLC is the landlord for apartments at 45200 Deep Canyon Road (pictured) where Heller was evicted. The landlord claimed she was too noisy fighting with her daughter

William Windham represented the landlord and told the Desert Sun: 'I've evicted people off of their death beds and regretted every second of the trial.

'But my job is unfortunately to set my feeling aside and do what my clients ask me to do.'

Following news of his good deed, Robbins, 56, tweeted: 'I hope this inspires us all to remember we can do so much more!'

The author made headlines in February after swooping in to help nuns who faced possible eviction from a soup kitchen that they used to feed the homeless, writing them a check for $25,000.

Lawyers for the nuns and landlord, with help from Robbins, reached a deal allowing the nuns to stay for a year at their current rent.
Drones have been banned from large parts of London and Windsor during Barack Obama's visit to Britain this week.

The US President and his wife Michelle arrive on Thursday night, just days after an unmanned aircraft is thought to have crashed into a British Airways flight landing at Heathrow on Sunday morning.

Flying restrictions which cover all aircraft, including drones, will be in place at various locations across and around the capital until the Obamas depart on Sunday morning.

Flying restrictions which cover all aircraft, including drones, will be in place at various locations across and around London during Barack Obama's visit later this week

Drones have been banned from large parts of London and Windsor during the visit of Barack Obama and his wife Michelle this week. They are pictured with the Queen and Prince Phillip during their visit to London in 2011

The first restriction will come into force on Thursday and will cover the skies over Stansted, where the president and his wife are flying into, and leaving from a few days later.

Central London will be covered throughout the visit, and the skies over Windsor will be subject to the ban when the Obamas have lunch with the Queen on Friday.

Drone operators are normally allowed to fly at least 492 feet over built-up areas such as towns and cities, while approved commercial users can fly as low as 164 feet.

But guidelines have been issued by the UK's national air traffic service (Nats) and regulator the Civil Aviation Authority, stating that Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin decided flights must be restricted 'as part of the overarching security plan' for the presidential visit.

The tightened rules have been brought in under article 161 of the Air Navigation Order 2009, which gives the power to prohibit or restrict flying.

The US President and his wife Michelle arrive on Thursday night, just days after an unmanned aircraft is thought to have crashed into the front of British Airways' G-EUYP (pictured) as it approached Heathrow

Detectives launched an investigation after the pilot of flight BA727 reported his aircraft being hit by a drone on Sunday afternoon with 132 passengers and five crew on board (stock image)

Drones will be banned from flying between 9pm on Thursday and 10.30am on Sunday over a large part of London, stretching from Purley in the south to Haringey in the north.

Restrictions are also in place for the skies between Windsor and London on Friday - when the Obamas will join the Queen for lunch at Windsor Castle the day after her 90th birthday celebrations before having dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry at Kensington Palace - and between Stansted airport and London on Thursday night and Sunday morning.

The regulations prohibit aircraft - including drones - from flying below 2,500 feet within the specified areas unless they are using Heathrow, Stansted or London City airports, London Heliport, RAF Northolt or are being operated by the emergency services.

Pilots of other aircraft wanting to fly in the restricted areas must seek permission from the Metropolitan Police.

An image shows the route taken by the flight over London on Sunday, during which time it was struck by an object shortly before landing

Similar rules have been put in place for previous significant events such as high-profile visits and major sporting fixtures.

Detectives launched an investigation after the pilot of flight BA727 reported his aircraft being hit by a drone as it flew 1,700 feet over Richmond on Sunday afternoon with 132 passengers and five crew on board.

The pilot of the Airbus A320, which was travelling from Geneva in Switzerland to Heathrow, said the craft had been hit by what he thought was a drone as he flew over Richmond Park at 12.38pm on Sunday.

The flight landed at Heathrow Terminal 5 safely and was inspected by BA engineers, who found that no damage had been done to the aircraft.

Police have searched the area below - in south west London - for debris but found nothing so far, and they are appealing for anyone in the area who finds 'identifiable' parts to come forward. No arrests have yet been made.

Chief Superintendent Martin Hendy, head of Metropolitan Police Service's Aviation Policing Command, said it illustrates the 'reckless, negligent and some times malicious use of drones'.

The incident - which has followed a number of near misses - has led to calls for a US-style register of drones. Fears have also been raised that drones could be used for terror attacks and collisions are likely to become more common.
Fixing the problem: Charlotte Moore, the 264,000-a-year controller of BBC TV channels, promised that the corporation will investigate sound issues

The BBCs TV chief admitted today that it is incredibly hard to fix mumbling by actors on popular dramas including Happy Valley.

Charlotte Moore, the 264,000-a-year controller of channels, promised that the corporation will investigate sound issues that have plagued the likes of Jamaica Inn and War and Peace.

A new set of guidelines has been issued by the BBC to programme makers to try to correct the growing problem, which has led to some viewers resorting to subtitles to understand shows.

According to The Guardian, Miss Moore, 47, told the Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference in London today: It is incredibly hard to get to the bottom of where things go wrong.

Its often several circumstances and its quite hard to isolate if there is one particular problem. It is often several different problems coming together. Sound is a very exact science.

She said that complaints about mumbling after the first episode of Happy Valley saw producers head back to the edit suite to change the sound levels so the issue could be corrected quickly.

The mother-of-two, who studied history at Bristol University and is married to documentary cameraman Johann Perry, added that a unique set of circumstances cause sound issues.

Her comments come just days after Happy Valley executive producer Nicola Schindler said viewers are partly to blame for the mumbling problem, adding that they are not tuning their TV aerials correctly.

She told BBC Radio 2: I dont think they do [mumble], not intentionally. My job is to sit there and make sure everyone can hear something. It doesnt do me any good if I think people cant hear it.

Mumbling concerns: The BBC said in February that the real problem with Happy Valley - in which Sarah Lancashire plays a hard-nosed policewoman - was the Yorkshire accent

I actually think a lot of it is peoples televisions, that theyre not tuned necessarily the right way. I dont know whether its bass or tone, or whatever it is, but there is some of that going on.

Her views come despite BBC director general Tony Hall ordering an investigation into mumbling, following hundreds of complaints about the series online.

A poll by The Stage found 80 per cent of viewers think there is too much mumbling on stage and screen. In February, the BBC said the real problem with Happy Valley was the Yorkshire accent.

We worked very hard to ensure everything was audible while keeping the sense of reality and the rawness of performances, a spokesman said at the time.

Happy Valley is a drama that has been lauded for its realism and dramatic pathos  as such the dialogue is representative of the characters and area in which it is based.

The show, in which Sarah Lancashire plays a hard-nosed policewoman, is set in West Yorkshire and filmed in and around Bradford and Huddersfield.

Popular show: Complaints about mumbling after the first episode of Happy Valley saw producers head back to the edit suite to change the sound levels so the issue could be corrected quickly, Mrs Moore revealed

Unsurprisingly, the BBCs explanation went down badly with licence fee payers in the region, who said that even they struggled to follow the programme. They accused the BBC of patronising them with nonsense excuses.

[I am] Yorkshire born and Yorkshire bred but have trouble hearing. It sounds muffled [and I am] missing half of whats going on, one viewer said online.

Patronising rubbish, said another. [The BBC] cant even admit when they get it wrong. How on earth can we not understand the Yorkshire dialect?

Even BBC bosses had a different explanation behind the scenes, the BBC Trusts minutes confirm.

Members discussed viewer complaints regarding audibility and sound quality on Happy Valley, the record of the meeting states.

The director general noted that he took all such complaints seriously and had already asked BBC Television to look into this matter and consider any immediate issues as well as identifying any lessons for future commissions.

And in 2013, Lord Hall said the corporation could look at how to stop actors muttering in its TV dramas.

I dont want to sound like a grumpy old man, but I also think muttering is something we could have a look at, he said. Actors muttering can be testing - you find you have missed a line - you have to remember that you have an audience.
David Cameron treated his wife to a gourmet meal in a top London restaurant yesterday to celebrate her 45th birthday.

The Prime Minister took wife Samantha to West Thirty Six in Notting Hill, where the couple met up with friends for an evening of celebration.

The trendy restaurant describes itself as 'retro-modern', with the website stating: 'Think leather armchairs, bare brick and reclaimed wood.'

Party leader: David Cameron took wife Sam out to a top restaurant to celebrate her 45th birthday yesterday

Birthday girl: Sam was seen smiling as she exited West Thirty Six restaurant in Notting Hill presents in hand

Tory leader Cameron kept it casual for the celebratory evening, wearing a dark blue polo shirt and collar-less navy jacket.

Style-conscious Sam meanwhile was spotted in a black dress and overcoat, with a dark green scarf and matching heels.

It looked like Samantha had been given clothing as a birthday gift, as she was seen clutching a bag from boutique Me + Em as she left the restaurant.

The venue offers a 65 T Bone steak or a 35.50 lobster dinner with garlic and hazelnut butter.

Wines range from the 18 Cotes de Gascogne up to the 360-a-pop Louis Reoderer Cristal champagne.

It is not the first time the Prime Minister has taken his wife to one of London's top eateries.

Night out: The couple sought to get away from the stresses of the referendum campaign for an evening

Presents? Samantha was seen holding a bag from boutique clothing store Me + Em as she left the restaurant

All smiles: The couple looked in good spirits as they left the restaurant yesterday evening and headed home

In 2014, the couple were seen heading for a 'date night' meal in celebrity hangout, The Chiltern Firehouse.

On that occasion, the Camerons dined at tables near where actresses Margot Robbie and Lindsay Lohan were sitting.

The Prime Minister appears to have upped his game since he was accused of using vouchers to pay for his 12.75 pizza and Samantha's 10.90 lasagna on a night out at Pizza Express in 2013.

Speaking of his and Sam's 'date nights' in 2010, Mr Cameron told Now magazine: '[Sam and I] have one night a week where we either stay in and do nothing or go out on our own.

'We have a couple of favourite Italian restaurants in north Kensington but I can't tell you about them.

'I once named my favourite Spanish restaurant and a newspaper went there and said the food tasted like boiled sawdust or something and totally trashed it, so I don't want to risk it.'

Hair today: The Prime Minister looked like he was in need of a comb as he waited to place his order
He said heron could be the mother or another bird nabbing a quick snack

A professor of biology told MailOnline the bird already seems to be dead

Heron appears to select the bird from a nest before quickly devouring it

This is the unnerving moment an adult heron appears to eat its own young after picking it up from the nest and swallowing it in one mouthful.

The footage was captured by a bird watcher on the Norwegian Island of Smola, and shows the large heron apparently selecting the baby to eat.

It holds it in its beak for a short while before devouring it and the clip concludes with the video maker zooming in on the heron to capture the bird travelling down its throat.

Sinister: The footage shows the heron apparently selecting a baby from the nest before quickly devouring it

Gruesome: The video maker zooms in on the heron to capture the bird travelling down its throat

Speaking to MailOnline about the footage, Douglas Mock, a research professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma, explained that two things could be at play.

He said: 'The adult may be a neighbor - in which case it is not particularly surprising, though in my own experience all such consumption I've observed has been between species.

'Herons are opportunistic consumers of anything they can overpower: protein is protein.

'Alternatively this may be the meal's actual parent. The latter case would make it more interesting, of course, but from what I could see, the chick was already dead, so this was scavenging, not depredating.'

Professor Mock, who has studied various manifestations of brood reduction in herons and egrets for 20 years, explained both options are viable but he would be more surprised if the second was at play.

A rival bird? Douglas Mock, a research professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma, explained two things could be at play

Explanation: The professor explained herons are opportunistic consumers of anything they can overpower and this could be a rival bird

Referring to his field studies, he said he has watched for parental scavenging for many years and despite anticipating it has never observed it.

He added that he has always been a bit puzzled when young victims of fatal sibling aggression or starvation are not consumed.

He said: 'If chicks are dying because of food limitations, then the opportunity to recycle some perfectly good protein seemed obvious.

'And yet what my assistants and I saw repeatedly was parents standing by (without interference) during the siblicidal process and then the victim essentially being left to rot in the floor of the nest.

'One can make up possible just-so stories for why that might be for the best (e.g., if parasites play a role), but it was counterintuitive.'

Potential: Professor Mock said that alternatively this may be the meal's actual parent, which would make the case more interesting

Unlikely? Referring to his field studies, the professor said he has watched for parental scavenging for many years and despite anticipating it has never observed it

Professor Mock concluded that either way a dead baby bird would be nothing more than protein to a heron and therefore consumption would be an option for the mother, as well as another bird.

The video was captured on a 24/7 camera that has been set up by Zooom - a website that has been launched through Norwegian newspaper ABC Nyheter - to study the birds.

The footage is being monitored by experts, who believed the bird was dead prior to consumption and admitted they too have never seen anything like it before.

They confirmed that they believe the heron was either the mother or father of the bird however, due to the fact they had been watching it at the nest.

To keep track of the birds, or to witness something equally fascinating first-hand, the live feed can be accessed here.
Hillary Clinton made her most important campaign stop of the New York primary early this morning - her polling location in Chappaqua, where she and Bill cast their ballot in the presidential election.

The candidate is off to Washington, D.C., for the day to speak at the National Building Trades Convention, but she'll be back by nightfall, in time to attend a primary night party hosted by her campaign at a Times Square hotel.

She'll speak at the event after polls close at 9 PM.

Opponent Bernie Sanders was in New York City this morning and will spend his day at rallies in Pennsylvania, one of five states that votes a week from today, He'll address his supporters before the race is decided in New York.

Sanders kept a brave face on Monday night as he told a New York City audience that victory was within his grasp. The scheduling move suggests that defeat is in the air at the Sanders camp, however.

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On her way to victory: Hillary Clinton is widely expected to take the New York State primary later on Tuesday

Rare appearance together: Hillary Clinton has deployed her husband as a campaign speaker meaning they have seldom been seen together during the New York campaign

I'm with her: Bill Clinton was at his wife's side as she cast her vote in their home town of Chappaqua, in Westchester. She is heading to Manhattan later for a rally which is expected to be a victory party

Hillary Clinton made her most important campaign stop of the New York primary early this morning - her polling location in Chappaqua, where she cast her ballot in the presidential election

Clinton is off to Washington, D.C., for the day to speak at the National Building Trades Convention, but she'll be back by nightfall to attend a primary night party hosted by her campaign at a Times Square hotel in New York City

DECISION DAY: New Yorkers cast their ballots today in both parties' primary elections.

Polls close in New York at 9 PM. Clinton is expected to win the Democratic primary but it could take time for results to roll in

Sanders, the underdog candidate, trails Clinton by double digits and is likely to lose today's contest. The city's diversity is reflected on voter material

Sanders made one last attempt at wooing New York voters Monday night on the eve of the state's primary at a waterside rally in Long Island City's Hunter's Point South Park.

The underdog candidate trails Clinton by double digits and is likely to lose today's contest.

He admitted last night that the state is 'enormously important' after nonchalantly discussing the possibility of a loss earlier in the day.

Sanders told his backers last night that he would win if there's a large turnout, however, and said, 'Tomorrow let us all do everything we can to make sure that New York state has the largest turnout in a Democratic primary in its history.

'Tomorrow New York can help take this country a giant step forward for the political revolution,' Sanders declared.

The presidential candidate sported a hoarse voice as he addressed his supporters following an introduction from actor Danny Glover and a performance by Brooklyn-based band TV on the Radio.

The rawness in his throat was evidence of the tough campaign he's waged against Clinton over the last two and a half weeks in the state they've both called home at one point over their lifetimes.

Clinton owns a home in Chappaqua and served as the state's junior senator for eight years before she was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as secretary of state following her defeat in the 2008 presidential race.

Sanders was born and raised in Brooklyn. He's lived in Vermont for most of his adult life, though, and has represented the state in Congress for the last 25 years.

Bernie Sanders was in New York City this morning and will spend his day at rallies in Pennsylvania, one of five states that votes a week from today. He'll address his supporters before the race is decided in New York

Sanders hugs a pedestrian as he takes a walk in New York's Times Square this morning

Sanders sits in his seat on a plane as he waits to leave town in Teterboro, New Jersey

Sanders speaks to supporter Michael Cantalupo who said he is unable to vote in the New York primaries. New York has a strict closed primary process and prospective voters had to register by October in order to cast a ballot today

Sanders is the native New Yorker in the race, but Clinton's years as a U.S. senator has not been forgotten.

The former first lady came into office a few months before 9/11. After the horrific terrorist attack she dedicated herself to passing a health bill that subsidized costs for first responders.

Both current New York senators, Chuck Schumer, and Kirsten Gillibrand, Clinton's replacement in the legislative body, endorsed their sister in arms as did New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray.

All of them made appearances on Clinton's behalf in New York in the days leading up to the election.

Sanders played to his strengths and threw large rallies across New York City geared toward the city's college-aged residents.

'Thank you! You all look beautiful!' he told thousands of young people who came to hear him last night. 'And you all look like you want a political revolution!'

Sanders mocked those who have criticized him 'for thinking too big' and said he's 'just a wild and crazy guy' as he drove home his opposition to fracking, his support for a $15 minimum wage and a pay raise for women and advocated on behalf of striking union members in the audience.

'This is a campaign on the move,' he said. 'This is a political revolution sweeping America from coast to coast. This is a movement getting the establishment very, very nervous.'

The U.S. senator has erased Clinton's national advantage and now runs within two points of her, having won the last eight of nine contests and the momentum.

But Clinton leads comfortably in New York and is anywhere from 10 to 17 points up on him, polling shows.

His campaign hoped a debate in Brooklyn last Thursday that it demanded would enhance his chances. An Emerson poll taken over the weekend indicated that was not the case, however, and Clinton was ahead by 15.

If he loses today, it won't have been for a lack of trying. Sanders held rallies upstate in addition to New York City as he went after the 247 pledged delegates at stake.

More than 60,000 people came to see him at events in the past week that featured performances from popular artists, including Vampire Weekend, as well as speeches from Danny DeVito, Spike Lee, Rosario Dawson, Justin Long, and other celebrities who have endorsed his campaign.

Sanders hugs actor Danny Glover after the actor's introduction of him at last night's rally. The candidate kept a brave face on Monday night as he told supporters in New York City that victory was within their grasp

'Wonderful reconnecting w @janeosanders & Bernie at the #NYforBernie rally. New Yorkers: make sure you vote tomorrow!' Glover tweeted after the rally. More than 60,000 people came to see Sanders at events that targeted to his college-aged base and featured performances from popular artists, including Vampire Weekend, as well as speeches from Glover and other celebrities

'This is a campaign on the move,' Sanders said last night. 'This is a political revolution sweeping America from coast to coast. This is a movement getting the establishment very, very nervous'

The U.S. senator, depicted in a cardboard cut out, has erased Clinton's national advantage and now runs within two points of her, having won the last eight of nine contests and turned the momentum his way - but it may run out today

He spent his day yesterday talking to voters at retail stores and visited picketing Verizon workers.

All the while, his campaign was launching a new assault on Clinton over her fundraising efforts, suggesting Monday that a joint fund with the national party that both candidates were free to make use of may violate campaign finance laws.

'As the race seems to be turning against him he has decided on a new strategy of false attacks like this on Secretary Clinton's character that we think have dangerous implications for the race ahead,' Clinton's campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters last night in response.

Prior to the debate Sanders went to war with Clinton over qualifications after she suggested that he's not ready to lead the country.

Her critique came after Sanders' sit down with the New York Daily News' editorial board. He had trouble responding to questions about basic elements of his platform, raising questions about his preparedness for the job.

Sanders said he could tell that Clinton and her establishment friends were getting 'desperate' based on the attack.

New York City's first lady, McCray, mocked him yesterday in a sing-songy voice said it's clear from his campaign's rhetoric he's the one 'getting desperate.'

'They know tomorrow could be, should be, will be a huge win for Hillary,' McCray told a ballroom full of women at the New York Hilton in midtown.

Clinton trotted out a slate high-powered women in Manhattan to help her close the deal at the afternoon event, and they went after Sanders in full force.

Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Planned Parenthood President Cecille Richards convened at the Women for Hillary event that also attracted McCray, a last-minute addition to the line up.

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney said Sanders 'only talks about one thing - income inequality - and Clinton, a former secretary of state, is the real deal.

'Tomorrow we're going to elect a Democratic nominee, who's going to be the first woman elected to the presidency of the United States,' Maloney said.

Clinton did not mention Sanders directly, but she reused a line from her Thursday debate against him and said, 'It is easy to diagnose the problems plaguing America - we need solutions.'

She said 'some people have commented' and said 'enough with the plans Hillary' and told her to go out and make some speeches.

'We dont want to hear any more plans,' she said. 'Now, dont talk too loudly, but dont talk too softly.'

The underdog candidate trails Hillary Clinton by double digits and is likely to lose today's contest, which he admitted lat night is 'enormously important.' He told his backers tonight that doesn't have to be the case, though. If there's a large turnout tomorrow, he'll win

Sanders will head to Pennsylvania in the morning and will rally supporters there at two events before the results in New York are finalized. The scheduling move suggests the writing is on the wall for Sanders, even though he kept a brave face tonight as he talked to his supporters in New York City

She told her audience, 'I want you to know that for me, this election is not just about me. Its about an agenda that we present to New York tomorrow, that we present to the country, that we vote on  because that will give us the chance to actually make the progress we all want to see.'

She has a light public schedule going into tomorrow's election - the mid-afternoon Women for Hillary event was the only item on it - but she's not been static.

Earlier in the day she stopped by a restaurant in Queens, where she had a bubble tea after she and her former Senate colleague Chuck Schumer and greeted potential voters.
A father accused of killing his baby son held up paramedics desperate to rush the critically-ill baby to hospital because he was searching for his phone, a court heard.

While his girlfriend was at work, Stephen Ward, 25, from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, allegedly shook nine-month-old Jordan so violently he suffered 'catastrophic and irreversible' injuries, it is claimed.

He spent the morning of June 10, 2014, vacuuming, playing games on his mobile and washing up some dishes before allegedly inflicting the fatal trauma.

Stephen Ward, 25, (left) from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, allegedly shook nine-month-old Jordan (right) so violently he suffered 'catastrophic and irreversible' injuries while his girlfriend was at work, it is claimed

The panicked father then dialled 999 and reported that Jordan had choked on food before begging rescuers to save his son, Bristol Crown Court heard.

When paramedics arrived at the family home they found the baby lying on the bed and not breathing having suffered a cardiac arrest.

As they battled to save the little boy, who was pale with blue lips, Ward disappeared into his bedroom and was thought to be searching for his phone.

One paramedic said when they decided they needed to get the baby to hospital as soon as possible they were left waiting around for him.

The baby was rushed to Great Western Hospital in Swindon, Wiltshire, by ambulance and Ward followed in a police car after finding his phone, the court heard.

Paramedic Bernard McIlroy, who responded to the 999 call, said he rushed to the address at around 1.20pm and saw Ward calling him from his flat window.

After carrying out an assessment Mr McIlroy managed to find a faint pulse and located a heartbeat.

He said: 'Shortly after this the baby's father left the room. After a couple of minutes of ventilation we could see signs of improvement in the baby's condition.

'We felt that owing to the improvement we would need to take the opportunity to take him to hospital straight away.

'My colleague went to look for the baby's father. After a short while I went to see what was taking the baby's father so long as we were ready to go.

'I believe he was trying to locate a mobile telephone.

'At this time the police arrived and I advised them that it was imperative to take the baby to hospital as soon as possible.

'They advised me they would deal with the father.'

At the Great Western Hospital Jordan was handed over to a resuscitation team before being transferred to Bristol Children's Hospital.

As paramedics battled to save the little boy, who was pale with blue lips, Ward disappeared into his bedroom and searched for his phone, the court heard

He ended up falling into a severe coma and died two days later in the early hours of June 12, 2014.

The little boy had a bruised head, fresh swelling and a bleed on the brain which indicated he had suffered a 'severe and irreversible brain injury', the court heard.

The jury was played a chilling recording of the call Ward made to rescuers, in which he repeatedly told his baby son to 'wake up'.

While music blared in the background, Ward told the call handler: 'Excuse me, can I get an ambulance please. Quickly, quickly.'

He then gave his address, before saying: 'I have got a baby and he is not moving that much. It is like his breathing has gone.

'What can I do to help him?'

After a short exchange, the line went quiet for around 30 seconds before Ward began speaking again.

Ward said: 'He is like breathing very hard and he has lost all movement, please help me.

'Jordan come on. Please, please, please hurry up.'

Ward left the courtroom as the call was played and his new partner wept in the public gallery.

The court heard on Monday that Ward had previously slapped Jordan's face, leaving him with red marks and crying hysterically.

He was also described as controlling and aggressive and often got 'frustrated and angry' when feeding Jordan because he would cry a lot.

Giving evidence in court, his girlfriend and Jordan's mother, Paula Watts, said she gave him a second chance despite suspecting that Ward may have hit Jordan before.

She said she never actually saw him inflict injuries on the baby and only took him back when he promised to have anger management.

When asked if she would have left her baby boy with Ward if she suspected he might hurt him, Ms Watts replied 'no'.

Ward denies one count of manslaughter.
A Florida babysitter was the last person to see two young children alive before their father murdered them, their mother and later killed himself.

Lauren Camarillo of Altamonte, Florida, was watching the kids before Henry Ramone Brown, 30, committed the triple murder-suicide.

Camarillo had only watched the children once before and did everything to keep them calm after Brown told her the one- and four-year-old's mother had been in a car accident.

Lauren Camarillo (pictured) of Altamonte, Florida, handed a one- and four-year-old child over to their father on Sunday night after babysitting the kids. She later learned the man killed the youngsters, his wife and himself

Henry Ramone Brown stabbed and ran over his estranged wife Chericia (pictured with their son Henry) on Sunday before killing his children and himself

'I just got like, a chill. It just didnt seem right.

'I could tell he had a lot going on in his mind, but I just thought it was because of the accident,' she told My News 13.

Brown asked Camarillo to watch the kids while he went to find his wife. Camarillo said she just wanted to keep the children calm.

'I put Disney Channel on, made them corn dogs. The little girl was adorable. They were jumping around, they were dancing.

'Their last meal was corn dogs and ketchup and grape Capri Sun,' she said.

When Brown returned Camarillo said he was behaving differently.

'Just nervous, shaky, like, "Lets go, lets go",' she said.

Later, when Camarillo heard helicopters circling overhead, said she felt sick.

'I thought I was helping him. I thought I was helping him, helping the children,' Camarillo said.

She didn't know that just months earlier Brown had threatened to kill his wife Chericia Brown, 31, and their two children.

The 30-year-old then drove to pick up the couple's two young children, aged one and four, who he shot dead

On December 18, 2015 Chericia Brown told authorities that she thought her husband was capable of killing and had threatened harm to her and the children, according to My News 13.

Investigators said they did not have enough evidence to prosecute Brown.

Chericia told police Brown threw a phone at her, flipped a mattress while she was on it, pulled her hair and held her against a closet wall.

She also said Brown stuffed a sock in her mouth, while he pinned his knee on her head and backhanded her five times in front of their one-year-old daughter.

Brown was not arrested due to lack of evidence.

The horrific incident began after Brown, 30, hid in the trunk of his wife's car which was parked outside a Sanford Chilis, (pictured) in Lake Mary, armed with a knife

Police said because Chericia was leaving the home 'the fear of further violence did not exist', according to My News 13.

Brown later denied the incident had happened when questioned by investigators, saying Chericia was lying to the authorities because he had had an affair.

On Sunday, after dining at a Chili's in St Mary, Florida, Chericia returned to her car at around 10pm.

Her husband, who had been hiding in the car's trunk, jumped out of the vehicle and stabbed her multiple times, according to police reports.

Brown attempted to hide the seriously injured Chericia by dragging her into the bushes and ran round the building to retrieve his car, Click Orlando report.

But two medical professionals, who had been dining at the restaurant, had discovered the victim and were attempting to help her when Brown returned.

The suspect drove around the building and ran over his wife, and the two diners attempting to help her.

All three were rushed to a local hospital where Chericia Brown was pronounced dead.

When Chericia Brown, 31, returned to her car at around 10pm on Sunday, her husband jumped out and stabbed her multiple times (pictured is the crime scene outside the restaurant)

Maricia and two medical professionals, who had been trying to assist her outside the Chillis, were rushed to hospital after Brown returned and ran them down

One of medical professionals is still in the hospital in 'stable condition' while the other has since been released.

Brown fled the scene and police say he swapped vehicles before driving to pick up his two children, aged one and four, from Camarillo.

The 30-year-old, who was armed with a gun, then drove to Central Florida Regional Hospital where his wife had been transported after his attack.

He arrived at 12.20am, in an attempt to find Chericia, but was quickly recognized by police.

Brown opened fire on the officers and hospital security staff.

Henry Brown (left) is thought to have married Chericia, (right) an operations clerk, in 2012 who gave birth to his son Henry Brown IV that same year

But the couple are said to have split in December after a domestic violence incident

After Brown stabbed and ran over his wife, he fled the scene and collected his two young children (pictured) from the babysitter

He managed to escape back to his Ford pick-up truck but police chased him and were able to track down Brown on Interstate 4, using 'stop sticks' to disable the vehicle.

When deputies approached the truck, they found the suspect had shot dead his two young children inside the car, before turning the gun on himself.

The Sheriffs Office could not confirm if the father had murdered his children before he arrived at the hospital or afterwards.

The investigation is ongoing.

Henry Brown married Chericia, an operations clerk, in 2012. She gave birth to his son Henry Brown IV that same year.
A 'significant' number of pills were found, as well as ecstasy and cannabis

The principal of Melbourne Girls Grammar said she was very '

A group of 'high achieving' students from a prestigious girls school have been caught with ecstasy and cannabis at their formal.

One student from Melbourne Girls Grammar, in South Yarra, an inner city suburb of Melbourne, was expelled and two others were suspended over a drug scandal at the school's formal at The Park in Albert Park on Friday.

Ecstasy and cannabis was found in one of the girl's bags after principal Catherine Mission became concerned with suspicious activity in the toilets, while another was understood to have been carrying a 'significant' number of pills, the Herald Sun reported.

One student from Melbourne Girls Grammar, in South Yarra, an inner city suburb of Melbourne, was expelled and two others were suspended over a drug scandal at the school's formal

Ecstasy and cannabis was found in one of the girl's bags afterthe principal became concerned with suspicious activity in the toilets, while another was understood to have been carrying a 'significant' number of pills

Ms Mission told the Melbourne newspaper that she was 'extremely disappointed' in the three students who were immediately 'isolated' and sent home from the lakeside event facility.

'We are extremely disappointed and saddened that this situation has occurred but we stand by our decision to take immediate action, as we will not compromise on student safety,' Ms Misson said.

The school has a strict no drug policy and the two students who will return to Melbourne Girls Grammar will do so under special conditions.

Daily Mail Australia found that the incident was not reported to police and the school failed to respond to questions from the Herald Sun about whether the authorities were notified.

A parent said the teenagers were high achievers and that their removal was disruptive and upsetting for other students at the formal, the Herald Sun reported.
A New Jersey woman who was molested while she slept by a male passenger on a 13-hour flight testified Monday in court about the shocking incident where she woke up to find that her body and private parts were covered with hand lotion.

The 25-year-old victim recounted the horrifying incident that took place on an Emirates flight from Dubai to Kennedy Airport last October.

The woman, who is only known to the jury by her first name, Stephanie, had to identify the dress and the thong underwear she had been wearing as well as the bottle of Nivea lotion during court on Monday, The New York Daily News reported.

Nadeem Memhood Quraishi has been charged with sexual contact without consent and could be deported back to Pakistan if he is convicted.

Nadeem Mehmood Quraishi, 42, from Staten Island, has been charged with sexual contact without consent for allegedly rubbing lotion on a female plane passenger and molesting her on a flight last October

The 25-year-old New Jersey woman who was allegedly molested by Quraishi while she slept on a 13-hour flight testified Monday that 'I love you, you're pretty' was whispered in her ear by him

She said she woke up and found her body covered in lotion. In court on Monday, she had to identify the dress and the thong underwear she had been wearing as well as the bottle of Nivea lotion (file photo above)

Stephanie, who had taken an anti-anxiety medication after boarding the plane and fell asleep, said that Quraishi sat in the seat next to her on her right side.

She testified that 'I love you, you're pretty' was whispered in her ear before she woke up. He also asked her if she had 'slept well.'

'My entire body felt sticky. I could smell the lotion,' she testified in Brooklyn Federal Court according to the Daily News. 'I was shocked. My heart dropped into my stomach.'

She immediately got up and went to the bathroom on the plane, where she noticed that her thong had been pushed aside as lotion covered her shoulders, breasts, arms, inner thighs, calves and vagina.

In addition, she said that her 'vaginal area was sore', according to court filings.

When she returned to her seat, the woman asked Quraishi where her lotion was. When the man handed her to bottle, she alerted the crew that something happened to her while she slept.

The court documents stated that when flight attendants asked Quraishi about what happened, he allegedly admitted to rubbing lotion on his fellow passengers 'arms, shoulders, and legs, and used the lotion in her vaginal area.'

The 42-year-old Staten Island man, who reportedly manages a Subway eatery, allegedly told the cabin crew he thought the woman 'needed it' and 'enjoyed it.'

She testified in Brooklyn Federal Court on Monday that her entire body felt sticky and that she could smell the lotion. She said: 'I was shocked. My heart dropped into my stomach'

'The defendant also told the flight attendants that he liked it and that it happened to him as a child,' the complaint read.

During the court session, his defense lawyer Mark Macron questioned Stephanie about the medication she had taken on the flight and how it was possible for his client to rub lotion on her body while she wore a belted dress, was covered by a blanket and had her seat belt on.

However, Gunjon Mangia, a flight attendant working during the flight, testified on the stand that Quraishi admitted that he applied the lotion on the victim's body, the Daily News reported.
A police officer shot dead a vendor over a row over the price of a cup of tea

A policeman has allegedly shot dead one man and wounded two others in an argument over the price of a cup of tea in Egypt.

The policeman's actions sparked a riot in a suburb of the capital Cairo.

Public anger over allegations of police brutality has been simmering over recent months, with several incidents spilling over into skirmishes and protests.

Police officers employed by the Interior Ministry, who were a focus of the 2011 uprising, have once again come in for criticism.

In the immediate aftermath of the incident an onlooker held up a bullet casing and accused the police of killing 'poor' Egyptians.

A crowd quickly gathered, overturning a police vehicle and beating up another policeman at the scene, said a witness in the affluent neighbourhood of Rehab.

'The Interior Ministry are thugs,' chanted a crowd of around 200 in a video obtained by Mail Online.

Witnesses said on social media the argument on Tuesday was over the price of a cup of tea, which was confirmed to Reuters by security sources.

A video showed a man lying still on the floor surrounded by angry onlookers.

The Interior Ministry said in a statement that a policeman got into an argument with a vendor over 'the price of a drink' and shot him dead, injuring two others in the process.

A judicial source told Reuters the policeman shot the three men with an assault rifle and fled.

The victim died from a bullet to the heart, the source said.

EGYPT SINCE THE ARAB SPRING January 25, 2011 - Demonstrations against police brutality began in Cairo, focusing on Tahrir Square February 11, 2011 - After weeks of protests and violence Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak finally resigns June 2012 - President Mohamed Morsi is sworn in after the Muslim Brotherhood wins the first democratic elections in decades July 2013 - After demonstrations against Morsi's government the Egyptian Army overthrows the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi in a coup July 2014 - With the Muslim Brotherhood boycotting fresh elections, army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is elected president January 2016 - Italy's government protests after student Giulio Regeni is tortured and killed in Cairo. Advertisement

'There are clashes between the police and locals. Security forces brought in two riot police vehicles and an armoured truck and the victim's family is here and pelting them with rocks,' said the witness, who declined to be named for fear of reprisal.

'Security forces are retreating and promising justice but the crowd is demanding police hand over the killer,' he added.

Human rights activists say police brutality is widespread in Egypt and there is a culture of impunity.

Usually the victims are Egyptian but in January this year Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian student who had been studying at Cambridge University, was tortured and killed near Cairo.

Last month the Egyptian authorities claimed they had shot dead a gang who had allegedly killed Regeni but the Italian government has cast doubt on the claims and demanded a full investigation.

It was anger over police brutality that fuelled the 2011 uprising that eventually brought an end to President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule.

The Muslim Brotherhood later won elections but the government of President Mohamed Morsi was overthrown in 2013 and since Army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power the police have returned to their old ways, according to human rights groups.

Public anger against the police has surged again in recent months.

Riot police and special forces monitor a demonstration in Cairo this week against President al-Sisi's government. Police brutality, which was partly to blame for the 2011 uprising, has been on the rise in recent months, according to human rights activists in Egypt

In February, a policeman shot dead a driver in the street in an argument over a fare, prompting hundreds to protest outside the Cairo security directorate.

There were also riots in Ismailia and the southern city Luxor over the authorities' handling of at least three deaths in police custody in a single week in November.
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A huge landslide has opened up a giant 900ft crevice along a cliff - dramatically changing the face of Britain's famous Jurassic Coast.

The colossal crack emerged in the land's edge at Bowleaze Cove near Weymouth, Dorset, after thousands of tons of earth suddenly gave way following heavy rainfall.

One walker was photographed standing just 50ft away from the giant 'unstable' chasm, which is 4ft wide and 6ft deep in places.

It has almost cut the land in two and officials have been forced to close a footpath on the side of the crack as it is feared further movement will occur.

A huge landslide has opened up a giant 900ft crack along a cliff on the Jurassic Coast near Weymouth, Dorset. A walker (circled) is just 50ft from the giant 'unstable' chasm, which is 4ft wide and 6ft deep in places

Excessive rainfall has led to water seeping through the limestone. That has then mixed with the clay, making it far heavier than before.

With the cliff unable to support the additional weight, the land has eventually broken off and slid towards the sea.

Ian Moore, who runs Howleys toy shop in Weymouth, used a 900 drone to fly over the coastal beauty spot to inspect the landslip from the air.

The coastline - a UNESCO World Heritage site - is prone to landslips due to its geology: a mix of permeable limestone at the top of the cliff and impermeable clay beneath it.

The landslide was caused after rain began to seep through the limestone and it ended up mixing with the clay which makes it heavier

Coastguards are warning people to stay away from the 'unstable' area which is going to start dropping 'like an elevator'. A walker (circled) was seen standing close to the crack near Weymouth, Dorset

WHAT IS SUBSIDENCE AND HOW DOES THE EARTH MOVE? Subsidence is the movement of the ground and is caused by changing moisture levels, either when the soil dries out or water levels increase rapidly. This movement is uneven and sudden, causing damage such as cracks in walls, ceilings and floors of buildings. An upward movement of the ground  known as heave  can then occur when dried soil becomes saturated. Trees planted close to properties are often a cause of subsidence as they suck up moisture under the foundations. Signs in homes include diagonal cracks, wider at the top, by windows or doors. In serious cases, underpinning may be required. In this instance, excessive rainfall has led to water seeping through the limestone in the land. That has then mixed with the clay, making it far heavier than before. With the cliff unable to support the additional weight, it has eventually broken off. Advertisement

Coastguards are now warning people to stay away from the unpredictable and 'unstable' area which is going to start dropping 'like an elevator'.

Geologist Richard Edmonds said: 'There's a really big landslide in that area which has been there for years and the more rain we get the more likely it is to move.

'We have clays in the lower part of the cliff and limestone in the top, which is porous. The rain seeps through the limestone and gets to the clay, which adds weight to the cliff and lubricates it, causing the landslide.

'It's really hard to tell how quickly that will fall away because it's driven by the weather.'

Mr Edmonds added: 'It will keep eating its way into the beautiful Dorset countryside, but the only reason the coast itself is beautiful and internationally important is because of that erosion.

'It's not a negative thing, it's all part of a progressive evolution of the coastline.

'But as it has just moved people do need to stay away. If hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rock have moved there is an increased risk of rock falls and mud.

'Mud can be quite a hazard there. It will spill out onto the beach and create a danger.'

Coastguards are warning people to stay away from the unpredictable area.

Mark Fagg, from Wyke Regis Coastguard, said: 'It is an ongoing thing and large sections will just slump and disappear.

'Our advice is just to give it a wide berth. That whole area is just going to start dropping now, like an elevator, and we will lose another bit of cliff.

'People need to keep dogs on leads and stay away from the edge because it is very unstable.'

This is the latest landslide to hit the Jurassic Coast in recent years.

In 2014, an expensive bungalow west of Lyme Regis in Dorset was left surrounded by hundreds of acres of unstable land after billions of tons of rock and mud gave way.

The colossal crack emerged in the land's edge at Bowleaze Cove near Weymouth, Dorset, after thousands of tons of earth suddenly gave way following heavy rainfall

The homeowners were left with a three-foot crack across the road from their property following the massive landslide.

Residents are used to seeing the Jurassic Coast's sea-cliffs fall spectacularly into the pounding waves - but now cracks and fissures are opening as far as a third of a mile inland.

Ancient sea-cliffs along the coast can be seen perched over 350 feet above the water. The landscape beneath them is merely reacting to gravity when pounded with rain water.

Ian Moore used a 900 drone to fly over the seaside beauty spot on the Jurassic Coast to inspect the landslip and get an aerial view
A schoolboys aged 12 and 13 have been arrested after allegations inappropriate images had been shared on Snapchat (file photo)

A pair of schoolboys aged 12 and 13 have been arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of a child.

The boys, both from South Tyneside, were questioned by police over allegations that inappropriate images had been shared via social media app, Snapchat.

Police became aware that images were being circulated at schools in the area on Friday, and the boys have been released on police bail, pending further inquiries.

Northumbria Police today said the investigation into the incident was ongoing, to 'ensure the safeguarding of those involved and that no children are at risk of being exploited'.

Officers have also been working with teachers to arrange special 'lessons' warning other children about the dangers of sharing photos online, while parents have reacted with shock at the allegations.

One mother, whose son was given a talk about the risks of sharing nude pictures and inappropriate texts, said: 'I don't think the kids realise the implications of what they're doing and what effect the trading of pictures, which they may view as a laugh, can have on the rest of their lives.

'I think the realisation that even one such picture can result in sex offender registration and possible court proceedings and criminal record came as a bit of a shock to some.

'I don't think kids can be reminded enough of online and social media dangers and they really do need to be protected from themselves, no matter how mature they feel or act.'

News of the arrests comes after a report by the Women and Equalities Committee found that 'sexting' was 'commonplace' among children.

The research was undertaken through a series of workshops with 300 children and young people as part of a wider probe into the scale and impact of sexual harassment and violence within schools.

Officers have also been working with teachers to arrange special 'lessons' warning other children about the dangers of sharing photos online (file photo)

It found one in four children admitted they had felt pressured into sending text messages of a sexual nature in or around schools, sexual activity, drinking alcohol and taking drugs, including so called legal highs in and around school.

Superintendent Sarah Pitt, from Northumbria Police, said: 'We are working closely with schools across South Tyneside to ensure children are aware of the risks around sharing images of themselves and others via text and social network sites and would advise youngsters to think carefully about they share on social networks.

'The internet is an essential tool and social networking sites are a popular way for children to communicate with their friends but we need to make sure they stay safe online and know how to use it responsibly.

'It's very important that we make sure young people stay safe online and are aware of the risks and what they can do to avoid them.
went to a doctor at the age of 18 it was revealed she had a congenital heart defect

An Idaho senator is defending a sate law that allowed the parents of a girl born with a congenital heart defect to refuse her requests to see a doctor.

Mariah Walton, 20, was refused medical treatment by her mother and father her entire life despite constant complaints of headaches and difficulty breathing because it is against their religion.

The fundamentalist Mormons are members of the Followers of Christ, and treated their daughter through prayer and supplements.

Mariah is now trying to overturn this law in Idaho after learning about her defect, and the fact that she will eventually need new lungs and a heart to survive.

She is already getting blowback however from Idaho state Senator Lee Heider who showed his support for her parents on Today Tuesday morning, saying of their decision; 'You know, it's a First Amendment right, the freedom of religion.'

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Opinion: Idaho state Senator Lee Heider (above) is defending a sate law that allowed the parents of a girl born with a congenital heart defect to refuse her requests to see a doctor saying it is 'freedom of religion.'

Victim: Mariah Walton (above), 20, was refused medical treatment by her parents her entire life despite constant complaints of headaches and difficulty breathing

'Whenever I'm at school, I'm out of breath and it's like, my lungs burn because I can't get the oxygen I need,' said Mariah during the interview.

The young girl only found out about her defect after turning 18, and now has to carry around an oxygen tank and frequently be hooked up to machines.

That is why she plans to take on the law - and her parents.

'I think it's time to prosecute them,' said Mariah.

The current law not only allows parents to make the decision to not seek medical treatment, but also protects them even if their child dies from something that is completely treatable.

There were two deaths last year in Idaho as a result of this religious exemption law with one child dying of diabetes and another from a gastrointestinal illness.

Mariah's mother has said she had no idea how sick her daughter was over the years, despite Mariah's claims to the contrary.

The young woman is now living with her sister Emily, who has started a GoFundMe page hoping that her sister will be able to go to Paris for one memorable trip after all those years of suffering and a very uncertain future.

Emily started the page after admitting she felt guilty about not stepping in herself and getting her sister to a hospital.

Awful: When Mariah (above in court) finally went to a doctor at the age of 18 it was revealed she had a congenital heart defect

Heartbreaking: Mariah (above receiving treatment) will eventually need new lungs and a new heart in order to have any chance of surviving

'When Mariah was on life support during the summer of 2014, I promised myself that if she lived I would do ANYTHING for another chance to make things good for her. And when she was recovering my attitude was like "Ok! What do we need to do to fix this and make it better!"' writes Emily on the page.

'But her doctors explained (patiently, many times) that there just wasn't a way to 'fix' it. Every solution had a worse downside.

'So they told us to just go home and have a good time with Mariah while we still could.

'So in the spirit of having a good time while we still can, Eliza (sister #6) and I want to take Mariah to Paris for her birthday next month (May 25th) and we need help from our friends to fund it. We've raised some money from her doctors and we can put some of our own in but we still need help.

'We want to do this trip now because she could need a transplant at any time, and lung transplants are really risky.'
Ms Jungfer, daughter, son will be deported in 28 days and launched appeal

Daughter's application was rejected due to '$3 million costs to care for her'

A mother who applied for permanent residency for herself and two young children after moving to Australia in 2010, has had the application rejected due to '$3 million expenses' associated with her daughter's disability.

Jennifer Jungfer met her Australian husband Bart at a country music festival in Alberta, Canada in 2009 and were married and living together in his home country by 2013.

When her work visa expired, Ms Jungfer - who is currently living in Strathalbyn in South Australia - applied for permanent residency for herself and her children, Aiden and Jesika Bowers, but received a rejection from the Immigration Department last month due to costs associated with caring for her daughter.

'They'd calculated some costs and gave us this huge figure of $3 million, saying that she would require different services from different parts of the Government,' Ms Jungfer told The ABC.

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Jennifer Jungfer applied for permanent residency for herself and two young children after moving to Australia in 2010 and had the applications rejected due to '$3 million expenses' associated with her daughter's disability

Jennifer Jungfer met her Australian husband Bart (pictured right) at a country music festival in Alberta, Canada in 2009 and were married and living together in his home country by 2013

The family have been told they will be deported in 28 days, even though Jesika does not require any extra care.

'Bart is here working for family business, so the refusal means breaking up our family,' she said.

Jesika has the rare genetic disorder Angelman syndrome, which leaves sufferers prone to delayed motor development, speech problems, jerky movements and hyperactive behaviour.

Because the Immigration Department rejected the family application, neither Ms Jungfer nor Aiden have been approved and the whole family will have to head back overseas.

Ms Jungfer said she did not ask the Australian Government for for 'any services' or 'respite'.

When her work visa expired, Ms Jungfer applied for permanent residency for herself and her children, Aiden and Jesika Bowers (pictured), but received a rejection from the Immigration Department

'They'd calculated some costs and gave us this huge figure of $3 million, saying that she would require different services from different parts of the Government'

The family have been told they will be deported in 28 days, even though Jesika does not require any extra care

Jesika has the rare genetic disorder Angelman syndrome, which leaves sufferers prone to delayed motor development

She has since launched an appeal with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in a hope to provide 'more evidence' about how the family plan to keep Jesika's costs down.

A Department of Immigration and Border Protection spokesperson told The ABC 'there will be instances where the department cannot grant a visa because people do not meet the health requirement'.

The family also launched a crowdfunding campaign with GoFundMe to raise funds for the court costs.

They have raised over $8,000.

Ms Jungfer has since launched an appeal with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in a hope to provide 'more evidence' about how the family plan to keep Jesika's costs down
But he says countries needed to work together MORE rather than less

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured addressing MPs from member states in Strasbourg today) said the EU had passed too many laws that should have been left for national governments to decide

The European Union has lost its attractiveness because it meddles too much in peoples lives, the most senior bureaucrat in Brussels admitted today.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said the EU had passed too many laws that should have been left for national governments to decide.

In a stark assessment, the former prime minister of Luxembourg conceded the bloc is losing economic clout, but he said this meant countries needed to work together more rather than less.

At the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Mr Juncker was questioned by British MPs on the EUs future.

Asked by Tory MP Nigel Evans whether the EU recognised there was a problem as Euroscepticism grows throughout the continent, Mr Juncker replied: We are not blind.

He said: We are listening to those who are expressing their views. You are right in saying the European project has lost parts of its attractiveness.

What does the European Commission do? The Commission is doing less.

I think that one of the reasons that European citizens are stepping away from the European project is that we are interfering in too many domains of their private lives. And too many domains where the member states are better placed to take action and pass legislation.

Under his leadership, Mr Juncker said there had been a reduction in the amount of EU legislation being proposed, but he said it was better to make certain laws at a European level.

I take issue with the suggestion that Europe should give priority to national solutions to the detriment of European solutions, he said.

Yes its true we are not very popular when we advocate for Europe, when we emphasise the need to give priority to the EU.

In a stark assessment, the former prime minister of Luxembourg Jean Claude Juncker (pictured speaking to David Cameron at a European summit last year) conceded the bloc is losing economic clout, but he said this meant countries needed to work together more rather than less

But there we will eventually end up with the ruins of this ideal, people who want more national things at the expense of European principles and they will find themselves defenceless. And the EU will no longer be respected around the world.

Recognising the declining economic power of the continent, he added: One hundred years ago 20 per cent of the global population was European. At the start of this century it was 11 per cent. At the end of this century four per cent of 10 billion citizens will be European.

We are losing economic clout in a very visible way with the low birth rate. If we continue all of this in the face of major problems that are emerging that is not the sort of image I want of Europe.

We want a strong influential Europe in the world pushing the values that are European.

Mr Juncker denied that the EU is German-dominated and said he did not believe other leaders kowtowed to Angela Merkel.

He became visibly annoyed when Tory MP Kelly Tolhurst asked him how the EU was tightening its belt in a time of austerity, but later answered her question and said it was trying to be careful with its finances.

The Council of Europe, which has 47 member states, is a separate body to the EU, which is made up of 28 countries.

The EU could crumble like the Soviet Union if Britain leaves, Gove claims as he urges voters to 'liberate' the continent

Michael Gove has insisted the EU could crumble like the Soviet Union if Britain chooses to leave - urging voters to 'liberate' the continent.

The Justice Secretary said the UK had a chance to restore 'democracy' in the referendum on June 23, dismissing fears that the country would be punished economically for abandoning the union.

The emotional appeal came in a speech as Tory infighting on the issue grew increasingly bitter.

Justice Secretary Michael Gove delivers his speech

A Tory backbencher has accused George Osborne in the Commons of 'disgraceful' behaviour by publishing a Treasury dossier making apocalyptic predictions about Britain's prospects outside the EU.

Mr Gove warned that the country was being held 'hostage' by Brussels and rebuked David Cameron for treating the public like 'children'.

He insisted the UK would be better off outside the European single market, arguing that major players like Germany and France would ensure we could still trade freely.

THE 'EX-SOCIOLOGY LECTURER' WHO SPEAKS FOR THE EU ON TRADE EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom represents the grouping on the WTO Justice Secretary Michael Gove dismissed the EU's representative on the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as an 'ex-sociology lecturer from Sweden'. He was referring to Cecilia Malmstrom, who leads on trade issues for the European Commission. Although EU states technically still have WTO seats in their own right, in practice they rely on Ms Malmstrom to stand up for their collective interests. The married mother-of-two became trade commissioner under commission president Jean-Claude Juncker in 2014, having previously served in the home affairs brief for four years. Before that she was minister for EU affairs in the Swedish government and vice-president of the Swedish Liberal Party, according to her biography on the commission website. In 1998-1999 she was senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Goteborg University, where she received a PhD in Political Science. Advertisement

He also dismissed the EU's current representative on the World Trade Organisation as a 'sociology lecturer from Sweden'.

'At different points In campaigners like to argue either that Brexit would lead to EU nations using their massive muscle to punish us, or that Brexit would lead to contagion and the collapse of Europe - just as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union collapsed following secession from those unions,' Mr Gove told the audience in London.

'Manifestly both cannot be true. An EU without the UK cannot simultaneously be a super-charged leviathan bent on revenge and a crumbling Tower of Babel riven by conflict.

'The UKs success will send a very different message to the EUs peoples. They will see that a different Europe is possible.

'It is possible to regain democratic control of your own country and currency, to trade and co-operate with other EU nations without surrendering fundamental sovereignty to a remote and unelected bureaucracy.

'And, by following that path, your people are richer, your influence for good greater, your future brighter.

'Our vote to Leave will liberate and strengthen those voices across the EU calling for a different future - those demanding the devolution of powers back from Brussels and desperate for a progressive alternative.

'But for Europe, Britain voting to leave will be the beginning of something potentially even more exciting - the democratic liberation of a whole continent.'

Deriding the 'Project Fear' approach of the Remain campaign, Mr Gove suggested they had recruited in horror writer Stephen King to drafted their script.

'The City of London would become a ghost down, our manufacturing industries would be sanctioned more punitively than even communist North Korea, decades would pass before a single British Land Rover or Mr Kipling cake could ever again be sold in France and in the meantime our farmers would have been driven from the land by poverty worse than the Potato Famine,' he said.

'To cap it all, an alliance of Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, emboldened by our weakness, would, like some geopolitical equivalent of the Penguin, Catwoman and the Joker, be liberated to spread chaos worldwide and subvert our democracy.'

He added: 'The idea that if Britain voted to leave the European Union we would instantly become some sort of hermit kingdom  a North Atlantic North Korea, only without that countrys fund of international good will  its a fantasy, its a phantom, its a great grotesque patronising and preposterous Peter Mandelsonian conceit, that imagines that the people of this country are mere children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night.'

Earlier Mr Gove had been unusually given three minutes of uninterrupted airtime on the BBC Radio 4's flagship Today programme to make his case for Brexit.

He used it to accuse the Remain campaign, led by Mr Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, of portraying the public as 'hapless and feckless'.

Mr Gove and London Mayor Boris Johnson arrive in Downing Street earlier today ahead of a meeting of Prime Minister David Cameron's political Cabinet

Britains a great country. Its the worlds fifth largest economy with the worlds best armed forces, best health service and best broadcaster,' he said.

Were first in the world for soft power, thanks to our language, culture and creativity. And yet the In camp try to suggest that were too small and too weak, and our people are too hapless and feckless to succeed without Jean-Claude Juncker looking after us.

Thats a deeply pessimistic and negative vision. Britain could do better. Were a uniquely inventive nation and our greatest invention is representative democracy - the principle that the people who run our county should be chosen by us and can be kicked out by us. Thats why its time to take back control.

Mr Gove also made a pointed reference to the controversial dossier published by the Treasury yesterday, which included an assumption the government will fail to hit its target for cutting immigration.

The Treasury's Brexit dossier assumed net migration to Britain will fall 'towards' 185,000 by 2021 - still well above David Cameron's target of 100,000. But officials also argued that leaving the EU would not cut numbers

He said the report amounted to an 'official admission from the In campaign that if we vote to stay in the EU then immigration will continue to increase by hundreds of thousands year on year'.

'Instead of a European open-door migration policy we could - if a future Government wanted it - have an Australian points-based migration policy,' he said. 'We could emulate that countrys admirable record of taking in genuine refugees, giving a welcome to hard- working new citizens and building a successful multi-racial society without giving into people-smugglers, illegal migration or subversion of our borders.

Mr Gove rejected the idea that Britain would emulate any of the existing models for relations with the EU after leaving. The Treasury analysis published yesterday considered Norway-style membership of the European Economic Area, a Canadian-style trade deal, and Russia-style membership of the WTO.

But the Justice Secretary insisted the UK was in a position to forge an entirely different model outside the single market. and restoring control over our borders.

'We'd be part of a European free trade area. It's already the case there's a European free trade area that extends from Iceland to the Russian border. The only country in the European land mass outside that is Belarus,' he said.

Chancellor George Osborne launches the Treasury's dossier on Brexit in Bristol yesterday flanked by Environment Secretary Liz Truss, left, and Energy Secretary Amber Rudd

We would be part of that and we would be able to benefit also by being able to take back control of our seat on the World Trade Organization. At the moment Britain is represented on the WTO by the EU single representative, an ex-sociology lecturer from Sweden.

I'd like to see a Briton on the WTO determining trade policy. More than that I would like to see trade barriers that we've erected in the EU against developing nations come down.

Ministers have spent a decade resisting a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, a non-EU institution, that inmates should vote.

Mr Gove said the European Court of Justice was now threatening to make a toxic intervention on the issue, which could leave us with no option but to comply.

Mr Gove went on to say: The Remain campaign want us to believe that Britain is beaten and broken. It treats people like mere children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night.

He also mocked the Prime Ministers renegotiation with Brussels, saying it has made no difference and will not stop the next EU power grab.

He warned that a Remain vote would lead to transfer of powers over tax and the financial system, so we are less able to guard against a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis, and the transfer of powers over the heart of our legal system.

If we vote Remain, British taxpayers will be paying ever-higher bills for years to come as the EU uses its growing power, Mr Gove will claim.

Eurosceptic MPs have conceded that it is hard to see how the Tory party will heal following the referendum on June 23.

One backbencher dubbed the Treasury dossier 'Project Utter Cr**', while others described it as shameful and accused Mr Osborne of pretending he had a 'crystal ball'.

Speaking during Treasury questions in the Commons today, Kettering MP Philip Hollobone described the report as 'disgraceful' and 'worth of the children's programme Jackanory'.

London Mayor Mr Johnson branded Mr Cameron and senior Remain campaigners the 'Gerald Ratners' of politics over the weekend - because they were trying to sell a 'cr**' product.

He also said President Obama would be 'hypocritical' if, as expected, he argues during a visit this week that Britain should stay in the EU. Mr Johnson said the US would never accept a similar erosion of its sovereignty.

His intervention comes only days after his fellow Out supporter, Boris Johnson, labelled David Cameron and his allies the Gerald Ratners of British politics  trying to push an EU project that they know is c**p

But Lord Hague said it was a 'bit rich' of Mr Johnson to say Mr Obama should not express a view.

'I would note that British leaders and commentators do not hesitate to hold forth on the foreign policy of the United States: a policy supported by David Cameron, attacked by Jeremy Corbyn, and denounced or questioned by many others with regard to the Middle East, defence spending, drone strikes, the handling of Cuba and scores of other issues. Our Parliament has even held a debate on the deficiencies of Donald Trump,' he wrote in the Daily Telegraph.

'So it would be a bit rich for us, opining as we do on every aspect of America's relations with other states, to turn all precious and sensitive when American leaders comment on ours.

'Secondly, I would advise that the President has the right wherever he is to explain what is in the interests of the United States of America.

'And since the US is our one indispensable ally, our biggest single trading partner and the ultimate guarantor of our security, its interests matter to everyone in Britain whether we like it or not.'

Last night Education Secretary Mrs Morgan, who supports the UK staying in, warned against allowing the debate to tear the Conservative Party apart.

'We need to step back from the brink and take a long hard look at ourselves,' she said, 'Yes, let's debate our EU membership but let's keep that debate on the issues and, above all, let's not undermine the work that this government is doing to deliver real social justice.'

Mr Johnson was among those arriving in Downing Street this morning for a meeting of the political Cabinet.
New York Rep. Peter King made it crystal clear who he's not voting for in his home state's pivotal primary today  Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

'First of all, in case anybody gets confused, I'm not endorsing Ted Cruz. I hate Ted Cruz, and I think I'll take cyanide if he got the nomination,' King said this morning on Morning Joe.

King was on the show to play pundit and said he thought frontrunner Donald Trump, a native New Yorker, would win the state big tonight.

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Colorful Congressman Peter King said he's 'take cyanide' if Sen. Ted Cruz won the Republican nomination. 'I hate Ted Cruz,' King said on Morning Joe

Rep. Peter King had nothing nice to say about Sen. Ted Cruz (pictured) having voted for Ohio Gov. John Kasich. King would need to hear more specifics from Donald Trump to support him going into the general election

'I think you are going to see Donald Trump scoring a big victory tonight,' King told the panel.

'I do not endorse Donald Trump. In fact, I actually voted by absentee ballot for John Kasich. I'm not endorsing John, but I voted for him to really send a message,' King continued.

'But I think Trump is going to win big,' King added.

King noted how The Donald seemed out of step after losing Wisconsin to Cruz, but now seemed to be back on track.

'People were wondering what happened to Donald Trump,' King said. 'Then he held this massive rally on Long Island. Ten minutes from my house. And that really, even psychologically, turned it around again.'

Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, who was sitting on the panel, wanted to know why King would vote for Kasich, but not endorse the Ohio governor who has only won his home state.

'I endorsed Marco Rubio and he lost,' King explained.

'With John Kasich, if I thought that John Kasich had a viable chance, I'd come out and endorse him, but I want to keep my powder dry because this may go to the convention.'

King quickly walked that statement back saying he thought a Kasich nomination was a 'real possibility.'

'But, I also  the likelihood is Donald Trump is going to get the nomination,' King said.

King said he would need to see more 'substance' from Trump before ever supporting him.

'He can't just be talking off the top of his head and making reckless charges,' the congressman said.

King thought that maybe Trump could make Kasich his running made, which would be a 'good choice.'

He also said he'd board the Trump train is he saw The Donald study up on foreign policy.

He'd want to see Trump announce a plan on how he would replace Obamacare.

And he's want to know what the Republican frontrunner planned to do about ISIS and Russia.

'Show that he has some comprehension of what's going on in the world, not just the guy at the end of the bar throwing in remarks,' King said.

When King came on air this morning, the Morning Joe hosts had a good laugh about the New Yorker's chronic disgust he's shown for Cruz, jokingy calling King the Texan's 'Nassau County chairman.'

'Congressman, congratulations on your new chairman position,' host Joe Scarborough joked.

The hosts reminded the audience that King had previously said,' Any New Yorker who even thinks of voting for Ted Cruz should have their head examined.'

At the end of the segment, Scarborough kidded with King again, suggesting he was wearing Cruz 2016 boxers under his suit.

'Joe, of all the things you've said about me, that's the worst,' King said. 'Even putting my name in the same sentence as Ted Cruz.'




A 21-year-old Swiss snowboarding champion has died in an avalanche after a slab of snow broke away during a film shoot and swept her down a narrow, rocky slope.

Estelle Balet, who won the Freeride World Tour in 2015 and 2016, died in the 1km-long avalanche above the Swiss village of Orsieres despite efforts of emergency crews to save her, police in the canton of Valais said.

Last year, Balet became the youngest champion of the Freeride World Tour, in which skiers and snowboarders compete by riding down steep, often rocky, ungroomed slopes.

Snowboarding champion Estelle Balet, 21, has died in an avalanche after a slab of snow broke away during a film shoot

Events are sometimes halted due to avalanches, including last February at a competition in Austria.

Police said Balet was the second person to ride down the slope today during filming.

She had been freed from the avalanche by the time emergency crews arrived.

Local police said: 'Despite immediate efforts to revive her, she died at the scene. An investigation has been started to determine the causes of the accident.'

Balet, who is sponsored by the Swiss watchmaker Swatch, had been wearing a device meant to help locate people in avalanches, as well as a helmet and an airbag designed to increase the chances of surviving a snow slide.

Estelle Balet during the Freeride World Tour in Chamonix in 2016. She won the tour in 2015 and 2016

Estelle Balet died in the 1km-long avalanche despite efforts of emergency crews to save her, police in the canton of Valais said
Portuguese detective Goncalo Amaral has won his appeal against his court libel defeat to Madeleine McCann's parents.

The former police chief had previously been ordered to pay Kate and Gerry McCann 395,000 in damages in April last year after accusing them of faking their daughter's abduction.

The appeal decision now paves the way for Mr Amaral's book The Truth of the Lie to be sold again in the shops in what would be a devastating setback for the McCanns.

Editor Guerra e Paz are expected to rush out new copies so they can hit the shelves next week, netting Amaral a potential fortune.

Former Portuguese police chief Goncalo Amaral (pictured) has won his appeal over a court libel loss against Madeleine McCann's parents and won't have to pat them 500,000 in damages, it was reported today

Today Mr Amaral posted a copy of the 16-page judgement overturning the original decision on an Internet blog.

The last page of the document, signed by three appeal judges and dated April 19, confirmed the original ruling was being revoked.

Amaral lost his long-running libel battle over his controversial 2008 book claiming the McCanns had faked missing daughter Madeleine's abduction after she died in their Algarve holiday apartment.

He was also ordered to pay interest after a Lisbon judge ruled he had overstepped freedom of speech limits in The Truth Of The Lie.

After the verdict, the McCanns announced they would plough 'every penny' of the payout into the hunt for their daughter, who was three years old when she vanished on May 3, 2007.

But Amaral's appeal, which he confirmed the following month, thwarted their hopes of spending the money.

The McCanns's Portuguese lawyer, Isabel Duarte, confirmed she had learned of the appeal decision this afternoon, adding that she was 'disappointed' but not surprised.

She said Madeleine's parents had instructed her to launch an appeal of their own which will be decided by Portugal's Supreme Court.

Madeleine McCann's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, speak to the media outside court in in Lisbon during their libel action against Amaral in July 2014. Their libel victory has now been overturned on appeal

She said: 'I have just learnt that the three appeal court judges have decided to overturn the original decision in favour of my clients.

'It was a unanimous decision. The original decision has been revoked.

'I and the McCanns are obviously disappointed but I am not surprised because one of the judges ruled in favour of a previous appeal overturning a ban on the book.

'This decision was an appreciation of the law and not the facts.

'We can appeal to the Supreme Court which we will do as we have instructions from our clients.'

She added: 'My understanding from reading the appeal ruling is that the judges have decided Amaral was entitled to write a book the court calls a literary book.

'The court is basically saying he had the right to express his opinions. We obviously hope the appeal will succeed.

'The McCanns never received any compensation money after the original decision although the money was deposited at the court so there is no money to return to Gonzalo Amaral.'

The McCanns announced after the original libel verdict that they would plough 'every penny' of the payout into the hunt for their daughter Madeleine (pictured), who was three when she vanished on May 3, 2007

Clarence Mitchell, spokesman for the McCanns, was unavailable this afternoon.

Amaral could also not be immediately contacted.

The appeal verdict comes a day after the detective in charge of the search for Madeleine said police still believe she could be found alive.

Madeleine disappeared in Portugal nearly nine years ago, just days before her fourth birthday, and officers have continued to hunt for her ever since.

The head of Scotland Yard's homicide squad, Detective Chief Superintendent Mick Duthie, insisted there is 'always a possibility' she will be discovered safe as he justified the ongoing operation.

Earlier this month, Home Secretary Theresa May granted the Metropolitan Police 95,000 so they could continue the search for Madeleine, codenamed Operation Grange, for six more months.

DCS Mick Duthie said that it could be extended into next year if police need to continue following up leads.

'There is always a possibility that we will find Madeleine and we hope that we will find her alive,' he told the Evening Standard.

'That's what we want and that's what the family and the public want and that is why the Home Office continue to fund it.'
A Florida college student has been charged with extortion after allegedly sending text messages demanding the owner of a missing kitten pay her at least $20 to have the animal safely returned.

University of Florida student Madeleine Joan Kaye, 22, was arrested on Friday on allegations she sent messages saying 'something bad' would happen to the one-year-old cat if she did not pay up, The Gainesville Sun reported.

Kaye is in the same circle of friends as UF student Ilana Barnes, 20, who police said received a text saying her kitten was not being returned out of revenge for how she treated one of Kaye's friends.

Florida college student Madeleine Joan Kaye, 22, (left) has been charged with extortion after allegedly sending texts demanding student Ilana Barnes (right) pay at least $20 to have her missing kitten safely returned

Barnes had posted on Facebook that her gray one-year-old kitten Tina was lost (pictured)

Barnes said Kaye had once asked her to date one of her friends which ended up creating hostility between the two women, according to The Independent Florida Alligator.

After Barnes posted that her gray kitten, Tina, was lost, she received several text messages on Thursday from a sender, later identified as Kaye, according to the police report.

Kaye reportedly claimed to have the cat and demanded the money.

'I don't give a f*** about your cat, but you don't deserve a beautiful animal when you're a disgusting person,' one text read, according to Barnes.

Barnes said she threatened to call police unless Tina was returned but that Kaye responded saying she had a lawyer ready.

Gainesville Police Officer Frederick Munn then met with Kaye on Friday in an attempt to get the kitten, however Kaye denied all knowledge of the cat, according to the police report.

Barnes' kitten pictured above. The cat owner said a possible motive was the hostility between them stemming from when Kaye asked her to date one of her friends

However, after reading Miranda rights to her, Kaye admitted to sending the messages while she was out drinking friends on Thursday night and said the messages were meant to be funny, police said.

'Defendant stated that the messages are representatives or examples of HUMOR,' Munn wrote in the report.

He also wrote that Kaye stated she had no knowledge of where the kitten is or what has happened to it.

She was then charged with extortion or threats and was taken to the Alachua County Jail where she was released on a $5,000 bond on Saturday afternoon.

On Saturday, Barnes also found Tina unharmed and underneath a house in her neighborhood, noting 'it's the most absurd thing that's ever happened,' according to the Alligator.

The bizarre cat extortion incident is not Kaye's first run in with the law.

Kaye (left) is studying neuroscience at the university according to her LinkedIn. She had a run in with the law in November 14 (mugshot, right) when she faced charges including aggravated assault on a police officer

In November 2014, she faced charges of aggravated assault on a police officer, possession of marijuana, two counts of possession of drug paraphernalia and driving with a suspended license following an incident during a traffic stop.

On November 7, 2014, Kaye was stopped for speeding before police found she was driving with a suspended license and a tow truck was called to remove the car, The Palm Beach Post reported.

'I didn't give you permission to tow my vehicle,' Kaye, who was then 20, reportedly said before placing her transmission in reverse and stepping on the accelerator, the police report said.

She then smashed into a police car, narrowly missing an officer before putting her car in drive as she tried to flee, according to police.

However, the officer leaned into her car and turned off the ignition.

During the traffic stop, police also found marijuana and drug paraphernalia after a search of the car.
Veteran TV presenter Tara Brown and mother Sally Faulkner have revealed they burst out laughing after they were photographed being shoved into a police car in handcuffs.

The 60 Minutes reporter said the frenzied moment outside a Beirut court 'looked much worse than it was' in her first interview since being thrown in jail over the botched child abduction in Lebanon.

Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner, who have spent the past two weeks behind bars, have also opened up about life inside the squalid prison.

The pair looked as though they were being manhandled by police after they were led out of Baabda Palace of Justice on Monday when their hearing was postponed.

Veteran TV presenter Tara Brown and mother Sally Faulkner have revealed that they burst out laughing after they were photographed being shoved into a police car in handcuffs

The 60 Minutes reporter said the frenzied moment outside a Beirut court 'looked much worse than it was'

Ms Brown looked as though she was being manhandled when she was led out of Baabda Palace of Justice on Monday

Tara Brown (right) and Sally Faulkner were pictured being led away in handcuffs from the Beirut court after the hearing was postponed

But they have revealed that they were just being shielded from the camera, saying that they started laughing after realising that the plan to avoid any photographers had failed.

'It looked much worse than it was,' Ms Brown told News Corp as both women spoke from inside the Baabda women's prison.

'They were trying to protect me from the cameras, it might have been easier for me to turn my head.'

Ms Faulkner added: 'We were laughing in the car, all we wanted to do was not get her photo taken.'

It was the first time Ms Brown was pictured since her arrest on April 7 over the attempt to snatch back Ms Faulkner's children, Lahela, 5, and Noah, 3, from their father's family on a Beirut street.

She laughed off claims that she had a blow dry before her brief court appearance, saying: 'I dont even have my hairbrush in here.'

Tara Brown (pictured) has been detained on kidnapping charges with a 60 Minutes crew that filmed the 'child abduction' of Sally Faulkner's two children in Lebanon on April 7

Sally Faulkner (pictured) travelled to Lebanon to retrieve her children, Noah, four, and Lahela, six

Ms Faulkner issued an emotional appeal to her ex-husband after becoming distressed when she heard that he said their children wanted to see her

But the 60 Minutes reporter insisted that she was being treated 'extremely well' and that all the women in the prison are generous and kind.

Ms Brown was careful not to divulge any information about court proceedings because she did not want to 'jeopardise' the situation.

She is facing kidnapping charges alongside 60 Minutes producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson, sound recordist David Ballment and Brisbane mother Ms Faulkner.

On Monday, Ms Faulkner's estranged husband, Ali Elamine, 32, insisted that he would press charges on 'everyone involved' in the failed abduction attempt.

But he conceded that the young children 'miss their mum' and probably want to be with Ms Faulkner in Australia.

Ms Faulkner issued an emotional appeal to her ex-husband after becoming distressed when she heard that he said their children wanted to see her.

Police push Tara Brown's head down as she is put into a car outside Baabda Court in Beirut

A policeman holds the back of Tara Brown's hair as he puts her into the car on Monday

She said that she did not want to take the children away from their father and that she wants him to be part of their lives.

'I am not spiteful, I acted out of desperation,' the Brisbane mother told News Corp.

'They have had the best of us, now they have the worst of us.'

She said she was concerned that Mr Elamine may be getting influenced by his family.

They are expected to appear before a judge at a gearing on Wednesday along with other members of the TV crew.

Mr Ballment, Mr Williamson and Mr Rice were reportedly seen looking pale, fatigued and unshaven on Tuesday.

Judge Rami Abdullah, who is presiding over the case, delivered a stiff warning to the Australians not to expect leniency, saying: 'This is not a custody case... they are charged with kidnapping.'

Lebanese authorities sought to shield Sally Faulkner and Tara Brown, ordering reporters into a stairway before leading them down a hallway out of sight

Tara Brown was pictured being forced into a police car before she was taken back to prison

Ms Faulkner's estranged husband, Ali Elamine, pictured leaving court on Monday, told reporters that he would press charges against everyone 'involved' in the failed abduction attempt

Tara Brown was pictured being escorted by police officers from the court in Beirut

Ali Elamine, said he would not drop the charges against Sally Faulkner because that would mean everyone else would 'get off'

Mr Elamine admitted his children 'probably' wanted to be with their mother but hardened his stance against 60 Minutes

All involved are facing charges of kidnapping and being members of a criminal gang, which can attract maximum sentences of up to three years and 10 years respectively.

Speaking outside court on Monday, Mr Elamine said he would not drop the charges against Ms Faulkner because that would mean everyone else would 'get off'.

Mr Elamine failed to reach an agreement on custody of their children after Ms Faulkner was arrested and charged with kidnapping.

'The way they are trying to push for this is that if Sally [Faulkner] goes out on bail, they all get out,' Mr Elamine, 32, said as he prepared to meet the judge Rami Abdullah on Monday.

'That is how I am seeing it as an outsider... They are pushing for Sal's release and everyone else gets a green card.'

'I will charge everyone involved,' he said, according to Seven News.

Mr Elamine's lawyer said no deal had been reached between the couple but denied the Lebanese-American father was seeking a compensation payout.

'There is no agreement. Ali wants his kids, no matter what price he has to pay,' lawyer Hussein Barjawi told News Corp.

When asked whether Mr Elamine was seeking a financial payout, he said: 'It's all rumours. There is no compensation at all.'

Adam Whittington, (pictured) the chief planner of the 60 Minutes botched 'child abduction' in Lebanon, said on Sunday that he can prove Channel Nine paid him more than $115,000 for the snatch

A prison van believed to be carrying those accused of the botched kidnapping attempt in Lebanon arrived at Beirut's Baabda court on Monday

A lawyer for Network Nine, Kamal Aboudaher, said the TV channel had not offered any financial compensation to Mr Elamine to try to resolve the issue.

'We didn't exchange any offer with Ali regarding funds,' he said outside the court.

Negotiations had been progressing between lawyers for Ms Faulkner and Mr Elamine when 'suddenly Mr Elamine's lawyer said 'we are not in a hurry'.

Mr Elamine earlier claimed he was still married to Ms Faulkner and that he secured custody in June 2015.

But he conceded that the two young children 'probably' wanted to be with their mother.

'They're kids, they always want what they don't have. When you take kids to a toy store they want the whole store,' he said, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

'Am I open [to letting the children travel to Australia?] I'm not 100 per cent sure about that,' he said.

Nine had 'dropped the ball by getting involved in family matters' and now 'everyone is blaming the other for what happened', he added.

He discounted claims by Ms Faulkner's lawyer, Ghassan Moughabghab, that negotiations over the custody dispute had broken down, saying they had not started.

'All that's happened is the judge asked us to talk.'

Ms Faulkner's claims her children Noah and Lahela were taken to Lebanon by her estranged husband Ali Elamine (pictured with Noah and Lahela) in 2015 and he refused to bring them back

Ghassan Mughaghab (pictured), the lawyer for Brisbane woman Sally Faulkner, said negotiations between Mr Elamine and Ms Faulkner had broken down

A prison van believed to be carrying those accused of the botched kidnapping attempt in Lebanon was pictured arriving at Beirut's Baabda court on Monday.

The accused were held in cells in the underground prison complex at the Baabda Court in Beirut while they waiting to appear.

The group is facing charges including kidnapping, physical assault, hiding information and criminal conspiracy.

They have been warned that they face longer stints behind bars and that they are unlikely to be freed immediately.

Judge Abdullah is set to examine the extent of the Nine network team's involvement in the attempted abduction.

Ms Faulkner's lawyer said she has been fighting to get access to her children for nine months.

For the past two weeks, Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner have been held at Baabda Central Women's Prison (pictured)

The prison is a grim, overcrowded block housing mostly murderers and drug dealers with up to 20 women per cell

The lawyer said that Mr Elamine took the two children on a three-week holiday to Lebanon and did not return them as agreed.

But an attempt to snatch them from a suburban Beirut street by a 'child recovery team', caught on CCTV, was ultimately unsuccessful.

The children were returned to their father and the 60 Minutes team were arrested.

Craig Michael and Adam Whittington, believed to be members of the child recovery agency hired for the operation, were also arrested.

Whittington claims he has receipts showing that Nine made online payments totalling $115,000 to him for the planning of the operation and recovery of the children.

'It was direct from Channel Nine, it was from their accounts department and they paid it in two instalments,' he told The Australian.

Nine has refused to comment.

'It will help everybody, I think. It will help everybody': Ms Faulkner's lawyer says that if Mr Elamine drops the personal kidnapping charges against her, it will have a favourable flow-on effect for the whole team

Sally Faulkner's lawyer has reportedly said she was paid for by the Nine Network and had used money given to her by 60 Minutes to the child recovery agency, Child Abduction Recovery International

Veteran journalist Stephen Rice (left), David Ballment (centre) and Benjamin Williamson (right) are also in custody in Lebanon

Ms Faulkner toldThe Australian on Friday she was doing well behind bars.

'Please tell my mum and dad how well I am and also [husband] Brendan and my in-laws,' she said. Ms Brown is also behind bars at the prison.

'I am fine but my loved ones need to know that.'

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has told The Project that she is in 'constant contact' with Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil regarding the case.

CCTV footage supplied by Lebanese authorities appeared to show the bungled kidnapping earlier this week




A nine-year-old girl in Alabama has bravely given a speech to her entire school about what it is like living with autism.

Fourth grader Keira Meikus got up during the school announcements of Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic School in Homewood, earlier this month, making a speech before all 450 students.

'I have autism. I am like you. I go to school, I take tests, I watch TV, I like music and playing with my friends,' Keira said in the speech.

'I am also different than you. Some noises hurt me, I flap my hands when I get excited or overwhelmed. I don't always make eye contact when I should, and I don't always know when someone is being serious or joking.'

Brave little girl: Fourth grader Keira Meikus got up during the school announcements of Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic School in Homewood, earlier this month, making a speech before all 450 students

'I don't always make eye contact when I should, and I don't always know when someone is being serious or joking,' Keira said as part of her speech

Keira continued: 'I can't speak for everyone who has autism, but I'm sure most want what every typical person wants - to be accepted and to belong....'

Keira's precociousness is all the more surprising given that she was only told what autism was one year ago.

Video of her speech, obtained by ABC News, has quickly spread online. However Keira's parents say she is not quite aware of the affect she has made.

'I don't know that she really understands the impact that she's making,' Keira's mom, Sarah Charles, told ABC.

'She's still very young. She calls autism her superpower. That's just part of who she is and that's just one piece of her that makes her special.'

Charles said that Keira's father, Jason Meikus, is her 'superman' and that he has encouraged his little girl to treat her situation as a positive.

Keira's mom, Sarah Charles (left), says that Keira (right) was diagnosed with autism at the age of four

Moving speech: This is a photo of the speech that Keira said before her school

'We are incredibly proud,' she added. 'We knew she was made to shine and she's shining at 9.'

Charles said, however, that the road has not always been so optimisitc.

'It was very scary because I wasn't sure what we would do,' Charles said of the diagnosis, which Keira got when she was four.

'I wondered how life would be for her and if she would be able to do all the things we hoped for her and all the things her older sister could do.

'She just found out a year ago that she had something called autism. We never named it for her before then. She's still learning about it.'

Keira's parents say she is not quite aware of the affect she has made with the moving speech

'My absolute favorite part of her speech is 'I am like you,'' Charles said.

''They [children with autism] want the same things.
A nuclear leak first spotted five years ago at Washington state's Hanford Site has got dramatically worse with eight inches of radioactive liquid escaping a protective carbon steel shell.

The tank, named AY-102, has two shells, with the inner steel layer containing up to one million gallons of the deadly waste, and the outer concrete one providing a two-foot-wide gap to collect the waste if the inner shell broke.

Now a small leak in the inner shell first seen in 2011 has worsened, allowing eight inches of the dangerous goo to leak out in an event that one ex-worker is calling 'catastrophic.'

Nuclear site: The Hanford site, which provided plutonium for the first atomic bomb, now houses millions of gallons of deadly nuclear waste. The most dangerous is kept in huge tanks (pictured) with two thick shells

Breach: On Sunday a small crack in the inner shell of tank AY-102 (pictured in 2012) widened, allowing eight inches of waste to pour through into the gap between the shells, or 'annulus.' The crack was first seen in 2011

Waste: These pictures from between AY-102's shells, all taken in 2012, show how the deadly material collected there. It dried into a white radioactive powder. However, the wider crack allowed eight inches of liquid to pool

Former Hanford worker Mike Geffre was the first to spot the leak in AY-102's inner shell in 2011, but it took the government a year to actually announce what had happened.

Back then, the small leak only allowed a slow flow of radioactive waste into the gap between the shells, or 'annulus'. That liquid which would quickly dry up into a white powder. But after five years, they discovered on Sunday that the crack had got worse.

'This is catastrophic,' he told KGW.com. 'This is probably the biggest event to ever happen in tank farm history. The double-shell tanks were supposed to be the saviors of all saviors.'

The Hanford Site was a major Second World War and Cold War nuclear site; it provided plutonium for the first atomic bomb.

It now houses millions of gallons of nuclear waste - two-thirds of all high-level radioactive waste in America in 2007 - and cleanup on the site has been ongoing since 1989.

As well as AY-102, six single-shell tanks were noted to be leaking in 2013.

Ironically, the original cracks in AY-102 appear to have been further widened by government efforts to pump waste out of the tank, sources told KGW.

Pumping began three weeks ago, after Washington state spent three years petitioning the federal government, which owns the tanks, to deal with the damaged structure.

But the change in pressure appears to have 'blown out' the weakened wall, causing the increased leak and bringing the waste closer to the nearby Columbia River.

'The primary tanks weren't designed to stage waste like this for so many years,' a current worker told KGW. 'Theres always the question, "Are the outer shells compromised?"'

Damaged: Washington State had campaigned for three years to have AY-102 (pictured during construction) emptied due to the crack, but pumping only began three months ago - and may have caused the crack to widen

Critic: Mike Geffre (left) is a former worker at Hanford, and is highly critical of the site. He was the first to spot the AY-102 leak in 2011, but it wasn't admitted by authorities until 2012

A statement from the Department of Energy (DOE) said that both they and Washington River protection Solutions (WRPS), the contractor that deals with the Hanford site, 'anticipated changes in the amount of waste between the inner and outer shells' of AY-102.

'Out of an abundance of caution, DOE and WRPS are in the process of evaluating the tanks condition,' the statement read.

And the Department of Ecology said: 'There is no indication of waste leaking into the environment or risk to the public at this time.'

It added that engineers are currently 'preparing a plan' to recover the waste that escaped the inner shell.

But workers at the plant told KGW that despite claims the breach was 'anticipated,' they had not been made aware that something like this could occur.

And Geffre said that he was frustrated that his warnings in 2011 hadn't been acted on for an entire year. 'Its an example of a culture at Hanford of "We dont have problems here. Were doing just fine." Which is a total lie,' he said.

Construction on the Hanford site began in 1943, and it went on to house the world's first full-scale plutonium production reactor, and to provide plutonium for the first atomic bomb.

After the Cold War ended, the site housed 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste and 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste.
New investigation: Coroners claim kidnapper Wolfgang Priklopil could have been dead before he was hit by a train in Vienna in 2006

The Natascha Kampusch kidnap case has taken a stunning new turn with experts now believing that her abductor Wolfgang Priklopil may have been murdered instead of committing suicide in the hours after she broke free from him.

Loner Priklopil's decapitated body was found on a rail line in Vienna on August 23, 2006, hours after Natascha had escaped from his clutches after eight and-a-half years as his sex slave.

Natascha was kidnapped as a 10-year-old on her way to school in March 1998 and plunged into a dungeon lair built beneath loner Priklopil's home in a Viennese suburb.

When she was 18 she made a break for freedom as she was vacuuming the interior of his car.

Rescue workers recovered 44-year-old Priklopil's body between the Praterstern and Traisengasse stations in the Austrian capital.

Investigators quickly concluded he had taken his own life after the young woman he tried to make love him vanished from his life.

Now two coroners hired by a man whose brother worked on the case at the time say it is possible that he was killed and his body laid on the tracks to look like a suicide.

Karl Kroll, whose deceased brother Franz Kroll launched the Special Commission Kampusch as a colonel with the Viennese police, doubts the suicide theory.

He has filed a criminal complaint against unknown persons at the Vienna police with the chief state prosecutor.

Now Germany's Spiegel magazine reports it has seen the findings of the two experts who concluded that 'the death of Wolfgang Priklopil is highly questionable to assess' and believe the possibility exists that he was killed before the train decapitated him.

The coroners said the incident was not investigated to the 'acceptable forensic standards and common procedures'. The medico-legal reports on the death of Wolfgang Priklopil in 2006 is, they declare, 'worthless'.

Taken: Natascha Kampusch, 28, pictured in 2010, was kidnapped by Priklopil at the age of ten and held captive for eight and a half years

'There was a considerable risk significant findings were destroyed and thus the awareness towards crime specifically forever foiled,' they added.

Johann Rzeszut, former President of the Supreme Court in Vienna and a member of the Evaluation Commission, which had asked the Ministry of the Interior to detect possible discrepancies in the Kampusch case, agrees with Karl Kroll that there are 'serious doubts' whether the kidnapper died by his own hand.

'That a criminal case with at least a relevant suspicion of murder is considered complete even before any significant discovery approaches have been exhausted, is not acceptable', says Rzeszut.

The coroners, Johann Missliwetz and Martin Grassberger, are of the opinion the original coroner 'failed to differentiate between self and foreign killing'.
A rare Seychelles banknote which appears to show the word 'sex' next to a young Queen Elizabeth's head is to be sold at auction.

The 50 rupee note, which is equivalent to around 2.50, was issued by the Government of Seychelles between 1968 and 1973.

Over the shoulder of the Queen are three palm trees with the branches crossing each other to spell the word 'SEX'.

A rare Seychelles banknote which appears to show the word 'sex' above a young Queen Elizabeth's head is to be sold at auction

The 50 rupee note, which is equivalent to around 2.50, was issued by the Government of Seychelles between 1968 and 1973

The note was produced at a time when the Indian Ocean archipelago was seeking independence from Great Britain, and it is suspected that pro-independence printers incorporated the design.

Auction house Moore Allen & Innocent, based in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, will be selling the note as part of a collection on Friday.

The collection, which also includes notes from Kenya, Mexico, Ceylon, Portugal and England, is expected to sell for between 200 and 300.
A hero of Greek mythology, known for his virility and thirst for women, has been stripped of his manhood one too many times, according to a seaside town in France.

A three-metre statue of Heracles, or Hercules, Greek mythology's divine hero, has stood in the Parc Mauresque in Arcachon since 1948, and the town has been powerless to stop vandals from constantly snapping off the beloved sculpture's genitalia.

Until now, that is.

A statue similar to this which stands in Parc Mauresque, Arcachon, has been robbed of its genitalia too many times according to townspeople (stock image)

To avoid any further pain or embarrassment to the statue, the townspeople have created a removable penis for the Greek God, for use only on special occasions which warrant ceremonies in the park.

'I wouldn't want anyone - not even my worst enemies - to go through what happens to this statue,' Mayor Yves Foulon said at a recent meeting, according to the Sud Ouest newspaper.



Deputy Mayor Martine Phelippot said it was the best solution, 'otherwise you just end up constantly chasing after the anatomy of Heracles'.

Heracles, or Hercules, was the son of Zeus and Alcmene, who famously killed the magical Nemean lion with his bare hands.

The seaside town of Arcachon in France has only 12,000 residents, and Mayor Yves Foulon says what keeps happening to the Heracles statue is something he 'wouldn't want anyone - not even my worst enemies - to go through'

The skin of this lion drapes across the back of the statue, and is said to be a metaphor for France's resistance against Nazi forces.

In recent years, thieves have continually robbed the statue, especially during festivals and special events, leaving nothing in its nether regions but a thin metal rod.

This isn't the first time the Greek God's penis has been a point of contention throughout the town of only 12,000 residents.

The sculptor, Claude Bouscau, was forced to shorten the length of the phallus more than once when the statue was built in the late 1940s, as some women in the town found it to be excessive.

Even in mythological times, Heracles apparently used his manhood to its full potential, allegedly bedding 50 women in one night.
Alan and Cathy Corliss were at their home in Canoa, Ecuador Saturday night when a 7.8-

An American couple who moved to Ecuador last year to fulfill their dream of starting a restaurant are among the more than 2,000 injured in this weekend's deadly earthquake.

Alan and Cathy Corliss, from Londonderry, New Hampshire, were at their home in the seaside village of Canoa Saturday night when the 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck, causing their house to collapse.

Cathy, 49, suffered the most injuries. The collapsed roof pinned her head and neck, and she lost feeling in her extremities. However, she has been able to wiggle her fingers and toes.

Alan and Cathy Corliss, pictured above, were their home in Canoa, Ecuador Saturday night with a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck

Her 50-year-old husband suffered a broken or dislocated hip, but is awaiting an x-ray to determine the severity of the injury.

One of their daughters, Krystin (pictured), was visiting at the time of the quake but was uninjured

One of the couple's daughters, Krystin, was visiting them at the time of the earthquake, but was not injured.

The couple were first rushed to a makeshift emergency center, but the building wasn't suitable for conducting surgeries.

So Mrs Corliss was flown to another hospital unaffected by the earthquake on Monday, where she underwent surgery to stabilize her neck and back, and reconstruct her face and teeth.

The Corliss' children believe their dad will likely need surgery as well to fix his hip. His daughter is looking after him.

Meanwhile, the family has been staying up-to-date on the Corliss' progress through Pete and Maija Stromberg, the fellow American couple who sold them the Surf Shack restaurant.

Not being able to hear her parents directly has been tough for daughter Britni Corliss.

'For me, not to hear their voice, its difficult,' Britni told the New Hampshire Union Leader. 'Sometimes you take for granted that phone call. Now you just wish you could hear from them.'

Britni says that her parents sold off their belongings in August to move to Ecuador and start their seaside restaurant.

The Surf Shack in Canoa serves American cuisine, and the Corliss' children are uncertain whether it's still standing after the earthquake. Canoa is located about 100 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake.

The couple sold all of their possessions and moved to Ecuador last year to start their own restaurant, the Surf Shack (pictured above)

More than 400 people were killed in the earthquake, in addition to more than 2,000 injured. Above, a collapsed building in Canoa on Monday

'They basically went down with what they had, and sold the rest. They dont have anything,' Britni said.

Before moving to Ecuador, Alan Corliss worked installing network cables while his wife was a data analytics project manager at Manchester's Elliot Hospital.

The couple grew up in Ticonderoga, New York, where they met in high school and started dating. They moved to New Hampshire in the mid-1990s, according to the Times Union.

Once their parents are healthy enough to travel, they will likely be moved to another hospital for rehabilitation, or even back to New Hampshire.

Britni says she doesn't believe that her parents have health insurance, but Ecuador is known for high-quality medical care at a fraction of U.S. costs.

A GoFundMe campaign has been started to help with the couple's medical costs

In addition to the more than 2,000 injured in the earthquakes, more than 400 were killed.
After Johnny Depp and Amber Heard released an excruciatingly awkward apology to Australia for sneaking their dogs into the country, Stephen Colbert decided he wanted to give it a go, too.

The Late Show host mocked the apology on a Monday night segment.

Colbert first asked his audience if they had seen the apology video before telling them the couple could have faced 10 years in prison for sneaking dogs 'Boo' and 'Pistol'.

He also added to the theory that the Depp-Heard video looked like a hostage situation by suggesting armed kangaroos were forcing the couple into making the apology.

Stephen Colbert mocked the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard apology video to Australia on the Late Show

In the video Colbert apologizes for smuggling dogs, parakeets, pigs - and his blonde friend - into the country

Colbert then tells the audience he has his own apology to make to the land down under.

A clip begins of Colbert dressed as Depp and a woman pretending to be Heard sitting side-by-side with a beige background.

'Australia is a beautiful island surrounded by sharks and kangaroos and bloomin' onions,' the blonde woman pretending to be Heard says.

Colbert chimes in, in a dead-pan voice: 'Australia is truly a lovely lady. And that goes double for all the angry men who make you do these video.'

The woman then apologizes for sneaking in her dogs 'Sparkles', 'Lurch' and 'Colonel Dogface'.

'Nor did we declare my colony of parakeets, whom I rightfully call the funky bunch. Nor my two 500-pound feral hogs "Niles" and "Frasier".

Colbert joked that the power couple was being held hostage by armed kangaroos, who forced them to make the awkward video

'It was wrong. Even if they are service animals, which they're not,' Colbert says.

The woman then makes a few more jokes about the toilets in Australia flushing backwards before Colbert clarifies the woman is 'not his wife' and that he smuggled her into the country, too.

He then proceeds to close the apology by playing the 'Australian national anthem' on a didgeridoo before closing with a line from Men At Work's 'Down Under'.

'Just smile and give me a vegemite sandwich,' he says.

On Monday Depp and Heard produced the original video saying they are 'truly sorry' for sneaking their Yorkshire terriers into Australia.

'I am truly sorry': Amber Heard and Johnny Depp appeared somber as they starred in a pro-quarantine video for Australian authorities on Monday. The video was shown to a Gold Coast court

In the clip, the Hollywood pair pleaded for leniency in the so-called 'war on terriers' case after they smuggled in their dogs Pistol and Boo last year.

Heard gushed that 'Australia is a wonderful island with a treasure trove of unique plants, animals and people' while a grim Depp urged tourists to 'declare everything when you enter' the country.

The clip was shown to a Gold Coast court on Monday before a magistrate hit Heard with a one-month good behavior bond and a $1,000 fine over the debacle.

Heard, 29, who reached a deal with prosecutors, pleaded guilty to one count of falsifying border protection documents after they dropped two charges of illegal importation.

The acting duo's 20-second video was shared online by Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce, who last year threatened to have the pups put down if they didn't leave the country.

But many on social media were unconvinced by the video message, saying it was Depp's 'best acting performance' to date.

Johnny Depp and his wife Amber Heard are pictured leaving the Southport Magistrates Court where the actress pleaded guilty to falsifying border protection documents
This is the moment a Royal Air Force fighter bombers destroys an ISIS vehicle loaded with explosives.

Drone footage shows the Tornado GR4 targeting and blowing up a lorry carrying a prepared car-bomb on its trailer west of Mosul in Iraq.

The Ministry of Defence said that despite the lorrys speed, a direct hit was scored on the car-bomb using a Brimstone missile.

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Target hit: Drone footage captures the moment British RAF Tornados destroy an ISIS lorry with explosives west of Mosul, Iraq

Brimstone is a 'fire-and-forget' radar-guided precision weapon which can be used against moving targets.

Prime Minister David Cameron described it as the kind of UK asset which would make a 'meaningful difference' to the coalition's battle against ISIS.

Tornado GR4s, Typhoon FGR4s and Reapers are flying daily missions over Iraq and Syria, where the terror group controls large swathes of territory.

As well as conducting a 'large number of successful strikes', the jets have also been gathering intelligence on ISIS activity.

The MoD said on its website that Typhoons and Tornados provided 'close air support to Iraqi forces clearing Daesh positions in the area around Ramadi'.

The footage shows the target in site as it moves at speed down a road near the ISIS-controlled city

Boom: The Tornado GR4 can be seen hitting the target - a lorry carrying a prepared car-bomb on its trailer

A direct hit was scored on the car-bomb using a Brimstone missile, the MoD said

It added: 'The Typhoons destroyed a terrorist building with a Paveway, then used two more Paveways to engage a pair of Daesh groups, armed with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, which were engaged in close combat with Iraqi troops.

'Despite the proximity of the friendly forces, the precision of the Paveways and careful planning by the aircrew allowed both targets to be struck successfully.

'Paveway attacks accounted for four groups of terrorist fighters, including one heavy machine-gun and two mortar teams.

'When machine-gunners opened fire on the Iraqis from the windows of a single storey building, the Tornados launched a pair of Brimstone missiles which accurately struck both windows.'

Brimstone is a 'fire-and-forget' radar-guided precision weapon which can be used against moving targets

The footage was released on the same day that Nato and the EU counter-terrorism officials warned that ISIS terrorists are planning nuclear and chemical attacks on Britain and Europe.

Both Nato and the EU say there are 'justified concerns' that ISIS jihadists are working on obtaining chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear materials to carry out attacks on the EU.

Speaking at the Security and Counter Terror Expo in London this week, senior officials warned of ISIS's plans to carry out chemical attacks.
Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro delivered a valedictory speech Tuesday to the Communist Party that he put in power a half-century ago, telling party members he will soon die and exhorting them to help his ideas survive.

'I'll be 90 years old soon,' Castro said in his most extensive public appearance in years, adding: 'Soon I'll be like all the others.'

He went on: 'The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we need to fight without a truce to obtain them.'

Castro spoke as the government announced that his brother Raul will retain the Cuban Communist Party's highest post alongside his hardline second-in-command.

Fidel Castro, 89, (pictured addressing Cuban congress on Tuesday) formally stepped down in 2008 after suffering gastrointestinal ailments and public appearances have been increasingly unusual in recent years

That announcement and Fidel Castro's speech together delivered a resounding message that the island's revolutionary generation will remain in control even as its members age and die, relations with the U.S. are normalized, and popular dissatisfaction grows over the country's economic performance.

Fifty-five years after Fidel Castro declared that Cuba's revolution was socialist and began installing a single-party system and centrally planned economy, the Cuban government is battling a deep crisis of credibility.

With no memory of the revolution's heady first decades, younger Cubans complain bitterly about low state salaries of about $25 a month that leave them struggling to afford food and other staple goods.

Cuba's creaky state-run media and cultural institutions compete with flashy foreign programming shared online and on memory drives passed hand-to-hand.

Emigration to the United States and other countries has soared to one of its highest points since the revolution.

Limited openings to private enterprise have stalled, and the government describes capitalism as a threat even as it appears unable to increase productivity in Cuba's inefficient, theft-plagued networks of state-run enterprises.

The ideological gulf between government and people widened last month when President Barack Obama became the first U.S. leader to visit Cuba in nearly 90 years and delivered a widely praised speech live on state television urging Cubans to forget the history of hostility between the U.S. and Cuba and move toward a new era of normal diplomatic and economic relations.

The Cuban government offered little unified response until the Communist Party's Seventh Party Congress began Saturday, and one high-ranking official after another warned that the U.S. was still an enemy that wants to take control of Cuba.

They said Obama's trip represented an ideological 'attack.'

That defensive stance was reinforced Tuesday as the congress ended and the government said Raul Castro, 84, would remain the party's first secretary and Jose Ramon Machado Ventura would hold the post of second secretary for at least part of a second five-year term.

Castro currently is both president and party first secretary.

The decision means Castro could hold a Communist Party position at least as powerful as the presidency even after he is presumably replaced by a younger president in 2018.

Machado Ventura, 85, who fought alongside the Castro brothers to overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, is known as an enforcer of Communist orthodoxy and voice against some of the biggest recent economic reforms.

Castro, sitting sixth from right, listens to his brother, Cuba's President Raul Castro, on Tuesday

Fidel is applauded by Raul and the second secretary of the Central Committee, Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, left, during the closing ceremonies for the 7th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in Havana on Tuesday

The Cuban Communist Party ended the third day of its twice-a-decade congress with a vote for the Central Committee, which in turn selects the powerful Political Bureau. Raul carries his vote and his ailing brother's

Raul Castro casts his vote to elect the new Cuba's Communist Party Central Committee on Tuesday

He often has been employed by the Castros to impose order in areas seen as lacking discipline, most recently touring the country to crack down on private sellers of fruits, vegetables and other agricultural goods.

While Raul Castro opened Cuba's faltering agricultural economy to private enterprise, the government has blamed a new class of private farmers and produce merchants for a rise in prices.

Shortly after the congress ended Tuesday afternoon, government-run television showed rare images of 89-year-old Fidel Castro seated at the dais in Havana's Convention Palace, dressed in a plaid shirt and sweat top and speaking to the crowd in a strong if occasionally trembling voice.

State television showed at least one delegate tearful with emotion, and the crowd greeting the revolutionary leader with shouts of 'Fidel!'

'This may be one of the last times I speak in this room,' Fidel Castro said. 'We must tell our brothers in Latin America and the world that the Cuban people will be victorious.'

The party congress had been criticized for secrecy and a lack of discussion about substantive new reforms.

Castro's speech and his brother's promise that more extensive public debate would come in the weeks and months after the congress appeared to have at least temporarily quelled discontent among the party ranks.

'The Cuban people are followers of Fidel and he's a force that still has a lot of power,' said Francisco Rodriguez, a party member who had publicly criticized the secrecy of the congress.
A drunken party-goer who was caught on camera urinating on a cenotaph just feet away from a display of poppies has avoided jail.

CCTV cameras captured Caedmon Kerr, 25, as he relieved himself on the First World War memorial in Manchester city centre shortly before 7am on February 7.

He pleaded guilty to outraging public decency and being drunk and disorderly, describing his own actions as 'bizarre' and 'shameful'.

Shameful: Caedmon Kerr, 25, was caught on CCTV as he relieved himself on the Manchester cenotaph

Sentencing Kerr to 220 hours of unpaid work, District Judge Sam Goozee said he had shown a 'complete lack of respect' to fallen British soldiers.

Manchester Magistrates' Court heard Kerr was seen urinating by a CCTV operator who tracked the reveller as he staggered and danced away from the scene while shouting at passers-by.

Police were informed of his whereabouts and he was arrested when he refused to leave the area.

In interview, Kerr said he had been looking after a party of 30 at The Milton Club, where he was employed at the time to look after 'high profile' guests.

Avoided jail: Former nightclub worker Caedmon Kerr

The nightspot is said to be a favourite of celebrities including former Manchester United player Rio Ferdinand and England rugby international Danny Cipriani.

Kerr claimed he left the venue at around 5am and said his next memory was being arrested by police.

Kerr was sacked after he was charged and CCTV footage of the incident was shared by Manchester City Council. He now works at a receptionist at a hotel.

Asked to explain his actions, Kerr said: 'I'm utterly ashamed of that evening and somewhat disorientated.

'It's not something I ever expected myself to do. My family are ashamed and embarrassed and I'm ashamed telling my friends about it.

'It's not just a piece of stone, it does represent people who died in the gruesome conflicts of World War One or before and I meant no disrespect to those people or their families.

'I have had a morally straight upbringing and education with plenty of opportunities and can fully understand the significance of the war memorial.

'I would like to offer my apologies to anyone to that was offended and the city of Manchester in general.'

He pleaded guilty to outraging public decency and being drunk and disorderly at Manchester Magistrates Court and was ordered to carry out 220 hours of unpaid work and pay costs of 145.

Sentencing, District Judge Sam Goozee said: 'This memorial is a place built to show public respect for soldiers who paid the ultimate sacrifice.

'Those soldiers secured the freedom you enjoy now - and you have distastefully abused - by your behaviour. You have shown a complete lack of respect.

Disrespectful: Kerr was caught on camera as he approached the memorial shortly before 7am on February 7

No memory: The former nightclub worker said he could not remember relieving himself on the cenotaph

Arrested: The reveller was arrested by police after he refused to leave the area and admitted to the charges

'Your behaviour was shameful, disgraceful, and, to be perfectly honest, disgusting.

'It is by chance that at the time of the offence significant members of the public did not have to observe you behaving in the way you did.'.

Kerr's lawyer Simon Harrison added: 'It was committed while in drink and clearly his alcohol consumption is the sole reason for his behaviour. He has no recollection of his behaviour.'
When she contacted the manager both man and girl fled into a van

She says she noticed a strange man signalling to the child in the store

The mom became concerned when the girl wouldn't leave them alone

She says they were approached by a young girl who offered Jenna candy

A mom has revealed the terrifying moment her young daughter was 'nearly kidnapped' at a Target store.

Missy Kalidy had been out shopping at the store in Edmond, Oklahoma, with her four-year-old Jenna, when she claims that a little girl tried to lure her daughter away by offering her candy.

The mother-of-two told the girl her daughter didn't want any sweets but became concerned when the girl, aged around nine, kept following them round the store.

'I was asking her where her mom was,' she told Fox 6 Now. She said the girl refused to answer her.

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Missy Kalidy (pictured with her daughter Jenna, son Noah and husband) had been out shopping with her four-year-old Jenna, when she claims that a little girl tried to lure her daughter away by offering her candy

Kalidy said that she told the girl that Jenna didn't want any candy and had carried on shopping.

They didn't see her again until they got the checkout where Kalidy says her daughter was approached by the girl again, this time offering chewing gum.

When she looked up, she noticed a strange man on the other side of the store, signalling at the girl.

She alerted the manager but said that the girl and the man 'bolted and got into a van.'

'If I had known what what was happening at the time, I could have grabbed the girl and saved her!' she wrote in a Facebook post about the alleged incident.

Kalidy says a girl offered her daughter candy at the Edmonton Target store in Oklahoma, before she noticed a strange man on the other side of the store, signalling at the girl

The mother-of-two decided to share her experience on Facebook to warn other parents to be alert

'Point being they wanted to take my daughter! She's 4! The manager told me they target Target because... many times moms turn their backs when loading the car and they can grab them from shopping carts.

'Please be careful and always watch your kids! It's real and in Edmond!'

Police say that human trafficking does happen in Oklahoma but said this was a legitimate kidnap attempt.

Michael Snowden of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics Human Trafficking Division told Fox 6: 'We don't generally see people snatching children from their parents or women being abducted from a retail store of some sort,' Snowden said. 'Human trafficking is much more subtle than that.'

'We would never belittle someone's fear, okay, but diversion is really a frequent tactic when I'm trying to steal your purse, get your car keys.'

He said he was not aware of any case of a child being kidnapped while they were out shopping in an Oklahoma retail store and forced into human trafficking.

Kalidy insists that the experience has made her more alert to the dangers facing her daughter (pictured are her children Jenna and Noah, with their father)

But Kalidy insists that the experience has made her more alert to the dangers facing her daughter.

'I' m not paranoid. Trafficking is real and just because they haven't been successful to our knowledge doesn't mean they don't try and it's not possible.

'The whole point if my message was to be careful and stay alert.'
But she knew it was a scam after watching a similar theft on

Quick-thinking: Eileen McCartney, 72, remembered watching a similar distraction technique on BBC's Crimewatch and was able to retain her bank card from the gang of four robbers

A brave grandmother thwarted a gang of robbers who tried to steal her bank card from a cashpoint in a distraction theft - after she saw a similar raid on BBC's Crimewatch.

Eileen McCartney, 72, was withdrawing 20 in cash from her local Natwest bank in Wigan, Greater Manchester, to pay for her lunch when she was surrounded by three men and a woman.

The retired carer, who had a 'substantial' amount of life savings in the account, was tapped on the shoulder by a man who pointed to a 20 note on the ground and gestured that it was hers.

CCTV footage shows as she looked at the floor, an accomplice then helped exchange her bank card for an alternate one as a third man and a woman can be seen keeping a looking out.

But the quick-thinking grandmother recalled watching a similar distraction technique featured on Crimewatch, and as the yob grabbed her bank card, she fought him off and snatched it back.

Today as police hunted the culprits, she said: 'I knew this was a scam because I'd seen it months previously on Crimewatch but that one happened in London.

'I said to the man "you have my card" and he was saying "no, no, no", he was pointing at the little slot and there was a card in there.

'At first I felt awful because I thought I was accusing this man of taking my card but then I looked at the back of the card in the machine and I realised it was not my card.

'I said "give me my card back". Then he brought his hand right up and my card was in his hand.'

Mrs McCartney gets tapped on the shoulder by one of the thieves as she tries to withdraw 20 to pay for her lunch in Wigan, Greater Manchester

He then points to a 20 note which has fallen on to the ground and he suggests that the money is hers

Mrs McCartney, from Orrell, Wigan, added: 'I jumped up and got it out of his hand.

'Then I was stuck in the room and I thought either I go into the street and scream but I went into the bank and shouted "I've just been scammed". By that time he had gone.

'He would have got away with everything, he would have left me with nothing, absolutely nothing. There was a substantial amount of money in the account.

'That was for all my bills and direct debits. I would not have looked at that card again until the next week. He would have got away with an awful lot of money.

'If I had not seen this on TV he would have got away with a lot of money. If I would have lost all that money, I would have been devastated, devastated that someone could come and do that.

As Mrs McCartney bends down to inspect the cash which is on the ground, a second man then swaps her bank card with a duplicate while she isn't looking

She then confronts the man and gets her card back after seeing a similar distraction theft on BBC's Crimewatch

The incident occurred when Eileen was about to meet friends in Wigan town centre and she withdrew 20 out to share a bottle of wine with a Chinese meal.

She added: 'I was not afraid but more angry that someone could have come to take my money from me and never thought how I was going to live.

'He would have taken the whole lot. It really shocked me so much but it was more anger that he could do this to older people who are very vulnerable.

'I wasn't going to let him out of the bank until I had seen the card in his hand. Usually you wouldn't look at the card you would take it out and put it in your purse.

'What was going through my mind at the time was "you're not getting away from me, you're not getting my card", I just didn't know how it could happen to me. I thought "how dare you" I couldn't believe it.'

The brave grandmother, from Orrell, Wigan, realised she was being scammed after watching BBC's Crimewatch which was reporting on a similar incident in London

She continued: 'Even now I can't believe it happened to me, I'm not a soft or a little old woman. They were targeting us old people, without a shadow of a doubt.

'If I ever did go to the bank and anyone was at the side of me, I would tell them to move. If I can help save someone else from a scam I'm quite happy to do so.

'It was done very slowly but very precisely and they could have got off with the whole lot of it.'

PC Rod Ashton of Greater Manchester Police said: 'We are still searching for these men on the CCTV, we have not made any arrests.

'We have got to keep an open mind, there is a trend in Wigan for like offences.
One of the two young girls accused of stabbing their classmate in the so-called 'Slender Man' stabbing claims she was sexually assaulted by her cellmate in jail in jail last year.

Morgan Geyser, now 13, and Anissa Weier, now 14, are being tried as adults for attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the May 2014 attack on Payton Leutner.

The pair allegedly stabbed Leutner 19 times in Waukesha as they tried to appease the Slender Man, a fictional character on the Internet who they claim told them to murder Leutner. At the time of the incident, all three were 12 years old.

Last week, Geyser's attorney, Anthony Cotton, said in court documents that she was sexually assaulted by her cellmate at the Washington County juvenile detention center where she was in custody last year.

A representative from the Waukesha County District Attorney's Office told Broadly: 'Police reports about the incident don't seem to substantiate sexual assault.'

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Morgan Geyser (left in 2014) and Anissa Weier (right in 2014) are being tried as adults for attempted first-degree intentional homicide. Geyser claims she was sexually assaulted by her cell mate last year

They stabbed Payton Leutner (above) 19 times as they tried to appease the Slender Man, a fictional Internet character who they claim told them to murder Leutner. At the time of the incident, all three were 12 years old

A district attorney's office representative said: 'Police reports about the incident don't seem to substantiate sexual assault.' Geyser (above last August) is being treated for early onset schizophrenia

The reports say that Geyser's cellmate exposed herself to Geyser and asked her to do the same, Broadly reported.

Jessie Andrews, a social worker, testified in court that Geyser's cell mate was moved after the incident.

Judge Michael Bohren said during a phone hearing Wednesday that he would consider the allegation but was concerned that it wasn't immediately reported, according to Broadly.

Geyser, who is being treated for early onset schizophrenia, was recently committed to a state hospital.

The judge denied requests from their lawyers to have their bail reduced from $500,000 and to live under house arrest.

Bohern said that he was not lowering the bail for the girls because he considered them a flight risk, noting that they had tried to flee before.

The two were picked up walking into the woods in hopes of meeting the Slender Man after stabbing Payton.

'Even the best effort to secure someone, outside of a secure facility, doesn't always work,' said Bohern.

On Friday, defense attorneys for both girls said their clients' mental states had improved. One girl said she was diagnosed as having a 'shared delusional belief' that had improved with separation from her co-defendant.

The other girl reported significant recent improvement from proper doses of anti-psychotic medication.

Cotton also brought in a counselor who testified that his client no longer heard voices or believed she interacted with Harry Potter characters, as she had in the past.

The families of both girls, from Waukesha, Wisconsin, have said they cannot afford the current bail, which has been set at $500,000 (Weier in court last August above)

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported last year Kenneth Robbins evaluated Geyser twice, and later testified that she had delusions which appeared to be worsening.

During that time she had told professionals she did not want medication because it might make her 'friends' - fictional characters from Harry Potter and Slender Man - disappear.

Geyser also believes she can control her emotions.

Robbins said her disease would never disappear and that she would at some point begin to lose the ability to function.

He also said he believed she would qualify for an insanity defense due to the fact that she believed Slender Man would hurt her or her family if she did not do as he wished and murder Leutner.

She did not receive treatment for this condition while behind bars.

Nicole Simon, a jail officer in Washington County where Geyser was being held, and other jail officials testified that she was a timid, polite and extremely creative child last year.

They also said she talks to herself, sits under a table in her jail pod and feeds and plays with ants crawling on the floor.

Testifying for the state, Kenneth Casimir said that despite her problems Geyser should not be sent home as she told him she would have to kill again for the Slender Man, proof he said that she is 'certainly at risk to engage in violent behavior.'

When asked if she would commit murder if freed, Casimir said Geyser told him; 'I'd have to do it.'

If the case is moved to juvenile court, the girls would spend no more than three more years in custody and would get far more more intense supervision after being released.

As adults, they could receive a sentence of 45 years behind bars.

In April of last year, Judge Bohren denied a request to move Geyser to a psychiatric treatment center.

Geyser's attorney, Anthony Cotton, at that time also applied to have her $500,000 bail reduced so that she could get out of jail and seek treatment for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.

Judge Bohren, once again, said Geyser was a flight risk, and even though she is young, she was capable of plotting a sophisticated plan to murder someone.

Cotton said at the time that his client had no way to get anywhere and that any allegations of violence have been limited to the stabbing and are connected to her mental illness.

'She has no transport, no car, no friends, no money,' he said.

'She's not any sort of flight risk.'

Wisconsin law requires anyone accused of certain serious crimes to be charged as adults if they are 10 or older.

According to a criminal complaint, the girls plotted for months before they lured Payton, their former friend, into some woods after a sleepover and attacked her.

They told investigators they hoped it would please Slender Man, a fictional online ghoul they had read about in horror stories.

Neither of the suspects has entered a plea as the attorneys attempt to move the case to juvenile court.

The two girls' attorneys have never denied they attacked and stabbed Payton, but claim they were so disturbed they truly believed the Slender Man would kill their own families in three seconds if they did not do his bidding.

Collins previously testified that she has interviewed the Geyser several times and concluded she honestly believes Slender Man exists.

'(Her belief) hasn't wavered and it's been unyielding to a rational perspective,' Collins testified.

Collins testified again at that hearing that Geyser told her she uses Vulcan mind control to keep negative emotions at bay and believes Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort visits her when he's not away on business trips.

The alleged attackers were found after the stabbing walking toward the Nicolet National Forest, where they say they thought they would join Slender Man.
A woman found herself too close for comfort when a wild buffalo snuck its head through the window of her car for an affectionate kiss.

The disgusted woman was on a driving tour of Olympic Game Farm in Sequim, Washington, when she recoiled from the large horned bison, screaming that she had just been 'licked on the face'.

Park officials have warned visitors not to stop near the elk or bison during the one hour tour, stating that doing so will cause damage to your vehicle - with no mention of being slobbered on.

A woman found herself too close for comfort when a wild buffalo at Olympic Game Farm in Sequim, Washington, snuck its head through the window of her car for an affectionate kiss

The video is sound-tracked with the laughter of other passengers in the vehicle, who can be heard poking fun at the lady's misfortune.

Wiping saliva from her cheek with a tissue, the woman can be seen lunging to the back of the car exclaiming that the bison is 'huge'.

Yelling in disgust she can be heard saying: 'Jesus Christ, he just licked my face.'

'Oh my god ... holy sh*t!' she cries.

Park officials have warned visitors not to stop near the elk or bison during the one hour tour, stating that doing so will cause damage to your vehicle - with no mention of being slobbered on

Wiping saliva from her cheek with a tissue, the woman can be seen lunging to the back of the car exclaiming that the bison is 'huge'

Looking for support from the other passengers in the car the woman can be heard saying: 'Did you see that ... I did not see him in there.'

To her dismay, she continued to be met with laughter and filmed by the driver of the car.

Disgruntled by the experience and clutching at a piece of bread that she had been feeding the wild animals with, the lady is seen winding up her window.

She says: 'Look he's moved my mirror and everything.'

The cheeky bison pulls its long black and pink tongue out at the lady who is mortified to have been kissed by the bearded creature

Looking for support from the other passengers in the car the woman can be heard saying: 'Did you see that ... I did not see him in there'

When approached by a smaller bison she says: 'No, go away, we're done feeding you ... go away.'

Olympic Game Farm has warned visitors not to stop by the elk and bison on the tour explaining that damage may occur.

In a description of the tour on their website a warning written in caps lock says: 'Do not feed them at the entrances to fields. Move far into the field before feeding.

'Move at a slow pace at all times. Stopping with the bison will result in damage to your vehicle and the vehicles behind you will be a scratching post.'

The video was sound tracked with the laughter of other passengers in the car despite the obvious disgust and horror shown by the woman

As she finally got the window of the car up the woman is heard saying: 'No, go away, we're done feeding you ... go away'

But this isn't unusual for the bison at Olympic Game Farm who have built a notorious reputation for planting kisses on unsuspecting women.

Often swayed by tasty portions of bread two similar incidents occurred in March and September last year.

Captured on video, two women were seen making their way through the car-friendly zoo in September last year when they to stopped to feed some passing bison slices of brown bread.

A similar fate met the women who, without much warning, came face-to-face with the animals large tongue.

Similarly another woman was approached by a bison at Olympic Game Farm that ran after her car as the women attempted to get away (left). The bison stuck its head through the window and licked the driver (right)

Shocked, the women are seen throwing the piece of bread out the window and driving away.

And again in March that year another woman was chased into her car by a buffalo's thick pink tongue which tried to coil itself around her.

The affectionate Buffalo or bison in Olympic Game Farm can grow up to 178 stone and reach a length of about 9 feet as adults.

During winter, the herds of buffalo migrate south as the prairie grasses became sparse.

Olympic Game Farm was first opened to the public in 1972 and initially only offered guided tours.
Europe's migration crisis led to a sharp increase in extremist and racist attacks in Austria last year, according to the interior ministry.

Registered incidents rose by 54 percent to 1,156, compared to 750 in 2014, according to latest figures published on Friday.

The number of offenders reported to police jumped from around 560 to more than 910 for the same period.

Right-wing demonstrators protest against migration in Brussels. Europe's migration crisis led to a sharp increase in extremist and racist attacks in Austria last year

In total, some 1,690 charges were brought over far-right attacks last year, ranging from bodily harm and property damage to fanning hatred against foreigners.

'There is no doubt that the migrant issue has contributed to a polarisation of Austrian society and prompted a rise in offences,' said interior ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundboeck.

The biggest number of offences were recorded in Upper Austria state, the country's industrial heartland, through which hundreds of thousands of migrants trekked in 2015 on their way to neighbouring Germany.

'There is no doubt that the migrant issue has contributed to a polarisation of Austrian society Interior ministry spokesman

Extremist organisations have seen their ranks swell, Grundboeck said, with groups carrying out increasingly brazen attacks.

Last week, around 30 members of the far-right Identitaere movement stormed a Vienna stage during a play performed by refugees and sprayed fake blood on the audience.

EU member Austria took in 95,000 asylum-seekers in 2015, making it one of the bloc's highest recipients on a per-capita basis.

Migrants scuffle in Slovenia as they wait to cross to Austria. Austria took in 95,000 asylum-seekers in 2015, making it one of the EU's highest recipients on a per-capita basis

The influx of migrants and refugees has prompted a surge in popularity for the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), which is hoping to reap the gains in this week's presidential election.

The party - whose candidate Norbert Hofer is polling in second place ahead of the first round of voting on Sunday - has been staging protests outside refugee centres in Vienna, the latest drawing several hundred people on Monday evening.

Three FPOe supporters were arrested after a brawl with police officers.

In an effort to stop the FPOe's advance, the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and conservatives has adopted a hardline stance on migrants by building border fences and introducing tough new asylum laws.
A German tourist who crashed his car into a guardrail and abandoned the wreck has been found after surviving for five days on water and honey he found in an outhouse.

Alexander Stelling, 32, was last seen leaving his car after crashing into a guard rail on Dukes Highway near Tailem Bend, a South Australian town on the Murray River, on Thursday.

The tourist, who does not speak English, was found early Tuesday morning after spending five days taking shelter in a nearby outhouse where he was able to find honey and water, Seven News reported.

Alexander Stelling, 32, who crashed his car into a guardrail and abandoned the wreck has been found after surviving for five days on water and honey he found in an outhouse

He left the outhouse, where he had found a protective bee suit, and managed to wander on to a nearby property where he fell asleep on the porch with a family's dog until day break.

Resident Frank Henderson said the tourist did not speak English but he still tried to communicate with him and his wife, Marie.

'[He was] just kind of verbalising with his hands, so I let him in, sat him down and gave him some breakfast: Shepherd's pie, toast and two glasses of milk,' Mr Henderson told Seven News.

'He only thought he'd been missing for two days He probably got a whack on the head, I'm assuming, and wasn't quite with it for a while,' he added.

He was last seen leaving his car after crashing into a guard rail on Dukes Highway near Tailem Bend, a South Australian town on the Murray River, on Thursday

The tourist, who does not speak English, was found early Tuesday morning after spending five days taking shelter in a nearby outhouse where he was able to find honey and water

Mr Stelling, who left both his wallet and passport at the crash site, appeared 'dazed and confused' but kindly left some money for the family whose honey he used

Mr Stelling, who left both his wallet and passport at the crash site, appeared 'dazed and confused' but kindly left some money for the family whose honey he used.

'I presume he didn't want anyone to think that he was stealing anything so he left some money for the honey,' Mr Henderson said.
Six Western tourists have died in just two years on a Thai paradise island where two UK backpackers were murdered - and the country's police admit their own force is 'not the best'.

Fears over the safety of idyllic Koh Tao island were heightened after the killings in 2014 of Hannah Witheridge, 23, from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk and David Miller, 24, from Jersey.

Four other Western tourists, including three more Britons, have died on the island over the last two years and the family of some of the deceased have accused local police of not investigating the deaths of their loved ones properly.

Six Western tourists have died in just two years on Koh Tao (pictured) where two UK backpackers were murdered - and the country's police admit their own force is 'not the best'

Fears over the safety of idyllic Koh Tao island were heightened after the killings in 2014 of Hannah Witheridge (left), 23, from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk and David Miller (right), 24, from Jersey

Zaw Lin and Wai Phyo (pictured) were sentenced to death for the killings. But although Mr Miller's family called the verdict 'justice', the trial of the two Burmese migrant workers was plagued by accusations of human rights abuses

The figure was revealed in Channel 4's documentary Murder in Paradise amid claims just six police officers protect the island's 2,000 residents and the thousands of tourists who flock there.

Koh Tao has become a huge draw for young backpackers thanks to its stunning beaches and cheap accommodation - so much so that as many as 750,000 Britons visit each year.

But on September 15 2014, the island's community was left reeling after the battered bodies of Ms Witheridge and Mr Miller were found on Sairee Beach.

Ms Witheridge had been savagely raped and beaten to death and Mr Miller had been beaten unconscious and left to drown in the incoming tide.

Zaw Lin and Wai Phyo were sentenced to death for the killings. But although Mr Miller's family called the verdict 'justice', the trial of the two Burmese migrant workers was plagued by accusations of human rights abuses.

The men, apprehended soon after the pair's bodies were found, initially confessed to the crime only to retract their statements amid claims they were extracted by torture.

Channel 4's documentary shows Phyo and Lin apparently describing how police ordered them to admit carrying out the murders 'or burn'.

Christina Annesley (pictured), from Orpington, South East London, died in January 2015 shortly after arriving on Koh Tao

The body of Nick Pearson (pictured), from Derby, was found by scuba divers in the sea after he disappeared following a night out with his family

Speaking through a translator, the 23-year-olds said officers told them they would throw them into the sea after chopping off their limbs.

In the weeks following the murders, police were criticised for not properly securing the crime scene. They also released names and pictures of suspects who turned out to be innocent and were accused of mishandling crucial DNA evidence.

The documentary also highlights concerns over police investigations from families of some of the other victims who have died on the island.

Christina Annesley, from Orpington, South East London, died in January 2015 shortly after arriving on Koh Tao.

The 23-year-old died of natural causes after mixing antibiotics for a chest infection with alcohol - but her father Boyne said a toxicology report was not carried out.

He said: 'We don't know how or why she died. She had medication for a chest infection and was drinking, but the Thai police failed to investigate if the combination was sufficient to kill her.

He also had to track down a man seen on surveillance footage leaving his daughter's flat hours before she was discovered. He had not been questioned by police - even though officers had his name in their files.

Frenchman Dimitri Povse, a 29-year-old Frenchman, was found hanged at this property. According to the documentary, his death was recorded as suicide - but officers were unable to explain why his hands were tied behind his back

Mr Annesley added: 'Why they couldn't contact him to eliminate him, to me, beggars belief. We found him on Facebook and were able to get a phone number, so I rang and spoke to him. Obviously speaking to the last man to see our daughter alive was a bit emotional.

'We would have liked to have been the last people to see her alive. But on talking to him, he seemed quite straightforward.'

Earlier that month, on New Year's Day, Frenchman Dimitri Povse, a 29-year-old Frenchman, was found hanged in a property. According to the documentary, his death was recorded as suicide - but officers were unable to explain why his hands were tied behind his back.

In January this year, British tourist Luke Miller, from the Isle of Wight, was found dead in a swimming pool on the same island.

Thai police said a post-mortem examination showed he drowned.

In January this year, British tourist Luke Miller, from the Isle of Wight, was found dead in a swimming pool on the same island

But, his sister Maria and the family told the BBC they would not rely on what Thai police said as there was still speculation over the circumstances surrounding the death - and that they had received 'different versions' of what might have happened.

A year earlier,on New Year's Day 2014, the body of Nick Pearson, from Derby, was found by scuba divers in the sea after he disappeared following a night out with his family.

Police who recovered his body and said he had fallen 50ft and drowned in an accident - but his family believe he was murdered.

His mother, Tracy, told the documentary she would warn parents not to allow their children to travel to the island.

She said: 'I would tell them to do everything in their power to stop them going. It's dangerous.

'In view of what's happend to David Miller and Hannah Witheridge and various other people I've read about, it just all leads to the same thing. Their parents must be going through hell just like we are and we have been for the last almost two years. It just doesn't go away.'

Police search the beach in Thailand where Hannah Witheridge and David Miller died. Thai police told documentary makers they investigated all the cases

Thai police told documentary makers they investigated all the cases.

The Major General of the Royal Thai Police, Suwat Jangvodsuk, said he was at a loss to explain why people did not believe DNA evidence produced in the murder convictions of Phyo and Lin.

He said: 'We are not the best police in the world but we try to do our best. We try to bring justice to the victims' family.'

The island's mayor, Chaiyan Turasakul, said foreigners came to Thailand 'without realising this is not their country'.

He added: 'When these foreigners live according to their culture, this leads to accidents and risks to their lives.

'For example, taking an overdose, or driving too fast leading to an accident, going diving without safety precautions - it all depends on fate.

'However, most of the incidents I come across, the foreigners were dead drunk and cannot even recall what happened. This is one of the main problems.'

But some of the families of those involved have warned parents should stop their children even thinking of going to Ko
Donald Trump stepped out of his Trump Tower residence to vote in the high stakes New York primary Tuesday morning, calling the act of voting for himself a 'great honor.'

'It's a proud moment. It's a great moment and who would've thought?' Trump told reporters outside the gleaming entrance to Trump tower shortly after voting at a synagogue in midtown Manhattan.

'It's just an honor. My whole reason for doing this is to make America great again,' Trump continued. 'We're a country with tremendous problems and we are going to make America great again.'

Huge ballot: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump brandished his ballot while voting for himself in the New York primary on Tuesday

So long, New York. Donald Trump takes his primary fight to Indiana and Pennsylvania after New York's primary Tuesday

Supporting dad! Donald Trump Jr and Vanessa Trump case their vote in New York, although daughter Chloe Sophia didn't seem particularly interested in the process and apparently 'wanted to vote for Elmo'

Trump is expected to rack up a resounding win in his home state  something his team hopes will inject his campaign with needed momentum and a rich delegate haul.

He hasn't won a contest since the Arizona primary on March 22, as rival Texas Sen. Ted Cruz scored a key win in Wisconsin while hauling in delegates at state conventions in North Dakota, Colorado, and Wyoming.

Cruz, anticipating a drubbing, skipped out of New York Monday to attend events in Maryland, which holds its primary on April 26.

On Tuesday, he is scheduled to appear at a campaign rally in Philadelphia in the state of Pennsylvania.

Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Connecticut all hold elections on the 26th.

Kasich, trailing badly in delegates having won only his home state of Ohio, planned to keep up his feverish pace of retail politicking by visiting an oyster house in Pittsburgh.

The 144-year-old establishment calls itself Pittsburgh's oldest bar and restaurant.

Turn tail? Ted Cruz bolted the Empire State Monday, but his team has been trouncing Trump in delegate math

Shell shocked: John Kasich heads to Pa. oyster house in advance of expected loss

Kasich got one prominent vote  from New York Republican Rep. Peter King of Long Island.

'I hate Ted Cruz, and I think I'll take cyanide if he ever got the nomination,' King told MSNBC Monday.

King predicted a victory for Trump, but said he personally voted by absentee ballot for Kasich.

Trump got words of encouragement  but nothing more  from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has talked up Trump on TV but held back in other ways.

'OK, so I'll endorse him,' Giuliani told CNN Tuesday as voters were heading to the polls. 'But I'm not part of the campaign.'
In Missouri too, Donald Trump's team is finding that they're late to the party in ensuring the delegates casting a vote for The Donald are actual Trump supporters.

While Trump won a majority of the state's delegates from its March 15 primary  37 delegates to Sen. Ted Cruz's 15  the Washington Examiner is reporting that Cruz loyalists account for at least 37 of the delegates heading to the Republican National Convention, meaning the results of the primary could be flipped.

This has Trump and his surrogates warning supporters that the nomination could be 'stolen' from the frontrunner, who will likely come to the convention with a plurality.

To stave off this threat, Trump needs to lock up the nomination earning 1,237 delegates before the convention, though allies are suggesting that if he's close, Republicans should just say that he's won.

'If he within 20 or 30 within the nomination, they have to give it to him,' urged former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is voting for Trump in today's New York primary, and suggested he 'endorsed' the GOP frontrunner, though is not working with the campaign in any official capacity.

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Donald Trump and his team are having a conniption fit over the delegate selection process in a handful of states, including Missouri, in which Ted Cruz loyalists will make up a majority, even though Trump won

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who said today that he, in effect, 'endorsed' Donald Trump suggested the frontrunner should get the nomination if he has the most delegates after the primaries are done

'That's not the rule,' pointed out CNN's Chris Cuomo who was questioning the former mayor on New Day this morning.

'I know, but they change other rules, so why not change that rule?' Giuliani responded. 'Just because it is a rule, doesn't mean it's fair.'

As it stands right now, Trump needs to hit the magic number  1,237  a majority, on the first convention ballot because that's when the majority of delegates are 'bound' to the frontrunner.

If the convention goes to a second ballot, this is where Cruz, who has the second-most pledged delegates, could rout The Donald because many of Trump's bound delegates are going to be, in real life, Cruz supporters.

On second ballot, giant swaths of these delegates will be unbound, per each state's rules, and can go ahead and vote for Cruz.

This is why the ground game of nominating delegates has become so important.

In Colorado, for instance, no nominating contest took place.

Without voters in the picture, the Cruz campaign paid special attention to the series of nominating conventions used to select RNC delegates and a Cruz supporter won every spot.

'The people of Colorado had their vote taken away from them by the phony politicians. Biggest story in politics. This will not be allowed!' Trump posted to Twitter a day after hearing of the results.

Cruz looks to have a superior ground game in Arizona and Arkansas as well.

Donald Trump, seen here with supporter Rudy Giuliani, is hoping to grab most of New York's delegates today as he's trying to wrap up the nomination before the convention, which could become a tough delegate fight

In Missouri, the primary results were very close with Trump edging out Cruz by 0.2 percent, with the election going to a recount and the results not announced for weeks.

Trump got such a hefty pledged delegate edge because he won the statewide vote and carried five of state's congressional districts to Cruz's three.

Missouri Republican insiders who spoke with the Examiner expressed surprise that Trump's team didn't do more to ensure that those delegates the billionaire won were his supporters and not rooting for Cruz.

'Most of the people who are bellyaching  they have caucused before,' Bev Ehlen, the co-chair of Cruz's Missouri campaing, told the Examiner, pointing to the process used to select delegates to go to the Republican National Convention.

'There might be a lot of Cruz people in Cleveland,' she noted. 'They might have to vote for Trump the first time, but that will be all there is,' she warned.

Trump and his team have railed against these rules with his new strategist Paul Manafort vowing to protest them when he appeared on ABC's This Week on Sunday.

'We will be filing protests. Missouri, we'll be filing protests. Colorado, we're going to be filing protests,' Manafort said.

He joined another Trump campaign surrogate, Tana Goertz, in charging that the Cruz campaign was somehow cheating.

Goertz threw some accusations at the Cruz campaign today on CNN saying Cruz wasn't 'gathering' delegates, but instead 'stealing, lying, and bribing people to become delegates.'

'I'm sorry if I wasn't clear,' she said.

But when hosts John Berman and Kate Bolduan asked the Trump surrogate, who had appeared on his television show The Apprentice, for specifics she demurred.

'Well, once I talk to Mr. Trump about it and he says that I'm at liberty to say these things, I will be more than happy to come back on your show and explain to you about what I saw and what I know is going on and the shadiness that Ted Cruz and his campaign do,' she answered.




Andrea Ott-Dahl was devastated when doctors told her that the baby she was carrying for her lesbian friends would be born with severe disabilities.

The pregnant 34-year-old, her wife Keston, and their two friends listened in shock as they were told how the child had just a five per cent chance of survival.

If by some miracle the baby girl, already named Delaney, was born at all, she would be blind, autistic and have severe deformities, the doctors said.

Andrea's friends told her to terminate the pregnancy, but she and Keston refused and made the decision to raise the girl themselves.

Surrogate mother Andrea Ott-Dahl (center, with wife Keston and Delaney) kept baby Delaney after her friends who asked her to carry their child told her to have an abortion because the girl has Down's Syndrome

Happy family: The other women had asked Andrea (pictured between Keston and Delaney) if she would like to carry their child after months of unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant

Playful: Andrea, who has five children, donated her eggs, making her Delaney's biological mother

Smile: Delaney (pictured with Andrea, left, and Keston) was born with Down's syndrome in July 2013, but had none of the other medical issues doctors feared she might have

'When the doctor came in, the four of us, I would say we were in shock,' Keston, 50, told ABC News.

'We were devastated. Andrea was catatonic. The doctors ... said the fluid build-up on the back of her neck, it would either kill her or there would be a severe deformity that would look like another head.

'They successfully scared those two intended moms into wanting to terminate,' Keston added.

The other women had asked Andrea, from Antioch, California, if she would like to carry their child after months of unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant through other means.

Andrea, who has five children, donated her eggs, making her Delaney's biological mother.

After the crushing news at the 12-week ultrasound in January 2013, the women asked Andrea to have an abortion.

Doctors thought Delaney had just a five per cent chance of survival and thought she would be born with severe developmental problems

Delaney would be blind, autistic and have severe deformities, doctors said at the 12-week ultrasound, but instead she was perfectly healthy

Delaney's third birthday is just a few months away, and her parents have no regrets about keeping her

'They said, "The decision to terminate is our decision alone",' Keston said.

'We decided we loved [the baby] and that she was ours.'

The Ott-Dahls were briefly threatened with legal action but this was quickly dropped.

They then set about learning what it would be like to raise a child with Down's syndrome, spending 'countless hours' reading up on the condition.

'We saw kids that are actors, entrepreneurs, they get married,' Keston said. 'They do things that any kids can do.'

Delaney was born with Down's syndrome in July 2013, but had none of the other medical issues doctors feared she might have.

Her third birthday is just a few months away.

'We just want to show parents out there, you don't have to lose hope,' Andrea said.
Drones could be bringing parcels to your door within two years, thanks to a bill that left the Senate today.

The bipartisan aviation policy bill, which passed the Senate 95-3 Tuesday, demands that the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) authorize package deliveries by drones within two years.

The bill, which must now be debated by the House, also makes changes to various regulations including those affecting airport security and airplane pricing.

Buy in the sky: The bill that passed the Senate Tuesday demands that the Federal Aviation Authority OK package deliveries by drones, such as this prototype Amazon design, within two years

It says that the agency must create a small drone 'air carrier certificate' for operators of delivery drone fleets, similar to the safety certificates granted to commercial airlines.

These rules are needed for Amazon and other companies to deploy fleets of delivery drones.

Another provision would establish criminal penalties for the reckless use of drones, aimed at penalizing operators who fly drones near airports without prior approval.

However, The White House criticized the bill's delivery-drone language as 'overly prescriptive' and said it would disrupt the agency's ongoing efforts to write safety regulations for commercial drone flights.

On April 3, the FAA announced that it had received recommendations for delivery drone regulations from a committee comprising drone and aviation experts, companies interested in using delivery drones, and others related to the subject.

The bill also makes changes to regulations concerning airport security and private carriers.

Responding to the attacks on Brussels last month, the bill authorizes an increase of government 'viper teams' - which search suspicious passengers in public areas, often with sniffer dogs - from 30 60.

It also requires the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to use private companies to market and enroll more people in its PreCheck program while ensuring PreCheck screening lanes are open during high-volume travel times.

The TSA has come under fire due to long waiting times caused by understaffing, and it is hoped that vetting passengers before they reach security checkpoints will get them through the system faster, reducing wait times.

Vetting of airport employees with access to secure areas is to be enhanced, random inspections of employees are to be increased and perimeter security to be reviewed.

And secondary barriers will be demanded for all new places to keep unauthorized people from gaining access when a pilot opens the cockpit door.

The wife of a pilot killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks led the lobbying effort to require the barriers.

Security: The bill also makes amendments to security law, including doubling 'viper teams,' which use sniffer dogs to check airports, from 30 to 60

A number of consumer provisions were also added, despite protestations by the airline industry.

One provision forces airlines to refund checked bag fees to passengers whose luggage is lost or arrives more than six hours after a domestic flight has landed, and more than 12 hours after an international flight has landed.

Refunds would also be required for services not delivered, such as advance seat assignments or early boarding.

Airlines' disclosure of fees for checked bags, seat assignments, and ticket changes and cancellations would also be standardized to make it easier for consumers to compare prices.

They would also have to seat families together at no extra charge.

Missing from the bill, though, was a Democratic amendment the Senate rejected that would have barred airlines from further shrinking the size of seats and required the FAA to set minimum dimensions for passenger space.

The bill also extends the Federal Aviation Administration's programs and powers through to October 1, 2017. That authority is due to expire on July 15.

South Dakota Senator John Thune (R) proposed the bill as a bipartisan-friendly way to push changes to aviation law through a House that is currently caught up in a long-running discussion over whether to privatize air traffic control operations.

Airlines have been pressing for privatization, arguing that the FAA's culture is too slow and inflexible to finish the air traffic system's transition from old radar technology to satellites.

The modernization has dragged on for more than a decade and fallen short of promised financial benefits and reduced congestion.

But those changes are opposed by Democrats and powerful GOP committee chairmen reluctant to cede a large share of Congress' authority over aviation to a private, nonprofit corporation.

Thune's bill is a way to tackle issues with aviation laws without broaching that dicussion.
Women's rights: Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, a national group that works for women's equality, said the wording of the Navy advert undersells a woman's potential

The U.S. Navy said Tuesday it has scrapped a national recruiting mailer that promised women they can enlist without compromising their feminine side and pursue careers that 'most girls aren't even aware of.'

Navy officials said they made the decision amid criticism that the wording was condescending and perpetuated stereotypes. Lt. Commander Nate Christensen, a Navy spokesman, said officials also have launched a review of all their mailer templates after The Associated Press inquired about the brochure, which has been sent to nearly 203,000 people in numerous states in the last few years.

The mailer invites women to take on 'the kind of exciting, hands-on work that most girls aren't even aware of. Making your mark in career areas that certainly aren't just for the guys. And what's more, you can do all this while staying in touch with your feminine side  and while bettering your world along the way.'

Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, a national group that works for women's equality, said the wording undersells a woman's potential.

The recruiting mailer promised women they could join while staying in touch with their feminine side. Navy officials said they've scrapped the plan amid criticism that the wording was condescending and stereotypical

Military might: Women of the Army, Marine Corps., Navy and Air Force are brought together as a reminder of the annual observance of Armed Forces Day, which is traditionally the third Saturday in May

Pioneer: Mary Louise Jorgensen was the first woman tactical jet pilot to be assigned to Miramar Naval Air Station at San Diego. Frustrated by an office job, she joined the Navy in 1972. She's said to be only the second woman in the Navy to become qualified to fly a jet

'You wouldn't recruit a boy by saying that,' said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, a national group that works for women's equality. 'What does it say about the Navy? It's relying on old stereotypes instead of a picture of modern women who can really make a contribution to the Navy and how needed they are.'

Christensen said the wording doesn't reflect the Navy's values, saying women make up 18 percent of the Navy and are indispensable to national security.

'Women have shown great courage and sacrifice  we simply could not accomplish the mission without them,' he said.

The Navy's advertising agency, Campbell Ewald, created the mailer's content five years ago, Navy officials said. Campbell Ewald officials didn't immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

Breaking barriers: Pictured at her desk in her New York City in 1950, Mrs. Anna Rosenberg was the first woman in history to be named to a post of authority over the Army, Navy and Air Force

Flying freely: In 1973 Judith Ann Neuffer who was 24 at the time, was the first woman to fly solo in a Navy Aircraft

It's not clear how much the Navy spent on the flyer because the costs were part of an advertising contract that wasn't itemized, Navy officials said.

Since it was created, the brochure has been mailed to about 202,900 people across recruiting districts that include parts of numerous states, including Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin, Christensen said.
to the ground, killing all those on board

The plane's nose pitched up and the pilot couldn't steer down, causing the aircraft to stall before

A crash on an American air base in Afghanistan that killed 14 people was caused by a case of night-vision googles, it has been determined.

The accident, which happened in October of last year, was initially claimed by the Taliban, but it has since been determined human error caused the C-130J Super Hercules to crash.

The dead included the pilot, co-pilot, two loadmasters, two security team members and five contractors as passengers, according to CNN, who also reported three Afghans were also killed.

A U.S. military plane crash that killed 14 people on October 3 of last year was caused by a case of goggles, it has been determined

Captain Jordan Pierson (left), 28, was among 11 Americans killed in a plane crash in Afghanistan last year, which was caused by a goggles case being placed by a steering shaft

A report released by the U.S. Military says the seemingly innocuous night-vision googles case was the reason the flight crashed 28-seconds after takeoff.

As crews loaded and unloaded cargo from the plane the pilot stuck the case in front of the cockpit yoke, which steers the plane in flight.

The pilot was trying to make the tail, where elevators are used to load items, easier to access for crews.

Captain Jonathan Golden was killed in the crash, which happened 28 seconds after the flight took off from Jalalabad Airport

Staff Sergeant Ryan D. Hammond, 26, of Moundsville, West Virginia (left) and Senior Airman Quinn L. Johnson-Harris, 21, of Milwaukee died in the accident

However, before take off, the pilot forgot to remove the case.

As soon as the plane took off the cockpit yoke was blocked by the goggle case, causing the plane's nose to pitch up too sharply.

The pilot 'misidentified' the issue with the plane and therefore used the wrong technique to correct the error.

The plane stalled and crashed, bursting into flames when it hit the ground and killing everyone aboard.

Airman 1st Class Kcey E. Ruiz, 21, of McDonough, Georgia, also died in the crash. Along with the eleven Americans, three Afghans were killed in the accident

Senior Airman Nathan C. Sartain, 29, of Pensacola, Florida, (pictured) is the final crew member to be identified among the deceased

'The blocking of the flight controls during loading operations is a non-standard procedure as such, there is no regulatory guidance to prohibit the act, or to address the proper placement and removal of the object blocking the controls,' the report said.

Because the pilot made an error that is not a standard practice for military pilots, there was no regulation in place to prevent the accident.

He would've had to know on his own to remove the goggles case.

The Pentagon has identified the airmen killed in the crash as Captain Jonathan J. Golden, 33, of Camarillo, California; Captain Jordan B. Pierson, 28, of Abilene, Texas; Staff Sergeant Ryan D. Hammond, 26, of Moundsville, West Virginia; Senior Airman Quinn L. Johnson-Harris, 21, of Milwaukee; Senior Airman Nathan C. Sartain, 29, of Pensacola, Florida; and Airman 1st Class Kcey E. Ruiz, 21, of McDonough, Georgia.
A mother is accused of orchestrating a fight involving several teen girls that was captured on video in Mississippi.

Angela Welborn was charged with simple assault when she made her initial appearance in a Covington County courtroom Monday afternoon, WLBT reported.

The family of the teen victim says that Welborn arranged the fight that included her two daughters.

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Busted: Angela Welborn (pictured leaving court) was charged with simple assault when she made her initial appearance in a Covington County courtroom Monday afternoon

The family of the teen victim says that Welborn arranged the fight that included her two daughters. Throughout the video, the victim suffers what appear to be brutal punches and kicks from the two sisters and Welborn

Throughout the video of the fight, the victim appears to suffer brutal punches and kicks from the two sisters and Welborn.

At several points, the video shows the victim lying flat out on the ground while being horrifically attacked in the vicious fight as other stand around and do nothing to stop it.

The Covington County Sheriff's Office says their investigation is still ongoing and that more charges are possible.

It's unclear when the incident took place, but it happened in the middle of a Mississippi highway, near the Smith/Covington County line, according to WLBT.

Welborn was granted bond, but the judge told her not to contact the teen victim on Facebook or any other social media.

The victim's father told WLBT that he hopes felony charges are filed against Welborn and the others that planned the fight.

The names of the victim and Welborn's daughters have not been released by authorities.

It's also unclear what led up to the vicious fight between the two sides or if the victim required medical treatment for any possible injuries suffered.
And Virginia also refused a law that would allow LGBT discrimination

Pearl Jam and Cirque du Soleil are two of many who cancelled NC events

NC Gov. Pat McRory is now asking attorneys how his law will be affected

But a 4th Circuit Court of Appeals said that was sex discrimination

A transgender Virginia teen won the right to use the boy's toilets at his high school Tuesday in an appeals court decision that will affect four other states - including North Carolina.

Tuesday's decision came from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that Gloucester County School Board was discriminating against Gavin Grimm, 16, by making him use female toilets in line with his biological sex.

That decision establishes legal precedent in all five states of the 4th Circuit, including North Carolina, which on April 1 passed a bill forcing people to use bathrooms based on the sex on their birth certificate.

Victory: Gavin Grimm (pictured), 16, who is biologically female, won an appeals court decision to allow him to use the boys' bathrooms in his Virginia high school Tuesday

Precedent: Grimm's victory sets a precedent for all 4th Circuit states, including North Carolina, whose governor Pat McRory (pictured) signed a bill in March restricting how transgender people could use bathrooms

Grimm, who was born female but identifies as male, was allowed to use the boys' bathroom at the school for several weeks in 2014, until parents complained.

He was then told he could use either the girls' bathroom or a single private stall - a policy he called stigmatizing. School officials said it respected the privacy of all students.

The U.S. Justice Department filed a 'statement of interest' in Grimm's case in July, saying that not allowing students to use the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity amounts to sex discrimination.

And now Grimm has won in the state of Virginia - creating a precedent that may concern politicians in neighboring North Carolina.

On March 25, North Carolina's House of Representatives voted 82-26 for House Bill 2, which ordered public schools, government agencies and public college to designate bathrooms by biological sex stated on a person's birth certificate.

It also removed protections that stopped businesses discriminating against people based on their sexuality or gender.

Now, however, precedent has been set in all 4th Circuit states: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia and Maryland.

North Carolina Governor Pat McRory is to meet with house attorneys to see how Tuesday's decision will affect the bill that he signed, North Carolina News reported.

And back on March 26, Joshua Block, attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Citizen-Times: 'What the court rules in Gavins case will likely be precedent for district courts in North Carolina that they will have to follow.

'It does seem odd that even though the governor and legislature presumably know a decision is going to come down from the Fourth Circuit, that they rushed in to enact this sweeping policy without seeing how the court rules.

'It seems like they are exposing the state to a lot of legal liability for no reason.'

Protest: The North Carolina bill also allowed businesses to discriminate based on gender or sexuality, leading to objections from many - including Pearl Jam (pictured) who cancelled their North Carolina concert

Standing up: Cyndi Lauper (pictured) stood up to the law by promising to give all money raised from her North Carolina concert to a group trying to fight the North Carolina law

This is just the latest in a string of headaches for North Carolina, which has suffered an avalanche of bad press since House Bill 2 came into effect.

Immediately after the announcement, PayPal, one of many companies that objected to the bill's announcement, cancelled its $3.6million plans to open a center in Charlotte that would have brought 400 jobs to the state.

More recently, Monday saw bands Pearl Jam and Boston both cancelling their North Carolina gigs to protest the law.

A few days before, Cyndi Lauper announced proceeds from her concert in the state would be given to a group trying to overturn the bill.

And Cirque du Soleil also joined the boycott Friday, cancelling their North Carolina shows.

Other states have toyed with the idea of passing laws similar to North Carolina's, but have stepped back from signing.

Virginia's own Governor Terry McAuliffe vetoed a 'religious exemption' on March 30 bill that would have stopped the state from punishing religious groups that refused services related to gay marriages.

And Georgia Governor Nathan Deal likewise refused to sign a bill two days before that would have allowed religious groups to decline to serve or hire someone based on their faith.

His decision appeared to be in part influenced by threats by Disney, AMC and other TV and film companies to stop filming in the state if it were signed.

The appeals court's decision on Grimm's case came after a federal judge had earlier rejected the sex discrimination claim.

Grimm, 16, told his parents he was transgender in April 2014.

They helped him legally change his name, and a psychologist diagnosed him with gender dysphoria, characterized by stress stemming from conflict between one's gender identity and assigned sex at birth.

Grimm had his breasts removed and began hormone treatment to deepen his voice and give him a more masculine appearance, ABC reported.

Rejection: Virginia's governor, Terry McAuliffe, rejected a bill in March that proposed allowing religious groups to refuse services related to gay marriage
John McDonnell has vowed to back all protests as he urged anti-austerity protesters to help him 'bring this Government down' before the 2020 election.

In an incendiary speech to activists in Trafalgar Square, the shadow chancellor said Labour under Jeremy Corbyn would offer 'solidarity' with the 'struggle' against the Conservative government.

Mr McDonnell, an avowed Marxist, praised disabled protesters for 'storming Parliament' on a regular basis.

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, pictured at the rally, said he would back protests 'on the streets' to bring down the Government

Thousands of people from the 'people's assembly' marched through central London to protest against Government cuts

Mr McDonnell was plucked from obscurity last year after Mr Cameron's unexpected majority win at the general election thrust Mr Corybn to an improbably landslide victory in the Labour leadership contest.

He appeared on the picket line with junior doctors in January to the frustration of many moderate Labour MPs.

But his latest remarks are set to reignite tensions within Labour over the direction Mr Corbyn is taking the party, which is lagging behind the Tories in most polls ahead of crucial local and devolved elections in little more than two weeks time.

Mr McDonnell said: 'For too long Labour leaders in the past have sought to be embarrassed by their association with struggles on the street or industrial action. That era is over.'

'I give you this commitment - whether it is in Parliament or on the picket or on streets, this Labour leadership will be with you.'

The shadow chancellor continued: 'When they come to academise our schools, if the teachers wish to take industrial action we will be with them in solidarity.

'And the same with nurses and their bursaries - it's the same every other struggle as we go forward now, because above all else now we need solidarity.'
ISIS have been accused of killing its own wounded fighters in order to sell their organs on the black market in Iraq.

The shocking claims were made by the Arabic-language al-Sabah newspaper, who quoted an unnamed source in Mosul.

'Doctors were threatened to take out the body organs of a wounded ISIL militant,' the report said.

ISIS have been accused of killing its own wounded fighters in order to sell their organs on the black market

ISIS have reportedly created a designated medical team, led by a German doctor, who extract the organs

The jihadi group have allegedly been extracting vital organs from their wounded fighters and have been selling them abroad to raise much needed funds for their fighters dreadful salary.

Prisoners held by ISIS have also reportedly been forced to give blood to the jihadi group, according to Fars news.

The news comes as it was revealed the initial contingent of 170 U.S. soldiers who entered Baghdad as advisers in June 2014 has now rapidly growth.

3,000 American security workers are now involved in Iraq with Defense Secretary Ash Carter authorizing a total above 4,000. More increases seem likely.

The jihadi group have allegedly been extracting vital organs from their wounded fighters and using them to sell abroad to raise much needed funds for their fighters dreadful salary

ISIS have developed a shocking reputation for extreme brutality including public executions in the streets

What the Pentagon calls 'tightening the noose' on the militants, critics call indecisive steps with limited chance to succeed.

One of the most vocal critics of Obama's Iraq policy, Republican Sen. John McCain, dismissed Carter's announcement that the U.S. would send another 217 troops to Iraq in support of the Iraqi security forces' preparation for an assault on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul.

'Grudging incrementalism,' McCain called it.

Patrick Martin, an Iraq specialist at the Institute for the Study of War, is skeptical that the U.S. approach is sufficiently aggressive.

'The addition of 217 advisers ... is not going to be nearly enough to actually make a significant difference on the ground in the near future,' he said in an interview.
A former TV journalist and radio show host who survived breast cancer has been shot dead by her husband in a murder-suicide, police said.

Denise Bohn-Stewart, 45, who lived in Berrien County, Michigan, was found dead in the bedroom of her family home alongside husband Eric, 56, on Tuesday.

Police say Eric shot his wife 'several times' while the couple's three children, aged 10, nine and eight, were in the house before going to the basement and also killing himself.

Denise Bohn-Stewart, 45 (left), was shot to death by husband Eric, 56 (right), at the home the couple shared with their three children ged 10, nine and eight (center) before killing himself, police said

Officer's were called to the property at 6.30am by the couple's eldest son, nine, who said his father was dead in the basement with 'blood all over' and he couldn't find his mother

The bodies were discovered at around 6.30am by one of the couple's sons at their $575,000 home before the boy called 911.

Police dispatch recordings reveal the boy found his father 'passed away in the basement' with 'blood all over' and said he couldn't find his mother anywhere.

The children told police they heard 'bangs' before finding their father dead, while police said there were bullet holes in the wall of the property.

Fortunately none of the infants were hurt in the attack according to WSBT, where Bohn-Stewart previously worked.

Lieutenant Chuck Christensen, Michigan State Police, said 'there is some indication this was planned', adding that Stewart used a handgun to carry out the killings.

When officers arrived at the property they found the three children on the front steps of the house. The youngsters were taken in by police and are now being cared for by family, WNDU reports.

Officers investigating the shooting say they spoke to neighbors of the couple Tuesday morning and discovered they were having marital issues, but did not go into detail.

Police who spoke to neighbors at the couple's $575,000 home say there were marital disputes between the pair, and there is evidence the shooting was planned

While Stewart (pictured left and right with her husband) was known for her work as a TV and radio journalist, she was also known for her charity work, having survived breast cancer eight years ago

Stewart worked as a TV reporter for 14 years at WSBT before leaving to co-host the morning show on 98.3 The Coast, based in Benton Harbor, Michigan, starting in 2015.

Fellow host Johnny Reinhardt was among those paying tribute to Stewart online Tuesday, writing: I am not sure what to say.Denise and I shared so many laughs every morning.

'I had only known her for a short time but it was like we were brother and sister.There are no words. I didn't just lose a co-worker today. I lost a friend.'

Meanwhile John Haferkamp, WSBT 22 News director, said: 'The entire WSBT 22 News family is saddened by todays tragedy.

'Denise was not only a fellow journalist, but a friend to many of us. Denise was hard-working, caring, and loved our community.

'Her strong passion for life, for news, and sharing great stories will be greatly missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with her children and family.'

As well as being known for her work as a journalist, Stewart was also prominent in the local community as a breast cancer survivor who helped raise money and awareness about the disease.

Stewart was a staff member at Susan G. Komen Michigan, a charity dedicated to helping fight the disease, helping organize events and serving as its vice president, according to the group's website.

Stewart worked for local station WSBT 22 (pictured) for 14 years before transferring to 98.3 The Coast in 2015. Staff from both companies paid tribute to her today after learning of her death

Just yesterday Stewart had posted a message on Facebook saying it has been eight years since she was declared cancer free.

Born and raised in Michigan, Stewart graduated from Michigan Lutheran High School in 1989 before attending Michigan State University.

Meanwhile husband Eric, originally from West Virginia, was a long-time employee of a nearby nuclear power plant.

A statement from plant owners says: 'Eric Stewart was a 28-year AEP employee. He was a maintenance supervisor.

'Our thoughts and prayers are with all those impacted by this terrible news, as well as with all of our employees. We have made grief counselors available to our employees.
He is also heard speaking to police, telling them everything is fine

Cumia is heard in the video searching his Long Island home for a gun

However nine extra minutes of footage has been released

The footage was taken on Brand's phone and two minutes was released at the time of the incident in December

New video emerged Sunday of the night of the alleged attack in New York

A new round of footage has mysteriously appeared online from the night that a radio shock jock was arrested for allegedly abusing his girlfriend, showing him yelling and screaming as he searches his New York home for a gun.

Anthony Cumia was arrested at his Long Island house in December after his girlfriend, Danielle Brand, 26, called police during a fight the two were having.

At the time of the incident, around two minutes of footage emerged that Brand had posted to a Periscope account, however a further nine minutes from the same night has now surfaced on YouTube, Page Six reported.

The new video shows Cumia shooing away the police as they arrive at the house, and yelling out: 'Where the f--- is my gun?'

Anthony Cumia, a controversial New York radio shock jock, was arrested in December for alleged strangulation and false imprisonment against his then-girlfriend. New footage has emerged from the night

'Hi, I'm in Long Island, I got my hand broken, I'm waiting for police to come,' Danielle Brand says in the video. Brand posted the footage to periscope with the handle Dani Golightly

Footage: In one part of the video, the camera cuts to a spot on the floor, where some white powder appears to have been spilled

Cumia can only be seen for a few seconds of the 11-minute video, and the police are not seen in the video, however Bland is talking constantly, saying that Cumia is still looking for his gun.

'He said he'd call the cops and lie to them and I'd look like an a-----e and no one would believe me,' she says.

'I'm gonna be in a lot of trouble if I don't go. I gotta go now. But  everything's fine.

'I don't know if you can see that my phone is shattered.'

At the five-minute mark, Brand is overheard talking to police.

'It was an accident, everything's fine,' she tells the officers.

When the cops leave, Cumia tells Brand: 'I can't believe you actually called the cops,' then resumes his search for his gun.

Brand offers to ask the police to help Cumia search for his gun, which he laughs off.

About nine minutes into the clip, Brand demands Cumia's checkbook and screams: 'You broke both my f---ing hands in one year!'

At another point in the video, Brand momentarily cuts to a spot on the tiled floor, where a white substance appears to have been spilled.

She can be heard saying: 'Oh god damn it. God f---ing damn it.'

As he gets up, the spill appears to be underneath a table and covered by a cloth.

Arrested: Anthony Cumia was arrested following a dispute with his girlfriend in Long Island, New York

Nassau County Police arrested Cumia at his home in Roslyn Heights on December 20, 2015, the morning after the video was made.

He was charged with strangulation in the second degree, unlawful imprisonment in the second degree, assault in the third degree and criminal mischief in the third and fourth degree, but has since pleaded not guilty.

He was ordered to stay away from Brand.

Newsday reports that Cumia allegedly 'stomped' on his girlfriend's hand, strangled her and pinned her against a wall after an argument, prosecutors said.

The fight began after Brand made a comment about a 'former dating partner' of Cumia. Brand suffered a fractured rib, swollen arm and chest pain, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors say that the fight escalated and Brand was assaulted after trying to flee the home.

'Hi, I'm in Long Island, I got my hand broken, I'm waiting for police to come,' Brand says in the video.

'I tried to call the police, but he turned the phone off,' she says.

The camera then shows Cumia coming towards the woman.

'Oh my God, don't hit me!  Stay away from me!,' she screams.

'I'll pay you to leave my house,' Cumio says. She responds by saying: 'I don't need you to pay for a car!' she screams. 'I need you to pay for my f-ing broken hand!'

Cumio then then be heard laughing. He calls the alleged victim 'baby' and suggests that they sing karaoke.

Bizzare laughter: Cumio can be heard laughing. He calls the alleged victim 'baby' and suggests that they sing karaoke

Court documents claim that when Brand tried to call the police, Cumia smashed her cellphone.

She allegedly tried to call for help from the home's landline phone, but Cumia pulled the phone from the wall.

The two allegedly broke each other cell phones.

Cumia's attorney, Alan J. Schwartz denied all allegations and said that Brand is Cumia's girlfriend and that she lives with him in his New York City apartment.

He's due back in court in January.

Cumia was fired by satellite radio company SiriusXM last year after he called a black woman a 'c***' and an 'animal b****'after claiming she punched him in the face as he took photos in Times Square.

Sirius called his remarks 'racially charged' and 'hate-filled'.

The fouled-mouthed shock jock still showed no sign of remorse. After his firing he tweeted: 'Sirius decided to cave and fire me. Welcome to bizarro world. Fired for s*** that wasn't even on the air & wasn't illegal. So, who's next?'

He wrote that he was fired via email, adding: 'F*** Sirius.'

His firing came after he explained that he was trying to take photos of the area in New York City on Tuesday night when the unidentified woman was caught in the frame.

Controversy: In an April 26, 2006 file photo, radio shock jock Anthony Cumia leaves CBS Radio studios on 57th Street with fans after finishing their first morning show in New York. Cumia, a radio personality who hosted 'Opie and Anthony', is facing charges over a fight with a woman at his New York home

She objected to being in the images and punched him multiple times as she called him a 'white motherf***er', he claimed on his Twitter feed.

He uploaded photos that he claim show her throwing punches at him, branding her a 'c*** animal'.

'Savage violent animal f***s prey on white people,' he continued in the hours-long rant. 'Easy targets. This C*** has no clue how lucky she was. She belted me 10 times. I had a gun.

'She's lucky I was a white legal gun owner or she'd be dead. Then 5 blacks started giving me s***!'

'I hope a home boy beats her to death,' he added. 'They aren't people.'

In another post, Cumia wrote: 'There's a deep seeded problem with violence in the black community. Try to address it and you'll be exiled to racistville. But it's real.'

As he posted his rant, he received mixed responses, with some people pointing out that she had mentioned the color of his skin, while others attacked him for being racist.

Racist rant: The 54-year-old Cumia was fired by satellite radio company SiriusXM last year after he called a black woman a 'c***' and an 'animal b****'after claiming she punched him in the face as he took photos in Times Square.

Predictably, he had no time for that.

'I was assaulted and used 'mean' words on Twitter and I'M the bad guy in all this?? Lol!' he tweeted.

After reports emerged about his rant, Cumia denied he was racist and was simply giving his attacker the lack of courtesy she deserved.

Cumia has been on air with his co-host Greg Opie Hughes for 20 years in a career that has been dogged with controversy. The show has been fined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) twice.

They were fined $21,000 for shows from between 2000 and 2001, in which a 17-year-old girl was told to take off her underwear and rub a telephone over herself.
A Massachusetts father-of-three is dead after trying to break up a fight after a night out with friends, according to an employee of a nearby bar and Boston police.

Brian Hingston, 45, of Quincy, Massachusetts, was believed to be celebrating a bachelor party when a party bus dropped him and friends off in a parking lot.

The group was dropped off in a parking lot across from Eire Pub and behind Greenhills Irish Bakery, according to an employee of the pub who declined to give his name.

Massachusetts father-of-three Brian Hingston (right) was out for a night with friends when he tried to break up a fight that broke out in the group

Hingston's wife Tammy (right) told Fox 25 he was accidentally pushed and hit his head. He later died from his injuries

The employee said the pub closed at 12am and the fight happened around 1am on Sunday.

As two members of the party began to fight, Hingston tried to break up the fight, his wife Tammy Street Hingston told Fox 25.

Tammy said Hingston was hit during the fight and fell backward, hitting his head.

The father of three later died from his injuries.

Boston Police say they are investigating the death after some sort of fight, but no one has been arrested yet.
who reported she had forgotten her own address

Ten days later she was ordered home after appearing intoxicated on bench

Investigation found she also referred to police called to

County Judge Jacqueline Schwartz is being investigated by the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission over reports of her inappropriate behavior

A Miami-Dade judge may face suspension after she appeared intoxicated on the bench and launched into a profanity-laden rant at a Greek restaurant.

County Judge Jacqueline Schwartz is being investigated by the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission over reports of her inappropriate behavior.

The judge had told a waiter: 'You are a f***ing idiot, you don't know who I am,' after she was refused more alcohol at Ergon Greek Restaurant, Miami on March 18, according to a state reports.

Staff and diners told police she had been slurring her words, spilling her wine and 'acting in an irrational and disorderly manner,' the Miami Herald reports.

When officers and paramedics were called to the restaurant, she referred to the police as 'pigs' and told them 'couldn't do anything' because she is a judge.

She was eventually taken home by a friend and reported herself to the commission.

A friend drove Schwartz home. She later reported the episode herself to the commission, insisting she had done nothing wrong.

Just over a week later, the judge landed herself in trouble once again when she appeared to be impaired while serving on the bench at South Dade Courthouse.

Court staff and police officers later testified that the judge had been 'unsteady' on her feet, 'slurring' and 'unable to concentrate.'

Chief Judge Bertila Soto ordered her home. Schwartz initially insisted she could drive herself before her bailiff eventually took her home.

A state investigative report, released on Monday, found that the judge had not been able to remember her own address.

Court staff and police officers later testified that the judge had been 'unsteady' on her feet, 'slurring' and 'unable to concentrate' while serving on the bench at South Dade Courthouse

The judge had told a waiter: 'You are a f***ing idiot, you don't know who I am,' after she was refused more alcohol at Ergon Greek Restaurant (pictured), Miami on March 18, according to a state reports

The investigation for the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission on Monday found that Schwartz should be suspended over her behavior.

Florida Supreme Court will make the final decision.

Schwartz's lawyer, Jeffrey Feiler, told the commission that his client had not been drunk but was taking a new prescription medication.

The judge is currently on paid medical leave after being sent home from the second incident on March 28.

It is not the first time that Schwartz has been in trouble over her behavior.

In June 2014, the judge allegedly told a store owner to 'go f*** yourself' after he posted a huge campaign poster of Schwartz's rival during a re-election campaign.
An 18-year-old woman continued to livestream the rape of her teenage friend on Periscope because she 'got caught up on the likes' the video was receiving, a court heard.

Marina Lonina, a student from Ohio, was allegedly 'giggling and laughing' as she used her phone to film the February assault.

She failed to help her friend, who cannot be named for legal reasons, while she was pinned down and instead enjoyed the viewers' feedback, prosecutors alleged.

The teenager, who claimed she was trying to record the assault as evidence, pleaded not guilty to rape, kidnap, sexual battery and pandering sexual matter involving a minor. A judge set her bond at $125,000.

Marina Lonina (pictured), 18, continued to livestream the rape of her teenage friend on Periscope because she 'got caught up on the likes' the video was receiving, a court heard

Police say Lonina (above) and the victim, who were friends, were socializing with Raymond Gates, 29, at a home in Columbus, Ohio, on February 27

Her co-defendant, Raymond Gates, 29, also pleaded not guilty, with a judge setting his bond at $300,000.

Prosecutors flatly dismissed the defense that Lonina was recording the rape as evidence.

Ron OBrien, the Franklin County Prosecutor, told the New York Times Lonina had got 'caught up' while discussing the case earlier this week.

He added to WNCN News: 'Based on the video that I saw it didnt appear for the most part of it that she was attempting to help the victim.'

The court heard Lonina and her friend met Gates at a Columbus mall for the first time the day before the assault.

He is said to have bought them a bottle of vodka and encouraged them to meet him in Columbus the following day, it was said.

When they met, Gates allegedly pinned the friend, who was said to have been drinking, down and raped her.

The case came to light when authorities were contacted by an out-of-state friend of the woman saw the images, Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien said.

Lonina (left) and co-defendant Gates (right) were charged with rape, kidnapping, sexual battery and pandering sexually-oriented matter involving a minor

Gates (above) is accused of raping the 17-year-old girl at his home in Columbus while Lonina filmed on Periscope

Lonina (pictured) was also charged with illegal use of a minor in a nudity-oriented material or performance, related to the alleged use of the social media livestreaming app Periscope

Lonina's lawyer, Sam Shamansky, acknowledged his client filmed the February 27 assault but said she was trying to get the girl out of the house where the attack happened.

He added that she was in the habit of filming everything using the application, which allows users to stream live video.

He said: 'She does everything possible to contain the situation even to the point of asking while it's being filmed to these Periscope followers, "What should I do now? What should I do now?"'.

Lonina and her friend are naturalized U.S. citizens from Russia, and Gates is also of Russian descent, Mr O'Brien said.

He claimed Lonina is seen trying to help only briefly during the 10-minute video. The victim was said to be clearly screaming 'stop' and 'no' during the assault.

He added: 'People need to know and understand that the use of a smartphone to video events can constitute serious felony crimes.

'They should think twice before they use their smartphones to either photograph or video anything that's of a sexual nature.'

Lonina is also charged with livestreaming her friend nude the day before the assault. Her attorney Josh Bedtely said Lonina 'categorically denies these charges'.
of the two key women in his life: his mother, Nelle, and second wife, Nancy

In a new book on the president, he offers an

He gave his wife the nickname 'Mommy' but his mother was the real influence on Ronald Reagan's life, a new book from one of his closest aides claims.

The former president drew personal and religious inspiration from Nelle, a preacher who wrote morality plays, who he saw as his 'rock'

Reagan adopted his mother's values - dedication to others, a deep religious conviction and a love of God - and they 'formed an ideal for him to adhere to'.

Nancy Reagan never achieved such influence and around her Reagan 'rarely yielded his position' and was the 'decidedly dominant force' in their relationship.

James Rosebush describes Reagan as a 'loner' and somebody who 'had his own plan' despite his wife's attempts to take charge.

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Mommy dearest: The future president was captured on set with his mother Nelle and his wife Nancy as he filmed Tropic Zone in 1953

Family: Ronald Reagan, aged around three or four, standing beside his mother Nelle, while his brother Neil is closer to his father Jack, an alcoholic. Rosebush writes that Nelle gave Reagan his values

Proud son: Reagan and his mother during the war, when he largely in the First Motion Picture Unit

He writes that she tried to inflate her position by 'stating the obvious' like she was the last one to speak to him at night.

The book says that in reality 'Reagan was not about to be controlled by anyone'.

The claims by Rosebush, Nancy Reagan's chief of staff and the president's deputy assistant, run against most biographers who portray the former First Lady as interfering.

Trusted aide: James Rosebush worked for both the Reagans and is now writing about the presidency

She supposedly had the final say over presidential appointments and even influenced relations with the Soviets during the historic 1985 Geneva summit.

Nancy Reagan, who died in March, supposedly ran the White House with a 'Gucci-clad fist', such was her obsession with fashion and control.

Rosebush, who joined the White House staff in 1981, says this is all wrong and the the biggest female influence in the life of Mr Reagan was always his mother.

In 'True Reagan: What Made Ronald Reagan Great and Why It Matters', he says the future President was 'enormously influenced by his earlier days under the tutelage of his very religious and virtuous mother'

Reagan supposedly admired his mother's 'instinctive motivation to give to others' and saw her 'unselfishness as a distinctly American trait'

Their bonds were forged in rural Tampico, Illinois, where Mr Reagan's father Jack was an alcoholic; at the age of 11 he had to drag him in out of the snow after he collapsed in a stupor outside their home.

Nelle was a substitute teacher for the regular pastor in their rural Illinois home - her son would go on to be a Sunday school teacher in his early life.

She read the Bible to him and made him read it back to her and memorize key passages.

Nelle, who had been an aspiring actress, also wrote morality plays and made her son perform them.

Rosebush writes that even though her family were incredibly poor, Nelle was always the first to offer to help others in need. Nelle would also go into prisons to minister aide to the inmates.

The book says: '(Nelle) gave (her son) a feeling of security because of her foundation principles, love of God, knowledge of the Bible and desire to help people

'Nelle was his rock, and her values became his values and helped him deal with an often-absent father and other challenges that he encountered throughout his life.

At work: Shortly before his inauguration, Nancy and Ronald Reagan flew from Washington DC to the west coast on the president-elect's jet, where Nancy was seen making plans for the White House with her interior designer Ted Graber

In action: Rosebush (center left) was Nancy Reagan's deputy chief of staff but offers a differing assessment of her role

'He told me how he stuck to the beliefs Nelle instilled in him, tried never to deviate from them, and they formed an ideal for him to adhere to. He was proud of the fact that he never had a period in his life when he abandoned or rebelled against his upbringing or the church.

'Nelle's activism and confident example gave Reagan a respect and an ability to work with have relationships with strong women.

'From the way Reagan talked about his mother I could see that she provided a safe harbor of stability for him as he grew up, which his father did not.

'Reagan found security in adopting her religious beliefs, which were grounded in Bible teaching.'

Rosebush argues that Nelle's role in Reagan's life has always played second fiddle to that of Nancy, who he met in 1950.

By that stage the future Mr and Mrs Reagan were already writing each other love letters in which he would tell her: 'Mr. Reagan loves you with all his heart'.

The couple were known for their public displays of affection and Nancy was known for 'The Gaze', a starstruck look she gave her husband.

Once they were in the White House however, Mrs Reagan became her husband's closest and most influential adviser by waging a 'quiet campaign' of influence on him behind closed doors, biographer H.W Brands has written.

In 'Reagan: The Life', the first full biography of the President since his death in 2004, he said that she convinced him not to cut benefits so deeply to fund the Star Wars program.

Mrs Reagan was also supposedly against military intervention in Nicaragua and told him not to make a controversial trip to a German cemetery.

Author Kitty Kelley revealed in her unauthorized biography of Nancy in 1991 a startling admission by her husband to aides who gave him the agenda for his first Geneva summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.

Reagan supposedly told them: 'Have you shown this to Nancy?'

Lasting image: Rosebush's assessment is different to that of most other biographers who see Nancy as a dominant figure in his presidency

When the answer came back 'no', the President is said to have replied: 'Well, get back to me after she's passed it.'

Rosebush says that despite all of these claims, when it came to official matters the President was actually the one firmly in command.

He claims that Reagan was deliberately enigmatic about his thoughts and 'always reserved judgement about what he thought was right'.

He writes: 'At times White House observers felt that Reagan was dominated by Nancy and that she was the real power in this political couple.

'From my position I could see that she was hardworking, smart, fiercely loyal and supportive spouse, yet i could also see that Reagan rarely yielded his position on policy issues to the First Lady.

'She frequently stated the obvious that she alone had the last word at night and the first word in the morning with the President'.

Rosebush says there is 'no question' that Mrs Reagan had influence on some policy issues but overall the President 'held tightly to the reins'.

'In this way he was the decidedly dominant force between the two of them', the book says.

Rosebush is forgiving in his analysis of Mrs Reagan's intentions and says that she was just trying to shore up what she saw as her husband's 'vulnerability' on personnel issues.

But this ran up against Reagan's faith in his own choices and his tendency to see the good in people.

In fact Reagan had an 'obstinate streak' that not even his wife could break through.

Rosebush writes: 'He never abdicated what he saw as his principal responsibility to do the job the way that would accomplish the greatest good - despite what others, including Nancy, thought he should do'.
Donald Trump's high-flying presidential campaign suffered an embarrassing mishap on the eve of his expected triumph in the New York primary, as it was revealed the candidate failed to keep the registration current on a small plane the candidate uses to fly to smaller airports around the country.

The records show that Cessna Citation X 750 owned by DJT Operations lapsed three months ago, back on January 31.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks confirmed the oversight to DailyMail.com after the New York Times reported on the mishap.

Grounded: Trump's Cessna Citation X has been flying without a current registration since January

A plane downer: The Feds warned Trump to pay the $5 fee to keep registration current

'The standard renewal process is just about complete,' she said, without providing further information on whether the plane would have to be mothballed for any period of time.

The three-year registration lapsed after the campaign failed to pay a $5 fee.

Trump used the plane to barnstorm across upstate New York in search of votes leading up to Tuesday's primary. On Monday, he used to to fly to Buffalo.

According to the FAA, failure to register an aircraft 'may result in regulatory and criminal sanctions.' The FAA 'may assess civil penalties' up to $27,500 as well as fines of 'up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment for up to three years.'

Those fines are set by a federal statute passed by Congress, although it is highly unlikely that either Trump or the operator of the plane would get hit with the full brunt of the sanction.

Trump's plane mishap was revealed as he was hoping for a big win in New York's primary Tuesday

Trump is set to fly to the small regional airport near Salisbury on Maryland's Eastern Shore for a campaign rally on Wednesday, where the campaign is hoping for a triumphant celebration of a big win in New York.

It is unclear which of Trump's fleet of private aircraft would fit the bill if the Cessna is sidelined.

An airport official told MailOnline that the runway was capable of accommodating larger aircraft such as the Boeing 757 also owned by Trump, though she didn't specify what plane Trump would use.

Trump does at least one of his civic duties by voting Tuesday

'We are aware he's coming to Salisbury. His plane can land here,' said the official, who didn't want her name used.

Trump relies on his aircraft to make an outsized impression on voters, occasionally staging campaign events in front of his massive 757 with 'Trump' emblazoned on the side.

Campaigning in Iowa, Trump even provided helicopter rides for children.
A group of surfers are being sued for allegedly harassing outsiders who try and ride the waves at a super desirable southern California surf spot.

Stories of confrontation in Lunada Bay, which is south of Los Angeles, have plagued the surfing location for years as the infamous group of local surfers known as the 'Lunada Bay Boys' fiercely protect the area.

The class action lawsuit filed last week by surfers Cory Spencer and Diana Milena Reed, asks a federal judge to prevent the group of surfers from congregating at the public beaches in wealthy Palos Verdes Estates, including Lunada Bay, which is known for its breathtaking views.

Authorities have been accused of looking the other way as the gang threatened outsiders, tossed rocks at them and vandalized their cars.

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A lawsuit filed last week by surfers Cory Spencer (above) and Diana Milena Reed, asks a judge to prevent the group of surfers known as 'Lunada Bay Boys' from congregating at the beaches in Palos Verdes Estates

Spencer is an alleged victim of the Bay Boys harassment and is also a police officer. He told CBS News: 'I was ran over in the water. I was injured. This is a gang. They do meet all those definitions. There's no denying that.'

Stories of confrontation in Lunada Bay have plagued the surfing location for years as the 'Bay Boys' fiercely protect the area. Above surfers ride a wave in Lunada Bay last year

Attorney Kurt Franklin told the Los Angeles Daily News that his firm has received dozens of calls and emails from people who say they've experienced harassment at the surf spot.

The suit targets the city, its police chief and eight alleged Bay Boys.

It seeks a gang injunction that would ban the Bay Boys from the surfing spot and also force them to pay fines of up to $30,000, the Daily News reported.

In addition, smartphones and computer communications between the group of surfers could be traced by forensic investigators to find additional members that belong to the gang.

The Daily News reported that the Bay Boys communicate in group chats and also over walkie talkies.

It's alleged they listen to police scanners to coordinate efforts above and below the bluffs to taunt people who are not locals in the area.

Forensic investigators could search the Bay Boys' smartphone and computer communications to find additional members.

The surfers allegedly communicate in group chats and over walkie talkies and listen to police scanners to coordinate efforts above and below the bluffs to taunt non-locals.

Attorney Vic Otten (above), who is also representing Spencer and Reed in the lawsuit, told CBS News that he's confident he has the evidence to prove that the Bay Boys are a gang

The lawsuit seeks a gang injunction that would ban the Bay Boys from the surfing spot and also force them to pay fines of up to $30,000. Above a surfer rides a huge wave in Lunada Bay

According to CBS News, last October a woman filmed video of a surfer getting punched and handed it over to police.

In addition, Spencer is an alleged victim and is also a police officer.

'I was ran over in the water. I was injured,' Spencer told CBS News.

'I finally got up the courage after 32 years of surfing to come and surf here and the rumors came alive and it's time to end this gang mentality here.

'This is a gang. They do meet all those definitions. There's no denying that.'

Attorney Vic Otten, who is also representing Spencer and Reed in the lawsuit, told CBS News that he's confident he has the evidence to prove that the Bay Boys are a gang.

'This beach has been stolen from the public,' Otten told CBS News.

'Rarely do lawyers have evidence like the tape from the two British guys that's cited to my lawsuit.'

In a statement, the city of Palos Verde Estates told CBS that the police department 'takes seriously its public safety mission and has, and will continue to monitor and enforce the laws in Lunada Bay.'
The Obama administration is to forgive $7.8 billion of student debt for hundreds of thousands of disabled graduates.

Today the Department of Education announced a new process for identifying 400,000 borrowers with disabilities who are eligible for the federal loan-forgiveness program.

Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell said that too few people have been taking advantage of the program because they either weren't aware of it or felt it was too complicated.

The Obama administration is to forgive $7.8 billion of student debt for hundreds of thousands of disabled graduates

In one case, a woman suffering with the side effects of breast-cancer treatment, which had left her permanently disabled, had spent seven years trying to get her debts written off.

'That's not how government should work,' Mitchell said in an interview. 'These are people who are struggling with health issues. We want to take one worry off their plate.'

Letters are being sent to 387,000 people that the agency has identified as eligible. Around half of those are already in default for their loans.

People on part-time disability are not eligible, but may be able to postpone their repayment, the Education Department told the Wall Street Journal.

The letter includes a simple application. All the borrower has to do is sign and return the form.

Anyone whose loans are forgiven would no longer be at risk of having their Social Security or disability payments seized.

President Barack Obama (pictured at the White House earlier today) had called for a better process for identifying those eligible to have their loans wiped as part of his Student Aid Bill of Rights last year

Once the loan is erased, the borrower will be monitored for three years for any changes to their earning status.

if that status changes or earning increases, they may have to start making payments again.

President Barack Obama had called for a better process for identifying those eligible to have their loans wiped as part of his Student Aid Bill of Rights last year.

Disability-rights groups have welcomed the move.

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations secretary-treasurer Liz Shuler said: 'This will come as a huge relief for people who are already struggling with the economic and financial challenges of a severe disability or injury.'
A mother has told of her disgust after heartless thieves stole her four-year-old daughter's wheelchair while they were away on a Make-A-Wish trip to Disneyland Paris.

Bailey Walters-Lawrence, who has cerebral palsy, is waiting to undergo life-changing surgery at Great Ormond Street after a public appeal raised the 30,000 needed for the operation.

Her mum, Shermel, from Kilburn, North London, told MailOnline she had been feeling 'positive about everything' after raising the money, but said the callous theft had been a 'blow that we do not need'.

Shermel Walters-Lawrence has told of her disgust after heartless thieves stole her four-year-old daughter's wheelchair when they were away on a Make-A-Wish trip to Disneyland Paris. She used the chair as an alternative to a walking frame

The family still have to raise 15,000 to cover the cost of aftercare following the Selective Dorsal Rhizotomy (SDR), which is used to improve muscle stiffness for people with cerebral palsy.

Bailey's specially-adapted buggy, which cost 2,000, was stolen from a shed at the family home earlier this month.

Full-time carer Ms Walters-Lawrence, 26, told MailOnline: 'It has really put a downer on everything that we have been doing recently.

'It had all been so positive with everyone pulling together to help out so this is a blow we really don't need.

'It has disgusted and upset everybody. We had one aim - to sort her treatment - and it is not good having to pay for these extra things.'

Shockingly, Ms Walters-Lawrence believes the burglars purposely targeted her home because they knew she was away and had a disabled child.

'I think they knew exactly what they were doing. It looks like they specifically took the wheelchair because everything else in the shed is still there, like the bike and kids' wellies.

'Maybe because they knew the amount of money we had raised and thought we wouldn't need it.'

Ms Walters-Lawrence called the help she has received from the public 'incredible', but said she hopes the thieves will still re-their actions

News of the callous theft originally came to light in an article in the Brent and Kilburn Times.

After reading the newspaper, mum-of-three Kim Quinn set up a fundraising page to help buy Bailey a new wheelchair.

She will be able to walk for herself, wear high heels... All those things that usually we all take for granted.

Ms Walters-Lawrence called the help she has received from the public 'incredible', but said she hopes the thieves will still re-think their actions.

She said: 'I would tell whoever took the chair to just have a conscience and bring it back.

'It was originally provided by the local wheelchair service but they will not replace it and it was not insured.

'Bailey was really annoyed when she found out it had gone. She just said, "Why has someone taken it? That was my chair".

'She needs it to get around. Although she is walking a little bit now it is very hard.'

Despite the set-back, Ms Walters-Lawrence said she now wants to focus on raising the extra money needed to pay for Bailey's aftercare.

Shockingly, Ms Walters-Lawrence believes the burglars purposely targeted her home because they knew she was away and had a disabled child

The family still have to raise 15,000 to cover the cost of aftercare following the Selective Dorsal Rhizotomy (SDR), which is used to improve muscle stiffness for people with cerebral palsy

'Everyone has been so generous the money was raised so quickly and most of the 30,000 came in just under seven weeks.

'This is a really exciting time for us. After this operation Bailey should be able to live independently.

'She will be able to walk for herself, wear high heels... All those things that usually we all take for granted.'

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: 'Police are investigating the theft of an electric wheelchair some time between 8am on Tuesday, April 5 and 7pm on Saturday, April 9.

'An electric wheelchair was taken from outside an address in Gorefield Place, Kilburn. The Simba make chair is black and red in colour with a red seat.

'No arrests have been made and enquiries continue.'

To donate towards Bailey's aftercare, visit his JustGiving page.
Photographs have emerged of the charred remains of the classrooms destroyed by a fire that engulf an elite Melbourne private school.

About 60 firefighters with 16 trucks battled for three hours to get the blaze under control at Wesley College on High Street Road in Glen Waverley, in Melbourne's east.

Three helicopters joined the firefighters at Wesley College's Glen Waverley campus after the fire was first reported about 5.15am on Wednesday.

A fire has destroyed 10 classrooms at Melbourne's Wesley College after residents reported hearing an explosion

About 60 firefighters with 16 trucks battled for three hours to get the blaze under control at Wesley College on High Street Road in Glen Waverley, in Melbourne's east

The fire scorched an area of 50 metres by 50 metres, gutting the 50-year-old campus' original classrooms and atrium.

Pictures of the aftermath show the extent of the damage, with burnt out walls and ceilings.

The ground is covered in blackened ash and debris is strewn everywhere, with a drone sent in to assess the buildings.

Peter Rau from the MFB said residents' reports of explosions during the fire were probably true.

'In a fire of this size, it would be common for items to explode,' he told reporters on Wednesday.

But firefighters have not yet discovered the cause of the blaze.

A drone flies overhead to examine the remains of the fire that gutted the school campus

An aerial view of the blaze from Wednesday morning, with smoke billowing metres above buildings

The school is closed for the day as firefighters are expected to remain at the scene for the rest of the day. The cause of the fire is still unknown

An aerial view of the fire shows firefighters dousing the fire with water as smoke billows metres into the sky

Principal Helen Drennen said surveying the destruction left by the 'very significant' blaze had been upsetting.

'Many teachers would have many years of resources in those classrooms,' Dr Drennen told reporters.

She said it was not yet clear why the fire was reported by a passer-by and not by a security guard on campus.

WESLEY COLLEGE'S NOTABLE ALUMNI TV personality Waleed Aly

Former Olympic swimmer Michael Kim

Former prime minister Harold Holt

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Retired actor Samuel Johnson Advertisement

The school is equipped with security cameras and the footage would be reviewed later on Wednesday, she said.

Students in foreign language classes and grades 5 and 6 had used the classrooms before the fire.

Classes for the school's 1500 students, from preschool to Year 12, have been cancelled until further notice.

Year 7 Dante Constanzo, who lives near the campus, said he was awoken early in the morning by the sound of helicopters fighting the fire.

'It wasn't like when you're a little kid and you hear school is off,' he told AAP.

'You feel bad for the students who lost their stuff.'

Senior staff are rushing to find temporary classrooms so classes, particularly those of senior students, can be resumed.

'We will be working very hard, very quickly to restore normality as soon as possible,' Dr Drennen said.

Classes for the school's 1500 students, from preschool to Year 12, have been cancelled until further notice

Principal Helen Drennen said surveying the destruction left by the 'very significant' blaze had been upsetting

A neighbour named Peter described to 3AW the noise he heard before flames shot up into the air.

'It sounded like gunfire but I realised it's probably a lot of small explosions, a massive fire,' he said.

Wesley College's principal Helen Drennen arrived at the scene before students started to show up to start their day.

But the school is closed for the day as firefighters are expected to remain on scene for several hours, Metropolitan Fire Brigade tweeted. Other Wesley campuses will be open as normal.

An aerial view of the school shows firefighters dousing the fire with water as smoke billows metres into the sky.

It was brought under control just after 8am about three hours after it started.

Due to the location of the fire, it has made it difficult for crews to fight the blaze and they have been seen rolling out 200 metres of hose to water mains in properties next door to the school, 7News reported.

After hearing explosions, a large number of people phoned 000.

The school was empty when the fire started and there are no reports of any injuries.

Student Jamie Hobbs who turned up to the school told 9News he was relieved no one was hurt.

A police car at the scene at Wesley College early on Wednesday morning before sunrise

Neighbour Peter told the Melbourne radio station: 'It sounded like gunfire but I realised it's probably a lot of small explosions'

'It's pretty scary. I'm glad no one was there when it happened. If people got injured it would be pretty bad,' he said.

All roads around the school have re-opened.

There is no threat to the community, but people are advised to avoid the area.

People are advised to open windows and doors to ventilate their residence if required.

Wesley College counts retired actor Samuel Johnson, who is best known for his portrayal of Molly Meldrum in television miniseries Molly and popular series The Secret Life of Us, as an alumni.
Everybody loves the person in the office that has the adorably tiny sneeze.

Put that sneeze in a tiny, fluffy wombat and you just have cuteness overload.

An adorable video from Sleepy Burrows Wombat Sanctuary shows the squat marsupial overcome with a sneezing fit.

Cute: An adorable video from Sleepy Burrows Wombat Sanctuary shows the squat marsupial overcome with a sneezing fit

Achoo! The baby snuffles in the ground before emitting a series of sharp squeaks, which jerks its head involuntarily

The baby snuffles in the ground before emitting a series of sharp squeaks, which jerks its head involuntarily.

Just like a human it even slowly closes its eyes in anticipation of a fresh onslaught.

In the wild, after birth, the tiny underdeveloped young wombats - like other marsupials - crawl into pouches on their mothers' bellies.

They will stay in the pouch for abut five months before emerging and even afterwards they'll come back to nurse or hide from danger.

Wombats are nocturnal animals and feed on grasses, roots and bark as adults and can often grow to be 30kg.

Their rodent like incisors never stop growing and are used for gnawing on tougher vegetarian foods.

Its just coming! Just like a human it even slowly closes its eyes in anticipation of a fresh onslaught

Tickly nose? Sleepy Burrows Wombat Sanctuary are a self funded wombat sanctuary in New South Wales, Australia

The pudgy mammal can be found in Australia and on scattered islands nearby.

Their long claws are used to dig burrows in open grasslands and eucalyptus forests which can become extensive tunnel-and-chamber complexes.

Sleepy Burrows Wombat Sanctuary are a self funded wombat sanctuary in New South Wales, Australia.

They specialise in rehabilitating injured, orphaned and pet wombats with the aim of raising orphaned wombats and teaching them the necessary skills so that they can be released back into the Australian bush, where they belong.
A 13-year-old boy was killed in Oklahoma after his homemade go-kart crashed into a pickup truck Monday night.

The boy, whose name has not been released, was driving home a little before 10pm when he crossed in front of a Dodge pickup truck on County Road 99, according to KXII TV.

Department of Public Safety officials said the truck hit the boy, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

A 13-year-old boy was killed after his homemade go-cart crashed into a pickup truck Monday night. Kyle Cox, 24, was driving the truck but he was not injured in the crash (file photo of police car)

The 13-year-old wasn't wearing protective gear such as a seat belt or helmet.

Kyle Cox, 24, from Byng, was driving the truck but he was not injured in the crash.

Byng Public Schools released a statement on Tuesday.

'The entire Byng Schools' family is saddened today to hear of the death of one of our students who was reportedly killed last night in an accident.

'Our prayers and thoughts are with the family, friends, and others involved in and affected by this tragedy.

The school said counselors and youth ministers helped the students cope with the boy's death.

'Teachers are also working closely with students and referring them as needed.'
When his 48-piece orchestra starts playing, the hundreds of thousands of pounds Paul Barrett has spent pursuing his 'magnificent obsession' all seems worth it.

The retired businessman has been hooked on the music of Mantovani since he was 12, when his father first took him to one of the conductor's concerts.

Now aged 70, the superfan has spent around 500,000 recreating the lavish sound he loved so much  with himself at the centre of it all.

Paul Barrett (pictured, top) has been hooked on the music of Mantovani since he was 12

Now aged 70, Barrett (circled) has spent around 500,000 recreating the lavish sound he loved so much

Barrett (right) pays 20,000 a time to hire musicians, a conductor and a music venue to replicate note-for-note the classic Mantovani Orchestra (left, composer Annunzio Paolo Mantovani)

He has learnt to play percussion including drums, glockenspiel and vibraphone, and has forked out thousands of pounds to buy original instruments from Mantovani's light orchestra.

He now pays 20,000 a time to hire musicians, a conductor and a music venue to replicate note-for-note the classic Mantovani Orchestra  making a small saving by playing all the percussion parts himself.

Mr Barrett said: 'I could spend my money on exotic cruises or maybe a top-of-the-range car but I've chosen to invest in re-inventing the Mantovani Orchestra. It's an expensive business but to me it's worth every penny.'

His most recent show, the Magic of Mantovani Orchestra, was held last Sunday, but he barely broke even despite attracting nearly 1,000 people.

He said: 'I do lose money on every show, but this is a magnificent obsession of mine.

'My partner Trisha thinks I'm a lunatic but she comes to every concert and supports me. She knows that my first love is the music.'

Barrett (pictured) He has learnt to play percussion including drums, glockenspiel and vibraphone

Barrett (left) has forked out thousands of pounds to buy original instruments (right) from Mantovani's light orchestra

His most recent show, the Magic of Mantovani Orchestra, was held last Sunday (pictured, the 'Mantovani barmy!' gig)

Annunzio Paolo Mantovani held the title of Britain's most successful album before the Beatles and was the first artist to sell over a million albums.

He sold 60million records in the UK and the US, and was considered such a heartthrob he received more than 700 marriage proposals in one year.

After Mr Barrett's father, a professional violinist, took him to his first Mantovani concert, he embarked on a lifetime of studying the performer's career.

He even signed up for music lessons with Mantovani's longtime percussionist, Charles Botterill.

Mr Barrett learnt every arrangement and perfected the percussion parts, secretly hoping his mentor would have to skip a show from illness and Mantovani would call him up as a stand-in.

But Botterill never missed a performance and so Mr Barrett never got the chance to perform with his idol, who died in 1980 aged 74.

When Mr Barrett sold his builders merchant business in Sheffield and retired in 1996, he moved to Bournemouth, Dorset, where Italian-born Mantovani had lived before his death.

After Mr Barrett's (right, aged 16) father took him to his first Mantovani concert, he embarked on a lifetime of studying the performer's career (left, Ken Mantovani with one of his fathers gold discs)

Annunzio Paolo Mantovani (left) held the title of Britain's most successful album before the Beatles

He decided to recreate the orchestra and approached the Mantovani family, who gave him access to the original music scores, free of charge. He also paid 50,000 for the 35mm film and rights to recordings of a 1950s American TV series that Mantovani made.

Mr Barrett put up 15,000 of his own money to stage his first concert in 2008, with a 45-strong orchestra.

On Sunday he held the seventh concert, with audience members travelling from as far as India and the US for the show in Bournemouth. Fifteen members of the Mantovani family also attended.
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Perched proudly on a pile of foam blocks, but holding Daddy's hand just in case, Prince George poses for his very first postage stamp alongside his father, his grandfather  and the great-grandmother whose face has appeared on more stamps than anyone in history.

Ahead of the Queen's 90th birthday tomorrow, the Royal Mail has released this historic image.

It is the scene on a new sheet of four commemorative First Class stamps.

Family: Perched proudly on a pile of foam blocks, but holding daddy's hand just in case, Prince George poses for his very first postage stamp alongside his father, his grandfather  and the great-grandmother whose face has appeared on more stamps than anyone in history

Much more than that, this is also a photograph which will be remembered long after this week's celebrations.

For this is the future. Here are monarchs 41, 42 and 43 (post-Norman Conquest) saluting Number 40.

If monarchy stands for anything, it is continuity and stability. And this superb image, captured in the White Drawing Room of Buckingham Palace by Royal Mail photographer Ranald Mackechnie a few months ago, reinforces that.

Think of it this way. When Prince George is celebrating his own 90th birthday, it will be the year 2103.

Stamps: The trickiest part was ensuring that all the principals were at roughly the same height and spaced evenly apart. That is because each face has to fit neatly inside its own perforated outline (pictured) on each sheet of four stamps - but the skilled photographer managed

PHOTOGRAPHER: PRINCE GEORGE'S ENERGY WAS 'FANTASTIC' After being given George's rough heigh measurements, the photographer and his team spent two half days setting up test shoots beforehand with the blocks, which form part of his kit, before the final shoot Photographer Mackechnie, 55, described the royals as 'amazingly relaxed' and said George's joy and energy was fantastic. 'It's great just to be asked to photograph a stamp, never mind four generations of the royal family. When I was asked about I was ecstatic but I had to keep schtum for 18 months,' he said. 'It was an amazingly relaxing and light-hearted sitting. They were comfortable with one another and behaved like any family with their conversation and jokes. It was much more relaxed than when I've tried to take pictures with my family. 'The joy and energy coming out of George was fantastic. It lifted the whole shot and lifted the afternoon. He was on top form. He was quite fascinated by the lights. He took it all in his stride.' He described how as soon as the royal family taken their seats for the portrait his computer crashed, but that he was able to use one of his spare ones which he had on standby. Advertisement

And the world will look back on this image of four monarchs stretching over two millennia, three centuries and 177 years, going all the way back to the birth of Princess Elizabeth of York in 1926.

We have regularly seen stamps marking important royal birthdays (though the Queen rejected a set to mark her 70th on the grounds that it was a lot of 'fuss' about nothing).

But few have been quite as eye-catching as this collection, partly because a British monarch has never celebrated a 90th birthday before.

Ostensibly, this is a simple, happy portrait of four generations of one family, from the doted-on little boy to his beloved 'Gan-Gan'.

But it involved some very complicated logistical challenges.

To begin with, there was the need to find a suitable date in all the royal diaries (Prince George may not yet have much in the way of royal engagements at the age of two but a royal nanny's eat/sleep/bath routine is not to be messed with).

Various locations were explored by Mr Mackechnie, a specialist portrait photographer.

His original choice had been the Palace's Yellow Drawing Room until test shots showed that it might 'overpower' the photograph and the White Drawing Room was selected instead.

The trickiest part was ensuring that all the principals were at roughly the same height and spaced evenly apart.

That is because each face has to fit neatly inside its own perforated outline on each sheet of four stamps.

You can't go to the Post Office and say: 'I want a dozen Prince Georges, please.'

You have to buy the full sheet of four for 2.56 (the regular price for four First Class stamps) and then press out each face one by one and lick the back.

If you want a dozen Georges, you must buy a dozen sheets.

Because of the design, there was no possibility of photographing Prince George on someone's lap.

He had to stand alone. So Mr Mackechnie brought along a batch of high-density foam blocks for him to climb on. You can almost hear the cry of 'I'm the king of the castle'.

According to royal aides, he was 'as good as gold' during the shoot which lasted around 25 minutes.

The family are dressed in various shades of blue, with Prince George in the same 59 Rachel Riley shirt and navy corduroys he wore for his first official photograph with Princess Charlotte last June.

A royal show: The Changing of the Guard are seeing practicing outside Windsor Castle in Berkshire yesterday. The Queen will emerge from Windsor Castle on tomorrow, her 90th birthday, to unveil a plaque for The Queen's Walkway, at the foot of Castle Hill, in the royal town

Marching band: The Changing of the Guard outside Windsor Castle in Berkshire yesterday as the town prepares for the Queen's birthday

Lining the streets: Bunting already lines the streets of Windsor ahead of Her Majesty The Queen's 90th birthday celebrations tomorrow

The Queen is wearing the Shell Brooch, a favourite piece which she inherited from the Queen Mother.

It was originally designed in 1919 by Sir Courtauld Thomson, the wealthy bachelor politician who later received a peerage and left his Buckinghamshire home, Dorneywood, to the nation (it's now used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer).

He gave this brooch to his sister who, in turn, gave it to Queen Elizabeth. She wore it at her own 100th birthday celebrations in 2000.

In addition to this specially-commissioned stamp sheet, the Royal Mail has also produced a presentation pack featuring a further six new stamps to mark the birthday.

There are three black and white 'family' scenes depicting the Queen with her father as a little girl, with her two elder children, and with the Duke of Edinburgh.

The other stamps, in colour, reflect her official roles.

Happy Birthday to you: The window display of the Daniel department store in Windsor, Berkshire to celebrate The Queen's 90th birthday

Preparations: The Changing of the Guard outside Windsor Castle in Berkshire yesterday (left). The Queen will emerge from Windsor castle on her 90th birthday tomorrow unveil a plaque for The Queen's Walkway, at the foot of Castle Hill. Right: Bunting in the royal hometown

SIX FURTHER STAMPS RELEASED TO MARK QUEEN'S BIRTHDAY SHOWING HER FAMILY LIFE AND WORK Six further stamps have been released for the head of state's 90th birthday - three focusing on the Queen's family life and three honouring her official role. They show the Queen: as a young Princess Elizabeth with her father then the Duke of York in around 1930; attending the State Opening of Parliament in 2012; with Princess Anne and Prince Charles in 1952; visiting New Zealand in 1977; with the Duke of Edinburgh in 1957; and riding in an open top carriage with Nelson Mandela in 1996. It is the first time the Royal Mail has issued a stamp featuring the Queen and her father, who went on to become George VI. Six further stamps (pictured) have also been released - three focusing on the Queen's family life and three honouring her official role Advertisement

They show her opening Parliament, touring New Zealand, and travelling in a carriage with President Nelson Mandela.

Philatelists will be very excited by both sets. Not only is this the first time the Queen has appeared on a Royal Mail stamp with her father but the new stamp sheet with the three Princes contains an irregularity.

By tradition, as we all know, British stamps feature the effigy of the reigning monarch instead of the name of the country.

But when a Royal Mail stamp also includes a picture of the Queen, the effigy is replaced by a crown. Here we see a photograph of the Queen alongside an effigy of the Queen.

'It's just more symmetrical with the other stamps on the sheet,' explains a Royal Mail spokesman.

Most unusual. But when you've been on 200 billion stamps over more than six decades, it's probably nice to do something different.
Prince William has revealed an incident from his childhood in which his grandmother the Queen gave him an 'almighty b******ing'.

Speaking to Sky News for a documentary called The Queen At 90 to celebrate the monarch's birthday tomorrow, the Duke of Cambridge recalled how a childhood telling off from The Queen has stayed with him throughout his life.

Referring to a childhood incident which landed him in hot water with Elizabeth II, William described getting into trouble with his cousin Peter Phillips after riding a quad bike at Balmoral.

Referring to a childhood incident which landed him in hot water with the Queen, Prince William described getting into trouble with his cousin Peter Phillips after riding a quad bike at Balmoral

He said: 'We were chasing Zara around who was on a go-cart, and Peter and I managed to herd Zara into a lamppost and the lamppost came down and nearly squashed her and I remember my grandmother being the first person out at Balmoral running across the lawn in her kilt.

'She came charging over and gave us the most almighty b******ing, and that sort of stuck in my mind from that moment on.'

Prince William also credited the Queen for helping him through the loss of his mother, Diana Princess of Wales, and said she has been a powerful female influence in his life.

He said his grandmother had been 'incredibly supportive' of him and been someone for him to look up to.

The Duke said: 'She's been a very strong female influence and having lost my mother at a young age, it's been particularly important to me that I've had somebody like the Queen to look up to.

'[She's someone] who's been there and who has understood some of the more, um, complex issues when you lose a loved one.

William revealed an incident from his childhood in which the Queen gave him an 'almighty b******ing'

'So she's been incredibly supportive and I've really appreciated her guidance.'

The second in line to the throne also talked about any private birthday celebration the Royals would be hosting.

He said: 'It's going to be a fun schedule - a big dinner on her birthday I think as well. Well keep her up very late. She won't like that at all! After everything she's achieved it is quite a moment for the family.'

Prince William also credited the Queen for helping him through the loss of his mother, Diana Princess of Wales, and said she has been a powerful female influence in his life

Asked what one gifts the Queen, Prince William responded: 'That's just the hardest question ever.

'We regularly have a lot of debate. Harry and I have decided to have a joint present this year which makes it a bit easier when we can share the responsibility of getting it right.'

The Queen can also expect presents from the Royal Family's newest additions - Prince George and Princess Charlotte.
A police station was placed under quarantine amid fears that illegal immigrants discovered sneaking into Britain in the back of a lorry had contagious diseases.

In chaotic scenes, paramedics were called to take the migrants to hospital after they complained of headaches and began vomiting while being held.

But fearing the Iraqis had brought in an infectious disease, the paramedics declared a 'major incident' and placed Luton police station on lockdown.

They were also concerned the migrants, who had been crammed like sardines in the back of the lorry, could have contaminated officers in the custody suite.

Paramedics were called to take the migrants (pictured) to hospital after they complained of headaches and began vomiting

It meant police were unable to investigate the driver overnight or deal with any other criminals coming in to custody. Officers were also ordered not to leave the station when their shift ended at midnight.

Incredibly, the lorry driver  a Romanian, who was arrested  could not be charged because border guards did not check his lorry at Dover. With police unable to prove that the migrants had arrived from the Continent, the haulier had to be set free.

The extraordinary situation was exposed in a new series of 24 Hours in Police Custody, which starts on Channel 4 this evening.

In the documentary, Bedfordshire Police allows TV crews unprecedented access to follow officers but the latest episode highlights the damaging consequences of the Border Force's failure to carry out security checks on all lorries arriving in the UK.

The programme begins with horrified officers finding 15 migrants, including a mother and her daughters aged five and three, crammed in the back of a filthy refrigerated lorry at Toddington services on the M1.

Fearing the Iraqis had brought in an infectious disease, the paramedics declared a major incident and placed Luton police station on lockdown

It was feared the illegal immigrants discovered sneaking into Britain in the back of a lorry (pictured) had contagious diseases

They were called after banging was heard in the trailer. The migrants, who have been travelling for 17 hours in temperatures of two degrees, are taken to three different police stations across Bedfordshire.

But investigations are abandoned when they start complaining of headaches and fever. They are ordered to put on face masks and the station goes into lockdown.

The migrants are subsequently taken to hospital for tests but Luton police station is closed for hours and placed under quarantine.

Eventually the hospital declares it safe to return the migrants to custody after it is found they had fallen ill from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by lorry fumes.

Luton Custody Sergeant Darren Turney tells the programme makers: 'The whole immigration thing is such a big issue. It drains our resources. Police officers are down the hospital, it takes all our cell space up and it's nothing to do with us.'

Investigating officer Nash Hussain is left in despair after discovering that the driver was not stopped at Dover. 'They signalled him straight through,' she says.

Paramedics were also concerned the migrants, who had been crammed like sardines in the back of the lorry, could have contaminated officers in the custody suite

'It makes it difficult to prove whether he knew they were there prior to entry in the UK. It is frustrating. You put a lot of effort into something and you can't actually go any further.'

The programme reveals that police investigations into illegal immigration have soared alarmingly. In Bedfordshire alone, the number arrested or detained on suspicion of offences increased by 75 per cent to 563 last year.

Immigration arrests at Toddington services almost quadrupled in a year to 79 in the first six months of 2015.
A curious toddler who accidentally tumbled from an apartment window on the 15th floor of a building survived the ordeal yet remains in a critical condition in hospital.

The three-year-old, named as Qiqi, evaded the attentions of his parents who were horrified to discover he had crawled through the open window of their flat, according to People's Daily Online.

The fortunate child landed face down on a soft patch of grass at the base of the large apartment block in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, east China, on the morning of April 11.

Hospitalised: The three-year-old, named as Qiqi, evaded the attentions of his parents to fall from the balcony

Horror: He suffered a dramatic, heart-stopping fall from the 15th storey apartment all the way to the ground

When his mother went to the bathroom, Qiqi used the opportunity of freedom to explore the apartment's treacherous balcony and fell as his mother returned to the room.

He hit a clothing line half-way down on his fall and luckily landed on a 10ft patch of grass on the ground, which had been significantly softened by recent rainfall.

Qiqi and his parents had only moved into their new home a few days earlier.

The boy's unconscious body was discovered by a security guard doing his rounds in the precinct, and rushed him to hospital with his mother who was convinced he had been killed.

Cushioned: The security guard who found Qiqi points to the patch of grass where the boy landed after his fall

Such luck: The incredibly narrow patch of grass onto which he landed was found to have been just 10ft wide

Threat: Qiqi is said to have suffered a fractured skull, fractured hip bone, broken ribs and several other injuries

Qiqi is said to have suffered a fractured skull, fractured hip bone, and broken ribs.

Additionally he sustained significant. damage to his left lung and kidneys.

His condition is said to be critical and doctors are as yet unsure whether he will make a full recovery.
A woman in China has claimed that her billionaire partner beat her because she had not yet produced a son for the family.

Going by the screen name of 'Chu Jian le Xiao', the woman posted images of her bruised body to her Weibo account, a popular Chinese social media, the People's Daily Online reports.

The woman, who has two daughters, claims that her partner also changed the locks of their house and won't let her back in.

The woman posted images of herself with bruises which she claimed were the result of a beating

She shared a long post on Weibo on April 13 which claimed she had been kicked out of her family home

The woman shared a long post on Weibo on April 13, which claimed she had been kicked out of the home belonging to her and her 'billionaire' partner.

In an interview with Zhejiang Online, which was later picked up by People's Daily Online, the woman said her surname is Li and she is originally from the city of Leqing, Zhejiang Province.

According to the woman, she and her partner, surnamed Ye, got engaged in March 2011.

After their engagement, she moved with him to Beijing.

Her father-in-law told her father that he hoped she would give him several grandsons and after this happens, he will get the marriage certificate to make their marriage official.

During this time, she gave birth to two daughters.

Li and her partner left Beijing and went back to Leqing in February to spend the Lunar Chinese New Year with Ye's family, according to Li's post.

In February 16, Li was with her elder daughter and was going to pick up her younger daughter when her mother-in-law started to attack her in the living room, she told the reporter.

She says that when her partner saw her being attacked, he joined in.

The woman claims that other family members had to restrain him from attacking her.

She said that after the attack she had a pain in her head and so her partner took her to Yueqing City People's Hospital.

They came back home and she rested.

The following morning she claims that she had bruised limbs and felt nauseous and a tightness in her chest.

She asked to go to the hospital but her partner rejected her requests so she returned to her parents' home.

In an interview with Zhejiang Online the woman said her surname is Li and she is originally from Leqing

When she returned to his family's home, all of the relatives had disappeared and gone back to Beijing.

A reporter contacted Li's father in law surnamed Ye on the morning of the 16th.

According to him, Li brought her elder daughter back to their home at around 5pm on February 16. She put down her daughter and kicked open the door of her mother-in-law's room and started cursing at her.

He says she smashed everything on the tea table and fortunately the granddaughter was not hurt. He had to ask Li to leave.

He says she called the police and claimed she had been beaten.

Local police said that they attended the scene at 5pm on the 16th and saw that things had been smashed in the house.

They said that they brought the two sides to the police station and both sides agreed to stop quarrelling.

Li went to hospital for examination as she had neck pain and a painful head however a CT scan showed no abnormalities.

Police officers from the Leqing Public Bureau confirmed to the reporter that there had been a domestic dispute between Li and Ye in February. The police station was informed.

After mediation, the two parties agreed to keep living together.

However, police say Li had in April requested them to re-investigate the case. The police said they are still investigating the case.

Local police said that they attended the scene on the 16th and saw that things had been smashed in the house

Meanwhile, people on Weibo have been discussing the case.

One user wrote: 'Why is it just the woman's fault for not being able to have a son?'

While another wrote: 'Her [partner] is so greedy. She doesn't have any credit for giving birth to two daughters?

'Man Zou Bu Song Muo Hui Tou' said: 'Why is it just the woman's fault for not able to having a son?'

'Wang Er Dan said': 'This woman is quite brave. She dares to post her story. She should start a lawsuit. And treat herself better.'

'Jiang You Xiao Duo' wrote: 'She's pathetic and hateful. Pathetic because there is no way to live a life like this and her children will be affected. Hateful because in order to marry a rich man she should get pregnant before getting officially hitched.'

'Valiant Ning' said: '[Her partner] is so greedy. She doesn't have any credit for giving birth to two daughters?'

'Guo Mu Nan' commented: 'The man should try to have a child himself. It's not an easy task for woman to have the 10-month pregnancy let alone the labour.'

'Cui Jian 66654' noted: 'This family will have their karma.'

To some conservative families in China, boys are usually preferred by couples because they are thought to be able to pass on the family name and the blood line.
was arrested charged with first degree criminal mischief and wanton

debate on how to investigate and collect evidence for cases

You could be sent to prison and charged with a felony for shooting a drone from the sky.

According to the federal law, 18 USC S 32, anyone who willfully 'sets fire to, damages, destroys, or wrecks an aircraft' will be fined or imprisoned no more than 20 years or both.

And the FAA says drones fall into the category of 'aircraft' and threatening anyone operating a drone is also punishable with jail time.

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According to the federal law, 18 USC S 32 , anyone who willfully 'sets fire to, damages, destroys, or wrecks an aircraft' will be fined or imprisoned no more than 20 years or both. And experts say drones fall into the category of 'aircraft' and threatening anyone operating a drone falls is also punishable with jail time

WHAT DOES THE 18 USC S 32 SAY? (a) Whoever willfully (1) sets fire to, damages, destroys, disables, or wrecks any aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States or any civil aircraft used, operated, or employed in interstate, overseas, or foreign air commerce; (5) interferes with or disables, with intent to endanger the safety of any person or with a reckless disregard for the safety of human life, anyone engaged in the authorized operation of such aircraft or any air navigation facility aiding in the navigation of any such aircraft; (c) Whoever willfully imparts or conveys any threat to do an act which would violate any of paragraphs (1) through (6) of subsection (a) or any of paragraphs (1) through (3) of subsection (b) of this section, with an apparent determination and will to carry the threat into execution shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. Advertisement

The law says that if you attempt to shoot down a flying robot from the sky, you could face up to two decades behind bars, and/or be handed a fine up to a quarter of a million dollars.

These convictions are similar if you damaged a chopper or a commercial jet.

'There will be exceptions to what is considered a lawful reason to shoot down a drone, but the FAA still defines a drone as an aircraft and shooting it down is a felony,' Joseph Lamonaca of the National and International Aviation Law Firm and appointed SafetyTeam Representative of the FAA, told DailyMail.com.

'The major issue with this law is that anyone who just threatens to shoot down a drone could get five years in prison.'

'That means, telling your neighbor that you are going to shoot down their drone can put you in jail.'

DailyMail.com reached out to the Federal Aviation Administration to gather more details about this law.

'We can't comment on pending state legislation. A private citizen shooting at any aircraft  including unmanned aircraft  poses a significant safety hazard,' Jim Peters, public affairs specialist for the organization, told DailyMail.com in an email.

'An unmanned aircraft hit by gunfire could crash, causing damage to persons or property on the ground, or it could collide with other objects in the air.

'Shooting at an unmanned aircraft could result in a civil penalty from the FAA and/or criminal charges filed by federal, state or local law enforcement.'

'There also may be state or municipal ordinances that address property owners' rights.'

These convictions are similar if you damaged a chopper or a commercial jet. 'The major issue with this law is that anyone who just threatens to shoot down a drone could get five years in prison, said Lamonaca. 'That means, telling your neighbor that you are going to shoot down their drone can put you in jail'

The agency declined to answer questions regarding if officials would start enforcing this law for every incident.

'Right now there is a lot of debate over how to investigate and collect evidence and a typical case is usually handled by the local police, who are still not aware about the jurisdiction', said Lamonaca.

Last year, 47-year-old William Merideth from Hillview, Kentucky was arrested for shooting down a drown he spotted flying over his property.

Merideth was arrested and charged with first degree criminal mischief and first degree wanton endangerment, reported WDRB.com.

The operator claims he was flying it to get pictures of his friend's house.

'Well, I came out and it was down by the neighbor's house, about 10 feet off the ground, looking under their canopy that they've got in their back yard,' Merideth said.

'I went and got my shotgun and I said, 'I'm not going to do anything unless it's directly over my property.'

The moment came and Merideth took the shot.

'The FAA and Congress defines an aircraft as anything invented, used or designed to navigate or fly in the air and it is such a broad definition,' said Lamonaca.
The problem has now been fixed by reconfiguring the system

Alert level was 'yellow' which is the least dangerous of three levels

This t riggered an alarm at the Esa control centre during a night shift

Radiation from space made one of the computers stop communicating

Life when orbiting 249 miles above the Earth can feel worryingly fragile anyway, but when an alarm sounds on board the International Space Station, it can bring a rapid sense of perspective.

Officials have revealed that the space station's warning system was triggered last week after space radiation deleted data from its on-board computer.

In a small room in a village near Munich, a group of scientists who monitor the Columbus space laboratory on the ISS were sprang into action to fix the fault.

Scroll down for video and to hear what the alarm on the ISS sounds like

One evening last week Esa's Columbus Control Center night shift team had expected a quiet evening monitoring the Columbus lab, but something unusual happened. Space radiation zapped one of the computers on the International Space Station (pictured), which set off an alarm in the control centre

The night shift team at the control centre on Earth can normally expect a quiet, uneventful evening, but last week something unusual happened.

Space radiation zapped one of the computers on the ISS, setting off a 'caution' alarm, one of three levels of warning that alert astronauts and engineers to problems on board.

WHAT IS SPACE RADIATION? Radiation in space takes the form of subatomic particles from the sun as well as from sources in the Milky Way galaxy and others beyond the Milky Way. Galactic cosmic rays consist of high energy protons, helium and other high energy nuclei. Solar energetic particles consist primarily of protons accelerated by the Sun to high energies via proximity to solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The magnetic field, generated by electric currents in the Earth's liquid iron core extends far into space, shielding the planet from 99.9 per cent of harmful radiation. The Earth's atmosphere provides additional protection, equal to a slab of metal about 3 feet (1 metre) thick. Advertisement

Flight Director Tom Uhlig who works at the control centre wrote about the alarm on an Esa blog.

'My colleagues on night shift had expected a quiet night monitoring the Columbus space laboratory without disruptions,' he said.

'But sometimes things turn out differently than expected  and that is why we are constantly alert.'

The alarm was triggered because the main memory in the computer in charge of data management had stopped interacting with the central computer.

This activated a second, fail-safe memory which sent the error message.

'The experts who know the computer inside out looked at the problem and have come to the conclusion that space radiation changed the memory that caused the error,' Mr Uhlig said.

Luckily the solution was simple, the team just had to reroute the contents of the defective memory through a different unit.

There are three levels of alert, yellow 'cautions' being the least dangerous.

In a small room in a village west of Munich, a group of scientists sit each night keeping their eyes on the Columbus space laboratory on the International Space Station. Last week a warning was triggered on the computers when space radiation deleted some data on one of the computers

Engineers were forced to work through the night to fix a problem with the ISS computer after a 'caution alarm' sounded. Listen to the alarm using the Soundcloud file above

'Cautions are not time-critical, and the astronauts only need to do something if control centres are out of contact with the Space Station for some reason and cannot analyse the data or send corrective commands,' Mr Uhlig said.

STATS AND FACTS: THE ISS Construction of the ISS began on 20 November 1998. It supports a crew of up to six, with crews split into groups of three. The station orbits at a height of about 255 miles (410km). It has a total mass of about 990,000 pounds (450,000kg) and has living space roughly equivalent to a five-bedroom house. It completes an orbit of Earth every 92.91 minutes and moves at 17,100 miles (27,600km) per hour. It has now been in space for more than 5,900 days, during which time it has completed more than 92,000 orbits of Earth, and has been continuously occupied for more than 13 years. Advertisement

The next level - 'warning' alarms - require an immediate response, because they mean an important component of the Space Station has a problem. These trigger a red flashing alert together with a warning tone on the space station.

The most urgent alarm is the 'emergency' that directly threaten the astronauts and where immediate countermeasures are necessary. These can include a sudden drop in pressure in the ISS, toxic substances in the air or a fire.

Red codes clash on dedicated caution and warning panels while an audible alarm sounds.

Radiation in space takes the form of subatomic particles from the sun as well as from sources in the Milky Way galaxy and beyond.

The magnetic field, generated by electric currents in the Earth's liquid iron core extends far into space, shielding the planet from 99.9 per cent of harmful radiation.

Alarms on the space station are sometimes switched on to reconfigure systems or for testing, but this time the alert was caused by a failure in one of the units.

The alarm was triggered because the main memory in the computer in charge of data management had stopped interacting with the central computer, which activated a second, fail-safe memory which sent the error message (pictured)

There are three levels of alarm on the ISS. The Emergency alarm is the most serious (listen above)

'Adrenaline always rises in the control room when the discreet but penetrating tone is heard that signifies to the flight controller that an alarm on the Space Station has sounded,' Mr Uhlig said.

'We immediately glance at our big centre display where the "Caution and Warning" tool runs continuously to display Space Station alarms.

'"Yellow alert"  fortunately not so bad. Our view then moves to the text at the end ' COL' indicating that it is our concern...'

While Esa is in charge of Columbus, there are other parts of the ISS that are under control by Nasa or the Japanese space agency, he says.

The warning alarm is the second most serious and usually requires immediate action (listen to it above)
Exactly 30 years and one week ago, a small town in the former Soviet Union witnessed the worst nuclear disaster the world has seen.

Following a fire in one of its reactors, an explosion at the Chernobyl power plant in the former Soviet Union town of Pripyat leaked radioactive material into the environment and saw the surrounding area evacuated.

But while radiation levels in the region is still considered too high for humans to return, wildlife has moved back into the area and is flourishing.

Scroll down for video

Researchers used camera traps to monitor wildlife in the radioactive exclusion area at the site of the Chernobyl accident, and have found 14 species of large mammal, including grey wolves (pictured)

Studies of the animals and plants in the area around Chernobyl are now providing clues as to what the world would be like should humans suddenly disappear.

The exclusion zone is still in effect around the site of the disaster in what is now Ukraine to protect people from the high levels of radiation which persist in the environment.

But in the absence of human activity, wildlife has flourished  making the site a unique habitat for biologists to study.

Scientists are monitoring the health of plants and animals in the exclusion area to see how they react to chronic radiation exposure.

Researchers placed motion-activated camera traps at two-mile intervals to capture images of the wildlife in the exclusion zone up to 30km around Chernobyl. Radiation levels in the zone are still considered to be too high for humans to return

In a new study published this week, researchers found no evidence to suggest that areas with the highest levels of radiation were keeping animal numbers down, and that populations inside the exclusion zone are doing well. Pictured is a deer captured by a camera trap used in the exclusion zone by the TREE project

Camera traps set up by researchers have captured a stunning array of local wildlife, including wolves, lynx, mouse, boars, deer, horses, and many others, as they wander through the area.

RADIOACTIVE WILDLIFE RESERVE Researchers have used motion-activated camera traps to capture images of the wildlife in the exclusion around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Images have captured 14 species of mammal, while other research groups indicate protected bird species are also frequenting the region. Mammal species include: Brown bears, roe deer, red foxes, lynx, grey wolves, raccoon dogs, moose, Eurasian boar, Protected bird species seen include golden eagles and white-tailed eagles. Advertisement

It shows that three decades on from the disaster, the area is far from being a wasteland. Instead life is thriving there.

Using the motion-activated traps to get snapshots of wildlife at a number of sites throughout the exclusion zone, researchers at the University of Georgia have recorded 14 species of mammal.

In a study published this week in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the Georgia group reports it found no evidence to suggest that the areas with the highest levels of radiation were keeping their numbers down, and that populations inside the exclusion zone are doing well.

Sarah Webster, a graduate student working on the project and first author of the study, told UGA Today: 'Carnivores are often in higher trophic levels of ecosystem food webs, so they are susceptible to bioaccumulation of contaminants.'

'Few studies in Chernobyl have investigated effects of contamination level on populations of species in high trophic levels.'

Following a fire in one of its reactors, an explosion at the Chernobyl power plant (pictured) in the former Soviet Union town of Pripyat, leaked radioactive material into the environment, resulting in the area being abandoned. The disaster happened on April 26, 1986, and is the worst recorded nuclear accident in history

Today an exclusion zone is still in effect around the site of the disaster (marked on the map are the 10km zone in yellow and the 30km zone in red) in what is now Ukraine and part of Belarus, keeping people out to protect them from the high levels of radiation which persist in the environment

The team set up stations a few miles apart in order to prevent animals from visiting more than one station in a day, and found that the most frequently seen animals were grey wolves, Eurasian boar, red foxes and the racoon dog, a unique dog-like species which has become invasive in Scandinavia.

THE CHERNOBYL DISASTER On April 26, 1986 a power station on the outskirts of Pripyat suffered a massive accident in which one of the reactors caught fire and exploded, spreading radioactive material into the surroundings. More than 160,000 residents of the town and surrounding areas had to be evacuated and have been unable to return, leaving the former Soviet site as a radioactive ghost town. The exclusion zone, which covers a substantial area in Ukraine and some of bordering Belarus, will remain in effect for generations to come, until radiation levels fall to safe enough levels. The region is called a 'dead zone' due to the extensive radiation which persists. However, the proliferation of wildlife in the area contradicts this and many argue that the region should be given over to the animals which have become established in the area - creating a radioactive protected wildlife reserve. Advertisement

It would be expected that carnivores would receive extensive radioactive exposure, both directly from the environment and water sources as well as ingesting it through eating contaminated animals.

In the long-term, this accumulation of radioactive material would be expected to be harmful to the top predators and would restrict their number, but findings from the latest study don't seem to support this.

'We didn't find any evidence to support the idea that populations are suppressed in highly contaminated areas,' said Dr James Beasley, a biologist at Georgia and senior author of the paper.

'What we did find was these animals were more likely to be found in areas of preferred habitat that have the things they need  food and water.'

Webster told MailOnline: 'The camera trap work was a small portion of the research our team is conducting within the exclusion zone.

'We also are investigating the population density of species in relation to contaminants as well as population health effects by examining prevalence of disease/parasites and quantifying how absorption of radiation is influenced by movement behaviours.'

Other research groups working within the area, including the TREE consortium, have found that endangered Przewalski's horses  released into the exclusion zone in the 1990s  are breeding successfully.

In addition, the camera studies have identified a number of protected bird species, including golden eagles and white tailed eagles.

Multiple research groups are using camera traps within the exclusion zones to monitor wildlife. They report there is currently no evidence to suggest reduced lifespan or increased cancers in predators, including grey wolves (pictured from TREE project camera)

Predators captured by the Chernobyl camera traps include grey wolves and lynx (pictured), captured by a camera trap used by the TREE project

Other research groups working within the area have found that endangered Przewalski's horses (pictured with camera trap by the TREE project)  released into the exclusion zone in the 1990s  may be breeding successfully

However, the future of the exclusion zone remains unclear. According to a recent article in New Scientist, the section of the zone which extends into neighbouring Belarus has been turned into an official wildlife radioecological reserve.

But the Ukrainian zone is being eyed as a potential depository for nuclear waste  which would require a fraction of the price of establishing storage sites elsewhere, due to the existing radiation levels and lack of human population.

Professor Nick Beresford, one of the principal researchers in the TREE project, told MailOnline: 'We do not know the definitive answer. As far as we are aware there is serious consideration of a wildlife reserve - as is the case for the Belarus CEZ already - or a nuclear waste repository.

'If it was the latter then this need not be bad for wildlife as human access would continue to be restricted.'

The future of the region, and its mammal populations, will remain uncertain.
Astronaut also managed to capture Mount Everest, saying it's 'harder to spot from space than you might think'

British astronaut is three months into his six month mission living 249 miles (400km) above the Earth

Major Tim Peake took the picture of the Klyuchevskaya volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia

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When orbiting 249 miles above the Earth, the landscape below can look frighteningly small and fragile.

But this picture captured by British astronaut Tim Peake from the International Space Station proves that volcanoes look impressive even from space.

Poking out from a blanket of clouds, the smoking peak of the Klyuchevskaya volcano on Russias Kamchatka Peninsula can be seen mid-eruption.

Towering more than 20,000 feet (6,000 metres), it is one of the tallest active volcanoes in the world, yet its summit is clear of snow due to the heat of the magma rising up inside. The smaller surrounding mountains can be seen in the image still capped in snow and ice.

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Astronaut Tim Peake captured an image (pictured) of the Klyuchevskaya volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia. The tip of the conical volcano can be seen poking out from the surrounding clouds and a plume of smoke is rising from it. The volcano is one of the tallest active volcanoes in the world. The heat from inside has melted the snow that tops the surrounding mountains

Since 2007 it has been in an almost constant state of eruption, spewing out plumes of ash and occasionally weak flows of lava. Its most recent period of unrest began earlier this month.

Posting the image on Twitter, Major Peake said: Spotted a volcano smoking away on Russias far east coast this morning  heat has melted snow around top.

It is not the first volcano Major Peake has captured on camera during this three months on board the ISS.

Last month he took an overhead snap of the Emi Koussi volcano and the Aorounga impact crater in Chad, Africa. Taken from a side-angle, however, the latest image of Klyuchevskaya reveals far more of the majesty that volcanoes can impose upon a landscape.

Last month Major Peake also captured images of the Emi Koussi volcano in Chad, but viewed from above it is hard to get a sense of the dramatic peak (pictured)

The volcano sits on the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia (shown on the map). It is one of the tallest active volcanoes in the world

The Klyuchevskaya volcano in Russia (stock picture) has been active almost continuously since 2007, spewing ash and slow moving lava from its summit

STATS AND FACTS: THE ISS Construction of the ISS began on 20 November 1998. It supports a crew of up to six, with crews split into groups of three. The station orbits at a height of about 255 miles (410km). It has a total mass of about 990,000 pounds (450,000kg) and has living space roughly equivalent to a five-bedroom house. It completes an orbit of Earth every 92.91 minutes and moves at 17,100 miles (27,600km) per hour. It has now been in space for more than 5,900 days, during which time it has completed more than 92,000 orbits of Earth, and has been continuously occupied for more than 13 years. Advertisement

Major Peake is more than half way through his six month mission in orbit and has developed a reputation for his stunning photography.

Earlier this month he said at times it felt more like looking down on the set of a science fiction movie than onto the Earth when he peered out of the windows of the ISS.

During his time in space, Major Peake has captured night-shots and weather events to selfies that have been taken more over the first three months of his six month mission. Last week, the British astronaut snapped a stunning picture of the UK

His latest image comes as Nasa has revealed stunning ultra-HD footage of the Earth taken from the space station.

Filmed using 4K cameras, the videos give viewers a true sense of the view experienced by the astronauts themselves.

Major Peake has also beamed back a series of impressive images of the aurora taken from far above the Earth's atmosphere.

His timelapse videos reveal the true beauty of the Northern and Southern lights in a way that can never be appreciated back down on Earth.

He has also posted pictures showing how light pouring from cities around the world can be clearly seen from Space. In cities such as London major roads extend like dazzling tentacles reaching out into the darkness.

Major Peake had plenty of opportunities to take an impressive shot of his home country on 8 April because the ISS passes over the same spot a total of 16 times in the day.

Spotted a volcano smoking away on Russias far east coast this morning  heat has melted snow around top pic.twitter.com/Q1F6TOi2LK  Tim Peake (@astro_timpeake) April 18, 2016

The ISS completes an orbit of Earth every 92.91 minutes and moves at 17,100mph (27,600km/h) per hour.

He has also shared incredible images of Italy, France and other neighbouring European countries on Twitter, alongside the odd seflie of Major Peake himself.

Major Peake has also managed to capture Mount Everest from his space lookout.

Tim Peake posted this picture on Twitter with the caption: 'I love this picture taken just before sunset - looks more like a movie scene than planet Earth'. Major Peake is three months into his six month mission living on the International Space Station (ISS) that completes an orbit of Earth every 92.91 minutes and moves at 17,100mph (27,600km/h) per hour

There's no place like home: Tim Peake snapped this stunning picture of the UK on 8 April (shown) from his current base on the International Space Station (ISS) as it orbited 255 miles (410km) above the Earth. The image (pictured) shows the lights of cities such as London blazing into space, with major roads like dazzling tentacles reaching out into the darkness

The bright lights of Europe: Major Peake had plenty of opportunities to take an impressive shot of his home country because the ISS passed over the same spot a total of 16 times on 8 April, when the photo was taken. He also shared a pretty shot of France (shown) with Paris burning brightly n the north of the country, and other parts of Europe on Twitter

Upon sharing the snap of the curved 'boot' of Italy (shown above) Major Peake tweeted: 'Been some great night passes over Europe recently...I am waving'

While the mountain in Nepal is the highest on Earth, at 29,029 feet (8,848 metres) above sea level, Major Peaks tweeted it's 'harder to spot from space than you might think.'

He asked Dave MacLean at the Centre of Geographic Sciences (COGS) to confirm he snapped the right mountain.

Last month, Major Peake celebrated celebrating St Patrick's Day by sharing a photograph of Ireland.

Last week, Major Peake managed to capture Mount Everest from his space lookout (right). While the mountain in Nepal is the highest on Earth, at 29,029 feet (8,848 metres) above sea level, Major Peaks tweeted it's 'harder to spot from space than you might think'

Tim Peake shared a photo of Ireland (pictured) from 255 miles (410km) above the Earth on the ISS to celebrate St Patrick's Day last month

He tweeted: 'The Emerald Isle is looking lush and green from space...Happy St Patrick's Day to all down there!'

Two months ago he captured storms raging across Europe and Africa in all their mesmerising beauty.

The British astronaut tweeted a timelapse of the footage, explaining that it's 'amazing how much lightning can strike our planet in a short time.'

It was filmed as the ISS travelled over North Africa, Turkey and towards Russia.

The ideal conditions for lightning and thunderstorms occur where warm, moist air rises and mixes with cold air above.

These conditions occur almost daily in many parts of the Earth and rarely in other areas, making certain regions more prone to strikes.

For example, parts of Africa including the Democratic Republic of the Congo have the highest frequency of lightning on Earth.

The photograph of the UK is one of many impressive scenes, ranging from countries and weather events to selfies, taken by Major Peake (pictured left), who is more than three months into his mission on the ISS (right)

Earlier this year, as storms raged across Europe and Africa, Tim Peake captured them in all their mesmerising beauty from on-board the International Space Station. The footage was filmed as the ISS travelled over North Africa, Turkey and towards Russia (pictured)

This is caused by air from the Atlantic Ocean hitting mountains as it blows across the region.

Nasa tracks lightning strikes using satellites fitted with sensors and information from these satellites is sent to staff on Earth.

During the 33-second clip, a spattering of flashes is seen on the horizon.

As the ISS soars towards Eastern Europe, the flashes become more intense and centralised and the cloud cover thickens.

More lightning occurs over land than water because the sun heats the land surface faster than the ocean.

The heated land surface warms the air above it and that warm air rises to encounter cold air.

Researchers recently found that regardless of where in the world a person is, lightning bolts are at their most powerful at 8am.

This is because there are fewer particles in the atmosphere overnight so it takes a more powerful charge to overcome the extra distance between these particles and release the bolt of power.

The ISS completes an orbit of Earth every 92.91 minutes and moves at 17,100 miles (27,600km) per hour. It typically visible as it flies over the regions in the clip between 6pm and 7pm local time. Lightning strikes are shown by the bright flashes in the centre of this image

Major Peake, who is three months into his mission, has sent hundreds of photographs back to Earth, including the odd selfie. The astronaut is shown somersaulting during an interview at the start of his mission in the animation above

By comparison, more storms occur in the afternoon as solar heating charges a higher number of particles, but these storms are weaker.

Typical afternoon lightning might vary from 6,000 to 20,000 amps per ground flash but powerful morning lightning to ground strokes can average 30,000 amps.

Urbanised areas are also five per cent more likely to be hit by thunderstorms, on a given day, than rural areas of the same size.

Storms were more likely to hit these urbanised areas during warmer months, in July and August, in the late afternoon and early evening.

During the 33-second clip, a spattering of flashes is seen on the horizon. As the ISS soars towards Eastern Europe, the flashes become more intense and centralised and the cloud cover thickens (pictured)

These findings add further weight to the fact rising temperatures increase the frequency of storms, but also that increased pollution levels in urban areas play a major role.

In addition to pollution, urbanised areas cause more storms because they create 'urban heat-islands'.

Concentrations of buildings can increase temperatures causing low pressures to form above cities, compared to high pressures in rural areas.

This causes a so-called 'low-level atmospheric convergence', which forces air up into thunderstorms.
An idea proposed more than a century ago that limbs evolved from gills, which has been discredited due to lack of fossil evidence, may prove correct after all.

Researchers have shown human limbs share a gene with the gills of cartilaginous fish such as sharks, skates and rays.

The discovery could shed light on the origin of jawed vertebrates - the group of animals that includes humans.

Researchers have shown that human limbs share a gene with the gills of cartilaginous fish such as sharks, skates and rays. An image of a dyed late skate embryo is shown left and skeleton of an embryonic bamboo shark pictured right

Unlike other fish, cartilaginous fish have a series of skin flaps that protect their gills.

These flaps are supported by arches of cartilage, with finger-like appendages called branchial rays attached.

In 1878, German anatomist Karl Gegenbaur presented the theory that paired fins and eventually limbs evolved from a structure resembling the gill arch of cartilaginous fish.

However, nothing in the fossil record has ever been discovered to support this.

Now, researchers have reinvestigated Gegenbaur's ideas using the latest genetic techniques on embryos of the little skate - a fish from the very group that first inspired the controversial theory 138 years ago.

They found striking similarities between the genetic mechanism used in the development of its gill arches and those in human limbs.

Researchers have used the latest genetic techniques on embryos of the little skate and found striking similarities between the genetic mechanism used in the development of its gill arches (shown above) and those in human limbs

The new study shows the functions of the Sonic hedgehog gene in human limb development - dictating the identity of each finger and maintaining growth of the limb skeleton - are mirrored in the development of the branchial rays in skate embryos. A stock image of a model of a human arm is shown above

Scientists say it comes down to a critical gene in limb development called 'Sonic hedgehog', named after the video game character by a research team at Harvard Medical School.

The sonic hedgehog gene is thought to play role in the growth of digits on limbs, as well as the organisation of the brain. It's even even been implicated in the development of some cancers, making it an important research topic.

The new study, published in the journal Development, shows the functions of the Sonic hedgehog gene in human limb development - dictating the identity of each finger and maintaining growth of the limb skeleton - are mirrored in the development of the branchial rays in skate embryos.

Lead author of the study Dr Andrew Gillis, from the University of Cambridge, said it shows aspects of Gegenbaur's theory may in fact be correct, and provides greater understanding of the origin of jawed vertebrates, including humans.

'Gegenbaur looked at the way that these branchial rays connect to the gill arches and noticed that it looks very similar to the way that the fin and limb skeleton articulates with the shoulder,' he said.

WHO WAS KARL GEGENBAUR? Karl Gegenbaur (pictured) lived from 1826 to 1903 Karl Gegenbaur lived between 1826 and 1903. The German analtomist demonstrated that the field of comparative anatomy offers important evidence supporting of the theory of evolution. He's best known for Grundriss der vergleichenden Anatomie or Eemnets of comparative anatomy. A strong supporter of Charles Darwin's theory of organic evolution, he thought that structural similarities among various animals provide clues to their evolutionary history. He was interested in relations between corresponding parts in different animals such as the arm of man, with the foreleg of a horse, and with the wing of a fowl. He sensationally claimed in 1878 that paired fins and eventually human limbs evolved from a structure resembling the gill arch of cartilaginous fish. However, nothing in the fossil record has ever been discovered to support this and his theory was discredited. Now researchers have shown human limbs share a gene with the gills of cartilaginous fish such as sharks, skates and rays and are revisiting his ideas. Advertisement

'The branchial rays extend like a series of fingers down the side of a shark gill arch.'

'The fact that the Sonic hedgehog gene performs the same two functions in the development of gill arches and branchial rays in skate embryos as it does in the development of limbs in mammal embryos may help explain how Gegenbaur arrived at his controversial theory on the origin of fins and limbs.'

In mammal embryos, the Sonic hedgehog gene sets up the axis of the limb in the early stages of development.

Dr Gillis explained: 'In a hand, for instance, Sonic hedgehog tells the limb which side will be the thumb and which side will be the pinky finger.'

In the later stages of development, Sonic hedgehog maintains outgrowth so that the limb grows to its full size.

To test whether the gene functions in the same way in skate embryos, Dr Gillis and his team inhibited Sonic hedgehog at different points during their development.

They found that if the gene was interrupted early in development, the branchial rays formed on the wrong side of the gill arch.

To test whether the gene functions in the same way in skate embryos, Dr Gillis and his team inhibited Sonic hedgehog at different points during their development. A skate embryo that has been stained is pictured

THE NEXT STEP IN TESTING GEGENBAUR'S THEORY Dr Gillis and his team are further testing Gegenbaur's theory by comparing the function of more genes involved the development of skates' unusual gills and mammalian limbs. 'Previous studies haven't found compelling developmental genetic similarities between gill arch derivatives and paired appendages - but these studies were done in animals like mice and zebrafish, which don't have branchial rays,' he said. 'It is useful to study cartilaginous fishes, not only because they were the group that first inspired Gegenbaur's theory, but also because they have a lot of unique features that other fishes don't - and we are finding that we can learn a lot about evolution from these unique features.' 'Many researchers look at mutant mice or fruit flies to understand the genetic control of anatomy. 'Our approach is to study and compare the diverse anatomical forms that can be found in nature, in order to gain insight into the evolution of the vertebrate body.' Advertisement

If the Sonic hedgehog gene was interrupted later in development, then fewer branchial rays formed.

However, the ones that did grow, grew on the correct side of the gill arch, showing that the gene works in a remarkably similar way here as it does in the development of limbs.

'Taken to the extreme, these experiments could be interpreted as evidence that limbs share a genetic programme with gill arches because fins and limbs evolved by transformation of a gill arch in an ancestral vertebrate, as proposed by Gegenbaur,' Dr Gillis said.

'However, it could also be that these structures evolved separately, but re-used the same pre-existing genetic programme.

'Without fossil evidence this remains a bit of a mystery -there is a gap in the fossil record between species with no fins and then suddenly species with paired fins - so we can't really be sure yet how paired appendages evolved.'

'Either way this is a fascinating discovery, because it provides evidence for a fundamental evolutionary link between branchial rays and limbs.'

Paired appendages, such as arms and hands in humans, are one of the key anatomical features that distinguish jawed vertebrates from other groups. Dr Gillis said: 'There is a lot of interest in trying to understand the origins of jawed vertebrates, and the origins of novel features like fins and limbs.
The residents of different cities will often claim to have their own unique traditions, dialects and cultures, but it seems there is something else that sets them apart - their bacteria.

A new study has revealed that cities have their own distinct microbial communities that can be used to tell them apart.

However, within a city, the bugs that live on the floor, ceilings and desks of offices differs little from one building to the next.

Professor Caporaso and colleagues monitored three offices over a one-year period in Flagstaff, San Diego and Toronto (pictured). They found cities have their own distinct microbial communities, and office floors have more microbes than any other parts of the office, because of the materials carried around by shoes

The scientists found that the same kind of bacteria can be found in all the offices in the city where you work, but different cities have their own microbial 'signatures'.

Microbes are any living organisms too tiny to be seen with the naked eye.

To examine the microbial communities living in three different cities, researchers swabbed various surfaces in offices in Flagstaff, San Diego and Toronto over a one year period.

Most of the microbes found in the offices came from human skin, the researchers said.

Office floors have more microbes than any other parts of the office because of the materials carried around by people's shoes.

E. coli bacteria. Microbes include bacteria and archaebacteria, protists, some fungi and even some very tiny animals that are too small to be seen without the aid of a microscope. These tiny creatures are accumulating in our offices over time

HOW THE STUDY WORKED Professor Caporaso and colleagues monitored three offices over a one-year period in Flagstaff, San Diego and Toronto. In each office they installed three sampling plates, with one plate each on the floor, ceiling and wall. Each plate contained two or three swatches each of painted drywall, ceiling tile and carpet, as well as sensors that allowed them to monitor parameters of the environment including equilibrium relative humidity on the surfaces of the swatches, available light, occupancy, and temperature. Samples were collected in four six-week sampling periods, one per season. They used laboratory techniques called 16S rRNA gene sequencing and ITS-1 to profile bacterial and fungal communities found in the samples. To see if any particular office workers or body sites were sources for the microbes seen in offices, the researchers also collected human skin, nasal, oral, and fecal microbiome samples from 11 workers at one of the Flagstaff offices, and from individuals performing the sampling techniques in all three cities. Advertisement

This process of spreading the organisms seems to help explain why different cities may have their own microbial profile.

The team led by the University of Arizona looked at nine offices and found human skin was the largest identifiable source of the office bacterial community samples in them all, with at least 25-30 per cent of the office surface microbiome from human skin.

Microbes include bacteria and archaebacteria, protists, some fungi and even some very tiny animals that are too small to be seen without the aid of a microscope.

These tiny creatures are accumulating in our offices over time.

'We suspect that in the absence of extreme conditions like flooding, microbes may be passively accumulating on surfaces in the built environment rather than undergoing an active process,' said senior study author Dr Gregory Caporaso, assistant director of the Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics at the university.

'As we continue to expand our understanding of the microbiology of the built environment, possibly including routine monitoring of microbial communities to track changes that may impact human health, our results will help inform future research efforts.'

Professor Caporaso and colleagues monitored three offices over a one-year period in Flagstaff, San Diego and Toronto.

In each office they installed three sampling plates, with one plate each on the floor, ceiling and wall.

The three cities had their own signature microbial communities.

The team looked at nine offices and found that human skin bacterial communities were the largest identifiable source of the office bacterial community samples in them all, with at least 25-30 per cent of the office surface microbiome from human skin

Professor Caporaso said: 'This was especially interesting because even within each city, the offices we studied differed from each other in terms of size, usage patterns, and ventilation systems, suggesting that geography is more important than any of these features in driving the bacterial community composition of the offices within the ranges that we studied.'

Researcher John Chase samples office surface materials just prior to installation in June, 2013

Samples were collected in four six-week sampling periods, one per season.

Then, the researchers profiled bacterial and fungal communities found in the samples.

Frequent sampling of the test plates disrupted the microbial communities only slightly, the researchers found.

To see if any particular office workers or body sites were sources for the microbes seen in offices, the researchers also collected human skin, nasal, oral, and fecal microbiome samples from 11 workers at one of the Flagstaff offices, and from individuals performing the sampling techniques in all three cities.

A small but consistent amount of office surface microbial communities came from human noses.

The largest source of microbial communities in these offices, however, was from non-human sources such as the environment.

The Flagstaff offices had richer microbial communities than those in San Diego or Toronto, which were more similar to each other, though Caporaso said it's unclear why.

There was no link found between office microbes and the temperature or humidity indoors.

THE BACTERIA FOUND IN NEW YORK'S SUBWAY The New York City subway is crammed with people, but the underground system may be much more crowded than we realised. Last February, scientists from Weill Cornell Medical College unveiled their findings after 18 months swabbing turnstiles, ticket kiosks, railings and benches for DNA on the world's largest transport system. They found 15,152 different types of microorganisms that share the train with its 5.5 million riders, including bubonic plague, dysentery and meningitis. The study, which used a super computer to study more than 10 billion biomedical fragments, was apparently inspired by lead author Dr Mason seeing his daughter, then in preschool, sticking toys in her mouth in 2010. Zoom in on the map to find out which subways stations have the most bacteria Advertisement
It is a topic that divides exhuasted new mothers and the medical community, but the argument for breast feeding babies could have been given a boost by new research into human milk.

Humans produce the most unique form of milk of all mammals with more than seven times as many different sugars of other animals, a study has found.

Researchers discovered human breast milk contains 200 sugar compounds while cows and mice carry between 30 and 50 in their milk.

Human breast milk has been found to contain 200 different sugar compounds while cows and mice have between 30 and 50 different sugars in their milk. Scientists say while the levels of these sugars change over time in breast milk, it is not clear what the role of each of them is (stock image of mother breastfeeding)

Scientists found the concentrations of each of the sugars in human breast milk changes over time during breast feeding.

Why this happens, and the role of each of the sugars, is still a scientific mystery.

EMBRYOS DRINK WOMB 'MILK' A mother's milk provides the valuable nourishment a baby needs during its first months of life, but it seems women also provide a form of milk for their child while they are still in the womb. Researchers have discovered that during the first months of pregnancy the mother's body secretes nutrients that have been dubbed 'womb milk' for the embryo. This milk, or histiotrophe as it is also known, provides the embryo with the energy and biochemical building blocks it needs to grow during the first 11 weeks of pregnancy. During this time the embryo is too small and delicate for the umbilical cord to be attached and supply nutrients from the mother's blood supply. Instead, researchers at the University of Manchester, have found that glands in the lining of the uterus produce a sugary substance known as glycogen and fragments of sugary protein. These are absorbed into the placenta and then used by the embryo to grow. Dr Carolyn Jones, a research fellow at the University of Manchester who conducted the research, said the work could help improve treatments like IVF by allowing the medium the fertilised eggs are kept in before implantation to be improved. Advertisement

However, researchers believe they may play a key role in the development of the infant immune system and helping babies establish a healthy balance of bacteria in their gut.

Professor Thierry Hennet, of Zurich University in Switzerland, said: 'The first impact breast milk has is favouring the colonisation of the gut by specific bacterial groups that can digest these sugar molecules.

'Infants don't have the machinery to digest these sugars so they are literally for the bacteria - it's like a seeding ground and breast milk is the fertiliser.'

Breast milk is often an infant's first meal but many of the sugars in the milk are not meant to feed it.

When they are born, babies do not have any bacteria in their guts but within a few days they have millions - and after a week there are billions.

The sugars that come from mother's milk are usually the first compounds these bacteria have to feed on and it is thought the sugars help to cultivate specific bacterial species.

Human breast milk also helps to lay the foundation for the new baby's immune system.

Professor Hennet and his team reviewed recent research on human breast milk in a paper published in the journal Trends in Biochemical Sciences.

After birth, milk is rich in antibodies and molecules that slow the growth of harmful bacteria and coordinate white blood cell activity.

After one month - when the infant begins developing an adaptive immune system of his or her own - the composition changes so levels of maternal antibodies drop by more than 90 per cent.

Public health workers and many doctors argue breastfeeding is better for infants than bottle feeding (pictured). The new review of scientific studies suggests breast milk helps to prime a baby's immune system and gut

There is also a sharp decrease in the diversity of breast milk sugars, which suggests there is less selection for bacterial species needed by this time.

Instead mature human breast milk has an increased number of fat and other nutrients that support infant growth.

Despite the many functions of breast milk children can grow up healthy with limited supplies or without ever being exposed - raising controversial questions about what is normal when it comes to breastfeeding.

Breast milk clearly reduces infant mortality and significantly decreases a newborn's risk for gut and airway infections - but there's little support for longer-term benefits.

Professor Hennet said: 'We have to be careful about giving any recommendations.

On the one hand breast milk is the product of millions of years of evolution and certainly possesses the optimal nutrients for a newborn but the question is how long does the new-born really need this supply?
Some were'pure' and others layered - something lemurs mysteriously do

Male lemurs produce a musky odour that they use to warn off rivals

The scent of ring-tailed lemurs could never be confused with Chanel no 5, but the cute creatures mix their scents like professional perfumers.

The Madagascan animals create particularly potent secretions by combining fragrances to create richer, longer-lasting scents, researchers say.

One of the chemicals in the smelly fluid is even used as a preservative in perfumes used by humans.

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Lemurs create particularly potent secretions by combining fragrances to create richer, longer-lasting scents, researchers say. Here, a male ring-tailed lemur stops to sniff the scent of another lemur

Male ring-tailed lemurs produce a distinctive musky odour using a pair of glands on their wrists that give off droplets of clear, fast-evaporating fluid.

A second pair of glands on their chests secrete a brown, foul-smelling paste.

Males use these scents to mark territories and tell rivals to back off, sometimes using wrist secretions alone by rubbing their wrists directly onto branches and saplings.

However, they also mix the two, pressing the insides of their wrists against their chest glands to mingle the scents.

They then smear the pungent mixture on their tails, waving them in the air and wafting them at rivals to see who has the superior stench, in a charming ritual called 'stink fighting'.

Biologists have been baffled as to why the animals blend their fragrances,

Male ring-tailed lemurs produce a distinctive musky odour using a pair of glands on their wrists that give off droplets of clear, fast-evaporating fluid, as well as a second pair of glands on their chests that secrete a brown, foul-smelling paste. A lemur pair are pictured in this stock image

WHY MALE LEMURS MAKE PERFUME Male ring-tailed lemurs produce a distinctive musky odour using a pair of glands on their wrists that give off droplets of clear, fast-evaporating fluid, as well as a second pair of glands on their chests that secrete a brown, foul-smelling paste. Males use their scents to mark territories and tell rivals to back off, sometimes using wrist secretions alone by rubbing their wrists directly onto branches and saplings. However, they also mix the two, pressing the insides of their wrists against their chest glands to mingle the scents. They then smear the pungent mixture on their tails, waving them in the air and wafting them at rivals to see who has the superior stench, in a charming ritual called 'stink fighting'. Advertisement

Now researchers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, have presented pure and mixed scent secretions from unfamiliar males to 12 ring-tailed lemurs in a lab, to gauge their reactions to the pungent perfumes.

The secretions were collected with cotton swabs and then rubbed onto three wooden rods -one rod with wrist secretions only, another with secretions from the chest, and a third with a mixture of the two.

Each male participated in two sets of trials, one set with fresh secretions and another in which the secretions were allowed to air out and evaporate for 12 hours first.

The researchers found that the lemurs paid more attention to the mixtures, spending more time sniffing rods covered with blended scents than pure ones.

Surprisingly, the lemurs showed an even stronger preference for mixed secretions after the scents had aired out, shifting from sniffing them when fresh to licking them intently when dried.

The results, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal suggest that mixing scents serves two purposes.

The greasy goo from lemur chest glands contains a chemical called squalene, a substance produced by many plants and animals and commonly used as a preservative in perfumes (stock image) and skincare products

Firstly, like blending perfumes with complementary notes, Professor Christine Drea, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke who led the study, said blending secretions may increase the amount of information conveyed by a single dab of scent.

The wrist and chest secretions of male ring-tailed lemurs differ somewhat in composition, previous studies showed and chemical analyses have identified dozens of odour molecules in the wrist secretions alone.

First author Lydia Greene explained mixing wrist and chest secretions may also lock in the more fleeting aromas and boost their staying power.

The greasy goo from the chest glands contains a chemical called squalene, an oily substance produced by many plants and animals and commonly used as a preservative in perfumes and skincare products.
Nasa is betting on advanced solar-electric propulsion technology to explore the outer reaches of our solar system.

In a step towards that goal, the space agency today awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne of Redmond, Washington, a $67 million contract to help develop the technology.

The Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) contract will design propulsion systems for the robotic portion of Nasa's Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) as well as missions to Mars.

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Nasa is betting on advanced solar-electric propulsion technology to explore the outer reaches of our solar system. The space agency today awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne of Redmond, Washington, a $67 million contract to help develop the technology. Pictured is a Hall thruster electric propulsion unit in operation

SOLAR ELECTRIC PROPULSION Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) uses solar energy from solar arrays converted into electricity. Electricity is then used to ionize and accelerate propellant to produce thrust. The technology could potentially increase spaceflight transportation fuel efficiency by 10 times over current chemical propulsion technology, according to Nasa. It could also more than double thrust capability compared to current electric propulsion systems. Advertisement

This will include the development of ion drives and Hall thrusters that could potentially increase spaceflight transportation fuel efficiency by 10 times over current chemical propulsion technology, according to Nasa.

It could also more than double thrust capability compared to current electric propulsion systems.

'Through this contract, Nasa will be developing advanced electric propulsion elements for initial spaceflight applications,' said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of Nasa's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD).

'[This] will pave the way for an advanced solar electric propulsion demonstration mission by the end of the decade.

'Development of this technology will advance our future in-space transportation capability for a variety of Nasa deep space human and robotic exploration missions, as well as private commercial space missions.'

Aerojet Rocketdyne will oversee the development of an electric propulsion system consisting of a thruster, power processing unit (PPU), low-pressure xenon flow controller, and electrical harness.

Nasa has developed and tested a prototype thruster and PPU that the company can use as a reference design.

The company will construct, test and deliver an engineering development unit for testing and evaluation in preparation for producing the follow-on flight units.

During the option period of the contract, the company will develop, verify and deliver four electric propulsion units that will fly in space.

Shown here is a 13-kilowatt Hall thruster being evaluated at Nasa's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Hall thrusters trap electrons in a magnetic field and use them to ionize the onboard propellant. It uses 10 times less propellant than equivalent chemical rockets

This work will directly complement recent advanced solar array systems work, also funded by STMD.

Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) uses solar energy from solar arrays converted into electricity. Electricity is then used to ionize and accelerate propellant to produce thrust.

Nasa anticipates the electrical power to operate this advanced electric propulsion flight system in space will be generated by solar arrays using structures similar to those that were developed under the solar array systems contracts.

COULD WE TRAVEL TO MARS IN JUST THREE DAYS? Technology harnessing the power of light could be the key to cutting down travel times to Mars from years to just a matter of days. A group of physicists in California is working on probe that could lead to technology to get to Mars at much faster speeds than is currently possible. The answer to doing this could lie in what's known as photonic propulsion, a technique that uses light from lasers to produce thrust to drive spacecraft. While the technology the team is creating will be targeted at extremely small probes, someday it could inspire the creation of larger spacecraft that travel rapidly to Mars. A group of physicists in California is working on spacecraft that could let humans reach the nearest stars in our solar system - a challenge that is not possible with current propulsion technology. The answer could lie in what's known as photonic propulsion, a technique that uses light from lasers to produce thrust (illustrated) Professor Phillip Lubin and his team from the University of California Santa Barbara are working on the Directed Energy Interstellar Precursors (Deep-In) programme. The theory is simple; thrust from photons emitted from a laser array could be used to propel a spacecraft. All spacecrafts operate by firing their propellant in the opposite direction to the way they want to travel. Traditionally this propellant is fuel and has to be carried on board the spacecraft, making it heavier and slowing it down. Photonic propulsion uses an array of lasers instead, which adds no mass to the spacecraft other than the laser itself. This enables it to accelerate for longer and reach higher speeds. In theory, this should help get aircraft to relativistic speeds. Advertisement

The space agency has been refining development of spaceflight electric propulsion technology for more than five decades, the first successful ion electric propulsion thruster being developed at Glenn in the 1950s.

The first operational test of an electric propulsion system in space was Glenn's Space Electric Rocket Test 1, which flew on July 20, 1964.

Since then, Nasa has increasingly relied on solar electric propulsion for long-duration, deep-space robotic science and exploration missions to multiple destinations, the most recent being Nasa's Dawn mission.

The Dawn mission, managed by JPL, surveyed the giant asteroid Vesta and the protoplanet, Ceres, between 2011 and 2015.

The advanced electric propulsion system is the next step in Nasa's Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) project.
Prague is one of Europe's big hitters, with a tangled history that swings from the romantic to the tragic.

It has seen occupation, repression and liberation - and it's a wonder it remains so enchanting.

You need two full days to do it justice so plan on three nights - and pack some sturdy shoes because almost all the streets are cobbled, and everywhere is walkable.

Sunshine smile: Prague is an effortlessly pretty city, with the vast Old Town Square sitting at its heart

I WANT TO BE ALONE

Tricky. But don't believe for a second that the place is overrun by hen or stag night hi-jinks. Avoid the summer if you can and, if you're going for only two or three nights, try to miss weekends. Early spring and September or October are ideal.

BACKGROUND BRIEFING

The Republic of Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918 following the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But it was occupied by Germany in World War II, and then became a one-party communist state in 1948 under Soviet influence.

A reform movement was crushed in 1968 when the Soviets invaded, and it was not until the 1989 Velvet Revolution that it emerged from the shadows. The first president when the Czech Republic came into being in 1993 - after separation from Slovakia - was the writer Vaclav Havel. He died five years ago, but is still much loved.

WHERE TO STAY?

There are plenty of cheaper options than the Four Seasons (www.fourseasons.com/prague) but none is in a better position.

Book a room with a view of Prague Castle and - below it - the haunting Charles Bridge, with its statues of 30 saints spanning the River Vltava. The hotel dates in part to 1737.

Service is impeccable and its Italian/Japanese restaurant, CottoCrudo, is one of the best in town.

THE ESSENTIAL ITINERARY

You must hire a guide who speaks good English. Ask Kirker Holidays (details below) if you can have Rosa. She's 86, and has lived through much of the country's extraordinary history.

Old Town Square (with its famous astronomical clock) is where you should start, admiring the Gothic spires of the Church of Our Lady and the rococo Goltz-Kinsky Palace (where Kafka studied). Then take in the haunting Jewish District, the Municipal House and some of the tiny narrow streets that make you lose all sense of direction.

Over the Charles Bridge and you're into the Mala Strana. Pay to enter the Church of St Nicholas, a riot of High Baroque, where Mozart played the organ in 1787, and then keep going up the hill to Prague Castle and St Vitus Cathedral.

BEAT THE CROWDS?

Hardly, but make a point of spending a good hour at the mesmerising Lobkowicz Palace (www.lobkowicz.com). This privately owned palace tells the story of one of the richest families in the country, which twice had all its treasures confiscated. But everything is back where it belongs, including two Canelettos of 18th century London and some astonishing original scores and manuscripts of Beethoven and Mozart.

THIRSTY WORK

For sure. Even if you don't normally drink beer, you should here The Pilsner Urquell somehow tastes different, stronger, fresher - and certainly cheaper.

Before dinner, drop in at Tretter's, a contemporary bar near Old Town Square.

Opt for local wines (surprisingly good dry rieslings) and pop into the tiny absinthe bar called Residence U Tri Bubnu. Sip rather than down it in one.

LET THE MUSIC BEGIN

A night at the State National Opera is a joy -and a steal. Expect to pay no more than 20-30 to be in the stalls. But hurry. The theatre will close in July for two years of renovation (www.stateopera.com). There are also regular concerts at venues all over the city, particularly in the spectacular Mirror Chapel (www.dvorak-symphony- orchestra.com).

DINNER IS SERVED

There are 155 churches in Prague but they are vastly outnumbered by bars and restaurants. Top of anyone's list should be cosy and romantic U Maliru (www.umaliru.cz) in Maltezske Square. The building dates to 1543. Ask to see the wine cellars.

Food is top-notch French. Francouzska (www.francouzskarestaurace.cz) is in the Municipal House building and is an East European Art Deco meets Art Nouveau confection. Terrific for people watching.

If near the opera house, eat at Cestr, which specialises in meat.

ANYTHING ELSE?

On May 14, it will be 700 years since the birth of Charles IV, father of the country.

Currency is the Czech crown but Euros are accepted.

There are trams and a Metro if you don't fancy walking.

Amadeus, Mission Impossible, The Chronicles Of Narnia and Casino Royale were all filmed here. And Albert Einstein spent a year living here while teaching at the German University.
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Given that sharks are among the planet's most efficient killers, the idea of swimming with them fills many people with dread.

But for one photographer, the experience is anything but terrifying - he actually finds it extremely calming. And he uses his skills to show just how majestic the predators can be, along with other sea creatures, with stunning underwater images.

What makes the pictures even more unique is that he only picked up a camera two years ago - and doesn't use scuba gear. In 2014, Matt Draper, originally from New Zealand, decided to move on from his life as a carpenter and focus on documenting the fascinating underwater world right on the doorstep of his new home - a small beachside community in Byron Bay, Australia - and in other exotic locations.

In 2014, Matt Draper, originally from New Zealand, decided to move on from his life as a carpenter and focus on documenting the fascinating underwater world right on the doorstep of his new home - a small beachside community in Byron Bay, Australia. While many find the idea of swimming with sharks terrifying, Draper finds it calming. Pictured is a great white shark

Draper's pictures are so mesmerising that his Instagram account, where they can be found, has 70,000 followers. Pictured is a green sea turtle in Oahu, Hawaii

Draper's images showcase encounters with great white, tiger and hammerhead sharks, humpback and pilot whales, common and bottlenose dolphins, seals, turtles and manta rays, to name a few. Pictured is a manta ray in Byron Bay, Australia.

His pictures have proved so mesmerising that he's managed to clock up 70,000 followers on Instagram.

Draper's work showcases his encounters with great white, tiger and hammerhead sharks, humpback and pilot whales, common and bottlenose dolphins, seals, turtles and manta rays - all captured while holding his breath.

Draper told MailOnline Travel: 'Ever since I can remember Ive had a fascination with the ocean.

'I have always wanted to capture dramatic scenes from the ocean that encourage a certain emotion.'

The explorer said this location provides the perfect chance to capture some of the ocean's most feared creatures in their natural habitat.

Draper posted this image of a great white shark on his Instagram page with the caption: 'I probably could have got a little bit closer...'

This incredible image shows spinner dolphins in Oahu, Hawaii. According to Draper they were synchronising their breathing pattern while resting off the coast

Draper said that spreading awareness about environmental issues and replacing a fear of the ocean with fascination, are his top priorities

DRAPER'S ADVICE FOR PERFECT UNDERWATER PHOTOGRAPHY He said: 'My perfect conditions are super blue water with no swell, no wind and 49 to 98ft visibility and an interesting subject. 'Since all of my images are captured while free diving under natural light  the middle of the day gives me the best lighting conditions.' Advertisement

The 30-year-old confessed: 'I love the silence underwater. To interact with such large, wild apex predators with no noise being exchanged is something that truly needs to be experienced.

'Most people have a vision in their head of swimming with a shark to be fearful, but to me its the complete opposite. Very calming.'

The artist's priority is to spread awareness about environmental issues as well as replacing fear of the ocean with fascination.

He's had a few scary moments, though.

Despite photographing dangerous sharks, one of his most nail-biting encounters occurred when he came face-to-face with a humpback whale.

He said: 'I was once interacting with a very curious female humpback whale calf that was getting extremely close to me.

'I had to be very aware of the whales actions and try my hardest to keep distance between her powerful tail and me.'

And it's not just keeping safe around large sea creatures that's tricky, the timing is, too.

'I will spend an hour or two patiently timing each time I dive down,' he said. 'Sometimes I will stay underwater for over three minutes holding my breath.'

Most of his work, which is mainly captured on a Canon 5D MKIII and a 15mm fisheye lens inside an Aquatica dive-rated housing, has been taken in Australia but he has also ventured to Hawaii, the Kingdom of Tonga, back to New Zealand and to Indonesia to snap sea creatures.

To follow his work and to buy prints, head to his website.

This humpback whale almost appears to be attempting to put its huge fin around Draper. He took this picture in Vava'u in the Kingdom of Tonga

Draper posted this picture, which he took in Byron Bay, on his Instagram page with a caption that read: 'An incredible image my good friend @scottwilsonimagery captured of me photographing this beautiful manta ray at our local diving spot'

This breath-taking picture shows a group of cownose rays drifting through the ocean at Byron Bay in Australia

Draper snapped this great white shark as it drifted through the ocean around the Neptune Islands, Australia

All of Draper's images were captured while free diving under natural light and Draper said the middle of the day gives his the best lighting conditions. Pictured right is a manta ray in Byron Bay

This image is called Cleaning Station, and is of rather mucky green sea turtles swimming through the warm waters of Hawaii

The image on the left shows a great white shark and trevally fish off the Neptune Islands in Australia. Pictured right is a humpback whale in Vava'u in the Kingdom of Tonga

This image is called Three's A Crowd - and shows humpback whales in Vava'u, gracefully making their way through sun-kissed waters
Passengers claim they thought they 'would die' when their plane made an emergency landing after smoke was detected in the cabin by crew.

Flyers on board the Iberia flight from Montevideo in Uruguay to Madrid in Spain claim that they were alerted to the emergency after a 'permanent alarm' sounded.

Following the emergency landing some flyers reported that they were stranded in Fortaleza, Brazil, for two days.

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The airline stated that the smoke was detected in the crew rest area of the aircraft, but some passengers have claimed that they were told that their baggage may have 'suffered burns'. The airline denied this

The Airbus A330-200 initially dropped 8,000ft from 37,000ft to 29,000ft in the space of nine minutes before making a full descent and landing at the airport in Brazil five hours into the 16 hour flight.

A video of it touching down was later uploaded to YouTube.

Passenger Pedro Amador from Dubai told MailOnline Travel that after the landing the plane was met by fire engines as the 'plane stopped very fast and the brakes started smoking'.

He said: 'In the middle of the flight an alarm started going off.

'I felt alright, I was telling myself it was a normal landing. But the crew were nervous, from my point of view they were definitely pretty nervous.

'For example one said "a nun is praying for us".

'According to the emergency plan, the plane had to stop very fast and we still had 50 per cent fuel.

'Due to this fast stop, the brakes overheated a lot and smoke started in the brakes. A team of fire fighters put water on the brakes.

'In the airport Iberia had no base, so the service provided was chaotic.'

Flyers on board the Iberia flight from Montevideo in Uruguay to Madrid (above) in Spain claim that they were alerted to the emergency after a 'permanent alarm' sounded

Some of the passengers were informed that several bags in the hold had suffered burns

A spokesperson for Iberia told MailOnline Travel that the incident is being investigated: 'Flight IB6012 from Montevideo to Madrid on April 16 was diverted to Fortaleza due to a smoke warning in the cabin crew rest compartment.

'Due to safety reasons and following the protocols, our aircraft was diverted to the nearest airport, Fortaleza, where we followed the procedures established for the landing.

'Our aircraft landed without any incident. Passengers disembarked normally.

'During the whole process, the situation was under control and safety procedures were followed by both pilots and flight attendants.

'Iberia doesnt fly to Fortaleza, therefore we dont have any staff working there. In spite of this, we have tried to react as fast as possible.

'Our customers were taken to hotels in the Brazilian city and we have worked to offer our customers the best possible alternative to arrive at their final destinations.

'Our technical team are currently investigating what caused this.'

Despite the airline stating that the smoke was detected in the crew rest area of the aircraft, some passengers have claimed that they were told that their baggage may have 'suffered burns' from a fire in the hold - something the airline has denied.

Speaking to MailOnline Travel, a spokesperson for Iberia confirmed that the incident is being investigated

Speaking to Montevideo Portal, one passenger who did not wish to be named said she was on the flight to visit her three children and ended up thinking she 'would die'.

She said: 'In full flight, the alarm began to sound. Then I realised that something was wrong, because it was a different and permanent sounding alarm. The crew did not say anything, but the faces of the flight attendants began to change.

'After a while the pilot explained that there was smoke in the cellar and it was all under control. Some of the passengers were informed that several bags in the hold had suffered burns.

'In the end we landed with a strong impact and begin to see fire and a lot of smoke from under the plane. We had no instructions for ten minutes until they said there were fire-fighters lowering the temperature of the brakes.'

A spokesperson for Iberia added: 'The containers, where the luggage were kept, are in perfect condition, so luggage wasn't affected by this incident.
How did Prince Charles celebrate his 11th wedding anniversary with the Duchess of Cornwall?

By taking her to see a play about another Royal Charles with a passion for his mistress.

My spies spotted the couple at Londons Apollo Theatre to watch Gemma Arterton, starring as Charles IIs lover Nell Gwynn.

The Prince was riveted by the play while, according to cast member Michele Dotrice, Camilla seemed to be having a great time larking about with her lady-in-waiting.

Gemma Arterton's performance as Nell Gwynn, left, in a West End play is said to have riveted Prince Charles, right

Heaven help anyone who riles Andrew Marr.

The broadcaster posted this snap on Twitter of himself brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle  taken in between presenting a documentary at the 13th Century Maunsel House, near Taunton  and joked: Taking a new approach to uncommunicative Sunday morning guests.

Many of Marrs 31,000 followers responded by noting that he looks like Vladimir Putin.

Funnily enough, Marr, 57, once quipped that the Russian leader should play him in a film of his life because of their uncanny likeness.
Olivia Wilde spent the day at the beach with her son Otis in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday.

The 32-year-old held tight to her adorable son, who is turning two on Wednesday, after having fun in the sand.

Her fiance, Jason Sudeikis, attended a press junket for his film Angry Birds on the island while the actress and their son enjoyed time by the shore.

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Doting mother: Olivia Wilde spent the day at the beach with her son Otis in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday

The actors, who started dated in November 2011, welcomed their son on April 20, 2014.

Olivia donned a white thigh-grazing cover up over her matching hued bathing suit, revealing her toned legs.

The Vinyl actress added pink sunglasses and a chunky bracelet to add color to her neutral beach ensemble.

The stunner showed off her natural beauty by opting to go makeup free and pulling her brunette locks back into a bun.

Time for work: Her fiance, Jason Sudeikis, attended a press junket for his film Angry Birds on the island while the actress and their son enjoyed time by the shore

Otis looked sweet in his patterned swim trunks with a blue and white top while staying close to his mother.

Olivia kept a close eye on her toddler - who held a mini blue shovel - as they walked along the beach.

Meanwhile, Jason looked dapper in a light blue collared shirt and navy trousers with orange-tinted sunglasses for the junket.

Sunshine: The 32-year-old held tight to her adorable son, who is turning two years old on Wednesday, after having fun in the sand

Having a good time: Olivia donned a white thigh-grazing cover up over her matching hued bathing suit, revealing her toned legs

The 40-year-old actor, who voices the character Red in Angry Birds, wore white sneakers for the trek to the press junket on the beach.

The animated film, which is set to hit theaters on May 20, also stars Bill Hader, Josh Gad, Maya Rudolph and Danny McBride.

Earlier this month, Olivia shared a photo of Otis to her 1.1 million Instagram followers, writing: 'Better behaved than I've ever been at the dentist. Guess they gave him the good drugs.'

Focused: The 40-year-old looked dapper in a collared shirt and navy trousers with orange-tinted sunglasses

Strike a pose: The animated film, which is set to hit theaters on May 20, also stars Josh Gad, Maya Rudolph and Danny McBride

Sweet moment: Earlier this month, Olivia shared a photo of Otis to her 1.1 million Instagram followers, writing: 'Better behaved than I've ever been at the dentist. Guess they gave him the good drugs'

In March, the brunette beauty posted a snap with her son while rocking a bomber jacket with his name emblazoned on the back.

She captioned the moment: 'This was a big deal. Thanks to the lovely bunny and her owner for letting us freak out for an hour.'

Olivia also recently shared a picture of Jason holding their son Otis in his lap, writing 'snapping lessons.'

'This was a big deal': In March, the brunette beauty posted a snap with her son while rocking a bomber jacket with his name emblazoned on the back
Touching down in Sydney on Sunday, Australian comedian and actress Rebel Wilson certainly had her hands full.

The 36-year-old Pitch Perfect star showed she doesn't need assistants to carry her luggage, as she was spotted walking through the terminal lugging two wheeled suitcases.

Opting for a cool and casual look, the Australian funnywoman wore a white printed blouse teamed with grey jeans.

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Touching down: Rebel Wilson was spotted arriving at Sydney airport on Sunday with two grey suitcases

She layered her top decorated with prints of spectacles with a sleek black leather jacket, while also sporting a matching dark cap.

Doing her best to keep a low profile, the actress donned a pair of sunglasses.

Meanwhile, a red bag and sparkly pink shoes added a splash of colour to her travelling wardrobe.

Keeping it cool: Opting for a cool and casual look, the Hollywood sensation wore a white printed blouse teamed with grey jeans

Rebel style: She layered her top with a sleek black leather jacket, while also sporting a matching dark cap

Rebel recently became the talk of Hollywood following her on-stage makeout session with Pitch Perfect 2 co-star Adam DeVine at the most recent MTV Movie Awards earlier this week.

Rebel and Adam picked up the award for Best Kiss during the show and recreated their smooch with a passionate display on stage in front of the entire audience.

Before launching into their steamy pash, the pair joked that they weren't into each other at all.

Splash of colour: She completed her look with a red handbag and sparkly shoes

Rebel said: 'Thank you, guys. It's incredible we won this award because in real life we have absolutely no sexual chemistry.'

Adam, 32, added: 'I mean, she's speaking the truth. We have none. Zero, zilch, nada. No, I'm not turned on. I'm not turned on by her soft, pillowy lips. I'm not. Sorry! I'm not.'

And before we knew it, Adam had dropped his golden popcorn trophy and locked lips with his co-star.

Is it hot in here? The comedian and Adam DeVine recreated their Pitch Perfect 2 kiss after winning Best Kiss at the MTV Movie Awards on Sunday night
Lara and Sam Worthington were quite the coordinated couple on Saturday while out and about with their son Rocket.

Spotted enjoying a stroll through New York, 28-year-old Australian model Lara and 39-year-old actor Sam both sported black ensembles, as did their one-year-old boy.

Keeping her frame under wraps, blonde beauty Lara sported a warm blouse and matching trousers while appearing to be relatively make-up free.

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Family day out: Lara and Sam Worthington were quite the coordinated couple on Saturday while out and about in New York with their son Rocket

She layered her outfit with a dark coat, while her feet perfectly slipped into a pair of chic flats.

With a section of her cropped golden locks clipped to the side, Lara completed her look with a pair of sassy shades.

Meanwhile Avatar star Sam wore a black hooded jacket, teaming the the printed number with a pair of dark trousers.

Matching in black: Spotted enjoying a stroll, the 28-year-old Australian model Lara and 39-year-old actor Sam both sported black ensembles, as did their one-year-old boy

Natural beauty: Lara appeared to be relatively make-up free on the day

Sleek style: Keeping her frame under wraps, blonde beauty Lara sported a warm blouse and matching trousers

He was quite the doting dad with a backpack strapped on, while keeping a firm grip on Rocket's pram when Lara wasn't pushing it.

Sam and Lara celebrated their infant son's first birthday last month.

At the time Lara shared a tender image with her adoring fans on social media to celebrate the occasion.

Layered look: Mother-of-one Lara also wore a warm black coat on top of her blouse

Keeping close: The married couple remained by each other's side as they made their way down the sidewalk

Looking cool: Avatar star Sam wore a black hooded jacket, the printed number teamed with a pair of dark trousers

In the black and white snap the model appeared to be shirtless and cradled her son in her arms while she planted a tender kiss on the top of his head.

'1 year of this angel. Thank you, Universe!' She captioned the shot alongside an emoticon image of a Rocket.

Rocket is the first child for the loved-up pair who married in an intimate ceremony in Melbourne in December 2014.

Specs appeal: Sam completed his look with a pair of cool glasses

By each other's side: The celebrity couple held hands as they walked along
Rose Byrne proved on Friday she is your normal working mum as she ran errands around New York City without her newborn son Rocco.

The 36-year-old Australian actress displayed a look off exhaustion as she covered her post-pregnancy figure with a black oversized jumper.

She teamed the large garment with a pair of boyfriend-style jeans that featured a torn rip on her left knee.

Missing sleep? Rose Byrne displayed a look off exhaustion on Friday as she ran errands around New York City without her newborn son Rocco

The new mum accessorised her outing attire with a pair of black leather lace-up shoes and a large brown bag which she wore crossed over her torso.

While opting for a basic look Rose wore her shoulder length brunette locks out with a natural wave as she parted them down the middle.

She showed off her blemish free complexion while going make-up free for the evening.

Hiding: The 36-year-old covered her post-pregnancy figure with a black oversized jumper which she teamed up with a pair of denim jeans

Rose and partner Bobby Cannavale welcomed their first child together, a baby boy Rocco Robin Cannavale on February 1 this year.

Last month, her partner, who stars in the new series Vinyl, took to social media to gush about the new arrival sharing several snaps on Instagram.

While holidaying in Florida, the 45-year-old Boardwalk Empire posted an adorable photo Rocco as the then seven-week-old rested poolside while Bobby seemed to catch up on the news with a newspaper in the frame.

New parents: Rose and partner Bobby Cannavale welcomed their first child together, a baby boy Rocco Robin Cannavale on February 1 this year

Doting dad Bobby - who also has a 20-year-old son, actor Jake Cannavale, from a previous relationship - proudly captioned the image: 'The best'.

Rose and Bobby began dating in 2012.

The New Jersey native confirmed their relationship at the 2013 Emmy Awards declaring the brunette beauty 'the love of his life' during his acceptance speech for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.
Channel Seven racing commentator Francesca Cumani and her polo-playing husband Rob Archibald have welcomed their first child.

The couple confirmed the happy news on Saturday, announcing they had a little boy named Harry.

'Mum and son (and dad) doing great,' the couple said in a joint statement.

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Happy news: Channel Seven racing commentator Francesca Cumani and her polo-playing husband Rob Archibald have welcomed a baby boy, named Harry, on Saturday

The genetically blessed pair confirmed their baby news in October last year.

Speaking about her pregnancy to the Herald Sun, Francesca said: Rob and I are really excited and looking forward to starting our family, she said. I am feeling well and enjoying the Spring Carnival.

Francesca, 32, is a is based in the New South Wales township of Scone with Rob.

In full bloom! Heavily-pregnant Francesca enjoyed the water and the sand with her polo playing husband Rob as they kicked back on a Sydney beach earlier in April

She is renowned for her vast knowledge of horses and racing, as well speaking four languages fluently.

The blonde beauty, who is the daughter of renowned Italian horse trainer Luca Cumani, has hosting roles with CNN and Network Seven.

To add to her busy schedule, Francesca shares in two mares and three racehorses.

Not just a pretty face: The 32-year-old is renowned for her vast knowledge of horses and racing, as well speaking four languages fluently

TV personality: The blonde beauty, who is the daughter of renowned Italian horse trainer Luca Cumani, has hosting roles with CNN and Network Seven

Meanwhile, Rob is one of Australias top ranked polo players, as well as heir to a 70-year family legacy of polo pony breeding, playing and training.

In 2009 he was voted among Vanity Fairs Polos Hottest Horsemen as a result of his Kennedy-esque good looks.

The couple wed in 2014 and juggle their time between a property in Scone and the UK.
She's known for her role as police officer Kat Chapman on Home and Away - and for her astonishing beauty.

So it's no wonder model-turned-actress Pia Miller looked flawlessly made-up as usual in her latest Instagram snap posted on Monday.

The Chilean-born star, 32, displayed her genetically-blessed features and slender curves in a photo shared with her 414,000 followers this week.

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Striking: Model-turned-actress Pia Miller (pictured) looked flawlessly made-up as usual in her latest Instagram snap posted on Monday, as she flaunted her cleavage in a chic low-cut, off the shoulder top

Pia - who separated from ex-AFL star husband Brad Miller last October - looked in good spirits ahead of a busy week, as she captioned the image: 'Hey Monday'.

However, it would seem from her recent social media activity that the photo was actually taken on Sunday as she dined with friends at the trendy Paddington Restaurant in Sydney.

She was the picture of beauty in smoky eye make-up as her luscious brunette hair fell loosely over her exposed shoulders.

Friendly display: It would seem from Pia's recent social media activity that the photo was actually taken on Sunday as she dined with friends at The Paddington Restaurant in Sydney

Pia accessorised simply with drop earrings and flaunted her bronzed decolletage in a chic low-cut, off-the-shoulder top

As she cast an enchanting gaze at the camera, the soap actress crossed one leg over the other in a relaxed posed.

It would seem she was also wearing a pair of figure-hugging skinny jeans during her stylish trip to the Oxford Street restaurant.

New beginnings: The Chilean-born beauty announced her divorce from Richmond player, Brad Miller, last year and has since been romantically linked to socialite Tyson Mullane

Meanwhile, the TV personality flashed a subtle smile which highlighted her plump lips and gorgeous natural dimples.

Last month, Pia escaped to Melbourne with her two sons for a well-deserved family holiday to celebrate Easter.

The single mother appeared to enjoy the time spent with her children - Isaiah 13 and Lennox, nine - and posted an Instagram snap of herself with one of her beloved sons.

Family fun: Pia Miller Pia escaped to Melbourne with her two sons for a well deserved Easter break away with her family last month

Previously, the soap star took a mirror selfie as she got ready to start her family weekend in the Victorian capital.

In the snap, the model-turned-actress was seen sporting a stylish all-black outfit - perfectly in tune with the city's fashionable image.

She later displayed her striking features as she shared a family photo from the car as they travelled to the airport for their getaway.

Stylish: During her stay in Melbourne, the former model was seen sporting a stylish all black outfit that perfectly matched the city's fashionable image
As a Myer ambassador, he's often seen sharply dressed in only the finest tailored suits.

But Kris Smith showed off his playful side this week as he spotted wearing a unusual backpack featuring the image of a roaring lion at Sydney Airport.

The former rugby player looked in good spirits as he enjoyed a kiss and cuddle with model girlfriend Maddy King before they jetted off to the Gold Coast for a romantic getaway on Monday.

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Pucker up! Kris Smith and girlfriend Maddy King were spotting sharing a kiss and a cuddle before boarding their 90 minute flight

Kris, 37, cut a suitably stylish figure in a navy blue shirt left fashionably unbuttoned and with the sleeves rolled up.

Going for his trademark designer stubble look, he opted for a simple pair of denim jeans for the 90 minute journey from the New South Wales capital to Queensland's tourist hotspot.

The ex-Daily Edition co-host accessorised with a brown outback hat and a flashy silver watch and clutched a bottle of Mount Franklin spring water for hydration.

Quirky: Kris' unusual lion backpack - which also featured a monochrome tribal print on the side panels and straps - turned plenty of heads as the happy couple made their way to the gate

Myer ambassador Kris (left) looked in good spirits as he enjoyed a kiss and cuddle with model girlfriend Maddy (right) at Sydney Airport before jetting off to the Gold Coast for a romantic getaway on Monday

Hear him roar! British-born Kris, 37, is well known for his sharp dress sense - but he showed off a more playful side with his Sprayground backpack featuring a roaring lion design this week

The British-born hunk rested a pair of dark sunglasses on his shirt neckline and seemed prepared for a more formal occasion ahead as he held a Politix suit cover.

Politix is one of Kris' favourite brands and has showcased their designs many times on the red carpet during his modelling career,

However, it was his Sprayground lion backpack - which also featured a monochrome tribal print on the side panels and straps - that really turned heads as the couple made their way to the gate.

Dapper chap! The ex-Daily Edition co-host, from Manchester, UK, seemed prepared for a more formal occasion ahead as he also clutched a Politix suit cover

Meanwhile, fashion model Maddy looked simply stunning in a low-cut red dress and beige sandals.

The brunette could hardly stop smiling as she walked alongside her handsome boyfriend - and the pair were even spotting sharing a kiss and a cuddle before boarding their flight.

Kris and Maddy have been dating for over three years and he previously told Daily Mail Australia an engagement isn't off the table for the couple.

Beauty: Meanwhile, fashion model Maddy looked simply stunning in a low-cut red dress and beige sandals

Speaking at the Magic Millions races in the Gold Coast in January, Kris said: 'She's a good chick, a great girl. I'm never going to say no.'

The loved-up pair were faced with breakup rumours in July after Kris was spotted with former FHM model Siobhan Parekh in Sydney's Double Bay.

But they quickly put an end to the speculation, however, emerging publicly for a morning walk together.

Good times: The brunette model could hardly stop smiling as she walked alongside her handsome boyfriend
Chloe Sevigny just had a big break in her career.

On Monday Deadline announced her short film Kitty, which she's directed, will debut at the Cannes Film Festival that takes place this May in France.

So it's no wonder the 41-year-old star was glued to her cell phone while strolling in New York City on Sunday afternoon.

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Call me! Chloe Sevigny was seen chatting on her cell phone in New York City on Sunday

The announcement of Chloe's film came from Cannes artistic Director Charles Tesson who said the festival will close with three short films.

In addition to Chloe's there will be shorts by actresses Sandrine Kiberlain and Laetitia Casta.

Deadline added: 'Sevigny is the only American in the bunch with Kitty which is based on a short story by Paul Bowles about a young girl who finds herself transforming into a kitten as she grows up and slips away from her family.'

Nice and noir: Sevigny looked chic on Sunday as she headed out in Manhattan with a black and white print dress which had a hem above the knee

Staying warm in style: A double-breasted black coat with pockets that was worn open added an air of urban sophistication

Sevigny looked chic on Sunday as she headed out in Manhattan with a black and white print dress which had a hem above the knee.

A double-breasted black coat with pockets that was worn open added an air of urban sophistication.

The blonde beauty also had on black loafers and carried a mini structured black purse with white lines.

A break: On Monday Deadline announced her short film Kitty, which she's directed, will debut at the Cannes Film Festival that takes place this May in France

In good company: The announcement of Chloe's film came on Monday when Cannes artistic Director Charles Tesson said the festival will close with three short films. In addition to Chloe's there will be shorts by actresses Sandrine Kiberlain and Laetitia Casta

Never one to lag in the glam department, the Brown Bunny star also wore bright red lipstick that attracted plenty of attention and wore her locks in cute braids with black ribbons on the bottom.

Large beige framed sunglasses looked as if they were borrowed from the 1950s.

The star held a pink-cased cell phone in her hand when she crossed the street.

Her main man: The blonde wonder with her arm around boyfriend Ricky Saiz in NYC in March

Not seen with the actress was her beau of about one year, director Ricky Saiz.

The Boys Don't Cry star and Saiz were first seen getting romantic in the Big Apple in June.

In early 2015, however, she appeared to be serious - and possibly even engaged to - art director Rene Navarrette.
Kim Kardashian has revealed she stopped breastfeeding Saint because her daughter North West was jealous.

The reality TV star, who gave birth to her son in December, discussed her difficulty juggling two young children in a teaser clip for the final episode of Kocktails with Khloe.

She appears on the show with husband Kanye West, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend.

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The struggles of motherhood: Kim Kardashian reveals in the final episode of Kocktails with Khloe that she stopped breastfeeding her baby Saint because her daughter North was jealous

Jealous tot: When her sister Khloe asked if she was still breastfeeding the 35-year-old replied 'Nope. North West stopped that for me. She would cry so much and try to pull him off me.'

When Khloe asked if Kim was still breastfeeding, the 35-year-old replied: 'Nope. North West stopped that for me. She would cry so much and try to pull him off me.

'She was so jealous she took her little milk box and put it in my bra with the straw sticking out and she wanted to drink while he was drinking.

'This week she goes to me "Mommy I'm not mad anymore, you can feed baby brother I won't cry"' and I was like "look honey, the milk is all dried up"'

See Kim Kardashian updates as she stopped breastfeeding Saint because North got jealous

'She was so jealous she took her little milk box and put it in my bra with the straw sticking out and she wanted to drink while he was drinking' Kim revealed about her toddler daughter

Tiny tot: Kim and Kanye welcomed baby Saint on December 5

Mischief-maker: Kim also revealed North (pictured with her on March 13) flushed Kanye's phone down the toilet when it contained the sole recording of his new album Life of Pablo

Kim and Kanye welcomed their son Saint in December.

She also revealed North, who turns three in June, flushed Kanye's phone down the toilet when it contained the sole recording of his new album Life of Pablo.

'They could not be retrieved' Kim explained to Chrissy and John as they all sat around a table.

'No Apple geniuses were genius enough' Kanye added as Kim told the group 'He didn't get mad'.

The last episode of Kocktails with Khloe airs on Wednesday, April 20 at 10pm ET/PT on FYI.

Patient dad: Kim explained to the guests that Kanye didn't get mad when they realised they couldn't retrieve his music from his phone

'No Apple geniuses were genius enough' Kanye quipped as they talked about the incident

Going out with a bang: Kim, 35, appears on the last episode of Khloe's show with her husband Kanye West, model Chrissy Teigen and her husband John Legend

Kim is currently exploring Iceland with her sister Kourtney, who celebrates her 37th birthday on Monday.

The duo left their children at home for the getaway and were joined by Kanye and close family friend Jonathan Cheban.

Khloe, 31, wrote on Instagram she was 'off to babysit the kiddies' hours before sharing a flashback photo in honour of her big sister's birthday.

Finale: The last episode of Kocktails with Khloe airs on Wednesday, April 20 at 10pm ET/PT on FYI

Hostess with the mostess: Koko rocked a sexy plunging jumpsuit for the show
It's the type of thing that is usually followed by embarrassment, lawsuits and images forever etched in the public's memory.

But comedian Joel Creasey says he's 'desperate' to have a sex tape leaked.

Speaking with radio hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie 'O' Henderson on KIISFM 106.5 on Tuesday, the 25-year-old joked he holds a member of his family personally responsible for not having one.

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'If my mum was a better mum she would have filmed me': Joel Creasey told Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O Henderson on Tuesday that he is 'desperate' to have a sex tape leaked

'I'm desperate to have a sex tape leaked,' he jested.

'If my mum was a better mum she would have filmed me like Kris Jenner.'

The conversation began when Joel revealed he was single, having been dumped for another man, after discovering messages on his American then-boyfriend's phone.

'I'm single and ready to mingle': The 25-year-old revealed he'd been dumped for another man after reading text messages on his then-boyfriend's phone

Catching up: The comedian made the remarks speaking with Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O Henderson (pictured

'I'm single and ready to mingle,' he said.

'And I'm really putting myself out there. If he's got a pulse, I'll bang him, and if you can put a camera on it, even better.'

The Perth local has forged a hugely successful stand-up career in Australia and internationally, having appeared at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2013 and 2014.

'And I'm really putting myself out there': The Perth local said he's been active on the dating scene

Despite his successes, he admitted to News Corp recently that he finds the lack of diversity on Australian television baffling.

'It is shocking to me that Im pretty much the only out gay man on commercial television in Australia that I know of,' he said.

'It should be something that doesnt need to be addressed but sadly this is the reality of the television industry in 2016.'
Rob Kardashian looked happier than he had in years landing at LAX with his new fiancee Blac Chyna - born Angela White - on Monday.

The tattooed couple of three months - nicknamed 'BlacRob' - were dressed way down in matching black sweats and caps for their flight.

While waiting for their Uber - something he revealed is now a necessity after his license was suspended - the 29-year-old reality star revealed that their wedding won't be fodder for an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

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Back from the Big Apple! Rob Kardashian looked happier than he had in years landing at LAX with his new fiancee Blac Chyna - born Angela White - on Monday

Twinning: The tattooed couple of three months - nicknamed 'BlacRob' - were dressed way down in matching black sweats and caps for their flight

'I'm really just trying to be happy': While waiting for their Uber, the 29-year-old reality star revealed that their wedding won't be fodder for an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians

'I'm not televising anything...I'm really just trying to be happy, that's all,' Rob told TMZ, before adding that his famous family approves.

'Everybody's happy.'

The USC business grad - who weighed 240 lbs. in 2013 - has reportedly dropped 40 pounds, but he still had a bite of New York pizza while in Manhattan.

'It's cool. I cheat. I'm a cheater,' Kardashian admitted, grinning.

'It's cool. I cheat. I'm a cheater': Rob - who weighed 240 lbs. in 2013 - has reportedly dropped 40 pounds, but he still had a bite of New York pizza while in Manhattan

When the 5ft10in diabetic was asked what his favourite cheat meal was he laughed: 'In-N-Out [Burger]. But we [still] eat In-N-Out. That's her though. I just ride with her'

'For driving to Texas to get her': The USC business grad also confessed that he takes Ubers 'daily' because his driver's license is both expired and suspended due to an unpaid speeding ticket

Wedding bling: Meanwhile, Blac - who turns 28 next month - stayed silent throughout Kardashian's interview

 A photo posted by www.Lashedbar.co (@blacchyna) on Apr 18, 2016 at 12:46pm PDT

 A photo posted by ROBERT KARDASHIAN (@robkardashian) on Apr 17, 2016 at 11:31am PDT

When the 5ft10in diabetic was asked what his favourite cheat meal was he laughed: 'In-N-Out [Burger]. But we [still] eat In-N-Out. That's her though. I just ride with her.'

Rob also confessed that he takes Ubers 'daily' because his driver's license is both expired and suspended due to an unpaid speeding ticket.

'I think I just have to take care of a ticket for driving to Texas to get her and I was speeding a couple of times,' he confessed.

It may not be as simple as Rob made it sound, however, as TMZ later reported that Rob's attorney was in court on Tuesday to enter a not guilty plea for one of the tickets.

Cops clocked him doing 107mph through Blythe, California, on January 31 as he headed home with Blac.

He was also stopped for speeding on his way to Texas on January 30.

Meanwhile, Blac - who turns 28 next month - stayed silent throughout Kardashian's interview.

'It's very likely to happen after the wedding': Perhaps it was due to the Lashed salon owner's mother Tokyo Toni (R) recently giving an interview to NW about how she wants grandchildren

The 45-year-old former stripper - born Shalana Hunter - told the mag: 'Rob is the perfect dad. He spends hours playing with King and he buys him lots of toys. Their favorite thing is playing a numbers game with Legos'

Fashion Nova spokesmodels: The whirlwind romance between Kardashian and Chyna raised eyebrows due to his half-sister Kylie Jenner being the 18-year-old girlfriend of Blac's former fiance, rapper Tyga

Co-parenting: The 26-year-old Grammy nominee - born Michael Nguyen- Stevenson - is also the father of Blac's three-year-old son King

Perhaps it was due to the Lashed salon owner's mother Tokyo Toni recently giving an interview to NW about how she wants grandchildren.

'I want another grandchild, for sure. It's very likely to happen after the wedding,' the 45-year-old former stripper - born Shalana Hunter - told the mag.

'Rob is the perfect dad. He spends hours playing with King and he buys him lots of toys. Their favorite thing is playing a numbers game with Legos.'

The whirlwind romance between Kardashian and Chyna raised eyebrows due to his half-sister Kylie Jenner being the 18-year-old girlfriend of Blac's former fiance, rapper Tyga.

'Welcome home!' Following a three-year absence, Rob will make his triumphant return to KUWTK when the 12th season premieres May 1 on E!

'Mother's Day is coming up!' The former Dancing with the Stars contestant has also been running his sock line Arthur George for four years

The 26-year-old Grammy nominee - born Michael Nguyen-Stevenson - is also the father of Blac's three-year-old son King.

Following a three-year absence, Rob will make his triumphant return to KUWTK when the 12th season premieres May 1 on E!

The former Dancing with the Stars contestant has also been running his sock line Arthur George for four years.

Jet setters: Also at LAX on Monday was Kardashian's mother Kris Jenner alongside her toyboy of 20 months, Corey Gamble following their trip to Dubai

The other side..... A video posted by Corey Gamble (@coreygamble) on Apr 17, 2016 at 8:46pm PDT
As Home and Away fans wait anxiously to see her character walk down the aisle, actress Bonnie Sveen has spoken candidly about her departure from the long-running soap.

During an appearance on Tuesday's Sunrise, the 27-year-old revealed that she was feeling 'very mixed' as she prepares to bid farewell to her character, Ricky Sharpe.

Bonnie, who was joined by co-star Kyle Pryor, also talked about her role as Layla in upcoming Channel Seven drama The Secret Daughter - which she called 'a huge step' in her career.

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Departure: Home And Away actress Bonnie Sveen (right) has spoken candidly about her departure from the long-running Channel Seven soap during a Sunrise interview alongside co-star Kyle Pryor (left) on Tuesday

Sunrise co-host Samantha Armytage asked Bonnie how she felt about leaving Home and Away after three years.

'I have left now. But I've been very mixed, very sad to leave the family,' she confessed.

'It's an incredible crew and cast,' continued Bonnie, who is in a relationship with assistant director Nathan Gooley.

See the latest Home and Away spoilers as Bonnie Sveen prepares for her departure

Moving on: Sunrise co-host Samantha Armytage (right) asked Bonnie (left) how she felt about leaving Home and Away after three years, and the 27-year-old actress admitted she's 'been very mixed'

Last days: In what is likely one of Bonnie's last duties as a Home And Away cast member, she took the opportunity to discuss her character Ricky Sharpe's final storyline - a love triangle between Summer Bay bad boy Darryl 'Brax' Braxton and handsome fiance Dr. Nate Cooper, played by Kyle

Bonnie appeared somewhat emotional during the interview - but remained hopeful about the future and confident in her decision to move on.

'I'm very fortunate and excited to be part of a new Seven production, The Secret Daughter', she added.

Speaking of her new role, she said: 'I'm going to be playing Layla, (co-star) Jess Mauboy's character's best friend.

Will she or won't she? Home And Away viewers are currently on tenterhooks waiting to see if Ricky (left) will tie the knot with doctor Nate (right) as she still holds feelings for an ex-lover

Decisions, decisions! In her final storyline, Bonnie's character Ricky appears to be pining after former beau Brax (Steve Peacocke) in the run-up to her Sydney wedding

'I'm really thrilled to have that musical challenge, and working with people who I really look up to. David Field is acting in it, I'm being directed by Leah Purcell.

'It's a huge step, I feel, in my career to be alongside people that I look up to like that.'

Meanwhile, Kyle spoke about Home and Away's 'great track record' for producing Hollywood-calibre actors - including Isla Fisher and Chris Hemsworth.

The 32-year-old Englishman, who plays Ricky's fiance Dr. Nate Cooper, said: 'We shoot so fast and shoot so much that is just really hones your skills.

'And like Bonnie was saying, it's such a family. It's a pleasure to go to work, it really is.'

Last week, Bonnie surprised fans by confirming that she was leaving Summer Bay after playing Ricky since April 2013.

New venture: The Logie Award-winner's new role on The Secret Daughter was announced this month; she will be playing the character of Layla (pictured) and has traded in her blonde hair for a notably darker look

New start: 'Bonnie said of her upcoming Channel Seven role, It's a huge step, I feel, in my career to be alongside people that I look up to like that'

She took to Instagram to break the news, sharing a photograph of herself on set with make-up artist Sherri Meissner.

'It is with a sad but proud heart I announce the end of my Home & Away journey,' she wrote in the caption.

'If someone had told me 10 years ago that I'd be playing a staunch, surfy chick in Summer Bay (and that it would bring me more joy than I could imagine) I wouldn't have believed them.'

She went on to thank co-stars and crew 'for the banter, the laughs and the lessons', and added that taking on the character had 'shaped' her 'forever'.

'I carry every bond that was forged and so many fond new memories into the new beginning. Very excited about what creative exploration the future holds,' she concluded.

Home and Away is broadcast Mondays to Thursdays at 7pm on Channel Seven

'Family': Kyle echoed Bonnie's sentiments about the close-knit atmosphere filming Home and Away, saying: 'It's a pleasure to go to work, it really is'
It became an iconic TV moment for many of his fans when Aidan Turner went shirtless in an episode of Poldark.

However, producers of the hit period drama needed convincing that the Irish actor was 'handsome' enough for the role.

The series' composer Anne Dudley admitted she was stunned when producer Damian Timmer asked her opinion on Aidan's hunk-ability factor.

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Treat for the ladies: Aidan Turner won over fans with his chiselled pecs in Series 1 of BBC period drama Poldark last year

Speaking at a Royal Television Society event, she said: 'It is true, Damien did ask me, "Do you think women will find Aidan attractive?"

'I said, "I don't think you will have a problem."'

Fortunately producers listened to Anne and cast the Being Human star in the role of the rejuvenated period drama, which won over nine million viewers when it returned to BBC last year.

The series is adapted from the Poldark novels by Winston Graham, following a previous adaptation in the 1970s.

Aidan and his co-stars recently completed filming Series Two of Poldark, which is due to return to the BBC in the autumn.

A bit chillier next time: The second series of Poldark, starring Aidan and Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza, returns in the autumn

Meanwhile, Poldark writer Debbie Horsfield recently disappointed some of Aidan's fans by revealing he would be quite wrapped up in the new series.

She said: 'Unfortunately autumn is very chilly in Cornwall, so he won't be doing any more of that.'

The new ten-episode series will be an adaptation of the third and fourth books by Graham, but Debbie revealed she had decided against including regular nudity, like in recent BBC dramas The Night Manager and War And Peace.

She did offer some consolation for fans, however, confirming that they would get a few peeks at the Irish actor's pecs.
Lindsay Lohan kept it casual while hanging out with her boyfriend and stylish little sister on Monday in New York City.

The 29-year-old actress wore a black tank-top, distressed skinny jeans and black boots while out shopping with little sister Ali, 22, in the SoHo area.

Lindsay had her long red hair down and accessorised with sunglasses.

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Smoke break: Lindsay Lohan and boyfriend Egor Tarabasov took a smoke break on Monday while out in New York City

Ali showed her model looks in a little black dress with a sheer lacy panel and trim for their shopping excursion.

She had her jet black hair down while walking around with her older sister.

Lindsay also caught up with her fiance Egor Tarabasov and they were spotted taking a smoking break together.

Shopping trip: Ali and her older sister also enjoyed a shopping trip together

Casual style: Lindsay kept it casual in ripped jeans and a tank-top

Retail therapy: The actress carried a bag from Alexander Wang

Egor also kept it casual in a plain white T-shirt, black jeans, black Nike sneakers and sunglasses.

Lindsay and Egor smoked while talking and walking and he appeared to be in good spirits sporting a wide smile.

The duo reportedly became engaged over this past weekend, with Page Six writing that Lindsay was surprised by the 5-carat oval emerald ring, and 'didn't see it coming.'

Tender moment: Lindsay wrapped an arm around Ai as they walked

Different styles: Ali wore a little black dress while out with her sister

Family time: Lindsay and Ali have been spending quality time together recently

Out and about: The sisters looked stylish with their sunglasses on

Entrepreneur Egor - whose father is a multi-millionaire businessman - asked for her hand in marriage 'over the weekend,' the site reported.

However, her spokesperson said soon after the Mean Girls star is not engaged.

Lindsay went public with their romance in March when she shared a photo of her Russian boyfriend on Instagram.

Going strong: Ego and Lindsay chatted while smoking

New relationship: Lindsay went public with their relationship in March
She recently teamed up with her long-time pal Thelma & Louise BFF Geena Davis.

But on Monday Susan Sarandon reunited with her The Meddler co-star Rose Byrne at the Mamarazzi Screening in New York City.

The 69-year-old actress looked ageless in a form-fitting chic wraparound blouse which showed off her curves.

Forever young! Susan Sarandon, 69, looked ageless at the screening of The Meddler in New York City on Monday night

The Oscar-winning actress donned the terra cotta-coloured garb with chocolate pin striped trousers for the event held at the Crosby Street Theater.

She opted for minimal makeup which highlighted her youthful appearance but added a touch of smokey eye and glossy pink lip.

The Hollywood icon also wore a boot as she had taken a tumble on a mountain top recently when on vacation in Colombia.

Flawless! The Oscar-winning actress donned a form-fitting chic wraparound blouse which showed off her curves

Mane attraction: Sarandon wore her silky red tresses in loose waves which fell just to her shoulders

Stylish: Sarandon donned the terra cotta-coloured garb with chocolate pin striped trousers

But thanks to Sarandon's faithful Maltese Penny, the world found out how the star injured her left foot.

'Oops a little sprain coming down the mtn,' the actress posted on her dog's Twitter account.

Also in attendance at the screening was Susan's co-star, Rose Byrne, 36, cut a ladylike figure in a mosaic-printed frock.

Susan took to her Instagram account and shared a snapshot of the women as she captioned the stunning image in a delicate light.

Ageless! Her youthful appearance makes it difficult to believe the veteran actress will turn 70 later this year

Mother-daughter drama: Susan reunited with her co-star Rose Byrne, 36, at the Meddler screening

Feminine frock: The Australian beauty cut a ladylike figure in a in a mosaic-printed number

'#TheMeddler NY Press w/ the lovely #RoseByrne,' she wrote alongside the photo of the pair sitting side-by-side at the event.

The co-stars paused before the screening for a photo opportunity with writer-directors Lorene Scafaria, Denise Albert, Melissa Musen Gerstein and producer Joy Gorman Wettels.

The pair's latest film is a comedy/drama where Susan plays a recent widow alongside Rose and Juno star J.K. Simmons which is set to be released on April 22.

Susan's new film sees her star as Rose's meddling mother, who follows her daughter across America to start a new life after the death of her husband.

Mix and match: The midi garment featured contrasting floral panels

Off-screen appeal: Rose and Susan clearly had chemistry as they joined up again for the screening of their film

Good company: The co-stars paused for a photo opportunity with (L-R) writer-director Lorene Scafaria, Denise Albert, Melissa Musen Gerstein and producer Joy Gorman Wettels

Dream team: Scafaria, Byrne and Sarandon reunited for the special screening

The Golden Globe nominee was all smiles, but at the film's premiere in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Sarandon was beaming as she reunited with her Thelma & Louise co-star and pal Geena Davis, 60.

The Lorenzo's Oil actress looked sensational in a crisp white classic outfit which she teamed with a pair of slim-fitting tapered trousers in the same achromatic shade.

The A League of Their Own favourite was stylish in a conservative black dress, complete with a racy cleavage-baring plunging neckline and knee-length skirt.

Each woman could not have looked more proud to be standing along one another at the premiere, as the two ladies beamed happily for the camera.

Longtime pals! Sarandon was beaming as she reunited with her Thelma & Louise co-star Geena Davis, 60, at the film's premiere in Los Angeles on Wednesday
He's a global superstar thanks to his role as a muscular Norse God in superhero blockbuster Thor.

But Chris Hemsworth reckons his toughest body transformation was dropping 15 kilograms (or 33lbs) in just four weeks to play a shipwrecked explorer in 2015's In the Heart of the Sea.

The Melbourne-born star, 32, was hardly recognisable as starving first mate Owen Chase in the Hollywood drama but told Wonderwall he would not try a similar weight loss again.

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Extreme weight loss: Thor actor Chris Hemsworth said it was 'exhausting' dropping 15 kilograms (or 33lbs) in just four weeks to play a shipwrecked explorer in 2015's In the Heart of the Sea (right)

When questioned at a press junket for his upcoming fantasy flick The Huntsman: Winter's War, Chris admitted that he's unlikely to lose that much body weight for a future role.

He also suggested that there are 'smarter ways' of making actors appear smaller on camera using special effects - similar to what his pal Chris Evans achieved in Captain America: The First Avenger.

'I don't think I'd lose it again, no, because it's just too exhausting,' Chris said of his 2015 weight loss. 'There are smarter ways of doing it now, I think, camera trickery and so on.'

See more of the latest on Chris Hemsworth as he talks about his 'exhausting' weight loss

Normal weight: The Melbourne-born actor, pictured at a recent red carpet event with his actress wife Elsa Pataky (right), said that he finds it 'easier' to bulk up to play Thor than to lose weight

The father-of-three also noted that it was 'easier' to bulk up to play Marvel superhero Thor than it was dramatically dropping weight for In The Heart of the Sea.

'It gets harder (to lose weight) each time once you put on that mass,' he continued. 'Your body's like, "Nah, it's staying here". And it's not very much fun to not eat.'

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia last year, Chris went into detail about his physically tough body transformation.

Lost at sea: For his role as Owen Chase in 2015's In the Heart of the Sea - based upon the real-life story that inspired Moby Dick, Chris played a healthy sailor who dramatically loses body weight while lost at sea

'We did the weight loss as healthy as you could do it. It was progressive,' he explained.

'We only sat at the low weight for a week and a half. That was the goal: once we got there, we shot the scenes and then we went back up again in weight.'

Meanwhile, Chris' Avengers series co-star Chris Evans was able to 'digitally downsize' for his role as army reject Steve Rogers - who is later transformed into a super-solider in a military experiment.

The Huntsman: Winter's War is released to Australian cinemas on Friday April 22

'Smarter ways' of losing weight: Chris' Avengers series co-star Chris Evans (left) 'digitally downsized' for his role as army reject Steve Rogers - who is later transformed into a tall, strong super-solider in a experiment
They will be appearing together in black comedy The Nice Guys, which will be released in May.

And if Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe's latest video promoting the film is any indication, viewers of the movie will be roaring with laughter throughout the film.

The comedy sketch shared on Twitter, which appears to have been filmed on set of The Nice Guys in Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles, sees the co-stars openly airing their grievances with one another, with Ryan even confessing: ''I think that Russell has a deep well of unaddressed anger.'

'I think that Russell has a deep well of unaddressed anger': Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe star in a comedy sketch for upcoming movie The Nice Guys, which sees the co-stars airing their grievances with one another

The clip begins with Russell, 52, and Ryan, 35, sitting in a psychologist's room, with the therapist asking: 'What brings you here?'

Russell starts out, saying: 'Long story short....'

But before he can finish his sentence, Ryan cuts in: 'Me and Russell have a film coming out - we thought it would be good to address some of our issues before we enter the PR phase.'

'Who's building bridges, who's building walls? Brick-by-brick the Great Wall Of Russell - can you see it?' he says. 'Of course you can see it - you can see it from space.'

'What brings you here?': The clip begins with Russell, 52, and Ryan, 35, sitting in a psychologist's room

Humorous: But before he can finish his sentence, Ryan cuts in: 'Me and Russell have a film coming out - we thought it would be good to address some of our issues before we enter the PR phase'

Ryan confesses to the therapist: 'I think that Russell has a deep well of unaddressed anger.'

The footage then cuts to Russell breaking down in tears as he demands: 'I just want to go home.'

The therapist then asks Russell: 'Is there anything that Ryan does that causes you stress?'

'Who's building bridges, who's building walls?': Ryan takes a stab at Russell in the clip

Frustrated: After being asked what annoys them about one abother, the co-stars exchange a look and Russell concedes: 'Occasionally he will interrupt me...' before he is cut off by Ryan once more

He responds: 'That's a real hot button issue and I don't think we are there yet.'

The co-stars exchange a look and Russell concedes: 'Occasionally he will interrupt me...' before he is cut off by Ryan.

During the hilarious skit, Russell becomes visibly frustrated as Ryan leaves his junk lying around, including his own memorabilia.

Hilarious: The Gladiator star is seen smoking in the room during the session, as well as correcting Ryan on his pronunciation of the word 'charade'

The Gladiator star is seen smoking in the room during the session, as well as correcting Ryan on his pronunciation of the word 'charade.'

Towards the end of the skit, it is clear that the couple have not managed to work out their problems, foreshadowing that the film will adopt a similar humour throughout.

The two stars are currently preparing to launch the upcoming movie, The Nice Guys, which is scheduled to hit cinemas next month.

Russell plays a contract killer to Ryan's private investigator in the film, with the pair working together to solve the mysterious disappearance of a porn star in 1970s Los Angeles.

Earlier this year, a Canadian radio station claimed Russell didn't get along with co-star Ryan.

While teasing a topic of discussion on their morning show, JUMP! 106.9 tweeted: '@russellcrowe reportedly a huge diva towards @RyanGosling'.

Not impressed: Ryan confesses to the therapist: 'I think that Russell has a deep well of unaddressed anger'

But Russell quickly set the record straight with a light-hearted tweet - and even claimed he and Ryan were 'great mates'.

Russell replied: '@JumpOttawa plonkers, Spanky aka @RyanGosling and I are great mates. He's pretty much mostly Australian anyway.'

The Oscar-winner later tweeted the Ottawa-based radio station a link to a YouTube video where the heartthrob 'crashed' his presenting role at the The Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards last January, as proof of their friendship.

Speaking to Nova FM's Fitzy and Wippa earlier this year, Russell had only nice things to say about his co-star in the upcoming crime dramedy, complementing Ryan's comedic timing.

'I tell you mate, that kid is a comic genius,' he said, adding: 'He's great company, he's really smart, loves what he does, he asks all the right questions and working with him was such a treat.'

And it seems the boys weren't short of a laugh on set either.

Airing their dirty laundry: During the hilarious skit, Russell becomes visibly frustrated as Ryan leaves his junk lying around, including his own memorabilia

Referencing a theatrical term known as 'corpsing' - when actors laugh at inappropriate moments - Russell revealed: 'The amount of times I corpsed on camera in total over all those [past] films would be less than per week working with Ryan - that kid knows how to make me laugh'.

It seems that the actors also forged an incredibly strong friendship during filming, with Ryan tweeting his support to Russll ahead of s appearance on Saturday's SNL show last week.

Good luck on SNL tonight @russellcrowe, he said. I learned everything I know about comedy from you. Or at least that's what you tell me...

Comedic duo: Towards the end of the skit, it is clear that the couple have not managed to work out their problems, foreshadowing that the film will adopt a similar humour throughout
She's one of the world's most glamorous up and coming stars.

And Chloe Moretz kept up with appearances on Monday as she stepped out in Beverly Hills.

The 19-year-old wore an edgy ensemble as she enjoyed some retail therapy in the upscale neighbourhood.

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Looking Kick-A**: Chloe Moretz kept up with appearances on Monday as she stepped out in Beverly Hills

The Equalizer actress sported skintight leather trousers and booties for her outing in LA.

Completing her getup was a button down shirt and dark sunglasses as she went solo, noticeably without her reported rekindled flame, Brooklyn Beckham.

it was recently reported that Chloe and Brooklyn were 'very much a couple' two years after they were first linked together.

Hell for leather: The 19-year-old wore an edgy ensemble as she enjoyed some retail therapy in the upscale neighbourhood

The 17-year-old model - who was recently thought to be dating Parisian model Sonia Ben Ammar -is said to have rekindled his romance with the Hollywood star after being spotted having dinner with his parents David and Victoria, and her mother Terri at Soho House in Los Angeles at the weekend.

A source told The Sun: 'Chloe and Brooklyn are very much a couple. They were really comfortable getting their families together.

'Chloe kept stroking Brooklyn's hair and putting her head on his shoulder and then he would do the same.

Back in the day:The pair were first linked as a couple back in 2014

'Victoria was making a huge effort with Chloe too. She sat chatting to her for ages and was clearly interested in finding out more about her life.'

Brooklyn's brothers Romeo, 13, and Cruz, 11, were also there for the meal at a posh restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, while his little sister Harper, 4, was absent.
LeeAnne Locken tried to maintain a stuffy sense of decorum among the charity society on Monday's episode of The Real Housewives of Dallas, while Brandi Redmond tossed it all out.

A rift opened between the two southern socialites at the Mad Hatter's Tea and Luncheon, a froufrou event to benefit the Dallas Arboretum.

While most women had 'spent thousands of dollars' on designer millinery Brandi had crafted her own headwear from fake grass, moss and a few 'plastic dog poops'.

Hand made: Brandi Redmond made her own hat for a charity society event on Monday's episode of The Real Housewives Of Dallas

'If you actually wear this I will give you money,' giggled Stephanie Hollman, who warned that the more tedious attendees would vehemently disapprove.

She was right.

LeeAnne, a former Miss USA Pageant competitor, was horrified.

'She might as well have walked up to everyone here and gone 'bitch slap,' huffed the 48-year-old charity volunteer.

Took offense: LeeAnne Locken took offense to Brandi's headwear and compared it to a mass 'bitch slap;

'She doesn't understand that wearing this hat is damaging to her reputation,' she sneered.

'Why would you wear s*** on your head? Mwah mwah, now get the f*** out,' she barked dismissively

Brandi was unrepentant, and placed the plastic poo on LeeAnne's chair as a joke.

Unique theme: Brandi made a hat that included a dog and fake poop

No luck: The former cheerleader joked about the plastic poop ending up on LeeAnne's chair

Of course: The plastic poop did end up on LeeAnne's chair

'If I made one person laugh then I did my job,' she chuckled.

Her best friend Stephanie agreed.

'She brought humour to something that could be boring, so they can go f*** themselves,' she said.

Not happy: LeeAnne was not happy about Brandi's hat or her joke

Sticking up: Stephanie Hollman stood up for Brandi for bringing some humor to the event

Quickly retracting her statement with: 'Oh god, I shouldn't have said that'.

Instead of starting a fight, LeeAnne told her most 'connected' allies that Brandi was lowering the tone.

'I know exactly what she's trying to doto bait me into a confrontation and it's not going to happen,' she vowed.

Not biting: LeeAnne refused to be baited into a confrontation with Brandi

Brandi, a former cheerleader, didn't care.

'My family donates thousands of dollars every year, nobody tells me how to behave,' she shrugged.

'Crossing the wrong people in society gets you crossed off the list,' threatened LeeAnne.

Not changing: Brandi insisted that nobody tells her how to behave

The show had opened with Brandi, who was teaching Marie Reyes' little daughter some cheerleading moves.

'I taught myself how to do a handless back spring,' said Brandi, who wondered if some of the moves were 'a little too naughty' for the girl.

'That's fine, but that's as far as it goes,' laughed Maria as they flipped their hair around.

Hanging out: Marie Reyes told Brandi that LeeAnne was actually funny and the should be friends

Brandi already had a few issues with LeeAnne.

'I've honestly never heard LeeAnne say anything funny,' she frowned.

Cary Deuber, 39, is married to a plastic surgeon, who 'used to be fat' with 'man boobs,' she said.

Husband makeover: Cary Deuber talked about inspiring her husband to lose 80 pounds

'I don't know what inspired him to lose 80 pounds, maybe my magical junk,' joked the socialite, who has her own aesthetic injectable practice.

'It's not like we were doing it when he was fat,' she said bluntly.

LeeAnne met with fashion designer Andre Yabin, to discuss the Mad Hatters charity event  a yearly 'who's who of Dallas society'.

In the kitchen: The reality star spent time in the kitchen with her husband and daughter

'You don't miss it, if you break your ankle you turn up in a wheelchair,' she said.

The theme for the party was 'April in Paris'.

'These hats cost thousands of dollars,' she boasted.

Hat party: LeAnne was show wearing a winning hat at the charity event

During a BBQ LeeAnne bullied her boyfriend to put a wedding ring on her finger.

'It's fate, so plan the wedding,' she shouted.

Actress Tiffany Hendra used to be a model in Los Angeles, but was looking to settle down in Dallas.

Former model: Tiffany Hendra talked about her partying days in Los Angeles

'You're invited to all the parties and you're doing lines in the bathroom, don't even get me started on the Playboy mansion,' she admitted.

Regretting that she could have saved more money the TV host talked real estate with her Australian rocker husband Aaron.

'I want a gigantic bathroom with a spa tub, she demanded.

Settling down: The former model was looking to move into a bigger home in Dallas

'You know we've been married 11 years and we've never seen each other pee,' she admitted.

Tiffany fell in love with a mansion, but Aaron wasn't enamored with Dallas in general.

'I don't know if I like it that much,' he admitted.

Not ready: Tiffany's rocker husband Aaron wasn't sure if he liked Dallas

To celebrate her mother's birthday Brandi made a chocolate cake, which she named 'poop pie' with her daughters.

'That's not funny mommy,' they sighed.

The former cheerleader was struggling with the girls, while her husband chased his dream to become 'a multi millionaire'.

Family affair: Brandi and her girls made a birthday cake for her mother

'It's like ''hey, we're here'',' she signaled.

'I see my sister and mother-in-law more than I see Brian,' she complained.

Brandi's mother had her at age 15.

'It taught me not to give a damn what other people think,' she said.

The RHOD continues next week on Bravo.
He is one of the most recognisable faces in Hollywood.

But fans were made to do a double take on Monday evening as Sir Patrick Stewart was seen dressed as a woman at an event in Los Angeles.

The 75-year-old was unrecognisable in full drag as he took to the stage in a blonde wig, pink satin dress and black heels for the Starz and FYC 'Blunt Talk' event.

Who's that girl: Fans were made to do a double take on Monday evening as Sir Patrick Stewart was seen dressed as a woman at an event in Los Angeles

What a transformation: The 75-year-old was unrecognisable in full drag as he took to the stage in a blonde wig, pink satin dress for the Starz and FYC 'Blunt Talk' event

Sir Ian stars as a cable news reporter in the US sitcom and the British Thespian took the chance to dress up for the episode.

The X-Men actor went to town with his look as he teamed the pink wrap dress with sheer tights and comfortable Mary Jane heels.

He accessorised with a glittery silver clutch purse and a bejewelled statement necklace, while his grey wig was styled in light waves.

Sassy: The X-Men actor went to town with his look as he teamed the pink wrap dress with sheer tights and comfortable Mary Jane heels

All smiles: Sir Ian stars as a cable news reporter in the US sitcom and the British Thespian took the chance to dress up for the episode

As for his make-up, the Star Trek: The Next Generation star sported dramatically large false lashes on his eyelid while he displayed a pink smokey eye and arched eyebrows.

A false mole was planted on his cheek while he completely his look with pink lipstick.

The esteemed actor teased fans about his head-turning look on the night as he shared a snap on Instagram with the caption: 'Something is happening in Hollywood tonight.'

Dream team: Sir Patrick was joined by Adrian Scarborough who also dressed up in drag for the event

Such a tease: The esteemed actor teased fans about his head-turning look on the night as he shared a snap on Instagram with the caption, 'Something is happening in Hollywood tonight.'

Fans immediately took to Twitter to share their thoughts about the new look with one fan writing: 'You look like Helen Mirren's older distinguished sister, and I have so many questions.'

Another fan suggested, 'U will need to change your twitter handle - @damepatstew', while one Twitter user asked: 'Why's Dame Helen Mirren in your dressing room?!'

Amused fans continued to react online as one wrote: 'you make one scary woman, Sir Patrick', while another stated: 'wow, I thought more Dame Hellen Mirrem (sic)!'

The gang: (L-R) Jonathan Ames, Sir Patrick, Jacki Weaver, Elvis Mitchell and Adrian posed together

Looking good: For his make-up, the Star Trek: The Next Generation star sported dramatically large false lashes on his eyelid while he displayed a pink smokey eye and arched eyebrows

The actor stars as British ex-pat Walter in the US show, produced by Seth MacFarlane and the show's creator Jonathan Ames recently admitted that he got inspiration for Sir Patricks role from Piers Morgan.

He explained: 'I was channelling past CNN and happened to see Piers Morgan in front of a blue backdrop'

'In that moment, I thought Patrick Stewart would look amazing behind such a desk. We could live behind the scenes and create a world from there.'

Time to talk: Fans immediately took to Twitter to share their thoughts about the new look with one fan writing, 'You look like Helen Mirren's older distinguished sister, and I have so many questions'

Comparisons: Another fan suggested, 'U will need to change your twitter handle - @damepatstew', while one Twitter user asked: 'Why's Dame Helen Mirren in your dressing room?!'
Christian Slater has claimed his father Thomas Knight Slater is suffering from manic depressive schizophrenia, with the actor citing the time he attempted to kill himself and his mother as evidence.

The Mr Robot actor has filed documents to have his father's defamation lawsuit thrown out, with the papers detailing the time his mother first told him about his 80-year-old dad's diagnosis, according to TMZ.

The 46-year-old actor alleges that Thomas was taken to Bellevue Hospital in a straitjacket in 1972 after he threatened to murder his wife Mary Jo Slater and a then three-year-old Christian.

Speaking out: Christian Slater has claimed his father Thomas Knight Slater is suffering from manic depressive schizophrenia, with the actor citing the time he attempted to kill himself and his mother as evidence

According to Christian's mother, Thomas also pushed his mother into a busy street when she was expecting the actor in 1969.

As further evidence, Christian has also included copies of old postcards his father sent, which appear to show him writing incoherently, telling his son that he would be nothing without him.

It's claimed one of the postcards reads: 'I take FULL CREDIT: I'm the vital ingredient.'

MailOnline have contacted Christian's representative for comment.

Christian was sued by his father in February after the Midnight Run actor claimed his son had 'destroyed' his career by going public with allegations of mental illness in an interview with the National Enquirer last year.

Family feud: Christian was sued by his father in February after the Midnight Run actor claimed his son had 'destroyed' his career by going public with allegations of mental illness

Hawkins - who had roles in soap operas including Ryan's Hope and As The World Turns in the '70s, as well as small roles in big movies such as Amityville Horror and Mommie Dearest - is supposedly suing his son for $20 million.

Thomas filed the pricey libel lawsuit against his son - and ex-wife Mary Jo - after claims the pair have prevented him from getting any acting roles because of their comments.

In a profanity laden interview Tom, who insists he has never suffered from any kind of mental illness, told Daily Mail Online exclusively that the pair had 'colluded and conspired against him' in a bid to destroy his reputation and poison the Hollywood establishment against him.

He claimed that despite teaching his son 'everything he knows' about show business, True Romance star Christian has disowned him and refuses to let him meet his two grandchildren, who are now in their teens.

[Pictured] A four-year-old Christian climbs a tree as he shares a photo with his casting director mother Mary Jo Slater and his father in Central Park in 1973

Tom, who once starred in the long-running soap opera Ryan's Hope, says he is determined to have his 'day in court' so the pair have to publicly apologize to him.

The former actor, who now works as a $10-an-hour parking valet and in the past has been forced to take handouts from food banks to survive, said: 'They are both determined to treat me like I don't exist.

'For the last 30 years I've lived in total pariah blacklist-ville. They've denigrated me.

'Christian has repeated the lie that I have mental illness many times - over and over again. He's effectively disowned me.

'It's because he's scared to death of his mother.

Tumultous history: The 46-year-old actor has alleged that Thomas was taken to Bellevue Hospital in a straitjacket in 1972 after he threatened to murder his wife Mary Jo Slater and a then three-year-old Christian

'His mother is a casting director and they are the most powerful people in show business. She has determined to write me off the map - she wishes I were dead.

'She's done everything she could do to destroy me and tell everybody in the world I'm a paranoid schizophrenic.

'She didn't even graduate from high school for f***'s sake - neither did Christian - these people are ignorant b*****ds - they don't have the authority to make a medical diagnosis.'

Slater also reveals he has had to stand in free food lines - and claims both his son and ex-wife have ruined him and his career.

'I can't act. They won't hire me because Mary Jo won't let them. She's poisoned the community of casting directors against me.
They're the reality TV twosome that formed an unlikely friendship last year.

But Gamble Breaux and Gabi Grecko's union has been an on-again off-again affair, with the pair spending almost as much time fighting as they do being friends.

Now it looks like the controversial twosome are back on again, with 27-year-old Gabi taking to Instagram to write: '@gamble_breaux I miss you.'

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'I miss you!' Gabi Grecko reached out to frenemy Gamble Breaux over Instagram on Tuesday

The Real Housewives of Melbourne star was quick to respond, writing: 'Miss you back naughty. Hugs.'

Gabi, who famously appeared on The Celebrity Apprentice, responded: 'I'm gonna text u boo.'

While things appear to be good for the dynamic duo right now, it hasn't always been smooth sailing when it comes to their friendship.

They first fell out after Gabi returned to New York last year following her split with her estranged husband, 72-year-old businessman Geoffrey Edelsten.

'Miss you back naughty. Hugs:' The Real Housewives of Melbourne star was quick to respond, expressing her affection towards the controversial 27-year-old

'I'm gonna text u boo,' responded the flamboyant Celebrity Apprentice star

Gamble told the Daily Mail Australia 'I dont consider her a friend anymore' after Gabi didn't return her text messages following her return to America.

The comments caused Gabi to publicly lash out in anger, resulting in Gamble issuing an apology before the pair patched things up.

They then fell out again in February after Gabi misconstrued some comments that Gamble made in an interview about not inviting Geoffrey Edelsten to her wedding to eye surgeon Dr. Rick Wolfe.

It resulted in a war of words across social media between the pair, with Gabi believing that good friend Gamble had taken a swipe at her.

Close friends: At one point Gamble and Gabi were so close that the 45-year-old introduced Gabi to her close friend and co-star Lydia Schiavello and beloved stepson Luke Wolfe

Oh my! Gabi and Gamble were so close that they even shared a passionate kiss while Gabi was filming The Celebrity Apprentice last year

The Real Housewives starlet was then forced to clarify her original comments, explaining to Daily Mail Australia that the real issue had nothing to do with Gabi, but was all about not wanting her doctor husband to be lumped into the same category as medical entrepreneur Geoffrey.

'My husband Dr. Rick Wolfe is a renowned eye surgeon and specialist and because Geoffrey Edelsten is also part of the medical industry, I didn't want Rick attached to any of that,' she explained.

'It was nothing personal against Gabi, she's a nice girl but we didn't know each other well enough for her to attend my wedding anyway.

'Not inviting her was nothing against her as a person, it was more about me protecting Rick from being associated with Geoffrey's image in the media.'
They flew in to Australia last week for a hotly anticipated court appearance.

And a day after admitting falsifying court documents to smuggle her pet dogs into the country last year, Amber Heard was in no doubt happy to be making her way home on Tuesday.

The actress was joined by husband Johnny Depp on a private jet in the Gold Coast hours after appearing at a courthouse in the area.

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Making their exit: Amber Heard and Johnny Depp were spotted boarding a private jet at Gold Coast Airport on Tuesday after a brief court appearance in Southport

On Monday she received a $1,000 fine and a one-month good behaviour bond after pleading guilty to one count of falsifying border protection documents when entering the country last May.

The 29-year-old failed to declare pet dogs Pistol and Boo when arriving in Australia where Depp was filming for Pirates of The Caribbean.

Making a stylish departure on Tuesday, Heard kept her blonde locks hidden beneath a trendy fedora hat.

She paired the hat with an elegant floral dress, revealing a glimpse of thigh as she climbed the stairs leading on to the jet.

Depp, 52, cut a more casual figure in a black leather jacket, jeans and a hat of his own.

Over and out: The Hollywood couple kept a relatively low profile as they boarded the jet on Tuesday

Understated: Amber kept her head down as she made her way on to the aircraft in an elegant ensemble

Until next time: It came a day after the pair's hotly anticipated appearance in Southport

He carried a book in one hand and kept his gaze forward as they were escorted on to the aircraft.

On Monday the Hollywood duo were swarmed by fans and photographers as they arrived at Southport Magistrates Court in Southport, Queensland.

Within minutes of their arrival Heard admitted the charge. Two others of illegally importing animals were dropped due to lack of evidence.

During his wife's hearing Depp was spotted smoking a cigarette on one of the courthouse's balcony - a breach of the rules under normal circumstances.

Action packed: Within minutes of arriving at the courthouse the day before their departure Heard pleaded guilty to one count of falsifying border protection documents in May last year

Stylish departure: Both Amber and Johnny added some hats to their outfits for the long haul flight

Reading material: The 52-year-old star carried a book in one hand as he followed his wife on to the plane

A source told Daily Mail Australia that court clerks made an exception for the star to stop him from leaving the building where hordes of fans awaited their departure.

As part of the hearing a judge was shown a cringe-worthy video produced by the couple in which they apologised for not declaring their two Yorkshire terriers during the 2015 journey.

In the clip a stony-faced Heard described Australia as a 'wonderful island' which boasts a 'treasure trove of unique plants, animals and people'.

'Australia is free of many pests and diseases that are commonplace around the world. That is why Australia has to have such strong biosecurity laws.

Moving on: On Monday Heard received a $1,000 fine and a one-month good behaviour bond at Southport Magistrates Court

Tough time: Depp was allowed to smoke on a balcony at the courthouse as crowds of fans and media gathered outside for the hearing

Travelling in style: The couple left the country in the comfort of a private jet

'I am truly sorry Pistol and Boo were not declared. Protecting Australia is important.'

An equally sombre Depp added: 'Australians are just as unique - warm and direct. When you disrespect Australian law they will tell you firmly.

'Declare everything when you enter Australia.'

The clip was widely mocked on social media with some commentators describing it as a 'hostage video'.

Bizarre: During the hearing a video of the pair in which Heard apologised for not declaring the dogs was shown

Heard and Depp were ordered to remove their dogs from the country last year or risk having them put down after they appeared at a grooming salon in Queensland having seemingly bypassed the proper protocol for animals entering the country.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce professed at the time that allowances should not be made for celebrities entering the country, fuming: 'If we start letting movie stars  even though they've been the sexiest man alive twice  to come into our nation (with pets), then why don't we just break the laws for everybody?'

He dismissed the pair's video this week, questioning its authenticity and Depp's acting skills.

Scandal: The row began last May when it emerged the pair's dogs, Pistol and Boo, were in the country seemingly having bypassed normal procedures

Jet set: Heard had flown in to Australia with the couple's dogs to visit Depp while he filmed Pirates of The Caribbean

'What I can say is although I don't think he'll get an Academy Award for his performance, the fact that he did it  he looked like he was auditioning for the Godfather,' he told the AM.

He admitted that the scandal had brought global attention to the issue of Australia's strict bio security laws, adding: 'At the end of it we've got a message that is going all around the world right now, it's going off like a frog in a sock telling people that if you come into this nation and you don't obey our laws, you're in trouble.'
They're not afraid to flash the flesh during a night on the Toon.

And when it comes to their holiday wardrobes, the Geordie Shore stars don't disappoint either.

Charlotte Crosby, Chloe Ferry, Holly Hagan and Sophie Kasaei enjoyed a recent girly getaway to Carpe Verde, and while their co-stars wowed in bikinis, Charlotte and Sophie chose some very skimpy one-pieces.

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One-piece wonders: Geordie Shore stars Sophie Kasaei and Charlotte Crosby both wowed in skimpy swimsuits during a recent girls' trip to Cape Verde

Sophie quit Geordie Shore two years ago but has been back shooting scenes for series 13 which brings together cast members past and present for a five-part mini-series to celebrate five years of the show.

And she's dug out her glam wardrobe for her return, hitting the beach during the fun getaway in a glam gold swimsuit.

The halter-neck number flaunted Sophie's ample assets with its plunging neckline, with the reality star barely covering up with a sheer black wrap.

Going for gold! Sophie shimmered in a metallic halter-neck number with a daringly low neckline

A pair of shades and a full face of makeup completed the beach ensemble as she messed around on the beach with her co-stars.

Charlotte also ditched the bikini in favour of a one-piece, standing out in her fun slogan-print number.

The black and white number featured a Mean Girls inspired taunt - 'You can't swim with us.'

Making a statement: Charlotte also ditched the bikini in favour of a one-piece, standing out in her fun slogan-print number

On the Shore: Sophie and Charlotte enjoyed their break with bikini-clad Geordie Shore co-stars Holly Hagan and Chloe Ferry

Cut low down the sides to allow her to flaunt a hint of sideboob, the swimsuit - from her own swimwear collection - also included a flattering high-cut on the leg giving her a chance to display her enviably toned, slim legs and her large tattoo.

She too added a flowing black cover-up and shades while her highlighted locks were piled up into an effortless do.

Charlotte recently reminisced over the Cape Verde trip, which the girls took in March, when she shared a throwback Thursday snap of herself and her beautiful bikini-clad pals this month.

She's got skills! Charlotte showed off her handstand skills on the sand as her co-stars cheered her on

There she goes! The fun-loving star appeared to lose her balance slightly

Kicking back: The girls soaked up the sunshine in their skimpy beach wardrobes

The 25-year-old reality TV star posted the sun-soaked shot on her Instagram page, adding that she is already missing the sunshine.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, Charlotte has confirmed that she and her on-off Geordie Shore co-star boyfriend Gaz Beadle are back on.

The couple's relationship took a hit when claims that Gaz invited a beauty queen back to his hotel room surfaced.

Since then though the reality couple- who have had a complicated and drawn-out on/off romance since 2011 - have been packing on the PDAs.

Bit cold? The reality stars got a fright when a huge wave threatened to ruin their outfits

Strut: The girls showed off their tanned and toned curves in their swimwear

Inked: Charlotte flashed her large thigh tattoo in her skimpy swimsuit
She's renowned for her striking and sharp stints on the big screen in the likes of Basic Instinct and Casino.

But Sharon Stone was throwing herself into her role as a mother on Monday, as she treated her eldest son, Roan, to a day out in Beverly Hills.

Heading out into Hollywood with her 15-year-old son, the actress, 58, cut a casually chic figure as she enjoyed some down time with one of her three boys.

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Devoted mother: Sharon Stone was throwing herself into her role as a mother on Monday, as she treated her eldest son, Roan, to a day out in Beverly Hills

The Basic Instinct star and her son - who's father is the actress' ex-husband Phil Bronstein - looked to be thoroughly enjoying their time out, as they both sported huge smiles throughout the trip.

And clearly delighted to be spending some quality time with Roan, Sharon looked to be in high spirits as she strolled around the Beverly Glen mall with the teenager.

Opting for a casual and comfy look for her excursion, the Total Recall star kept her chic credentials up by slipping into a jazzy floral mini dress.

Making sure her incredible figure was still firmly on display, thanks to the figure-hugging nature of the dress, Sharon opted to showcase her slim legs in the thigh-grazing number.

A day out with mum: Heading out into Hollywood with her 15-year-old son, the actress, 58, cut a casually chic figure as she enjoyed some down time with one of her three boys

She added a very comfy edge to her look by donning a pair of blue Adidas sandals.

Although she kept her fashionista credentials firmly in place by coordinating her accessories with her outfit; sporting an emerald leather handbag and a green gem stone necklace.

While she kept a hint of A-List siren about her with a pair of mirrored oval sunglasses

Roan meanwhile showcased his own street savvy style, by teaming a grey baggy hoodie with a pair of denim jeans and white high top sneakers.

All smiles: The Basic Instinct star and her son - who's father is the actress' ex-husband Phil Bronstein - looked to be thoroughly enjoying their time out, as they both sported huge smiles throughout the trip

Her eldest: Roan is the eldest of Sharon's three adopted sons, with the star also later adopting Laird Vonne Stone in 2005 followed by Quinn Kelly Stone in 2006

And it seem her eldest son - she also has two other adopted son, ten-year-old Lair and Quinn, nine - decided to take some style tips from his famous mother, as he sported a pair of similar mirrored sunglasses.

The mother/son duo looked just as happy and chirpy as they jumped into Sharon's convertible Bentley Continental later on, with Sharon gazing adoringly at Roan as he chatted away to her.

Sharon and her second husband Phil adopted Roan in 2000, and split four years later.

The year following her break-up, 2005, Sharon adopted Laird Vonne Stone followed by Quinn Kelly Stone in 2006.

Before tying the knot with Phil, Sharon was married to television producer Michael Greenburg. The pair wed om 1984 but separated three years later, and finalised their divorce in 1990.
She has recently undergone another body transformation after admitting she had let her fitness regime slip during a promo tour of Australia.

But Holly Hogan was more than happy to show off her killer body as she jetted off on a girls' trip to Cape Verde alongside her Geordie Shore co-stars.

The 23-year-old looked sensational as she frolicked on the beach in a very revealing hot pink two piece.

She Shore looks good! Holly Hogan was more than happy to show off her killer body as she jetted off on a girls' trip to Cape Verde alongside her Geordie Shore co-stars

The tiny bikini made the most of her sensational curves, including her famous assets and her tiny waist.

Sporting a pair of shades, Holly skipped around the sand as she had a whale of a time with her gal pals.

The beauty was joined by Chloe Ferry, who also displayed her curves in a racy red bikini.

The pouting TV personality added a crochet cover-up to add a chic twist to her beach look.

Hot pink! The 23-year-old looked sensational as she frolicked on the beach in a very revealing hot pink two piece

Making waves: The tiny bikini made the most of her sensational curves, including her famous assets and her tiny waist

Her ship's coming in: The beauty was joined by Chloe Ferry, who also displayed her curves in a racy red bikini

One-piece wonders: Geordie Shore co-stars Sophie Kasaei (left) and Charlotte Crosby (right) both wowed in skimpy swimsuits

Making a statement: Charlotte also ditched the bikini in favour of a one-piece, standing out in her fun slogan-print number

Going for gold! Sophie shimmered in a metallic halter-neck number with a daringly low neckline

Holly recent decided to take a 21-day eating and workout challenge after putting weight on in Australia.

Her decision to answer back to body-shamers follows a post on her Instagram page that compared a recent mirror selfie with a beach snap from Oz six weeks ago, which some considered a poor representation of the change.

Explaining her decision to share the snapshots, Holly said: 'I get accused of everything when I lose weight, so this time I thought I'd remove one of the most common suggestions from online trolls, that being I have all my images airbrushed.

'I hear it hundreds of time a day, "you airbrush your photos" "look how bumpy your legs are from bad airbrushing". If I was going to airbrush my photos I'd at least have my legs made not bumpy! That's just my legs!'

Gal pals: Holly and Chloe frolicked on the sand alongside co-stars Sophie Kasaei and Charlotte Crosby

Inked: Charlotte flashed her large thigh tattoo in her skimpy swimsuit

Bit cold? The reality stars got a fright when a huge wave threatened to ruin their outfits

Kicking back: The girls soaked up the sunshine in their skimpy beach wardrobes
He has been busy getting to grips with his role as father following the birth of his son in January.

But Louis Tomlinson took some time away from his young son on Monday afternoon as he was seen running errands with a friend and his bodyguard in West Hollywood.

The One Direction star was dressed casually for his outing as he teamed a Home Made black top with grey tracksuit bottoms and black Adidas trainers.

Busy guy: Louis Tomlinson took some time away from his young son on Monday afternoon as he was seen running errands with a friend and his bodyguard in West Hollywood

The beardy 24-year-old wore his brown locks swept to the side while he had a cigarette tucked behind his ear.

He was seen sporting a small plaster on his left hand while he drank a milkshake drink and browsed his mobile phone.

Earlier this month, Louis was forced to address the fan conspiracy claims that his child was a doll.

See more of the latest on One Direction's Louis Tomlinson as he steps out in Hollywood

Out and about: The One Direction star was dressed casually for his outing as he teamed a Home Made black top with grey tracksuit bottoms and black Adidas trainers

Scruffy style: The beardy 24-year-old wore his brown locks swept to the side while he had a cigarette tucked behind his ear

He was quizzed by a pap, 'Hey Louis, it's good to see that your baby is real, man,' in reference to the newly-publicised theory.

'Have a bit of respect for a baby, pal,' a visibly annoyed Louis replied.

Freddie's mother Briana Jungwirth has also had her say on the 'sick' claims, branding them 'cruel'.

Keeping in touch: He was seen sporting a small plaster on his left hand while he drank a milkshake drink and browsed his mobile phone

Laughable claims: Earlier this month, Louis was forced to address the fan conspiracy claims that his child was a doll

She commented on an MTV News Instagram post which showed her child Photoshopped out of one of the first photos of Louis holding him.

The stylist fumed: 'Sorry but that is just cruel. I don't usually speak out much, but I'd like to know how would you feel as a new proud mother reading something like this?

'How dare anyone call my child fake? That's sick and morally wrong. Say all you'd like but I won't let anyone take away the happiness I have for my baby son. I know Louis won't either.'

Silly: He was quizzed by a pap, 'Hey Louis, it's good to see that your baby is real, man,' in reference to the newly-publicised theory

His sighting came after Buzzfeed exposed the intricate details of a conspiracy theory claiming young Freddie - whose mother is LA-based stylist Briana Jungwirth - isn't real.

The thesis is the work of One Direction fans who reckon Louis' new-found fatherhood is an elaborate lie to cover up the fact he's secretly gay and dating band-mate Harry Styles - which is part of another fictional viral sensation, entitled Larry Stylinson.

Both Louis and Briana have also been sharing several snaps of little Freddie in a bid to prove the youngster is definitely their child.
He has been busy promoting the new Wonder Woman film in Italy, but Chris Pine showed that even heroes deserve some time off.

The 35-year-old cut a casual figure as he visited the historical site of Villa Adriana in Rome on Monday.

The Star Trek star looked the epitome of laid back coolness as he sported a loose-fitting grey T-shirt and light blue ripped jeans.

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Archaeological adventure: Wonder Woman star Chris Pine enjoyed some time off from his hectic schedule as he headed to soak up the sights in Rome, Italy

Making sure he was comfortable for his day of sightseeing, Chris added a pair of white Adidas Stan Smith trainers.

Enjoying the Italian weather, Chris opted for a pair of quirky round sunglasses and he completed the look with a chunky silver watch.

But rather than just lounging around in the sun, Chris decided to visit the archaeological complex at Tivoli.

Laidback chic: The 35-year-old cut a casual figure as he visited the historical site of Villa Adriana on Monday

Strict itinerary: Rather than just lounging around in the sun, Chris was seen taking in the beautiful views at the archaeological complex at Tivoli

Here he was seen avidly taking in the atmosphere and beautiful views.

The actor plays Wonder Woman's love interest Steve Trevor in the highly-anticipated movie.

And he revealed why he's just fine taking a backseat to Israeli actress Gal Gadots fearsome female lead.

'Action is so synonymous with violence and revenge and eye-for-an-eye,' Pine told DuJour magazine in February.

'The masculine footprint in the world is so violent and obviously it hasnt really gotten us anywhere.

'A woman at the forefront naturally leads with this compassion, and [is about] giving life instead of taking life.
Ryan Reynolds has had a big year, what with the success of his hit movie Deadpool - for which a sequel is already in the works - and the recent announcement that wife Blake Lively is pregnant with baby number two.

And the 39-year-old's good news just keeps coming, as GQ has praised him as one of the 13 Most Stylish Men In The World Right Now.

He covered the May issue of the men's magazine - one of many special covers - for the fashion spread, which also included stars such as Drake and Future, as well as Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

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Leading man: Ryan Reynolds covered May's GQ as one of the year's most fashionable men

The Proposal actor was praised for his propensity to take classic looks, and up the ante by adding a twist, such as a subtle plaid print on a blue suit.

GQ dubbed him 'The Double Taker' for making the most out of his red carpet looks, saying the 'subtle detail is the key to Ryan's style.'

He was featured on one of the magazine's May 2016 covers, sporting a custom midnight blue velvet tuxedo and classic bow tie by Gucci (worn to the 2014 Met Gala).

Subtle surprise: The magazine praised his look to the Mississippi Grind premiere in 2015, for at first glance it was a nice, navy suit, but upon closer inspection it actually has a subtle plaid print

In an Instagram post promoting the issue, the magazine gushed of Ryan's 'leading-man-level wardrobe thats somehow classic and swerve-y at the same time.'

Of course, the comical star - known for his wacky online persona - reposted the shot with a joke, quipping: 'Thank you @jimmooregq and @gq -- Although, in shots like these, I'm almost never wearing pants.'

The magazine's spread was accompanied with a slideshow on their website of Ryan's '11 Best Double Take Outfits,' such as his look for the Mississippi Grind premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015.

Well put together: It also gushed over his bold cardigan, tailored topcoat, and suede boots worn to the AOL Build Speaker Series in February

At first look the actor is dapper in a navy blue suit, but upon closer inspection it's actually a chic navy plaid suit, with a Burberry tie and micro dot pocket square.

Another example was Ryan's appearance at the AOL Build Speaker Series in February, in which he sported a bold cardigan.

GQ noted that he coupled it with a perfectly tailored topcoat, a broken-in T-shirt, slim, pleated trousers, and trendy, charcoal suede boots, finishing off an unforgettable look.

In good company: Drake, Future, and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were a few of the other fashionable men honored in the issue

The issue also praised Drake as 'The Coziest Baller,' writing that his loose-fitting clothes are a power move that say: 'I can get in anywhere without so much as a collared shirt, because I am me.'
She never fails to look anything but chic.

And as Elizabeth Hurley dressed up for another evening out on Tuesday, she shared a teasing sneak peek at her glam look.

Posing for an Instagram selfie, the star flaunted her cleavage in a little black dress with a daringly low neckline.

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Wow factor: Elizabeth Hurley dressed up for another evening out on Tuesday, teasing sneak peek at her glam little black dress with a daringly low neckline

Liz looked sensational as she pouted for the camera, but all the attention was on her ample assets.

A glittering necklace further accentuated her chest, while Liz was glammed up for her night out with flawless hair and a full face of makeup including glossy lip and lashings of eyeliner.

'Another evening, another LBD,' she teased in the photo's caption.

Spring break: It looks like the British actress is enjoying a trip to Italy, as she shared a photo over the weekend while standing in front of a magnificent view of the countryside

It looks like the British actress is enjoying a trip to Italy, as she shared a photo over the weekend while standing in front of a magnificent view of the countryside

The smiling actress was looking effortlessly chic in a cream jumper and aviator shades as she enjoyed the sunshine, writing in the caption: 'Glorious Umbria.'

Liz arrived in the Italian region on Saturday, sharing another smiley snap, this time from the airport.

Jetting in: Liz arrived in the Italian region on Saturday, sharing another smiley snap, this time from the airport

It's been a jet-set week for the busy star as she headed to New York last week for a charity event.

Elizabeth made sure she was perfectly colour coordinated for the annual Hot Pink party in New York city, on Tuesday evening.

Heading out to the bash which is held in conjunction with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the 50-year-old actress ensured that her glamorous gown matched the party's trappings perfectly.
She's remained relatively tight-lipped over details of her blossoming romance.

But on Tuesday former Biggest Loser contestant Fiona Falkiner told of her success story as she encouraged singletons to try new things when looking for love.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia at the launch of her friend Jodi Anasta's range for Mon Purse, Fiona gushed over her restaurateur beau.

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Lucky in love: Fiona Falkiner opened up about her 'incredible' partner at the launch of Jodi Anasta's range for Mon Purse in Sydney on Tuesday

Suggesting online dating services such as eHarmony, for which she is an ambassador, the 33-year-old said: 'If you're kind of not really meeting new people then why not try something new.

'I did and I went on some really great dates and met an incredible guy. Just step out of the box and try something different.'

Little is known of the beauty's new boyfriend other than that he is in the restaurant business.

Happy: The 33-year-old would not be drawn on further details of her new man but said they were enjoying their time together

Out of her comfort zone: The beauty encouraged singletons to try new things to find love

Speaking of their relationship after stepping out for the first time together last month, Fiona said the pair were enjoying their time together.

'The time I spend with him is really lovely and we've been doing really fun stuff.

'He's a restaurateur. One of my passions is food and I love checking out restaurants and stuff like that; so that's definitely something we have in common'.

The starlet would not be drawn on further details of their romance on Tuesday but encouraged others to step out of their comfort zones to meet new people.

She also revealed hopes to one day design a range of plus size clothing, adding: 'I represent the curvier lady.

'It's something I've always been passionate about.'
It is hard to deny she is a head-turner.

And Roxanne Pallett proved her showstopping power as she won the admiration of a gaggle of builders as she enjoyed a jaunt through Manchester's MediaCity development on Tuesday.

The 33-year-old former Emmerdale star looked stunning in a blue floral mini dress with a pink cardigan as she flashed her incredible legs - much to the joy of the group of men.

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Flirty florals: Roxanne Pallett proved her showstopping power as she won the admiration of a gaggle of builders as she enjoyed a jaunt through Manchester's MediaCity development on Tuesday

Roxanne exhibited her unique flare for fashion as she paired her blue and white tea dress with a bright pink cardigan layered over the top.

Adding in cowboy boots to the look, she afforded a stylish addition to the stunning ensemble before rocking a pair of rectangular framed glasses.

The Cumbria born beauty, who shot to fame in 2005 playing Jo Sugden in the ITV soap, added a splash of designer with her cross body Michael Kors handbag in a mushroom colour.

While her ensemble was quirky and sweet, it was the scripts she clutched which drew the eye as she seemed to be prepping for a new TV role.

Twit twoo! Roxanne exhibited her unique flare for fashion as she paired her blue and white tea dress with a bright pink cardigan layered over the top - much to the admiration of surrounding workers

Legs eleven: The 33-year-old former Emmerdale star looked stunning in a blue floral mini dress with a pink cardigan as she flashed her incredible legs

She went on to enjoy a solo al fresco bite where she was yet again caught by a passerby, as she chatted to a gentleman while she enjoyed her iced beverage in the warm sun.

Her beaming look on Tuesday was far from her mood just weeks ago when she filmed an analysis of how the elderly get treated in society by transforming into an old woman.

After undergoing four hours of prosthetics and make-up, the actress finally became 'Doris' and mentioned: 'It was a pretty brutal experience. I thought it was going to be fun and exciting but it just wasn't.'

Chilled out: Adding in cowboy boots to the look, she afforded a stylish addition to the stunning ensemble before rocking a pair of rectangular framed glasses

She also mentioned that she felt 'invisible' after going undercover for BBC Radio 5 Live.

'I only went through it for a few hours but it's left me with a really heavy heart,' said Roxanne- who is an ambassador for Age UK.

Continuing about her experience and the lack of help she received, she mentioned: 'No one was assisting me and it was obvious I needed help.

Chatting away: She went on to enjoy a solo al fresco bite where she was yet again caught by a passerby, as she chatted to a gentleman while she enjoyed her iced beverage in the warm sun

'One man barged me when I was walking down the street, it was like I didn't matter.

'There's a lot of chivalry out there but it doesn't seem to apply to older people and that's not right and it's not fair.'

Since leaving Emmerdale in 2008, Roxanne has appeared in the stage production of the Rocky Horror Show and is set to star in the British film The Violaters this coming June.
Empire of the Sun burst onto the Australian music scene in 2008 with their smash hit debut single Walking On a Dream.

But the synth pop track struggled to break it big in the States, instead finding popularity overseas in Europe and Asia.

Now, eight years after its original release, the song has finally gained some popularity on the American music charts thanks to its placement in a popular Honda Civic television commercial.

Hitting the big time! Empire of the Sun's 2008 single Walking on a Dream has now become a huge hit in America eight years after it was first released

The rising popularity of the track landed the Australian duo a gig on The Ellen Degeneres Show, where they performed to a rapturous audience.

Walking On a Dream started gaining traction in the States earlier this year, debuting on the Billboard Hot 100 in January.

It later peaked at No. 65, but performed even better on the Alternative Songs chart where it reached No. 3.

Performing: The Australian duo performed the hit song on The Ellen Degeneres Show

Unique: Their unique fashion and stage theatrics surely wowed the crowd

The song has now been certified Platinum by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) for sales of one million copies.

With Walking On a Dream now a Stateside success, Empire of the Sun are working hard on their next studio album in a bid to keep the momentum going.

'The third record, we've been working on for about two years,' frontman Luke Steele told Spin earlier this year.

'The third record, we've been working on for about two years,' frontman Luke Steele revealed to Spin

He added: 'The timing is, like, immaculate.'

The 36-year-old also revealed that the band are aiming to release the new disc by September.

'I think now that this has happened, its going to be probably, September,' he said, once again referring to the late success of Walking On a Dream.
She hit back at body shamers last month who accused her of not being curvy enough to be 'a real woman'

And now Daisy Ridley, 24, has inspired her fans once more by tackling the murky world of faking it on social media.

On Tuesday the actress posted a selfie of her looking gorgeous, with perfectly applied eyeliner, and added the classic captions that people use: 'I woke up like this #nofilter #nomakeup'

While clearly wearing cosmetics for the close-up as well as using a flattering tinted filter, the star wrote a powerful message alongside the snap which started with refreshing honesty, '3 of these statements aren't true...'

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Being honest: Daisy Ridley shared an inspiring message to fans on Tuesday when she shared a glamorous selfie and added the classic captions that people use: 'I woke up like this #nofilter #nomakeup'

She continued: 'Social media is great but also a bit scary cause what people post is the most filtered, most carefully chosen and cleverly edited moments of their lives.

'And self esteem is a huge issue for people around the world. My skin isn't great so I don't post no make up selfies, much as I'd like to;

'I have a trainer urging me on in workouts and don't include all the times I say 'I can't do it' and I don't smile all the time but I like to share the pictures where I am.

Inspiring: The 24-year-old actress talked about the dangers of believing everything you see on social media and how it affects self esteem

She concluded: 'But I actually do love myself, I try to think good thoughts always and am surrounded by the most wonderful people, so I'm keeping it balanced (like the Force, obvs). Just thought I'd say :)'

Last month Daisy noticed that someone on Instagram had posted a meme of her as Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and attacked her for not being curvy enough.

The user had accused the star of setting 'unrealistic expectations' for young girls, as 'real women have curves.'

Role model: Last month the British beauty hit back at a body shamer who said that her being cast as Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens was setting unrealistic expectations for girls as she doesn't look like a 'real woman'

Standing up for women: The Instagram user shared this image and the actress hit back by commenting on it before then writing a message on her own account

Daisy wasted no time in hitting back, originally writing a caption on the photo saying that '"real women" are all shapes and sizes, all ethnicities, all levels of brave' and that she's 'a "real woman" like every other woman in this world.'

She then shared a message on her own account writing: 'What's weird is most of the time I see such gorgeous messages from people around the world,'

She added: 'It is much more hurtful to continue to slate other women than BE a woman, BE a character, BE whoever you want to be.'

'I'm a normal girl thrust into extraordinary circumstances, just like Rey. I will not apologise for how I look, what I say and how I live my life cause what's happening inside is much more important anyway and I am striving to be the best version of myself, even if I stumble along the way.'

'I will not apologise for how I look': Daisy's inspiring message reminded fans to lift people up instead of bringing them down

Next up: Daisy is set to partner up with her Star Wars: The Force Awakens producer J.J Abrams on a new project titled Kolma

Meanwhile the actress is reteaming with Star Wars producer J.J. Abrams on fantasy thriller Kolma, to be helmed by Diary of a Teenage Girl filmmaker Marielle Heller.

The film follows a young couple who get in a car accident, leaving the man dead.

Decades later, on her way to the afterlife, the old woman must choose whether to reunite with her long-lost love or return to the fateful day her life aged 22.

The Wrap describes the flick as a mix between The Notebook and 1991 romance Defending Your Life.

Daisy is now busy filming Star Wars: Episode VIII.
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Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt are every inch convincing gunslingers in newly released photos of them on the set of The Magnificent Seven remake.

The two stars are seen leaning against the wooden fence of a corral wearing stetsons and pistols in gunholders.

The pair headline the new version directed by Antoine Fuqua about a band of seven gunfighters in the old west who band together to protect a poor village against ruthless thieves.

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Back to the old west: Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt make for convincing gunslingers in newly released photos from the set of Antoine Fuqua's remake of The Magnificent Seven

They ride again! The band of gunslingers come together to protect peasant villagers from ruthless thieves in a re-telling of the classic 1960 western. From l-r, Vincent D'Onofrio, Martin Sensmeier, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ethan Hawke, Washington, Pratt and Byung-hun Lee

It's the first time in his long and acclaimed career that Washington has made a western.

He previously worked for Fuqua in the hit Training Day, in which he starred with Ethan Hawke, whom the director has also enlisted to joing the gang of gunslingers.

Rounding out the seven are Vincent D'Onofrio, South Korean star Byung-hun Lee, Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Native American Martin Sensmeier.

'These guys are gunslingers, and when they walk into the room, you notice them,' Fuqua told USA Today. 'These are people you want to be with, or you want to protect you.'

New experience: The Magnificent Seven is a first for Washington - he's not previously starred in a western. He was persuaded to take on the role by Fuqua who directed him in Training Day

The way they were: The cast of the original The Magnificent Seven read like a who's who of Hollywood leading men and included Steve McQueen, far left, Yul Brynner, second from left, and Charles Bronson, far right

It turns out that two-time Oscar winner Washington fully embraced the new experience, taking horseback riding lessons and making sure his nickel-plated Colt .45 never left his side.

'He had it with him all the time, even when he wasnt on the set,' Fuqua said.

'Wed have meetings and hed be spinning and twirling his gun while we were talking. He used to walk around his house spinning guns, go to restaurants. Obviously, people knew it was for his character.'

Gun toting: Washington got so much into character that he took his Colt .45 with him everywhere during filming, even when not on set

In a movie icon's footsteps: Washington stars as the leader of the ragtag bunch, a role played in the 1960 original by Yul Brynner, right

Hunks: Pratt takes on a role that went to action man and sex symbol Steve McQueen, right

The first footage from Fuqua's film was shown at CinemaCon in Las Vegas last week, and the first trailer is set to debut Wednesday.

In talking about the project, Jurassic World star Pratt said he finally understands the appeal of the genre.

He said he used to watch them as a child with his father, who was a big fan.

'I didnt like them then and now I get it, like country music,' he said, according to TheWrap.com.

The Magnificent Seven is slated for release in North America in September 23.
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He's been cast as serial killer John Christie in the retelling about the infamous Notting Hill murders in the 1940s and 50s.

And Tim Roth was spotted filming upcoming BBC drama Rillington Place for the first time on Tuesday, looking virtually unrecognisable thanks to a dramatic makeunder as he got to work on location in Glasgow.

The 54-year-old Hollywood actor was seen perching on a park bench with a pet Jack Russell dog on a lead, sporting a receding hairline and round spectacles.

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Transformation: Hollywood actor Tim Roth underwent a makeover to portray murderer John Christie in upcoming BBC drama Rillington Place, getting to work on the set in Glasgow on Tuesday

Tim was dressed in a retro ensemble to play the cunning killer, comprising a brown mackintosh, smart chinos and a blue shirt.

The Hateful Eight actor topped off his attire with a grey hat, looking older than his years in the period costume.

The cast and crew were seen hard at work as old-fashioned buses, vintage vehicles and retro props were set up on the streets of the Scottish city in a bid to transform the West End of Glasgow into Notting Hill circa 1948.

Cold blooded killer: Christie murdered at least eight women  including his wife  by strangling them in his flat at 10 Rillington Place in London

Makeunder: Hollywood star Tim, 54, looked poles apart from his usual dapper self thanks to a bald head cap and spectacles

New look: The Hateful Eight actor donned a smart coat, grey trilby and round glasses to play the infamous killer, who carried out his killings at his home address and let his neighbour Timothy Evans take the fall for the crimes

Big screen adaptation: Richard Attenborough played the killer in 1971 adaptation 10 Rillington Place, directed by Richard Fleischer

The three-part drama is based on the real-life multiple murders undertaken by John Christie in Notting Hill.

Christie murdered at least eight women  including his wife Ethel  by strangling them in his flat at 10 Rillington Place in London.

The series begins as Timothy and Beryl Evans, played by Nico Mirallegro and Jodie Comer, move in next door to Christie and his wife (played by Samantha Morton) and fall prey to the killer's evil ways.

Storyline: The series begins as Timothy and Beryl Evans, played by Nico Mirallegro and Jodie Comer, move in next door to Christie and his wife (played by Samantha Morton) and fall prey to the killer's evil ways

Looking the part: Extras dress in period clothes stand outside some of Glasgow's Georgian and Victorian buildings as they recreate mid-20th century London

Retelling: The story was previously adapted for the big screen in 10 Rillington Place in 1971, starring Richard Attenborough, John Hurt and Judy Geeson

Must-see: Writers Ed Whitmore and Tracey Malone commented, 'This is a story you just can't look away from: an unlikely serial killer who orchestrated a devastating miscarriage of justice'

Welshman Timothy was falsely charged with the murder of his infant daughter and wife, but only went to trial over the baby's death.

Despite accusing downstairs resident Christie of the crimes during the trial, Timothy was found guilty of baby Geraldine's murder, while the charge against him regarding Beryl remained 'on file' as was common legal practice at the time.

Christie and his wife Ethel were key witnesses for the prosecution.

Timothy was hanged in 1950 for a crime he didn't commit, and the miscarriage of justice eventually contributed towards the abolition of capital punishment in Britain in 1965.

Historic case: The miscarriage of justice contributed towards the abolition of capital punishment in Britain

Big budget drama: Rillington Place will be filmed at BBC Scotlands Dumbarton Studios, and on location in Glasgow and London

On location: The crew were hard at work, transforming the West End of Glasgow into Notting Hill circa 1948

Miscarriage of justice: Actor Nico Mirallegro (pictured in the BBC's Upstairs Downstairs) will play Welshman Timothy, who was wrongly accused of murdering his wife and infant daughter, despite accusing downstairs neighbour Christie of the crimes during the trial, and was hanged in 1950

Victim: Award-winning actress Samantha Morton (left) will play Ethel Christie (right) was murdered by her own husband on 12 December 1952, aged 54

Tragic: Thirteen star Jodie Comer (left) will be portraying Beryl Evans, 20, pictured with her infant daughter Geraldine (right)

Three years after Evans's execution, Christie was found to be responsible for the murders of six other women in the same house. He confessed to murdering Mrs. Evans during his trial.

An inquiry concluded in 1966 he had also murdered the couple's daughter, and Evans was granted a posthumous pardon.

Show writers Ed Whitmore and Tracey Malone commented: 'This is a story you just can't look away from: an unlikely serial killer who orchestrated a devastating miscarriage of justice.

'It has drawn us in at every turn and has attracted an incredibly exciting level of talent who are as committed as we are to bringing it to life.'

The true crime story was previously adapted for the big screen in 10 Rillington Place in 1971, starring the late Sir Richard Attenborough, Sir John Hurt, Pat Heywood and Judy Geeson.

Scene of the crime: The three-part drama is based on the real-life multiple murders undertaken by John Christie at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London, which no longer exists as a road

A policeman stands guard outside 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill in 1966, which was demolished in 1970

1971 adaptation: Richard Attenborough (John Christie) and Pat Heywood (Ethel Christie) appeared in the film, adapted by Clive Exton from the book Ten Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy

Powerful performance: John Hurt (right) received a BAFTA Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Evans alongside Judy Geeson as Beryl (centre)

Christie's victims: The first person Christie confessed to killing was Ruth Fuerst, 21, (left) an Austrian munitions worker and prostitute. In October 1944, he coerced his co-worker Muriel Amelia Eady, 32, (right), back to his house, where he strangled her and buried her next to Ruth in the back garden

Murdered: The bodies of baby Geraldine and Beryl Evans (left) were discovered in an outdoor wash-house in late 1949. Timothy Evans at first insisted that Christie had killed his wife Beryl in a botched abortion operation, but under forceful police questioning he eventually confessed to the murder himself. Christie later killed his own wife Ethel (right) on 14 December 1952, strangling her in bed.
New York's resident celebrities were out in force for the state's primary elections with a plethora stars backing their favored Democratic candidate.

Republican celebrities however were thin on the ground.

Amy Schumer made it clear to everyone which box she ticked when it came to choosing the democratic nominee.

The comedienne and actress went to the polling station wearing a t-shirt with a line drawing of Hillary Clinton on the front and then shared a photo via Twitter showing her with the 'I Voted' sticker stuck on her nose.

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'Go New York!' Amy Schumer made it clear where her allegiance lies when it comes to choosing the next president of the U.S., wearing a picture of Hillary Clinton on her t-shirt as she went to cast her primary ballot

'Make your voice heard': Native New Yorker Lena Dunham posted this selfie on her Instagram showing she, too, had voted Tuesday and urging others to take part on the process

Composer, creator and star of the Broadway msucial Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, states proudly that he voted

Sarah Jessica Parker decided to stick her 'I voted' badge onto her door

Little monster: Lady Gaga firmly backed Hilary Clinton as she tweeted after voting in her primary

Schumer raised her hands in the air as she tweeted the rallying cry: 'Said go New York go New York go! #imwithher.'

Girls creator and star Lena Dunham shared a selfie with her NYC Votes sticker on the palm of her right hand.

While she didn't publicly reveal who she cast her vote for, Dunham had earlier posted a message exhorting her social media followers to take part in the primary process.

'While I've spent time campaigning for my candidate of choice, the message I want to share today is a simple one: VOTE,' she wrote.

Give us a clue? Shouldn't be too hard to see who Chelsea Clinton voted for on Tuesday

Democracy in action: Ugly Betty star America Ferrera and her husband Ryan Piers Williams, who are Clinton supporters, cast their votes together

American actress and playwright Zoe Kazan voted and said how happy she was to have a sticker

She went on: ' Voting is one of the top ways that we make our voices heard as citizens, that we demand change. As WOMEN it is especially important that we show up to the polls this election.'

Last month, she participated in an event in Hollywood with actress America Ferrera and Chelsea Clinton where she spoke about why she supports Hillary Clinton for president.

Ugly Betty star Ferrera and her husband Ryan Piers Williams also shared the news that they had cast their votes via a selfie posted on their Instagram accounts.

Orange Is the New Black actress Uzo Aduba didn't state who she was voting for but urged others to do it

Feeling the Bern: Shailene Woodley tweeted this photo of herself in a make-up chair and working on a laptop while chatting on her cell phone

Coyote Ugly actress Piper Perabo didn't state who she was rooting for but urged other to exercise their democratic right

Stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan makes light of the days events

A number of famous names who support Bernie Sanders took to Twitter to send messages throughout the day on Tuesday.

Shailene Woodley tweeted a photo of herself on a laptop and cell phone while sitting in a make-up chair.

'Multi tasking at work. no excuses, let's get @BernieSanders in the #NYPrimary!!' she tweeted.

Look what I did! Bernie Sanders supporter Susan Sarandon stuck her 'I Voted' sticker on her forehead and

She's with her: Julianne Moore cast her ballot for Clinton

Debating? Julianne and her husband Bart Freundlich were having an animated conversation after casting their votes in the primary NY election

Actor Kevin Bacon stuck his 'I Voted' sticker onto his leather cap

Oscar winning actresses Julianne Moore and Susan Sarandon also participated in the democratic primary - but for different candidates.

Moore, using the hashtag #ImWithHer revealed her ballot had gone to Clinton.

Sarandon, however, pointing to the 'I Voted' sticker on her forehead, tweeted her support for Bernie Sanders.

Witty: Samantha Bee proudly shared that she, too, had voted in the NY primary

Stylish: Fashion designer Zac Posen appars to make voting trendy again

Actress and New Yorker Olivia Wilde makes a passionate plea for her fellow residents to get out the vote

Former Daily Show correspondent and host of Full Frontal on TBS Samantha Bee tweeted a selfie as well.

She added the tweet: 'Local satirist earnestly performs civic duty.'

Hilaria Baldwin took baby son Rafael with her to the Primary Day ballot box.

She managed to wrangle two stickers off the election officials and proudly showed them off in an Instagram selfie.

Starting him young: Hilaria Baldwin took baby son Rafael with her when she went to the polls on Primary Day and got an extra 'I Voted' sticker for her trouble

Actress Allison Williams stuck her sticker on her mouth for her Twitter selfie, while actor Zachary Quinto shared a photo of himself and partner Miles Mcmillan with Clinton.

'Proud to be heading to the polls on this beautiful spring day to support @hillaryclinton in the new york primary. exercise the right to have your voice be heard no matter who you believe is the best candidate,' he wrote.

'Support is only as valuable as the action it inspires. so take action. stand up. be heard.'

Me too: Actress Allison Williams voted and then stuck her sticker on her mouth for a selfie

Famous friend: Zachary Quinto encouraged his fellow New Yorkers to go out and vote by sharing this photo on Instagram of himself and partner Miles Mcmillan with Clinton

Rosario Dawson was among hundreds of protesters arrested at a 'Democracy Spring' demonstration in Washington, D.C. on Friday, but on Tuesday she voted for Bernie Sanders

Colombian-Puerto Rican actor John Alberto Leguizamo posted proudly with his daughter at the polling booth

Actor and Sanders supporter Justin Long offered to hug anyone and everyone who exercised their right to vote.

Danny Glover tweeted: 'When we act on our beliefs, together we're unstoppable. Let's defy the pundits once again, NY--vote for Bernie today.'

While Mark Ruffalo, also a Sanders supporter, tweeted: 'Ok #NYPrimary this is the day, lets make sure you count by showing up to vote. Have a great voting day!'

She's with Hill! Will & Grace actress Debra Messing wants you to get out the vote for Hillary Clinton
His parents owned a multi-million dollar corporation.

But Danny Rand doesn't look like he has access to that fund in the first images from the set of Netflix's Iron Fist.

Game Of Thrones star Finn Jones was spotted for the first time on the New York set of the upcoming superhero series on Monday.

Fist look: Game Of Thrones star Finn Jones was spotted for the first time on the New York set of Iron Fist with co-star Jessica Stroup on Monday

And the 28-year-old looked more than a little disheveled as he ran through the streets barefoot.

Wearing a ratty hoodie and filthy jeans, the actor looked like he was portraying a homeless man rather than the heir to a mega-successful company.

And while he did have an iPod in his possession, it was super old-school.

Iron Fist is a master martial artist and wielder of the mystical force he is named after, which allows him to focus his chi - or natural energy force - to move or strike at devastating speed, or even heal himself or others.

Hobo chic: The 28-year-old, who plays Danny Rand, looked more than a little disheveled as he ran through the streets barefoot

Low down: Wearing a ratty hoodie and filthy jeans, the actor looked like he was portraying a homeless man rather than the heir to a mega-successful company

Ready to take off: The star looked like he was set to take off at any minute

Back story: In the series, Jessica plays Joy Meachum, Danny's childhood friend, who along with her brother Ward has inherited his father's company

Old model: And while he did have an iPod in his possession, it was super old-school

In the comics, Danny is travelling on an expedition with his father Wendell Rand and his business partner Harold Meachum, searching for the mystical city of K'un L'un.

The father and son suffer a climbing accident, but instead of helping them, Meachum betrays and kills Wendell. Danny is later found by the inhabitants on K'un L'un, where he is raised and trained, and ultimately imbued with the power of the Iron Fist.

In the series, Jessica plays Joy Meachum, Harold's daughter and Danny's childhood friend, who along with her brother Ward has inherited the company, Rand Enterprises.

Our hero: It turns out Danny is Iron Fist, a master martial artist and wielder of the mystical force he is named after. It allows him to focus his chi - or natural energy - to move or strike at speed, or even heal himself or others

Plot: In the comics Danny is travelling on an expedition with his father Wendell Rand and his business partner Harold Meachum - Jessica's character's father - searching for the mystical city of K'un L'un

Awkward moment: The father and son suffer a climbing accident, but instead of helping them, Meachum betrays and kills Wendell

Lots to talk about: The first shots from the set appear to show Danny, after making his way back to New York City, finding and confronting Joy for the first time

The first shots from the set appear to show Danny, after making his way back to New York City, finding and confronting Joy for the first time.

On the same day, the official Twitter account released an image of an old Polaroid from 2001 showing just the feet of Danny, Joy and Ward as they sat together.

'They thought Danny was gone forever. #IronFist,' the caption read, hinting at the complicated relationship the trio will face in the story.

Laid back: In between takes the duo chatted happily

Ruff justice: They even stopped to greet a canine fan

Superpowers: In the comics, Danny is found by the inhabitants of K'un L'un, where he is raised and trained, and ultimately imbued with the power of the Iron Fist

Sole purpose: He appeared delighted when he was permitted to wear shoes when the camera stopped

Can't wait:The star bent down to retrieve his sandals

Iron Fist is the fourth Marvel TV series ordered by Netflix, after Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, which all exist in the same Marvel Cinematic Universe as the Avengers.

Also appearing in the series alongside Finn, who plays Loras Tyrell in Game of Thrones, is his co-star Jessica Henwick who plays Sand Snake Nymeria in the hit HBO fantasy drama.

Lord Of The Rings star David Wenham has also been cast as Harold Meachum.

Shoe shuffle: Jessica changed her high-heeled footwear for flip-flops and Finn put on his Birkenstocks during a break in filming

Still coming: Iron Fist is the fourth Marvel TV series ordered by Netflix, after Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, which in turn exist in the same Marvel Cinematic Universe as the Avengers

History: On the same day, the official Twitter account released an image of an old Polaroid from 2001 showing just the feet of Danny, Joy and her brother Ward as they sat together
Algeria says 14 Islamists killed near Tunisia last month

The Algerian army killed 14 Islamist fighters last month in the El-Oued region near the border with Tunisia, the government said on Sunday.

The Islamists were killed in an operation in the town of Kouinine near El-Oued, the defence ministry said on its website.

It also announced that soldiers had found an arms cache in the area on Friday, the second such discovery in 10 days.

The Algerian army killed 14 Islamist fighters last month in the El-Oued region near the border with Tunisia, the government said on April 17, 2016 Farouk Batiche (AFP/File)

Last year the Algerian army killed or arrested 157 "terrorists", according to ministry figures.

A brutal civil war in the 1990s between the government and Islamists claimed the lives of some 200,000 people.
Oil prices tumble on Doha talks failure

Oil prices tumbled Monday a day after top producers failed to reach a deal in Doha to cap output, fanning fresh fears over a supply glut that has plagued the market.

Prices had rebounded last week on hopes the OPEC exporters' club and other major players, including Russia, would agree to freeze output levels at Sunday's meeting.

However, discussions in the Qatari capital floundered and a deal to curb abundant global oil supplies failed to materialise, sending the market lower once again.

Shortly before 1500 GMT on Monday, US benchmark West Texas Intermediate for delivery in May had sunk $1.08 to $39.28 per barrel Haidar Mohammed Ali (AFP/File)

Shortly before 1500 GMT, US benchmark West Texas Intermediate for delivery in May sank $1.08 to $39.28 per barrel. Brent crude for June delivery lost 95 cents at $42.15.

The Doha failure "has raised the fear that the current glut and oversupply issue is never going to be solved", GKFX analyst James Hughes told AFP.

"It has also brought into question the relevance of the OPEC cartel, if the most powerful voice in the group cannot affect change."

The long-running oil glut sparked a vicious collapse from above $100 in mid-2014 to 13-year lows of around $27 in February.

Kingpin Saudi Arabia insisted it would not agree to freeze production without the participation of fellow cartel member Iran -- which boycotted the talks.

- 'Politics trumped economics' -

"The much-awaited meeting exposed the political rift between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and (this) ultimately doomed the agreement," said Barclays oil analyst Miswin Mahesh in a research note.

"Though Iran initially planned to send their OPEC minister, his participation was cancelled when the Qataris insisted that all attendees would also be signatories to any deal.

"The political tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran trumped the economics for agreeing to a deal."

In both June and December last year, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries -- which pumps about 40 percent of the world's oil -- refused to cut output.

The Saudi-backed policy is aimed at pushing the market lower to hurt less-competitive players, including US shale producers, and maintain precious market share.

Major exporters from Nigeria to Venezuela, and even Saudi Arabia, have suffered billions of dollars in lost revenue as prices have collapsed.

Iran -- which only recently returned to world oil markets after the lifting of nuclear-linked Western sanctions in January -- has ruled out capping its own production.

"Iran are more likely to increase their output, after years of sanctions, and this is the issue," added Hughes.

"Iran are in no place to start to cut their output and abide by an OPEC rule after already stating they want to increase output to pre-sanction levels, levels they are nowhere near currently."

Opinion had been split over whether a deal on Sunday would be enough to tackle the global oversupply, which is also due to slowing demand in major consumer China and burgeoning US shale production.

- 'Sustained depression' for prices? -

Rebecca O'Keeffe, head of investment at online broker Interactive Investor, cautioned Monday that global oil supply was being constrained by industrial action in Kuwait and Saturday's deadly earthquake in Ecuador.

"While there are a number of factors that might curb oil supply in the short-term -- including a strike in Kuwait and the earthquake in Ecuador -- OPECs main problem is the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran and this problem is not going to go away," O'Keeffe told AFP.

"Indeed, Saudi Arabia may move to increase supply in response to higher Iranian output in an effort to maintain their market share.

"This impasse could see a sustained medium-term depression in oil prices."

A walkout by thousands of Kuwaiti oil workers entered its second day on Monday, slashing production by over 60 percent as the government looks abroad to recruit foreign employees.

Chart showing the performance Brent crude oil Monday AFP (AFP Graphic)
Carnival opens Cuba cruises to people born there

Cruise giant Carnival, under fire for perceived discrimination, reversed course Monday and started accepting reservations for its planned trips to Cuba from people born on the island.

The US leisure group plans to start cruises from the United States to Cuba on May 1 as part of the historic restoration of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

But under a rule dating back to the Cold War, the Cuban government only allows Cubans to enter the country by air, not by ship.

Carnival Cruises plans to start trips from the United States to Cuba on May 1, 2016 Karen Bleier (AFP/File)

Carnival said it is holding talks with the Havana government and trusts this restriction will be lifted.

If it is not, the May 1 launch of the cruise trips by a new Carnival unit called Fathom will be postponed, the company said in a statement.

"Carnival Corporation continues active discussions with Cuba, asking that travel on Fathom be on a level playing field with air charter travel to Cuba and remains confident its discussions with Cuba will result in a positive outcome for everyone who wants to travel to Cuba, including those who are Cuba-born," Carnival said in a statement.

Carnival is the first cruise ship company to receive permission from the United States and Cuba to offer trips between the two countries for the first time since they were halted with the Cuba Revolution in 1959. The bilateral rapprochement began in 2014.

But Carnival came in for criticism by not accepting reservations from Cuban-born people, in line with the current Cuban law. The uproar came from anti-Castro activists in Florida, US lawmakers and even the government of President Barack Obama.

"Carnival needs to not discriminate," Secretary of State John Kerry said last week in an interview with the Miami Herald, although his ire was really aimed at the Cuban government.
US top court divided on major immigration case

President Barack Obama's plan to delay deportation for nearly half of the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants was fraught with uncertainty Monday, as the US Supreme Court appeared closely divided on the issue.

If the eight justices deadlock in their ruling, due by late June, the plan would remain on hold, dealing a bruising defeat to Obama during his last year in office and pushing the issue to the next president.

Hundreds of immigrant rights activists massed outside in blazing sunshine to mark the high-profile hearing, brandishing heart-shaped signs reading "Keep families together" and chanting "Si se puede" -- putting a Spanish twist on Obama's 2008 campaign slogan "Yes We Can."

Supporters of US President Barack Obama's immigration reforms leave the US Supreme Court after arguments in United States vs Texas were heard April 18, 2016 in Washington, DC Brendan Smialowski (AFP)

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, two conservatives whose opinion is critical in this case, sparred repeatedly with the Obama administration's attorney during an extended 90-minute session of oral arguments.

At stake is a series of executive actions the president took in November 2014 to bypass a Republican-held Congress that refused to enact his promised reform of America's immigration system.

One initiative, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), would shield from deportation people who have lived in the United States since 2010 and whose children are US citizens or residents. They would also be able to obtain a work authorization and pay taxes.

Another would expand on an existing program that grants a reprieve to immigrants who entered the country as children.

In unveiling his actions, Obama said he wanted to prioritize deportations of "felons, not families. Criminals not children. Gang members, not a mom who's working hard to provide for her kids."

The four liberal-leaning justices appeared to defend Obama's plan and pointed to similar actions by his predecessors.

But critics accuse Obama of overstepping his authority, a view echoed on the conservative wing of the bench.

- 'Upside down' -

"It's as if the president is setting the policy and the Congress is executing it," Kennedy said. "That's just upside down."

Mirroring Obama's gridlock with Congress on immigration is that of a Supreme Court evenly split between liberals and conservatives while Senate Republicans refuse to hold hearings on filling the seat left vacant by the death of justice Antonin Scalia.

Roberts, who has insisted the Supreme Court should stand above the political fray, is likely to focus on whether Texas and 25 other mostly Republican-led states would suffer enough injury as a result of Obama's actions to legally sue the federal government.

Texas for instance claims it would cost the state millions of dollars in public funds to provide driver's licenses at a subsidized cost to the huge group of immigrants who would be allowed to stay in the United States.

That question dominated much of the court's session.

If the states lack legal standing, that would be enough to dismiss the case -- allowing the justices to eschew a decision on more fundamental aspects of the immigration debate, an immensely divisive issue at the heart of the White House race.

Justice Stephen Breyer, a liberal, noted that if Texas is allowed to sue the government on immigration, that would open the door for states to challenge "all kinds" of federal regulations with which they disagree.

But Roberts, the chief justice, repeatedly challenged Solicitor General Donald Verrilli as he argued on behalf of the administration that Texas had no grounds to sue.

- 'Unprecedented, unlawful' -

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has sharpened the fault lines on immigration by vowing to build a wall along the Mexican border, and deport all of America's undocumented immigrants.

Nearly five million people would get relief from deportation under Obama's policy.

Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller called the actions "an unprecedented, unlawful assertion of executive power," and "one of the largest changes in immigration policy in our nation's history."

But Verrilli stressed that those who would win a reprieve would be a low priority for deportations anyway.

"There is a pressing humanitarian concern in avoiding the breakup of families that contain US citizen children," he said.

America's huge population of undocumented immigrants is "living in the shadows," said Sonia Sotomayor, the court's first Hispanic justice and the daughter of Puerto Rican-born parents.

"They are here, whether we want them or not," she argued.

Activists gather during a rally outside the US Supreme Court a month before the court will hear the case US v Texas March 18, 2016 in Washington, DC Brendan Smialowski (AFP/File)
Syria regime accuses Saudi, Turkey of derailing peace talks

The Syrian regime late Monday accused Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar -- all backers of the opposition -- of seeking to derail peace talks in Geneva, after the rebels suspended their participation in the negotiations.

"There has been a decision... in Saudi Arabia, in Turkey and in Qatar to derail inter-Syrian decision-making," the regime's lead negotiator in Geneva, Bashar al-Jaafari, said in an interview with Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen.

"They do not want there to be a dialogue between Syrians -- they want to make the Geneva negotiations fail."

Syrian ambassador to the United Nations and head of the government delegation Bashar al-Jaafari speaks on April 18, 2016 in Geneva Fabrice Coffrini (AFP)

He added: "The Saudi, Turkish and Qatari sponsors do not want to stop the bloodbath in Syria and do not want a political solution in Syria."

Jaafari said the opposition and the countries that support it are "annoyed because of the progress being made by the Syrian army on the ground".

The UN struggled Monday to keep the troubled Geneva talks on track, as the opposition suspended its "formal participation", accusing the regime of repeated violations of a fragile ceasefire in place since February 27.

Riad Hijab, coordinator for opposition umbrella group the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), said it was "unacceptable" for the negotiations to continue while the regime of President Bashar al-Assad continues to "bombard and starve civilians".

But UN peace envoy Staffan de Mistura insisted the ongoing round of indirect discussions, which began on April 13, would continue through the week as planned.

The fate of Assad remains a major sticking point between the two sides.

The HNC insists that any peace deal must include Assad's departure from power. Damascus has so far said the president's future is off limits.
Pearl Jam latest to shun N. Carolina over anti-trans law

Pearl Jam on Monday became the latest band to boycott North Carolina over a law against transgender people, calling the measure "despicable."

The alternative rockers led by Eddie Vedder called off a concert scheduled in the state capital Raleigh for Wednesday, saying they hoped to be able to return at a later date.

The band said North Carolina's law "is a despicable piece of legislation that encourages discrimination against an entire group of American citizens."

Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam performs during the fourth annual Global Citizen Festival in Central Park Manhattan on September 26, 2015 in New York Kena Betancur (AFP/File)

"The practical implications are expansive and its negative impact upon basic human rights is profound," the band said in a statement.

"We want America to be a place where no one can be turned away from a business because of who they love or fired from their job for who they are," it said.

Rock legend Bruce Springsteen earlier canceled a concert and businesses including online payment leader PayPal and Deutsche Bank reversed or froze investments in the southern state.

Cyndi Lauper, meanwhile, said she would go ahead with a concert but devote all proceeds to campaigners fighting the law. Pearl Jam also said it would make a donation to the cause.

The law, signed last month by the state's Republican governor, Pat McCrory, bans local governments from acting to stop discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people in public facilities or restrooms.

The state legislature voted on the move to prevent an anti-discrimination ordinance passed by North Carolina's largest city, Charlotte.

Faced with the outrage, McCrory has clarified that state government employees would remain protected from job discrimination but has not budged on the most controversial part which requires transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender listed on their birth certificate.

Pearl Jam, one of the biggest acts in the 1990s alternative rock boom, has long been active on political causes.

Vedder is a prominent supporter of US President Barack Obama and has rallied support for environmental protection and the right to legal abortion.
Obama's immigration plan faces uncertainty in court test

President Barack Obama's plan to delay deportation for nearly half of the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants was fraught with uncertainty Monday, as US Supreme Court justices signaled deep divisions.

If the eight justices deadlock in their ruling, due by late June, the plan would remain on hold, dealing a bruising defeat to Obama during his last year in office and pushing the issue to the next president.

Hundreds of activists massed outside in blazing sunshine, brandishing heart-shaped signs reading "Keep families together" and chanting "Si se puede" -- putting a Spanish twist on Obama's 2008 campaign slogan "Yes We Can."

Supporters of US President Barack Obama's immigration reforms leave the US Supreme Court after arguments in United States vs Texas were heard April 18, 2016 in Washington, DC Brendan Smialowski (AFP)

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, two conservatives whose opinions are critical in this case, sparred repeatedly with the Obama administration's attorney during an extended 90-minute session of oral arguments.

At stake is a series of executive actions the president took in November 2014 to bypass a Republican-held Congress that refused to enact his promised reform of America's immigration system.

One initiative, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), would shield from deportation people living in the United States since 2010 whose children are US citizens or residents. They would also be able to obtain a work authorization and pay taxes.

Another measure would expand on an existing program that grants a reprieve to immigrants who entered the country as children.

Obama, who has deported more people than any other US president, said he wanted to prioritize deportations of "felons, not families."

The four liberal-leaning justices pointed to similar executive actions by his predecessors.

Critics accuse Obama of overstepping his authority, a view echoed on the conservative wing of the bench.

- 'Upside down' -

"It's as if the president is setting the policy and the Congress is executing it," Kennedy said. "That's just upside down."

Mirroring Obama's gridlock with Congress on immigration is that of a Supreme Court evenly split between liberals and conservatives while Senate Republicans refuse to fill the ninth seat left vacant by the late Antonin Scalia.

One way out of a stalemate would be for the justices to issue a narrow ruling on whether the 26 mostly Republican-led states bringing the challenge would suffer enough injury as a result of Obama's actions to legally sue the federal government.

Roberts, who has insisted the Supreme Court should stand above the political fray, is likely to focus on the issue, which dominated much of the court's morning session.

Texas, for instance, claims it would cost the state millions of dollars in public funds to provide driver's licenses at a subsidized cost to the huge group of immigrants who would be allowed to stay.

If the states lack legal standing, that would be enough to dismiss the case -- allowing the justices to eschew a decision on more fundamental aspects of the immigration debate, an immensely divisive issue at the heart of the White House race.

Justice Stephen Breyer, a liberal, noted that if Texas is allowed to sue the government on immigration, that would open the door for states to challenge "all kinds" of federal regulations with which they disagree.

But Roberts repeatedly challenged Solicitor General Donald Verrilli as he argued on behalf of the administration that Texas had no grounds to sue.

While declining to predict the outcome of the case, White House spokesman Josh Earnest expressed "continued confidence in the power of the legal argument" the government's attorney presented to the court.

Senate Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid urged Republicans to cooperate to pass immigration reform in Congress for a "permanent solution."

"Our nation would be far better off with a bipartisan, comprehensive overhaul of our nation's immigration laws," he said.

- 'Unprecedented, unlawful' -

Nearly five million people would get relief from deportation under Obama's policy.

Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller called the actions "an unprecedented, unlawful assertion of executive power."

But Verrilli stressed that those who would win a reprieve would be a low priority for deportations anyway.

"There is a pressing humanitarian concern in avoiding the breakup of families that contain US citizen children," he said.

Roshell, a 17-year-old protester who declined to give her last name, said she lives with the fear "every day" that authorities could come deport her and her parents, who brought her to the United States illegally when she was just a toddler.

"We have hope, we are on the right side of justice," said Uruguayan immigrant and activist Victoria Siciliano, while Mexican Mariachi bands played the US national anthem outside the court.

America's huge population of undocumented immigrants is "living in the shadows," said Sonia Sotomayor, the court's first Hispanic justice and the daughter of Puerto Rican-born parents.

"They are here, whether we want them or not."

Activists gather during a rally outside the US Supreme Court a month before the court will hear the case US v Texas March 18, 2016 in Washington, DC Brendan Smialowski (AFP/File)
Iran has seen only $3 bn returned since nuke deal: Kerry

Iran has so far seen only around $3 billion in previously frozen assets returned since it struck a nuclear deal with world powers, US Secretary of State John Kerry said.

The extent to which Tehran stands to gain from the agreement to place its nuclear program under tight controls has been a matter of fierce debate since Iran signed the accord last year.

In the United States, Republican opponents of the deal have alleged that it will allow Iran to get its hands on more than $100 billion with which it could fund "terrorism" against American allies.

Iran has so far seen only around $3 billion in previously frozen assets returned since it struck a nuclear deal with world powers, says US Secretary of State John Kerry Molly Riley (AFP/File)

Meanwhile, in Iran, officials have complained that the country has yet to see much benefit from the end of nuclear sanctions, as banks and private companies have been slow to renew ties with the former pariah.

The US administration has been trying to find its way between the competing claims, insisting it has met its side of the bargain in lifting sanctions while vowing it will not tolerate Iranian backsliding.

And so Kerry, who is to meet with his Iranian counterpart Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in New York on Tuesday, hit back against critics of the deal, insisting their figures are wrong.

"Remember the debate over how much money Iran was going to get?" he said to delegates at a dinner hosted by the progressive pro-Israel group J Street.

"Sometimes you hear some of the presidential candidates putting out a mistaken figure of $155 billion. I never thought it would be that.

"Others thought it would be about $100 billion, because there was supposedly about $100 billion that was frozen and so forth," he continued.

"We calculated it to be about $55 billion, when you really take a hard look at the economy and what is happening," he said, giving the usual State Department estimate.

"Guess what folks. You know how much they have received to date? As I stand here tonight, about $3 billion."

The United States has not had diplomatic relations with Tehran since April 1980, but Kerry got to know Zarif while negotiating the nuclear deal, and the two speak fairly regularly.

Tuesday's meeting in New York will be the pair's first face-to-face encounter since January 16, when they met in Vienna to formally implement the accord.

Iranian officials have since begun to complain the United States has not lived up to its side of the agreement, as sanctions aimed at its missile program and financing of militias abroad have continued.

But Washington has also pointed the finger, warning that it retains the right to impose new sanctions if Iran's ballistic missile tests breach separate United Nations resolutions not covered by the nuclear deal.
Aussie hurdles champ Pearson sees return to golden best for Rio

Australian Olympic hurdles champion Sally Pearson said Tuesday she was finally back in the blocks nearly a year after a nasty fall and had her sights set on Rio.

Pearson, who won 100 metres hurdles gold at London in 2012, broke two bones and dislocated her wrist at a Rome Diamond League meeting last June and has not raced since.

"Yesterday was my first session out of the blocks over the hurdles," 29-year-old Pearson said.

Australian Sally Pearson (L) broke two bones and dislocated her wrist at a Rome Diamond League meeting last June and has not raced since Tiziana Fabi (AFP/File)

"It all felt really good, I just have to get faster and faster so I can win."

Australia's top athlete told reporters she was "full of belief and raring to go for Rio" in August.

"In previous years when I start hurdling it's a little bit rusty, a little bit shaky, but I felt really confident this time around," said the 2011 world champion as she modelled Australia's new Olympic competition kit in Sydney.

She expects to be competing next month to further her fightback.

"So I'll have a few unofficial first races back and then I'll head over to Europe and start my campaign towards Rio," she said.

Pearson had hoped to race during Australia's domestic season but suffered a series of minor setbacks, including an Achilles tendon scare.

She went to Germany last month to see the doctor who treats sprint king Usain Bolt for an ongoing back problem, Hans-Wilhelm Muller-Wohlfahrt, where she sought reassurance that her body would hold up to an Olympic campaign.

She returned saying he had given her a clean bill of health.
Hong Kong leader testifies in 'glass-throwing' case

Unpopular Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying gave evidence Tuesday in an assault case against a legislator who threw a glass at him in parliament, the first time a sitting chief executive has testified in court.

An initially calm Leung became increasingly exasperated as he was cross-examined for hours by pro-democracy and anti-China lawmaker Raymond Wong, who is accused of common assault and was representing himself in a courtroom packed with supporters from both sides.

Wong has pleaded not guilty to the charge and questioned the validity of allowing Leung's testimony, calling him "a liar and untrustworthy".

Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying arrives at court to give evidence in an assault case against legislator Raymond Wong, in Hong Kong on April 19, 2016 Isaac Lawrence (AFP)

The court ruled however that Leung could be admitted as a witness.

It comes as he battles widening political divisions in the semi-autonomous city, with some young campaigners pushing for self-determination or outright independence from China as fears grow that Beijing is tightening its grip.

Rival groups clashed inside the Eastern Magistrates' courtroom before the hearing and during the breaks, with anti-Leung groups shouting: "Down with the Chinese Communist Party," eliciting the response: "May the CCP live for 10,000 years!"

A small scuffle broke out when one pro-Leung demonstrator shoved a supporter from the Wong camp, with the Leung group calling their rivals "yellow dogs".

In court Leung described the incident in July 2014, saying paper had been thrown at him while he was at the podium in the legislature.

"Then I heard glass breaking behind me," said Leung. "It sounded close and forceful."

Adding that he was "startled", he said he "made sure whether or not I was injured".

"It was an assault," he concluded.

- 'Special pocket' -

Wong is accused of throwing a glass of water at Leung during the question-and-answer session. It did not hit him, smashing on the floor nearby.

The incident took place as tensions were rising in the wake of a policy paper from Beijing in which it asserted its authority over Hong Kong.

Frustrations later boiled over into massive pro-democracy rallies in September 2014 after Beijing insisted on vetting candidates for the city's future leader ahead of a public vote.

In around four hours of detailed cross-examination, Wong questioned Leung on the minutiae of the incident, from the wordings in his statement to the police, to which pocket he used to carry away a shard of the hurled glass.

"That piece of glass is quite sharp...maybe your suit has a special pocket that can store a piece of glass?" said a mocking Wong.

Leung limited his answers to repeatedly defending his statement to the police, saying it was "accurate".

The cross-examination will resume Thursday morning.

It was the latest public drama for Leung, who is also embroiled in a row over an alleged breach of aviation rules involving his daughter's luggage.

The incident led to more than a thousand people protesting at Hong Kong airport Sunday.

They were angered by an apparent special arrangement that helped 23-year-old Leung Chung-yan after she accidentally left behind her hand baggage at a check-in counter last month.

Airport staff brought it to her in the restricted zone.

Local media reported the chief executive made a phone call to relevant officers before the bag was delivered to his daughter.

Leung has admitted making a call but denied pressuring staff.
30 dead, hundreds wounded as Taliban attack rattles Kabul

Thirty people were killed and hundreds wounded when a Taliban truck bomb tore through central Kabul and a fierce firefight broke out Tuesday, one week after the insurgents launched their annual spring offensive.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a densely crowded neighbourhood, which sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing into the sky and rattled windows several kilometres (miles) away.

The brazen assault near the defence ministry marks the first major Taliban attack in the Afghan capital since the insurgents announced the start of this year's fighting season.

Afghan security forces have been on a heightened state of alert after the Taliban recently launched their "spring offensive" Shah Marai (AFP)

"One of the suicide attackers blew up an explosives-laden truck in a public parking lot next to a government building," Kabul police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi told reporters.

"The second attacker engaged security forces in a gunbattle before being gunned down."

Interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said 30 people, including women and children, were killed in the attack on a government office that provides security to senior officials.

He added that more than 320 people were wounded, with many of them battling for their lives in hospital -- an indication that the death toll could rise.

"I saw wounded people lying on the road and screaming helplessly," said Sadiqullah, who runs a tea stall near the building which was attacked.

"We are fed up with such attacks. How long must ordinary civilians suffer like this?"

The interior ministry said hundreds of kilograms of explosives were used in the bombing, the deadliest so far this year in the Afghan capital.

The scene of the attack was littered with upturned cars, many of them mangled and charred.

The pitched firefight appeared to die down several hours after the powerful explosion, but some security officials expressed concern that other bombers may still be on the loose.

The Taliban claimed three "martyrdom seekers" carried out an attack on the National Directorate of Security, the main spy agency. One of them, it said, managed to slip away alive.

The NDS says it had used the building in the past.

Later Tuesday, a second explosion was heard in downtown Kabul, but the nature of the blast was not immediately clear and no casualties were reported.

- 'War crimes' -

"This (deadly) attack shows the devastation caused by the use of explosive devices in urban areas and once more demonstrates complete disregard for the lives of Afghan civilians," the UN said.

"The use of explosives in populated areas, in circumstances almost certain to cause immense suffering to civilians, may amount to war crimes."

The Taliban on Tuesday last week announced the start of their spring offensive even as the government tries to bring them back to the negotiating table to end the drawn-out conflict.

The insurgents warned they would "employ large-scale attacks on enemy positions across the country" during the offensive dubbed Operation Omari in honour of the movement's late founder Mullah Omar, whose death was announced last year.

The Taliban began the fighting season last week by targeting the northern city of Kunduz, which they briefly captured last year in a stunning setback for Afghan forces.

But officials said Afghan security forces drove Taliban fighters back from the city on Friday.

The Taliban's resurgence has raised serious questions about the ability of Afghan forces to hold their own and prompted calls for the US to reconsider its troop withdrawal schedule, already delayed once by President Barack Obama.

There are currently 9,800 American troops in the country, set to fall to 5,500 by 2017.

Peace talks which began last summer were abruptly halted after it was revealed that Mullah Omar had been dead for two years, a disclosure which sparked infighting in the insurgents' ranks.

A four-country group comprising Afghanistan, the United States, China and Pakistan has been holding meetings since January aimed at jump-starting negotiations, though their efforts have so far been in vain.

The US State Department condemned Tuesday's attack, saying the violence only deepened its support for the government.

"The United States condemns in the strongest terms the attack today in Kabul," spokesman John Kirby said.

"Attacks like these only deepen our support for the people and government of Afghanistan, and their efforts to bring security and stability to Afghanistan."

Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah announced he was postponing his upcoming trip to Pakistan after "initial evidence of today's suicide attack".

Kabul has fraught relations with Islamabad, which it blames for sponsoring the insurgency.

Attacks in Kabul since August 2015 Simon Malfatto, Kun Tian (AFP)

Afghan security personnel arrive at the scene after a car bomb attack in the Puli Mahmood Khan neighbourhood of Kabul, on April 19, 2016 Wakil Kohsar (AFP)

An Afghan soldier blocks a road leading towards a government office in the Puli Mahmood Khan neighbourhood of Kabul, on April 19, 2016 Shah Marai (AFP)

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in Kabul Shah Marai (AFP)
Rough justice in Burkina as vigilantes dole out lashes

Francois Kabore, a village militia chief in central Burkina Faso, grins as he watches five men ride up on a motorbike and tricycle and throw two criminal suspects in their clutches to the ground.

"The 'widses' ('sparrowhawks') are here," Kabore says proudly of the vigilantes who have brought their captives to a patch of wasteland in Kokologho village, about 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the capital Ouagadougou.

Watched by the assembled villagers, the young suspects -- a mechanic accused of theft and a youth who tried to intervene when the mechanic was arrested -- are dragged through the red dust to a hut, where their backs are bared.

A man suspected of robbery grimaces as he receives lashes from a member of a vigilante group in Kokologo, Burkina Faso Nabila El Hadad (AFP)

They are then tied to a tree to be flogged.

Both men seem to be in shock, staring up at the sky, resigned to the beating to come. One of the pair already has bright weals on his back.

Village elders armed with tree branches step forward and at the sound of a whistle the lashings begin. "Confess that you helped your friend to steal petrol!" one of the elders shouts.

When they do not answer, the whipping resumes.

- Environmental roots -

Such scenes have become common in the centre and east of the west African country, where self-defence groups known as Koglweogo ("environmental protection" in the local Mossi language) have set themselves up as judge and jury, cheered on by a population grown mistrustful of state institutions.

The first Koglweogo association emerged in the north of the country in the 1990s as an environmental protection force working to combat illegal logging, grazing violations and other environmental offences, said Boniface Some Desire, professor at the University of Ouagadougou's sociology department.

But the movement's self-claimed remit has grown over time, particularly in the two years since the uprising that ousted longtime president Blaise Compaore from power.

"The popular fervour of 2014 during the fall of Blaise Compaore motivated people to fight injustice, determine their own fate and ensure their own protection," Some Desire explained.

Chrysogone Zougmore, president of the Burkinabe Movement for Human and People's Rights, linked the widespread support for the vigilantes to a "galloping increase in insecurity" since 2014.

"The state spends billions on protecting those in power but very little on protecting citizens," he told AFP.

- 'Setting an example' -

In Kokologho village, Kabore translates as a confession is extracted from the mechanic's accomplice.

"He was drugged, that's why he fought our men," Kabore relates.

Sentence is passed -- 10,000 CFA francs (15 euros/$17) for the petrol used to transport him to the kangaroo court and compensate those he injured -- and the man's pockets are turned out, eliciting peals of laughter from the excited onlookers.

Then comes the turn of the mechanic, who had already been beaten earlier in the day. A militia member poured water on his back to reopen the cuts before he was flogged anew.

His penalty is heavier: 30,000 CFA francs.

"Say you will never steal again. Working for food is better than stealing!" the village elders say, chastising the pair.

The Koglweogo association in Kokologho has about 1,200 members, mostly traders and cattlemen, according to Kabore.

"Before, there used to be about 20 thefts every month. Today there are one or two," he said, declaring that the public trials "set an example to others."

- Flogged to death -

The rise of the Koglweogo have sparked a debate in the country of 19 million, with some witnesses accusing them of branding people as criminals merely to extort money from them.

Several criminal cases involving the Koglweogo have made headlines recently.

In February, a group of Koglweogo flogged a suspected thief to death in Sapouy, 100 kilometres from Ouagadougou, and refused to let the police arrest those responsible.

In March, 10 Koglweogo members were jailed for beating up a suspected thief in Fada in the east, prompting hundreds of supporters to block a major road leading to Niger, Benin and Togo with boulders and tree trunks for nearly two days.

On a visit to Paris earlier this month, President Roch Marc Christian Kabore admitted to AFP that vigilantism was flourishing in the face of "the mistrust that citizens have vis-a-vis the justice system" and the authorities' inability to secure all of Burkina's territory.

In future the militia would have to toe the state's line, he said.

Kabore, the Koglweogo chief, insisted that his men did "try to work with the gendarmerie (paramilitary police) but complained that "when we hand over thieves, they don't stay in jail and the victims are not compensated."

But the muscle men of Burkina's hinterland do appear to have taken the government's warnings on board.

At a recent meeting, the Koglweogo reportedly agreed to give up public beatings and punish suspects instead by fitting them with a codpiece and parading them around their local market.

People look at members of a vigilante group beating a man after he was detained upon suspicion of robbery in Kokologo, Burkina Fas Nabila El Hadad (AFP)

A man is tied up and questioned by members of a vigilante group after he was detained upon suspicion of robbery in Kokologo, Burkina Faso Nabila El Hadad (AFP)

A man suspected of robbery is tied up by members of a vigilante group after he was detained in Kokologo, Burkina Faso Nabila El Hadad (AFP)
Experts examine new debris for MH370 clues

Investigators were on Tuesday examining two more pieces of debris for clues to the fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, along with marine life found on two other items which "almost certainly" came from the lost jet.

The latest two pieces -- one found in South Africa and another on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius -- were brought to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's laboratories for testing last week.

"Investigators from the ATSB and the Malaysian authorities are currently examining those two pieces for details which would serve to identify them as coming from a Boeing 777," the bureau said in a statement.

A piece of debris (L) that was found on a Mozambique beach and has since been found to be 'almost certainly' from missing flight MH370, seen next to comparisons of Boeing stencilling and Malaysia Airlines ones - (Australian Transport and Safety Bureau/AFP/File)

"And in particular for any details which might serve to link the debris as coming from MH370."

Two parts found on beaches in Mozambique along its Indian Ocean coast have already been identified as "almost certainly" from the missing plane.

Australia is leading the search in the remote southern Indian Ocean, believed to be the final resting place of the plane which disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014 carrying 239 passengers and crew.

Last year a wing part recovered from the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, which neighbours Mauritius, was confirmed as coming from the jet.

Since then two more items found about 220 kilometres (140 miles) apart from each other in Mozambique in December 2015 and February 2016 have been examined.

The ATSB confirmed Tuesday earlier statements that both pieces "almost certainly" came from the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft operating as MH370.

The first part, which had a number stencilled on it, was identified as a segment from a Boeing 777 flap track from the right wing, with the stencilling on it conforming to that used by Malaysia Airlines.

The second part, which had the words "No Step" on it, was identified as a segment of a Boeing 777 horizontal stabiliser panel. Its stencilling was also consistent with that used by the carrier, the ATSB said.

Both pieces were also examined for "marine ecology and remnants of biological material" which could provide clues to their sea journey.

"Visible marine ecology was present on both parts and these items were removed and preserved," the report said.

"At the time of writing, ongoing work was being conducted with respect to the marine ecology identification as well as testing of material samples.

"The results from these tests will be provided to the Malaysian investigation team once complete."

The ATSB said the pieces found in Mozambique would be returned to Malaysia this week.

The remote southern Indian Ocean is believed to be the final resting place of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 which disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014 carrying 239 passengers and crew Manan Vatsyayana (AFP/File)
Myanmar's 'long-necked' women hope to turn tourism into homecoming

Wearing a stack of bronze neck coils -- a sign of beauty for her Kayan tribe -- Mu Par dreams of a time when all "long-necked" women can return to Myanmar from Thailand where they are a tourist attraction.

For years Kayan women and girls have been driven across the border by poverty and conflict to earn money posing in holidaymakers' pictures in purpose-built Thai villages decried by rights campaigners as "human zoos".

Now several have returned to their remote native Panpet area in Kayah state, Myanmar, with an entrepreneurial plan to reverse the flow of departures as their once junta-ruled homeland emerges from decades of solitude.

Monu, 76, sits in her home wearing a stack of bronze neck coils -- a sign of beauty for her Kayan tribe -- at Panpet village in Kayah state Phyo Hein Kyaw (AFP)

Mu Par came home just a few months ago having saved enough money after 14 years working in Thailand.

She now runs one of a dozen neat little shacks selling locally-made wooden dolls, scarves and individual bronze neck rings -- giving tourists a more ethical window into their unique culture.

Lining up a neat row of handmade "long-neck dolls" at a new craft market, Mu Par hopes to entice tourists to her eastern Myanmar homeland, and provide for her four children, aged between four and 15.

"In Myanmar my children can attend school and also I am happy to be among my relatives," the 33-year-old told AFP, as a handful of tourists milled through the area.

Once the preserve of intrepid travellers as it languished under junta rule, Myanmar is now a hot new tourist draw.

Arrivals have doubled in the past five years and numbers are expected to surge under a new government led by Aung San Suu Kyi's pro-democracy party.

Much of tiny Kayah state was off limits to foreigners until recently.

Authorities now hope the region's emerald hills and languid waterways will become the country's next top travel destination.

Mu Par and her neighbours from Panpet's cluster of five hamlets grouped together to build the market.

They share the profits from the 5,000 kyat ($4) visitor entrance fee.

"If we can get many tourists here, we want all the Kayan girls in Thailand to come back," she told AFP.

- Controversy and culture -

From as young as five years old, Kayan girls are given up to ten neck rings to wear, they then add a new one approximately every year until adulthood.

The practice, which gives them a giraffe-like appearance, painfully compresses their shoulders and collarbones, rather than actually stretching their necks.

A grown woman can wear as many as 25 rings, weighing a total of five kilos (11 pounds).

One local legend suggests women began wearing the rings to protect themselves against tigers, who once roamed the region in large numbers and bite the necks of their prey.

Men in the village also used to wear face-shaped masks on the backs of their heads in a bid to ward off tiger ambushes, according to local people, although the practice has since died out.

Fewer women now wear the coils, which force them to keep looking straight ahead.

Families often cannot afford the costly, handcrafted rings, while many young girls feel they are an impediment to getting a job outside of their region.

The women can remove their rings with the help of a specialist and their shoulders and collarbones can eventually return to normal, depending on the age when they are taken off.

Several dozen women and girls still wear the traditional bands, including those at the new handicraft market in Panpet.

Until recently they spent much of the year in Thailand, earning around 3,000 baht ($90) a month in the tourist attraction villages, where most of the money goes to Thai tour agents.

"Asking them to pose for photographs for money is acting like they are in a human zoo," said Phyoe Wai Yar Zar a Myanmar tourism official.

"Instead (in their home villages) people can buy their products like food, handmade crafts and souvenirs to support them."

Wearing a stack of bronze neck coils -- a sign of beauty for her Kayan tribe -- Mu Par sells handmade products at Panpet village in Kayah state, central Myanmar Phyo Hein Kyaw (AFP)

For years Kayan women have been driven across the border to earn money posing in tourist pictures in Thai villages decried by rights campaigners as "human zoos" Phyo Hein Kyaw (AFP)
Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos Jnr defiant on father's legacy

On the verge of securing his family's biggest victory since their humiliating downfall three decades ago, Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos's son talks confidently about his political ambitions and his father's legacy.

In an exclusive interview with AFP ahead of May 9 elections, with surveys showing he could win the vice presidency, Ferdinand Marcos Jnr conceded there were "widespread human rights abuses" during his father's rule.

But the 58-year-old insisted the Marcos name remained one of his strongest assets, as he stuck to a no-apology mantra that has been a key part of his family's remarkable political resurrection.

Ferdinand Marcos Jnr, son and namesake of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and a vice-presidential candidate for the May 9 elections, speaking during an interview with AFP at his campaign headquarters in Manila Ted Aljibe (AFP)

"I think one of the things that is happening now is I am a beneficiary of the good work that was done in my father's time," Marcos said on Monday night at his campaign headquarters in the Philippine capital.

"There were so many different things that were initiated at that time that to this day are of benefit to the people."

Marcos was a fresh-faced provincial governor in his father's dictatorship when millions took to the streets in a famous 1986 "People Power" uprising that forced the family to give up two decades of power and flee into US exile.

The Marcos family and its business allies are accused of plundering billions of dollars during the patriarch's rule, while the regime's security forces allegedly killed and tortured thousands of critics.

However, after Marcos Snr died in exile in Hawaii in 1989, his controversial wife, Imelda, and their children were allowed to return to the Philippines, and they slowly began rebuilding a power base.

- 'Golden age' debate -

Part of their strategy was to portray the Marcos years as a golden age of peace, security and infrastructure-building for the nation.

They also consistently denied any major wrongdoing, fending off dozens of legal challenges and probes aimed at retrieving the fortune allegedly stolen from state coffers.

Marcos, who rarely gives interviews, deflected questions about mass theft by his parents, saying he believed accusations against them were exaggerated but that he was not privy to their decisions.

"I think a great deal of it was made up because none of it has been verified," he told AFP when asked whether they stole billions.

"These huge numbers that we hear about, we don't really know where they come from and how they were made up."

Marcos did concede there were abuses under his father's regime, but insisted they were no worse than those committed by the democratically elected governments that followed.

"I acknowledge that there were," Marcos said when asked about human rights abuses under his father's rule.

"(But) there are widespread human rights abuses in any administration and that is a problem that we as a country have to face."

Memories of the Marcos years have dominated this election campaign.

In the Philippines, the president and vice president are elected separately.

Marcos's bid for the vice presidency has stolen many headlines away from the race for the top post -- which in itself is a fascinating four-way tussle.

President Benigno Aquino, whose mother led the "People Power" revolution and succeeded Marcos as president, has repeatedly urged Filipinos in recent months to never forget the dictatorship's horrors and stamp out the Marcos comeback.

- Presidential plans? -

However Marcos -- who has enjoyed a high national profile as a senator since 2010 -- is in the lead or running a close second in the race for the vice presidency, according to various surveys.

His controversial mother, Imelda, 86, is also regarded as a near certainty to win a third term as a congresswoman representing the family's northern provincial stronghold of Ilocos Norte.

And one of his sisters, Imee, will secure a third term as Ilocos Norte governor, with no opponent challenging her, while other relatives are expected to easily secure lower level posts.

One important aspect of the family's success has been its ability to tap into a vast network of allies that never fully crumbled despite the revolution.

A younger generation of voters fed up with corruption and politics in modern society has also proved receptive to the Marcos "golden age" mantra.

Asked why he wanted to become vice president, the former governor of Ilocos Norte spoke at length about wanting to return to the executive branch of government because that is where he could do the "most good".

He insisted he was not gunning for vice president as part of a grand plan to run for the presidency at the next elections in 2022.

"That's not something I am thinking of at all right now. Every brain cell that I have is directed towards this campaign," he said, when asked about a presidential bid in six years, but then nevertheless spoke candidly about his loftier ambitions.

"Of course you have a political career and many times you'd be frustrated and think: 'God if I was president I'd fix this in a flash'... and in that sense I guess we all aspire to that."

Senator and vice presidential candidate Ferdinand Marcos Jnr throws a t-shirt to his supporters during ex-Philippine President Joseph Estrada's (L) proclamation rally, running for his second term as Mayor in Manila, in March 2016 Noel Celis (AFP/File)

Philippine Senator Ferdinand 'Bongbong' Marcos Jnr tries a 'pandesal' ('poor man's bread') at a bakery in Manila, in October 2015 Ted Aljibe (AFP/File)
Clinton, Trump tipped to win as New York votes

New Yorkers went to the polls Tuesday in the state's most decisive presidential primary in decades with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump firm favorites in the race to clinch the Democratic and Republican nominations.

Polls show that Clinton -- the former secretary of state, first lady and New York senator -- has a double-digit lead over her Brooklyn-born challenger, Bernie Sanders, even if nationwide surveys put them neck-and-neck.

Trump, the 69-year-old Manhattan billionaire whose controversial campaign has appalled the Republican establishment, is well ahead of his evangelical rival Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich.

A woman casts vote at a polling station in Brooklyn, New York on April 19, 2016 Kena Betancur (AFP)

The tycoon is banking on a big home state victory in his quest to sew up the nomination before Republican grandees can anoint another candidate at the party convention in July.

"It was just a great honor and I think it's a great honor for New York," Trump said after voting in a synagogue, reiterating his campaign slogan. "We're going to make America great again."

A relaxed and confident-looking Clinton, 68, dressed in a colorful tunic, voted with her husband, former president Bill Clinton, in the leafy Chappaqua suburb they call home, taking time to greet well wishers outside.

"I had a great time going around the city in the last couple of days just seeing a lot of old friends, meeting new people," she said. "Everybody please come out and vote before 9:00 pm tonight. That would be terrific."

With both races for the White House nomination so competitive, it is the most consequential primary in decades in New York, the country's fourth largest state and one with a vastly diverse electorate.

Three of the candidates can claim New York as home: Trump, who has never lived anywhere else; Clinton, who was twice elected the state's US senator; and Sanders, who was raised in Brooklyn but is now senator for Vermont.

But there has been some frustration over New York's strict rules governing the vote, particularly among independent voters not allowed to participate and who in other states have tended to favor Sanders.

Only New York's 5.8 million Democrats and 2.7 million Republicans who registered by last October -- four months before the nation's first caucus election in Iowa -- are eligible to vote.

- 'Hillary knows how' -

Nevertheless turnout was brisk at polling stations visited by AFP in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where a string of Democrats said they had voted for Clinton, who would make history if elected as America's first woman president.

"I think she's got the record across all of the issues that matter to me," said Rachel Karpf, 30, an arts producer who works in theater and lives in Brooklyn.

"I like Bernie Sanders, I love his energy and his passion," said Carlos Rios, a human resources manager in Chelsea who voted for Clinton.

"But I worry that he is not going to be able to withstand the political reality we have today, and for better or worse, Hillary knows how to navigate."

A victory in New York, which also selected Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008, would quash the momentum generated by her self-styled democratic socialist rival, who has won seven out of the last eight state nominating contests.

Only California has more than the 247 Democratic delegates and 44 superdelegates up for grabs in New York.

Clinton already leads with 1,791 compared to 1,115 for Sanders, according to a CNN tally -- putting her on course to clinch the 2,383 delegates needed to secure the party's presidential nomination.

The 74-year-old Sanders -- who has galvanized a youth movement with his call for health care as a right, free college education and campaign finance reform -- needs a win to keep alive his hopes of winning the presidency.

But in stark contrast to victory parties arranged by the Clinton and Trump campaigns in New York, Sanders opted to spend Tuesday in the neighboring state of Pennsylvania, which holds its primary next week.

The senator has also signaled he could be willing to swing behind Clinton should she win the nomination, provided she moves farther to the left on causes that he has highlighted.

While New York City is largely Democrat, Republicans in rural areas and fallen manufacturing cities upstate have warmed to Trump's populist message, despite his insults of women, Mexicans and Muslims.

The tycoon will be looking to win as many of the state's 95 Republican delegates as possible.

Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump returns to his midtown office after voting on primary day in New York on April 19, 2016 Spencer Platt (Getty/AFP)

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (C) and her husband Bill Clinton greet voters before casting their ballots on April 19, 2016 in Chappaqua, New York Eduardo Munoz Alvarez (AFP)
China, India move closer to military hotline: Xinhua

China and India are moving towards setting up a military hotline, Chinese state media reported, with a border dispute and tensions over terror sanctions still lingering over relations between the Asian giants.

China "reacted positively" to the idea of setting up a hotline, the official Xinhua news agency cited Defence Minister Chang Wanquan as saying Monday during talks with his Indian counterpart.

The world's two most populous nations are jockeying for regional influence in Asia and their relationship is coloured by territorial disputes at both ends of the Himalayas.

Indian military personnel guard Bumla pass on the India-China border, in north-eastern Arunachal Pradesh state Biju Boro (AFP/File)

In 1962 they fought a border war over the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, parts of which Beijing claims as South Tibet.

Tensions rose in 2014 when hundreds of Chinese troops allegedly moved into mountainous areas of Ladakh under Indian control, as China's President Xi Jinping arrived in India on a landmark visit.

Xinhua late Monday cited Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar as saying India "hopes to beef up bilateral exchanges and cooperation (with China) in all sectors".

Parrikar repeated a call for clear demarcation of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between the two countries, Indian news agency PTI reported.

But it added that China "expressed reservations over such a move" which was proposed last year when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited China.

India reacted angrily earlier this month after China blocked its request to add Masood Azhar, head of the Pakistani militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad, to a UN sanctions blacklist.

China enjoys close relations with India's arch-rival Pakistan, and is pursuing a multi-billion-dollar slew of infrastructure projects there.

In a bid to gain Chinese investment, Islamabad said in January it was considering upgrading the constitutional status of a northern region which is also claimed by India.

PTI reported that Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj asked Beijing Monday to "review" its position on Azhar, who is accused of masterminding an attack on the Pathankot airbase in the northern state of Punjab.
Ringleader in 2014 burning alive of Palestinian teen ruled sane

An Israeli court ruled Tuesday that a Jewish man found to be the ringleader of the beating and burning alive of a Palestinian teenager in 2014 was sane and responsible for his actions.

Israeli settler Yosef Haim Ben-David, 31, was found in November to have led the assault, but his lawyers had submitted last-minute documents saying he suffered from mental illness.

Tuesday's ruling clears the way for him to be sentenced, with his conviction having been put on hold while the court decided on his sanity plea in the closely watched case.

Israeli Yosef Haim Ben-David (C) the ringleader of the killing of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir in 2015, is escorted by Israeli policemen at the district court in Jerusalem on March 22, 2016, prior to hearing his psychiatric evaluation Ahmad Gharabli (AFP/File)

The family of the teenager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, welcomed the decision but said they hoped judges followed through with a life sentence for Ben-David, who appeared in court Tuesday with a thick beard and wearing a yarmulke.

Abu Khdeir's mother wore a heart-shaped pendant with an image of her son wearing a baseball cap inside at the hearing, and his father said the decision "should have been made a long time ago".

"We knew that he wasn't mad," Hussein Abu Khdeir told AFP.

"It was all a big lie to get off from the crime which he carried out. Even if they sentence him for life, this will never bring Mohammed back again. Our hearts are wounded from what happened."

The court ruling found that Ben-David "was not psychotic, fully understood the facts, was responsible for his actions, had no difficulty in understanding reality and had the capacity to prevent the crime".

In February, a court sentenced his two young Israeli accomplices to life and 21 years in prison for the killing, which was part of a spiral of violence in the run-up to the 2014 Gaza war.

The two were minors at the time of the chilling attack in which they snatched Abu Khdeir, 16, from an east Jerusalem street and then killed him.

His murder was seen as revenge for the killing of Israeli teenagers Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach, who were abducted from a hitchhiking stop near the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron.

- Long wait for decision -

Israeli authorities said the suspects had decided to kill an Arab and equipped themselves with cables, petrol and other materials before randomly choosing Abu Khdeir.

"Today's decision has come late, but it is correct," Mohannad Jbara, a lawyer for Abu Khdeir's family, told AFP.

"The crime occurred a year and nine months ago, so this decision has taken a long time, but we have succeeded in convincing the court that he was faking."

Abu Khdeir was kidnapped from Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem on July 2, 2014 and beaten, with his burned body found hours later in a forest in the western part of the city.

A forensic report showed smoke in his lungs, indicating he was alive when set alight.

The case has threatened to further raise tensions following a wave of violence that erupted in October that has killed 201 Palestinians and 28 Israelis.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, according to Israeli authorities.

Israeli forces have however been accused of using excessive force in some cases, which they firmly deny.

The violence had steadily declined in recent weeks, but on Monday a bomb blast ripped through a bus in Jerusalem and sparked a fire, wounding at least 21 people.

If confirmed as a Palestinian bombing, it would mark a sharp escalation ahead of Jewish Passover celebrations beginning Friday night.

Many analysts say Palestinian frustration with Israeli occupation and settlement building in the West Bank, the complete lack of progress in peace efforts and their own fractured leadership have fed the recent unrest.

Israel blames incitement by Palestinian leaders and media as a main cause of the violence.
Iran-Saudi hajj talks halted because of visa hurdle

Talks between regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia on this year's hajj pilgrimage have stalled because of a disagreement on how visas can be processed when no formal diplomatic relations exist.

An Iranian delegation last week travelled to Saudi Arabia, which cut ties in January, for discussions on the pilgrimage to the Muslim holy places in the kingdom.

Said Ohadi, head of the Iranian Hajj Organisation, said on state television late Monday that four days of negotiations had achieved progress on security issues and travel to the kingdom.

Muslim pilgrims circle Islam's holiest shrine, the Kaaba, at the Grand Mosque in the holy Saudi city of Mecca, late on September 20, 2015 Mohammed Al-Shaikh (AFP/File)

But the lack of a functioning Saudi embassy in Tehran -- both it and the kingdom's mission in Iran's second city Mashhad are closed -- means there are currently no visas being issued to Iranians.

"The problem of visa issuance has not been solved yet," said Ohadi. "Saudi Arabia has not yet offered a clear solution."

Tehran wants visas to be issued inside the Islamic republic.

In the absence of its own representatives, Switzerland looks after the interests of the Sunni-dominated kingdom in mainly Shiite Iran.

Ohadi said the foreign ministry had offered to provide "all means necessary" to help Saudi Arabia issue visas inside Iran but did not elaborate on how that could be done in the absence of an embassy or consulate.

He said Saudi Arabia had agreed that Iranian aircraft could land for the hajj, an exception since all flights from the Islamic republic were barred after the diplomatic crisis.

Security was another contentious issue in the talks, after a massive stampede in last year's hajj killed more than 2,000 foreign pilgrims, including 464 Iranians.

"The Saudis offered good solutions on security," introducing electronic tracking bracelets for all hajj participants, Ohadi said.

The Iranian delegation was expected back in Tehran later on Tuesday.

Other officials in Tehran also waded into the row.

"Saudi Arabia is stonewalling on the visa issue," Culture Minister Ali Jannati said on Monday.

"We say that if the Swiss government is protecting your interests in Iran, then it should issue visas too. Issuing visas in a third country is absolutely unacceptable for us."

Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties with Iran on January 3 after its diplomatic missions in Tehran and Mashhad were stormed and set alight by mobs following Riyadh's execution of a prominent Shiite cleric and activist, Nimr al-Nimr.

This year's pilgrimage to Mecca -- a trip that all Muslims who are able to are expected to perform at least once in their lifetime -- is due to take place in September.

The Iranian honour guard carries the coffins of Iranian pilgrims killed in a stampede at the annual hajj, during a repatriation ceremony on October 3, 2015 at Tehran's Mehrabad Airport Atta Kenare (AFP/File)
Kuwait oil workers reject appeals to end strike

Kuwaiti oil workers Tuesday rejected fresh appeals to call off their three-day old strike as the state oil firm said it had managed to restore some affected production.

"The strike is continuing until all our demands are met," spokesman for the Kuwait Workers Union Farhan al-Ajmi told a news conference.

"We will return to work only after (national oil firm) Kuwait Petroleum Corp. scraps all decisions that took away some rights of the workers," Ajmi told thousands of striking workers.

Kuwaiti oil workers sit at the union's headquarters in Al-Ahmadi, 35 kilometres south of Kuwait City, on April 19, 2016, as they participate in the third day of strikes Yasser al-Zayyat (AFP)

The demands include abolishing decisions by authorities to cut some incentives in the face of falling oil prices and excluding the oil sector form a new payroll scheme for public servants.

Ajmi said several initiatives to reach a settlement did not succeed.

His comments came after KPC spokesman Sheikh Talal Khaled Al-Sabah said Kuwait output was now running at 1.5 million barrels per day -- 50 percent of normal output -- against 1.1 million bpd when the strike first erupted on Sunday.

Sheikh Khaled said a crude gathering centre in the north of the emirate had been put back into production and that the company had plans to reopen three more.

He did not specify how they were being staffed but on Sunday the cabinet gave orders for KPC to recruit contractors from abroad to operate some of its facilities in defiance of the indefinite strike called by the Kuwait oil workers union over planned wage cuts.

The stoppage in the OPEC oil cartel's fourth largest producer has helped world prices to recover after a sharp fall on Monday following the failure of major producers to reach agreement on a proposed output freeze.

Besides the fall in Kuwait's crude production, refining also dropped from 930,000 bpd to 520,000 bpd and natural gas output dropped to 620 million cubic feet (17.6 million cubic metres) from 1.3 billion cubic feet (36.8 million cubic metres).

Sheikh Khaled said the strike had not affected exports or domestic supplies as the emirate was using its strategic storage.

Late on Monday, acting oil minister Anas al-Saleh urged striking workers to return to work and pledged that their wages will not be cut.
Iraq's Mosul will eventually be retaken from IS: Obama

US President Barack Obama said he expects Iraq's second city Mosul to be retaken from the Islamic State group "eventually".

Obama's comments in an interview with CBS News on Monday came on the same day that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Washington would send Apache attack helicopters and more troops to Iraq.

"As we see the Iraqis willing to fight and gaining ground, let's make sure that we're providing them more support," Obama said.

An Iraqi soldier holds a position on the frontline on the outskirts of Makhmur on March 30, 2016 Safin Hamed (AFP/File)

"We're not doing the fighting ourselves, but when we provide training, when we provide special forces who are backing them up, when we are gaining intelligence -- working with the coalitions that we have -- what we've seen is that we can continually tighten the noose," he added.

"My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall."

Mosul, in northern Iraq, was overrun during a jihadist offensive in June 2014 and has become an IS stronghold.

Washington heads an international coalition that is carrying out strikes against IS and also providing training and other assistance to forces fighting the jihadists in both Iraq and neighboring Syria.

Carter, on an unannounced trip to Baghdad, said the Apaches being sent to Iraq will support Iraqi efforts to surround and eventually recapture Mosul.
Iran says oil production freeze would prolong sanctions

Iran will not accept an oil output freeze because it would effectively mean a prolonging of sanctions, its oil minister said Tuesday, insisting rival producers caused a supply-led price slide.

Iran has been pumping more crude since sanctions were lifted on January 16 under its nuclear deal with major powers, aiming to regain market share lost in recent years but adding to a global glut.

Oil prices rebounded last week on hopes that major producers -- including the largest two, Russia and Saudi Arabia -- would agree at a weekend meeting in Doha to freeze output at January levels.

Iran's oil exports have reached two million barrels per day following the lifting of sanctions under its nuclear deal with world powers

Prices plunged early Monday soon after news that the long-awaited meeting in Doha had collapsed with no decision taken, but they recovered in volatile trading on Tuesday.

OPEC cartel member Iran did not send a representative to the Doha meeting and Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh's comments underlined why Tehran sees no justification for changing its stance.

"Accepting a production freeze in practice amounts to a voluntary acceptance of sanctions by our country after years of effort to have them lifted," state television quoted Zanganeh as saying.

"A freeze by Iran at January 2016 production levels would mean that sanctions are not lifted and Iran's exports would be stabilised at the sanctions level."

Sanctions were lifted in return for curbs on the Islamic republic's nuclear programme, which saw the OPEC cartel-member return to world oil markets and increase exports to around two million barrels per day, up from just over one million bpd previously.

Zanganeh, without naming any states, blamed other producers for the oversupply.

"Some countries imagine that after the lifting of sanctions they can create an atmosphere among oil producers to distract public opinion from the fact they have caused the market instability.

"Iran has had no role in destabilising the oil market and those who were responsible for this instability and the saturation of the market are now trying to escape from it," he said.

Zanganeh, however, endorsed the talks in Qatar as "a start for cooperation among non-member and OPEC countries for returning stability to the oil market".
More rockets hit Turkish town on Syria border after five killed

More rockets hit a Turkish town on the Syrian border on Tuesday, wounding at least three people, a day after five were killed by fire from an area of Syria controlled by jihadists, a Turkish government official said.

In the last few weeks, Islamic State (IS) jihadists have repeatedly fired rockets at Kilis, the only town in Turkey where refugees from Syria's five-year conflict now outnumber local Turks.

"Three rockets slammed into three different spots in the centre of Kilis, one in an empty field, one near a school and another near a mosque," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

A man carries an injured child on April 18,2016 in Kilis, after four rockets fired from Syria hit the southern Turkish town

The official said the rocket fire left three people lightly injured while the strikes caused a fire to break out one of the houses.

Four Syrian children are now confirmed to have been killed in the strikes by Katyusha-type rockets Monday on Kilis, along with a Syrian shepherd, the CNN-Turk and NTV channels reported.

The death toll from Monday's rocket strikes rose to five on Tuesday after another Syrian child died in hospital, reports said.

The children were killed when a rocket ripped through a three-storey building where nine Syrian families had been living, state-run news agency Anatolia said.

The children had lost their fathers in the war at home and had come to Turkey with their mothers around two years ago, it added.

At least 11 people have now been killed so far in strikes on Kilis from Syria but this was the heaviest toll recorded so far in a single day.

Last week, Kilis residents held protests over the inability of local authorities to protect them, prompting a visit by Turkey's powerful spy chief Hakan Fidan.

The government has promised to compensate the material losses sustained by the residents by the strikes from Syria.

Turkey has responded to each of the strikes on Kilis by destroying the launching positions of the jihadists with howitzer fire.

Turkish officials have repeatedly lauded the hospitality of people in Kilis towards Syrians as an example of how Turks are hosting the 2.7 million Syrians who have fled their country's civil war to Turkey.
Philippine presidential candidate apologises for rape remark

Leading Philippine presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday finally apologised for his apparent joke about the rape and murder of an Australian missionary after initially sneering at the widespread outrage he sparked.

Duterte, longtime mayor of the southern city of Davao, told cheering supporters last week that when he saw a female Australian lay minister who was raped and murdered in a Philippine prison riot in 1989, his initial reaction was: "she was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor should have been first."

He initially refused to apologise despite widespread condemnation by rival candidates and the public.

Philippines presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte faced a storm of criticism after a video showed him making crude remarks about a female Australian missionary who was raped and killed during a prison riot in 1989 Noel Celis (AFP/File)

However on Tuesday he issued a statement saying: "I apologise to the Filipino people for my recent remarks in a rally. There was no intention of disrespecting our women and those who have been victims of this horrible crime."

Duterte, who has previously boasted of extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals, defended himself, saying: "I will not apologise for the things I've done to protect our people, especially the weak and defenceless, from crime."

Many Filipinos have embraced Duterte for his profanity-laced speeches and his promise to get tough on crime. He has vowed to oversee the mass killing of criminals if elected.

On Tuesday, respected research agency Pulse Asia released the results of a survey taken from April 5-10, showing Duterte well ahead of other presidential candidates with 32 percent of respondents compared to 25 percent from second-placed Senator Grace Poe.

The survey was conducted before the furore over Duterte's rape remark.

Pulse Asia president Ronald Holmes said it was hard to tell if the mayor's statements would change his standing.

"The people who are affected (by his rape jokes) are the ones who do not support Duterte," he told AFP.

He conceded that Duterte's remarks could "potentially" scare off some voters.

Duterte's supporters defended him on social media with one saying on Twitter: "at least he is true to himself. The other candidates are just putting up a front."

Duterte has previously been criticised in the devoutly-Catholic Philippines after he called Pope Francis a "son of a whore" for causing traffic jams during his visit last year.

He later apologised for the remark.
Israel probes bus bombing, boosts security for Jewish holiday

Israeli authorities on Tuesday were investigating a Jerusalem bus bombing that wounded 21 people and raised fears of a sharp escalation in violence, while police planned tightened security for the Jewish Passover holiday.

The bomb tore through a bus in a relatively isolated area of southern Jerusalem on Monday night, with the fire spreading to a second bus.

In total at least 21 people were wounded, police said, with Israeli media reporting a 15-year-old girl in serious condition.

Israeli forensics search in the remains of a burnt-out a bus after a bomb blast ripped through the vehicle in Jerusalem on April 18, 2016 Thomas Coex (AFP)

Israeli domestic security agency Shin Bet referred to the explosion as a "terror attack".

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld confirmed officers were seeking to question the wounded and did not rule out the possibility of potential suspects among them.

"The investigation is looking to see how the explosive device was placed on the bus," he said.

Police imposed a gag order on further details of the investigation and any suspects.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to "find whoever prepared this explosive device".

"We'll settle the score with these terrorists."

The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which rules the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip, welcomed the attack but there was no claim of responsibility.

The explosion comes with tensions high following a wave of violence that has killed 201 Palestinians and 28 Israelis since last October.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, according to Israeli authorities.

However the level of violence had decreased in the weeks before the bombing.

- Intifada fears -

Bus bombings were common during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the early 2000s, but Monday's attack was the first bomb targeting a bus in Jerusalem since 2011, when a British tourist was killed.

In Tel Aviv, a bomb exploded on an empty bus in 2013 in what Israeli authorities called a "terrorist" attack.

Nir Hasson, writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, called such scenes the "ultimate Jerusalem nightmare."

"Fifteen years have passed since these scenes were repeating themselves on a weekly basis."

But Avi Dichter, a lawmaker and former Shin Bet chief, stressed the bomb did far less damage than those during the intifada.

The frame of the bus was still largely intact, unlike with larger bombs.

"The explosive charge was much lower than those we experienced during the suicide bombings of the second intifada," Dichter told public radio.

The blast comes ahead of the Jewish Passover holiday, which starts on Friday evening.

The Israeli government regularly closes off access to Israel for Palestinians during major Jewish religious festivals, and is expected to do so again.

Rosenfeld said the threat level would be raised during the week-long holiday.

"Security assessments were made immediately yesterday evening following the attack," he told AFP.

"Extra police units and border police are patrolling public areas," including bus stations and the light rail tram system in the city, he said, without specifying how many reinforcements.

Thousands of Jewish pilgrims flock to Jerusalem and other holy sites during Passover, which commemorates the Jewish exodus from Egypt in Biblical times.

Brachie Sprung, spokeswoman for Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, said the city council was not planning any changes to its schedule.

"We are telling people to go back to normal -- we don't cancel events," she told AFP. "We talk about being super cautious but going back to normal as quickly as possible."

Itamar Yaar, former deputy head of Israel's National Security Council, said he did not expect any major security clampdown in the city.

"I really don't think there will be any change in the Israeli behaviour," Yaar told AFP. "Perhaps in the first few days you will see more checks at checkpoints.

"But the most effective activities in this case are collecting intelligence and trying to reach the people that organised it."

Separately on Tuesday, an Israeli court ruled that a Jewish man found to be the ringleader of the beating and burning alive of a Palestinian teenager in 2014 was sane and convicted him of the attack.

Israeli settler Yosef Haim Ben-David, 31, was found in November to have led the assault, but his lawyers had submitted last-minute documents claiming he suffered from mental illness.

Israeli forensics experts search in the remains of a burnt-out a bus after a bomb blast ripped through the vehicle in Jerusalem on April 18, 2016 Thomas Coex (AFP)

A member of the Israeli security forces tries to keep photographer away from the scene of an explosion on a bus in Jerusalem on April 18, 2016 Ahmad Gharabli (AFP)
Syria regime says open to talks on 'broader unity government'

Syria's regime is prepared to discuss the creation of a new unity government at peace talks in Geneva but President Bashar al-Assad's fate remains off limits, its lead negotiator told AFP on Tuesday.

Assad's chief representative in Geneva, UN ambassador Bashar al-Jafaari, had during previous rounds of peace talks insisted that any discussion of a political transition in Syria was premature.

"A broader unity government is the only topic of discussion here," Jafaari said in the interview with AFP.

More than 270,000 people have been killed in Syria's civil war which began in 2011 Amer Almohibany (AFP)

"It is not in our jurisdiction, it is not within our prerogatives to discuss the fate of President Bashar al-Assad."

Jafaari made the comments a day after the main opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) suspended its formal participation at the UN-brokered talks in protest at escalating violence and continuing restrictions on humanitarian access in Syria.

But the HNC pledged to remain in Geneva and may continue to meet informally with mediators outside the UN compound.

Despite the setback, UN envoy Staffan de Mistura told reporters on Monday that the government's readiness to even discuss political transition in Syria amounted to progress.

"Indeed, there is one major improvement in what we used to have: everybody agrees the word 'political transition' is the point of the agenda," he said.

He said huge divides exist in terms of how each side defines political transition, but there is "no doubt about the need" to tackle the subject.

However, prospects for a breakthrough on the crucial issue of Assad's future remain dim.

The HNC has insisted that the president must go and cannot be part of any transitional or interim government.

The opposition rejected an idea, floated during talks with de Mistura, that Assad remain the ceremonial head of a transitional body that would include three vice presidents of the HNC's choosing.

And Jafaari told AFP that Damascus was also unequivocally against such a proposal.

That idea "will never be discussed in any upcoming session because it is not within the authority of the negotiators in Geneva," he said.

De Mistura insisted the negotiations would continue, even as rising violence around the northern Syrian city of Aleppo further threatened a fragile ceasefire on the ground.

The truce broked by the United States and Russia and declared on February 27 led to a sharp decline in bloodshed in the five-year conflict that has killed more than 270,000 people and displaced millions.

De Mistura is set to meet the ceasefire monitoring taskforce later Tuesday after talks with two smaller opposition groups that are independent of the HNC.

War in Syria: the control of territory

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been in power since 2000

Bashar al-Jaafari is Syria's chief negotiator during the UN peace talks in Geneva Philippe Desmazes (AFP)
Taiwan protests after officials 'barred by China' at OECD meet

Taiwan said Tuesday it would protest to Beijing and Belgium after its delegation was barred at a global industry conference in Brussels due to complaints from China.

It is the latest bout of diplomatic sparring between Taiwan and China as tensions simmer ahead of the inauguration of Taiwan's president-elect, Tsai Ing-wen, in May.

Beijing does not trust Tsai's historically pro-independence party and ties are predicted to deteriorate.

Tsai Ing-wen, chairwoman of the Beijing-sceptic Democratic People's Party, was elected Taiwan's next president in January 2016 Philippe Lopez (AFP/File)

Although it is self-ruling, Beijing considers Taiwan a province awaiting reunification since the two sides split after a civil war on the mainland in 1949.

Taiwanese officials attending the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) steel symposium in Brussels were barred from a meeting Monday after China complained to Belgium they were not sufficiently high-ranking, Taiwan's economic ministry said.

Taiwan is not an OECD member but has attended the organisation's steel committee meetings since 2005.

"Our delegation protested on the spot, and pointed out that nearly half of the heads of delegations held similar ranks as us," Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement.

The Taiwanese group were unable to enter the meeting because of China's complaint, it added.

"That is an unreasonable and discriminatory act," the statement said.

Taiwan's representative to the European Union has asked the island's Mainland Affairs Council to lodge a complaint with China, and the delegation will submit a protest letter to the Belgian government Tuesday, it said.

Taiwan's five-member delegation included a section chief from the economic ministry, as well as representatives from the trade bureau and the island's steel sector.

Taiwan is barred from a number of international organisations as Beijing's global dominance has grown and its number of allies is dwindling -- the island now only has diplomatic ties with 22 states.

The Brussels snub comes after Taiwan last week blasted Beijing for being "rude and violent" over the deportation of 45 of its citizens from Kenya to China where they face investigation for fraud.

Taiwan said it will send 10 officials to the mainland Wednesday in an attempt to bring the suspects back to the island for investigation and trial.
Maldives orders jailed ex-leader Nasheed to return

The Maldives on Tuesday cancelled the prison leave granted to jailed former president Mohamed Nasheed to undergo medical treatment in London and said it expected him to return "expediently".

The 48-year-old former leader was jailed last year on controversial terrorism charges, but was allowed to travel to Britain in January for treatment after he fell ill in jail.

The government initially extended Nasheed's prison leave to allow him to undergo surgery, but revoked the extension almost immediately, although it has not given him a deadline to return.

Former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, who is serving a 13-year jail term after being convicted on controversial terrorism-related charges, obtained prison leave to undergo urgent surgery in London Ben Stansall (AFP/File)

"The former president was given an extension to undergo surgery. As his lawyers have confirmed that there is no surgery scheduled, the extension was cancelled," it said in a statement.

"The government expects he will return expediently."

Nasheed became the first democratically elected president of the Maldives in 2008 and served for four years before he was toppled in what he called a coup backed by the military and police.

He was jailed on terrorism charges relating to the arrest of an allegedly corrupt judge in 2012, when he was still in power.

The Maldives has suffered prolonged political unrest in recent years, seriously denting its reputation as an upmarket tourist destination.

Nasheed's lawyer Hassan Latheef said his client's situation had been made clear to the authorities, accusing them of breaching Nasheed's right to privacy.

Nasheed, whose legal team includes the high-profile human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, told reporters in January that he had not yet decided whether to return to the Maldives to resume his 13-year jail sentence.
Apple received some 30,000 data requests from law enforcement agencies around the world in the second half of 2015 and provided information in a majority of cases, the company's latest transparency report reveals.

Apple said it provided some data in 80 percent of the 4,000 request from US law enforcement agencies alone in the July-December period.

The news comes with Apple at the centre of a controversy over whether it can be compelled to help authorities decrypt devices where only the user has encryption 'keys'.

Apple's transparency report shows a total of 30,687 law enforcement requests from authorities around the world, involving more than 167,000 devices. The company's logo is shown above

The issue hit a boiling point last month when Apple refused to help the FBI access an iPhone used by Syed Farook - one of the shooters in last year's San Bernardino massacre.

The request is included in this report. The US government eventually withdrew the request after the FBI found a way to access the information without Apple's help.

However, similar cases are still pending in the courts.

The latest report from Apple showed a total of 30,687 law enforcement requests from authorities around the world, involving more than 167,000 devices.

Apple refused to help the FBI access an iPhone used by Syed Farook - one of the shooters in last year's San Bernardino massacre. He is pictured with wife Tashfeen Malik

APPLE DENIES HANDING SOURCE CODE OVER TO CHINA Apple denied providing Chinese authorities with special access to its devices, as the iPhone maker defended its position on encryption and cooperation with US law enforcement. The company's general counsel Bruce Sewell said he wanted to set the record straight on China in light of rumours that the company had turned over its software instructions or 'source code' - which could be used to break encryption - to Beijing. 'We have not provided source code to the Chinese government,' he told lawmakers at a US congressional hearing. 'We have been asked by the Chinese government. We refused,' he said, adding that this had happened 'within the past two years.' The hearing was called to discuss how strong encryption is hampering law enforcement and how technology firms should respond to legitimate law enforcement requests to break encryption. Apple recently refused to help the FBI weaken the operating system of an iPhone used by one of the shooters in last year's San Bernardino killing spree. Sewell defended the company's toughened encryption for its iPhones, which can sometimes make data unreadable to authorities, even with a warrant. 'The best way we, and the technology industry, know how to protect your information is through the use of strong encryption,' he said. 'Encryption today is the backbone of our cybersecurity infrastructure and provides the very best defense we have against increasingly hostile attacks.' 'We have seen case after case -- from homicides and kidnappings, to drug trafficking, financial fraud, trade secret theft, and child exploitation -- where critical evidence came from smartphones, computers, and online communications,' said FBI executive assistant director Amy Hess. 'Increasingly, some technologies are prohibiting law enforcement from having access to that critical evidence.' Advertisement

That compared to some 26,000 requests in the prior six-month period affecting more than 360,000 devices.

Apple said it provided at least some data in 63 percent of the cases in its Asia-Pacific region and 52 percent of the cases in the region that includes Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, and 80 percent for Latin America and North America.

US National security requests to Apple almost doubled over the course of 2015, The Verge noted.

The report lists between 1,000 and 1,249 accounts affected by national security requests in the second half of 2015.

'When we receive an account request from law enforcement requesting a customer's personal information, we will notify the customer a request concerning their personal data was made unless we are explicitly prohibited from doing so,' the report said, adding that some exceptions are made.

'For extreme situations when we believe disclosing information could put a child or other person in serious danger,' it explained.

Apple said any government agency 'must get a search warrant' and that 'our legal team carefully reviews' each one.

'We only comply with information requests once we are satisfied that the request is valid and appropriate, and then we deliver the narrowest possible set of information,' the report said.

It showed Apple received the largest number of requests from the region which includes Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India  a total of 19,322 in the second half of 2015, with more than 11,000 coming from Germany.

It received 4,000 from the US and 7,300 from Asia.

The report says of these: 'The vast majority of the requests we receive from law enforcement relate to information about lost or stolen devices, and we report these as device requests.

'Device requests may include requests for customer contact information provided to register a device with Apple or the date(s) the device used Apple services.

When it came to 'emergency requests', a total of 178 requests were made in the time frame, with 106 coming from the US and 43 from the UK.
Yemen clashes kill 13 as UN urges start of delayed talks

Clashes between Yemeni loyalist forces and rebels have killed 13 fighters, military sources said Tuesday, as the UN chief urged warring parties to begin delayed peace talks.

UN-brokered peace talks, which were set to open in Kuwait on Monday, were delayed after the insurgents failed to show up over alleged Saudi violations of a ceasefire that took effect on April 11.

Fighting erupted late Monday in Marib province, east of the rebel-held Yemeni capital Sanaa, with warring parties trading blame for the ceasefire breaches.

Pro-government forces sit on a heavily armoured vehicle in Sanaa on April 17, 2016 Nabil Hassan (AFP/File)

Five soldiers loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and eight rebel fighters were killed in the clashes which continued intermittently through Tuesday, the pro-government military sources said.

They said the fighting erupted when the Iran-backed Huthi rebels and their allies tried to capture positions held by loyalist troops.

The toll could not be independently confirmed.

Sporadic fighting was also reported in other areas, including Nahm northeast of Sanaa and in the southwestern province of Taez.

At the United Nations, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the Gulf-backed government and the Shiite Huthi rebels and their allies to engage with his envoy "so that talks can start without further delay".

Pro-Hadi chief-of-staff General Mohammed Ali al-Maqdishi slammed the rebels for "not respecting" the ceasefire which he said his forces were committed to.

"The truce is still holding based on orders from our political leadership," said Maqdishi.

In Kuwait, representatives of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council sent a message to the rebels saying they "understand their fears" and urging them to "quickly join" the talks, according to a Western diplomat.

The rebels meanwhile accused loyalist forces of launching attacks and dispatching reinforcements to several provinces, in a statement on their sabanews.net website.

- 'Commitment to dialogue' -

They also said warplanes belonging to the Saudi-led coalition, which has intervened militarily in support of loyalists since March last year, flew sorties over several areas of Yemen despite the ceasefire.

In a statement on Facebook late Monday, rebel spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam said "we affirm our continued commitment to dialogue... and this is why our demand from the first day was for talks to be held in an atmosphere of calm, peace, and stability."

"But unfortunately, since April 11, the aggression hadn't stopped and the air strikes have continued on several areas," he said.

UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed and government representatives were still in Kuwait on Tuesday, according to officials close to the government delegation.

Previous attempts at peace talks -- including a failed round in January -- have been unable to stop Yemen's conflict, which the United Nations says has killed more than 6,400 people and forced almost 2.8 million from their homes.

Jihadists including from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the powerful Yemeni branch of the extremist network, have exploited the conflict to seize territory and gain influence.

On Tuesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up before reaching a security checkpoint in main southern city Aden, where jihadists have carried out deadly attacks against pro-government forces in recent months, a security official said.

There were no casualties apart from the assailant himself, said the official, describing the bomber as "an extremist".

A Yemeni child poses inside a tent at a makeshift camp housing Internally Displaced Persons on April 16, 2016 Mohammed Huwais (AFP/File)
UN demands Western Sahara mission be fully restored

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned Tuesday that Morocco's expulsion of staff from the UN mission in Western Sahara could be exploited by extremists and urged the Security Council to restore the peacekeeping force.

Ban said in a report obtained by AFP that staff cuts ordered by Rabat are weakening the MINURSO mission and "can be expected to be exploited by terrorist and radical elements."

"I call on the Security Council to restore and support the mandated role of MINURSO," said the report sent to the council on Monday.

Morocco expelled 83 civilian staffers of MINURSO a month ago and shut down a military liaison office Fadel Ssnna (AFP/File)

"The risk of a rupture of the ceasefire and resumption of hostilities, with its attendant danger of escalation into full-scale war, will grow significantly in the event that MINURSO is forced to depart or finds itself unable to execute the mandate that the Security Council has set," he said.

Council members are to vote on April 28 on whether to renew mandate of the mission, which was established in 1991 after a ceasefire ended a war that broke out when Morocco sent troops to the former Spanish territory in 1975.

Morocco expelled 83 civilian staffers of MINURSO a month ago and shut down a military liaison office, severely crippling operations in what was once a 500-strong mission.

The move was in response to a visit by Ban to the region during which he used the term "occupation" to refer to the status of Western Sahara, a term fiercely rejected by Rabat.

In his report, Ban said the mission should stay on for a further 12 months, until April 2017.

- Critical UN presence -

Ban's appeal to the Security Council put pressure on France, Senegal and Spain which have been in close contact with Morocco over the fate of MINURSO.

While the council has called for the mission to continue its work, it has been divided on the way forward.

The UN chief warned that downsizing MINURSO will have "significant implications for the stability of the region as well as the credibility of the Security Council and United Nations peacekeeping" worldwide.

Diplomats have raised concerns that concessions to Rabat will embolden other governments unhappy with a UN presence to try to weaken the missions.

Keeping MINURSO intact is "absolutely critical, not just for Western Sahara but also for UN peacekeeping broadly," said British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft.

"It's the Security Council that decides the mandate, it's the Security Council that decides whether to change it or not," he said.

Morocco maintains that Western Sahara, which it forcibly annexed in 1976, is an integral part of its kingdom despite a UN resolution that tasks MINURSO with organizing a referendum on the future of the territory.

Sahrawis have long campaigned for the right to self-determination and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic is a full member of the African Union.

Ban also requested that the council approve the deployment of 14 additional military medical personnel to a new MINURSO outpost in response to the cuts in personnel that have affected drivers and communications.

He said the time had come to engage in "serious negotiations" on a political solution to end the decades-old conflict.

UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon warns that staff cuts to MINURSO could be "exploited by terrorist and radical elements" Robin van Lonkhuijsen (ANP/AFP)
Iraq speaker suspends parliament 'until further notice'

Embattled Iraqi parliament speaker Salim al-Juburi Tuesday announced the suspension of parliament sessions "until further notice" after a week of turmoil during which lawmakers brawled and sought to sack him.

The political crisis comes as Iraq battles the Islamic State jihadist group, which overran large areas in 2014, and contends with a serious economic crisis caused by low oil prices and years of mismanagement and corruption.

Both the United States and the United Nations have warned that the crisis could distract from efforts to combat IS.

Iraqi security forces stand guard outside the parliament in Baghdad on April 13, 2016, during a sit-in by lawmakers Sabah Arar (AFP)

Some MPs voted last week to remove Juburi and elected Adnan al-Janabi as his interim replacement, meaning there are now two claimants to the speakership.

Juburi insists the vote to sack him and his deputies was invalid because the session lacked the necessary quorum, but his opponents are seeking to move ahead with selecting replacements.

"I announce the suspension of sessions... of the Iraqi parliament until further notice," Juburi said in a statement.

But Janabi has called for a session to be held on Thursday, so MPs may still meet without Juburi's leadership.

Juburi's decision was taken to "preserve the reputation of parliament" and prevent it from being "a place for conflict", he said.

There has been plenty of conflict in parliament over the past week: lawmakers held an overnight sit-in and threw punches in the chamber, as well as seeking to sack Juburi.

The turmoil began with disagreement over proposed cabinet line-ups presented by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, but shifted to calls for Juburi to go.

Abadi has sought to replace the cabinet of party-affiliated ministers with a government of technocrats, but has faced significant opposition from powerful political parties that rely on control of ministries for patronage and funds.

President Fuad Masum proposed a plan to end the parliamentary leadership crisis, but the session he called for failed to resolve differences among lawmakers.

Under Masum's plan, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, parliament was to convene for an "extraordinary session" to vote on whether or not to remove Juburi and his two deputies.

The proposal was accepted by Juburi but rejected by his opponents on the grounds that it would return to the issue of whether or not he should stay in office, which they insist has already been resolved.

According to a parliamentary official who was present, Janabi presided at the Tuesday session, announcing that nominations would be accepted to replace Juburi and his deputies and saying the next meeting would be on Thursday.

The move was criticised by lawmakers who do not support Juburi's removal, meaning parliament will remain divided for now.

Abadi called on Monday for parliament to put aside its differences and do its job, saying he hoped for a vote on a new cabinet within days -- something that looks increasingly unlikely.
Hollande 'worried' over Syria talks, pledges Jordan support

French President Francois Hollande said Tuesday that the Syrian opposition's decision to suspend participation in peace talks was "worrying", as he offered to support Jordan in dealing with refugees fleeing the five-year conflict.

Speaking a day after Syria's main opposition announced its formal participation in peace negotiations in Geneva was on hold, Hollande said he was concerned a ceasefire that has dramatically reduced fighting across Syria might not last.

"If the truce is broken, fighting will restart, and civilians will flee once again. There will be no hope," Hollande said after talks with Jordan's King Abdullah II.

French President Francois Hollande (L) meets with Jordanian King Abdullah II in Amann on April 19, 2016 Stephane De Sakutin (Pool/AFP)

"For Jordan, what's happening in Geneva is very important. The suspension of talks is worrying."

On Monday a collection of key Syrian rebel groups announced an armed response to what it said were "violations" of the ceasefire deal by pro-regime forces as violence mounted around second city Aleppo.

Hollande, who visited Cairo on Monday, had said that everything needed to be done in order to ensure the cessation of hostilities holds.

He has been on a regional tour to countries affected by war, during which he announced 100 million euros ($113 million) for Lebanon to help with the mass influx of Syrians escaping violence.

In Jordan, home to more than 630,000 displaced Syrians, the president discussed the refugee crisis as well as the fight against the Islamic State group.

The jihadists were recently forced from the ancient city of Palmyra but still control swathes of Syria, including their de facto capital Raqa.

"There are still refugees coming from Syria after fleeing fighting around Raqa and Palmyra. We need to support them but also ensure that terrorism isn't brought with them," Hollande said.

Jordan, which is part of a US-led coalition battling IS in Syria and Iraq, has struggled to cope with the numbers of Syrians seeking refuge in the kingdom.

It said on Monday that more than 50,000 refugees were stranded in no-man's land along its border with Syria -- a three-fold rise since January due to increased security checks.

Jordan insists it must screen newcomers to ensure they are genuine refugees and not jihadists seeking to infiltrate the country.

A French presidential source said Hollande's visit was to express thanks for "the leading role Jordan plays in the fight against terrorism".

Hollande also announced a total of 900 million euros worth of French aid over three years for the kingdom, principally in the form of loans.

He was due to head later Tuesday to Prince Hassan airbase, northeast of Amman, where French warplanes are stationed for missions against IS in Syria and Iraq.

"The French system put in place to fight (IS) can only be deployed thanks to Jordan," Hollande said.
IMF suspends aid to Mozambique over hidden $1 bn debt

The International Monetary Fund has suspended aid to Mozambique after discovering the country had hidden debt of more than $1 billion.

"The undisclosed borrowing exceeds $1 billion and significantly changes our assessment of Mozambique's macroeconomic outlook," said Antoinette Sayeh, head of the IMF's African Department, in a statement to AFP on Tuesday.

As a result, the global crisis lender has cancelled a staff mission to the African country this week that was part of its $283 million standby credit facility and a policy support program from the IMF.

A view of Mozambique's capital Maputo showing buildings under construction in June 2015 Adrien Barbier (AFP/File)

That cancellation of the mission effectively puts on hold any disbursements from the facility. A first instalment of $117.9 million was made in December to help the country cope with lower commodity prices that have depressed revenues.

Mozambican Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho Rosario on Tuesday began an emergency visit to Washington to meet with IMF and World Bank officials.

Aid has been suspended "pending a full disclosure and assessment of the facts," on the unreported borrowing, Sayeh said.

"It is difficult to imagine how the government will provide a satisfactory explanation for its handling of the debt," wrote Anne Fruhauf of the New York-based Teneo Intelligence in a note to investors.

"All this will have a massive impact on virtually every financial lifeline available to Maputo, at a time when the country thought it was just getting past its balance of payments tight spot."

Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world, and a quarter of its budget comes from donors.

The discovery of oil in 2010 sparked a period of optimistic growth and investment, but the fall in world prices of raw materials saw the local currency, the metical, drop by more than 40 percent against the US dollar last year.
EU to charge Google over Android on Wednesday: sources

The EU will unveil formal anti-trust charges against Google on Wednesday over how it markets its widely-used Android mobile phone operating system, two sources close to the matter told AFP.

Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager is set to announce the charges in what would be a massive blow to one of the US-based tech giant's most strategic businesses, altering the global smartphone sector.

The case against Android would follow a similar one involving shopping services on Google's search engine last year.

The EU is looking at whether Google gives unfair prominence to its own apps such as maps or music streaming in deals with mobile manufacturers such as Samsung or Huawei Justin Sullivan (Getty/AFP/File)

The commissioner will "make her announcement on Wednesday," one of the sources told AFP. The European Commission declined to comment on the matter.

The EU is looking at whether Google gives unfair prominence to its own apps such as maps or music streaming in deals with mobile manufacturers such as Samsung or Huawei.

The Android operating system captures about 80 percent of the world market for mobile phones, far ahead of its closest rival Apple.

Android is seen as crucial to Google's future as customers increasingly rely on smartphones and tablets for their computing needs instead of traditional PCs.

Global smartphone sales are estimated to reach 1.5 billion units in 2016 as the sales of PCs plummet, according to the Gartner IT research company.

Google in an email to AFP denied that Android contracts with phone manufacturers crowded out rivals.

"Anyone can use Android, with or without Google applications," said Google spokesman Mark Jansen.

- 'Bait and switch' -

In a speech in Amsterdam on Monday, Vestager all but confirmed that her team was ready to target Google over its dominance of the mobile phone industry.

EU regulators "need to be sure that big companies don't try to protect themselves by holding back innovation," she said.

"That's why we're looking closely at Google's contracts with phone makers and operators which use the Android operating system," she said.

The EU a year ago formally charged Google with abusing its dominance in Europe and a decision could come later this year.

In both cases, Google risks a fine of 10 percent of worldwide global sales for one year, which would amount to a $7.4 billion fine on the basis of 2015 revenues.

In a historic case in 2013, the EU fined Microsoft 561 million euros ($634 million) for failing to offer users a choice of web browser.

Fairsearch, an umbrella organisation for several plaintiffs in the case including Nokia and TripAdvisor, said that Google had tricked mobile phone companies into using its Android software, which comes at no or little cost.

"In order to ensure the broadest possible adoption of Android, Google implemented a 'bait and switch' strategy," Fairsearch said in a summary of its complaint to the EU Commission.

"While Google claims that its success relies on merits and posits itself as an innovation champion... it has built barriers to entry that are virtually impossible to overcome," Fairsearch added.
MH17 families mulling lawsuit against Malaysia Airlines

Dozens of families of those killed when a missile shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine two years ago are considering suing the carrier for compensation, their lawyer told AFP Tuesday.

All 298 passengers and crew -- the majority of them Dutch -- died when the Boeing 777 was hit by a Russian-made BUK anti-aircraft missile over war-torn eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.

"We are still negotiating the case. But the offers that Malaysia Airlines are making are almost offensive for our clients," lawyer Veeru Mewa told AFP.

The wrecked cockpit of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is shown to the press during a presentation of the final report on the cause of its crash at the Gilze Rijen airbase in the Netherlands on October 13, 2015 Emmanuel Dunand (AFP/File)

His office, Beer Advocaten, represents the families of 91 people killed in the disaster. But he is also leading a core group of Dutch lawyers, acting for the families of some 168 people who died on the ill-fated flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

Under a 1999 international accord dubbed the Montreal Convention, the families have until the second anniversary of the disaster -- July 17 -- to decide if they want to press a lawsuit.

Mewa said the airlines' insurers were "taking advantage of Dutch law" under which if someone dies in an accident then you can only claim "compensation for the funeral costs."

"According to international standards that would mean a Dutch life is worth less than any other life," he said.

The lawsuit, if it is filed, would seek damages for the loss of earnings as well as compensation for the "psychological" trauma of those who lost loved ones.

The legal team was also thinking of holding Malaysia Airlines "liable for flying over Ukraine" which was in the middle of a conflict with government forces fighting pro-Russian rebels.

Many "families are struggling with real traumatic bereavement, real post-traumatic stress syndrome because of the images, seeing rebels walking on the gravesite, and not being able to go there, knowing that the Dutch government was not there to collect the bodies for quite a while," Mewa said.

They just want "a just" settlement, and the offer so far on the table did not give them "satisfaction," he added.

It remains to be decided if the suit would be filed in The Hague or in Malaysia, he said, adding that as well as Dutch clients the group including Swiss, Indonesian and Australian nationals.

"Malaysia Airlines, immediately after the crash said that they will take responsibility and take care of the families. And the offers they are making is not suggesting that."

Officials with the Dutch Safety Board (OVV) concluded last year as part of an international investigation that the Boeing 777 was hit by a BUK missile.

In February, a separate criminal investigation team said they hoped within months to pinpoint the exact spot from which the missile was fired.
Odyssey that ended with a Muslim family in Rome as pope's guests

They left war-ravaged Syria, family and friends behind them. France was where they were aiming for. A Greek island was where they ended up.

Now, five months after fleeing their home in the suburbs of Damascus, young Syrian couple Hassan and Nour and their two-year-old son Riad find themselves in Rome as guests of Pope Francis, who plucked them and two other Muslim families from Lesbos on Saturday.

An odyssey fraught with danger and the fear of the unknown has ended with plates of lasagna and strolls in the spring sunshine of the Eternal City.

Nour, 30, a Syrian refugee and one of the 12 Syrian asylum seekers Pope Francis brought back with him from Greek island of Lesbos, holds her son Riad, 2, as she arrives at the St. Egidio Roman Catholic Charity in Rome on April 18, 2016 Filippo Monteforte (AFP/File)

Nour, 30, clutches little Riad's hand as she explains why they had no option but to get out of a Syria on its knees after five years of civil war.

"We were neither for the Syrian regime or for the Islamists," the scientist said. "We had to leave the country because my husband had been conscripted to join the army."

As Nour had studied in France and speaks the language, that was where they decided to head for.

But first they had to get out of Syria and into Turkey, a challenge that involved the ordeal of being detained for a week by the Islamic State group in the region of its stronghold Raqa.

- Capture could mean death -

At a time when Syrian and Russian warplanes were intensifying air strikes on the region, it was a terrifying experience. But they escaped from it thanks to a trafficker skilled at smuggling people over the border.

"Between Turkey and Greece, if you are caught it is not serious, you are likely to only be in prison for a few hours. If you get caught in Syria, you can get killed," said Nour.

Hassan, 31, recalled being swindled in a Turkish port by a less helpful smuggler who tried to convince him to join more than 60 people on board a rubber dinghy made for 40 in rough weather.

"I refused," said Hassan.

Eventually, the family found their way across the narrow strait of the Aegean Sea that separates Turkey from Lesbos, only to find themselves bogged down in the interminable bureaucracy associated with trying to enter the European Union via its southeastern tip.

Having arrived before the entry into force in March of an EU deal allowing migrants arriving clandestinely to be sent back to Turkey, they were not in danger of deportation.

But with their hopes of a new life in limbo, the Greek island was no less a prison to them for that - until representatives of the Catholic Sant-Egidio community began to raise the possibility of a transfer to Italy, without ever mentioning the pope or his plane.

"Even now I do not believe what happened to us, it is like a beautiful dream," said Nour.

Once on the plane, Francis came to greet them. "He ruffled our little boy's head. Now Riad kisses his picture."

- An uncertain future -

Installed in temporary accommodation in the Trastevere district of Rome while the Vatican prepares longer-term housing for the families, Hassan says the relief of reaching safety cannot remove the pain of being so far from loved ones.

"The pope is an amazing person. We hope every religious person should be like the pope," he said.

"You can find a new place but you cannot find a new family."

The couple also feel a longing for a time when Syria was not a place of war, when people of different religions and cultures were able to co-exist peacefully.

And they see the pope's gesture as all the more symbolic because of how it highlighted the failure of the Muslim world to come to the aid of the Syrian people in their hour of need.

"No Muslim cleric, no president felt our suffering," Nour said.

"None of them have done what the pope has done. And yet they have the means, the money. I am thinking of the Gulf states. They have everything to take in Syrian refugees but they have not done it."

Having already taken their first language lessons in their new home, the family now face another odyssey of sorts: dealing with Italy's notorious bureaucracy over their application for asylum.

Who knows what the future holds for them but Nour is clear about one thing: "I want my son to have the kind of life I had before the war."

Pope Francis welcomes a group of Syrian refugees after landing at Ciampino airport in Rome following a visit at the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on April 16, 2016 Filippo Monteforte (Pool/AFP)
Turkey kills 32 IS fighters in Iraq after attack on tank

The Turkish army killed 32 suspected fighters from the Islamic State group in northern Iraq on Tuesday following an attack on one of its tanks, Turkish media reported.

Turkish troops destroyed a building used by IS, killing 10 jihadists, and then killed another 22 who tried to flee the scene, the Anatolia news agency said.

It was not immediately possible to independently verify the toll.

Turkey has soldiers deployed an a military base in Nineveh province, northern Iraq Mustafa Ozer (AFP/File)

The agency said the incident occurred after militants fired an anti-tank missile at one of its tanks near the Bashiqa military camp not far from the city of Mosul, which has been an IS stronghold since 2014.

Dogan news agency said the tank crew was unhurt and that they had fired back in response, shelling the building from which the fire came and causing it to collapse, killing 10 jihadists.

They also fired at a group of people fleeing the scene in seven cars and four motorcycles, killing 22 of them, the agency said.

Last month, a Turkish soldier was killed and another wounded when missiles fired by IS fighters hit another military base in northern Iraq during clashes with local Kurdish forces.

Bashiqa camp has been targeted several times by IS jihadists.

In December, Turkey said it had sent hundreds of troops to Bashiqa to protect Turkish military personnel involved in training Iraqi fighters, sparking a diplomatic row with Baghdad.

At the time, a senior Turkish official said up to 300 soldiers and 20 tanks were deployed there, although an unspecified number were pulled back following US pressure to end the row with Baghdad.

The same month, IS militants attacked the camp, wounding four soldiers, and tried again in January although the Turkish military repelled them, with Ankara claiming 18 IS jihadists were killed. Baghdad flatly denied the claim.
Cancer fears as Uganda's only radiotherapy machine breaks

Bronia Naturinda was diagnosed with cervical cancer last year and, with help from a charity, travelled 300 kilometres (186 miles) to Kampala for treatment using Uganda's only radiotherapy machine.

The 28-year-old's chance of survival were good until, after waiting for more than three weeks, she was told to go home because the machine she was counting on had broken down beyond repair.

"I felt pain because I thought that if it works, we are going to be okay, we will get recovery," Naturinda said. "It has pained me because I have not yet produced any children. Even I have lost lots of weight, bleeding every time."

Uganda's Cancer Institute is located at the main Mulago Hospital Michele Sibiloni (AFP/File)

The radiotherapy machine was a lifeline when China donated it 21 years ago: since then it has provided around 30,000 life-saving treatments a year and given patients relief from unbearable pain.

It had already broken down several times before its final collapse this month and, although the government paid 325,000 euros ($368,000) for a replacement three years ago, the bunker needed to house the new machine has never been built.

As a result, the lifeline sits, unused.

The breakdown of the current machine has given fresh urgency to efforts to get the new one operational, but it will take time.

"If they can even work 24 hours, within six months, we should have the bunker ready," said Jackson Orem, who heads Uganda's Cancer Institute at the main Mulago Hospital.

"So that means for the next half of the year we should be installing the equipment and testing it, so by one year, it should be up and running."

- Ailing healthcare -

The government has tried to ease the row over the delay, but for many cancer patients a year may be too long.

Accusations are flying that the problem is symptomatic of a wider crisis in the health system.

Winnie Watera, an economist at the Parliament Watch civil society organisation says there are many reasons why the machine was allowed to fall into disrepair.

"There is the question of money, there is a question of management, there is a question of planning," she said.

"When all these come together, it makes things work, but if one component is missing -- of which, in this case, all are missing - we have a problem."

Patients are now being advised to go to neighbouring Kenya for radiotherapy, a journey too expensive for many.

On Tuesday Nairobi's Aga Khan University Hospital offered free treatment for 400 Ugandan cancer patients.
Washington seeks Gulf special force, naval cooperation

The United States is seeking greater special forces and naval cooperation with the Gulf states to counter Iran's "destabilising activities" in the region, a senior American official said.

Defence Secretary Ashton Carter, who arrived in the Saudi capital on Tuesday, will meet his Gulf counterparts on Wednesday.

The following day he is expected to join President Barack Obama at a summit with monarchs of the six Gulf Cooperation Council states.

US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter (L) meets with United Arab Emirates Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces Mohammed bin Zayed in Abu Dhabi on April 19, 2016 Senior Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz (DoD/AFP)

They will gather in an atmosphere of tension with regional leaders offended by Obama's perceived reluctance to get involved in the region's problems, and in particular his tilt towards Iran.

The Sunni Gulf monarchies are worried after the lifting this year of international sanctions against their regional rival, Shiite Iran, under an international agreement to curb Tehran's nuclear programme.

Riyadh and its neighbours fear the US-supported deal will only embolden Iran which they accuse of interference throughout the Middle East.

Over the past 15 years the US has sold combat aircraft to Gulf states, but the senior American defence official said Iran's activities "won't be countered" in that way.

Rather, "special operations forces and maritime interdiction" are needed, he said.

The US is proposing to help train Gulf special forces and to develop their naval capacity to prevent Iran from supplying Shiite groups that it supports in the region, the official said.

In "just over a six month period we and our coalition partners were able to interdict four weapon shipments off the coast of Yemen", he said.

The United States provides precision-guided weapons and intelligence support to a Saudi-led military coalition that intervened in Yemen 13 months ago to support the government against Iran-backed rebels.

Royal Saudi Air Force jets, many of them US-made F-15s, have carried out intensive air strikes against the rebels and their allies. The coalition maintains a naval blockade of Yemen.

Carter will also repeat to his GCC counterparts the importance of increased support for Iraq, where the government is trying to reconquer territory seized by the Islamic State group of Sunni extremists.

"We are urging them to come in... provide funds and support, both political and economic, to the Iraqi government," the American official said.

Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Iraq presented his credentials in January, re-establishing relations a quarter-century after they were cut following ex-president Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.

"In a perfect world, we would see full diplomatic normalisation between all Gulf countries and the Iraqi government," the official said.

"There has been some reluctance among the Gulf states".

On Monday in Baghdad, Carter announced new US support for the Iraqi government, including the deployment of an additional 217 military personnel.
Apple denies handing source code over to China

Apple denied providing Chinese authorities with special access to its devices, as the iPhone maker defended its position on encryption and cooperation with US law enforcement.

The company's general counsel Bruce Sewell was appearing at a US congressional hearing on encryption's impact on law enforcement, as the high-tech giant battles the government over whether it should be compelled to help authorities in criminal cases.

Sewell said he wanted to set the record straight on China in light of reports cited by officials at the hearing that the company had turned over its software instructions or "source code" -- which could be used to break encryption -- to Beijing.

Bruce Sewell, General Counsel of Apple, is sworn-in prior to testifying on data encryption policies on Capitol Hill, April 19, 2016 Saul Loeb (AFP)

"We have not provided source code to the Chinese government," he told lawmakers.

"We have been asked by the Chinese government. We refused," he said, adding that this had happened "within the past two years."

- Encryption debate renewed -

The hearing was called to discuss how strong encryption is hampering law enforcement and how technology firms should respond to legitimate law enforcement requests to break encryption.

Lawmakers at the House Energy and Commerce committee said they hoped the discussion would help both sides in the debate find common ground, so that privacy can be protected while enabling law enforcement to get data its needs for criminal probes.

"I can't believe this problem is intractable," said Representative Diana DeGette. "What I want to hear... is about possible solutions going forward."

While law enforcement officials and Apple both expressed a willingness to talk, the comments appeared to show little common ground in a debate which has been raging for weeks.

The encryption issue hit a boiling point earlier this year when Apple refused to help the FBI weaken the operating system of an iPhone used by one of the shooters in last year's San Bernardino killing spree.

The government eventually withdrew the request, saying it had been able to get into the phone with help from an outside party, but similar cases are pending in the courts.

Sewell defended the company's toughened encryption for its iPhones, which can sometimes make data unreadable to authorities, even with a warrant.

"The best way we, and the technology industry, know how to protect your information is through the use of strong encryption," he said.

"Encryption today is the backbone of our cybersecurity infrastructure and provides the very best defense we have against increasingly hostile attacks."

An FBI official however repeated concerns that unbreakable encryption may help criminals and terrorists evade detection.

"We have seen case after case -- from homicides and kidnappings, to drug trafficking, financial fraud, trade secret theft, and child exploitation -- where critical evidence came from smartphones, computers, and online communications," said FBI executive assistant director Amy Hess.

"Increasingly, some technologies are prohibiting law enforcement from having access to that critical evidence."

- 'In the dark' -

Thomas Galati, chief of intelligence for the New York City police department, expressed frustration over the default encryption for smartphones.

He said that in the six-month period from October 2015 through March of this year, "we have been locked out of 67 Apple devices lawfully seized pursuant to the investigation of 44 violent crimes."

"In the past, a phone or wiretap -- legally obtained through a judge -- would alert the police to drop-off points, hideouts, and target locations," he said. "Now, we are literally in the dark. Criminals know it."

But Amit Yoran, president of the security firm RSA, said law enforcement is failing to use tools available to them.

"We live in a 'golden age' of surveillance, more so than in any other point in history," he told the panel.

"In just about everything we do, we leave an incredibly insightful digital breadcrumb trail... Law enforcement has an overwhelming volume of information readily available to it, creating challenges to efficiently manage and fully leverage it."

Apple said in its most recent transparency report Monday that it received more than 30,000 data requests from law enforcement worldwide and provided some information in a majority of those cases.

Amy Hess, FBI Executive Assistant Director for Science and Technology, told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing that unbreakable encryption may help criminals and terrorists evade detection Saul Loeb (AFP)
21 die in boat capsize off Myanmar: UN

At least 21 people including nine children died after a boat capsized off the coast of Myanmar's restive Rakhine state on its way to a local market Tuesday, a United Nations spokesman said.

The vessel was transporting around 60 passengers from a camp for internally displaced people, the UN said, in a region where sectarian violence has pushed tens of thousands of Rohingya, Myanmar's largely stateless Muslim minority, from their homes.

"The majority of passengers on the boat were internally displaced people from the Sin Tet Maw camp in Pauktaw Township," Pierre Peron, a spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) in Myanmar, told AFP.

Rakhine state in western Myanmar is home to many IDP camps housing thousands of ethnic Rohingya Ye Aung Thu (AFP/File)

They were "on an authorised day trip to Sittwe to make purchases at the market", he said, adding that the number of fatalities was expected to rise as many of the passengers remained unaccounted for.

Paukaw is surrounded by rivers that feed into the sea and people from its camps can only reach the markets in coastal Sittwe, the state capital several dozen kilometres away, by boat.

An official from the Rakhine's security and border affairs ministry also confirmed the accident but put the death toll at 14.

"The boat sank because of a heavy wave in the sea," the official said, requesting anonymity.

He said the passengers were "Bengalis" -- a term many officials use to refer to Rohingya.

The Rohingya have been forced to live in apartheid-like conditions ever since unrest between Buddhists and Muslims tore through Rakhine state in 2012 and left hundreds dead.

Their movement and access to services, including health care, is severely restricted by authorities in the Buddhist-majority country, where many insist they are foreign interlopers from neighbouring Bangladesh.

The new civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi has vowed to press for greater autonomy for Mymars patchwork ethnic minorities in an early move to soothe the rebellions roiling the country.

But the human rights icon has faced international criticism for not taking a stronger stance on the Rohingya's plight, and for failing to field any Muslim candidates in the November election.

A rising tide of Buddhist nationalism across the country has in recent years deepened hostility towards the group -- most of whom are rendered stateless by a web of citizenship laws despite having lived in the country for generations.

Tens of thousands have fled persecution and poverty in dangerous boat journeys headed for neighbouring countries.

In 2015 a Thai crackdown on people smuggling led gang bosses to abandon many Rohingya on land and at sea, sparking a regional crisis.
He says they will get long-range nuclear missiles 'if they're not stopped'

South Korea has confirmed that North Korea has successfully created miniaturised nuclear warheads as a leading US general said it is only a matter of time before Pyongyang builds long-rang missiles capable of hitting America and Japan.

General Vincent Brooks told the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un was determined to build rockets that could target the United States.

He said: 'It's very clear through the parades that they've done, what systems they have and some of the attempted launches that ... over time, I believe we're going to see them acquire these capabilities if they're not stopped.'

Last month North Korean state media published this image of Kim Jong-un standing beside what it claimed was one of its first miniaturised nuclear warheads

Last month North Korean media published images showing Kim standing next to what it said was a miniaturised weapon.

Miniaturisation is achieved when the nuclear warhead weighs less than 2,200lb and the diameter of the bomb measures 35 inches or less.

Kim was also quoted as saying: 'We must always be ready to fire our nuclear warheads at any time.'

A South Korean government report has confirmed North Korea had miniaturised a 660lb nuclear warhead.

The National Assembly Research Service said the warheads could be mounted on missiles, contradicting statements put out by South Korea's defence ministry last month when they said North Korea had not reached a stage where they could mount nuclear weapons on ballistic missiles.

The Seoul Shinmun newspaper said the report concluded the North now had between eight and 20 miniaturised warheads and it said the defence ministry's estimates were 'too conservative'.

General Vincent Brooks, pictured in 2013, has warned that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is determined to build rockets that could one day reach as far as the United States

Senator John McCain, who chairs the Senate committee, asked General Brooks how concerned he was about the 'immaturity and unpredictability of the rotund ruler in Pyongyang'.

General Brooks, replied: 'I'm very concerned about the direction he's going, and it's evident that he's not yet deterred from his pursuit.'

The US has kept thousands of troops in South Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

The two Koreas technically remain at war, because the conflict ended in an armistice instead of a peace treaty.

Timeline of Kim Jong-un's progress in developing nuclear weapons

China supported the North in the Korean War but Beijing eschewed hardline communism and embraced free market economics in the 1990s and it has become increasingly exasperated by the antics of Kim, who came to power after the death of his father Kim Jong-il in 2011.

There are around 28,500 US troops stationed in South Korea, who are intended as a deterrent to any North Korean adventurism.

General Brooks said of North Korea's plans to build submarine-launched ballistic missiles: 'While they have not been successful, this is like watching someone ride a bike and falling off of it, but eventually they could become a BMX champion.'

Pyongyang last week conducted a test of what appeared to be a medium-range missile, but the rocket suffered a catastrophic failure on launch.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un smiles as he visits a test firing of a new multiple launch rocket system in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) last month

Washington and Seoul are discussing deploying a sophisticated Theater High Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD), to protect against ballistic missiles from the North.

The South Korean government report pointed out that it took the US seven years to miniaturise a nuclear warhead back in the 1960s while the Soviet Union took six and China only two years.

North Korea is thought to be planning another nuclear test in the run-up to its next Party Congress on May 7.

South Korean defence ministry spokesman Moon Sang-kyun said their military is on standby for any provocations.

But South Korean analyst Yang Moo-jin told CBS News that China could pressure North Korea into postponing another nuclear test.
Russian foreign minister insists Syria peace talks 'not frozen'

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday insisted that Syria peace talks in Geneva were "not frozen" as he slammed main opposition chiefs for walking out.

Lavrov said that while the main opposition High Negotiations Committee has announced it is putting its participation on hold, a government delegation and other groups are still taking part.

"The talks are not frozen," Lavrov said at a press conference with French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault in Moscow.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, pictured on April 19, 2016, insisted that Syria peace talks in Geneva were "not frozen" Vasily Maximov (AFP)

"We are coming from the position that (UN envoy) Staffan de Mistura is continuing his shuttle diplomacy with those who are not trying to put forward ultimatums and conditions," Lavrov said.

Delegates from the opposition High Negotiations Committee were leaving Geneva after the group suspended its formal participation to protest escalating violence and restrictions on humanitarian access.

Lavrov blasted the HNC opposition group as "capricious participants in the talks who are spoilt by their external patrons".

"They imagined that they could insist on what would be the agenda for the negotiations, stating that it needs to be clear for the start of these negotiations when and how (President Bashar al-Assad) will cease to lead Syria," Lavrov said.

"No one can win the war. All experts recognise this," Lavrov said. "There are some external players who dream about deposing the regime by force and try to do everything including disrupting the talks in Geneva."

The United Nations has insisted the talks have not collapsed, with de Mistura saying they would continue through the week.

He said that the indirect talks format -- which has seen the HNC and Assad's representatives meet separately with UN mediators -- created flexibility to continue the discussions.

This week's talks are meant to focus on Syria's political future, as the UN pushes a plan involving a transitional authority, a new constitution and eventual elections.
Israel says still wants Aqsa cameras after Jordan reneges

Israel remains in favour of installing security cameras at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, even after Jordan reneged on the project due to Palestinian reservations, a senior official said Tuesday.

"Israel's support for placing cameras on the Temple Mount remains unchanged. That's because we believe in transparency," the Israeli official told AFP on condition of anonymity, using the Jewish term for the site.

"It is regrettable that the Palestinian Authority objects to this idea. It's clear that they don't want repeated Palestinian provocations caught on tape," the official said.

A poster, calling for the destruction of CCTV cameras, is seen on a column at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem on April 8, 2016 Ahmad Gharabli (AFP)

Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Nsur had on Monday announced his state would not be proceeding with its plan to install 55 cameras at the site, Islam's third holiest, citing Palestinian "doubts about the aims of the project".

"Because we respect the point of view of the Palestinians... we believe the project is no longer consensual, but a potential source of conflict, and have decided to end it," he said.

On March 20, Jordan said it would set up the security cameras around the flashpoint compound to monitor any Israeli "violations".

The site, which is revered by Jews as their holiest, is administered by a Jordanian trust or "Waqf".

In October, after meeting Jordan's King Abdullah II and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, US Secretary of State John Kerry endorsed a plan for cameras at the site in a bid to calm repeated disturbances.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed.

Kerry hailed the agreement as an important breakthrough at the time. On Monday the US State Department expressed disappointment that the plan has apparently failed.

"We still see the value in the use of cameras," said spokesman John Kirby.

The compound in east Jerusalem, which was occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed in a move not recognised internationally, houses the famed golden Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque.

Clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli security forces erupted at the compound last September amid fears among Muslims that Israel was planning to change rules governing the site which enable only Muslims to pray.
Red Cross says three workers missing in Mali

The International Red Cross on Tuesday said three of its workers were being held in northeastern Mali by an unidentified group.

The team were flagged down in their vehicle "by someone on a motorbike, who told them to follow him," Valery Mbaoh Nana, the spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the Malian capital Bamako, told AFP.

The incident happened on Saturday as the team were driving out of Abeibara, in the north of Kidal region, at the end of a three-day assignment, he said.

The International Red Cross said three of its workers were being held in northeastern Mali by an unidentified group

Four were in the vehicle at the time, one of whom was later released, the spokesman said.

That individual told the ICRC that the previous night, the four had camped in an area where French forces in the Barkhane anti-terror mission were carrying out operations, Nana said.

"During the operation, it seems that their guide was arrested," he said.

Another source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP "the kidnappers have called for the release of the guide" before they release the three workers.

The ICRC said in a statement on Monday it had "lost contact with three of its workers" on Saturday and that the reasons for their disappearance were currently unknown. It did not give their identities or nationalities.

- 'Acceptable conditions' -

Mbaoh Nana on Tuesday said that according to information that had reached the ICRC, the three "are being held in acceptable conditions. They are not being tortured, they have not been physically maltreated." He gave no details about which group or community was believed to be holding them.

Several armed groups -- former rebels, pro-government groups and jihadists -- are active in northern Mali, a vast area that four years ago came under the control of organisations linked to Al Qaeda.

The jihadists were forced out of key towns by an international operation led by France, but swathes of territory remain lawless.

In a separate development on Tuesday, the UN mission to Mali, MINUSMA, reported that two demonstrators had died in Kidal, in the northeast of the country, in a protest against foreign forces on Monday.

Local protesters had forced their way onto an airport runway used by UN and French soldiers supporting Malian forces.

On Monday, a source in MINUSMA said "at least one civilian" was killed. A Kidal resident said UN troops had "fired on the crowd."

The group mostly comprised women and young people angry at what they considered to be frequent cases of arbitrary detention, according to ex-rebels of Mali's Coordination of Movements of the Azawad (CMA), which has a significant presence in the area.

A Guinean MINUSMA soldier told AFP the protesters were demanding the release of three men arrested in connection with the killings of French soldiers who died in a mine blast on April 12.
Danish lawmakers back expanding IS fight from Iraq to Syria

Danish lawmakers on Tuesday approved a plan to commit F-16 warplanes, a transport aircraft and 400 military personnel to expand the country's fight against the Islamic State jihadist group from Iraq to Syria.

In a 90-19 vote, only three small leftist parties opposed the proposal, which was announced last month by Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen.

"The brutal and ruthless terrorist organisation IS should meet a powerful response from the outside world," Rasmussen said in a statement.

Starting from "mid 2016", the Danish contribution to the fight against Islamic State jihadists will consist of seven F-16 warplanes -- four of them operational at any one time Henning Bagger (Scanpix/AFP/File)

Starting from "mid 2016", the Danish contribution will consist of seven F-16 warplanes -- four of them operational at any one time -- a C130J transport aircraft and 400 military personnel, including 60 special forces troops.

Nikolaj Villumsen, a lawmaker for the leftist Red Green Alliance, said during the parliamentary debate that Denmark was "once again on its way into a misguided war that could destabilise Iraq and Syria further".

The US heads an international coalition that is carrying out strikes against IS and also providing training and assistance to forces fighting the jihadists in both Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

Denmark is a member of the coalition but previously only had a mandate to intervene in Iraq.

From October 2014 until October 2015, it had seven F-16s fighting IS in Iraq.
US, Iran make progress on nuclear deal implementation

The United States and Iran made progress Tuesday on implementing an international nuclear deal during a UN meeting of the countries' chief diplomats, who said they would meet again on Friday.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met for two-and-a-half hours after Tehran complained that it was not receiving enough sanctions relief.

"We worked on a number of key things today, we made some progress on it," Kerry said.

US Secretary of State John Kerry (R) with Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on April 19, 2016 at the UN in New York Don Emmert (AFP)

"We are both working at making sure that the JCPOA - the Iran nuclear agreement -- is implemented in exactly the way that it is meant to be and that all the parties to that agreement get the benefits that they are supposed to get out of the agreement," he added.

Zarif confirmed that the talks touched on ensuring "that we will draw the benefits that Iran is entitled to from the implementation of the agreement."

"We agreed that we will continue to work on this and meet again on Friday to see how best we can put the necessary measures into operation and into motion in order to make sure the benefits will be there for Iranian people to enjoy," he added.

Iranian officials have complained that the United States has not lived up to its side of the agreement, as Western banks and corporations have been reluctant to renew business ties.

But Washington has also pointed the finger at Tehran, warning that it retains the right to impose new sanctions over Iran's ballistic missile tests.
'Concerned' UN pushes South Sudan's Machar to return to Juba

The UN Security Council expressed "serious concern" on Tuesday over delays in the return of South Sudan's rebel leader Riek Machar to the capital Juba as part of a peace deal.

The 15-member council met behind closed doors at the request of the United States to hear a report on the latest hurdle in the way of the agreement to end the two-year civil war.

Council members "urged all parties to quickly form the transitional government and fully implement the peace agreement," said Chinese Deputy Ambassador Wu Haitao, whose country holds the council presidency.

South Sudan's rebel leader Riek Machar, pictured on January 26, 2016, failed to return to the capital Isaac Kasamani (AFP/File)

UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous told the council that there had been disagreements over security arrangements allowing rebel forces to be stationed in Juba in advance of Machar's arrival, which was supposed to have been on Monday.

But he said he was hopeful that Machar would return on Wednesday, diplomats said.

The council called on all sides to "remain calm" and said it was "ready to address any obstruction of implementation of the agreement," although it did not specify which measures were envisaged.

Under the peace deal, Machar was to join President Salva Kiir in a new 30-month transitional government leading to elections.

The deal is to end a devastating war that erupted in December 2013 after Kiir fell out with Machar, who was his deputy.

"The United States is extremely disappointed that Riek Machar has not fulfilled his commitments under the peace agreement and returned to Juba as he stated publicly he would," said US Deputy Ambassador David Pressman.

"We expect Riek Machar and all parties to live up to their commitments under the peace agreement and do their part to establish the transitional government."

Tens of thousands of people have died in the fighting and more than two million have been driven from their homes.

Machar was supposed to return to Juba for the first time since the war began from his tribal stronghold of Pagak in the east of the country to formally take up his post as vice president.

Speaking to reporters at Juba airport, rebel spokesmen William Ezekiel said on Tuesday that unspecified "issues relating to logistics" were to blame for the latest delay. He was unable to say when Machar might arrive.

South Sudan's information minister Michael Makuei said the government had blocked Machar's flight because he wanted to bring "machine guns and laser-guided missiles" as well as additional troops in violation of the peace agreement.
British Airways flight believed to hit drone on approach

LONDON (AP)  Police say a British Airways flight from Geneva hit an object believed to be a drone while on approach to London's Heathrow Airport.

The airline says the plane landed safely Sunday afternoon and has been cleared for its next flight. The Airbus A320 was carrying 132 passengers and five crew members.

No arrests have been made and police are investigating the incident.
S. Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of 'vagrants'

BUSAN, South Korea (AP)  The 14-year-old boy in the black school jacket stared at his sneakers, his heart pounding, as the policeman accused him of stealing a piece of bread.

Even now, more than 30 years later, Choi Seung-woo weeps when he describes all that happened next. The policeman yanked down the boy's pants and sparked a cigarette lighter near Choi's genitals until he confessed to a crime he didn't commit. Then two men with clubs came and dragged Choi off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.

A guard in Choi's dormitory raped him that night in 1982  and the next, and the next. So began five hellish years of slave labor and near-daily assaults, years in which Choi saw men and women beaten to death, their bodies carted away like garbage.

ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates, child inmates line up for morning assembly at the Brothers Home in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation shows that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. It also reveals that the secrecy around Brothers has persisted for decades because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government.(Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES, NO ARCHIVE

Choi was one of thousands  the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled  rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea's arrival as a modern country. An Associated Press investigation shows that the abuse of these so-called vagrants at Brothers, the largest of dozens of such facilities, was much more vicious and widespread than previously known, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates.

Yet nobody has been held accountable to date for the rapes and killings at the Brothers compound because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government, the AP found. Two early attempts to investigate were suppressed by senior officials who went on to thrive in high-profile jobs; one remains a senior adviser to the current ruling party. Products made using slave labor at Brothers were sent to Europe, Japan and possibly beyond, and the family that owned the institution continued to run welfare facilities and schools until just two years ago.

Even as South Korea prepares for its second Olympics, in 2018, thousands of traumatized former inmates have still received no compensation, let alone public recognition or an apology. The few who now speak out want a new investigation.

The current government, however, refuses to revisit the case, and is blocking a push by an opposition lawmaker to do so on the grounds that the evidence is too old.

Ahn Jeong-tae, an official from Seoul's Ministry of the Interior, said focusing on just one human rights incident would financially burden the government and set a bad precedent. The Brothers' victims, he said, should have submitted their case to a temporary truth-finding commission established in the mid-2000s to investigate past atrocities.

"We can't make separate laws for every incident and there have been so many incidents since the Korean War," Ahn said.

Former inmates, however, cannot forget. One spent months standing quietly in front of the National Assembly with a signboard demanding justice. Choi has attempted suicide several times and now attends weekly therapy sessions.

"The government has consistently tried to bury what happened. How do you fight that? If we spoke up, who would have heard us?" he asked. "I am wailing, desperate to tell our story. Please listen to us."

___

"HELL WITHIN A HELL"

Once an orphanage, Brothers Home at its peak had more than 20 factories churning out woodwork, metalwork, clothing, shoes and other goods made by mostly unpaid inmates. The sprawling compound of concrete buildings rose above the southern port city of Busan, its inmates hidden from view by tall walls and kept there by guards who carried bats and patrolled with dogs.

The horrors that happened behind those walls are inextricably linked to South Korea's modern history.

The country at the time was still recovering from the near-total devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War, which followed nearly four decades of brutal Japanese colonization. From the 1960s until the '80s, before democracy, it was ruled by military dictators who focused overwhelmingly on improving the economy.

In 1975, dictator President Park Chung-hee, father of current President Park Geun-hye, issued a directive to police and local officials to "purify" city streets of vagrants. Police officers, assisted by shop owners, rounded up panhandlers, small-time street merchants selling gum and trinkets, the disabled, lost or unattended children, and dissidents, including a college student who'd been holding anti-government leaflets.

They ended up as prisoners at 36 nationwide facilities. By 1986, the number of inmates had jumped over five years from 8,600 to more than 16,000, according to government documents obtained by AP.

Nearly 4,000 were at Brothers. But about 90 percent of them didn't even meet the government's definition of "vagrant" and therefore shouldn't have been confined there, former prosecutor Kim Yong Won told the AP, based on Brothers' records and interviews compiled before government officials ended his investigation.

The inner workings of Brothers are laid bare by former inmate Lee Chae-sik, who had extraordinary access as personal assistant to the man in charge of enforcing the rules. The AP independently verified many of the details provided by Lee, now 46, through government documents.

Lee was sent to Brothers at 13 after trouble at school. His first job was in a medical ward. Twice a day, Lee and four others, none of whom had medical training, would try to care for patients, often dousing their open wounds with disinfectant or removing maggots with tweezers.

"People screamed in pain, but we couldn't do much," Lee said. "It was a hell within a hell. The patients had been left there to die."

Stronger inmates raped and beat the weak and stole their food, he said. Lee attempted suicide after a guard at the medical ward raped him.

A year later, he was made personal assistant to chief enforcer Kim Kwang-seok, who like other guards at Brothers was an inmate raised to power by the owner because of his loyalty. Many former inmates remember Kim as the facility's most feared man. The AP tried repeatedly to track Kim down but could not find him.

Lee said he was present when Kim, a short, stocky man with sunburned skin, led near-daily, often fatal beatings at the compound's "corrections room." Lee accompanied Kim as he compiled a twice-a-day tally of the sick and dead for the owner; four or five daily deaths were often on the list.

A scene recounted by Lee provides a firsthand account of the efficient, almost casually evil way the facility worked. One morning, Kim approached owner Park In-keun on his daily jog to report that yet another inmate had been beaten to death the night before. The boy heard Park order Kim to bury the body in the hills behind the compound's walls.

___

MONEY FROM SLAVES

The violence at Brothers happened in the shadow of a massive money-making operation partly based on slave labor. The factories were ostensibly meant to train inmates for future jobs. But by the end of 1986, Brothers saw a profit from 11 of them, according to Busan city government documents obtained exclusively by the AP.

The documents show that Brothers should have paid the current equivalent of $1.7 million to more than 1,000 inmates for their dawn-to-dusk work over an unspecified period. However, facility records and interviews with inmates at the time suggest that, instead, most of the nearly 4,000 people at Brothers were subject to forced labor without pay, according to prosecutor Kim.

Another probe at the time, quickly scrapped by the government, showed that "nearly none" of about 100 inmates interviewed received payment. None of 20 former inmates interviewed by the AP received money while at Brothers either, though three got small payments later.

Adults worked on construction jobs, both at Brothers and off-site. Children sometimes hauled dirt and built walls, but mostly they assembled ballpoint pens and fishing hooks.

Some products were tied to other countries. For example, dress shirts made at Brothers' sewing factory were sent to Europe, and inmates were trained by employees at Daewoo, a major clothing exporter during the 1980s to the United States and other markets, according to the owner's autobiography. Park, the owner, said officials from Daewoo had toured the facility before offering a partnership. Daewoo International spokesman Kim Jin-ho said it was impossible to confirm such details because of a lack of records from the time.

Inmates during the 1970s recounted spending long hours tying fishing lines to hooks for packages with Japanese writing on them, for export to Japan.

Kim Hee-gon, an inmate at Brothers for eight years, said he and his colleagues were beaten severely in the early 1970s after thousands of such packages shipped to Japan were returned because they were faulty or missing hooks. Park Gyeong-bo, who was confined at Brothers from 1975 to 1980, remembered sneaker bottoms produced with the logo of Kukje Sangsa, a now-defunct company that manufactured shoes for the United States and Europe in the 1970s and 80s.

The operation thrived because everybody benefited, except the inmates.

Local officials needed somewhere to put the vagrants they were charged with corralling, so each year they renewed a contract with Brothers that required an inspection of how the inmates were treated and of how the facility was financially managed. Brothers got government subsidies based on its number of inmates, so it pushed police to round up more vagrants, the early probe found. And police officers were often promoted depending on how many vagrants they picked up.

Two Busan city officials would say only that the facts are difficult to confirm now because the facility closed three decades ago. Heo Gwi-yong, a spokesman for the Busan Metropolitan Police Agency, said he couldn't confirm any details for the same reason.

The owner of Brothers, Park, received two state medals for social welfare achievements and sat on a government advisory panel. His version of his story even inspired a 1985 television drama about a man's heroic devotion to caring for what were called "bottom-life people."

Park eventually served a short prison stint for embezzlement and other relatively minor charges, but not for the abuse at Brothers. When the facility was at last raided in 1987, investigators found a vault in Park's office filled with the current equivalent of about $5 million in U.S. and Japanese currencies and certificates of deposit.

In his autobiography, in court hearings and in talks with close associates, Park has denied wrongdoing and maintained that he simply followed government orders. Repeated attempts to contact him through family, friends and activists were unsuccessful.

The AP, however, tracked down the former second-highest management official at Brothers, Lim Young-soon, who bristled in a telephone interview at descriptions of corruption, violence and slavery at the facility. Lim, a Protestant pastor now in Australia who is the brother of Park's wife, said Park was a "devoted" social worker who made Busan better by cleaning its streets of troublemakers. He said Brothers' closure "damaged national interests."

Lim acknowledged beating deaths at Brothers, but said they were caused by clashes between inmates. He attributed the facility's high death toll to the many inmates he said arrived there in poor physical and mental health.

"These were people who would have died in the streets anyway," Lim said.

___

"I DIDN'T LIVE AS A HUMAN"

While Park raked in the money, the death toll mounted and the inmates struggled to survive.

On his second day at Brothers, still dazed from his brutal rape the night before, Choi waited with other children to be stripped and washed. He said he watched a guard drag a woman by her hair and then beat her with a club until blood flowed from her head.

"I just stood there, trembling like a leaf," Choi, 46, said. "I couldn't even scream when the platoon leader later raped me again."

Another time, Choi recalled, he saw seven guards knock down a screaming man, cover him with a blue blanket and stomp and beat him. Blood seeped through the blanket. When it fell away, the dead man's eyes had rolled back into his head.

Death tallies compiled by the facility claimed 513 people died between 1975 and 1986; the real toll was almost certainly higher. Prosecutor Kim interviewed multiple inmates who said facility officials refused to send people to hospitals until they were nearly dead for fear of escape.

"The facility was Park's kingdom, and violence was how he ruled," Kim said of the owner. "When you are confined to a place where people are getting beaten to death every day, you aren't likely to complain too much about forced labor, abuse or getting raped."

Most of the new arrivals at Brothers were in relatively good health, government documents show. Yet at least 15 inmates were dead within just a month of arrival in 1985, and 22 in 1986.

Of the more than 180 documented deaths at Brothers in 1985 and 1986, 55 of the death certificates were issued by a single doctor, Chung Myung-kuk, according to internal facility documents, interviews and records compiled by Kim. Chung, now dead, mostly listed the cause of death as "heart failure" and "general weakness."

Life at Brothers began before dawn, as inmates washed and got ready for mandatory 5:30 a.m. prayers, transmitted by loudspeaker from the facility's Presbyterian church. After a morning run, they ate breakfast and then headed to factories or construction sites.

When city officials, foreign missionaries or aid workers visited, a select group of healthy inmates worked for hours to prepare a sanitized version of Brothers for the guests. Guards locked everyone else in their dormitories. Choi said inmates watched hopelessly as these clueless do-gooders trooped through.

"We were trapped in a prison. But who could help us? No one," Choi said.

Once the doors were locked at 6 p.m., Choi said, the guards unleashed "uncontrolled violence" upon the 60 to 100 kids in his dormitory, including frequent rapes.

A principal at a Busan school who once taught at Brothers acknowledged that inmates were held against their will, and even called the facility a massive concentration camp. However, the principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was worried about his reputation, staunchly defended its practices. He said severe violence and military-style discipline were the only ways to run a place filled with thousands of unruly people who didn't want to be there.

Park Sun-yi, who had been snatched by police at age 9 from a Busan train station in 1980, was one of the few to escape.

She had watched as the guards reserved their most ruthless beatings, the kind where inmates sometimes didn't recover, for those who tried to run. But after five years, she said, she became "consumed with the thought that my life might be like this forever and that I might die here."

She and five other girls used a broken saw from the ironwork factory to file away bars on a second-floor window at night, little by little, reattaching them with gum each morning. At last, they squeezed themselves out, scaled a wall embedded with broken glass and fled into the hills.

When she finally walked through the door of her family home in Munsan, she said, her father fainted.

___

"JUST WAITING TO DIE"

The unraveling of Brothers began by accident.

While pheasant hunting, Kim, then a newly appointed prosecutor in the city of Ulsan, heard from his guide about men with wooden bats and large dogs guarding bedraggled prisoners on a nearby mountain. When they drove there, the men said they were building a ranch for the owner of the Brothers Home in nearby Busan. Kim knew immediately, he said, that he'd stumbled onto "a very serious crime."

On a frigid January evening in 1987, Kim led 10 policemen in a surprise raid past the facility's high walls, imposing steel gates and gape-mouthed guards. Inside, he found battered and malnourished inmates locked in overcrowded dormitories. The inmates gave the unexpected visitors crisp, military-style salutes.

"I remember thinking, 'This isn't a welfare facility; it's a concentration camp,'" Kim, now 61 and a managing partner at a Seoul law firm, said. People lay coughing and moaning in a squalid sick ward, "just waiting to die."

After the owner was arrested, he demanded a meeting with Kim's boss, the chief Busan prosecutor, who then supervised Ulsan. A day later, Busan Mayor Kim Joo-ho, who died in 2014, called Kim to plead for Park's release. Kim said he politely declined and hung up.

At every turn, Kim said, high-ranking officials blocked his investigation, in part out of fear of an embarrassing international incident on the eve of the Olympics. President Chun Doo-hwan, who took power in a coup after Park Chung-hee was assassinated, didn't need another scandal as he tried to fend off huge pro-democracy protests.

Internal prosecution records reveal several instances where Kim noted intense pressure from Chun's office to curb his probe and push for lighter punishment for the owner. Kim had to reassure presidential officials directly and regularly that his investigation wouldn't expand.

Park Hee-tae, then Busan's head prosecutor and later the nation's justice minister, relentlessly pushed to reduce the scope of the investigation, Kim said, including forcing him to stop his efforts to interview every inmate at Brothers. Park, a senior adviser to the current ruling party, has repeatedly denied AP interview requests. His personal secretary said Park can't remember details about the investigation.

Despite interference, Kim eventually collected bank records and financial transactions indicating that, in 1985 and 1986 alone, the owner of Brothers embezzled what would be the current equivalent of more than $3 million. That came from about $10 million of government subsidies meant to feed and clothe the inmates and maintain the facilities. However, Kim said, the chief Busan prosecutor forced Kim to list the embezzlement as nearly half the amount he had actually found so that a life sentence couldn't be pursued under the law at the time.

Kim said his bosses also prevented him from charging the owner, Park, or anyone else for the suspected widespread abuse at the Brothers compound, and limited the prosecutor to pursuing much narrower abuse linked to the construction site Kim found while hunting.

Kim demanded a 15-year prison term for Park. After a lengthy battle, the Supreme Court in 1989 gave Park 2 years in prison for embezzlement and violations of construction, grassland management and foreign currency laws. He was acquitted of charges linked to off-site abuse. Only two guards received prison terms, one for 1 years and another for eight months.

After prison, Park continued to earn money from welfare facilities and land sales. The Brothers site was purchased in 2001 by a construction company for what would now be about $27 million, according to a copy of the land sale shown to the AP. One of Park's daughters operated a school for troubled kids that closed in 2013. His family in 2014 sold a home for the severely disabled.

___

UNFORGETTABLE PAIN

The legacy of Brothers lingers.

It finally closed its gates in 1988. In the 1990s, construction laborers dug up about 100 human bones on the patch of mountain just outside where it stood, according to one of the workers who found the bones, Lee Jin-seob. Blankets covering the bones and the lack of burial mounds made Lee think they'd been buried informally and quickly. It's unclear what happened to the remains.

On a recent trip to the site, which is now covered with tall apartment buildings, ex-inmates Choi and Lee Chae-sik stood on a concrete-covered former water reservoir that they think is the only remaining physical trace of Brothers. Both recalled the sight of guards carrying corpses into the woods.

"There could be hundreds of bodies still out there," Lee said, pointing toward the steep slopes.

Inmates released from the facility ended up homeless and in shelters and mental institutions; many struggle with alcoholism, depression, rage, shame and poverty. Choi, whose back is covered by a large tattoo from his time in a gang after he left Brothers, was imprisoned for assaulting a policeman.

The few former inmates who have begun speaking out want justice: an apology and an admission that officials encouraged police to kidnap and lock away people who shouldn't have been confined.

"How can we ever forget the pain from the beatings, the dead bodies, the backbreaking labor, the fear ... all the bad memories," Lee, who now manages a lakeside motel, said. "It will haunt us until we die."

___

Follow Foster Klug, the AP's Seoul bureau chief, on Twitter at twitter.com/apklug. Follow reporter Kim Tong-hyung at twitter.com/kimtonghyung

This undated photo shows the Brothers Home compound in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (Yonhap via AP) KOREA OUT

In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates at the Brothers Home, owner Park In-keun, right, shakes hands with then South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. It also reveals that the secrecy around Brothers has persisted for decades because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government.(Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES, NO ARCHIVE

In this Dec. 22, 2014, photo, Kim Yong Won, the former prosecutor who was in charge of the Brothers Home case, speaks during an interview at his office in Seoul, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates at the Brothers Home, guards unload children from a truck in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation shows that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. It also reveals that the secrecy around Brothers has persisted for decades because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government.(Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES, NO ARCHIVE

In this December 1986, photo provided by the Ulsan District Prosector's Office, Brothers Home inmates work at a construction site in Ulsan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (Ulsan District Prosecutors' Office via AP)

In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Lee Chae-sik talks as he walks up a hill behind a row of apartments at the former location of the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo shows an old photo of the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo, left, and Lee Chae-sik talk as they stand in front of an apartment complex at the former location of the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo examines a lock on what he says was a water tank left from the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
Tuesday, April 26

Today is Tuesday, April 26, the 117th day of 2016. There are 249 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

1478 - Guiliano de Medici is killed during Mass at the cathedral in Florence in an unsuccessful coup attempt by the Pazzi family against the Medicis.

1532 - Suleiman I, Sultan of Turkey, invades Hungary and advances toward Vienna.

1607 - Captain John Smith lands at Cape Henry, Virginia, with the first group of colonists to establish a permanent English settlement in America.

1798 - France declares war on Austria.

1807 - Russia and Prussia form alliance to drive France out of German states.

1828 - Russia declares war on Turkey.

1860 - Spain and Morocco sign peace agreement.

1865 - John Wilkes Booth, assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, is surrounded and killed by troops near Bowling Green, Virginia.

1872 - Civil war breaks out in Spain.

1885 - Britain occupies Port Hamilton, Korea.

1886 - Major powers send ultimatum to Greece to halt support for revolution against Ottomans in Eastern Rumelia, now in Bulgaria.

1937 - In the Spanish civil war, German planes bomb the town of Guernica, killing between 1,000 to 1,650 people. Painter Pablo Picasso later immortalized their suffering in one of his masterpieces.

1945 - Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France's Vichy government during World War II, is arrested.

1954 - Member countries of the United Nations meet in Geneva and insist on free elections in Korea.

1962 - First international satellite is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida  a U.S.-British venture.

1964 - African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania.

1966 - Mt. Kelud in Java, Indonesia, erupts, killing 1,000 people. It is the second eruption since 1919, when it claimed 5,000 lives.

1966 - A sidewinder missile, launched by a U.S. jet plane, shoots down the first Communist MIG-21 in the Vietnam War.

1971 - White House commission recommends that China be brought into United Nations, with Nationalist China (Taiwan) retaining its membership.

1986 - The world's worst nuclear accident occurs at the Chernobyl plant in the Soviet Union when a reactor meltdown in a power plant exposes hundreds of thousands of civilians to dangerous radioactive material. Thirty-two people die immediately.

1989 - Chinese students march to central Beijing to protest government statements condemning their campaign for democracy.

1990 - Leftist Colombian presidential candidate, Carlos Pizarro, is assassinated aboard Colombian airliner. A drug cartel claims and later denies responsibility.

1992 - Moscow residents celebrate first Russian Orthodox Easter in 74 years.

1993 - An Indian airliner hits a truck on takeoff and crashes in Aurangabad, India, killing 56 people.

1994 - Taiwanese airliner crashes in Japan, killing all 264 aboard.

1996 - After 16 days, Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon agree to a truce to end a blitz that had left more than 150 people dead and forced a half-million people to flee.

1997 - Banners of loyalty and life-size images of Saddam Hussein adorn Iraq's capital, as Iraqis begin seven days of festivities in celebration of his 60th birthday.

1998 - Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a leading human rights activist in Guatemala, is bludgeoned to death two days after a report he compiled on atrocities during Guatemala's 36-year civil war was made public.

1999 - The Chernobyl computer virus, perhaps the most destructive so far, damages hundreds of thousands of computers around the world.

2000 - Vermont Governor Howard Dean signs the United States' first bill allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions.

2002 - The U.N. Commission on Human Rights in its annual review of human rights censures Cuba's human rights policies but drops official condemnations of Russia and Iran.

2003 - Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf rejects demands from opposition leaders that he give up his role as chief of the military.

2005 - Syria's last soldier in Lebanon walks across the border, a quiet end to a once indomitable 29-year military presence that was the key to Damascus' control of its neighbor.

2006 - European Union lawmakers announce findings that the CIA has conducted more than 1,000 clandestine flights in Europe since 2001, and some of them secretly took away terror suspects to countries where they could face torture.

2007 - Thousands of Buddhist monks demonstrate outside the Thailand parliament building to demand that the country's new constitution enshrine Buddhism as the official national religion.

2008 - Zimbabwe's electoral commission says a recount of votes for 10 parliamentary seats shows the opposition won six of them in last month's elections, making it unlikely that Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party can wrest control of parliament.

2009 - World governments race to avoid both a pandemic and global hysteria as more possible swine flu cases surface from New Zealand to Canada and the United States declares a public health emergency.

2010 - Gunmen shoot and kill a Nigerian journalist at his home the same day two others die while attempting to cover fighting between Christians and Muslims in the nation's restive central highlands, highlighting the daily dangers confronting local journalists in Africa's most populous nation.

2011 - Syrian forces heap more punishment on residents of restive towns, detaining hundreds in raids or at checkpoints, firing on people trying to retrieve the bodies of anti-government protesters and even shooting holes in rooftop water tanks in a region parched by drought.

2012 - Pakistani authorities deport Osama bin Laden's three widows and his children to Saudi Arabia, less than a week before the first anniversary of the unilateral American raid that killed the al-Qaida leader in his hideout in a military town.

2013 - Rescuers dig through mangled metal and concrete in a collapsed garment factory building in Bangladesh and find more survivors but also more corpses, pushing the death total past 300.

2014 - South Korea's prime minister offers to resign over the government's handling of a deadly ferry sinking, blaming "deep-rooted evils" and societal irregularities for a tragedy that left more than 300 people dead or missing and led to widespread shame, fury and finger-pointing.

2015 - Tens of thousands of Nepalese who spent the night under a chilly sky were jolted awake by strong aftershocks, while rescuers aided by international teams cleared rubble in search of survivors after a powerful earthquake killed nearly 2,000 people.

Today's Birthdays:

Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter, engineer, sculptor and architect (1452-1519); David Hume, Scottish philosopher-historian-economist (1711-1776); Alfred Krupp, German metallurgist-industrialist (1812-1887); W.F. Massey, New Zealand politician (1856-1925); Carol Burnett, U.S. actress (1933--); Giancarlo Esposito, U.S. actor (1958--); Joan Chen, Chinese actress (1961--).

Thought for Today:
Standoff halts traffic, work for hours at California Capitol

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  A vehicle covered in scribbled writing blocked traffic across from the California Capitol on Monday, stopping traffic for hours, leading police to close nearby businesses and disrupting government operations as officers tried to talk to a man inside before he was taken into custody.

The man inside the suspicious car voluntarily surrendered around 4 p.m., stepping out of the car more than two hours after the standoff began, said Officer Matthew McPhail of the Sacramento Police. Hours later police had found a device deemed suspicious in the man's trunk and were working to render it safe.

"Even though the man is now out of the vehicle, we don't yet know the entirety of why he was here or what his purpose was," McPhail said.

A man barricades himself in his car while blocking an intersection on the north side of the state Capitol Monday, April 18, 2016 in Sacramento, Calif. A standoff near the California Capitol is over after a vehicle covered in scribbled writing blocked traffic and stalled business for several hours. Sacramento police said a suspect in a suspicious car voluntarily surrendered Monday. (Randy Pench/The Sacramento Bee via AP) MAGS OUT; LOCAL TELEVISION OUT (KCRA3, KXTV10, KOVR13, KUVS19, KMAZ31, KTXL40); MANDATORY CREDIT

The man could be seen raising his hands and wearing a black tank top and red sweat pants as he surrendered.

The Sacramento Bee spoke to the man's roommates and checked the car's records at the Department of Motor Vehicles to identify him as Edgar Napoles Rodriguez, 28, of Sacramento.

One of the roommates, Karla Garcia, said that Rodriguez had been acting so strange and frightening lately that they had received a restraining order against him on Thursday.

Garcia said Rodriguez had threatened her, had put a propane tank from a barbecue grill into their apartment's oven and had torn down curtains to make a flag. "He went to my room with a bat, and I was scared and ran outside and called the police," she told the Bee (http://bit.ly/1VfptUG ).

Garcia said Rodriguez was angry at his estranged wife, with whom he has a child, but she has no idea what his motivation might have been for the standoff at the Capitol. "I don't know what he's trying to say, or what he's trying to do," she said.

Rodriguez parked in the middle of a busy street outside the north entrance to the Statehouse around 1:45 p.m., blocking three lanes of traffic, leading police to close restaurants and clear businesses for several blocks.

The state Assembly ended business early Monday afternoon because of the standoff outside, and two of three entrances to the state Capitol were closed. Capitol tours continued, and visitors joined people who work downtown to watch the scene unfold throughout the afternoon.

McPhail said SWAT and hostage personnel tried to speak with the driver, who could be seen posting handwritten notes on the windshield, but he did not speak to them.

The street remained closed for hours after the man surrendered.

___

This story has been corrected to reflect that it is Officer Matthew McPhail, not Michael McPhail.
Hanks, movie-land ambassador to America, takes another trip

NEW YORK (AP)  Tom Hanks, great American, has been to some far-flung places in the service of Hollywood and country.

There's no working actor who more embodies America, or at least its most idealized, virtuous image of itself. It's one reason why Hanks has five times topped the annual Harris Poll, including this year, as the nation's most popular actor.

More than that, Hanks ranked as America's most trusted person in a 2013 Reader's Digest poll.

This image released by the Roadside Attractions shows Tom Hanks in a scene from "A Hologram for the King," a film being featured at the Tribeca Film Festival. (Siffedine Elamine/Roadside Attractions via AP)

Hanks has long played iconic Americans, both fictional (Forrest Gump) and real (Walt Disney in "Saving Mrs. Banks," Sully Sullenberger in the upcoming "Sully"). But many of his most indelible characters have been Americans abroad, including in his latest film, "A Hologram for the King."

The film, which premieres this week at the Tribeca Film Festival and opens in theaters Friday, is Tom Tykwer's adaptation of Dave Eggers' novel in which Hanks plays a struggling middle-aged American businessman who travels to the Saudi Arabian desert to pitch the king on an IT system for a new complex being built.

For Hanks, it's another stamp in a movie passport that includes Cold War-era Russia ("Bridge of Spies"), the dangerous waters off the coast of Somalia ("Captain Phillips") and a tiny South Pacific island ("Cast Away").

It's fitting that Hanks' all-American should be such an international one; his stardom coincides with decades of American imperialism in warfare and commercial expansion. With basic decency and good-humored candor, he has refracted American triumph ("Apollo 13") and tragedy (perishing in the Twin Towers in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close").

He's our funnier, less sure John Wayne for a more complicated time, a cowboy only as Sheriff Woody in "Toy Story." Who better to send on the country's behalf? Everybody loves Tom Hanks, movie-land ambassador to 20th Century America.

Here's a look at his many sojourns abroad:

BRIDGE OF SPIES: In Steven Spielberg's 2015 thriller, Hanks played the lawyer James B. Donovan for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). His idea of patriotism  including that all men, even national enemies, deserve their day in court  is at odds with the time and perhaps with today as well. When Donovan travels to Moscow, one feels Hanks could have, by himself, warmed away the Cold War.

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS: Paul Greengrass' docudrama of a Maersk cargo ship taken by Somali pirates may have taken some liberty with the details of the 2009 kidnapping and Navy Seal rescue. But few films have better captured America  this time a hardy New Englander  face-to-face with terrorism.

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR: Hard-drinking Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson was a more unlikely participant in a far-away battle in Mike Nichols' 2007 comic drama. The brash, can-do Wilson leads a program to support the Afghan mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan War, only to watch the U.S. fatefully withdraw once the Russians exited.

THE DA VINCI CODE: This and Ron Howard's sequel, "Angels and Demons," took Hanks to Paris' Louvre and the Vatican, seeking divine secrets in Old Europe in Dan Brown's best-sellers.

THE TERMINAL: Hanks didn't play an American in Spielberg's less-loved 2004 film but an Eastern European tourist forced to take up residency at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. It's a rare look at a country-less Hanks. But with all his traveling, it was inevitable he would at some point be waylaid.

CAST AWAY: The consummate Hanks abroad movie about just trying to make it home. What more does a humble FedEx employee need on a desert island than a friendly volley ball and an unbreakable spirit?

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: Hanks' first collaboration with Spielberg and his most heroic. On the timeline of Hanks' decorated Americans, none matches Captain John Miller  a small-town Pennsylvania schoolteacher who taught English composition before WWII  for courage. "Earn this," he tells Matt Damon's rescued soldier.

APOLLO 13: It's only fitting that the well-traveled Hanks would also make it to the final frontier and utter Jim Lovell's famous words: "Houston, we have a problem."

___

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

___

This story has been corrected to show the title is "The Da Vinci Code," not "The Da Vince Code."
Arabic-speaking student says he was victim of Islamophobia

LOS ANGELES (AP)  A college student and Iraqi refugee yanked from a Southwest Airlines flight after mentioning a terrorist group's name during a phone conversation in Arabic said Monday he was degraded and humiliated and wants a public apology.

Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, who arrived in the U.S. in 2010 as an Iraqi refugee, was removed from the April 9 flight from Los Angeles to Oakland, California, after the airline said another Arabic-speaking passenger reported hearing him say something that alarmed her.

The airline said in a statement that it regretted what occurred, but under federal regulations it had no alternative but to remove Makhzoomi.

Khairuldeen Makhzoomi talks during an interview in his office in Berkeley, Calif., Monday, April 18, 2016. A University of California, Berkeley student who came to the U.S. as an Iraqi refugee says he was unfairly removed from a flight at Los Angeles International Airport earlier this month because a fellow passenger was alarmed by an innocent conversation he was having in Arabic. Southwest Airlines said in a statement Sunday that the passenger, Makhzoomi, was taken off the April 9, 2016, flight from Los Angeles to Oakland, California, for questioning and the plane took off while that was happening. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)

"To be honest with you, I really was intimidated," Makhzoomi told The Associated Press on Monday. "It was an overwhelming process. They made me feel as if I were guilty."

He was released after being interrogated by Los Angeles International Airport police and FBI agents who, according to Makhzoomi, asked him about his thoughts on martyrdom. He said he angrily told them he had no interest in such matters, and they eventually believed him.

"The statement he made was not illegal, there was nothing that involved threats or anything like that, so he was released," airport police Officer Rob Pendregon said.

The 26-year-old University of California, Berkeley, senior said his troubles began as he was excitedly telling his uncle in Baghdad that he was on his way home after attending a speech by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

He said most of the conversation was mundane, covering subjects like who was there and what the food was like, but at one point he noted someone posed a question about the Islamic State group.

When he noticed a woman in the next row staring at him he told his uncle he'd call back later, adding he ended the conversation with the phrase "inshallah," meaning "God willing."

Two minutes later, he said, a Southwest employee approached and told him he'd have to leave the plane.

In the terminal he said the man, accompanied by three police officers, told him he should have known better than to speak in Arabic on an airplane, given how it might rattle people these days.

"I said, 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that,' " he said he replied.

The FBI was called, he said, after the employee blamed him for delaying the flight and he responded, "No, I think this is what Islamophobia got this country into."

After being released he was told he couldn't return home on a Southwest flight and his ticket was refunded.

"We would like the opportunity to speak with Mr. Makhzoomi further about his experience and have reached out to him several times," the airline said in a statement.

Makhzoomi said he did speak briefly with an airline representative Monday, but he told the woman the only thing he was interested in hearing was a public apology. Southwest did not respond to an email asking if that was a possibility.

Meanwhile, Makhzoomi said he's been contacted by people who have offered to put him in touch with top-notch lawyers if he wants to sue. Still, he said, all he really wants is the apology.

"I hope I can get that apology because we need to solve this problem," he said. "But we cannot solve any problem without mentioning what is the problem and that is that Islamophobia is real and it's been used by many people and it's time to say enough is enough."

___

Associated Press Video Journalist Haven Daley reported from Berkeley, California.
The majority of those who arrived in 2014 and 2015 were Central American

But data shows 80 percent are sent to sponsors who are in the U.S. illegally

The U.S. says it places the children regardless of adults' immigration status

The vast majority of immigrant children who arrive alone at the U.S. border are placed by the government with adults who are in the country illegally, federal data has revealed.

The U.S. government has long said that it places the children with family and friends regardless of immigration status.

But since more children began arriving on the border in 2014, officials have not revealed how often those sponsors had legal papers.

The vast majority of immigrant children who arrive alone at the U.S. border are placed by the government with adults who are in the country illegally, data has shown. Pictured are migrants from Central America in Texas

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Associated Press, the Department of Health and Human Services provided data showing that 80 percent of the 71,000 mostly Central American children placed between February 2014 and September 2015 were sent to sponsors who were not here legally.

Another 6 percent were placed with adults who had temporary protected status, a U.S. government program that has let some Central American citizens stay and work in the country legally for more than a decade.

Four percent were sponsored by American citizens and 1 percent by immigrants facing deportation proceedings.

Many of the others were placed with sponsors who had other forms of legal status or who have filed immigration applications.

Tens of thousands of children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras began arriving on the border in Texas in 2014, overwhelming border officials, overflowing government shelters and further backlogging the country's immigration courts.

Once apprehended by border agents, the children were placed in the care of Health and Human Services in line with U.S. law until caseworkers could screen and select suitable sponsors to care for them.

Republican lawmakers have blamed the border influx on Obama administration policies they say encourage kids to leave their countries and come here.

They say releasing unaccompanied children to sponsors who lack legal papers encourages illegal immigration and reduces the chances the children will attend deportation hearings in immigration court.

Immigrant advocates say the minors are fleeing violence and should be granted asylum. The top priority for children, they say, is to be placed with parents or close relatives so they can get on stable footing in the U.S. Any effort to deport sponsors might spook them from coming forward and put the children at risk.

Immigrants from El Salvador who entered the country illegally walk through a bus terminal after they were released from a family detention center in San Antonio, Texas in 2015

Immigration status is not a factor in determining whether someone can sponsor a child. But sponsors are asked their status, and those in the country illegally must provide a backup plan to care for the children if they are deported.

U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, said he was not surprised by the data.

He blamed current policies for the surge on the border, but did not say whether placing children with sponsors who are here illegally created any additional problems.

'Since the president refuses to enforce our immigration laws, unlawful immigrants in the United States consistently pay criminal organizations along the border thousands of dollars to smuggle their family members into the United States,' he said in a statement.

Republican Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California and a Judiciary Committee member, said the government is required to find a safe home and guardian for children. Immigration status shouldn't matter, she said.

'If you were here as a legal resident or a U.S. citizen, you would petition for your child,' she said. 'Their only route is political asylum. It is not the visa system.'

During the 20-month period covered by the data, more than half of unaccompanied children were released to a parent. Many others were placed with siblings, aunts and uncles.

Potential sponsors must provide proof of identity and their relationship to the child and undergo screening and background checks. In some cases, the department's Office of Refugee Resettlement conducts a home study to determine if the placement is safe.

The vast majority of those arriving unaccompanied are from Central American countries, the data showed. File image used

The office has collected information about sponsors' immigration status since at least 2005, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement. Sponsors who are not the children's parents also are fingerprinted.

'The safety and well-being of every child in our care is of paramount importance at every stage,' the statement said.

The statistics were culled from a database created in January 2014, according to the department.

Geyso Lemus from El Salvador said she didn't know what would happen to her 10-year-old son when he landed at a shelter in Illinois in 2014 because she didn't have legal papers, but a government social worker quickly put her at ease.

Two weeks later, she said, her son was sent to live with her in Southern California. He has since been granted asylum.
Brazil president says sexism part of impeachment drive

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP)  Brazil's first female president insisted Tuesday that misogyny has played a role in the impeachment process against her, saying she is sure she would be treated differently if she were a man.

President Dilma Rousseff made the comments in the wake of Sunday's devastating 367-137 vote in the lower house of Congress to move forward with the impeachment proceedings.

"They've taken an attitude with me that they wouldn't take with a man," she said, adding, "I profoundly lament the level of prejudice against women."

Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff takes part in a press conference with the international press regarding the congressional vote to open impeachment proceedings against her, at the Planalto Presidential Palace in Brasilia, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. The impeachment proceedings against Rousseff are based on accusations that illegal accounting tricks by her administration allowed her to use government spending to shore up flagging support before elections. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Feminists criticized some of the speeches as sexist and noted that some legislators brandished signs reading "Ciao, dear."

Rousseff said at a news conference in the capital that she believed Brazil's deep-rooted culture of misogyny is "a strong component in this matter."

The president faces allegations of using illegal budget tactics to maintain government spending during a sharp economic recession. She says earlier governments used similar policies and calls the impeachment process a "coup" orchestrated by a powerful rival dogged by corruption accusations and bent on revenge.

If the Senate votes to accept the measure, Rousseff will be immediately suspended and Vice President Michel Temer will temporarily take over. The Senate will then have six months to rule whether to permanently remove Rousseff from office, in which case Temer would serve out her term though its 2018 conclusion.

The political crisis has heightened uncertainty in South America's largest country, which is in the throes of the worst recession in decades and has been shaken by near-daily revelations in a sprawling investigation of corruption at the state oil company Petrobras.

Many of the congressmen voting on impeachment themselves face corruption or other serious charges.

Rousseff acknowledged the disastrous economy had taken a toll on her popularity but placed part of the blame on factors beyond her control, including the slowdown in China, to the fall in commodity prices and a drought.

She said the impeachment drive was an "explicit act of revenge" for her party's failure to help House Speaker Eduardo Cunha avoid potential prosecution over corruption allegations. He has been charged with taking $5 million in bribes.

Temer and Senate chief Renan Calheiros have also been implicated in the Petrobras scheme.

Under the guidelines for impeachment, it will be at least 40 days until Rousseff's fate is decided. However, the speed of the process depends on Calheiros, who could potentially drag out any trial for months.

Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff arrives for a press conference with the international press regarding the congressional vote to open impeachment proceedings against her, at the Planalto Presidential Palace in Brasilia, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. The impeachment proceedings against Rousseff are based on accusations that illegal accounting tricks by her administration allowed her to use government spending to shore up flagging support before elections. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

A video camera screen displays an image of Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff during a press conference with the international press regarding the congressional vote to open impeachment proceedings against her, at the Planalto Presidential Palace in Brasilia, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. The impeachment proceedings against Rousseff are based on accusations that illegal accounting tricks by her administration allowed her to use government spending to shore up flagging support before elections. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff speaks during a press conference with the international press regarding the congressional vote to open impeachment proceedings against her, at the Planalto Presidential Palace in Brasilia, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. The impeachment proceedings against Rousseff are based on accusations that illegal accounting tricks by her administration allowed her to use government spending to shore up flagging support before elections. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)
Pulled from rubble, Ecuadorean won't need coffin wife got

PORTOVIEJO, Ecuador (AP)  Despite the grief roiling this earthquake-stricken town, Pablo Cordova has something to be thankful for: He can return the coffin his wife had obtained for his funeral.

The 51-year-old hotel administrator was one of a trickle of survivors pulled from the rubble after Ecuador's strongest earthquake in decades flattened towns along the coast and killed more than 500 people.

Cordova*s wife had given up on ever seeing him again after the five-story Gato de Portoviejo hotel collapsed on him Saturday night, pancaked by the magnitude-7.8 earthquake like the rest of downtown. She asked his boss to buy his casket.

Pablo Rafael Cordova CaOizares shakes hands with one of the Colombian firefighters who rescued him, at the Verdi Cevallos Balda hospital in Portoviejo, Ecuador, Monday, April 18, 2016. The 51-year-old hotel administrator was one of a trickle of survivors pulled from the rubble after Ecuador's strongest earthquake in decades flattened towns along the coast and killed hundreds. (AP Photo/Emilio D. Garcia)

But Cordova held out for 36 hours beneath the rubble, drinking his own urine and praying service would be restored before his cellphone battery died. He was finally able to call his wife on Monday afternoon, and was pulled from the wreckage soon after by a team of rescuers from Colombia.

"They were organizing the funeral, but I've been reborn," Cordova said, grinning from beneath his bushy mustache in a provincial hospital. "I will have to give that coffin back because I still have a long way to go before I die."

On Tuesday, teams from all over the world fanned out across the country's Pacific coastline to look for the dozens of people still missing. Residents joined in with their bare hands, increasingly desperate as the clock for finding survivors runs down.

"Since Saturday, when this country started shaking, I've slept only two hours and haven't stopped working," said Juan Carranza, one of the firefighters leading the rescue effort in Portoviejo.

In the port city of Manta, a group of about 50 rescuers working with trained dogs, hydraulic jacks and a drill managed to free eight people trapped for more than 32 hours in the rubble of a shopping center that was flattened by Saturday night's quake.

While the country cheered videos of such rescues, tragedy continued to mount.

At the same shopping center, authorities were working to free a woman they had found buried alive with a heavy concrete slab pinning her legs when an aftershock forced them to suspend the effort. When they returned the debris pile had moved and the woman was dead, said Angel Moreira, a firefighter coordinating the effort.

The official death toll was raised to 507 in the evening, but there was confusion about the number of missing.

Deputy Interior Minister Diego Fuentes said 2,000 people had been reported as missing to a government registry created to track casualties. But it was not clear if all of those people remain unaccounted for. Earlier, Ecuador's Defense Ministry said 231 people were missing.

Whichever number was correct, it raised the likelihood that more dead would be found and the toll could surpass casualties from earthquakes in Chile and Peru in the past decade. Among the dead were at least nine foreigners, including an American and two Canadians.

A nun from Northern Ireland also died. Her Roman Catholic religious order, Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother, said Sister Clare Theresa Crockett was leading a group of trainee nuns to safety at a school where she worked when a stairwell collapsed. She and five of the young postulants died.

Complicating rescue efforts is the lack of electricity in many areas, meaning noisy power generators must be used, making it harder to hear anyone who might be trapped beneath rubble.

Christian Rivera, the head of emergency services for the capital, Quito, said that depending on the circumstances a person without serious injuries can survive up to a week in such conditions.

"After that, there's a quick decline ... and the rescuers' work becomes very difficult," he said.

Foreign Minister Guillaume Long tweeted that 654 search experts from other nations were on the ground late Monday and that more were expected to arrive Tuesday  bringing to 13 the nationalities involved in the rescue.

The U.S. said Tuesday it would be sending experts and $100,000 in assistance.

President Rafael Correa has spent the past days touring flattened towns and accompanying missions to delivery supplies. He said Tuesday the quake had caused $3 billion in damage, about 3 percent of gross domestic product, and rebuilding would take years.

"It's going to be a long battle," he told reporters.

After a deadly earthquake in Chile in 2010, that South American country was able to get back on its feet quickly thanks to a commodities boom that was energizing its economy. But Ecuador must rebuild amid a deep recession that has forced austerity on the OPEC nation's finances. Even before the quake, the International Monetary Fund was forecasting the oil-dependent economy would shrink 4.5 percent this year.

To assist in the recovery effort, Ecuador plans to draw down on some $600 million in credit lines from the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and other multilateral lenders.

Manta, a thriving port city, is among the areas hit hardest by the earthquake. Power cables lie in city streets and electricity remains out in many neighborhoods. Among the many buildings flattened by the shaking was a control tower at the airport that was home to U.S. anti-narcotics missions in South America until Correa kicked the Americans out.

As humanitarian aid begun trickling in, long lines formed as people sought to buy bottled water. Many residents are sleeping outdoors in makeshift camps or in the street cuddled next to neighbors.

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AP writers Joshua Goodman and Jacobo Garcia in Bogota, Colombia, Hannah Dreier in Caracas, Venezuela and Gonzalo Solano in Quito, Ecuador, contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to state that the death toll is from Monday, not Tuesday.

Earthquake survivor Pablo Rafael Cordova Canizares smiles as he rests at the Verdi Cevallos Balda hospital in Portoviejo, Ecuador, Monday, April 18, 2016. Cordova's wife had given up on ever seeing him again after the five-story Gato de Portoviejo hotel collapsed on him Saturday, pancaked by the magnitude-7.8 earthquake like the rest of downtown. (AP Photo/Emilio D. Garcia)

A truck moves the belongings of a family from Pedernales, over the earthquake destroyed road to Jama, in Ecuador, Monday, April 18, 2016. A Saturday night quake left a trail of ruin along Ecuadors Pacific Ocean coast. Hundreds have died, thousands are homeless and without electricity. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa)

A mourner is revived with spalashes of water, before family members head to a nearby cemetery to bury their loved ones who were victims of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake, in Portoviejo, Ecuador, Monday, April 18, 2016. The Saturday night quake left a trail of ruin along Ecuadors normally placid Pacific Ocean coast. At least 350 people died and thousands are homeless. President Rafael Correa said early Monday that the death toll would surely rise, and in a considerable way. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd) (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Rescue workers from Venezuela organize themselves before they search for earthquake survivors in Portoviejo, Ecuador, Monday, April 18, 2016. The strongest earthquake to hit Ecuador in decades flattened buildings and buckled highways along its Pacific coast, sending the Andean nation into a state of emergency. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

A man, his home destroyed by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, sleeps in his uncle's boat docked along the shore, in La Chorrera, Ecuador, Monday, April 18, 2016. The Saturday night quake left a trail of ruin along Ecuadors normally placid Pacific Ocean coast. At least 350 people died and thousands are homeless. President Rafael Correa said early Monday that the death toll would surely rise, and in a considerable way. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa)

Residents sleep under a makeshift tent outside the emergency center in the town of Portoviejo, Ecuador, Sunday, April 17, 2016. Parts of Ecuador have been devastated by the country's strongest earthquake in decades, as the death toll continues to rise and people left homeless prepare to sleep outside for second straight night. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Residents look at rescue workers toil in an earthquake collapsed building in Manta, Ecuador, Monday, April 18, 2016. A Saturday night quake left a trail of ruin along Ecuadors Pacific Ocean coast. Hundreds died and thousands are homeless. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Relatives mourn the loss of their family members, victims of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake, during a funeral service in Portoviejo, Ecuador, Monday, April 18, 2016. The Saturday night quake left a trail of ruin along Ecuadors normally placid Pacific Ocean coast. At least 350 people died and thousands are homeless. President Rafael Correa said early Monday that the death toll would surely rise, and in a considerable way. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

A mannequin lies amid the rubble caused by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake, in La Chorrera, Ecuador, Monday, April 18, 2016. The Saturday night quake left a trail of ruin along Ecuadors normally placid Pacific Ocean coast. At least 350 people died and thousands are homeless. President Rafael Correa said early Monday that the death toll would surely rise, and in a considerable way. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
Q&A on adults who care for unaccompanied immigrant children

LOS ANGELES (AP)  Government statistics show 8 of every 10 immigrant children arriving in the country alone are released to adults who are in the United States illegally.

Here are answers to common questions about who these adults, called sponsors, are and how the program works:

WHEN DID THE PROGRAM FOR THESE IMMIGRANT CHILDREN BEGIN, AND HOW LONG HAVE OFFICIALS ASKED ABOUT IMMIGRATION STATUS?

FILE - In this Tuesday, July 7, 2015, file photo, immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala, who entered the country illegally, board a bus after they were released from a family detention center in San Antonio, Texas. The vast majority of immigrant children who arrive alone at the U.S. border are placed by the government with adults who are in the country illegally, federal data reviewed by The Associated Press show. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

An office in the Department of Health and Human Services was tasked with the care and placement of unaccompanied immigrant children under a law passed in 2003. Since then, the Office of Refugee Resettlement has cared for more than 175,000 children, according to its website.

The office has been asking about immigration status since at least 2005, the department said.

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WHAT IS THE PROCESS OF SCREENING SPONSORS FOR THE CHILDREN?

Children apprehended by border or immigration agents are sent to temporary shelters until case workers can screen suitable sponsors who can take them in.

The first choice of sponsor is a parent, followed by a close relative. Sponsors must provide proof of identity and their relationship to the child. They must undergo screening and records checks.

The office also checks out adult members of the household where the child will live.

In some instances, case workers will conduct a home study before the child can be placed.

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WHO ARE THE CHILDREN, AND WHEN DID THEY START ARRIVING?

More than 57,000 immigrant children were placed in the Department of Health and Human Services' custody in the 2014 fiscal year, more than double the number a year earlier, as a surge in arrivals on the border in Texas overwhelmed shelters and further backlogged courts.

The following fiscal year, another 33,000 children were placed in the department's care.

That's compared with the roughly 7,000 or 8,000 children the program initially worked with each year.

Since the surge, more than 90 percent of children came from three countries combined: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Most are teens, and about a third are girls, according to the Department.

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WHAT IS TEMPORARY PROTECTED STATUS?

Temporary protected status, or TPS, is a short-term and renewable legal status the U.S. government granted to citizens of several Central American countries more than a decade ago following natural disasters in the region.

It enables immigrants to stay in the country and work legally, but it does not let them petition to bring relatives to live here.

About 204,000 Salvadorans and 61,000 Hondurans are estimated to have TPS, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Six percent of unaccompanied immigrant children released in the 20 months ending in September 2015 went to sponsors with TPS.

FILE - In this July 7, 2015, file photo, immigrants from El Salvador who entered the country illegally walk through a bus after they were released from a family detention center in San Antonio, Texas. The vast majority of immigrant children who arrive alone at the U.S. border are placed by the government with adults who are in the country illegally, federal data reviewed by The Associated Press show. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
Cosby's wife finishes deposition in defamation lawsuit

BOSTON (AP)  Bill Cosby's wife on Tuesday completed her deposition in a defamation lawsuit filed by seven women who contend the comedian branded them as liars after they went public with sexual assault allegations against him.

Camille Cosby answered questions under oath for about 5 1/2 hours, according to Joe Cammarata, a lawyer for the women. Cammarata wouldn't discuss specifics of questions he asked during the civil deposition in Boston.

"We accomplished what we needed to accomplish," he said.

FILE - This Oct. 26, 2009 file photo, comedian Bill Cosby, left, and his wife Camille appear at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts before Bill Cosby received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in Washington. Cosby's wife will answer more questions under oath in a defamation lawsuit filed by seven women who claim the comedian branded them as liars after they went public with sexual assault allegations against him. Camille Cosby's deposition is scheduled to continue Tuesday, April 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

Camille Cosby's attorneys said in a statement that she has "no relevant non-privileged information" and that they were "thankful for this distraction to now be over."

Cosby's wife of 52 years had sought to terminate or limit her deposition. Her lawyers said the women's lawyer asked "outrageous questions" about personal topics during the first day of the deposition in February.

They said Cammarata questioned Camille Cosby about her sexual relations and her opinion of the honesty and integrity of her husband, questions they argued were "designed to annoy, embarrass and oppress the witness."

A magistrate judge ruled April 12 that Camille Cosby must continue her deposition but prohibited "improper questions," including those involving protected communications between husband and wife.
Brothers charged with killing missing Washington couple

SEATTLE (AP)  Two brothers wanted in the disappearance and presumed slayings of a Washington state couple may be heading for the Mexican border, authorities said Tuesday as they charged the pair with first-degree murder.

Detectives found a car in Phoenix that had been driven by John Blaine Reed and his brother, Tony Clyde Reed, and they said two friends of the brothers gave them a different car  a gold Acura sedan  and $500, knowing they were on the run from police.

A license plate reader captured the Acura's plate near Calexico, California, on Monday, authorities said.

These undated booking photos provided by the Snohomish County Sheriff Office shows Tony Reed, left and John Reed. Authorities are searching for the two brothers who were involved in a property dispute with a missing Washington state couple. Neighbors reported Patrick Shunn and his wife, Monique Patenaude, of Arlington missing on Tuesday when their livestock was left unattended, and detectives in Snohomish County now believe they were killed. (Snohomish County Sheriff Office via AP )

The brothers are wanted in the disappearance of John Reed's former neighbors, Patrick Shunn, 45, and his wife, Monique Patenaude, 46, who were reported missing a week ago. Investigators say they found evidence the couple were killed, and teams were searching for their bodies in a wooded 23-square-mile area around their home near Oso, 50 miles northeast of Seattle.

"The exact location of the Reed brothers is unknown, but there is reason to believe they may be trying to flee to Mexico," the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office in Washington said in an email Tuesday.

Authorities described them as convicted felons who should be considered armed and dangerous, as several guns seemed to be missing from John Reed's former home. Charging documents filed Tuesday said authorities found blood in the home's bathtub, as well as in John Reed's pickup, the victims' vehicles, and on gasoline-soaked clothing found in bags underneath a mattress outside the home.

The state crime laboratory is analyzing the blood for DNA evidence.

The victims' vehicles had been driven or pushed down a steep, forested embankment, and at 3:30 a.m. on April 12, a neighbor's surveillance camera caught the vehicles being simultaneously driven up the remote road on the way to where they were later discovered, a prosecutor wrote. The camera also recorded John Reed's pickup traveling up the same road the next day, he said.

Authorities found the pickup at the home of the brothers' parents, in the central Washington city of Ellensburg. Clyde Reed, their father, told investigators he had just cleaned the truck and added "that he did not know where his two sons were, but if he did, he would not tell law enforcement," the charging papers said.

When the brothers left Ellensburg last Thursday, they were driving the parents' red Volkswagen  the same car authorities found in Phoenix, detectives said.

The grim mystery played out on land abutting the nation's worst landslide disaster, the 2014 Oso landslide, which wiped out a rural neighborhood and killed 43 people. In an interview shortly afterward, John Reed, 53, told The Seattle Times he watched the slide as it roared past his front yard.

The county bought out Reed's house last month to ease any risks from future flooding, but investigators believe Reed had been returning to the home since then. According to charging documents, John Reed was upset that his property had been condemned, and he recently had been angry because the couple had complained that he was squatting at his old house, prompting authorities to warn him to leave.

Shunn and Patenaude had long worried about getting on the wrong side of John Reed, who lived a little ways up an old logging road from their 21-acre spread in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. When they sued other neighbors over a property dispute more than two years ago, they avoided naming him as a defendant because they didn't want to irk him, their former lawyer, Thomas Adams, said Monday.

Court documents say John Reed had threatened to shoot the couple for cutting brush between their two properties in 2013.

John Reed has been cited for a number of mostly minor offenses, but also was convicted of felonies for growing marijuana and eluding law enforcement.

Tony Reed, 49, has amassed dozens of arrests and twice was under state supervision  from 1989 to 1991 on drug charges, and from 1994 to 2003 for three misdemeanors, including an assault charge.

Authorities believe they are now driving a 2002 gold Acura 3.2TL with Arizona plate BNN-9968.

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China sets aside rancor, offers Japan condolences for quakes

BEIJING (AP)  Chinese President Xi Jinping has extended his condolences to Japan's Emperor Akihito over the country's recent deadly earthquakes in a brief respite from the usual rancor between Beijing and Tokyo.

Reports Tuesday of Xi's comments said he also expressed "sincere wishes" that the Japanese people might speedily overcome difficulties and rebuild their homes.

"On behalf of the Chinese government and people, I extend my sympathies for those who have died and condolences to their families and those who were injured," Xi said in the message issued late Monday.

Xi made no mention of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is widely loathed in China over his conservative views on history and moves to strengthen Japan's defense.

High-level Chinese-Japanese ties have been largely frozen since Japan nationalized a string of uninhabited East China Sea islands claimed by China in 2012, setting off violent anti-Japanese protests in several Chinese cities. The move infuriated many Chinese, who feel Japan has never properly atoned for its brutal World War II invasion.
South Korea's central bank cuts growth forecast

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  South Korea's central bank has lowered its growth forecast for Asia's fourth-largest economy.

The Bank of Korea said Tuesday that South Korea's economy will likely expand 2.8 percent this year over a year earlier, down from the 3.0 percent expansion predicted in January.

Governor Lee Ju-yeol blamed the economy's weaker-than-expected first quarter performance and the downward revision in the global economic outlook by global agencies.

South Korea's exports are suffering as demand from China, its top trading partner, softens. Lee said that despite uncertainties in the global outlook, South Korea will see a modest recovery during the rest of the year.
PEGIDA leader goes on trial in Germany for incitement

BERLIN (AP)  One of the founders of the German anti-immigration group PEGIDA went on trial Tuesday, charged with incitement over Facebook posts in which he allegedly called foreigners "cattle" and "trash."

Lutz Bachmann's trial at the district court in the eastern city of Dresden is scheduled to last until May 10. Incitement can carry a prison sentence of up to five years.

Bachmann is accused of trying to incite Germans against refugees with the social media posts in September 2014.

Lutz Bachmann, co-founder of Germany's PEGIDA movement, sits in the courtroom of the local court during the beginning of the trial on accusations of incitement in Dresden, eastern Germany, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer/pool)

Bachmann expressed regret shortly after the postings  and photos of him posing as Adolf Hitler  surfaced. He described them as "ill-considered comments that I wouldn't make in this way today" and apologized for harming PEGIDA.

Bachmann has denied the charges, saying the trial is "purely politically motivated" and meant to discredit him and the group. His lawyer, Katja Reichel, rejected the charges in court Tuesday, saying he didn't write the postings attributed to him.

As the trial opened, supporters staged a protest outside the court bearing banners calling for "freedom for Lutz Bachmann." Opponents chanted "Bachmann in the slammer."

According to the Saechsische Zeitung daily, Bachmann has previously spent time in jail for burglary and possession of drugs.

PEGIDA, whose German acronym stands for Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West, has dismissed claims that it cooperates with neo-Nazi groups, though far-right extremists regularly take part in its weekly protests in Dresden, the capital of Saxony.

The state has become a hotbed of anti-immigrant violence in recent years. Authorities arrested five people in Saxony on Tuesday on suspicion of founding a right-wing terror group to attack refugee homes and other facilities. The "Freital Group," named after a suburb of Dresden, was formed in July last year or earlier.

Bachmann's trial is scheduled to resume May 3.

Lutz Bachmann, co-founder of Germany's PEGIDA movement, wears sunglasses as he sits in the courtroom of the local court during the beginning of the trial on accusations of incitement in Dresden, eastern Germany, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer/pool)

Lutz Bachmann, co-founder of Germany's PEGIDA movement, wears sunglasses as he sits in the courtroom of the local court during the beginning of the trial on accusations of incitement in Dresden, eastern Germany, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer/pool)

Lutz Bachmann, co-founder of Germany's PEGIDA movement, left, arrives in the court building together with his wife Vicky Bachmann, right, for the beginning of his trial in the courtroom of the local court during the beginning of the trial on accusations of incitement in Dresden, eastern Germany, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer/pool)
Houston flood control efforts fall behind urban sprawl

HOUSTON (AP)  Flood control has long been a challenging issue in Houston, dating back to the city's infancy on the banks of the Buffalo Bayou when its first flood was recorded more than 170 years ago.

Major reservoirs built in the 1940s helped alleviate some of problems, but a population explosion and urban sprawl since then enveloped the reservoirs. Experts said the city's efforts since then have fallen woefully short of the massive needs. And there is climate change, which has increased the frequency of large rainfalls, climatologists said. The result this week was that sudden downpours overwhelmed infrastructure and inundated whole sections of the city, leaving at least seven people dead.

"To throw up your hands and say we're going to be vulnerable and have hundreds of millions of dollars of impact every year in Houston just because it rains a lot is not the attitude we need to take," said Sam Brody, a professor of regional planning at Texas A&M University at Galveston. "We are not thinking about the big picture."

Louis Marquez carries his dog Dallas through floodwaters after rescuing the dog from his flooded apartment Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Thousands of people were routed from their homes and major highways when Houston's spaghetti-like web of bayous spilled over banks after rains that began Sunday night.

Then on Tuesday, creeks getting runoff from nearly 18 inches of rain in some spots in outlying northwestern Harris County rose quickly over their banks, prompting a new round of evacuations, including rescues of some residents in wheelchairs from an assisted living facility.

Prospects brightened for some as many roads reopened, although a flash flood watch was in effect through Wednesday.

"It's going to have to trickle its way through the city of Houston and to Galveston Bay," Francisco Sanchez, a county emergency services spokesman, said of the waters progressing downstream toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Houston, with more than 2 million people including 90,000 arriving last year alone, is the nation's fourth-largest city. And Harris County, which includes most of Houston, has seen a 30 percent jump in population since 2000, with an accompanying 25 percent increase in pavement.

The situation is exacerbated by a flat topography barely above sea level and the humid Gulf Coast climate prone to produce extreme rainfall.

There have been at least three dozen significant floods since Houston's founding, including one in 1929 and another in 1935 that prompted construction of reservoirs in the western part of the county, Barker and Addicks, in the 1940s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

"They were way out in the country," said Wayne Klotz, a former American Society of Civil Engineers president who has a Houston engineering firm. "They were going to solve all the problems. The city continued to grow. And Barker and Addicks now are like in the middle of town."

Few notable flood-control efforts have been implemented since then, said Philip Bedient, a Rice University engineering professor who has been studying flood control in the area for more than three decades.

Houston's leaders "sort of forgot about it for the next 20 years, and it was the wild west," he said. "They built and built like there was no tomorrow."

"It didn't have to be this way," he said.

Among Houston's recent efforts is a voter-approved program aimed at rebuilding its streets and drainage systems to better cope with floods. The city says it has collected and spent more than $1 billion since 2012, improving 900 miles of roadway.

Brody says more could be done, including an effort to buy out homeowners flood-prone areas and turn the land into open space. He also suggests upgrading building codes to mandate elevating structures in flood-prone areas, as some suburbs have done.

"You need to think," he said. "And we're not."

The Harris County Flood Control District, the agency working in recent years with the Corps of Engineers on hundreds of millions of dollars in projects to ease the flooding impact, did not immediately return a phone message Tuesday seeking comment.

Tropical Storm Allison, with nearly 39 inches of rain in the hardest hit area, left $5 billion in damage in 2001. Hurricane Ike hit in in 2008. Just last Memorial Day, hundreds of homes along Brays Bayou in Houston sustained severe damage after an 11-inch rainstorm.

From 1999 to 2009, the Houston area incurred over $3 billion in insured flood losses, Brody said.

Money is a considerable obstacle to improved flood control.

"We know what it would take to eliminate flooding," Klotz said. "The cost is in the billions. ... We live in times of constraint of public resources. Elected bodies have elected to choose to spend on different priorities."

An increase in sudden downpours across the nation in recent decades augurs worse for ill-prepared cities such as Houston. Incidents of extreme rainfall increased 16 percent in the Southwest region in the 54 years ending in 2012, according to the 2014 U.S. National Climate Assessment.

"You are in this paradoxical situation where you're going to get more intense rainfall" but also more extended droughts, said Andrew Dressler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M. And as Houston grows, "it's going to be a more challenging place to live."

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AP writer Nomaan Merchant contributed to this story from Dallas.

Residents are evacuated from their flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Residents are evacuated from their flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Residents wait to be evacuated from their flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Residents are evacuated from their flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Residents are evacuated from their flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Residents are evacuated from their flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Residents are helped off rescue boats after being evacuated from their flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is briefed by emergency personnel during a visit to the Texas Department of Public Safety State Operations Center, in Austin, Texas, on Monday, April 18, 2016. Abbott has declared a state disaster declaration for nine counties and said more will likely be added to the list. Abbott said Monday that his office had been in contact with the IRS about pushing the tax filing deadline for those in areas inundated by heavy downpours. (Rodolfo Gonzalez/Austin American-Statesman via AP) AUSTIN CHRONICLE OUT, COMMUNITY IMPACT OUT, INTERNET AND TV MUST CREDIT PHOTOGRAPHER AND STATESMAN.COM, MAGS OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Kelly Gorrell, who moved into her Meyerland home in January, reacts while seeing it for the first time, Monday, April 18, 2016, in Houston. Massive flooding has become nearly an annual rite of passage in Houston, which is grappling with destroyed homes, trapped drivers and deaths for the third straight year. (Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT

Meital Harari cleans water out of her Meyerland home, Monday, April 18, 2016, in Houston. Her family rode out the storm at a nearby house because her daughter has nightmares from the Memorial Day floods. Massive flooding has become nearly an annual rite of passage in Houston, which is grappling with destroyed homes, trapped drivers and deaths for the third straight year. (Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT
Morocco: one of the world's oldest libraries is renovated

FEZ, Morocco (AP)  The settling dust from renovations and the banging of tools aren't ideal sights and sounds for a library  but this is no ordinary library.

Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman and nestled in the old medina of Fez, Morocco's University of al-Qarawiyyin library is one of the world's oldest libraries, home to unique Islamic manuscripts treasured by historians. Yet it's been largely hidden from the public. The architect leading its restoration, Fez native Aziza Chaouni, didn't even know it existed until she was asked to work on it.

King Mohammed VI is expected to inaugurate its reopening soon. Chaouni is hoping it will mark an ideological change, too, and open to the public for the first time in its long history. Until now, the privilege of using the library has been limited to scholars who seek formal permission, and authorities haven't decided yet whether to change that.

This April 14, 2016, photo shows the reading room of the Al-Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez, Morocco. Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman, the al-Qarawiyyin library is wrapping up a careful restoration project and King Mohamed VI is expected to preside over the reopening. But authorities haven't decided whether the public will be able to view its treasured Islamic manuscripts, or whether that privilege will be limited to university researchers. (AP Photo/Samia Errazouki)

From calligraphic designs on the walls to ceramic patterns on the floors and wooden carvings on the ceilings, the fingerprint of almost every ruling dynasty since the 9th century can be seen in the architecture.

A devout and wealthy Muslim woman from the Tunisian town of Kairaouan, Fatima al-Fihri, provided the endowment for building al-Qarawiyyin in the 9th century. Originally a mosque, it expanded in the 10th century to become a university, Abdelmajid El-Marzi, imam and administrator of the mosque, told The Associated Press.

The library houses a collection of manuscripts written by renowned thinkers from the region, including Ibn Khaldun's "Muqadimmah." The 14th-century historical work spent six months on loan to the Louvre Museum in Paris during the renovations, library curator Abdelfattah Bougchouf said.

Other texts include a 9th-century Quran written in Kufic calligraphy, and a manuscript on the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence by Ibn Rochd, also known as Averroes.

The manuscripts are now kept in a secure room, with strict temperature and humidity control. They weren't always kept like this, however.

"The original manuscript room door had four locks," Bougchouf told The AP. "Each of those keys was kept with four different people. In order to open the manuscript room, all four of those people had to physically be there to open the door."

Now, he chuckled, "all of that has been replaced with a four-digit security code."

A previous renovation and expansion effort in 1940 opened up the library to foreigners and non-Muslims by creating a separate entrance. Before that, the only way to access the library was via the mosque. Non-Muslims aren't allowed to enter the Qarawiyyin mosque to this day.

"It was a sign of tolerance," Abdelfattah said.

Since ascending to the throne in 1999, King Mohammed VI has called for restorations at Qarawiyyin.

Architect Chaouni said she was pleasantly surprised when the Culture Ministry approached her in 2012 to work on the project  especially in a field dominated by men.

"I knew about the mosque, but never even knew there was a library there," she said, despite growing up in the city.

She specializes in restoring old buildings in a sustainable fashion, and is also trained as an engineer, with degrees from Harvard and Columbia universities.

The restoration is fixing a plumbing issue that increasingly threatened to drench the rare manuscripts in sewage water.

Chaouni is also lobbying for opening a public exhibition room for the first time - calling it "the biggest challenge of my soul" during the restoration project.

The Culture Ministry accepted the idea but bureaucratic control over the site shifted to the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs. Chaouni worries that this shift will squash her efforts. Authorities are also concerned about the cost of keeping the previous manuscripts secure.

Another way to improve access to the manuscripts is to digitize them, which the library has been doing, and about 20 percent are now available in electronic form.

In this April 14, 2016, photo, curator of the Qarawiyyin library, Abdelfattah Bougchouf, opens an original version of Ibn Khaldun's most famous work, Muqadimmah, dating back to the 14th century at the Al-Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez, Morocco, Thursday, April 14, 2016. Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman, the al-Qarawiyyin library is wrapping up a careful restoration project and King Mohamed VI is expected to preside over the reopening. But authorities haven't decided whether the public will be able to view its treasured Islamic manuscripts, or whether that privilege will be limited to university researchers. (AP Photo/Samia Errazouki)

In this April 14, 2016, photo, Abdelfattah Bougchouf, curator of the Qarawiyyin library, opens the first page of an original version of Ibn Khaldun's most famous work, Muqadimmah, dating back to the 14th century at the Al-Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez, Morocco. Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman, the al-Qarawiyyin library is wrapping up a careful restoration project and King Mohamed VI is expected to preside over the reopening. But authorities haven't decided whether the public will be able to view its treasured Islamic manuscripts, or whether that privilege will be limited to university researchers. (AP Photo/Samia Errazouki)

This April 14, 2016, photo, shows the fountain for abolutions before prayers is pictured in the Al-Qarawiyyin mosque is pictured in Fez, Morocco. Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman, the al-Qarawiyyin library is wrapping up a careful restoration project and King Mohamed VI is expected to preside over the reopening. But authorities haven't decided whether the public will be able to view its treasured Islamic manuscripts, or whether that privilege will be limited to university researchers. (AP Photo/Samia Errazouki)

This April 14, 2016, photo shows the courtyard of Al-Qarawiyyin mosque is pictured in Fez, Morocco. Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman, the al-Qarawiyyin library is wrapping up a careful restoration project and King Mohamed VI is expected to preside over the reopening. But authorities haven't decided whether the public will be able to view its treasured Islamic manuscripts, or whether that privilege will be limited to university researchers. (AP Photo/Samia Errazouki)

This April 14, 2016, photo shows books of the Qarawiyyin library reading room are pictured in the Al-Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez, Morocco. Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman, the al-Qarawiyyin library is wrapping up a careful restoration project and King Mohamed VI is expected to preside over the reopening. But authorities haven't decided whether the public will be able to view its treasured Islamic manuscripts, or whether that privilege will be limited to university researchers. (AP Photo/Samia Errazouki)

This April 14, 2016, photo shows an original manuscript by Ibn Rochd on Maliki jurisprudence written in Andalusian style caligraphy at the al-Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez, Morocco. Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman, the al-Qarawiyyin library is wrapping up a careful restoration project and King Mohamed VI is expected to preside over the reopening. But authorities haven't decided whether the public will be able to view its treasured Islamic manuscripts, or whether that privilege will be limited to university researchers. (AP Photo/Samia Errazouki)

This April 14, 2016, photo shows a prayer hall of Al-Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez, Morocco. Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman, the al-Qarawiyyin library is wrapping up a careful restoration project and King Mohamed VI is expected to preside over the reopening. But authorities haven't decided whether the public will be able to view its treasured Islamic manuscripts, or whether that privilege will be limited to university researchers. (AP Photo/Samia Errazouki)

This April 14, 2016, photo shows a plank of wood that is allegedly Fatima Fihri's diploma, founder of Al-Qarawiyyin, in Fez, Morocco. Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman, the al-Qarawiyyin library is wrapping up a careful restoration project and King Mohamed VI is expected to preside over the reopening. But authorities haven't decided whether the public will be able to view its treasured Islamic manuscripts, or whether that privilege will be limited to university researchers. (AP Photo/Samia Errazouki)
Spain: Police arrest Moroccan In Mallorca for IS links

MADRID (AP)  Police say they have arrested a Moroccan man with alleged strong links to the Islamic State armed group and who was pushing for attacks to be carried out in Spain and elsewhere in Europe.

A statement said the man was arrested Tuesday in Palma de Mallorca city on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca where he lived.

It said the detainee poses "a clear threat to national security" given that he used the Internet to promote recruitment for IS, help send potential combatants abroad and encourage attacks in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. It said he maintained close contact with IS leaders in Syria.
Freddie Gray, 1 year later: What has changed in Baltimore?

BALTIMORE (AP)  When Freddie Gray died April 19, 2015, and riots erupted, Baltimore and its residents were forced to confront issues that had plagued them for decades, community leader Ericka Alston said.

"I think for Baltimore as a community, that day really changed our lives forever," said Alston, who founded Kids Safe Zone in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood just blocks from where Gray was arrested.

Gray's death  a week after he was injured in a police transport van  became a focal point in the national debate over police treatment of African-Americans. When the smoke cleared, Baltimore looked much the same: Debris from rioting was hauled off, but blocks of dilapidated homes still stood vacant. Violence continued. And the city still has a pervasive problem of economic disparity, a lack of job opportunities for young black men, and a dearth of resources for disenfranchised children.

FILE- In this July 30, 2015 file photo, a man walks past a corner where a victim of a shooting was discovered in Baltimore. The summer after Gray's death saw the highest rate of bloodshed since Baltimore police began keeping track of homicides in 1972. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

But change has been cropping up. The police commissioner was fired, and the department is rolling out body cameras. Community activism, advocacy and grassroots organizing are more visible throughout Baltimore. Criminal cases against the officers charged in Gray's death are progressing.

Here's a look at what has changed  and what hasn't  in the year since Gray's death.

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POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake fired police Commissioner Anthony Batts in July and replaced him with his deputy, Kevin Davis. But two months later, after criticism about her performance during the unrest  she placed the city under a 10 p.m. curfew  Rawlings-Blake announced she wouldn't seek re-election.

Political hopefuls from Baltimore and beyond flooded the zone: More than 29 signed up to run. Police reform is center stage in the campaign, with candidates invoking Gray's name to tout policy change.

Among them: DeRay Mckesson, who gained national attention for his role in the Black Lives Matter movement, wants to establish a program of community first-responders to de-escalate situations between residents and police.

But the two front-runners of the race are familiar names: Catherine Pugh is a state senator and former member of Baltimore City Council. She spent one year in the Maryland General Assembly before she was elected to the Senate. And Sheila Dixon is a former mayor who resigned after she was convicted of stealing gift cards meant for underprivileged children.

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COURT CASES

Six officers are charged in Gray's death. None of the cases has been resolved.

William Porter was tried first. The case ended in mistrial when the jury couldn't unanimously agree on any of the charges: manslaughter, assault, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office.

That delayed the remaining trials. Lawyers squabbled over whether Porter could be forced to testify against the others while awaiting retrial. Ultimately Maryland's highest court ruled that he could. The trials resume next month.

In September, Gray's family and the city reached a settlement awarding his relatives $6.4 million settlement.

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LAWS AND PRACTICES

The Police Department is preparing to roll out a body-camera program to outfit every patrol officer with a device in May. The program, however, was in the works before Gray died.

Other changes came about after his death. Recruits undergo mandatory community-engagement training, and the department is deploying full-time patrol officers to walk the most crime-ridden neighborhoods.

This month, the Maryland legislature passed a police accountability bill, the product of months of work by a panel convened after Gray's death. The bill changes policies on how police are hired, trained and disciplined, and places a greater emphasis on recruiting from minority communities. Doug Mayer, a spokesman for Gov. Larry Hogan, says the governor is reviewing the bill.

On the federal level, the Department of Justice opened an investigation into the Police Department for allegations of excessive force and unlawful stops. Findings will probably be published this year.

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CRIME

The summer after Gray's death saw the highest rate of bloodshed since Baltimore police began keeping track of homicides in 1972: In July alone, 45 people were killed. By year's end, the city recorded 344 homicides and more than 600 nonfatal shootings. Some attributed the spike to officers abandoning their posts in the wake of charges in the Gray case.

In July, Commissioner Davis announced the formation of the War Room, a collaborative effort among the Police Department and more than a dozen local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, to identify repeat offenders and "top trigger pullers."

Now, about four months into 2016, Davis points out that gun arrests are up 52 percent from last year.

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ACTIVISTS, ADVOCATES

Since Gray's death, several community groups have emerged, particularly in West Baltimore. The Kids Safe Zone was founded in an old laundromat as a place for children with nowhere else to go to spend the day. One year later, the center has expanded and has new program space.

Additionally, the 300 Men March, an organization dedicated to empowering young men in Baltimore, is opening a community space on the city's East Side. The group marched to Washington, D.C., in August.

And Safe Streets, which works to reduce violence by connecting with both victims and perpetrators in neighborhoods, opened an outpost in West Baltimore, Gray's neighborhood. Safe Streets aims to moderate conflicts on the streets before they turn deadly.

Alston, of Kids Safe Zone, said the unrest galvanized organizations to do more for their communities instead of waiting for the city to help. "What the uprising did? I wouldn't be in a position to offer the services that I do had that not happened," she said.

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THE ROOT ISSUES

The systemic issues that helped turn Freddie Gray into a symbol for the plight of poor, young black men in Baltimore, and nationwide, are largely the same a year later.

In the wake of Gray's death, the city's 17,000 vacant homes and decrepit public housing complexes gained attention. Most of those homes are still vacant. Gov. Hogan recently announced a $94 million plan to raze blocks of blighted vacant homes. Many residents, tired of watching their communities deteriorate, praised the move.

The school system, which spent more than 25 years under a federal consent decree, is woefully underfunded, and in February, a police officer was caught on camera slapping and kicking a student. That raised questions about the safety of Baltimore schools and whether officers there are adequately screened.

Late last year, Hogan killed plans for the Red Line, a light rail that would have connected West Baltimore to the rest of the city. He diverted the budget of about $3 billion to road and bridge projects outside Baltimore. The NAACP sued, calling the decision a civil rights violation.

University of Maryland sociology professor Rashawn Ray says that for the most marginalized people Freddie Gray represents, "unfortunately, nothing has changed. Our schools are still underfunded. Our neighborhoods are still dilapidated, and we still do not have jobs."

FILE - In this April 30, 2015 file photo, Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Anthony Batts, center, approaches a news conference with Deputy Commissioner Kevin Davis in Baltimore. Among the changes that have cropped up since the death of Freddie Gray: Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake fired Batts in July and replaced him with Davis. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

FILE- In this July 21, 2015, file photo, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake stands outside vacant homes before a ceremony to kick off their restoration in Baltimore. Rawlings-Blake fired police Commissioner Anthony Batts in July and replaced him with his deputy. But two months later, after criticism about her performance during the unrest, Rawlings-Blake announced she wouldn't seek re-election. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

FILE - In this May 1, 2015 file photo, Baltimore state's attorney Marilyn Mosby speaks at news conference in Baltimore to announce criminal charges against six police officers suspended after Freddie Gray's fatal spinal injury while in custody. While the officers still face charges in Gray's death, not one has been resolved. The first case ended in mistrial and has delayed the remaining trials. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

FILE - These undated file photos provided by the Baltimore Police Department show Baltimore police officers, top row from left, Caesar R. Goodson Jr., Garrett E. Miller and Edward M. Nero, and bottom row from left, William G. Porter, Brian W. Rice and Alicia D. White, charged with felonies ranging from assault to murder in the police-custody death of Freddie Gray. While the officers still face charges in Gray's death, not one has been resolved. The first case ended in mistrial and has delayed the remaining trials. (Baltimore Police Department via AP, File)

FILE - In this May 3, 2015 file photo, people pray during a rally at City Hall in Baltimore, where hundreds of jubilant people prayed and chanted for justice days after the city's top prosecutor charged six officers involved in Freddie Gray's arrest. Since Gray's death, several community groups have emerged, particularly in West Baltimore, and community activism, advocacy and grassroots organizing are more visible throughout the city. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

In this March 31, 2016 photo, Baltimore Police Department Officer Jordan Distance stands on a street corner during a foot patrol in Baltimore. One departmental change since the death of Freddie Gray: recruits undergo mandatory community-engagement training, and the department is deploying full-time patrol officers to walk the most crime-ridden neighborhoods. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

FILE - In this April 28, 2015 file photo, police and protestors gather at the intersection of North Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue, bottom right, in Baltimore, a day after unrest that occurred at the intersection following Freddie Gray's funeral. In the year since Gray's death, change has been gradually cropping up. The police commissioner was fired, and the department is rolling out body cameras. Community activism, advocacy and grassroots organizing are more visible throughout Baltimore. Criminal cases against the officers charged in Gray's death are progressing. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
Cold rice balls, no flush toilets at quake-hit Japan shelter

MINAMIASO, Japan (AP)  In this mountainous Japanese town known for its hot springs, prized beef and Jersey milk cows, more than 2,000 people have taken refuge from earthquakes at school gymnasiums and community centers, surviving on rock-hard biscuits, cold rice balls and bread.

There is no running water to bathe or flush toilets. Many elderly evacuees rest on futon mattresses they brought from home. The bedding covers the floor, and there is no privacy.

"Now I realize I haven't taken a bath since we came here," said Yachiyo Fuchigami, a 64-year-old woman in a hilltop gymnasium in the town of Minamiaso on the southern island of Kyushu.

In this April 18, 2016 photo, a woman rests at a shelter in Mashiki, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan. About 100,000 people have left their homes in southern Japan after two shuddering earthquakes on successive nights last week knocked over hundreds of buildings. There is no running water to bathe or flush toilets. Many elderly evacuees sit or lie on futon mattresses that they brought from home. The bedding covers the floor, and there is no privacy. (Ryosuke Ozawa/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

She is among some 100,000 people who left their homes after two shuddering earthquakes on successive nights last week  late Thursday and early Saturday  knocked over hundreds of buildings and killed at least 45 people.

Even many whose houses are still standing are afraid to sleep inside because of aftershocks. Many are sleeping in buildings converted into temporary shelters or in their cars.

With water service cut off in many places and roads heavily damaged or blocked by landslides, authorities are struggling to cope with the stream of people seeking shelter.

The situation is particularly acute in Minamiaso, a town of 12,000 and hot spring resorts in small clusters of buildings scattered on mountainsides. The shortage of food, water and other necessities shows how easily remote Japanese villages can be cut off.

The second, magnitude 7.3 earthquake knocked down a bridge that links the town to the outside world, so that getting there now requires a long drive around Mt. Aso, a 1,592-meter (5,223-foot) volcano.

Nearly 500 staying at the hilltop gymnasium initially received only a sweet bean dessert called "yokan," a couple of rice balls and water. Then rolls of bread and instant cup noodles were added. Volunteers cooked and delivered miso (soybean paste) soup.

Sunday brought bananas, as well as additional portable toilets and diapers supplied by the university.

At another shelter in Minamiaso, the food ration was rock-hard biscuits called "kanpan," which means dried bread and rice balls and rolls, which came with cold tea or water.

"Unfortunately those kanpan aren't my favorite, they are not good for your teeth," said 60-year-old Takayuki Aramaki. "I miss hot food."

He was delighted to see U.S. Marines flights bringing supplies, which included ready-to-eat food and emergency supplies, via tilt-rotor aircraft called MV-22 Ospreys, which landed at a park on the edge of town.

Workers, meanwhile, tried to fix cracks in the road to improve access to the town, but a magnitude 5.8 aftershock Monday night triggered new landslides and left already-tilting electric poles even more tilted.

In the nearby city of Aso, the aftershock forced the reclosing of a main road just opened after a repair.

"That means we are not going to get food supply to this area," Munetaka Ikeda, a hotel owner, said Tuesday morning. "The road conditions and access virtually change by the minute."

Ikeda sleeps in the reception hall so he can spring up to escort his guests to a parking lot after strong aftershocks.

There were screams at the gymnasium when Monday night's quake struck, and everyone went outside, said 30-year-old evacuee Masashi Otsuka.

The gymnasium evacuees were moving to another shelter Tuesday, a nearby elementary school, because some were worried that the gym stands on a hill.

Minoru Ninomiya, an 80-year-old retired tofu maker who has been sleeping in his car, said he might move to the new shelter because it's closer to his home than the gym was.

The two-story apartment building he used to rent to students collapsed, with its first floor rooms crushed to the ground. His house and former tofu shop still stand, but look shaky.

"These buildings have to be demolished," he said, pointing at all of them.

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This story has been corrected to fix order of retired tofu maker's name to Minoru Ninomiya.

In this April 18, 2016 photo, people rest at a shelter in Mashiki, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan. About 100,000 people have left their homes in southern Japan after two shuddering earthquakes on successive nights last week knocked over hundreds of buildings. There is no running water to bathe or flush toilets. Many elderly evacuees sit or lie on futon mattresses that they brought from home. The bedding covers the floor, and there is no privacy. (Ryosuke Ozawa/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

In this April 18, 2016 photo, evacuees take shelter at a gymnasium of a junior high school in Minamiaso, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan. About 100,000 people have left their homes in southern Japan after two shuddering earthquakes on successive nights last week knocked over hundreds of buildings. There is no running water to bathe or flush toilets. Many elderly evacuees sit or lie on futon mattresses that they brought from home. The bedding covers the floor, and there is no privacy. (Yohei Fukai/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

People line up for rations in Kumamoto, Japan Tuesday, April 19, 2016. About 100,000 evacuees from a pair of powerful earthquakes in Japan have been enduring chilly weather, some sleeping outdoors or in their cars. (Naohiko Hatta/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

In this April 18, 2016 photo, plastic bags containing garbage are piled up near a shelter in Mashiki, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan. About 100,000 people have left their homes in southern Japan after two shuddering earthquakes on successive nights last week knocked over hundreds of buildings. There is no running water to bathe or flush toilets. Many elderly evacuees sit or lie on futon mattresses that they brought from home. The bedding covers the floor, and there is no privacy. (Ryosuke Ozawa/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT
EU to provide humanitarian funding for refugees in Greece

ATHENS, Greece (AP)  The European Commission says it will be providing 700 million euros in emergency humanitarian funding for Greece until 2018 to help it deal with the massive refugee crisis that has seen tens of thousands of people stranded in the country  the first time such funding has been used to help a European Union member.

The funding, announced Tuesday, will be given to aid organizations that will work with the Greek government in providing assistance such as food, shelter, medical and educational services for refugees.

Christos Stylianides, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management, said he was in Athens signing agreements allocating the first 83 million euros to eight aid organizations, including UNHCR, the Danish Refugee Council, the International Rescue Committee, Save the Children and the international Red Cross.

Afghan migrants walk towards the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. More than 11,000 people have been waiting at this border point for over a month hoping it would reopen. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Clothes dry infront of a barbed-wire fence that lines a makeshift camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. More than 11,000 people have been waiting at this border point for over a month hoping it would reopen. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Children peer out from train carriage windows near a makeshift camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. More than 11,000 people have been waiting at this border point for over a month hoping it would reopen. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
Trump has slip of tongue discussing 9/11 at Buffalo rally

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP)  Donald Trump made an unfortunate slip of the tongue while campaigning in Buffalo, New York, at his final campaign rally before Tuesday's big-prize primary.

He was about to deliver prepared remarks lauding New York values when he mistakenly mentioned the name of a popular convenience store chain in place of 9/11.

"It's very close to my heart because I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7-Eleven, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down, and I saw the greatest people I've ever seen in action," Trump told the crowd of thousands packed into the city's hockey arena.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives the crowd a thumbs up at a campaign rally Monday, April 18, 2016, in Buffalo, N.Y. (Joed Viera/The Union-Sun & Journal via AP) FALLS OUTS: BUFFALO NEWS AND BATAVIA DAILY NEWS OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

While few in the room appeared to notice the flub, Trump's comments quickly drew attention on social media, where some panned him for the confusion.

Trump has repeatedly invoked the Sept. 11 attacks as he's campaigned across his home state, where 95 delegates are at stake. Earlier this month, he and his wife paid a visit to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum  his first, according to a museum spokesman who said Trump also made a $100,000 donation that day.

Trump had previously said that he watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center from his apartment in Midtown Manhattan, and claimed he'd watched people jumping to their deaths, despite the fact that his apartment is located about four miles from the World Trade Center site.

On Monday evening, Trump also suggested that he had played a personal role in the recovery efforts as he praised "Everyone who helped clear the rubble. And I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit," he said. "But I want to tell you, those people were amazing. Clearing the rubble, trying to find additional lives. You didn't know what was going to come down on all of us and they handled it."

Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks did not respond to a request for comment on the misstatement, or to questions about what Trump was referring to or what kind of role he'd played.

In an interview with a German news station available on YouTube and dated September 13, 2001, Trump recounts that he "just went to what they call Ground Zero, I've never seen anything like it, the devastation, the human life that's been just wasted for no reason whatsoever. It is a terrible scene."

Asked whether he intended to play any role in the reconstruction efforts Trump said he had "a lot of men down here, right now" with more on their way.

"We have over 100 and we have about 125 coming, so we'll have a couple of hundred people down here. And they're very brave and what they're doing is amazing," he said, adding, "And we will be involved in some form in helping to reconstruct."

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Corrects style for 7-Eleven in headline and 3rd paragraph
Taiwan protests ejection from OECD steel talks, blames China

BEIJING (AP)  Taiwan says its delegation was ejected from a meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's steel committee after China complained, part of an apparent hardening of Beijing's attitude toward the island it claims as its own territory.

Taiwan is only an observer rather than a member of the OECD due to China's campaign to isolate it diplomatically. It was participating as a dialogue partner in the meeting held Monday in Belgium to discuss excess steel capacity.

However, the Chinese delegation demanded the Taiwanese leave because the delegates' ranks were not senior enough, Taiwan's official Central News Agency said Tuesday.

CNA cited Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Eleanor Wang as saying that claim wasn't valid because Taiwan had participated in previous meetings at the same level and in the same capacity.

"Strong protests" had been lodged against China, Belgium and the OECD over the ejection, CNA said without giving details.

Taiwan and China recently disagreed over Kenya's deportation of 45 Taiwanese wire fraud suspects to China, with Taiwan saying Beijing had violated a tacit understanding under which both sides agreed not to interfere in the legal affairs of their citizens abroad.

China said it had jurisdiction because the victims of the scammers were residents of mainland China. Officials claimed also that Taiwan hadn't sufficiently punished the perpetrators of previous such scams.

Facing intense public pressure, Taiwanese officials managed subsequently to convince Malaysia to deport a separate group of Taiwanese criminal suspects to Taiwan despite Beijing's request that they be sent to China. With no arrest warrants issued against them, Taiwanese police had no choice but to release the group after their arrival, prompting outrage in China's state media.

Taiwan's Justice Ministry said 10 officials from the police and agencies responsible for contacts with China would travel to Beijing on Wednesday to negotiate over the fate of the 45 and seek ways to boost cooperation in fighting cross-border crime.
Chinese man gets death for selling documents on encryption

BEIJING (AP)  A Chinese man has been sentenced to death for selling 150,000 classified documents that revealed key secrets about military and government data encryption to an unidentified foreign spy agency, state broadcaster CCTV said Tuesday.

Huang Yu, a former computer technician at a Chinese research firm specializing in encryption, received $700,000 for providing the documents between 2002 and 2011, CCTV said.

It did not say when Huang, 41, was tried on the espionage charge. The case was publicized as part of a national campaign to raise public awareness about state security following China's first national security education day last Friday.

CCTV said Huang leaked highly classified national secrets and caused "immeasurable" damage to the security of encrypted communications used by multiple departments within the ruling Communist Party, the government, the military and the financial sector.

Huang began leaking secrets in revenge for poor performance evaluations that eventually got him fired by the company in 2004, CCTV said. After leaving the firm, he used his wife, brother-in-law and former colleagues to pilfer more classified documents and traveled repeatedly to Southeast Asia to trade them for cash, the state broadcaster said. Huang's wife was sentenced to five years in prison and his brother-in-law to three years for their involvement, it said.

Huang was shown with his head shaved and dressed in prison garb discussing his case on television. He urged others aiding foreign countries in spying against China to turn themselves in.

"It's better for your family and for you," he said.
Aftershocks rattle Japan as deaths from quakes rise to 45

MINAMIASO, Japan (AP)  Japan's southern quake-hit area was rattled by a strong aftershock Tuesday and searchers found a woman's body buried under landslide rubble, raising the death toll from the twin earthquakes to 45.

More than 100,000 evacuees, some sleeping in their cars and others in gymnasiums or community centers, were bracing for another chilly night. Many people are afraid to stay in their homes as aftershocks continued to shake the area on the southern island of Kyushu, including a 5.5-magnitude temblor Tuesday afternoon.

Authorities were advising people staying in cars and shelters to move about to avoid developing deep-vein thrombosis, or blood clots that develop after being immobile for a long time. Japanese media reported that a 51-year-old woman from Kumamoto had died Monday from the condition.

Evacuees do a stretching exercise at a shelter in Kumamoto city, southern Japan Tuesday, April 19, 2016. More than 100,000 evacuees, some sleeping in their cars and others in gymnasiums or community centers, were bracing for another chilly night. Many people are afraid to stay in their homes as aftershocks continued to shake the area on the southern island of Kyushu, including a 5.5-magnitude temblor Tuesday afternoon. (Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

At least 23 people have developed symptoms, Kyodo News service said. Saiseikai Kumamoto Hospital said Tuesday it had diagnosed 10 cases, including two people in critical condition.

The area around Kumamoto was hit by two quakes just 28 hours apart late Thursday and early Saturday, triggering landslides that have blocked roads. The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said nearly 1,200 houses had been destroyed.

Nine people died in the first, magnitude 6.4 earthquake, and at least 36 died in the second one, which registered 7.3. About 1,100 have been injured.

The hardest-hit towns were Mashiki, where 20 residents died, and Minamiaso, a remote mountain area where 11 died and the death toll was creeping higher as soldiers and emergency workers use backhoes and shovels to search for missing people.

Temperatures around Kumamoto city were forecast to fall to 8 degrees Celsius (46 F) overnight.

The earthquake damage and loss of power and water is reverberating beyond Kyushu as Toyoto Motor Corp. and other manufacturers have suspended production.

Several soldiers carried a woman's body down on a plastic tray covered with an olive-green tarp Tuesday morning as dozens of workers dug through where a mudslide slammed into buildings in Saturday's quake.

American military airlifts are helping to deliver water, bread, ready-to-eat food and other emergency supplies. The U.S. has about 50,000 troops stationed in Japan, and the American military played a large role in rescue and relief after the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami on the northeastern coast.

Limited flights resumed to Kumamoto Airport on Tuesday, but outbound passenger flights remain almost entirely suspended because of severe damage to the terminal building.

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Associated Press writer Ken Moritsugu in Tokyo contributed to this report.

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This story corrects the magnitude of the second earthquake to 7.3 instead of 7.1.

Army troops carry at least one body dug up from a mudslide in Minamiaso, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Searchers digging in a mountainous area of southern Japan where twin earthquakes triggered landslides found another body Tuesday. (AP Photo/Mari Yamaguchi)

Troops bring in supplies to set up a new shelter in Minamiaso, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Evacuees at a gymnasium were moving to another shelter Tuesday, a nearby former elementary school, because some expressed fears after the strong aftershock, because the gym stands on the hill. (AP Photo/Mari Yamaguchi)

A woman rests inside a car at a parking lot where lots of evacuees gather in Mashiki, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan Tuesday, April 19, 2016. More than 100,000 evacuees, some sleeping in their cars and others in gymnasiums or community centers, were bracing for another chilly night. Many people are afraid to stay in their homes as aftershocks continued to shake the area on the southern island of Kyushu, including a 5.5-magnitude temblor Tuesday afternoon. (Naoya Osato/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

A man cries as his father is missing after the landslide in the earthquake-hit Minamiaso, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan Tuesday, April 19, 2016. More than 100,000 evacuees, some sleeping in their cars and others in gymnasiums or community centers, were bracing for another chilly night. Many people are afraid to stay in their homes as aftershocks continued to shake the area on the southern island of Kyushu, including a 5.5-magnitude temblor Tuesday afternoon.(Yohei Fukai/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

Rescuers, usuing blue plastic sheet, search for missing persons at the site of a landslide in Minamiaso, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Minamiaso, a town of 12,000 on the southern island of Kyushu, was partly cut off by landslides and road and bridge damage after earthquakes. (Yohei Fukai/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

A man cries as his father is missing after the landslide in the earthquake-hit Minamiaso, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan Tuesday, April 19, 2016. More than 100,000 evacuees, some sleeping in their cars and others in gymnasiums or community centers, were bracing for another chilly night. Many people are afraid to stay in their homes as aftershocks continued to shake the area on the southern island of Kyushu, including a 5.5-magnitude temblor Tuesday afternoon.(Yohei Fukai/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

A woman offers prayer at the site of a landslide where her neighbor was found dead in the earthquake-hit Minamiaso, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan Tuesday, April 19, 2016. More than 100,000 evacuees, some sleeping in their cars and others in gymnasiums or community centers, were bracing for another chilly night. Many people are afraid to stay in their homes as aftershocks continued to shake the area on the southern island of Kyushu, including a 5.5-magnitude temblor Tuesday afternoon. (Sadayuki Goto/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

Evacuees, Mutsue Nishimura, 88, right, and her husband Teruo, 88, rest in a hotel's courtesy bus where they have sheltered for three days following the earthquake in Mashiki, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan Tuesday, April 19, 2016. More than 100,000 evacuees, some sleeping in their cars and others in gymnasiums or community centers, were bracing for another chilly night. Many people are afraid to stay in their homes as aftershocks continued to shake the area on the southern island of Kyushu, including a 5.5-magnitude temblor Tuesday afternoon. (Yu Nakajima/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

Rescuers search for missing persons at the site of a landslide in Minamiaso, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Minamiaso, a town of 12,000 on the southern island of Kyushu, was partly cut off by landslides and road and bridge damage after earthquakes. (Sadayuki Goto/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT
The Latest: US to press on for transition to end Syria war

BEIRUT (AP)  The Latest on the conflict in Syria as escalating violence in the north has prompted opposition representatives to suspend participation in U.N.-sponsored peace talks (all times local):

9:40 p.m.

The White House says it will continue to push for a political transition to end Syria's civil war.

UN Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Syria Staffan de Mistura speaks to the media during a press conference after a round of negotiations, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday, April 18, 2016. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

Spokesman Josh Earnest says the "terrible situation" there was caused by the failed leadership of President Bashar Assad. Earnest says the U.S. will continue to push both sides in the conflict to participate in a U.N.-led process to bring about the desired political transition.

Earnest is calling on Russia to use its influence with Assad to force Syria to honor the terms of a cease-fire agreement that has all but collapsed.

In Geneva, where the U.N.-sponsored talks were being held, the leader of the opposition coalition says it can't participate in talks while the Syrian regime continues its military campaign.

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8:10 p.m.

A Syrian opposition coalition says President Bashar Assad's government is responsible for the airstrikes on rebel-held towns that killed 44 civilians earlier in the day.

Salem Meslet, official spokesman of the Western-backed Syrian High Negotiations Committee, says the deadly strikes validate the coalition's decision to suspend its participation in peace talks with the government in Geneva.

Meslet says that "Assad is telling the world he has no interest in diplomacy for peace." He also called the strikes a "massacre of innocents."

Riad Hijab, head of the HNC, accused the international community of failing to protect civilians from pro-government forces earlier on Tuesday.

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7:50 p.m.

The Danish parliament has approved the government's plan to send combat planes and special forces to join a U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq.

The Danish contribution will consist of up to seven F-16 fighter jets, one C-130 transport plane and about 400 personnel, including 60 from the special forces.

Denmark's TV2 says the vote was formally approved by lawmakers on Tuesday in a 90-19 vote.

Danish warplanes have previously participated in airstrikes on IS forces in Iraq, but not Syria. Those planes were brought back for repairs last year.

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6:30 p.m.

Syrian activists say airstrikes targeting two opposition-held towns in northwestern Syria have killed 44 civilians.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says there were three children among the victims in Tuesday's airstrikes. The Observatory says it expects the death toll to rise further.

The group says the towns hit are Maarat al-Numan and Kafranbel in Idlib province. Rallies against both extremists and President Bashar Assad's government have frequently taken place in the towns during the five-year civil war.

Another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees, says the strikes on Maarat al-Numan hit the town's market place. It says images of the aftermath show widespread destruction.

Observatory's chief Rami Abdurrahman says the strikes are among the deadliest since a cease-fire took effect in Syria at the end of February.

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5:40 p.m.

Turkey's state run news agency has raised the toll of wounded from a round of rockets that hit southern Turkey, saying three people were hurt.

The Anadolu Agency said Tuesday that three missiles hit the roof of a house, sparking a fire, the bathroom of a mosque and a graveyard in Kilis. On Monday, a similar barrage of rockets hit the border town, causing the death of five Syrians, including four children.

Syrian refugees outnumber locals in Kilis, a town that is being hammered by projectiles fired from its war-torn neighbor.

The wider province of Kilis borders areas in Syria held by Syrian anti-government rebels, Kurdish factions, and Islamic State group militants.

In the wake of such attacks, the Turkish military typically fires back at targets in Syria in line with its rules of engagement.

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5:30 p.m.

The Syrian opposition chief negotiator Mohammed Alloush says he is leaving Geneva because he does not want to be part of an "absurd" political solution that realizes no lasting resolution to the conflict.

Alloush said on Tuesday that the talks in Geneva as they have been going will not lead to a "real transition" of power nor meet the aspirations of Syrians. He spoke in a recorded message sent to The Associated Press.

He says the opposition would return to direct talks once the Syrian government meets international resolutions including end the siege on rebel held areas, allowing aid in, releasing detainees, and ending airstrikes on civilians.

He says: "For how long will the world continue to see us as numbers only?"

The Syrian opposition said it is suspending its participation in indirect talks because of government violations of a cease-fire in place since late February.

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4 p.m.

Turkey's state run news agency says three rockets fired from Syria hit a town in southern Turkey, wounding two people.

The Anadolu Agency said Tuesday that the missiles hit the roof of a house, sparking a fire, the bathroom of a mosque and a graveyard in Kilis.

On Monday, a similar barrage of rockets hit the border town, causing the death of five Syrians, including four children.

Syrian refugees outnumber locals in Kilis, a town that is being hammered by projectiles fired from its war-torn neighbor.

The wider province of Kilis borders areas in Syria held by Syrian anti-government rebels, Kurdish factions, and Islamic State group militants.

In the wake of such attacks, the Turkish military typically fires back at targets in Syria in line with its rules of engagement.

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2:30 p.m.

Russia's ambassador to the international organizations in Geneva says extremists took control of the Syrian opposition group, effectively hijacking the Syrian peace talks.

Alexei Borodavkin told the Russian Tass news agency on Tuesday that "the suspension of the Syrian opposition delegation's participation in peace talks is proof that, unfortunately, extremists took control within the delegation."

Borodavkin said the talks will continue without the groups who pulled out, implying that the extremists were backed by Saudi Arabia, and saying that opposition groups "other than the 'Al Riyadh' groups, would still participate in the peace talks.

During the interview with Tass, the ambassador reaffirmed that Russia would continue to support the Syrian army's fight against the Islamic State group and the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front.

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2:15 p.m.

The head of the Syrian opposition negotiating team in Geneva has called for international monitors to observe a cessation of hostilities agreement that has been repeatedly violated, urging the U.N. Security Council to take firm actions against violators.

Riad Hijab is speaking in Geneva Tuesday, a day after his coalition said it is suspending its participation in the peace talks, which began last week, over government violations of a cease-fire.

Hijab complained that supplies and ammunition were denied to rebel forces during the truce period, which began in late February; meanwhile he said the Syrian government continued to receive aid from its allies. He said he hoped the U.S., a main backer of some rebel groups, would continue supplying weapons. He said: "We will fight no matter the circumstances. We will fight even with stones, and will not surrender."

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2 p.m.

Just hours before attending the official opening of the International Criminal Court's new headquarters, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said that people responsible for atrocities in the Syrian civil war must face justice.

The ICC has not been able to file any charges linked to the devastating Syrian conflict because the country is not a member state and the United Nations Security Council has not exercised its power to call on the court to launch prosecutions.

Speaking to students in a Hague theater on Tuesday, Ban said the war "has been the scene of the use of chemical weapons, siege and starvation as a tool of war, unlawful detention, torture and indiscriminate and criminal shelling and aerial bombardment of civilians."

Those responsible, he says, "must be held to account."

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1:30 p.m.

The head of the Syrian opposition negotiating team in Geneva says his coalition requires a clear timetable for the political transition in Syria, which he says can't include the incumbent President Bashar Assad.

Riad Hijab is speaking in Geneva Tuesday, a day after his coalition said it is suspending its participation in the peace talks, which began last week, over government violations of a cease-fire.

Hijab said: "There cannot be a solution in Syria while Bashar Assad is present." He said his coalition can't continue with the talks in Geneva while fighting and suffering continued on the ground.

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1:15 p.m.

The Kremlin spokesman says Russia will continue to support further talks in Geneva.

During a conference call on Tuesday with journalists, Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed Russia's support for embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad and said Russia would continue to oppose terrorist groups.

Peskov would not confirm reports that President Putin had recently sent Assad a telegram.

According to Peskov, President Putin, when speaking to U.S. President Barack Obama yesterday, stressed the need to continue dialogue and maintain the current U.S.-Russia brokered ceasefire.

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12:45 a.m.

Syrian rebels and activists are reporting intensified fighting in the country's north and center, while a chief opposition negotiator says the conditions on the ground are not conducive to a political process.

The fighting in rural parts of the northern Latakia province, a government stronghold, and in the central Hama and Homs provinces Tuesday comes a day after the Syrian opposition said it is pausing its formal participation in the Geneva talks because of what it said were hundreds of government violations of a cease-fire agreement over two months.
German reported denied entry to Turkey back in Egypt

ISTANBUL (AP)  A German reporter was prevented from entering Turkey on Tuesday and was held in a deportation room at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport before he was sent back to Cairo, according to a Turkish official and a German broadcaster.

German public broadcaster SWR wrote on Twitter that its correspondent Volker Schwenck had landed in Cairo, his base, after being detained for several hours in Turkey. A Turkish official confirmed he was sent back to Egypt saying the decision was an "individual matter."

SWR is part of the ARD network, one of two main public broadcasters in Germany. Another of ARD's members recently aired a song poking fun at Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, triggering a diplomatic rebuke from Turkey.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel attends a news conference with the President of Mozambique Filipe Jacinto Nyusi after a meeting at the chancellery in Berlin, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

The Turkish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the matter, pointed out that ARD TV has an office and full-time staff in Istanbul and said the decision to expel Schwenck was not a "reflection on their journalistic activities."

He did not say why the journalist was banned from entering.

Earlier in the day, Chancellor Angela Merkel said her government was concerned about the detention of the German television reporter, adding that diplomats were trying to resolve the situation.

Asked about the incident during a news conference in Berlin, Merkel said German officials "immediately looked into the matter."

"The Foreign Ministry in particular is in constant contact with all necessary authorities and is of course trying to restore the journalist's ability to work. As such we are pursuing this and regard it with some concern."

It is the latest incident involving journalists to sour German-Turkish relations.

Last week, Merkel's government granted a Turkish request to allow the possible prosecution of a German TV comic for writing an intentionally offensive poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Critics of the decision accused Merkel of giving in to Turkish pressure because of Ankara's key role in halting the flow of migrants to Europe.

The poem by comedian Jan Boehmermann was a response to Turkish anger over a satirical program on one of SWR's sister channels that had also poked fun at Erdogan.

Last month, German weekly Der Spiegel pulled its correspondent from Istanbul, saying Turkey had refused to renew his press permit.

Another Turkish official said Schwenck was banned from entering Turkey because of a previous incident but gave no details.

"He knew he would not be allowed in, yet he still came," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

A spokesman for SWR denied the official's version.

"There had never previously been problems. It's the first time he's faced such a situation," Wolfgang Utz told The Associated Press. "He wasn't aware of any entry ban."

Schwenck, who had planned to travel to the Syrian border to interview refugees, posted a picture on Twitter of a document titled "Inadmissible Passenger Notification Report."

He tweeted: "Final stop Istanbul. Entry to Turkey denied. There's a note with my name. I'm a journalist. A problem?"

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Suzan Frazer in Ankara contributed to this report. Jordans reported from Berlin.
Police: FBI employee 'unintended target' in fatal shooting

WASHINGTON (AP)  A suspect has been arrested in the death of an FBI employee who authorities say was an "unintended target" in a shooting in southeast Washington.

The Washington Post reports (http://wapo.st/1QiK0zr) 29-year-old Kelby Ronald Gordon was arrested Sunday and charged with second-degree murder in the death of Gabriel Turner.

District police say the 46-year-old Turner, a custodian for the FBI, was found fatally shot outside on March 24.

Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said Monday that Turner wasn't the intended target in the shooting.

Court documents reveal detectives also recovered surveillance footage showing Turner walking as another person walks behind him. The second person quickly ducks and then runs as a gunman fires toward that man, who police think was the intended target.

It's unclear whether Gordon has an attorney.

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Belgian authorities investigating IS fighters reports

BRUSSELS (AP)  Belgian authorities are investigating information that suggests the Islamic State group has sent more fighters to Europe, an official said Tuesday, as Belgium remains on high alert following last month's suicide bombings in Brussels.

"Signals appear to suggest that IS has again sent fighters to Europe, to our country," Paul Van Tigchelt, the head of Belgium's security threat analysis center, told reporters in Brussels Tuesday. He did not elaborate.

Belgium has been on at least its second highest alert level for four months  since the week after the November 13 attacks in Paris  with troops and extra police mobilized.

A woman lays flowers on a memorial to victims of the Brussels attacks during a march against hate in Brussels on Sunday, April 17, 2016. Thousands of people have rallied in Brussels for a march against hate in the wake of the suicide bombings in the city last month. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

Strategic sites like airports, major rail stations, nuclear plants and buildings housing radioactive materials remain under close surveillance, while security is high at soft targets like shopping complexes and cinemas.

Federal Police spokesman Peter De Waele said surveillance cameras are being monitored full time and that car number plate reading devices are in use around the airport. More than 50 suspect packages have been dealt with since the Brussels attacks, he said.

"The threat is still there, it's serious and possible," Van Tigchelt said. "We have to stay alert."

Belgian authorities believe they have "destabilized" the network that carried out the March 22 suicide attacks on the Brussels airport and subway, killing 32 and injuring hundreds. The perpetrators have been closely linked to the group that carried out the attacks in Paris.

Van Tigchelt said the continued high alert level was not based solely on the Paris-Brussels network, some of whose acts were prepared in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, where several extremists have lived or traveled through.

"There are several ongoing investigations," Van Tigchelt said. He declined to be drawn on the exact nature of the threat.

Marchers gather a memorial to victims of the Brussels attacks during a march against hate in Brussels on Sunday, April 17, 2016. Thousands of people have rallied in Brussels for a march against hate in the wake of the suicide bombings in the city last month. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

A woman drops a flower onto a memorial to the victims of the Brussels attacks at the Bourse in Brussels on Sunday, April 17, 2016. Thousands of people have rallied in Brussels for a march against hate in the wake of the suicide bombings in the city last month. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
India now says it will try to reclaim crown jewel from UK

NEW DELHI (AP)  A day after India's solicitor general told the Supreme Court that it won't request the return of the 106-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond, which is now part of the British crown jewels, the government reversed track and said it would work to bring the diamond back.

India's solicitor general had said Monday that Britain shouldn't have to give the diamond back, since it was given freely to the British in the mid-19th century by the family of Punjab's Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and had been "neither stolen nor forcibly taken by British rulers."

The statement was surprising after decades of demanding the diamond be returned. For many Indians, the loss of the Koh-i-Noor is symbolic of India's subjugation under British colonial rule, and its return is viewed as partial compensation for centuries of economic exploitation.

FILE- in this April 5, 2002 file photo, The Koh-i-noor, or "mountain of light," diamond, set in the Maltese Cross at the front of the crown made for Britain's late Queen Mother Elizabeth, is seen on her coffin, along with her personal standard, a wreath and a note from her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, as it is drawn to London's Westminster Hall. India's government has told the country's top court it won't try to reclaim the 106-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond, which is now part of the British crown jewels.The government told the Supreme Court on Monday that the diamond was neither taken away forcibly nor stolen, but was given as a gift to Queen Victoria by an Indian king in the mid-19th century. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)

But on Tuesday night, the Culture Ministry issued a statement saying it had yet to make its position known, and that India's government would make all possible efforts to bring back the diamond.

The court was hearing a petition filed by a rights group asking it to order the government to seek the return of the diamond.

The two-judge bench said Monday that it did not want to issue a ruling that might jeopardize a future attempt to bring back the diamond or other treasures that once belonged to India. It told the government to take six weeks to reconsider its position before the court decides whether to dismiss the petition.

The diamond is on display in the Tower of London, set in front of the Queen Mother's crown.

The Koh-i-Noor, which means "Mountain of Light," was discovered in the Golconda mines in what is now the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The large, colorless diamond then passed between Mughal princes, Iranian warriors, Afghan rulers and Punjabi Maharajas before it was given in 1849 to the East India Company, which then offered it to the British queen.

India along with Pakistan and Afghanistan have long squabbled over who has the rightful claim to the diamond.

During a 2010 visit to India, British Prime Minister David Cameron told local media that the diamond would stay in Britain.

"If you say yes to one (request), you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty," Cameron said. "I'm afraid it's going to have to stay put."

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Syria's Palmyra arch, destroyed by IS, recreated in London

LONDON (AP)  A 2,000-year-old triumphal arch destroyed by the Islamic State group in Syria has risen again  in replica  in London's Trafalgar Square.

The Arch of Triumph in Palmyra formed part of one of the world's most extensive ancient archaeological sites. The ancient city, a UNESCO world heritage site, was among Syria's main tourist attractions before the civil war erupted in 2011.

IS militants overran Palmyra in May 2015, demolishing Roman-era monuments including the archway and two large temples dating back more than 1,800 years  and posting videos of their destruction online. Syrian government forces retook the city last month and authorities have begun assessing the damage to its ancient monuments.

An imposing to scale replica of Palmyra's Triumphal Arch in Trafalgar Square is surrounded by people after the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the Executive Director of the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) Roger Michel, unveiled it in London, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. The 5.5m high reconstruction of the 2,000 year old Triumphal Arch from Syria is being installed in the square for three days from Tuesday April 19 until Thursday April 21, to help raise awareness of the importance of historic sites and antiquities as part of World Heritage Week 2016. It will then travel to other cities both inside and outside the Middle East. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Built under the Roman emperor Septimius Severus between A.D. 193 and A.D. 211, the arch towered over the colonnaded streets of the ancient city, which linked the Roman Empire to Persia.

The six-meter (20-foot) Egyptian marble replica  about two-thirds the size of the original  was created by the Institute for Digital Archaeology from photographs of the original site using 3-D imaging technology and computer-aided carving tools.

"When I saw the destruction, I felt like I needed to do something to try and make it right," said Roger Michel, executive director of the Institute for Digital Archaeology. The institute is a joint venture between Harvard University, the University of Oxford and Dubai's Museum of the Future.

"The first thing I thought was, when I saw Palmyra come down, is these folks are censoring history," Michel said.

London Mayor Boris Johnson unveiled the model Tuesday. It will stay in London for three days before traveling to cities including New York and Dubai  and eventually to Palmyra itself.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, poses for the media after unveiling an imposing scale replica of Palmyra's Triumphal Arch in Trafalgar Square, in London, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. The triumphal arch destroyed by the Islamic State group in Syria was been recreated in London's Trafalgar Square. The Arch of Triumph in Palmyra formed part of one of the world's most extensive ancient archaeological sites. The 5.5 meter (18-foot) Egyptian marble replica about two-thirds the size of the original, was created by the Institute for Digital Archaeology using 3-D printing technology. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, second left, joins the Executive Director of the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) Roger Michel, left, after unveiling an imposing scale replica of Palmyra's Triumphal Arch in Trafalgar Square, in London, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. The triumphal arch destroyed by the Islamic State group in Syria was been recreated in London's Trafalgar Square. The Arch of Triumph in Palmyra formed part of one of the world's most extensive ancient archaeological sites. The 5.5 meter (18-foot) Egyptian marble replica about two-thirds the size of the original, was created by the Institute for Digital Archaeology using 3-D printing technology. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)
Japan's Asahi to buy Peroni, Grolsch brands from AB InBev

BRUSSELS (AP)  Japanese drinks group Asahi says it has reached an agreement with brewing giant Anheuser-Busch InBev to buy the Peroni, Grolsch and Meantime brands and related businesses, excluding certain U.S. rights.

Asahi Group Holdings Ltd. had made a binding offer in February of 2.55 billion euros (currently $2.88 billion) for the brands. AB InBev is looking to sell the brands to assuage antitrust concerns over its acquisition of rival SABMiller.
Ukraine, Russia reach deal to release pilot, Poroshenko says

MOSCOW (AP)  Ukraine and Russia have reached a deal to free a jailed Ukrainian pilot, President Petro Poroshenko said Tuesday, suggesting that she will be swapped for two Russian servicemen imprisoned in Ukraine.

Nadezhda Savchenko, who was captured by Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine in 2014, was sentenced to 22 years in prison in Russia last month for her alleged role in the deaths of two Russian journalists.

Her capture and trial became a rallying point for Ukrainians at home and abroad.

FILE - In this Tuesday, March 22, 2016 file photo Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko looks out from a glass cage inside court, in the town of Donetsk, Rostov-on-Don region, Russia. Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev, who have acknowledged being Russian servicemen and said they were on a reconnaissance mission, have been named as possible candidates to be exchanged for Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, who was captured by separatist rebels last year and sentenced last month to 22 years in prison in Russia over her alleged role in the deaths of two Russian journalists. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev, file)

"I think we have agreed on a certain algorithm that would allow Nadezhda's release," Poroshenko said Tuesday, a day after he had a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Speaking at a televised news conference in Kiev with the Danish prime minister, the Ukrainian president mentioned Monday's conviction of the two Russian officers in Kiev, saying that the verdict "gives opportunities to launch the mechanism of a swap."

In a sign that the swap could be imminent, an attorney for one of the men told the Interfax news agency that the two Russians would not appeal the verdict.

Later Tuesday, Poroshenko tweeted that he had a telephone conversation with Savchenko together with the pilot's mother and sister, and had urged her to stop a hunger strike that she went on last month.

Savchenko's lawyer Ilya Novikov told The Associated Press that the pilot has agreed to start taking food.

It wasn't immediately clear how the call with Savchenko, who is kept in a detention facility in southern Russia, was arranged.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed frustration over persistent demands from the U.S. and other Western countries for Savchenko's release.

"At the moment all our Western partners, overseas and in Europe, talk only about Nadezhda Savchenko when the topic of human rights in the Russian Federation is discussed," Lavrov said after talks with his French counterpart. "No one remembers now that Russian journalists were killed in Ukraine."

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault expressed concern about Savchenko's health. "I hope that the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine regarding the prisoners exchange will end soon so that this complicated situation is solved," he said through a translator.

Savchenko, who is a professional pilot, enlisted in a volunteer Ukrainian battalion in the summer of 2014 to fight the separatist rebels in the Luhansk region. She was captured by the rebels and re-surfaced in Russian custody on the other side of the border. Moscow claimed Savchenko escaped from the separatists and was caught in Russia, while the Ukrainian claims she was abducted and smuggled into Russia.

Poroshenko would not say when he expected Savchenko to be returned, but added that he told Putin that he was ready to send a presidential jet to Russia to bring her home.

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters earlier Tuesday that the two presidents talked about Savchenko as well as the two Russian officers.

A Kiev court sentenced Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev to 14 years in prison after finding them guilty of terrorism and waging war in eastern Ukraine. The two, who were captured last year, acknowledged being Russian officers, but the Russian defense ministry claimed they had resigned from active duty.

Peskov would not respond to Poroshenko's statement when contacted by the Interfax news agency, but only said that Savchenko's future was discussed during Monday's call.

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Dmytro Vlasov in Kiev, Ukraine, contributed to this report.

Denmark's Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, left, and Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko talk before a meeting in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Poroshenko said Tuesday that he and President Vladimir Putin agreed in a telephone call on Monday on a formula that will allow Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko to be returned. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov)

FILE - In this Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2015 file photo, Russian special forces Sgt. Alexander Alexandrov captured while fighting in war-torn eastern Ukraine, sit in a cage during a trial hearing at the Holosiivskyi District Court in Kiev, Ukraine. Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev, who have acknowledged being Russian servicemen and said they were on a reconnaissance mission, have been named as possible candidates to be exchanged for Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, who was captured by separatist rebels last year and sentenced last month to 22 years in prison in Russia over her alleged role in the deaths of two Russian journalists. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov, file)
Philip Morris' 1Q profit falls, misses forecasts

NEW YORK (AP)  Philip Morris International Inc. on Tuesday reported a drop in first-quarter profit on lower cigarette sales volume.

The tobacco company, which only sells its products outside the U.S., reported a 14.8 percent dip in net income to $1.53 billion, or 98 cents per share.

The results missed Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of eight analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of $1.11 per share.

FILE - In this Feb. 5, 2015, file photo, a man smokes a cigarette as he walks past a shop displaying a Marlboro sign at a market in Jakarta, Indonesia. Philip Morris International reports financial results Tuesday, April 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara, File)

Revenue fell 3.3 percent to $16.08 billion in the period, which also fell short of Street forecasts. Three analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $16.28 billion.

The company said a mix of currency fluctuations and lower shipment volumes cut into its overall revenue.

Philip Morris expects full-year earnings to be $4.40 to $4.50 per share.

Philip Morris International shares fell $1.10 to $99.50 in premarket trading about 2 and a half hours ahead of the market open. They have increased 14 percent since the beginning of the year, while the Standard & Poor's 500 index has risen 2.5 percent. The stock has risen 18 percent in the last 12 months.

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Elements of this story were generated by Automated Insights (http://automatedinsights.com/ap) using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on PM at http://www.zacks.com/ap/PM

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The Latest: Pope asks migrants to forgive indifference

ISTANBUL (AP)  The Latest on Europe's efforts to cope with the influx of migrants (all times local):

8:45 p.m.

Pope Francis is asking migrants to forgive what he says is societies' "closure and indifference" toward them.

The Greek writing on the Idomeni railway station, towers over a man using his mobile phone at a makeshift migrant camp in the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Despite appeals from authorities to move to organized shelters, thousands of refugees and migrants have been camped for weeks at Idomeni. They hope that Macedonia will reopen its border and allow them to travel north towards Europe's prosperous heartland. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

The pope made the remarks Tuesday in a message to a Jesuit center in Rome that has assisted refugees for 35 years.

Francis says people fleeing oppression, war and "unjust distribution" of Earth's resources are brothers with whom to share bread, homes and life. Instead of being seen as a problem or expense, migrants should be seen as a gift, in the pope's view.

Francis said migrants can be a "bridge that unites faraway peoples."

Last week, Francis brought three Syrian Muslim refugees families to Italy aboard his plane after a visit to a Greek island. Some 3,000 migrants on the island face possible deportation back to Turkey under an EU deal.

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8:05 p.m.

An Afghan man has appeared in court on the Greek island of Chios after being charged with raping a 13-year-old Afghan boy in a refugee camp on the island.

Authorities said Tuesday the 29-year-old man was arrested after the boy's parents reported the attack on Saturday. The boy was hospitalized, and the man was arrested shortly afterward.

The suspect appeared before a prosecutor Tuesday and was given until Thursday to present his defense. He was being held in custody on the island pending the new court appearance.

Greek police said this was the first such crime reported among the country's refugee population.

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5:45 p.m.

Human Rights Watch says the initial round of deportations of migrants from Greece to Turkey under a new European Union-Turkey deal were "rushed, chaotic and violated the rights of those deported."

The rights group said Tuesday that Turkish authorities had not allowed visits by rights organizations or the United Nations to those sent back from the Greek island of Chios, and that those returned had lost contact with family and friends still in Greece.

Under an EU-Turkey deal meant to tackle the refugee crisis and signed last month, migrants arriving on Greek islands from the Turkish coast from March 20 onwards face deportation to Turkey unless they successfully apply for asylum in Greece.

HRW said some of those deported from Chios on April 4 had not been informed they were being sent back and weren't told where they were being taken.

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4:50 p.m.

Sixteen Iraqis who were offered asylum in the Czech Republic have decided to return home.

They arrived in the Czech Republic as part of 153 Iraqi Christians who were threatened by extremists and included in a program to receive asylum here.

After 89 arrived, 25 of them asked to cancel asylum procedures and traveled illegally to Germany where they were arrested; the government consequently stopped the program.

The 16 collected their travel documents last week and were heading also for Germany before police detained them near the German border. They again tried to apply for asylum.

But on Tuesday, Interior Minister Miland Chovanec said they asked to return to Iraq. No reasons were given.

Eight others from the 153 also decided to return home earlier.

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2:20 p.m.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu says Turkey could easily call off the migrant deal struck with the European Union if visa rules for Turkish nationals aren't relaxed within the next two months.

The deal struck by Ankara and Brussels sees Turkey accepting migrants deported from Europe in return for easier access to European visas for Turkish nationals.

The Anadolu Agency quoted the prime minister as saying that if Brussels did not hold up its end of the bargain by June then "no one would expect Turkey to adhere its commitments."

Davutoglu spoke on his way to Strasbourg, France where he addressed EU lawmakers on Tuesday.

He said the deal had already led the number of migrant crossings to nosedive.

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2:15 p.m.

A poll shows a large majority of Romanians do not want migrants settling in the country, and opposition to them is growing.

The INSCOP survey found that nearly 85 percent of Romanians questioned expressed a negative opinion about migrants and refugees moving to Romania.

Institute director Darie Cristea told The Associated Press Tuesday: "Migration is now perceived as a phenomenon that brings risks rather than a humanitarian problem. There is also the perception that European authorities are not handling the crisis well."

The poll found that 11 percent would welcome refugees.

In November, the same poll showed 80 percent of people were opposed to migrants moving to Romania, up from 65 percent in September.

The latest poll was carried out from March 21-28 in 92 places from cities to villages and 1,063 people were questioned. The poll has a 3 percent margin of error.

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11:20 a.m.

The European Commission says it will be providing 700 million euros ($790 million) in emergency humanitarian funding for Greece until 2018 to help it deal with the massive refugee crisis that has seen tens of thousands of people stranded in the country  the first time such funding has been used to help a European Union member.

The funding, announced Tuesday, will be given to aid organizations that will work with the Greek government in providing assistance such as food, shelter, medical and educational services for refugees.

Christos Stylianides, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management, said he was in Athens signing agreements allocating the first 83 million euros to eight aid organizations, including UNHCR, the Danish Refugee Council, the International Rescue Committee, Save the Children and the international Red Cross.

A woman walks with a child along the train tracks near a makeshift camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. More than 11,000 people have been waiting at this border point for over a month hoping it would reopen. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
French leader worried about suspension of Syria talks

AMMAN, Jordan (AP)  French President Francois Hollande expressed concern over the suspension of Geneva peace talks on ending Syria's civil, saying Tuesday the development was "very worrying."

Hollande, who spoke during a visit to Syria's neighbor and Western ally Jordan, said the decision by a Syrian opposition delegation to halt talks in Switzerland could quickly lead to renewed fighting, more airstrikes and suffering among civilians.

A complete collapse of the talks would mean "no hope," Hollande said during a meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah II and underscored the need for a political solution to the conflict.

French President Francois Hollande, right, shakes the hand of Amman Mayor Aqel Biltaji after landing in Jordan on April 19, 2016 on the last leg of a Middle East tour including Lebanon and Egypt. (AP Phoro/ Sam McNeil)

Jordan has been significantly affected by the fighting next door, now in its sixth year. The Syria conflict helped to give rise to Islamic State extremists, who control large areas of Syria and Iraq, also a neighbor to Jordan.

"I know what you are facing in this area," Hollande told Jordan's king, referring to the extremists. "The threat is not a virtual one, it's a real threat at your borders. We are cooperating at the military level, and our cooperation is a really exceptional."

Later Tuesday, Hollande was to visit an air base in Jordan from which French aircraft have staged airstrikes against IS. Jordan is also a member of the U.S.-led military coalition against the extremists.

The kingdom, meanwhile, has absorbed more than 630,000 Syrian refugees, out of a total of close to 5 million Syrians who fled their homeland since 2011.

Since last year, Jordan has further tightened restrictions on the entry of refugees, causing thousands to be stranded in a remote border area in the desert. Jordan's government said earlier this week that the number of Syrians waiting to be let in has reached 50,000.

Jordan has argued that its security comes first and that it can only permit Syrians to enter after careful security vetting. Human rights groups have warned that refugees endure tough conditions and have urged Jordan to carry out the vetting at better facilities in the country.

Hollande said Jordan has "shown great solidarity, and there are still refugees coming from Syria fleeing the fighting around Raqqa or around Palmyra," referring to current or former IS strongholds.

"You need to give them the support they need, but at the same time make sure that there are no terrorists infiltrating among the refugees," Hollande added.

As for the Geneva talks, Hollande said it was "very worrying to see that the negotiations have been suspended."

In Geneva, the Syrian opposition delegation said there can be no solution in Syria with President Bashar Assad in power, and called for international monitors to observe a cease-fire that has all but collapsed.

French President Francois Hollande, right, shakes the hand of Amman Mayor Aqel Biltaji after landing in Jordan on April 19, 2016 on the last leg of a Middle East tour including Lebanon and Egypt. (AP Phoro/ Sam McNeil)
Swiss snowboard star Estelle Balet killed in avalanche

GENEVA (AP)  World champion extreme snowboarder Estelle Balet was killed in an avalanche on Tuesday while making a film in her native Switzerland.

Police said the 21-year-old Swiss athlete was struck by the snow slide early in the morning above Orsieres, near Switzerland's southern border with France and Italy.

She had been following another snowboarder, who was not caught in the avalanche.

FILE - In This March 9, 2015 file photo Freestyle Snowboarder Estelle Balet poses in front of the vallee du Rhone in Vercorin in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland. The 21-years-old skier has been killed in an avalanche police confirmed April 19, 2016. (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone, file via AP)

Valais state police said in a statement that rescuers were able to free Balet, who had been wearing special safety equipment, but she died at the scene. An investigation into the cause has been launched.

Two days earlier, Balet had looked forward to her filming work in a message posted on her Instagram account.

"Pretty awesome to get to snowboard with this view.. Can't wait for more filming next week !" she had written.

Balet recently won the Freeride World Tour for a second straight year racing as a member of watchmaker Swatch's professional team.

The global series challenges snowboarders and skiers in extreme conditions on ungroomed snow, and is organized outside the Olympic system.

"Estelle Balet was a naturally gifted shining star and demonstrated remarkable talent," the Freeride series said in a statement on its website.
The Latest: Clinton picks up at least 135 delegates in NY

NEW YORK (AP)  The Latest on campaign 2016 as voters in New York cast their ballots in the state's primary (all times Eastern Daylight Time):

12:05 a.m.

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is picking up a majority of New York's delegates with her win Tuesday over Bernie Sanders.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves to supporters as she enters the room with daughter Chelsea Clinton and son-in-law Mark Mezvinsky after winning the New York state primary election Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

With 247 delegates at stake, Clinton will pick up at least 135. Sanders will win at least 104. Eight remain to be allocated pending final vote tallies.

Based on primaries and caucuses to date, Clinton now has 1,424 delegates to Sanders' 1,149.

When including superdelegates, or party officials who can back any candidate, Clinton's lead is bigger  1,893 to Sanders' 1,180.

It takes 2,383 to win.

Sanders needs to win 71 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates if he still hopes to win the nomination.

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11:45 p.m..

Donald Trump is now the only Republican candidate with any chance of clinching the nomination before the convention.

Ted Cruz was mathematically eliminated Tuesday after Trump's big win in the New York primary.

Trump won at least 89 of the 95 delegates at stake. John Kasich won at least three and Cruz was in danger of being shut out.

There aren't enough delegates left in future contests for either Cruz or Kasich to reach the 1,237 delegates needed to win the GOP nomination. Their only hope is to block Trump and force a contested convention.

The AP delegate count:

Trump: 845.

Cruz: 559.

Kasich: 147.

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11:30 p.m.

Hillary Clinton is about 80 percent of the way to clinching the Democratic presidential nomination after her win in New York.

With 247 delegates at stake, Clinton will pick up at least 129. Sanders will win at least 98. Twenty delegates remain to be allocated, pending final vote tallies.

Based on primaries and caucuses to date, Clinton now has 1,418 delegates to Sanders' 1,143.

When including superdelegates, party officials who can back any candidate, Clinton has 1,887. Sanders has 1,174.

It takes 2,383 to win.

Sanders now has an even high bar if he hopes to win the nomination  he needs to get 71 percent of remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates.

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10:35 p.m.

A top adviser to Bernie Sanders says the senator still has a path to the Democratic presidential nomination but will need to perform well in primary contests next week.

Senior adviser Tad Devine spoke in a phone interview after Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders in New York by a convincing margin. He says Sanders "never counted on winning New York  this is her home state."

Devine says there are "still a pretty good number of delegates left. We have to win most of the states. We have to win enough delegates to make up the difference."

Devine says the Sanders campaign will see how it does next week in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island and Connecticut and then "assess where we are."

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10:30 p.m.

Hillary Clinton is all but declaring victory in the Democratic primaries, telling raucous supporters in New York that the race for the nomination "is in the home stretch and victory is in sight."

Clinton is addressing supporters after her convincing win in her home state against Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders. In a nod to her role as a New York senator a decade ago, she tells supporters they helped prove "once again, there's no place like home."

Clinton is reaching out to the supporters of Sanders, telling them she believes "there is much more that unites us than divides us."

The former secretary of state was winning by large margins in New York City's five boroughs, which hold more than half the votes in a Democratic primary.

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10:05 p.m.

Hillary Clinton is solidifying her big delegate lead after a win in New York.

With 247 delegates at stake, Clinton will pick up at least 104 while Bernie Sanders will gain at least 85. Many remain to be allocated, pending final vote tallies.

Based on primaries and caucuses to date, Clinton now has 1,393 delegates to Sanders' 1,130.

When including superdelegates, party officials who can back any candidate, Clinton's lead is even bigger, 1,862 to 1,161.

Before New York's contest, Sanders needed to win 68 percent of remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates to catch Clinton.

That bar is on track to become even higher, heading into a set of contests next week in the Northeast that are expected to favor Clinton.

It takes 2,383 delegates to win the nomination.

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9:55 p.m.

Donald Trump is again signaling that he plans to challenge the Republican National Committee to change delegate selection rules.

Trump says: "Nobody should take delegates and claim victory unless they get those delegates with voters and voting. And that's what's going to happen."

Republican rival Ted Cruz has won fewer contests and has been allotted fewer delegates, but has outmaneuvered Trump in organizing state-by-state.

The strategy has allowed Cruz to scoop up delegates who could support him if the nomination requires multiple ballots at the national convention.

Trump has called the party's delegate selection plan "rigged." The plan has been public for more than a year and official since October.

The Republican National Committee meets in Florida later this week.

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9:50 p.m.

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer has ordered an audit of the city's Board of Elections after reports that some voters were turned away from poll sites during the state's presidential primary.

The agency's executive director dismissed the issues Tuesday, saying few people experienced problems.

The comptroller's concerns were based partly on statistics showing that the number of registered Democrats and Republicans in Brooklyn fell by around 64,000 between Nov. 1 and April 1.

Elections officials said that was part of a routine review to cancel the registrations of people who haven't voted in recent elections and didn't respond to notices asking them to confirm their address.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said he supported Stringer's audit.

A state voter hotline received more than 700 complaints by Tuesday afternoon.

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9:47 p.m.

Hillary Clinton has won the Democratic presidential primary in New York, which she represented in the U.S. Senate for eight years.

Clinton beat out rival Bernie Sanders in Tuesday's election, further extending her lead in the delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination.

Most Democratic primary voters see Clinton as the best candidate to face Donald Trump if he is the Republican nominee in November, and 7 in 10 see her as the most likely eventual Democratic nominee.

Before Tuesday, Clinton led Sanders 1,292 to 1,042 in the delegate count. When including superdelegates, the AP count had Clinton at 1,761 and Sanders at 1,073.

Most of New York's Democratic delegates are awarded on a proportional basis by the outcome in each congressional district. New York has 247 pledged delegates at stake.

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9:40 p.m.

Donald Trump, fresh off a commanding victory in the Republican primary in his home state of New York, is suggesting he may soon have the race in hand.

Trump, speaking Tuesday night in Trump Tower, says Senator Ted Cruz "is just about mathematically eliminated" from clinching the delegates needed to win outright before the national convention.

"We don't have much of a race anymore," says Trump, declaring that his campaign is "really rocking" and he could have the nomination sown up before the party convention in Cleveland.

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9:35 p.m.

Donald Trump is touting that "the people who know me best" gave him a resounding victory in the Republican primary in his home state of New York.

Trump appeared Tuesday night in the lobby of Trump Tower to the strains of Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York." He then walked a red carpet with an American flag as a backdrop, the whole scene bathed in red, white and blue lights.

He saluted his family and campaign staff, saying it's "been an incredible night, an incredible week."

The Trump campaign was banking on a significant win in New York after a stumble in Wisconsin earlier this month. The win allows him to stay on a narrow, but real, path to capture the delegates needed to clinch the GOP nomination before the party's national convention in Cleveland this summer.

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9:05 p.m.

Cheers broke out in Trump Tower in Manhattan at 9 p.m. Tuesday night as polls closed and news organizations called the New York Republican primary for Donald Trump.

He's expected to speak soon in front of assembled reporters, supporters and staffers, who have gathered in the lobby of Trump's midtown office and residential building.

Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says the campaign's goal is to beat the margins that rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich achieved in their home states.

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9 p.m.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has won the primary in his home state of New York.

Trump was widely expected to beat his rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich in Tuesday's election. The precise allocation of delegates from the state won't be determined until the vote results are calculated by congressional district, but Trump is certain to extend his delegate lead and come closer to the 1,237 delegates required to clinch the party's nomination.

Early results of the exit poll in the state show a large majority of New York Republicans want the next president to be a political outsider.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Trump had amassed 756 delegates, while Cruz had 559 and Kasich had 144.

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8:45 p.m.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is trying to move beyond a crushing defeat in New York, which he is dismissing as merely "a politician winning his home state."

Instead, he is pivoting with a sweeping call to unite the Republican Party by painting himself as the outsider able to capture the imagination of a party searching for leadership.

Already moving on to Pennsylvania, Cruz is saying: "This generation needs to answer a new set of questions. Can we? Should we? Will we?"

Cruz is comparing his candidacy to Ronald Reagan's and John F. Kennedy's, asking the Pennsylvania audience, "Are we still those people, those dreamers and doers?"

The Pennsylvania primary is April 26.

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8:15 p.m.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich says he believes the Republican presidential primary will be "deadlocked" and delegates will choose their nominee at the party's convention in July.

Kasich spoke in Annapolis, Maryland, on the evening of the New York primary. Maryland holds its primary next Tuesday.

Kasich is predicting that neither Ted Cruz nor Donald Trump will win enough delegates to clinch the GOP nomination before the convention in Cleveland. He is pitching himself as a candidate with a positive and unifying message.

Former Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich attended the event. He says Kasich's resume "reflects what the country needs right now."

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8:10 p.m.

Donald Trump will mark the results of the New York primary with a press conference in the Manhattan skyscraper he calls home.

Trump is expected to address the media Tuesday night sometime after polls close in his native state. He has held a commanding lead in all recent state polls.

The lobby of Trump Tower has been festooned with patriotic touches: a large American flag is hanging behind the podium from which Trump will speak and portions of the lobby are bathed in red, white and blue lights.

Unlike most other candidates, Trump usually eschews large election night rallies, instead choosing to address reporters and a small group of friends and supporters.

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7:35 p.m.

New Mexico Gov. Susan Martinez is expressing fundamental differences with presidential candidate Donald Trump on his proposal to build a bigger wall along the southern U.S. border and make Mexico pay for it.

Martinez told the Associated Press on Tuesday that building fences can impact the U.S. economy and relationship with trading partners in Mexico and farther south.

The chairwoman of the Republican Governors Association confirmed comments made behind closed doors as she traveled last week to a Republican gala in New York City attended by Trump, and a Republican Governors Association fundraiser in Florida.

Martinez is frequently mentioned as a potential vice presidential pick. She says she understands the need for a secure border as a former prosecutor who has lived near the border for some 50 years.

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7:30 p.m.

Hundreds of voters have complained to New York's attorney general about problems at polling places during the state's presidential primary.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's voter hotline received 562 phone calls and 140 emails by late afternoon Tuesday. That's compared to 150 complaints received during the 2012 general election.

A Schneiderman spokesman says this year's total number of election complaints is "by far" the most it's handled since Schneiderman took office in 2011.

The complaints include registration problems, a lack of privacy at the voting booth, accessibility and poor instructions from poll workers.

Schneiderman's office says it received many complaints from people complaining that they were not allowed to cast a primary ballot because they had not registered with a political party.

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7:15 p.m.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is telling thousands of supporters at Penn State that his rival Hillary Clinton is "getting a little bit nervous" by his recent string of wins.

Sanders addressed the boisterous crowd in Pennsylvania Tuesday as New Yorkers voted in their state's crucial presidential primary.

Earlier, in an interview with The Associated Press, Sanders said he expects his campaign will "surprise" people and do "a lot better than people think."

He dismissed claims by the Clinton campaign that his path to victory is "close to impossible," saying "that's what people who are getting nervous will say."

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5:40 p.m.

New Yorkers Democrats and Republicans alike are concerned about the economy. And many in both parties are worried about the influence of Wall Street.

Large majorities of voters in either primary Tuesday said they are concerned about the direction of the national economy, and voters on both sides were most likely choose it as the top issue facing the country, according to early results of exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and television networks by Edison Research.

About 6 in 10 Democrats regard Wall Street as detrimental to the U.S. economy, while 3 in 10 say the New York City financial sector helps. GOP voters were nearly even on the question.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a New York primary night campaign event, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton celebrate at her New York primary campaign headquarters, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a campaign rally at Penn State University, Tuesday, April 19, 2016 in State College, Pa. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton cheer at her New York primary campaign headquarters, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Republican presidential candidate Ohio Gov. John Kasich speaks during a campaign stop in Annapolis, Md., Tuesday, April 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Yemeni rebels detain Jew over smuggling out old Torah scroll

SANAA, Yemen (AP)  A member of Yemen's Jewish minority has been detained over allegations he helped smuggle an 800-year-old scroll out of the country to Israel, Yemeni officials said Tuesday, weeks after some of Yemen's last remaining Jews arrived in Israel following a clandestine operation.

Yahia Youssef Yaish was being interrogated by the intelligence service run by Shiite Houthi rebels, who control the country's capital, Sanaa, the officials said.

It wasn't immediately clear when exactly Yaish was arrested as the officials only said he was taken from his house last week. Three airport employees were also detained, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Yemeni intellectuals issued a statement demanding Yaish's release and describing the allegations against him as "fabricated."

In Israel, Avi Mayer, the spokesman for the Jewish Agency, confirmed the Torah scroll was smuggled out of Yemen with a rabbi and 18 Yemeni Jews who left to Israel last month. The rabbi, Saliman Dahari, said the Torah scroll he brought was handed down over the generations.

"The notion that the Torah should have remained in a country torn apart by a violent civil war, several of the parties to which are openly anti-Semitic, is preposterous," said Mayer. "The Torah served members of the Raydah Jewish community for centuries and will continue to do so in Israel, where the last remnants of that community now live," he added.

On Yaish, he said the agency is aware of the reports of his detention and is monitoring the situation.

Since 1949, some 50,000 Jews have arrived to Israel from Yemen and have grown to become an integral part of Israeli society. Mayer said that there is an estimated number of 50 Jews remaining in Yemen, where they dwell in a closed compound next to the U.S. Embassy.

They are often subject to attacks by both Sunni and Shiite Muslim militants, he added.

The conflict in Yemen has been ripped the country apart. The rebel Houthis overran Sanaa in September 2014, forcing the internationally-recognized government into exile in Saudi Arabia. Since last year, the Saudis have led a coalition of mostly Sunni Arab countries in an intensive air campaign against the Houthis.

Mansour Hayel, who was among those who signed the petition, said he believed the Houthis "never cared about manuscripts" and that Yaish "was only taken as a scapegoat after the Houthis felt embarrassed when Israelis showed the scroll on TV."

Hayel said that over the years, Houthis destroyed ancient manuscripts and scrolls when they forced the Jewish community in the northern city of Saada  a Houthi stronghold to flee to Sanaa.

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Turkey wants EU visa changes by June or migrant deal is off

PARIS (AP)  Turkey could easily call off the migrant deal struck with the European Union if visa rules for Turks aren't relaxed within the next two months, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Tuesday, sounding a warning over a controversial deal which has stemmed much of the human tide across the Aegean Sea.

The March 18 deal stipulates that anyone arriving on Greek islands from Turkey will be sent back unless they successfully apply for asylum in Greece. For every Syrian sent back, the EU will take another Syrian directly from Turkey. In return, Ankara was granted billions of euros to deal with the more than 2.7 million Syrian refugees already living in Turkey and promised a loosening of the visa regime governing Turkish citizens.

Comments carried by the Anadolu Agency quoted the prime minister as saying that if Brussels did not hold up its end of the bargain by June then "no one would expect Turkey to adhere its commitments."

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (above) warned the EU that it needs Turkey 'more than we need you' as tensions grew over promises for visa liberalisation in a crucial deal on stemming the flow of migrants

Davutoglu sounded the warning on his way to Strasbourg, France where he addressed lawmakers at the European Council on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rejected a report by the European Union's parliament that criticized democratic shortfalls in the country, and warned that the "EU needs Turkey more than Turkey needs the EU."

Speaking to local official in Turkey Erdogan disputed the report, endorsed by the European Parliament last week, which criticized the Turkish government's moves to muzzle freedom of expression and reported a "regression" in its democracy.

Addressing local officials on Tuesday, Erdogan said the EU report was prepared with a "destructive understanding."

Davutoglu's speech boasted about Turkey's magnanimity, saying that "if there was a test on humanity globally, Turkey would be the only country to pass the test."

He said Turkey had "fulfilled all its commitments" but that Europeans had yet to deliver all the promised funds.

He said crossings from Turkey into Greece were down to 60 or even sometimes zero people per day. "This is a huge achievement," he said, speaking through an interpreter.

The International Organization for Migration says Greece has seen fewer than 70 arrivals per day in the past 10 days, down from nearly 1,500 of arrivals per day before the deal was struck.

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Canapes under the canopy? Paris gentrifies rusty mall

PARIS (AP)  Swapping burgers for lobster souffle and rusty welding for a state-of-the-art canopy roof, Paris' mayor this month unveiled a $1 billion revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and transport complex, Les Halles.

Paris authorities view the building project  which made central Paris a construction site pockmarked with cranes for seven years  as an opportunity to gentrify the 70s complex that was often voted among the city's the biggest eyesores by disgruntled Paris residents, and also attract a share of the millions of tourists who visit the city every year.

The previous incarnation of Les Halles became associated more with the myriad gangs of youths who traveled in on regional trains from the less-affluent suburbs to hang out there than it was for its rich past  as the gilded food market and shelter the French king would use to impress merchants in the 12th century and the culinary heart of the city that 19th-century novelist Emile Zola famously called "the belly of Paris."

The high-tech glass-and-metal undulating "canopy" roof are reflected on thewindows of the Brasserie Za of French designer Philippe Starck in the new Les Halles shopping mall Friday April 8, 2016 in Paris. Amid great fanfare, Paris' Mayor Anne Hidalgo has unveiled the long-awaited 1 billion U.S dollar revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and metro complex Les Halles, that might help restore the former royal food market to its old glory. Behind is Saint Eustache church. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Today, a giant, green high-tech glass-and-metal undulating "canopy" roof designed by architects Patrick Berger and Jacques Anziutti sparkles in the spring sunshine.

And 35 new stores and restaurants hope to restore the site its culinary and cultural prowess, including a posh brasserie by Michelin-starred chef Alain Ducasse and a literary eatery designed by Philippe Starck with the slogan "Feed Your Mind."

But not everyone is convinced that the attempted gentrification of Paris' main artery to the poorer regional suburbs will work.

"I think it's a bit patronizing," said Paris resident Alice Betout, 31. "It feels a bit like Paris is trying to give culture to the masses, so to speak. When young people come here from the suburbs on the train they just want to hang out. What are they going to do with a literary cafe, foie gras and garlic snails?"

For others more amenable to the new structure, it still seems like an expensive gamble.

"This is a working-class place ... and so the shops which are here ... were conceived to do cheap business," said 71-year-old pensioner Jacques Merlino, nostalgic about the old Les Halles, a market he remembers from before it was torn down in the 70s.

"Ducasse, Starck and all that are in opposition to that (profile). So will this become chic, with a working-class edge?" he asked. "History will answer this question."

The new canopy is a stark contrast to its predecessor  a hangout so engrained in youth and urban culture that Les Halles is even cited in French rap songs.

But Ducasse  whose restaurants include London's Dorchester and Paris' Plaza Athenee hotels, where dinner can cost $500-$1,000  says the new brasserie, Champeaux, is not out of touch with its surroundings.

He believes it will be popular with those who frequent Les Halles, since the brasserie prices remain surprisingly affordable. Some have called it "democratic gastronomy."

"What we do can never be disconnected to the economic reality of where you are. It's a young and busy place with a big traffic of  I'd say  the working-class chic," said the chef as he admired his restaurant's view onto the magnificent 16th-century Saint Eustache church.

A deviled egg will set you back 6 euros ($6.70), a hand-cut steak tartare 20 euros ($22.50) and lobster souffle a mere 22 euros ($24.80).

"We want any customer to be able to come into Champeaux and ... dine, have a drink, nourish himself. You can also spend more! But it's an important access key," he added.

Ducasse said that Champeaux was named after a restaurant that used to occupy the historic grounds in the 19th century, which was pulled down at the advent of World War I.

Opposite, the high-tech eatery "Za" has more bookish ambitions.

Designed by Starck, diners come in and order organic delights, with the aid of an iPhone application, that are delivered to the customer on a conveyor belt to the table.

Za's owners struck a deal with three French publishing houses to print out books while clients dine, thanks to a huge printing press at the side of the cafe.

Any book  maybe Zola's 1873 novel "The Belly of Paris" or George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London"  can be printed off in under 10 minutes, to be collected as the diner leaves the restaurant.

"It was a slightly mad idea we had to create this combination of quick, chic and hipster because we don't know if it will work yet," said Za owner Philippe Amzalak, who said that the rise in real estate prices in the surrounding areas might attract clientele with more spending power.

"The areas around have evolved a lot ... (but) it's a mix and a gamble at the same time to see if the upgrade renovation will work," he added.

A waitress at Za, 23-year-old Juliana Abessole, who comes to work from the suburbs on an RER suburban train and used to hang out in Les Halles, said that the literary cafe attracts a completely different profile of person to the mall than she's used to seeing.

"When you work in the suburbs you won't see the same people as here. The people are classier, and have another standard of living than us," she said.

"In the suburbs, we have another language."

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Thomas Adamson can be reached at: http://twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP

Interior view of French Chef Alain Ducasse's Brasserie Champeaux in the new Les Halles shopping mall Friday April 8, 2016 in Paris. Amid great fanfare, Paris' Mayor Anne Hidalgo has unveiled the long-awaited 1 billion U.S dollar revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and metro complex Les Halles, that might help restore the former royal food market to its old glory. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

FILE - This is a Sept. 15, 1944 file photo of a general view of the vegetable market at Les Halles in Paris. Amid great fanfare, Paris' Mayor Anne Hidalgo has unveiled the long-awaited 1 billion U.S dollar revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and metro complex Les Halles, that might help restore the former royal food market to its old glory. (AP Photo, File)

French Chef Alain Ducasse, left, and his Executive Chef Pascal Feraud, test the menu prior to the opening of the Brasserie Champeaux in the new Les Halles shopping mall Friday April 8, 2016 in Paris. Amid great fanfare, Paris' Mayor Anne Hidalgo has unveiled the long-awaited 1 billion U.S dollar revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and metro complex Les Halles, that might help restore the former royal food market to its old glory. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Bar person Marjolaine Arpin, from Quebec, Canada, prepares a cocktail at French Chef Alain Ducasse's Brasserie Champeaux in the new Les Halles shopping mall Friday April 8, 2016 in Paris. Amid great fanfare, Paris' Mayor Anne Hidalgo has unveiled the long-awaited 1 billion U.S dollar revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and metro complex Les Halles, that might help restore the former royal food market to its old glory. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

French Chef Alain Ducasse, left, and his Executive Chef Pascal Feraud, test the Cheese and Lobster Bisque Souffles prior to the opening of Ducasse's Brasserie Champeaux in the new Les Halles shopping mall Friday April 8, 2016 in Paris. Amid great fanfare, Paris' Mayor Anne Hidalgo has unveiled the long-awaited 1 billion U.S dollar revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and metro complex Les Halles, that might help restore the former royal food market to its old glory. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

A woman walks in French Chef Alain Ducasse's Brasserie Champeaux in the new Les Halles shopping mall Friday April 8, 2016 in Paris. Amid great fanfare, Paris' Mayor Anne Hidalgo has unveiled the long-awaited 1 billion U.S dollar revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and metro complex Les Halles, that might help restore the former royal food market to its old glory. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

French Chef Alain Ducasse, left, and his Executive Chef Pascal Feraud, test the Cheese and Lobster Bisque Souffles prior to the opening of Ducasse's Brasserie Champeaux in the new Les Halles shopping mall Friday April 8, 2016 in Paris. Amid great fanfare, Paris' Mayor Anne Hidalgo has unveiled the long-awaited 1 billion U.S dollar revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and metro complex Les Halles, that might help restore the former royal food market to its old glory. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

The logo to indicate the place for mobile phones to get the App is seen on the wooden table at the Brasserie Za of French designer Philippe Starck in the new Les Halles shopping mall Friday April 8, 2016 in Paris. Amid great fanfare, Paris' Mayor Anne Hidalgo has unveiled the long-awaited 1 billion U.S dollar revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and metro complex Les Halles, that might help restore the former royal food market to its old glory. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

The high-tech glass-and-metal undulating "canopy" roof are reflected on the shop windows at the Brasserie Za of French designer Philippe Starck in the new Les Halles shopping mall Friday April 8, 2016 in Paris. Amid great fanfare, Paris' Mayor Anne Hidalgo has unveiled the long-awaited 1 billion U.S dollar revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and metro complex Les Halles, that might help restore the former royal food market to its old glory. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Customers enjoy a drink at the Brasserie Za of French designer Philippe Starck in the new Les Halles shopping mall Friday April 8, 2016 in Paris. Amid great fanfare, Paris' Mayor Anne Hidalgo has unveiled the long-awaited 1 billion U.S dollar revamp of the city's dilapidated main shopping and metro complex Les Halles, that might help restore the former royal food market to its old glory. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
DC schools chief asked contractor for $100K

WASHINGTON (AP)  The chancellor of Washington's public schools asked a food-service contractor for a $100,000 contribution to a Kennedy Center gala honoring teachers, weeks after the company was accused in a whistleblower lawsuit of cheating the city out of millions of dollars, according to emails obtained by The Associated Press.

The messages, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, shed new light on dealings between school leaders and a contractor that, according to court documents, cheated the system out of $19 million and served spoiled food to city students. The contractor, Chartwells, is still serving food in schools, although the system plans to select a new vendor.

After the lawsuit was filed, Chartwells and its local partner, Thompson Hospitality, gave $25,000 to support the black-tie gala, according to records from the D.C. Public Education Fund, a nonprofit that raises money for schools and organizes the $700,000 event. The emails show the companies made the contribution after Chancellor Kaya Henderson asked Thompson Hospitality's president to give $100,000 to the event.

FILE - In this Oct. 13, 2010 file photo, then-Deputy DC Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson during a news conference in Washington. Emails obtained by The Associated Press show that now-District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Henderson asked a troubled contractor for a $100,000 contribution to a Kennedy Center gala honoring teachers. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

City ethics rules generally prohibit city employees from soliciting money, including charitable contributions, from companies that do business with the city. The rules are meant to prevent the appearance of "pay to play" politics in which contractors get preferential treatment in exchange for gifts or campaign contributions. The D.C. Council has established exceptions for fundraising by the chancellor, although they don't address D.C. Public Education Fund donations.

"The D.C. Ed Fund does its best to attract donors to the event, and the chancellor plays an important role in that," school system spokeswoman Michelle Lerner said in a statement. "However, there is a firm wall between the management of DCPS contracts and the fundraising of the D.C. Ed Fund."

The school system declined to make Henderson available for an interview.

D.C. Council member Mary Cheh, who has investigated the school system's dealings with Chartwells, said she's troubled by the timing and amount of Henderson's request.

"I think it's highly irregular and improper," Cheh said.

The whistleblower lawsuit against Chartwells was filed in July 2013 and shared with school system attorneys the following month. On Sept. 16, 2013, Henderson asked Thompson Hospitality President Warren Thompson for the contribution, according to the emails.

"I look forward to receiving the sponsorship information for the event at the Kennedy Center," Thompson wrote.

"I'm so pleased that you're willing to support us," Henderson wrote back six minutes later.

Henderson emailed later that day to clarify how much she was seeking. "Warren, we're hoping you come in at A Round of Applause, as we'd love to have a dozen of your team members able to share in celebrating the teachers they support every day," she wrote.

"A Round of Applause" refers to a $100,000 contribution. Chartwells and Thompson ended up giving $25,000, or a "Supportive Salute."

In an Oct. 3 email, Henderson thanked Thompson and invited him to attend the gala. "You rock!" she wrote.

Chartwells and Thompson gave another $25,000 to the following gala, in January 2015, records show.

Thompson said in an emailed statement that the companies were "proud to have supported the Standing Ovation for D.C. Teachers." He didn't respond to follow-up questions about the amount and timing of the contribution.

The AP requested all emails between Henderson and Thompson. Nowhere in the correspondence do they mention the whistleblower lawsuit or Chartwells' poor performance.

In June 2015, Chartwells' parent company  Compass Group USA, based in Charlotte, North Carolina  agreed to pay $19.4 million to settle the lawsuit, which included claims that it had cheated the city through price-gouging and fraud, deliberately stockpiled food and allowed it to rot, and served spoiled food in cafeterias. Despite the settlement, Chartwells' contract was renewed. The company is being paid $32 million to serve food this school year.

Compass Group also paid $18 million in 2012 to settle similar claims in New York.

The lawsuit in the District was filed by the school system's former food-service director, Jeffrey Mills. Henderson fired him in early 2013 after he repeatedly pointed out Chartwells' practices. Mills also sued for wrongful termination. The school system agreed to pay him $450,000  nearly three times his salary.

Other school system contractors that have contributed to the gala include Children's National Medical Center, FedEx, Scholastic and the Washington Post Co.

Sodexo, a Chartwells rival that is bidding on the new food-service contract, also has sponsored the gala, with $10,000 contributions in 2013 and 2015. Lerner acknowledged in a statement that Henderson had asked for money from other city contractors, saying "the chancellor reaches out to all our education partners to support Standing Ovation."

Billed as a celebration of the school system's best teachers, the Kennedy Center gala also lets Henderson promote her school-reform efforts, including high-stakes teacher evaluations that are tied, in part, to student test scores. The honored teachers, who receive $230,000 in cash prizes, are judged as "highly effective" under the evaluation system. Henderson has fired hundreds of teachers deemed ineffective.

Henderson has led D.C. public schools for five years after succeeding the polarizing Michelle Rhee. Henderson's less confrontational style has helped her remain through two mayoral administrations and build a national reputation among education-reform advocates. Students have seen steady, if slow, improvements on standardized tests during Henderson's tenure, but the gap between the performances of black and white students has widened.

Henderson has repeatedly characterized food service as a distraction from her goals of improving academic performance, saying it's not a "core competency" of the school system. During Mills' time as food-service director, he argued that the system could save money and serve more nutritious meals if it took food service back in-house, but Henderson resisted those suggestions.

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Snubs of president spark talk of rift in Polish ruling party

WARSAW, Poland (AP)  The body language was telling. Polish President Andrzej Duda approached Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the ruling party, nodding and reaching out to shake his hand. But Kaczynski barely acknowledged him, reaching his hand to the side in a passing shake, but without pausing or even looking at the head of state.

That frosty encounter amid April 10 anniversary observances of a national tragedy has sparked rumors that a rift has emerged between the two leaders. If true, it would be the first sign of division in the ruling echelons since the conservative Law and Justice party swept to power last year, winning both the presidency and parliament  unprecedented power for any party in Poland's post-communist era.

Observers are watching the development with interest. A brief video clip of the snub has made the rounds on social media and newspapers have been discussing the relationship in recent days. If the chill is serious and lasting, it raises questions about the party's ability over the coming years to push through its conservative and nationalist program and to maintain a centralization of power that has raised concerns about the rule of law.

FILE - This file photo from April 14, 2016 shows Poland's President Andrzej Duda, front left, and his wife Agata Kornhauser-Duda, front right, with ruling party Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski sitting behind them during a ceremony marking 1,050 years of the nation's Catholicism in Gniezno, Poland. Kaczynski appears to be snubbing the nation's president, one of his own choice, in what appears to be the first rift in the Law and Justice party since it took power last year. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski, file)

Political analysts say it is too early to say whether there will be real consequences to the rift and say the real test will be if Duda starts vetoing legislation passed by the parliament, where Law and Justice has a majority. Duda, who formally left the party in accordance with tradition, remains deeply loyal to the group and there is no sign he would stifle its legislative agenda.

Whatever happens, the situation is putting a renewed spotlight on a highly unusual division of power: Kaczynski holds no elected position other than that of lawmaker  by law an equal to 459 other lawmakers in the lower house of parliament. Yet he is widely acknowledged to be the most powerful person in Poland, the man calling the shots from his seat in the parliament and from his party's headquarters in Warsaw.

This arrangement results from a political calculation Kaczynski made before last year's presidential and parliamentary elections. A prime minister briefly from 2006-2007, he has a core group of loyal supporters  but also a large body of people put off by his divisive and combative style. After losing a string of elections over the previous eight years, this time he hand-picked two loyal but little-known party members to stand for the jobs of president and prime minister.

The strategy worked perfectly, bringing Duda to office followed by Beata Szydlo as prime minister, both of whom are regularly dismissed by critics as Kaczynski's "puppets."

Duda appears to be the case of a minor politician who won the country's highest office in what must have been a huge surprise even to himself  and who is showing signs after several months in office of testing his own wings.

The main point of contention between him and Kaczynski centers on the plane crash in Smolensk, Russia, in 2010, that killed Kaczynski's twin brother Lech Kaczynski and 95 others. Kaczynski supports a conspiracy theory holding that Russia might have assassinated his brother, in collusion with Polish officials in power at the time. That theory is not supported by evidence cited in official investigations, which blame the crash on crew error and dense fog.

The reluctant handshake came amid ceremonies on April 10 marking the sixth anniversary of that disaster. Duda gave a speech calling for forgiveness and reconciliation in a society deeply divided over that tragedy. Later, Kaczynski said reconciliation is only possible after those responsible are punished, an apparent rebuke of Duda's approach.

In a recent interview with the pro-government magazine w Sieci, Kaczynski tried to downplay the idea of a rift, but acknowledged their differences of opinion reflected in those speeches.

"I did not enter into polemics with the president, but I said what I thought was right," Kaczynski said. "One can treat it as a kind of a supplement, but naturally, someone could have seen a certain discrepancy."

Kaczynski appears to have snubbed Duda again just days later during celebrations marking the 1,050th anniversary of Christianity in Poland. Photos of the event appear to show a moment in which those gathered stand up as Duda arrives  with Kaczynski staying seated.

Duda's spokesman, Marek Magierowski, declined to say what the president's position is on the rift.

An increasingly independent Duda could, in theory, prove one of the greatest threats to Kaczynski, who is on a self-declared mission to remake Poland, asserting national sovereignty at the expense of the European Union, restoring traditional Catholic values and rooting out liberal and, to his mind, persisting communist influences.

Kaczynski acknowledged having some influence on Szydlo, describing her government as part of an "experiment" that will be assessed toward the end of the year  a hint he could replace her eventually.

But he would be essentially powerless to replace Duda, who was directly elected in a national vote to a five-year term ending in 2020.

"We have a situation, which I respect, that the president wants to be independent," Kaczynski said in the interview. "Probably these stories saying he might be dependent on someone are very painful to him; his entourage must be taking it very hard."

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Associated Press writer Monika Scislowska contributed to this report.

FILE - This file photo from April 14, 2016 shows Poland's President Andrzej Duda, front left, and his wife Agata Kornhauser-Duda, front right, with ruling party Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski sitting behind them during a ceremony marking 1,050 years of the nation's Catholicism in Gniezno, Poland. Kaczynski appears to be snubbing the nation's president, one of his own choice, in what appears to be the first rift in the Law and Justice party since it took power last year. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
The Latest: Houston-area flooding death toll now at 7

HOUSTON (AP)  The Latest on heavy rains and flooding in the Houston area, plus other parts of Texas (all times local):

6:45 p.m.

A seventh flood-related death has been confirmed in the Houston area after a body was found in a vehicle in a flooded underpass in western Houston.

A resident of a retirement and assisted living complex is helped by rescue personnel as the facility is evacuated due to rising floodwaters, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Spring, Texas. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

A spokesman at Houston's Emergency Operations Center says the body was found in the vehicle when the underpass at Westpark Toll Road at Interstate 610 was drained. Spokesman Michael Walter said no other details were immediately available.

The death is the fourth confirmed in Houston proper. Two others were confirmed in Houston's Harris County suburbs and one in nearby Waller County. All were caught up in the high water after heavy rain this week dumped more than a foot of water on the region.

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2:45 p.m.

A sixth flood-related death has been confirmed in the Houston area where heavy rain this week dumped more than a foot of water.

The Harris County Precinct 4 Constable's Office says a body was recovered Tuesday morning from a flooded car. Capt. Toby Hecker says deputies received a call about a vehicle in some water in a drainage ditch in a neighborhood. Hecker says a wrecker was called, and when the car was pulled from the water a woman was found dead inside.

Hecker says the woman, whose name wasn't immediately released, had been last seen Monday night. He says investigators believe the woman lives in the neighborhood and was close to home when she encountered flooded streets, tried to make a U-turn to return home, cut it too short and ended up in the flooded ditch.

Hecker says the woman was alone in the car.

Five flood-related deaths had been previously confirmed in the Houston area, all people in vehicles caught up in the high water.

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1:45 p.m.

A heavy-duty truck has been used to evacuate elderly and other residents from a Houston-area assisted living facility that's surrounded by floodwaters.

Several dozen people were being moved Tuesday from the Atria Cypresswood facility in Spring. Some residents were seen on local TV being carried into the open-air back of the truck as other rescuers assisted while standing in the nearly knee-deep water. Wheelchairs were also put into the truck.

The complex is in north Harris County, where more than a foot of rain was recorded since Sunday.

A statement from Atria, released to KTRK-TV, says the safety and well-being of residents and employees is the highest priority. The statement cited flooding problems and forced the evacuation of residents and employees to another senior living community.

No injuries were immediately reported.

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11 a.m.

Nearly a dozen Red Cross shelters have opened in the Houston area to help hundreds of flood evacuees after storms dumped more than a foot of rain.

A Red Cross statement Tuesday says 11 shelters have been assisting about 400 residents forced from their Houston-area homes due to the high water.

Harris County isn't the only part of Texas where flooding related to heavy rain prompted evacuations. Some North Texas neighborhoods also flooded following rainstorms since last weekend.

Red Cross spokeswoman Anita Foster says a shelter remained open Tuesday in Weatherford, about 20 miles west of Fort Worth, following Parker County flooding. The Brazos (BRAZ'-uhs) River went out of its banks after storms that began on Sunday, forcing evacuations by boat in areas including Horseshoe Bend.

Foster says several people spent Monday night at the shelter at the Weatherford High School Ninth Grade Center.

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8:25 a.m.

More rain is likely as Houston cleans up after more than a foot of rain swamped parts of the nation's fourth-largest city.

The National Weather Service says there is a 50 percent chance of more rain falling on the Houston area Tuesday and has issued a flash flood watch through Wednesday morning.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner says the city is returning to normal operations and advises drivers to take care on flooded roads.

Five people died in the Houston area after storms since Sunday dumped up to 16 inches of rain. Dozens of schools, public transit and city offices were closed Monday.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority resumed service Tuesday, including light-rail operations.

A chance of showers continues through Thursday.

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1:35 a.m.

Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods and leaving at least five people dead.

Heavy flooding has become nearly an annual rite of passage in the practically sea-level city, where experts have long warned of the potential for catastrophe.

Experts say in addition to its location, Houston's fast-growing population and building boom make it vulnerable to high waters.

Philip Bedient, an engineering professor at Rice University, says the flooding problem can't be solved. He says, "All we can do is a better job warning."

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This version of The Latest corrects 3rd paragraph of first item to make clear the facility is in northern Harris County.

Residents of a retirement and assisted living complex are evacuated as floodwaters rise around the facility, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Spring, Texas. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

A resident of a retirement and assisted living complex is helped by rescue personnel as the facility is evacuated due to rising floodwaters Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Spring, Texas. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Residents are evacuated from their flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Residents are evacuated from their flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Residents are helped off rescue boats after being evacuated from their flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Natalie Hamdin is helped off a rescue boat after being evacuated from her flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Betty Jones, center, is helped while being evacuated from her flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Residents are evacuated from their flooded apartment complex Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Houston. Storms have dumped more than a foot of rain in the Houston area, flooding dozens of neighborhoods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, right, speaks to the media as Nim Kidd, Chief of Texas Division of Emergency Management, looks on, following a meeting with emergency personnel at the Texas Department of Public Safety State Operations Center, in Austin, Texas, on Monday, April 18, 2016. Abbott has declared a state disaster declaration for nine counties and said more will likely be added to the list. Abbott said Monday that his office had been in contact with the IRS about pushing the tax filing deadline for those in areas inundated by heavy downpours. (Rodolfo Gonzalez/Austin American-Statesman via AP) AUSTIN CHRONICLE OUT, COMMUNITY IMPACT OUT, INTERNET AND TV MUST CREDIT PHOTOGRAPHER AND STATESMAN.COM, MAGS OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Kelly Gorrell, who moved into her Meyerland home in January, reacts while seeing it for the first time, Monday, April 18, 2016, in Houston. Massive flooding has become nearly an annual rite of passage in Houston, which is grappling with destroyed homes, trapped drivers and deaths for the third straight year. (Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT

People evacuate from Arbor Court Apartments in the Greenspoint area Monday, April 18, 2016, in Houston. Massive flooding has become nearly an annual rite of passage in Houston, which is grappling with destroyed homes, trapped drivers and deaths for the third straight year. (Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT
Actor helps dedicate Tom Hanks motion pictures center

DAYTON, Ohio (AP)  Actor and filmmaker Tom Hanks proves again he excels at taking directions.

Hank wielded oversized scissors Tuesday and, on a count of three, led a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a newly renovated motion pictures center named for him at Wright State University in Ohio.

It doesn't matter where a student goes to college, Hanks said, adding, "It matters how hard you work. I hope this building spurs the students who come here."

Actor Tom Hanks holds up a piece of ribbon after participating in a cutting ceremony for the new Tom Hanks Center for Motion Pictures at Wright State University in Fairborn, Ohio, on Tuesday, April 19, 2016. The Oscar-winning star isnt an alumnus, but has connections with teachers and alumni of the public school and is national co-chair of a fundraising campaign for the university. (Lisa Powell/Dayton Daily News via AP)

Hanks said that when he was a teenager, he couldn't have gotten into the university. He joked about his performance on the SATs, asking his audience to guess what he got on the tests. His answer? "Spilled Coca-Cola."

The Oscar-winning star isn't an alumnus, but has connections with teachers and alumni of the public school.

Hanks is national co-chair of a $150 million fundraising campaign for the university, along with Amanda Wright Lane, great-grandniece of aviation pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Hanks planned to attend a fundraising gala and talk with theater, dance and motion picture students during his Tuesday visit.

Historian David McCullough also visited the campus Tuesday and conducted a master class with WSU students. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian is collaborating with Hanks on an HBO miniseries based on McCullough's latest book, "The Wright Brothers."

"I think that the Wright brothers are a lesson in history if ever there was," said the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, according to the Dayton Daily News.
Italian furniture makers strengthen brands through archives

MILAN (AP)  Big Italian furniture brands turned out collections at the 55th Milan Furniture Fair that included forgotten or neglected treasures from their archives, along with fresh innovations by the "starchitects" who have infused design with glamour.

A record 372,000 people attended the premier event for Italian design and furnishings that ended Sunday. It featured more than 2,400 exhibitors at the Rho fairgrounds and spilled out into eight design districts in Milan's city center. The annual gathering highlights the prowess of Italy's furniture manufacturing sector, which last year reported a 3 percent increase of revenues to nearly 25 billion euros ($28 billion).

Some highlights:

In this April 11, 2016 photo, Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola is lying on a chair called "Gender," during an interview with the Associated Press, at the Cassina space, part of the Design Fair exhibition, in Milan, Italy. Big Italian furniture brands turned out collections at this year's Milan Furniture Fair that both mined neglected treasures from their archives and added fresh innovations by the "starchitects'' who have infused design with glamour. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

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GENDER BENDING

Patricia Urquiola, who was named Cassina's new art director in September, is doing it all: launching her own designs while curating new works from colleagues, and updating the Italian brand's iconic pieces ahead of its 90th anniversary next year.

Urquiola said she has brought a more feminine influence to the Cassina DNA, which "has always been very masculine, very architectural."

She started with a new armchair called "Gender," which she described as her "manifesto piece." It combines two elements: a ridged, high-back form that embraces the occupant with a more cartilaginous, adjustable headrest and a fitted cushioned "dress." The chair can be paired with an inverted U-shaped ottoman.

"I think it is time to stop the argument of gender. We need more blended gender," she said.

For her debut collection, Urquiola also revisited a steel-supported table designed by Carlo Scarpa in 1968, making it from anodized aluminum in strong shades including copper and matte red to lighten the impact. The table in the central Milan showroom featured a clear glass top, but it's also available in white or black marble.

"Now the table is much lighter," she said. "Evolution means to take care of things and make them new."

The energetic Spaniard's works also popped up at collateral design events, including a stained-glass credenza, cabinet and room divider trio commissioned by Spazio Pontaccio.

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EAST MEETS WEST

Taiwan-based architect Shi-Chieh Lu adapted the traditional yoke-back Ming chair popular in China for Poltrona Frau, as the Italian brand infuses its collection with a taste of the Orient.

While the Ming chair has traditionally been crafted from wood, the "Ming's Heart" design for Poltrona Frau takes its European cues from the leather styling. The distinctive geometric back and seat are suspended from the tubular frame, creating the sensation of a swing.

"It gives the idea of floating in the air," Shi-Chieh said.

The Ming chair is among a series of pieces commissioned by Asian designers this year that merge with Poltrona Frau's iconic pieces and contemporary design.

"I think that Frau is recognizable beyond the fact of whether a designer is from Taiwan or from Milan, because identity is something you create through the construction, the way of working the leather, and the stitching," said Marco Romanelli, who is in charge of reviving the brand's icons. "It is like saying the brand is strong enough to absorb the work of people who come from any part of the world."

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THE ESSENTIAL CHAIR

Leave it to Knoll to provide the essential chair update.

The U.S. brand has made some of the world's most distinctive, enduring chair designs, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair. "The chair is an intricate question," allowed Benjamin Pardo, Knoll's design director, recalling the 70 series executive seating collection that marked the brand's entry into the European market in the mid-20th century.

Knoll's latest entry to the world of side dining seating, designed by Marc Krusin, arches comfortably around the occupant and features a functional horizontal aperture between the seat and the back that is both appealing to the eye and allows for easing lifting.

Keeping the focus on seating, Piero Lissoni designed a new rail-based sofa system, a trend in the sector, allowing combinations of softer seating with tables on the same base. Dubbed "Avio," the Knoll system evokes a sense of floating, and has the interior-design advantage of not being either left- or right-handed.

"It is intended to be a sofa that one can sit up and have a great conversation in, and also take a really great nap in," Pardo said.

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CRYSTAL WORKS

One of architect Zaha Hadid's last design projects before her sudden death last month was a striking, curved, crystal statement piece for the Austrian crystal maker Swarovski.

Titled "Crista," the massive crystal and metallic flutes splay out of a central point like arching reeds, utilizing for the first time Swarovski's new wave cut technology. The work anchored Swarovski's debut home collection, which also featured a collection of brightly reflecting trays, centerpieces and bowls by Spaniard Tomas Alonso, and candle holders with refracting crystal wax catchers by Kim Thome of Norway.

Hadid's creativity lived on elsewhere at the Milan design fair, with a prototype cubed low-back armchair for Cassina and curving, black granite wall shelves for Italian brand Citco.

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HEROIC ACCENTS

As with his runway designs, Tomas Maier took inspiration from materials for Bottega Veneta's latest home collection, with heroic bronze accents.

The bronze base of round, arched coffee tables provided a fitting thematic counterpoint to frescoes of fierce war scenes in the living room of the brand's 18th century palazzo showroom. They were harmonized with velvet seating.

Bottega Veneta launched its home line in 2006, and as with other design houses, it is a growing part of the portfolio. This year's collection featured updates on tableware, including porcelain dishes and flatware imprinted with Bottega's distinguishing weave pattern.

"I think when one has an aesthetic point of view and a sensibility about materials and color and shape  and that can be in a handbag, that can be in a garment, that can be in a shoe, that can be in a lot of things  we also then have a sensibility for interiors and interior furnishings," Maier said. "So I am talking to a client that is already my client."

Maier also finds cross-overs from his ready-to-wear looks. A leopard pattern on a chair appeared on the runway last season, while platinum boxes with semi-precious stone was inspired by Bottega Veneta's stone-inlaid sterling silver jewelry.

In this April 11, 2016 photo, visitors looks at furniture in the Cassina space, part of the Design Fair exhibition, in Milan, Italy. Big Italian furniture brands turned out collections at this year's Milan Furniture Fair that both mined neglected treasures from their archives and added fresh innovations by the ''starchitects'' who have infused design with glamour. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

This April 11, 2016 photo shows two chairs by Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola for Cassina, part of the Design Fair exhibition, in Milan, Italy. Big Italian furniture brands turned out collections at this year's Milan Furniture Fair that both mined neglected treasures from their archives and added fresh innovations by the ''starchitects'' who have infused design with glamour. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

This April 12, 2016 photo shows miniatures of leather chairs that are displayed at the Poltrona Frau space, as part of the Design fair, in Rho, near Milan, Italy. Big Italian furniture brands turned out collections at this year's Milan Furniture Fair that both mined neglected treasures from their archives and added fresh innovations by the "starchitects'' who have infused design with glamour. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

In this April 12, 2016 photo, crystal letters are displayed at the Swarovski atelier, as part of the Design fair, in Milan, Italy. Big Italian furniture brands turned out collections at this year's Milan Furniture Fair that both mined neglected treasures from their archives and added fresh innovations by the ''starchitects'' who have infused design with glamour. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

In this April 11, 2016 photo, two armchairs are displayed at the Cassina space, part of the Design Fair exhibition, in Milan, Italy. Big Italian furniture brands turned out collections at this year's Milan Furniture Fair that both mined neglected treasures from their archives and added fresh innovations by the "starchitects'' who have infused design with glamour. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Judge rules US Capitol plot suspect competent to stand trial

CINCINNATI (AP)  A federal judge ruled Tuesday that a suburban Cincinnati man is competent to stand trial on charges that he plotted to attack the U.S. Capitol in support of the Islamic State group.

"The court finds that a preponderance of the evidence supports that conclusion," U.S. District Judge Sandra Beckwith wrote.

She noted in her order that a psychologist for the defense testified in a Monday hearing that Christopher Lee Cornell, 22, is currently able to participate in his defense. The psychologist had filed an evaluation last year concluding Cornell couldn't properly assist his defense, but has modified his opinion, Beckwith wrote.

This undated photo provided by the Boone County Jail shows Christopher Lee Cornell. Cornell, a suburban Cincinnati man, the beard and long hair he had when arrested gone, has been calling himself again by his birth name and appears competent to stand trial on charges that he plotted to attack the U.S. Capitol in support of the Islamic State group, according to testimony Monday, April 18, 2016. (Boone County Jail via AP)

Psychologist Scot Bresler, of the University of Cincinnati, who has met repeatedly with Cornell, said for the first time Sunday he asked to be called "Chris" instead of Raheel Mahrus Ubaydah, which he had adopted as his Muslim name. The long hair and beard Cornell had when arrested in January 2015 have been cut off.

The psychologist testified Cornell has anxiety and personality disorders and can be deeply depressed, and urged he be re-evaluated before trial because his competency could change.

Prosecutors filed a report by another psychologist concluding Cornell is competent, and also filed exhibits including letters from Cornell the government said show he understands the charges against him and can help his attorneys.

Cornell, held without bond, has pleaded not guilty to four charges, including attempted murder of U.S. officials and employees. His father has said he was misled and coerced by "a snitch."

His attorneys could still pursue an insanity defense.

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Hearing delayed in police ambush case after judge bars media

MILFORD, Pa. (AP)  A judge postponed a hearing Tuesday for a man charged with ambushing two troopers outside a Pennsylvania State Police barracks after reporters objected to being excluded from part of it.

Eric Frein, 32, is charged with opening fire outside the Blooming Grove barracks in 2014, killing Cpl. Bryon Dickson and seriously wounding Trooper Alex Douglass. The anti-government survivalist led police on a 48-day manhunt before U.S. marshals captured him in an abandoned airplane hanger.

Tuesday's hearing centered on the admissibility of Frein's videotaped statement to police after his arrest. Frein told police that Dickson's slaying was an "assassination" and that he ambushed the troopers to "wake people up," according to court documents filed earlier in the case.

His attorneys argue his statement should be suppressed because police did not inform Frein his parents had hired a lawyer to represent him.

Citing heavy pretrial publicity, a Pike County judge tried closing that part of the hearing to the public, then postponed it until Friday after a TV station formally objected. Judge Gregory Chelak said he will hear arguments Thursday on whether the suppression hearing should be held in open court instead.
Florida man pleads guilty in $4.8M gold truck heist

MIAMI (AP)  One of three South Florida-based men accused of stealing $4.8 million in gold from a truck along a North Carolina interstate has pleaded guilty.

Court records show Roberto Cabrera faces a maximum of 50 years in prison after pleading guilty Monday to robbery, firearms and other charges. Sentencing is set for June 23 in Miami.

The FBI says Cabrera, co-defendant Adalberto Perez and an unidentified third man used a GPS device in March 2015 to track the gold-laden tractor-trailer heading from Miami to Massachusetts. Investigators say pepper spray was released by remote control to sicken the driver and a passenger before the robbery along Interstate 95 in Wilson County, North Carolina.

The crooks made off with 275 pounds of gold bars and some silver.
AP finds SKorea covered up mass abuse, killing of 'vagrants'

BUSAN, South Korea (AP)  Three decades ago, a policeman tortured Choi Seung-woo over a piece of bread he found in the boy's schoolbag.

After being stripped and having a cigarette lighter repeatedly sparked near his genitals, the 14-year-old falsely confessed to stealing the bread. Two men with clubs came and dragged him off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.

Even now, Choi weeps as he speaks of what happened there.

ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates, child inmates line up for morning assembly at the Brothers Home in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation shows that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. It also reveals that the secrecy around Brothers has persisted for decades because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government.(Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES, NO ARCHIVE

A guard in Choi's dormitory raped him that night in 1982, and the next, and the next. So began five hellish years of slave labor and near-daily assaults, years in which Choi saw men and women beaten to death, their bodies carted away like garbage.

Choi was one of thousands  the homeless, the drunk, the unlucky, but mostly children and the disabled  who were forced into facilities for so-called vagrants in the 1970s and '80s. The roundup came as the ruling dictators prepared to bid for and host the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which they saw as international validation of South Korea's arrival as a modern country. So they ordered police and local officials to "purify" the streets.

Today, nobody has been held accountable for the hundreds of deaths, rapes and beatings on the grounds of Brothers, the largest of dozens of facilities for those considered undesirable, according to an Associated Press investigation. The AP found that abuse at Brothers, previously almost unknown, was much more vicious and widespread than had been realized, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates, most of whom had not spoken before publicly.

Secrecy around Brothers persists because of a cover-up at the highest levels, the AP found. Two early attempts to investigate were suppressed by senior officials who went on to thrive in high-profile jobs; one remains a senior adviser to the current ruling party.

Products made using slave labor at Brothers were sent to Europe, Japan and possibly beyond, and the family that owned Brothers continued to run welfare facilities and schools until just two years ago.

The few former inmates speaking out want a new investigation. The government is blocking an opposition lawmaker's push to revisit the case, contending that the evidence is too old.

Ahn Jeong-tae, an official from Seoul's Ministry of the Interior, said Brothers' victims should have submitted their case years ago to a temporary truth-finding commission. "We can't make separate laws for every incident," Ahn said.

The official silence means that even as South Korea prepares for its second Olympics, in 2018, thousands of traumatized former inmates have still received no compensation, let alone public recognition or an apology.

"The government has consistently tried to bury what happened. How do you fight that?" Choi asked. "Look at me now. I am wailing, desperate to tell our story. Please listen to us."

Police officers, assisted by shop owners, rounded up children, panhandlers, small-time street merchants, the disabled and dissidents. They ended up as prisoners at 36 nationwide facilities, and numbered 16,000 by 1986, according to government documents obtained by AP.

Nearly 4,000 were at Brothers. Once an orphanage, Brothers Home at its peak had more than 20 factories behind its well-guarded walls in the southern port city of Busan, churning out goods made by mostly unpaid inmates.

Some 90 percent of those shouldn't have been there because they didn't meet the government's definition of "vagrant," former prosecutor Kim Yong Won told the AP, based on Brothers' records and interviews compiled in 1987 before government officials ended his investigation.

A former inmate, Lee Chae-sik, said he watched the man he worked for, chief enforcer Kim Kwang-seok, lead near-daily, often fatal beatings at a "corrections room." Lee said he also saw records that sometimes listed as many as five daily deaths. The AP tried repeatedly to track Kim down but could not.

Amid the violence was a massive money-making operation partly based on slave labor. Eleven of the factories, ostensibly meant to train inmates for future jobs, saw a profit by the end of 1986, according to Busan city government documents obtained exclusively by the AP.

The documents show that Brothers should have paid the current equivalent of $1.7 million to more than 1,000 inmates for their dawn-to-dusk work over an unspecified period. However, facility records and interviews with inmates at the time suggest that most people at Brothers were subjected to forced labor without pay, according to prosecutor Kim.

In his autobiography and elsewhere, Brothers' owner, Park In-keun, has denied wrongdoing, saying he simply followed government orders. Repeated attempts to contact him through family, friends and activists were unsuccessful.

The former second-highest management official at Brothers, Lim Young-soon, attributed the facility's high death toll to the many inmates he said arrived there in poor health.

"These were people who would have died in the streets anyway," Lim told AP in a phone interview.

While Park grew rich, inmates struggled to survive.

On his second day at Brothers, Choi said he watched a guard drag a woman by her hair and beat her with a club until blood flowed.

Death tallies compiled by the facility claimed 513 people died between 1975 and 1986; the real toll was almost certainly higher. Most of the new arrivals at Brothers were in relatively good health, government documents show. Yet at least 15 inmates were dead within just a month of arrival in 1985, and 22 in 1986.

Brothers' downfall began by accident.

While pheasant hunting, Kim, then a newly appointed prosecutor in the city of Ulsan, stumbled upon bedraggled prisoners working on a mountainside. Their guards said they were building a ranch for the owner of the Brothers Home in nearby Busan.

Kim and 10 policemen raided Brothers in January 1987. But at every turn in his investigation, Kim said, high-ranking officials blocked him, in part out of fear of embarrassing pre-Olympics news. Internal prosecution records reveal intense pressure from the president's office for Kim to curb his probe and push for lighter punishment for the owner.

Kim's boss, Park Hee-tae, then Busan's head prosecutor and later the nation's justice minister, pushed to reduce the scope of the investigation, Kim said, including forcing him to stop efforts to interview every Brothers inmate. Park, a senior adviser to the current ruling party, denied AP interview requests. His personal secretary said Park can't remember details about the investigation.

Kim, now 61 and a managing partner at a Seoul law firm, said his bosses also prevented him from charging the owner for suspected widespread abuse at the main compound, limiting him to pursuing much narrower abuse linked to the construction site he'd found.

Despite interference, Kim eventually collected bank records and financial transactions indicating that, in 1985 and 1986 alone, the owner embezzled millions from government subsidies. The Supreme Court in 1989 gave Park 2 years in prison for embezzlement and violations of construction, grassland management and foreign currency laws.

Brothers finally closed its gates in 1988.

While most former inmates are silent, a few are demanding an apology and an admission that officials encouraged police to kidnap and lock away people who shouldn't have been confined.

"How can we ever forget the pain from the beatings, the dead bodies, the backbreaking labor, the fear ... all the bad memories," said Lee, who now manages a lakeside motel. "It will haunt us until we die."

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Follow Foster Klug, the AP's Seoul bureau chief, on Twitter at twitter.com/apklug. Follow reporter Kim Tong-hyung at twitter.com/kimtonghyung

This undated photo shows the Brothers Home compound in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (Yonhap via AP) KOREA OUT

In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates at the Brothers Home, owner Park In-keun, right, shakes hands with then South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. It also reveals that the secrecy around Brothers has persisted for decades because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government.(Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES, NO ARCHIVE

In this Dec. 22, 2014, photo, Kim Yong Won, the former prosecutor who was in charge of the Brothers Home case, speaks during an interview at his office in Seoul, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates at the Brothers Home, guards unload children from a truck in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation shows that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. It also reveals that the secrecy around Brothers has persisted for decades because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government.(Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES, NO ARCHIVE

In this December 1986, photo provided by the Ulsan District Prosector's Office, Brothers Home inmates work at a construction site in Ulsan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (Ulsan District Prosecutors' Office via AP)

In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Lee Chae-sik talks as he walks up a hill behind a row of apartments at the former location of the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo shows an old photo of the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo, left, and Lee Chae-sik talk as they stand in front of an apartment complex at the former location of the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo examines a lock on what he says was a water tank left from the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
Filipino presidential candidate apologizes over rape comment

MANILA, Philippines (AP)  The front-runner in the Philippine presidential race apologized Tuesday for a campaign rally remark about wanting to rape an Australian missionary who was assaulted and killed by prisoners during a hostage-taking in 1989.

The comment by Mayor Rodrigo Duterte of southern Davao city sparked a storm of criticism ahead of the May 9 election.

Duterte issued an apology saying "sometimes my mouth can get the better of me" and adding that he has "no intention of disrespecting our women and those who have been victims of this horrible crime."

FILE - In this March 10, 2016 file photo, Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte talks to the media prior to addressing seafarers organization in Manila, Philippines. The Australian ambassador and Philippine presidential candidates condemned Duterte's, the leading contender, remark made Tuesday, April 12, 2016, at a campaign rally that he "should have been the first" to rape an Australian missionary who was assaulted and killed by prisoners in 1989. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)

At a campaign stop last week, Duterte said he "should have been the first" to rape Australian Jacqueline Hamill, whose throat was slit by prisoners after she was raped during a 1989 prison siege. His supporters laughed and cheered at the comment.

Rival candidates and women's groups, however, were shocked and slammed the tough-talking mayor for the remark. A rival candidate for the presidency called Duterte a "crazy maniac" who is not fit to lead the nation.

Australian Ambassador Amanda Gorely tweeted Sunday that "rape and murder should never be joked about or trivialized" and "violence against women and girls is unacceptable anytime, anywhere."

An incensed Duterte asked Gorely to "shut up," according to news reports.

Duterte's campaign promise to rid the Philippines of criminals, drug dealers and corrupt politicians in six months has won him wide support but political analyst Ramon Casiple said his rape remark may alienate the undecided whose backing may be crucial in the tight contest among four contenders.

Duterte was in the lead in a voter preference survey conducted days before his comment.

"It can possibly be his Waterloo," Casiple said. "There's not much time. It remains to be seen whether corrective measures by his camp can still gain traction."

Duterte has come under fire for past remarks. Last year, he cursed Pope Francis for causing a traffic jam during a visit to Manila that trapped the mayor for hours.
Study: Fox, CNN spent more time on GOP candidates than Dems

NEW YORK (AP)  Anyone who used Fox News Channel's prime-time lineup as their main source of campaign news over the past month may be forgiven for thinking there was only one presidential nomination contest.

Fox spent 666 minutes interviewing Republican candidates for president or their surrogates, with 13 minutes on Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, according to the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog. The group tallied the number of minutes guests spoke or were questioned weeknights from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET on March 21 through April 15.

During the same period, CNN spent 729 minutes with remaining Republicans Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, John Kasich or their representatives. Democrats had 326 minutes, including last Thursday's debate in Brooklyn, the group said on Tuesday.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a Women for Hillary event in New York, Monday, April 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Fueled by Trump fascination, the Republican race in general has gotten more coverage. With ratings soaring, the news networks frequently have candidates on for "town hall"-style interviews: each Republican appeared with family members on three successive nights on CNN last week.

Fox no doubt believes that its audience, dominated by Republicans, is more interested in the GOP campaign, said Rich Noyes of the MRC. For example, Sean Hannity's show had no Democratic candidates or surrogates on during the monthlong period, the group said. A 2012 study by the Pew Research Center found that 78 percent of Hannity's audience identified themselves as conservative, and 5 percent as liberal.

For the same reason, two candidates seeking the votes of fellow Democrats would have little incentive to speak to that type of audience.

Fox has repeatedly been rebuffed in efforts to host Democrats for debates, network spokeswoman Dana Klinghoffer said. Sanders and Clinton both appeared at a Fox town hall hosted by Bret Baier on March 7, before the period the MRC counted.

The advocacy group did not include party members not affiliated with a particular campaign or straight news coverage in its calculations.

MSNBC, which has a left-leaning lineup at night, talked to Democrats or their representatives for 296 minutes in prime time, with 246 minutes for Republicans, the study said.

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This story has been corrected to show that Democratic candidates or their surrogates were featured for 13 minutes on Fox, not 11.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop at the First Niagara Center, Monday, April 18, 2016, in Buffalo, N.Y. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Republican presidential candidate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich speaks during a campaign stop at Solvay Youth Center, Monday, April 18, 2016, in Syracuse, N.Y. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Capital of conservative Utah will name street for gay leader

SALT LAKE CITY (AP)  The Salt Lake City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to name a street after pioneering gay leader Harvey Milk, the latest display of its position as a blue island in a sea of deep-red, where the prevailing Mormon faith still has a fraught relationship with the LGBT community.

Utah's capital city recently elected its first openly gay mayor and its second sitting gay councilman, creating an increasingly friendly atmosphere for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in the home of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The conservative religion's tone on gay issues has softened in recent years, but it still opposes same-sex marriage, believes homosexuality is a sin and recently banned baptisms for the children of gay parents. Faith leaders said the highly criticized move would avoid putting children in a tug-of-war between their parents and church teachings.

Cars ride along 900 South, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Salt Lake City. The Salt Lake City Council has voted to hold a public hearing on whether to name a street after pioneering gay leader Harvey Milk alongside thoroughfares honoring civil rights icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

The Mormon church declined to comment on renaming the street. Sponsor Stan Penford, the city's first openly gay councilman, said that leaders likely would have reached out if they had a strong opposition.

Milk set the tone for the modern gay rights movement and his uncompromising calls for gay people to come out of the closet inspired a generation of activists, including many in Utah, said supporters who spoke at a Tuesday hearing that drew about 100 people.

"This sends a loud message that Salt Lake City values inclusion and diversity," said Troy Williams, director of the group Equality Utah.

Several people spoke against the idea, with many saying that a local leader or inventor should be honored instead. The street serves as the ending spot for an annual parade honoring the deeply felt legacy of Mormon pioneers.

"Those are our pioneers, not San Francisco's pioneers," said resident Ralph Pahnke.

The street with the honorary name will be located near thoroughfares named for civil rights icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. Lined with coffee shops, restaurants and a community garden, it runs through one of the city's most in-demand neighborhoods.

Milk became the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in the U.S. when he won a seat on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in 1977. A disgruntled former city supervisor assassinated him and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone at City Hall in 1978.

The activist's life was memorialized in the Oscar-winning 2008 movie "Milk," and he also has been honored with a commemorative stamp and a posthumous Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. The San Diego City Council approved naming a street for Milk in 2012, something officials said was a first.

The honorary name will be placed on part of a street that is nine blocks from Mormon church headquarters. Temple Square was the site of protests in 2008 after the church supported efforts to pass a short-lived gay marriage ban in California.

Mormon leaders subsequently softened their tone, backing a Utah anti-discrimination law last year that protects gay and transgender people from housing and employment discrimination while safeguarding the rights of religious groups and individuals.

As many as two-thirds of Utah's 3 million residents are believed to be members of the Mormon religion, though some are more involved in the faith than others.

Utah's capital also has supported a thriving gay community. An annual LGBT pride parade is the second largest in the state  behind only the yearly celebration of Mormon pioneers.

The city's first openly gay mayor, Jackie Biskupski, took office this year, as well as its second sitting gay councilman. Derek Kitchen and his husband were one of three couples who sued to overturn the state's same-sex marriage ban.

FILE - This file photo from April 1977 shows San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk in the mayor's office during the signing of the city's gay rights bill in San Francisco. A proposal to name a street after pioneering gay leader Harvey Milk is the latest display of Salt Lake City standing out as a blue dot in a deep-red state where the prevailing Mormon faith still has a fraught relationship with the LGBT community. (AP Photo/File)

FILE- In this file photo from June 26, 1978, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk is seen in San Francisco's seventh annual gay freedom parade in San Francisco. A proposal to name a street after pioneering gay leader Harvey Milk is the latest display of Salt Lake City standing out as a blue dot in a deep-red state where the prevailing Mormon faith still has a fraught relationship with the LGBT community. (AP Photo, File)
UN chief warns of terror threat in Western Sahara

UNITED NATIONS (AP)  Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned Tuesday that Morocco's expulsion of most of the U.N. peacekeeping mission's civilian staff in the disputed Western Sahara will likely be exploited by "terrorist and radical elements" and could lead to full-scale war.

In a rebuke to Morocco's unilateral action, the U.N. chief urged the Security Council to "restore and support" the mission's role of monitoring a cease-fire between the Moroccan government and the Polisario Front independence movement and helping organize a referendum on the future of the Western Sahara.

He recommended in a report to the council obtained by The Associated Press that the council extend the mission's mandate until April 30, 2017, with the addition of 14 medical staff. The Security Council. which is expected to vote on April 28 on whether to renew the mandate, has called for the mission to continue but is divided on the way ahead.

Morocco annexed Western Sahara in 1975 and considers it as its "southern provinces." The Moroccan government has proposed wide-ranging autonomy for the region, but the Polisario Front insists on self-determination through a referendum for the local population  as called for in U.N. resolutions.

Polisario Front Secretary-General Mohammad Abdulaziz warned in a letter to the secretary-general last Thursday that Morocco will have "a green light to a military aggression" unless the Security Council imposes "real and direct pressure" on the government to restore the U.N. mission's work. He warned that the Sahrawi people in Western Sahara will defend their rights in the face of aggression "by all legitimate means, including armed struggle."

Morocco expelled most U.N. civilian staff last month after the secretary-general used the word "occupation" to refer to the situation in the region following a visit to a camp for Western Sahara refugees in Algeria. The U.N. mission had nearly 500 military and civilian personnel but 83 were ordered to leave and a military liaison was ordered to close, crippling its operation.

In the report, Ban expressed "regret" that the Moroccan government chose not to seek clarification of his comments through diplomatic channels. He reiterated his remarks were not meant "to take sides, express hostility to the Kingdom of Morocco, or signal any change in the approach of the United Nations to the Western Sahara issue."

Ban said the expulsion of most U.N. international civilian staff has resulted in altering the mandate of the mission, known as MINURSO, "a development that can be expected to be exploited by terrorist and radical elements."

With limited civilian staff, he said military activities including monitoring the cease-fire "will not be sustainable in the medium to long-term, as the military and civilian components of the mission go hand-in-hand."

The expulsion of civilian staff also has significant implications for regional stability, Security Council credibility and U.N. peacekeeping operations and political missions globally, Ban said.

He urged the Security Council "to restore and support" MINURSO's full role, not only to uphold peacekeeping standards and U.N. impartiality, but "most importantly, avoid setting a precedent for United Nations peacekeeping operations around the world."

"The risk of a rupture of the cease-fire and a resumption of hostilities, with its attendant danger of escalation into full-scale war, will grow significantly in the event that MINURSO is forced to depart or finds itself unable to execute the mandate that the Security Council has set," Ban said.

Britain's U.N. Ambassador Matthew Rycroft expressed hope that the council will support Ban's recommendations.
GOP senators want US to cut off money to UN climate agency

WASHINGTON (AP)  More than two dozen Republican senators are calling on Secretary of State John Kerry to cut off money the U.S. sends to the United Nations climate change agency or risk breaking the law.

In the letter sent Monday, the 28 senators say Palestine last month became a member of the agency, known formally as the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

They say Palestine's entry triggered a restriction under the 1994 Foreign Relations Authorization Act. The law prohibits the U.S. from providing taxpayer funds to U.N. organizations that grant full membership to certain groups, such as the Palestinians.
Red Cross loses contact with 3 workers in northern Mali

BAMAKO, Mali (AP)  The international Red Cross says it has lost contact with a three-person team working in a part of northern Mali where multiple Islamic extremist groups are present.

Valery Mbaoh Nana, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Bamako, said Tuesday the aid workers disappeared Saturday while returning to the northern city of Kidal from the village of Abeibara, where they had been distributing water. The Red Cross did not disclose their nationalities but said they were all African.
Senators call on Obama to investigate sexual assault cases

WASHINGTON (AP)  President Barack Barack Obama is being urged by two U.S. senators to investigate whether the Pentagon misled Congress with information about sexual assault cases in an effort to undercut support for a Senate bill that senior military officials steadfastly oppose.

In a letter sent to Obama on Tuesday, Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., cited an Associated Press investigation published Monday and a report by the advocacy group Protect Our Defenders that found inaccuracies and omissions in military records that summarized the outcomes of cases prosecuted in military courts.

Grassley is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Gillibrand is a member of the Armed Services Committee.

The military records buttressed the Pentagon's position against the bill  which is sponsored by Gillibrand and backed by Grassley  that would strip senior officers of their responsibilities to decide whether to prosecute sexual assault crimes. That authority would be given instead to seasoned military trial lawyers outside the chain of command.

Underscoring the essential role commanders play, Pentagon officials have said such a shift will mean fewer victims will get justice because there will be fewer prosecutions. They've also said major strides have been made in curbing sexual assaults in the ranks.

Military representatives defended the accuracy of the information sent to Congress.

The records portrayed civilian district attorneys and local police forces as less willing than senior military officers to punish sex offenders. But in a number of the cases, the steps taken by civilian authorities were described incorrectly or omitted, AP's investigation found. Other case descriptions were too imprecise to be verified.

There also is nothing in the records that supports the primary reason the Pentagon told Congress about the cases in the first place: To show that top military leaders insisted on taking the cases to trial after civilian law enforcement said no.

"In case after case, the AP revealed facts that challenge the Pentagon's assertion that civilian prosecuting attorneys are either electing not to pursue justice, or are incompetently pursuing justice, in cases of military sexual assault," Grassley and Gillibrand wrote.

Grassley and Gillibrand also said AP's investigation and the report by Protect Our Defenders raise questions about the Pentagon's commitment to ending sexual violence in the armed forces. Protect Our Defenders, a nonpartisan organization, supports the bill.

"The allegations in the Protect Our Defenders report and the AP article include providing inaccurate information to a congressional committee, misleading the Congress, and undermining efforts to make critical reforms to a broken system," the senators wrote. "Due to the very serious nature of these allegations, we request that you direct an independent investigation into this matter."

The military records were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the advocacy group Protect Our Defenders, which provided the documents exclusively to AP. The nonprofit group on Monday said it found no evidence that any case was prosecuted at a commander's insistence.
Man pleads guilty to making online threats toward university

COLUMBIA, Missouri. (AP)  A man charged with posting threats online last year that he would shoot black students and faculty at the University of Missouri's Columbia campus has changed his plea to guilty.

Hunter Park, 19, admitted Monday to making a terrorist threat. Authorities say the threats showed up Nov. 10 on the anonymous location-based messaging app Yik Yak.

Brouck Jacobs, an assistant prosecutor, said there was no plea deal. He said the prosecutor's office has requested a three-year prison sentence.

A university police officer says Park admitted he wrote the postings when confronted. The school said no weapons were found.

One post included a threat to "shoot every black person I see," while another threat said: "Some of you are alright. Don't go to campus tomorrow." The message seemed to echo one that appeared on the website 4chan  a forum where racist and misogynistic comments are common  ahead of the deadly campus shooting at an Oregon community college in October.

The threats also came amid turmoil and protests at the University of Missouri that activists said were spurred by administrators' indifference to racial issues on campus. Two other people also were charged with school shooting threats during the unrest; one has pleaded guilty and the other is awaiting trial.
Abbas: Palestinians reject 'all forms of terrorist activity'

BERLIN (AP)  Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, speaking a day after an attack on a bus in Jerusalem that wounded at least 21 people, says his administration rejects violence against civilians.

Abbas said during a visit to Germany on Tuesday that "we are against all forms of terrorist activity that affect Israeli and Palestinian civilians."

After meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told reporters that Palestinians "want to achieve an end to the occupation and the building of settlements through diplomatic means, and through peaceful resistance by the Palestinian people."
DC Council approves permanent ban on marijuana clubs

WASHINGTON (AP)  District of Columbia lawmakers have voted to enact a permanent ban on smoking marijuana in private clubs.

Possession of pot for personal use has been legal in the District since early last year. But Congress blocked the city from any further liberalization of its marijuana laws, and Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser moved quickly to clarify that pot clubs wouldn't be allowed.
Email goes to wrong Verona but helps save suicidal woman

VERONA, N.J. (AP)  An email from a concerned friend of a suicidal student in Verona, Italy, mistakenly went to a police department of the same name in New Jersey, but authorities said it helped save a life.

Mitchell Stern, police chief in Verona, New Jersey, said the department received an email April 14 from a Chinese student in the United Kingdom concerned about another Chinese student at the Verona Academy of Fine Arts in Italy.

After trying to find contact information for the Italian police department of the same name and the Italian embassy, he eventually got in touch with Interpol, a network of police forces around the world. Interpol forwarded it to the state police in Italy.

The student was found with her wrists partially slit and with a half-empty bottle of antidepressants when local police arrived at her apartment, the Italian Interior Ministry said in a statement.

The student had told her friend in an online chat that she was going to harm herself, Stern said.

"It really makes you step back and think you can help to save a life half a world away," Stern said.

Stern said the 30-member Verona, New Jersey, police department occasionally gets emails looking for lost luggage or reporting thefts in Verona, Italy, but nothing at the same magnitude as last Thursday's.
Court weighs law aimed at domestic violence on tribal lands

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Obama administration asked the Supreme Court Tuesday to uphold a federal law aimed at people who have been convicted of repeated acts of domestic violence on Indian lands.

The case argued at the high court tests whether the law and its stiff prison terms can be used against defendants who did not have lawyers in earlier domestic violence convictions in tribal courts.

The U.S. appeals court in San Francisco threw out a 46-month federal prison term for defendant Michael Bryant Jr. because his earlier domestic violence convictions were handled without a lawyer in tribal courts on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana.

Several justices seemed skeptical of the argument of Bryant's lawyer, Steven Babcock. Bryant never challenged his earlier convictions or prison sentences of up to a year. Congress has put limits on prison terms imposed by tribal courts.

"So if it's a valid conviction, why can't you use it?" Justice Stephen Breyer asked.

Babcock said the use of the earlier convictions in prosecuting Bryant on new charges violated his constitutional right to a lawyer.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees an attorney for criminal defendants in state and federal courts. Under the Indian Civil Rights Act, defendants have the right to hire their own attorneys in tribal court but are not guaranteed that one will be retained by the court for them.

Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Prelogar said Congress, in 2005, provided for prosecutions in federal court and lengthier penalties for repeat offenders "in response to the epidemic of domestic violence in Indian Country."

Bryant has more than 100 tribal court convictions on his record, including five domestic violence convictions between 1997 and 2007, the government said. In 1999, he attempted to strangle his live-in girlfriend and hit her over the head with a beer bottle, the government said. In 2007, Bryant beat up his girlfriend and kneed her in the face, breaking her nose, the government said.

In 2011, federal agents arrested him under the law at issue on charges he beat two women in the span of several months.

Prelogar said the appeals court was wrong to rule in favor of defendants like Bryant "who have abused and battered their intimate partners again and again."
2,000 tusks aflame in large burn of poached wildlife goods

YAOUNDE, Cameroon (AP)  Some 2,000 illegally trafficked elephant tusks and hundreds of finished ivory products erupted in a ball of fire Tuesday as Cameroonian authorities conducted what was believed to be one of the largest burnings of poached wildlife goods in African history.

Setting the pyre aflame in a sandy square in Cameroon's capital, Samantha Power, America's U.N. ambassador, joined Cameroonian officials in hailing the ceremony as symbolic of their commitment to win the war against illegal smuggling of animal products.

Central Africa's forest elephants have declined in number by two-thirds between 2002 and 2012.

A firefighter tends to the first Cameroon Ivory Burn, attended by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power at the Palais des Congres in Yaounde, Cameroon, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, to highlight the need to halt the Ivory trade in order to save Africa's elephants. Power is visiting Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria to highlight the growing threat Boko Haram poses to the Lake Chad Basin region. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

"All of our countries can and must do more," Power said. The burning sends a clear message, she added, that "the only place ivory belongs and the only value ivory has is on elephants."

The heap included ivory chess boards, beads, totem poles and even miniature elephant sculptures, all intermixed with the raw tusks. Cameroonian officials said the pile totaled 3.5 tons of tusk alone, though that figure couldn't be verified. What's certain is the merchandise was worth millions of dollars. The pyre will burn for three days.

Philip Ngole Ngwese, Cameroon's minister of forestry and wildlife, said the seized tusks and ivory, much of which originated abroad, were now "beyond reach." He also described the human costs of poaching, mourning several guides and park rangers who have been killed in recent years.

Cameroon's biggest city, Douala, is a port through which much of the region's trafficked goods transit overseas.

Power, on a weeklong trip to promote the battle against the Muslim extremist group Boko Haram, also met President Paul Biya and other senior Cameroonian officials. She announced $40 million in new U.S. humanitarian aid to the region.

The United States has some 200 special operations forces in Cameroon advising and assisting African troops in the fight. Power, making the first trip to the country by a U.S. Cabinet member in a quarter-century, stressed the need for Cameroonian soldiers to exercise restraint amid reports they've sometimes targeted civilians.

"Any fight against terrorism has to be comprehensive," she said, echoing remarks she made in Cameroon's embattled north on Monday. Political inclusiveness, good governance, economic development and combatting extremism at the grassroots level, she said, "are every bit as critical as one's military campaign itself."

Smoke billowed from the pyre as the ivory tusks turned black and statuettes smoldered.

Ivory-burning ceremonies aren't a gesture universally appreciated - even in Cameroon. Some wonder why the valuable tusks aren't reused in some capacity, given the elephants are already dead.

Echoing such sentiments, one local journalist asked Power why the tusks aren't preserved in museums for future generations that may never see elephants.

"I don't want to think about contingency plans for if elephants are eliminated from the wild," Power said.

The event and Power's participation underscored the Obama administration's effort to prioritize the fight against wildlife trafficking. In doing so, it is trying to break a multibillion-dollar criminal industry that officials say sometimes interweaves with drug trafficking and even terrorist enterprises. The U.S. held its own ivory crushes in 2013 and 2015.

In March, a U.S. task force said a "turning point" had been reached in the global endeavor to strengthen enforcement, reduce demand and expand international cooperation. But much ultimately depends on China cracking down, because its citizens are driving global demand.

As a port of exit, Cameroon plays a major role in snuffing out ivory smuggling from Central Africa, where several countries are struggling to assert control over their own territory, and national parks are often poorly protected. Cameroon, too, has suffered from poaching.

Four years ago, armed poaching gangs from Sudan massacred more than half of the elephants in the Bouba Njida National Park in northern Cameroon. The raids highlighted the vulnerability of elephants even in stable African countries. Biya, who is 83, has ruled Cameroon for more than 30 years.

----

Charred Elephant tusks burn during the first Cameroon Ivory Burn, attended by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power at the Palais des Congres in Yaounde, Cameroon, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, to highlight the need to halt the Ivory trade in order to save Africa's elephants. Power is visiting Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria to highlight the growing threat Boko Haram poses to the Lake Chad Basin region. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
The Latest: Bear that mauled professor was a brown bear

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  The Latest on a university educator mauled by a bear in Alaska (all times local):

9:45 p.m.

A group of students and teaching assistants has arrived safely in Juneau after a bear mauling that sent one of their professors to the hospital in critical condition.

This April 2, 2016, photo provided by Gemini Waltz Media shows Forest Wagner at a Eaglecrest Ski Area in Douglas, Alaska. Wagner, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, was mauled by a bear while leading a mountaineering class near Haines, Alaska, on Monday, April 18, 2016. (Photo courtesy of Ryan Cortes Perez, Gemini Waltz Media via AP)

Students disembarking from the ferry Tuesday evening said they were tired, not yet ready to talk and headed to the nearby University of Alaska Southeast campus.

Forest Wagner, 35, was teaching a mountaineering class with 11 students and two teaching assistants when he was attacked by a brown bear with sows.

The Washington Post reports that an initial Alaska State Trooper said Wagner suffered extensive leg injuries.

Troopers contracted with a Juneau-based helicopter company to airlift Wagner from the mountain to an Anchorage hospital, where his condition was later upgraded to serious from critical.

___

6:50 p.m.

A University of Alaska Southeast spokeswoman says it was a brown bear that mauled an assistant professor on a mountain near Haines, Alaska.

Spokeswoman Katie Bausler says Forest Wagner, 35, was with a group of students and teaching assistants running a mountaineering class on Mount Emmerich on Monday when he tangled with a brown bear sow. No students were hurt, but they were evacuated from the mountain when the bear, who had cubs, was seen again, according to Alaska State Troopers.

Troopers reported that a student hiked into cellphone range to report the attack. They rescued the outdoor education professor from the mountain via helicopter.

Wagner was flown to the intensive care unit at an Anchorage hospital in critical condition, but he is now listed in serious condition.

___

2:40 p.m.

The condition of an assistant university professor who was mauled by a bear in southeast Alaska is improving.

A spokesman at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage says 35-year-old Forest Wagner's condition has been upgraded to serious.

A University of Alaska Southeast spokeswoman says Wagner was with a group of students and teaching assistants leading a mountaineering course on Mount Emmerich near Haines, Alaska, when he was attacked by a sow with two cubs. No students were hurt.

Alaska State Troopers reported they were called to rescue Wagner. A spokeswoman said the school group was spread out on the mountain and it was unclear if anyone witnessed the attack.

An Alaska Department of Fish and Game spokesman says a biologist plans to interview the students about the attack after they return to Juneau.

___

9 a.m.

An assistant professor who was mauled by a bear while teaching a mountaineering course in southeast Alaska is in critical condition.

A spokesman at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage says 35-year-old Forest Wagner is in the intensive care unit Tuesday, a day after the attack.

A University of Alaska Southeast spokeswoman says Wagner was with a group of 11 students and two teaching assistants on Mount Emmerich near Haines, Alaska, when he was attacked by a sow with two cubs. No students were hurt Monday.

A student hiked down the mountain to get cellphone reception and call for help.

Wagner's biography says he's been coordinating and teaching in the outdoor studies program at the university's Juneau campus since 2006. He teaches rock and ice climbing, backcountry navigation, glacier travel and mountaineering.

___

9:45 p.m.

A teacher has been hospitalized after he was mauled by a bear during a mountaineering class in the Alaska Panhandle.

A University of Alaska Southeast spokeswoman says Forest Wagner was with a group of 11 students and two teaching assistants on Mount Emmerich near Haines, Alaska, on Monday when he was attacked. No students were hurt.

A student hiked down the mountain to get cellphone reception and call for help.

The university says Wagner was taken to Providence Hospital in Anchorage. His condition was not immediately available, but the university said he was stable.

Wagner has been coordinating and teaching in the outdoor studies program at the university since 2006, according to his biography. He teaches rock and ice climbing, backcountry navigation, glacier travel and mountaineering.

University of Alaska Southeast Chancellor Rick Caulfield smiles after greeting a group of students who safely returned to Juneau from a remote mountaineering class on Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Juneau, Alaska. One of their professors, Forest Wagner, was badly mauled by a brown bear and the class was cut short after they were evacuated from a mountain near Haines, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rashah McChesney)
Guyana bans mining near river banks to protect waterways

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP)  Guyana has banned mining around rivers to protect waterways across the South American country in a win for environmentalists who have long decried the practice.

Mines Commissioner Newell Dennison said Tuesday that inspectors have been ordered to issue immediate cease-work orders to those panning or excavating for gold or diamonds 60 feet (18 meters) or less from a riverbank. Activists have said such activities have changed river courses, built up sedimentation and destroyed wildlife and vegetation.

Miners Association spokesman Patrick Hardin said members will soon discuss the government's actions.
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Court overturns Virginia school's transgender bathroom rule

RICHMOND, Va. (AP)  A Virginia high school discriminated against a transgender teen by forbidding him from using the boys' restroom, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a case that could have implications for a North Carolina law that critics say discriminates against LGBT people.

The case of Gavin Grimm has been especially closely watched since North Carolina enacted a law last month that bans transgender people from using public restrooms that correspond to their gender identity. That law also bans cities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances, a response to an ordinance recently passed in Charlotte.

In the Virginia case, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals  which also covers North Carolina  ruled 2-1 to overturn the Gloucester County School Board's policy. The court said the policy violated Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination in schools. The ruling also said a federal judge who previously rejected Grimm's discrimination claim ignored a U.S. Department of Education rule that transgender students in public schools must be allowed to use restrooms that correspond with their gender identity.

FILE This Tuesday Aug. 25, 2015 file photo shows Gavin Grimm on his front porch during an interview at his home in Gloucester, Va. A U.S. appeals court has overturned a policy barring a transgender student from using the boys' restrooms at his Virginia high school. A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday, April 19, 2016 that the Gloucester County School Board policy is discriminatory. A federal judge had earlier rejected Grimm's sex discrimination claim. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

"We agree that it has indeed been commonplace and widely accepted to separate public restrooms, locker rooms, and shower facilities on the basis of sex," the court wrote in its opinion. "It is not apparent to us, however, that the truth of these propositions undermines the conclusion we reach regarding the level of deference due to the department's interpretation of its own regulations."

Maxine Eichner, a University of North Carolina law professor who is an expert on sexual orientation and the law, said the ruling  the first of its kind by a federal appeals court  means the provision of North Carolina's law pertaining to restroom use by transgender students in schools that receive federal funds also is invalid.

"The effects of this decision on North Carolina are clear," she said, adding that a judge in that state will have no choice but to apply the appeals court's ruling.

North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, speaking to reporters just after the decision was made public, said he strongly disagrees with what he calls Democratic President Barack Obama's "objective to force our high schools to allow a boy in a woman's or girl's locker room facility." He said high schools should be allowed to make "appropriate arrangements for those students that have unique circumstances."

McCrory said the ruling "puts a whole dynamic" on North Carolina's law.

Other states in the 4th Circuit are Maryland, West Virginia and South Carolina. While those states are directly affected by the appeals court's ruling, Eichner said the impact will be broader.

"It is a long and well-considered opinion that sets out the issues," she said. "It will be influential in other circuits."

Appeals court Judge Paul V. Niemeyer, who was appointed to the appeals court by Republican President George H.W. Bush, wrote in a dissenting opinion that the majority's opinion "completely tramples on all universally accepted protections of privacy and safety that are based on the anatomical differences between the sexes."

The majority opinion was written by Judge Henry F. Floyd and joined by Judge Andre M. Davis, both Obama appointees. The Richmond-based court was long considered the nation's most conservative federal appeals court, but a series of vacancies in the last few years has allowed Obama to reshape it. Including the two senior judges, the court now has 10 judges appointed by Democrats and seven by Republicans.

The school board could appeal the decision to the full appeals court or the U.S. Supreme Court. David Patrick Corrigan, attorney for the school board, did not immediately respond to a telephone message.

Grimm was born female but identifies as male. He was allowed to use the boys' restrooms at the school for several weeks in 2014. But after some parents complained, the school board adopted a policy requiring students to use either the restroom that corresponds with their biological gender or a private, single-stall restroom.

Grimm called the policy stigmatizing. School officials said the policy respects the privacy of all students.

The 16-year-old Gloucester High School junior said he was "dead to the world asleep" at noon, catching up after a couple of nights of insomnia, when the phone rang with what he called the best news he can remember ever receiving.

Because the school board could appeal further, it's unclear whether Grimm will be able to use the boys' room anytime soon  but he said he's not worried about that.

"Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of the situation," Grimm said in a telephone interview. "I'm just going to take things one day at a time."

___
Had Dr. Erin Grantham not been hired by Billings Clinic last year, things might have turned out much worse for baby Brylon Harrell.

At just eight weeks old, the boy underwent a significant surgery to repair a combined and painful hernia and testicular torsion that would have, without quick treatment, otherwise left him with lifelong damage and then had a second hernia fixed several weeks later.

"I'm just so thankful," said Brylon's mother, Alysha Harrell. "I don't know what I would've done had he been taken to another city for it. Having that option here now made me feel so much better."

Brylon was born premature, at about 35 weeks. It was Dec. 10 when his mother noticed he was in pain.

"He just started screaming," she said. "It was a weird cry."

She thought he might be gassy, but that wasn't the case. She checked his diaper to see if something might be going on there, but with no clues.

A short time later, as Harrell's mother gave Brylon a bath, they discovered the cause of his pain: the right side of his scrotum was hard, red and very swollen.

"I said, 'I'm taking him to the emergency room right now,'" Harrell said.

At Billings Clinic, medical staff soon figured out that Bryson had both the incarcerated hernia and testicular torsion, and that he'd need surgery soon to fix it and prevent lasting damage.

Hernias happen when part of the intestines poke through the abdominal lining. As a male fetus matures during pregnancy, his testicles develop in the abdomen and eventually drop to the scrotum through what is called the inguinal canal.

Usually, the canal opening closes shortly after birth but if it doesn't, the intestines can push through and cause a hernia. Premature babies, as in Brylon's case, are more susceptible to those problems.

Complicating Brylon's case was the testicular torsion, in which a testicle rotates and twists the cord that brings blood to the scrotum, which in turn reduces or cuts off blood flow and can cause pain and swelling.

Grantham joined Billings Clinic in Aug. 2015, becoming the only pediatric urologist in Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota, and was called in the night Brylon arrived to perform emergency surgery.

"When you have intestines like that, if you waited even an hour or two, he probably would've had some intestines die," she said. "And surgery, that's really critical for testicular torsion."

The loss of blood flow can, within six hours, cause permanent damage that can result in the loss of the testicle, she said. In addition, the hernia was also complicating blood flow.

With Grantham based in Billings, she was able to perform the two-hour surgery Brylon needed at Billings Clinic that evening.

The surgery went well, and, after spending time in the intensive care unit and half a day of recovery, Brylon and his mother went home.

"He was doing great and everything was fine," Harrell said.

But in late February, she noticed what she thought was another hernia on Brylon's left side and, once again, took him into the clinic to visit Grantham.

This time around, it was a more minor hernia that was quickly repaired by Grantham via routine surgery.

"It went well and he did great," she said. "It went absolutely swimmingly both times."

Grantham came to Billings Clinic, and its recently expanded urology department, after completing a pediatric urology fellowship at Children's Hospital Colorado, preceded by residency at New York Medical College and graduating from medical school in California.

As the only practitioner in a three-state area, she said that pediatric urology is a service she hopes to provide across the region through outreach efforts four to six times a month while also regularly fielding calls from other facilities.

Harrell said that she's simply glad Grantham was in Billings to help her son.

"It was scary seeing my little tiny premature boy screaming and not knowing why," she said. "It was terrifying. But now he's doing great. He is a happy-go-lucky, curious boy. He's a good baby and hardly ever cries now."
Legislators clash with Puerto Rico gov over debt moratorium

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP)  Puerto Rico legislators gave their governor power to declare a debt moratorium just two weeks ago. Now they're trying to limit it.

Amendments approved by the legislature late Monday would block the governor from imposing a debt moratorium on general obligation bonds.

The measure also would authorize municipalities to access their funds held by the troubled Government Development Bank and withdraw money without penalty. The bank is running out of money and is under a state of emergency.

Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla vows to veto the measure, which he says benefits creditors.

The Senate will vote next on the bill.
Brush fires near tracks halt trains near New York City

SECAUCUS, N.J. (AP)  Amtrak has restored service on its busy Northeast Corridor line between Newark, New Jersey, and New York's Penn Station.

Train travel had been disrupted for more than an hour Tuesday by brush fires in the New Jersey communities of Kearny and Secaucus. The fires sent large clouds of thick, black smoke billowing into the air, but no injuries were reported.

Service was restored after both fires were extinguished. The fires had also spurred New Jersey Transit to divert its trains into Manhattan to Hoboken, but that service also was restored as of Tuesday afternoon, albeit with delays of up to an hour.

Men look over a burned area after officials put out a brush fire along a rail line, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Secaucus, N.J. The fire in Kearny and Secaucus caused disruptions to rail service. Both blazes sent large clouds of thick, black smoke billowing into the air, but no injuries were reported. The National Weather Service has issued a "red flag" warning, saying strong winds and dryness are creating ideal conditions for brush fires. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

The National Weather Service has issued a "red flag" warning, saying strong winds and dryness are creating ideal conditions for brush fires.

Commuters make their way alongside official vehicles along the New Jersey Turnpike next to a burned area after officials put out a brush fire, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Secaucus, N.J. The fire in Kearny and Secaucus caused disruptions to rail service. Both blazes sent large clouds of thick, black smoke billowing into the air, but no injuries were reported. The National Weather Service has issued a "red flag" warning, saying strong winds and dryness are creating ideal conditions for brush fires. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Jerome Ortiz, a maintenance and construction worker at a packing business, checks the area around his job's building after officials put out a brush fire, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Secaucus, N.J. The fire in Kearny and Secaucus caused disruptions to rail service. Both blazes sent large clouds of thick, black smoke billowing into the air, but no injuries were reported. The National Weather Service has issued a "red flag" warning, saying strong winds and dryness are creating ideal conditions for brush fires. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Commuters make their way along the New Jersey Turnpike next to a burned area after officials put out a brush fire, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Secaucus, N.J. The fire in Kearny and Secaucus caused disruptions to rail service. Both blazes sent large clouds of thick, black smoke billowing into the air, but no injuries were reported. The National Weather Service has issued a "red flag" warning, saying strong winds and dryness are creating ideal conditions for brush fires. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Firefighters battle a brush fire in in Secaucus, N.J., Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Officials say two brush fires have halted some rail service outside New York City. Amtrak wrote on Twitter that service on its busy Northeast Corridor line is on hold between Newark, New Jersey, and New York's Penn Station until a fire is cleared. And New Jersey Transit says its trains into Manhattan are being diverted to Hoboken. (Joe Shine/The Jersey Journal via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT

Firefighters battle a brush fire in in Secaucus, N.J., Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Officials say two brush fires have halted some rail service outside New York City. Amtrak wrote on Twitter that service on its busy Northeast Corridor line is on hold between Newark, New Jersey, and New York's Penn Station until a fire is cleared. And New Jersey Transit says its trains into Manhattan are being diverted to Hoboken. (Joe Shine/The Jersey Journal via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT
Sending more US troops to Iraq fits a 2-year pattern

WASHINGTON (AP)  President Barack Obama's decision to send still more American troops to Iraq, and to put military advisers closer to the front lines against the Islamic State, fits a pattern of ever-deepening involvement in a country whose war Obama exited with supposed finality in December 2011.

From the initial contingent of 170 U.S. soldiers who entered Baghdad as advisers in June 2014, after the Islamic State overran much of northern and western Iraq and seemed poised to threaten Baghdad, the troop total jumped to 1,550 six months later. It topped 3,000 in April 2015 and then edged higher. The latest increase announced Monday by Defense Secretary Ash Carter pushes the authorized total above 4,000. More increases seem likely.

What the Pentagon calls "tightening the noose" on the militants, critics call indecisive steps with limited chance to succeed.

FILE - In this April 13, 2016 file photo, President Barack Obama speaksin the East Room of the White House in Washington. President Barack Obamas decision to send 217 more troops to Iraq and to put military advisers closer to the front lines, fits a pattern of ever-deepening involvement in a war against the Islamic State. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

One of the most vocal critics of Obama's Iraq policy, Republican Sen. John McCain, dismissed Carter's announcement that the U.S. would send another 217 troops to Iraq in support of the Iraqi security forces' preparation for an assault on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul.

"Grudging incrementalism," McCain called it.

Patrick Martin, an Iraq specialist at the Institute for the Study of War, is skeptical that the U.S. approach is sufficiently aggressive.

"The addition of 217 advisers ... is not going to be nearly enough to actually make a significant difference on the ground in the near future," he said in an interview. On the other hand, the U.S. offer to fly Apache attack helicopters in support of an Iraqi advance toward Mosul is a significant move, Martin said, noting that it would be the first time the Iraqis have accepted that kind of support since U.S. forces returned to Iraq in 2014.

Obama's approach in Iraq has been tempered not just by his pledge to end U.S. military involvement there after he took office in 2009 but also by the Iraqis' own political failings, which even now cast doubt on the durability of any battlefield victories U.S. troops can help the Iraqis achieve. In 2007, at the peak of the Iraq war, the U.S. had about 170,000 troops there.

Rather than commit large ground combat units to Iraq or Syria, Obama in 2014 opted for providing a support role on the ground, backed by bombing from the air. Obama was on his way Tuesday to Saudi Arabia to encourage Gulf Arab countries to contribute more to the battle in Iraq.

Nearly two years later, the Islamic State has been weakened and squeezed but remains a credible threat. It not only holds territory in Iraq and Syria but also has spread to Libya and Afghanistan while launching deadly attacks in Paris and Brussels.

On a visit to Baghdad this week, Carter described the decision to deploy another 217 soldiers as "more of the same," in the sense that it aligns with the U.S. strategy of providing more support to Iraqi forces as they gain momentum, while not doing the fighting for them.

"Our strategic approach makes sure that the defeat of ISIL is lasting," he said, using a common acronym for the Islamic State. "It is to enable capable and motivated local forces to sustain the defeat. We are committed, I am committed, to doing more to accelerate that defeat. We want to do it as fast as we possibly can."

It has taken this long to bring Mosul within the Iraqis' gunsights because they have been slow to leverage U.S. training, partly because of sectarian conflict and political gridlock in Baghdad. Four months ago the Iraqis recovered Ramadi after collapsing there in May 2015, which prompted Carter to question their will to fight. They still lack essential ingredients for battlefield success such as close-air support for maneuvering ground forces, and it's not clear they will retake Mosul before 2017, even with additional American support.

Most of the additional 217 troops would be Army special forces, who have been used throughout the anti-Islamic State campaign to advise and assist the Iraqis. For the first time, the advisers are authorized to assist the Iraqis at battalion level, meaning with smaller Iraq combat units likely to be closer to the front lines.

The extra U.S. troops also would include trainers, soldiers to provide security for the advisers, as well as maintenance teams and crews for the Apache attack helicopters that Carter said the Iraqi government has agreed would be needed to provide close-air support for ground forces in a Mosul assault. The U.S. also will provide additional sets of mobile artillery, known as HIMARS, to support Iraqi ground forces as they advance toward Mosul.

And those are unlikely to be the last additions to the U.S. military presence. Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters Monday that the focus for now is on getting the Iraqis to fully isolate Mosul and set the right conditions for recapturing it.

"The next step of that obviously is to actually clear the city," MacFarland said. "And when we get to that step, that will be another conversation that we'll have" about U.S. support. For now, he said, "We're going to employ these additional authorities and capabilities and see how far it takes us. And then if it doesn't take us all the way, we'll come back and have another discussion and ask for more if we need to."

Asked whether this was incrementalism, MacFarland said, "I would prefer to call it a step-by-step approach. We're on the first step right now."
The Latest: 2 wanted in disappearance charged with murder

SEATTLE (AP)  The Latest on the disappearance and presumed slayings of a Washington state couple (all times local):

3:50 p.m.

Two brothers have been charged with murder in the disappearance and presumed killings of a Washington state couple.

These undated booking photos provided by the Snohomish County Sheriff Office shows Tony Reed, left and John Reed. Authorities are searching for the two brothers who were involved in a property dispute with a missing Washington state couple. Neighbors reported Patrick Shunn and his wife, Monique Patenaude, of Arlington missing on Tuesday when their livestock was left unattended, and detectives in Snohomish County now believe they were killed. (Snohomish County Sheriff Office via AP )

Snohomish County prosecutors charged 53-year-old John Reed and 49-year-old Tony Reed on Tuesday with two counts of first-degree murder and second-degree unlawful possession of a firearm.

The Reeds are wanted in last week's disappearance of 46-year-old Monique Patenaude and her husband, 45-year-old Patrick Shunn.

Authorities are working to track down the brothers, who have been described as armed and dangerous.

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12 p.m.

Authorities say two brothers wanted in the disappearance and presumed slayings of a Washington state couple may be heading for the Mexican border.

Detectives said Tuesday that they found a car in Phoenix that had been driven by 53-year-old John Blaine Reed and his brother, 49-year-old Tony Clyde Reed. They say the suspects have since taken a 2002 gold Acura 3.2TL with Arizona plate BNN-9968. A license plate reader captured that plate near Calexico, California, on Monday.

The brothers are wanted in last week's disappearance of 45-year-old Patrick Shunn and his wife, 46-year-old Monique Patenaude. Investigators are searching a 23-square-mile wooded area 50 miles northeast of Seattle for their bodies.

The Snohomish County Sheriff's Office says it's working with U.S. marshals and Phoenix police to track down the Reeds, who are described as armed and dangerous.

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12 a.m.

Court documents released Monday say that a man wanted in connection with the disappearance and presumed slayings of a married couple previously threatened to shoot them for cutting brush between their two properties.

The Seattle Times reports (http://bit.ly/1rdrkgp ) that John Blaine Reed who shared a common driveway with Patrick Shunn and his wife, Monique Patenaude, "reportedly stated he would shoot or assault them if they didn't leave" him alone, investigators wrote in an affidavit for a search warrant.

The newspaper says that Reed's alleged threat, which Shunn later reported to Snohomish County sheriff's deputies, was just part of an "ongoing and constant" dispute between the couple and Reed.

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10 p.m.

Patrick Shunn and Monique Patenaude worried about getting on the wrong side of the man who lived a little ways up an old logging road from their 21-acre spread along the Stillaguamish River.

When they sued other neighbors over a property dispute more than two years ago, they avoided naming him as a defendant because they didn't want to irk him, their former lawyer said Monday.

But now the couple is missing and presumed murdered, and investigators are trying to track down the man, John Blaine Reed along with his brother, Tony Clyde Reed. Snohomish County Sheriff Ty Trenary said surveillance video linked them to the dumping of the victims' cars over an embankment in a remote, wooded area near Oso, about 50 miles northeast of Seattle.

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The Latest: Ex-cop to appeal reduced conviction in shooting

NEW YORK (AP)  The Latest on the sentencing of a New York Police Department officer in the stairwell shooting death of an unarmed man (all times local):

5:10 p.m.

A defense lawyer says a former New York City police officer will appeal his newly reduced conviction in the shooting death of an unarmed man in a dark stairwell.

Peter Liang, center, leaves the courtroom after his sentencing in New York, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. The former police officer convicted in the accidental shooting death of an unarmed man in a darkened stairwell was spared prison time Tuesday, and a judge reduced his manslaughter conviction to a lesser charge. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Ex-officer Peter Liang was sentenced Tuesday to five years' probation and 800 hours of community service. The sentence came after Brooklyn state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun reduced Liang's manslaughter conviction to the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide.

Attorney Paul Shechtman says, "This was a very good chapter for Peter Liang," but he still plans to appeal.

He added that Liang "is very sad" about what happened.

Liang was patrolling inside a public housing complex when he opened the stairwell door and fired once. He said he was startled. The bullet ricocheted and hit Akai (ah-KEYE') Gurley.

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4:05 p.m.

Prosecutors say they will appeal a judge's decision to reduce the manslaughter conviction of a former New York City police officer who shot and killed an unarmed man in a darkened stairwell.

Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson says in a statement that prosecutors "respectfully" disagree with the decision Tuesday to lower former Officer Peter Liang's conviction to criminally negligent homicide.

Liang was patrolling inside a public housing complex when he opened the stairwell door and fired once. He said he was startled. The bullet ricocheted and hit Akai (ah-KEYE') Gurley.

After reducing the conviction, state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun sentenced Liang to five years' probation and 800 hours of community service.

Thompson had recommended against prison for Liang.

Gurley's aunt, Hertensia Petersen, says the outcome shows "there's no justice."

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3:05 p.m.

A former New York City police officer convicted in the shooting death of an unarmed man in a darkened stairwell will not go to prison.

Peter Liang was convicted in February of manslaughter in the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley at a public housing project. Gurley was walking down to the lobby and Liang was patrolling the inside of the building in 2014. Liang opened a door to the stairwell and fired his weapon once accidentally. The bullet ricocheted and struck Gurley.

On Tuesday, Judge Danny Chun reduced the manslaughter conviction to criminally negligent homicide before sentencing Liang to five years of probation and 800 hours of community service.

Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson had recommended Liang serve no prison, based on his record and the circumstances of the trial.

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3 p.m.

A judge has reduced the manslaughter conviction of a former New York City police officer who shot and killed an unarmed man in a darkened stairwell.

Brooklyn state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun ruled Tuesday that ex-officer Peter Liang's conviction should be cut to the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide.

A jury convicted Liang this winter of manslaughter in the 2014 death of Akai (ah-KEYE') Gurley. The verdict marked the first conviction of a New York City police officer in an on-duty shooting since 2005.

The 28-year-old rookie officer was patrolling the inside of a public housing complex when he opened the stairwell door and fired once. The bullet ricocheted and hit Gurley.

The DA's office says it will appeal the judge's decision.

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2:50 p.m.

Dozens of demonstrators have gathered outside a New York City courthouse in anticipation of a former police officer's sentencing in the deadly shooting of an unarmed man in a darkened stairwell.

Ex-officer Peter Liang is set to be sentenced Tuesday. He was convicted of manslaughter in the 2014 death of Akai (ah-KEYE') Gurley.

Demonstrators representing each side were separated on Tuesday by police barriers and surrounded by court officers.

Supporters of Akai Gurley's family are demanding prison time for Liang. The officer's supporters say the shooting was an accident.

The 28-year-old rookie officer was patrolling the inside of a public housing complex when he opened the stairwell door and fired once. The bullet ricocheted and hit Gurley.

Some Liang supporters are carrying signs reading, "One tragedy, two victims."

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12:10 a.m.

A former New York City police officer will find out if he's going to prison following his manslaughter conviction in the shooting death of an unarmed man in a darkened stairwell.

Peter Liang was fired from the police force shortly after the February jury verdict in the death of Akai Gurley. The 28-year-old rookie was patrolling the inside of a public housing project when he opened the stairwell door and fired once. Gurley, also 28, was walking down to the lobby and was struck by the bullet that had ricocheted.

Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson has recommended probation and home confinement but not prison time, angering some members of Gurley's family.

Judge Danny Chun could still sentence Liang to prison. A manslaughter conviction carries up to 15 years behind bars.

FILE - In this Feb. 9, 2016 file photo, former New York City police officer Peter Liang, center, returns to the courtroom after a break in his trial on charges in the shooting death of Akai Gurley, at Brooklyn Supreme court in New York. Liang was fired from the police force shortly after the February jury verdict in the death of Gurley. Liang will find out if he's going to prison during sentencing on Tuesday, April 19, following his manslaughter conviction in the accidental shooting death of the unarmed man in a darkened stairwell. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

FILE- In this Jan. 29, 2015 file photo, Kimberly Ballinger, the domestic partner of Akai Gurley and mother of his toddler daughter, hold a news conference in New York. Former New York City police officer Peter Liang will find out if he's going to prison during sentencing on Tuesday, April 19, 2016, following his February 2016 manslaughter conviction in the accidental shooting death of the unarmed man, Gurley, in a darkened stairwell. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
Senate takes up energy bill after 2-month delay for Flint

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Senate on Tuesday revived a bill that would promote a variety of energy sources, from renewables such as solar and wind power to natural gas, hydropower and geothermal energy.

The bill also would speed federal approval of projects to export liquefied natural gas to Europe and Asia, update building codes to increase efficiency and strengthen electric-grid safety standards among dozens of provisions.

Senate passage is expected as soon as Wednesday. The measure must be reconciled with a House-passed bill that boosts oil and natural gas and speeds completion of environmental reviews for a proposed coal export terminal in Washington state. President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the House measure.

If approved by both chambers and signed by Obama, the bill would be first far-reaching energy law in nearly a decade.

"Moving forward with this act will help America produce more energy and bring us one step closer to being an energy superpower," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and one of the bill's co-sponsors. "At the same time, it will help Americans save more money and save energy with all of the energy-policy provisions."

The bipartisan bill is widely popular, but was delayed in early February amid a partisan dispute over sending hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency aid to Flint, Michigan, to fix and replace the city's lead-contaminated pipes.

Michigan's Democratic senators dropped the Flint provision last week after a months-long standoff with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah. Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters said they would seek another way to get the Flint aid package through the Senate.

Congress last approved broad energy measures in 2005 and 2007, during the George W. Bush administration. The two laws aimed to boost U.S. energy independence by cutting reliance on imported oil, boosting fuel economy standards for cars and imposing a mandate for ethanol in gasoline.

Since then, the U.S. energy landscape has changed dramatically, as improved drilling techniques, including hydraulic fracturing, have sparked a years-long boom that has pushed the United States to become the world's top producer of oil and natural gas. Hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, involves injecting water mixed with sand and chemicals into underground rock formations, allowing oil and gas to flow.

The Senate bill includes a long-delayed energy efficiency measure that includes incentives to cut energy use in commercial buildings, manufacturing plants and homes. The measure, co-sponsored by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, also requires federal agencies to develop best practices to increase energy efficiency in federal buildings.

The efficiency measure has passed the Senate before but has not been approved in the House.

Beside the Flint provision, Murkowski and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., also worked to remove a series of procedural obstacles that delayed the overall bill, including an amendment by Louisiana Sens. Bill Cassidy and David Vitter to expand revenue sharing for states where offshore drilling occurs.

Cassidy and Vitter, both Republicans, want Gulf Coast states to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue. They also would expand revenue sharing to Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, if drilling begins in those states. The Obama administration has blocked drilling off the Atlantic coast.

The Louisiana senators agreed to drop their amendment after Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., objected. Nelson said he feared the measure could increase pressure to allow drilling off the Florida coast.

"I've spent four decades fighting to protect Florida's coast from the threat of offshore drilling and I've made it clear to my colleagues in the Senate that I'm certainly not going to stop now," Nelson said.

Cassidy said Senate leaders have assured him that a revenue-sharing proposal will be voted on this year. "Revenue sharing is not only about fairness, it is about Louisiana's survival and American energy security," he said.

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Storytelling Suit: Judge mulls arguments in tour guide case

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP)  An attorney for three would-be tour guides told a federal judge Tuesday they shouldn't have to pass a test and get a license to earn a living telling tales about historic Charleston, while a lawyer for the city insisted requiring licenses for guides is a lawful business regulation.

In a lawsuit similar to cases in other historic cities, the three are challenging an ordinance requiring tour guides to pass a 200-question test based on a nearly 500-page manual in order to receive a license. Applicants also must pass an oral exam.

The plaintiffs "seek to do nothing more than to tell stories about Charleston," attorney Arif Panju told U.S. District Judge David Norton. Panju said requiring a license violates their First Amendment rights to free speech.

Attorney Arif Panju speaks with reporters outside the U.S. Courthouse in Charleston, S.C., on Tuesday, April 19, 2016, after a hearing on a federal lawsuit challenging Charleston's tour guide licensing ordinance. Behind Panju are Michael Nolan, left, and Michael Warfield, two of the three plaintiffs suing the city over the ordinance they claim violates their rights to free speech. (AP Photo/Bruce Smith)

The three plaintiffs all failed the licensing exam.

While Panju asked Norton to issue an injunction blocking the ordinance, attorney Carol Ervin argued for the city that the judge should toss out the case.

She said the ordinance isn't about restricting free speech but is a legal means to regulate businesses in the tourism industry that attracts millions to Charleston each year.

"The ordinance does not control speech, it regulates occupational conduct," she argued. Ervin said the city doesn't monitor what guides say about the city and that anyone can give a tour for free.

A federal appeals court has upheld a similar licensing ordinance in New Orleans.

The court in that case found the city's interest was not in regulating what was said on tours but "making sure tour group participants get what they pay for" namely a safe tour "conducted by someone with a minimum quantum of professionalism."

But the courts have thrown out a tour guide licensing ordinance in the District of Columbia. In Savannah, Georgia, after a lawsuit was filed, the city council repealed a requirement for a written exam.

Norton heard about 40 minutes of arguments but did not indicate when he might rule.

Charleston City Council is in the process of changing, but not eliminating, tour guide requirements. It has given preliminary approval to eliminating the oral exam and lowering the passing score on the written exam.

One of the plaintiffs, Kimberly Billups, said outside the courthouse that she is willing to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"History is my passion. I love teaching and talking about it. Opening a tour company and earning money for it is going to be my way of making living and supporting a family," she said.

Another plaintiff, Michael Nolan, said some of the exam questions are obscure.
Trump campaign plane flying with expired registration

WASHINGTON (AP)  One of Donald Trump's jets has been flying for months with an expired registration, Federal Aviation Administration records showed Tuesday.

The Republican presidential candidate's airplane lost its registered status in January after failure to pay a $5 fee to the FAA. The aircraft in violation is not Trump's Boeing 757, the renovated commercial jet that the billionaire sometimes uses as a backdrop for his rallies. Instead, it is a 1997 Cessna Citation X, a far smaller plane which Trump has used to visit smaller airports. Citation jets of a similar vintage sell for around $3 million, according to aviation brokerage firms' current listings.

The FAA declined to comment beyond confirming the registration was expired. In an email to The Associated Press, Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said "the standard renewal process is just about complete" for the plane.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump leaves his apartment building to vote in New York, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

The owner of record for the Cessna is a limited liability corporation whose sole member is Trump.

The New York Times, which first reported the expiration on Tuesday, said the registration lapse could ground the jet for days.

Plane registrations are supposed to be renewed every 36 months. If the FAA learns that a registration has expired but the plane is still being flown, the agency typically sends a warning letter to the owner, according to aircraft operators who asked not to be named because they didn't want to be associated with the Trump case. Fines are also common.

FAA regulations permit the agency to impose total civil fines up to $27,500 for the lapsed registration. The agency also has the option of seeking up to $250,000 in criminal fines and imprisonment of up to 3 years.

The news emerged as voters in Trump's home state of New York cast their ballots Tuesday in the state's crucial presidential primary.

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No prison time for NYPD officer in stairwell shooting case

NEW YORK (AP)  A former police officer convicted in the shooting death of an unarmed man in a darkened stairwell was spared prison time Tuesday, and a judge reduced his manslaughter conviction to a lesser charge.

Peter Liang was sentenced to five years' probation and 800 hours of community service in the 2014 shooting of Akai Gurley, who was walking down a stairway in a public housing complex when the rookie officer fired a bullet into the dark  by accident after being startled, he said. The bullet ricocheted and killed Gurley, 28.

"Given the defendant's background and how remorseful he is, it would not be necessary to incarcerate the defendant to have a just sentence in this case," Brooklyn state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun said in sentencing Liang, also 28.

FILE - In this Feb. 9, 2016 file photo, former New York City police officer Peter Liang, center, returns to the courtroom after a break in his trial on charges in the shooting death of Akai Gurley, at Brooklyn Supreme court in New York. Liang was fired from the police force shortly after the February jury verdict in the death of Gurley. Liang will find out if he's going to prison during sentencing on Tuesday, April 19, following his manslaughter conviction in the accidental shooting death of the unarmed man in a darkened stairwell. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

A jury had convicted him in February of a manslaughter charge carrying up to 15 years in prison. But Chun on Tuesday reduced the offense to criminally negligent homicide, which carries up to four years in prison.

Brooklyn prosecutors recommended Liang serve no time, based on his record and the circumstances of the trial. They suggested five years of probation, six months of home confinement and 500 hours of community service.

Some members of Gurley's family said they felt betrayed by Thompson's recommendation and had hoped Chun would sentence Liang to prison anyway.

The shooting happened in a year of debate nationwide about police killings of black men. Activists have looked to Liang's trial as a counterweight to cases in which grand juries have declined to indict officers, including the cases of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York. Like Gurley, Brown and Garner were black and unarmed. Liang is Chinese-American.

Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson cautioned that Liang's case shouldn't be commingled with others. But relatives of other New Yorkers killed in police encounters had joined Gurley's family outside court during the trial to call for police accountability.

Meanwhile, Liang's supporters have said he has been made a scapegoat for past injustices.
The Latest: Judge won't immediately toss primary lawsuit

PHOENIX (AP)  The Latest on an challenge to Arizona's presidential primary election results (all times local):

12:45 p.m.

A judge has refused to immediately dismiss a lawsuit that seeks to have the results of Arizona's presidential primary thrown out.

At a hearing Tuesday, Judge David Gass set a full evidentiary hearing for Monday.

The election was marred by long lines at polling places and complaints by voters who believed they should have been allowed to cast a ballot but weren't on the rolls.

Gass declined to immediately act on a request from the Arizona attorney general's office to throw out the case.

Instead, he will hear testimony from voters and experts in the lawsuit filed by a Tucson man over the problems during the March 22 election.

The attorney general is seeking to have the case thrown out on procedural grounds, but Gass didn't give an indication of whether he thought that effort had merit.

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3 a.m.

A Maricopa County judge is set to hold a hearing on a lawsuit seeking to have the results of Arizona's presidential primary thrown out.

The hearing set for Tuesday before Judge David Gass comes as the Arizona attorney general's office want the case dismissed. It argues state law doesn't allow the March 22 election results to be contested.

But the lawyer for a Tucson man contesting the results calls that argument "silly." Attorney Michael Kielsky said Monday the attorney general is in essence arguing that the election wasn't a real election.

The lawsuit was prompted in part by long lines in Maricopa County.
2 men in line for Brazilian presidency accused of corruption

The impeachment proceedings against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff have put a spotlight on endemic corruption in the ranks of lawmakers. Some 60 percent of the 594 legislators in both chambers of Congress are being investigated for wrongdoing or are facing corruption charges, according to watchdog groups. Many of the investigations are related to a kickback scheme at state oil company Petrobras. The two men in line to replace Rousseff if she is impeached, and a third who would have been in line, are themselves being investigated in the Petrobras and other cases.

FIRST IN LINE: Vice President Michel Temer.

 A former senator turned state's witness recently accused Temer of appointing a lobbyist to distribute bribes between 1997 and 2001 in ethanol deals through Petrobras. He denies wrongdoing.

FILE - In this March 2, 2016 file photo, Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff talks with her Vice President Michel Temer at Planalto presidential palace in Brasilia, Brazil. Temer is the first in line to replace Rousseff if she's impeached, but is himself under investigation in the Petrobras corruption scandal. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)

 Temer is accused of arranging the appointment of a Petrobras director who was involved in a series of corruption cases linked to Temer's Brazilian Democratic Movement Party. He denies knowing the man.

 As acting president, Temer signed the same kind of budget decrees that triggered the current impeachment process against Rousseff. Detractors have already signaled they may try to impeach him based on those actions.

 Temer is being investigated for receiving more than US$ 1.5 million in funds from a construction company that works with Petrobras. Temer says they were legal campaign donations.

 Authorities seized spreadsheets from construction company Camargo Correa that showed Temer's name listed 21 times alongside numbers that added up to $345,000, allegedly in bribes. While the case was thrown out in the courts, the investigation is credited with having led to the current Petrobras probe.

SECOND IN LINE: Senate leader Renan Calheiros.

Calheiros would be acting president if the event that Temer was traveling. Brazil's Supreme Federal Tribunal is currently considering seven investigations against Calheiros in the Petrobras probe. He denies wrongdoing in all. Included in those seven are:

 Calheiros is accused by a lobbyist of being paid $600,000 to stop a Senate probe of corruption in Petrobras.

 Calheiros is accused by a former Petrobras director of threatening to withhold support unless he was paid off. The same ex-director says Calheiros was paid $1.7 million through a Petrobras lobbyist in a case related to drill ship contracts.

 In a plea bargain, another former Petrobras director accuses Calheiros of using lower Chamber of Deputies representative Anibal Gomes to be pay bribes for contracts with constructors.

OUSTED: Former Chamber of Deputies Speaker Eduardo Cunha would have been the second in line. However, last week the country's highest court removed him from office while he is investigated in several corruption probes so he doesn't figure into the line of succession.

A look at the cases against Cunha, who led the impeachment push against Rousseff in his chamber and frequently tweets verses from the Bible. He denies wrongdoing in all of them.

 Brazil's chief investigator has requested the Supreme Court remove Cunha from office because of all the allegations of wrongdoing against him and for allegedly obstructing justice. The court has not yet made a decision.

 In March, prosecutors accused Cunha of corruption and money laundering for his role in negotiating contracts for drill ships, including a payment of $5 million.

 Swiss prosecutors say Cunha owned secret bank accounts at Julius Baer bank. In December, those accounts had 2.4 million Swiss francs, according to local reports. Brazilian investigators say they believe those funds are connected to corruption with a Petrobras oil field operation in Benin.

 Brazilian investigators say Cunha also has held undeclared accounts in the United States since 1990, with funds of more than $20 million.

 A senator-turned-government-witness said Cunha and the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party were paid more than $10 million by BTG Pactual bank to get an executive order approved by the lower house.

 In court testimony from a lobbyist who pleaded guilty in the case, Cunha is accused of being paid bribes worth more than $12 million from constructors Odebrecht, OAS and Carioca to renovate Rio's port area ahead of the Olympic Games.
South Carolina entrepreneur to face no charges in shooting

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  The founder of the clothing company Southern Tide won't face charges for fatally shooting another man who trespassed on the South Carolina estate of the entrepreneur, authorities said Tuesday, drawing criticism from the dead man's family.

Prosecutor Walt Wilkins said at a news conference that businessman Allen Stephenson was justified in the early morning shooting outside his home March 19.

In 2006 Stephenson founded Southern Tide, a purveyor of high-end polo shirts, shorts and other classically styled apparel for men and women that bears a skipjack fish logo. Authorities say the 32-year-old businessman shot and killed Matthew Whitman as Whitman trespassed on Stephenson's estate, its home patterned after a German castle, several miles north of Greenville.

According to Sheriff Steve Loftis, Stephenson's girlfriend called 911 to report that someone was trespassing on the grounds and walking down a quarter-mile-long driveway leading from a locked gate to the home. When the man refused to stop, Stephenson stood on his porch and fired two warning shots in the air from a shotgun, according to Loftis.

Stephenson left the porch and approached the man, who then tried to stab him with a folding hunting knife, according to Loftis. At that point, the sheriff said, Stephenson fired five times, hitting Whitman three times in the arm, face and chest.

Wilkins said Stephenson was legally standing his ground on his property, defending himself and his girlfriend, and therefore was immune from prosecution.

"He was justified in shooting the suspect under the circumstances and the facts that we have," Wilkins said of Stephenson. "He was in harm or fear of death or injury to his person."

Whitman lived a little more than a mile from Stephenson's home, but Wilkins said there is "zero evidence" the men knew each other or had ever had any prior communication. The prosecutor also said testing had not been completed on whether Whitman was under the influence of alcohol or drugs when he was shot.

In a statement, the Whitman family said it was "disappointed" in the decision not to charge Stephenson, according to what family attorneys had heard on the 911 call.

"The 911 operator and the witness both pleaded with Mr. Stephenson to return inside," the family statement said. "Matthew, at worst, was simply trespassing that morning."

In a statement, an attorney for Stephenson said his client "is deeply saddened" by the shooting but was left with "no alternative than to defend himself and his fiancee."

The attorney, Sloan Ellis, provided an incident report describing a February 2016 instance during which Whitman's family called 911 after he broke a vase at his grandmother's home and acted erratically, also noting that he had "spent most of his time locked in his bedroom" for several years prior.

Wilkins said Whitman was not charged as a result of that incident, and police reports indicate deputies referred his family to available mental health resources.

Wilkins declined Tuesday to discuss Whitman's mental health history.
Teenager quizzed after being arrested at Manchester Airport on terror offences

Police are continuing to question a teenager arrested at a British airport on suspicion of Syria-related terrorism offences.

The 18-year-old man from Birmingham was held by counter-terrorism officer at Manchester Airport on Saturday after returning to the UK, West Midlands Police said.

A force spokesman said: "(The) arrest follows the arrest of a man and a woman on 4 April. The pair, a 24-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman, both from Birmingham, are currently on police bail.

The teenager was arrested at Manchester Airport on Saturday

"There was no risk to any passengers at Manchester Airport or to the wider public in relation to these arrests."
PM urged to raise human rights abuses with Indonesia's president

Indonesia's human rights record must be raised by Prime Minister David Cameron when he meets the country's president, Amnesty International has insisted.

President Joko Widodo is to be granted the honour of addressing members of both Houses of Parliament as part of his visit to Britain, which also includes a meeting with Mr Cameron in Downing Street.

Amnesty has urged the prime minister to raise the case of British woman Lindsay Sandiford who is on death row in Indonesia. The 59-year-old former legal secretary from Cheltenham was convicted of drug smuggling offences and sentenced to death in 2013.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo.

Papang Hidayat, Indonesia researcher at Amnesty International, criticised president Widodo's record.

"Trade deals must not be made by the UK government at the expense of condemning the deeply troubling human rights abuses which have taken place under president Widodo's leadership.

"This is a president whose ruthless 'war on drugs' led to 14 executions last year to the horror of the watching world, with more promised for this year.
William and Harry duel with lightsabers as Star Wars heroes look on

The Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry could not resist the lure of the lightsaber when they met the heroes of the latest Star Wars movie - as well as the creative technicians bringing the latest instalment to the silver screen.

William and Harry had a brief duel in the props department at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, where Star Wars: Episode VIII is currently in production - and loved every minute of it.

Guided by British actress Daisy Ridley, who played Rey in last year's The Force Awakens, the royal brothers were shown Chewbacca's head - before getting a hug from the full-size 7ft 6in version - as well as robotic stars R2D2 and the BB8 droid from the latest instalment of the sci-fi saga.

Prince Harry and the Duke of Cambridge try out lightsabers during a tour of the Star Wars sets at Pinewood studios

The royal brothers both confessed to being big fans of the movies, which began in 1977 and starred Mark Hamill as the hero Luke Skywalker - who also chatted to the duke and his sibling at the end of their tour.

But when the royal brothers came across Ridley's lightsaber, William picked it up, while Harry wielded the weapon belonging to the villainous character Kylo Ren.

The props' effects were remotely controlled by a technician who turned on their internal glowing lights.

The Duke joked with his brother, asking "are you scared?" before their sabers clashed, following some tentative moves from both of them.

Ever the joker, Harry aimed at his brother below the waist, but the duke was too quick and stepped back.

A few moments later, the prince asked everyone in the workshop to mimic the lightsaber's famous sound effect, before joining in as their weapons clashed.

After their moment fencing with lightsabers, Harry jokingly mimed sliding the weapon into his belt and told William: "Your son would love this."

Ridley later joked about their mock battle: "When you see someone with a lightsaber you're like: 'You're just one of us'."

Hamill said even establishment figures regress to being children when they come into contact with Star Wars.

He quipped: "It's unsettling when you see grown men, policemen or any figure of authority melt and turn into an eight-year-old boy.

"They're doing their job, then all of a sudden it's like: 'What's it like working with a Wookiee?'"

During the tour Maria Cork, supervisor of hair and creature effects, was working on the head of Han Solo's best friend Chewbacca - usually played by Briton Peter Mayhew - when the royal brothers stopped for a brief chat in the creatures department.

They were a little shocked by the life-like model head of Ridley, used by her stunt double in the film, but William could not resist touching Chewie's head.

Ms Cork said about working on the character dubbed the "walking carpet" by Star Wars character Princess Leia: "It's lovely being on set, everybody wants to hug him, when you see an iconic character that's been around since the 1970s, it's amazing."

Commenting on the work of the department, William said: "It's a combination of good special effects and putting people inside (the creatures)."

The props department had an array of weapons on display for the royal visit, and Harry could not resist trying one unusual item: a First Order taser that spun around a handle. But the Prince put it down when he though he had damaged it.

When he was offered a pistol, as a former frontline Army officer he instinctively pointed it at the ground. When he pulled the trigger and it failed to fire, Harry made those around him laugh when he shrugged his shoulders and said: "See, look, why does everything I touch end up breaking?"

Mark Rocca, head of props, highlighted how much his department's work was under scrutiny by Star Wars fans across the globe: "There are people out there who know every single nut and bolt, so we have to get it right and we have to make it last because they are well-used.

"It's been an honour to work on films that we've grown up with, and to work in an industry where you can go on set and see stormtroopers running around is great, but there's a lot of hard work."

Britain's contribution to making Lucas's vision of Luke Skywalker's fight against the Empire a reality has been significant over the years.

From actor Alec Guinness, who famously played Obi-Wan Kenobi, to the creative teams making props and weapons like the original lightsaber, designed by British set decorator Roger Christian.

The Force Awakens - the seventh instalment of the series - saw the return of original cast members Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill and was the highest grossing film of all time in the UK.

The royal engagement was aimed at recognising the wealth of British creative talent involved in the production of the Star Wars films, Kensington Palace said.

The end of the visit brought the royal brothers to a huge film set with a green backdrop where various X-wing and A-wing spacecraft were on display.

As an ex-Apache helicopter pilot Harry did not hesitate when asked if he wanted to get into the cockpit of one of the impressive life-size A-wing craft and he chatted to Hamill as he slid into the seat.

The Luke Skywalker actor said later: "To see Harry jumping into the cockpit like that, I was asking him how does that compare to the real thing and he said it was luxury with the leg room - as in the real thing your knees are up by your chin, and I asked what about the controls and he said 'that's complete fantasy'."

He said about William and Harry's obvious love of the Star Wars films: "They're roughly my sons' ages, so if they're anything like mine I have a real fanatic and I have one kid who likes them but (is not too bothered)."

Hamill said filming in the UK was like a homecoming but he remained tight-lipped about what his character would be doing in the latest instalment of the Star Wars saga.

William and Harry had each got a hug from Chewbacca when they first arrived on the studio set and before they left the Prince had a chat with the actor inside the costume, Joonas Suotamo.

The Duke, who is president of Bafta, looked across at the pair talking and said: "Something quite surreal about watching this conversation."

Prince Harry sits in an A-wing fighter as he talks with actor Mark Hamill, who plays Luke Skywalker

The Duke of Cambridge hugs Chewbacca as actor John Boyega looks on

The Duke of Cambridge smiles at the BB8 droid

The Duke of Cambridge tries out a lightsaber

Prince Harry meets Chewbacca

Mark Hamill and director Rian Johnson and were among those to pose with the royals during the tour

Prince Harry takes a closer look at a robotic mask

John Boyega and Daisy Ridley speak while Prince Harry talks with Chewbacca
Police launch fraud probe in connection with Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca

Police forces across the country have launched a campaign to tackle fraud related to Hajj.

Around 25,000 British Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia each year a nd many will book their travel arrangements over the coming months.

Action Fraud - the UK's fraud reporting centre - was informed about 49 cases of Hajj fraud from April 2015 to last month.

Police are investigating alleged fraud connected to the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca

The average loss was over 2,600 and hotspots for offending were London, Birmingham, Manchester and Blackburn.

But detectives believe the extent of the problem is much worse than the reported cases.

Some 16 forces are engaging with their local Muslim communities in a bid to raise awareness of fraud.

The campaign is being supported by the British Council of Hajjis, travel association Abta and Atol, a financial protection scheme from the Civil Aviation Authority.

City of London Police Commander Chris Greany said: " Many victims will have saved for years to be able to afford to travel to Saudi Arabia and as a result will be absolutely devastated when they find out that they have in fact been conned by fraudsters."

People booking package trips with flights for Hajj this autumn are advised to make sure the company is covered by the Atol scheme to offer protection against losses if it goes bust.

They are also warned against paying by cash or direct bank transfer into an individual's account, to get everything in writing and to check flight details, accommodation and Hajj visas are valid.

Mark Rayner, Atol's head of compliance, commented: "It is really important that anyone looking to travel to Mecca this September as part of a Hajj pilgrimage looks beyond the price, c hecks that the travel business has Atol protection and ensures they receive an Atol certificate once they pay any money towards their trip."
Muslim jail chaplains 'distributing hate literature'

Muslim prison chaplains have routinely distributed Islamist literature, according to a leaked report.

A review which started in September, commissioned by Justice Secretary Michael Gove, found extremist pamphlets and CDs in more than 10 jails in November, according to the The Times.

The material included homophobic and misogynistic sentiments and encouraged the murder of apostates - Muslims who leave or reject the religion.

A review reportedly found extremist pamphlets and CDs in more than 10 jails

The report on what was found has not yet been cleared for publication.

It is said to have concluded that many Muslim prison chaplains were under-equipped for counter-radicalisation work, "sometimes because they lacked the capability but often because they didn't have the will".

Prisoners at more than one jail were encouraged by chaplains to fund-raise for Islamic charities that had links to terrorism, according to the report, which warned that lax controls and senior level failings had allowed the problems to occur.

The Times reported that jails in England and Wales held 12,328 Muslim inmates at the start of 2016.

Convicted terrorists numbered 131 and a further 1,000 were deemed vulnerable to radicalisation.

Muslims make up 4.8% of the population but 14.5% of prisoners.
Sadiq Khan pledges 'battle' for capital's health services

Labour's Sadiq Khan, the front-runner to be the next mayor of London, will pledge to tackle the capital's NHS "crisis".

The move comes as Ukip unveils its plans for London if the party takes control of City Hall on May 5.

Mr Khan will use a speech to insist the NHS needs a mayor who will go into battle with the Government for medical resources.

London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan says he will fight for the capital's NHS services

"NHS staff are overstretched and overworked," Mr Khan will say. "I'll be the first mayor to provide real leadership for London's NHS.

"The Tories short-sightedly abolished NHS London - meaning London's health and social care system doesn't have the strategic planning and co-ordination it needs. As mayor, I will fill that vacuum.

"London's NHS is in real crisis under the Tories. Waiting times in A&Es are rising, with some even turning patients away.

"Ambulance response times are endangering lives. Mental health services are simply unable to cope, and cuts to social care services mean Londoners aren't receiving the early support they need to avoid hospital admissions.

"NHS staff are overstretched and overworked so hospitals are spending huge amounts on temporary staff - as they struggle to recruit and train nurses.

"There has been a 156% rise in the amount London's hospitals are spending on agency nurses in just four years and one in six nursing posts in London is currently vacant," Mr Khan will say.

Ukip is promising a crackdown on crime if its mayoral candidate, Peter Whittle, is elected.

The party will prioritise affordable housing, and lobby the Government to "prevent non-British nationals from accessing right-to-buy, or help-to-buy schemes".

Ukip says it will give Metropolitan Police borough commanders more control over planning and resources.
Philip Hammond plays down suggestions of UK frontline role in Libya

British warplanes and battleships could be deployed to counter Islamic State (IS) in Libya although frontline fighting is not expected for UK troops , Philip Hammond has said.

The Foreign Secretary said it is "quite possible" the fledgling government of national accord (GNA) would request air and naval support to combat IS, also referred to as Daesh, as it will not be able to develop its own forces of this nature.

Mr Hammond added no request or talks on such a military deployment have taken place but he said the UK would consider the idea if it is proposed and indicated MPs would be allowed a vote.

Mr Hammond is due to make a statement amid speculation UK forces could be deployed

His refusal to rule out air and naval operations in the region came after he insisted there is "no appetite" in Libya for foreign combat troops on the ground.

Mr Hammond said the UK is willing to send troops to help train and support the GNA's forces, adding: " We do not anticipate any requests from the GNA for ground combat forces to take on Daesh or any other armed groups and we have no plans to deploy troops in such a role.

"I will of course keep the House informed of any plans we develop in the future in response to requests from the Libyan government.

"But the type of mission that we currently envisage would be focused on providing training and technical support away from any frontline operations."

Labour MP Mike Gapes (Ilford South) later told Mr Hammond: "You said that there's no appetite in Libya for foreign combat troops on the ground.

"Is there any appetite in the Libyan political system for foreign air forces or foreign naval forces operating in Libyan territorial waters?"

Mr Hammond replied: "I think we've seen on the latter point already a clear wariness of any suggestion of foreign naval forces operating in Libyan territorial waters even if the focus is counter-migration rather than counter-Daesh.

"I can't rule out, and it would be wrong to rule out, any future request for air or naval support to a counter-Daesh operation.

"I can envisage prime minister (Fayez) Sarraj, if his government is successful, being able to muster enough ground forces to mount an attack on the Daesh stronghold around Sirte.

"Sirte is a coastal port, of course, and it's certainly the case that the Libyans will not be able to develop either naval or air assets in any reasonable period of time to support such an operation.

"Indeed, it is quite possible that from a military point of view they would seek assistance from outside.

"Now, prime minister Sarraj would have to balance that military imperative with the political issues that would arise if he were to request foreign assistance.

"There has been no such request, no discussion of such a request, but if it comes we will consider it and if we think that the UK should participate in such action we will come to the House and allow the House to express an opinion through a vote."

Mr Hammond made a statement to the House of Commons after visiting the troubled North African state in a show of support for prime minister-designate Sarraj's administration on Monday.

Tory chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee Crispin Blunt (Reigate) stressed the importance of carrying the House in any decision making on Libya.

He said: "A coherent British contribution will be easier with the consent and understanding of this House, it might need to include for example air strikes on Daesh targets, as well as the training mission he has alluded to and I would counsel him that he's dancing on pretty thin ground with this differentiation between a training mission into a combat zone and not seeking to carry this House with him."

Mr Hammond responded: "Any proposal to carry out air strikes in support of a counter-Daesh operation absolutely would trigger the convention that the Government would come to the House, consult the House and allow a vote by which the House could express its view on the proposed intervention."

He said he understood Mr Blunt's concern that the lines between what is a combat mission and what is a training mission "could be blurred", adding: "But we are very clear that we can make that distinction."

Mr Hammond said there was a "big difference" between training and advising troops and getting engaged in combat activities, adding: "The Government is extremely mindful of that distinction and of the obligations it's entered into in respect of consulting the House."

Responding to questions from backbenchers, Mr Hammond said he envisaged any training force to be between "tens and hundreds of trainers" rather than thousands.

Any mission is unlikely to focus on "hard" training of infantry troops initially but instead on military command structures through a civilian-led defence ministry - advice that could be given from Whitehall, he said.

The Foreign Secretary also indicated that police and ex-military contractors could carry out some or even all of the training rather than serving forces personnel.

"There's been a kind of assumption across the House that any training we give would have to be given by UK military personnel," Mr Hammond said.

"Some of the training that's needed will be police training...

"It's also quite possible that some of the training, perhaps all of the training, will be delivered by contractors, often ex-military personnel working for contractors rather than current serving military personnel."

Mr Hammond stressed that the only way of stabilising Libya is to co-opt the different militias which sprung up after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

He insisted that many of those armed groups are not extremists but instead local defence forces who were protecting the local population.

The Foreign Secretary said: "It's not possible to talk about raising a new Libyan armed forces that will then take on all these militias, that would be a completely unrealistic project.

"The only way forward is to co-opt militias into a nascent Libyan armed forces backed by a political system which is highly devolved and assures them of the autonomy and the fair shares of Libya's wealth for the communities that they are seeking to back."

Mr Hammond was asked by Labour's Daniel Zeichner to rule out any Libyan troops being trained in Cambridgeshire, following a series of sex attacks by trainees in his Cambridge constituency in 2014.

The group were part of a Libyan unit undergoing training at Bassingbourn Barracks as part of an agreement by the Government to help the country after the 2011 collapse of Gaddafi's regime.

Mr Hammond said he could not give any further information about where a training programme could be located as no request had yet been made by the Libyan government but insisted it would probably be a "very different operation in very different circumstances."

Mr Zeichner had asked: "You will recall the unhappy saga in 2014 when some 2,000 Libyan personnel were trained at the Bassingbourn barracks in Cambridgeshire, that ended very badly with a series of violent sexual assaults in my city of Cambridge when they were left out unsupervised.

"Can you reassure residents in Cambridge there will be no further training of Libyan personnel in Cambridgeshire?"

Mr Hammond replied: "This would be I think a very different operation in very different circumstances.

"There are no plans yet, there is no request, so I'm afraid I can't give the House any further information about what such a training programme might look like or where it would be conducted but I can give you the assurance that the lessons of what happened at Bassingbourn have been taken on board by the Ministry of Defence and will be properly factored in to any future plan."

SNP Stephen Gethins (North East Fife) argued Libya had been an "unmitigated disaster for this Government, where we even have a sitting president criticising a sitting UK Prime Minister".

Mr Hammond: "It's very easy to sit over there hurling stones, the world I'm afraid is not a neat and tidy place and we have to deal with the situations that present themselves."

Tory John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) echoed Mr Gethins's point and asked what lessons could be learned.

He said: "There can be no doubt that our intervention in Libya in 2011 as some in this House suggested has been an unmitigated disaster resulting in many thousands of casualties and more, the establishment of Daesh and basically a vicious civil war."

Mr Hammond replied: "I would very much take issue with him."

The situation in Libya in 2011 he said was very difficult and messy but there was a need to be positive about Libya regaining stability.

On Daesh, he said there were "probably up to about 3,000 Daesh fighters in Libya of whom a significant number would be foreign fighters".

Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Committee Keith Vaz (Leicester East) said he was "disappointed" more had not been offered to deal with the migration crisis with an 80% increase in crossings between Libya and Italy.

He said: "What we need is permission to enter Libyan coastal waters in order to stop the people traffickers."

Mr Hammond said Mr Vaz was approaching the issue in "exactly the wrong way".
Drones ban for London during Barack Obama's UK visit

Drones have been banned from large parts of London and surrounding areas during Barack Obama's visit.

The US President and his wife Michelle arrive on Thursday night, just days after an unmanned aircraft is believed to have collided with a British Airways flight landing at Heathrow.

Detectives launched an investigation after the pilot of flight BA727 reported his aircraft being hit by a drone on Sunday afternoon with 132 passengers and five crew on board.

A ban on drones has been brought in for the visit of Barack Obama

Flying restrictions will be in place at various locations until the Obamas depart on Sunday morning.

Under normal circumstances c ommercial operators may be allowed to fly a drone under 7kg within congested areas such as towns and cities as long as they remain at least 50 metres (164 feet) from all people and structures.

Amateur drone pilots are barred from flying within 150 metres (492 feet) of congested areas and within 50 metres (164 feet) of people, vehicles and structures.

But a Notice to Airmen has been issued by t he UK's national air traffic service (Nats) and regulator the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), stating that Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin decided flights must be restricted "as part of the overarching security plan" for the presidential visit.

Drones will be banned from flying between 9pm on Thursday and 11am on Sunday in and around London.

A large part of the capital will be affected, from Croydon in the south to Haringey in the north.

Restrictions are in place for the skies between Windsor and London on Friday - when the Obamas will join the Queen for lunch at Windsor Castle the day after her 90th birthday celebrations - and between Stansted airport and London on Thursday night and Sunday morning.

The regulations prohibit aircraft - including drones - from flying below 762 metres (2,500 feet) within the specified areas unless they are using Heathrow, Stansted or London City airports, London Heliport, RAF Northolt or are being operated by the emergency services.

Pilots of other aircraft wanting to fly in restricted areas must seek permission from the Metropolitan Police.
The Montana Territory Peacemakers will hold a cowboy action shooting match on Saturday at the Billings Rod and Gun Club pistol range.

Registration opens at 8 a.m. The match fee is $15, but first-time shooters shoot for free. The five-stage match begins at 9 a.m. and is open to the public.

Round count for the match is 50 rifle, 50 pistol and 25-plus shotgun.

Youth ages 12-18 must be accompanied by an adult. Spectators and photographers are welcome. Eye and ear protection are required.

For additional information visit montanaterritorypeacemakers.org, which also will provide notice in the event the match is canceled. Additional information is also available via email at mtpeacemakers@gmail.com.
Japan's Renesas: aftershocks prevent replacement of damaged equipment

TOKYO, April 18 (Reuters) - Japanese automotive chipmaker Renesas Electronics said on Monday aftershocks were keeping it from installing replacement equipment at a quake-hit plant, raising the prospect of delays for the global supply chain for automakers.

Renesas holds 10.5 percent of a $30 billion market for chips that are used throughout vehicles, in critical areas such as engines as well as in frills like assisted parking, according to research firm Gartner.

The company said the replacement equipment was available but it was still assessing when to install it, and that it had not decided when it would restart the plant in the south, where operations were halted following a series of earthquakes measuring up to 7.3 magnitude.

"We have begun a reexamination following the major quake on April 16, but since yesterday we have been able to confirm the safety of the clean room and have been able to start it," the company said in a statement.

"We are currently confirming the detailed condition of our facilities."

It was not immediately clear which companies the Kumamoto plant supplies, but brokerage firm Nomura said the plant was one of the company's main bases for microcontrollers and produces automotive and general-purpose microcontrollers.

Overseas automakers accounted for about 40 percent of its automobile-related chip sales, while domestic automakers, including Toyota Motor Corp and Nissan Motor Co , account for roughly 60 percent, according to the company.

Renesas, which suffered significant damage at its semiconductor plants in northeastern Japan in a big 2011 quake, leading to months of delays to the global supply chain for automakers, previously said it had not been stocking extra inventory for risk management purposes since that disaster.

However, it has begun to standardize more parts across various models to enable in-house production at alternative plants during emergencies.

Renesas reiterated on Monday alternative production was part of its business continuity plan, but whether it could implement that plan depended on clients. It declined to comment on the possibility of increasing production at other plants.
Chevron seeks buyers for Myanmar gas assets worth $1.3 bln - sources

By Denny Thomas and Anshuman Daga

HONG KONG/SINGAPORE, April 18 (Reuters) - U.S. oil and gas major Chevron Corp has put its Myanmar gas block stakes worth an estimated $1.3 billion up for sale, banking sources familiar with the matter said, in what would mark the biggest M&A transaction involving the country's assets.

The sale is part of Chevron's efforts to preserve cash and retreat from non-core assets in the wake of sliding oil prices. It is also seen as setting the tone for deals in a country that investors hope will see continued reforms after a historic election win by Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy last year.

The sources said suitors could number about half a dozen and would likely include Australia's Woodside Petroleum, Thailand's PTT Exploration and Production, Japanese trading houses and Chinese companies.

"Companies understand that Myanmar is in a very good position as you have export markets like China and Thailand and a growing domestic market," said Adrian Pooh, a Singapore-based analyst at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

"It's kind of one of the last few remaining exploration plays with good prospects as well."

The sources said buyers would be keen to acquire all three assets bundled together.

Chevron is working with an U.S investment bank on the deal, they added, declining to be identified as the sale process has not been made public. Chevron, which has been operating in Myanmar for two decades, declined to comment.

Woodside declined to comment on whether it was interested in Chevron's assets. But it highlighted its recent exploration successes in the Rakhine Basin, where it is the largest holder of acreage, as well as its partnerships across its six exploration blocks in Myanmar.

Thailand's PTT Exploration and Production did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Chevron owns 28.3 percent of the Yadana and Sein gas fields operated by France's Total SA in the Andaman Sea, which mostly supplies Thai power plants and also has a stake in the pipeline company that transports the gas to the Thai border. Some of the gas is also supplied to Myanmar.

Last year, it also signed a production sharing contract in exploration Block A5 in the Rakhine Basin. Its subsidiary holds a 99 percent stake in this exploration block.

Chevron's net daily natural gas production in Myanmar last year averaged 117 million cubic feet, making up 2.2 percent of the company's annual gas output in 2015.

Myanmar's previous record deal was Singapore's Sea View Hotel Ltd's $1 billion purchase of a hotel property in 2005, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Syrian govt negotiator takes swipe at Israel, avoids political talk

GENEVA, April 18 (Reuters) - The chief Syrian government negotiator at peace talks in Geneva accused Israel on Monday of cooperating with Islamic State and al Qaeda militants in the Golan region, deflecting attention from intra-Syrian negotiations.

The Damascus delegation had already sought on Friday to steer the round of peace talks away from the political transition that U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura hopes to promote as increased fighting across the country threatens to undermine a shaky truce in place since Feb. 27.

"This Israeli provocation ... confirms without any doubt the cooperation between Israel and terrorists of Daesh (Islamic State) and Nusra Front on the demarcation line between where the Golan is and UNDOF (United Nations Disengagement Observer Force) troops are positioned," Bashar Ja'afari told reporters after meeting U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura.

He was responding to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's holding of a cabinet meeting in the Golan, the first since it was captured from Syria in a 1967 war and annexed in 1981. He said the annexation, not recognised internationally, would never be rescinded.

"It is no coincidence at all that this Israeli escalation was accompanied by irresponsible statements by members of the so-called Saudi delegation in the intra-Syrian talks here in Geneva," Ja'afari said, referring to the High Negotiations Committee main opposition group. Some members of the HNC have called on rebel fighters to resume attacks on government forces.

"The fact that all that happened simultaneously clearly indicates there are close ties between Israelis, and I regret to say some Arabs and some terrorists within Syria," he said.

He did not clarify how he believed the developments established a link between Israel and islamist groups.
Libya's eastern army makes further advances around Benghazi

BENGHAZI, Libya, April 18 (Reuters) - Libyan forces have recaptured key areas in the city of Benghazi, building on earlier advances during weeks of clashes with Islamist militants and other opponents.

Troops allied with the government based in eastern Libya took control of a cement factory and cemetery in El Hawari district, where fighters loyal to Islamic State had been holding out, said Milad al-Zawie, a spokesman for the government forces.

The troops also took a camp behind Garyounis university, which they captured on Sunday, Zawie said. Five soldiers were killed and nine wounded in the Benghazi fighting, he said.

The university has been one of the most bitterly contested sites in the city since the eastern military commander, Khalifa Haftar, launched his Operation Dignity campaign to rid the city of Islamists and other opposition in May 2014.

Benghazi itself has seen some of the heaviest fighting in the conflict that has engulfed Libya after the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.

The country has been split since then between two governments, one in Tripoli and one in the east. Various armed groups are allied with both governments, and Islamist militants have inserted themselves into the conflict.

The army began a fresh push in Benghazi in February, recapturing the neighbourhoods of Laithi and Boatni and allowing some residents to return to their homes. But until now the army had not built on those advances.

A U.N.-backed unity government arrived in Tripoli last month, and is trying to establish itself by winning over opponents in both the east and west of the country.
Brazil's shrewd Senate boss unlikely to rescue Rousseff

By Brad Haynes and Alonso Soto

MACEIO/BRASILIA, Brazil, April 18 (Reuters) - Dilma Rousseff is not the first Brazilian president forced to contemplate the loyalty of Renan Calheiros on the eve of her possible impeachment.

Nearly 25 years ago, Calheiros, the current president of the Senate who will decide the pace of debate over Rousseff's impeachment, weighed the fate of a fellow politician from his tiny northeastern state of Alagoas: Fernando Collor de Mello.

Calheiros was a key advisor in Collor's successful presidential campaign in 1989. Just three years later, his explosive revelations of government corruption to journalists and congressional investigators helped topple Collor in a corruption scandal.

As the impeachment process against Rousseff moves to the Senate after winning overwhelming support in the lower house of Congress on Sunday, she and her allies may look with trepidation to Calheiros, a crucial but inconsistent ally in the past year.

Calheiros has resisted the rush to remove Rousseff among a large wing of his Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), throwing his support behind the idea of new general elections to settle the country's political crisis.

Yet those proposals are distant and theoretical, while the decision before Calheiros is urgent. He faces intense pressure from his own party and others in the opposition to quickly set a date for a Senate vote on whether to accept impeachment charges and put Rousseff on trial.

The precedent of Collor's impeachment suggests a committee will be formed to present a recommendation on whether Rousseff should be tried. This would be voted on by the full chamber within 10 parliamentary sessions - which would be in early May.

The pro-impeachment camp only needs a simple majority in the Senate to open a trial, an easier hurdle than Sunday's lower house vote, which required two-thirds support.

But if Calheiros delays the vote it could give Rousseff vital time to regroup, negotiate and try to swing wavering senators in her favor.

Those closest to Calheiros say his shrewd sense of realpolitik, which has helped him dodge several scandals of his own, makes him reluctant to put his own judgment before the intense political currents of the day.

"Renan could decide the history of the country. And that's exactly what he doesn't want: to be marked as the one who dealt the final blow," said a close confidant in his home state of Alagoas, who asked not to be named. "Because if that works for him, then it's chicanery, and if it goes wrong then he's dead."

Calheiros' aides did not respond to a request for comment, but the Senate leader downplayed his role to reporters on Monday, saying he would neither rush or draw out the impeachment process but would follow the law and the constitution.

A SURVIVOR

Calheiros, 60, is part of a group of politicians known in Brazil as the "dinosaurs", an old guard who entered politics under military rule and consolidated power after the return of democracy in the 1980s with a knack for compromise and sharp survival instincts.

Born in the remote interior of Alagoas, Brazil's third poorest and most violent state, Calheiros' career has been marked by shifting allegiances.

First elected to Congress in 1982, he quickly built a reputation as a power broker and has allied with every Brazilian president since Collor in 1990, even as the ruling ideology shifted to the left under the governments of Rousseff and her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Calheiros is also known for close escapes from corruption scandals that could have sunk a less experienced politician.

One incident came in 2007, when a news magazine reported a construction company's lobbyist was paying child support for a daughter Calheiros conceived with a young journalist.

Further allegations of tax fraud and improper business dealings prompted an inquiry by the Senate's ethics committee and calls for his ouster.

Calheiros quit as Senate boss, taking enough heat out of the attacks to gather votes and dodge impeachment.

And by 2013, he was back in charge of the Senate.

When Rousseff's congressional coalition began crumbling and the movement to impeach her began last year, Calheiros came to her aid.

He helped to pass crucial tax measures and delayed an audit into a breach of budgetary laws for which she will now likely be put on trial in his chamber.

But colleagues in his party, the PMDB, which led the impeachment process in the lower house, believe he will not stand in the way of Rousseff being forced from power.

One party leader with close ties to Vice President Michel Temer, who will replace Rousseff if she is impeached, admitted there were divisions in the PMDB but that in the face of significant political change the party sticks together.

To prove the point, the source called Calheiros during the interview. "Lets move ahead together, my friend," he told Calheiros in a light-hearted phone conversation.

On Monday, Calheiros took center stage in the impeachment saga, meeting with Rousseff and then her arch-rival, lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha, and Ricardo Lewandowski, the Supreme Court justice who would preside over a trial in the Senate.

Regardless of Calheiros' own views, the political momentum is clearly with the pro-impeachment camp.

"I think Renan right now is watching to see who wins," Paulo Pereira da Silva, a union boss and ardent critic of Rousseff, said as votes were being cast in the lower house on Sunday.
Turkey slaps dumping duties on U.S. cotton imports

By Chris Prentice

NEW YORK, April 18 (Reuters) - Turkey has slapped anti-dumping duties on U.S. cotton imports, a U.S. industry trade association said on Monday, fraying relations between one of the world's top fiber growers and one of its biggest customers amid weak global prices and demand.

Imports on a cost, insurance and freight (CIF) basis will incur dumping duties of 3 percent effective immediately, the NCC said, the first official confirmation of the move.

The decision to introduce tariffs has been widely expected since Turkey's Economy Ministry said in February that U.S. cotton was hurting the country's domestic industry.

The NCC vowed to fight the move through the World Trade Organization and Turkish courts, and warned it put U.S. cotton at a competitive disadvantage to other countries and jeopardized U.S. business with Turkish mills.

Turkey is the second-biggest buyer of U.S. cotton, with shipments ranging between 1.5 million and 2 million bales per year.

Still the tariff is lower than expected after Turkey detailed in a February report anti-dumping margins in a wide range for firms shipping to Turkey. Those margins ranged from 3.14 percent for Cargill Co to 7.91 percent for LD Commodities Cotton LLC, a division of Louis Dreyfus Commodities.

The less prohibitive levels offered relief to some. They were expected to slow shipments to Turkey, without halting them entirely.

"It's not great for business, but it could have been worse," said Jordan Lea, chairman and co-owner of Eastern Trading Co in Greenville, South Carolina, and a board member for the National Cotton Council of America.

U.S. cotton prices have been under pressure from huge global inventories as demand for manmade fibers like polyester has stolen market share.
UAE fund says Malaysia's 1MDB in default on $1 bln deal

By Rozanna Latiff and Saeed Azhar

KUALA LUMPUR/SINGAPORE, April 18 (Reuters) - An Abu Dhabi sovereign fund said on Monday Malaysia's troubled state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) was in default of its obligations on $1.1 billion in debt and interest.

The International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC) said in a filing to the London stock exchange, where it is listed, that it was now considering all its options to remedy the default. That included referring the matter to the appropriate dispute resolution forum, the IPIC statement said.

The Abu Dhabi fund said it was terminating last June's agreement, under which it agreed to provide $1 billion in cash as well as assume payments on $3.5 billion of 1MDB debt. It also forgave an undisclosed amount of debt that 1MDB owed to IPIC, in exchange for assets which have not been named.

The Abu Dhabi fund said 1MDB and Malaysia's finance ministry - which owns 1MDB - are in default on the terms of this agreement.

The development came after IPIC's denial last week that it owned a British Virgin Islands company, Aabar Investments PJS Ltd, which received payments of $3.5 billion from 1MDB meant for the Abu Dhabi fund.

Malaysia's Ministry of Finance (MOF) said it would honour all its commitments in financial markets.

"The MOF wishes to make clear that it will continue to honour all of its outstanding commitments in the financial markets," the ministry said in a statement late on Monday.

The assurance followed a statement by 1MDB that Abu Dhabi had agreed to assume its interest payments on a $1.75-billion bond, but one such payment, due on Monday, had not been paid because of the dispute between the two.

"1MDB wishes to make clear that it and its group entities will meet all of their other obligations under any other financing arrangements and have ample liquidity to do so," it said in a statement.

The Malaysian fund did not say whether it would make the interest payment due on Monday.

In an earlier statement, 1MDB said it had repaid all its bank debt and short-term obligations, and had a cash surplus of about 2.3 billion ringgit ($585.2 million).

Over the past four weeks, 1MDB has made debt principal repayments of about 7.25 billion ringgit, it said.

Monday's announcements throw into doubt 1MDB's efforts to rationalize its debt, said Christian de Guzman, a credit analyst at Moody's Investors Service in Singapore, which rates the $1.75 billion 1MDB-linked energy bonds.

"We're still trying to figure out what it means for IPIC, because IPIC has guaranteed these bonds and as far as we understand these (guarantees) were irrevocable."

PM'S BROTHER TAKES LEAVE

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has been under pressure from critics at home after reports claimed that $681 million deposited into his personal bank account just before a 2013 general election originated from 1MDB.

Saudi Arabia's foreign minister said last week the money from an unspecified Saudi source was a "genuine donation" with no obligations attached.

The prime minister's brother, Nazir Razak, announced on Monday that he was taking a voluntary leave of absence from his role as chairman of CIMB Group Holdings Bhd, amid an independent review into money transfers into his personal account.

Nazir was dragged into the scandal around political funding and alleged misuse of money from 1MDB after the Wall Street Journal reported last month he received $7 million in funds from his elder brother, Prime Minister Najib Razak, before the 2013 elections.

"Nothing I did was illegal or compromised my position at CIMB, but given the media attention, I understand that it makes the stakeholders uncomfortable," Nazir told a news conference after the bank's annual general meeting.

Nazir, a leading Malaysian corporate figure, had said earlier he believed the money came from legitimate fund-raising. He said that CIMB staff disbursed the funds to ruling-party politicians on the instructions of his brother Najib.

Transactions involving 1MDB, which had a debt of more than $11 billion, are being investigated in several countries, including the United States, Switzerland and Singapore.

Najib has denied any wrongdoing, saying he had not accepted money from any state entity for personal gain.

A government-appointed attorney-general this year cleared Najib of any criminal offence or corruption, saying the funds were a political donation from the royal family of Saudi Arabia..
Canada promises 'real plan' to address aboriginal suicide crisis

By Michelle Conlin

ATTAWAPISKAT, Ontario, April 18 (Reuters) - A Canadian Cabinet minister visited remote Attawapiskat, Ontario, on Monday and said the government was finalizing a comprehensive plan to help the aboriginal community plagued by suicide attempts and harsh living conditions.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett met for about two hours with Chief Bruce Shisheesh in the northern community of 2,000 people.

"We had a good, frank discussion," Bennett told reporters. "It's no longer going to be Band-aids and piecemeal. It's going to be a real plan."

Saying announcements were imminent, Bennett said: "We're almost there."

Five children tried to take their own lives on Friday night in Attawapiskat, following 11 suicide attempts the previous weekend.

Attawapiskat, 600 miles (965 km) north of Ottawa on James Bay, is only accessible by plane or winter ice road.

Bennett said the suicide rate was many times higher for aboriginals than for other Canadians because of their loss of culture, stemming partly from past governments forcing aboriginals to leave their communities and attend residential schools.

The minister said she would appoint a youth delegation from the community to serve as her advisers and travel to Ottawa. A new recreation center, programs for children and plans to reclaim the healing center - which has been turned into housing since many residents are homeless - are also in the works.

Canada's Liberal government said in March it would spend an extra C$8.37 billion ($6.54 billion) over five years to help the aboriginal population deal with dire living conditions, which include overcrowded housing and unfit drinking water.
As global steel crisis grips, China says March output was a record

By Philip Blenkinsop and Sue-Lin Wong

BRUSSELS/BEIJING, April 19 (Reuters) - Under pressure to curb steel output and relieve a global glut, China said on Tuesday its production actually hit a record high last month as rising prices, and profits, encouraged mills that had been shut or suspended to resume production.

The China Iron & Steel Association (CISA) said March steel production hit 70.65 million tonnes, amounting to 834 million tonnes on an annualised basis. Traders and analysts predicted more increases in April and May.

The data comes as major steel producing countries failed to agree measures to tackle an industry crisis, with differing views over the causes of overcapacity. A meeting of ministers and trade officials from over 30 countries, hosted by Belgium and the OECD on Monday, concluded only that overcapacity had to be dealt with in a swift and structural way.

Washington pointed the finger at China, saying Beijing needed to cut overcapacity or face possible trade action from other countries.

"Unless China starts to take timely and concrete actions to reduce its excess production and capacity ... the fundamental structural problems in the industry will remain and affected governments - including the United States - will have no alternatives other than trade action to avoid harm to their domestic industries and workers," U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a statement.

Asked what steps the Chinese government would take following the unsuccessful talks, Commerce Ministry spokesman Shen Danyang told reporters on Tuesday: "China has already done more than enough. What more do you want us to do?"

"Steel is the food of industry, the food of economic development. At present, the major problem is that countries that need food have a poor appetite so it looks like there's too much food."

In a monthly report, the CISA said a recent rally in steel prices in China - up 42 percent so far this year - was unsustainable given the rising production, and it warned that increased protectionism in Southeast Asia and Europe would make steel exports more difficult.

"The big rise in steel prices has led to a rapid reopening of capacity that had been shut or suspended ... a large rise in output will not be good for the gap between market demand and supply," the CISA said.

The OECD says global steelmaking capacity was 2.37 billion tonnes in 2015, but declining production meant only 67.5 percent of that was being used, down from 70.9 percent in 2014.

Britain in particular has felt the squeeze as its largest producer Tata Steel has announced plans to pull out of the country, threatening 15,000 jobs. Last week, more than 40,000 German steel workers took to the streets to protest against dumping from China.

China, the world's top steel producer, has ramped up exports of steel in recent years, as it steers its economy into services-led growth and away from traditional manufacturing, while avoiding mass job losses. China's steel exports jumped 30 percent to 9.98 million tonnes in March from a year ago despite a slew of anti-dumping measures globally.

Blaming China for the global steel industry crisis is simply a lazy excuse for protectionism and will be counter-productive, China's official Xinhua news agency said.

"It's more been their competitive advantage into Asian countries which has really driven that rise in exports," said Daniel Hynes, commodity strategist at ANZ Bank. "I think that will continue and will keep those export levels relatively high despite the pressures we're seeing now."

DEEP DIVISIONS

The deep divisions between China and rival producers were clear at a news conference following Monday's meeting.

Cecelia Malmstrom, the EU's trade commissioner, insisted governments should not grant subsidies that keep unviable plants running and should subject state-controlled firms to the same rules as the private sector.

China's assistant commerce minister, Zhang Ji, said China had cut 90 million tonnes of capacity, with plans to reduce it by a further 100-150 million tonnes. "That is only 10 million tonnes less than the capacity in Europe," he said, although critics say China would still have a capacity of around 1 billion tonnes, far in excess of its needs.

The CISA has previously acknowledged that the flood of Chinese steel product exports is damaging to Beijing's to gain market economy status from the European Union - an important goal as its domestic economy slows.

Tensions have erupted between other producers, too, with Japan leading criticism of Indian minimum prices for imported steel at a recent World Trade Organisation meeting. Japan and South Korea have also come under fire for exporting steel products cheaper than they sell them at home.

In a step to reduce trade frictions with Washington, Beijing agreed to scrap some export subsidies on products including steel, the United States said last week.

On Monday, the United Steelworkers union (USW) said it filed a case with U.S. regulators seeking to stem a "flood" of aluminum imports which it says damage U.S. producers and threatens jobs.

The case is the latest move by the U.S. aluminum industry to prod the authorities to investigate the impact of rising imports, particularly from China.
WIDER IMAGE-As economy booms, children toil in Myanmar

By Hnin Yadana Zaw and Soe Zeya Tun

YANGON, April 19 (Reuters) - When a boat stacked with gravel moors at a jetty in Yangon, 14-year-old Aung Htet Myat fills a basket he then carries on his back to trucks that whisk the load to construction sites springing up across Myanmar's booming biggest city.

For each basket a labour broker rewards the boy with a stick he puts in a plastic bottle tied to his belt. At the end of the shift, which at the busiest times can last up to 24 hours, he exchanges the sticks for cash - 100 baskets earns him about $2.50.

"I carry baskets with stones the whole day," said Aung Htet Myat, who has worked at the jetty for the last two years. "If there is no gravel boat to unload, I help bus drivers as an assistant."

One in five children in Myanmar aged 10-17 go to work instead of school, according to figures from a census report on employment published last month, and the opening up of the economy since 2011 has triggered a spike on demand for labour.

As the former Burma emerges from nearly 50 years of neglect under military rule, Yangon has been transformed into a vast construction site.

Than Than Win and her two teenage sons began working at the same jetty as Aung Htet Myat after her husband died. The family now rely on a labour broker who lends her money in return for on-demand, non-stop work when a boat arrives.

"He gives us a place to stay and we can also take money from him when we have no job," said Than Than Win, as nearby her sons carried another load of gravel on their backs. "We have no way to pay it back, so whenever he asks us to work we can't refuse."

Her story is common in Yangon's slums, filled with people who have flocked from the countryside as the economy has boomed, says Michael Slingsby, an urban poverty expert based in the city.

"People borrow money from lenders and in order to repay their debts children are being sent out to work," he said.

LAWS RARELY ENFORCED

May Win Myint, a senior member of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) which took power this month, said tackling child labour was one of the party's goals.

"If we cannot solve this problem, there will not be any development in our country because they will be the people serving the country in the future," she said. "They need to be educated to do that."

To do that the first freely elected government since the early 1960s will need to address labour laws that experts say are fragmented and rarely enforced.

Myanmar law bars children under 13 from working in shops or factories, and says teenagers aged 13-15 should not work more than four hours a day, or at night.

"Nobody under 18 should be carrying heavy cargoes," said Vicky Bowman, a former British ambassador who now runs the Yangon-based Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business.

Outside of construction, child labour is most visible in hospitality, with even small children serving food in Myanmar's ubiquitous tea shops. Many children also work in fish farming and processing.

At Yangon's San Pya fish market, the country's largest, over two days in February Reuters found girls and boys as young as nine cleaning and processing fish and unloading boats and trucks during 12-hour overnight shifts.

"I don't want my son to do this kind of hard labour," said Hla Myint, 56, whose 15-year-old son works in San Pya.

Speaking from their home in a dilapidated bamboo hut close to the river bank, Hla Myint did not share many of his fellow citizens' high hopes for Suu Kyi's government.
Hell Creek State Park supporters will have the opportunity to address the Montana State Parks and Recreation Board when it meets on Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to noon at Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Region 7 Conference Room in Miles City.

The board has backed a Montana State Parks plan to not renew its Hell Creek lease from the Army Corps of Engineers in 2021. The decision was made since infrastructure needs at the park are costly and visitation is low compared to other state parks.

The board will take action on its public use rules, Milltown State Park land acquisition, and proposed Cooney Lake lease. The board will also hear informational updates on a bike camping fee reduction, Hell Creek camping fees, lands reconciliation and classification implementation.

The public is invited to attend the meeting. Public comment for items not on the agenda is scheduled for 9:30 a.m.

On Wednesday, board members will tour Hell Creek and Pirogue Island state parks.

For more information or to view the meeting agenda visit: http://stateparks.mt.gov/about-us/parksBoard.html.
U.S. to deploy disaster experts to help Ecuador after quake

WASHINGTON, April 18 (Reuters) - The United States said on Monday it will dispatch a team of disaster experts to help Ecuador with relief efforts following Saturday's 7.8 earthquake that has killed at least 413 people.

"The Government of Ecuador has accepted the United States' offer of assistance with disaster relief efforts," a USAID official said, adding that the experts would help the government with damage assessments and identifying humanitarian needs, while also providing analysis of the situation on the ground.
Saudi Arabia turns oil weapon on Iran: Kemp

By John Kemp

LONDON, April 18 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's decision to scupper negotiations on a coordinated oil output freeze in Doha on Sunday seems to confirm a significant shift in the kingdom's oil policy.

For decades, the kingdom has insisted it does not wield oil as a diplomatic weapon, but at the weekend it did just that as part of an intensifying conflict with Iran. ("Saudi-Iran tensions scupper deal to freeze oil output", Reuters, April 17)

The kingdom's position on Iranian oil production has steadily hardened over the course of the last year and at the weekend it reached its logical conclusion.

Saudi Arabia will not accept any constraints on its output, even freezing at record levels, unless Iran agrees to similar controls, which it has rejected until production has reached pre-sanctions levels.

By insisting on this hard-line position, Saudi Arabia ensured the talks would fail, and the kingdom seems comfortable with the outcome. Diplomatic strategy seems to have trumped oil market considerations.

Saudi Arabia would rather have a lower oil price and lower revenues for all producers, including itself, rather than reach a production agreement that would deliver increased income to its arch-rival across the Gulf.

GULF RIVALRY

Iran has reiterated for more than a year that it intends to increase production to pre-sanctions levels before it will consider any restraint to help stabilise prices, a position that most other oil producers have quietly accepted.

Boosting oil exports and revenues in exchange for controls on its nuclear activities was the centrepiece of the deal between Iran and the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council reached in July 2015.

Saudi Arabia has consistently opposed the nuclear deal fearing that it will strengthen Iran economically and allow it to increase funding for proxy conflicts in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Until recently, however, the kingdom's oil policy appeared to be in the hands of technocrats in the petroleum ministry and Aramco, rather than be run as a branch of foreign policy.

Saudi officials privately cast doubt on whether Iran would be able to increase its exports as rapidly as it claimed once sanctions were lifted.

But the official line was that growing world oil demand would help the market accommodate extra Iranian crude without any need for output restraint by other producers.

ROAD TO A DEAL

By the end of 2015, it was clear the Saudi strategy of maintaining production and allowing low prices to drive high-cost producers out of business was working more slowly than originally expected.

Amid pressure from some of the weaker members of OPEC in Latin America and Africa, as well as Russia, the Saudis reluctantly and provisionally agreed to an output freeze in February 2016.

At Saudi insistence, the agreement between Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and Qatar, was conditional on adherence by other major oil producers.

So over the last two months, an intensive round of diplomacy assembled a large group of OPEC and non-OPEC producers representing 50 million barrels per day of production, more than half the world total.

Sixteen oil-producing nations sent representatives to the summit in Doha meant to conclude a deal on a production freeze.

Even if it had been successfully concluded, the draft agreement would have been weak. It would not have removed actual barrels from the market but it was meant to offer symbolic support to prices by encouraging hedge funds to focus on the gradual rebalancing of the underlying physical market.

HARDENING LINE

In the end, most major producers sent representatives to Doha with the exception of the United States and Canada (unable to coordinate production because of antitrust laws), China (a net importer), Iran and Brazil.

It seems unlikely most of the participants would have agreed to attend unless they believed there was a realistic prospect of reaching a deal, since a failed summit would be worse than none at all.

Pre-summit diplomatic contacts must have left most other countries with the impression Saudi Arabia was open to a deal that would necessarily exclude or make special provision for Iran.

In the run up to the summit, however, the Saudi position appears to have hardened. On the eve of the meeting, Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman warned the kingdom could increase its output immediately to 11.5 million barrels per day and 12.5 million within 6-9 months.

The prince said the kingdom would increase its capacity to 20 million barrels per day if it chose to invest and reiterated any production deal would be contingent on Iranian participation ("Saudi prince says he could add a million barrels immediately" Bloomberg, April 16).

The comments could be interpreted as negotiating rhetoric, nonetheless such a late intervention was ominous.

Saudi delegates arrived in Doha still apparently committed to reaching a deal but at the last minute insisted on substantial changes to the draft ("No agreement on oil freeze at Doha meeting", Wall Street Journal, April 17).

"In the very early hours of Sunday morning, veteran Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi received a call from Riyadh, and then informed his delegates that they would need to scrap the draft agreement for a freeze that didn't include Iran, according to a person familiar with events," the Wall Street Journal reported.

The same story emerges from other sources. Russia's energy minister blamed "some OPEC countries" for trying to change the terms of the agreement at the last minute "trying to get concessions from countries that are not here" ("Russia 'disappointed' by Qatar oil talks," Russia Today, April 17).

OIL AND DIPLOMACY

Saudi Arabia has never been enthusiastic about coordinated production restraint, endorsing the principle while stating tough conditions that would make it all but impossible in practice.

The kingdom is likely to pay a diplomatic price for derailing the negotiations at such a late stage, embarrassing everyone else, but senior policymakers evidently decided no deal was better than even a weak one.

With so many other producing countries present at Doha and ready to agree to a production freeze, there was a deal on the table that met most of the conditions that the Saudis set months ago.

Saudi Arabia was not being asked to cut production, merely avoid it increasing for six months until a review in October, which would have been a fairly empty gesture.

The only condition not met was participation by Iran, a relatively marginal consideration from an oil market perspective, but critical from a diplomatic one.

Some analysts see a more straightforward motive for Saudi Arabia's refusal to sign up: the kingdom is worried oil prices are rising too soon and too far, throwing a potential lifeline to U.S. shale drillers and other higher-cost producers.

Rising prices put at risk the market rebalancing Saudi Arabia and its allies have painfully pursued over the last 18 months ("Saudis won't shed any tears over Doha", Bloomberg, April 17).

The two explanations (diplomacy and market rebalancing) are not mutually exclusive. But it seems oil policy has to some extent become embroiled in the kingdom's broader conflict with Iran.

"Saudi Arabia's increasingly bitter dispute with Iran is now being played out in the oil market", according to my colleague Andy Critchlow ("Proxy war", Reuters, April 18).

The kingdom's oil minister has been sidelined and that oil policy is now apparently being directed by the royal court and the deputy crown prince, where it is treated as an aspect of diplomacy.

Saudi Arabia has taken an increasingly assertive position on a range of foreign policy issues since the accession of the new king last year. Economic diplomacy is an increasingly important part of that effort.

Saudi Arabia has tried to restrict the resumption of Iran's exports by warning tanker companies that they will be blacklisted if they carry Iranian oil ("Saudi Arabia acts to slow Iran's oil exports", Financial Times, April 4).

The decision to derail the Doha discussion is consistent with an emerging pattern of economic warfare being waged by Saudi Arabia.

Unlike other oil producers, which are seeking higher prices, Saudi Arabia appears willing to risk lower prices that will hurt its own economy in the belief they will hurt Iran more.
China "positive" on India military hotline proposal

BEIJING, April 19 (Reuters) - China is "positive" towards proposals to establish a military hotline with India to deal with issues along their disputed border, Defence Minister Chang Wanquan told his Indian counterpart during a meeting in Beijing, state media reported.

The two nuclear-armed neighbours have been moving to gradually ease long-existing tensions between them.

Leaders of Asia's two giants pledged last May to cool a festering border dispute, which dates back to a brief border war in 1962, though a messy territorial disagreement remains.

Chang "reacted positively toward setting up a military hotline with India on border security", state news agency Xinhua reported late on Monday, after Chang's meeting with Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar.

Chang "also suggested the two sides strengthen defence exchanges and jointly safeguard peace and tranquillity of the border area", the report added.

Xinhua cited Parrikar as saying India is ready to work with China to maintain the stability of the border.

China lays claim to more than 90,000 sq km (35,000 sq miles) ruled by New Delhi in the eastern sector of the Himalayas. India says China occupies 38,000 sq km (14,600 sq miles) of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau in the west.
China calls for talks after Costa Rica abandons project

BEIJING, April 18 (Reuters) - China's Foreign Ministry on Monday called for talks after Costa Rica's state-run oil company, Recope, said last week it had decided to abandon a $1.5 billion refinery upgrade project it was working on with China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC).

In 2009, the two firms formed a company called Soresco, with each putting in $50 million. But the project has been paralysed since 2013 by Costa Rica's comptroller after complaints of conflicts of interest in the feasibility studies.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he had noted the media reports on the issue, adding that relations had been developing well in recent years.

"As for individual problems that arise during our cooperation, we hope the relevant companies in both countries can continue to increase communication, understand each other's concerns and find an appropriate resolution," he told a daily news briefing, without elaborating.

Later on Monday, a lawyer for Soresco said Costa Rica could face international arbitration and steep legal fees if Recope's decision stands.

"(Recope) is unilaterally deciding on the contract (and) will have to deal with the consequences," Soresco lawyer Enrique Rojas said in an interview, adding the contract stipulated that the London Court of International Arbitration could be called in to settle the matter.

The upgrade at the Puerto Limon refinery would have boosted crude processing capacity to 65,000 barrels per day from 18,000 bpd.

Costa Rica made the surprise move in 2007 of breaking off its decades-long relations with Taiwan, now recognised only by a handful of small countries, including the rest of Central America. China claims self-ruled Taiwan as a wayward province, to be brought under its control by force if needed.
0-Oil rises as Kuwaiti strike cuts output for third day

By Devika Krishna Kumar

NEW YORK, April 19 (Reuters) - Oil prices jumped more than 3 percent on Tuesday after a strike by workers in Kuwait nearly halved the OPEC member's crude production, overshadowing bearish sentiment after Sunday's failure by producers to agree to freeze output levels.

Thousands of Kuwaiti oil workers remained on strike for a third day on Tuesday to protest against planned public sector pay reform. The action cut crude output to 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd), according to an oil spokesman cited by news agency KUNA.

That is little more than half of Kuwait's average output of 2.8 million bpd in March.

Traders said other factors that supported prices included reports of power outages leading to output declines of about 200,000 bpd in Venezuela and a pipeline fire in Nigeria that may have cut production by 400,000 bpd, along with the upcoming refinery maintenance season.

"The Kuwait strike in particular is a major factor. It was a bolt out of the blue in terms of how much oil came off the market so quickly," said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital, a New York energy hedge fund.

"Usually these things have a ramp-down period but this seems to be able to flick a switch ... It's supportive for the market for now."

A spokesman for the Kuwaiti oil and gas workers said on Tuesday their strike would continue until planned public sector pay reforms are canceled.

Brent crude futures settled up $1.12 at $44.03 a barrel while U.S. crude settled $1.30 higher at $41.08.

Oil pared some gains in post settlement trading after data from industry group American Petroleum Institute (API) showed U.S. crude stocks rose more than was anticipated, last week.

Short covering added to a rally catalyzed by the S&P 500 index crossing a key level that triggered buying in oil.

Analysts said Kuwait's disruption would likely be brief and expect prices to be pressured again as the market is likely to refocus on the oversupply given the failure of major exporters on Sunday to agree to freeze output to avoid worsening the glut.

A deal to freeze oil output by OPEC and non-OPEC producers fell apart at the weekend meeting in Doha after Saudi Arabia demanded Iran join in despite calls on Riyadh to save the agreement and help prop up crude prices.

Iran has repeatedly said it would prioritize regaining pre-sanctions crude output levels over discussing an output freeze.

Tehran's crude oil exports have risen to around 1.75 million bpd so far in April, according to an industry source and shipping data. Exports averaged about 1.6 million bpd in March
Australia's Turnbull bets his political future on a difficult budget

By Byron Kaye and Ian Chua

SYDNEY, April 19 (Reuters) - Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Tuesday gambled his political fate on a budget that he hopes will shore up his dwindling appeal with voters without blowing out the country's budget deficit.

With an early election in July a near certainty, Turnbull also hopes to silence increasingly loud accusations of dithering after his government suggested several new revenue-raising measures only to rule them out later.

Hikes on tobacco tax, closing tax loopholes for wealthy pensioners and limiting corporate tax havens are among the cash-raising measures the conservative leader has left open to possibility, according to local media reports.

Under Australian electoral rules, Turnbull was free to call a vote anytime until January 2017, but he has been anxious to revamp a Senate dominated by unaligned minor parties and the centre-left opposition Labor party.

After the Senate voted down a controversial labour reform bill on Monday, he used a rare constitutional mechanism, only allowed in Australia after the upper house rejects a bill twice, to dissolve both houses of parliament and put them to a vote.

In the meantime, he will try to deliver a budget that can make good on promises to guide the country through a once-in-a-generation commodities downturn and into a new phase of tech-savvy entrepreneurship.

He expects to deliver all that without growing a national deficit already expected to hit A$37.4 billion ($29.1 billion) in fiscal 2016 and last another five years.

"This is his chance to say 'I do have policies and we do have a plan'," said Annette Beacher, Chief Asia-Pacific Macro Strategist at TD Securities.

"He's been losing ground in the polls because everyone thinks he doesn't have a plan, so this is big for Turnbull."

SIX LEADERS IN SIX YEARS?

A campaign effectively lasting 74 days is double Australia's conventional five-week window and adds to a sense of instability that has been battering the country's Federal government for half a decade.

Before Australia's last general election in 2013, another former prime minister, Julia Gillard, announced a September poll date in January of that year, 228 days in advance and lasting a quarter of her three-year term.

If Turnbull loses on July 2, Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten will be the country's sixth leader since 2010 - and the sixth to be introduced to U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Nevertheless, business groups said the gambit may stabilise sentiment.

"The idea of minor parties holding government to ransom does not create the best climate in which business can operate," Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry spokeswoman Patricia Forsythe said, referring to the Senate deadlock.

Council of Small Business Australia CEO Peter Strong said that, while his members face a longer election campaign, "we've got a budget. The community gets to see what they're doing... and then we see the opposition's response".

Paul Bloxham, HSBC's chief economist of Australia & New Zealand, said Turnbull has made clear the government won't be delivering a lot of sweeteners.

"It is going to be a budget that focuses on consolidating the budget position," he said.
China looks to broaden free trade agreement with New Zealand

BEIJING, April 19 (Reuters) - China aims to expand an existing free trade agreement with New Zealand, Premier Li Keqiang told Prime Minister John Key during a meeting in Beijing, state media said on Tuesday.

New Zealand was the first OECD country to sign a free trade agreement with China, in 2008, and China became New Zealand's largest export market in 2014.

"China will work to expand trade within the framework of the FTA and create conditions on broadening the agreement," the official China Daily paraphrased Li as telling Key.

China will also expand cooperation overall with New Zealand, in areas such as agriculture and food safety, Li added.

The report quoted Key as saying he will also work to upgrade the free trade agreement. The newspaper gave no further details.

The move comes as New Zealand and 11 other advanced economies accounting for 40 percent of the global economy have signed the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), to which China is not a party.

Beijing has been keen to shore up bilateral trade deals and promote the 16-member Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in the face of TPP, concerned by Washington's effort to reshape and liberalise Asia's trade rules.
Afghan president says several killed and wounded in Kabul blast

KABUL, April 19 (Reuters) - A number of people were killed and wounded in a blast that rocked central Kabul during the morning rush hour on Tuesday, President Ashraf Ghani said, an attack that apparently targeted the offices of Afghanistan's main security agency.

The Presidential Palace condemned the attack "in the strongest possible terms" and said in a statement a number of people had been killed or wounded.

A spokesman for an emergency hospital in the city said the facility had received eight lightly wounded Afghan soldiers.
Turkish police detain 28 people over links to Gulen movement - Anatolia

ISTANBUL, April 19 (Reuters) - Turkish police on Tuesday detained 28 people on allegations of being members of a movement led by U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen in an operation launched in 28 provinces, state-run Anatolia Agency said.

The group included journalists, lawyers and police officers, and prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for 64 people in the investigation, Anadolu said.

President Tayyip Erdogan accuses Gulen of setting up a 'parallel state' and conspiring to unseat the government with a network of supporters in the judiciary, police and media.

Gulen, whose adherents run schools and are active in the media industry, denies the charges.
Police at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee have removed six rainbow colored nooses - widely seen as a symbol of racial hatred - hanging from a tree on campus.

Police on Monday took down the row of nooses found near the university fine arts building on the main campus in Clarksville, Tennessee, after receiving several complaints, the school said in a statement.

'This incident is deeply disturbing and is hurtful to our university community,' said university president Alisa White. 'I am saddened, and I am sorry for the hurt and offense this has caused.'

Scroll down for video

On Monday, authorities at Austin Peay State University took down this display of rainbow-colored nooses found hanging on a campus tree

Austin Peay is a four-year public university located in Clarksville, Tennessee. The student population is 63 per cent white and 20 per cent African-American, according to the College Board

The intent of the display, especially in the multicolored style suggesting a link to the gay pride movement, was unclear.

The noose is a symbol of racial hatred in the United States, where thousands of blacks were lynched in a dozen states including Tennessee between 1877 and 1950, according to a 2015 Equal Justice Initiative report.

High-profile police killings of unarmed black men in the last two years have triggered waves of protest and heightened awareness of racism and discrimination in the United States.

Speculation on social media suggested the display might be a student art project meant to highlight the struggles facing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community with suicide, given that the nooses were the same colors found in the LGBT rainbow flag.

'Suicides in the LGBT community is an epidemic,' one Facebook poster wrote. 'You have the attention of the people, that is what art is about.'

The student population is 63 per cent white, 20 per cent African-American, and six per cent Hispanic, according to the College Board. That's slightly more diverse than the state at large, which has a 77 per cent white population, 17.4 per cent Hispanic population and 13.2 per cent Black population, according to the most recent Census figures.

In March, a former University of Mississippi student pleaded guilty to a federal civil rights charge, admitting to his role in draping a noose around the neck of a statue of the school's first black student, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
Czech Republic - Factors To Watch on April 19

PRAGUE, April 19 (Reuters) - Here are news stories, press reports and events to watch which may affect Czech financial markets on Tuesday. ALL TIMES GMT (Czech Republic: GMT + 2 hours) ===========================ECONOMIC DATA======================== Real-time economic data releases................... Previous stories on Czech data............ Overview of economic data and forecasts......... Updates on CEE currencies........................... ] ==========================EVENTS================================ PRAGUE - Telecoms company O2 Czech Republic to hold annual general meeting. Vote on dividend on agenda. The board has proposed a 16 crown per share payout. Related news ==========================NEWS================================== EPH: Czech investor EPH has agreed to buy the loss-making lignite coal mines and associated power plants in Germany from state-owned Swedish utility Vattenfall as it bets on a recovery in European power prices. Story: Related stories: BONDS: The Czech Finance Ministry will offer up to 10 billion crowns ($418.52 million) worth of domestic government bonds in two primary auctions taking place in May, the ministry said on Monday. Story: Related stories: BANKS: Czech banks expect a further easing of credit standards for corporate and consumer lending in the second quarter, while conditions for mortgages are expected to tighten, a central bank survey showed on Monday. Story: Related stories: STOCK SPIRITS: Vodka maker Stock Spirits Group Plc removed its chief executive of seven years, bowing to pressure from its largest individual shareholder. Story: Related stories: CEE MARKETS: Central European stocks and currencies mostly fell on Monday after oil producers failed to agree a cut in supply and the price of crude dropped. Story: Related stories: ---------------------- MARKET SNAPSHOT ------------------------ Index/Crown Currency Latest Prev Pct change Pct change close on day in 2016 vs Euro 27.018 27.02 0.01 -0.07 vs Dollar 23.834 23.886 0.22 4.13 Czech Equities 904.65 904.65 -0.22 -5.4 U.S. Equities 18,004.16 17,897.46 0.6 3.32 Pvs close or current levels vs prior domestic close at 1500 GMT ========================PRESS DIGEST============================ CARS: Czech car production rose by 2 percent in the first quarter to 349,766 vehicles. Production at Volkswagen's Skoda Auto, the biggest carmaker, dropped 3 percent, according to data from the Automotive Industry Association. Pravo, page 19 Reuters has not verified the stories, nor does it vouch for their accuracy. For Instant Views of key economic data click on For summary of economic data and forecasts For diary of forthcoming Czech events For calendar of east European economic indicators TOP NEWS -- Emerging markets TOP NEWS -- Convergence watch For an economic indicator diary for the euro zone, the United States and other Group of Seven countries see For real-time stock market index quotes click in brackets: Warsaw WIG20 Budapest BUX Prague PX Prague Newsroom: +420 224 190 477 E-mail: prague.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (Reporting by Prague Newsroom)
Spain arrests Moroccan accused of links to Islamist militants

MADRID, April 19 (Reuters) - Spanish police arrested a Moroccan man on the island of Mallora early on Tuesday on suspicion of having close links to Islamist militants, the Interior Ministry said in statement.

The man, who was not named, is also accused of recruiting fighters to join forces in Syria and Iraq and of being in charge of commissioning potential attacks in Spain and across Europe, the ministry said.

"The police operation, which has meant the rapid neutralisation of a direct threat, remains ongoing," it said.
Papua New Guinea LNG projects see opportunity in tough market

By Sonali Paul

MELBOURNE, April 19 (Reuters) - As liquefied natural gas (LNG) producers despair over a supply glut, two projects in Papua New Guinea are pressing on in a bid to sign off on new developments by 2018 to take advantage of a drop in construction costs and high quality gas.

France's Total SA said this week it could build the country's second LNG plant for $10 billion, well below industry estimates, while Australia's Oil Search Ltd, which aims to expand in the region, said it expected new projects would have no trouble attacting lenders.

The push is in stark contrast to moves by rivals to shelve or delay LNG projects from Australia to Canada following an 80 percent slump in prices amid a flood of new supply just as demand has slowed.

Papua New Guinea has an advantage over Australian and U.S. gas as it is liquids rich, which creates extra revenue, it is closer to the world's biggest LNG markets in Japan, South Korea and China, and the gas has a higher heating value.

ExxonMobil Corp is already weighing an expansion of its PNG LNG plant, which has been exporting for two years and is now producing at an annual rate of 8 million tonnes.

In its first public comments on cost, rival Total said a second plant, dubbed Papua LNG, could be built for $10 billion, at least 25 percent below analysts' estimates.

"We intend to build our own facilities. It will be a big project - about $10 billion and 10,000 people will have jobs," Chief Executive Patrick Pouyanne was quoted saying in two PNG newspapers on Monday following talks with PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill.

Oil Search, a partner in both Papua LNG and ExxonMobil's PNG LNG, said on Tuesday it expects to be able to fund its share of any new PNG developments.

"Based on soundings with financial institutions ... significant debt funding appears to be available for good quality projects such as these potential developments, despite the weaker oil price," it said in its quarterly report.

For a 7-million-tonnes-a-year project using gas from the Elk and Antelope fields, $10 billion would imply a cost of around $1,425 a tonne, compared with previous estimates from Papua LNG partner InterOil Corp of a cost of around $2,000 to $2,100 a tonne.

"That is low," Neil Beveridge, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research, said in an email, adding: "We certainly believe that project could be one of the lowest cost in the region."

Oil Search declined to comment, deferring to Total as operator of the project. A Total spokesman told Reuters the cost estimate referred to the entire project, not just Total's share.

TIME TO INVEST

Pouyanne said last week now is the time to invest in new LNG plants, as projects will be able to negotiate cheaper construction costs with contractors as a raft of ongoing projects are completed over the next two years.

"Frankly for a major company like Total, the best strategy is to invest when prices are low because then the costs are low," he told reporters at a conference last week.

Oil Search wants the Papua LNG and PNG LNG projects to work together, to prevent wasting money the way LNG producers have on the east coast of Australia building three competing projects side by side.

UBS analyst Nik Burns estimates a stand-alone Papua LNG project would cost $15 billion and an expansion of PNG LNG would cost $9 billion, while tying them together could cut the combined costs by at least 10 percent.
Slovak Republic - Factors To Watch on April 19

BRATISLAVA, April 19 (Reuters) - Here are news stories, press reports and events to watch which may affect Slovak financial markets on Tuesday. ALL TIMES GMT (Slovak Republic: GMT + 1 hours) =========================ECONOMIC DATA======================== Real-time economic data releases................... Previous stories on Slovak data............ Overview of economic data and forecasts......... ==========================EVENTS================================ BRATISLAVA - Slovakia's central bank governor Jozef Makuch and finance minister Peter Kazimir will address a business conference at 1000 GMT. Related news: ===========================NEWS================================ FAR-RIGHT EXTREMISM: A Slovak far-right party demanded a minute's silence in parliament on Monday to mark what it called the murder of the head of the Slovak wartime Nazi puppet state who was hanged for treason in 1947; the chamber's head refused the move. Story: Related news: PRIME MINISTER'S HEALTH: Prime Minister Robert Fico is to remain at a specialist clinic until at least the end of this week after suffering chest pains last week and will therefore miss presenting the new cabinet's programme in parliament on Monday. Story: Related news: BOND AUCTION: Slovakia sold 190.0 million euros ($214.72 million) worth of 1.625 percent state bonds due in January 2031 at an auction on Monday, the finance ministry's Debt and Liquidity Management Agency (ARDAL) said. Story: Related news: BOND AUCTION: Slovakia sold 177.4 million euros ($200.62 million) worth of 1.50 percent state bonds due in November 2018 at an auction on Monday, the finance ministry's Debt and Liquidity Management Agency (ARDAL) said. Story: Related news: BOND AUCTION: Slovakia sold 113.0 million euros ($127.72 million) worth of 1.375 percent state bonds due in November 2027 at an auction on Monday, the finance ministry's Debt and Liquidity Management Agency (ARDAL) said. Story: Related news: For Instant Views of key economic data click on For summary of economic data and forecasts For diary of forthcoming Slovak events For calendar of east European economic indicators TOP NEWS -- Emerging markets TOP NEWS -- Convergence watch For real-time stock market index quotes click in brackets: Warsaw WIG20 Budapest BUX Prague PX News editor of the day: Jan Lopatka on +420 224 190 474 E-mail: prague.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (Reporting by Prague Newsroom)
Italy's Vicenza aims low in IPO, punishing small investors

By Valentina Za and Silvia Aloisi

MILAN, April 19 (Reuters) - Italy's Banca Popolare di Vicenza effectively wiped out the savings of thousands of its small shareholders on Tuesday when the struggling lender set a price range for its initial public offer which valued its stock at a fraction of what they paid.

Shocked retail investors voiced anger and disbelief, accusing the bank's management and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's government of inflicting losses on unwitting ordinary citizens who bore no responsibility for the lender's troubles.

"I have received calls from two dozen people in tears and threatening desperate measures because it's only sinking in now that they have lost everything," said Andrea Arman, a lawyer who heads an association of Popolare di Vicenza shareholders.

Arman said his own family had invested more than 1 million euros ($1.13 million) in the bank's shares. He estimated their current value at around 10,000 euros.

"It's even worse than we had expected. Not only our shares are essentially worth zero now, we also don't have a say whatsoever in what is happening. We feel scorned and humiliated by the bank and the government," he added.

Italy's eighth largest bank must raise 1.76 billion euros and list on the stock market to plug a capital shortfall revealed by the European Central Bank and avert the threat of being wound down after big losses.

It has 119,000 shareholders of whom 90 percent are retail investors.

BURDEN ON ATLAS?

The bank set an unusually wide range of 0.10 to 3 euros per share, saying investor interest during the pre-marketing phase was too weak to be more precise. The floor price is not binding so the final price could even fall below 10 euro cents.

Only a year ago, the bank sold shares at 48 euros apiece to many of its own customers in marketing exercises that are now under investigation in its hometown of Vicenza in northern Italy. In 2014, it was selling its shares for as much as 62.5 euros each.

The share sale, at least half of which is reserved for professional investors, is expected to start this week ahead of the bank's market listing in Milan which is likely to be in the first week of May.

It comes at a turbulent time for Italian banking shares , which have lost 30 percent this year due to concerns about the sector's high levels of soured loans.

A 5 billion euro fund called Atlante -- Atlas in English -- was set up last week by predominantly private-sector investors to bail out struggling Italian lenders and prevent a wider crisis developing in the euro zone's fourth-largest banking industry.

Analysts at brokerage ICBPI said a newly created fund would likely have to mop up the Popolare di Vicenza share sale for no less than 1 billion euros.

Atlas on Monday replaced UniCredit as the guarantor of the issue.

As an unlisted lender, Popolare di Vicenza used to be able to decide the price of its own shares. Until last year the value of the stock had been rising steadily, inflating the bank's capitalisation well above that of listed rivals.
German police arrest five suspected far-right militants

BERLIN, April 19 (Reuters) - German police arrested five people near Dresden on Tuesday who they suspected of forming a far-right militant group and preparing attacks on asylum seekers using explosives, the public prosecutor's office said.

Over 200 police and state officials were involved in the swoop to arrest the five, aged between 18 and 39, who are suspected of plotting to bomb shelters housing asylum seekers.
Swedish FSA, Riksbank at odds over roles in policing economy

STOCKHOLM, April 19 (Reuters) - Sweden's Financial Supervisory Authority said on Tuesday it - and not the central bank - should get an expanded role in policing the economy, deepening a rift between the two over who should take charge in heading off any future financial crisis.

With soaring household debt levels and real estate prices, Sweden has been locked in a debate about how to prevent imbalances from building up and threatening the health of the economy.

A report earlier this year recommended that the government review both the Riksbank's mandate and the framework for financial oversight, giving the central bank more power, a move the Financial Supervisory Authority rejected.

"The responsibility for macro prudential oversight should lie with the FSA," FSA Director General Erik Thedeen and Chairman Sven-Erik Osterberg said in a signed article in daily Dagens Nyheter.

"The Riksbank's independent role is suitable for monetary policy, but not for decisions where clearly political considerations are necessary."

The FSA said that Sweden's Financial Stability Council, which comprises the watchdog, the Riksbank, the Finance Ministry and Debt Office, should have a key role and that democratic oversight of measures that would impact the wallets of ordinary Swedes was necessary.

The two agencies have been locked in a battle over financial oversight following the financial crisis of 2008. The government handed financial policing powers to the FSA in 2013.

But the lack of measures to head off a damaging housing bubble has frustrated the Riksbank and the two agencies have repeatedly clashed.

Earlier this year, FSA chief Thedeen sent a letter to the Riksbank complaining that the central bank was stepping on the watchdog's toes over regulating banks' liquidity requirements.

The FSA said tighter mortgage rules - delayed by uncertainty over the watchdog's legal powers - were now on the way, but that more might be needed to cool the housing market.

"The FSA, therefore, needs broader powers," Thedeen and Osterberg said.

In its response to the monetary policy review by former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King and U.S. academic Marvin Goodfriend, the Riksbank said it should be given more power over financial oversight, although it did not go into specific details.
Glencore, Tohoku set coal contract, but benchmark fades

TOKYO, April 19 (Reuters) - Glencore and Tohoku Electric Power set a Australian thermal coal import price 9 percent below last year, although the traditional benchmark for industry pricing appears to be breaking down, sources said on Tuesday.

The contract price for the financial year beginning April 1 was set at $61.60 per tonne, down from $67.80 a year ago, four sources said, reflecting a global supply glut for thermal coal but still well above current spot prices.

The Tohoku/Glencore price has often set the benchmark for other Japanese utilities, but industry sources said the pricing mechanism was coming under pressure amid a shakeup of Japan's electricity market that has increased competition.

"What is happening this year is the traditional Japanese benchmark system is collapsing," said a source familiar with the negotiations. "We are hearing there will be different prices depending on where the coal comes from and also volumes."

Another source with direct knowledge of the matter said there were other contracts with lower prices, including ones below $60 per tonne, depending on where coal is mined.

"Given higher competition in the face of the liberalisation of Japan's retail electricity power market, buyers' evaluations and negotiations have become more strict," the source said.

"The utilities are not buying coal just by calories any more, but are trying to set different prices to reflect their evaluation of each mine," he added.

Competition among Japanese power and city gas utilities intensified this month when the companies lost their monopoly control over the retail power market.

A Tohoku spokesman said the company had reached an agreement with Glencore, but declined to comment further. Glencore was not immediately available for comment.

Australia accounts for about three-quarters of Japan's thermal coal imports. Shipments reached 86.8 million tonnes in 2015, with about 50 million tonnes covered by annual contracts.

Other potential buyers said they were slightly disappointed with the Glencore-Tohoku price, as spot coal has been traded at below $55 a tonne due to slow demand in Asia.

Asian benchmark thermal coal from Australia's Newcastle terminal fell about 14 percent in the financial year to March 31, settling at $54.19 a tonne. The price has lost more than 60 percent since early 2011.

"The agreed price came a bit high, but Japanese utilities need to accept higher prices so that producers can stay in business and supply high-quality coal for a long-term," one buyer said.

Coal producer Peabody Energy Corp filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection last week after a sharp drop in coal prices left it unable to service debt of $10.1 billion, much of it incurred for expansion in Australia.
Austrian presidential polls to rattle centrists, buoy right wing

By Kirsti Knolle and Shadia Nasralla

VIENNA, April 19 (Reuters) - Austrian voters look set to shake the foundations of the centrist coalition government in a presidential election on Sunday and may give yet another boost to the anti-Islam Freedom Party as Europe's migrant crisis rumbles on.

The president plays a largely ceremonial role from offices in the imperial Hofburg palace. But he or she is head of state, swears in the chancellor, has the authority to dismiss the cabinet and is commander in chief of the military.

Members of the centre-left Social Democrats and the conservative People's Party have filled the job since it was first put to a popular vote in 1951. The two parties have ruled the nation of 8.7 million in tandem for most of the postwar era.

But Austrians are fed up with political cockfighting, including bickering between Social Democrat Chancellor Werner Faymann and conservative Vice-Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner, and appear to be looking elsewhere for their new head of state.

The migrant crisis, which has seen around 100,000 asylum seekers arrive in Austria since last summer, has dominated the campaign from which two front-runners have emerged.

Alexander van der Bellen, a 72-year-old Greens Party veteran, has criticised the government for being too harsh in its treatment of asylum applicants, while right-wing Freedom Party (FPO) candidate Norbert Hofer says it has been too soft.

Hofer got 24 percent support in a recent poll by market researcher OGM, while van der Bellen got 25 percent as his lead over his rival shrinks.

If neither win a majority in the first round on April 24, a run-off vote will be held.

"Presidential elections are considered less important than other elections, and that's why people use them as a way to teach politicians a lesson," said Eva Zeglovits, opinion researcher at the IFES institute.

Hofer, a 45-year-old shooting fan, has called Europe's deal on migrants with Turkey "fatal" and does not want neutral Austria, a major destination for refugees from the Middle East and Afghanistan, to become a land of immigration.

The candidates from the centrist parties, one in their 60s and the other their 70s, were floundering on about 11 and 15 percent in the OGM poll.

"Only the fear of forthcoming elections and the immigration crisis bind the two (centrist) parties together," independent political consultant Thomas Hofer said.

Recent polls for parliamentary elections, due to take place in 2018, show the Freedom Party above 30 percent, while the coalition parties would struggle to get a combined majority.

Van der Bellen has opposed the FPO's EU-critical stance and said he would not swear FPO head Heinz-Christian Strache in as chancellor.

The far-right FPO's criticism of the EU has also irked independent candidate Irmgard Griss - a former high court chief justice who headed a hard-hitting inquiry into Austria's biggest banking disaster and is the only woman running. She is polling at around 20 percent.
Gun and grenade attackers kills woman in Burundi bar

NAIROBI, April 19 (Reuters) - Attackers armed with guns and grenades burst into a bar and opened fire, killing a woman and seriously wounding three other customers in Burundi's capital Bujumbura on Monday night, police said.

Officers said they were still investigating the motive for the attack in Ngagara neighbourhood, near a base housing police officers in charge of protecting government offices.

Retaliatory attacks between President Pierre Nkurunziza's security forces and his opponents have escalated since April 2015 when he announced a disputed bid for a third term and then won re-election in July.

Nkurunziza's opponents said his decision violated the constitution and a peace deal that ended the central African country's 1993-2005 civil war. The government cited a subsequent court ruling that said he could run again.

"Three people in civilian clothes and armed with guns and grenades burst into a bar opened fire on a group of people who were having beer there. One lady died instantly three others were serious injured," Deputy Police Spokesman Moise Nkurunziza told Reuters.

"If it was just robbery, they would have taken money and not killed innocent people," he added. "Let's wait the outcome of investigations."

U.N. officials have said the crisis risks pushing Burundi back to the kind of ethnically charged conflict that characterised the war, in which 300,000 people died.

About 250,000 people have fled since violence erupted, most to border camps in neighbouring Tanzania and more than 400 people have been killed in the ensuing violence, according to estimates by the U.N. and rights groups.
China rejects U.S. query on military flight to disputed island

BEIJING, April 19 (Reuters) - China's Defence Ministry on Tuesday rejected queries by the U.S. military as to why China had used a military aircraft to evacuate sick workers from a new airport on an island China has built in the disputed South China Sea.

CNN quoted Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis as saying it was unclear why China had used a military aircraft rather than a civilian one in the landing on Fiery Cross Reef.

China's Defence Ministry said in a statement its military's tradition was to help those in need as part of its commitment to "wholeheartedly serve the people".

"In sharp contrast, the U.S. side is expressing doubts about whether it's a military or civilian aircraft at a time when somebody's life is in danger," it said.

"We cannot but ask: if a U.S. citizen suddenly took ill on U.S. soil, would the U.S. military look on with folded arms?"

China has indisputable sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and the United States has no right to comment on China's building works and defensive facilities there, the ministry said.

Chinese activity in disputed waters of the South China Sea, including the construction of islands by dredging up sand onto reefs and shoals in the Spratly archipelago, has alarmed rival claimants, in particular the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as the United States.

The United States has repeatedly criticised the construction of the islands and worries that China plans to use them for military purposes. China says it has no hostile intent.

The runway on the Fiery Cross Reef is 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) long and is one of three China has been building for more than a year in the archipelago.

Civilian flights began test runs there in January but the landing by the military aircraft, on Sunday, was the first time China has publicly reported a flight by a military plane to Fiery Cross Reef.
Lotte Shopping to pull out from auction of Casino's Vietnam retail chain -sources

SEOUL/SINGAPORE, April 19 (Reuters) - South Korea's Lotte Shopping is pulling out of French retailer Casino's auction of its Big C Vietnam supermarket chain, people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

A spokesman for Lotte Group, which controls Lotte Shopping, declined to comment. There was no immediate comment from Casino.

One of the sources said that Lotte was not keen to bid aggressively for Big C Vietnam, which has attracted companies including Thailand's Central Group. The sale could fetch about $1 billion, people familiar with the matter have said.

The sources declined to be identified as the information was not public.

Last month, one person close to the matter said that Casino had received more than 10 offers for the sale of its interests in Vietnam.
UK minister attacks colleagues for patronising voters in EU debate

LONDON, April 19 (Reuters) - Britain's justice minister will accuse his colleagues in government on Tuesday of treating voters like children, saying they are trying to scare them into voting to stay in the European Union "by conjuring up new bogeymen every night".

Michael Gove, a friend of pro-EU Prime Minister David Cameron, will use a speech to criticise "In" campaigners including several top ministers, deepening a rift in the ruling Conservatives before a June 23 referendum on membership of the bloc.

He will also attack a report delivered on Monday by the country's finance minister, who said that an exit from the EU, or Brexit, could cost Britons thousands of pounds a year and sap funding for public services.

With British voters evenly split over whether to stay in the 28-member bloc, the campaign to convince the large numbers of undecideds has become increasingly fierce.

"The Remain campaign want us to believe that Britain is beaten and broken ... It treats people like mere children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night," Gove will say, according to excerpts of a speech he is due to make at a building overlooking Westminster.

He will criticise members of the "In" campaign for courting "real danger", saying Brussels wanted to take more power and money away from Britain.

In his most direct attack to date on the government, he will describe Osborne's report as "an official admission from the 'In' campaign that if we vote to stay in the EU then immigration will continue to increase by hundreds of thousands year on year".

The government, which wants to reduce immigration to the tens of thousands, says the country can only control its borders if it cooperates with the EU and has warned that thousands of refugees may flock to Britain from France if the country left.

Dominic Grieve, Conservative chair of parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, told BBC radio that Britain could control its borders.
Syrian peace talks must continue, Kremlin says

MOSCOW, April 19 (Reuters) - Russia unequivocally supports the continuation of Syrian peace talks in Geneva, the Kremlin said on Tuesday, commenting on the decision by the mainstream Syrian opposition to take a pause in the negotiations.

"We believe this (the peace talks) is a necessary condition," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a conference call with journalists.

"The need to continue this dialogue and maintain the ceasefire regime was stressed yesterday during the telephone conversation between President Putin and President Obama."
Bangladesh plans to more than triple oil refining capacity

DHAKA, April 19 (Reuters) - Eastern Refinery Ltd (ERL), which supplies around 40 percent of Bangladesh's fuel needs, said it plans to more than triple its oil-processing capacity with a 3.5 million tonne-a-year unit to help meet rising domestic demand.

The new unit at Patenga refinery in Chittagong will cost $1.7 billion, Nasrul Hamid Khan, Bangladesh's junior minister for power, energy and mineral resources, said on Tuesday.

The expansion will be mainly financed by ERL, according to a senior official of the ministry.

ERL, a subsidiary of state-run Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC), signed a deal on Tuesday with Engineers India Ltd, which will provide management consultant services for the expansion project.

The government will decide on the project developer through a tender.
Oman builds industrial outpost in desert to escape oil trap

By Andrew Torchia and Fatma Alarimi

DUQM, Oman, April 19 (Reuters) - On a stretch of barren coast 550 km (345 miles) south of the capital Muscat, workers at a ship repair yard swarm over cargo vessels from around the world, labour that will help to determine Oman's fate in an era of cheap oil.

The yard, owned by the government's Oman Drydock Co and operated by South Korea's Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co, is far from the country's industrial areas in the north.

But it's at the centre of the biggest single economic project in the history of Oman, part of efforts to wean the country off exports of crude oil and gas and diversify into downstream industries before the country's limited financial and oil reserves begin to run out.

The government is spending billions of dollars to develop the area around the remote fishing village of Duqm into a sprawling business zone, aiming to attract companies that will create tens of thousands of jobs.

In addition to the ship repair yard and its adjacent port, the Duqm Special Economic Zone will include an oil refinery, a petrochemical complex, manufacturing operations and warehousing and logistics facilities.

A fish processing district will become the focus of Oman's fishing industry. A tourism area aims to bring in hard currency from foreign visitors.

The strategy -- spend lavishly on infrastructure, jump-start key industries with state funds and lobby the private sector to participate -- carries substantial financial risks.

But it is a key plank of economic policy in Oman, a thinly populated country of just 4.4 million people that lacks the deep pockets of neighbouring oil exporters such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

"We are diversifying beyond hydrocarbons," said Saleh Hamood Ali al-Hasni, the executive in charge of handling investment applications at Duqm. "We have to create jobs for the people and attract foreign direct investment."

Other Gulf Arab oil exporting states have cut spending on infrastructure and development projects in the past 18 months as low oil prices have strained their finances.

Oman's finances have also been hit hard, but it does not have as much time as its neighbours. Its financial reserves are estimated in the tens of billions of dollars rather than hundreds, and its proven oil reserves will last only 15 years at the current rate of production, oil company BP estimates.

So the government is continuing to spend heavily on Duqm and other, smaller projects to move the economy beyond crude oil. Total state investment spending rose 5.5 percent from a year earlier to 2.81 billion rials ($7.3 billion) in the first 11 months of 2015, even as the government ran a budget deficit of 4.07 billion rials, the latest official data shows.

"Oman's infrastructure and industrial investment drive remain near the top of the government's agenda and key strategic projects, such as the vast Duqm port and economic zone, will go ahead," analysts at Eurasia Group said in a report.

SPENDING

Five years ago, Duqm had a population of about 3,000 villagers and no commercial air links to the rest of the world; workers coming from outside were housed in tents, portacabins or a retired cruise ship moored at the port.

Now, four-lane highways -- still almost empty of vehicles -- snake across the desert while power and water lines have been laid across scores of square kilometres. Housing complexes and commercial buildings are rising from the sand. An airport opened in 2014, but the passenger terminal is still under construction.

The area's population has risen to about 13,000, including workers, and is set to hit 67,000 in 2020, officials say. In the longer term, authorities talk of a city of 100,000 or more.

Financing all of this building is a challenge. The government has so far spent $1.2 billion and will find it hard to come up with the billions more that will be needed if oil prices stay low.

Hasni said the zone was looking at several options to raise money, including a possible bond issue and a loan from international banks, and had started generating fee income that would help it to finance itself.

A bigger challenge may be attracting enough private investment.

Duqm is marketing its location as an advantage; situated on the Arabian Sea near major shipping routes through the Red Sea to Asia and Africa, it is outside the crowded Strait of Hormuz, which is vulnerable when regional tensions rise.

But an important part of the vision is in doubt. The zone was to have been connected to the other Gulf Arab states by a 2,100 kilometre (1,310-mile) railway due to be built by 2018, allowing the port to receive imports for the entire region and transport them north by rail as far as Kuwait.

Governments' strained budgets have now delayed that project indefinitely, and Omani officials say they may instead focus on building a domestic rail network.

Companies from around the region have expressed their intention to invest $2.15 billion in Duqm, in sectors including housing, tourism, fisheries, commercial services and chemicals, said Hasni, the investment executive.

In a sign of how commercial links may develop in coming years, Iranian companies -- keen to expand after the lifting of economic sanctions on Tehran in January -- are the second biggest source of that investment after Omani firms.

In January, an Omani sovereign wealth fund and Iran's biggest auto maker, Khodro, agreed to study a proposal for a $200 million auto plant in Duqm, for example.
North Korea can learn from Iran nuclear deal, U.S. says

SEOUL, April 19 (Reuters) - North Korea, which conducted a fourth nuclear test in January in contravention of U.N. Security Council resolutions, can learn from a deal struck between Iran and world powers to freeze its nuclear programme, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday.

North Korea, which regularly threatens the United States and rich, democratic South Korea, also conducted a long-range rocket launch in February, defying U.N. sanctions.

The Security Council last month expanded those sanctions aimed at starving North Korea of funds for its weapons programme on a resolution drafted by the United States and China.

"Iran made a fundamental choice. It decided to freeze and roll back its nuclear programme and allow inspectors to come in and create the time and space to see if we could agree a comprehensive agreement," Blinken told reporters in Seoul.

Iran and six world powers clinched the nuclear agreement in July 2015, which allowed for the easing of sanctions imposed by the United States, European Union and United Nations in return for Tehran curbing its nuclear program.

"It's our hope that the DPRK will be inspired by that example," said Blinken, speaking after a meeting with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.

DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's official title.

Recent diplomatic progress between the United States and Cuba and Myanmar demonstrated U.S. willingness to engage with countries like North Korea, Blinken said.

"If a country, even one with which we've had the most profound differences, is prepared to engage seriously and credibly in answering the demands of the international community, we are also prepared to engage," Blinken said.

Blinken said on Monday the United States would respond strongly in the case of a further North Korean nuclear test, days after the North's failed attempt to launch what the United States believes was an intermediate-range ballistic missile.
Ruling expected on April 20 in Lebanon child kidnapping case

BEIRUT, April 19 (Reuters) - A Lebanese judge is expected to rule on Wednesday in the case of an Australian woman and TV crew charged with kidnapping her children from their father in Beirut following a custody dispute.

A judicial source said the case would likely be dismissed, with the father and mother reaching an out-of-court settlement that would result in the four-member television crew being fined and released. The children would remain with their father, the source said.

But a lawyer for the father suggested otherwise, saying there was no indication the case would be dropped.

The Australian "60 Minutes" television crew, the mother, two Lebanese and two Britons were charged with kidnapping on April 14 after the Lebanese authorities said they scuppered their attempt to take the woman's two children back to Australia.

CCTV footage broadcast on Lebanese television appeared to show several people grabbing the children, who the father said were aged five and three, from their grandmother and bundling them into a car.

Australia's Channel Nine television network said its crew was not connected to the people who grabbed the children, Australian media reported.

The mother was subsequently arrested and the children were returned to their father.

"We have faith that the Lebanese justice system will deal with this matter appropriately," Channel Nine said in a statement. "The Lebanese people we are dealing with on the ground have been welcoming, professional and are treating our people on the ground, with consideration and respect."

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said the case had been adjourned for a couple of days after a hearing on Monday "to enable the parties and their lawyers to try to negotiate some solution and that would obviously be the best outcome in the interests of the children and interests of the parents".

"We want to see all Australians detained brought home to Australia as soon as possible," she said.
Italy braces for summer migrant arrivals as EU solidarity wavers

By Steve Scherer

ROME, April 19 (Reuters) - Italy is bracing for an expected rush of boat migrants this summer as the European Union's failed relocation programme ratchets up pressure on the country's shelter system, a top immigration official said.

Mario Morcone, the official in charge of managing Italy's immigration system, told Reuters that arrivals were up slightly this year over 2015, when more than 150,000 migrants came by boat, mostly from Libya.

As of Monday, about 25,000 boat migrants had come to Italy, compared with just under 24,000 during the same period last year, an increase of 4.7 percent, according to the Interior Ministry.

With calmer seas now favouring more crossings, Italy is trying to create 150,000 spots for asylum seekers and migrants in its shelters, where 112,700 are already housed.

"It's getting more and more complicated to find places and open new immigration centres," Morcone said in his office at the Interior Ministry.

According to an EU relocation programme for refugees, up to 40,000 asylum seekers from Syria, Eritrea and Iraq can be shifted to other member countries over two years to help relieve pressure on Italy, a frontline state in Europe's worst immigration crisis since World War Two.

Since the plan took effect in October, however, Italy has found spots for just 560 people, Morcone said, because of a lack of solidarity from partners and the programme's focus on only the three nationalities it specifies.

"Member states are offering only a few spots, the procedures are very slow, and we can relocate only Eritreans. Syrians don't come here, and nor do Iraqis," Morcone said. "On the whole, the response ... is not what had been asked for."

Turkey and the EU last month sealed a controversial deal intended to halt illegal migration to Greece from Turkey in return for financial and political rewards for Ankara.

The deal aims to shut down a short sea corridor that brought over 850,000 refugees and migrants to Europe last year. Countries along the so-called "Balkan route" have closed their borders to stop movement there as well.

Italy is concerned that the migrant flow will shift after the agreement, with more boats coming to Italy from North Africa, and especially from Egypt.

"Already three or four boats have arrived from Egypt this year," Morcone said. "Egypt could be the main worry."

"Since there are people blocked in Greece, we fear that there will be a bypass either through Egypt or Albania or even from Morocco to Spain. We must wait and see how the situation evolves."

Because the Mediterranean sea journey to Italy mainly consists of young people from impoverished African countries seeking a better future, Europe must develop a long-term migrant policy focused on Africa.
Oil industry services group Aker to cut 280 jobs in Britain

LONDON, April 19 (Reuters) - Norwegian oil industry engineering group Aker Solutions is to cut around 280 jobs, 11 percent of its UK workforce, in its Aberdeen and London offices, the company said on Tueday, blaming poor market conditions.

Aker suspended dividend payments in February and warned market conditions would remain challenging as the slump in oil prices has led to reduced spending by oil companies.

"Aker Solutions (has begun) a consultation with employee representatives on reducing its UK Subsea workforce capacity because of a continued market slowdown," said a spokesman.

Aker has roughly 15,000 permanent employees worldwide, 2,500 of whom are based in Britain.
US leads 18 strikes against Islamic State in Iraq, Syria -statement

WASHINGTON, April 19 (Reuters) - The United States and its allies staged 17 strikes against Islamic State in Iraq and one in Syria on Monday in the coalition's latest operation against the militant group, the U.S military said in a statement.

The strikes in Iraq near eight cities were concentrated near Mosul, where seven strikes hit an Islamic State improvised explosive devices factory, three tactical units and three supply caches, among other targets, the Combined Joint Task Force said in the statement released on Tuesday.

Other strikes hit targets near Al Huwayjah, Al Baghdadi, Ar Rutbah, Kisik, Qayyarah, Sinjar and Tal Afar, it said.
Russia won't rush with structural reforms - PM

MOSCOW, April 19 (Reuters) - The Russian government should not rush to implement rapid structural reforms because this may extend the crisis for another few years and weigh heavily on the recession-battered economy and population, Russia's prime minister said on Tuesday.

"We will not conduct reforms at the expense of people," Dmitry Medvedev said to a rapturous applause in the lower chamber of Russia's parliament as he reported on the performance of his cabinet.

"Both people and the economy can bear only a certain speed and depth of reforms."

Russia is suffering hard from low world prices for its vital oil exports, and from Western economic sanctions imposed on Moscow over its role in the Ukraine crisis. But Medvedev said the government had no plans to resort to printing money to help bridge a budget gap.
U.N. envoy struggles to start Yemen talks, truce teeters on collapse

By Mohammed Ghobari

KUWAIT, April 19 (Reuters) - The U.N. envoy to Yemen sought on Tuesday to persuade Yemen's Houthi group to send representatives to peace talks in Kuwait as a shaky truce declared this month teetered near collapse, delegates said.

An advisor to the U.N. delegation in Kuwait said the Houthis had been "very positive" until two days ago and were agreed with envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed on almost everything.

"They have since completely changed and this has caused a shock (to Ould Cheikh Ahmed)," the aide, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters. The envoy was now working with the Houthis and the government to iron out the problems.

Houthi negotiators have stayed put in the capital Sanaa, demanding a ceasefire begun on April 10 be fully observed before travelling for the talks with envoys from Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's government in Kuwait.

The Houthis have also rejected a proposed agenda that stipulates they hand over heavy weapons and withdraw from areas they controls before a new government comprising all Yemeni forces is formed.

Any failure of the talks is likely to stoke intensified fighting between the Iran-allied Houthis and their ally, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, on the one side and Hadi supporters, backed by a Saudi-led Arab coalition, on the other.

Residents in Marib reported intensified fighting in the province east of Sanaa after fresh troop reinforcements loyal to Hadi arrived on Monday after training in Saudi Arabia

They also reported more fighting in Taiz in southwestern Yemen, despite the presence of ceasefire monitors, while Saudi-led warplanes flew over the Yemeni capital.

Delegates representing Hadi's government have threatened to leave Kuwait, accusing the Houthis of trying to impose new conditions on the talks. Officials said delegates were meeting at the emir's palace to decide on their next move.

The Houthis have observed a period of calm along the border with Saudi Arabia and exchanged prisoners with Riyadh, paving the way for Ould Cheikh Ahmed to draft a broad outline for the talks, which were due to start on Monday.

HUMANITARIAN DISASTER

The United Nations says the Yemen war has killed more than 6,200 people and displaced millions of people in the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula.

Al Qaeda and Islamic State have also exploited the war to widen their influence and gain more supporters in a country next door to Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter.

The Houthis complain that Hadi's forces are trying to exploit the truce to try to make gains on the ground in several provinces, while war planes from the Saudi-led alliance continued to fly over areas held by the group.

Teams of joint ceasefire monitors have been deployed in some areas, but the Houthis say they were still unable to curb continued violations of the truce.

Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Salam, in a Facebook posting on Monday, said his group had long been ready for a dialogue to bring peace to Yemen and stability to the entire region.

"Unfortunately, and since the April 11 (ceasefire), aggression had not stopped," he said.

Abdul-Salam said that one of the committees set up to monitor the ceasefire in the northern al-Jawf province had had a lucky escape from an air strike by the Saudi-led coalition.
German PEGIDA founder in court over hate speech

BERLIN, April 19 (Reuters) - The co-founder of Germany's anti-Islam PEGIDA group arrived at a Dresden court on Tuesday for his trial on incitement charges wearing large rectangular black glasses obscuring his eyes, apparently mocking German media and privacy rules.

Lutz Bachmann, a 43-year-old with drugs and burglary convictions, is charged with incitement for sending a Facebook post in which called refugees "cattle", "garbage" and "scumbags". He insists he is not racist.

Bachmann's dark glasses appeared to be mocking German media, described by PEGIDA as the "lying press", a Nazi term, as media are supposed to conceal the faces of suspects in some cases.

PEGIDA, short for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, forced itself onto Germany's political agenda last year with its anti-immigrant rallies that started in the eastern city of Dresden and spread to several other cities.

Bachmann, who briefly quit as leader of PEGIDA last year after pictures were printed of him posing with a Hitler moustache and haircut, shook hands outside the court with a handful of supporters, some holding Germany flags and placards.

One read: "We want a Germany out of the euro, out of the European Union, out of NATO and with true democracy". Another read: "(Chancellor Angela) Merkel to court!"

Prosecutors say he could face a prison term of between three months and five years.

"We accuse the defendant of insulting asylum seekers and refugees in a publicly accessible Facebook comment. In addition, he is said to have denied them an equal life in Germany," said state prosecutor Lorenz Haase.

At its height, just over a year ago, PEGIDA's twilight rallies drew tens of thousands of supporters, with many waving Germany flags and chanting xenophobic slogans. A rally on Dresden on Monday night drew about 3,000 people, German media reported.

Despite the influx of over 1 million migrants to Germany last year, the grassroots movement's appeal has waned. Support has shifted to the anti-immigrant right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) which has won seats in eight regional assemblies.
Serbia determined to join EU despite bloc's "problems"

By Aleksandar Vasovic

BELGRADE, April 19 (Reuters) - Serbia is determined to join European Union despite the bloc's "problems" but will do nothing to jeopardise its good relations with Russia, Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said.

Dacic is also deputy prime minister in Serbia's ruling coalition that is expected to win four more years in power in Sunday's general election.

The government opened negotiations on EU membership last December, and hopes to complete them by 2019, but opinion polls show Serbs are increasingly sceptical about the benefits of joining given the painful economic restructuring required.

Years of euro zone crisis and Britain's June referendum on whether to leave the bloc have also clouded the EU's image.

"Clearly, the EU has problems. There's no international institution without problems in its functioning," Dacic told Reuters in an interview on Monday evening.

"Serbia is neither Norway nor Switzerland to say it does not need the EU. (Brexit) is a danger to the EU, not to our determination to enter the EU," he said.

Serbia's ties with Russia, with which it shares Slav and Orthodox Christian history, and its link with rising power China, will not be harmed by plans for accession to the EU, Dacic said.

Serbia relies heavily on Russia for gas and sees Russia as an important market for its agricultural exports. It holds military exercises with both NATO countries and Russia and has no plans to join NATO.

In 2014, Serbia refused to join Western sanctions imposed on Moscow over its annexation of Ukraine's Crimea and its backing of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, despite EU pressure to align its foreign policy.

"Serbia has no intention of making any moves that would jeopardise its EU path, but neither will it make any moves that could jeopardise ties with our traditional friends, including Russia," Dacic said.
Turkey wants coalition help at Syrian border as IS rockets pummel town

By Orhan Coskun and Tulay Karadeniz

ANKARA, April 19 (Reuters) - Turkey may call on the U.S.-led coalition to take stronger action in its fight against Islamic State along its border with Syria, Turkish officials said on Tuesday, as the border town of Kilis came under rocket fire for a second straight day.

Turkish forces returned fire into an Islamic State-controlled region of Syria after three rockets hit Kilis, a security official said. No one was killed.

Mayor Hasan Kara told Reuters that three people were lightly wounded in the attack, one of them a Syrian national. On Monday four people were killed when five rockets landed in the town, including one that hit a teachers' dormitory.

As part of the U.S.-led coalition, NATO member Turkey is fighting Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq.

Separately on Tuesday, Turkish armed forces retaliated after a Turkish tank was hit by an Islamic State missile at the Bashiqa military camp in northern Iraq, where Turkish soldiers are training local forces to fight the insurgents.

CNN Turk said 32 Islamic State militants were killed.

Kilis has been hit by repeated rocket fire in recent weeks. The army has usually responded with artillery fire into Syria.

Last week more than 20 people were wounded in three straight days of rocket salvoes towards the town, where an estimated 110,000 Syrian refugees are housed.

"The terrorists, who staged the attacks, are mobile. They come to the border with motorcycles and fire rockets from there. It is not easy to hit moving targets," one senior security official said.

"The coalition is called in and they hit those targets from time to time. From now on, the coalition could be asked to hit those moving targets preemptively, this is something we are thinking about."

Part of the problem for Turkey is the sheer difficulty of using artillery against mobile opponents, an army official said.

"It is extremely hard to hit moving targets with a howitzer," the official said.

Since January, the military has hit 146 Islamic State targets across the border from Kilis, the Turkish defence minister said last week, with an estimated 362 militants killed and 123 wounded.

"From now on, we want to destroy them preemptively, without waiting for the rules of engagement," a senior government official said.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, together with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Council President Donald Tusk, is expected to visit the southeastern Turkish province of Gaziantep this weekend, which is also near the Syrian border.
Turkish warplanes hits Kurdish militant PKK targets in Iraq -statement

ANKARA, April 19 (Reuters) - Turkish warplanes struck targets of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in northern Iraq on Monday, the military said in a statement on Tuesday.

Thousands of militants and hundreds of civilians and soldiers have been killed since the PKK resumed its fight for Kurdish autonomy last summer, ending a 2-1/2-year ceasefire and shattering peace efforts.
Ukraine's Poroshenko hints at deal with Russia to swap pilot Savchenko

KIEV, April 19 (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Tuesday he and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin had agreed a framework for a deal to secure the release of Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko from a 22-year jail sentence in Russia.

The sentencing of two captured Russian servicemen in Ukraine on Monday fuelled speculation that they might be swapped for Savchenko, 34, who was found guilty of involvement in the killing of two Russian journalists in 2014 during Ukraine's separatist conflict. She has denied any involvement.

"Yesterday I initiated a conversation with Putin and based on preliminary preparations it seems to me we have managed to agree on a certain algorithm to free Nadezhda," Poroshenko told journalists.

The sentencing of the Russian soldiers "opens certain possibilities of initiating a swap. But I strongly urge no speculation about a timeframe for (her) return or future steps."

In her homeland, Savchenko is a regarded as a national hero and symbol of resistance to Russia, which annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in March 2014 after a Moscow-backed president was toppled during street protests in Kiev. Russia has also backed separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.

But many in Russia see her as a Ukrainian nationalist with the blood of civilians on her hands.

She was captured by pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine in June 2014 at the height of fighting there between the Kiev government's forces and Russian-backed separatists.

At her trial in Donetsk in Russia earlier this year she was accused of directing artillery fire that killed two Russian television journalists.

Poroshenko said he had spoken to Savchenko by telephone and that she had agreed to end a hunger strike she has been observing on-and-off since late last year.

Speculation that a deal might be afoot increased with the sentencing of two Russian soldiers, Alexander Alexandrov and his commander, Captain Yevgeny Yerofeyev, to 14 years in jail. The pair were captured almost a year ago in eastern Ukraine and subsequently charged with preparing "an act of terror".

Russia denies sending members of its military to help the rebels and says Alexandrov and Yerofeyev had quit their special forces unit to take part in Ukraine's conflict on their own initiative.

Last week Putin said he was in touch with Ukraine's leaders regarding the Savchenko case, but that "it's better not to get ahead of ourselves."

On Monday Poroshenko said Putin had agreed to grant Ukraine's Consul General in Rostov-on-Don access to Savchenko. One of her lawyers said the diplomat had visited the prisoner on Tuesday.
Syrian talks appear doomed as air strike kills dozens in market

By John Irish and Tom Perry

GENEVA/BEIRUT, April 19 (Reuters) - Syrian peace talks appeared all but doomed on Tuesday after air strikes killed about 40 people in a crowded vegetable market in rebel territory, with the opposition saying a truce was finished and it would keep out of negotiations indefinitely.

A monitoring group said it believed the strike on the market in Maarat al-Numan in Idlib province was the deadliest single attack since a partial ceasefire took effect on Feb. 27.

The main opposition HNC described the attack as a "dangerous escalation" which reinforced its decision a day earlier to suspend negotiations. France described the bloodshed as "another massacre".

A rescue worker said warplanes had simultaneously struck markets in two towns in Idlib killing at least 38 people in Maarat al-Numan and 10 others in nearby Kafr Nubl.

"We have more than 20 cars that have been moving dead and injured to hospitals in the area," said Ahmad Sheikho, a member of the civil defence corps, a rescue service operating in opposition-held territory.

The air strike, accompanied by intense fighting in other areas, appears to leave the fragile six-week-old ceasefire in tatters. The truce was brokered by the United States and Russia to pave way for the first peace talks attended by the warring factions since fighting began five years ago.

Those talks, taking place under U.N. auspices in Geneva, were already close to collapse after the opposition called a pause on Monday.

"There cannot be a political process which prolongs the life of this regime. We will not accept this," said Riad Hijab, chief coordinator for the main opposition HNC bloc. "We will fight under all circumstances, even with stones. And never give up."

So far, the opposition has been careful to say it is not pulling out of the talks altogether. Some members of its delegation will remain in Geneva for expert-level talks on technical issues like humanitarian aid and swapping prisoners.

But Hijab said he himself was leaving Geneva. There was no chance of returning to the main talks while the government broke the truce, blocked humanitarian access and ignored the issue of detainees, he said.

"ANOTHER MASSACRE"

It was not immediately clear whose aircraft were responsible for the air strikes. Both Syria's own air force and that of its Russian allies have been operating despite the truce.

"We learned today there had been another massacre this morning," French envoy Franck Gellet said in Geneva.

Damascus and Moscow say they are striking only territory held by Islamist fighters who are not covered by the ceasefire, but opposition groups dismiss this, saying the government and Russia use the Islamists to justify wider attacks.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said 37 people were killed in Maarat al-Numan and seven in Kafr Nubl. Many of the injured were in a serious condition and the death toll was expected to rise, it said.

Asked if it was the deadliest attack recorded since the ceasefire began, the Observatory's head, Rami Abdulrahman, said: "I believe so."

Ahmed al-Seoud, head of the 13th Division, a foreign-backed faction fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, also gave a death toll of about 40 in Maarat al-Numan and said 80 people were wounded.

The Syrian military could not immediately be reached for comment, and state news agency SANA made no mention of air strikes in Idlib.

As fighting raged and air strikes on rebel-held areas intensified, the opposition urged foreign states to supply them with the means to defend themselves, a reference to the anti-aircraft weapons long sought by insurgents.

U.S. President Barack Obama told Russia's Vladimir Putin in a phone call on Monday that Syria was starting to fray more rapidly. The two Cold War era super-powers are joint sponsors of the peace process and ceasefire, after intensifying diplomacy following Russia's decision last year to join the war, an intervention that tipped momentum Assad's way.

The Geneva talks aim to end a war that has killed more than 250,000 people, created the world's worst refugee crisis, allowed for the rise of the Islamic State group and drawn in regional and world powers.

Damascus blames the rebels for breaking the cessation of hostilities. Chief Syrian government negotiator Bashar Ja'afari said his team was pushing for an expanded government as a solution to the war, an idea rejected by the armed opposition which has fought for five years to oust Assad.

With fighting reported across much of northwest Syria on Tuesday, both sides were obdurate. The government says it is willing to negotiate on a national unity government that could include some opposition figures, but not on the question of Assad leaving power.

"Our mandate in Geneva stops at forming a national unity government," Ja'afari told Reuters. "We have no mandate whatsoever either to address the constitutional issue meaning establishing a new constitution or addressing parliamentary elections or addressing the fate of the presidency."

NO DATE TO RESUME TALKS

The opposition made clear its suspension of political talks was indefinite.

Still, a Western diplomat said it was important that the opposition delegation had not stormed out altogether.

"They have made this point...that they will not participate in formal meetings for perhaps a short period of time, but are open to continued discussions at the technical level."

Syrian forces backed by Russian warplanes launched a counter-attack against rebels in the northwestern province of Latakia, a rebel group and the Observatory reported.

Targets included towns and villages where the truce agreement had brought about a lull in fighting. Fighters predicted more bloodshed.

"Let's be realistic. The escalation will start," said Bashar al-Zoubi, a rebel leader.

Ahmed Al-Seoud, the head of another rebel group, said he hoped for more military support from Assad's foreign enemies.

Rockets fired by insurgents killed three children in Kefraya, a Shi'ite town loyal to the government, the Observatory said. State media said the dead were members of one family.

Fighting in Latakia focused on areas where insurgent groups had launched an attack on government forces on Monday, and where battles had often erupted despite the cessation of hostilities.

"The regime is trying to storm the area, with the participation of Russian helicopters and Sukhoi (warplanes)," said Fadi Ahmad, spokesman for the First Coastal rebel group in the area.

The Observatory said fighting had raged since morning. Government air strikes were also reported in northern areas of Homs province under rebel control.
U.N. warns of Western Sahara war if peacekeeping mission ends

By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS, April 19 (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has recommended extending the mandate of a peacekeeping mission in the disputed territory of Western Sahara for a year, warning that the conflict there was in danger of reigniting, according to a new report.

"The risk of a rupture of the ceasefire and a resumption of hostilities, with its attendant danger of escalation into full-scale war, will grow significantly in the event that MINURSO is forced to depart or finds itself unable to execute the mandate that the Security Council has set," Ban said in the report, which was seen by Reuters on Tuesday.

Morocco expelled dozens of U.N. staff from the mission in Western Sahara, known as MINURSO, after Ban last month referred to the North African nation's 1975 annexation of the region from Spain as an "occupation."

Morocco has said its decisions were irreversible but that it was still committed to peace.

In his annual report to the U.N. Security Council, Ban urged the 15-nation body to ensure the resumption of full operations of MINURSO, which has been crippled by the staff reduction and closure of a military liaison office.

He said the resulting vacuum "can be expected to be exploited by terrorist and radical elements."

"I call on the Security Council to restore and support the mandated role of MINURSO, uphold peacekeeping standards and the impartiality of the United Nations, and, most importantly, avoid setting a precedent for United Nations peacekeeping operations around the world," he said.

The Security Council is scheduled to vote next week on whether to renew MINURSO's mandate.

The controversy over Ban's "occupation" comment, made during a visit to refugee camps for Sahrawi people, is the worst dispute between the U.N. and Morocco since 1991, when the international body brokered a ceasefire to end a war between Rabat and rebels fighting for independence in Western Sahara. MINURSO was established at that time.

The Sahrawis' Polisario Front separatist movement wants a referendum on independence, but Morocco says it will only grant autonomy.

The U.N. mission had nearly 500 military and civilian personnel before the recent staff reduction. Morocco also has canceled some $3 million in support for the mission.

"The military component will struggle to maintain its monitoring of the ceasefire given its reliance on civilian capabilities and technical functions for sustainability," Ban said.
Air strikes in opposition-held northwest Syria kill at least 40

BEIRUT, April 19 (Reuters) - Air strikes in opposition-held northwest Syria killed at least 40 people and wounded around 80 on Tuesday, a rebel commander and a rescue worker said.

The rescue worker said 38 people were killed in the town of Maarat al-Numan in the insurgent stronghold of Idlib province, and said 10 people were also killed in the nearby town of Kafr Nubl.
Cuba awaits decision of Communist Party on younger leadership

By Frank Jack Daniel

HAVANA, April 19 (Reuters) - Cubans will find out on Tuesday whether President Raul Castro's call for younger blood in the Communist Party will mean some of the septuagenarian and octogenarian leadership in power since a 1959 revolution will retire now or not for another five years.

Castro, 84, has called for sweeping changes in the management of Cuba's Soviet-style command economy and wants top leaders to retire at 70, but he also has made clear that such changes must not be rushed.

The Communist Party, which was founded in 1965 and is seen as more powerful in Cuba than the government, will reveal its new leadership at the closing session of the party congress later on Tuesday. Major changes would be a surprise.

Party delegates chose the members of the party's top governing bodies on Monday but the results have not yet been announced. Among those voting was former president Fidel Castro, 89, who sent his vote in an envelope carried by his younger brother Raul. Fidel Castro also was seen at the congress on Tuesday.

At the weekend, Raul Castro proposed 60 as the maximum age for joining the party's central committee with a limit of two five-year terms. But he said the next five years would be for transition and such rules would not be fully applied until then.

The congress, held no more than twice a decade, is not due to reconvene until 2021. Castro steps down as Cuba's president in 2018 and it is not yet clear whether he will stay on as party leader for the full five-year term if re-elected on Tuesday.

His No. 2 in the party, Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, 85, fought alongside Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara in their rebellion against a U.S.-backed government in the 1950s.

There are younger faces in senior roles, including Miguel Diaz-Canel, 55, who as first vice president of the country is widely seen as Raul Castro's successor. He also has a senior position in the party.

PROMOTING THE YOUNG

Castro said on Saturday that his proposal would allow the young to be promoted more quickly in the party - key to securing the relevance of an institution that has suffered falling membership in recent years.

He also said the party should represent more women and Afro-Cubans. The top leadership is currently overwhelmingly white and male.

On Monday Diaz-Canel read out a resolution adopting Castro's main proposals, including the need to speed economic reforms begun in 2011 that have only been partially implemented.

Echoing Castro, Diaz-Canel said the party needed to overcome bureaucratic resistance and "obsolete thinking" to push ahead with economic reform.

The party adopted 50 new reforms but gave scant details of what they included. The previous 313-point program was consolidated into 124 points, with a few of the reforms apparently being ditched. Again no details were available.

Among the few measures that were announced was a plan to build 108,000 new hotel rooms in the next 14 years to cope with soaring tourist demand as Cuba and the United States normalize relations. A plan to allow investment in technology parks was also adopted, but details were not given.

The opaque nature of the congress has frustrated many Cubans, including party members who are used to more discussion around such events. Castro said on Saturday measures adopted at the congress would be discussed later with party members nationally.

But party newspaper Granma announced on Tuesday that the last day of the congress would not be broadcast live as it usually is. No explanation was given.

At the opening ceremony Castro strayed from his written speech on several occasions. As he was talking about human rights, an aide passed him a note saying "We are live" on television.
Aylwin, who led Chile's transition after Pinochet, dies at 97

SANTIAGO, April 19 (Reuters) - Patricio Aylwin, who oversaw Chile's peaceful transition to democracy with a pragmatic but cautious hand as the first elected president after a bloody 17-year military dictatorship, died on Tuesday. He was 97.

Aylwin, who died surrounded by his family, won widespread praise for combining booming economic growth with the establishment of democracy during his 1990-1994 rule of what became one of Latin America's most stable countries. The center-left coalition that he helped launch then ruled uninterrupted until conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera became president in 2010.

"Chile has lost a great statesman, a man who put unity before our differences, a man who made possible a democratic country once he assumed the presidency of the Republic, and in that sense we owe Patricio a lot," said President Michelle Bachelet.

Some accused Aylwin of favoring stability over deeper political reforms. He was criticized for not taking a strong enough stand against the human rights abuses committed under his predecessor, General Augusto Pinochet, who had ousted socialist president Salvador Allende in a Sept. 11, 1973 military coup.

Aylwin, a lawyer by profession, defended his record, saying he did the best he could during a difficult time.

"Criticism of the transition makes pretty sound bites, but demonstrates ignorance of what really happened," Aylwin said in an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais in 2012.

A DIVISIVE MODERATE

An estimated 3,000 people were killed during the rule of strongman Pinochet, who built a bulwark of anti-communism in the South American country and cast a long shadow over Aylwin's rule.

Aylwin set up a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate and document the political executions and forced disappearances of suspected leftists by Pinochet's security forces.

But fears of another coup lingered, with tensions peaking in 1993 when the army staged a protest while the president was away in Europe.

And not only did Pinochet stay on as head of the army for several years after he stepped down as ruler, but the constitution he had enacted remains in effect. As a result, it took many years after the transition to democracy for alleged perpetrators of crimes committed during the dictatorship to face the justice system.

Groups of Chilean exiles protested Aylwin's official visits. In 1993, protesters even hurled eggs at him in Sweden.

"I have the feeling that these people have somehow got caught in a time warp around 1973," Aylwin said afterwards.
Activists lobby EU about logging in Poland's ancient forest

WARSAW, April 19 (Reuters) - Poland's plans to increase logging in the Bialowieza Forest could breach European Union law because it would some of its destroy natural habitats, campaigners lobbying the European Commission for action said on Tuesday.

The forest is a UNESCO World Heritage site that sprawls across the border between Poland and Belarus, occupying almost 580 square miles of woodland and providing home to rare European wood bison among others.

Environment Minister Jan Szyszko said in March he would approve a tripling in the volume of wood to be harvested because of an infestation of the spruce bark beetle.

"We told the minister his action was illegal, but he didn't listen. We cannot challenge this decision under Polish law, so complaining to the Commission is our last resort, said Agata Szafraniuk, lawyer at environmental law firm ClientEarth said.

The complaint was sent on Tuesday by seven Polish and international organisations, including ClientEarth, Greenpeace and WWF.

They said Szyszko's decision breached Europe's Habitats Directive, which conserves natural habitats and rare fauna and flora, and could result in Poland being taken to the European Court of Justice.

Iris Petsa, spokeswoman for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries at the Commission, said the Commission was concerned about Poland's decision and was looking into it.

"The Commission decided to contact the Polish authorities to make sure that the proposed interventions are in line with EU law. Based on the replies received yesterday from the Polish, the Commission will decide on any further steps," Petsa said in response to the groups' letter.

Many local communities support the foresters plans and say the environmentalists are attacking their way of life and the source of their livelihood.
Iran struggles to find enough ships for oil exports

By Jonathan Saul and Parisa Hafezi

LONDON, April 19 (Reuters) - Iran faces a struggle to increase oil exports because many of its tankers are tied up storing crude, some are not seaworthy, and foreign shipowners remain reluctant to carry its cargoes.

Tehran is seeking to make up for lost trade to Europe following the lifting of EU sanctions imposed in 2011 and 2012, which deprived it of a market that accounted for over a third of its exports and left it relying completely on Asian buyers.

Iran has 55-60 oil tankers in its fleet, a senior Iranian government official told Reuters. He declined to say how many were being used to store unsold cargoes, but industry sources said 25-27 tankers were parked in sea lanes close to terminals including Assaluyeh and Kharg Island for this purpose.

Asked how many tankers were not seaworthy and needed to go to dry docks for refits to meet international shipping standards, the senior official said: "Around 20 large tankers ... need to be modernised."

A further 11 Iranian tankers from the fleet were carrying oil to Asian buyers on Tuesday, according to Reuters shipping data and a source who tracks tanker movements. That was broadly in line with the number consistently committed to Asian runs since sanctions were lifted in January, putting more strain on the remaining available fleet.

This means foreign ships are needed for Iran's plans for a big export push to Europe and elsewhere, to meet its target of reaching pre-sanctions sales levels this year. But many owners, who are not short of business in a booming tanker market, are unwilling to take Iranian cargoes.

The main reason is that some U.S. restrictions on Tehran remain in place and prohibit any trade in dollars or the involvement of U.S. firms including banks - a major hurdle for the oil and tanker trades, which are priced in dollars.

Eight foreign tankers, carrying a total of around 8 million barrels of oil, have shipped Iranian crude to European destinations since sanctions were lifted in January, according to data from the tanker-tracking source and ship brokers.

That equates to only around 10 days' worth of sales at the levels of pre-2012, when European buyers were purchasing as much as 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) from the OPEC producer.

So far no Iranian tankers have made deliveries to Europe, according to data from the tanker-tracking source.

'PLENTY OF OTHER BUSINESS'

Paddy Rodgers, chief executive of leading international oil tanker company Euronav, said at present there was "no great urgency to do business in Iran".

"There is not a premium to do business in Iran and there is plenty of other business - the markets are busy, rates are good. So there is no stress on wanting to do it," he told Reuters.

"I don't really want to set up a euro bank account in Dubai in order to trade with Iran - that would crazy."

Michele White, general counsel with INTERTANKO, an association which represents the majority of the world's tanker fleet, said: "We have witnessed a reluctance by our members generally to return to Iranian trade given the prohibition on use of the U.S. financial system - essentially no U.S. dollars."

The senior Iranian government official, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, acknowledged his country was finding it difficult to hire foreign tankers.

"We are working on the problems. There are various issues involved, financial, banking and even insurance. It has improved a little bit since the lifting of sanctions but we still face serious problems."

Asked if this and the need to modernise some of the domestic fleet was holding back exports, he said: "Of course it does."

The strain on Iran's fleet is partly because it has struggled to gain access to land storage sites around the world, as sanctions shut it out of the international financial network, making it more reliant on floating storage than many oil-producing rivals including Saudi Arabia.

The problem has been compounded by a global oversupply of oil, and the industry sources estimated Iranian tankers were storing 45-50 million barrels of unsold crude.

POLITICAL RISK

Two other sources with other leading oil tanker operators echoed the concerns of Rodgers and White, and said they were not doing Iran deals at the moment.

One of the two sources said with a new U.S. president to take office in January, tanker owners were unsure whether there could be any change to the nuclear deal Washington and other world powers agreed with Iran which led to the end of sanctions.

"It does not appeal to them to take on the risk and the uncertainty of the U.S. connection and future U.S. political policy that would come into play," said the source, who declined to be named, citing sensitivity over potential Iranian trade.

Gavin Simmonds, of the UK Chamber of Shipping trade association, said of the U.S. presidential timing and the global oil oversupply: "Iran is rejoining the market at the worst possible time."

Before 2012 Iran exported around 2 million bpd, with more than half going to Asia, mainly China, South Korea, India and Japan. Tehran has been banned from selling oil to the United States for decades.

The tanker industry has cited other problems posed by Iranian business. Ship insurers have plugged a shortfall in cover that had been caused by U.S. reinsurers being restrained by Washington's sanctions, although tanker owners say it comes with risks and it could also be withdrawn if, for instance, wider sanctions are reimposed.

"Shipping insurance is still a problem. We see many buyers in the market still avoid buying from Iran," Fereidun Fesharaki, founder of energy consultancy FGE, wrote in a note.

Tanker industry sources also pointed to reports that Iran's arch rival Saudi Arabia had banned Iranian-flagged ships from entering its waters with. Separate reports indicated Saudi ally Bahrain had imposed a ban on any vessels that visited Iran as one of its last three port calls.
No problem if opposition boycotts Syria talks, government says

By Marina Depetris and John Irish

GENEVA, April 19 (Reuters) - The Syrian government's chief negotiator said on Tuesday that peace talks in Geneva could continue with other rebel groups even though the main Riyadh-backed opposition has suspended its participation.

The High Negotiations Committee (HNC), which was formed in Saudi Arabia and is considered as the main opposition bloc, did not hold a monopoly among opposition groups," Damascus' envoy Bashar Ja'afari told Reuters.

"If they want to boycott, they can boycott. It's not a big problem for us because they are not the only representatives of the Syrian opposition," he said.

The HNC, which brings together a range of political and military elements, on Monday postponed indefinitely formal negotiations.

Laying the blame on President Bashar al-Assad's camp, it said that a fragile truce was effectively over after a surge in violence and lack of progress on humanitarian deliveries.

"The arguments used by the Saudi group are not convincing," Ja'afari said.

Other opposition groups include the "Moscow-Astana platform" and "Cairo platform", which the United Nations has consulted during the indirect talks but does not give the same importance to as the HNC.

"The other groups don't share the same assessment (of events on the ground) and this is why the talks will continue as smoothly as possible," Ja'afari said.

He accused the HNC of repeatedly creating problems since the beginning of the process and threatening to pause or adjourn the negotiations because they were waiting on instructions from their Saudi, Turkish and Qatari backers.

"It's filibustering as you call it in United Nations' language," Ja'afari, who is also Damascus' envoy to the United Nations. "They are filibustering to torpedo the whole talks."

Responding to the HNC and Western assertions that the government's actions were behind the breakdown in negotiations, Ja'afari pointed to calls by rebel military commanders in Geneva to attack the Syrian army as evidence they were the cause.

"Those complaining about the Syrian government doing this and that are the ones who did it," he said, adding that "radical, terrorists" elements within the HNC were dominating decision-making mechanisms.

As the Geneva talks struggled to avoid collapse, air strikes on Tuesday on a market in opposition-held northwest Syria killed about 40 people and wounded dozens, a rebel commander, rescue worker and war monitor said. Ten people were also killed in an air strike on the nearby town of Kafr Nubl.

It was not clear if the air strikes were carried out by Syrian or Russian warplanes that have been deployed to Syria to support Assad.

However, Ja'afari dismissed suggestions the truce was dead.

"The cessation of hostilities stands on its feet. It's taking place and there are no complaints," he said, adding that the increased fighting was "against terrorists".

When asked whether Assad's future should be discussed at the talks, he reiterated that only the Syrian people could decide that issue and anything else would be illegal.

"The Syrian people wouldn't choose a U.S. president or a French president. It's not our business. We wouldn't decide who the Pope is. It's not our business," he said.
Syrian opposition says Tuesday air strikes a "dangerous escalation"

GENEVA, April 19 (Reuters) - The main Syrian opposition bloc said on Tuesday its decision to postpone participation in peace talks in Geneva had been reinforced after air strikes which it called a "dangerous escalation" of the conflict.

The attacks on a market in opposition-held northwest Syria killed about 40 people and wounded dozens, a rebel commander, a rescue worker and a war monitor said. Ten people were also killed in an air strike on the nearby town of Kafr Nubl.

"These (attacks) represent a dangerous escalation, with the targeting of markets crowded with civilians," a statement from the High Negotiations Committee (HNC) said.
Elderly Castro holds onto Cuba's top job in changing times

By Frank Jack Daniel and Nelson Acosta

HAVANA, April 19 (Reuters) - President Raul Castro will serve up to five more years as head of Cuba's Communist Party as he and other aging revolutionaries keep their grip on power at a time of economic reform and detente with the United States.

The Communist Party announced the result of internal elections on Tuesday. Wrestling with economic change and transition from the generation that toppled a U.S.-backed government in 1959, the party wants to avoid any chaotic shake-up within its leadership ranks.

Speaking at the closure of a four-day party congress, Castro, 84, signaled he and his fellow octogenarian No. 2 would step aside sometime before the next such meeting in five years.

"This seventh congress will be the last one led by the historic generation," Castro said, at the closing ceremony where delegates gave his older brother, former president and revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, 89, a roaring ovation.

In an admission of mortality, the elder Castro startled Cubans used to his towering presence over the island's politics since he was a young man.

"Soon I will be 90 years old," he said. "Soon I will be like all the rest. Our turn comes to all of us," the now frail former leader said in his most extensive public appearance in years.

Raul Castro had proposed an age limit of 70 for top officials as the party gathered for the start of the congress over the weekend, raising expectations veterans would begin to step aside. But he said the next five years would be for transition and such rules would not be fully applied until then.

The congress is not due to reconvene until 2021. Castro steps down as Cuba's president in 2018 and when he does he could either remain in the more powerful role as head of the party or retire from that post as well.

The congress backed steps toward more foreign investment and a growing private sector of small businesses, but few details of new measures to free up the economy were revealed and Castro made clear that such changes would not be rushed.

"(We will) introduce the necessary changes, without hurry and with no improvisation, which would only lead to failure," he said.

At the end of the congress, the first since 2011, the Communist Party said Castro had been re-elected as first secretary, with Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, 85, re-elected as second secretary.

Machado Ventura, a doctor, fought alongside Fidel and Ernesto "Che" Guevara in their 1950s rebellion. He is seen as a ideological hard-liner who has sought to slow a move to market economics, leading a campaign to reintroduce price controls after an inflation spike at the end of last year.

The two men are close, but Castro is seen as more of a pragmatist who built Cuba's army and brought efficient management to some of the military's powerful companies during long years in the shadow of his brother Fidel, who ruled the country until 2008.

AFTER OBAMA

The younger Castro ordered market reforms to the economy and oversaw the thaw with the United States that led Barack Obama to become the first U.S. president to visit Cuba in 88 years.

Since that historic visit last month, the brothers have hardened anti-U.S. rhetoric and raised political defenses out of a stated concern Washington plans to topple them.

Under Castro, Internet usage has slowly grown in one of the world's least connected countries, and Cubans are more open in expressing political views. But the congress made no political concessions, reaffirming the importance of a one-party state.

After encouraging self-employment to lower the state's responsibilities at the last congress, about half a million Cubans now work for themselves or for small private businesses, forming a growing middle class.

Only a fifth of planned reforms have been fully implemented and there is growing irritation more has not been done, with thousands of young Cubans taking advantage of new travel freedoms to leave for good.

While top posts were unchanged, the party brought in five mostly younger faces to the powerful political bureau. In an attempt to diversify the mostly white, male bureau, the new members included three women. Two were of mixed Afro-Cuban descent.

Arturo Lopez-Levy, who teaches Latin American politics at Texas University, likened Castro's moves to defensive driving as he seeks to maintain Cuba's single-party political system.

"Castro expressed a desire to broaden the scope of the reforms and speed up their implementation, but he wants to preserve a cushion space for maneuver and reverse," Lopez-Levy said.

Younger faces include Miguel Diaz-Canel, 55, who as first vice president of the country is widely seen as Raul Castro's successor. He was re-elected to a senior position in the party but was not promoted.
Turkey denies entry to German journalist at Istanbul airport

By Joseph Nasr and Michael Nienaber

BERLIN, April 19 (Reuters) - Turkish officials at Istanbul airport temporarily detained and denied entry on Tuesday to a German public television journalist who planned to interview refugees at the Turkey-Syria border.

Volker Schwenck, who works for public broadcaster ARD, announced his detention on Twitter and posted a picture of an entry ban letter given to him by authorities with the headline in Turkish and English: "Inadmissible Passenger Notification Report."

ARD said Schwenck was held for nearly twelve hours before flying back to Cairo, where he is based. He told the station's evening news programme that Turkish officials gave no explanation for refusing him entry.

In Ankara, a Turkish official confirmed a German journalist had been detained and would be deported, having attempted to contravene a blacklist by entering the country. The official gave no further details.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel had voiced concern about Schwenck's detention, which further tested bilateral relations strained this month by Turkey's insistence that Germany prosecute a satirist who mocked President Tayyip Erdogan on television.

In a decision criticised by media and other political parties, Merkel last week agreed to allow prosecutors to pursue a case against Jan Boehmermann under a section of the German criminal code that prohibits insults against foreign leaders.
Sierra Leone 'helped deploy ex-child soldiers to Iraq', academic says

By Tom Esslemont

LONDON, April 19 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Sierra Leone's government helped British private security service firms recruit former child soldiers to work as guards in Iraq from 2009, said a Danish academic who has spent years investigating the issue.

Thousands of children were forced to fight in Sierra Leone's 11-year civil war, which ended in 2002. More than 50,000 people were killed in the fighting and many tens of thousands more mutilated or raped by rebels.

By 2009, with Iraq in chaos, impoverished Sierra Leone was looking for a way to engage its workforce, said Maya Mynster Christensen, a researcher at the Danish Institute Against Torture who made repeated trips to the West African country.

"From a Sierra Leone government perspective the recruitment was supposedly quite a good deal because it could take the local troublemakers and send them to Iraq for a couple of years," the anthropologist told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"The government returned the men, many of them now in their late twenties and thirties, with money earned on their overseas deployment," she said.

But Christensen said this ran counter to Sierra Leone's stated policy of demobilisation following the civil war.

Of the 72,500 combatants demobilised by January 2002, nearly 10 percent were children, according to the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF.

A spokesman for Sierra Leone's government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"SLAVERY"

Christensen's allegations appear in a new Danish-made documentary, "The Child Soldier's New Job", which reveals that thousands of ex-soldiers were re-assigned to private security contractors in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation cannot verify how many of those recruited to Iraq were once child combatants, but in the documentary those who were deployed described feeling awe-struck on arrival in the war-torn country.

In filmed interviews, one former child soldier, who had only received training in light weapons in Sierra Leone, said he heard mortar shells every day in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

"For many of the ex-soldiers, Iraq reactivated memories of the civil war. It was traumatic," said Christensen, who also works for the Royal Danish Defence College.

British contractors operating on behalf of U.S. security companies recruited up to 10,000 former Sierra Leonean militia fighters from 2009 onwards, said Christensen.

She said two UK-based contracting companies were operating in Sierra Leone over a three year period - Sabre International ran a training camp in Sierra Leone in 2009, while Aegis Defence Services Ltd was recruiting men when she visited in 2012.

Of those recruited, around 3,000 were actually deployed, usually to guard U.S. military bases in Iraq, Christensen said.

"Some of the recruits found out subsequently they would only get paid $200 per month once they got to Iraq, but a number of them went on strike when they arrived," she said.

"The recruits frequently likened the experience to slavery."

Sabre International and Aegis Defence Services did not respond to requests for comment.

Britain's Guardian newspaper earlier this week quoted a former Aegis senior director saying the firm employed mercenaries from Sierra Leone to work in Iraq because they were cheaper than Europeans, and did not check if they were former child soldiers.

James Ellery, a director of Aegis Defence Services between 2005 and 2015, said it helped reduce costs for the U.S. presence in Iraq and contractors had a "duty" to recruit from countries like Sierra Leone.

Aegis was taken over last year by GardaWorld, a Canadian security company.

Child rights groups were alarmed that ex-child combatants appeared to have been recruited to protect U.S. assets in Iraq.

"It is surprising that a defence contractor, in its quest to find lower cost labour, should conclude that former child soldiers form a good recruiting pool," said Dan Collison, director of programmes at War Child UK, a charity helping former child combatants.
CASPER, Wyo.  Prosecutors say John Tramaine Knox broke another mans jaw in an unprovoked attack at a party last summer.

Defense attorneys for Knox, whose jury trial began Monday in Casper, maintain Knox hit the man in self-defense after being struck with a bottle of liquor.

Knox is charged with aggravated assault for allegedly punching Nimrod Kariuki, who underwent facial reconstruction surgery at Wyoming Medical Center following the incident. Knox is also awaiting trial for attempted murder stemming from an unrelated incident.

The three-day trial is taking place in the courtroom of Natrona County District Judge Catherine Wilking. Witnesses who attended the party, law enforcement officers and medical workers were expected to testify.

During his opening statement, prosecutor Trevor Schenk said that during the party, Knox accused Kariuki of stealing a bottle of Tuaca liquor from him. The two began arguing and as Kariuki was preparing to leave the party, Knox punched Kariuki in the face.

Kariuki was bleeding from his mouth and nose, Schenk told the jury.

This escalates very quickly, all over a $24 bottle of liquor, the prosecutor said.

Kariuki called 911 and an ambulance took him to the hospital. Schenk showed the jury a photo of Kariuki at the hospital, which depicted Kariukis left eye swollen shut. His lip was bloody.

Defense attorney Kurt Infanger told the jury Knox did punch Kariuki, but that he did so in self-defense. Infanger said the two fought over who the bottle of alcohol belonged to.

You have to think how silly this is," Infanger said.

The attorney said Knox told Kariuki to leave his house and that as Kariuki was leaving, he swung the bottle of liquor at Knox. The defendant responded by punching Kariuki once.

Infanger said Kariuki was injured by falling down a flight of stairs.

Mr. Knox was entitled to defend himself in his own home, Infanger told the jury.

He said the police officers who responded to the scene did not attempt to get both sides of the story.

Infanger said his client is planning to testify during the trial.

Knox also faces a charge of attempted second-degree murder for an incident in January.

Authorities say Knox threatened a man with a gun Jan. 16 at Racks Gentlemens Club. No one was injured in the incident.

Knox has pleaded not guilty to the charge, as well as charges of aggravated assault and possession of a deadly weapon with unlawful intent. Wilking set his trial for July 11. Infanger is also representing Knox in the case.
German PEGIDA founder in court over hate speech

BERLIN, April 19 (Reuters) - The co-founder of Germany's anti-Islam PEGIDA group arrived at a Dresden court on Tuesday for his trial on incitement charges wearing a rectangular black strip obscuring his eyes in a mocking gesture towards the German media and privacy rules.

Lutz Bachmann, a 43-year-old with drugs and burglary convictions, is charged over sending social media posts in which he called refugees "cattle", "garbage" and "scumbags". He says he is not racist.

Bachmann's defence lawyer Katja Reichel told the court her client rejected all charges, arguing it was not he who had written the comments on his Facebook page.

Bachmann, wearing the dark strip across his eyes like sunglasses, appeared to be taking a swipe at the German media for double-standards and prejudging him. In Germany, photo-editors normally protect the identity of suspects on trial by placing a black bar across their faces in the print media.

PEGIDA, short for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, forced itself onto Germany's political agenda in 2014 with its anti-immigrant rallies that started in the eastern city of Dresden and spread to several other cities.

Bachmann, who briefly quit as leader of PEGIDA last year after pictures were printed of him posing with a Hitler moustache and haircut, shook hands outside the court with a handful of supporters, some holding Germany flags and placards.

One read: "We want a Germany out of the euro, out of the European Union, out of NATO and with true democracy". Another read: "(Chancellor Angela) Merkel to court!"

He could face a prison term of between three months and five years, prosecutors said.

"We accuse the defendant of insulting asylum seekers and refugees in a publicly accessible Facebook comment. In addition, he is said to have denied them an equal life in Germany," said state prosecutor Lorenz Haase.

At its height, just over a year ago, PEGIDA's twilight rallies drew tens of thousands of supporters, with many waving Germany flags and chanting xenophobic slogans. A rally on Dresden on Monday night drew about 3,000 people, German media reported.

Despite the influx of over 1 million migrants to Germany last year, the grassroots movement's appeal has waned. Support has shifted to the anti-immigrant right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) which has won seats in eight regional assemblies.
Hungary's Orban, Germany's Kohl say EU ability to absorb migrants limited

By Frank Simon

OGGERSHEIM, Germany, April 19 (Reuters) - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a fierce critic of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door refugee policy, and her ex-mentor Helmut Kohl agreed on Tuesday it was questionable whether Europe could continue to absorb migrants indefinitely.

Orban and Kohl issued a joint statement after the right-wing Hungarian leader paid a rare private visit to the 86-year-old Kohl, architect of Germany's 1990 reunification and a major driver of European integration in the 1990s.

Orban's meeting with Kohl, 86, who makes only rare public appearances and is largely wheelchair bound, stoked speculation that it was meant as a snub to Merkel and that Germany's foremost elder statesman disagrees with her course.

Trying to play down talk of any such rift, the Kohl-Orban statement said they and Merkel shared the overall objective of alleviating the humanitarian emergency represented by migrants but signalled differences over how to tackle the challenge.

"There is complete agreement on the goal," the two said in the statement issued by Kohl's office after the hour-long Orban visit to the conservative Christian Democrat's longtime home in Oggersheim near the Rhine river in southwestern Germany.

"It is about a good future for Europe and peace in the world. The efforts of (Merkel) point in the same direction."

But, they added, "how many people can Europe sensibly take in and in the end integrate? And what happens to the remaining millions of people in need around the world who cannot flee?"

Critics say Merkel's decision last year to let in Syrian refugees without restriction contributed to the arrival of more than 1 million asylum-seekers in Germany - the great majority of those reaching European Union territory - in the last year.

HUNGARY SLAMS DOOR TO REFUGEES

By contrast, Orban's government has built a razor wire fence on Hungary's border with Serbia and Croatia to keep out mostly Muslim migrants, citing the need to help safeguard Europe's Christian civilization.

In a column published on Sunday in Berlin's Tagespiegel daily, Kohl said he did not think the EU could integrate millions of refugees. "The solution lies in the affected regions. It does not lie in Europe. Europe cannot become a new home for millions of people in need around the world," he wrote.

Merkel has acted of late to deter an uncontrolled influx of migrants into the EU and defuse intensifying criticism from her conservative Bavarian coalition ally and the public at large.

Last week, she agreed to require migrants granted residence rights to show willingness to integrate by learning German and seeking work or see their benefits cut. Her government has also introduced steps to speed up processing of applications and deportations of those refused permission to stay.

Neighbouring Austria as well as Balkan countries have also sealed their borders against undocumented migrants, cutting their overland route from Greece to Germany. The migrant flow has since ebbed and the pressure on Merkel has eased.

She appeared relaxed about Orban's visit with Kohl, saying the two had known each other a long time and the talks were "sensible and useful".

Orban presented Kohl with a Hungarian-language version of the former chancellor's book "Out of Concern for Europe".

Kohl governed from 1982 to 1998, during which the Berlin Wall fell and Communism collapsed in eastern Europe.

Merkel was his protege in the 1990s but their relations cooled after she called on the Christian Democrats (CDU) to break with their "old warhorse" over a party funding scandal. Since then, Kohl has voiced doubt about some of Merkel's policies, including her handling of the euro zone debt crisis.
Angola's dos Santos accuses Portugal of "partial" decision on BPI

By Axel Bugge and Sergio Goncalves

LISBON, April 19 (Reuters) - The daughter of Angola's president accused Portugal's government on Tuesday of making an "unprecedented and clearly partial" decision in changing a law on shareholder voting rights that helped Spain's Caixabank make a bid for Banco BPI this week.

Angolan investor Isabel dos Santos has systematically opposed attempts by BPI's largest shareholder Caixabank to take control of the bank and thereby reduce her influence at Portugal's second largest listed bank.

One analyst said the statement may suggest dos Santos is preparing to challenge the change in the law in court, potentially derailing Caixabank's takeover offer for the 56 percent of BPI it does not already own.

"The risk of a legal battle exists, but we have to wait for what Isabel dos Santos will do," said Albino Oliveira, analyst at brokerage Patris.

The decision by Portugal's government to eliminate shareholder voting right limits was announced on Sunday, a few hours after negotiations between Caixabank and dos Santos collapsed. On Monday morning Caixabank launched a bid for BPI.

The decision "was historically unprecedented and clearly partial ... it favoured one of the parties at a time when they were in the middle of negotiations," dos Santos' holding company Santoro Finance said in a statement.

The government was not immediately available to comment.

A change in the law directed just at BPI could face legal hurdles under Portugal's constitution. Prime Minister Antonio Costa said on Monday the change applied to eight Portuguese banks.

Angola, a former Portuguese colony, has made several large investments in Portugal in recent years, especially during Lisbon's debt crisis. Dos Santos, who is Africa's richest woman, also shares control of Portugal's second largest phone company, NOS.

Caixabank and dos Santos started talks several weeks ago to try to reach agreement on their holdings in BPI, including the sale of BPI's 50.1 percent stake in Angolan bank BFA to dos Santos. But the talks collapsed and BPI said dos Santos had disrespected the agreement.

Santoro said in the statement the agreement with Caixabank was never finalised. "And, as it was never finalised, it is false that Santoro broke any agreement," it said.

Costa said on Monday he hoped the conditions were now in place for the European Central Bank to accept that BPI was working to reduce its stake in BFA.

Caixabank has been prevented from exercising its full 44 percent holding in BPI under the previous shareholder law, which limited it to only 20 percent, virtually the same as dos Santos' stake in BPI of 18.6 percent. That has allowed her to oppose previous takeover bids.

BPI is also facing troubles due to its business in Angola because of a change in European rules on exposure to the African country. BPI said on Tuesday it was in contact with the European Central Bank about the exposure, which could lead to daily fines of up to 162,000 euros.

An agreement between Caixabank and dos Santos would have resolved the Angola issue if Unitel, an Angolan telecom jointly controlled by her and state oil company Sonangol, would have bought BPI's stake in BFA. Unitel owns the other 49.9 percent stake in BFA.

Shares in BPI closed 7.6 percent lower on Tuesday while Caixabank was virtually flat.
U.N. chief urges warring Yemen parties to start peace talks

UNITED NATIONS, April 19 (Reuters) - United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Yemen's warring parties on Tuesday to "engage in good faith" with his envoy on the conflict so that peace talks could start without further delay, his spokesman said.

U.N. mediator Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed is seeking to persuade Yemen's Houthi rebels to send representatives to peace talks in Kuwait as a shaky truce declared on April 10 teetered near collapse, delegates said earlier on Tuesday.

The talks had been due to start on Monday.

"The Secretary-General is convinced that seizing this opportunity to move the process forward will help resolve outstanding issues and bring the end of this prolonged conflict closer," Ban's spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

He said Ban noted that the Yemeni government delegation had arrived in Kuwait for the talks, and he looked forward to the participation of the Houthis and representatives of ex-President Ali Abdullah Saleh's General People's Congress party.

Houthi negotiators have stayed put in the Yemen capital Sanaa, demanding the cessation of hostilities be fully observed before traveling to Kuwait for talks with President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's government.

Any failure of the talks is likely to stoke intensified fighting between the Iran-allied Houthis and their partner Saleh on the one side, and Hadi supporters, backed by a Saudi-led Arab coalition, on the other.
North Korea's Jong Un more aggressive than father -U.S. general

WASHINGTON, April 19 (Reuters) - North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un appears more "risk-tolerant, arrogant and impulsive" than his father as he forges ahead with military programs that have left even China - Pyongyang's top ally - feeling frustrated, a top U.S. general said on Tuesday.

Army General Vincent Brooks, who is President Barack Obama's nominee to lead American forces in South Korea, told a Senate hearing that he was "not optimistic" about North Korea's direction.

The reclusive state conducted a fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch in February, both in contravention of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Last week, it failed to launch what the United States believes was an intermediate-range ballistic missile.

"Compared to his father, Kim Jong Un is more aggressive with advancing the North's nuclear program and ignoring international concerns," Brooks said in written responses to questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He noted Kim's purges and executions of senior officials since he succeeded his father, Kim Jong Il, who died in 2011, adding: "We now see greater potential for instability as a result of Kim Jong Un's behaviors and the absence of advisers he is willing to consult."

Some experts expect North Korea to conduct its fifth nuclear test in the near future, possibly before its party congress in early May.

Brooks said at his Senate confirmation hearing that some Chinese military leaders have told him "they don't have the influence they once had" with Pyongyang, although he questioned that.

"It is my assessment that China is in fact frustrated, yet unwilling to apply pressures that could threaten the viability of the North Korea" regime, he said in written responses to the committee.

In March, North Korea said it had miniaturized a nuclear warhead to be mounted on ballistic missiles and a simulated re-entry test of a ballistic missile, which could indicate advances in its ICBM program, if true.[ nL3N17B4GZ]

But South Korean officials questioned those assertions and said the North was several years away from developing an ICBM.

Brooks restated the U.S. military's position that it must be prepared defensively by assuming the worst.

"Given the amount of time and resources the regime devotes to nuclear and missile programs, we must assume North Korea has the technical capability to mount and deliver a nuclear warhead using ballistic missiles," he said.
Syria market attack most likely by Syrian government forces-U.S.

WASHINGTON, April 19 (Reuters) - Air strikes that killed around 40 people in a crowded vegetable market in rebel territory in Syria were likely carried out by Syrian government forces, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday.
Mexico's president says he is open to legalizing medical marijuana

By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS, April 19 (Reuters) - Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said on Tuesday he is open to the legalization of medical marijuana in Mexico and that his government would announce new measures in the coming days.

"I am giving voice to those who have (in public forums) expressed the necessity of changing the regulatory framework to authorize the use of marijuana for medical and scientific purposes," Pena Nieto said in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Speaking at a special session where world leaders gathered to rethink global strategy in the war on drugs for the first time in two decades, Pena Nieto said drug use should be addressed as a "public health problem" and users should not be criminalized.

Pena Nieto, who has traditionally been a vocal opponent of drug legalization, also called for a global shift in dealing with drug consumption while continuing to fight organized crime.

"We should be flexible to change that which has not yielded results, the paradigm based essentially in prohibitionism, the so-called 'War on Drugs' ... (which) has not been able to limit production, trafficking nor the global consumption of drugs," he said.

Since a landmark Supreme Court decision late last year that paved the way for liberalization of Mexico's marijuana laws, support for medical marijuana has been growing.

A senator from Pena Nieto's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party told Reuters earlier this year that a bill permitting the use of medical marijuana should be approved by May.

Late last year, Colombia approved the use of medical marijuana.
U.N. world powers press Yemenis to start talks, truce in danger

By Mohammed Ghobari

KUWAIT, April 19 (Reuters) - The United Nations and world powers sought on Tuesday to persuade Yemen's Houthis to send representatives to peace talks in Kuwait as a shaky truce teetered near collapse, delegates said.

Houthi negotiators have stayed put in the capital Sanaa, which their movement holds, demanding a ceasefire that began on April 10 be fully observed before they travel for the talks originally planned to start with representatives of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's government on Monday.

The Houthis have also rejected a proposed agenda that stipulates they hand over heavy weapons and withdraw from areas they control before a new government comprising all Yemeni forces is formed.

A failure of the talks is likely to stoke fighting between the Iran-allied Houthis and their ally, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, on the one side and Hadi supporters, backed by a Saudi-led Arab coalition, on the other.

An advisor to the U.N. delegation in Kuwait said the Houthis had been "very positive" until two days ago and had agreed with envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed on almost everything.

"They have since completely changed and this has caused a shock)," the aide, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters.

The envoy was now working with the Houthis and the government to iron out the problems.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed to all Yemeni parties to engage with Ould Cheikh Ahmed "so that talks can start without further delay".

A Western diplomat said the Chinese ambassador to Yemen delivered a message from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to the Houthis urging them to attend the talks.

"We understand your concerns but you need to carry your worries to Kuwait and put them at the table," the diplomat said, quoting the message.

Hadi's government has ordered its delegation to stay put in Kuwait while the United Nations sought to persuade the Houthis to join the talks.

Residents in Marib province east of Sanna meanwhile reported intensified fighting after troops loyal to Hadi arrived on Monday after training in Saudi Arabia

Fighting was also taking place in Taiz in southwestern Yemen despite the presence of ceasefire monitors, while Saudi-led warplanes flew over the Yemeni capital.

The Houthis have observed a period of calm along the border with Saudi Arabia and exchanged prisoners with Riyadh, paving the way for Ould Cheikh Ahmed to draft a broad outline for the talks, which were due to start on Monday.

HUMANITARIAN DISASTER

The United Nations says the Yemen war has killed more than 6,200 people and displaced millions of people in the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula.

Al Qaeda and Islamic State have also exploited the war to widen their influence and gain more supporters in a country next door to Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter.

The Houthis complain that Hadi's forces are trying to exploit the truce to try to make gains on the ground in several provinces, while war planes from the Saudi-led alliance continued to fly over areas held by the group.

Teams of joint ceasefire monitors have been deployed in some areas, but the Houthis say they were still unable to curb continued violations of the truce.

Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Salam said on Monday the movement had long been ready for a dialogue to bring peace to Yemen and stability to the entire region, but the violence had not stopped with the ceasefire.

Abdul-Salam said one of the committees set up to monitor the ceasefire in the northern al-Jawf province had had a lucky escape from an air strike by the Saudi-led coalition.
Chilean authorities find Zika mosquito for first time in decades

SANTIAGO, April 19 (Reuters) - Health authorities in Chile have for the first time in decades found a specimen of the mosquito species responsible for spreading the Zika virus and say more are likely to appear.

Chile eradicated the Aedes aegypti mosquito species in 1961 on its mainland and the World Health Organization has said it does not expect the Zika virus to spread to the country.

The mosquito specimen was found dead in a home in the city of Arica, located some 1,033 miles (1,663 kms) north of capital city Santiago in the Atacama desert next to the border with Peru, health authorities said.

"The mostly likely scenario is that it isn't just one (specimen) because it was captured as an adult and it probably came here in an egg; it's easier to transport that way," Health Undersecretary Jaime Burrows said on Tuesday.

"Now we're in the process of counting them, seeing how many larvae there are, where they are found," said Burrows.

Large parts of Latin America and the Caribbean have been affected by the Zika outbreak, with Brazil hardest hit so far. It is likely to spread to all countries in the Americas except Canada and Chile, the WHO has said.

There have been no reported cases in mainland Chile of mosquitoes infecting people with the Zika virus. In March the country reported its first case of the Zika virus being sexually transmitted.

U.S. health officials have concluded that Zika infections in pregnant women can cause microcephaly, a birth defect marked by small head size that can lead to severe developmental problems in babies.

The World Health Organization has said there is strong scientific consensus that Zika can also cause Guillain-Barre, a rare neurological syndrome that causes temporary paralysis in adults.

The connection between Zika and microcephaly first came to light last fall in Brazil, which has now confirmed more than 1,100 cases of microcephaly that it considers to be related to Zika infections in mothers.
Syrian opposition decision a "mistake", Russian envoy says

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, April 19 (Reuters) - The main Syrian opposition's decision not to attend formal peace talks is a "mistake" as a political settlement can only come through negotiations, but it does not signify a breakdown in the effort, a senior Russian envoy said on Tuesday.

Alexei Borodavkin, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, also told Reuters that the opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) lacked a political vision for a transition period and seemed incapable of striking any deal.

"The announcement by the HNC of its decision to suspend their participation in proximity talks here on the Syrian settlement was a mistake," Borodavkin said in an interview at Russia's diplomatic mission.

"We are convinced that there is no alternative for a political settlement through negotiations. We also think that they should be transformed into direct negotiations among the Syrian parties concerned," he said.

The peace talks appeared doomed after air strikes killed about 40 people in a market in rebel territory on Tuesday, with the HNC saying a truce was finished and it would keep away from negotiations indefinitely.

"Our assessment is that the HNC suspended their participation in the talks not because of these reasons which are absolutely artificial and not true actually. But according to our information it is just because they do not have a clear political position. The only approach they have is 'Assad should resign'. Nothing but that. But this is not enough," Borodavkin said.

U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura has been conducting separate talks with the warring sides, following a truce that entered into force on Feb. 27.

"Staffan de Mistura is trying to focus them on the transitional period, the transitional institutions to be established and how they should work, what would be the composition. And there is nothing, there is nothing on the part of the HNC," Borodavkin said.

"They suspended participation not because they have real reasons in the humanitarian sphere or be it the cessation of hostilities, but as we see it they just do not have a position for the negotiations. They are not capable to discuss things and even less so make agreements."

The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which Russia has backed throughout the five-year conflict, "is ready to discuss the political transition", he said.

The Syrian government's chief negotiator Bashar Ja'afari said on Tuesday his team was pushing for an expanded government led by Assad at U.N.-led peace talks, and Assad's own future was not up for negotiation.

Borodavkin, asked about whether Assad's future was not on the table, replied: "We think it is for the Syrian people to elect its leader. Full stop, period."

"It's not for the opposition delegation or for the government delegation to try to make a decision on such important issues. It's for the Syrian people themselves. This should be decided not during the negotiations but at the polling stations."
CASPER, Wyo.  The Wyoming Supreme Court on Friday denied a request for a new trial from a Casper man serving time in prison for cutting his nephews cheek with a knife.

The Supreme Court determined it was unlikely that a new trial for James Emerson would yield a different verdict.

A jury found Emerson guilty of aggravated assault during a July 2014 trial in Casper. About a year later, Emerson claimed he had evidence showing that three people who testified at his trial talked beforehand to rehearse their stories and that this information could have resulted in an acquittal. Emerson filed a motion for a new trial in Natrona County District Court.

District Judge Daniel Forgey said there were credibility issues with the two people who came forward to report they heard conversations between the victim, Samson Emerson, and witnesses before the trial. Forgey denied the motion.

The Supreme Court concurred with Forgey, according to an opinion written by Chief Justice E. James Burke. The judge wrote that none of the witnesses could recall specific conversations with Samson Emerson and that all had admitted to drug use at the time that may have affected their memories.

Burke also wrote that none of the witnesses said they had agreed to give untruthful testimony.

Forgey sentenced James Emerson in November 2014 to 15 to 25 years in prison for aggravated assault.

According to court documents, Emerson got into a fight with someone while at a party with his nephew in March 2014. Emersons nephew ended the argument, and Emerson left the party and went home. His nephew realized Emerson had forgotten his cellphone and delivered it to his house.

Emersons nephew left the phone on the porch and began walking back home. Emerson followed the man down the street, put him in a headlock and threatened to slit his throat while holding a knife below his chin.

The man was able to free himself, but not before Emerson  whose knife reportedly said Joker and why so serious? on each side  sliced his cheek. Emersons nephew punched him to end the fight.
Airbus close to selling 37 A321 jets to Delta - sources

PARIS, April 19 (Reuters) - European planemaker Airbus is close to a deal to sell 37 current-generation A321 passenger jets to Delta Air Lines, three people familiar with the matter said.

Such a deal would be worth $4.3 billion at list prices.

Airbus declined to comment. A Delta spokesman said "no decision has been made on any aircraft transaction."

If confirmed by the airline's board, which has the final say, the deal could be announced next week as part of a fleet renewal plan that may also include an order for 75 Bombardier CSeries jets and 50 options, the people said.

Both the CS100 and larger CS300 planes were part of the discussions, though the final mix of Bombardier planes is unclear, one of the sources said. The CS100 seats 108 passengers and the CS300 seats 130 in a standard dual-class configuration, according to Bombardier.

The Airbus part of the deal is for the current version of the A321, a 185-seat jet that has scored significant gains against the largest member of the competing Boeing 737 family.

Airbus has also seen a surge in demand for the newer A321neo, a costlier version with more efficient engines, but low oil prices have helped prolong interest in existing models.

Bloomberg News reported last week that Delta was poised to buy at least 30 Airbus jets.

The deal comes as Delta prepares to unveil the first of 45 A321 jets it has already ordered. It was delivered last month.

The airline, which has been reviewing part of its narrowbody fleet, plans to hold a media event and "fleet showcase" on April 28-29 at which it says it plans a series of announcements.

Boeing is also bidding for more of Delta's business, having recently agreed to sell it up to 20 used E-190 jets built by Brazilian manufacturer Embraer, market sources said.
Tennessee student apologizes for rainbow noose project

By Brendan O'Brien

April 19 (Reuters) - The Tennessee university student whose art project, six rainbow-colored nooses hanging from a tree, was swiftly removed by police said on Tuesday that she did not intend to be racially insensitive or offend the gay community.

The project was up for less than an hour on Monday before complaints prompted officials at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee to take it down.

"My intention with my sculpture project was to address the cycle of death and rebirth that is represented by the arrival of spring," the student, whose identity was not disclosed, was quoted as saying in a statement released by the university.

"I had no social or political statements in mind. I did not take into consideration that nooses are a racially charged symbol, for that I am sorry."

A university spokesman would only identify the student as a female.

A professor in the art department approved the initial concept for the artwork and expressed concerns about how the project might be interpreted. The student mounted the project without final approval, the spokesman said.

"This incident is deeply disturbing and is hurtful to our university community," said university President Alisa White. "I am saddened, and I am sorry for the hurt and offense this has caused."

The noose is a symbol of racial hatred in the United States, where thousands of blacks were lynched in a dozen states including Tennessee between 1877 and 1950, according to a 2015 Equal Justice Initiative report.

High-profile police killings of unarmed black men in the last two years have triggered waves of protest and heightened awareness of racism and discrimination in the United States.

Speculation on social media suggested the display might have been meant to highlight the struggles facing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community with suicide, given that the nooses were in the colors of the movement's rainbow flag.
Yemen's guerrilla war tests military ambitions of big-spending Saudis

By Angus McDowall , Phil Stewart and David Rohde

RIYADH/WASHINGTON, April 19 (Reuters) - Six years ago, Saudi and American officials agreed on a record $60 billion arms deal. The United States would sell scores of F-15 fighters, Apache attack helicopters and other advanced weaponry to the oil-rich kingdom.

The arms, both sides hoped, would fortify the Saudis against their aggressive arch-rival in the region, Iran.

But as President Barack Obama makes his final visit to Riyadh this week, Saudi Arabia's military capabilities remain a work in progress - and the gap in perceptions between Washington and Riyadh has widened dramatically.

The biggest stumble has come in Yemen. Frustrated by Obama's nuclear deal with Iran and the U.S. pullback from the region, Riyadh launched an Arab military intervention last year to confront perceived Iranian expansionism in its southern neighbour.

The conflict pits a coalition of Arab and Muslim nations led by the Saudis against Houthi rebels allied to Iran and forces loyal to a former Yemeni president. A tentative ceasefire is holding as the United Nations prepares for peace talks in Kuwait, proof, the Saudis say, of the intervention's success.

But while Saudi Arabia has the third-largest defence budget in the world behind the United States and China, its military performance in Yemen has been mixed, current and former U.S. officials said. The kingdom's armed forces have often appeared unprepared and prone to mistakes.

U.N. investigators say that air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition are responsible for two thirds of the 3,200 civilians who have died in Yemen, or approximately 2,000 deaths. They said that Saudi forces have killed twice as many civilians as other forces in Yemen.

On the ground, Saudi-led forces have often struggled to achieve their goals, making slow headway in areas where support for Iran-allied Houthi rebels runs strong.

And along the Saudi border, the Houthis and allied forces loyal to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh have attacked almost daily since July, killing hundreds of Saudi troops.

Instead of being the centrepiece of a more assertive Saudi regional strategy, the Yemen intervention has called into question Riyadh's military influence, said one former senior Obama administration official. "There's a long way to go. Efforts to create an effective pan-Arab military force have been disappointing."

Behind the scenes, the West has been enmeshed in the conflict. Between 50 and 60 U.S. military personnel have provided coordination and support to the Saudi-led coalition, a U.S. official told Reuters. And six to 10 Americans have worked directly inside the Saudi air operations centre in Riyadh. Britain and France, Riyadh's other main defence suppliers, have also provided military assistance.

Last year, the Obama administration had the U.S. military send precision-guided munitions from its own stocks to replenish dwindling Saudi-led coalition supplies, a source close to the Saudi government said. Administration officials argued that even more Yemeni civilians would die if the Saudis had to use bombs with less precise guidance systems.

Saudi officials see the intervention as a qualified success, halting Iranian expansionism in Yemen and bringing their opponents to the negotiating table. They compare it to the 1991 Gulf War when a military threat was addressed overwhelmingly by military power.

They said Saudi-led forces have stabilised large parts of the country and allowed its government under President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to remain viable. They also dispute the number of civilian deaths and have announced investigations into the strikes.

Among many of their fellow Gulf Arabs, who believe they face a broader struggle against Iran, the war continues to be popular. At a forum in Riyadh this week the mostly young audience started to cheer when speakers said the campaign had demonstrated a new self reliance.

Spokesman for the Saudi-led Arab coalition, Brigadier General Ahmed al-Asseri, said the main goal of degrading Houthi capabilities had been achieved. Coalition-backed Yemeni forces had paused after taking ground north of Sanaa at the request of the U.N. and to encourage talks, he said.

Prince Sultan bin Khaled al Faisal, a former Saudi special forces officer and now a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, said the intervention had succeeded.

"You cannot say there is no progress," he said. "The enemy is on the back foot. They are surrounded in every single city that they are in  and they are blockaded from the sea."

SELLING STUFF

The United States has been helping equip and train Saudi armed forces since U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdulaziz Al Saud struck an oil-for-security alliance in 1945.

"Our tanks are American. Our infantry vehicles are American. Our jet fighters are American," said Asseri, the Saudi general. "Our command and control system is American so having these people working with us is normal."

Some of the largest beneficiaries of the alliance have been U.S. defence contractors. Vinnell Arabia, now a Northrop Grumman subsidiary, has received multimillion-dollar contracts to train Saudi Arabia's National Guard since 1975, for instance, including a five-year contract worth up to $550 million in 2010.

In an effort to counter Iran, U.S. arms sales grew under President George W. Bush administration and even more under the Obama White House.

The primary goal of the huge 2010 sale was to defend against Iran, according to both American and Saudi officials. The Obama administration also saw a chance to turn Saudi Arabia into a regional military power that could act as a stabilising influence in the Middle East.

Saudis emphasise their own interests rather than those of the United States. "Saudi Arabia chooses and buys its weapons according to its own strategic planning, needs and interests, not those of anyone else," said Prince Sultan. "The whole premise that we bought weapons to play a role for someone else is false."

Whatever the motivation, between 2009 and 2015, IHS Jane's estimates that General Dynamics delivered $5 billion worth of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, Boeing $2.9 billion and Raytheon $2.5 billion.

European defence contractors profited, as well with Eurofighter, a European consortium, delivering $5.6 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia and U.K.-based BAE Systems delivering $2.9 billion during the same period, according to Jane's estimates.

Current and former U.S. officials said one of the reasons arms sales to Saudi Arabia had faced little opposition in Washington was the deal's failure might have resulted in Saudi Arabia buying arms from Russia or China. They also said the sales boosted U.S. defence contractors as the Obama administration cut military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We sold them that stuff," said one U.S. official, "because that's what creates jobs in America."

ADVANCING STEP BY STEP?

Even with more weaponry, the Saudi-led coalition has struggled in Yemen. That's been apparent in its bombing campaign from the start.

"Initially there was far too much reliance on the (Riyadh-backed) Yemeni government for intelligence and far too little effort to confirm it," said a Saudi with knowledge of the campaign. He said targeting rules had improved in the second half of last year.

But Brigadier General Samir Haj, a Yemeni and the official spokesman for the government's military forces, told Reuters that the coalition has "joint military operations rooms in Aden and Riyadh which work together with the coalition countries to coordinate targets for both air strikes and battle operations on the ground."

Problems with targeting are particularly embarrassing because they were also issues during the border war between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in 2009-2010, U.S. embassy cables released by WikiLeaks show. A cable dated Feb. 7, 2010 noted one instance in which Saudi jets aborted an air strike on a target supplied by the Yemeni government because it turned out to be the headquarters of a senior general and rival of then president Saleh.

Six years on, errors are still occurring. Just last month, two American-made laser-guided bombs struck a market and killed at least 97 civilians, 25 of them children, along with 10 Houthi fighters, according to Human Rights Watch investigators who reached the site of the bombing. U.N. investigators who reached the site reported 96 civilian dead, including 24 children.

Asseri said the coordinates had been provided by coalition-backed Yemeni forces fighting in that area, and the bombs had struck a gathering of Houthis, not civilians.

U.S. officials said the United States does not provide detailed targeting information to the Saudis in Yemen. "We're giving them broad intelligence of the area," said a third U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

American officials said they have repeatedly tried to find ways to improve Saudi targeting. As well as the extra precision-guided bombs, the Pentagon sent U.S. military lawyers to train their Saudi counterparts on how to ensure the legality of coalition strikes. They say the Saudis have American software designed to help them determine whether certain munitions might cause destruction beyond the target.

Matthew Spence, who served as the Obama administration's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for the Middle East from 2012 to 2015, said it takes time for any country to learn how to use advanced weapons systems. "It's going to be an imperfect process that advances step by step," Spence said.

Michael Knights, an expert on the conflict in Yemen at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the fact that the Saudi military had been able to maintain a year-long intervention in a country as complex as Yemen has surprised some observers.

"They're able to maintain operational tempo for a year," Knights said. "These are things that if you'd asked somebody about this two years ago, they would say there's no way Saudi can do that."

But investigations by the U.N., Human Rights Watch exposed scores of Saudi missteps. A January report by a U.N. Security Council panel of experts found that the Saudi-led coalition had carried out attacks that appeared to violate international humanitarian law 152 times, including 41 strikes on residential neighbourhoods, 22 on medical facilities and 10 on marketplaces. U.N. investigators also found at least 38 violations by Houthi and Saleh forces.

The Saudis "are dropping bombs with a large payload on a house in the middle of a residential neighbourhood," said Belkis Wille, Human Rights Watch's Yemen researcher, who just spent three weeks in the country investigating civilian deaths. "If you do that, you are bound to cause collateral damage. Using these kinds of bombs in this context is indiscriminate."

Asseri, the Saudi-led coalition spokesman, has repeatedly questioned such investigations, saying they are often carried out remotely or with guidance from locals employed by the Houthis, and that they have made little effort to engage with the coalition or Yemen's government.

U.N. officials said they have a team of 19 investigators stationed inside Yemen who visit the sites of attacks on their own. They said the team members, both foreigners and Yemeni nationals, follow a thorough methodology that U.N. human rights investigators use worldwide and are not taken to sites by Houthis.

"We collect our information direct from the scene of incidents and from witnesses and victims," said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. "We are careful to avoid manipulation by any of the warring parties."

Asseri said the Saudi air force uses the same procedures as those of the U.S. air force to assess targets, and checks information against images from drones and a no-hit list. He said munitions were selected to avoid causing harm beyond the selected target.

U.S. officials said they have urged the Saudi-led coalition to better distinguish between military targets and civilians. Asseri said a Saudi colonel with a doctorate in law has been appointed to run an investigative commission into civilian deaths and is now selecting members.

BORDER PROBLEMS

One of the stated goals of the Saudi-led campaign was to protect the kingdom's borders. In many ways, though, the war has made them less secure.

The mountainous western stretch of the Yemeni border, which runs from the Red Sea to the Empty Quarter desert, is rife with smuggling and illicit crossings. The Houthis had not attacked Saudi Arabia along the frontier since 2010.

Beginning in July 2015, though, when the coalition regained complete control of Aden after three months of brutal street fighting and airstrikes, the Houthis and Saleh's forces began to launch near daily attacks across the border.

The assaults have killed and injured around 400 civilians inside Saudi Arabia, the coalition said. Diplomats say around 400 Saudi soldiers and border guards have died. The coalition said it will not release figures on the number of military casualties until after the campaign, though Asseri did not dispute the broad number.

The rugged border areas held by the Houthis - steep mountains scattered with boulders and pitted by gullies and deep, scrubby valleys - are ideal for guerrilla warfare.

Saudi officials said they had been hampered by the decision not to take territory inside Yemen, which they feared would feed Houthi propaganda that Riyadh's war goals were territorial. "It is the most difficult thing to conduct a static defence," said Asseri.

Between July 2015 and the beginning of the tentative truce last month, an average of 130 mortars, shells and rockets were fired at Saudi Arabia's frontier every day, the coalition said. The Houthis and their allies also staged frequent incursions, overrunning villages, pushing several kilometers into Saudi territory and laying large numbers of explosive devices, according to both Western and Saudi officials.

Houthi-aligned media have posted dozens of video clips showing Yemeni fighters in Saudi territory or attacking Saudi targets. In February, the Houthi-aligned al-Masirah television station, which broadcasts from Lebanon, reported on daily attacks along the border, often accompanied by video or photographs. It listed sniper killings of Saudi soldiers, mortar and anti-tank rocket attacks on Saudi border posts and military vehicles, ambushes, infiltrations and guerrilla raids.

The Saudis have evacuated around a dozen villages, shuttered hundreds of schools in the region and closed the airport of Najran, a provincial capital that lies a few kilometers from the border.

Riyadh concedes it underestimated the number of Houthi ballistic missiles. Days into the conflict, Asseri said the Houthis' ability to fire rockets at Saudi Arabia had been neutralised. But the Houthis continued to fire Scuds at the kingdom until well into 2016.

Asseri said the Houthis hid weapons in schools and evacuated embassies. Riyadh believes Iran sent weapons to Yemen by plane before the war and by ship afterwards, he said. Houthis have denied that.

Riyadh used to enjoy an extensive network of patronage and influence in Yemen that gave it an unrivalled understanding of the workings of its complex neighbour. But those networks were run by the late Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, a veteran defence minister, and deteriorated as his own health began to fail just over a decade ago.

The Saudi with knowledge of the campaign said the performance of the army had been patchy and varied greatly from one unit to another. He and other Saudi and Western officials said the kingdom's forces on the border have been hampered by their lack of battlefield surveillance technology, which meant they were often unable to watch threats emerge in real time.

Riyadh has partly addressed that by buying drones from China, Western and Saudi officials said. As well, the Royal Saudi Land Forces, which were trained for desert warfare, are beefing up their mountain training, first started after the 2009-10 war.

EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

A few days before operations began in Yemen last year, Riyadh tried to bring together a broad Muslim military alliance. But none of its most powerful Muslim allies - Egypt, Pakistan or Turkey - ended up taking leading roles.

Asseri said Riyadh never requested big numbers of ground troops from them, believing that a large-scale land operation would be counterproductive.

Turkey chose not to participate from the start. Pakistan's parliament voted to remain neutral, but only after its flag had been displayed alongside those of other coalition countries. It later committed a ship to help enforce a partial blockade, Asseri said. And Egypt eventually committed a naval expedition to the coalition.

That left Saudi Arabia itself to produce ground forces along with several thousand troops from other Gulf neighbours, principally the United Arab Emirates. Morocco carried out airstrikes and Sudan committed two companies of troops late in the war.

Saudi Arabia decided to entrust ground operations inside Yemen to local fighters backed by Gulf Special Forces and air strikes. But many of these fighters were untrained and disorganised.

Asseri said that as the war has progressed they have been organised into a more coherent army.

The lack of a professional ground operation hurt, say military experts. Asseri said using a large foreign army would have created the impression of an invading force and encouraged militant attacks. He pointed to the recapture of Aden in July as evidence that only small numbers of foreign troops were needed for specific operations.

But the inexperience has shown in incidents such as a Houthi rocket strike in September in Marib. A senior Saudi officer told Reuters forces in Marib had been positioned too close together and near a munitions store, causing a high number of deaths.

Asseri acknowledged that procedures had not been followed in Marib.

"This is their first fight," he said. "You learn the hard way."
U.N.concerned by Machar delay in return to South Sudan capital

By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS, April 19 (Reuters) - The United Nations Security Council expressed serious concern on Tuesday over the failure of South Sudanese rebel leader Riek Machar to return to Juba to take up his old post as deputy to President Salva Kiir as part of a peace deal.

U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous briefed the 15-member council on South Sudan at the request of the United States. Machar had been due to return to Juba on Monday, but a spokesman for his group said logistical reasons had delayed his travel.

Thousands have been killed and more than 2 million people in a country of 11 million have been driven from their homes by more than two years of fighting that erupted at the end of 2013, barely two years after South Sudan's independence.

Kiir's decision to sack Machar as his deputy in 2013 precipitated the crisis that erupted into conflict in December that year. Fighting has often run along ethnic lines, pitting Kiir's dominant Dinka ethnic group against Machar's Nuer.

Machar and Kiir signed a peace deal in August that called for a transitional government and other security arrangements to end the fighting. But clashes have flared outside the capital and Machar has repeatedly delayed his return.

"The members of the Security Council ... reiterated that they are ready to address any obstruction of implementation of the agreement," China's deputy U.N. ambassador, Wu Haitao, told reporters. China is president of the council for April.

Russian Deputy U.N. Ambassador Petr Iliichev said Ladsous told the council there was a huge lack of confidence between the parties but that the U.N. peacekeeping chief was hopeful that Machar might return to Juba on Wednesday.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon spoke to both Kiir and Machar by phone on Sunday and urged them to form a transitional government quickly and roll out other parts of the fragile peace deal.

The United States voiced dismay on Tuesday at Machar's failure to return to Juba.

"The United States is extremely disappointed that Riek Machar has not fulfilled his commitments under the peace agreement and returned to Juba as he stated publicly he would," U.S. Deputy U.N. Ambassador David Pressman said.
When Leon Billings was first asked to join a congressional subcommittee on pollution, he was not interested.

To me, I thought being polluted was having too much alcohol, the Helena native routinely quips to admit that he had known little about the topic that would come to define his career as he helped create bedrock environmental protection laws. Sewage engineers talked about this. This wasnt part of a public discussion other than as a localized issue. There certainly wasnt a public consciousness.

Billings was persuaded to leave his lobbying job in 1966 to become staff director of the Senate Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution. The influence of the then-minor subset of the Committee on Environment and Public Works would grow with the leadership of Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, who later made two runs for the White House before serving as U.S. Secretary of State. At the direction of Muskie, Billings negotiated and wrote two landmark pieces of legislation: the Clean Air Act of 1970 and Clean Water Act of 1972.

Interest in politics

In a wide-ranging interview, Billings, 78, discussed growing up in Montana and his role in creating the first nationwide pollution standards.

Leon's parents, Harry and Gretchen Billings, are legendary in Helena history.

The couple ran the Peoples Voice newspaper through the 40s, 50s and 60s. The liberal weekly, derided by conservatives as The Pink Reporter, was funded by a cooperative of unions and progressive leaders such as Lee Metcalf and James Murray.

They were early fighters for justice in just about every aspect you could think of in Montana, said Dennis Swibold, a University of Montana School of Journalism professor and newspaper historian. A lot of people that grew up in progressive Montana got their start reading Harry and Gretchen.

Former U.S. Rep. Pat Williams was one of them. When he was a sixth-grade teacher in Butte considering a career in politics, Williams said he drove to Helena twice a week to talk with the Billingses at their small office across the street from the Capitol. He called them among the most important Montana progressives in my lifetime.

Leon Billings, who was the same age as Williams, also developed an interest in politics because of his parents and their visitors.

My folks had one rule, he said. Anybodys welcome at the house as long as they bring their own bottle of whiskey. Theyd sit around and talk all night.

Anne Cantrell, who wrote her 2006 masters thesis at the University of Montana about Harry and Gretchen Billings, said they were ahead of their time, particularly on topics that broadened conservation beyond public land and wildlife issues to link environmental and human health.

While the Anaconda Copper Mining Company-controlled papers  known as the Copper Press  suppressed environmental reports, the Peoples Voice worked to make environmental issues public, Cantrell wrote. Over the years, Harry and Gretchen reported and editorialized about a variety of environmental issues, including the dangers associated with building an aluminum plant in the Flathead Valley, the need for air pollution controls and the protection of water.

For instance, she noted that a 1958 article about waste discharge from a pulp mill killing fish in the Clark Fork River near Missoula was published 12 years before the first Earth Day and the beginning of a national environmental movement, and 14 years before the state Constitutions guarantee to the right of a clean and healthful environment.

Harry and Gretchen were just a touch out in front of the next progressive movement, Williams agreed. They were writing about things and pushing for them just before, just prior to Montana taking on an issue. Sometimes they caused it. I dont know that was their purpose. I think they were trying to get people to think big.

'Abrasive'

But their aggressive idealism ultimately led to the failure of the newspaper in 1969. The family staunchly opposed the Vietnam War, which angered some of their remaining funders.

The reason it dried up financially, Williams said, laughter interrupting his recollection of the couples fierce independence, was the paper finally angered virtually ever interest in Montana, including their good friends at organized labor. The Peoples Voice just didnt pull any punches.

Neither did Leon Billings.

When Muskie later suggested Billings as a candidate to lead the fledgling Environmental Protection Agency, President Jimmy Carter called the senator to discuss his concerns.

Abrasive? Billings recalled Muskie saying into the phone. Abrasive, Mr. President? Youve never met Leon Billings. You have no idea how abrasive he is.

Billings admits to being a mouthy kid, the youngest of three boys. He has said he started to hone a reflex for cutting quips while dropping off copies of his parents newspaper to offices in the state Capitol, where his deliveries  particularly to the Department of Agriculture  were not always welcomed. He recalled being kicked out of history class at Helena High School eight or nine times junior year because I argued with the teacher who had very strong, very conservative views. The Billings boys were called commies and attacked, sometimes physically, by peers.

At the time of Leon's brother Harry Billings death in 1990, the Helena Independent Record quoted him as once saying, I kept a wrench on my desk in case the (American) Legion boys came galloping in, which they did one time.

Obviously, Leon grew up in a very hostile world, to say the least, with a very radical mom and dad, Montana Historical Society spokesman Tom Cook said.

It was an education growing up a Billings, Leon Billings said.

Yet his role in crafting the Clean Air Act and other bipartisan compromises reflected a give-and-take political strategy at odds with his parents often all-or-nothing approach.

There was a general philosophy among liberals back in the day that half a loaf wasnt good enough, he said. And I learned that if you get it right you could get three-quarters to seven-eighths of a loaf, but never the whole loaf.  I had a mentor in Ed Muskie who taught me to get a result thats acceptable without just having a fight where you wont get anything at all.

Environmental protection

Pollution surged to the forefront of public discussion in the late 1960s as evidence of environmental degradation confronted Americans and a generation of progressive activists found a new cause. Rivers caught fire. Beaches were closed. Bad air days caused deaths. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-Wis., organized the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, drawing millions to hear speeches about the importance of the environment.

In this climate, the first nationwide air pollution standards were crafted with Billings, typewriter at the ready. Provision by provision. Negotiated behind closed doors  as was legal then  with Democrats and Republicans.

Muskies focus was protecting public health by infusing environmental controls with scientific rigor, yet leaving room for them to adapt as research yielded new findings. Sen. Howard Baker, R- Tenn, who would later serve as Chief of Staff to President Ronald Reagan, believed technologies that could cut emissions from cars might have to be forced to development by permitting renewals. Sen. Philip Hart, D-Michigan, sought a mechanism for the general public to force regulators or polluters to comply with the law, creating the citizen suit provision that brought environmental advocates to a negotiating table once effectively limited to lobbyists and bureaucrats.

Carpooling between their homes and the U.S. Capitol each day in a pickup truck, Billings and minority staff director Tom Jorling hammered out comprises and refined pitches they'd make to their respective parties.

Among the most pivotal changes to the Clean Air Act was substituting a single word, Billings said. Every instance of may was replaced with shall, shifting the statute from something administrators and elected executives might do when it suited their political purposes to something that they must do.

President Richard Nixon also had tasked Republicans to update the Clean Air Act of 1963, although to a lesser degree, as part of a strategy to usurp the issue from Democrats in future campaigns. The version written by Billings and that passed the Senate in a unanimous vote nearly died in the House then again in conference committee. Narrowly avoiding a deadline, the Clean Air Act of 1970 was finally approved late on Dec. 31.

It was 38 pages long and is probably the most radical statute ever enacted, Billings said. We were in a full-scale war between protecting public health and welfare from environmental degradation and the profit motives of corporate America.

Although environmentalists praise the landmark legislation he helped craft, some are hesitant to label Billings a champion. Jim Jensen, director of the Montana Environmental Information Center, noted that Billings later worked as a lobbyist and consultant for W.R. Grace, owners of the Libby vermiculite mine that contaminated the town with asbestos, causing hundreds of deaths.

Billings said the work he did for Grace was at the request of a former Capitol Hill colleague who was hired by the company just as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer revealed that the company failed to disclose health threats to employees. He said he helped set up an initial meeting for the company with Sen. Max Baucus and gave advice on setting up health programs for employees and other measures. Billings said his work for Grace was less involved than what he did for other companies who hired him to help navigate the politics of setting up trust funds for victims or negotiating remediation efforts after being called out for major pollution.

"Because of my background on environmental legislation, by the time people came to me they were in such desperate shape politically," Billings said. "They wanted to know how to quickly resolve it after sometimes stonewalling and denying the issues for years."

Most other environmental advocates point to his ongoing efforts to protect anti-pollution laws.

Billings says he sees many of the same interests and arguments at play today as during the drafting of the federal statues, as the Clean Power Plan, Waters of the U.S., and the fate of the Environmental Protection Agency itself are dragged into campaign stump speeches and challenged in courtrooms.

Williams explains Billings' lifelong pursuit of environmental protections in two ways.

Leon, having breathed clean air before he left Montana to go to Washington, D.C., knew the difference between that air and this air, Williams said. He also grew up with a mom and dad who talked politics and policy all the time. Caring about an issue was not a shirt he had to put on in the morning. It was part of his skin because of Gretchen and Harry.
A Billings attorney has been arrested for operating a vehicle with three children as passengers and an open bottle of vodka. Her blood-alcohol content was measured at more than three times the legal limit.

Michele Lynn Braukmann, 39, was charged in Yellowstone County Justice Court on Monday with felony criminal child endangerment and misdemeanor counts of unlawful possession of an open container and operating a vehicle without proper registration.

The affidavit said at about 9:50 p.m. on Saturday Braukmann was driving a Nissan Armada on Shiloh Road with her two sons and an additional 11-year-old passenger.

Montana Highway Patrol troopers pulled over Braukmann after seeing her struggle to navigate roundabouts. During the stop, the troopers found an open bottle of vodka in the passenger compartment.

Braukmann failed field sobriety tests, the charges allege. A breathalyzer test registered her blood alcohol content at 0.247 percent, more than three times the legal limit.

In 2013, Braukmann was featured in 40 Under Forty, a Billings Gazette publication celebrating area business leaders.
A man who forced his way onto a School District 2 school bus Tuesday morning has been arrested.

Billings Police Department officers arrested the man where the bus dropped him off, Sgt. Nate West said. He was detained on unrelated warrants. Police believe that drugs were involved and that there was no threat of a shooting. West declined to release the man's name.

The bus was on route 43, which serves middle and high school students and includes the Cherry Creek Trailer Park, SD2 Superintendent Terry Bouck said in an email. At the last stop, a man "forced his way onto the bus claiming that someone was trying to shoot him."

The driver called First Student dispatch, and the dispatcher called police. The driver then drove several blocks out of the area and asked the man to leave, which he did. Police were updated, and the driver continued to Skyview High and Castle Rock Middle School to drop off students and wait for police.

All other buses were asked to stay out of the Cherry Creek area until further notice.

First Student protocol is for the driver to call dispatch, Bouck said. The dispatcher then calls police. Protocol calls for the bus to stop until the police arrive.

The driver left the scene out of concern for student safety, Bouck said. No one was harmed in the incident.

"I am pleased that the driver acted in a matter that put student safety first," Bouck's email said.

Parents of students on the bus were notified.
School District 2 Trustees approved new principals at their Monday night board meeting.

Superintendent Terry Bouck previously announced that he would recommend Jeff Uhren, an assistant principal at Senior High, to take over as principal at the school, but two elementary positions were introduced for the first time.

Uhren is replacing Dennis Holmes, who took a job as a principal in Gillette, Wyo.

Jeremy Carlson, currently the assistant principal at Orchard Elementary, will take the top job at Orchard. Julie Donald, a fifth-grade teacher at Sandstone, was hired as a principal but not immediately assigned to a school.

Current Orchard principal Karen Ziegler and current Beartooth Elementary principal Cheryl Malia-McCall are retiring.

SD2 offered an elementary principal position to Nicole Swigart, an administrator at Rapid City High School in South Dakota, but she turned the position down, Bouck said. The district still has to hire an elementary principal and an assistant principal to replace Carlson.

Broadwater Elementary Principal Joe Halligan is moving into an associate principal position next year at Will James Middle School.

Three other middle school associate principals were recently hired.

Tyler Blood, a Senior High assistant principal, will move to Medicine Crow.

Colby Fitzgerald, the superintendent in Hobson for a K-12 school district, will be at Castle Rock.

Fred Petak, a history teacher at West High, will move to Lewis and Clark.

Other news

The Education Foundation for Billings Public Schools will be awarding classroom grants soon. The group will spread out about $89,000 in individual and collaborative grants across more than 100 classrooms.

SD2 officials conducted lead testing of water at three schools recently. Levels at Arrowhead, Rose Park and Ponderosa elementaries were all safe, SD2 facilities director Scott Reiter said. Lead in water at schools has become a nationwide concern after unsafe amounts of the heavy metal in Flint, Mich. cast a spotlight on the issue.

The district will continue work on deferred maintenance projects this summer using money from a $122 million bond approved by voters in 2013. The work focuses on minor projects like replacing sidewalks and windows, SD2 Bond Manager Lew Anderson said, as any projects identified in the district's master plan have been completed. About 90 percent of money in the bond earmarked for such projects has been spent.
 Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population announce the first Francis Fife Scholarship, to be awarded to an Albemarle County or Charlottesville public high school senior. Applicants must submit an essay of no fewer than 700 words that express the concept of our communitys sustainability and quality of life as it is affected by population growth or other anticipated and related change, plus a sketch not more than a page in length of the applicants hopes for his or her future, including the school he or she hopes to attend and current thoughts about particularly interesting field(s) of study or future vocations; a list of high school, civic and/or community activities and achievements; a letter of recommendation from a teacher, guidance counselor, or mentor in the community; and a current grade-point average furnished by a guidance counselor. This package must be submitted no later than May 1 to Dr. David Shreve, ASAP President, at cdavidshreve@gmail.com or mailed to The Francis Fife Scholarship Committee at Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population, P.O. Box 582, Earlysville, VA 22936-0582. (434) 245-5151.

 Albemarle County Public Schools will offer Community Technite, providing information to parents and guardians on ways technology is used in the classroom and how technology use can be supported at home, from 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at Sutherland Middle School, on Tuesday at Walton Middle School and on April 28 at Western Albemarle High School. (434) 296-5820.

 Allen and Allen will be accepting nominations through May 16 for its Hometown Heroes awards, which will be announced June 22. Details and nomination forms are available at allenandallen.com/hometownheroes/. (866) 388-1307.

 Blue Ridge Area Food Bank will be represented and will accept donations on the first Friday of the month at nTelos Wireless Pavilions Fridays After Five events. Each month, nTelos Wireless will make a $500 donation. (540) 213-8425.

 Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA offers a Compassionate Care Clinic, proving wellness exams, pet care education, rabies vaccines and more at a reduced price to clients receiving public assistance, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday at 3355 Berkmar Drive. (434) 964-3310

 Charlottesville City Market offers a composting station for organic waste from market vendors, customers and residents. Acceptable composting items include all food and plant items, uncoated paper not otherwise recyclable and certified compostable products. Collection is available from 7 a.m. to noon each Saturday through October. (434) 970-3631.

 Jefferson Area Board for Aging holds a resource fair, offering information on JABAs services and available resources for the areas older population, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesday at Scottsville Community Senior Center at 250 Page St. in Scottsville. Additional fairs will be held at various locations through May. jabacares.org. (434) 817-5267.

 NAACP Unit No. 7058, serving Madison County, meets at 7 p.m. Thursday at St. Stephens Episcopal Church at 115 N. East St. in Culpeper. (540) 522-2812.

 Piedmont Virginia Community College offers a Jumpstart information session for new student applicants and for those who have not enrolled at PVCC, but are interested in attending for the fall 2016 semester, from 10 to 11 a.m. Saturday at the Charlottesville campus. Register in advance at pvcc.edu/jumpstart. Veterans Education and Transition Services sessions for veterans and active service members interested in registering for summer and fall semester classes, are offered from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Friday, May 13 and May 20. Details are available at pvcc.edu/veterans and (434) 961-5282. Getting Started information sessions for prospective students, providing an introduction to PVCCs degree programs, information about placement test materials and other resources, are held from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the PVCC Guiseppe Center in Stanardsville and from 6 to 7 p.m. Monday at Carver Recreation Center and from 6 to 7 p.m. Tuesday at Westhaven Community Center. pvcc.edu/outreach. (434) 961-5275.

 Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority holds Bulky Waste Amnesty Days for residents of Albemarle County and Charlottesville, with tires being accepted from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Ivy Material Utilization Center on Dick Woods Road. (434) 977-2976.
RICHMOND  With his craft beer company being acquired by the worlds largest beer producer, Devils Backbone Brewing Co. co-founder Steve Crandall is relinquishing his position on the board of a trade group for craft beer makers.

It was a requirement, Crandall said Monday of his decision to resign from the board of directors of the Brewers Association, which represents craft beer companies across the nation. We are considered no longer independent, he said of Devils Backbone, the states largest craft beer maker by volume.

Devils Backbone, which opened in November 2008 and distributes its beer in five states, announced last week that it has agreed to be acquired by St. Louis-based global beer company Anheuser-Busch for an undisclosed sum.

Devils Backbone has a production facility in Rockbridge County and a brewpub in Nelson County. The company produced about 62,000 barrels of beer in 2015 and expects to produce 92,000 barrels this year.

The acquisition, scheduled to close by the end of June, would mean Devils Backbone no longer meets the Brewers Associations definition of a craft beer maker.

The association defines craft beer makers as those that produce less than 6 million barrels per year and are not more than 25 percent owned by another, noncraft beverage maker.

In comparison, Anheuser-Buschs Belgium-based parent company Anheuser Busch InBev produced about 457 million barrels of beer in 2015 throughout its global operations. The company has about 200 beer brands and posted revenue of $43.6 billion in 2015.

We can continue to be members of the Brewers Association, but we are not voting members anymore, Crandall said. I would have preferred to stay on [the board], but that wasnt in the cards.

Crandall has said he does not expect the companys beers to change as a result of the acquisition. Devils Backbone is keeping its management team.

Our DNA is craft, he said. It will continue to be so. We love what we do in this segment of the beer business, and we have an amazing innovation pipeline in front of us.

It remains unclear what role Devils Backbone will have with the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild once the acquisition is done.

Devils Backbones Chief Operating Officer Hayes Humphreys is chairman of that state-level trade organization, which is affiliated with the Virginia Manufacturers Association.

Hayes and Crandall said the board of the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild is scheduled to meet in May and will discuss whether the company will continue to maintain a role in the group.
Updated at 9:02 p.m.

M. Rick Turner, president of the Albemarle-Charlottesville NAACP branch, spoke out Monday morning in response to the lack of African-Americans and diversity in the final candidates for Albemarle Countys search for a new police chief.

At a news conference in front of CVille Coffee, Turner was critical of the search committees lack of inclusion, and asked for the search to be redone.

Of the four finalists, three are white men and one a white female.

Turner said he learned Friday about who the four candidates are when he was invited to an interview session with them. After finding out, he said, he left the meeting.

Police Chief Col. Steve Sellers attended Mondays news conference, saying he wanted to hear Turners concerns.

Turner made a point to say that he did not oppose the four candidates based on their qualifications and that its qualifications hes concerned about.

I have no problems with the qualification of the applicants, I have no problem, he said. I think any one of those four applicants probably would have made a good police chief.

But Turner is still calling for the search to start over.

If you have an applicant pool and you dont see diversity in that pool, you go get it, he said.

Turner argued that inclusion of more diverse candidates in the selection process gives more people an opportunity to compete for the job.

To compete, thats what we do in America, he said. Its highly competitive for jobs, especially one of the most important jobs in the county, which is the chief of police.

Sellers said he agreed with Turners remark that the police chief position is an important one in the county, but said he doesnt see where the search was flawed.

From what I know about it, I know we had people of impeccable integrity, unbiased oversight of this process and I know this one has been just overwhelming with community input, diverse community input from Albemarle County and diverse community participation in the process, he said. I dont think Ive seen a process with more input than this. So I still have yet to see specific examples of why he deems it unfair.

I understand where hes coming from and I understand what hes trying to move forward, I just happen to disagree that the process was flawed, Sellers added. Thats the only difference.

Lee Catlin, assistant county executive, released a county statement in response to Turners remarks, defending the search process.

We continue to have confidence in the validity of our process to yield the candidate that best meets the qualifications and attributes identified and valued by the community, she said.

The statement outlined the countys process for accepting input for how it should proceed with the search and by what criteria the candidates should be evaluated, as well as for how the county advertised the position.

Because we value diversity in our workforce, we will continue to assess and attempt to improve upon our efforts to recruit, select and retain the most highly qualified candidates that also embrace that value and other attributes considered important by the community through their background, experiences and skill sets, according to the statement.

Sellers announced his decision to retire in early December, and his last day as police chief will be May 31.

Catlin said County Executive Tom Foley could announce a pick for the new chief to the Board of Supervisors as early as May 4 at a board meeting, or during the next one, on May 11. She said the goal is to have a new chief in place by the time Sellers retires.

The news conference came in contrast to an event in Charlottesville later Monday, where the citys new police chief was publicly introduced. Alfred S. Thomas Jr., who was the chief of the Lexington Police Department, will be Charlottesvilles first black police chief.

Turner shared his thoughts on that matter during the news conference, saying that people can now see a black role model in Charlottesville who through all his hard work has ascended to the top policeman in the city.

They can see him and they might want to be a policeman or chief, Turner said. You see, you have to see what you can become. If you dont see what you can become, you wont do it. You have to see it.
Two University of Virginia alumni have been appointed to high-ranking positions in the administration of Taiwans incoming president, Tsai Ying-wen.

David Lee, who received a masters degree in 1981 and a Ph.D. in 1987 from UVa, will begin his new role as Taiwans foreign minister in May, when Tsai takes office. A career diplomat, Lee currently is his nations representative to Australia, and previously worked as representative to the United States.

Lin Cheng-yi, who also earned a masters degree and Ph. D. during the 1980s at UVa, will serve as deputy minister to Taiwans Mainland Affairs Council. The council is in charge of maintaining affairs with the communist government of mainland China.
The EU referendum has been marred by the negative StrongerIn campaign spreading their woeful stories of disaster and impending doom upon the population, they have continued to put Britain down, to negate the peoples ability to think for themselves, in short, they have treated the people like children.

Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Michael Gove on the other hand, today gave a speech setting out clear grown-up plans for a Brexit, with a zing of optimism, we can do this, and Britain can regain its rightful sovereignty back from the faceless eurocrats who have been running things for awhile now.

There will be no volcanoes, if we Brexit, as StrongerIn seem to relate, there will be no earth opening up and swallowing whole cities into a mass of red hot lava. Brexit would be conducted in a very orderly and calm manner befitting the British sensibility, and maybe after a cuppa or two, we would get moving, in our own time.

The Daily Squib was given exclusive full access to the Vote Leave conference today in London.

It has been argued that the moment Britain votes to leave a process known as Article 50 is triggered whereby the clock starts ticking and every aspect of any new arrangement with the EU must be concluded within 2 years of that vote being recorded  or else

But there is no requirement for that to occur  quite the opposite. Logically, in the days after a Vote to Leave the Prime Minister would discuss the way ahead with the Cabinet and consult Parliament before taking any significant step.

Preliminary, informal, conversations would take place with the EU to explore how best to proceed.

It would not be in any nations interest artificially to accelerate the process and no responsible government would hit the start button on a two-year legal process without preparing appropriately.

Nor would it be in anyones interest to hurry parliamentary processes.We can set the pace.

We will repeal the 1972 European Communities Act, which automatically gives EU law legal force. But we can change it on our terms at a time of our choosing. After we establish full legal independence we can then decide which EU-inspired rules and regulations we want to keep, which we want to repeal and which we wish to modify.

On the subject of the free trade zone, Mr Gove gave a simple yet erudite explanation:

There is a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey that all European nations have access to, regardless of whether they are in or out of the euro or EU. After we vote to leave we will stay in this zone. The suggestion that Bosnia, Serbia, Albania and the Ukraine would stay part of this free trade area  and Britain would be on the outside with just Belarus  is as credible as Jean-Claude Juncker joining UKIP.

Agreeing to maintain this continental free trade zone is the simple course and emphatically in everyones interests.

There is a vast chasm between the positive nature of the Vote Leave campaign and the negative, fearmongering one of the StrongerIn group, who do not address the people with any positivity instead talk down to them. One can immediately feel the affirmative nature of a Brexit as Mr Gove spoke.

On immigration, Mr Gove called upon an Australian points based system of entry into the UK, which is what many have been calling for for years.

Further, there are five more countries  Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey  in the queue to join the EU  and the European Commission, as we have just experienced ourselves during the recent negotiation process, regards free movement as an inviolable principle of EU membership And my ambition is not a Utopian ideal  its an Australian reality. Instead of a European open-door migration policy we could  if a future Government wanted it  have an Australian points-based migration policy. We could emulate that countrys admirable record of taking in genuine refugees, giving a welcome to hard-working new citizens and building a successful multi-racial society without giving into people-smugglers, illegal migration or subversion of our borders.

Mr. Gove also touched on a subject that many have ignored so far from both sides of the campaign, and that is a reform of Europe. Britain on a Brexit would thus force the EU to re-think its undemocratic stance to many ongoing issues, and a Vote to Leave would invariably bring about other imprisoned states to break free from the suffocating octopus-like grip of the EU.

Leaving would also bring another significant  and under-appreciated  benefit. It would lead to the reform of the European Union.

At different points In campaigners like to argue either that Brexit would lead to EU nations using their massive muscle to punish us, or that Brexit would lead to contagion and the collapse of Europe  just as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union collapsed following secession from those unions.

Manifestly both cannot be true. An EU without the UK cannot simultaneously be a super-charged leviathan bent on revenge and a crumbling Tower of Babel riven by conflict

The UKs success will send a very different message to the EUs peoples. They will see that a different Europe is possible. It is possible to regain democratic control of your own country and currency, to trade and co-operate with other EU nations without surrendering fundamental sovereignty to a remote and unelected bureaucracy. And, by following that path, your people are richer, your influence for good greater, your future brighter Our vote to Leave will liberate and strengthen those voices across the EU calling for a different future  those demanding the devolution of powers back from Brussels and desperate for a progressive alternative

But for Europe, Britain voting to leave will be the beginning of something potentially even more exciting  the democratic liberation of a whole Continent.

If we vote to leave we will have  in the words of a former British Prime Minister  saved our country by our exertions and Europe by our example. We will have confirmed that we believe our best days lie ahead, that we believe our children can build a better future, that this countrys instincts and institutions, its people and its principles, are capable not just of making our society freer, fairer and richer but also once more of setting an inspirational example to the world. It is a noble ambition and one I hope this country will unite behind in the weeks to come.

Full speech here

Michael Gove speech starts approximately 26 minute mark.
LONDON - England - As the German EU army has now effectively taken over the Dutch army, there are serious concerns for global security especially relating to Russia.

There is a very valid reason why under everyones noses, the German army is now strengthening itself by integrating with the Dutch army.

This move away from NATO is a direct threat to global stability and yet here we are 70 years after World War II, in the same zone of Germanic supremacy.

The Daily Squib warned in 2012 of the threat of an EU army and when the European Union poked the Russian bear with a stick in Ukraine by ousting its Russian allied leader, and installing a pro-EU stooge. Naturally, the Russian bear did not take too kindly to this and annexed the Eastern portion of the country.

In an article on November 2014 we wrote that the EU is essentially doing the reverse of what Hitler did from 1939 onwards. Where Hitler bounded in first militarily, the EU has utilised a reverse tactic of bounding in economically and taking over territory with fiscal might. The next stage after this is military union in a covert fashion, and its working. The planned conflict will come last.

What the pro-EU element of the UK government under David Cameron is not telling anyone is that eventually the British army will be swallowed up by the EU army and incorporated into the ranks if Britain remains in the EU. For such a thing to happen would be devastating to Britain because it would be a signal to Russia that the UK would be target numero uno when conflict arose. Purely because strategically Britain would be weakened by not having its own military command and the UK is a great place to utilise for further attacks on Europe and the United States.

The British army has always prided itself in its effectiveness in combat, but under EU orders this would be compromised, and as the UK would be a sitting target it would be overrun in a few days if the Russians pleased to do so.

Napoleon Bonaparte tried, Adolf Hitler tried, but they both ultimately failed to take Russia, both caught out by the Siberian winter.

Jean Claude Juncker, may try as well. It is his dream to expand into Russia, and if not economically take the Slavs, he will, once the EU army has been built up, maybe jaunt across the Steppes and try for himself. Of course, there will have to be a move first by the Russians, and the EU move will be made to look retaliatory, but if Putin is around at the time, the EU will have its work cut out trying to best the grand chess master himself.

If Britain chooses to leave the EU however, it will have a chance in any future conflict. For a start, it will still have full control over its army, and secondly it will not be seen as such a threat to Putin. The real threat for Russia right now is the EU, and during a conflict, Britain would be seen as a neutral observer to the conflict if outside the EU.

When China joins in, as it is Russias ally, then things will change, but that will come later, as the Chinese are still building up their forces, and are not finished developing their military with high end equipment.

Britain must stick with NATO if it wishes to survive. This is something the EU is moving away from as they see NATO as a mainly Anglo led alliance, and the Europeans out of spite more than anything else are not happy with that reality.

The UK has its best chance of surviving if it always stays within the bounds of American NATO influence and aligning itself with the U.S. military supremacy, not only in defence but offence.

The recent foray into Syria by the Russians was indeed a good demonstration of what their military is currently capable of, and their hardware has improved considerably since the Cold War era.

For the safety of Britain, it is imperative that we all vote to leave the EU, we must not listen to the daily Project Fear bulletins fired from the StrongerIn campaign. They are misleading the people, and walking into a living nightmare which will eventually end in conflict.

The EU is planning for conquest in reverse, first economic, then military. Yes, it is covert and unseen to the untrained eye but there are little clues now and then that reveal the truth.

In the interests of global security, the EU should desist immediately from creating its own non-NATO military force, and should stay with NATO. We all know it wont do that, and has already begun creating its own amalgamated army much to the detriment of global peace.
A one-mile stretch of the Pryor-St. Xavier Road on the Crow Reservation has closed after chunks of asphalt collapsed into an apparent sinkhole between mile markers 31 and 32.

The road caved in about 8:15 a.m. Tuesday in the eastbound lane of Route 91, just west of mile marker 31, after the culvert beneath became clogged with storm water runoff and saturated soil and fell apart, Crow tribal officials said.

The road is unsafe for vehicles traveling in both directions and will be closed until further notice, according to the tribe.

Workers with the Crow Tribal Road Maintenance Crew were on site Tuesday afternoon on Route 91. They will work until the road is passable for traffic, hopefully by nightfall Tuesday, according to Sam Windy Boy of the Crow tribe.

Permanent repairs will be made at a later date, Windy Boy said.

The hole appeared to be at least 10 feet wide Tuesday afternoon and will likely grow across the entire road, according to the tribe.

The culvert was first damaged during the 2011 floods that swept through Eastern Montana and possibly again during heavy rains.

Road closure signs have been posted at Pryor and St. Xavier. Alternate routes are available through Billings and Hardin.
A woman arrested in Billings on Monday night faces a deliberate homicide charge related to the 2015 shooting death of a man near Thompson Falls.

Jenna L. Michael, 31, is being held in the Yellowstone County jail on a $101,000 bond. The U.S. Marshal's Violent Offender Task Force arrested Michael on Monday night outside a bar on Avenue D.

Michael appeared Tuesday in Yellowstone County Justice Court and was ordered to remain in custody until such time as she can be extradited back to Sanders County.

In court documents, Sanders County Attorney Robert Zimmerman accused Michael of shooting 54-year-old Marvin Gallaher to death July 9.

At about 9:50 p.m., police responded to a home northwest of Thompson Falls where Michael had told a homeowner she had shot a man along a nearby river, records state. She arrived with a Ruger SR1911 and a removed silver magazine holding two rounds.

Michael spoke to the Sanders County undersheriff but could not give her account in chronological order and she appeared nearly hysterical at times. She said she spent the day with Gallaher. They started at his house, but they left town after Gallaher said he was wanted by police.

She agreed to guide the undersheriff to where the shooting occurred. On the ride to the site, Michael said she was afraid for her life and thought she was being set up. She said the bullets in the gun she used were not real and Gallaher had been making hand signals behind his back to people hiding in the trees.

Before reaching the area of the shooting, Michael continued to say she was afraid for her life and believed there were people waiting in the trees. She said Gallaher was ex-military and was all cammo-ed up.

They reached Vermillion River, and Michael pointed to a dark shape that looked like a moss covered rock. Upon further inspection, the undersheriff identified the object as a dead person dressed in camouflage clothing.

Gallaher was positioned in a kneeling position with his head on the ground. Michael had told the undersheriff she believed she was under attack when she shot him. She said she would not be surprised if people remained in the nearby woods.

Police decided the area was too large to process at night so it was taped off until the next morning. At about 11:55 p.m. Michael was read the Miranda Rights and taken to Sanders County Sheriffs Office.

During an interview she said she was freaking out and didnt know what was going on. However, she admitted to shooting Gallaher twice. Michael said she shot him, he went down to his knees and then she shot him again. The autopsy later revealed Gallaher was only shot once.

Michael said she fired several rounds after shooting Gallaher to get somebodys attention and receive help. Then she sped off in Gallahers truck to the house where the 911 call was made and she was later found.

Michael was not placed under arrest after the initial interview at the sheriffs office. Two days later she returned for another interview and revealed she had met Gallaher two weeks previously. She admitted to using illegal drugs with him the day of the shooting.

Blood tests found Michael had methamphetamine and amphetamine in her system but no alcohol. Gallahers toxicology report revealed meth, amphetamine and THC, the psychoactive compound in marijuana, in his system.
Dayton-area high school students to speak out against gun violence and its effects.

Dayton-area high school students will speak out against gun violence and its effects at the 2016 " Speak. Be Heard. Be Considered. " spoken word grand slam, presented by the Dayton Human Relations Council in partnership with the Victoria Theatre Association and Dayton Public Schools.

Hosted by Metaphorically Speaking, "Speak. Be Heard. Be Considered." will bring 18 high-performing poets, writers and rhymers to the Victoria Theatre stage on April 28 at 6:00 p.m. The community is welcome to attend, and admission is free.

The performers have successfully made it through preliminary rounds and will compete for a scholarship package to Sinclair Community College.



The high school poetry slam series is designed to provide forums for expression that reflect voices of the young adult community. This event supports the Community Initiative to Reduce Gun Violence (CIRGV) and the Community Police Council's (CPC) efforts to speak out against gun violence and build better relationships between law enforcement and the young adult community.

More information:

In an effort to reduce gun violence and improve police relations within the community, Speak. Be Heard. Be Considered. provides students with an opportunity to address community concerns and issues they find important.

When: Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 6PM

Where: Victoria Theatre

Cost: Free
Adults $8; Seniors/students $5

Throw in a lovable donkey who's annoyingly chatty, a bad guy with a short temper, a cookie with an attitude and over a dozen other fairytale misfits, and you've got the kind of mess that calls for a real hero. Luckily, there's one on hand...and his name is Shrek!

Leading the cast of characters is Mackenzie Dailey as Shrek, Conner Myers as Fiona, Taylor Stanley as Donkey, Robbie Engle as Lord Farquaad, Baylee Yost as Dragon, Austen Walker as Pinocchio, and Jenna Kepler as the Gingerbread Man (affectionately known as Gingy). And making his first appearance on any stage will be Michael Jauss, who will be starring as Little Shrek at the tender age of 6. Add a few entertaining cameo appearances by Greeneview staff members and you're in for a real treat!

During the show, you actually witness four different Fionas! Conner Myers (starring as Adult Fiona), Brooklyn Biggs (starring as Teen Fiona) and Adara Brooks, a talented 7th grader who was selected to play the part of Young Fiona, all sing a special song together called I Know It's Today, which is a memorable highlight in the first Act. The fourth Fiona, Ogre Fiona, will be played by Cassidy Collins who is seen later during the transformation scene.



Directed by Jennifer Jauss and Steve Shiveley and choreographed by Brianna Elwert, the show features an imaginative set, wonderful costumes, and a dragon  what more could you ask for? It promises to be a belly of laughs for the whole family, all while proving that beauty is truly in the eye of the ogre.
BUTTE  Sometimes it takes social media to find a stolen treasure.

Thats exactly what happened to John Swisher of Butte, who after learning his custom-built smoker or barbecue pit went missing on Sunday, posted a message on Facebook seeking its return.

By 9 p.m. Sunday, his sister in Idaho told him his post had more than 200 shares. A woman who had seen Swishers plea for help that night saw the missing smoker through the window of her home Monday morning.

She called Swisher, who runs Pit Crew BBQ, and he called police.

Butte-Silver Bow Sheriff Ed Lester said the smoker and 10-foot trailer were found at the back of a trailer park on the 900 block of South Washington Street, and police towed it to its rightful owner. He estimated the total value of the equipment at $8,000.

Asked how it felt to see his barbecue once again  copper-colored and outfitted with headframes and the Big M  Swisher replied, Unreal. Happy. I was just so floored the way the community jumped all over this. I was truly impressed.

The sheriff cited the recovery as a good example of the power of social media.

Anyone with information about this case is asked to call Butte police at 406-497-1120 or Crimestoppers at 406-782-7336.
Mumbai: Aamir Khan, it seems, is playing mediator to patch things up between Hrithik and Kangana whose public spat is becoming uglier by the day. Aamir is known to be cordial with both of them. He recently met Hrithik and from what close friends of the actor suggest, it was to make peace between the two stars.

Says a source, Aamir is close to both. Recently when Hrithik sent a legal notice to Kangana, she confided in Aamir. He knows both sides of the story and is probably in the best position to be the peacemaker. Both Kangana and Hrithik hold him in high regard as well.

Kangana has always been invited to all of Aamirs parties and the two recently met during PM Narendra Modis private dinner. Meanwhile, Aamir appears to be back to playing the Good Samaritan otherwise too. The actor, since the wrap-up of Dangal, has been lending support to water crisis-related programmes in Maharashtra. As part of one such programme, he visited a school in Satara to highlight the problem of drought in Maharashtra.
Rameswaram: A fisherman from Thirupalaikudi in Tamil Nadus Ramanathapuram district, who had gone to Bahrain to work for a fisheries company there, met with a ghastly death when a boiler burst in his company premises.

The 35-year-old Sivanathan alias Karmegam had been working for a Bahrain fisheries company for the past two years, reports reaching here on Monday said.

The ghastly mishap took place when he returned to the company premises there after completing a fishing assignment at sea. Sivananthan was rushed to a hospital in Bahrain but later succumbed to his burn injuries. As the news reached his family here, his wife, Indira, was shocked. She along with her two children went to the Ramanathapuram district collectors office and presented a petition to the collector, Dr S Natarajan urging the government to take immediate steps to bring back the deceaseds body home from Bahrain and payment of due compensation to the victims family.

Two held under Goondas Act:

Meanwhile, two persons have been detained under the Goondas Act by an order issued by the district Collector, on an advice given by the Ramanathapuram district SP, an official release said here on Monday.

They detenus included Sabarivasan, 24, and Abdul Rahman, 31, both of whom were wanted in several criminal cases and continued to indulge in other criminal activities. The accused were later lodged in the Madurai Central prison.
BENGALURU: Defending the state governments decision to award a contract to Matrix Imaging Solutions Pvt Ltd, in which Chief Minister Siddaramaiah's son Dr Yathindra Siddaramaiah was a director, medical education minister Dr Sharan Prakash Patil said the government had used its discretionary power to outsource lab and diagnostic services to this firm.

Answering a question on whether the government would allow outsourcing of services even if bidders quoted rates less than the minimum set by the government, Mr Patil said that it was not a policy issue and the state government would use its discretionary power.

If the service is in public interest, if there is a requirement and if there is financial crunch in the department, we will outsource such services. It is not a policy matter that any services in government hospitals should be outsourced based on the cost factor, he added.

Reiterating that there was nothing wrong in awarding the contract to Matrix Imaging Solutions Pvt Ltd, Mr Patil said Victoria hospital was in dire need of MRI scanners and had placed request with the ministry.

After a pre-tender meeting, in which representatives of five companies participated, only those of two companies participated in the final bidding process. In view of a technical problem with one of the bidders, where the EMD amount was not deposited in time, the tender was awarded to Matrix Imaging Solutions Pvt Ltd, he added.

Mr Patil said, The government would have to shell out Rs eight crores for purchasing the machine. Now, we are providing only space and patients can use the services as per rates fixed by the state government.
The Chief Minister directed the officials of Vijayapura to ensure there was adequate storage in all fodder banks

Vijayapura: Wrapping up his whilrwind tour of drought-hit areas in Vijayapura district on Monday, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah announced that he was sending a team of his ministers headed by agriculture minister, Byre Gowda, to Delhi to request Central assistance of Rs 1,416 crore for drought-relief work in the state.

Mr Siddaramaiah said he would shortly hold a meeting in Bengaluru to review the implementation of the Multi Village Scheme (MVS) to provide drinking water to dry areas of the state.

While admitting that he had received complaints about ineffective implementation of MVS in many areas, he said, he would review the scheme and ensure that it was implemented better.

He also directed officials of Vijayapura to ensure there was adequate storage in all fodder banks and prevent illegal supply of fodder to other states as farmers here needed it more.

Several farmers, who spoke to the Chief Minister in drought -hit areas like Atharga and Jodigudi pleaded with him for government financial support as they had lost their crops in the absence of rain.

They also urged him to waive their crop loans to help them tide over the crisis. Vijayapura Deputy Commissioner, D Randeep, for his part, said that drinking water was being supplied to 164 villages where there was an acute shortage of it. Arrangements had been made to rush 610 water tankers to rural pockets and 55 to urban localities. Ten fodder banks had been opened in areas which did not have enough of it and cattle houses had been set up to feed cattle, he added.

Lime board to come up in Vijayapura

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah is keen to set up a Lime Development Board in Vijayapura district where lemons are grown in but fail to fetch a good profit for growers.

The Chief Minister has insisted that the Horticulture Department send a proposal to set up the board and assured that it would be cleared immediately. The lemon crop grown in 5000 acres of land in Indi taluk have totally failed owing to poor rainfall and the drought situation in Vijayapura district in recent weeks.

The board which is expected to operate like Coffee Development Board in the state is expected to boost lemons production in Vijayapura and other neighbouring districts. Already, the Horticulture Department in Vijayapura has been able to provide an effective market to horticulture crops like grapes, pomegranate and other fruits grown on a massive scale.

A large portion of grapes and pomogranate from Vijayapura are being exported to many foreign nations. In the near future, the government is keen on giving an effective platform to lemon producers in the state to market their yield effectively by utilising facilities to be extended by Lemon Development Board.

According to the Vijayapura Deputy Commissioner, most horticulture crops in Vijayapura, a dry area, depend on irrigation. Since the lemon crop is not grown in irrigated stretches, farmers had to suffer losses due to scanty rainfall this season.
Ports and islands are useful things, especially those scattered across thousands of miles of a hotly contested ocean in one of the most volatile regions of the world. To lease, occupy and possibly even own one is every countrys ambition.

Take the United States, long settled in its largest overseas military base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia (leased from the British in the late Sixties in exchange for a handful of Pershing missiles). Since all roads on the world terror map somehow lead to the AfPak region and given Chinas expansionism across Asia, US presence in the Indian Ocean has swelled in recent years.

For India and China, more than 80 per cent of whose crude oil needs are met by tankers traversing the ocean (with Sri Lankas Colombo port playing a pivotal role), the battle for supremacy here began a long time ago. But while New Delhi under the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance governments remained stultified in the stranglehold of coalition partners such as the anti-Sinhalese Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu, Beijing cast its pearly net swiftly and precisely all over the Indian Ocean region  in Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh  and beyond. In Sri Lanka, it went from strength to strength.

It built and enjoys unrestricted access to the south eastern port of Hambantota and was later awarded the coveted $1.5 billion dollar contract for constructing Colombos Port City. The last rankled New Delhi the most, since more than 80 per cent of Indias overall commercial shipping traffic passes through Colombo.

Scattered across 90,000 sq km, the 1,192 islands of the Maldives are of particular interest to all players, more so since the countrys growing closeness to Saudi Arabia has allegedly led to a rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the archipelago. Since 2014, all religions other than Islam stand banned and the country will receive a grant from Saudi Arabia to intensify the study of the Quran, build more mosques and therewith almost certainly allow the radical Wahhabi form of Islam to strike roots in the Maldives.

Most recently, Western nations fighting anti-terror wars around the world found a handy weapon to threaten action against the Maldives: The ousting of democratically-elected former President Mohamed Nasheed and his quasi-banishment to the UK, ostensibly for medical treatment. An international campaign calling for sanctions against the Maldives has been launched and is being spearheaded by none other than Mr Nasheeds lawyer, the glamorous Amal Clooney.

But like its approach in Sri Lanka under the all-powerful Rajapaksa, Chinas Maldives policy too has focused on geo-strategy and predictably ignored alleged violations of human rights and democratic principles. China is building infrastructure in the Maldives and has for long been suspected of maintaining a nuclear submarine base in a southern atoll. The liberalisation of land sales by Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom and his welcoming his countrys inclusion in Chinas Maritime Silk Road plan will certainly lead to more Chinese acquisitions across the archipelago.

Indias presence in the Maldives is not unsubstantial. It maintains naval ships and radar stations there and has helped out in times of natural disasters. But on the political and geo-strategic front India has so far teetered indecisively, at times supporting and at others,ignoring the calls for democracy that have grown over the past decades, chiefly at the behest of the ousted Mr Nasheeds Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), now restricted to the opposition. Relations soured after Indias GMR group was ousted from the Male airport modernisation project and the contract given to a Chinese company which will invest $800 million in it.

Suddenly, human rights became an issue and India joined Western nations in denouncing Male for sacking the Chief Justice and arresting several ministers. Prime Minister Narendra Modis omission of the Maldives on his Indian Ocean tour was conspicuous. Sri Lankan analysts often point to how it was primarily Indias support of Western, anti-Sri Lanka resolutions at the United Nations that pushed Colombo into the waiting arms of the Chinese. Indian policy towards the Maldives too seems stuck in a similar groove.

It was the age-old conundrum: Do we side with the big boys of the West and denounce Male, or craft a more pragmatic policy? For the first time in decades, those questions were answered decisively by Mr Modi when President Yameen arrived in Delhi earlier this month. Mr Yameen came to power by illegally ousting Mr Nasheed. Votes were rigged, Opposition members  of late even 30 journalists  were slammed behind bars. Mr Yameen belongs to the same party as former President Gayoom who ruled the Maldives with near-dictatorial control for over three decades. And, finally, this is the same Yameen who has visited Saudi Arabia three times in under two years and given that country unbridled access to investment and education in the Maldives.

And yet, Mr Modi initialled six agreements, including one on defence cooperation with the Maldivian President earlier this month. Further, India has been making backroom efforts to prevent international sanctions against the Maldives. So are geo-strategy and an India-centric thrust going to be the new benchmarks of Delhis Maldives policy?

After all, for all their political troubles, the Maldives have for decades remained a tolerant, if conservative society, permitting alcohol, pork and scanty beachwear  items forbidden by Islam  on the hundreds of islands leased to international luxury resort chains. Despite the indignation and loud protests by their governments, Western tourists continue to flock to what is one of the most beautiful countries in the world to sample its superlative, high-end hospitality.

Indias new approach to relations with the Maldives seems to have factored in that relatively peaceful history too.

Though India has every reason to be worried about the growth of Wahhabism anywhere in the neighbourhood, Mr Modi, for now, seems content with Mr Yameens promise to curb radicalism and his assurance of institutional reforms. Oxymorons from the self-appointed President of an increasingly conservative Islamic nation, say analysts. India, as the Indian Ocean Rims most powerful country, must demand action.
Afghan officials gather near the suicide bombing site in central Kabul in Afghanistan. (Photo: AP)

Kabul: At least 30 people have been killed and 327 injured in a powerful Taliban suicide bombing that ripped through central Kabul on Tuesday, triggering heavy firefight in a densely packed neighbourhood.

The incident comes barely a week after the Taliban announced the start of their annual spring offensive.

Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack near the Afghan intelligence agency office, which sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing in the sky and rattled windows several miles away. This is first major Taliban attack in Kabul since the insurgents launched this year's fighting season.

Read: Afghan Taliban announce 'spring offensive'

"The first blast was carried out by a suicide bomber in a car and possibly one or two bombers are still resisting," interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said.

"The scene of the attack has been completely cordoned off by Afghan security forces."

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed their fighters had managed to enter the office of the National Directorate of Security, the main Afghan spy agency.

Afghan officials did not confirm that claim but intense gun battles could be heard near the NDS compound. The Taliban are generally known to exaggerate battlefield claims.

Read: Taliban launches Operation Omari, the spring offensive in Afghanistan

"Today's terrorist attack near Puli Mahmood Khan area of Kabul city demonstrates the clear defeat of the enemy in the face-to-face fight against Afghan security forces," the Afghan presidential palace said in a statement on Twitter.

The Afghan Taliban last Tuesday announced the start of their "spring offensive" even as the government in Kabul seeks to bring the insurgents back to the negotiating table to end their drawn-out conflict.

The Taliban warned they would "employ large-scale attacks on enemy positions across the country" during the offensive dubbed Operation Omari in honour of the movement's late founder Mullah Omar, whose death was announced last year.

Read: Pakistan condemns Kabul terrorist attack

The insurgents began the fighting season last week by targeting the northern city of Kunduz, which they briefly captured last year in a stunning setback for Afghan forces.

But officials said Afghan security forces drove Taliban fighters back from the city on Friday.

The annual spring offensive normally marks the start of the "fighting season", though this winter the lull was shorter and they continued to battle government forces albeit with less intensity.

Read: Narendra Modi condemns terror attack in Kabul

The Taliban's resurgence has raised serious questions about Afghan forces' capacity to hold their own, with an estimated 5,500 troops killed last year, the worst ever toll.

Peace talks which began last summer were abruptly halted after it was revealed that Taliban leader Mullah Omar had been dead for two years.

A four-country group comprising Afghanistan, the United States, China and Pakistan has been holding meetings since January aimed at jump-starting negotiations, though their efforts have so far been in vain.
Islamabad: Pakistan on Tuesday strongly condemned the terrorist attack in Afghanistan's capital Kabul which killed at least 28 people and wounded more than 300 others.

"We extend our heartfelt sympathies and condolences to those who have lost their loved ones and pray for an early recovery of the injured," Foreign Office (FO) said in a statement.

Pakistan strongly condemns the attack, it said. "Pakistan condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestations and expresses solidarity with the government and brotherly people of Afghanistan in their hour of grief and struggle against terrorism," it further said.
From a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a loud pop signals the catapult launch of a small fixed-wing drone that is designed to carry medical supplies to remote locations almost 40 miles away.





The drones are the brainchild of a small group of engineers at a Silicon Valley startup called Zipline, which plans to begin operating a service with them for the government of Rwanda in July. The fleet of robot planes will initially cover more than half the tiny African nation, creating a highly automated network to shuttle blood and pharmaceuticals to remote locations in hours rather than weeks or months.



Rwanda, one of the worlds poorest nations, was ranked 170th by gross domestic product in 2014 by the International Monetary Fund. And so it is striking that the country will be the first, company executives said, to establish a commercial drone delivery network  putting it ahead of places like the United States, where there have been heavily ballyhooed futuristic drone delivery systems promising urban and suburban package delivery from tech giants such as Amazon and Google.



The concept of drone ports is something that a very small decision-making unit in the country decided they were going to do, said Michael Fairbanks, a member of Rwandan President Paul Kagames presidential advisory council. It took a very short time. Its something that America could learn from.



That Rwanda is set to become the first country with a drone delivery network illustrates the often uneven nature of the adoption of new technology. In the United States, drones have run into a wall of regulation and conflicting rules. But in Rwanda, the countrys master development plan has placed a priority on the use of the machines, first for medicine and then more broadly for economic development.



Rwanda has a vision to become a technology hub for East Africa and ultimately the whole continent of Africa, said William Hetzler, a founder of Zipline, which is based in the seaside town of Half Moon Bay, California. Projects like ours fit very well with that strategy.



The new drone system will initially be capable of making 50 to 150 daily deliveries of blood and emergency medicine to Rwandas 21 transfusing facilities, mostly in hospitals and clinics in the western half of the nation.



The drone system is based on a fleet of 15 small aircraft, each with twin electric motors, a 3.5-pound payload and an almost 8-foot wingspan. The systems speed makes it possible to maintain a cold chain  essentially a temperature-controlled supply chain needed to provide blood and vaccines  which is often not practical to establish in developing countries.



The Zipline drones will use GPS receivers to navigate and communicate via the Rwandan cellular network. They will be able to fly in rough weather conditions, enduring winds up to 30 mph.



When they reach the hospitals, they will not land but will drop small packages from very low altitudes. The supplies will fall to earth suspended by simple paper parachutes. The planes will then return to a home base, where they will be prepared for a new mission by swapping in a new battery and snapping in a new flight plan stored in a SIM card.



This is the new face of the aerospace industry, said Jay Gundlach, president of FlightHouse Engineering, an Oregon-based aviation consulting firm. Established unmanned aircraft companies should learn from Ziplines agile and innovative culture.



Like Zipline, others are attempting to solve the problem of the autonomous distribution of medical supplies. Many other systems being developed, however, are based on less-efficient multicopter or quadcopter designs that have shorter range and less ability to fly in all-weather situations.



In the United States, a firm named Flirtey has delivered medical supplies using multirotor helicopters as an experiment in Virginia. Another Silicon Valley startup, Matternet, is experimenting with the government of Malawi and with UNICEF to deliver infant HIV tests by quadcopter. Google X, the advanced research arm of Alphabet, is now developing a vertical-takeoff-and-landing system that will hover and deliver packages by the use of winches.



Airborne alternative



Zipline began in 2014 when two of its founders, Keller Rinaudo and Hetzler, visited a young public health worker in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The worker had created a text-messaging system that enabled hospital workers to urgently request medical supplies in life and death situations.



But Rinaudo said he realised that what he was looking at was a long list of death sentences. Today in many places worldwide, attempts are made to deliver medical supplies by motorcycle or pickup truck over roads that are frequently impassable.



The public health worker showed me the database that had entries every time someone texted, and it was thousands of names long, Rinaudo said. It was mostly infants, and there was no response. The supply chain had no way of taking them into account.



Rinaudo and Hetzler set about to find an airborne alternative to automate a supply chain. They met Keenan Wyrobek, a Stanford-trained roboticist who was instrumental in the design of the PR1 robot, a pioneering general purpose mobile robot with arms, and later the more advanced PR2 robot developed by Willow Garage.



The three technologists assembled an engineering team with aerospace industry experience, attracting talent from Space X, Aurora Flight Sciences, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as Stanford and Google. The startup has raised $18 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures), SV Angel, Subtraction Capital, Stanford University and individuals including Jerry Yang, a founder of Yahoo, and Paul Allen, a founder of Microsoft. Hetzler said that by placing engineers who have consumer electronics expertise in close collaboration with roboticists and aerospace engineers, it had been possible to rapidly build a highly automated system that would be operated by a staff of five to eight.



In February, Zipline signed a contract with the Rwandan government to begin operating the drone service this summer. A small team will be based in a city near the Rwandan capital of Kigali to oversee the service.



I always think of Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist, who said, They promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters,' said Paul Willard, a former Boeing aerodynamics engineer who is now an investor in Zipline, referring to the social media service Twitter. This feels a little bit more like flying cars.




The career of Montana poultry specialist Harriette Cushman will be the topic of a presentation by Amy McKinney at the next meeting of the Pahaska Corral of Westerners.

The April 25 meeting will be held at the Sunset House in Cody, Wyo. There is a no-host dinner starting at 6 p.m. followed by the presentation around 7 p.m. The dinner and the presentation are open to the public. Guests are also welcome to attend only the presentation.

Cushman was the first Extension Service Poultry Specialist in the United States and served in Montana from 1922 until her retirement in 1955. As poultry specialist, Cushman was responsible for developing and disseminating information about poultry to people across Montana.

McKinney is an associate professor of history at Northwest College in Powell, Wyo. She completed her doctorate at the University of Calgary in 2011 and her masters at Montana State University in Bozeman in 2000. Her dissertation, How I Cook, Keep House, Help with Farm Work Too: Rural Women in Post-World War II Montana, examines how and to what degree the suburban housewife ideal translated to rural areas in Montana after World War II.

The Pahaska Corral of Westerners is the local chapter of Westerner International.

For more information, contact Jeremy Johnston at 307-578-4032 or by email at jeremyj@centerofthewest.org.
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A 26-year-old American woman will file a lawsuit against a Catholic Indian priest and his church in India for allegedly sexually abusing her during his posting in the US between 2004 and 2005.





The move comes in protest against the recent Vatican decision which announced Diocese of Ootacamund located in Mylapore is reinstating Joseph Jeyapaul to ministry.



Minnesota attorney Jeff Anderson will file suit on behalf of the victim in federal court that claims the Diocese of Ootacamund endangered children by reinstating Jeyapaul.



Jeyapaul who served as a priest in Crookston township of Minnesota in 2004 and 2005 was arrested in India in 2012 and extradited to the US on charges of sexually abusing two girls in a congregation.



He was later deported to India last year, after serving his sentence of one year and one day. In a statement, advocacy group SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) announced that one of the sexual abuse survivors would sue the priest and the diocese.



"It may be the most irresponsible Vatican move we've ever seen: Catholic officials in Rome have lifted the suspension of a recently convicted predator priest. We are stunned and saddened by such blatant recklessness and callousness," Barbara Dorris of St Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, said in a statement today.



A letter sent to Anderson and Roseau County Attorney Lisa Hanson and signed by over 500 Jeyapaul supporters in India will also be released as evidence of the public danger (nuisance) permitted by Indian Bishop and Vatican, it said.



"On January 16, 2016, with the permission of Pope Francis, Bishop Amalraj lifted the suspension of Father Joseph Jeyapaul," the firm said, adding that in 2015, after his extradition from India, Jeyapaul plead guilty to criminal sexual conduct involving the sexual abuse of a minor girl while he worked in the Diocese of Crookston in 2005.



"Catholic officials refuse to keep this admitted sex offender away from kids, so our only hope of stopping him is to get him charged and convicted again," Dorris said.



Over the weekend, Barbara and the victim were seen distributing leaflets outside the church in Crookston to find another sex abuse survivor.



"Our goal is to find just one more victim who might be able to file criminal charges and get this proven predator behind bars," the victim told local 'Grand Forks Herald'.



The lawsuit would charge Catholic officials with creating "public nuisances" by hiding and helping predator priests.



"It was the first victim's courage that brought forward a second victim of Fr Jeyapaul. It was the second victim's courage that prodded Fr Jeyapaul to plead guilty. And we hope the courage of a third victim will get Fr Jeyapaul extradited, convicted and jailed again, so that no more innocent lives are shattered," SNAP said.



"Until he's charged and convicted again, Jeyapaul should be put in a remote, secure, independently-run treatment center far from families who have learned to trust him," it said.
Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton today looked set for solidifying their presidential front-runner status after suffering a series of losses recently as polling began in the potentially game-changing New York state primary.



All the presidential hopefuls packed in back-to-back campaign stops, making final pitches before voters ahead of the crucial primary election.



Democratic contenders Clinton and Bernie Sanders and their Republican rivals Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich toured across the state holding rallies and meeting voters yesterday, seeking to solidify their positions.



At stake are 291 Democratic delegates and 95 for Republicans.



68-year-old Clinton, the New York senator for eight years, is leading the delegate count with 1,307, while Sanders has 1,094 delegates. The one who clinches 2,383 delegates in all wins the party's nomination.



Clinton is trying to end a seven state winning streak for 74-year-old Sanders in this primary.



A total of 1,237 delegates are needed to sew up the Republican nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention.



Trump, 69, leads in the total delegate count with 743, followed by Cruz with 543 and Kasich with 144.



Trump, who has faced defeats at the hands of Cruz recently, is desperately trying to get enough delegates to avoid a contested convention this summer.



For Trump, a win in New York would be his first since he won the Arizona Primary on March 22.



A new NBC New York/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll shows Trump will garner 54 per cent of the Republican primary voters. Ohio Governor Kasich is expected to come in second, instead of Cruz.



On the Democratic side, Clinton has a double-digit lead over her competitor Vermont Senator Sanders.



However, nationally, Republican presidential front-runner Trump has the support of a record 40 per cent Republican voters while Clinton is engaged in a tough contest with Sanders, according to a latest poll.



Trump has the support of 40 per cent of the Republican primary voters and is followed closely by Senator Cruz with 35 per cent and Ohio Governor John Kasich with 24 per cent, according to a latest opinion poll by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal.



Meanwhile, in the Democratic party, Sanders (46.3 per cent) has all but eliminated Clinton's (47.7 per cent) primary polling lead, it said.



While Trump would need as many votes as possible, he will not be getting two from his own family.



Since only registered voters from participating parties may vote, Trump's children Eric and Ivanka Trump missed the deadline to register with a political party, making them ineligible to cast ballots for the billionaire businessman.



Clinton sought support of the minorities and women doing her various stops across the city.


Most of the hitches in the multi- billion Euro deal for 36 Rafale fighter planes have been addressed and the remaining ones will be cleared in the next meeting of the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh said today.



The meeting of DAC, the apex body of the Defence Ministry for procurement, is likely to take place on April 21, a day after Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar arrives here from his visit to China.



Hoping that the Rafale deal would be inked soon, Indian Air Force Chief Arup Raha said, "It is at a very advanced stage."



Singh told reporters here, "I can only tell you this that most of the hitches that were there, have been addressed. A few (remaining) issues will be addressed, when possibly the matter comes up before DAC. They shall be addressed in the next DAC. And thereafter I think the road shall be clear."



He was asked as to when the deal is likely to be signed. When the same question was put to Air Chief Marshal Raha on the sidelines of an IAF seminar, he said, "We have seen so many years go past. How can I give an assurance? But it is in a very advanced stage."



The junior defence minister brushed aside a suggestion that at least six indigenously made Light Combat Aircraft Tejas can be bought for the price of one Rafale plane, saying both the aircraft were totally different in nature and that IAF needed both.



India and France could firm up the order for the purchase of 36 Rafale combat planes as both the countries have managed to narrow down their differences over pricing.



The development comes nearly four months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Francois Hollande signed a memorandum of agreement to purchase 36 Rafale aircraft.



The Indian side has been negotiating hard to bring down the price with Parrikar refusing to buckle under pressure even as questions were raised about the delay in signing of the contract.



Sources said the price for 36 Rafales, as per the UPA government's tender, keeping the cost escalation and dollar rate in mind, comes to a little over Rs 65,000 crore.



This includes the cost involved in making changes India has sought in the aircraft, including Israeli helmet-mounted display and some specific weaponry. "The effort is to bring down the price to less than Euros 8 billion (Rs 59,000 crore)," the sources said.

The final deal may be clinched by May-end.
India's first bullet train project may have gone to Japan but China is wooing the country to help build high-speed railway on other routes, claiming that it has the technology and expertise which could bring enormous economic and social benefits to the people.



With questions being raised on the cost factor involving setting up of high-speed railway networks, China has cited its own example of the profits that it is reaping now.



"The reason of introducing or promoting our high-speed railway (HSR) to other countries...is that we are confident in our technologies. The second reason is that we share a lot of similarities with southeast Asian countries in terms of large population and we are all developing countries," Vice General Engineer of the China Railway Corporation Zhao Guotang told visiting journalists from India and some ASEAN nations at the China Railways headquarters here.



"We are also quite happy to share our experiences with these nations. The advantages brought by HSR to our economic and social development is quite remarkable and quite well known," he said.



Zhao, who holds the rank of a Deputy Minister, also asserted that the construction and operation of high-speed railway is economically sound.



Significantly, questions have been raised in India about the financial viability of setting up the HSR.



"For example Nanchang to Shanghai high-speed railway line started generating profits in the first year of its operation after opening to public. Beijing to Shanghai HSR, with a total distance of 1318 km, has been earning money in third year after being thrown open. Last year, it made a profit of over six billion RMB (USD 927 million) and this year, it is hoped it will exceed 10 billion RMB," Zhao said.



"Beijing to Tianjin inter-city high-speed railway line has also realised profitability and Beijing to Guangzhou high-speed rail line realised balance. So, some people may say that profitability of high-speed railway is some kind of magic thing or marvellous thing, but I should say it is needed for country's economic and social development. It is a good thing, we are happy to share our experiences with other countries," he said.



Earlier, India's move to opt for Japanese bullet trains on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad route had raised concerns in China which is competing with Japan to build high-speed rail networks in India.



In addition to conducting a feasibility study to build a high-speed rail track on the 2,200-km Chennai-Delhi route, an India-China consortium is also conducting a study for the 1,200-km New Delhi-Mumbai corridor.



The proposed Chennai-Delhi corridor could be the second largest in the world after China's 2,298 km-long Beijing- Guangzhou line which was launched three years ago.



Zhao said that "actually, people often tend to pay more attention to maximum speed of HSR, but what matters most for passengers is the average operational speed".



"For our Beijing to Guangzhou HSR line, the average operational speed is 287 kmph, which is the highest in the world, the second is in France which is 246 kmph and third in Japan at 239 kmph," he said.



"For example, from Beijing to Guangzhou HSR line the total distance is 2,298 km and the total travelling time of the fastest train on this route is 8 hours and 2 minutes," he said.



On the feasibility studies in India, Zhao said the party responsible for such work is Third Railway Survey and Design Institute Group Corporation (TSDI) of China.



"They have taken about 50 per cent of feasibility work of our overseas rail projects, so they have rich experience in this area," he said.



Asked if HSR was an expensive proposition and if China faced similar problems when it set up such projects, he said, "actually, national conditions in India are somewhat similar to what we have in China. In the railway development of China, we have also experienced the process from the upgrading of the existing lines to the development of high-speed railway lines."



"However, there is always a feeling for the upper limitation of upgrading our existing railway lines, that's why we decided to develop the HSR after we have upgraded the speed of existing rail lines to 200 kmph. Not every existing rail line needs to be re-built into HSR line, this needs thorough economic analysis and it also needs consideration of the passenger demand," he said.



Further, the senior railway official said, "I will give you two examples or two technical parameters of railways. The first is the distance between centres of tracks, this parameter of HSR than that of existing railway is quite different. If you want to build or upgrade a new line on the basis of the existing railway line, you need to overcome this difference. Actually, what you need to do is somewhat similar to built a new line.



"Second parameter is the curved radius of high-speed rail line is also different than that of existing line. In China, in our experience, most of our existing railway line run across the urban areas. So, even in our upgrading of existing rail lines, we have done a lot of work in land acquisition and re-settlement...In short, the decision between the upgrading of existing lines and building new HSR lines depends on thorough study analysis."



Zhao said China had also experienced different voices and different opinions in the country with regards to HSR.



"But finally we decided to choose the path of developing HSR. Now, it is proved that our choice is correct," he said.



Speaking about the train ticket price of high-speed trains, Zhao said the situation in India is very much similar to what they have in China.



"The train ticket price of existing rail line was also very cheap in China. The price is less than 10 Chinese cent per km and that for HSR, the price for second class is 48 cent per km and that for highway buses it is 87 cent to 1 Yuan per km. Ticket price of our high-speed railway is cheaper than even the highway buses and the flights as well," he said.



Speaking of non-fare revenue, he said the land price around and adjacent to HSR stations has and will experience big increase.



HSR is also bringing profit to local government and other departments, besides helping China Railways reap profit, he stressed.



Replying to a question, Zhao said, "China's HSR technology is much more compatible than the technologies of other countries because the availability and usability of HSR line depends on its inclusiveness within the whole railway network of the country."



"We have the strength of people or talent. During recent decade, the last ten years, the newly built high-speed line in Japan is 350 km, that of France is 496 km, so you can see what we have in China," he said.



Further touching upon the cost factor, he said, "the first aspect is the construction technologies, especially because of utilisation of machineries and Information Technology, we can have remarkable improvement for increase of our construction efficiency. In this way, we can ensure reasonable construction period and shorter period than some other countries."



"Normally, for one HSR, we can finish for 3-5 years, but for some other countries, it may take 7-8 years," Zhao said.



He also talked about the high-speed rail helping bring cities closer.



"For example, the high-speed railway has brought to us the One-City effect, that means it makes the neighbouring cities integrated...It has helped to boost the economic development of the region and of the country. It has also played a role in our social development," he said.



Replying to a question, he said, "during our construction of high-speed railway lines in China, we have encountered a lot of difficulties, they are never less than what we have encountered now in our process of going global. But now some currently, some media are exaggerating some difficulties we have faced."



Later, visiting the traffic control centre, Deputy Head at the centre, Zhuang He briefed the journalists about various operations.



"On daily basis, we are running over 7000 passenger trains including 4000 EMU trains," he said.
Congress today hit back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah over the Ishrat Jehan case, accusing them of "obstructing" judicial process and taking to "patent falsehoods".





"The Prime Minister and the BJP President are shamelessly misleading the country and obstructing judicial process by blocking trial of accused in the Ishrat Jehan fake encounter case pending in a court in Ahmedabad, Gujarat," Congress chief spokesman Randeep Surjewala said.



He said Modi and Shah must tell the country the real motive behind "desperation" to shut down the trial.



"What is it that they seek to hide or are scared of needs to be placed before the nation? Is there some evidence available on that file of the court that goes against somebody very senior in the leadership of the BJP, which is scaring Amit Shah and Modi?" he asked.



He alleged the Modi government is using a "web of selective news leaks, deceptive statements of its ministers and non-grant of sanction for prosecution of the accused to ensure mistrial and reinvestigation through pliable investigating agencies".



"Modi government is not only economical with the truth but is also relying upon patent falsehood to hide the facts," Surjewala said, hitting back at BJP which accused it of aiding a "conspiracy to eliminate Narendra Modi" and claimed Congress President Sonia Gandhi "worked actively" on it.



Surjewala said the Modi government seeks to "falsely hide" behind the language of pleadings before the High Court to ensure no trial takes place and truth does not come out.



"This itself makes the motive of Prime Minister, BJP President and their ministers clearly suspect," he said.



"Ishrat Jehan fake encounter case has no connection to the then Congress government in any manner," he said, adding findings of the fake encounter have been recorded in a judicial inquiry of the encounter by Ahmedabad Metropolitan Court after examining the entire evidence.



Citing a media report which claimed that the then Home Minister P Chidambaram had signed the first affidavit in the encounter case, Union Minister and BJP leader Nirmala Sitharaman had said yesterday Congress, especially Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, should take responsibility because Chidambaram did so as the party found itself not strong enough to fight Modi politically.



Surjewala sought to to know the motive, the conspiracy and the real reason for "sinister" attempts to derail the judicial process from reaching a final conclusion.



"Is it to hide something that BJP is afraid of or to protect the accused officers, one of whom has now been appointed as DG of Gujarat Police despite pendency of trial?



"Or is it to divert attention from the massive scam in Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation in which nearly 20,000 crore of public exchequer's money has been put at stake?" he asked.



"Or is it to divert attention from the illegal land allocation to Anar Patel, daughter of present Gujarat CM Anandiben Patel by the then State Cabinet headed by Narendra Modi causing a clear-cut loss to the exchequer?" he asked.
Ahead of National Security Advisor Ajit Doval's visit here, China today stuck to its stand on blocking India's bid to get JeM chief Masood Azhar banned by the UN, saying it was in accordance with "facts and relevant resolutions".



Ahead of the crucial boundary talks between Doval and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi tomorrow, China also said it was in "sound communication" with all relevant parties including the Indian side over the Azhar issue.



As both External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar raised the Azhar issue strongly yesterday in their talks with their counterparts asking China to review its stand, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying once again reiterated that Beijing's decision was in accordance with "facts" and "relevant" UN resolutions.



"As for the listing matter China has already expressed its position. We support the UN central coordinating role in the world campaign against terrorism and China has taken active part in the world cooperation against terrorism," Hua said.



"We oppose double standards in counter terrorism campaign. We have been dealing with the listing matter in accordance with the facts and relevant resolutions. We are also in sound communication with all relevant parties including the Indian side," she said.



China's assertion came in the backdrop of Swaraj's remarks at the Russia-India-China (RIC) foreign ministers meet in Moscow where she warned the international community of "serious consequences" if it continues to adopt "double standards" in dealing with terrorism.



China's "hidden veto" in blocking India's bid to get JeM chief Azhar banned by the UN has cast a shadow on the Sino- India boundary talks beginning here tomorrow.



While Swaraj raised the Azhar issue with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Moscow on the sidelines of the RIC meet, Parrikar, who held talks with top defence officials here yesterday, said he took up the issue with them.



"What happened in UN is not in the right direction and they have to take a common line on terrorism which is in the interests of India and China," he said.



Asked to elaborate on what "facts" China needed on the issue of Azhar, whose outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) was banned by the UN in 2001, Hua said she needs to check on it.



However, she said the Chinese mission in UN is in touch with relevant parties including India.



Talking about criticism that China's stand of putting a "technical hold" on India's move at the last minute to get Pathankot terror attack mastermind Azhar banned by the UN smacked of "double standards", Hua said, "China is firmly opposed to double standards on the counter terrorism issue".



"China is also victim of terrorism. We believe that only by working as one we can fight against terrorism and maintain peace and stability of the whole world. There is no doubt about that," she said.



China supports central coordinating role for the UN Security Council in the global counter terrorism campaign, Hua said.



China along with other four permanent members of the UNSC has a final say on listing terror leaders and groups by UN committee on counter terrorism.



Last month, China had vetoed India's bid to get Azhar designated as terrorist by the UN Sanctions Committee, maintaining that the case "did not meet the requirements" of the Security Council. The Chinese action evoked a strong reaction in India which said that it was "incomprehensible" that while JeM was banned by the UN, its chief was not.



This is not the first time China has blocked India's bid to get Pakistan-based militant groups and leaders proscribed by the UN.



The UN had banned the JeM in 2001 but India's efforts for slapping of sanctions on Azhar after the 2008 Mumbai terror attack also did not fructify as China, that has veto powers, did not allow it apparently at the behest of Pakistan.



Last July, China had similarly halted India's move in the UN to take action against Pakistan for its release of Mumbai terror attack mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, saying its stand was "based on facts and in the spirit of objectiveness and fairness" with Beijing again claiming at the time that it was in touch with New Delhi.



Ahead of tomorrow's boundary talks to be held between Doval and Jiechi, officials said China is asking India to directly resolve the issue with Pakistan, which has become a major cause of worry as Islamabad while cracking down on terror groups active in China's Xinjiang province has protected militant groups that carried out terror attacks in India.



Besides the talks on boundary issue, which has been protracted for nearly two decades, Doval and Yang, the designated Special Representatives, have a mandate to discuss all issues concerning the bilateral, regional and international issues of mutual interest.



The Azhar issue was expected to figure prominently in the talks.



On the boundary talks, Hua said, "We have been working to resolve territorial disputes through negotiations and consultation and we have completely settled territorial disputes with 12 of the 14 land neighbours."



Only the border dispute with India and Bhutan needed to resolved, she said.



"Both history and practice have proven that it is possible to resolve territorial disputes through negotiation and consolation," she said.



In tomorrow's talks the two sides will continue to work to strive to reach a settlement acceptable to both sides, she said.



While working for a solution "we would like to work together with the Indian side to maintain stability in the border areas and create favourable condition for the boundary question," she said.



On India's stand of delineation of the 3,488 km-long LAC to bring about a clarity in order to avert standoffs at the disputed boundary, she said the issue could be further discussed at the boundary talks tomorrow.



It was raised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year and again highlighted by Parrikar during his talks with Chinese defence officials here yesterday.



"With regard to Line of Actual Control (LAC), we hope that we could have further discussion on that in the Special Representatives meeting. As for any breakthrough in the 19th session, I am not sure but I believe that both sides have the willingness to continue with the discussion, a friendly discussion on that," Hua said.



"During the meeting the two sides will work on the framework settlement to work out a plan that is acceptable to both sides," she said.
The Centre today got a rap on its knuckles yet again in the Uttarakhand High Court which said by imposing President's rule it was taking away the powers of an elected government and introducing "chaos" and that floor test "cannot be deprived of its sanctity".





The division bench of the court repeatedly maintained that irrespective of allegations of horse-trading and corruption, the only Constitutional way to test majority was to hold a floor test, which "you still have to go for".



The Centre also faced searching questions from the the court which observed that if the reasons for imposition of Article 356 in the instant case, where ruling parties are different at the Centre and in the state, are accepted then it may lead to the central government "watching with a magnifying glass where there is an opportunity for President's rule".



"It (President's rule) has to be applied in exceptional cases only," the bench of Chief Justice K M Joseph and Justice V K Bist said adding that the President could have waited for events to unfold on March 28 when a floor test was to take place.



The bench was hearing arguments on the petition challenging imposition of President's rule filed by the ousted Chief Minister Harish Rawat and related pleas.



By imposing President's rule, "you (Centre) are taking away power of an elected government. You are introducing chaos", it said adding the Governor had not recommended imposing of Article 356.



The bench went on to say that the Governor's action of March 23 calling for a floor test "cannot be deprived of its sanctity".



"After (the decision on) March 23 what has happened for imposition of Article 356?" the court asked.



It said that irrespective of allegations of horse-trading or a sting operation pointing towards corruption in the government, "the only Constitutional way to test majority was to hold the floor test. You still have to go for floor test".



"The sting operation and conclusions derived from it are totally irrelevant. The Union Cabinet could not have known that the Speaker would on March 26 disqualify the nine MLAs.



"Even if it (Cabinet) did know, it was irrelevant for the Centre to take it (disqualification) into consideration. If it (Centre) does take it into consideration, then it would stand accused of being partisan and playing politics in the state," the bench said.





The court also said that the government cannot say that the Chief Minister was trying to buy back his rebel MLAs while at the same time he was trying to get them disqualified.





"Both can't go hand in hand," it observed.





Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for state of Uttarakhand, asked the bench if the Centre has "clinching proof of corruption" should it allow floor test to happen and a corrupt and illegal government to go on by remaining a "mute spectator".





The Centre cannot be "hapless" in such a situation, he said and added that the Centre "cannot be a mute spectator to blatant slaughter of democracy".





"The Centre is in the business of Constitutional morality and not head counting," Salve said.





Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for the former CM, objected to Salve presenting arguments saying "the state has no role since currently the President is the state".





The bench, however, said that since the Governor cannot be made a party, he would speak through the state.





The court asked the Centre whether events like Governor asking for a floor test, would "eclipse what happened on March 18"? (Assembly proceedings relating to Appropriation Bill).





"Wouldn't the event of March 18 pale into insignificance in view of subsequent events?" it asked.





The court observed that irrespective of whether a division of votes occurred on March 18, the composition of the state's assembly was bound to change as the nine rebel Congress MLAs had to "pay the price" of being ousted as per Constitutional provisions under the 10th schedule.





"The composition did not change because of a unilateral action of the petitioner (Rawat). Composition was bound to change and it changed subsequently because of Constitutional provisions under the 10th schedule. They (rebel MLAs) will have to pay the price," the bench said.





To the court's queries and observations, Attorney General (AG) Mukul Rohatgi said in the instant case the Speaker's action of March 18 had allowed an "illegal and minority" government "to stay afloat" even though it had fallen as the appropriation bill had failed.





"These circumstances show that the government of the state cannot be run as per Constitution. So a freeze for a few months," he said.





The AG also said that a solitary instance was sufficient to impose Article 356. "Merely because the Governor has allowed a floor test, the President need not give a second chance. When a money bill fails, then there cannot be another chance. Therefore, President was not bound to wait," he said.





The AG also said that there can be a floor test after President's rule, which he termed as a "temporary freeze", gets over in two months.





He said that subsequent events would not eclipse what happened on March 18 when 35 MLAs had sought division of votes. "We can't shut our eyes to what happened on March 18," he added.





The AG also raised a question whether it would be "fair" to give a second chance to a government "which was dead and gone on day one (March 18)".





He said if the nine rebel Congress MLAs had to "suffer or pay the price" for what they did, then for what happened on March 18, the government and Speaker should also suffer. "They (government and Speaker) too should suffer," he said.





He said if the court holds that what happened on March 18 was not material enough to impose President's rule, "then it would mean the court has pardoned or condoned the illegal action of Speaker on March 18".





"This would not be a fair position," he said to which the court humorously remarked "all is fair in love and war".





The court then asked "how can it be said that the 35 MLAs would have voted against the government unless and until it is actually done?".





To this, the AG replied that since 35 MLAs sought division of votes it was clear that they would vote against the government. "Else why would they demand for division of votes," he said.





The court also asked whether the Centre "was aware that if it did not act urgently, the nine rebel MLAs would have been left in the lurch".





It asked the Centre whether there was any "urgency" of this sort or whether any "collateral purpose" was sought to be achieved.





The bench said that from the "hasty manner" in which the Union Cabinet took a decision to impose President's rule in the state, it appeared that a "purpose foreign to provisions of Article 356" was sought to be achieved.





Salve said the President's rule was imposed without any collateral purpose in mind.





He said the Centre was mainly concerned with the fact that the money bill had failed and horse-trading was going in the state.





The court also asked the Centre whether a letter of March 26 to the President by the BJP of Uttarakhand asking for imposition of article 356 in view of alleged instances of horse-trading, would have "tipped the scales"?





With regard to the March 26 letter of BJP to the President, Salve said it cannot be found out whether it would have tipped the scales.





Salve said that the President took a decision based on various factors like allegations of horse-trading, Governor's apprehension that some violence might occur on March 28 and allegations of corruptions on both sides.





To this the court said "hardly any government in India would last five minutes" if allegations of corruption against it are sufficient for dissolving it.





Towards the fag end of the day, Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said as per Constitutional conventions, if a government cannot pass a money bill it is obliged to resign.





To this the court said, "obliged to resign does not mean government has fallen".

"If they do not resign, then as per procedure either a motion of no-confidence is moved against them (state government) or the Governor asks them to show that they enjoy confidence," the bench said.





It also said that "all over the country, it is happening where governments, which are obliged to resign, are shamelessly continuing".





Arguments will continue tomorrow.








LARAMIE, Wyo.  University of Wyoming officials are working to provide more resources to victims of sexual assault on campus.

Nine sexual assaults were reported on campus and one in on-campus student housing to the UW Police Department in 2014. UW officials say a significant number of assaults are not reported to administrators or police, so other resources are important.

Professor of psychology Matt Gray supervises a free, confidential counseling program for victims of sexual or domestic violence in a private setting. Outside groups that are unaffiliated with the university, such as the STOP Violence Program and the SAFE Project also offer help to victims.

STOP coordinator Megan Selheim says about 40 to 60 people visit the STOP office on UW's campus each year for reports of sexual violence.
Amitabh Bachchan today sought to put a lid on speculation that government is having second thoughts on engaging him for 'Incredible India' campaign after his name appeared in Panama paper leaks, saying he has not been "formally" approached for the task.





"There have been queries from the media regarding my being Brand Ambassador for 'Atulya Bharat' (Incredible India). I wish to state that I have not been formally approached for this position.



"The speculation of the media regarding its discontinuance is, therefore, not relevant as far as I am concerned," Bachchan, 73, said in a statement here.



His clarification came following reports that his name has been "put on hold for the brand ambassador's role" after figuring in Panama papers, according to Tourism Ministry sources.



"His name would be considered only if he comes clean on the issue," they added.



Bachchan's name figured among 500 Indian individuals and entities who owned firms and accounts in offshore tax havens in the leaked documents of Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. He has already denied any knowledge of the offshore firms, saying his name could have been misused.



"On the Panama disclosures, I wish to state that queries continue to be sent to me by the media. I would humbly request them to kindly direct these to the Government of India (GOI) where I, as a law abiding citizen have already sent, and shall continue to send, my responses.



"I stand by my earlier statement on the 'misuse of my name' in the matter and in any event the press reports do not disclose any illegal act committed by me," he stated.



Bachchan and actress Priyanka Chopra were the frontrunners for the publicity of the campaign aimed at promoting India as a favourite tourist destination abroad after popular actor Aamir Khan ceased to be its brand ambassador following his intolerance remarks.
The logic-defying poll promises of Tamil Nadu parties have not only left experts aghast, but also created confusion in voters minds as they await their date with democracy on May 16.





The DMDK promised to reduce petrol prices to Rs 45 and diesel Rs 35 a litre, blissfully oblivious of the fact that regulating fuel prices is the prerogative of the central government and the oil marketing companies.



State governments can only waive taxes on fuel and cannot control the prices, senior economist and tax consultant S Madhavan told Deccan Herald.



The Vijayakanth-led outfit also promises cutting down toll plaza fees, allowing major textile companies to open branches in other states and countries, entering the software business and fix prices, and setting up special schools for transgenders.



Why should textile companies need governments permission to operate in other states? asks Venkatesh, another expert.



The transgenders, on the other hand, feel the idea of special schools would further isolate them from the mainstream of the society. Already we face discrimination in the society. Special schools would only disengage us, Mohini, a transgender, said. Though not as bizarre, the DMK, too, has its share of lofty and high-sounding plans such as setting up a Tamil chair in varsities all over the world and waiver of students education loans.



Azhagiri rules out support to any party



In a major setback to the DMK, party chief M Karunanidhis elder son and former Union minister Azhagiri said he would not support any political party in the May 16 Tamil Nadu Assembly polls, DHNS reports from Chennai.



Azhagiris statement came just a few days after he met his father, fueling speculations that the Madurai strongman might join the party and launch a poll campaign.



I wont support any party. This is also applicable to my supporters, he said at the Chennai airport. Sources told DH that the party high-command did not heed to Azhagiris request for giving his supporters tickets to contest. Sources said during Azhagiris first meeting with Karunanidhi on March 24, the former DMK south-zone secretary gave his wish list of candidates to his father. However, Azhagiris younger brother and DMK treasurer M K Stalin, tipped to be the heir apparent to Karunanidhi, refused to accept it. His (Azhagiri) second attempt of meeting Karunanidhi on April 14 did not yield any result.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday imposed exemplary cost of Rs 25 lakh each on three companies for wasting enormous amount of judicial time by filing different petitions.





Describing the case as classic example of the abuse of the judicial process by unscrupulous litigants with money power, a bench of Justices J Chelameswar and Abhay Manohar Sapre directed Messer Griesham GmbH, a German company and two others GGL and Ruias to deposit the money for wasting the courts time.



This case should also serve as proof of the abuse of the discretionary jurisdiction of this court under article 136 (of the Constitution) by the rich and powerful in the name of a fight for justice at each and every interlocutory step of a suit, the bench said.




As situation remained calm, authorities on Tuesday lifted curfew from violence-hit north Kashmirs Kupwara district.





The curfew was imposed last week after the killing of five civilians in security forces firing during protests against the alleged molestation of a school girl in Handwara town.



Deputy Commissioner of Kupwara Kumar Rajeev Ranjan said curfew has been lifted from the entire district and all the schools will open on Wednesday. There will be no restrictions in the district on Wednesday, he said.



Meanwhile, meeting the demands of locals authorities removed three army bunkers from main chowk Handwara on Tuesday. The move is seen as the measure to defuse trust deficit and restore normalcy after civilian killings.



Soon as the curfew was lifted from Handwara, the civilian authorities started work to demolish the army bunkers in the town.



Peace returns



Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Police north Kashmir, Uttam Chand confirmed that three bunkers were removed in the town. Yes, the bunkers were removed this morning. The timing of relaxation in curfew was extended as the overall situation in the district remained peaceful, he said.



Locals welcomed the decision to remove the arm bunkers set up in the town during mid 1990s and army was reluctant to remove these.



However, sources said, the Army relented after negotiations with the administration and intervention at the highest level from the state government.


The Indian doctors who conducted autopsy on Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh, said on Tuesday that there were no external or internal injuries on the body but his vital organs were missing.





Kirpal mortal remains were handed over to Indian authorities at the Wagha-Attari border in Punjab on Tuesday after his mysterious death in a Pakistan jail last week.



The report comes at a time when Kirpal family in Punjab has been crying foul over his sudden death. Dr Ashok, who headed the team of doctors that conducted the post-mortem, said Kirpal vital organs, including his heart, were missing in the body. There were no external injuries or internal injury marks found on Kirpal body, he said. Body organs, sources said, were removed by Pakistan doctors for further clinical investigation.



Dalbir Kaur, the sister of Sarabjit Singh, another Indian prisoner who was brutally murdered in Kot Lakhpat jail three years ago, has come out in support of Kirpal aggrieved family. Kaur, accompanied by family members of the deceased prisoner, had also met Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh in New Delhi a few days ago and urged him to get Pakistan to act judiciously in the matter.



Kirpal had been languishing in Pakistan jail for the last 26-years. Documents pertaining to his death were also handed over to the Indian authorities. Pakistan has not specified cause of the death, saying it would be intimated later, sources said.



Meanwhile, reports said a woman claiming to be Kirpal wife is also staking claim over his mortal remains. Kirpal had been languishing in Pakistan jail since 1992 and was accused of terror and spying.



Kirpal hails from Mustafabad Saidan village in Gurdaspur in Punjab. He had reportedly crossed over inadvertently into Pakistan in an inebriated state 26 years ago. After the brutal attack on Sarabjit in Kot Lakhpat jail three years ago, his family in Punjab had apprehended threat to Kirpal life. They had sought the Centres intervention, but to little avail, it is alleged. Early March this year, the family received two letters from Kripal written in Urdu. His letters had indicated towards the horrible conditions prevailing in jail. That was the last time they heard of him.


The outstation students of the National Institute of Technology (NIT)-Srinagar on Tuesday that either Prime Minister Narendra Modi or the Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Minister Smriti Irani visit the institute and hoist national flag on the campus to instil a sense of security.





This will end the leave taken by the students and also give them a sense of security. This will reiterate the message that Kashmir is an integral part of India and students will have a psychological win over the anti-national elements in the campus as well as outside, they said at the second round of meeting with the Ministry officials.



The delegation of the NIT-Srinagar students was accompanied by Akhil Bharaitya Vidyarthi Parishad activists.



In a 19-point memorandum of demands submitted to the ministry, the students also demanded permanent deployment of the CRPF on the campus and immediate reshuffling of the institutes administration. The students, however, dropped their demand of shifting of students from the campus, accepting that such a move will send out a wrong message to the world as Kashmir was an integral part of India.
The Committee of Secretaries (CoS) has acknowledged Karnatakas drought tackling concerns and directed the Union finance ministry to ascertain whether marginal farmers can be provided easy loans from commercial banks.



The move aims at preventing the non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) from fleecing the farmers. The CoS, headed by Union Cabinet Secretary PK Sinha, in a meeting of drought-hit states held last week, also asked Maharashtra to consider Karnataka for release of two thousand million cubic (TMC) feet of water each from Koyna and Warna reservoirs to address immediate drought crisis in 30 districts including Hubli, Dharward, Belagavi, Vijayapura and Bagalkot, said sources in the government.



Karnataka had sought four TMC, but it was agreed that Maharashtra would release two TMC water for drinking and other purposes in the parched northern regions impacting nearly three crore population.



With more than one thousand farmers reportedly committing suicide in drought-hit districts last year, Karnataka officials had drawn the attention of the committee of secretaries to NBFCs offering loans to small farmers at high rate of interest. Government sources said that one of the reasons for farmers giving up their lives was their inability to clear loans. Since the Karnataka government does not have powers to intervene, the state requested the Centre to explore possibilities of commercial banks lending money at affordable rate of interest to farmers.



Bill to expand green cover



A much-awaited legislation to expand Indias green cover using a Rs 40,000 crore corpus is set to be placed before the Union Cabinet, DHNS reports from New Delhi.

The Cabinets approval is essential before the bill comes to Parliament.



We will discuss the Compensatory Afforestation Fund bill in the Cabinet on Wednesday. We have incorporated the concerns raised by the Parliamentary Standing Committee and expect support from all political parties when the bill comes to Parliament, Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said.



Since the government is in minority in the Rajya Sabha, support from the Opposition parties is essential for legislations to be passed in the Upper House.



The bill seeks to create statutory authorities at the central and state-level for managing the fund created from the compensatory money deposited by all project proponent for using forest land.


A Mumbai-based activist has shot off a letter to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis urging him to stop VIP visits by helicopters to prevent wastage of water.





The Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP-Shiv Sena government has come under criticism over the way it is handling the drought situation and its ministers have come in the line of fire.



Dayanand Nene, the president of Alert Citizens Forum of India and National Secretary of Consumer Protection Service Council, in letter to Fadnavis, said that the road route needs to be preferred.



In his letter, he also attached photographs of the visit of Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh and Maharashtra Revenue and Agriculture Minister Eknath Khadse to Bhiwandi in Thane district on Monday to attend a function.



Nene, who is a member of the BJP and a social activist also said in the letter, On one hand the government is trying its best to deal with the drought conditions in the state. You have taken a landmark decision of supplying water through railway train to Latur. On the other hand nobody pays attention to such colossal waste of water during official visits by VIPs by helicopters.



He requested the chief minister to issue a directive or a code of conduct to all as to not to use helicopters to visit places where there are no proper helipads.



They can go to the nearest place where a helipad is available and then drive down to the site, he said pointing out that the ministers could have flown in to Thanewhere there is a proper helipad and driven down to Bhiwandi which is just 20 minutes away. It would have saved 10,000 litres of waterwhich is very important as the entire area is reeling under a 60% water cut, he said.
A day after the State government slapped disciplinary notice, the agitating PU lecturers called off their 17-day protest and decided to resume evaluation work from Wednesday.





The decision follows a meeting with Primary and Secondary Education Minister Kimmane Ratnakar. It is not clear what exactly transpired between the minister and the protesting lecturers.



The development will bring a huge relief for students who feared that delay in evaluation might adversely affect their results.



Ajay Seth, principal, Primary and Secondary Education department expressed confidence that evaluation would be completed in two weeks.



S R Venkatesh, working president, Karnataka State Lecturers Association said they have called off the strike despite their demands not being met by the government.



The government has told us that they will try and work to fulfil our demands, he said.

Earlier in the day, Ratnakar met Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and held talks. Emerging out of the meeting, he went straight to the agitating lecturers at the Freedom Park and made an emotional appeal to call off their strike. He is said to have made references to the prevailing drought in the state and promised to meet lecturers demand in the coming days.


The team comprising senior officials had separate meetings with Karnataka Rural Development Minister H K Patil and the chief secretary and the additional chief secretary in Bengaluru. The MDWS (Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation) team, led by Secretary to the ministry, Parameshwaran Iyer, assessed the water crisis and sanitation situation in Karnataka.



According to an official press release issued by the MDWS in New Delhi, Iyer assured the senior officials of support from the Union government to combat the drought situation prevalent in parts of the state.



The officials of the MDWS and state government discussed the possible drought management techniques and technologies, especially those dealing with water recharge and conservation.



A key highlight of the meeting was a presentation made by a team of water experts from Latur district in Maharashtra. The experts spoke about the Shirpur model of watershed work that has been successful in many parts of Maharashtra. Efforts are being made to replicate and scale this technique and a pilot of the technique is being planned in North Karnataka to improve the drinking water situation in the region, noted the MDWS press release.



In a video-conference on sanitation with the District Collectors of Karnataka, the officials made a commitment to make seven districts in the state open defecation-free (ODF) in 2016-17. Four districts should become ODF by October 2 next, the second anniversary of the launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission.



They also set a target that every district of Karnataka would have at least some blocks or gram panchayats or villages that are ODF by October 2, for which a participatory celebration will be organised by the state. The chief secretary said the ODF movement had to be taken up as a community movement and that the involvement of people was mandatory to make it a success.



A team from the Union Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation on Tuesday prodded Karnataka to replicate Maharashtras Shirpur model in the state for conserving water and recharging depleting groundwater resources.
In a statement late on Tuesday, the Centre said it has not yet conveyed its views to the Supreme Court  contrary to what is being misrepresented in the media  about bringing back the Kohinoor diamond from the UK.





The factual position is that the matter is sub judice at present. A PIL has been filed in the Supreme Court that is yet to be admitted, it said.



The statement, which was issued by the culture ministry after reactions from the BJP and the RSS, said the Solicitor General has not yet conveyed the governments view.



A day ago, Solitictor General Ranjit Kumar submitted before a bench of Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justice U U Lalit that Kohinoor was gifted as compensation

Maharaja Ranjit Singh had given Kohinoor in the 19th century for help rendered by the British in the Anglo-Sikh war. It was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away, he added.



The Solicitor General of India informed the Supreme Court about the history of the diamond and gave an oral statement on the basis of the existing references made available by the ASI. Thus, it should be reaffirmed that the government has not yet conveyed its views to the court, contrary to what is being misrepresented. The court granted six weeks on the prayer of the solicitor general to take instructions for making his submission in the matter, the statement said.



The status report on which the preliminary submission was made by the solicitor general have references to the stand taken by governments earlier that Kohinoor was a gift and cannot be categorized as an object stolen.
The state government has decided to institute the Mahaveer Award from next year onwards, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said on Tuesday.



Addressing the gathering after presenting the Mahaveer Award, instituted by the Karnataka Jain Association and Sakala Jain Samaja, during the Mahaveer jayanti celebrations, the chief minister said the government would fund the anthology on the complete works on Jainism.



The government is ready to set aside whatever amount is required to compile Jain literature. The government will also institute the Mahaveer Award for individuals who have contributed to the welfare of society, from next year onwards, he added.



The Mahaveer Award for 2016 was presented to Sudha Murty, chairperson of Infosys Foundation. In her absence, her husband Narayan Murthy collected the award.


Members of the Jain community celebrated Mahaveer Jayanthi with religious fervour and gaiety in the city on Monday. The day was marked by prayers, mass celebrations, religious discourses and processions.



A World Peace March was held on the occasion of Non-violence Day by Jain Yuva Sangathan. The march, flagged off by Additional Commissioner of Police, Bengaluru West, K S R Charan Reddy, started from Town Hall and culminated at Freedom Park.



Thousands of Jains marched along the streets of Chickpet, Seshadri Road, Avenue Road and surrounding areas before heading towards Freedom Park, spreading the message of non-violence and peace among the public.



A medical checkup and blood donation camp was also held, followed by cultural programmes at Freedom Park.



This day marks the 2,615th birthday of Mahaveer, the last Tirthankara. Tirthankara, also known as Arihant or Jina is the one who established the fourfold order of religion. Our main objective is to spread the message of peace and also bring together all sects of Jains under one forum, said treasurer of Yuva Sangathan, Kamal Kumar P Jain.



At Jain temples, special prayers and rituals were performed by priests. The day at Sri Adinath Digambar Jain temple, Balepet, began with the ceremonial bath of the Mahaveer idol, followed by religious discourses. At Sri Dharmanatha Shwetambar Jain temple, religious discourses on the teachings of Lord Mahaveer were held.



Pandals were erected in various places by Jain associations and free food was distributed to poor people. The Jain Charitable Hospital at Jayanagar observed the festival by honouring 100 blind women and organising free a checkup for diabetic patients.




Violence, stone-pelting, tear gas shelling and police firing marked the second day of the protest by over 25,000 garment workers at Bommasandra over the PF policy. The protest seemed to have been hijacked by unruly elements, mobs and goons not connected with the protest. Biocon, the citys premier bio-tech company, was also targeted.





At around 9.30 am, large crowds gathered at the Bommasandra junction and moved towards the houses in and around Hebbagodi, shouting slogans. Residents, who were scared, locked themselves up inside. At around 11.30 am, the mobs moved towards Biocon. Mobs carrying weapons and sticks entered the companys premises and started thrashing the securitymen. They shouted at the staff, around 3,000 of them, and asked them to come out and support them. Then, they started damaging the vehicles inside the campus. Six cars and an ambulance were vandalised. At this juncture, police had to resort to firing to disperse the mob.



A few representatives of the management came outside, spoke to the protesters and calmed them down. The management asked the staff not to go out till evening.



Another mob had gathered near the Hebbagodi police station. Seeing the police sitting inside the station, the mob barged inside and started damaging property. Four jeeps, 20 bikes and four ambulances were burnt down. While some damaged the vehicles around the police station, others damaged property inside. Stones were thrown at around 15 policemen who were inside. One woman police constable was injured. Tear gas shelling did not deter the mob and the police opened fire.



A bullet pierced through the shoulder of Manjunath, 44, a courier company employee. Preethi Ninge Gowda, 19, injured in the leg, was admitted to a nearby hospital.



The police were worried about another possibility. There were 500 gas cylinders stocked just outside the police station. Fearing the worst, the police sought reinforcements from the Karnataka State Reserve Police. They arrived and saw to it that the crowd did not set the cylinders or other property on fire. Together with the local police, they were able to push back the crowds towards the main road and avert a tragedy.



Cops injured



In the stone-pelting, an ACP, 10 police constables and a DySP were injured.

There was also police firing at S K Factory where hundreds of people had gathered. When the slogan-shouting crowd did not heed the warning to disperse, the police fired in the air and the crowds moved away.



At Bommasandra, workers from non-garment factories in Attibele, Bannerghatta, Anekal, Hebbagodi and Jigani joined the protestors.



The crowds went on the rampage around Bommasandra main road. The police were hopelessly outnumbered, 700 of them dealing with nearly 25,000 protestors. With more forces arriving, normalcy was restored.




The three heritage sites in Karnataka that could have made it to the final list of the Unesco World Heritage List nominations have missed the bus this year.



Monuments of Srirangapatna Island Town; Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysala (Belur and Halebid); Monuments and Forts of Deccan Sultanate (Bidar, Vijayapura, Kalaburagi), were included in the Unescos tentative list on April 15, 2014.



In March, 2015, the state government had announced Rs three crore in its budget for preparation of the nomination dossiers for all three, so that they could be added to the final list by the Centre in 2016.



However, politics and blame game in the state Heritage and Archaeology department have led to delays and impediments, it is said. As a result, the three sites will not be part of the final list during this year's Unesco meet in Istanbul in July. The amount of Rs 3 crore has not been utilised and has lapsed, sources in the department said.



There are also charges that the department is making attempts to forego the tender process (for dossier preparation) in a bid to favour certain agencies.



Pinning the blame on his predecessor for the delay in initiating the tender process, Heritage Commissioner C G Betsurmath said that he was hopeful of pushing for the inclusion of the three sites in this year's final list. He had written to the Kannada and Culture department, seeking exemption under the Karnataka Transparency in Public Procurement Act (KTPP), so that the process can be expedited, he added.



There has been an inordinate delay as the previous commissioner (R Gopal) failed to initiate the tender process. I took over in January, but since I also hold charge of Mysuru City Corporation, I have not been able to focus on this. I have sought an exemption under the KTPP Act, so that we can get the dossier prepared at the earliest. I will take personal interest and push for this years participation.



He maintained that the allocation of Rs 3 crore has not lapsed. The department has zeroed in on two agencies for dossier preparation - Indian Heritage Cities Network (IHCN) and the Unesco Chair for Culture, Habitat and Sustainable Development at Srishti Institute of Art. If objections are raised, the tender process will be initiated, he said.



However, both K S Raykar, executive director, IHCN, and Jyoti Hosagrahar who heads the Unesco Chair at Srishti said that the dossier preparation will take at least a year. The dossiers should have been sent to the Centre in September and to Unesco by January-end.



When contacted, Gopal refuted charges against him. When I was holding charge between September 2015 and January 2016, I wasnt given any financial powers. We couldn't even pay staff salaries, let alone run other activities of the department. Though I initiated the tender process, I could not get approvals for the same. He wondered why tenders were not called for during Betsurmath's stint between the months of April and September 2015.




The protest by garment workers affected the IT, ITES and BT workers around Electronic city and other parts of the city for the second day on Tuesday.





According to a source in a leading IT company a few of the employees arrived late to the office. An employee with Continental said that he found it difficult to go back to home.



A majority of the stranded employees were supposed to join the afternoon shift. Employees who attended the general shift which starts at 10 am didnt find any hurdles to reach office. But those who started their work afternoon, especially for US and UK shifts, got affected, said an IT employee.



Biocon,a leading BT company, in a statement, said the protesting garment factory workers entered the company campus on Hosur Road and Jigani Industrial area on Tuesday.They resorted to violence and vandalised Biocon property before the police could arrive on the scene. In the process, a couple of employees were hurt. We have taken necessary steps to safeguard our employees, stated the company. Infosys, in a reply to a query said there was no disruption in its operation. According to some sources, IT companies made alternative routes for their employees to reach home.








The officer conceded that the police apparatus woke up only after the damaged had been done but insisted that it was fully prepared now. Our junior staff are injured. We will clamp down on those who indulge in such incidents, he said.



Additional Commissioner of Police (East) P Harishekaran told Deccan Herald that the violence had been taken very seriously. We will not spare anyone who dares to spread violence. We have already detained 30 people, he said.





Garment workers protest against new provident fund withdrawal rules took everyone by surprise. But was it as spontaneous as it appeared? It has now emerged that rivalry between two persons for control over the workers union in the unorganised sector triggered the protest.The ugly conflict between R M N Ramesh and Sabastian Devaraj, who are reportedly associated with the Congress and the JD(S) respectively, is said to have led to the protest that turned violent and crippled life in parts of Bengaluru on Monday and Tuesday.A police officer, who was working in the state intelligence wing until recently, said the two leaders nurtured political ambition and had blessings of big-time politicians. The two men often led the protests of unorganised sector workers and their supporters clashed in the past. Their focus area is the garment industry which employs a large number of women who can be easily influenced, the officer said on the condition of anonymity and added that he would soon submit a comprehensive report on the matter to government.When contacted, Ramesh blamed Devaraj for stoking violence and claimed he had tried to pacify the protesters. Leaders like Devaraj misled factory managements over the last few months. We tried convincing the workers but they wont listen, he told Deccan Herald.The officer confirmed that Devaraj was on a campaign against the new provident fund structure. He misled HR heads of some firms and convinced the workers to go on a large-scale flash strike in Bengaluru city, Bengaluru rural and Ramanagaram. The local police had no clue about his activities, the officer said.A senior officer of the Bengaluru police described the protest and violence as sponsored and well-planned. Thousands of innocent women workers were manipulated to further someones petty rivalry. We will mention these facts in our report to the Home Department, he said.
The agitation by over a lakh garment workers, mostly by women, on city roads on Monday and Tuesday exposed sorry state of affairs in police department. Male police officers were seen caning protesting women garment factory workers. This only goes to show that there is severe shortage of women police personnel in the force.





Senior police officials admit that there is severe shortage of women police staff.

There is staff shortage, but there is no written rule that only women police personnel should handle agitating women or women offenders. The rule says that women cannot be called to police stations at night, and if they are kept in lockups, women police staff should be deployed for their safety. When there is a law and order situation, one cannot expect only women police to be pressed into action, said the officer on the condition of anonymity.



According to the sources, not many women are keen to join the force because of safety and family commitments. Of the There are around 80,000 police personnel in Karnataka and women constitute 5.5% (around 3,500) of the force. Bengaluru police has 300 women police officials of various ranks across 200 police stations.



Add to it, most of the women officials are not trained to handle the weapons or wield lathis. They are trained to register complaints, give security, record statements and do counselling among others.



About 90% of one lakh-plus agitating garment workers were women. So, even if all 300 women were pressed to service, it would still have been impossible to manage the crowd, where mob was pelting stones, burning buses and vehicles, creating havoc on roads. If one speaks of human rights, then what should a male police official do when women attack, should he call control room asking women staff for his protection? When you find women with suicidal tendencies, you will not wait till women officials come and rescue. Men have to act. People should think practically, the senior official said.



Not acceptable



But women activists are not convinced. Noted lawyer and women rights activist Pramila Nesargi said, A man cannot arrest a women. It is a rule and it has been violated. No women staff was seen any where on the ground in the last two days.



Shakun D, a women activist, said, Shortage of staff cannot be taken as an excuse for beating up women. Why the vacancies in the force are not being filled. It cannot be accepted that women are beaten by men, said Vimala K S, Vice President of Karnataka Janavadi Mahila Sangha State Committee.




The City police have clamped prohibitory orders under Section 144 CrPC in the entire city for three days in the wake of violent protests against the new policy of the Union government on provident fund withdrawals.





Addressing a press meet City police commissioner N S Megharikh said that two companies of Rapid Action Force (RAF) from Coimbatore was on the way for beefing security.



The commissioner said the City police was prepared for Tuesdays protests and that it was not intelligence failure. It was a leaderless protest and no established trade unions participated in the stir. Some anti-social elements in the garb of protesters resorted to violence. We have registered 38 cases against the protesters arrested around 116 persons, he said.



Around 16 Hoysala jeeps apart from scores of buses were damaged in the violence and 65 policemen were injured in the protests, the commissioner said. The ban orders will be in force till the midnight of April 22. Accordingly assembly of more than five people, processions and marches are prohibited. Speaking to reporters after a meeting with Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Home Minister G Parameshwara said that the government would bear the cost of treatment of the college girl (Preethi) injured in the violence. He also visited Sparsh Hospital where the girl is under treatment.



The minister defended the police caning saying that the only intention was to quell the protest and bring the situation under control.




3 April 2016 (ABC News)  The Queensland Government has approved mining leases for the $21.7 billion Carmichael coal mine and rail project in the Galilee Basin. State Mines Minister Dr Anthony Lynham on Sunday approved the three individual mining leases about 160 kilometres north-west of Clermont for Indian company Adani. Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said it was a major step forward for the project after extensive government and community scrutiny. Some approvals are still required before construction can start and ultimately committing to the project will be a decision from Adani, she said. She said stringent controls would continue to protect the environment and the Great Barrier Reef, as well as the interests of landholders and traditional owners. We are talking about thousands and thousands of jobs  5,000 jobs from this project during construction and another 4,500 during the peak of its operations  it means jobs for local people as well, she said. [] The project has received widespread criticism from environmental groups who say it will have catastrophic impacts for the Great Barrier Reef. Greenpeace Australia Pacific spokeswoman Shani Tager said in a statement the State Governments decision was appalling, and came as the Great Barrier Reef suffered severe coral bleaching. Coral scientists, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and even the Queensland Government have acknowledged the severity of this latest bleaching, she said. The federal and Queensland environment ministers are wringing their hands, despairing over the state of the Great Barrier Reef, yet at the same time they are paving the way for the nations biggest coal mine  a development that can only harm the reef. Protecting the reef and approving the Carmichael mining lease are diametrically opposed  you cannot do both. [more]
By Mujib Mashal

17 April 2016 KABUL, Afghanistan (The New York Times)  With nearly 2,000 civilians killed or wounded and more than 80,000 people displaced this year already, the Afghan conflict continues to affect lives in record numbers, the United Nations said on Sunday. The report came as fighting raged across several provinces. For a third day, government forces repelled Taliban attacks across several districts of Kunduz and were trying to prevent the insurgents from taking the provincial capital, as they did in the fall. The United Nations mission in Afghanistan documented 600 civilian deaths and 1,343 wounded in the first three months of 2016, which by most accounts is expected to be a bloody year as the Taliban rejected the latest efforts to bring them to peace talks. While the death toll fell 13 percent from the same period last year, the number of wounded increased 11 percent, the report said, with a high rise among children. In the first quarter of 2016, almost one-third of civilian casualties were children, said Danielle Bell, the United Nations human rights director in Afghanistan. If the fighting persists near schools, playgrounds, homes, and clinics, and parties continue to use explosive weapons in those areas  particularly mortars and I.E.D. tactics  these appalling numbers of children killed and maimed will continue. The report blamed the insurgents for 60 percent of the casualties, and forces on the government side for 19 percent. Though the Taliban were still at fault more often, the report noted that deaths caused by pro-government forces were up sharply from last year  roughly 70 percent higher over the same period. The deaths caused by government forces, put at 127 over the first three months of this year, were mostly caused by explosive weapons, including mortars, rockets and grenades, the report said. The United Nations also expressed concern at the increase of civilian casualties in airstrikes by the Afghan government and the United States-led NATO coalition. The spread of fighting also continues to displace people at record levels, with 81,445 individuals forced from their homes in the first three months of the year, according to figures from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. [more]
Highlights

As Mongolia transitions to spring, 20 per cent of the country still has snow cover with 23 districts (soums) in six provinces (aimags) experiencing white dzud or nearly white dzud conditions.

Conditions remain unseasonably cold and there are concerns of an iron dzud emerging in some parts.

858,153 camels, horses, cows, sheep, and goats have so far perished as a result of harsh conditions; 9,115 from disease.

41 percent of Mongolias total herder population (225,788 people) has been affected by the harsh 2015/16 winter. Of these, 11,800 households with less than 100 animals are considered most vulnerable.

The Humanitarian Country Team (HCT) is seeking US$14.3 million to provide immediate assistance over the next six months in food security, nutrition, protection, agriculture, livelihoods and early recovery. US$6.36 million (45 per cent) has so far been secured by the international community to complement the Government of Mongolias (GoM) response efforts

225,788 people are adversely impacted by harsh conditions in 211 districts US$14.3 million needed to meet humanitarian assistance requirements 858,153 livestock have perished over the past winter

Situation Overview

Mongolia has one of the coldest climates in the world, with temperatures dropping below -40C for several months each year and extremely heavy snowfalls. The harshness of the 2015/16 winter has resulted in significant loss of livestock and compounded existing strain on thousands of herders across the country. The situation is unique to Mongolia and is known as a dzud; a complex, long-lasting natural disaster in which a summer drought is followed by heavy snowfalls and unusually low temperatures in winter, and then a harsh spring. 225,800 people have been negatively affected by dzud in 211 districts (soums), which is the equivalent of 41 per cent of the total herder population in Mongolia. As the country transitions to spring, and the snow melts, the number of soums facing dzud or near-dzud conditions have decreased. According to the National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA) 20 per cent of the country still has snow cover with 13 soums in Zavkhan and Uvs aigams affected by white dzud and 10 soums in Uvs, Zavkhan, Khuvsgol and Bayan-Uligii aimags affected by nearly white dzud. White dzud is characterized by increased snow density (above 0.25 ground per cubic cm), lower than normal temperatures (by 3.0 C), and increased snow cover. It has been reported that the Mongolian summer of 2015 was exceptionally dry also partially because of the El Nino effects in the region. Whilst primarily affecting livestock exposed to extreme winter conditions, dzud events should not be seen as simply winter emergencies or livestock famines. Rather these conditions have profound and farreaching impacts on the Mongolian pastoral herder sector which depends on livestock for food and income. Despite a reduction in snow overall, the stress on vulnerable herders remains extremely serious due to the protracted nature of the disaster and increased rates of livestock death. The number of animals that have perished increased significantly from 40,000 in January 2016 to 858,100 by 7 April 2016. These losses have been compounded by a very dry summer and drought conditions that resulted in low crop yields and over-grazing, meaning that herders were unable to adequately prepare adequate supplies of hay and fodder to sustain the winter months. Based on previous dzuds, the number of livestock deaths may increase to as high as 1.2 million during the spring, when weak and starved animals are expected to die in large numbers. The situation may yet worsen, as the spring birthing season is predicted to coincide with further livestock deaths in April and May amid unseasonably cold conditions. The GoM, together with humanitarian partners, has been closely monitoring dzud conditions. As the winter months end, heavy snowfall and sub-zero temperatures persist in many areas, prolonging and intensifying the suffering for both people and their livestock. Assessment findings show that the affected population is suffering from a range of factors including lack of access to basic services, food insecurity, loss of livelihoods, and psychological trauma. The livelihoods of 62,719 nomadic households of Mongolia who practice herding and animal husbandry represent a sector that contributes 13 per cent to the countrys total GDP. In particular, many poorer herder families often do not have cash or income to withstand continuous shocks and stresses and therefore debt is increasing. The United Nations (UN) is supporting the GoM to ensure the needs of vulnerable rural herder households are met as they continue to face harsh winter Dzud conditions around the country. US$2.4 million has been allocated to response activities through the UN Central Emergency Relief Fund (CERF). CERF will be implemented as a package which include food, nutrition, protection, agriculture and early recovery, and will complement the broader response effort being carried out by UN Partners, INGOs and the Mongolian Red Cross Society (MRCS). The HCT will continue to work with the Government and international partners to advocate for more resources and to assist the most vulnerable households.
18 April 2016 (UN)  The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) announced today it will launch an emergency operation in Haiti to assist one million people devastated by three years of prolonged drought exacerbated by the El Nino weather phenomenon. An estimated 3.6 million people  or one-third of Haitis population  face food insecurity. This number includes more than 1.5 million who are severely food insecure and do not know where their next meal is coming from, according to an assessment by WFP and the National Coordination for Food Security. We must immediately help hungry Haitians. Drought and poverty should not force a child to go to bed hungry, said WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin, ending a three-day visit to Haiti where she met communities hit by drought and El Nino. The assessment found that the main 2015 spring harvest was below average, with almost three-quarters of farmers reporting they had lost more than 82 per cent of production. For the 2016 spring season, 65 per cent of families said they could not plant due to a lack of agricultural inputs. A scarcity of locally produced food has led to price hikes of up to 60 per cent. We can help save lives and livelihoods now. We must work with the government, local communities and other partners, on longer-term asset development and climate smart agriculture programmes, Ms. Cousin said. Poor Haitian farmers living in vulnerable places must have the capacity to endure future climate-related disasters. Working together we will begin building a future with zero hunger. WFP initially responded with food distributions in Haiti for a two-month period to 120,000 people. With the new emergency operation this week, WFP said it will assist one million people as Haiti enters the lean season from March to June when food stocks from the previous year run out. Some 700,000 people in Haiti will receive cash transfers, which will provide the poorest and most vulnerable with the ability to purchase food while at the same time strengthening local economies. Another 300,000 people will be given a mix of cash transfers and food. In a second phase, 200,000 people will receive food to work on watershed management and soil conservation projects, creating assets to help communities to plant small vegetable gardens. WFP plans to assist pregnant and breastfeeding women and young children with a specialized blended cereal fortified with vitamins and minerals to prevent malnutrition. While addressing the drought, WFP said it also aims to maintain the level of assistance to a school meals programme that today represents the countrys largest food-based safety net. The agencys school meals support government efforts to establish a Haitian-owned programme by 2030. In coordination with the National School Meals Programme, WFP underlined that it will deliver daily hot meals to 485,000 schoolchildren in over 1,700 schools in nine of Haitis 10 departments until the end of April. Unless new donations are received, the programme will only reach 320,000 children as of May. However, WFP warned it cannot perform any of this work in Haiti without additional contributions and needs $72 million for its drought-relief emergency operation from April to September, as well as $7 million to maintain the level of school meals until the end of the next school year. The agency indicated that it is grateful so far for a confirmed contribution to the new Haiti emergency operation from the European Commission and a pledged contribution from the United States.
Begum Jaan To Go On Floors In June
Malaysia-based MNO Axiata has entered the Nepal telecoms market having finalised its acquisition of the countrys leading operator Ncell for US$1.365 billion.

The company completed the purchase through its wholly-owned subsidiary Axiata Investments, acquiring Ncell from TeliaSonera and Reynolds. The deal effectively secures Axiata an 80 per cent equity interest and controlling stake in Ncell.

All terms of the sale and purchase agreement have been met for the completion of the transaction, Axiata said, including approvals from all relevant regulatory authorities in Nepal and Malaysia.

The unique mix of a controlling stake of a well-managed number one player in a healthy, growing market presents Axiata the perfect expansion opportunity of its footprint. The addition of Ncell into the Axiata network of mobile operators marks yet another significant milestone for the Group, in terms of solidifying our strong hold in the South Asian region, said Axiata president and group chief executive officer Dato Sri Jamaludin Ibrahim.

We are grateful for the approvals from all relevant government authorities involved in the acquisition exercise, both in Malaysia and Nepal. With our proven track record in contributing to national development in markets where we operate, and our extensive experience within the region, we look forward to working with the Nepali government and regulators to further improve the quality of lives of all Nepalese, in line with the countrys ambitions.

He said one key ambition of the company is to effectively offer high-speed data connectivity, and exciting products and services to meet the demands of a young and maturing Nepali market.

There are tremendous opportunities for us to grow with the nation for the longer term. As a Group respected for its commitment to corporate responsibility and governance, we will play an integral role with the Nepali government and civil society, and contribute towards the socioeconomic development of the country and her people, Ibrahim said.

In conjunction with its entry into the Nepali market, Axiata with also launch two special edition voice and roaming products for Ncell customers. Roaming service Axiata Roam will be introduced for the first time in Nepal, offering discounted roaming prices to Ncell customers travelling within the Axiata footprint countries and roaming with operating companies and partners.

Call Ayo Paisa Payo will also be made available, offering bonus balance to Ncell customers receiving international calls lasting more than five minutes from Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Five operators spanning Africa, the Middle East and South Central Asia will construct a new 17,000 km submarine cable system connecting the three regions.

The operators signing the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) are MTN Group, PCCW Global, Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Telecom Egypt (TE) and Telkom South Africa, with further carriers expected to join the consortium. In addition to connecting the three regions the new Africa-1 submarine cable system will provide onward connectivity to Europe.

Between them, the members said they have access to landings at all major cable systems in the Middle East, facilitating the establishment of connections to Africa and Europe. Africa-1 will have at least a 3-fiber pair core extending more than 12,000 km along Africas east coast towards Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, with up to an additional 5,000 km for branches.

Africa is an important emerging marketplace with ever-increasing opportunities arising from the positive socio-economic developments in many African countries. STC is proud to participate in Africa-1 and looks forward to work towards its success, said Dr. Homoud M. Alkussayer, vice president and head of wholesale business at STC. We believe that with its effective connectivity with the rest of the world, Africa-1 can become an important enabler and contributor to the economic progress of Africa in the coming years, Dr Alkussayer said.

Africa-1 will use the latest state-of-the-art 100G technology and will be equipped to accommodate several terabits of capacity from day one. The cable system will have comprehensive interconnection with other cable networks, as well as full Open Access at all cable landing points.

The addressable market of African wholesale bandwidth customers is more promising than in many other regions. The weakness of the continents international bandwidth is due to the lack of new systems coming into Africa to enhance the competitiveness of the African market. Africa-1 system has a superior cost base and a state-of-the-art design that will enable it to be the most competitive system coming to serve this diversified market, said Tamer Gadallah, chief executive officer (CEO) of Telecom Egypt.

The Construction and Maintenance Agreement is expected to be signed by June 2016, with a target ready for service timeframe of the third quarter of 2017.
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by Kathleen Gilbert BEIJING, September 7, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com)  Escaped Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng is leading international opponents of forced abortion in calling upon the worlds largest company to end compliance with the Chinas one-child policy. Family planning police have targeted employees (569)

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Church Militant, we need to band together to protect our religious liberties and win the culture war!
Machine learning is the brain, VPUs (Vision Processing Units) are the eyes, what more does a machine need to be human? The answer is blood. If machines need to be as intelligent as humans, they need to perform as efficiently. They can't heat up easily, and they must be able to regulate the temperature efficiently when they do. That's exactly what IBM Research, along with partners, have been working on, since 2013. "The general concept has been something I first began focusing on in 2006 when the Stern Reporter was released. This triggered me to pivot my research towards inventing incredibly powerful computers, which are densely packed and therefore very energy efficient using 3D chip stacks," said Dr. Bruno Michel from IBM Research.

The actual project is called REPCOOL. It stands for Redox flow electrochemistry for power delivery and cooling, but it's popularly known as Electronic Blood. "This groundbreaking approach is modeled after the structure and power supply of the brain, where blood capillaries serve both to cool it and to supply it with energy," said Michel. It stems from a very real need in modern chips, the need for heat regulation and power. More powerful a computer, more is the heat that it generates, and more room it needs. According to Michel, the researchers at IBM believe that they can drastically reduce the size of such computers.



IBM Redox Flow Battery Demo at CeBIT 2016

"Compared to today's top computers, however, the human brain is roughly 10,000 times denser and 10,000 times more energy-efficient. The research team believes that their approach could reduce the size of a computer with a performance of 1 petaflop/s from the dimensions of a school classroom to that of an average PC, or in other words to a volume of about 10 liters," Michel explained.



Dr. Bruno Michel, Manager of the Advanced Thermal Packaging group at IBM Research - Zurich

What is Electronic Blood?

Computer chips get more powerful as more transistors are crammed into them. But, manufacturers have recently found it more difficult to cram more transistors on a single silicon wafer, leading to the end of Moore's Law. However, a new technology that has showed promise, is that of 3D Chips. This literally brings vertically stacked chips, with pieces of memory and logic, on top of each other. This, in turn, increases the efficiency of the chips in terms of speed, but also increases heat and power concerns. Initial examples of such chips can be found in Intel and Micron's 3DXPoint technology.

Such chips generate a lot of heat, even though they're more powerful. Electronic Blood can solve this issue. "To cool 3D chips efficiently, IBM scientists have already developed fluid-cooled test systems with capillary cooling structures that allow the fluid to flow between the individual chip layers, a process called "interlayer cooling" that achieves a cooling capacity of 3 kW/cm3," said Dr. Michel.



5D Scaling (Credit: IBM J. RES. & DEV. VOL. 55 NO. 5 PAPER 15 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011)

Michel further explained that the IBM Research team has taken this approach a step further now, by developing an integrated cooling and energy distribution system. This is based on an electrochemical flow battery to address the power supply challenge in a sustainable way. The researchers want to replace wires with electronic blood, flowing through tiny pipes (similar to blood capillaries). "Unlike conventional batteries, which store energy in solid electrode materials, a flow battery transports energy simply by circulating the redox chemicals. Thus the electrolytes are charged by an electrochemical cell called an electrolyzer and discharged via numerous distributed receiver electrodes on a single layer of a 3D chip stack."

It sounds quite unbelievable, but large electrochemical flow batteries do exist already, and are used for grid-scale electricity storage from renewable sources. Electronic Blood is like miniaturised, improved version of the existing technology, said Michel. The project, in essence, is a Redox Flow battery that has existed for years, but IBM Research is taking it to a level that's never been done before. The liquid used is Vanadium.

Why do we need it?

Until now, Moore's Law had ensured that the performance of computer chips doubled every 18 months. In doing so, power consumption also went up. "The downside is that their power consumption has also grown at the same pace. This trend of ever-increasing computer performance is expected to be pushed to the zeta scale in the next few decades. Such systems would be able to perform 1021  a 1 followed by 21 zeros  computational operations per second, which is roughly 30,000 times more than (what) today's best computer systems can do," said Michel.



IBM's Redox Flow Battery

With the obsolescence of Moore's Law, however, it's more difficult to add transistors to a Silicon wafer and improve performance. Hence, companies are looking for newer ways to do this, with 3D chip stacking being one of the ways to do so. IBM's research arm is also conducting research on quantum computing, neuromorphic computing and nanotechnology, which are important for addressing the end of Moore's Law.

"The great strength of the "electronic blood" is that it is the final point of a new density roadmap that uses dense mobile and wearable packaging to get more compact systems and combines this with our research effort on 3D packaging to allow higher densification factors exceeding 1,000,000x," Michel said. "The roadmap starts immediately with the first proof points being the 1000x denser microserver. It builds on existing CMOS technology and is fully backward or legacy compatible in the software stack - capabilities that quantum computing and neuromorphic computing do not have," he added.

According to Michel, the density and electronic blood roadmap isn't just important, but replaces the obsolete Moore's Law with a new "law" based on volumetric densification, instead of areal densification.

How far away are we?

IBM Research sees the first applications of Electronic Blood in 2030, which is just 14 years away. Given the recent advancements in machine learning and other computing techniques, progress seems on track. Advanced computing algorithms, like those used in machine learning, do require quite a bit of power, especially when used on larger scales, and that, as mentioned above, increases power and heat dissipation requirements.

"The research the team develops within the REPCOOL project will scale from supercomputers to cloud computers and wearable devices, but its too early to make any predictions at this point," said Michel.

Electronic Blood is one of the many developments in computing that have been brought forth in the past years. Power delivery and heat dissipation are two of the central problems faced by hardware makers today, and IBM Research could potentially be eliminating both.
The Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) cable system will provide high speed connectivity to South East Asia and the Middle East

Reliance Jio has announced the launch of the Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG), a 8,100 km cable system that will provide high speed connectivity to South East Asia and the Middle East. This would then link to Europe, Africa and Far East Asia via interconnection with existing cable systems. The company already owns and operates an undersea cable landing facility in Chennai.

Mathew Oommen, President of Reliance Jio said, We are excited about the launch of BBG as it offers not just direct connectivity in and out of India through Chennai and Mumbai but also acts as a state-of-the-art 100 Gbps extension of Jio's 100 Gbps core network. This global connectivity brings key international content hubs closer to our customers, delivering a much richer experience as an important part of driving India's broadband adoption, enabling consumers to shift away from the current high-cost low value propositions

The company says that BBG utilises the latest submarine cable 100Gbps transmission technology, which uses wavelength add/drop branching units along the route. The system has an initial equipped capacity of 9 terabits per second. The BBG has been launched in partnership with Dialog Axiata, Etisalat, Omantel, Telecom Malaysia, and Vodafone.
Industrial metals and crude oil futures continued rising, with investors in the latter keeping a close eye on Kuwait's oil sector as they tried to determine for how long supplies from the Gulf country might be curtailed by a strike among its public sector workers.

In parallel, front month Brent crude futures were rising by 3.03% to $44.24 per barrel on the ICE, alongside gains of 3.61% to 41.27 for West Texas Intermediate.

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries would restart talks on freezing their level of output when they meet again in June, Iraq's governor to OPEC, Falah Al-Amri, said on his Facebook page, Bloomberg reported.

To take note of, Kuwait's crude oil output had recovered to 1.5m barrels a day, from 1.1m barrels on Sunday, versus 2.81m barrels a day last month, according to reports.

The strike among the Gulf country's oil workers which had forced it to slash production might last between 10 to 15 days, according to Energy Aspects.

Industrial metals were wanted.

The metals complex is flying, aided by the weaker dollar and also apparently because base metal buying is considered a decent hedge against the Chinese yuan, said Brenda Kelly, head of analysts at London Capital Group.

Three-month copper futures on the LME were 2.0% higher to $4,917.50 per metric tonne as of 16:35BST, alongside gains of 0.8% to $1,582 per metric tonne for primary aluminium and lager gains of 1.4% and 1.2% for nickel and zinc futures.

Prices for soft commodities were again higher, with corn futures on Euronext LIFFE ending the day 1.8% higher at 159.75 per tonne, while milling wheat futures gained 2.0% to 154 per tonne.

Cocoa futures on the other hand only managed to eke out a small 0.1% gain to 2,214.00 per tonne. White sugar futures were the lone decliner on Euronext LIFFE, losing 0.6% to $445.10 per metric tonne.

Bloomberg's US dollar spot index was retreating 0.47% to 94.04 and its commodity index up by 2.19% to 166.28.

Gold futures were up by 1.80% to $1,254.72 per ounce, as demand for the US dollar ebbed.

Nonetheless, it was silver that shone brightest, with COMEX traded May 2016 futures jumping 4.66% to $17.01 per ounce.

Despite all the apparent risk on sentiment, silver prices are surging with gold prices also taking upside cues. The price ratio is now at a 2016 low. Silvers greater industrial use means it is more sensitive to the industrial cycle and potentially less of a haven than gold. Over the long term (100 years) the ratio has gone below 20 three times and neared 100 twice, so silver does look cheap relative to gold in some respects, Kelly added.

According to data from Bloomberg, Tuesdays rally in silver - if it closed at then current levels, would mean futures had entered a bull market again, after having risen by over 20% from their most recent lows, with gold just shy of crossing that same threshold.
Tesco 's banking arm has set out plans to increase its lending by offering mortgages through independent brokers.

The supermarket chains Tesco Bank subsidiary has made its mortgage range available through London and Country mortgage brokers initially and will expand this into a range of other brokers via Legal & General in coming weeks.

Benny Higgins, the bank's chief executive, said broker market competition has increased since the introduction of the Mortgage Market Review in 2014.

The vast majority of Tesco customers select their mortgage through a broker and our platform has been specifically designed to help brokers provide a great service to customers remortgaging or purchasing their home, he said.

David Hollingworth, associate director at L&C, added: We are confident that their broad range of sharply priced mortgages will appeal to customers and advisers alike.

The mortgages will be offered under the name of Tesco Mortgage Intermediaries, with the brokers expected to offer the loans including Nouveau Group, Mortgage Advice Bureau, John Charcol and Stonebridge.
Shares in miners surged again as sentiment towards the sector continued to thaw on Tuesday, amid more bullish views from some strategists in the previous session and a soft US dollar.

That sent a pan-European gauge of stocks in the sector, the DJ Stoxx 600s Basic Resource sub-index, bounding higher by 4.55% to 304.22.

Anglo American paced gains on Londons top -flight index, rising by 8.49% to 752.5p, alongside an advance of 7.55% in the likes of Antofagasta and another 7.50% to 169.9p for shares in commodities-trader Glencore.

BHP Billiton was up by a tamer 5.25% to 964.5p.

Three-month copper futures were up 2.0% to $4,917.50 per metric tonne in LME trading as of 16:35BST, in tandem with gains of 0.8% to $1,582 per metric tonne for primary aluminium and larger gains of 1.4% and 1.2% for nickel and zinc futures.

Some order indices for steel at record levels, Macquarie says

The results of Macquaries steel survey for April, published on Tuesday, revealed a continued strengthening in demand from infrastructure and construction, with order indices for both of them reaching the highest level in the history of our survey.

Sentiment among steel mills was at its strongest since the start of 2013, the Australian brokers analysts said.

However, sentiment among iron ore traders dipped, perhaps reflecting the pressure from rapid supply increases from both domestic and overseas mines, the broker added.

Macquarie also called attention to the $61.60/tonne price (Macquarie: $58/tonne) settled between Glencore and Tohoku for the Japanese Fiscal Year (JFY) thermal coal contract, which marked the largest premium to spot in at least 15 years.

Citi sees commodities markets stumbling back towards normalcy

On 19 April, Citis global commodities research team argued that the worlds commodity markets were stumbling back towards normalcy.

Energy is uniquely critical to a commodities rebound, given the energy intensity across commodities, Oil markets now look likely to enter a period of sustained inventory draws, ushering in higher prices, propelled by demand growth and declining non-OPEC production, the team from Citi led by Ed Morse said in a research note sent to clients.

Kuwait oil strike in focus

Another Stoxx 600 sub-index for Oil&Gas shares rose 1.90% to 274.70, as investors kept track of Kuwaits efforts to restore oil production after last Sundays walk-out by public sector workers saw output drop from about 2.8m barrels a day to approximately 1.1m barrels.

Production had so far recovered to roughly 1.5m barrels day, Bloomberg reported, with analysts at Energy Aspects telling the newswire the strike might last between 10 to 15 days.

Silver futures move back into bull market

Stock in Fresnillo was also near the top of the leader board on the Footsie, taking its cue from silver futures, as the COMEX-traded May 2016 contract saw the biggest advance in the industrial metals space, rising 4.66% to $17.01 per ounce.

Despite all the apparent risk on sentiment, silver prices are surging with gold prices also taking upside cues. The price ratio is now at a 2016 low. Silvers greater industrial use means it is more sensitive to the industrial cycle and potentially less of a haven than gold.

Over the long term (100 years) the ratio has gone below 20 three times and neared 100 twice, so silver does look cheap relative to gold in some respects, London Capital Groups chief market analyst Brenda Kelly said.

According to data from Bloomberg, Tuesdays rally in silver meant futures might have entered a bull market again, after having risen by over 20% from their most recent lows, with gold just shy of crossing that same threshold.

In terms of the big picture, the US dollar spot index was retreating 0.47% to 94.04 on Tuesday, while the Bloomberg commodity index was up by 2.14% to 166.20.
Credit Suisse cut its price target on Premier Foods after coming off restriction on the stock, saying that management now had to show they made the right call after their "bold rejection of a potential offer from McCormick.

The Swiss bank retained its 'outperform' rating on the Mr Kipling and Oxo Cube maker but trimmed its earnings forecasts for the new financial year by 7%.

Management will need to deliver the revenue growth that formed the base of their rejection of the McCormick offer, but the fairly withering comment was that "2-4% looks an ambitious number for the company that hasn't yet delivered on the previous 1-2% target".

Premier Foods faces some short term investment costs of delivering this growth, with marketing set to rise 6-8m in the new year, which extra costs led to the cut in estimates.

However, directors have confirmed 2015/16 profits were as expected, though Credit Suisse's tracking of retail channels via AC Nielsen suggested sales remain subdued.

The rate of innovation has been picking up materially, with the Paul Hollywood range of 'artisanal style' banking flour now being sold in four major retailers, while the tie-up with Japan's Nissin also brings opportunities, analysts said.

"Nissin's presence on the register and McCormick's interest will likely keep a speculative element to the shares, though we don't see the former other than a commercial partner, albeit with a 20% holding."

On valuation, analysts declared that the equity is "highly geared into stability/growth in EBITDA, albeit the group has yet to demonstrate this - but if it can we believe the upside remains significant".
Ahead of a shareholder meeting next month, Stock Spirits and major shareholder Luis Amaral have both fired off new shots in a war of words that led to the early retirement of the Polish vodka maker's chief executive on Monday.

Stock Spirits pointed out that Portuguese cash-and-carry tycoon Amaral has an "an overriding conflict of interest" as he is the CEO and main shareholder of Eurocash, the London-listed company's largest customer, meaning his proposal to appoint friendly directors would give him "undue influence at the expense of other shareholders".

In a letter to shareholders ahead of the 23 May meeting, chairman David Maloney urged a vote against the proposals put forward by Amaral's Western Gate investment vehicle, which included the removal of chief executive Chris Heath, the appointment of two new non-executive directors and a review of the company's mergers and acquisitions strategy.

In response to Amaral's criticism of the company's significant loss of market share in the last two years, Maloney argued this had stemmed from repeated price cuts by competitors and a slowdown in the new product development programme, which he said has since been addressed with the 33 new products launched in Poland last year.

Rebutting allegations of corporate cost increases, he argued that forex and the costs of being a listed company were the major components of the increase, with the remaining cost base having reduced by over 3m.

"On a constant currency basis, total corporate costs, excluding FX, have actually decreased by 1.427m since IPO," he said, adding that an M&A review would be a "poor use of senior management resources".

Western Gate had argued that under the "remote control management" of the business from the UK, corporate costs have soared 111% since 2011, with corporate costs of 16.7m in the UK last year, against revenues that declined 11% over the same period.

Last week Stock Spirits followed encouraging first-quarter results with the appointment of a Polish managing director to address another of the failings cited by Western Gate, alongside the promotion of non-executive director Mirek Stachowicz to the role of interim CEO.

"We firmly believe that the board, as currently constituted, has the right experience to take the company forward until we find a permanent replacement as CEO and would not benefit from the addition of two non-executive directors hand-picked by Amaral," Maloney said.

Amaral issued a riposte later on Tuesday that accused the board of a "tendency to blame other people for the trouble they find themselves in".

He denied there was a conflict of interest from his position at Eurocash, arguing that Stock Spirits makes up "just 3% of Eurocash revenues and a negligible contribution to profit".

He concluded: One thing that I do have is a view of what has been going wrong in their business on the ground in Poland, and my assessment was that they could only benefit from the knowledge and experience of the two independent NED candidates that are proposed.

"I can only conclude that the reason why they are rejecting the proposed NED candidates is because they didnt come up with the names themselves, which seems a pretty weak excuse given how their business has been underperforming."

Shares in Stock Spirits were up 0.5% to 154.75p just before noon on Tuesday, up from their December low of 100p but half 2014's highs.
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SanDisk iXpand Flash Drive

SanDisk has announced the SanDisk iXpand Flash Drive, the company's first USB Flash Drive designed specifically for the iPhone and iPad. The iXpand Flash Drive is a powerful, yet simple-to-use solution that quickly transfers photos and videos from an iPhone or iPad to a Mac or PC, all without cables, Internet connections, or bandwidth limitations. In addition, it maintains the original photo or video resolution quality. The full-featured iXpand sync app launches when the iXpand Flash Drive is plugged into an iPhone or iPad and can be configured to automatically sync photos and videos from the camera roll to the drive. In addition, users can store their favorite movies on the iXpand Flash Drive and play them directly from the drive on their iPhone or iPad.
No power, no hot water, bedbugs at apartment towers near Downtown

Residents at the Latitude Five25 apartment towers on the Near East Side said they've had no hot water, no power at times. The city is going to court.
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The plane landed safely but the incident has focused attention on unregulated drones in the sky and the potential for disaster if they hit a plane.



By JILL LAWLESS

Associated Press

LONDON  A collision between a British Airways passenger jet and a drone over London has left the plane undamaged but the aviation industry deeply shaken.

British police and air accident authorities were investigating Sunday's incident, in which an Airbus A320 carrying 137 people struck an object believed to be a drone at a height of about 1,700 feet (518 meters) while it was approaching Heathrow Airport.





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From hairstylist to award-winning social studies teacher, Shannon Sorenson was glad she persevered and applied a second time for the James Madison Fellowship Award. Last year, she was selected as alternate.

I thought, Ill apply one more time, and then I got it, Sorenson said.

After being a hairstylist for 14 years, she decided it was time for a change and returned to school to earn a business degree. During her classes, she said she found herself imagining more intriguing ways to teach.

I think its easier to learn something when you can make it relevant, said Sorenson, who has been teaching for the past four years, one of which was spent at Bismarck High School.

She currently teaches government and psychology at Century High School, where she has been for the past three years. She is qualified to teach any of the social studies and has previously taught history and AP government.

Its weird because I wouldve never thought I would ever teach government, Sorenson said. If someone wouldve told me that while I was a high school student, I wouldve laughed at them.

The James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation was founded by Congress in 1986 with the goal to help secondary level history, government and social studies teachers become outstanding educators of the U.S. Constitution, according to a foundation statement. It awarded the first James Madison Fellowship Award in 1992 and has since granted more than 1,400 fellowships to teachers around the United States.

Every year, we run a competition to select an outstanding history and government teacher in each state, the foundations director of special projects and 1992 award winner Clara Griffin said. Mrs. Sorenson was selected as the outstanding teacher this year from the state of North Dakota.

The foundation has an independent selection committee that selects applicants, based upon transcripts, professional experiences and involvement, civic activity and the relevance of an essay on the importance of studying the Constitution.

Its very prestigious, 2001 Fellowship Award winner and sociology teacher at Century High School Gregg Schmidt said. Its very difficult to receive since only one person in every state can get it.

When teachers are selected for the award, they are given a $24,000 grant toward earning their masters degree as well as attend an all-expense paid four-week course on the origins of the American Constitution in Georgetown, Va.

The Madison Fellowship was wonderful. Georgetown, as stressful as it was and as intimidating as it was, was worth it, Schmidt said.

Schmidt, like 80 percent of the fellowship members, continued teaching since winning the award in 2001.

It is a transformative experience, Griffin said. If youre a good teacher, youll become a great teacher. If youre a good historian, youll become a great historian. Its something thats a truly wonderful experience.

Sorenson anticipates attending Georgetown this summer and is working towards her masters degree in teaching history and government. She is enrolled online at Ashland University and plans to continue to teach. Meanwhile, she strives to reach the needs of her students and present the material in a relatable and captivating way.

I want to teach as long as Im still good for the kids, Sorenson said. As long as Im still able to make connections with those kids and inspire them to be better.

I think its easier to learn something when you can make it relevant. Shannon Sorenson, recipient of the James Madison Fellowship Award
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COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho (AP)  Hydroplanes won't be racing on Lake Coeur d'Alene again this summer. The race organizer has canceled for the third year in a row because of a lack of sponsorships.

The Coeur d'Alene Press reports the general manager of the Coeur d'Alene Silver Cup Unlimited Hydroplane race is working toward hosting races in 2017.





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By BRIAN MELLEY

The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES  One of California's early offshore oil drilling operations is under fire from state regulators to clean up its act after severely corroded and unsafe wells and other equipment were found at the idle facility as part of ramped-up inspections.

The Department of Conservation focused its renewed enforcement efforts on a facility with ties to an oil company with a long history of spills that allowed man-made Rincon Island wells to fall into disrepair near a popular surf spot on the Southern California coast.





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PA DMV Permit Practice Test

Its always important to make sure that youre prepared for the big tests that youll encounter in life. Getting your Pennsylvania Learners Permit via the written test is one of those huge examinations that happen throughout ones lifetime. The good news is that when it comes to Pennsylvania driving test practice, youre in the right place. Were #1 when it comes to practice DMV permit tests online. The Pennsylvania Learners permit test isnt the hardest, but it is one of the larger exams one will ever take when it comes to gaining rights as a Pennsylvanian and a U.S. citizen. Failing the Pennsylvania DOT written exam can be a costly process. You can find yourself losing both time and money. Preparing diligently with our free written test before you take your Pennsylvania permit test is the only way to go.

The best way to get ready for your Pennsylvania written permit test at the DPS is by taking as many practice tests as you can. A practice test also referred to as a Pennsylvania DMV cheat sheet utilizes questions from the actual written exam you would take at the Department of Transportation. These questions are crowdsourced from peers who have previously passed the DMV written exam. Our Pennsylvania permit practice tests are formatted to be just like the permit test you would take at the Department of Transportation. By finding us here at DMV-Written-Test, you can access as many permit test questions and answers as you can handle before you take your learners permit examination.

For learners who prefer learning from one sheet of paper, a Pennsylvania DMV cheat sheet is available for a nominal fee. This puts all of the Pennsylvania test questions and answers in one simple to use and read PDF form. Students who use this method pass at a rate of 99.2%.

Pennsylvania Learners Permit Requirements

We know youre ready to hit the road, but the state of Pennsylvania has several requirements you will need to meet before you can get your learners permit and legally hit the road with supervision.

To reduce the number of accidents involving teenagers, Pennsylvania has joined many states in the union in implementing a Graduated Driver License (GDL) program. As part of your PA GDL program, the first step is obtaining a drivers permit.

How Old Do I Have to Be to Get a Learners Permit in Florida?

To get your Pennsylvania learners permit, you must be at least 16 years of age. Age does not impact the speed or ease of the testing or drivers education courses if you are under the age of 18.

Getting Your Pennsylvania Drivers Permit

The first step in the Pennsylvania GDL process is getting your drivers permit. Applying for your Pennsylvania learners permit is something that can only be done by yourself and in person. Save yourself some time by booking your appointment with the PA DOT Driver License Center ahead of time. This trick has saved many people hours of their day. If you are under the 18 years of age mark, you must bring along your parent(s) or legal guardian(s). Theyll be the ones to sign off on any of the paperwork.

What Paperwork do I Need to Get My Pennsylvania Learners Permit

To get your Pennsylvania learners permit you will need to present the following at the PA DMV when you arrive to take your written test for driving.

A completed Non-Commercial Learners Permit Application (Form DL-180). Note: You must have a medical professional conduct an examination and complete the required medical section of this application. A completed Parent or Guardian Consent Form (Form DL-180TD) Proof of Identity Proof of Residency Your Social Security Card

You must also pass a vision screening and a written permit test to get your PA learners permit. Once you pass, you will get your Pennsylvania learners permit. This is good for up to 1 year. During that time you are intended to get your PA Junior Drivers License.

How Much Does the Permit Test Cost in Pennsylvania?

Technically the permit test doesnt cost anything in Pennsylvania. You will however have to pay a $35.50 learners license fee that will cover getting your learners permit from the DMV. This is a modest amount when compared to other states and their permit fees.

How Many Questions is the Pennsylvania Learners Permit Test?

The Pennsylvania written test is 18 multiple-choice questions. It is based completely on the 2021 drivers manual provided by PennDot and also found here on our practice tests and premium cheat sheet. You will need to get 15 of your 18 questions right in order to pass the test. This is an accuracy of 83%

Going back to the PennDot Driver License center to retake the written permit test isnt what anyone wants. Make sure to pick up our PA DMV cheat sheet and give yourself a 99.2% chance of passing the test on the first attempt!

What Happens if I Fail My PA Learners Permit Test?

Its never a good thing to have to take the test again. If you fail the knowledge test, the examiner with return the Non-Commercial Learners Permit Application and your Parent or Guardian Consent Form.

You cannot take your test again on the same day. You will need to rebook your appointment with PennDOT. When that depends on the time of year and business of the drivers services department. This stresses the importance of getting it right the first time.

Make sure youre ready for the test. Purchase a DMV cheat sheet in Pennsylvania to give yourself a 99.2% chance of passing on the first try!

PA Permit Behind the Wheel Requirements

When you ultimately pass and get your learners permit in the state of Pennsylvania, its time to start practicing your skills. During the learners permit phase of your GDL, you must log 65 hours of supervised driving with a licensed driver. This supervisor must be 21 years of age or older, sober, and sitting in the front seat with you. Of your 65 hours of practice, 10 hours must be at night and 5 hours must be in inclement weather.

You will need to hold your learners permit for a minimum of 6 months before taking your road test and getting your Pennsylvania Junior Drivers license.

Pennsylvania Drivers Education

While not a requirement to obtain a drivers permit, you must complete a certified Drivers Education course in Pennsylvania to obtain your PA Drivers License. You must complete Drivers Ed to get a full drivers license before you turn 18 years old by state law.

You can take Drivers Ed after receiving your Pennsylvania junior drivers license. This is a document you must apply for after you get your Pennsylvania learners permit after you meet the learners permit requirements. You must complete 65 hours of driving practice with 10 hours occurring at night and 5 hours occurring in inclement weather. You must also pass the driving skills test.

Drivers Ed in PA consists of both a classroom course curriculum and a behind-the-wheel instruction component. 30 hours of theory instruction occur in the classroom (or online). 6 hours of your course are spent behind the wheel with a driving instructor.
IOC inks pact with Bangladesh for LPG terminal

State-owned Indian Oil Corp (IOC) today signed an agreement with Bangladesh Petroleum Corp (BPC) to set up an LPG import terminal at Chittagong and lay a pipeline from there to Tripura.

India plans to use the terminal at the Bangladeshi port to ship cooking gas or LPG which would then be piped to Tripura.

The MoU, signed during petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan's three-day visit to Bangladesh, "Paves the way for discussion on setting up LPG import terminal at coastal belt of Chittagong district, marketing of LPG and developing related infrastructure in Bangladesh and transportation of LPG from Chittagong to Tripura," an official statement said here.

Pradhan reached Dhaka on Monday to follow up on issues discussed during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Bangladesh in June last year.

He met Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury, adviser on energy, power and mineral resources to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh and Nasrul Hamid, Minister of State for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources of Bangladesh.

During the meetings, he discussed modalities for sustainable supply of diesel from Siliguri Marketing Terminal of Numaligarh Refinery Ltd (NRL) to Parbatipur Depot of BPC.

Pradhan expressed confidence that early implementation of these projects will create a win-win situation for both countries.

He briefed them about the status of seismic survey being carried out by ONGC Videsh Ltd in offshore blocks allocated to it by Bangladesh.

Pradhan will tomorrow travel to Chittagong where he is scheduled to witness the award of consultancy contract by Eastern Refineries Ltd to Engineers India Ltd for its expansion of refinery by 3 million tons per annum.
Many scientists fear that global warming will hit staple food crops hard, with heat stress, extreme weather events and water shortages. On the other hand, higher levels of carbon dioxide - the main cause of ongoing warming -- is known to boost many plants' productivity, and reduce their use of water. So, if we keep pouring more CO2 into the air, will crops fail, or benefit? A new study says more carbon dioxide in the air could help mitigate projected damage to crops caused by climate change -- at least for some crops, in some regions. Here, farmers harvest okra in the village of Loulouni, Mali. Credit: Francesco Fiondella/International Research Institute for Climate and Society A new study tries to disentangle this complex question. It suggests that while greater warmth will reduce yields of some crops, higher CO2 could help mitigate the effects in some regions, unless other complications of global warming interfere. The study, by 16 researchers from a half-dozen countries, uses newly available crop models and data from ongoing large-scale field experiments. It appears this week in the journal Nature Climate Change. "Most of the discussion around climate impacts focuses only on changes in temperature and precipitation," said lead author Delphine Deryng, an environmental scientist at Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the University of Chicago's Computation Institute. "To adapt adequately, we need to understand all the factors involved." Deryng cautions that the study should not be interpreted to mean that increasing carbon dioxide is a friend to humanity--only that its direct effects must be included in any calculation of what the future holds. Many studies say that as temperatures rise, crops across the world will suffer as average temperatures become unsuitable for traditionally grown crops, and droughts, heat waves or extreme bouts of precipitation become more common. Agricultural scientists say that losses could be mitigated to some extent by switching crops, developing varieties adapted to the new conditions, or moving some crop-growing regions poleward. But such adaptations pose daunting challenges. Due to human activities, average global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have risen by more than a quarter since 1960; they now stand at around 400 parts per million, and are expected to keep increasing, along with temperature. At the same time, experiments since the 1980s have shown that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air helps plants build biomass. The concept is relatively simple; plants take in carbon to build their tissues, and if there is more carbon around, they have an easier time. Leaves take in air through tiny openings called stomata, but in the process the stomata lose water; with more carbon available, they don't have to open up as much, and conserve moisture. However, much of the initial evidence for so-called CO2 fertilization has come from lab experiments on isolated plants. These do not account for environmental factors that might affect plants even more powerfully in a warming world, including possibly increased insect and fungus attacks. Thus, suggestions that the greenhouse gas itself might prove a boon to crops have aroused deep skepticism. In 2014, Deryng and her colleagues published the first global calculation of how heat waves might affect crops, and found that maize, spring wheat and soybeans would all suffer. When they added the effects of carbon-dioxide fertilization, they found that maize yields would still go down--but that spring wheat and soybeans might actually go up. Some media misinterpreted the study to say that climate change might help agriculture overall. The picture is much more complicated, say the authors. The new study looks at how rising temperatures and carbon dioxide along with changes in rainfall and cloud cover might combine to affect how efficiently maize, soybeans, wheat, and rice can use water and grow. It confirms that heat and water stress alone will damage yields; but when carbon dioxide is accounted for, all four crops will use water more efficiently by 2080. Based on the current biomass of these crops, water-use efficiency would rise an average of 27 percent in wheat; 18 percent in soybeans; 13 per cent in maize; and 10 per cent in rice. All things considered, the study projects that average yields of current rain-fed wheat areas (mostly located in higher latitudes including the United States, Canada and Europe), might go up by almost 10 per cent, while consumption of water would go down a corresponding amount. On the other hand, average yields of irrigated wheat, which account for much of India and China's production, could decline by 4 per cent. Maize, according to the new projections, would still be a loser most everywhere, even with higher water efficiency; yields would go down about 8.5 per cent. The study is less conclusive on the overall effects on rice and soybean yields; half of the projections show an increase in yield and half a net decline. Deryng says the study is sturdier than past research, because it uses new data from experiments done in actual farm fields, and a half-dozen global crop models, several of which only recently became available. Nevertheless, she says, the uncertainties remain large. Field experiments, which involve blowing CO2 over sizable farm fields for entire growing seasons, have been done only at a handful of sites in the United States, Germany, Australia, Japan and China -- not in Africa, India or Latin America, where subsistence farming are mainstays of daily life. She noted that greater yield also might not translate to more nutrition. For example, greater carbon uptake might not be balanced by other nutrients such as nitrogen, and trace elements like zinc and iron that are needed to make crops nutritious. Bruce Kimball, a retired researcher with the US Department of Agriculture who has studied crop-CO2 interactions, said the paper does "a good job on a huge scale," though, he said, "more data from more crops from more locations" is needed." Kimball cautioned also that previous research has shown that the benefits of higher CO2 levels tend to bottom out after a certain point -- but that the damage done by heat only gets worse as temperatures mount. "Thus, for greater warming and higher CO2 the results would likely be more pessimistic than shown in this paper," he said.










Halloween creatures  owls, crows and bats  all live at Crossroads, and that makes us very happy, for these scary animals make a positive contribution to the habitats of the preserve. We don't even mind black cats, IF they are kept indoors. Feral and outdoor cats are exceedingly harmful to wildlife ... and that's not a superstition! But to tamp down superstitions, we at Crossroads will spend the week demystifying Halloween creatures.

On October 28, 2022, at 6 p.m. will be our Evening with Owls. The Open Door Bird Sanctuary will be at Crossroads, offering a one-hour presentation followed by the opportunity to meet and greet live birds. Learn all about owls and the other incredible birds in the care of the Sanctuary!

Down through the centuries, in many cultures throughout the world, owls have been associated with evil and death. Truth is, owls probably are not smart enough to be evil. But researchers agree that owls are about as dim as the nighttime forests in which they hunt.

Owls don't need to be smart. They have everything else going for them. They are muscular. They fly silently. Their huge eyes enable them to see in the dark. Their beaks and talons are strong and wickedly sharp. But their sensitive ears are what make owls extraordinary hunters.

Most people assume that the plumicorns (a.k.a. "horns) of an owl are its ears. Not so.

The actual ears lie under feathers on the sides of the head, and they aren't symmetrical. Because one ear is higher than the other and the ears are unequal in size, sound is different from different directions, helping owls locate prey, which they do almost unfailingly, even in total darkness.

Owls do not smell their prey. As with most birds, the sense of smell is insignificant, if it exists are all. Great Horned Owls frequently prey on skunks. Enough said.

But well-developed intelligence? Researchers have observed owls beating their wings on bushes to try to flush out little birds. Is this learned behavior? Is it problem-solving?

Maybe.

For the most part, owls do not have a lot of problems to solve. They appropriate abandoned nests of other birds, so they don't need building skills. They are stealthy by nature, and they pounce on and usually catch anything they hear, so they don't need hunting techniques.

In spite of ghost stories, legends of American First People, and superstitions from Europe and India, hooting owls do not foretell impending death, although their nocturnal calls are spooky. We hear them now and then this time of year, but we will regularly hear those eerie calls at Crossroads in January or February.

In contrast to owls, crows are noisy all year round and they are amazingly intelligent. They can learn. They can remember. They can solve problems. They can even identify individual humans. And they detest owls, though whether this is innate or learned behavior is not clear.

Those curious about crows will want to attend the Crossroads Book Club on Wednesday, October 26, at 10:00 a.m. This month, the book Crow Planet, Essential Wisdom for the Urban Wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt will explore the fascinating world of these remarkable birds. The program is free and open to all, whether or not they have read the book.

So bring the family to our program on owls, learn about crows at the Crossroads Book Club, or learn about bats at our pre-school Junior Nature Club on Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. or our Family Science Saturday program at 2:00 p.m. Costumes are encouraged but not required at Junior Nature Club and Science Saturday, and adult visitors are welcome.
Ronald Moede was born on December 21, 1934, in Rio Creek, WI. The son of the late Fred and Emily (Hanamann) Moede, he married Bonnie Neinas in Brussels on June 4, 1960, and they were married for 62+ years. He was a life-long resident of Rio Creek and was an innovative dairy farmer. He owned and managed a large dairy operation, Meade Manor Farms, which had been homesteaded by his grandfather, August Moede, in 1895. The log cabin home, barn, and herd grew to become one of the larger dairy farms in Kewaunee County under his guidance. Upon his retirement, it evolved into Meade Manor Pet Clinic, a vet service for small animals, but the land continued to flourish and produce. Ron graduated from Casco High School, Class of 1952 and Graham School for Cattlemen, Kansas. He was a member of the Wisconsin Holstein Breeders, Kewaunee County Holstein Breeders, and the National Holstein

Association. He was a charter member of the Algoma FFA Alumni. His family exhibited champion dairy cattle at local, state, and national dairy cattle shows. In 1984, in Madison, the Wisconsin FFA named him Outstanding Farmer and in 1995, he was named and honored at the Wisconsin State Fair as a Century Farmer. He served as an elder in his church for many years as well as a trustee and various committee appointments. In his younger days, he was active in dartball and also high school sports. He received the Algoma Honorary Chapter Farmer Award, and the Unified Board Business Award. In his retirement, he drove school bus for 15 years for the Algoma School District and was a member of the Great Lakes Sports Fishermen. A hobby later enjoyed was his chicken farming. He raised a small flock of chicken, and he enjoyed passing out extra eggs to friends and relatives when the supply was greater than the family could handle. He was an avid sports fan and he and Bonnie attended both Packers Super Bowl games in 1996 and 1997, and also the Milwaukee World Series in 1983. He enjoyed hunting and fishing, both here and in upper Michigan and Minnesota. He even got Bonnie to go along with him to Lake of the Woods on the Canadian border to do some ice fishing. He held Packers season tickets since 1960 and at the time they bought their tickets they were allowed to pick out where they wanted to sit on the sidelines --there were no end zone seats yet-- and the tickets cost $5.00 a piece! He traveled through most of the U.S. including Alaska and Hawaii as well as traveling to the Caribbean and Europe. He enjoyed a summer place in Door County for 20 years. He told many stories of farming with his dad and the fact that at the age of 12, he had his own team of horses to work with on the farm. Responsibility came early as he was left in charge whenever it was necessary for his parents to be gone for a few days. He learned to drive a truck at an early age and often drove himself to school in 8th grade and parked the vehicle a few doors down at a relatives. This was because chores need to be done before and after school. The first tractor purchased was in 1937. In his retirement, he had it restored and displayed in local fairs and tractor shows. He would tell of shocking grain and threshing crews traveling from neighbor to neighbor and the wonderful table his mother would set full of food. A vivid memory was the day WWII ended. The whole neighborhood and working crew quit in the early afternoon (unheard of) and celebrated With beer and music! Even the clergy arrived and joined in. It was a day to remember! In his lifetime he went from horses and the depression, to the digital age and unimagined luxuries. There was no electricity and no running water in his youth and now he had wireless phones, computer screens in his vehicles, along with heated steering wheels and heated seats. Who would have thought that back then.

Ron is survived by his wife Bonnie; son Robert (Debbie Harms) Moede; grandson Michael and granddaughter Megan; siblings, Terry (Jane) Moede, Paul (Roxie) Moede; sisters-in-law, Diane Fontaine, Sheila (Don) Baudhuin; and brothers in-law, Dan (Mary) Neinas. He was preceded in death by his parents, Fred and Emily Moede; sister, Marilyn (Arno) Schneider; father- and mother-in-law, Herman and Madeline Neinas, and brother-in-law, Gary Fontaine.

Visitation will be held at Kinnard Funeral & Cremation Services  Algoma, on Friday, October 7, 2022, from 4-7:30 pm with a prayer service at 6:30. Visitation will continue on Saturday, October 8th at St. Johns Lutheran Church  Rankin, from 9-11:00 am. Funeral service will be held at 11:00 am with Dr. Rev. Christopher Jackson officiating. Burial to follow in Evergreen Cemetery. Online condolence message may be shared at KinnardFCS.com. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to the Kewaunee County 4-H Dairy Fund and the Projection Screen Fund at St. Johns- Rankin.
Its not uncommon to see a Legacy High School student typing away on a Google Chromebook, and soon the cloud-based laptops will come to Bismarcks other public high schools.

School district leaders seek to provide one device per student to accomplish everything from writing essays to reading digital textbooks, taking tests and using apps for learning. Throughout the country, school districts are adopting similar technology initiatives, including Mandan Public Schools, which is buying iPads for its high-schoolers.

Legacy opened this school year by assigning one Chromebook to each student to take to class and home at night.

The computers will roll out differently at Bismarck and Century high schools, said Tanna Kincaid, technology director for Bismarck Public Schools.

Teachers will keep sets of Chromebooks in their classrooms, though not all will receive them immediately.

Those interested have submitted applications to their schools administrators outlining how they intend to use them. Others will receive them over the next couple years, allowing time to study how to leverage the technology in lessons.

We want teachers to be prepared when the devices come into their classrooms, said Lynette Johnson, assistant principal at BHS. Theres nothing scarier for a teacher to have this device and struggle to incorporate it into their teaching.

Kincaid said the district may offer after-school or summer training sessions for teachers, and other lessons will be arranged as needed.

When Johnson was a teacher, she piloted Chromebooks in her classroom. Ten English classrooms at BHS have sets this year.

Johnson held review sessions in the evenings so students could get feedback on their essays written in Google Docs.

In class, her students watched films and carried on live discussions by typing online.

They were able to make comments without interrupting the documentary, she said.

Students helped select the Chromebooks, which power up fast and allow the user to access their work in the Google cloud, Kincaid said.

They dont want a lot of whistles and bells, she said.

Each Chromebook is $350, and the school district will incorporate next years cost into its annual $1.2 million technology replacement budget, Kincaid said. The purchase of additional Chromebooks in subsequent years may require separate authorization from the school board.

At some point over the next couple years, the number of Chromebooks in classrooms will match the student population. Kincaid said the devices would likely be assigned to each student, as they are at Legacy.

When Chromebooks break at Bismarcks newest high school, the student technology club makes the repairs.

Were looking to see how we can get students involved in the support piece, said Kincaid, adding that Bismarck and Century also plan to offer students internships working on the devices.
At least two rounds were shot into the Larrys Bar-B-Q on U.S. Highway 84 in Enterprise on Monday night in what authorities are calling a drive-by shooting.

EPD spokesman, Sgt. Billy Haglund, confirmed authorities were searching for a blue or dark green mid-1990s Nissan Sentra just before 9 p.m. Monday from which an unknown number of suspects fired from the roadway between three to six rounds, two rounds of which hit, inside the Larrys restaurant, near the Boll Weevil Circle intersection.

Haglund said no one was injured during the shooting. It was not immediately available how many occupants were inside the restaurant at the time of the shooting.

In addition to the drive-by shooting on Monday, EPD authorities are still investigating a shooting that occurred early Saturday in which four people were shot during an apparent house party on Baxter Street.

Anyone with information on either of the shootings can contact EPDs Criminal Investigations Division (CID) at 334-347-2222 or leave a tip at www.enterprisepd.com.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case of Lee Carroll Brooker, a Cottonwood man who was sentenced to life in prison for trafficking marijuana in Houston County Circuit Court in 2014.

Brooker and his son were arrested in 2011 at the sons home on State Line Road, where sheriffs deputies found 42 marijuana plants weighing almost three pounds, its street value an estimated $92,000.

The younger Brooker received a 10-year sentence that will be suspended if he successfully completes five years probation without incident.

Lee Carroll Brooker, who has a record of armed robberies and had previously served 10 years in prison, received life in prison without parole based on the states habitual offender law.

The case has generated broad publicity because of Brookers age  hes now 75 and disabled  and is being held up as a symbol of Alabamas broken sentencing guidelines.

Last year, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court wrote that the states sentencing system contained grave flaws.

I believe that Brookers sentence is excessive and unjustified, Moore wrote in an opinion.

The Alabama Supreme Court refused to overturn the verdict. However, Moore raises a valid point  there are indeed grave flaws in the states sentencing system.

Alabamas prisons are brimming with inmates serving long, mandatory terms for drug crimes, and the growing inmate population -- now almost double the capacity of the states penitentiaries  has prompted the state Legislature to consider a bond issue of almost a billion dollars to build new prisons.

While sentencing guidelines are in order, trial court judges should have a measure of leeway in sentencing in order to consider mitigating factors that should be weighed in handing down judgment. In determining how to proceed with the states prison overcrowding problem, lawmakers should consider exploring how they got that way.

It would be reckless to presume what led the U.S. Supreme Court to decline to hear the Brooker case; however, Alabama lawmakers should not take that decision as an endorsement of the states mandatory sentencing system.
The Dothan City Commission paved the way Tuesday for all Dothan Police officers to be equipped with body cameras in the near future.

The commission agreed Tuesday to allow the City of Dothan to apply to the Department of Justice for a $202,500 grant that should fund about 50 percent of the total cost. Police Chief Steve Parrish said he expects to receive word on whether the application was approved sometime this fall.

Parrish said the primary benefit of the cameras is accountability.

When you talk about the biggest benefit, I think it is peace of mind for the community. In this day and time, people want to see it on camera, Parrish said. The officers in our department actually embrace the idea.

Parrish said 14 body cameras are currently in operation in the department on an experimental basis.

The Dothan Police Department is currently developing policies and procedures for the cameras. As a member of the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, the department must meet the agencys standards related to the use of body cameras. The department must enter into memoranda of understanding with the city attorney and district attorney offices as well as the Southeast Alabama Child Advocacy Center. The department must provide adequate data storage, set a policy on the length of time data is stored and be able to obscure people on video such as juveniles or items such as tag numbers of vehicles belonging to people not involved in the law enforcement activity.

Parrish said the cameras can be used as a law enforcement tool in an addition to its primary role as a level of accountability.

These cameras can help document scenes such as domestic violence incidents in which a victim may be injured. In many cases, we find that the victim is reluctant to come to court when the time comes. In these instances, we can interview victims at the scene, document their injuries on video and provide that evidence needed in a prosecution of the aggressor, Parrish said.

The total cost to outfit 135 officers with body cameras for the first two years is $435,000. Annual maintenance, storage and miscellaneous costs are expected to be $153,900 after initial startup costs.
Two men were killed Monday morning when the 2005 Ford F350 they were riding in struck a garbage truck on Alabama Highway 30 near Clayton in Barbour County.

Alabama State Troopers identified the victims as Tyrine David Hamilton, 31, and Edward James Ross, 50, both of Clayton. Hamilton and Ross were passengers in the F350. The driver of the F350 and garbage truck were transported to a local hospital for treatment of their injuries. Their condition is not known.
The excruciating pain started in his rib. Over the years, it spread to his sternum. Then his hips. Now, the pain has returned in his back  and it wont go away. His journey for relief has led him to Seattle, where he will undergo an experimental treatment that might safe his life.

Matt Jahner was a junior at Dickinson High School when he was diagnosed in 2008 with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He was treated at Mayo Clinic, where he underwent chemotherapy and went into in remission.

But in 2013, the disease came back. His doctors said his best bet for survival was a bone marrow or stem cell transplant. He didn't find any matches in the bone marrow registry, but found two matches in an umbilical cord database.

Because of his size -- 6 feet, 1 inch and roughly 180 pounds -- Matt needed both of the umbilical cord transplants. He underwent surgery in May 2013, and it appeared he was healed right away.

We thought, awesome, hes cured, said Matts sister, Erin Jahner, 27.

Matt and his family were told that if he could survive two years after the transplant, hed be considered cured.

Matt was three months shy of two years when he relapsed in March. The cancer had returned: Tests showed 80 percent leukemia in his bone marrow.

His doctors at Mayo Clinic said they could no longer treat him, and he and his family were told they should look for treatment elsewhere.

Erin, a nurse at CHI St. Alexius Health, went digging for other options for her little brother after his first relapse. She scoured the Internet, joined online support groups and spoke with physicians at the hospital in which she works. She spent all hours of the day on the phone and emailing.

Her medical knowledge and connections she made with people in online support groups led her to an alternative cancer treatment: immunotherapy, an experimental treatment that involves using a patient's own immune system to kill cancer cells.

She contacted Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which was doing one of these clinical trials. It was reserved for patients who have failed other standard treatment options, and her brother had been found ineligible for it about two years prior.

Erin and a representative from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society contacted the facility to try to get Matt into the trial. We pushed," she said. "I had Matts records sent there in a day. I had our insurance information sent there in an hour. I called and called and called."

Finally, he got in. The family drove 20 hours to Seattle for his initial appointment on March 28.

After blood tests, biopsies and spinal taps, they determined he was a candidate for the trial. Matt and his mom, Kathy Long, moved into an apartment in Seattle three weeks ago.

In Seattle, the family learned more about immunotherapy, including its success rate and side effects.

I didnt know there was a treatment out there with such positive outcomes," Matt said. Theyre saying it could be an alternative treatment from chemo.

Dr. Cameron Turtle, a physician at Fred Hutchinson, said the trial has been going on for two and a half years, and they've dealt with more than 100 patients. Basically, he said, the treatment involves removing some of the patient's T-cells, which are part of the immune system; engineering them in a lab to recognize and kill cancer cells; and then reinjecting them into the patient.

"Weve seen a lot of success, Turtle said, though he couldn't point to any figures because the information is under embargo.

Patients in the trial are required to stay in Seattle for two months and then are monitored for a year, he said.

Because these are very new trials, we have to keep an eye on them to make sure there are no long-term issues," Turtle said.

Last week, Matt started chemotherapy to make room for the T-cells. Today, the cells will be put back into his body, where they will travel through his bloodstream and into his bone marrow to attack cancer cells.

The goal is to have the cells remain in his body for life so if the leukemia starts to come back, they kill it right away.

Its kind of all a blur. Im still kind of in shock (that the cancers back again)," said Matt, 24, who lives in Bismarck. I dont know if Ive accepted the fact yet.

Yeah, theres a chance it might work, but, yet again, theres a chance theres not much they can do," he said.

Matt was supposed to graduate from Bismarck State College in May with two degrees: in petroleum engineering and process plant technology. He's a banker at Dakota Community Bank and said he might explore a career in finance or human resources.

Matt became a Make-A-Wish recipient after he was diagnosed with cancer. He was awarded a trip to Alaska to go deep-sea fishing. He's been volunteering with the nonprofit ever since.

I knew how much (Make-A-Wish) helped me when I was going through it," he said.

Erin flew to Seattle on Monday and says she'll stay with her brother for about a week to monitor his condition. Any adverse reactions to the treatment and hell be right back in the hospital, she said.

Matt said he's mostly afraid of the "unknowns" of the new trial and its potential long-term effects.

Were scared; were very scared," Erin said. "But without this, we dont have any other options at this point."

The family has set up a GoFundMe page (www.gofundme.com/matthewjahner) and CaringBridge site (www.caringbridge.org/visit/matthewjahner) to help cover Seattle expenses, medical bills, flights and specialized care. There are also two medical accounts set up at Gate City Bank and Dakota Community Bank under "Matthew Jahner Medical Fund."
dpa ElectionsData

With dpa ElectionsData you get access to a unique collection of data. Via a programming interface (Rest-API), your developers can access detailed information, candidate profiles and live results for all national elections in the European Union and important international elections, like the US Midterm elections etc.

The data pool also includes all heads of state and government as well as about 20,000 elected members of parliament throughout the EU. In addition to their data (name, party, constituency or list position), we collect social media profiles and official websites of individuals and parties.
North Dakotans wanting Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and the Republican-led Senate to hold hearings on the presidents nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court gathered on the state Capitol grounds Monday evening to advocate for the constitutional process to proceed.

The rally, organized by the North Dakota AFL-CIO, was a call for Hoeven to do his job, said the groups president, Waylon Hedegaard. About 50 people demonstrated along Boulevard Avenue at the south end of the Capitol grounds.

He cant just take his ball and go home, Hedegaard said before the rally. At work, we have to do some things we dont want to do sometimes.

President Barack Obama named Merrick Garland as his Supreme Court nominee last month. Garland, 63, is chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was appointed to the court in 1997 and became its chief judge in 2013. Garland is a Harvard Law School graduate.

The nominee fight comes after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February, one of the five who had made up the high courts 5-4 conservative majority.

Within hours of Scalias death, the fight over his replacement began. Nearly all Senate Republicans, including Hoeven, have argued that the people should have a say over his replacement in the November election.

Hoeven and others have cited instances in which prominent Democrats have called for similar tactics in the 1990s and 2000s.

Democrats can call up a vote on Judge Garland, but they havent because they know they dont even have a simple majority of 51 votes in support of him, Hoeven spokesman Don Canton said Monday in a prepared statement. Sen. Hoeven will meet with Judge Garland as a courtesy, but he does not support his confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Hoeven has previously said that of the 160 past nominations for justices, the Senate has confirmed 124, with 25 not having received a vote. Hes also said the next confirmed justice could have a huge impact in North Dakota involving decisions made on federal water, energy and environmental rules.

The senator is concerned about Judge Garlands record on Second Amendment rights and his support for the Obama regulatory agenda, which will hurt farmers, energy workers and small businesses in North Dakota and across our nation, Canton said. In fact, for the first time in their 73-year history, the National Federation of Independent Business, the leading national group representing small businesses across the country, has decided to oppose this candidate for the Supreme Court.

Hedegaard dismissed the arguments from Hoevens office.

He said the people spoke on the matter when Obama was re-elected in 2012. The argument that an elected official shouldnt be making major decisions in the final year of a term is interesting, he said, given that Hoeven is running for re-election this year.

What does that say about his position? Hedegaard said.

A complete history of actions on U.S. Supreme Court nominees since 1789 can be found at www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/nominations/Nominations.htm.
Brig. Gen. (retired) Philip G. Randich, 83, passed away on April 15, 2016. Mass of Christian burial will be held at 10 a.m. Friday, April 22, at Church of Corpus Christi, 1919 N. Second St., Bismarck, with the Rev. Paul Becker officiating. Burial will be at North Dakota Veterans Cemetery, Mandan. Cremation has taken place.

Phil was born to Andrew and Josephine Randich on Sept. 26, 1932, on the family farm in New England. Phil married his high school sweetheart, Genie Jaeger, and they were blessed with four children.

Phil enlisted in the North Dakota National Guard while in high school and was honorably discharged in 1953 at the rank of sergeant first class. He re-enlisted in 1954 as a second lieutenant. As he progressed through the ranks, he commanded five engineering battalions, graduated from the U.S. Army Command Staff General College, and retired from the Guard in 1989, after attaining the rank of brigadier general.

Phil studied geological engineering at University of North Dakota and began working for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1955. He became a certified professional hydrologist and was a project chief for groundwater investigations, publishing 35 manuals documenting the geohydrology of central North Dakota.

Phil loved hunting, fishing and playing cards.

Phil is survived by his wife, Genie; their four children, Laurie Jo, Tim, Greg and Leslie; five grandchildren, Billie Jean, Gabriel, Mikala, Logan and Trey; two step-grandchildren, Shiree (David) and Allen; and one step-great-grandchild, Leighton.

Preceding him in death were his parents; and his siblings, Anton, Andrew, Peter, Gregory, John, Elsie and Josephine.

Memorials can be made to the N.D. Veterans Cemetery, Mandan.

Go to www.parkwayfuneral.com to share memories of Phil and sign the online guest book. (Parkway Funeral Service, Bismarck)
Mazda is keeping the door open to make its upcoming CX-4 available outside of China.

Due to be unveiled in final production trim at the Beijing motor show next month, the CX-4 is Mazda's take on the modern coupe-style soft-roader following the trend set by the pioneering BMW X6 and subsequently copied by the Mercedes-Benz GLE and upcoming Audi Q6.

The car, which was previewed by the Koeru concept at last year's Frankfurt motor show and uses the underpinnings of the popular CX-5, has been ruled out for immediate Australian sales as it will be produced and sold exclusively in China for now.

But Mazda's Director and Senior Managing Executive Officer, Yuji Nakamine, told Australian media at the official opening ceremony for the company's new local headquarters in Melbourne that the brand will evaluate the opportunity of expanding its availability in the future.

"At this moment, this vehicle is exclusively for the Chinese market. But we have to study whether this kind of CX-4 concept will be accepted by other markets," he said.

"At this moment, we are studying the possibility of introducing CX-4 type of vehicles in other markets. The possibility is there, but at the moment we don't plan to sell this vehicle outside of China.

"This is interensting as more people move toward SUV then if the CX-4 styling is well accepted by other brands in other markets then we should seriously study the possibility of introducing that kind of design theme into other markets."

Nakamine admitted the company is using the more progressive Chinese market as an experiment to gauge the reaction of the CX-4's styling and its compromised practicality before committing to building it for other markets.

He conceded the brand is taking a conservative approach with its limited resources and a focus on building solid foundations for its regular passenger car and SUV models in more mature markets such as Australia.

"There are a couple of elements involved [in why Mazda is limiting its availability to China], such as production capacity, engineering resources and maybe the confidence in this kind of concept for other markets," he said.

"We will work with this in China at the moment and see what happens for other markets."
Sinn Fein Louth TD Gerry Adams has warned that a Yes vote, in the June referendum for Britain to leave the EU, would have serious implications for Louth and the border region, as well as for the economy of both states on the island.

The Louth TD said:

More than 1 billion is traded each week in goods and services between this State, the north and Britain. Much of this is in agriculture.

In the north the end of the Single Farm Payment for farmers would result in a loss of 2.5 billion euro.

And Britain exiting the EU would mean an end to the Rural Development Fund, Structural Funds, and PEACE Funding.

The north would lose 982 million alone in Structural Funds which are crucial for Small and medium businesses, community regeneration and community groups.

This loss of money and the dislocation of the northern economy would have a hugely damaging impact in the border region and across the rest of the island.

In addition the introduction of trade barriers between the Irish state and Britain would cost jobs in this state and destabilise the economy.

This week the International Monetary Fund warned that a British exit from the EU would do severe regional and global damage by disrupting established trading relationships.

It is clear that the economic consequences of a UK exit from the EU will be enormous.

This month saw the 18th anniversary of the signing in 1998 of the Good Friday Agreement.

The peace process and the GFA and subsequent agreements, have led to a political and economic transformation with the physical border now all but invisible and the economies across the island benefitting.

The potential for the return of border controls is deeply worrying. They would undermine the political progress that has been made and would act as a serious impediment to economic activity along the border and between the economies north and south.

The current debate around Brexit presents the most serious economic challenge to the border region since partition.

Sinn Feins attitude to the European Union is one of critical engagement. We want a different kind of EU  a social Europe in which the undemocratic aspects of the current system would be reformed and in which citizens would have a greater say.

Our approach to Brexit is dictated by the fact that a part of this island could well end up outside the EU while the other part stays in it. This poses a substantial risk to jobs and the economies of both states on this island.

When Sinn Fein asked the British Secretary of State in the north Theresa Villiers, - who supports Brexit - if the British government would replace the funding which would be lost to the north as a consequence of withdrawal by the British state from the European Union; she refused to answer.

The fact is a Brexit is opposite to the interests of the citizens of this island.

The case for Brexit is not motivated or sustained by alternative and better strategies and policies. Instead it is the product of a growth in influence by narrow inward looking nationalism linked to conservative, Tory ideological interests and the crisis over refugees.

Sinn Fein will be campaigning in the June 23rd referendum in the north to oppose Brexit.

I would invite others, in political parties and business in this state, to join with us in that effort and to strive to win the argument for continued EU membership.

Brexit is one of the few topics in Irish politics which in there is wide agreement.
A BLACKROCK man and former De La Salle College student has been promoted to the role of Managing Partner at one of Irelands top ten law firms.

A BLACKROCK man and former De La Salle College student has been promoted to the role of Managing Partner at one of Irelands top ten law firms.

John White joined Beauchamps Solicitors as a trainee after graduating from University College Dublin (UCD) in 1997, and has been the Head of Beauchamps corporate and commercial department since 2007.

I am delighted and honoured to take on the role of Managing Partner at Beauchamps and look forward to growing the firm with my colleagues, said John.

I believe that now is a time for Irish businesses to show optimism and I will focus on developing the firm to meet our clients needs in domestic and international markets.

His practice areas include mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance, insolvency and corporate recovery.

Having spent my whole career with the firm, I am excited about taking on this new role and will work with the team on developing and managing strong client relationships, he said.

In business for over 200 years, Beauchamps is one the oldest law firms in Ireland. Imelda Reynolds, Chairman and current President of Dublin Chamber of Commerce has welcomed Johns appointment on behalf of the partners.

John succeeds Shaun OShea who returns to the position of a full-time partner in the corporate and commercial department.

The Louth man has lectured at the UCD Commercial Law Centre and regularly speaks at and chairs seminars on business law topics. He has also written articles on a range of corporate law topics for various publications.
Over the past decade, the balance of power in the consumer-company engagement dynamic has shifted unequivocally in favour of the customer.

Once upon a time, brands spoke to consumers via one-way vehicles such as broadcast and print media. Now, there are multiple digital channels, many of them open to public scrutiny, creating a dialogue between companies and individuals rather than simply a brand monologue. This means that a companys competitive edge can come down to how they relate to and engage with customers.

The new engagement channels and the power shift between consumers and companies have resulted in an equally large change in consumer expectations. Customers now expect organisations to be proactive in their engagement and provide a personalised service.

If companies want to keep up in this competitive environment, they now need to create lifelong brand loyalty by focusing on their customers. More than ever, companies must leverage the customer experience to keep those customers coming back again and again.

Voice-of-Customer (VoC) programs, which use customer feedback for business insights, are a valuable first step for any company looking to excel at the customer experience.

There are six basic steps involved in building a successful customer experience program:

Step 1: Map the customer journey

Determine the most valuable metrics by identifying the most common type of customers and their personas. Consider how most customers experience the organisation throughout the customer journey, from first contact to final service or product delivery. Include touchpoints, potential roadblocks, and success gates.

Step 2: Identify channels and timeline

Identify what you need to know about each customer touchpoint and determine how to collect the feedback for each. Consider how to get a mix of solicited (where companies proactively seek customer feedback e.g. email surveys) and unsolicited feedback (e.g. social media) for a fuller picture.

Step 3: Test and repeat

Test survey questions against two key factors: reliability (when asking groups of questions relevant to a similar topic) and validity (how well survey items measure).

Channel feedback performance also needs to be monitored through response-rate and completion-rate metrics. Ideally, conventional surveys will achieve a 10 per cent response rate and a five per cent completion rate. If rates dip below these levels, there may be something wrong with the design or choice of feedback channel. The most common issue that leads to poor response or completion rates is an inappropriately-high number of questions.

Step 4: Report

Strategic and role-based reporting is key. It is essential to give the right information to the right stakeholders, without overwhelming them with irrelevant data. The data needs to be real-time and meaningful to the end recipient based on their department and level.

Step 5: Set goals

Its important to set SMART goals, which are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. If company-wide buy-in is strong, it may be possible to formally hold employees responsible for the customer experience. This depends on completing the previous steps successfully.

Step 6: Act

The final and most important step is action. This means addressing opportunities and always closing the loop with customers. Opportunities occur when customers have a negative experience. This lets the company engage with the customer to win back their trust and their business.

More than ever, companies must leverage the customer experience to succeed. An exceptional customer experience is a true differentiator for brands, but in order to achieve this differentiator, organisations must own the success of their Voice-of-Customer program and embed a culture of customer-centric into the organisation.

About the Author

Bill McMurray, Managing Director, Asia Pacific and Japan, Qualtrics

Qualtrics provides the balance of full-function capability, with an easy-to-use VoC platform, to enable an organisation to have a flexible and agile VoC program. This allows organisations to take action and respond to customers in real-time, to make a negative or OK experience, an exceptional experience and ultimately life-long customers.
The livestock industry is an important economic and value-added driver in the states economy. In this letter we provide perspective on the value of this industry and describe some tenants of responsible livestock development.

When compared to neighboring states, one finds there is room for growth in the North Dakota livestock industry. While the livestock industry accounts for approximately 34, 40 and 47 percent of the gross agricultural receipts in Minnesota, South Dakota and Montana, respectively, in North Dakota, it is less than 12 percent of gross agricultural receipts.

Each year a number of companies search for and hire North Dakota State University students for both internships and full-time positions in a variety of livestock related positions. All too often, those jobs are in neighboring states, not in North Dakota. Enhanced livestock development means more of these students would become lifelong residents of North Dakota, thus contributing to local communities.

To maintain their social license, livestock producers must remain committed to good stewardship of the resources entrusted to them. Enhanced livestock production must continue to include the principles of good stewardship in order that the soil, air, and water resources we have enjoyed for generations are passed on in a sustainable manner. As the states land grant university, North Dakota State University serves its citizens by contributing to the expertise needed to maintain and enhance this resource base with a focus on stewardship and sustainability.

The livestock industry is an important driver in North Dakotas economy, but opportunities exist for enhancement. For this to occur, livestock producers must continue to practice good stewardship to maintain their social license. This will yield benefits for rural communities, the agricultural sector, and the economy.
The world marks the 30th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl accident on 26 April. Reports from the site will show the almost completed New Safe Confinement, the giant structure constructed to seal the destroyed reactor 4 from the environment. The EBRD has played an important role in this unique feat of engineering as manager of the Chernobyl Shelter Fund and the largest contributor to the project.

The Banks involvement in nuclear safety begins in 1993 with the establishment of the Nuclear Safety Account (NSA) for urgent safety upgrades of Soviet-type reactors in operation in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Russia.

At that time reactor 3 in Chernobyl was still in operation. This raised serious concerns and the international community and Ukraine entered into a dialogue how to find a long-term solution that would satisfy the countrys energy needs and security concerns.

The EBRD was tasked by the international community with managing the financing of work to secure Chernobyl, including the construction of the enormous arch which will protect damaged Reactor 4. This is our story. More videos

As a first step, the NSA funded the first nuclear safety and security projects in Chernobyl in 1995. These later also included the construction of a Liquid Radioactive Waste Treatment Plant (LRTP) and a new Interim Storage Facility (ISF-2) for spent fuel from reactors 1-3.

However, the biggest task was to overcome the legacy of the 1986 accident with the destroyed reactor enclosed only in a temporary structure (shelter) erected in the immediate aftermath of the explosion under extremely hazardous conditions. The vicinity of the plant had to be evacuated due to heavy contamination and a 30 kilometre exclusion zone was declared which remains in place to this day.

To assist Ukraine in making the site of the shelter stable and environmentally safe, the international community led by the G-7 and the European Commission established the Chernobyl Shelter Fund (CSF) in 1997. Again, the EBRD was commissioned to become the new funds administrator.

The first task of the CSF was to take stock and develop a work programme of how to transform Chernobyl into an environmentally safe and secure environment. Vince Novak, who joined the EBRD after a visit to Chernobyl in 1997 and today is Director of its Nuclear Safety Department, remembers: The task was so enormous that the most difficult challenge was to define the project.

Based on recommendations by Ukrainian and international experts, this strategy was outlined in the Shelter Implementation Plan (SIP), a step-by-step approach on how to make the accident site safe. The plan defined five central safety goals, one of which led to the design and construction of the New Safe Confinement. However, long before work on the structure could begin, extensive preparations had to be made and implemented ranging from research and engineering for conceptual designs to the development of the site infrastructure and procedures for worker protection.

Overall, the Shelter Implementation Plan includes more than 300 sub-projects, which today have been completed (save for those related to the finalisation of the New Safe Confinement). These include creating the infrastructure for the construction of the NSC, the successful stabilisation of the existing shelter (including the western wall and the transfer of the roof load to the new supporting structure), the removal of the heavily contaminated vent stack, radiological protection and safety measures for the workforce and permanent monitoring and risk assessment for all activity on the site.

The most visible, prominent and final element of the SIP is the New Safe Confinement with a height of 108 metres, a length of 162 metres, a span of 257 metres and a weight of 36,000 tons. The structure has been under construction since 2012 on a clean platform near the existing shelter. In was built in two huge halves which were lifted in 2014 and successfully joined last year. Currently, the arch is being fitted with cranes and other equipment for dismantling and waste management tasks, before being slid over reactor 4 in late 2016.

Once in place, the NSC will seal reactor 4 from the environment and prevent the release of contaminated material from the existing shelter, which houses the remains of the destroyed reactor and at the same time protect the structure from external impacts such as extreme weather. Approximately 5,000 metric tonnes of sand, lead and boric acid dropped from helicopters during the weeks following the accident are mixed with more than 200 tonnes of uranium, forming a lava like mass. These fuel-containing materials remain highly radioactive and represent the most significant radiological hazard at the site. Analyses show that less than 5 per cent of the radioactivity contained in unit 4 was released to the environment during the 1986 accident.

The NSC will provide a safe working environment equipped with heavy duty cranes for the future dismantling of the shelter and waste management. It will be strong enough to withstand a Category 3 tornado (with winds up to 320 km/h) and its sophisticated ventilation system will eliminate the risk of corrosion, ensuring that there is no need to replace the coating and expose workers to radiation risk during the structures lifetime of at least 100 years.

The arch is being built by Novarka, a consortium of the two French companies Bouygues and Vinci, in cooperation with a global network of contributors and subcontractors. A total workforce of over 2,000 workers has been in action on the site without any serious accidents. The construction work is overseen by international and local experts. Commissioning of the NSC is expected by late 2017, when the management of future decommissioning works in Chernobyl will be transferred to the Ukrainian authorities.

The total cost of the Shelter Implementation Plan is 2.1 billion, of which the New Safe Confinement alone will come close to 1.5 billion. The EBRD serves as the fund manager and today is the largest donor. The Bank applies the EBRD procurement rules and regulations for awarding contracts and disburses funds directly to contractors. To date, the Chernobyl Shelter Fund has received contributions and donations from 47 countries and multinational organisations. The ten largest donors are currently

1 EBRD 498m 2 European Commission 431.6m 3 United States 329.5m 4 France 114.9 5 Germany 106.1m 6 United Kingdom 89.5m 7 Japan 83.8m 8 Italy 74.2m 9 Russia 70.3m 10 Ukraine (in cash) 64.1m

In Chernobyl the EBRD is also involved in the Liquid Radwaste Treatment Plant, which retrieves highly radioactive liquids from their current tanks, processes them into a solid state, and moves them to containers for long-term storage. The plant received an operating licence at the end of 2014 and is fully functioning.

The Interim Storage Facility-2 is currently in the final phase of construction and will process, dry and cut more than 20,000 fuel assemblies and place them in metal casks, which will be enclosed in concrete modules on site. Construction works are scheduled to be concluded by the end of 2016. After the plant has received approval by the Ukrainian regulator full processing and storage can commence. The spent fuel will be stored safely and securely for a minimum period of 100 years. The total cost of the ISF-2, paid through the Nuclear Safety Account and a separate grant by the Bank, is 400 million.

Instructions for broadcasters:

Video footage



Broadcast quality versions of these packages, as well as drone material, archive, time lapse sequences and animations, can be downloaded from the EBRDs ftp server (https://download.ebrd.com) in the folder named CHERNOBYL VIDEO:



Username: videoebrd



And this password: VX0Kpm8m



You may need to tick or untick the java dialogue box



** Mandatory on-screen credit to EBRD **

Please address any further video queries to boothc@ebrd.com

Photography

Flickr High resolution photographs from the Chernobyl site and Pripyat, including archive shots, can be downloaded

Please credit EBRD.

For specific further requests, please contact doorlyd@ebrd.com

Interviews

EBRD experts Vince Novak, Director, Nuclear Safety, and his deputy Balthasar Lindauer are available for interviews with written and electronic media. For requests, please contact axel.reiserer@ebrd.com or anton.usov@ebrd.com
The Bank supported the country in all sectors of the economy where it invested

The EBRD's single biggest challenge at its creation was how to help Russia, still the world's largest country after the break-up of an even more gigantic state, the Soviet Union, and the collapse of over 70 years of totalitarian rule. The immediate task facing the members of the international community who grouped together to found the Bank was how to revive a bankrupt state whose economy had ceased to function and which could no longer feed its own population, then still numbering some 150 million people.

EBRD at 25 We celebrate 25 years of investing for change



The country on which the market economy was to be grafted represented a strange world where, for instance, telephone directories and detailed street maps had not been publicly available because of security concerns. It is easy to forget those distant times and just how much progress has been made since then, despite inevitable setbacks.

The EBRD could obviously not intervene on day one of its existence, but its strategy for Russia in those early years was crystal clear.

Russia needed a sound and diversified banking system to inject money into its new economy. It was vital to develop land and sea transport, to invest in food retail and create efficient communication networks. Newly privatised industries had to be supported to help them modernise and gain access to export markets.

However, just as important a priority was to create jobs for people who had lost them when the communist state failed.

This led to the idea in 1993 of creating what became the country's oldest and most successful mechanism for supporting micro, small and medium-sized businesses, the Russia Small Business Fund (RSBF), set up by the EBRD with financial support from the G-7 and Switzerland.

The banks participating in the RSBF have since issued over 800,000 loans worth 16 billion, but however impressive, that figure is only part of the story. Many Russian banks have long since graduated from the RSBF, but nevertheless continue to use its highly successful technology, based on a detailed knowledge of its customers and how their businesses work. This technology was developed by the RSBF to help ensure that the proportion of loans repaid always remains extremely large, even during economic crises, a trait that highlights the useful role it can play in times of trouble.

When Russia in August 1998 massively devalued the rouble and defaulted on its domestic bonds (but not its international ones), it wiped out large parts of the country's fledgling banking system. Panic-stricken depositors stormed bank branches all over the country to try to recover their savings. The memory of those long queues is deeply impressed on the psyche of the generations which lived through that financial crisis and it helped to bring about the consequent change in Russia's political system.

For the EBRD, that crisis in its main country of operations represented an existential challenge as many of its clients went under. However, it eventually recovered its losses, thanks not only to a vigorous pursuit of debtors but also a realisation by most of them that at a time when the local banking system had been severely shaken, the EBRD was one of the few games left in town and that it intended to stay for the long term. In fact, several of the debtors inherited in 1998 by the EBRD from failing banks later became its regular clients.

The devaluation of the rouble helped the Russian economy to become more competitive and it quickly started to recover. The EBRD for its part considerably tightened checks on the integrity of potential clients and the financial health of their companies. It also launched a bureaucracy-free and speedy Trade Facilitation Programme to get East-West trade flows going again  with the EBRD acting as a guarantor on transactions, something that helped to restore confidence in the banking system throughout the entire EBRD region.

A key move to revive grassroots business activity in Russia was the creation of KMB Bank, Russias first small business bank, by the EBRD and other international financial institutions (IFIs). Its outstanding success proved to the market that small business could also be good business and later helped in the sale of KMB Bank to a foreign bank.

At a time when other banks were wary of getting involved in the reorganisation of the Russian power sector, the EBRD in 2001 provided a pioneering US$ 100 million loan to the energy giant RAO UES. This helped set in motion the reform of the sector, ultimately leading to the break-up of RAO UES itself, the first Russian natural monopoly to take the reform road and liquidate itself.

On the banking side, the EBRD shifted its focus to regional banks after the 1998 crisis. In terms of industry, it financed the entry of the first foreign car-maker into Russia, when General Motors and Russia's AvtoVAZ decided to set up a joint venture in Togliatti. It was the first of a series of deals that over the years saw the EBRD help international car-makers enter the Russian market. These in turn spawned smaller transactions that helped localise auto industry suppliers.

While the EBRD's business in Russia has always been heavily slanted towards the private sector (85 per cent), the Bank also played a key role in vital infrastructure. A good example was the building of a new passenger terminal at St Petersburg's Pulkovo airport where the presence of major IFIs helped to attract important support from commercial banks. The EBRD also helped fund the long-delayed completion of what was originally a Soviet-era project to protect the city of St Petersburg from freak floods. Thanks to a separate EBRD project, over 90 per cent of St Petersburg's wastewater is now treated before being released into the Neva river, a development that has been warmly welcomed by all Russia's Baltic Sea neighbours.

In total, the EBRD has invested 24 billion in Russia, spread over 800 projects. However, in July 2014 a majority of the EBRD's shareholders signalled to the Bank's management that they would not support any new Russian projects following events in Ukraine earlier that year. The EBRD nevertheless remains operational in Russia and continues to support existing projects in the country, as well as monitoring its Russian portfolio, which remains significant.
ST. MICHAEL  An argument led to a Spirit Lake man stabbing and killing one man and critically injuring another before striking one of them with a pickup more than a week ago, according to court documents.

Dallas Wayne Thundershield, 35, was charged in federal court April 12 with murder and attempted murder after one man was found dead and another in critical condition with multiple stab wounds in a ditch on the Spirit Lake Reservation.

An affidavit submitted by an FBI agent in court records describes the charges against Thundershield.

Fort Totten Police Department received four calls between 9:07 and 9:10 p.m. April 9 from a caller requesting someone respond to a scene on the Spirit Lake Reservation. The caller told police, He stabbed him, and Somebody was stabbed and they are on a truck trail.

A Bureau of Indian Affairs special agent and police officers arrived on scene at BIA Service Road 6 and found two men lying in the ditch. The deceased man was identified as Richard Dean DeMarce Sr., 52, and the injured man as Elvis DeMarce, 43.

As Thundershield awaits his court appearance next week, the family of Richard DeMarce held a funeral service Monday. Elvis DeMarces condition is unknown.

I have to kill them

According to the affidavit, Thundershield had been driving around the Spirit Lake Reservation and Devils Lake on April 9 from about 5:30 p.m. until late that night with Elvis DeMarce and Richard DeMarce.

Thundershield began fighting with Elvis DeMarce, but the affidavit does not say what the argument was about. Thundershield got out of a red Chevy truck with a knife in his hand before he began kicking Elvis DeMarces face with his boot and holding the knife to Elvis DeMarces throat, the affidavit states. Richard DeMarce got out of the truck and began fighting with Thundershield.

According to the affidavit, Thundershield went back into the truck and kept stating that I have to kill them over and over and turned the truck around to face the two men. Richard DeMarce was standing on the side of the road when Thundershield drove the truck toward him, striking Richard DeMarce on the drivers side of the truck.

After moving Elvis DeMarce across the road, Thundershield drove away in the truck, crashing it into a tree near Hamar, telling witnesses he killed them, the affidavit states.

An officer found the Chevy truck in a wooded area and an agent took photographs of it, noting a red substance that appeared to be blood located on the hood, bumper, bug deflector and inside the vehicle. The agent also found a knife that was partially stuck in the ground near the truck.

Court proceedings

Thundershield was arrested in a residence on the reservation early April 10 and transported to Fort Totten Police Department. He was booked April 12 at the Grand Forks County Correctional Center and made his first appearance in federal court on the charges the same day.

Two days later, he waived his right to a detention hearing, meaning he will remain in custody until the final resolution of the charges against him, according to court records.

He is next scheduled to appear at 11 a.m. April 25 via video from Grand Forks to Fargo before Judge Alice R. Senechal.

A redacted affidavit detailing the incident was made public Monday on the federal courts online record system. The affidavit would have been available April 12 when the case was unsealed and Thundershield made his first court appearance, but a clerical error caused the delay, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office.

Once charges are filed, its standard practice that the U.S. Attorneys Office not issue a press release until a plea is entered or a sentencing ruled, U.S. Attorney Chris Myers said. Any press release prior to charges would have been handled by the investigating agency, he said.

To ensure a fair trial without prejudice, the U.S. Attorneys Office has an ethical duty not to comment on an open case, Myers said.

Its not like were hiding things, he said. We dont want to get in trouble ethically as public servants.

Outside the case





A wake was held Sunday for Richard DeMarce, and his funeral was held the following morning. An updated condition of Elvis DeMarce has not been released. After responding officers found him in the ditch April 9, he was transported to Mercy Hospital in Devils Lake before being flown to Altru Hospital in Grand Forks, where he (was) hospitalized in critical condition.

An Altru Hospital representative said the hospital was unable to give a report on his condition Monday.
(Photo: LWF / MTI)Hungarian police form a cordon as refugees board a train for northern Europe in Sept. 2015.

Thousands of Hungarians have participated in the 'March of the Living' to commemorate Holocaust victims in the biggest 2016 anti-racist march at which Christian clerics expressed repentance for what happened to Jews.

The march took place shortly after the remains of about 20 executed people, most of them Jews, were buried in Budapest's Jewish cemetery.

"It is a historic moment, when the leaders of the Christian and the Jewish religion are on the same stage together," Gabor Gordon, the head of the March of the Living Hungary Foundation, said in his introduction, the World Jewish Congress reported.

The yearly March of the Living is in its 14th year and commemorates the deportation of Hungarian Jewry to the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported.

It is the largest civic demonstration against racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi and anti-democratic movements in Hungary.

Jews have long played a key part in the history of Hungary and at the beginning of the 20th century they accounted for about 5 percent of the population. Today they are thought to number less than 50,000 of the 9.9 million people in the eastern European nation.

The ghettoization of the Hungarian Jews started on April 17, 1944 under Nazi occupation.

Of approximately 825,000 Jews living in Hungary in 1941, about 63,000 died or were killed prior to the German occupation of March 1944, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Around 437,000 Jews from the countryside were sent to Auschwitz in Poland and the majority of them were gassed in the neighboring death camp of Birkenau, with only a few thousand surviving.

At total of 600,000 Hungarian Jews were exterminated in different concentration camps during the Holocaust which occurred during the period around the Second World War.

The Hungarian branch of the international organization of the March of the Living Foundation, ahead of the March of the Living to Auschwitz, also holds an annual anti-xenophobic and anti-racist rally in Hungary.

This year's march started April 17 from the downtown Dohany Street Synagogue and ended at the downtown Basilica, the largest Catholic Church in Budapest.

For the first time, three Christian bishops took part together in the March of the Living and gave speeches on the same stage.

"It is a historic moment, when the leaders of the Christian and the Jewish religion are on the same stage together," Gabor Gordon, the head of the March of the Living Hungary Foundation, said in his introduction.

IMRE KERTESZ

The rally started with a moment of silence in memory of Imre Kertesz, the Hungarian Jewish writer who died earlier this month at the age of 87, and whose Holocaust novels won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.

Hungarian Chief Rabbi Robert Frolich got loud applause in his speech and was speech was openly critical of the Christian churches.

"What if the doors of the Basilica had been left open then, during the Holocaust? ... But the doors were not open, the Basilica was closed when it needed to be open," he said.

Roman Catholic bishop Janos Szekely said: "We are here now at the March of the Living in Budapest to express our pain and repentance over the killing of more than half a million Hungarian Jewish compatriots."

Among those at the rally was the Israeli Ambassador to Hungary, Ilan Mor, who said: "This is now the March of the Living and not as it was 72 years ago, when it was the March of the Dead. Now this is the March of Hope."

Geza Rohrig, the star of the Oscar Award-winning Hungarian film "Son of Saul" also appeared at the event.
( Peter Kenny / Ecumenical News)The Reichstag building in Berlin which houses the German Bundestag, the federal legislative chamber, on Aug. 26, 2015.

Seventy years after Nazi Germany's defeat ended World War II, the United Nations is praising the country, along with Austria for responding to Europe's escalating migration crisis by receiving refugees.

The United Nation Refugee Agency has welcomed the decision of Austria and Germany to receive thousands of refugees and migrants who crossed the border from Hungary at the weekend.

"This is political leadership based on humanitarian values," the UNHCR said in a statement Sept. 5, while also praising civil society and faith-based organizations for changing the debate on refugees.

A number of European leaders have described the flight of people in the Europe Middle East region as the biggest humanitarian crisis there since World War II.

Most of the refugees arriving in Germany are fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, say German officials.

But other parts of Europe, got a dressing down from the Geneva-based World Council of Churches.

In Calais near the Channel Tunnel to Britain thousands of migrants from Africa are also encamped and prepared to risk all for a better life, facing resistance to having them.

It is "absolutely and critically necessary that all European States take their proper responsibility in terms of reception and support for people seeking refuge, safety and a better future for themselves and their families.

"This cannot be left only to the States where they enter first," the World Council of Churches general secretary, Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, said in a statement issued on Sept. 4 in Colombia.

"Today, Europe  both West and East  is being tested on the strength of its commitment to human dignity and rights. This is a test of our human values and Christian legacy," he said.

Pope Francis responded by asking every Catholic church in Europe to set an example of Christian mercy by taking in a family of refugees, The Wall Street Journal reported.

POPE URGES EUROPEAN CATHOLIC PARISHES TO ACT

"May every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary in Europe host a family," the Pope told a crowd in St. Peter's Square after the traditional noon Angelus prayer after Sunday mass Sept. 6.

There are some 120,000 Catholic parishes in Europe, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University says.

Francis said that the Vatican itself would receive two families in the next few days.

The Vatican is a tiny city-State with fewer than 600 citizens, most of them members of the clergy.

If it took in two families of three, that would be a similar commitment as a proportion of the population to Germany's target to accept 800,000 this year, The Independent newspaper reported.

"Faced with the tragedy of tens of thousands of refugees who are fleeing death by war and by hunger, and who are on a path toward a hope for life, the Gospel calls us to be neighbors to the smallest and most abandoned, to give them concrete hope," Francis said.

The UNHCR also praised civil society groups and individuals of Austria and Germany mobilizing in large numbers to welcome and provide aid to people as they enter.

All over Europe, UNHCR said it is witnessing a remarkable outpouring of public response.

This includes faith-based organizations, NGOs and individuals, in many cases driving governments to change policies and rhetoric, the refugee agency, it said.

The UN Refugee Agency noted, however, that the current concentration of refugees and migrants in a small number of countries willing to receive them is not a sustainable solution.

Archbishop Philip Tartaglia, the Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, criticized the "mean-spirited and unhelpful" approach Britain has adopted so far.

He urged, "It is time to open our hearts and borders," The Scotsman newspaper reported.

The archbishop stated: "In my view the refugees crisis is a test, not of political shrewdness, but of common humanity. What is happening in the Mediterranean, Calais and other access points is an affront to human dignity.

"The UK should be generous in providing a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers," said the Catholic leader.

"Britain's policy in the Mediterranean of rescue and deposit elsewhere is mean-spirited and unhelpful to the nations who are bearing the brunt of the migrations - especially Italy and Greece."

(Photo:  UNHCR / A.Kitidi) A UNHCR staff member distributes blankets to people waiting to cross the Greek-FYR Macedonian border in September 2015. UNHCR staff have been at the border since the start of the current crisis, monitoring the situation and helping the vulnerable.

The head of the UN refugee agency Antonio Guterres, had on Sept. 4 emphasized the European Union faces a "defining moment."

He laid out some key guidelines which should underpin all efforts to resolve the current refugee and migration crisis facing Europe.

Guterres said the biggest influx of refugees into Europe for decades requires a "massive common effort" and a break with the current fragmented approach which has led Europe overall to fail to find an effective common response.

"Europe cannot go on responding to this crisis with a piecemeal or incremental approach.

"No country can do it alone, and no country can refuse to do its part," he said in a statement issued ahead of a key round of EU meetings on the crisis," noted the UN Refugee Agency leader.

LUTHERAN CALL TO SUPPORT HUMAN DIGNITY

His message was echoed by Lutheran World Federation general secretary, Rev. Martin Junge who told LWF churches in a letter the crisis is a pivotal moment in Europe in which churches can demonstrate solidarity and human dignity.

Guterres said, "Exceptional circumstances require an exceptional response. Business as usual will not solve the problem.

(Photo:  Peter Kenny / Ecumenical News) Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche (Holy Cross Church) an iconic Gothic style Protestant church from 1888 in Berlin's Kreuzberg district where many immigrants live.

"More than 300,000 people have risked their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea so far this year. Over 2,600 didn't survive the dangerous crossing."

In Germany, a website has run for months which aims to match offers of accommodation in private homes - ideally shared rental apartments - across the country with individual refugees in need of a place to stay.

The website, Refugees Welcome (Fluechtlinge Wilkommen) has placed dozens of refugees who otherwise might be placed in overcrowded migrant centers or struggle to put a roof over their heads at all, CNN reports.

Despite Germany's generosity, there are signs of the mounting pressures, The Washington Post reports.

Cracks opened in German Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition as allies questioned her decision to make Germany the most accepting country in Europe.

Leaders must stop the "mass influx of refugees coming only to Germany," said Andreas Scheuer, the general secretary of Merkel's southern German sister party, the center-right Christian Social Union, in an interview in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Guterres has praised some exemplary and "truly inspiring" examples of generosity and moral leadership on the part of some countries and many private citizens, but reiterated his appeal for a collective strategy including a renewed drive to settle conflicts,

The image of the young Syrian boy, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach after a failed attempt to reach Greece, stirred the hearts of millions worldwide and has thrown a fresh spotlight on the human tragedies now regularly occurring in the Mediterranean.

"It (the EU) now has no other choice but to mobilize full force around this crisis.

"The only way to solve this problem is for the Union and all member states to implement a common strategy, based on responsibility, solidarity and trust," he said.

Lurking prominently is the problem of resources for humanitarian agencies.

( Peter Kenny / Ecumenical News) The Golden Rooster restaurant on Oranienstrae in Berlin's Kreuzberg area Sept. 27, 2015 a part of Berlin that has many immigrants and a strong Moslem community.

The UN's humanitarian agencies are on the verge of bankruptcy.

They are unable to meet the basic needs of millions of people because of the size of the refugee crisis in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, senior figures within the U.N. have told The Guardian newspaper.

The deteriorating conditions in Lebanon and Jordan, particularly the lack of food and healthcare, have become intolerable for many of the 4 million people who have fled Syria, driving fresh waves of refugees north-west towards Europe and aggravating the current crisis.

The head of UK-based Christian Aid's Middle East section, Frances Guy, said: "Countries in the region are hosting an overwhelming number of refugees, and our partners in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon are working to provide succour and support to those fleeing conflict and persecution.

He commeneded British Prime Minister David Cameron's change of heart regarding resettlement, but urged him to be ambitious, the Edinburgh think tank Ekklesia reported.

"The UN refugee agency recommends that the UK resettle at least 10,000 Syrian refugees and we regard this as a minimum. A truly generous response proportionate to the human need would be to accept many more.

""Resettlement, however, is only one part of the solution," said Guy.

Christian Aid called on all governments to work together for peace in Syria.

"That should be the priority. Without peace the ongoing displacement in and around Syria will have repercussions for decades to come," said Guy.
Jeff Drop, Catholic Health Initiatives senior vice president and division executive officer in Fargo, announced the formation of a new healthcare system in central and western North Dakota.

The system will encompass Mercy Medical Center in Williston, CHI St. Josephs Health in Dickinson, CHI Carrington Health, CHI Mercy Hospital in Devils Lake, CHI St. Alexius Health in Bismarck, Garrison, Turtle Lake, Minot, Mandan and Washburn.

Essentially, the hospitals will be rebranding under one name: CHI St. Alexius Health. The result is the formation of the largest health care delivery system in central and western North Dakota, according to a press release.

The decision came amid changes to health care, with more focus on raising quality of care and better outcomes, as well as becoming more efficient.

Hospitals face some challenging hurdles, which means they must look to be more efficient, said Tod Graeber, administrator of CHI St. Alexius Health in Garrison and Turtle Lake.

Patients in small, rural communities will directly benefit from the name changes. Such benefits include from a physical standpoint, as well as through advances in technology, including telemedicine and televideo, said Kurt Schley, CEO and president of CHI St. Alexius Health in Bismarck.

Patients will have access to services in those communities that they maybe not have had in the past, he said.

CHI St. Alexius Health in Bismarck will be the tertiary point of the new system and will provide services and expertise to smaller hospitals.

CHI St. Alexius Health here (in Bismarck), we are a level two trauma center. We are making our services, our expertise available to those other facilities.

Change wont come right away, Schley added, but instead over time, this will evolve into a very tight-knit, coordinated system focused on quality outcomes.
Indiana this month became the latest state to seek to curb persistent teacher shortages by offering college-tuition dollars to students who go into teaching.

On April 7, Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican, signed a new law that provides more than $10 million to create the Next Generation Hoosier Scholarship fund , designed to entice high-performing students into K-12 education.

This bipartisan initiative encourages our best and brightest students to consider teaching in Indiana classrooms as a lifelong career, Gov. Pence said.

Starting in the fall of 2017, up to 200 college students who commit to teaching in Indiana for at least five consecutive years after graduation can receive up to $7,500 per year (no more than $30,000 in total) to cover tuition as they pursue their degrees.

To be eligible, students must have graduated in the top 20 percent of their high school classes or scored in the top 20th percentile on their ACT or SAT exams. After receiving the scholarship, the students are required to maintain a grade point average of 3.0 or higher. Students who fail to meet the terms of the scholarship, including by not remaining in teaching for five years, would have to repay all or some of the money, depending on the circumstances. Application and other program details are being ironed out by the states Commission for Higher Education.

Teacher-Prep Declines

Indiana is one of a number of states that have been struggling with well-publicized teacher shortages, particularly in hard-to-staff subjects and geographic areas, as well as declining enrollments in teacher-preparation programs.

In Indianas case, problems in the new-teacher pipeline appear to be particularly dramatic. According to federal data , the number of students enrolled in teacher-prep programs in the state dropped from 15,115 in 2009-10 to 7,222 in 2013-14. In the same period, program completions dropped from 4,339 to 3,510.

According to the Indiana education department, the state has seen a drop of more than 30 percent in new-teacher licensures issued over the past six years.

Last fall, state Superintendent for Public Instruction Glenda Ritz created a special commission to develop recommendations to systematically address Indianas teacher shortage. In January, the groupknown as the Blue Ribbon Teacher Commission issued a report urging policymakers (among other initiatives) to provide for more professionally competitive salary scales for educators, de-emphasize the use of standardized tests in teacher evaluations, and offset the costs of teacher preparation for students, with an emphasis on teacher-candidates from underrepresented groups.

Also in January, Gov. Pence signed a bill to create a one-year reprieve of teacher-evaluation consequences tied to the states standardized test. But that initiative appeared to be related less to teacher-recruitment issues than to concerns about schools transition to a new testing regime.

Samantha Hart, a press secretary for the state department of education, said in an email that the new scholarship program was not based on recommendations from the commission and that Ritz would continue to concentrate on pushing through the strategies outlined by the group.

Tuition Assistance

But Indiana lawmakers move to focus on providing college-tuition money to entice students into teaching echoes initiatives put forth recently by other states.

Last year, Nevada lawmakers approved a measure to provide nearly $5 million in scholarships to students who enroll in teacher-preparation programs, starting with alternative-route offerings, at select state colleges. And both Illinois and Virginia have programs that provide tuition assistance to students who commit to teaching in designated shortage areas in the states.

Legislators in South Carolina recently proposed an $8.2 million student-loan-forgiveness program for would-be teachers who agree to work in high-needs districts, according to the Associated Press. California lawmakers are considering a measure that would reinstate a similar loan-forgiveness program that was cut several years ago because of budget constraints.

Other states have smaller, more targeted loan-forgiveness measures for teachers on the books.

Skeptics argue that, no matter how generous, tuition-assistance programs alone do little to resolve long-term teacher shortages because they fail to address structural problems within the profession itself.

But some school recruiters see them as a step in the right direction.

Thomas A. Oestreich, the human resources director for the Washington Township in Indianapolis, said that while much more needs to be done to support teachers in Indiana, the scholarship program helps raise the professions profile.

Anytime we receive support from our legislators in order to support the outstanding profession of teaching is a positive step for our state, he said. It is my hope that many young people in our high schools will look at the teaching profession in a positive light, and this scholarship fund may entice some of our top high school students to enter this noble profession.
Millions of years ago, a warm shallow sea covered much of present-day North Dakota. In that sea lived mosasaurs  enormous creatures related to present day lizards.

Fossils of the creatures have been found preserved in North Dakota in the Pierre Shale formation. The North Dakota State Fossil Collection contains six partial mosasaur skeletons and isolated mosasaur bones.

Clint Boyd, senior paleontologist at the North Dakota Geological Survey, said no published works have been completed on North Dakotas mosasaurs.

No one who works here is specifically focused on those animals, he explained.

Now a Texas researcher wants to raise $4,000 on scientific crowdfunding site Experiment.com to study the states mosasaurs. If Nathan Van Vrankens project can garner more supporters than 11 other paleontology projects on the site, it will get an additional $1,000 grant.

Boyd said the Geological Survey posted images on social media of some eastern North Dakota mosasaur specimens while putting together a display for the Barnes County Museum. The images caught the attention of Van Vranken, a freelance paleontologist.

Van Vranken has been captivated by the evolutionary success that took mosasaurs from land-dwelling reptiles to marine animals that were among the top predators in the Western Interior Seaway.

Mosasaur fossils can be found from Texas to Canada. The Pierre Shale is younger than the Texas rocks that preserved mosasaurs, so the North Dakota mosasaurs offer a look at a later stage in their evolution, Van Vranken said.

I am interested in helping try to promote knowledge of mosasaurs but also help figure out what was going on in their last days, a time when the massive Western Interior Seaway was starting to shrink, said Van Vranken, adding he wants to come to North Dakota to describe, photograph, document and update the information on the states mosasaurs.

He is aiming to discover variations among the specimens, including ages and genres.

Perhaps if we are lucky, we might be able to find enough variation to describe a new species of mosasaur, which will add another piece to the biodiversity of the state, Van Vranken said.

Van Vranken brought up a paleontology contest on Experiment as a possible source of funding when he contacted the Geological Survey about looking at the mosasaurs.

Research funders tend only to back obvious ideas, leaving many good ideas unexplored, according to Experiment co-founder Cindy Wu, who was among a team of researchers who learned their promising antibiotic research had little chance of being funded. While they founded Experiment to fund their own research, they later opened it to other scientists.

The site allows researchers to post details about their potential projects, and the public can pledge money to help get them going. Only projects that reach their goals get funded.

Since 2012, the public has supported 449 of the 1,098 projects launched on the site. The successful projects have resulted in 4,695 lab notes shared and 31 published papers. The projects also can be published in Experiments online journal.

Wu said none of the research funded through Experiment would have been possible without the crowdfunded support. And Van Vranken said he does not believe he will be able to accomplish his research if his project does not get funded on Experiment.

Doing paleontology professionally requires funding that is hard to come by when you are a freelance paleontologist, Van Vranken said. A lot of this funding will help not only to evaluate the specimens and gather data but also develop the collections and make fossils more accessible to researchers and the public. Without funding this project, we cannot tell the story.

While all 12 of the projects featured in the sites Paleontology Challenge could get funded, the project with the most supporters by May 3 will receive an additional $1,000 courtesy of Lance Schnatterly.

Schnatterly, who lives in New Jersey, studied astronomy and computer science and has spent his career working in programming and engineering. But in the past 10 years, Schnatterly has returned to his love of paleontology. He calls himself an engineer by day and an amateur paleontologist by night.

Im a dinosaur guy at heart. I guess it appeals to the kid in me, said Schnatterly, who learned about Experiment after backing a friend on the platform. His friend told him about opportunities to contribute to the Paleontology Challenge, and Schnatterly put up the first-place prize and backed all of the projects.

Its truly amazing stuff, he said.

Van Vranken is seeking $4,000. The money will go toward travel, room, board and supplies, and hell be able to study and classify fossils already here.

While none of the money raised will go to the North Dakota Geological Survey, paleontologists here are excited about the knowledge that could come from the project.

Were not going to get any funding out of it, Boyd said. Were trying to get more people here to work with our specimens and get that research out there.

To support the project, visit https://experiment.com/projects/the-diversity-of-north-dakota-s-mysterious-monsters-of-the-deep.

I am interested in helping try to promote knowledge of mosasaurs but also help figure out what was going on in their last days, a time when the massive Western Interior Seaway was starting to shrink.  Nathan Van Vranken, freelance paleontologist
Ely, Cambridgeshire is best known for its majestic cathedral dubbed the 'Ship of the Fens' because it dominates the flat landscape. The city, which is the second smallest in England, is about 14 miles north-northeast of Cambridge and about 80 miles by road from London.

08:11, 22 OCT 2022
Bishop wants beneficial ownership info to be public



Robert Paterson

Why won't government publish the register of Isle of Man-based beneficial ownership?

The Bishop of Sodor and Man wants an explanation - he'll ask why it's not public, and who is likely to benefit from that privacy, in Tynwald.

The 'groundbreaking' information sharing agreement was signed by the Chief Minister and the UK Treasury Financial Secretary in London last week.

Robert Paterson says the Manx public needs answers:

Media

Robert Paterson
Reed Watson:

Todays myth: As taxpaying citizens, we should not pay to visit our national parks.

Fact: Our national parks are chronically underfunded and visitor fees provide critical, though currently insufficient, funding for park operations and maintenance.

We Americans fancy ourselves a nation of conservationists. We claim ecologically sensitive and culturally significant places are worth protecting for future generations. We celebrate the creation of the national park system as Americas best idea. Yet we oppose paying to maintain the national parks we claim to cherish so deeply.

Whether that opposition is rooted in the belief that public parks should be free or that, by paying our taxes, we have already paid our fair share, the result is the same: our national parks have become a crowded and crumbling mess.

As evidence, consider the National Park Services $12 billion deferred maintenance backlog. That is $12 billion in crumbling roads, leaking water systems, and dilapidated trails that should have been maintained or repaired, but werent because the Park Service lacked funding.

To put that number in perspective, consider that the Park Services annual budget is approximately $3 billion. With similar finances, a household with annual income of $100,000 would have $400,000 in unfunded home repairs. Yikes!

If protecting treasured places as national parks was Americas best idea, we have failed to make that idea a reality.

Visitor fees offer the National Park Service an opportunity to climb out of the deferred maintenance hole. Visitor fees align the incentives of park managers with the desires of park visitors for fun and safe experiences, and they provide park managers with a funding source not subject to whimsical congressional appropriations.

Currently, visitor fees make up less than 10 percent of the Park Services annual budget. This number is hardly surprising given how cheap most fees are: a seven-day pass into Yellowstone National Park is a paltry $30; day passes to the Cape Cod National Seashore are $3; and nearly two-thirds of all national park properties charge nothing at all.

Park managers, not Congress nor the Park Service, should be allowed to set visitor fees. Congestion pricingcharging more during the busiest seasonswould allow park managers to capture much needed revenue for deferred maintenance projects, while simultaneously addressing the congestion that sours so many visitor experiences. Moreover, technological innovations make recreational fee collection a breeze, while a voucher program would ensure visitation is not limited to the rich.

This week is National Park Week and today is tax day, but those taxes will not save our parks for the future. Sadly, the National Park Service is celebrating its centennial by offering free admission into every park. Park visitors should realize that their taxes are not paying the full cost of park maintenance.

On alternating Mondays, PERCs executive director, Reed Watson, will bust a widely-held environmental myth using research by PERC scholars.
Applications are open for the ESRF/ILL International Student Summer Programme on X-Ray and Neutron Science, from 28 August to 23 September 2016. Selected participants will spend 4 weeks working on an experimental project within a research group of ESRF or ILL. The programme also includes a series of introductory lectures on the principles and applications of X-ray and neutron science (magnetism, materials science, soft matter, structural biology, imaging, etc.).

Undergraduate students from an ESRF/ILL member country or scientific associate country are invited to apply online. Successful candidates will receive financial support and free accommodation in Grenoble.

Find out more about the ESRF/ILL International Student Summer Programme.
In a study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, researchers examined whether or not antipsychotic drugs, which are sometimes used to prevent or treat delirium, are effective. Delirium, a psychiatric syndrome that is the direct result of a medical problem, is a sudden change in ability to think and pay attention. It can cause people to become confused, potentially aggressive, agitated, sleepy, and/or inactive. Delirium also is a psychiatric syndrome that is a direct result of a medical problem.

Most often, delirium occurs in the midst of illness during admission to the hospital or after recovery from surgery. Factors that can contribute to delirium include:

Acute illness

Infection

Immobilization (not being able to get out of bed)

Medications

Underlying cognitive problems such as dementia

The researchers examined data from 19 different studies that included several thousand hospitalized patients. They reported that, when looking at all the causes of delirium, antipsychotic medications (treatments used for certain mental health conditions) did not lessen the number of new cases of delirium, and that using antipsychotic medication may not make much difference to the duration, severity, hospital length of stay, or mortality associated with delirium. However, the researchers caution that their findings may not cover particular situations where antipsychotics might prove useful for delirium treatment. More studies are needed in this area, say researchers.

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This summary is from "Antipsychotics for Prevention and Treatment of Delirium in Hospitalized Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis." It appears online ahead of print in the April 2016 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The study authors are Karin J. Neufeld, MD, MPH; Jirong Yue, MD; Thomas N. Robinson, MD, MPH; Sharon K. Inouye, MD MPH; and Dale M. Needham, MD PhD.

About the Health in Aging Foundation

This research summary was developed as a public education tool by the Health in Aging Foundation. The Foundation is a national non-profit established in 1999 by the American Geriatrics Society to bring the knowledge and expertise of geriatrics healthcare professionals to the public. We are committed to ensuring that people are empowered to advocate for high-quality care by providing them with trustworthy information and reliable resources. Last year, we reached nearly 1 million people with our resources through HealthinAging.org. We also help nurture current and future geriatrics leaders by supporting opportunities to attend educational events and increase exposure to principles of excellence on caring for older adults. For more information or to support the Foundation's work, visit http://www.HealthinAgingFoundation.org.
WASHINGTON, DC, April 19, 2016 -- The number of children in foster care across the country is driven not solely by child abuse and neglect, but by states' varying politics and approaches to social problems, a new University of Washington (UW) study finds.

States with more punitive criminal justice systems tend to remove children from their homes far more frequently than those with generous welfare programs -- meaning that two states with similar rates of child abuse and neglect could have very different rates of foster care entry.

Those findings are the basis of a study published online today that will appear in the June print edition of the American Sociological Review. Author Frank Edwards, a UW doctoral student in sociology, concludes that child welfare policies are heavily influenced by how states address social problems overall.

"We see across the board that politics are great predictors of policy," Edwards said. "If a state prefers more punitive criminal justice and less generous welfare benefits, then it's very likely that it will prefer a certain approach to child welfare as well."

Edwards, who previously worked with children in foster care in Texas, undertook the study to determine whether factors beyond child abuse and neglect were driving rates of foster care in various states. While previous studies have looked at the role of incarceration and welfare programs on parents' ability to care for their children, Edwards said none have statistically examined how states' differing policies for addressing social issues influence child welfare systems.

And those variations, Edwards found, lead to big differences in the rates of foster care between states, after controlling for population differences. For example, Edwards found that states with punitive criminal justice systems are expected to place an average of 1.5 more children per 1,000 into foster care annually than states with less punitive criminal justice systems. For the national state average of about 1.47 million children, that translates to 2,200 additional foster care entries annually.

States with generous and inclusive welfare programs are expected to place 0.8 fewer children per 1,000 into foster care, compared to states with meager welfare programs.

Edwards analyzed federal foster care data for 2002 to 2011 for each state to determine rates of foster care entry; he also looked at how frequently states put foster children in residential treatment centers or other restrictive settings.

Then Edwards set out to measure how punitive states' criminal justice systems were, using the number of death sentences, incarceration rates, and numbers of police officers per capita as a benchmark. He also measured the relative generosity of states' welfare systems by their level of welfare benefits, enrollment in various assistance programs, and welfare workers per capita.

Comparing the data for various states, Edwards found that states with more punitive criminal justice systems generally had higher rates of foster care and tended to put children in treatment centers or other restrictive environments more often. Conversely, those with more generous welfare structures had lower rates of foster care, and lower rates of restrictive confinement for children in foster care.

However, states with both generous welfare benefits and large bureaucracies tended to have slightly higher rates of foster care than those with generous benefits and smaller bureaucracies, since bringing more families into contact with service providers increases the ability to identify abuse and neglect.

"The idea of including all these other factors is that it's not just the direct effects of abuse and neglect that are involved," Edwards said. "If a state has a punitive criminal justice system, or a generous system of welfare provision, that indicates a stable way that legislators and bureaucrats think about and respond to problems like crime, poverty, and child abuse.

"These ways of understanding how to solve a particular problem get institutionalized, and play a large role in determining how a state designs and implements social policy across the board."

The study notes the often contradictory nature of child protection agencies, which are tasked both with providing support and resources for struggling parents and taking action when parenting falls short of expectations. That intervention resulted in an average of 1.4 percent of U.S. children coming into contact with the foster care system annually between 2002 and 2011, Edwards found.

There were a few anomalies in Edwards' findings -- for example, some southern states had high incarceration rates and low welfare benefits but also low foster care rates, which he said could be due to less-developed child welfare infrastructures. And there were some limitations to the data. Up to 75 percent of all cases of children being placed in foster care with family members, for example, occur without taking children into state custody and therefore are not recorded in federal foster care statistics.

But overall, Edwards said, the study shows that there is enormous variation in foster care rates across the country that is driven largely by states' politics and policies.

"If we want to understand why some states are putting more kids into foster care than others, we need to look at the policy environment," he said. "A state that prefers to punish people when they break the rules is also a state that might put families in situations such that abuse and neglect are more common. It's also a state that is likely to think that removing a child from the family is the only way to respond.

"The story of foster care is not just the story of child abuse and neglect. It's the story of policymaking and politics, writ large."

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About the American Sociological Association and the American Sociological Review

The American Sociological Association (http://www.asanet.org), founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. The American Sociological Review is the ASA's flagship journal.

The research article described above is available by request for members of the media. For a copy of the full study, contact Daniel Fowler, ASA Media Relations Manager, at (202) 527-7885 or pubinfo@asanet.org.

Deborah Bach, University of Washington, wrote this press release. For more information about the study, members of the media can also contact Bach at (206) 543-2580 or bach2@uw.edu.
HORIZON 2020 has granted 3.9 million Euros to the EDGE project; The project will train 15 Ph.D. students from 5 European countries in virology and immunology

15 PhD students now have the opportunity to improve their skills via the EDGE project. Here they will specialise in the herpes virus, which is widespread and can cause of serious diseases, particularly in children, elderly people and those with a weakened immune system. The project will take place interactively with the aim of creating new knowledge and new synergies between basic research and ways of utilising the new knowledge for the benefit of society.

The joint European project receives support to the tune of 3.9 million Euros from the EU's research and innovation programme HORIZION 2020.

Sren Riis Paludan from Aarhus University is coordinator on the project, which brings together PhD students for work in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Italy and Denmark.

"EDGE is a network-based platform to train the next generation of researchers to solve some of the challenges that need to be overcome so we can be better to prevent and treat herpes virus infections," says Sren Riis Paludan.

The PhD students come from nine different universities, and as part of the project they will also collaborate closely with the involved partners across sectors.

"This grant will lead to the establishing of a European network that will provide the PhD students with research training and teaching, so they are prepared for future career opportunities within academia, hospitals and the biotechnology industry," says Sren Riis Paludan.

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EDGE - Who is in the project?

Coordinator of the program is Professor Sren Riis Paludan, Aarhus University. Further participants are:

Hannover Medical School

Helmholtz Center for Infektion Research

University of Oxford

University Medical Centre Utrecht

Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry

University of Torino

Aarhus University Hospital

Janssen Infectious Diseases & Vaccines, Crucell Holland.

Jena Biosciences GmbH og LADR GmbH are connected as partners. Further information:

Sren Riis Paludan

Aarhus University, Department of Biomedicine

Telephone: (+45) 2899 2066

srp@biomed.au.dk
Summary: Seattle-based biotech startup BioViva USA Inc. and London-based biotech investment fund Deep Knowledge Life Sciences (DKLS) are announcing a partnership with the aim of bringing about affordable gene therapies.

BioViva aims to make gene therapy affordable to everyone. Dmitry Kaminskiy, the founding partner of Deep Knowledge Life Sciences, is enthusiastically funding gene therapy, and is himself an early adopter, said BioViva CEO Elizabeth Parrish, adding We both want to see a world where investors actually live their legacy instead of just leaving it, alluding to a possible future trend.

Parrish made headlines in 2015 when she travelled to an undisclosed location outside the US and personally underwent two of her own companys experimental gene therapies: one to protect against loss of muscle mass with age, another to battle stem cell depletion. It was a gesture intended to prove the safety of the therapies and clear the road ahead for human trials in the US. Months later, BioViva are tracking her results and she has reported no negative side-effects.

I believed the biotech industry had become over-regulated and that the prevailing model was unlikely to bring new therapies to market in our lifetime. What we needed was a company that would treat diseased patients with no other options and then develop these treatments into preventative medicines. BioViva has accomplished so much with so little. Now, with DKLS behind, so much more is possible. The skys the limit for Bioviva, said Parrish.

BioVivas game-changing approach makes it an ideal fit for the DKLS portfolio with its exclusive focus on disruptive biotechnologies aimed at tackling biomedicines greatest challenges. The sooner we can bring affordable gene therapies and other cell therapies to market, the more needless deaths can be avoided, said the funds founding partner Dmitry Kaminskiy, adding Liz Parrish is a model leader of company, and we could like to see more founders in our portfolio with skin-in-the-game.

For Kaminskiy, its not all about profits. He wants to shift the entire industry up a gear, and put an end to the lack of vision he believes has mired biotechnology for decades. Smarter funding for translational biomedical science would raise human life expectancy to 120 and beyond.

Many innovative companies have come to us looking for funding and support. BioViva is one among several other breakthrough companies that are going to leapfrog the current generation of biotech and will be included in our portfolio. This is the start of a big trend, and it ought to give investors food for thought. 2017 will be year in which we will see an investment boom in the longevity industry, said Kaminskiy.

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About BioViva: BioViva USA, Inc. is a to-clinic gene therapeutics company incorporated in Delaware. BioViva utilizes intramural and extramural peer-reviewed research in order to create marketable therapies for treating age-related diseases and infirmities -- including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart-disease, cancer, sarcopenia and kidney failure -- at the level of the genome. For more information visit: http://bioviva-science.com

About Deep Knowledge Life Sciences (DKLS): An innovative investment fund which aims to accelerate the development of biotechnologies for healthy longevity. It is London-based subsidiary of Deep Knowledge Ventures. DKLS has gathered eight life science portfolio companies of Deep Knowledge Ventures (DKV), including Insilico Medicine and Pathway Pharmaceutical. For more information visit: http://deepknowledge.life
CINCINNATI - Researchers are developing a new drug to treat life-threatening lung damage and breathing problems in people with severe infections like pneumonia, those undergoing certain cancer treatments and premature infants with underdeveloped, injury prone lungs.

Scientists at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center report April 19, 2016 in Science Signaling that a transcription factor called FOXF1 activates several biological processes that promote recovery from acute lung injury. Two laboratories at Cincinnati Children's are developing a pharmacologic compound that in mouse models stimulates FOXF1 and promotes repair after lung injury.

"Besides toxic insults from some cancer treatments, acute lung injury can be a major medical problem for people who get infectious diseases like flu, pneumonia or Ebola because of pathogens that target the lung," said Vladimir Kalinichenko, MD, PhD, co-senior author and a physician and researcher in the Divisions of Pulmonary Biology and Developmental Biology at Cincinnati Children's. "A small molecule compound we developed efficiently stabilizes the FOXF1 protein in cell cultures and mouse lungs, and it shows promise in inhibiting lung inflammation and protecting experimental mice from lung injury."

Along with co-senior author Tanya Kalin, MD, PhD, in the Cincinnati Children's Perinatal Institute, the research team learned that loss of FOXF1 in lung endothelial cells of mice caused them to die from respiratory problems, pulmonary edema (fluid in the lungs) and lung inflammation. This happens when endothelial cells that line blood vessels in the lung can no longer provide a protective barrier between the external environment and the body's circulatory system.

Mutations in FOXF1 gene cause alveolar capillary dysplasia, a rare and universally fatal congenital lung disorder of newborns and infants that researchers said underscores the importance of the FOXF1 in the respiratory system. Alveolar are tiny air sacs in the lung.

The authors propose that stabilizing or restoring FOXF1 will promote the formation of blood vessels in lungs, promote healing and decrease breathing complications in children and adults.

Researchers are following up their current study with further development of the targeted small molecule they recently discovered. Specifically, they are determining efficacy and safety of the FOXF1-targeting compound in mouse models of lung injury and repair. The authors emphasize that additional time and research are needed before the compound can be tested in human patients.

Acute respiratory distress syndrome is a life-threatening complication of acute lung injury with a mortality rate of more than 35 percent. It accounts for about 75,000 deaths and 3.5 million hospital days per year in the United States, according to the authors. Given the lack of major improvements in the clinical management of acute lung injury and respiratory distress, the current study is designed to address a compelling need for innovative molecular approaches that complement existing therapies, according to the researchers.

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Funding support came in part from the National Institutes of Health (HL84151, HL123490, CA142724) and the Cincinnati Children's Perinatal Institute.

About Cincinnati Children's

Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center ranks third in the nation among all Honor Roll hospitals in U.S.News and World Report's 2015 Best Children's Hospitals. It is also ranked in the top 10 for all 10 pediatric specialties, including a #1 ranking in pulmonology and #2 in cancer and in nephrology. Cincinnati Children's, a non-profit organization, is one of the top three recipients of pediatric research grants from the National Institutes of Health, and a research and teaching affiliate of the University of Cincinnati's College of Medicine. The medical center is internationally recognized for improving child health and transforming delivery of care through fully integrated, globally recognized research, education and innovation. Additional information can be found at http://www.cincinnatichildrens.org. Connect on the Cincinnati Children's blog, via Facebook and on Twitter.
A team of scientists in the UK and Bangladesh are turning to the combined knowledge of the global scientific community to address an emerging threat to Asian agriculture.

The target is the fearsome fungal disease wheat blast. The pathogen was spotted in Bangladesh in February this year -- its first report in Asia. Wheat is the second major food source in Bangladesh, after rice. The blast disease has, so far, caused up to 90% yield losses in more than 15,000 hectares. Scientists fear that the pathogen could spread further to other wheat growing areas in South Asia.

The UK and Bangladeshi teams are making raw genetic data for the wheat blast pathogen available on a new website -- http://www.wheatblast.net -- and inviting others to do the same. Professor Sophien Kamoun, of The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, who is leading the project, said that a wide cultural change is needed for scientists to optimally address new threats to food security.

"I have a beef with the way that research is typically done. We need a fundamentally new approach to sharing genetic data for emerging plant diseases," he said. "We need to generate and make data public more rapidly and seek input from a larger crowd because, collectively, we are better able to answer questions."

Professor Kamoun, with colleagues at The Genome Analysis Centre and John Innes Centre in Norwich, and with Professor Tofazzal Islam's Team of Bangabndhu Sheikh Mujubur Rahman Agricultural University (BSMRAU) in Bangladesh, is hoping that the http://www.wheatblast.net website, together with an accompanying Facebook page, will provide a hub for information, collaboration and comment. They are basing the site on their successful Open Ash Dieback website, which brought scientists together in the fight against ash dieback disease.

The blast fungus normally infects rice and over 50 types of grasses. Occasionally, a blast fungus strain would jump from one host to another resulting in a new disease. Such a "host jump" to wheat has happened in Brazil in the 1980s. The wheat blast pathogen is now rife in South America, where it infects up to 3 million hectares and causes serious crop losses.

Prof Kamoun and colleagues are working with Professor Tofazzal Islam's team, of the Department of Biotechnology of BSMRAU in Gazipur, Bangladesh. They hope that the genetic data will help determine whether the Bangladeshi wheat-infecting strain has evolved independently from local grass-infecting fungi or was somehow introduced into the country.

Professor Tofazzal Islam said "This pathogen causes a destructive disease on rice and it would be disastrous if the same situation arises now in wheat. Genomic and post-genomic research should clarify the origin of the wheat strain and guide measures for disease management. Prompt responses are needed from the scientific community and the government of Bangladesh for addressing this national crisis to ensure increasing wheat production, which is linked with future food and nutritional security of the nation."

The group of scientists includes Dr Diane Saunders at The Genome Analysis Centre and John Innes Centre who developed a technique last year, known as Field Pathogenomics. To date, Field Pathogenomics has been applied to track another fungal crop disease - yellow rust. The method generates highly-specific genetic information directly from diseased wheat samples to determine the identity of the pathogen strain that's associated with an epidemic. Application of this method to wheat blast should unmask the pathogen in Bangladesh and contribute to a response plan.

The recent wheat blast epidemic in Bangladesh has prompted Professor Nick Talbot, University of Exeter, to post on the wheatblast.net website a set of genetic data generated by his group from worldwide populations of the wheat and rice blast fungus. Prof Talbot said "In an emergency like this one, the community must come together to share data and compare notes. Only then, we will determine the true identity of the pathogen and put in place effective measures in a timely fashion."

Professor Neil Hall, Director of The Genome Analysis Centre said: "It is critical in emerging crises like this that scientific data is rapidly generated and made available as soon as possible. Having an open-access site has already galvanized open exchange of information for the ash dieback disease. The scientific community needs to rally behind open science to respond to recurrent threats to global food security."

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This research has been funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Notes to editors

1. Professor Sophien Kamoun is available for interview on Friday April 15, 2016 and Saturday April 16, 2016. After that he will be travelling but available for telephone interviews. If you would like to interview Professor Kamoun please see contact details below.

2. For further information or to arrange interviews please contact:

Geraldine Platten

communications manager for TSL and JIC

T: 016043450238

E: geraldineplatten@jic.ac.uk

Prof Sophien Kamoun

The Sainsbury Laboratory

E: sophien.kamoun@tsl.ac.uk

Twitter: @KamounLab

Prof. Tofazzal Islam

Department of Biotechnology, BSMRAU, Bangladesh

E: tofazzalislam@yahoo.com

T: +88-01534568893, +88-01714001414

3. Images to accompany the press release can be found at: http://bit.ly/1p3Fu1L

4. About The Sainsbury Laboratory

The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) is a world-leading research centre focusing on making fundamental discoveries about plants and how they interact with microbes. TSL not only provides fundamental biological insights into plant-pathogen interactions, but is also delivering novel, genomics-based, solutions which will significantly reduce losses from major diseases of food crops, especially in developing countries. TSL is an independent charitable company and receives strategic funding from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation with the balance coming from competitive grants and contracts from a range of public and private bodies, including the European Union (EU), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and commercial and charitable organisations http://www.tsl.ac.uk.

5. About The Genome Analysis Centre

The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) is a world-class research institute focusing on the development of genomics and computational biology. TGAC is based within the Norwich Research Park and receives strategic funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) - 7.4M in 2013/14 - as well as support from other research funders. TGAC is one of eight institutes that receive strategic funding from BBSRC. TGAC operates a National Capability to promote the application of genomics and bioinformatics to advance bioscience research and innovation.

TGAC offers state of the art DNA sequencing facility, unique by its operation of multiple complementary technologies for data generation. The Institute is a UK hub for innovative Bioinformatics through research, analysis and interpretation of multiple, complex data sets. It hosts one of the largest computing hardware facilities dedicated to life science research in Europe. It is also actively involved in developing novel platforms to provide access to computational tools and processing capacity for multiple academic and industrial users and promoting applications of computational Bioscience. Additionally, the Institute offers a Training programme through courses and workshops, and an Outreach programme targeting schools, teachers and the general public through dialogue and science communication activities. http://www.tgac.ac.uk

6. About the John Innes Centre

Our mission is to generate knowledge of plants and microbes through innovative research, to train scientists for the future, to apply our knowledge of nature's diversity to benefit agriculture, the environment, human health and well-being, and engage with policy makers and the public.

To achieve these goals we establish pioneering long-term research objectives in plant and microbial science, with a focus on genetics. These objectives include promoting the translation of research through partnerships to develop improved crops and to make new products from microbes and plants for human health and other applications. We also create new approaches, technologies and resources that enable research advances and help industry to make new products. The knowledge, resources and trained researchers we generate help global societies address important challenges including providing sufficient and affordable food, making new products for human health and industrial applications, and developing sustainable bio-based manufacturing.

This provides a fertile environment for training the next generation of plant and microbial scientists, many of whom go on to careers in industry and academia, around the world.

The John Innes Centre is strategically funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). In 2014-2015 the John Innes Centre received a total of 36.9 million from the BBSRC.

7. About the BBSRC

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) invests in world-class bioscience research and training on behalf of the UK public. Our aim is to further scientific knowledge, to promote economic growth, wealth and job creation and to improve quality of life in the UK and beyond.

Funded by Government, BBSRC invested over 509M in world-class bioscience in 2014-15. We support research and training in universities and strategically funded institutes. BBSRC research and the people we fund are helping society to meet major challenges, including food security, green energy and healthier, longer lives.

Our investments underpin important UK economic sectors, such as farming, food, industrial biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.

For more information about BBSRC, our science and our impact see: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk

8. About Department of Biotechnology of BSMRAU

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University (BSMRAU) is a public university in Bangladesh, which is known as a "Center of Excellence" in higher education and advanced research. The Department of Biotechnology of BSMRAU delivers high class teaching and conducts cutting-edge research in biotechnology for sustainable solution of current and emerging challenges associated with food and nutritional security of Bangladesh and the globe. http:http://www.btlbsmrau.org

9. Useful links:

Wheatblast.net (to go live weekend of 00:01 1April 19, 2016)

Wheat blast website at Kansas State University https://www.k-state.edu/wheatblast/

Wheat blast website at CIMMYT http://www.cimmyt.org/en/wheat-blast

Wheat in Bangladesh http://aobpla.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/pls042.full

Wheat blast threatens yield http://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/wheat-blast-threatens-yield-784372

Wheat blast affects 15,500 hectares of land in 5 districts http://www.thedailystar.net/country/wheat-blast-affects-15500-hectares-land-5-dists-1208944

Genomics of emerging plant pathogens: too little, too late. Microbiology Today http://kamounlab.dreamhosters.com/pdfs/MicrobiologyToday_2012.pdf

OpenAshDieBack http://oadb.tsl.ac.uk
New Rochelle, NY, April 19, 2016--A novel approach to preventing overweight/obesity in young children by replacing traditional, individual well-child care with a series of group visits that emphasize nutrition-focused interventions during the first 18 months of life was associated with a significantly reduced obesity rate at 2 years of age. Designed for use in a primary care setting, this model provides a unique opportunity to target an effective strategy for pediatric obesity prevention to at-risk communities, as described in the study published in Childhood Obesity, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Childhood Obesity website until May 19, 2016.

In the article "Well Baby Group Care: Evaluation of a Promising Intervention for Primary Obesity Prevention in Toddlers", Hildred Machuca, DO, Sandra Arevalo, RD, MPH, Barbara Hackley, PhD, Jo Applebaum, MPH, Arielle Mishkin, Alan Shapiro, MD, Community Pediatric Programs, Montefiore, and Moonseong Heo, PhD, Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, NY), describe the Well Baby Group (WBG) care model, in which the same 6-8 mother-infant pairs participated in 11 group sessions during 18 months. The researchers compared the rates of overweight and obesity in these children at age 2 years to a group that received traditional well-child care at the same health center.

"While most obesity prevention programs are having little to no impact, this well-baby care program conducted early in life may have a substantial impact among infants and toddlers at high risk for obesity," says Childhood Obesity Editor-in-Chief Tom Baranowski, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX. "While these results are exciting, the evaluation needs to be extended to assess the effects beyond 2 years and replicated with a randomized clinical trial to have confidence in the effect. Stay tuned!"

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About the Journal

Childhood Obesity is a bimonthly peer-reviewed journal, published in print and online, and the journal of record for all aspects of communication on the broad spectrum of issues and strategies related to weight management and obesity prevention in children and adolescents. Led by Editor-in-Chief Tom Baranowski, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine, and Editor Elsie M. Taveras, MD, MPH, Massachusetts General Hospital for Children & Harvard Medical School, the Journal provides authoritative coverage of new weight management initiatives, early intervention strategies, nutrition, clinical studies, comorbid conditions, health disparities and cultural sensitivity issues, community and public health measures, and more. Complete tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Childhood Obesity website.

About the Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative medical and biomedical peer-reviewed journals, including Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders, Population Health Management, Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics (DTT), and Journal of Women's Health. Its biotechnology trade magazine, GEN (Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 80 journals, newsmagazines, and books is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.
As detector assemblies get smaller and denser -- packed with electronic components that all must be electrically connected to sense and read out signals -- it's becoming increasingly more challenging to design and manufacture these all-important instrument devices.

A team of NASA technologists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, however, has begun investigating the use of a technique called aerosol jet printing or direct-write manufacturing to produce new detector assemblies that are not possible with traditional assembly processes.

"If we succeed, aerosol jet technology could define a whole new way to create dense electronic board assemblies and potentially improve the performance and consistency of electronic assemblies," explained Goddard technologist Beth Paquette, who is leading the R&D effort that began last fiscal year. Furthermore, aerosol jet printing promises to slash the time it takes to manufacture circuit boards, from a month to a day or two, she added.

Important Distinction

As with other 3-D printing techniques, aerosol jet manufacturing builds components by depositing materials layer-by-layer following a computer-aided design, or CAD, drawing. However, jet aerosol printing offers an important difference.

Instead of melting and fusing plastic powder or some other material in precise locations, as in the case of many 3-D printers, aerosol jet printing uses a carrier gas and printer heads to deposit a fine aerosol of metal particles, including silver, gold, platinum, or aluminum, onto a surface. Aerosol jet printers also can deposit polymers or other insulators and can even print carbon nanotubes, cylindrically shaped carbon molecules that have novel properties useful in nanotechnology, electronics, and optics.

"It can print around bends, on spheres or on something flat, or on a flexible surface, which then can be flexed into the shape you want," she said.

These attributes make the technology ideal for detector assemblies, particularly those that need to be shaped differently or are very small, yet dense because of the large number of tiny components that must be electrically wired or linked together on a circuit board -- an inescapable reality as instruments get smaller and smaller.

"We can make these wires microns in width," Paquette said. "These lines are very small, down to 10 microns wide. These sizes aren't possible using traditional circuit board manufacturing processes." (By way of comparison, the average human hair measures between 17 and 191 microns in width.)

Other Applications

However, the technique's use isn't limited to detector electronics. Technologist Wes Powell, who specializes in electronics at Goddard, envisions a time where instrument developers could use aerosol jet technology to print antennas, wiring harnesses, and other hardware directly onto a spacecraft.

Paquette's research involves NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the University of Maryland's Laboratory for Physical Sciences, the University of Delaware, Georgia Tech, and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. In addition, several industry groups are involved, including the United Technologies Research Center, East Hartford, Connecticut; NanoDirect LLC, Baltimore, Maryland; Raytheon, Waltham, Massachusetts; and Optomec, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So far, the team has found that the technology holds promise, and is now evaluating the technique's repeatability and robustness particularly for a spaceflight application.

"Aerosol jet printing has the potential for many configurations, but the deposits have not yet been assessed under typical flight conditions. That's what we're doing here," she said.

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For more Goddard technology news, go to https://gsfctechnology.gsfc.nasa.gov/newsletter/Current.pdf
Low body mass index increases risk mortality after acute myocardial infarction (AMI), even after adjustment for other health factors that affect body weight, according to a study this week in PLOS Medicine. Emily Bucholz, Hannah Krumholz, and Harlan Krumholz of Yale University conducted a prospective cohort study of elderly patients hospitalized for AMI, analyzing short- and long-term mortality among underweight and normal weight patients (as measured by body mass index, BMI) while controlling for comorbid illness and frailty.

The researchers used data from the Cooperative Cardiovascular Project, a US quality improvement initiative in which Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized for AMI were followed for many years. They included 57,574 underweight and normal weight patients (excluding overweight and obese patients). Crude mortality (deaths from all causes without adjustment for other factors likely to affect the risk of death) was higher among underweight patients than among normal weight patients at 30 days and 1, 5, and 17 years after AMI. After adjustment for comorbidities that cause cachexia (for example, cancer and chronic liver disease), variables reflecting frailty (such as mobility), and two laboratory measures of nutritional status, underweight patients had a 13% higher risk of death at 30 days and a 26% higher risk of death over 17 years than normal weight patients. Among patients without comorbidity, underweight patients had a 21% higher risk of death over 17 years than normal weight patients.

While the association between being underweight and mortality after AMI was known previously, it was not clear whether this risk was a linked to the low BMI or medical conditions that lead to patients being underweight. Though the authors point out that they were unable to directly measure cachexia and were unable to determine the primary cause of low BMI in underweight patients, these findings suggest that while coexisting illnesses that contribute to cachexia may contribute additional risk, being underweight on its own is an important independent risk factor for death after AMI, even years later.

They note that their findings "highlight the need for additional research in underweight patients, who are frequently excluded from studies evaluating BMI in patients with CAD" and that "Clinically, these findings suggest that strategies to promote weight gain in underweight patients after AMI are worthy of testing."

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Research Article

Funding:

EMB was supported by an F30 Training grant F30HL120498-01A1 from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. HMK was supported by grant U01 HL105270 (Center for Cardiovascular Outcomes Research at Yale University) from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute during the time the work was conducted. HAK reports no financial disclosures. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests:

HMK is the recipient of research agreements from Medtronic and from Johnson and Johnson through Yale University, to develop methods of clinical trial data sharing. HMK also works under contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to develop and maintain performance measures, and is Chair of a Cardiac Scientific Advisory Board for UnitedHealth. The authors declare no further competing interests exist.

Citation:

Bucholz EM, Krumholz HA, Krumholz HM (2016) Underweight, Markers of Cachexia, and Mortality in Acute Myocardial Infarction: A Prospective Cohort Study of Elderly Medicare Beneficiaries. PLoS Med 13(4): e1001998. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001998

Author Affiliations:

Department of Pediatrics, Boston Children's Hospital and Boston Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America

Yale College, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America

Section of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America

Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, Department of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America

Department of Health Policy and Management, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America

IN YOUR COVERAGE PLEASE USE THIS URL TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE FREELY AVAILABLE PAPER:

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001998

Contact:

Harlan M. Krumholz

Yale University Medicine

1 Church Street

Suite 200

New Haven, CT 6510

UNITED STATES

203-764-5885

harlan.krumholz@yale.edu
This week, FORCE2016 is taking place in Portland, USA. The FORCE11 yearly conference is devoted to the utilisation of technological and open science advancements towards a new-age scholarship founded on easily accessible, organised and reproducible research data.

As a practical contribution to the scholarly discourse on new modes of communicating knowledge, Prof. Cameron Neylon, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University, Australia, and collaborators are to publish a series of outputs and outcomes resulting from their ongoing data sharing pilot project in the open access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).

Starting with their Grant Proposal, submitted and accepted for funding by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), over the course of sixteen months, ending in December 2016, they are to openly publish the project outputs starting with the grant proposal.

The project will collaborate with 8 volunteering IDRC grantees to develop Data Management Plans, and then support and track their development. The project expects to submit literature reviews, Data Management Plans, case studies and a final research article with RIO. These will report and reflect on the lessons they will have learnt concerning open data policies in the specific context of development research. Thus, the project is to provide advice on refining the open research data policy guidelines.

"The general objective of this project is to develop a model open research data policy and implementation guidelines for development research funders to enable greater access to development research data," sum up the authors.

"Very little work has been done examining open data policies in the context of development research specifically," they elaborate. "This project will serve to inform open access to research data policies of development research funders through pilot testing open data management plan guidelines with a set of IDRC grantees."

The researchers agree that data constitutes a primary form of research output and that it is necessary for research funders to address the issue of open research data in their open access policies. They note that not only should data be publicly accessible and free for re-use, but they need to be "technically open", which means "available for no more than the cost of reproduction, and in machine-readable and bulk form." At the same time, research in a development context raises complex issues of what data can be shared, how, and by whom.

"The significance of primary data gathered in research projects across domains is its high potential for not only academic re-use, but its value beyond academic purposes, particularly for governments, SME, and civil society," they add. "More importantly, the availability of these data provides an ideal opportunity to test the key premise underlying open research data -- that when it is made publicly accessible in easily reusable formats, it can foster new knowledge and discovery, and encourage collaboration among researchers and organizations."

However, such openness is also calling for extra diligence and responsibility while sharing, handling and re-using the research data. This is particularly the case in development research, where challenging ethical issues come to the fore. The authors point out the issues, raised by such practice, to be, among others, realistic and cost-effective strategies for funded researchers to collect, manage, and store the various types of data resulting from their research, as well as ethical issues such as privacy and rights over the collected data.

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Original source:

Neylon C, Chan L (2016) Exploring the opportunities and challenges of implementing open research strategies within development institutions. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e8880. doi: 10.3897/rio.2.e8880
South Africa's mountains are essential to the economic well-being of the country, providing many goods and services essential for social and economic prosperity. However, the biodiversity value of these mountains is still poorly understood. This is exemplified by the large number of plant species still only known from one or two collections made well over a century ago.

The Great Escarpment Biodiversity Research Programme, led by Prof. Nigel Barker, University of Pretoria, has been systematically documenting plant diversity and endemism along much of the Great Escarpment - southern Africa's principal mountain system.

"This 'un-sexy' foot-slogging research has yielded a number of valuable discoveries and rediscoveries, highlighting the biodiversity value of these mountains," points lead author Dr Ralph Clark, Rhodes University, South Aftica.

One of these rediscoveries is a plant last seen only by one more person: Mrs Elizabeth Barber, one of South Africa's finest women botanists of the 19th century. Mrs Barber has been a regular correspondent with Charles Darwin and has provided material of South African plants to numerous institutions in Europe.

"Her discovery - Lotononis harveyi, also known under the common name 'Mrs Barber's Beauty' in her honour, was published in 1862, but unfortunately, as her specimen did not include a date, we do not know the actual year in which she discovered it," he explains. "What we do know, is that it mysteriously disappeared for at least 147 years, despite attempts to relocate it."

In 2009, Dr Ralph Clark undertook an extensive collecting trip to the Great Winterberg, where he accidently stumbled across a flowering specimen of 'Mrs Barber's Beauty'. It was only in 2014, however, that the plant was properly recognised for what it was, and a second trip was quickly planned.

The results of the second trip included the first photographs and ecological records of this apparently scarce species. Dr Clark's results have been published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

"There are currently only six known individuals of this species. The main limiting factors appear to be fire and grazing, the plants only occurring where these two prominent ecological actors have been excluded for some time," notes Dr Clark.

"However, with much of these mountains still poorly explored by biodiversity scientists, it is possible that additional individuals will come to light. For now the species will be regarded as Critically Endangered."

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Original source:

Clark VR, Bentley J, Dold AP, Zikishe V, Barker NP (2016) The rediscovery of the Great Winterberg endemic Lotononis harveyi B.-E.van Wyk after 147 years, and notes on the poorly known Amathole endemic Macowania revolutaOliv. (southern Great Escarpment, South Africa). PhytoKeys 62: 1-13. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.62.8348
Martina Havenith beat a fierce competition envisioning a new method to infer real time heat and energy changes at the protein-solvent interface.

The pan-European funding body ERC (European Research Council) will finance the team of Prof Dr Martina Havenith from the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum (RUB) with 2.5 million Euros in five years to develop a ground-breaking methodology called "Time-Resolved THz-Calorimetry". Scientists will tinker with Terahertz (THz) laser spectroscopy to deduce with nanosecond precision how proteins and solvent exchange energy and rearrange themselves in a biological process.

Martina Havenith, Chair of the Department of Physical Chemistry II at RUB and speaker of the cluster of excellence Ruhr Explores Solvation" (Resolv), will lead an international team with Prof Dr Irit Sagi' from the Weizmann-Institute in Israel and Dr Matthias Heyden's from the Max-Planck-Institute for Coal Research in Mulheim at the Ruhr.

Ruhr-Universitat receives two prestigious Grants

In the current application round for the hotly contested Advanced Grants, two researchers from the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum have been successful. In addition to Martina Havenith, IT security expert Prof Dr Christof Paar also raised such a grant. Via these two projects, the RUB can receive 5 million euros in total.

The ERC Advanced Grants funding scheme

The European Union launched the European Research Council in 2007 to fund excellent research in Europe. The ERC Advanced Grants program targets senior researchers with ground-breaking ideas that may be risky to pursue, awarding up to 2.5 million for five years. The 2015 call received 1.953 project applications from 29 countries, but only about 14 % of them got selected after a peer review process made on the basis of excellence as sole criterion. "I received the message at the Zurich airport after an 11 hour flight. I had to read it three times before I believed it. It is such a great chance to test some exciting new ideas", says Havenith.

The underestimated role of water in biology

Fundamental biological processes like protein folding, protein-protein interactions and enzymatic reactions take place in watery solutions and depend upon the ability of the reacting molecules to recognise themselves in a solvent. Molecular recognition is mediated through various chemical interactions that can be studied by calorimetry, measuring enthalpy (heat transfer), entropy (a measures of disorder for a system) and other associated energetic parameters.

Unfortunately, current calorimetric approaches are all based on heat transfer, hence they deliver results on time scales of 1 to 100 seconds and can analyse the system only at equilibrium, i.e. when molecules are already bound. However, as Havenith points out, a successful reaction is the result of a dynamic interplay between the partner molecules and the solvent. THz-Calorimetry promises to investigate these processes, for the first time in real time with a million time better time resolution.

Interdisciplinary research

The new technique will use THz light sources (1012 Hertz = 1 Terahertz) to excite solvent molecules and biomolecules at the time scales of hydrogen bond dynamics in water as well as large amplitude motions of proteins and nucleic acids. "If we are able to collect full information on these time-scale dynamics, we can deduce quantities like entropy, enthalpy, etc. associated with molecular recognition processes", says Havenith.

Time-Resolved THz-Calorimetry will also offer, for the first time, the chance to directly access the distinct contributions of the solute entropy changes versus those of the solvent. To this end, the Bochum-based project will combine the expertise collected in THz laser development with microwave technology, biophysics, calorimetry and theoretical modeling. "Interdisciplinary discussions within Resolv were crucial to inspire us the THz calorimetry idea", says Havenith.

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Download image

An image of Martina Havenith can be downloaded from: http://aktuell.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/pm2016/pm00052.html.en
HOUSTON - (April 18, 2016) - Thank the little "muscles" in your neurons for allowing you to remember where you live, what your friends and family look like and a lot more.

New research at Rice University suggests actin filaments that control the shape of neuron cells may also be the key to the molecular machinery that forms and stores long-term memories.

The Rice lab of theoretical biological physicist Peter Wolynes reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a theory about how long-term memories are made; the theory is based on simulations that analyze the energy landscapes of the proteins involved.

Wolynes and his colleagues are pioneers in the development of an energy landscape theory for proteins, which enables them to build computer models of proteins to predict how they will fold. These molecular-dynamics simulations employ the principle of minimal frustration by which proteins find their most stable folded forms.

For long-term memories, stability is desirable. Wolynes and his co-authors, Rice graduate student Mingchen Chen and postdoctoral researcher Weihua Zheng, determined the path to encoding memories may lie in the way actin filaments - the "muscle" part of the cytoskeleton in every eukaryotic cell - pull upon and stabilize soluble cytoplasmic polyadenylation element binding proteins (CPEB) into longer, insoluble prion-like fibers.

Prions are proteins that, when they misfold, are thought to become self-propagating and cause infectious diseases like mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other disorders. But their very existence and the transitions known to take place in synapses suggest properly folded prions must have a biological function, the researchers wrote. These transitions were the focus of their study.

CPEB proteins, when made in cells, first bind a few at a time in oligomers, which are coiled alpha helices. The intrinsic energy landscapes of these oligomers allow mechanical forces provided by actin to prompt a transition into longer beta strands that are much more stable. These now-stable fibers are thought to aggregate and encode memories in neurons' synaptic regions.

Wolynes said Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was onto something 20 years ago when he wrote about memory and molecular turnover. Crick puzzled over the fact that memories tend to last much longer than proteins typically do in living cells. "Crick slightly anticipates, in one sentence, that perhaps what we have is a form of protein that aggregates somewhere," he said. "By virtue of being an aggregate, it's not able to move. In that way it would be able to mark one particular synapse.

"It's obviously very difficult to study the molecular basis of memory because memory involves a fairly complex activity," Wolynes said. "You can't study it in a bacterium. You have to study it in some sort of organism that can learn.

"At the same time, it's clear that forming memories involves some very high-order neural processing and other things at the subcellular level in order to store the large amount of information you memorize. There are many steps in memory that are really not understood at all."

He said previous research shows that memories make changes in the synapse, the thousands of regions in each neuron responsible for sending electrical and chemical signals to other neurons. "Short-term memories that last less than an hour or so seem to be done through the electrical and direct biochemical circuitry. Forming these memories doesn't seem to require creating new protein," Wolynes said.

Researchers who conducted experiments with sea slugs poisoned to prevent them from synthesizing proteins seemed to confirm that, he said. "They found these snails were able to memorize things for short periods of time but not for periods of hours when protein synthesis was stopped."

Chen, who led the Rice research, knew from the literature that actin has the ability to bind oligomeric CPEB. This fact, along with the computer simulation, suggests that the mechanical force provided by actin can restructure CPEB into a longer fiber with new hydrogen bonds between the coils. Wolynes said that the restructuring not only forces CPEB to a lower-energy, prion-like state, but also allows the prion to bind an RNA sequence that otherwise prevents more actin from being synthesized. The resulting feedback loop further stabilizes the memory.

"We still don't understand the beginning of the process, how you go from short-term to long-term memory," he said. "But we can now see that actin starts to form in a particular location in response to electrical signals. The actin then takes any CPEB oligomers that are around and activates them, which makes more actin and causes the formation of a self-replicating prion of the CPEB. That prion aggregates until it stops, changing the structure of the synapse in a way that should last for a very long period of time, perhaps decades."

Wolynes said he put Chen on the job with few expectations. "I give starting students a project I think will teach them the tools we use to look at protein dynamics," he said. "It's usually a somewhat far-outish project, and if they don't get anywhere, I won't feel sad.

"So I said, 'Why don't we look at this protein that (Eric) Kandel and (Susan) Linquist said was involved in memory, this CPEB protein.'"

Wolynes said many neurobiologists have followed up on that pioneering work with sea slugs. "But we add a new element by being able to look at the structures of these proteins and to predict the thermodynamics of the process," he said. "We now can see how the force of the cytoskeleton can complete a feedback loop that allows the memories to be preserved."

Wolynes considers the new study a beachhead to launch others to determine the entire process of how memories form, as well as the implications for diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's that involve protein aggregation.

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The National Institute of General Medical Sciences supported the research. The researchers used the National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported DAVinCI supercomputer administered by Rice's Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology.

Wolynes is the D.R. Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science, a professor of chemistry, of biochemistry and cell biology, of physics and astronomy and of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice and a senior investigator of the NSF-funded Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at Rice.

Read the abstract at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1602702113

This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/2016/04/18/thanks-actin-for-the-memories/

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Video:

https://youtu.be/F73xSp09nrI

A Rice University computer simulation shows how actin pulls upon and stabilizes soluble proteins known as CPEB into longer, insoluble prion-like fibers, a process believed to be key to stabilizing long-term memories.

Animated GIF:

http://news.rice.edu/files/2016/04/0418_MEMORY-ANIMGIF-large-191t7nv.gif

http://news.rice.edu/files/2016/04/0418_MEMORY-ANIMGIF-small-1cmqkoj.gif

Related Materials:

Wolynes Research Lab: http://wolynes.rice.edu/node/129

Center for Theoretical Biological Physics: https://ctbp.rice.edu

Rice Department of Bioengineering: http://bioe.rice.edu

Images for download:

http://news.rice.edu/files/2016/03/0304_MEMORY-1-web-1r6jeks.jpg

From left, Rice University graduate student Mingchen Chen, postdoctoral researcher Weihua Zheng and theoretical biological physicist Peter Wolynes co-authored a paper explaining a complex feedback loop between actin filaments and aggregating proteins in neurons that appears to be key to the formation of long-term memories. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/files/2016/04/0304_MEMORY-2-web-22g7zt5.jpg

Actin pulls upon and stabilizes soluble cytoplasmic polyadenylation element binding proteins into longer, insoluble prion-like fibers, a process believed to be key to stabilizing long-term memories. Rice University researchers simulated the force (F) applied by actin through computer models that predict how proteins are likely to find their least-energetic (and most stable) states. (Credit: Mingchen Chen/Rice University)

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,910 undergraduates and 2,809 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for best quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceUniversity.

David Ruth

713-348-6327

david@rice.edu

Mike Williams

713-348-6728

mikewilliams@rice.edu
In a study appearing in the April 19, 2016 issue of JAMA, Matthew D. Snape, F.R.C.P.C.H., M.D., of the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, and colleagues conducted a phase 1 trial to evaluate the tolerability and immunogenicity of two candidate Ebola vaccines, an adenovirus type 26 vector vaccine (Ad26.ZEBOV), and a modified Ankara vector vaccine (MVA-BN-Filo).

The recent outbreak of Ebola virus disease in West Africa has caused in excess of 28,600 cases and 11,300 deaths since the first cases were identified in December 2013 in Guinea. The international response has included the accelerated clinical development of several candidate Ebola vaccines. In nonhuman primates, an Ad26-vectored vaccine was able to generate up to 75 percent protection from Ebola challenge.

For this study, participants (healthy volunteers, 18-50 years old) were randomly assigned to 4 groups, within which they were simultaneously randomized 5:1 to receive study vaccines or placebo. Those receiving active vaccines were primed with Ad26.ZEBOV or MVA-BN-Filo and boosted with the alternative vaccine 28 or 56 days later. A fifth, open-label group received Ad26.ZEBOV boosted by MVA-BN-Filo 14 days later. The trial was conducted in Oxford, U.K.

Among 87 study participants, 72 were randomly assigned to 4 groups of 18, and 15 were included in the open-label group. Four participants did not receive a booster dose; 67 of 75 study vaccine recipients were followed up at 8 months. An immune response was observed after primary immunization with Ad26.ZEBOV; boosting by MVA-BN-Filo resulted in sustained elevation of specific immunity. Immunization with Ad26.ZEBOV or MVA-BN-Filo did not result in any vaccine-related serious adverse events.

"Our data showed that, in contrast to MVA-BN-Filo, Ad26.ZEBOV priming generated an initial immune response, and there is evidence for protection from this vaccine given alone in nonhuman primate models. Therefore, this priming dose would be expected to generate at least partial protection against Ebola; for this reason, Ad26.ZEBOV prime schedules with MVA-BN-Filo boost are currently being further evaluated in phase 1, 2, and 3 studies," the authors write.

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(doi:10.1001/jama.2016.4128; this study is available pre-embargo at the For The Media website.)

Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
Dinosaurs were already in an evolutionary decline tens of millions of years before the meteorite impact that finally finished them off, new research has found.

The findings provide a revolution in the understanding of dinosaur evolution. Palaeontologists previously thought that dinosaurs were flourishing right up until they were wiped out by a massive meteorite impact 66 million years ago. By using a sophisticated statistical analysis in conjunction with information from the fossil record, researchers at the Universities of Reading, UK and Bristol, UK showed that dinosaur species were going extinct at a faster pace than new ones were emerging from 50 million years before the meteorite hit.

The analyses demonstrate that while the decline in species numbers over time was effectively ubiquitous among all dinosaur groups, their patterns of species loss were different. For instance, the long-necked giant sauropod dinosaurs were in the fastest decline, whereas theropods, the group of dinosaurs that include the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex, were in a more gradual decline.

Dr Manabu Sakamoto, University of Reading, the palaeontologist who led the research, said: "We were not expecting this result. While the asteroid impact is still the prime candidate for the dinosaurs' final disappearance, it is clear that they were already past their prime in an evolutionary sense."

'Losing their edge'

"Our work is ground-breaking in that, once again, it will change our understanding of the fate of these mighty creatures. While a sudden apocalypse may have been the final nail in the coffin, something else had already been preventing dinosaurs from evolving new species as fast as old species were dying out.

"This suggests that for tens of millions of years before their ultimate demise, dinosaurs were beginning to lose their edge as the dominant species on Earth."

Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol, one of the co-authors of the research, said: "All the evidence shows that the dinosaurs, which had already been around, dominating terrestrial ecosystems for 150 million years, somehow lost the ability to speciate fast enough. This was likely to have contributed to their inability to recover from the environmental crisis caused by the impact."

It is thought that a giant asteroid's impact with Earth 66 million years ago threw up millions of tonnes of dust, blacking out the sun, causing short-term global cooling and widespread loss of vegetation. This ecological disaster meant that large animals reliant on the abundance of plants died out, along with the predators that fed on them.

The new research suggests that other factors, such as the break-up of continental land masses, sustained volcanic activity and other ecological factors, may possibly have influenced the gradual decline of dinosaurs.

'Room for mammals'

This observed decline in dinosaurs would have had implications for other groups of species. Dr Chris Venditti, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Reading and co-author of paper said: "The decline of the dinosaurs would have left plenty of room for mammals, the group of species which humans are a member of, to flourish before the impact, priming them to replace dinosaurs as the dominant animals on earth."

Dr Sakamoto points out that the study might provide insight into future biodiversity loss. He said: "Our study strongly indicates that if a group of animals is experiencing a fast pace of extinction more so than they can replace, then they are prone to annihilation once a major catastrophe occurs. This has huge implications for our current and future biodiversity, given the unprecedented speed at which species are going extinct owing to the ongoing human-caused climate change."

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The new study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the work was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Full reference: Sakamoto, M., Benton, M.J., and Venditti, C. 2016. 'Dinosaurs in decline tens of millions of years before their final extinction', by Manabu Sakamoto et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in press.
The quest for a 1,000-fold capacity enhancement alongside higher data rates for 5th generation (5G) wireless networks is the subject of intense international academic and industrial research. Two engineers from the University of Bristol's Communication Systems and Networks (CSN) group, who are leaders in this field, have been invited to discuss the future of wireless communications in Brussels and Brooklyn (US) this week [19 to 22 April].

Mark Beach, Professor of Radio Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, will give an invited presentation on the Bristol Is Open Massive MIMO test bed to a European audience at the NetWorld2020 Annual Event and General Assembly 2016 in Brussels today [Tuesday 19 April].

This experimental hardware platform, which achieved a world's first in terms of over-air spectrum efficiency, will be showcased alongside many EU Horizon 2020 5G-Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) projects and European test-beds to experts in this area, including the EU Commission and standardisation bodies ITU-R and 3GPP.

Andrew Nix, Professor of Wireless Communication Systems and Professor Beach, will then attend the Brooklyn 5G Summit, hosted by Nokia Networks and New York University, to demonstrate Bristol's 5G research to an international audience.

The exhibit will include collaborative examples of the CSN group's work in the EU 5G-PPP research projects mmMAGIC and 5G-Xhaul, the experimental wireless facility through Bristol Is Open, together with pioneering research in the field of full duplex, Massive MIMO and Enabling RF Technologies.

Around 150 delegates are expected at this event, with experts from industry, academia and the standardisation bodies.

Professor Andrew Nix, Dean of Engineering, said: "In addition to our posters, we will also show a series of videos highlighting the state-of-the-art test bed and measurement facilities at Bristol alongside the expertise of our researchers."

Professor Mark Beach added: "This is our third Brooklyn 5G Summit. It is an excellent opportunity for us to meet with our international collaborators, discuss results, plan further collaborations and most importantly showcase Bristol's ground-breaking research."

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RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A survey of early-career scientists and environmental-science professionals found that only 11 percent felt their academic training alone provided the needed exposure to natural history, which can be defined as the observation of organisms in their natural environment.

The results of the survey, which was conducted by scientists from the University of California campuses in Riverside, Berkeley and Davis were just published in the journal BioScience.

The survey coincides with a shift in ecology away from teaching and research rooted in natural history and toward modeling, laboratory and theoretical research, which tend to attract more grant funding and publications in higher-impact academic journals.

This shift is occurring despite the cross-disciplinary connections natural history research creates among species, habitats and ecosystems.

For the survey project, which was led by Cameron Barrows, an associate researcher at UC Riverside's Center for Conservation Biology, the researchers questioned 185 professionals at 31 universities in California.

Among the findings:

Of the scientists surveyed, 93 percent agreed that natural history is relevant to science.

About 70 percent believed it is essential to conduct field-based research.

Only 54 percent felt inadequately trained to teach a natural-history course.

More than 80 percent said they would benefit from additional training in natural history.

Nearly 82 percent of respondents indicated that writing grants, research reports and manuscripts for publication was a daily to monthly component of their job.

Just more than half indicated that conducting field research was a regular aspect of their employment.

Only 24 percent had been given the opportunity to participate in a citizen science-type field campaign, which is defined as the collection and analysis of data relating to the natural world by members of the general public, typically in collaboration with professional scientists.

Building on previous citizen science research by Barrows, the researchers argue that citizen science may be the key to keeping natural history relevant in the 21st century and keeping pace with the direction of modern ecology.

They write: "Modern natural historians are in a unique position to act as a bridge between science and nonscientists and should capitalize on the inclusion of the public in ways that will empower them to make societal changes to combat looming environmental and conservation issues."

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The BioScience paper is called "At a Crossroads: The Nature of Natural History in the Twenty-First Century." In addition to Barrows, the authors are Michelle Murphy-Mariscal, lead biologist for the Western Riverside Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan, and Rebecca Hernandez, an assistant professor at UC Davis who was previous a post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.
A secondary analysis of data gathered in scores of interviews with female inmates suggests girls who have an incarcerated adult in the family may be at greater risk for lifelong neurological problems.

The new findings in a study by Kathleen Brewer-Smyth of the University of Delaware's College of Health Sciences show that female inmates with at least one adult incarcerated family member during childhood were more than twice as likely to have neurological abnormalities as adults than female inmates who had no incarcerated family members. The article was published by Health Care for Women International.

The implications are significant internationally, Brewer-Smyth said, in light of a World Health Organization 2015 report that predicts neurological decline will be an increasing public health problem worldwide.

Because of the nature of the study - a cross-sectional review of data gathered in other research - no cause and effect can be determined, said Brewer-Smyth, associate professor in the School of Nursing.

However, knowledge of the many challenges and potential deficits facing children with an adult family member behind bars can help researchers, child advocates, and policy makers find better strategies and support systems for those children in the future.

"We're good at identifying problems," Brewer-Smyth said, "but we haven't figured out the best ways to fix them."

Brewer-Smyth's original research looked at neurological function and high-risk behaviors of female inmates. She has studied more than 770 prison inmates and conducted private interviews and examinations of 135 female inmates in a Mid-Atlantic-area prison, spending hours alone with many of them, often in maximum-security areas. The inmate interviews, conducted between 2000-07, represent an intense period of study that provided insight into the difficulties many had faced as children.

With her background in neurological rehabilitation nursing, Brewer-Smyth found neurological incidents that predated the inmates' crimes and/or neurological abnormalities in 95 percent of the inmates. The incidents were primarily traumatic brain injuries. Additionally, some experienced exposure to lead or other toxins, stroke, seizures, central nervous system (CNS) infection, CNS tumor, having been the product of a complicated pregnancy and delivery, migraines, surviving cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, being struck by lightning, loss of consciousness such as due to choking, myasthenia gravis, and/or having undergone a neurosurgical procedure.

"These conditions can lead to behavior and numerous other problems that can result in a prison sentence," she said.

The most common neurological deficits found were cranial nerve deficits, extremity weakness, gait abnormalities, rapidly alternating movement deficits, memory deficits, cranial facial scars, and palpable evidence of skull injury.

She carried a concealed alarm with her when she interviewed inmates such as those who had been convicted of homicide.

"As soon as she sat down, the first woman I interviewed who had committed homicide said, 'I didn't want to kill him. I just wanted him to stop hitting me,'" Brewer-Smyth recalled. "At that point when I could see obvious scars on her face, I forgot about the alarm and never needed to use it.... Everyone had a story. They didn't just get there. Something happened to them, mostly abuse during childhood."

Inmates who had incarcerated adult family members while they were children also experienced greater physical and sexual abuse during childhood. Some inmates would tell Smyth-Brewer they had never been abused, but when she asked about scars and other signs of physical injury and asked other questions designed to assess symptoms of abuse, they would shrug and say, "Oh, yeah."

"As if it was a normal part of life," she said.

Often, she felt like she was in a behavioral health unit - not a correctional facility, she said. Signs of traumatic brain injury were common - some from repeated blows to the head, falls, accidents, and other violent encounters that occurred prior to the crime for which they were incarcerated.

"But only two of 135 had had any kind of neuro-rehabilitation," she said.

For some, the problems began when they were still in their mother's womb and were exposed to the illegal drugs she was taking, Smyth-Brewer said. Some were sexually abused by a boyfriend of their mother, were in and out of foster homes, and never knew who their father was.

Those who knew their fathers sometimes had other horrors to navigate.

"One woman told me, 'My father was good when he wasn't drinking, but when he was drinking he would get a gun out and start shooting,'" Brewer-Smyth said. "That little girl would run out and hide in the dog box with the dog. There, she was able to weather the storm."

But that same little girl stopped going to school, ashamed of her bruises and the dog mess on her clothes after those incidents.

"Without resources, that could have been any of us," she said. "I had a form of survivor guilt because I had full scholarships at the University of Pennsylvania, while she didn't have the resources to go to elementary school. I worry that any of us could be just one brain injury away from a prison sentence due to the very limited neurological rehabilitation resources for long-term follow-up after brain injuries."

Brewer-Smyth is scheduled to speak on this problem at the ninth World Congress for NeuroRehabilitation in Philadelphia in May.

Finding the best ways to interrupt what can become inter-generational cycles of physical and emotional trauma, neurological deficits and lifelong neurological impairment is critical, Brewer-Smyth said. Prison health systems, mental health workers, other health care providers, educators and child advocates all could contribute important support to help females recover and avoid further decline.

###

Brewer-Smyth's co-authors include UD biostatistician Ryan Pohlig and Dr. Gabriel Bucurescu, a neurologist with the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia, who validated the neurological examinations.

The work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society, the Rehabilitation Nursing Foundation, The Baxter Foundation, the University of Delaware General University Research Fund and the University of Delaware Research Foundation.
Most Seattle employers surveyed in a University of Washington-led study said in 2015 that they expected to raise prices on goods and services to compensate for the city's move to a $15 per hour minimum wage.

But a year after the law's April 2015 implementation, the study indicates such increases don't seem to be happening.

The interdisciplinary Seattle Minimum Wage Study team, centered in the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance surveyed employers and workers and scanned area commodity and service prices. The team's report found "little or no evidence" of price increases in Seattle relative to other areas, its report states.

The City of Seattle's $15 minimum wage ordinance was adopted in June of 2014, and began taking effect on April 1, 2015. Under the law, businesses with fewer than 500 employees will reach the $15 an hour wage in seven years, or 2021. Employers with 500 or more employees (either in Seattle or nationally) will reach that level in three years.

When approving the ordinance, the Seattle City Council also commissioned a thorough study of the law's impacts, and sealed a contract with the UW in December 2014. The study is led by Evans School professors Jacob Vigdor and Mark Long with Jennifer Romich, associate professor in the UW School of Social Work, and other co-authors from the Evans School and the School of Public Health. Two economists from the Washington Employment Security Department are also on the team.

The researchers released the first in an anticipated series of reports April 18 in a presentation to the Seattle City Council.

The study, conducted between January and May 2015, surveyed 567 randomly selected Seattle employers as well as 55 workers, asking their awareness of and feelings about its expected and actual effects, to establish a baseline for that information.

Responses indicate that nearly all employers knew about the new law, though many were uncertain about its implementation. Many employers expressed hope the higher wages will improve both worker morale and boost job applications, though they also doubt it will improve individual employee productivity among minimum wage workers.

Sixty-two percent of employers said they expected to raise prices of goods and services to accommodate the higher wages brought by the law. Ten percent of the employers believed incorrectly that the ordinance would force their business to move to a $15 wage immediately upon implementation.

But in an analysis of area prices over time, done through a combination of "web scraping" and in-person visits to grocery stores, restaurants and other retail locations, such price increases were not in evidence.

"Our preliminary analysis of grocery, retail and rent prices has found little or no evidence of price increases in Seattle relative to the surrounding area," the team concluded.

Workers, for their part -- many of whom reported struggling to make ends meet despite community and government assistance -- responded to the survey wondering doubtfully if the wage increases would truly improve their financial situation. Most knew about the law but many were uncertain of details, the study found.

"Today's report documents both the hopes and fears that workers and business managers expressed as Seattle began its initiative to raise the minimum wage," said Vigdor. "Business owners are hopeful that small changes to their operation -- such as small price increases -- will keep them in the black.

"Workers are hopeful about the promise of greater income, but harbor few illusions about the potential for price increases, or reductions in government benefits, to eat away at these gains."

The team's subsequent study on the Seattle minimum wage law will include:

A second round of worker interviews this spring to learn more about its effects on work and family life, and more in spring of 2017 if funding allows.

Analysis this spring of employment security data on employment, hours, and earnings for a report to be released this summer

Another full survey of employers and workers in 2017.

A brief follow-up survey of employers this summer to depict changes over time.

Continued study of prices, expanding to the areas outside Seattle.

A study this fall on the impact of the ordinance on Seattle nonprofits, through surveys and interviews.

"From its inception, this study has sought to do more than track employment figures," Vigdor said. "Our team hopes to develop a full understanding of how businesses and nonprofits change their practices to accommodate higher wages, and of whether a higher minimum wage meaningfully transforms lives. Today's report showcases that broader approach."

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Vigdor and Long's co-investigators on the Seattle Minimum Wage Study are Jennifer Otten of the UW's School of Public Health and Heather Hill, Scott Allard and Robert Plotnick of the Evans School. Other co-investigators are Scott Bailey and Anneliese Vance-Sherman of the state employment security department.

The research was funded in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant to the UW's Center for Demography and Ecology. Funding also was provided by the John Arnold Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and the City of Seattle.

For more information, contact the research team at mwage@uw.edu or J. Paul Blake, Evans School director of media and external relations, at 206-543-3958 or jpblake@uw.edu.

Grant # R24 HD042828
MADISON, Wis. -- Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine (SVM) have developed one of the first mouse models for the study of Zika virus. The model will allow researchers to better understand how the virus causes disease and aid in the development of antiviral compounds and vaccines.

"The tools have not been available to people who want to be able to test vaccines and antivirals against Zika virus," says Matthew Aliota, assistant SVM scientist and lead author of the study that describes the model, published April 19 in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. "The caveat is that it's a mouse model, but it does allow us to test vaccines, and the pathology caused by the virus in the mouse brain could be used to understand the pathology in the brains of humans, especially fetuses."

Zika virus was first described in Uganda in 1947. Before last year, it had circulated in people in Africa, southeast Asia and in the Pacific Islands and only sporadically caused disease. The virus is transmitted by mosquitoes and typically causes mild, flu-like symptoms, when it causes symptoms at all.

However, in 2015 the virus began infecting unprecedented numbers of people in Brazil and then spread throughout the Americas. Public health officials in the United States expect it to spread to the southern U.S. as the weather warms and activity of the Aedes aegypti mosquito -- the species that harbors the virus -- subsequently increases.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed Zika virus is responsible for a large rise in brain defects in developing fetuses, including microcephaly. In fact, cases of microcephaly -- marked by a small head, reduced brain size and cognitive impairments -- were 20 times higher than usual in parts of Brazil last year. There has been some evidence of neurological effects in adults as well.

Researchers now also know the disease can spread through sexual contact.

"It's scary to know so little about something that can be so devastating," says Katrina Larkin, a UW-Madison undergraduate student and a study co-author. "Learning how instrumental animal models can be to combating diseases makes this work even more urgent."

Mouse models allow researchers to conduct larger-scale studies than animal models like nonhuman primates, and to perform experiments that are not possible to conduct in human beings.

The mouse model described by Aliota and the rest of the research team, including Jorge Osorio, professor of pathobiological sciences at SVM, is an immunocompromised mouse the laboratory already possessed for research on viruses similar to Zika, like dengue virus. The team learned they could inject Zika virus into the foot pads of the mice, and under their skin, and the virus would then spread throughout the body, including the brain. Other mouse strains are resistant to infection with Zika virus.

"Similar models have been revealed in the last two weeks, but there are also differences between those and ours," says Aliota, who was part of the team that first found Zika virus in Colombia. The differences in their model will allow the researchers to test how exposure to other viruses, like dengue, may influence how the body responds to Zika infection.

The team's mouse model lacks three types of interferons -- known as alpha, beta and gamma -- which are among the immune system's first lines of defense against some types of viral infections. Mice with normal interferons are resistant to Zika virus infection but those lacking them get sick. Humans also have interferons but they are less effective at blunting Zika virus infection.

In the study, once the mice were infected with a range of doses of Zika virus -- including doses similar to human exposure following a bite from an infected mosquito -- they rapidly became ill. The virus was 100 percent fatal in mice at all doses, which is an effect not seen in humans.

The mice were euthanized within one week of infection and, unlike in the other recent mouse model studies, the researchers examined the effects of the virus in various organs of the body, including the liver, spleen, brain, kidney, intestine, heart, lungs and skeletal muscles.

The virus had spread throughout the body but Aliota says they were surprised to find it caused pathology only in the brain and skeletal muscle.

"It looks really bad for the brain," he says, noting they saw evidence of meningitis, cell infiltration and necrosis (abnormal cellular death).

In addition to providing an opportunity for researchers to study vaccines and antivirals, the model also affords scientists the ability to study how the virus works, including whether it can replicate, or make copies of itself, and spread within brain tissue.

"It's pretty easy for people to see on the news that there's this illness affecting lots of people and wonder why no one has come up with a vaccine yet," says Emma Walker, another undergraduate researcher and study co-author, "but for Zika, which hasn't really been researched before, there's a lot of pressure just to find out more basic things -- like how the virus works -- before you can try to tackle 'curing' the illness."

Aliota calls the students who worked on the study, including Ph.D. student Liz Caine, "outstanding," and says it would not have been possible so quickly without their dedication and long hours in the lab. Zika findings from labs across the country have published at breakneck speed as researchers focus their efforts on combating the disease. In fact, Aliota and colleagues at UW-Madison have made other aspects of their collaborative research available to other scientists and the public in real time.

"I have been amazed with the amount of information that has been generated about Zika virus in such a short amount of time," says Caine.

Aliota also credits the resources available at UW-Madison for the pace of Zika study progress here.

"UW has become a center of Zika virus research. There are a lot of people with diverse expertise to take on this problem," he says. "That's the advantage of having a medical school, a veterinary school and a primate center; it's possible to do things here that only a few institutions around the globe can accomplish."

For Aliota, who has long studied infectious diseases like Zika, the fact that his work and that of his team has had such profound impact in the response to a significant public health issue is vastly rewarding.

"It's scary for the people living with it," Aliota says. "Our goal is to translate what we find to the field. To see such immediate impact, that doesn't happen often."

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--Kelly April Tyrrell, kelly.tyrrell@wisc.edu, 608-262-9772
Written by ACM



*Strasbourg/CoE/Angelo Marcopolo/- A last-minute endorsed Decision for a Report and a Vote on the controversial EU - Turkey Deal on Mass Asylum Seekers/Irregular Migrants, taken earliedr Today by the PanEuropean Organisation for Human Rights, Democracy and Rule of Law, i.e. CoE, is apparently behind a sudden, and otherwise unexplained, rush of an impressive series of Key Political Players, throughout Europe and beyond, who were attracted by CoE Assembly's Spring 2016 Plenary Session, this Week in Strasbourg (18-22 April 2016) ::



- EU Commission's President, Jean-Claude Juncker, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglou, Austrian President Heinz Fischer, even Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili, as well as Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, (etc), are all due to be here soon.



Juncker, (who shall meet also with Davutoglou, as well as with the Georian PM) kickStarts the 1st, from Early Next Morning, closely followed by the Turkish PM, on Tuesday, i.e. one whole Day Before CoE Assembly's Final Vote on a Resolution about the controversial EU - Turkey Deal, scheduled for Wednesday Afternoon.



Meanwhile, another notoriously Strategic Geo-Political Player also on the field of Mass Migrants via Turkey, (i.e. through EU Member Greece, but even through Italy, via Libya, etc), is expected on Wednesday Morning, by a coincidence, on the occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the Accession of Wien to the CoE, back on April 16, 1956, (Comp., f.ex. : ....).



To all this was added also the Spanish Foreign Minister Garcia-Margallo, a former EU Parliament MEP well known in Strasbourg, who is due to Speak and Answer Questions at CoE's Assembly just before it starts Debating and Voting on the EU - Turkey Deal about Mass Migrants. His participation, the Closest possible to the main issue,

(Comp. Supra), is quite Logical, since Spain has a notoriously functional Agreement with Neighbouring Morocco to help Prevent such Massive Asylum Seekers/Irregular Immigrants "Tsunami", as that which was suddenly thrown upon EU Member Greece since Last Summer 2015, through Turkey.



Last, but not least, even the Prime Minister of Georgia, Kvirikashvili, (ater meeting with Juncker here already since Tuesday), will Start his official Visit to the CoE witha first Press-point, etc, shortly Before that Crucial CoA Assembly Vote on the EU - Turkey Deal, at an Earlier Time of that same Wednesday Afternoon, (followed also by a Thursday Morning subsequent session. Indeed, as a well informed Georgian Lady Expert has already told "Eurofora", it's enough to have a Look at a Map in order to undestand that, in fact, there is a close GeoPolitical Proximity between Georgia and Syria/Iraq...



This explains, also, the relevant Fact that so many Christian Refugees from Syria or Iraq, etc., have strived to reach Armenia, instead of Turkey, known for its Islamic trend and its reportedly "Islamic Agenda" Local Chiefs at most Camps located at its South-Eastern Borders, that the Greek Authorities proved astonishingly Unable to Find not even, at least, one (1) Christian Family among more than 55.000 Mass Asylum Seekers' comming from Turkey, in order to propose that to the Pope, instead of giving him only Muslim Candidates, in all three (3) Asylum Seeker Families taken under Protection of the Vatican, as several mainstream Media observed, (f.ex., France's ""Figaro", etc)...



A Motion for an "Urgent" Debate on the controversial EU Turkley Deal on Mass Migrants had already been Tabled, last Friday. But it had been presented at the usual CoiE Press Briefing with Strasboueg Journalists (including "Eurofora"), exceptionaly "burried" among a very Long List of various Other Motons on Differend Issues, (f.ex. Nagorno-Karabach, Panama Papers' scandal, Brussel Attacks by Deadly Islamist Terrorists, etc), that nobody had noticed then...



However, already, both "Eurofora" and several other observers had raised Questions about the real Reason for which, suddenly, such a Huge, Top Political Interest was expressed by so many and important Politicians, exceptionaly attracted, all Together, by the present CoE Assembly's Spring 2016 Plenary Session.



This became Crystal-Clear, Earlier Today (Monday) Morning, when CoE Assembly's Bureau, and afterwards the Plenary, officially endorsed an Urgent Debate on that EU - Turkey Deal for Wednesday Afternoon.

The New CoE Assembly's President, Experienced Spanish MEP Pedro Agramunto, former Chairman of the ChristianDemocrat/EPP Group, the Biggest in PACE, has already Started, since January 2016, to show a keen political Will to "Surprize", at the beginning of each Plenary Session, by making several Important Changes to the Draft Agenda, on the most Crucial a,nd Topical Issues, (Comp., f.ex., also : .....)



Unlike EU Parliament's only Oral Debates, last week in Strasbourg, about both the latest general EU Summit in Brussels, and that EU - Turkey Deal, on the Contrary, CoE's PanEuropean Organisation, (which holds an official Mandate, given at the Highest Political level of Heads of State/Governments' Summit; for Human Rights, Democracy and Rule of Law), decided to hold also a Specific Debate focused on the EU - Turkey Deal, as well as to prepare a written Report, with a Resolution due to be Voted Wednesday Afternoon.



Meanwhile, probably Crucial Amendments are to be Tabled 1 Day before, i.e. until Tuesday Evening, included, on that Report which is due to be adopted by the Competent Committee (on Migration) Earlier on Tuesday Morning/Noon, (i.e. during Juncker's and Davutoglou's successive Visits : Comp. Supra).



And Juncker is a Key Personality also for EU - CoE relations, since he had got an official Mandate by CoE's PanEuropean Heads of State/Government Summit, back on 2004 in Warsaw, (Comp. "Eurofora" co-Founders' NewsReports from the spot, published then at "TCWeekly"), to make an Original Study with concrete Proposals on the Future PanEuropean Architecture and EU CoE roles, (Comp. also Juncker's Replies to 3urofora" Questions during his Press Connference at the CoE in Strasbourg, when he had presented, some years ago, his Report's main Conclusions).



This week's forthcoming Political developments will obviously be also a Test of the EU - CoE possible relations in a fully functioning European Institutional Architecture. And CoE might, eventualy, give to the EU a Chance to at least Rectify, sooner or later, in one way or another, some otherwise notoriously Thorny points, earlier conceded under obvious Pressure (some denounced a "Blackmail", or that "EU was Hostage to Turkey", etc) by Ankara's controversial regime.

(../..)



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("DraftNews", as already send to "EuroFora"s Subscribers/Donors, earlier. A more accurate, full Final Version might be Published asap).

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Wirex may be as close as the fintech sector has yet come to providing a regular mobile bank built in considerable part on the bitcoin blockchain.

Bitcoin, as Euromoney readers know, is very good for certain things that individual banking customers value: for micro-payments or transferring small sums quickly across border without paying hefty fees. But it still feels like an amazing application in theory that isnt much use in the real world. Its not going to change the landscape of retail payments if you cant buy a flat white with it at Cafe Nero.

Pavel Matveev, Wirex

Wirex may change that. Its founders  who focused initially on building E-coin, a business around bitcoin debit cards, before becoming dis-heartened by the slow pace of adoption  describe Wirex as a hybrid personal banking platform. Its target is to serve frequent travellers, international students, nomadic workers, for example in the knowledge industries, users of the big remittance corridors and even the unbanked.

Arguably what makes it most threatening to the established banking order is not that the bitcoin blockchain is central to everything Wirex does as that it is almost incidental.

Wirex offers a single mobile account that can hold fiat currencies including dollars, euros and sterling, as well as bitcoin. By bridging the fiat currency and cryptocurrency worlds, it opens up possibilities for fast and cheap cross-border transfers where the currency swap may go through a bitcoin leg, unseen by sender and recipient.

If you want to send 100 to a friend in Europe and convert it into euros, we can do that from sterling to bitcoin and then bitcoin to euro, at a better rate and cheaper friction cost than in the conventional currency market, Pavel Matveev, founder of Wirex, tells Euromoney. This fiat-to-fiat conversion on blockchain is the new big thing.

Wirex also links bitcoin wallets to Visa and MasterCard debit cards. It allows instant transfers to friends and family. It also allows payment through near-field communication off a mobile phone and the capacity to withdraw fiat cash from ATMs with a virtual e-card on a mobile, even for customers that havent paid the delivery fee for a very traditional-looking plastic Wirex card.

We are trying to break down the border between crypto- and fiat currencies and bring to customers the best of both worlds, Dmitry Lazarichev, another company founder, tells Euromoney. Essentially, this is about bringing the benefits of blockchain technology to the conventional banking world. We already have more than 20,000 customers in 130 countries that we have shipped cards to. We are now growing very fast.

Removing worry

The company has addressed markets where families need to send money to young students abroad, such as to Chinese students in Europe who sometimes find it hard to open bank accounts. Often families try to manage high money-transfer costs by sending large sums once a quarter, raising obvious worries about cash security. Instantly up-loading money onto a virtual card removes that worry and reduces costs.

Dmitry Lazarichev, Wirex

Wirex charges commissions on fiat-to-fiat transfers that it says are lower than MasterCard and Visa; it says that for remittances the service is far cheaper than incumbents like Western Union, which doesnt move physical cash across borders and so needs to maintain cash reserves in every country it serves.

Wirex has identified big remittance corridors under-served by the new start-ups in that segment, for example between Canada and the Philippines, as well as high-cost corridors such as to and from Japan. With virtual cards delivered via apps to mobile phones, the service is very popular among populations underserved by traditional banks. And it sees big opportunities in Latin America, notably Colombia, Brazil and Argentina.

Anyone with internet access can open an account instantly and use a virtual card, points out Lazarichev. There is great opportunity among the 2 billion unbanked people in the world.

Wirex raised money via crowdfunding last September and is now negotiating a series-A funding round with venture capitalists to raise another 1 million.

Next to some of the giant fund-raisings for fintech companies in the past 12 months, measured in many tens of millions of dollars, it doesnt sound so impressive, until Lazarichev points out: We only need 1 million because we are already profitable and we dont have a high burn rate.

The company is looking for distribution partners on the ground in local markets where it sees opportunity.

Rising hackles

As Lazarichev speaks, Euromoney almost pictures the hackles rising on the back of regulators necks. They are seeking to clamp down on, for example, pre-loaded cards as used by terrorist attackers in Paris last year.

Matveev tells Euromoney: The blockchain world is new and we are trying to anticipate the regulations flooding into it. For example, we are talking to [blockchain intelligence firm] Elliptic about ways to do due diligence around addresses and gain a clear picture of where money is coming from and going to. And we are putting in place the same kind of know-your-customer and anti-money laundering infrastructure that already covers conventional bank accounts and debit cards.

The blockchain world is not regulated in the UK yet, though Wirex says it will certainly apply for a licence once the regulation frame is defined. Its banking partner is WaveCrest, an e-money issuer licensed by the Financial Services Commission of Gibraltar, which has passported its licence across Europe. WaveCrest is a principal member of MasterCard in Gibraltar and the UK and a principal member of Visa in Gibraltar.

Euromoney reports elsewhere on the first tentative steps of the worlds biggest banks to integrate this new technology, such as Barclays, which is working with Circle, a US app, to facilitate payments between sterling and US dollars on the blockchain. The UKs Financial Conduct Authority has granted the service a licence  the first of its kind to be handed out in the UK.

For now Wirex sees itself as a first mover in this personal banking hybrid service between the fiat and cryptocurrency worlds.

Matveev says: For banks, blockchain adoption is at the very early stage. Ive worked at a number of large banks, and while they and Visa and MasterCard are all working on their proofs of concept, they are still playing with the technology. I think it will take them a long time to test it and really deploy it.
Martin Blessing steps down as chairman of the managing board of Commerzbank on Wednesday. He is the last remaining chief executive of a large European bank that was bailed out during the financial crisis to have remained in office through the painful recovery that followed.

Still only 52, Blessing has served as CEO of Germanys second biggest private bank for eight tumultuous years, since May 2008. That is longer than any other large European bank CEO, aside from Frederic Oudea, who was named as chief executive of Societe Generale in the same month Blessing took the top job at Commerzbank.

Oudea has hardly had a quiet career, but Blessings has been a rollercoaster ride, as early triumphs quickly turned to disaster, initial revival gave way to further calamities and then a long, slow recovery ground forward. How does he feel, Euromoney wonders, as he prepares to leave behind the regular criticism from the German press for his annual salary of 1.3
The ongoing confrontation between Russia and the west has been characterised by competing narratives concerning the origins and development of events. These differing interpretations make coming to any kind of consensus on the future of the European security order extremely difficult.

Prominent European and Russian experts were brought together by the European Leadership Network and the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) to examine these narratives, their origins in international law, and to determine how they may be transcended. This workshop forms part of a larger research project, supported by the Carnegie Corporation, with the next meeting due to take place in Moscow.

In its analysis of the experts deliberations, the ELN found fundamentally different interpretations, on both sides, to critical questions relating to the evolution of the European security order; the expansion of NATO; past military interventions; the right to self-determination; and the right to succession.

The nature of the problem:

The dominant western media narrative on the crisis in Russia-West relations is that, through its annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine, Russia has behaved aggressively, has broken international law, and the core policy challenge for the West is therefore how to deter further such Russian aggression while trying to re-establish the status quo.

In this narrative, arguments used by the Russian elite are dismissed as instrumental, developed for propaganda purposes only, and are unlikely to be genuinely believed even by Russian leaders themselves.

However the ELNs new report, while certainly not producing agreement over Ukraine or Crimea, tells a more complex story of the differences over European Security running much deeper than one might think.

The report finds that:

Participants in the dialogue agreed that the narratives of both sides reflect deeply held beliefs based on well-developed intellectual and legal perspectives and are not simply the instrumental products of official propaganda. The arguments of neither side, the group finds, can easily be dismissed.

The disagreement, moreover, is not only about individual cases but spans two fundamental conceptual axes. The first concerns disagreements over what sovereignty means at this stage of the 21st century and over who and what can legitimise interventions in the affairs of other states. Touchstone cases of disagreement here include not only Russian interventions in Ukraine in 2014 and Georgia in 2008, but Western interventions in Kosovo in 1999, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.

The first concerns disagreements over what sovereignty means at this stage of the 21st century and over who and what can legitimise interventions in the affairs of other states. Touchstone cases of disagreement here include not only Russian interventions in Ukraine in 2014 and Georgia in 2008, but Western interventions in Kosovo in 1999, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011. The second axis concerns disagreements over the circumstances under which the territorial integrity of a state must always be respected versus when and under what circumstances a legitimate self-determination movement must have its argument for secession from an established state recognised.

These findings are important because they suggest the disagreement is so fundamental that the current down-turn in relations will not be dealt with by a simple change in leadership in any state and the dispute is likely to last a very long time.

in any state and the dispute is likely to last a very long time. Moreover, the discussion group, which included leading thinkers from Oxford, Cambridge, the Russian Academy of Sciences and academia, agreed that the core policy challenge facing Europe was not the need to restore Europe to some static interpretation of the status quo but to come up with a political process capable of managing what is in effect a long term process of historical change underway in Europe .

. The group noted that change inside Europe has already been profound since the end of the Cold War with the break-up of Yugoslavia, the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The number of unresolved disputes and areas of tensions in Europe also remain high. It is likely therefore that further challenges to the European order will present themselves in the form of unexpected events.

Interestingly, the group agreed that to handle those situations, a call merely to obey international law would not be adequate since in individual cases, there was often no consensus on what the law ought to mean in practice. Here, the disputes were not just between Russia and the West but often within the West too. Witness the disagreement among EU states as to whether Kosovo should be recognised as an independent state or not.

since in individual cases, there was often no consensus on what the law ought to mean in practice. Here, the disputes were not just between Russia and the West but often within the West too. Witness the disagreement among EU states as to whether Kosovo should be recognised as an independent state or not. Moreover, it was noted that when significant events do happen, such as in Ukraine, there is almost always no agreed Russia/US/EU account of what has been happening and why, while there are no mechanisms for trying to achieve an agreed account as the situation develops.

Conference contributions

The opinions articulated above represent the views of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect the position of the European Leadership Network or any of its members. The ELNs aim is to encourage debates that will help develop Europes capacity to address the pressing foreign, defence, and security challenges of our time.
Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg is in Rome this week for Actons conference on the 125th anniversary of Pope Leo XIIIs ground-breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum. The conference  titled Freedom with Justice: Rerum Novarum and the New Things of Our Time  takes place on April 20th from 2-7:30 pm at the Roma-Trevi-Conference Center in Rome, Italy.

Sam sat down for an in-depth interview with Vatican Radio about the encyclical and the conference, noting that there are many things about Rerum novarum that are timeless, partly because the encyclical draws very specifically on natural law [and] Thomistic thought, when it discusses things like, for example, its defense  its very rigorous defense  of private property, but also its very strong critique of socialism.

For more information on the conference, visit acton.org/rome2016; you can follow the conference as it happens on twitter using #125onFreedom.
The British pound to euro rate (GBP/EUR) extended its best consecutive run today after rallying strongly on Monday, rising more than 1% on the day from a low of 1.25 and a high of 1.2650. Sterling also moved higher versus the U.S Dollar, rising above the 1.43 level, as swings in oil prices and U.S stocks underlined the UK currencys sensitivity to risk sentiment.

As foreign exchange markets approach today's key economic events the British pound to euro exchange rate has resumed best conversion levels seen in over 21 days. See today's update.

Today's key GBP to EUR rate impacting events include the UK retail sales, the ECB meeting and BoE Gov Carney's speech.

Earlier in the week, stronger ZEW Economic Sentiment Survey results were ultimately not enough to shore up the Euro (EUR) exchange rates as concerns persist over talks between Greece and its creditors.

With creditors apparently pushing for the Hellenic nation to sign up to additional austerity measures, which would come into force in the event of further target shortfalls, the mood was not overly positive.

The British Pound made strong gains against most major currencies and erased its biggest decline in more than a week against the Euro, as equity markets bounced back amid better-than-expected earnings data on Monday.

The pound sterling to euro exchange rate started the week on the backfoot, reeling following the collapse in Doha of talks among oil producers to limit output.

Investors are anticipating more price swings and more volatility ahead of the June 23rd referendum and Pound exchange rates also benefited from comments from the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne on Monday.

Other Pound Sterling / Currency Exchange News

Latest Pound/Euro Exchange Rates

On Monday the Pound to British Pound exchange rate (GBP/GBP) converts at 1

Today finds the pound to pound spot exchange rate priced at 1.

The GBP to USD exchange rate converts at 1.131 today.

The live inter-bank GBP-CHF spot rate is quoted as 1.132 today.

Please note: the FX rates above, updated 24th Oct 2022, will have a commission applied by your typical high street bank. Currency brokers specialise in these type of foreign currency transactions and can save you up to 5% on international payments compared to the banks.

Pound Sterling (GBP) Exchange Rate a Very Risk-Sensitive Currency

The government, campaigning for the UK to remain in the European Union, went on the offensive yesterday with Osborne warning of permanent damage should the UK leave the EU, estimating that it would cost each household more than 4,000 a year.

The market interpreted this fear mongering as good reasons for the UK electorate to vote to stay in the EU, despite recent polls indicating a healthy majority for those wishing to leave.

The Pound is also benefiting from a risk-on environment and we have seen this many times through the year already.

Sterling is a very risk sensitive currency and will rise and fall with the stock market to a large degree and the swings in risk sentiment.

Will Pound Sterling (GBP) Relief Rally End?

U.S stocks advanced on the day yesterday, erasing an earlier decline, as investors shook off losses in crude oil prices to focus on the number of corporate earnings reports due this week.

The Pound is up today but sentiment is tentative and any gains should be treated as short-term with the balance of probability suggesting there is a far greater chance of a renewed decline for Sterling than any dramatic shift in trend.

The Pound has been in the middle of a relief rally for the past week or more following lows of 1.2319 versus the Euro but it is still far too premature to be calling the recent upside movement a long-term recovery.

The June 23rd referendum will cause a lot of market uncertainty as we build up to the event and the prospect of a UK exit remains very possible so the Pound is likely to come under pressure again in the short-term.

GBP,EUR,USD Related Data Released 21th April 2016

GBP 09:30 UK Retail Sales (source)

EUR 13:30 ECB Press Conference, Minimum Bid rate (source)

U.S 13:30 US Unemployment Claims (source)

U.K 15:00 BoE Governor Carney Speaks (source)

The Pound Sterling to Euro (GBP/EUR) exchange rate trended lower in response to the fact that the number of unemployed in the UK had risen for the first time since August.

Although German Producer Prices also proved disappointing this was ultimately not enough to shore up the vulnerable GBP/EUR pairing.

GBP/EUR Conversion Rate Edges Lower on UK Jobs Data

Wednesday's European session on the fx markets has seen the pound sterling to euro's uptrend stall after the UKs average weekly earnings report missed forecasts.

The UK Average Earnings Index printed at 1.8%, 0.3% below market predictions. The Claimant Count Change also missed estimates at 6.7k.

The British Pound has risen against the Euro today, potentially on account of a recent UK Referendum poll

Conducted on behalf of The Telegraph, the poll indicated that (among respondents), more were likely to vote for an In vote than an Out one.

This strengthened the appeal of the pound to euro exchange rate considerably, due to the fact that a more stable In vote seemed a more likely possibility.
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twostep said: Pulling teeth here. Work authorization of students is generally limited to on campus p/t positions. What visa did you use to work at the restaurant? Click to expand...

I didn't have a visa. I went with the Visa Waiver Program to do my course ( which was less than a certain number of hours/ week, 18, I think ). Then every 90 days I would leave the US for 15 days, and then come back. A friend of mine had done the same thing a year before, taking the same course and it was fine.But of course she didn't work ilegally.I know I shouldn't have done it. But what made it worse was the Summer before my family( due to the crisis) almost lost all its money and my father said " sorry can't help you any more".Of course I could have stayed in Portugal, but I went. A month in the course when I realised it was gonna be impossible to pay for it I talked to the Director of the course ( which I knew from Portugal) and said I had to quit. He said I had signed an agreement and so if I didn't pay ( he thought my father would step in ...) he would sue us, even my father in Portugal. So I had no choice.
sienna11 said: How much Spanish do Americans learn from K-12? Click to expand...

I am sure this depends entirely on what part of the US you are in. Regardless, I think you will find that very young schoolchildren are exposed to the very basics (numbers, "hello", "good-bye", "how are you" and so on) but beyond that, it just depends. My five-year old grandson is currently learning basic Japanese in his kindergarten class even though we live in an area with a fair number of Hispanics and very few Japanese.Do keep in mind that the US imposes very little in the way of education standards at the Federal level; individual States have near-total control over what they teach, when they teach it, graduation requirements, etc.Finally, the Spanish which is likely to be taught in US schools is not the same Spanish which is spoken in Spain, but closer to the dialect used by a large percentage of Mexican immigrants because, after all, that is where most Spanish-speaking Americans have come from.
Hi all,



Need ur advice here plz.



I submitted my application to ACS for assessment, the result came as follows:



----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Your skills assessment has been assessed as NOT closely related to the nominated ANZSCO code.



The assessor has made a recommendation that your application is suitable for ANZSCO code -



263212 ICT Support Engineer



Please note: If you wish to nominate an alternate ANZSCO code other than this recommendation, you will be required to submit a Review Application after your current skills assessment has been finalised.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



I was aiming for [261112: Systems Analyst] (that's what I've actually been doing for 9 years) so I can apply for GENERAL SKILLED VISA 189, as my score is 65 points.

But the new code they suggested [263212 ICT Support Engineer] needs 85 points (for Visa subclass 489), a score I will never be able to reach!



Kindly let me know if there is any hope in this, and what options do I have?



Thanks.


There are good opportunities for jobs in Auckland, New Zealand, at the moment with the latest data showing strong possibilities in design, architecture, construction and real estate.The city is descried as having a jobseekers market by online employment marketplace SEEK, with its latest report showing that new job ads are 9.3% up year on year and up 4.2% month on month.A strong property market is driving job opportunities across many professions with an outward ripple effect on other areas such as trades and service associated with real estate."Outside a minor drop in advertising volume in December which is to be expected, there has been six months of near consecutive increases in the number of opportunities advertised in Auckland," said Janet Faulding, general manager of SEEK New Zealand.Design and architecture have seen a 53% rise in job adverts quarter on quarter from November 2015 to January 2016. Other top risers include government and defence up 42%, legal up 24%, construction up 20%, accounting up 18% and real estate and property up 15%.Dale Gray, partner at Inside Recruitment said that the recruitment market in Auckland is optimistic about the future. "What we're noticing in the market is a greater level of consideration going in to each new hire, whether that is a new role, or a replacement role. Organisations are doing the thinking to ensure it makes business sense and that they really know what skills and experience they require from their hires and being strict in hiring to that," he added.Faulding said that the impact this hiring climate has on candidates is that they need to take the time to thoroughly read and research the advertised jobs.Other regions in the North Island also have opportunities. The collective regions outside of Auckland and Wellington have 7.5% more jobs than January 2015. Wellington remains at much the same level in terms of opportunities available compared to the same time a year ago."We are starting to see a broadening of opportunities available in cities like Hamilton and Tauranga which are new hubs for those wanting to escape the higher costs of living and business in Auckland," added Faulding.


The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, shareholder activists of the corporate God-fly variety, are gearing up for the May 25 ExxonMobil Corporation annual general meeting. The ICCR agenda isnt about maximizing shareholder value, but seems far more intent on reducing it.

For the record, your writer possesses no financial stake in ExxonMobil, but if he did its certain hed be upset mightily at ICCRs efforts to hobble the industry giant and send stock prices plummeting even further. The religious-left activists of ICCR have submitted seven proxy resolutions aimed at ExxonMobil this season. Aiming to protect the interests of all its investors, the company challenged the resolutions, but was overruled by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the ICCR website:

Included in this group of resolutions are calls for greater disclosure of lobbying activities that may be tied to the types of climate change denial campaigns currently under investigation, as well as a call for board expertise on environmental issues and a resolution asking that the company acknowledge the moral imperative of limiting global warming to 2 celsius, the threshold participants at the COP21 climate talks agreed could not be exceeded if we are to safeguard our planets future. Another resolution asks that the company assess the risks of their carbon assets within the context of this carbon-constrained future.

And this, from one of ICCRs actual resolutions:

As a large GHG [greenhouse gas] emitter with carbon intensive products, ExxonMobil should robustly support the framework to address climate change resulting from the 21st Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2015. Constructive engagement on climate policy is especially important given Exxons historical role in financing climate denial and misinformation campaigns on climate change. Failing to address this could present reputational risk for ExxonMobil. In contrast to ExxonMobil, ten oil industry peers including Total, Shell, BP, and Saudi Aramco, and business leaders in other industries, support an international agreement to limit warming to 2C.

Ahhh, climate denial, to which your writer sarcastically offers the interrogative: Could there be anything more morally reprehensible than questioning the veracity of scientifically inconclusive claims of imminent catastrophic climate-change? But such is the dogmatic nature of these corporate God-flies that the question is rendered rhetorical. Never mind the facts that support the use of fossil fuels as essential to reducing world poverty because facts usually get in the way of a good photo-opportunity.

The Washington Post, in an op-ed this week aimed at a specific U.S. presidential candidate who voices much the same claptrap as ICCR, refutes many of the generalized claims weighed against fossil fuels:

When burned, natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal. The recent fracking boom contributed to a reduction in national carbon dioxide emissions over the past several years, as utilities switched from cheap coal to now-cheaper gas. It is true that some concerns remain. Methane leaks from natural gas wells and pipelines. Many worry about drinking water near fracking operations. But the government can require drillers to address these issues without shutting the industry. It is also true that natural gas is a waystation; though it is cleaner than coal, natural gas still produces carbon dioxide emissions. Yet gass price and emissions profile is still attractive enough that the Environmental Protection Agencys Clean Power Plan, the most aggressive global warming policy the country has ever had, relies on gas displacing coal to meet medium-term emissions goals. Nuclear accounts for about a fifth of the countrys electricity, and it is practically emissions-free. Shutting down that much clean electricity generation would put the country into a deep emissions hole. Yet every dollar spent to replace one carbon-free source with another is a dollar that could have been spent replacing dangerous and dirty coal plants. Under [the candidates] vision, either the country would fail to maximize emissions cuts, or it would waste huge amounts of money unnecessarily replacing nuclear plants. Unsurprisingly, the Clean Power Plan relies on nuclear, too, assuming that the country will get about the same amount of electricity from nuclear in 2030.

Now, mind you, your writer doesnt endorse all of the WaPos arguments. First of all, hes not convinced cheap and plentiful coal should be removed completely from our nations energy portfolio as opposed to exercising cleaner ways of burning it for energy. And, while many worry about drinking water near fracking operations might sound like a compelling argument to some readers, its remarkably vague in identifying specific people, their numbers and the legitimacy of their concerns.

All told, however, its a far-more reasoned  and moral  response to the efforts ICCR is waging against ExxonMobil, other companies and their respective shareholders.
A new Pew Research survey finds that the majority of American Catholics (73 percent) say they rely a great deal on their own conscience when facing difficult moral problems. Conscience was turned to more often than the three other sources  Catholic Churchs teachings (21 percent), the Bible (15 percent) or the pope (11 percent)  combined.

While it never really went away, conscience is making a comeback among Christians.

Over the past few years, the term conscience has been increasingly referenced in debates occurring both in our churches (e.g., appeals to conscience on moral issues) and the public square (e.g., defending the right of conscience). This is a welcome resurgence, since formation and promotion of Christian conscience is particular important to our primary mission at Acton of articulating a vision of society that is both free and virtuous, the end of which is human flourishing.

We hear a lot about conscience, but what exactly does it mean? The general concept of conscience can be found in almost every human culture, but it has a unique and distinctive meaning for Christians. The Greek term for conscience (suneidesis) occurs more than two dozen times in the Bible, and serves an important concept, particularly in the Pauline epistles. If we examine the way Scripture talks about conscience we uncover five general themes:



1. Conscience is an internal rational capacity that bears witness to our value system.

A few decades ago, a common trope in comedies and cartoons was the shoulder angel/devil. A persons inner turmoil was personified by having an angel, representing conscience, on the right shoulder and a devil, representing temptation, on the left shoulder. This type of folklore imagery gave people the false impression that the conscience was like an inner listening room in which a person could hear the voice of God (a good conscience) or the devil (a bad conscience).

A more Biblical view is to consider the shoulder angel/devil as representing witnesses to our inner value system. Our conscience is a part of our God-given internal faculties, a critical inner awareness that bears witness to the norms and values we recognize when determining right or wrong.

Conscience does not serve as a judge or a legislator; that is a modern take on the concept. Instead, in the Biblical sense, conscience serves as a witness to what we already know. (Rom. 2:15, 9:1) Conscience may induce an inner dialogue to tell us what we already know, but more often it merely makes its presence known through our emotions. When we conform to the values of our conscience we feel a sense of pleasure or relief. But when we violate the values of our conscience, it induces anguish or guilt. Pastor-theologian John MacArthur describes conscience as a built-in warning system that signals us when something we have done is wrong. The conscience is to our souls what pain sensors are to our bodies: it inflicts distress, in the form of guilt, whenever we violate what our hearts tell us is right.

2. Conscience is a trustworthy guide only when it is informed and ruled by God.

A few days before he became a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama sat down with religion reporter Cathleen Falsani to talk about his faith. When Falsani asked, What is sin?, Obama replied, Being out of alignment with my values. While there is a lot wrong, theologically speaking, with that answer, it does contain a kernel of truth. What Obama was describing as being out of alignment with my values is what we could call violating our conscience. To violate ones conscience is indeed a sin (as well discuss in a moment). But what makes something a sin is not merely being out of alignment with our values but in choosing our own will over the will of God. Our conscience is therefore only trustworthy when it does not lead us to choose our will over Gods will. As theologian R.C. Sproul explains,

[W]e have to remember that acting according to conscience may sometimes be sin as well. If the conscience is misinformed, then we seek the reasons for this misinformation. Is it misinformed because the person has been negligent in studying the Word of God?

A prime example of the way our conscience may lead both Christians and non-Christians to sin is when we violate, or advocate for the violation, of creation ordinances. Among the creation ordinances are the clear injunctions to preserve the sanctity of the marriage bond between one man and one woman, the necessity and propriety of godly labor, and the keeping of the Sabbath (Gen. 2:1-3, 15, 18-24). Our conscience bears witness to the reality and truth of these ordinances, and we are guilty of sin when we deny or break them

3. Conscience is to be subordinated to, and informed by, the revealed Word of God.

Conscience cannot be our final ethical authority because it is, unlike Gods revealed Word, changeable and fallible. Too often, though, Christians reverse the order and attempt to use their conscience in order to judge God and his Word. Many Christians claim, for example, I could not worship a God who would say [a clear statement from the Bible] or I couldnt believe in a God who would do [something the Bible claims God clearly told someone to do].

In making such statements they may be appealing to their conscience. But in such cases, their consciences are being informed by Satan, not by God. A persons conscience may cause them to question a particular interpretations of Scripture. But our conscience can never legitimately judge a holy God or his holy Word.

When we find ourselves thinking Did God really say? when Scripture clearly says he did say just that, then we know it is the serpent and not the Savior speaking. (Gen. 3:1)

4. To willfully act against conscience is always a sin.

The conscience of the Christian is obligated and bound only by what the Bible either commands or forbids, says Sam Storms, or by what may be legitimately deduced from an explicit biblical principle. Our conscience should always be informed by what God has said. But what if we are mistaken about what the Bible commands or forbids? What if, for example, I believe that the Bible forbids any form of dancing  and yet I go square dancing ever Saturday night. Is that a sin?

In that case, it would be a sin to square dance since I would be acting in a way in which I think is wrong. Imagine if I were at a neighbors house and see a wallet lying on the floor. Thinking its my neighbors wallet, I quickly take the cash from it. Later I realize that it wasnt my neighbors wallet at all  it was my wallet, which had fallen out of my pocket. Would I still be guilty of theft, even though it was my own money I took? Yes, I would be since I had intended to do wrong. I had intended to steal  intended to violate Gods commandseven though I was mistaken about the object of my theft. As Paul says, For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin (Rom. 14:23). R.C. Sproul expands on that verse by saying:

If we do something that we think is sin, even if we are misinformed, we are guilty of sin. We are guilty of doing something we believe to be wrong. We act against our consciences. That is a very important principle. [Martin] Luther was correct in saying, It is neither right nor safe to act against conscience.

Sproul adds that the conscience can excuse when it ought to accusing, and it also can accuse when it should be excusing. While we should challenge misperceptions of what the Bible commands and forbids, we should be careful about encouraging people who are not yet mature in the faith or are underdeveloped in knowledge of Scripture from acting in ways that will violate their unformed or immature conscience.

5. Conscience can be suppressed by sin.

If we desire to develop a positive habit, we need to perform an action repeatedly, over time, until it becomes an automatic reflex. The same process occurs when we fall into sin. When we sin, we reject Gods authority. If we repeat our sin, over time, the rejection of Gods authority becomes an automatic reflex.

Even unbelievers, who innately know Gods general revelation, such as his invisible attributes, the creation ordinances, and the Noahide Laws, begin to deny such knowledge because of sin. Paul says that by our unrighteousness we suppress the truth. They think they are wise, but their sin makes them foolish. Eventually, God gives them over to their debased minds. (Rom. 1:24)

Believers are also in danger of falling into this destructive pattern. Sometimes our sin leads us to doubt the very reality of God. When we deny Gods authority we begin to doubt his existence so that we can salve our conscience about his judgment. (Not all doubt is caused by sin, but sin almost always leads to doubts.) Sin can cause our conscience to become seared and corrupted and wholly unreliable. (1 Tim. 4:2; Titus 1:15)

This is why to protect our conscience and keep it in working order we must preach the gospel to ourselves daily. We must call on the Holy Spirit to convict us of sin, lead us to righteousness, and remind us of the judgment that we are spared by our union with Christ Jesus. Only then can our conscience serve its intended purpose of helping us conform to the values of our Creator.
A San Antonio family nurse practitioner faces possible disciplinary action by the Texas Board of Nursing after the agency accused him of engaging in nontherapeutic prescribing practices.

Keith A. Wichinski, who co-founded and works at Nurse Practitioner Associates at 311 W. Laurel St., is accused of issuing 8,798 prescriptions for controlled substances to patients in an 18-month period spanning from December 2013 through June 2015, including dangerous drug cocktails of central nervous system depressants, according to a formal administrative charge lodged by the Texas Board of Nursing in January.

Those drug combinations in some cases included the painkiller hydrocodone, the muscle relaxer Soma and the anti-anxiety medication alprazolam, a generic form of Xanax, the charging document shows.

Wichinski, 44, declined to comment Monday and referred questions to his attorney, Dan Lype, who said Wichinski denies the allegations. Lype, whos based in Austin, also said he expects the case will ultimately be dismissed.

Theyre just allegations. Nothing has been proven or shown at this point. Theres not been any kind of hearing at this point, either, Lype said.

Combinations of controlled substances, such as those Wichinski is accused of prescribing, have greater risks than therapeutic benefit when taken together, the nursing boards charging document states. Wichinski repeatedly prescribed the same combinations of controlled substances in the same doses, strengths and quantities to patients, indicating a failure to individually assess each patient and develop a treatment plan in response to each patients individualized assessment.

The state board claims Wichinski failed to follow the minimum standards of nursing related to pain management by failing to exhaust low-risk, evidence-based treatments before resorting to high-risk treatments, failing to develop a treatment plan corresponding to a patients assessment, not appropriately monitoring patients for aberrant and/or drug-seeking behavior and not adequately collaborating with or adequately documenting his collaboration with a supervising physician.

Wichinski has not been charged with any criminal wrongdoing. He still has valid state licenses allowing him to work as an advanced practice registered nurse and as a registered nurse, the state nursing board confirmed. He also still has authority to prescribe medications. And he is continuing to see patients, Lype said Monday.

Wichinski responded in writing to the charge, but neither the state nursing board nor his attorney would provide a copy of that response to the San Antonio Express-News on Monday.

The nursing boards charge lists the initials of 20 patients who are tied to the allegations. Lype said the names of those patients have not been disclosed to him or to Wichinski, which has made it somewhat difficult to mount a defense.

Theres never been any mention of any specific patients, Lype said of the nursing board, adding that hes requested copies of the boards documents and patient records it has gathered.

Lype said he hasnt seen any problems in Wichinskis patient records. I dont really see any issues, he said.

I see this ultimately being dismissed, but it just takes time, Lype added.

Wichinskis practice, founded in 2009, provides weight loss pills and other weight loss solutions to patients, according to its website. Wichinski also provides hormone therapy to transgendered patients, the website states. He also has experience in primary care, psychiatry, pediatrics, emergency medicine, hospice care, Department of Transportation physicals and geriatric medicine, according to the website. The practice accepts most health plans as well as patients who dont have health insurance, the website states.

Wichinski is one of 16,553 licensed nurse practitioners in Texas, said state nursing board spokesman Bruce Holter. Of those who are licensed in Texas 16,101 have authority to prescribe medications. There are 950 nurse practitioners in Bexar County  and 516 of them are family nurse practitioners like Wichinski, statistics show.

Nurse practitioners in Texas can prescribe medications if they have a written agreement with a collaborating physician who supervises them, according to the Texas Nurse Practitioners website. There is nothing to indicate that any investigation has been undertaken on the physician who supervises Wichinski, Lype said.

The Texas Board of Nursing opened its investigation against Wichinski last summer, said Dusty Johnston, general counsel for the agency.

Johnston declined to say if the case was sparked by a complaint that the agency received. The agency doesnt release copies of complaints or disclose who filed them, even if nurses are ultimately publicly disciplined.

If the case is not resolved or settled, Wichinski will have a formal hearing in Austin before an administrative law judge. No hearing had been scheduled for him as of Monday.

Voter Guide: What to know for the midterm election Your guide to the Texas and San Antonio races and candidates on the Nov. 8 ballot.

An administrative judge typically issues findings and conclusions and may recommend what action, if any, should be taken. But the final decision on disciplinary action rests with the Texas Board of Nursing.

The board could order a nurse to undergo remedial education, issue a warning or a reprimand, or suspend or revoke a nurses license.

The state nursing board receives more than 16,000 complaints a year, but not all of those prompt investigations or disciplinary action. Nontherapeutic prescribing allegations account for only a small fraction of those cases, but are becoming more frequent, Johnston said. It is becoming a more serious issue with our board, he said.

In recent years, the state nursing board has received an increasing number of complaints about advanced practice registered nurses in pain clinics prescribing dangerous combinations of medications to patients in amounts that pose a greater risk of harm than help, according to the agencys self evaluation report filed with the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission in September. This trend has significantly strained the nursing boards resources to prosecute effectively, the report said.

Non-therapeutic prescribing cases are fairly complex and usually require cooperation with investigators and attorneys from other agencies, such as the Texas Medical Board and the Department of Public Safety, that report stated.

In fiscal years 2014 and 2015, the agency referred 44 complaints about nontherapeutic prescribing to its legal department. Of those cases, 16 were resolved through settlements, nine were set for hearings and 19 were still waiting to get on the docket when the agency filed its report with the Sunset Commission in September.

Those cases didnt include 21 other complaints about nontherapeutic prescribing that were still being investigated and 17 that hadnt yet been assigned to an investigator when the report was filed in September.
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Alamo City-based Lara Vineyard can use the name San Antonio under the terms of a settlement of a trademark-infringement lawsuit brought by Los Angeles-based San Antonio Winery.

Local startup Lara Vineyard can continue to use its hometown name San Antonio on its wine labels and elsewhere provided its followed by Texas to ensure connoisseurs dont confuse the young vintner with the long-established California winemaker.

Every place that San Antonio is used, whether its going to be on (Lara Vineyards) website, whether its going to be on the (wine) labels, wherever  wherever its used, youre going to find, comma, Texas after the words San Antonio, said Ted Lee, a local attorney who represented Lara Vineyard in the dispute.

San Antonio Winery had sued in January asking the U.S. District Court in San Antonio to declare that Lara Vineyards use of San Antonio in connection with the sale of wine would infringe on the California winerys trademark. The suit also sought unspecified attorneys fees and court costs.

The parties earlier this month jointly filed a request to permanently dismiss San Antonio Winerys lawsuit and a counter-lawsuit filed by Lara Vineyard. The request awaits a judges approval.

I cant give you the terms of the settlement, but I will tell you this much: Lara Vineyard is very happy with the settlement, Lee said.

Jeffrey Sheldon, San Antonio Winerys lawyer, confirmed the matter has been resolved.

Lara Vineyard owner Michael Lara planted grapes on his familys four-acre homestead on Smithson Valley Road on the Far North Side several years ago, a court filing indicated.

In July, Lara received approvals from the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau the labels for his vineyards Blanco Dulce de San Antonio and Blanco de San Antonio, the fanciful names for two white table wines.

Two weeks after the approvals, Sheldon sent a letter to Lara Vineyard directing it to modify the labels to exclude San Antonio from the wine names.

Voter Guide: What to know for the midterm election Your guide to the Texas and San Antonio races and candidates on the Nov. 8 ballot.

Just as you would protect Lara as a trademark, San Antonio Winery must protect its San Antonio mark, Sheldon wrote.

Lara responded by adding Texas to the names of the wine and to the vineyards home page on the Internet, but that wasnt enough to prevent San Antonio Winery from suing.

In its counter-lawsuit, Lara Vineyard argued the use of San Antonio, with or without Texas, is classic' fair use of a geographically descriptive term.

San Antonio Winery founders launched the business in 1917. It takes its name, just like the city, from St. Anthony of Padua, a popular saint of the Catholic Church.

pdanner@express-news.net

Twitter: @AlamoPD
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CHARLOTTE, N.C.  It happens all the time. You cant recall the lyrics to a familiar song until you hear the music. Then the words come flowing back, as if youd never forgotten.

This phenomenon is at the heart of a new program at Southminster retirement community that uses personally meaningful music and digital technology to improve the quality of life for people whose memories are fading.

Its working for John Robison, 85, a retired Charlotte businessman who lives in the south Charlotte complex. He suffers from dementia and has trouble with short-term memory.

But when he dons the ear phones to his iPod, his foot starts tapping and his eyes light up in recognition of songs by the crooners Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole.

Robisons wife, Rooney, 83, who also lives at Southminster, loves watching her husband get pleasure from the music.

Its so important for people with prolonged memory problems to be able to relate to something in the world that they can still enjoy, she said. Every connection you can make is rewarding for the family.

The Robisons are participating in the Music & Memory program, which is the subject of a documentary Alive Inside, about how music therapy can ease the suffering of people with Alzheimers disease.

The idea is that songs associated with important personal events can trigger memory for people with dementia, Parkinsons disease and other diseases that damage brain chemistry.

Calming music can enable the listener to focus and regain a connection to others.

And ideally, it can also help replace or reduce the use of medicines for anxiety and depression.

At Southminster, four residents so far have been outfitted with iPods specifically programmed with music that has personal meaning.

Alive Inside tells the story of Dan Cohen, a New York social worker who founded Music & Memory in 2010.

A few years earlier, Cohen had the idea to use iPods, which had been growing in popularity, to provide personalized music for nursing home residents.

It was a hit with residents, staff and families and became the prototype for a bigger effort.

With a foundation grant in 2008, Cohen brought 200 iPods to residents of four New York long-term care facilities.

Then came the documentary which made the program famous when a video clip of Henry, a nursing home resident reawakened by listening to his Cab Calloway favorites, went viral.

Since the founding of Music & Memory, hundreds of care facilities throughout the United States and Canada have implemented personalized music programs.

Alive Inside, the film by director Michael Rossato-Bennett, won the audience award for top U.S. documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014. Rossato-Bennett is making a new film, tentatively called Alive Inside 2, that takes a deeper look at human connections and personalized music by focusing on the relationship between elders and children.

Song that has meaning

Elizabeth Frye, Southminsters life enrichment and volunteer coordinator, is particularly excited about the new Music & Memory program because its so personalized.

Compiling a play list of meaningful music for an individual is like writing a biography, she said. It takes time to interview the family and find the right songs.

You have to become a detective, Frye said. You need to make sure its a song that has meaning.

The first Southminster resident to get an iPod was a 67-year-old man who had suffered a massive stroke that left him bedridden.

Frye said he was chosen because he was refusing to eat, was having a lot of pain and beginning to withdraw from others.

When a staffer asked the man to choose songs for his iPod, he wrote out a long list, including an emphasis on songs he didnt want, such as Who Let the Dogs Out?

He stayed up late adding to it every night, Frye said. He would call his wife, excited that he thought of a new one to add. It gave him something else to focus on beside his pain.

Just creating the list improved his outlook. He started eating more and being more social. He died unexpectedly only four weeks after getting the iPod. But during the time he participated, Frye said, His quality of life drastically changed.

Deep connection with music

John Robison, a banker who ran his own executive search firm in Charlotte, was the second Southminster resident to receive an iPod through the program.

The centers staff chose him because they knew hed had a deep connection with music throughout his life.

Rooney Robison told them he used to sing in his Presbyterian church choir and also played the clarinet.

When Frye sat down with the Robisons to download music, she made choices based partly on John Robisons body language. If the song got his foot tapping, it was a keeper.

He seemed to enjoy a wide array of music, from the Mills Brothers to Mozart, Luciano Pavarotti to Andrea Bocelli, and Onward Christian Soldiers to the UNC Chapel Hill fight song.

Only 29, Frye didnt know some of the songs Robison liked. But shes enjoyed learning about new music and watching his response.

She said hes coming out of his room more often and enjoying other music programs at the center.

Rooney Robison is also pleased: Im just so glad hes getting a chance to have something in his life that is like in the old days.
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To the people who gambled on a break in the weather to come downtown Monday evening, the color and spectacle, the confetti and cheers, of the Texas Cavaliers River Parade seemed to kick up a notch with the growing realization that they had guessed right  no rain.

Wow! Were having a parade! said one Texas Cavalier, expressing the general delight in his opening speech. I really wasnt sure this was going to happen. Were excited to be here.

The crowd stood and cheered as the first floats came by, bearing Marines, with musicians competing with the noise of a news helicopter whirring overhead. Peter Mako of Terrell Heights, working his 10th river parade, was still worried about the weather.

Weve logged a lot of man hours to put this thing together, he said. Its a miracle that weve managed to get a very good window here. Were very lucky.

Diane and Carlos Rincon came prepared with ponchos and umbrellas.

Its nice to be around a lot of people in the spirit of celebrating; everybodys happy and having a good time, she said.

While the crowd was large enough in spots to fill walkways to the edge, several stretches were noticeably thinner than in recent years.

Normally we bring the whole family, about 14, 15 people, said Rosalinda Benitez, 47, who was perched on a high wall near Convent Street with her mother, Evelyn, 71. But we didnt want to drag our kids through the rain if it started (pouring) on us.

Billy Ray Sheppard and the Main Event Band tuned up on their jazzed-up float, bustling with brass, woodwinds and colorful apparel, at the starting line at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, ready for their first-ever performance in the event.

Sheppard, 51, said the group was too excited to finally be in the parade to worry about rain.

This is a tradition that its an honor and a privilege to be a part of, drummer Lynel Lowery said. This, right here, is the event that makes you feel like youre really a part of San Antonio.

Closer to Houston Street, the seats started filling five deep as music blared from the passing floats. Thats where Marie Gordon, 53, was jamming out. A casino worker from Sacramento, California, she said she loved the intimacy of the venue.

Ive been to the Rose (Bowl) Parade (in Pasadena, California), but youre out of the action, she explained, swaying to the beat. I dont care about the rain today; its worth it to be right in the middle of things, right on the river.

Murray Dougherty, 72, and his wife, Isola, 74, made a random decision to come to San Antonio for Fiesta while touring around South Texas on a jaunt from Ontario.

We wanted to see it all, Murray Dougherty said. The trips been nothing bad, all positive.

The pair handled themselves like Fiesta veterans, courteously standing aside several times to help larger groups pass through the gap between their seats and the back wall of the walkway.

Just keep the rain away and well be happy, Isola Dougherty laughed.

The Star Wars-themed float by Girls Inc. was named the winning entry at the end of the evening.

It had been some years since Annette and Fred Navarro made it out to the river parade, but the lights, colors and people were as nice as she remembered, she said.

Its really awesome how much they do, Annette Navarro said of the Cavaliers support of education programs. She is retired after 26 years of working on special-education school buses. Her husband worked on buses too, after serving in the Army.

A man in uniform on one of the passing floats pointed at Fred Navarro, who was wearing a black Army T-shirt, smiled, and mouthed the words Thank you.

It touches me when people do that, when they thank him, Annette Navarro said. Theyve been through a lot.

For Jennifer and Kevin Steger, the bridge near La Villita was a special vantage point: Its where they met by chance 18 years ago, while watching the same parade. Shed never been to one. They sat next to each other and watched the floats go by.

A couple days later he sent a card to my work  you know the story of the frog prince? The note turned into a picture of a prince and a princess, and inside it said Help this frog turn into a prince; come with me to more Fiesta events, Jennifer Steger said.

Their first date was at A Night in Old San Antonio. They were married just across the river from where they met, at the Little Church of La Villita. Now they have a house on the Northeast Side and 2-year-old twin daughters, Brenna Marie and Riley Rae.

It was one of many decorative hats in the crowd, but there was a story behind Jennifers flower crown, too. He gets me fresh flowers every year at Fiesta, she said, smiling.

fioannou@express-news.net

Twitter: @obioannoukenobi
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WASHINGTON  No one answers the phone at Donald Trumps Texas campaign headquarters in Austin. Callers just get a busy signal, day and night.

His original state director quit abruptly in January, and the deputy named to replace him, Houston operative Joshua Jones, has kept a low profile.

To supporters in Webb County, a Mexican-border region that went for Trump in the Texas GOP primary, it has been a solitary journey, especially for those who hope to run as delegates for the national convention in July.

Few, if any, will make it past the state convention in Dallas next month, where Ted Cruz supporters will be the overwhelming majority, meaning they will get to pick most, if not all, of the states 155 delegates who are going to Cleveland.

In a contested national convention that goes past two ballots, Texas GOP party rules allow Trumps 48 pledged delegates to switch their support. That could be the difference in a prolonged floor fight.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign in Texas, with one of the largest troves of Republican delegates in the nation, has all but gone dark, adding to a sense of disarray as the billionaire businessman shakes up his top leadership team in New York.

Trump is expected to add to his overall delegate total in the coming weeks, including most of the 95 at stake in todays primary in his home state of New York. The absence of a meaningful ground operation in states such as Texas, however, illustrates how his chances of clinching the nomination ahead of the convention have steadily eroded.

Texas needs to get organized for Trump, said Elva Leyendecker, a Trump supporter from Laredo who hopes to be a delegate at the national convention in Cleveland. He needs to get with the program in Texas.

Much as Cruz has cut into Trumps delegate support by working the party machinery in states such as Colorado and North Dakota, the senators grass-roots supporters in Texas are confident they can out-hustle Trump to fill all the states delegate slots with their loyalists.

Their mission, spelled out by Cruz in recent speeches, is to deny Trump the 1,237 delegates needed to win the GOP nomination on the first convention ballot. In that scenario, Cruz said, I think we will go in with an overwhelming advantage.

While Cruz prepares for a drawn-out convention battle in July, Trump is aiming to rack up a majority of pledged delegates before the convention even starts.

Trump adviser Ed Brookover, meeting with House Republicans last week, assured them that Trump is on a glide path to hit the magic number in upcoming contests from New York to California.

Cruz believes that he can block that path. The Texas delegation could weigh heavily in that plan.

Although Trump won 48 pledged delegates in the March 1 Texas primary, their personal loyalties more likely will lie with Cruz.

The Cruz campaign intends to make sure of that with overwhelming numbers at next months state convention, where national delegates will be elected.

Were not going to send somebody who might waffle, said JoAnn Fleming, the Cruz campaigns Texas tea party chairwoman. If Im going to make a nominating speech, or a seconding speech, Im going to make sure they would rather have bamboo shoots shoved under their nails than vote for anybody other than Ted Cruz.

The same goes for the three delegates pledged to Marco Rubio, who dropped out of the race. Assuming Rubio falls short of 20 percent in Round 1, they will be free agents in Round 2, likely adding to the 104 Texas delegates Cruz won on the day of the primary.

I would be very surprised if Ted Cruz doesnt get all or virtually all of the 155 Texas delegates, said former Texas GOP Party Chairman Steve Munisteri, now a convention adviser to the Republican National Committee.

Cruz won nearly 44 percent of the vote in the states GOP primary, winning in all 36 congressional districts. Trump, second with nearly 27 percent of the vote, won a half-dozen counties. Most of those, such as Webb County, are along the Mexican border.

This is a border city, where the wall would go up, Leyendecker said.

Elected from her precinct to the state convention, Leyendecker would like to be a Trump delegate in Cleveland.

I would absolutely stick with the peoples choice, she said. Its not about me. Its about our country.

Thomas Ferrell, another state delegate from Webb County, said he also wants to support Trump at the national convention, where he fears the businessmans national lead in delegates could be reversed.

Its evident someone is trying to steal the delegates from Trump, Ferrell said.

The math does not favor Leyendecker or Ferrell. Their congressional district went to Cruz by 14 points. Though Trump won nearly a third of the Republican vote, the districts three national GOP delegates probably will be Cruz supporters.

That is because Leyendecker and Ferrell likely will be outvoted at their congressional district caucus meetings in Dallas to pick delegates for Cleveland.

Trumps only hope of electing Texas delegates loyal to him is to turn them out in large enough numbers at the state convention. There has been little sign of that.

Leyendecker said she has had no contact with the Trump campaign recently, and Ferrell said his contacts mainly have been through occasional emails. Although the campaign claims to have coordinators in each congressional district and a state staff of four, Ferrell and Leyendecker could not identify any Trump campaign organizers.

That impression was echoed by R.D. Griffin, the GOP chairman in Sabine County, a stretch of the Louisiana border that Trump won. I am not aware of a Trump ground operation in Sabine County, he said in an email.

Munisteri said the Cruz campaign was well represented at his own district gathering in March, when delegates were picked to the state convention. There was zero sign of any Trump or Kasich organization, he said, referring to presidential hopeful John Kasich.

Jones, the Houston operative who oversees Trumps grass-roots operation, did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did Trumps national operation in New York.

In recent weeks, Trump has reshuffled his top leadership ranks, installing longtime GOP operative Paul Manafort, a veteran of the 1976 contested GOP convention, to be in charge of the campaigns delegate efforts. The national field director, a loyalist to Corey Lewandowski, the embattled campaign manager, resigned Monday afternoon.

Trump brought on Rick Wiley, another veteran GOP operative, to head the campaigns Texas field operations. Both moves are intended to counter Cruzs use of party rules that Trump said are stacked against him to keep him from winning the nomination.
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HONDO  The owners of the deer-breeding ranch where Texas first whitetail with chronic wasting disease was discovered in June have dropped their lawsuit against the state over its handling of the outbreak.

State District Judge Mickey Pennington on Friday granted a motion for nonsuit by Robert and Susan Patterson, who had sued the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and its executive director, Carter Smith, last February.

The state has confirmed the disease in 10 white-tailed deer statewide since the first case was found at the Pattersons Texas Mountain Ranch in Medina County.

The ranchs entire penned breeding stock, a herd of more than 200 deer, was put down last summer as part of the states efforts to control the spread of the neurological disorder thats similar to mad cow disease.

Early this year, state officials returned to cull free-ranging deer on the 2,000-acre ranch for postmortem testing on the animals brains to see if any had CWD. The Pattersons sought a court order to block game wardens from hunting the loose deer and compensation for what it called a government taking of private property.

But Pennington in February agreed with the states position that TPWD officials have immunity from lawsuits unless the Legislature has waived it, which left the Pattersons with no legal remedy, their attorney Brian Davis said at the time.

Since the first CWD-positive test at the ranch, three other deer there also tested positive, as did one deer bred there and sold to a breeder in Lavaca County, state officials say.

Davis said Tuesday that his clients dropped the suit after concluding they could accomplish as much politically and administratively as they could judicially. He cited the states aim to develop a reliable live animal test for CWD as a factor in the decision.

A fatal form of spongiform encephalopathy, CWD can be transmitted through blood, saliva, urine and feces. State officials use postmortem testing on the brain stem and thyroid glands to detect the disease but hope to switch this year to techniques that allow live testing.

Davis previously said the Pattersons losses from the disease top $1 million, although they did receive $400,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in indemnification funds.

They also had challenged the states response to CWD in a lawsuit filed last summer, but it was quickly dropped.

Before June, CWD was previously found only in mule deer in Texas. CWD has spread to deer in 24 states since its discovery in 1967.

zeke@express-news.net
WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court appeared evenly divided in arguments Monday over a challenge by Texas and other states to President Barack Obamas far-reaching immigration policies  and that could spell trouble for the administration.

Conservative justices sounded sympathetic as expected to assertions that the Obama administration went too far with executive actions that shield 4 million immigrants from deportation and grant authorization to work.

But it was the comments by Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom the administration likely will need to prevail, that raised eyebrows.

Its as if the president is setting the policy and the Congress is executing it. Thats just upside down, Kennedy said.

The scope of executive authority is a key issue in the case, along with the right of Texas and other states to sue the federal government.

At issue is the administrations Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, known as DAPA, announced in November 2014. It would provide an initial two years of deportation relief and work visas to immigrants if they have been in the country for at least five years and avoided serious legal difficulty.

Obama said he acted because Congress refused to take up comprehensive immigration reform, an issue that surfaced in oral arguments.

The outcome of the case could have a significant effect on immigration policy and presidential authority, both hotly debated issues in the 2016 presidential campaign.

In 90-minute extended arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito aimed at wording in guidance that accompanied the presidents actions. The wording said immigrants would be lawfully present but still violate immigration law.

Questions about benefits under DAPA loomed large in the discussion. Texas has said that it would cost the state millions of dollars under a program that subsidizes drivers licenses.

Roberts at one point said the order had thrust states into a real Catch-22.

Responding to U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who handled the governments case, Roberts said: It seems to me that what youre saying here is, Texas says our injury is we have to give drivers licenses here, and that costs us money. And your answer is, Well, maybe you dont have to give drivers licenses. Go change the policy.

Roberts asked: Isnt losing money the classic case for standing?

Liberal justices grilled Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller, who argued the case for Texas and 25 other states.

Keller began his remarks by referring to DAPA as one of the largest changes in immigration policy in our nations history.

Before he could proceed, Sotomayor demanded to know: How can you say that?

She observed that an order by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 deferred action on deportation and granted work authorization to 1.5 million people  40 percent of the known population of undocumented immigrants at the time. Obamas actions would affect about 35 percent, she said.

When Keller alluded to economic burdens imposed on states, Sotomayor observed: If Congress really wanted not to have an economic impact, it would allot the amount of money necessary to deport them. But it hasnt.

Sotomayor pressed on, requesting details about how Texans get drivers licenses and asking: So why is it that you have to spend all this money? Why cant you just have your regular process and let people wait in line?

Keller replied that there has to be integrity in the license so it can be used for airport security and other identification purposes required by the federal government.

The death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February left the court shorthanded. A 4-4 split would leave intact a U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Texas had standing to sue. The appellate court also concluded that the states were likely to prevail in their claim that the Homeland Security Department should have used formal rule-making for the far-reaching policy.

A Supreme Court ruling is expected in late June.

Activists and politicians on both sides of the case rallied outside the court.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, who was in the chamber for the arguments, acknowledged afterward that Kennedys comments were concerning. But he noted that other questions suggested that justices are aware that courts could be overwhelmed if states were able to sue on the basis of costs incurred from federal actions.

The court asked tough questions on both sides, said Castro, an administration supporter in the case. It seemed to me that the justices were cognizant of the precedent they could be setting by ruling that the states have standing in this case.

Speaking on the Supreme Court steps, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton referred to the Constitution.

Its an amazing opportunity, an amazing day for us, he said. Our efforts to stop the presidents illegal immigration plan go back to fundamental principles  which is that one person doesnt have the unilateral authority to change the law and make new law.

Other critics, among them U.S. Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Tyler, set up a microphone to make their voices heard. Often they were drowned out by the boisterous crowd.

Its ironic that people who came into this country illegally .... want us to be like the countries they came from where we dont respect the law, Gohmert said.

At one point in a chaotic scene, pro-immigration activists joined in when Gohmert and his allies sang the national anthem.

Amid a cacophony of loudspeakers and drumming, supporters waved signs reading I Am An American and Keep Families Together.

Jessica Azua, 24, was among 15 people who arrived from San Antonio in a van trip that began Saturday afternoon.

We are not going to stop until we get what we need for our families, she said.

Mexico-born Jose Camargo, 56, was part of the San Antonio delegation. He described the spectacular scene he witnessed at the Supreme Court, a building he had seen only on television before Monday.

It (DAPA) would have a great, positive effect on me if it passes. It will have a negative effect on me if it doesnt, he said.

bill.lambrecht@hearstdc.com

Washington Bureau reporter Kevin Diaz contributed to this report.
This week on Radio Free Acton, Magatte Wade joins us to discuss the challenges and rewards of being an entrepreneur in Africa. Too often, people in the West tend to think of Africa as a place to send aid rather than a place to engage in trade. Magatte is working to change that attitude while building her beauty company, Tiossan, as well as the local economy in her native Senegal.

Wade will be joining us as a plenary speaker at Acton University in Grand Rapids, Michigan in June. If youre interested in attending, head over to the Acton U website for registration information, and do it quickly, as registration closes at midnight on May 20. You can listen to the podcast via the audio player below.
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The path to his profession was clear when James Bryant was just 5 years old.

Hed wear his little black suit and bow tie as he placed fallen birds or insects in a wagon, then lead a procession on his tricycle in his backyard. Even at that young age, pride welled inside of him at the thought of preparing a funeral for the departed.

Decades later, he doesnt remember exactly what sparked the idea of becoming a mortician. But the passion stayed with him as a teen when he interned with his uncle as an embalmer at a local funeral home. After a tour of duty in Vietnam, he separated from the Army and struck out to become the best embalmer he could be in an industry not often celebrated by society. The work became his calling, to be part of a team to present families with the lasting image of their departed loved ones.

And now, at 66, he has reached the pinnacle of success: He has been named National Embalmer of the Year, presented at the 2016 Epsilon Nu Delta Annual Osiris in San Antonio last month.

Its really the greatest award you can get as an embalmer, Bryant said. We are the nucleus of the funeral home.

Bryant has been a member of the San Antonio chapter since 1977 and a member of the national mortuary fraternity since 1983. Epsilon Nu Delta is a non-profit organization that Thomas and Frieda Whibby founded in 1942 for members of the mortuary profession.

Outgoing Epsilon Nu Delta president Rev. James Preston said membership in the national organization is by invitation only and a candidate must be a licensed embalmer. Preston called Bryant a very humble spirit who not only deserves the award but represents the organization very well.

Each year we look across the nation to recognize someone who has the attributes worthy of the award and Rev. Bryant exceeded all of those qualifications, Preston said, using an honorary title.

As unsung as it is, it still an important profession, Preston said. We have the responsibility of not only servicing the families that call us, but also embalmers are important in the sense (that) they are health professionals.

Bryant started at Lewis as an apprentice of the late Robert Washington. He worked for Washington for three years until the director thought he could be on his own.

Bryants co-workers enjoy working with him, said Lois Washington, the late directors widow who is now owner and general manager of Lewis Funeral Home.

James has been a blessing to the Lewis Funeral Home business, she said. Hes a very hard worker. Hes not only an embalmer, a funeral director, whatever questions a family may have, we refer them to him and he answers them with dignity.

For the past 36 years, Bryant has passed on lessons and shared his pride in his profession to students from the San Antonio College Mortuary Science program. In addition to the art of embalming, the students study chemistry, human anatomy, funeral home administration, pathology and psychology.

Bryant recognizes that there are many people who are afraid of what goes on in funeral homes, but he notes death is a natural part of life. His goal is to console the families he serves. He has always stressed reverence for the deceased.

I thank God for the longevity and heights He allowed me to gain in this profession, Bryant said. We do more than just have funerals. I hope that stigma will be broken one day.

vtdavis@express-news.net
The first year Rachel Barrios-Van Os competed in the Chili Queens Chili Cook-off, she came in third place. The second time, she won second.

This year, the third time really was the charm for Barrios-Van Os, crowned Chili Queen at this years cook-off Sunday at the Bonham Exchange downtown. The annual event benefits the San Antonio AIDS Foundation kitchen; 2016 was its10th year, and its third as an official Fiesta event.

This cause is very important to me. The San Antonio AIDS Foundation, Ive seen personally their kindness and generosity to those in the community in need, people going through a lot of pain. Were cooking from the heart and with love. Its all about caring for people  my heart is really in it. I love all the people here, said Van Os, who lives in Terrell Heights.

It was a theme echoed by other competitors. Love and heat, said Paul Rodriguez and Alicia Oviedo, when asked their chilis key ingredients.

Others had trusty techniques. I add things in a first, second and third dump. Im layering flavors. Then, I pray, said Bob Machaghgon of Alta Vista, who said hes been making chili since he moved to San Antonio in the 1970s. When I first got here I thought it had beans in it. Now I know better, he said.

Still others were relative chili neophytes. This is my first chili. Im from California and I wanted to make a Texas chili, said Angie Beckham, who is soon opening a business that will donate all its proceeds to the homeless, and who dreams of having her own food truck.

Were cooking for cooks. Its so wonderful to know that if they need a new blender, if someone needs a birthday cake for their last birthday, that we can help them get that. Were passing the hat along and we get to have a party in the meantime, said Joan Duckworth, Chili Queen Commissioner, who works in the office of the Bonham Exchange by day. She has deep ties to the building itself, too  its the place where her grandparents met and where her son got married.

As Sunday afternoon wore on, the rain started to come down hard on the patio, but you wouldnt know it from the party that was happening inside.

This year, the annual contest of Tackiest Drag Queen was renamed the Miss Whoochie title to honor Torrance Cheeves, a popular San Antonio drag performer who performed under that name and was stabbed to death in his East Side home last year. Contestants wore technicolor wigs, glitter in their beards, and flowers in their hair; This is all for Miss Whoochie  she had a beautiful heart, one said.

It was a day for celebrating and remembering community, and the Fiesta spirit was in the air.

Thats the best part, seeing all the people ready for Fiesta. You can feel the energy of Fiesta. Its not just the gay community coming together, its the entire city, said Rick Williams, president of the Texas Gay Rodeo Association.

Just look around, weve got everybody  gay, straight, blue, green, brown. Its the great thing about San Antonio, he continued. Its a melting pot for everybody and everyone is accepted.
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AUSTIN  The state is facing big problems affecting vulnerable populations that will take significant money to fix at the same time that a slump in the energy industry is chipping into its revenues, House Speaker Joe Straus warned Tuesday.

Writing a balanced and disciplined budget that appropriately funds our top priorities is going to be a significant challenge, Straus said in a letter to House budget-writers, expressing confidence they are up to the challenge.

This is not a theoretical exercise, but rather a task that affects children, taxpayers, and our states future, he wrote.

Oil prices that stood at close to $60 a barrel when the Legislature adjourned last year are averaging closer to $37 a barrel, Straus wrote. And the state sales tax has marked five monthly declines.

Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar last year reduced his estimate of anticipated tax revenue for the current budget period by billions of dollars, while still leaving more than enough money for the state to pay its obligations.

But lawmakers are facing budget challenges such as addressing a foster care system in crisis, Straus wrote. A federal judge has ruled that the system violates the rights of children who most often leave state custody more damaged than when they entered.

The public school funding system also is under court challenge. A state district judge already has ruled it unconstitutional, suggesting that a fix could cost up to $11 billion. The state has appealed the case to the Texas Supreme Court, which could rule this year.

In addition, Straus said, the program providing health care benefits to retired teachers is in need of a long-term solution.

Those challenges will require significant financial resources, wrote Straus, R-San Antonio, and they alone would pose a challenge for lawmakers who return in regular session in January.

Yet they come at a time when our state continues to grow rapidly, bringing more children in our schools, more cars on our roads, and an overall greater demand for state resources, Straus noted. At the same time, we do not want to abandon the commitment to lower taxation and overall fiscal discipline that has put our state in such a sound budgetary position.

He said budget-writers should approach their work with purpose and creativity.

Straus isnt alone in his worries, Senate Finance Committee Chair Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, said in a statement.

I share Speaker Straus concerns and look forward to working with the House to address the challenges facing our state. We are working on several fronts to tackle these issues  and keeping a close eye on our revenue situation, she said.

Nelson and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick sent a letter to state agencies Friday saying they are looking for ways to work with them to identify and reduce state spending.

As part of this effort, we strongly encourage that you review and scrutinize each and every expenditure within your agency using a zero-based budget approach, they wrote.

In addition to looking at state program needs, leaders including Patrick are setting the stage for additional tax relief in the next legislative session. Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican named by Patrick to head the Select Committee on Property Tax Reform and Relief, said there will be room for reducing taxes and that zero-base budgeting, in which all spending items must be justified, will help accomplish that goal.

The Legislature last year cut the state business tax and sent an option for local school property tax relief to voters, who approved it overwhelmingly.

While Texas can pay for its current two-year budget and then some, its economic difficulties were highlighted in October when the comptroller lowered his revenue estimate because of the oil and gas slump.

Hegar reduced his forecast of state tax collections by $4.6 billion. That still left more than enough money to pay for the overall spending plan approved by lawmakers for the fiscal period that began last Sept 1. Thats because legislators left funds on the table and had a bigger-than-expected balance when the state ended its last fiscal year.

The forecast did, however, anticipate less funding for addressing transportation needs because that money came from oil and gas revenues, and oil prices were lower than projected.

Hegars revised estimate still anticipates the price per barrel of oil to be $49.48 this fiscal year and $56.52 in the next one. He said Tuesday he has no immediate plans to issue a new estimate even though oil prices are lower than predicted. Tuesday, the price settled at $41.08. He said other factors are making up the difference.

The state economy continues to function and keeps doing it well, Hegar told reporters after testifying Tuesday at a meeting of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee. The Texas budget continues to work.

Hegar pointed out that the overall cushion for the current budget is $4.1 billion. But most of that is in so-called dedicated accounts that are collected for a particular purpose. Just $600 million is not so encumbered. The state also has $9.6 billion in its so-called rainy day fund.

There are looming factors that could further affect the budget picture, including tax lawsuits that could cost the state billions of dollars and spending thats expected to be needed for Medicaid growth.

And thats not the end of it, experts pointed out at the Appropriations Committee meeting, with new challenges likely to face lawmakers before they meet in regular session in 2017.

One example was apparent with the severe flooding brought by the recent rain, pointed out Rep. Armando Walle, D-Houston, citing the devastation in Harris County.

I would hope we would find some way of helping our folks in Harris County, Walle said. There are a lot of folks who are in need.

pfikac@express-news.net

Twitter: @pfikac
BAGHDAD  President Barack Obama will send U.S. military advisers closer to the front lines of the conflict against the Islamic State in Iraq, part of a series of measures that will escalate the U.S. military campaign to defeat the extremist group.

Until now, the advisers had been assisting Iraqi military divisions, which have about 10,000 troops. The assistance will be extended to units of about 2,000 soldiers who are more directly involved in day-to-day combat, Defense Department officials said Monday.

U.S. and Iraqi commanders want the advisers, who the officials say will not be on the actual front lines, to move closer to the fighting so they can provide timely, tactical guidance to the Iraqis as they prepare for a long-awaited assault on Mosul, Iraqs second-largest city, which was seized by the Islamic State in 2014.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who made the announcement in a speech to dozens of U.S. troops in Baghdad, said the Pentagon would also deploy several Apache attack helicopters and long-range artillery to aid in the fight. The Apaches, known for their withering  and accurate  fire, can quickly provide powerful air support to ground forces. The Pentagon would also increase its logistical support for the Iraqi military, Carter said.

The announcement of an enhanced U.S. presence in Iraq comes as the administration has said the campaign against the Islamic State is gaining momentum. In recent days, the Iraqis reclaimed the city of Hit, where commanders estimated there were several hundred Islamic State fighters. The administration says the Iraqis, with U.S. advisers and air and logistical support, are now poised to move toward larger cities.

We want to have our forces there with them so they can help them and they can bring the great weight of the coalitions enablers to this campaign, Carter said. Its all consistent  these additions are consistent with our overall strategic approach, which is to enable the Iraqi security forces, not to substitute for them.

The package of military aid will involve dispatching more Army Special Forces, or Green Berets, who specialize in advising and training foreign military forces.

Obama will increase the number of U.S. forces that commanders can use in Iraq by 217, to 4,087. But that number is largely symbolic because the Pentagon uses a system that has exceptions for soldiers who are supposed to be in the country less than four months and for commandos. Defense Department officials have said there are more than 5,000 service members in Iraq.
 CNN Fixes 'Bus Fire' Headline | Main | Wheres the Coverage? Twenty-Nine German Soldiers Join ISIS 

April 19, 2016

LA Times Ignores Bus Bombing, Covers Charges for Israeli Soldier

The Los Angeles Times, which earlier this year entirely ignored the fatal stabbing of Israeli mother Dafna Meir, and also ignored the Palestinian stabbing attack of Michal Froman, a pregnant Israeli woman who suffered wounds, ignores yesterday's bus bombing in Jerusalem.

According to Lexis-Nexis searches, the print edition has mentioned not a word about the bus bombing in which over 20 Israelis were injured.

It's not that the paper's attention is focused on other regions. In fact, The Times is very much focused on Israel. Today's print edition carries this story about Israel on page 3: "Israeli soldier charged with manslaughter in shooting of wounded Palestinian knife attacker."

And the Israeli government's cabinet meeting on the Golan Heights got over 1,0000 words on yesterday's page 3. On April 3, an Associated Press article about Palestinian clowns working in Gaza hospitals appeared on page 9. But the bombing of a bus in Israel's capital, injuring more than 20? According to Lexis-Nexis, it gets not one word in the print edition.

The Middle East section of the The Times website carries an AP story about the bombing. As of this writing, the Mideast section leads off with the story about the Israeli soldier facing manslaughter charges, prioritizing it over the Islamic State's take over of 70 percent of Syria's Yarmouk refugee camp, which places over 10,000 civilians in danger of starvation.

The Los Angeles Times, which just received a Pullitzer Prize for its coverage of terrorism of San Bernardino , falls short in its coverage of terrorism in Israel.

Posted by TS at April 19, 2016 04:30 AM

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Question: When a doctor could not find a dislodged biopsy guide wire, he abandoned his search after informing the patient of his intention to retrieve it at a later date. Two months later, he was successful in locating and removing the foreign body, but the patient alleged she suffered pain and anxiety in the interim. She filed a negligence lawsuit and, based on the obvious nature of her injuries, called no expert witness to testify on her behalf.

Dr. S.Y. Tan

Which of the following choices is best?

A. Expert testimony is always needed to establish the applicable standard of care in medical negligence lawsuits.

B. Although a plaintiff is not qualified to expound on medical matters, he/she can offer evidence from learned treatises and medical texts.

C. The jury is the one who determines whether a plaintiff can invoke either the res ipsa loquitur doctrine or the common knowledge rule to obviate the need for an expert witness.

D. This patient will likely win her case.

E. All are incorrect.

Answer: E. It is well-established law that the question of negligence must be decided by reference to relevant medical standards of care for which the plaintiff carries the burden of proving through expert medical testimony. Only a professional, duly qualified by the court as an expert witness, is allowed to offer medical testimony  whereas the plaintiff typically will be disqualified from playing this role because of the complexity of issues involved.

However, under either the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself) or the common knowledge rule, a court (i.e., the judge) may allow the jury to infer negligence in the absence of expert testimony.

The res doctrine is invoked where there is only circumstantial but no direct evidence, and three conditions are met: 1) The injury would not have occurred in the absence of someones negligence; 2) the plaintiff was not at fault; and 3) the defendant had total control of the instrumentality that led to the injury.

The closely related common knowledge rule relies on the everyday knowledge and experience of the layperson to identify plain and obvious negligent conduct, which then allows the judge to waive the expert requirement.

The two principles are frequently used interchangeably, ultimately favoring the plaintiff by dispensing with the difficult and expensive task of securing a qualified expert willing to testify against a doctor defendant.

The best example of res in action is the surgeon who inadvertently leaves behind a sponge or instrument inside a body cavity. Other successfully litigated examples include a cardiac arrest in the operating room, hypoxia in the recovery room, burns to the buttock, gangrene after the accidental injection of penicillin into an artery, air trapped subcutaneously from a displaced needle, and a pierced eyeball during a procedure.

A particularly well-known example is Ybarra v. Spangard, in which the patient developed shoulder injuries during an appendectomy.1 The Supreme Court of California felt it was appropriate to place the burden on the operating room defendants to explain how the patient, unconscious under general anesthesia throughout the procedure, sustained the shoulder injury.

The scenario provided in the opening question is taken from a 2013 New York case, James v. Wormuth, in which the plaintiff relied on the res doctrine.2 The defendant doctor had left a guide wire in the plaintiffs chest following a biopsy and was unable to locate it after a 20-minute search. However, he was able to retrieve the wire 2 months later under C-arm imaging.

The plaintiff sued the doctor for pain and anxiety, but did not call any expert witness, relying instead on the foreign object basis for invoking the res doctrine. The lower court ruled for the doctor, and the court of appeals affirmed.

It reasoned that the object was left behind deliberately, not unintentionally, and that under the circumstances of the case, an expert witness was needed to set out the applicable standard of care, without which a jury could not determine whether the doctors professional judgment breached the requisite standard. The court also ruled that the plaintiff failed to satisfy the exclusive control requirement of the res doctrine, because several other individuals participated to an extent in the medical procedure.

Hawaiis case of Barbee v. Queens Medical Center is illustrative of the common knowledge rule.3 Mr. Barbee, age 75 years, underwent laparoscopic nephrectomy for a malignancy. Massive bleeding complicated his postoperative course, the hemoglobin falling into the 3 range, and he required emergent reoperation. Over the next 18 months, the patient progressively deteriorated, eventually requiring dialysis and dying from a stroke and intestinal volvulus.
WOOSTER, Ohio  Sometimes as reporter, I have to take a step back from what Im doing. Sometimes the news or the action is too much, and I need a little time to think.

That was the case April 12, when the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction announced it would be closing all of Ohios prison farms, selling 12,500 acres, 2,300 head of beef cattle and 1,000 dairy cows.

The plan, according to the DRC, is that the sale of prison land and assets would provide millions of dollars to help fund inmate rehabilitation efforts.

In disbelief

My first words to my editor, when I forwarded her the story from The Associated Press, were I cannot believe this.

And the more I read, and the more I learned, the more upset I became.

First, I knew that this decision deserved a fair and objective story  a news article that would include both sides of the issue. We provide that story in this weeks edition and, as a reader, you can agree or disagree with what is being done.

But because what youre reading now is an opinion column, I will tell you, I think the decision to sell off Ohios prison farms should be reconsidered, re-evaluated, and quite possibly, revoked.

Diverse skills

In the initial AP story, prisons director Gary Mohr said about 220 inmates work on the farms in peak season, with few taking farm jobs after being released. About 20,000 inmates are released each year, and he reasons that spreading the wealth across all programs would do more good.

But is the goal of the program to have inmates go into farming?

I visited the Mansfield prison farm for a story in 2014, and I saw prisoners who were trained, not only in farming, but also construction, heavy equipment operations, shop labor and animal husbandry.

Moreover, the inmates I met were learning life skills about hard work, patience, planning and being trusted. They used wrenches, drove tractors, worked with bulls and took care of crops. And they were growing the very food that they and other inmates would eat.

Earning trust

They got to work on the farm only after proving they were responsible enough to be trusted outside of the brick and mortar and fences that housed other inmates. They were made to put every wrench back where it belonged, and anything that came up missing or out of place resulted in a full inspection.

We titled the story, Ohios prison farms help inmates experience freedom, responsibility, because, well  thats what we saw.

Serious issue

I do realize we have a serious drug and prison problem in this state. And I realize that with todays land values, the state could probably net a good return on 12,500 acres. For instance, the state fared well when it sold and privatized the prisons themselves, in 2011.

But whats a bunch of money going to do to fix it? Whats the cost of selling off our farms, and buying the foods and services they currently provide? Our inmates learning to work and providing for their own?

Life lessons

According to the announcement, the DRC wants to phase out outmoded prison farming operations, so they can focus on programs inside prison walls, in order to provide meaningful, in-demand job training.

When I was a boy, the most meaningful job training I ever got was from agriculture. I learned that if I didnt stack hay bales right the first time, Id be made to do it again. I learned how to work with animals, neighbors, how to work safely around farm machinery, and that chemicals and vapors were nothing to mess with, let alone sniff.

I also learned the value of hard work, and the value of taking care of the land, as it takes care of us. I did not become a farmer, but I sure do use the skills I learned.

Like our state prison farms, many of our farmers could also choose to sell off their land and make millions. But because they know the value in what they do, selling is a last resort.

The DRC does point out the potential for an increase in tax revenue if these properties are sold to private farmers or developers. If the property were privately owned, the state and local governments could tax you, and they surely will.

And I suppose that in some cases, farmers would probably like the chance to add the acreage to their operation. I dont downplay that there could be some incentives.

But this is a huge decision  a big chunk of land and herd of cattle that has been state-owned and providing a public service for many years.

Selling this off in the name of money deserves full scrutiny and review  down to the finest detail.

Related:

Ohio corrections department to sell prison farms (April 15).
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 Wheres the Coverage? Twenty-Nine German Soldiers Join ISIS | Main | Presspectiva's Amiur Exposes Haaretz Publisher's Bias 

April 19, 2016

USA Today Prints Palestinian Attacker as VictimAnd Refuses to Correct



USA Today omitted essential context in its print coverage by correspondent Shira Rubin of the March 24 shooting of a Palestinian terrorist who attacked Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Hebron (Israeli soldier to be charged in shooting,? April 14, 2016). This failure allowed readers to draw the false conclusion that IDF soldiers murdered, without any cause or explanation, an innocent man.

As CAMERA has noted (Voxs April Fools Day Reporting on Palestinian Terror Attacks,? April 7) on March 24, 2016 two Palestinian terrorists, armed with knives, attacked an IDF checkpoint in Hebron. During the attack, an IDF soldier was stabbed before both terrorists were shot, one of them fatally. Shortly thereafter, the wounded terrorist, Abed al-Fatah al-Sharif, was again shot, this time fatally in the head, by an IDF soldier named Elor Azaria. Azaria later claimed he thought al-Sharif was armed with a vest of explosives that he was attempting to detonate. The incident was filmed by BTselem, an anti-government group, and the IDF is investigating.

In its print edition, USA Today reported that Azaria was being charged with manslaughter after he was, caught on video fatally shooting a Palestinian in the head.? Later the paper said, Video shows the soldier firing on the wounded Palestinian man, Abd al Fattah Yusri al Sharif.?

However, the paper failed to explain why al-Sharif was wounded in the first place. No mention was made of the attack that preceded the incident, that another Palestinian assailant was involved and that an Israeli soldier was stabbed before the two perpetrators were shot. Instead, readers were left with the impression that a Palestinian Arab was inexplicably murdered by an Israeli soldier.

USA Todays online version (Israeli soldier who shot Palestinian to face manslaughter charges,? April 14) did note these essential details. It clearly stated, The military initially said two Palestinians stabbed and wounded an Israeli soldier before troops shot and killed the pair.? Unlike the print version, the online article also detailed statements by Israeli officials who criticized Azarias actions. While not perfectthe online version failed to note BTselems history of anti-Israel distortions (see, for example BTselem Casualty Count Doesnt Add Up,? CAMERA, Nov. 2, 2008)it did offer a more nuanced and detailed accounting of the Hebron shooting as it was understood at the time than the print version.

On April 15, 2016 CAMERA contacted USA Today requesting a correction to the misleading print article, noting that other outlets such as the Times of Israel (IDF: Enough evidence to charge Hebron solider in killing,? April 5) and The Los Angeles Times (Israeli military battles public furor,? April 8), among others, reported that two armed Palestinian Arab men had precipitated their shooting by initiating an attack on IDF soldiers.

In an email response to CAMERA, USA Today refused to correct, although it implicitly acknowledged that the print version of the article did not provide the context that could be found online. The paper claimed, there is limited space in print to elaborate on all the context of what is often a complicated story, however, we did run a longer version online with further context as you suggested.?

USA Todays explanation did not pass muster. The same day that USA Today published its misleading article on Hebron, The Washington Post ran a four paragraph Associated Press brief (Soldier to be charged in death of Palestinian?) on the same topic. Unlike USA Todays print version, it managed to provide the who? and the why? that basic journalistic standards require.

Posted by SD at April 19, 2016 04:45 PM

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Holly Lodge

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Holly Lodge is a newly built Self Catering Holiday Lodge based on a farm in rural South Worcestershire.

Sleeping up to 8 people, Holly lodge is the ideal base for visiting the many attractions this part of the country has to offer.



Sandra & Tom Goodwin would like to thank you for taking the time to visit our web site. We hope that you will find the contents informative and to your liking. Should you have any queries, or wish to make a booking please do not hesitate to contact us.

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Around 90 percent of consumers who are buying less pork have not cut back consciously, according to initial research into why consumption has been falling in recent months.

The National Pig Association suggests reversing the downward trend will be do-able, particularly if consumers see more convenience products on supermarket shelves.

Eye-appeal is also important as pork is still considered by some shoppers to be a fatty meat  so a lean appearance is important to achieve a healthy image.

Consumers aged 35-44 have contributed the biggest declines in pork consumption but all consumer groups have registered declines, except children aged 5-9.

Even bacon, sausage and ham consumption has been declining  except at breakfast-time where consumers are more engaged with these products.

Own-label brands continue to dominate the sausage market with premium sausages being the largest tier which, although still in decline, is performing better that other tiers.
Farmers in England who have not received their Basic Payment Scheme payment by the end of April will receive 50 per cent bridging payments.

The Rural Payments Agencys chief executive has announced the money will initially be paid from Treasury funds and then topped up at a later date.

Mr Grimshaw said he was fully aware of the "frustration and anxiety" felt by farmers still waiting for their money and acknowledged that the RPA "could have done more".

"It's been an incredibly challenging year," he said. "Our experiences from 2015 will give us valuable insights into 2016."

"We will pay these claims as soon as we can but these are complex claims that are proving harder to complete than anticipated," stressed Mr Grimshaw.

The Tenants Farmers Association (TFA) welcomed the bridging of payments but said it would continue to push for an extension to the current deadline of May 16.

TFA chief executive George Dunn said the organisation has been working closely with the RPA to fulfil payments, but following a meeting of the RPA's Technical Stakeholder Group on April 13 there were a "significant number" of issues that still need to be resolved.

"Although some progress was made, there are a significant number of issues which remain outstanding.

"With a month to deadline the TFA viewed the meeting as an important line in the sand."

"Without such an extension both the RPA and BPS applicants will be placed under intolerable stress," concluded Mr Dunn.

Delays in payments to farmers are putting incredible financial pressure on cash flows, at a time when farmgate prices are down across the board and markets are particularly volatile.

Farmers in desperate situation

CLA President Ross Murray said: "Many of the farmers that have still not been paid for work they carried out as long ago as autumn 2014, are in a desperate situation.

"Given how late this has become, if they cant be paid in full it is right they receive a bridging payment.

"We are disappointed that yet again emergency measures have become necessary. In due course there will need to be yet another review into how this situation has come to arise.

"We advised the RPA leadership to consider a part payment process for complex claims in the autumn of 2015 and it is important to understand why any action was not taken sooner.

"In the meantime we remain absolutely focused on working with the RPA leadership and the Secretary of State to ensure they are finding solutions to these mounting problems."
Farmers are seeing some of the worst oil seed rape crops they have ever seen this year.

Numbers of recorded cabbage stem flea beetles (CSFB) have increased greatly over the past few years.

Methods traditionally used by farmers to fight the pests are no longer having the same affect, as the beetle is becoming increasingly resistant to chemical sprays.

Keith Wells, who farms oil seed rape in East Yorkshire, said: "These are the worst crops of rape weve ever had."

Keith said that the problem had become seriously worse since the Euorpean Union banned the use of neonicotinoid treatments in 2013.

The problem is driving up the cost of growing oil seed rape, with farmers having to nearly double their seed rates to combat the problem.

In 2012 oil seed rape was worth 400 per tonne compared to todays price of just over 250 per tonne.

Keith said that some farmers might seriously question the viability of growing the crop in the future.

Nearly impossible to grow without treatment

NFU crops board chairman Mike Hambly said: "We are very aware of the threat of flea beetle attack on oilseed rape crops being a widespread problem across the country.

"Neonicotinoid seed dressing has been an effective and targeted way of protecting crops from this.

"Without this treatment, growing one of the most important crops in the UK sustainably is becoming nearly impossible for many farmers and many are using older products which the pest is increasingly resistant to.

"We must see a timely response from Defra and CRD so we can move forward with the logistics of seed distribution if approved."

AHDB has issued a call for research to improve knowledge of the interactions between cabbage stem flea beetle (CSFB) and oilseed rape.

The call forms part of AHDB Cereals & Oilseeds programme of research to understand the impacts arising from the restriction on the use of neonicotinoid seed treatments.
Kenilworth and Southam MP, Rt Hon Jeremy Wright QC, visited Stoneleigh based businesses operating within the anaerobic digestion (AD) industry to learn how they support the local economy and jobs.

By building and supplying AD technology to British farmers across the UK, Stoneleigh Park based agriKomp and Stoneleigh Abbey based Weltec Biopower are delivering vital baseload power, decarbonising the energy, waste and farming sectors, and improving food production.

After his visit to both businesses, Jeremy Wright MP commented: "Anaerobic digestion has a great deal to offer in both energy generation and waste disposal and it was good to see locally based firms operating in this sector.

"They are adding to Stoneleigh's strength as a centre for rural industries and innovation."

The Chief Executive of the industry trade body (ADBA), Charlotte Morton, added: "We were pleased that Jeremy took the time to listen to the AD businesses operating in his constituency and offered pragmatic and proactive support in raising industry concerns with the relevant government departments.

Kenilworth and Southam MP, Rt Hon Jeremy Wright QC; agriKomp Director, Steven Cook; and agriKomp General Manager, Quentin Kelly-Edwards

"AD offers our homes much more than round-the-clock green energy alone. It reduces the UKs carbon footprint, reverses soil degradation that is estimated to cost the UK 1.2 billion a year, limits our reliance on imported energy and artificial fertilisers.

"AD integrates perfectly into existing farming businesses to support rural economies the length and breadth of the British isles.

"During his visit Mr Wright learned of the local industrys uncertain future amidst falling tariff support and a severely restrictive cap on continued deployment.

"With support capable of sustaining the recent surge in AD deployment, the industry could significantly improve its already excellent return on investment over the next five years, potentially delivering 30 per cent of the UKs domestic heat or electricity and employing a further 30,000 people.

AgriKomps General Manager, Quentin Kelly-Edwards, explained: "AD has proved to play a major part in providing base load electricity, district heating and biomethane in the renewable energy mix across Europe.

"The challenge is it takes longer to deploy compared to other renewables, so requires longer term support from the Government to reach maturity and fulfil its role in the energy market.

"We are constantly developing new products & processes towards making AD more efficient, to not only become a significant part of the UK renewables sector, but a truly global product.

"With our focus on agricultural plants, we are committed to providing farmers with market leading technology that is simple, cost effective and highly efficient, which in turn enables them to create much needed additional revenue streams at a time when agriculture faces challenges.

"By utilising on farm waste, particularily slurry and manures, the potential is there to provide much needed employment to rural communities and electricity and heat to the nation."

Weltec Biopowers UK Sales Manager, Dr Kevin Monson, added: "AD is very much a sector that provides many diverse benefits for UK plc, and is therefore worth supporting at Government level.

"AD provides home-grown secure renewable energy, safe baseload power that we dont have to buy from Russia or the Middle East, de-centralised energy supply, availability of organic wastes from Lands-End to John OGroats, dealing with materials that would otherwise go to landfill or cause pollution.

"AD also provides a profitable use for break-crops, recycles organic materials to land, enhancing soil quality, provides long-term employment in rural areas, and underpins/safeguards farms incomes - often keeping them in business meaning they can continue to produce food!"
Merial will use its presence at the Pig and Poultry Fair to launch its NeO vaccination technology to the UK and Irish poultry sectors on 10th and 11th May 2016.

NeO effervescent tablets offer an alternative to the traditional glass vial method of dispensing vaccines to water, in preparation for spray or drinking water administration.

This new tablet technology is designed to significantly improve vaccination practices for poultry producers while maintaining reliable virus protection.

The NeO tablets are packed in aluminium blisters and easily dissolve in water.

Gavin Kelly, Merials Avian Manager for the UK and Ireland, says: "Were really excited to be able to bring this new tablet technology to British and Irish poultry producers.

"NeO is going to be really helpful on farm. Compared to the traditional glass vials, NeO tablets are much easier to use.

"They are coloured so you can be sure you have added the dose and theres no risk of glass breakage, so its safer for operators too.

"Less glass and less packaging on farm can only be a good thing; the aluminium blister packs and card outers reduce the quantity of waste by 10% compared to vials.

"Fridge space is always at a premium, and while NeO tablets do need refrigerating, the packs only take up a fraction of the space normally required."

Two of Merials world-leading poultry vaccines will be available in the new NeO format, including Gallivac IB88 and Avinew and boast the same high levels of safety and efficacy.

Gallivac IB88 NeO contains live vaccine against Infectious Bronchitis caused by the coronavirus variant, strain CR88 (793B) and is administered in water via spray.

Avinew NeO contains live attenuated virus of Newcastle disease, VG/GA-AVINEW strain and is administered in water by either spray or through drinking water.

Producers interested in learning more about NeO should visit the Merial stand at Pig and Poultry Fair, or speak to their vet. Avinew NeO is already available while Gallivac IB88 NeO is expected to be available shortly.
Scientists at The John Innes Centre and The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) have developed a free online tool that will help a global community of scientists understand more about important food crops.

The recent revolution in genomic technology has provided crop scientists with the opportunity to generate an enormous amount of information about how plants grow under different environmental conditions.

However, making sense of this information is extremely difficult as it relies on computational expertise that many crop scientists do not possess.

A team of scientists from The John Innes Centre and TGAC, led by crop geneticist Dr Cristobal Uauy, have used their expertise to develop a novel database analysis software tool called expVIP (expression Visualisation and Integration Platform).

This is specifically designed to help the worldwide community of crop scientists get more out of their data.

ExpVIP allows researchers to submit information from any species into a single web-based tool that will provide a full analysis of their expression data.

This enables scientists and breeders to know where and when genes are expressed in their favourite plants.

Dr Uauy, said: "This new tool will accelerate scientific discoveries by enabling researchers and breeders to more easily place their discoveries in the context of previous knowledge."

Most of the worlds major crops are polyploid, meaning they have multiple copies of a very similar set of genes.

This makes analysis of gene expression notoriously difficult. However, expVIP is designed to tackle this effectively and simplifies the interpretation and linkage of this complex data.

As a proof-of-concept, the scientists used expVIP to analyse publicly available data from wheat plants grown under a variety of growth conditions.

Over 400 datasets which were previously separate and were not easily accessible to most breeders and researchers have now been opened up and linked thanks to this resource.

Ricardo Ramirez-Gonzalez, PhD student at TGAC and JIC and a member of the team who created the new tool, said: "ExpVIP makes the analysis of big data from expression experiments more accessible, enabling the research community to focus on the biology behind the experiments."

Philippa Borrill, a BBSRC Anniversary Future Leader Fellow and expVIP team member, envisages that, "the ability to visualise the expression patterns and infer the functions of genes presents a tremendous opportunity to improve major food crops".

Analysis of genomic data is a key aspect of future strategies that researchers will use to develop improved crop species that are able to flourish in the worlds changing climate.

The expVIP tool is an important step to help researchers without advanced computer skills to get the most out of their data, ultimately, better preparing them to develop improved crop varieties.

This work was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the International Wheat Yield Partnership (IWYP) and from TGAC at Norwich Research Park.
The European Council has given its approval to a regulation aimed at promoting the consumption of milk, fruit and vegetables in schools.

The NFU has lobbied the UK government to support this scheme and is pleased to see the final European step towards implementation in August 2017.

Under the revised proposals, the existing Fruit and Vegetables Scheme and School Milk Scheme will merge into one larger programme with an increased budget of 250m Euros, with the UKs allocation increasing from the last review of the programme.

It has been a lengthy process of approval and European farm ministers met on Monday 11 April, voting to adopt the new measure.

The UK abstained from the vote, despite supporting the newly approved scheme.

The UK Government traditionally objects to any 'over extension' of European influence.

While it supports the notion of the schemes, it often abstains on principle in order to make the point that national governments should be allowed to determine the finer technical details, rather than leaving it to the European Commission.

"We are all too aware that young people are eating fewer dairy products and the NFU has been working hard both in Brussels and with other UK stakeholders as part of the School and Nursery Milk Alliance to monitor and push for progress towards 2017 for implementation of the scheme.

"This final seal for the regulation moves us closer to the need for practical implementation decisions to be made in the UK and the NFU will continue to work closely with Defra, lobbying to improve access to high quality, nutritious British dairy products for our children in schools.

"Not only does the scheme help to improve the nutritional profile of childrens snacks and meals, but it also helps to shape consumption trends for the future."
Egg producers supplying the countrys second biggest packer have been informed that the company has sold its free range business.

Stonegate has written to its producers to tell them that it has sold its free range and organic operations. The company, which is based at Chippenham in Wiltshire will continue with its colony egg business, it says.

The letter to producers was signed by Richard and Pam Corbett, who bought the business in July 2008 after the Competition Commission stepped in to thwart the attempted merger with Deans Food Group to form Noble Foods. The Competition Commission ruled that the merger would reduce competition in the market.

In the letter announcing the sale of the free range business, the Corbetts said: "Today we are announcing that we have sold part of our egg packing and production business.

"The sale includes Stonegates free range and organic egg production and packing, as well as the Clarence Court operations.





"We will continue to own and operate our colony egg business Ridgeway Foods."

They said: "It was July 2008 when we joined Stonegate, and over the years we have built Stonegate to be a solid and successful player in the egg market.

Instrumental to this has been our producers and customers. Under James Corbetts successful guidance,

Stonegate has developed into a modern grocery supplier with a strong management team and great employees."

James, the son of Richard and Pam Corbett, took over as managing director of the company in 2014, succeeding Nick Rogers.

Richard and Pam said in their letter: "After eight years, we have decided that the time is right for us to take a step back and pass the baton to the next person.

Adrian Gott, who previously worked at Stonegate and was instrumental in establishing the Clarence Court speciality egg brand, has purchased Stonegate from the Corbett family.





"As a free range egg producer, himself, from a family who were involved in the poultry industry, we are confident he will continue the successful growth of the business going forward.

"Stonegate will be celebrating its 90th birthday this year and we are very proud to have been part of its fantastic journey.

We know we leave the company in a secure position with excellent producers and a strong customer base.

"We have thoroughly enjoyed working with you all over the years and we wish you all the very best for the future."

Stonegate was founded in 1926 when a small group of farmers from the village of Stonegate in East Sussex came together to form an egg co-operative.

The farmers pooled all the eggs they produced and packed them before taking them to markets to sell.

The modern business emerged following the merger between Horizon Farms and Stonegate in 2000 and major acquisitions that included Thames Valley Foods in 2001.

In 2006 there came the controversial merger with Deans Foods to form Noble.

The merger was referred to the Competition Commission and Noble was subsequently ordered to sell the Stonegate business to maintain competition in the UK egg market.

The business was bought by Pam and Richard Corbett.
After five successful years, Great British Beef Week 2016 will take place from 23rd April to 2nd May.

Beef Week kicks off on St Georges Day  and is designed to raise awareness of the quality and versatility of great British beef.

Organised by Ladies in Beef, this year the emphasis is on beefing up your butty, a cheeky celebration of sandwiches of which over 5.7 billion are eaten every year.

Research shows that the humble sandwich is increasingly becoming the meal of choice for time-pressed families.

Sophie says to look out for the Red Tractor logo, so you know your meat is fully traceable from farm to fork

The campaign will help consumers get the best from their beef, from creating a celebration roast for St Georges Day and using up their leftovers in a proper butty, to advising on the huge range of steaks that can be used to make a perfect sandwich.

It will be celebrated with events and activities around the country, run in conjunction with Great British Beef Weeks charity partner, the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution (R.A.B.I.).

The face of the week is talented young butcher Sophie Cumber, who will be telling consumers to look out for the Red Tractor logo and encouraging them to visit their local butcher.

"I grew up on a beef and dairy farm. That, combined with my experience as a butcher, means I fully understand what goes into producing top-quality British beef," Sophie commented.

"As this years Great British Beef Week representative, Ill be telling consumers to look out for the Red Tractor logo so that they know their meat is fully traceable from farm to fork and encouraging them to visit their local butcher."

Who stocks 100% British?

Shoppers are being reminded of the NFUs online sourcing guide as the best way to find out who is backing British livestock farmers.

The shopping guide lists the sourcing policies of all the major retailers on their own brand products.

It shows the Co-operative, Aldi, Lidl, M&S, Waitrose and Morrisons source 100% British beef across all lines while Tesco, Asda, and Sainsburys only source 100% British for their premium lines of beef.

Charles Sercombe, NFU livestock board chairman, said: "Im delighted that we see the return of this annual event to promote British beef at a time when were seeing significant challenges for the sector as millions of pounds are being wiped off the value of the payment grids leaving many producers questioning the viability of the industry.

"We need initiatives like Great British Beef Week to raise awareness among shoppers of great British beef and to re-engage with consumers who continue to call for greater provenance and clearer labelling of the origin of the product."
 LA Times Ignores Bus Bombing, Covers Charges for Israeli Soldier | Main | USA Today Prints Palestinian Attacker as VictimAnd Refuses to Correct 

April 19, 2016

Wheres the Coverage? Twenty-Nine German Soldiers Join ISIS

Twenty-nine former German Army soldiers have joined the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a U.S.-designated terrorist group, according to a German military intelligence report.

Legal Insurrection, an online blog that focuses on antisemitism, legal and political issues, reported that the German military also is investigating 65 suspected jihadists serving as active duty German soldiers (German Army alarmed at growing Islamist infiltration, as 29 ex-soldiers join ISIS,? April 14, 2016).?



Legal Insurrection noted that according to the German newspaper Handelsblatt, since 2007 German Military Counter-Intelligence Agency (MAD) has investigated 320 active duty soldiers for having suspected links to Jihadist circles. The newspaper also confirmed that until recently no background checks were done on soldiers handling combat equipment. The screening was only limited to soldiers accessing classified materials.?

An estimated 700 Germans have left to join ISIS, 100 of them women. Legal Insurrection said that approximately 800 jihadists have returned or attempted to return to Germany from the battlefields of Iraq and Syria. Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germanys domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has claimed that there has been a sharp increase? in the number of women under 25 leaving the country to join ISIS.

The reports of members of the German military joining ISIS come after an increase in terrorist attacks on the European continent.

Yet, major U.S. print news outlets largely failed to note reports of German soldiers either defecting or deceiving a country that is a key American ally and NATO leaderafter receiving advanced military training from that ally.

A Lexis-Nexis search of USA Today, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times showed no mention of the report of jihadist infiltration of the Germany military.

However, in a three paragraph brief, The Washington Times (Military proposes ways to weed out jihadis,? April 18, 2016) informed its print readers that German counterintelligence officials believe at least 29 former soldiers from the country have left to join the Islamic StateSince 2007, as many as 22 German soldiers have been identified as Islamists and 17 have been fired, the DPA [German news agency] report said.?

Legal Insurrection said, The infiltration of German and other NATO militaries is part of a well laid out plan by the Islamic State. Islamic State has been urging potential recruits in Europe to get military training before heading to Iran and Syria.?

Islamist terror groups previously have used knowledge and skills they picked up from the U.S. military. Ali Mohamed, one of the founding members of al-Qaeda, the U.S.-designated terror group that among other acts perpetrated the Sept. 11 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, was a member of the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In his 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, author Lawrence Wright noted that Mohamed wrote terrorist training guides for al-Qaeda, imparting skills he learned from the U.S. Army and elsewhere [Mohamed was a member of the Egyptian Army prior to serving in the U.S. Army] to al-Qaeda. Mohameds influence extended to the top of the terror network, including its founder Osama bin Laden. Former FBI Special Agent Jack Cloonan called Mohamed [Osama] bin Ladens first trainerHe taught bin Laden (The Torture Question: Interview with Jack Cloonan,? PBS Frontline, Oct. 18, 2005).?

Whether the ISIS members who defected from the German army will have the sort of influence of Ali Mohamed is an open questionone that many in the news media are failing to ask or even report. Wheres the coverage?

Posted by SD at April 19, 2016 09:48 AM

If you let them in your army, this is what you can expect... Wait until they start pulling a Fort Hood instead of joining ISIS so the Russians can send them to Hell...

Posted by: Charles Hanks at April 20, 2016 02:05 PM

Even more discouraging is the fact that sociologists and social activists will ignore the direct connection between the decline of the Nazis with the rise of Islamist causes and Sharia law in Germany.

Islamic terrorists seem to be the only notable growth in the garden replacing a potential flower bed with nothing but weeds.

When are Muslim reformers going to take up their bullhorns and make themseleves heard?

Posted by: jeb stuart at April 21, 2016 11:40 AM

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Legal ruling set to have implications for farm inheritance rows
This has coincided with the massive devaluation of the Ukrainian hryvnia and Professor Kingwell identified this in his report as a trend which is expected to continue, along with the growing competitiveness this has brought for Ukraine in the world market.
"We like Magenta's long coleoptile as it allows us to sow deeper to seek sub-soil moisture and we have sown the variety up to 100 millimetres deep and achieved about 50 per cent emergence in years where there has been good subsoil moisture in early May and no significant rain on the horizon."
Fayetteville mother says four charged in son's killing were his friends

The mother-of-two is struggling to understand not just how her son could be gone so quickly, but why his friends turned on him.
Yesterday, Chinas two main judicial agencies released a joint judicial interpretation on bribery, corruption, and misappropriation of official funds.

This interpretation provides additional clarity in understanding the amendments to the Criminal Law that took effect last year, most notably by (1) expanding the definition of bribes to include certain intangible benefits, (2) clarifying that bribes given after benefits are received are indeed bribes, (3) establishing monetary thresholds and standards for bribery prosecutions, including raising the thresholds for bribes involving government officials and non-government officials, and (4) providing additional details on the requirements and benefits of voluntary disclosure.

The judicial interpretation (Interpretation), formally titled Interpretation of Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in Handling Criminal Cases Related to Graft and Bribery (), was released on April 18 by the Supreme Peoples Court and Supreme Peoples Procuratorate and is effective immediately.

Expanded definition of bribes to include certain intangible benefits. The PRC Criminal Law criminalizes giving money and property () to state functionaries () or to business counterparties in exchange for improper benefits. The new Interpretation defines money and property to include money, material objects, and also property-like benefits. Property-like benefits includes material benefits that can be calculated monetarily, such as home renovation, debt relief, etc., and other [intangible] benefits that need to be paid using money, such as membership services, travel, etc. (,). This expansion of the definition to explicitly include certain intangible benefits seems aimed at giving prosecutors more tools to investigate and prosecute cases where a service provider offers its own services to a government official for free or confers benefits through intermediaries.

Clarified bribes includes payments given after benefits are received. The interpretation clarifies that a government official accepting money or property after the improper benefits are sought or received is bribery. This closes a perceived loophole where some companies or individuals believed that later thanking an official for their help (e.g., giving them a lavish gift or other transfer of value) should not be considered bribery because the transfer of value was not an inducement to the official providing the benefit.

Re-established monetary thresholds and standards for bribery prosecutions. The monetary thresholds are somewhat convoluted depending on the crime and certain conditions, but of particular note is raising the minimum bar for most prosecutions for offering bribes from RMB 5,000 (about $770) to RMB 30,000 (about $4,600), unless certain other factors are involved, such as bribing three or more people, using unlawful gains for the bribe, or bribes given to officials of certain government agencies. Similarly, the monetary thresholds for prosecutions of bribery crimes not involving state functionaries are set as double the thresholds for bribery crimes involving state functionaries, reflecting the governments emphasis on prosecuting government officials.

The Interpretation also provides limited additional guidance on the standards for certain terms used in the Criminal Law as amended last year, such as relatively large amount, huge amount, especially huge amount, other relatively serious circumstances, other serious circumstances, other especially serious circumstances, and causing heavy loss to State interests.

Expanded on requirements and benefits of voluntary disclosure. Last years amendments to the Criminal Law changed slightly the requirements for punishment to be reduced or waived. The Interpretation provides additional details about this process, most of which require voluntary confession of the crime.

* * *

Covington is preparing a more detailed analysis and a translation of the Interpretation, both of which will be available from the author upon request.

The release of the Interpretation follows on the heels of the release in February of draft amendments to the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, which mirrors several of these changes. (See Covingtons summary and analysis here and here.)

The release of the Interpretation also follows the release in late March of a new regulation regarding whistleblowers. The regulation (available in Chinese here) largely restates existing provisions on whistleblowers (amended most recently in 2014) and is focused on encouraging individuals to report state functionaries who are involved in crimes while conducting their official duties. The regulation reiterates the opportunity for rewards of up to RMB 200,000 (about $31,000) for whistleblowers in certain cases and provides protection from retaliation for whistleblowers and their family members. The regulation does not directly apply to reports of improper conduct by non-state functionaries (e.g., private companies or their employees).

Few of the provisions are new, but the release of the regulation, particularly in conjunction with the release of the Interpretation, suggests ongoing efforts by the Chinese government to encourage individuals in China to report improper conduct by government officials.

______

Eric Carlson, a contributing editor of the FCPA Blog, is a Shanghai-based partner at Covington & Burling LLP. He specializes in anti-corruption compliance and investigations, with a particular focus on China and other regions of Asia. He speaks Mandarin and Cantonese and can be contacted here. Anna Zhao and Huanhuan Zhang, associates in Covingtons Washington and Shanghai offices respectively, contributed to this post.
Image courtesy of PetrofacUK oil services firm Petrofac PLC said it launched an investigation into allegations of bribery to win contracts Kazakhstan and the Middle East.

Australias Fairfax Media and the Huffington Post reported that Monaco-based Unaoil was a middleman for bribes, according to leaked emails the news outlets said they viewed.

The reports said Unaoil may have paid bribes on behalf of Petrofac for work in Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Iraq, and Syria.

Petrofac said it hadnt found evidence of bribery.

It hired Freshfields and KPMG LLP for the investigation.

Petrofac has about 19,000 employees in 31 offices worldwide.

Its listed on FTSE 250 Index and trades under the symbol PFC

The firm designs and builds oil and gas infrastructure projects. It also manages assets and trains personnel in the oil and gas sector.

Police in Monaco raided Unaoils offices and the homes of its directors.

The raids reportedly came after the UK Serious Fraud Office asked for help.

Monaco police questioned Unaoil directors for two days.

* * *

Petrofacs April 7 statement said,

Petrofac confirms that an internal investigation is underway into media reports alleging a breach of the Groups Code of Conduct. We take any allegations of activities that may contravene our strict anti-bribery and corruption standards very seriously.

Whilst to date we have not identified any evidence of wrongdoing, we have appointed Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and KPMG LLP to assist us in conducting a full investigation, the findings of which will be reported directly to the Petrofac Limited Board. We aspire to the highest standards of ethical behaviour and we are determined to investigate these allegations to the fullest extent possible.

___

Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. He can be contacted here.
I received an order for almost $1 million of grenades from a Caribbean Island  as I recall, it was Antigua. You dont need to be an auditor to know that doesnt look right.

I was working then for a large defense contractor. The sales rep for the region rushed into my office and tossed the purchase order on my desk.

A million dollars for riot control grenades was a big order, especially for a country with no internal or external public safety threats, aside from the occasional rowdy tourist. And the order was almost full list price, where a discount would have been the standard practice.

When I saw that order, did I think about how that million dollars might be better used in education or healthcare? No, all I saw was a very profitable sale.

My reaction was all fist bumps and high fives with the sales rep. I wasnt thinking about what Katherine Dixon (Director TI, Defense and Security) has described as the theft of national budgets.

Months after that order was placed and shipped, I read how the outgoing head of state there was accused of using contracts and procurements to pad his pension prior to leaving office.

I didnt share that news with anyone or publicly link it with our million-dollar grenade order. But I knew for certain the purchase order wasnt suited to the market. In other words, my gut told me it didnt look right.

That purchase order came to mind this month when the Unaoil story broke. On CNBC, I described Unaoil as wrapped in risk.

Theres no substitute for personal judgment in compliance. Looking at a third party or a transaction, we should always ask ourselves if it looks right.

I dont know any of the Unaoil details other than whats been reported. But a company lodged in one tax haven and incorporated in another triggers obvious concerns on the basis of atmospherics. Its a feeling in the gut.

You dont pick that up in a transactional audit. But it only takes one person, from compliance, legal, finance, HR, or anywhere, to hit the pause button and say out loud, This looks bad.

I often wonder if we are so deep in analytics, certifications, and processes that were overlooking the greatest asset for compliance that we all have  our intuition.

Bill Waite said in a post for the FCPA Blog, referring to Unaoil, It is somewhat difficult to conceive of a relationship which required more vigorous attention.

Agreed, and there are multiple players in most legal, audit, and compliance organizations who have the authority to look at a third-party relationship and hit the pause button, and even to decline the onboarding of an agent or reject an order.

Sometimes (many times) thats going to upset the commercial and business teams, as messing up a good piece of business. But lets face it, no one goes to jail or ends up in an enforcement action for saying no to a deal that doesnt feel right in the gut.

So heres my advice, learned the hard way (I did go to jail, after all). Save your celebration for the next time you read about an intermediary whos making news for the wrong reasons, and who someone in your organization had the guts to say no thanks to doing business with.

____

Richard Bistrong is a contributing editor of the FCPA Blog and CEO of Front-Line Anti-Bribery LLC. He was named one of Ethispheres 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics for 2015. He consults, writes and speaks about compliance issues. He can be contacted by email here and on twitter @richardbistrong.


We caught up with Lizi Patch, the creative mind behind 'Punching the Sky', a new play about porn, parenting and pressure which will open its doors at the Soho Theatre on 27th April 2016.

Lizi Patch

For those who are not familiar with Punching the Sky- please can you tell us a little bit about it?

In 2013, my 11 year old son came to me and told me he'd watched some brutal online pornography after a lad at school sent him a link. My blogpost on the subject was picked up by the Independent newspaper, published and re-published and discussed across the globe. I was invited to Westminster and on to Newsnight to discuss the issues raised.

Not wanting to sink under the pressure I decided to find my way back to where I felt able to speak honestly and openly, and so started to write Punching The Sky. The show has been through two Art's Council research and development phases working with partner venues the Lowry, Live Theatre, Theatre in the Mill and the Hub in collaboration with some brillant artists. The show has been touring throughout Yorkshire and the North East, finishing with a week at Soho Theatre as part of A Nation's Theatre Festival.

What made you want to explore the complexities of our relationship with online pornography?

No one is indifferent to the subject of pornography. Debate veers between total libertarianism and some kind of fundamentalism that would ban all things. My article in the Independent prompted 112 pages of comments, which I trawled through in the name of research for Punching The Sky. And amongst those pages and pages of comments I found no consensus whatsoever. One of the first comments was this:

"I sometimes wonder if this massive, ubiquitous use of porn will not be one of the defining characteristics of our age - and yet you hardly hear a breath of discussion of it, really, on news shows, in the media etc. Has it ever come up on Question Time, or Newsnight?"

Commentators went on to discuss and rant about the extremes of sexual pleasure, pain and exploitation, of morals, fantasy and censorship. For me, as a parent - making it up as I go along - it's about how and where we draw a line for those we are responsible for.

Why are there contradictions in the nature of our feelings about sex, censorship and parenthood?

Because the majority of parents tend to feel their 11 year old watching hardcore, brutal pornography online is unacceptable but that enjoying watching a bit of porn alone or with their partner can be a turn on

And whilst no one wants to be told what to do, what to watch or how to live their life, censorship and conversation are 2 very different things, and I'm calling for the latter - after all that's what has worked for my sons and I.

What do you see as the biggest dangers of the internet other than pornography?

The internet is stunningly brilliant and completely hellish at the same time. It just depends where your search takes you, who's in control and how able you are to contextualise what you experience. As an adult we can make choices about what we want to stream into our eyeballs. A child searching for stuff they are in no way ready to see so they can fit in with the cool kids is a whole new level of 'dare' from when people of my age were 11.

You wrote, co-produced and perform in this production, so how difficult was it to be involved in so many aspects?

It has been the hardest thing I've done - both as a mother and an artist. But it has been my choice. I have wanted to stop a good many times - not least of all because, let's not forget, I'm the mother in this and I want to be sure I'm doing the right thing by my son. It's too important for half measures and if the feedback from audiences is anything to go by, then job done. Oh and my son tells me he's proud of me and the conversations we've started, so that'll do me. I'm pretty damn proud of him too as it happens.

How did you collaboration with Mark Hollander come about?

I've know Mark from way back when he worked for the Art's Council and I was sat across the desk eyeing this smart be-suited man, hoping for a positive outcome to a bid. Mark struck me as someone who actually listened and it became clear his opinions were to be respected. Years later he went freelance and became a 'critical friend' and then co-producer for the 2nd R&D period. Now and again he made a comment when he sat in on the rehearsals and he was always spot on. So I asked him to direct the show for the tour (and to continue to Co-produce) and he said 'yes'. And here we are. We're both grafters and we work around all our other commitments. We understand each other and it's a fantastic working partnership.

One review said that this production is 'more relevant than ever'- so how much do you agree with this?

Kids are increasingly being given tablets and smartphones as soon as their hands can hold on to them. The internet pervades every aspect of modern life for better and worse. Young people have to be able to navigate the online world just as much as the offline world - so it's not going away. Others say it better than me:

This was fabulous! My son had gone to see it at Leeds Carriageworks with his AS Drama group. He said I should see it when it came to Seven Arts. 'would you want to see it again?'. He did. So mate, mothers and girlfriends all came too. Powerful, pertinent and a real sense if what motherhood is about. The nurturing, protecting, self esteem building all blasted out of the water in an instant. So well handled. Arthur is lucky to have you. And we are lucky to have seen this play. Thank you. (Audience member on Facebook)

"Saw @Punch1ngTheSky last night - brilliantly explored the impact of oversimplifying the debate around porn. Brava @LiziPatch" ( Madeline Shann, Theatre Maker/Choreographer working on 'Sex in Real Life': investigating the gulf between what we are taught, and what we have to figure out for ourselves.)

Why did you want to combine live performance with animation?

I can't bring my son onto the stage and I can't show the video. So I have to be a bit clever in the way I evoke my son, the content he watched and the fallout from this. Arcus Studios (Gateshead) have developed gorgeous animations that work on a number of levels, evoking the innocence of early childhood, showing my son's world being turned upside down and bringing my original article and many of the verbatim responses to life. So the animations projected onto Scott Thompson's simple but effective set, along with a unique piano score from Aron Kyne combine to assault the senses and beautifully support the live action.

You have already toured Punching the Sky around the country before it goes to the Soho Theatre in London, so how have you found the response to the project?

Overwhelmingly positive. From teenagers to parents to sex educational professionals to grandparents. Again, audience feedback sums it up.

"An extremely powerful and thought-provoking piece of theatre. Your dedication to raising awareness of this very important issue, in such a brilliantly engaging production, is such a credit to you." Julia Louise Haworth (Actress, Coronation Street)

I turned to my clearly captivated 14 year old son at the end of the play and he said"That's about me isn't it?" And there you have its appeal'It's about me and you and everyone in-between' I replied. This beautifully written play is engaging, witty and insightful as well as painful and heartening by turns." A Father: CEO in Creative Industries.

What is next for you?

Punching The Sky will go to bed for a little while as I'm also the Artistic Director of the City Varieties/Leeds Grand Youth Theatre and have a production of the Addams Family (with a cast of 65!) in rehearsal for production in July. I'm also developing a new radio play about the Menopause (more joy!) and, most importantly, I'm going to watch a whole load of films and eat junk with my kids and partner.

@lizipatch

@punch1ngthesky

www.lizipatch.co.uk/punchingthesky

https://m.facebook.com/PunchingTheSkySoho/

by Lucy Moore for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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Richard Raymond is set to make his feature film directorial debut as he makes the leap from shorts with Desert Dancer.

Richard Raymond

Written by Jon Croker, Desert Dancer tells the incredible true story of Afshin Ghaffarian, who risked everything to train as a dancer in Iran.

We caught up with the filmmaker to chat about the new movie, what drew him to Afshin's story, and bringing together such a wonderful cast.

- Desert Dancer is the film, so can you tell me a bit about it?

Desert Dancer is the true story of a young man and his friends who wanted to become dancers in a country where it is forbidden to dance; which is in Iran. It is the story of how they learnt how to dance by watching YouTube - which is also banned. So they hacked into YouTube. They watched the greatest dancers that were available to them; Baryshnikov, Nureyev and Michael Jackson.

They would learn how to become dancers in an underground centre after school. They ended up putting on a performance in the desert, where there would be no police to arrest them for dancing. It is a story about how important freedom of artistic expression is to young people and that nothing can really hold it back.

- The movie sees you in the director's chair, so what was it about Afshin Ghaffarian story and Jon Croker's script that was the big appeal for you?

I read the story in a newspaper and I connected to it as someone who had been struggling for many years to try and become a filmmaking. I connected with Afshin's story of someone who had been struggling for many years to become a dancer and realising that all the obstacles in his path were a lot more dangerous and real that they were in my path. I just resonated with that very strongly. You can't really help what you fall in love with, I fell in love with this story and I wanted to share it.

- I was not familiar with Afshin's story before I watched the film. What sort of research did you do into his life and his struggles as you were preparing to make this film?

I went to Paris with Jon Croker, before the script was written, and we met with Afshin. we sat down with him, talked to him, and listening to him as he told us word for word what had happened to him. Jon wrote all of that down and, together, we looked at his life and really came to a decision about what portions of his life that we wanted to present and share as a story. Jon went off and wrote the screenplay based on Afshin's interviews.

- Which part of Afshin's story was the main appeal - his dedication and his determination is something that really comes over in the movie?

I think it was the passion. I think that you are absolutely right in what you are saying, it was his passion. At the time when I met him, that passion was still very very vibrant and you could tell. That is what I connected with and that is really what drew me in. He was a young man who had a passion in a place that... I feel that the country of Iran is one of the most beautiful and Iran had the first ever charter of human rights and it is the birthplace of great poetry. I just feel that a story about artistic oppression to be contrasted against that country was something that was very attractive to me.

- The movie sees Reece Ritchie takes on the role of Afshin. So what were you looking for when you cast this role and what did you see in Reece?

To be honest, Reece is Afshin's doppelganger; he looks like his twin brother. When Reece and I went to see Afshin perform in Paris, a lot of the people who were in the audience actually thought that Reece was Afshin. Reece is an incredible actor and very professional. He is trained in martial arts, so he was able to use his body that this character demanded. He embodied Afshin and really connected to him. He was the only person for the part.

- Freida Pinto, Tom Cullen, and Nazanin Boniadi are also on board. Can you talk a bit about bringing this great cast together?

It was very important to me to not just cast Iranians. It was a story for the world. There are plenty of Iranian films out there and I am a big fan of Iranian cinema but this is a film that I wanted to make very accessible to people who normally would never go and see a film that's set in Iran or an Iranian story. I wanted to tell the story of the heroes of Iran, who are the youth of Iran, and I wanted to show the youth all over the world that we are all the same.

For that reason, I cast actors from all over the world that represent people from all over the world - that was a very conscious decision. Tom Cullen is from Wales, Nazanin Boniadi is from Iran, Freida Pinto is from India, Marama Corlett is from Malta, and Reece Ritchie is from England; you have a real collective group of actors who are very international and that is how I wanted to tell the story.

Freida trained for twelve months in dance before we started shooting the film. She was incredibly dedicated. Her character was completely true. A lot of people might watch the film and think that it might be a cliche because her character was a heroin addict, but it is all true. In fact, before we started shooting the film, Freida Pinto's character died in real life. It was incredibly shocking and it really motivated Freida to make sure that she was on and in the character with her performance. I think that she did do an incredible job.

- You also worked with acclaimed choreographer Akram Khan for the film, so how was that experience? It must have been invaluable to have someone so experienced on board?

Absolutely. The dance would not be there if it had not been for Akram as he created all of the dance sequences. It was Akram, myself and the cast in London for five months creating out of nothing. It was the most incredible experience and I learnt a lot from Akram, as did all of the cast. Dancers just do and actors always ask 'why' and so it was an incredibly challenging experience for everybody to just do without questioning. And Akram really just instilled all of that in the cast.

Also, just to sit at the Opening Ceremony at the London Olympics in 2012 and watch Akram's performance right at the end was wonderful. We all just sat there and were like 'oh my god, this is amazing.' He is the greatest. He is just so renowned in the dance community. We felt that Afshin's story deserved to be a major cinematic event and we wanted to bring two together.

- How did you find working on the dance element of the film as you are not from that background?

It is visual storytelling. We live in an era of very superficial and one-dimensional dance that is on television. It is always about very superficial things, such as boy meets girl, girls leaves boy, boy chases after girl - it is not very substantial. What I loved about Akram's work - and there are many other choreographers that are fantastic - was it was so visceral and visual. It was incredibly three-dimensional visual storytelling and that is what I wanted for the film. And the truth of the film is to be found in the dance.

- The movie was shot in Morocco - was there an element of disappointment that you couldn't shot the film in Iran?

We tried. We did try. I had a ticket to go there but you have to lie and I had to say that I was a tourist visiting religious sites and I worked in real estate. The insurance won't cover you, you are going to be arrested, and it is best not to lie. We weren't permitted to film there. I spoke to many Iranian filmmakers and the ones that wanted to tell stories that the government wouldn't allow, filmed in Casablanca in Morocco. I just listened to their advice and went to the city where other Iranians had made their films.

It does double for Iran in a relatively good way; obviously, it does need some production design to pass. But that is why we shot there. It has a great desert and James Bond have just shot down there and Laurence of Arabia was shot there. The people of Morocco are 'can do' people and they just make it happen - we need to shoot scenes with thousands of extras and we had thousands of extras. You can't really get that in England on the budget that we had. It was a brilliant country to film in and make a movie in.

- The movie marks you feature film directorial debut. How have you found the experience of making the transition from shorts?

It is a dream. You want to be making films and you are only happy when you are making a film. It was just incredible and it was a long-time coming. It was the most wonderful experience because of the team. Being the director can be a very lonely job but on a film like Desert Dancer, whether you were in the wardrobe, the make-up, or the acting, everyone was very very passionate and we all came together as a family to support one another and make the film.

As the director, I couldn't be prouder of everyone's work. It is a film that so many women love. I have been in hundreds of screenings around the world and to see the way women connect to this film has been extremely gratifying and one of the most memorable experiences of my life. It has been wonderful. I cannot wait for British women to see the film.

- How important do you think your experience with short film was as you made your first feature?

My short films are awful (laughs). You have to get all of that out of the way. I also produced a film to learn more about directing. I would watch the director of the film that I produced work with actors and got to understand that by producing. When I make the leap into directing, I had been a long long road but all of the mistakes and all of the things that you learn by making short films come to a great place and you are able to put it down into a real film.

I think that every young director goes through that rite of passage; you have to make your shorts and you have to learn the hard way, in a sense. I am proud of all of the work that I have done and they were great to cut my teeth on but I am just glad to be able to make a feature film.

- You have touched on this slightly already. The movie is released in the UK next week, so how have you been finding the early response to the film so far?

It has been amazing. To see lines around the block and packed out after packed out screenings all around the world has been the most incredible thing. You contrast that against the male critical response, and it is quite a contrast. One of the most important things is seeing how positively the audience respond to the film. This is an audience film and I made this film for audiences. People - especially women - get really caught up in it emotionally and feel elated and full of hope by the end.

Nowadays, there're not that many films that you can say that about; to leave the cinema feeling better than you did when you went into it. That is all down to the truth of Afshin's real story and the dance and the performance that the actors gave. It is definitely and experience and I would to people that are looking for an experience and being taken on a journey, this is definitely a film for you.

- Finally, what's next for you?

I will let you know soon (laughs). I can't really tell you because it hasn't happened yet and I am very superstitious. Fingers crossed there will be an announcement very soon. But it is just fantastic that I'm getting to show Desert Dancer in the UK as it is my home country and it is a British film. I am very proud of that.

Desert Dancer is released 22nd April.

by Helen Earnshaw for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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Pearl Jam have cancelled their North Carolina show over the American state's anti-LGBT "bathroom law".

Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam

The 'Alive' hitmakers made the decision not to play their planned concert at the PNC Arena in Raleigh on Wednesday (20.04.16) in protest over the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, which decides which toilet a transgender person can use.

A handwritten statement posted to the band's Facebook page yesterday (18.04.16), read: "It is with deep consideration and much regret that we must cancel the Raleigh show in North Carolina on April 20th. This will be upsetting to those who have tickets and you can be assured that we are equally frustrated by the situation. (sic)"

The US rock band believe it is a "despicable piece of legislation" and explained they had no choice but to pull out to "make a stand against prejudice".

The statement continued: "The HB2 law that has recently been passed is a despicable piece of legislation that encourages discrimination against an entire group of American citizens.

"The practical implications are expansive and its negative impact upon basic human rights profound. We want America to be a place where no one can can be turned away from a business because of who they love or fried from their job for who they are.

"It is for this reason that we must take a stand against prejudice (sic)"

Pearl Jam also said they are working with local groups to work on the issue.

The band - comprised of Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, Matt Cameron, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready - added: "We have communicated with local groups and will be providing them funds to help facilitate progress on this issue.

In the meantime we will be waiting with hope and waiting in line for a time when we can return - perhaps even celebrate (sic)"

Pearl Jam follow in the footsteps of Bruce Springsteen, Boston, Ani DiFranco, the Cirque do Soleil and Ringo Starr, who also opted out of playing concerts in the state to make a stand against the newly-instated law.
A new book claims Britain's Prince Charles was infactuated with Barbara Streisand.

Prince Charles

The 67-year-old royal was a huge fan of her 1968 hit movie 'Funny Girl' and met the American star - who he apparently called his "only pinup" - when he was a 26-year-old officer docked in Los Angeles.

The circumstances are described in 'Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate & the Throne' written by American journalist Christopher Andersen and although the subject matter discusses the prince's mother Queen Elizabeth II, his wife Camilla the Duchess of Cornwall and daughter-in-law the Duchess of Cambridge, his fondness of the actress and the times they met have been described.

According to a report by the New York Post, Christopher's book states that Prince Charles had seen 'Funny Girl' three times and kept a framed photo of Streisand on his wall at Cambridge and in his private quarters in Buckingham Palace.

He was then given the chance to meet the star, who is six years older than him, on the set of 'Funny Lady' in 1974.

Barbara, now 73, was "nervous" during the meeting but later joked she could have been "the first real Jewish princess" had Charles not met and married Lady Diana.

The friends saw each other again in London in April 1994 when Barbara performed at Wembley Stadium for his charity, the Prince's Trust,t and again later that year in Los Angeles at a gala dinner held in his honour.

The book goes on to claim that the pair were "very affectionate" towards one another at another event in London ten months later and a housekeeper reported they were "quite flustered" when she saw them together in Charles' study.
A second season of Jessica Jones was confirmed by Marvel and Netflix following the huge success of the first on the streaming service, and the popularity of the first series to hit the platform, Daredevil. With both those superheroes and Luke Cage and Iron Fist all set to team up in a collaborative series, The Defenders at some point in the future, Jessica Jones actor Eka Darville, who plays Malcolm, has confirmed he'll also be in the series.

Credit: Netflix

At the Supanova Pop Culture Expo in Melbourne, Australia, Darville told Spoiler TV: "Yes. I will be in it. I'm not sure how much yet but I will be in it."

Still in early pre-production, The Defenders is also likely to include supporting characters from the rest of the Marvel-Netflix series, such as Trish Walker and Foggy Nelson. Their roles may only be small in the miniseries, but it will be nice to see some familiar faces on board amongst the main leading cast.

Daredevil seasons 1 and 2 are available now on Netflix alongside Jessica Jones season 1. Luke Cage season 1 premieres on September 30, with dates for Iron Fist, Jessica Jones season 2 and The Defenders yet to be revealed.

by Daniel Falconer for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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Brandix, the largest apparel exporter in Sri Lanka, has topped the 2016 ranking by Brand Finance  an independent consultancy company  for the best export brands in Sri Lanka.

The company ranks first in the country amongst major exporters of apparel, manufacturing, tea, IT and food and printing in Sri Lanka for the second consecutive year, according to a press statement released by Brandix.

It has a score that is higher than the scores assigned to the top-ranked conglomerate brand and highest-placed multinational brand in the 2016 ranking.

Brandix has topped the 2016 ranking by Brand Finance for the best export brands in Sri Lanka.#

The ranking is based on parameters such as corporate vision, leadership and people, reputation and image and degree of innovation and quality consciousness. The top ranked companies need to have world-class products and services with high standards, and should be able to compete with best in the world.

Brand Finance has described Brandix, along with the other toppers in the list, as brands that are marketing Sri Lankan products to the world.

Brand Finances 2016 ranking was released in a special edition of the LMD magazine. (MCJ)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk
In an interaction with about 50 exporters allied with the Tirupur Exporters Association (TEA), Bob Berg, Director (International Business), Sourcing at Magic from USA event gave them the low-down on how to develop contacts with buyers and brands in the world market through the fair to be held in Las Vegas from August 14 to August 17.Berg, who visited Tirupur on April 15 interacted with exporters on How to do business with USA, TEA President Dr. A.Sakthivel said in a press release.

In an interaction with about 50 exporters allied with the Tirupur Exporters Association (TEA), Bob Berg, Director (International Business), Sourcing#

Berg said India contributes 4 per cent of US apparel imports. The given import scenario in US apparently reveals that there is a good potential for increasing imports from India thereby giving more avenues for Indian knitwear and apparels to US markets.Sourcing at Magic is North America's largest, most comprehensive sourcing event, reflecting the fashion supply chain, Berg said. It offers unmatched access to over 35 countries representing the world's most important markets and the Sourcing Zone is a convenient space for retail buyers, global importers, licensees and brands to meet and conduct business with offshore manufacturers like India and contract suppliers from manufacturing countries.Berg said that products made in India have huge potential in the world market and many are inclined to source their requirements from India, keeping in mind advantageous factors like political relationship, cultural relationship, quality manufacturing, communication angle and above all dependability and responsibility.Dr. Sakthivel said he urged Berg to focus on sourcing from India by highlighting the facts to all the leading buyers and brands at Sourcing Magic in the fair's upcoming edition. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
The ONGC Mangalore Petrochemicals Ltd (OMPL) will be supplying Paraxylene (PX) to the upcoming Purified Terephthalic Acid (PTA) plant by JBF Petrochemicals, a subsidiary of JBF Industries, at Mangalore, Karnataka for a period of ten years or more, according to a statement filed by JBF Industries with the BSE.

JBF Petrochemicals has entered into an agreement with OMPL for the assurance of the supply of raw material (PX) to its upcoming PTA plant for a long term  of minimum ten years, which can be extended with mutual consent.

PX will be supplied by a pipeline of 3 km length for the production of around 1.25 million tonnes of PTA in a year.

OMPL will be supplying Paraxylene (PX) to the upcoming Purified Terephthalic Acid (PTA) plant by JBF Petrochemicals.#

Around 114 acres of land has been allotted for this project. The total estimated cost for this entire project is $677 million.

This project is one of the largest of its kind in the country, according to the company website. (MCJ)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk
Pakistani Commerce Minister told Khurram Dastagir Khan told the National Assembly (Parliament) recently that the government was taking steps to end forced child labour in the cotton industry. He also said that concrete steps are also being taken to avoid use of pesticides which were damaging the health of these children, Pakistani newspapers have reported.Pakistan is the world's fourth largest cotton producer. In the next session of Parliament, he said his ministry would inform the House about the number of forced child labour in the cotton industry. Khan also said that the Punjab and Sindh governments have started addressing the issue.

Pakistani Commerce Minister told Khurram Dastagir Khan told the National Assembly (Parliament) recently that the government was taking steps to end#

He said agricultural pesticides were regulated items under law. The import, distribution and sale of agro commodities are in the private sector, he said. Khan said according to the WHO toxicity classification the registered pesticides in Pakistan were moderately hazardous and easily degradable.No pesticides other than those internationally recommended and following FAO code of conduct on distribution and use, are registered in Pakistan. He said that the government has banned all pesticides having potential for damaging human health as declared by the Rotterdam Convention. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Connecticut-based Gerber Technology that supplies software and hardware systems for apparel and technical textiles, sign making and specialty graphics, composites and packaging applications, says it is upbeat about the Bangladesh market.Till now, woven and knit garment manufacturers formed our clientele in Bangladesh, but a lot of lingerie manufacturing units have started coming up now, with more and more Sri Lankan expats joining the Bangladesh garment industry; thats the technological geography that were observing, said Bill Ramsey, Gerbers Regional Sales & General Manager-South West Asia.As Bangladeshs garment sector gears up to reach an export turnover of $50 billion by 2021, manufacturers are strengthening compliance and getting ready for big production and expansions, Ramsey said. A significant number of garment manufacturers are approaching Gerber to get a hang of investment requirements to give shape to their expansion plans and set up new facilities, according to a company press release.With the kind of expansion that the company has been observing in Bangladesh, Gerber has stationed about 15 engineering personnel in the country , who have been trained by us and have more than 10 years of experience to meet the clients requirements, Ramsey said.One of the pioneers in providing innovative technology solutions for the cutting room, Gerber proved its mettle long back when it introduced knife intelligence on the Gerber S91. According to the company, the knife intelligence technology guarantees top and bottom ply of a 72-ply bundle of 14-ounce denim match perfectly due to its ability to control the knife.

In addition to the knife intelligence, Gerber also provides automatic vacuum maintenance in their cutting solutions, thereby providing just the right amount of pressure on the fabric, which is very important as different fabrics with different porosity need various pressures levels to arrest slipping.



Taking care of the smart needs in cutting room solutions apart, Gerber has also set up separate assembly plants in America and China to cater to diverse needs of both these areas. The facility in America caters to manufacturers who supply smaller quantities and accordingly need low-ply cutting solutions whereas the one in China is for the large-quantity suppliers in countries like Bangladesh, India, Vietnam and China, who need high-ply cutting solutions. China was strategically chosen by the company for its facility as the country is almost equidistant to all the Asian apparel manufacturing destinations, helping Gerber to offer faster and cheaper shipping, and shorter lead time. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Attorney General and Minister for Finance Hon. Aiyaz Sayed- Khaiyum received a donation of $32,299 from the Fiji Ontario Association of Canada and a donation of $2,292.42 from the East Hawaiian Fijian Community to the Prime Ministers National Disaster Relief and Rehabilitation Fund.



The cheque donations were presented by Fijis ambassador to the United States, Mr. Solo Mara.



The AG expressed the Fijian Governments gratitude to both Fijian diaspora communities for coming to the aid of Fijians badly affected by TC Winston.



It is wonderful to see so many Fijians from our diaspora communities come together and offer support to affected Fijians during this difficult time. Your support for your fellow Fijians will help greatly in our efforts to rebuild in the aftermath TC Winston, he said.



The AG went on to explain the Governments new Adopt A School program and asked individuals and organisations abroad to consider covering the costs of school repairs for Fijian students through this new initiative.



The AG was in Washington DC for the 2016 Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Ambassador Mara also briefed the AG on Fijis strategy for political engagement with the United States.


Prime Minister Hon. Voreqe Bainimarama has expressed his condolences to his Japanese counterpart, Hon. Shinzo Abe MP and to the people of Japan following the recent devastation and tragic loss of lives caused by the recent earthquake and flooding in Kumimoto Prefecture and surrounding areas.



In a condolence message, Prime Minister Bainimarama said the Fijian Government and the people of Fiji stood by their Japanese brothers and sisters, who have lost their loved ones.



Prime Minister Bainimarama said Fiji empathized with the victims of such disaster, having recently suffered similar loss of lives and devastation caused by Tropical Cyclone Winston in Fiji.



It was with great sense of sadness and shock to receive news and pictures of the horrific devastation and tragic loss of lives, caused by the earthquake and flooding in Kumimoto Prefecture and surrounding areas of Japan, in recent days, PM Bainimarama said.



During such a dark and difficult time for Japan, words fail to convey how deeply we feel for the Kumimoto Prefectural community, your government and the people of Japan, as you face the heartbreaking task of recovering victims and to provide relief and rehabilitation to a community, experiencing such great devastation.



On behalf of the Government and the people of the Republic of Fiji, I convey our deepest sympathies and condolences to the people who have lost loved ones and whose livelihood have been devastated. Our prayers are with your government, the people of Kumimoto Prefecture and Japan, as you begin the long and painful process of rehabilitating the devastated communities and its people, PM Bainimarama added.


Divestments are set to soar in Asia, EYs 2016 Global Corporate Divestment Study has found  and one of the main reasons companies plan to sell or spin off assets is to fund growth.

For the global M&A markets, 2015 was the biggest year on record, and divestments (sometimes called divestitures) were an important part of that story. Around the world, corporates are increasingly looking to divestments to fund long-term growth opportunities, allowing management to focus on the core and shed underperforming businesses.

In the last 12 to 18 months, businesses in the Asia-Pacific region have turned dramatically to divestment as a strategy.

Nearly half of all Asia-Pacific corporations polled by EY are planning a divestment within the next two years, compared with just 15% a year ago. Intentions in Asia-Pacific are now similar to companies globally: in Asia-Pacific, 47% of corporations are planning at least one divestment within the next two years  close to the 49% for companies globally.

Raising funds to support growth plans is one of the main reasons corporates are divesting. In Asia-Pacific, 73% of firms that responded to EYs divestment study (similar to the 70% globally) are using divestments to fund growth  with 35% planning to reinvest proceeds in the firms core business, 24% planning to fund expansion into new products or markets, and 14% dedicating the cash to further M&A.

The big increase in using divestments as a way of generating funds for growth, and focusing on where to take the business, contrasts with three or four years ago; then most companies were divesting because they had to fix up their balance sheets after getting into financial trouble.

In addition to providing a source of funds for future growth, or otherwise helping their balance sheets, by divesting companies often experience a further benefit through an increase in value of the remaining business post divestment. In Asia-Pacific, 81% believe their divestments create long-term corporate value in the remaining business.

Its quite a change to see Asian companies take the view, more prevalent internationally, that divesting can be an aggressive business strategy. Traditionally, we have seen Asian companies focused on buying and building the corporate empire.

However, we may be getting to a point that Asian executives are thinking about what it is exactly that they own, and whether conglomerates really deliver the best value. In Korea, for example, and this is fairly consistent across a number of Asian countries, conglomerates have built themselves up with all sorts of strange and wonderful businesses, which dont necessarily align. Its rather like conglomerates in the United States in the 1970s and early 80s, when a company such as ITT was invested in multiple industries, owning telecoms, heating & air-conditioning, insurance, hotels & resorts and so on, before it was broken up in the mid-1990s.

Weve seen companies in the US, increasingly so in the last 10 or 15 years, going back to core and getting rid of assets that are not necessarily part of that. A recent example is GE divesting its financial services business, because that was not really its core skill or what it does best and what it wants to be doing going forward.

EYs 2016 Global Corporate Divestment Study is based on interviews with 900 global corporate C-suite executives and 100 private equity executives, as well as on external data from nearly a decades worth of divestments. All the executives interviewed had been involved in at least one major divestment in the past three years.

For more from the study, click here.

By Stephen Lomas, Asia-Pacific Divestments Leader, Transaction Advisory Services
- Overwhelming support for enhanced beneficial ownership transparency: 91% agree

- Corruption levels are persistent: 39% say its widespread in their country

- Pressure continues to bring out the worst in executives: 42% justify unethical behavior

- Data privacy issues are creating complexity for cyber threat management yet only 41% of CFOs concerned

LONDON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EY's 14th Global Fraud Survey 2016: Corporate misconduct - individual consequences finds a worldwide clamor for enhanced transparency at a time of increased geopolitical tensions and heightened volatility in financial markets. The escalating threats of cybercrime, terrorist financing and, more recently, the revelations regarding widespread possible misuse of offshore jurisdictions, have increased pressure on governments to act and companies to identify and mitigate fraud, bribery and corruption issues.

Conducted between October 2015 and January 2016, the survey of nearly 3,000 senior business leaders from 62 countries and territories highlights overwhelming corporate support for enhanced beneficial ownership transparency, with 91% of executives recognizing the importance of establishing the ultimate beneficial ownership of entities with which they do business.

David Stulb, EY Global Leader of Fraud Investigation & Dispute Services, says:

"With the continuing anti-corruption enforcement focus on third-party conduct, and the recent revelations on the possible misuse of offshore financial structures, business leaders are right to be focused on securing a deeper understanding of their clients, partners and suppliers. Enhanced transparency is clearly a focus of broad public interest."

Increased transparency is, however, only one facet of the solution to a problem that shows no sign of abating. In total, 39% of respondents believe that bribery and corrupt practices happen widely in their country, little changed from 38% in 2014 and 38% in 2012. In a question introduced in this year's survey, 32% of respondents report that they have had personal concerns about bribery and corruption in their workplace.

Coordinated efforts by regulators to root out corruption

Regulators recognize the threat that bribery and corruption pose to a financial system already under stress and are increasingly cooperating across borders to hold individuals accountable for illegal acts. Such enforcement efforts appear to be heavily supported by survey respondents, with 83% agreeing that prosecuting individuals will help deter future fraud, bribery and corruption.

However, with 42% of respondents admitting that they could justify unethical behavior to meet financial targets, and 16% of finance team members below the CFO ready to justify making a cash payment to win or retain business, those executives responsible for ethics and compliance appear to be facing a significant challenge if they are to keep their organizations clear from the scrutiny of prosecutors.

The survey also identified a perception in emerging markets1 that individuals responsible for corruption are not being held to account, with 70% of respondents in Brazil and 56% in both Africa and Eastern Europe believing that although governments are willing to prosecute, they are not effective in securing convictions.

Stulb says, "Increased levels of global cooperation between law enforcement agencies are making it harder for fraudsters and bribe-payers to evade prosecution. However, with respondents indicating that such misconduct is showing no sign of abating, companies continue to be exposed to major risks driven by the illegal actions of a small minority of employees. Better use of technology is certainly part of the answer. More can be done to leverage forensic data analytics to manage these risks and improve compliance and investigative outcomes."

There are some positive indicators in markets where governments and regulators have taken steps to crack down on impropriety. In India, for example, where steps to increase transparency and crackdown on corruption have been taken by the government, the proportion of respondents from this country believe that bribery and corruption happens widely in the country declined from 67% in 2014, to 58% this year. In China, 74% of local respondents report that enforcement is effective, indicating the apparent effectiveness of the Chinese Government's commitment to tackle corruption.

Robust compliance, robust growth?

Expanding into new markets is essential for most companies, yet such expansion brings new and less familiar risks. The research shows that companies are frequently failing to take appropriate steps to respond and reduce their risk exposure:

One in five do not identify third parties as part of their anti-corruption due diligence

One in three do not assess country or industry-specific corruption risks before making investments

Only half utilize technologies such as forensic data analytics to identify and mitigate risks

Innovation is critical to responding to emerging risks

Whistleblowers remain a critical source of information on alleged misconduct. According to this year's survey, 55% of companies have whistleblower hotlines in place. Regulators welcome such tips, and in some jurisdictions, including the US, whistleblowers are offered substantial monetary rewards. Yet such mechanisms are not always effective. Survey respondents report barriers to using such mechanisms: 18% cite that loyalty to colleagues would deter them from reporting an incident of fraud, bribery and corruption and 19% cite loyalty to their company as a deterrent.

Stulb says, "What we are seeing clearly is that some employees, with widely varying motivations, are prepared to misappropriate - or enable others outside the firm to have access to - the confidential data of their companies. The balance between data privacy and security creates further complications. Dealing with such cyber and insider threats should be a top priority for management and boards. Yet 59% of CFOs view cybercrime as a low risk - a perspective that deserves robust challenge."

View the report online at: www.ey.com/FIDS

Follow us on Twitter: @EY_Press

Notes to Editors

About EY

EY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. The insights and quality services we deliver help build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. We develop outstanding leaders who team to deliver on our promises to all of our stakeholders. In so doing, we play a critical role in building a better working world for our people, for our clients and for our communities.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

This news release has been issued by EYGM Limited, a member of the global EY organization that also does not provide any services to clients.

About EY's 14th Global Fraud Survey 2016: corporate misconduct - individual consequences

Between October 2015 and January 2016, our researcher - the global market research agency Ipsos MORI -conducted 2,825 interviews in the local language with senior decision-makers in a sample of the largest companies in 62 countries and territories.

1 For the purposes of this report, "emerging" countries and territories include Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China (mainland), Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Oman, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Ukraine and Vietnam.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/18/16 -- DuSolo Fertilizers Inc., (TSX VENTURE: DSF) ("DuSolo" or "the Company") is pleased to announce the results of its annual general meeting held today (the "Meeting").

At the Meeting, all resolutions proposed in the Notice of Meeting and Information Circular mailed to shareholders on March 18 2016 were approved by the Company's shareholders.

ABOUT DUSOLO

DuSolo Fertilizers Inc. is focused on developing a fully integrated process to produce phosphate based fertilizers within the Cerrado region of Brazil as part of a nationwide effort, incentivized by the government, to increase supply of domestically sourced fertilizers and achieve agricultural self sufficiency.

On behalf of DuSolo Fertilizers Inc.

Giles Baynham, Chief Executive Officer

Forward-looking statements

Certain information contained in this press release constitutes "forward-looking information", within the meaning of Canadian legislation. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur", "be achieved" or "has the potential to". Forward looking statements contained in this press release may include statements regarding the future operating or financial performance of DuSolo which involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties which may not prove to be accurate. Actual results and outcomes may differ materially from what is expressed or forecasted in these forward-looking statements. Such statements are qualified in their entirety by the inherent risks and uncertainties surrounding future expectations. Among those factors which could cause actual results to differ materially are the following: market conditions and other risk factors listed from time to time in our reports filed with Canadian securities regulators on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. The forward-looking statements included in this press release are made as of the date of this press release and DuSolo 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.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange Inc. nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange Inc.) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

Contacts:

DuSolo Fertilizers Inc.

Giles Baynham

Chief Executive Officer

(604) 484 7122

ir@dusolo.com




CAMBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM -- (Marketwired) -- 04/18/16 -- Avita Medical (OTCQX: AVMXY) (ASX: AVH)

ReCell technology improves burn wound healing, reduces scarring, discoloration and itching

ReCell effective for extreme burns in emergency situations

95% healing in less than 2 months achieved with ReCell for explosion patient with 70% burn

Leading EU hospital incorporating ReCell technology into general protocol in Burns Unit

Various findings from top clinicians who presented at the REPAIR session at Avita Medical's 4th Annual Skin Regeneration Symposium (SRS) showed that the company's ReCell regenerative skin technology offers important advantages in patient recovery and quality of life for the treatment of burns.

The burns-focused session during the event held at Cambridge University was attended by some 140 clinicians and researchers with an interest in the company's regenerative medicine approach. Many of the presentations explored instances where skin grafting could not be deployed as large body surface burns left few donor sites. In these cases, ReCell provided a strong alternative, the most notable cases coming from Taiwan, where ReCell was deployed following the June 2015 Taipei Waterpark disaster, that left 15 people dead amongst the 499 people injured, with burns covering an average of 43% of body surface area in the total group.

"By using early and aggressive surgical intervention, we were able to treat over 60 patients in our hospital, with no fatalities," said Dr Hung-Hui Lu, of the Burns Service of Taiwan. "ReCell was the perfect tool for severe and moderate burn patients -- it was immediately available, enabled us to use smaller donor sites and demonstrated faster epithelialisation. During follow-up we have seen minimal scarring and contracture."

Under the FDA's Compassionate Use program, US burns specialist Dr James H Holmes IV, MD FACS, Medical Director of the Burn Center at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, North Carolina, USA has been able to use ReCell in a number of very serious burns cases, including severe traffic accidents and extensive burns resulting from explosions. "In our center, using the treatment has already reduced mortality -- two years ago a patient with 90% would not have been resuscitated." He also emphasized the additional benefit of the concomitant treatment of donor sites, ensuring rapid re-epithelialization and significant reduction in pain.

"I feel that pain reduction is a component of this treatment which will have a big impact," added Dr Holmes. The issue of pain reduction as a consequence of treatment with ReCell was echoed in the findings presented by a number of speakers, as was a reduction in itching.

Long-term outcomes were explored by Dr Elliott Cochrane, from Pinderfields Hospital UK, who presented data on the use of ReCell in paediatric partial thickness scalds, where the skin's epidermis and the dermis are damaged. His group of researchers treated 100 children with 4 standard-of-care routes, including ReCell alone, or in conjunction with special dressings. When following up the group 4 years later, they found that the ReCell-treated group had reduced-scarring and better outcomes compared to other groups, which he believes now warrants further investigation.

"A third of the annual 250,000 burn injuries in the UK are paediatric, with scalds attributable for 65%," he said. "Over four years, we have found that with ReCell there was a low incidence of scarring, when used with biosynthetic skin dressings as standard-of-care, in addition to a reduction of itching, significantly contributing to our patients' speed of recovery and quality of life."

Knowing when and where ReCell can offer advantages is important. Having treated more than 100 cases with ReCell over the past seven years, Miss Isabel Jones, Clinical Lead for the Burns Service at the NHS Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, stated: "12 of the 15 cases of facial burns we have treated were healed within four weeks. We are now integrating ReCell into our standard-of-care protocols."

"It's down to meticulous technique to get a good outcome with ReCell," stated Miss Alexandra Murray, Consultant Plastic and Burns Surgeon and Clinical Lead for Burns at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, UK, rounding off the session. Sharing her experiences of using ReCell in conjunction with a skin substitute in major burns and complex soft tissue loss in over 400 cases, she highlighted: "We had a case of a patient with burns on 70% of their skin following an explosion. We saw 95% healing in 55 days, and two years later the patient is fully back to work and able to drive."

ABOUT THE 4TH ANNUAL SKIN REGENERATION SYMPOSIUM

140 experts from around the world are attending the 4th Annual Skin Regeneration Symposium (SRS), which explores the latest advancements in skin repair, regeneration and restoration and the impact this has on patients. Keynote presentations are being delivered by international experts from the fields of burns, trauma, chronic wounds and aesthetics during the two-day session at the University of Cambridge's Moller Centre, April 12-13.

The educational event, hosted by Avita, provides a forum to showcase research and present robust clinical evidence of Avita's pioneering ReCell technology, supporting Avita's commercialization drive, by providing the data required by medical professionals and regulatory authorities, as well as drawing from Avita's clinical bibliography of more than 60 abstracts and peer-reviewed publications. In recent months, the Company has published positive data from randomized trials in the areas of pigmentation and venous leg ulcers, while an FDA-approval trial in burns has just completed enrollment.

ABOUT AVITA MEDICAL LIMITED

Avita Medical develops and distributes regenerative products for the treatment of a broad range of wounds, scars and skin defects. Avita's patented and proprietary collection and application technology provides innovative treatment solutions derived from a patient's own skin. The Company's regenerative product portfolio includes ReCell for burns aimed at plastic reconstructive procedures, ReGenerCell for chronic wounds and ReNovaCell of restoration of pigmentation and cosmesis. ReCell, ReGenerCell and ReNovaCell are patented, CE-marked for Europe. ReCell is TGA-registered in Australia, and CFDA-cleared in China. In the United States, ReCell is an investigational device limited by federal law to investigational use, and a pivotal U.S. trial is well underway aimed at securing FDA approval.

To learn more, visit www.avitamedical.com.

AVITA'S REGENERATIVE TECHNOLOGY AND RES

Avita Medical's unique proprietary technology enables a clinician to rapidly create, at the point of care in approximately 30 minutes, Regenerative Epithelial Suspension (RES) using a small sample of the patient's skin. RES is an autologous suspension comprising the cells and wound healing factors necessary to regenerate natural, healthy skin. RES has a broad range of applications and can be used to restart healing in unresponsive wounds, to repair burns using less donor skin yet with improved functional and aesthetic outcomes, and to restore pigmentation and improve cosmesis of damaged skin.

Avita Medical Ltd

Adam Kelliher

Chief Executive Officer

Phone: +44 (0) 1763 269770

akelliher@avitamedical.com



UK/EU

Instinctif Partners

Gemma Howe/Sue Charles

Phone +44 (0)20 7866 7860

avitamedical@instinctif.com



Avita Medical Ltd

Tim Rooney

Chief Financial Officer

Phone: + 1 (818) 356-9400

trooney@avitamedical.com



USA

The Ruth Group

Lee Roth

Investor Relations

Kirsten Thomas

Public Relations

Phone: +1 (646) 536-7012 / +1 (508) 280-6592

lroth@theruthgroup.com / kthomas@theruthgroup.com



Avita Medical Ltd

Gabriel Chiappini

Company Secretary

Phone +61(0) 8 9474 7738

gabriel@laurus.net.au



Australia

Monsoon Communications

Rudi Michelson

Investor Relations / PR

Phone: +61 3 9620 3333

rudim@monsoon.com.au




Mississauga, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 18, 2016) - Pioneering Technology Corp. (the "Company") (TSXV: PTE) is pleased to announce that it has secured a new long term financing agreement of up to $1,750,000 (the "Loan") from Roynat Capital Inc. (the "Lender"). The Loan will be used to repay indebtedness, fund inventory purchases and for general working capital purposes. All indebtedness owing to McAllister Holdings Ltd. has now been repaid in full.

The Loan is repayable over a period starting in March 2017 and ending in February 2021 and is secured by a debenture providing a charge on the Company's assets subject to Pioneering's operating lender's security requirements.

Pioneering CEO Kevin Callahan said of the announcement "We are pleased with this new arrangement with RoyNat. This long term agreement coupled with our recent private placement enables us to clean up our balance sheet, invest in inventory and position the company for long term growth while minimizing shareholder dilution."

The Company also announces that that it has granted an aggregate of 1,845,000 stock options to directors and officers of the Company (approved March 31 and April 4). The stock options are exercisable into common shares of the Company for a period of five years at a price of $0.22 per share. These options have been granted pursuant to the Company's Stock Option Plan, some of which are subject to vesting requirements.

For further information contact: Kevin Callahan, President & CEO at (905) 712-2061 ext. 222.

The TSX Venture Exchange Inc. has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy and accuracy of this release.
SUNNYVALE (dpa-AFX) - YP Holdings LLC, the digital advertising business of what was formerly called Yellowpages.com, plans to submit a first-round bid Monday to merge with Yahoo! Inc.(YHOO), Bloomberg reported citing people familiar with the matter. YP is working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to investigate a variety of strategic alternatives, which could include acquiring smaller firms or selling itself, the report said. The company, controlled by Cerberus Capital Management, is valued at $1 billion to $1.5 billion. Its size makes it a candidate for a Reverse Morris Trust with Yahoo: a tax-free transaction in which YP would merge with a spun-off subsidiary of Yahoo's core business, the report said. According to the report, GoDaddy Inc. and YP also have held preliminary high-level talks on a merger. A deadline for first-round bids for YP could be set for late May, one of the people set. 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 GSR GO Global Fund Will Focus on Building a World-Class Lighting Industry



BEIJING, Apr 19, 2016 - (ACN Newswire) - (Quoted from media in China) GSR Capital announced today the formation of a one billion USD cornerstone fund, "GSR Go Global Fund", with Limited Partners from Chinese leading high-tech companies, Taiwan industrial group, and world renowned entrepreneurs. The aim is to invest and build a world-class lighting industry through global acquisitions of leading LED lighting assets. The fund has already been oversubscribed and agreements have been signed by anchor Limited Partners. Industry experts Dr. Frank Fan and Mr. Jianghua Su will join the core general partner team.



GSR Capital has extensive experience in investments within the entire value chain of LED lighting. As the industry is shifting from conventional lighting to LED technology, and the global manufacturing value chain has consolidated, several world leading lighting businesses, including Philips Lighting and Osram Lighting, have recently been put on the market for sale. "These types of buyout deal are a rare opportunity for China's solid state lighting industry, to not only accelerate its globalization process, but also to improve its R&D and manufacturing capabilities," said Ms. Baiyu GUAN, General Secretary of China LED Industry and Application Association.



"M&A creates a synergistic effect by combining global distribution channels, consolidating supply chain, increasing capacity utilization, and achieving economies of scale. These impacts eventually all lead to a much-improved competitive position in the global LED lighting industry," added Ms. Ling WU, Chairwoman of International Solid State Lighting Alliance, General Secretary of China Solid State Lighting Alliance.



GSR Capital is a leading participant in these buyout deals. GSR Capital's team has deep domain knowledge of the LED lighting industry in China and around the world. With the formation of the new cornerstone fund and through the acquisition of LED lighting assets, GSR Capital is confident that it will build world-class LED enterprises with its partners capable of transforming and reshaping the lighting industry.



"To align with the supply-side reform strategy in China, it is important for China enterprises to invest in R&D, improve IP positions, build reputable brands, and set up stable global channels," remarked Mr. Sonny Wu, Founder and Managing Director of GSR Capital. "China offers not only a large and growing market, but also a great pool of R&D talent and a strong manufacturing base. We strongly believe there is a great opportunity to build the next leading LED lighting enterprise in China that will dramatically improve products and services, increase operational efficiency and significantly reduce overall cost. By doing so, we will accelerate the world's conversion to more energy efficient and environmentally sustainable lighting."

About GSR Capital



GSR Capital believes in "Building World-Class Technology Industries in China" and focuses on industrialization of mature technology investment and high-growth emerging industry sectors. Combining highly advanced technology and powerful market force of China, GSR Capital is gaining cross-border capital arbitrage and technical achievement arbitrage while successfully achieving large-scale development of the some of the world's leading industries. GSR Capital has offices in Beijing, Hong Kong and Silicon Valley.









Copyright 2016 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.





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SAN FRANCISCO, CA --(Marketwired - April 18, 2016) - McGuire Real Estate hosted an exclusive event on Monday morning at the City Club of San Francisco for the special release of Savills' San Francisco Bay Area Spotlight Report, a new research publication from Savills World Research and McGuire.

More than 100 guests gathered to hear Yolande Barnes, Director of World Research at Savills, and Alex Buehlmann, COO of McGuire, deliver an in-depth presentation on the report's findings and explain how the San Francisco Bay Area marketplace compares to other top-tier cities around the world. According to the report, San Francisco's residential market was the strongest performer of major world cities in 2015, driven by a growing domestic economy, low levels of inventory and demand for urban living.

To get things started, Barnes explained that the fundamental strengths of San Francisco's markets are assisted by the even faster rise of rents than capital values. "There is no investor-induced speculative bubble in San Francisco," she said. "At a time when many of the world's core, prime city markets have seen yield compression due to investor demand, San Francisco's residential yields have moved out due to rental growth."

The 2016 Spotlight Report takes a look at what's driving wealth in the San Francisco Bay Area as well. It explains that rapid job growth in high-value industries is fueling demand for prime residential property by creating wealth and housing demand from new employees. Job growth has been led by the professional, scientific and technical services sector, incorporating many 'tech' related roles. For example, between 2000 (the 'dot com' peak) and 2015, Silicon Valley added 36,800 jobs in this sector, an increase of 31%. Meanwhile San Francisco added 81,500 jobs in the sector over the same period, a 77% increase.

When comparing top-tier cities globally, the 2016 Spotlight Report, shows that San Francisco has come up the rankings as the seventh most expensive city on price per square foot, behind Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, New York, Paris and Moscow. This trend emphasizes the increase of smaller cities competing on a global scale.

McGuire's exclusive relationship with Savills, a global real estate firm headquartered in London, provides the company with direct access and expert insight into many of the world's top performing real estate markets. Established in 1855, Savills PLC is one of the world's largest global real estate service providers and has an international network of more than 700 offices and associates throughout the Americas, the UK, continental Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East.

Click here to download the complete San Francisco Bay Area Spotlight Report from Savills World Research and McGuire Real Estate.

ABOUT SAVILLS WORLD RESEARCH

Savills World Research monitors global real estate markets and the forces that shape them. Working with Savills teams across the globe and drawing on bespoke and published data and market intelligence, the team produces a range of market-leading publications as well as providing bespoke research services to clients. Yolande Barnes leads the World Research team at Savills with 28 years of experience in property research. Her areas of focus are world cities, the impact of private wealth in real estate, emerging trends in real estate markets, residential and commercial, urbanism and mixed use issues.

ABOUT MCGUIRE REAL ESTATE

As a local, luxury boutique that focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area's high-end niche markets, McGuire Real Estate is a privately held corporation that was founded in 1919. We are headquartered in San Francisco's Marina District with offices in Noe Valley and South Beach -- as well as Mill Valley, Berkeley, Burlingame, and Wine Country. McGuire is the exclusive international associate of Savills PLC, headquartered in London, and is a broker member of Luxury Portfolio International, Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, and The Enterprise Network. Our luxury, global, and industry affiliations allow us to connect our agents and clients to a world-wide marketplace with exclusive opportunities.

Visit mcguire.com for more information or contact McGuire Client Care at 1.800.4RESULT and clientcare@mcguire.com. Follow McGuire Real Estate on Facebook and @mcguire_re on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin.

Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/19/11G093994/Images/SFBaySpotlight1-b6190c50c1e7869781fdb685221234df.jpg

Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/19/11G093994/Images/SFBaySpotlight2-a387dba49294ab438e3eec20739b9bdf.jpg

Kate Stephenson

Content Strategist

McGuire Real Estate

kstephenson@mcguire.com

415.351.4672
In a First for Turkey's Airline Industry, Global Aviation Giant Turkish Airlines to Use a Level-D Pilot Training Simulator Produced by HAVELSAN, an In-Country Turkish Systems Manufacturer

ORLANDO, Florida, April19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --(WATS 2016 Conference- Booth 133)- HAVELSAN, a prominent global software and systems provider based in Ankara, Turkey, has announced that it will manufacture the first domestic simulator to be used in pilot training for Boeing 737NG aircraft operated by Turkish Airlines. This device will provide both low-cost and safe training for pilots and also will be the first civil (non-military) airplane simulator to be provided by HAVELSAN.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160415/356048

Combining its extensive past experience in design, manufacturing, integration and maintenance of military simulators with new technologies suitable for today's rapidly changing and growing commercial airline sector, HAVELSAN will produce a Full Flight Simulator with international EASA Level-D certification. This type of simulator will provide orientation, proficiency, and refresher training at lower cost than before, while delivering the near-reality experience that is essential to effective pilot training.

After a competition and lengthy evaluation against major leading global simulator manufacturers lasting nearly a year, HAVELSAN has been awarded a contract to provide one of 4 new simulator types currently being purchased by Turkish Airlines. Currently Turkish Airlines operates 10 full-flight simulators at its Flight Training Center, and with the addition of these new simulators including the one manufactured by HAVELSAN the capacity will be raised to 14 simulators by the end of 2016.

This project will result in several benefits to Turkish Airlines, its customers, and to HAVELSAN. First, by reducing costs without sacrificing training quality, Turkish Airlines will continue to improve its efficiency and competitive edge in the airline market. By reducing dependency on foreign suppliers, the airline will have greater control over uncertainties that affect operations. And not least, HAVELSAN will establish itself as a true world-class provider of training solutions to the airline industry.

TRAINING WITH SIMULATORS

Simulators are one of the most effective tools available today for enhancing the quality of pilot training. Typically pilots continue to receive training on simulators in the specific types of aircraft they will operate following their basic ground courses. They graduate to flying the real aircraft only after several hours of simulator training, which can be more or less depending on the airplane type and experience of the pilot.

In addition, airline pilots are commonly required to fly on simulators as often as every 6 months to refresh and test their skills. During these sessions, pilots experience emergency scenarios under the worst weather and environmental conditions. Simulators allow pilots to practice dangerous situations, such as engine failure upon take-off, which would be too risky to practice in a real aircraft. And the skills gained are measured in the hundreds of lives potentially saved in each of the rare occasions when a pilot actually has to put those special skills to use.

HAVELSAN TO TAKE A LEADERSHIP ROLE

Equipped with decades of experience in simulation and training, best in class technology, and bolstered by this win with Turkish Airlines, HAVELSAN intends to assume a leadership role in the global market for civil aviation and airline pilot training. This Boeing 737NG full-flight simulator is an important first step, but is only the beginning to what the company believes will become a long-term and successful relationship with the commercial airline training market.

About Turkish Airlines:

Established in 1933 with a modest fleet of 5 airplanes, Turkish Airlines is today a Star Alliance member and holder of 4 stars flying to 285 destinations across the globe, 236 of which are international and 49 domestic, with its fleet of 308 passenger and cargo planes. According to Skytrax 2015 ratings, Turkish Airlines won the "Best Airline in Europe" award for the 5th straight time, and "Best Airline in Southern Europe" award for the 7th time. It has received the awards of "Best Economy Class In-flight Catering" in 2010 and "Best Business Class Catering" in 2013 and 2014. Turkish Airlines was awarded "Best Business Class Special Lounge Catering" and "Best Business Class Special Lounge" awards according to the 2015 Skytrax evaluations. Please visit www.turkishairlines.com for more information about Turkish Airlines.

About HAVELSAN:

HAVELSAN is a global systems and software company serving the information and defense market around the world. HAVELSAN specializes in the fields of Command Control and Combat Systems, Cyber Security and Information Technologies, Management Information Systems, and Simulation, Training and Test Systems.

Focusing on analysis, design, development and integration of large systems with its expertise, capabilities, synergy, and team spirit, HAVELSAN has embraced a systematic approach to address the ever increasing client demands for large-scale solutions. Please visit www.havelsan.com for detailed information about HAVELSAN.
PORTLAND, OR and BARCELONA, SPAIN -- (Marketwired) -- 04/19/16 -- iovation, the provider of device intelligence for authentication and fraud prevention, today announced it will participate on the panel "Machine Learning - the Solution to Getting Ahead of the Fraudsters Once and for All?" at the 10th annual Airline & Travel Payments Summit. Tristan Prince of iovation will discuss how to balance preventing travel fraud while enhancing the customer experience in the discussion at Barcelo Sants Hotel in Barcelona, Spain on April 26, 2016 at 11am CEST. Peter Gross, credit and fraud 2-IC at Virgin Australia and Asia-Pacific Airlines Fraud Prevention Group chairman, will moderate the discussion.

"Fraud never takes a vacation, and in the travel industry it's rapidly increasing," said Prince. "Despite the soaring fraud risks, it's crucial that businesses balance both fraud prevention and reducing online customer friction. We've found the best way to accelerate commerce and keep fraud schemes from taking flight is to pair device-based authentication with machine learning."

In the panel discussion, Prince will discuss the latest fraud trends, and share common scam techniques cybercriminals leverage to defraud travelers. He will also outline how machine learning can be leveraged for fraud prevention -- enabling businesses to reduce review queues, increase fraud catch and accelerate revenue. Common scams discussed will include:

Airline ticket credit fraud - where crooks use stolen credit cards to purchase airline tickets online only to cancel them and receive a flight credit

Fake travel vouchers on social media - users are prompted to connect a legitimate-looking malicious application with their account, which harvests personal information





Airlines and travel businesses leverage iovation's global intelligence about the behavior of more than three billion known devices to provide instant risk-based, real-time checks against devices attempting to access their website. This enables the businesses to simultaneously reduce fraud risk while eliminating friction for consumers with known good devices. Businesses use iovation's Customer Authentication solution to help trusted consumers bypass some passwords and immediately access low-risk but confidential sections of their online accounts -- like account balances, payment records and activity histories. If necessary, the service triggers stronger "step-up" authentications, like one-time or SMS passwords, for higher-risk actions like user and account changes or money transfers.

Speaking alongside iovation on the panel will be Chargebacks911 COO Monica Eaton-Cardone and Perseuss CEO Maarten Alleman. For more details about the panel, go to https://www.iovation.com/news/events/airline-travel-payments-summit.

About iovation

iovation protects online businesses and their end users against fraud and abuse, and identifies trustworthy customers through a combination of advanced device identification, shared device reputation, device-based authentication and real-time risk evaluation. More than 3,500 fraud managers representing global retail, financial services, insurance, social network, gaming and other companies leverage iovation's database of billions of Internet devices and the relationships between them to determine the level of risk associated with online transactions. The company's device reputation database is the world's largest, used to protect 15 million transactions and stop an average of 250,000 fraudulent activities every day. The world's foremost fraud experts share intelligence, cybercrime tips and online fraud prevention techniques in iovation's Fraud Force Community, an exclusive virtual crime-fighting network. For more information, visit iovation.com.

CONTACTS:

iovation Inc.

Connie Gougler

503-943-6748

Email Contact






PARIS (dpa-AFX) - French advertising and communications company Publicis Groupe SA (PUBGY.PK, PGPEF.PK) reported that its consolidated revenue for the first quarter of 2016 totaled 2.291 billion euros, up 8.9% from 2.103 billion euros in the first-quarter of 2015.



Exchange rates had a 20 million-euro negative impact, i.e. 1% of the first-quarter 2015 revenue. Net acquisitions contributed 147 million euro or 7.0% of the first-quarter of 2015 revenue. Growth at constant exchange rates was +10%.



Organic growth rose to +2.9% over the period, buoyed by digital (+7.6%) and good performance levels in Europe and North America, where the loss of media accounts in 2015 during the so-called 'Mediapalooza' had only a moderate impact on the first-quarter of 2016. The impact will be bigger in quarters to come. Sapient, which has been included in the calculation of organic growth since February 6, 2016, posted organic growth of slightly above 10%.



Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe said, 'With 55% of our revenue coming from digital, we are confident about our future but must remain cautious about the next two quarters which will be more impacted by losses that occurred in the 2015 media account reviews......Our objective remains achieving our three priorities: the completion of our organization by the end of the first half of 2016, the return to more usual levels of growth, and the continued improvement of our profitability.'



Publicis Groupe confirmed its previous indications of an improvement of all its financial indicators: revenue, operating margin, adjusted earnings per share, and dividend payout.



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AIM: MARL Suite 102, 3 Eden Street 19 April 2016 North Sydney, NSW 2060 Australia



Mariana to Pursue Dual Listing on the TSX Venture Exchange



Mariana Resources Ltd ('Mariana' or the 'Company'), the AIM listed exploration and development company with projects in Turkey and South America, is pleased to advise that the board of Mariana has taken the decision to pursue a dual listing of the Company on the TSX Venture Exchange ('TSX'), whilst retaining the current AIM listing.



Chief Executive Officer Glen Parsons today commented:



'Mariana believes that the decision to dual list the Company comes at an opportune time as the market begins to show positive signs, specifically in relation to gold. The high grade Hot Maden gold-copper development project in Turkey and the Argentine gold portfolio is becoming increasingly attractive to North American investors.



'Furthermore Mariana's visibility has grown significantly over the last two years and the Company has gained a stronger institutional following, particularly from Canada and the US. This interest will play a role in ensuring Mariana's ability to move its portfolio forward in an efficient manner. Given this increasingly stronger following, Mariana believes creating a platform to facilitate the ability to trade on an accessible exchange for North Americans is a priority.



'The dual listing will also give Mariana access to a wider capital pool for future fund raising as markets continue to improve. Mariana is familiar with the TSX exchanges and commitment to this market will be fully supported. We anticipate the process to complete in 2-3 months and, accordingly, Mariana's market visibility will be increased.'



**ENDS**



For further information please visit website at www.marianaresources.com or contact the following.



In Australia:



Glen Parsons (CEO) Mariana Resources Ltd +61 2 9437 4588



Eric Roth (COO) Mariana Resources Ltd +56 9 8818 1243



Rob Adamson RFC Ambrian Limited (Nomad) +61 2 9250 0041



Will Souter RFC Ambrian Limited (Nomad) +61 2 9250 0050



In U.K.



Oliver Stansfield Brandon Hill Capital (UK Broker) +44 20 3463 5061



Jonathan Evans Brandon Hill Capital (UK Broker) +44 20 3463 5016



Camilla Horsfall Blytheweigh (Financial PR) +44 20 7138 3224



Megan Ray Blytheweigh (Financial PR) +44 20 7138 3203



About Mariana Resources Mariana Resources Ltd is an AIM quoted exploration and development company with an extensive portfolio of gold, silver and copper projects in South America and Turkey. Mariana's most advanced asset is the Hot Maden gold-copper project in north east Turkey, which is a joint venture with its Turkish JV partner Lidya (30% Mariana and 70% Lidya). A maiden mineral resource estimate of 2.03 Moz gold Equivalent (Indicated Category) and 0.97 Moz gold Equivalent (Inferred Category) (100% basis) was reported for Hot Maden on August 18, 2015. Elsewhere in Turkey, Mariana holds a 100% interest in the Ergama gold-copper project. In Suriname, Mariana has a direct holding of 10.2% of the Nassau Gold project.) The Nassau Gold Project is a 28,000 Ha exploration concession located approximately 125 km south east of the capital Paramaribo and immediately adjacent to Newmont Mining's 4.2Moz gold Merian project. In southern Argentina, the Company's core gold-silver projects are Las Calandrias (100%), Sierra Blanca (100%), Los Cisnes (100%), Bozal (100%). These projects are part of a 160,000+ Ha land package in the Deseado Massif epithermal gold-silver district in mining-friendly Santa Cruz Province. Mariana acquired 100% interests in the Dona Ines gold-silver and Exploradora East copper prospects in northern Chile through the Aegean Metals Group transaction which closed in January, 2015, with Mariana exploration now being funded by Asset Chile through the provision of $1.65m for a total 50% interest. In Peru, Mariana is focusing on acquiring new opportunities which complement its current portfolio.



Safe Harbour This press release contains certain statements which may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made as at the date of this press release and include, without limitation, statements regarding discussions of future plans, the realization, cost, timing and extent of mineral resource estimates, estimated future exploration expenditures, costs and timing of the development of new deposits, success of exploration activities, permitting time lines, and requirements for additional capital. The words 'plans', 'expects', 'budget', 'scheduled', 'estimate', 'forecasts', 'intend', 'anticipate', 'believe', 'may', 'will', or similar expressions or variations of such words are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause actual results to vary materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to: the effects of general economic conditions; the price of gold, silver and copper; misjudgements in the course of preparing forward-looking statements; risks associated with international operations; the need for additional financing; risks inherent in exploration results; conclusions of economic evaluations; changes in project parameters; currency and commodity price fluctuations; title matters; environmental liability claims; unanticipated operational risks; accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry; delays in obtaining governmental approvals or in the completion of development or construction activities; political risk; and other risks and uncertainties described in the Company's annual financial statements for the most recently completed financial year which is available on the Company's website at www.marianaresources.com . Although we believe that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions and have 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 forward-looking statements. Accordingly, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward- looking statements. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statements, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.



This announcement is distributed by GlobeNewswire on behalf of GlobeNewswire clients. The owner of this announcement warrants that: (i) the releases contained herein are protected by copyright and other applicable laws; and (ii) they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.



Source: Mariana Resources Ltd via GlobeNewswire [HUG#2004634]



B12GJ72R4



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White Paper Presents Blueprint for Enabling Smart City and Personalised Digital Life Services by Harnessing Smart Data Aggregation and Real-Time Analytics in the Internet of Things (IoT)

Comptel Corporation (OMX Helsinki: CTL1V) and Heavy Reading today published a white paper that addresses the unique opportunity for telecom operators presented by the influence of IoT, smart cities and smart living on evolving digital lifestyles. The paper offers a blueprint for how operators can leverage intelligent fast data and real-time analytics to enable smart living as part of a broad IoT service strategy, with findings supported by Heavy Reading's global survey of communications service providers (CSPs).

As the megatrend of urbanisation accelerates, telcos have a significant opportunity to improve urban dwellers' digital experiences by anticipating customer needs and delivering in-the-moment digital services by tapping into their wealth of data.

Critical to telcos' central role will be their ability to collect, aggregate and analyse the data intelligence from various silos, and act on findings fast enough to support service delivery expectations. Heavy Reading found that CSPs are already in agreement, with 70 per cent of those surveyed believing that the analysis of data in real-time is very important or critical.

"Telcos not only bring the technical and network capabilities required for the development of smart cities, but they stand to play an even more important role in smart living with the insight they have into how consumers behave," said Steve Bell, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading.

"If operators are to thrive in Nexterday, they need to become holistic partners in consumers' digital lives, as well as cooperating with city governments and industry partners," said Veli-Pekka Luoma, Director of Advanced Analytics for IoT, Comptel. "This is where real-time data analytics and decision-making can play a powerful role. Comptel helps telcos make sense of the vast amount of data available, turning it into valuable digital assets that can power better decisions and actions."

Comptel will highlight key takeaways from this white paper at IoT Nordics, taking place 19-20 April 2016 in Helsinki, Finland. The white paper will be presented by Veli-Pekka Luoma during his session, "Smart Living with IoT," at 9:55 a.m. on 19 April.

Resources

Download a copy of the Heavy Reading white paper, "Smart Cities Smart Living: The Role of Telecom Operators."

Learn more about how Comptel is enabling digital and communications service providers and global enterprises to act on Intelligent Fast Data.

Watch Comptel's Intelligent Data webinar to learn more about how the real-time analysis of data is transforming organizations, and an interview with Heavy Reading's Steve Bell about CSP's IoT approaches and strategies.

Connect with Comptel on its blog and on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Comptel Corporation

Life is digital moments. Comptel perfects these by transforming how you serve, meet and respond to the needs of "Generation Cloud" customers.

Our solutions allow you to innovate rich communications services instantly, master the orchestration of service and order flows, capture data-in-motion and refine your decision-making. We apply intelligence to reduce friction in your business.

Comptel has enabled the delivery of digital and communications services to more than 2 billion people. Every day, we care for more than 20% of all mobile usage data. Nearly 300 service providers across 90 countries have trusted us to perfect customers' digital moments.

For more information, visit www.comptel.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005230/en/

Contacts:

Comptel Corporation

Jukka Janonen, +358 9 700 1131

Global Communications Manager

jukka.janonen@comptel.com

or

March Communications

Hanah Johnson, +1-617-960-9875

comptel@marchcomms.com
OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- A jazz tour scheduled to make a stop in Ocean Springs after a New Orleans appearance cancelled the April 27 show after tour sponsors pulled support in the wake of Mississippi's adoption of House Bill 1523 -- the so-called religious freedom law.

Ocean Springs Mayor Connie Moran said tour organizer Charles Nevett contacted her via email Tuesday and said major tour sponsors Mariott and Coca-Cola refused to sponsor a show anywhere in Mississippi.

"He said the sponsors were very angry and refused to spend any money in Mississippi," Moran said.

Moran also said the cancellation of the tour stop should serve as a "wake up" call for anyone of a mind that HB1523 won't have an impact on Ocean Springs or the coast.

"I continue to be amazed by people who think this is going to blow over and have no impact on us," she said. "That simply isn't true. And it isn't just events which were already scheduled being cancelled -- it's also those who were considering coming here who now will not."

Moran also noted that her cousin, local businessman Fred Moran, has in the past rented one of his short-term rental properties to an elderly couple who would annually visit Ocean Springs.

About a week ago, however, they sent an email to Fred Moran politely notifying him they would not be returning.

"In consideration of recent political movements in the State of Mississippi," the couple wrote, "we have decided that we should not return to your fair state in the foreseeable future."

As for the jazz concert, the mayor said Everett and the musicians would still like to perform in Ocean Springs, perhaps after the official tour ends.

"If I could get some local sponsors, we might be able to do a free concert at Ft. Maurepas," she said.
Next generation with touch screen, Wi-Fi and camera

Speech Processing Solutions, the global market leader in professional dictation solutions, introduces the first smart voice recorder: Wi-Fi-ready, easy to use with touch screen and slide switch, as well as an integrated camera which can even scan barcodes. Perfect ergonomics and ultra-sensitive dedicated microphones meet all the demands of a professional and mobile voice recorder.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005377/en/

Philips SpeechAir smart voice recorder (Photo: Business Wire)

The fusion of two worlds

"Philips SpeechAir unites the best of two worlds. It's the missing link between the worlds of smartphones and dictation recorderssaid Dr. Thomas Brauner, CEO of Speech Processing Solutions. The users benefit from the flexibility of an Android product, including the familiar look and feel, a touch screen, a camera, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth data transfer options. SpeechAir offers a variety of possibilities: mobility, multi-functionality combined with comfort and efficiency. And the dictation function? It's certainly something to talk about with three precision microphones providing superior recording quality, ergonomic single-handed slide-switch control operation, remote administration, long-lasting rechargeable batteries for maximum performance and maximum data security through real-time encryption. The built-in camera is not just great for snapping quick photos, it also serves as a barcode scanner ideally suited for various practice areas including health care. SpeechAir is designed to last, and its antimicrobial and shock proof housing with Gorilla glass make it suitable for the toughest environments.

Superior sound quality and maximum security

The device is equipped with the latest technology including three professional microphones that guarantee the best sound quality in every recording situation. The 360 microphone is ideal for recording meetings and dictations; the directional microphone helps cancel noise and is specifically designed for ambient-sound environments, while a third microphone allows VoIP phone calls. To ensure maximum data security, all SpeechAir recordings are encrypted in real time using AES, 256-bit. The device itself can be PIN or password protected, the camera can be locked, and access to Wi-Fi networks can be restricted.

Easy integration into existing IT systems

The legal and medical professions are the primary target audience of SpeechAir. Lawyers and medical practitioners value its effectiveness and mobility. "When we developed Philips SpeechAir we thought of busy professionals who frequently travel or work remotely," said Dr. Brauner. "Thanks to the built-in functions, users don't need to wait until they're back in the office to transfer their data."

It's easy to integrate Philips SpeechAir with other workflow solutions, such as hospital information systems or legal practice and case management software. Software and system developers can install their own apps, while users can configure SpeechAir to directly access patient and client data connecting it with relevant dictation recordings.

Speak. Send. Done: The perfect solution for mobile recording

SpeechAir is ideal for combining it with other Philips workflow solutions, such as the Cloud-Service SpeechLive.

To learn more about Philips SpeechAir, please go to www.speechair.com. More information can also be found at www.philips.com/dictation

Philips SpeechAir (PSP1100 and PSP1200) is available immediately at certified Philips dictation solutions distributors.

About Speech Processing Solutions

Speech Processing Solutions is the global leader in professional dictation solutions. The company was founded in 1954 in Austria as a Philips subsidiary, and has been a driving force for innovative speech-to-text solutions for 60 years. The company developed ground-breaking products such as the mobile Philips SpeechAir, the Philips Pocket Memo voice recorder, the Philips SpeechMike Premium USB dictation microphone and the Philips Dictation Recorder app for smartphones, thus meeting its demands for excellence and superior quality. Thanks to the newest innovation, Philips SpeechLive, dictations and recordings will become faster and easier than ever before with a Cloud-based workflow services. Speech Processing Solution's perfectly tailored offers and products help professionals save time and resources and maximize efficiency.

Follow Speech Processing Solutions:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/philipsvoicetracer

Twitter @speech_com: http://www.twitter.com/speech_com

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/philipsdictation

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/speech-processing-solutions

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005377/en/

Contacts:

For more information please contact:

Lea Pachta, +43 1 60529-1744

lea.pachta@speech.com

www.philips.com/dictation
Ballerup and Tokyo, Apr 19, 2016 - (ACN Newswire) - Nets A/S and JCB International Co., Ltd. (JCB), the international operations subsidiary of JCB Co., Ltd. have entered into a partnership agreement which allows Nets to use J/Speedy, JCB's contactless technology, for Dankort payments with smart phones.When Nets launch Dankort on the mobile in autumn 2016 it will thus be based on an international, well-proven technology from JCB, an international payments scheme originating from Japan. JCB has many years of experience facilitating contactless mobile payments as Japan was among the first countries in the world to adopt mobile payments and make it a part of daily life. This also marks an important milestone for JCB as it aims to accelerate its mobile payment implementation globally using Host Card Emulation (HCE) technology."We are very pleased with this long-term partnership with JCB that will help retain Dankort as the most cost-effective and convenient means of payment for Danish merchants and consumers," says Jeppe Juul-Andersen, Senior Vice President in Nets with the responsibility for Dankort.Nets believes that in 2020 up to half of all payments at the point-of-sale in Denmark may be initialized from a smartphone and that there will be more than 3 million Dankort on mobile phones."With this new partnership, Dankort will be powered by strong technology from JCB. The first step in the partnership will be to base Dankort on the mobile phone on JCB's technology but there is also a solid base for further developments. A second phase will include international interoperability using JCB's global network," adds Jeppe Juul-Andersen.Seamless transition for Danish cardmembers and merchantsPaying contactless with the mobile will be very similar to the payment experience when using the contactless cards at the point-of-sale. The user just "tap and go" without any physical contact between phone and terminal. If the payment exceeds DKK 200 a passcode must be entered on the phone to complete the payment.Dankort on the mobile phone can be accepted by all merchants accepting Dankort based on the current subscription model and the existing terminal infrastructure. Merchants who have already activated their terminal to accept contactless payments will only have to make small adjustments to their terminal set-up. The number of terminals with contactless readers is steadily increasing. Right now 60 pct. of all Dankort transactions are carried out using a contactless enabled terminal and over the coming years Nets expects that most of the terminals in Denmark will be able to accept contactless payments.Dankort was originally established based on international scheme standards and international corporation has ever since been an important driver in the ongoing development of the Dankort. Therefore, the partnership with JCB is a natural next step for the Dankort. The core technology powering Dankort on the mobile includes state-of-the-art security through tokenisation and strong cardmember protection. It will not be visible for cardmembers as they will pay in the same way as they do today with their contactless plastic cards.Contactless payments to JCB cardmembers in DenmarkAs a result of the partnership agreement Nets will, with support from terminal vendors and integrators, gradually prepare Danish terminals to accept payments with Dankort via mobile phones. Once this is in place, JCB cardmembers can benefit from making J/Speedy contactless payments when visiting merchants in Denmark that accept JCB cards.Kimihisa Imada, Deputy President of JCB International stated, "We are honoured to announce a remarkable partnership with Nets. We are confident that our mobile payment program is a secure and future-proof solution which a lot of Dankort issuers and merchants will be satisfied with. Furthermore, our partnership will ensure a wide acceptance of J/Speedy in Denmark, and this will bring huge benefits to our JCB cardmembers. We believe that the relationship between Nets and JCB is becoming stronger and will be able to provide new attractive benefits with both Nets and JCB partners. In order to make our partnership more worthwhile, JCB will continue to make efforts to promote JCB contactless payment infrastructure in European countries."About JCBJCB is a global payments brand and a leading credit card issuer and acquirer in Japan. JCB launched its card business in Japan in 1961 and began expanding worldwide in 1981. Its acceptance network includes around 30 million merchants and over 1 million cash advance locations in 190 countries and territories. JCB cards are now issued in 20 countries and territories, with more than 93 million cardmembers. As part of its international growth strategy, JCB has formed alliances with more than 350 leading banks and financial institutions globally, increasing its merchant coverage and card holder base. As a comprehensive payment solution provider, JCB commits to providing responsive and high-quality service and products to all customers worldwide. More information about JCB is also available on the website: www.jcbcorporate.com/englishAbout NetsAt Nets, we specialise in powering digital payments. We connect banks, businesses and consumers via an international network facilitating digital payments. Spanning across the Nordic region, we provide a broad range of card services, account services, and payment solutions for merchants. www.nets.euAbout Dankort on mobile phonesNets is developing a solution for Dankort on mobile phones, which supports smartphones with an active Near Field Communication (NFC) function as well as smartphones without an active NFC function through the use of QR codes or Bluetooth.The NFC contactless technology is based on the use of token. This means that the information in the smartphone which is exchanged between smartphone and terminal does not contain sensitive data. The smartphone generates a token, a numerical value, which Nets uses to create a payment transaction. The payment is performed by tapping the smartphone on the contactless terminal without the need for any physical contact between smartphone and terminal. The terminal display will show when the payment is approved. Entering of passcode on device (PIN) will only be necessary for purchases above 200,- DKK.Dankort on the mobile is expected to be launched this autumn and will subsequently be made available in mobile wallets issued by banks or others.For further information please contact:Nets A/SSoren WingePress ManagerTel: +45-29-48-26-46JCB International Co., Ltd.Ayako TanakaCorporate PlanningTel: +81-3-5778-8390Email: jcbinternational-pr@info.jcb.co.jpSource: JCBNetsCopyright 2016 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Saxo Bankannounced today a tri-party agreement between Saxo Bank, Wallstreet CN and LeanWork which will significantly bolster Saxo Bank's presence in Greater China following its launch in the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone in September 2015.

The users of Wallstreet CN, one of the most popular financial content providers in Greater China, will be able to access global capital markets from WEEX, an online trading service platform created by Wallstreet CN, with trading system developed by LeanWork and Open API powered by Saxo Bank.

"This unique partnership underlines the strength of Saxo's Open API which with limitless customization options will increase the power of trading technology now and in the future. This truly is a win-win for all parties and at Saxo Bank we are excited to be working with two exceptionally successful start-ups which empower Chinese speaking investors," said Kim Fournais, co-founder and CEO of Saxo Bank.

Saxo Bank is one of the first financial institutions to give access to its trading infrastructure through the bank's REST based API called Open API. The move, which covers Saxo's multi-asset trading and back office infrastructure, will allow its partners, clients and external developers to access over 20 years of trading infrastructure innovation and enable them to customise their trading experience and create new revenue streams.

Wallstreet CN was founded by Wu Xiaopeng in 2013 and conceived in the form of a personal blog when he was stationed overseas in New York. Upon his return to China in May 2013, the company was registered in Shanghai and received venture capital investment from China Ping An and Hai Tong Securities' investment funds, along with several other well-known institutions in China.

During the past three years, Wallstreet CN has accumulated 15 million monthly unique visitors from scratch. Today it is the leading financial news source providing the most influential market news and economic data to Chinese speaking investors.

"I am honoured to partner with Saxo Bank and LeanWork. Saxo Bank is a leader in online trading technology. The global reach of Saxo Bank and the local touch of LeanWork & Wallstreet CN combined will make WEEX, the trading platform, a powerful value proposition for Chinese speaking investors," said Wu Xiaopeng, founder and CEO, Wallstreet CN.

LeanWork is a technology start-up based in Hong Kong which originally started with the creation of a multiple broker solution and has overtime gained significant market share amongst the Chinese speaking broker community. Today LeanWork has a sizable IT development team with over 30 IT developers in its offices across Greater China.

"No team is better than Saxo Bank, Wallstreet CN and LeanWork combined. As a leading financial institution in online trading, Saxo Bank provides access to over 30,000 financial instruments. LeanWork's local understanding and strength in IT development makes the best local user experience a reality." said Darren Qian, CEO and founder of LeanWork.

The partnership was sealed at an official ceremony at Danish Consulate in Shanghai on April 13th, 2016 with attendance of Nicolai Prytz, Danish Consul General of Shanghai.

About Saxo Bank

The Saxo Bank Group (Saxo) is an online multi-asset trading and investment specialist, offering a complete set of trading and investment technologies, tools and strategies.

A fully licensed and regulated bank, Saxo enables private and institutional clients to easily trade multiple assets from a single margin account on multiple devices seamlessly.

Saxo's award winning trading technology platforms are available in more than 20 languages and form the technology backbone of more than 100 financial institutions worldwide.

Saxo also offers traditional banking services through Saxo Privatbank in select markets.

Founded in 1992 and headquartered in Copenhagen, Saxo employs 1500 people in 25 offices across the five continents.
Automotive and industrial equipment companies could spend up to 220 billion in R&D over next five years to create a connected industrial workforce

Despite plans to invest in machines and artificial intelligence as part of their strategy to boost productivity, many automotive and industrial equipment companies are failing to implement the measures needed to harness these capabilities, according to a new report from Accenture (NYSE:ACN).

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005222/en/

The report, "Machine dreams: Making the Most of the Connected Industrial Workforce," is based on interviews with more than 500 business executives in Asia, Europe and the United States involved in setting their company's strategy for the connected industrial workforce. According to the report, manufacturing and production are undergoing rapid change as machines and artificial intelligence are becoming closely integrated with personnel, creating the connected industrial workforce. By combining mobile, safety and tracking technologies with analytics, companies are enhancing the activities of an industrial worker.

The report concludes that the creation of a connected industrial workforce is already part of the business strategy of the majority of automotive and industrial equipment producers, cited by 94 percent of respondents. Respondents estimate that their companies could spend up to one-quarter of their R&D expenditure over the next five years on connected industrial workforce technologies. This could reach 181 billion for automotive companies and 39 billion for industrial equipment companies.

But while the manufacturing companies surveyed believe that the impact of the connected industrial workforce will be significant, the research reveals that the companies making these investments could fail to maximize the competitive advantage that the investments can bring. For instance, fewer than one-quarter (22 percent) of respondents said their companies have implemented measures designed to realize the potential of a connected industrial workforce, with 85 percent of respondents describing their companies as digital followers or laggards, rather than leaders.

One of the issues that could adversely impact the implementation of a connected industrial workforce is the related technology. Data vulnerability is seen as a medium or high risk for 76 percent of respondents, while system complexity and related vulnerability is seen as medium or high risk by 72 percent of respondents. In addition, more than two thirds (70 percent) of respondents consider a shortage of skilled human workers to be a high or medium risk. This could also impact their ability to deliver on their connected industrial workforce strategy.

"Those leading manufacturers investing in digital technologies to harness competitive advantage are spending almost twice as much as laggards on the connected industrial workforce and will continue to raise the bar over the next five years," said Eric Schaeffer, senior managing director and head of Accenture's Industrial practice. "We also see laggards lacking the confidence to implement the technologies that underpin a successful connected industrial workforce and this may threaten their competitiveness."

The vast majority of respondents 85 percent said they expect the focus of technology in manufacturing to evolve from human to human-machine-centric, where collaborative machines, humans augmenting machines and autonomous machines are combined to create a more effective workforce. A number of the organizations surveyed have a clear focus for investments relating to workforce effectiveness. Autonomous guided vehicles mobile robots that move materials around a facility or warehouse already account for half of spending by these companies in this area and will continue to account for much of it in the future. The same organizations plan to boost their investments in both collaborative robots ("cobots") and augmented reality devices, including smart glasses and helmets, over the next five years.

In their efforts to tackle the security concerns, a number of respondents are also investing heavily in upgrading their existing IT infrastructures to help ensure a securely connected workforce. Among the respondents who believe they are leading the creation of the connected industrial worker, 89 percent have started to hire new talent to close the skills gap.

Automotive could lead the way

Accenture estimates that by 2020 the connected industrial workforce could help an automotive manufacturer with annual revenues of 50 billion unlock as much as 500 million in additional profitability including 50 million in increased R&D profitability, 415 million in increased profitability from manufacturing and supply, and 30 million in increased after-sales profits.

Among the respondents who are seeking to use technology to help them improve productivity, the automotive manufacturers and suppliers have the highest interest in collaborative robots, automated guided vehicles and augmented reality devices.

"As cobots take on more and more specialized tasks, leading manufacturers that are investing in digital to harness competitive advantage are moving rapidly toward human-machine-centric manufacturing," added Schaeffer.

The report also identified some differences by country in terms of their R&D investments in connected workforce technologies. US respondents expect to make the highest percentage of R&D investment in the connected industrial workforce, at 40 percent of total R&D spend. The next highest percentage is for respondents in China, estimating 23 percent of R&D to be spent in this area, falling to 17 percent of total R&D spend for respondents in Japan. The respondents in Germany and France estimate 20 percent and 19 percent respectively.

About the research

Accenture interviewed 512 business professionals at companies in China, France, Germany, Japan and the United States. All respondents were involved in setting their company's strategy for the Connected Industrial Workforce; the sample included factory directors, engineering and R&D heads, operations and HR managers, and C-suite executives. More than half were from the industrial equipment industry, with the rest split between automotive and construction equipment. The interviews were conducted in December 2015.

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions underpinned by the world's largest delivery network Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With approximately 373,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005222/en/

Contacts:

Accenture

Anthony Hatter, 44 7810 756 138

anthony.hatter@accenture.com
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM and MENLO PARK, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/19/16 -- Calypso Technology, Inc. ('Calypso'), a leading provider of capital markets software, announced today that it is to be acquired by European private equity fund Bridgepoint and global growth equity investor Summit Partners. The acquisition will support Calypso's next phase of growth and continued innovation leadership in capital markets technology.

Established in 1997, Calypso offers an integrated suite of trading and risk management solutions used by over 34,000 market professionals in more than 60 countries. Calypso's cross-asset, front-to-back architecture was designed from the outset to enable systems consolidation, enterprise risk management and rapid access to new markets for its customers. Clients today range from global and local banks to asset managers, clearing houses, central banks, custodians, insurance companies and treasuries of large corporations. Calypso has over 700 employees and operates a network of 22 offices in 19 countries. Over 50% of the company's employees are engaged in R&D across 5 global development centers.

Pascal Xatart, President of Calypso, said, "Today's announcement sees the arrival of a new investor base with the financial strength and shared vision to support our growth ambitions. Capital markets require both resilient and innovative technology and Calypso's solutions support our clients' most critical operations. We are recognized as a market leader with a reputation for ease of use, innovation and customer satisfaction. Our goal now is to become the landmark financial software provider serving institutions with complex treasury and capital markets needs."

Xavier Robert, partner responsible for Bridgepoint's investments in the media & technology sector, said, "Constant pressure on financial institutions to improve risk management and return on capital, while at the same time managing margins and increased regulation, has created the need for integrated solutions able to reduce operating costs, improve capital allocation and comply with regulations. Calypso has been at the forefront of addressing this growing demand with a single, integrated platform that is acknowledged as both reliable and scalable across asset classes. We will partner with management as they build on the company's success to date, consolidating its market leadership by continuing to better serve its clients and realizing its true growth potential."

Scott Collins, managing director at Summit Partners, added, "We are pleased to partner with Calypso management and Bridgepoint to invest in this outstanding treasury and capital markets software business. At Summit, we have deep experience investing in financial technology, and we believe that the core strengths of Calypso's unified technology architecture, the company's focus on innovation and a strong commitment to client service will continue to drive growth in the years to come."

The transaction is subject to standard competition authority clearances. Debt for the transaction was provided by Goldman Sachs, UniCredit, Credit Agricole, Mizuho and Bank of Ireland.

Advisors involved included:

- for Calypso: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

- for Bridgepoint and Summit Partners: Credit Suisse, Latham & Watkins, Kirkland & Ellis, Bain & Company, EY

About Calypso

Calypso is the leading provider of front-to-back technology solutions for the financial markets. With 19 years of experience delivering cross-asset solutions for trading, processing, risk management and accounting, Calypso brings simplicity to the most complex business and technology issues. Constant pressures for better allocation of capital and improved risk management, matched by an ever changing regulatory landscape in the financial markets demand technology solutions that are reliable, adaptable and scalable. In response Calypso provides customers with a single platform designed from the outset to enable consolidation innovation and growth. Calypso is a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Trading Platforms, and the #1 selling Treasury and Capital Markets Solution for the seventh year running in the 2016 IBS Sales League Table.

About Bridgepoint

Bridgepoint is a European private equity firm. With over EUR 20 billion of capital raised to date, it typically focuses on acquiring well managed companies in attractive sectors with the potential to grow organically or through acquisition. It is currently investing a EUR 4 billion fund in growth-oriented middle-market businesses in Europe.

Bridgepoint currently comprises two businesses: 1. Bridgepoint Europe which concentrates on middle market companies across Europe typically valued between EUR 200 million and EUR 1 billion. It has offices throughout Europe in Frankfurt, Istanbul, London, Luxembourg, Madrid, Paris, Stockholm and a portfolio development office in Shanghai, and 2. Bridgepoint Development Capital, a separate 'lower mid-cap' or smaller buyout and growth capital business which focuses on the acquisition of companies in the UK, France and the Nordic region, typically valued between EUR 50 million and EUR 150 million. www.bridgepoint.eu

In January 2015, Bridgepoint acquired eFront, the business software solutions provider which specializes in enterprise risk management and alternative investments, in a transaction totaling approximately EUR 300 million.

About Summit Partners

Founded in 1984, Summit Partners is a global growth equity firm that is currently investing more than $7.2 billion into equity and fixed income opportunities. Summit has invested in more than 430 companies in technology, healthcare, life sciences and other growth sectors. These companies have completed more than 135 public offerings, and more than 160 have been acquired through strategic mergers and sales. Notable financial technology companies financed by Summit Partners include 360T, FleetCor, Flow Traders, Multifonds, Ogone and optionsXpress. Summit maintains offices in North America and Europe and invests in companies around the world. For more information, visit www.summitpartners.com or follow on Twitter at @SummitPartners.

In the United States of America, Summit Partners operates as an SEC-registered investment advisor. In the United Kingdom, this document is issued by Summit Partners LLP, a firm authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Summit Partners LLP is a limited liability partnership registered in England and Wales with registered number OC388179 and its registered office is at 20-22 Bedford Row, London, WC1R 4JS, UK. This document is intended solely to provide information regarding Summit Partners' potential financing capabilities for p2rospective portfolio companies.

For further information:



Chris Shayne

Calypso Technology

Tel: +1 415 530 4147

Email: Email Contact



James Murray

Bridgepoint

Tel: +44 207 034 3555

Email: Email Contact



Meg Devine

Summit Partners

Tel: +1 617 824 1047

Email: Email Contact




By closely simulating well-planned, real-world attacks, the company effectively identifies and corrects cracks in an organization's cyber resilience architecture.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --Based on recent analysis of the red team-based penetration testing market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes NCC Group as the winner of the 2016 European Product Leadership award. NCC Group helps organizations evaluate their cyber resilience and recommends effective security mechanisms by demonstrating well-orchestrated cyber attacks that take into account the nature of the industry, organization and its human capital.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356461

"New cyber threats are generated at an alarming rate, leading to rapid obsolescence of the countermeasures previously installed," said Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst, Arjun Sreekumar. "Red team-based penetration testing is a way to achieve cyber resilience through continual testing of a firm's security framework. The effectiveness of red teaming depends on the ability to emulate real-world threat actors and create advanced and realistic attack scenarios after careful and systematic assessments of the organization and operational processes."

NCC Group is widely chosen by companies, spanning industries such as oil and gas, banking and finance, and pharmaceuticals, to evaluate their cyber resilience and recommend specific strategies to enhance security. The company has carved out an impressive niche through its ability to converge physical and cyber threat factors seamlessly into the red teaming exercise. The company's services have the versatility to scale up and down according to the complexity of the challenge and the diversity of the client's institutional framework to deliver superior customer value.

"The optimum combination of knowledgeable human capital, advanced processes, and clear ability to understand client requirements enable NCC Group to deliver a consistent and quality output solution," iterated Sreekumar. "This gives it a strong head start as demand for red teaming-based penetration testing services is on the rise, driven by regional instability, the emergence of new nation states, and the proliferation of cyber terrorism."

Robert Horton, European MD of Security Consulting at NCC Group, said he is delighted that the Group's red teaming services have been acknowledged.

He added: "The award demonstrates to employees, customers, investors and the public that the Group is superior in the red team based penetration testing space."

Having anticipated this surge in demand, NCC Group recently made several well-planned acquisitions to enlarge both its capabilities and its footprint in Europe. Retaining the best talent and nurturing a select workforce make NCC Group one of the most reliable and quality-oriented participants in the red teambased penetration testing space.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has developed a product with innovative features and functionality, gaining rapid acceptance in the market. The award recognizes the quality of the solution and the customer value enhancements it enables.

Frost & Sullivan's Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for outstanding achievement in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research.

About NCC Group

NCC Group is a global expert in cyber security and risk mitigation, working with businesses to protect their brand, value and reputation against the ever-evolving threat landscape.

Through a unique range of services, the company helps businesses to prepare for and respond to cyber threats, providing freedom from doubt that their most important assets are protected and operational at all times.

Listed on the FTSE 250, NCC Group is a trusted advisor to more than 15,000 clients worldwide. Headquartered in Manchester, UK, with over 30 offices across the world, the Group employs more than 1,800 people.

https://www.nccgroup.trust/ncc-group-frost-and-sullivan-2016/;

https://www.nccgroup.trust

About Frost & Sullivan

As a Growth Partnership company, Frost & Sullivan collaborates with clients to leverage visionary innovation to address global challenges and related growth opportunities that could make or break today's market participants.

Frost & Sullivan's Growth Partnership supports clients by addressing these opportunities and incorporating 2 key elements driving visionary innovation: the Integrated Value Proposition and the Partnership Infrastructure.

The Integrated Value Proposition provides support to clients throughout all phases of their journey to visionary innovation, including research, analysis, strategy, vision, innovation, and implementation.

provides support to clients throughout all phases of their journey to visionary innovation, including research, analysis, strategy, vision, innovation, and implementation. The Partnership Infrastructure is entirely unique as it constructs the foundation upon which visionary innovation becomes possible, including 360 degree research, comprehensive industry coverage, and career best practices as well as Frost & Sullivan's global footprint of more than 40 offices.

For more than 50 years, Frost & Sullivan has been developing growth strategies for the global 1,000; emerging businesses; the public sector; and the investment community.

Is your organization prepared for the next profound wave of industry convergence, disruptive technologies, increasing competitive intensity, Mega Trends, breakthrough best practices, changing customer dynamics, and emerging economies?

Contact Us: Start the discussion

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Subscribe: Newsletter on "the next big thing"

Register: Gain access to visionary innovation

Contact:

Mireya Espinoza

P: +1 210. 247.3870

F: +1 210.348.1003

E: mireya.espinoza@frost.com
Renamed Turnitin Feedback Studio, new version is focused on helping instructors provide authentic feedback to improve student writing.

NEWCASTLE, United Kingdom, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --This week, Turnitin announced a new version of its flagship product with a focus on ease-of-use, accessibility for students, and new mobile features to support instruction in the modern classroom. Formerly known as "Turnitin," the new version is being renamed "Turnitin Feedback Studio" and will be made available to its two million educators and 30 million students on an opt-in basis beginning today. Click to Tweet.

Turnitin Feedback Studio has been reimagined from front to back with an emphasis on providing instructors tools to give relevant feedback that students will understand and learn from, while also supporting academic integrity. "Worldwide, instructors rely on Turnitin for preventing plagiarism in student writing. Turnitin Feedback Studio goes a step further in helping students become better writers by giving instructors a single place to quickly provide direct, actionable feedback on all aspects of student work," said Will Murray, chief product officer at Turnitin.

Feedback Studio offers:

Great feedback, fast. Re-designed user interface brings plagiarism prevention, feedback, and grading into a unified view that helps educators mark faster while making it easier for students to engage with their instructors' comments.

Re-designed user interface brings plagiarism prevention, feedback, and grading into a unified view that helps educators mark faster while making it easier for students to engage with their instructors' comments. Anytime, anywhere learning. Responsive design works on PCs, tablets, and smartphones to support students and instructors wherever they are and however they work.

Responsive design works on PCs, tablets, and smartphones to support students and instructors wherever they are and however they work. Accessibility improvements . Major upgrades make Turnitin Feedback Studio more usable by all students, moving closer to compliance with WCAG 2.0 AA Standards for web accessibility.

. Major upgrades make Turnitin Feedback Studio more usable by all students, moving closer to compliance with WCAG 2.0 AA Standards for web accessibility. Unparalleled content coverage. Enhanced technology intelligently and rapidly crawls and indexes the most relevant and up-to-date content on the Web, including content hidden behind Javascript, expanding Turnitin's vast content database in support of academic integrity.

Enhanced technology intelligently and rapidly crawls and indexes the most relevant and up-to-date content on the Web, including content hidden behind Javascript, expanding Turnitin's vast content database in support of academic integrity. Multiple markers. A new feature for users via integrations that enables multiple instructors to feedback onto a single submission with unique identifiable mark layers for high-stakes assessments.

"The new Turnitin Feedback Studio is a big improvement. It is much cleaner, more modern and easier to navigate," said Joe Currie, Learning Technologist at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. "With added features such as multiple markers, it will help to overcome one of the main hurdles our staff struggle with and drive further adoption across the University." See Feedback Studio in action here go.turnitin.com/feedback-studio-demo.

About Turnitin

Turnitin is revolutionising the experience of writing to learn. Turnitin's formative feedback and originality checking services promote critical thinking, ensure academic integrity, and help students improve their writing. Turnitin provides instructors with the tools to engage students in the writing process, provide personalised feedback, and assess student progress over time. Turnitin is used by more than 30 million students at 15,000 institutions in 140 countries. Backed by Insight Venture Partners, GIC, Norwest Venture Partners, Lead Edge Capital and Georgian Partners, Turnitin is headquartered in Oakland, Calif., with international offices in Newcastle, U.K., Utrecht, Netherlands, Seoul, South Korea, and Melbourne, Australia. @Turnitin
LONDON, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Sequa Petroleum N.V. (the "Company") announces that it has decided not to progress with the acquisition of a 15% interest in Gina Krog, asannounced on 19 October 2015 and subsequentlyapproved by the Norwegian government on the basis of an effective date of 1 January 2015, and the acquisition of a 0.554% interest in the Ivar Aasen field from OMV, as announced on 9 November 2015, due to current market conditions.

Further to the Notice to Bondholders on 11 April 2016 regarding the Company's U.S. $300,000,000 5 percent convertible bonds due 2020 (the Bonds),the Company has decided not to implement the consent received,which leaves the Bond terms unchangedandtrading in the Bonds will be unblocked before close of trading on today's date.

The Company continues topursue itsstrategy to create value in a cyclical marketenvironmentby means of acquisition, optimisation and monetisation ofassets with proven resources, current and near term production, and value upsides,applying its technical and financial expertise to establish a balanced asset portfolio in select areas with low marginal cost, growth potential and synergies.

About the Company

The Company is an oil and gas company registered in the Netherlands, with its principal office in London and listed on Euronext Marche Libre. In 2014, the Company established an operating presence in Kazakhstan, acquiring 75% of the Aksai licence which has subsequently been drilled and is currently being evaluated. In 2015, the Company established a presence in Norway, acquiring Tellus Petroleum Invest AS as a 100% subsidiary.

For more information please visithttp://www.sequa-petroleum.comor contact:

Jacob Broekhuijsen, Chief Executive Officer: +44(0)203-728-4450

info@sequa-petroleum.com


CINCINNATI, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

itelligence, Inc. today announced that it has received two 2016 SAP Pinnacle Awards as the SAP S/4HANA Adoption Partner of the Year and the Global Value-Added Reseller, recognizing the company's outstanding contributions as an SAP partner. SAP presents these awards annually to the top partners that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP and helping customers run better. Winners and finalists in 19 categories were chosen based on recommendations from the SAP field, customer feedback and performance indicators in the following umbrella categories: Build, Service, and Sell with each category including a Customers' Choice award, which recognizes a customer-nominated SAP partner.

"We are honored to receive this recognition from our longtime partner," said Herbert Vogel, chief executive officer and founder, itelligence AG. "After working together for more than twenty five years, we are proud to continue to partner with SAP as we help customers take on business challenges."

"In today's changing business environment, our customers need next-generation business tools like SAP S/4HANA to stay competitive," said Steve Niesman, president and chief executive officer, itelligence, Inc. "We're proud to work in tandem with SAP to help customers streamline business processes and run simple."

"Winning the SAP Pinnacle Award is a tremendous accomplishment," said Rodolpho Cardenuto, president of SAP Global Channels & General Business. "Only 16 companies in our ecosystem of 13,000 partners received this recognition. itelligence should be very proud of their success."

Kevin Ichhpurani, executive vice president of SAP Strategic Business Development & Global Ecosystem added, "The SAP Pinnacle Award winners represent the very best in our partner community, and we congratulateitelligence for two well-deserved 2016 SAP Pinnacle Awards."

itelligence, Inc. has been an SAP North America partner since 1993 and an SAP Global partner since 1989, and provides expertise on SAP's solutions to help its customers with implementation, application management and hosting through each stage of the process. itelligence is SAP-certified in cloud services, an SAP-certified provider of hosting services for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and an SAP Platinum Partner among other achievements.

SAP Pinnacle Awards shine a spotlight on SAP's partners' remarkable contributions, acknowledging their dedication to teamwork, innovative approach and capacity to challenge what is possible to help customers achieve their goals. Award winners will be formally recognized at the SAP Global Partner Summit on May 16, in conjunction with SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP's international customer conference in Orlando, Fla., May 17-19. For descriptions of the awards, visit: http://www.sap.com/partners/become/partner-program/benefits/pinnacle-awards.html.

About itelligence

itelligence, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of itelligence AG, an international full-service solution and consulting company with a global presence in 23 countries. itelligence provides a broad range of consulting and customer support services to further maximize SAP solutions, including implementations, application management services and hosting. itelligence also provides support for solutions including the SAP BusinessObjects' Business Intelligence suite, mobile solutions, the SAP HANA platform, SAP Human Capital Management and SAP SuccessFactors solutions, and office of CFO solutions including SAP Business Planning and Consolidation and SAP solutions for governance, risk and compliance (GRC). itelligence is an SAP gold partner authorized to resell SAP Business All-in-One and SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solutions, an SAP global services and SAP global hosting partner, and an SAP-certified global provider of application management services. itelligence also holds global quality accreditation by the SAP Active Quality Management organization for demonstrating clear quality standards and processes.

Learn more about itelligence at itelligencegroup.com/us/

Follow itelligence on Facebook: facebook.com/itelligenceUS

Follow itelligence on Twitter: twitter.com/itelligence_US

Read our blog: itelligencegroup.com/us/news-and-insights/local-blog/

SAP, SAPPHIRE and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. See http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx foradditional trademark information and notices.

All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

SAP Forward-looking Statement

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

For media inquiries, contact:

Laure Poquette

itelligence, Inc.

+1-630-725-3346

laure.poquette@itelligencegroup.com

Brent Curry

Hill+Knowlton Strategies

+1-312-255-3086

brent.curry@hkstrategies.com

For international media inquiries, contact

Head of Corporate Public Relations itelligence AG

Silvia Dicke

silvia.dicke@itelligence.de

+49-(0)521 / 9-14-48-107


Offers more flexibility to publishers who want to include the voice of the crowd on their sites, in apps, and in other digital experiences

GRONINGEN, Netherlands, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Crowdynews, the world's largest social media curation platform, today announced it has released two APIs associated with its solution. These APIs enable customers and developers to utilize the core functionality of the Crowdynews platform in applications of their own creation (e.g., mobile app or other custom application), delivering maximum flexibility in finding, filtering, managing, and publishing social content.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160208/330590LOGO

"While many organizations use Crowdynews' 'out of the box' features, some of our customers have envisioned ways to use social media curation that exceed what's offered off the shelf, thus we've created the APIs," said Edwin Kuipers, co-CEO and co-founder, Crowdynews. "We're excited to see how they use the APIs to apply these capabilities in their mobile apps, on their websites, and in other digital experiences to deliver social media content alongside their editorial content in new and creative ways."

Two APIs are offered at this time:

Content API: Offers greater flexibility in how media companies publish curated social media content. Filter content by social network service, by content type (e.g., only content with pictures), by location, or sort by time published or trending score. The Crowdynews Content API allows developers to incorporate curated social media content right within mobile apps or other custom experiences, which allows them to deliver the most relevant, timely, and safe social content right to readers, no matter what their interaction point is.

Offers greater flexibility in how media companies publish curated social media content. Filter content by social network service, by content type (e.g., only content with pictures), by location, or sort by time published or trending score. The Crowdynews Content API allows developers to incorporate curated social media content right within mobile apps or other custom experiences, which allows them to deliver the most relevant, timely, and safe social content right to readers, no matter what their interaction point is. Control API: Offers greater flexibility and control in how media companies manage and filter curated social media content. The Crowdynews Control API allows customers to more easily manage the administration & inputs associated with curated social content, which allows them to deliver the most relevant, timely, and safe social content right to readers.

The APIs will be available at the end of this month; for more information, visit www.crowdynews.com/technology/APIs.

About Crowdynews

Crowdynews is the world's largest social media curation platform, delivering social content to the news media market worldwide. We are the definitive one-stop shop for automating the inclusion of relevant, real-time, and safe social content from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, and more alongside editorial content. Using artificial intelligence & natural language processing, we enable our customers to tell "the whole story" by augmenting their own content with photos, videos, eyewitness reports, and opinions shared through social media. For more information, please visit www.crowdynews.com or follow us on Twitter @Crowdynews.
Gage Nelson and son.jpg

Ocean Springs police officer Christian Gage Nelson and his 16-month-old son, Braysen. Nelson was diagnosed with leukemia about a month ago.

(Facebook photo)

OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- It was roughly a month ago Gage Nelson thought he might die.

After vomiting for "about a month straight" and then ultimately coughing up blood, Nelson, 24, went to Ocean Springs Hospital, where doctors gave him an initial diagnosis of leukemia -- cancer of the blood. Further tests at University Medical Center in Jackson confirmed that Nelson had chronic myeloid leukemia.

"I was terrified," said Nelson, a corrections officer for the Ocean Springs Police Department. "My first thought was I was going to die. It terrified me because of my son (16-month old Braysen). I want to be a dad."

But now, a month later, the outlook is optimistic. Nelson said doctors have told him the form of leukemia from which he suffers can often be treated with medication and in some cases go into remission -- although he notes he may have to continue the medication for the rest of his life.

Nelson, whose full name is Christian Gage Nelson (he answers to both Christian and Gage) is a native of Clarksdale and a graduate of Gautier High School.

He has long harbored a dream of being a police officer and initially joined the OSPD as a reserve officer before accepting a position with the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office as a patrolman/corrections officer.

But his love of home brought him back to the coast when he was offered the opportunity to return to Ocean Springs as a full-time corrections officer.

It's a decision which is paying huge dividends now. After doctors informed him of his diagnoses, they encouraged him to take some time off from work to rest as he began his treatments.

But there was a problem -- he had little in the way of vacation or leave time available. Without hesitation, his co-workers came to the rescue.

"Now I have six months of donated leave," Nelson said. "In law enforcement, you have to trust the people you work with. My trust for those people is absolute."

A community-wide fundraiser for Ocean Springs police officer Gage Nelson is set for May 28.

"It's unimaginable," said OSPD Chief Mark Dunston of Nelson's diagnoses. "He's a brave young man and he's doing well. The support of his co-workers has been great. Something like this doesn't bring everybody together, because we're already a tight-knit group. What is does is reinforce it."

Support for Nelson goes beyond the police department. A GoFundMe account has been set up to help offset Nelson's medical expenses not covered by insurance and, in addition, a community-wide fundraiser called "Rage-4-Gage" is scheduled for Saturday, May 28, at Greyhound Stadium.

The event will feature a number of activities for children, an dunking booth which will be manned by police officers (a chance to get even for that speeding ticket), a fish fry, raffle and a community-wide rummage sale.

"You want to do what you can to help -- especially when it's a member of the thin blue line," said one of the event organizers, Summer VanNocken, who used to work with Nelson at the OSPD.

"Everyone knows police officers don't make much money, so when something like this happens, the bills begin to pile up," she said.

More information can be found on the Rage-4-Gage Facebook page.

Although he was encouraged to take time off from work, Nelson said doctors have told him he can lead an otherwise normal life, including eating normally and, most importantly, spending time with his girlfriend, Korina Quintana, and their son.

In his Facebook profile, Nelson wrote of himself "family and friends are my life support." Little could he have known how true those words would prove to be. That, plus his devout faith in God, will carry him through this journey, he said.

Thats one thing that has gotten me though all this and kept me going -- my faith in God.

Ed. Note: Christian Gage Nelson died Aug. 11, 2020. He was 28 years old.










Bilingual app guides visiting culture mavens to more than 250 off-the-beaten-track stores, cafes, restaurants, and cultural centers during World Design Capital Taipei 2016

TAIPEI, Taiwan, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/-- Operating under the banner "Adaptive City - Design in Motion" -- the core concept behind World Design Capital Taipei 2016 -- Taipei City is set to launch the 2016 edition of the annual Creative Expo Taiwan (CET). Both events are tied directly to the city of Taipei, aiming to bring people to design and take design to the people through themes that re-invent city neighborhoods as spaces for creative products and projects.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/356973

Taipei City invites travelers and businesses alike to become their own tour guides with a bilingual, user-friendly app launched in April 2016 to celebrate the opening of the Creative Expo Taiwan, the island's largest lifestyle design trade show.

Part of an inaugural CET Fringe Shops program, the travel app interprets city neighborhoods as experiential spaces for creativity, and highlights exceptional design and innovation around the city. With 250 stores, cafes, restaurants, and cultural centers at their fingertips, visitors will discover first-hand why Taipei has been named World Design Capital 2016.

The app guides people through the neighborhoods that surround the three major exhibition sites of the 2016 edition of Creative Expo Taiwan, which officially opens on Wednesday, April 20. These neighborhoods include Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, Huashan 1914 Creative Park, and the Expo Dome. The app features several useful functions to help travelers design their own tours, including news, maps, visitor information, events, and a list of hand-picked Fringe Shops.

Pioneering Design at Songshan Cultural and Creative Park

Renowned for promoting pioneering Taiwanese design, Songshan Cultural and Creative Park is a fitting home for the Taiwan Design Museum, which holds exhibitions of local and international design year round. Using the app's map function, travelers can quickly locate must-see homegrown design stores in the vicinity, such as minimalist furniture showroom Mountain Living, handmade shoe shop O'Ringo, eyewear brand Classico, and a host of fashion labels such as Just In Case, Groovy Store, and A Room Model.

Inspiring Craft at Huashan 1914 Creative Park

The successful urban regeneration project that transformed an abandoned wine-making warehouse into today's Huashan 1914 Creative Park has resulted in an upwelling of creative projects and workshops in and around the venue. Visitors can wander through the neighborhood and visit the iconic 24-hour Eslite Spectrum Bookstore, which holds much more than books within its cavernous interior. Others may prefer to rummage through the treasure trove of magazines, creative Taiwanese products, and vintage memorabilia at VVG Thinking, or the stylish contemporary art, fashion, and lifestyle brands on display at Mano Select Shop.

Creative License at Expo Dome

The Expo Dome, situated among some of Taipei's most important art galleries and museums, will play host to the Images of Art display, exhibiting culturally significant art pieces from such institutions as the National Palace Museum and the National Museum of History. Visitors can enjoy a visit to the nearby Taipei Fine Arts Museum, a shining example of contemporary museum architecture. Next door to the Expo Dome, MAJI Square is a vibrant market of vintage and contemporary fashion and accessories, while farther afield, Everyday Ware flaunts beautifully designed homeware.

"This is the first time Taipei City has harnessed the power of modern technology to provide an immersive experience of the city's lifestyle design. We hope that travelers from near and far will be inspired, and leave with a deeper understanding of innovative Taipei design and Taiwanese culture," says Commissioner Pei-ni Beatrice Hsieh of the Department of Cultural Affairs (Taipei City).

Visitors to Taipei can download the app here: https://goo.gl/MQGz62 (iOS) and https://goo.gl/4YkVjc (Android). For more information on CET Fringe Shops, go to: http://cetmap.tw/. Visitors to Taipei can also pick up a printed city guide at museums, theaters, and visitor information centers. Produced by the Taipei City Government, the guide will soon be available in English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.

To view more images of the Creative Expo Taiwan 2016, a video demonstration of the app in use, and a print version of the CET Fringe Shops map, please follow this download link: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Bz9o_vxqYG27TFQzcHNXZUJ5cnc&usp=sharing.

Taipei City Government's Department of Cultural Affairs has also launched two urban design projects that visitors to the city might notice during their travels.

In collaboration with City Yeast, a local social enterprise organization, the New Color for Transformer Boxes project (part of the wider Urban Landscape Planning project) will make Taipei's electrical transformer boxes, cycling paths, and public squares more aesthetically and environmentally appealing. With the support of Taipei Power Company, to date 62 pairs of transformer boxes along five major roads have been earmarked for a revamp. The public is encouraged to help select final color schemes via the official Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/taipeiworlddesigncapital/.



project (part of the wider project) will make electrical transformer boxes, cycling paths, and public squares more aesthetically and environmentally appealing. With the support of Taipei Power Company, to date 62 pairs of transformer boxes along five major roads have been earmarked for a revamp. The public is encouraged to help select final color schemes via the official Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/taipeiworlddesigncapital/. The Small Shop Signboard Manufacturer-organized in collaboration with Taipei -based culture promotion brand Archicake-is another project that connects small, family run businesses with designers. Designers consult with business owners to create signboards that highlight their shops' unique character. Running since 2013, the project will this year focus on the creation of signboards for traditional market stalls in Taipei ; by the end of 2016, the project hopes to celebrate the creation of the 100th signboard.

For images of these projects, please follow this download link: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Bz9o_vxqYG27TFQzcHNXZUJ5cnc&usp=sharing.

The Creative Expo Taiwan (CET) has been organized by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan and run by the Taiwan Design Center since 2010. CET 2016 operates under the theme "Savoring the Rich Eastern Culture" and the 2015-2017 core concept "The City is the Exhibition; the Exhibition Displays Life," values that feed into the World Design Capital Taipei 2016's focus on "Adaptive City-Design in Motion." For more information, including dates, locations, and special events, go to: https://creativexpo.tw/en/.

About WDC Taipei 2016

"Adaptive City--Design in Motion" was Taipei City's core concept in its 2015 application to host World Design Capital 2016. How can we apply innovative design thinking practices to overcome the constraints placed on our city's development by limited resources, pursue continuing change in our urban governance, create happiness in the lives of our citizens-providing them with a better quality of life in a more livable, forward-looking city? These are the goals for Taipei City. 2016 marks the beginning of an evolution for Taipei, whereby we will take advantage of the potential in change by "Engaging Communities," "Connecting Information," and "Revitalizing the City." For more information on WDC Taipei 2016, visit the official website (http://wdc2016.taipei/) or follow on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/taipeidesign/).

About World Design Capital

Every two years, Icsid designates a different city World Design Capital (WDC) in recognition of that city's innovative use of design for economic, social, and cultural development and to showcase effective design-led urban revitalization strategies from which other cities can benefit. Past holders of the WDC title include Torino (Italy) in 2008, Seoul (South Korea) in 2010, Helsinki (Finland) in 2012, and Cape Town (South Africa) 2014. Taipei (Taiwan) is this year's WDC, and Mexico City has just been named WDC 2018. For more information, please visit http://www.worlddesigncapital.com.

Media Contact: Taipei Office Contact: Kate Nicholson International Media Liaison +886 2 2772 5850 ext. 180 kate.nicholson@ddg.com.tw Annta Su World Design Capital Taipei 2016 Office +886 2 2745 8199 ext. 473 annta_su@tdc.org.tw








MILAN, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Italtel, a leading telecommunications company in Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), managed services and all IP communication, today announced it is renewing the communications network of Costa Cruises - Europe's leading Italian shipping company - to implement a modern and integrated communication system, based on IP protocol and capable of delivering new services.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130429/612742 )

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160408/353234 )



Costa Cruises was previously equipped with a voice-based infrastructure on a different set of local exchanges directly connected to the traditional telephone network. Although these guaranteed basic telephone services, they did not allow the various systems used by different locations to be integrated and originated high costs both in terms of telephone company rates and maintenance and management.

In less than six months, Italtel migrated Costa Cruises' system from TDM to VoIP, linking the company's headquarters in Genoa to its offices in Paris, Barcelona and Madrid. The new infrastructure allows employees to access additional messaging tools such as video calling, video conferencing, instant messaging and a centralized address book, improving individual productivity and saving time.

Roberta Rabino, Vice President, Head of Enterprise & Public Sector at Italtel, said: "We are extremely pleased that one of the major companies in the cruise industry has selected Italtel for its migration project. Costa Cruises recognized that we are pioneers in migrating voice, data and video traffic over IP. Our experience and professionalism to successfully implement projects in a short time, without disruption, has been imperative to our role in renewing the communications network."

The new VoIP platform has been integrated into the existing call center, centralizing management of all telephone routes and allowing common access to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) both for the contact center, which is located in the headquarters, and the European offices. Italtel will now extend this renewed communication service to the remaining offices (Shanghai, Miami, San Paolo, Buenos Aires) and to the Costa fleet of ships.

Throughout the project, Italtel has ensured total continuity of service for all call center activities, including bookings addressed to Costa Cruises' customers.

The implemented solution uses Cisco Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) architecture, based on Cisco Unified Communications Manager, which consists of two clusters. The first is devoted to managing phones in Costa Cruises' European offices, while the second - with SME function (Session Manager Edition) - centralizes the routing and VoIP connectivity, including for the offices, call center, other group companies and, ultimately, all ships in the fleet.

Italtel designs and provides All IP communication solutions; Managed Services; IT System Integration Services; Network Integration and Migration activities. Italtel is present in several countries in EMEA and LatAm. http://www.italtel.com.
FRANKFURT, GERMANY -- (Marketwired) -- 04/19/16 -- Management and technology consultancy BearingPoint, which ranks among the leading providers of regulatory technology (RegTech), announced that Van Lanschot, one of the oldest independent wealth managers in Europe, selected their flagship product ABACUS/DaVinci as a Regulatory-as-a-Service solution (RaaS). The solution covers Dutch, Belgian and European (EBA ITS) reporting requirements.

With ABACUS/DaVinci as RaaS, Van Lanschot will replace an existing reporting solution operated on site aiming to streamline the regulatory reporting process and minimize the risk of non-availability and business continuity issues.

Jeroen Kroes, Director Finance, Reporting and Control at Van Lanschot, explained: "We opted for BearingPoint's RaaS solution, as it allows us to comply with all relevant rules and regulations in an efficient manner. With ABACUS/DaVinci as RaaS we get a standardized regulatory reporting solution with a well-defined roadmap and regulatory maintenance by BearingPoint."

Dr. Maciej Piechocki, Partner at BearingPoint commented: "Van Lanschot is an important customer for BearingPoint from two perspectives: It is another milestone of our international growth strategy and it shows our competitive advantage by providing consulting, software and managed services from one source."

"We are pleased that Van Lanschot benefits from a reduced workload with use of BearingPoint's hosted Software as a Service infrastructure. BearingPoint works closely with banks and regulators as part of its continuous development of Abacus, helping it stay at the forefront in reporting system technology and expertise. This allows us to provide the Regulation as a Service so that Van Lanschot complies with the latest regulatory reporting requirements. We are confident that the joint experience of the Van Lanschot and BearingPoint implementation teams involved will result in a successful delivery of the new solution for Van Lanschot," said Evert Arbman, Director Solutions, BearingPoint Netherlands.

ABACUS/DaVinci, part of BearingPoint's proven Abacus Solution Suite, is a market-leading, off-the-shelf strategic risk aggregation and regulatory reporting platform that has been developed over 20 years alongside Basel I through Basel III. ABACUS/DaVinci covers the reporting requirements of CRD IV / CRR I and EBA ITS (CoRep, FinRep, etc.) but also statistical and granular reporting in multiple jurisdictions and enables financial institutions to comply with regulatory requirements in efficient manner. Renowned financial institutions representing more than 800 reporting entities trust ABACUS/DaVinci, including a majority of the most important European banks under supervision of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM).

About the Abacus Solution Suite

With the Abacus Solution Suite, BearingPoint offers banks, insurers, financial services providers, central banks, and supervisory authorities innovative Regulatory Technology (RegTech) along the regulatory value chain. Over 240 customers from approximately 1,900 domestic and foreign reporting entities trust the Abacus Solution Suite products. BearingPoint provides unrivalled experience and a unique product and service offering in the area of regulation, ranging from consulting to managed end-to-end services, from proprietary specialist reporting software to ongoing training.

For more information, please visit: www.abacus-solution-suite.com.

About Van Lanschot

Van Lanschot, a wealth manager operating under the Van Lanschot and Kempen & Co brand names, is active in Private Banking, Asset Management and Merchant Banking. Its roots date back to 1737, when it was founded in the South of the Netherlands. Its mission is preserving and creating wealth for its private and institutional clients. Van Lanschot NV is listed on Euronext Amsterdam.

About BearingPoint

BearingPoint consultants understand that the world of business changes constantly and that the resulting complexities demand intelligent and adaptive solutions. Our clients, whether in commercial or financial industries or in government, experience real results when they work with us. We combine industry, operational and technology skills with relevant proprietary and other assets in order to tailor solutions for each client's individual challenges. This adaptive approach is at the heart of our culture and has led to long-standing relationships with many of the world's leading companies and organizations. Our global consulting network of 9,700 people serves clients in more than 70 countries and engages with them for measurable results and long-lasting success.

For more information, please visit: www.bearingpoint.com

Contacts:

Press contact

Alexander Bock

Manager Communications

+49 89 540338029

alexander.bock@bearingpoint.com

Twitter: @BearingPoint




AUSTIN, Texas, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On March 3 and 4, 2016, the Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute (TCAI) at St. David's Medical Center hosted its third international symposium on complex arrhythmias, EP Live 2016. Nearly 200 leaders in the field of electrophysiology (EP) from Europe, Asia and Latin America, as well as experts from across the United States, attended the two-day educational conference, including practicing clinical cardiac electrophysiologists, electrophysiologist fellows and general cardiologists who have an interest in treating complex arrhythmias-a condition in which the heart beats with an irregular or abnormal rhythm.

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1cwdUdIJWI

EP Live 2016 used live and recorded cases with expert commentary as the primary teaching tool. Cases were broadcast from some of the world's premier treatment centers, such as TCAI, Mayo Clinic, Stanford University Medical Center, Mount Sinai Hospital, UCLA Health System, the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Loyola University, Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, Lancaster General Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. It featured demonstrations by Dr. Natale, as well as a number of TCAI physicians, such as course co-director, Amin Al-Ahmad, M.D., as well as Rodney Horton, M.D.; Patrick Hranitzky, M.D.; Robert Canby, M.D.; Joseph Gallinghouse, M.D.; Shane Bailey, M.D.; Javier Sanchez, M.D.; David Burkhardt, M.D. and Jason Zagrodsky, M.D.

"We are pleased to see so many of the world's top cardiac specialists come together, under one roof, to learn about the newest and most effective procedures to treat cardiac arrhythmias," Andrea Natale, M.D., F.H.R.S., F.A.C.C., F.E.S.C., cardiac electrophysiologist and executive medical director of TCAI and EP Live course director, said. "This allows us to improve patient care by educating physicians about the latest advances in interventional cardiac electrophysiology, as well as new tools and technology to safely and effectively treat patients who suffer from arrhythmias."

EP Live provided attending physicians with a better understanding of techniques used to treat atrial and ventricular arrhythmias, as well as implant complex devices and extract malfunctioning devices. Cases included procedures to treat endocardial and epicardial VT ablation, AF ablation, AF Rotors and post-AF arrhythmias; balloon cases; Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy implants; lead extraction and venoplasty.

EP Live also featured new technology, such as the latest generation of the EpiAccess' System to access the pericardial cavity of the heart during an epicardial ablation.

Physicians received a maximum of 16 American Medical Association (AMA) Physician's Recognition Award (PRA) Category 1 Credit'hours at the conference.

The Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute at St. David's Medical Center is one of the world's preeminent centers dedicated to the latest treatment advances for correcting arrhythmias. The center is led by Dr. Natale, who is at the forefront of advancing treatment for A Fib, leading numerous clinical trials, and participating in the development of new technologies and procedures.

All presentations will be available for online Continuing Medical Education (CME) in June 2016. For more information, visit TCAInstitute.com/EPLive.

Media Contacts:

Erin Ochoa and Kristin Marcum

Elizabeth Christian Public Relations

+1 512.472.9599
Customer experience design and management consulting firm, Strativity Group, Inc. retains Danny Peters as Head of Client Success Europe, Touchpoint Dashboard.

New Jersey based consulting firm, Strativity Group, Inc. announces an agreement with Danny Peters to represent Touchpoint Dashboard as Head of Client Success Europe. Peters will lead sales and service for Touchpoint Dashboard in the EU.

"Touchpoint Dashboard has a large existing base of global clients, with a strong concentration in Europe", stated Lior Arussy, CEO Strativity Group and Touchpoint Dashboard, "Danny has been a partner of Touchpoint Dashboard in the Netherlands since 2012 and he has an extensive knowledge of journey mapping and customer experience."

Peters appointment marks the next step in Touchpoint Dashboard's launch of a full suite of products and professional services, including local journey mapping workshops and trainings that will begin in the second-half of 2016.

"The demand for journey management solutions is growing globally and our existing European clients deserve a more local support and training infrastructure." Says Touchpoint Dashboard Managing Director, Peter Haid. "Danny has been a key to our success in the region for more than four years and we are pleased to have him lead our new office. This is the beginning of a much stronger bridge of support to our European customers."

Peters, founder of Conexperience, has spent many years working with Touchpoint Dashboard. "As Head of Customer Success Europe, I look forward to providing local support, training, infrastructure and serving as a bridge of support between the US and EU" stated Peters.

About Strativity Group Inc. Passion, Expertise and Execution

The people at Strativity are united by passion and guided by a proprietary integrated methodology to unleash exceptional performance with employees and customers. With experience at leading organizations such as American Express, Deloitte, Ipsos, Bulgari, and HP, Strativity brings world-class experience combined with a focus on measurable results. http://www.strativity.com

About Touchpoint Dashboard Where Journeys Meet Exceptional Experiences

Touchpoint Dashboard's journey management platform gives you the flexibility to design engaging customer experiences. You can integrate your Voice of Customer data, get a better understanding of your customers and ultimately, increase your operational efficiency. Together we help you deliver the right results for the right customer. www.touchpointdashboard.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005068/en/

Contacts:

Strativity Group Inc.

Kelly Sirimoglu, 201-808-8511

kelly@strativity.com




Voice Complete Now Available in Select Western European Countries

BROOMFIELD, Colorado, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NYSE: LVLT) is expanding its award-winning Voice Complete enterprise communications solution to select countries in Western Europe.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160413/355025-INFO

As the way we communicate and collaborate continues to evolve, Voice Complete delivers a comprehensive portfolio of voice functionality, the ability to extend existing technology investments and a migration path for enterprises to transition to more efficient Unified Communications applications at their own pace.

With this expansion, Voice Complete customers can use one solution to connect with their sites in Western Europe, reducing operational complexity, and achieve greater efficiencies by using shared calling resources between locations.

Key Facts:

Voice Complete is a global communications solution that leverages Level 3's expansive, purpose-built IP network to provide Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking and native PRI-ISDN (Primary Rate Interface-Integrated Services Digital Network).

The solution supports hybrid customer environments and gives customers the ability to transition old equipment to an IP-based voice solution.

Voice Complete has an inclusive design, providing a vendor-agnostic foundation for the adoption of Unified Communications and Collaboration solutions.

The solution delivers emergency services, built-in failover protection and single vendor management.

Voice Complete is available in the United States , Germany , the United Kingdom , France , the Netherlands and Belgium .

, , the , , and . In 2015, Frost & Sullivan recognized Level 3 for Best Practices in VoIP and SIP Trunking Services to Enterprises, calling the Voice Complete solution "...a sophisticated set of enterprise voice technologies that simplifies VoIP and SIP trunking for mainstream enterprises to adopt."

Features:

SIP trunking and PRI connections to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) that do not require premise conversion gear

Telephone numbers and the ability to call local, long distance/national, toll-free/freephone and international destinations

Emergency calling services

Ability to share calling bandwidth from a multicontinental or multiregional pool of CCPs (Concurrent Call Path)

Built-in failover that does not require purchasing additional CCPs

Global pricing model, with flexible invoicing options

A customer portal to manage the solution globally

One vendor contract and a unified set of service level agreements

Free intra-enterprise calling

Key Quotes:

Mike Sapien, principal analyst, Ovum Enterprise Services

"Level 3's Voice Complete is a comprehensive, global communications solution enabling large enterprises to implement SIP-based services to integrate their voice communications and business applications to improve performance, enhance reliability and allow collaboration among its employees and customers. Voice Complete includes communications management using a single contract, customer portal, feature set and the appropriate SLAs. Based on Level 3's strong, successful experience in the U.S. with this service, this solution offers European enterprises a flexible, dynamic and cost-effective IP platform for business communications."

Anthony Christie, chief marketing officer, Level 3

"Keeping true to the global nature of our business, we are standing up a solution that is not limited by geographic boundaries. Voice Complete operates where our customers do business, and enables them to share their internal calling resources across borders and continents. We're also removing the burden of managing multiple voice technologies, by delivering a platform that supports their legacy infrastructure while preparing them to take advantage of the next-generation communication solutions. Customers will benefit from greater efficiencies within their voice environment, improved reliability and streamlined operations so they can focus on their business."

Andrew Crouch, regional president, EMEA and Global Accounts Management Division, Level 3

"This is yet another milestone in our efforts to deliver easy to use, comprehensive solutions that support the needs of our customers. Global companies are looking for business solutions that will help them extend the life of their current communications solutions while creating a bridge to new platforms. Regardless of existing architecture, enterprises can capitalize on more efficient technology, improve the reliability of their communications and reduce operational complexities. With Voice Complete, customers don't need additional equipment; they can transition at their own pace, keeping focused on their core business."

Resources:

Solution Brochure: Level 3 Voice Complete: The Intelligent Path to A Simple Conversation

About Level 3 Communications

Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NYSE: LVLT) is a Fortune 500 company that provides local, national and global communications services to enterprise, government and carrier customers. Level 3's comprehensive portfolio of secure, managed solutions includes fiber and infrastructure solutions; IP-based voice and data communications; wide-area Ethernet services; video and content distribution; data center and cloud-based solutions. Level 3 serves customers in more than 500 markets in over 60 countries across a global services platform anchored by owned fiber networks on three continents and connected by extensive undersea facilities. Level 3 services are provided by subsidiaries of Level 3 Communications, Inc. For more information, visit www.level3.com or get to know us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

 Level 3 Communications, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Level 3, Level 3 Communications, Level (3), Voice Complete and the Level 3 Logo are either registered service marks or service marks of Level 3 Communications, LLC and/or one of its Affiliates in the United States and elsewhere. Any other service names, product names, company names or logos included herein are the trademarks or service marks of their respective owners. Level 3 services are provided by subsidiaries of Level 3 Communications, Inc.

Forward-Looking Statement

Some statements made in this press release are forward-looking in nature and are based on management's current expectations or beliefs. These forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of performance and are subject to a number of uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside Level 3's control, which could cause actual events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the statements. Important factors that could prevent Level 3 from achieving its stated goals include, but are not limited to, the company's ability to: increase revenue from its services to realize its targets for financial and operating performance; develop and maintain effective business support systems; manage system and network failures or disruptions; avert the breach of its network and computer system security measures; develop new services that meet customer demands and generate acceptable margins; manage the future expansion or adaptation of its network to remain competitive; defend intellectual property and proprietary rights; manage risks associated with continued uncertainty in the global economy; manage continued or accelerated decreases in market pricing for communications services; obtain capacity for its network from other providers and interconnect its network with other networks on favorable terms; successfully integrate future acquisitions; effectively manage political, legal, regulatory, foreign currency and other risks it is exposed to due to its substantial international operations; mitigate its exposure to contingent liabilities; and meet all of the terms and conditions of its debt obligations. Additional information concerning these and other important factors can be found within Level 3's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Statements in this press release should be evaluated in light of these important factors. Level 3 is under no obligation to, and expressly disclaims any such obligation to, update or alter its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

Contact Information:

Media U.S. Media EMEA Investors D. Nikki Wheeler Beatrice Martin-Vignerte Mark Stoutenberg +1 720-888-0560 03300607342 +1 720-888-2518 Nikki.Wheeler@Level3.com Beatrice.Martin-Vignerte@level3.com Mark.Stoutenberg@Level3.com

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140908/144115
Marel will release the company's consolidated financial statement for Q1 2016 after market closing on April 25, 2016. Marel hf. invites market participants and investors to a meeting where the financial results for Q1 2016 will be presented by Arni Oddur Thordarson, CEO and Linda Jonsdottir, CFO. The presentation will be held on Tuesday April 26, at 8:30 am (GMT), at the company's headquarters, Austurhraun 9, Gardabaer. Please note that the meeting will also be webcast at www.marel.com/webcast. Breakfast will be served from 8:00 am.

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.
Halifax, Nova Scotia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 19, 2016) - Troy Grant, President and CEO of ELCORA ADVANCED MATERIALS (OTCQB: ECORF) (TSXV: ERA) (FSE: ELM), (the "Company" or "Elcora"), is pleased to announce that Elcora will be hosting the first North-American stop of the 80eDays Electric Vehicle Challenge in June of this year in the Canadian city of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

80eDays, "El Duro", is the second event to showcase the future of electric cars. The first event was held in 2012. The goal of the event is to have all participants drive their electric car around the world passing pre-set presentation points at important cities in 80 days or less. To help offset the greenhouse gases produced from the event, the participants will plant trees along the route. All 80eDays participants recognize the critical importance of protecting the environment and providing a "greener" future for generations to come.

Elcora will showcase its graphene R&D facility in Halifax, Nova Scotia where 12 international teams will be briefed on the route. This sustainable global event will start in Barcelona on June 16, 2016. A distance of 25,000 kilometers will be covered across twenty countries and three continents. 80eDays will demonstrate to the world that electric cars can be a sustainable means of transportation across any country and through all types of terrain and climates. 80eDays will also prove that long distances can be travelled with an electric car in reasonable time frames while enjoying a level of comfort equal to or better than conventional cars.

"We are thrilled for the 80eDays electric vehicles to make a stopover at our facility and making it a presentation point on their route," said Troy Grant. "Electric cars are the future". "80eDays' team is doing a fantastic job promoting an environmentally friendly greener future. Elcora, who is dedicated to developing batteries for electric cars, stand behind this great cause. We want to help promote 80eDays' challenge, and in turn, Elcora and Halifax will become recognized by people all over the world following this popular event."

For more information on 80eDays Electric Vehicle Challenge, please visit their website http://www.80edays.com

About Elcora Advanced Materials

Elcora was founded in 2011 and has been structured to become a vertically integrated graphite & graphene company that mines, processes, refines graphite, and produces both the graphene and end user graphene applications. As part of the vertical integration strategy, Elcora has secured high-grade graphite and graphene precursor graphite from its interest in the operation of the Ragedara mine in Sri Lanka which is already in production. Elcora has developed a unique low cost effective processes to make high quality graphite and graphene that are commercially scalable. This combination means that Elcora has the tools and resources for graphite and graphene vertical integration.

For further information please visit the company's website at http://www.elcoracorp.com

For further information please contact: Troy Grant, Director, President and CEO, Elcora Resources Corp., T: 902 802-8847 F: 902 446-2001.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT:

The TSX Venture Exchange does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. No stock Exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. This News Release includes certain "forward-looking statements". All statements other than statements of historical fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding potential mineralization and reserves, exploration results, and future plans and objectives of Elcora, are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from Elcora's expectations are exploration risks detailed herein and from time to time in the filings made by Elcora with securities regulators.

Investors are cautioned that, except as disclosed in the filing statement prepared in connection with the transaction, any information released or received with respect to the transaction may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon.
Scania's order bookings for trucks reached the highest level for a first quarter since 2007 thanks to the continued strong demand in Europe. The growth is increasingly coming from the eastern and southern parts of Europe, where the recovery from the crisis years has now gained momentum.

Order bookings for trucks in Europe remained strong during the first quarter of 2016 and reached the highest level in almost ten years. The replacement need, the oil price and access to financing means that European demand is still holding up well.

"It is great to see that the southern parts of Europe have made a comeback from the crisis years and private consumption now has gained momentum, driving investments in vehicle fleets," says Scania's President and CEO Henrik Henriksson.

Scania's market share in Europe came in at a strong 17.4 percent for the first quarter of 2016, a slight increase compared to last year.

"During the tougher years, we concentrated on strengthening our sales organisation and on entering new segments, in countries such as Spain, France, Portugal and Italy amongst others. We are now seeing the positive results of this," says Henriksson.

Another shining star in Europe is Poland. In just a few years, Poland's total market for heavy trucks has grown dramatically and is now the fourth largest in Europe. Scania has managed to capture a large part of that growth and is today leading make with a market share of almost 22 percent.

"For some years Poland has benefitted from increasing local establishment of manufacturing and logistics companies. In addition, major infrastructural investments have been completed, which makes Poland an important market for Scania. In addition to this, Scania's products and service offering enjoy strong credibility in Poland," says Bengt Thorsson, Senior Vice President and Executive Regional Director, European Region.

The demand situation in Eurasia improved slightly during the first quarter of 2016 thanks to Russia. Asia also improved somewhat due to an upturn in the Middle East while demand in Latin America was still very weak because of Brazil. Scania's total order bookings amounted to 19,363 (18,311) trucks during the first quarter of 2016.

Scania is a part of Volkswagen Truck Bus GmbH and one of the world's leading manufacturers of trucks and buses for heavy transport applications. Scania is also leading provider of industrial and marine engines. Service-related products account for a growing proportion of the company's operations, assuring Scania customers of cost-effective transport solutions and maximum uptime. Scania also offers financial services. Employing some 44,000 people, the company operates in about 100 countries. Research and development activities are concentrated in Sweden, while production takes place in Europe and South America, with facilities for global interchange of both components and complete vehicles. In 2015, net sales totalled SEK 95 billion and net income amounted to SEK 6.8 billion. Scania press releases are available on www.scania.com (http://www.scania.com/se)

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005877/en/

Contacts:

Scania

Hans-Ake Danielsson, Press Manager

tel. +46 8 553 856 62
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/19/16 -- Seabridge Gold Inc. (TSX: SEA)(NYSE: SA) ("Seabridge") and SnipGold Corp. (TSX VENTURE: SGG) ("SnipGold") are pleased to announce that they have entered into a definitive agreement dated April 18, 2016 (the "Arrangement Agreement") pursuant to which Seabridge has agreed to acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of SnipGold (the "SnipGold Shares") by way of a statutory Plan of Arrangement under the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia) (the "Arrangement").

Rudi Fronk, Seabridge's CEO and Chairman, said: "The board of directors of Seabridge believes the proposed transaction will enhance our exploration potential in an area where our technical team has built up significant expertise. This proposal also meets our transaction test of immediately increasing our gold resource ownership per share. Our KSM Project has geological similarities to SnipGold's Iskut Project and the two properties are near enough to each other to offer synergies in terms of personnel and infrastructure.

"This business combination offers SnipGold shareholders the opportunity to maximize the potential value of their Iskut property by accessing the technical and financial resources needed to explore, engineer and permit their project. SnipGold shareholders will also benefit from Seabridge's more senior exchange listings and greater liquidity. In our view, the proposal offers shareholders of the combined company the potential for enhanced capital appreciation with exposure to a larger asset base in B.C.'s prolific Golden Triangle."

Patrick Soares Chairman of SnipGold said: "SnipGold's Board of Directors believes that our loyal shareholder base will benefit from this combination of companies. We are pleased by the premium that shareholders are receiving from Seabridge, which we think is in recognition of not only the exploration efforts of SnipGold management, but the underlying value of SnipGold's property. Seabridge has the ability to fund the project going forward with minimal dilution to its shareholder base."

John Zbeetnoff, President and CEO of SnipGold said: "I am pleased the SnipGold project will pass to a mid-tier company that has the funding capacity to build upon our technical efforts that advanced the understanding of the area. Our project offers Seabridge excellent high grade gold and bulk tonnage resource expansion and discovery potential at several drill ready targets.

"I want to thank the employees and consultants of SnipGold for the loyalty and sacrifice they have shown the company during the last few difficult years. I also want to thank our shareholders and Board of Directors, for their support. As well, I thank the BC Ministry of Mines, the Ministry of Environment and the Tahltan First Nation for working collaboratively with SnipGold management through the years. Without the patience and faith entrusted in management by stakeholders, we would not have been able to advance the company to this stage."

Particulars of the Transaction

Pursuant to the Arrangement Agreement, holders of SnipGold Shares will be entitled to receive 1/63rd of a common share of Seabridge in exchange for 1 SnipGold Share held (the "Exchange Ratio"), representing an implied offer price of CDN$0.291 per SnipGold share, a premium of 124% based on yesterday's closing prices for both companies on the TSX/TSX.V and a premium of 115% based on the trailing 30-day volume weighted average trading price of SnipGold and Seabridge shares on the TSX/TSX.V, calculated from the date of the Arrangement Agreement. Based on the foregoing, the Arrangement represents total consideration to SnipGold shareholders of CDN$9.9 million.

In connection with the Arrangement, approximately 600,000 Seabridge shares are expected to be issued to existing SnipGold shareholders (not including shares which might be issued on exercise of convertible securities), which would result in SnipGold shareholders owning approximately 1.14% of the combined company (based on the Exchange Ratio and the number of issued and outstanding SnipGold Shares and Seabridge shares as of the date of the Arrangement Agreement).

To be effective, the Arrangement will require approval by a majority of at least 66 2/3% of the votes cast by SnipGold Shareholders at a special meeting expected to take place in June, 2016 (the "SnipGold Meeting"). The board of directors of SnipGold has unanimously approved the Arrangement and recommends that SnipGold shareholders vote in favour of the Arrangement. The SnipGold board of directors acted in accordance with the recommendation of its independent special committee (the "SnipGold Special Committee") which received advice from Primary Capital Inc. ("Primary Capital"), its independent financial advisor.

All directors and officers of SnipGold, who hold approximately 24% of the issued and outstanding SnipGold Shares, have entered into voting and support agreements with Seabridge in support of the Arrangement.

The Arrangement Agreement includes covenants typical of transactions of this nature, including with respect to non-solicitation, a right granted to Seabridge to match superior proposals for SnipGold and a provision entitling SnipGold to a fiduciary-out under certain conditions. In addition, SnipGold has agreed to pay a termination fee to Seabridge upon the occurrence of certain events.

In connection with the Arrangement, Seabridge will provide SnipGold with interim debt financing of up to $400,000, to be repaid 90 days following the termination of the Arrangement Agreement, should termination occur.

Full details of the Arrangement will be included in a management information circular of SnipGold describing the matters to be considered at the SnipGold Meeting, which circular is expected to be mailed to SnipGold shareholders May 2016 and made available on SEDAR under the issuer profile of SnipGold at www.sedar.com. It is anticipated that the transaction will close in the second quarter of 2016.

About SnipGold Corp.

SnipGold Corp. (formerly Skyline Gold Corporation) is a Canadian exploration company focused on exploration in the Golden Triangle Area of northwestern B.C. SnipGold's primary asset is a contiguous block of ground in excess of 286 sq km in size which has been consolidated through a series of transactions that began in 2005. The consolidated land package has undergone intermittent exploration with the majority of the work carried out in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This early work was undertaken by over 30 independent operators and their efforts have highlighted numerous targets which have seen little to no follow up work in the past 20 years.

SnipGold completed a resource estimate for the Bronson Slope Porphyry Deposit on its Iskut property in a preliminary economic assessment completed in 2010 in accordance with NI 43-101, summarized as follows:

Grade Tonnes Mag-netite Mineral Category (Millions) Au g/t Cu % Ag g/t % Measured 84.15 0.42 0.151 2.22 5.9 Indicated 102.74 0.31 0.098 2.17 4.8 (i)M + Ind 186.89 0.36 0.122 2.19 5.3 Inferred 4.94 0.32 0.074 2.19 3.7 Contained Metal Au Oz Cu lbs Ag Oz Mag Tonnes Mineral Category (Millions) (Millions) (Millions) (Millions) Measured 1.14 280.1 6.01 4.96 Indicated 1.02 222.0 7.16 4.93 (i)M + Ind 2.16 502.7 13.17 9.91 Inferred 0.05 8.1 0.35 0.18

(i)Burgoyne, Al, 2012. Technical Report on the Iskut Property, p 109

SnipGold's property contains two main target types:

-- High-grade precious metal mineralization, with drill ready targets at McFadden, Snip-Bronson Trend, Johnny Flats and Gorge. The property hosts numerous other attractive exploration high grade targets. -- Bulk tonnage gold-copper porphyries, with resource expansion potential at Bronson Slope deposit and resource definition at the partially drill defined Snip North Iskut porphyry. Several other porphyry targets exist on the property.

For additional information see: www.snipgoldcorp.com

Qualified Persons

The technical information contained in this news release has been reviewed and approved for Seabridge by William Threlkeld, a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101 and for SnipGold by John Zbeetnoff, P.Geo, the Chief Executive Officer of SnipGold Corp and a Qualified Person under NI 43-101.

Advisors

Bennett Jones LLP has acted as legal counsel to Seabridge and DuMoulin Black LLP has acted as legal counsel to SnipGold. Canaccord Genuity Corp. has acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Seabridge. In connection with this transaction, the SnipGold board of directors formed a Special Committee comprised of the independent, disinterested directors to evaluate the transaction. Primary Capital has acted as the exclusive financial advisor to the SnipGold Special Committee. Primary Capital has provided an oral opinion to the SnipGold Special Committee that, based upon and subject to the assumptions, limitations and qualifications in the opinion, the consideration being offered by Seabridge is fair, from a financial point of view, to the shareholders of SnipGold. SnipGold expects to receive a written opinion from Primary Capital prior to mailing the management information circular to SnipGold Shareholders.

About Seabridge Gold Inc.

Seabridge's principal assets are the 100% owned KSM property located near Stewart, British Columbia, Canada and the 100% owned Courageous Lake gold project located in Canada's Northwest Territories. For a breakdown of Seabridge's mineral resources by project and resource category please visit the Company's website at www.seabridgegold.net

NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

Forward-Looking Information Disclaimer

This release contains certain "forward-looking information" under applicable Canadian securities laws concerning the events and transactions contemplated by the Arrangement Agreement. Forward-looking information reflects Seabridge's and SnipGold's current internal expectations or beliefs and are based on information currently available to the two companies. In some cases forward-looking information can be identified by terminology such as "may", "will", "should", "expect", "intend", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "projects", "potential", "scheduled", "forecast", "budget" or the negative of those terms or other comparable terminology. Assumptions upon which such forward-looking information is based include, among others, that the conditions to closing of the Arrangement will be satisfied, that the transactions contemplated by the Arrangement Agreement will be completed on the terms set out the Arrangement Agreement, that all required regulatory, security holder, court and governmental approvals will be obtained on a timely basis, and that the business prospects and opportunities of each of the companies will proceed as anticipated. Many of these assumptions are based on factors and events that are not within the control of Seabridge and SnipGold, and there is no assurance they will prove to be correct or accurate.

Risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted herein include, without limitation: that the Arrangement will not be completed at all or on the terms less favourable to one party or the other, that required regulatory, security holder or court approvals will not be obtained and that the business prospects and opportunities of each of the companies will not proceed as anticipated. In addition, there are risks and hazards associated with the business of mineral exploration, development and mining, including environmental hazards, industrial accidents, unusual or unexpected formations, pressures, cave-ins and flooding (and the risk of inadequate insurance or inability to obtain insurance to cover these risks), as well as the risks disclosed by Seabridge and SnipGold in their respective filings on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance and actual results and future events could differ materially from those discussed in any such forward-looking information. All of the forward-looking information contained in this news release is qualified by these cautionary statements. Readers cannot be assured that actual results will be consistent with such statements. The Arrangement may not be completed on the terms described above, or at all. Accordingly, readers are cautioned against placing undue reliance on any of the forward-looking information contained herein. Seabridge and SnipGold each expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information in this news release, whether as a result of new information, events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws.

Contacts:

Rudi P. Fronk, Chairman and CEO

Seabridge Gold Inc.

(416) 367-9292

(416) 367-2711 (FAX)

info@seabridgegold.net



John Zbeetnoff, President and CEO

SnipGold Corp.

(604) 681-3989

(604).681-3557 (FAX)

info@snipgoldcorp.com




Lead poisoning. Legionnaire's disease. Brain damaged children. Unsound plumbing. Plummeting home values. Costly home repairs. City-wide failure of the public water infrastructure. State appointed emergency managers. Dollars over people.

This is Flint.

A once prosperous city, by the late 1980s Flint had fallen into a state of extensive decline, and has suffered under two states of financial emergency in the last 15 years.

Touted as a money-saving venture, Flint switched its water source from the Detroit water system to the Flint River in 2014. Due to the failure to add proper equipment to the water treatment process, corrosion inhibitors were not correctly added to the water, leading to the corrosive properties of the water being piped into homes and businesses and the leaching of lead into the city's water. Despite early warnings from residents and General Motors, government officials from a myriad of agencies failed to respond in a timely manner.

"GM stopped using Flint water in 2014, because it was corroding their engines," said Ven Johnson, attorney and counselor at Johnson Law, PLC. "Yet, the emergency manager and Governor Rick Snyder weren't concerned about what the water might be doing to the actual people of Flint. It's ludicrous. It's unforgivable."

Obviously, Flint is not the first occurrence of unsafe drinking water. Water sources sometimes become temporarily hazardous due to spring melts, broken levees, leaks in sewage pipes, or other unforeseeable threats. If you've ever been the victim of a boil water advisory or a ban on water usage, you have a definitive understanding of our dependency on clean water.

Now, imagine your drinking water is unsafe. Not for a day, or a week, but for over a year. Imagine trying to cook meals, wash dishes, brush your teeth and bathe with water known to contain harmful amounts of lead and other dangers. Then imagine you were not even properly warned about these hazards.

Further muddying the waters, is actually fixing the problem. And beyond this, compensation for the victims; who coincidentally are still on the hook for usage bills on lead contaminated water. The ramifications are far-reaching. Long-term health concerns for children and adults, including 85 cases of Legionnaire's disease and brain damage to exposed children. Damage to the communities infrastructure, with decreasing home values, an estimated $4000 per household cost to replace existing water heaters, pipes and service line connections, and the 1.5 billion dollars it will eventually cost to replace the corroded pipes in a city already inundated with debt.

Then, there is the underlying question of who is to blame.

America's drinking water has been protected by law under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SWDA) since 1974, granting all citizens accessibility from tainted water from public water systems. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is tasked with regulating all public water supplies within the United States. Every State except Wyoming and the District of Columbia currently operates under a "primacy" authority, meaning the states themselves will adopt standards at least as stringent as the EPA's.

To date, the aid money, $28 million from the state and the $85 million pledged from the federal government, comes down to about $1000/per resident, or around $4000 for a family of four. Certainly not enough, even if every dime actually reached those in need.

And worse?

Because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity, Flint residents are legally incapable of suing the State of Michigan or its official representatives. Sovereign immunity sounds contrary to common sense, but is covered in the 11th Amendment of the Constitution. Over hundreds of years, this has been interpreted and held up by the U.S. Supreme Court to mean that state governments and state and local government officials cannot be sued for monetary compensation.

These facts have not prevented Governor Rick Snyder to ask taxpayers to pay $1.2 million to personally protect him from any civil or criminal prosecution for his role in the Flint water debacle. Attorney General Bill Schuette has also asked Michigan taxpayers for an additional $1.5 million in legal fees to aid in investigating Flint's public health fiasco.

Hardly seems fair to the unfortunate residents of Flint. However, there have been many lawsuits filed in the Flint water disaster. None have yet been granted class action status by any state or federal court.

The methods for seeking compensation for victims will be extremely complicated. Rising to the challenge, Johnson Law, PLC, working in partnership with environmental class action law firm Liddle & Dubin, P.C., filed a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of victims of the Flint Water Crisis in February.

Attorney Ven Johnson, a Saginaw native, knows he's facing an uphill battle but plans to continue fighting.

"While the Governor uses state funds to hire defense attorneys, the residents of Flint are left to fend for themselves," said Johnson. "How do you tell a parent they have no recourse for the irreparable damage done to their children as a result of lead poisoning? What do you tell those people whose pets have been poisoned, whose property is worthless, whose businesses have gone under? They deserve answers and they deserve justice."

For more information on the federal class action suit, please visit www.venjohnsonlaw.com/headlines/flint-water-crisis.
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Iron Mountain Inc. (IRM) Tuesday said the shareholders of Recall Holdings Ltd. has approved the acquisition proposal from Iron Mountain. 99.9 percent of the votes at the special meeting of the shareholders were in support of the offer, while 0.1 percent voted against the deal. Subject to approval by the Federal Court of Australia, the transaction is expected to close on May 2. The second hearing of the court is scheduled for April 21. 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.
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 19, 2016) - DNI Metals Inc. (CSE: DNI) (FSE: DG7N) ("DNI" or the "Company") Further to its news release dated January 29, 2016, the Company has closed, subject to final Regulatory approval, the fourth tranche (the "Fourth Tranche") of its non-brokered private placement financing (the "Private Placement"). The Fourth Tranche comprises 700,000 units of the Company (the "Units") at a price of Cdn$0.05 per Unit for aggregate gross proceeds of Cdn$35,000. Each Unit consists of one common share of the Company (a "Common Share") and one common share purchase warrant of the Company ("Warrant"). Each Warrant will entitle the holder to acquire one additional Common Share at a price of Cdn$0.10 per Common Share for a period of 18 months following the date of the closing of the Fourth Tranche. All securities issued under the Third Tranche are subject to a four-month hold period expiring on August 19, 2016. A finder's fee of $4,400 cash will be paid, in conjunction with this closing.

The Company will to use the proceeds raised from the Fourth Tranche to fund general and operating working capital.

Neither the CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

DNI - Canadian Securities Exchange

DG7N - Frankfurt

Issued: 37,911,204

For further information, contact:

DNI Metals Inc. - Dan Weir, President & CEO 416-595-1195

DanWeir@dnimetals.com

Also visit www.dnimetals.com

We seek Safe Harbour. This announcement includes forward looking statements. While these statements represent DNI's best current judgment, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to vary, including risk factors listed in DNI's Annual Information Form and its MD&As, all of which are available from SEDAR and on its website.

Caution Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Any statement that involves discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as "expects", or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts", "estimates", "believes" or "intends" or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results "may" or "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements. In this news release, forward-looking statements relate, among other things, to: the anticipated benefits of the Transaction to the Company and shareholders of the Company; the pro forma shareholdings of the Company's shareholders in DNI; execution of the Definitive Agreement, the timing and receipt of the required shareholder, stock exchange and regulatory approvals for the Transaction; the anticipated timing for mailing the management information circular to the shareholders of the Company in respect of the Transaction; the closing of the Transaction; the length of the current market cycle and requirements for an issuer to survive in the current market cycle; future growth potential of DNI and its business; and future mine development plans.

These forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions and estimates of management of the Company at the time such statements were made. Actual future results may differ materially as forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to materially differ from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors, among other things, include: satisfaction or waiver of all applicable conditions to closing of the Transaction (including receipt of all necessary shareholder, stock exchange and regulatory approvals or consents, and the absence of material changes with respect to the parties and their respective businesses); the synergies expected from the Transaction not being realized; business integration risks; fluctuations in general macroeconomic conditions; fluctuations in securities markets and the market price of the DNI Shares and the Company Shares; fluctuations in spot and forward prices of graphite or certain other commodities; fluctuations in currency markets (such as the Canadian dollar to United States dollar exchange rate); change in national and local government, legislation, taxation, controls, regulations and political or economic developments; risks and hazards associated with the business of mineral exploration, development and mining (including environmental hazards, industrial accidents, unusual or unexpected formations pressures, cave-ins and flooding); inability to obtain adequate insurance to cover risks and hazards; the presence of laws and regulations that may impose restrictions on mining; employee relations; relationships with and claims by local communities and indigenous populations; availability of increasing costs associated with mining inputs and labour; the speculative nature of mineral exploration and development (including the risks of obtaining necessary licenses, permits and approvals from government authorities); and title to properties. In addition, the failure of a party to comply with the terms of the Definitive Agreement (assuming the Definitive Agreement is entered into) may result in that party being required to pay a non-completion or other fee to the other party, the result of which could have a material adverse effect on the paying party's financial position and results of operations and its ability to fund growth prospects and current operations. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this news release are based upon what management of the Company believes, or believed at the time, to be reasonable assumptions, the Company cannot assure shareholders that actual results will be consistent with such forward-looking statements, as there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended.

Readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release. Except as required by law, the Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law.
CALGARY, ALBERTA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/19/16 -- ATCO announced today that it is expanding its international modular structures business by acquiring 50 per cent ownership of Sabinco Soluciones Modulares S.A. (Sabinco) from Sitrans Servicios Integrados de Tranportes Ltda. (Sitrans). Sitrans will retain 50 per cent ownership of the company, which will now operate under the name ATCO-Sabinco S.A. The transaction included the purchase of a land position and the provision of funds for a future manufacturing facility.

"Re-establishing a position in the South American market allows us to expand our global reach and further diversify our revenue sources," said Stephen Lockwood, President & Chief Operating Officer, ATCO Structures & Logistics. "ATCO's expertise in manufacturing and project execution, paired with Sabinco's diverse client base and local knowledge, will allow ATCO-Sabinco S.A. to expand its product offering and grow its customer base."

Headquartered in Santiago, Chile, Sabinco's fleet of nearly 2,500 space rental and workforce housing units accounts for approximately 10 per cent of the Chilean market. Sabinco's established presence in Chile also provides a strong foundation upon which the partnership can expand, with potential growth opportunities identified in other South American markets.

With nearly 8,000 employees and assets of approximately $19 billion, ATCO is a diversified global corporation delivering service excellence and innovative business solutions in Structures & Logistics (workforce housing, innovative modular facilities, construction, site support services, and logistics and operations management); Electricity (power generation, distributed generation, and electricity distribution, transmission and infrastructure development); Pipelines & Liquids (natural gas transmission, distribution and infrastructure development, natural gas liquids storage, and industrial water solutions); and Retail Energy (electricity and natural gas retail sales). More information can be found at www.ATCO.com.

Forward-Looking Information:

Certain statements contained in this news release may constitute forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "anticipate", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "may", "will", "intend", "should", and similar expressions.

Forward-looking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking information.

The Company's actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in this forward-looking information as a result of regulatory decisions, competitive factors in the industries in which the Company operates, prevailing economic conditions, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company.

The Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct and such forward-looking information should not be unduly relied upon.

Any forward-looking information contained in this news release represents the Company's expectations as of the date hereof, and is subject to change after such date. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities legislation.

Contacts:

Investor Inquiries

B.R. (Brian) Bale

Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer

403-292-7502



Media Inquiries

Spencer Forgo

Senior Advisor, Communications

403-662-8467




NEW YORK, NY -- (Marketwired) -- 04/19/16 -- NYI, an enterprise grade data center and managed IT solutions provider enabling customers to build customized infrastructure, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Over the past two decades, NYI has transformed from a small website design and hosting company serving a handful of local enterprises to a leading customized, mission-critical solutions provider delivering services from coast to coast.

With humble beginnings as the brain child of brothers Erik and Phillip Koblence, NYI has grown into one of the most trusted leaders in enterprise-class infrastructure solutions, serving numerous verticals, including media and publishing, financial services, technology, and life sciences. Through the years, three key pillars of NYI's philosophy have driven the growth and success of the company -- accessibility, responsibility and a hyper-focus on customer success. These core values remain intact today and continue to drive the company to remain at the forefront of the industry.

Another major contributor to the company's success has been its consistent 100% uptime in the face of natural disasters and forces majeure over the last 20 years. NYI data centers were engineered for resilience with N+1 UPS configurations. The New York facility offers over 2 megawatts of power, and the New Jersey data center has 5 megawatts of power and a 2N generator configuration. In addition, NYI's fully meshed, BGP4-based, fault-tolerant network offers no single point of failure.

"It is incredible to look back on the past 20 years of NYI's history," states Phil Koblence, Chief Operating Officer of NYI. "I was just a kid when this company was created, commuting back and forth from college on the weekends to consult with companies on their IT environments and host their websites. While our offerings have grown substantially and evolved, our core values remain the same today as they did at the beginning. NYI doesn't just bark a solution at our customers. We speak with customers individually to gain insight into their requirements and develop unique, custom-tailored solutions."

"I'm very proud of NYI and its growth over the past two decades," said Erik Koblence, Chief Executive Officer of NYI. "NYI's evolution from a small website design company to the infrastructure services provider we are today gave us a first-hand understanding of the growing pains companies experience. That is why we are so in tune with problem solving and designing the best IT solutions for our clients."

NYI recently announced its participation in the Startup Infrastructure in a Post-Cloud Era event to be held April 21, 2016 at 6:30 p.m. at the LMHQ facility in New York City. The event brings together industry experts to help attendees determine when cloud is appropriate and where scaling infrastructure makes sense. To register, please click here.

NYI owns and operates data centers in New York and New Jersey. In addition to serving the Northeast, NYI also extends its data center, managed and cloud services across the coast, with facilities located in Seattle and Los Angeles. With 100% uptime, NYI facilities are SSAE-16, HIPAA and PCI compliant and offer 24x7x365 onsite support.

For more information about NYI, visit http://www.nyi.net

About NYI

At NYI, we understand you're important and so is your business. Our approach is simple, effective and unique in our marketplace. We look beyond our world-class data centers and focus on supporting customer growth and success acting as a genuine extension of your IT team. Since 1996, we have provided our customers with fully managed, highly customized infrastructure solutions built to suit their specific business and mission critical IT needs. Our customers view us as a true partner; always available for round-the-clock support from a team they know and trust.

Colocation - Cloud - Hybrid - Managed Services - Disaster Recovery

NYI is SSAE 16, PCI and HIPAA-compliant. For more information, visit www.nyi.net; call (800) 288-7387; or follow the company on Twitter and LinkedIn.

For NYI media inquiries, please contact:

Jaymie Scotto & Associates (JSA)

+1.866.695.3629 ext. 13

Email Contact




Grand Opening to Take Place on April 21, 2016

Inteva Products, LLC, a leading global Tier One automotive supplier of engineered components and systems, has recently opened a new state-of-the-art facility in Rychnov, Czech Republic. The new facility produces window regulators and latches for Inteva's European customers and currently employs 250 people, with plans for additional growth.

Inteva's leadership team, led by President, CEO and Founder Lon Offenbacher, will celebrate the grand opening of the new facility on April 21, 2016 during an invitation-only event. Employees, customers and suppliers, and dignitaries will attend the event, which will include a plant tour, lunch, and a ceremonial ribbon-cutting. Dignitaries will include Martin Puta, Governor of the Liberec region, and Tomas Levinsky, Mayor of Rychnov.

"I'm honored to join our Rychnov employees and guests in celebrating the opening of this new facility," said Mr. Offenbacher. "Inteva's strategic global presence ensures that our teams around the world are well-positioned to meet the needs of our customers. We look forward to this chapter in Rychnov and we envision a long and prosperous future with continued support and partnership between our employees, suppliers, and customers."

Since it was founded in 2008, Inteva has grown dramatically and tripled its global footprint with new facilities in all regions of the world. Eastern Europe is a critical region in Inteva's global growth plans. Not only is Inteva opening this facility in Rychnov this month, the company will also celebrate the opening of a new manufacturing site in Oradea, Romania on May 4.

About Inteva Products, LLC

Inteva Products, LLC is a leading global automotive supplier providing automakers with innovative, reliable, environmentally friendly products that enhance vehicle quality, safety and performance. Inteva has global resources for engineering, manufacturing and customer service for Closure Systems, Interior Systems, Motors and Electronics, and Roof Systems. Formed in 2008, the tier-one supplier is focused on achieving sustained global growth, providing excellent customer service and driving innovation. Inteva was founded on INnovative solutions and the use of applied TEchnology to drive VAlue-based solutions. Inteva employs more than 15,000 people in 18 countries and is headquartered in Troy, Michigan USA.

For future company updates, please visit the Inteva website, or the company's Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005433/en/

Contacts:

Inteva Products, LLC

Karen Manardo

248-535-4825

kmanardo@intevaproducts.com
DUBLIN, April 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Surge Protection Device Market-By Protection (Line-Neutral, Neutral-Ground, Line-Ground); By Type (Type 1, Type 2, Type 3 and others); By Component (Metal oxide varistor, Gas discharge tube, Silicon avalanche); By Application - Forecast (2015 - 2021)" report to their offering.

Most of the industries today are tending towards automation to reduce time, increase productivity and cut down the costs. This has led to produce more electronic based devices. There has also been a drastic increase in home automation which focuses more and more on electronic devices being integrated for common operations. Most of the microprocessor based electronic devices need power protection to function at ease and avoid issues poised by power fluctuations and this has been ignored due to low awareness of surge protection devices.

The surge protection devices market is expected to experience significant growth in the coming years due to the increasing demand by end users such as residential, industries, commercial, medical, telecommunication, data centers and others. Surge protection devices are classified into three types, namely: Type 1, Type 2, Type 3 and others and protection types are classified into Line to Neutral, Neutral to Ground, Line to Ground.

This market has been analyzed by components such as:

Metal Oxide Varistor

Gas Discharge Tube

Silicon Avalanche Diode

In this report, the SPD's are further segmented into Power rating, Applications and Geography.

The report contains detailed and in-depth analysis of the segmentation of the Surge Protection Devices market.

Companies Mentioned:

Eaton Corp.

Emerson Electric

Schneider Electric

Leviton

Hager

Thomas & Betts Power Solutions

General Electric

Advanced Protection Technologies Inc.

Littlefuse

Tripp Lite

ABB

Siemens AG

Report Structure:

1. Surge Protection Device - Market Overview

2. Executive Summary

3. Surge Protection Device - Market Landscape

4. Surge Protection Device - Market Forces

5. Surge Protection Device Market- Strategic Analysis

6. Surge Protection Device Market - By Protection Type

7. Surge Protection Device Market - By Type

8. Surge Protection Device Market - By Power Rating Mode

9. Surge Protection Device Market - By Component

10. Surge Protection Device Market - By End User Industry

11. Surge Protection Device - Geographic Analysis

12. Market Entropy

13. Company Profiles

14. Appendix

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/kcbbcr/surge_protection

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com

For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716
LILEE Systems, the leading provider of advanced wired and wireless communication products, solutions and services for the transportation industry, today announced that based on the accelerated acceptance of its solutions in the U.S., it has made key appointments to its executive team and expanded its operations into Europe. John Marshall has joined as Senior Vice President with responsibility for global sales, marketing, and solutions development. Marshall's immediate growth initiatives include augmenting the Company's product portfolio and driving expansion into Europe. To that end, Marshall has appointed Jessica Sweeney to lead marketing and product strategy and Rene Hendrikse to lead EMEA sales and services from the newly established EMEA headquarters in Amsterdam.

John Marshall brings a strong background in general management, sales, and marketing of wireless connectivity solutions for M2M and IoT platforms. Prior to joining LILEE, Marshall served as CMO and VP/GM for SkyCross Inc.'s North America and Europe business units; led SiBEAM's worldwide sales, marketing, business development, and advanced technology teams; and served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at 2Wire, Inc.

"LILEE has developed highly reliable, scalable M2M and industrial IoT solutions that have gained wide acceptance in the railroad industry," said Marshall. "We will now leverage this expertise into additional markets including the broader transportation industry, as well as expand geographically into Europe. These solutions include communications gateways, software, professional services, analytics, and a wide range of integrated offerings for enterprise customer needs."

Join LILEE Systems at SmartRail Europe, Amsterdam, April 19 20, to see firsthand how LILEE's technology is defining long-term systems management and operations-prioritized communications. Attend the Plenary Session on April 20 to hear John Marshall's discussion on Innovating Rail Services and Maintaining Operational Excellence and stop by the stand to talk with LILEE technology experts.

Jessica Sweeney joins LILEE with 20 years of B2B software experience in management, sales, and marketing across government, academic and private sector, in North America and EMEA. Prior to joining LILEE, Sweeney was head of Customer Discovery and Innovation in Elsevier's Science and Technology division. Sweeney will focus on expanding LILEE's product mix, as well as vertical market and geographic go to market strategy.

Rene Hendrikse joins LILEE as Vice President and Managing Director of EMEA based in the newly established EMEA headquarters in Amsterdam. Hendrikse will lead LILEE's EMEA sales strategy and oversee an expanding sales and services solutions team. Prior to joining LILEE, Hendrikse was Vice President of Worldwide Sales at iPass Inc, a leader of global mobile connectivity.

"Advances in mobile connectivity are enabling a new generation of M2M and industrial IoT capabilities that are enhancing operations by improving safety and efficiency through predictive and prescriptive insights," said Jia-Ru Li, Founder and CEO, LILEE Systems. "LILEE is at the forefront of offering these solutions and is now expanding our offerings into the wider transportation industry as well as into Europe. The addition of John, Jessica and Rene, as well as the opening of our Amsterdam office will be critical to executing our new go to market strategy."

For more information about LILEE Systems or to inquire about joining the teams in Silicon Valley, Taipei and Amsterdam, visit lileesystems.com.

About LILEE Systems:

LILEE Systems delivers integrated, open, and reliable industrial IoT wireless connectivity solutions incorporating hardware, software, and services for fleet management, telematics, cargo services, and safety. LILEE's T-Cloud is a unified, virtualized platform to support asset management and analytics for sensors and field communications across multiple vertical markets. LILEE is headquartered in Silicon Valley, with offices in Taipei and Amsterdam.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005392/en/

Contacts:

LILEE Systems

Victoria Guimarin, 415-397-7600

Public Relations for LILEE Systems

Victoria@upraisepr.com
DW Catalyst Fund Limited

For immediate release

19 April 2016

COMPANY ANNOUNCEMENT

DW Catalyst Fund Limited - Investor Audio Web Conference

Friday, 29 April 2016 at 14:00 (BST)

Pre-registration is required in order to join the conference.

Please email investor.relations@dwpartners.com by close of business on 28 April 2016 to pre-register.

Participants will have the opportunity to hear a review of 2016 Q1 performance and market themes, and a discussion of outlook and upcoming opportunities from David Warren, CEO/CIO of DW Partners, LP ("DW"). DW is a specialist credit manager and the Manager of DW Catalyst Offshore Fund, Ltd. ("DWCOF").

During the call participants will be provided with the opportunity to submit questions. A space is also available on the registration page for those who would like to submit questions in advance.

A replay will be available for three business days following the conference.

Access to the conference will be restricted to persons who can make the following confirmations and agreements:

confirming that if you are in the United Kingdom you either (i) have professional experience in matters relating to investments and fall within the definition of "investment professional" in Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005, as amended or (ii) fall within the description of (or are investment personnel of) high net worth companies, high net worth unincorporated associations or partnerships or trustees of high value trusts as set out in Article 49(2) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005), as amended; confirming that you are outside the US and a non-US person (as defined in Regulation S); accepting that the information disclosed in the investor call is not for public dissemination and no recordings or transcripts are permitted to be made; agreeing that you are not a member of the press; agreeing that no information and opinions conveyed in the investor call will constitute investment advice; accepting that no information or opinions conveyed in the investor call will create any warranty; confirming that you understand that the information given in the investor call and subsequent discussions (if any) are for information purposes only and are not intended to constitute an offer, solicitation of an offer, invitation or inducement to purchase or sell any shares or any other securities in any jurisdiction; undertaking that you will not base any investment decision solely on the information that you receive during the course of the investor call; confirming that, if you are outside the United Kingdom , you are entitled to join the investor call without the DW Catalyst Fund Limited (the "Company"), DW, or any other person being in breach of any laws or regulations in the jurisdiction in which you are located and without compliance by the Company, DW, or any other person with any filing, reporting or other requirements; confirming that you understand that DW receives management and performance fees as Manager to DWCOF and that accordingly the views and opinions expressed by DW should not be considered as independent.

This invitation and the information contained herein is personal and must not be forwarded and is not for publication, distribution or release in, or into, directly or indirectly, the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan or to US persons. The information contained herein does not constitute an offer of securities for sale including in the United States, Australia, Canada or Japan.

Information regarding the Company, including NAV reporting and RNS announcements is available to existing shareholders on the Company's website at http://www.dwcatalystltd.com.

End
BEVERLY, MA--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - Cellceutix Corporation (OTC: CTIX) (the "Company"), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing innovative therapies with oncology, dermatology, anti-inflammatory and antibiotic applications, is pleased to inform shareholders that the clinical database for Prurisol's Phase 2 FDA trial for mild-to-moderate chronic plaque psoriasis has instituted a "Database Soft Lock."

Also referred to as a "database freeze," this step in the regulatory process means all case information has been compiled and put into the database and all known queries have been resolved. Next, the Quality Assurance staff will review all the data points to ensure statistical accuracy in preparation of the dataset's final analysis and confirm that all data points, including PK data, are in-line with the Statistical Analysis Plan.

Additionally, the Company would like to provide the following updates:

FDA Feedback Received for Phase 3 Trial of Brilacidin-ABSSSI

Cellceutix has received a response from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") regarding the Company's Special Protocol Assessment ("SPA") for its Phase 3 Trial of single-dose Brilacidin for the treatment of Acute Bacterial Skin and Skin Structure Infection (ABSSSI). The FDA reviewed the Company's SPA submission and has requested certain changes be made to the protocol, as is typical procedure (see 'About SPA Agreements' below). Cellceutix will be scheduling a meeting with the FDA to discuss the proposed protocol changes toward finalizing the agreement. Meanwhile, the Company is moving ahead in matters of clinical supply procurement and study sites selection.

About SPA Agreements

Obtaining Special Protocol Assessment (SPA) designation from the FDA is an important step as it reinforces the potential of a promising drug in clinical development. The SPA agreement delineates key statistical and clinical endpoint requirements, streamlining the process toward a product gaining FDA approval should the agreed upon criteria and outcomes be met. The SPA process itself can be iterative in nature. In fact, according to industry data, 78 percent of SPAs require multiple review cycles and an average of three months to finalize the SPA. For more information about the FDA's SPA program, please visit: http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Guidances/ucm080571.pdf.

"We are extremely proud of Brilacidin as it represents the first potential new class of antibiotics to treat serious skin infections in some twenty plus years and very much look forward to the start of the Phase 3 ABSSSI trial as soon as our SPA discussions with the FDA conclude," stated Leo Ehrlich, Chief Executive Officer of Cellceutix. "There is a huge unmet medical need, worldwide, for newer and better antibiotics, with the market likely to gravitate toward single-dose drugs like Brilacidin. Commonly praised by clinicians once introduced to it, Brilacidin is positioned to help fill this void, and in the process, further unlock shareholder value. In addition, we see the ABSSSI clinical trials as a gateway for Brilacidin's use in bacterial biofilm infections and its use in the treatment of diabetic foot infections."

Clinical Advisory Board Addition

Dr. Frances A. Farraye MD, MSc, has joined the Cellceutix Clinical Advisory Board. Dr. Farraye is Clinical Director in the Section of Gastroenterology and Co-Director of the Center for Digestive Disorders at Boston Medical Center. He is also Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine. Prior to accepting the position, Dr. Farraye consulted with Cellceutix to help design the protocol for its planned Phase 2 ulcerative proctitis clinical trial. Commented CEO Leo Ehrlich, "We are thrilled to have Dr. Farraye formally join the Celleutix team. His expertise and leadership has been clearly demonstrated throughout his stellar career. Dr. Farraye's experience and knowledge will help us explore Brilacidin's potential in treating other gastroenterological conditions. Brilacidin continues to impress us as we explore its application in numerous clinical areas."

About Dr. Francis A. Farraye, M.D., MSc.

Francis A. Farraye, M.D., MSc, Professor of Medicine, Clinical Director, Section of Gastroenterology and Co-Director, Center for Digestive Disorders, Boston University School of Medicine

Dr. Farraye is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, American Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, American Gastroenterological Association and the American College of Gastroenterology. He has published over 350 original manuscripts, abstracts and book chapters. He has served on numerous national and international committees including as a member of the ACG Board of Trustees. The New England CCFA named Dr. Farraye Humanitarian of the Year in 2003. In 2009, the ACG awarded Dr. Farraye the William Carey Award for service to the college. Dr. Farraye has been recognized as "Top Doctor" in Gastroenterology by Boston Magazine and U.S. News and World Report since 2010. His newest books for clinicians are Gastrointestinal Emergencies and Curbside Consultations in Inflammatory Bowel Disease and for patients Questions and Answers about Ulcerative Colitis, Questions and Answers about Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis for Dummies.

Cellceutix clinical trials on Clinicaltrials.gov:

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=cellceutix&Search=Search

About Brilacidin

Brilacidin is the first of a completely new class of antibiotics called defensin-mimetics. Modeled after the body's innate host-defense response, Brilacidin kills bacteria quickly and efficiently, penetrating bacterial cell wall membranes. Given this mechanism-of-action, resistance is much less likely to develop. Beyond its robust antimicrobial properties, Brilacidin also functions in an immunomodulatory capacity, lessening inflammation and promoting healing.

Alerts:

Sign-up for Cellceutix email alerts is available at http://cellceutix.com/email-alerts/sthash.CRfqSmmY.dpbs

About Cellceutix:

Headquartered in Beverly, Massachusetts, Cellceutix is a publicly traded company under the symbol "CTIX". Cellceutix is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing innovative therapies in multiple diseases. Cellceutix believes it has a world-class portfolio of compounds and is now engaged in advancing its compounds and seeking strategic partnerships. Cellceutix's anti-cancer drug Kevetrin concluded a Phase 1 clinical trial at Harvard Cancer Centers' Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Cellceutix is now preparing its FDA application for a Phase 2 ovarian cancer study. In the laboratory Kevetrin has shown to induce activation of p53, often referred to as the "Guardian Angel Gene" due to its crucial role in controlling cell mutations. Cellceutix is in a Phase 2 clinical trial with its novel compound Brilacidin-OM for the prevention of Oral Mucositis in patients with head and neck cancer. Brilacidin-OM, a defensin mimetic compound, has shown in an animal model to reduce the occurrence of severe ulcerative oral mucositis by more than 94% compared to placebo. Cellceutix's anti-psoriasis drug Prurisol is in a Phase 2 trial. Prurisol is a small molecule that acts through immune modulation and PRINS reduction. Cellceutix's lead antibiotic, Brilacidin, has completed a Phase 2b trial for Acute Bacterial Skin and Skin Structure Infections, or ABSSSI. Top-line data have shown a single dose of Brilacidin to deliver comparable clinical outcomes to the FDA-approved seven-day dosing regimen of daptomycin. Brilacidin has the potential to be a single-dose therapy for certain multi-drug resistant bacteria (Superbugs). Cellceutix has formed research collaborations with world-renowned research institutions in the United States and Europe, including MD Anderson Cancer Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the University of Bologna. More information is available on the Cellceutix web site at www.cellceutix.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause Cellceutix's actual results and experience to differ materially from anticipated results and expectations expressed in these forward looking statements. Cellceutix has in some cases identified forward-looking statements by using words such as "anticipates," "believes," "hopes," "estimates," "looks," "expects," "plans," "intends," "goal," "potential," "may," "suggest," and similar expressions. Among other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements are Cellceutix's need for, and the availability of, substantial capital in the future to fund its operations and research and development; including the amount and timing of the sale of shares of common stock to Aspire Capital; the fact that Cellceutix's compounds may not successfully complete pre-clinical or clinical testing, or be granted regulatory approval to be sold and marketed in the United States or elsewhere. A more complete description of these risk factors is included in Cellceutix's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. Cellceutix undertakes no obligation to release publicly the results of any revisions to any such forward-looking statements that may be made to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this press release or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by applicable law or regulation.

INVESTOR AND MEDIA CONTACT:

Cellceutix Corporation

Leo Ehrlich

Email contact


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - An increasing number of Americans want the Senate to vote on President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, according to the results of a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll. The poll found that 52 percent of Americans want the Senate to vote this year, up from 48 percent in March and 43 percent in February. Just 30 percent said the Supreme Court seat should be left vacant until the next president takes office, while 18 percent have no opinion. The increase in support for holding a vote this year comes after Obama officially nominated federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland to fill the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. However, most Senate Republicans remain steadfastly opposed to considering Garland's nomination, arguing that it would further politicize the court to hold hearings during an election year. The poll found that 76 percent of Democrats want the Senate to vote on the nomination this year compared to 43 percent of independents. Just 24 percent of Republicans support holding a vote this year, although that number is up from 16 percent in March. With Scalia's seat currently vacant, the Supreme Court is expect to be deadlocked 4 to 4 in a number of important cases. Reports suggest the Justices are likely to reach a split decision in a recent case regarding Obama's use of executive actions to protect 4 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. A split decision by the Supreme Court would maintain a lower court decision that blocked Obama's actions. The NBC/WSJ survey of 1,000 registered voters was conducted April 10th through 14th and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. 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.
DENVER, CO--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - Inspired by Colorado's refreshing attitude toward legalized marijuana and the proliferation of the artisan spirit, O.penVAPE presents Craft RESERVE', a top-shelf quality pure cannabis oil made from fine, flavorful and potent cannabis flower. Craft RESERVE is processed without solvents or additives and is now available in small quantities at selected dispensaries throughout Colorado, California and Arizona.

O.penVAPE's chemists begin the artisan process by working with local growers to hand select high quality cannabis flower. They handle small batches of flower -- not trim -- using the Organa Labs' proprietary supercritical CO2 extraction process, which is safe, clean and environmentally friendly. The result is a naturally clear concentrate, more potent, more pure cannabis oil. Craft RESERVE delivers each strain's experiential characteristics including taste, strength and the desired effect. The strain-specific, small-batch Craft RESERVE is packaged in superior quality glass cartridges.

Ralph Morgan, O.penVAPE CEO, predicts that Craft RESERVE is the future of cannabis extraction because of the absence of additives or transfer agents required to make cannabis oil, making it perfect for vaporizing or infusing.

"Pure cannabis oil requires investment in superior technology, equipment and professional hands-on attention throughout the molecular distillation process," Morgan said. "With Craft RESERVE, our highly educated and accomplished scientists perfected the art of extracting the best parts out of every terpene to satisfy the demand of a rapidly maturing and selective market."

Five cannabis entrepreneurs joined forces in 2012 to bring intelligently crafted cannabis oil, in a safe form, to medical patients. Now, in just four years, collective research and development has fueled O.penVAPE's reputation as the national leader in safe cannabis oil extraction. Because of this position, O.penVAPE has been able to hire the best talent, which includes people like Tom King.

Tom King, PhD., joined O.penVAPE to lead a team of five chemists to oversee product research development and production in nine states and Jamaica. With a doctorate in molecular and cellular biology, King puts his research at Harvard University and pharmaceutical corporation experience to perfecting cannabis oil for O.penVAPE.

"Cannabis provides fascinating opportunities for therapeutics research and development in a fast-growing industry with a wide window to make an impact in human health," King said.

In tandem with the Craft RESERVE, O.penVAPE has released the new O.penVAPE 2.0, a variable voltage battery. Consumers can set the battery to complement the oil according to their specific taste.

O.penVAPE makes Craft RESERVE available only when raw cannabis flower is sourced, selected and approved by O.penVAPE's specially trained scientists and artesian extractors.

About O.penVAPE

With products in over 1,100 dispensaries nationwide and in Jamaica, O.penVAPE has established itself as the leader within the cannabis industry. O.penVAPE appreciates a mutually beneficial relationship with its network of affiliates who are licensed to sell O.penVAPE cannabis oil-filled cartridges, vaporizer devices and other related products. Licensees in Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Connecticut employ O.penVAPE's Organa Labs technology to manufacture cannabis oil through supercritical CO 2 extraction. Now, medical marijuana patients and cannabis enthusiasts have broader access to a pure, safer and more consistent product. O.penVAPE's leaders ardently support cannabis legalization in order to provide better, alternative medicine. Please visit www.openvape.com.

Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/19/11G094049/Images/Craft_RESERVE_OpenVAPE-71a6dcfd5a62bb0b90c355a815e03ebc.jpg

CONTACT:

Ann Dickerson

303-319-4330

ann.dickerson@openvape.com
ALBUQUERQUE, NM -- (Marketwired) -- 04/19/16 -- April is Financial Literacy Month, and First National Rio Grande is the proud title sponsor of the 2016 Money Smart Week in New Mexico, with classes and seminars taking place throughout New Mexico offering free financial education on a wide range of topics, from student loans to mortgages to establishing credit. Due to the week's success in Southern New Mexico in past years, this year marks the first year that free classes will also be offered in the Albuquerque and Santa Fe areas. Classes are open to people of all ages and offered in English and Spanish.

"Bringing Money Smart Week to more areas in New Mexico is an important milestone for us," said Shirley Hitson, senior vice president and commercial banker, First National Rio Grande. "Having the opportunity to promote financial literacy in New Mexico allows us to use our expertise to help our neighbors, which in turn betters our entire community. These classes give participants tools they can use throughout their lives to successfully manage their finances, and we could not be prouder to be a part of Money Smart Week."

Money Smart also encompasses the Junior Achievement Program, where volunteers teach five interactive lessons in one day at local schools. The program focuses on promoting financial literacy, entrepreneurship and workforce readiness to youth.

Money Smart Week is the broadest and most comprehensive financial education program in the country. Started in 2002 in Chicago by the Federal Reserve and supported by the FDIC with just 40 programs, it has expanded significantly to become the only national educational program for people at all stages of life. Thousands of free financial education classes and seminars for consumers will be held throughout the U.S. during Money Smart Week, April 23-30.

For more information on Money Smart Week, please visit www.moneysmartweek.org.

About First National Rio Grande

First National Rio Grande is a division of First National Bank of Santa Fe. Chartered in 1870 as the first bank in the Southwest, First National Bank of Santa Fe has a rich heritage of community commitment and financial strength and stability. With $1.7 billion in assets (as of December 31, 2015), First National is the largest locally chartered banking organization in the state of New Mexico operating as First National Rio Grande and First National Santa Fe. In Colorado, the Bank operates as First National Denver. To learn more, visit www.firstnationalriogrande.com.

CONTACT:

Jeanne Lipson

Vice President, Director of Marketing

915.747.3825

jlipson@firstnational1870.com




BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MI--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - More than 750 experienced professionals and college graduate workers seeking employment in a diverse group of career fields are expected to attend the Oakland County Job Expo Job Expo on Thursday, April 28, from 9:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. at Kingsley Inn Hotel, 39475 Woodward Avenue, in Bloomfield Hills. JobFairGiant.com and Sion Recruitment are hosting the event which features over fifty companies.

Employers include Prince Metal Stamping USA Inc, Detroit Police Department, Arrow Strategies, Prudential, NAPA Auto Part Stores, The Dako Group, Match RX, Class Appraisal, G4S Secure Solutions, PSCU, Inc., Executive Car Rental, Volvo Cars, Eisenhower Center, Global Information Technology, The Home Depot, Goodman Networks Check n 'Go, US. Customs and Border Patrol, TTI Global, Universal Truckload, US Army, American Jewelry and Loan, WADL Detroit, SCA Solutions, Atlas Copco, Dialog Direct, Sion Recruitment and many more companies.

From financial services companies to information technology firms; radio stations; banking facilities, retail stores; restaurants; engineering firms, hotels; law enforcement; healthcare and nursing; security agencies; manufacturers; and other service related companies are expected to be on hand. The companies at the Oakland County Job Expo are located in communities spanning, Oakland, Wayne and Macomb counties and the Woodward Avenue corridor.

They're going to be offering full-time and part-time employment opportunities. The hiring event is free and open to the public. If you plan to go, you should dress professionally and bring plenty of resumes. For more information, click here.

Vendor opportunities and sponsorships are still available. To register, go to www.jobfairgiant.com or contact event contact Maria Westwood at 734-956-4550 or email westwood@jobfairgiant.com.

About the JobFairGiant.com

JobFairGiant.com is a direct connection for businesses ready to hire candidates in an array of career fields. Founded by a diverse management team our market niche and expertise is the recruitment of experienced candidates, college graduates, entry-level workers, skilled trades workers, CDL truck drivers and diversity professionals. JobFairGiant.com has aided statewide employers in their recruitment efforts for over twelve years; as the sponsor of monthly job expo events held throughout the Metro Detroit area. We offer an unparalleled recruiting opportunity for Michigan employers and candidates looking to bridge the job search gap.

Information and print material regarding the upcoming job fair is available on the company website at JobFairGiant.com or by calling 734-956-4550 or via email at tammy@jobfairgiant.com.

JobFairGiant.com Social Media

Facebook Page

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Michigan-Job-Fair-Giant/158400607550050

Linkedin Page

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jobfairgiant

Twitter Page

https://twitter.com/jobfairgiant

Blog Page

http://blog.jobfairgiant.com/

Google Plus Page

www.google.com/+JobfairgiantMichiganJobFairs

Jobs Board

www.giantjobs.net

Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/19/11G094052/Images/APRIL-2-64859dda3ef88623afeafbd2076584d3.jpg

Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/19/11G094052/Images/APRIL-28-7796df42903cbad184ddd339c1500bf7.jpg

Embedded Video Available: https://youtu.be/SY2pyYFyPzc

Maria Westwood

734-956-4550

westwood@jobfairgiant.com
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Legislation setting policy and providing funding for the Federal Aviation Administration easily clear the Senate on Tuesday. The Senate voted 95 to 3 in favor of the FAA reauthorization bill, which greenlights the agency's programs through the end of fiscal year 2017. Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., were the only lawmakers to vote against the bill. The legislation included provisions to improve airport security, provide new consumer protections and speed the regulation of drones. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., described the bill as the most pro-passenger, pro-security FAA reauthorization in recent history. However, Senators rejected an amendment from Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that would have established minimum seat-size standards for commercial airlines. The bill now heads to the House, where similar legislation has stalled due in part to efforts to privatize air traffic control. The FAA's current authorization is set to expire on July 15th, giving the House and Senate about three months to reach a compromise. A White House statement expressed concerns about the short-term nature of the Senate bill but acknowledged that it would enable a longer-term dialogue about the future of the nation's aviation system. 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.
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Senator Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., is seen as one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the current election cycle, and she is now the subject of Planned Parenthood's first Senate ad of the year. Planned Parenthood Votes, the political arm of the women's health group, is reportedly spending $400,000 to run the 30-second ad. The spot attacks Ayotte for refusing to fill the current Supreme Court vacancy and seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade. 'For New Hampshire women, the consequences of letting Kelly Ayotte play politics with the Constitution could last a lifetime,' the ad's narrator says. The Ayotte campaign responded with a statement accusing Democratic opponent and New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan of utilizing dark money to support her negative campaign. Ayotte campaign manager Jon Kohan said, 'Kelly's long record of standing up for New Hampshire women and families is clear and she cares deeply about ensuring all women have access to health services.' The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Ayotte with a 45.8 percent to 41.3 percent lead over Hassan, although polling in the race has been somewhat limited. 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.
DUBLIN, April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Sodium Chlorate: 2016 World Market Outlook and Forecast up to 2020" report to their offering.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO )





The present report is an essential resource for a one looking for detailed information on the world sodium chlorate market. The report covers data on global, regional and national markets including present and future trends for supply and demand, prices, and downstream industries.

In addition to the analytical part, the report provides a range of tables and figures which all together give a true insight into the national, regional and global markets for sodium chlorate.



Report Scope:

The report covers global, regional and country markets of sodium chlorate

It describes present situation, historical background and future forecast

Comprehensive data showing sodium chlorate capacities, production, consumption, trade statistics, and prices in the recent years are provided (globally, regionally and by country)

The report indicates a wealth of information on sodium chlorate manufacturers and distributors

Region market overview covers the following: production of sodium chlorate in a region/country, consumption trends, price data, trade in the recent year and manufacturers

Sodium chlorate market forecast for next five years, including market volumes and prices is also provided

Key Topics Covered:



1. INTRODUCTION: SODIUM CHLORATE PROPERTIES AND USES



2. SODIUM CHLORATE MANUFACTURING PROCESSES



3. SODIUM CHLORATE WORLD MARKET



3.1. World sodium chlorate capacity

- Capacity broken down by region

- Capacity divided by country

- Manufacturers and their capacity by plant



3.2. World sodium chlorate production

- Global output dynamics

- Production by region

- Production by country



3.3. Sodium chlorate consumption

- World consumption

- Consumption trends in Europe

- Consumption trends in Asia Pacific

- Consumption trends in North America



3.4. Sodium chlorate global trade

- World trade dynamics

- Export and import flows in regions



3.5. Sodium chlorate prices in the world market



4. SODIUM CHLORATE REGIONAL MARKETS ANALYSIS



Each country section comprises the following parts:

- Total installed capacity in country

- Production in country

- Manufacturers in country

- Consumption of in country

- Suppliers in country

- Export and import in country

- Prices in country



4.1. Sodium chlorate European market analysis

Countries covered:

- Finland

- France

- Italy

- Norway

- Portugal

- Romania

- Spain

- Sweden



4.2. Sodium chlorate Asia Pacific market analysis

Countries included:

- China

- Indonesia



4.3. Sodium chlorate North American market analysis

Countries under consideration:

- Canada

- USA



4.4. Sodium chlorate Latin American market analysis

Countries overviewed:

- Brazil

- Chile



4.5. Sodium chlorate Africa market analysis

Countries examined:

- Cameroon



5. SODIUM CHLORATE MARKET PROSPECTS



5.1. Sodium chlorate capacity and production forecast up to 2020

- Global production forecast

- On-going projects



5.2. Sodium chlorate consumption forecast up to 2020

- World consumption forecast

- Forecast of consumption in Europe

- Consumption forecast in Asia Pacific

- Consumption forecast in North America



5.3. Sodium chlorate market prices forecast up to 2020



6. KEY COMPANIES IN THE SODIUM CHLORATE MARKET WORLDWIDE



6. KEY COMPANIES IN THE SODIUM CHLORATE MARKET WORLDWIDE



7. SODIUM CHLORATE END-USE SECTOR



7.1. Consumption by application

7.2. Downstream markets review and forecast



For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/pw5q87/sodium_chlorate





Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com



For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716


Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 19, 2016) - Iconic Minerals Ltd. (TSXV: ICM) (FSE: YQG) is pleased to announce the appointment of the following individuals as Technical Advisors and Consultants, who the Company believes will be integral in strategically assisting to develop the drilling and exploration program, sampling, analysis and quality control of the collection of liquids and brines for the prospective lithium brine claims at the Bonnie Claire Property in Nevada.

Dr. David Shaw, B.Sc, Ph.D.

Dr. Shaw has over 30 years' experience in resource and finance industries, with specific emphasis on technical and financial due diligence of resource projects. He has in the past worked with Chevron Canada Resources in their metal and hydrocarbon exploration programs, and with Yorkton Securities Inc. in their Corporate Finance department. In 2009, Dr. Shaw was Chairman of Salares Lithium Inc., where he assisted in the development of their Chilean lithium brines project. That project was subsequently acquired in 2010 by Talison Minerals Pty., an Australian corporation, which then formed Talison Lithium Inc. ("Talison"), which some consider to be the world's largest pure lithium company. Dr. Shaw served as a director of Talison until it was acquired by Chengdu Tiangi Industry Co., Ltd. in 2013 for over CDN$800 million.

Dr. Ian Hutcheon, B.Sc, Ph.D., M.Sc

With over 35 years' expertise in the oil, gas and mineral resource industries, Dr. Hutcheon obtained an Honors B.Sc degree in Geology, Earth Sciences/Geosciences from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, B.C. in 1969, and a Ph.D and MSc. in Geochemistry and Petrology from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario in 1977. For 24 years Dr. Hutcheon was a Professor at the University of Calgary, where he taught and researched Petroleum Geology and Environmental Geochemistry. In 2002 he received Emeritus Professor status from the University of Calgary. Dr. Hutcheon also consulted on the lithium brines project in the Chilean salares that was acquired in 2010 by Talison. In 2014, Dr. Hutcheon received the Vernadsky Medal from the International Association of Geochemistry. Dr. Hutcheon currently consults on oil fields projects specifically, with issues relating to scaling, and water and acid gas production in conventional, CO2-assisted, and steam assisted recovery.

Mr. Matt Vitale, B.Sc, M.Sc (Independent Hydrologist)

Mr. Vitale is an independent hydrogeologist and a Professional Geologist (in California), with 14 years' experience in surface water, groundwater and water quality on public and private water projects within North America and Australia. He has worked with various mining companies, including De Beers Canada and Newmont Mining Corporation. Mr. Vitale was also Project Manager for several Nevada State Department projects, including with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the State of Nevada Department of Conservation, and the Nevada Division of State Lands.

The following is a brief summary on the Bonnie Claire Property:

The Bonnie Claire Property is a lithium brine target located within a valley that is over +20 miles (+30 km) long and 12 miles (20 km) wide, into which streams from an +800 mi2 (2,070 km2) drainage basin empty. The source rocks are quartz-rich volcanics that contain anomalous amounts of lithium. Sampling of salt flats within the basin indicates lithium values in salt samples ranging from 50 to 340 ppm. The deeper part of a gravity-low within the valley is 12 miles (20 km) long, and initial estimates of the depth to bedrock ranges from 1,500 to 2,000 feet (460-610 m) within this low. The current claim block covers the gravity-low and associated mud flats that could be used for evaporation ponds if significant lithium brines are discovered in drilling.

Richard Kern, Certified Professional Geologist (#11494) and CEO of Iconic is the Qualified Person who has prepared and reviewed this press release in accordance with NI 43-101 reporting standards.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

SIGNED: "Richard Kern"



Richard Kern, President and CEO

Contact: (604) 336-8614

For further information on ICM, please visit our website at www.iconicmineralsltd.com

The Company's public documents may be accessed at www.sedar.com

Forward Statement: This news release includes certain forward-looking statements or information. All statements other than statements of historical fact included in this release are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Iconic 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 otherwise required by applicable securities legislation.

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.
WAUKESHA, WI--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - CIB Marine Bancshares, Inc. (the "Company") (OTCQB: CIBH) has announced that its 2016 Annual Meeting of Shareholders will be held May 26, 2016, at the Sheraton Milwaukee Brookfield located in Brookfield, Wisconsin. The common shareholders of the Company will elect three directors and vote on the ratification of Crowe Horwath LLC as the Company's independent auditor. The three nominees for the Board of Directors are Charles E. Baker, J. Brian Chaffin, and John P. Hickey, Jr., and each will serve a three-year term. Each nominee is a well-qualified business professional from a banking market the Company serves. The Company does not expect to bring any additional issues before the 2016 Annual Meeting of Shareholders.

It has been reported that a third-party intended to nominate an alternate candidate to the Board. In fact, the Company has not received any such nominations from any shareholders of record and the period for submission of any matter to come before the Annual Meeting has expired. The only candidates for election to the Board at the 2016 Annual Meeting of Shareholders are those individuals nominated by the Company's Board of Directors: Charles E. Baker, J. Brian Chaffin, and John P. Hickey, Jr.

The Board of Directors of CIB Marine Bancshares, Inc. encourages all common shareholders to carefully review the 2016 Annual Meeting Notice and to vote their shares as provided in the Notice. Shareholders are also encouraged to submit questions to be addressed during the presentation by management following the Annual Meeting by sending them to ShareholderRelations@cibmarine.com or by mail to CIB Marine Bancshares, Inc.; Attn: Shareholder Relations; 1930 W. Bluemound Road, Suite D; Waukesha, Wisconsin 53186, no later than the close of business May 24, 2016.

CIB Marine Bancshares, Inc. is the holding company for CIBM Bank, which operates 11 banking offices in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana. More information on the Company is available at www.cibmarine.com, including recent shareholder letters, links to regulatory financial reports, and audited financial statements.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

CIB Marine has made statements in this release that may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. CIB Marine intends these forward-looking statements to be subject to the safe harbor created thereby and is including this statement to avail itself of the safe harbor. Forward-looking statements are identified generally by statements containing words and phrases such as "may," "project," "are confident," "should be," "intend," "predict," "believe," "plan," "expect," "estimate," "anticipate" and similar expressions. These forward-looking statements reflect CIB Marine's current views with respect to future events and financial performance that are subject to many uncertainties and factors relating to CIB Marine's operations and the business environment, which could change at any time.

There are inherent difficulties in predicting factors that may affect the accuracy of forward-looking statements.

Stockholders should note that many factors, some of which are discussed elsewhere in this Earnings Release and in the documents that are incorporated by reference, could affect the future financial results of CIB Marine and could cause those results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements contained or incorporated by reference in this document. These factors, many of which are beyond CIB Marine's control, include but are not limited to:

operating, legal, and regulatory risks;

economic, political, and competitive forces affecting CIB Marine's banking business;

the impact on net interest income and securities values from changes in monetary policy and general economic and political conditions; and

the risk that CIB Marine's analyses of these risks and forces could be incorrect and/or that the strategies developed to address them could be unsuccessful.

These factors should be considered in evaluating the forward-looking statements, and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. CIB Marine undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Forward-looking statements are subject to significant risks and uncertainties and CIB Marine's actual results may differ materially from the results discussed in forward-looking statements.

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

J. Brian Chaffin

President & CEO

(217) 355-0900

brian.chaffin@cibmbank.com
ST. LOUIS, MO--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - Stifel Financial Corp. (NYSE: SF) today announced that its board of directors has appointed two new members. Kathleen Brown and Maura A. Markus will join Stifel's board effective as of the firm's 2016 annual meeting. The two new independent directors will replace current independent directors Charles A. Dill and Alton F. Irby III, who have chosen to retire effective as of the annual meeting in accordance with Stifel's retirement age policies.

"A priority of ours has been to recruit exceptionally talented leaders to Stifel's board to add to the leadership of our firm. We've found two outstanding candidates who possess a deep understanding of our industry and have each earned great success in their personal careers. We couldn't be more pleased to welcome them to our board and for their future contribution," said Ronald J. Kruszewski, Chairman and CEO of Stifel. "I would also like to take this opportunity to thank both Charlie and Alton for their valuable contributions to Stifel. Their extensive industry and corporate experience were instrumental in growth and performance of the company during their time on the board."

Kathleen Brown is a Partner in the Government and Regulatory Affairs Group at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP. Ms. Brown's practice focuses on business counseling, particularly as they relate to the healthcare, energy, infrastructure and financial services sectors. Ms. Brown brings to her practice a background that includes 18 years as a senior executive in the banking and financial services industry, including more than 12 years at Goldman Sachs, where she served as chairman of Midwest Investment Banking and, prior to that, as managing director and head of the firm's Western Region Public-Sector and Infrastructure Group. Ms. Brown also held various senior positions with Bank of America, including president of the private bank.

Ms. Brown has 16 years of public-sector experience, including a term as California's state treasurer, where she managed a $25 billion bond portfolio, oversaw a $32 billion cash management fund, and served as a trustee on the boards of CALPERS and CALSTRS, two of the largest pension funds in the nation.

Ms. Brown earned a BA in History from Stanford University and a JD from Fordham University School of Law. She currently serves on the board of Sempra Energy and is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. Ms. Brown also serves on the Board of the National Park Foundation.

Maura Markus has more than 25 years of experience leading operations, sales, and marketing initiatives in the U.S. and Europe, helping build both Bank of the West and Citibank in senior executive and board roles. From 2010 to 2014, Ms. Markus served as President, Chief Operating Officer, and as a board Director at Bank of the West. Prior to joining Bank of the West, Ms. Markus was a 22-year veteran of Citigroup, where she served as Executive Vice President, Head of International Retail Banking in Citi's Global Consumer Group from 2007 to 2009. She held a number of additional domestic and international management positions including President, Citibank North America, from 2000 - 2007, as well as Citi's European Sales and Marketing Director based in Brussels, Belgium, and as President of Citi's consumer business in Athens, Greece. She has been named multiple times as one of American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Banking

Ms. Markus graduated summa cum laude from Boston College with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and holds a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School. She is a current member of Women Corporate Directors San Francisco and International Women's Forum Northern California and a former member of the Financial Services Roundtable. Among her numerous community interests, she is a trustee of College of Mount St. Vincent in New York, board member of Catholic Charities San Francisco, and a member of Year Up San Francisco Bay Area Talent and Opportunity Board. She currently serves on the board of Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

Stifel Company Information

Stifel Financial Corp. (NYSE: SF) is a financial services holding company headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, that conducts its banking, securities, and financial services business through several wholly owned subsidiaries. Stifel's broker-dealer clients are served in the United States through Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated; Keefe Bruyette & Woods, Inc.; Miller Buckfire & Co., LLC; and Century Securities Associates, Inc., and in the United Kingdom and Europe through Stifel Nicolaus Europe Limited. The Company's broker-dealer affiliates provide securities brokerage, investment banking, trading, investment advisory, and related financial services to individual investors, professional money managers, businesses, and municipalities. Stifel Bank & Trust offers a full range of consumer and commercial lending solutions. Stifel Trust Company, N.A. and Stifel Trust Company Delaware, N.A. offer trust and related services. To learn more about Stifel, please visit the Company's web site at www.stifel.com.

Stifel Investor Relations Contact

Joel Jeffrey

(212) 271-3610

investorrelations@stifel.com
CALGARY, ALBERTA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/19/16 -- Veresen Inc. ("Veresen") (TSX: VSN) expects to release its first quarter 2016 financial and operating results on Wednesday, May 4, 2016 after the close of North American markets. The first quarter 2016 management's discussion and analysis and unaudited consolidated financial statements will be available on the Company's website at www.vereseninc.com and on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Earnings Conference Call & Webcast Details

A conference call and webcast presentation will be held to discuss first quarter 2016 financial and operating results at 7:00am Mountain Time (9:00am Eastern Time) on Thursday, May 5, 2016.

To listen to the conference call, please dial 647-788-4919 or 1-877-291-4570 (toll-free). This call will also be broadcast live on the Internet and may be accessed directly at the following URL:

http://www.gowebcasting.com/7513

A presentation will accompany the conference call and will be available via the webcast. Alternatively, the presentation will be made available immediately prior to the conference call start time of 7:00am Mountain Time on Veresen's website at: http://www.vereseninc.com/invest/events-presentations.

A digital recording will be available for replay two hours after the call's completion, and will remain available until May 19, 2016 21:59 Mountain Time (23:59 Eastern Time). To listen to the replay, please dial 416-621-4642 or 1-800-585-8367 (toll-free) and enter Conference ID 95413052. A digital recording will also be available for replay on the company's website.

Webcast of AGM Presentation

Veresen is holding its annual meeting of shareholders on Wednesday, May 4, 2016 at 2:00 p.m. Mountain Time at Livingston Place (South Tower) in the Livingston Club Conference Centre, Plus 15, 222 - 3rd Avenue S.W., Calgary, Alberta.

At approximately 2:20pm Mountain Time, and following the conclusion of the formal proceedings of Veresen's annual shareholder meeting, Mr. Don Althoff, President and CEO, will address shareholders and provide an update of Veresen's 2015 accomplishments, remarks on the current state of the business and discuss highlights of the company's key initiatives.

To view a live broadcast of the presentation on the Internet, please access the following URL:

http://www.gowebcasting.com/7467

A digital recording will be available on the company's website for replay two hours after the completion of the presentation.

About Veresen Inc.

Veresen is a publicly-traded dividend paying corporation based in Calgary, Alberta that owns and operates energy infrastructure assets across North America. Veresen is engaged in three principal businesses: a pipeline transportation business comprised of interests in the Alliance Pipeline, the Ruby Pipeline and the Alberta Ethane Gathering System; a midstream business which includes a partnership interest in Veresen Midstream Limited Partnership which owns assets in western Canada, and an ownership interest in Aux Sable, which owns a world-class natural gas liquids (NGL) extraction facility near Chicago, and other natural gas and NGL processing energy infrastructure; and a power business comprised of a portfolio of assets in Canada. Veresen is also developing Jordan Cove LNG, a six million tonne per annum natural gas liquefaction facility proposed to be constructed in Coos Bay, Oregon, and the associated Pacific Connector Gas Pipeline. In the normal course of business, Veresen regularly evaluates and pursues acquisition and development opportunities.

Veresen's Common Shares, Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Shares, Series A, Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Shares, Series C, and Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Shares, Series E trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbols "VSN", "VSN.PR.A", "VSN.PR.C" and "VSN.PR.E", respectively. For further information, please visit www.vereseninc.com.

Contacts:

Veresen Inc.

Mark Chyc-Cies

Investor Relations Director

(403) 213-3633

investor-relations@vereseninc.com




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/19/16 -- Orca Gold Inc. (TSX VENTURE: ORG) ("Orca" or the "Company") announces that it has granted an aggregate 6,950,000 incentive stock options to certain officers, directors and other eligible persons of the Company. The options are exercisable, subject to vesting provisions, over a period of three years at a price of $0.27 per share.

Other

The Company also announces that Jeff Yip, in addition to being the Chief Financial Officer of the Company, has taken on the role of Interim Corporate Secretary, effective April 13, 2016, replacing Rashida McLean, who is on temporary leave.

About Orca

Orca Gold Inc. is a Canadian resource company focused on exploration opportunities in Africa. On the Block 14 exploration permit in Sudan, Orca has defined an Indicated Resource of 27.6Mt grading 1.83g/t for 1.63 million ounces of gold and an Inferred Resource of 10.3Mt grading 1.8g/t for an additional 0.6 million, based on a 1g/t cut-off grade (News Release: February 4, 2015).

The principal focus of the Company at present is on the compilation of a Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) for its 70% owned Block 14 Gold Project in the Sudan. Work on the PEA, which is being overseen by SGS Time Mining of South Africa, is expected to be completed by the end of the second quarter.

Exploration is continuing in Block 14, targeted on proving up extensions to the Galat Sufar South (GSS) and Wadi Doum and on identifying new high grade targets within the 3,750 km2 exploration permit.

The Company has an experienced board of directors and management team and a strong balance sheet, with a treasury of CAD 17.7 million at year end 2015.

The technical contents of this release have been approved by Hugh Stuart, BSc, MSc, a Qualified Person pursuant to NI-43101. Mr. Stuart is President and CEO of the Company and a Chartered Geologist and Fellow of the Geological Society of London. Samples used for the results described herein are prepared and analyzed by fire assay using a 50 gram charge at the ALS Chemex facility at Rosia Montana in Romania in compliance with industry standards. Field duplicate samples are taken and blanks and standards are added to every batch submitted.

On behalf of the Board of Directors:

Hugh Stuart

President, CEO and Director

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "expect", "intend", "estimate", "forecast", "project", "budget", "schedule", "may", "will", "could", "might", "should" or variations of such words or similar words or expressions or statements that certain events "may" or "will" occur. Forward-looking statements in this press release include, but are not limited to, statements relating to indicates and inferred mineral resources, the potential to expand the resource targets in the Main and East Zones, the plans of the Company to conduct preliminary metallurgical testwork and increase its ownership in Block 14 and the future potential of GSS to become a commercial mining operation, including exploration activities.

Forward-looking information is based on reasonable assumptions that have been made by the Company as at the date of such information and is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to: risks associated with mineral exploration and development; metal and mineral prices; availability of capital; accuracy of the Company's projections and estimates; interest and exchange rates; competition; stock price fluctuations; availability of drilling equipment and access; actual results of current exploration activities; government regulation; local political instability or unrest, local economic instability; global economic developments; environmental risks; insurance risks; capital expenditures; operating or technical difficulties in connection with development activities; personnel relations; the speculative nature of strategic metal exploration and development including the risks of diminishing quantities of grades of reserves; contests over title to properties; and changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions management believes to be reasonable, including but not limited to the price of gold; the demand for gold; the ability to carry on exploration and development activities; the timely receipt of any required approvals; the ability to obtain qualified personnel, equipment and services in a timely and cost-efficient manner; the ability to operate in a safe, efficient and effective manner; the expected timing, costs, and results of a PEA; the expected burn rate; the regulatory framework regarding environmental matters, and such other assumptions and factors as set out herein. 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 information. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking information if circumstances or management's estimates, assumptions or opinions should change, except as required by applicable law. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information contained herein.

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.

Contacts:

Hugh Stuart

Tel: +44 7788 487462




NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) held its first Strategic Advisory Committee (SAC) meeting on March 18th, at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The SAC is chaired by GCA's three founding partners: New York County District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., London Police Commissioner Ian Dyson, and Chair of the Center for Internet Security John Gilligan. The SAC comprises senior-level executives from the public and private sectors.

The mission of GCA is to identify systemic cyber risks where significant progress can be made on risk mitigation, and then to bring together the people and resources to identify and implement a solution -- to take action -- and to measure the effect. The outcome of this effort is not a report with recommendations but actual risk reduction moving forward on a path to eradicate a systemic cyber risk.

GCA will regularly assess the top cyber risks that the collective community believes are significant threats to the global, on-line community and for which GCA can have a measurable, positive impact on the eradication of the risk.

At the Strategic Advisory Committee meeting, the Global Cyber Alliance presented the following Top Systemic Risks to consider tackling through task groups focused on implementation:

Phishing, Risks arising from weak identity and authentication mechanisms, Risks arising from vulnerable and compromised websites, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

GCA, based on the advice and recommendations from its Strategic and Technical Advisory Committee members, has decided to tackle Phishing by driving implementation of two solutions that have been shown to be effective -- limiting spoofing of email (through DMARC) and minimizing the effect of phishing and other attacks (through secure DNS practices). For more information on the solutions, please visit www.globalcyberalliance.org.

Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., stated: "The Global Cyber Alliance was borne out of a shared commitment to reducing cyber risk worldwide. By focusing the institutional knowledge and resources of stakeholders on select challenges, GCA will be able to isolate and address key vulnerabilities adversely affecting individuals and organizations all over the world, ultimately benefitting those in both the public and private sectors."

Chair of the Center for Internet Security and Former Chief Information Officer of the United States Air Force and Department of Energy, John Gilligan, stated, "I have first hand knowledge of the power of the collective effort to make systemic changes to improve our cyber security posture. GCA mission is to confront these risks on an international scale which is critical in this day and age. The SAC meeting reconfirmed the importance of working together to confront these top risks."

City of London Police Commissioner, Ian Dyson, said, "The Global Cyber Alliance has identified the biggest risks to businesses and individuals globally from cyber crime. By prioritizing the risks that cause the most harm the alliance can build solutions that can make the cyber world a safer place in the future."

GCA President and CEO Philip Reitinger stated, "Phishing is a priority for everyone, and there are many groups that are working on phishing, such as the Anti-Phishing Working Group, the National Cyber Security Alliance, DMARC.org, the Shadowserver Foundation, law enforcement, and many others. GCA will work in partnership with these organizations to tackle the problem -- to drive the deployment of DMARC and use of secure DNS services, and to measure the effect -- so that we all may accelerate eradication of phishing as a systemic cyber risk."

Peter Cassidy, Secretary General of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) and an early supporter of GCA, stated, "The APWG welcomes GCA to the counter-cybercrime community with cheer and anticipation of the great advances we can and will make together. Alliances that we forge today, amidst the gathering chaos, are the foundations of institutions and conventions that will make cybercrime, in all its manifestations, a predictable and manageable risk tomorrow."

The GCA Strategic Advisory Committee presently comprises 42 entities spanning the finance, health, telecommunications, education, insurance, cyber security, technology, and media sectors, as well as government and law enforcement officials from Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Jim Routh, Chief Information Security Officer at Aetna who is a member of the GCA Strategic Advisory Committee, stated, "Spear phishing is increasing in both frequency and sophistication, and represents a real threat to companies large and small. All industries should consider the use of a proven control like the DMARC standard, which can help rebuild trust in the email ecosystem."

GCA is currently building international task groups to drive these solutions and measure progress. Individuals and entities interested in joining the GCA campaign to do something about it are urged to contact GCA at www.globalcyberalliance.org.

Contact:

Lisa Light

llight@globalcyberalliance.org

646.677.5521

Manhattan, New York
CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - Japan will on Wednesday release March figures for import, exports and trade balance, highlighting a modest day for Asia-Pacific economic activity. Imports are expected to fall 16.5 percent on year after losing 14.2 percent in February. Exports are called lower by 7.1 percent after dipping 4.0 percent in the previous month. The trade surplus is pegged at 819.1 billion yen, up from 242.2 billion a month earlier. Japan also will see March numbers for supermarket and convenience store sales; in February, they were up 3.4 percent and 1.6 percent on year. Australia will see March results for the Westpac leading index, plus skilled vacancies; in February, they were down 0.15 percent and 0.9 percent on month, respectively. Taiwan will provide March data for export orders, with forecasts suggesting a decline of 8.0 percent on year following the 7.4 percent decline in February. Malaysia will release March numbers for consumer prices, with analysts looking for an increase of 0.3 percent on month and 3.5 percent on year. That follows the flat monthly reading and the 4.2 percent yearly gain in February. 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.
LONDON, April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

A group of MPs specifically formed to investigate a major consumer mis-selling scandal that has lasted for more than a decade, today (Apr 20th) release their highly damning assessment, claiming that one of the UK's Big Six energy suppliers not only sustained the scandal for years, but sought subsequently to cover it up.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on ScottishPower's Cashback Mis-selling, made up of 28 MPs, took evidence over recent months into how 625,000 consumers across the UK - many of them pensioners - lost out collectively on more than 75 million in unpaid consumer goods guarantees to which they were entitled.

The MPs are now calling for a formal Select Committee hearing into the scandal so that ScottishPower executives can be called to account for their actions before Parliament, opening the way to achieving some form of justice, including compensation, for those consumers who are affected.

Launching the report, the Chair of the APPG, Andrew Percy MP, said;

"Over the past year this group has been compiling evidence from many sources, including liquidators, regulators, former customers and employees on how this came to pass; much of that evidence made detailed allegations of fraud, criminality and more. Therefore, we have been shocked by the complete lack of uptake by regulators and authorities to date, and I expect this report to make them sit up and take notice.

"There is no doubt in our mind that selling a Cashback Promise that was neither financially capable of functioning, nor designed to deliver, is effectively a fraud on the public - and they have been covering it up ever since. Indeed, we do not believe it was in ScottishPower's gift to sell on that promise (which was to their customers) to another retailer in the first place. It is high time they were held accountable and I look forward to taking this report to our meeting with the Minister next week (27 April 2016), I am sure he will agree with our assessment."

Alan Campbell, the whistleblower who originally brought the scandal to the attention of Parliament and who has fought relentlessly for ScottishPower management to answer for their actions, said;

"I've spent the past 5 years of my life fighting to get this issue the attention it deserves. I'm incredibly grateful to the MPs for shining a light on a fraud that has gone unanswered for too long.

"This group has now seen with their own eyes an evidence trail that stretches back to the late-1990s and drawn their own conclusions.

"The fact that ScottishPower have refused to properly engage with this investigation, indeed refusing to turn up to the evidence session, only speaks to their guilt. I only hope that now in light of this report that Parliament acts to drag ScottishPower out into the open to truly account for themselves. That scrutiny will, I'm sure, expose them for what they are - and that is a company not fit to be responsible for 5.3 million customers.

"I have started a Government e-Petition so that other dissatisfied consumers who have had enough of this company's abuse of customers' trust can join the call - I encourage you to sign it."

The PowerPlan Cashback Promise

PowerPlan Company Ltd was set up by ScottishPower to issue warranties on white/brown goods (such as TVs, fridges, cookers, etc.) in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Cashback warranties were sold on these goods, meaning that if you didn't claim on your warranty within 5 years they would give you the cash deposit back. These warranties were called PowerPlan, and a sub-company PowerPlan Company Ltd (PPCL) was set up in the Isle of Man to issue the warranties for the purposes of avoiding VAT.

The scheme went under in 2004, following its sale to another retailer (Powerhouse) and ScottishPower refused to pay out on the cashback offer on the warranties. In 2004/5 thousands of people started calling in their cashback but the cashback warranties were never paid, meaning that 625,000 customers across the UK have lost out on a combined 75m.

Notes to editors

The APPG are releasing their report, and holding a Q&A, at 10.00am in Room O, Portcullis House, Westminster.

in Room O, Portcullis House, Westminster. The APPG on ScottishPower's Cashback Mis-selling has now released a report on their investigation into the scandal. The report calls for a number of regulators to use their powers to investigate, including a Parliamentary Select Committee who would have the power to call ScottishPower to account in person. For a copy of the report please either contact the APPG directly.

The APPG are meeting with the Consumer Affairs Minister, Nick Boles MP, on 27 April 2016 to discuss their findings and try to seek a resolution for customers.

to discuss their findings and try to seek a resolution for customers. For more information on the ScottishPower Broken Promises campaign, or to speak with customers who lost out, please email info@scottishpowerbrokenpromises.co.uk .

In the late 1990s and early 2000s ScottishPower used to have retail stores that sold TVs, fridges, washing machines, etc. On those they used to sell cashback warranties, meaning that if you didn't claim on your warranty within 5 years they'd give you the cash deposit back. These warranties were called PowerPlan, and a sub-company PowerPlan Company Ltd (PPCL) was set up to issue the warranties.

In 2001 ScottishPower sold their stores to another retailer, Powerhouse, on the proviso that the already existing claims would be covered by ScottishPower.

In 2004/5 thousands of people started calling in their cashback. When Powerhouse tried to call on their indemnity with ScottishPower they reneged on the agreement. Powerhouse, partly as a consequence of this, went bust. 625,000 customers never got their money back, meaning over 75m is still owed.

For more information or to arrange an interview with Alan Campbell please contact James Hargrave on +44-(0)7900-904-707 or james.hargrave@jbp.co.uk. For a copy of the report or more information on the All-Party Parliamentary Group please contact the Chair, Andrew Percy MP, on +44-(0)20-7219-7208 or andrew.percy.mp@parliament.uk.
Avantium, an Amsterdam, the Netherlands-based innovative chemical technology company, closed a financing round of 20m.

Backers included PMV, an independent investment company for Flanders, FPIM, a Belgian Federal Holding and Investment Company, and existing shareholders.

The company intends to use the funds to commercialize its technology.

Led by Tom van Aken, CEO, Avantium is advancing the the YXY technology for producing 100% biobased packaging material PEF (polyethylenefuranoate), a next generation plastic with superior performance. The companys roll-out plan includes the construction of a reference plant with a capacity of up to 50,000 metric tons per year in Antwerp, Belgium.

Avantium recently partnered with BASF signing a letter of intent to establish a joint venture for the production and marketing of the renewable chemical building block FDCA, as well as marketing of PEF. The joint venture intends to use the YXY process technology developed by Avantium to solidify its positions in FDCA and PEF, and subsequently license the YXY technology for industrial scale applications.

FinSMEs

19/04/2016
River Capital Finance, a TruWest Company, has launched a new business specialized in debt financing options for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies located in the United States.

Led by President Matt Kennedy, River SaaS Capital is a finance company that specializes in the finance of Software-as-a-Service companies. Located in Westlake OH, the firm focuses on the stability of the candidate companys Average Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and its ability to generate positive cash flow.

FinSMEs

19/04/2016

Press Release

River Capital Finance Announces Launch of New Business, River SaaS Capital

CLEVELAND, April 18, 2016  River Capital Finance, a TruWest Company, announces the launch of their new business, River SaaS Capital. The company specializes in debt financing options for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies located in the United States.

With recent cloud based businesses growing at a rate of 36% compound annual growth rate, we realized that this is an emerging market that we need to be a part of, says River SaaS Capital President Matt Kennedy. I reached out to some of my peers with extensive technology and finance experience, developed a business model, and created the business. Our portfolio will consist of SaaS based companies who are looking for an alternative means of financing that differs from venture capitalists and banks. We have been formulating this idea for the past two years and are very happy to now finally go to market.

River SaaS Capitals focus is on the stability of the candidate companys Average Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and its ability to generate positive cash flow. Unlike venture capital funds, River SaaS Capital offers finance packages that do not demand equity in the SaaS business. River SaaS Capital also offers more flexible credit lines than traditional banks. The cornerstone goal of River SaaS Capitals business model is to foster the continued financial growth of our customers over time.

River SaaS Capital is located in Westlake OH. If you are interested in learning more about River SaaS Capital or financing options, please visit www.riversaascapital.com or call 216-535-4115.
SoftCube, a Kiev, Ukraine-based e-commerce solution that gathers customer data across multiple communication channels to improve shopping experience, raised $400k in funding.

Backers included Digital Future and other undisclosed private investors.

The company intends to use the funds for marketing and business development activities in the US market.

Founded by Oleg Lesov in 2012, SoftCube provides a solution for personalized merchandising and product recommendations for ecommerce by helping retailers increase sales by 15-20% allowing cross-selling and up-selling. A mathematical model allows the platform to effectively use small amount of customer data to generate recommendations for different products, including niche ones.

The company has served more than 25 customers from many European countries, including Metro Cash&Carry.

FinSMEs

19/04/2016
JK Tyre and Industries Ltd. have announced complete acquisition of Cavendish Industries Ltd. (CIL). In an official release, JK Tyre has stated that the acquisition was done at an enterprise value of Rs 2,200 crore. In September 2015, JK Tyres had announced the signing of an agreement with Kesoram Industries Ltd. to acquire 100 per cent equity in CIL.

CIL houses three tyre business undertakings of Birla Tyres. The plants are located at Laksar in Haridwar and manufacture a wide range of tyres, tubes and flaps. JK Tyre has announced that it...
Anurag Kashyap, who has taken several of his films to the Cannes International Film Festival, including Gangs of Wasseypur, Peddlers, and Bombay Talkies, among others, has just announced that his upcoming film, Raman Raghav 2.0 will be premiered at Cannes Director's fortnight.

Kashyap took to Twitter to make the announcement:

Raman Raghav 2.0 to premiere at Cannes Directors Fortnight.. Congratulations team  Anurag Kashyap (@anuragkashyap72) April 19, 2016

The title character in Raman Raghav 2.0 is played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who has been to Cannes earlier with GOW. Vicky Kaushal, of Masaan fame, is also in the film.

According to this article in Variety, Kashyap's film is being called Pyscho Raman (which is another pseudonym of the character that the film is based on).

Raman Raghav 2.0 is the story of a real life serial killer called Raman Raghav, infamous for his criminal activity in suburban Mumbai during the 1960s. The film is set to release on 27 May.

Filmmaker Sriram Raghavan had earlier made a 70-minute documentary on the serial killer, which has Raghubir Yadav as the lead.
Soon after her death on 1 April, reports claimed that TV actress Pratyusha Banerjee had possibly been two months pregnant at the time. Forensic surgeons at the time had noted the presence of a whitish fluid in her uterus at the time of conducting an autopsy, said a report in Mid-Day.

Nearly 20 days later, medical experts have confirmed that the Balika Vadhu star seems to have had undergone an abortion a little before she ended her life.

In a report carried in The Times of India on Tuesday, doctors from JJ Hospital said that an examination of Pratyushas uterine tissues indicated that there was a conception a few days or a month before hr demise, and that there was a premature death of the foetal cell. JJ Hospital had carried out a histopathological examination of the tissues to arrive at its findings.

The report also said that it would be difficult to establish the paternity of the foetus as there was hardly any matter left to conduct a DNA test.

The medical authorities at JJ have now presented a report based on their examinations to the Mumbai police. Whether or not their finding will have a bearing on Pratyushas partner Rahul Raj Singhs anticipatory bail plea  the hearing has been set for 25 April by the Bombay High Court  remains to be seen. Rahul was booked by the police for abetting Pratyusha's suicide.

In the meantime, further tests are being conducted at the Kalina Forensic Science Laboratory where Pratyushas hair, nail and blood samples have been retained.
In recent days, Civil Aviation Minister Ajit Singh has been giving voice, with uncharacteristic candour, to his thoughts on the folly of the merger of Indian Airlines with Air India.

"In retrospect, it appears that the merger hasn't worked out in the way it was envisaged at that time," Singh told Karan Thapar on CNN-IBN. "At that time, they perhaps thought there would be a lot of synergy, and there would be cost savings. Looking at it now, it definitely hasn't worked out."

Hindsight vision is, of course, always perfect. What was in 2007 perceived as an astute move that would bring synergies and cost savings is today being shown up to be a cross-cultural marriage that brought together two traditional families, neither of whom is ready to give up the peculiar orthodoxies of their respective culture.

Which is why even if it made business sense, the merger never really took off owing to perceptions of a 'status' hierarchy. The two airlines' employees were on vastly different payscales, and although they were both immersed in the 'sarkari naukri' culture, a pecking order was established even within themselves.

Indicatively, as former Civil Aviation Minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy points out, one of the issues over which Air India pilots have now gone on strike relates to their unwillingness to allow pilots of the erstwhile Indian Airlines be sent for training on Boeing 787 Dreamliners or even the 777s and the 747s.

It didn't help, of course, that the union was never fully consummated. To this day, the merger is only 70 percent complete. Significantly, critical Human Resource functions, which go to the core of the problems over the 'clash of cultures', haven't been merged. That is now being addressed through the instrument of the Dharmadhikari Committee report, which was submitted in late January.

That report went into critical aspects of staff restructuring, including the issues of career progression, rationalisation of pay scales and allowances. But true to form, the government has now appointed another committee to make recommendations on the operational aspects of implementing the Dharmadhikari Committee report.

So if Ajit Singh feels the merger hasn't worked as envisaged, does he wish to turn the clock back by de-merging the two entities? Appearing on NDTV on Monday, the Minister said he did not favour such a move - since it would take another five years to operationalise.

In fact, the cross-cultural issues between the employees of Air India and Indian Airlines appear somewhat overstated in comparison to several other mergers in the airline industry in other contexts, many of which were far more challenging - because they were carried out across national geographies.

For instance, when KLM merged with Air France in 2004, among the cultural issues that cropped up was whether the language of communication would be French or Dutch. (They decided it would be neither, and opted for English.)

Even organisationally, the Air France-KLM merger was better managed with foresight: the two companies were vastly different in size and stature, but operated as separate entities, but with one holding company. Each of them retained and operated under their own brand names from their respective home bases - in Paris and Amsterdam. The KLM brand and logo was protected for five years, and Schiphol was allowed to retain its status as an international hub for eight years. (More details here.)

In contrast, the IA-AI merger - although between two families who belong to the same governmental gothra and who had much more in common between them - comes across as a shotgun wedding, entered into without adequate application of mind or a union of hearts. Is it any wonder it is playing out on prime-time television with all the sordid elements of a saas-bahu serial...
In this increasingly globalized, hyper-connected world that we live in, banks and financial institutions are going through a silent yet powerful process of change. Profoundly impacted by new technologies and changing customer expectations, banking has long since ceased to be about cold hard numbers that intimidated customers. Banking today, is all about harnessing the digital power and giving the customers an experience they look forward to, as well as solutions that are embedded in their life cycle.

With geographical divides blurring rapidly as far as service standards are concerned, and with customers becoming far more demanding and spoilt for choice, financial institutions across the world are fast realizing the importance of adopting global best practices to make banking what it should be like, truly simple, intelligent, effortless and efficient.

A huge champion of change is DBS, the largest bank in South East Asia that helped finance Singapores industrialization and also one of Asias leading financial services groups. Spearheading the change at DBS is CEO Piyush Gupta, who has been heading the group since 2009. Piyush brings with him a sea of experience, having had over three decades of experience, honed by managing multiple businesses across different geographies. At DBS, he is establishing practices and processes that are driving growth by marrying the best of East and West.

Here are some key lessons from DBS that financial institutions can use to enhance customer experience and give them an experience that goes far beyond just banking.

Strategic shift to attend to multiple stakeholder needs

The west has typically been focused on streamlined processes that largely focus on shareholder interests. With short-term performance in focus, a long-term strategy often takes a backseat. This is a key difference between the east and west: wherein the East, having more owner-entrepreneurs as leaders, has often developed strategies that are more inclusive and long-term in nature.

DBS has taken into cognizance this key cultural difference and focused not just on shareholder profits, but proactively engaged with all key stakeholders such as individuals, corporates, Government and societies at large. Learning from the global financial crisis, the west too has realized that focusing on shareholder interests alone is not adequate and is making meaningful attempts at adapting to the changing needs and expectations and trying to develop more inclusive strategies for all its stakeholders.

A fresh look at team management

To build an organisation that will work in a growth market, one needs a team of not just generals but soldiers, says Piyush Gupta. Western leaders have typically been very focused on managing individual performance to the last degree. Individual enterprise is rewarded while laggards are weeded out regularly. The East, on the other hand, has had teamwork as its key strength as performance as a parameter is not just assessed as mere statistics. The downside to both is that while individual performances get recognized in the western culture, in the East there is always the danger of being sucked into mediocrity because of the deadwood that does not get weeded out in time. The challenge, therefore, is finding a balance between rewarding individual results in the larger context of encouraging teamwork. At DBS, therefore, the KPIs (Key performances indicators) have been aligned in a manner to inspire and nurture individual enterprise while celebrating innovation as a whole. This unique attempt of blending East with the West is a lesson that all financial organisations can take a leaf out of, irrespective of geography.

Make innovation people centric

Piyush Gupta points out that even in the recent past, western countries thought that processes and metrics are the key recipes for success. But that has changed significantly with western leaders seeking innovation in their processes. DBS, he says, thinks of innovation as a journey that is both critical and inevitable and has identified ambassadors that encourage the journey of innovation across the organisation and inspire people to think out the box.

The aim is to create an environment that inspires every employee at DBS to dare to try and come up with creative solutions to the even the most mundane or perennial problems. Individual efforts are acknowledged and the whole team is encouraged to showcase their own innovative solutions. The result is a combination of processes and metrics with the power of individual enterprise, thus also fostering an entrepreneurial culture. These initiatives and attempts to inspire also boost team spirit and ultimately drive growth.

The sum total of the processes that DBS has put in place over the past six years can be summarized by the acronym RED (Respectful, Easy to deal with and Dependable). Going forward, DBS seeks to take its customer ethos even further. The bank lives by the maxim that in the future, banking integrated with technology and mobility should make banking easy and effortless. In its own words, it seeks to direct its efforts towards making banking joyful

For making your banking experience a joyful and seamless one, log on to dbs.com/in.

This is a sponsored post.
Mumbai: Small and payments banks have not yet devised a business model which can be termed viable, said SBI Chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya.

"Neither the payments banks nor small finance banks seem to have as yet devised a business model that can be said as viable," said Bhattacharya, whose bank has tied up with Reliance Industries for a payments bank venture.

Addressing a banking seminar organised by industry lobby IMC here, she added, "...a mobile banking customer, who is also a customer for payment services, will be less free to migrate to a competition for mobile services. Hence, it is hard to see payment banks taking away customers or income from commercial banks in a big way. Similar arguments hold for small finance banks."

Admitting that the entry of other non-banking companies, through their investments in small finance and payments banks, has changed the dynamics of competition in the sector, she said, "There are some legitimate concerns whether banks, particularly public sector banks, will survive this onslaught."

This is the third time the SBI chief has cast doubts over the payments banks model. At one public event, she went to the extent of saying that with deep-pocket corporates entering payments banking, it would be a "dog eat dog" scenario in the sector.

Bhattacharya's comments come within a fortnight of RBI saying it will allow differentiated lenders like custodian and wholesale banks. The RBI has already issued in-principle licences to 10 payments banks and 11 small finance banks.

Soon after Reliance Industries secured a licence to operate a payments bank, SBI tied up with the company and picked up 30 percent stake worth Rs 30 crore in the venture, which is yet to begin operations.

Noting that technology will play a bigger role in banking, she said the potential of technology, mainly mobile phones, to deliver banking services was recognised way back in 2010. She said mobiles offer the cheapest mode of banking.

"A mobile banking transaction costs about 2 per cent of the bank branching cost, 10 per cent of ATM-based transaction and 50 percent of the Internet banking cost," she said.

Banks that succeed in digital or mobile banking can expect to see an increase in low-cost float funds. "They can also better access and analyse data on customers, especially retail customers, and thus reduce non-performing assets. Digital banking can also increase productivity of back office operations and generate income on a wide range of payments."

Admitting rising competition, Bhattacharya said the share of top five banks in the total market has fallen from 46 percent in 1998 to 39.5 percent now. She added that the recent RBI decisions on new players will only increase competition.

Ruing the decline of cooperative, local area and regional rural banks, Bhattacharya said "Very little attention is being given to these banks."

"The feeling that I get is that people seem to have given up on these smaller banks. I believe that this existing sector needs reforms very badly as they are not actually controlled by the Reserve Bank," she said.

Seeking support for these small players, she said it is important that we talk about this narrative because these banks have large customer base and also employ a large number of people.

She said as the industry prepares for more competition from the new players, "we should also look at what the government machinery and the regulator are doing to make sure these existing banks are made ready for competition and some amount of handholding is provided to these institutions."

Admitting that banks are going through a period of stress, Bhattacharya said, "It is as if the global financial crisis is affecting our economy with a lag. However, it would be unwise to draw conclusions or prescriptions about our banking by reading the performance indicators over the past three years of stress."

Blaming the stress in banking on the strain in the real economy, she said as the economy contracted in 2011-12, the banking sector too took a beating.
NEW DELHI India will make all possible efforts to get back the Koh-i-Noor Diamond from Britain despite comments by New Delhi's solicitor general that the priceless jewel should stay with the former colonial ruler, the government said on Tuesday.

India has repeatedly demanded that Britain return the 105-carat diamond, which was presented to Queen Victoria in 1850 and today sits on display as part of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.

India's solicitor general surprised many on Monday when he told the Supreme Court that his country should forgo its claims to the jewel because it was given to Britain as a gift by an Indian king in 1851, rather than stolen as many Indians today believe.

The government said on Tuesday his view did not represent its own and that it was yet to give its opinion to the court, which is hearing a case demanding the diamond be returned.

"The Government of India further reiterates its resolve to make all possible efforts to bring back the Koh-i-noor Diamond in an amicable manner," the ministry of culture said.

The ministry said the stone was a "valued piece of art with strong roots in our nation's history" and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was determined to get it back.

A lawyer in India's neighbour Pakistan last year filed a court petition calling for the stone's return. India and Pakistan became two different countries with partition in 1947, when they became independent from Britain.

The Koh-i-Noor is set in the crown worn by Queen Elizabeth, the mother of the reigning monarch, at the coronation of her husband George VI in 1937, and was placed on her coffin at her funeral in 2002.

The Duchess of Cambridge, who last week visited India with her husband, Prince William, will wear the crown on official occasions when she becomes queen consort. William is second in line to the British throne.

(Reporting by Tommy Wilkes, Editing by Angus MacSwan)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
NEW DELHI India's trade deficit narrowed for the third straight month in March to $5.07 billion, the lowest in five years, as imports shrank at a faster pace than exports, data showed on Monday.

Although exports for the year ending March were the weakest since 2010/11, down 15.85 percent from a year ago, the narrowing trade gap showed that India - the world's third-largest crude importer - has been a net beneficiary of the collapse in oil prices.

The positive shift in the terms of trade has helped shield India from a slowing global economy and helped it outperform other major emerging economies, its economic growth outpacing China's while Brazil and Russia are contracting.

Yet analysts said prospects for export growth remain bleak, with global trade forecast to expand by just 2.8 percent in 2016 by the World Trade Organisation.

"We expect Indian exports to continue performing poorly in 2016/17 (April-March) due to subdued global economic growth and still-depressed commodity prices," said Chua Han Teng of BMI Research, a unit of rating agency Fitch.

"Additionally, strength of the Indian rupee in real effective exchange rate terms will also have a negative impact on the country's exports," he said.

Merchandise exports contracted 5.5 percent in March from a year earlier to $22.7 billion, data released by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry showed.

For the whole of 2015/16, total exports were down 15.9 percent from a year ago to $261.1 billion. Imports fell 15.3 percent to $379.6 during the same period.

In Asia, China's exports returned to growth in March for the first time in nine months, another sign of stabilisation in the world's second-largest economy.

India' economy is now expected to grow 7.5 percent this year and next, according to the International Monetary Fund. Its current account deficit remained under control at 1.3 percent of gross domestic product in the quarter to December, the most recent figure available.

India's exports account for just 1.7 percent of world trade, compared with nearly 12 percent of China. Prime Minister Narendra Modi aims to take a 5 percent share of global trade by 2020. Analysts doubt that will happen.

"With progress on the reforms needed to support a vibrant export sector still slow, the governments ambition to nearly double export values by 2020/21 is looking increasingly unrealistic," said Shilan Shah, India economist of Capital Economics.

Exporters said Modi administration's delay in signing free trade pacts, such as with the European Union, and policies that seek to protect domestic industries have hurt India's export prospects, though they still remain optimistic.

(Reporting by Manoj Kumar; Editing by Malini Menon, Larry King)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Kohima: The Government of India and National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), under the leadership of N Kitovi Zhimomi and MB Neokpao Konyak have mutually agreed to extend the Ceasefire Agreement by another year with effect from 28 April.

The agreement, extended till 27 April 2017, aims to bring lasting peace in the state of Nagaland with the involvement of Naga people, stated an agreement signed between the Centre and GPRN/NSCN.

While the Centre was represented by Satyendra Garg, Joint Secretary of Ministry of Home Affairs, North East Division, GPRN/NSCN was represented by Jack Zhimomi and Chenyum Konyak in New Delhi on Monday.

The signatories also agreed that the ceasefire will adhere to Ceasefire Ground Rules (CFGR) as mutually decided and signed by the two sides. The CFGR will subject to mutual review and amendment with the involvement of both the parties.
Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court has ruled that every member of a rioting mob is guilty of the offence

committed by some of its constituents, while maintaining that cases related to communal riots require "very careful handling."

A division bench of justices KS Jhaveri and GB Shah said this in their order given on 11 February, which was

uploaded recently on the High Court's official website, while reducing life sentence to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment for seven convicts in a communal riot case of 2003.

"Law is abundantly clear that if an offence is committed by any member of an unlawful assembly in furtherance of the common object of that assembly, every member of that unlawful assembly is guilty of that offence," the court said.

"Specific overt act of each member of unlawful assembly need not be proved when the accused are proved to be members of that assembly," the court said.

The court passed the order after hearing seven persons who had in 2006 challenged the order of a lower court which had sentenced them to life imprisonment in murder, dacoity and rioting case.

On 7 November 2003, a mob of around 1500 people had gathered at Shah Alam area of the city where they murdered one Mukesh Panchal whose body was recovered from Chandola lake of the city. They also assaulted and looted other passers-by.

The lower court had convicted seven persons to life sentence. The 17 March, 2006 judgement was then challenged in High Court.

"After appreciating the entire evidence on record, we are unable to accept the contention advanced by learned counsel for the appellants (accused persons) that the accused were merely passive onlookers who joined the mob out of curiosity and they had no intention and did not share the common object of the unlawful assembly," the court said.

"In our considered opinion, the common intention of the appellants was writ large that they wanted to create havoc in different areas of the city and to fill terror in the minds of people. In pursuance of this common object, the accused persons killed the deceased besides injuring other people and causing damage to public as well as private properties," it added.

The court delivered its judgment while maintaining that, "riots, resulting in serious injuries or even death, are of frequent occurrence in this state and cases relating to such riots require very careful handling."

"There is, moreover, great danger of innocent persons being implicated along with the guilty, owing to the tendency of the parties, in such cases, to try to implicate falsely, as many of their enemies, as they can," the court maintained.
New Delhi: Security forces conducting operations in Left Wing Extremism (LWE) affected states have been directed to be extra vigilant in view of enhanced IED attacks and an all-time high recovery of over 5,000 kg of the deadly bombs in these areas.

With back-to-back incidents of security forces personnel and civilians being targeted by using these bombs in the affected states in the recent past, Central security agencies and the operations command of the CRPF have ordered a "strict observance" of operating procedures, usage of sniffer dogs, absolute discard of vehicles and effective gathering of intelligence every time a patrol goes out or an operation is executed.

A report prepared by these agencies states that as many as 1,702 Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) weighing about 5,908 kgs have been recovered from the LWE-affected states last year.

The report, accessed by PTI, states that during 2014, only 523 IEDs were recovered and they weighed about half of what was recovered in 2015.

What has worried the security establishment is the fact that fatal injuries and casualties have occurred to the troops of Central forces like the Central Reserve Police Force, Border Security Force and those from state police units.

"Gun battles are reducing between security forces and Naxals. It has been analysed that Maoist cadres are low on weapons and obviously no match with the security forces when it comes to fire power. Hence, IED attacks of the deadly variety are increasing," a senior official working in the anti-Naxal operations domain said.

While 19 troops lost their lives in the line of duty due to IED blasts and 67 got injured (with six amputations) in 2014, the next year saw three personnel getting killed and 47 injured (three personnel had to undergo amputation).

"Maoists have elevated IED warfare on the security forces using a cocktail of command wire IEDs to victim operated IEDs to radio controlled ones. They are capable of launching rocket attacks on camps of security forces, blowing mine proof vehicles apart and creating a minefield for targeting a foot patrol. So, wherever the forces are in conflict zones they can be targeted," the report said.

The official added, "Now, in the first about four months of this year, we are witnessing a spurt in IED related casualties and injuries again. While nine personnel lost their lives, 13 have been injured and two had to undergo amputation during this time period. About 250 such improvised bombs have been recovered this year."

The last year, the data said, also witnessed the recovery of the highest number of detonatorsat 20,871used to trigger these IEDs. In 2014, the numbers were a mere 6,643.

"An advisory has been issued again to the forces keeping in mind the spurt in these incidents. Every week, such incidents are happening with the maximum being reported from Bastar area of Chhattisgarh. Not only personnel of the security forces, civilians have also become a target of these deadly kill devices," the official said.

The CRPF, mainstay for anti-Naxal operations in the country, has recently admitted that it has witnessed a smart technique of planting these IEDs deep inside 'pucca' roads with Maoists creating 'fox holes and tunnels' to plant these bombs.

One such technique of planting IEDs claimed the lives of seven of its men who were travelling in an un-marked vehicle in order to transport a cooler for a force dog in Chhattisgarh.

In 2015, a total of 41 such incidents of IED explosions took place which was the highest in the last five years, the data said.

In order to buttress the threat level of IEDs, the advisory specifically talks about two incidents where a seven-year-old girl and a woman were killed in Chhattisgarh's Sukma due to IED blasts thereby underlining the fact that even civilians are not safe from the impact of these bombs.

PTI
New Delhi: A college guard and six others, accused of gangraping a minor girl inside the premises of the institution in 2006, were on Tuesday acquitted by a Delhi court.

Additional Sessions Judge Pawan Kumar Matto absolved the seven men of the charges of kidnapping and gangraping the 16-year-old girl in the Hindu College premises under the IPC.

All the seven men were granted bail by the court in 2008 during pendency of the trial. Two of them are in custody in some other case.

According to the prosecution, the accused had allegedly kidnapped the girl while she was going to purchase medicines in a North Delhi colony on the evening of 1 May, 2006.

It said that three of the accused had allegedly took her to a room in a building in Sabzi Mandi area where another co-accused joined them and forced her to take sedative-laced cold drink, before raping her.

The girl was later taken to the Delhi University's Hindu College lawns where other co-accused, including the college security guard, joined them and again raped her, the prosecution had alleged. The accused were arrested following a hue and cry in the media.

Advocates Amit Kumar and R K Mishra, appearing for all the accused, had argued before the court that there was no evidence on record which could connect the accused person with the crime.

They also contended that there were discrepancies and contradictions in the testimonies of the witnesses.

The girl had claimed to be 16-years old at the time of the incident while the doctors had opined her age to be between 18 to 20 years, they had said.
Haridwar: Shankaracharya of Dwarka Peeth Swaroopanand Saraswati on Tuesday waded into yet another controversy with comments that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj's choice of clothes during her Iran visit delivered a "blow" to India's prestige.

Swaroopanand said that Swaraj chose to wear outfits that catered to Iranian sensibilities but neglected India's tradition.

"Swaraj wore outfits in Iran which followed the Iranian tradition and went against our own traditions. She thus delivered a blow to India's prestige abroad," he said.

He compared Swaraj with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who always wore clothes that reflected her "Indianness" during foreign visits.

"Unlike her, Indira Gandhi on her foreign visits took great care to ensure that her Indianness reflects in her clothes and conduct," the Shankaracharya said.

Known to court controversies, Swami had recently said that entry of women into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra would lead to increase in crimes like rape against them.
United Nations: India has regretted the "downward trend in the peace process" for the Middle East but refrained from direct criticism of either Israel or the Palestinians for the escalation of tensions in the region.

India's Deputy Permanent Representative at the UN Tanmaya Lal told the Security Council on Monday that attempts to revive the Palestinian-Israeli talks have failed and, "instead, we saw an unfortunate escalation in Gaza. Unilateral actions by the parties, unfortunately, are moving them further apart".

He had participated in a Security Council debate on the situation in the Middle East at which Israel faced a barrage of criticism from several nations, including long-time allies, over Israelis building settlements in the Palestinian territories and their retaliation for attacks by Palestinians.

In a continuing reflection of the closer ties developing between India and Israel, Lal refrained from direct criticism of Israel or even mentioning it except in one sentence about a Palestine state existing side-by-side with it. He, however, dealt an implied criticism of both sides by referring only to "the unilateral actions by the parties".

At the same time, he spoke of "our continued commitment with the Palestinian cause and our friendship with the Palestinian people remain an integral part of India's foreign policy" and reiterated India's support for a two-state solution with "a sovereign, independent, viable and united state of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, living within secure and recognised borders, side by side at peace with Israel".

On Yemen, Lal said India was "encouraged by the planned peace talks and hopes that these will commence soon and lead to positive outcomes".

India contributed $4 million in assistance for Syrian refugees and participated in the February meeting in London on Syria where it committed to bilateral humanitarian assistance to Syria, he said.

"We hope that the intra-Syrian talks under UN auspices will ensure a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political transition, bringing an end to the violence in Syria and contribute to stabilising the country and the region," he added.

Earlier, leading off the criticism of Israel, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: "The creation of new facts on the ground through demolitions and settlement-building raises questions about whether Israel's ultimate goal is in fact to drive Palestinians out of certain parts of the West Bank, thereby undermining any prospect of transition to a viable Palestinian State."

Ban also criticised the Palestinians for the "continued failure of intra-Palestinian discussions to achieve genuine unity on the basis of non-violence, democracy and the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) principles".

He said he was concerned by the discovery of tunnels going from Gaza into Israel and called upon the Palestinians to stop building attack tunnels and firing rockets into Israel.
Amritsar: The body of Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh, who died under suspicious circumstances in a Lahore jail last week, arrived in India on Tuesday. His family members alleged that his body bore injury marks and foul play led to his death, but doctors who conducted an autopsy denied this.

Alleging foul play in his death, Kirpal's family members said the body bore injury and blood marks.

Contrary to the claims, the medical board which conducted the post-mortem examination here after his body was brought back to India on Tuesday, said there were no external or internal injury marks on the body.

Ashok Sharma, head of the three-member medical board, however, told the media after the post-mortem examination that the cause of death has not been established yet.

The doctor said some organs from his body were missing, as an autopsy has already been done (in Pakistan).

"In the post-mortem examination, it was found that there was no external or internal injury on the body. Post-mortem of this body has already been done (in Pakistan) because stitches were present on the body and the head.

"When we opened the body, we found that some of the organs were missing because when post-mortem is done, some organs are taken to test to find out whether there is any disease or not," Sharma said.

"... rest of the organs which were present, we took out portions of those organs and we sent them for testing (to know) about diseases as well as poisoning. I can say with 100 percent accuracy that the wound marks which are inflicted during life, they cannot be removed. The cause of death has not been established yet," the doctor added.

After being handed over to the Border Security Force at the Attari-Wagah joint check post, Kirpal's body was immediately taken for post-mortem examination in Amritsar after which it was taken to Gurdaspur district for cremation in his native village.

His family members alleged that he was murdered either by fellow prisoners or prison officials in Pakistan.

Close relatives and residents from Kirpal Singh's village were present at Attari, 30 km from here, when the body was brought back to India.

The body, in a coffin, was carried by porters on the Indian side even as family members showered flowers on the coffin.

Close family members were allowed to see the body to identify Kirpal Singh's mortal remains.

Pakistani authorities have attributed his death to heart attack, but his family has alleged he was murdered in prison.

"He has been murdered by the Pakistanis under a conspiracy. He was the sole witness to the murder of Sarabjit Singh in the Lahore prison. We want a thorough inquiry and post-mortem to know the truth of his death," Kirpal's nephew told the media outside the hospital mortuary.

Kirpal Singh, the family has maintained, had inadvertently crossed into Pakistan and was arrested and charged with spying by Pakistani authorities.

His family had met union home minister Rajnath Singh and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in New Delhi last week to seek immediate repatriation of his body to India.

The Punjab government has offered to extend all help and relief to Kirpal's family on the same lines as given to another Indian prisoner, Sarabjit Singh, who was murdered in the same prison in Lahore in April 2013.

Kirpal Singh, a former serviceman, was lodged in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat prison since 1992. He died on April 11.

Pakistani authorities had labelled him a spy and got him convicted for terror attacks inside Pakistan. He was initially sentenced to death which was later converted to 20 years' imprisonment.
Mumbai: The Maharashtra government on Tuesday banned digging of borewell below 200 feet in view of the acute water crisis in the state.

Water Supply and Sanitation Minister Babanrao Lonikar said here on Tuesday that any violation will invite action under the 'Maharashtra Groundwater Development and Management Act' where violators may face fine or even imprisonment.

"The Maharashtra Groundwater Development and Management Act has to be implemented strictly due to the severe drought conditions prevalent and the depleting water stock. We have spoken to all senior officials and decided to ban the digging of borewells below 200 feet," Lonikar told reporters here.

He said that with the amount of water being drawn out from the ground, it's imperative to control the digging of borewells. It will eventually help in averting drought-related problems, he said.

"While the Act will be implemented strictly, we require participation of the people. Everyone needs to come forward and help us save ground water," he said. Meanwhile, Lonikar said 4,356 tankers are currently being supplied by the state government, out of which, 52 are for Konkan, 831 for Nashik, 303 for Pune, 3,032 for Aurangabad, 131 for Amravati and 7 tankers for Nagpur divisions.

"The government has sanctioned Rs 750 crore for water distribution, out of which Rs 500 crore has already been provided to district collectors. This money will be used for 17 different works like providing water tankers, changing of old pipelines, changing of burnt pumps, fixing of leakages in water tanks etc," Lonikar said.
A series on Marathwadas battle with three consecutive years of drought is incomplete without understanding the impact of climate change. The rise in the countrys annual temperature by 0.7 C and erratic climatic patterns are sure to affect the regions agriculture which is primarily rainfed with 12 per cent area under irrigation.

Firstpost spoke to farmers in Nanded and Parbhani districts and almost all have either blamed unseasonal rains or dry spells for their failed produce. These are, however, only two of the several causes of crop failure. The repercussions of climate change have set off a domino effect.

Rise in the number of farmer suicides, inability of a farmer to repay bank loans; no availability of water in dams; no fodder for cattle; no capital to start allied businesses; suffering poultry; unemployment and migrations  are some of the grave issues faced by the farmers in the region.

Babu Patil, a marginal farmer from Nandeds Babulgaon village, has a 750-feet borewell that dried up this February. In his four-acre land, Patil had sown jowar in two and cotton in the rest. Jowar fell prey to unseasonal rains and cotton to water scarcity and pests. With no water, soaring summer temperature is only adding to his misery.

Now, there is nothing I can do except wait for the monsoon now. Last year, the cotton that I had sown got damaged because there was not enough water for irrigation. My borewell has gone dry. The temperature during the day stops us from entering the fields and then pests ruin our standing crops too. I am running out of money to buy fodder and water for my cattle and have a loan of Rs 5 lakh to repay. I am just looking at ways to save my sanity, said a distraught 49-year-old Patil.

Impact of climate change on Marathwada

Agricultural scientists observe that for the past two years, extreme weather events like hailstorms, heat wave, frost, unseasonal and erratic rains have played havoc with agriculture in Maharashtra.

According to B Venkateswarulu, vice-chancellor of Vasantrao Naik Marathwada Krishi Vidyapeeth (VNMKV) in Parbhani, Hailstorms, which are common in March, generally occur in isolated places for a couple of days. However, in the last two years, hailstorms have occurred in several parts of the state, on larger areas and for longer duration. Such impacts are likely to compound the problems of the agriculture sector, which is already struggling with severe water crisis.

Though there has been consistency in total rainfall in the country, the distribution and the area covered have become erratic, thereby adversely affecting farmers produce, he said. For example: Kharif crops rice, maize, jowar, bajra, cereals, pulses, soyabean, groundnut, cotton  known as monsoon crops, are affected a lot by fluctuations in rainfall, while Rabi crops  wheat, barley, oats, chickpea/gram, linseed, mustard  known as winter crops, are impacted more by changes in temperature.

According to agricultural scientists, the heat wave that India witnessed in 2013 had reduced four million tonnes of wheat production. Rise in one degree temperature during the flowering stage in that year caused a huge loss to the farmers in Marathwada. In fact, the severe drought has been compared to the devastating one which occurred in 1972. The following chart shows the trajectory of the rainfall pattern Marathwada witnessed since 1972.

Horticulture is another area that has been badly affected. A report by India Spend illustrates how pomegranate-farming, which accounts for 80 per cent of the states agricultural production, took a hit this year because of sudden spells of unseasonal rains and hailstorms in districts like Solapur, Nashik, Sangli, Satara, Pune and Ahmednagar, also known as the pomegranate belt.

The sudden rise in temperature has also increased the population of pests which thrive and breed in warmer climatic conditions, ultimately ruining the standing produce.

Shailesh Vaidya had cultivated cotton on three of his seven-acre land. White flies completely destroyed the produce. He is slightly better off than most of the other farmers in Nanded and also runs a general store in the main city. Although, I had no water issues as my 300-feet borewell was sufficiently supplying water to the field, my cotton crop was completely ruined, he said.

Moreover, allied sectors like livestock, poultry and dairy,which usually bring some revenue to the farmer, in case of crop failure, are in a sorry state. In districts like Parbhani and Nanded, there are either few or no cattle camps. Small farmers, who cant afford to buy fodder and water for their cattle, either sell them or abandon them if the cattle doesnt fetch them adequate price.

Professor Gokul Gholap, head of Dairy Science of Dnyandevo Mohekar College in Kalamb taluka of Osmanabad district, also a well-to-do farmer, said: There has been no fodder for cattle for over a year now. Hailstorms and unseasonal showers are to be blamed as they ruin the generation of green or dry fodder. There is no drinking water for humans, how will we provide water for our cattle? Also, with inadequate camps to supply water and fodder, cattle perish due to the rise in temperature and misery caused by drought.

Keshavrao Vyavhare of Loha taluka in Nanded district is one such dairy farmer who shut his shop in despair. Unseasonal showers in November damaged my crops. How can you expect to feed your cattle if there is no water available? We have to buy drinking water. Temperature is soaring; rivers and borewells are running dry; cattle are dying.There is hardly any assistance from the government at the grassroots. And it takes years to avail benefits of state-run schemes. Is there any other option left than giving up business? asked the disgruntled 58-year-old farmer.

Head of VNMKVs meteorology department, Professor Pralhad Jaybhaye, attributes these instances to conditional instability. According to him, such instabilities are commonly observed every year, but the state should be equipped to handle them by installing adequate automated weather stations, especially in agricultural universities. There should be enough automated weather stations and a committee should be set up to help determine and monitor the loss caused by the hailstorms. In this way, we will be able to predict such calamities so that the farmer can be alerted well in advance to save his produce, he said.

What is the state government doing?

Past measures reveals that a Climate Action Programme, launched in May 2014 with a budget allocation of Rs 290 crore, includes National Action Plan on Climate Change proposed by the then government in 2008 and state action plans in order to focus on the impacts of the climate change in drought-prone areas of the nation.

Capacity building and setting up of Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Climate Change Studies, with an outlay of Rs 25 crore, was also proposed with an objective to support scientific and analytical studies relating to climate change policy and implementing strategies.

Elaborating on the climate action plan, Malini Shankar, principal secretary of environment department of Maharashtra Pollution Control Board, said: Three parameters have been taken into consideration while preparing the action plan  weather conditions which include intensity and quantum of rainfall, increase in temperature; economic factors and resources available in the districts and lastly social parameters, including education, unemployment and households below poverty line.

The parameters have been set keeping in mind how dependent rural areas are on agriculture as opposed to the cities, which can survive the climatic shifts given the allied businesses backing the economy of the cities, she said.

Shankar added that the department will look at creating special cells and set aside budget for climate change with adequate focus on the use of solar energy. The action plan is awaiting Cabinets nod.

The phenomenon is mostly a consequence of man-made actions. Policies focusing on water-use pattern should be implemented. Measures implemented to reverse the negative impacts of climate change, however, will not yield results overnight, she said.

Tracking extreme weather

Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), a non-profit organization which has worked on independent watershed projects in Marathwada for the past 23 years, has recently developed a weather-based system called AgroMet. Its a climate change adaptation project which aims at providing a forecast three days in advance, with the help of India Meteorological Department (IMD), to the farmers on erratic rainfall and climatic patterns so that they can save their produce. They also issue advisories on how to protect crops and what irrigation procedures should be followed.

Harish Daware, Marathwadas regional WOTR coordinator, believes that the rainfall has been consistent, but there are drastic variations in the climatic pattern of the region over the past three years. Though the intensity of the normal and unseasonal rainfall has increased, the number of rainy days has slumped. Higher intensity destroys the fertility of the soil and also reduces the possibility of groundwater recharge due to heavy run-off. Prolonged dry spells too are responsible for the huge amount of crop loss a farmer bears, Daware said.

According to WOTR, which has 78 automated weather stations across Jalna and Maharashtra, farmers across Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh suffered around Rs 8,300 crore worth of loss owing to weather changes in 2013, the year when the crops were baked due to the heatwave.

Secondly, fluctuation in temperature is a problem too. It gives rise to evaporation losses. These things used to happen once in every 15 years, but this has now become an annual affair. If farmers are informed beforehand, it could help them tremendously. We are now looking forward to striking a deal with the state government and agricultural universities which will help in forwarding the cause, Daware added.

Effective solution to any problem is often simple, yet hardly implemented. Suggesting an age-old solution to tackle climate change, Vasant Futane, a 65-year-old organic farmer from Amravati, said, One simple and affordable solution to this crisis is to plant more trees, especially drought-tolerant trees, which help in reducing the soaring temperature. If trees are planted in greater volumes, we will be able to sustain ourselves in the face of recurring drought.

According to experts, if measures like watershed management, changing cropping pattern, focus on agro-forestry, tree-farming and allied sectors like poultry and dairy are diligently followed on a larger scale, it will surely help in reversing the negative impacts of climate change, they suggest. It might take years, but its not an impossible feat.

This is the twelfth segment of a 13-part series on Marathwadas drought.

Part 13: Maharashtras sugarcane addiction has a history which precedes the drought in Marathwada.

Read the previous parts of the series here:

Part 1: Region is parched, impoverished and desperate, but it's a crisis of its own making

Part 2: In the midst of severe economic downturn, private water sellers reap profits in Latur

Part 3: Drought has brought the economy down and is forcing farmers to leave the region

Part 4: Water scarcity has created a region where trust has eroded and left the social fabric frayed

Part 5: Maha has the most dams in the country, but the least effective irrigation network

Part 6: A surveyor of suicides tells the story behind the statistics and the lonely struggle of Indian farmers

Part 7: Will outreach help reduce farmer suicides?

Part 8: 'Toothless' laws lead to water exploitation

Part 9: Shirpur, Jal Biradari projects show impact of small local initiatives

Part 10: Why debt-ridden farmers are deemed least creditworthy

Part 11: Crop insurance for farmers not adequate to cover cultivation costs
New Delhi: India may insist on a written commitment for the visit of a NIA team to Pakistan to probe the terror attack in Pathankot airbase following indications that it may not be averse to such a visit.

Official sources said the Home Ministry will ask the External Affairs Ministry to seek a written commitment from Pakistan on the National Investigation Agency team's visit whenever the next bilateral engagement takes place.

Investigators have found that Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar, his brother Abdul Rauf and two other individuals  Kasif Jaan and Shahid Latif  were the main conspirators of the 2 January attack on the strategic airbase and India will insist access to all of them whenever NIA will visit Pakistan.

Sources said so far there have been no indication of any "insider hand" in the Pathankot incident and it was planned and executed by Pakistan-based JeM only, sources said.

Pakistan Prime Minister's Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz on Monday indicated that his country may consider such a request.

On whether NIA team will be allowed to visit Pakistan in connection with Pathankot attack probe, Aziz said, "Once the stage is reached...India makes a request and then we will see".

Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju on Monday said the government was hopeful that a team of NIA will soon visit Pakistan to gather evidence in connection with the Pathankot terror attack.

"We are hopeful that a team of NIA will visit Pakistan soon," he said.

Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit had indicated last fortnight that Indian investigators may not be allowed to visit Pakistan to pursue the probe in connection with the Pathankot attack.

However, India countered it by saying that before the visit of a Pakistani Joint Investigation Team here last month, both sides had agreed that it would be on the basis of reciprocity.
The Srinagar Valley is smoldering. There was the violence at NIT, Srinagar, with media reporting that 2,000 non-Kashmiri students had left NIT, and another 1,000 non-Kashmiri students proceeded on leave. The Centre was forced to rush in CAPF units, with some students alleging that the local police beat up non-Kashmiri students who actually were the very victims of the student violence. The issue has not died down. There were calls to move the NIT out of Srinagar which the CM refused. Now student unrest is being reported in Rajouri as well.

The fires in Handwara are still burning after the violence erupted post allegations that a local minor girl was molested by army soldiers. It is a sad commentary that some Kashmiri radicals will even molest and rape local girls in order to please their masters from Pakistans ISI. The allegation of molestation created unprecedented violence including a mob of frenzied youth attacking an army camp. The army opened fire in self-defence which resulted in the deaths of five youths. The girl, accompanied by her father, was produced before the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Handwara, where she revealed that after school hours on 12 April, she entered a public toilet on way back home but as she came out, she was confronted, assaulted and dragged by two boys and her bag was snatched. One of the boys was in school uniform. Significantly, a video shot right after the alleged Handwara molestation is on the social media, where the girl clearly says that no soldier tried to molest her, and that local boys had already planned to create disturbance and just wanted an excuse for it. The girl from Handwara was exceptionally brave and persisted with the truth, despite threats to her and her family from terrorists and their sympathizers. Otherwise, the situation could have been uglier.

The separatist Hurriyat Conference questioned the credibility of the girls statement before the CJM and raised the issue of the youth killed because of army firing. Yes, innocent lives were lost, but it is not the army which is responsible for killing people in Kashmir. The Pakistans ISI and their Indian proteges (Hurriyat included) behind the violence want the world to focus its attention on Kashmir while the ISI and the Pakistan Army is slaughtering Baloch people into silence and targeting the Shia population of Gilgit-Baltistan (already reduced from 70% to 50%) through demographic invasion, institutionalized killings and military courts steamrolling valid dissent. A former CISF officer, veteran of the 1st CISF Course, wrote on social media, If you are surrounded by 1000 people who want to kill youThey are trying to burn you to death and pelting stones at you and the ones next to you, what will you do? Army men in Handwara were in the same situation. If they hadnt fired, the mob would have lynched them. Is that what you want? If not, please support your Jawans. They did what they did to save the lives of their colleagues. Jai Hind.

Now a blog (not any national daily) has reported that the state government is quietly shifting art treasures (including oil paintings, acrylic paintings, sculptures, artifacts wooden works, modern Art, Basohli paintings and a collection of the works of top artists of the country  collected over 58 years) on display at Kala Kendra, Jammu under pretext of inadequate storage capacity and suitable weather conditions in the Valley. Significantly, the J&K Academy of Art Culture and Languages (JKAACL) is the custodian of these art works. Shifting these 300 paintings, 91 miniatures, 34 artifacts, 80 sculptors and a number of rare photographs has already commenced. The State Minister of State for Culture and Education was not even aware of the shifting having commenced till recently because the move was apparently ordered during the fag end of Governors rule. It is possible that even the Governor not aware of it. Significantly, it is being reported these art works are being shifted to the Academys strong room at Lal Mandi Srinagar, which was flooded with water in September 2014 causing immense damage to historic manuscripts and other art works. It is difficult to decipher whether this is an attempt to destroy old art, akin to what the Taliban and IS did elsewhere. If these art works are on display in Jammu, why cant they remain on display to the public? The authorities can install air-conditioners and add additional accommodation, as required. Is this not better than locking them up in a strong room in Lal Mandi, awaiting the next deluge?

During 2013, the media, quoting the NIA had reported: one, Kashmiri terrorist groups had received US$ 100 million for terror operations in past two years; two, over the past 10 years. some Rs 600 crores were diverted to terrorism in J&K from within India; three, Rs 98 crores were diverted in one single year from the J&K Affectees Fund; four, the J&K Affectees Relief Trust (JAKART) has been facilitating Pakistani infiltration into J&K and; five, goods sent through trucks to POK were intentionally overpriced two-three times and additional money received was being diverted to terrorist operations. Syed Salahuddin, HuM chief has been involved in exploiting JAKART for funneling more than Rs 100 crore in J&K; manipulating funds meant for relief to finance terrorism in the state. The ISI has also been pumping in fake Indian currency, narcotics and drug money into J&K, drug proceeds being significant amount obtained through Taliban links.

With 42 terrorist training camps running full steam in PoK, the main branches of terror financing from Pakistan at Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Muzzafarabad service collection points at Pulwama, Kupwara, Sopore, Budgam, Doda, Baramula and Srinagar. It is unthinkable that with all the illegal funding coming in to finance terror, the politicians of J&K are not getting their pie. For example, how is it that the State Government is not aware of such a large diversion of funds from JAKART? Rackets like overpricing of goods transported by trucks, narcotics and fake Indian currency rackets would obviously have political connections including through the state intelligence. The irony of J&K is that none of the state governments have tried to focus on improving administration leave aside correcting the anti-national narrative, because retaining status quo implies enormous funds from all directions. So, while successful panchayat level elections are lauded, panchayats per se have little powers and hardly any finances. That is why no government in J&K has released data of the massive number of AIDS cases in the Valley courtesy Pakistani infiltrators. That is why, Pakistani and IS flags can be waved without fear. Ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pundits was successfully orchestrated by one political party. A subsequent attempt in Doda was made during the last regime.

Pakistan knows well that no matter what they do, including attempts to masquerade PLA Troops on posts along the LoC, it cannot get them J&K. Radical politicians and rabble rousers in J&K know this too. The more Pakistan implodes; the more ISI will attempt to destabilize India, J&K in particular. Nawaz Sharif being caught in the Panama web is an indication that the Pakistani military is holding all aces. It appears that, aided by China and cajoled by the US, the proxy war levels will be raised by Pakistan. The elder Bhutto had announced we will get the bomb even if we have to eat grass.

The present mantra of the ISI appears to be we will get J&K even if we have to sell our sovereignty to China. Only difference is that Bhutto succeeded in getting the bomb (not that he did not want J&K as well), but ISI can continue to destroy Pakistan until infinity in the vain hope of getting J&K. The Modi government and BJP as a coalition partner in J&K need to work within this paradigm.

The author is a veteran of the Indian Army.
Washington

The huge disparities in money spent on rich and poor students across the country are little known but tremendously damaging, and more must be done to get parents and the public more involved in spending decisions, former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in remarks here Monday.

Speaking at an Edunomics Lab event on school finance at Georgetown University, Duncan also defended the U.S. Department of Educations push to create relatively strong regulations to govern school finance in the Every Student Succeeds Act. He portrayed ESSA as a law that in some situations creates more risk for school accountablity and students, but offers other opportunities as well. And he downplayed his controversial remarks at the end of last year in which he said the departments lawyers would be able to outfox Congress when it comes to ESSA implementation.

In a conversation with Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education Partners, Duncan stressed that school funding gaps between wealthy and non-wealthy schools persist despite federal law, and are quite stark. Two-thirds of students in Title I schools have less money spent on them (per pupil) than their non-Title I counterparts in the same districts, Duncan noted. And a great deal of money in education is spent on things wih little basis in research, he also said.



Those sorts of resource imbalances and mistakes ultimately mean that in places like his hometown of Chicago, where Duncan now works for the Emerson Collective as a managing partner serving disconnected youth, young men in particular are largely left without job or educational prospects and turn to crime. Schools must do a better job to provide those young people jobs and a better path in life, Duncan said: I want to compete with the gangs.



The goal, he said, is to move beyond numbers and help create narratives and stories about why spending decisions matter, and to make the issue less complicated so that parents and others can take action in their local schools. That also means the federal government doesnt have to micromanage school spending, something Duncan stressed he doesnt like. But that demand for financial equity also means, he said, schools have to deliver strong results.

This should be a public dialogue, Duncan said of school finance decisions. I think it makes us smarter. I think it builds trust. I think it makes it more publicly accountable.

But theres another problem besides school budgets that fail to get attention or are hard to understand, Duncan saidand thats the fact that education is not a high priority for voters.

The fact that no one votes on these issues, every politician gets a pass, he said.

Defending the Department and Himself

Duncan made waves on his way out the door as education secretary by saying that his departments attorneys would be able to win a tug-of-war with Congress in terms of its regulatory authority in ESSA. Asked by Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute whether he wanted to apologize for that remark and whether he thought it damaged ESSA negotiations, Duncan responded that he would be happy to apologize.

But he also scorned the idea that politicians were so turned off by his remark that it hurt the climate in Washington for the new law, saying, My one sentence is that important? Are you kidding me?

And the former secretary also said that some members of Congress were not focusing on the right conversations in terms of helping the neediest children: I doubt the motivations of some of them.

In that same vein, Duncan defended the Education Departments push in ESSA regulatory negotiations to include per-student spending levels in Title I schools versus the average in non-Title I schools when measuring compliance with the law. Its within the departments rights, he said, to ensure that federal money ultimately is spent on top of, and is not supplanting, state and local money.

On ESSA in general, the former secretary portrayed the law as containing more good provisions than bad.

There are fewer, maybe, guardrails, in the law. Thats a risk, Duncan said, but also more opportunities for states and districts to innovate, as well as for different constituencies to get involved.

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
Jammu: Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday for a day-long visit.

State Governor NN Vohra, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh and other senior officials of central and state governments received Modi at the airport.

The Prime Minister arrived to address the convocation of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, formally inaugurate a 250-bedded super specialty state-of-the-art hospital and address a public rally.

India will rule the 21st century which is the era of knowledge and with 800 million youths below the age of 35 years, the dream of every young person can become a progress story of this country, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at the convocation ceremony.

He said this is a century of knowledge and whenever there has been an era of knowledge, India has shown the way.

"India will lead the 21st century because the energy required for the 21st century, which is knowledge and that is with India. India has 800 million youth power which is below 35 years. Dream of every youth can become a progress story for the country," Modi said.

The Prime Minister told the students that the question of "what next" will play on their minds but the person who knows what lies ahead won't need to depend on others.

"Recall what your parents did for you. They sacrificed their own happiness for yours. You may have thought of so much in your childhood but it may not have worked out. Forget that and instead, think of what you have achieved," he said.

Modi said this university has been built with the contribution of millions of pilgrims, many of whom came from far away places.

"Let's pledge that we will do something for the poor, because it was the poor pilgrim who contributed to build this university," he said.

"Our nation is scaling new heights of progress and with such a youthful population we can achieve so much. Dream to do something and not to become someone," he said.

Modi said a unique feature of this university is that while other varsities in the country are run by tax payers' money given by parents, this one is being funded by millions of poor people who come to pay obeisance to Vaishno Devi shrine.

Invoking former President A P J Abdul Kalam, the Prime Minister said, "You don't only need facilities but dedication too.

"Kalam, who laid the foundation stone of this university and was known as the Missile Man, at one time used to sell newspapers. Darshan Manjhi of Bihar had no education or facilities but he had a dream and he constructed a road all by himself."

Modi said that if facilities were everything then the people who have all such facilities should have achieved everything in life but that was not the case.

The convocation was attended by Jammu and Kashmir Governor NN Vohra, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and Union and state ministers, among others.

The Prime Minister told the students that 'Deekshant Samaroh' (convocation ceremony) has a history of thousands of years as it has continued since the days of 'Treta Yug' (mythological period of King Rama).

"You must realise your dreams. Our scientists worked to ensure that a probe vehicle reached Mars in less than Rs seven per kilometre," he said.

He asked the students to not get demoralised if their dreams were not always fulfilled.

"Problems come in life but you must strive to move ahead. This university is a mini-India and when you move out of here be the ambassadors of the 'Crown of India' (Jammu and Kashmir)," he said

Desh ke har naujavan ka sapna iss desh ke vikaas ka kaaran ban sakta hai: PM Modi pic.twitter.com/Tv5HQDldrI  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

Universities are funded by taxpayers money but this university is funded by poor:PM Modi at convocation of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

India has always showed the way whenever the human kind has entered in an era of knowledge and this is a century of knowledge: PM Modi  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

I salute all the mothers who motivate their daughters to study: PM Narendra Modi pic.twitter.com/4PhJmPwUzQ  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

Watch the entire video:

With inputs from agencies
Chennai: A day after DMDK chief Vijayakanth announced his candidature from Uloontherpet constituency for the May 16 Assembly polls, PMK on Tuesday changed its nominee for the seat, fielding party spokesperson K Balu.

Party President GK Mani announced the candidature of Balu, an advocate and a regular on TV channel debates, in a statement.

Earlier, R Ramamurthy had been fielded as PMK's nominee, Mani recalled, adding Balu's candidature has been approved by PMK founder S Ramadoss and his son and the party's Chief Ministerial candidate Anbumani.

The constituency is all set to witness a four-cornered showdown between the three Dravidian parties-- AIADMK, DMK, DMDK, and PMK.

Originally allotted to DMK ally MMK, the Muslim party later opted out of contesting from this Assembly segment in Villupuram district, prompting DMK to announce its candidate.

AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa has fielded her party's sitting MLA R Kumaraguru.

Vijayakant had announced on Monday that he will be seeking his fortune from Ulunthoorpet, jumping constituencies for a second time.

He had made his electoral debut from Vriddhachalam in 2006, but had shifted to Rishivandiyam in 2011 from where he won.
Katra: Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti today spoke about "pain in the heart of Kashmir" that needs to be addressed immediately by all so that the youth of the state also flourish and contribute to the growth of the nation.

In her first public rally after taking over as the first woman chief minister of the state early this month, she spoke about the unrest in Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Syria and Libya.

"In Pakistan, the government is fighting against its own people... Sunni kills Shia and vice-versa," she told the rally after inauguration of Shri Vaishno Devi Narayana Superspeciality Hospital here, 32 kilometres from Jammu.

"I am proud to live in a nation where people from different religions live in peace and harmony but there is a pain... There is a pain in heart of Kashmir and we all have to heal it together.

"We need to heal it so that the youth of Kashmir flourish like those in rest of the country," she said at the function which was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Jammu and Kashmir Governor NN Vohra and Union and state ministers among others.

Referring to the recent killings in Handwara town of north Kashmir, she expressed hope that under the leadership of the prime minister, her government will be able to restore peace in the state.

She recalled her conversation with her late father Mufti Mohammed Sayeed and said when talks for alliance between PDP and BJP were going on he had told her, "I have held the hand of a person who has been made the prime minister of the country by crores of people."
Kolkata: Disabled voters are getting special attention at polling booths in the West Bengal Assembly

elections as they don't have to stand in queues and can avail of aids like wheelchairs and braille EVMs.

"We have a policy for them that all those voters who are differently-abled can give their vote on their own. They are being given priority treatment and there is no queue for them. Standing instructions have been issued to all polling officers that there should be no waiting time for them," Amitjyoti Bhattacharya, Deputy Chief Electoral officer, said.

The poll panel has made a list of disabled voters in each polling station for easy identification.

"We flagged them in the electoral rolls. Wherever they were in large numbers the returning officers are ensuring more facilities," he said.

According to officials they are ensuring that each and every polling station has wheelchairs and either permanent or temporary ramps are there to make the place friendly for disabled folk.

In cases where the booth is not on the ground floor, polling officials have been asked to ensure that wheelchair-bound voters are taken to the respective areas.

Even visually challenged voters will not have to depend on others as the EVMs have braille signage on ballot units indicating the serial number of the candidate.

A dummy ballot paper indicating the names and the serial numbers of the contesting candidates is provided to the presiding officers, officials said.

Disability activists, however, allege that initiatives have not been implemented properly at all places.

"We have noticed that full implementation is not being done. In some places, the height at which the EVM is kept is too high for a wheelchair-bound person. So they have to take the help of other people in pressing the button. The secrecy of their vote is not maintained," Debajyoti Roy, secretary of the NGO National Institute of Professionals said.

East Midnapore district administration has taken the lead by providing Booth 'Sahayak' or helpers for all such voters.

They also run a special training programme for visually impaired and hearing impaired persons at sub-division level and another training program for awareness of polling personnel about requirements of differently abled persons.

To ensure higher turnout among the disabled voters, poll campaigns were also designed specifically for them in some districts.
The winners of the Pulitzer Prize 2016 were announced during a YouTube live-stream on Monday. While the Pulitzer for Broadway's breakout hit Hamilton came as a surprise to no one, the Fiction award for Viet Thanh Nguyens The Sympathizer might have surprised some, according to The Guardian.

AP's expose on slavery in Southeast Asia's fishing industry was awarded for public service. The series called Seafood from Slaves, covered by four reporters, documented the harsh treatment of fishermen held captive on a remote island and traced their catch to US supermarkets and restaurants.

Alissa J Rubin of The New York Times was given the Pulitzer in the International Reporting category for her extensive coverage on the abuse and injustice faced by women in Afghanistan, more than 14 years after the US-led invasion to bring down the Taliban. The New York Times also won the award for Breaking News Photography.

The Los Angeles Times' reportage of last year's mass shooting in San Bernardino that left 14 people dead and 24 injured was given the award for Breaking News Reporting. Syed Farook and wife Tashfeen Malik killed 14 people on 2 December, 2015 before dying in a firefight with police.

From The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum, Kathryn Schulz and William Finnegan won the Pulitzer.

After the announcement was made, the noted Television critic thanked the magazine and congratulated the other winners on Twitter.

Hot damn. I won a goddamn Pulitzer. Thank you to this wonderful magazine for letting me mouth off & think out loud.  emily nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) April 18, 2016

The Pulitzer for Hamilton in the Drama category came as a surprise to no one. The Broadway's hip-hop musical is on the American revolution and the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton. According to the Rolling Stone, Hamilton is the ninth musical in the Pulitzer's 100-year history, to win the award.

Congratulations poured in for Lin-Manuel Miranda, the author, composer, lyricist and the star of Hamilton on Twitter.

Elmo's friend @Lin_Manuel won a fancy prize called Pulitzer, but Elmo doesn't know what it means! Congratulations Mr. Lin! Yea baby!  Elmo (@elmo) April 18, 2016

Grateful grateful grateful grateful grateful grateful grateful grateful grateful grateful grateful grateful grateful grateful great full  Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) April 18, 2016

The prize for Non-Fiction was won by Joby Warrick for his book Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS and its assessment of the "flawed rationale" of the Iraq war and the rise of the Islamic State extremist group, the committee said.

On domestic American news, outlets in Florida scooped three Pulitzer Prizes. The Tampa Bay Times and Sarasota Herald Tribune won for their investigation into violence and neglect in Florida mental hospitals.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen got the Pulitzer for Fiction. Thanh Nguyen's debut novel is on the Vietnam War and its aftermath. In its review, The Guardian said: "The Sympathizer can be read as a spy novel, a war novel, an immigrant novel, a novel of ideas, a political novel, a campus novel, a novel about the movies, and a novel, yes, about other novels."

After his win, Thanh Nguyen released a statement on Twitter saying "I sat around shocked, stunned, fielding phone calls from my publicist and doing news interviews."

My Pulitzer is a collective win for all who believe in social justice in the (literary) world. Full thoughts here. https://t.co/LM7SjvKDAi  viet thanh nguyen (@viet_t_nguyen) April 19, 2016

Click here to see the full list of winners.
Kabul: A powerful Taliban suicide bombing tore through central Kabul Tuesday, triggering a heavy firefight in a densely packed neighbourhood, a week after the Taliban announced the start of their annual spring offensive.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack near the Afghan intelligence agency office, which sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing in the sky and rattled windows several miles away.

It was not immediately known if there were any casualties from the assault, which marks the first major Taliban attack in Kabul since the insurgents launched this year's fighting season.

"The first blast was carried out by a suicide bomber in a car and possibly one or two bombers are still resisting," interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told AFP.

"The scene of the attack has been completely cordoned off by Afghan security forces."

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed their fighters had managed to enter the office of the National Directorate of Security, the main Afghan spy agency.

Afghan officials did not confirm that claim but intense gun battles could be heard near the NDS compound. The Taliban are generally known to exaggerate battlefield claims.

"Today's terrorist attack near Puli Mahmood Khan area of Kabul city demonstrates the clear defeat of the enemy in the face-to-face fight against Afghan security forces," the Afghan presidential palace said in a statement on Twitter.

The Afghan Taliban last Tuesday announced the start of their "spring offensive" even as the government in Kabul seeks to bring the insurgents back to the negotiating table to end their drawn-out conflict.

The Taliban warned they would "employ large-scale attacks on enemy positions across the country" during the offensive dubbed Operation Omari in honour of the movement's late founder Mullah Omar, whose death was announced last year.

The insurgents began the fighting season last week by targeting the northern city of Kunduz, which they briefly captured last year in a stunning setback for Afghan forces.

But officials said Afghan security forces drove Taliban fighters back from the city on Friday.

The annual spring offensive normally marks the start of the "fighting season", though this winter the lull was shorter and they continued to battle government forces albeit with less intensity.

The Taliban's resurgence has raised serious questions about Afghan forces' capacity to hold their own, with an estimated 5,500 troops killed last year, the worst ever toll.

Peace talks which began last summer were abruptly halted after it was revealed that Taliban leader Mullah Omar had been dead for two years.

A four-country group comprising Afghanistan, the United States, China and Pakistan has been holding meetings since January aimed at jump-starting negotiations, though their efforts have so far been in vain.
WASHINGTON Dancing, singing, chanting and cheering, throngs of supporters of President Barack Obama's plan to protect millions of people in the country illegally from deportation and provide them work permits rallied on Monday outside the U.S. Supreme Court.

More than a thousand demonstrators from around the country flooded the sidewalks and streets around the white marble courthouse as the justices heard arguments on whether to reinstate Obama's executive action, blocked by lower courts.

They greatly outnumbered conservative opponents of Obama's action. Due to the crowds, police closed a section of the street separating the courthouse from the Capitol building to traffic.

Chicagoan Omar Martinez, 24, said he landed a congressional internship because of an Obama program that let some immigrants who entered the country illegally before age 16 receive a renewable, two-year work permit and exemption from deportation.

"It's not just a Latino issue," Martinez said. "It's a multicultural, multinational issue. You have people who are contributing to the economy, contributing to tax funds but can't fully enjoy what it means to be a U.S. citizen."

Demonstrators brought their young children to the rally and a mariachi band played. Members of the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center danced in the street with a small band of drummers. A gospel choir from Howard University, a historically black college, sang several hymns including civil rights anthem "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around."

Speakers at the conservative Tea Party Patriots' rally could barely be heard over boos, screams and chants of "stop the hate" from Obama supporters.

Iowa Republican congressman Steve King shouted back: "Are you an example of the America we can expect if this court finds that the president can write law and violate the Constitution at will? If so, we're in for a rough ride in the future."

Iowan Greg Cummings, 51, said his opposition to Obama's action has "nothing to do with race." He said his wife emigrated from Honduras when she was 11 and is now a high school English teacher.

"It's a national sovereignty thing," Cummings said. "A country without borders ceases to be a country. The United States can't be an open society to all the Earth."

Zaira Garcia, 23, a recent University of Texas graduate, recalled how her Mexican father's employers would sometimes withhold pay because they knew he was not in the country legally.

"It's inhumane, the way people who are undocumented can be taken advantage of," Garcia said. "It made us realise and appreciate the sacrifice my parents made to come here. A lot of people think coming to the U.S. is an easy choice, but the reality is hard work and lots of humiliation because of lack of status."

(Reporting by Clarece Polke; Editing by Will Dunham)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Washington: A large number of Indian-Americans and people from the South Asian community joined a massive rally in front of the US Supreme Court in support of Obama Administration's plans to defer deportation of four million illegal immigrants whose children are US citizens.

The Supreme Court, which is hearing the case, is now split on the Obama Administrations plans to defer deportation called Deferred Actions for Parents of Americans (DAPA).

It has been challenged by some 26 States.

During the hearing on Monday, four conservatives judges appeared to be critical of DAPA and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), while another liberal justice suggested that the case had no business being before the courts at all.

Supporters of DAPA, including a large number of Indian Americans held a rally outside Supreme Court calling for these programs to move forward swiftly and keep families together.

"This is a misguided and unnecessary challenge to eminently common-sense immigration programs that allow some aspiring Americans to remain with their families, continue contributing to the American economy, and pursue their dreams," the South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) said in a statement.

"An estimated 5.2 million immigrants, including at least 200,000 undocumented Indian-Americans and countless more South Asians, are eligible for DAPA and expanded DACA announced under President Obama's executive action on immigration in 2014," SAALT said.

"DAPA and the expanded DACA programs are the latest in the long struggle for immigrant rights in this country that should have ended with comprehensive immigration reform legislation in Congress, which the Senate passed with bipartisan support in 2013," said Suman Raghunathan, executive director of SAALT.

"While Congress has been unable to advance a bill, we ope the Supreme Court will uphold the constitutionality of these programs as a first step toward protecting millions from deportation, including thousands of undocumented South Asians. This occurs as South Asians are the fastest growing demographic in the country, totaling nearly 4.3 million strong as of 2013," Raghunathan said.

Democratic presidential front Hillary Clinton in a statement said the Supreme Court would upheld the decision of the Obama Administration in this regard.

"This case only underscores how crucial it is that our country finally enacts comprehensive immigration reform. I will propose legislation to do that within my first 100 days. We need to stand up, fight for families, fix our broken immigration system, create a reliable path to citizenship and end the fear that haunts too many lives and communities," Clinton said.

Obama acted within his legal and constitutional authority in halting the deportation of parents and children, she said.

"I hope the Court will uphold his actions. If elected president, I will do everything I can to protect the President's executive actions and go further to bring more people relief and keep families together," Clinton said.

To qualify for deferred action, individuals must have continuously resided in the US since 1 January, 2010, register with the government and pass a criminal background check.

"Instead of tearing apart families through broad enforcement actions, the President is letting law enforcement officials focus their attention on those who pose the greatest threats to public safety," said American Immigration Council in a statement.

The White House said it would wait for the verdict from the Supreme Court.

"At this point we're going to wait and see what the Supreme Court decides. Obviously the US government and the Obama administration has been deeply engaged in that process, and we have made strong arguments before the courts about the wisdom of this approach," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.

"We've also made strong arguments about how the approach that President Obama has pursued to use this executive authority to bring greater accountability to our immigration system is consistent with the way that President Reagan and President George HW. Bush used their executive authority," Earnest said.

"Both of those Presidents used their executive authority to offer relief to undocumented immigrants, and offered them the opportunity to get a job in the US. That was relief that was granted to about 40 per cent of the undocumented population in the US at the time," Earnest said, adding that Obama has used the same authority to do exactly the same kind of thing.

"That's why we continue to be confident in the persuasiveness of the arguments that we have made before the courts. But at this point, it's unclear exactly what impact this will have on the policy process and in our ability to implement this policy decision that the President and his team have made here," he said.

"So once we have greater clarity from the Supreme Court, we'll be able to offer clearer guidance to those who are eager to get that relief," he added.
Teaching Now blog.

Using an iPad for portions of mathematics lessons may not make much of a difference in student performance, at least initially, but it can help teachers in managing and differentiating instruction, according to a recent study.

To investigate the impact of technology on teaching and learning, Oregon State University-Cascades researcher and instructor Rachael Schuetz conducted the experiment last year in a 2nd grade classroom at William E. Miller Elementary in Bend, Ore. Schuetz presented her findings on last week in a lecture at her university, according to the Bulleton, an Oregon-based news service.

For the study, 85 elementary students were randomly placed in two groupswith the first group using the app IXL on iPads to practice math, and the second using paper worksheets. According to The Bulletin, this was done daily for 25 minutes, and after four weeks, the groups switched.

The students were asked to rate their interest in math after being tested at the beginning, middle, and end of the eight-week experiment.

After comparing the students achievement and engagement in math, and incorporating feedback from teacher focus groups, the study found that on average, student achievement and engagement were about the same in the two groups.

Teachers, however, reported significantly different experiences from the two methods. From the Bulletin piece:

The iPad app read problem instructions to students and told them immediately if they got a problem right or wrong. If they got it wrong, the app could give them a hint for next time. Students could also work at their own pace and typically did twice as many problems in the 25 minutes. For students with the paper worksheets, however, teachers sometimes had to read them instructions (remember, these students are also still learning to read) and help them find the answer. If students got a problem wrong and the teacher didn't notice, the students would just keep goingsometimes they'd do all the problems wrong and the teacher wouldn't find out until she went to grade the worksheet, Schuetz said.

Schuetz said that teachers found it easier to differentiate instruction with the iPad app, and noted that a longer study with more students may yield different results on students achievement and engagement levels.

Based on the findings, Schuetz suggested that teachers consider giving math homework on an iPad for support out of the classroom, but also warned that teachers should be critical consumers when recommending devices to students.

Technology is in our schools, she reportedly said. Its here to staywe just need to make the right decisions about how to use it.

See also:
NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - An international court should be set up to punish those responsible for child labour and other forms of abuse against children, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the United Nations on Monday.

A court to investigate cases of child labour, child slavery and child marriage is urgently needed amid the current refugee crisis, Brown said at a media briefing ahead of a meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The proposed children's court was among several recommendations Brown brought to the U.N. as head of the Global Citizenship Commission, a group of political leaders and academics focussed on human rights.

Such a court would have the power to oversee cases requested by children and issue legally binding rulings, the group said in a lengthy report.

"We need, in a sense, a civil rights struggle by and on behalf of children because their rights have been neglected in the international community," said Brown.

Children account for half of the world's displaced people, he said.

Some 168 million children - one in ten globally - can be classified as child labourers, according to the International Labour Organization.

The children's court would be similar to the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague in the Netherlands, that hears cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Last week, the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) called for child refugees in Europe to be better protected from traffickers.

"When so many children are displaced, the first priority has to be to ensure that children's rights are protected," Brown said.

A million migrants, many fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations in conflict in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, have poured into Europe through Greece since last year.

The Global Citizenship Commission includes such members as Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei and Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum.

The group also recommended revisions to the veto process among nations that are permanent U.N. Security Council members and reform of the way U.N. refugee aid is funded.

(Reporting by Sebastien Malo, Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
A powerful Taliban truck bombing followed by a fierce firefight left at least seven people dead and 327 others wounded Tuesday, officials said, a week after the insurgents launched their annual spring offensive.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack near government offices, which sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing in the sky and rattled windows several kilometres (miles) away.

The brazen assault in a densely packed neighbourhood marks the first major Taliban attack in the Afghan capital since the insurgents announced the start of this year's fighting season.

"The latest toll shows at least seven people have been killed and 327 others wounded," health ministry spokesman Mohammad Ismail Kawoosi told AFP.

"Most of those wounded are civilians and many are in a serious condition."

Security officials said the loud explosion was triggered by a truck bomb, expressing concerns that other bombers may still be on the loose.

The Afghan interior ministry denounced the attack as a "war crime", pledging to track down the perpetrators.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed their fighters had managed to enter the offices of the National Directorate of Security, the main spy agency.

Afghan officials dismissed those claims, saying that the target of the attack was a government office responsible for providing security to government VIPs.

Pitched gun battles were ongoing near the building, which was cordoned off by security officials as ambulances were seen rushing to the scene.

The Taliban are generally known to exaggerate battlefield claims.

"(We) condemn in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Puli Mahmood Khan neighbourhood of Kabul, as a result of which many of our countrymen were martyred and wounded," President Ashraf Ghani said in a statement.

"Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism."

'Spring offensive'

The Taliban on Tuesday last week announced the start of their "spring offensive" even as the government in Kabul seeks to bring them back to the negotiating table to end the drawn-out conflict.

The Taliban warned they would "employ large-scale attacks on enemy positions across the country" during the offensive dubbed Operation Omari in honour of the movement's late founder Mullah Omar, whose death was announced last year.

The insurgents began the fighting season last week by targeting the northern city of Kunduz, which they briefly captured last year in a stunning setback for Afghan forces.

But officials said Afghan security forces drove Taliban fighters back from the city on Friday.

The annual spring offensive normally marks the start of the "fighting season", though this past winter the lull was shorter and rebels continued to battle government forces, albeit with less intensity.

The Taliban's resurgence has raised serious questions about Afghan forces' capacity to hold their own. An estimated 5,500 troops were killed last year, the worst-ever toll.

Peace talks which began last summer were abruptly halted after it was revealed that Taliban leader Mullah Omar had been dead for two years, a disclosure which sparked infighting in the insurgents' ranks.

A four-country group comprising Afghanistan, the United States, China and Pakistan has been holding meetings since January aimed at jump-starting negotiations, though their efforts have so far been in vain.
Two newspaper series that focused on race and education on Monday won Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious award in print journalism.

The Tampa Bay Times won the Pulitzer for local reporting for its Failure Factories  series, about the failures of the Pinellas County, Fla., school system to educate its African-American children. The series has swept a number of other journalism prizes recently.

The Pulitzer for commentary went to Farah Stockman of The Boston Globe, for what the prize committee said were extensively reported columns that probe the legacy of busing in Boston and its effect on education in the city with a clear eye on ongoing racial contradictions.

Theres something ... notable about our conversations on race today: the disconnect between where we are in 2015 and where we thought wed be, Stockman wrote in her first column of the Boston After Busing  series last August. The half-finished project of racial equality in the United States leaves us with a parade of endless contradictions.

Stockman, an East Lansing, Mich., native who attended Harvard University, was an editorial writer for the Globe and now is a reporter for The New York Times. She wrote in a later column in the Globe series that Today, the concept of court-ordered busing to desegregate schools has few champions. Conservatives look back on busing in Boston as an outrageous overreach of government powers. Liberals look back on it as a policy that didnt go far enough. It didnt last long enough. It didnt reach deep enough into the wealthy suburbs.

Its a shame that busing has gone out of style at the very moment weve gotten a better understanding of why it failedand where it worked, she wrote.

Stockmans comprehensive, nuanced examination of busing mapped out not only the contours of the past but also the long-tailed impact on the Boston and New England of 2015, the Globe wrote in nominating her series for the Pulitzers , which are administered by Columbia University.

Local Reporting Award

The Tampa Bay Times series by Cara Fitzpatrick, Lisa Gartner, and Michael LaForgia examined the 104,000-student Pinellas County district after it abandoned racial desegregation efforts in 2007.

The series was named a finalist in the Pulitzers top category, Public Service, but the Pulitzer Board moved it to the local reporting category and awarded it the top prize there. (Its not uncommon for the Pulitzer board to make such moves after separate panels of judges nominate finalists in each category.)

For years, the people in charge of Pinellas County schools blamed abysmal black academic performance on poverty, the Tampa Bay Times said in nominating the series. They excused it as the natural state of things, saying it was no different than the challenges faced by any other school system across the nation.

Nothing could be further from the truth, the nomination letter continued. The Tampa Bay Times investigation found that in just the past seven years, school leadersthrough their actions, their neglect and a blind-eye to the consequences of bothcreated five of the worst schools in Florida. Compared with black students in urban and rural communities poorer and socially rougher, the kids in well-to-do Pinellas fared badly, the Times found.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Educations office for civil rights opened an investigation into whether the school district systematically discriminates against black children.

We are still the voice that challenges, LaForgia, 32, told his colleagues in a newsroom celebration Monday, the Times reported. We have to come in to work and be that voice.
ACT Inc. has added a new twist to its test-preparation service: live teaching, streamed online.

The Iowa City-based testmaker announced Monday that it has teamed up with Kaplan Test Prep to offer ACT Kaplan Online Prep Live. Kaplan already offers test-prep services that feature live, online teaching , but its partnership with ACT marks the first time one of the big college-entrance-exam testmakers will offer such a service.

ACT Kaplan Online Prep Live will be available in the fall, and will cost less than $200, but ACT didnt disclose the exact fee. Low-income students who obtain a fee waiver for the ACT college-entrance exam will be able to use the new online prep service at no cost, ACT said.

ACT already offers an online test-prep service , which costs $39.95 per student for a one-year subscription. (Theres a different pricing structure for school and district contracts.) The company will include that service for free to those who buy the new ACT Kaplan Online Prep Live, according to company spokesman Ed Colby.

The new offering blends ACTs test questions and study resources with Kaplans online delivery and instructional staff. Students who use it will have access to courses taught by teachers in real time, and to prerecorded sessions they can use whenever they wish. Theyll also be able to use online discussion boards that can connect with a social community of teachers and peers for answers and help outside of classroom hours, ACT said. There will also be one-time teaching events designed around specific questions. The first one, later this month, focuses on helping students understand their ACT scores.

ACTs new service is the latest move in an ongoing, heated competition with the College Board. Both have been ramping up test-prep services, with a particular eye to helping low-income students who cant pay for tutoring the way their wealthier peers can. The College Board partnered with Khan Academy to provide online test prep , and the service is personalized and interactive, but doesnt include a live teaching element, according to College board spokesman Zach Goldberg. Adding that piece is something we continue to discuss with our members and partners, he said.
Washington

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday appeared divided on whether Texas could challenge the Obama administrations program offering relief from deportation and work permits to some 4 million unauthorized immigrant parents of U.S. citizen children.

The question of whether Texas and 25 other states have legal standing to challenge the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program dominated the 90 minutes of intense arguments in United States v. Texas (Case No 15-674).

The DAPA program and an expansion of an earlier program aimed at young people hold an array of implications for the nations schools, parents, and students, as I reported in Education Week last week.

Although the arguments did not get into some of the particulars of school-related issues raised in some of the briefs, the human dimension of the immigration debate did not go unmentioned by the justices.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested the administration had authority to create the DAPA program and those nearly 11 million [total] unauthorized aliens are here in the shadows because Congress has remained silent on immigration reform.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, and Elena Kagan also expressed support for the administrations views.

Meanwhile, three justices of the courts more conservative bloc expressed varying degrees of sympathy for the states position, while conservative Justice Clarence Thomas remained silent.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who was defending the DAPA program, that Texas doesnt want to give drivers licenses to the beneficiaries of DAPA. And unless you can tell us that there is some way that they could achieve that, then I dont see how there is not injury in fact.



Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said that when it came to an immigration policy affecting some 4 million people, what were doing is defining the limits of discretion. And it seems to me that that is a legislative, not an executive act.

And Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. seemed to suggest that Texas and other states should be able to challenge the program based on increased costs.

Isnt losing money the classic case for standing? Roberts said.

In blocking the Obama administrations program, lower courts held that at least Texas had standing because it would incur additional costs for issuing drivers licenses if some 500,000 unauthorized immigrant parents received notice from the federal government under the DAPA program that they were not a priority for deportation.

Those courts approved an injunction blocking the Obama initiative. The administration thus must win five votes on the eight-member court (with the late Justice Antonin Scalias seat still vacant) to revive the program.

In its brief , Texas cites not only increased costs it would face to issue drivers licenses to those who gained relief under the DAPA program, but additional education costs of some $58 million per year stemming from illegal immigration.

DAPA is an unprecedented assertion of executive power, Texas Solicitor General Scott A. Keller told the justices on Monday.

There was considerable discussion Monday on what the DAPA program would actually do, given that it builds on other laws and regulations that all sides agree give the executive branch wide discretion on deferring deportation of various classes of non-citizens.

DAPA does not confer any immigration status, Verrilli said.

Roberts and Alito pointed to what they viewed as inconsistent language in the administrations defense of the program that DAPA recipients may work lawfully but not be considered to be here legally.

Im just talking about the English language, Alito said.

Verrilli suggested there were fine lines between the meanings of various words and phrases in immigration law, especially the idea of lawful presence.

A decision in the case is expected by late June.
Stephen Pruitt, Kentuckys commissioner of education, said this week that he doesnt want to rank the states schools under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Pruitt said that the model the state currently uses, which ranks schools and their districts by a percentile score , is oversimplistic and unfair. He instead wants to use a dashboard approach that lists how schools measure in several categories, such as chronic absenteeism or graduation rate, for example, allowing parents to draw their own conclusions.

The new system needs to be fair, reliable, easier to understand and more meaningful for kids, said Pruitt, who is touring the state to gather feedback on what the states education accountability plan should look like under ESSA.

Several states are considering using dashboard approaches for their next accountability system.

While using a dashboard will be permissable under ESSA, states must still rank their bottom 5 percent of schools. That means states still will have to have some sort of index in their new accountability system.

California officials, who are at the tail end of building their next accountability system, are refusing to rank schools or identify the states worst-performing schools. Officials there say that schools are too complex to come up with one number or grade to convey to parents how their students will be served. The U.S. Department of Education has yet to respond to a letter California officials sent describing their concerns.



Critics of the dashboard approach, particularly school choice advocates, say poor and minority parents need a more direct way of drawing conclusions about the schools their children attend.

Dont miss another State EdWatch post. Sign up here to get news alerts in your email inbox. And make sure to follow @StateEdWatch on Twitter for the latest news from state K-12 policy and politics.
In a unanimous decision, the North Carolina Supreme Court last week agreed with two lower courts that state lawmakers had violated the constitutional rights of veteran teachers when they retroactively stripped them of their tenure protections.

In 2013during the first legislative session after Republicans took control of both chambers of the legislature as well as the governors office for the first time since Reconstructionlawmakers pushed through legislation that would phase out job protections for all teachers by 2018 . The states teachers union swiftly challenged the law.

The state Supreme Court ultimately ruled that taking tenure away from teachers who had already earned it violated the contracts clause of the U.S. Constitution. The ruling means that while those teachers will maintain their tenure rights, however, teachers hired since the law went into effect still dont have a route to career status. Newer teachers work under contracts that schools may terminate for any reason that isnt arbitrary, capricious, discriminatory, for personal or political reasons or on any basis prohibited by state or federal law . Fired teachers can appeal to local school boards.

In a case that has parallels to Vergara v. California and similar lawsuits , the attorneys arguing for the anti-tenure law contended it was necessary for protecting students from ineffective teachers in the classroom. In his opinion, Justice Bob Edmunds said that the defendants had failed to establish the connection.

While we acknowledge that the retroactive repeal was motivated by the General Assemblys valid concern for flexibility in dismissing low-performing teachers, we do not see how repealing career status from those for whom that right had already vested was necessary and reasonable, Edmunds wrote.

Moving forward Republican House Speaker Tim Moore said they would turn their attention to making sure that the state does a better job retaining good teachers, The News & Observer reported .

I believe that we need to focus on recruiting and retaining the best teachers for our classrooms and great teachers should be rewarded for their work, Moore said in a statement. We need to continue to push for policies that allow local school administrators to remove teachers that consistently underperform.

After the original trial court judge declared the law unconstitutional, North Carolina Republicansin addition to appealing the case up to the states highest courtalso tried to get teachers to voluntarily give up job protections in exchange for pay raises , a plan that ultimately failed.
Following Governments warnings about strict measures, taxi aggreagators Uber and Ola have suspended surge pricing in Delhi.

The move comes from both the companies after Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal warned them about overcharging riders on the first full-fledged working day of the implementation of the odd-even vehicle rationing scheme. Both Uber and Ola had reportedly hiked their rates by three to five times of the regular fare. Kejriwal also warned that the Government will cancel permits and impounding of vehicles, for charging fares more than the rates prescribed by the government.

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Following the government directive, Uber and Ola temporarily suspended surge price. Earlier this month, the Karnataka government too banned surge pricing. The Delhi Transport Department issued a helpline number (011-42 400 400) that will take any complaint related to overcharging. People can call the helpline number about an issue along with a copy of the bill and taxi number in cases of overcharging.

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Samsung Galaxy C5 (SM-C5000) with Snapdragon 617 and 4GB of RAM surfaced in Geekbench listing a few days back, now the Galaxy C7 (SM-C7000) with Snapdragon 625 SoC and 4GB of RAM has been leaked by AnTuTu. The Samsung Galaxy C-Series smartphone are expected to come with a metal body, but still dont have images of any of these upcoming C-Series phones yet.

The listing just says it will come with a 1080p display, which could be a 5.5-inch Super AMOLED panel like the A7 (2016). These are chances for it to come with a fingerprint scanner and it will obviously have support for Quick charging, but no details about the battery capacity yet. It scored 60140 points in the AnTuTu 6 benchmark.

Samsung Galaxy C7 (SM-C7000) rumored specifications

5.5-inch (19201080 pixels) Full HD display

Octa-Core Snapdragon 625 14nm processor with Adreno 506 GPU

4GB RAM, 32GB Internal Storage, expandable memory via micro SD card

Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow)

16MP rear camera with LED flash

8MP front camera

Fingerprint sensor

4G LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v 4.1, GPS

Since details about two of the Samsung Galaxy C-Series smartphones have leaked, we can expect live images in the coming weeks and the announcement is also expected soon.

Source
A North Carolina waitress recently discovered that instead of leaving money for her tip, a couple of diners offered an unsolicited prayer and left a Leviticus verse instead. For waitress Alexandra Judd, the customers targeted her for her sexuality being a lesbian and the bible verse is particularly spiteful - it calls for death to gay people.

Judd, who works for Zada Janes located in Charlotte's Plaza Midwood area, was infuriated with she considers to be a hateful gesture. Apparently, the diners wrote on the tip portion of the bill a bible passage from Leviticus 20:13 which reads, "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."

The diners even added a note at the bottom of the bill saying "Praying for you."

Venting her frustration over the offending note, Judd posted a photo of the bill on her Facebook account, but she erased the card details and the name of the customer respecting the customer's privacy according to YahooNews. In her post, Judd wrote announced that she does not need anyone praying for her because she has want she wants out of life.

Judd admits that the turn of events caught her off-guard as she did not expect the discriminatory act to happen, living in a more tolerant age. Judd recounts that the ladies who left the note were rude and didn't seem to want to talk to her, reports WNCN.

North Carolina has recently approved an anti-LGBT legislation, a move that is seen by many to be a step backward for the LGBT community who are striving for equality. In particular, LGBT residents of the state must use the bathroom based on their birth certificate's indicated sex and not their orientation or identity.
Major oil-producing states failed to reach any agreement on freezing production at Sunday's long-hyped summit in Doha, Qatar.

Perhaps surprisingly, oil investors took this news in stride. Crude oil prices plunged initially but ended Monday roughly flat following news that a massive strike had crippled production in Kuwait. Meanwhile, most oil stocks actually rose on Monday.

This suggests that oil investors don't fully appreciate the risks following the failure of the Doha talks. In a worst-case scenario, the oil market might not rebalance until late 2017 or even 2018 -- leading to a lot more pain for oil companies ranging from industry titan ExxonMobil (XOM 1.86%) to shale pioneer Continental Resources (CLR 0.28%).

The oil market is -- or was -- rebalancing

After oil prices plummeted in late 2014, most oil industry pundits expected a relatively quick rebound, with low prices forcing relatively high-cost U.S. shale production out of the market. Nevertheless, U.S. output remained stubbornly high throughout 2015.

However, U.S. production has finally started to decline steadily. As of early April, U.S. crude oil production was down about 400,000 barrels per day compared to a year earlier, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Based on the decline in supply from the U.S. and other producers outside OPEC -- along with a projected 1.2 million barrel per day rise in demand -- the International Energy Agency has forecast that supply and demand will move back into balance during the second half of 2016.

However, this forecast assumes that OPEC production holds roughly steady. Yet Iran hopes to boost production to at least 4 million barrels per day by early 2017, up from 3.2 million barrels per day in February. Meanwhile, after Iran refused to join other major oil producers in freezing production, Saudi Arabia threatened to raise production by another 1 million barrels per day.

Of course, it's possible that Iran's production ramp-up will take longer than planned. There's also a decent chance that Saudi Arabia's threats to boost its own output are a bluff. And supply disruptions are a constant risk. But if Iran and Saudi Arabia both increase production without corresponding declines elsewhere in OPEC, the oil market will remain flooded for at least one more year.

Oil bulls ignore the risks

Notwithstanding the risk of another big increase in OPEC oil supply, Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm predicted on Monday that oil would probably jump to $60 per barrel by the end of 2016. He stated that lower oil prices were unsustainable and that the market would probably rebalance by the summer.

Yet oil billionaires like Hamm have consistently underestimated the threat from OPEC lately. Indeed, Hamm himself called OPEC a "toothless tiger" in late 2014 and cashed out all of Continental Resources' oil hedges back when oil still traded above $80 per barrel, anticipating a quick recovery. This foolish decision cost Continental Resources roughly $1 billion last year.

If oil bulls like Hamm can be so cavalier with their own money on the line -- Hamm owns more than two-thirds of Continental Resources -- their empty prognostications deserve even more skepticism.

Oil investors need to watch out

In keeping with the general dismissive mood among oil investors, Continental Resources shares rose 4% on Monday, and have more than doubled from the multi-year low reached in late January. Meanwhile, shares of ExxonMobil are only 5% short of their 52-week high.

These valuations reflect all of the potential for an oil price recovery later this year and none of the risk of a longer downturn. Continental Resources lost money in 2015, and oil prices are still nearly 20% below last year's average. Analysts currently don't expect the company to get back in the black until at least 2018.

ExxonMobil fared a little better last year, with net income down "only" 50% year over year. However, ExxonMobil was helped by a multibillion-dollar increase in its downstream profits as refining margins surged.

Like other oil producers, ExxonMobil will face further earnings pressure this year from oil price declines. But it will also have to contend with shrinking downstream profits, because refining margins are down significantly year over year around the globe. As a result, analysts currently expect earnings per share to sink another 39% in 2016.

Investors are clearly betting on a quick bounce-back at oil companies including ExxonMobil and Continental Resources beginning later this year or in 2017. If a market share war between Iran and Saudi Arabia prevents the oil market from rebalancing until late 2017 or 2018, these companies will be in for a lot more pain. Investors shouldn't underestimate that risk.
Polaris Industries (NYSE: PII) might be riding a little bit higher after analysts said rival Harley-Davidson (NYSE: HOG) was losing market share and was likely to post a big drop in motorcycle sales this quarter, presumably with Polaris' Indian Motorcycle nameplate picking up the lion's share of those lost sales.

But with motorcycles still only accounting for less than 15% of total revenues, there may be a few other things investors ought to keep their eye on when the powersports vehicle maker posts its first-quarter earnings on Thursday, April 21.

Metric Q1 2015 Q1 2016 est. % Change Revenue $1.03 billion $968.6 million (6.3%) EPS $1.30 $0.71 (45.4%)

The off-road vehicle market has suffered broad weakness as macroeconomic headwinds, currency fluctuations, and competitive pressures take a toll. Last time out it specifically pointed to the collapse in oil prices hitting oil-rich states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana as the reason sales of ORVs dropped 20% in North America. Moreover, OPEC nations also just recently failed to reach an agreement on limiting production, and oil's price tumbled again. With high inventories and storage at full capacity, we may be in a period of persistently low prices for oil.

That's good for consumers, but not necessarily good for off-road vehicle manufacturers selling into markets depressed by the situation. Polaris noted in its fourth-quarter conference call that ORV retail sales in oil-producing states were down about 10% for the full year while the rest of the North American market was up mid-single digits. Considering the sales hit it took last quarter, that means the vehicle maker's business is highly skewed toward those few states, so not even oil's 50% rebound since its February lows is likely to change that situation much.

That suggests Polaris may have to take inventory reductions at dealers as it did last quarter. It has a mid-single-digit inventory target for them, and the weak market caused it to withhold a large amount of its otherwise highly profitable RZRs and Rangers from dealerships, the first time in six years it had to do so. Consumers may have been out buying cars in record quantities, but that hasn't translated into big-ticket purchases in the ORV market, and Polaris said there was no indication the situation was going to improve in the power-sports industry throughout 2016.

That means the vehicle maker will have to maintain its cost discipline policies for the foreseeable future. It has said that although the amount it actually spends this year is probably going to be higher than last year (mostly due to compensation expenses), as a percentage of sales, Polaris' operating expenses are expected to improve.

Still, the ORV/snowmobile market is going to remain under pressure, even if the rough winter weather we had helps spur some extra sales of the latter. Rather, it will be left to the motorcycle division to pick up the slack.

Sales of Indian motorcycles and the Batmobile-like three-wheeled Slingshot are expected to continue making gains. Across all of 2016, Polaris is expecting high-teen percentage sales gains, and since Harley-Davidson has yet to figure out a way to arrest the slide in sales it's been experiencing, Polaris Industries will probably keep taking share.

Offsetting those gains, though, will be the currency headwinds that have been buffeting its results for the past two years. Like the weakness in ORV sales, foreign exchange rates will put a damper on its growth. Parts, clothing, and accessories sales, however, may help blunt that edge a bit, as Polaris expects growth to exceed the growth rate of the whole company.

There are many more moving parts here than what investors might find at Harley-Davidson, which is mostly about selling motorcycles, or at Arctic Cat, which generates 85% of its revenues from snowmobiles and ORVs. As Polaris is to Harley in motorcycles, seeing outsize gains because it is starting from a smaller base, so is Arctic Cat to Polaris. It generates sales all year long that are just half of what its rival sells in a quarter.

The market hasn't materially improved for Polaris Industries since it reported its year-end results in January, and that may lead it to report underwhelming results later this week.
Yes, You Can Get Arrested for Your Snapchats

As we have explained here before: Facebook threats can get you arrested; Twitter threats can get you arrested; and even one-word text threats can get you arrested. So as teens abandon these modes of communication in favor of the image messaging app Snapchat, it's probably a good idea to let them know that yes, Snapchat threats can get your arrested.

Modesto, California police arrested two California high school students after they posted a video on Snapchat, aimed at a black classmate, complete with noose, the words "You must die motherf***er," and an image of a gun being fired at the viewer. Here's what the students are charged with:

Snapthreat

The video was originally posted on March 25th, while students were on Easter break. The two white students (who names have been withheld because they are minors), were first suspended from Central Catholic High School then arrested and booked on 3 felony charges:

Criminal Conspiracy: Defined as when two or more persons conspire to commit any crime, it would apply to the student who filmed the Snapchat and the one who appeared in it; Making Terrorist Threats: Meaning a threat to "commit a crime which will result in death or great bodily injury to another person," regardless of whether the person making threat intends to carry it out; and Committing a Hate Crime: Any criminal act committed because of the race or ethnicity of the victim.

All told, the teens could be facing anywhere from seven to twelve years in prison.

Threatchat

While the names of the perpetrators have not been released, the victim to whom the threat was aimed did allow news outlets to publish his name. Noah Porter, an 18-year-old senior at Central Catholic released a statement two weeks after the video was posted:

"The death threat made me afraid. I know that a noose around someone's neck is nothing to joke about. I heard my name in the video. The death threat made me afraid because I was singled out. I felt threatened and angered ... The video was put on social media for everyone to see. I know what the noose represents and it's not a positive or joking matter. I usually don't get mad easily but this was serious and nothing like I had experienced before."

While some have insisted that the video was a joke, it only matters whether those who made the communication intended it to be taken as a threat and whether it caused the target to be in reasonable fear for his or her safety. So a few words to the as-yet-unwise: just because your Snapchats disappear quickly doesn't make them any less threatening or any less illegal.

Related Resources:
The Boston Beer Company (NYSE:SAM) has been at the forefront of innovation among craft brewers since day one. It should come as no surprise that the company features a special high-end brand called Utopias.

The unique brews is aged in used spirits barrelssome being 22-years-old. Only 15,000 bottles are sold during each release, which occurs every two years since 2002.

Utopias is kind of the lunatic fringe of brewing, Jim Koch, Boston Beer Company founder tells FOXBusiness.com. Its kind of the Starship Enterprise of beer. It has taken beer where no beer has gone before.

While the average beer has about 4-6% alcohol by volume, Utopias, at nearly 30% is one of the stronger commercial beers on the market today. Koch places the beverage among some of the finest spirits and says the taste usually comes as quite a surprise to drinkers.

It doesnt taste like what people think beer is. It really pushes the boundaries out and the flavor profile is kind of if you can imagine a space between like a vintage port and a fine cognac and an old sherry, thats where Utopias lives. And when people taste it, the normal reaction is wow, this stuffs amazing.

Koch said the company is deliberate with how much of Utopias they allot during each release.

We have to ration it, we have to allocate it, he said. We sell every single bottle that we can make for $200 a bottle. Now thats innovation in beer.
When rhetoric becomes disconnected from reality, weve crossed a dangerous line. We deserve better from people aspiring to be President.  Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam

Former Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg was a man of the people. He grew up on the streets of the Bronx, worked as a cable splicers assistant right out of High School, fought in Vietnam and earned two college degrees at night school. And he turned a regional Baby Bell into a telecom powerhouse.

Seidenberg had his run-ins with politicians and unions, but he always managed to walk that fine line between tough and fair. That said, he had no use for whiners, something I learned after writing a profile piece about him and his AT&T counterpart called CEOs are Just Like You  Without All the Whining.

Apparently whining wasnt cool in the Seidenberg household. The articles title got his daughters attention, she forwarded it to him and he emailed me  not so much to thank me for the piece but more importantly for prompting his wonderful daughter and mother of their two grandchildren to contact him.

The guys quite a charmer, I can tell you that. I always thought hed be a tough act to follow, but his successor, Verizon chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam, appears to be doing just fine. He certainly has a way of dealing with whiners that would probably make all the Seidenbergs very proud.

The wireless trend has left Verizons legacy phone business in a tough spot  shrinking and under intense margin pressure. Rival AT&T isnt fairing any better. After nine months of unproductive negotiations, last week 36,000 Verizon landline workers voted to strike, leaving McAdam embroiled in a high-risk game of chicken with their labor unions.

Naturally, Verizon is looking for concessions to keep the telecom industry from ending up like Detroits automakers  bankrupt and needing a taxpayer bailout. Meanwhile, labor bosses are digging in their heels. Never mind that the concessions are reasonable and these are well-paid workers. Some of them earn six figures plus benefits.

But it is an election year, and neither Bernie Sanders nor Hillary Clinton was about to pass up an opportunity to pine for union voters ahead of the critical New York State primary (which kicked off this morning). They both joined the picket lines last week, but it was the democratic socialist who was far and away the more outspoken of the two.

Sanders called workers courageous for standing up to corporate greed and standing up for dignity and justice. The Vermont Senator claimed that Verizon wants to outsource jobs, take away health benefits and avoid paying taxes, and said the company is just another major American corporation trying to destroy the lives of working Americans.

McAdam wasnt about to let that slide. The former engineer took to LinkedIn with a scathing rebuttal called Feeling the Bern of Reality  The Facts About Verizon and The Moral Economy that called Sanders views uninformed and contemptible.

The post set the record straight about Verizons exemplary tax record and capital investments. And McAdam made it clear that his companys comprehensive proposal is intended to safeguard well-paying union jobs with good benefits while ensuring that they dont find themselves in the same quandary as the one U.S. automakers faced nearly a decade ago. But it was the native New Yorkers final message that really hit home.

I understand that rhetoric gets heated in a Presidential campaign. I also get that big companies are an easy target for candidates looking for convenient villains for the economic distress felt by many of our citizens, he wrote. But when rhetoric becomes disconnected from reality, weve crossed a dangerous line. We deserve better from people aspiring to be President. At the very least, we should demand that candidates base their arguments on the facts  even when they dont fit their campaign narratives.

I guess were all getting pretty used to the political pandering, grandstanding and fear mongering that comes with the territory in an election cycle. But when candidates base their entire platform on anti-corporate rhetoric full of ludicrous exaggerations, generalizations and fabrications designed to rally the masses against the very core of the American economy, we have crossed a dangerous line.

Maybe Sanders is protected by the First Amendment, but the kind of broad strokes with which he routinely characterizes corporate America as intent on destroying the very fabric of our nation or trying to destroy the lives of American workers is about as close to the proverbial shouting fire in a crowded theater as you can get, at least in the political sense.

The notion that a man who is that out of touch with reality is this close to winning the White House should scare every American.
Billions of dollars of value was erased from Netflix's market capitalization on Monday. The stock fell about 2.8% during the trading day and declined about another 8% in after-market hours when the streaming-video giant reported first-quarter results. The stock's decline was driven by two main factors. Here's what investors need to know -- and whether these reasons for Monday's sell-off are worth fretting over.

Here are the two most likely reasons Netflix stock sold off at the beginning of the week.

1. Amazon launched a standalone video service. The e-commerce video-streaming efforts aren't new by any means. What changed was the way the company is now offering the service.

Until now, Amazon.com's Prime Video service was bundled with a full Prime membership, which included free shipping on Prime Amazon items. But Sunday night, Amazon changed the way it markets its Prime benefits -- and the change makes Prime Video more accessible than ever. Over the weekend, Amazon began offering alternative options for subscribing to Prime beyond its traditional $99 annual all-access free. The company now offers two new options: an all-access subscription to Prime for $10.99 each month, or a Prime Video-only service for $8.99 per month.

Image source: Amazon.com.

Amazon's decision to offer Prime Video as its own subscription outside of other Prime benefits is a reflection of the company's growing emphasis on streaming video. With Prime Video now available as a stand-alone subscription, and as the company continues to ramp-up its original content, it's clear that Amazon wants in on Netflix's business.

For now, Amazon's Prime Video is still too small to impact Netflix in any meaningful way. For instance, in Netflix's fourth-quarter letter to shareholders, the company cited Sandvine data showing that Netflix represented 37% of peak North American downstream Internet traffic, while Amazon Video accounted for just 3% of this same traffic. But as Amazon spends more money on streaming video, it's possible that the e-commerce giant's invigorated efforts could pressure Netflix over the long haul.

2. Netflix's forecasted weaker-than-expected subscriber growth. Netflix first quarter, which it reported results for on Monday after market close, was an all-around great quarter. But the company's guidance for member growth in Q2 -- particularly for its International markets -- seems to have worried some investors.

Image source: Netflix.

Netflix forecast for member net adds during Q2 of 0.5 million in the U.S. and 2 million internationally was less than the consensus analyst estimate for 505,000 and 3.45 million in these markets, respectively. The 5,000 net member miss for domestic guidance in Q2 is obviously not a big deal. But the company's guidance for just 2 million net adds internationally may raise some eyebrows.

Management offered a few reasons for the worse-than-expected guidance for international member net adds.

"Our international forecast for fewer net adds than prior year is due to a tough comparison against the Australia/New Zealand launch," the company said in its first-quarter letter to shareholders.

Further, management noted that its forecasted international net additions "are down sequentially both due to standard seasonality and our launch in 130 countries at very beginning of Q1 (so Q1 captured the initial surge of signups)."

In Q1, Netflix added 4.51 million international members, highlighting the potential in its international expansion. Investors expected a deceleration in international net additions in Q2 -- but not one this severe. Adding just 2 million new international members in Q2 would be a lower figure than in any quarter during 2015.

Keep an eye on these narratives, but don't react to themWhile a close look at both of these reasons for Monday's sell-off of Netflix stock reveals they are worth keeping an eye on, neither of them are thesis-changing.

Amazon, for instance, simply changed the way it prices Prime video; but it will have to actually follow-up and execute in a way that negatively affects Netflix -- a challenge likely easier in theory than in reality.

Further, while it's normal for investors to be a bit taken aback by Netflix's lower-than-expected guidance for international users, investors should keep in mind that this is just a single estimate for a single quarter. It's going to take more than a few quarters after the streaming-video giant's major January international expansion to really put a finger on what its international opportunity holds.

The article 2 Reasons Netflix, Inc. Stock Was Slammed This Week originally appeared on Fool.com.

Daniel Sparks has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Amazon.com and Netflix. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
On Monday afternoon, Netflix reported that growth remained strong during the recently ended first quarter. But as a high-flying growth stock trading for nearly 100 times forward earnings, "good" wasn't good enough for Netflix in the eyes of Mr. Market.

Let's take a look at the highlights from Netflix's earnings report.

Solid numbers all aroundFor most key financial metrics, such as global streaming revenue, operating income, and segment contribution profit, Netflix's Q1 results came in very close to what management had projected three months ago.

Netflix key Q1 metrics

Metric January Forecast Q1 Actual Global streaming revenue $1.81 billion $1.81 billion Operating income $50 million $49 million Domestic subscriber adds 1.75 million 2.23 million Domestic contribution profit $416 million $413 million International subscriber adds 4.35 million 4.51 million International contribution profit ($114 million) ($104 million)

Data source: Netflix Q4 2015 and Q1 2016 subscriber letters. Chart by author.

Of these six metrics, the only ones for which Netflix's guidance was off by more than 1% were domestic subscriber additions, international subscriber additions, and international contribution profit. In all three cases, Netflix's Q1 performance exceeded its guidance.

Domestic subscriber growth was particularly impressive. Netflix added 2.23 million domestic subscribers, 27% ahead of its guidance and roughly in line with its performance a year earlier. Netflix stated that growth exceeded the company's expectations "because we underestimated the positive acquisition impact of our major original content debuts."

Investors were hoping for moreA few days ago, I noted that investors were likely to care about one thing more than anything else when interpreting Netflix's Q1 results: international subscriber growth.

Netflix beat its guidance by nearly 4%, adding 4.51 million international subscribers, compared with its forecast of 4.35 million. However, Netflix's international subscriber growth had come in at least 14% ahead of the company's forecast in every single quarter of 2015.

As a result, most investors were probably expecting faster international growth last quarter. The company's much-hyped expansion into 130 new markets back in January further contributed to investors' high expectations.

Netflix went global in January -- building up big growth expectations. Image source: The Motley Fool.

To make matters worse, Netflix projected that it will add 2 million international subscribers in Q2, after adding 2.37 million in Q2 2015. The company attributed this projected growth slowdown to tough comparisons. In Q2 2015, Netflix benefited from a surge of signups in Australia and New Zealand after going live there in late March.

Caution is warranted -- but Netflix should bounce backAfter the Q1 earnings release, Netflix shares dropped precipitously. As of 5:15 p.m. ET on Monday, the stock was down 10.3% in after-hours trading, following a 2.8% decline during the regular session.

Netflix's Q1 earnings report showed that the company has a lot of work left to get to breakeven outside the U.S. -- and even more to make international markets just as profitable as its domestic business. It will need to invest heavily in foreign language support, local content, and marketing in order to stimulate growth in its new markets.

That said, Netflix already has a lot of experience working in fairly diverse international markets. Management has a good idea of what needs to be done, and the company will gradually learn more as it gains experience in its newest markets.

Furthermore, Netflix's strong domestic growth shows that it still has a lot of upside in the U.S. -- a market where it has already demonstrated strong profit potential. Thus, if Netflix shares continue to pull back, long-term investors could get some enticing opportunities in the months ahead.

The article Netflix, Inc. Earnings: International Growth Disappoints originally appeared on Fool.com.

Adam Levine-Weinberg has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Netflix. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Image source: Pixabay.

What: Shares of Primero Mining , a small-cap gold and silver miner with resource properties in Canada and Mexico, shed as much as 22% of their value during Monday's trading session after providing a first-quarter production update and full-year guidance adjustment that Wall Street and investors clearly weren't digging.

So what: For the quarter, Primero announced preliminary production of 36,158 gold equivalent ounces, or GEO, including 22,901 GEO from its San Dimas mine in Mexico, and 13,257 GEO from its Canadian Black Fox mine. Combined, this 36,158 GEO of production is down 41% from the prior-year quarter and included a 40% drop-off in gold production and a 52% plunge in silver production. Average mill grade also dropped by 17% for gold and 21% for silver as salt in the wound.

Making matters worse, in an effort to improve safety at its San Dimas mine, new safety and procedure standards were implemented which adversely affected production and all-in sustaining costs (AISC). AISC for the quarter was $1,556, or 49% higher than it was in the year-ago quarter.

Image source: Primero Mining.

Looking ahead, Primero Mining sees full-year production at between 230,000 GEO and 250,000 GEO, and AISC ranging between $975 and $1,025 per ounce. Comparatively, when Primero reported its Q4 results and issued guidance back in February, it foresaw 260,000 GEO to 280,000 GEO for 2016, with AISC falling 10% to between $850 and $900 per ounce. In other words, shave about 30,000 GEO off full-year estimates, and AISC is now expected to be about the same as full-year 2015.

Now what: Just in case today's bad news wasn't enough of a kick in the pants for Primero's shareholders, it's also been contending with legal claims against its Mexican subsidiary, Primero Empresa Minera, since early February. Mexican authorities are seeking to nullify the Advanced Pricing Agreement (APA) issued in 2012 that governs how much of Primero's proceeds are taxed between 2010 and 2014. Primero believes itself to be in the right, but it's another potential gray cloud hanging over the company.

On the bright side (and yes, there really is a bright side), the prospect for Primero's underlying resources has been improving, with gold prices having their best quarter in a long time. Low-yield environments in numerous developed countries, as well as economic uncertainty and growing demand for physical gold from various central banks, could further assist physical gold's ascent.

Primero, despite its rough first quarter, is also generally known for modest improving production results, as well as keepings AISC below spot gold prices. Even though 2016 could prove to be a rough year in terms of comparisons for Primero, the proactive actions it's taking could result in some very easy-to-beat year-over-year comparisons come 2017.

The real wild card is the APA, which may not have a resolution for quite some time. Even then, I don't anticipate a negative ruling having a lasting impact on Primero's Mexican mining operations.

My suggestion? Primero's plunge could be an opportunity to consider dipping your toes into the water, but you'll need to understand that this is a multi-year hold if you do buy, and it's probably best-suited for mining investors that can stomach the volatility.

The article Primero Mining Corp.'s Preliminary Q1 Report -- Why We Can't Dig It originally appeared on Fool.com.

Sean Williamshas no material interest in any companies mentioned in this article. You can follow him on CAPS under the screen nameTMFUltraLong, track every pick he makes under the screen name TrackUltraLong, and check him out on Twitter, where he goes by the handle@TMFUltraLong.The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter servicesfree for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe thatconsidering a diverse range of insightsmakes us better investors. The Motley Fool has adisclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Volkswagen released several "teaser" photos of its Beijing Concept, a new plug-in hybrid SUV that will likely be unveiled next week. Image source: Volkswagen

On Sunday, Volkswagen released "teaser" photos of a new SUV concept it plans to show off at the Beijing Motor Show. The show will get under way this weekend.

What Volkswagen said: VW said that its "Beijing Showcar" is a "new development in the premium SUV segment." It gave "ten key facts" about the concept:

"1. Volkswagen is presenting one of the world's most advanced full-size SUVs.

2. Concept Car transfers full-size SUV design to a new sporty and elegant level.

3. Volkswagen systematically advances digitalisation of the automobile.

4. Digitalised display and control concept of the SUV concept car enables a completely new range of interactivity.

5. Active Info Display and infotainment system merge under a sheet of transparent glass to become a Curved Interaction Area.

6. Interior is a relaxed living space, and digitalised operation focuses on the person more than ever.

7. SUV has a plug-in hybrid drive with 280 kW of system power and 700 Nm of system torque.

8. Electric driving range of the SUV is up to 50 km.

9. Less than 3.0 l/100 km NEDC fuel consumption.

10. Concept Car accelerates to 100 km/h in 6.0 seconds and has a top speed of up to 224 km/h."

Image source: Volkswagen

Simply put: It's a big plug-in hybrid SUV with a high-tech dashboard.

What it means for VW: So far, there's no suggestion that this SUV is anything but a concept car built for show. But following on other recent VW SUV concepts, it shows again that VW is thinking hard about how to become a player in SUVs, a market in which it currently sorely lags.

Image source: Volkswagen

While VW's premium Audi and Porsche SUVs have done well in luxury segments, the SUV offerings from the mass-market Volkswagen have been poor sellers. Compact crossover sales boomed in the U.S. last year, but VW sold just 35,843 examples of its Tiguan SUV -- barely more than Ford's Escape or Toyota's RAV4 manage in a good month. The concept shows that VW is thinking hard about ways to build appealing crossover SUVs for its mass-market brand.

It also shows that VW is making a broader commitment to electrification. This has been expected: CEO Matthias Mueller has signaled clearly that VW will aggressively develop more plug-in hybrids and electric cars as it seeks to move past its diesel-emissions cheating debacle.

Image source: Volkswagen

There's also a local angle with the Beijing Concept: Plug-in hybrids are becoming more important in China, where cities have limited non-electric car use as part of efforts to curb air pollution. The fact that it's an SUV is also significant, as VW lost ground to General Motors in China last year in large part because of GM's strong SUV portfolio.

Looking ahead: We'll take a closer look at this new VW once the company releases full details, likely next week. If the concept turns out to be a preview of an upcoming new production Volkswagen SUV, it could be a significant product. We'll know more soon.

The article Volkswagen Looks to Move Past Diesel Mess With New Plug-in SUV originally appeared on Fool.com.

John Rosevear owns shares of Ford and General Motors. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Ford. The Motley Fool recommends General Motors. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
IMAGE SOURCE: ALPHABET, INC.

Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) is set to release third-quarter 2016 results this Thursday, Oct. 27, 2016, after the market close. With shares up 9% over the past three months (as of this writing) thanks largely to a stellar second-quarter report in July, what can investors expect to hear from the internet-search behemoth this time?

Alphabet's headline numbers

This will mark Alphabet's fourth quarterly report since it began breaking out its results on a segment basis earlier this year. Alphabet instituted the practice after reorganizing last October to become the holding company of Google and its operating subsidiaries, and -- to borrow the company's words -- "to bring increased focus, accountability, and transparency" for investors who wish to know more about those varied businesses.

Much to the chagrin of analysts, however, Alphabet doesn't make a habit of providing specific financial guidance each quarter. So while we don't typically pay close attention to Wall Street's near-term demands, note that consensus estimates predict Alphabet will grow revenue 18.1% year over year, to $22.05 billion, and generate earnings of $8.64 per share (up from $7.35 in last year's third quarter).

Within that, we can expect Alphabet to divide its report into two primary segments, namely Google and "Other Bets."

On Google

If Alphabet were an apple right now, Google would be its core and most of the flesh. But this shouldn't be terribly surprising, considering Google encompasses results from nearly every well-known product Big G has innovated, from Search to Android, Maps, Chrome, YouTube, Google Play, and Gmail.

As such, last quarter Google represented more than $21.3 billion of Alphabet's $21.5 billion in total revenue. And as operating margin for the segment expanded 100 basis points year over year, to 32.8%, Google generated operating income of just under $7 billion.

Digging deeper into those totals, the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from advertising, which grew 19.5% year over year in Q2, to $19.1 billion. Alphabet should further break that down this quarter into both ad revenue that came from its own websites (up 24.2% last quarter, to $15.4 billion), and the amount derived from Google Network Members' sites (up 3.4% in Q2, to $3.74 billion). In recent quarters, Google has largely credited that growth to progress in monetizing mobile search, as well as rapid increases in revenue from YouTube.

Relatedly, listen for metrics on the volume of aggregate paid clicks (up 29% year over year last quarter), and aggregate cost-per-click, the latter of which measures how much Google makes per ad. But keeping in mind cost-per-click declined 7% last quarter, don't be surprised if it continues that downward trend. In part, this is a consequence of that outsized growth from YouTube, where Google's TrueView ads reach consumers early in the purchase funnel, so tend to monetize at lower rates than traditional web-based impressions.

We also can't forget about Google's non-advertising products, including Apps, Commerce, Cloud, and hardware products. Collectively, these sources saw sales increase last quarter by one-third year over year, to $2.3 billion. This quarter, I'm particularly interested to hear about consumers' early reactions to Google's new Pixel smartphone.

Everything else

On the other side of Alphabet's fence is its decidedly unprofitable -- but ripe with long-term potential -- Other Bets segment, which includes Fiber (high-speed internet), Nest (connected home products), Verily (longevity), Calico (life sciences), self-driving cars, and X ("moonshot" initiatives).

With the exceptions of Nest, Verily, and Fiber, which together helped Other Bets revenue rise last quarter 150% year over year, to $185 million, Alphabet's other bets are primarily pre-revenue businesses that seek to solve novel problems across multiple industries. As a result, that revenue translated to a segment operating loss of $859 million last quarter alone.

But we also shouldn't judge Other Bets' results by viewing each quarter in isolation. Because these efforts are early-stage, can be hugely affected by one-time items like new partnerships, and operate in disparate industries, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat will almost certainly reiterate her assertion that it's most "instructive" to view Other Bets with at least a 12-month time frame in mind. That's fair enough; given their considerable potential to meaningfully change the way we do things -- and, of course, with the financial resources and cash flow provided by Alphabet's massively profitable Google segment -- Alphabet can afford to thoughtfully invest in these young businesses.

In the end, barring any negative surprises from its usually stable core business, I suspect this week's report will contain little to fundamentally alter Alphabet's compelling growth story. But that won't stop us from digging in to better understand Alphabet's progress in continuing to generate long-term value for shareholders.

A secret billion-dollar stock opportunity The world's biggest tech company forgot to show you something, but a few Wall Street analysts and the Fool didn't miss a beat: There's a small company that's powering their brand-new gadgets and the coming revolution in technology. And we think its stock price has nearly unlimited room to run for early in-the-know investors! To be one of them, just click here.

Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Steve Symington has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A and C shares). Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
'The Good Wife': Good Law? -- Season 7, Episode 19

"So we're right back where we started." Yeah, Peter, we are. Mr. Florrick is facing a scandal, and there's Mrs. Florrick, standing resolutely by his side: "I am standing by my husband again."

Only some big things have changed over the past seven years, to the point that Alicia might finally know exactly what she wants. But is she any closer to getting it? Can she keep her (as of now at least) husband out of jail? And who has criminal jurisdiction in international airports? Here's a legal rundown of the recent episode, "Landing."

Episode Recap (Spoiler Alert):

The grand jury investigation into Peter's handling of a murder case while at the state's attorneys' office has finally led to an indictment, and his arrest. We're still not sure if the governor is guilty, or just how guilty he is, but Cary is laying the blame for disappearing bullets at the feet of the crime lab. (And he may have a point.)

At the same time, Alicia is drawn to Toronto, or a concourse at the Toronto airport to be more specific, to battle NSA-leaker Jeff's Dellinger's arrest and extradition. But her mind is really on her man at home. Nope, not Peter -- that'd be Jason Crouse.

Legal Roots:

The episode's central legal question: who gets to arrest you in the customs area of an international airport? Dellinger gets caught on the line between the U.S. and Canada, and both governments get to argue about custody. That initial argument gives way to whether Dellinger can be extradited to the United States now that he is in custody. While there are some countries with no extradition treaty with the States, Canada is not one of those, as Randy Quaid can tell you.

Legal Fiction:

So would Canada really give Dellinger asylum just to talk to him about NSA surveillance? Asylum in another country is generally reserved for those facing persecution in their homeland for their religious or political beliefs. Edward Snowden was offered political asylum by several countries, though none were so close an ally as Canada. And our neighbor to the north limits asylum to those who would face "torture, a risk to their life or a risk of cruel and unusual treatment or punishment" if they returned home.

Legal Babble

"Perp walk." After Peter is indicted, his attorneys negotiate the terms of his surrender with prosecutors. Obviously, Eli and Mike Tascioni want to avoid the "perp walk," where Peter is paraded in handcuffs in front of the media. Meanwhile, lead prosecutor Connor Fox wants nothing more than the spotlight of putting a corrupt governor behind bars. A tacit agreement to do it quietly is tossed aside when Fox learns Eli lied about a national security briefing, and the televised arrest becomes the episode's central image.

Legal Verdict

Well, we finally know what Alicia wants -- after Jason poses that question to her, repeatedly, she responds, "You." But can she get it? Will she? We only have three more episodes to find out.

What did you think of this week's episode of "The Good Wife"? Is the show guilty of making any legal mistakes? Check back here for more legal recaps of "The Good Wife," and send us a tweet at @FindLawConsumer with the hashtag #TheGoodWife.

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In the past few years, Delta Air Lines , American Airlines , United Continental , and Hawaiian Holdings have repeatedly clashed about four slots reserved for U.S. airlines at Tokyo's Haneda Airport.

Airlines have fought over access to Haneda Airport in recent years. Image source: American Airlines.

Now they're going to have to do it all over again. Last week, the Department of Transportation finalized its decision to start from scratch in allocating Haneda flights now that U.S. airlines will no longer be limited to overnight operations there.

Haneda Airport opens a little furtherFrom 1978 to 2010, Haneda Airport was closed to flights from the U.S. Long-haul international flights were all required to use the newer Narita Airport, which is nearly 40 miles from central Tokyo.

Since late 2010, the U.S. government has been allowed to allocate four daily flights to Haneda, but all takeoffs and landings have been relegated to the undesirable 10 p.m.-7 a.m. window. Japanese carriers have been allowed to operate another four daily roundtrips from Haneda to the U.S.

All four U.S. airlines that serve Haneda have been pushing the U.S. government to negotiate for better access to that critical airport. Delta has been particularly strident, calling for open access to Haneda.

The airlines are finally getting their wish, to some extent. In February, the U.S. and Japan reached a new agreement that will allow U.S. carriers to operate six daily roundtrips to Haneda Airport -- five of which will be during the daytime.

Delta goes its own way againFollowing this agreement, American Airlines, Hawaiian Holdings, and United Continental all asked the DOT to let them move their nighttime Haneda flights to the new daytime slots. If they (and Delta) had been allowed to do so, it would have left just one remaining daytime slot and one nighttime slot for the DOT to allocate.

United Airlines hoped to keep its Haneda slot without having to bid again.

Instead, the DOT plans to run a full allocation proceeding to determine which routes to Haneda would best serve the public interest. It thinks that daytime slots will make far more routes viable than was the case when Haneda operations were limited to the overnight hours. Most notably, routes to the eastern half of the U.S. -- which all failed previously -- may now be workable.

This means that some of the airlines that currently fly to Haneda could potentially lose their route authorities. Delta Air Lines was the only carrier to support this reallocation process.

Delta's gambit is unlikely to pay offBased on Delta's support for reallocating the Haneda slots, there's a good chance that it will request all five daytime slots. This would also fit with the company's long-standing demand that the U.S. pursue the removal of all restrictions on flights to Haneda Airport.

Delta believes that its mini-hub at Narita Airport is in grave danger. American Airlines and United Continental both have joint venture partners in Japan with hubs at both Narita and Haneda. This allows them to offer greater access to Haneda Airport and numerous connecting opportunities at both airports, which Delta can't hope to match.

Delta will likely argue that United and American already control half of the slots for U.S.-Haneda flights through their Japanese joint venture partners -- and that Delta should receive the other five daytime slots to create competition. (It might let Hawaiian Airlines keep the remaining nighttime slot.)

Delta may ask for all five daytime Haneda slots.

However, the DOT has shown a tendency to divide assets like these Haneda route authorities relatively evenly. The agency's main goal seems to be giving cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta a shot at nonstop service to Haneda. It would be very surprising to see it hand out more than two (or, at most, three) frequencies to any one airline.

Who wins? Who loses?In all likelihood, this new route allocation proceeding won't lead to radical changes. American, Delta, and United all have the inside track in terms of moving their existing flights to daytime slots. The one possible exception is the Los Angeles-Haneda route, which American and Delta both serve today. The DOT may opt to drop one of those flights to provide more geographical diversity, but the loser would probably be awarded a different route.

In allocating the other two daytime slots, the DOT will look at which cities have the greatest demand for service to Haneda and will likely award the routes accordingly. New York, Chicago, and Detroit all seem like plausible options. Each of the legacy carriers has hubs in two of the three cities, so it should be a fair fight.

Hawaiian Airlines looks like the loser in this allocation proceeding. In a sense, it's a victim of its own success. Because its existing Haneda-Honolulu route has worked well during the overnight hours -- unlike other airlines' current Haneda flights -- the DOT will probably award it the remaining nighttime slot.

Hawaiian Holdings may not snag a daytime slot at Haneda Airport. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

Given the DOT's interest in geographical diversity, Hawaiian is unlikely to secure a second route authority. By contrast, if it had been allowed to move its existing flight to a daytime slot, Hawaiian would have had a good chance of picking up the nighttime slot as a growth opportunity rather than a fallback option.

Even so, Hawaiian will end up no worse off than it is today. That's the nice thing about the DOT reallocating these routes -- it may be a bit of a headache, but all of the airlines should benefit.

The article Airlines Will Have to Fight for Slots in Tokyo Again originally appeared on Fool.com.

Adam Levine-Weinberg owns shares of Hawaiian Holdings, and United Continental Holdings, and is long Jan. 2017 $40 calls on Delta Air Lines, long Jan. 2017 $30 calls on American Airlines Group, and short Oct. 2016 $50 calls on Hawaiian Holdings, The Motley Fool is long Jan. 2017 $35 calls on American Airlines Group. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Source: Alphabet.

Africa is home to some of the fastest-growing economies in the world.Many political bodies and global businesses see the continent of Africa as one of the most intriguing potential growth stories for the 21stcentury.

To help encourage this development, tech companies like Alphabet and Facebook have created some ambitious plans in Africa. Case in point: Alphabet recently announced an impressive objective to bring digital job training to more than one million Africans.

Altruistic Alphabet According to a company blog post, Alphabet has reached an agreement to fund a series of digital skills training programs for more than 1 million young people in sub-Saharan Africa in the next year alone. Internet penetration is expected to grow significantly through the end of the decade in Africa, and Alphabet sees this as an opportunity to create a new generation of online businesses and entrepreneurs. To do so, Alphabet has teamed up with non-profit Livity Africa, which will handle the actual administration of the training programs on a daily basis.

Per Google's blog post, Livity Africa's training activities will include both online and in-person formats. The in-person teaching will involve two distinct class types -- Digify Bytes and Digify Pro. Digify Bytesis a less-immersive one-to-two day training program designed to familiarize students with important online skills like digital marketing, web design, content marketing, digital strategy, and more.

Conversely, Digify Pro is a three-month immersive course that supplies students with technical training, professional networking skills, and job placement assistance at companies in need of these skills in Africa. Lastly, Livity has created the online education site digifyafrica.com, which includes a series of courses and information required in today's online business climate.

Who benefits?These kinds of efforts deserve credit for helping foster growth on a continent long wracked by poverty and conflict. However, initiatives that help foster increased online activity also eventually benefit Internet companies like Alphabet and Facebook.

In this case, Alphabet taking steps to foster greater online activity, particularly business activity, can also be seen as the company making an investment in its own growth in the region. Alphabet still generates the bulk of its revenue from online advertising, either through its own search engine and online products, or its third-party ad network.

Alphabet and Facebook need businesses to come online in order to be in a position to spend money on either of their advertising platforms. In this sense, Alphabet's job-training program should be viewed as both a charitable endeavor, and a planting of the seed for its future growth in the space.

Facebook Internet-beaming drone. Source: Internet.org.

Similarly, Alphabet's and Facebook's highly publicized efforts to increase Internet availability around the world should be viewed as simultaneously philanthropic and commercial. Earlier this year, news of Facebook's long-term goal to reach 5 billion users online by 2030 became public. However, with only 3.2 billion people online today, Facebook will need to leverage new technologies to bring greater numbers of people online.

Both Facebook and Alphabet have experimented with various aerial approaches to beam wireless Internet across large areas. Facebook's efforts range from high-altitude drones to geosynchronous satellites as part of its Internet.org initiative. Alphabet appears more interested in either helium-filled balloons,or ground-based Internet beaming stations.

Helping to bring more of the world's population online is a laudable goal, and one that will enhance quality of life for many people. In that sense, Facebook and Alphabet indeed deserve credit. However, not to belabor the point, bringing more people online also creates more potential users and customers for each company. Facebook and Alphabet thenbecome the eventual beneficiaries of their altruism, a fact that's always worth remembering when these kinds of stories arise.

The article Alphabet's African Training Program Is More Than Charity originally appeared on Fool.com.

Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fools board of directors. Andrew Tonner has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), and Facebook. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Image source: Illumina Inc.

After the closing bell yesterday, Illumina's management surprised investors with lackluster preliminary first-quarter sales that caused shares in the gene sequencing giant to plummet. With shares deeply discounted from yesterday's prices, is now the time to add this growth stock to portfolios?

First, a bit of backgroundIllumina's gene sequencing machines are used globally by researchers to peer into DNA, and resulting genetic discoveries are ushering in next-generation medicine that is more personalized than ever before.

There are over 7,500 of Illumina's gene sequencing machines installed throughout the world (roughly 90% of DNA data is produced by Illumina machines), and sales of Illumina's systems -- and the consumables used to run them -- totaled $2.22 billion in 2015, up 19% from 2014.

Although Illumina isn't the only competitor in the space -- Thermo Fisher and Pacific Biosciences are among its competitors -- Illumina is by far the industry Goliath.

Growing painsAs you can see in the following chart, Illumina's revenue path has been mostly, but not entirely, a straight line higher.That's an important thing for investors to remember, because stock prices typically track sales and profit growth, and as such, they don't move higher in an entirely straight line either.

ILMN Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts.

Given that backdrop, it's certainly possible Illumina's struggles in Q1, which include top-line sales that were about 4% shy of industry watchers' projections, are simply another blip on the way to greater long-term growth.

However, for that to be the case, Illumina is going to have to find a way to outmaneuver competitors eager to chip away at its market dominance.

For example, Pacific Biosciences released its "Sequel" next-generation machine last fall, and that machine produces long-read data that may be particularly useful in researching next-generation medicine, such as cancer drugs. Roche Holdings has an arrangement with Pacific Biosciences that allows it to rebrand and sell the Sequel to its in-vitro diagnostic customers globally, and that could negatively impact demand for Illumina'sMiSeqDx machine at some point.

Similarly, the U.K. based Oxford Nanoporeis also attempting to knock Illumina off its perch with an entirely new technology for sequencing. In 2014, Oxford Nanopore rolled out a handheld minION device that's the first and only nanopore sequencer on the market. This machine provides on-the-go genetic sequencing using next-generation technology that could ultimately be faster and cheaper than the technology used by Illumina. The minION doesn't compete with any specific Illumina machines itself, but Oxford Nanopore's plans include incorporating that nanopore technology into its PromethION, a much larger system that could threaten Illumina's top-of-the-line sequencers in future. Illumina recently filed suit against Oxford Nanopore, claiming it's infringing on Illumina's patents, so it's unclear how this battle may shake out.

Image source: Oxford Nanopore.

Finally, Thermo Fisher's ION S5 is a machine designed for targeted sequencing, which can be very useful in clinical settings. ION S5's features and pricing arguably match up favorably to Illumina's MiSeq, and therefore, Illumina could face some demand headwinds in the next-generation sequencing market from them as well.

For its part, Illumina launched the miniSeq earlier this year. The miniSeq is a $50,000 machine that opens up the gene sequencing market to researchers of just about any size. Ultimately, the miniSeq could expand demand for higher-margin consumables, and that's important, but the big bread and butter money in this industry still comes from the mid-size to large market, and that's where Illumina faces the greatest risk.

Looking forwardPacific Biosciences is a small player with only 160 installed systems globally to its name, so it's unclear whether or not its Sequel is making significant headway against Illumina. Pacific Biosciences reports its first-quarter financials on April 21, so investors will want to read through their results to see if there are any clues regarding Pacific Biosciences' market share.Similarly, Oxford Nanopore and Thermo Fisher don't appear to be major threats now, either.

Assuming competitors aren't to blame, then the big question facing investors is what's behind sluggish sales in Europe? In its conference call yesterday, Illumina attributed its lackluster first-quarter performance to a slowdown there, and for now, we're left guessing what's behind that drop-off. The company's still growing at a mid-teen pace in Asia and the Americas, so its not clear why Europe would be the exception. Perhaps the slowing is due to delays in projects, such as Genomics England, a massive attempt to sequence the genes of 100,000 people there. Or, maybe it's simply a hangover from Europe's ongoing economic uncertainty.

Either way, Illumina's CEO Jay Flatley didn't sound impressed on the company's conference call yesterday. In that call, Flatley said, "We continue to believe that the market potential for next-generation sequencing in Europe is far greater than this outlook suggests and are clearly disappointed by this projection." That disappointment prompted Flatley to reorganize the European team, including relocating one of the company's top sales leaders to the region.

Nevertheless, Europe's slowdown led management to cut their full-year growth revenue target to 12% from 16%, and absent proof that Flatley's restructuring is paying off with a European recovery, there's no guarantee he won't be forced to cut his outlook again at some point.

Do the competitive threats and European uncertainty make Illumina too risky to buy right now? Not necessarily. Clearly, investors need more insight into why Europe's growth is slowing, but assuming it's not related to competitors, there's enough to like about Illumina to think a sell-off could be temporary. After all, Illumina remains the market share leader in a lucrative and fast-growing industry, and given Illumina's well established leadership position and its R&D depth, picking up its shares when they're trading on sale could be a savvy long-term decision.

The article Are Illumina's Shares Worth Buying on This Drop? originally appeared on Fool.com.

Todd Campbell has no position in any stocks mentioned. Todd owns E.B. Capital Markets, LLC. E.B. Capital's clients may have positions in the companies mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Illumina. The Motley Fool recommends Pacific Biosciences of California. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Much of the news surrounding Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) involves its myriad lawsuits and the negative impact they've had on its financial results. But in spite of the company's legal wranglings with longtime smartphone customer Apple and others, the stock has performed admirably.

Unlike Qualcomm, which gets more than its fair share of press, Micron (NASDAQ: MU) and its data storage, memory, and solid state drive (SSD) solutions seems to fly under many an investor's radar. But for investors in search of growth, Micron warrants serious consideration.

So which stock is the better buy?

The case for Qualcomm

Despite paying out a whopping $2.65 billion in legal settlements last fiscal year and missing out on significant licensing revenue, Qualcomm's $22.3 billion in sales was a mere 5% decline compared to 2016. Not bad, considering the company is losing an estimated $500 million a quarter from its dispute with Apple.

Even with the legal snafus with BlackBerry, South Korea, and Taiwan behind it, Qualcomm's all-important, and highly profitable, licensing unit is taking a hit. Last quarter's $1.2 billion in licensing revenue and $829 million in earnings before taxes (EBT) marked 36% and 48% declines, respectively.

But all is not lost for Qualcomm: Its smartphone unit is performing admirably. QCT, Qualcomm's smartphone division, generated $4.65 billion in revenue last quarter, or a 13% improvement from a year ago. The QCT unit is also becoming significantly more profitable, with EBT soaring 42% to $973 million in fiscal 2017's fourth quarter.

Qualcomm's strong 3.5% dividend yield should make the company's ongoing shift to 5G, Internet of Things, mobile computing, and networking a bit easier to tolerate. The icing on the cake: Each of the burgeoning markets Qualcomm is targeting carries significant growth opportunities. It will take some time for the effects of the lawsuits to abate, but counting Qualcomm out because of its legal issues would be a mistake.

The case for Micron

As stellar as Micron's performance was last year -- the stock nearly doubled in value -- and as phenomenal as its fiscal 2018 first quarter was, shares remains a bargain. Micron trades at 6.6 times trailing earnings, below its peer average of 6.9, and at just 4.5 times projected earnings.

Micron is hardly the new kid on the block, but last quarter's 71% jump in revenue to $6.8 billion was reminiscent of a start-up in hyper-growth mode. Micron's memory and storage solutions are ideally suited to today's fast-growing cloud data centers, IoT "gadgets," and mobile-computing markets, and it shows.

In addition to notching solid top-line growth, Micron was able to keep a handle on expenses, which in turn resulted in a skyrocketing bottom line. Last quarter's $2.19 in per-share earnings obliterated fiscal 2017's first-quarter $0.16 EPS. Even after redeeming $2.25 billion in secured notes in the quarter, Micron still boasts $6.17 billion in ready cash on its balance sheet.

A strong pricing environment for Micron's memory solutions was reflected in its gross margin as a percentage of sales. Margins more than doubled to 55.1%, compared to last year's 25.5%. The combination of flat expenses and higher margins lifted Micron's operating income to $3.1 billion from last year's meager $359 million.

And the better buy is...

While I don't buy into the notion that Qualcomm's legal troubles warrant shunning its stock -- at least for investors with a long-term perspective -- Micron's performance can't be denied. Micron's mind-boggling comparables aren't the result of one-time gains or supplied merely by a big contract or two.

The memory solutions specialist may fly under many an investor's radar, but that actually works is a positive for investors in search of growth. Thanks to having the right solutions, at the right time, and a nearly unmatched performance, Micron is the hands-down better buy over Qualcomm.

10 stocks we like better than QualcommWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*

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Tim Brugger has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Apple. The Motley Fool owns shares of Qualcomm and has the following options: long January 2020 $150 calls on Apple and short January 2020 $155 calls on Apple. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
In the desert and out, Apache sales are heating up. Image source: Boeing.

Last month, Boeing won big when the U.S. Army placed an order for $896.9 million worth of CH-47F Chinook cargo helicopters. Last week, Boeing stock scored yet another win -- and once again, it was the U.S. Army opening its checkbook for Boeing.

The newsIn a major win for the Chicago aerospace giant, the U.S. Pentagon has asked Boeing to supply it with 117 remanufactured AH-64E Apache attack helicopters. "Remanufactured" is Pentagon-speak for "upgraded." In the context of Apaches, it generally refers either to AH-64E models that have been simply refurbished, or to older-model Apaches (-64As, Bs, Cs, or Ds) that have been upgraded to the -64E configuration.

This -64E configuration is currently the most modern Apache variant. Like the -64D before it, it includes the modern Longbow radar system, and features powerful new T700-GE-701D engines from General Electric, improvements in digital connectivity (including the ability to command and control unmanned aerial vehicles), and new composite rotor blades, which increase the helo's speed, climb rate, and payload.

Follow the moneyBoeing's new Apache contract, announced in the Pentagon's daily summary of contract awards on April 7, is actually a supplemental contract building on an earlier Apache production contract originally awarded to Boeing back in April 2014 -- a contract that was initially valued at only $103.8 million. Last week's award, however, vastly outweighs the size of the contract initially awarded to Boeing, adding $922.6 million in new funds to the Army's order.

In fact, when you factor in previous additions to the original contract -- including a $591.2 million order for 35 AH-64E Apache newbuilds placed in February 2015, the original contract has now swelled more than 15 times in size -- in just two years.

Boeing Stock Market capitalization $86.9 billion Revenue $96.1 billion Net profit $5.2 billion

DATA SOURCE: YAHOO! FINANCE.

How much is this contract worth to Boeing? Well, let's consider.

Boeing's Military Aircraft division builds the Apache. According to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, this is Boeing's second-largest business, and took in $13.5 billion in revenue last year -- 14% of companywide revenue. It's also one of Boeing's more profitable divisions, earning pre-tax profit margins of 9.8%.

Thus, even if we assume that General Electric will ultimately receive part of the funds under this contract as the engine subcontractor, the likely profit for Boeing across the two years this contract has been growing still works out to more than $158 million (on more than $1.6 billion in total revenue). Last week's award alone should contribute more than $90 million of that profit, or about $0.14 per share.Should you buy Boeing stock?Within the big bucket of $5.2 billion that is Boeing's annual profit ($7.44 per share), a mere $90 million won't make much of a splash. Big as it is, even this contract is not in and of itself a reason to buy Boeing. First, you need to take a look at the valuation of Boeing stock as a whole.

Boeing Stock Price-to-earnings ratio 17.6 Price-to-free cash flow 12.6 Price-to-sales 0.9 Projected 5-year growth rate 10% Dividend yield 3.3%

DATA SOURCES: YAHOO! FINANCE, S&P GLOBAL MARKET INTELLIGENCE.

Valued on its price-to-earnings (P/E) divided by growth, Boeing boasts a PEG ratio of 1.8, which is right in line with the rest of the S&P 500 and suggests that at the very worst, Boeing stock is not frightfully expensive. The stock has also dropped 0.6 P/E points over the past month, so relatively speaking, it's cheaper than it once was.

At the same time, Boeing's price-to-free cash flow ratio, when divided by its growth rate and dividend yield (EV/FCF/growth), works out to less than 1.0. Boeing stock also sells for less than its price-to-sales ratio, and defense stocks ordinarily cost about the equivalent of sales. Both these facts suggest to me that Boeing stock is currently undervalued.

Long story short, it's not often you see this nice a price on the world's premier aerospace company. I can think of worse times to buy Boeing stock.

The article Boeing Stock Lands Nearly $1 Billion in Apache Attack Helicopter Contracts originally appeared on Fool.com.

Rich Smith does not own shares of, nor is he short, any company named above. You can find him onMotley Fool CAPS, publicly pontificating under the handle TMFDitty, where he's currently ranked No. 283 out of more than 75,000 rated members. Follow him on Facebook for the latest in defense news.The Motley Fool owns shares of General Electric Company. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Wells Fargo Tower in downtown Portland, Oregon. Image source: Barry Caruth via Flickr.

A look at Wells Fargo's historical profitability reveals why it's long been considered a "widows and orphans" stock -- i.e., one that's appropriate for even the most conservative of investment scenarios.

One of the great things about Wells Fargo is that it doesn't hide from its past. It makes available on its website every annual report that it's issued since 1967. Its competitors, meanwhile, offer previous annual reports dating back to 1998 at best, and more commonly for only the past decade or so.

Unlike other banks, there is no incentive for Wells Fargo to hide its historical performance. If anything, the California-based bank has every reason to feature it prominently. As you can see in the chart below, which contains profitability data gleaned from these reports, Wells Fargo hasn't lost money on an annual basis for at least half a century.

Data source: Wells Fargo annual reports: 1967-2015.

It's true that Wells Fargo has experienced troubles along the way. In 1987, for example, its return on equity dropped from over 11% the year before down to less than 3%. To a large extent, however, that drop was voluntary, stemming from Wells Fargo's notoriously conservative approach to loan loss provisions.

Thanks to souring loans made to governments throughout Latin America, Wells Fargo nearly tripled its provisions in 1987. Because these are the functional equivalent of an expense on the income statement, the decision to set aside so much money in anticipation of future loan losses decreased Wells Fargo's net income that year by more than 90% compared to 1986.

Most importantly, by setting aside so much in 1987, Wells Fargo positioned itself to earn record profits the two following years, as it could be less aggressive insofar as provisioning was concerned. In 1989, for example, it recorded a smaller provision than it did in 1985 despite nearly doubling in size in the intervening years.

This sequence of events explains why the two most notable dips in Wells Fargo's profitability -- in 1987 and 1991 -- were followed immediately by meaningfully higher profits. It also explains why Warren Buffett was so eager to buy shares of Wells Fargo in 1990 after investors dumped its stock out of fear of a commercial real estate crisis in its home state of California.

"Our purchases of Wells Fargo in 1990 were helped by a chaotic market in bank stocks," Buffett wrote in his shareholder letter that year. "Aided by [investors'] flight from bank stocks, we purchased our 10% interest in Wells Fargo for $290 million, less than five times after-tax earnings, and less than three times pre-tax earnings."

It would be an understatement to say that Buffett's bet on Wells Fargo has paid off. The holding is currently valued at $23 billion and generates dividend income of roughly $720 million a year.

Why has Well Fargo done so well? Not only has it avoided recording an annual loss for the past 50 years, which is a notable accomplishment given the multitude of financial and banking crises over this stretch, but it's also consistently generated a respectable 12.8% average return on equity since 1966. It's these two reasons, in turn, that make Wells Fargo one of the safest and most lucrative bank stocks to own even today.

The article Here's Why Wells Fargo Is a "Widows and Orphans" Stock originally appeared on Fool.com.

John Maxfield owns shares of Wells Fargo. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Wells Fargo. The Motley Fool has the following options: short May 2016 $52 puts on Wells Fargo. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Image source: Abiomed.

Over the past year, Abiomed stock has outperformed theiShares Global Healthcare ETF by a mile, and I'm sure Blackrockregrets not adding it to the ETF's holdings.Rapidly expanding sales, coupled with plenty of room to grow, will do that for a stock -- even if the market as a whole isn't thrilled with the sector it's in.

During Abiomed's third quarter, which ended Dec. 31, U.S. patient utilization of Abiomed's tiny heart pumps soared 45% over the same period the previous year.However, with a stock price around 34 times trailing earnings, the company needs to continue growing at a terrific pace to justify such a high multiple. Part of Abiomed stock's jumpiness can be explained by the recent acquisition of its main rival, Thoratec, by St. Jude Medical , a cardiovascular device heavyweight.

In the medical-device ocean, Abiomed is a minnow among sharks. St. Jude isn't a Medtronic-sizedgreat white, but it's large enough that investors should be concerned. Allow me a few minutes to outline the threat St. Jude poses to Abiomed, and hopefully you won't be needing one of their devices if the stock flutters again.

Key differencesAlthough both Thoratec and Abiomed build heart pumps, there's a key difference in their approach. Thoratec has traditionally been a designer of external pumps built for long-term use.

HeartMate PHP source: St. Jude Medical.

The HeartMate PHP was Thoratec's, now St. Jude's, first pump designed to be inserted into the heart by sliding it through a major artery in the leg or chest, a procedure known as percutaneous insertion. Last July, the HeartMate PHP earned a CE mark, but it has yet to gain approval from the FDA.

Abiomed, on the other hand, was built around percutaneous, catheter-based heart pumps. Until recently its devices were given 501(k) clearance, a status reserved for class 2 medical devices such as condoms, syringes, and sutures. You're not the only one who thinks that's a bit bizarre, but Abiomed's devices had been used in U.S. hospitals for years under this "clearance" that didn't allow the company to promote the devices as "FDA approved" until recently.

In 2015, Abiomed's Impella 2.5 was the company's, and the country's, firstpump to win the "premarket approval" classification reserved for high-risk devices.The first approval was specific to use during "percutaneous coronary intervention procedures" more commonly known as angioplasty.

What to look out forAfter an FDA panel recommended allpercutaneous heart pumps follow themore stringent premarket approval protocol in 2012, Thoratec, now St. Jude, found itself in a bit of a pickle.The premarket approval process requires clinical trials. Since the only percutaneous pump with such approval was Abiomed's Impella 2.5, it's in a head-to-head study with the HeartMate PHP.

The primary outcomes to determine non-inferiority are straightforward, but investigators will measure a handful of secondary outcomes that could be spun in a way to make Abiomed's products seem inferior. The HeartMate PHP is designed to generate blood flow of 4 to 5 liters per minute.The Impella 2.5, as its name implies, generates blood flow up to 2.5 liters per minute.

Reasons to stay calmIf St. Jude puts some spin on the trial pointing to HeartMate PHP's superior flow, don't sweat it. The FDA recently gave premarket approval to Abiomed's 5 liter-per-minute Impella 5.0 and three other pumps for treatment of ongoing cardiogenic shock -- basically whenever the heart isn't pumping enough blood, typically following heart attacks.

More importantly, the FDA did so without requiring big clinical trials,or an advisory committee meeting.In a nutshell, the FDA already has tons of data for most of Abiomed's heart pumps, and they're clear.

Reasons to get excitedSeveral years ago, Abiomed found itself accused of improperly marketing the Impella 2.5.Now it can actually advertise its products as "FDA Approved" for a population it's just beginning to tap into.

Impella 2.5. Source: Abiomed,

In the past, Abiomed has been extremely cagey about how often its devices are used to treat cardiogenic shock, but some analysts estimate the indication comprised about two-fifths of recent Impella sales.

If St. Jude wins premarket approval for its HeartMate PHP, tiny Abiomed will have difficulty battling the giant in thepercutaneous coronary intervention procedure space. So far, Abiomed's products are used in roughly 5% of this 120,000-patient population. Gaining more ground if St. Jude wins approval for the HeartMate PHP could be difficult.

These aren't consumer goods. Be careful not to underestimate the valuable relationships St. Jude has built over the years with U.S. healthcare providers and their purchasing departments.

The good news is that for the moment, Abiomed is the only company able to freely market four pumps to roughly 100,000 patients who suffer cardiogenic shock in the U.S. each year. Its penetration of this space is estimated at roughly 5%, giving it plenty of room to grow.

The faster, the better -- St. Jude's $3.4 billion acquisition of Thoratec tells me the sharks smell blood in the water.

The article How Big Is the St. Jude Medical Threat to Abiomed, Inc. Stock? originally appeared on Fool.com.

Cory Renauer owns shares of Medtronic. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Medtronic. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Image source: Transocean.

What: Crude oil prices jumped 3% today, which fueled a big rally in oil stocks. Several were up by double digits, including Transocean , ENSCO , EP Energy , Noble , and Seadrill Partners .

RIG Price data by YCharts.

So what: Crude oil was driven higher by an oil workers' strike in Kuwait. The strike, which is now in its third day, has caused roughly 1.5 million barrels per day of production in that country to go offline. That's more than half of its daily output and roughly the amount of oversupply currently in the oil market.

Higher crude prices always seem to provide a lift to oil stocks, even if the reason behind crude's move is unrelated. Today, for example, the bulk of the biggest movers are offshore drillers Transocean, ENSCO, Noble, and Seadrill Partners, which don't see the immediate boost from rising oil prices that a producer like EP Energy would. Instead, these companies need crude to move meaningfully higher -- think $75 a barrel or more -- before producers will start pouring more money into new offshore wells, which would enable offshore drilling contractors to put some of their idle rigs back to work. That said, crude will likely only go that high once the oil market is back in balance due to improving market fundamentals, not because of a temporary supply issue such as the one caused by striking workers in Kuwait.

Now what: While the oil workers' strike in Kuwait is providing a boost to both crude oil and oil stocks today, it's likely a short-lived one. Instead, offshore drillers need to see supply and demand rebalance naturally in order to drive the oil price high enough to create the need for new offshore developments. We're still at least a year away from that happening, which suggests that there's still a lot of volatility and uncertainty ahead for these oil stocks.

The article Kuwait Jump-Starts Oil Prices, Sends Oil Stocks Soaring (RIG, ESV, EPE, NE, SDLP) originally appeared on Fool.com.

Matt DiLallo has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
AeroVironment is known for its drones -- like this RQ-11B Raven, immortalized in pseudo-WWII propaganda poster form. Image source: AeroVironment.

For nearly a quarter-century, Tim Conver has helmed drones and battery chargers conglomerate AeroVironment , but no more. On May 1, Conver will cede the CEO spot to current company Chief Operating Officer Wahid Nawabi.

What will this mean for the company and its investors?

We're huge in small airplanesWhile it's still the biggest name in small drones, AeroVironment's stock has come upon hard times lately. Last year, revenue at the company grew less than 3%, and profits plunged precipitously, falling nearly 80% to less than $3 million. Sales for the past 12 months remain 18% below their full-year peak, reached in 2012.

While you might assume that owes primarily to the decreased tempo of combat operations in Afghanistan (and consequent decreased demand for military drones), in fact, both sides of AeroVironment's business are experiencing a slowdown. According to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, revenues from AeroVironment's flagship unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) division are down 19%. Revenue from the company's less-known efficient energy systems division (EES), though, are down 25% from the 2012 peak.

What's next?Speaking of EES, new AeroVironment CEO Wahid Nawabi hails from the "efficient energy" side of AeroVironment, having joined the company as senior VP for that division after being hired away from privately held fuel cell manufacturer Altergy Systems in 2011. In its press release describing the transition, AV head Conver (who will remain chairman even after vacating the CEO's chair) called Nawabi "an outstanding and proven leader" and one ready "to lead the next phase of AeroVironment's growth."

Nawabi says he sees growth opportunities in at least four areas, including unmanned aircraft systems for the military, tactical missile systems (kamikaze UAVs), UAVs for the civilian industry, and also in his own original department -- electric vehicle charging.

Will this growth materialize? While AeroVironment's EES division continues to struggle, UAS has shown at least some signs of life, growing sales year over year in each of the final quarters of last year. Work ongoing at the Federal Aviation Administration to expand the areas in which commercial drones can operate in the U.S. offers the prospect of further growth there. Meanwhile, Nawabi inherits a company amply supplied with cash (more than $200 million in the bank), free of debt, and at least marginally profitable.

In short, he's got all the tools that "an outstanding leader" should require to make a success of the venture. All that remains is to make use of them.

The article Leadership Shake-Up at AeroVironment: Meet the New CEO originally appeared on Fool.com.

Rich Smithdoes not own shares of, nor is he short, any company named above. You can find him onMotley Fool CAPS, publicly pontificating under the handleTMFDitty, where he's currently ranked No. 315 out of more than 75,000 rated members.The Motley Fool recommends AeroVironment. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
As investors digest the implications of Netflix first-quarter results, here's a look at some critical quotes from the earnings call. Often overlooked by investors, the earnings call offers a closer look at important narratives for the company, including how management views its international opportunity, why its guidance for international members was lower than expected, and how Netflix is different from Amazon's Prime Video.

Image source: Netflix.

It's going to take time to realize international opportunityLooking forward to international growth, Netlix CEO Reed Hastings explained that while it has expanded to international markets these new markets will need to be localized before the company can fully tap into these markets' potential.

Hastings went on to explain that it's going to take some time to beef up its international offering.

Recent international growth wasn't normal Even after Hastings' note about how early the company is in the process of building up its offering in international markets, analysts continued to field Netflix management about the company's prospects for international growth. It's no surprise this was a common theme throughout the call, as the company's guidance for net international member additions for Q2 was much lower than expected.

Image source: Netflix.

The reason for the disconnect between what analysts were expecting Netflix to guide for and the company's actual guidance boils down to tough comparisons due to the company's recent international expansions.

Netflix CFO David Wells said it best:

The company guided for 2 million net member additions in international markets in Q2. This figure was more than a million lower than most analysts' estimates -- and lower than any quarter's international net additions in 2015.

Amazon's stand-alone option for Prime Video service is no surprise When asked about what Hastings thought of Amazon's decision over the weekend to offer a stand-alone subscription option to Prime Video, Hastings noted the move only highlights the natural evolution to Internet TV that Netflix is so bullish on.

How Netflix differs from Amazon's Prime VideoAfter being asked about what Hastings thought of Amazon's reported talks with programmers to offer linear channels as part of Prime Video, in addition to its Netflix-style offering of originals, on-demand content, older shows, etc., the CEO promptly and succinctly reminded investors exactly what Netflix is aiming to do -- and how it differs.

First, he explained that the company's huge emphasis on original content very much because of its aim to produce as much global content as possible -- whether its global because its simply cross-culturally appealing, in Spanish, or completely localized.

Image source: Netflix.

"And that's very different from carrying other people's single-nation networks. So, this is just a very different business."

But after explaining why he strongly supports heavy investment in original content in lieu of reliance on existing programming from linear TV, he boiled Netflix' simplified value proposition into as few words as possible:

"We know what we want to be, which is a great global producer and distributor of content," he explained. "And other people will do other things. And that's fine. They may be very successful."

Netflix' first-quarter earnings interview was full of interesting information for investors. Investors can find a copy of the call at Netflix' investor relations page on its website.

The article Netflix, Inc.'s Q1 Earnings Call: Must-Read Quotes originally appeared on Fool.com.

Daniel Sparks has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Amazon.com and Netflix. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
GM Recalls 1M Trucks on Defect Impacting Seatbelts

General Motors last week announced a recall of more than a million trucks due to an issue with a cable connecting the seatbelt. The cable reportedly can bend while drivers are in the seat and eventually cause the belts to loosen, reports GM; but it said no one has been hurt from this defect.

Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks from 2014 and 2015, distributed in the US, Canada, the Middle East, and Latin America, are all affected. The company has reportedly warned dealers not to sell these vehicles until the cables are repaired, providing instruction on their replacement.

Relatively Mild Recall

According to the Associated Press, GM said it found the problem by analyzing warranty data. There have been no reports of crashes or injuries due to the cables, and the company says the problem occurs only rarely. It is most likely to affect businesses with trucks used by businesses in which drivers frequently enter and exit their vehicles, GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson said.

The company said that the recall costs will be covered by money in its warranty reserves and thus does not expect serious financial losses from the cable problem. GM has been hit with numerous lawsuits for injuries and deaths due to other defects and, as such, must be acutely aware of the risk involved in failing to act on any potential hazard as soon as it becomes aware.

An ignition-switch-related defect led to a series of lawsuits involving multiple claims ... so much so that GM created a fund to process and pay victims and their families. That defect impacted more than 2.5 million cars, and was a serious public relations and logistical nightmare for the company. In comparison, this latest cable issue involving no injuries seems quite mild.

Injured Due to a Defect?

If you have been injured due to a defective product, be it a GM vehicle or otherwise, speak to a lawyer. Many attorneys consult for free or a minimal fee and will be happy to discuss your case.

Related Resources:
Investing checklists can help you in many ways. They make it easier to avoid obvious mistakes, help you stick to your convictions, and provide a starting point for narrowing the massive market down do a handful of serious investment ideas.

Here are five important points to consider before buying a stock in the telecom industry. They are ordered from most to least important, to avoid wasting time on deeper analysis of a stock that struck out on an absolutely crucial requirement.

1. Does the business model make sense to you? This is easily the most important item on our list. Beyond a first pass/fail selector, the business model also becomes the lens through which you'll view the rest of this checklist.

For example, let's say that your portfolio is desperately thirsty for a growth story, with expanding prospects in the years ahead. You would immediately have to discard AT&T and Verizon , because they are stable giants with limited growth plans. T-Mobile US , on the other hand, gets to move on because it's a vital growth stock. Over the last 3 years, T-Mobile's revenues have doubled while Verizon's and AT&T's sales only increased by roughly 15% each:

VZ Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts

On the other hand, investors looking for stable dividend payers would reach the opposite conclusion. Verizon's dividend yield stands at 4.4% today, backed by $11.2 billion in trailing free cash flows. Ma Bell's 4.9% yield rests on annual cash flows of $15.9 billion. T-Mobile burned $1.3 billion of free cash over the last year, and doesn't pay a dividend at all.

All three stocks may have a place in your portfolio. But you do have to set the rules right up top -- and the companies have to have a real strategy in place to reach the goals you're hoping for.

Verizon is doubling down on its North American wireless network operations, having taken full control of that asset and selling off landline operations, AT&T looks for growth by acquisition, and is expanding into South America next. Do these plans make sense to you? Good, you can keep going. Otherwise, try another company.

T-Mobile calls itself the uncarrier, hoping to attract millions of wireless subscribers by blazing its own trail. In Magenta's eyes, established business practices were made to be broken. That strategy has been effective so far, but also costly. Are you OK with burning cash to build a larger operating platform for the future? If so, T-Mobile will pass this first test.

2. Is the company growing fast enough? Again, the answers to this question must fit the expectations you set at the first point.

Sure, T-Mobile is growing its revenues much faster than AT&T and Verizon. The Magenta network also grew its subscriber count from 33.3 million to 63.9 million over the same period -- a 90% increase. Meanwhile, Verizon boosted its subscriber count by 22% and Ma Bell's wireless business grew 20% larger.

So T-Mobile is soaring on that nifty Un-carrier strategy -- but are the numbers adding up fast enough?

Keep in mind that it's an expensive tactic, digging deep now to establish a large and stable platform for the long term. Along the way, T-Mobile has missed analyst targets on both the top and bottom lines many times. Is that good enough?

As for Verizon and AT&T, their torrential revenue flows may grow slower but are much more predictable. Sometimes, that's all you're looking for.

3. Can the company handle its debt load? Make no mistake -- every serious telecom comes with a hefty debt package.

T-Mobile's current debt stops at $29 billion. Accounting for cash and debt balances, the company's enterprise value stands 68% above the market cap.

Verizon holds $110 billion of debt papers, and AT&T's debt adds up to $130 billion. Both of these giants sport enterprise values roughly 50% above their plain old market caps.

There's no getting around some debt service when you're running a nationwide web of networking assets. This is true both for wireless and landline operations.

To put these loans into perspective, Verizon spent 12% of its earnings before income and taxes on interest payments in its most recently reported quarter. For AT&T, that ratio ran up to 15%. T-Mobile's debt is smaller, but so are the incoming profits. In this case, the ratio stopped at a hair-raising 58%.

That's another risk reading. If you're looking for stability, you need a low value here. For growth stocks like T-Mobile, a higher ratio may be acceptable -- but this step will give you a reminder of the go-for-broke stakes at this table.

4. Is management adapting to the changing telecom industry? Ten years ago, smartphones didn't exist. Ten years before that, it was all landlines, all the time. There's no telling what the telecom industry might look like in 2026, but you might want to make sure the company you're investing in is planning to be a part of that unknown future.

Strategies vary.

AT&T seems intent on buying its way into whatever comes next, including a splashy entrance into the satellite TV market via DirecTV.

Verizon doubled down on its own wireless network. Several nibbles at media subscriber markets have failed. It's unclear to me exactly how this company plans to stay relevant for the long haul.

T-Mobile is more than happy to follow swings in the market, to the point of often setting the industry's course. From no-contract voice plans to reimbursed cancellation fees and rollover data, we've seen plenty of new wireless features making their debut at T-Mobile before the others majors eventually follow suit.

So Big Red comes with a big, red flag here. AT&T's strategy may not be foolproof, but it shows a willingness to get things done. And T-Mobile passes this test with flying colors.

5. Is this stock worth the current price? Finally, none of this vetting matters if the stock is too expensive today.

From some popular angles, T-Mobile will come out looking terribly expensive. Share prices have nearly tripled in three years, leaving P/E ratios at a pricey 24 times forward earnings. AT&T and Verizon hover around 13 on this metric. Stop there, and the giants of the industry will look like the obvious choice.

But things change if you dig deeper.

T-Mobile's enterprise value sits at 7 times trailing EBITDA earnings, nestled right between its two larger rivals. And taking expected growth into account, Verizon and AT&T are nursing PEG ratios north of 2.6 while T-Mobile's stops at 1.0. As a reminder, values near 1 should indicate fair value through the lens of expected 5-year growth prospects, and higher figures are worse.

This brings us right back to square one. According to those PEG ratios, analysts generally agree that neither Verizon nor AT&T have earned their current price tags and should underperform the market over the next five years. T-Mobile, on the other hand, gets a passing grade. You may not agree with Wall Street's assumptions, but analyst reports are tailor-made for each stock and business model.

Next steps You should take the list itself as a starting point, tweaking it to suit your own skills and needs. "One size fits all" isn't a thing in investment circles. But with these five points in hand, you're at least ready to take a deeper dive into the telecom sector.

In this quick overview, I'd say that T-Mobile still looks like an interesting growth play. Verizon fell out on the fourth step, and AT&T's long-term value looks iffy in the end.

Do you agree? Disagree? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The article Quick 5-Point Checklist for Investing in Telecom Companies originally appeared on Fool.com.

Anders Bylund has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Verizon Communications. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but over the past few years, your smartphone data usage has been going up. Or, at least, everyone around you is using more data.

That's because for the most part we're watching videos on our phones, uploading pictures, and streaming music. The average North American smartphone user goes through about 2.5 GB of data each month right now, but that number will climb to 14 GB per month by 2020, according to Ericsson.

This trend worries wireless carriers. T-Mobile , Verizon Communications , and AT&T are all looking for new ways to offload some of that data usage from their cellular networks so they can increase capacity.

They think they've found a partial solution in what's called LTE Unlicensed, or LTE-U. Basically, LTE-U technology allows data to jump off of wireless LTE bands and onto unlicensed wireless bands. These bands are typically reserved for things like garage doors and baby monitors, but they're also used for more important connections like your home Wi-Fi.

And therein lies the conflict. T-Mobile and Verizon have been outspoken about the advantages of LTE-U and how it'll help the industry, while Microsoft and Alphabet's Google have said the technology interferes with Wi-Fi signals.

Verizon has conducted tests showing that LTE-U doesn't impede Wi-Fi, while Microsoft and Google have their own tests showing that it does.

Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has refused to give approval of LTE-U devices and services until it's been determined that the technology doesn't hurt WI-Fi communications.

It's still uncertain which way this will go Verizon's vice president of public policy, David Young, said last year, "Unlicensed spectrum is going to be an important part of a better mobile broadband experience for our customers."

T-Mobile thinks the same way, but its VP of government affairs, technology, and engineering policy, Steve Sharkey,told Fierce Wireless recently that "a continued delay is going to cause a product impact"for releasing LTE-U services and devices.

But while mobile data usage continues to creep up -- and networks could certainly function better with more capacity -- Verizon and T-Mobile may be making a bigger deal about this than they need to.

AT&T has said that another type of unlicensed spectrum called LAA (license-assisted access), could work to help offload network data as well. The carrier is focusing its attention on that technology, and has already begun tests of LAA.

T-Mobile and Verizon are looking into LAA as well. So while they both may be unhappy with how long the FCC is taking to approve LTE-U, it's not as if there aren't other options.

The fact is that neither T-Mobile's nor Verizon's network are going to collapse if LTE-U doesn't get approved any time soon. The carriers will need some unlicensed spectrum over the next few years -- and they'll likely get it -- but waiting a few extra months for approval isn't going to hurt their networks in the short term. It's much better for the FCC to ensure that Wi-Fi signals aren't inhibited by LTE-U instead of prematurely approving the technology.

The article T-Mobile Says Regulators Are Holding Back LTE-U: Here's Why originally appeared on Fool.com.

Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Chris Neiger has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), and Verizon Communications. The Motley Fool owns shares of Microsoft. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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The proposed merger between Energy Transfer Equity and Williams Companies is becoming one of the most fascinating boardroom dramas to hit the energy patch in the past few years. Despite what both companies say, neither seems too thrilled with their deal and have been searching high and low for a loophole to break their commitment. The latest attempt at a breakup stems from a tax issue after Energy Transfer's lawyers said that they might not be able to issue an opinion on taxes, which could impact the company's ability to close the deal.

The tax delayWhen Energy Transfer Equity and Williams Companies agreed to combine last fall, they decided on a cash-and-stock merger whereby Williams shareholders would receive $8 per share in cash with the rest of the $43.50 merger consideration being paid via shares of a new company called Energy Transfer Corporation. Unlike Energy Transfer Equity this new entity would not be an MLP, but instead would be a C-Corp like Williams Companies. Because of this structure, Energy Transfer noted in the press release announcing the deal that "the transaction is expected to be tax-free to Williams' stockholders, except with respect to any cash received."

However, in an SEC filing this week, Energy Transfer Equity revealed that it had yet to obtain a tax opinion for its proposed merger with Williams Companies from its tax lawyers. What the company needs is a 721 opinion, which would deem the deal to be tax free for Williams shareholders for the stock portion of the deal. As such, it is a potentially big deal breaker for Williams Companies' investors because they could be on the hook for a big tax bill if the completion of the merger is deemed to be a taxable event. That said, Williams disagrees with the opinion of Energy Transfer Equity's lawyers and doesn't think the deal will trigger any taxes for its investors.

Adding it to the listThis latest wrinkle in the deal is the first issue that has come up on the stock portion of the proposed transaction. Most of the issues prior to this have been on the cash portion of the deal, due primarily to the fact that Energy Transfer Equity will be borrowing an incremental $6 billion via a short-term bank loan to pay out the $8 per share in cash to Williams shareholders. It's debt that has the potential to sink both companies due to the oil market taking a turn for the worse since the deal's announcement. The debt has been called "mutually assured destruction" by Energy Transfer Equity's now former CFO, who was reportedly terminated for actively working to sabotage this deal.

It's the potential problems posed by the additional debt that led Energy Transfer Equity to issue Convertible Preferred Units to some of its investors in a private offering. In exchange those investors agreed to forgo their Energy Transfer Equity distributions for up to nine quarters so that the company could use the retained cash flow to whittle down its debt. However, it was an offering that Williams refused to sign off on, which is why it's nowsuing Energy Transfer Equity in order to reverse that exchange saying it gives favorable treatment to some investors, including Energy Transfers' CEO who was the recipient of half of the units. Not only that but, Energy Transfer had agreed not to "authorize the issuance of any other securities in respect of, in lieu of or in substitution for shares of its capital stock" as part of its merger agreement with Williams. That makes it a potential breach of the merger contract, which could be enough for Williams to terminate the deal if it wins in court.

Investor takeawayThe merger of Energy Transfer Equity and Williams Companies is looking less likely to close with each passing day. Both companies are searching high and low for the loophole that will get them out of the deal, with the market hoping they find a solution soon. It will be interesting to see if they do find a way out, or if they're forced to close a transaction that at the moment no one wants to see happen, at least under the current terms.

The article Taxes Throw New Wrinkle in Energy Transfer Equity LP's Merger Drama originally appeared on Fool.com.

Matt DiLallo has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Image Source: Pixabay.

Shares of American Water Works returned 16%, including dividends, in the first quarter of 2016 -- equivalent to a sizzling annualized return of nearly 64%.

This performance by the largest investor-owned water and wastewaterutility in the United States mops up that of the S&P 500, which returned 1.4%. It also leaves underwater the performances of the second- and third-largest publicly traded companies in the industry, Aqua America and American States Water , which returned 7.4% and negative 5.7%, respectively.

American Water Works also leads the pack over the longer term. For the five-year period, the company's 182% return bests American States Water's 157%, Aqua America's 99%, and the broader market's 73% returns.

Why has American Water Works stock been red-hot in 2016? And can its outperformance continue?

Data byYCharts.

American Water Works' businessAmerican Water Works provides water and wastewater services to an estimated 15 million people in 47 U.S. states and one Canadian province.It operates as a regulated utility in 16 states. The company also has a market-based business that primarily builds, operates, and maintains water and wastewater facilities for military bases, municipalities, industrial customers, and others.

The regulated business provides a predictable cash flow -- which the company uses to buy smaller players in the fragmented industry and to fund its reliable dividend -- while the market-based business provides an opportunity for organic growth.

Flight to safety in a rough marketAmerican Water Works stock's outperformance in the first quarter was largely due to investors' flight to safety amid a challenging market. While the broader market managed to eke out a slight gain in the quarter, the S&P 500 had been down as much as 10.5% year to date in mid-February. This caused many investors to seek safer investing harbors -- utility stocks in general were a major beneficiary.

This flight to less-volatile water utility stocks caused the valuations of almost all of these stocks to rise. American Water Works' price-to-earnings ratio increased 15.4% in the quarter.

Data by YCharts.

American Water Works' main advantages: size and geographic diversityWhile the Q1 stock price jump was due to a rising valuation, there are good reasons that some investors poured money into American Water Works' stock rather than the stocks of some of its peers. It has two primary advantages: industry-leading size and geographic diversity.

The whale in a sea of mainly minnowsAmerican Water Works has a market cap of $12.4 billion. This is more than twice the $5.5 billion market cap of Aqua America, and about nine times the $1.5 billion market cap of American States Water. This large size relative to others in the industry provides the company with the financial resources to grow its regulated business by acquiring smaller players in an extremely fragmented industry. It also allows the company to grow its market-based business, as municipalities that own their water systems are increasingly contracting out their operations. The company has a boatload of cash relative to its peers and a manageable debt load, especially in such a low-interest-rate environment.

The only nearly nationwide player in the industryAmerican Water Works is by far the most geographically diverse water utility. As mentioned above, it operates in 47 U.S. states and one Canadian province, and operates as a regulated utility in 16 of these states. Its two largest peers, Aqua America and American States Water, operate in eight and seven states, respectively, though the lion's share of American States' business is in one state, California, where it operates its only regulated business. One benefit of this geographic diversity is that it allows for greater operational efficiency. The company can often expand its operations without adding new management teams. Additionally, this diversity makes it less vulnerable to drier-than-usual weather or droughts, which can pose challenges to water utilities.

These two primary advantages should help the company continue to post superior revenue and earnings growth relative to its peers just as it did in 2015.

Data by YCharts.

American Water Works' dividend statsThe company's current payout ratio (dividends paid as percentage of net income) of 50.2% is the second-lowest among the eight water utilities that operate in the U.S. and have market caps of at least $300 million. Dividend ratios less than roughly 70% generally suggest that a company should be able to comfortably afford to pay its quarterly dividends.

Stocks shown are American Water Works (AWK), Aqua America (WTR), American States Water (AWR), California Water Service (CWT), SJW Corp. (SJW), Connecticut Water (CWTS), Middlesex Water (MSEX), and York Water (YORW). Data by YCharts.

American Water Works' conservative dividend policy is a plus for investors who are more concerned with long-term capital appreciation than current income. There are plenty of opportunities for the company to use its funds to expand its business. Investors whose top concern is current income, however, might want to look elsewhere. The company's current dividend yield of 1.9% is the lowest among our eight industry players.

A stock for the long termWater utility stocks are attractive investments because fresh water is an essential commodity. Moreover, supplies could decrease because of the Earth's long-term warming trend.

American Water Works is a top choice in the industry,largely because of its huge relative size and geographic diversity. The stock is best-suited for conservative investors whose primary concern is capital appreciation, as well as for the conservative portion of many investors' portfolios.

The article Why American Water Works Stock Returned a Whopping 16% in the 1st Quarter originally appeared on Fool.com.

Beth McKenna has no position in any stocks mentioned, though is now inexplicably thirsty. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Image source: Viacom.

Tuesday largely involved the stock market marking time, consolidating big gains from Monday's session as investors apparently resisted the temptation to take profits after the Dow climbed above the 18,000 mark yesterday for the first time in nine months. Among blue chip stocks, favorable earnings reports in the healthcare and health insurance space helped lift major market benchmarks, and solid performance in the oil market offset concerns from the technology sector about the ability of well-established tech giants to adapt to changing conditions in the industry. Even though most broad-based measures of the market rose, several stocks gave up ground. Among the worst performers were Viacom , MGIC Investment , and Rambus .

Viacom fell 8% after concerns grew about the company's ongoing negotiations with DISH Network to continue carrying Viacom channels like Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and MTV. The media giant said that DISH "has not engaged in a serious way to reach an agreement for Viacom's number-one family of cable networks," and Viacom cited 10 instances in which it alleged that DISH derailed negotiations through bringing issues to the public rather than having productive sessions between the two parties. The tension heightens the increasingly difficult situation that content providers face in negotiating with cable and satellite TV companies, given that both face competition from streaming-video service providers that could crush their respective business models. If a negotiation ever fails completely, then it will be a game-changer for the entire industry, and that could be bad news for both DISH and Viacom.

MGIC Investment dropped 9% in the wake of its first-quarter earnings report. The mortgage insurance provider saw its revenue and net income per share drop by nearly half, missing the consensus forecast among investors. CEO Patrick Sinks pointed to some of MGIC's more favorable trends, including "adding high quality new insurance, continu[ing] to experience positive credit trends, and maintain[ing] our traditionally low expense ratio." Nevertheless, overall new insurance written fell about 8% from year-ago levels, and although the percentage of loans delinquent fell by about a quarter, the percentage of insurance still in force from a year ago fell below the 80% mark. The more important question for long-term investors in MGIC is whether the housing market will sustain its recent health, because worsening conditions could put more financial strain on its insurance operations and create new problems for the company.

Finally, Rambus also declined 9%. The semiconductor technology provider reported its first-quarter results Monday afternoon, and even though revenue inched downward and net income dropped by three-quarters from year-ago levels, Rambus performed better than many investors had expected. However, Rambus said that it expects revenue of between $72 million and $77 million in the current quarter, and that was well below the nearly $79 million in sales that shareholders were hoping to see. Security technology development projects added some revenue for Rambus, but weakness in patent and technology royalty revenues could create an ongoing drag on the company's top line if Rambus can't find ways to keep growing its business and finding new customers for its software and licensing.

The article Why Viacom, MGIC Investment, and Rambus Slumped Today originally appeared on Fool.com.

Dan Caplinger has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Bernie Sanders is crying foul against the DNC and the Hillary Clinton camp. He is charging that the DNC is favoring Hillary Clinton when it comes to joint fundraising and violates a number of campaign laws.

Former 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee and former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman told the FOX Business Networks Neil Cavuto, while its more politics than law, Sen. Sanders is probably somewhat right.

Senator Sanders made a complaint in a letter to the Democratic National Committee. He hasnt, at least yet, filed any charges with the Federal Election Commission. From what I hear, people who are election law experts say that this happens a lot -- joint fundraising between a national committee and a particular candidate. Senator Sanders may think that its too cozy a relationship, he said.

He also discussed the debate over legislation that would allow Americans to sue Saudi Arabia for any alleged role officials played in 9/11.

This is really between a rock and hard place because the Saudis are really important allies of ours Somehow if the families of the victims of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are able to make their case back to somebody in Saudi Arabia then the Saudis ought to voluntarily create a fund to enable them to reimburse without waiving their rights.
Trump has maintained his frontrunner status of the Republican field since his announcement speech at Trump Tower all the way back in June, despite relentless attacks from both the Democratic and Republican establishments. Now hes back in New York poised for a commanding win in the New York Republican Primary on Tuesday. It is Trumps New York roots that have given him the chutzpah to command the lead, and perhaps capture the nomination, go on to win the presidency, and ultimately make America great again.

Many of Donald Trumps harshest critics have characterized him as rude, obnoxious, arrogant, dismissive, and at times uncivil. They question his ability to be presidential and are baffled at how a real estate mogul who never held political office could spark a revolution, winning decisive primaries in key states, rallying millions of workaday Americans behind him, and taking on both political establishments.

What his critics fail to realize is that Trump has tapped into a geyser of anger and frustration that has been years in the making and his ability to channel that anger can be traced directly back to his real estate roots.

He cut his teeth in the rough and tumble world of New York City real estate and his career has been publically chronicled by many ups and downs which put him on this solid path as a contender for Commander-in-Chief.

He turned an outer borough residential portfolio into a trophy building Manhattan portfolio which has included the Plaza Hotel and the General Motors building. Hes developed Hyatt hotels, Trump Tower, and renovated Wollman Rink in Central Park.

Deal-making in this town is known to be cutthroat and unforgiving. I can tell you from personal experience that its not for the faint of heart. Trump knows first-hand about clawing your way back when the chips are down.

In order to be a successful developer, dealmaker, and investor in the Manhattan real estate market you need to have solid instincts and guts, a stomach for taking on tremendous risk, and you need to be a world-class negotiator. Trump embodies all of these qualities but most importantly he expresses himself like a true New Yorker; forcefully and directly. This is one of the reasons I am supporting Trump.

For the first time, we have a candidate that is speaking to the American people not at them. Trump speaks his mind just as he did when dealing with some of the toughest unions in the real estate business. He has a rough edge to him and is certainly far from a policy wonk.

For decades politicians on both sides of the aisle drove us deeper and deeper into debt, passed massive regulations, created crushing debt and made questionable trade deals. As Trump has argued; millions of manufacturing jobs have left the country and our borders have opened to illegal immigrants who in turn have taken jobs from American workers and have put intense strain on an already over-burdened middle class. This is the most important decision our country will make in a decade.

Trumps New York brashness  his refusal to be politically correct  is thus seen by many as uniquely qualifying him to accomplish the immense change we now require to set our country back on track. In other words, Trump is seen as the means by which to change the existing political order.

Decades down the road, this election could one day be seen as the beginning of a new political order.

Jason D. Meister is a Senior Director at real estate firm Ackman Ziff and is also Co-Chair, Trump New York State Campaign of 12th Congressional District.
Ah, cruising is the life. Youre practically waited on hand and foot. With all of the cool activities on board (IMAX, gambling, facials!) youre never bored; theres yummy food galore; and the booze is flowing. But before you leave port, here are a few pointers you should know to avoid getting sick or injured at sea.

RELATED: The 10 Most Slimming Vacations

Dont buy health insurance from the cruise line

When you book your trip you may be offered insurance. But its probably best to pass, said industry expert Ross Klein, PhD, who runs the site CruiseJunkie.com. While health insurance is certainly a good idea (a medevac can cost more than $100K), ideally you want your insurer to be independent of the cruise line to avoid a conflict of interest, he explains. Check with your own health insurance company to see what expenses are covered abroad. If you need extra coverage, consider short-term supplemental travel insurance. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers guidelines to help you select a good policy.

Dont go without getting your shots

The CDC urges cruisers to make sure theyre up to date on routine vaccines like measles/mumps/rubella, since youll be living in close quarters with crew and fellow passengers from countries where these diseases are more common. You should also look up each of the ship's destinations to check for health alerts, and any additional vaccine or medication recommendations.

Dont get too paranoid about the buffet

Self-serve meals might give you the heebie-jeebies, but you can trust that the food served on American cruise ships is safe to eat, said Sarah Krieger, MPH, RDN, a nutritionist who specializes in food safety issues. Dishes are held at the proper temperature and consistently monitored. But if youre worried, Krieger suggests sticking to food that is steaming hot, and skipping food that's at at room temp, and thus carries a higher risk of pathogens. And needless to say, if something looks bad, steer clear.

RELATED: 12 Germs That Cause Food Poisoning

But dont go crazy at the buffet either

The biggest buffet risk, says Krieger, is approaching it like a personal eating challenge: Food is everywhere on a cruise," she said, which makes it all too easy to overindulge and come back with extra bulges you didnt want. Kreigers tip: Try to strike a balance between food thats nutritious (veggies) and food that feeds your soul (ice cream!). For example, Krieger said, if you have Belgian waffles and bacon for breakfast, choose a Caprese salad for lunch, and a lean burger and glass of wine at dinner.

Dont eat too late at night

It never occurs to you to have a pizza snack after dinneruntil you get on a boat. Jimmy Minardi, a personal trainer on Long Island, New York, advises his clients to close the kitchen (so to speak) two hours after the sun goes down.

Late night eating is the kiss of death. Theres a lot of drinking involved on a cruise and the combination of food and booze basically turns you into a sloth, he said.

Besides, food digests better when youre moving aroundnot when youre trying to snooze on a heavy stomach.

RELATED: 5 Tips to Stay Fit While Traveling

Dont get your teeth whitened

Cruise ships often offer teeth whitening sessionsand they are not a good idea, said Clifton M. Carey, PhD, a professor at the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Sure, you want a sparkling vacay picture-worthy smile. But whitening on the high seas can entail serious risks. For one, its unlikely that a professional dentist will perform the procedure. And two, once a cruise ship is in international waters, they can use incredibly aggressive whitening ingredients on teeth, Carey said. This can destroy the protein structure of teeth and can cause a lot of pain.

Dont drink the water

Youve heard this before, but if youre in a developing country, tap water, fountain drinks, freshly squeezed juice, and any beverage with ice in it can make you ill if the water is contaminated.

As a foreign traveler personally, Ive been told that Americans are like newborn babiesvery fragile bodies when it comes to germs, Krieger said.

The water on the ship will be safe to drink, but Krieger recommends that when youre on land, you opt for the safest possible option: bottled sparkling water.

RELATED: A Running Vacation Rebooted My Spirit

Dont hire a personal trainer

Its smart to stay active on holiday, but dont go, er, overboard. Hiring a personal trainer on a ship is expensive, and fitness classes, from spin to TRX, also cost extra. Save your money, Minardi said.

There are plenty of things that are free that will keep you fit on vacation, Minardi said.

For example, there are stairs everywhere on cruise ships, so take a walk after every meal. And when you get off the boat, explore the port cities on foot. Plus: When you hire a trainer on a ship, you dont know his or experience level, Minardi pointed out. What's more, someone who sees you only once or twice wont have time to learn about your strengths and weaknesses, and a shoulder strain is not the kind of souvenir you want.

This article originally appeared on Health.com.
Imagine being told that your child would never give you a hug or say, I love you. Imagine that your child would never live independently. Many parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and other developmental disabilities face these realities every day. ASD is used to describe a group of developmental disorders which range in severity, symptoms and level of disability. These include autism, Aspergers syndrome, and other disorders which affect a childs ability to communicate and socialize.

April is Autism Awareness Month and provides an opportunity to highlight the importance of support for research, early intervention, timely diagnosis and appropriate treatment.

The national statistics are startling. One in 68 children in the United States is diagnosed with ASD. In addition, there are increased rates of intellectual disabilities, ADHD, learning disabilities and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. It is clear that the need to address our children's developmental health has reached a critical stage.

Signs and Symptoms

Many children with ASD will show developmental differences from a very young age. They may reach milestones such as sitting, crawling and walking, but differences can be seen in spoken language and social behaviors. There is also a great deal of variability in how each individual child acts. Some early warning signs include:

? Not making or keeping eye contact;

? Not responding to a parents smile or facial expressions;

? Not saying single words by 16 months of age;

? Not being soothed by human contact;

? Engaging in odd, repetitive mannerisms;

? Having difficulty with change;

? Sensitivity to sounds, light, texture, and smells.

Scope of the Problem

More children are being diagnosed with ASD than ever before. In the 1970s, Autism affected approximately 1 in every 10,000 children. In recent years, there has been increased research examining possible reasons for the rising rates of ASD, but much work remains to be done. The increased prevalence of these diagnoses is partly due to a better understanding and earlier identification of the symptoms. Parents who suspect that their child may have ASD should ask their pediatrician for a full assessment and, if necessary, a referral for early intervention.

Current Treatment

Though there is no medical cure for ASD, research shows that frequent treatment and well-rounded therapy is the most effective way to ensure success for children with ASD. The greatest success rates are reached through a combination of therapies that include applied behavioral analysis (ABA), speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and social skills training. ABA involves reinforcing positive behaviors and is one of the most clinically proven, evidenced-based interventions for children with ASD. For children with ASD, speech and language therapy addresses articulation, expressive communication, language delays, and swallowing/feeding issues and occupational therapy helps children with play, socialization, sensory issues, motor skills and oral functioning. However, it is important to work with a care provider to establish a treatment plan specifically for each child. There is no set formula for treating ASD as each child is unique and his or her needs vary by the way the individual level of functioning across the spectrum.

Hope for the Future

A diagnosis of ASD is often frightening and overwhelming for parents. It is difficult to learn that a child may have a lifelong developmental disability. But with early diagnosis and intervention, many children with ASD can make significant progress in their overall functioning. Many can be mainstreamed into a regular classroom at school and many of these children develop loving, caring and meaningful relationships with their parents, families and friends.

Public Awareness

Given the national prevalence rates, it is highly likely that most Americans will know or interact with a family impacted by ASD. Take time to learn more about ASD and the impact it can have on children and their families. Be understanding of situations that may cause a child with ASD to be emotional or challenged. For example, if you see a child having a temper tantrum in the grocery store, dont immediately assume the parents do not have control of the situation as many children with ASD get overstimulated in public situations. Children with autism can have a difficult time making friends, so encourage your child to be inclusive and accepting. Invite your friends child to participate in a play group or family outing and ask the family how best to have your child interact with him or her. And most of all, help raise awareness by advocating for access to services which are much needed by families. Many states have less than adequate services for children with ASD and many insurance companies do not provide the level of coverage needed.

When parents, extended families, healthcare providers, caregivers and lawmakers work together, great outcomes can be achieved that will undoubtedly have a meaningful impact on the future of children with autism.

Dr. Alan Kadish is President of Touro College and University System. Touros Nevada campus is home to the Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities which provides comprehensive services and resources for children, families, and other health care providers and promotes early detection of symptoms and intervention implementation.
Third-grader Marlee Park lost her hair after completing more than 40 weeks of chemotherapy, but she wont be the only student with a smooth scalp her classmates shaved their heads in solidarity.

Over 65 students and educators at Meridian Elementary School in Broomfield, Colo., participated on March 16, raising more than $25,000 for the St. Baldricks Foundation, a Monrovia, Calif.-based nonprofit that helps fund childhood cancer research, Fox31 Denver reported.

"I didn't want her to be left out. I did it just for her," student Noah Carrington, 9, told Fox31.

Parks best friend, Cameron McLaughlin, came up with the idea.

"When Cameron told Marlee she was thinking about shaving her head, Marlee got a huge smile on her face and said, 'We can be baldy besties together!'" Cheray McLaughlin, Cameron's mom, told TODAY.com.

Park was diagnosed about a year ago with alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare soft tissue cancer where cancer cells form in muscle tissue. In March, she learned the is in remission.

When McLaughlin had her head shaved, her best friend was there to support her.

"It's OK to cry," Marlee said, TODAY.com reported.
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Catherine Holm, of Long Island, N.Y., had picked out a dress and couldnt wait to fly to Puerto Rico for her 24-year-old son Marks wedding on Saturday, April 23. But 58-year-old Holms plans changed in March, when she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a cancer of the blood and bone marrow.

Holm spent three weeks in the bone marrow transplant unit at Stony Brook University Hospital, in Stony Brook, N.Y., where some of her nurses suggested an early ceremony at the hospital an arrangement that would allow Holm to see her baby boy get hitched while awaiting a bone marrow transplant.

The family all got on board, and Monday evening, Mark Jr. and his fiancee, Joanna, said their vows at the Stony Brook University Chapel. Afterward, they celebrated with a reception at a cafe in the hospital.

Holm was thankful to the hospital staff for the idea and their support.

"I'm overwhelmed that people would do things like this," Holm told NBC New York amid tears on Monday. "I'll never forget what they've done for me and my family."
Prosecutors in Luzerne County, Pa., dropped a slew of charges against Richard Pieri, including DUI and reckless endangerment, in March. But that's not good news for the former VA Medical Center nurse accused of downing four or five beers at a local casino and then assisting in an emergency appendectomy.

On Friday, federal prosecutors took up the case and charged Pieri, 59, with reckless endangerment, as the alleged incident took place in a federal facility, the Times Leader reports.

Pieri claims he forgot he was on call Feb. 4 as he swilled beer and played slots, the Washington Post reports. An affidavit has him admitting that he knew he shouldn't have been involved with the surgery, but didn't want someone else to get called in to cover for him.

So he allegedly drove drunk to the hospital and staggered inside. "Rick, are you drunk or something?" a co-worker asked as Pieri grew frustrated while trying to use the computer.

A physician's assistant says he smelled alcohol on someone in the operating room. Now Pieri faces up to two years in prison and a $5,000 fine for putting a patient "in danger of death or serious bodily harm," the Times-Tribune reports.

Pieri's estranged wife alleged in a restraining-order application last year that he abuses alcohol and that he has been abusive while drinking. In 1985, according to the Times Leader, Pieri was charged with killing a man in a hit-and-run accident.

More on the alleged incident here.

This article originally appeared on Newser: Feds Go After Nurse Accused of Being Drunk in OR

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Patients assigned a "nonurgent" status on arrival in the emergency room might still be sick enough to be hospitalized, a new study shows.

Patients deemed by triage nurses to be "nonurgent" often receive diagnostic services and procedures, and some are even admitted to critical care units, researchers found.

Triage was never intended to completely rule out severe illness, only to give patients an estimate of how long they may have to wait to see a doctor, the researchers note.

Dr. Renee Y. Hsia of the University of California, San Francisco and colleagues used a national survey of patient visits to the emergency department (E.D.) between 2009 and 2011, with triage scores assigned by a nurse when the patient arrived. The scores range from one to five, with one through three including immediate, emergency and urgent patients, and four and five being semi-urgent and nonurgent.

They used data on almost 60,000 observations of patients age 18 to 64 collected between 2009 and 2011, which represented 240 million E.D. visits. More than 90 percent had a score of one to four and were deemed "urgent" visits, while about eight percent had a score of five and were "nonurgent."

Almost half of nonurgent visits involved diagnostic scans, imaging or blood tests, and a third involved procedures like splinting or giving intravenous fluids. For urgent visits, about three-quarters involved diagnostics and half involved procedures.

About four of every 100 nonurgent visits resulted in hospital admission, as reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Backache, acute upper respiratory infections, soft-tissue inflammation, and acute sore throat were among the 10 most common diagnoses for both urgent and nonurgent patients.

"Triage is normally done at the very beginning of the visit, usually by a triage nurse," Hsia told Reuters Health by email. "Triaging patients is an extremely difficult task, since patients are what we (as providers) call 'undifferentiated,' since there has not been time to do a full history and physical, and nurses have limited information upon which to base their determination."

"We should not expect triage categorization to be perfect, and one of the goals of this paper is to show that, indeed, triage is not," Hsia said.

Many states have policies that patients with Medicaid insurance who present to the E.D. for "non-urgent" visits will be charged a co-payment, which may keep people from seeking needed care, even though the triage system is not perfect, she said.

"It is important that we do not blame the patient for going to the E.D. if there were no alternatives that were available in a timely manner," Hsia said.

"Our study cannot distinguish the reasons behind why we found such a high proportion of visits that received diagnostic services or procedures," she said.

Some of the procedures may not have needed to happen in an E.D. setting, but since the patients presented there, they were treated, Hsia added.
Last year's emergence of so-called "super gonorrhea" in Leeds hasn't ended in the UK city. The STD is now popping up in new British cities including London, and doctors are worried it may spread faster just as it becomes untreatable.

Because the STD is so good at fighting off antibiotics, treatment typically involves a combination of two drugsazithromycin and ceftriaxonebut resistance to azithromycin is spreading and doctors worry ceftriaxone will soon be next, reports the BBC.

The spread is a "further sign of the very real threat of antibiotic resistance to our ability to treat infections," says Public Health England, which has had only limited success in tracking down sexual partners of those diagnosed with super gonorrhea, reports the Independent. "The spread of high level azithromycin-resistant gonorrhea is a huge concern and it is essential that every effort is made to contain further spread," says Dr.

Elizabeth Carlin, president of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV. While the outbreak seems to have started among heterosexual couples, it is now infecting gay men as well.

Just last week Chancellor George Osborne declared resistance to antibiotics "an even greater threat to mankind than cancer" if there is no concerted global action. Caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae, gonorrhea spreads by unprotected sex, but can also pass from mother to child in utero.

In the past few years the infection rate in the UK has more than doubled, reports Vice, with only chlamydia higher up the list. Syphilis infections are up for the first time in years as well.

(A study says syphilis can't be blamed on Columbus.)

This article originally appeared on Newser: 'Super Gonorrhea' May Go Global, Become Untreatable

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The New York primary scrap between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over US policy toward Israel seems to some Americans like a man-bites-dog story.

How could Bernie Sanders--the first Jewish candidate for president! -- take the Palestinian side of the Arab-Israel dispute? And in New York, off all places, the Jewish metropolis that another progressive Democratic candidate, Jesse Jackson, once called Hymie Town.

Arent Democratic hopefuls supposed to court the Jews of New York by waving the Israeli flag? Since when did embracing the Palestinian cause become a vote getter?

Israelis are less surprised by Sanders. There is a whole party here, Meretz, dedicated to his dark view of Israel. In the last election, in 2015, it received roughly 4 percent of the Jewish vote.

If Bernie Sanders were running against Hillary Clinton in Israel, he would be lucky to get that much (so, in fact, would Meretz). But most Israelis see their local Bernies as annoying but harmless. As for the real Bernie, he is the subject of humor. His trust me I once lived here Israel shtick (What, fifty years ago, for two months?) and his Ive got family there bit (Nu, so why dont you ever come to visit) get laughs.

Nor are Israelis impressed by Sanders charge that their country used disproportional force in Gaza last summer. What does Bernie Sanders know about force? The only rockets he has seen overhead were at the Fourth of July picnic in Burlington.

No, if Bernie were running in Israel his main bloc of voters would be Arab-Israeli citizens, most of whom share his distaste for Zionism.

But, of course, Bernies not running in Israel. Hes running in New York, where his Jewish credentials wouldnt have become an issue if he hadnt chosen to make it one.

Why has he? It is likely that Sanders believes that Jewish young people have turned against Israel and that attacking the Jewish state is a slick move. If so, he has been conned. In every election for the past half century, the professional propagandists and politruks of the anti-Zionist Jewish left float this trend. This year, as always, the New York Times falls for it, and it gets picked up by its media satellites.

Now, being critical of Israel is a rite of passage for American Jewish students at elite colleges. It demonstrates sophistication and broadmindedness. There is a thrill to being so noble that you are against yourself. But this does not affect the majority of American Jewish kids, certainly not in its toxic anti-Israel form. And those who do join the blame-Israel-now crowd usually grow out of it as adults. That explains how the American Jewish community has managed, generation after generation, to remain on Israels side.

The great majority of the young Jews who support Bernie are not there because of his anti-Israel rhetoric. Most of them dont care enough about Israel to turn it into a voting issue. The Sanders campaign is an event to them, a happening. They (like their non-Jewish comrades) are all in favor of free college tuition, painless equality, pretend revolution and hooking up (as Gloria Steinham famously observed) with the rest of the cool kids.

Sanders is just an old guy whos throwing the party. If the price of admission is a vote and a cheer for Palestine, hey, why not?

But if I were Bernie I wouldnt count on a huge anti-Israel Jewish turnout.

The Jewish Democratic vote of New York, the 96 percent(I exaggerate but not by much) will go to Hillary for reasons that have nothing, and everything, to do with Zionism. Mostly she personifies New York Jewish valuesliberal capitalism, womens and gay rights, free trade and its benefits, upward mobility, domestic tranquility. But she is also a potential commander in chief who knows that the critics and cynics are a minority, that the great majority of New York Jews (and American Jews, and just plain Americans) want a commander-in-chief whose foreign policy includes an unapologetic embrace of the Jewish State of the 96 percent.
When it comes to pandering nobody does it better than Hillary Clinton  who is desperate to become the nations first black female president.

In her latest outreach to New York Citys black voters, Mrs. Clinton told hip-hop radio show hosts that she carries a bottle of hot sauce in her purse.

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It was an apparent homage to a lyric in Formation, Beyonces latest hit song. Or as Hot Sauce Hillary calls her, Bay-on-say. But Ill get to that little faux pas later.

I got hot sauce in my bag, swag, is how the song goes.

Mrs. Clintons revelation that she likes it a little spicy came as a surprise to the hosts of Power 105.1s Breakfast Club.

Heres a transcript of the conversation between Hot Sauce Hillary and the hosts of Breakfast Club on Power 105.1:

Angela: Whats something that you always carry with you?

Mrs. Clinton: Hot sauce

Well, it turns out that she really does like hot sauce  a lot.

The Clinton campaign confirmed to Time magazine that Mrs. Clinton enjoys an array of spicy foods  from chili flakes to jalapenos. To be fair her love affair with hot sauce goes back 20 years. Her current favorite is apparently something called Ninja Squirrel.

Regardless, her on-air admission was met with skepticism in the media.

It was a clear attempt to snag New Yorks black vote, TMZ opined.

I wouldve demanded that she produce the bottle  but thats probably why she refuses to come onto my radio program.

Continuing with the transcript:

Charlamagne Tha God: Hot sauce in my bag, swag.

Mrs. Clinton: Hot sauce.

Charlamagne Tha God: Now, I just want you to know people are going to see this and say, okay, shes pandering to black people.

Mrs. Clinton: Is it working?

No, it's not working. What in the name of Texas Pete is she thinking?

Last January, she was named the radio stations Donkey of the Day for being inauthentic and for pandering to black people, the Washington Post reports.

Charlamagne said Hot Sauce Hillary was trying to reach black voters in a Grandma trying to be hip kinda way.

Im just glad she didnt beatbox the theme song to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Now  about that unfortunate incident involving Hot Sauce Hillary butchering Beyonces name. She was speaking at a town hall gathering and called Beyonce, Bay-on-say.

A lot of black people feel like they cant trust you because you mispronounced Beyonces name, Charlamagne said.

Its not the first time Hot Sauce Hillary has pandered to black communities across the fruited plain  dropping her gs above and below the Mason-Dixon Line.

There was the time she changed her Twitter logo to represent Kwanzaa. And then there was the time she had chicken and waffles in South Carolina.

Truth be told  I'd be willing bet a jug of sweet tea Hot Sauce Hillary couldnt tell the difference between a collard green and a turnip green.

And how could we forget her cringe-worthy recitation of an African-American spiritual  delivered in a church house with a faux black dialect?

Ah dont feel no ways tired Hot Sauce Hillary told an enthusiastic congregation. Ah come too far

Sweet mercy, America. It's like she's turning into Tyler Perry's Madea.


The Mafia, in its heyday, ran lucrative protection rackets. Pay them and your business would be kept safe from "unforeseen" threats. Don't pay them and your business might go up in smoke with you inside.

Today, things are more sophisticated.

The New York Times reports that Saudi Arabia, playing the role of Mafia extortionist, has threatened to "...sell off hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

The Saudis are estimated to hold about $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the U.S. and the concern is that they might sell them before American courts could impose a freeze. The Obama administration opposes the bill, saying it could potentially open the kingdom to lawsuits from relatives of the dead and injured. So?

Why do the Saudis oppose this bill, which enjoys bipartisan support? Could it be because, as many believe, they helped facilitate the greatest mass murder in American history? Fifteen of the 19 men involved in the terrorist plot were Saudi citizens and that country promotes the most extreme form of Islam known as Wahhabism.

Adding to the suspicion that there is more to be learned about Saudi Arabia's role are 28 pages contained in the 9-11 Commission's report censored by the Bush administration for "national security reasons." Need more? According to government documents obtained by Judicial Watch, "160 subjects of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including but not limited to members of the House of Saud and/or members of the bin Laden family fled the U.S. (on chartered planes when all other aircraft were grounded) between September 11, 2001 and September 15, 2001."

In an April 10 appearance on the CBS program "60 Minutes," former Florida Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time the report was being written, said: "I think it is implausible to believe that 19 people, most of whom didn't speak English, most of whom had never been in the United States before, many of whom didn't have a high school education, could've carried out such a complicated task without some support from within the United States."

Graham thinks the hijackers received active support and guidance from rich Saudis, Saudi charities and top members of the Saudi government.

This is a matter that is easily resolved by releasing the 28 pages. The relatives of the dead have a right to know who funded the terrorist attack that killed their loved ones. Justice demands it and if compensation is awarded, the Saudis, who have made billions from oil sales to the West, can afford it.

The intent of the Senate bill is to clarify the immunity normally given to foreign governments. It says such immunity should not apply when nations are found culpable of committing terrorist attacks that kill Americans on U.S. soil.

The Obama administration claims that weakening the immunity law could put U.S. corporations, the American government and its citizens at legal risk because other nations might retaliate with similar legislation. The difference is that U.S. citizens are not hijacking planes and committing mass murder in other countries. The bill's sponsors, notes The New York Times, "have said that the legislation is purposely drawn very narrowly -- involving only attacks on American soil -- to reduce the prospect that other nations might try to fight back."

For too long Republican and Democratic administrations have ignored the actions and teachings of Saudi Arabia, including textbooks used in Islamic schools that denigrate Jews and other "infidels" and the building of mosques that some imams are using to spread hate and recruit suicide bombers.

This bipartisan bill should pass, and if the president vetoes it, he should explain his reason to the families of the dead.
Editor's note: The following essay is adapted from "Rich is Not a Four Letter Word" (Crown Forum, April 19, 2016).

To understand how liberal progressive policies have undermined American wealth, let's go back to the beginning.

President Obama's first legislative initiative, the stimulus act, was passed by Congress on February 17, 2009, less than a month after the president's inauguration.

It was the biggest economic recovery package in the nation's history, originally $787 billion in stimulus spending (it would blossom to $830 billion later) that was supposed to pull us out of the Great Recession. Instead, it turned into a hopelessly mismanaged giveaway that failed in its fundamental objective: bailing the economy out of the biggest downturn since the Great Depression.

The idea was to use government spending to create economic demand where none exists. That idea came from John Maynard Keynes, a British economist of the early twentieth century who believed that recessions should be fought with taxpayer dollars.

In fact, according to his theory, it didn't matter much what the government was buying. What mattered was that government was spending, a nd spending big. Imagine workers being paid to dig a hole and then refill that hole. Over and over. Workers get paid, so goes the Keynesian argument, and then spend that money in the economy, which creates demand for grocery store owners, butchers, and the like.

Economic activity is supposed to bubble up like a pot of water boiling on the stove with the government providing the burner. But that didnt happen for two reasons.

First, the money didn t reach its destination; much of it was wasted. Second, Americans who did receive stimulus dollars didn't react in the way Keynes anticipated. They didn't spend; they saved.

Despite the president's promise that stimulus dollars would " help those hardest hit by our economic crisis," ProPublica, a left of center nonprofit journal, reported that spending was not correlated with need.

Stimulus dollars didn t go to the poorest parts of the country or even the places where joblessness was the most concentrated. The emphasis was getting the money out the door quickly.

Echoing Keynes, Vice President Joe Biden called on local politicians to spend on "stupid things." And that is what happened. Much of the stimulus money went to the government and education sec tors, where unemployment was low, but only 10 percent went to infrastructure, though unemployment in construction was running in double digits.

Then there was the out-and-out waste. Former Senator Tom Coburn , a famed tracker of wasted government dollars, issued a report 18 months after the bill was signed, detailing 100 projects in which taxpayer dollars were squandered. There was half a million dollars for new windows at the Mount St. Helens visitors center in Amboy, Washington.

The building had been closed since 2007, and there were no immediate plans to reopen it. Nearly $7 million went for repairs to an 1846 brick fort at the end of the Florida Keys even though few people could visit the remote national park unless they hired a seaplane or took a four-hour round-trip boat ride.

Money also went to research projects: $2 million to send researchers from the California Academy of Sciences to islands in the Indian Ocean to study exotic ants, $296,000 for a study of dog domestication at Cornell University, and $141,000 to send students from Montana State University to China to study dinosaur eggs.

The fact that spending didnt target need didnt happen simply because government bean counters were ineffective or incompetent. There was a method to the spending stimulus madness, according to research by John Lott, a research scientist at the University of Maryland. Instead of states with high bankruptcy, foreclosure, and unemployment rates, Lott wrote, states with powerful Democratic representatives or ones that had voted for Obama in the presidential election got more money.

States that had entirely Democratic congressional delegations received $460 more in stimulus dollars per person than did states that did not. The states in which Obama won by the largest margin in 2008 got the most money. Lower-income states got less. States with higher bankruptcy rates got less. States with high unemployment got less.

Lott called the stimulus program a massive wealth transfer, but it was also doomed from the beginning because the money went to political cronies rather than to the people who needed it. Stimulus spending in other words was a waste.

As a result of this mismanagement, anniversaries of the stimulus spending hill came and went and still the president had little to show for the unprecedented outlay of taxpayer money.

Five years after President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act the economy was still in dire straits. He said the spending would mark "the beginning of the end" of the nation's economic troubles. When the stimulus was passed the goal was to get unemployment to 5 percent. Six years later that goal was achieved, but only because millions of Americans dropped out of the workforce and others accepted part-time work.

Even the part of the stimulus that went directly to Americans didn't provide a Keynesian push to the economy. Even though payroll tax reductions put money immediately in people's hands, most saved that money rather than spending it.

Stanford economist john Taylor theorized that this occurred because the tax cuts were temporary, not permanent. States used the money to pay down deficits or to save for a rainy day even though the expectation was that they would spend the money on new equipment and capital purchases that could goose the economy.

The president tried to rewrite his stimulus history again and again. On the campaign trail in early January 2015, he laid the groundwork for a State of the Union address later that month in which he would argue that his policies, particularly the stimulus spending, had turned the U.S. economy around.

His first trip was to a Ford plant in Wayne,Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where he said that the $80 billion infusion of taxpayer money into automakers in 2009 had rescued the industry.

"There is no doubt that thanks to the steps that we took early on to rescue our economy we are entering into the New Year with a new confidence tha t America is com ing back," the president said.

True enough , the industry had enjoyed impressive sales the previous year, but it wasn' t due to the bailout.

The recovery in auto sales happened because of building demand among A mericans who had held on to their cars for an average of 11 years, an all-time high. The economy recovered because of real need for products rather than a government program. Moreover, Ford was the one American automotive company that turned down the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) money. Ford, under Alan Mulally, turned around Ford.

Even so, the president soldiered on, claiming his policies were successful. But the pictures told a different story.

The Ford plant the president chose to speak from was closed because of lack of demand for the compact hybrid cars made there. About 5,000 workers had been laid off at that plant.

At the same event, the president touted the fact that the deficit had been cut by two-thirds. What he didnt say was that under his watch the nation's debt had risen by $ 6 trillion.

The true legacy of stimulus spending is not a stronger economy; it's much larger debt. As a country, we now owe more than $18 trillion, a figure that will burden taxpayers for decades to come.

If the stimulus programs main goal was to create work for Americans, it failed miserably. According to University of Maryland economist Peter Morici, by early 2015, one in six men of working age was unemployed.

Obama had managed to create 7 million jobs (whereas 8.7 million had been lost in the recession), whereas President Ronald Reagan created 11 million jobs in a much smaller economy.

In a rare meeting of the President's Jobs and Competitiveness Council, the president admitted that the plan to generate shovel-ready jobs wasnt a success.

"Shovel-ready was not, uh, as shovel-ready as we expected," he said.

Reprinted from "RICH IS NOT A FOUR LETTER WORD": How to Survive ObamaCare, Trump Wall Street, Kick-start Your Retirement, and Achieve Financial Success." Copyright  2016 by Gerri Willis. Published by Crown Forum, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
A transgender bathroom bill in the Tennessee legislature failed Monday after the House sponsor said she was withdrawing the legislation while waiting to see how legal challenges play out in other states that have passed similar measures.

The bill's demise follows intense lobbying from both supporters and opponents of the measure and questions about potential economic fallout if it were to become law.

Rep. Susan Lynn, the Mount Juliet Republican who sponsored the bill in the House, said she needed to tweak the legislation before bringing it back up again next year.

"There's definitely some issues we need to work out," Lynn said. "We know as soon as this bill passes, we're going to be sued. So if we're going to be heading into a lawsuit, we want to make sure we have the strongest position possible."

The bill would have required all students in public schools and universities to use bathrooms and locker rooms that matched their gender at birth.

Supporters said it would have protected the privacy of students. Opponents called it discriminatory.

Lynn had amended the bill so students who objected could be given an alternative, but opponents said it was still hurtful toward transgender students. She pulled the measure the same day that a religious coalition of the Family Action Council of Tennessee and about 30 pastors urged lawmakers earlier in the day to stand strong in the face of intense opposition.

They asked lawmakers to ignore the "false prophesies of economic gloom and doom" and outside corporations and instead listen to churchgoers, parents and voters in Tennessee.

David Fowler, the president of Family Action Council of Tennessee, blamed the bill's failure on "consistent opposition from the governor's office and others."

"We join the thousands of parents across the state who are profoundly disappointed that at this point in the process Rep. Lynn has decided not to proceed with a bill that would have simply protected the privacy of the children they have entrusted to our public schools," Fowler said in a statement.

Henry Seaton, a senior at Beech High School in Hendersonville and a transgender student, said he couldn't understand why lawmakers were targeting people like him now.

"I feel singled out, and I feel stigmatized," Seaton said earlier in the day.

The state's attorney general had issued an opinion saying that the state risked losing federal education funds if the measure became law, putting more than $1.3 billion at risk. There was also a backlash from the business community.

The leaders of 60 businesses, including the chief executives of Williams-Sonoma, Hilton Worldwide and T-Mobile, signed a letter last week that asked Tennessee lawmakers to reject the bathroom bill, saying it is discriminatory.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, who said he had received calls and emails from a number of business people about the measure, had raised concerns that the state could lose education funding if the measure were to ever become law. Lynn said she had spoken to Haslam before yanking the bill.

"We've had conversations about it," Lynn said. "And those conversations had to do with timing, had to do with strategy, and had to do with some outstanding issues we probably need to address in the legislation."

She said she still supports the measure.

"I feel very passionately about this issue," she said. "I really believe that boys should just use the boys' room and girls should use the girls' room."
Vice President Joe Biden said Monday night that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government was leading the country "in the wrong direction" hours after a bus bombing in Jerusalem wounded at least 21 people.

In a speech to the Israel advocacy group J Street, Biden criticized Palestinian leaders, but saved his harshest words for Israeli officials.

"I firmly believe that the actions that Israel's government has taken over the past several years -- the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures -- they're moving us, and, more importantly, they're moving Israel in the wrong direction," Biden said.

Biden did single out Palestinian leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, for declining to condemn specific acts of terrorism carried out against Israelis. The vice president said he didn't know whether Monday's explosion was a terrorist attack, but added that the U.S. condemns "misguided cowards" who resort to violence.

Israeli officials have called the bombing of an empty bus parked near other vehicles a terror attack, with Netanyahu linking it to the ongoing wave of attacks in which Palestinians have targeted Israelis in Jerusalem.

"We will settle accounts with these terrorists," Netanyahu said in a speech following the bombing. "We are in a protracted struggle against terror -- knife terror, shooting terror, bomb terror and also tunnel terror."

The fact that the bulk of Biden's criticism was reserved for Netanyahu reflected diminishing patience within the White House as President Obama's term nears an end. Tension between the longtime allies has been compounded by deep disagreements over Iran and a strained relationship between the two leaders.

Biden, who met in March with both Netanyahu and Abbas, said he came away from that trip discouraged about prospects for peace anytime soon. Still, he said the U.S. is obliged to guarantee Israel's security and to "push them as hard as we can" toward a two-state solution despite "our sometimes overwhelming frustration with the Israeli government."



"There is at the moment no political will that I observed from either Israelis or Palestinians to go forward with serious negotiations," Biden said.

As if to underscore the point, Israeli and Palestinian officials had a testy exchange at the United Nations Monday at a Security Council open meeting on the Middle East.

Are you ready right now to denounce terror against innocent Israelis? Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon demanded of his Palestinian counterpart, Riyad Mansour.



Mansour refused, shooting back, Shame on you! You are the occupier.

"Shame on you!" Danon replied. "Instead of denouncing terror, you are encouraging it!"

Biden's remarks to J Street, a dovish group that frequently criticizes Netanyahu, came at the height of a campaign season in which candidates have been scrutinized over their adherence to traditionally stalwart U.S. support for Israel.

Ahead of Tuesday's primary in New York, Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders has sparked controversy by saying the U.S. should be even-handed and mustn't always say that Netanyahu is right.

In another dig at Netanyahu and his Likud Party, Biden singled out for praise Stav Shaffir, a young member of Israel's parliament and a Netanyahu critic from the left wing of Israeli politics.



"May your views begin to once again become the majority opinion in the Knesset," Biden said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Hillary Clinton is facing a spicy new round of pandering accusations after telling the hosts of a hip-hop/R&B station the one item shes always got on her is  hot sauce.

The thing is, the Democratic presidential front-runner, whose struggles to fit in with ordinary voters have been the stuff of SNL parody virtually since the start of the campaign, has a fiery firewall against the criticism this time.

Clinton apparently does carry hot sauce with her. At least, shes mildly obsessed with the condiment, if past accounts of the former first familys eating habits are to be believed.

The Clinton campaign told TIME shes lately been carrying a brand of hot sauce known as Ninja Squirrel.

Still, Clinton raised eyebrows when she discussed her love of hot sauce while chatting Monday with the hosts of The Breakfast Club, a radio show on New Yorks 105.1 FM. She named the condiment when asked what item she always carries.

Really? an incredulous host asked.

The hosts immediately suggested she was dropping a reference to Beyonces Formation and its hot sauce in my bag lyrics. Host Charlamagne Tha God counseled, Listen, I just want you to know, people are going to see this and say okay shes pandering to black people again.

They all chuckled and Clinton answered: Okay -- is it working?

Republican candidate Donald Trump, speaking Tuesday morning with Fox News Fox & Friends, charged thats exactly what she was doing.

She carries hot sauce, like I carry hot sauce  its just so phony and so pandering, he said.

This isn't the first time Clinton's love of spicy foods, though, has come up.

According a recent Associated Press story on her eating habits, Clinton had a collection of more than 100 hot sauces when she was at the White House. And she for years has touted the health benefits of eating hot peppers, apparently raw.

She said in the radio interview, conducted ahead of Tuesdays New York Democratic primary, that she seriously has been consuming a lot of hot sauce, as well as raw peppers.

I think it keeps my immune system strong, she said.

An article in Salon.com quipped that either Clinton is telling the truth  or over the years shes been building an elaborate long con over hot sauce.
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz on Tuesday accused Donald Trump of whining about the delegate process, in a feisty interview with Fox News Sean Hannity in which the Texas senator insisted the only ones raising concerns about the rules are Trump backers.

Cruz, and the Republican Party as a whole, for days have battled claims that the nominating process is rigged. Trump still leads comfortably in the overall delegate count, but Cruz has strengthened his position by getting allies elected to the delegate slates in a number of states  including those that never held traditional primaries or caucuses.

Cruz, in an interview on Hannitys radio show as voters went to the polls in New York, called the process very, very simple.

After Hannity pointed out that voters are sounding off on social media about how confusing the process is, Cruz responded: The only people asking this question are the hardcore Donald Trump supporters.

In a heated exchange, Cruz then called the claims about him winning voterless elections nonsense. And he said the Trump campaign does not know how to organize on the grassroots, especially when it comes to the actual selection of individual delegates to the convention.

Trump, though, reportedly is reorganizing his campaign staff with an eye toward the upcoming contests and has voiced confidence in his ability to take on Cruzs operation.

Were bringing in very high-level people, he told Fox News Fox & Friends on Tuesday morning. Wed like to see if we can close it out.

Cruz, though, maintained: The Donald Trump campaign doesnt know what theyre doing. Its a Kim Kardashian reality show.

Fox News Dan Gallo contributed to this report.
When Democrats caucused in Washington state last month, Bernie Sanders scored an overwhelming victory  winning 73 percent to Hillary Clintons 27 percent.

But that wide margin did nothing to sway the states superdelegates, party insiders and officials free to back whomever they choose. Of the 16 up for grabs, all nine who have announced their support have gone for Clinton.

All are elected leaders, including Gov. Jay Inslee. Im endorsing Hillary Clinton, Inslee said. Ive worked with her for over 25 years, I know shes tough, I know she can really be an effective leader.

But the disconnect with the voters who put Inslee and other Democrats into office has sparked a backlash. The same tensions over superdelegates are flaring in states across the country. Sanders supporters want party insiders and elected leaders to follow their lead, and not  as it so often seems  act as a counterbalance to their vote.

The danger in my mind, as a Democrat, is it makes our Democratic party look corrupt, said David Spring, a leader of WashingtonforBernieSanders.com.

Over the last month, the Vermont Democratic socialist has won seven of eight nominating contests. Thats netted him two-thirds of the pledged delegates that were up for grabs in those states. But, among the superdelegates in those same states, Clinton leads 25-1.

After winning the Wisconsin primary on April 5, Sanders started lobbying to change some minds.

I think that a lot of superdelegates are going to be looking around them, Sanders told a crowd in Laramie, Wyo., and theyre going to be saying which candidate has the momentum, which candidate is bringing out the numbers of people.'

Democratic Party officials point out that superdelegates are free to switch candidates and theyve never been the deciding factor in any nomination since being created before the 1984 presidential election. But there always could be a first -- if its this year, those currently feeling the Bern might simply feel like they got burned.

Sanders backers, though, are turning up the heat with websites aimed at pressuring Clinton superdelegates to switch candidates. One, www.superdelegatesdemocracy.com, gives the social media accounts of all 469 superdelegates pledged to Clinton. Another recently described itself as a hit list and gave phone numbers and emails of Clinton superdelegates.

Washington states delegation has been especially targeted. Rep. Rick Larsen, after wishing Facebook friends a Happy Easter, was greeted with "happy last term as a congressman." Democratic Rep. Suzan DelBene was accused in one post of undermining her constituents. And Rep. Derek Kilmer was told his support for Clinton made him the same type of subhuman.

The Sanders camp says it has no connection to the websites and denies any attempt to embarrass or harass Democratic superdelegates. But Sanders supporters say the current system is undemocratic. Former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn wrote an op-ed piece saying superdelegates poisoned the nomination process by trying to create an air of inevitability early on.

A Sanders supporter in Colorado who attended a campaign event in Wyoming agreed.

There is something completely wrong and the superdelegates currently have the power to change the outcome, said Victoria Bard. And we want the people to be able to decide the outcome.
Ted Cruz is a very, very conservative guy.

Like, ultra-conservative. Seriously, hyper-conservative. As in, you wouldnt believe how conservative.

That is the unmistakable message of a New York Times piece that aims to plumb the depths of the senators ideologyand, near the top, notes that John McCain called him a wacko bird.

Im all for scrutinizing the candidates and their stands on the issues, even if this story begins with sort of a forehead-slapping tone. We would see more of this coverage of Cruz if the media consensus wasnt that Donald Trump is still the most likely nominee.

Most of the media attention surrounding Cruz focuses on his trench warfare to lure delegates away from Trump; his response to charges by Trump; and some version of the Time magazine question, Likable Enough?

Cruz advisers believe the Texan is softening his testy image by launching a charm offensive. This includes joking around with Jimmy Fallon (in his Trump wig), using his wife Heidi as a surrogate and appearing on CNN with his young daughters. They believe Mitt Romney lost in 2012 because many people didnt like him, and are trying to avoid that problem.

Cruz is also using more humor, telling Good Morning America yesterday that he is the only GOP candidate who doesnt eat pizza with a knife and fork.

In the runup to todays New York primary, where the Cruz camp is hoping to win a few delegates at best, the senator has been attacking Trump as someone who has supported liberal Democratic causes for 40 years. So hes hardly hiding the fact that hes a true-blue conservative.

The Times piece starts out with a laundry list. It says that on immigration Cruz is to the right of Ronald Reagan, who backed a liberalization compromise in 1986. Of course, most of the GOP is now to the right of Reagan on this issue.

Cruz opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and supports an amendment to allow states to avoid performing or recognizing same-sex marriages.

Cruz favors the gold standard, wants to abolish the IRS, and has criticized Trump on deportation policyfull stopfrom the right.

The larger point, of course, is that Cruz would be a weak candidate, the most conservative presidential nominee in at least a half-century, perhaps to the right of Barry Goldwater. And we all recall what happened to him.

And heres the sort-of praise: Cruz anticipated the rightward tilt of the Republican Party of today, grasping its conservatism even as colleagues dismissed him as a fringe figure.

Cruz told Bill O'Reilly yesterday that "the Times is not exactly a barometer for the mainstream." Asked about his position on abortion, he said it is Hillary Clinton's position on the issue that is "radical."

"I recognize the media loves to focus on issues where they can hit Republicans over and over again," Cruz said, but that his main focus will be jobs.

Now theres little question that Cruz could have a rough time when he has to defend his positions on abortion, immigration, even his flat-tax plan to a national electorate, not just Republicans.

Even some mainstream Republicans think he would lead the party to defeat, although part of the establishment is reluctantly embracing him as an alternative to Trump.

But in the latest Fox News poll, Cruz is in a virtual tie with Hillary Clinton, trailing by 1 point, while Trump trails by 7 points (and John Kasich leads her by 9). On paper, at least, Cruz and Trump would lose to Bernie Sanders by 12 and 14 points, respectively.

For now, Cruz advisers believe they are beating Trump at the delegate game and that some party regulars are insulted by the billionaires attacks on a crooked system. These are the kind of delegates, they say, who would throw their weight behind Cruz on a second ballot.

If the race between the two men becomes more competitive, expect to hear much more from the media about how Cruz is an unapologetic right-winger.
Republican and Democratic presidential front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have another chance to edge closer to their respective parties' nominations Tuesday as voters go to the polls in the delegate-rich New York primary.

Pre-primary polls show Trump and Clinton holding comfortable leads, but winning alone is not necessarily enough. Clinton will want a convincing victory to halt rival Bernie Sanders' winning streak and blunt his claims of "momentum" in the Democratic race.

Trump needs to garner more than 50 percent of the statewide vote to have a shot at taking home all 95 of New Yorks delegates. Trump has been campaigning heavily in the state with an eye toward that goal, and most recent polls shows him with just over 50 percent support in the state, holding a huge double-digit lead over rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich.

Trump and Clinton are hoping to win in part on the strength of their local ties. Clinton was twice elected senator from New York, while Trump was born in Queens and lives in a building bearing his name in Manhattan.



"We love this city," Trump said Monday in brief remarks to reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower. "You look at the other folks that are running, they couldn't care less about New York."

Cruz, who infamously panned Trump's "New York values" earlier in the primary, was bracing for a tough showing in the Empire State. The Texas senator was already looking ahead on the primary calendar, scheduling events Tuesday in Pennsylvania, which votes next week.

"New York is Donalds home state," Cruz told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly Monday evening. "Of course he will do well in his home state. When we were in Texas, my home state, we walloped him."

Trump leads the GOP race with 744 delegates, ahead of Cruz with 545 and Kasich with 144. Securing the GOP nomination requires 1,237 delegates. While it's still possible for Trump to reach that number ahead of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, it'll be tough. If Trump cannot reach that threshold, voting would proceed to a second ballot at the convention, with a majority of delegates free to vote for whomever they choose.

In the Democratic race, Clinton's campaign was declaring the contest virtually over Monday and warning Sanders that he risks damaging the party's eventual nominee if he keeps up harsh criticism of the former secretary of state.



Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said Sanders faces a "close to impossible path to the nomination" and predicted New York would result in Clinton taking "an important step to the nomination." Sanders needs to win 68 percent of the remaining delegates if he hopes to clinch the Democratic nomination.

Clinton herself spent the final hours of campaigning in New York trying to drive up turnout among women and minorities, her most ardent supporters. Since Sunday, she's danced to Latin music at a Brooklyn block party, vowed to defend abortion rights to female supporters in Manhattan, prayed at a black church in Westchester, drunk a bubble tea at a dumpling shop in Flushing and cheered newly unionized workers in Queens.



"We're not taking anything for granted," Clinton said Monday after greeting workers at the Hi-Tek Car Wash & Lube in Queens. "Tell your friends and your family, everyone, to please vote tomorrow."



The Sanders campaign has held out hope for a closer race, relying on the large crowds at the Vermont senator's rallies translating into votes Tuesday.



"This is a campaign on the move," Sanders shouted to a crowd of thousands gathered along the waterfront in Queens, the Manhattan skyline serving as a dramatic backdrop. "This is a movement getting the establishment very, very nervous."



Among Democrats, Clinton has accumulated 1,758 delegates to Sanders' 1,076. Those totals include both pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses, as well as superdelegates, the party insiders who can back the candidate of their choice regardless of how their state votes. It takes 2,383 to win the Democratic nomination.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton regained their stride in the presidential race Tuesday night, winning their respective primaries in New York  and sending a message to their rivals that their campaigns are back on track after recent stumbles.

Trump, in his home state, notched what appeared to be his biggest victory yet. Speaking to cheering supporters Tuesday night at Trump Tower, he declared: We dont have much of a race anymore.

[Texas] Senator [Ted] Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated, Trump claimed. Were really, really rockin. Indeed, Cruz's poor showing left him with no mathematical chance of clinching the nomination before the Republican convention in July, though Trump could still end up short of the needed 1,237 needed to seal victory before the gathering.



With 94 percent of precincts reporting, Trump had garnered 60 percent of the vote, his highest total in any state. He had claimed at least 89 of New York's 95 Republican delegates.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich finished second in the state with 25 percent of the vote, leaving Cruz to finish third with 15 percent. Kasich was awarded at least three delegates, leaving Cruz in danger of getting shut out.

As of Tuesday night, Trump had 845 delegates. Cruz had 559, and Kasich had 147.

Cruz, who infamously panned Trump's "New York values" earlier in the primary, had been bracing for a tough showing in the Empire State and showed no signs of throwing in the towel. The Texas senator was already looking ahead, turning his attention to Pennsylvania, where he delivered a speech calling on Americans to join together to move the country forward.

"It is time for us to get up, shake it off and be who we were destined to be, he said.



In the Democratic race, Clinton soundly defeated Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in her adopted home state, which she represented in the Senate for eight years. Despite the Brooklyn-born Sanders hard-fought attempt at an upset, the former secretary of state successfully staved off that possibility Tuesday night. With 94 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton had 58 percent to Sanders 42 percent.

Theres no place like home, Clinton said at her victory rally.

Clinton claimed the race for the Democratic nomination is now entering the home stretch and victory is in sight. In an apparent bid to bridge divides in the party amid an increasingly bitter primary, she directed a message to Sanders voters: There is much more that unites us than divides us.

Clinton and Trump both were seeking rebound victories Tuesday after recent setbacks. Cruz had complicated Trump's path to the nomination by winning recent contests like Wisconsin and getting allies elected to state delegate slates. On the Democratic side, Sanders had been on a winning streak up until Tuesday  winning seven of the eight prior contests.

Whether Trump and Clinton's performance Tuesday will help either wrap up the race in the coming weeks remains an open question. The campaigns head next to five Eastern states that vote next Tuesday: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware.

Its potentially friendly territory for the front-runners. But unless Trump can drive Kasich and Cruz out of the race, the billionaire businessman still may have to fight all the way to the final primary contests on June 7  including delegate-rich California, which may end up being the deciding race  to see if he can clinch the nomination.

On the Democratic side, Clinton could easily attain the necessary 2,383 delegates to win by June. The question is whether Sanders would accept it  as her tally includes the support of party insiders known as superdelegates, and the Sanders campaign has suggested they shouldnt count toward that 2,383-delegate threshold.

As of Wednesday morning, Clinton had 1,893 total delegates, compared with Sanders 1,180.

Sanders also campaigned in Pennsylvania Tuesday. He hammered his campaign themes about a rigged economy and corrupt campaign finance system, while urging voters to join him in challenging the status quo.

Were gonna win this election, Sanders vowed. However, his senior adviser Tad Devine told the Associated Press that the campaign planned to "sit back and assess where we are" after a next week's contests.



According to an Associated Press tally, Clinton won at least 135 of New York's 247 delegates. Sanders had won 104, with eight delegates outstanding.

The importance of every last delegate has increased in recent weeks as Cruz has appeared to outmaneuver Trumps campaign in the behind-the-scenes preparations for Julys convention.

Cruz has been laying the groundwork for a contested convention  one in which where no candidate has the required number of delegates  by getting allies elected as delegates. That way, if voting extends to a second round, some of those pledged to Trump on the first round could peel off and support Cruz. This has heightened the pressure on Trump to clinch the nomination before the convention.

A Kasich campaign memo, meanwhile, touted the Ohio governors chances in the upcoming state contests  and his prospects for securing delegate support in the event of a contested convention.

The next 7 days are absolutely critical," the memo concluded. "Its now or never to stop Trump and save the Republican Party."

The primary-day voting was not without its problems in New York. Voters ran into an array of polling-site glitches earlier Tuesday as they tried to cast ballots  with some locations opening late and others using broken machines.

The Wall Street Journal reported that some voters waited hours to cast ballots at a site in Brooklyn, where workers apparently did not have the keys when it was supposed to open Tuesday morning. Elsewhere in the borough, voters reportedly were turned away due to technical problems.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio also responded Tuesday to reports that thousands of registered Democrats have been dropped from the rolls, especially in Brooklyn. In a statement, the mayor called for major reforms to the election board and voiced support for an audit -- which the city comptroller has ordered.

It has been reported to us from voters and voting rights monitors that the voting lists in Brooklyn contain numerous errors, including the purging of entire buildings and blocks of voters from the voting lists, he said in a statement. I am calling on the Board of Election to reverse that purge and update the lists again 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The Obama administration on Monday began sending letters to nearly 400,000 people with permanent disabilities, in an attempt to help them through the process of discharging their student loans.

The U.S. Department of Education last week announced a new process to identify those eligible for an already existing federal loan forgiveness program set up for those who are permanently or severely disabled and unable to work.

The letter campaign was set to begin April 18, and included approximately 387,000 people the agency has identified as eligible; 179,000 of those people are already in default. The department estimates the loans eligible for forgiveness amount to about $7.8 billion.

Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell said last week that too few borrowers have used the program as they may not know about it, or found it too complicated to apply.

"These are people who are struggling with health issues. We want to take one worry off their plate," Mitchell said in an interview with The Associated Press. He said the department worked with the Social Security Administration to identify those with loans who were also receiving disability payments and were deemed permanently disabled.

The letters to be received by those eligible will include an application to be signed and returned. The borrowers will not be required to submit documentation proving eligibility.

However, there will be a three-year monitoring period. If the eligible person eans above a certain threshold, they may have to start making payments again.

President Obama called for a more streamlined approach last year as part of his Student Aid Bill of Rights.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
President Obama did not raise Russian military provocations against a Navy warship and Air Force intelligence jet last week during a Monday phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the White House disclosed Monday.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the president had an intense discussion by telephone with Putin, but not about two dangerous aerial actions by Russian warplanes.

The conversation instead was limited to Russian activities in Ukraine, where Moscow has militarily annexed Ukraines Crimean Peninsula, and the conflict in Syria.

We have ample opportunities to express our concerns about these kinds of provocative actions to the Russians and it did not necessitate a presidential level conversation, Earnest told reporters at the White House.

Two Russian Su-24 jets buzzed the guided missile destroyer USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea on April 14, flying dangerously close to the ship as it was conducting operations.

Two days later, a Russian Su-27 jet flew within 50 feet of an RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft over the Baltic Sea and executed a barrel roll over the top of the jet in what the U.S. European Command said was an unsafe action that threatened the safety of the aircraft in international airspace.

Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon.
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PRESENTING YOUR NEW YORK FIELD GUIDE

Its been 60 years since a New Yorker was last elected president. And its been 60 years since either party nominated a New Yorker. But as the wild and wooly 2016 primaries roll into the nations third-most populous state, New Yorkers stand atop both the Democratic and Republican ranks.

While home-state wins for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are to be expected  certainly for Trump, who faces a still-divided GOP  how they win, and by how much could prove very important for the closing weeks of both parties nominating processes. And if Clinton were to lose? Well, hold on to your Birkenstocks.

Polls close at 9 p.m. ET, and theres plenty to know. So grab a crisp empire or any of the more than 40 varieties of apples grown in New York, kick back and enjoy the grand tour of the Excelsior States political geography.

HIGH STAKES AT HOME FOR HILLARY

Eight years ago, then-Sen. Clinton won her home state by a whopping 17 points and carried away almost half of the delegates. But the Real Clear Politics average of polls shows her on track to do a bit worse than that, and against a substantially weaker opponent.

Could some of the surprisingly close margin in New York be attributable to the fact that her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is a New York native? Sure. But it is also reflective of the listlessness that has marked her frontrunners march to the nomination all year.

Most alarming for Clinton is that Sanders has dramatically outperformed pre-election polling in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, which makes an upset possible. A loss in her home state would not permanently ruin Clintons chances, but it would be a devastating setback.

The states closed primary does help her, since the independents and fringe-party members that might naturally support Sanders cant play. She can also count on the astonishing diversity of the New York metro area, and the voters of the many wealthy enclaves beyond the subway lines.

But Sanders can find lots of reason to hope in a city that elected Bill de Blasio as its mayor and in a state that has seen a leftward lurch in its politics over the past decade. The Vermont senator only started actively seeking votes in New York at the end of March, but has been pouring it on since then.

A whopping 247 delegates will be awarded on the basis of todays election on the Democratic side. Of those, 84 will be divided proportionately between Clinton and Sanders on the statewide level. But the real delegate haul is at the congressional-district level where the states 27 districts will award a total 163 delegates, also proportionately based on the popular vote by district.

The candidates have been looking high and low for potential voters, but where should you be looking for the keys to victory on the Democratic side?

[Dem delegate count: Clinton 1758; Sanders 1076 (2,383 needed to win)]

THE CITY SPLIT

Both Clinton and Sanders can claim New York City as a place to shine today, but for very different reasons. Clinton will expect to do well in places like the Bronx, where non-Hispanic white voters are a tiny sliver of the electorate, while Sanders will be aiming for the hipster youth and older liberals in places like Brooklyn.

Kings County: Brooklyn

--7th, 8th, 9th congressional districts

--Population: 2,621,793

--Median household income: $46,958

--Race: Caucasian (non-Hispanic), 39 percent; Hispanic, 20 percent; black, 35 percent

--Adults with bachelors degrees: 32 percent

--2012 election: Obama 82 percent

--Residents 65 and older: 12 percent

--Originally its own separate city, Brooklyn did not become part of the City of New York until the turn of the century dubbed the Great Mistake of 1898 by many in Brooklyn at the time.

Bronx County

--15th, 16th Congressional District

--Population: 1,455,444

--Median household income: $70,794

--Race: Caucasian non-Hispanic, 11 percent; Hispanic, 55 percent; black, 44 percent

--Adults with bachelors degrees: 18 percent

--2012 election: Obama 91 percent

--Residents 65 and older: 11 percent

--Edgar Allen Poe wrote several famous poems in his Bronx home, including Annabel Lee.

BERN NOTICE

If Sanders and his supporters could build a world all of their own, it might look a lot like Central New York: farms, college towns and staunchly liberal politics.

This is the Sanders breadbasket this year. Central New York included some of Clintons weakest spots in the 2008 primary and promises to do so again. Syracuse University, Ithaca College, Cornell University and the white rural voters who reflect Sanders home state of Vermont should deliver bigly for him.

Tompkins County: Ithaca

--23rd district

--Population: 104,926

--Median household income: $52,836

--Race: Caucasian, 82 percent; black, 4 percent

--Adults with bachelors degrees: 50 percent

--2012 election: Obama 52 percent

--Residents 65 and older: 12 percent

--Ithaca has its own local currency called, HOUR, started in 1991 to keep money in the local economy. HOUR is equal to roughly $10 and is widely accepted in the town.

[Watch Fox: Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier team up to bring special coverage of the New York primary tonight starting with Special Report at 6 p.m. ET]

WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE

After the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881, Vice-President Chester Arthur became the third New Yorker to ascend to the presidency. But Arthur, whose wife had died the year before, didnt move into the White House right away. Instead, Arthur ordered what was likely the first-ever professional redecoration of the executive mansion. Vintage Designs has the story: Louis Comfort Tiffany is now probably most famous for his work in glass, particularly his stained-glass windows. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, he and his company were also a popular firm of interior designers; they were often hired to decorate homes of the rich and famous, including Mark Twains homeTiffany himself described some of the work done to the White House: At that time we decorated the Blue Room, the East Room, the Red Room and the Hall between the Red and East Rooms, together with the glass screen contained therein. 

Got a TIP from the RIGHT or the LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM

POLL CHECK

Real Clear Politics Averages

National GOP nomination: Trump 40.3 percent; Cruz 31.3 percent; Kasich 21.5 percent

National Dem nomination: Clinton 47.7 percent; Sanders 46.3 percent

General Election: Clinton vs. Trump: Clinton +9.3 points

Generic Congressional Vote: Democrats +1

HOW YUGE IS YUGE?

The big question for Republicans in New York today is how yuge is yuge. While a candidate always likes to win by a healthy margin, frontrunner Donald Trump has extra incentive to run up the score in his home state.

If Trump gets more than 50 percent of the statewide vote in New Yorks GOP-only primary, he automatically gets 14 of the states 95 delegates. No big whoop. But, he can really start to add to his totals in the states 27 congressional districts.

Each district has three delegates to award. First place gets two delegates, while the second-place finisher gets one, provided they get at least 20 percent of the vote. But if Trump gets more than half of the vote district by district, he gets all three delegates.

Its conceivable that Trump could sweep the state, which would mean an almost 50 percent increase in his delegate lead over Sen. Ted Cruz. It would also shift Trumps path to clinching the nomination outright to much more certain terrain.

That would be a great night for Trump, as would any outcome that features a majority statewide and majorities in at least half the districts. If Trump grabs 75 delegates or more, hes really making the most of his home-state advantage.

And given that the Real Clear Politics average for the state shows Trump not just 30 points ahead of Cruz but clearing the 50-percent threshold, he ought to be able to get at least 60 delegates without breaking a sweat.

If Trump misses a statewide majority and/or gets less than two thirds of the delegates available, he will have underperformed.

Given the fact that the primary is closed to non-Republicans and party switchers would have needed to have changed their registrations in October to be eligible, GOP stalwart Cruz has some hopes of snatching some of the relatively scant numbers of party loyalists and conservatives in the state.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, meanwhile, hopes to bag some delegates in the tonier precincts where the dying vestiges of country club Republicanism live on.

With voter turnout expected to crush the puny showing of less than 200,000 in the no-consequence 2012 GOP state primary, you should get to know who New Yorks remaining Republicans are and how to win their votes.

[GOP delegate count: Trump 756; Cruz 559; Kasich 144 (1,237 needed to win)]

BIG APPLE BIG FOR TRUMP

Only New York City could have produced Trump. Born to privilege but in an outer borough, Trump has learned to surf through the citys celebrity obsessed media maelstrom like no other businessman. The gossip columns and the business pages, for good and ill, have been his haunts for more than 30 years.

What sets Trump apart from other tycoons is that he has always been a blue-collar guys idea of what a rich guy should be like. His wealth equates not to mergers and acquisitions and wood-paneled private clubs, but wealth that buys the privilege of saying whatever he wants, always having a beautiful model on his arm and opulence that would make a sultan blush.

Its worked with voters in places like Massachusetts and New Hampshire already, and Trump knows there are a lot of the same kinds of guys in his native city.

Take Richmond County  Staten Island  home to the lone Republican district in the city. As has been much reported, Trump should have a blow-out victory here, with some projections saying he could top 60 percent. His tough-talk and bullish attitude represent the ethos of the so-called forgotten borough of New York perfectly.

What makes the New York metro area so different is that Trumps support will extend beyond the working-class voters who have sustained him elsewhere, especially on Long Island where Trumps style and rhetoric dont offend as they have in other upscale suburbs.

Richmond County: Staten Island

--11th Congressional District

--Population: 473,279

--Median household income: $53,482

--Race: Caucasian, 77 percent; black, 12 percent

--Adults with bachelors degrees: 29 percent

--2012 election: Obama 50 percent

--Residents 65 and older: 15 percent

--Todt Hill, located here, is one of the highest points on the East Coast at 410 feet above sea level.

Suffolk County: Long Island

--1st, 2nd and 3rd congressional districts

--Population: 1,501,587

--Median household income: $88,323

--Race: Caucasian, 85 percent; black, 8 percent

--Adults with bachelors degrees: 32 percent

--2012 election: Obama 51 percent

--Residents 65 and older: 15 percent

--Long Islands Gold Coast served as the backdrop to F. Scott Fitzgeralds classic novel, The Great Gatsby.

WESTWARD EXPANSION

Although Western New York is close to Kasichs turf in neighboring Ohio, his favorability doesnt carry over into the Empire State. This part of the state will tend to act much more like the Rust Belt and Appalachian counties where Trump has dominated in earlier contests. Buffalo and its environs should be as good to Trump as places like Detroit and North Georgia.

Erie County: Buffalo

--26th district

--Population: 922,578

--Median household income: $51,050

--Race: Caucasian, 80 percent; black, 14 percent

--Adults with bachelors degrees: 31 percent

--2012 election: Obama 57 percent

--Residents 65 and older: 17 percent

--In 1886, Buffalo became the first city to have widespread street lamps thanks to the power provided by Niagara Falls.

CRUZ UP LATE FOR THE UPSTATE?

The remaining Republican stronghold in New York is the Upstate region, and that means its the best bet for Cruz and maybe Kasich to snag delegates today.

Cruz has invested in some New York City districts where there are vanishingly few Republicans, like the Bronx, where fewer than 1,700 Republicans voted in the 2012 primary. But you dont need microtargeting to find Republicans north of Albany.

The region fits Cruzs demographics so far: more Republican, a higher median income, a higher percentage of college educated people. What could cause him to fall short, however, is a split among these voters between him and Kasich potentially leaving Trump with a plurality to take two of the three delegates.

Albany County

--20th Congressional District

--Population: 309,381

--Median household income: $59,940

--Race: Caucasian, 78 percent; black, 14 percent

--Adults with bachelors degrees: 39 percent

--2012 election: Obama 64 percent

--Residents 65 and older: 15 percent

--The very first passenger railroad in America was the Mohawk and Hudson River Railroad, which ran from Albany to Schenectady.

POLITICS WAS A NATURAL FIT FOR JOSIAH

Teddy Roosevelt is famous for his love of hunting, but he and his family loved live critters, too. As president, Roosevelt brought his six children with him to the White House and the children brought their many, many pets. The National Parks Service brings us the tale of one of the Roosevelt children and his unlikely animal friend: At age 9, Archie Roosevelt was granted a pet badger named Josiah, whose temper was short but whose nature was fundamentally friendly. The boy would carry him about, holding him in his arms, clasped firmly around what would have been his waist. When it was suggested by his father that the badger might take advantage of his situation to bite his face, Archie, seeing this as an unworthy assault on the character of Josiah, replied: He bites legs sometimes, but he never bites faces.

Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Sally Persons contributed to this report. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump may be in hot water with the Federal Aviation Administration for reportedly flying to campaign stops on an expired airplane registration.

The New York Times reported Tuesday on the expired registration for Trump's Cessna, which he's used to visit cities like Jackson, Miss., and Sioux City, Iowa.

The 1997 Cessna 750 Citation X, which seats eight people, has been used on hundreds of flights since Trump announced he would seek the Republican nomination in June 2015, according to the FAA.

The Times reports that dozens of those flights, however, were made after Jan. 31  the day his $5 registration expired.

Trumps Cessna flew as recently as Monday, when it was used to transport the candidate between La Guardia Airport in Queens and Buffalo, N.Y., for a campaign event. Three days earlier, it was used to fly to Plattsburgh, N.Y., and to Hartford for political rallies, according to radio transmissions broadcast by the plane that were archived on a flight data website and reviewed by the Times.

Records show the FAA warned Trump the Cessnas registration was about to expire. On Dec. 1, DJT Operations CX LLC, the limited liability company owned by Trump that operates the Cessna, was issued a final notice the registration was about to expire. Three months later on March 1, DJT Operations CX was sent another notice that the registration had expired.

If the FAA decides to pursue the matter, it could slap a fine on Trump  and possibly even seek prison time, though thats unlikely. According to the FAA, flying without a registration could result in a civil penalty of up to $27,500 and a criminal fine of up to $250,000 and three years behind bars.

Asked about the report, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told FoxNews.com, "The standard renewal process is just about complete."

Click for more from The New York Times.

Fox News' Christopher Snyder contributed to this report.
Bloomsburg gets you in the classroom often and gives you experience right away. Teaching is a work of the heart, and all of BUs professors teach you how to be the best social-emotional educators you can be in the real world by giving you real-life examples. Without Bloomsburg, I would not be the teacher I am today, which I will be forever grateful for.
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump's final rally before Tuesday's New York primary was marked by an unfortunate slip of the tongue, as the real estate mogul mistakenly mentioned the name of a popular convenience store chain in place of 9/11.

Trump was about to deliver prepared remarks lauding New York values at Buffalo's First Niagara Center Monday night when he referred to 7-Eleven.

"It's very close to my heart because I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7/11, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down, and I saw the greatest people I've ever seen in action," Trump told the crowd.

Trump, who polls show holding a sizable lead over rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich in New York, has repeatedly invoked the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks as he campainged across his home state. He paid his first visit to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum earlier this month.

Trump billed the Buffalo event as a final push to rally supporters and make sure they vote.

"No New Yorker can vote for Cruz, no one can vote for Kasich", Trump told the estimated crowd of more than 11,000 people. "You know Cruz is way down in the polls, Kasich is not even showing up."

Cruz, who has made up considerable ground on Trump in the Republican delegate race, tried to downplay his Empire State expectations in an interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly Monday.

"New York is Donalds home state," the Texas senator said. "Of course he will do well in his home state. When we were in Texas my home state well walloped him."

Trump countered later Monday by calling Cruz "a catastrophe. He didnt even [garner] 50 percent [of the vote] in his own state."

The rally was briefly interrupted by about a dozen protesters, who sat locked arms and sat down on the floor of the arena shortly after Trump took the stage  forcing authorities to carry several out by their arms and their legs. Trump continued speaking as the demonstrators were removed.

Buffalo police said they arrested six people, mainly for disorderly conduct and trespassing. They added that 21 people were ejected from the event, but no arrests were made inside the arena.

Fox News.com's Christopher Snyder and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
For decades, Indians have demanded that Britain return a 105.6-carat diamond that they say was taken from them when they were under colonial rule. The matter may soon be settled, and not in their favor.

In a Monday appearance before India's Supreme Court, which was hearing a case on the stone, Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar said the Koh-i-Noor diamond "was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away." In recommending the government relinquish its claim, Kumar said Maharaja Ranjit Singh bestowed the gem"the most famous diamond in the crown jewels," per its current profile on the British royal palaces websiteon Queen Victoria in 1849 for Britain's help in the Sikh wars.

It isn't clear what brought about the change of heart, though Kumar said pressing India's claim might result in other countries "claiming their items from us." The Telegraph notes Kumar also referenced a 1970s law that says only those items removed illegally from pre-independent India may be pursued by the government.

While the royals are likely thrilledthe jewel is embedded in a crown that was worn by the Queen Mother and will be sported by Kate as queen consortthe man who petitioned the Supreme Court is less so, per Reuters: "The British rulers looted India and the government is making a mistake by not supporting our claims." The diamond is said to have surfaced in the 1300s and "passed through the hands of conquering Mughal princes, Iranian warriors, Afghan rulers," some of whom met a fate that gained the diamond a reputation as cursed and "unlucky for men to wear," writes the Guardian.

The profile says it came to Britain "as the spoils of Empire." (This man bought the world's priciest gem for his 7-year-old.)

This article originally appeared on Newser: India Says Britain Can Keep Its Cursed Jewel

More From Newser
Photos and a handwritten note detailing the grisly discovery of Titanics last lifeboat will be auctioned in the U.K. later this week.

The three photos were taken on May 13, 1912, almost a month after Titanics sinking, and show crewmembers from RMS Oceanic attempting to recover one of the doomed liners lifeboats. Inside the lifeboat, thought to be the last to leave the sinking ship, were the decomposing bodies of three Titanic passengers.

One photo shows a boat from Oceanic being lowered, another shows the boat approaching the drifting lifeboat. A third picture shows Oceanic crewmembers on the Titanic lifeboat.

Related: First letter written onboard the Titanic up for sale



Titanic struck an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. ship's time on April 14 1912 and sank just over two hours later with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

A handwritten account of the lifeboat recovery by an unidentified Oceanic passenger describes the gruesome discovery of three corpses. One corpse was wearing a dinner jacket and the bodies of two Titanic firemen were wedged under the lifeboats seats, it explained, adding that one corpses arms came off in the hands of the Oceanics boarding officer. A womans ring was also found on the lifeboat, according to the note.

Its an incredibly graphic account of the recovery, Henry Aldridge & Son auctioneer Andrew Aldridge told FoxNews.com. Titanic was the ship of dreams but this is the ship of nightmares  its the horrific elements of what happens in a disaster.

Related: Molly Brown's Titanic cup sold at auction for $200,000

A number of Titanic passengers made it to the lifeboat, known as Collapsible A when it washed off the ships deck, partly submerged, but not all survived. The bodies found by Oceanic were left on the lifeboat when Collapsible As survivors were picked by another lifeboat.

The corpse in the dinner jacket was identified as Titanic first class passenger Thomson Beattie. The wedding ring belonged to Swedish passenger Elin Gerda Lindell, who briefly reached Collapsible A, but later drowned, according to Encyclopedia Titanica. Her husband Edvard Bengtsson Lindell held Elins ring before he died on Collapsible A. His body was never recovered.

The photos and handwritten note are among a host of Titanic artifacts that will be sold at auction in Devizes, U.K. on April 23. The lot containing the photos, note and an Oceanic log abstract has a pre-sale estimate of between $2,879 and $4,318.

Related: Sextant used in rescue of Titanic survivors up

for sale

Other Titanic memorabilia up for auction include a rare ticket stub from the liners launch in Belfast 1911 and a photo of the drawing office where the ship was designed, showing a model of the ship. Both lots have pre-sale estimates of $8,636 to $14,393. The first letter written onboard the Titanic, penned just hours before the ship embarked on its doomed maiden voyage, will also be sold.

Last year a cup presented by Titanic survivor Molly Brown to the captain of rescue ship Carpathia sold for $200,000 in a major auction of Titanic memorabilia held by Henry Aldridge & Son. A photo purportedly showing the iceberg that sank the Titanic also sold for $32,000 in the auction.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
Robots have come a long way since the days of cartoon character George Jetsons Rosie, who served as housekeeper and maid and referred to her keeper as Mr. J.

Last week, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China, located in Hefei, introduced the world to Jia Jia, a lifelike female robot that dazzled.

Related: Man's homemade robot looks a lot like Scarlett Johansson

The team said it took three years to design and complete Jia Jia, who boasts a flexible plastic face, long brown hair, arms that move and eyes that roll naturally.

Chen Xiaoping, who served as the teams director, said that during her design, particular attention was paid to Jia Jias eyes, as well as ensuring that her speech was in sync with her lip movements, according to The Independent.

Hello everyone, Im Jia Jia, said the robot, as she greeted the crowd, welcome.

The robot, wearing a gold dress, referred to Chen as her Lord and advised members of the media to keep back when taking photos so that her face wouldnt appear too fat.

Related: Most Americans think robots will take our jobs within 50 years

According to Xinhua, Chen said plans are in the works to upgrade Jia Jia with artificial intelligence mechanisms that will allow her to recognize facial expressions, among other things. Chen told the news outlet that he hopes to transform her into a robot goddess.

Jia Jia will be featured at the Shanghai International Technology Fair on April 21.
A four-month-old girl has died while travelling on a Cathay Pacific Airways flight from London to Hong Kong.

The infant is believed to have been suffering from a gastrointestinal disease when the family boarded the plane at Heathrow on Sunday.

She fell unconscious during the flight and her parents - who were planning on visiting relatives in China  alerted cabin crew immediately.

Another passenger  a nurse  started giving first aid to the baby.

The pilot made an emergency landing at Almaty Airport in Kazakhstan and paramedics rushed to the scene.

But the baby could not be saved and she was pronounced dead soon after the emergency landing.

Her mother  believed to be a 36-year-old Chinese-French national - and father - continued the journey to Hong Kong with their dead child.

Fellow passengers said they were emotionally distraught during the rest of the flight.

The baby's death was confirmed by officials but is not being treated as suspicious. A post-mortem examination is yet to take place.

A doctor told Apple Daily that parents should avoid taking sick babies onto planes as a lack of medical support could lead to very dangerous situations on board."
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A group of families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 terror attacks released a letter to President Obama Monday, just before he left on a trip to Saudi Arabia, saying there was no excuse for refusing to reveal the truth, whatever it may be, about the events of 9/11 and to ensure that anyone responsible for the worst terrorist assault in history is held to account.

The letter comes several days after reports that Obama will soon decide whether to declassify 28 pages of sealed documents suspected of showing a Saudi connection to the deadly terror attacks.

Obama was scheduled to leave Washington Tuesday and arrive Wednesday in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, where he will hold talks with King Salman.

Saudi Arabia has reportedly told the Obama administration and congressional leaders that it will sell billions of dollars in U.S. financial assets if Congress passes a bill to make the Saudi government legally responsible for any role in the 9/11 attacks.

The administration has tried to stop Congress from passing the legislation, a bipartisan Senate bill, since Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir last month told Washington lawmakers his countrys position, according to The New York Times.

In their letter to Obama, the 9/11 families said, We were pleased to hear news reports, uncertain and conflicting as we may find them, that you are now reconsidering declassification of sections of the 9/11 Joint Inquiry report that address possible involvement in the attack by persons and institutions for which the Saudi government has responsibility.

That disclosure, of course, must extend beyond the so-called '28 pages' redacted in the public version of the report and encompass all information bearing on the subject of possible Saudi involvement.

Former Florida Democratic Sen. Bob Graham told Fox News last week that the White House told him a decision on whether to declassify the documents would be made within 60 days.

Graham helped lead a 2002 congressional inquiry into the attacks.

The Bush and Obama administrations have refused to unseal the documents, arguing their release would jeopardize national security.
An 18-year-old Ohio woman accused of livestreaming the rape of her 17-year-old friend with a social media app was trying to record the assault as evidence, the woman's attorney said Friday in a defense a prosecutor flatly dismissed.

Marina Lonina pleaded not guilty Friday to multiple charges including rape, kidnapping, sexual battery and pandering sexual matter involving a minor. A judge set bond at $125,000 for Lonina, a student at New Albany High School, outside Columbus.

Her co-defendant, Raymond Gates, 29, also pleaded not guilty, with a judge setting his bond at $300,000. A public defender representing Gates did not comment about the allegations.

Lonina and her friend  who attends the same high school  met Gates at a Columbus mall for the first time the day before where he bought them a bottle of vodka and encouraged them to meet him the following day, her lawyer Sam Shamansky said.

He acknowledged his client filmed the February assault of her intoxicated friend but said she was trying to get the girl out of the house where the attack happened.

Lonina is in the habit of filming everything with Periscope, Shamansky said. The app for smartphones allows users to stream live video.

"She does everything possible to contain the situation even to the point of asking while it's being filmed to these Periscope followers, 'What should I do now? What should I do now?'" Shamansky said.

Lonina and her friend are naturalized U.S. citizens from Russia, and Gates is also of Russian descent, said Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien. The comments on the video are in Russian.

O'Brien said Lonina is seen trying to help only briefly during the 10-minute video. O'Brien said the victim was clearly screaming "stop" and "no" during the assault.

Although Lonina told police she was trying to record the assault as evidence, her behavior as people watching via Periscope "liked" the assault painted a different picture, O'Brien said.

"She got, I guess, taken up with all the 'likes' that her livestream was getting and therefore continued to do it, and did nothing to aid the victim," O'Brien said.

Independent of the rape count, Lonina is also charged with livestreaming her friend nude the day before the assault, which is a felony, O'Brien said.
A university educator who was mauled by a bear while teaching a mountaineering course to a group of students in southeast Alaska was in critical condition Tuesday.

A sow with two cubs attacked Forest Wagner on Mount Emmerich, where he was leading 11 students and two teaching assistants Monday, University of Alaska Southeast spokeswoman Katie Bausler said. A student hiked down the mountain to get cellphone reception and called for help. No one else was hurt.

A helicopter flew Wagner off the mountain and took him to an Anchorage hospital, where he is in intensive care, a university statement said. The hospital said Wagner, 35, of Juneau, would not give interviews.

Wagner has been coordinating and teaching in the university's outdoor studies program since 2006, according to his biography. He teaches rock and ice climbing, backcountry navigation, glacier travel and mountaineering.

His teaching schedule says he planned to leave the mountain by Tuesday.

The Haines Police Department alerted Alaska State Troopers to the attack Monday. After flying Wagner to the hospital, authorities took the students down from the mountain, and they spent the night in the town of Haines with another professor.

Students on Tuesday planned to take a ferry back to Juneau, about 90 miles north, Bausler said.

Wagner is the second man attacked by a bear in Alaska within days. A 77-year-old bear hunter is recovering at an Anchorage hospital from injuries he suffered when a grizzly mauled him in interior Alaska on Friday.
Authorities in Houston said late Monday that at least five fatalities appeared to be weather-related after parts of the city and surrounding areas were inundated with more than 20 inches of water since Sunday night.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the county's chief administrator, said two bodies were found in a vehicle shown on traffic cameras driving around barricades and unsuccessfully attempting to navigate a flooded underpass.

In addition, one person, believed to be a contractor with the city's airport system, was found in a submerged vehicle not far from the airport. A second person, a truck driver, was found dead in the cab of his rig after encountering high water on a freeway service road.

In nearby Waller County, a man was found in a submerged vehicle, which investigators believed was caught in rushing water, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Thousands of other Houston-area residents were forced to flee their homes and take up temporary residence in shelters. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said. At least 1,000 people taken from apartment complexes in the north part of the city and moved to a shopping mall were being ferried by city buses to a shelter.

Turner told residents to to stay home to fend off a weather system he called "stubborn." More rain was projected over the next two to three days, although heavy downpours had subsided and only another half-inch was expected, he said.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who declared a state of disaster in nine counties, said Monday afternoon that there had been over 1,000 water rescues in Harris County. Emmett said thousands of homes in the county outside Houston were flooded, many for the first time. At least 450 high-water rescues were conducted, he said.

One man on the city's north side emerged from flood waters carrying an armadillo by its armored tail to safety.

In another animal rescue, deputies from the Harris County Sheriff's Department livestock unit used boats to reach an estimated more than 70 horses trapped up their necks in water when their stables were flooded.

About 1 million students got the day off, including the Houston Independent School District's 215,000 students, Texas' largest public school district. Most colleges and universities also closed because of the bad weather.

Dozens of Houston subdivisions flooded. At least two interstates  I-10, the main east-west freeway, and I-45, the major north-south freeway  were under water near downtown.

Other major freeways, plus some feeder roads leading to the highways, were blocked by high water.

"I was trying to get to work," Marcel Gwinn said as he was stranded for more than 90 minutes on an overpass in west Houston. "It kills me because my boss just told me that work's closed for the day."

Immediately to the north of Houston in Montgomery County, more than 260 water rescues were carried out, county emergency management officials said.

"When you get off the freeways and off the main thoroughfares, you could be in water 10 to 15 feet deep," Fire Department spokesman Jay Evans said. "You do not want to trap yourself in these vehicles."

One TV reporter in Houston helped to rescue a man who drove his car into a flooded underpass.

In the incident captured on video Monday, KTRK reporter Steve Campion yells, "Dude, you've got to get out of the car!" The man opens the passenger door and crawls out into the water as the reporter yells: "Leave the car! Swim!"

The driver swims toward Campion, who wades out into the waist-deep water and extends his hand. As the car slowly sinks under water, the driver tells Campion that he's OK and that he didn't think the water was so deep.

The storms were part of a wide weather system that left warnings and watches through Tuesday morning for Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Tyler-Longview and as far east as Texarkana.

Houston, at near sea level and known for its "gumbo" soft soil, is no stranger to flooding from torrential rains, tropical storms and hurricanes. Last Memorial Day, heavy rains caused severe flooding in the southwest parts of the city. Bayous that last year overflowed after 11 inches of rain quickly rose again, putting water in at least 200 homes, the mayor said. They appeared to be receding slightly by Monday evening.

In 2001, Tropical Storm Allison inundated parts of the city by dumping as much as nearly 29 inches of rain, causing $5 billion in damages.

"A lot of rain coming in a very short period of time, there's nothing you can do," Turner said. "I regret anyone whose home is flooded again. There's nothing I can say that's going to ease your frustration. We certainly can't control the weather."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
We thank our sponsor for making this content possible; it is not written by the editorial staff nor does it necessarily reflect its views. While our brains may be at capacity in terms of storage, our noggin space looks void compared to the digital organization throughout the electronics we work on. Finding a safe home for all those files is challenging READ THE REST
Houston officials said Tuesday six people were confirmed dead after flash flooding dumped more than a foot of rain on the city and surrounding towns.

"I regret anyone whose home is flooded again," Houston mayor Sylvester Turner said. "There's nothing I can say that's going to ease your frustration. We certainly can't control the weather."

The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences said three people were killed in the City of Houston, two in Harris county, and one in Waller County.

Flash flooding and a 50 percent chance of more were possible Tuesday, a day after nearly 18 inches fell in 24 hours. The National Weather Service had the area under a flash flood watch through Wednesday morning.

Scores of subdivisions were flooded and most schools remained closed although the city itself was returning to normal. Municipal offices reopened Tuesday and by midmorning, less than 10,000 CenterPoint Energy customers were without power, an improvement from 24 hours earlier when electricity outages topped 100,000. Houston's Metropolitan Transit Authority resumed service and most highways within the city were open.

Outside the city and into the suburbs of northwest Harris County, runoff from Monday's rains forced creeks over their banks and forced more people to evacuate their homes overnight.

In addition to its location, Houston's "gumbo" soft soil, fast-growing population and building boom that has turned empty pastures into housing developments all over the city's suburbs and exurbs make it vulnerable to high waters.

Harris County has seen a 30 percent jump in population since 2000. Its surrounding counties have almost grown more than 10 percent since 2000, according to the Greater Houston Partnership, a business group.

Some of the resulting developments include adequate greenspace for water runoff, but not all of them do, said Philip Bedient, an engineering professor at Rice University.

"Could we have engineered our way out of this?" Bedient said. "Only if we started talking about alterations 35 or 40 years ago."

Samuel Brody, director of the Environmental Planning & Sustainability Research Unit at Texas A&M University, has called Houston "the No. 1 city in America to be injured and die in a flood."

He said Tuesday that mounting damages from flash floods point to a woeful lack of planning in a city that added 90,000 people last year alone and is a major cog in the national economy. He suggested the city should offer buyouts to homeowners in areas that chronically flood and turn the land into open space. The city should also upgrade its building code to mandate elevating structures in flood-prone areas, he said.

"To throw up your hands and say we're going to be vulnerable and have hundreds of millions of dollars of impact every year in Houston just because it rains a lot is not the attitude we need to take," Brody said. "We are not thinking about the big picture."

Rainstorms last year over Memorial Day weekend caused major flooding that required authorities to rescue 20 people, most of them drivers, from high water. Drivers abandoned at least 2,500 vehicles, and more than 1,000 homes were damaged in the rain.

The year before, flash flooding in Houston and suburban counties left cars trapped on major highways.

Those storms still pale in comparison to the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. Allison left behind $5 billion in damages and flooded parts of downtown and the Texas Medical Center, which sits near the Brays Bayou, a key watershed.

The National Weather Service's chief meteorologist for Houston, Jeff Evans, said Monday's soaking and the 2015 Memorial Day deluge were the second- and third-biggest rain events on record after Allison, which dumped more than 30 inches of rain on parts of the sprawling city over two days.

Asked if man-made climate change could be a factor, he said the data is unclear but that the El Nino weather phenomenon, caused by heightened surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific, could "be a player in why we're had so many big rain events this year."

Evans said rain fell in some places Monday at a rate of 3-4 inches an hour.

"No matter what drainage system you build, anything will struggle with that kind volume in that short a time," he said.

Bedient has worked with the Texas Medical Center on better preparing its facilities for massive rainfall, including the use of a sophisticated weather alert system that gives the medical center extra time to activate gates and doors that block excess rainwater.

Improving the monitoring of specific watersheds and flood-prone areas might give affected residents the extra bit of time they need to save lives and take protective measures.

"We can't solve this flood problem in Houston," Bedient said. "All we can do is a better job warning."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
All about New York today as the Empire State plays a crucial role in the presidential election for the first time in decades. Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton all have ties to the state. New York could be a make-or-break moment for Sanders and could provide Trump the solid victory he needs to get closer to sewing things up.

The New York Times writes today about the two front-runners:

Polls have shown both front-runners ahead by double-digit margins before Tuesday's New York primary. A big win for Trump would bring him closer to winning an outright majority of Republican delegates - an outcome that remains in jeopardy and that has prompted rival Ted Cruz to mount a spirited campaign to force a contested convention.

For Clinton, a victory would give her a boost of momentum and perhaps a new mandate to more openly pivot her campaign to prepare for the general election. Unlike Trump, Clinton is so far ahead in the delegate count against Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) that it has become close to impossible for him to catch up.

Theres growing sentiment that Sanders role as a spoiler is beginning to hurt Hillary Clinton. The attacks on Hillary Clinton have moved her negatives higher.

New polling out last night from the WSJ and NBC News suggest Hillary Clintons negatives continue to rise. In fact, the polling shows the three front-runner are very unpopular with much of the nation. Trump and Cruz have even worse ratings than Hillary Clinton. Seven in Ten registered voters say they couldnt support Donald Trump. 61% for Ted Cruz and 58% for Clinton.

Meantime, the same polling shows Sanders has nearly caught Clinton nationally among Democrats.

2012 candidate Mitt Romeny again weighing in on the race. Romney warning that if both Ted Cruz and John Kasich stay in the race, they could hand the nomination to Trump. Politicos Hanna Trudo writes today:

Cruz and Kasich are splitting the anti-Trump vote, the former Massachusetts governor argued in an interview with David Gregory for the former NBC hosts new podcast, The David Gregory Show."

"I think that Mr. Cruz and Mr. Kasich divide the vote, if you will, and that will make it easier for Mr. Trump to win the winner-take-all congressional districts and the winner-take-all states and get the delegates he needs to either hit the 1,237 or get close enough to it that he could persuade the uncommitted delegates that he would need to get the victory on the first ballot," Romney said.

If Cruz or Kasich becomes inactive after New Yorks primary on Tuesday, however, Republicans would likely move to a contested convention, he said. If it remains three candidates, I think Mr. Trump wins on the first ballot.

When asked about Trumps ability to gain the support of uncommitted delegates and thus secure the nomination, Romney mentioned perks that the billionaire could offer, such as trips on his private plane or resort memberships.

I think theres a lot of ways to be persuasive, he said, adding that its conceivable that Trump could win over as many as 50 or 100 uncommitted delegates.

Romney dismissed, however, Trump's repeated complaint that the delegate-selection process is "rigged" against him.

Trump held a massive rally last night in Buffalo. The Washington Posts Ed OKeefe writes about Trumps delegate struggles today:

Weeks after his campaign vowed to turn things around in the hunt for delegates, GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump is still struggling to ensure that supporters will be there to vote for him at the Republican convention in Cleveland.

In recent days, supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) earned delegate slots in Wyoming, Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia. They're also packing party meetings in Nebraska and Washington state, where Republicans are beginning to pick delegates before primaries next month.

Sanders is accusing the Clinton campaign and the DNC of fundraising violations.

There are several live events to keep an eye out for today:

8am -- Hillary Clinton votes in Chappaqua, NY. LIVE via LiveU

1130EDT -- Hillary Clinton speaks at the National Building Trades Convention. Washington, DC. LIVE via LiveU

TBA EDT -- Donald Trump casts his ballot. New York, NY. FNC COVER

1330EDT -- OH Gov Kasich makes a retail stop at the Original Oyster House, Pittsburgh, PA. TBA COVER

1400EDT -- Sen Sanders holds a rally. Bayfront Convention Center, Erie, PA. LIVE via LiveU

As much as 20 inches of rain has fallen in parts of Texas.. Houston is seeing historic flooding. More rain and flash flooding are possible again today. Homes and roads are flooded, and at least four people have died.

President Obama heads for Saudi Arabia today. Controversy continues to swirl over the Saudi role in the 9/11 terror attacks. The President is fighting to keep a top secret report private that apparently implicates some high-ranking Saudis in helping the terrorists in the September 11, 2001 attacks. Congress is debating a measure that would force its declassification and publication. The President is considering a veto and the Saudis are threatening economic repercussions if the report is released.

The Taliban has claimed responsibility for a terror attack in Kabul that left at least 28 and wounded more than 320. There was also a terror attack in Pakistan.

The death toll in a massive earthquake in Ecuador has passed 400. The quake has caused severe damage to coastal areas of the country.

More than 900 people are living in shelters in Japan after a series of massive earthquakes. At least 45 were killed.

We get earnings today from beleaguered Yahoo! Goldman Sachs disappointed investors with its results this AM. Oil had four days of losses but is up 1% so far today. Netflix shares plummeted overnight as it reported weaker-than-expected growth prospects. We also get a report on housing starts.

The Dow hit 18,000 yesterday.

For more news, follow me on Twitter: @ClintPHenderson
Megachurch pastor Matt Chandler of The Village Church in Texas recently participated in a podcast with fellow pastor Josh Patterson and The Village Church staff members Kyle Worley and Anne Lincoln Holibaugh to discuss how Christians can positively impact the current political season.

Worley, who serves as connections minister at the evangelical church, starts off by saying there are several "sinful ways" in which Christians can engage in politics, whether it be pridefully or idolatrously.

The problem with an unhealthy involvement in politics stems from expecting too much from politics, Worley contends.

"If our hope is in Christ and the kingdom of God then we'll be able to expect from modern politics what it can deliver and not expect more than what it can deliver," Worley says.

Ultimately, if we're putting too much hope in the next president rather than Christ and his kingdom, we're going to be disappointed and disolusioned, the church leaders agree; politics will never be able to deliver the hope that God can.

Chandler adds to this argument, suggesting that Christians can use their "faithful presence" to shape their culture and therefore shape politics.

It's also important for Christians to remember that ultimately, God is in control of the political process. "The Lord's at work in this political process," Chandler says. "He's not panicked or nervous  He already knows who our next president is."

While Christians can be led by their faithful presence in all aspects of life, it is important to remember that politicians frequently address issues in a one-dimensional manner, such as the issue of pro-life.
In the future, everyone will get food by manhandling restaurant managers and then stealing a handful of chicken and bacon.

So said an Oklahoma City man, 36-year-old Dante Rashad Anderson, who told police when he was arrested Friday for robbery that he comes from a time four years into the future, FOX25 reported.

I am from planet Earth 2016 and am four years advanced on you, and you guys are always trying (to) kill me, Anderson is quoted as saying in a police report viewed by KOCO. On my planet Earth, everyone is dead and I walked here from there.

Oklahoma City Police Sgt. Gary Knight told FOX25 Anderson explained to investigators that, in the future, his method of taking food was how everyone would eat.

He was possibly under the influence of some sort of narcotic or intoxicant or suffering from some type of break with reality, Knight said.

After being ejected from a Carls Jr. restaurant on Friday morning for loudly demanding food, Anderson allegedly walked across the street to an Arbys, jumped on the counter and grabbed the manager. After forcing the manager against a wall, Anderson was accused of grabbing some bacon and chicken and walking out of the business  breaking a glass door in the process.

Witnesses told police that as Anderson walked back across the road, he chomped on bacon and kicked and damaged several cars.

He jumped up like he was Chuck Norris and just kicked the crap out of my car, Patricia Beedle told FOX25. I mean, he kicked it so hard you could just feel the momentum of him kicking it.

No word on whether Anderson revealed who wins Novembers presidential election.

Click for more from FOX25.
As Christian persecution across the globe reaches levels never before seen, churches throughout the U.S. will devote time during Sunday worship services to pray for victims by taking part in "Stand With the Persecuted Sunday."

Eight prominent religious liberty organizations  Open Doors USA, the Institute on Religion & Democracy, The Voice of the Martyrs, In Defense of Christians, Christian Solidarity Worldwide USA, International Christian Concern, 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative and the Family Research Council  are calling on over 40,000 American churches to designate a small portion of their services this weekend to pray for those around the globe that have been persecuted because of their faith in Jesus Christ.

Besides prayer, the initiative also calls on churches to show a brief video highlighting the plight of Christians across the world, distribute a special bulletin insert, participate in practical ministries and promote policy and legislation designed to protect the persecuted.

According to the 2016 Open Doors World Watch List, 2015 proved to be the worst year for Christian persecution the organization has ever recorded. As over 7,000 Christians were killed for their faith, more Christians were killed during Open Doors' 2015 reporting period than any previous reporting period.



"As Christians here in America, we have an obligation to pray for and act on behalf of our brothers and sister in Christ who are being persecuted for their faith," FRC President Tony Perkins said in a statement. "The persecution of Christians is at an unprecedented level and we are even seeing it here in the United States, but the hostility that Christians here in America are facing pales in comparison to the mistreatment, displacement, violence, rape, crucifixions, and beheadings experienced by followers of Jesus in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, and other parts of the Middle East and beyond."

A number of churches have already indicated that they will take part in "Stand With the Persecuted Sunday."

Among the churches that have indicated thus far that they will participate in the initiative are the Cross Church megachurch in Arkansas headed by Southern Baptist Convention President Ronnie Floyd and Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego headed by Pastor Jim Garlow.

"I think many churches are aware of the rise of persecution across the globe, but as to praying for them and taking action, calling upon leaders to intervene, this could be improved upon dramatically," Floyd stated in an email to The Christian Post. "Yet, this is why we educate them through Sundays like this."

According to Floyd, standing with the persecuted means to become "their voice for religious liberty" and call "upon national and global leaders to intervene on their behalf."
Authorities in Texas were searching for a man dressed in SWAT gear after a fitness trainer and mother of three was found murdered inside a church Monday.

Terri Bevers, 45, was found at around 5 a.m. local time at the Creekside Church of Christ in Midlothian, about 25 miles southwest of Dallas. Bevers was scheduled to teach an early-morning fitness class at the church and one of her students found her body.

Midlothian Police Chief Carl Smith told reporters that the church's motion-activated surveillance cameras captured a suspect walking around inside the church before Bevers' body was found. Smith said the man was wearing full tactical gear with a heavy vest, helmet, shin guards, gloves and POLICE on the front.

"He is designed to look like a police officer," Smith said. "His intent was to look like a police officer."

The suspect was first seen on the cameras at around 3:50 a.m. Bevers is first seen on the cameras about 30 minutes later, as she arrives to prepare to teach the 5 a.m. fitness class.

Police said the suspect appeared to be carrying a tool used to either break windows or force doors. Investigators found several signs of forced entry, but nothing was reported taken from the church.

"It's just an odd random situation that they would actually happen to come into a building that was being burglarized on a Monday morning, said Smith. "This is an extremely unusual situation for the city of Midlothian. We have a very safe community. In fact, its going to be the first event of my tenure here in almost ten years. Nothing like this happened here before."

Investigators also have not ruled out that Bevers was the victim of a targeted attack. The Dallas County medical examiner will determine exactly how Bevers died.

She was very passionate about transforming people's lives, physically and mentally, Bevers' husband, Brandon, told KDFW. She transformed herself into a very fit person and her desire was to do that for others."

Click for more from Fox4News.com.
Night-vision technology, which could help the U.S. Coast Guard rescue stranded boaters, nab drug smugglers and even prevent terrorists from sneaking onto American shores, is collecting dust because of a quirk in the federal bureaucracy, a lawmaker charged Tuesday.

Coast Guard choppers are equipped with the night-penetrating Electro-Optical Sensor System, but the equipment cant be activated. Although the technology is used by other Pentagon branches of the Armed Forces, the Coast Guard falls under Department of Homeland Security, and its use of the equipment is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

This laser equipment is essential for the Coast Guard to carry out its mission, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, told FoxNews.com.

The system converts even the faintest light into an electronic signal readable by instruments. In addition to its use by the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines, the technology is used in the commercial maritime industry for detecting the threat of approaching pirates.

The Coast Guard has it, but can't use it, said Hunter.

Earlier this month, Hunter fired off a letter to the FDA, first reported by The Navy Times. Coast Guard spokesman Chief Warrant Officer 3 Chad Saylor said the Coast Guard is seeking authorization to use it.

"The Coast Guard intends to use the ESS technology and is in the process of ensuring that it can be done safely," Saylor said in a statement. "The systems are administratively prohibited, and there are locks on the controls to prevent access/use."

This is the U.S. Coast Guard, not the San Diego Police Department  Rep. Duncan Hunter

The Coast Guard routinely carries out dangerous operations, safeguarding the nations shores from importation of drugs and, Hunter said, potentially weapons of mass destruction. Having equipment that could aid the mission and keep Guardsmen safe, yet not being able to use it, is maddening, Hunter said.

Theyre basically performing a Department of Defense mission in the Caribbean, he said. The routes that they cover are dangerous. These are routes where 5,000 pounds of drugs are smuggled on fast boats. If these smugglers can transport that amount of drugs, theres no reason to think that this is not a serious national security issue.

Hunter's office learned about the laser issue when his chief of staff, Joe Kasper, recently visited the Hitron Jacksonville station in Florida. Kasper, a former Air Force mechanic, was stunned to learn that the Coast Guards MH-65 helicopters are equipped with a turret-based night vision system that must be disabled because it was not approved by the FDA.

When Kasper told his boss, a former U.S. Marine, about the situation, Hunter shared his disbelief and frustration.

Youre endangering lives, Hunter said. This is the U.S. Coast Guard, not the San Diego Police Department.

The Navy Times reported that the Coast Guard is also limited in its use of another technology, the PEQ-15 laser targeting and illumination systems. The technology is used for spotting and locking onto targets in darkness.

Illuminators and laser sights stand to provide a clear advantage during use of force operations and other missions, but imposed limits on the use of these tools creates needless challenges and safety risks, Hunter wrote in his letter to the FDA.
A man charged with posting threats online last year that he would shoot black students and faculty at the University of Missouri's Columbia campus has changed his plea to guilty.

Hunter Park, 19, admitted Monday to making a terrorist threat. Authorities say the threats showed up Nov. 10 on the anonymous location-based messaging app Yik Yak.

Brouck Jacobs, an assistant Boone County prosecutor, said there was no plea deal. He said the prosecutor's office has requested a three-year prison sentence.

A university police officer says Park admitted he wrote the postings when confronted in his dorm room at a sister campus in Rolla. The school said no weapons were found.

One post included a threat to "shoot every black person I see," while another threat said: "Some of you are alright. Don't go to campus tomorrow." The message seemed to echo one that appeared on the website 4chan -- a forum where racist and misogynistic comments are common -- ahead of the deadly campus shooting at an Oregon community college in October.

The threats also came amid turmoil and protests at the University of Missouri that activists said were spurred by administrators' indifference to racial issues on campus. Two other people also were charged with school shooting threats during the unrest; one has pleaded guilty and the other is awaiting trial.

Park's attorney, Jeffery Hilbrenner, didn't immediately return phone messages from The Associated Press seeking comment. Sentencing is set for June 16.
The convicted felons suspected of murdering a missing Washington state couple last week have dumped the car they were using in their desperate escape and are now in a new vehicle headed for Mexico, investigators said Tuesday afternoon.

Brothers John Reed and Tony Reed are now thought to be driving a 2002 Gold Acura 32T with Arizona plate BNN-9968, the Snohomish County Sheriffs Office said in a news release. A license plate reader detected the vehicle in Calexico, Calif. on Monday. The Volkswagen EOS Coupe they had initially driven was found abandoned in Phoenix on Monday, deputies add.

The exact location of the Reed brothers is unknown, but there is reason to believe they may be trying to flee to Mexico, the news release said.

The brothers were officially charged with murder by Snohomish County prosecutors Tuesday afternoon.

Murder suspect vehicle located in Phoenix. Reed brothers believed to now be driving '02 Gold Acura (AZ BNN-9968) pic.twitter.com/pXfVlO9XPp  Snohomish Sheriff (@SnoCoSheriff) April 19, 2016

Police are hunting the brothers, ages 53 and 49, in connection with the deaths of Patrick Shunn and Monique Patenaude. Shunn and Patenaude disappeared on April 11 and authorities said its clear theyre dead, though no bodies have been found. The Reed brothers are considered armed and dangerous.

Search crews on Monday were trying to reach a mound covered with a tarp and freshly cut branches in a wooded area near where abandoned vehicles belong to Shunn, 45, and Patenaude, 46, were found, according to court papers viewed by The Herald of Everett.

The property dispute between John Reed and the couple stems from a March 2014 mudslide that killed 43 people and damaged several properties in the Arlington neighborhood where the three lived, The Herald reported. In the aftermath of the disaster, several properties were eligible for buyouts and Reed accepted one for $244,000. Reed allegedly continued to live on the land he sold back to Snohomish County, however, and Shunn and Patenaude reported him a few weeks ago, according to search warrants viewed by The Herald.

The squatting incident, however, was not the first time John Reed allegedly fought with the couple.

In 2013, Shunn called 911 to report Reed for threatening Shunn and his wife over a brush-cutting disagreement. Reed allegedly told Shunn he would shoot or assault the couple if they didnt leave Reed alone. It was apparently just one of ongoing and constant issues between the two parties.

After the mudslide, Reed told a deputy that he blamed others who lived in the area for triggering the tragedy and that he could shoot the people responsible and hide their bodies in the woods, The Herald reported.

Dried blood was found in the bathtub and bedroom of Reeds former home and blood was found in Shunns and Patenaudes ditched vehicles. It was unclear whose blood it was.

John Reed also was seen on the vanished couples property on April 13, two days after they vanished. Reed had a key to the gated driveway because it was next to his old property.

A neighbor in the area also told police he recently found a shotgun that didnt belong to him in his garage. Reed reportedly was familiar with the garage and the shells found in the shotgun were similar to ones found in a bedroom on Reeds former property, according to court papers viewed by The Herald.

Surveillance video shows the vehicles belonging to Reed and Patenaude approaching the area where they were later discovered dumped at about 3 a.m. on April 12. Thats the same time records show the couples cell phones were moved from their home and traveled two miles west, The Herald reported. After three hours, the phones returned to the area of the couples home and were shut off.

Both John and Tony Reed have felony convictions. John Reed was prosecuted in 2014 for violating state natural resource laws and also was involved in a previous drug case, The Herald reported. Investigators found an underground room at John Reeds former Arlington property they believe had been used in a marijuana growing operation. Tony Reeds rap sheet stretches back three decades and includes assaulting a police officer in one instance and assaulting a man with a pool cue and pliers in another.
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African Union investigators discovered mass graves in South Sudan and found evidence of horrific crimes, including forced cannibalism, according to a long-awaited report. President Salva Kiir's faction in the conflict is also accused of recruiting an irregular tribal force before the outbreak of war in December 2013.

The report, released late Tuesday, also disputes that there was a coup attempt in December 2013 by former Vice President Riek Machar. Government troops carried out organized killings of members of the ethnic Nuer in Juba, the capital, the report said. When violence broke out, Machar, a Nuer, became a rebel leader. He and Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, recently signed a peace agreement.

The African Union investigators, led by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, found that the conflict began on Dec. 15, 2013, as a skirmish broke out between Dinka and Nuer soldiers of the presidential guard following political tension between Kiir and Machar, who had been fired as Kiir's deputy the previous July.

The report was scheduled for release months ago but its release was delayed by the African Union's Peace and Security Council.

Hundreds of Nuer men were rounded up and shot, and mass graves were discovered. Perpetrators -- described as government forces or their allies -- allegedly tortured their victims, including by forcing them to jump in fires or eat human flesh, according to the report.

The killings were "an organized military operation that could not have been successful without concerted efforts from various actors in the military and government circles," the report said. "Roadblocks or checkpoints were established all around Juba and house to house searches were undertaken by security forces. During this operation male Nuers were targeted, identified, killed on the spot or gathered in one place and killed."

The report said Minister of Defense Kuol Manyang Juuk described a shadowy "group (that had) organized itself as Rescue the President. It killed most people here (in Juba) -- from 15th to 18th. It was even more powerful than organized forces."

The group comprised some Dinka soldiers who had been mobilized following a 2012 border crisis with northern neighbor Sudan. Some of these soldiers were moved south to Kiir's private farm near Juba in 2013 and later participated in the killings, the report said, citing interviews with informants.

Amid the Juba killings, Machar fled the capital and mobilized an insurgency which committed revenge attacks against the Dinka, sparking a cycle of violence in Bor, Malakal, and Bentiu towns which also included rape and murder of people in churches and hospitals, according to the report. Those revenge attacks occurred so quickly they were also likely coordinated, it added.

Kiir and Machar signed a peace agreement in August but fighting continues.
The Authors Guild has been trying to get a court to shut down Google's book-scanning/book-search program for more than a decade.

Last October, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals  the most publisher-friendly court in America  ruled that the program was legal. Today, the Supreme Court settled the question forever, by declining to hear the Authors Guild's appeal.

I've written a lot about this, but here's the tl;dr: if making a copy in order to create a search index violates copyright, then all search engines are illegal, because they contain billions, if not trillions, of copyrighted works that they ingest in order to create search indexes.

The Supreme Court did not comment in its order other than to say that Justice Elena Kagan did not participate. Google, for its part, urged the justices to side against the writers because, in the end, their works would be more readily discovered. "Google Books gives readers a dramatically new way to find books of interest," Google's brief said. (PDF) "By formulating their own text queries and reviewing search results, users can identify, determine the relevance of, and locate books they might otherwise never have found." Unlike other forms of Google search, Google does not display advertising to book searchers, nor does it receive payment if a searcher uses Google's link to buy a copy. Google's book scanning project started in 2004. Working with major libraries like Stanford, Columbia, the University of California, and the New York Public Library, Google has scanned and made machine-readable more than 20 million books. Many of them are nonfiction and out of print.



Fair use prevails as Supreme Court rejects Google Books copyright case

[David Kravets/Ars Technica]

ORDERS IN PENDING CASES [Supreme Court]

(Image: Librarians Against DRM, Listen to My Voice, CC-BY-SA)
Australia says rape and murder should never be joked about after the leading Philippine presidential candidate said last week that he "should have been the first" to assault an Australian missionary who was gang raped and killed by prisoners in 1989.

Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte spoke at a campaign rally last Tuesday about the killings of 36-year-old Australian Jacqueline Hamill and four other missionaries in his city. She and other women hostages also were raped.

Duterte said he was angered because Hamill was so beautiful and the prisoners took turns raping her when "the mayor should have been first."

Ambassador Amanda Gorely tweeted late Sunday that "rape and murder should never be joked about or trivialized."
Evangelical Christians in Mexico are facing increasing persecution at the hands of rural followers of a hybrid faith who demand submission, say advocates, who are calling on the government to protect religious freedom.

An alarming number of incidents over the past year have seen Christians in a handful of states in southern Mexico attacked, beaten and even banished from their villages, according to the charity group International Christian Concern (ICC). The perpetrators are allegedly synchretists, who consider themselves Christian but practice a blend of mythologies, faiths and traditions.

They will try to force them to convert, and if they refuse, they are banned from their villages, unable to live with or see their families, said Nate Lance, advocacy manager for the ICC. When they refuse to recant their faith, they are expelled from the community.

While Mexico is considered more than 80 percent Catholic, the nation's synchretists count themselves in that majority even though the faith they practice incorporates a baffling stew of spiritual beliefs.

They will try to force them to convert and if they refuse, they are banned from their villages, unable to live with or see their families.  Nate Lance, International Christian Concern

Around the world, synchretism describes any faith that incorporates two or more religions or philosphies and includes such beliefs as Rastafarianism, Unitarian-Universalism Santeria and blends of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism practiced widely in China.

In northern Mexico, Christians have faced violent reprisals for their condemnation of drug cartels, but the persecution in the nation's south is typically sectarian, Lance said.

Last month, Lauro Nunez, an evangelical Christian who had reportedly been kicked out of his village in the state of Oaxaca after publicly professing his faith, was attacked and imprisoned when he returned to visit his family.

In January, some 30 evangelical Christians in the state of Chiapas were banished by village elders who then destroyed their homes, according to supporters. Lance's group counts those cases among nearly 150 incidents in which Christians allegedly have been victimized within the past 12 months.

Chiapas, where most of these incidents occurred, is very indigenous, said Christopher Wilson, deputy director of the Mexico Institute at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "Most of these areas in the south are self-governing. And if the majority of the town is Catholic, then the town activities are Catholic and anybody that declines to participate is ostracized.

Mexico's Constitution guarantees the freedom of religion, but advocates say state and federal governments do little to ensure citizens' rights at the local level.

We are equally appalled that the state government continues to let this persecution fester, allowing more Christians to be displaced, imprisoned, and beaten, Lance said. If the government does not intervene to protect religious minorities, I see no reason why the trend of increased persecution will not continue.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye is to visit Iran early next month for what would be the two countries' first summit talks.

Park's office said Monday she and her Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani will discuss regional issues including the Korean Peninsula and ways to promote bilateral ties.

It says Park's trip set for May 1-3 will be a chance to further boost ties following Iran's agreement last year to curb nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.

South Korea and Iran established diplomatic ties in 1962.

South Korea has urged rival North Korea to follow in the footsteps of Iran and give up its nuclear weapons program.

Iran and North Korea have long been suspected of being close partners in weapons technologies.
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Sweden's housing minister has stepped down amid mounting questions over his contacts with Islamists and ultra-nationalists from his native Turkey.

Mehmet Kaplan, a 44-year-old Green Party member and former spokesman of Sweden's Muslim Council, says Monday he has done nothing wrong but was resigning because the criticism against him was interfering with his ability to perform his job.

Kaplan came under pressure after Swedish media published photos showing him dining with Turkish Swedish leaders, including the local leader of the Gray Wolves, an ultra-nationalist group.

He also faced criticism for having compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to how the Nazis persecuted Jews.

Kaplan told reporters his resignation was "not a confirmation of reports about me that I consider wrongful. I know who I am and what I have done."
The prosecutor general for Russian-occupied Crimea says security services are pressing charges against a Crimean journalist for undermining Russia's territorial integrity.

Shortly after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, the parliament passed a law making it a criminal offense to question Russia's territorial integrity, which also means opposing the occupation.

The prosecutor general's office said in a statement on Tuesday that the Federal Security Service is pressing charges against an unidentified journalist for reports where he or she "called for the isolation of the peninsula." This could be the first criminal case for denouncing the occupation.

Independent media have been virtually banned in Crimea since the annexation and the few reporters who work for independent media outlets use pen names to hide their identities.
The Latest on the conflict in Syria as escalating violence in the north has prompted opposition representatives to suspend participation in U.N.-sponsored peace talks (all times local):

1:15 p.m.

The Kremlin spokesman says Russia will continue to support further talks in Geneva.

During a conference call on Tuesday with journalists, Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed Russia's support for embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad and said Russia would continue to oppose terrorist groups.

Peskov would not confirm reports that President Putin had recently sent Assad a telegram.

According to Peskov, President Putin, when speaking to U.S. President Barack Obama yesterday, stressed the need to continue dialogue and maintain the current U.S.-Russia brokered ceasefire.

___

12:45 a.m.

Syrian rebels and activists are reporting intensified fighting in the country's north and center, while a chief opposition negotiator says the conditions on the ground are not conducive to a political process.

The fighting in rural parts of the northern Latakia province, a government stronghold, and in the central Hama and Homs provinces Tuesday comes a day after the Syrian opposition said it is pausing its formal participation in the Geneva talks because of what it said were hundreds of government violations of a cease-fire agreement over two months.

Riad Hijab, the head of the Syrian opposition coalition, said on his Twitter account that government and allied forces target residential areas. He said conditions on the ground are not "conducive" to go on with the political talks.
Mastering the art of hailing a cab can be tricky, but for one parrot, it comes easy.

Evie, an 11-year-old bird from the British town of Tamworth, was able to find its way home after squawking hello to a passing cab driver in the area.

Missing parrot flies up to taxi, says 'hello' to the driver and is reunited with its owner: https://t.co/lwH9RZRm9n  klmtaxis (@klmtaxis) April 19, 2016

The parrot disappeared from its owners home over Easter weekend and appeared distressed, the Tamworth Herald reported.

Taxi driver Pete Knight, from nearby Glascote, picked up Evie and then reached out to UK charity Problem Parrots.

We had run an appeal on social media but it wasn't until [its owner] saw the article in the Herald that he got in touch with us, Rebecca Hartill-Speak, lost and found officer for Problem Parrots UK, told the newspaper.

Evies owner, Peter Jackson, went to retrieve the bird last Sunday.

Evie is doing really well, she's eating and happy  I'm so glad that she's home, he said.

Click for more from the Tamworth Herald.


Just five years ago, celebrities such as George Clooney and Don Cheadle hailed the creation of a new African nation as one of President Obamas foreign policy success stories, but now South Sudan is looking like a failed state.

The nation, sought as a means of bringing peace to Sudans long-running civil war, was promoted as a potential U.S. ally and was formed following a referendum passed with 98 percent of the vote to secede from the northern part of Sudan and the Khartoum government. But hope has given way to desperation, as South Sudan has descended into bloodshed and chaos.

The euphoria has faded and South Sudan is an embarrassment for the administration, and that comes with reputational costs, Joshua Meservey, policy analyst for Africa and the Middle East at The Heritage Foundation, told FoxNews.com. Bringing attention to it is not in the White Houses interest.

The issue of human rights in South Sudan has no value to reality. The war machine just wont stop.  Joseph Afhandy, South Sudanese journalist

Meservey said the U.S.-backed solution was based on a very superficial grasp of the war between Sudan and South Sudan, and the deep divisions that existed in the nascent nation.

People ignored the warning signs and it was an exciting time framed as the liberation of the region, he said.

The civil war that rocked Sudan from 1983-2005 started in what is now South Sudan, and would eventually see more than 2 million people die as a direct result of war or of famine and disease related to the conflict. Twice as many people were displaced before a peace agreement was signed in 2005 and laid the groundwork for the creation of the new nation.

With three-quarters of Sudans oil reserves in the newly formed country, the future looked bright for South Sudan. It was accepted as a United Nations member state, and expatriates flocked back to help build the country. But South Sudan plunged into civil war in late 2013 after President Salva Kiir accused his then-deputy, Riek Machar, of plotting a coup. Machar denied the accusation, but quickly formed a rebel army.

The UN stepped in in an effort to head off a deadly and embarrassing civil war. Under the threat of sanctions, a peace deal was signed by both sides last August  intended to stop the fighting and targeting of civilians and bring about the formation of a transitional government. But in just the last eight months, thousands of people have since been slaughtered and driven from their homes  with the number of displaced now well over two million  into deteriorating and dangerous camps and settlements.

These arent refugee camps, they are military bases where they have to be under armed protection, Casie Copeland, an Africa-based analyst focusing on South Sudan for the International Crisis Group, said. They are afraid to leave, and are fearful for their lives every day.

A recent UN investigation found that South Sudanese army soldiers were given permission to rape more than 1,300 women and girls "as a reward" in lieu of receiving salaries. Amnesty International investigators also reported that scores of men and boys have been suffocated in a shipping container by government forces. Countless civilians have been burned, starved, shot, speared, blown up and even consumed in ritual cannibalism.

People have been burned and drowned, children are raped and homeless mothers are being forced to eat meat of their dead children after their husbands die, South Sudanese journalist Joseph Afhandy  who is now living in exile in Nairobi, after enduring his own brutal torture for exposing corruption and government abuse - told FoxNews.com.

The issue of human rights in South Sudan has no value to reality, he said. This is about power and shadow-wrestling. The war machine just wont stop.

Both government and rebel leaders have been accused of recruiting more than 15,000 child soldiers to take up arms in the bloody civil war. While it is nearly impossible to quantify, some analysts have likened the suffering and slaughter to what has taken place in Syria during the same period.

It is possible, John Prendergast, prominent human rights activist and founding director of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide, said of the comparisons to Syria death tolls. But we will never know because the world does not prioritize what is happening in South Sudan sufficiently to even properly count the dead there.

Aid groups this month issued critical warnings that the country was on the brink of running out of medicine and facing alarming levels of hunger and food shortages. However, U.S. emergency aid assistance to South Sudan alone has already far exceeded $1 billion, and yet the famine crisis continues to worsen and policy experts have condemned the U.S. administration for giving aid money without conditions.

Warning signs of the new nations chronic dysfunction were there even as the U.S and the UN praised its formation as a foreign policy triumph. Despite its oil, South Sudan is one of the world's least developed and poorest nations, and ethnic rivalries, mainly between the Dinka, Kirrs people, and the Machers Nuer faction go back generations.

Ted Dagne, an Ethiopian-American who was formerly a leading advocate in Washington for the countrys creation, an embedded go-between for United Nations, United States and Sudanese diplomats and initially appointed by President Kiir as his special advisor, has charged that that officials stole $4 billion in start-up funds before South Sudan was even formalized.

Those who came to power began to loot and do very little to help their people, except themselves and their cronies, Dagne told FoxNews.com, claiming that he and Kiir sought to stamp out corruption from the very beginning but that brought pushback and increased hostility against the president from forces loyal to the vice president.

With sudden wealth and power to fight over, the new government wasted no time. Eric Reeves, an English literature professor at Smith College, in Massachusetts, and an expert in Sudan, noted that horrific atrocities are taking place on both sides of the spectrum and while the civil war didnt officially break out until December 2013, things on the ground were tumultuous from day one. The Obama administrations miscalculations did not help, he said.

There have been some serious missteps by the Obama administration, Reeves said.

The U.S. State Department has repeatedly condemned ongoing attacks in the region, insisting that the conflict be settled through diplomacy as there is no military solution. Obama and National Security Advisor Susan Rice  both of whom led the charge to create South Sudan  have expressed disappointment over the leadership that has failed to stop the hostilities.

In the most recent testimony to the House Foreign Relations Committee from the Special Envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, Ambassador Donald Booth assured members in December that the people of South Sudan have no greater friend than the United States, and that the peace agreement remains the best chance for a fresh start.

Yet critics say its easier to keep the issue out of the political and media spotlight than it is to address it properly, and even though talks between the two parties have resumed in Juba, hopes for stability are being met with skepticism.

The creation of the worlds newest country was in fact a foreign policy success, Prendergast said. It helped avoid a return to the North-South war within Sudan, a war that had taken two and a quarter million lives.

What followed, however, was not sufficiently understood by international supporters of the new state. The foreign policy success was followed by a foreign policy failure.
Islamic State terrorists are plotting to attack tourists at beach resorts across Europe this summer by posing as drink vendors and placing bombs under sunbeds, German media reported on Tuesday.

The terrorists also plan on detonating suicide bombs and gunning down tourists with automatic rifles, Italian security sources told German newspaper Bild.

"They want to strike Italian, French and Spanish beaches, Seck Pouy, a police chief from Senegal, said. They will exploit certain radicalized vendors who travel regularly between Italy and Senegal.

The Italian Interior Minister has denied the reports and claims Italys beaches are safe for citizens and tourists.

But a senior German security source insists, "holiday beaches cannot be protected," Bild adds.

The suspects behind the alleged terror plot are said to be allied with Boko Haram and based in Senegal.

In June, terrorists gunned town 38 people, including 30 British citizens, on a beach resort in Tunisia.
Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Ross Chapman was the first member of the military killed by enemy fire during the Afghanistan war, but many details his mission had never been revealed  until now.

Working as a communication specialist for a CIA paramilitary team, Chapman was gunned down when his convoy was ambushed en route to investigate an Al Qaeda safe house on Jan. 4, 2002, The Washington Post reported. Chapmans gun was later found emptied of bullets, showing the Green Beret had fired every shot he could before slumping over in the back of a pickup truck.

Chapman was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star with a V for valor and the CIA issued him an intelligence star. The agency also listed Chapman on its Memorial Wall after a 13-year delay, the Post reports.

Chapman had been known as a master at learning and utilizing new communications equipment, earning a sterling reputation during multiple deployments throughout Asia. He was also an instructor for an advanced computer program that allowed CIA and military officials to see in real-time what was unfolding on battlefields, according to the newspaper.

When his team, nicknamed Team Hotel, was dispatched to Afghanistan in late 2001 after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, its initial mission was to box in Usama bin Laden from the Pakistan side of the Afghanistan border. But when that plan fell through, Hotel headed into Afghanistan, eventually settling in Khost. There they hoped to deny Al Qaeda a base of operations and plant the flag for the CIA, the Post adds.

It was for that reason Chapman jumped in the bed of a pickup truck on Jan. 4 for what would turn out to be his final operation. The identities of the gunmen who killed Chapman are a mystery to this day, with some analysts saying they were local tribesmen looking to extort the U.S. and others believing they were members of the nefarious Haqqani network.

An Afghan airfield in Khost and the U.S. Special Forces Association of Thailand each renamed themselves after Chapman after his death.

Click to read more from The Washington Post.
Blake Snow imagines a world without internet

In addition to blurring (or obliterating) the lines between work and home life, the Internet has dramatically changed our cultural conception of patience. "Without it, we wouldn't expect instant gratification as often as we do," notes Michael Calore, a senior editor at Wired magazine. "Not just the ability to get an online answer immediately, or same-day delivery. Because of the Internet, the anticipation of waiting for things is largely gone."

Snow's tone is questing, yet bound by inevitability; Clay Shirky is consulted and reassures us that escape is impossible. Alex Balk adds a few preliminary thoughts on how nice it would be in a world without internet.

3. Your awareness of just how shallow, vapid, rage-filled, dense, empty, angry and otherwise tiresome your fellow human beings are would be restricted to your personal observations of the few people around you who were unable to hide it, rather than being something informed by the constant universal broadcast of the vast army of people who were proud to proclaim it. 

8. Your own self-loathing would be based on the terrible things you actually did instead of the terrible things you actually clicked.

9. Idiot lists like this would never be published
Attack on Rubavu from DRC = "Operation Himmler"

What marked the Beginning of World War II was the German Invasion of Poland. On August 22 of 1939 at Hitlers Obersalzburg home, Hitler addressed his Wehrmacht commanders in regards to the Invasion of Poland:



"I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn't matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth."

This excerpt is now known to be a part of the Armenian Quote, getting its name because of Hitlers reference toWho, after all, speaks today of the Annihilation of the Armenians."

Hitler wanted to invade Poland and implement his ethnic cleansing program. The invasion had been in the works since 1928 when Wehrmacht General Werner Von Fritsch started working on the Fall Weiss strategic plan for the Invasion of Poland.

Although Hitler was confident in his abilities to successfully invade Poland, he was not confident in the support he had from the German people. Hitler saw firsthand through World War I how losing popular support can lead to a defeat in the war, so he made it a primary objective to make the Polish people a common enemy to the people of Germany.

Hitler was able to successfully do this through a national and international propaganda campaign that accused Poles and Polish authorities of committing violent atrocities against ethnic Germans that were living in Poland. Although this did help in creating opposition to the Poles, Hitler needed something bigger to fully justify the invasion.

At Hitlers orders the German propaganda campaign against the Poles came to its peak under Operation Himmler,which was a false flag project that would show there was Polish aggression, giving the people of Germany fear of their neighbors in Poland, leading them to support a first strike. Hitler succeeded in making the invasion an act of defense, an attack or be attacked situation.

On August 31, 1939, the night before the invasion of Poland, undercover German units dressed in Polish uniforms attacked and seized the Gleiwitz station where they broadcasted an anti-German message in Poland. To make the plan look even more valid, the Germans took Poles from concentration camps, killed them, put them in uniform, and left them dead at the scene.

Along with the Gleiwitz incident there were other incidents throughout the night along the Polish-German border. The next day when Hitler announced the invasion of Poland, he cited the border incidents, calling them all very serious and a justification for the German invasion of Poland.

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CPAs Drink On Us On April 17th And 18th Before Tax Day Deadline

Bananas Gives Certified Public Accountants Wings to Power through Tax Day with Frostie Dubbed The CPA

April 06, 2016 // Franchising.com // MORRISTOWN, NJ - Every year, Certified Public Accountants go bananas trying to get Americans taxes done on time, but rarely get the credit for those long days and big returns. Bananas Smoothies & Frozen Yogurt knows how hard these underappreciated folks work during tax season, so this year, the brand wants to help accountants be audit they can be! On April 17th and 18th, 2016, the day prior to and of the looming Tax Day deadline, Bananas will offer The CPA on its menu, an energizing and delicious frostie, featuring fresh strawberries and bananas, with added Red Bull Yellow Edition, to help power through all the paperwork. To top it off, ALL Certified Public Accountants will receive The CPA on the house when they present a valid CPA license at participating Bananas locations on April 17 and 18, 2016.*

Everyone needs accountants, especially when the clock is ticking down to the infamous Tax Day deadline of April 18th, but their hard work often goes unnoticed, said Leslie Chinea, Director of Marketing for Bananas and Villa Restaurant Group. The creation of The CPA is a fun way for us to say thanks for all of those late nights trying to help us get those big returns!

The CPA, made with fresh strawberries, bananas and ice, with added Red Bull Yellow Edition, will be available, while supplies last, on April 17 and 18, 2016. Whether in a cone, cup, sundae or smoothie, Bananas uses nonfat frozen yogurt and fresh ingredients to make delicious combinations. Bananas menu features a variety of items, including real fruit smoothies, fresh squeezed juices, nondairy fruit frosties, nonfat frozen yogurt sundaes and an assortment of natural grab-and-go snack offerings.

*Must provide valid identification.

*Offer available only on April 17 and 18, 2016 at participating locations, while supplies last.

*Limit one per customer.

*Cannot be combined with any other offer.

For more information, please visit http://www.greenleafsbananas.com/about.

About Villa Restaurant Group (previously known as Villa Enterprises)

Villa Restaurant GroupSM is a global multi-brand restaurant operator and franchisor. Founded in 1964 by Michele (Michael) Scotto, a Naples, Italy native, Villa Restaurant Group, began as a small pizzeria next to the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City. Today, Villa Restaurant Group is an international organization that recently celebrated its 51st anniversary with nearly 400 restaurants in malls, airports, casinos and other high-traffic locations.

Villa Restaurant Groups QSR brands, including Villa Italian Kitchen, Green Leafs Beyond Great Salads, Bananas Smoothies & Frozen Yogurt, South Philly Cheesesteaks & Fries, Far East Asian FireSM, Mo Burger and other emerging brands, can be found across 41 U.S. states, Puerto Rico and eight additional countries. Villa Restaurant Group also operates full-service restaurants in New Jersey under the 40North GroupSM brand, including The Black Horse Tavern & PubSM The OfficeSM, Steelworks Buffet & GrillSM, PiattinoSM and George & MarthasSM.

SOURCE Villa Restaurant Group

Contact:

Jillian Reed

Account Executive

BML Public Relations

D: 973-337-6395

M: 251-648-7485

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BedBug Chasers Now Killing Bed Bugs in Long Island NY

Manhattan, NY - April 19, 2016 - (PR.com) - BedBug Chasers, New York Citys #1 bed bug heat treatment is now servicing Nassau and Suffolk Counties with 2 Long Island locations  Massapequa and East Hampton NY.

The BedBug Chasers of Long Island NY service centers will be run by Michael Colongione, Managing Partner. Mr. Colongione is also President of GotchA Bed Bug Inspectors one of NYs earliest and most respected NY Bed Bug Dog Inspection companies and brings a wealth of experience and knowledge of the local market to BedBug Chasers of Long Island.

The BedBug Chasers heating system, the Original One and Done bed bug treatment, quickly turns a home or business into a superheated convection oven by using 100% chemical free, highly specialized electric heaters and a proven methodology to quickly and effectively rid any home of bed bugs. In other words, we Kill Long Island Bed Bugs. BedBug Chasers is also recognized as the leader and only company able to perform NYC High Rise Bed Bug Heat Treatments as well as treating bed bugs on private aircraft and yachts.

Joe Gere, COO of BedBug Chasers, was asked to comment on what does this mean for Long Islanders with bed bugs, As you know, BedBug Chasers has many accounts in NYC and the surrounding Boros. Many of our NYC Corporate clients live in central Long Island or summer near the Hamptons. Bed Bugs have become an unfortunate part of life in the city today and with our technology, the process of getting rid of them is a 1 day event  no more weeks living out of plastic bags. We welcome Michael into our family and are thrilled to have him running the Massapequa and East Hampton NY service centers. We are now in a position to dominate the Long Island bed bug market!

Mr. Colongione, Long Island Managing Partner explained how BedBug Chasers differs from its competitors and why he sees this as a great benefit to the Long Island market, First, BedBug Chasers has no real competitors; BedBug Chasers uses their own proprietary heating equipment. No one other than BedBug Chasers has this equipment, they designed and built it to Kill Bed Bugs, theyre not small under sized and repurposed restoration heaters! No one company in the country has the amount of heating equipment available to Kill Bed Bugs in our Long Island Estate Homes. Other exterminators can only heat a room or two then spray the rest with dangerous chemicals to kill bed bugs. We are the only Long Island Bed Bug Heat Treatment company using the One and Done methodology and we can kill bed bugs in the largest of Long Islands Estate Homes, no one can heat an entire home or office building except us!

About BedBug Chasers

BedBug Chasers is a nationwide franchised bed bug heat treatment service company providing a 100% Green and Chemical-Free alternative to exterminate bed bugs and other insects in commercial, residential and industrial environments. Using its proprietary, state of the art electric heat technology, BedBug Chasers equipment is capable of facilitating fast, effective and inexpensive heat treatment services throughout the United States. For more information, visit http://bedbugchasers.com/longisland/ or http://bedbugchasers.com/now-franchising-a-low-investment-franchise/ .

SOURCE BedBug Chasers

Media Contact:

Joe Gere

855-241-6435

BedBug Chasers

JGere@bedbugchasers.com

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Local Entrepreneur to Open Patrice & Associates Office in Seattle

Nations Leading Restaurant and Hospitality Recruitment Firm Launches New Franchise Location Supporting Seattle

April 19, 2016 // Franchising.com // SEATTLE - Patrice & Associates, the nations preeminent strategic partner in the restaurant industry, announced today the opening of its franchise in Seattle to meet the growing management needs at local restaurants and other related hospitality businesses.

Rachel Grossman, local resident, will run day-to-day operations for Patrice & Associates in the greater Seattle area. In this new phase of her career, Grossman will leverage her professional background, which includes more than 10 years of consultative sales experience helping large companies meet their employee health and wellness needs.

In Seattle, the landscape for restaurants is changing with implementation of minimum wage laws and a move away from traditional tipping. As owners and managers focus on these aspects of their business, more and more are heavily relying on recruiters to find the best talent, Grossman said. As changes evolve, I am eager to connect our great restaurants with bright personalities and hard workers.

Patrice Rice, CEO and founder of Patrice & Associates, began the hospitality management recruiting company more than twenty years ago out of her basement. She recently launched a growth initiative for the company, seeking to expand by opening franchised Patrice & Associate offices. Now, one of the largest privately held search firms in the country, Patrice & Associates fills positions for thousands of U.S. restaurants and guides thousands of management candidates to new job opportunities.

We are happy to have Rachel join the Patrice & Associates family, Rice said. Rachel knows exactly how to deliver what her clients want, which makes her an ideal recruiter.

Patrice & Associates has evolved from a hospitality-staffing agency to a strategic partner for restaurant brands. Restaurant companies today are looking for more than a resume, they are seeking talent that can embody the culture and have a positive impact on the brands growth.

The $625 billion hospitality industry employing 12 million people in the United States has proven resistant to the recent forces of the recession. Rice began franchising her hospitality industry recruiting business four years ago in the midst of the Great Recession. It has continued to grow rapidly with more than 55 regional franchise offices spread across the entire nation. Patrice & Associates currently has more than 600 managerial positions to fill.

For more on Patrice & Associates and Rachel Grossman, please visit www.patriceandassociates.com or patricejobs.com/rgrossman. You can also contact Rachel directly at 206.550.3133 or rgrossman@patriceandassociates.com.

About Patrice & Associates

As the preeminent hospitality recruiting service in the U.S. since 1989, Patrice & Associates helps thousands of managerial candidates every year find rewarding jobs in the restaurant and hospitality industry. The company has exclusive recruiting partnerships with some the nations largest restaurant chains and hotels to ensure those hospitality venues recruit the top managers in their industry. Currently, there are more than 55 franchise units across dozens of states. Patrice & Associates is growing its franchise base dramatically in the next few years, expecting to add more than 100 franchisees to help fill 1,100 open territories nationwide. For more information about Patrice & Associates, visit http://www.PatriceAndAssociates.com. To learn about available franchise opportunities, call (301) 327-5059 or email Patrice Rice at patricer@PatriceAndAssociates.com.

SOURCE Patrice & Associates

Media Contact:

Niveen Saleh

All Points Public Relations

(847) 897-7489

nsaleh@allpointspr.com

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N-Hance Wood Renewal Announces Expansion Plans in Texas

Leader in Cabinet and Hardwood Floor to introduce new franchises in more than 30 major territories

LOGAN, Utah - April 19, 2016 - (BUSINESS WIRE) - Home renovations are about to become much easier for residents throughout the state of Texas as N-Hance Wood Renewal, a national franchise that specializes in the refinishing of hardwood floors and kitchen cabinets, has announced expansion plans to add 30 new territories through strategic franchise partnerships in the lone star states largest cities  Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. Backed by Harris Research, Inc., N-Hance is the only wood refinishing company with a presence in more than 1,550 Home Depots across the nation.

The National Remodeling Index indicates an annually growing remodeling market as Americans are investing more in their proprieties  with Texas as a major contributor. A 2015 report by the Texas Association of Realtors indicated a higher rate of home remodeling taking place in all of the states major cities. The report also showed increased revenue and higher return on investments due to the remodels. This optimism in home improvement spending is contributing in large part to the rapid growth of N-Hance and its active development plans in Texas.

The requests for services like the ones we offer are in high demand throughout the state of Texas, said Ryan Combe, SVP of Development at N-Hance. Customers can expect satisfaction when they choose to have N-Hance services done to their hardwood floors and cabinets. They can also expect to save money. Our ability to stay ahead of trends in the home improvement industry and remain opportunistic about consumer demands has positioned us for significant franchise growth in major DMAs.

Already working towards the goal of 30 new territories, N-Hance currently has a presence of nine territories operating across Dallas, San Antonio and Houston. N-Hances growth is due to its strong franchise owners and their drive to satisfy customers. One such owner is Derek Griffith who has been operating since 2012 and experienced a 32.6 percent year-over-year revenue increase in 2015.

We are busy every day, Griffith said. We need more franchises all across the state. There is a high demand for our services and we are very appealing to customers. Our price for service is very attractive and people love to see the end result; they often cant believe how their kitchen looks.

N-Hance Wood Renewal offers wood surface renewal for hardwood floors and cabinets at a fraction of the cost of more traditional methods of resurfacing or replacing. The renewal of these surfaces starts with the deep cleaning of any dirt, grease, or stains that are present. Technicians can then restore the cabinets to their original luster or change the color to fit newer trends. The innovative process provides one day hardwood refinishing without the hassle of dust, mess or odor. With more than 410 franchises nationwide, the company is projected to close 2016 with the addition of 100 new unites across the United States, with a significant focus in Texas.

For more information about franchising in Texas and N-Hance Wood Renewal, please visit http://www.buynhance.com or call (435) 799-7651.

About N-Hance Wood Renewal

Based in Logan, Utah and founded in 2001, N-Hance Wood Renewal is the trusted partner of the Home Depot with a presence in more than 1,550 locations. Using a proprietary chemical abrasion and refinishing technique that requires no sanding, N-Hance Wood Renewal restores the natural beauty of hardwood flooring, trims and cabinets at one-third to one-fifth the cost of traditional re-facing or replacing of cabinets. The companys powerful Lightspeed U.V. curing technology shortens the refinishing process and produces less dust, mess and odor than traditional methods, making it ideal for homes and businesses. N-Hance Wood Renewal has more than 382 franchises across the United States and Canada and is backed by Harris Research, Inc., the same company that grew Chem-Dry into the worlds largest carpet cleaning company. For more information, please visithttp://www.buynhance.com or visit http://nhancefranchise.com/ to learn about franchise opportunities.

SOURCE N-Hance Wood Renewal

Contact:

Kelly McNamara

Fishman Public Relations

847-945-1300

KMcNamara@fishmanpr.com

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St. Regis Hotels & Resorts to Debut in Serbias Capital City in 2019 with The St. Regis Belgrade

Iconic Luxury Brand will Move Into Exclusive 40-story Tower as the Crown Jewel of the Highly Anticipated Belgrade Waterfront Development

BELGRADE, Serbia - April 19, 2016 - (BUSINESS WIRE) - Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. (NYSE:HOT) today announced the signing of The St. Regis Belgrade and The Residences at The St. Regis Belgrade, a development project slated to open in 2019. Owned by Belgrade Waterfront LLC, the 125-room hotel will additionally feature 220 St. Regis branded residences in Kula Belgrade, the countrys highest mixed-use tower that will form the centerpiece of the new Belgrade Waterfront development.

We are delighted to strengthen our relationship with Belgrade Waterfront LLC and to introduce the St. Regis brand and its bespoke hospitality to Serbia, said Michael Wale, President, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Europe, Africa and Middle East. Belgrade is fast emerging as a popular tourist destination in Europe and we are proud to be part of this new, exciting landmark development.

The St. Regis Belgrade will occupy the first nine floors of Kula Belgrade and will offer 125 elegant rooms and suites looking out to the city or River Sava. The hotel will feature distinct dining experiences including a destination restaurant at the top of the tower with panoramic views, an all-day dining venue and the St. Regis Bar, inspired by the iconic King Cole Bar at The St. Regis New York. Luxury leisure facilities will include a spa, pool, gymnasium, and unrivalled event and meeting space for special celebrations.

Guests at The St. Regis Belgrade will get to experience renowned hallmarks of the St. Regis brand, including St. Regis Butler Service which provides anticipatory service and customizes each stay according to personal tastes and preferences.

The cooperation between Belgrade Waterfront and Starwood with The St. Regis Belgrade is a sign of prosperity for Serbia and its potential as a tourist destination. Setting the tone for Belgrade Waterfront, the St. Regis brand is renowned for providing unmatched services for its guests, said Nikola Nedeljkovic, General Manager, Belgrade Waterfront. Situated at a prime location in Kula Belgrade, the highest tower in the development, The St. Regis Belgrade will offer sweeping city and river views from the observation deck at the top of the tower.

More than 550 feet tall and overlooking the Sava River and Kalemegdan Fortress, Kula Belgrade (Belgrade Tower in English) will set an unprecedented architectural benchmark for property developers in the region. Designed by internationally acclaimed design firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Global, Kula Belgrade will feature an observation deck at the top of the tower which will be the citys only public observatory at this height.

The landmark building will feature 220 luxurious St. Regis branded residences ranging from 750 to 1700 square feet spread across the 14th and 39th floors. Residents will enjoy access to the services and amenities at The St. Regis Belgrade.

This signing fuels Starwoods strong growth momentum in Europe, where we continue to see a demand for high-end hotel accommodations, said Karl Bieberach, Vice President, Development, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Europe, Africa and Middle East. We are particularly interested in expanding our luxury portfolio and The St. Regis Belgrade will be a terrific addition to our strong and growing footprint in the region.

Situated along the Sava River, Belgrade Waterfront will feature commercial hubs, hotels, educational institutions, healthcare amenities, a 1.1 mile long public waterfront and parks featuring leisure attractions. The project will also feature a Cultural District and Historic Plaza, further making the city a cultural and artistic destination. The master planned community will also feature W Belgrade and The Residences at W Belgrade which are scheduled to open in 2019.

For more information, visit www.stregis.com and www.belgradewaterfront.com.

About St. Regis Hotels & Resorts

Combining classic sophistication with a modern sensibility, St. Regis is committed to delivering exceptional experiences at over 35 luxury hotels and resorts in the best addresses around the world. Since the opening of the first St. Regis hotel in New York City over a century ago by John Jacob Astor IV, the brand has remained committed to an uncompromising level of bespoke and anticipatory service for all of its guests, delivered flawlessly by signature St. Regis Butler Service. For more information and future openings, please visit stregis.com or follow Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

About Belgrade Waterfront LLC

Belgrade Waterfront is a spectacular new city hub situated along River Sava in Belgrade, Serbia. On a site area of approximately 1 million sqm, and a total construction area of 1.8 million sqm, Belgrade Waterfront is a modern city within the city, developed by Eagle Hills. It will feature world-class residences and offices, Belgrade Mall, hotels, educational institutions, modern healthcare amenities, as well as a 2 kilometre long public waterfront edge and public parks featuring leisure attractions. For more information, visit www.belgradewaterfront.com.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419006217/en/.

SOURCE Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc.

Media Contact:

Simon Neggers

St. Regis Hotels & Resorts

Director, Global Communications

212.380.4029

Simon.Neggers@starwoodhotels.com

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The Krispy Kreme Hot Light is Coming to New Jersey

Six shops to open in Bergen and Hudson Counties

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - April 18, 2016 - (BUSINESS WIRE) - Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc., (NYSE:KKD) today announced it has signed a development agreement with Entrepreneurs, LLC, to open six shops in Bergen and Hudson counties in New Jersey over several years.

Karl Halligan, John Mondry and Thomas Gallagher are partners of Entrepreneurs, LLC. Halligan and Mondry have been involved in various restaurants for more than 10 years.

Krispy Kreme is an iconic brand that provides an experience unlike any other, said Patricia Perry, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Vice President, Global Franchise Development. We are confident our partners at Entrepreneurs, LLC, will provide that experience to customers in New Jersey using their extensive background in the restaurant industry.

Halligan said now is the ideal time to open shops in New Jersey because of the growing demand for Krispy Kreme brand products.

Krispy Kreme is such a classic brand and were excited to bring the best sweet treats and premium coffee to New Jersey, said Halligan. The fan base for Krispy Kreme products is already very strong in New Jersey, so were thrilled to be adding to the excitement already surrounding the brand.

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts is in the process of expanding its development efforts throughout the United States, with particular focus on the Northeast, Northwest and certain areas of the Midwest. There are currently almost 300 shops located in 41 states.

About Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc.

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc., is a global retailer of premium-quality sweet treats, including its signature Original Glazed doughnut. Headquartered in Winston-Salem, N.C., the Company has offered the highest-quality doughnuts and great-tasting coffee since it was founded in 1937. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts is proud of its Fundraising program, which for decades has helped non-profit organizations raise millions of dollars in needed funds. The Company has more than 1,000 retail shops in 25 countries. Connect with Krispy Kreme Doughnuts at www.KrispyKreme.com, or on one its many social media channels, including www.Facebook.com/KrispyKreme, andwww.Twitter.com/KrispyKreme.

Forward-Looking Statements

Information contained in this press release, other than historical information, should be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are based on managements beliefs, assumptions and expectations of our future economic performance, considering the information currently available to management. These statements are not statements of historical fact.

Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results, performance or financial condition to differ materially from the expectations of future results, performance or financial condition we express or imply in any forward-looking statements. The words believe, may, forecast, could, will, should, would, anticipate, estimate, expect, intend, objective, seek, strive or similar words, or the negative of these words, identify forward-looking statements. Factors that could contribute to these differences include, but are not limited to: the quality of Company and franchise store operations; our ability, and our dependence on the ability of our franchisees, to execute on our and their business plans; our relationships with our franchisees; our ability to implement our international growth strategy; our ability to implement our domestic small shop operating model; political, economic, currency and other risks associated with our international operations; the price and availability of raw materials needed to produce doughnut mixes and other ingredients, and the price of motor fuel; our relationships with wholesale customers; our ability to protect our trademarks and trade secrets; changes in customer preferences and perceptions; risks associated with competition; risks related to the food service industry, including food safety and protection of personal information; compliance with government regulations relating to food products and franchising; increased costs or other effects of new government regulations relating to healthcare benefits; and risks associated with implementation of new technology platforms.

These and other risks and uncertainties, which are described in more detail in the Companys most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and other reports and statements filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, are difficult to predict, involve uncertainties that may materially affect actual results and may be beyond the Companys control, and could cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by any of these forward-looking statements. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for management to predict all such factors or to assess the impact of each such factor on the Company. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which such statement is made, and the Company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which such statement is made.

SOURCE Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc.

Contact:

Sarah Roof

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc.

336-726-8878

Corporate Communications Coordinator

sroof@krispykreme.com

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Tikiz Shaved Ice Awards 1st Franchise in the State of California

April 19, 2016 // Franchising.com // BOCA RATON, FL.  Tikiz Shaved Ice & Ice Cream, a mobile franchise specializing in unique frozen treats, will soon open an all-new business for the Apple Valley, California community. The territory will be operated by Leona Collantes, who will serve as the owner/operator of her fully customized Tikiz truck to provide residents, schools, businesses and organizations delicious and refreshing enjoyment all year long.

Tikiz is on the move, and were looking forward to watching Leona experience that growth with her Apple Valley location, said Brian Tollefson, founder of Tikiz Shaved Ice & Ice Cream. Apply Valley is a prime territory for Tikiz and were confident the community will embrace the concept and all that it has to offer.

Like all Tikiz franchises, the all-new Apple Valley, CA business will feature the Tikiz truck, built from the ground up with numerous custom components to provide a truly one-of-a-kind experience. Based off brand new, heavy-duty, yet fuel efficient Ford truck platforms, all Tikiz trucks share the same, highly visible Hawaiian beach-themed wrap with real, custom surfboard signage, multiple water misters at each end, 20 chrome wheels and custom lighting with strobes, neon colors and steel drum music. The patented Surv-Board dispenser allows customers to create their own fruit syrup creations, while a high-output ice shaver works from high output batteries to provide owners efficient, yet powerful operation.

A Tikiz truck is more than just a shaved ice and ice cream truck as it provides true community support, said Tollefson. In addition to bringing fresh, healthier and delicious treats to kids of all ages, our FUNdraiser program will be offered to schools and local organizations who are looking for reputable financial support. Its an easy and fun way for us to give back to those we serve.

The Tikiz Apple Valley location is currently in the development process and will be available soon. To find out more about Tikiz and franchise opportunities available nationwide, visit http://www.tikiz2u.com/franchising/.

About Tikiz Shaved Ice & Ice Cream

Since 2012, Tikiz Shaved Ice & Ice Cream has been providing communities with professional, clean and fun on-site unique frozen treats. Founded and based in Boca Raton, Florida, Tikiz franchises are available nationwide with year-round options for sales and business growth. Each truck is a custom, made-to-order service vehicle built at Tikizs headquarters and features every component needed for franchise partners, including the patented Surv-Board syrup dispenser and more. To find out how to start your own Tikiz franchise, visit tikiz2u.com/franchising-info.

SOURCE Tikiz Shaved Ice & Ice Cream

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Two Maids & A Mop Franchise Expands in North Carolina

Mainstream Demand for Residential Cleaning Services Fuels Franchise's Growth

BIRMINGHAM, AL - (Marketwired - Apr 19, 2016) - Two Maids & A Mop is the fastest-growing cleaning franchise in America for three years running, according to Inc. magazine. With a three-year growth rate of 571 percent and annual revenue of nearly $5 million that is propelled by its unique franchise model, Two Maids & A Mop is backed by more than a decade of direct operating experience. The cleaning franchise has plans for growth in business-friendly North Carolina, beyond its already established territories of Greensboro, Charlotte and Raleigh.

Two Maids & A Mop is an easily scalable business that meets the growing demand for a cleaning service. Hiring a cleaning service is becoming more mainstream as busy families look for ways to delegate household chores and errands to carve out more family time. Eighty percent of two-income households use a cleaning service at least once per year, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"Our tagline is 'A Maid Service Worth Talking About,' and we are excited about our plans for growth and expansion beyond our current 24 locations across eight states," said Two Maids & A Mop CEO Ron Holt. "We are particularly focused on expansion in North Carolina, and we are excited about the growth opportunities."

North Carolina is growing, as an average of 281 new residents move to the state daily, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; with that growth comes increasing demand for cleaning services. With a population of 10 million, North Carolina is the nation's ninth-largest state.

The Tar Heel State is also consistently recognized for its business-friendly environment. In 2015 North Carolina ranked second in the nation by Forbes as a top state for business and careers and for the second year in a row, North Carolina placed fourth nationwide and first regionally in Site Selection magazine's annual Governor's Cup ranking of economic development success.

As such, North Carolina is an attractive state for middle-income families, many of whom are open to the idea of hiring a residential cleaning service. Today the average Two Maids & A Mop client is 30 to 40 years old, and the average client's house size is 2,000-3,000 square feet.

About Two Maids & A Mop

Two Maids & A Mop credits its growth to its innovative sales and marketing process that generates a large number of qualified leads. Best of all, the company offers a unique compensation plan -- the Pay for Performance Plan -- that serves as a tremendous employee motivational tool and an equally effective sales tool. Each customer provides a 1-10 numerical rating on their house cleaning, and the number directly determines an employee's total compensation.

Offering several business models, including an Owner-Operator Model and a Multiple Location Model, Two Maids & A Mop is seeking potential franchisees interested in launching locations in several North Carolina cities, such as Durham and Fayetteville.

For in-depth details about Two Maids & A Mop franchise opportunities, visittwomaidsfranchises.com.

SOURCE Two Maids & A Mop

Contact:

Dr. Jaime Kulaga, PhD

jaimetwomaids@gmail.com

866-695-3984

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Why would you sharpen a carrot, I hear you asking? At $3.77, why wouldn't you?



It's not just carrots, either: you can sharpen zucchini and cukes too  and if you want a tactical version, it comes in black for $10.

More prosaically, it does effectively shred carrots while providing some visual whimsy, possibly sufficient to lure the kids in your home into helping with dinner prep.



Karoto Sharpener and Peeler [Monkey Business]

(via Red Ferret)
United Real Estate Welcomes Joe Cremonese and Patrick McFarland

United hires additional Franchise Sales Directors to keep pace with doubling the size of its franchise network in 2016

April 14, 2016 // Franchising.com // KANSAS CITY, Mo.  United Real Estate, a rapidly growing real estate company, announces today that Joe Cremonese and Patrick MaFarland will be joining as Franchise Directors. They will further expand Uniteds market presence coast-to-coast by establishing relationships with independent real estate companies, evaluating and selecting new franchisees and assisting existing franchisees with business expansion.

With the rapid expansion of United Real Estate, we needed experienced individuals that could assist us in selecting the right partners and embraced our high-growth entrepreneurial model, said Peter Giese, President United Real Estate. Joe Cremonese and Patrick McFarland have passionate entrepreneurial mindsets that we strongly believe will expand Uniteds presence, knowledge and power in the industry.

With over 30 years of experience, Joe Cremonese has a proven track record of growing leading brands in the real estate industry and exceeding expectations in the process. Cremonese started in real estate as a sales agent and quickly became a top producer. He later became a branch sales manager, where he tripled the size of the office in just six weeks. Cremonese successful history in the real estate industry coupled with his consulting abilities and extensive backgrounds in sales, management, agent recruiting and retention make him a key hire for the United Real Estate team.

I look forward to bringing my real estate industry knowledge to United and find the right partners to expand the network, said Cremonese, Director of Franchise Development. I am excited to provide Uniteds top-notch technology, training and marketing solutions platform to future offices and have the opportunity to continue a tradition of exceeding expectations with United Real Estate.

Patrick McFarland is a third generation real estate broker born and raised in Chicago, IL. He became a licensed broker in 1980 and since then has created a long history of helping real estate brokers start, and grow their business. McFarland has held various franchise developments and brokerage leadership positions throughout the country. McFarlands experience as a business consultant, franchise sales director, agent, broker, builder and owner will bring the depth of knowledge United Real Estate is looking to add to the team.

Growing up with real estate and carrying on the family tradition has led me to United Real Estate, said McFarland, Director of Franchise Development. I thrive on working with entrepreneurs and discovering new methods for differentiation. United Real Estates model has everything that a broker or agent could be looking for and is certainly the model of the future. Im thrilled to be joining this innovative team.

United Real Estate is a company that has been exceeding goals and expectations from coast to coast. Uniteds network is supported by a company with 90 years of real estate success. Offering real estate solutions that support brokers, entrepreneurs, and agents across the board, United Real Estate welcomes our new Franchise Directors and looks forward to continued growth.

To learn more about United Real Estates franchise offering, visit GrowWithUnited.com.

A Closer Look at United Real Estate

United Real Estate  a division of the United Real Estate Group  was founded with the purpose of offering solutions to the challenges facing agents in the residential real estate brokerage industry. Providing the latest training, marketing and technology tools to both agents and brokers under a 100-percent commission strategy, United Real Estate makes it more profitable for an agent to sell real estate and for real estate brokers to leverage a complete system to better grow a successful, thriving real estate brokerage. Named as a frontrunner in the real estate industry in the 2013 Swanepoel TRENDS Report, United Real Estate has more than 30 offices and over 1,800 agents. Through a worldwide franchise solution, United continues to rapidly expand. Driven by an unwavering commitment to giving back, a pillar of Uniteds core values and guiding principles, United Real Estate is proud to support and partner with Autism Speaks, the worlds leading autism science and advocacy organization, as Uniteds charity of choice.

Members of the media needing information on United Real Estate or our marketplace, contact: Public Relations Department - EMS@unitedrealestate.com.

SOURCE United Real Estate

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Wag N Wash Natural Food & Bakery Opens in Las Vegas

Company plans call for having as many as ten locations in the next several years.

April 19, 2016 // Franchising.com // DENVER  Wag N Wash Natural Food & Bakery, a full-line specialty retail and grooming destination for cats and dogs, has opened its doors in Las Vegas.

The 4,170-square-foot store is located at 7060 S. Durango Drive in Spring Valley. The store is Wag N Washs first location in Nevada and tenth overall. Company plans call for opening as many as 10 area locations in the next several years.

Local residents Jeremiah Richardson and Christie McLean will own and operate the store. Their passion for animals and strong desire to educate pet parents about pet nutrition drove them to bring Wag N Wash to Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is widely regarded as one of the best cities in the U.S. for pet owners, so Christie and I are very excited to introduce Wag N Wash to the community, said Richardson. We look forward to improving the lives of companion animals and help them transition to a much healthier lifestyle.

Founded in 1999 by Jef Strauss and Dan Remus, Wag N Wash Natural Food & Bakery offers a community for pet enthusiasts to come, find quality goods and services for their pet companions, and simply be pet people. Among the stores offerings are various brands of all-natural pet foods, high-end supplements, grooming and washing facilities, and cool toys. In addition, an in-house bakery, rare in the pet store market, offers treats such as Liver Bites, Pumpkin Ravioli, Poochie Sushi and a variety of pies, cakes and muffins.

Expert nutritional staff is there to help customers make the best nutritional choices; and all the while, furry friends are mingling throughout the store.

We pride ourselves in being a one-stop shop for pet enthusiasts, added Richardson. Wag N Wash allows pet owners to pamper and spoil their companion animals in a multitude of ways.

Wag N Wash locations also support local dog adoption and rescue organizations, dog and cat health events, and pet safety and wellness events.

Store hours are Monday to Sunday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.

About Wag N Wash Natural Food & Bakery

Founded in 1999 and franchising since 2006, Wag N Wash Natural Food & Bakery is a full-line specialty retail destination for cats and dogs that has created a community for pet enthusiasts to come and be pet people. With a mission to recognize, promote, and foster the positive impact that companion pets and their humans have on each other, Wag N Wash provides the full experience  fresh dog treats baking in the oven, natural food, high-end supplements, clean grooming and wash facilities and cool toys. There are currently nine stores open and operating in Colorado, Arizona and Minnesota, with others in various stages in development in Kentucky, Maryland, Washington, Colorado and New Jersey. For more information, visit www.wagnwash.com.

SOURCE Wag N Wash Natural Food & Bakery

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Chicago's Police Department are notorious: the force maintains a "black site" where prisoners are secretly held under fake names and tortured, uses political shenanigans to suppress information about corruption, sabotages their own dashcams, secretly operates illegal mass-surveillance equipment (bought with asset forfeiture money, natch), forces out internal investigators who do their jobs conscientiously, and don't get me started on the evils of the Illinois prison system!

But this week, there was a glimmer of hope in this story of hopeless corruption. The CPD's Police Accountability Task Force published an unflinching, thorough, evidence-based and objective look at the force's culture of silence, cover-ups, racism and violence. The report is especially harsh on the force's internal accountability process, which it calls "badly broken" and "riddled with legal and practical barriers to accountability."

The report is an easy read, but it's not easy to stomach. This is a picture of a city at war with its law-abiding residents, where an armed, criminal gang in uniform operates with perfect impunity. The report is the first step: it names the problem and describes it in incontrovertible facts and figures. What happens next in Chicago is anyone's guess.

CPD is not doing enough to combat racial bias. Policies need further clarification, as it is not clear whether and when officers may use race as a factor when initiating stops. While CPD collects a fair amount of data, little is reported to the public. CPD still has significant work to do to diversify its ranks, especially at supervisory levels. And more needs to be done to train officers to acknowledge and address their biases and deploy officers who are culturally competent and have a proper understanding of the communities they are assigned to serve. Historically, CPD has relied on the Community Alternative Policing Strategy ("CAPS") to fulfill its community-policing function. The CAPS brand is significantly damaged after years of neglect. Ultimately, community policing cannot be relegated to a small, underfunded program; it must be treated as a core philosophy infused throughout CPD. CPD officers are not adequately equipped to engage with youth. The existing relationship between CPD and youthparticularly youth of coloris antagonistic, to say the least. Children in some areas of the City are not only being raised in high-crime environments, but they are also being mistreated by those who have sworn to protect and serve them. Finally, CPD is not doing enough to protect human and civil rights. Providing arrestees access to counsel is a particular problem. In 2014, only 3 out of every 1,000 arrestees had an attorney at any point while in police custody. In 2015, that number "doubled" to 6. The City's youth are particularly vulnerable and often lack awareness of their rights.

Recommendations for Reform: Restoring Trust between the Chicago Police and the Communities they Serve [Police Accountability Task Force/Chicago Police Department]





Chicago Police Department Task Force Report

[Cathy O'Neil/Mathbabe]
Google is pointing a finger at its own website, declaring it "partially unsafe" for web visitors. It's not clear if the report is one part of the sprawling company telling the truth about another part, a mistake, or a clever "googlebomb" of inbound links designed to trigger this result.

In any case, the warnings posted are delicious.
Fredericksburg is going head-to-head with Charlottesville in the final round of the Virginia is for Lovers Culinary Challenge.

Each city has four entries in the contest, which is sponsored by the Virginia Tourism Corp. Thats the most number of any locality across the state, but Fredericksburg may have an advantage.

One of its four in Eat Like a Local  Local Hot Spots, which the states tourism office calls the mother of all vote-offs, is Foode, the Caroline Street restaurant that won last years competition.

Joy Crump, the co-owner and culinary mind behind both Foode and its sister Mercantile in downtown Fredericksburg, won last year for her buttermilk fried chicken and waffles.

That contest featured 32 restaurants nominated by customers. They competed in bracket-style vote-offs to narrow the field to two, whose chefs competed in a cook-off.

Foode also finished in the top eight in 2014, the first year the annual competition was held.

This year Virginia Tourism Corp. decided to broaden the contests scope. Instead of one dish, there are five categories and selection is by public vote online at virginia.org/culinarychallenge. The idea is to showcase more of what the state has to offer, said Andrew Cothern, a Virginia Tourism Corp. spokesman.

The challenge kicked off March 21 with the Small Bites category, which was won by Kybecca, a craft bar and restaurant on William Street in downtown Fredericksburg.

It was followed by Burgers and BBQ. Allmans Bar-B-Que, which has been serving cue in Fredericksburg since 1954, won third place. Densons Grocery and Oyster Bar placed third in the next challenge: Oysters and Seafood.

Eileens Bakery in downtown Fredericksburg was one of 15 entries in last weeks Desserts and Bakeries division, but didnt win.

Voting for the 33 entrants in this last round ends at 5 p.m. Thursday, and the winners will be announced on Friday.
BLAIRS  The Dan River Regions historic tobacco barns will forever be remembered in history, thanks to a new highway marker preservation officials unveiled Friday morning.

Officials dedicated the state historical marker from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources recalling the numerous tobacco barns once found in Pittsylvania County and other Southside Virginia counties.

The marker is sponsored by Preservation Virginia, which has led efforts in Southside Virginiaincluding Pittsylvania and Halifax counties and Caswell County, N.C.to repair tobacco barns and raise awareness of the regions tobacco heritage.

The event, also attended by residents, farmers and county officials, took place at the farm of C.D. Bryant at U.S. 29 in Blairs within sight of an iconic red barn thats visible from the highway.

Will Glasco, assistant director of development with Preservation Virginia, said preserving history is important not only for the education of our children and grandchildren, it attracts tourisman economic driver in the commonwealth.

So much of our history is disappearing, Glasco said. Once its gone, its gone forever.

The regions and the states tobacco history is what makes it unique and its why people come here, Glasco said.

He also credited sponsors of the organizations tobacco barns preservation project, including JTI Leaf Services, the Danville Regional Foundation, the Community Foundation of the Dan River Region, National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the department of historic resources.

Preservation Virginia Field Representative Sonja Ingram called the unveiling a culmination of almost five years of work Preservation Virginia has been involved in. Bryant recounted the story of the property where his barn stands and his familys history in the area.

This is my farm and Im proud to be a part of this heritage, Bryant said. The red barn built between 18851900 included a stick barn for curing. The barn was used for both curing and packing tobacco, whereas most tobacco structures are used for those processes separately.

The structurewhich was restored as part of the projectincludes a pit underneath the structure about 15 feet deep, where tobacco was stored before it was taken to the market in Danville.

Over the last five years, the tobacco barns preservation program helped raise awareness and documented more than 200 barns and recorded stories of 16 tobacco farmers. By the end of the year, 45 tobacco barns in the three counties will have been repaired by the JTI-sponsored mini-grant barn repairs project, according to Preservation Virginia officials.

Other speakers included Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jessie Barksdale; Brenda Bowman, former county supervisor and local preservationist; and Jim Hare of the department of historic resources.

Bright-leaf tobacco barns emerged in Southside Virginia during the latter decades of the 19th century, according to the marker. The barns were typically constructed of hand-hewn logs and outfitted with wood-burning stoves. Tobacco leaves were hung on sticks that rested on horizontal tier-poles and exposed to heat distributed by flues [or ducts] that allowed the tobacco to cure while protecting it from the smoke of fires.

Once a commonly seen building type in Pittsylvania and Southside, Flue-cure tobacco barns were retrofitted with oil and gas burners after World War II and fell into disuse with the introduction of bulk-curing barns in the 1970s, the marker reads.
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It's early on a Thursday morning at Fredericksburgs Christ Lutheran Church Preschool. The 3-year-olds in teacher Hope Woods class are enjoying the last few minutes of free play.

All around the classrooms, students are playing in their favorite ways, occupied with everything from black plastic toy trains to glittering pink slippers to the ever-popular homemade version of red Play-Doh.

But when Wood plays the musical cue for Clean-Up TimeBeethovens No. 5 on a little record playerthings change rapidly.

Young Elias Sutton, whod been content nudging a plastic train engine along a matted track, lets out a little whoop as he joins the others in the class in a controlled wave of putting things in their proper places.

Blocks, toys and art supplies go into bins in a controlled scramble until every piece of everything is put away.

That leads right into Circle Time, where the eight youngsters in this one of two classes start their day with a Pledge of Allegiance, weather report and review of the officers of the day. You know, who gets to be the line leader, the weather person, the days official counter, stuff like that.

Its a routine thats been playing out for 39 years at the church on Augustine Avenue, a fact that people will celebrate Sunday from 13 p.m. with a reunion and open house.

The school has educated roughly 2,000 students since its start in 197677. And those students, families, teachers and others connected with the preschool are invited to stop by and see pictures, recently added classrooms and offices and share memories.

This columnist is in that group, forever thankful to then-CLC preschool teachers Gail Drebes and Karen Silbert for giving his two children a joyous and solid introduction to school.

With that way that all great teachers have, the pair helped both my children develop a love for learning and a respect for teachers that still serves them well today.

To see how thing are going 20-some years after my pair was there, Ive stopped by the preschool on a typical morning.

As Tuesdays and Thursday mornings are for the 3-year-oldsthe 4s do half days Monday, Wednesday and FridayI am greeted by two rooms full of sweet, smiling youngsters still shy of their 4th birthdays.

I start in the room of teacher Richele Davis, who notes that the preschool is a play-based environment with the main objective from Day 1 of teaching the youngsters to have a love for school and learning.

That doesnt mean learning isnt built in at many turns, from teaching the youngsters to hold a crayon or pencil as they do an art project or work basic numbers into a counting song.

Other things that get accomplished early on: helping students learn to separate from parents, follow simple instruction and learn to get along with each other.

All of that is accomplished during a day where the activities can go from free play to projects like todays, making a piece of art about spring and muddy boots, Davis says.

Its a picture the youngsters have worked on in several steps, from sponging on colors of a childs legs, cutting out paper boots and, in the last step, adding a black swirl of painted mud.

We have to be careful to tell the students not to lick their fingers as they apply the mud, she says of the black paint. Earlier in the year, we worked with liquid chocolate and they were free to taste their fingers.

As young Vivienne Furrow works to add swirls of mud to the mosaic, she notes that she needs to be extra careful.

Were going to the Baltimore Aquarium this afternoon and my Mommy said I need to keep my clothes clean, she explains, getting some extra help from Davis and assistant Deanna Tiller to make sure that happens.

Before I leave the preschool, I stop in to see two MarthasSummerford and Colemanin the church office.

Summerford, an educator whos been connected with the preschool since its start, says she believes the preschool formed after two individuals outside the church inquired about starting a preschool there.

Members of the church liked the idea of a preschool, but thought that if one was started, the church should do it, she says. And it did, putting money into the effort.

Coleman, the preschools current coordinator, says the reunion grew out of a conversation among former teachers.

The fact that its a 39th anniversary instead of a 40th didnt really change the idea to have it this year, she says. Were excited to do it now and are just saying its almost been 40 years!
LOUDOUN COUNTY  The Washington Redskins and Virginia Blood Services will host a blood drive on Saturday, April 23, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the YMCA, 5700 Smith Station Road, in Spotsylvania.

Current Virginia Blood Services ambassador and Redskins defensive end Chris Baker will be on hand to visit with donors during the blood drive, and two Redskins Cheerleaders will also be in attendance for photos and autographs. All donors will receive a limited edition Redskins T-shirt and be entered for a chance to receive a VIP Fan Experience at Redskins Park this June.

For more information, visit http://bit.ly/1SjXnai. To sign up for an appointment, visit http://bit.ly/1p4CXo7.

Virginia Blood Services is the non-profit provider of blood products to area hospitals. When donors give blood with VBS, they are supporting patients in need every day. One blood donation can help save up to three lives.

Basic requirements to donate blood are simple: donors must be 16 or older, weigh 110 pounds or more and be in good health. More information about medications or travel destinations that may cause deferrals can be found online at vablood.org. The donation process takes approximately one hour. Donors are asked to please bring ID on the day of the drive.
As we enter the mid-terms, and begin ramping up for the upcoming presidential election, we would all do well to get to know Mark Noll.
The New York State Democratic primary is a "closed primary" that excludes anyone who isn't a registered Democrat from casting a ballot. Many people say they are registered Democrat but have been purged from the list, or had their affiliations changed to Republican or Independent. Some have posted images of what they say are forged signatures on voter registration cards.



The newly formed activist group Election Justice USA has filed an emergency lawsuit in New York Federal District Court, challenging closed primaries. The group cites National Voting Rights Act (NVRA) and New York Election law in support of their case against closed primaries.

If you are a New York State voter who wishes to participate in the primary, but are not on the rolls, you may request an Affidavit or Provisional Vote at your polling place. If the lawsuit prevails, your vote will be counted.

Election Justice USA filed the emergency lawsuit in New York the day before the primary. The lawsuit is requesting the "immediate restoration" of voting rights for any New York voters who had previously been registered to vote and now are not. It also seeks to restore the voting rights of any New York voter who had previously registered or voted as a Democrat and is now listed as unaffiliated or Republican. Because the New York primary is closed, you can only vote for the party with which you're registered. Shyla Nelson, spokeswoman for EJUSA, said: We have heard hundreds of stories, with desperate pleas for help. This election season has excited and galvanized the voting public in unprecedented numbers. For these voters to be systematically and erroneously removed from the rolls or prevented from voting in their party of choice is devastating to them personally and has sent a wave of doubt and worry through the voting public." According to Gothamist, the lawsuit reads: "Plaintiffs are in imminent harm of losing their right to vote. They have beseeched the various Boards of Elections without result. Nothing can save their right to vote save an order from this Court." As of Friday, more than 200 voters had signed onto the lawsuit. The case is called Campanello et al v. New York State Board of Elections et al

New York Primary Lawsuit: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

[Stephanie Dube Dwilson/Heavy]

BREAKING: ELECTION JUSTICE USA Files Emergency Lawsuit in New York [Deltadoc/Daily Kos]
Conveyancing Solicitors Bristol Now Serving The Local Suburbs Of Bristol

Conveyancing Solicitors Bristol is a Bristol based solicitor's firm that handles legal aspects regarding transferring of property title from one party to another. The company has recently renewed its official website.

--

Conveyancing Solicitors Bristol is a reputed firm that handles all the legal paperwork and research work pertaining to transferring the title of property from the seller to the buyer. The process of conveyancing has changed a lot and so hiring the services of professional conveyancers makes sense.

Everyone is busy with his or her business and other responsibilities and yet, buying a property is as complicated and taxing too. Though the buyer has to read the draft of contract and raise inquiries regarding any terms to the seller, one might actually overlook that. However, such carelessness can prove to be rather costly for the buyer later. This is where the conveyance services from professional solicitors come in handy.

Works done by Conveyancing Solicitors Bristol:

Reading and preparing all the legal documents of property: The proficient lawyers who take care of the conveyance are known to offer the services of doing all the legal paperwork pertaining to buying or selling of property.

Property registration, subdivision, and change in title done: Property division and further sub-division of property, along with registration, or renaming or changing the title of the property and the paperwork are done by the conveyance solicitors.

Gathering information for the buyer and seller: The Conveyancing Solicitors work on behalf of buyers and sellers. If the buyer requires information about the property, and the details of the seller, all such queries are handled on the seller's behalf by the conveyance solicitor.

Representing the buyer, the conveyance solicitor learns more about the property from the estate agents and if needed, from the other homeowners in the neighbouring areas too. Researching about the plot, reading the title agreements, negotiating and managing rates and taxes, and finally exchanging contracts with the titles in place, and arranging for indemnity insurances are done by the conveyance solicitors from Bristol.

About Conveyancing Solicitors Bristol:

The company has been offering expert solicitors who are knowledgeable and practiced in the field of real estate dealings and legal services to buyers and sellers of property alike. To know more about the services, visit the new website of the company at www.conveyancingsolicitorsbristol.net.

For more information about us, please visit http://www.conveyancingsolicitorsbristol.net/

Contact Info:

Name: Gregory Mumm

Organization: Conveyancing Solicitors Bristol



Release ID: 111177

For more information visit r



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Comedian John Hodgman, who is incredibly well loved here at Boing Boing, today endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Full text is here.

Just because the social and economic right wing are in flailing, comic disarray at the moment, it doesn't mean they are not a force. Or that conservative voters are not still our friends, family, neighbors, and fellow citizens.

I don't think this is a time to laugh at the Republican party.

I think it is a moment to consolidate and continue our gains, enact new progressive policies; let existing progressive policies mature in place; offer independent and new voters the allure of continuity, professionalism, and effectiveness; and gradually regain the congress.

(This makes me sound pretty conservative for a liberal! And maybe that's just who I am now in my 45th year as a human)

I will certainly vote for and work for Sen. Sanders should he gain the nomination.

But today I am voting for Hillary Clinton.

Yes, she has wanted this job for a long time. There is no crime in that. It's in the constitution! I think she's earned it. And while I cannot predict the future, I am curious and eager to see what she does once she gets it.

So that's what I think.
My photographer friend Clayton Cubitt, whom I met here in the Boing Boing comments a decade ago, did an amazing project to support the campaign of U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

From Clayton's post about the images he shot for Veterans for Bernie Sanders:

I was proud to donate my efforts as a photographer and creative director for this social media campaign in support of a group of military veterans that advocate for the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders.

I spent a day photographing portraits of each veteran, as well as personally-significant artifacts of their service, from uniform patches, to medals, to dusty combat boots that were worn on deployment.

The campaign pairs the images I created with quotes from the vets about what Bernie's candidacy means to them, through the lens of their service.

Dozens of variations were created for people to share on social media, and are housed on a dedicated site, along with quotes from the candidate, and his campaign video referencing veterans and their service.
Tesco Bank is set to enter the intermediary mortgage market, in a move to take on the largest high street lenders.

The supermarket chains Edinburgh-based subsidiary has initially made its mortgage range available through London & Country mortgage brokers.

The new service, Tesco Mortgage Intermediaries, will be offered through a range of other brokers via Legal & Generals key account firms, including Nouveau Group, Mortgage Advice Bureau, John Charcol and Stonebridge.

The service includes a number of features to help brokers make the transaction as straightforward as possible, including searchable lending criteria, webchat, and the ability to scan and upload documents and track the status of applications from any device.

Brokers will be able to contact Tesco Intermediaries by phone or online using the banks webchat functionality.

Benny Higgins, chief executive of Tesco Bank, said broker market competition has increased since the introduction of the Mortgage Market Review in 2014.

The vast majority of Tesco customers select their mortgage through a broker and our platform has been specifically designed to help brokers provide a great service to customers remortgaging or purchasing their home, he stated.

David Hollingworth, associate director at L&C, added: We are confident that their broad range of sharply priced mortgages will appeal to customers and advisers alike.

Product Max LTV Fee Product (Product Fee + 195 non-refundable booking fee applies) Product Fee APR No Fee Product (No Product Fee. 195 non-refundable booking fee applies) APR 2 year fixed until 30/06/2018 60% 75% 80% 85% 90% 1.67% 1.72% 1.84% 1.94% 2.28% 1,300 1,300 800 800 800 3.9% 3.9% 3.9% 4.0% 4.0% 2.07% 2.12% 2.24% 2.34% 2.68% 4.0% 4.0% 4.0% 4.0% 4.0% 3 year fixed until 30/06/2019 60% 75% 80% 85% 90% 1.99% 2.29% 2.34% 2.34% 2.99% 800 800 800 800 800 3.8% 3.9% 3.9% 3.9% 4.0% 2.39% 2.69% 2.74% 2.74% 3.39% 3.9% 3.9% 3.9% 4.0% 4.1% 5 year fixed until 30/06/2021 60% 75% 80% 85% 90% 2.34% 2.49% 2.59% 2.79% 3.39% 800 800 800 800 800 3.6% 3.7% 3.7% 3.8% 4.0% 2.74% 2.89% 2.99% 3.19% 3.79% 3.7% 3.8% 3.8% 3.9% 4.1% 2 year tracker until 30/06/2018 60% 75% 80% 85% 90% 1.35% (BoE* base rate plus 0.85%) 1.45% (BoE base rate plus 0.95%) 1.69% (BoE base rate plus 1.19%) 1.79% (BoE base rate plus 1.29%) 2.50% (BoE base rate plus 2.00%) 800 800 800 800 800 3.9% 3.9% 3.9% 3.9% 4.1% 1.75% (BoE base rate plus 1.25%) 1.85% (BoE base rate plus 1.35%) 2.09% (BoE base rate plus 1.59%) 2.19% (BoE base rate plus 1.69%) 2.90% (BoE base rate plus 2.40%) 3.9% 3.9% 3.9% 4.0% 4.1%

In February 2015, Mr Higgins revealed Tesco Bank was laying the groundwork to offer mortgages through intermediaries in the first half of 2016.

This followed a move into the intermediated market by HSBC at the tail end of 2014, providing residential mortgages in partnership with Countrywide Mortgage Services.

Over 70 per cent of the mortgages in the UK are obtained through brokers rather than banks or building societies directly.
There is a misconception that water is everywhere in the UK, but it is fast becoming a scarce resource with an uncertain future.

With an increasing population comes more mouths to feed, so to ensure food security by producing enough of our own food, farmers will need adequate amounts of water  particularly irrigators in the potato and veg sectors.

This has prompted Defras reform of a dated water abstraction licence system.

See also: Defra water reforms not yet set in stone

We look at these proposed changes, the impact for farmers and what you need to do now to prepare your buisness to ensure a smooth transition to a new permit system.

Antiquated system

The current abstraction licensing system that regulates the quantity and timing of water abstraction from ground and surface water is over 50 years old.

The current system contains inconsistencies and inequities and is more favourable to some than others, with agriculture being at a disadvantage, according to Professor Ian Barker, managing director at global consultancy, Water Policy International.

Defras proposal outlining what the new permit system will look like was published in January after a lengthy public consultation.



Defras water abstraction manager, Henry Leveson-Gower, says they are aiming for a more flexible system that is fair to all users.

Fairer water abstraction permit system will be in place by early 2020s

New rules will result in both winners and losers in UK crop production

Growers urged to plan for changes and invest in storage to secure supply

Farm impact

Agriculture accounted for just 2% of the 8bn cu m of fresh water abstracted in England and Wales in 2013, but holds 64% of the abstraction licences, so will be significantly affected by the changes.

Mr Leveson-Gower says the reforms will help farmers manage risks from water scarcity and ensure that food production is competitive on a global scale as climate change bites.

During the transition to the new system, some farmers holding licensed volumes that pose risk to the health of rivers or groundwater aquifers may have changes on their new permits to reduce environmental risk.

These farmers are likely to have relatively underused licences without any flow-based restrictions and they will be in parts of the country where irrigation is, or has been used, says Mr Leveson-Gower.

The need for this is highlighted by the stat that between 2002 and 2013, just 45% of the annual total of water licensed for abstraction was actually abstracted.

Winners

The NFU accepts that changes need to be made, and once the dust has settled on the new system, some will have won and others lost.

Winners include those that have already invested in reservoirs and will see seasonality removed from all new permits.

Under the new rules there should be no more bans and less discrimination against farmers Prof Ian Barker, managing director, Water Policy International

This will enable them to abstract water during high flows all year round and not just in winter, giving flexibility and security of supply.

Also, in a drought year the Environment Agency (EA)  which manages all abstraction licensing  previously had the power to introduce an abstraction ban known as Section 57, which only applied to agricultural abstractors.

Rather than being a straight on-off switch, there will be low flow conditions for everyone with an abstraction permit.

This will mean restrictions can be imposed by the EA on a catchment basis, but there will be a more transparent process whereby growers will receive a request to adopt voluntary conditions ahead of being stopped.

Under the new rules there should be no more bans and less discrimination against farmers, says Prof Barker.

On top of this, time limited licences will be scrapped. These are licences that are typically granted for a 12-year period and currently make up about one-third of agricultural licences.

Instead, these would move to a timeless permit like the other two-thirds, and all permits would be subject to reviews that would take place with plenty of notice from the EA.

This would give abstractors much more confidence in their permit and there will be fewer shocks, adds Prof Barker.

Trading

At present, there is a bureaucratic and cumbersome water trading system in place that will continue in ordinary catchments.

However, in enhanced catchments, a new and improved trading system will be introduced.

Enhanced status enables authorities to use extra measures to manage abstraction in a water-stressed catchment, giving local solutions to local problems.

In these catchments, annual and daily limits will be linked to proportional shares, which can be traded upstream or downstream, with the rules set outlined by the EA in the short term.

Paul Hammett, NFU national water resource specialist, says that he remains open-minded to the new trading rules, but remains unconvinced that the admin cost of introducing the system will provide a cost-benefit.

Parts of it could be useful, but farmers will have to pay more for their water in order to set it up.

Despite that, Im pleased there is the opportunity, and the idea that a network of farmers on the same river can organise trading between each other helps add to business certainty, explains Mr Hammett.

There is a concern that water companies and other large abstractors could dominate trading and have an advantage over farmers, but Prof Barker disagrees.

When trading you need a willing buyer and willing seller and the water companies wont necessarily be able to buy.

At present, farmers and water companies dont speak each others language, so there needs to be improved dialogue about potential water trading and more collaborative working to improve farmers water security, he explains.

He adds this is common in other countries around the world, where water companies invest in the infrastructure, such as reservoirs, and share a proportion of the water.

Water companies could talk to farmers and work out their needs and see if they can build those into planning of public supply reservoirs.

Losers

With any wholesale change, it is difficult to please all parties, and Mr Hammett says losers could be abstractors with licensed headroom removed, which is the limit of water they can abstract over a given period.

You plan your business cropping so you dont need to use the whole limit each year and the headroom is a buffer in an emergency, he explains.

This buffer could be removed from some licences if the EA deems the limit to be unnecessary, and the risk is heightened by the fact that decisions will be based on a 10-year average.

However, abstraction is erratic year to year and the last decade has included some very wet summers where abstraction has been low.

We dont want given volumes based on wet summer use as irrigators wouldnt have access to enough to water their crop in a dry summer, says Mr Hammett.

Trickle regulations

Another big loser looks set to be trickle irrigators, who for some time have been exploiting a loop hole that means they dont require an abstraction licence.

This has put them at an advantage to other agricultural users and they will now require a permit like everyone else.

It is estimated there are about 1,000 trickle irrigators in the UK, and the EA wants to have them under regulation by the end of 2016 and on new permits by 2021.

The NFU have worked hard to ensure that these abstractors are seen as being engaged in lawful activity.

It isnt their fault they havent been able to get a licence and Defra has recognised that and should ensure a light touch, risk-based approach. Many will get permits, but not necessarily all, warns Mr Hammett.

Getting ready

The January Defra response to the consultation sets out clear objectives of the reforms, but much of the devil will be in the detail post-2020, according to Prof Barker.

He says it will be disruptive for farmers, but in the long term it will put abstractors on a level playing field with a fairer basis to trade resource.

Take part in AHDBs water use survey Potato and veg growers still have time to help inform the discussion and detail of Defras abstraction reforms by providing irrigation water use data. Levy board AHDBs potato and horticulture divisions are running the survey. It can be found on either website at www.potatoes.ahdb.org.uk or www.horticulture.ahdb.org.uk

The new system will also require farmers to manage their abstraction much more, be aware of flows and when restrictions might be implemented.

I would encourage farmers to work hard to understand the changes and through the NFU help the government deliver a system that is good for everyone, he says.

Mr Leveson-Gower agrees farmers need to better understand the water scarcity risks, and Defra expects the EA to help with this, providing catchment-based information on threats to water supply.

Farmers have the potential to increase their efficiency, invest in reservoirs and work with water companies to increase their resilience, as many are already beginning to do, he adds.

This long-term thinking is something that Mr Hammett says is crucial, and he advises growers to look at their current licences and consider what business changes need to be made in preparation for the reforms.

Dont think that because abstraction reform is 5-10 years away you dont need to worry.

There will be upheaval and you need to think about how you can minimise that upheaval on each individual farm.

Gearing up for abstraction reform

Although new low-flow conditions, rather that Section 57 bans, will provide a more transparent and fair means of restricting abstraction, it could create problems with current equipment used on farm.

Norfolk-based grower, contractor and chief executive of the Broadland Agricultural Water Abstractors Group (Bawag) Andrew Alston says many pumps currently on farm can only pump at a fixed capacity.

Many farms would have put irrigation systems in to suit their licence, but many wont be capable of a variable flow and that wont be acceptable to the EA in the long term.

It may mean that farmers have to change their pumps to get a variable flow  the rules are flexible, so abstractors need to be flexible too, he explains.

In addition to reviewing pumping equipment, Mr Alston also urges abstractors to consider installing smart IT systems to accurately monitor and record irrigation water use.

This will help build a case for permitted quantities on new permits by 2020 and also helps to ensure abstractors are pumping within the conditions of current licence or future permit.

Without it, you not only risk problems with your permit, you also risk a 20,000 fine and 5% of your basic payment, so it is a good idea to be able to prove what you have pumped.

It will also enable you to look at energy use to ensure you are using the water in a way that your business can afford, explains Mr Alston.

Proposed changes to water abstraction rules

Abstraction licences will become permits

Permits that replace the abstraction licenses will be based on three key areas:

Water account conditions  these are the conditions that relate specifically to an individual abstraction, such as annual and daily volume limits and abstraction returns.

Site-specific conditions  these include specific requirements around the point of abstraction, such as a fish pass. These should transfer directly without any change.

Standard catchment rules  documents outlining the rules will be available online and will include common hands off flows, trading rules and low flow controls.

If your licensed volume poses an environmental risk it could be cut

An abstractors permitted volume would only be decreased if the previous licensed volume would create a risk to the environment and applies to both surface and groundwater licences.

If a licence does pose a risk to the environment, Defra will calculate a permitted volume based on peak actual annual abstraction volumes of an historic period of at least 10 years.

Seasonality conditions would be removed

No permits will have seasonal conditions under the new system, and where abstractors have a winter only licence, they would be given a hands off flow condition, which allows access to high flows when they occur, subject to annual or daily limits.

Time limits would be removed

Some current licences are time limited, typically to 12 years. This would be removed and your new permit would not expire. Instead, it would be subject to a risk-based review by the Environment Agency, who can then make changes to your permit.

Hands-off conditions would be retained and standardised

Hands off conditions  or the point at which abstractions need to stop when a river level drops below a certain point  will be kept on new permits. However, due to standardisation across catchments, they could change when converted from licence to permit. It is thought this will help regulation and water trading within a particular catchment.

Abstractors with no hands-off flow conditions might have new ones introduced to allow control at low flows

Surface water abstractors with no hands-off conditions, or ground water abstractors that impact on surface water, could both be subject to new controls on abstraction during low flows.

Irrigators would not be subject to these controls under current reform, but catchment-specific regulation may occur, taking into account cost and benefit and essential users.

This would be controlled by the Environment Agency, contacting abstractors when flows are low to encourage more efficient use or make voluntary reductions in use.

Non-consumptive abstractors will shift from licence to permit

Low or non-consumptive abstractors  approximately 8% of licence stock  will still have to move from permit to licence. However, there is an ongoing consultation as to how the new framework will function for them. It will not affect agricultural use.

Abstractors of 20cu m or less will not need a permit

Users of 20cu m or less do not have a significant impact on the environment and therefore remain exempt from a permit. However, they can voluntarily register an abstraction.

Permits wont expire but abstraction conditions can be changed

A review by the Environment Agency can be triggered where there is evidence a risk to the environment in a particular catchment occurs. The EA would make changes to permits and they may apply to all permits.

In a fully transparent process abstractors would:

Be notified when reviews start

Be able to see availability of water in their catchment

Be consulted on any changes to rules

Be asked to make voluntary changes before any are enforced

Be given three years notice of major changes unless required to address serious damage

Abstraction charges will remain based on cost recovery

Defra has yet to clarify the exact nature of how abstractors will be charged for their water to cover the cost of regulation, but indicate that it will be based on cost recovery and similar to the current system.

It promises that the Enviroment Agency will settle on a system that is simple and understandable, as well as predictable for customers.

Additional reforms in Enhanced catchments

So called enhanced catchments are estimated to make up about one third of catchments initially. As no catchment is the same, some will be subject to EA control that may include:

Bonus water that doesnt count towards permitted volumes when flows are high

Hands-off flows for those that already have them and a gradual on and off of these measures to help businesses respond

The annual permitted amount each abstractor can take will be accounted for in shares, which can be traded

Pre-approved trading rules to make trading quicker and easier

Source: Defra, 2016

Case study  Building a secure water supply

One Norfolk farm manager reckons investment in reservoir storage to meet water security challenges and prepare for abstraction will provide irrigators with big benefits.

Paul Wortley, farm manager at OW Wortley & Sons, says the business has invested heavily in land with reservoir storage and in new reservoirs over the last 17 years.

It now has access to water in six reservoirs, capable of storing 130m gallons of winter water for use across its 1,400ha of light and free-draining land around Methwold, Norfolk.

OW Wortley & Sons irrigated crop plan 2016 Potatoes  250ha

Parsnips  100ha

Onions  100ha

Carrots  20ha

I think it would be good advice for a farm business to invest [in storage], both for the security of your crops, but also for land values.

You land is your asset and especially in our light land area, to be able to offer irrigation and the chance to grow crops such as potatoes, onions and parsnips adds to land value considerably, says Mr Wortley.

He uses a ball park figure of 1,000/ac added to land value for every acre inch irrigation capacity, which could provide a considerable contribution to the cost of reservoir investment.

In the past we have also spoken to landlords locally and worked with them and paid towards securing water supplies on their land in return for clean potato growing land for 20 years, he adds.

The foresight to invest in such a comprehensive irrigation network has ensured that the business will mostly benefit reforms, with proposals designed to make better use of high flows.

If the investment had not already been made, Mr Wortley says it would be difficult to raise the funds and believes there should be more incentives for growers to invest in water storage.

I cant work out why there isnt some sort of tax relief to help and encourage growers to build them, he adds.
Dairy farmers are planning to blockade the distribution centre of a retail outlet which they claim is importing milk at the expense of UK producers.

David Handley, chairman of Farmers For Action, said the organisation has been monitoring a number of retailers and discounters over recent weeks and was convinced that large quantities of imported milk was coming into the country.

Mr Handley said the milk was going under the radar because it was coming in on curtain-sided lorries, rather than in refrigerated tankers, because it was heat-treated first.

See also: Read Farmers Weeklys latest stories on milk prices

The milk, the bulk of which was from Belgium, was then being used to make products such as milkshakes which were aimed at children, he suggested.

We think the time is right for us to highlight this, he told Farmers Weekly. I think we are talking millions of litres a year coming in. But because they process the milk first, they are getting away with it.

Mr Handley said he would have less of a problem with companies importing UHT milk if it was not available in the UK.

However, there were two processors in the country  Crediton Dairy in Devon and Arla at its Settle creamery  which could supply UHT products made from British milk.

Our question for retailers is why they are sourcing milk from Belgium when we have two plants in the UK that have the capacity to supply this milk. Why are we feeding kids Belgian milk in milkshakes when it could be British?

Farmers from the North West and the Midlands are being invited to join the protest, which will take place on Tuesday evening (19 April).

A spokesman from AHDB Dairy said HMRC figures showed 130m litres of UHT milk had been imported into the UK during 2015. This compared with 138m litres in 2014 and 137m litres in 2013.

The bulk of last years imports  50m litres  came from Belgium, with 31m litres from the Netherlands, 17m litres from Germany and 11m litres from Denmark.

Data from consumer monitoring company Kantar showed consumption of UHT was currently at 240m litres a year.
Farming is wonderful job and one that comes with lots of perks, but it is also a tough industry and is affected by many factors and involves lots of decisions.

Some people think the solutions to agricultures issues are simple and are keen to tell farmers exactly what they should do. Here are nine of the things that farmers are tired of being told

1. It must be nice  being able to pick when you work.

Yes, lovely. The animals needing feeding, milking, calving, lambing and the weather allow us to work as and when we please.

2. Diversify. Youve just got to open up a farm shop. Everyones doing it.

Nice idea, only problem is were eight miles down a muddy farm track that would take the sump out of a Sherman tank.

3. Expand. Its all about spreading your fixed costs.

Good job theres so much land available then, isnt it. And its not as if its expensive to buy or rent. Oh, hang on

4. Change enterprises.

Of course, why didnt we think of that before? Ill grow milling wheat on this 1-in-4 hill farm field, currently covered with more scree than grass.

5. Hand over the reins to the next generation.

Yes, thats important  but all in good time. Were not past it quite yet as it happens! And lets be honest, just because someone has a degree certificate, it doesnt make them Richard Branson.

6. Make more use of technology.

OK, Im just off now to ask the bank manager if I can borrow 100,000 for that state-of-the-art combine. Im sure hell be falling over himself to lend me the cash when he hears I grow all of 6ha of combinable crops.

See also: 8 issues farmers take with horses

7. PR what you do to the public.

Yes, initiatives such as Open Farm Sunday are great, but there are not enough hours in the day as it is and I rarely cross paths with the public. I did explain the other day to that man with the dogs (nine of them, to be precise) about the merits of buying British. He called me something that I cant repeat here.

8. No you cant convert that shed/barn into something useful that will give it a future, help the family farm survive and provide rural employment.

Better to leave it to fall into disrepair and disappear.

9. Pull over in your tractor every 5m along the road.

Of course, its not as if weve got a job to do or anything and Im sure some kind driver will be willing to let me out again.
An investigation has been launched into the death of a teacher who was killed by a cow while on holiday in Northumberland.

The family of Marian Clode, 61, including her grandchildren, watched in horror as she was flipped like a rag doll by a cow while out walking on 3 April.

The teacher, from Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, suffered a broken neck and was treated at the scene by paramedics.

See also: Top tips for safe cattle handling to avoid injury

Mother-of-three Mrs Clode was airlifted to Royal Victoria Hospital in Newcastle. She died two days later from her injuries.

It charged at her a third time with its head down. It lifted its head up and flipped my mum like a rag doll over the fence that she was stood up against and into the next fieldLucy Rowe, Marians daughter

She had been visiting the area with her husband, Christopher, 63, their daughter, Lucy Rowe, her husband, Kevin Rowe, and their two children (Marians grandchildren), Oliver and Charlotte, staying at Swinhoe Farm Cottages, in Belford.

Her family told the BBCs Look North they had been out walking on a public bridleway, which runs through a farm on the National Trust site, St Cuthberts Cave, when Mrs Clode was attacked.

Daughter Lucy Rowe said one of the cows broke loose from the herd, approached Mrs Clode and repeatedly headbutted her.

She added: It charged at her a third time with its head down. It lifted its head up and flipped my mum like a rag doll over the fence that she was stood up against and into the next field.

The Health and Safety Executive confirmed they will be investigating the incident and an inquest into Mrs Clodes death has been opened.

Farmer Alistair Nixon arrived at the scene on a quad bike a few minutes after the incident. He told national media it was the first time the cows had been let out on the grass after the winter.

A spokeswoman for the farm told Farmers Weekly: We will not be commenting on the story now that an investigation is under way.

Mrs Clodes family said farmers had a duty of care to inform the public whenever they move livestock.

A statement released by Gordon Cartwright, of JMW Solicitors, said: The familys main reason for sharing their story at this terribly distressing time is that they want to prevent other families going through such a traumatic experience.
See sample pages from this book at Wink.

Activists, artists, pioneers. Rad American Women A-Z takes readers on an alphabetized journey through the lives of women throughout the country and across time "who fought," "who led," and "who soared." Every woman's story begins with an action: there are no passive heroines in this historical feminist primer.

Each biographical sketch by Kate Schatz is accompanied by a crisp, black and white print from Miriam Klein Stahl. The author and illustrator team create a tone that is both conversational and immediate. The brightly colored background of each portrait seeps across from image page to text, highlighting each woman's name and drawing readers into her story. This alphabet book meets call to action lends itself to a wide range of readers, using accessible, explanatory language ("A union is an organization that helps protect the rights of people who have the same kind of job."), bold, dynamic illustrations, and a traditional walk through each letter of the alphabet ("J is for Jovita," and "K is for Kate."). I've been reading it with my three year old knowing that even on the days we use it only to practice the alphabet, she's getting a dose of empowerment and diverse herstory. Though many of the women profiled are easily recognizable agents of change, Rad American Women introduced me to others I hadn't heard of and began to flesh out the origin stories and broader social contexts of the women I already knew. Through the work of greats like Billie Jean King, Angela Davis, Temple Grandin, and Maya Lin, this book does an excellent job introducing the concepts of identity, intersectionality, and straight-up girl power, simply by telling the stories of real, radical women.

It's easy to forget that "rad" is short for radical, and even easier to forget what being a radical really means. In addition to the snapshots of rad women that make up the bulk of the book, there is a brief resource guide at the end for further reading, as well as the alphabetical acrostic, 26 Things That You Can Do To Be Rad! Armed with this list of ideas for cultivating social change through basic, individual actions, Rad American Women readers, no matter their age or identity, will connect with, and aspire to be like, one of the athletes, organizers, writers, or rock stars whose actions shaped the world we live in today.

 Marykate Smith Despres
July 17, 1941  April 7, 2016

Surrounded by friends and family, Sandy passed as the sun set on April 7, 2016, in Portland after a long and wonderful life.

Born in the Oak Park neighborhood of Chicago to Eugene Fields to Annie Noreen Sanders, she relocated to Southern California in 1944, growing up in the orchards of Orange County. Sandy flourished in the sun, excelling both scholastically and socially through school, up to the student council presidents seat at Covina High School. When she received an acceptance letter from Lewis & Clark in faraway Portland, she jumped at the challenge of independence while taking the next step in her education.

She met and married Terry Barker of Corvallis in 1961 and graduated in 1962. They lived together in Portland while she taught high school English and earned her Masters degree at PSU, then moved back to Corvallis where she taught education and English at Oregon State. After taking some time off when their son, Richard, came along in 1969, she was soon recruited to lead a statewide language arts curriculum project in Salem.

Finding their paths growing apart, she and Terry agreed to take a break that became permanent after she completed her Ph.D. in higher education administration from the University of Oregon in 1983 and was hired to head the Ackerman Laboratory School at Eastern Oregon College in La Grande. After a few cold winters there, Puget Sound would become her home for more than 20 years when an educational administration position opened at Seattle University.

The opportunity to transition from her tenured professorial position and fully pursue her love for design could not be ignored. Retiring in 2003, she returned to school again for an associate degree in interior design to help clients and friends with home renovation and organizational challenges. While helping a good friend with a remodel in Portland, their discussion led to purchasing a home to share, spurring her final move back to Portland.

Outside of her tireless efforts to teach and nurture future academics and administrators, Sandy was constantly looking for a new adventure afield. Whether with family, friends or alone, she circled the world multiple times via cruise ships, spent time annually wrangling cattle in Eastern Oregon, visited her grandson in Orange County and timeshares in Hawaii and Canada, and truly lived life to the fullest. An active volunteer and board member, she supported Friends of the Library in Portland as well as numerous local and national charities.

After enduring five years under the relentless challenges of cancer with the mantra Im just doing what anyone else would do!, Sandy is reunited with her parents, and brother Bradley Fields who passed in 2000, and she is survived by Richard (Kelly); grandson Jett; and Terry.

There will be a celebration of life at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, April 23, at Holladay Park Plaza and she would appreciate a donation to the Multnomah County Friends of the Library or KMHD Jazz Radio in lieu of flowers.
The Smartress is a mattress with embedded sensors that will send an alert to your phone "whenever someone is using your bed in a questionable way," according the manufacturer, Durmet.

It costs $1,700 and is probably not real.
Benton County Republican Womens April meeting, scheduled for Monday, April 25, is devoted entirely to getting to know Republican candidates.

Seven candidates will attend a Candidate Fair at the groups meeting, in the meeting room at the King Tin Restaurant, 1857 N.W. Ninth St. in Corvallis.

Two candidates for U.S. senator from Oregon, Sam Carpenter and Mark Callahan, will be in attendance. Also planning to attend are gubernatorial candidate Bruce Cuff and secretary of state candidate Sid Leiken. Judson McClure, a candidate for the District 16 state House of Representatives, will attend, along with two Benton County commission candidates: Jerry Jackson, whos running for position 2 and Paul Cauthorn, running for positions 3. Daniel Crowe, a candidate for attorney general, also will attend.

A no-host lunch and social hour begins at 11 a.m.

Candidate presentations, with questions and answers, begin at noon. The meeting is open to the public.
Sunday was the day the Oregon State University Robotics Clubs underwater team tested its robot in the pool at Dixon Recreation Center.

At least that was the plan.

Instead, the team spent most of their three hours of pool time sitting on the deck trying to figure out why their robot, designed and constructed over more than five months, just wouldnt run.

But while the team did not get to use their pool time the way they wanted, its members may have picked up some deeper lessons about problem-solving and the process of engineering.

Failing is still successful if you learn something from it, said Daniel Knott, the team lead and an OSU senior. Its disappointing, but well figure out what went wrong and well learn something.

Greg Mulder, a graduate student in physics and the teams adviser, said projects like this give students real-world experience to go with their classroom lessons.

In engineering, this is what action looks like 90 percent of the time, he said Sunday as the team was struggling with their robot.

Rob Macdonald, a sophomore in computer science who works on the robots control system, said the team recently installed a new computer system in the robot. In retrospect, he said, maybe the team should have done more testing to make sure everything worked before the scheduled time at the pool.

Good judgment comes from experience, he said, and experience comes from bad judgment.

Knott said the next steps for the team are to document what it experienced and try to determine what went wrong.

That means students will be putting in a lot of hours over the next couple of weeks, Macdonald said; the team is hoping to have the robot ready for a Marine Advanced Technology Education robotics regional competition in North Bend on April 30.

Its going to be a mad dash, Macdonald said.

The team, with about 15 members, is one of three sub-teams within the Robotics Club and the students have about $1,500 in funding from the College of Engineering for their project. The teams usually help build the robot by pillaging parts from their past years robot.

The challenge the team faces in the competition is to design a robot that can collect samples and data, like water temperature and pressure, for a theoretical space probe to Europa, a moon of Jupiter that has an ocean beneath its icy shell.

Mulder, who in the past has advised underwater robotics teams at Linn-Benton Community College, said he thinks the team will pull things together for North Bend and qualify in the competition there for the national competition at NASAs Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston, Texas.

Its going to be tight, but theyll make it, he said.

Knott said he thinks underwater robotics is one of the more challenging fields of robotics.

Everything has to be waterproofed or youre dead, he said.

Water is evil, Macdonald added, saying that in addition to the challenge of waterproofing everything, the members have to make sure motors dont burn out under the strain of pushing water around, and they have to keep their robot on a control tether because radio signals dont transmit well through water.

Knott, a mechanical engineer and certified scuba diver, said the challenge is part of what makes robotics fun.

The cliche is that those aha moments make it worthwhile, he said. Youre working on something and you figure it out. ... Its nice when things come together, when youre not sure that they will.

I like learning to do new things, said Macdonald. Theres always something I dont know that I need to figure out to make the robot go.
As mid-valley skies clear and people start spending time outside, we head into that time of year when we are solicited by strangers to sign documents clamped to clipboards.

Put that way, it sounds a little creepy, doesnt it? It is our democracy in action.

We complain from time to time about how our general election ballots in November are crammed with measures: Some of them have been referred to the ballot by legislators. Some have made their way to the ballot by virtue of initiative campaigns. It all makes for heavy lifting by the time voters get to the end of the ballot, especially considering that many of these measures have the potential to make a bigger difference than any of the races for political office.

This Novembers ballot in Oregon likely will offer another smorgasbord of election issues. The secretary of states office is tracking 86 measures that in theory could still qualify for the state ballot. (That doesnt include levy requests and other local measures that might also be added.)

Of course, most of those measures wont qualify for the ballot, for one reason or another. According to the website Ballotpedia, Oregons general election ballot in even-numbered years over the last two decades has featured an average of about a dozen measures. Of those measures, voters reject slightly more than half, a percentage that strikes us as low. (Remember this rule of thumb: When in doubt on a ballot measure, no is often the best choice.)

It could be worse. In his engaging Sunday story about the history of the presidential primary in Oregon, Gazette-Times reporter Anthony Rimel tracked down a state election in 1910 that included 32 separate measures. To their credit, voters rejected some 23 of them. (One of the measures that did pass that year allowed Oregon to hold a presidential primary; although the state was not the first to hold such a primary, it was the first to authorize it.)

That was an era marked in part by a high level of distrust, even anger, with government: Voters then had little faith that government could solve the problems of the day and so set about to take matters into their own hands through the initiative process. Does that sound familiar?

By contrast, consider the 1960s and 1970s in Oregon, when Gov. Tom McCall and an unlikely group of colleagues were pushing through landmark legislation: As recounted by journalist Floyd McKay in his book about those times, Reporting the Oregon Story, the era attracted few ballot measures. It was a time when voters had faith that government could get things done.

Those days appear to have gone, perhaps never to return. And so we enter another season in which we are invited to affix our signatures to political petitions.

As you deal with each request to sign, remember that each signature brings that measure one step closer to the November ballot. Its your call. After all, its our democracy in action.
Brady Forrest writes, "Ignite SF's first event of 2016 is on 4/26. We've got lots of great speakers. Eva Galperin (EFF) is going to talk about the FBI, Apple & your iPhone. Renee Diresta is going to dive into conspiracy theories and how algorithms influence policy."

"Dan Shapiro (Robot Turtles) will share the old-school computer game he plays with his father and kids. Karen Cheng will share how she comes up her viral videos (like Gravity Illusions). Other topics include data-driven clothes, the culture shock of moving to the US from Vietnam as a young child, and a deconstructed magic trick by magician Robert Strong. Hope to see you there!"



Ignite SF: Behind The Curtain

[Ignite/Everbrite]
An honest essay has numerous characteristics: original thinking, a good structure, balanced arguments, and plenty more.

But one aspect often overlooked is that an honest essay should be interesting. It should spark the readers curiosity, keep them absorbed, make them want to stay reading and learn more. An uneventful article risks losing the readers attention; whether or not the points you create are excellent, a flat style, or poor handling of a dry subject material can undermine the positive aspects of the essay. The matter is that a lot of students think that essays should be like this: they believe that a flat, dry style is suited to the needs of educational writing and dont even consider that the teacher reading their essay wants to search out the essay interesting. You might want to have online essay editor service to boost your confidence in writing with an error-free output. Academic writing doesnt need to be  and shouldnt be  bland. The excellent news is that there is much stuff you can do to create your essay more attractive, while youll be able only to do such a lot while remaining within the formal confines of educational writing. Lets study what theyre.

Have an interest in what youre writing about

Dont go overboard, but youll be able to let your passion for your subject show.

If theres one thing bound to inject interest into your writing, its being fascinated by what youre writing about. Passion for a subject matter comes across naturally in your essay, typically making it more lively and fascinating and infusing an infectious enthusiasm into your words  within the same way that its easy to talk knowledgeably to someone about something you discover fascinating.

Include fascinating details

Another factor that may make an essay boring maybe a dry material. Some topic areas are naturally dry, and it falls to you to form the article more interesting through your written style and by trying to seek out fascinating snippets of knowledge to incorporate, which will liven it up a small amount and make the data easier to relate to. A way of doing this with a dry subject is to create what youre talking about that seems relevant to the critical world, as this is often easier for the reader to relate to.

Emulate the fashion of writers you discover interesting

When you read lots, you subconsciously start emulating the fashion of the writers you have read. Reading benefits you a lot, as this exposes you to a spread of designs, and youll start to require the characteristics of these you discover interesting to read.

Borrow some creative writing techniques

Theres a limit to the quantity of actual story-telling youll do when youre writing an essay; in the end, essays should be objective, factual and balanced, which doesnt, initially glance, feel considerably like story-telling. However, youll apply a number of the principles of story-telling to create your writing more interesting.

consider your own opinion

Take the time to figure out what its that you think instead of regurgitating the opinions of others.

Cut the waffle

Rambling on and on is dull and almost bound to lose the interest of your reader. Youre in danger of waffling if youre not completely clear about what you wish to mention or havent thought carefully about how youre visiting structure your argument. Doing all your research correctly and writing an essay plan before you begin will help prevent this problem.

Editing is a vital part of the essay-writing process, so edit the waffle once youve done a primary draft. Read through your essay objectively and eliminate the bits that arent relevant to the argument or labor the purpose.

employing a thesaurus isnt always a decent thing

Avoid using unfamiliar words in an essay; theres too great a likelihood that youre misusing them.

You may think that employing a thesaurus to seek out more complicated words will make your writing more exciting or sound more academic, but using overly high-brow language can have the incorrect effect.

Avoid repetitive phrasing

Please avoid using the identical phrase structure again and again: its a recipe for dullness! Instead, use a variety of syntax that demonstrates your writing capabilities and makes your writing more interesting. Mix simple, compound, and complicated sentences to avoid your paper becoming predictable.

Use some figurative language

Using analogies with nature can often make concepts more accessible for readers to know.

As weve already seen, its easy to finish up rambling when youre explaining complex concepts  mainly after you dont know it yourself. One way of forcing yourself to think about a couple of pictures, present it more simply and engagingly is to form figurative language. This implies explaining something by comparing it with something else, as in an analogy.

Employ rhetorical questions

Anticipate the questions your reader might ask.

One of the ways ancient orators held the eye of their audiences and increased the dramatic effect of their speeches was by using the statement. A decent place to use a statement is at the top of a paragraph, to steer into the following one, or at the start of a replacement section to introduce a brand new area for exploration.

Proofread

Finally, you may write the top interesting essay an instructor has ever read. Still, youll undermine your good work if its plagued by errors, which distract the reader from the particular content and can probably annoy them.
New Years Eve attacks : Communication chaos

Dusseldorf An investigating committee finds flaws in law enforcement communication on New Years Eve in Cologne.

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Investigations into what went wrong on New Years Eve in Cologne point to a lack of effective communication amongst law enforcement personnel. Chair of the investigating committee, Peter Biesenbach said that on that night, police were working parallel to each other (as opposed to working in unison). At 10:14 p.m., a police unit put out a call that several thousand people were gathering in front of the Cologne Cathedral and firing off fire rockets but they didnt have enough units on the scene to do anything about it. No extra police forces were sent to the area despite the call. The dispatcher says she turned on her computer first at 10:20 p.m. after a meeting.

Dispatcher Sarah Willmes told the committee she was not aware that there were too few personnel on the scene at the Cathedral. She only heard about a person being taken into custody because of a sexual assault just before 5:00 a.m. Hundreds of persons were checked by police on that night, often they were asylum seekers.

Police supervising assistant, Nicole von der Heiden reported that she first knew about the assaults just after 5:00 a.m. when she met a crying woman near the central train station who said she had been sexually assaulted. Von der Heiden herself did not go among the masses of people because she did not have protective gear on. Many women with crying children fled the area. In the aftermath, several hundred charges were filed of sexual assault and theft. Most of the suspects were young men who were asylum seekers from north Africa.
Arrests at Cologne/Bonn airport : Two men taken into custody

Cologne/Bonn Arrest warrants for two men helped lead to their arrest at Cologne/Bonn airport.

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On Sunday afternoon, police arrested a man at Cologne/Bonn airport after having seen his picture in a European wide arrest warrant. The 21-year-old man from the Netherlands is wanted on charges of suspected homicide. Police made the information public on Tuesday.

While on security patrol, police had noticed a suspicious looking traveler at the check-in counter in Terminal 2. The suspect was wearing the same shirt at the airport as could be seen in the mugshot of him distributed by law enforcement authorities. They spoke to him and he gave conflicting answers. It turns out the man was indeed the suspect authorities had been searching for and he was arrested and taken to the Cologne police headquarters.

On Friday, April 15, police took another man into custody at the Cologne/Bonn airport. There had been an arrest warrant out for him since 1999 on narcotics charges. The man, from Skopje, Macedonia had been living in Belgium. He was also taken to police headquarters in Cologne.
Uber suspends Surge Pricing in Delhi: Is it really unethical? News oi -Ankit

Uber's surge pricing has always been a matter of controversy, around various cities worldwide. Whether be it New York, Beijing or even New Delhi, Uber has always been criticized for 'exploiting' customers with these exorbitant rates for their cabs.

The odd-even car pollution rule is on in Delhi till the 30th and Uber is the saving grace for a lot of office-goers. Once again, Uber is notoriously applying surge on their rides in Delhi and a lot of customers are complaining. So much so that these have concerned the Delhi Chief Minister, who on Monday called for a serious meeting regarding the Uber issue.

SEE ALSO: Apple iPhone To Go All Glassy: Here Are The Interesting Things!

In lieu of these events, Uber has apparently suspended their surge pricing for the time being. But, is the government intervention really necessary in this kind of complex business? Is Uber's surge pricing unethical or just a clever marketing tool?

Here are some pointers that will help you take sides between the Delhi government and Uber with their surge pricing.

What exactly is Surge Pricing?

Given the threat to the livelihood of our partners, at the expense of reliability, we are temporarily suspending surge with immediate effect  Uber Delhi (@Uber_Delhi) April 18, 2016

Let's start with the basics here. Surge pricing is a method of scientifically increasing the normal taxi fare, so as to match the supply and demand of a particular area. Uber claims that a surge in normal prices motivates more and more drivers to reach that location for picking up customers. This, in turn, improves the supply and helps the most important customers to get on first.

What are the cases FOR surge pricing?

The inflated rates, whether 2x, 3x or 4x, go directly to the driver partner himself (after Uber's cut of course). The argument lies within the fact that their livelihood is on the line.

It is a perfect tool for market management that completely takes over the forces of demand and supply. This is how an organization should function in a free market.

Only the one, who needs the cab the most, gets it. For example; if you are booking a cab to get some dinner and there's another individual in an emergency. In the scenario where there is just one cab available, surge pricing will help the latter ensure him a cab for respite.

What are the cases AGAINST Surge Pricing?

The Delhi government's argument is that surge is straight out illegal. Tampering with any kind of public or private transport pricing-after rate approval from the authorities-is 100% illegal and unethical. It is a sort of fraud with the customers.

There is currently no clear-cut explanation as to why and when surge pricing is applied by Uber. As a result of the methods being vague, some claim that the taxi aggregator dupes customers on a daily basis.

Another argument claims that if supply is the issue, Uber should get in more driver partners. This is quite possible in Indian markets and actually results in more revenue for Uber.

What are the consequences of the suspension?

As the suspension is self-applied by Uber, there is no news as to when it ends. But, after Delhi government's strict language over these practices, Uber would definitely want to avoid another ban in the capital. It is expected that this suspension would thus continue for the next couple of months atleast.

SEE ALSO: How to prevent Laptops, Smartphones, Tablets from Over-Heating this Summer

If the city's residents are still able to take cars without much delay, then it could rip through the company's stand that surge pricing is an important component for their business. That, combined with customer pressure to protect individuals from price spiking could have a big impact on how the company operates worldwide as well.

Meanwhile, autorickshaws and e-rickshaws are another alternative to the taxi cabs and older players like Meru and EasyCabs also offer point-to-point taxis, but at a much higher rate.

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Lawyer Denies Reports Snowden Working With Russia's FSB

Sputnik News

19:51 18.04.2016

Whistleblower Edward Snowden is not cooperating with any intelligence agency, including Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), his lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said Monday refuting corresponding media reports.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Last week, media reports emerged claiming that Germany's intelligence BND believed Snowden was cooperating with the Kremlin and Russian special services.

"I can say that Edward has never broken his principle of not cooperating with any governments or any structures of any states, including Russian," Kucherena told RIA Novosti.

According to Kucherena, Snowden made clear his position on the issue upon arrival in Moscow.

Former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, who made revelations about US global surveillance through leaking classified documents, was granted temporary asylum in Russia for one year in 2013 and later received a three-year residence permit. His whereabouts in Russia are a closely-guarded secret.

Snowden's data leaks could cost him as much as 30 years in prison in the United States, where he is wanted on charges of espionage and theft of government property.

 Sputnik

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Army, Air Force train for short takeoff, landing

By Spc. Sarah K. Anwar, 304th Public Affairs Detachement / Published April 18, 2016

HOHENFELS, Germany (AFNS) -- Airmen from the 321st Special Tactics Squadron out of Royal Air Force Mildenhall, England, and Soldiers from the 173rd Brigade Support Battalion, 173rd Airborne Brigade out of Vicenza, Italy, secured the Hohenfels Training Area's short takeoff and landing strip (STOL) April 13, as part of their certification at Saber Junction 16.

The airfield team from the 321st STS practiced seizing the STOL and assessed it for suitability by looking for obstacles and barriers that would be in the way of aircraft, explained Master Sgt. Christopher B. Sones, assigned to the 321st STS and the airfield team leader for the crew accessing the STOL. They also conducted fast-paced landing and takeoff maneuvers for several hours, refining their timing, efficiency and communication.

Sones also said Hohenfels Training Area's STOL differs from other military landing strips.

"It's unique because it's right at 3,000 feet, which is our bare minimum for C-130s," Sones said. "The composition is something we call "rhino-slide;" it's a dirt aggregate kind of concrete mix."

Sones added that even the concrete mix is still tough enough for aircraft to land.

Saber Junction 16, which lasts from March 31-April 24, is a multinational exercise for U.S. Army Europe's 173rd Airborne Brigade, in which they're evaluated on the readiness of their combat units to conduct unified land operations and promote interoperability. The STOL supports this effort because is it the only semi-prepared, dirt landing zone in Germany, distinguishing it from other landing zones.

Sones says it is essential for his team be able to work in joint operations and share best practices, just as they are doing with the 173rd AB.

C-130s usually land on an average of a 4,600 foot strip. The STOL is 3,600 feet, but only 3,000 feet are usable for takeoff and landing due to the requirement for 300 unused feet to be on either end of a strip for safety.

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Crisis Response Marines help Spanish maintain aerial refueling qualifications

US Marine Corps News

By Sgt. Tia Nagle | April 18, 2016

U.S. Marine Corps KC-130J Hercules with Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force-Crisis Response- Africa flew straight and level as the F/A-18 approached from behind to receive fuel. This F/A-18 however belonged to the Spanish Air Force, conducting an air-to-air refueling mission from a U.S. Marine KC-130J for the first time during a training exercise in Gran Canaria, Spain, Mar. 29, 2016.

"The purpose of the trip was to do bilateral training with the Spanish 462 Squadron," said Capt. Kyle Bookhout, a pilot with Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 252. "We provided them with aerial refueling and played along in some of their training scenarios so that they can keep improving their qualifications and maintain their readiness."

During the training scenario, the C-130 acted as the "slow mover" among the group of fighter jets. The Marines simulated dropping paratroopers at a designated landing zone while the Spanish F-18s provided security above the route. Following the scenario, the Marines refueled the jets to give the Spanish pilots additional training in aerial refueling.

"I think it's a great opportunity anytime that you can get two nations together and do this type of bilateral training," said Bookhout. "They have limited assets for air refueling so we help them out and keep their qualifications current. Just seeing how other people operate and getting past the communication barriers and seeing that we're all pretty similar... It's just a great experience and I think everyone receives a lot of training value out of it."

While this was the first time U.S. Marine aircraft had refueled the 462nd, the C-130 crews make an effort to do refueling missions with the Spanish at least twice a month to remain proficient in their assigned mission essential tasks throughout the deployment. Bilateral exercises such as this one help reinforce the strong relationships between the U.S., Spanish and other NATO allies.

"Just working with the Spanish or other foreign militaries helps in case we do, in a real-world mission, have to deal with other nations," said Bookhout. "We're already familiar with how they operate and they're familiar with how we operate."

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Indonesia, Philippine, Malaysia plan to conduct joint patrol

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 19:32, April 18, 2016

JAKARTA, April 18 -- Military men from Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia will carry out a joint patrol at the countries'sea borders as threat of piracy is escalating after the abductions of 14 Indonesians in the territory, senior security official said here on Monday.

Spokesman of Indonesian Security Chief Ministry Agus R. Barnas said that the joint patrol will secure the sea waters which are also a busy shipping lane for international trade.

Each military officer will patrol in their own territories in the border areas of the three nations, but the patrol will be integrated, Barnas said.

"We will cooperate on a joint patrol. This patrol is coordinated and aims to secure the border areas, and also the shipping lane,"he told Xinhua by phone.

One of the functions of lane, which passes through Indonesian territory, is for transporting coal from Indonesia to other countries, such as the Philippines, according to Barnas.

Indonesia is an archipelago country and is passed through by three international shipping lanes called ALKI.

"(The border) is passed by an international shipping lane from (China's) Hong Kong to the south, and passes through Indonesian waters. The economic activity is frequent there, including the transport of coal,"he revealed.

As many as 10 Indonesian workers in a ship transporting coals have been kidnapped in the border territory since last month by Abu Sayyap terrorist group based in the Philippines.

Last week four other Indonesians were also abducted by gunmen, while six others including one who was shot escaped the incident, according to Indonesian foreign ministry.

The spokesman of the security ministry said that an investigation is being conducted by the ministry to find out whether the abductors are the Abu Sayap group, or its splinter group.

Attempt to free all the Indonesians being abducted is being undertaken by the governments of Indonesia and the Philippines.

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US to deploy more troops, Apache helicopters to Iraq, says Carter

Iran Press TV

Mon Apr 18, 2016 4:28PM

US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter says the US is going to deploy 217 more troops and a number of Apache helicopters to Iraq, to help Baghdad expand its military efforts against the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group.

Carter made the announcement during a visit to Baghdad on Monday, adding that the US military was going to provide Iraqi forces with Apache attack helicopters and an additional HIMARS rocket system as they gear up to retake the city of Mosul that fell to Daesh last year.

Moreover, Carter said Washington was going to make a $415 million contribution to the Peshmerga, a Kurdish military group fighting Daesh.

The Pentagon chief made the announcement as he made a stop in Iraq on his Middle East tour, in which he also asked allies in the region for help on the war against Daesh.

Upon his arrival in Baghdad, Carter met with Lt. General Sean MacFarland, the US military commander overseeing the fight against Daesh. He also met with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and Defense Minister Khalid al-Obeidi.

With the new decision, the administration of President Barack Obama has put the US troop level in Iraq at 4,087, up from the previous 3,870 forces that the Pentagon had deployed.

US Army Colonel Steve Warren, who is stationed in Baghdad, said it was "fair to say" that there are hundreds more troops than even that figure, arguing that it was part of the natural rotation of incoming and outgoing forces.

This is while Obama was elected on a promise to withdraw US troops from Iraq, and announced its fulfillment in 2011.

Last June, the president said he would send hundreds of military personnel to train Iraqi troops in Anbar province while continuing an aerial campaign on Daesh positions which was started since September 2014.

Additionally, in late March, US military officials confirmed the creation of the Marine outpost, dubbed Fire Base Bell, which is said to be the first such base established by the US since it returned forces to Iraq in 2014.

However, they insisted that the nearly 200 Marines were only there to provide security for Iraqi forces and US advisers at the nearby Iraqi base in Makhmur.

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'US to monitor Beijing's South China Sea moves'

Iran Press TV

Mon Apr 18, 2016 9:5AM

The United States Navy will keep an eye on Beijing's activities in the disputed South China Sea by means of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) or 'submarine drones.'

The Pentagon has over the past several months talked publicly about a once-secret program to develop unmanned undersea vehicles or drone subs that are becoming part of the US plan to 'deter China from trying to dominate the region,' according to the Financial Times.

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter recently made reference to drone subs in Asia, pointing to their potential use in the South China Sea, which has large areas of shallow water.

The Pentagon's investment in the subs "includes new undersea drones in multiple sizes and diverse payloads that can, importantly, operate in shallow water, where manned submarines cannot," said Carter, who visited a US warship in the South China Sea on Friday.

The underwater drones are part of a US push into military robotics as it hopes some of them will be operational by the end of the decade in a bid to 'deter' potential rivals such as China and Russia, the report added.

"The idea is that if we were ever to get into a bust-up in the South China Sea, the Chinese would not know for sure what sort of capabilities the US might have," FT quoted Shawn Brimley, a former White House and Pentagon official as saying.

"Countries across the Asia-Pacific are voicing concern with China's land reclamation, which stands out in size and scope, as well as its militarization in the South China Sea," Carter said in Manila on Thursday.

China has time and again slammed the US military build-up in the South China Sea, saying it is Washington, and not Beijing, which is truly militarizing the disputed waters by conducting patrols there.

The South China Sea and patches of islands there have become a source of tension between China, the US, and some regional countries who are seeking control of trade routes and mineral deposits.

The disputed islands are claimed by countries such as Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei, which all have overlapping claims with China over the territories in the South China Sea, including the Paracels, Spratly Islands, Pratas Islands and Scarborough Shoal.

Washington and China's rivals have been accusing Beijing of attempting to take advantage of the situation and gradually assert control in the South China Sea.

Beijing, however, rejects the allegations and accuses Washington of meddling in the regional issues and deliberately stirring up tensions in the South China Sea.

The South China Sea serves as a crossing for more than $5 trillion worth of annual maritime trade.



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Yemen peace talks delayed: Report

Iran Press TV

Mon Apr 18, 2016 6:22AM

Monday peace talks in Kuwait aimed at ending over a year of Saudi war in Yemen have been delayed, Reuters says citing officials from the warring sides.

The news agency quoted a senior official in ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh's party as saying that "there's no point in going to Kuwait if there's no respect for the ceasefire."

Delegations representing Yemen's Houthis and Saleh's General People's Congress party, the main groups fighting Saudi-backed forces, have yet to depart the capital Sana'a and cited heavy combat and airstrikes.

Fighting and airstrikes persist on several battlefronts throughout the country, especially in the contested southwestern city of Ta'izz and the Nehm area east of the capital.

Local residents and witnesses said Saudi warplanes bombarded al-Ghayl district in the northern Yemeni province of Jawf early on Monday.

Saudi Arabia's remotely-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles carried out a number of reconnaissance missions over the skies of the capital Sana'a, the al-Masirah television reported.

Saudi-backed militiamen meanwhile fired a barrage of rockets and artillery rounds at the city of Sirwah, about 120 km (75 miles) east of the capital, it said.

Reuters quoted two officials from the Saudi-backed group as saying that the opposing delegations would likely arrive on Tuesday.

Abdulmalek al-Mikhlafi, the foreign minister of ex-president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi's administration, said he didn't expect "a full agreement at this stage but rather a step toward that end."

The ceasefire has been violated numerous times with fighting that has been unabated in Nahm, northeast of Sana'a, killing nine Saudi-backed militants on Sunday.

The northern capital remains in the hands of the Houthis and Saudi Arabia continues carrying out attacks from the air and ground to take it.

The kingdom, however, is under growing pressure as its protracted war has ground into a no-win situation.

In February, Saudi military spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed Asiri acknowledged that Riyadh was stuck in a "static war" against its southern neighbor.

Saudi Arabia is also coming under an unprecedented criticism from around the world over rising civilian casualties and destruction in Yemen.

The United Nations has raised alarm over the growing influence of al-Qaeda in Yemen since Saudi Arabia launched the war in March 2015.

More than 9,400 people have been killed and at least 16,000 others injured since the onset of the aggression.

The Saudi strikes have also taken a heavy toll on the country's facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools, and factories.

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Two-state solution in Middle East 'tragically more distant' than ever, Ban tells Security Council

18 April 2016  United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned today that a two-state solution, which envisages peaceful co-existence of Palestine and Israel, seems more distant than it has for many decades, citing the ongoing violence, Israel's settlement activity and demolitions of Palestinian homes, and the absence of Palestinian unity.

"For over six months, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory have been gripped by a surge in violence, triggered by individual terrorist attacks by Palestinians," he told the Security Council in a regular briefing, noting that more than two dozen Israelis and two hundred Palestinians have been killed.

While welcoming the joint Palestinian-Israeli efforts that have contributed to a reduction of tensions in recent weeks, the latest killings have only deepened the legacy of divisiveness, hatred and grief, he said.

Mr. Ban urged Israeli and Palestinian leaders to elevate public discourse above mutual accusations, and to engage in a constructive dialogue that can rebuild the trust that has all but evaporated.

The diplomatic Middle East Quartet, comprising the UN, the European Union, the United States and Russia, which mediates the peace process, is moving forward on a report that will review the situation on the ground, the threats to a two-state solution, and provide recommendations on how to advance peace, he said.

"Tragically, this solution seems more distant than it has for many decades," he said. "A 20-year-old Palestinian living under occupation has seen no political progress at all during his or her lifetime," he noted.

Israel continues to demolish Palestinian structures in the West Bank at an alarming rate. The total number of demolitions in 2015 was exceeded in the first three months of this year. More than 700 people have been displaced.

He said he was also concerned by the continued punitive demolitions of homes belonging to families of alleged Palestinian perpetrators of attacks against Israelis. Punitive demolitions are a form of collective punishment, which is prohibited under international law.

This, together with last month's declaration of "state land," signal that Israel's strategic settlement enterprise continues to expand on land intended for a future Palestinian state. "I once again reiterate that settlements are illegal under international law and undermine the two-state solution," Mr. Ban said.

"The creation of new facts on the ground through demolitions and settlement building raises questions about whether Israel's ultimate goal is in fact to drive Palestinians out of certain parts of the West Bank, thereby undermining any prospect of transition to a viable Palestinian state," he said.

On the Palestinian political front, Mr. Ban expressed regret that the continued failure of intra-Palestinian discussions to achieve genuine unity on the basis of non-violence, democracy and the PLO principles, calling again on Palestinian factions to demonstrate their commitment to reconciliation, which is integral to reaching the goal of Palestinian statehood.

In Gaza, the security situation has calmed in recent weeks; however on 14 April, three rockets were fired from Gaza towards Israel. No injuries were reported, but he condemned all attacks and called on all parties to avoid further escalation that jeopardize the lives of Israeli and Palestinian civilians.

The Palestinian Government has laid out an ambitious $3.8 billion agenda for stabilizing Gaza, repairing damage from the 2014 conflict, and getting recovery underway. Economic development and rebuilding critical electricity and water infrastructure are essential. He welcomed that on 3 April, Israel expanded the Gaza fishing zone from six miles to nine nautical miles.

"The path out of the current political deadlock requires commitment, compromise, mutual respect and leadership on both sides. It also requires the acceptance  demonstrated by deeds as well as words  that the two-state solution is the only road to peace that meets the national aspirations of both peoples," he said.

Turning to Lebanon, he said he addressed political and security issues with Lebanese leaders during his visit to Beirut on 24 and 25 March, consistent with the concerns of the Security Council.

These included: the importance of preserving Lebanon's model of pluralism and coexistence from regional tensions; the urgency of electing a President without further delay; and the need for all parties to work with Prime Minister Tammam Salam to enable the Government to function effectively and to continue to engage in political dialogue.

They also discussed the importance of sustained international support for the Lebanese Armed Forces, and the expectation that both Lebanon and Israel work to consolidate stability along the Blue Line and advance the implementation of resolution 1701  which imposed a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hizbollah conflict of 2006 .

At the outset, he gave a brief report on his trip to Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Tunisia three weeks ago, noting that the trip sought to highlight the need to increase development assistance through innovative financing mechanisms for countries like Lebanon and Jordan that are disproportionately impacted by the conflict in Syria.

He said that last Friday, he, together with the Presidents of the World Bank and the Islamic Development Bank, co-chaired a ministerial-level conference to garner the financial support for this initiative. Eight countries and the European Union generously pledged $1 billion for a concessional loan facility, $141 million in grants, and $500 million for a guarantee facility, and many other countries expressed support for this innovative initiative, he noted.

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Analysts: Russia Plays Double Game in Afghanistan

by Noor Zahid, Fatima Tlisova April 18, 2016

Russia is increasing diplomatic contacts with the Taliban insurgent group in Afghanistan as Moscow looks to counter Islamic State (IS) gains in Central Asia and increase its influence in the nation it once occupied.

"We and the Taliban have channels for exchanging information," Russian President Vladimir Putin's special envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, told the Interfax news agency recently. The Taliban interest objectively coincides with ours," he said, referring to IS, which emerged in Afghanistan last year as a rival to the Taliban in eastern parts of the country.

In pursuing the Taliban, Moscow is playing a two-sided diplomatic game, analysts say.

Which way does the aid flow?

More than two decades after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia has upped its military and economic aid to the Afghan government, which is battling the Taliban in several areas of the country.

That aid includes 10,000 Kalashnikov rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition that the government will use to fight both IS and the Taliban insurgency, analysts say.

"Moscow does not want to seem as a supporter of the Taliban," said Kabul-based security analyst Wahid Muzhda. "It has good ties with Kabul, too. Its contacts with the Taliban do not mean that it is against the Afghanistan government."

Pakistan's English-language newspaper The Nation reported in December that Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour held a secret meeting with President Vladimir Putin to discuss possible Russian support in the Taliban's fight against IS.

VOA could not confirm the authenticity of the report. The Taliban said in a statement that it does "not see a need for receiving aid from anyone concerning so-called Daesh" - the Arabic acronym for IS.

But, according to analysts, Russia sees Taliban help as essential in fighting the spillover effects of the IS insurgency in Afghanistan.

Battling Islamic State militants

Militants from Central Asian nations have been training under IS in the tribal belt along the Durand Line between Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to IS video and military intelligence in several nations.

Central Asians have also been fighting alongside the Taliban.

Some of the militants recently joined IS and may return to their native countries for terror activities, Russian media say.

"Russia is genuinely concerned by the deteriorating security situation in Central Asia and afraid that it might be forced to help its Central Asian allies in their fight against terrorism," said Stephen Blank, a Russian analyst at the American Foreign Policy Council.

But the Afghan government, while publicly welcoming Russian aid, is casting a wary eye on Moscow's Taliban overtures.

"A number of [Afghanistan's] neighboring countries, including Russia, have reached out to various Taliban splinter groups to establish information channels," said an adviser at the presidential palace in Kabul, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"Uzbekistan is probably the only neighboring country that has not approached the Taliban," the adviser told VOA. Tajikistan, he said, "played a crucial role in facilitating contacts between Russia and the Taliban."

It is not clear whether or not the Taliban has received any military or financial assistance from Russia, but the group has been trying to gain international recognition, according to the Kabul presidential palace adviser.

Taliban insurgents have increased militant activities in various parts of Afghanistan. The Taliban warned last week that new attacks coming in the new fighting season. The Afghan government, for its part, called the Taliban spring offensive warning "mere propaganda."

Afghanistan's northeastern province of Kunduz briefly fell to the Taliban last year. According to Afghanistan's Foreign Ministry, around 1,300 foreign militants, most of them members of the Pakistani Taliban, participated in the assault on Kunduz.

IS militants in Afghanistan have established a presence in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar and launched multiple attacks on government and Taliban security checkpoints.

Recent Afghan and NATO military operations have helped clear many areas in Nangarhar of IS presence. But reports of fighting between government and IS forces  and the Taliban and IS  continue.

Russian officials say IS fighters in Afghanistan plan to use the country a jumping-off point.

"They have other aims," said Kabulov, the Russian president's special envoy to Afghanistan. "They need Afghanistan as a springboard for a wider expansion."

But the Taliban have reportedly told Moscow that IS is using Afghanistan mostly as a training ground and, according to analyst Muzhda, the Taliban would not support the spread of terrorist activities into neighboring Central Asian countries.

Still, Russia is conducting its second major military drill in as many months in Tajikistan near the Afghanistan border as part of what it calls "anti-terrorism training."

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China Lands Military Plane on Island in Disputed S. China Sea

by VOA News April 18, 2016

China says a military plane has landed on one of the country's man-made islands in the disputed South China Sea, the first public acknowledgement of such a mission.

China's state-run media said Monday that the plane was on patrol in the area Sunday when it received an emergency call to land on Fiery Cross Reef to evacuate three injured construction workers.

After picking up the injured workers, the plane then flew to Hainan Island where it was met by an ambulance.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, said such rescue missions are part of the military's tradition.

"On Chinese territory, something like this is not out of the ordinary," he said.

China completed the 3,000-meter runway on the island in the disputed Spratly archipelago last year, and began test flights of commercial airlines there in January.

Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said the United States has serious concerns about China's actions in the South China Sea.

He said other Asian countries in the region have been expressing their concerns to the United States both publicly and privately about China's military actions, which he said "stand out in size and scope."

U.S. military officials have said that any attempt by China to fly military aircraft from the man-made islands would not deter U.S. flights over the area.

China claims much of the South China Sea, while several other nations  including the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam  have rival claims.

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U.S. Department of Defense

Press Operations

News Transcript

Presenter: Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, commander, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve April 26, 2016

Remarks by General MacFarland in a Media Availability in Baghdad, Iraq

Presenter: Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, commander, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve

April 18, 2016

Remarks by General MacFarland in a Media Availability in Baghdad, Iraq

Q: General, can you just give us a better sense about the advisers, where they're going to go and how they're going to be used?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL SEAN MACFARLAND: So the advisers are going to be doing largely what we've been doing all along, which is providing the kind of military advice and access to enablers that help our partners on the ground against the enemy.

So access to coalition fires and logistic support, things of that nature are typically what the advisers provide.

Q: But they'll be closer to the fight, at this point how close and what are your concerns about safety?

GEN. MCFARLAND: Yes. Not necessarily closer to the fight, closer to the commanders who are making the critical decisions on the ground. The operation around Mosul is going to be of a slightly different character than the operations around Ramadi.

And Ramadi was what we call a non-contiguous battlefield. And we were operating out of bases, forward operating bases like Taqaddum and Al Asad. And the Iraqi security forces headquarters are all located in that -- those facilities which were largely surrounded by enemy-held territory and received occasional indirect fire as a result.

Well, now it's more of a linear type of an operation, more contiguous and therefore those headquarters are pushed out of those bases and in order to continue to provide the kind of assistance that we have been providing, we have to be able to go to them.

Does that help?

Q: Mm-hmm.

Q: How close to the fight do you need to be to use the HIMARS?

GEN. MCFARLAND: So the HIMARS has a pretty good range on it. It will out-range anything that the enemy has. And will -- we won't need to get within enemy indirect fire range to employ it. And I'd kind of like to keep it at that.

(CROSSTALK)

Q: Secretary Carter mentioned that troops will be used in new ways, not only extra troops, but what are some of the ways they will be used?

GEN. MCFARLAND: That's kind of what I was just talking about in that the character of the operation is evolving into much more of a maneuver fight. And for us to enable that maneuver fight will require us to be able to have a little bit more flexibility.

And one of those ways will be logistically, the Iraqi security forces are going to be operating at extended distances from their bases, their depots, and so forth. So we're going to have to provide them with a different kind of logistics support to keep their vehicles rolling and operational as they close with the enemy.

Q: And then if I could ask you about the attack helicopters. What exactly is going to be provided and I guess how will they be used?

GEN. MCFARLAND: Well, there's a range of ways that we employ attack helicopters in the U.S. military. And we can employ them in singles, pairs, groups of four, eight, and on and on.

And how we employ those depends very much on what the mission is and what the enemy situation is.

So we look at mission. We look at enemy. We look at troops available. We look at terrain. We look at time, civilians on the battlefield. We factored all that together. And then we crank a tactical solution for that.

The great thing about the Apache is that it has standoff capability. And our Apaches actually have the ability to operate in conjunction with unmanned aerial system, so that provides them with even greater flexibility in standoff.

Q: How many Apache helicopters will be available for (off-mic.) use to support the Iraqis?

GEN. MCFARLAND: Well, I don't want to get too specific on that, OK? So let me just say all of them that are here, OK?

Q: So that would be like about eight?

GEN. MCFARLAND: I'll just leave it at that. I don't want to get specific on numbers.

Q: And on the Apaches, around December Secretary Carter had said that, you know, the U.S. is willing to provide not only the Apaches but also the advisers now to the lower levels.

The Iraqis didn't take the U.S. up on that offer. It was kind of assumed to be political issues here in Iraq --

(CROSSTALK)

GEN. MCFARLAND: No, it wasn't really a political issue so much as the sense that they weren't going to be necessarily required, the risk versus reward calculation wasn't the same as it is for Mosul.

One thing we have to understand about Mosul is Mosul is about four to five times the size of Ramadi. It's a lot farther away from the Iraqi bases, like in Taji where they draw their logistic support from.

So it's an order of magnitude more challenging than Ramadi was. And so obviously we were able to take Ramadi back without the additional enablers. Mosul is going to be more difficult.

And so hence the additional support.

Q: So let me rephrase this just a little bit. The U.S. is expanding its footprint in Iraq. That raises a lot of domestic and political pressure for Prime Minster Abadi. How do you address his concern or do you think they will be an issue going forward?

GEN. MCFARLAND: The additional capabilities that we're bringing in really don't equate to large numbers of troops. They really just will provide the Iraqi security forces with the additional capabilities that they need to succeed.

Operating in and around Mosul, so I think that largely people understand that Mosul is going to be a tough fight. And as long we're supporting our partners on the ground, most people will accept that.

(CROSSTALK)

Q: How can 200 military people change the balance of forces on the ground?

GEN. MCFARLAND: Well, what we're focusing -- we're focusing our support on those units that are going to be operating in and around Mosul. And we're going to be judicious in how we do that, and ensure that we get most return on that investment.

I think that it's really not so much about the 200 people, it's about capabilities and the support that they can bring to bear.

So when you look at a coalition service member, an American service man or woman, you just have to remember that behind that soldier, sailor, airman, or marine stands the entire power of the United States military, and our coalition.

So having those people in key location enables us to bring that power to bear at the right time and place.

Q: (inaudible)

GEN. MCFARLAND: Speak up.

Q: Does this mean that soldiers will be closer to the fight or they won't? Because at first you said they would, the way you described the situation.

GEN. MCFARLAND: No. The soldiers will be advising -- we have down to the brigade and potentially battalion level, which, as they begin to maneuver, are going to be operating at greater distance from locations like we had Taqaddum or Al Asad airbases.

It's not any closer to the enemy than it has ever been. It's just that the Iraqi security forces are disaggregated and not operating out of fixed bases anymore as they maneuver up towards Mosul.

Q: General, if you go from a division to a brigade level, how could the advisers be still the same distance from the fight? It just doesn't seem to make sense.

GEN. MCFARLAND: OK. Because you're thinking linearly. You have to think that prior to this, the brigades, the divisions, everybody were consolidated pretty much their headquarters on places like Taqaddum Airbase.

And they were only moved -- the fight for Ramadi was only 10, 15 kilometers away. So they were -- their leaders were commuting back and forth from their headquarters to the fight.

Well, Taqaddum Airbase, Taji, all those places are now many, many, many kilometers away from that fight. So you have to be able to move off of those bases, but you're not getting any closer to the enemy necessarily.

Q: If I could, can I ask you about the other half of the equation, Syria. What additional steps might be necessary to defeat the Islamic State in Syria?

GEN. MCFARLAND: Well, that's a great question. So one of the things that we are trying to do here is develop the indigenous partner forces on the ground amongst the Syrian Arabs who have been oppressed by Daesh, and are now starting to take up arms in their own defense in greater numbers in partnership with our Special Forces.

So that process has a lot of room to run. We're in early days on that. And that in conjunction with the airstrikes and everything else that we're doing out there are really beginning to take their toll on the enemy in Syria as well.

We don't look at this fight as just Iraq and Syria. It's all one big fight. And what we're doing now in Syria is completely connected to what we're doing in Iraq and vice versa.

And if you want to think of it in terms of a close battle and a deep battle, that is kind of what we're doing right now.

Q: General, based on your discussions with the Iraqis, do the changes that you've done and announced today, do you think that's enough to take you through the fight for Mosul, or is this going to be an evolving thing where you might identify more requirements as you go forward?

GEN. MCFARLAND: Right now what were focused on is getting the Iraqis and the Peshmerga and all the forces that are available in and around Mosul to complete its isolation, to cut it off from the rest of what the secretary refers to as the "parent tumor."

The next step of that obviously is to actually clear the city. And when we get to that step, that will be another conversation that we'll have. But right now the intent is to cut that city off and set the conditions for its liberation.

Q: What does the money for the Peshmerga go to? What are they going to use that for?

GEN. MCFARLAND: Well, that is a conversation that we're going to have with the Kurdish regional government. And we think that there are a number of ways that we can do that.

But I'll tell you one way to immediately comes to mind is that right now the Peshmerga are not getting enough calories to keep them in the field. So we're very interested in making sure that they have enough food just to carry on the fight.

And then we'll -- through discussions with the KRG, we will determine other ways that we'll assist them as well.

Q: So these additional means are to envelop Mosul. But it won't be enough to take Mosul, actually take it?

GEN. MCFARLAND: Well, that remains to be seen. This is action-reaction-counteraction. No plan survives contact with the enemy, as we say.

So we're going to employ these additional authorities and capabilities and see how far it takes us. And then if it doesn't take us all the way, we'll come back and have another discussion and ask for more if we need to.

But right now we're going to take what we've got and see how far we can go with it.

Q: Will this give you enough trainers, do you think?

(CROSSTALK)

Q: Is this fair to call it an incremental approach?

GEN. MCFARLAND: I would prefer to call it a step-by-step approach. We're on the first step right now. We're moving up to Mosul. We're setting the conditions around it, towards liberation.

And then, like I said, it's action-reaction-counteraction. So we'll see how the enemy reacts to that. And if those conditions are sufficiently favorable for us to go in and liberate the city with the forces that we have at hand, great.

If they prove to be insufficient, that will be another assessment that we'll make, and then we'll have another discussion about any additional --

STAFF: Hey, sir, we need to wrap it up here.

Q: Will this give you enough trainers to get enough Iraqi forces for at least encirclement?

GEN. MCFARLAND: Yes, well, so here's the other thing we all have to keep in mind is that we're talking about relatively small numbers of Americans here, but there are over 2,600 coalition troops on the ground, most of them are doing the training missions -- or many of them.

And that that training mission is ongoing, and it's expanding, and it's providing the Iraqi security forces that we need both military and police. And so that shouldn't be forgotten. We tend to focus a little bit too much, I think, on the American presence and forget about all of our international partners and all that they're doing.

Q: Before you go, could you give a sense of with your talks with the Iraqis, they express eagerness to have these additional forces? Are they eager to see what the Apaches can do to help them take Mosul?

GEN. MCFARLAND: Absolutely.

STAFF: All right. One-word answer to end it.

(Laughter.)

-END-

http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/728456/

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U.S. Department of Defense

Press Operations

News Release

No. NR-137-16 April 19, 2016

Readout of Secretary Carter's meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates

Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook provided the following readout:

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates met today in Abu Dhabi to discuss the U.S.-UAE bilateral defense relationship. The meeting at Shati Palace took place ahead of a U.S. - Gulf Cooperation Council Summit in Riyadh.

Secretary Carter emphasized the importance of the U.S.-UAE strategic partnership and reiterated both countries' shared commitment to ensuring a stable and secure Middle East. The conversation focused on counterterrorism cooperation, instability in Iraq and Syria and countering Iran's destabilizing activities. The Secretary thanked the Crown Prince for UAE's strong commitment to counterterrorism.



Secretary Carter lauded the bilateral security cooperation between the two countries and commended the UAE's efforts to work with the United States to expand regional military collaboration.

The meeting ended with a discussion of regional issues, including shared objectives for the U.S. - Gulf Cooperation Council Summit. Secretary Carter and the Crown Prince agreed to continue to deepen defense ties at all levels of the UAE and U.S. militaries.

http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/728434/

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NATO Secretary General discusses stronger NATO-EU cooperation at EU Defence Ministers Meeting

NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

19 Apr. 2016

Speaking ahead of the EU Defence Ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Tuesday (19 April) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed close cooperation between NATO and the EU to respond to the refugee and migrant crisis.

He said that NATO ships deployed in the Aegean Sea are doing surveillance and reconnaissance and "providing real-time information to the Turkish coastguard, to the Greek coastguard and also the EU border agency Frontex".

The Secretary General said that the upcoming NATO Summit in Warsaw and the EU Summit in June will provide a very good platform for cooperation between NATO and the EU. "We will look into how we can expand that cooperation", he said. He added that "NATO stands ready to provide support to the new government of national accord" in Libya.

Talking about the NATO-Russia Council, which will take place tomorrow (20 April), the Secretary General highlighted that it will be the first NRC meeting since 2014 and said that the crisis in and around Ukraine, military activity, transparency, risk reductions and Afghanistan will be among the issues discussed. "And I think that the incidents we have seen in the Baltic Sea over the last week with the unprofessional and unsafe behavior of Russian planes close to an American ship and also close to an American plane just underlines the importance of open military lines of communication, of predictability and risk reduction", he said.

On Tuesday, the Secretary General was also meeting with the EU Commissioner for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and Small and Medium Enterprises, Elzbieta Bienkowska and with the Minister of Defence of Spain Pedro Morenes Eulate.

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US Sending More Weapons, Advisers to Iraq Without Change in Strategy

Sputnik News

04:15 19.04.2016

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said that the United States will be sending hundreds more advisers along with mobile rocket launchers and Apache gunship helicopters to back up the Iraqi drive against the Mosul stronghold of Daesh.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The United States will be sending hundreds more advisers along with mobile rocket launchers and Apache gunship helicopters to back up the Iraqi drive against the Mosul stronghold of the Islamic State, or Daesh, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in Baghdad.

"These are capabilities that will continue the process of accelerating the defeat of ISIL [Daesh, also known as the Islamic State]," Carter told NBC News in a televised interview on Monday evening. "We are going to accelerate this campaign every time we find an opportunity to do so."

Carter confirmed that at least 200 more US troops would be sent as advisers to the Iraqi Security Forces bringing the total number of US military still in the country.

But, Carter insisted that the moves did not signal any change in the Obama administration's strategy to defeat the Islamic State.

"I am very comfortable that our operational approach is the right one. In the end, Iraqi forces have to do the defeating, sustain the defeat. We can help them, we can't substitute for them we're not looking to," Carter explained.

According to other US media reports, eight Apache ground-support helicopters would be sent to support the Iraqi Security Forces drive on Mosul, which Carter described as the "parent tumor" of Daesh in the Middle East.

 Sputnik

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Update: air strikes against Daesh

19 April 2016

British forces have continued to conduct air operations in the fight against Daesh

Latest update

- Wednesday 13 April  Typhoons and Tornados conducted attacks in northern and western Iraq, destroying heavy weapons and a truck-bomb, and sinking a number of terrorist-operated barges.

- Thursday 14 April  Typhoons and Tornados struck further Daesh targets in northern and western Iraq, including boats being used by the terrorists to flee from the town of Hit.

- Sunday 17 April  Tornados attacked a mortar position in northern Syria, while Typhoons bombed Daesh positions in northern Iraq.

- Monday 18 April  Typhoons and Tornados bombed terrorist targets in northern and western Iraq, including two mortar positions, ten rocket launchers and an improvised explosive device factory.

Detail

Iraqi counter-terrorist forces, supported by Royal Air Force and other coalition aircraft, have made good progress in clearing Daesh extremists out of the town of Hit, strategically located on the southern bank of the Euphrates in western Iraq.

On Wednesday 13 April, RAF Typhoon FGR4s assisted in the destruction of one of the remaining terrorist strongpoints on the eastern outskirts of the town, striking, despite the very close proximity of the Iraqi forces, a Daesh machine-gun position with a Paveway IV guided bomb. When the Iraqi troops liberated the town's hospital, they found that it had been converted into a terrorist bomb-making factory, with a number of vehicles there, including an ambulance, converted into truck-bombs; fortunately, the speed of the Iraqi victory prevented these deadly booby-traps from being deployed. In northern Iraq, other Typhoons bombed terrorist rocket and mortar teams located some miles south-west of Sinjar, and in the Kisik area, which had opened fire on advancing Kurdish troops. West of Mosul, Tornado GR4s tracked an articulated lorry carrying a prepared car-bomb on its trailer; despite the lorry's speed, a direct hit was scored on the car-bomb using a Brimstone missile.

The Tornados then used Paveways to destroy two clusters of barges being used by the terrorists to move men and supplies across the Tigris.

Thursday 14 April saw Tornados patrolling over northern Iraq, providing close air support to Kurdish forces in the areas south of Sinjar and Kisik. Successful Paveway attacks accounted for a Daesh mortar team and destroyed the entrance to a tunnel system where a number of terrorists were reported to be hiding. Near Qayyarah, Typhoons destroyed a Daesh-held building, again using a Paveway IV. In western Iraq, as the last Daesh fighters pulled out of Hit, a Tornado flight employed two Brimstone missiles to sink boats used by them to cross the Euphrates.

A Tornado armed reconnaissance patrol over northern Syria on Sunday 17 April bombed a Daesh large calibre mortar position near Manbij. In northern Iraq, a Typhoon flight used a total of eight Paveways in a succession of successful strikes around Kisik, Mosul and south of Kirkuk, destroying a terrorist mortar team, four vehicles, and three Daesh-held buildings.

The next day, Monday 18 April, a Typhoon mission used Paveways to attack two mortar positions which had opened fire on Kurdish troops near Kisik, while a pair of Tornados conducted simultaneous attacks on three Daesh targets north-east of Mosul, hitting a bomb-making factory and two other terrorist-held buildings. In western Iraq, Typhoons dropped four Paveways to destroy ten rocket-launchers and a stockpile of ammunition positioned on the bank of the Euphrates.

Previous air strikes

1 April: Typhoons were active over western Iraq. A Daesh truck armed with an anti-aircraft gun was successfully bombed north-east of Ramadi and Paveways were used to destroy a fuel tanker converted into a truck bomb near Hit and a bunker west of Fallujah where terrorists had been spotted. In northern Iraq, a Tornado patrol employed Paveway IVs to destroy three Daesh buildings in the Mosul and Sinjar areas.

2 April: Coalition surveillance operations had identified Daesh extremists using a former Iraqi military ammunition depot near Qayyarah in northern Iraq. This intelligence indicated that the terrorists were manufacturing improvised explosive devices and other weaponry on the site. As part of a large coalition air strike on terrorist facilities in the area, four RAF Tornado GR4s were tasked with attacking 16 of these storage bunkers. Each aircraft dropped a salvo of four Paveways, and initial indications are that the strike was highly accurate and effective. An RAF Reaper was also active in the Qayyarah area, hunting a Daesh mortar team. The aircraft's crew were able successfully to locate the team, operating a truck-mounted mortar, concealed under trees on the western bank of the Tigris, and secured a direct hit with a Hellfire missile.

4 April: Typhoon FGR4s patrolled over Anbar province in western Iraq. East of Fallujah, the Typhoons struck two buildings occupied by Daesh fighters that had been identified by Iraqi ground forces with Paveway IV guided bombs. The aircraft then flew to the city of Hit, on the Euphrates river, where a coalition surveillance aircraft had spotted a large group of terrorists positioned in a line of trees on the edge of the town. These extremists were also struck using a Paveway IV.

Other RAF aircraft were active over northern Iraq; Tornado GR4s assisted Kurdish peshmerga engaged in a firefight north-west of Mosul, hitting their Daesh opponents with a Paveway, whilst Typhoons conducted a successful bombing attack on extremists mustering near Qayyarah.

5 April: A Typhoon flight operated over northern Iraq, using Paveways to attack three Daesh-held buildings north-east of Mosul, including a weapons store. They then used a further three Paveways to destroy three Daesh positions some miles south of Kirkuk, including a headquarters building and a base used by a mortar team.

6 April: A Typhoon flight tasked to provide close air support to the Iraqi security forces attacking Daesh strongholds in Hit. The Typhoons used Paveways to strike a total of seven targets identified by the aircraft themselves, the Iraqi forces and supporting surveillance aircraft. A rocket-propelled grenade team firing from a building were silenced in a precise strike which avoided causing damage to a nearby mosque. They also destroyed two heavy-machine guns; a third heavy machine-gun on the northern bank of the river; and a series of simultaneous attacks eliminated a fourth machine-gun position and two more groups of Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG)-armed terrorists. In northern Iraq, Tornado GR4s bombed a network of trenches near Qayyarah.

7 April: The Tornados were in action again over northern Iraq, where they used a Paveway to destroy a truck-bomb positioned ahead of Kurdish troops south of Kirkuk. They then destroyed a machine-gun position on the Little Zab River using a Brimstone missile. Near Qayyarah, a Typhoon flight supported Kurdish troops who had come under fire from a number of Daesh positions. Two terrorist-held buildings were destroyed, and a group of extremists caught manoeuvring in the open were also struck with a Paveway.

8 April: RAF Typhoon FGR4s patrolled the area around Hit. Coalition surveillance aircraft located a concealed improvised artillery piece  known as a "hell cannon"  which had opened fire on the Iraqi troops and was hidden under trees. Working closely with surveillance aircraft, the Typhoon flight was able to score a direct hit using a Paveway IV guided bomb.

9 April: A RAF Reaper remotely piloted aircraft was tasked to hunt for a Daesh mortar team operating in the Hit area. Intensive surveillance allowed the Reaper's crew to identify and track motorcycle-mounted terrorists who stopped to set up a mortar. They were struck by a Hellfire missile from the Reaper.

10 April: Two flights of Tornado GR4s operated over northern Iraq to support Kurdish ground forces. One flight working east of Mosul demolished a Daesh-held building, suspected to be a local headquarters, using Paveway bombs. The Tornados then hit a building being used to stockpile rockets with another Paveway and used a Brimstone missle to account for a set of rocket launch rails nearby. The second Tornado flight provided support to Kurdish troops near Qayyarah who were coming under fire from a sniper team  they were successfully silenced by a further Paveway.

11 April: An RAF Typhoon mission destroyed a terrorist machine-gun team east of Mosul, then struck three Daesh positions east of Qayyarah.

12 April: A pair of Tornados bombed through thick cloud to hit two terrorist positions, including a rocket launching team, north of Mosul, and a Daesh mortar team near Qayyarah. In western Iraq, Typhoons supported the Iraqi counter-terrorist forces pushing into Hit, and used Paveways to strike two buildings held by Daesh rocket-propelled grenade and machine-gun teams.

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South Sudan: UN refugee agency warns of worsening civilian situation

19 April 2016  The United Nations refugee agency today expressed extreme concern over a combination of new fighting in previously peaceful areas, food insecurity and severe humanitarian funding shortages, which continue to cause a worsening of the situation in South Sudan for many civilians.

Recent fighting between Government and opposition forces in Western Bahr al Ghazal has displaced more than 96,000 people to Wau town, in the northwest of the country, Ariane Rummery, spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told reporters in Geneva, noting that neighbouring countries are now reporting rising refugee inflows.

"With the Regional Refugee Response Plan funded at just 8 per cent, many life-saving services are threatened," Ms. Rummery said. "UNHCR is extremely concerned."

The spokesperson said that an estimated 52,000 South Sudanese have fled into Sudan since late January, exceeding planning projections for 2016. At present, the refugees are mainly in East and South Darfur and West Kordofan.

UNHCR non-food item distributions by truck in East Darfur are expected to begin on Wednesday and distributions have already taken place to all new arrivals in South Darfur and to some of the new population in West Kordofan, she said.

Ms. Rummery noted that the World Food Programme (WFP) has been distributing one-month food rations to new arrivals in East and South Darfur, and is prepared to begin distributions in West Kordofan pending security clearance from authorities. Together with partner agencies, a three-month response plan has been prepared to accommodate an additional 120,000 new arrivals before June.

In addition, Ms. Rummery said that Uganda has seen a sharp increase in refugee arrivals from South Sudan since January, sometimes as many as 800 individuals per day. In all, 28,000 South Sudanese  86 per cent of them women and children  have sought refuge in Uganda.

The site where the South Sudanese refugees are sheltered, Maaji III, which is in the north-west of the country, is nearing capacity and basic life-saving services and other services are severely stretched, the spokesperson said.

She also said that Ethiopia, which hosts some 285,000 South Sudanese refugees, is seeing a recent  albeit more modest  increase in arrivals after a long period in which there were very few new refugees.

This recent spike in the rate of arrivals from South Sudan followed a long lull with an average daily arrival rate of less than one for the past two months, according to Ms. Rummery. UNHCR and partners have been providing basic assistance, including corn soya blend to children, plastic sheets, mosquito nets, blankets, sleeping mats and water jerry cans at the camp.

Ms. Rummery went on to say that while fighting has subsided in the Western Equatoria region of South Sudan since February, some 12,000 people crossed into the Democratic Republic of the Congo and sought shelter in the north-eastern province of Haut-Uele in the past few months.

The local communities have been welcoming of the refugees, but capacities are stretched, and thousands of the more recent arrivals have settled in very precarious conditions. The area is difficult to access and there are few humanitarian organizations present, the spokesperson said.

In addition, the conflict in Western Equatoria has forced thousands of South Sudanese from Source Yubu and Ezo to cross the border and seek asylum in the Central African Republic. As of 11 April, UNHCR had registered 10,454 South Sudanese refugees in the town of Bambouti, located in a difficult-to-reach area in the easternmost part of the Central African Republic.

The new arrivals in Bambouti greatly outnumber the host community, estimated at about 950 inhabitants, putting a severe strain on resources. Many refugees are suffering from malaria, waterborne diseases and malnutrition. Access to potable water, food, health care, sanitation and shelter is urgently needed for the entire population, Ms. Rummery said.

The spokesperson also said that UNHCR's Kakuma Operation in north-eastern Kenya has recorded a steady increase in new arrivals from South Sudan, rising from an average of 100 people a month at the start of this year to 350 people a week over the past two months.

Ms. Rummery noted that 2.3 million people have had to flee their homes since violence broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, 678,000 of these across borders as refugees and 1.69 million displaced inside the country.

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Kurdish Officials: Coalition Airstrike Kills IS Military Adviser

by Sharon Behn April 19, 2016

Kurdish security officials say a targeted airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition has killed an Islamic State military adviser.

The Kurdistan Region Security Council said the airstrike on April 16 killed Khaled Afer, also known as Abu Sarya. He was a military adviser in Mosul and was a close associate of the group's spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani.

According to the KRG security council, Abu Sarya was also responsible for IS operations in Mosul.

Saturday's targeted strike took place in Sahel al-Aysa, near the Salam Hospital.

The strike appeared to be the second successful joint operation against IS leaders in less than a week.

On Monday, security officials in Iraqi Kurdistan said IS commander Salman And Sahib al-Jabouri, also known as Abu Saif, was killed as he traveled near Hamam Ali, south of Mosul.

Separate sources said that a number of documents had been found in the vehicle.

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Taliban Assault in Kabul Kills 30, Wounds More Than 300

by Ayaz Gul April 19, 2016

A group of Taliban insurgents staged a bomb and gun attack in the Afghan capital Kabul Tuesday morning, killing at least 30 people and wounding more than 327, according officials.

The assault targeted a building, which officials say houses a special unit of the Afghan security force working under the Afghan spy agency and responsible for protecting government officials.

The attack began at around 9 a.m. local time with a suicide bomber detonating his explosives-laden vehicle at the entrance.

Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Siddiqi told reporters "hundreds of kilograms of explosives" were packed in the vehicle. He said investigations are still underway to determine details about the number of attackers but admitted security lapses led to the deadly assault.

Gunfight

Officials said the ensuing intense gunfight between the assailants and Afghan security forces lasted for several hours and left all the attackers dead, with some blowing themselves up.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has condemned the attack "in the strongest possible terms" and said many people have been killed and wounded. He said the attack "clearly shows the enemy's defeat in the face-to-face battle" with Afghan security forces.

Taliban claim responsibility

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the violence, with a spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, saying all three attackers were wearing suicide vests.

In a statement sent to reporters, the Taliban said the assault targeted the Afghan intelligence agency's office, calling it "one of the brutal and inhuman organs" of the Kabul government.

Mujahid said the suicide bombing made way for other heavily armed Taliban suicide attackers to enter the building and engage personnel of the intelligence agency in a gunfight.

Mujahid claimed the assault inflicted "heavy casualties on the enemy and the massive car bombing destroyed a portion of the building."

The insurgent group often issues inflated details of attacks against government and military targets.

Afghan officials immediately pointed fingers at Pakistan, blaming the neighboring country for not delivering on its commitments to uproot Taliban sanctuaries on Pakistani soil.

Islamabad rejects the allegations, citing counterterrorism operations underway to secure volatile tribal areas near the Afghan border.

The deadly assault prompted Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah to postpone his official visit to Islamabad.

Abdullah was due to under take the trip on May 2 at the invitation of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, officials said.

"After initial evidence of today's suicide attack in Kabul, CE Dr. Abdullah decided to postpone his upcoming visit to Pakistan," said an announcement posted on Abdullah's official Twitter account.

Blast near US embassy complex

Television footage showed a thick plume of black smoke rising from the area immediately after the powerful blast, which took place not far from the presidential palace and the sprawling U.S. embassy complex in Kabul.

The U.S. Embassy released a statement Tuesday, condemning the attack.

"Afghanistan deserves peace and security, not attacks that victimize parents taking their children to school, workers on their morning commute, and people who have stepped forward to help defend their fellow citizens," the statement read.

The NATO-led Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan "strongly condemned" the assault.

"Today's attack shows the insurgents are unable to meet Afghan forces on the battlefield and must resort to these terrorist attacks," U.S. Army General John Nicholson, Resolute Support commander.

The incident comes as Taliban insurgents have intensified battlefield attacks in more than 15 Afghan provinces as part of their annual spring offensive.

The United Nations condemned the attack, saying it is verifying facts on numbers of civilian casualties.

"Taliban use of huge bomb in a densely populated area shows total lack of respect for civilian live," said the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

Civilian casualties

In a report released Sunday, UNAMA said that the Afghan conflict caused about 2,000 civilian casualties in the first three months of this year, including 600 dead.

Neighboring Pakistan, where Afghan officials said Taliban leaders are sheltering, also condemned the bloodshed.

"We extend our heartfelt sympathies and condolences to those who have lost their loved ones and pray for an early recovery of the injured," a foreign ministry statement issued in Islamabad said, and reiterated that the government "condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestation."

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Officials Dismiss Islamic State Claims of Fighters in Bangladesh

by Maaz Hussain April 18, 2016

The latest claim by the Islamic State (IS) that it has launched a new front in Bangladesh and its local fighters are gearing up to launch attacks on India and Myanmar has been dismissed by the government in Dhaka, which says the militant group has no presence in the South Asian nation.

In an interview published in the latest issue of the Islamic State magazine Dabiq, Shaykh Abu Ibrahim al-Hanif, who was introduced as the head of the organization's Bangladesh wing, said efforts to recruit "soldiers of the Khilafah (Caliphate)" in Bangladesh has gained "great momentum" with many Muslims joining its ranks.

"Bengal (Bangladesh) is an important region for the Khilafah and the global jihad due to its strategic geographic position a strong jihad base in Bengal will facilitate performing guerrilla attacks inside India Also, jihad in Bengal is a stepping-stone for jihad in Burma," Hanif said in the interview.

Hanif added that IS has succeeded in building a base by attracting Muslims following the organization's campaign in Bengali language in the social media.

However, Bangladesh's Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said IS is indulging in false propaganda.

"The statement (that IS has established its network in Bangladesh), which was issued outside the country, actually shows that the group is desperately seeking a foothold in our country," Kamal said in a media conference in Dhaka on Friday. "This statement is bogus because the group has no existence in Bangladesh."

IS claims attacks

In Bangladesh, where more than 90 percent of the country's 160 million population is Muslim, Islamists have long agitated on issues which they say threaten Islam.

After an Italian aid worker, a Japanese farming expert, two Shiite people and a muezzin of a Shiite mosque were killed in four separate attacks between September and November in Bangladesh, IS claimed responsibility for all of the deaths.

Among the death threats that around three dozen Bangladeshi Christian leaders received in December, many were claimed to have been sent by local IS commanders.

IS also claimed responsibility for the February murder of a Hindu priest in northern Bangladesh.

Local groups blamed

Despite the reported IS claim of responsibility for the killings and threats, authorities insist the group does not have a functioning network in the country and blames the opposition alliance, led by Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), and its ally Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) for the attacks.

Police have also said Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), another banned local militant outfit, was behind some of the gun and bomb attacks.

Both the BNP and JeI have rejected the allegations, saying the government is desperate to frame them for terror crimes.

But a JeI central executive council member and former Member of Parliament, Hamidur Rahman Azad, agreed with the government in dismissing the IS claim.

"The claim that Jamaat e Islami grassroot cadres are joining the Islamic State in Bangladesh is absolutely false and baseless. None from our organization has joined that group," said JeI executive council member Hamidur Rahman Azad in a press release Friday.

Experts dismiss IS threat

Retired Major General Mohammad Abdur Rashid, executive director of Dhaka's Institute of Conflict, Law & Development Studies, said all terrorist outfits in Bangladesh are homegrown and their creations were linked to the turbulence of the country's domestic politics.

"IS claimed responsibility to some recent killings in Bangladesh. But those violent incidents have been found as a mixture of terrorist actions and contract killings, aimed at causing destabilization in the country," he told VOA.

"IS has not turned its main focus from spreading its network in the West. It has not prepared itself yet to look east. The news or interview as published in Tabiq and claims to have established an IS base in Bangladesh roping in local fighters, clearly seems to be a hoax," he added.

Security analyst Ajai Sahni, executive director of New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, said the terrorist groups in Bangladesh are in complete disarray as a result of decimation of their leaderships, both in counter-terrorism operations and as a result of the country's war crimes trials.

"The surviving fragments are now attempting to reinvent themselves, and the IS banner is currently the most theatrical and effective in terms of getting international attention. IS also finds it advantageous to claim that it has 'spread' to Bangladesh and established a 'base' there, and has happily claimed the occasional hacking and stabbing incidents against intellectuals and bloggers as its own doing," Sahni said to VOA.

However, he added there is no sign of any transfer of resources, capabilities or materials, nor of any direct command structures or networks that suggest an effective operational links between the terrorist groups in Bangladesh and the IS leadership and networks in Iraq-Syria, Sahni noted.

"The possibility of any dramatic spike in terrorism in Bangladesh or directed against India in the foreseeable future, however, remains remote," he said.

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Obama slams 9/11 bill against Saudi Arabia

Iran Press TV

Tue Apr 19, 2016 1:58PM

US President Barack Obama has condemned legislation allowing victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to hold the Saudi ruling family accountable in US courts.

"This is a matter of how ... the United States approaches our interactions with other countries," Obama said Tuesday in an interview with "CBS This Morning."

The president argued that allowing Americans to "routinely start suing over governments" would open the floodgates to lawsuits by individuals in other countries against the US government.

The bipartisan bill, called the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, would allow families of victims of the 9/11 massacre and other attacks to sue foreign governments in cases "arising from a terrorist attack that kills an American on American soil."

Obama has come under intense pressure to declassify 28 pages of a 2002 congressional report which could implicate Saudi Arabia in the 9/11 attacks.

A group of families who lost loved ones in the attacks wrote a letter to President Obama Monday, saying there was "no excuse for refusing to reveal the truth, whatever it may be."

"We were pleased to hear news reports, uncertain and conflicting as we may find them, that you are now reconsidering declassification of sections of the 9/11 Joint Inquiry report that address possible involvement in the attack by persons and institutions for which the Saudi government has responsibility."

Former US Sen. Robert Graham, co-chairman of the joint congressional commission that wrote the full 838-page report on 9/11, recently told CBS's "60 Minutes" the secret material could reveal a possible Saudi support network for the hijackers who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The former senator said the hijackers were "substantially" supported by elements within the Riyadh regime, as well as rich Saudi individuals and charities. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens.

Obama told CBS that the US intelligence community has been reviewing the controversial documents and that James Clapper, director of national intelligence, must ensure that whatever is made public does not compromise "some major national security interest of the United States."

Saudi Arabia has threatened that it will sell off $750 billion in American assets if legislation to hold it liable for the 9/11 attacks is passed.

The White House said Monday that the president will veto the bill if it comes to his desk for approval.

The administration contends that broader concerns  rather than just the alliance with Saudi Arabia  are at risk, including a loss of immunity for US troops if the Saudis retaliate.

Obama was scheduled to leave Washington Tuesday and arrive Wednesday in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. The visit is expected to be overshadowed by the debate over congressional efforts to expose any Saudi involvement in 9/11.

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Beijing Officially Lands Military Plane on South China Sea Reef

Sputnik News

01:35 19.04.2016(updated 01:40 19.04.2016)

In what appears to be the first such occasion covered by Chinese media, a transport plane has landed at an airport constructed on a disputed reef in the South China Sea as part of a rescue mission.

On Monday, a Chinese military airplane evacuated three injured workers from the construction site on the Fiery Cross Reef, an island claimed by both Vietnam and the Philippines.

According to a report in the People's Liberation Army Daily, people were taken to the island of Hainan for medical aid.

This is the first instance Chinese officials acknowledged a landing on the disputed reef, Global Times newspaper claimed.

"On the Chinese territory, this kind of thing is not surprising at all," Lu Kang, a foreign ministry spokesperson, stated during a regular media briefing. "It is a good tradition of the People's Liberation Army to provide a necessary assistance to Chinese people in need."

China has been in the process of constructing an artificial island on the reef, located a thousand kilometers from its Hainan province, for about a year. In 2014, Beijing began building a 3,000-metre runway on the island, causing outrage from neighboring countries with overlapping territorial claims. China completed its first testing of the facility in January, with a civil aircraft landing on the reef.

A military expert told Global Times that the latest landing showcases that the landing strip was designed so that it could also serve as a military base. The runaways are long enough to handle China's cutting edge jets, providing Beijing with a staging area in the middle of Southeast Asia.

China has repeatedly denied allegations that the runway is to be used for military purposes, while US repeatedly condemns Beijing for "militarization in the South China Sea." The Pentagon has concurrently stated its intention to deploy underwater drones in the region.

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said the Navy would use "new undersea drones in multiple sizes and diverse payloads that can, importantly, operate in shallow water, where submarines cannot."

Beijing claims almost all of the maritime and terrestrial regions within the South China Sea. Overlapping claims are made by Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan. The US has no territorial claims in the area.

 Sputnik

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US response to N Korea nuke test will be 'strong'

Iran Press TV

Mon Apr 18, 2016 3:23PM

The United States will strongly respond in the event of a fifth nuclear test by North Korea, a senior US government official says, days after Pyongyang's alleged failure to launch a ballistic missile.

The secretive regime conducted its last nuclear test in January, followed by an alleged satellite launch the next month, both in violation of sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council (UNSC).

Under the current UN resolutions, North Korea is banned from using any technology that is related to ballistic missiles.

In early March, the US and China drafted tougher sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear program which were approved by the UNSC in a bid to starve Pyongyang of funds for its nuclear weapons.

Speaking in Tokyo on Monday during a visit with Japanese officials, US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that North Korea would be putting itself in more trouble if it pursued more provocations.

"There will be an additional strong response in case of another (North Korean) nuclear test," Blinken said, adding that such actions were "unacceptable".

Blinken said Washington would consider "a number of possibilities" and it was "premature" to speak of a specific action just yet.

North Korea declared itself a nuclear power in 2005 and carried out four nuclear weapons tests in 2006, 2009, 2013 and 2016.

Some experts speculate that North Korea is about to conduct its fifth nuclear test in the near future, following its recent missile failure.

American and South Korean officials said Friday that the North attempted to test-fire a mobile Musudan or BM-25 missile, but it failed.

The alleged launch coincided with the 104th birthday anniversary of the country's founding leader Kim Il-Sung, the grandfather of current leader Kim Jong-un.

The missile is believed to be capable of striking US military bases in Guam Island.

Pyongyang accuses the US of plotting with regional allies to topple its government, and says it will not relinquish its nuclear deterrence unless Washington ends its hostile policy toward Pyongyang and dissolves the US-led UN command in South Korea.

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Iran sees oil output freeze as new ban on itself

Iran Press TV

Mon Apr 18, 2016 3:27PM

Iran's Oil Minister Bijan Zangeneh on Monday described a plan to implement a freeze on the output of key oil producers as a "new sanction" against the country's oil industry.

Zangeneh, talking to the state radio, said certain oil producers had been trying to prevent the removal of sanctions against Iran. To the same effect, he said, they have been trying to keep the prices of oil at low levels by producing extra supplies of oil over the past years beyond the market demand.

"Such measures have nonetheless led to the saturation of the oil market as well as the deterioration of the instability in the market with a surplus of two million barrels per day," the Iranian minister has been quoted as saying by the media.

He further added that the same producers are responsible for the instability in the market but are now trying to pin the blame for the low oil prices on Iran's post-sanctions production.

Zangeneh said those producers are delusional to think their anti-Iran efforts bear any fruits.

"They are trying to portray Iran as the country responsible for the instability in the oil market," he said. "This is while Iran has had no role in the instability of the market."

The Iranian minister said the proposed output freeze which is now being discussed in Doha between key OPEC and non-OPEC producers is meant to keep the production of all oil major at the same level that existed in January 2016.

This, he said, is a new sanction on Iran. "In other words, they want to take Iran's production back to the sanctions era."

Zangeneh said Iran supports all efforts to return stability to the oil market, stressing that the Islamic Republic will spare no effort to that connection.

He said it is necessary for all major producers to continue their discussions to find a way to help the stability of the oil market.

However, he emphasized that the argument by certain producers that Iran's post-sanctions production is to blame for the volatility of prices "cannot be accepted by anyone".

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Iran, US at Odds Over Nuclear Sanctions Relief

by Pamela Dockins April 18, 2016

Iran's concerns about its perceived lack of sanctions relief and Syria's faltering political talks will be focal points for Secretary of State John Kerry when he sits down for talks Tuesday with his Iranian counterpart.

Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will meet in New York, at the start of a trip for Kerry that will include stops in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Iranian officials have complained that their country is not getting the sanctions relief specified in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the landmark nuclear agreement that was implemented in January.

"All of the countries should take necessary measures to remove the obstacles to the implementation of the nuclear deal," Zarif said at a Saturday news conference with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.

"We have seen the Americans' attitude, so we will put some pressure on them, so should the EU, to pave the way for cooperation between the non-U.S. banks and Iran," he added.

The U.S. has been "fulfilling" its commitment to the JCPOA, said White House spokesman John Earnest on Friday. He said giving Iran access to the U.S. financial system was "not part of the deal."

At the State Department on Monday, spokesman John Kirby acknowledged that he expects the sanctions issue to be on Tuesday's agenda for Kerry and Zarif.

"We are obviously aware of the concerns that they have expressed about the status of sanctions relief, and the secretary is very mindful that this topic will come up," he said.

Syrian setbacks

Their meeting also comes at a time when the U.N.-facilitated process for a political transition in Syria appears to be showing signs of fray.

The Syrian opposition announced that it has postponed its participation in the political talks because of what it says are the Syrian government's cease-fire violations.

The two sides have been holding indirect talks in Geneva.

Iran supports the Syrian government while the U.S. has supported the moderate opposition. But Tehran and Washington are part of the International Syria Support Group, which has been backing the process for a political transition.

After his meeting with Zarif, Kerry travels to Cairo, where he will discuss bilateral and regional issues with officials including President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

He then will join U.S. President Barack Obama in Riyadh for a Gulf Cooperation Council summit.

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Zarif urges effective implementation of JCPOA by US

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

New York, April 19, IRNA -- Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif urged effective and real implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) by Washington.

Talking to reporters upon arrival here on Tuesday, he said that during the meeting with his American counterpart on the sidelines of the United Nations events, he will urgently focus on the issue of need for Washington to frankly implement the JCPOA content and demand the US to stop sabotaging world countries' banking and financial relations with Iran.

He also noted that his visit to New York aims at participating in two UN events namely signing ceremony of Paris Agreement and also the Sustainable Development Goals.

He will also hold bilateral meetings with officials from other countries, the foreign minister added.

Zarif further noted that the visit provided a good opportunity to foil the attempts by certain groups who are seeking to promote Iranophobia spirit in post-JCPOA era by conducting interviews or organizing meetings with the US academic circles and think tanks.

The foreign minister said he was going to have a bilateral meeting with his American counterpart John Kerry to stress the need for the US to seriously start to implement the nuclear deal.

He said he saw no obstacles in holding healthy economic relations with the US but still stressed that Iran has never been asking the US for any economic deals.

However, he added, the signing of the JCPOA was in essence pursuing the goal of having the US stop sabotaging in Iran's economic relations with other countries not changing those decisions by the US Congress which would affect Iran.

Now it was time for Iran to work to win the trust of those companies and institutions that suffered losses in the past because of their interactions with Iran, Zarif noted.

The foreign minister said Iran should now try to assure such bodies that ties with Iran will no longer hurt them.

1424**1771

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Kerry: Iran has received only $3 billion since nuclear deal

Iran Press TV

Tue Apr 19, 2016 1:4PM

US Secretary of State John Kerry says Iran has so far received only about five percent of its frozen assets since it reached a historic nuclear agreement with the P5+1 group of countries in July.

Iran has reaped just $3 billion out of a total of over $100 billion in previously frozen assets, Kerry said Monday in Washington at a dinner hosted by the left-wing pro-Israel advocacy group J Street.

Kerry said that Iran will get about $55 billion in the long run, under the nuclear deal.

"Sometimes you hear some of the [US] presidential candidates putting a mistaken figure out of $155 billion," the top US diplomat said.

"While others thought it would be about $100 billion," he said, "We calculated it to be about $55 billion, when you really take a hard look at the economy and what is happening."

"Guess what, folks. You know how much they have received to date as I stand here tonight? About $3 billion," Kerry said. "So what we said to people was true."

Iran has criticized the US for refusing to grant it access to the global financial system. Tehran says such access is one of the goals of the nuclear deal, and has urged Washington to stop preventing non-American banks from dealing with Iran.

Kerry and Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif are due to discuss the issue in New York City on Tuesday.

The meeting follows complaints from top Iranian officials that the US is not honoring its end of the nuclear accord.

Zarif said Monday he would urge Washington to "seriously" live up to its side of the deal and stop interfering in Iran's banking and financial ties with other states.

Over $100 billion from Iranian oil sales have been piling up in banks in China, India, Japan, South Korea and Turkey over the past few years.

Those countries have been holding the funds in escrow because sanctions imposed by the West in 2012 had prevented the Islamic Republic from repatriating them.

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Protests escalate in Baghdad as Iraqis urge reforms

Iran Press TV

Mon Apr 18, 2016 6:2PM

Thousands gathered at the entrance of a high-security compound in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Monday as protests continue over a delay in the parliament to endorse reforms in the government.

The protest started from Baghdad's Tahrir Square, where people have been holding a one-day sit-in, and then reached the gates of the heavily fortified Green Zone, where the government and foreign embassies are located.

There was a call over loudspeaker in Tahrir, urging people to run from the sit-in site to the Jumhuriyah Bridge which leads to the gates of the Green Zone.

The action comes less than a month after Iraqis followed an appeal by the influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and staged rounds of protests and sit-downs outside the Green Zone. Those protests ended after Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi presented a new cabinet line-up to parliament.

However Abadi's bid to replace the cabinet of party-affiliated ministers with a government of technocrats has met heavy resistance in the legislature, with dominant parties still wanting affiliated figures as ministers in a bid to maintain their grip on power and wealth in Iraq.

"It is a message we want to deliver to the government and the parliament," Ibrahim al-Jaberi, the head of Sadr's east Baghdad office said Monday, adding that the demonstrators would not try to enter the Green Zone. He said, however, that people could be quickly mobilized to gather there.

On March 31, the parliament in Iraq rejected an initial list presented by Abadi, which mainly included independent professionals. The Iraqi premier then replaced most of his nominees with those proposed by political blocs. The move sparked protests and clashes in the parliament with voting on government reshuffle postponed three times.

The global slump in oil prices and Iraq's costly battle against the Daesh Takfiri group has badly shattered the Arab country's finances. That has apparently affected the daily life of Iraqis, making corruption a major issue in light of the current political wrangling.

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Iraqi premier calls for emergency parliament meeting

Iran Press TV

Mon Apr 18, 2016 8:33AM

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has called on Iraq's parliament to convene an emergency meeting to seek a way out of the current political standstill that has almost crippled the country.

In a Monday statement, Abadi stressed the significance of the parliament's approval of the new cabinet line-up proposed by Abadi, Iraq's al-Sumaria television network reported.

The parliament had on March 28 given Abadi a three-day deadline to present a new government or face a vote of no-confidence in the face of alleged government corruption. The premier met the deadline and presented a list of nominees. However, on March 31, the Iraqi parliament rejected the initial list presented by Abadi, which reportedly included independent professionals.

The Iraqi premier then replaced most of his nominees with those proposed by political blocs. That sparked protests and clashes in the parliament, with voting on the government reshuffle being postponed three times.

In his Monday statement, Abadi said that the fight against the Daesh terrorists group, which controls parts of Iraq's west and north, and the settlement of the country's security and financial problems require the unity and solidarity of all the people.

On April 14, some lawmakers held a vote to remove Speaker Salim al-Jabouri, overshadowing the cabinet issue. Jabouri called the move invalid, saying the session at which MPs voted to sack him lacked a quorum.

Abadi also said in his statement that the Iraqi government is in talks with global financial institutions in a bid to resolve the country's economic problems and bring prosperity.

Iraq has seen a major shrink in its finances as a result of the slump in global oil prices while the country is in the midst of a large-scale battle against Daesh. That has apparently affected the daily life of Iraqis, making corruption a major issue in light of the current political wrangling. Iraq ranks 161st among the 168 countries on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index.

The Iraqi premier had earlier warned that the political crisis engulfing the country could hamper the war against the terrorists operating in the country.

On Sunday, several hundred people took part in a sit-in in the capital, Baghdad, demanding accelerated efforts for setting-up a reform-minded government and a halt to the current system of patronage in Iraq's politics.

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Iraqi Kurds Want More Military Aid Against Daesh Amid Growing US Support

Sputnik News

19:38 18.04.2016(updated 19:44 18.04.2016)

The Kurdish Peshmerga fighters hope for more military aid from the US-led coalition.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Members of the US-led coalition against Daesh should consider providing additional aid to the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters following the US announcement of a new assistance package, Kurdistan Region Security Council Chancellor Masrour Barzani said in a Twitter message on Monday.

"This war is a shared responsibility, and I hope other members of the global coalition will consider increasing their aid to Kurdistan," Barzani tweeted.

Earlier on Monday, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced that the United States will provide Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in Iraq with up to $415 million in financial assistance to support the fight against Daesh.

"I welcome the announcement by Secretary Ashton Carter to give financial aid to our Peshmerga and increase military engagement in war on ISIL [Islamic State]," Barzani stated.

The United States will also deploy additional 217 troops to Iraq to assist the local forces in the fight to retake the city of Mosul from the terrorist group, according to the US Department of Defense.

The US-led coalition of more than 60 nations has been conducting airstrikes in Syria and Iraq against Daesh since the summer 2014. However, coalition leaders have been reluctant to indicate a time-frame for the liberation of Mosul.

Over the past year, the coalition has reclaimed a number of cities around Mosul in a bid to choke off outside support to Daesh.

 Sputnik

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Suu Kyi Reaffirms Pledge to Revamp Myanmar's Constitution

by VOA News April 18, 2016

Aung San Suu Kyi says Myanmar's constitution needs to be amended in order to transform the former military-ruled nation into a true "federal democratic union."

The Nobel Peace laureate and de facto head of state repeated her vow to revise the nation's charter during a nationally televised speech Monday, as part of her goal to ensure "national reconciliation," including equal treatment of the country's various ethnic groups.

Myanmar, also known as Burma, has been plagued by ethnic insurgencies since gaining its independence from Britain in 1948.

The current constitution was crafted by Myanmar's long-ruling military junta shortly before turning over power in 2011 to a semi-civilian government. But the military granted itself 25 percent of all parliamentary seats, plus the key ministerial posts of home affairs and defense -- enough to give it veto power over any proposed constitutional changes.

The constitution also bars Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming president, because she was married to and had children with a foreign national. But she is serving in President Htin Kyaw's Cabinet as foreign minister, and is also serving in the legislature-created post of "state counselor," allowing her to follow through with her pledge to run the government through a figurehead president.

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South Korea's Park says North preparing for nuclear test

Iran Press TV

Mon Apr 18, 2016 6:23AM

South Korean President Park Geun-hye has said that North Korea is preparing to carry out another nuclear test.

Park said on Monday that there are signs that Pyongyang is gearing up for its fifth nuclear test, but did not discuss the basis for her claim.

The president, however, ordered the South Korean military to be ready for any "provocation" by Pyongyang.

Citing South Korean government sources, media reports also said on Sunday that the North is preparing for the test to be carried out in early May.

South Korea's military has said Pyongyang is technically ready for an additional nuclear test. The Defense Ministry also said the North can conduct its fifth nuclear test at anytime.

South Korea and the US are concerned that a new nuclear test could take the North a step closer toward manufacturing a warhead small enough to place on a long-range missile.

Washington says Pyongyang is after developing long-range missiles which could put the US mainland within the strike range for a nuclear attack.

Both the US and South Korea said on Friday that Pyongyang attempted to test-fire a mobile Musudan or BM-25 missile early in the day, but it failed.

North Korea declared itself a nuclear power in 2005 and carried out four nuclear weapons tests in 2006, 2009, 2013 and 2016.

It also launched a long-range rocket in February this year, which it said was aimed at placing an earth observation satellite into orbit.

The US and the South, however, denounced the move as a cover for an intercontinental ballistic missile test.

North Korea says it is strengthening its defense capabilities to protect itself against hostile countries, including the US.

The East Asian country has already been targeted with international sanctions over its nuclear and missile activities. Back in March, the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved the toughest sanctions on Pyongyang in two decades.

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Brief History of Russian Air-to-Ground Cluster Bombs

Sputnik News

14:01 18.04.2016(updated 14:17 18.04.2016)

When the first bombers were used in warfare, pilots were literally dropping bombs on enemy targets by hand. A lot has changed since then and modern planes now use advanced cluster bombs, hitting targets with extreme precision and devastation from afar. Here's a closer look at the development of cluster bombs dropped from military aircraft.

Hitting enemy targets from a plane is no easy task. It's one thing to find, identify and destroy a single stationary enemy object, but quite a challenging mission to successfully carry out a massive airstrike, causing serious damage to enemies on the ground, TV Channel Zvezda reported.

The Germans were first to introduce advanced anti-personnel bombs during World War II. Luftwaffe pilots were dropping the AB-23 SD-2 and AB-250 bombs, named the Butterfly Bombs, because after a bomb cylinder disintegrated in the air, it released a bunch of individual bomblets that looked like a butterfly.

The AB-250 bombs had as many as 180 submunitions that were released in the air. The AB bomb-series were the first cluster bombs ever used in combat history and they proved to be highly effective against enemy manpower.

The Soviet Army used PTAB bombs against enemies on the ground. Bombs were dropped mainly from the IL-2 Ground Attack Aircraft bomber, which could carry 192 bombs on board. Each PTAB bomb had between 1.5 and 2.5 kg of explosives and destroyed the area of 15 square meters.

During intense fighting, such as at the Battle of Kursk, IL-2 pilots took on board more than the maximum capacity of 192 bombs. According to historian Andrei Rumin, IL-2 planes were packed with 300 PTAB bombs in Kursk to destroy all the Wehrmacht tanks rolling toward Soviet positions.

Since the 1970s, the Soviets began using RBK-250 AO-1 cluster bombs dropping them from Su-17 bombers and Mi-24 attack helicopters. Each bomb had 150 little clusters and could cover the area of 4,800 square meters.

The bombs were effectively used during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the first Chechen war. A few Soviet planes, packed with RBK-250 bombs, could "re-design the mountainous landscape of Afghanistan" in front of terror-stricken Mujahedeen, according to TV Channel Zvezda.

Starting in the 1990s, the Russian military began to develop RBK-500 and PBK-500 cluster bombs with a special target-locking system. When a target is identified and bombs are dropped, the self-targeting technology accelerates munitions to a speed of up to 2,000 meters per second for maximum destruction.

Military experts say that when these bombs lock on their targets, whether it's an infantry vehicle, a tank or any other armored vehicle, they have virtually no chance of survival, Zvezda said. If a bomb doesn't hit its target, the self-destruct system will be activated and the bomb is eliminated.

 Sputnik

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In Test Case, Top Russian Court Rejects European Rights Ruling

April 19, 2016

by Tom Balmforth

MOSCOW -- Russia's Constitutional Court has ruled that Moscow may ignore part of a European court judgment in a dispute on prisoner voting rights, marking the first time Russia has used a controversial law asserting its right to reject international court rulings.

The leadership of the Council of Europe responded by saying the Russian verdict left room for compromise, although an international rights watchdog called it a "devastating blow" to victims of Russian injustice.

Legislation signed by President Vladimir Putin in December created a mechanism for Russia to disregard international rulings, including by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), if they are believed to contravene the Russian Constitution.

The December move came months after the same Strasbourg court ordered Russia to pay $2 billion to the shareholders of Yukos, the dismantled oil giant once controlled by tycoon-turned-Kremlin-critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The Constitutional Court verdict on April 19 stems from a request by the Russian Justice Ministry in February to consider the constitutionality of another ECHR judgment from 2013 calling on Russia to reform its blanket ban on prisoner voting rights.

The Constitutional Court said it was "prepared to compromise" with Strasbourg but that it was "impossible" to change the law to give prisoners the right to vote.

The court, however, said that some facilities for prisoners serving sentences for less serious crimes could be labeled differently under the law in order to preserve their right to vote.

"Russia was and remains a composite part of the European legal space, which supposes dialogue on an equal footing and a preparedness to compromise," the court wrote on its website.

The secretary-general of the Council of Europe, Thorbjorn Jagland, reacted cautiously to the Russian verdict.

"Today's judgment of the Constitutional Court suggests that there is a way to resolve the issue through a change of legislation which would alleviate the existing restrictions on the right to vote," he said in a statement. "I now call on the Russian parliament to draw on the Constitutional Court's judgment and consider appropriate solutions in order to implement the judgment of the Strasbourg Court."

Prisoners in many Western countries are banned from voting, and the Russian Constitutional Court judgment is being watched less for the details of the particular case than for the precedent it sets.

International watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) decried the ruling.

"It's very simple: Russia is violating its legal obligation to enforce rulings of the European Court of Human Rights," said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at HRW. "The Constitutional Court's decision, while predictable, deals a devastating blow for people in Russia who turn to the European Court because they can't find justice in the Russian courts."

The ECHR is a key platform for victims of perceived human rights abuses seeking recourse beyond courts in their own countries.

The court in Strasbourg issues binding judgments in response to individual or state applications alleging violations of rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights, which Russia signed in 1998.

Every year, it is flooded with cases from Russia.

The April 19 judgment was welcomed by some human rights activists who had feared a less conciliatory move by Russian authorities, or even that Russia might reject the jurisdiction of the ECHR outright.

"I think this is not a bad decision, and, generally, in some ways maybe it is positive from the point of view of maintaining relations with the Russian Federation and the ECHR," Ilya Shablinsky, a member of the Russian president's Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, told RFE/RL's Russian Service.

"Russia recognized the jurisdiction of the ECHR," Shablinsky said. "Many had expected a decision that would point to a breakdown of these relations and Russia's attempts -- attempts, at the least -- to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR."

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/article/27684005.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Saudi Arabia's Curbing of Religious Police Hailed by Rights Group

by Aline Barros April 18, 2016

Human Rights Watch commended Saudi Arabia on its new regulation that strips power from the often criticized religious police force.

The Saudi cabinet passed the measure last week which prevents religious police from stopping, arresting, chasing or detaining people.

The Council of Ministers also requested the religious police, formally known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice or Mutawaa, to carry official identification showing name, position, work hours, and branch.

"This is a positive move for Saudi citizens and residents who have suffered years of harassment and abuse by the religious police," Human Rights Watch Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson said.

The new guidelines say that only police and drug squad officers have the jurisdiction to make arrests.

"Saudi Arabia has taken a step that could rein in longstanding religious police abuses, but authorities must enforce the new regulations for them to have any meaning," Whitson said.

The Mutawaa is responsible for enforcing the country's strict interpretation of Islam, by, for example, ensuring that women are covered from head to toe in public, that they are not mingling with unrelated men, and that all shops are closed during the five daily prayers.

Whitson said the "authorities should go even further and strip the religious police of the power to enforce sex segregation rules."

The controversial Mutawaas were barred from interrogating and pressing charges back in 2013; such actions could only be validated with the support of accompanying policemen. But abuses were said to have continued.

In February, the controversial law enforcement group apprehended two women in Riyadh, capital city of Saudi Arabia, and told them to cover their faces. According to the Arab News, the religious police ordered them to get into their car, but they refused. While one of the women escaped to a nearby mall, the other was shoved and dragged on the ground as videos posted on social media networking sites showed.

A five-member advisory committee is set to make suggestions to the Mutawaa president on holding officers accountable for any violence or abuse.

"It's a very, very controversial issue inside Saudi Arabia," Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle Eastern studies at the London School of Economics, told CNN, adding, "Obviously the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the political leaders, have decided that the religious police is doing more damage than good and they are very much concerned with the popular misgivings about recent incidents in the kingdom."

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Obama to Meet Saudi King Amid Rising Tensions

by Mary Alice Salinas April 19, 2016

U.S. President Barack Obama and Saudi Arabia's King Salman are set to meet just as relations between the White House and the monarchy have become increasingly frayed, and the two longtime allies face significant disagreements over how to combat terrorism and regional conflicts.

Obama will meet Wednesday with the monarch in Riyadh on his fourth trip to Saudi Arabia as president.

The visit will be followed on Thursday with a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), an alliance of six Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman.

It appears, however, that fundamentally different priorities and strategies on combating terrorism and bringing stability to the region likely will keep Washington and Riyadh at odds on myriad key challenges.

Competing priorities

The United States and much of Europe see the Islamic State group and al-Qaida as the top threats in the region and around the world.

For many of the Gulf states, though, the main threat emanates from Iran and the people and groups that Tehran supports  like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Shi'ite Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The Sunni-majority Saudis have led a costly military intervention against the Houthis.

"To almost all of the Arab states, Assad is at least as serious a threat as ISIS [Islamic State]. Iran and the Shi'ite domination of Iraq is far more serious than ISIS. And in Yemen the Houthi, Iran and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP] are the dominant threats," said Anthony Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The White House said Obama and GCC leaders will look at ways to step up cooperation, and "align" their policies and approaches in areas of mutual interest, such as countering terrorism and promoting peace and stability in places like Yemen and Syria.

In an interview that raised questions about the state of U.S.-Saudi relations, Obama referred to the Saudis as "free riders" in the battle against Islamic State, implying Riyadh benefits from the U.S. security umbrella without sharing the burden.

He also told The Atlantic that Saudi Arabia would have to learn to co-exist with Iran by "learning to share the neighborhood."

White House officials would not say if the president and the king planned to discuss Obama's remarks in The Atlantic interview.

Islamic State threat

Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes explained, "The nature of the threat from ISIL [Islamic State] is not restricted to the targeting of one nation. We see ISIL as posing a threat to the entire world."

Rhodes added that while cooperation between the U.S. and Gulf states has improved since the first U.S.-GCC summit last year at Camp David, "there is always room to see what more can be done."

Rob Malley, White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, described current U.S.-Saudi relations as "complicated."

He asserted that sectarian fights, like the one in Yemen, create humanitarian crises and distract attention away from the coalition's fight against Islamic State and al-Qaida. So the White House is seeking to de-escalate sectarian conflicts and shift focus back to terror groups it views as global threats.

"As that fight against the Houthis in Yemen de-escalates. ... We will be able to focus more activities against ISIL and against al-Qaida," Malley said. "I think that is a very important reason why we believe that these regional conflicts that often have a sectarian tinge to them need to be de-escalated."

Despite efforts by the U.S. and its coalition partners to push back Islamic State and stabilize the region, the Middle East remains fertile ground for terror groups, sectarian conflicts, political chaos and proxy wars.

Still, Malley argued, "The trend line is positive."

Ongoing trends

He pointed to fragile cease-fires in Yemen and Syria, and successes by Iraqi forces in recapturing territory from Islamic State in the last year.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which faces shrinking revenues with the downturn in oil prices, is working to build up its missile systems as regional rival Iran continues to bolster its military capabilities.

"Iran does not stop improving its air, missiles and naval capabilities to threaten traffic through the Gulf," Cordesman said.

Overall, expectations for any significant outcomes from this summit are low, especially during a presidential election year.

"The Saudis obviously are looking at a situation where you have presidential candidates that as yet have not really provided any clear indication as to what the United States will be as an ally in the future," Cordesman said.

"This is a summit in which on every important issue there are no good options for either country," he concluded.

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Militants launch fresh attacks on Syria forces

Iran Press TV

Mon Apr 18, 2016 3:48PM

Militants currently engaged in peace talks with the Syrian government have begun a fresh offensive against military and civilian positions northwest of the country as accusations fly high on violations of a truce deal meant to restore calm to the country.

Sources close to the militants said on Monday that attacks were launched in rural areas of the Latakia Province, northwest of Syria, where the government enjoys a relatively considerable support.

The sources said the offensive was meant to retaliate what they called government's deliberate violation of the truce, which has been in effect across Syria since end of February.

Other militants said attacks were carried out in rural districts of Hama, a province adjacent to Latakia.

The attacks come against the backdrop of meetings between the government and militant groups in the Swiss city of Geneva, where the United Nations is trying to seal a permanent peace deal between the warring sides. The United Stated and Russia engineered the current ceasefire in a bid to facilitate the talks.

A representative of the militants in Geneva talks, identified as Mohammed al-Abboud, said Monday that the opposition has the right to defend itself. However, reports from Geneva have shown that the anti-government side is becoming increasingly irked with the way the talks are going forward. Damascus denies it has done any deliberate violation, saying militant attacks like the one on Latakia on Monday are meant to give the opposition the upper hand in the negotiations.

The current truce in Syria excludes Daesh and Nusra Front, two major Takfiri groups operating in the east and north of Syria. Government forces have managed to retake some key areas from the two groups over the past few weeks.

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No secret talks with US on Syria: Russia's Lavrov

Iran Press TV

Mon Apr 18, 2016 3:16PM

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says there are no secret talks between Moscow and Washington over Syria.

"No secret negotiations are being conducted between Russia and the US," Lavrov said at a press conference on Monday, adding that a "normal regime of working consultation" is being conducted between the two sides as the "co-chairs of the International Syria Support Group and the co-chairs of the two target subgroups created in that group."

Lavrov noted that one subgroup "is on ceasefire and on the observance of its conditions and the second is on the solution of issues that prevent the delivery of humanitarian assistance in the entire territory of Syria."

He added that "considerable" progress has been made on both tracks.

A truce, brokered by the US and Russia, went into effect across Syria on February 27. However, it does not apply to terrorist groups such as Daesh and al-Qaeda's Syria branch, al-Nusra Front.

The Saudi-backed opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) and representatives from the Syrian government are currently in Geneva for another round of UN-brokered peace talks aimed at finding a political solution to the Syrian conflict

'Plan B' for Syria

Lavrov further stressed that a number of countries in the Middles East, including Turkey, have been supporting the so-called Plan B for Syria.

The plan was prepared by the US and its regional allies and is aimed at providing vetted "moderate" militant groups with weapons systems that would enable them to launch attacks against Syrian government aircraft and artillery positions.

Washington has said the Plan B will come into effect if the ceasefire deal fails to reduce hostilities in Syria.

"Despite the denial from Washington, there are many who want to think about such Plan B: if not right in the heart of the Pentagon or other US agencies, then in the region. I will mention, specifically, Turkey, which continues attempts to interfere using military methods," Lavrov said.

He noted that some states were preparing the plan in the hope that "the negotiations on Syria will fail and then new weapons can be pumped into Syria" for military acts aimed at overthrowing the Damascus government.

The remarks come as the Syrian army has liberated a number of key areas from Takfiri militants over the past few weeks, vowing to press ahead with its counter-terror military operations and drive Daesh elements out of their major strongholds in the country.

Syria opposition groups

The Russian foreign minister also called on the so-called moderate militant groups in Syria to leave Takfiri groups' positions if they do not want to be regarded as supporters of terrorists.

"If these groups want to observe the ceasefire conditions and do not want to look like supporters of terrorists, one simple thing needs to be done: change the territory where they are and disassociate themselves from the terrorist positions physically," Lavrov said.

He also said that Washington has pledged to encourage the militant groups to withdraw from the areas to avoid causing problems for the fight against al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front group.

The promise, however, has not been fulfilled, Lavrov said, adding, "This raises a very simple question: if these moderate groups don't want to leave the positions occupied by Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Nusra Front), maybe they are not moderate, but are those who are working with terrorists in breach of the UN Security Council resolution."

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Total of 64 Syrian Settlements Joined Ceasefire Since February

Sputnik News

22:53 18.04.2016(updated 23:19 18.04.2016)

The Russian Defense Ministry said that the number of settlements that have joined ceasefire regime in Syria has increased to 64.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The number of settlements that have joined ceasefire regime in Syria has increased to 64, the Russian Defense Ministry said Monday.

"The number of settlements that have joined the reconciliation process and signed relevant agreements with the Syrian authorities has increased to 64," the ministry said in a daily bulletin posted on its website.

The Russia-US brokered ceasefire regime in Syria came into force on February 27.

The Russian Defense Ministry also reported that the Russian center for Syrian reconciliation at the Hmeimim airbase registered a total of five violations of the ceasefire regime in Syria in the last 24 hours.

"The cessation of hostilities in Syria has been respected in most of the Syrian provinces. However, a total of five violations of the ceasefire regime have been registered, including four in the Latakia province and one in the Hama province," the ministry said.

"Militants of Ahrar al-Sham armed group, which had claimed to belong to the opposition, carried out shelling with multiple launch rocket systems and mortars of Sandran, Ain al-Ashara, Ard al-Wata and Qellaz [Latakia province] as well as positions of the government troops near Maharda in the Hama province," the ministry said.

"Three civilians were killed and four others were wounded," the bulletin said.

 Sputnik

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HNC Unprepared to Engage in Syria Settlement - Damascus Delegation

Sputnik News

22:13 18.04.2016(updated 22:41 18.04.2016)

The head of the Damascus delegation at the peace negotiations in Geneva claims that the decision of HNC to suspend its participation in the intra-Syrian talks proves that the HNC delegation is immature and not ready to engage in the process of political settlement.

GENEVA (Sputnik)  The decision of the Syrian opposition's Riyadh-backed High Negotiations Committee (HNC) to suspend its participation in the intra-Syrian talks proves that the HNC delegation is immature and not ready to engage in the process of political settlement, Bashar Jaafari, the head of the Damascus delegation at the peace negotiations in Geneva, told Sputnik on Monday.

Earlier in the day, a source close to the negotiations told Sputnik that the HNC would stay in Geneva but asked for a short break while truce violations in Syria continued.

"By deciding to withdraw or suspend their participation, they are showing their irresponsible approach towards the process of Geneva, they are showing that they are immature, politically speaking, because we have been here in Geneva only for 48 hours. They have not yet engaged in any serious discussions before deciding unilaterally to freeze their participation [in the talks]," Jaafari said.

"The masters of the group of Riyadh are the ones who instructed them to take such an irresponsible and provocative decision [to suspend their participation in the talks]. The proof is that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia will arrive this evening to Geneva to conduct a direct monitoring of the group of Riyadh performance," Jaafari said.

"It only proves that these people are not independent, they are not representing an independent Syrian opposition, but rather a group of people working for the Saudi and Turkish agenda," he said.

 Sputnik

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Syria Talks Collapse Looming as Only 3 Out of 15 HNC Members Arrive

Sputnik News

16:31 18.04.2016

The collapse of the intra-Syrian talks in Geneva is looming as only three out of 15 members of the Syrian opposition's Riyadh-backed High Negotiations Committee (HNC) arrived for talks with UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura.

GENEVA (Sputnik)  The HNC delegation's head Asaad Zoubi and chief negotiator Mohammed Alloush are not among those three who arrived, a Sputnik correspondent reported.

HNC members are reportedly divided on whether it is necessary to continue the talks amid escalation of violence in Aleppo.

With the escalation of clashes in Syria's northern Aleppo province, a member of the HNC decried what they termed "the regime's offensive" and said it could lead to the collapse of the current round of talks.

On April 15, the HNC accused the Syrian government of launching offensives prior to Geneva negotiations. The committee accused Damascus of preferring a military solution to the situation over a political one.

The new round of intra-Syrian talks began in Geneva on April 13. According to de Mistura, this round of talks is focusing on Syria's political transition, governance, and the constitution.

 Sputnik

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Syrian Opposition Believes Ceasefire Ended - Spokesperson

Sputnik News

10:47 18.04.2016(updated 14:20 18.04.2016)

There is a general feeling that the ceasefire in Syria has ended, the opposition's High Negotiations Committee (HNC) spokesperson Riyad Naasan Agha told Sputnik.

GENEVA (Sputnik)  According to Agha, the current round of talks has resulted in no advance on several issues, including humanitarian access to besieged areas.

"There is a general feeling that the ceasefire is over, and the fact that the regime, as you know, is trying to recapture Aleppo, confirms this. It is fiercely bombing Aleppo, Homs and other areas," the spokesperson said.

Riyad Naasan Agha also stressed that the Syrian High Negotiations Committee opposition group was not offered to participate in the unified Syrian opposition delegation by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura.

"No he [de Mistura] didn't offer this. Possibly, we have read something on Facebook or Twitter, but he did not offer this to us at meetings <> Mr. de Mistura, during the first meeting with us in Riyadh, said 'there are no other negotiations, except between your delegation and the regime, it is your privilege'," Agha told Sputnik.

"Our delegation is united, the others do not concern us. They are not the delegation at the talks, but de Mistura's delegations for consultations, and he is free to decide how to act," Agha added.

The Syrian opposition's High Negotiations Committee believes that UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura will deliver a report to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon following the April round of intra-Syrian talks in Geneva, the spokesman added.

"[De Mistura] will definitely deliver a report to the UN Secretary-General," the spokesman for the Riyadh-formed HNC said.

On Sunday, a source in one of the groups of the Syrian opposition told Sputnik that the current round of intra-Syrian talks in Geneva will end with draft final proposals on the settlement, which should further go to the UN Security Council for approval.

The new round of intra-Syrian talks began in Geneva on April 13. According to UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura, this round of talks is focusing on Syria's political transition, governance, and the constitution.

Moscow and Washington mediated an agreement of the cessation of hostilities in Syria, which came into force on February 27.

 Sputnik

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Obama-Putin Hold 'Intense' Talk on Syria

by Aru Pande April 18, 2016

Amid reports that Syrian peace talks are at an impasse, U.S. President Barack Obama urged his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to use his influence with the Assad regime during a phone call early Monday.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest confirmed Obama had an "intense" conversation with Putin that centered on the situation in Syria and concern about all of the parties living up to commitments made in the cessation of hostilities.

"President Putin has publicly expressed his view that this kind of political transition is critical to both Russian and U.S. interests in [Syria] and in the broader region, and this is an opportunity where our interests overlap," Earnest told reporters.

In a readout of the call, the White House said Obama "stressed the importance of pressing the Syrian regime to halt its offensive attacks against the opposition."

In its statement on the call, the Kremlin said Putin "stressed the need for the moderate opposition to distance themselves swiftly from ISIS and [al-Qaida affiliate] Jabhat al-Nusra, and to close Syria's border with Turkey, from where fighters and arms supplies for the extremists make their way in."

ISIS is an acronym for the Islamic State.

During Monday's briefing, Earnest said the "fragile" and "increasingly threatened" cessation of hostilities was critical to a successful political transition in Syria.

Other topics

The two presidents also spoke on Ukraine, with Obama calling on Putin to "take steps to end the significant uptick in fighting in eastern Ukraine" and implement the Minsk agreement.

"President Obama continues to make a forceful case that Russia needs to abide by their commitments, and by doing so they can begin to relieve some of the isolation that they have sustained as a result of interfering in the sovereign activities of their neighbors in Ukraine," the White House press secretary said.

For its part, the Kremlin said Putin expressed "hope that with the new Ukrainian government in place now, the authorities in Kyiv will finally start taking concrete steps toward implementing the Minsk agreements."

An issue that was not addressed in Monday's call was the recent incident in the Baltic Sea where the U.S. military says Russian jets flew within 30 feet (10 meters) of the U.S. Navy destroyer the USS Donald Cook.

More recently, the U.S. military says a Russian jet "barrel-rolled" a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance flight last week. Russia disputes the account.

Earnest said the incidents were not elevated beyond the U.S. military attache in Moscow expressing U.S. concerns to his Russian counterpart.

"Those kinds of activities are destabilizing and a source of some concern, but they are not particularly unusual," Earnest noted.

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Saudi-backed HNC leaders leave Syria talks

Iran Press TV

Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:31PM

Top negotiators of Syria's opposition group High Negotiations Committee (HNC) have quit ongoing peace talks with the government, one day after the Saudi-backed group halted its formal participation in the negotiations.

Riyad Hijab, HNC coordinator, said on Tuesday that he was leaving Geneva, Switzerland, repeating allegations that the Syrian government is violating a truce deal despite the talks.

"I will be travelling today along with some of my colleagues from the HNC. Some people left yesterday and today and they will keep leaving gradually until Friday," Hijab, who was speaking in Arabic, told journalists.

The Saudi-based negotiator said, however, that some delegates will remain in Geneva for technical discussions with UN staff and for workshops on humanitarian issues and detainees.

Hijab called for international observers to be sent into Syria and for ceasefire violators to be held to account. He repeated previous statements regarding the violation of truce by the Syrian government, saying Russia is also assisting Damascus in attacks on militant positions.

Syria's chief envoy to the talks, Bashar Ja'afari, said there will be no problem for the talks if the HNC delegation leaves Geneva. Ja'afari said the HNC did not hold a monopoly among opposition groups.

"If they want to boycott, they can boycott. It's not a big problem for us because they are not the only representatives of the Syrian opposition," said Ja'afari, adding that the arguments used by the HNC are not "convincing."

"The other groups don't share the same assessment (of events on the ground) and this is why the talks will continue as smoothly as possible," he said, accusing the HNC of repeatedly creating problems since the beginning of indirect talks on April 13.

Earlier in the day, Syrian army forces and allied Russian warplanes and helicopters carried out a series of counter-offensives against militants operating northwest of the country. Militant sources claimed dozens were killed in air strike carried out in the province of Idlib. The government offensive was apparently meant to avenge militant attacks on Latakia and Hama on Monday.

The surge of violence seems to have effectively abolished the ceasefire agreement which the United States and Russia engineered in late February in a bid to facilitate the talks.

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Syria ready to discuss inclusive unity government: Ja'afari

Iran Press TV

Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:16PM

Syria's chief negotiator in peace talks with the foreign-backed opposition says Damascus is prepared to discuss the formation of a new inclusive unity government but the future of President Bashar al-Assad remains off limits.

Bashar al-Ja'afari, who also serves as Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, made the remarks in an interview with AFP in Geneva on Tuesday.

"A broader unity government is the only topic of discussion here," Ja'afari said. However, the Syrian ambassador added, "It is not in our jurisdiction, it is not within our prerogatives" to talk about Assad's fate.

The latest round of indirect UN-brokered negotiations on the Syria crisis began in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 13.

Five days later, however, the main opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) suspended its formal participation at the talks in protest at what it called escalating violence in the Arab country.

Ja'afari criticized the opposition's move as "childish and adolescent behavior."

During the Geneva discussions, Staffan de Mistura, who is the UN special envoy for Syria, floated the idea of President Assad remaining in power in exchange for the opposition's nomination of three Syrian vice presidents.

The opposition dismissed the proposal while Ja'afari took a similar position, saying the Damascus government was unequivocally against such an initiative.

That idea "will never be discussed in any upcoming session because it is not within the authority of the negotiators in Geneva," the Syrian diplomat said.

The opposition insists on Assad's resignation, saying he cannot be part of any transitional or interim government. On the contrary, the government says the fate of Assad is a red line and only the Syrian people can decide about it.

Meanwhile, De Mistura said the peace talks would continue despite renewed violence in Syria threatening a fragile truce on the ground.

The ceasefire, brokered by the US and Russia, went into effect on February 27 across Syria, excluding terrorist groups such as the Takfiri Daesh and al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front.

Later Tuesday, de Mistura is expected to meet the ceasefire monitoring taskforce after talks with two smaller opposition groups that are present at the Geneva negotiations.

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Fate of Syria president non-negotiable: Ja'afari

Iran Press TV

Tue Apr 19, 2016 8:16AM

Syria's chief negotiator says President Bashar al-Assad's future is not up for discussion after the opposition insists on a transition without the Syrian leader, pushing peace talks in Geneva near collapse.

Bashar Ja'afari, speaking to Lebanese TV station Al Mayadeen, said his team is pushing for an expanded government as the solution to the war.

"In Geneva, we have one mandate only to arrive at an expanded national government only, this is our mandate," he said.

UN-sponsored peace talks came close to collapse on Monday after the opposition decided to suspend participation until Damascus starts discussing the creation of a transitional government.

The opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) said it would no longer attend meetings at the UN office in Geneva.

Ja'afari said Assad's fate could never be raised in peace talks nor was it a matter that any UN-backed political process could deliberate.

"This matter does not fall under the jurisdiction of Geneva. This is a Syrian-Syrian affair, Security Council or no Security Council," he said.

The UN has hosted weeks of on-and-off peace talks aimed ultimately at ending the country's devastating five-year war.

The latest round of talks on the Syria crisis, which began on April 13, was due to continue until the end of this week.

On Monday, however, foreign-backed militant groups declared a new war on government forces as opposition negotiators suspended their participation in peace talks.

Turkey-based Free Syrian Army and Ahrar al-Sham militants announced the launch of new assaults in Latakia and Hama provinces.

The declaration of the new war came as the Syrian army pushed ahead with its battle in Aleppo against Daesh and Nusra Front terrorist groups which are excluded from peace talks.

Ja'afari said the opposition and the countries that support it are "annoyed because of the progress being made by the Syrian army on the ground."

The official blamed Saudi Arabia as well as Turkey and Qatar, the HNC's chief supporters, of seeking to sabotage the peace talks.

"There has been a decision... in Saudi Arabia, in Turkey, and in Qatar to derail inter-Syrian decision-making," he said. "They do not want there to be a dialog between Syrians -- they want to make the Geneva negotiations fail," he added.

"The Saudi, Turkish and Qatari sponsors do not want to stop the bloodbath in Syria and do not want a political solution in Syria."

The HNC supports an array of militant groups on the ground in Syria.

Militants pound army positions: Footage

As militants launched new attacks, a video released on YouTube appeared to show a fighter from Jaish al-Nasr - a militant coalition vetted by the CIA - using US-supplied anti-tank missiles against targets near the Jabal al-Akrad region in Latakia.

Washington insists there is no place for Assad in Syria's future and has been generously supplying anti-Damascus militant outfits with weapons and military training.

The foreign-sponsored conflict has left over 470,000 people dead since it began in the Arab country in March 2011, according to a February report by the Syrian Center for Policy Research.

Ja'afari said the Western-backed opposition is seeking to bring about a collapse of the country and replicate the chaos seen in Iraq and Libya after Western military intervention.

"They want to repeat the experience of Libya and Iraq and turn Syria into a failed state," he said.

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Lavrov: Several Actors Try to Derail Syria Talks to Solve Crisis Militarily

Sputnik News

21:12 19.04.2016(updated 21:23 19.04.2016)

The Russian foreign minister said that several actors were trying to derail intra-Syria talks to resolve the crisis in the country militarily.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Several actors are trying to derail intra-Syria talks in Geneva to resolve the crisis in the country in a military fashion, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday.

"Nobody can win this war [in Syria] There are some players on the external front who cherish drams of ousting the regime using force, they are trying to do everything they can to achieve this, including attempts to trigger derailment of the intra-Syria talks," Lavrov told a press conference.

The top Russian diplomat stressed that Moscow, Washington and their partners at the International Syria Support Group (ISG) did not agree with a military resolution to the crisis. He added that Moscow would do everything in its power to prevent the military solution to the conflict from prevailing.

"This is a way to ultimate chaos, a breakdown of another state It is necessary to bring those nurturing those plans to justice," Lavrov added.

At the same time, there is no ministerial meeting of the International Syria Support Group is being planned yet, Lavrov said.

"As far as the ministerial meeting of the International Syria Support Group on April 21 is concerned A ministerial meeting is not on the agenda at the moment," Lavrov told a press conference.

No opposition faction in Syria has a monopoly to represent opposition as a whole at the reconciliation talks in Geneva Sergei Lavrov said.

"No opposition group none of them alone have a monopoly right to represent the opponents of the regime which exists in Damascus," Lavrov told a press conference.

 Sputnik

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Taiwan hopes to talk with China on detained nationals this week

ROC Central News Agency

2016/04/18 21:22:02

Taipei, April 18 (CNA) Justice Minister Luo Ying-shay () said Monday that her ministry has set this week as the target for traveling to mainland China to negotiate over 45 Taiwan nationals currently detained there in connection with telephone scams in Kenya.

The 45 Taiwanese suspects in the telecom fraud were deported from Kenya to China April 8 and April 12, respectively, despite strong protests from Taiwan.

Luo told a legislative hearing that Taiwan originally wanted to send a delegation to China on Tuesday, but the Chinese authorities said that the amount of information involved is too great and that the related discussions will take time to arrange, which prompted the delegation to set the target of later this week to make the trip.

The delegation will comprise officials from the Justice Ministry, the Mainland Affairs Council and the semi official Straits Exchange Foundation, as well as the Criminal Investigation Bureau.

Amid reports that Tuesday's trip had been cancelled, Luo said that "from the start, we did not set a specific date, so therefore, there is no question of a cancelation."

Deputy Justice Minister Chen Ming-tang () also said that the ministry has not received information about any cancellation, adding that the exact timing will require further discussion between the two sides.

Luo said before the legislative hearing that the more the legislators bash China over the case, the more drawn-out the proceedings might be.

She said she felt that Beijing might prefer to talk with anti-China people and that the talks could therefore be delayed until after May 20, when the incoming Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will take office.

She said that many people look at things with a biased perspective, and will label anyone who "thinks rationally" as tilting toward China and selling out Taiwan. They can even stoke cross-Taiwan Strait tensions just to make a show of themselves, she said.

She expressed the hope that the good cross-strait cooperation of the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou () over the past eight years can be extended to the DPP administration, adding that she has contacted Chiu Tai-san (), justice minister-designate, who shares this viewpoint and has pledged to discuss the matter with the DPP.

(By You Hsiang-kai and Lilian Wu)

ENDITEM/J

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Turkey detains 101 for alleged links to cleric Gulen

Iran Press TV

Mon Apr 18, 2016 9:50AM

Turkey has detained scores of people for their alleged link to Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen whom the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regards as an opponent.

Police said on Monday that 101 people have been detained so far in an ongoing operation in nine provinces, which has primarily been focused on Istanbul, Anadolu News Agency reported.

Prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for 140 people under investigation centering on financial support for Gulen's group.

Ankara has accused the cleric of heading a criminal group, what it calls the Fethullahist Terror Organization/Parallel State Structure (FeTO/PDY).

Gulen fled to the United States in 1999 after former secular authorities laid charges against him. Turkey has asked the US to extradite him but Washington has shown little interest in doing so.

Erdogan claims Gulen has built a network of supporters in Turkey's police, media and judiciary and is conspiring to oust his government. Gulen denies the allegations.

As part of a crackdown on Gulen's followers, police forces launched a raid on opposition media outlets linked to the cleric late last year.

Officers also arrested hundreds of people, believed to be sympathizers of Gulen, many of whom members of the police and the judiciary. Most recently, police shut down Zaman newspaper over ties with the cleric.

Erdogan's government has been under fire for clamping down on journalists and sentencing them to long prison terms. Dozens of journalists are currently imprisoned in the country.

Erdogan and Gulen were allies until police and prosecutors, seen as sympathetic to the latter, opened a corruption investigation into Erdogan's inner circle in 2013.

The investigation led to the resignation of the ministers of economy, interior, and urbanization. Gulen is also viewed to be behind the leaks that led to the probe.

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EU needs Turkey more than Turkey needs EU, Erdogan says

Iran Press TV

Tue Apr 19, 2016 12:57PM

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has denounced a recent report by the European Union critical of the rule of law in his country, saying the EU needs Ankara more than Turkey needs the union.

"The European Union needs Turkey more than Turkey needs the European Union," Erdogan said in a televised speech to municipal leaders in Ankara on Tuesday.

On April 14, the European Parliament, the directly elected parliamentary institution of the EU, published a 2015 progress report on Turkey, which has long pressed for EU membership.

The report accused the Turkish government of "backsliding" on democracy and the rule of law, raising concerns over Ankara's record on human rights and press freedom in 2015.

The Turkish president, however, dismissed the criticisms, arguing that they come at a time that Ankara-Brussels ties are on a good track.

"At a time when our relations with the European Union are in a positive phase regarding the migrants... it is provocative to come out with a report like that," Erdogan said.

The Turkish president censured the report for what he called failure in praising Turkey's hosting millions of refugees from neighboring Syria.

"Three million people have been looked after in this country so they don't disturb the Europeans. Is there anything about this in the report?" he asked.

Elsewhere in his comments, President Erdogan emphasized that most of the criticisms against Turkey coming from the West had "bad intentions."

Last month, Turkey and the EU sealed a controversial deal intended to stem the flow of refugees from Syria and other troubled countries to Europe in return for financial and political rewards for Ankara.

Under the deal, the bloc will take in thousands of Syrian refugees directly from Turkey and reward it with money, visa-free travel and progress in its EU membership negotiations.

Critics, however, have accused Turkey of blackmailing Europe into letting it join the EU. Likewise, the bloc has come under fire for selling out its principles by offering to speed up Turkey's EU membership process.

On Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu also warned that Ankara would not abide by its side of the refugee agreement unless the EU fulfilled a promise to grant Turks visa-free travel by June.

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Erdogan's Government Arrests Over 100 on Suspicion of Plotting Coup

Sputnik News

03:32 19.04.2016(updated 03:53 19.04.2016)

More than a hundred people were detained by Turkish law enforcement on Monday over alleged links to the movement of Erdogan's ally-turned-bitter-rival Fethullah Gulen, who, in the view of Ankara, seeks to depose the current leader.

Some 105 people were detained in a police raid targeting the well-known construction company Dumankaya and Bank Asya, AFP reported.

Those taken into custody include over 40 bank employees and 45 businesspeople. Two top executives of the construction firm were also among those arrested, Anadolu Agency wrote.

"Our board members were called to give a statement at the Financial Crimes Department on Monday morning," Dumankaya confirmed in a statement.

Detainees are suspected of funding what Turkish prosecutors call a "terror organization" headed by the US-based Muslim cleric. Those arrested reportedly gave $17.5 million to Gulen's group from 2004 to 2015.

They have been also charged with spreading terrorist propaganda.

Initially, prosecutors issued 140 warrants, and more arrests are expected.

Authorities claimed that Gulen is behind the so-called Fethullah Terrorist Organization, and is hatching a plan to oust Erdogan. Gulen, exiled from Turkey in 1999, has repeatedly denied the existence of the group.

Gulen was Erdogan's ally for many years until 2013, when a high-profile corruption scandal occurred.

Since that time, Erdogan has waged war against Gulen and his supporters. Over 2,300 people have been put in custody in connection to the movement since 2014.

 Sputnik

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UK Defense Ministry Admits Gaffe Over Leaked War Games Report

Sputnik News

18:56 18.04.2016

The UK Ministry of Defense has admitted a "communications issue" which led to a manual about a joint exercise off the Scottish coast containing codewords and "special instructions" being sent out accidentally to fishermen and ferry operators.

The 192-page manual on exercise Joint Warrior 161 was sent out accidentally via email, according to the Herald Scotland newspaper. Joint Warrior 161, is taking place between April 11 and 23, 2016 and will comprise of a program of exercises conducted by land forces, warships, submarines and aircraft across the UK. The maritime element is focused in the offshore and coastal waters to the north east, north and north west of Scotland. Further information will be provided in nearer the time.

The briefing  marked "NATO Restricted" on every page  contained technical details of aircraft "killbox" target areas, code decryption tables, radio jamming rules and authentication protocols. As well as dozens of codewords, call signs and map co-ordinates, the report includes long lists of phone numbers, email addresses and military facilities.

The fishermen and ferry operators were only supposed to receive a general briefing on where activity would take place, to avoid collisions and conflicts of navigation.

Brendan O'Hara MP, the Scottish National Party's defense spokesman in Westminster, told the Herald:

"The careless circulation of this document represents a leak of highly sensitive information. This could compromise the safety and security of the whole exercise. The MoD must investigate this breach and review their communications procedures around exercises as soon as possible."

Warship Contact

"A communications issue around the Joint Warrior and Griffin Strike exercises was identified and appropriate measures have been taken. There is no impact to the public, military personnel or units participating in the exercise," an MoD spokesman said.

A public briefing  which is available on the Royal Navy website  states that the exercise includes Submarine, warship, minewarfare, live firing and gunnery activity and that GPS navigations would be turned off at certain times in some areas.

The documents states: "The warships taking part have been instructed to offer fishing vessels and the wider civilian community every assistance in their dealings with exercise activity. This applies especially when in the vicinity of submarines, when warships are conducting live firing or when GPS is denied for military training. You are invited to contact them via VHF to ensure that military training and civilian activities are safely de-conflicted."

 Sputnik

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UK Arms Sale Licenses to Saudi Arabia Total $4Bln in 1 Year

Sputnik News

16:35 19.04.2016(updated 16:36 19.04.2016)

The United Kingdom has issued 2.8 billion pounds ($4 billion) worth of arms export licenses to Saudi Arabia in a little over a year since Riyadh launched airstrikes against rebels in Yemen, British media reported Tuesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The British government issued 122 military licenses to Saudi Arabia since March 2015, The Guardian daily reported, citing figures released by the UK government. London's arms exports to Riyadh amount to the equivalent of $9.6 billion since 2010.

A coalition led by Saudi Arabia began airstrikes against Houthi rebels from the Shiite Ansar Allah movement in Yemen as part of its Operation Decisive Storm on March 26, 2015. Peace talks that were meant to begin on Monday teetered on the verge of collapse behind the Houthis' failure to arrive in Kuwait and regular violations of a ceasefire in effect since April 10.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron's administration has been accused of increasing weapons supplies to Riyadh as it boosted imports nearly threefold over the past five years.

In January, the UK government's arms sales statistics demonstrated that British arms companies had increased their sales to Saudi Arabia by more than 100 times over the course of last year  from contracts worth almost $13 million in April-June 2015 to $1.43 billion in July-September.

London issued $10 million worth of arms sales licenses to Riyadh in the last three months of 2015, according to the latest reported data.

The UK Defense Ministry, in a July 2015 letter to the House of Lords on the amount of assistance being provided by the United Kingdom to Riyadh in its anti-Houthi campaign in Yemen, said that the country was providing precision-guided weapons and technical support to the Saudi Air Force "as part of pre-existing arrangements."

 Sputnik

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Russia Suspends Crimean Tatar Mejlis For 'Extremist Activities'

April 18, 2016

by RFE/RL

The Russian Justice Ministry has suspended the Crimean Tatars' highest ruling body due to what it called "extremist activities," a fresh escalation in Moscow's crackdown against a group that has broadly opposed Russia's forcible annexation of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula.

The ministry said in an April 18 statement that the Mejlis, the self-governing Crimean Tatar body legalized by the Ukrainian government in 1999, has been included in a federal list of civic and religious organizations suspended due to alleged extremism.

Tatars make up around 12 percent of Crimea's population of 2.5 million. Many fled the Black Sea peninsula after its military seizure by Russia in March 2014. Others who remained have complained of harassment or even disappearances under the Moscow-backed authorities there.

International rights groups and Western governments have issued searing criticism of Russia's treatment of the Turkic-speaking Muslim group since the annexation.

The ministry's action now prohibits the Mejlis from using state-owned media, holding public gatherings, participating in elections, and using bank accounts for anything other than paying off taxes, debts, or other financial penalties.

The ministry said the move was based on an April 13 order by Crimea's Moscow-backed prosecutor, Natalya Poklonskaya, to suspend the council.

Ukraine's Foreign Ministry called Poklonskaya's order "a violation of fundamental rights and freedoms in the peninsula," while international rights watchdog Amnesty International said the decision signals a new wave of repression against Crimean Tatars.

"Anyone associated with the Mejlis could now face serious charges of extremism as a result of this ban, which is aimed at snuffing out the few remaining voices of dissent in Crimea," Denis Krivosheev, Amnesty International's deputy director for Europe and Central Asia, said in an April 13 statement.

A U.S. State Department official told RFE/RL on April 18: "We are deeply disturbed by these reports. Banning the Mejlis Council, the body representing the region's Tatar ethnic minority, would remove what little representation and recourse the Tatars have left under Russian occupation.

"Crimean Tatars face repression and discrimination in Russian-occupied Crimea. Almost 10,000 Crimean Tatars have been forced to flee their homeland. Those who remain have been subjected to abuses, including interrogations, beatings, arbitrary detentions, and police raids on their homes and mosques. These brutalities and human rights abuses must end."

The Mejlis has refused to recognize Russia's takeover of Crimea, which triggered a wave of Western sanctions against Moscow, and played a key role in the consolidation of efforts on behalf of Crimean Tatars.

The council was led for many years by the veteran leader of the Crimean Tatars, Soviet-era dissident Mustafa Dzhemilev. Since November 2013, the Mejlis has been led by Refat Chubarov.

Dzhemilev and Chubarov, both Ukrainian lawmakers, have been barred from entering Crimea for five years by Crimea's Moscow-backed leadership.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation In Europe (OSCE) issued a report in September saying that, since Russia's land grab, fundamental freedoms have "deteriorated radically" for many in Crimea, especially for pro-Ukrainian activists, journalists, and the Crimean Tatar community.

In its annual human rights report issued last week, the U.S. State Department criticized what it portrayed as a broad range of rights violations against Crimean Tatars, including "systematic discrimination" and "physical abuse and beatings" by "Russian occupying forces."

Russian President Vladimir Putin last year suggested that foreign countries were funding efforts to "destabilize the situation" by highlighting difficulties faced by Crimean Tatars, and said that Moscow would not allow this.

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-crimea-tatar- mejlis-suspended-extremist/27682394.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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New Suggestions of Russia-Ukraine Soldier Swap Deal

by Charles Maynes April 19, 2016

A long rumored "soldier swap" between Moscow and Kyiv seemed to gain new traction Tuesday, with Ukraine leader Petro Poroshenko claiming talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin had produced an "algorithm for freeing" an imprisoned Ukrainian pilot turned national cause celebre, Nadezhda Savchenko.

The rumors came just one day after a Ukrainian court convicted two Russian soldiers on charges of terrorism and conducting war on Ukrainian soil, prompting new speculation over a deal.

The Kremlin confirmed President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko had touched on the issue of the prisoners during a phone call late Monday  just hours after the two Russian soldiers, Sergeant Aleksander Aleksandrov and Captain Yevgeny Yerofeyev, were sentenced to 14 years in jail.

Tuesday, in Kyiv, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko elaborated on his talks with the Russian leader.

"Yesterday's phone conversation was my idea, and judging by the preparation work, I think we have agreed on a certain algorithm that would allow Nadezhda's release," Poroshenko said.The Ukrainian leader insisted he was ready to send a presidential envoy to Moscow immediately to secure the pilot's release.

Last month, a Russian court convicted Nadezhda Savchenko for complicity in the deaths of two Russian journalists killed while covering the war between Ukraine forces and pro-Russian rebels in east Ukraine, and sentenced her to 22 years imprisonment.The Ukrainian pilot, who maintains she was captured by Russian forces before the incident occurred, has refused to appeal the decision, instead going on a dry hunger strike, refusing to consume both food and water, as part of a high stakes bid to gain her release.

But, as Savchenko's trial ground toward its finale, so too did rumors the pilot's fate was tied to that of two Russian soldiers captured by the Ukrainian army amid fighting in the Donbas region.

The two Russians initially admitted to being active duty officers at the time of their capture, but later went back on their testimony.

In Kyiv, the Russians' Ukrainian lawyer, Oksana Sokolovskaya, announced that her clients, too, would not appeal the Ukrainian court's decision, seemingly leaving a negotiated swap as their only path for release.

Symbols of conflict

All three have become symbols of widely disparate views surrounding a war in eastern Ukraine that has left more than 9,000 dead.

For Ukrainians, Savchenko has emerged a symbol of their nation's defiance of Russian intervention, while the captured Russians are proof of Moscow's shadowy role in a war the Kremlin says it has no part in.

But for Russians, Savchenko has been portrayed as the face of what the Kremlin has branded a "fascist junta" that came to power after street protests demanding closer ties to Europe toppled Ukraine's pro-Moscow government in 2014. The Kremlin insists Russian fighters in eastern Ukraine are merely impassioned volunteers over which it has little control.

Despite the claims by the Ukrainian president that a deal over Savchenko had been reached, Savchekno's lawyer Mark Feygan voiced caution in an interview with VOA.

Feygan noted that despite wide interest in the prisoner swap, the Kremlin had yet to commit on the deal publicly.

"The Kremlin has yet to explain to Russians why they've taken this decision," says Feygan. " And propaganda is for them a very important part of how they exercise power." he told VOA.

Analysts have also voiced skepticism over the latest soldier swap rumors.

Speaking on Echo of Moscow radio, Russian analyst Stanislav Belkovsky noted, "Putin has made it clear that Savchenko is too valuable an asset to trade for Aleksandrov and Yerofeyev, whom Russia doesn't even recognize."

Belkovsky joined a chorus of observers who insist Putin is seeking additional trades for the Ukrainian pilot, deals that only negotiations with the United States or major Western powers could deliver.

"He's telling America, if you want freedom for Nadezhda Savchenko," said Belkovsky, "then do something nice for me, too."

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president suggested the exchange agreement was already paying dividends. In an announcement on Twitter, Poroshenko said that Savchenko  whose deteriorating condition was a growing concern to supporters  had agreed to halt her hunger strike upon hearing news of the deal.

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DGAP-News: G-Therapeutics / Key word(s): Financing G-Therapeutics raises EUR 36 million to develop novel neuro-stimulation therapy for spinal cord injury 19.04.2016 / 08:00 The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- PRESS RELEASE G-THERAPEUTICS DISTRIBUTION VERSION, NOT TO BE RELEASED BEFORE TUE APRIL 19, 2016, 8:00 hrs. G-Therapeutics raises EUR 36 million to develop novel neuro-stimulation therapy for spinal cord injury Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Lausanne, Switzerland; April 19, 2016 -- G-Therapeutics announces today that it has raised EUR 36 million to develop its novel neuro-stimulation therapy for people with spinal cord injuries (SCI). G-Therapeutics is a spin-off from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), with offices in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and Lausanne, Switzerland. An amount of EUR 26 million is raised in a Series A investment round co-led by LSP, INKEF Capital, Gimv and Wellington Partners. In addition, G-Therapeutics has secured a EUR 10 million deferred, risk-bearing 'innovation loan' from the Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland (RvO, part of Dutch ministry of Economic Affairs) to support the development of its innovative therapeutic solutions. G-Therapeutics B.V. (G-Therapeutics or the Company) will use the funds to bring a unique, new therapy for improved rehabilitation of spinal-cord injuries from the lab to patients. In particular, the Company is developing a unique, Implantable Neuro-stimulation System (INS) for electrical stimulation of specific areas of the spinal cord and will subsequently perform a multi-center clinical study to obtain regulatory approval. The Swiss-Dutch Company is building further upon the scientific achievements of Professor Gregoire Courtine, who occupies the International Paraplegic Foundation Chair in Spinal Cord Repair, and his colleagues at the Center for Neuro-prosthetics and Brain Mind Institute, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and at the University Hospital of Vaud (CHUV). For over 15 years, Professor Courtine has been working on unravelling the mechanisms underlying an effective treatment for people with a spinal cord injury affecting the lower limbs. As one of the founders and Chief Scientific Officer of the Company, Professor Courtine comments: "I am delighted that after a decade of dedicated research and all the scientific accomplishments of my team, G-Therapeutics will enable the development of realistic therapeutic solutions for people with spinal cord injury." There are two unique attributes about this new therapeutic approach: an implantable neuro-stimulation system (INS) for the spinal cord with real-time motion feedback, and intent-driven rehabilitation. The system enables the INS to deliver electrical pulses to the correct nerves at the appropriate timing to facilitate raising and lowering the legs and feet during walking. It was shown by Professor Courtine's team that this combination of neuro-stimulation and will-powered training results in a massive remodelling of residual neural connections, restoring voluntary control over paralysed limbs. The clinical and regulatory activities of the Company will remain in Lausanne, in the vicinity of the lab of Professor Courtine at EPFL, and CHUV, the academic hospital of Lausanne that will be involved in the clinical studies, under the guidance of Dr Jocelyne Bloch, who is the lead functional neurosurgeon at the CHUV and co-founder of the Company. The INS development activities and general management of the Company will be based at the High Tech Campus, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Sjaak Deckers, one of the founders and CEO of the Company, remarks: "It is very rewarding to start this unique European endeavor that can bring enormous benefits to these individuals with spinal cord injury. Our international team has all the necessary capabilities to realize Professor Courtine's vision, backed by a strong investor syndicate of highly renowned medical technology investors." Dirk Kersten, Managing Director at INKEF Capital, notes: "INKEF is excited to be part of the G-Therapeutics story which combines world-class science with a team of proven entrepreneurs led by Sjaak Deckers. It is a great opportunity for INKEF working together again with this talented group of people to build towards continued success." John de Koning, Partner at LSP, adds: "G-Therapeutics is uniquely positioned to translate an exciting and highly promising technology into products that have the potential to transform the future of spinal cord injury treatment. At LSP, we are looking forward to working once again with this team of experienced professionals, both in the management and at supervisory board level." After the new financing, the Company's supervisory board will consist of Jan Ohrstrom, former CEO of Profibrix, as Chairman; Patrick Van Beneden, partner at Gimv; Professor Gregoire Courtine; Regina Hodits, general partner at Wellington Partners; Jan Keltjens, Senior Director at INKEF Capital; and John de Koning, partner at LSP. ----- # End # ----- For further inquiries, please contact: Sjaak Deckers, CEO G-Therapeutics: Sjaak.Deckers@gtherapeutics.com +31 622 49 01 04 ABOUT G-THERAPEUTICS G-Therapeutics is a spin-off company from Professor Courtine's laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland), with offices in Switzerland and the Netherlands. The Company is developing an Implantable Neuro-stimulation System (INS) with real-time motion feedback and uses training tools to rehabilitate patients suffering from neurological disorders such as spinal cord injury (SCI). The initial focus of G-Therapeutics will be paraplegic patients with incomplete SCI due to a lesion in the cervical or thoracic segments of the spinal cord. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The Company, incorporated in December 2014, acknowledges its early supporters whose support and financial contributions have been critical to turn the early endeavor into a Company: EPFL, Fondation pour l'Innovation Technologique (FIT, Lausanne, Switzerland), Venture Kick (Switzerland), Venture.ch (Switzerland), Lausanne Region (Switzerland), Hello Tomorrow Challenge (France), Universal Biotech (France), Stimulus (Netherlands), The Wellcome Trust (UK), Eurostars (EU) and RVO (Netherlands). ABOUT INKEF INKEF Capital is an Amsterdam, the Netherlands, based venture capital firm that is focused on the long-term collaboration and active support of innovative technology companies. INKEF was founded in 2010 by Dutch pension fund ABP and with EUR 200 million under management it is one of the largest venture capital funds in the Netherlands. INKEF focuses on investment opportunities in Healthcare, Technology and IT/NewMedia and prefers to participate from series A round financing onwards. www.inkefcapital.com ABOUT LSP LSP (Life Sciences Partners) is a leading independent European investment firm, providing financing for private and public life-science companies. Since the late 1980s, LSP's management has invested in a large number of highly innovative enterprises, many of which have grown to become leaders of the global life-science industry. With over EUR 1 billion of investment capital raised to date and offices in Amsterdam, Munich and Boston, LSP is one of Europe's largest and most experienced specialist life-science investors. For more information, please visit www.lspvc.com ABOUT GIMV Gimv is a European investment company with over three decades experience in private equity and venture capital. The company is listed on Euronext Brussels. Gimv currently manages around 1.8 billion EUR (including co-investment partnerships) of investments in about 50 portfolio companies. As a recognized market leader in selected investment platforms, Gimv identifies entrepreneurial and innovative companies with high-growth potential and supports them in their transformation into market leaders. Gimv's four investment platforms are: Connected Consumer, Health & Care, Smart Industries and Sustainable Cities. Each of these platforms works with a skilled and dedicated team across Gimv's home markets of the Benelux, France and Germany and can count on an extended international network of experts. More information on Gimv can be found on www.gimv.com. ABOUT WELLINGTON PARTNERS Partners Wellington Partners is among the most successful pan-European Venture Capital firms. With more than EUR 800 million under management and offices in Munich, London and Zurich, Wellington Partners invests in start-up companies throughout Europe that have the potential to become global leaders in the areas of digital media, resource efficiency and life sciences. Since 1998, Wellington Partners has invested in more than 100 companies, including publicly listed firms like Actelion, Evolva, Genticel, , Oxford Immunotec, Supersonic Imagine, Wavelight (acquired by Alcon) and Xing as well as privately held companies like AyoxxA, Definiens (acquired by Medimmune), Grandis (acquired by Novartis), ImevaXx, immatics, Immobilienscout24 (acquired by Deutsche Telekom), invendo medical, MPM Medical, MTM Laboratories (acquired by Roche), NEUWAY Pharma, Oxagen/Atopix, Quanta, Rigontec, Sapiens (acquired by Medtronic), Sensimed, Symetis, Spotify and Themis. For further information, please visit www.wellington-partners.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 19.04.2016 Dissemination of a Corporate News, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases. Media archive at www.dgap-medientreff.de and www.dgap.de --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 455283 19.04.2016
Common Questions

How does an Army base salary compare to pay in the private-sector?

When you consider affordable health care for part-time Soldiers and free health care for full-time Soldiers, plus access to bonuses, allowances for housing, food, and clothing, opportunities to get a college degree without incurring debt, and more financial benefits, the Army offers a more competitive choice to similar civilian careers. Your Army base salary is just one part of the total compensation Soldiers receive. While civilian jobs may pay higher base salaries, the Army offers a starting salary above the federal minimum wage for a 40-hour work week, 30 days paid leave every year, plus a variety of benefits on top of your base pay that add up.

What is special pay? How else can I earn money in the Army?
A worker who was injured on the job Saturday at Danvilles Goodyear plant was scalded by steam  or possibly a mixture of steam and hot liquid, according to an official with the United Steelworkers Union.

The incident occurred at about 1:50 p.m. Saturday.

After being seen at the plants onsite hospital, the associate chose to drive home and visit a local medical provider later that day and for a follow-up visit Monday, according to a Goodyear news release. The cause of the incident is under investigation.

Goodyear is committed to providing a safe work environment for our associates, the news release stated.

Mike Wright, the unions director of health, safety and environment, said the employee was a pipefitter scalded by steam or a mixture of hot liquid and steam. The victim first sought treatment by medical personnel at the plant and it was thought the injuries werent serious, Wright said.

The employees injuries included second-degree burns, which occurred through clothing, he said.

However, the burns were looked at again Monday morning at Danville Regional Medical Center, where personnel thought the employee should be treated at a regional burn center, Wright said.

Local 831  the unions local branch that represents Goodyear employees in Danville  did not report the accident to the unions headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Wright said.

It wasnt called in to us because the local union did not think it rose to that level [of seriousness], Wright said. He said he did not know the employees condition.

Wright found out about the incident from a union official investigating last weeks fatality at the Goodyear plant. The union is investigating Saturdays incident, as well, Wright said.

The official investigating the fatality and the unions assistant director of health, safety and environment are having safety discussions with Goodyear officials, Wright said. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is conducting a comprehensive inspection of the Danville plant, he said.

Saturdays incident follows two recent fatalities at the Goodyear plant. On April 12, Greg Cooper, 52, of Chatham died on the job. Coopers death led to a temporary plant shutdown as the company, OSHA and the United Steelworkers Union conducted investigations.

Another Goodyear worker, Kevin Edmonds, 54, of Penhook, died at the plant on March 31. In August 2015, Jeanie Lynne Strader, 56, of Chatham, died while working at the plant.
To the editor:

For some reason, most people think Donald Trump is a smart businessman. His companies have used the bankruptcy courts four times. That doesnt sound like such a smart businessman at all. He has used the system to get ahead in ways that most people like myself couldnt.

His tax plans would be the largest redistribution to the rich in American history. Trump is against a minimum wage increase and even stated that he thought most Americans made too much  coming from someone who thought a million dollar loan from his father was small.

Ted Cruz costs this country $24 billion with the government shutdown over the ACA instead of using compromise to avoid that. Does that sound like a leader? I dont think so.

The tax cuts proposed by both Trump and Cruz are larger as a proportion of the government budget and the total economy than any tax cuts ever before proposed. Trumps cut would reduce the top tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent, creating a giant windfall for the wealthy, according to the Tax Policy Center. The richest one-tenth of 1 percent of taxpayers  whose incomes are more than $3.7 million  would get an average tax cut of more than $1.3 million every year.

I guess he thinks the trickle-down theory will work even though it never has before. Middle income households would get a tax cut of $2,700. Cruz would abandon our century-old progressive income tax and instead tax the amount people spend in a year and exclude income from investments. This would burden low-income workers who spend everything they earn and have few if any investments. He also proposes a 10 percent flat tax, which lowers tax rates on the rich and increases taxes for low-income workers.

These plans would cut federal revenues by as much as $12 trillion over a decade, but neither candidate will say what theyll do to fill this hole. They both want to increase the military. How will that happen is my question. I think I know how. They will either explode the national debt or cut Social Security, Medicare and any assistance to the poor which they could care less about.

As I have said, if either of these men are elected president we could see the largest redistribution from the poor and the middle class of America to the rich. To me this is pure class warfare with a vengeance. We must not let this happen to the middle class or the poor. Wake up, America.

ROBERT HAYDEN

Blairs
Members of the Halifax County Industrial Development Authority are spreading their wings, meeting in and touring manufacturing facilities that have made their A+ presence known. On Friday, the off-site meeting place for IDA happened to be Huber, a wood products plant in Crystal Hill with an 80-acre footprint and a 20-year record of hiring, investing, partnering and profiting in Halifax County.

IDA Executive Director Matt Leonard, Deputy Director Kristy Johnson, Chairman Butch Blanks, Treasurer Mattie Cowan and board members Robert Bates, W. W. Ted Bennett, Chad Francis, Chris Lumsden and Nancy Pool gathered in Hubers conference room where they moved first through a closed session and then quickly through the second half of their monthly meeting, an open session that covered new bids for custodial services, an on-target budget, an update on the 2017 budget (working on last major component), and an RFP for audit services.

After the board had moved through housekeeping tasks, Bennett told fellow members he thought it was time to work on a plan to make the IDA financially independent  localities only play 15 percent of the authoritys costs now  without sacrificing the IDAs ability to recruit business prospects.

The response was a collective hear, hear, at which point Lumsden thanked Leonard for arranging the off-site meeting at Huber so we can get out and see whats going on in our community.

Lumsden updated members on the Southern Virginia Advanced Manufacturing Center (SVAMC)  the former Daystrom building  noting $7 million had gone into renovation, 90 percent grant funds.

New lighting, fire protection  were ready now for multiple manufacturers to occupy that building  that space is ideal for a number of prospective industries.

Lumsden added that, during the closed session, hed updated members on new business prospects, and the good news is that theres a lot of activity. Just last week, we met with several prospects, and while that doesnt guarantee anything, these were strong, quality prospects.

Lumsden also reported IDA had been meeting with representatives from the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, experts on international trade, marketing and expansion.

Again, members expounded on the value of networking.

They give us an opportunity to see how we are perceived in other parts of the state, said Pool. We can learn from them, see what strategies work in Fairfax County, what works in Halifax County and what could work in both.

The conversation returned to networking and modeling: Its good to see how and what the state does at a higher level and how they market that to prospects, added Pool. If they have a good thing, we can model it  its all about relationship-building.

The key to all this, responded Lumsden, is being prepared  VDEP is focused on bringing business to the state of Virginia, but we can learn from its successes.

Leonard moved to the meetings last piece of business with an admonition that the IDA must look to disposing of property of no value, while improving more usable properties.

After that, the authority can look at acquisitions that would add value to its portfolio.

At that point, Leonard introduced Jeremy Catron, Hubers manager, who opened his presentation with a history and overview of J.M. Huber Corporation and its four facilities, including the Huber Engineered Woods facility located in Crystal Hill, outside of Halifax.

Huber is a family-owned business, Catron told the group, five generations, working on the sixth. We do business in over 20 countries, and we have 4,000 employees across the globe.

Forbes magazine confirms the private family ownership, tracing the corporations genesis back to German immigrant Joseph Maria Huber. Huber founded an ink company in 1883 in New York City and rode the wave of a massive expansion in the media and advertisement business in the late 19th century.

Now in its sixth generation, adds Forbes, the Edison, New Jersey-based J.M. Huber Corp. had revenues of nearly $1.9 billion in 2013 and operates in 20 countries, in a broad range of industries including engineered materials, engineered wood, oral care and food chemicals and additives such as Xanthan gum and pectin. Two family members sit on the board.

Today, the J.M. Huber Corporation includes CP Kelco, Huber Engineered Materials, Huber Engineered Woods and Huber Resources, the last managing thousands of acres of timberland for third-party owners.

Huber Engineered Woods, a subsidiary of J.M. Huber Corporation, focuses exclusively on wood products  AdvanTech flooring and Zip products. In addition to its Virginia facility, Huber Engineered Woods has plants in Maine, Georgia, Tennessee and Oklahoma.

The Virginia facility, highly computerized, employs 150 workers from Halifax, Brookneal and Charlotte. The subsidiary procures timber within a 100-mile radius of Crystal Hill, supports replanting and sustainability initiatives and markets its wood products south to South Carolina, over to Tennessee, up to Ohio and on to New York all the way to Vermont.

Demand for wood engineered products, of course, depends on the housing industry.

The high point for that industry was 2005, said Catron. We had 2 million housing starts. Then, in 2009, housing starts plummeted. The average is about 1.5 million, and we think well be there again in about two years.

Huber owns 1,000 acres in Crystal Hill, with its plant occupying roughly 80 of those acres.

We built this plant for $100 million in 1994, today the same plant would cost $200+ million.

Catron also told IDA members his plant has benefited from its Halifax location: a local machine and tools grant operates as an incentive for capital expenditures, i.e., tools and machinery, and that money, said Catron, is reinvested in the process improvements.

A local job creation grant also has allowed Huber to hire 17 new employees since 2013, and Catron told IDA members we will receive incentives for those 17 employees every year for five years.

Should more new employees be hired at the Virginia facility, those same incentives would kick in for additional five-year spans.

These are both great programs weve taken advantage of by being in the Enterprise Zone, said Catron.

IDA Executive Director Leonard told Catron that Huber might soon be able to tap into larger state grants for property and improvement.

Bennett seconded the authoritys support for Huber saying, Were proud that youre here  not all manufacturers have made it, but you have.

Catron added that one of the few disadvantages Huber experienced from its Halifax location is the high cost of electricity  Huber is Mecklenburg Cooperatives biggest customer, Catron told IDA members.

This is not a low-cost utility zone  as you go further south, the Huber manager told the group, those utility costs go down.

Huber Engineered Woods has received recognition from OSHA for its safety initiatives (VPP or Volunteer Protection Program) and employee satisfaction  the turnover, said Catron, is very low.

IDA members finished the tour with smiles on their faces  the Huber wood products plant is hidden in a country landscape that in, late April, left visitors with a bright vision of where their economy might go with more Hubers steering the ship.
VANCOUVER, Apr 18, 2016 - DuSolo Fertilizers Inc. , (TSX VENTURE:DSF) ("DuSolo" or "the Company") is pleased to announce the results of its annual general meeting held today (the "Meeting").At the Meeting, all resolutions proposed in the Notice of Meeting and Information Circular mailed to shareholders on March 18 2016 were approved by the Company's shareholders. DuSolo Fertilizers Inc. is focused on developing a fully integrated process to produce phosphate based fertilizers within the Cerrado region of Brazil as part of a nationwide effort, incentivized by the government, to increase supply of domestically sourced fertilizers and achieve agricultural self sufficiency.On behalf of DuSolo Fertilizers Inc.Giles BaynhamChief Executive OfficeForward-looking statements: Certain information contained in this press release constitutes "forward-looking information", within the meaning of Canadian legislation. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur", "be achieved" or "has the potential to". Forward looking statements contained in this press release may include statements regarding the future operating or financial performance of DuSolo which involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties which may not prove to be accurate. Actual results and outcomes may differ materially from what is expressed or forecasted in these forward-looking statements. Such statements are qualified in their entirety by the inherent risks and uncertainties surrounding future expectations. Among those factors which could cause actual results to differ materially are the following: market conditions and other risk factors listed from time to time in our reports filed with Canadian securities regulators on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. The forward-looking statements included in this press release are made as of the date of this press release and DuSolo 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.Neither the TSX Venture Exchange Inc. nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange Inc.) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.Giles Baynham, Chief Executive Officer(604) 484 7122ir@dusolo.com
VANCOUVER, April 19, 2016 /CNW/ - Intact Gold Corp. (TSX-V: ITG) (FSE: 1A5) (the "Company" or "Intact Gold"), is pleased to announce that it has entered into an option agreement dated April 18, 2016 (the "Agreement") with Caprock Ventures Corp. ("Caprock") to acquire an undivided 100% interest in and to certain mineral properties, together with the surface rights, mineral rights, personal property and permits associated therewith (collectively, the "Guillet Property" or the "Property"), located five kilometres east of the town of Belleterre, Temiscamingue, Quebec.

The Property is comprised of 21 claims covering an area of approximately 600 hectares. The Guillet property covers part of a greenstone belt measuring 50 kilometres by 10 kilometres. The previous Belleterre mine, located fewer than two kilometres northwest of Guillet, produced 2.2 million tons at 10.7 grams per tonne gold (735,000 ounces of gold).

Previous work on the property culminated with a bulk sample taken in 2005-2006 from the Lake Expanse gold zone returned 11,538 tonnes of 3.28 g/t Au. In 2007, a resource estimate was produced and results were as follows:

Measured and indicated: 320,950 tonnes of 2.62 g/t Au;

Inferred: 76,570 tonnes of 2.31 g/t Au.

Closing of the Agreement is subject to a number of conditions, including the receipt of the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSX-V").

Anthony Jackson of Intact Gold comments: "Intact is excited to acquire an advanced Gold asset such as the Guillet Property. This acquisition falls in line with our current strategy of adding to our portfolio of advanced stage projects."

Agreement Terms

Intact Gold will have the option to acquire 100% of the Guillet Property in consideration for:

(a) payment to Caprock of an aggregate amount of $50,000 to be paid upon the following:



a. payment to Caprock of $25,000 upon signing of agreement;



b. payment to Caprock of $25,000 upon receipt of TSX-V approval;



(b) issuance to Caprock of 1,000,000 common shares of the Company (each, a "Share") upon receipt of TSX-V approval; and (c) Intact Gold must incur $500,000 in exploration expenditures over a period of three years from date of signing the agreement.





The Property is subject to a 0.5% net smelter royalty (the "Royalty") on future gold production which includes advance royalty payments of $25,000 annually on Dec. 31, beginning in 2020 to Caprock. The Company has the option at any time to purchase 0.5% of the Royalty on payment of $500,000 to Caprock. The original vendors of the property will retain a 3.5% NSR Royalty on the Guillet Property. Intact Gold will have the right to purchase the first 1% for $1.0 million, the second 1% for $1.5 million, and the third 1.0% for $2 million at any time.

Qualified Person - David Hladky, P. Geo., is the Qualified Person as defined in National Instrument 43-101, that has reviewed and approved the contents of this press release.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF INTACT GOLD CORP.

Per: Anthony Jackson, President and CEO

Disclaimer for Forward-Looking Information

Except for statements of historical fact, 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" occur. Forward-looking information in this press release includes, but is not limited to, statements regarding expectations of management regarding the acquisition of the Property. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Such forward-looking information is subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in the statements including, without limitation, the risks that the Company may not have the funds necessary to make its payments pursuant to the Agreement, that the TSX-V may not approve the transaction, and other factors beyond the control of the Company. Except as required by law, the Company expressly disclaims any obligation, and does not intend, to update any forward-looking information in this news release.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE Intact Gold Corp.
Major Drilling to drill 10,000 meters (33,000 feet)

RENO, NEVADA--(Marketwired - Apr 19, 2016) - NuLegacy Gold Corp. (TSX VENTURE:NUG)(OTCQX:NULGF) reports awarding a 10,000-meter (33,000 ft.) drilling contract for the 2016 Iceberg deposit exploration program to Major Drilling of Salt Lake City, Utah.

Starting in early May the majority of the multiphase program will focus on expanding the extent of the high-grade zones in the Iceberg deposit, with a sizable portion directed towards exploring other prospective Carlin-type gold systems on the property, principally the Avocado, VIO and Jasperoid Basin gold anomalies. The circa 40-hole program is scheduled for completion late August/early September.

The Iceberg is classic Carlin-type oxidized gold deposit extending along a 3,000-meter structural corridor of gold mineralization with an established exploration target of 90-110 million tonnes of 0.9 to 1.1 grams of gold per tonnei. Located in the Cortez gold-trend of Nevada, the Iceberg is on trendii with three of Barrick Gold's multi-million ounce gold deposits that are amongst its largest, lowest cost and politically safest mines in the world.iii

ON BEHALF OF NuLegacy Gold Corp.

James E Anderson, Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Roger Steininger, NuLegacy's chief operating officer is a Certified Professional Geologist (CPG 7417) and the qualified person as defined by NI 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects responsible for preparing and reviewing the scientific and technical information contained in this news release

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

This news release contains forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company. These forward-looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ materially from those expected. There are no known resources or reserves in the Iceberg deposit and the proposed exploration programs are exploratory searches for commercial bodies of ore. In addition, the presence of gold deposits on properties adjacent or in close proximity to the Iceberg Deposit is not necessarily indicative of the gold mineralization on the Iceberg Deposit. The forward-looking statements made in this news release are qualified by these cautionary statements and those in our continuous disclosure filings available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com including our annual management's discussion and analysis dated July 28, 2015 for the year ended March 31, 2015. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances save as required under applicable securities legislation.

i These figures are conceptual in nature and derived from a compilation of 149 historic and 34 NuLegacy drill holes in and around the Iceberg deposit. To date, there has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target delineating as a mineral resource.

ii The similarity and close proximity of these deposits in the Cortez Trend is not necessarily indicative of the gold mineralization in the Iceberg deposit.

iii As extracted from Barrick's Q4-2013 and Q1-2014 reports.
Toronto, Ontario (FSCwire) - California Gold Mining Inc. (California Gold or the Company) announces that a shareholder (the Subscriber) has agreed to a sale of 7,985,000 units of the Company (Swap Units) at a price of $ 0.05 per Swap Unit to an arms length institutional purchaser (the Swap Transaction). Each Swap Unit consists of one common share of the Company and one-half of common share purchase warrant (Warrant), with each whole Warrant entitling the holder thereof to acquire a further common share of the Company at a price of $0.10 for three years following the date of issuance, which is described further below. The purchase and sale of the above common shares was completed today through the facilities of the TSX Venture Exchange (TSX-V) in accordance with applicable rules and policies.

The proceeds of this sale will be used by the Subscriber to purchase an equivalent dollar amount of units (Subscribed Units) in a non-brokered private placement (the Offering). Each Subscribed Unit consists of one common share of the Company and one whole Warrant.

The transfer of the Warrants as part of the Swap Transaction will be completed pursuant to applicable prospectus exemptions following completion of the Offering.

The Company intends to use the net proceeds of the Offering to complete its Phase 3 drill program at its Fremont Project and for other general corporate purposes.

The Company will issue a further news release when it closes the Offering. The securities issued as part of the Offering, including the securities issuable on exercise of the Warrants, will be subject to a hold period that will expire four months following the date of issuance of the securities issued as part of the Offering.

About California Gold Mining Inc.

California Gold Mining Inc. is focused on developing its flagship Fremont gold project in Mariposa County, California. The project consists of a land package totaling 3,351 acres of historically producing gold mines. The Fremont Property lies within Californias prolific Mother Lode Gold Belt that has produced over 50 million oz of gold historically. The Company purchased the property in March 2013.

CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

This news release of California Gold contains statements that constitute forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause California Gold's actual results, performance or achievements, or developments in the industry to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words expects, plans, anticipates, believes, intends, estimates, projects, potential and similar expressions, or that events or conditions will, would, may, could or should occur. Forward-looking statements in this document include statements regarding completion of the Offering, anticipated use of proceeds from the Offering and anticipated completion of the Phase 3 drill program. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate. Actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements, and readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward looking statements. Any factor could cause actual results to differ materially from California Gold's expectations. California Gold undertakes no obligation to update these forward looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change, unless otherwise required by law.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

For further information contact:

Vishal Gupta

President & CEO

647-977-9267 x333

Website: www.caligold.ca

To view this press release as a PDF file, click onto the following link:public://news_release_pdf/californiagold04192016.pdfSource: California Gold Mining Inc. (TSX Venture:CGM, OTCQX:CFGMF) http://www.caligold.ca

Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com

Copyright  2016 Filing Services Canada Inc.
Pop-up to permanent: Ides in Collingwood. Photo: Josh Robenstone

Address 92 Smith Street Collingwood, Victoria 3066 View map Opening hours Wed-Sun 6pm-late Features Accepts bookings, Degustation, Events, Gluten-free options, Groups, Late night, Licensed, Vegetarian friendly, Wheelchair access Prices Expensive (mains over $40) Chef Peter Gunn Payments eftpos, AMEX, Visa, Mastercard

Last we visited Ides, we were elbowing into a packed-out Persillade and grateful for a seat. For 18 months, the pop-up by Attica sous chef Peter Gunn was the hottest ticket in town  for good reason. Gunn originally set out on a mission to test his own strengths outside the temple of native Australian cuisine that is Attica. In doing so, he started a tiny revolution.

The Kiwi chef, who is otherwise pretty hesitant to get whimsical, gathered about him a team of volunteers for monthly dinners where all lines were blurred. His motto was "In pursuit of creation, not perfection". Chefs served dishes. Diners were asked for critiques. It was fourth-wall-dismantling dining, and one of the most memorable experiences of 2015.

Now, with the backing of restaurant visionaries David Mackintosh and Peter Bartholomew (they who tapped MoVida's Frank Camorra, Rosa Mitchell and Lee Ho Fook's Victor Liong), Ides the pop-up has become Ides the Smith Street restaurant.

Tomato and olives. Photo: Josh Robenstone

Gunn has upped the comfort factor but he's kept that energy alive.

The old Lee Ho Fook site is unrecognisable. Luxe in all the right ways, it's a felt-panelled cocoon where glassware twinkles and a plating station draws the eye. For that you can thank Grant Cheyne, the Spice Temple Melbourne designer whose love of targeted lighting means everything beyond your leather-clad table vanishes into a smoky sea. It's mostly classic with a sharpened edge  a chip fryer portrait glows resplendent on a wall and Outkast is setting the pace.

Ides' manner of flipping the script on fine dining is subtle but astute. It's a tight six courses, plus bread. No secret amuse. No pre-pre-dessert petit fours. That's about two hours, and in 2016, that feels exactly enough.

Pineapple-melon and saffron white chocolate sauce.

That bread, malty and hot with a peanut butter-butter (your late-night shame brought to savoury life) arrives in the hands of a puff-chested chef. The chefs-as-waiters is a big thing here and it's a dorky-excellent touch.

Booze is the charge of Gunn's longtime ally Raffaele Mastrovincenzo who shows no less fondness here for the natural and cutting edge wines, sakes and craft beers, than he did at Kappo.

Gunn's plan to keep the energy high is to keep the menu evolving, so, while I can recommend the excellence of Jauma's peachy, lightly tingling Peek-a-Boo Pet Nat to start, your dishes are anyone's guess.

Panko crumbed confit chicken thigh.

Our opening gambit is destined for tweaking  a complex union of a goat's curd-filled fig razzed up with toasted hazelnuts, a savoury-sweet coriander-pear puree and smoked herring roe battles a mandarin oil frenemy.

But a pan-fried tranche of line-caught red gurnard is bold, and beautiful: a firm-fleshed thing tingling with a fiery pumpkin and chorizo sauce, atop toasty fushimi chillies, with soy bean garnish.

Gunn's broth work, a highlight of previous Ides pop-ups when he created a smoky, deep and complex consomme from barbecued fennel tonkotsu is evident again in a dark, peppery, sweet and acidic broth of charred-and-fresh carrot, poured table side around chickpeas, samphire and citrus-poached octopus. Doubly good with Mastrovincenzo's Ryan and the Beaster Bunny Evil Twin saison, a yeasty calming force.

Eagle-eyed eaters might wonder at the lack of saltbush and lemon myrtle. But if Gunn's time at Attica has imbued him with the qualities of leadership  and he's captaining what seems to be a happy crew  and a faith in bending the rules, his food philosophy is far from Shewry's.

The complexity of that fish yields to the armchair comfort of a luxurious chicken thigh: first given the confit treatment, skin on, then coated in panko crumbs and baked to give soft-as-butter flesh and a double crunch crust of crackling and crumb. Chestnut puree earths it while clove dusted kohlrabi is a crunchy, refreshing fascinator.

What Gunn and his team bring to the table is dynamic, risky dining. A wedge of pineapple-melon (all honeydew texture, with tropical funk) bejewelled with finger lime and a saffron white chocolate sauce is the antithesis of safe, and squarely divides the room. But who wants safe, when risky gifts us great?

THE LOWDOWN

Pro tip Sunday fundays are starting soon  one-day pop-up concepts in their own space (hello, hotel buffet day).

Go-to dish Charred carrot broth with octopus and chickpeas.

Like this? Another pop-up that's downed roots is team Nora, doing contemporary Thai. 156 Elgin Street, Carlton.

http://www.idesmelbourne.com.au/
The vegan 'Snickers' bar at Health Nuts' new cafe. Photo: Christopher Pearce

Hold the bourbon triple shot, glimpses of a post-lockout laws Kings Cross are surfacing and it is a sea of health shakes, vegan dishes and hot yoga. Health Nuts opened a store nine years ago selling vitamins to gym junkies, it has now opened a cafe selling organic, no carb sushi, vegan versions of popular chocolate bars and a green vegetable quiche.

"If you'd told me when we first moved into the area that I'd eventually do this sort of thing in the middle of Kings Cross I'd probably have laughed at you," says Health Nuts owner Elie Rochelle.

Rochelle is part of a new movement snapping up the casualties of the Cross area - in his case it's a space long unoccupied after a Japanese restaurant vacated - and argues the new style of resident moving to the area is helping drive demand for healthier product.

Elie Rochelle at his Health Nuts Cafe. Photo: Christopher Pearce

The former site of Bayswater Diner now mixes clinic and retail, and O Bar owner-chef Michael Moore once toyed with opening a cafe spin-off to his Blood Sugar bestseller in the neighbourhood. Over on Kings Cross Road English chef Tom Kime recently opened the healthy-leaning Ceru.

"We favour sustainable fish and have lots of vegetable dishes," Kime says. "People are much more aware of what's in food. It's a trend that's not going to go away."

4/82-94 Darlinghurst Road, Potts Point, facebook.com/healthnutspottspoint
Golden beetroot, goat's milk whey, celeriac leaf puree, saltbush and hazelnut. Photo: Kristoffer Paulsen

The art of playing host isn't lost on husband-and-wife team Nedim and Majda Rahmanovic, who open their new dining room, not coincidentally named Host, on Wednesday.

"In our group of friends we are always the ones who love having people over, hosting people, and we want to extend that here in Brunswick," says Majda.

The couple, both trained graphic designers, sold their tiny North Melbourne cafe, Twenty & Six Espresso, in mid-2015 to do something different, taking over a laneway site on Saxon Street, Brunswick, in October 2015.

The converted warehouse features striking timber-framed booths. Photo: Kristoffer Paulsen

The former warehouse space has been given the Rahmanovic touch: cosy booths framed in timber down one side of the long room; a communal and a handful of smaller tables down the other; and an open kitchen up the back.

All the furniture is by Melbourne-based studio Moda Piera, and the walls are framed with striking sketches and paintings by Sydney-based, New Zealand-born artist Simon Kennedy.

The couple has secured as head chef Florian Ribul, most recently at short-lived South Yarra venue Enquire Within.

Raw beef, oyster, saltbush, linseed and nori. Photo: Kristoffer Paulsen

Ribul has worked good stints at Fitzroy's Hammer & Tong and The Clove Club in London. He's been asked to create a "contemporary Australian menu that reflects the eclectic nature of Brunswick", says Nedim.

Expect dishes such as flame-grilled mackerel with shiitake and daikon; raw beef, oyster and saltbush with linseed; and braised short ribs with onion, peppers and kohlrabi.

The drinks list focuses on drops made with minimal intervention from small boutique winemakers and brewers.

Open Wed-Thu 5pm-11pm; Fri-Sun 11am-11pm.

4 Saxon Street, Brunswick; 9023 5317
Vino by the beach: Russell Beard promises coffee by day, wine out the back. Photo: Danielle Smith

Eastern-suburb oenophiles are finally getting a little rub in an area increasingly obsessed by the coffee bean. Russell Beard, highly credentialled in caffeine circles for his part in the success of Reuben Hills and Paramount Coffee Project, has a mix of caffeine and vino in his sights with a new Bondi Beach venture. Snapping up Sensory Lab on Hall Street and renaming it Bondi Hall, Beard and business partner Mark Dundon from Seven Seeds plan to open a wine store later this year. "It'll be coffee during the day and a wine store at the back," Beard says. "Wines with a small run. We're not wine professionals, but I love it and I'm interested."

Zetland quaffers will also have added reason to shuffle to the Prince Wine Store. In early July it'll open its own wine bar. Danielle Rensonnet, Danielle Rensonnet, head chef of the Prince's wine bar in Melbourne, is reported to be responsible for overseeing the Sydney menu.
Yfat Yossifor / Standard-Times Visitors listen to Roger Allen, director of the Old Chicken Farm Art Center, talk about technique Monday in the San Angelo National Ceramic Competition at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, 1 Love St.

SHARE Yfat Yossifor / Standard-Times Roger Allen, director of the Old Chicken Farm Art Center, points out details about technique Monday, April 18, in the San Angelo National Ceramic Competition at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, 1 Love St. Yfat Yossifor / Standard-Times Pat Johnson from Fayetteville talks about her artwork in the San Angelo National Ceramic Competition Monday, April 18, at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, 1 Love St. Yfat Yossifor / Standard-Times Visitors listen to Roger Allen, director of the Old Chicken Farm Art Center, talk about technique Monday, April 18, in the San Angelo National Ceramic Competition at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, 1 Love St. Yfat Yossifor / Standard-Times Laura Huckaby, assistant director, talks about displaying the artwork featured in the San Angelo National Ceramic Competition at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Art.

By Yfat Yossifor, yfat.yossifor@gosanangelo.com /

Roger Allen, director of the Old Chicken Farm Art Center, bent down close to a sculpture to examine its surface.

About 15 people around him listened as he talked about the techniques and styles of artwork featured in the 21st San Angelo National Ceramic Competition at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, 1 Love St.

The Walk-Talk concluded the weekend-long events surrounding the competition, which brought more than 100 out-of-towners to the city, said Laura Huckaby, the museum's assistant director.

"It's an informal discussion about style and technique," Huckaby said. "Allen will share his expertise and highlight the pieces that stand out to him."

"This weekend is a big deal for the museum, and we are happy to bring it to the community," she said. "We had lots of people attend, and I think everyone had a good time."

About 500 people attended Friday's opening night.

"It's a chance to really examine technique," Allen said. "I don't know what the artists were thinking but I can talk about how its done, why this is rough and that's shiny and what kind of glaze gives a certain effect."

John and Darlene Williams from Dallas participated in Monday's walk. John Williams jumped in and explained technique along with Allen.

Williams talked about depth created by larger sized designs with a piece.

"It's much more complicated than most people think when looking at it casually," he said.

Christy Johnson, the juror of the show, was there as well. She is a curator and artist from Southern California.

"It's a great show, it's very well juried and a wide-range of styles," Allen said. "I wouldn't want to have her job. She had to look through more than 1,100 images."

Allen said it's hard as an artist to judge a show because it's easy to pick personal preferences.

Some of the techniques Allen discussed included slip casting where liquid clay is poured into a mold, sandblasting and burnishing.

The artwork will remain at the museum through June 26, 2016.
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Specialist collects data on treatments

By Marie Mccullough, The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)

Nineteen years ago, Elyce Cardonick got a call about a newly diagnosed lymphoma patient whose fast-growing chest tumor was causing severe breathing problems.

Phyllis Markoff underwent treatment before and after she had her son, Jacob, now 9.

She was 13 weeks pregnant and had rejected her oncologist's advice to abort before starting toxic chemotherapy.

Cardonick, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist then at Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, found that little was known about treating cancer during pregnancy. The issue became her calling, inspiring her to create the Pregnancy and Cancer Registry to collect data about treatment and long-term results for mothers and children.

Today, the registry includes nearly 400 women who had 23 types of malignancy, including colon, ovarian and lung cancer. Ninety-five percent of them gave birth and, as Cardonick has published, the results are both reassuring and surprising: Effective cancer treatment need not compromise the health of an unborn child.

A wall of her office at Rowan University's Cooper Medical School in Camden is crammed with photographs of smiling families who turned to her for guidance, some from as far away as Thailand. The gallery includes the lymphoma patient, Patty Sosnader of Worcester, Pennsylvania, and her son, Brenden, who will soon be in college.

"This wall inspires me every day," Cardonick said.

Based on the few epidemiological studies of cancer in pregnancy, it is uncommon, affecting perhaps 4,000 women a year in the United States. Obstetricians and oncologists may see only a case or two in a career, which is one reason Cardonick's pre-Internet idea for a registry faced considerable skepticism.

Logically, she said, cancer treatment seems "in conflict with the interest of the developing fetus." Traditional chemotherapy attacks fast-multiplying cells, a characteristic of both cancer and a fetus. Radiation damages cellular DNA; for the fetus, ionizing rays could mean deformity, brain damage, or an increased risk of leukemia.

Even so, when Cardonick scoured the medical literature in 1997, she found a small but heartening trove of data: Agustin Aviles, an oncologist in Mexico City, had treated dozens of pregnant women for blood cancers, with remarkably good outcomes. Cardonick also spent a month studying with a University of Pennsylvania breast cancer specialist, because breast cancer is the most common malignancy in pregnancy. It affected more than half the registry patients, and its incidence is expected to increase as more women delay childbirth.

Cardonick deduced that judicious use of chemotherapy, and even of low-dose diagnostic radiation, was relatively safe. The risks depended on many factors. Were the drug molecules small enough to penetrate the placenta? How did the drug work? Could the fetus be shielded from the maternal radiation? And, most of all, what was the stage of pregnancy? A fetus is most vulnerable in the first 14 weeks, when the organs are forming, so the first trimester was the riskiest.

"One drug we tend to avoid is methotrexate," which interferes with a vitamin vital to brain and spinal cord formation, Cardonick said. "But even that has been safely used in the second trimester."

Newer drugs that target a specific molecular driver of cancer pose particular problems. Some are so novel that their fetal effects can't be predicted, while others are clearly too risky. Avastin, for example, disrupts the formation of blood vessels, which is vital to placental and fetal development.

In 2000, Cardonick found a unique ally, Hope for Two. The online support group had recently been founded by Patty Murray of suburban Buffalo, New York, who had breast cancer before delivering a healthy son. The Hope for Two website became a source of referrals to the Pregnancy and Cancer Registry.

Cardonick believes that abortion is the woman's choice. Of 90 women in the registry whose doctors recommended termination, 20 took that option, in most cases because first-trimester treatment was deemed essential for the woman and too perilous for the fetus.

For women who plan to proceed with treatment, Cardonick stresses that the data show they should tailor it  not lessen or postpone it until delivery  to protect their offspring. While treatment doesn't guarantee long-term survival (several women in the registry have died of their cancer), she has found no evidence that it impairs children's cognitive or general development.

In 2004, Cardonick published one of a series of reassuring studies in the journal Lancet Oncology. She drew on the registry data submitted annually by women and their obstetricians, oncologists and pediatricians.

Six thousand miles away at University Hospitals Leuven in Belgium, gynecological oncologist Frederic Amant thought that Cardonick's findings reinforced his decision to subspecialize in a fairly obscure area  cancer in pregnancy.

"She was an expert before my time. She had a landmark publication  and I used it when I started with this project," he said.

Amant now has a large research group underwritten by big funders, including his university, the Belgian government and a European institute. He also founded the International Network on Cancer, Infertility and Pregnancy  of which Cardonick is a member.

Cardonick, in contrast, has struggled to find money for database management, and for developmental testing of children in her most recent study, published last year. Cooper and a few small charities have helped, but she has struck out with federal grants and big cancer philanthropies.

"I need to find a benefactor," Cardonick said. "But I'll continue to do this on my own. It's a labor of love."
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High school students gain college edge

By Ami Mizell-Flint

Students still have time to register for dual credit classes through Angelo State University or Howard College, provided they have completed all necessary requirements:

Visit high school counselor

Complete application

Admissions testing in place

Have scores needed for TAKS, and Accuplacer, ACT or SAT, depending on school

Space is available in desired classes

Costs for academic dual credit classes:

ASU: $250; $125 for students in distinguished scholar bracket (based on ACT/SAT scores, not high school graduation requirements)

Howard: $125 per three-hour class, $200 per six hours concurrently. Reduced fee for students who qualify for free and reduced lunch for Howard College classes.

CTE classes: No tuition cost.

280

Central High School students in dual credit classes

61

Lake View High School students in dual-credit classes

280

Central students in Advanced Placement classes

66

Lake View students in AP classes

91

Students in combined dual-credit/AP classes, offered only at Lake View

600

SAISD students enrolled at Howard College in 2011-2012 school year

As a student in high school, Joy Gay took a dual-credit accounting class, which eventually led to an accounting degree at Angelo State University.

She then got her teaching certificate and became a business education teacher.

Now the career and technical education coordinator for San Angelo ISD, Gay oversees about 600 students taking the same types of career and technical education classes that she says molded her life.

Dual-credit classes ? CTE classes and core curriculum classes in English, science, social studies and math ? allow students to earn college credits while in high school.

Students save time and money with dual-credit classes, said Stacie Riddle, lead counselor for Lake View High School.

"Dual-credit classes get the students engaged and understanding the college culture and gets them identified with a college," Howard College San Angelo Provost LeAnne Byrd said.

SAISD students have the option of taking classes on their high school campuses, through Howard College at the West Texas Training Center or at Angelo State University, depending on the classes they choose.

The CTE classes enable students to work toward learning a marketable skill they can use after high school graduation, Byrd said, "and if they are really focused, they can graduate (from high school) with an associate degree."

Howard College offers classes from cosmetology to welding, Byrd said, in 24 areas including criminal justice, business, auto body, computers, and drafting, to students in SAISD and surrounding school districts.

"The key is getting them turned on to something, to get these kids to try it," Gay said.

The school district tries to expose students to as many classes as possible to educate them about the kinds of opportunities available.

"Kids are kind of tuned into career fields that they've heard about," she said. "We want to get them channeled into technical classes while they're in high school and it doesn't cost them anything."

For many students, the ability to take dual-credit classes helps them to get a head start on their college degree. Students have the option of taking either dual-credit or advanced placement in core curriculum classes to earn credits for both high school and college at the same time.

Students taking dual-credit classes earn college credits just by passing the class, but in AP classes they must pass an exam at the end of the course to earn college credits.

"Both are fabulous programs," said Ann Hardigree, lead counselor at Central High School. "It's a personal decision for the students and family to make."

Core curriculum classes are offered by ASU and Howard.

"Our method of delivery is in the classroom" on ASU's campus, said Lorri Morris, coordinator of testing and early enrollment initiatives at ASU.

While that may present a problem for some students, Morris said the flip side is that students attending classes on the ASU campus are getting the "true college experience."

"They know the expectations of the professors and what is needed to study for exams," she said.

To alleviate the transportation issue, buses run from both high schools during the school year for students who need transportation for early classes.

Core curriculum dual-credit classes come with a tuition cost, although at a reduced rate from what is charged to regular students at either Howard or ASU.

No costs are incurred to take AP classes, but students pay a fee to take the AP test at the end of the school year. Students only earn college credits if they score a score of three, four, or five, out of a possible five points on the exam.

Some colleges require a score of four or higher to earn credits, while others give more credits for higher AP test scores.

The nationally standardized AP program is "an excellent program for students," Hardigree said.

While dual-credit classes transfer to every state school in Texas, out-of-state and some private schools may not accept the credits.

"Always check with the school to see what they accept," Hardigree said.

While AP credits are accepted at universities and colleges nationally, the credits may not transfer exactly as intended, said Toni Riley, associate director of recruitment for undergraduate studies at Texas Tech University.

For example, if a student takes dual-credit or AP college algebra, then attends the College of Business at Texas Tech, they would need business math instead, so the college algebra course would be counted as an elective.

After graduating from Central High School in 2011, Lisa Simpson started at Texas Christian University as a sophomore, with more than 30 credits toward her college degree.

"I took one dual-credit class, but I don't get credit for it here ? it counts as an elective," Simpson said.

While a score of a three is required to pass the AP test, TCU requires a four or higher, she said.

"Before I applied at schools, I looked at what credits I would get for my AP scores," she said."It's always good to check with different universities and what they offer," Riley said. "There are different requirements when it comes to testing and credit."

Students receiving college credits while in high school is becoming more common, Riley said, and is mostly driven by finances and the lower cost of both options.

"It also allows them to shave off time from their college careers," Riley said.

But that does not apply to students who plan to enter medical school. They must complete four years at Texas Tech.

"A lot of that is maturity level," she said. "We don't want them entering medical school at such a young age."

While earning credits before college is more affordable, the disadvantage of earning too many college credits is the possibility of students missing out on a true college experience, Riley said.

"Everything gets accelerated ? students have to think about things such as study abroad and internships much earlier," she said. "Students need to ask themselves, 'Do I really want to get that many hours before coming to a four-year campus?' "

While students have goals of saving time and money while earning college credits, Joy Gay said the school district's goal is to provide students with knowledge to make wise career decisions.

"The hardest thing you have to decide is what you want to do for the rest of your life, and knowing what direction you're headed is half the battle," she said. "Our quest is to keep the kids informed, and to give them every opportunity to get them ready."
Some of the people waiting to enter Washington, D.C.'s central library are homeless. A growing number of public libraries are trying to do more to help them. (Sophie Quinton/Pew Charitable Trusts)

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Buildings safe, open for long hours

By Sophie Quinton, Stateline.org (TNS)

WASHINGTON  Every weekday morning, people line up outside the central library in the nations capital and wait for it to open. On a recent Monday, about two dozen people, some carrying shopping bags or large backpacks, clustered around the entrance. At 9:30 sharp, the doors opened and they trooped in.

Public libraries have long been havens for people with nowhere else to go. Now, a growing number of library systems are adding services for patrons who are homeless, hungry, or suffering from drug addiction or mental illness. For the District of Columbia, that means hiring a social worker, partnering with nonprofits and organizing social hours.

The library can be part of the citys efforts to reduce homelessness, said Jean Badalamenti, the social worker for the system here. I see the library as playing a role in that, since this is where people are, she said.

Libraries in the Internet age offer more than books and computer access. On a typical day, Washingtons central library, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, less than a mile from the White House, hosts all types of events, from free tax preparation assistance for adults to poetry workshops for teens.

Increasingly, public libraries also are providing social services, such as serving children free lunches during the summer, said Sari Feldman, president of the American Library Association. Reaching out to patrons who dont have a safe place to sleep at night is part of that trend.

Libraries are safe, open for long hours, and offer everything from public bathrooms to a place for people to search for online job listings. I think libraries are fully equipped and ready to address community needs, and this is another community need, Feldman said.

Homelessness has fallen nationally since 2007. But in big cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Washington, the numbers keep rising, according to the latest federal statistics. One in a hundred Washington residents is homeless, according to the nonprofit Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments latest tally, and the homeless population has increased 11 percent since 2011.

Public libraries dont track patrons housing status, and librarians say theres no way to tell whether someone lacks housing just by looking at them. But many library regulars in low-income neighborhoods and central cities dont have a home or a job to go to.

Some patrons who lack housing also struggle with mental illness or addiction, and need more than a quiet place to study or read. They might have breakdowns in the reading room, start fights in the lobby or sneak into the bathroom to use drugs.

During the recession, behavioral incidents spiked in the main branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library, said Tommy Hamby, the librarys adult services coordinator. We saw a lot of what our manager called new homeless,  he said: panicked people who had just lost their homes and were in crisis mode.

Public libraries have expanded services in a number of ways. San Francisco was the first to hire a social worker, in 2009. Washington and Denver have followed suit. The Dallas Public Library has used grant money to station two AmeriCorps volunteers behind a help desk  as well as answering questions, they might help proofread resumes or help with food stamp applications  and to hire someone who refers patrons to social services.

In 2012, the Salt Lake City Public Library began stationing three outreach workers from Volunteers of America, Utah, a nonprofit, at its main branch. When that happened, it really, fundamentally changed the way we engaged with our patrons, Hamby said.

The outreach workers were trained to work with people experiencing mental illness, addiction and homelessness. They do everything from giving directions to nearby food banks to escorting victims of domestic violence to battered womens shelters and helping patrons get state ID cards. I helped a lady get a divorce decree once, said Ethan Sellers, who leads the Volunteers of America library team.

They also can step in to calm people in crisis and have trained library staff to do the same. Our police calls went down dramatically, our security calls dropped dramatically, Hamby said.

Effective programs also involve a philosophical shift. One of the first things the Dallas library did, for instance, was to require staff to take turns greeting all patrons at the door. Treating homeless people with respect was the first step, said Mary Jo Giudice, the library director.

Joe Borrego first walked into the Dallas library two Thanksgivings ago. Originally from South Dakota, he had lost his job in the oil fields, then fallen out with his brother and lost a place to stay.

A pamphlet distributed by the library help desk helped him figure out the basics, such as where to find food. But he says that encouragement from library staff did more to get his life back on track. Without that additional push, Id probably still be sitting there on the homeless side of things, Borrego, 37, said.

He started attending coffee hours the library arranges to help regular patrons and staff get to know each other. A lifelong guitar player, he started taking piano lessons  one of the arts classes the library introduced based on feedback from coffee hour attendees, most of whom are homeless.

Staff members encouraged him to show off his guitar skills at open mic nights around the city and to spend his nights at the Bridge, a homeless shelter and recovery program, rather than on the street.

Borrego said that the activities forced him to socialize and have faith in people again. Hes now working as a busker, playing guitar on street corners and earning enough money to pay rent on a shared apartment.

Washingtons library introduced coffee hours inspired by Dallas model in November. And San Franciscos library has found another way to welcome homeless patrons: by hiring them. Five people who are working their way out of homelessness now make rounds of the building, offering advice to their peers and helping enforce library rules.

Not every person who is homeless wants help. Some Dallas library patrons who are homeless mock the librarys efforts, Borrego said. And not every library can afford to hire a social worker, although most can bring in local community organizations for occasional workshops and events.

Libraries also have to contend with how the presence of down-and-out people can make some more affluent patrons uncomfortable. Take this online review of the Salt Lake City Public Librarys main branch, from a woman called Shauna: I dont feel comfortable walking outside by myself, especially at night, because of beggars and homeless people.

The Salt Lake library raised some eyebrows when, in 2014, it briefly considered staying open 24 hours a day to give residents a safe haven. Why not improve existing services for the homeless and return the downtown library to taxpayers, one Salt Lake Tribune reader commented. The idea was eventually rejected as too costly.

When Salt Lakes librarians hear those kinds of complaints they explain that libraries are open to everyone, including people who dont have a home, Hamby said.

Some patrons conflate homelessness with other issues, Dallas Giudice said. The people who live downtown are constantly accosted by people panhandling  which is illegal in Dallas. But thats not something that happens in the library, and street beggars arent necessarily homeless.

The Dallas library had a daylong forum for area residents, business owners and patrons experiencing homelessness last May and will have another, focused on mental illness, this year.

Libraries do have codes of conduct that allow them to temporarily eject or suspend patrons for minor offenses, such as falling asleep or smelling bad, and to ban them for longer periods for serious offenses, such as doing drugs.

But public libraries are public spaces, and library staff members like Washingtons Badalamenti want to preserve that. The public library is one of the last places where people from all different backgrounds can be together, she said.

At the end of this year, Washingtons central library will shut its doors for a major renovation. Its unclear where many patrons will go during the three-year overhaul  or where city vans that transport people downtown from far-flung homeless shelters will stop.

The librarys jutting upper floors create a covered, outdoor space thats a perfect drop-off point. From here, homeless people can easily fan out across the city in search of free meals, some money or their case workers.

Families can stay in Washingtons homeless shelters 24 hours a day, and the city maintains a drop-in day center for individuals in the Northeast of the city, near the National Arboretum. There isnt a plan to open more such day centers, said Dora Taylor, public information officer for the Department of Human Services.
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CHICAGO  We've heard for years that when it comes to African-Americans, Hispanics and low-income minority communities in general, expectations for academic achievement are low.

Indeed, the Center for American Progress found in 2014 that 10th-grade teachers thought that African-American students were 47 percent, and Hispanic students were 42 percent, less likely to graduate college than white students.

But parents and families of these students disagree. They want public schools to be rigorous and to set high expectations for their children.

According to a new nationwide survey conducted by the Leadership Conference Education Fund on the attitudes and aspirations of African-American and Hispanic parents, a third of African-Americans and a quarter of Latinos do not believe that the nation's schools are really trying to educate low-income students in their communities.

This belief goes hand in hand with these parents' certainty that their students should be challenged more in school than they currently are to help ensure they are successful later in life.

This could be a potentially groundbreaking insight if we can get it into the heads of teachers.

You see, educators insist they have a particularly difficult time teaching low-income and minority students because these kids tend to show up in classrooms lacking the fundamentals of a stable home  reliable schedules, quiet places to study, nutritious meals, enough sleep, the ability to control impulses  that set them up for success in the classroom

If a child doesn't do homework and does not participate constructively in class or show the adults in school respect  perhaps because the child does not have the basic routines and resources a college-educated teacher might expect at home  it becomes easy for teachers to believe that his or her parent must not care about the child's education.

According to Wade Henderson, the Education Fund's president, not only are minority parents (which his group calls "new majority parents," since students of color are the new majority in schools) highly interested in their children's education, they are "a sophisticated group of respondents who are savvy consumers of public education, want more funding for schools and more rigor for their kids."

Interestingly, though one might have expected such a survey to confirm that African-American and Hispanic parents prioritize racial issues at school  due to news headlines about violence in schools and the school-to-prison pipeline  the parents who responded actually listed good teachers as the No. 1 important quality, by far, of a great school. Good core curricula and parental involvement rounded out the top three.

Not to say that diversity is completely unimportant to these families  it is in the eighth spot on a list of nine factors for ensuring great schools  but it certainly takes a back seat to the same qualities that white parents expect from their schools: adequate funding, low class size and high standards.

A full 90 percent of both African-American and Latino parents said that they believe expectations for low-income students should be either the same or higher than those of other students.

And both minority groups take personal responsibility quite seriously, saying that when low-income students succeed, it is mostly because of the support they receive at home. Their student's own hard work is seen as the next biggest reason, while few parents cited schools as the driving factor in a low-income student's success.

This is, potentially, a revelation for school systems, administrators and teachers who have for years equated poor educational outcomes for students with a lax attitude at home about academic potential.

At a bare minimum, these findings should provide education policymakers a new lens through which to view low-income and minority students: Don't underestimate them  and don't expect less of their parents and families, either.

If schools endeavor to push these kids harder and expect them to achieve on par with their white peers, they are likely to find that parents, too, will rise to the challenge of helping their students succeed.

Esther Cepeda is a Washington Post columnist. Contact her at estherjcepeda@washpost.com.
When the Valley Springs Manor assisted living facility in California closed with virtually no warning back in 2014, as many as 19 sick and bedridden residents were left alone inside. A cook and janitor herocially stayed behind to help them until they could be relocated. But the event prompted California lawmakers to pass the Residential Care for the Elderly Act in September 2014, which expands regulations that a long-term facility must meet.Regulations like California's are rare, and if they do exist, advocates say they're simply not good enough. Fifteen states, for instance, dont require an administrator to have a high school diploma, and eight states either dont require any routine inspections or require them every few years. Furthermore, there is no federal oversight of assisted living facilities, despite the fact that some take Medicaid.Prior to the Residential Care for the Elderly Act, California only required an inspection every five years. Even then, many facilities would go uninspected because the law didnt have any teeth to it, said Pat McGinnis, executive director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.The new regulations change that. In addition to increasing inspections, they prevent past facility offenders from opening a new facility, increase training requirements and create a bill of rights for residents, among other things.Assisted living facilities have become popular alternatives to nursing homes in recent years because they tend to offer more freedom. Nursing homes require round-the-clock nursing care, whereas assisted living facilities have aids on hand to help where needed.The increased popularity has brought more calls for regulation, particularly to deal with facility closures. Last year, a facility in Salinas, Calif., was forced to close after 224 pages of complaints led inspectors to a bed-bug infested home with spoiled food.There isnt any data on just how many assisted living facilities close within a given year, but advocates say it happens regularly. The incident in Salinas is a special case, but its not uncommon for an assisted living facility to close for other reasons -- like foreclosure on the property or because the administrator just wants to move on, said Mike Connors, an advocate with the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.Every state has a long-term care ombudsmen tasked with making sure that residents have enough notice when a closure happens -- typically 60 days -- and that they are transferred to another facility. The process can take months and can lead to other problems, such as transfer trauma. Its stressful for anyone when youre forced to move. People in assisted living facilities are often struggling with many issues, so its even more disorientating. It sets people back and its a real problem, said Eric Carlson, directing attorney for Justice in Aging.Cynthia Rudder, project director for the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, is currently working on a report that looks at exactly how common nursing home closures are and how states can best handle them. It will be released in a few months, but preliminary findings call for extra measures such as requiring states to have a closure plan, intervening when a facility is at risk for closure and letting residents visit a facility before moving them. We need to hold facilities accountable early on. If all were doing is fining them when something goes wrong, what incentive does that give them to change? Rudder said.While the federal government has never given any indication that it would step in and create regulations for assisted living facilities, advocates worry that the piecemeal regulations among state just isnt sustainable. I feel that the bubble will burst if there isnt some sort of federal oversight eventually. Because at the state level, its a disaster waiting to happen, Rudder said.
Deadly Outbreaks

States Insist on Funding

Industry Concerns

With the most extensive food safety regulations in history set to take effect soon, state agriculture officials across the country are preparing to enforce the federal law, but say their ability to inspect farms and enforce the new standards depends on the receipt of promised federal funds.The law  which Congress approved in 2011 following several high-profile outbreaks of foodborne illnesses, linked to contaminated spinach, tomatoes and peanut products  comes at a time when demand for fresh vegetables is increasing. And it marks a shift in focus for the nations food safety system, from containing foodborne illnesses once they occur to preventing those outbreaks in the first place.It gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration new authority to regulate the production of fresh fruit and vegetables. It also imposes the same food safety standards on imports as it does on domestic foods, and includes provisions to create a more integrated food safety system across all levels of government  federal, state and local.The law, known as the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and set to take effect gradually through 2020, applies to all farms except meat, poultry and egg producers. Farms that have less than $500,000 in annual sales are not covered, although their buyers may insist that they adhere to the same standards.And the FDA reserves a key role for states in ensuring that farmers comply with new standards for water quality, sanitation, the handling and composition of compost, and worker training and hygiene. That means on-site inspections and laboratory testing water used in irrigation and soil used in planting.State agriculture and public health personnel are the ones who have built relationships with and knowledge of local farming communities and practices and can often deliver oversight most efficiently, top FDA officials wrote last month. But almost all states will have to build produce safety programs largely or completely from scratch. We want to rely on them, not only to deliver education and technical assistance, but also to provide ongoing compliance support and oversight.Several states that produce little of the fresh fruit and vegetables covered by the law  states such as Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming  are expected to opt out, leaving that work to federal authorities. But Bob Ehart, a senior policy and science adviser of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), which has worked closely with the FDA, said that most states, particularly those with extensive food production, seem likely to work with the federal government to carry out the law. The largest producers of fruits and vegetables are California, Florida and Washington.Under the law, the federal government is to pay for those new state activities. Several state agriculture departments say its too soon to know how much it will cost them. But many are now preparing applications to the FDA, seeking a share of the $19 million that Congress set aside in 2016 to help states determine what they need to do to help enforce the law, including adopting new state laws or regulations, and identify the farms that it will cover.The new food safety push comes as the federal government is encouraging Americans to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables, and consumers are following that advice.But while the federal government and states have long regulated some areas of food production and handling, such as food processing and animal feed, fresh fruit and vegetable growers have largely been left to their own devices.Several lethal outbreaks of foodborne illnesses convinced lawmakers in both parties, as well as food industry groups and public health advocacy organizations, that the U.S. food safety system was antiquated and ill-equipped to prevent future outbreaks, Ehart said. There was a recognition that we needed to be preventive. We need people to produce food, but we need them to make it safe.While most food contamination is thought to occur on farms, it also occurs during transport, packaging and handling by wholesalers and grocers.The results can be deadly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 48 million Americans get sick from foodborne illnesses every year; 128,000 of them require hospitalization; and 3,000 die. The annual cost of those foodborne illnesses is $15.5 billion, according to an estimate by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.States that choose to participate must decide exactly what role they wish to play, which could include training farmers in the new law and conducting on-site inspections and laboratory testing, as well as determining which state agencies should have responsibility for that work. They must also enact laws or write policies that authorize that role and enable the state to apply for or spend the federal funds. And they must determine which farms in their states are subject to the law, which in turn will determine how many people will be needed to enforce it.But states have been clear about one thing: They wont be doing this work unless the feds provide the resources to do it, said Katy Coba, director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture. We dont have the funds to do this work.Joe Reardon, the North Carolina Department of Agriculture assistant commissioner for consumer protection, agreed. He expects many states to increase their own expenditures on food safety, but its equally true that the states have made it clear to the FDA that they will expect additional funding from the federal government.Food safety and consumer groups, as well as other organizations, including The Pew Charitable Trusts, have called for full funding of the law. (Pew also funds Stateline.)President Barack Obamas 2017 budget calls for another $11 million for the states to begin to implement it. NASDA has asked for more  $100 million  and the U.S. House and Senate are considering proposals to increase the contribution to the states. What were hearing from our members is that we cant implement it until we have federal funding and the day we dont have the funding we need we will give the whole job back to the FDA, Ehart said.For now, Reardon said he thinks most states will work with the federal government on the law. We anticipate a majority if not all states will adopt laws or regulations with the understanding that there will be adequate funding from the federal government.But there may be a few exceptions. A Montana or Wyoming or North Dakota doesnt have a lot of produce farms and may think its not worth going through the process of setting up [state] laws so they can enforce FSMA, said Jeff Farrar, the FDAs director of intergovernmental affairs and partnerships in the office of foods and veterinary medicine. In such cases, the federal government will do inspections and enforcement itself.The food industry has largely supported the law. They take a lot of pride in the product they are growing and they dont want someone to get sick from it, Coba, the Oregon agriculture director, said.And the industry understands they are going to sink or swim by their weakest members, said Jamie Clover Adams, director of the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.In Michigan, tomato growers saw their sales suffer in 2008 after a bad outbreak of salmonella was traced back to tomatoes grown in the Southwest U.S., Adams said. Similarly, if an outbreak occurs in a particular name brand product  for instance a brand of peanut butter  consumers will avoid all peanut butter rather than just that brand, she said.But large producers were upset that smaller farms were exempted from the law. They also pushed to ensure that food imports face the same standards as those applied domestically.Many of the legislators we talked to said one of the reasons they voted for [FSMA] is that it required a level playing field for international growers and domestic growers, Farrar said.And the industry has tried to shape the FDA rules that will provide specifics on the law and how it will be enforced, said Roland McReynolds, executive director with Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, a nonprofit that represents farmers and food businesses in the Carolinas.Those rules could, for example, tell farmers how often they need to submit water samples for testing, the type of compounds that can be used to clean workers toilets, and what constitutes adequate cleanliness.For farmers, those specifics translate into costs but also choices in what types of crops they choose to grow. There is a lot of area of concern where rubber meets the road on this, McReynolds said.
something wasnt right about the companies doing business with Portland, Ore. As the citys ombudsman, Sollinger had for some time been hearing from business owners about fraud in the citys minority- and women-owned contracting program. But it wasnt until she received a specific complaint in 2013 -- about a certified minority-owned construction firm doing work for Portlands housing authority -- that she decided to take action. According to the complaint, the firm was merely acting as a pass-through, winning valuable city contracts and then subcontracting the work out to nonminority companies.Like many cities and states, Portland has a program allowing it to give special consideration to women- and minority-owned companies when handing out government contracts. The goal, of course, is to help support traditionally disadvantaged companies by giving them a leg up. But as Sollinger began to discover, the city wasnt necessarily helping the firms it thought it was.When she first started looking into the housing contract complaint, she wasnt sure where to turn. As ombudsman, the most I can really do is make recommendations, she says. But even still, I reached a lot of dead ends. According to state law, the city of Portland wasnt allowed to take action against minority-owned firms it believed to be fraudulent; those complaints had to be referred to the state. But Sollinger says the state Office of Minority, Women and Emerging Small Businesses initially shrugged her off. So she referred the case to the Oregon Department of Justice, where the investigation continued for nearly two years. Ultimately, the contracting firm was forced to relinquish its minority certification and pay $15,000 to the state. State legislators took an interest in the issue, and last year passed legislation allowing all public agencies in the state to conduct their own investigations into future allegations of minority contract fraud.The fact is, says Sollinger, its not hard to figure out whos actually doing the work on contracts like these. Simple city inspections to make sure the awarded company is showing up to perform the job would have caught past violators. But cities and states across the country are struggling to provide sufficient oversight when it comes to minority- and women-owned firms, also known as disadvantaged business enterprises, or DBEs. As a result, much of the money thats targeted to help these businesses doesnt really go where governments want it to.Its a problem thats shown up all over the place. In Louisville, Ky., the metro sewer district banned two minority businesses from receiving future contracts after it was discovered that they were subcontracting with nonminority-owned businesses. An audit in Pittsburgh found the city didnt even have a way to track how much work was going to DBEs. The city of Denver has also been dealt a blow by contracting scandals in recent years. In 2014, the city proudly touted a new contract for mechanical work at Denver International Airport that had been awarded to a company owned by an African-American woman; at $39.6 million, it was the citys largest-ever minority contract. But it later became clear that the company was subcontracting more than $23 million of the work to a different firm, one that didnt qualify as a minority contractor. That December, a city audit declared that Denvers minority contracting program was failing. This program is broken, and the city is breaking its word to those it has promised to help, City Auditor Dennis Gallagher said at the time. It troubles me that stakeholders, including the public and firms in the construction and professional services industries, do not know whether this program is working.Nationwide data on DBE contracting programs is spotty. The National Association of State Procurement Officials doesnt monitor them, and relies on state offices to track fraud and abuse. But states efforts vary widely. A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2011 found that the Federal Highway Administration did not have the right tools to properly monitor states DBE programs for transportation construction. The GAO has published a smattering of reports over the past 25 years on women- and minority-owned contracting programs with two main conclusions: More information was needed, and the contracting world in general lacks women and minorities.Boosting their ranks is an important goal for government, says Wendell Stemley, president of the board of the National Association of Minority Contractors. Cities and states owe it to their residents to help minority firms, he says, and that begins with tighter oversight. The faces of these businesses should reflect how diverse the locality actually is, Stemley says. And if a state has lax compliance standards, then of course there are going to be firms willing and able to game the system.a minority contracting program is functioning properly takes a lot of work. Just ask Minnesota state Sen. Scott Dibble. As the chairman of the Transportation and Public Safety Committee, Dibble has been leading the charge to overhaul minority contracting ever since a 2013 internal audit by the Minnesota Department of Transportation found extensive problems with its DBE program, ranging from mismanagement and weak oversight to outright fraud. The audit had come at a time when the state was aggressively ramping up construction projects, thanks to rebounding post-recession revenues. Officials were trying to include more women- and minority-owned companies, but it wasnt working. We just werent seeing a lot of success, and we were even having protests outside the state Department of Transportation office, says Dibble. The scathing audit highlighted millions of dollars that had been passed through to non-DBEs and a consistent failure to meet the states own DBE goals. But the key finding, says Dibble, was from the state Office of Civil Rights. There were some serious concerns within that office that numbers were fudged, he says. Basically, our program was a mess.Since then, the state has made several reforms to its contracting program. Leadership within the office has been cleared out. DBE mentoring programs -- in which a certified disadvantaged business enters a three-year partnership with an established company to help hone business practices to better compete in the marketplace -- have been put in place. This year a consortium of state agencies will be working together to develop more objective criteria for what really qualifies as a disadvantaged business. Perhaps most important, Dibble says, the effort has raised awareness among lawmakers of the need for intense oversight. In order to remedy age-old injustices against disadvantaged firms, he says, it requires proactive action, not passive acceptance.The state has seen some successes. For 2015, the transportation department announced that 7.3 percent of its contracts were awarded to DBEs, a significant step toward its goal of 10.3 percent. While we made some progress over the last half of the fiscal year, we are not pleased with this number, Transportation Commissioner Charlie Zelle said when he announced the new figures. The state DOT has laid out specific goals that Zelle hopes will help it hit its goal for this year. Those benchmarks include finding businesses that qualify as DBEs and getting them certified, providing them with tools to help with bids, and ensuring consistent contracting practices. Statewide, the Minnesota purchasing office has begun more intensive outreach to identify and certify DBEs, which has resulted in a 13 percent increase in minority-owned businesses registered with the state.Still, theres an inherent challenge when a state endeavors to mix bureaucracy with complicated social problems, says Dibble. Its a problem, and I dont really know how to solve it.Another place thats taking on contract reform is New Orleans. The city has long had a minority contracting program in place, but when construction projects ramped up as the city rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina, it became clear the program had extensive problems. There was a two-year backlog of companies waiting to be certified as minority- or women-owned businesses, and the city had virtually no record-keeping or monitoring processes in place. The hurdles for disadvantaged businesses reflected larger socioeconomic realities, says Ashleigh Gardere, director of the Network for Economic Opportunity in the mayors office. New Orleans is a city all about relationships, and its also a segregated one. Women and minorities who owned businesses just didnt know the right people, so the opportunities werent there. In 2010, there were 200 certified DBEs in New Orleans, but thats an insufficient number considering the scope of the rebuilding work being done, Gardere says.In 2013, Mayor Mitch Landrieu introduced a set of proposals to raise the profile of the program. These reforms focused mostly on outreach and oversight of public contracts -- regulations that would hold the city accountable for making sure DBEs were earning city contracts. The certification process now takes 45 days, and the city wants to ultimately reduce that to 15 business days. Cutting down that wait time is crucial, says Gardere, because previously people didnt even want to become DBE-certified because it was just such a cumbersome effort. The efforts have helped lead to a dramatic improvement in DBE participation. Minority- and women-owned firms made up 16 percent of city contracts in 2011. By 2014, that number jumped to 37 percent -- exceeding the citys goal of 35 percent.Last fall the city implemented a second wave of regulations, focused more on enforcement and compliance. Now, when fraudulent activity is discovered, the city can withhold payments and exclude that particular firm from future contracts. The city has also introduced new technology tools to monitor existing contracts and payments. (As a side benefit, the technology will allow subcontractors to see when a primary contractor gets paid, adding another level of transparency to the entire contracting process.)In order to fully enforce these new changes, the city needed to invest in more people. When Landrieu took office in 2010, the Office of Supplier Diversity was made up of one person. But thanks to a local millage, the city was able to budget $700,000 to beef up staffing. Now theres a staff of seven people, many of whom have a background in construction. There is also a dedicated staff focused on compliance, making sure companies that are awarded contracts are the ones showing up to do the job.Its too soon to know how effective the new technology and compliance measures will be; the city only began training employees on them in February. But its a testament to the importance of political leadership in prioritizing minority contract programs, says Gardere. Get local government officials talking to your local NAACP, Urban League, your local inspector general. But as those conversations are happening, she says, start testing out solutions.Overhauls like the ones in New Orleans and Minnesota are cause for optimism, says the National Association of Minority Contractors Stemley. And while he says theres plenty of room for improvement in DBE programs across the country, he believes the high-profile cases of fraud and noncompliance are the exception to the rule. Still, he says, the onus is on states and cities to step up their efforts to attract more minority- and women-owned businesses. We need to be trying harder to make sure we have workforce diversity in the contracting community, he says. We cant ignore these underserved communities that need jobs.
On Monday, in the morning, His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC and Mrs Kaye de Jersey visited Karumba State School, where the Governor addressed staff and students, and with Mrs de Jersey, toured classrooms.

The Governor and Mrs de Jersey then departed Karumba for Doomadgee.

In the afternoon, the Governor and Mrs de Jersey visited Doomadgee State School, where His Excellency addressed staff and students, and with Mrs de Jersey, toured classrooms.

Following, at Doomadgee Aboriginal Shire Council, the Governor and Mrs de Jersey received a briefing on local issues from Council representatives, met staff, went on a driving tour of Doomadgee, and then attended a community afternoon tea where His Excellency addressed guests, and then returned to Karumba.
Description

GIS  19 April 2016: Mauritius has signed, on Friday 15 April 2016, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for Institutionalising Cooperation in Radio Astronomy in Africa in the context of the African Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project.

The signatory for the country was the Minister of Education and Human Resources, Tertiary Education and Scientific Research, Mrs Leela Devi Dookun Luchoomun. Other signatory Education Ministers comprised South Africa and Botswana who were present at the SKA Ministerial Meeting held in Muldersdrift near Johannesburg, while the other partner countries are expected to sign the MoU through diplomatic channels.

The main objective is to strengthen cooperation amongst the nine partner countries of the SKA (Mauritius, South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Botswana, Mozambique, Madagascar, Ghana, and Namibia) in the field of radio astronomy and the African Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network project for the eventual implementation of the project.

This initiative will enable to develop a competent community of researchers and scientists to undertake radio astronomy studies across the partner countries; and, build institutional capacity in universities, research institutions and government departments that are necessary to promote the development of radio astronomy programmes and initiatives.

About SKA

The SKA is a 2 billion EURO international scientific project coordinated by the Office for the SKA Organisation (SKAO), which is headquartered at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Manchester, United Kingdom. It was established in December 2011 as a not-for-profit company in order to formalise relationships between the international partners and to centralise the leadership of the project.

This scientific project will consist of the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope, about 50 times more sensitive, and up to 10 000 faster (in terms of its survey speed) than the best radio telescopes of today. It is expected to have a significant impact on Africas drive towards a knowledge economy, wherein information flow is supercritical and underpins the character of a knowledge economy.

Eleven countries, represented by their local research organisations, are current members (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom).

In 2012, it was decided to co-site the SKA in the deserts of South Africa (about 70 % of the project) and Australia.

SKA will be set-up in two Phases with:

 South Africa and Australia being the Phase 1 host countries.

 Phase 2 where thousands of small SKA antenna dishes will be built by 2025 in South Africa, with outstations in other parts of South Africa, as well as in eight African partner countries, namely Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.
(TNS) -- Rules proposed Friday to regulate Airbnb and other vacation-rental websites in Los Angeles could set the stage for a political showdown, with the city seeking information from the companies in order to track down illegal rentals.The plan would empower Los Angeles to fine the online platformsand the hosts if they advertised rentals that defied restrictions on where and how often rooms or entire homes could be used for short stays.The websites also could be fined if they failed to hand over addresses and other information to the city. Airbnb and other companies have been reluctant to share data, including how long travelers had stayed and the price they paid, arguing that doing so would trample on hosts privacy rights.The proposed law takes a step backward, putting consumer privacy at great risk by requiring online platforms to give the government unfettered access to confidential user data without any idea of how that information would be used, Airbnb spokeswoman Alison Schumer said in a statement.But critics contend that requiring the websites to help find and halt illegal rentals is a crucial step in stopping scofflaws. City Councilman Mike Bonin said that if the companies dont hand over information, were shooting blind.Were not asking for a ton of deep, personal private information, Bonin said. What units are being rented? How often?The law would allow short-term rentals in Los Angeles but impose several restrictions:People would be able to rent out only their primary residence, defined as the place they live at least six months out of the year. Hosts could rent out only that home, or a room within it, for up to 90 days annually.They would be barred from offering apartments that fall under rent stabilization or affordable-housing covenants, and would have to pay the same kind of lodging taxes as hotels, which would go into a city fund for affordable housing.The plan drew praise Friday from housing and labor advocates worried about how the rise of such rentals has affected housing availability.Roy Samaan, a research and policy analyst with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, called the proposal a great step forward.It allows legitimate home-sharing without displacing rent-controlled tenants, Samaan said.But the Los Angeles Short Term Rental Alliance  which includes hosts who use Airbnb, HomeAway and other platforms  called the plan overreaching and misguided, saying it would hurt residents who rely on renting out a second home to support their families.Bryce Fujii, an Airbnb host who lives in Canoga Park, said it would be stifling to be able to share his home for only up to three months of the year. Renting out a private bedroom has connected Fujii to global travelers and helped him make his mortgage payments, he said.If L.A. passes the law, its probably the nail in the coffin, Fujii said. I will be looking to leave California.The plan was released after a string of heated public hearings packed with rental hosts, housing advocates and neighborhood activists.As it stands, short-term rentals are illegal in many residential areas of the city, according to a planning department memo. But Los Angeles has struggled to enforce those rules as Airbnb, VRBO and other websites explode in popularity, especially in tourist hot spots such as Venice and Hollywood.Fans say such night-to-night rentals provide an economic lifeline to strapped Angelenos and a way to share a slice of their lives. Criticsincluding housing activists and hotel worker unions complain they have disrupted neighborhoods and pulled needed housing off the market.However, those critics largely have focused their ire on commercial operators renting out a string of homes or apartments nonstop, not people offering up a spare bedroom from time to time. Bonin said the proposal targets those de facto hotels while allowing genuine home-sharing.Several other big cities, including San Francisco and Portland, Ore., already have regulations. Bonin and city planning officials said they had sought to learn from those efforts to make L.A.s rules as easy as possible to enforce.The proposal hinges on a registration system: Hosts would be given an official number that would have to be displayed in online listings. If they failed to do so, they could be fined and so could the websites they use.Hosts would be charged at least $200 daily for advertising a rental that lacked a registration number or otherwise broke the rules, while the websites would face fines of $500 a day.Other violations could trigger stiffer fines: Hosts who rented out a room or home beyond the number of days allowed could be docked $2,000 per day. The websites, in turn, could be penalized $1,000 per day for refusing to turn over addresses of rentals that failed to register with the city.Rental websites say they want to crack down on illegal hotels, city planner Matt Glesne said. Were putting the ball in their court a little bit and saying, How can we work together?Angelenos will be able to weigh in on the proposed rules at a May hearing; the city planning commission will take up the proposal in June. If approved, the law would then have to be vetted by the City Council.
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) wants to make congestion and other traffic data much, much more visible  and it wants state and local agencies to work together to make it happen.With a proposed rulemaking notice released April 18, the administration laid out a plan to require state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations to crunch numbers and submit information about things like travel times and greenhouse gas emissions. While states might have that data already , the FHWA is proposing to require standardized reporting at the national level, which it would then publish on a website to tell a national performance story  essentially, keeping tabs on highway traffic conditions.The administration is proposing that agencies could either mine the data from the National Performance Management Research Data Set  which collects traffic information from a network of in-vehicle devices in five-minute intervals  or from more local data sets.Thats where the collaboration component enters in. Since there might be scores of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in a given state that would report the same information as that states department of transportation, the proposal calls for those agencies to work together on reporting.The FHWA expects that state DOTs and MPOs will work collaboratively to come to agreement on the data sources to use to meet the requirements proposed in this rulemaking, the notice of proposed rulemaking reads.The motive behind the proposal is to inject more information into the transportation planning process at the state and local levels while simultaneously giving the federal government a better idea of the true impact of its funding. Since the U.S. DOT is a huge source of transportation funding  including projects it hopes will lead to some radical changes to address things like congestion and carbon emissions  it has a vested interest in demonstrating the success of those projects. The administrations website describes the move as a down payment on its proposed Clean Transportation Plan , which seeks to drive down greenhouse gas emissions in conjunction with promises the country made in Paris in December to combat climate change.The department is taking a major step to improve accountability and address the costly congestion problem that is plaguing our nation every day. Commuters and truck drivers from every state and region will be able to learn valuable information about how transportation investments are performing in delivering reliable highway travel with minimal delays and less air pollution, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement . We are also taking a hard look at how to track progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, and Im looking forward to what we hear back on this important topic.The FHWA is tentatively considering Jan. 1, 2018 as the beginning of its first period of performance measurement.




IIJA & ARP Broadband Funding

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Cities have a history of working willingly, often eagerly, with Silicon Valleys biggest companies to test cutting-edge tech  just look at Google Fibers launch in Kansas City, Mo. , or Nevadas tax break gift to Tesla to build a battery plant.Now, one of the biggest might be going in another direction: Building its own city to test tech.Its all rumor right now, but tech news servicehas reported that Dan Doctoroff, the head of Alphabets portfolio company Sidewalk Labs, will meet with Google co-founder Larry Page in coming weeks to discuss the possibility. In the meantime,reported, the company has hired about 100 experts in city planning, technology and other fields to develop the concept.Sidewalk Labs is the company behind the Wi-Fi-spreading LinkNYC kiosks in New York, along with the development of an Internet of Things analytics platform called Flow that will be deployed to the winner of the U.S. Department of Transportations Smart City Challenge Its not exactly a new idea. Government jurisdictions from Las Vegas to Virginia have been scrambling to make themselves into attractive places for companies like Sidewalk Labs to test out that kind of technology, and at times, that has involved testbeds like the fake MCity for testing self-driving cars in Ann Arbor, Mich.Another project, called the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation that has long been planned in the New Mexico desert, remains nascent after years of hype. The plan was to build a place where researchers could test their ideas in a setting similar to the real world without actually exposing those ideasthe real world. In the case of self-driving cars, that could be important because it means that researchers could test potentially unsafe ideas without putting people in harms way.Alternatively, Alphabet might simply be looking to find a part of a city it can turn into a digital district. That might involve a bid process with cities and counties. According to, Denver and Detroit are early prospects in the companys eyes.
String of access issues

(TNS) -- The state Public Records Board used contradictory messages to describe its decision last summer to expand what kinds of records could be destroyed immediately.To the public and news organizations, the message was: The board made a routine clarification that was not "substantive." That was the explanation given by Matthew Blessing, the board's chairman, in downplaying why the board did not even give advance public notice by putting the matter on its Aug. 24 agenda.But to state employees, the message was: The board made "significant changes" to which records are considered to have only temporary usefulness and can be destroyed. That was the update issued by Georgia Thompson, the board's executive secretary, to alert state records officers that the definition of so-called "transitory records" had been expanded.Thompson's email was among hundreds of pages of documents released to the Journal Sentinel in response to a request under the state's open records law. In her email, sent Sept. 28, Thompson also urged records officers to share the update with other employees and agencies throughout state government.The action by the Public Records Board could have limited the access of citizens and media outlets to information from texts, emails, Facebook messages and other methods that public employees might use to communicate about official actions. Amid widespread indignation that the action was another effort to hinder public accountability and transparency, the action was rescinded early this year.Christa Westerberg, an attorney who also serves as co-vice president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said Thompson's email confirms the importance of the changes."I think that allowing records custodians or people who work in the agency to destroy records without further review by the agency or the Public Records Board is certainly not routine," Westerberg said. "And the fact that she flagged it as a significant issue confirms that interpretation."But Blessing again said Monday that the changes were not out of the ordinary."The Public Records Board routinely reviews revisions and clarifications of record schedules," he said in an email. "The effort to eliminate non-technical language and provide actual examples was routine."Westerberg said that interpretation was alarming."If this is something that the board considers routine, then I think further scrutiny of the board is warranted," she said. "And the response that the public gave to the board's action was appropriate."The newly released documents show the changes to the definition of transitory records were considered for months.An email sent by Thompson to records officers in May noted that there had been talk of revising retention policies  how long records are kept  to include transitory records beyond just "correspondence and related records."Follow-up emails showed staffers mulling the definition of transitory records, with one employee  Dawn Bluma of the state Department of Workforce Development  raising concerns that the language wasn't clear enough."The description still sounds a bit vague to me, and the examples too much like 'email' if this is designed to cover 'other' short-term records," Bluma wrote in a June 10 email.The state Public Records Board voted unanimously on Jan. 11 to revoke its August decision. The reversal came after nearly 1,900 emails and letters criticizing its action were sent to the board and posted to a state website . The change drew criticism from conservative and liberal groups alike, including the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, and One Wisconsin Now.Before the board's August vote, transitory records were described as "correspondence and other related records of short-term interest which have no documentary or evidentiary value." The new definition expanded that description to include "emails to schedule or confirm meetings or events, committee agendas and minutes received by members on a distribution list, interim files, tracking and control files, recordings used for training purposes and ad hoc reports for individual use."The recent battle over open records in Wisconsin is just the latest fight to erupt around the country over public access to government officials' texts and other electronic messages.It's also the latest in a string of actions taken in Wisconsin over the past year that could be used to limit access to open records.In July, just before Independence Day weekend, Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee unexpectedly amended the state budget to put sweeping limits on open records. Under withering criticism from both Democrats and other Republicans, GOP leaders quickly retreated, saying they would instead appoint a study committee to consider how to treat the matter.Further, the governor's office has withheld some records that include internal deliberations, saying that releasing them could inhibit the free exchange of ideas within his administration. State law doesn't specifically recognize that as a reason for withholding records.And the Journal Sentinel reported in February that the state Department of Natural Resources previously kept a "do not respond" list for a group of 16 citizens and activists with complaints about how the agency managed wildlife and administered clean water and other rules. The agency has dropped the list, which dealt with ordinary requests for information, not open records requests.Attorney General Brad Schimel has called for stronger guidance to public employees about what records they need to retain. And he said he would like to see the open records law updated to account for changes in technology, noting government business is now sometimes conducted by text messages and instant messages.State officials say they're now working to expand access to records.In March, Walker issued an executive order requiring state agencies to promptly handle public records requests, better track them and give clearer guidelines on how much they should cost and how long they should take to fulfill. The executive order requires all agencies to put in place a common set of standards that citizens, journalists and others can use to measure the state's work in responding to open records requests.
(TNS) -- U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Hazleton, recently examined how well prepared the United States is for a cyber-attack on the electrical grid.The sub-committee heard testimony that states and localities should be prepared to face weeks, rather than days, of power outages following such an assault.Barletta chaired a subcommittee hearing for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee titled: Blackout! Are We Prepared to Manage the Aftermath of a Cyber-Attack or Other Failure of the Electrical Grid?Barlettas subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management heard from government witnesses and electric utilities, who said that preparations have been made, but the threat from terrorists continues to evolve.Among the utilities represented at the hearing were PPL Corporation and Claverack Rural Electric Cooperative.State and local governments, who are on the ground, will be the first ones charged with the protection of people and property, Barletta said. Whether it is a Category 5 hurricane hitting Miami or an 8.0 earthquake in Los Angeles, the federal government has realistic estimates or scenarios for states to plan. The federal government does not have this basic planning scenario for a cyber threat to the power system and there is a huge disparity in what different groups think is a potential scenario for which states and local governments should prepare.Leaders of federal agencies tasked with preparation and response said the threat is evolving and they are working to anticipate and respond to potential scenarios. Barletta asked how long localities should plan to be without power in the event of an attack, and the answer was clear.Planning needs to be measured in weeks, particularly if theres damage to infrastructure, said Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. With cyber, we have seen restoration potentially very quickly if theres not physical damage. But if you do have damage to things like very large transformers or generator capacity, that will extend it.The electric utility representatives testified they are aware of the changing risks of a potential cyber-attack on the U.S. power grid and they continue to make preparations.William H. Spence, chairman, president and chief executive officer of PPL Corporation, which serves 10 million customers in the United Kingdom and U.S., including Pennsylvania, said PPL and the broader electric power industry are committed to protecting the nations power grid from threats of all types.This commitment did not arise in the face of new, modern threats; it is a shared commitment that is deeply rooted in the fabric of the industry, Spence said. We have made, and continue to make, significant investments in tools, technology and people to strengthen our defensive capabilities and ensure grid reliability and resiliency.In particular, Spence said, utility companies recognize cyber threats are persistent and evolving.Even as we enhance our responses to meet the rising threats, there is no way to fully guarantee a breach will not occur, Spence said. As such, we plan and drill regularly to ensure we can respond and recover quickly and effectively should an emergency arise.Following the hearing, Barletta indicated he had received at least an estimated answer to the broad question of how long portions of the national electrical grid could be expected to be down.
Jolyon Palmer's performance in China last weekend was "embarrassing".

That is the view of Jason Watt, a former F3000 driver and pundit who scoffed at Briton Palmer finishing dead last in his Renault in Shanghai.

"Kevin (Magnussen) really got the upper hand" in China, Watt, a Dane like Magnussen, told Ekstra Bladet newspaper.

"You have to say that Renault generally had a hard time (in China), but I think it is bordering on embarrassing when Palmer is behind the Manor when there is nothing actually wrong with the car," he added.

"If he (Palmer) continues like this, then even the money he brings to the team will not secure his seat," said Watt.

The Danish newspaper quoted Magnussen as saying after the race: "I was much faster than him (Palmer), but I don't know if there was something wrong with his car."

Renault is expecting to improve in the coming weeks, mainly by introducing a major upgrade for its engine in Canada.

"Mercedes has done a great job and is far ahead of us, but at the same time I think their learning curve is levelling off, making it easier for us to catch up," Renault's Cyril Abiteboul told BT newspaper.

"In fact, we believe we have already reduced the gap to them with the improvements we made during the winter.

"The development will continue, otherwise I'll be fired," he laughed.

(GMM)
Kajal's Career On The Edge?

Luck favoured Kajal Agarwal, when she acted as Princess beside young hero Ram Charan Teja. Later, she faced a few flops in Telugu film industry.

But when she got the offer to play the role of Princess again, this time with Cherrys uncle Pavan Kalyan, everybody thought she would stage a comeback with a lot of luck.

But alas, it has not happened for Kajal and it looks like her career in Tollywood has come to the cliff hanger.

Latest reports is that Kajal is now testing her luck by acting beside Daggubati Rana in the next film to be directed by Teja. It clearly shows she is desperate to make hay while the sun shines.

Rana is no doubt a talented actor who is riding on the success of Baahubali; but he has not proven a successful hero in a full-length movie.

So, heroines prefer to make off-screen friendship with Rana, but do not like to act with him in films in which he is a hero. Yet, Kajal has agreed to do a movie with him, may be only to make some big money.

At present, Kajal is banking heavily on Mahesh Babu-starrer film. But, she might not hog the limelight because she is just one of the three heroines in that film.

So, Kajal might have thought she could make some quick buck by acting with Rana.

Interestingly, a few years ago, another glamorous actress Genelia also acted with Rana, but disappeared from the industry soon after by getting married to Ritesh Deshmukh.

It may be coincidence, but Kajal also revealed that her parents are on the lookout for a groom for her. Who knows, she might also bid adieu to films soon after the marriage!
Puri Jagannadh Not To Produce Movies

Three distributors trying to attack Puri Jagannadh at his office has sent shock waves in Tollywood. Although Puri Jagannadh is not producer of "Loafer", the distributors demanding money from him for the losses has made industry worry.

Hence all the biggies are lending support to Puri Jagannadh. Director Puri has already filed a case against three distributors - Sudheer, Abhishek and Mutyala Ramadass, who threatened him and his family members.

Puri Jagannadh is in financial mess as he has lost huge money by producing movies and also wasting the money for his "personal joyful exercises". He has now stopped producing movies on his banner.

Puri Jagannadh will be working with other producers for remuneration. His next film with Kalyan Ram is to be produced by the Nandamuri hero himself.

Puri is also directing a movie called "Rogue" introducing a new hero and for which he is being paid whopping Rs 10 Cr as remuneration.
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Flood Threat To Amaravati?

The special news report that appeared in Telugu newspaper Sakshi with regard to the new capital region of Amaravati is a matter of grave concern to the people.

According to the report, the Chandrababu Naidu government, which had ignored the recommendation of the Sivaramakrishnan Committee constituted by the Centre to look into the feasibility of the capital region and acquired thousands of fertile lands of farmers who were raising three cops a year, is now facing a peculiar situation.

Quoting a scientific study, the report said over 14,000 acres of the capital region of Amaravati might witness a grave flood threat from surrounding streams, including Kondaveeti vaagu.

To overcome this problem, the Capital Regional Development Authority is learnt to have proposed to raise the height of the seed capital area by about eight feet to the extent of five kilometres.

Now, the question is what will be the fare of villages if the height of the seed capital area is increased. An expert from Delhi also reportedly found fault with the Naidu government in this regard. And it costs not less than Rs 750 crore to raise the height of the area.

Already, the government has been wasting crores of rupees in the name of Vaasthu and such costly decisions would impose a heavy burden on the people of the State. And it is not yet clear as to whether it would ultimately benefit the people at all.

At a time when the entire media is blindly supporting the Naidu government, it is really daring on the part of Sakshi to come out with such a bold report. The government should not go for prestige and give a clarification to the people in this regard.
Media Biggie Lobbying For MP Seat?

With elections to Rajya Sabha round the corner, several politicians and non-political personalities have started intense lobbying with the Telugu Desam Party president N Chandrababu Naidu for a nomination to the Upper House from Andhra Pradesh.

According to reports doing rounds in political circles, a media house owner who has been the backbone of the TDP right from the beginning and maintaining personal relations with Naidu, has been strongly trying for the Rajya Sabha nomination from the ruling party.

This gentleman, who is successfully running a Telugu newspaper and a news channel with guts, is reportedly playing a key role in drafting plans to lure the Opposition party MLAs into the TDP.

The modus operandi of this media house owner is to spread strong rumours about defection of YSR Congress party MLAs into the TDP so that they would create confusion among the people as well as his followers, besides sowing seeds of suspicion among the YSRC boss Y S Jaganmohan Reddy.

When those MLAs come under pressure from inside and outside, the media biggie negotiates with them directly or indirectly and force them to join the TDP.

For his services in encouraging defections, this gentleman is demanding that he be rewarded with the Rajya Sabha seat.

Well, it is not known how far this speculation is correct, but one can easily guess who this media gentleman is.

Yet, Naidu is not able to take a decision, because he already has quite a few applications before him.
Priyanka Gandhi Demands Apology From TOI

New Delhi: Congress president Sonia Gandhi's daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Sunday served a legal notice to leading daily Times of India demanding an "unqualified apology" for its report on her official accommodation.

"My client calls upon your esteemed publication to tender an unqualified apology and publish the contents of this letter in its entirety with the same prominence and display as you have done to the patently false and malicious captioned news article. This letter is being sent without prejudice to any rights and contentions of my client and nothing contained herein should be considered an admission of any fact or a waiver of any of the rights and remedies of my client," said a letter from lawyer Aman Panwar addressed to Editor-in-Chief Jaideep Bose, among others.

It said the journalist "appears to have completely lost sight of the incontrovertible facts in her eagerness to publish a sensational but false and defamatory story in a hasty fashion".

"The entire tone, tenor and phraseology of your news article are misleading and are laden with premeditated fatal misstatements or inaccuracies," it claimed.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Saturday had said that the rent for her government accommodation was the "same as others in her category" and she was asked to occupy the premises "on security grounds".

A release issued by her office had said the special licence fee decided by the government has been regularly paid by her for the entire duration of her occupation.

The release came after the news report said Priyanka got the erstwhile Atal Bihari Vajpayee government to reduce the rent of her house from Rs.53,421 a month to Rs.8,888. The report cited a reply given to a Right to Information (RTI) query.

The newspaper report said she wrote to the government in May 2002 that Rs.53,421 was "too high" an amount and "beyond her paying capacity". It said she informed the government that she had been occupying the bungalow on the request of the SPG, which occupied a large part of the bungalow.

It said that, at present, Priyanka pays Rs.31,000 for her Type VI government accommodation.
Why Are Media Owners So Crazy For RS Seats?

Surprising as it might sound, more and more bigwigs belonging to media houses are expressing interest in becoming Rajya Sabha members.

In the past, we had seen former Deccan Chronicle MD T Chandrasekhar Reddy becoming Rajya Sabha member on behalf of the Congress party.

After his death, his son T Venkattram Reddy became MP in his place. He tried several times later for the RS ticket, but could not succeed.

In the north, several media personalities like Chandan Mitra (of Pioneer) and Vijay Darda (Lokmat Times) had become Rajya Sabha members.

Even senior journalist M J Akbar became an MP, but got elected to Lok Sabha, instead of being nominated to Rajya Sabha.

Back to south, we had seen Girish Sanghi, founder of Vaartha Telugu daily, became a Rajya Sabha member from the Congress party.

Now, with the elections to the Rajya Sabha round the corner, some more media persons are lobbying for the RS nomination.

In Andhra Pradesh, there is a talk that Andhra Jyothy MD Vemuri Radhakrishna is strongly trying for the RS seat. And in Telangana, two media owners are in race: D Damodar Rao from Namasthe Telangana Telugu daily and C L Rajam of Metro India English daily.

Indications are that Damodar Rao might get the RS nomination from the TRS, while former minister Capt Lakshmikanth Rao might get the nomination under Brahmin quota.

Apparently, it is a matter of prestige for the media persons to become Rajya Sabha members. They might not aspire for big political positions, but they would definitely use the same to develop their media houses. Hence, so much craze for RS seats!
Siemens said that the electric vehicle components market is expected to grow with a compound annual growth rate of more than 20% until 2020. According to the agreement, Siemens and Valeo will each hold a 50% stake in the joint venture, have joint control and account for their respective stake using the equity method.

Siemens and Valeo have signed an agreement to form a joint venture in high voltage powertrains for the entire range of electric vehicles including hybrids, plug-in hybrids and full electric vehicles. Building upon the complementary scope and portfolio of the partners, the joint venture will provide substantial synergies in manufacturing and sourcing and create a base for sustained growth and profitability.

We are delighted at the perspective of combining our strengths with Siemens in electrified powertrain systems. With the expertise offered by Siemens, a leader in power electronics and electric motor product, Valeo would maintain its technological lead by offering a comprehensive line-up of technologies ranging from micro-hybrid to all-electric solutions. This joint venture also illustrates the ability of European companies to develop leading industrial partnerships to bring breakthrough technologies to the global market. Jacques Aschenbroich, Chairman and CEO of Valeo

Valeo will be contributing its high-voltage power electronics business, including 200 employees of which 90 are based in France, and which is part of the Powertrain Systems Business Group (PTS). Siemens will be contributing its E-Car Powertrain Systems Business Unit, employing around 500 people of which 370 are based in Germany and 130 in China.

The joint venture will have full business responsibility for the development, the sales and the production of high-voltage electric motors and power electronics products above 60V, required for electrified passenger cars and light commercial vehicles. The joint-venture will be able to provide an extended range of products from hybrid drive-train modules and solutions, including electric motors, range-extenders, DC/DC converters, inverters and chargers, to a fully electrified powertrain.

Siemens and Valeo strongly complement one another with regard to their product portfolios, production know-how and geographical spread. As a leading automotive player with strong market intimacy, Valeo has a strong industrial expertise, providing a worldwide customer base in powertrains with competitive and advanced high-voltage electronics produced by automotive certified production lines. Siemens e car unit leverages the Groups system design competences in electric drivetrains, its strong engineering and validation base with an excellent experience in traction motor products.

The companys structures will be lean and adapted to global market requirements and the international competitive environment. Its headquarters will be located in Erlangen, Germany.

The joint-venture will have a global focus and cost-efficient regional set-up, providing access to key markets for automotive electrification, such as Europe and China: headquartered in Germany, with facilities in France, Norway, Poland, Hungary and China.

The project is subject to consultation of the employee representatives. Subject to approval of the relevant authorities, the joint venture is expected to start operations in the last quarter of calendar year 2016.
ContiTech has supplied the entire engine mounting system for the 2016 Chevrolet Malibu. Almost all the functional components of the hydraulic mounts are made of polyamide. The significant increase in high technology polyamide elements has resulted in a weight reduction of around 20 percent in the mount components.

This development shows very clearly that the lightweight construction trend is becoming increasingly significant for the US market as well and that polyamide components have finally arrived in mid-size cars too. Scott Bykowski, head of Development for North America at ContiTech Vibration Control

For the current vehicle models, ContiTech will supply a total of three engine mounts and their attachments. These include an engine mount and a transmission mount, which combine to support the drive unit and hydraulically dampen vibrations, and a torque rod support, which absorbs torque.

A particular challenge in the development of the new components lay in the nature of the newly developed 1.5 l engine  its smaller size means that, conversely, the engine mounts have become considerably larger. To reduce the weight at the same time, ContiTech developed a completely new design.

We were able to replace all the internal components with much lighter polyamide versions. Only one steel component has been retained, and the crash-relevant parts are still made of aluminum because of the limited installation space. Florian Reinke, developer at ContiTech Vibration Control

Changing to polyamide has also opened up many more options for the designers. It was possible to make the components more detailed, smoother and therefore more streamlined, enabling greater functional efficiency.

The ContiTech division of Continental is one of the worlds leading suppliers of technical elastomer products and is a specialist in plastics technology. It develops and produces functional parts, components, and systems for machine and plant engineering, mining, the automotive industry, and other industries. ContiTech generated sales of almost 5.4 billion in 2015 and currently employs approximately 43,000 people in 44 countries worldwide.
After misleading his way through Meet the Press, Gov. McCrory claimed to have defended North Carolina against selective outrage from out-of-state special interests and the corporate elite.

McCrory is deluding himself into believing that he is under attack from vague outside forces that can easily be ignored. In doing so, he is closing his eyes to the ugly truth.

The garbage that the legislature whipped out in 90 minutes and that McCrory signed the same day  in Holy Week  is contrary to the progress, welcome and protection for all citizens for which North Carolina used to be known.

If my outrage is selective, it is outrage at the selection of a clueless schmoozer to lead our state backward into the 19th century. The damage his administration has done will take generations to repair.

The Rev. Beth Woodard

Greensboro
A few mature female celebrities have been making the waves in the media recently for their amazing age-defying looks.

Elise Neal, 50, looks stunning as ever in photos shared on her Instagram page, and Cameron Diaz, 43, just shared a selfie with no makeup, showing off how much of a goddess she truly is.
WASHINGTON  Fairfield County is the Northeastern territorial edge of the mosquito most commonly associated with transmitting the Zika virus, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention map distributed Monday by the White House.

But senior public health officials cautioned against panic and agitation, saying the 346 cases of Zika in the continental U.S. are all the result of travelers infected while visiting tropical locations such as Brazil, Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean.

I dont think its anything to panic about or get agitated about, but we cant just make the assumption that a Zika outbreak would be as easy to control as other mosquito-borne diseases such as Dengue fever and Chikungunya virus, said Anthony Fauci, chief of infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

So while we hope were not going to see a sustained local outbreak, we need to be prepared, Fauci told reporters.

Zika causes only mild symptoms, but among pregnant women in Brazil and the Caribbean it has been implicated in an uptick in births of children with small heads, called microcephaly.

The mosquito most frequently implicated in Zika transmission, Aedes aegypti (also known as the yellow-fever mosquito) is common to the Southern and Western U.S., with its Northeastern border ending on Long Island and Southwestern Connecticut.

A second type of mosquito, Aedes albopictus (the Asian tiger mosquito), is present throughout Connecticut. But Fauci and Anne Schuchat, principle deputy director of the CDC, said it is less efficient than Aedes aegypti at spreading the disease.

While not wanting to sound alarms, both officials said they were surprised at the potential implications of a serious outbreak in the U.S.

The more we learn, the more concerned we actually get in some respects with regard to what this virus can do, Fauci said.

As the U.S. enters its warm-weather season, mosquitoes potentially could bite someone with Zika and transmit it to another person with the next bite.

Also, researchers have found Zika can be sexually transmitted. Federal health officials have been working with state and local counterparts to prepare for the diagnosing and testing that would be necessary to detect a rash of Zika cases.

Health officials at all levels ``need to be ready because we may not be lucky and avoid it, Schuchat said.

The Obama administration has reprogrammed $510 million from Ebola-virus-related programs to fund Zika preparedness. But the White House nevertheless is asking for a $1.9 billion emergency appropriation to fight Zika worldwide and prepare for thwarting it at home. Republicans so far appear to be lukewarm.

dan@hearstdc.com
Eat your words. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

When the New York Observer, which is published by Donald Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner, endorsed the Republican candidate, restaurant critic Joshua David Stein knew it was time to go after three years on the job. Stein, who also contributes to New York Magazine and Grub Street, writes in The Guardian:

I wrote about crudites and deconstructed borscht. So I kept my head in my plate and tried to ignore the ugly politics around me. In my own indirect way, I tried to push back. Shortly after Trump delivered a toxic attack on Mexicans calling them rapists and murderers, I parroted his syntax for a favorable review of two tremendous Mexican restaurants, Cosme and Rosies. When Mexico sends its people  I wrote,  Theyre sending people that have lots of poblanos and theyre bringing those poblanos with them. Theyre bringing tclayudo. Theyre bringing tlacuyo, their arepas. And some, I assume, are good people, too.

Subtle, it wasnt. And for a while I contented myself as working for gradual change from within the system. I tried to convince myself that if I lauded love and light in my writing it could somehow redeem the dark toxicity of the papers ownership. Perhaps that I served the reader or shone the spotlight on chefs could absolve me. But in the end, there became less and less room to manoeuvre. But whats the difference between a court jester and a genuine voice of dissent? One the court keeps; the other has too much integrity to keep the court entertained.

Ultimately, as Stein says, To stand with Trump is to stand with hate; what I ate, and what I thought about it, is small beer compared with that.

[Guardian]
A smidgen less on-demand. Photo: UberEATS

Its not even 30 days into UberEATs New York launch and already the company concedes it may have overreached a little. On Monday, it sent app users in the city a somewhat-vague email that said, In order to bring you the most exciting selection, the highest quality food, and the fastest delivery time, weve decided to narrow our focus. Starting today, 4/18, well no longer be offering a daily Instant Delivery lunch menu. Instant Delivery was Ubers lightning-fast, lunchtime-only service that promised users a meal delivered curbside in as little as ten minutes. The two order options varied day to day but included items from places like American Cut, Num Pang, Mighty Quinns, and Sweetgreen.

As Quartz notes, the inner workings of Instant Delivery were a bit mysterious. To get food to customers in ten minutes, Uber stored all of that days meals in a building in midtown (that way, deliverers didnt trek to the restaurant first). But figuring out how much to send was apparently the restaurants responsibility. Uber admitted it wasnt pre-purchasing the food, but rather just letting partner restaurants ship over however much they thought was appropriate each morning. It also wouldnt say how many of those orders deliverers could fill each hour, or at a time.

The company says Instant Delivery is sticking around in every other city served by the UberEATS app, which is another reason to think maybe it saw a flaw in a business plan built around believing New Yorks bike couriers could get from midtown to, well, anywhere else in ten minutes. The apps more popular use as a Seamless-killer, where customers can order food from more than 100 NYC restaurants in 30 minutes, is totally unaffected.

[Quartz]
This February Sony bid farewell to its Z line of smartphones as it introduced the new Xperia X, Xperia X Performance, and Xperia XA. And now it seems like a new member will be added to the X family at some point in the near future.

We're talking about the Xperia X Premium, which according to a new rumor is going to be the successor to the Z5 Premium from last year. That particular device was the first smartphone to sport a display capable of showing 4K content, and if this report is accurate then the X Premium's main differentiator will be the screen too.

Namely, it's said to come with an HDR display, something that would be a first for the mobile world (but is becoming more and more widespread in TVs). This will allegedly mean it will be capable of displaying 1.07 billion colors, compared to the 16.8 million color depth of every other high-end device out there.

The Xperia X Premium is also apparently going to feature 120Hz refresh rate, 2,000:1 contrast ratio, and it will have the brightest display panel ever put into a phone. It will offer 1,000 nits of "white brightness" and could actually go up to a whopping 1,300 nits, which is more than twice as much as the 539 nits the Samsung Galaxy S7 can achieve.

The upcoming handset should be powered by the Snapdragon 820 chip from Qualcomm, aided by 3GB of RAM. It will have a USB Type-C connector. It is however unclear when it will launch.

Source




Haiti - Politic : The new DG a.i. of the PNH, filed its documents to the Senate





Monday, Michel-Ange Gedeon, the new Director General a.i. of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) installed in office on April 8 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17124-haiti-security-new-director-general-to-the-pnh.html filed at the invitation of the Senate Commission "Justice and Security" chaired by Senator Jean Renel Senatus, the originals of the required documents.



Jean Renel Senatus confirmed receiving 14 original documents that will be investigated by a subcommission to determine their authenticity, then the Commission Justice and Security will deliberate on the choice of the new Chief of Police and will draft its recommendations.



Jean-Renel Senatus, promises that the Commission's report will be voted on in the Assembly Tuesday, 26 April.



For his part, Michel-Ange Gedeon said he was confident to pass through the Senate, estimating fulfilling all the requirements for this position.



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Education : Demonstration outside the Ministry of National Education





Friday of interns graduating students of the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) once agin demonstrated with violence outside the Ministry of National Education, throwing stones against the building and against the agents of the Corps of Intervention and Maintenance of Order (CIMO) providing security; burning tires and shouting words hostile to the Government.



These student interns demanding their appointment at the end of their internship, as agreed between the ministry and the ENS. Should be noted that these interns in late March had used violence and the breakdown of public goods as a way of claims to demand their letter of appointment and payment of 6 months internship...



Let us recall to our readers that the Ministry had already deplore these unacceptable demonstrations and said that firstly these students had received financial support to start their internship and on the other hand they were only in their second month on internship out of 6. What does not justify their protests...



See also :

https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-16964-icihaiti-flash-ransacking-and-vandalism-at-the-ministry-of-education.html



TB/ HaitiLibre


















Harlow is a former New Town in Essex with a population of 86,000. Located in the upper Stort Valley, it was built in the decades after the Second World War to ease overcrowding and London and provide homes for people bombed out during the Blitz. It includes Britain's first pedestrian precinct and first modern residential tower block, The Lawn. Old Harlow, the historic part of the town, was mentioned in the Domesday Book. David and Victoria Beckham's former home, Rowneybury House, nicknamed 'Beckingham Palace', is nearby.

09:00, 23 OCT 2022
Hardin Park School kicked off its four-week Walking Wednesday program on Wednesday, April 13, 2016 as students and staff are headed for an increase in physical activity and taking a step to improve air quality on campus. Hardin Park School is encouraging students to walk more often to school during this four-week program as they are offering this safe, buddy system-oriented walking program for students of all grades to walk together with a group to school in the mornings to school.

The CDC and Active Living Research suggest that students who are physically active have better grades, better school attendance, and better classroom behavior. The remote drop off program encourages positive social and physical environments to promote good health and healthy behaviors for students. This is one way students can get some physical activity minutes first thing in the morning to get their brain ready to learn when they arrive the classroom, says Taylor Hartley, Adapted PE teacher of Hardin Park School, and one of the teachers heading up the program.

Programs such as Walking Wednesdays offer students a chance for physical activity and social interaction which may play out positively in academic performance throughout the rest of their day. Mary Smalling, Principal of Hardin Park School states, This is a great way to encourage students to spend time with friends in a healthy way. We hope to see some parents come out and walk with us too!

These events are part of a larger partnership between Hardin Park School, the Appalachian District Health Department, and Active Routes to School, a Safe Routes to School project in North Carolina, which is being implemented through the local health department. The goal of this partnership is to increase student health, as well as instilling pedestrian and biker safety for children in K-8 grades.

To learn more about how your school can partner and participate with Active Routes to School, contact Beth Fornadley Johnson at (828) 964-8119 or by email [email protected] To learn more about Safe Routes to School in North Carolina, please visit http://saferoutespartnership.org/state/srts-in-your-state/northcarolina

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The middle school Hardin Park Gold team came in a very close second in the regional Battle of the Books, finishing just two points behind first place. The regional competition is open to school systems in 14 counties in northwestern North Carolina.

This team, with mostly the same students, has won the Watauga County Schools Battle of the Books two years in a row and finished second in the state last year. Hardin Park Media Specialist Candice Trexler describes the team as highly motivated and very hard working. They have earned the success they enjoyed and were very proud of their achievements.

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During the week of Monday, April 25  Saturday, April 30 Appalachian State University students will be representing Purple Heart Homes of the High Country to host percentage nights at five different bars/restaurants throughout Boone and Blowing Rock. These students have been planning this fundraiser all semester in an effort to give back to our patriots. Each bar has offered 10% of either their beer and/or food sales to benefit Purple Heart Homes. In addition, Appalachian Mountain Brewery will be matching a 10 percent donation of all AMB beer sold at the participating establishments.

Purple Heart Homes is a nonprofit organization whose main goal is to improve quality of life housing solutions for disabled American Veterans of all generations. John Gallina and Dale Beatty, two combat wounded Iraq Veterans, created Purple Heart Homes in 2008. This nonprofit organization encourages the community to serve and show their appreciation to their local veterans. Because of Purple Heart Homes, disabled veterans are able to live comfortably by having their homes renovated to suit their individual needs.

The week long bar crawl schedule is as follows:

Monday 4/25:

TAPP ROOM located at 421 Blowing Rock Road, Boone, N.C. 28607 from 12 p.m.  4 p.m. (food and beer sales) AND

TOWN TAVERN OF BLOWING ROCK located at 1182 Main St., Blowing Rock, N.C. from 4 p.m.- 10 p.m. (food and beer sales)

Tuesday 4/26:

CAFE PORTOFINOS located at 970 Rivers Street Boone, N.C. All day 11:30 a.m.  9 p.m. (food and beer)

Wednesday 4/ 27:

THE LOCAL located at 179 Howard Street Boone, N.C. from 5 p.m.  2 a.m. (beer sales)

Thursday 4/28:

PEDALIN PIG located at 2968-A Hwy 105 Boone, N.C. 28607 ALL DAY 11 a.m.  10 p.m. (beer sales)

Friday 4/29:

KLONDIKE CAFE located at 441 Blowing Rock Road Boone, N.C. from 5 p.m.  2 a.m. (beer sales)

Saturday 4/30:

APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN BREWERY located at 163 Boone Creek Drive, Boone, NC ALL DAY, 12  10 p.m.

Live performances will be provided throughout the day featuring an appearance from Adam Church at 3 p.m.

Organization boilerplate: PHH USA is dedicated to finding personalized solutions that will make existing homes meet the specific needs of Service Connected Disabled Veterans who have served and sacrificed on our behalf. After a thorough verification process, PHH USA identifies the needs of the disabled veteran and determines the scope of work required to modify, adapt or build, a home that is accessible barrier-free and safe. We make it our goal to partner with local, professional contractors who are willing to take ownership of the process, thus enabling them to use their existing network of tradesmen and material suppliers. In this way we can fully involve the community allowing them to quickly address the needs of the wounded veteran and find a suitable community based solution.

For more information visit https://www.purplehearthomesusa.org/

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ASAP Local Food Guide is Back

The growing season has arrived in Western North Carolina and the Southern Appalachians! Finding seasonal local farm products at farmers tailgate markets is certainly a sign of spring along with local food at restaurants and roadside stands. It is also the time of year to pick up the latest edition of ASAPs Local Food Guideto find the best sources for Appalachian Grown food.

The community asks for local food, and ASAPs Local Food Guide is the best way to find it, says Molly Nicholie, ASAPs Local Food Campaign Director. In the guide, you can find hundreds of local family farms, farmers tailgate markets, restaurants, grocers, artisan foods, lodging, and travel destinations featuring an astounding variety of local products. ASAP renews and collects data each year so that the best, current information is available for consumers.

This years Local Food Guide offers stories of people making positive changes in the food system including parents and children cooking seasonally and adding the farmers tailgate market to their routines, farmers developing networks to meet increasing demand for local products, and more. Other features include area restaurants building community connections through local food, and details about ASAPs programs such as the Growing Minds Farm to School Program and the Local Food Research Center.

Print copies will be distributed to locations in every county in Western North Carolina and other partners in the Southern Appalachians. A full list of distribution points can be found atasapconnections.org. Search by product or location at ASAPs online Local Food Guide atappalachiangrown.org. The 2016 Local Food Guide can always be picked up at ASAPs office: 306 West Haywood Street, Asheville, NC 28801.

The 2016 Local Food Guide is made possible with support from Buncombe County Service Foundation, The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, Farm Aid, TVA Ag & Forestry Fund, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, and Asheville Area Airport.

ABOUT ASAP (APPALACHIAN SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE PROJECT)

ASAPs mission is to help local farms thrive, link farmers to markets and supporters, and build healthy communities through connections to local food. To learn more about ASAPs work in the region, visit asapconnections.org, or call (828) 236-1282.

Online Self Defense at the Library April 25-26

FIRST PART

The Watauga County Public Library would like to invite you to join Sean Haupt for the first in a series of Online Self Defense classes on Monday, April 25th from 2:00 pm  3:00 pm in the Meeting Room at the Watauga County Public Library, 140 Queen Street, Boone, NC 28607.

The internet is a scary place. Come learn to defend your privacy online. This is the first of an ongoing series. White belt level will cover the basics that everyone should know including: Protecting yourself from malware and viruses, keeping your computer up to date, and setting good passwords.

Space is limited to 10 participants. To RSVP or for more information please call: (828) 264-8784ext. 2.

SECOND PART

The Watauga County Public Library would like to invite you to join Sean Haupt for the second in a series of Online Self Defense classes on Tuesday, April 26th from 3:30 pm  4:30 pm in the Meeting Room at the Watauga County Public Library, 140 Queen Street, Boone, NC 28607.

The internet is a scary place. Come learn to defend your privacy online. This is the second part of an ongoing series. Yellow belt level will include: safe web browsing practices, privacy enhancing browser plugins, and how to prevent websites from tracking you.

Space is limited to 10 participants. To RSVP or for more information please call: (828) 264-8784ext. 2.

ASU Apparel Design Showcase Set for April 24

Appalachian State Universitys Apparel Design and Merchandising program will host its annual showcase Sunday, April 24, at 4 p.m. in the Schaefer Center for the Performing Arts. The event is open to the public. Tickets are $8 for students and $10 for general admission.

Appalachians Apparel Design and Merchandising program is housed in the universitys Department of Applied Design in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. The program focuses on apparel and textiles while emphasizing both design and merchandising.

The annual showcase features collections and individual pieces designed by students and faculty. This years show will feature a series of cohesive collections created by students enrolled in the spring 2016 Apparel Production class. Additional work featured will include individual student designs created in the following classes: Apparel Construction, Flat Pattern Design, Sustainability in the Apparel Industry and the Reebok Studio, as well as independent student designs created outside of classes. There will also be a brief exhibition featuring faculty designs.

The showcase is an opportunity for students to share their creations as well as a chance for campus and local communities to learn more about the Apparel Design and Merchandising program.

Tickets can be purchased online at http://theschaefercenter.org/ tickets or at the door.

Farmland Preservation Board Meeting May 2

The Farmland Preservation Program Advisory Board will have a meeting on Monday, May 2nd, 2016 at 8:00 am at the Soil and Water District Office 971 West King Street Boone. The public is invited to attend.

Watauga Soil and Water Board to Meet April 27

The Watauga Soil and Water Conservation District Board will hold its regular Board meeting Wednesday April 27, 2016 at 8:00 am at the Soil & Water Office located at 971 West King Street, Boone NC 28607.The public is invited to attend.

Sailing, Speed and Passion with Gary Jobson at Watauga Lake May 21

WLSC and the Tri-Cities Boating Club Johnson City Sail and Power Squadron wil present Sailing, Speed and Passion with Gary Jobson, world class sailor, at Lakeshore Marina on Watauga Lake, Sailboat Dock 2285 on U.S. Highway 321 in Hampton, Tennessee, on May 21. Reservations are required. 1:30 p.m. for junior sailors will precede the 3 p.m. pain event. Admission is $20 for the main event and $10 for juniors. Get your tickets now before they sell out!

Get tickets online at www.eventbrite.com/e/sailing-speed-passion-by-gary-jobson-tickets-20150336198.

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When it comes to weight loss, salmon probably isnt the first food you think of. Many people eat
The Finns Party opposes the de-regulation of taxi licences. We will not allow [the industry to be turned into] a Wild West, he writes.

Timo Soini (PS), the Minister for Foreign Affairs, reveals on his blog that the proposal unveiled yesterday by Anne Berner (Centre), the Minister of Transport and Communications, to de-regulate the taxi industry does not enjoy the unanimous support of the Government.

The proposals are not part of the government programme and have not been discussed by the Government. We cannot move forward without the unanimous support of the Government. There is currently no such support, and we [consequently] cannot proceed with the state transport network project, says Soini.

Berner proposed yesterday that the quantitative regulations on taxi licences and licence quotas be abolished, that the regulations on maximum fares be removed, and that taxi drivers be allowed to take passengers regardless of their main area of operation.

Taxis would no longer have to drive back from the airport empty but would be allowed take passengers anywhere. It would also mean that anyone of us could get a taxi on the fly like we can in many other countries, she explained in a news conference.

She also insisted that she and Soini are on the same page.

I and [Soini] agree that we should wait until the proposals have been circulated for comments. [] Contrary to the starting point of the Finns Party, the taxi sector will not be de-regulated completely, not even in terms of taxi licences, said Berner.

Taxi licences, she pointed out, would simply be converted from driver and vehicle-specific licences to operator-specific licences.

I'm confident that the discussions we've had with the Finnish Taxi Owners' Federation will allow us to find common solutions that strengthen the state transport network, promote the reform process and have the support of the Finns Party. What's key now is to receive feedback, and that's something I and Soini agree on, she stated.

The Ministry of Transport and Communications has also launched preparatory work to transfer the responsibility for the development and maintenance of the state transport network to a state-owned company that would finance its operations primarily by charging for the use of the network, according to a press release.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Vesa Moilanen  Lehtikuva

Source: Uusi Suomi
WHHS continues run of yearbook honors

West Henderson High Schools 2015 Westwind yearbook, This Is What We Do, won the Pacemaker Award from the National Scholastic Press Association, which honored 42 yearbooks nationwide this month.

Related Stories

The Pacemaker Award makes This Is What We Do the second yearbook in the schools history to win top honors from the National Scholastic Press Association, the North Carolina Scholastic Media Association, the National High School Journalism Convention, the Southern Interscholastic Press Association, and the Columbia Scholastic Press Association.

In June 2015, This Is What We Do earned the Tar Heel Award for top yearbooks in North Carolina from the North Carolina Scholastic Media Association, followed by Best of Show at the National High School Journalism Convention in November 2015. In March 2016, the yearbook received the Scroggins Trophy for best yearbook in the Southeast from the Southern Interscholastic Press Association, and the Gold Crown from Columbia Scholastic Press Association. The last West Henderson yearbook to sweep the table of national awards was the 2012 Westwind, We Stand Proud.

"In spite of all the standardized testing, today's students are capable of incredible creativity and excellence, said Brenda Gorsuch, publications adviser at West Henderson since 1983. The 2015 Westwind, edited by Maggie King and Haley Staton, shows off the amazing talents of more than 50 students who worked together to create the book.

The writing, design and photography are all outstanding. Overall, the book is evidence of the high level of learning taking place in our schools, Gorsuch said. The students sold and designed the advertisements, designed the cover, created the spreads, took the photos and wrote the copy and captions. It is truly a student publication that covered a year in the life of West Henderson students and their school."

King is currently a freshman at Appalachian State University, and Staton is a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Co-editor of the 2016 Westwind, Izzy Denman, said, "Being a member of such an award-winning yearbook staff has been one of the most rewarding things I have ever been a part of. Knowing that I was able to take part in creating the 2015 Westwind gives me incredible pride. I am very grateful to have played a role in such an amazing publication."
A Dublin man who was jailed for a joyriding crash that killed two gardai has been given a suspended sentence for new motoring offences.

Raymond Dowdall (30), who was given an eight-year sentence and a 30-year road ban in 2003, is now working for a security company, a court heard.

Dowdall was the driver of a stolen Mazda MX5 when it smashed into a patrol car containing Gda Anthony Tighe (53) and Gda Michael Padden (27) on the Stillorgan dual carriageway early on April 14, 2002.

Dowdall was aged 16 at the time and already had a litany of prior convictions.

The father-of-one appeared yesterday before Dublin District Court, where he entered guilty pleas via his barrister to two motoring offences, driving without insurance and a licence, last July 13 at Galtymore Road.

Dowdall turned up late for his hearing and a bench warrant was issued, but Judge Hugh O'Donnell cancelled it when his barrister said he had arrived and there was a guilty plea.

Gda Marcus Regan, of Sundrive Road Station, told Judge O'Donnell that Dowdall had 51 prior convictions.

Dangerous

They included two counts of dangerous driving causing death of gardai. He also had four previous convictions for driving without insurance.

Judge O'Donnell noted that the accused had been driving while disqualified when he committed his latest offence.

Gda Regan agreed with the defence barrister that Dowdall, who did not address the court, had been cooperative and had not been driving dangerously.

In pleas for leniency, Judge O'Donnell was told Dowdall - of Galtymore Road, Drimnagh - had gone to his partner's house and took her car after a row.

He has a young child to care for and was apologetic.

The court heard he was now working for a security firm and would do anything to avoid going into custody.

He was willing to do community service, counsel also said.

Judge O'Donnell noted that he had already served an eight-year sentence, but added that "it does not seem to have worked".

He imposed a five-month jail sentence but suspended it on condition that Dowdall does not re-offend for the next two years.

Fines totalling 750 were also imposed, but Judge O'Donnell said there would be no point imposing another road ban because Dowdall is already disqualified from driving.
The family of an Irish citizen detained in Mor- occo for nearly two weeks on heavily-contested false passport allegations have appealed for his release.

Father-of-three Franck Mananga (30), an IT threat research analyst from Kilbarrack, had travelled alone to Casablanca for a holiday on March 28 and was supposed to return on April 4.

However, his family became concerned when he did not come home and had not been in contact with them.

"He never came back," said his brother, Chris Amour.

"We started to get worried because he wasn't on social media and Franck is the type of person who would always be on WhatsApp to let us know where he is."

Mr Mananga's family became seriously concerned when they contacted his employer, Webroot, who confirmed he had been due to return to work but had not shown up.

"On the Saturday, April 9, his partner finally managed to get through to him," said Chris.

"He said he had got into trouble at the airport and was due to go to court."

Mr Mananga said Mor- occan authorities were accusing his brother of travelling on a false passport.

Ridiculous

They believe there was a notice on Interpol for his arrest and that he was wanted in Portugal for an unspecified crime.

His family have said the allegation is ridiculous.

"His passport is 100pc genuine. He's been a naturalised Irish citizen for the last five years, originally from Congo," said Chris.

"He is always travelling on that passport for work and was recently in the US."

He said his brother, who has a newborn baby here, was forced to sign some documentation in Arabic that he did not understand and that he requested a lawyer but was denied.

He added that he was due to appear in court yesterday, but police said they misplaced his file and it would take a week for a new hearing.

"It will be three weeks that he is detained without charge and we are not even clear on why they are holding him," said Chris.

"There's no evidence other than this suspicion."

A statement from the Department of Foreign Affairs said it was aware of the case and was providing consular assistance to Mr Mananga's family. There was no response to questions addressed to the Moroccan embassy in Dublin.
A 29-year-old gangster who turned his back on the Kinahan cartel after the murder of Gary Hutch has been demanding fellow criminals "give up" the suspected gunman in last week's botched murder.

The criminal was a close associate of Gary Hutch, who was murdered last year.

The feared northsider is a key member of the Hutch mob and sources said that he is desperate to avenge the reckless shooting in which intended target Keith Murtagh (32) escaped unharmed.

The attack led to the murder of innocent man Martin O'Rourke.

"He has been calling up and leaning on individuals who are connected to the suspected killer.

"He wants these fellas to give up the location of where this individual is hiding out," a source said.

The gangster, who is believed to be hunting for the killer, is himself one of the rival cartel's biggest targets in the feud that has now claimed five lives.

The suspected gunman for Thursday's atrocity on Sheriff Street was arrested twice by Tallaght gardai investigating the cartel-sanctioned slaying of Michael 'Mad Mickey' Devoy in January 2014.

He was also "very friendly" with many players in the Hutch mob before last week's shocking events.

Warned

The Hutch mob gangster, who is now gunning for last week's hitman, had his home raided in late February by gardai investigating the Regency Hotel attack.

It is understood he warned detectives that the feud would not be over until Daniel Kinahan was killed.

"We will not rest until Daniel Kinahan is dead. He caused all of this, it won't end until he is in his grave," he said.

This notorious north inner city criminal is a feared hitman suspected of carrying out the murders of Paul Kavanagh last year and Eamon 'The Don' Dunne in 2010 on behalf of the Christy Kinahan cartel.

However, in the aftermath of Gary Hutch's murder, sources revealed the hitman refused to attend a number of meetings that the cartel attempted to organise because he was "disgusted and heartbroken" about what happened to his friend.

Last month, it emerged he was lucky to survive after one of his associates tried to set him up just weeks before the Regency hotel bloodbath.

Sources revealed that the gangster managed to flee a north-Dublin car park after another criminal who he had trusted and worked with for years set up a bogus meeting.

No shots were fired in the apparent murder attempt because the intended target got "spooked and fled the scene".
John Leslie with the sword worn by his uncle Norman, who was killed in World War I. Photo: Frank Mc Grath

John Leslie, one of Ireland's last surviving Second World War veterans, has died aged 99.

Leslie, a cousin of Winston Churchill and whose family seat was Castle Leslie in Co Monaghan, died at home with his family at his side.

While his official title was the 4th Baronet of Leslie and he was sometimes called by his British aristocratic honorific of Sir John, he preferred being called simply 'Uncle Jack'.

"The Leslie Family are sad to announce that Sir Jack Leslie passed away peacefully in his sleep surrounded by his family," a statement said.

Sir Jack became an international news sensation in 2002 as his castle hosted Paul McCartney's wedding to Heather Mills.

With the global media gathered at the gates of the estate near Glaslough he announced the superstar's nuptials were taking place behind the gates but that it was "a secret".

Born on December 9, 1916, he was an active Knight of Malta, art connoisseur, water colour painter and restorer of historical buildings.

Leslie's passing comes just a few months after he received France's highest honour for his service in World War II.

He celebrated receiving the Legion of Honour in November with a glass of champagne in the French embassy in Dublin, dedicating it to "all soldiers from the island of Ireland who fought and died between the two great wars".

Jean-Pierre Thebault, French Ambassador to Ireland, said his country had "lost a friend and a hero".

"I had the privilege to pay him a private visit last Friday. We chatted for half an hour," he said.

"In his perfect French, he spoke of the many opportunities he had to visit our country and the many links he and his family still had with France."

During World War II, Leslie served with the Irish Guards and was captured by the Germans in 1940.

He went on to spend the rest of the war in POW camps across Europe. For a time, it was believed he had been killed in action.

Pleaded

During that time, he contacted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his cousin, and pleaded with him to secure the release of his comrades who had fallen ill in captivity.

"So many of us would be grateful if you could, by chance arrange the repatriation of prisoners," he wrote in a postcard.

"We know that our trivial discomforts are as nothing compared to the suffering world, but we feel a change could favour us."

Once he was freed, Leslie travelled extensively throughout the United States and Europe until he settled in Rome in the 1950s and purchased a 1,500-year-old monastery.

Returning to Castle Leslie, in Glaslough, Monaghan, in 1994, Leslie soon made a name for himself.

Far from being the shy and retiring type, he was often spotted joining crowds of 20-somethings on the dance floor.

Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney were just some of the A-listers who stayed at the Castle Leslie hotel.

The Beatle returned to marry Heather Mills there in 2002. Speaking to the crowds of international reporters gathered at the gates, Mr Leslie revealed: "They're getting married on Tuesday, but it's a secret."

His colourful life was enough to rival those of most rock stars, and he was known for being the life of the party in the village and beyond.

His family said "one of the most endearing of Uncle Jack's hobbies was his love of 'house music'. Each week he would visit the local nightclub to dance to the 'boom boom' music", they said. "He quickly gained respect in the clubbing community to the extent that there is a nightclub named after him in Clones."

His interest in raves and discos even resulted in a trip to Ibiza for his 85th birthday, where he danced the nights away in Privilege, one of the world's biggest clubs.

He also remained a regular in Glaslough's local bars, joining locals for karaoke sessions and nights on the tiles.

His unorthodox hobby was also the subject of two hit documentaries, Lord of the Dance and Uncle Jack and the Boom Boom Music. He also published his memoir, Never A Dull Moment, in 2009.

In an interview, he said: "I used to go to the village pub. A lot of the girls and boys there would go to discos, but I didn't pay the slightest attention.

"Then I thought I'd try one, and it was absolutely delightful," he added.

Locals also remember him popping in to the local shop for his paper and "a bit of craic".

He will be buried in a private enclosure next to the estate's St Salvator church.
An Irish nun killed in the Ecuador earthquake had given up a life of partying and drinking to help others, friends and family members have said.

Sister Clare Theresa Crockett (33), from the Brandywell area of Derry, was among 350 people who died when the 7.8-magnitude quake struck on Saturday.

A second Irish nun, Sr Therese Ryan (36), from Limerick, was pulled from the rubble in their building in Playa Prieta with a fractured ankle.

Five postulates, or trainee nuns, also died when the building collapsed. They were named by their Home of the Mother Order as Ecuadorian Sisters Jazmina, Mayra, Maria Augusta, Valeria and Catalina.

Actress

Two other nuns were rescued, Sr Estela Morales (40), the superior from Spain, and Sr Merly Alcybar (34), from Ecuador, who survived a wall falling on her.

Sr Clare had been with her order for 15 years, entering religious life when she was 18 after giving up plans to become an actress.

She had appeared as an extra with actor Jimmy Nesbitt in Paul Greengrass' movie, Bloody Sunday.

Sr Clare joined the order almost by accident after going to Spain when she was 18 for what she thought was a holiday but which turned out to be a pilgrimage.

"I liked to party a lot. My weekends, since I was 16 or 17, consisted of getting drunk with my friends. I wasted all my money on alcohol and cigarettes," she later wrote.

"I tried to get out of it, but my name was already on the ticket, so I had to go. I now see that it was Our Lady's way of bringing me back home, back to her and her Son."

Sr Clare's cousin, Emmet Doyle, said she was "a superstar - everybody loved her".

"She died as she lived, helping others," he said.

Her spiritual director and personal friend, Derry priest Fr Roland Colhoun, said her death had devastated all who knew her.

He said she joined the order in Spain, had gone to the United States and returned to Ecuador a couple of years ago for a second time.

"The terrible news has devastated everyone who knew her," he said. "This is a young girl who gave her life to God and died for the Gospel. She literally died in the line of duty.

"She was a joyful girl. I've known her since she was a teenager. She was a beautiful person. I'll remember the joy she brought to her youth group and the enthusiasm she showed for her vocation to religious life.

"It's counter-cultural to join a religious order for a young girl, but she embraced it. We'll remember her with such affection.

Special

"She was 33 but had the vitality of a teenager. We're devastated she has lost her life in such a tragic way."

Sr Theresa, the head of the order based in northern Spain, said: "Sister Clare had spent nearly 15 years in consecration to the Lord. She was a generous sister with a special gift for reaching out to children."
Modular homes could be built in multi-storey blocks across Dublin to solve the homelessness crisis

Modular homes could be built in multi-storey blocks across Dublin to solve the homelessness crisis.

The Office of Government Procurement (OGP) has asked companies to provide information on the types of 'rapid delivery' homes they are capable of supplying to ramp-up delivery across the country.

Tender documents state that the companies should be in a position to supply "standard" homes with one, two or three bedrooms which are two storeys in height.

But it adds that, in some urban areas, there may also be sites suitable for "multi-storey, multi-dwelling" buildings.

In a request for market information, the OGP said it is attempting to understand the "nature, structure, capacity and capability" of the market to deliver so-called "rapid delivery housing solutions".

But it stressed that it was not seeking any of these units, merely seeking information.

The move comes as part of the outgoing government's commitment to deliver 350 rapid-build homes as part of its Social Housing Strategy out to 2020.

The homes are planned for the four Dublin local authorities, but other councils may also decide to use these buildings to reduce the need to house homeless families in hotels or other forms of emergency accommodation.

The homes must last for up to 60 years and meet all the current building regulations. Local authorities and voluntary housing agencies can use the companies if they believe they are suitable to meet their needs.

Developments

The Department of the Environment said the companies could be used to cater for "pressing accommodation needs".

While multi-unit developments were "not planned" at the moment, local authorities may wish to pursue this option at a later date, a spokesman added.

Two lots will be created - one for standard two-storey projects between one and 30 units, and a second for projects of more than 30 homes, including multi- storey dwellings. Submissions must be made by May 13.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of a transgender student fighting to use a boys bathroom at his Gloucester County school.

The court issued its ruling Tuesday overturning a district courts denial of a preliminary injunction saying the judge in the case was guided by erroneous legal principles.

The injunction would have allowed 16-year-old Gavin Grimm, who was born female but identifies as a male, to use the boys restroom at Gloucester High School as his lawsuit against the county's School Board works its way through the court system.

We therefore conclude that the district court abused its discretion when it denied (Grimms) request for a preliminary injunction without considering (Grimms) proffered evidence, the court said in its ruling.

We vacate the district courts denial of (Grimms) motion for a preliminary injunction and remand the case to the district court for consideration of (Grimms) evidence in light of the evidentiary standards set forth herein.

The court allowed lawyers to reinstate a claim that the School Boards bathroom policy violates federal sex discrimination law.

Grimm will not be allowed to use the boys bathroom at the school until the district court hears the case again, unless the school system changes its policy.

No comment at this time. Have a great day! Walter R. Clemons, Gloucesters school superintendent said in an email.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Grimm, the courts ruling marks the first time that a federal appeals court has determined that Title IX protects the rights of transgender students to use sex segregated facilities that are consistent with their gender identity.

The case stems from the School Board's 2014 policy that designates bathrooms to a student's specific biological gender and allows for unisex bathrooms.

Grimm, according to court records, refused to wear girls clothes as a child and at 12 years old "acknowledged his male gender identity to himself."

By the time he got to his freshman year in high school, Grimm's friends were aware of his decision. He told his family in April 2014.

That August, his mother notified Gloucester High School that Grimm is transgender and had legally changed his name. Grimm, who has a twin brother, and his mother then met with the school's principal and guidance counselor to talk about his transition. Teachers were notified about the name change and his desire to be referred to by male pronouns.

Grimm, at first, feared how other students might react to his transition and agreed to use the bathroom in the nurse's office.

When the 2014-15 school year began, Grimm asked for permission to use the boys bathroom. The school's principal agreed, and for seven weeks Grimm used it without issue.

However, court records show that some community members disapproved and asked the School Board to prohibit him from using the boys bathroom.

The issue came to a head when it came up during a School Board meeting on Nov. 11, 2014.

According to court papers, 27 people spoke in favor of the proposal to limit bathrooms to the corresponding biological genders.

Speakers worried that allowing transgender students to use a bathroom not of their biological genders would violate other students' privacy and could "lead to sexual assault in the bathrooms."

It was suggested that a non-transgender boy could come to school in a dress and to use the girls restroom, according to court filings.

The School Board approved the resolution 6-1 on Dec. 9, 2014. Grimm was told the next day that he could no longer use the boys restroom and would be disciplined if he did, according to court filings.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union asked a three-judge panel in January to overturn the district courts denial of the preliminary injunction.

The ACLU argued that forcing Grimm to use the girls bathroom is a violation of Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

I feel so relieved and vindicated by the courts ruling. Grimm said in a statement. Todays decision gives me hope that my fight will help other kids avoid discriminatory treatment at school.

The appeals courts ruling establishes legal precedent in every state in the 4th Circuit, including North Carolina, which faces a lawsuit challenging a new state law requiring transgender people to use the public bathroom that corresponds to the sex listed on their birth certificate.

The sweeping law, which also barred cities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances like one recently passed in Charlotte, has prompted a national backlash. Businesses and politicians have announced boycotts of North Carolina, and legal challenges ensure that the wedge issue will dominate Republican Gov. Pat McCrory's re-election campaign.
KINGSPORT, Tenn.  Nine Rock Springs Elementary School 5th graders have been selected to be in the Tennessee Honor Treble Choir.

The students auditioned and were the only students selected from Sullivan County and the region for the event that was held in Nashville last week, a written statement from Sullivan County Schools says.
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Mystified Outer Banks tourists witnessed a bizarre act of nature Friday, Oct. 14, as fish began flinging themselves onto the beach at Ocracoke Island. Multiple videos shared on social media show the ocean appeared to boil with fish as they tumbled over each other in the surf. The so-called bluefish blitz concluded with thousands of dying fish piled on the sand, flopping up and down as ...
RICHMOND, Va.  A policy barring a transgender student from using the boys' restrooms at his Virginia high school is discriminatory, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

In a case closely watched by public schools and transgender-rights activists across the country, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Gloucester County School Board's policy. A federal judge had previously rejected Gloucester High School student Gavin Grimm's sex discrimination claim.

Transgender rights have become the latest civil rights battleground issue across the country after the Supreme Court laid to rest the gay marriage debate when it ruled last year that same-sex couples had the right to marry. The issue was thrust further into public consciousness in 2015 when Olympic athlete and reality TV star Bruce Jenner disclosed his transgender identity and name change to Caitlyn Jenner.

The appeals court's ruling establishes legal precedent in every state in the 4th Circuit, including North Carolina, which faces a lawsuit challenging a new state law requiring transgender people to use the public bathroom that corresponds to the sex listed on their birth certificate. The sweeping law, which also barred cities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances like one recently passed in Charlotte, has prompted a national backlash. Businesses and politicians have announced boycotts of North Carolina, and legal challenges ensure that the wedge issue will dominate Republican Gov. Pat McCrory's re-election campaign.

Other states in the 4th Circuit are Maryland, West Virginia and South Carolina.

Grimm was born female but identifies as male. He was allowed to use the boys' restrooms at the school for several weeks in 2014. But after some parents complained, the school board adopted a policy requiring students to use either the restroom that corresponds with their biological gender or a private, single-stall restroom.

Grimm called the policy stigmatizing. School officials said the policy respects the privacy of all students.

The U.S. Justice Department filed a "statement of interest" in Grimm's case in July, declaring that failure to allow transgender students to use the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity amounts to sex discrimination.

Grimm, 16, said he started refusing to wear girls' clothes by age 6 and told his parents he was transgender in April 2014.

Grimm's parents helped him legally change his name, and a psychologist diagnosed him with gender dysphoria, characterized by stress stemming from conflict between one's gender identity and assigned sex at birth. Grimm began hormone treatment to deepen his voice and give him a more masculine appearance.
WEST IREDELL -- A motorcyclist was critically injured when he crashed while trying to elude a N.C. Highway Patrol trooper early Monday afternoon, authorities said.

The operator, Daniel D. Bowlin, 29, of Hillsborough, is a patient at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, said First Sgt. Brian Owenby of the N.C. Highway Patrol.

Owenby said the highway patrol communications center in Salisbury received a call late Monday morning about a motorcycle being operated at a high rate of speed and in a reckless manner.

Trooper J.N. Chapman said he spotted the motorcycle traveling about 80 mph near the 157-mile marker on Interstate 40. Chapman said he turned around in the median and the motorcycle accelerated to more than 100 mph.

Chapman closed in on the bike and it continued west on Interstate 40, exiting at Stamey Farm Road.

As his motorcycle approached the stop sign at the intersection with Island Ford Road, the operator braked and went across Island Ford Road, Chapman said. The bike struck an embankment and went airborne, landing in a yard. The operator was thrown several feet, coming to rest in a driveway.

Bowlin was taken via Iredell EMS to Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.
RALEIGH  The agency that promotes tourism in Raleigh says losses have reached $3 million because of cancellations prompted by the protests of North Carolina's law on LGBT rights.

The Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau told local media Monday the economic losses from the law have quadrupled in the past week.

The visitors' bureau said $2.4 million in lost business has been reported this week. The bureau said last week the area lost about $732,000 because of cancellations or the scaling back of plans.

Opponents say the law discriminates against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

The biggest cancellation is $1.7 million from the Community Transportation Association of America. It planned to bring 1,000 people in June 2018. The Washington, D.C., association says it will hold the event in Baltimore instead.
LINCOLNTON  The Lincoln County Narcotics Unit arrested a man and woman after the woman called detectives and offered to sell them drugs Monday in Lincolnton, according to a Lincoln County Sheriffs Office press release.

Angela Shorty Lingerfelt Juarez, 43, of Lincolnton, inadvertently called an undercover detective thinking he was someone else, officers said.

That's when the undercover narcotics investigator continued to have a conversation with her acting as if he was the person she intended to call, officers said via the press release.

Juarez and Robert Castillo, 44, of Vale, had several more phone conversations with the undercover officer and set up a meeting to exchange money and methamphetamine, according to the press release.

An undercover detective gave the couple money for drugs, and once the couple realized the undercover officer was not who they thought, they left the area and kept the money, according to the release.

Castillo possessed methamphetamine and a small amount of hydrocodone pills and was taken into custody.

"It's not every day we receive a call from someone by mistake trying to sell us drugs, Lincoln County Sheriffs Office Narcotics Lt. Jon Propst said via the release. Quick thinking and aggressive enforcement techniques allowed us to make the most of the situation and take two more drug offenders off the street."

Juarez was charged with one felony count of conspiracy to sell methamphetamine, one misdemeanor count of resisting a public officer, and served with outstanding orders for arrest for failure to appear, larceny, and first-degree trespassing. She was placed in the Harven A. Crouse Detention Center under an $8,000 secured bond.

Castillo was charged with one felony count each of possession of methamphetamine and conspiracy to sell methamphetamine. He also was charged with one misdemeanor count of possession of schedule II controlled substance. He received a $12,000 secured bond.
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So sharp and enraged were the public agitations in Handwara and Kupwara last week that a lot of people in Kashmir have been talking of a return of 2010. Thankfully, things have settled down there, but the signs are worrying. Top police officers have spoken to senior army officers of the possibility that this will be the worst year yet for the forces.

Comparisons with 2010 are natural. That was the year when mobs of Kashmiri youth took to the streets with stones and rage. Around 120 young men were killed that summer as the police and the Central Reserve Police Force repeatedly opened fire on belligerent crowds of youth.

In early September that year, the Union cabinet was given a very alarming report about the situation. Indeed, so bad was the situation that the then chief minister, Omar Abdullah is said to have indicated to a cabinet committee in New Delhi that he did not want to return to Kashmir.

Already, the portents this year are so worrying that comparisons with 2010 may turn out to be underestimates. Some people in Kashmir have talked excitedly of Indo-Pakistan and Sino-India tensions. They did not in 2010. Locally too, greater rage and frustration could be manifest than in 2010. A lot of Kashmiris have expressed amazement over the levels of the rage apparent in Kupwara district, which was considered safely dormant for India in the past.

In 2010 too, rage was partly animated by disappointment with the Omar Abdullah-led government, which was formed after the elections that were held in the winter of 2008. In 2016, there is not just disappointment but disgust with the established political process. This disgust and rage focuses on the BJP, which many Kashmiris not only disparage but deeply fear as the face of Hindu Right-wing animosity against Muslims in general and Kashmiris in particular. The PDP-BJP coalition is seen as a betrayal of poll promises; during the 2014 campaign PDP leaders had urged people to vote for the party in order to keep the BJP from coming from power.

Read | Fresh protests in Kashmirs Handwara and Kupwara, restrictions reimposed

Apart from the PDP-BJP tie-up, two other factors make the situation this year more dangerous than 2010. One of these is an increased sense of Islamic identity. This is partly a response to the RSSs Hindudva ideology. This identity has also been strengthened by global currents emanating from the Gulf and elsewhere.

There is greater acceptance of the idea that Muslims are under global siege by dominant powers, including a Christian West, Israel and a Hindu India. The third factor plugs into the second; insider-outsider antipathy has increased greatly since 2010. The sense that Kashmiris have been wronged by outsiders has been boosted by recent events at the National Institute of Technology in Srinagar, at Handwara and Kupwara, and by perceptions that the media coverage of both have been biased.

The rage of 2010 was largely animated by anger over specific killings of innocent Kashmiris. The names of Wamiq Farooq, Tufail Mattoo and Zahid Farooq, who were teenagers when they were killed by forces that year  at least one of them was only returning from tuition  still reverberate in Kashmir. Rage increased after the murder of three young men who were lured to an army camp at Machil with the promise of work, killed, defaced, buried and described as Pakistani terrorists. Rewards were claimed by the army men, who were dismissed from service by a court martial in 2014. Many Kashmiris say that that measure of justice was not only too late, it was far too little. They should have been hanged, they say, to give an adequate signal to others who might want to misuse state power to murder innocents for personal gains.

Read | JNU students protest Handwara killings, demand repeal of AFSPA

The rage this year is clearly more generalised, and focuses more on what has now come to be widely perceived as an illegitimate establishment. This stems in large measure from the narratives and discourses that have been vigorously circulated over the past few years. A young Kashmiri taxi driver remarked with a sense of triumph that an Indian tourist had told him that Kashmir was illegally occupied. The young man does not know very much about history or geopolitics but is convinced that this must be true since an Indian says so. Sensible voices in the ruling establishment rue the fact that history and world affairs are not taught in school curricula. Orchestrated discourses naturally gain ground.

Partly owing to the recent narratives, there is more intense rage than in 2010. Despite a curfew, unarmed young men attacked an army camp last week. This was unheard of in the past. Students who were part of bands of young stone-pelters told me in Old Town Baramulla in June 2010 that they only pelted the CRPF and the police, since these oppressed them. If an army truck came by, they let it pass. Lt Gen Naresh Marwah (retired), who was the Corps Commander in the Kashmir Valley that year, confirms that not a single army vehicle was attacked that year. This was despite the fact that there was anger against the Machil fake encounter and the killing of an elderly beggar who had approached an army camp gate in Kupwara that spring. Nor, adds Marwah, did the army fire a single shot during that summer of unprecedented rebellion with stones. Last week, by contrast, unarmed youth attacked an army camp in Kupwara, something that was unheard of in the past. They have also been attacking police stations and vehicles of both the forces. That is a very sobering indicator of just how bad things could get  and relatively soon.

David Devadas is a senior journalist based in Kashmir. The views expressed are personal.
The social medias response to any article on Chhattisgarhs iron fist-style of governance in the Maoist-affected Bastar region is always boringly similar. There will be a (minority) group supporting and sharing the piece, but a far bigger and vociferous section will not think twice before making unsubstantiated accusations against the author: Maoist supporter, JNU-Left intellectual or what about Maoist violence? I do agree with the last question: Those who condemn State-sponsored violence must also condemn Maoist violence and demand more reportage and discussion on it.

Back to the social media issue, it was no different on Monday when I started tweeting from the launch of Amnesty Internationals report Blackout in Bastar, Human Rights Defenders Under Threat. The accusations came thick and fast. I yawned. I find it tiresome to reply to such tweets, but a thought crossed my mind: What would have happened to me if I had tweeted instead from Chhattisgarh?

A minute later, one of the panelists at the launch of the report, the editor of a Bastar-based newspaper, Bhumkal Samachar, Kamal Shukla, said grimly: One report can kill us or put us in jail.

He added: We are always reminded by the state police that our lives will be in danger if we dont follow the government narrative. And now we have the vigilante groups backed by the state that just make it difficult for independent journalists to work in Bastar.

Read: | Chhattisgarh: Another journo arrested, focus on police intimidation

Over the last six months, human rights defenders have faced a relentless crackdown by the police and vigilante groups, leading to a near-total information blackout in the state, said Amnesty International India in the report.

Four journalists  Santosh Yadav, Somaru Nag, Prabhat Singh and Deepak Jaiswal  have been arrested on politically motivated charges since July 2015. Another journalist, Malini Subramaniam, was forced to leave the state in February following attacks on her home and police pressure on her landlord.

Political opponents are not spared either, especially those who have tribal backgrounds because they are thought to have deep links with the Maoists. In February, AAP leader Soni Sori, who contested the 2014 general elections from Bastar, was attacked by unknown assailants.

Read | Activist Soni Sori attacked with acid-like substance in Chhattisgarh

Then there are the cases of human rights activists such as Bela Bhatia and lawyers Isha Khandelwal and Shalini Gera. All three were harassed by the state authorities: Bhatia for helping tribal women file FIRs on sexual violence, allegedly committed by police personnel and Khandelwal and Gera for providing legal assistance to prisoners since 2013.

Many of their clients are tribals who are accused of being Maoists. What I find more disconcerting is how, in 2015, the Bastar Bar Association passed a resolution debarring lawyers not enrolled in the State Bar Council from practising in Jagdalpur courts, a move which could have been aimed at Khandelwal and Gera. Interestingly, their research showed that between 2005 and 2013, about 96% of all criminal cases in Dantewada resulted in acquittals. Now what does this say about the police? Of course, acquittals only after many undertrials spent long periods in jail.

Read | The Amnesty International Report : Bastar Blackout

In this theatre of the absurd, chief minister Raman Singhs government has divided the citizens of the state  and of India  in a neat binary, and the message is clear: Either you are with us or against us.

kumkum.dasgupta@hindustantimes.com

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As many as 106 candidates in the fray for the third and fourth phases of the Bengal assembly elections are millionaires, while 128 candidates have criminal cases registered against them. Affidavits filed by the candidates reveal that 61 of the 418 candidates in the third phase and 45 of the 345 candidates in the fourth phase are multi-millionaires.

West Bengal Election Watch said 80 aspirants in the third phase and 48 candidates in the fourth phase have declared criminal cases, including serious offences like murder and rape, pending against them.

In the third phase, the Trinamool Congress heads the multi-millionaires list with 27 candidates, followed by the Bharatiya Janata Party with 14 and the Congress with 11. Sixty-two constituencies spread across Burdwan, Kolkata, Murshidabad and Nadia districts will go to polls in the third phase on April 21.

Forty-nine constituencies in Howrah and the North 24-Parganas will go to polls in the fourth phase on April 25. In the fourth phase, Trinamool has fielded 15 candidates with criminal cases, the BJP 7 and the Congress and the CPI-M 6 each.

The BJPs Somabrata Mandal from Shyampukur constituency in Kolkata is the wealthiest candidate in the third phase with assets worth over Rs.28.65 crore. The second wealthiest candidate is of Trinamool Congresss Jangipur nominee Jakir Hussain with Rs 21.95 crore.

The average worth of assets held by the 418 candidates in the third phase is Rs.74.76 lakh.

In the fourth phase, the Trinamool Congress has fielded 19 crorepati candidates, followed by the BJP with eight and the Congress with five.

Trinamool nominee and state Finance Minister Amit Kumar Mitra, contesting from Khardaha in the North 24-Parganas, heads the multi-millionaires list in the fourth phase with assets worth over Rs 11.74 crore. The average worth of assets held by 345 candidates in the fourth phase is Rs.50.02 lakh.

Of the 80 candidates in the third phase with criminal cases, 65 face serious charges of murder, rape, attempt to murder and kidnapping. Among them Trinamool has 20 candidates with criminal cases, followed by the Congress and the CPI(M) with 16 each and the BJP 15.

The first two phases of polls had witnessed stray incidents of violence, but largely passed off peacefully. Though the opposition alleged foul play and intimidation, the Election Commission called the polls peaceful. With several candidates wanted in criminal cases in fray in phases going forward, the fear of violence looms large.
Expelled former DMK strongman MK Alagiri on Tuesday said he will not support any party in the May 16 Assembly polls in Tamil Nadu.

No support for anyone. Thats all, was the Madurai leaders cryptic response when reporters asked him whom he will support in the coming election.

It applies to my supporters also, he added.

In 2014 Lok Sabha polls, leaders, including MDMK founder Vaiko and the BJPs H Raja, had called on Alagiri in an apparent effort to get his support.

Vaiko had contested from Virudhunagar and Raja from Sivaganga, both South Tamil Nadu constituencies.

Alagiri, the oldest son of DMK president M Karunanidhi, had enjoyed tremendous clout as partys organisation secretary south, when DMK was in power between 2006 and 2011.

However, he fell out of favour with the party leadership following a power tussle with younger sibling MK Stalin, resulting in his suspension and expulsion later.

Alagiri had recently called on Karunanidhi at his Chennai residence, triggering speculation of his homecoming, but Stalin had dismissed any such move, saying there was no politics behind the meeting.
The inter-state newborn trafficking racket was being run at the Gwalior-based nursing home for the last four years, police said on Monday.

The racket was busted on Sunday when crime branch sleuths, acting on a tip-off, raided the nursing home and found two newborns with no record of their birth and other mandatory details. The manager of the hospital told police that the babies were kept for sale to customers who could offer to them an amount between Rs 50,000 and Rs 1 lakh.

The Palash Hospital, owned by TK Gupta, that started functioning five years ago and was allegedly set up as a camouflage to run the illegal trade, Gwalior additional superintendent of police (ASP) Kumar Prateek told HT on Monday.

The ASP said investigations so far indicated the racket was being run for the last four years and that it was being operated with the help of agents present across the Chambal region of Madhya Pradesh, adjoining Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

The police suspect several babies, abandoned by unmarried mothers or impoverished couples who couldnt afford to raise them, could have been sold for hefty sum.

So far police have rescued two newborns from the private hospital, while they suspect one baby is with Gupta, who is on the run. Two more babies have already been sold to couples in Lucknow and Dabra in Gwalior, they said.

Meanwhile, on Monday, police produced Palash Hospital co-director Arun Bhadoria in a local court and sought four-day custody for further interrogation. Bhadoria, who was arrested on Sunday after a former employee tipped-off police, confessed that the nursing home was selling newborns for anything between `50,000 and `1 lakh.

Police also raided Guptas house in Maheshpura-Moral locality, but were unable to find him or the newborn he had allegedly kept for sale.

Well be sending teams to Lucknow and other places to track those who had bought the newborns through the racket being run at the private hospital. Efforts will also be made to track the biological parents of the newborns, the Gwalior ASP said, adding that some other private nursing homes and hospitals in Gwalior too were under the police scanner for running similar rackets.

Five people, including Gupta, Bhadoria, Anupam Chauhan, Rinki and another person, have been booked on charges of human trafficking in the case.
After an inter-state newborn trafficking racket being run at a Gwalior-based nursing home was busted, the Madhya Pradesh Commission for Protection of Child Rights chairperson Raghvendra Sharma on Tuesday blamed the health department officials for apathy and negligence.

Sharma was here in the wake of police raids at a private hospital  Palash -- during which it was discovered that newborn babies born out of illicit relationships or rapes were sold to childless couples for Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh per child.

The racket was busted on Sunday when crime branch sleuths, acting on a tip-off, raided the nursing home and found two newborns with no record of their birth and other mandatory details.

Sharma said the government must take serious measures to correct the system which, according to him, was lacking in responsibility and delivery.

Sharma inspected the SNCU ward and beds where the two newborn babies -- recovered in the raid from Palash Hospital -- were being kept under close supervision.

He said directions had been given to chief medical and health officer (CMHO) Anoop Kamthan to conduct speedy survey of all private nursing homes operating in the district and submit a report at the earliest.

I will ask the district collector for a thorough investigation into the matter by an appropriate agency, he added.

Civil surgeon of district hospital Dr DD Sharma, district women empowerment officer Shalin Sharma and other officials accompanied the chairperson during his visit.

Police denied remand of accused

Police investigation into the incident suffered an initial setback after the court refused to grant protection remand of accused Arun Bhadoria -- Palash Hospital co-director -- on Monday. Bhadoria, who was arrested on Sunday, has confessed that the nursing home was selling newborns.

Gwalior additional superintendent of police (ASP) Kumar Prateek said the police had sought at least 10 days remand.

Bhadoria was sent to jail under judicial remand.

Prateek said the police were tipped off about three new brokers allegedly involved in the trafficking racket and their places would be raided soon.

Palash hospital owner TK Gupta is hiding somewhere in Chhattisgarh and police parties would be sent to various places including Lucknow to bring the people who purchased the babies, added Prateek.

Cops unable to get hold of official records

Sources said the police were unable to get hold of official records of the nursing home which may have been destroyed or kept hidden.

The Palash hospital nursing staff, which helped consulting doctors in administering deliveries, has gone underground and the hospital wore a deserted look.

The regulatory/supervisory agency of the health department in the district claimed to have no knowledge about any wrong-doing despite the prevalent trend there.

Chief medical and health officer Anoop Kamthan, however, said strict action was taken against Palash hospital including its closure and cancellation of license under MTP (Medical Termination of Pregnancy) Act.
With celluloid being influenced by real-life incidents and movies turning to reality for inspiration, heroines are also moving away from their over-the-top looks. With their de-glam looks, actors are also helping to bring in some authenticity to their characters.

Actor Aishwarya Rai Bachchans look in her film Sarbjit (based on the life of Sarabjit Singh, an Indian convicted of terrorism and spying by a Pakistani court) and actor Alia Bhatts first look from Udta Punjab have got noticed for being a far cry from glamourous. Add to that list, actors Anushka Sharma and Lisa Ray, who will be more than just Plain Janes in their upcoming films Sultan and Veerappan, respectively.

Filmmaker Ali Abbas Zafar, who is directing Anushka-Salman Khan-starrer Sultan, says, We are making films on realistic subjects now and actors also want to take up real-looking characters. So once the actors come on board, everything works backwards - first the characters are decided, then the dialect, body language, and then the get-up, he says.

Trade analyst Atul Mohan says, Actors dont want to do run-of-the-mill stories anymore. They are keen to do roles which are challenging. they want to look authentic, not glamourous. So, such roles demand realistic looks. Also, there is no denying the fact that such looks help the promote the film, for they become the talking point. It creates quite a buzz. Also, actors now want to do such roles because it helps them get noticed.

Actor Anushka Sharma in a still from Ali Abbas Zafars Sultan. (Twitter)

Read: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan runs barefoot on stones, cow dung for Sarbjit

Aishwarya, who plays the role of Sarabjits sister Dalbir Kaur in the film inspired by Sarabjits life, says her director Omung Kumar helped get the look right. How you look is very important and I have the highest regard for make-up which helps us transform. I went through my directors vision, before prepping for Dalbir. It was Omung who told me you have to look like her, talk like her, I did exactly what he told me to. I also met Dalbirji on the first day of the shoot, she said at a promotional event of the film earlier.

Actor Alia Bhatt in a still from Abhishek Chaubeys Udta Punjab. (YouTube)

Read: Abhishek Chaubey was sceptical to cast me as a Bihari migrant: Alia

Alia, who has so far portrayed girl-next-door roles in films such as Student of the year (2012), Two States (2014) and Shaandaar (2015), plays a Bihari migrant in Udta Punjab. She said, For my look, I have to give credit to the costume designer and our director Abhishek Chaubey... I think Abhishek was sceptical about casting me. I am happy that I am a part of it.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
Deepika Padukone may be away in Toronto, Canada, shooting for her upcoming Hollywood debut, but that hasnt stopped the actor from making headlines in India. Photos and updates from the stars filming schedule have kept her fans busy. But Deepika, who will be seen in her maiden Hollywood film with Vin Diesel, often gets homesick. In fact, she has even been tweeting pictures of Indian snacks that she misses eating. We are also told that while interacting with the foreign crew and artistes, who are working on the same movie, Deepika adopts the Indian way of greeting people.

Read: Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra are achievers: Sanjay Leela Bhansali

For instance, when she met the well-known American actor-producer, Samuel L Jackson, on the sets of her film for the first time, she greeted him by folding her hands and saying, Namaste. A source from the sets reveals, He was pleasantly surprised by the gesture. With some help from Deepika, he also greeted her in the same manner. Apparently, the two celebrities got along well, and discussed Indian culture at length. The source also reveals that the Bollywood actor was heard teaching Jackson some easy Hindi words.

Read: Deepika Padukone cant wait to work with Fawad-Sidharth

The insider adds, They spoke about their respective cultures. He also asked her how the shoot was going, how her experience of working on the movie had been, and how she liked it in Toronto.

Follow @htshowbiz for more.
In 2014, Sonakshi Sinha announced the launch of her own production house with her brothers, Luv Sinha and Kussh Sinha. Back then, the Dabangg (2010) star had said, I will support the company as an actor as well as a family member. However, since then, no movie has been announced under the banner. The reason for the same, according to Sonakshi, is the lack of good scripts.

Good scripts are rare in todays world. And honestly, with three of us involved, it often happens that if one person likes something, the other two dont, she says, laughing. She adds, We need to reach a consensus. But, it is also good to work with your siblings, as its easier to make a point without worrying about what the other person will think.

Over the years, Sonakshi has also made a mark when it comes to her sense of fashion. (HT Photo)

Read: Sonakshi has got no fear, Im proud of her: John Abraham

Over the years, Sonakshi has also made a mark when it comes to her sense of fashion. While the actor is a fashion design graduate, she admits that during her initial years in the Hindi film industry, she never took enough care of herself. The way I dress now is a result of a lot of inputs from a lot of people. In the last two years, I worked with some really good stylists, says Sonakshi. She reveals that when she started working out and shedding the extra kilos, compliments started pouring in from all quarters. Ive needed help in that (style) department. And eventually, I started looking better and getting compliments so, when you are praised for your style, its natural to want to do it (take care of oneself), she adds.

Read: I have never succumbed to any pressure: Sonakshi Sinha

Making a statement

Sonakshi is clear that she wants to do films that challenge her. (HT Photo)

The actor points out that her friend, stylist Sakshi Mehra, helped her a lot in this journey. Sakshi stepped in and really changed my style around. So I started thinking like her. She knows what I like, what I would wear, etc. She no longer lives in Mumbai, but her assistant, Chinar Desai, has stayed on, says Sonakshi, who adds that even though Chinar is young and new, she is doing a great job.

Read: Fitness is not always about being thin: Sonakshi Sinha

On the work front, Sonakshi is clear that she wants to do films that challenge her. Im just going to go with the flow. But Im definitely not going back to doing four films a year. That is something that drains me. I only want to do films that push me, she says.

Read: Sonakshi Sinha shames man for asking creepy question on Twitter

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The Delhi high court on Tuesday asked the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to hear the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC), which had claimed that the upcoming film Santa Banta Pvt Ltd made fun of Sikhs.

Justice JR Midha said this after the bench was informed by the government that the DSGMCs member could have a meeting on Wednesday at the CBFC chairmans office in Mumbai regarding the film scheduled to be released on April 22.

The issue was also brought up on Tuesday before the Supreme Court, which asked the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) counsel that he could file a petition and challenge whichever aspect they felt aggrieved of in the movie.

The high court was hearing a plea filed by the DSGMC and two others against CBFC chairman Pahlaj Nihalani and its CEO Anurag Shrivastava in which it was alleged that they had not complied with the March 29 directions given by the court.

On March 29, a bench headed by chief justice G Rohini had directed CBFC to reconsider the U/A certification issued to the film and asked it to give an opportunity to parties to be heard on the issue before passing an appropriate order.

The division bench had also asked CBFC to treat as a representation the petition filed by the DSGMC, which had claimed that the movie could lead to disturbance.

In the plea which came up for hearing on Tuesday, the DSGMC alleged that CBFC had clandestinely passed an order on April 7 without hearing them on the issue about certification of the movie despite the courts direction.

Countering the DSGMC claims, governments standing counsel Anil Soni told the court that proper messages were sent to them but they did not appear before the CBFC for a discussion.

They (petitioners) are the ones who did not take the opportunity granted by the court. We have passed the order in their absence keeping in view their representation, he said.

The counsel appearing for the petitioners said they had not received any such communication from CBFC. Soni then said the DSGMC members could meet CBFC officers in Mumbai on Wednesday.

During the hearing, the court said an opportunity should be granted to the DSGMC to discuss the issue with CBFC. It also said a fresh order be passed by CBFC on or before April 21 after hearing the petitioners.

During the hearing on the petition earlier before a division bench, the censor board had stood by its decision to certify it on the grounds that there was nothing objectionable.

In its petition filed before the division bench, the DSGMC had sought stay on the films release contending that it misrepresented the community and projected the personality of the community in defamatory and denigrating manner, which could cause disturbance.

Read: Bombay HC refuses to ban release of Santa Banta Pvt Ltd
They finished work on their next film on Monday (April 18). Although shooting for the movie has been challenging for the makers, director Vishal Bhardwaj and producer Sajid Nadiadwala are glad that they managed to shoot it in Arunachal Pradesh.

Read: There is a shortage of talent, says Sajid Nadiadwala

An insider from the production house says, This film is among the few Bollywood projects that have been shot extensively in Arunachal Pradesh. It was difficult for the makers to get the permission to shoot in the state. Even tourists are required to fulfil a few official formalities to visit the northeastern state. For instance, all international tourists are required to have a Protection Area Permit to enter Arunachal Pradesh, and all domestic tourists need to obtain an Inner Line Permit.

Though getting the permissions was difficult, Vishal and Sajid were keen to shoot in Arunachal, as the place offered the perfect landscape for the film, which stars Shahid Kapoor, Kangana Ranaut and Saif Ali Khan.

Read: I am my own audience: Vishal Bhardwaj

When contacted, Sajid confirmed the news, and said, It was not easy to get the permissions to shoot in Arunachal Pradesh. Since Vishal and I were clear that the states landscape would add to our vision, we did it. I am glad that our entire team feels that our efforts were worth it.

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Boman Irani has been part of Bollywood for over 15 years, playing an array of roles. And rather than calling himself a character actor, he prefers to think of himself as an actor who does character roles. He says, Let people slot you in any category; it doesnt bother me. In your own head, you know you are playing different characters.

The actor says that he often has to play same role in different films, but he makes sure that they are poles apart. For example, in Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006) and Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006), both characters are estate agents and Punjabi. Then, in Munna Bhai MBBS (2003) and 3 Idiots (2009), both are principals and have daughters who are in love with men they despise. I make a concentrated effort to play them differently, he says.

Read: I will do anything to be with Rajkumar Hirani, says Boman Irani

Over the years, Boman has garnered a fan following that includes six-year-olds and even 60-years-olds. He believes that this stardom is the by-product of his acting, and says, I came here to be an actor. If Id have come to become a star, Id be a lesser actor, as your focus and drive is different. Stardom is good only to sell tickets.

Read: I miss Sajid Khan: Boman Irani on Housefull 3

He, however, does enjoy the appreciation he gets from his fans, and credits his family for keeping him grounded. It is difficult for people to come up to you. especially old people. So, it is a great honour. But Im not put on pedestal in the house; I get no special treatment at home, says Irani.

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Four hundred years after his death, iconic English poet and playwright William Shakespeare is more popular across the world than in his homeland Britain, and still continues to contribute significantly to the UKs prosperity and influence, claims a survey published on Tuesday.

The British Council, which commissioned the YouGov survey of 18,000 people from 15 countries, said the results showed that internationally Shakespeare is widely known, liked and understood.

Read: Visit Shakespeares England to mark his 400th death anniversary

Four hundred years after his death, Shakespeares work continues to play a vital role in educating and entertaining people around the world, said the Councils Rosemary Hilhorst in a statement.

The Council, which fosters cultural relations between Britain and other countries, said Shakespeares influence internationally helps generate a positive attitude towards the UK.

Over a third of people questioned said Shakespeare made them feel more positive about Britain in general, with the greatest number of respondents holding this view in Brazil (57%) and India (62%).

Shakespeares grave at Holy Trinity Church in the United Kingdoms Stratford Upon Avon. (Shutterstock)

The survey also found Shakespeare was more popular (65%) in terms of being liked, understood and still regarded as relevant today overseas than in his home country (59%).

But his popularity in other English-speaking countries such as Australia and the United States was significantly lower than in the non-English speaking countries polled including China, Turkey and Mexico.

The British Council said his popularity had a direct influence on Britains economy, not just in terms of attracting visitors to Shakespeares theatres but also contributing to the countrys standing in the world which had the knock-on effect of attracting tourists.

Read: No fear Shakespeare!

William Shakespeares work, which includes 38 plays and 154 sonnets has been translated into over 80 languages and is performed throughout the world. The precise date of his death is not known but his funeral was held on April 25, 1616.

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The Pulitzer Board conferred the most prestigious honours in US journalism and the arts at New Yorks Columbia University on Monday.

This years announcement marked the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzers, which began in 1917 after a bequest from newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer.

Listed below are the winners who were felicitated this year for their outstanding work:

Investigative reporting

Leonora LaPeter Anton and Anthony Cormier from The Tampa Bay Times, and Michael Braga from The Sarasota Herald-Tribune

For their series, Insane. Invisible. In Danger, which connected steep budget cuts with rising violence and neglect at Florida mental hospitals.

National reporting

Staff, The Washington Post

For its revelatory national database detailing fatal shootings by police officers nationwide. The Post identified 990 fatal shootings nationwide in 2015, far more than ever recorded by the federal government.

International reporting

Alissa J. Rubin, The New York Times

Alissa Rubin of the New York Times, center, is applauded by her colleagues in the newsroom in New York, including chief executive Mark Thompson, center right, after winning the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting on Monday. (AP)

For reports illuminating the struggles endured by women in postwar Afghanistan. The committee highlighted an investigation into the death of Farkhunda Malikzada, 27, who was killed by a mob, and the failure of Afghanistans legal system in its aftermath.

Breaking news

Staff, The Los Angeles Times

The Times coverage of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which killed 14 people, was a newsroomwide effort that resulted in a live-blog that was constantly being refreshed, and a main news story that was updated 22 times.

Feature writing

Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker

Kathryn Schulz. (AP)

For her vivid investigation into the Cascadiasubduction zone, a fault line that threatens to unleash the worst natural disaster in the history of North America, potentially ravaging vast portions of the Pacific Northwest with a huge earthquake and resultant tsunami.

Public Service

The Associated Press

The Associated Press team that investigated seafood caught by slaves. (From left) Martha Mendoza, Robin McDowell, Esther Htusan and Margie Mason. (AP)

The APs investigation into the use of slave labor across the seafood industry in Southeast Asia traced how that very seafood was then sold across supermarkets and restaurants in the United States. It was credited for a series of articles that freed 2,000 slaves, brought perpetrators to justice and inspired reforms.

Local reporting

Michael LaForgia, Cara Fitzpatrick and Lisa Gartner from The Tampa Bay Times

Tampa Bay Times reporters Lisa Gartner, center, reacts to Pulitzer prize announcements in the Times' newsroom in St. Petersburg, on Monday. (AP)

For exposing a local school boards culpability in turning some county schools into failure factories.

Explanatory journalism

T. Christian Miller from ProPublica, and Ken Armstrong from The Marshall Project

Ken Armstrong. (AP)

For their article, An Unbelievable Story of Rape, about a failed police investigation into a young womans allegations of rape.

Criticism

Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker

Emily Nussbaum. (AP)

For a set of reviews and essays about subjects like Joan Rivers legacy, David Lettermans last shows, Robert Durst and the end of Mad Men.

Commentary

Farah Stockman, The Boston Globe

Farah Stockman. (AP)

In a series of reported columns, Stockman wrote about the legacy of busing in Boston, which began there in 1974, and about the complex problems of race relations that persist today, in that city and throughout the country.

Editorial cartooning

Jack Ohman, The Sacramento Bee

This cartoon by Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee won the editorial cartooning Pulitzer Prize on Monday. (AP)

For conveying wry, rueful perspectives through sophisticated style that combines bold line work with subtle colors and textures.

Editorial writing

John Hackworth, Sun Newspaper

For fierce, indignant editorials that demanded truth and change after a state prison inmate was beaten to death by 10 corrections officers. His editorials led to the resignations or dismissals of the corrections officers as well as changes in the prisons administration.

Breaking news photography

Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev, Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter from The New York Times, and Reuters photography staff

A policeman tries to stop a migrant from boarding a train through a window at Gevgelija train station in Macedonia, close to the border with Greece. (REUTERS)

For documenting the huge scale of the migrant crisis as it swept across Europe and the individual pain of families finding their way in the turmoil.

Feature photography

Jessica Rinaldi, The Boston Globe

Jessica Rinaldi. (AP)

For her raw and revealing photographs of a 5-year-old boy struggling to regain his footing after nearly dying at the hands of his mothers abusive boyfriend.

Drama

Lin-Manuel Miranda for Hamilton

Lin-Manuel Miranda (centre) with the cast during a performance of Hamilton in New York. (AP)

Mirandas work, a musical about the life and death of Alexander Hamilton, is distinguished by its use of hip-hop music and a predominantly Hispanic and African-American cast to explore Americans revolutionary era.

Biography

William Finnegan for Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

Finnegans memoir of over five decades on and off the waves was praised for taking readers deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses.

History

TJ Stiles for Custers Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

The book cover of Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by TJ Stiles. (AP)

For a magisterial biography that radically changes our view of the man and his turbulent time, looking past a tidy narrative that ends at Little Bighorn to take in Americas transformation in the 19th century.

General non-fiction

Joby Warrick for Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

The book cover of Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick. (AP)

Warricks book explores how the United States flawed military strategy in Iraq helped fuel the rise of the terrorist group the Islamic State.

Fiction

Viet Thanh Nguyen for The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen. (AP)

His debut novel, The Sympathizer, opens in 1975 in Saigon and is narrated by the captain, a Communist sympathizer who escapes to Los Angeles and spies on a South Vietnamese group he has infiltrated.

Music

Henry Threadgill for In for a Penny, In for a Pound

For this 2015 recording featuring his quintet, Zooid. The Pulitzer board described it as a highly original work in which notated music and improvisation mesh in a sonic tapestry that seems the very expression of modern American life.

Poetry

Peter Balakian for Ozone Journal

Balakians seventh book of poems, it is deeply rooted in thoughts about the Armenian genocide. The author, 64, traveled in 2009 to excavate the bones of victims in the Syrian desert.

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The Bio-Chemic Education Grant Commission (BEGC) offers accreditation to medical colleges and gives licences to doctors to practice medicine in the field of bio-chemic.

This would seem to be like a regular government body similar to the Medical Council of India, but it isnt. BEGC, which claims to be a statutory authority, has been deceiving colleges and doctors across India since being established around seven years ago.

Based in West Bengals Nadia district, BEGC claims it was established under the Indian Bio-Chemic Act 2009, an act that doesnt exist. But its notifications have appeared on the Gazette of India, the official rule book of the Indian government.

How? The authorities are clueless. On March 23, 2015, three notifications appeared in section 4 of part III of the Gazette that is meant for miscellaneous notifications by statutory bodies.

All Indian Medical system will consult for any advice and activities to get legal permission from the commission, one of the notifications said. Another listed 13 members of the commission. Every notification ended: By order, Shyamal Dutta, the CEO and the President.

Through an RTI, HT asked the government press in New Delhi, how the notifications were published without verification. The genuineness of the notification is not verified by the press, it replied. The department of publication did not reply.

The commission also gets its alleged authenticity through its website, which has photos of minister of science and technology Jitendra Singh along with Dutta.

BECG even conducted a seminar in New Delhis Hotel Ashok in January in collaboration with the Department of North East Development.

BEGC runs a medical court, gives accreditation to doctors and educational institutions to conduct courses on bio-chemic education. Its centralised processing cell has even sent notices to doctors in Kerala, asking them to pay Rs 3,000 each for getting registered with BEGC.

The commissions website lists about 24 bio-chemic colleges and a not-for-profit University of Bio-Chemic Health Sciences established in 2015 and controlled by BEGC.

It also gives an idea of what the commission did so far. Nearly 1,000 students are receiving teaching and training within the affiliated colleges across India.

The Patna Bio-chemic Medical College & Research Institute, one of the accredited colleges, said the first batch started last year with about 25 students. The course fee is Rs 1.51 lakh a year for a 4-year MBBS. The new batch is about to start.

The person could not explain what bio-chemic is except that it is an advanced medicine form, and said there are four faculties to teach and they are MBBS doctors.

BCEGCs website also shows clippings of some national dailies (including HT) that carried stories on its press conference.

The CEO has not responded to HTs email queries. On why the commission was located in Nadia, an official of BEGC replied: It is because our CEOs house is here.
Tata Steel Europe on Monday appointed Standard Chartered as additional adviser along with KPMG to scout for buyers in Asia and the Far East. The company said it has reached out to 190 potential financial and industrial investors for selling its UK assets.

The company said new changes to its leadership operations included re-designating Bimlendra Jha, executive committee member of Tata Steel Europe, as the chief executive officer of Tata Steel UK.

Jha, who is currently executive chairman of Tata Steel Europes long products business, led the divestment process, which resulted in the deal with investment firm Greybull Capital on April 11.

Todays announcement by Tata Steel Europe will ensure the full focus on the vital tasks that lie ahead of Tata Steel UK, said Koushik Chatterjee, group executive director of Tata Steel Ltd.

Bimlendras successful experience of the process of divestment of long products Europe business will be invaluable as Tata Steel Europe explores strategic alternatives for its operations in the UK. He will be supported by a team with immense operating experience of the UK business.

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The Delhi Police have busted a huge racket involving the stealing and selling of high-end cellphones, especially iPhones, that crisscrosses the country and goes as far as China and Nepal.

In their biggest such operation, the force has arrested eight persons, including a DU graduate, in the last three days and recovered 448 phones, including 310 Apple iPhones, worth R2.5 crore. These phones were stolen from Delhi, Kerala, Bihar, Mumbai and Haryana.

The interstate gang, the police said, stole the phones and sold their parts to registered service centres and to dealers at Gaffar Market in Karol Bagh. The screens went for R17,000 each, the cameras for R5,000. The motherboard and the rest of the body, which could not be used in India for fear of being tracked, were sent to the two neighbouring countries. The gang comprised snatchers and receivers.

Smelling a racket, the police put a snatcher, Vicky, under surveillance and with his arrest, unearthed the racket. They got lucky, too. During Vickys interrogation, DCP, north, Madhur Verma said, Some receivers called him, asking him to deliver a consignment. The investigators, posing as the snatcher, spoke to the receivers and sought an urgent meeting. They lay a trap, called the receivers to a place from where they were arrested.

Vicky gave the police the names of receivers he supplied stolen phones to. One of them, Tarun, named a Delhi University BCom graduate who ran the pan-India racket. The police  who did not identify him as it may compromise the investigation  raided his Mangolpuri house and recovered 328 mobile phones.

Many snatchers work for this receiver across the country. They steal phones and send them to him. Two of his associates travel to Nepal to dispose of the parts that cannot be used in India, Verma said, adding that the operation is on and more arrests are likely.

The police have another challenge on their hands  tracing the owners of the phones. A team is going through the phones IMEI numbers for this purpose.
The Juvenile Justice Board is likely to pronounce the judgment today against the minor, who allegedly mowed down a 34-year-old while speeding in his Mercedes car.

The Class 12 student surrendered to the police last Sunday after which he was sent to a juvenile justice home. The Delhi Police had last week slapped culpable homicide charge on the juvenile driver after learning that he was a repeat offender and had also arrested his father for abetting the crime.

Read: Mercedes hit-and-run case: Teen driver is a repeat offender

The teen, who turned 18 years old four days after the accident, was said to be going at 80 km an hour when he hit marketing consultant Siddharth Sharma near Ludlow Castle School in North Delhis Civil Lines area. Minutes before hitting Sharma, the Mercedes car had grazed past two bikers near the Delhi Vidhan Sabha. They were not injured and did not file any complaint.

The boys father, who has been charged with abetment to culpable homicide not amounting to murder, had also been arrested. He was later granted bail and released on a personal bail bond of Rs 1 lakh.

Read: Delhi: 32-yr-old killed by speeding Mercedes, juvenile apprehended

The police are also preparing to challenge the bail granted to the juveniles father.

The boy was first apprehended last Tuesday but bailed within hours because the police had then booked him for causing death due to negligence. But on Friday when the police learnt that the juvenile had been involved in speeding and other similar accidents  driving without a licence  a case of culpable homicide not amounting to murder was registered.

Read: Caught on CCTV: Video of Delhi man killed by Mercedes released by family

In a recent three-part series, HT had highlighted the menace of underage driving and the dangers it poses to the safety of commuters in the city.

In a ploy to mislead the police, a man had claimed before the court that he was driving the car when the accident took place but later retracted his statement. He was later arrested for giving false information.

The family of the victim had released CCTV footage of the incident, which went viral on the social networking websites. The grisly video showed Siddharth Sharma crossing the road and a speeding Mercedes car hitting him, throwing him several feet in the air.

(With inputs from ANI)
A juvenile board on Tuesday dismissed the bail plea of a minor accused of driving a Mercedes car that crushed a 33-year-old business consultant earlier this month in Delhi.

The Juvenile Justice Board rejected the bail application of the boy, observing that he was a repeat offender. He had been earlier challaned in another case of rash driving.

His father was granted bail by a court on April 10, two days after he was arrested.

Police had apprehended the minor offender on April 5, a day after he killed Sidhharth Sharma by hitting him with his Mercedes car the previous night when the victim was crossing a road to buy eatables.

The minor was then freed on bail as he was only booked under section 304A (causing death by negligence) of the Indian Penal Code.

After an uproar and allegations that police officers were going soft on the accused, the police took a U-turn.

The boys father was also arrested under section 304 (abetting the crime of culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of IPC for letting his minor son to drive even after knowing that he had caused an accident earlier.

Read: Teen driver is a repeat offender

Police had earlier told the court that CCTV footage showed that the minor offender was driving his car at great speed in a residential area.

In a recent three-part series, HT had highlighted the menace of underage driving and the dangers it poses to the safety of commuters in the city.

(with agency inputs)
The Delhi government on the fifth day of its odd-even experiment on Tuesday impounded 25 Ola and Uber vehicles for surge pricing.

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal had on Monday warned of action after complaints of overcharging against Ola and Uber during peak hours.

Sources said the government may summon Ola and Uber executives. The transport departments enforcement team has been ordered to check cab bills and investigate surge pricing.

The impounded vehicles face a fine of R 5,000 and a life ban. We are monitoring all complaints and conducting surprise checks on commercial vehicles, said a senior transport officer.

Also read: Odd-even 2.0: Uber, Ola suspend surge pricing after Delhi govt threat

The government on Monday evening also started a helpline for aggrieved commuters.

On Monday morning, many commuters took to Twitter and other social media platforms to vent their anger.

A woman working for an IT company was charged R 1,200 for a ride from Noida to Connaught Place. Similar complaints were shared on social media with most commuters posting screen grabs of the prices.

Kejriwal tweeted on Monday,Strict action, incl permit cancellation n impounding vehicle, to be taken against taxis which charge rates more than govt prescribed rates.(sic)

Facing the heat, aggregators Ola and Uber on Monday evening suspended the surge-pricing system. Ola said they were suspending it to support the governments odd-even experiment.

We have temporarily suspended the surge-in-price option but this is not for the entire two weeks of odd-even. We will be closely working with the government to see how to serve customers better, said an Uber spokesperson.

Follow full coverage of odd-even here
Delhi entered its fifth day of the odd-even scheme on Tuesday and the results, though premature, seem partially optimistic. According to data collected by The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), pollution levels dipped on Monday, the first full-fledged traffic day since the start of the second road rationing scheme.

Monitoring stations across the city, set up by the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC), recorded lower pollution levels on Monday (April 18) than on Saturday (April 16). However, the data showed levels had spiked considerably when compared with last Tuesday (April 12), before the odd-even rationing began restricting odd and even number licensed cars to ply on alternate days.

Teri is collecting daily data from four DPCC monitoring stations and is also monitoring another five locations for air quality. This data, made available to Hindustan Times, showed that the citys air was marginally cleaner on Monday than on Saturday, the second day of the scheme.

At Anand Vihar, one of the most polluted corners of the Capital, concentration of PM 2.5  particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 microns  was recorded at 122 micro gram per cubic metres (g/m3) on Monday. On Saturday, PM2.5 levels were at 168 g/m3 while last week they were 55 g/m3.

The Indian permissible standard for PM 2.5 is 60 g/m3 while the World Health Organisation, that listed Delhis air quality as the worst in the world last year, considers 25 g/m3 to be of good quality.

PM 2.5 is huge concern as the particulate matter, released by vehicular and industrial emissions, is tiny enough to penetrate deep into lungs and cause severe respiratory and cardiac problems. The matter is so fine that even most protective masks available in the market cannot filter them out.

Teri experts monitoring pollution levels attribute the differing levels to the changing wind speeds.

On Saturday, air pollution increased as the wind speed, which results in dispersion of pollutants, was comparatively less at 6km/h. On Monday, it was 8 km/hour. However, it is too early to link this dip in pollution level with odd-even scheme, said Teris Sumit Sharma who led the monitoring team.

Sharma added that a detailed analysis is required to ascertain the actual impact of the second phase of road rationing after it concludes on April 30.

The Delhi government took the extreme measure for the first time in January as pollution levels touched alarming levels in the city.

The DPCC, which monitored a total of 74 locations, earlier said PM 2.5 levels were within the permissible limit of 60 g/m3 at 42 locations on Saturday, underscoring that the governments scheme was having a positive impact on air quality.

Officials said nearly 69 locations registered PM 2.5 levels at below 100, while PM 100 levels were below 200. The meteorological department however cautioned that Tuesday could be a bad day as very weak wind speeds could increase PM2.5 and PM10 levels across the city.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to entertain the Delhi governments plea seeking to refer to a larger bench of the Delhi high court a bunch of petitions seeking clarity on powers of Lieutenant Governor on the governance of the national capital.

A bench of justices V Gopala Gowda and Arun Mishra declined to pass any order saying the matter was already pending before the high court.

Earlier, the city government had made similar application before a bench headed by chief justice G Rohini on the issue of interpretation of Article 239AA saying the issue involves interpretation of the Constitution and raises substantial question of law of great public importance.

It had contended that there have been two contradicting verdicts from the high court on the issue due to which, it should be referred to a larger bench.

It had sought the court to decide as a preliminary issue whether the petitions have to be referred to a larger bench.

It contended that the Centre was trying to interpret Article 239AA to mean that Union government is the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi and if that interpretation is accepted, then a democratically elected government will be reduced to zero.

Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Sanjay Jain, appearing for the Centre, had contended that there was no need for referring the petitions to a larger bench.

Arguing on the larger issue of interpretation of Article 239AA, the ASG had contended that appropriate government means the Union government where union territories are concerned.
The Art of Living on Monday completed the clean-up of the Yamuna flood plains where the World Culture Festival was held and officially handed it over to the Delhi Development Authority (DDA).

The World Culture Festival, held here from March 11 to 13, was embroiled in a controversy that it harmed the local ecology as well as disturbed the farmers and their crops. A green court had imposed a fine on AoL for organising the event in the flood plains.

The grounds have been returned by Art of Living in a better condition than they received it -- greener, cleaner and with no damage to the soil. There was no water, air or soil pollution from AoLs side. That should put to rest all apprehensions about the possible pollution due to the mega event, Art of Living said in a statement.

The World Culture Festival attracted 172 leaders from across globe, and over 3.7 million people from 155 countries.

The seven-acre stage on which the event was hosted was build in 50 days and dismantled in 28.

The foundation said the stage was set up without a foundation to prevent damage to the soil.

The area under the stage, as well as the rest of the grounds, now sport a carpet of green grass, and show no signs of any damage. In fact, the place is frequented by cattle for grazing, it said.
The dictum that there is strength in numbers has been used to chilling effect by mobs in India. Add to this anonymity and hardly anyone has to pay for the violence unleashed by mobs whether it be in communal riots or caste and class wars.

We have seen numerous riots in which frenzied mobs have destroyed public property and visited murder and mayhem in the name of religion, caste or just revenge on people. Yet, thanks to the facelessness of the mob, it is difficult for the law enforcement agencies to pinpoint blame on individuals or indeed those who incited the mob in the first place.

In this context, the Gujarat high courts ruling that anyone in a mob is guilty of the misdemeanours of the gathering holds out some hope. The ruling was in a 13-year-old case of mob dacoity in the Shah-e-Alam area of Ahmedabad where innocent commuters were looted and harmed. We have had some high profile arrests of those in mobs, notably Jagdish Tytler in the Sikh riots of 1984 and Maya Kodnani in the fateful Gujarat riots of 2002. But there have been numerous instances of those in power having encouraged mobs with their statements  the late Balasaheb Thackeray would often say that he was not responsible for the conduct of his boys if anyone tried to besmirch the fair name of the Shiv Sena. Rajiv Gandhi, unwittingly or wittingly, seemed to justify mob violence when he talked of the earth shaking when a great fell, a reference to his mother Indira Gandhis assassination.

The ruling will, at the very least, lead to people pausing to think of the consequences of being part of a murderous mob. No doubt, this ruling could mean that innocent people could also suffer but in such cases, making exceptions would be lead to people misusing the provision to get off the hook.

The court, has however, reduced punishment for those found guilty of mob violence from life imprisonment to a minimum of 10 years in jail. While the ruling may reduce the fervour of miscreants to take to the streets in the belief that they can get away with it, it would also be the time to focus on restitution for the properties destroyed during mob violence.

In the Haryana Jat agitation recently, crores of rupees worth of private and public property was vandalised and no one seems to be accountable. In many instances, the police have to go by reports of eyewitnesses to determine guilt in mob violence. This could lead to miscarriages of justice. The court ruling is hardly ideal but it will certainly lessen the enthusiasm among people to be part of the scene in mob gatherings, irrespective of their role in its actions.
You go past a pub and it announces Happy Hours between 4 and 6 p.m. You go in and enjoy your usual beer at 50% below the price. You dont complain, do you? Then why crib about surge pricing in taxis?

As the Arvind Kejriwal-led Delhi government joined Bengalurus transport authorities in frowning on app-based taxi rental companies that cash in on peak-hour demand, questions have arisen on whether companies such as taxi operator Ola Cabs or taxi aggregator Uber are exploitative or not. Maharashtra is also considering a proposal to impose ceilings on surge pricing.

No one complained when Ola charged only Rs 49 for a -4-kilometre ride or Uber charged Rs 80 for 5 km. Market economics is about demand and supply, and companies often offer discounts to boost demand and charge premiums when the demand exceeds supply.

When governments stand in the way of demand and supply, they must have sound reasons to do so. In both Delhi and Bengaluru, there is reason to believe that authorities might have jumped the gun to protect the short-term interest of consumers while in reality they may be hurting their long-term good.

Read | Odd-even 2.0: Uber, Ola suspend surge pricing after Delhi govt threat

Before Ola or Uber happened, taxi and auto-rickshaw rides were not always determined by the meter. In many Indian cities, negotiated prices are more the rule than exception. There was no competition to offer cheaper prices either.

Aggregator companies standardise services with a degree of transparency, and also offer customer support to address consumer complaints. It is difficult to imagine customers complaining to regional transport authorities on specific rides.

As they are competing with each other as brands, aggregators are under pressure to offer better rates. But more important, they are ushering in a platform model under which technology is used to locate demand and match it with supply in a manner that lowers costs whose benefit can be passed on to the consumer.

Read | Here is an app to help you against Ola, Uber price surge during odd-even days

Protests and action against dynamic pricing based on demand results from two perspectives. One is the notion that taxis are public goods and the other that some rides cost too much. The big question: Are we stopping a technological revolution that results in long-term gains, stronger competition and extra convenience on its tracks by a crackdown on surge pricing?

There is, however, a case against predatory pricing - which involves cheap pricing that attempts to eliminate competition. It is possible to argue that cheap fares offered by Ola in effect usher in rather than eliminate competition. In the case of Uber, it brings in more supply into the economy by using spare capacities in private taxis. Only after the brands go big and take a dominant market share can they can be seen as indulging in monopolistic pricing, which can be regulated formally by the Competition Commission of India under Indian laws.

In the US, Walt Disneys Disneyland theme parks introduced demand-based surge pricing this year, raising ticket prices by up to 20% for holiday periods. Customers are finding it useful to avoid peak-time rush. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has also issued Uber new patents, including one that helps an on-demand system of pricing.

Karnataka, where authorities have even impounded vehicles, has set Rs.19.50 per km as the price ceiling for air-conditioned cabs and Rs.14.50 for ones without air-conditioning. Delhi is yet to announce rules but operators have suspended surge pricing, but the government is already facing a court case filed on behalf of consumers.

Perhaps Indian regulators can set higher price bands within a framework of surge pricing than set ceilings closer to current normal fares so that technology-driven business model innovation is not discouraged, and a middle path found so that premiums do not reach exorbitant levels.

In general, too much government control can discourage disruptive innovation by a desirable new technology.

As for taxi companies, they can waive surge pricing for loyal customers. And they should also learn from pubs that offer Happy Hours: A discount always sounds better than a premium!
Two men armed with sharp weapons thrashed the pastor and his pregnant wife in a church in Bastar district of Chhattisgarh while also allegedly setting ablaze a Bible and other articles.

The incident took place on Sunday evening at village Karanji Matagudi Para under Parpa police station limits.

As per the written complaint of Pastor Deenbandhu Sameli, an FIR has been lodged in this connection. Continuous patrolling is being done in the region to nab the attackers. We are pretty sure that the culprits will be arrested soon, Bastar SP RN Dash told PTI.

As per the complaint, two men identified themselves as belonging to some other denomination of the Christian community and expressed their desire to pray in the church.

After entering inside the premises, they launched an attack on the pastor and poured inflammable liquid on the Holy Bible, furniture and other religious material kept inside and set them ablaze.

After getting information about the incident, we immediately rushed to the spot and deployed a policeman for security throughout the night, Dash said.

A case under sections 295 (injuring or defiling place of worship), 392 (robbery), 452 (house-trespass after preparation for hurt), 435 (mischief by fire or explosive substance), 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt) and 34 (common intention) of the IPC was registered against the unidentified persons, he added.

After breaking locks of church premises, they barged inside and poured petrol on the Bible, other holy books, furniture and mike set and torched them. (ANI photo)

Meanwhile, president of Chhattisgarhs Christian Forum, Arun Pannalal alleged that the attack was carried out by the workers of Bajrang Dal and accused police of covering up the incident.

This was third attack on the religious premises of Christian community in the region. It was carried out by the goons of Bajrang dal. Police are trying to cover it up, Pannalal claimed.

The attackers were armed with a knife, hammer, sword and petrol.

After breaking locks of church premises, they barged inside and poured petrol on the Bible, other holy books, furniture and mike set and torched them, he said.

They also poured petrol on pastor Deenanath and his pregnant wife, Meena and tried to set them afire but somehow they managed to escape, Pannalal added.

Police personnel immediately reached the spot after getting report of the incident and deployed night gaurds there, he added.
Amar Priyo Bhai or Bonera. Subho Nabarasha. Apnara sobai kemon achen?

In the coming days, millions of Bengali voters will hear Prime Minister Narendra Modi wishing them a Happy Bengali New Year over the phone. If they keep their ear to the receiver long enough, they will receive further calls that dwell on issues such as the Saradha scam, the Narada sting and the Vivekananda Road flyover collapse  followed by an impassioned appeal to vote for the BJPs cause of development.

After radio, mobile phones may well turn out to be the BJPs best friend in the Bengal assembly elections.

The Bengali New Year started on April 14, and the saffron party wants to utilise it to the hilt in the ongoing polls. The party has drawn up a database of 4.5 crore voters in the state  out of the total 6.5 crore  and claims to have already called around 2 crore of them.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is reaching out to each voter personally. Calls are going out to the people, and Modis message is being communicated in Bengali and Hindi in his own voice. What better way can be there to connect with the people of Bengal and push for the BJPs development agenda? said Neeraj Gaur, head of the BJPs IT department in Haryana.

Read: Bengal polls: BJP could become a rival to Trinamool Congress in future

Gaur, who is handling the partys IT and social media communications campaign in the Bengal assembly polls, had earlier helped steer it to victory in Jammu & Kashmir and Haryana.

The party has set up a media and communication unit in Kolkata, and established branches across every district of West Bengal. It has also established a 30-seater call centre in the heart of the state capital.

We make around three to four lakh calls at one go to people from various assembly constituencies, with more than one call reaching individual voters. Apart from this, we are also campaigning on the social media like never before. We have a dedicated team in place to handle the situation, said Gaur.

Each phone call runs for around 30 seconds, targeting every section of the society  from students and women to senior citizens. A mechanism has been put in place to track the length of the initial phone call and gauge the listeners response.

We get feedback on how long the voter listened to the call. If the person stays on the call for more than 26 seconds, we advance to the next step in the campaign and call him/her more frequently. The first call by Modiji is nothing more than a greeting. But, from the next call onwards, he starts speaking on issues like unemployment, the law-and-order situation and corruption. Lastly, he appeals for a vote on the development agenda, said a senior BJP leader.
Thousands of garment factory workers in Bengaluru blocked traffic and set vehicles on fire on Tuesday to protest against changes in provident fund rules that are perceived to puncture the only social safety net for Indians.

Police fired warning shots after the protesters threw stones at the Hebbagodi police station and lathicharged the workers, mostly women, in clashes that damaged property worth crores and injured hundreds.

The violence came on a day Union labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya announced that the government put off for three more months the move to bar withdrawal of employers contribution to the provident fund corpus until they turn 58. The announcement came amid protests by labour unions in several parts of the country.

Indias information technology capital has been tense since Monday when garment workers went on a snap strike and blocked several highways. According to trade union leaders, the police started using force to evict the agitators from the highway. This triggered a violent response from them, Meenakshi Sundaram, a trade union leaders told reporters.

Read: Restrictions on EPF delayed, to come into effect on August 1

State home minister G Parameshwara, however, claimed the police showed remarkable restraint.

He urged the protesters to return to work and said, The police should not be provoked. We dont know who is leading this agitation. The leaders should come forward and participate in talks with us.

The agitators should know that the state government has nothing to do with this change in PF rules, he said.

Police said they had to resort to lathicharge and fire teargas shells to disperse the violent protesters in Bengaluru. There are over 12 lakh garment factory workers in the city.

At least two Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation buses and one of Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation were torched, a police officer said. Incidents of vehicles being attacked were reported from other parts of the city.

Traffic jams were reported at various entry and exit points to the city. City police commissioner NS Megharikh said the situation was under control, but there are some issues on the citys outskirts.

...we are at work, our officers are at the spot, reinforcement has already gone there. The situation is being brought under control, he said.

Police said other workers, too, have joined garment workers in the protest against the change in PF rules.

People have also launched online campaign against the decision, which was to be implemented from February 10 but was later put on hold till April 30.

Around 15,000 women garment workers had on Monday staged a massive demonstration on the outskirts of Bengaluru, protesting the change in the Provident Fund Act.
Armed with fresh revelations in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case, the BJP on Tuesday accused the Congress of playing with national security in trying to frame then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi and demanded an unconditional apology from the grand old party for supporting terrorists.

It is astonishing to see that political leaders can stoop down to that level. This is the kind of politics the Congress Party has played with the nation. The Congress must come clean and render an unconditional apology. The stigma of supporting such activities will continue to haunt the Congress Party even in future also, Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu said.

The Congress Party must come clean on the Ishrat Jahan episode. It is a serious issue that a party can stoop down to that dirty level to change the affidavit and try to implicate political leaders by siding with Pakistans sponsored terrorists. The entire UPA Government has to take the responsibility. It is not P. Chidambaram alone, he added.

Naidu further said Chidambaram would not have done it for himself, but for his party.

The senior BJP leader added that the then UPA regime took this decision not only to harass Narendra Modi but also in the process making him vulnerable to the terrorist attacks.

Chidambaram earlier has gone on records that as facts have come to his notice he had changed the affidavit. He suppressed the facts that he signed the original affidavit also even after (then home secretary) G.K. Pillai made it public, said Naidu.

The Congress was silent and Chidambaram also was trying to justify the change of the affidavit. But now, the truth is out. One of the channels has come out with the truth and the truth is not being contested, he added.

Based on RTI disclosures, a leading English news channel claimed yesterday that Chidambaram had seen and signed the first affidavit, a fact that he has denied so far.

Chidambaram said that he would not like to comment without pursuing the files and the noting.

New developments unfolded in the Ishrat Jahan case with the 51-page file of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) recording that Chidambaram had signed the original affidavit describing Ishrat as part of a Lashkar module.

Media reports revealed that Chidambaram had in fact signed the first affidavit, which declared Ishrat and three others as terrorists, but gave all four a clean chit a month later as serious amendments were made in the second affidavit also signed by him.

The first affidavit in the encounter case stated that Ishrat was a LeT operative, who was part of a plot to assassinate the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.

Chidambaram had initially claimed that the first affidavit declaring Ishrat and three others as terrorists was filed in the court without his approval, adding that he had made some editorial changes to avoid misinterpretation when the matter was brought to his notice.

Chidambaram, however, completely altered his stance in the second affidavit, saying that intelligence inputs on Ishrat and the three others did not constitute conclusive proof and favoured a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe in the encounter.
Why should I elope? I will only marry the boy that my family chooses for me.

Class X student Jolly Patel may not be old enough to fully understand the meaning of this declaration, but the deafening applause that greets it is enough to leave her elated.

The occasion is a street play organised by the Patidar Pragati Yuvak Mandal at Bechraji village in Mehsana, Gujarat, and the message is something that the Patel community wants its womenfolk to know and understand.

The Patidars, who are up in arms against the government in its quest for quotas in jobs and education, have embarked on a drive to prevent their women from marrying outside the community. The reason behind this is a centuries-old practice of picking the boy child over the girl, something that has now brought them face-to-face with a bad sex ratio problem.

To tackle the situation, members of the community have been reduced to searching for brides in Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar  going beyond caste, socio-financial status and even lingual differences. In December last year, the Samast Patidar Samaj had brought 42 Kurmi brides from Jharkhand for matrimonial alliances with eligible Patel bachelors who couldnt find a match within the community.

Read | Patel quota stir: Govt relents, to help free jailed leaders

Now, in another initiative to ensure that no Patidar male remains unmarried, the community has forbidden its women from tying the knot with anybody outside the caste. A multi-pronged approach  from street plays that speak against marrying outside the community to making parental signatures mandatory in wedding certificates  is being adopted to ensure this.

Community leaders of three districts, including Mehsana, have submitted memorandums to collectorates  demanding that a marriage certificate be considered valid only if it bears the signature of the womans parents, said Dr Nachiket Mukhi, secretary of the Sardar Patel Group. The idea will be further propagated at an employment fair held in Ahmedabad on May 29, he added.

Our women are influenced by their peers, and they end up eloping and marrying the wrong person for immature love, said Harshad Patel, who wrote the street play that Jolly featured in. Every community has its unwritten constitution. Patidar women should understand the sex ratio problem we face and not marry outsiders.

The community is all set to come up with matrimonial and employment portals of its own on May 1, so Patidar men can find brides and jobs of their liking. This move will also end a practice that prohibits two Patel sub-castes  the Leuvas and Karvas  from allying with each other.

Read | BJP wont come back to power in Gujarat: Patel leader Lalji

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Chinas stubborn stand on blocking Indias bid to ban JeM chief Masood Azhar, the Pakistan-based terrorist accused of masterminding the Pathankot attack, could put a chill on bilateral relations plagued by multiple issues.

On Tuesday, the Chinese government again failed to furnish specific reasons why it had put on hold Indias move to sanction Azhar at the UN Security Council.

External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and defence minister Manohar Parrikar raised the issue of Azhar with their Chinese counterparts in Moscow and Beijing on Monday.

Parrikar, who met Premier Li Keqiang on Tuesday, told Beijing-based Indian reporters he had informed Chinese officials the decision wasnt in the right direction.

Asked to explain Chinas stand, foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said: I can understand your concern. I would like to repeat our position that we support the central coordinating role of the UN Security Council in the world counter-terrorism campaign.

We always deal with the listing matter in the UN Security Council according to rules of procedures and basic facts.

Hua did not specify the reasons for Chinas stand, including the procedures and facts that led to the blocking.

The spokesperson was quick to dismiss the issue of China having double standards on terrorism.

China is firmly opposed to double standards on the counter-terrorism issue. China is also a victim of terrorism. We believe that only by working as one can the world fight against terrorism and maintain peace and stability of the whole world, she said.

There is no doubt about that, she said. On the specific issue of Azhar, China is in close communication with all relevant parties including India, she added.

India has blamed the Jaish-e-Mohammed for the January 2 attack on Pathankot airbase, which killed seven security personnel. It is believed China blocked the move to sanction Azhar at the behest of its close ally Pakistan. Beijing has blocked several past attempts to ban Azhar.

Noted South Asian expert Hu Shisheng told Hindustan Times that the matter involving Azhar was an annoying issue but should not be seen in isolation.

Such an issue is really annoying, and requires more urgently for both parties to talk with each other to reduce as much as possible the misunderstandings. It is much better for the Indian side to raise this issue directly before their Chinese counterparts, Hu, who is with the influential China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said.

According to Hu, such issues should not disturb bilateral relations. At the same, according to Hu, rumours like Indian agents making efforts to damage the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which could also be a disturbance, should also be discussed.

He said: It is the time to strengthen mutual understandings in terms of security between China and India now.

Only through military-to-military or security high-level dialogues, such mutual suspicions and eventualities could be addressed.

But for that to happen, China may have to rethink its policy on Azhar.
China on Tuesday emphasised the importance of dialogue to resolve the long-standing border dispute with India but gave enough indications that it is not up for mapping or demarcating the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Beijings statement came a day before the two sides resume talks on the border issue in the Chinese capital after a gap of a year.

Visiting defence minister Manohar Parrikar raised the issue of demarcating the LAC during meetings in Beijing on Monday, saying it could go a long way in reducing tension along the border and cutting down transgressions by border patrols.

On Tuesday, China came as close to a public response to Parrikars remarks as possible, and it came hours before National Security Adviser AK Doval was to arrive in Beijing for the 19th round of talks between Special Representatives on the boundary issue.

As it turns out, China is not ready to demarcate the border.

With regard to LAC, we can have further discussions on that. As for any breakthrough during the 19th session (of talks), I am not sure but I believe both sides have the willingness to continue with friendly discussions on that, foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told a regular news briefing.

Hua said after Parrikars meetings with Chinese officials and talks on the LAC, it was seen the two militaries have the common aspiration of enhancing military-to-military exchanges so as to build up mutual trust and taking concrete actions to maintain peace and stability in border areas.

Peace and stability? Yes. Demarcating the LAC for peace and stability according to Indias argument? No.

Hua did not explain why China wasnt up for mapping the LAC.

The LAC currently divides India and China along 3,488 km of mountainous terrain but it has never been laid down on a map because the two countries have differing perceptions of the border.

Hua pointed to the need to carry forward the dialogue mechanism.

We have been working to resolve territorial disputes through negotiations and consultations. We have completely settled territorial disputes with 12 out of 14 land neighbours (except for India and Bhutan). Both history and practice have proven that it is practical to resolve territorial disputes through negotiations and consultations. It is also an approach advocated by international law, she said.

The talks, she said, demonstrate the two sides are willing to resolve the boundary question through bilateral consultations. Pending a final settlement acceptable to both countries, they will make joint efforts to maintain peace along the frontier.

Hua added the bilateral relationship was in sound momentum and there have been frequent interactions, exchanges and visits. It reflects that both sides are willing to enhance strategic mutual trust, expand practical cooperation in different fields through high-level exchanges, she said.
Amid Nitish Kumars strong pitch for largest possible unity among secular parties to defeat BJP, Congress on Tuesday virtually ruled out an alliance at the national level in the next Lok Sabha polls.

I am 100% (sure) there will be unity. National alliance...I dont think Nitish Kumar has said that....we had an alliance with him in Bihar elections.

Alliances take place every day...Some party is very strong in a particular state, but is not in existence in the neighbouring state. Alliances take place according to circumstances in a particular state, party General Secretary Shakeel Ahmed told reporters.

Signalling that there will be no tie-up at the national level by the party, he questioned whether there has been any (regional) party which is present in Bihar as also in Haryana as also in faraway Kerala and Bengal.

He said the reality is that there are state level tie-ups.

Ahmed was replying to a volley of questions on the Bihar chief minister and JD-U chiefs call for a national alliance to take on BJP in the 2019 general elections.

He made light of a question whether Nitish would be the bridegroom and Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi just his best man in the 2019 elections, suggesting that it was media which was playing on certain statements.

By the time 2019 approaches, things will slide so much for the Modi dispensation and BJP that there will be no need for any alliance, he said, adding that people of India will themselves pitch for making RSS and BJP mukt Bharat.

Nitish has given a call for an RSS-free India.

To persistent questions on Kumars statements, Ahmed said Rahul as also he himself have good relations with the Bihar chief minister and everyone should have ambition.

Last week, Congress had dismissed as too premature party leader Digvijay Singhs remark that it is ready to work with Nitish Kumar at the national level to bring about largest possible unity among parties to defeat BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Congress, however, said it has always worked in the larger interest of democratic, secular and progressive forces in the country.

Congress is part of the Nitish Kumar-led coalition government, which also includes Lalu Prasads RJD.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) will likely seek Interpols cooperation to have liquor baron Vijay Mallya deported to India, similar to how gangster Chhota Rajan was brought back after he was arrested in Indonesia last year.

A non-bailable warrant (NBW) was issued by a Mumbai court against Mallya on April 18, opening the doors for the ED to seek a Red Corner Notice (RCN)  the global police bodys alert that facilitates arrest anywhere across the world and subsequent detention. However, the NBW itself cannot be implemented as Mallya left India a month ago. The 60-year-old businessman left India on March 2 as creditor banks closed in on him to recover a Rs 9,200-crore debt owed by Kingfisher Airlines (KFA) Limited, Mallyas defunct airline company.

Mallya, a Rajya Sabha MP, ignored three summons to appear before the ED, leading to the external affairs ministry suspending his diplomatic passport and threatening to revoke it unless Mallya responded within a week. Mallya had earlier sought time till May to join the investigations, posting on Twitter that he wasnt on the run and would abide by the law. He had also offered to pay Rs 4,000 crore by September to settle the loan, an offer the banks rejected. His current whereabouts are unknown, though it is believed he left for the UK.

A source said the warrant will help ED approach courts for permission to initiate extradition proceedings against Mallya. Once the courts give permission, the ED can approach the external affairs ministry to get in touch with UK authorities for Mallyas extradition.

A RCN mandates a member country to detain or arrest a person staying in its territory for handing him or her to a country where he or she is wanted in an investigation. Mumbai gangster Chhota Rajan was handed over to India in November last year by Indonesian authorities after he was detained on the basis of a pending RCN.

There is a catch though: The RCN will only be issued after Interpol verifies the merits of the request.

Efforts to arrest former IPL chief Lalit Modi using the same protocol have been in the works since last August. However, there have been constant delays as the Interpol has yet to green-light the request. A recent brainstorming video conference session between the two agencies officials did not break the stalemate either. India seeks to extradite Modi from the UK to face a money-laundering case probe.

EDs plan to secure Mallyas custody may seem effective but there is a catch: The RCN will only be issued after the Interpol verifies the merits of the request.

Efforts to arrest former IPL chief Lalit Modi using the same protocol have been in the works since last August. However, there have been constant delays over Interpol examining the merit of the request. A recent brainstorming session between the two agencies officials via video-conferencing did not break the stalemate either. India seeks to extradite Modi from the UK to face a money-laundering case probe.

Mallya is being investigated under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) for a Rs 950 crore-loan from IDBI as well as loan defaults amounting to Rs 9,200 crore from public sector banks.

While issuing the NBW, the Mumbai court rejected the KFAs application denying the EDs claim that Rs 430 crore was siphoned off from the Rs 950 crore-IDBI loan and was allegedly used to acquire properties abroad.
A West Bengal court on Tuesday awarded death penalty to eight people convicted for the abduction and murder of a 21-year-old college student known for opposing hooch dens.

The body of Sourav Chowdhury, chopped to pieces, was found beside a railway track between Duttapukur and Bamongachi stations in Kolkata in July 2014, days after he had started campaigning against hooch dens in the area.

The court on April 15 had convicted 12 people -- nine for abduction and murder -- and three others for harbouring the criminals.

While eight of the nine convicted for murder have been given the death penalty, another convict was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The death penalty awarded to the eight convicts is pending confirmation from the Calcutta high court.

Three others found guilty of harbouring the criminals have been sentenced to five years rigorous imprisonment.

In all, 13 people were charge-sheeted by police for the gruesome incident, of which one was acquitted by the court.

Souravs family expressed happiness at the verdict.

We have been hoping death for all those who had killed my brother. I thank police and the judiciary for acting swiftly in the case, said his brother Sandip.
A district court sentenced eight persons to death on Tuesday morning for killing a youth two years ago in the North 24 district of Bengal.

Saurav Chowdhury, 21, a college student and a resident of the district was killed on July 5, 2014. His body was found beside the rail tracks between Duttapukur and Bamangachi rail stations. The incident triggered massive unrest among the residents of the area.

A resident of Prantik Palli of Bamangachi, the youth had to pay for the crime of leading a protest against illicit liquor dens and gambling rackets in the area. The gruesome murder happened exactly two years after a 39-year old school teacher Barun Biswas was killed by criminals in Sutia in the same district for protesting against the increasing number of rapes in his neighbourhood.

The seventh additional district judge of Barasat, Daman Kumar Biswas, pronounced all the accused guilty last week.

Those given capital punishment were Shyamal Karmakar (prime accused), Amal Barui, Ratan Samaddar, Somnath Sardar, Tapash Biswas, Suman Das, Tarak Das and Suman Sarkar.

North 24 Parganas is perhaps the most crime-prone districts of the state. It shares a long border with Bangladesh, through which smuggling of a lot of items from cattle to human trafficking takes place and real estate promoters and narcotics trade spawn crime in this district.

With a population of more than a crore, this area is also known as one of the most populous districts in the country.

The ghastly rape and murder of a 20-year-old woman in Kamduni that shook the country was also in North 24 Parganas district.

Karmakar was a local tough and the rest were his associates. The judge described the crime as rarest among rare cases.

On April 15, when the judge pronounced the accused guilty, principal accused Karmakar threatened the family of the victim for pursuing the case.

The judge also sentenced one person (Rakesh Barman) to life imprisonment and three to five years behind bars.

We are happy. Let me get the copy of the order, and then we will decide whether we will appeal for stiff sentences for those who escaped death penalty, said Chowdhurys mother at the Barasat court premises.

A police outpost should be set up in Bamangachi. We are happy but there is no feeling of security yet, said Sandip Chowdhury, the victims brother.

One was acquitted by the court for lack of evidence.

The FIR had 14 names. One is still absconding.

Two of the accused  Karmakars sister Polly Maity and his childhood friend Sishir  were convicted for providing shelter to the murderers.
Former chief election commissioner TS Krishnamurthy has reignited the debate on the first-past-the-post system by proposing a minimum of 33% votes for a candidate to be declared elected.

According to the first-past-the-post system, the winner of the vote in each constituency takes the seat. Overall, the national vote share is irrelevant in deciding who wins a general election -- it is all down to the number of seats each party wins.

Speaking to Hindustan Times, Krishnamurthy pointed to the flaws of the system and said it allows a person to win even with 20% of the votes polled and with a margin of one vote.

The present first-past-the-post system should be replaced by providing that the winning candidate should have got minimum one-third of the votes polled to be declared as elected, he said.

He said the first-past-the-post system encourages voting on the basis of narrow considerations of language, creed and caste.

This has resulted in a proliferation of political parties based on caste, language and creed. If the proposed change is brought about, the elected representative can present more balanced views in the legislature and represent a larger section of the constituency instead of representing narrow considerations, Krishnamurthy said.

The demand for revisiting the first-past-the-post system was raised in 2014 after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the Lok Sabha election with just 31 % votes. However, the same system ensured the victory of the grand alliance in the 2015 Bihar assembly election in spite of the BJP getting more percentage of votes.

The former CEC blamed the enforcement of laws, calling it the weakest link in our governance, for the rampant flouting of the Election Commission of Indias norms and code of conduct by political parties. In the past one week, two chief ministers have been accused of violating the code of conduct by the poll panel.

A First Information Report was registered against Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi for violating sections of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 by holding a press conference within 48 hours of polling.

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee was issued a notice for violating the rule by announcing the carving out of a new district.

On electoral reforms and decriminalising the process  an issue raised periodically by the Supreme Court  he said the lack of political will is to blame for the delay in accepting recommendations made over the years to clean the process.

Several recommendations, such as making paid news an offence under the Representation of Peoples Act, punishable by a jail term of up to two years, have been pending for years with the law ministry.

To give the EC more power, Krishnamurthy also suggested a separate law regulating political parties.

At present, many regulations for formation and functioning of the political parties have no legislative backup. Many provisions of the model code of conduct can be incorporated in such law where the Election Commission should be empowered to impose monetary penalties and to disqualify the political parties, candidates or voters in respect of certain violations during the election time, he said.

He also suggested the setting of a national election fund to check the rampant use of money during elections. The proposed change will allow political parties to accept donations only from their members within specified limits. Donors would get 100% tax exemption.

Apart from curbing competitive donations from the business community to pacify ruling and opposition parties existing now, the proposed changes will enable even poor candidates to contest elections successfully thereby bringing level playing field among the contesting candidates, he said.

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Workers of a garment factory took to the streets and blocked traffic on the busy Mysore-Bengaluru highway and set buses on fire on Tuesday to protest amendments to provident fund rules, police said.

Police lathi-charged garment factory workers during their protest against new provident fund withdrawal rules. (Kashif Masood/HT Photo)

Women argue with a police officer during a protest against the central governments new rules on withdrawal of provident fund. (Kashif Masood/HT Photo)

A police vehicle damaged during the protests in Bengaluru. (Kashif Masood/HT Photo)

Around 20 people were arrested and police fired warning shots as stone pelting protestors attacked the Hebbagodi police station, a police officer said. The mob also set afire vehicles parked near the police station, he said.

Read: Restrictions on EPF delayed, to come into effect on August 1

Thousands of garment factory workers at Mysuru Circle in Bangalore on Tuesday. (Kashif Masood/HT Photo)

The protest against the new provident fund rules caused jams across Bengaluru on Tuesday. (Kashif Masood/HT Photo)

Police said they had to lathicharge and fire teargas shells to disperse violent protesters in Bengaluru on Tuesday. (Kashif Masood/HT Photo)

State DGP Om Prakash said the situation went out of control at Hebbagodi and Jalahalli, where reinforcements had been sent. (Kashif Masood/HT Photo)

The workers have been protesting since Monday against changes the central government mooted in provident fund withdrawal rules.

Workers opposing an amendment to Employees Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 have expressed fear that the new rule will take away their right over employers contribution to provident fund till they attain 58 years of age. (Kashif Masood/HT Photo)

About 15,000 women garment workers on Monday staged a massive demonstration on the outskirts of Bengaluru, protesting changes in the Provident Fund Act. (Kashif Masood/HT Photo)

The central government on Tuesday kept in abeyance for three more months the move to bar the withdrawal of the employers contribution to the provident fund corpus until the employee attains the age of 58 years. It later said it was cancelling the notification restricting the provident fund withdrawals.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said India has the wealth of knowledge to lead the world in the 21st century.

Addressing the fifth convocation of the Mata Vaishno Devi University in Katra town of Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir, Modi said, India is a country of 800 million strong population of youths below 30 years of age and this is a wealth pool equalled by no other country in the world.

Knowledge is the driving force of the 21st century and India has enough wealth of knowledge to lead the world.

PM Modis convocation address in Katra: As it happened

Modi said while universities elsewhere in the country and across the globe are run by tax payers money or by donations, the Mata Vaishno Devi University is the only university in the world that is run by humble devotional offerings often as meagre as one rupee made by devotees who visit the Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine.

Modi told scholars who were warded their doctoral and other degrees at the convocation, Your loyalty in life has to be towards the poorest of the poor in the country, whose devotion has made it possible for you to achieve your degrees and honours today.

He told the scholars not to forget the hardships faced by their parents to make their dreams possible.

When children are born, parents get immense joy, but when children achieve in life, the joy of patents becomes boundless, he said.

Now it is for you to decide where you go from here.

Modi arrived in Jammu earlier in the day on a day-long visit.
The BJP and the Congress continued to trade charge against each other over the Ishrat Jahan encounter controversy, a day after an RTI response reveled that then home minister P Chidambaram had signed the first affidavit confirming her LeT connection and a plot to eliminate Narendra Modi.

Ishrat was killed in an encounter by Gujarat police in 2004. A court-monitored CBI probe had found the encounter fake and a major row erupted after the UPA government filed in September 2009 a second affidavit which, unlike the first, did not make any reference to her suspected LeT links.

The ruling party reiterated its claim that Chidambaram acted at the behest of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and said UPA could "tolerate terrorists but not Narendra Modi as Prime Minister".

It alleged Sonia Gandhi, the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram "suppressed" information provided by the NIA and the FBI, the US probe agency, about Ishrat being a terrorist and a threat to Modi's life.

Why did you suppress it? What was the need? Because you could not tolerate these two persons (Modi and Amit Shah). You could not tolerate him as you feared him becoming the Prime Minister. You tolerated terrorists, BJP spokesman Sambit Patra said.

The Congress was quick in hitting back at Modi and Shah and accused them of "obstructing" judicial process and taking to "patent falsehoods".

"The Prime Minister and the BJP President are shamelessly misleading the country and obstructing judicial process by blocking trial of accused in the Ishrat Jehan fake encounter case pending in a court in Ahmedabad, Gujarat," Congress chief spokesman Randeep Surjewala said.

He said Modi and Shah must tell the country the real motive behind "desperation" to shut down the trial. "What is it that they seek to hide or are scared of needs to be placed before the nation? Is there some evidence available on that file of the court that goes against somebody very senior in the leadership of the BJP, which is scaring Amit Shah and Modi?" he asked.

He alleged the Modi government is using a "web of selective news leaks, deceptive statements of its ministers and non-grant of sanction for prosecution of the accused to ensure mistrial and reinvestigation through pliable investigating agencies".

"Modi government is not only economical with the truth but is also relying upon patent falsehood to hide the facts," Surjewala said.

Ends.//


All WhatsApp groups in the Kashmir Valley that share news among users will have to register with district authorities in 10 days, the state government announced on Tuesday amid simmering tensions over the death of five civilians in police firing.

The administration also banned government employees from criticising and commenting on official policies on WhatsApp and made group administrators responsible for any rumours spread using the messaging service.

Divisional commisioner Kashmir Asghar Samoon said the orders were issued to maintain law and order in the valley.

There are many unauthorised news groups on WhatsApp that disseminate news. Its not restricted to just chatting, they have thousands of followers who post news without verification and many times lead to law and order problems, Samoon said.

The order comes after a week of violence in the valley triggered by allegations of molestation of an underage local girl by army personnel. Angry mobs have clashed with police and paramilitary forces in several parts of north Kashmirs Kupwara district  especially in Handwara town  with five dead and scores injured.

Government employees are for implementation of policies, if they have grievances or suggestion they can be put forward through proper channel not in public forms. In many cases government employees were seen instigating violence, said Samoon.

The district magistrate of Kupwara  the epicenter of the protests  was the first to implement the order. HT has a copy of the document that makes the additional district information officer as the nodal agency.

The officer has been authorised to register the groups and keep a vigil on the activities of such groups.

District authorities issued the order for all government employees working in the district and warned them of strict action if they fail to comply.

In an order dated April 18, 2016, the district magistrate writes government employees serving in the district are directed to restrain from making any comments/remarks with regard to the government policies and decision of the government on the WhatsApp news groups running in the district and if anyone is found involved in such activities, strict action will be initiated against them as required under the rules.

Four employees in Kupwara were suspended following reports that they were part of the protestors that threw stones at security personnel after last weeks civilian killings in the area.

The violence has brought back memories of the 2010 street protests across Kashmir where over 100 people died. Since then, WhatsApp has emerged as a potent source of information sharing for local people. Authorities even briefly suspended mobile internet services last week to clamp down on the messaging service.

There was a suggestion by police that government employees should restrain from commenting on policies and actions as is put forth in their conduct rules, Samoon added.

The order came hours after police arrested a local resident Hilal Ahmed Bandey, who was named by the minor girl as her molester.

In a video released by army, the girl dismissed the molestation charge by a soldier and said, Two local boys, one of whom was wearing a school uniform created a scene by snatching her bag and shouting.

She named a person known to her as Hilal bhaya who slapped her when she went to him for help after being assaulted.

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The body of Indian prisoner Kirpal Singh of Gurdaspur, who died under mysterious circumstances in Lahores Kot Lakhpat Jail on April 11, was handed over to the Border Security Force (BSF) officials at the Attari-Wagah border check-post on Tuesday in the presence of tearful family members.

The body was taken to Government Medical College, Amritsar, for post-mortem at 3.30pm. Even as the Pakistani authorities have been claiming that Kirpal died of a heart attack, his family said he was murdered in the jail and had sought a probe. Though the post-mortem had been conducted at Lahores Jinnah Hospital, the Indian authorities wanted to conduct the autopsy again to find out the reasons for his death and have constituted a three-member panel of doctors to conduct the post-mortem at Amritsar.

The coffin containing the dead body of Kirpal Singh being handed over to Indian authorities at the India-Pakistan Joint Check Post (JCP), some 30 km from Amritsar on Tuesday. (Sameer Sehgal/HT Photo)

Kirpals sister Jagir Kaur said the family would perform his last rites in Gurdaspurs Mustafabad village once his body was handed over to them. Dalbir Kaur, sister of another Indian Sarabjit Singh, who too had died in a Pakistani jail in May 2013, was also present.

Kirpal was languishing in a Pakistani jail for over 24 years on spying charges. He had allegedly crossed over to Pakistan through the Wagah border in 1992 and was arrested. He was subsequently sentenced to death in a serial bomb blasts case at Faisalabad in Pakistans Punjab province. First sentenced to death, his punishment was reduced to 20 years in prison. He was in Lahores Kot Lakhpat prison since February 29, 1992, and his family had for all these years been asking Pakistan to set him free.

Read more: Indian national languishing in Pakistan jail for 20 years found dead

Family terms it murder

Claiming that there were injury marks on the body, Kirpals nephew Ashwani Kumar said: There are injury marks on the face and blood clots in the nose. We are certain that he was murdered by fellow prisoners in the jail. He was also a witness to another Indian prisoner Sarabjit Singhs murder in the jail and the Pakistan authorities feared that after Kirpals release, they will be exposed. We want a thorough probe into his death.

Read: Pak killed another Sarabjit: Kirpal Singhs sister

Unable to hold back his tears, Kirpals brother Roop Lal said: We always hoped that Kirpal would be released one day. But his death came as a shock to us. Its a clear case of murder. he added.

Amritsar deputy commissioner Varun Roojam, cabinet minister Gulzar Singh Ranike and officials were present at the joint check post to receive the body.

The body will be handed over to the family after post-mortem, said the DC.

Kirpals family members and Shiv Sena activists raised slogans against Pakistan when the body reached India.

Kirpals belongings

Kirpal Singhs nephew Ashwani (left) and sister Jagir Kaur (right) having a look at his belongings. (Sameer Sehgal/HT Photo)

Along with the coffin, the Pakistan jail authorities also sent Kirpals luggage which included bed sheet, family photographs, magazines and a few letters. His nephew Ashwani and brother Roop Lal got emotional looking at his belongings.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday delivered the convocation address at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University at Katra in Jammu and Kashmir.

Highlights of Modis speech:

11:20am

- India has always showed the way whenever the human kind has entered in an era of knowledge and this is a century of knowledge.



11:15am

- Our nation is scaling new heights of progress and with such a youthful population we can achieve so much.

- Dream to do something and not to become someone.

- People will try to misguide you and then you will yearn for your college days.

- Universities are funded by taxpayers money but this university is funded by poor.

- It may cost around Rs 10/km to travel in Katra, but travel cost/km of Indias Mars mission was less than Rs 7.

- Question of what next will play on your minds. But the person who knows what lies ahead wont need to depend on others.



11am

- Lets pledge that we will do something for poor, because it was a poor pilgrim who contributed to build this university.

- Forget what could you not achieve, instead think of what you have achieved.

- This university is built through the contribution of so many pilgrims, many of whom came from far away places.

- Have courage to feel happy about what you are rather than regretting about what you could be.

- Recall what your parents did for you, they sacrificed their own happiness for yours.

- You may have thought of so much in your childhood but it may not have worked out. Forget that and instead think of what you have achieved.

Also Read | India has wealth of knowledge to lead the world: PM Modi to students

Earlier, Modi opened a 230-bed private hospital in Katra in Reasi district.

PM Narendra Modi inaugurates Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Narayana Superspeciality Hospital in Katra. (Twitter/PIB_India)

Jammu and Kashmir Governor NN Vohra, chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, Union minister of state in PMO Jitendra Singh, deputy chief minister Nirmal Singh and health minister Bali Bhagat were present at the inauguration.

(With inputs from PTI)
Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan said on Tuesday he has never been approached to be the brand ambassador for the Incredible India campaign.

Hindustan Times reported on Tuesday that the Panama Papers scandal appeared to weaken Bachchans chances of becoming the face of the campaign, the tourism industrys main publicity drive that targets global audiences.

A source in the ministry said the government has put Bachchans name on hold and is now looking at other celebrity names.

A statement released on behalf of Bachchan on Tuesday said: There have been queries from the media regarding my being Brand Ambassador for Atulya Bharat (Incredible India). I wish to state that I have not been formally approached for this position. The speculation of the media regarding its discontinuance is, therefore, not relevant as far as I am concerned.

Leaked documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca showed Bachchan was among 500 Indian entities who owned firms and accounts in offshore tax havens. The actor denied any connection with those companies, saying his name may have been misused.

On Tuesday, Bachchan said those looking for his feedback on the Panama Papers leak can send their queries to the government. On the Panama disclosures, I wish to state that queries continue to be sent to me by the media. I would humbly request them to kindly direct these to the GOI (government of India) where I, as a law abiding citizen, have already sent, and shall continue to send, my responses.

I stand by my earlier statement on the misuse of my name in the matter and in any event the press reports do not disclose any illegal act committed by me, the statement said.

Tourism ministry officials told HT the other names in the reckoning for the tourism campaign are of actors Priyanka Chopra and Akshay Kumar. The ministry is also discussing whether we should have a female brand ambassador this time. A final decision will be taken soon, one of them said, requesting anonymity since he was not authorised to speak on the matter.

In January, Bollywood star Aamir Khan ceased to be the face of Incredible India, leading to speculation that the move may be a fallout of him being embroiled in the intolerance row. Khan had in November last year said that his wife Kiran Rao was considering moving out of the country due to the prevalence of an atmosphere of intolerance  an allusion to attacks purportedly carried out by Hindu extremists.
The government on Tuesday rolled back new norms on provident fund withdrawals after violent protests in Bengaluru by garment factory workers who set ablaze 15 buses and attacked a police station in the countrys IT hub.

We have decided to cancel the February notification (tightening PF withdrawal norms)the old system will continue, Union labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya said, a day after the government decided to defer restrictions on PF withdrawals till August 1.

Read: Protests in Bengaluru over new provident fund rules turn violent

The rollback means that PF subscribers can continue to withdraw their entire retirement fund in case of unemployment for two months or more. The government had proposed to put a bar on the 100% withdrawal, leading to discontent among the five crore-odd PF subscribers.

The decision marks the governments second u-turn on changes to the pension fund. In March, the government withdrew a plan to tax EPF withdrawals after an outcry from salaried workers.

Discontent has brewed ever since the government announced its decision in February to put curbs on withdrawal from the retirement fund, a major source of instant money for the five crore-odd PF subscribers.

The new norms restricting 100% PF withdrawal by members out of job for more than two months were to come into effect from May 1. Every month, salaried individuals contribute 12% of their pay to the EPF account and the employer matches this.





Several labour unions including the RSS-affiliated Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh have been demanding complete rollback of the decision.

In Bengaluru, thousands of garment factory workers launched protests on Monday against the governments proposal, allegedly panicked by reports which said the new norms bar PF withdrawals completely.

In its notification issued in February, the labour ministry restricted 100 per cent withdrawal by members unemployed for two months or more. Instead, individuals will be able to withdraw only their contribution to the fund and the interest earned on it, and not the employers contribution.

The rules also barred subscribers from claiming PF before turning 57.

Read: In pics: Vehicles torched, police station attacked in Bengaluru

As per the earlier norms, subscribers were allowed to claim 90 per cent of their accumulations in their PF account at the age of 54 years and their claims were settled just a year before their retirement.

Under the proposed norms, subscribers could withdraw the full amount in case of emergency situations including housing, major medical treatment, education of children in medical, dental and engineering courses, and weddings.

Sources said the governments rollback decision will be ratified at a meeting next month of the central board of trustee of the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), the government body which manages the funds.

The CBT is the highest decision-making body of the EPFO and includes representatives from the industry, trade unions and government.

Trade unions welcomed the governments decision.

If its workers money why should the government decide when it can be withdrawn? The government was unnecessarily creating confusion, said AK Padmanabhan, president of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions.
Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti on Tuesday spoke about pain in the heart of Kashmir which needs to be addressed immediately by all so that the youth of the state can also flourish and contribute to the growth of the nation.

In her first public rally after taking over as the first woman chief minister of J&K earlier this month, she spoke about unrest in Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Syria and Libya.

In Pakistan, the government is fighting against its own people... Sunni kills Shia and vice versa, she told the rally after inauguration of Shri Vaishno Devi Narayana Superspeciality Hospital, 32 kms from Jammu.

I am proud to live in a nation where people from different religions live in peace and harmony but there is a pain... There is a pain in heart of Kashmir and we all have to heal it together.

We need to heal it so that the youth of Kashmir flourish like those in rest of the country, she said at the function which was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Jammu and Kashmir Governor N N Vohra and Union and state ministers among others.

Referring to the recent killings in Handwara town of north Kashmir, she expressed hope that under the leadership of the Prime Minister, her government will be able to restore peace in the state.

She recalled her conversation with her late father Mufti Mohammed Sayeed and said when talks for alliance between PDP and BJP were going on he had told her, I have held the hand of a person who has been made the Prime Minister of the country by crores of people.
India is likely to formally inform Pakistan on sending a team of National Investigation Agency (NIA) sleuths early next month for sharing evidence in connection with the Pathankot attack, sources told HT. In the meantime, NIA is also formally providing names and addresses of four Pathankot attackers.

We want to give ample time to the joint investigation team (JIT) sent by Pakistan here to work on evidence shared by the NIA when they visited New Delhi last month. Early next month, India will tell Pakistan to host NIA investigators, which, in effect, will mean a period of more than a month for Pakistani sleuths to show some results, said a senior home ministry official, requesting anonymity.

On Monday, Sartaj Aziz, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharifs adviser on foreign affairs, revived hope of a visit from the NIA team to Islamabad by indicating that Pakistan may not be averse to the idea. Azizs remarks came after Pakistan High Commissioner to India, Abdul Basits statement earlier this month that there was no question of reciprocity for allowing a visit of the NIA after the JITs trip to New Delhi.

On January 2, four to six attackers had allegedly entered India from Pakistan and targeted the Pathankot air base resulting in death of eight persons.

A senior NIA official said a fresh letter rogatory or a court-approved request for assistance in probe will be sent to Pakistan giving names and addresses of four dead Pathankot attackers to confirm their identity.

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Its a stone that, legend says, should only be worn by a woman or a god; to a man who dares wear it, it will only bring bad luck. But, it adds, one who owns the Kohinoor will own the world, and so for centuries, kings have fought over its possession and for much of the past century, four countries have argued about who gets to keep it now.

It is currently housed in the Tower of London in the United Kingdom.

On April 18, during a court hearing on a suit seeking the diamonds return to India, Ranjit Kumar, the Solicitor General said that the rock, whose name means mountain of light, was not stolen by the UK, but was given to them by the Sikh king Ranjit Singh.

Accounts of ownership are often disputed and contentious and it is worth looking at how far the diamond has travelled thus far.

1306:

The diamond  not yet christened Kohinoor  is mentioned for the first time in some historical texts as belonging to the Rajas of Malwa around this time, according to some historians.

Read: Clarify stand on bringing Kohinoor back to India: SC to centre

The exact history is lost in the mists of antiquity, reads an account on the stone in The Smithsonian, it is reported to have belonged to the ruler of an ancient oriental kingdom as far back as 3000 BC. Records, including a book by seismologist Harsh K Gupta, say that the diamond was mined from Guntur in present-day Andhra Pradesh.

1526:

The first verified mention of the stone crops up in the Baburnama, the writings of Mughal ruler Babur. Babur acquired the rock after defeating Ibrahim Lodi, the last of the Delhi Sultans, in the first battle of Panipat.

Historian NB Sen, among others, has written that from Babur, the diamond passed to Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, before coming into the possession of his grandson, Sultan Mahamad.

1739:

Persian general Nadir Shah defeats Mahamad to conquer Delhi  and the diamond -- in 1739 and gives it its now-famous name. He takes the stone back to Persia but is assassinated eight years later. The diamond now passes into the possession of one of his generals, Ahmad Shah Durrani, in whose family it stays for the next generation, writes Sen in his book, the Glorious History of Kohinoor, the Brightest Jewel in the British Crown.

The Kohinoor Diamond. (HT File Photo)

1813:

The diamond returns to India when Shah Shuja Durrani, a descendant of Ahmad Shah, escapes from his quarrelling brothers in Kabul, brings it to Punjab and gives it to Maharaja Ranjit Singh  the founder of the Sikh empire -- in return for being granted asylum.

Read: Kohinoor diamond was given to Britain, not stolen, govt tells SC

Much later, Lord Dalhousie wrote in a letter that Shah Shujas wife Wufa Begum, was said to have described the rock saying, If a strong man were to throw four stones, one north, one south, one east, one west, and a fifth stone up into the air, and if the space between them were to be filled with gold, all would not equal the value of the Koh-i-Noor.

1839-1843:

Maharaja Ranjit Singh dies, leaving the diamond  and his kingdom  to his sons. However, after three of his older sons are killed in quick succession, in 1843, 5-year-old Duleep Singh took the throne, becoming the last Indian sovereign to own the Kohinoor, writes Sen in his book.

1849:

The British win the second Anglo-Sikh War and annexe the Sikh kingdom of Punjab under the Treaty of Lahore. 11-year-old Duleep Singh signs over the kingdom and the diamond over to them before stepping down from his throne.

Article III of the treaty reads: The gem called the KohiNoor, which was taken from Shah Sooja-ool-moolk by Maharajah Runjeet Singh, shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to the Queen of England.

1852:

The diamond is taken to England and showcased to the public. However, after reports of disappointment with the stones uncut appearance, Queen Victorias husband, Prince Albert orders the polishing of the Kohinoor. The final product, which takes 38 days to achieve, shaves off significant portions of the stone, reducing its weight by 42% -- from 186 carats (or 37.2 g) to its current 105.6 carats (21.12 g).

Bearing in mind the myth surrounding the stone, Queen Victoria later asks in her will that the Kohinoor only be worn by a female queen.

The stone is then added to the crowns of her successors and is stowed away in the Tower of London where it has been ever since.

Ever since:

Despite claims of ownership by four countries -- India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Britain -- the United Kingdom has maintained its ownership over the gem.

Reacting to one of the many attempts by Indian groups to push for its return to India, in 2015, British historian Andrew Roberts was quoted as saying: Those involved in this ludicrous case should recognise that the British Crown Jewels is precisely the right place for the Koh-i-Noor diamond to reside, in grateful recognition for over three centuries of British involvement in India, which led to the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the sub-continent.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi may finally get to address a joint session of the US Congress when he visits the United States in June.

The visit, yet to be announced by either side, is likely on June 7 and 8. No other details were available of the visit, dates or confirmed engagements.

Eliot Engel, Democratic ranking member of the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee, moved a letter Tuesday to speaker Paul Ryan to extend an invitation to Modi.

Committee chairman Ed Royce is likely to endorse sign on. And so are other members, including the only Indian-American congressman Ami Bera, who co-chairs the India caucus.

Congressional sources said the initiative enjoys bipartisan support, as before. It was Royce, a Republican, who started the initiative in 2014, with a letter to then speaker John Boehner.

But it didnt come through despite Boehner supporting the effort. In a letter to Modi, he conveyed his inability to host him, citing unpredictability of the House schedule.

Boehner had offered Modi any other time of his choosing, but it didnt happen.

And Boehner himself left office in 2015 in an inner-party tussle.

If this new effort is not derailed, Modi will become the sixth Indian prime minister to address a joint session of US congress after Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi, PV Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.

Most visiting US presidents have also been accorded the honour of addressing a joint sitting of Parliament  President Barack Obama did that on his first visit in 2010.

The June visit will be Modis fourth to the US since assuming office  the first one was in October 2014 and then in 2015 and earlier this month for the nuclear summit.

Read | PM Modi arrives in US to attend Nuclear Security Summit

Read | Modi speaks the tech tongue, pushes Digital India in US
The severity of the water crisis in drought-hit Marathwada region prompted the Maharashtra government on Tuesday to ban digging of borewells below 200 feet to check further depletion of ground water.

The decision came close on the heels of cut in water supply to industrial units including breweries in the severely affected Aurangabad district.

Water supply and sanitation minister Babanrao Lonikar said any violation of the decision on borewells will invite action under the Maharashtra Groundwater Development and Management Act where violators may face fine or even imprisonment.

The provisions of the act concerned has to be implemented strictly due to the severe drought conditions prevalent and the depletion of water stock. We have spoken to all senior officials and decided to ban the digging of borewells below 200 feet, Lonikar said.

Lonikar said with the amount of water being drawn out from the ground, it is imperative to control the digging of borewells, which will eventually help in averting drought-related problems.

While the Act will be implemented strictly, we require participation of the people. Everyone needs to come forward and help us save ground water, he said.

According to an official of the Maharashtra irrigation department, dams across the state have only 19% water left compared to 32% at this time last year.

In Marathwada, eight of the regions 11 major dams are at dead storage level, which means water from the reservoirs cannot flow out but has to be lifted. It is down to only 3%, the official said.

This is a drastic decline in water storage as at this time last year, water level in Marathwadas dams was much higher at 11%, Aurangabad divisional commissioner Umakant Dangat said.

We will also use the groundwater stock and as the IMD forecast is good, we hope that we will be able to carry on till the monsoon arrives, he said.

We have already cut water supply to (the) industry. The collectors and divisional commissioners have been instructed that use of water for drinking is the top priority, Maharashtra water resources minister Girish Mahajan said.

As many as 2,745 water tankers are being used in the parched region compared to 939 at this time last year.

Lonikar said 4,356 tankers are currently being supplied by the state government, out of which, 52 are for Konkan, 831 for Nashik, 303 for Pune, 3,032 for Aurangabad, 131 for Amravati and 7 tankers for Nagpur divisions.
Punjab Congress president Capt Amarinder Singh on Monday constituted a high-level committee of senior leaders to monitor the wheat procurement.

The decision was taken at a meeting that had Amarinder, Punjab affairs incharge Shakeel Ahmad and co-incharge Harish Chaudhry. Campaign committee incharge Ambika Soni will also visit the mandis. PPCC senior vice-president Lal Singh is coordinator of the committee.

The committee will hold its first meeting in Chandigarh on April 20 to chalk out the course of action and in the next three weeks will monitor procurement in the state.

The purpose of monitoring the procurement process is to ensure that the farmers did not face any difficulty in selling off their produce and got the payment on time, said Amarinder, who is leaving on a three-week tour to the US and Canada. He said that given the track record of the last nine years of Akalis, it was necessary for the Congress to stand by the farmers.

Change of heart?

Amarinder on Sunday had deputed former CLP leader Sunil Jakhar to monitor wheat procurement and asked him to look into Rs 12,000 crore wheat scam.

Read more: Captain tasks Jakhar with exposing accused in multi-crore wheat scam

I am confident he (Jakhar) will ensure that the Akalis are exposed for the cheating and fraud they have committed with people of Punjab and the case is taken to its logical conclusion, Amarinder had said. But the committee constituted on Monday has no mention of Jakhar.
Top leaders of Canadas Ontario province led by premier Kathleen Wynne joined the Sikh community in celebrating Baisakhi at the Ontario legislative assembly.

For the first time, Guru Granth Sahib was brought to the assembly here on Monday to celebrate the harvest festival and Sikh Heritage Month.

Wynne and her cabinet ministers joined Sikhs as kirtan was performed and prayers were recited. The communitys saffron flag, Nishan Sahib, was also hoisted outside the assembly building to mark the day.

Celebrating Guru Angad Dev and his spiritual leadership on the day of his birth. Happy Gurupab to all members of Ontario's Sikh community!  Kathleen Wynne (@Kathleen_Wynne) April 18, 2016

It is the first time in the history of Ontario that the holy Guru Granth Sahib has been brought inside the legislative assembly building and the Sikh flag installed to mark Baisakhi. It is a proud day for Sikhs in Canada, said Indian-Canadian politician and former Ontario transportation minister Harinder Takhar at the Baisakhi reception in the assembly building, Queens Park.

Wynne praises Sikh citizens

Dressed in salwar-kameez and with her head covered, premier Wynne praised the Sikh community for integrating into Canadas multicultural society while still maintaining its rich heritage. She said she was very happy that the Sikh holy scripture was brought to the assembly for the first time. Such events should happen more often to create an atmosphere of peace and harmony so that more productive work can be done by assembly members.

Wynne, who visited India in February, stressed that her visit was as much about promoting business as connecting with people. She lauded the hospitality and warmth extended to her wherever she went in India.

Recalling her visit to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, she said it was a very beautiful and serene place. She said she was overwhelmed by the sense of volunteerism at the gurdwara.

In a lighter vein, she said India was a place where so much news happens and travels very quickly. There are so many newspapers; I wonder how they read them all, she said.

Kathleen Wynne helping in the preparation of guru ka langar at Golden Temple during her visit to Amritsar in January. (Sameer Sehgal/HT Photo)

As her picture of making chapatis at the langar (community kitchen) at the Golden Temple was splashed in the media across India, she said wherever she went after that, people would say: You were the one who was making chapatis.

The Ontario premier also praised the decision of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to apologise for the Komagata Maru incident of 1914. She said her own party legislator Vic Dhillon will move a motion in the Ontario assembly on the Komagata Maru apology and ensure that no future immigrants are ever discriminated against in Canada.
Parents agitating over the alleged overcharging issue entered the Shiv Jyoti Public School premises on Monday morning and held a protest again, following which a wary school management called in police.

Schools fleece students: Fee-regulation law before year-end, says Cheema

The protesting parents also stopped school buses going to pick children from their homes.

Fearing protest, the school had deployed police outside for the past couple of days, especially in the backdrop of parents holding demonstrations against many schools across the city. While all this was happening on Monday, the school appeared more of an arena with anxious teachers and students standing outside the classrooms to see what unfolded there as soon as the police and slogan-raising parents came face to face.

The parents were not allowed to go beyond the fee counter and meet the school principal.

They alleged that while the principal had claimed that admission fee will not be taken before April 30, the reality was different. Principal Ravi Suta said that she never forced any parent to come.

Education shouldnt be a tool for politics

I have been getting calls from parents who want to come and get their wards admitted. The parents not letting schools buses pick students is unfortunate. When I have told them to come on April 30 to meet the management, why are they creating ruckus unnecessarily, Suta said.

Cops intervene

Police division-3 station house officer (SHO) Sukhwinder Singh Buttar reached the spot to pacify the agitating parents.

The parents, however, refused to budge and showed him the copy of the Punjab and Haryana high court order that says that schools cannot charge readmission fee.

Then the SHO met the principal and asked her to arrange a meeting of agitating parents with the school chairman. To this, the principal replied that it was not possible for the management to come and hold a meeting with the parents before April 30.

The SHO said that atmosphere at the school was getting vitiated due to the ongoing protest and he will approach the deputy commissioner and request him to intervene into the issue.

The police got the school into an agreement with the parents that it will not take admission fee before April 30 and that the latter will not demonstrate on the premises till then.

Allegations galore

Vinod Kumar claimed that he changed his daughters school because Shiv Jyoti Public School deliberately got her failed in the Class 9 examination

I had protested against the fee hike last year, after which the school got my daughter failed in her exams, as a result of which she went into depression, Kumar claimed.

Sanyogita, whose child studies in Class 2, said the school was increasing fee every year and it was not acceptable. How will we pay such hefty fees? We are middle-class people and not millionaires, she said.
Not a single rupee has been paid to farmers for the wheat procured at the Nabha grain market. While the government had claimed that farmers will be paid within 48 hours of procurement of their produce, officials said payments are yet to be released from Chandigarh.

Meanwhile, late procurement, slow lifting and shortage of space are adding to farmers woes, who otherwise should have been excited about the bumper crop.

The procurement began late in Nabha (on April 7) and 3 lakh quintal of the crop has been purchased so far. The agriculture minister, during his visit to the town, had cautioned about delayed payments while advising the farmers to be patient, but failed to give any timeframe.

Clouds in the sky are further adding to the farmers worries. The tenders for lifting of the produce were delayed and the process started only a few days back, resulting in the grain markets being flooded with the crop.

Due to the shortage of space and slow lifting, we have to pay for extra labour for storing the stock. The volatile weather is only adding to our worries and there is no arrangement to protect the crop from rain, said Ashish Garg, a commission agent.

We had warned the administration that the crop will reach the market early this year and requested them to make all arrangements, said Ghumman Singh, a representative of a farmers union.
The Monday meeting convened by Akal Takht jathedar Giani Gurbachan Singh to discuss racial attacks on Sikhs abroad and incidents of desecration of the Guru Granth Sahib turned out to be a no-show as none of the invitees, including senior officials of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), reached the venue.

Scheduled to begin at 11am, the jathedar had no option but to call the meeting off. Senior officials of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), members of the Dharam Prachar Committee and managers of some select gurdwaras were to attend the meeting.

Sources told HT that the SGPC chief Avtar Singh Makkar was not in favour of the meeting and had directed officials not to attend it. Makkar, it is learnt, had questioned the very logic behind the meeting as the SGPC had already discussed the issue on April 10.

We have already formed a committee to study cases of racial attacks on Sikhs abroad and to suggest ways and means to curbing them. There was no need for the jathedar to call this meeting, a senior SGPC official said.

Besides SGPC members and officials, the April 10 meeting was also attended by some Sikh historians, scholars and heads of different religious groups, including the Damdami Taksal.

The jathedar, too, had sent out invitations to historians and scholars, but withdrew them on Sunday after it was conveyed to him that they had already made suggestions on April 10.

Communication gap: Jathedar

The jathedar termed the development as communication gap. When I reached office, I was told by the personal assistant of the SGPC president that he (Makkar) wished to meet me, jathedar Gurbachan Singh said, ruling out differences with the SGPC.

The meeting will probably be held after I meet the SGPC chief, he told mediapersons, after officially calling off the meeting at 2.30pm.

Makkar, who was out of the city, said, I will comment on the development only after reaching Amritsar. He, however, clarified that there were no differences with the jathedar.

Attempt to belittle head priest?

Many in the SGPC see this as an attempt to belittle the Akal Takht jathedar. They pointed out that the jathedar had on April 1 taken the decision to convene a meeting to discuss racial attacks and informed the SGPC in this regard. Without taking the jathedar into confidence, Makkar held a meeting to discuss the issue on April 10 and didnt even invite the jathedar to the meeting, sources said.

Barring jathedars staff and securitymen, no SGPC official was seen at the Akal Takht secretariat at the time the meeting was scheduled to take place on Monday.

This is perhaps for the first time that differences have come to the fore between jathedar Gurbachan Singh and the SGPC chief Avtar Singh Makkar.
Residents of Mustafabad Saidan village waited all day to offer heros welcome to Kirpal Singhs body here on Tuesday.

The body, however, has been kept in the mortuary of the Gurdaspur civil hospital, as it arrived too late for the cremation to take place. Deputy commissioner Pardeep Sabharwal said the last rites will take place at his native village on Wednesday.

Kirpal Singhs cousin Varinder Kaur, a resident of Mustafabad Saidan, said that in his letters from Pakistan, he used to ask his brother Jagir Lal and other family members to urge the Indian government to make efforts for his release. Kaur said because of poverty, they could not do much to help him.

Varinder Kaur said Kirpal used to write for things of daily use and eatables like dry fruit besides kurta pyjamas, which were sent to him through parcel. The family said Kirpal, in his letters, never mentioned about being suffering from any disease.

The villagers demanded sufficient compensation for Kirpal Singhs kin besides a memorial in his name.
Even though deputy commissioner Ravi Bhagat had directed the private schools to reduce development charges by 30% and hike fee only by five percent, some schools are not implementing the orders fuelling protests by parents.

Parents of students studying in four schools  Harkrishan Public School, Guru Nanak Senior Secondary School, Teja Singh Swatantar Senior Secondary Memorial School and DGSG School  blocked the Gill Road at Shimlapuri for more than six hours on Monday.

Read more: Schools fleece students: Fee-regulation law before year-end, says Cheema

The protest that began at 7am and continued till 1.30pm caused traffic snarls causing inconvenience to commuters.

Parents raising slogans against private schools for fee hike at Gill Road in Ludhiana on Monday. (Sikander Singh Chopra/HT )

Besides, a delegation of parents met deputy commissioner and requested him to issue notices to the schools that were not following the orders of district administration.

Manjit Singh, a parent, whose child is studying in DGSG School, said, The school increases fee every year and is not following DCs orders. We have met the school management several times, but to no avail.

He said, We were forced to block the road as school authorities are not paying heed to our issues and even misbehaved with us. We demand strict action against such schools which are not complying with the orders.

Education shouldnt be a tool for politics: Daljit Singh Cheema

Harpreet Singh Mann, a member of the delegation, which met the DC, said, We submitted the names of some schools which were not implementing the orders. The fee structure of these schools is same, but they are charging increased fee from parents. The DC has assured us that fee will be reduced and a meeting with these schools will be conducted on Wednesday.

Deputy commissioner Ravi Bhagat said, We had resolved the issue between private school managements and parents amicably. School will be directed again to reduce development charges by 30% and increase fee by 5%.

Decision taken

On March 17, the DC formed a committee, including additional deputy commissioner (ADC, general) Ajay Sood, ADC (grievances) Kanu Thind, district attorney (legal), district education officer (secondary) Paramjit Kaur Chahal, district education officer (elementary) Gurjot Singh, five representatives of private unaided schools and five representatives of parents of different schools as its members, to resolve the issue.

After two meetings on April 6, The DC had directed the schools to decrease development charges by 30% and increase tuition fee by not more than 5%, but on April 8, a total of 23 private schools in the district refused to obey the DCs orders.
Even as the district authorities are claiming to have made the wheat procurement process at grain markets completely hassle free, but the farmers and commission agents are worried as they have not received payments of procured grain from the government so far.

The district authorities have reportedly not received funds due to the delay by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in sanctioning the Rs 20,000 crore cash-credit limit (CCL), which the chief minister (CM) Parkash Singh Badal led-government had sought for wheat procurement.

It is learnt that sanctioning of the CCL has been delayed following massive stocks of food grain, that Punjab procured, were allegedly found missing from godowns.

The district food civil supplies and consumer affairs department claimed to have procured 1.54 lakh metric tonnes of wheat since April 1 when the procurement began.

The commission agents are claiming that they have not received a single penny to pay the farmers as advance and they are waiting for payment from the government agencies so that they could further disburse the same.

Normally, the government used to credit the amount in our accounts in a day or two, but this time, we have not received even a single penny, due to which we are being forced to pay farmers from our own pockets or else risk their annoyance by delaying payments, a commission agent said.

Gurmel Singh, a farmer who sold his crop harvested from 20 acres, said the state government was claiming that farmers would get payments for their produce within 48 hours of procurement but they had not received payments for their crop even several days after procurement.

Gurbinder Singh, another farmer, said he had sold the crop from his 14 acres land, but had not received payment for the same so far.

Rajnish Kumari, district food and supply controller, said, The government has not yet credited the amount required for paying the commission agents. We will immediately disburse payments in accounts of commission agents after getting funds from the government, so that farmers can be paid in a time-bound manner.

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The Fazilka police on Tuesday submitted a challan against Akali leader and liquor baron Shiv Lal Doda in the court of judicial magistrate Jagjit Singh in the Abohar murder case.

Doda had been booked for criminal conspiracy for the December 11, 2015, incident in which a Dalit, 27-year-old Bhim Sain, was murdered at the Akali leaders farmhouse in Abohar, a sub-division of Fazilka district. His both hands and legs were chopped off at Dodas farmhouse and another person, Gurjant Singh, who accompanied Bhim, also suffered injuries in the incident. Doda is lodged in the Fazilka sub-jail.

Though the contents of the challan could not be known, Fazilka senior superintendent of police (SSP) Narendra Bhargav confirmed the development.

Doda was not named in the challan presented against 25 accused, including Dodas nephew Amit Doda, on March 12.

Read more: From an ice-cream vendor to a liquor baron, know Shiv Lal Doda

A day after the murder, the police had registered a case against 26 people under Sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder), 326 (voluntarily causing grievous hurt by dangerous weapons or means), 148 (rioting), 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object.), 115 (abetment of offence punishable with death or imprisonment for life), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code and Section 3 (2)V of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act on the statement of Gurjants brother Ranjit Singh. The case will come up for hearing on April 25.

The police was forced to submit the challan against Doda as Bhims mother Kaushalya Devi and Gurjant had threatened to hold a dharna in front of the Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badals residence in Chandigarh on Tuesday for the deliberate delay. The police are not submitting the challan against Doda under political pressure and are trying to give him a clean chit, Kaushalya had alleged.

Satisfied over filing of the challan, Kaushalya demanded a probe into the alleged VVIP services being provided to Doda in the Fazilka sub-jail. It is strange that despite assurance by deputy chief minister Sukhbir Badal of ensuring justice, Doda is enjoying VVIP treatment in the jail. All our appeals to transfer him to another jail have gone in vain. Doda is running his liquor trade from the jail, she alleged, adding: If the authorities dont stop giving VIP treatment to him, we will sit on protest in front of the jail.

Gurjant, whose limbs were also severed, said: Even four months after the attack, the state government has not provided any financial aid for my treatment.

Doda family blames Jakhar

Dodas relative Avinash Doda has accused Abohar legislator and senior Congress leader Sunil Jakhar of hatching a conspiracy against Doda. Jakhar was trying to implicate him since 2012 assembly polls as Doda secured more than 35,000 votes despite being an independent candidate in his maiden election battle, he said. Doda had succeeded in making a strong base among the voters in Abohar and was a threat to Jakhar, he added.

Read more: Dodas liquor vend set afire in Abohar, employee beaten up
To promote fisheries as an alternative venture, the Punjab government for the first time will organise a two-day fish festival at Ludhiana on April 24 and 25.

Giving details, animal husbandry and fisheries minister Gulzar Singh Ranike said the fisheries department would collaborate with the National Fishery Development Board, Hyderabad. The festival is aimed at giving maximum exposure to fish farmers so that they can derive maximum benefit out of this. South-west districts which are waterlogged will be developed for fisheries on a large scale, he said.

The minister said that during the festival, technical sessions had been planned for guidance by renowned scientists from across the country.

The festival will also witness an exhibition on hi-tech machinery and other essential items required in fish farming. Progressive fish farmers will be honoured on the occasion.
As wheat harvesting is in full swing, farmers across the region are worried as dry and ready-to-harvest wheat crop is catching fire incurring losses.

Wheat crop over 100-acre land near Raikot and Bowani was destroyed in two fire incidents in the past four days.

In the first incident, crop caught fire due to a short-circuit in the electricity wires at Jalaldiwal near Raikot on Sunday.

Wheat crop over 50 acres was burnt causing heavy losses to five farmers, including Jagroop Singh (18 acre), Gurcharan Singh (15 acre), Joginder Singh (4 acre) and Nadhu (four acre).

Jagroop Singh, whose crop was burnt, said, My crop over 18 acres of land was gutted. The fire arose from high-tension wires. The electricity department is totally responsible for the incident. We are seeking compensation but no one is listening to us.

Raikot SDM Harpreet Singh Sudan said, During initial inspection, we found that crop over 40 acres was destroyed and rest of the 10 acres had only straw. The cause of fire is being investigated. We will submit a final report to the district administration after conducting an inquiry.

In another incident, wheat over 35 acres was engulfed in a fire at Bowani on April 15.

Farmer Harjinder Singh said, I had to face huge losses as of the total 35 acres that caught fire, most of the land was mine. The fire started from the roadside, but the cause has not been ascertained. The government officials came here and inquired. Now, we are expecting adequate compensation.

Payal SDM Harjot Kaur said, We have visited Bowani village and received reports of fire from other villages too. We are investigating the cause behind fire. The report will be sent to higher authorities soon.

Farmers to be sensitised on taking precautions

DC Ravi Bhagat said we have held a number of meetings with PSPCL officials to safeguard measures to present such incidents of fire in the fields where wheat is being harvested. The farmers will be sensitised on how to prevent such incidents with adequate precautions.

Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) engineer-in-chief NK Sharma said, We have made all arrangements and taken precautions to ensure safe harvest. If any discrepancy is found on our part, farmers will be adequately compensated.
Dalbir Kaur, sister of Sarabjit Singh, who died in Lahores Kot Lakhpat jail three years ago, on Tuesday claimed that as many as 11 Indian prisoners in Lahore jails are in danger.

I have received information about direction given to the Lahore jail to kill 11 of our prisoners. Mainly two of our prisoners in Pakistan jails are in danger - Kuldeep Kumar from Ahmedabad and Ansari from Maharashtra. The ministry of external affairs must probe this and take strict action. The lives of the 11 Indian prisoners are in danger and efforts should be made to free them, Kaur told ANI.

Pakistan killed another Sarabjit: Kirpal Singhs sister

When I heard of Kirpals body being brought to India, I was reminded of the time when Sarabjits body was brought. It is suspicious why Pakistani prisoners do not die in Lahore jails. I still believe that Kirpal didnt die of heart attack, the reason is something else. Everything will be cleared in the post-mortem, she added.

The mortal remains of Kirpal Singh, the Indian prisoner who died under mysterious circumstances in Lahores Kot Lakhpat Jail, will be brought back to India this afternoon.

Kirpal Singhs family had on Friday met Union home minister Rajnath Singh to express their concern over the gruesome treatment being meted out to Indians languishing in Pakistani jails.

Kirpal Singhs family had earlier rejected Pakistans claim that he died of a heart attack and demanded a post-mortem to ascertain the true reason behind the sudden death.

Kirpal had allegedly crossed the Attari-Wagah border to enter Pakistan in 1992 and was subsequently sentenced to death in a serial bomb blasts case in Pakistans Punjab province.
Punjab education minister Dr Daljit Singh Cheema has promised a body or a legislation by year-end to regulate school fee and save parents from exploitation at the hands of private institutions.

Even three years since a Punjab and Haryana high court order, the Punjab government is yet to lay down a permanent mechanism to regulate private-school fee. Arbitrary increase in these charges year after year has prompted parents to come out on streets in Punjab, leading to ugly reactions such as the illegal confinement of students at Patialas Budha Dal School on April 12 for not paying capitation fee.

Read more: Education shouldnt be a tool for politics: Daljit Singh Cheema

The committee that the Punjab and Haryana high court had constituted to look into fee increase considers itself merely an advisory body, while the Punjab government thinks otherwise. If Justice Amar Dutt Committee could order fee refund in case of a few schools (such as Bal Bharati) in Ludhiana, it can do so in other cases, too, the education minister told HT in an exclusive interview on Monday.

The high court had asked Punjab for a regulatory mechanism within six months from April 2013. The government didnt come out with even a law promised in the compliance report submitted in 2014.

Read more: Patiala school confines students, 3 land in hospital as fee row turns ugly

Caught between high court, govt

In the Patiala confinement case, the deputy commissioner who asked the sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) and district education officer (DEO) concerned for a report within 24 hours seems to have forgotten the issue. After the SDM has been transferred, the administration hasnt care to depute another official. Patiala DC Ramvir Singh said: After a long agitation by parents in his district, Ludhiana DC Ravi Bhagat had announced on April 6 that development charges in private schools would be 30% of last academic year and the fee increase only 5% instead 15. A fortnight later, Bhagat said formal orders were not issued, since the schools and the parents had reached a compromise. Most schools have started complying but a few still dont adhere to what we say.

Another DC in the state said on the condition of anonymity that the government needed to take control of the situation. We are helpless beyond a point, unclear whether to go by high court recommendations or follow governments regulation. One avoids getting into all this, so the best way is to help the two parties resolve the issue amicably at the district level, the officer claimed.

In Bathinda, DC Basant Garg had to intervene when the secretary of the parents association went on an indefinite fast earlier this month.

CBSE clueless about HC order

Various private schools in the state are charged with transferring money to franchise or another school close by. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) affiliation rules forbid diverting of school income to individuals in a trust, society, or school committee or outside. CBSE regional coordinator RK Khanderao said since the matter was sub-judice, the board could not take action or withdraw affiliation.

Disposing of a writ petition in 2013, the high court had formed committees in Punjab, Haryana, and Chandigarh to look into fee regulation. Asked about it, Khanderao said in his knowledge, the matter was still sub-judice. What can the CBSE do until the committee files a report, he says.

PSEB schools fair, says chairperson

Punjab School Education Board chairperson Tejinder Kaur Dhaliwal said the fee at most of its affiliate schools was nominal and so the issue was not big, even though we do take action on complaints. Exorbitant fee is an issue in the CBSE-affiliated private unaided schools in the state, she said

Punjab director public instructions (secondary) Baljit Singh said hed discuss a solution with the education minister on Monday. Asked about letter that Justice Amar Dutt Committee had sent him last month about implementing fee norms, he said: We have endorsed it, and the respective DEOs (district education officers) are in the process of communicating it to all schools. The committee wants private schools to display the fee structure and book lists on notice boards and issue receipt against the fee received.

The way forward

The annual fee increase by private schools remains a contentious issue. Maybe Punjab can learn from some other states. The Delhi government mooted the Delhi School (Verification of Accounts and Refund of Excess Fee) Bill, 2015. In January, the Delhi high court ruled that the private unaided schools that had received land from Delhi Development Authority could not increase charges without the governments permission.

Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra have also enacted a legislation for fee regulation in private schools.

In case of Chandigarh, the tribunal led by Justice RS Mongia (retired), remains a work in progress.

Haryana is only one of the three in region to have devised an actual mechanism to regulate school fee. In February 2015, it constituted division-level fee and funds regulatory committees for private unaided recognised schools under the chairmanship of the divisional commissioners at by adding Rules 158-A and 158-B to the Haryana School Education Rules. The interim committee constituted on the high court orders and led by late justice Kiran Anand Loll was, thus, dismantled.

Parents protest across state

In Ludhiana, parents continued to hold protests on Monday, demanding that private schools implemented the orders of deputy commissioner Ravi Bhagat to drop development charges to 30% and five increase to 5%.

Parents from four schools blocked the Gill road at Shimlapuri from 7am to 1.30pm, disrupting traffic. Their delegation also met the DC, requesting him to issue a notice to the schools that had declined to follow his orders.

In Bathinda, protesting parents burnt an effigy of state education minister Dr Daljit Singh Cheema and accused the Punjab government of acting in favour of private schools. Their representatives met additional deputy commissioner Parampal Kaur. On April 12, they had moved a complaint to DC Basant Garg, on which the administration has taken no action.

In Amritsar, a day after parents took to the streets against fleecing by private schools, the district administration decided to take up the matter with the principals concerned. DC Varun Roojam said he had called all principals for a meeting to address this issue on priority.

In Jalandhar, parents broke a police cordon to barge into a private school and protest against its management. They stopped the school buses from taking students home. For the past few days, they have been agitating against various schools.

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Now, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) has staked a claim to the Kohinoor diamond, saying Sikhs are its legitimate owners and it should be returned to the religious body.

The SGPC has claimed that the diamond was taken away through deceitful means by the British from Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last Sikh ruler of Punjab.

In a statement issued here on Tuesday, SGPC president Avtar Singh Makkar expressed surprise over the Centres stand on the issue in the Supreme Court on Monday, where it said India should not stake claim to the Kohinoor as the Maharaja had gifted it to the British government. He said the Centre should rethink its stand.

To say that the Kohinoor was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away by the British but was given as a present by Maharaja Duleep Singh to the East India Company is a gross misrepresentation of historical facts. This stand seems to support the deceitful ways and means of the British, he said.

Makkar said Maharaja Duleep Singh was just nine when the Kohinoor was taken away from him at Lahore. Even if the Maharaja himself had parted with the diamond, we cannot ignore the ways and means the British must have employed to secure it, he said, while calling upon the Centre not to create obstacles in the efforts being made by certain individuals and organisations to get the diamond back.

In fact, not just the Kohinoor but other precious items in the possession of Sikhs, like the jewelled Peacock throne, were taken away from Lahore after the fall of Ranjit Singhs empire. We must demand all such items back, he added.

Maharajas descendant wants Kohinoor back

Local resident Sukhdev Singh Sandhanwalia, claiming to be a descendant of Maharaja Duleep Singh, said the Solicitor General of India had presented wrong facts before the Supreme Court and belittled the rights of Sikhs to get back the Kohinoor.

In a statement issued here, he said the Maharajas descendants had repeatedly demanded the return of the Kohinoor. He said that in 1997, his father Beant Singh had met Queen Elizabeth during her visit to the Golden Temple and given her a written representation demanding the Kohinoor and all such precious items that were taken away by the British from Lahore.

Our fight for justice, to bring back the Kohinoor to Harmandar Sahib will continue. Kohinoor is not merely a bright stone, its a monument of hope, dignity and justice, which would only be served by its return to its rightful place in Amritsar, he said.
Deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal cautioned traders against the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) saying that Delhi was the live example where traders were suffering due to the wrong policies of the topi-wali sarkar (government of white cap-bearers).

Addressing traders at a function to distribute health insurance cards under the Bhagat Puran Singh Sehat Bima Yojana in Pathankot on Tuesday, he said the Akali-BJP government had always strived for the welfare of traders.

He said the Delhi residents were paying more taxes and inflated electricity bills and traders were being harassed under the AAP government. But the situation is different in Punjab, he added.

Sukhbir said the Congress was trying to tarnish Punjabs image by claiming that 70% of its youths are drug addict. I challenge the Congress leaders to prove their allegations. We save other states by seizing drugs which come from across the border, he said.

He said Punjab was placed better then the neighbouring of Himachal, Jammu and Kashmir, Haryana and Rajasthan. No communal violence took place in the state in the nine years of the present regime, but Punjab remained on the boil under the Congress rule, claimed Sukhbir.

He also hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for supporting the state which was missing under the Congress-led government at the Centre.
Two marginal farmers have committed suicide in villages of the district in the last two days. Farmer Charan Singh, 45, a resident of Kotdharmu village, committed suicide by hanging himself at his house here on Monday afternoon.

According to his relative Ranjit Singh, the victim had taken 1.5 acres of land on lease at a rate of Rs 45,000 per acre. Due to whitefly attack on the cotton crop, he incurred huge loss and was reeling under a debt of around Rs 1.5-2 lakh borrowed from moneylenders. He used to say in his peer group that he would end his life due to the mounting debt, he said.

While his two sons were out in the fields, Charan Singh hanged himself at his house in the afternoon. An FIR under Section 174 (inquest proceedings) of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) was lodged at Kotdharmu police station. The victim is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter.

In a similar case, a day before his court hearing in a case registered by the moneylender for not clearing his debt, 43-year-old Darshan Singh, a resident of Kotli Kalan village, committed suicide on Sunday morning by consuming pesticide. Darshans family claims that he was fighting a legal case filed against him by the moneylender only because he could not clear his debt.

A moneylender from the neighbouring town of Talwandi Sabo had lent some money to Darshan around three years ago. We were struggling to clear the debt and then the moneylender filed a case, said Darshans father Magar Singh.

Upset over the scheduled court hearing on Monday, Darshan consumed pesticide on early Sunday morning. Speaking to HT, his daughter Kamaljeet Kaur, who has done a masters degree in political science, appealed to the government to waive off the loan amount. He remained upset after the damage to cotton crop grown on 10 acres of land. He had attempted suicide on several occasions in the past due to the pending debt. Unfortunately, this time, we could not save him, said Kamaljeet Kaur.

Meanwhile, deputy commissioner (DC) Varinder Kumar Sharma has assured both the families of delivering the due compensation if the cases are found to be genuine.

I appeal to the farmers and the aggrieved families that the administration will ensure that their issues are resolved in time and they should not take the extreme step, he said. HT has also found that despite clear instructions from the state government, most of the suicide affected families have not even received counselling from either the revenue or the agriculture department.

We are aware that the government has a policy of compensation to families of farmers killed in suicide but we dont even know how to avail this benefit. The nambardar concerned has not even detailed anything about this, said Darshans family members.

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Jalandhar police on Monday arrested two waiters employed with the Hotel President New Courts for allegedly attempting to rape a three-year-old girl on late Sunday night.

Reports said the girls family had gone to attend a party.

As per the FIR, the girls father alleged that even after he rescued his daughter from a room where the accused tried to rape her, the hotel owner and manager did not help him.

He said the hotel even did not have CCTV cameras fitted in it. He alleged that he tried to inform the hotel owner telephonically but he did not respond.

The complainant, who works as a distributor, had gone to a party with his wife and two daughters.

He said their daughter suddenly went missing and they started locating her.

The complainant said he heard screams for a room and as soon as he opened the door, two waiters fled the spot.

A case has been registered against Pardeep Singh and Vinay under sections 376, 511(attempt to rape), 342 (punishment for wrongful confinement), 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of the Indian Penal Code and section 4 of the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offence Act (POCSO) at the Navi Baradari police.

SHO Balwinder Singh said the accused would be taken on the remand for further probe into this case.

Despite repeated attempts to contact the owner of the hotel, he did not respond to phone calls and SMSes.
The hilarious actor who played the tart-tongued, endlessly meddling mother on CBS long-running sitcome Everybody Loves Raymond, Doris Roberts, has died. The five-time Emmy winner died on Sunday night in her sleep of natural causes in Los Angeles, her representative Janet Daily said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

In 1996, Roberts landed the part of Marie Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond, playing Rays mom and the wife of the cranky Frank (Peter Boyle).

She was with the hit CBS sitcom for every one of the shows nine seasons, covering 210 episodes.

She was scheduled to appear at an Everybody Loves Raymond reunion in June in Austin.

Truly the end of an era, Patrica Heaton, who did battle with Roberts as daughter-in-law Debra on the show, wrote on Twitter.

Peter Boyle, Doris Roberts and Ray Romano in a still from Everybody Loves Raymond. (CBS)

My wonderful TV mother-in-law and ELR nemesis Doris Roberts was a consummate professional from whom I learned so much. She was funny and tough and loved life, living it to the fullest.

Roberts once said she based Marie on a combination of Romanos mother, an Italian, and series producer Phil Rosenthals mom, a German Jew.

Wrote Rosenthal on Twitter, We loved our mom, the great #DorisRoberts. A wonderful, funny, indelible actress and friend.

Doris Roberts had an energy and a spirit that amazed me, Romano said in a statement.

She never stopped. Whether working professionally or with her many charities, or just nurturing and mentoring a green young comic trying to make it as an actor, she did everything with such a grand love for life and people.

Roberts excelled in motherly roles throughout her career. She played Donna Pescows mother on the 1979-80 ABC series Angie, created by Garry Marshall, and joined NBCs Remington Steele as Mildred Krebs, the receptionist for the detective agency run by Pierce Brosnan and Stephanie Zimbalist, in 1983. She stayed with the show through 1987.

Read: Sawyer Sweeten of Everybody Loves Raymond dies at 19

Roberts also won another Emmy in 1983 for a stint on St Elsewhere.

She received 11 nods in all, three more for Everybody Loves Raymond, one for Remington Steele and one apiece for Perfect Strangers and American Playhouse.

Watch her in a scene from the show:

Her big-screen resume included Something Wild (1961), Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Honeymoon Killers (1969), National Lampoons Christmas Vacation (1989) and Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star (2003).

Her marriage to novelist and short story writer William Goyen lasted 22 years until he died of leukemia in 1983 at age 68.

Survivors include her son Michael, daughter-in-law Jane and grandchildren Kelsey, Andrew and Devon.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
US presidential hopefuls made last-minute pitches in New York on Monday on the eve of the states most decisive primary in decades, with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump hoping to cut their rivals down to size.

The states 5.8 million registered Democrats and 2.7 million registered Republicans are eligible to vote Tuesday for their partys nominee for the White House in a fraught race still competitive on both sides.

It shines an unprecedented spotlight on a state that normally has little sway in presidential campaigns in a year when three of the candidates -- Manhattan billionaire Trump, former senator Clinton and Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders -- can each claim New York as home.

The former secretary of state is steeling herself for a big win, determined to quash the momentum generated by her self-styled Democratic socialist rival who has won seven out of the last eight primary and caucus votes.

On Monday she appeared at a Manhattan hotel alongside New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand and former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived being shot in the head, to discuss womens rights and raising incomes.

The Democratic establishment has swung behind the former first lady. She is endorsed by the New York mayor and on Monday the state governor joined former president Bill Clinton in hitting the campaign upstate.

While nationwide polls edge Clinton just 47-46% over the 74-year-old Sanders, in New York she leads by a whopping 53.7-40.9%, based on a RealClearPolitics poll average.

She also carried the state in 2008 against Barack Obama, who would go on to win the presidency.

The margin will probably be a little tighter than people might expect, but we think were going to pull this out and that is going to be a very meaningful victory, Clintons campaign press secretary Brian Fallon told CNN.

Clinton holds 1,790 delegates compared to 1,113 for Sanders, putting her on course to scoop the 2,383 needed to secure the partys ticket.

Republican hopeful Donald Trump greets members of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, a day ahead of New York primary in New York City. (AFP)

Only California has more than the 247 Democratic delegates up for grabs in New York, including 44 super-delegates. Sanders desperately needs a win in the state of his birth to keep alive his hopes of winning the presidency.

On the Republican side, a somewhat toned-down Trump hopes that winning the majority of the 95 Republican delegates can lessen his chances of facing a contested nomination at the party convention in Cleveland in July.

Republicans in rural upstate areas and fallen manufacturing cities have warmed to his populist message despite a growing backlash among party elites opposed to his decisive campaign that has insulted women, Mexicans and Muslims.

Two-way street

On Monday he met minority representatives at his headquarters in Manhattan before a rally in Buffalo scheduled for the evening.

The 69-year-old tycoon commands a thumping home-state advantage at 52.6%, with Ohio Governor John Kasich and Texas Senator Ted Cruz languishing at 22.9 and 17.9%percent respectively, according to RealClearPolitics.

Were going to win so much that youre going to say Mr President please were winning too much, he told a rally in the Hudson Valley on Sunday.

But Trump has repeatedly blasted Republican party rules as rigged as he has lost a string of recent delegate hauls to right-wing evangelical Cruz.

Cruz, who is widely disliked in New York for insulting its values earlier in the campaign, confined himself to only private meetings and television appearances in New York on Monday.

Sanders, who on Sunday addressed what his campaign said were 28,000 supporters in Brooklyns Prospect Park, has another rally scheduled in Queens on Monday.

Clinton talks with recently unionized car wash workers at Hi Tek Wash and Lube on Sunday in the Queens borough of New York City. (AFP)

The Vermont senator has galvanized millions with his call for universal health care, free public college and campaign finance reform, exhorting youth voters and working people to get more involved in politics.

But he suffers a major disadvantage in New York, where Tuesdays voting is closed to independents, many of whom have swung behind his message.

If voter turnout is high, working people come out to vote, young people come out to vote, we can win this thing, he told CNN.

But he signaled that he could be willing to swing behind Clinton, should she win the nomination, provided she take on causes that he has highlighted.

He said Clinton had moved to the left in this campaign but not gone far enough to propose solutions.

Its a two-way street, he said. The Clinton people are going to have to say, you know, maybe Bernie has a point, he said.
Armed militants in Afghanistan staged a coordinated assault on a government security agency in the capital Tuesday morning, killing at least 30 people and wounding more than 320. The Taliban has claimed responsibility.

Many of those wounded are in serious condition, ministry spokesman Mohammad Ismail Kawoosi said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the brazen attack in a densely packed neighbourhood with government offices, which sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing in the sky and rattled windows several kilometres away, in their first major attack in the Afghan capital since they announced the start of this years fighting season.

Talibans spring offensive The Afghan Taliban last Tuesday announced the start of their spring offensive even as the government in Kabul seeks to bring the insurgents back to the negotiating table to end their drawn-out conflict.

The Taliban warned they would "employ large-scale attacks on enemy positions across the country" during the offensive dubbed Operation Omari in honour of the movements late founder Mullah Omar, whose death was announced last year. The insurgents targetted the northern city of Kunduz, which they briefly captured last year in a stunning setback for Afghan forces. But officials said Afghan security forces drove Taliban fighters back from the city on Friday.

The annual spring offensive normally marks the start of the "fighting season", though this past winter the lull was shorter and rebels continued to battle government forces, albeit with less intensity.

(We) condemn in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Puli Mahmood Khan neighbourhood of Kabul, as a result of which many of our countrymen were martyred and wounded, Ashraf Ghani said in a statement without specifying the number.

Afghan security forces carry an injured soldier after a suicide car bomb attack in Kabul in Afghanistan on April 19, 2016. (Reuters)

Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism, Ghani said.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid claimed their fighters had managed to enter the offices of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the main spy agency.

Afghan officials did not confirm that claim but intense gun battles could be heard near the NDS compound. The Taliban are generally known to exaggerate battlefield claims.

The first blast was carried out by a suicide bomber in a car and possibly one or two bombers are still resisting, interior ministry spokesperson Sediq Sediqqi said.

The scene of the attack has been completely cordoned off by Afghan security forces.

Afghan security forces respond to a Taliban-claimed suicide attack at Kabul in Afghanistan on April 19. (AP)

The Talibans resurgence has raised serious questions about Afghan forces capacity to hold their own. An estimated 5500 troops were killed last year, the worst-ever toll.

Peace talks which began last summer were abruptly halted after it was revealed that Taliban leader Mullah Omar had been dead for two years, a disclosure which sparked infighting in the insurgents ranks.

A four-country group comprising Afghanistan, the United States, China and Pakistan has been holding meetings since January aimed at jump-starting negotiations, though their efforts have so far been in vain.

Read | Al Qaeda re-emerges as challenge for US, Nato in Afghanistan

Instantly in heavens embrace: How an Afghan child became a bomber
Brazils President Dilma Rousseff vowed on Monday to fight impeachment tooth-and-nail in the Senate after a heavy defeat in the lower house of Congress raised the likelihood of an end to 13 years of leftist rule in Latin Americas largest economy.

In a raucous vote late on Sunday that sparked jubilation among Rousseffs foes, the opposition comfortably surpassed the two-thirds majority needed to send Brazils first female president for trial in the Senate on charges she manipulated budget accounts.

If the Senate votes by a simple majority to accept the case next month, as is expected, Rousseff would become the first Brazilian leader to be impeached for more than 20 years.

The crisis has paralysed the government as it struggles to revive the economy from its worst recession in decades. It has also sparked a bitter struggle between Rousseff, a 68-year-old former Communist guerrilla, and her Vice President Michel Temer, 75, who would take power if she is impeached.

Addressing the nation on television, a combative Rousseff insisted that she had committed no impeachable crime and accused Temer of openly conspiring to topple her government in what she described as a coup.

While I am very saddened by this, I have the force, the spirit and the courage to fight this whole process to the end, Rousseff told the televised news conference. This is just the beginning of the battle, which will be long and drawn out.

Rousseff stands accused of a budgetary sleight of hand employed by many elected officials in Brazil: delaying payments to state lenders in order to artificially lower the budget deficit to boost her re-election bid in 2014.

Nevertheless, opinion polls show more than 60% of Brazilians support impeaching Rousseff, less than two years after the leftist leader narrowly won re-election. Her popularity has been crushed by the recession and a vast graft scandal at state oil company Petrobras.

The impeachment vote has deeply divided Brazilians, tens of thousands of whom demonstrated in front of Congress and in cities nationwide during the vote.

Many hold Rousseff responsible for everything from the devastating recession to chronic high taxes and poor public services. At the same time, a broad swath of the population attributes tens of millions of poor Brazilians rise from destitution over the past decade to Rousseffs Workers Party and decried the vote as anti-democratic.

Im happy because I think Dilma had to go, but Im also both sad that it came to this and also really worried that the next president could be even worse, said Patricia Santos, a 52-year-old small business owner who was among the demonstrators outside Congress. I quiver to think what awaits us next.

A Rousseff aide said the government would focus on clawing back support in the 81-seat Senate, where it lacks the simple majority needed to prevent the case being accepted for trial. Given that it currently has the support of only 31 senators, the aide said the situation looked very difficult.

The government has been looking to Senate Speaker Renan Calheiros, a crucial but fickle ally of Rousseffs, to delay the Senate vote as long as possible to give it time to negotiate.

President of the Chamber of Deputies Eduardo Cunha (L) speaks with President of the Brazilian Senate Renan Calheiros during a meeting in Brasilia, Brazil April 18, 2016. (REUTERS)

However, Calheiros said on Monday he would remain neutral and would meet with party leaders in the Senate on Tuesday to define the calendar for the process.

Paralysed Government

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators from both sides of the impeachment battle took to the streets across Brazil on Sunday in peaceful protests. Millions watched the vote live on television.

The heavy margin of defeat in Sundays vote shocked many Workers Party insiders, who blamed treachery by allied parties. The final tally was 367 votes cast in favour of impeachment, versus 137 against, and seven abstentions. Two lawmakers did not show up to vote.

More than half the lawmakers who decided her fate on Sunday are themselves under investigation for graft, fraud or electoral crimes, according to Congresso em Foco, a prominent watchdog in Brasilia.

Claudio Couto, professor of political science at Fundacao Getulio Vargas, said that Sundays loss dramatically weakened Rousseffs ability to strike political bargains and shore up support for her government.

It is almost impossible the Senate will not take up the impeachment. And with her removal for up to six months, the governments power of persuasion will be dramatically diminished, he said.

Brazil's lawmakers celebrate after they reached the votes needed to authorise President Dilma Rousseff's impeachment to go ahead, at the Congress in Brasilia on April 17, 2016. Brazilian lawmakers on Sunday reached the two thirds majority necessary to authorize impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff. (AFP Photo)

Senior Workers Party figures have pledged, if necessary, to take their struggle onto the streets, raising concerns that it could seek to destabilise a future Temer government.

Despite anger at rising unemployment, the party can still rely on support among millions of working-class Brazilians, who credit its welfare programs with pulling their families out of poverty during the past decade.

The U.S. State Department voiced confidence on Monday that Brazil would navigate the political crisis democratically in accordance with the constitution.

Brazilian financial markets have rallied strongly this year after a disastrous 2015 on the prospect of a more business-friendly Temer administration.

Brazils Bovespa stock index shed 0.75% on Monday, with traders citing profit taking after it gained more than 20% so far in 2016. The real also weakened more than 2% to 3.60 per dollar after the central bank intervened to prevent a sharp rise in the currency.

Once regarded as an emerging markets powerhouse, Brazil has been hit by the end of a long commodities boom as well as political instability. It lost its coveted investment grade credit rating in December.

Fitch, which has a negative outlook on Brazils BB+ sovereign rating, said it would focus on a new leaders attitude to the corruption probe and efforts to stem the steep rise in government debt.
A British Muslim father of Algerian descent has lost a court battle with his England-born wife on whether to circumcise their sons according to Islamic principles.

The boys, aged six and four, had been the subject UK high court dispute after their parents disagreed over whether to have them circumcised.

Their father, who has lived in England for 15 years, argued that it would be in the childrens best interests to circumcise them in accordance with his Muslim practice and religious beliefs.

Their mother, however, wanted to wait until the boys were competent to give consent.

First and foremost, this is a once and for all, irreversible procedure. There is no guarantee that these boys will wish to continue to observe the Muslim faith with the devotion demonstrated by their father, Justice Roberts said in her ruling.

The details of the case emerged yesterday after a ruling by Roberts.

The judge said no one involved could be identified, but she said the man and woman were both in their mid-30s and now separated.

The couple met in 2006 and lived together in London.

They went through an Islamic ceremony for marriage in 2009 before the boys were born.

But then in July 2012 the mother fled the flat with the boys following violent attacks on her by the father, according to reports.

Just as the father is passionate in his cause and the reasons for circumcision, the mother is resolutely opposed to it at this point, the judge said, adding that she was simply deferring the decision until the boys can make their own choice.
Chinese media on Tuesday highlighted Defence Minister Manohar Parrikars remarks that Sino-India ties should not be affected by a third party while omitting his request that Beijing reviews its stand on blocking Indias efforts to get Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar banned by the UN.

The issue of Azhar, Jaish-e-Muhammad chief, was raised by External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj during her meeting with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow on Monday, while Parrikar called on China to strike a united stand with India on terrorism.

What happened in UN is not in the right direction and they have to take a common line on terrorism which is in the interests of India and China, Parrikar had said after his meeting with Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan on Monday.

For its part, the state-run media here highlighted Parrikars remarks to Chang that India hopes that the development of bilateral ties will not be affected by other factors including the third party.

The remarks came one week after Parrikar and US Defence Secretary Ash Carter vowed to safeguard maritime security in the region, including the South China Sea, state-run China Daily reported.

According to observers, India is seeking to strike a balance between China and the United States in its frequent high-level meetings with Chinese officials this week, it said.

Parrikar also said India attaches highest importance to its ties with China.

As the Indian government has long been dedicated to settling border disputes with China, Parrikars visit to the country aims to reduce tensions caused by border patrols, although the issue cannot be solved overnight, said Zhao Gancheng, director of South Asia Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies.

The border dispute will be discussed at the 19th boundary talks between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi this week.

Zhao said normal patrols on the Chinese side of the Line of Actual Control have been portrayed in the Indian press as aggressive incursions in the Indian territory.

Despite a Border Defence Cooperation Agreement, its implementation is problematic, Fu Xiaoqiang, an expert on South Asian studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations told Global Times, citing media hype and the tough stance on China taken by certain Indian politicians.

Beijing and New Delhi inked the agreement in October 2013 during ex-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singhs visit to China, formulating a formal mechanism to improve security along 3488-kilometre long border.
Helen Ramasaran became a Hillary Clinton supporter just the day after Barack Obama was elected President in 2008. She started by sending her money to pay off her campaign debt, and has been a supporter since.

An African-American who gets her last name from her Trinidadian ex-husband, Ramasaran is convinced Clinton is ready for the White House. There is no doubt in my mind about it or that she will win, Ramasaran said leaving a Clinton campaign event in midtown Manhattan on Monday.

Clinton leads the Democratic race in delegate count  1,289 to Bernie Sanderss 1,045 (their threshold is 2,382)  and in polls, massively in New York but with a shrinking lead nationally.

New York has had my back always and I have had New Yorks, Clinton told supporters at the event, taking the stage to Rachel Plattens Fight Song, a current campaign favourite.

Clinton will win New York, which votes on the primary on Tuesday, but experts say she needs to win big, perhaps with a double-digit margin, to not only end Sanderss recent winning streak, but also send a message.

Theres this perception that the people want Sanders but the party wants Clinton, David Birdsell, dean of a Manhattan school of public affairs, told Politico news-site.

If she wins by a margin of six figures, high five figures in New York, you have a significant rebuttal to that, he added. That should set her up nicely for the race for now and later.

But Sanders is determined to not make it easy for Clinton.

And an upset win, however unlikely, is his target. But he may be happy, experts said, if he loses by less than 10 points.

Clinton leads Sanders 53.1% to 41.4% in the RealClearPolitics average of polls for New York, holding off the surging senator from Vermont who was trailing by over 30 points a month ago.

But she is ahead still on polling day. She will take an important step tomorrow, Robby Mook, her campaign manager, stated confidently on a conference call with reporters Monday.

New York is Clintons adoptive home, where she and her husband settled down after eight years in the White House. She went on to represent the state in US Senate for one term.

Sanders lives in Vermont and represents the state in the Senate, but was born in Brooklyn, New York, and is thus as much a New Yorker as any other in the race.

9/11, 7-Eleven and the Republican race

Its a no-contest across the line in the Republican party, also.

New York is frontrunner Donald Trumps home state and he leads the polls by a massive margin  53.1% to 22.8% for John Kasich, who is placed second.

At 18.1%, Ted Cruz, Trumps main challenger nationally, is barely noticeable. He seems to have given up on New York already and is focusing on the next bunch of primaries.

At a campaign event in Buffalo, New York state, Trump slipped up a bit using 7-Eleven, a countrywide network of convenience stores, when referring to 9/11, the September 11, 2001 terrorists attacks.

Trump brought up 9/11 to attack Cruz, who spoke disparagingly about New York values at a presidential debate and continues to suffer because of it, specially in New York, where he is toast.
China is marking its National Security Education Day with a poster warning young female government workers about dating handsome foreigners, who could turn out to have secret agendas.

Titled Dangerous Love, the 16-panel, comic book-like poster tells the story of an attractive young Chinese civil servant nicknamed Xiao Li, or Little Li, who meets a red-headed foreign man at a dinner party and starts a relationship.

The man, David, claims to be a visiting scholar, but he actually is a foreign spy who butters Xiao Li up with compliments on her beauty, bouquets of roses, fancy dinners and romantic walks in the park.

After Xiao Li provides David with secret internal documents from her job at a government propaganda office, the two are arrested. In one of the posters final panels, Xiao Li is shown sitting handcuffed before two policemen, who tell her that she has a shallow understanding of secrecy for a state employee.

The poster has appeared on local governments public bulletin boards, targeting mainly rank-and-file state employees.

A Beijing district government said in a statement that it would display the poster to educate its employees about keeping classified information confidential and reporting to state security agencies if they spot any spying activity. It said it would familiarise employees with ways to counter espionage.

The central governments inaugural National Security Education Day, which was last Friday, was meant to make people aware about security problems in China, and was marked by speeches and the distribution of materials.
Rescuers and desperate families clawed through rubble on Monday, pulling out survivors two days after an earthquake that killed at least 413 people and devastated a tourist region of Ecuador.

Tearful relatives grabbed chunks of debris with their bare hands as they joined in the search for their loved ones, along with stretched firefighting teams and mechanical diggers.

Among the stories of survival, authorities reported that one person was found alive on Monday afternoon under the rubble of the El Gato hotel in Portoviejo.

Local media reported that a girl was rescued from the ruins of a building after being trapped for 20 hours in the hard-hit town of Pedernales, at the center of the quake.

Firefighters said on Twitter they pulled out three other survivors from rubble in the town of Manta.

The government raised the death toll of the 7.8-magnitude quake in the South American nation to 413.

We are counting 413 people dead at present, the countrys Security Ministry said on Monday, updating the count from 350 earlier in the day.

At that time authorities said more than 2,000 people were injured.

Foreign countries and organizations dispatched rescue teams to help search and medical units treat the injured, saying tens of thousands would need aid.

Rebuilding the destroyed areas will probably cost billions of dollars, President Rafael Correa said during a visit to Pedernales.

Along the Pacific coast, in the towns of Pedernales, Manta and Portoviejo, the stench of rotting bodies filled the tropical air among heaps of rubble and twisted metal. Rescuers with sniffer dogs roamed the wreckage.

My husband is under there, said Veronica Paladines, 24, tearing at a mound of debris that used to be a hotel in Manta, with tears flooding down her cheeks.

Her 25-year-old spouse, Javier Sangucho, the father of their two young children, worked at the property as a painter.

He had just gone down to rest a bit when it happened, his wife told AFP.

A similar scene unfolded in Pedernales, where Laura Taco stood in front of the Royal Hotel, where her sister-in-law and niece were buried by the earthquake.

We are desperate, but hopes are not lost, there are signs that beneath the rubble that people are alive, she told AFP.

- Rising death toll -

Correa said on Sunday that the death toll would certainly rise and probably in a considerable way in the hours ahead.

There are still lots of bodies in the rubble, he warned. These are extremely difficult times, the biggest tragedy in the last 67 years.

He was referring to an August 1949 earthquake near the central Ecuadoran city of Ambato that killed some 5,000 people.

In Pedernales, Mayor Gabriel Alcivar estimated there were hundreds of dead buried under the rubble of collapsed hotels.

Soldiers patrolled the beach town, and the Red Cross and the army opened a field hospital and a makeshift morgue at the local stadium.

Here in Pedernales survivors have been rescued among the rubble and we are not losing hope that more will be found, Ecuadors Vice President Jorge Glas, who visited the town, told AFP.

- Aid flows in -

Foreigners killed by the quake included seven Colombians, two Canadians and at least one US national, officials said.

Three Cuban doctors died in a collapsed building in Pedernales, Havanas Ministry of Public Health said Monday.

A Catholic missionary nun from Northern Ireland was killed along with three trainee nuns at a school, her religious congregation said.

Although Ecuador frequently suffers seismic shudders because of its position on the Pacific Rims Ring of Fire, the weekends quake -- which lasted a full minute -- was the worst in nearly 40 years.

Since 1900 Ecuador has been rocked by seven earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or higher in the region of Saturdays quake, the US Geological Survey said. One in March 1987 killed about 1,000 people.

Sympathy and offers of help flowed in from around the world.

The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said it was preparing to airlift supplies including hundreds of tents and kitchen sets as well as mosquito nets to protect people from the Zika virus.

It said it aimed to provide shelter and aid to 40,000 people, including Colombian refugees settled in the area.

The Spanish Red Cross estimated that up to 100,000 people would need assistance.

The World Bank said it had a credit line of $150 million ready to help with reconstruction. Correas government said it had access to $600 million in emergency credit overall.

But Correa said rebuilding will take months and years and will cost hundreds of millions, and probably billions, of dollars.
Ukraine and Russia have reached a deal to free jailed Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, President Petro Poroshenko said on Tuesday, suggesting that she will be swapped for two Russian servicemen jailed in Ukraine this week.

Savchenko, who was captured by Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine in 2014, was sentenced to 22 years in prison in Russia last month for her alleged role in the deaths of two Russian journalists.

Her capture and trial became a rallying point for Ukrainians at home and abroad.

I think we have agreed on a certain algorithm that would allow Nadezhdas release, Poroshenko said Tuesday, the day after his conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Speaking at a televised news conference in Kiev with the Danish Prime Minister, he mentioned Mondays conviction of two Russian officers in Kiev, saying that the verdict gives opportunities to launch the mechanism of a swap.

In a sign that the swap could be imminent, an attorney for one of the men told the Interfax news agency that the two Russians would not lodge an appeal against the verdict.

Professional pilot, Savchenko enlisted in a volunteer Ukrainian battalion in summer 2014 to fight the separatist rebels in the Luhansk region. She was captured by the rebels and re-surfaced in Russian custody on the other side of the border. Moscow claimed Savchenko escaped from the separatists and was caught in Russia, while the Ukrainian claims she has been abducted and smuggled into Russia.

Poroshenko would not say when he expected Savchenko to be returned but added that he told Putin that he was ready to send a presidential jet to Russia to take her home.

Putins spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters earlier on Tuesday that the two presidents talked about Savchenko as well as the two Russian officers convicted on Monday of waging a war of aggression in Ukraine.

A Kiev court on Monday sentenced Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev captured last year to 14 years in prison after finding them guilty of terrorism and waging war in eastern Ukraine. The two acknowledged being Russian officers but the Russian defense ministry claimed they had resigned from active duty.

Peskov would not respond to Poroshenkos statement when contacted by the Interfax news agency, but only said that her future was discussed during Mondays call.
A 60-year-old Indian-American Sikh physician and a well-known supporter of the Khalistan movement has been sentenced to nine years in prison for a USD 3-million (around Rs 20 crore) healthcare fraud scheme in the US in which he filed claims for procedures that were never performed.

Paramjit Singh Ajrawat was ordered to forfeit and pay restitution of USD 3 million in federal court in Greenbelt. The US attorneys office said in a news release that Paramjit and his wife, Sukhveen Kaur Ajrawat, owned and operated Washington Pain Management Center in Greenbelt.

In September 2015, a federal jury convicted Paramjit and his 57-year-old wife. His wife died on February 1, and the charges against her were dismissed.

During trial, evidence was presented that showed how the couple defrauded federal health benefit programmes, including Medicare and Medicaid. The defrauding efforts happened from January 2011 to May 2014.

They were convicted in September of numerous offences, including healthcare and wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and aggravated identity theft.

At the peak of the Khalistan movement, Paramjit was blacklisted by the Indian government. In May 2011, he along with 138 others, including Gurmit Singh Aulakh, president of the Council of Khalistan, were removed from the blacklist, which prevents their entry into India.
At least six persons, including an Indian-American woman, were killed in historic flash flooding here, submerging scores of subdivisions and several major interstate highways and forcing closure of schools.

Sunita Singh, 47, senior electrical engineer at Bechtel Oil & Gas, was found dead in her car. She was trying to get to work when she was trapped by the flood waters, an official said.

Sunita is survived by her husband Rajiv Singh and a 15-year-old son. Singh said his wife called him at around 6:50 am and said she was in trouble, but immediately thought help was on its way. That did not happen and she was later found dead in her car.

One of the victims was found in a submerged 18-wheeler cab on the N Beltway 8 frontage road near the Hardy Toll Road.

Two others were found in separate vehicles. In Waller County, a 56-year-old Royal ISD teacher was found inside a submerged vehicle off Adams Flat Road. More than 470 flights were cancelled at Bush Intercontinental and Hobby Airport in the morning hours.

An overnight storm dumped between 8 and 16 inches of water on the area. The heavy rainfall also closed local schools, knocked out power for more than 121,000 residents, cancelled flights and made many roadways impassable.

More than 1,200 high water rescues have been reported by Houston and Harris County officials. Officials in Harris County have declared a disaster area and estimate at least 1,000 homes have already been flooded.

More than half the watersheds in Harris County are experiencing significant flooding, with least one cresting above its estimated 500-year flood mark, a new all-time record.

The local National Weather Service (NWS) has warned residents not to travel unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order.

About 120,000 homes are without power, and school and transit systems are shut down across the region. Houston is in the midst of an unbelievable deluge, with already more rainfall in a single day than any hurricane to ever hit the hurricane-prone city. The flooding is historic, NWS said in a statement.

The City of Houston closed city offices, including municipal courts, and has told non-essential employees to stay home for the day.
A suicide bomber blew himself up at a government office in the northwestern city of Peshawar in Pakistan on Tuesday, injuring at least 10 people.

The suicide attacker detonated the explosive vest at the crowded Excise and Taxation Office in Mardan district of Khyber Pakthunkhwa, district police officer Faisal Shahzad said.

The bomber fired two shots before the explosion, Shahzad said.

Police and security forces rushed to the site after the explosion and cordoned off the area.

The injured have been admitted to nearby hospitals.
Pakistan Army chief Gen Raheel Sharif waded into the Panama Papers leaks controversy on Tuesday, stressing the need for across-the-board accountability so that corruption can be uprooted to ensure the countrys prosperity.

In his remarks to a gathering of army personnel in Kohat, Sharif said, Across-the-board accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity and prosperity of Pakistan.

Pakistans armed forces will fully support every meaningful effort in that direction, which would ensure a better future for our next generations.

The army chiefs remarks come at a time when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is under attack from the opposition after his two sons and a daughter were linked to the Panama Papers scandal.

In his pointed remarks, the army chief said the war against terrorism and extremism being fought with the backing of the country cannot bring enduring peace and stability unless the menace of corruption is uprooted.

Around 220 Pakistanis, including Nawaz Sharifs three children, have been named in the massive leak of documents from a Panama-based law firm. The prime minister has rejected any allegations of money laundering, saying his children have legitimate businesses abroad.

He has ordered the setting up of an inquiry commission to probe the issue.

Analysts said the Pakistan Army chiefs remarks will increase pressure on the prime minister. Already, the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party has said it will hold a protest outside the prime ministers house in the coming week.
Pakistan is cooperating closely with India in the investigation of the attack on Pathankot airbase and hopes that stalled bilateral talks will resume in the next few weeks, foreign policy chief Sartaj Aziz has said.

Aziz, the adviser on foreign affairs to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, told a select audience at the Royal Institute of International Affairs here on Monday evening that suspension of talks did not mean cancellation but temporary suspension.

We still hope that as we make progress on the Pathankot investigation, the dialogue can begin because terrorism-related issues are important, he said while delivering a lecture on the theme A Strategic Vision for Pakistans Foreign Policy.

Pakistans regional situation, he said, was further complicated by Indias attitude. We are not seeing a positive response from India. It is a difficult situation.

Responding to questions, he said: We are cooperating closely (on the Pathankot attack). Our team visited Pathankot and Delhi. We are now pursuing those investigations.

India has blamed the January 2 attack on Pathankot airbase on Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed and demanded action against the banned groups chief, Masood Azhar. Pakistan has said it needs more evidence to act against the perpetrators.

Aziz also brought up the arrest of an alleged Indian intelligence operative by Pakistani authorities. New Delhi has acknowledged the arrested man, Kulbhushan Jadhav, was a former naval officer but dismissed reports that he was involved in espionage.

Meanwhile, we have arrested an Indian intelligence operative in Balochistan who was trying to encourage insurgency there. But we still want to resume our composite and comprehensive dialogue, and terrorism is one part of that dialogue, he said.

Hoping the global community will encourage India to resume dialogue because without that we cannot deal with the problems that we all face, Aziz rejected claims that Pakistan is apologetic about the arrest of Jadhav.

We are not apologetic, but we dont use unparliamentary language. Once investigations are completed, the network that is operating, has been operating, we will properly document it and present it to India and globally, Aziz told a questioner.

On RAWs activities, in last September we exchanged some dossiers with the UN and US. Now of course we have evidence. The composite and comprehensive dialogue has eight segments, one of them is extremism and terrorism, so obviously it is better if we exchange this kind of information across the table rather than through the media, he said.

Reiterating Pakistans stance of Jammu and Kashmir being the core issue in bilateral ties, Aziz said no dialogue can start without talks on its future. He said a number of formulae had been discussed in the past, but he rejected the idea that the Line of Control be made the border between the two countries.

Our feeling is that once the dialogue begins, you put on the table all options that have been discussed, you can always find some common groundyou may not have a solution, but can go towards a solutionOf course, the LoC cannot be treated as an international border because the Kashmirirs want the right of self-determination, he said.

Now the ground situation in Kashmir is becoming much more volatile because of the sentiment among Kashmir population to renew their cause for self-determination.

According to Aziz, Pakistan has a better record than India on treating minorities. He alleged Muslims were targeted and discriminated against on a very large scale in India.

During the lecture, Aziz outlined four pillars of Pakistans foreign policy: security, economic revival, a peaceful neighbourhood and converting the countrys geo-strategic location from a liability to an asset.

The first priority is our own security. This looks very obvious. But the fact is that by getting involved in other countries wars and affairs, we have jeopardised our own security. So the new policy is the policy of non-interference. We will not fight other peoples wars and we will not involve ourselves in any issue that does not directly affect us, he said.

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Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif boarded a flight from Britain to Pakistan on Tuesday, quashing rumours that he wouldnt return home after members of his family were linked to the leaks in the Panama Papers.

Sharif travelled to London last Wednesday for a medical check-up amid rumours he was leaving Pakistan following the leaks of the Mossack Fonseca documents, which showed his two sons and a daughter owned offshore assets.

He told reporters in London before his departure that he was feeling much better after doctors gave him a clean bill of health. Sharif added, With your prayers I hope (my health) will remain well. I am going back to my country right now where I will once again start working for the revival of its economy.

Sharif accused Pakistan-Tehreek-e-Insaf chief Imran Khan of confusing the people with his plans for a sit-in outside Sharifs London home to protest over the Panama Papers. I have done nothing illegal and he is trying to deceive the public, he said.

Pakistan, he said, needs peace and stability for its economic revival and the nation has rejected negative politics. A large number of Pakistanis want peace and stability in the country instead of the politics of sit-ins, he said.

Sharif said a commission will soon be formed to probe the Panama Papers. Interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has already disclosed the names of the people we have contacted to form the commission and the Supreme Court has also passed remarks on the issue, he added.

Opposition parties have severely criticised Sharifs decision to visit London at a time when demands were being made for his resignation following the leaks.

About 220 Pakistanis, including Sharifs three children, have been named in the massive leak of documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The expose includes 143 Pakistani politicians, some serving and retired judges, several businessmen and a media baron. The leaks sparked calls for an independent probe against those with offshore assets.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Barack Obama agreed during a phone call on Monday to strengthen a Syria ceasefire brokered by their two nations, the Kremlin said.

The leaders discussed in detail the situation in Syria, confirming in particular their intention to facilitate the strengthening of a Russian-US initiated ceasefire in this country as well as access for humanitarian aid, the Kremlin said in a statement.

Putin also stressed the need for moderate rebels to distance themselves from Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front jihadists and also urged the closure of the border between Syria and Turkey where supplies of arms for extremists are filtering across, the Kremlin said.

A landmark partial ceasefire, which was negotiated by the United States and Russia and took effect on February 27, had dramatically curtailed violence across much of Syria and raised hopes that a lasting deal could be struck in Geneva to end the bloodshed.

But fighting has surged around second city Aleppo in the last week, prompting tens of thousands of people to flee, leading the opposition to question President Bashar al-Assads commitment to a political solution to a conflict that has displaced half of the population and killed more than 270,000 people.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that the phone call provided an opportunity for the president to, once again, make the case to President Putin that he should use his influence with the Assad regime to live up to the commitments that theyve made in the context of the cessation of hostilities.

Unfortunately, weve seen that the cessation of hostilities continues to be fragile and increasingly threatened due to continued violations by the regime, he added.

Syrias opposition has postponed its formal participation in peace talks in protest over escalating violence, but will remain in Geneva and may continue informal discussions with mediators, the UN envoy said Monday.

The Kremlin said both Putin and Obama had stressed the significance of the Geneva talks and the two also agreed that the two countries security services and defence ministries would ramp up cooperation over Syria.

With this end in view additional measures on how to quickly react to existing ceasefire violations will be worked out, the Kremlin added.

Obama also thanked Putin for Russias help in securing the release of a US national, Kevin Dawes, who had been held in Syria, the Kremlin said.

The 33-year-old man -- identified by the FBI as a freelance photographer -- had been abducted in 2012 after crossing the border from Turkey.

Moscow said the Assad regime had detained him for entering Syria illegally.
The condition of a 60-year-old Sikh priest, who was seriously injured in an explosion at a gurdwara in the German city of Essen has improved and he is now out of danger, police said on Tuesday.

The priest was among three persons who were hurt when an explosive device went off in the entrance hall of the Gurdwara Nanaksar at the end of a wedding ceremony on April 16.

Most of the wedding guests had left the gurdwara to attend a reception in a nearby hall, but several persons were still inside the temple when the device exploded.

The priest has been undergoing treatment at a hospital in Essen where he was admitted soon after the explosion.

The injuries of two other men were not so serious and they could attend the wedding reception after receiving treatment from emergency medical teams arrived at the gurdwara, a police spokesman said.

He said the explosion was certainly an attack, but it was too early to say what kind of explosive device was used or how it was detonated as the forensic analysis and other investigations were continuing.

So far there were no indications of any terrorist link, but investigations were being conducted in all directions, police said.

Meanwhile, police have received new information that a hooded man dressed in black, who is suspected of throwing the explosive device into the gurdwara, was seen by some people as he ran away from the temple without his head dress.

According to eyewitnesses, he has the appearance of a person from the Mediterranean region or North Africa and the investigators are now searching for him, the spokesman said. The spokesman said he could not confirm some media reports that the head dress of the man was recovered by police and it is being subjected to DNA analysis.
Syrias fragile peace talks appeared doomed on Tuesday after air strikes killed around 40 people in a crowded vegetable market in rebel territory, with the opposition saying a truce was finished and it would keep away from negotiations indefinitely.

France described the bloodshed as another massacre. A monitoring group said it believed the strike on the market in Maarat al-Numan in Idlib province was the deadliest single attack since a partial ceasefire took effect on February 27.

A rescue worker said warplanes had simultaneously struck crowded markets in two towns in Idlib killing at least 38 people in Maarat al-Numan and 10 others in nearby Kafr Nubl.

We have more than 20 cars that have been moving dead and injured to hospitals in the area, said Ahmad Sheikho, a member of the civil defence corps, a rescue service operating in opposition-held territory.

The air strike, accompanied by intense fighting in other areas, appears to leave the fragile six-week-old ceasefire in tatters. The truce was brokered by the United States and Russia to pave way for the first peace talks attended by the warring factions since fighting began five years ago.

Those talks, taking place under UN auspices in Geneva, also appear to have collapsed this week. The opposition says it has called a pause to negotiations, although it is reluctant to accept blame for the collapse by walking out altogether.

It was not immediately clear whose aircraft were responsible for the strikes. Both Syrias own air force and that of its Russian allies have been operating despite the truce.

Damascus and Moscow say they are only attacking territory held by Islamist fighters who are not covered by the ceasefire, but opposition groups dismiss this, saying the government and its Russian allies use the Islamists to justify wider attacks.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which monitors the conflict through a network of sources on the ground, said 37 people were killed in Maarat al-Numan and seven in Kafr Nubl. Many of the injured were in a serious condition and the death toll was expected to rise, it said.

Asked if it was the deadliest attack recorded since the ceasefire began, the Observatorys head Rami Abdulrahman said: I believe so.

Another massacre

We learned today there had been another massacre this morning, French envoy Franck Gellet said in Geneva. The Syrian military could not immediately be reached for comment, and state news agency SANA made no mention of air strikes in Idlib.

As fighting raged and air strikes on rebel-held areas intensified, the opposition urged foreign states to supply them with the means to defend themselves, a thinly veiled reference to the anti-aircraft weapons long sought by insurgents.

U.S. President Barack Obama told Russias Vladimir Putin in a phone call on Monday that Syria was starting to fray more rapidly. The two Cold War era super-powers are joint sponsors of the peace process and ceasefire, after intensifying diplomacy following Russias decision last year to join the war, an intervention that tipped momentum Assads way.

The Geneva talks aim to end a war that has killed more than 250,000 people, created the worlds worst refugee crisis, allowed for the rise of the Islamic State group and drawn in regional and major powers.

Damascus blames the rebels for breaking the cessation of hostilities. Chief Syrian government negotiator Bashar Jaafari said his team was pushing for an expanded government as a solution to the war, an idea rejected by the armed opposition which has fought for five years to oust Assad. With fighting reported across much of northwest Syria on Tuesday, both sides were obdurate.
A 26-year-old American woman will file a lawsuit against a Catholic Indian priest and his church in India for allegedly sexually abusing her during his posting in the US between 2004 and 2005.

The move comes in protest against the recent Vatican decision which announced Diocese of Ootacamund located in Mylapore is reinstating Joseph Jeyapaul to ministry.

Minnesota attorney Jeff Anderson will file suit on behalf of the victim in federal court that claims the Diocese of Ootacamund endangered children by reinstating Jeyapaul.

Jeyapaul who served as a priest in Crookston township of Minnesota in 2004 and 2005 was arrested in India in 2012 and extradited to the US on charges of sexually abusing two girls in a congregation.

He was later deported to India last year, after serving his sentence of one year and one day.

In a statement, advocacy group SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) announced that one of the sexual abuse survivors would sue the priest and the diocese.

It may be the most irresponsible Vatican move weve ever seen: Catholic officials in Rome have lifted the suspension of a recently convicted predator priest. We are stunned and saddened by such blatant recklessness and callousness, Barbara Dorris of St Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, said in a statement on Tuesday.

A letter sent to Anderson and Roseau County Attorney Lisa Hanson and signed by over 500 Jeyapaul supporters in India will also be released as evidence of the public danger (nuisance) permitted by Indian Bishop and Vatican, it said.

Read | Vatican is cooperating with US officials on Indian priest case

On January 16, 2016, with the permission of Pope Francis, Bishop Amalraj lifted the suspension of Father Joseph Jeyapaul, the firm said, adding that in 2015, after his extradition from India, Jeyapaul plead guilty to criminal sexual conduct involving the sexual abuse of a minor girl while he worked in the Diocese of Crookston in 2005.

Catholic officials refuse to keep this admitted sex offender away from kids, so our only hope of stopping him is to get him charged and convicted again, Dorris said.

Over the weekend, Barbara and the victim were seen distributing leaflets outside the church in Crookston to find another sex abuse survivor.

Our goal is to find just one more victim who might be able to file criminal charges and get this proven predator behind bars, the victim told local Grand Forks Herald.

The lawsuit would charge Catholic officials with creating public nuisances by hiding and helping predator priests.

It was the first victims courage that brought forward a second victim of Fr Jeyapaul. It was the second victims courage that prodded Fr Jeyapaul to plead guilty. And we hope the courage of a third victim will get Fr Jeyapaul extradited, convicted and jailed again, so that no more innocent lives are shattered, SNAP said.

Until hes charged and convicted again, Jeyapaul should be put in a remote, secure, independently-run treatment center far from families who have learned to trust him, it said.

Also read | No Spotlight in India: Sex abuse in Catholic Church a blind spot?
Texas police are on the hunt for a man seen in a video wearing tactical clothing inside of the Creekside Church in Midlothian who is believed to be connected to a woman who was found dead there Monday morning.

Local authorities say the woman, 45-year-old Terri "Missy" Bevers, arrived at the church shortly after 4 a.m. to prepare for a boot camp class, called "Camp Gladiatior" that she teaches. Normally classes are held outdoors, but due to the storm that affected the area Monday morning, the class was forced to have the class inside.

Her students soon arrived to class about 5 a.m., but instead of finding Bevers, who is also a mother of three, ready for their morning classes, they found her unresponsive, prompting them to call 911. EMS workers arrived minutes later and noticed broken glass and other indications that a struggle had taken place.

Police arrives soon after, searched the building and determined there were visible signs of forced entry. No one else was found in the building but a review of a surveillance video recorded within the building showed that a man entered the building shortly before Bevers did.

During a press conference Monday afternoon, Police Chief Carl Smith said the man was wearing what looked like a tactical helmet, gloves and a heavy vest with "POLICE" written on it, noting that the man was essentially "designed to look like a police officer."

The cameras did not record any interaction between Bevers and the man and the circumstances of the incident have led to several theories for the motive behind it. On one hand, police say they believe its possible Bevers interrupted a burglary attempt, but are still leaving other scenarios "on the table."

"It's just an odd, random situation that they would they would actually happen to come into a building that was being burglarized on a Monday morning," Smith said. "But all scenarios are on the table right now."

On the other hand, in the eyes of former police officer Pete Schulte, there is some evidence that the murder was planned. Noting that Bevers advertised the class date, time and location online, he stated there has been no indication that anything was ever stolen during the alleged burglary.

"This is not your routine burglary," he said. I don't want to say anything's routine but, if somebody's going to try to go burglarize a business, they're going to get in and get out and try to grab as much stuff as they can and then leave."

Regardless of motive, the community has taken Bevers' death quite hard, not just because her murder was the first in Midlothian in the past seven years, but also because she was truly a beloved member of the community. To emphasize this, several people gathered at the Midlothian Conference Center for a private candlelight vigil in Bever's memory.

"She was a loving mother of three. She loved her husband very much," said Chad Tucker, Bevers' brother in-law. "She was dedicated to taking care of herself, taking care of other people and being a good mother."

Oak Farms Dairy announced it is offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to the suspect's arrest and indictment. Anyone with any leads is encouraged to call the Midlothian Police Department at 972-775-3333.

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It appears that the Indian government conceded Monday that the historic Koh-i-Noor diamond adorning a British royal crown wasn't stolen as was once alleged, but was given to the nation as a gift.

The development comes after India's solicitor general, Ranjit Kumar, told the country's supreme court during a public interest filing seeking the gem's return that the jewel was neither stolen or forcibly taken away, as many in India have argued in the past.

Currently, the Koh-i-Noor, or "mountain of light," is part of the purple-velvet Queen Mother's Crown in the Tower of London. But to understand the controversy behind the entire affair, we need to go over a little bit of its alleged history.

The gem's origins is believed to date back to the 1300s when it was mined in what is now the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It passed through the hands of various sultans, warlords and Mughal emperors before winding up in the hands of a Sikh warrior of Punjab by the name of Maharajah Ranjit Singh.

Historians say Singh meant to have the diamond go to a Hindu temple upon his death, but instead the British secured it in the Treaty of Lahore and his heir presented it to Queen Victoria in 1850.

However, this is where the controversy begins. Britain believes the diamond is rightfully theirs, while many in India believe Britain obtained it through duplicitous means, reportedly going as far as to hiss at the Mother's Crown where the diamond resides whenever they pass by during trips to London.

At the very least, Kumar said the diamond was given to Britain fair and square and, thus, India has no right to lay claim over it.

"It was given voluntarily by Ranjit Singh to the British as compensation for help in the Sikh Wars. The Koh-i-Noor is not a stolen object," he said before the court Monday.

On the other hand, Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, said in the past that it should be returned as "atonement for the colonial past." He reiterated that point when he spoke during an interview Monday.

"It's a moral issue," he said. "This was our heritage, which was stolen, which was taken away forcefully. Every country, every culture has aspirations to regain what they have lost in history. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't have these kinds of emotions."

The diamond doesn't just have historical value to India, but a bit of mystique behind it as well. Legend says that the diamond is quite sexist, with only a woman or a god being permitted to wear it. If a man dares to wear it, he will be cursed due to its "long and bloody history."

Interestingly, India isn't the only country that wants the diamond for themselves. Groups and politicians from Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan have also tried to lay claim to the diamond in recent years. However, successive British prime ministers have refused to return it. David Cameron is the most recent to do so, saying it would set an "unworkable precedent" that would leave the British Museum empty.

"If you say yes to one, you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty," he told Indian media during a trip to the country in 2010.

The Koh-i-Noor diamond was last worn by the late Queen Mother and was displayed on top of her crown when her coffin lay in state after her death in 2002.

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The actions of Ohio teenager Marina Lonina, who was indicted after filming and broadcasting the rape of her 17-year-old friend through popular live-streaming app Periscope, has shocked America. In a recent statement, however, Sam Shamansky, Lonina's attorney, alleged that the 18-year-old only broadcast the sexual assault as evidence.

Lonina, together with 29-year-old Raymond Gates, who sexually assaulted the 17-year-old victim, are facing multiple charges including rape, kidnapping, sexual battery and pandering sexual matter involving a minor. Both of the accused have pleaded not guilty.

Unsurprisingly, the prosecution has flatly dismissed Shamansky's allegations. Despite this, Shamansky said the teen's actions were understandable, considering she is a really active user of the popular live-streaming app.

"She's in the habit of filming everything with this app called Periscope," Shamansky said.

The lawyer further alleged that Lonina's actions in the app, while the rape was being committed, showed that she was panicking and really trying to aid her friend.

"She does everything possible to contain the situation, even to the point of asking while it's being filmed to these Periscope followers, 'What should I do now? What should I do now?'" the lawyer added.

However, the fact remains that despite the disturbing event taking place and despite her friend being in a compromising situation, Lonina did not stop filming and broadcasting the event. According to police reports, the video that Lonina broadcast included parts where the minor clearly was in distress as Gates assaulted her.

There were even parts where the teenager was allegedly screaming "No, it hurts so much," "Stop" and "No" multiple times. Despite these words, however, Lonina still kept filming.

According to Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien, what seemed to motivate Lonina to continue filming the assault was the reaction of the Periscope community to the livestream. As the rape happened, the video started garnering "likes" from users, which, according to the lawyer, pushed his client to continue filming the assault.

"She got, I guess, taken up with all the 'likes' that her livestream was getting and, therefore, continued to do it, and did nothing to aid the victim," he said.

A judge has set Lonina's bond at $125,000, while Gates, the man who actually raped the teen, was set a bond of $300,000.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Pretty soon, Utah will probably be dealing with its biggest health crisis yet. Thankfully, this crisis does not involve an outbreak that results in physical sickness and injury. Rather, this new health crisis involves something very, very common among adults: pornography.

Today, Gov. Gary Herbert is expected to sign two pieces of legislation that effectively brands pornography as the state's most recent health crisis. The legislation is aimed at combating what the state said is something that fosters a "sexually toxic environment."

The legislation was the brainchild of Sen. Todd Weiler, who believed that porn quite simply "normalizes violence and abuse of women and children, and that it equates violence towards women and children with sex and pain with pleasure, which increases the demand for sex trafficking, prostitution, child sexual abuse images and child pornography."

Indeed, Weiler's proposal was embraced wholeheartedly by the state senate. In February, the resolution was passed unanimously. According to Weiler, however, the legislation does not in any way criminalize porn. Rather, it is aimed at encouraging people to treat pornography as a scientific health hazard, a lot like tobacco.

"My goal in passing this resolution is to start a national movement to do the same thing with pornography, not to ban it, but to protect our children from it," Weiler said. "Within a few clicks, they can see some of the most vile and disgusting images that the mind can imagine. For us to pretend that this has no impact on our values and on our society and culture and the brain development of our adolescents is very naive."

The legislation has gotten the support of several prominent groups in the state as well, among them being the Utah Coalition Against Pornography, a group backed by the Mormon Church. In a statement last month, Elder Jeffrey Holland embraced the legislation.

"If this moral plague could catch our imagination the way a medical epidemic does, we would be calling out every available member of the health care industry," he said.

Despite priding itself as one of America's most wholesome states, Utah has actually earned a pretty ironic moniker as a state that consumes a lot of pornography. In a 2009 study conducted by Harvard University, researchers concluded that Utah's religious residents ranked as one of America's top consumers of online pornography.

After today, it looks like a lot of people in Utah will indeed be considered very, very ill.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Southern Ireland Holidays

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Explore the South of Ireland from the comfort of a private holiday cottage in Southern Ireland. Get out and enjoy the charming towns and villages of Cork, Kerry, and Wexford.

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The south of Ireland is a beautiful part of the Emerald Isle.

There is a range of stunning countryside ideal for walking, cycling, kayaking and general exploring.

Or why not try and spot dolphins from the charming town of Dingle?

There is something for everyone when visiting the south of Ireland. The coastal path is a fantastic walking area for walking groups and provides the ideal getaway for a family holiday.

Or why not check out the city locations? Take a trip to Blarney Castle in County Cork or head across to the Waterford Cathedral in County Waterford.

The South of Ireland offers some of the most beautiful landscapes in Ireland. By following the ring of Kerry, you will be able to experience this first-hand.

Places to Visit on your Southern Ireland Holiday

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The holiday cottages in southern Ireland come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

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Get out and explore the rolling green hills and the dramatic southern coastline.

Find your perfect holiday cottage in southern Ireland today. Choose from the collection of southern Irish holiday cottages and book your holiday home online with Hogans.
T he thing is, I knew right from the start that it was a bad idea to accept two sharers in a two-bedroom flat, so why did I say yes? Id advertised the flat as a single unit and two friends put an offer on it straight away, but they didnt mention until I presented them with the tenancy agreement that they wanted two individual contracts, one for each room.

I wasnt keen because I was concerned that if one tenant left before the end of the term but the other stayed, Id be responsible for filling the empty room, which is often harder than letting a whole property.

However, as both girls insisted they wanted to stay for a full 12 months, and they seemed really nice, I agreed, but I explained that if one of them did decide to leave before the end of the term, they would both have to go so that I could re-let the property as a single unit. I made it clear I wasnt going to take responsibility for finding either one of them a new flatmate.

Sure, they said, thats all good.

Five months later one of girls contacted me to say she was moving out due to ill-health. She said she needed to return to her home country within a few weeks for medical treatment. Though she could have used the break clause in the contract to give me notice, she refused to do so because she was aware that this would prompt me to give her flatmate notice, too. Instead, she asked to transfer the remainder of her tenancy to someone else.

I wasnt opposed to this idea in principle, but I warned her that it was financially risky for her. What if she didnt find someone to take over her contract? What if she found someone but they failed a credit check, or changed their mind at the last minute? Then she would have to cover the rent herself.

I urged her to give me two months notice instead, after which she could leave the property with no further financial obligations. She refused in order to protect her flatmate.

I wont see her kicked out, she said, turning all drama-queenie on me. Ill do anything to stop her becoming homeless.

I pointed out this was highly unlikely, given that her flatmate would have two months to find somewhere else to live. She had a solid job with a decent salary - I didnt think she would have much difficulty finding a new place.

However, the tenant was adamant she would find someone to take over her tenancy and she insisted that if she didnt, she was prepared to pay the rent for her room herself for the rest of the year.

Now she has returned home and  as I feared  she didnt succeed in finding anyone to take over her tenancy, so she has to pay rent for six months on a room she isnt using.

Actually, so far, she has been true to her word and paid for next month, but I wonder how long she will keep up these payments. Now that there is an ocean between this girl and her flatmate, I am worried she might forget her promise  and her rent will stop arriving.

At the same time, I am not 100 per cent comfortable with taking money from someone who is no longer living in my property. It doesnt feel right to me, so I have toyed with the idea of giving both girls notice to bring the matter to a swift conclusion. However, as neither of them has done anything yet to justify me ending their tenancies, I suppose I will just have to wait and see what happens.
In the three days you spend with us, you will experience an enhanced AHIC like never before! It will be here, away from the day to day routines, where you will have the opportunity to focus on insights shared by world-class speakers, creating relationships and discovering opportunities which will drive your business forward.

This event is organized by AHIC

For more information please contact Matthew Weihs

+44 (0)1372 466 209
BELGRADE, Serbia -- Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. (NYSE:HOT) today announced the signing of The St. Regis Belgrade and The Residences at The St. Regis Belgrade, a development project slated to open in 2019. Owned by Belgrade Waterfront LLC, the 125-room hotel will additionally feature 220 St. Regis branded residences in Kula Belgrade, the country's highest mixed-use tower that will form the centerpiece of the new Belgrade Waterfront development.

Rendering of Kula Belgrade building which will house The St. Regis Belgrade and The Residences at The St. Regis Belgrade (Photo: Business Wire)

"We are delighted to strengthen our relationship with Belgrade Waterfront LLC and to introduce the St. Regis brand and its bespoke hospitality to Serbia," said Michael Wale, President, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Europe, Africa and Middle East. "Belgrade is fast emerging as a popular tourist destination in Europe and we are proud to be part of this new, exciting landmark development."

The St. Regis Belgrade will occupy the first nine floors of Kula Belgrade and will offer 125 elegant rooms and suites looking out to the city or River Sava. The hotel will feature distinct dining experiences including a destination restaurant at the top of the tower with panoramic views, an all-day dining venue and the St. Regis Bar, inspired by the iconic King Cole Bar at The St. Regis New York. Luxury leisure facilities will include a spa, pool, gymnasium, and unrivalled event and meeting space for special celebrations.

Guests at The St. Regis Belgrade will get to experience renowned hallmarks of the St. Regis brand, including St. Regis Butler Service which provides anticipatory service and customizes each stay according to personal tastes and preferences.

"The cooperation between Belgrade Waterfront and Starwood with The St. Regis Belgrade is a sign of prosperity for Serbia and its potential as a tourist destination. Setting the tone for Belgrade Waterfront, the St. Regis brand is renowned for providing unmatched services for its guests," saidNikola Nedeljkovic, General Manager, Belgrade Waterfront. "Situated at a prime location in Kula Belgrade, the highest tower in the development, The St. Regis Belgrade will offer sweeping city and river views from the observation deck at the top of the tower."

More than 550 feet tall and overlooking the Sava River and Kalemegdan Fortress, Kula Belgrade (Belgrade Tower in English) will set an unprecedented architectural benchmark for property developers in the region. Designed by internationally acclaimed design firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Global,Kula Belgrade will feature an observation deck at the top of the tower which will be the city's only public observatory at this height.

The landmark building will feature 220 luxurious St. Regis branded residences ranging from 750 to 1700 square feet spread across the 14th and 39thfloors. Residents will enjoy access to the services and amenities at The St. Regis Belgrade.

"This signing fuels Starwood's strong growth momentum in Europe, where we continue to see a demand for high-end hotel accommodations," said Karl Bieberach, Vice President, Development, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Europe, Africa and Middle East. "We are particularly interested in expanding our luxury portfolio and The St. Regis Belgrade will be a terrific addition to our strong and growing footprint in the region."

Situated along the Sava River, Belgrade Waterfront will feature commercial hubs, hotels, educational institutions, healthcare amenities, a 1.1 mile long public waterfront and parks featuring leisure attractions. The project will also feature aCultural District and Historic Plaza, further making the city a cultural and artistic destination. The master planned community will also feature W Belgrade and The Residences at W Belgrade which are scheduled to open in 2019.

For more information, visit www.stregis.com and www.belgradewaterfront.com.

About Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc.

Starwood Hotels &

Resorts Worldwide, Inc. is one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world with more than 1,300 properties in some 100 countries and approximately 188,000 employees at its owned and managed properties. Starwood is a fully integrated owner, operator and franchisor of hotels, resorts and residences under the renowned brands: St. Regis, The Luxury Collection, W, Westin, Le Meridien, Sheraton,Tribute Portfolio, Four Points by Sheraton, Aloft, and Element, along with an expanded partnership withDesign Hotels. The company also boasts one of the industrys leading loyalty programs, Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG). Visit www.starwoodhotels.com for more information and stay connected @starwoodbuzz on Twitterand Instagram and facebook.com/Starwood.

Simon Neggers

Starwood Hotels

212-380-4029

Starwood
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The ubiquity of the Crying Jordan meme has been well-documented, and it doesnt seem to be phasing out of internet vernacular anytime soon. If anything, its only getting bigger, and this Air Jordan custom sneaker is proof. The Crying Jordan meme has transcended from digital to IRL.

The custom sneakers were created by CryingKicks, a two friends in the ad industry. They dont make any major changes to the upper, which uses the Air Jordan Playoff 8 as the base. Instead, they focus their attention on the tongue and sole, which see the Jumpan logo replaced with a Crying Jordan patch. The insoles are a super nice touch, and these shoes will forever go down as the Crying Jordan 8s.

At this rate, Jordan Brand might have to acknowledge that the Crying Jordan face is almost as recognizable as the iconic Jumpman itself. Our only question is, if theres only one pair of customs which of the creators gets to wear them?

Crying-Jordan-8
Both acts are racing certs this summer

The Bulmers Live At Leopardstown line-up has just got even tastier with The Academic (June 16) and Hermitage Green (July 14) joining Aslan, Nathan Carter, Jack L, Booka Brass Band, The Strypes and The Boomtown Rats in going to the races.

The former are one of the countrys fastest rising young bands, and the latter bona fide Irish stars having got to number three here with their Save Your Soul album.

Leopardstown is only 20 minutes from Dublin City Centre on the Luas Green line, with dedicated shuttle buses running from the Sandyford stop.
The indestructible punk band are doing their legendary thing in August

Legendary punk outfit The Damned are back in Dublin on August 26 for a show in The Academy, tickets for which are 25 and go on sale on Friday.

The first UK punk band to release a single  New Rose dropped five weeks before the Sex Pistols Anarchy In The UK  their ranks still include founder members Dave Vanian and Captain Sensible.

Their crazy life and times were chronicled last year by Dont You Wish That We Were Dead, a superb doc from Lemmy: The Movie director Wes Orshoski.
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United Continental Holdings is nearing an agreement with activist investors that would include replacing Chairman Henry Meyer III as part of a broader board overhaul, people familiar with the talks said Monday.

Former Continental Airlines CEO Gordon Bethune is no longer in the running for a board position, the people said.

Meyer's departure would clear the way for a successor with deep airline experience, one of the changes sought by Altimeter Capital Management and PAR Capital Management, which combined control 7.2 percent of the airline's stock. The 66-year-old retired banker has served as United's non-executive chairman since the September ouster of former CEO Jeff Smisek, but drew criticism for communication lapses when Smisek's successor, Oscar Munoz, fell gravely ill.

The funds are set to gain representation on United's board, but not the six seats they had requested, the people said. Two or three of the investors' candidates are under consideration for director posts, but not Bethune, they said.

Contenders to succeed Meyer include two directors who joined the United board a day before the proxy fight became public: former Air Canada CEO Robert Milton and James Whitehurst, a former chief operating officer at Delta Air Lines, three of the people said.

Milton is poised to emerge as the winner because of his stint heading the Canadian carrier and its holding company, two of the people said.

Reached by phone Monday, Bethune said he didn't know specifics but felt the reported lineup would help the United board by adding airline experience at the helm.

Bethune said he was not upset about no longer being under consideration. He said he agreed to be involved in the proxy fight only to help the airline's employees and to get more airline-specific experience on the board.

"I like my time off," he said.

The company has been working with the investors to end a boardroom battle that threatened to overshadow Munoz's efforts to turn around United, whose stock and operational performance have largely lagged peers since it acquired Houston-based Continental Airlines in 2010. The parties could have an agreement in hand by the time United reports earnings on Wednesday, one of the people said.

The negotiations are ongoing, and a final agreement hasn't been reached, the people said.

United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy and a representative for Par and Altimeter both declined to comment.

Meyer didn't respond to a request for comment.

The boardroom tussle broke into public view March 8, when the funds proposed an insurgent slate that included Bethune, who revived Continental in the 1990s, former Orbitz Worldwide CEO Barney Harford and Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital.

The activist investors said in a letter that they supported Munoz and weren't seeking to control the board. Rather, they believe the airline would be better served by naming either Bethune, Milton or Whitehurst as chairman.

Employees have rallied in support of Munoz, who took over from Smisek in September after leaving railroad CSX Corp. Munoz was sidelined with a heart attack about a month later and subsequently received a heart transplant.

Pilots and flight attendants picketed Par and Altimeter headquarters in Boston on April 6, complaining that the board fight was creating unnecessary distractions.

During his recovery, Munoz made appearances around the company and pushed for labor peace as a step to revitalizing United's culture and improving service.

The approach has been "night and day" from the divisive tactics favored by previous management teams, said Craig Symons, president of the union that represents United's flight dispatchers.

"It is finally a decent place to work," he said by phone. "I haven't seen it this optimistic in a long time."

Andrea Rumbaugh contributed to this report.
BURBANK, Calif. - An executive from virtual reality company Oculus says consumers shouldn't be concerned about an invasion of their privacy when using the Oculus Rift.

Jason Rubin, Oculus' head of worldwide studios, is downplaying questions raised about the VR system's privacy policy.
"Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" wraps up its first season on Monday night, but only around a million people will notice -- at least, that's what you might gather from the Nielsen ratings. Despite the average total audience numbers, however, the CW has already picked up the musical comedy for a second season.

Surprised? As it turns out, "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," starring co-creator Rachel Bloom as a depressed lawyer who impulsively moves across the country to be closer to her former boyfriend from camp, is the perfect low-rated show to survive in the truly insane time of "peak TV." Even with 1,400 scripted series on air at the moment, this type of show can still sustain in an era of fierce competition. Here's how it's done:

1) Exist on a very patient network.

If any channel knows the value of word of mouth over numbers, it's the CW. Catering to a younger crowd, the network realizes its target audience is likely to hear about the show months later from a friend or a Facebook link, and then binge-watch the whole thing online or on-demand. As a result, CW executives tend to give promising freshmen shows time to prove themselves.

2) Have potential to go viral.

In the "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" universe, Rebecca Bunch (Bloom) regularly sees the world through songs as she starts a new job in West Covina, California, and winds up in a love triangle with her ex-boyfriend Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III) and his snarky friend Greg (Santino Fontana). Each episode has at least two hilarious musical numbers; and thanks to the fact that they tackle relatable indignities of modern dating and social anxiety, the tunes are primed to go viral.

Some of the songs in the first season included: "The Sexy Getting Ready Song," about the horrifying beauty regiments women go through while getting ready for a date; "Settle For Me," begging someone to give up their first choice love interest; "Group Hang," the enemy of romance everywhere; and "I Gave You a UTI," which is, well, self-explanatory.

3) Be awards-bait.

With sharp writing and clever production, "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" received lots of great reviews -- and it got a bigger boost when Golden Globe voters decided to love the show, too. At the awards in January, Bloom won over Julia Louis-Dreyfus ("Veep") and Jamie Lee Curtis ("Scream Queens") for best actress in a TV musical or comedy. Bloom's truly shocked, emotional speech was one of the highlights of the night and put the show on viewers' radar.

That kind of awards prestige is quite valuable to the CW, which rarely gets recognized on the mainstream trophy circuit. Just ask Gina Rodriguez of CW's "Jane the Virgin." Rodriguez won the same best actress prize in 2015 and just saw her low-rated show renewed for a third season. If there's any series that could emulate the same path to multiple seasons without a ton of viewers, "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" would be a safe bet.




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NEW YORK - The premise of "The Night Manager" is simple. Or might seem so.

Jonathan Pine, a former soldier now in a different kind of service as night manager of a luxury hotel, is drawn into a risky mission to bring down international arms dealer Richard Roper by posing as a fellow merchant of evil.

But this six-part miniseries (premiering on AMC Tuesday at 9 p.m.) is based on the John le Carre spy thriller of the same name, which should strongly suggest this is no simple cloak-and-dagger affair.

Somehow, "The Night Manager" manages to be as menacing and methodical as any film noir, yet at the same time teem with color, sweep and action cloaked in stillness.

Meanwhile, its brilliant co-stars, Hugh Laurie (who plays Roper) and Tom Hiddleston (the intrepid Pine) - well, they speak for themselves. Literally.

The series, Hiddleston explained in a recent interview with the two stars, "deals with the more fascinating aspects of the psyche and identity and to what extent we tell lies to ourselves to justify who we are."

"I think that sums everything up," said Laurie, pretending to take his leave. "Our work is done."

More Information 'The Night Manager' When: 9 p.m. Tuesdays Network: AMC See More Collapse

Not quite.

Laurie said he had yearned to appear in a movie version - even attempting to option the novel himself - ever since its 1993 publication.

But the book seemed to resist being shoehorned into a feature-length film.

"There is a pace and a density to the interior lives of the characters that makes it hard to do justice to (in a movie)," said Laurie. "Le Carre is writing thoughts rather than deeds. Everything is oblique and concealed, and it's the painstaking discovery that's the fascination of it."

Originally, Laurie saw himself as Pine, but when the chance arose to play Roper, "I fell to my knees in an indecent display of pleading."

Who indeed could resist playing anyone so charismatic yet so wicked that he is described as "the worst man in the world"?

"That's quite a complicated metric to establish," Laurie acknowledged with a laugh, "but clearly he qualifies for the semifinals. He does it with charm and skill and daring, and he's fun to be around, the way one imagines the devil would be. If he was just a tattooed thug with 'Devil' on his forehead, we'd all give him a wide berth. Richard Roper is not like that."

In effect, Laurie spent two decades preparing for the role.

"From the moment I read the book, I felt like I could picture and hear and almost smell this character."

And from the moment viewers confront this character, Laurie, 56, guarantees with his performance they will forget his eight TV seasons on "House M.D." playing the crusty yet lovable Dr. Gregory House.

As for the 35-year-old Hiddleston, whose past projects have included "Thor," Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" and the role of Hank Williams in the recent "I Saw the Light," he described the first "Night Manager" script as "immaculate." After reading it, he was in.

Infiltrating Roper's world, Pine is a model of disarming polish and suave restraint.

"I wanted to do as little as possible," said Hiddleston, "and trust the audience to join the dots. I worried that I wasn't doing enough, but there's something very active about the way Pine is passive. It was a fascinating challenge to try to communicate how deep those still waters run."

"The tendency that all actors have," said Laurie, "is to constantly tell the story with every line and every look, and the audience very quickly reacts against it. But Tom is able to be, to simply be.

"The audience wants to participate in the construction of the story. And often that requires an actor who has the confidence to just be. There probably aren't more than a half-dozen actors who can accomplish that, and I couldn't name the others. So let's just say 'one' - and he's sitting right there."

"Goodness," said Hiddleston on hearing this accolade, then, recovering, turning the tables on Laurie: "I'll tell you one thing I've never said before."

"Bloody hell!" Laurie responded in mock dread.

"Hugh has a rigor about his work," said Hiddleston, "that's as far away from ego as you can imagine. Sometimes, actors are shy about that kind of active involvement because they don't want to rock the boat. But if something doesn't feel right, Hugh is unafraid to say so, and it's all in the service of the whole."

That tribute left Laurie speechless. But only for a flash. The inevitable James Bond question must be dealt with, and Laurie waggishly went for it.

"I refuse to deny that I'm being considered for Bond," he replied, deadpan. "I also refuse to deny that I'm being considered for Cleopatra."

With that, he turned to Hiddleston, who in fact has been buffeted by gossip recently that he might headline the next Bond sequel. "Poor bloke," said Laurie. "What can he say? There's no way of answering the question that doesn't increase this tabloid dialogue."

"I'm just trying to take it as a compliment," said Hiddleston, for now very pleased to play a breed of spy even James Bond would applaud.
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Our recommended wines today are an eclectic mix of reds. One comes from a relatively new kid on the wine block - a very tall one, too, in the 7-foot-6 ex-Rocket Yao Ming. Another hails from one of Italy's most hallowed names in wine-making, Gaja. The other two are from Sonoma and the South of France.

Yao's is pure, powerful, straight-ahead Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, and the Gaja is a blend of cab, merlot and the Piemonte region's centerpiece varietal, nebbiolo. The Patz & Hall pinot noir, in turn, excellently expresses the grace of Sonoma Coast fruit. And the grenache-centric Domaine de Mourchon screams South of France.

Ranging from the mid-$20s to $100, these four reds aren't for the hardcore bargain-hunter, but they're each well worth their respective tariff, given the care with which they're made and the quality that results from the process. Prices listed are what Spec's charges for a cash sale, but the wines are likely available elsewhere around town and can be purchased online as well.

2013 Domaine de Mourchon Grande Reserve

Overall score: 19.2 (9.2 for quality, 10 for value)

Our tasters: Gave it a unanimous recommendation with a high score of 9.3 and six scores of 9 or higher. "Rich earthy aromas. Juicy, jammy tart cherries and cranberries with a peppery under-taste and good minerality. Very easy drinking but should age well, too."

My score: 9.1. A Cotes de Rhone Villages from Seguret, just north of Gigondas, it's a blend of 65 percent grenache and 35 percent syrah, all from 60-year-old estate-grown vines on steep hillsides with roots that penetrate deeply into the clay, limestone and sandstone soil. Aging took place in oak barrels (40 percent) and the region's traditional concrete vats. Walter McKinlay's now almost 2-decade-old winery - the first vintage release was 1998 - keeps delivering well-crafted, well-priced winners that Houston has embraced, with good reason. It's a special market for McKinlay, who has been doing business in the city since the mid-1960s.

Alcohol: 14.5 percent

Winemaker notes: "Deep purple in color with a nose suggesting spices, licorice and cooked red fruit. The palate is full-bodied with elegant fruit intensity, some spice and harmonious tannins."

Pairings: Red meats, wild game, creamy cheeses or a chocolate dessert with red fruit coulis.

Price: $26.59

2013 Patz & Hall Jenkins Ranch Pinot Noir

Overall score: 17.4 (8.9 for quality, 8.5 for value)

Our tasters: Gave it a unanimous recommendation with three scores of 9 or higher. "Nice acidity. Tart, clean and balanced."

My score: 9. The Petaluma Gap vineyard was planted with three Dijon clones in the early 2000s by Charlie Chenowith for the Jenkins country-music family. Whole cluster fermentation was done using both natural and cultured yeasts, and the aging taking place in French oak barrels, 60 percent new.

Alcohol: 14.8 percent

Winemaker notes: "Vintage after vintage, Jenkins delivers a rich, flowing expression of pinot noir with fine-grained velvety tannins and alluring fruit. While there are beautiful black raspberry, blueberry, dark plum and milk chocolate layers to this wine, there is also a decidedly savory side, with elements of roast meat, mushrooms and fine herbs adding character and complexity. The finish is broad and lingering, with a mouth-coating density."

Critical acclaim: The Wine Advocate awarded a score of 93, saying, "The deep ruby-purple hue is followed by beautiful aromas of wild mountain blue and black fruits, sweet raspberries, forest floor and spring flowers. As this meaty, rich, complex wine sits in the glass, notes of slow-cooked pot roast also emerge."

Pairings: Grilled quail, pulled pork, seared salmon and tuna. Barbecue. Roast or other cooked beetroot dishes. Dishes that include cherries or figs.

Price: $55.56

2013 Yao Family Wines Cabernet Sauvignon

Overall score: 17 (9 for quality, 8 for value)

Our tasters: Gave it a unanimous recommendation with three scores of 9 or higher. "Great fruit but also nicely tannic. Black cherry and cola aromas. Intense."

My score: 9.2. Sourced from bench-land vineyards in Yountville to northern St. Helena with three cabernet clones in the mix, the fruit was harvested at 25.1 brix, then hand-sorted and fully de-stemmed. Cold soaks and warm fermentations followed. Total skin contact ranged from 19 to 34 days. Winemaker Tom Hinde selected the barrels for the final blend by taste, and bottling took place without filtration. The result? A wine worthy of a hall-of-famer, which Yao became recently.

Alcohol: 14.1 percent

Winemaker notes: "The appearance exhibits a deep ruby hue. Aromas are layered with berry and flavors of cherry, cassis and plum. There is a core minerality with lavender tones. The oak is well integrated and has nice toast aroma with hints of vanilla and wild sage. On the palate the wine is lush and firm but also has mature tannins and supple texture."

Critical acclaim: The Wine Advocate awarded a score of 90, saying, "The wine exhibits a beautiful bouquet of graphite, blueberries and blackberries, rich, opulent flavors, impressive purity, and a long, elegant finish. This lovely cabernet sauvignon represents a synthesis in style between a top-class French Bordeaux and the beautiful lightness and generosity of a Napa cab."

Pairings: Grilled well-marbled prime beef, especially rib-eye, with a creamy, cheesy side dish.

Price: $100 from yaofamilywines.com

2013 Gaja Sito Moresco

Overall score: 17.4 (8.9 for quality, 8.5 for value)

Our tasters: Gave it a unanimous recommendation with three scores of 9 or higher. "Floral aromas and maraschino cherries on the palate. Hint of oak. Firm, tart tannins."

My score: 9.1. The Gaja brand dates from 1859, after Giovanni Gaja began making wine for his small cafe in Barbaresco. But it's the current Gaja, Angelo, and his winemaker Guido Rivella, who has been in the cellar since 1970, who made the wines famous internationally. A blend of estate-grown nebbiolo, merlot and cabernet, the Sito Moresco is the Peimontese equivalent of a Super Tuscan. Each varietal was fermented separately on the skins in stainless-steel tanks for two weeks at controlled temperatures. After blending, malolactic fermentation took place, and the wine aged for 19 months in oak, followed by nine months in the bottle before release.

Alcohol: 14 percent

Winemaker notes: "Ruby red. Pure nose with aromas of small fruits. A fruity, elegant taste; good balance in the mouth and a fresh fruity finish with very fine, silky tannins. Ideal to drink young but matures well for at least five to seven years."

Pairings: Rich and hearty meat dishes such as osso bucco. Mushroom risotto with shaved white truffles. Hard, granular cheeses such as Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano.

Price: $57.75
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Marla Cooper almost made it home, but the rains came again.

Washed out of her home of 33 years by flooding in late May of last year, Cooper meticulously rebuilt the interior of her ranch house along Reamer Street, a few yards from Brays Bayou. To avoid the same problems, she had electrical outlets placed higher on her walls and replaced her carpet with tile floors.

Cooper moved her new furniture and appliances in over the weekend, and her clothes yesterday. Then she returned to the apartment she has shared with her 87-year-old mother since Cooper's own house was damaged last year.

"I didn't even get to stay the night," Cooper said.

Monday, she found herself mopping up water. Again. She repeated the process of checking her furniture and walls for damage, and complaining along with her neighbors about flooding that seems to have become more severe recently.

Cooper was among many residents of the Meyerland and Robindell neighborhoods assessing the damage Monday after thunderstorms spawned major flooding, turning the streets closest to Brays Bayou into riverfront property. While far less damaging than last year, Monday's flooding made roads impassable, ruined carpets and furniture and sent homeowners wading into rainwaters to retrieve photo albums and what was safe to carry away.

"We probably lost most of what we managed to salvage from the other flood," said Amy Ernest, who lives west of Fondren along the bayou. "But there was no work wasted... Most people had just barely finished recovering."

Caption: Rainfall Monday left many areas of Houston under water. The powerful thunderstorms led to several fatalities, damages hundreds of homes and caused several schools and businesses to close for the day. The map above shows where the highest concentration of 311 calls originated and which areas where impacted the most by rainfall, according to National Weather Service data. The map does not show information for 911 calls.

After the Memorial Day 2015 floods, the city's Department of Public Works and Engineering believed that nearly 1,000 homes had been substantially damaged, meaning the cost to restore the house exceeded half its value before the flood.

Homeowners whose houses meet that description must elevate their homes, if they choose to rebuild, to meet modern floodplain regulations.

City officials eventually downsized their estimate of substantially-damaged homes to 429 - with most in the Meyerland area.

Some homeowners are appealing declarations of substantial damage, while others are seeking to be added to the list, PWE spokeswoman Julie Gilbert said. The city also is reviewing numerous permit requests from owners seeking to elevate, or demolish and rebuild, their homes.

Cooper rebuilt the inside of her home, with touches to avoid calamity again. Monday, as she scoured for water damage to the grout on her tile floors and along her baseboards, she sighed in relief that water hadn't done much damage in her bedroom. She flung open an exterior door that lets out onto her patio and looked down.

"I had storm drains installed here and here," she said, pointing toward the other patio door in another room. "I'm glad I did."

The blessing was this rain didn't destroy her home, it just damaged it.

"We'll be out a few more months," she said, saying she wanted to give the house a thorough inspection before moving anything else in.

Residents like Cooper worry this is the new normal even if the city doesn't think there is a major problem with flood control in the area. A detention basin was built a few years ago in the Robindell area, along Brays Bayou, in hopes of addressing flood control by catching bayou overflows

"The bayou did not flood us," Cooper said. "The detention basin did. It didn't flood in Allison and it didn't flood in Rita. It flooded after they put in that basin."

Others were less likely to let Mother Nature off the hook, calling it a cost of living in Houston.

"It's flat and it rains," said Bill Kirkgard, 76, who has lived on Reamer for 55 years. "You don't live here for beautiful Mount Houston."

Still, many residents have complained that flood-control measures meant to solve drainage problems and allow for development south and west of them led to decisions now leaving their homes exposed to heavy rains. In these torrential downpours - bad but not once-in-a-generation affairs - they fear they are exposed.

The heavy rains and lack of drainage can have ruinous consequences. At the house across the street from Cooper, four adults who are developmentally disabled had to be relocated to another group home. It wasn't police or state health officials who sprang into action, however. It was two 20-somethings from Rosenberg and neighbors.

"It is us just trying to help," said Tayler Alloggio, 21.

Alloggio, active in a local four-wheel rescue club, helped rescue four people from high waters with her own Jeep, then called on her friend Ryan Kempisty, 20, and his lifted Ford diesel crew cab pickup.

Two by two, the wheelchair-bound residents were lifted into the backseat of Kempisty's automotive monster. Neighbors assured them they were going on a fun ride. In teams, the motorized wheelchairs were lifted into the bed of the pickup, and off they went.

When they will be able to return, or when some residents will stop worrying about the next flood, remain unknown.

Glen Rosenbaum's Meyerland home took on 21 inches of water during the Memorial Day floods last year, and took on another seven inches Monday. As of late Monday afternoon, his floor had half an inch of water left, trapped by door jams and thresholds.

He lived upstairs on a mattress for three months as the most recent phase of repairs was completed, and may do so again this time.

"It was a real pain in the rear, but it did go quickly," Rosenbaum said. "This phase, if it can go as quickly, it will be OK. I hope I'm making the right decision because I hope we don't have another deal a year from now. I have to believe the odds are against that, but we'll see."

Reporters Mike Morris and St. John Barned-Smith contributed to this story.
WASHINGTON - A shorthanded Supreme Court appeared closely divided on a Texas-led challenge against President Barack Obama's 2014 immigration plan Monday, asking sharp questions about whether the state could bring the case and if the president had overstepped his authority.

The eight justices appeared split across ideological lines with the four liberal appointees seeming to indicate they support the president's plan while the conservative justices questioned the limits of his executive powers. A decision, expected in June, could be the most important related to immigration in decades and comes at the height of a presidential campaign where it has been one of the defining issues.

The court itself is embroiled in a political battle to fill the seat of Justice Antonin Scalia, and his absence has caused it to twice reach a tie. Many experts think the justices would not want to decide a case with such hugely consequential questions without a full bench.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, seen as the two most likely conservative appointees to side with the liberal wing and allow the program to proceed, pressed U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Monday on whether Texas would suffer if the plan is implemented and how far the president's power extends.

Modeled after a similar but smaller program for young adults that Obama unveiled in 2012, his 2014 initiative would temporarily delay deporting the parents of American citizens and legal residents who have been here since 2010 and provide them with provisional work permits. About 4 million immigrants here illegally could benefit.

The president announced the program after Congress failed to pass immigration reform in 2013. Texas, leading a coalition of 26 mostly Republican states, immediately challenged it.

During the 90-minute oral arguments Monday, Kennedy, who is often the deciding vote in close cases, worried that the administration may have overstepped its reach by having the executive branch set de facto immigration policy, rather than carry out laws passed by Congress.

"It's as if the president is setting policy, and the Congress is executing it," he said. "That's just upside down."

Roberts seemed concerned about the program's scope, asking whether it meant the president could defer the deportation of every immigrant in the country illegally.

"Definitely not," Verrilli replied.

The government argues it is not creating new policy, but simply prioritizing which immigrants to deport - necessary given that Congress doesn't allocate enough funding to remove all 11 million immigrants here illegally. Only about 400,000 are deported a year.

Under questioning from Justice Elena Kagan, Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller agreed that the administration has the right to decide who to deport and might even be allowed to delay removing an entire class of immigrants. But it cannot grant them legal authorization, he said, which the state argues the work permits extend.

David Leopold, an attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said temporary work authorization is usually provided to anyone qualifying for a deferral from deportation otherwise they would be a burden on the government. Having the permit does not grant any legal status and could be repealed anytime, he said.

"Regardless of the thorough questioning today, which we expected, when (the justices) apply the law, especially the law in work authorization, we are going to prevail," Leopold said.

Opponents of the president's plan similarly read positive predictions from the justices' questioning but, if anything, it seemed clear that the court was conflicted.

"The court is quite divided," said Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law who filed an amicus brief against Obama's plan on behalf of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington D.C. "I think there's a distinct possibility that this case goes to a 4-4."

A tie would uphold a lower court's decision to block the program without deciding any of the underlying questions at hand, so states like California which support it could file suit elsewhere to challenge the injunction.

The prospect of such disarray has some legal experts expecting the justices may decide Texas can't prove it will be harmed by the plan and so doesn't have so-called standing to bring the challenge in the first place. The chief justice in particular has favored such narrow views on when states can sue the federal government. That finding would allow Obama's program to immediately proceed.

Texas argues it will suffer by losing money if it is required to provide driver's licenses to nearly 600,000 eligible immigrants in the state. The state subsidizes the document by about $130.

But Verrilli argued Monday that the state could simply change its policy, either choosing not to offset the cost of the documents or not to grant them to this group of immigrants.

Roberts said giving the licenses to some but not others could be considered discriminatory, putting Texas in a tough spot.

He asked the government to compare the harm Texas would suffer to a 2007 environmental case in which Massachusetts sued the Environmental Protection Agency about its refusal to regulate vehicle emissions linked to climate change. The state argued that rising seawater, a result of global warming, would erode its coastline, giving it sufficient claim to sue the federal government. The state prevailed but Roberts led the court's conservative dissent, arguing Massachusetts could not prove it was hurt by the government's policy.

Verrilli said Texas isn't required to discount the license.

"There was no way for Massachusetts to avoid the effects about which it was complaining, and there is a way here," he said.

Justice Stephen Breyer noted that Texas' main claim of injury is that it would lose money. Breyer said accepting that point as a basis for standing would allow any number of states to sue the federal government if they don't like a policy or the costs it imposes.

"We can't just let you sue on the basis that you, as a taxpayer, will have to spend more money," he said. "If we do, taxpayers all over the country will be suing in all kinds of cases, many of them which will involve nothing more than political disagreements of all sides."

In contrast to the serious mood in the courtroom, outside on the steps under a sunny blue sky, immigrants from Texas and across the nation chanted, waved signs and sang hymns.

"We have come to the steps of the Supreme Court to seek justice," said U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat.

A crowd numbering in the thousands responded with chants of "Si, se puede," Spanish for "Yes, we can."

Among a group of about 60 Texans was Hilda Salmeron, a 30-year-old kitchen worker from Houston who rode with her family on a nearly 40-hour bus trip sponsored by the Texas Organizing Project, a local advocacy group.

"We need to be heard," she said, speaking over the sound of a mariachi band on a makeshift stage. "We want to be able to live and work without the fear that they are going to come and take us out of our homes."

Some activists sought seats inside the court, joining a line of spectators that wrapped around the block. Giancarlo Tello, a 26-year old from Peru who would benefit from Obama's program, called it "one of the most important days in immigration history."

The party atmosphere lasted until the oral arguments ended, when a dozen conservative administration critics - including Texas U.S. Rep. Louis Gohmert - set up their own loudspeaker system outside the courthouse. Joined by Iowa U.S. Rep. Steve King, another immigration hard-liner, the Republican and his supporters were largely drowned out by the much larger pro-Obama crowd surrounding them.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, speaking to reporters on the courthouse steps, said he was not bothered by the overwhelming display of support for the immigration program.

"We are here defending the Constitution," he said. "So whether we have people out here or not is irrelevant."
FORT WORTH - Bart Salter was spending Monday watching the Brazos River rise.

After Monday's kayak ride through the flood-prone Parker County neighborhood of more than 1,000 homes, Salter said the water was beginning to take its toll.

Officially, the Brazos was projected to crest at 27.2 feet on Tuesday, less than the 27.55 feet during the last major flood on June 29, 2007, and well below the record crest of 31.88 feet on Oct. 14, 1981.

"It looks like a war zone out there," Salter said. "We've got propane tanks floating and water probably in about 115 homes. It's getting pretty bad."

As in Houston, residents were dealing with the realities of floodwaters.

Water covered the roadway and filled low-lying areas of the southwestern Parker County neighborhood surrounded by the Brazos on three sides. Normally, the river is about 125 yards away from Salter's home. On Monday afternoon, it was at his front steps.

"We've got current flowing right in front of my house.

"We've got current flowing right in front of my house," Salter said. "I would call this a major flood. This is almost as bad as the 2007 flood."

Help getting out

Parker County officials also were monitoring Possum Kingdom Lake, where the Brazos River Authority opened a second floodgate Sunday, said Judi Pierce, an authority spokeswoman.

"It looks like we're going to stay at two gates, but we're very close to needing to open a third gate," Pierce said. "If we get any substantial, heavy rainfall, we would need to do that."

Since Sunday, Parker County had to help evacuate 22 people from three rural Parker County neighborhoods - Soda Springs, Horseshoe Bend and Brazos Rock.

"We've assisted in getting people out," said Joel Kertok, a Parker County spokesman. "These weren't rescues. These were people who needed help getting across flooded roadways that prevented them from leaving their neighborhood."

But Kertok said the flood is impacting low-lying homes all along the Brazos.

"Every community along the Brazos in Parker County is dealing with flooding," Kertok said. "The bad news is the river came up fast. The good news is the rain has stopped for now. Now we just need to catch a break."

If no more rain falls, Kertok said, the worst may be over.

"We're optimistic," Kertok said. "We're keeping our fingers crossed that Possum Kingdom doesn't have to open a third gate."

More issues

High water also is causing an issue at Lake Bridgeport, which was closed to boat traffic Sunday. The lake is just below the lowest homes said David Marshall, Tarrant Regional Water District director of engineering services and operations support.

"We're just shy of getting in anyone's house," Marshall said. "We're only about half a foot away. If we don't get any more rain, we should be OK."

At Lake Worth, boat ramps closed on Monday. The lake will remain closed to all boating.

Water that will flow toward Eagle Mountain Lake in the next several days is being released downstream along the West Fork of the Trinity River. That could impact some low-lying roads in Wise County, which dealt with numerous closures early Monday morning.

Johnson County also dealt with road closures because of high water overnight.

The Colorado River also is rising east of Austin and headed toward moderate flooding near Columbus.

In Tarrant County, most areas saw 2-3 inches of rainfall. The highest total was 5.47 inches near White Settlement Road in west Fort Worth.

Overall for the area, the highest total was 7.35 inches southwest of Mineral Wells.

National Weather Service meteorologist Juan Hernandez said rain will stick around through at least Wednesday but the torrential downpours should be over for North Texas.

"We're still seeing light showers but they shouldn't have too much of an impact," Hernandez said. "It should be much lighter than what we saw over the weekend."

Waiting it out

At Horseshoe Bend, residents like Salter are hoping he's right.

He owns 13 rental houses in the rural Parker County neighborhood and has jokingly been called the mayor of Horseshoe Bend.

As the water continued to pour into the neighborhood, Salter felt a sense of helplessness.

"All I'm doing is sitting here looking at the water," Salter said. "There's nothing else I can do."
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NEW YORK - The Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for documenting the use of slave labor in Southeast Asia to supply seafood to American tables - an investigation that spurred the release of more than 2,000 captive workers.

The Los Angeles Times was awarded the breaking news prize for its coverage of the shooting rampage by husband-and-wife extremists that left 14 people dead in San Bernardino, Calif., and the Washington Post received the national reporting award for an examination of killings by police in the U.S.

Besides recognizing some of the biggest national and international stories of the year, the awards also spotlighted deep dives into a chilling rape case, the long arc of school segregation, and the mistreatment of psychiatric patients. The New Yorker was honored in the criticism and feature writing categories, which only recently were opened to magazines.

2 awards for Times

The New York Times won the international reporting award for detailing the plight of Afghan women, and the breaking news photography prize for images of refugees. Thomson Reuters was also honored in the same photography category, for its pictures of migrants covering hundreds of miles.

The Boston Globe was likewise honored twice: It won in the feature photography category with pictures showing the life of a poor, 6-year-old boy who survived a horrific beating by his mother's boyfriend, while the newspaper's Farah Stockman took the commentary prize for her work on the legacy of school busing in the city.

The Tampa Bay Times and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune received the investigative reporting prize for demonstrating that years of budget and staff cuts and overall neglect had resulted in a dramatic uptick of violence in Florida's mental hospitals.

The Tampa Bay Times also won in local reporting for detailing the harmful effects of ending school integration in Pinellas County, Florida, the most concentrated site of academic failure in Florida. Officials responded by increasing funding and teacher training in the mostly black school system.

ProPublica and The Marshall Project received the award for explanatory reporting for exploring a rape case in which authorities initially didn't believe the victim, prosecuted her for lying, and years later came to realize she was telling the truth.

'Hamilton' wins

In the arts categories, "Hamilton," the hip-hop stage biography of Alexander Hamilton, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for drama, honoring creator Lin-Manuel Miranda for a dazzling musical that has captured popular consciousness like few Broadway shows.

The Columbia University's prize board on Monday cited "Hamilton" as "a landmark American musical about the gifted and self-destructive founding father whose story becomes both contemporary and irresistible."

"I feel really humbled and really overwhelmed," Miranda said. "Columbia is Hamilton's alma mater so I think that gave me a home-court advantage. But it's extraordinary to be recognized in this way."

Viet Thanh Nguyen's "The Sympathizer," a debut novel set in the final days of the Vietnam War and narrated in flashback by a former Communist agent who infiltrated the South Vietnamese army, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Cuban President Raul Castro has reiterated his intention to step down two years from now, at age 86, and has said that in the future, all top Communist Party and other officials should be restricted to two five-year terms and should retire when they reach 70.

Calling for the party to inject more youth into its leadership, Castro pointed out that the experience of a number of countries has demonstrated that retaining aging leadership "is never positive."

"Never forget that during the final stage of the Soviet Union," a government he described as "esteemed and beloved," three first secretaries of the Communist Party Central Committee, all in their 70s, died within two years, he said.

Castro spoke Saturday at the opening session of the four-day Party Congress, an event held every five years to review national progress, plan for the future and recommit to "revolutionary" principals.

In his speech to the group Monday, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said President Obama's recent trip in Cuba was at least in part "a deep attack on our ideas, our history, our culture and our symbols." He accused Obama of trying to "dazzle" Cuba's growing private sector with outreach and promises that even the United States has said it hopes will lead to political change on the island.

Castro devoted much of his own two-hour address to the Cuban economy and its relationship to the political system. While he spoke less harshly than Rodriguez, Castro also referred to the United States as "the enemy." He said U.S. claims to have a multiparty political system were largely a sham, since both parties are based on money rather than popular will.

The United States "and their fellow travelers," Castro said, speak of a single-party system "as if it were a crime. They want to shape the world . . . adjust it to their own convenience."

Only U.S. methods have changed, not its goals, he said, and "we have to be more alert than ever."

As he has in the past, Castro said, "There have been concrete results in the dialogue and cooperation between the United States and Cuba" since the two governments announced in December 2014 that they would normalize relations.

"Nevertheless, the [U.S.] economic, commercial and financial blockade, in place for more than half a century, continues in effect, with unquestioned intimidating effects and extraterritorial scope, although we recognize that President Obama and senior administration officials oppose it and have repeatedly called on Congress to repeal it."

Obama's efforts to use his executive powers to bypass the embargo "are positive, but insufficient," Castro said, and the embargo "remains the principal obstacle" to Cuba's economic development. He also criticized the "illegal occupation" of Guantanamo Bay, and U.S. immigration policy that gives special preference to Cuban exiles in general and particular advantages to Cuban medical personnel willing to defect to the United States.

Since Castro took over from his brother Fidel in 2006, becoming president in 2008, he has significantly liberalized Cuba's state-owned economy. The percentage of Cuban workers employed by the state has shrunk from 81.2 percent in 2010 to 70.8 percent last year, he said, and more than half a million Cubans are now self-employed.

At the same time, he noted, the important tourism industry brought 3.5 million visitors to Cuba last year, the most ever. Since the last Party Congress in 2011, he said, Cuba has opened nearly 11,000 new hotel rooms and renovated an additional 7,000. More than 14,000 lodgings are now offered by private-sector homeowners who rent rooms and apartments to tourists.

Overall gross national product growth, Castro said, was 2.8 percent. But he criticized the party for failing to adequately plan for economic changes, including delays in eliminating Cuba's dual currency rates.

As part of the U.S. normalization, and Cuba's plans to grow the important tourism industry, U.S. airlines are expected to begin regular flights to Cuba later this year.

But plans to begin a ferry service between Miami and Havana have run into roadblocks. Carnival Corp. said Monday that Cuban law prevents Cuban-born passengers from using its services, effectively eliminating a major source of revenue for the route.

In a policy that stems from the early days of the Cuban revolution, when U.S.-sponsored exiles invaded the island, and the CIA tried to infiltrate Cuba to damage its economy and assassinate its leadership, Cuban-born people are only allowed to arrive there by air.

In a statement, Carnival said its 704-passenger Adonia luxury ship would begin sailing to Cuba every other week beginning May 1, the first time a cruise ship has sailed from the United States to Cuba in more than 50 years.

But "we want everyone to be able to go to Cuba with us," said Carnival chief executive Arnold Donald.

At least two Cuban Americans have filed lawsuits against the cruise line, charging illegal discrimination. In a speech in Miami last week, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said the Cuban government was "forcing its discrimination policy on us."

"If they want a full relationship and a normal relationship," he said, "they have to live by international law."
NEW YORK - Voting has begun in the most raucous nominating contest of an already acrimonious season, which closed the day before with a flurry of retail politicking in New York that appeared likely to strengthen the trajectory of the two front-runners.

Democrat Hillary Clinton spent Monday reaching out to New Yorkers one handshake and one neighborhood at a time. She stopped by a hospital cafeteria in Yonkers, met with workers at a unionized carwash in Queens and sipped "bubble tea" at Kung Fu Tea counter in Flushing.

Republican Donald Trump, meanwhile, appeared for a photo op at his own Trump Tower in Manhattan with a new "diversity coalition." The group, representing many ethnic groups, is trying to fight accusations that Trump has stoked racial and ethnic tensions with his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Polls have shown both front-runners ahead by double-digit margins in Tuesday's New York primary. A big win for Trump would bring him closer to securing an outright majority of Republican delegates - an outcome that remains in jeopardy and has prompted rival Ted Cruz to mount a spirited campaign to force a contested convention.

For Clinton, a victory would give her a boost of momentum and perhaps a new mandate to more openly pivot her campaign to prepare for the general election. Unlike Trump, Clinton is so far ahead in the delegate count against Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vt., that it has become close to impossible for him to catch up.

"I am hoping to do really well tomorrow," Clinton said at Mikey Likes It Ice Cream in Manhattan's East Village. "I am hoping to wrap up the Democratic nomination."

The Sanders campaign has played down his prospects in New York, citing the state's closed primary, which doesn't allow the participation of independents. But Sanders has drawn tens of thousands of supporters at rallies in recent days, and he spent much of Monday shaking hands during a series of unannounced appearances around New York City.

Sanders strolled down the Avenue of the Americas on Monday morning, greeting surprised Manhattanites over the course of 15 city blocks. The scene repeated itself in the mid-afternoon in the Bronx, where the senator posed for dozens of selfies with bystanders during a walk with his entourage in a busy retail district. He also visited a public housing project in the Bronx, where he said a shuttered playground and community center were unacceptable "in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world."

Sanders said what he saw was an example of the nation's misplaced priorities.

"Want to talk about crazy, crazy is that we have more people in jail in the United States of America than any other country on Earth," he said. "It seems to me a lot more sensible, a lot more humane, a lot more cost-effective to invest in our children, to invest in recreation, to invest in community centers, to make sure that kids have the education they need."

Clinton has tailored her message in New York to her tenure as the state's senator for eight years, calling upon voters to remember the work that she did on her behalf. But she has also sought to use Trump and New York's diversity to make a sweeping case that the primary - and the election on a whole - is about a choice between her vision for the future and Trump's divisive rhetoric.

"I am so proud of New York," Clinton said. "Lady Liberty stands in our harbor. We are a city of immigrants, a state of immigrants and a nation of immigrants."

At a campaign event in Midtown Manhattan, where she was joined by a slate of female leaders that included Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Clinton hit both Trump and Sanders simultaneously. She criticized Trump for suggesting that women should be punished for seeking abortions and Sanders for suggesting that Trump's comments were a distraction.

"When Trump said what he said about punishing women, I was appalled," Clinton said. "That was a core issue.

"When my opponent in this primary said it was a distraction and he wanted to talk about the real issues, I was appalled again."

Trump has crisscrossed the state in recent days. Over the weekend, he held campaign events in Staten Island and in Poughkeepsie, where he accused Cruz of being dishonest and too close to special interests. He also highlighted his message of economic populism.

Like Sanders, Cruz is bracing for a loss in New York, polling behind not only Trump in recent surveys but also Ohio Gov. John Kasich, whose only primary victory so far came in his home state.

On Monday, Cruz was already looking ahead to a string of upcoming contests in Eastern states, including Maryland, which will vote next week. The senator from Texas spent Monday bouncing between New York and Maryland, where he held a rally at an American Legion hall in the Baltimore suburb of Towson. Cruz held a private meeting with GOP leaders in New York on Monday ahead of an evening fundraiser at the Harvard Club.

In Maryland, he told supporters that he expects the state to have an "outsized voice" as "the nation is looking to Maryland to decide: Do we nominate Donald Trump and hand the election to Hillary Clinton, or do we unite behind the Cruz campaign and beat Hillary Clinton?"

For Trump, a strong victory in New York could help him recover from several recent setbacks. Earlier this month, he lost the Wisconsin primary to Cruz amid a series of controversies over women's issues that many critics hoped represented a break in the wave of populist momentum buoying his candidacy.

The campaign also struggled to secure delegates in states, including Wyoming and Colorado, that require deep organization on the ground to secure favorable delegate slates. Cruz, meanwhile, has built up such organizations across the country, resulting in the selection of delegates who favor him. Many of these delegates will be bound to vote for Trump on a first ballot. But if Trump fails to secure an outright majority at the national convention, these delegates would be free to vote for Cruz on a second ballot.

Trump has been locked in an escalating feud with the Republican National Committee over the issue and has accused the RNC of stacking the race against him.

"Nobody has better toys than I do. I can put them on the best planes and bring them to the best resorts anywhere in the world," Trump said in Staten Island on Sunday. "You're basically saying, 'Delegate, listen, we're going to send you to Mar-a-Lago on a Boeing 757, you're going to use the spa, you're going to do this, you're going to do that, we want your vote. That's a corrupt system."

Even with the prospect of a contested convention in July hanging over Trump, his campaign appears to be pivoting to a more organized posture ahead of a potential general-election battle. Trump has empowered Paul Manafort to lead the final stretch of the primary season as "convention manager" and also hired Rick Wiley, a political veteran, as national political director. Manafort and Wiley are expected to help Trump bridge divisions with the Washington establishment if he wins the nomination.

Trump has also homed in on Clinton in campaign events across New York and unrolled a new moniker for the former secretary of state: "crooked Hillary."

"We don't vote too much in this country, the percentage is extremely low," Trump said in Poughkeepsie on Sunday evening. "Trump versus Clinton will be the biggest voter turnout in the history of our country. Everybody says it."
It was clear that Houstonians would have to brace for the worst when meteorologists started describing Sunday night's approaching storm in terms of the A-word - Tropical Storm Allison.

But as television cameras aimed at Greenspoint-area apartments, another curse word in the Gulf Coast weather dictionary came to mind - Katrina.

Those apartments along the banks of Greens Bayou were home to evacuees after New Orleans was devastated in that 2005 storm. And now, seeing their residents paddle in makeshift rafts to high ground, you can't help but wonder how many Katrina survivors were in dire straits all too familiar.

Desperation could be found all across the city, where people found themselves stranded in roadways that transformed overnight into makeshift rivers. From everyday people to our brave first responders, there's no doubt that quick action and selfless service saved countless lives.

Pets and animals struggled to keep their heads above water, as well. Dogs were rescued from their kennels and horses from their stables. One rescue worker carried an armadillo to safety - a scene that might as well summarize this flood in the eyes of national media.

Homes have been lost, cars destroyed and lives ruined. In time the waters will recede and life will turn back to normal for most of us. Others, however, will be left asking questions:

Why did my home flood? How do I rebuild? Should I move?

Something has changed about our city. Whether development on the Katy Prairie, the unintended consequences of new flood infrastructure or the planet's changing climate, there has to be some explanation as to why a 500-year flood now feels like an annual occurrence.

In the days and weeks ahead, we look to our political leaders to drive those hard conversations.

Those leaders acted admirably Monday. In the early morning hours, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett stood as a pillar of calm, informed administration. As rising waters forced families from their homes, Mayor Sylvester Turner directed city resources to ferry people to shelters.

But when the full wrath of Mother Nature bears down on a city, sometimes the most important leadership comes from our communities of faith, where we're inspired to care for our neighbors and pray for the best. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Houston's charitable heart set the standard for a nation in shock.

As this goes to press, meteorologists say another line of storms may hit our region. So while Houston again braces for the worst, there's no doubt that it always brings out our best.
Budget blame

Regarding "Budget stress" (Page B13, Sunday), the editorial moves readers toward an understanding of why our government cannot get anything done and is so badly broken. At least for the time being, House Speaker Paul Ryan is hamstrung by what has come to be known as the "Hastert Rule. Named after former House Speaker Dennis Hastert in the mid-1990s, this informal procedure, which was never voted upon by the House membership, holds that no bill shall come to the floor for a vote unless it is already known that it will pass with a minimum 218 votes from the party that is in the majority.

House Republicans, who hold a majority, need the aforementioned 218 votes to pass a budget. But that minimum number cannot be reached because 40-50 of them have refused to vote affirmatively with the rest of their cohorts. In other words, the entire country and the budget process is being held hostage by no more than 50 Republican House members who represent just a tiny fraction of the national total of eligible voters.

It is ironic that back at our founding, James Madison warned about the "tyranny of the majority." What we have today is tyranny of a distinct minority that has left us with a budget that has yet to pass and a broken government. There should no longer be any uncertainty as to why this is the case and who is to blame.

Marty Adams, Houston

Rule of law?

Regarding "DACA's fate in court's hands" (Page A1, Sunday), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says that the state's lawsuit against DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents) is "fundamentally about the Constitution, not just about immigration law," about whether a president has the authority "nomatter his or her philosophy to make law and step into the role of Congress."

If "rule of law" is the issue, Paxton should go on record publicly urging Congress to fund the resources needed to round up and deport DACA and DAPA immigrants (or enact President Obama's executive orders into law authorizing their stay in the United States). If deportation is too costly, unworkable, undesirable or unwise, the attorney general should save taxpayer money and rescind his lawsuit.

Dennis Toombs, League City

Absent senator

Regarding "How Texans Voted" (Page A22, Sunday) for many, many months, Sen. Ted Cruz has been absent for most, if not all, of the votes on issues before the Senate. If the man refuses to do the job to which he was elected, why should we entrust him to be president of the United States? It's obvious he only ran for Senate to create a national platform for himself and his presidential run. Texans need both our senators working for us.

Russel J. Sanders, Houston

Rain lingo

Regarding "Multiple fatalities reported as flood waters swamp Houston area (HoustonChronicle.com), when did our lives turn into a series of "events?" Did you know we had a serious rain event followed by a severe flooding event? That gobbledygook-speak rates up there with "sharing," "hydrating" and the blinding "at end of the day."

Bill Klimko, Spring
WASHINGTON - As Archie Bunker might say, the world is going down the terlet.

And how.

Who could have predicted that politics would require serious discussion of who uses what restroom? Or, personally speaking, a second column?

Alas, it seems that yet greater clarity is needed regarding this terribly serious, faux dilemma of proper bathroom usage in North Carolina.

As you likely know, the state recently passed a hastily written bill, signed by Gov. Pat McCrory, to pre-empt a Charlotte law that would have allowed transgender folks to visit the facility corresponding to their gender identity.

Tar Heel lawmakers, ever alert to the presumably rampant problem of gender fakery, so ordered: Men and women must use the restroom that corresponds to their sex as indicated on their birth certificate.

It is actually not insane to insist that men use the men's room and women use the women's. Most people reckon this system has worked fine for as long as anyone can remember and see no reason to make accommodations for the roughly 700,000 Americans who are transgender. What has become clear, however, is that North Carolinians and others aren't worried about transgender people; they're worried primarily about heterosexual men who pretend they're transgender in order to gain access to women's quarters.

For what purpose would a man do this? I can imagine a fraternity initiation prank or a punk on a dare using the women's facility as a foil. Oh what fun to hear the ladies shrieking. Or, perhaps, not. Maybe the women tackle the idiot and toss him out the door. That's where I'd put my money.

As to the would-be rapist/fondler/exhibitionist, why would anyone imagine that a law forbidding transgender people from entering the women's room would stop him from walking through an unlocked door?

The backlash to the new law has been harsh. In the latest squeeze, Pearl Jam canceled a concert in Raleigh, following Bruce Springsteen's example. Several cities and states, including Boston and Connecticut, have cut government-subsidized travel to North Carolina. And Monday, Duke University President Richard Brodhead said that the law has damaged the state's reputation and is having both financial and material impact on its colleges and universities.

In response to these concerns and other financial losses stemming from the law, McCrory last week issued an executive order almost as abruptly as he signed the original bill. He has said he'll urge the Legislature to amend the law to reinstate state employees' right to seek legal recourse in cases of discrimination for sexual orientation or gender identity. The bathroom part of the bill would remain, as would the law's mandate that cities and municipalities may not pass their own nondiscrimination laws. For McCrory, who is up for re-election, the issue comes down to conservative principles of limited government.

On Sunday's "Meet the Press," he told host Chuck Todd that he "will always call out government overreach." This might be a good campaign motto, but isn't the state overreaching by telling the residents of towns and cities that they can't pass their own laws? In effect, this means that a business in, say, Hamlet, N.C., where McCrory recently visited what he termed an "African-American buffet" restaurant, could deny service to my delightful gay married neighbors.

As luck would have it, McCrory's appearance on the NBC program coincided with my own, exactly one day following The Washington Post's publication of a letter from McCrory excoriating me and my earlier column. What fun! Before the show, we found ourselves seated just inches apart in makeup. Nothing quite neutralizes tensions like comparing foundation notes. Miraculously, I was able to suppress the transgender quip that was performing cartwheels on the tip of my tongue.

We chatted in that Southern way - with Dentyne smiles and lizard eyes. Bless his heart.

While it is certainly understandable that some people would be uncomfortable with the idea of faux transgender males ogling their daughters, I'd be far more concerned about sending a boy into the men's room, where even pedophiles are allowed to relieve themselves. Imagine what would happen to Caitlyn Jenner if she were forced to use the men's room. Or, what about a transgender man, who, though he's bald, bearded, muscled and rough, is forced to use the women's room?

But of course, she and he won't. Because this bathroom law is utterly unenforceable and therefore unnecessary. What we have is a non-solution to a non-problem.

And my guess is McCrory knows it. He should flush HB2 down the terlet.

Parker's email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.
Benjamin Franklin once said, In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. As the fear of another tax day approaches, these words ring true for most Americans.

Over 150 million people find themselves stressing this week to file their taxes and figure out how much they owe before the April 18th deadline. When faced with an over 70,000 page, 4 million word federal tax code its no wonder that the average taxpayer spends over 8 hours and $120 to have someone else file their individual tax return for them. To put that in perspective thats close to 1.35 billion man hours and $20 billion in compliance costs nationwide for all filers  and thats the cost just to file ones taxes, not even the underlying tax burden!

What it comes down to is that our tax code is just too cumbersome, to confusing and costs you and your family too much. In fact, most Americans need to work 107 days just to be able to earn enough to pay their tax liability for that year. That is over three months of hard-earned wages going directly towards paying your tax bill this year. Americans now spend more to fulfill their annual tax obligations then they do on necessities such as shelter, food and clothing. We need a tax code that is aimed at helping American families, not hurting them. I believe that you are a better steward and deserve to keep more of your hard earned money than the government and it is one of the exact reasons I fought to get on the House Ways & Means Committee with jurisdiction over all federal tax issues.

You deserve a tax system which is simpler, fairer and flatter. Along with my colleagues on the Ways & Means Committee, I am working on a proposal to collapse the half a dozen tax rates into two simple ones while simultaneously reducing tax rates on families, farmers and small business owners. We owe it to you to make filing your taxes so simple that it can be completed on one sheet of paper, the size of a postcard. The current myriad of deductions, credits, and exemptions only benefits the special interests of a few while ultimately meaning you and your family pay more to make up the short fall.

In 1960, 17 of the 20 largest companies in the world were headquartered here in the U.Stoday that number sits at 6. Our tax code should promote economic growth, should be of assistance to you and your family and should help bring our economy into the 21st century, not be a deterrent to it. We should want American based companies to stay here, for foreign based companies to relocate here and for small business owners to be rewarded for their risk taking and hiring. We can get there through making our tax code attractive to investors, entrepreneurs and employers. The surest bet to increase wages in this country is to renew demand for the American worker, and we can get there reforming and simplifying our tax code so that America is once again the place businesses want to expand, invest, grow, and hire.

Ever increasing taxes to fulfill an insatiable appetite for Washington spending is no way to garner growth in this country. You deserve a government which rewards your hard work and a tax system which incentivizes success here at home, not one which punishes it. When we tax the fruits of hard work by American families, we punish those doing the most to move our country forward. Let this be the last tax day we fear scrambling for old receipts, payroll stubs and pencil sharpeners by renewing the call to overhaul an outdated and cumbersome tax code, replacing it with one which rewards, incentivizes and stimulates success & growth for you and your family here at home.

Jason Smith represents Missouris 8th Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives. Contact him at 573-335-0101 or visit https://jasonsmith.house.gov
The Houston City Council reorganized Monday following elections earlier in the month.

Two members were sworn in  Sheila Walker in Ward II and Victoria Castleman Narancich in Ward III  by City Clerk Tonya Foster. A third member, Joe Honeycutt in Ward I, was absent and will be sworn in later.

Due to the absence of Honeycutt and Alderman David Arthur, Mayor Don Tottingham said he was postponing the naming of a mayor pro-tem and other committee posts.

Steve Dunlap of Mountain Grove described a ministry that he operates at Mountain Grove and Juarez, N.M., that helps young woman who have been involved in human trafficking for sexual purposes. Dunlap said a home-like setting is establishing for the women as they rebuild their lives. Dunlap, who presented several letters of reference, said volunteers and various faith ministries assist.

The Houston-based location is proposed for Second and Main streets in downtown Houston, where Cornerstone Christian Church once met.

In other matters, members:

Approved a $73.10 per ton bid from Pace Construction for the citys annual asphalt overlay program. Thats about $6 per ton cheaper than last year as oil prices have dropped. Work must be done by Sept. 1.

Authorized a $22,570 bid for transformers for the citys electrical department.

Heard that drilling progress continues for a new city well and tower at the Houston Industrial Park. Workmen have drilled 750 feet toward a project that is expected to reach 1,100 to 1,200 feet.
Freda Marie Chipps Lewis, 76, passed away Monday, April 11, 2016.

She was born Jan. 23, 1940, in Salem, daughter of Wade Weldon Chipps and Vera Nell Scott.

She graduated from Houston High School and went to work in St Louis as a secretary for a major corporation for a couple years. She went to beauty school in the late 1950s and owned her own beauty show in Raymondville for two years. She then began working for Velma Wantland at the Chuckwagon cafe in Raymondville.

She opened and ran a clothing store, also in Raymondville, until her three children were born. She also worked at Horsemans Paradise Barn, which was owned by her parents, as a cook and waitress in the late 60s and 70s. She owned and operated Maries Dairy Freeze in Raymondville, now known as Acleadas Korner Kitchen. In the late 70s and 80s, she worked at HD Lee, doing various jobs, for more than 20 yrs until the factory closed.

She then returned to school and earned a degree in medical billing. She did her internship at Butch Burch Insurance in Houston and was offered a job there. She worked there many years until her health forced her to retire at age 73.

She had a number of hobbies, including quilting, embroidery and playing bunco, dominos and bingo.

She was preceded in death by her parents; three half-brothers, Wendell, Donny and Billy; and her husband, Ralph.

Survivors include three children, Dan Lee, Vern Weldon and Sherry Louann; six grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; three siblings, Bub, Marilyn and Myra; and many other family members and friends.

Memorial services were Friday, April 15, at Fox Funeral Home. Services were Saturday, April 16, at Big Creek Baptist Church with Pastor David Jett officiating.
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demand for a new type of HR professional and the move to bring together HR and other services under an employee experience umbrella is a compelling combination that will ultimately move HR forward, Ben Whitter, leader of organisation and people development at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, said.As for whether the concept of employee experience is a passing trend, Whitter is confident that this new role will be here for a long time to come.The flood of adverts now seeking a director of employee experience provides further evidence and assurance that this is not simply a shiny new concept, thing or HR fad, he said.Instead, it is something that businesses are taking very seriously in terms of how they develop and connect their business performance.So, a flash in the pan it isnt, and I note the growing number of HR practitioners trying on this new (or at the very least evolved) hat and liking its comfortable fit.There is a reason why this shift is occurring, Whitter added: mainly that it feels broad and all-encompassing.When practitioners talk of engagement it traditionally has felt like something was missing from the discussion, he said.Experience brings the whole of HR and much more into play. It appears somehow more complete, with massive potential to clearly demonstrate value and impact on business performance.However, there is always a caveat when making a concerted shift such as this, he added.Its very easy to create a nice new title and brand for HR, but the proof, as always, is in the pudding, he said. Thats why its so revealing to take a look at the accompanying job descriptions for these roles.In general, firms will line up the strategies behind these titles and lay out a much broader mandate required for success, he noted. This typically includes key services and functions which affect employee experience across the business.In reality, will continue to differ as businesses build their own versions of the new HR, he said.The fact that HR practitioners and business have generally reacted very positively to this shift is exciting, he said, adding that the trend itself has the potential to elevate HR into a true business leadership role.
ling asleep on the job might sound like an obvious case of gross misconduct but it seems the Employment Relations Authority thinks otherwise after it awarded one worker more than $5,000 for unfair dismissal.Mereana Taylor had worked as a night porter for eight years when she was fired for falling asleep on shift  she claimed to have sat down to rest her as shed been feeling generally unwell and had a sore back and neck.The long-service employee admitted that she couldnt remember falling asleep at around 3.40am but acknowledged being woken up by two kitchen staff at 5.35am.Taylor  who was the only employee on duty at the time  was supposed to let two colleagues into the building but they had been forced to wake one of the managing directors, Pete Tennent, instead.After two meetings, Tennent Hotels Ltd decided Taylors actions constituted serious misconduct as she had compromised the security, health and safety of guests  she was ultimately dismissed.However, while the employer appears to have provided the required consultation process, the Employment Relations Authority found there was no adequate investigation into Taylor's claims that her back was sore and she was unwell."A fair and reasonable employer could be expected to have requested that Ms Taylor obtain medical evidence, and to have considered that evidence, before deciding to dismiss her," the authority said in its findings.Tennent Hotels was eventually ordered to pay $5,488.20 to Taylor for lost wages and emotional reparation. Simpson Grierson lawyer Carl Blake told HRM that failure to follow a fair process was one of the most common firing mistakes among New Zealand employers.Regardless of how absolutely clear an employees misconduct may be  in the sense of even being videoed stealing money or engaging in absolutely serious misconduct  a process still needs to be followed, he stressed.
der may have changed the face of dating for millions of people around the world but for one young student, its also improved her employment prospects after the company offered her a paid internship as well as its first full scholarship.The impressive offer came after University of Nebraska Omaha student Shannon Workman had her sorority membership revoked for posting a risque photograph of herself on the app. The photo, which shows Workman and two fellow sorority sisters wearing Chi Omega shirts, was deemed to violate the sororitys Human Dignity rule.Theres no place for personal degradation within membership of Chi Omega, explained one chapter administrator but Workman insisted she hadnt done anything wrong and quit before the organization could forcibly remove her.However, Workman  who says she was in shock following the reprimand  now has a unique offer on the table which would surely be more sought after than a sorority membership.Tinder reached out to the 20-year-old, offering its first ever full scholarship as well as a paid internship.Its easy to give in and give up, Tinder co-founder and CEO Sean Rad told BuzzFeed News. We think what Shannon did sends a very empowering message to young women and college students, which is actually one of Tinders largest audiences. Dont conform, dont let people tell you your beliefs are wrong just because its not the same as their beliefs.Rad personally contacted Workman after the news broke and admitted it was a company first.Its the first time we reached out to someone whose story inspired us and asked them to be part of the team, he said. Her actions showed a depth of leadership and courage that is admirable and something we value as part of our company culture. We always want to stand up for our users who stand up for us.Workman was understandably thrilled with the offer and defended the dating app  I think its absolutely amazing, she said. I do stand up for Tinder because I dont think theres anything wrong with it. Some people use it for hookups but I dont, and a lot of great things happen through Tinder.
Americans are on the verge of consuming more bottled water than sugary soft drinks per capita for the first time ever.

U.S. residents have steadily been drinking more bottled water concurrently with a drop in pop consumption, says data released by Euromonitor.

This year, Americans can be expected to drink approximately 102 litres of bottled water, compared to about 98 litres worth of soft drinks.

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And that trend is only likely to continue, as these charts show.

Consumption of bottled water is set to overtake that of soda in the U.S. for 1st time https://t.co/AwXTrTuaCIpic.twitter.com/7gPXRx5a3y  Bloomberg (@business) April 15, 2016

Soda is about to go under water https://t.co/s2mFBT7RB7pic.twitter.com/TiSmCuabuD  Quartz (@qz) April 18, 2016

Bloomberg noted that Nestle SA, which owns brands such as Perrier and Poland Spring, could see a nice profit from this trend.

But it also said prices for bottled water are falling. Price pressure reduced Nestle's first-quarter growth by half a percentage point, the business news outlet said.

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The upward tick for bottled water comes as soft drink companies such as Pepsico turn to healthier beverages to boost their earnings, Quartz reported.

Pepsico's Naked Juice products grew by 60 per cent in the first quarter of 2016, while its Lipton tea products grew by 10 per cent, CEO Indra Nooyi said in a Monday earnings call.

Only 12 per cent of Pepsico's North American beverage revenue comes from the Pepsi soft drink, she added.

The real cost of bottled water

But bottling water also comes with an environmental cost.

A 2009 study out of the Pacific Institute found that long-distance transport of bottled water can "lead to energy costs comparable to, or even larger than, the energy to produce the bottle."

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The cost is also as much as 2,000 times larger than it is to produce tap water.

Bottled water is restricted in over 80 Canadian cities and towns. The City of Toronto, for example, bans the distribution and sale of bottled water in all city facilities, parks and civic centres, with some exceptions.

"While water bottles are recyclable, they still require a significant amount of energy to manufacture, transport and eventually recycle," the city says.

Montreal is also looking at restricting bottled water. Mayor Denis Coderre says the city "needs to have that debate on plastic."

Also on HuffPost:
In an effort to generate as much money as possible to slay its deficit, Newfoundland and Labrador has decided to implement a tax on ... books.

The Telegram reports the province, which introduced a budget last Thursday full of new fees and deep cuts, will up its harmonized sales tax (HST) to 15 per cent and slap it on book sales next year.

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Gavin Will, who owns a publishing company, told CBC News the tax will have an "immediate" effect on book sales in a province that already has Canada's lowest literacy rate.

The move would make Newfoundland the first province to impose such a tax. P.E.I and Nova Scotia considered a similar idea years ago, but eventually ditched it.

Newfoundland and Labrador Finance Minister Cathy Bennett presents the 2016 provincial budget at the House of Assembly in St.John's last week. (Photo:Paul Daly/The Canadian Press)

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"It sends a message that the government doesn't necessarily care about literacy, authors or the book publishing sector," Wills said in a CBC interview.

Alison Dyer, executive director of the Writers Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador, told The Telegram that the tax isn't even expected to net that much money.

Tax hikes galore

The province's budget, which despite the tax increases and cuts still forecasts a $1.8 billion deficit, has been blasted by critics as a "Tax on Pretty Much Everything Budget." Income taxes, as well as gas and cigarette taxes, are going up.

Finance Minister Cathy Bennett blamed 12 years of Progressive Conservative rule that ended when the Liberals won power last fall, promising "a stronger tomorrow."

She accused the Tories of squandering historic wealth with spending increases and tax cuts hinged on volatile oil prices that have since crashed.

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"The previous government's willingness to mortgage our future has left Newfoundland and Labrador with the biggest deficit and highest net debt ever recorded in our history," Bennett said in her speech to the legislature.

With files from The Canadian Press

Also on HuffPost
But according to E!, the "East-meets-West" tour wardrobe didn't come cheap. They're reporting Catherine's Indian and Bhutan royal tour ensembles cost a whopping $50,000 in total.

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We mean, what do you expect from a future queen?

Here's five of the Duchess' most expensive outfits:

Cost: $8,675

It is reported that the beaded Jenny Packham gown donned by the mother of Prince George and Princess Charlotte cost $6,000. And those Amrapali Jewels blue lapis earrings upped the cost with their $1,925 price tag.

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Cost: $7,875

In thanks to the pricey Kiki McDonough Lavender Amethyst Pear and Oval Drop earrings ($5,500), the 34-year-old's archery outfit was also up there in terms of cost. The ensemble also consisted of a fabric hand-woven by Mrs. Kelzang Wang Mo of Bhutan, which E! is reporting took five people and more than three months to tailor it for Kate.

Cost: $6,985

While meeting the world leader, Kate made sure to don something special. For the occasion, Middleton sported a $1,395 Alice Temperley Desdemona lace dress and another pair of expensive Kiki McDonough earrings, this time costing $4,950 in thanks to it being custom-made to commemorate the birth of Princess Charlotte.

Cost: $6,695

In celebration of the Queen's upcoming birthday, the Duchess donned a beautiful Alice Temperley Delphia skirt and matching crop top that cost $4,520. The Prada bag in hand upped the price by $1,340.

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Cost: $5,385

Kate almost suffered a Marilyn Monroe moment in her free-flowing Emilia Wickstead gown which rang in at $2,500. She paired the look with Rupert Sanderson pink pumps ($600) and Temple of Heaven earrings ($1,495).

And if you're wondering what Kate's cheapest outfit looked like, it's the printed dress she wore to feed baby elephants and rhinos. It's a Topshop steal for $140. The whole outfit, with recycled wedges and Accessorize earrings, comes in at smooth $208.

What have we learned here? Looking good doesn't come cheap...but we'll always have Topshop.

Check out the slideshow below for all of Kate Middleton's royal tour looks:

Kate Middleton's Outfits From The Royal Visit 2016 - India And Bhutan See Gallery

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OTTAWA  "You'll need to volunteer yourself for this," reads a tag line at the bottom of a GIF the Liberal party used to mobilize young Canadians during the last federal election.

The GIF is a scene from "Arrested Development," the critically acclaimed television show, in which socially inept Buster tells his brother, Michael: "Mom volunteered me for the army. Just because the fat man dared her to."

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The GIF on the party website includes only the first part of that quote, but it is one of several pieces of content the Liberals used last fall to connect with and encourage young voters to cast a ballot.

Six months after the last election campaign, the impact of the Liberals' outreach to 18- and 24-year-olds  a fully developed media campaign that addressed young Canadians on issues such as marijuana legalization, youth jobs, the environment, affordable post-secondary education and the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning and two-spirited people, otherwise known as LGBTQ2 rights  is getting more attention.

A new survey out Tuesday from Abacus Data suggests young Canadians were critical to the Liberal party's majority victory on Oct. 19.

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Liberal leader Justin Trudeau addresses students and staff during a campaign event at St. Thomas University Wednesday, October 7, 2015 in Fredericton. (Photo: Paul Chiasson/CP)

Forty-five per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 25 voted Liberal, compared with 25 per cent for the NDP and 20 per cent for the Conservative Party, the online poll of 1,000 suggests.

More young people voted for the Liberals in every region of the country, including in Alberta, than for any other party.

The Liberals' gains came mostly at the expense of the NDP, the Abacus survey indicates. Forty-three per cent of young voters who had gone NDP in 2011 voted Liberal in 2015, while 29 per cent of young Tory voters switched to the Grits.

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The online survey of Canadians aged 18 to 25 was conducted between Feb. 8 and 15. The margin of error for a comparable probability-based random sample of the same size is +/- 3.2%, 19 times out of 20.

'Young people coalesced around one option'

"Young people affected the last election in a way they haven't in the past," David Coletto, the CEO of Abacus Data, told The Huffington Post Canada. "We see much higher evidence of a higher turnout among those under 34, and, really for the first time since 1997, young people coalesced around one option."

Coletto said he believes "young people really gave the Liberals a majority."

"The Liberals probably would have won, had [youth] turnout been what it was in 2011, but I think [the increase in the youth vote] really pushed them over."

While the Liberals' vote grew by double-digits across all age groups, Coletto's survey suggests that the increase in support among young people was most impressive as it represented a 30-point swing among voters aged 18 to 29 and a 31-point swing among those aged 30 to 44.

His findings are similar to a Statistics Canada survey from February that also reported a 12-point increase in voter turnout for youth aged 18 to 24, and an 11-point increase for those age aged 25 to 34.

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Youth influence not so 'trivial'

Back in 2013, when HuffPost first wrote about then newly elected Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's efforts to reach out to young people with a pledge to legalize marijuana and by making numerous campus visits, pollsters Frank Graves from EKOS and Darrell Bricker of Ipsos Public Affairs cast doubt on the strategy.

Young people have a "trivial influence" on election outcomes because of their declining voting rates, Graves told HuffPost.

"If the youth voted, it would change a lot," Bricker added. "But you first need them to show up."

Young people, he said, don't vote because they don't think their vote matters.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau poses with Caitlynn Charteris, Jay Cee Hebron and Tory Shynkaruk as he visits the Saskatchewan Roughrider practice field on Friday, July 5, 2013, in Regina. (Photo: Roy Antal/CP)

During the 2011 election, Elections Canada estimated, less than 39 per cent of young Canadians cast a ballot. In 2008, the agency's best guess was that 37 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds had participated.

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Canada's chief electoral officer, Marc Mayrand, was particularly concerned about the low turnouts.

"If young people understood their collective influence and started to vote at the same rate as the general population, then that would mean 700,000 more votes at the election. That is bound to have an influence," Mayrand told HuffPost.

While it may not have been a sure bet, Liberals did set out to engage what they believed would be a core demographic for their electoral strategy, and they devoted considerable resources to involving young people, especially in the last weeks of the 2015 election.

Betting on youth proved expensive

At the outset of the campaign, the Liberals found identifying young voters online to be expensive, said Tom Pitfield, the person responsible for the Liberals' digital campaign and the current head of the think tank Canada 2020. So the party focused on other segments of voters, while it knocked on campus doors and pushed its message out to young people through shareable campaigns.

As HuffPost first outlined in a piece about the Liberals' winning strategy immediately after the election, Trudeau's team designed a campaign titled #matters that focused solely on young people's issues. A microsite, built by Pitfield's team of 20-somethings, included compelling digital videos featuring real people, some of which went viral and helped the Liberals spread their message beyond the youth demographic to their parents, teachers and siblings.

A few days before on-campus advance polls opened on Oct. 5, the Grits made a big and expensive push on Facebook, Youtube, and Vice, among other sites, to get their message out, Pitfield said.

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Trudeau also sat down for with Vice for a town hall in which he urged young people to head out to the polls, a key point of the #matters campaign, telling them "Stephen Harper doesn't want you to vote." The clip went viral.

One of the best explanations for the importance of voting that I've ever heard. And I would have given kudos to Harper or Mulcair had they said it too. Posted by Sandenn Killoran on Tuesday, 6 October 2015

"We hit hard," Pitfield said. "We spent a lot of money doing it and reaching out to [youth] based on the content that they engaged in."

The Liberals were also aided by having a party leader who was, in Pitfield's words, "likeable" and who connected well with young people.

"We did use it to our advantage in any way we could."

The Liberals' electoral strategy depended on bringing new voters to the polls, and they did. Voter turnout rose from 61.1 per cent in 2011 to 68.5 per cent  the highest since 1993.

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"I think the lesson is: Don't write off young people. Don't write them off as being apathetic and unengaged."  David Coletto, Abacus Data CEO

Getting young people out to vote was also helped in part by an Elections Canada pilot project that included new polling stations on some university campuses and in community centres.

Another reason for the higher voter turnout among young Canadians, Coletto suggests, is all the get-out-the-vote campaigns by organizations such as Apathy is Boring and the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, which commissioned his survey. More than one-third, 37 per cent, of the voting youth reported being encouraged to vote by an organization working to increase turnout among younger voters, the Abacus survey suggest.

Millennials a force in 2019

So what does it all mean?

Coletto believes the young people  millennials, those born between 1980 and 2000  could constitute the largest voting group in 2019, becoming an influential and powerful block.

"I think the lesson is: Don't write off young people. Don't write them off as being apathetic and unengaged."

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For Trudeau's government, keeping young voters happy and engaged is key to a successful re-election strategy, Coletto added.

So far, he sees signs the Liberals are listening to their younger demographic of voters. Trudeau appointed himself minister of youth, and the federal budget included many policies and programs aimed at youth employment and affordable post-secondary education, he noted.

"It's not easy to get young people engaged and get them to turn out again, so I think the results suggest that as we head towards the next election, as far away as that is, this government, probably more than any government before, has a real motivation to keep young people engaged  and I think that's a fundamental change."

ALSO ON HUFFPOST:
A Philadelphia father has been charged with third-degree murder after he confessed to shooting his daughter by accident.

Maurice Phillips, 30, admitted to shooting four-year-old Tahirah Saturday, police told WPVI.

"It was a stupid, idiotic act. He was completely reckless in doing this and, unfortunately, a four-year-old lost her life," said Capt. James Clark of the Philadelphia Police Homicide Unit.

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People at the home initially told police the girl's five-year-old sibling had accidentally shot in her in the head while playing with a gun, according to Philly.com, but Phillips later turned himself in Saturday evening to say he did it.

Phillips fled the home after the shooting, according to police, which they believe happened in a bedroom where Tahirah and her six siblings were playing and watching TV.

After the gun accidentally went off, police say Phillips hit Tahirah's five-year-old sister and wiped blood on her shirt.

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He hit the girl, police told WPVI, to make it look like she was being punished.

He then put Tahirah into another bedroom and called his fiance. Once she came home, he changed clothes and fled.

He faces charges of third-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, endangering the welfare of children, possession of an instrument of crime and recklessly endangering another person.

Also on HuffPost
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested Tuesday that there was nothing unusual about his foreign affairs minister not seeking his input before signing export permits for the $15-billion Saudi arms deal.

Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion told The Globe and Mail a day earlier that Trudeau and his advisers were not involved in the call to approve permits covering most of the deal, though he said he consulted with International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland.

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Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion is congratulated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a ceremony at Rideau Hall, in Ottawa, on Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2015. (Photo: Sean Kilpatrick/CP)

Dion told The Globe it was a "ministers decision," not one for cabinet.

In question period Tuesday, NDP foreign affairs critic Helene Laverdiere said Canadians were led to believe everything was a "done deal" and deserve to know "who is running the show."

"Is it true that the prime minister and the PMO were kept completely in the dark about the signing of the export permits?" she asked.

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Trudeau said he has been clear since the election campaign that a Liberal government would honour the contract, adding such a step sends a signal to the world that "when Canada signs a deal, it is respected."

But he also reminded the House that his is a "government by cabinet," which evidently means he wont be involved in every decision.

"I have tremendous confidence in the ministers in our government to make the right decisions on files that cross their desks, and they do so with the full support of the prime minister because that is why we put them in this job," he said.

Laverdiere shot back that Liberals were a long way from openness and transparency.

'Government by cabinet is back'

At a press conference with his cabinet in November, shortly after he was sworn in as prime minister, Trudeau hinted that his approach to government would be much different than his predecessor. Former prime minister Stephen Harper had a reputation for being a one-man band during his decade in power.

"This is going to be a period of slight adjustment in the political world in Canada, because government by cabinet is back," Trudeau said at the time.

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But giving ministers a long leash could also help insulate Trudeau from controversy.

Last week, BuzzFeed Canada reported that Trudeau did not attend the emergency debate in the House on the Attawapiskat suicide crisis. Trudeau instead went out for dinner with his wife and made an appearance at a book launch.

The Prime Ministers Office told the website that Trudeaus cabinet was "well-represented" at the debate by Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett, and others.

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Former Guantanamo inmate Omar Khadr is getting married, according to media reports.

A friend of the 29-year-old confirmed his engagement to human rights activist Muna Abougoush, according to CTV News.

Abougoush, a University of Alberta graduate, played a key role in rallying a network of supporters to advocate for Khadrs freedom. She helped keep his case in the news and encouraged people to write letters to him while he was in jail.

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Postmedia cited Facebook posts congratulating the couple on their upcoming nuptials, including one that read: I am so happy to think you will be sharing your future together after so many years of shared past.

Omar Khadr walks out the front door of his lawyer Dennis Edney's home to speak the media in Edmonton on May 7, 2015. (Photo: Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press)

In 2013, Abougoush met the former child soldier for the first time while visiting him at the medium-security Bowden, Alta. prison he was serving his sentence at.

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She admitted she was nervous when it came time to meeting Khadr in person after years of supporting his case from behind the scenes.

This case that everyone had been talking about for over a decade was about to become a real person, she told the Toronto Star at the time.

She told the newspaper their conversations broached topics that ranged from schools, different education paths, cars.

Plea to Canadians

Khadr was 15 when he was captured wounded in Afghanistan during a firefight. At the time, he was the youngest prisoner and only Westerner to be held at Guantanamo Bay.

He pleaded guilty to multiple war crimes in 2010 and was sentenced to an additional eight years in prison by a United States military commission.

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I'll prove to them that I'm a good person.

In 2012, he was transferred to serve the remainder of his sentence in Canada. After nearly 13 years behind bars, Khadr was granted bail last year. He asked Canadians to give him a chance.

I will prove to them that I'm more than what they thought of me, I'll prove to them that I'm a good person, he told reporters.

The former Conservative government condemned the judges decision at the time, releasing a statement saying, (We) regret that a convicted terrorist has been allowed back into Canadian society without having served his full sentence.

Abiding by one of his bail conditions, he currently lives in Edmonton with his lawyer Dennis Edney.

With files from The Canadian Press

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By Carolina Prado

World Vision (WV) has been contributing to the improvement of children's well-being in different parts of the developing world for a very long time. We do this mainly through the "development program approach," which has been rooted in decades of field experience.

This approach intends to equip field level staff to work effectively with a whole variety of local partners towards the sustained well-being of children, within their families and communities. All the partners, families and children will participate in the process of planning and implementing the program. In this article I would like to share what the results of this approach look like in reality.

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It is the rainy period in the Peruvian Andes and maybe landslides will block the road. Jeronimo, Catalina and their two daughters, Karol, eight, and Karla, 12, are part of the program WV implements in this area. They live in Ramon Castillo, a small rural community. To get there, it is necessary to take a long journey in the tortuous Andean highlands, about ix hours by car from Trujillo, capital of La Libertad.

The communities in Ramon Castillo, located about 2,500 metres above sea level, lack access to basic health and to quality education services and children may suffer from respiratory diseases, high incidence of diarrhea, as well as malnutrition, due to inappropriate feeding and hygiene habits and to poor sanitary infrastructure. Challenging access to the nearest city market makes it complicated for small farmers to sell their products (1) and they end up selling at very low prices to middlemen, who will resell the products at a much higher price.

Andean traditional culture usually puts women in an inferior place -- as they are not granted the social space to share their views publicly, if men are present. Gender-based violence is a serious issue, as is domestic violence. It is common for children to be disciplined through physical punishment and they are usually very shy and do not express themselves freely in public. These are sensitive issues to approach in a cultural respectful way; however child protection and gender equality are necessary components of the development approach in the Peruvian highlands.

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Nonetheless, it is possible to observe a different reality in the program that has been implemented by WV together with local partners since 2007, and the impact of this approach is sound and clear. The positive changes are the result of a long-term community partnering approach to poverty reduction. At community meetings, volunteer women and children were happy to talk about their community life and the impact the program has had in their lives.

Karol and Karla have been sponsored by WV and are participating in activities for the last seven years. Both of their parents are volunteers and also have been benefitted from the economic development and leadership strengthening actions. Their mother, Catalina, says that the early childhood development activities have supported her daughters to socialize, not to be shy and have prepared them to enter primary school ready to learn. Health activities have supported them to decrease the level of malnutrition in the community:

"There were many changes in the way we raise our children, there is no child abuse in this community. There are good changes in health, learning, and hygiene habits. We have learned to always wash our hands; children who go to early childhood development activities are ready to enter school, and learn to love to read, through the Ludoteca and Reading Backpack activities (2)."

Jeronimo and Catalina share they have participated in the planning of the program, which has supported small farmers with guinea pigs' breeding, for their own consumption and for commercialization. Today this is a source of income for families. He mentions WV has partnered with them to improve their agriculture production, providing seeds and supporting to set up the irrigation system, so their crops can be well irrigated throughout the year. More profitable commercialization channels are still challenges, though.

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The family has been benefitted with the "Enhanced Kitchen" activity, which educates families to build their kitchens outside their adobe houses, directly decreasing the rate of respiratory diseases in children.

Karla, the oldest daughter, shared a bit of her routine: she wakes up early, and after breakfast she takes a 40 minutes' walk to school. She loves studying, and after getting home, she has lunch and helps their parents with the farm. Later, she will have a time to study, read, or draw at the Learning Place (3), together with her sister Karol and to play afterwards.

When I asked Karla about what she wants to do when she grows up, her answer was:

"I want to go to the university and study to be an Agricultural Engineer. And then I want to come back to my house and work here, with my parents. I love to live here and I love this farm!"

This is the best indicator of the program's impact: children are healthy, happy, studying and hold a life project that includes staying in the rural area, working with their families to continue improving their quality of life.

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(1) potatoes, avocado, passion fruit, tree tomato, quinoa, wheat

(2) Ludoteca is a literacy stimulation strategy that the ADP implements in partnership with the local primary school and through the Reading BackPack children and their families can bring books to their homes and have a reading time with their family. Families are also encouraged to have "Learning Place" for their children at home

(3) A WV education tool - of supporting families to secure an appropriate place in their houses for children to study

Carolina Prado is Program Manager at World Vision Canada

The views expressed in this blog are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of CCIC or its members.

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Tomasz WyszoAAmirski

Just like the rest of Canada, Quebec wants a diversified economy based on full employment, the use of its natural resources and its know-how. Let's not lose sight of the fact that Energy East is more than just a steel pipe. It is the logical extension of the industrial policies of the last 10 years. This is a political and economic infrastructure which will influence the direction of our economy for the next decades.

Unfortunately, for the past 10 years, the economic policy of Canada has relied on the exportation of an unrefined natural resource without any added value. As long as the market price of a barrel of oil was over $80, it was easy money!

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This put the Canadian dollar on steroids. A Canadian dollar on par with the U.S. greenback made our manufactured products non-competitive to our most important trading partners, especially the United States.

This archaic policy has had a devastating effect on our manufacturing sector, in Quebec as well as in Ontario. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost. So much so that Ontario, the traditional pillar of Canada's economy, has had to receive equalization payments for the first time in its history. With the fall in the price of oil, the Harper government was forced to talk of ''recession'' during the 2015 electoral campaign.

One does not need a degree in economics to understand the necessity of exploiting our natural resources with value added.

Will we allow ourselves to again become a ''company town," an economic dinosaur at the mercy of the price fluctuations of the market?

Which is the more profitable? To sell iron ore at ''une cenne la tonne,'' as in the Duplessis era, or sell a finished product like an angle-iron ( 2 X 2 X 1/4 X 20 feet) for $38.24? Since the weight of the angle-iron is 64 lbs, that means selling our iron for $1.67 per pound instead of one cent per ton.

Similarly, to export unrefined "dilbit" is to to exploit a natural resource as our ancestors did at the time of the United-Canadas in 1840. At that time, we were exploiting another natural resource, wood. ''Cages'' (or rafts) of logs came down the Ottawa River to be loaded on boats. Transforming the logs into planks and beams was reserved for the economy and workers of England.

We were not an economy; we were a colony in the service of England!

By building Energy East, Quebec -- and Canada -- are regressing to a 19th-century economy in which we would become a ''company town,'' one of those small, mono-industrial municipalities whose fortunes are linked to the fluctuations of the price of commodities on international markets. To build Energy East is to allow Quebec as well as Canada to become just such an economic dinosaur.

In the beginning of the 21st century, should Canada, an industrial nation of the G8, have a diversified, knowledge-based economy? Or will we allow ourselves to again become a ''company town," an economic dinosaur at the mercy of the price fluctuations of the market?

Even Saudi Arabia wants to diversify its economy so as not to remain dependent on oil. Why does Canada wish to return to the status of a resource economy of the 19th century? Is a policy that hamstrings our manufacturing and service sectors good for our future?

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Not only will Energy East export our crude oil, it will also export all the greenhouse gases (GHG) associated with its refining and combustion. It is impossible to respect our commitments at the Paris Conference without also exporting our greenhouse gases.

"To be or not to be. That is the question!" Will we know how to adapt to the 21st-century economy and its technological revolution? Even more important, will we know how to do what is necessary to avoid disastrous climate change?

The dinosaurs, which did not know how to adapt to reality, have disappeared! It is Darwin's Law.

To refuse Energy East is to adapt to the new reality.

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Aping Vision / STS via Getty Images medical staff

Autonomy, it would seem, is an intoxicant. The more we have, the more we want. In tabling its draft legislation on physician-hastened death, the Federal Government has rejected several key recommendations made by the Parliamentary Committee on Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID). In the days ahead, as Canadians weigh in on Bill C-14, some will say it has gone far enough. Those craving more autonomy, however, will insist it must go further.

The draft legislation does not include the Parliamentary Committee's recommendation to allow death hastening by way of advance directives for people with dementia. Those jurisdictions that have attempted to include an advance directive provision for dementia have found it completely untenable. Physicians almost always find it 'inconceivable' to comply with these requests, given the patient with dementia is a psychologically different person than the one who signed the advance directive.

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Physicians are not able to determine the patient's current wishes, feel the patient is not suffering or no longer wants to die. While family members support forgoing life-prolonging treatment, most ask the euthanasia directive not be followed because of uncertainty about the person's current wishes, not being ready for the person to die or not sensing that the person is suffering.

The draft legislation did not abide the Parliamentary Committee's recommendation to include patients with psychiatric illness. Based on lessons from jurisdictions with death hastening experience, the government landed on the right side of this tragically difficult issue. In Oregon, the lawyers, psychiatrists and other physicians I spoke with -- many, ardent supporters of the Death With Dignity Act -- found the idea of physician-hastened death for non-terminally ill psychiatric patients utterly inconceivable.

Recent data from Holland indicates that physician-hastened death on psychiatric grounds is fraught with difficulty. A study of people who received euthanasia or assisted suicide for psychiatric reasons reported that the majority were women, with issues including depression, psychosis, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, substance abuse; various forms of cognitive impairment such as intellectual disability or early dementia, eating disorders, prolonged grief and autism. Most had personality disorders and were described as socially isolated and lonely.

In one quarter of instances, despite differences of opinion between physicians, death hastening proceeded. In about one third of cases initially refused, most were carried out by new physicians willing to comply. Mental illness often leads people to see themselves as worthless, to believe their situation is hopeless, and to perceive that their lives have little value. Little wonder a death-hastening response is so deeply problematic.

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The Government also rejected the Parliamentary Committee's suggestion that the law include mature minors. They suggested that this issue requires further study. They would be well advised to speak with people caring for children with life threatening and life limiting conditions, including pediatric specialists (oncologists, palliative care clinicians), child psychologists, development specialists; and of course, family members of critically ill children. In discussing the issue of minors, these voices have not as yet been heard.

Bill C-14 bears some of the hallmarks of Quebec's legislation, with eligibility including a natural death being reasonably foreseeable and the patient being in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capabilities. Just what that means and how it will play out remains to be seen.

One would hope that every patient whose angst expresses itself as a wish to die would have access to palliative care expertise, including a thorough and detailed evaluation of the physical, psychosocial, existential and spiritual drivers motivating their request for hastened death.

Since the government is committed to reviewing this legislation in five years, it is critical that data of this kind be collected, prospectively, in order to inform future policy amendments. While autonomy can be intoxicating, clear and sober thinking must prevail as we move towards a MAID in Canada approach.
Copyright by Ata Mohammad Adnan via Getty Images A muslim woman making dua(prayers) as light falls on her palm.

Gretta Vosper, who has been dubbed as the atheist minister, recently expressed on CTV that people "are not in search of doctrinal beliefs that are dictated by religious organizations" but rather "want to find ways to create meaning in their lives, ... improve their own well-being and their engagement in the community beyond themselves."

Vosper's incisive observations holds true for many Canadians like Rob Wells of Southminster Steinhauer United, who passionately believes:

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"My god is not a being; not an old bearded man with winged cherubs; not someone who loves us but casts us into eternal damnation whenever his mood swings; not an old man who plays favourites by granting prayers for some and not for others. ... I will be more than content with the gift of life and love, joyfully celebrating the blessings of this life and, when the time comes, making space for those who come after me with a big HALLELUJAH!"

Vosper's words also hold true for Muslims, despite some conservative Muslims touting Islam as the fastest growing religion imbued with "the truth." Indeed, for many Muslims, God is not a stingy merchant engaged in debit-credit accounting or a partisan bully that enforces hollow rituals by threats of eternal damnation. For them ritual prayer is not about seeking material gains from a stern taskmaster but having an undying trust in the power of hope, mercy and compassion.

Many Muslims are more concerned about ethical living instead of doctrinal differences, which have wreaked much suffering in the Muslim world. It is important to showcase such Muslim voices, including those of the unmosqued, to affirm the reality that Islam and Muslims are not a monolith. The following is a kaleidoscope of such Muslim views.

Islam is often defined as submission, which for me amounts to being in a state of sanctuary that no matter how bleak things are they will sort out, if not now then in the infinite future. As such, to know God is a move towards this state of inner peace.

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The Director of Universalist Muslims, Shahla Khan Salter captures this essence of Islam as submission in the following words.

"Islam means to submit. But to what? To dogma? No. I feel as Muslims we can reflect on the 99 names of Allah - The Merciful, The Compassionate, The Loving, The Just, The Nourisher, The Light ... Personally, I ask myself how can I get through each day by being more loving, forgiving, nourishing - notwithstanding any difficulties I may face. To me surrendering to those qualities and making them part of you is not easy but may be a way to create a life with fewer regrets and hopefully a better world. To me that is submission. One's ego must be set aside and pride must be swallowed to embrace those qualities sometimes, particularly when life gets hard."

Suroor Ali emphasizes religious pluralism, which is often echoed through Rumi as "the lamps are different but the light is the same," as follows.

"For me, God is one Reality ... This Truth shines through each uniquely coloured window (religion) into the Universe with us perceiving the eternally cloaked Light as best as we can. ... For me, accepting that different truths merge to contemplate one Truth is what makes my Islam an accepting and tolerating truth."

On the other hand, Dr. Asma Sayed at MacEwan University, emphasizes constant reflection as the hallmark of Islam through the following words.

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"A constant search - within and without; in nature; in living things; on planet Earth. A constant process of learning. Being able to question: - and yes, that means questioning his/her/its existence as well."

For Jamila Tharp, who is an Imam, spiritual guide and a Unitarian Universalist candidate for ministry, the essence of Islam lies in its cardinal teaching of Oneness, which affirms the golden rule. She writes:

"My orienting guide is the most fundamental concept in Islam, Tawhid meaning the oneness [of creation], the Unity of One. My faith is a verb, a practice of remembrance of this indivisible oneness, the reality that we all come from one source, love, and that we all return to the source, love. Islam teaches me that it is not enough that we want or strive for ourselves good health, security, prosperity and deep connections, but instead we must want for and strive for each other what we want and have for our self."

To reiterate, for many Muslims, Islam is about having inner peace, acknowledging multiple paths to the Sacred, having constant reflection and nurturing community based on Oneness.

It is probable that hardliners may unabashedly view such viewpoints as heretical. However, just as we cannot pry into the hearts of others, it is only through our deepest recesses that we can try to fathom the unknowable.

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As Director of Muslims for Progressive Values in Columbus, Ohio - Frank Parmir, poetically expresses:

The Pure and Perfect Resonance of The One Eternal Presence is all there is for us to see. And It is our seeing too.

In essence, Vosper is right in her observation that for many Canadians, and to this I shall add Muslims, organized religion is not as important as seeking community and sharing social values, norms and engagement.

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One of the most important concepts I've ever come across is the concept of an education itself. We live in a world where there are an endless amount of injustices that are going on, most of which can in fact be prevented by education. Education (lack of it) primarily held accountable for being the problem, but is a huge contributor to the solution. It is the solution.

We can begin with defining education in itself, what does this term actually mean? Education is, "The process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university." To educate, is to give intellectual, moral, and social instruction to (someone), typically at a school or university.

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Its origin is from old English, it came from the Latin word educat which meant "led out." It originated from the mid 17th century term duct, which, coming from the Latin word ductus, meant both "leading" and "aqueduct" formed from ducere, "to lead." With no mention of it having to be done through formal instruction. Simply a matter of leading one's mind, and exposing them to the wondrous world of knowledge.

The fourth Global Goal, is Quality Education, with the aim to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all."

Notice the use of the term, "quality" which implies that, the education needs to be of quality, and not quantity, or simply good reputation. There are a lot of schools built in areas all around the world that provide education, but it's not of quality.

Why is it that while we're all living on the same planet, there are worlds of difference between developed and developing countries when it comes to basic education infrastructure?

A child may learn more from a intelligent individual on the street than he/she ever would in a classroom with a teacher that's not dedicated to providing quality education for the child. Sometimes, it doesn't even have to do with the teacher itself, it could also have to do with the content that the teacher is provided with, and required to teach.

According to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, every single person on this planet, has the right to an education. So why is it, that even today, in a time so advanced as ours, that 785 million adults worldwide are still illiterate? And why are two thirds of that figure women?

The problem we need to worry about even more, is the fact that people, are not educated about their rights, which leads to the uneducated constantly being taken advantage of, and put into horrible situations as a result.

Why is it that while we're all living on the same planet, there are worlds of difference between developed and developing countries when it comes to basic education infrastructure? It all has to do with one word, that can change everything. Access. Access to knowledge of one's world; access to the knowledge of what one's basic human rights are, and access to quality education. Entire regimes thrive under the lack of knowledge from their citizens, and the access to it, the understanding of it, ultimately leads to their downfall.

Time and time again, kingdoms and leaderships rise and fall, only to attempt to gain control using the same strategies that were used in the past. Is it so hard to consider that if citizens were granted the access from the beginning, then maybe they'd be more willing to give back to their communities in a positive way? As said by Maimonides, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." It all ties back to quality education, which will have significant long term effects on an individual, who will as a result have an impact on the generations to come, that will ultimately affect the nation and the world.

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Access to quality education will be the difference between an uneducated member of society who'll ultimately do more harm than good, and a member of society who has the skills, information, and self confidence that makes better citizens overall. The educated are able to have the opportunity to discover themselves, their environment and world, and make better, educated decisions in regards to their futures.

Understanding that the long term effects of educated citizens includes not only individual benefits but also benefits to nations and the generations to come, has guided many thriving nations to putting the much needed emphasis on education. As said by Nelson Mandela, "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." It gives people the opportunity to think critically, and take action for their beliefs.

Although there are an endless amount of individuals who fight for quality education rights in communities all over the world, I'd like to highlight the work of one girl in particular.

Humaira Bachal - Founder of the Dream School Trust - Mawach Goth in Karachi, Pakistan

After facing constant challenges to go to school -- by both society and her family, backed by her mother throughout her journey Humaira completed her education despite the odds. She then founded the "Dream School Model School" for street children -- to ensure that every child on the streets went to school as well. After endless struggle and commitment, she was able to become part of founding the Dream School Trust, and build a real model school.

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What's unique about this school is that children are also taught Socio-economic enhancement education, Gender, Social and Civic responsibilities as well as Minority Right's education. Read more about the Dream School Foundation, their journey to this point, and the unique and effective quality education they provide to students, here.

I hope that if anything, you were able to conclude from this blog that an education, matters, and that examples are set by many organizations worldwide to be followed, supported and drawn inspirations from. From this blog, I'd love for you to take the message that, you are powerful, and if you see something you don't like in your community, country, or world, use your education, your knowledge, to change it.

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The five things you need to know on Tuesday April 19, 2016

1) BRINGUS THE BOGEYMAN

After the Treasury stat attack on Brexit yesterday, its the turn of Michael Gove to hit back with his own Big Speech. Not that hell be using his own statistics all that much, despite the goading of George Osborne (the Leave camp dont want to repeat the mistake of the SNPs independence White Paper that detailed just how much the oil bonanza would boost the nation).

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Instead, Gove will try a judo move, where you use your opponents weight against them, saying that the sheer avalanche of Project Fear stories is like treating voters like children with a nightly story about the bogeyman. Its almost as if the Justice Secretary is saying keep on using the bogeyman because it proves youre worried.

And some in the In camp certainly are worried. The first jitters appeared over the last few days, with the big fear of low turnout and fears of a migrant crisis looming among some Remain ministers and MPs. The polls look a bit better today (ORB has a wider 9 point gap for Remain), but Lynton Crosby writes in the Telegraph that Leave can swing it: if it mobilises the 11% who think the UKs immigration system would benefit from Brexit, but who are not yet backing the Leave camp.

And on immigration, lots of papers give Osborne a kicking over the buried bit of his report admitting he will rely on missing his migration target to get growth. The Sun lays into Osbornes Crystal Balls. The Mirror tries to square the In camp circle saying George Osborne's figures "are iffy, as is the norm with this tricky chancellor, but there is no doubt that Britain would be a poorer country if we left Europe"

The continuing problem of having a split Leave campaign emerged again yesterday, as Arron Banks suggested families losing 4,300 was a small price to pay. Brexiteer Allison Pearson made the same mistake last night on ITVs The Agenda, saying the figure was more likely only 1,000. Osborne took her down mercilessly, saying that was still a lot of dosh for many families.

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On the Today prog, Gove was given an uninterrupted few minutes in the prime 8.10am slot. That was a party election broadcast from Michael Gove Nick Robinson joked at the end. But thats exactly what it sounded like. I wonder if Osborne was offered a similar uninterrupted essay yesterday?

For Labour voters - and many floating voters - both Gove and Osborne are among the most loathed members of the Government and its unclear how much either of them can make the impact thats needed for their respective causes among the key 'undecideds'. When it comes to 'Bogeymen', you don't get many more politicians with greater negative ratings than the pair of them. Who knows, Beefy Botham and Boris versus Alan Johnson and Martin Lewis may be the real contest.

Mary Creagh, whose Environmental Audit Committee today explains why Brexit would be bad for the environment, has blogged for HuffPost.

2) OBAMA DRAMA

The White House can relax: Jeremy Corbyn wants to meet the Prez in London this weekend. He is keen to meet Obama, said a Labour spokesman, adding the party was working to make it happen and that Jez was an admirer of Obamacare. The Times is defending its story yesterday, insisting it still hasn't been sorted.

As for that other famous American import, Corbyn stood firm last night as MPs confronted him over the plan to ban McDonalds from party conference. In a sign of how much he is now more prepared to face down his PLP critics, the Labour leader said it was right to make a stand for union rights. The PLP was quietish, with just a couple of references to anti-semitism. Corbyn also warned MPs against making predictions in the local elections, which was probably an attempt to stop the Shadow Shadow Cabinet from talking about all those 400 gains he should be making.

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It turns out Mrs Obama will join her husband for the birthday lunch with the Queen and the Duke this Friday (now thats what I call a Quad). Not that IDS is enamoured of the Presidents decision to intervene in the EU referendum. Speaking in Washington yesterday, he tells the Telegraph Cameron had begged Obama "on bended knee" to help "bully the British people. Strong stuff (which kinda confirms IDS aint expecting a Cabinet recall when this is all over).

Its primary day in New York state. Donald Trump is expected to win. But overnight hes had a brain fade and instead of saying 9/11 said 7/11. (watch THIS). Maybe late-night shopping was on his mind.

3) WAR GAMES

Barack Obama wants Europeans to do more in Libya to stem the chaos (which is kinda ironic given he had to be convinced by Cameron and Sarkozy to topple Gaddafi). Philip Hammonds surprise appearance in the country yesterday focused on stemming migrant flows but it also fuelled the already heightened rumours that the UK is set to deploy troops in some form.

But those suspicious of whats going on were even more struck by the way Michael Fallon yesterday told MPs that he was not going ahead with William Hagues 2011 pledge to enshrine in law the necessity of consulting parliament on military action. The Defence Sec dumped the promise because it would constrain the operational flexibility of the armed forces. He also insisted a convention to consult MPs on military action did not cover UK personnel embedded with the armed forces of other nations.

No10 insisted at lobby that It would be wrong to make any connection. But the Telegraph rightly smells a rat and splashes the story that troops could now be sent to Libya without a Commons vote. The Times has a Government source saying the PM wants to stop MPs from testing the limits and expanding a convention that parliament votes for major military action. The changing nature of warfare has made it harder to codify.

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Its not just special forces, its embedded troops and others grey areas the MoD and No10 are worried about. But as Chilcot looms (in theory it could be published from this week, though civil servants may be nervous of purdah), its a reminder that the legacy of Iraq hasnt gone away.

BECAUSE YOUVE READ THIS FAR

Watch Labours MSP candidate Ken Macintosh singing Return of the Mac in his new carpool Karaoke video. Its a fun way to encourage voter registration, but the SNP may point out therell be no return of this Mac to Eastwood: hes on course to lose his constituency.

4) SEXT BOMB

The first ever Commons inquiry into sex harassment in schools is being launched by the Women and Equalities Committee - and thanks to the charity Fixers it has gathered the views of some 300 youngsters on sexting, online bullying and the normalisation of pornography.

The findings make depressing reading: "In school corridors and playgrounds, sexually charged behaviour drives young people's physical interactions and permeates through to their 24-hour-a-day life online. They're feeling pressurised into sex, otherwise they're branded 'frigid' by their peers. There is a sense that boys have an 'entitlement' to girls and some report 'being bullied for being a virgin'."

One way to end the lad culture that seems to pervade schools is to teach boys much younger the need for consent and other basic norms, through compulsory sex and relationships education. Nicky Morgan has held out against this in the past, despite (or maybe because of) Yvette Coopers constant campaign. But with select committee chairs of all stripes backing the idea, maybe its time has come?

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5) FEES HIGH, HO HUM?

The Telegraph has a nice scoop of a snap of an embarrassing document carried by an unnamed minister (was it Jo Johnson?) on uni fees. Education across the spectrum  from some in the Russell group to courses  through FE [further education] colleges  do not offer the quality and intensity of teaching we expect for 9k, it says. The document adds that ministers plan to publish a white paper next month to solve real problems of quality and regulation.

But just as intriguingly it suggests all is not well with the Government pledge to double the number of disadvantaged pupils entering higher education by 2020 from 2009 levels. BIS [Department for Business and Skills] think we will never achieve this from the established sector alone (probably because of a combination of high entry requirements and reluctance to expand too fast).

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When I was about twenty one I did something I'd never done before. I got my hair cut. I don't mean to suggest that I'd never had my hair cut before. But this time I went further. This time I got it really cut. I bought clippers and gave myself a size two - about a millimetre away from skinhead.

Now, I should make it clear that I wasn't - and very definitely still am not - a skinhead. Not in the political sense of the word. David Beckham was sporting the look at the time; a certain breed of cultured middle aged male I'd spot around London gave the look a bohemian air. I have to admit I probably didn't make a particularly brilliant job of it (I had to ask my student flatmates to finish the back of my head), but I thought it might give me an arty, vaguely Buddhist feel. I certainly wasn't expecting the reaction I got.

"Christ, have you joined the BNP or something?"

My grandfather's startled response wasn't the only one. People looked at me different on the street. I wore baggy jeans to compensate, but the effect was clear: I'd gone for Yoga chic and ended up with the EDL.

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It was then that I realised fashion is never just neutral. It always means something to somebody, somewhere. Take the video that recently went viral, the one featuring a black person telling a white person that they find their dreadlocks offensive. Whatever the ins and outs of the exchange itself - and confronting someone on a staircase is probably not the best way to go about this - it does raise an interesting discussion: do white people have the right to grow a hairstyle popularly associated with Rastafarian culture?

I should come out and say first of all I've never had dreads, nor wanted them. I'm white and I've always loved reggae, but never wanted to symbolise that love with my head. And perhaps I don't have any right to speak on this subject given my race. But then I think this question goes far beyond me. In fact it goes far beyond any single person, really. It goes to the heart of what culture is - whether a look or style can really "belong" to a certain group.

Most people would say that's a dangerous slippery slope to go down - after all, where do you stop? And isn't all culture the product of creative clashes? The free speech brigade - disproportionately overrepresented by white men - will no doubt do their usual huffing and puffing, making the usual wild proclamations about the "banning" of behaviour (nobody's banned anything). No doubt there are people harrumphing this minute that "it's illegal for white people to get dreadlocks now". (It isn't). Legal intervention in fashion would be a terrible thing - not least because I think my own fashion crimes would have landed me with a twenty year sentence by now - but nevertheless, this is a debate worth having. Should white people take their scissors to the dreaded white dreads?

When I put this question out to social media I got a predictable spread of comments. All cultures are formed by intercultural influence; this is a slippery slope; ban this and what next? None of these points are wrong. But here's what I think. I think it seems extreme, maybe, to ban hairstyles on the basis of skin colour. But I also think majority populations of all stripes - in this case we're talking about white people - should learn to think a little bit more about the symbolism of what they say and do.

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As a white straight male, I'd say the last five years of my life has been a quiet voyage of discovery, as I've attempted to think very, very hard - more than I've ever thought before - about exactly why people might be offended if I use a certain word or joke about a certain topic. I guess you could call it a slow realization of my privilege. And here's the thing about privilege: it can be defined negatively as well as positively. So someone like me needs to think not so much in terms of what I can do (I'm no more powerful than anybody else) but in terms of what I'm prevented from doing.

My life isn't great by any stretch, but I'll never really know what it's like to fear serious sexual assault walking home. Or to fear getting my head kicked in for daring to walk out of a gay club. Or, indeed, to be black and face a bunch of white police on the streets of contemporary America.

So here's what I feel. Legal intervention in matters of personal style would be wrong. But culture, not the law, is the final determinant here. Look at blackface, one of the worst kinds of appropriation to have survived into this century. If you raised a problem about, say, a college fraternity blacking up for a party a few decades ago you'd have been shrugged off as PC-gone-crazy. Now, save for a few assholes intent on upsetting as many people as possible, blackface is generally just not done. The government didn't have to make it illegal; changing social norms effectively moved things on. The same thing's happening to Native American head-dress. Dreads on white people simply may well become "not cool" in the same way.

And here's the thing. So what?

If a new generation of white kids growing up just mostly elect not to grow dreads, has society really lost anything? The older generation will presumably keep them (now there's a weird image: geriatric white Rastas in old peoples' homes) but they'll gradually be replaced as new generations rise - the same life cycle of change that drives all culture. One could argue that this is a blow for "free expression" - but the truth is that free expression has always had to exist within the bounds of contemporary acceptability, as anyone from atheist poets in the nineteenth century to left-wing film-makers in 1950s Hollywood discovered.

I don't think this is an easy subject. It's true that culture can never really be "owned" by one group (I argue elsewhere in these pages that the word "slave" doesn't only refer to historical African-Americans, and banning yoga classes simply because they're run by a white person seems to be on the extreme side). But privilege comes with responsibilities, and white privilege is no different. If you know something's going to make some people uncomfortable, why do it? I can stand up at an open-mic night and make jokes about rape if I want to - that's my legal right. But I don't want to, because in general making jokes about rape is a shitty thing to do, calculated to make half your audience uncomfortable for the sake of it. (Would you crack bereavement jokes to your friend after their mother died? Of course not).

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Being part of the EU means that British businesses has as its home market not just the UK, but the whole of Europe. The EU is home to 500million consumers who purchase nearly half of our exports - worth more than 200billion last year. The single market allows our businesses to sell to Europe without facing barriers in the shape of tariffs, red tape and differing regulations.

The jobs, livelihoods and opportunities of millions of Britons depend on this trade. Leaving would put them at risk. Whatever the Vote Leave campaign might say, there is no alternative that could even come close to replicating the economic benefits of EU membership.

Vote Leave have admitted today that they want Britain to leave the Single Market. They do not set out their alternative in detail - today, Michael Gove suggested, in vague language, that we would join "a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey".

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This might sound nice. But the EU's single market is not a vague concept. It is defined in the treaties that govern the European Union. You are either in it or not. If we leave the single market, our country will face new tariffs on goods trade, which means higher prices, exclusion from the single market in services, which comprise 80% of our economy and would put jobs at risk, and the UK having no influence over EU regulations we would be forced to follow when trading.

Vote Leave have already come up with a panoply of countries they think Britain should emulate - Norway, Switzerland, Canada, even Peru. Today, they added a few more to the list - namely Bosnia, Serbia and Albania. These countries, which have bilateral free trade agreements with the EU, have a far inferior deal to Britain. Some tariffs on imported goods remain, and critically service markets remain outside their scope. Our vital financial services sector would lose the so-called "passport" that allows our firms to operate freely in Europe. Leaving the EU on these terms would see a flight of jobs from London, Edinburgh and Leeds to Dublin, Frankfurt and Paris.

Detailed and sober analysis released by the Treasury suggests that, under this scenario, the economy would be 6.2% smaller, costing the average family 4,300.

But things could be far worse than this if we leave, as Vote Leave today made clear. If Michael Gove is to be believed, we would repeal the European Communities Act 1972, rather than invoking the lawful Article 50 process. Article 50 at least mandates two years of negotiations on a new arrangement before the country involved actually leaves. But repealing the Act without first invoking Article 50 would see Britain dumped, unceremoniously and unilaterally, out of the EU. It would also be an unprecedented and flagrant breach of an international treaty obligation which as Lord Chancellor I would not have expected him to countenance.

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Suddenly, we would have no free trade deal with the EU at all. This means we would only be able to trade with the EU under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules. Tariffs on our exports would spring up, hitting exporting business and the jobs that depend on them. Tariffs on imports would also be likely to rise, causing higher prices in the shops. The Treasury estimates that this nightmare scenario would make our economy 9.5% smaller, costing the average family 5,200.

Aside from the dangerous weakness of its central argument, the speech contained numerous misrepresentations. EU countries do not have a huge incentive to conclude a generous free trade agreement with Britain, since just 8% of their exports are sold to us, while nearly half our exports are sold to them. And a vote to remain does not mean a vote for "more Europe", since the Prime Minister's renegotiation has delivered us solid and substantial safeguards against being caught up in further integration.

Britain is stronger, safer and better off as a member of a reformed European Union. Leaving would be a leap in the dark with a very high risk of seeing jobs lost, prices rise, and businesses shut out. Michael Gove had the chance today to try to set out a detailed plan for how he believes Britain could thrive outside Europe. Instead, his speech serves only to prove that no such plan exists. It is now clearer still that the sensible choice is to vote to remain in Europe as the key to our future prosperity, security and wellbeing.
According to a poll recently carried out by Channel Four and presented by Trevor Philips last night I find that apparently I may be accepting of my husband to have another wife, want homosexuality banned, should always obey my husband, wouldn't report someone going to Syria, and of course want Sharia law implemented instead of British Law. Certainly a surprise to me.

Philips claims the poll supports his belief there is a 'chasm' opening between Muslims and people of other faiths and he's right there probably is, but ironically what he fails to acknowledge is the reasons why and those responsible. It is polls such as this and the one carried out recently by the Sun which is creating a 'them and us' narrative.

He also claims there is the creation of a 'nation within a nation with its own values and separate future' but why are differences such a bad thing? I know I am different to my friends of other or no faiths. As a Muslim my beliefs and values do differ and that is not something I should be expected to explain or apologise for, any more than a person of Christian or Jewish faith should have to. However that does not mean that I do not have a sense of belonging or consider myself to be British I also know there are issues that need to be addressed in the Muslim community as there are in all communities. But I also know this isn't the way to address them.

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I could point out the flaws with the methodology of this study resulting in distorted results, such as the fact that the survey polled those living in an area where Muslims formed more than >20% of the population in an area of socioeconomic deprivation and therefore may have more conservative beliefs, that the size of the sample couldn't be reflective of almost 3 million Muslims in the UK or even that the poll group was interviewed face to face and the control group over the telephone, but the damage has already been done.

I could also go through each statistic and place it in context e.g although only 34% of Muslims would report to the police suspicion that someone they know harbored terrorist sympathies, in the control group the figure was actually only 30% too. But I wont.

Philips worries 'integration of Muslims will be the hardest task we face'. The poll states that one in five Muslims have never entered a Non-Muslim household but I wonder how many Non-Muslims have entered a Muslims home or visited a mosque on an open day? Is integration a one sided process? Surely Integration is a 'two way process with cross influences from both cultures and changes from both sides to accept the minority culture into the majority culture'. If communities maintain their identities and live peacefully alongside each other by accommodating each other's viewpoints surely that's integration? Perhaps addressing issues affecting integration like education, job discrimination and socioeconomic deprivation to provide the opportunity for people to move and integrate is what should be done.

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I could go on.

But I won't because there is much a bigger point that is being overlooked....

Why was there a need for the poll in the first place?

This is the question that sincerely needs to be asked. Why are Muslim repeatedly being interrogated about their thoughts and religious beliefs? And this is where as a British Muslim I worry we are sleepwalking towards assimilation which is one directional and relies on minority communities giving up on their beliefs and cultures in order to be accepted, in this case to fit in with 'British Values'.

Perhaps if Philips had asked what ideas, concerns and expectations Muslims have ie What Muslims 'really' think, then that may have been the start of a constructive dialogue to promote integration.

But that's just my viewpoint and I also know my thoughts don't speak for approximately 4.5 % of the population but hopefully one day someone will sincerely ask what British Muslims really think?
I lied to a patient today. I didn't feel good about it, but I didn't know what else to say. It was a man I was visiting at home, let's call him Stan. An elderly patient who is normally in excellent health and rarely comes to the surgery. He was down for a home visit to check his chest after being unwell for a few days. Before I went out I looked at his notes, and saw we hadn't seen him for a good six months. Quite uncommon for a lot of older patients. He isn't a smoker, isn't on much in the way of medicine, and had rung the surgery last week.

The notes were from my colleague. They were brief.

"Cough for five days. Productive. Advised paracetamol as required and fluids."

The patient hadn't been seen, just spoken to on the phone. I remembered the day my colleague was on-call last week. It had been hellishly busy. Permanently one doctor short at the moment, the day had been frantic from start to finish for all of us. This was one of many patients who had rung throughout the day. I knew the doctor on-call hadn't left till gone 8pm that night. Days like this are now common-place.

So on my way to Stan's house, I wondered what I might need to do. I assumed his cough hadn't settled. Or that he was still feeling rough from a cold; perhaps he was anxious or his family were worried.

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When I got to the house he was sat in bed, looking pale and tired. A neighbour hovered, looking worried. "He's not eating much doctor. He's been in bed since last week. Coughing something dreadful."

I spent about 20 minutes with Stan. Chatting to him, finding out about the cold that turned into a cough. The cough that hadn't settled. The temperature, loss of appetite, feeling short of breath. When I examined him he had a nasty chest infection and clearly had been struggling for a few days. He was grateful and nodded as I explained my plan to treat him. All good. A happy customer.

It was when I turned to say my goodbyes that he got me.

"Can I ask you, when I rang last week, the doctor I spoke to said I wouldn't be able to have a home visit. There weren't enough of you to do them. He suggested I just sit it out. You are still doing visits then?"

I nodded.

"It's just, I don't want to trouble you. There are lots of poorly people a lot worse than me. I just wondered if maybe I'd have been better a bit sooner if I'd been able to see someone then. He said there was no way he could come out, and I'm sorry, I just don't feel well enough to come into the surgery".

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I stood there, totally torn. Half of me wanted to defend my colleague - to explain how busy his day had been, the pressure he was under. That we are all under. I had overheard him on the phone that day, talking to patients and trying to keep the workload under control. I had been pleased not to have more work to do as I overhead him saying we can only visit dying and genuinely housebound patients.

But the other half of me felt dreadful. The voice at the end of the phone was this man, and others like him. This man who was not abusing the system. Who rarely saw us. Who rang his doctors because he was sick, and who really had needed to be seen and assessed by a doctor that day. This wasn't good enough. He had sat, getting worse, because we were too busy to see him. Now he was asking me if I could explain it to him.

Could I defend my colleague? Ultimately their decision was wrong. This man had needed a home visit. He wasn't dying but he was genuinely too poorly to get to the surgery. He didn't need to go to hospital. He needed his GP. But if I admitted that, would this man complain? He would be right too.

Could I make this man understand how busy things were at work? Probably. I felt sure he would feel sympathy for the doctor who was too busy to come out and see him. But should he have to? Surely if a patient needs medical care then we are there to provide it. To the person in front of me at that moment, the rest of the demands on my time can't matter; otherwise how will I ever find the energy to treat them?

In the awkward moment that stretched out, I wrestled with my conscience. Do I criticise my colleague, and say he probably wouldn't have been this sick if we had seen him last week? That he was the victim of our collective burnout; the work none of us had the energy to do?

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In the end I couldn't. I swallowed my integrity and made some vague reference to how hard it was to diagnose things sometimes, conditions rapidly worsening and so on - I threw in some medical jargon as I swept up my bag and headed out of the door. I heard a "thank you doctor" as I left the house.

In that drive back to the surgery, I lost a bit of self-respect. In lying to him, I was condoning not just what my colleague had done, which was entirely understandable; I was condoning the system that was making him do it. That doctor isn't alone. We are all trying not to get buried in work. Each phone call, each appointment becomes a challenge to be bounced away. We have been doing it so much in the last few years, it has become second nature. We have hardened ourselves to the fact each of those is a patient, like Stan. Frightened, poorly, needing our help. To us, they are just demand. Endless demand that we don't have the time, resources or emotional strength to meet.
George Osborne pulled yet another budget-related rabbit from the famous red suitcase last month. After a cunicular living wage hike and stamp duty reform in the Autumn Statement, the Chancellor's newest furry friend is a sugar tax on fizzy drinks. Cue a jig of delight on the Parliament Square by celebrity chef and long-term healthy eating campaigner Jamie Oliver.

However satisfied Osborne's actions leave both the anti-obesity lobby and health authorities, this ruling could have unexpected consequences. Telling people what they should and shouldn't do or, in this case, can and cannot eat and drink is risky. There is a history of this kind of intervention in people's everyday lives engendering unpredictable and resistant behaviours amongst certain pockets of consumers.

"Blowback" as a result of what some see as nanny-state intervention is almost an inevitability, irrespective of how sensible the policy may seem. We have already seen an example of collective resistance to public health initiatives in the case of the 'anti-vax' movement. This is a loosely organised community of people reflexively opposed to the use of vaccines, particularly for children. Anti-vaxxers' arguments include conspiracy theories that governments and big pharma are acting opportunistically or, more insidiously, are out to cull the earth's human population. Others believe modern vaccinations are responsible for a wide range of health problems. This theory gained traction after discredited claims that autism spectrum disorders in children are linked to the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. There are also those who are ignorant of the risks of refusing vaccinations for their children.

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Another example of state intervention blowback is the anti-environmentalists and global warming deniers believed to constitute factions within the 'rolling coal' subculture. Predominantly limited to North America, 'rolling coal' motoring enthusiasts engineer their vehicles - normally diesel trucks - to produce conspicuous plumes of thick, black exhaust smoke. While the movement has existed for some time, it gained traction amongst conservatives in protest to the Obama administration's energy policy, particularly new emissions regulations.

So are pockets of the British public capable of exercising a similar rebellion against the government's sugar tax? In 2006, we saw what were dubbed 'junk-food mums' passing unhealthy food through school fences to their children in response to Jamie Oliver's School Dinners campaign. Will we now see a parental backlash of mums and dads insisting on the inclusion of 7up or Fanta in their children's packed lunches? Or could we see more extreme and conspicuous displays amongst young consumers analogous to 'rolling coal'? Perhaps a 'fizzy pride' movement? Will youths chugging two litre bottles of cola in protest be the next ice bucket challenge-esque social media sensation? Or will resistance be more innocuously limited to disgruntled tweets and Facebook statuses? Perhaps we'll see a passive aggressive spike in sales of sugary milk-based drinks which are exempt from the new levy? Or perhaps, contrarily, a full-scale boycott of fizzy drinks?

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More likely is the continued growth of post-ironic establishments that pride themselves on the amount of sugar their food contains. Back across the pond, this concept manifests in the growing trend for in-house eating challenges and novelty eateries. Las Vegas' Heart Attack Grill prides itself on the over blown calorie-count of its meals. Its signage proudly declares: 'Caution: This Establishment is Bad for your Health'. At the diner, punters can order a "quadruple bypass burger" burger with 20 rashers of bacon with a side of "flatliner fries" deep fried in pure lard. Customers eat for free if they are over 350 lbs (25 stone).

Although this is an extreme example, subtler attempts to rebel against 'the state's' public health diktats are popping up in the UK. Black Milk Cafe in Manchester attracted attention last year for selling a close to 4000-calorie breakfast containing an estimated 100 teaspoons of sugar. Comprising two types of cereal, a chocolate brownie, marshmallows, Creme Egg, mini eggs and M&M's, topped off with salted caramel sauce and served in half a chocolate Easter egg, the platter is accompanied by three different flavoured milks.

Elsewhere in the UK, equally caloric menu items have developed cult-like appeal amongst consumers, such as the "Kidz Breakfast" (estimated 6000 calories, marketed as weighing the same as a small child) at Jesters Diner in Southtown, Great Yarmouth and the "Two-Foot Sausage Roll"(estimated 3,600 calories) at the County Arms restaurant in South London.

Although these establishments do not necessarily use their dishes' calorie-count as a selling point, their very presence clearly refuses to succumb to pressure for a healthier UK.
Originally published on

This is probably a piece I shouldn't write in public. As I sit here, on the train, I realise that a private environment may have be the wiser choice. Funny thing is... I'm not an emotional person.

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Credit: The Culture High

For whatever reason, Howard's death has affected me more than I thought it would. I've found my mind straying over towards him during this last day or so. I met Howard on a number of occasions and in many different settings. From seeing his live stage show, where he held every audience in the palm of his hand with his snake-charmer quality voice, to actually sharing a stage with him at various events, Howard would make time for every request which fell into his heaped inbox.

Credit: The Culture High

In the film The Culture High, we gave Howard the spotlight and he told his own story. This clip goes some small way in lifting the veil on just what a unique existence this man had. His dramatised biopic, Mr Nice, is a fine tribute to a man who was clearly destined to have his life projected onto bigger screens.

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Despite being such an amplified, larger than life figure, it's the 'real' Mr Nice that I'm remembering. The off-the-clock Howard Marks.

It speaks volumes when even your biggest adversary respects you and has extremely fond words - this is what Howard's legacy truly is; a character of beautiful dichotomy.

One of the world's most notorious drug smugglers should go down in history as a super villain, but far from it. Even the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens is deeply saddened over Howard's death. In his reminiscent blog, Peter describes the night of an Oxford Union debate where he and Howard struck their mutual bond over purified respect.

It was at a debate in Bristol between Peter Hitchens and Howard Marks that I find myself looking back on - a smile now hitting my face in front of this entire train carriage as I simultaneously write and reminisce with little fluency, and without filter.

After a particularly heated and yet sporting debate on cannabis, Peter and Howard retired to the venue's library to sign their respective books. Both sat at the same table, sparring and laughing with the interested parties looking on. This was an unbridled and unbilled after-show. I was one the last person at the venue. I had both Peter Hithchens' book, The War We Never Fought, and Howard's publication Dope Stories. I was of course going to get them both signed.

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Credit: The Culture High

I stepped up and said hello to Howard first, and to my shock, he remembered me! He even remembered the organisation that I work with, LEAP UK. We had a good chat as he signed his book for me, not breaking his rhythm as his almost colliery band-esque tone greeted me with notes of comfort.

Peter Hitchens' attention turned towards us as Howard and I chatted, me still being coy in the presence of such polarising and dominating characters. Howard, in mid-flow of, well, being Howard, took the next book out of my hand to sign. Before I had the chance to combat my reticence, Howard had signed the book... and as his pen hit a rather theatrical full-stop. He realised that he had indeed signed Peter Hitchens' book. Peter immediately spotted this and erupted with laughter at the possibility of the deliberate mistake. Howard flitting between our gazes gleefully told me that I now had a unique copy, ready for eBay the next day. Peter Hitchens found this legitimately funny and to see the both of them engaging in pure, impish banter is something that I keep going back to in my mind. Peter signed the copy of his book too - so I do indeed have the only copy of Peter's The War We Never Fought signed by both the author and a notorious drug smuggler.

As much as this anecdote now rests with me, I am filled with guilt and regret. On a number of occasions Howard spoke with me and members of the LEAP UK team over his own contribution to the organisation. Given how Howard has the unprecedented accolade of being on all sides of the law (he really did have a strange life!) we collectively pondered as to if Howard could fit in to an organisation of enforcement personnel who oppose the 'war on drugs'. It was Howard, with humility and self-deprecation, who put forward concerns as to if his association would potentially detract from the gravitas of the organisation.

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Since learning of his inoperable cancer, I kept meaning to reach out to Howard. My own health, my own shyness, my own awkwardness over the situation prevented me from doing so. Complacency meant that I was putting off until tomorrow. Only now is that special brand of perspective hitting me; when finality hits, all other considerations really do become meaningless. Howard has taught me to throw more caution to the wind and to simply 'be more Howard'.

Credit: The Culture High

What I'm making a hash of saying is: Howard has provided me with that special brand of reflection and contemplation. He really did enjoy life rather than endure it. I didn't quite realise that he would leave as big of an impression on me as he has - so here's to you, Mr Nice, you'll always be in our thoughts.
The UK's Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, has been actively working to educate parents and educators about radicalisation and extremism in the hopes of protecting children in a campaign entitled "educate.against.hate". This comes in tandem with the Home Office's guidance on "Protecting Children From Radicalisation" and "The Prevent Duty" (2015), the document outlining advices for schools and childcare providers. I found out about these campaigns quite by accident, while searching for a childminder for my daughter when I came across a document from the Tower Hamlets, "Advice to Parents and Carers: Keeping Children and Young People Safe Against Radicalisation and Extremism" (2015).

Reading this document alarmed me for a number of reasons, not least of which because this document relies on intuition rather than a clearly stated mandate. And here is the paradox: in none of these documents is mentioned the word Islam, yet anyone reading these documents is quite aware to whom the government and its agencies are referring. The words "risk" and "extremism," are mentioned dozens of times throughout these information sites, but nowhere is it clarified from where the risk come, what precisely is the form of extremism to be avoided. Let's remember that during the heigh of the IRA no similar document was issued in hopes of keeping anyone radicalising in North Ireland.

All this because in the framework of core British values, it would be frowned upon to pigeonhole any one faith. Yet, the government wants to do its due diligence and warn people about radicalisation within the Islamic faith while conterminously not naming the "what exactly" which needs forewarning, mostly because it is quite clear from the documentation that people writing these documents have no idea of the culture to which they are referring.

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In February, 2015, Shamima Begum, 16, Kadiza Sultana, 17, and Amira Abase, 16, left their families in Tower Hamlets to Raqqa to join ISIS. This act has been cause for concern by the government such that programs like Prevent have been created and bolstered as a means of counter-terror propaganda. However, Prevent has been viewed suspiciously by many in the Muslim community, not least of which are lawyers warning fellow Muslims to distrust this program. Regardless of any one attorney or government official coming down against or in favour of the Prevent strategy, these documents are troublingly dangerous in their vagueness regarding the potential harm to the Muslim community in the UK in an era where well-documented anti-Muslim sentiment is not uncommon.

Tower Hamlets has the highest percentage of Muslim residents in England and Wales (38 per cent compared with a national average of 5 per cent). Recently, I spoke with Alison Langley, Communications Advisor of London Borough of Tower Hamlets about their document published last year for parents and carers. Langley informed me that this document was "drawn up locally by officers in Tower Hamlets, in the week following the departure for Syria of three local schoolgirls, and was an emergency response to the specific and actual threat that more children might follow them." She furthermore communicated that the aim of this document was to raise awareness about the potential risk to their children "and that the signs to this threat might be very general and non-specific." But if signs of radicalisation can be general or non-specific, how can such publications produce anything meaningful that does not set up these communities as targets, once again? It is clear is that the documentation as well as the ethos behind the drawing up of this documentation is rather vague in its mission which unnecessarily sets up the Muslim community as a target, if not as a field of profiling and surveillance.

While Langley informed me that the information was produced "in response to a specific threat of online grooming activity, supported by an extreme and violent interpretation of Islam" there is no clear understanding of what this extremist ideology consists except that of a different ideology of UK propaganda which pits those individuals over there as dangerous. When I asked Langley if this pamphlet was designed with the Muslim subject in mind she responded: "The pamphlet was targeted at the Muslim community by distribution through the mosques, but this is an issue that goes beyond an ISIS / Syria threat and could equally apply to other extremist groups trying to recruit young people to a cause with an extreme and violent agenda." Ultimately it would seem that Muslims and their lawyers have reason to be worry about targeting of their community since effectively that is what is going on without any clear ethos aside from some Muslims are terrorists. While the three girls who left to join ISIS last year is a tragedy for their communities, and moreso for their families, we must question if it is acceptable that their lives serve the political currency of examples as what "bad girls do" when they run off to join ISIS. As I had asked Langley if there was a similar pamphlet to ware off the 50% of Jewish sixteen-year-olds who go to Israel from the UK every year? Or the many Brits who fight for the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) either as dual Israeli-British citizens or as British citizens serving in the IDF Mahal?

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Recently it was announced that the National Union of Teachers will hold a conference in Brighton to challenge the counter-radicalisation policies that "are having the unintended consequence of stopping teachers talking about "challenging ideas" with their pupils" and that such measures "close down space for open discussion in a safe and secure environment." Government programs like Prevent and educate.against.hate are simply not working to accomplish their desired effect and are, in the process, proving frightening and alienating to Muslim students across the United Kingdom.
I believe that this is the biggest decision that we as a nation will make in our lifetime. The outcome of the EU referendum will determine the future of Britain and the lives of British people for generations to come. I have been clear from the outset that I very strongly believe that staying in Europe is the right thing to do for Britain. I will campaign for us to stay in Europe because I am proud to be British and I want to give our country and our children the best possible future. I want to see a strong Britain in a strong Europe.

As we move to make this important decision we should have at the forefront of our minds the fact that the two world wars in living memory, both started in Europe. I have talked to local people who served in the armed forces in these conflicts and I personally have family members who lost their lives in wars fought over land and trade disputes in Europe. I would say that anyone who has visited the battlefields of Europe, and seen the graves of those who died in the First and Second World Wars knows that we must never return to a time where we are at war with our neighbours. We still have our rows with our European neighbours but now we sort our differences around a table using diplomacy not bombs and tanks. The EU has helped keep the peace in Europe for decades and at a time when there is so much instability around the world I'll be voting 'yes' first and foremost because I want to be part of a group of nations committed to peace, security and democracy.

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The EU is made up of The European Parliament and The European Council both of which are democratically elected. The most undemocratic body affecting our lives is the British House of Lords.

Our membership of the EU helps to protect us from terrorists and the perpetrators of organized crime. These people have no respect for national borders and we best protect ourselves when we work together pooling intelligence to avert terrorist attacks and foil criminals. The European Arrest Warrant means that criminals apprehended in Europe can be returned to Britain in a matter of days. It used to take months and sometimes years for criminals to be brought to justice.

Our membership of the EU also brings us economic security. Those who want us to leave Europe always exaggerate the costs of our membership. As member of parliament and as the former leader of Burnley Council I know the facts and they are : we pay in 7.6 billion a year to the EU (This is less than half a percent of our national spending and less than Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark or Finland.) We get benefits and investment totalling over 62 billion. We get far more out than we put in. Much of the building and improvement work that is going on in my constituency is as a result of European funding. One really important fact to note is that funding from the EU to Britain is shared out equally, with each region getting a fair share. In contrast money from the British Government favours the southern regions. Add to this the fact that over 7 my constituency are dependent upon trade with Europe. At the moment 58% of all our trade deals are done with Europe and we have easy access to a market of 500 million people. On the wider issue of trade : As a nation of less than seventy million we cannot hope to compete with the likes of China or India both of whom have populations of a billion. We could not hope to negotiate such favourable trade deals on our own. The EU is an important spring board to the rest of the world. Businesses in my constituency have access to a market of $24 trillion and recent EU deals with Canada, Japan and the U.S. Could see this rise to$48 trillion. We cannot afford to walk away from this.

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If Britain votes to come out of the EU we would have to try negotiate some kind of trade deal. The EU would not make this easy. It took two years for Iceland to negotiate a trade deal when they exited. Such deals involve the payment of tariffs and all are conditional upon allowing the free movement of people across Europe. The tariffs would mean us paying more for goods in our shops and in case anyone is wondering: leaving Europe would not affect levels of immigration one iota. The other side of this is that we should remember that over 2 million British peoplelive and work in Europe and many of our young people choose to study there.

It is important to remember that it was Britain's EU membership not the British Government that gave British workers' rights to minimum paid leave, rights for agency workers, paid maternity and paternity leave, equal pay, anti-discrimination laws and protection for the workforce when companies change ownership. These are all at risk if we leave because I have to say that the Conservatives don't have a good track record when it comes to workers' rights.

The 28 nations of the EU share many of the same challenges whether it be: tackling terrorism, coping with the pressures of an aging population or facing up to climate change. It is much easier and makes a lot of sense to deal with these together.

Being in Europe gives Britain a more influential voice. We are the natural respected link between Brussels and Washington. Our voice counts at international conferences and summits. It wouldn't be so if we stood alone. I am not trying to say the EU is perfect but it is a powerful alliance that brings many benefits for us. If we were outside the EU we would still be affected by its actions but we would be powerless to change anything. It is definitely not in our interests to be bystanders.

In conclusion, I genuinely want what is best for Britain. I want to see Britain leading in a strong Europe tackling inequalities, ending tax evasion, standing up for workers and families, rising to the ever increasing number of global challenges of modern life, sharing responsibilities, working together for prosperity for all. We should stay in Europe not just because it is economically advantageous, though it is, but because we are a confident, an outward looking internationalist country. It is the right thing to do because we all have a moral duty to pass on a better world to our children. Britain is better in Europe and the world is better for it.

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April is caesarean awareness month and exactly three years and seven months since I had mine. It was the day we welcomed our second daughter into our lives and so a memory I will always cherish.

Despite this, it wasn't all roses; there were certain aspects of the caesarean that I did find difficult. At the time though I accepted these small niggles as "just the way it is." Now though I know different, now I know about the "gentle" caesarean.

I wish I had known about it three years and seven months ago.

A caesarean may be a medical intervention but it is also the birth of new life, it is the first moment you will meet your baby and this time really counts. Those initial moments after your baby is born can impact on the physical and physiological well-being of both of you which is why many refer to this time as the "magical hour." The gentle caesarean is focused more on the mother and baby and aims to allow this magical hour to be as beneficial and significant as possible.

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More than 10% of babies are born by elective caesarean; my little girl was one of them. Despite the number being so high many are unaware that they can make the experience more personal and less clinical.

Here are 3 things I wish I knew when I was preparing for her birth.

You can choose the music that plays in your caesarean

Music is such a powerful tool that affects our mood and energy levels. As I walked into the operating theatre the radio was playing, this was a relief, I had wanted music but assumed I couldn't ask for it. The moment she was actually born Take That Let It Shine was playing and I remember smiling at how appropriate it seemed. I was lucky, what if it had have Justin Beiber or Iron Maiden? These may be perfect for some but I didn't want my daughter being born to "oh baby" (*cringe*). Choosing the music for my first baby was such an important part of the preparation.

I wish I had known that I could have chosen the soundtrack to my caesarean birth.

You can see your baby being born in a caesarean

OK, so I am not suggesting that you get a good gander at your intestines but the screen can be lowered at the key moment to allow you and your partner to witness your baby's first breath. I remember feeling as if my heart was going to stop as I waited for the midwife to peep around the sheet. When I compare it to my other two births this bit makes me want to cry a little. After the alien feeling of a washing machine on a spin cycle in my stomach I felt her be physically lifted out of me, the weight of her life just disappeared in an instant but I couldn't see where she had disappeared to. Realistically this was probably only seconds but I remember them vividly. The sound of her cry and then shortly after the sight of her scrunched up new-born face softened that strange transitional time between pregnancy and motherhood; but it still remains.

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I wish I had known I could have watched her take her first breath.

You can have skin to skin in a caesarean

I was told that when my baby was born the cord would be cut; she would be taken to be checked by the midwife and then passed to my husband while they put me back together. I asked about skin to skin and was told that I would get that opportunity in the recovery room. I accepted this and the process went exactly to plan.

My memory of this time is very mixed, on one hand I was in an environment I felt safe with my husband and new baby by my side. I knew she was well and so was I. On the other hand I was so wired up that I could just about reach my hand out to touch her, this magical hour (that I was unaware of at the time) was slipping away.

Skin to skin has many benefits. It increases the chance of successful breastfeeding and it helps the baby regulate their own heartbeat, sugar levels and temperature. One of the major benefits of skin to skin is that it kick starts the bonding process.

I must admit (and I haven't admitted this to many people) that in the first couple of days after my second was born I did have a few wobbles. I loved her undoubtedly but at the time I pondered whether I could ever love her as much as I loved her older sister. These feelings may still have been there if I had free birthed in the mountains, I will never know, but when I read about the importance of the magical hour and I think about how I spent most of mine only able to reach her hand it makes me wonder.

Research has shown that women are 48% more likely to suffer post natal depression after a caesarean than a natural birth. If the first hour is so important to the wellbeing of mum and baby it is worth asking if taking the gentler approach could bring this shocking statistic down?

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There are changes that need to be made to allow skin to skin to take place; staff in the gentle caesarean strategically place IV drips and monitoring equipment to allow the mother more freedom. The midwife will also make sure that there is practical room for the baby to rest on the mother's chest and have contact with her skin (and breast).

I wish I had known that I could have held my daughter straight away.

Gentle Caesarean Awareness

A caesarean maybe a routine procedure but it is also major abdominal surgery with a potentially difficult recovery process; it is certainly not the pain free alternative to birth. Making the process "gentle" won't alter these facts but they will put you more in control. If you talk to your doctor or midwife about it and are met with resistance don't be over surprised. In general though, the staff do want to make your experience positive and in most cases will do everything they can to accommodate you. The gentle approach is a growing trend and has been since the beginning of the century so it may already be practiced in your hospital.

My advice is if you don't ask, you don't get and don't assume anything is just the "way it is." Surround yourself with people who have a positive birth attitude. I highly recommend joining Rock Star Birth and the Positive Birth Movement on Facebook. Also check out your local doulas; for example the Welsh Doula Network is an expanding group of Doula UK trained doulas who can support you through the gentle caesarean process. On my third pregnancy I made a connection with Doula Samantha Gadson through the Cardiff Positive Birth group and even though I opted for a VBAC she made me realise that it was my birth and how ever my baby was born it was still my experience to own.

So as we are in caesarean awareness month I would like to share a little awareness of the gentle way to do it.

I wish someone had made me aware three years and seven months ago.
Just as there is a military covenant, so there is an unwritten agreement between the nation and its foster carers. It goes something like this: ordinary families commit to provide a loving home to children and young people who cannot, for reasons beyond their control, live with their own parents. In return, the state promises to cover all expenses and to provide support to ensure that looked-after children flourish.

Over years this covenant, broadly speaking, has survived through good times and bad, and the UK system of child welfare has come to rely heavily on foster carers: about 80 per cent of the 81,000 children in care live with foster families.

However, the fostering covenant is currently being broken, to coin a phrase David Cameron once used to describe our neglect of the military. Austerity measures are having a devastating effect on practical and financial support for foster carers, and on children's access to their social workers and other services, including mental health services.

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A report by The Fostering Network, the national charity for foster carers, published a stark survey of foster carers last week. Three-quarters of carers said that cuts have had a negative impact on the fees they receive for fostering, and two-thirds said that cuts had restricted access to vital services, including respite care and mental health services. Two-thirds said that cuts had reduced access to their child's social worker.

This is happening at a time when record numbers of children and young people are being taken into care, putting a severe strain on children's services. To put that into context, one child comes into care needing a foster family every 20 minutes. The picture painted by respondents to the survey is of a system in crisis, unable to cope with the demands heaped upon it.

We are foster carers and on a typical day we receive three mobile texts from our local authority looking for foster homes. By definition, the texts are brief. But they hint at complex family situations that have led to children and young people being removed from their homes. These texts are a last resort, sent by social workers racing against the clock, having failed to secure accommodation through the usual channels. These are the hard-to-place children that nobody wants. The frequency of these texts suggest that there are many such cases.

We currently foster three siblings, so we are in no position to help. Yet we find ourselves trying to work through how we might offer accommodation, even if it were only for a few days until something else became available. It is a pointless exercise, and yet that is what we do, and I am sure other foster carers respond in the same way.

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These texts are a stark illustration of stresses within the system, a consequence of the shortage of foster carers. The Fostering Network estimates that some 9,000 new foster carers are currently needed to ensure stability in the system, yet recruitment and retention is severely compromised by the impact of cuts. One Fostering Network respondent said that 2,000 a year had been cut from her allowances. Increasingly, the day-to-day cost of providing for looked-after children is being subsidised by foster carers.

At a time of cuts across public services, foster carers do not expect to be immune from austerity. But the cuts now being imposed mean that children are increasingly to be in placements that are not appropriate for their circumstances or needs, and that families are often pushed beyond their ability as foster carers, without training or support. Cuts in benefits have also had a significant impact, causing some foster carers to simply give and look for work.
Scaremongering quotes are now the modus operandi of our Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, who argues European Union membership is vital for our security. Over recent months Hammond has become one of the biggest cheerleaders for the UK to remain inside the EU. This has been an extraordinary U-turn by the formerly Eurosceptic Foreign Secretary, who argued very clearly in 2014 for the UK to leave the EU.

Presumably his change of heart has been due to the Prime Minister allowing him to keep his job on condition he campaigns for the 'Remain' side in the referendum. If the EU is so vital for our security and leaving it would irreparably damage our national interests, why did he argue for the UK to leave the EU in 2014? Surely he wasn't jeopardising this country's security then!

We believe the UK will be much stronger and safer outside the EU. The Remain camp believes their ace in the pack is the European Arrest Warrant (EAW). The EAW is a system whereby an arrest warrant authorised in one EU country, is valid in all EU countries. This requires each EU Member State to arrest and transfer the person who is subject to the warrant back to the State which authorised the warrant. Overall, this is a sensible scheme, but a similar system can be replicated after Brexit.

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However, the EAW does have serious flaws. The UK outside the EU could negotiate a new system without these failings. We currently have 116 extradition agreements with countries outside the EU, including with the pariah state Zimbabwe. Arguing the UK wouldn't be able to get an extradition warrant after Brexit is a bizarre claim, and one which has no bearing on the reality.

The EAW was criticised in a 2011 report by Fair Trials International which said "they are being issued for minor offences and without proper consideration of whether extradition is proportionate". Additionally, the warrant may only relate to an allegation, and in some circumstances the accused may have been convicted without even being present at the trial.

Of course we should deport people accused of very serious offences such as murder, but not when there is a spurious claim made by - say - a corrupt policeman in Bulgaria who the accused refused to bribe. There was the case of Deborah Dark, who was arrested 20 years after she had been acquitted for a drugs offence. Also, who could forget the harrowing case of Ashya King's parents who were ruthlessly pursued under the EAW for attempting to get medical treatment for their child with a brain tumour.

The Foreign Secretary tells us that our security is guaranteed by pooling intelligence. Intelligence pooling will still continue when we are outside the EU, but what we share will always be our decision. We hear there is a move afoot to increase the EU's role in security affairs - this will jeopardise the UK's current arrangements, therefore Brexit is the best bet.

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Our closest partners and allies are not EU Member States; our closest partners are the nations in the Five Eyes alliance and others in the Commonwealth. New Zealand, Canada, the USA and Australia each have a common law system and a shared history with the UK. This alliance is a world leader, protecting this country where the EU has failed. Some Member States of the EU don't have reliable systems in place and are open to corruption. If we share our intelligence with some of these countries we might as well copy Vladimir Putin into the email! This could even jeopardise the Five Eyes alliance, as our historic allies won't want to risk their prized intelligence with an authoritarian regime determined to see the downfall of the West.

In the words of former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove: "Brexit would bring two potentially important security gains: the ability to dump the European Convention on Human Rights - remember the difficulty of extraditing the extremist Abu Hamza of the Finsbury Park Mosque - and, more importantly, greater control over immigration from the European Union."

The EU often makes grandiose claims about creating peace in Europe. This doesn't stand up to the briefest analysis. They make this false claim because there hasn't been a war between any EU Member State while the EU has existed. However, just because something hasn't happened over a certain period of time, it doesn't mean a completely unrelated organisation (the EU) has had anything to do with preventing it. The reason we have peace in Europe is because of NATO, nuclear weapons, the lack of a Treaty of Versailles, the spread of democracy and the collapse of imperialism. Peace in Europe has had nothing to do with the EU at all.

Finally, some people argue voting for Brexit would please Vladimir Putin. This is completely irrelevant from start to finish. We shouldn't simply do something based on what Putin thinks we should or should not do. If Putin gives money to charity, should we give none? If Putin declares war on ISIS, should we support ISIS? The Great British Public should treat the Putin-pleasing argument with the contempt it deserves.

Britain has the best security services in the world. Many have tried to invade us since 1066 and all have failed. We are the nation of Churchill, Turing, Wellington and Nelson. The EU has not kept us safe in the past - despite the ridiculous claims made. We will continue to be safe outside the EU. Don't let 'project fear' scare you into voting 'Remain' - vote for democracy, vote to Get Britain Out.

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The notion of 'First World Problems' is one that many are familiar with, a rare occasion when those in the First World poke fun at themselves and their entitlement.

Whether it's a flight being late, a particular kind of coffee being unavailable or broadband speeds being less than supersonic, the problems of the First World are relative difficulties that other countries would love to have.

Bandwidth issues are the most ridiculous of our complaints. As I write, I am able to watch UK horse-racing in one corner of my screen, as well as being able to do four or five things at the same time because of the speed of my internet connection.

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For others, this is far from the case and it is only when travelling to emerging economies and sharing their experiences, how seemingly impossible it is for people, let only companies, to get anything done online.

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the dichotomy between countries' bandwidth capabilities are vast. While Israel, and particularly Tel Aviv, benefits from the faster internet in the world, neighbouring countries such as Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon struggle by on much slower technologies.

Even the differences between these territories are unthinkable. Hussam Hammo is the CEO of mobile games company Tamatem, which are based in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

Recently, he invited over to the city some of the startups represented by Gaza Sky Geeks, an accelerator based in Gaza that encourages young entrepreneurs to set up companies where population density is of almost claustrophobic intensity and career opportunities limited.

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"It was incredible. These guys were used to 1G speeds and although we still struggle in Jordan to get 3G, they were doing things they could not have dreamt of doing back in Gaza.

"Whenever I come back from Silicon Valley or London, I always get frustrated when I come back to Amman and the online limitations Tamatem has to face, but the Gaza Sky Geeks experience encouraged me to make the most out of every byte of bandwidth," he says.

It certainly seems to be working for Hammo. The company publishes its own games in Arabic for the MENA region and localises into the language games from the world's biggest publishers. It realised two years ago that the App stores were empty of Arabic-based content and have addressed that lucky lacuna.

The company is experiencing 40% month-on-month growth on downloads and revenue and in 2014-15 had 200% growth over those 12 months. It is also the only Arabic company to have been selected by 500 Startups, having graduated in London as part of the Dojo Distro program at the end of last year.

"I think the market in MENA is absolutely huge, but if you want proof from a third party, according to Arabnet, in 2020 this will be a market of 700 million people that will be worth $2.4 billion," adds Hammo.

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The mention of Arabnet is timely. It describes itself as the hub for Arab digital entrepreneurs to connect and learn. It runs a series of events across the region aimed at growing the web and mobile industry, and launching new digital startups.

Not least of these events is the conference in Beirut, now in its sixth year and the launching pad for the city's tech culture. Last year, Lebanese startup accelerator Flat6Labs started its first tech programme in the city, which will see them invest seed money of up to $50,000 in more than 100 companies.

The city even has its 'Digital District' in the shadow of the Al-Omari mosque, a much more beautiful backdrop than anywhere in Palo Alto or London's so-called Tech City in Shoreditch.

While the Arabnet conferences have made an extraordinary impact on confidence in the MENA reject, it is perhaps the influence of another up-and-coming conference that will provide a longer legacy.

The STEP conference took place this month (EDITOR NOTE: 4/5th April) in Dubai and not only did it focus on the MENA region, but was of such quality that it could have taken place anywhere in the world. Companies based in Europe were represented, but more importantly wealth management funds and VCs were out in force.

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Dubai, not least its immigration visa policies and immigration queues that face those who do obtain travel documents, is as far from Jordan and Lebanon in capitalist and status terms as London and Berlin, but confidence was apparent around the 3,000 attendees. Dubai, itself, remains an acquired taste for visitors.

One particular innovation in the cuty was Startups On A Plane, not only for its networking opportunities, but also because meetings in Dubai were on a yacht, not a plane.

Berthed in the harbour adjacent to the STEP conference and five minutes' walk away, it was an opportunity for investors and startups to talk in a more salubrious environment than a conference stand. When the conference was over, those involved moved on to Teheran to bring together in the Iranian tech ecosystem.

Naturally, in an oil-rich state such as Dubai, internet speeds were fast enough for any of those in the First World to have any Problem with it, but the confidence on show suggests that in the future, it will be companies in the MENA region that will be showing the First World how to do things.
Imagine a society in which scientific findings - for example about the best way to treat a newly discovered disease - were not allowed to be discussed in the media. In which social scientists could not publish work recommending how we might deal with poverty and homelessness. In which theatres could not mount political plays or museums display issue-driven work. In other words, that there was little or no national debate around any of the pressing concerns of the day. Fanciful? Wrong. Because the first significant steps towards such a society - if it can then be called such - will be taken in Britain in less than two weeks' time if the government goes ahead with the anti-lobbying clause restricting the use of public funds. The seemingly narrow term 'anti-lobbying clause' - the government's own - disguises the enormity of a regulation which will prevent public money being used to "influence or attempt to influence Parliament".

The government's official concern is that taxpayer funds are being used inappropriately and that, in Cabinet Office Minister Matt Hancock's explanation, should be "spent on improving people's lives and good causes, rather than lobbying for new regulation..."

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Yet what is 'lobbying for new regulation' other than part of the essential national debate? It is a healthy open society which not just allows but actively encourages public monies given out as grants to challenge the status quo, to question government policy - and indeed make necessary recommendations to government for changes in policy, thereby also engaging the wider public in what is - because it operates in the public sphere - an inherently transparent process.

If we are to take the clause and its accompanying guidelines at face value - as we should - what would be the result?

Every area of public life including publicly funded universities, research councils, national academies, charities, arts organisations and more would be affected. Most immediately would be bodies which are wholly publicly funded. Yet many organisations only partly in receipt of public monies are likely to be drawn into a culture of self-censorship, fearful of losing this support even when private funds are used to 'lobby'.

The clause would work at two levels. Firstly, organisations and individuals would be discouraged - in many cases, effectively banned - from publishing, whether in specialist periodicals, through the letters pages of newspapers or in any other media, including appearances on television - anything which takes issue with current government policy. Such organisations would not be able to inform parliamentarians either, inevitably leading to a decrease in the quality of parliamentary debate.

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Secondly, the primary work organisations undertake would - as a result of a lessening of debate - become increasingly more reactionary as it would be less able to challenge accepted norms.

It has been argued that the cuts - accompanied by an increasing association of organisations with corporate interests - have already led to a less questioning culture. Yet public money is still hugely important, not just to provide necessary services, but as an essential platform of our democracy, facilitating debate in every area of public interest. What is really behind this clause (brainchild of the markedly non-transparent and - crucially - public funding-averse Institute of Economic Affairs) is the wider privatisation agenda. One of the ways that the government can achieve this is to debilitate the uses to which public money is put. Which is why this clause is dangerous for the sciences and arts alike.

With such altered assumptions about how public money is spent, would we have had plays like David Hare's The Permanent Way - which might reasonably be described as a 'lobbying from the stage' against the privatisation of the railways? Or more recently Jack Thorne's Hope concerned with local authority cuts? Or artist Peter Kennard's politically engaged work currently - and appropriately - on display at the Imperial War Museum? Or Bob and Roberta Smith's direct criticism of the present government's educational policy? Because of the still generally accepted mixed ecology of the arts, much work - at some stage in the process - makes necessary use of public money. No media are excluded from the guidelines, and so this work - alongside much else - could be interpreted as being in breach of them.

Of course playwrights are not going to stop writing political plays overnight - and scientists will not immediately discontinue challenging research. Yet it is likely that all this work will become increasingly stifled by the new rules governing the public space in which it is to operate.

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It is disturbing how quietly the clause is being introduced, with little public outcry and not enough opposition - at least in England - from the major institutions, even though worried charities have written to the government voicing concern and the science community has begun to speak out. One problem is the extent to which in recent times - particularly since the Blair years - organisations from the top down have been encouraged to 'negotiate' directly with government. The result of this is that some are decrying the regulation while in the same breath arguing for an exemption from it. To its credit the Scottish government has rejected it, and the most robust public rebuttal so far has come from the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

This clause is not the action of a government seeking to further public debate but of one wishing to build its very own safe space. It will be damaging for democracy and should be scrapped.
Following extra pressure reviewing gender inequalities when it comes to pay, the Government is calling on financial services employers to sign up to a Women in Finance charter, which seeks to promote gender diversity through four key pledges:

Having one member of the firm's senior executive team who is responsible and accountable for gender diversity and inclusion

Setting internal targets for gender diversity within the company's senior management

Publishing progress annually against these targets in reports on their website

Having an intention to ensure the pay of the senior executive team is linked to delivery against these internal targets on gender diversity.

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The charter has continued the recent focus on the persistent gender pay gap, which naturally was especially in the spotlight during the most recent International Women's Day on March 8. In the finance industry in particular, the issue is prescient as women are heavily under-represented at senior levels. They make up only 34% of managers in the sector, and just 11% of corporate managers/senior executives in banking, according to a recent ILM report. This inevitably has its own knock-on effect on pay, with the AAT's own salary survey, researching its accountancy and finance membership last year, showing that there was an 18% gap between the salaries of male and female full-time workers - a gap that widened to 23% for more senior members.

But following this new charter alone may not be enough for financial services firms who are looking to close the gender gap. It's so important for employers to treat their staff equally, but also for female employees to have the confidence to ensure they are properly remunerated for their work.Our latest research has revealed that men working in finance are far more bullish about their salary expectations, seeking an average of some 12,000 more than they are currently earning, whereas women want an average of just over half that amount (7,000).

And men are far more likely to ask - and get - a pay rise of some description, even if it doesn't reach their overall salary expectations. Over one in four men working in finance (26%) asked their employer for a rise over the past year, compared to just 18% of women. Conversely, some 61% of women in finance told our survey that they have never requested a pay rise, a figure that falls to just 54% of men. Nearly half of the men we surveyed (47%) secured a pay rise for themselves over the last year - again a figure that falls to 40% for women.

Of course, there will be many women in finance who feel comfortable with both their current role and salary, and they will neither pursue the opportunity to put some more pennies in their monthly payslip or indeed chase a promotion. But others may still be victims of unconscious gender bias in the workplace, perhaps lacking the confidence to seek what they may in fact be worth.

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The onus therefore doesn't just lie with companies to encourage gender diversification - but for employees as well, of both sexes. It is of course going to be easier for those women who hold strong relationships with their direct line manager to raise the subject of pay, but all managers should certainly be taking their request into consideration - while senior management should give thought to whether the salaries of their female employees are keeping pace with male counterparts.

Women need to be encouraged to feel more empowered to redress the balance and ensure they are receiving fair recompense for the hours they put in at the office. The finance sector needs to consider equality and diversity in more depth if it is to continue to attract the best talent.
Last September Governments from across the globe came together to sign up to the new Sustainable Development Goals. These Global Goals, as they have been popularly dubbed, are an ambitious roadmap to end extreme poverty over the next 15 years.

Civil society organisations from across the globe can be proud of the work that we undertook to persuade governments to generate this agreement. But having got the promises in place, our challenge now is to get them off the paper and turn them into a reality for the worlds' poorest.

The ambition of the Global Goals is even more significant for two reasons. Firstly, because of their commitment to reach the poorest and most marginalised and leave no-one behind. Secondly, because the Goals are universal - they apply equally to countries in the Global North as to countries in the Global South. Under the banner of the Global Goals, we are now all developing countries. These twin challenges mean we have not got to just redouble our efforts but also to rethink our ways of working.

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Last week, the heads of 15 of some of the biggest international development and human rights organisations met in New York hosted by the International Civil Society Centre. Part of our discussion was how we can better work together and align our efforts around the Global Goals.

As individual organisations, we are proud of what our staff and partners have achieved. But if we're going to make a bigger difference going forward, we're going to have to get much better at collaboration. This means reaching out to new people.

We know that government is crucial to delivering services to the poorest and we need to work better with all levels of public administration. We also recognise the growing importance of business. Given its impact on people's lives, Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever has said that he sees his organisation as the biggest NGO in the world!

Civil society needs to find ways not just of challenging business to do better or to end bad practices but actively to work together in innovative ways to deliver sustainable development.

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But strange as it might sound, two of the biggest challenges for civil society organisations are first, to collaborate better with each other and second, to engage more profoundly with ordinary people around the world.

This means sharing our learning and results across organisations. It means handing over intellectual property more readily. It means being quicker to share, learn and innovate with each other, helping to build on where we are having the most impact.

It also means ensuring that the voice of the poorest around the world is heard more clearly and that work harder to win public support for and engagement with our work. We need to make our poverty alleviation work and the Global Goals relevant wherever you live in the world.

So the challenge is clear: we have to collaborate more, and when and where required leave our organisational egos at the door. We need to be bolder and quicker in seeking out innovation that delivers the best results for the poorest and most marginalised. Ordinary people, not just in the global south but the global north, have to be better engaged and mobilised.
It's Responsible Business Week and a perfect opportunity to reflect on the growth of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes. CSR policies have now become a staple for business strategies of many SMEs, not just multinationals. But are they merely a high-profile marketing initiative or is there real substance and impact in businesses doing social good?

As CEO of In Kind Direct, founded by HRH The Prince of Wales to make it easy for companies to donate their surplus products for charities, I work with our donor companies day in, day out. I have experienced first-hand the growing importance for businesses to not just be seen as responsible, but to reap the benefits and gratification of operating in a genuinely responsible way. While some might still be building their strategies primarily to improve their image in the media and appeal to environmentally and socially aware customers, most businesses have now realised that acting responsibly puts a virtuous circle in motion with beneficial effects felt across their entire value chain.

Responsible businesses attract and retain resourceful and productive millennials. They inspire suppliers and contractors to improve their operating standards and appeal to investors. Their practices create a climate of trust, innovation and a sense of belonging in the community which has the effect of attracting customers and boosting their brand reputation. In Kind Direct's warehouse volunteering scheme is a simple example of how hands-on experience of supporting a charity can boost employee engagement and productivity. We challenge teams from our donor companies to get out of their offices and literally get their hands dirty doing some work which directly helps people in need. Volunteers sort product donations and prepare deliveries for our charity beneficiaries. It's fun, rewarding and many teams return time and again.

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With sustainability and social programmes multiplying and 150 million worth of products donated to In Kind Direct since 1997, our donor companies have long understood the power of responsible business. Every time they donate their surplus products to In Kind Direct, they are not just diverting usable surplus products from landfill; they are releasing extraordinary social value by making their essential products accessible to those who may otherwise go without.

One of the almost 8,000 UK charities In Kind Direct has supported is Dostiyo Asian Women and Girls Organisation, a small charity based in Northampton which overcomes barriers of language, culture, racial prejudice and isolation through empowerment. Dostiyo's service users are given a wide range of In Kind Direct goods from toiletries and make-up to clothing and household products. One of the charity's beneficiaries, a victim of domestic violence, recently received a toiletry gift bag and said, as the tears ran down her cheeks, that she had never before in her life received a gift. This goes to show how everyday products that we take for granted can change a person's life. Receiving products from In Kind Direct enables Dostiyo to save on operational costs and reach more women to help them rebuild their lives.

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Through In Kind Direct our donors can support Dostiyo and thousands of other grassroots charities working across a huge range of causes from women's or homeless shelters, care homes to children's charities, disabled groups and many more. By helping local communities to become stronger, healthier and happier, our donors are not only giving back, they contribute to their own success.

In Kind Direct is an enabler. We ensure companies' surplus products reach those who need them most. We enable charities to make considerable savings, improve and enhance their services and relieve hardship by bringing dignity and self-respect to their beneficiaries. We provide companies with a practical opportunity to focus and extend their responsible business action and generate measurable and tangible impact with their stakeholders, their employees and the environment.
Eye in the Sky

There's something wonderful about watching a movie without reading or hearing any reviews. You have no expectations and haven't been told what to think, but given the calibre of the cast, you hope they won't let you down.

Such was the case with Eye in the Sky, a taut thriller about ethics and morality in 21st century warfare. The presence of A list stars such as Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman was a good sign, while Aaron Paul, Jeremy Northam, Iain Glen and Monica Dolan didn't hurt matters either.

The premise is simple. When assorted terrorists collect in one Kenyan house, the desire to take them out with a single drone strike is tantalising. However, the fact a little girl is selling bread in the blast radius means the remote warriors have a clash of conscience. Can they justify sacrificing one girl's life if it means a bunch of terrorists will be erased in one go, and save the lives of potential victims in a pending suicide bombing?

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Juggling the numbers to minimise fatality while constantly "referring up" to different VIPs means this could be one of those yawnsome movies involving assorted phone calls, video conferences and the like, but it's a testament to director Gavin Hood that he manages to make this as gripping as he does.

Another strong aspect is Barkhad Abdi from Captain Phillips as the ground agent spying on the terrorists while trying to keep his cover. Not that easy when there's a curious villager wondering if he's playing a game on his mobile instead of operating a flying camera. For an actor that held his own in a scene with Tom Hanks, he's proved once more to be an outstanding complement to a film, adding authenticity to the proceedings.

Though EITS could work as well on the stage, it's worth a look on the big screen as events unfold in real time, a bit like that 12 part UK run of 24 which also focused on hot button topic, drone strikes.

Obviously as this was Alan Rickman's last on screen performance, it's hard not to watch the film without a poignant twang. The fact he signs off with the best scene reminds us of what an immense talent we have lost.

Laced with flashes of humour, great editing and a tense score, EITS is a thriller that engages the brain as well as the heart.

Like the remote weaponised plane at the heart of the drama, this locks you in its sights and hits its target with pinpoint accuracy.

The Jungle Book (2016)

Image: Disney

Everyone loves the cartoon version of Kipling's most famous tome. It was a 1960s classic with lush animation and some great songs.

We didn't really need a new version, though Disney seems determined to revamp its classics with a live action spin and 21st century effects.

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Sadly Jon Favreau's new, live action version of Disney's take on The Jungle Book is a massive let down. I spent half the film trying to stay awake and the rest of the movie trying to make out what was going on.

One of the problems is it's so dark, visually and tonally; it looks like it was shot with a night time Instagram filter.

Okay, purists might argue that the original was equally dark, but this is just murky.

The vocal cast is excellent, from Ben Kingsley (Bagheera) to Bill Murray (Baloo), but Christopher Walken is mis-cast as the Godfather-like King Louie.

Idris Elba, Disney's current go-to guy when it comes to vocalising creatures with authority (after Zootroplis), is excellent as always; his one-eyed Shere Khan spot on as the big bad, while Scarlett Johansson does a good job as the sinuous, seductive snake Kaa.

Alas, Neel Sethi's Mowgli is a bit of a let down also, lacking that magic quality.

I'd like to see it again without an army of kids running to and from the loo, and with a better print where I knew what was what.

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U.S. soldiers assigned to Troop B, 5th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, Multi-National Division-Baghdad run toward a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter during an air assault training event in Baghdad February 25, 2009. President Barack Obama's plan to pull U.S. combat troops out in 18 months won't plunge Iraq back into chaos, but the United States will need to use adroit diplomacy to quell fresh conflicts between rival Iraqi groups. Picture taken February 25, 2009. REUTERS/U.S. Army/Staff Sgt. James Selesnick/Handout (IRAQ)

The United States appears on the cusp of doubling down on military tactics to fight terrorism. That's a bad idea.

On March 19, the latest American military member was killed in Iraq. A week later, the U.S.'s top general said he expects an increase in U.S. troop levels there shortly. Presidential hopefuls have offered their insights on the Islamic State, al Qaeda, and the Taliban, with one keeping open the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons against the Islamic State. Pentagon planners are readying for another round of U.S. intervention in Libya. Most recently, arguably the most-respected general of the modern era, David Petraeus, called for a "sustained" U.S.-led effort in the fight against Islamic extremism.

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But why? Islamic terrorism poses a modest threat in the scheme of things, and military campaigns are not effective in diminishing it further. Where is the compelling argument that the United States should continue fighting what is already its longest war?

The attacks of September 11 were as anomalous as they were severe. Nothing like that has ever happened before or since. Almost all of the massive increase in terrorism since 9/11 has occurred in war zones in the Middle East and in weak or failing states. And believe it or not, Americans have been safer from terror attacks since 9/11 than they were the thirty years prior. Data from the Global Terrorism Database indicates we have lost, on average, four Americans per year to terror attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11 compared to 11 per year from 1970 to 2000. This reduction is even more noteworthy, as it occurred while the number of terror attacks and fatalities worldwide rose 64 and 72 percent, respectively.

Still, many assert that only a U.S.-led effort can succeed against ISIS. Though we agree that the world must confront ISIS, the "U.S. must lead" mantra has become dogma among much of the foreign policy establishment, repeated endlessly with great confidence but without evidence. Upon closer reflection, it makes little sense.

First, the argument that U.S. leadership is necessary to motivate a response to ISIS is a non-starter. It is local actors, not the United States, who face an existential threat from the insurgency and terrorism. Iraq and Syria are worried about survival, but their neighbors in the region all have pressing concerns ranging from national security to regional influence and economic stability that are already motivating them to action.

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Second, the argument that U.S. leadership is necessary because only the U.S. has the military capabilities to defeat ISIS and terrorism is nonsensical. Terrorists and insurgents are, by definition, weak. Otherwise, they would control the powers of the state and use them. ISIS may not be a pushover, but it is no match for the combined capabilities in the region even without the United States. Moreover, research from the RAND Corporation indicates that local policing and intelligence efforts are five times more likely to lead to the dissolution of a terrorist organization than the use of military force.

Beyond this, the insistence on U.S. leadership in the war on terrorism has muzzled discussion about the unintended consequences of U.S. policies. How might the U.S. invasions of two Muslim-majority states and military operations in another five have fueled recruiting efforts which rely on the narrative that Islam is under attack from the U.S.? Recall that the emergence of ISIS was predicated on the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ungoverned spaces that have resulted. Similarly, U.S. efforts to install democracies within states where few or none of the needed liberal institutions or cultural norms existed have fallen short and likely exacerbated grievances among Iraqis and Afghans.

Finally, calls to go all in on the "long war" ignore an essential calculation: are the benefits worth the costs? In the past 15 years, nearly 7,000 Americans have given their lives in the fight and the government has borrowed somewhere between $1.7 and $5 trillion to fund the wars and their associated costs. The benefits remain elusive, to put it charitably. Worldwide terror attacks and fatalities have soared to unprecedented levels. Islamist-inspired groups and the fighters that comprise them have more than doubled since 2000. Meanwhile, the relative security of America suggests that focusing on homeland security efforts is a more effective approach to dealing with terrorism than endless war.

At the end of the day, the current arguments for fighting the long war are not persuasive. The discussion we should be having now is about how to reduce our footprint in the Middle East and how to end U.S. involvement in the endless conflicts being fought in the name of the war on terrorism.

A. Trevor Thrall is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and an associate professor at George Mason University's School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs. Erik Goepner is a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel who commanded units in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Recent nuclear agreements between Iran and Western countries, led by the United States, have been well-received by the Iranian people. Sanctions have been removed, as promised by President Hasan Rouhani, and now the people expect improvements in relationships between the Islamic Republic and the West, as well as with the Arab countries. But more importantly they are looking forward to greater political freedoms. The nuclear accords were the first step taken by the Rouhani government towards reform.

The opposition groups, moderate forces within the regime, and the Reformists who were in favor of the agreement are now expecting the same improvements to occur domestically in order to usher in national reconciliation and political reform culminating in a passage to democracy . But since the traditional conservatives and extremists, led by Ayatollah Khamenehie, are vehemently against the agreement, and particularly oppose any domestic reforms in the wake of the implementation of the agreements, a severe confrontation has emerged between Ayatollah Khamenehie on the one hand and Rouhani and Rafsanjani on the another.

The February 26 , 2016 election of the Expediency Council was a great success. In this election, people voted against the most influential candidates supported by Khamenehie, and in this way said 'no' to him. In addition, the people managed to elect a group of moderate representatives in the parliamentary elections. On April 29, 2016 the representatives who did not win a clear majority will compete in runoff elections. The new "Majles" will convene on May 27, 2016. There is every reason to hope that the moderate parliament will be in favor of Rouhani's agenda. But this is a small step toward shaping the country's internal affairs along the agreement's lines, and one should not underestimate the possibility of a repetition of the period of Mahmood Ahmadinejad and Saeed Jalili in the next round of the presidential elections.

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The Presidential Elections and the threat of the resurgence of the Ahmadinejad/Jalili camp.



The presidential elections of the Islamic Republic of Iran will take place 14 months from today, and almost 4 months after the inauguration of the new president of the United States on January 20, 2017.

The conservatives, led by Khamenehie, have been preparing for some time. Khamenehie is harshly attacking Rouhani. He repudiates the agreement, criticizing for not having servedg the interests of the Islamic Republic. He states that Iran has fulfilled all its agreements while the United States not only has not yet lifted the sanction, but has imposed new additional sanctions. Indeed, the United States still prevents the other countries from having open relationships with the Islamic Republic and does not allow the release and return of Iranian's frozen assets.

According to Khamenehie, the agreement means surrendering to the United States' demands with nothing in return, and - he claims -- that is the American style of agreement which means nothing but domination. Is it wiseor in our national interest, he argues, to agree to such a contract; to give up everything and receive nothing in exchange? He also says that Rouhani, Rafsanjani, and Khatamee, along with groups like the Reformists and the moderates, who are talking about a domestic reforms in the wake of the nuclear agreements, either consciously or unknowingly have turned into agents of America, following and implementing its imperialistic designs.

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General Mohammad Ali Jaffary, The Commander in Chief of the Revolutionary Guards, claimed in his speech on March 28, 2016

"The sanctions have not yet been lifted even after the nuclear agreement, and apparently there is no intention for this, or if there is any, it seems it is going to be too gradual, drop by drop!"

On the same day Amir Ali Haji Zadeh, then Commander in Chief of the Revolutionary Guards' Air Force, referring to the recently imposed nuclear sanction by the United States, declared that Iran should not worry about an American military attack. Rather, "Our chief worry is here at home. Those who worry us are the sons and nephews of the authorities and those who can influence the decision makers."

On March, 30, 2016 Kamenehie, in response to Hashemi Rafsanjani's Tweets, accused him of betraying the country, and said that in today's world negotiations and military preparedness are both essential. Without military power small country will militarily threaten you. . Meanwhile, he expressed his dissatisfaction over the actual process of the nuclear agreement, claiming that the Americans have swindled Iran:

"One has to be forceful in negotiations, and should negotiate in a way to avoid being deceived. If we agree and sign a contract, and they just pretend that they are keeping their agreement but do not lift the sanctions and continue the trade embargo, this indicates a problem. We should not let these problems be created, we should be proactive there as well by boosting our defenses."

It seems like Khamenehie's criticism of the Reformists has encouraged the Revolutionary Guard commanders to attack the moderates and Reformist factions within the regime. On, in April 5, 2016 Jaafari said that whoever, including the Khatamee's government, the [Reformist] Sixth Parliament, or the Green Movement, which intended to transmogrify the regime, was in turn "destroyed and lost credibility. No one needs be concerned about Rafsanjani or Rouhani, since the Iranian regime was strong enough to bypass even the deviance of Ayatollah Montazeri." Even if they occupy both the legislative and executive powers, these people "will eventually be pushed away." There are those who are inclined toward the West and who have penetrated the regime, but the Revolutionary Guards "will never allow the seeds of treason to grow to maturity."

The recent nuclear agreement has not a document to be proud of. It was not such a success story to deserve second and third retelling on the domestic scene as a governmental fable". It has been embarrassing and humiliating enough and "we would never think about repeating such an experience in other occasions". " We are not afraid of the United States treats, and "prior to any other way of responding, we have prepared ourselves for a military response." He also added that



"The Revolutionary Guards are prepared with an exact plan about how to respond to the provocative and stupid actions of backward regimes like Bahrain and Saudi, which is the result of their reliance on the support they receive from Americans, and we will retaliate, if necessary, upon receiving an order."

Rouhani in his speeches delivered on April 4, and April 9, 2016, defended the nuclear agreement, tolerance, and friendship with the world, and responded to Khamenehie, and Jaafari, saying, "if we wanted to continue Ahmadinejad's policy today, our oil exports would be zero. If not for the agreement, however gradual, we could not have even exported one barrel of oil." He called his opponents extremists who cause Iranophobia and push the country to the brink of destruction. In response to Jaafari, he said ,

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"We are not a threat to any country, we have not plotted against any country; nor do we intend to do so. The safety and security of our neighbors and the region is our safety and security. Any defensive measures are only to serve the maintenance of our security as well as that of the region's security. All our neighbors should keep in mind that Iran's plan is to support its neighbor and other Islamic countries, and if any country thinks that Iran is a threat to itself, it has in all likelihood made a grave miscalculation. Iran is no threat to anybody, and has never declared was against any nation and won't do so in future."

He also said that by inducing fear and with tough baseless words, the leadership of the Revolutionary guards could destroy all the opportunities achieved through nuclear agreement.

Iran's Economic Situation

According to the World Bank , the growth rate of Iran's gross domestic production during the presidencies of Rafsanjani, Khatamee, and Ahmadinejad was 5.1%, 4.3%, and 3.2% respectively. The average economic growth rate in Iran during the years of 1989-2011 has been 4.7%. Under the crippling sanctions, Iran's economic growth in 2012 and 2013 was reduced to -6.6% and -1.9%, and will probably reach .5% in 2015.

Not only Rouhani, but even the Americans promised that the economic situation in Iran would noticeably improve with the nuclear agreement and removal of the sanction. But even at the outset of the negotiations some distinguished American analysts and personalities gave false information concerning the fate of Iran's frozen assets in the United States . They argued that a large portion of these assets should be paid as compensation for all the terrorist activity that Iran had been involved in after the sanctions were lifted. Iran has fulfilled all its agreements.

However, the United States has placed Iran in a bind: Iran is still under sanctions regarding banking transactions with American banks. It cannot use dollars in its trade since non-American banks are worried about the heavy penalty for trade with Iran, even if it does not use dollars. Iran is not even able to use its free assets due to the above restrictions. Under these conditions, in fact, no improvement has taken place, and it is as if the nuclear agreement did not bring any economic improvement for Iran. Moreover, the American Congress is opposed to these nuclear agreements too.

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These are independent of all the new sanctions and penalties that the Congress and various criminal courts have issued. For example, New York Supreme Court judge George Daniels sentenced the Islamic Republic to pay $10.7 billion dollars (with the addition of 9% the interest over the period since the incident it will amount to 21 billion dollars) as compensation for losses during the September 11 terrorist attack. Needless to say, 15 out of 19 people who were involved in this terrorist attack were from Saudi Arabia.

Under these circumstances, foreign investment and the importation of high technology which is a necessary condition for economic development, job creation and improving that national welfare is impossible. Rouhani must be able to effect economic growth at least by six percent in order to fulfill these needs. But according to the most recent report from the World Economic and Financial Surveys , the rate of unemployment in Iran would increase during the years of 2016- 2017, and the rate of economic growth would reach to 4% in 2016 and 3.7% in 2017.



Helping the extremist conservatives to take over?

Extremist conservatives harshly blamed the Rouhani government as well as the moderate and reformist elements within the regime, for entering agreements that resulted in no benefits for Iran and has caused the economy to go from bad to worse. The inconclusiveness of the nuclear agreements, plus economic recession, poverty, unemployment, the closing of the industries and factories, have altogether given the conservatives an excuse for such attacks. Even India could not repay its debts to Iran due to the present banking sanctions.

The extremists aim is to topple the Rouhani government and replace it with a government such as Ahmadinejad's. Even Ahmadinejad has increased his own activities and clearly stated that, "Since they (the Rouhani government) have created a mess,"... the people are demanding my candidacy." He has said that he is looking forward to the 2017 elections to appear as a presidential candidate again. Saeed Jalili on March 11, 2016 has also said: "BRJAM, (the acronym for nuclear agreement in Persian), turned from a shining sun has into a rapidly passing cloud" and said if he would have been elected as president "... I would never have signed such an agreement since I think very differently."

Some of the extremist conservatives claimed that Ahmadinejad could get up to 65% of votes the next election, but many others say that if he runs against Rouhani, he may even receive up to 75% .

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The other important issue is Khamenehei's illness and the question of his succession. Naturally each faction tries to propose a candidate affiliated with itself. While moderates think a reformist candidate would help pave the road to democracy, the hardliners and conservatives want an even more radical person than Khamenehei.

However, the conditions created by the Western countries for Iran, and the increasing pressures they impose on Iran could, very likely, benefit the hardliners and conservatives and may eventually result in the total elimination of the reformists and the moderates. It seems that many Western governments have deliberately chosen a policy that keeps the power in the hands of hardliners and extremists. But it is not yet clear if the United States would follow their policy or consider it to be in its national interest. Such a policy Undoubtedly would make the United States unreliable. Even the Europeans would protest it.

If the sanctions are not lifted and the nuclear agreements doesn't lead to any tangible economic improvement, and indeed more sanctions are imposed, the situation will shift in favor of the conservatives and extremists and they are very likely the ones who will be the winner of upcoming presidential elections.
On two recent Monday evenings in Washington DC, major US political figures addressed pro-Israel audiences. Their speeches could not have been more different.

On March 21, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump appeared before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), winning ovation after ovation, especially when he declared that President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "have treated Israel very badly." (Next day, the president of AIPAC tearfully apologized for this disrespect to President Obama).

Reading from a prepared text, Trump placed all the blame for the current impasse in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts on the Palestinians - and on the Obama administration for, in his words, "applying pressure to Israel." He also repeated the well-worn promise to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem - a pledge often made by presidential candidates and never fulfilled. (Ted Cruz has also promised to move the embassy while John Kasich has said he would "prefer" to see it located there.)

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Exactly three weeks later, both Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden spoke to the national gala of J Street, a pro-Israel, pro-peace organization celebrating its eighth anniversary, for whom I work as Special Adviser to the President.

Kerry promised to keep working for a two-state peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians as the only solution, "because anything else will not be Jewish and it will not be democratic - and we understand that."

His argument is that if Israel continues to rule over millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, it will eventually have to choose between granting them civil rights including the right to vote - in which case Israel would no longer be able to protect its Jewish majority and character - or denying them those rights - in which case it could no longer claim to be a democracy.

Biden made the same point, using more passionate language.

"We have an overwhelming obligation, notwithstanding our sometimes overwhelming frustration with the Israeli government, to push them as hard as we can toward what they know in their gut is the only ultimate solution, a two-state solution, while at the same time be an absolute guarantor of their security," he said.

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"I firmly believe that the actions that Israel's government has taken over the past the past several years -- the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures -- they're moving us and more importantly they're moving Israel in the wrong direction," Biden said.

What can we learn from these events?

In the past 20 years, as Israeli governments have become more and more dominated by the settler movement, which wants to keep the West Bank as part of a Greater Israel, much of the American-Jewish establishment has moved to the right with them. Today's narrow coalition presided over by Benjamin Netanyahu is the most right-wing in Israel's history and Netanyahu has made no secret, in word and deed, of his strong preference for Republicans in the United States and his disdain for President Obama.

But American Jews remain predominantly progressive. Pollster Alan Cooperman of the Pew Research Center says 70 to 80 percent have voted for Democrats in the past five presidential elections. The emerging young generation of American Jews are passionate proponents of social justice- and they are not prepared to abandon these values when it comes to Israel. Many no longer feel represented by the traditional American Jewish organizations which have marched lockstep with Netanyahu and the settler movement.

Last week's exchange between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in their Brooklyn debate on Israel and the Palestinians was another liberating moment. Finally, presidential candidates, at least on the Democratic side, seem to have realized that the way appeal to Jewish voters is to put forward sensible, balanced policies based on US interests and values.



Both candidates addressed not only Israel's need for security and peace - but also the Palestinians as actual human beings who are suffering and also have rights and needs that must be met. There was also a substantive debate of the complexities of the 2014 war between Israel and Gaza.

These events have shown that things are changing in America's political discourse about Israel. It's about time.
Nobody succeeds alone. Whether it's in sports, business, art or politics, the greatest achievers have one thing in common - strong relationships. It may be an inspirational mentor, a dedicated business partner, or a rock solid team. Connection and support help foster innate potential and buffer against the blows of adversity.

The same holds true for organizations. Without the glue of strong relationships, the mission and work of a company can become scattered and the big picture lost.

And contrary to what you may think, strong relationships are not all about unfailing positive support. It's about aligning rather than duplicating tasks, reducing confusion and mistakes, and delivering critiques in an empowering way that jumpstarts quality work.

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Leadership manuals write about engagement and support, about balanced perspectives and the superiority of the group intellect over the intellect of one. But too often relationships are neglected in the workplace, and leadership is left scratching its head as to why so much of the work produced holds that characteristic stench of a low-quality rush job.

Perhaps it's because people don't feel respected, appreciated, or connected. Consider this - only about 32% of American employees feel engaged in their work and a mere 31% feel valued. Given that these are associated with motivation and better work, it would bode well for companies to focus on enhancing these factors.

If people don't feel like they matter, their work may not matter much either. But there are ways to improve relationships and communication within the workplace and create an environment that promotes better work. Here are 5 ways to do so and the bonus is that none of them costs a dime.

1. Show gratitude on an on-going basis

There is incredible power in the simple act of gratitude. Studies have demonstrated that it activates areas of the brain associated with the "feel good" chemical, dopamine. Maybe this is why a whopping 94% of survey participants say they like getting positive feedback for work accomplishments, and 84% thinks this gives a better understanding of a company's objectives.

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Gratitude works best when it's specific (i.e. not general praise but an acknowledgement of a particular action done well), and delivered at regular intervals to maintain that feeling of goodwill. Since gratitude helps not only the one receiving it but the one giving it as well, the positive effect on the work culture is two-fold.

2. Listen, seek input, and respond

People yearn for the opportunity to express their thoughts without being interrupted or shut down. In this era of hyper multi-tasking and cell phones glued to our eyeballs, this is becoming increasingly rare. But listening is a skill that can be leveraged to establish a connection and enhance motivation.

One of the most valuable things you can do to promote a better work environment is to listen to your employees - to their ideas, challenges, pains, successes, and desires. It need not take too much time, even just giving a few moments of undivided attention may be enough to enhance trust and rapport. Additionally, through allowing someone to explore their thoughts, it may lead to insight and discovery.

3. Adjust work to fit their learning style

Nothing spells "I don't matter" like being in a workplace that treats all of its employees the same. This does no favors to your company either because if you're delivering information in a way that is confusing or misleading, the work quality is likely to suffer and you may end up wasting time correcting unnecessary mistakes.

By taking the time to inquire about learning style of employees, you're gaining critical information on how to speak to and provide information to them in a way that will increase their understanding of their duties and your expectations of them. Adjusting communication in this way may help streamline work and create a more amicable relationship with employees.

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4. Connect the dots for employees

A mission statement may be prominently featured on your website and press materials, but it doesn't mean that workers are necessarily keyed into how their work promotes this mission. If employees don't understand this, they may feel disconnected or, worse, that their efforts aren't contributing in any substantial way to the company.

Taking the time to debrief employees about the overall structure of work at an organization and how their tasks contribute to the mission can help increase motivation and work quality. Plus, it helps cement them as a critical and valued member of a greater team.

5. Give space for an outside life

Consistently working without a break may yield short-term results (and even be necessary during a product or service launch) but it is not sustainable. People will get burnt out, and their motivation will take a nose-dive, which is why research has repeatedly found that working continuously leads to disengagement and poor mental and physical health.
President Obama leaves Washington today for his third and final presidential "hajj" to Saudi Arabia for tense meetings with newly installed Saudi King Salman. By any measure, the once "enduring" U.S. - Saudi alliance is on a collision course, triggered by a fateful election year reckoning long overdue of the costs and benefits to a "friendship" that strains the credibility of that word. No amount of diplomatic doublespeak from Mr. Obama or his press secretary can camouflage the President's ire at the Saudis, who were shocked at Mr. Obama's unprecedented public rebuke last month of their unhelpful conduct in the Middle East.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Obama told The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg that the Saudis are not only among "free rider" allies that ask the United States to fight their battles for them and "exploit" American muscle for their own narrow, sectarian end, but are also responsible for encouraging anti-American militancy (his sanitized expression of spreading radical Islamic jihadi ideology).

This is a first: a U.S. President on the record flying off the handle against the Saudis. If there ever was an undiplomatic hanging out of dirty Saudi laundry this was it - a double presidential whammy. It represented a fascinating insight into Obama's pent up anger against the Kingdom that with all of the military assistance this White House has showered on the Saudis as payback for Mr. Obama's Iran deal, the Saudis are not to be trusted. Mr. Obama approved over $60 billion in new military sales to Saudi Arabia. By doing so, he accelerated an already runaway arms race in the region. This has been Mr. Obama's solution to his Saudi contradiction. That's just what a turbulent Middle East needs now: billions of dollars of new U.S. military equipment to a Saudi Arabia under a presidential cloud of suspicion, ladled out as a substitute for a coherent U.S. strategy in the region.

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A good share of the fault for this crisis of confidence lies on the President's own doorstep. Mr. Obama failed to incubate his Iran nuclear agreement with a requisite regional security strategy to protect our Israeli and Sunni Arab allies against a newly unshackled Iranian military -- the White House has been playing catch up ever since as Iran ratchets up its interference in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and with Hamas in Gaza. Mr. Obama has talked the talk of pivoting to Asia away from the Middle East (that rhetoric has only added to the angst among our regional allies), but he keeps having to do a back-step shuffle as events outstrip his rhetoric. Chalk another foreign policy failure up for the President's national security team.

Mind you, the Saudis have also greatly contributed to this crisis of confidence by their own actions -- particularly at a time when the American people have credible reason to hold the Kingdom responsible for actions inconsistent with fundamental U.S. objectives in the Middle East.How would the American people feel if they knew how much funding and support "private" Saudi citizens provide to Al Qaeda and radical Islamic groups on Syria? What would they demand if they knew the extent to which Mr. Obama has stumbled into a Saudi proxy war in Yemen that has backfired into a bigger safe haven for ISIS and Al Qaeda in Yemen? It is simply mindboggling that the Obama Administration would allow itself - given its aversion to Middle East wars - to become a willing enabler of the Saudi proxy contest with Iran in Yemen - especially given what the President said in his Atlantic interview

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'The "28 Pages Crisis" All of this comes against growing public demand for the U.S. to lift the veil once and for all off of information which could link Saudi diplomats based in Los Angeles before 9/11 to two of the Saudi hijackers by declassifying 28 pages of the "9/11 Commission Report." According to a "60 Minutes" report two weeks ago those 28 pages are replete with damning evidence that could blow the U.S. ties to the Kingdom sky high.

The Saudis clearly are concerned about those 28 pages, and have threatened their own version of financial blackmail. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir warned the Obama administration and Congress last week that if Congress votes to lift Saudi Arabia's sovereign immunity as demanded by families of 9/11 victims, the Saudis would dump $750 billion in U.S. bonds it holds. Full-fledged, on display, brinkmanship is now the order of the day between the U.S. and the Kingdom.Each of these factors would be troublesome standing alone, but collectively they occur against a backdrop of vociferous Saudi displeasure with the Obama administration's dalliance with the Kingdom's dreaded adversary, Iran, and the Saudi's unwillingness to contribute tangible support to the U.S. in the struggle against ISIS.

So, find me a division...I would settle for a brigade (indeed, I would even settle for a platoon) of Saudis who are fighting alongside the American-led coalition in Syria or Iraq to vanquish ISIS. Find me a Saudi fighter pilot or two, I beg you, who are flying formation with Americans to bomb ISIS targets in Syria, Libya or Iraq.

Whether it be ISIS or Iran, the Saudis would prefer, to put it undiplomatically, that Americans die to the last Saudi. The Saudis need more skin in the anti-ISIS game to regain a modicum of trust in Washington.My critique of Saudi conduct must be measured, however, against the Kingdom's own travails. The Saudis find themselves cornered and at a crossroads with their hitherto great American protector. Given growing Iranian belligerence and a pervasive fear that the Obama administration is abandoning them in favor of an evolving Iranian relationship, the Saudis have reason to wonder what the hell is going on with this White House.

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The U.S. - Saudi Relationship is Important to American Global Interests. A road map out of this conundrum is needed because the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia is an important element in projecting vital American interests in the Middle East. On good days, the Saudis provide vital intelligence to the U.S. military and counter-terrorism officials against Al Qaeda. The Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council provides an essential politico-military shield to our real allies in the Gulf; namely Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Oman. Without the Saudi-U.S. Strategic Partnership, Iran would enjoy open season against American interests in the Middle East. Yes, even if the Saudis and Iranians are fighting an Islamic-fueled duel to the death, the Saudis have a credible role in deterring Iran that serves America's parochial agenda.

If this relationship serves American interests then it must be salvaged. So what must the next president do given that Mr. Obama can do little at this point?

It's Not Washington, Stupid! The Saudis must do much better at public diplomacy. It isn't just Mr. Obama who has grown weary of Saudi duplicity in the Middle East - it is the American people. And the Saudis are about to confront the worst crisis in the 80 year old alliance in the weeks and months ahead. The days of being coddled by President Bush 43 are over. No presidential candidate on either side of the aisle is prepared to play the Saudi's preferred inside game in Washington. The U.S. is no longer dependent on Saudi oil. And the public wants to know whether the Saudis are with us or against us.

Saudi Boots Are Essential Against ISIS. The Saudis are going to have step up their game four square in the battle against Al Qaeda and against ISIS. Not, as they claim they are, in Yemen. Not just inside Saudi Arabia. But in Iraq, Syria, and in Libya. That requires Saudi boots on the ground and pilots in the air. It requires the Saudis to stop the printing presses that covertly support radical Islamic theology, and arrest any Saudi found to be financing Islamic radicalism abroad. It also requires the callow Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed to cease waging a losing war in Yemen.

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A 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund. If the Saudis step up to the plate and agree to a full accounting for any official Saudi culpability in the 9/11 attacks, the Saudis must establish a compensation fund for 9/11 victims governed by Americans - not Saudis. That will not erase the foul taste Americans will have for Saudi duplicity, but it will eventually drain the swamp. One way or another those 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report are going to see the light of day. The Saudis will not be able to stop it. But even if the emerging evidence is not a smoking gun, why shouldn't the Saudis do the right thing: pay the fine without admitting wrongdoing. The big banks do it...so can they!

A New U.S. Security Structure. If/if the Saudis agree to these two prior conditions, the U.S. should consider creating a new regional defense agreement umbrella (the U.S. led a similar effort in the 1950s by forging the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). This new 21st century version would focus on countering Islamic terror, containing Iran's ballistic missile, cyber, and wage a multi-pronged battle against ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the incipient radical Islamic ideology that feeds them. For good measure, such a regional defense umbrella should work to eventually include Israel if it begins in earnest to work toward a two state solution. Such a regional security umbrella could also incubate a final peace settlement between Israel and Sunni Arab states if Israel, in turn, c0mmenced a two state solution enterprise in earnest.

Americans & Saudis Share The Goal of Holding Iran Accountable. Mr. Obama's often Pollyannaish attitude toward Iran must give way to a zero tolerance policy against any violation of the Iran nuclear agreement and, more urgently, Iran's ballistic missile testing. Once again, it took Congressional pressure against Mr. Obama to compel him to fess up against Iran's ballistic missile testing before the ink was dry on the nuclear accord. When Mr. Obama and his team finally vacate the White House all of the presidential candidates have committed to re-ratcheting sanctions on Iran if it continues to hide behind the nuclear agreement as a pretext to wreak havoc and terror in the Middle East. Congress and the next president will find common cause in a new sanctions regime and containment strategy to bring some much needed sobriety to our Iran policy. A new anti-Iran containment strategy is in order and overdue. The Saudis and the U.S. will have common cause in this endeavor.
Back in the late 1970's when my family and I came to Greece for our regular summer visits, it always felt like we were leaving our modern California paradise, and going back in time to what was then a very underdeveloped country. The roads were terrible, and it took a whole day to travel the switch-back, single-lane, concrete pavement, in order to get to our family village near Tripoli - only about 75 miles from Athens. The women of our village, many war-widows all in black, huddled around a single spigot in the shade. They spent mornings slowly filling huge olive-oil cans with water for use in the house. Our large American family moved in for the summer with suitcases full of new bed linens, and bath towels - commodities that at the time were almost impossible to find Greece, and if you could find them, they were very expensive. Electricity came and went, but somehow everyone seemed to know the schedule.

Yet even all those years ago, with so little infrastructure, so few goods in the shops and trinkets in people's humble homes, I never saw anything in Greece like what I saw today at the Idomeni refugee site. Sprawled among the fields, a tent-city had taken over the landscape. It was dirty and trash-filled. People sat on the ground or milled around aimlessly, some of them stirring pots of food atop small fires. A long line of portable toilets was situated along the railroad tracks, but the acrid smell that permeated the air was proof that not everyone was using them. Children roamed alone, some of them carefully holding smaller children in their arms.

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As I toured the improvised, unofficial site at Idomeni with representatives of UNHCR, Praxis, Samaritan's purse, Medicins Sans Frontiers and other global NGO's, I had a very hard time remembering where I was. And when I recalled that this is Greece, in 2016, I was filled with dread of what this immigration crisis means for a country that has seen highs and lows, and now sits at the bottom of an eight-year economic depression. And even more, was filled with anxiety for the families, mostly from Syria but many from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Africa, and what their futures hold.

Idomeni is located on the border between Greece, and what the Greek's call FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). For months, this crossing sat along the main artery of the Balkan route - through which hundreds of thousands of migrants made the journey from the islands of Lesvos, Samos, Chios, through central Europe and on to their final destinations of Germany and Northern Europe.

As our car first approached Idomeni, I could see brand new silver fences, topped with loops of razor wire, snaking along the border and gleaming in the sunshine. With the border now firmly closed to refugees, families have amassed in dozens of locations in Northern Greece. Idomeni is the largest location, with an estimated 10,000 people pooling there, many refusing to leave.

The Greek authorities would like to close this site, and relocate its residents to recently constructed, formal, sites. Some of these are controlled by local municipalities, and others - like the one a few miles away in the more remote town of Nea Kavala - are operated by the army.

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There is a Greek army colonel at the Nea Kavala camp. He introduced himself to me as its commander. He is an orderly man, and operations there are far tidier and more organized than Idomeni. As if trying to overcome the impression that his military profile creates, the colonel takes great pains to make it clear that people are not being detained. They are free to come and go at will, and there is no danger that they will find themselves without the freedom of movement.

Nevertheless, efforts to move refugees from Idomeni and into official sites have been stymied. I couldn't help but wonder, why? In addition to having much better facilities, it even has a playground donated by Save the Children.

"People are afraid. They don't want to be sent back to Turkey and they don't want to stay here. They want to go to Germany where there are jobs," I heard again and again from aid workers. (The reference to Turkey has to do with the recent EU-Turkey agreement that is still in its fledgling stages of implementation.) Many of these people had houses back home, they say. They are not used to living conditions like this. Faced with idea that these temporary facilities - even the more humane ones - could become permanent, they would rather go back to Syria than stay here.

One worker put it this way. She said that in Idomeni, you are right at the gateway, right on the border. Every once in awhile there is a rumor that the border will open again, maybe just for a few hours. People pack their tents and start mobilizing. The point, she said, is that even though conditions are bad there is hope. Hope that they can keep going. Hope that they are not trapped in limbo. Hope that they have a future for themselves and for their families. Economically strapped Greece, with nearly 50 percent unemployment among young people, does not offer the hope that they are looking for.
Vibrant entrepreneurial communities are key drivers of entrepreneurship and economic prosperity in cities, regions and countries. They support and promote entrepreneurship, businesses growth and innovation in geographic regions.

Latinas Think Big recently launched its first entrepreneurial community in New York City, and is launching a second one in San Francisco on April 27, 2016, at Galvanize. Our entrepreneurial community model is unique, designed around the needs of both entrepreneurial and professional Latinas. These bimonthly gatherings will grow dynamic communities to exchange innovative ideas, support new ventures, promote the growth of existing businesses, and advance the careers of professional Latinas.

Latinas Are Launching New Businesses at 3 Times the National Rate, But Business Growth Disparity is Troublesome

The number of companies owned by Latinas rose to 1.48 million, an 87 percent increase between 2007 and 2012, compared to the national rate of 27% (U.S. Census Bureau). However, Latina-owned businesses tend to be small, and struggle to achieve growth and scalability. According to the 2014 State of Women-Owned Business Report, the average revenue of Latina-owned firms was $68,806, compared to $188,124 for companies owned non-minority women. This growth disparity between Latina-owned businesses and their non-minority women counterpart is an entrepreneurial crisis and a 1.5 trillion dollar opportunity for the Latino community at large, and the nation.

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Local Entrepreneurial Communities Are Critical For Latina Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurial communities are nurtured and grown through on-going gatherings that bring together local entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, universities, innovation leaders, students and other stakeholders. Entrepreneurial communities create vibrant spaces and ecosystems that promote the exchange of ideas, supportive relationships, collaborations and connections to influential networks. There is no lack of entrepreneurial communities in Silicon Valley, Austin, New York, Boston and Denver, among other tech and entrepreneurial hubs around the country. However, most of these communities are led by successful White male entrepreneurs who are doing great work in these communities, but may not necessarily be attuned to the needs of Latino entrepreneurs, or may not know how to engage them.

Entrepreneurial communities are especially important for Latinas. They create a special place where Latinas can connect with other Latina entrepreneurs, share entrepreneurial stories and strategies, and meet potential advisors, mentors and investors. The opportunity to share their challenges, strategies and goals with fellow Latina entrepreneurs is important for the successful launch of new ventures and the business growth of existing companies. Unfortunately, entrepreneurial communities focusing exclusively on Latinas are non-existent around the country. This is why we launched the Latinas Think Big Exchange in New York City and San Francisco, with the vision of having these entrepreneurial communities all around the country by 2020.

The Latinas Think Big Exchange: A Unique Entrepreneurial Community Model For Latina Entrepreneurs And Professionals

The Latinas Think Big Exchange is the first entrepreneurial community of its kind, creating welcoming spaces uniquely designed around the needs of Latina entrepreneurs. In addition to focusing on entrepreneurs, our entrepreneurial community intentionally engages professional Latinas. We strongly believe there is valuable synergy between Latina entrepreneurs and professional Latinas. Bringing them together in these entrepreneurial spaces is critical for both business and career success.

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Professional Latinas Play A Key Role In Entrepreneurial Communities

Professional Latinas are increasingly achieving influential roles within their companies and organizations. They bring unique talents, ideas and influence to entrepreneurial communities. Professional Latinas also bring a wealth of resources and networks that can help activate these entrepreneurial communities. They can also facilitate connections between Latina entrepreneurs and their influential networks. By building relationships between professional and entrepreneurial Latinas, these entrepreneurial communities leverage the collective talents, resources and networks of these two important stakeholders.

Entrepreneurial Communities Can Accelerate The Careers Of Professional Latinas

Today more than ever, an entrepreneurial model is an essential tool and approach to achieving success in the workplace. Leveraging an entrepreneurial mindset and entrepreneurial strategies is the new approach to managing your career, whether you're working in the private, public or nonprofit sectors. Being a part of an entrepreneurial community offers the opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship and innovation, and sparks innovative thinking and solutions in the workplace.

Professional Latinas Are Well-Positioned To Become Successful Founders Of Scalable Businesses

Consider the following successful Latina entrepreneurs: Tanya Menendez (Co-Founder of Markers Row), Sylvia Flores (CEO, Manos Accelerator), Noramay Cadenas (Co-Founder, Make in LA), Catherine Lajara (Founder/CEO, Novel Research of NY) and Luz Rivas (Co-Founder, KitHub) and Betty Francisco (Founder/President, Fit Nation Ventures). What do they all have in common? They had a professional career prior to launching their own business enterprise.

A professional career can serve many purposes for future Latina entrepreneurs, including the accumulation of talents, skills, knowledge and networks that can be transferred to launch, manage and growth a new business. Furthermore, working in these professional spaces can spark ideas for new ventures and market opportunities. For first generation Latina founders, their professional career journey can serve as a pre-incubator and launching pad to a successful business.

We Invite You to Join our Latinas Think Big Exchange on April 27, 2016, at Galvanize in San Francisco.

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We are excited to host our first entrepreneurial community gathering on April 27, 2016. These intimate gatherings will bring together Latina entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, professional Latinas, students, mentors, advisors and supporters. While our focus is on Latinas, we welcome every to join us and become an active part of our community.
Image: Domestic violence. Stock Photo. Pixabay.com

Domestic violence makes life for many women in the former Soviet Union a nightmare.

Preventing the problem from being resolved are a patriarchic attitude that looks down on women, most authorities' contention that domestic violence is a private matter between a man and woman, few shelters where women can escape battering, and lack of domestic-violence laws in most countries.

Thus domestic abuse is pervasive in countries with cultures and traditions as diverse as Russia, Armenia and Uzbekistan.

It is hard to find accurate statistics about domestic violence in the former Soviet Union, but the few that are available show a problem that is much worse than in the West.

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Two sobering statistics are that a Russian woman is 2.5 times more likely to die at the hands of a partner than an American woman, and five times more likely than a European. Those statistics are from the Anna Center for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, a long-running Moscow-based non-governmental organization.

Russia's Interior Ministry estimates that domestic violence kills 14,000 women a year. That is two-thirds of the country's homicides, and equates to a woman dying at the hands of a partner every 40 minutes.

In addition, Russia, which is a country of 140 million, has only about four dozen shelters for battered women nationwide. The same handful of shelters is true in most countries in the region.

Women's-rights organizations in the former Soviet Union have tried for more than two decades to prod lawmakers into enacting domestic-violence legislation.

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Most of those efforts have failed, even when top politicians such as Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev have supported the campaigns.

The key obstacle is male-dominated parliaments whose members contend that a domestic-violence law is unnecessary because current laws already cover assault, battery and murder.

The authorities enforcing those laws make a distinction between a woman being attacked by a non-partner or a partner, however.

If the attacker is a non-partner, police and prosecutors will bring a case against him.

If the attacker is a partner, they will try to talk the couple into "working it out."

A woman can bring charges against a partner on her own without police assistance, but it's a daunting proposition.

She has to gather evidence and line up witnesses herself. She also has to bring a case before a judge by herself -- a difficult task if she's not a lawyer.

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That leads to only 2 percent of Russian domestic-violence victims reporting their battering to police.

The combination of authorities' attitude that domestic abuse is a private matter, and most former Soviet countries' lack of a domestic-violence law, is that prosecutors will bring charges against a batterer only after he has killed his partner or assaulted her so severely that she's disabled. This, of course, means it's far too late for her.

Journalists in the former Soviet Union, who are afraid to criticize the authorities on many issues, have to their credit been bringing attention to the domestic-abuse problem and calling for separate legislation to address it.

In Uzbekistan, for example, news organizations covered the case of a divorced woman whose former husband stabbed her 47 times, leading to her having both a leg and arm amputated.

But even coverage of outrageous cases of domestic abuse has failed to prompt Uzbekistan, Russia, Armenia and most other former Soviet countries to adopt domestic-abuse laws.

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Most of the domestic-abuse bills that have been drafted in the region have focused on prevention: stopping the batterer from continuing to abuse his partner to the point that she becomes crippled or dies.

As an example, almost no country in the region has a restraining-order law that would allow a judge to order a batterer to avoid further contact with his victim.

The absence of such a provision means that a batterer can continue assaulting his partner or ex-partner until it's too late.

Armenian women's-rights groups have had the same lack of luck persuading parliament to pass a domestic-violence law as their Russian counterparts.

They are trying again this year, energized by the latest highly publicized abuse case.

In January of 2016 a court convicted Karen Khechoyan of Lori Province of beating his wife Lusine Ghabuzyan so severely that she had to be hospitalized. Her injuries included multiple broken bones.

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The majority of Armenians were incensed when the court gave Khechoyan a punishment of only a $300 fine.

The hand-slap came despite Ghabuzyan's testimony that Khechoyan had been battering her for 17 years.

Uzbekistan has a practice rooted in village tradition that adds an additional layer of difficulty to a domestic-abuse victim's search for justice.

This is the Mahalla system, under which a group of community elders tries to adjudicate a domestic-abuse situation with an eye toward preserving the marriage.

The elders, typically conservative, usually advise the victim to continue bearing the abuse for the sake of the family and -- worse -- to change whatever behavior she engages in that provokes her batterer.

In other words, the vast majority of the time, the Mahalla system sides with the abuser against the abused.

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Since most Uzbek women have no resources to start a life of their own, and few battered-women shelters are available, they continue to get battered, wondering when it will get so bad that they are killed or maimed.

Because most of the former Soviet Union consists of patriarchal societies where men are considered king, it will probably take generations to eliminate the deeply ingrained attitude that men can batter women with impunity.

Domestic-abuse laws, which have helped reduce abuse in other countries, can help protect women in the former Soviet Union until there is a wholesale change in men's attitudes.

That means it's imperative for women's-rights organizations to keep pushing for them.
Afghan schoolchildren study at an open-air classroom in the Mohmand Dara district in eastern Nangarhar province on December 18, 2014. Afghanistan has had only rare moments of peace over the past 30 years, its education system undermined by the Soviet invasion of 1979, a civil war in the 1990s and six years of Taliban rule. AFP PHOTO / Noorullah SHIRZADA (Photo credit should read Noorullah Shirzada/AFP/Getty Images)

Increasing violence, threats and intimidation in 2015 left nearly 230,000 Afghan children without access to education and healthcare, according to the United Nations.

Miriam, an 11-year-old from Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province, believes she and her family are lucky to have escaped alive. Her village in Achin district is a place of fierce fighting between Taliban, Islamic State, and government fighters.

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During one battle, a mortar landed on Miriam's friend's house, killing her. "There are a lot of killings and beheadings," she said.

With them, come threats and intimation - especially against girls' schools, and Miriam remembers the chilling day 10 months ago when ISIS fighters marched into her classroom."We had just completed the mid-year exams, and one day the ISIS fighters told us not to come to school anymore. They had guns and everyone was so scared."

Miriam's school is one of more than 23 out of 46 in the district that local officials say are now closed because of fighting.

Photo: Tahera Hussaini / UNICEF Afghanistan

Across the country, incidents like this are on the rise, according to "Education and Healthcare at Risk," a new report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

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In 2015, UNAMA and UNICEF documented 132 cases in which schools or school personnel were attacked or threatened - an 86 percent increase from 2014, and a 110 percent increase from 2013. This led to the closing or partial closing of more than 369 schools, affecting at least 139,048 students and 600 teachers.

Girls are particularly vulnerable. According to the report, 213 girls schools were shut down last year, denying nearly 51,000 girls access to education. In addition to closing schools, anti-government forces created additional barriers to education for women and girls by prohibiting education beyond 4th or 6th grade, and in many cases by completely banning them from going to school.

Even before ISIS shut down her school and started using it as a military base, Miriam knew her days there were numbered.

"People can send their daughters to school, but only for preliminary education. They have to stop sending them in 6th grade," she said.

"Conflict-related violence not only puts Afghan children at risk of harm, but also limits their fundamental rights to education and healthcare," said Danielle Bell, UNAMA Human Rights Director. "Efforts must be redoubled to enable children - particularly girls - free and safe access to medical services and education."

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All parties in the conflict - including the United States - have taken over schools for their military operations, according to UNAMA. Over the past few months, a school abandoned because of violence in Helmand province has been the center of fighting between the Afghan National Army and the Taliban, and control of the school has shifted between the two.

A classroom in an abandoned school on the outskirts of Chora, Uruzgan. The school was built approximately five years ago but was taken over by U.S. Special Forces who used it as a temporary base while conducting operations in the area. Their presence attracted fighting, so the local community asked them to vacate, which they did after three weeks. During this period, the school was largely destroyed due to the fighting. It now lies abandoned. May 2015. Photo: Andrew Quilty

"Protecting children's right to education...despite conflict and displacement, must be an integral part of our response in Afghanistan. The next generation could be compromised if we cannot protect children's rights to education," said Leila Zerrougui, U.N. Special Representative for the Secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict.

While the highest number of incidents against schools occurred in Afghanistan's eastern region - and tied in part to the rise of ISIS there, almost no area of the country was immune, and growing insecurity is furthering a climate of fear.

"When the Taliban attacked our village and the government's military forces, they warned us to close our schools... Even after the attack, we weren't able to re-open the girls' schools," said Aiwaz Khan, headmaster of a primary school for girls in Afghanistan's northeastern Baghlan province.

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UNAMA documented three cases of attacks against education in Baghlan in 2015, but after Taliban forces launched a new offensive there last week, Khan's concerns are growing that this area could spiral into another Kunduz which fell briefly to the Taliban in September 2015 and is still a place of raging violence.

"Without a doubt, we are worried about this," Khan said. "Our children - girls and boys - are being excluded from education, and that's bad for our future. Really, we are hopeless."

The increased threats, abductions and extortion that are sending a wave of terror through the education sector are also being documented in record numbers in the health sector. Again, the impact on children is particularly devastating. More than 90,000 children missed their immunizations last year because of skyrocketing attacks on hospitals, clinics and medical personnel - 125 attacks in 2015 compared to 59 in 2014 and 33 in 2013.

"The consequence of attacks against healthcare in Afghanistan go far beyond the terrible loss of life," said Mark Bowden, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan. "Afghan men, women and children requiring medical treatment may suffer or die, because people no longer feel safe at a hospital or clinic or there are no longer medical personnel available to treat them."

Photo: Andrew Quilty

While no direct connection has been made between decreased access to healthcare and a sharp rise in the number of children killed and injured by the violence, UNAMA data show that children now account for one out of every three civilian casualties, compared to one out of four last year.

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"In the first quarter of 2016, almost one third of civilian casualties were children," said Bell. "If the fighting persists near schools, playgrounds, homes and clinics, and parties continue to use explosive weapons in those areas - particularly mortars and IED tactics, these appalling numbers of children killed and maimed will continue."

The report calls on the Afghan government and anti-government forces to stop attacks that target or affect civilians, and for the international community to implement programs that will help the Afghan government prevent harm to schools and hospitals.

For children like Miriam who have been forced out of the classroom, there is no assurance of ever being able to return. She and her family are now living in Jalalabad after fleeing the violence in her village.

"We have lost everything - not only school," she said. "Now we live in a smallrented house, and all the girls and boys from my area are like me. We do not go to school in the city. My father said one day we will go back to our village, and you can study there... I don't know what will happen."
In early March, the Cruz for President campaign announced the formation of an official Religious Liberty Advisory Council. One of the members of Cruz' advisory council, Bishop Harry Jackson, appears to have the official power, through his participation in a major prophetic organization associated with the radical New Apostolic Reformation movement, to add new teachings to the Bible -- in a similar manner as Mormon prophet Joseph Smith's discovery of scripture that comprises the Book of Mormon which, for the Church of the Latter Day Saints, augments and completes the Bible.

Harry Jackson has been a longtime member of a group called the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders that began in 1999 under the initiative of Cindy Jacobs, who then invited C. Peter Wagner to preside over the group. In 2008, Wagner officially passed leadership of ACPE on to Jacobs (1), with whom Harry Jackson works closely -- such as in a 2007 effort to block the Hate Crimes Bill.

ACPE is perhaps the most important group of prophets in the global New Apostolic Reformation movement that church growth specialist Peter Wagner has played a major role in launching and helping organize.

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Interviewed at length about the NAR in 2011 for National Public Radio, Peter Wagner has called for members of his movement to "take dominion over everything". Wagner describes "dominion" as a process of "subduing" in which his movement becomes "the head not the tail" and NAR members rule "like kings".

Harry Jackson has himself promoted the NAR's characteristic teaching on the "Seven Mountains" which encourages believers to develop influence and control in seven key sectors of society, and referred to the Apostle Paul as the "Osama Bin Laden of his day".

Beyond ACPE, Harry Jackson's extensive involvement in Wagner's NAR movement includes being listed as teaching a Wagner Leadership Institute (WLI) course in Malaysia, in 2014. Courses taught by the globally active WLI are one of the top ways the NAR spreads its doctrine.

Another WLI course instructor has been Ugandan NAR leader Julius Oyet, who claims to have helped co-author Uganda's notorious, so-called "kill the gays" bill.



NAR doctrine holds that its movement prophets can receive divine revelation directly from God. ACPE's two-dozen odd prophets have the ability to issue prophetic statements that can, in effect, add new scriptural teaching to the Bible. The one catch is that these prophetic statements cannot contradict scripture.

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One 2007 edict from an ACPE member clarified God's will concerning abortion -- as an act that requires a compensatory shedding of blood. In 2008, ACPE head Wagner stated,

"There are principles in the Bible that you can put together and make a case for it, but you look up the word 'abortion' in your Concordance--it's not there. See? And, so, all I'm saying is that's a good, live example of something that we have received from the Holy Spirit that is now legitimate.. But the Holy Spirit has revealed to us that abortion is murder. See?"



In 2004, Bishop Harry Jackson appeared in a video interview in which Jackson and the founder of the Elijahlist website (one of the NAR's main event and news clearinghouse sites, which boasts of having Sarah Palin as a daily reader) Steve Schultz discussed their mutual membership in the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders.

Harry Jackson's name appeared on ACPE membership rosters from 2004 through 2010 (1,2,3,4,5) published on the Elijahlist website. Since 2011, ACPE has neglected to publish its full member list. But there are indications Jackson's association with ACPE continues.

In 2012, Jackson joined ACPE head Cindy Jacobs at a rally against same-sex marriage and in 2013 filmed a fund-raising infomercial for Jacobs' ministry. In 2014, shortly after a prophetic statement from Cindy Jacobs' ministry concerning possible race riots over an impending grand jury verdict in the Ferguson, MO shooting death of Michael Brown, Harry Jackson flew to Ferguson along with Alveda King, who appears to have joined ACPE in 2016.

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In a February 3, 2008 appearance at a West Coast NAR church, during a question and answer period, C. Peter Wagner revealed the radical power that ACPE prophets can wield. Wagner was emphatic -- there's nothing whatsoever about abortion in the Bible. "But the Holy Spirit has revealed to us that abortion is murder," Wagner explained:

"the Holy Spirit still speaks to us today and we can hear from the Lord, and He gives us information, actually, that you can't find in any of the 66 books of the Bible--even though none of it contradicts the Bible. If the Holy Spirit ever says anything that contradicts the Bible, then it's false, see? But there's a lot of truth that the Holy Spirit gives us that the Bible doesn't even touch, doesn't even bring up, see? And so, I mean, like I say... You know, a big one that the Bible doesn't even touch is abortion. Nothing in the Bible that condemns abortion. But the Holy Spirit has revealed to us that abortion is murder. See? Now, that's not in the Bible."

The Call co-founder Lou Engle was quoted in an official ACPE prophecy for the year 2012 was listed as an ACPE member from 2004 through 2007 (1,2,3).

One of Engle's prophetic doctrines presents a chilling example of how those who channel the voice of God can use their divine gift:

In late 2007, Lou Engle released his Doctrine of the Shedding of Innocent Blood that was originally published on the website of his The Call organization. Stated Engle,

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"Surely blood requires blood in God's judgment. God so highly values humanity that He protects it with His severe judgment. A day of reckoning is set if man does not obey Him... Where there is shedding of innocent blood, there is no atonement for the land. There is a blood pollution problem on America's soil. The most "dangerous terrorist" is not Islam, but God. One of God's names is "the Avenger of Blood." Have you worshipped [sic] that God yet?"

Because of Lou Engle's status as a prophet in ACPE, we can guess that Engle's teaching may have been considered within the NAR movement to have the force of Biblical scripture.

In 2008, Lou Engle joined Bishop Harry Jackson, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee on C-SPAN for a one hour public discussion on issues such as abortion and traditional marriage.

In a 2009 blog post, Engle compared late-term abortion doctor George Tiller to an Auschwitz death camp worker, writing,

"Tiller is being charged with 19 counts of illegal late-term abortions after he claimed ignorance of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, a federal bill signed into law in 2002 that protects children born alive from infanticide by abortion doctors. [...] Why should an abortion doctor be found guilty for criminal activity and a governor who has done everything to cover and protect that crime be exalted? Was it only the Auschwitz death camp workers who were guilty of killing the Jews or were the political leaders who sanctioned it guilty as well? The answer is obvious to anyone who has a heart."

Little more than two months later, Dr. Tiller was gunned down in the lobby of his church, by antiabortion activist Scott Roeder.

Harry Jackson is one of several members of the Ted Cruz For President Religious Liberty Advisory Council who are involved in the New Apostolic Reformation movement. Pastor Jim Garlow and Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, also on the council with Jackson, have had extensive association with NAR organizations.

In addition, head of a leading pro-Cruz super-PAC David Barton has numerous ties to the New Apostolic Reformation movement including a longtime friendship with ACPE head Cindy Jacobs.

Major NAR leaders to have endorsed Cruz' presidential bid include Charisma magazine publisher Stephen Strang and International House of Prayer head Mike Bickle, who has claimed claimed that God sent Hitler to hunt the Jews.



Top NAR leaders have repeatedly emphasized in their writings the need for believers to destroy or neutralize, by burning, smashing, or flushing down toilets, objects deemed to be unholy, including profane books and "idolatrous" religious texts (such as Books of Mormon), religious relics (such as statues of Catholic saints, the Buddha, or Hindu gods), and native art (such as African masks, Hopi Indian Kachina dolls, and totem poles.)

According to New Apostolic Reformation doctrine, objects to be destroyed include those associated with Mormonism, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses, Hinduism and eastern religions generally, Christian Science, native religions, and Baha'i.


A portion of the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico blowout in May 2010.

Photo: Carl Safina

Six years ago we rushed to the Gulf of Mexico after Deepwater Horizon exploded and BP's well gushed oil for 87 panicked-filled days of oiled beaches, oiled birds, oiled turtles, dead dolphins, and shattered human lives.

But memories are short, so we're drilling for more in harder, riskier places. Last month, the Obama administration made the decision to lease parts of the Arctic for potential offshore drilling. We are gratified that the Administration has taken Atlantic Seaboard leases off the table; we wish they'd nixed arctic drilling too.

The Gulf and the Arctic Ocean have similarities: people depend on these places for their livelihoods, unique and iconic wildlife make these places their homes, and oil companies lobby for the right to own these places and people.

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Yet here's where they are different: the Arctic Ocean environment is harsh and unforgiving - it is cold, dark and icy for most of the year. Unlike the Gulf, there is little infrastructure in place to help if there was a spill -- the nearest Coast Guard station is 1,000 miles away. Despite having an astonishing array of nearby infrastructure in the Gulf, we watched BP oil gush for months while they bumbled helplessly with ineffective ad-hoc efforts at plugging the hole.

Accidents happen. The risks in the Arctic are huge if drilling happens in the Chukchi Sea. Cleaning up a blowout or major spill in the Arctic's icy environment is impossible.



Shell's drilling rig Kulluk after running aground on Sitkalidak Island, Alaska, January, 2013.

Photo: Petty Officer 3rd Class Jonathan Klingenberg, United States Coast Guard

As Interior Secretary Jewell said,

We know the Arctic is a unique place of critical importance to many - including Alaska Natives who rely on the ocean for subsistence... we want to hear from the public to help determine whether these areas are appropriate for future leasing and how we can protect environmental, cultural and subsistence resources.

They are not appropriate. The risks of Arctic drilling are far too great -- to the people, to the wildlife and to the future of our country.

Alaska is feeling the impacts of climate change more than any other area of our country. Permafrost is melting, sea levels are rising and communities are washing into the sea. Since 2009, walrus unable to find ice have been increasingly hauling out on land, to the detriment of their young. Haul-outs of 20,000-40,000 animals have occurred because there was no ice in the Chukchi Sea. Easily frightened on land, walrus and their babies can get caught in sheer panic during a stampede, all because our climate change caused by burning oil and coal has destroyed their home. Now is not the time to add the possibility of a major spill. That time has passed.

We shouldn't have to worry about arctic animals. We're already tired of seeing televised images of oil-coated birds and otters. We're tired of safety equipment that fails. We're tired of seeing the pain from people that have lost the opportunity to make a living at what they love. We need to make the transition to a clean energy economy and we must do it now by taking special places off the table and protecting them from risky and dangerous drilling.

We cannot justify opening the Arctic to drilling when the Arctic is a poster child for climate change. President Obama has made a commitment to mitigate climate change and has announced a U.S.-Canadian agreement to working together to protect the Arctic. It's a no-brainer to avoid any new Arctic leases. Protecting our climate and protecting the Arctic are intrinsically linked. Leave the oil where it is and let's do more for clean energy.
A few months ago I was in Greece documenting the Island of Lesbos where the refugees would arrive via small boat from Turkey. After arrival they are registered and then sent along the migration route to Europe. Now, I'm in Northern Greece next to the Macedonia border which is fenced, heavily guarded by police, and closed to refugees. The conditions here are no less dire. This camp is called Idomeni and the refugees have been here for over 40 days, left in limbo with nowhere to go.

I met a few amazing characters at the Idomeni camp and documented some of their stories in the videos below.

Mohammed is fifteen, and one of the few people in the camp from Iran. In the video, you can see the poor conditions of the camp environment. The pond in the area is a mixture of rain water and portable toilet run off. I call it 'Living in the Shit'. It's not a surprise that Mohammed's family, and many others in the camp, are sick.

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Omar, a Syrian refugee, is an artist whose work has been inspired by recent events and his current living situation. In the video below, he explains his latest work in detail.

Until recently the protests in the Idomeni camp have been somewhat peaceful. Here is a Syrian man sharing his newfound heart flag with Greek Police at the Macedonia border which is blocked by 2 police busses.

Now, Idomeni sees rubber bullets and tear gas, as they make the camp more permanent or send the refugees back to Turkey.
NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 17: Democratic presidential candidate U.S Senator, Bernie Sanders speaks during, 'A Future To Believe In' GOTV rally concert at Prospect Park on April 17, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Mireya Acierto/FilmMagic)

Tomorrow's New York primary will be the decisive one, the pundits tell us. It will join a long list of other primaries and caucuses which were also deemed to be the crucial one which would decide the whole race: Iowa, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and (of course) all the Super Tuesday states. All of these, in turn, were the decisive ones to watch, we were told. The fact that no decisive winner has emerged on either side is deemed irrelevant afterwards, of course, because by then we'll all be focused on the next big, definitive primary on the calendar. This will likely continue right up to California's (decisive) vote, in June.

The simple fact of the matter is that there are two Democratic candidates and two Republican candidates who are still relevant. This will likely be true all the way to the conventions, no matter how many delegates are won by the frontrunners. The battle between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump will still be contentious in Cleveland, and the fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is still going to matter in Philadelphia. Both parties are struggling with the question of who they are and what they stand for, and on both sides this will likely continue long after the 2016 race is over.

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Having said all of that, though, I'm still going to devote the rest of this column to predicting the horserace, as I've been doing all throughout the primary season. Part of the reason New York looms so large is the fact that we've had a two-week period of relative calm on the calendar, and also that no other state will be voting tomorrow. Next week will be more interesting, as many Atlantic seaboard states vote together, but for now New York is the sole focus.

Before I get to predictions, I've got to update my record. Two weeks ago, I called the Wisconsin race for Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz, although I was much more timid in my predictions on the margins. I hedged my bets by predicting both would win by only around five points, and both candidates impressively exceeded this: Cruz won by 13 points, Sanders by 12. I also snuck a prediction of victory in Wyoming for Sanders into one of my Friday columns, which turned out to be correct. This improves my score by calling two-for-two right on the Democratic side and calling the only Republican race right as well. Overall, this pushed my record up to exactly three-fourths correct for the whole season.

Total correct 2016 Democratic picks: 27 for 36 -- 75% Total correct 2016 Republican picks: 30 for 40 -- 75% Total overall correct picks: 57 for 76 -- 75%.

With the recordkeeping out of the way, let's take a look at the two primaries which will happen tomorrow night.

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New York (Republicans)

This one's pretty easy to predict. Donald Trump will take his home state by a very large margin. The only real question is whether Ted Cruz can even manage second place here, or whether John Kasich will beat him. Cruz is no doubt kicking himself repeatedly for that "New York values" quip, as it now seems that every single Republican voter in the state fully remembers Cruz sneering at them, back in Iowa. The polling between Cruz and Kasich has been neck-and-neck, but unfortunately for both of them, it is also at only about half of Trump's overall support.

The big question for tomorrow night in the GOP is whether Trump completely sweeps the state or not. If he gets over half of the vote, he could walk away with every single delegate -- which would boost his lead over Cruz by almost 100 delegates. For both Cruz and Kasich, wresting even a handful of delegates away from Trump will be a victory (of sorts), because at this point neither Cruz nor Kasich is ever going to be able to amass more delegates than Trump. They're fighting for one purpose and one purpose only -- to deny Trump the 1,237 delegates he needs to win on the first convention vote. So peeling off five or ten delegates from Trump's haul tomorrow night will be about the best either Cruz or Kasich can hope for, at this point.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that Trump gets at least 90 delegates tomorrow night. He may not sweep every single delegate, but he's going to at least come close. Trump should wind up with a sum total of around 850 delegates, meaning he'll have fewer than 400 to go to reach the magic number. Whether he manages to do so or not, his big victory tomorrow night will tamp down all the talk of Trump "losing momentum." Trump will win New York big (huge, even), and he'll then be in good position to win most of the states voting next Tuesday as well.

New York (Democrats)

Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been campaigning very hard over the past two weeks. Bernie's back from meeting the Pope, and Hillary's back from meeting George Clooney, and both will be fighting hard for every Big Apple vote right up until the polls close tomorrow.

Hillary has always had the most to lose here. If Bernie actually beats her tomorrow, then she will have lost her "home" state. Clinton can claim three states as home ground, and she's won two already (Arkansas and Illinois), but New York is the big one, since it is the state she represented in the Senate for eight years. To lose would be a big embarrassment for Clinton, and that's putting it mildly.

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Bernie can claim home ground in New York as well (along with Vermont), since he was born here. But his ties are a lot less recent than Hillary's, and he's never won an election here. If he manages to do so tomorrow, it would be a bigger upset than beating Clinton in Michigan was, and it will produce a whole lot of angst within the party over the relative weakness of Clinton as a candidate. So Bernie's got the most to win tomorrow, and Hillary's got the most to lose.

However, I don't think it's going to happen. Bernie Sanders will likely fall short of upsetting Hillary Clinton tomorrow night. Bernie has been packing them in to his rallies, pulling audiences of 27,000 and 28,000 in the past week. The enthusiasm is still there, and lots of New Yorkers are feeling the Bern in a big way. But it's not going to be enough.

I say this for two reasons. The first is that New York holds a closed primary, meaning independents cannot vote for a Democratic candidate. Sanders has done a lot better in open primaries, because his support reaches deeply into the independent demographic. But they'll be shut out of the process tomorrow, which is going to hurt Bernie's overall vote total.

The second reason I don't see Bernie winning tomorrow night is that there has been almost no movement in the polls over the past two weeks. Clinton was up by ten points or better two weeks ago, and she is now up by almost exactly the same margin. Sanders hasn't moved the needle at all, in other words, even after all those impressive rallies. This may be because it is so late in the primary season -- many voters have already made up their minds by this point, and there's not a lot that would get them to change their view. Even holding a debate in New York didn't shift the numbers at all, so it's hard to see some sort of Sanders wave appearing at the last minute.

Of course, the polls could be wrong -- all of them. They certainly were in Michigan, please remember. But I don't think they will prove to be all that inaccurate tomorrow night. Usually an upset is preceded by a very late surge in the polls, mere days before the election. That has so far failed to materialize for Bernie. Maybe Sanders will outperform where the polls put him now, but I think the best he could manage would be to lose to Clinton by only five points or so (rather than by 10 or 15).

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While Clinton does have a lot to lose in New York, if she wins it may be the end of any chance Bernie Sanders has to beat her in the overall pledged delegate count. This chance was slim (at best) heading into New York, but it could become nothing short of an impossible dream afterwards. I doubt Bernie is going to drop out of the race or anything -- I fully expect him to keep fighting, all the way to the end of the primary calendar. He'll be following in Clinton's footsteps if he does so, since this is precisely what she did back in 2008. Bernie's still generating a lot of excitement out there on the hustings, and he's still generating a huge amount of campaign cash, so there is really nothing stopping him from going the distance. Hillary Clinton likely won't hit the delegate count she needs until the very end of the race (California, perhaps), so she will not be able to make the pivot to attacking only the Republican candidates -- she's going to have to fight Sanders for every state, right up to the end.

So those are my predictions -- Trump in a landslide, with at least 90 delegates when the night is done; and Clinton wins the vote, but only by single digits. If you think I'm way off base, let me know about it in the comments, where (as always) you are free to share your own predictions with everyone.

[Previous states' picks:]

Chris Weigant blogs at:
Prior to my first trip to Stockholm, I barely did any research and entered Sweden with no plan. Now that I've experienced the vibrant culture and charm of the Swedish capital, I created a list of the most noteworthy things I encountered on the trip. So if you're planning on venturing to Stockholm, here are some tips to keep in mind.

1.Bundle up and embrace the cold. Traveling to Scandinavia will induce shivers during most of the year, but don't let this prevent you from visiting. Locals are always decked out in wool hats, mittens, and scarves, and a nice puffy coat is essential. Most clothing stores sell snugly winter apparel so you can withstand the cold and enjoy your visit. Besides, the frigid air keeps the adrenaline up while exploring, and the wintry landscape makes driving through the countryside that much more beautiful.

2. Try the Cinnamon rolls. A specialty of Stockholm, they are soft, sweet, and simple, and quite cheap (equivalent to a only a few US dollars). The most popular place to indulge in this Swedish treat is Fabrique, a chain bakery with numerous locations in the city. The cinnamon roll dusted with black pepper and cardamom from this place is absolutely incredible..

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3. Visit the Fotografiska (Museum of Photography). Stockholm has so many museums, but if there's one that will really blow your mind it's this one. I've never been so emotionally moved by photographs before visiting this collection, and the view from the cafe is stunning.

4. Walk along the water. You'll find this task incredibly easy to achieve since Stockholm is composed of numerous islands connected by bridges, so water seems to follow you wherever you go. But this abundance of canals and lakes leads to many gorgeous views, where the towering architecture of the city reflects in the glassy surface of the dark water.

5. Go shopping. Many designers and clothing stores are originally Swedish, so they have great shops in the city for decent prices. Famous Swedish stores like Weekday and H&M reside on Drottninggatan, the famous pedestrian shopping street.

6. Get brunch in Sodermalm. This district of the city is known for its trendy shops and quirky restaurants, so it's great for shopping and eating out. But who doesn't love a nice hearty brunch once in a while? Avocado toast and Acai bowls are gifts from the gods. Search for meal deals and discounts. Stockholm is a notoriously expensive city, but if you look hard enough you can find affordable food specials. Restaurants and bars often have weekly specials and theme nights that offer decent prices and interesting cuisines.

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7. Stroll through Gamla Stan, the historical district. Featuring cobblestone alleyways, tightly packed buildings of faded pastel hues, ornate churches, and a relaxed vibe, this area is beautiful and has endless shops and streets to explore.

8. Browse a candy store. Even if you're not planning on buying anything, candy shops always charm you with colorful sweets and sugary aromas. Swedish candy shops are filled with chocolates in metallic wrappings and overflowing buckets of traditional salty licorice.

9. Watch the sunset. While sunsets are amazing anywhere in the world, there is something magical about the orange and pink sky igniting the dark, shadowy water and warming the icy atmosphere. The scenery can be so incredible that you'll forgot about your frozen toes for a moment and just marvel at the harmony between the colors of nature and the vibrancy of the city.

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My high school US history course taught that we all have a place at the lunch counter. Anyone who walks into your bakery and wants to buy a cake should be offered a cake. Mechanics should service all cars, no matter who owns them. All of us need to use public restrooms from time to time. Fathers need access to public restrooms where they can assist young daughters and women need the same type of facilities to help their elderly fathers. Transgender individuals get to use those facilities with the rest of us too. The laws in Mississippi and North Carolina protecting "deeply held religious beliefs" aren't about wedding cakes or public restrooms per se. They are part a system of ongoing abuse that subjects LGBT individuals to discrimination and violence, two issues that can create a foundation for substance abuse later in life.

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Tennessee is going a step further, proposing that therapists should be able to refuse service to LGBT individuals. This is antithetical to the guidelines and ethics codes of every major therapeutic organization in the nation; if you go into counseling, therapy, social work, or chaplaincy as a profession, you go into it knowing that you will serve and support to the best of your ability any person who walks through the door. Imagine a gay youth in a rural school where there is only one counselor, being denied assistance with college applications because of the "deeply held" religious beliefs of the school counselor. An individual could be denied access to addiction treatment that his/her insurance covers at the only nearby facility, because the services are offered by a religious group. Sometimes, there are no other options; we can't always go to another service provider.

These laws are not about religious freedom. The concept of religious freedom is that each of us is free to worship however we want, but we may not impose those beliefs on others. A therapist who opens a practice takes whoever seeks his/her aid. A baker bakes cakes, bread, or cookies for those with the money to buy them. It is no issue at all to offer "family" or non-gendered bathrooms so that all sorts of people can use the facilities safely and in peace.

As an addiction researcher, I can report without question that people who suffer discrimination are at increased risk of many different physical, economic, and mental health issues: addiction included. We cannot allow these laws to stand.
I love clothing. Choosing what to wear is my creative outlet. But I also have dedicated my life to fighting injustices, working on building a more just economy and, ultimately, trying to make the world a more fair place to work and live. I love to shop, but shopping is also a source of inner conflict, as I think about the people I don't see behind the clothing that I want before I buy.

The apparel supply chain is extremely complex, starting with the raw material (cotton or wool are the most common agricultural sources) and going through 5-6 more processes to get a wearable product. Because the apparel sector is so labor intensive, and because globalization is here to stay, we have seen U.S. apparel production drop by approximately 92% since the 1960's. That means that in the 1960's the U.S. was making 95% of its clothing and today it is down to a mere 3%. The U.S. outsources 97% of its clothing production to countries around the world where labor is cheap and worker protections are minimal or non-existent, creating a race to the bottom for workers around the world.

April 24 marks the anniversary of the worst ever industrial accident to hit the garment industry. Let us remember and never forget the 2013 disaster that struck the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, which killed 1,134 workers. These workers were in that factory because, like most of us, they need to work to earn enough money to feed their families. The reality - they were making clothing for consumers in wealthier countries like the United States.

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The Rana Plaza factory did not collapse due to a natural disaster. It collapsed because of structural failure, poor upkeep of the building and weak emergency plans and equipment. Photo Credit: rijans via Flickr under Creative Commons License.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) set up a fund for compensation for the families called the Donor Trust Fund. The Clean Clothes Campaign put together a list of the brands that were linked to the factory and that have sourcing relationships in Bangladesh and called on them to help support the survivors and compensate families of victims. It took two years of heavy campaigning to encourage reluctant brands like Benetton to contribute enough to reach the funding goal.

The Rana Plaza factory did not collapse due to a natural disaster. It collapsed because of structural failure, poor upkeep of the building and weak emergency plans and equipment. It collapsed with people inside because workers were told to work despite visible cracks in the walls. All of this is the result of the push for Fast Fashion. What is Fast Fashion? It is the speed of fashion trends rolling out and the scurry of consumers to buy more and more clothes to keep up with those trends; for the system to be maintained, these mountains of soon-to-be-outdated clothes need to be sold for less than the true cost of production.

Those brands linked to the Rana Plaza disaster have a responsibility but those brands are not the only actors supporting this system of Fast Fashion. Keeping up with trends has become more important today than ever before. Where we used to have two clothing seasons a year, we now have a new clothing season with new styles available weekly.

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We have to think about the people behind the clothing we buy. Credit: Solidarity Center/Sifat Sharmin Amita under Creative Commons License

The culture of Fast Fashion comes at a high cost to apparel workers and the environment, and the system is re-enforced by government policy and international agreements. New trade policies such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are a risk to workers everywhere. The agreement will make it easier to shift production to the countries with lowest wages and weakest worker protections, taking decent manufacturing jobs out of some countries, and further trapping the most vulnerable workers in other countries in this system. And these international policies are virtually impossible to overturn once they are written into law.

Rana Plaza was the largest and most publicized apparel disaster, but unfortunately not the only one. Victims and their families of these disasters must be compensated. But what about the invisible victims who make our clothing every day, in dangerous conditions, with little protection, and for poverty wages?

We can stand together to say no more exploitation and start participating in transforming policies that affect workers around the world. We can be more intentional in the way we spend our money and think about clothing.

There are many things we all can do immediately to demand Fair Fashion, rather than supporting Fast Fashion. The first thing to do is become more educated about the issue. Watch The True Cost, a documentary by Andrew Morgan and read my interview with him, and then pledge to be more intentional when purchasing clothing. You can show how you are doing this by signing onto our Demand Fair Fashion, Not Fast Fashion campaign pledge.

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Fair Brand, Maggie's Organics is creating alternatives to Fast Fashion by building long-term relationships with the people making their apparel line from farm to finish. Photo Credit: Maggie's Organics

You can also look for apparel brands that are creating alternatives and stay away from the big chain stores like H&M, Forever 21 and the Gap that are creating Fast Fashion. And as we direct more of our own purchasing dollars elsewhere, we cannot ignore the influence of these larger Fast Fashion corporations. We need to demand better from all corporations. Fashion Revolution is leading the call for consumers to think about fashion differently so that we can transform the industry into one that is more transparent and values the people who work in it, starting with asking the question Who Made My Clothes (#whomademyclothes).

Even brands that are known for excellent social justice policies, such as Patagonia, are seeing injustices in their complex supply chains: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/patagonia-labor-clothing-factory-exploitation/394658/. But the good news is that they are looking and finding the problems so they can fix them because we cannot fix what we cannot, or choose not to, see. Brands like Patagonia should be applauded for this level of commitment and transparency and, following the call of Fashion Revolution, we should expect transparency and transformation throughout the entire industry.
Mature Businessman at lectern outdoors, holding microphone and documents

Heightened media attention in this election season gives presidential candidates power to influence the public on health concerns like Ebola and Zika. But the inflammatory rhetoric candidates deploy often cause unwarranted fear. We should be wary of politicians' uninformed statements about public health. If we've learned anything from the Ebola crisis, it's that everyone--elected officials especially-- should follow health experts' decisions rather than catastrophize about them.

A year ago, the Ebola outbreak in Guinea and Liberia monopolized the news. The public feared that a similar outbreak would occur in the U.S. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) advised that confining people before they showed symptoms of Ebola was unnecessary, since they were not contagious. Regardless, state authorities in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Illinois ignored the CDC's advice, imposing quarantines on asymptomatic health workers. According to a study by Yale public health students, at least 273 were confined to their homes for 21 days, the maximum incubation period for the virus. An additional 2,815 U.S. service personnel returning from assisting Ebola-stricken countries were confined to military bases. Over 3,000 people were quarantined, but none actually developed Ebola. Over a dozen governors, including Christie (NJ), Malloy (CT) and Cuomo (NY), triggered unwarranted fear in the public, and disrupted the lives of those quarantined.

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Now that the hysteria surrounding Ebola is behind us, we should be careful about reacting to Zika as vehemently. Both Christie and Malloy are being sued by those they wrongfully quarantined. This shouldn't happen with Zika. Politicians can start by educating the public on the Zika virus. CDC Director Tom Frieden says that the virus is not a major threat, as 80 percent of people who contract the virus will have no symptoms at all. The rest will have only mild symptoms--mild fevers and rashes that last a week. The biggest concern over Zika is its looming threat to pregnant women and those planning to become pregnant. The CDC confirmed this week that Zika causes microcephaly and other severe fetal brain defects in newborns. They also confirmed that the virus could be transmitted through certain kinds of sex.

However, it is unlikely that the virus will turn into an epidemic in the United States. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine commented, "at this point, around the time of acute illness there is a small risk of sexual transmission." Mosquitos are still the major concern for Zika transmission. But the mosquito that carries the virus can't survive in most of the U.S. Although El Nino threatens to bring in tropical climate change perfect for mosquitoes, the U.S has a robust system of vector control that would regulate the growing mosquito population.

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Between January and March, the CDC screened 5,000 travelers for Zika, and just over 4 percent tested positive. Stephen Morse, director of the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Certificate Program at Columbia University, says, "the fact that the risk of contracting it is less than you might think ... it might be somewhat reassuring."

Most Zika-related discussions in the U.S. have issued from the Republican presidential candidates. After Senator Mitch McConnell claimed, "we're sort of reacting too late, like we did on Ebola," Zika became a frequent question in the Republican debates. During the New Hampshire debate in early February, the candidates were asked about Zika. Chris Christie, who had sanctioned Ebola quarantines in New Jersey, said he wouldn't hesitate to do this again with Zika. But according to the CDC, quarantines are completely ineffective.
Each year in April Rwanda commemorates its 1994 genocide, in which at least half-a-million Rwandans were killed in a hundred days. The theme this year is "Fighting Genocide Ideology," which sounds, on the face of it, like a good thing to do, especially in Rwanda. But much depends on how we identify genocide ideology, and how we fight it.

An ideology is genocidal if it proposes or implies that a particular group of people (such as an ethnic or religious group) should be destroyed. Genocidal ideologies make genocide possible by dichotomizing people into "us vs. them" categories, demonizing and dehumanizing "them," and justifying (often while simultaneously denying) group destruction. We should speak out against such ideologies; schools everywhere should teach about their dangers.

Rwanda, however, does not just teach and persuade. In 2008, it passed a law criminalizing "genocide ideology" and providing for its punishment. Under this law one is punished for what one believes, not for what one says. Speech is evidence of belief. In Rwanda, genocide ideology is now a thought-crime.

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Specifically, genocide ideology is defined as "an aggregate of thoughts" that can be inferred from speech or action. Examples of evidence from which "genocide ideology" may be inferred are dehumanizing, marginalizing, "defaming, mocking, boasting, despising, [or] degrading" on the basis of "ethnic group, origin, nationality, region, color, physical appearance, sex, language, religion or political opinion." Even "laughing at [others'] misfortune" may show genocide ideology.

The penalties are no laughing matter: "Any person convicted of the crime of genocide ideology ... shall be sentenced to an imprisonment of ten (10) years to twenty five (25) years." Public dissemination of genocide ideology is punished by a sentence of 20-25 years. Associations, organizations, and political groups convicted of genocide ideology are subject to "dissolution."

Even children can be guilty: The law includes a section entitled "Penalties awarded to children guilty of the crime of genocide ideology." For children under 12 years, the penalty is up to 12 months in a rehabilitation center. For ages 12-18 years, the penalty is half the adult penalty, with the possibility of serving some or all of the imprisonment in a rehabilitation center.

And who is responsible for the thought-crimes of children? Parents and teachers of children found guilty of genocide ideology are subject to imprisonment of 15 to 25 years if it is "evident" that they "participated" in inculcating the forbidden ideology. Teachers, in addition, are permanently barred from teaching.

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"Genocide ideology" is also inferred from "genocide denial." The government has determined that the 1994 genocide shall be officially known as the "Genocide against the Tutsi." This accurately reflects the fact that in 1994 thousands of Hutu killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsi, mostly with machetes, in a hundred days of political violence planned and orchestrated by advocates of Hutu power, an unambiguous act of genocide.

But tens of thousands of Hutu were also killed, many by Hutu perpetrators intent on eliminating the political opposition and many by Tutsi forces taking control of the country. Rwandans face criminal penalties for questioning the government's official story about the nature and context of the 1994 violence and the identities of its perpetrators and victims. This severely undermines much-needed research, teaching, and discussion regarding Rwanda's genocide.

Dozens of Rwandans are charged each year with genocide ideology. Intellectual freedom is also restricted through systematic indoctrination of students and deadly attacks on journalists. Human Rights Watch and others have repeatedly charged the government with human rights abuses including disappearances and assassinations of those deemed to oppose it.

Rwanda is admirable in many ways, including economic development and women's participation in government. Its suppression of "genocide ideology," however, is part of a larger pattern of repression inconsistent with its democratic aspirations and with its need for free and serious discussion of its history, social identities, and political options.
A Southwest Airlines jet comes in to land at Lindbergh Field in San Diego, California February 25, 2015. Southwest Airlines Co said it pulled 128 aircraft out of service on Tuesday after it discovered that they were overdue for a required check of the standby hydraulic system that serves as a backup to the planes' primary systems. REUTERS/Mike Blake (UNITED STATES - Tags: TRANSPORT BUSINESS)

Southwest Airlines seems to have embraced an unspoken policy that sees Arabic as a terrorist threat.

Virtually every time I travel, aside from international trips, I fly Southwest Airlines. As a loyal customer, I appreciate their low prices, flexible cancellation policies, and who could forget the alluring lack of a baggage fee?

Like many people suspended thousands of feet in the air, often my first act after getting comfortable in my seat on a plane is to utter a brief prayer, asking God for protection on my journey. This prayer happens to be in Arabic, and following an incident of blatant Islamophobia on April 6th when Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, an Iraqi UC Berkeley student was removed from a Southwest Airlines plane for speaking in Arabic on his phone -- hardly the first time the airline has done such a thing -- I will think twice about reciting my prayer aloud.

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However, I would be lying if I said I never considered the possibility of this scenario unfolding for me before this occurrence. After all, even if I didn't "sound" Muslim to a potential Islamophobe sitting within earshot, I definitely "look" Muslim, clad in my headscarf. In reality, for me, there is no escaping the ire of a paranoid, xenophobic individual.

Most recently, my husband and I were on a full flight to New York, and a man sat down next to us. Although his looks did not give him away as an Arab to me, my hijab lead him to ask us where we were from. He was an Iraqi American, a physician, who ended up talking to my husband, who is also a physician, the entire flight about their hectic schedules, the ups and downs of their specialities and the challenges of working in small-town hospitals versus urban areas. They commiserated over their lack of sleep and horrid hours.

They also conducted much of their discussion in Arabic, especially when sharing the commonalities of their experiences--he as an Iraqi refugee, and my husband as a Palestinian refugee.

I distinctly remember writhing in my seat, wondering who might comment, cautiously eyeing the people next to us to see if anyone was watching. I also remember chastising myself thinking I, too, was paranoid and should not think ill of those around me. There was nothing wrong with speaking in Arabic and I had no reason to feel there was.

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But my misgivings have been validated.

As I read various pieces on the experience of Makhzoomi, I asked, why has Arabic been erroneously transformed into the language of terror?



Why has Arabic been erroneously transformed into the language of terror?





Why and how has this rich, profound language with centuries-old deep historical, scientific and religious significance become associated with, and reduced to, a reflection of perverse contemporary geopolitical dynamics? Why does its aural presence elicit a Pavlovian response in some to alienate, exclude and report?

Sadly, like other symbols sacred to myself and millions of others, including but not limited to hijab (headscarf), niqab (face veil), or a non-hipster beard, Arabic as means of expression and component of a complex identity, has fallen into the arsenal of the Islamophobe. One more item to target, one more cause for suspicion, one more element to fuel misunderstanding.

Phrases like inshaAllah (God-willing), alhamdulillah (All praise is due to God), or words like shahid, which can mean martyr or witness, and jihad, which can generally refer to any type of struggle, have been covered with the pall of ignorance. The Arabic language has fallen prey to the semiotics of Islamophobia.

When Makhzoomi ended his phone call on that Southwest flight with inshaAllah, a phrase which rolls off the tongue of Arabs and Muslims so easily that they often use the phrase unwittingly in conversation with non-Arabic speakers, I'm sure he didn't think much of it--initially.

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Is my connection to the Arabic language another piece of my fragmented identity that I now must be exceedingly aware and cautious of?

As a Muslim, Arabic is the language of revelation; sacred, yet sometimes abstruse and esoteric, fascinatingly timeless at others. In my belief, it is the vehicle through which the words of God were communicated to mankind. It is ancient, yet functions in contemporary society to connect me with my religious heritage. Contrary to popular belief, it is the language of prayer and worship for non-Muslim Arabs as well.



Phrases like inshaAllah...alhamdulillah or words like shahid and jihad have been covered with the pall of ignorance.





The language is complicated and calculated, based a system of morphology that never ceases to astound me. It encompasses a vast literary tradition, from the orally transmitted poetry of the 6th century to the romantic poetry of the 7th century, Layla wa Majnun, Antara and Ablah, to the saga of Alf layla wa layla (One Thousand and One Nights).

It has adapted to modernity, with authors such as Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, poet Mahmoud Darwish, and novelist and playwright Elias Khoury.

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It is scientific and has preserved ancient Greek texts and fostered the Scientific Revolution of the 16th-17th centuries. "The history of Arabic is deep and closely tied to the evolution of intellectual thought, the birth of math and science, etc," says William Cotter, a joint PhD student in Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Arizona studying language change in the Middle East as a result of political conflict and long-term violence.

"The academic in me finds [Arabic] both breathtaking and heartbreaking. Although I think it would be safe to say that all language is very much tied to the history, politics, and context of the community that speaks it, Arabic, at least in my mind, has perhaps a more intimate connection with forms of politics and social change given the history of the Arabic-speaking world and its relationship to Western colonialism."

As a person of Arab descent, Arabic is the language of my culture. It is unique and the dialect I speak makes me readily identifiable as a Palestinian from the West Bank. My Arabic is imperfect and at times a source of both pride and anxiety. I am proud of my ability to communicate in the language of a homeland I know primarily through the diaspora; I am proud that I am able to preserve a part of my identity as a Palestinian, a fragment of my identity that has been questioned, denied, attacked and politicized. I am anxious about my weaknesses when it comes to this language; I must struggle for the appropriate word at times and consciously remind myself that I need to prove my ability when it comes to adeptness in conversation. I involuntarily reveal my American roots when communicating with native speakers. I dissect my word usage and mull over my pronunciation.

I come from here, and I am neither here nor there. I have two names that come together but pull apart. I have two languages, but I have forgotten which is the language of my dreams. I have the English language with its accommodating vocabulary to write in. And another tongue drawn from celestial conversations with Jerusalem. It has a silvery resonance, but rebels against my imagination (Mahmoud Darwish).

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Writer for GOOD Magazine Tasbeeh Herwees articulates similar sentiments. "I rarely have long conversations in Arabic anymore, not even with with my parents, because English is my primary language. But it infiltrates my language regardless. It slips in when I'm trying to bring intimacy into a conversation I'm having with someone, like my family or a new Arabic-speaking friend. When I use inshaAllah or assalamu alaikum or habibti, I am attempting to invoke a shared heritage, to lay claim to a common history. These words also help me reaffirm my relationship to a homeland that I was never able to experience as a home."

Like my identity as a Muslim, my association with the Arabic language has been Otherized. And like people of color who have been mistaken for Muslims and suffered the slings and arrows of Islamophobia, non-Muslim Arabs and Arabic speakers will also now be Otherized, subject to the same scrutiny and mistrust as Muslims.



Like my identity as a Muslim, my association with the Arabic language has been Otherized.





Southwest Airlines has set a precedent with its action on that flight. It has validated the insidious paranoia that has become rampant in our society. It will unjustly lead Muslims and Arabic speakers to rethink their language of choice when boarding a plane. Muslims and people of color must reassess their appearance, clothing, language, topic of discussion, reading materials and probably just remain silent and inconspicuous in order to remain on a flight.

Laith Saud, the co-author of "An Introduction to Islam in the 21st Century," says this is another instance of ethnic discrimination in action. "Imagine how many times you wanted off an elevator that was too crowded, but you wait or you get off. So the ability to have someone removed from a plane because they are speaking their native language is actually quite extreme," Saud says. "Islamophobes would argue no...with some trite argument like 'not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim,' which sounds right when you watch TV, but is simply statistically and factually false."

While some might echo the "safety supersedes cultural sensitivity" argument, for those of us who do not occupy positions of privilege in a situation where such a dilemma arises -- who are looked upon with suspicion because of our language, our clothes, or the color of our skin -- whether it be on a plane, or perhaps later in a shopping mall or classroom, it seems corporate entities like Southwest Airlines have simplified the formula we must abide by in order to fly under the radar: don't look Muslim; don't act Muslim; don't sound Muslim. Until this unspoken policy is publicly rescinded, Muslims will have to search for friendlier skies to fly.

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@deannaothman my forked, broken arabic is my constant reminder of my history and identity  sara yasin  (@sarayasin) April 16, 2016

@deannaothman the Arabic I speak is the sum of all the languages my ancestors have spoken passed down from one generation to the next.  Sami (@siinjiim) April 16, 2016

A means of understanding the beauty of what has been revealed to us in our book of guidance. https://t.co/jAE3Z5milg  Wassim (@KosharyMan) April 17, 2016

@deannaothman decolonisation: connecting & practising/nourishing your roots, particularly important when living in exile.  Tas (@TasneimZyada) April 17, 2016
During the past few years I became quite close to two veterans.

One is a World War II veteran. The other is a Vietnam War veteran.

The World War II veteran, John Tschirhart -- "the French-American" -- recently celebrated his 95th birthday.

Readers may remember him, as I have written extensively about him and about his patriotic and romantic pursuits while flying as a B-17 bombardier over Nazi-occupied Europe.

John was "only" 90 when I first met him and we immediately bonded.

I met John just a couple of months ago.

He told me he was of French descent. That, I believed immediately.

He also told me he was 90 years old. That, I could hardly believe.

He then told me his life story. I could say "unbelievable," but that would be an understatement.

As will become apparent, the story of John Tschirhart is one that you would only expect to see in a compelling, haunting movie about romance, amour, passion and heartbreak; about war, suffering, intrigue, spies and heroism and, yes, perhaps some stronger stuff, too, but we'll keep this one PG-13.

It was truly "A Veteran's Story Made for Hollywood," but it has taken many years and many disappointments before his story would have the chance to appear on the "silver screen."

Then, two years ago, Denver-based Film It Productions' Darla Rae learned about Tschirhart's story and immediately fell in love with it -- and with John.

The planning and the work to bring John's story -- a story he has carried and treasured for more than 70 years -- to the big screen in a feature film finally started in earnest.

The name of the film? You guessed it, "The French American."

However, in addition to the challenges of raising funds and signing up investors to produce the movie, there would be setbacks.

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A major one occurred when a simple fall a year ago sent John Tschirhart to the hospital where he encountered complications and at times fought for his life.

We asked for readers' prayers and they worked.

Although frail at 95 and although his memory is not as sharp as before, John is well aware of the ongoing pre-production activities of his movie, his life story.

Last week, at his assisted living community in Austin, Texas, John was treated to a "Red Carpet Event" complete with red carpet, applause, tributes and the viewing of a trailer of The French American.

Sharply dressed in his U.S. Air Force uniform, Major John Tschirhart made us all proud of him and thankful for his service and for his Greatest Generation. (Below - Photo by author))

We still need to keep John in our prayers, so that he may finally see his lifetime dream come true when The French American appears on a screen near us.

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But prayers -- of a different kind -- are also in order for my second veteran friend.

You see, Vietnam War veteran Allen Winfred Hancock Jr. died unexpectedly three weeks ago, just four days after celebrating his 62nd birthday.

He passed away at his small house in the Texas Hill Country, a house that had finally become home for him for what would be the last few peaceful years of his life.

Young Hancock left the military after serving aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Mellon during the Vietnam War, where he received a leg injury. The CGC Mellon's mission was to maintain close surveillance over 1,200 miles of Vietnamese coastline. As part of this mission, the Mellon conducted numerous naval gunfire support and rescue operations along with medical civic action and training programs for Vietnamese military personnel.



Hancock, the crew and the ship received several awards for their actions, but Hancock modestly maintained, "I was just down in the engine room on a ship... I can imagine what the 'ground pounders' went through."

Hancock would encounter many challenges after leaving the Coast Guard in 1975, not the least of which was a serious motorcycle accident in 2011 resulting in above-knee amputation of his left leg.

But relative peace would come to him when, thanks to Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 4443 in Austin, Texas, and thanks to the hard work of many volunteers, Hancock was able to move into a specially adapted rental home on the beautiful Texas Hill Country grounds of the Post.

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The installation of a special wheelchair ramp and a chain link fence by volunteer groups contributed to making Allen's final years as peaceful and comfortable as possible -- time he spent with his loyal companion, a dog named "Tonto."

Members of Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association (CVMA) Chapter 23-7 stand by disabled Vietnam War veteran Allen Hancock after installing a chain link fence surrounding the veteran's property. (Photo courtesy CVMA)

Allen has left us now and is in a much better place. However, left behind are the headaches, red tape and expenses involved with taking care of the final affairs, expenses and funeral arrangements, especially when the person upon whom these responsibilities suddenly fall is in dire financial straits herself.

Such is the case with Cris, Allen's niece, who also lost her own mother exactly one month before losing her uncle, and now faces the almost insurmountable financial and emotional tasks of taking care of both tragedies.

Should readers want to help her out -- no matter in what small way -- please go to Cris' GoFundMe site here.

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As Cris quotes, "First John 3:17 'But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?'"

Allen's final wishes were to be buried with his beloved father, Allen W. Hancock. Hancock Sr. served in the Philippines during World War II, was taken prisoner by the Japanese, forced to march in the tortuous "Bataan Death March" and spent an equally tortuous 44 months as a prisoner of war in Japan.

May both Rest in Peace.
testing of atomic bomb over ocean with mushroom clouds - red destroy

Donald Trump again caused international consternation. His remarks about South Korea and Japan developing nuclear weapons set off a minor firestorm. "It would be catastrophic were the United States to shift its position and indicate that we support somehow the proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional countries," argued deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

Actually, what would be catastrophic is American involvement in a nuclear war as a result of its defense commitment to another nation, especially one able to defend itself. Indeed, Rhodes praised the fact that "Japan and the Republic of Korea benefit from our very rock-solid security assurances that we will come to their defense in any event." But this has turned prosperous, populous countries into permanent defense dependents.

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Trump addressed this dependency. Neither country pays enough for its own protection, instead preferring to rely on Washington. He suggested that one answer would be for them to go nuclear. The issue "at some point is something that we have to talk about," he explained.

That's hardly a radical sentiment. The issue recently was raised by a former presidential candidate in South Korea; as president during the 1960s, the current president's father pursued a nuclear program before caving in to U.S. pressure. After Trump's remarks Cheong Seong-chang of the Sejong Institute observed: "If we have nuclear weapons, we'll be in a much better position to deal with North Korea."

Over the years there has been talk in Japan about pursuing the nuclear option. In an earlier political incarnation the current prime minister seemed open to discussing the subject and the country is slowly doing more militarily. Former Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto said Trump's sentiments allowed "Japan to change the peace-addled notion that America will protect us."

Despite the campaign to treat nuclear nonproliferation as sacrosanct, it is an issue the U.S. tends to honor in the breach. Washington does not press Britain or France to abandon their nuclear programs. American officials never criticize Israel for having amassed a nuclear arsenal. The U.S. reluctantly accepted India as nuclear power. However laudable nonproliferation as an objective, policymakers always balance it with other interests.

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Moreover, nonproliferation cannot be decided in isolation. Broadly speaking, it is better if fewer nations have nukes. Yet in some cases proliferation might be stabilizing. For instance, it is widely believed that the U.S.-Soviet nuclear balance helped prevent the outbreak of conventional conflict during the Cold War. Neither party wanted to risk the next step. In contrast, had Ukraine not given up its nuclear weapons left over from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia might not have grabbed Crimea and supported separatists elsewhere.

Worse, the way Washington won assent of some nuclear-capable powers to abstain is to provide a "nuclear umbrella," that is, promise to use nukes to defend them if necessary. As a result, the price of nonproliferation in East Asia is America's willingness to risk Los Angeles to protect Seoul and Tokyo, and maybe Taipei and Canberra too. Nonproliferation has turned out a lot like domestic gun control: only the bad guys get guns. In East Asia China, Russia, and North Korea are the nuclear powers. America is supposed to provide geopolitical balance.

The result of this situation truly could be catastrophic.

And while there was good reason to oppose, say, President Park Chung-hee, a dictator in charge of a still poor and unstable Republic of Korea, deploying nukes, the same objections do not apply to his daughter and the much wealthier democracy she heads. While few might have been inclined to trust Japan just two or three decades after World War II, now more than 70 years have passed. Surely Tokyo is far more trustworthy than well-armed Beijing.

Thus, the question is what approach is likely to most promote stability in Northeast Asia and least risk to U.S. security. So far, America's defense promises have not caused the dragon or bear to lie down with the lamb. China is acting aggressively toward Japan, Philippines, and Vietnam in particular; Russia has challenged the U.S. in the eastern reaches of Europe and the Middle East. North Korea is worse, constantly breathing fire against its neighbors and the U.S.

Still, policymakers act as if U.S. defense guarantees will never get called. The threat of nuclear retaliation undoubtedly has deterrent value. However, the two great wars of the 20th century started because deterrence failed. In particular, threats which seem inconsistent with underlying interests have little credibility. Thus, the Chinese have publicly doubted that America would risk nuclear war to preserve Taiwan's independence.

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Moreover, once given, it is hard to back away from "rock solid security assurances" which have lost their original purpose. Which means if deterrence fails America could be at war automatically. But that is a decision which should be taken only after serious consideration for vital stakes. It isn't obvious that South Korea or Japan is worth a nuclear contest.

Finally, promising to defend other, smaller powers allows them to hold American security hostage. With Washington behind them they are more likely to engage in risky behavior. In 2008 Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili provoked a war with Russia. During the 2000s Taiwan's independence-minded President Chen Shui-bian upset Chinese sensibilities. Both leaders were convinced of U.S. support.

Japan has refused to even discuss the status of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands with China. Washington's view that they are covered by the "mutual" defense treaty likely has encouraged Tokyo's tough stance. Philippines has a military which might not be even second rate, yet that government is attempting to enlist the U.S. in its squabble with Beijing over Scarborough Reef.

It's one thing to risk a naval confrontation over various worthless pieces of rock in the Asia-Pacific. It's quite another to contemplate nuclear war.

Which suggests that the nuclear umbrella really is something Americans should debate, as Trump suggested. Yet Rhodes dismissed even discussing the idea, contending that "for the past 70 years" the U.S. has opposed nuclear proliferation. But one of the worsts arguments for a policy today is that we've always done it that way. After all, the world changes over time. In recent years those changes have come particularly quickly.

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Burdensome and unworkable is the best description of the plan proposed by a group of religious nonprofit organizations and institutions to interfere with the ability of women in their health plans to access birth control, and undermine the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive coverage mandate.

The religious nonprofits -- charities and schools among them -- have rejected the ACA's contraceptive provision, and sought to undermine it, regardless of how accommodating the Obama administration has been. Their supplemental brief filed on April 12 in the Supreme Court case, Zubik v. Burwell, might, at first glance seem like they are saying "yes" to a compromise as proposed by the justices, but a careful read, as noted by The Economist, reveals the groups are still stubbornly opposed to sound health care policy.

Over and over again in their supplemental brief, the religious nonprofits reveal that they are proposing an outlandish situation. Essentially, the religious nonprofits want family planning coverage carved out of their health care plans, and for women to have to opt into non-existent contraceptive-only plans. The religious non-profits want contraceptive coverage to be "truly separate," meaning "provided through a separate policy, with a separate enrollment process, a separate insurance card, and a separate payment source, and offered to individuals through a separate communication." Such policy, if adopted by the high court, would disrupt the ability of tens of thousands of women to make their own life decisions, forcing them to try and identify and enroll in another health plan or health insurance program, or receive contraceptive care from different providers in different networks from their usual source of care, or pay up-front costs and seek reimbursement later.

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This proposal, moreover, would seriously undermine a major aim of the ACA, which is to provide a clear path to quality health care for Americans, including seamless health care coverage for women. The religious groups in Zubik continue to urge the Court to embrace policy that rewrites the rules implementing the ACA's contraceptive coverage, and creates an arduous path to quality care. It would require hundreds of thousands of women to overcome additional hurdles to obtain full health care coverage. No woman should be forced into such a situation.

The Supreme Court should reject the religious non-profits onerous proposal, and uphold the ACA's contraceptive coverage provision, which includes a reasonable way for their employees to access the quality care to which they are entitled while respecting sincerely held beliefs.

As U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli states in his April 12 supplemental brief, the contraceptive coverage provision, with its accommodation for religious objectors, "furthers the compelling interest in ensuring that women covered by every type of health plan receive full and equal health care coverage, including contraceptive coverage. At the same time, it goes to great lengths to separate objecting employers from the provision of contraceptive coverage and to minimize any burden on religious exercise."

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Indeed, Verrilli goes on to note, "Religious organizations providing coverage to hundreds of thousands of people have now invoked the accommodation to opt out of the contraceptive requirement." (The accommodation requires religious organizations objecting to the contraceptive coverage to notify their insurer or the government, triggering the insurance providers or third-party providers to exclude contraceptive coverage from group plans but provide separate payments for contraceptive services without cost-sharing requirements.)
notes rose glass of champagne microphone isolated on white background soft selective focus

To be perfectly honest, I hadn't heard of Selena Quintanilla-Perez up until that point, but when I saw the trailer to Selena, I remember insisting my mother and stepfather take my sister and me to see it. To this day, her life fascinates me, yet the film's conclusion leaves me with the unsavory taste of sadness. I didn't know her personally, but in some ways, just like many others, I felt as though I did.

Selena was, among other things, an exceptional performer. But having obsessed over plenty of her interviews, it's clear that she was much more than just that -- even Jennifer Lopez, who portrayed her in what turned out to be her breakout role said so:

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People like that don't come along every day. There is never going to be another Selena. And as far as music goes, that's what's beautiful about artistry. Somebody is going to come along and move the world in a different way. There was Celia Cruz. There's Gloria Estefan. I'm still around. Marc Anthony is an iconic Latin artist, Ricky Martin. But it's not something that happens all the time. It's a special thing that Selena had. That's why we're still talking about her 20 years later.

It's this very special thing that got me thinking, right as we approach what would've been the Queen of Tejano's 45th birthday had Yolanda Saldivar not pulled the fatal trigger that ended her life on March 31, 1995. I think of all that Selena might've accomplished had she had more time, the many more songs she would've sang, all the interviews she would've given and the children she might've had with her beloved husband Chris Perez.

But then my mind immediately races to what she means to us now and how that might differ were she still alive. Now, to be clear, this isn't me rejoicing at her departure, but more so clinging to the belief that we all come to this earth with a purpose already engrained, and for Selena, I believe that was to emphasize diversity and simultaneously unite a culture in ways that hadn't been done before. She broke barriers that paved the way for Latinos to come. To this point, her passing led to Lopez's success, which included becoming the highest paid Latina in Hollywood at the time -- a revolutionary concept, to say the least.

Deborah Paredez, author of Latinidad, hit the nail on the head when she expressed viewing Selena's career as

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an emergence as an icon within the political and cultural transformations in the United States during the 1990s, a decade that witnessed a 'Latin explosion' in culture and commerce alongside a resurgence of anti-immigrant discourse and policy.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks during a panel discussion at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in the Brooklyn borough of New York April 16, 2016. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Perhaps the greatest compliment paid to me recently was from a Boston Globe columnist who remarked that I must really be Andy Kaufman. It's a compliment, first because Kaufman was a genius, and also because his genius rested in the absurd; almost like voting for a presidential candidate being investigated by the FBI. In 2016, the most qualified candidate according to smart Democratic strategists holds negative favorability ratings in every single national poll. In 8 out of 10 national polls, Hillary Clinton's favorability ratings are negative by 15 points or more. According to recent CBS and NBS/WSJ polls, Clinton holds negative favorability ratings by 23 and 24 point margins, respectively. A progressive said to "get things done" won't be able to win the White House with such negative national ratings.

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In contrast, Bernie Sanders is the only leading candidate with positive favorability ratings, and this has nothing to do with Clinton being more "vetted." Bernie doesn't need private servers and speaks to millions of people in open forums; Clinton is the antithesis of Vermont's Senator. It's not that people don't know about Bernie's controversies, it's that he simply doesn't have a penchant for controversy like his competitor. Unlike Clinton, Bernie Sanders can type an email without the FBI interviewing him or his associates.

Furthermore, I explain in my latest CNN International appearance that Sanders is the best chance to defeat Trump, especially since Clinton could face DOJ indictment. I also discuss on CNN New Day that Clinton's white privilege allows her to circumvent almost any scandal, even issues that Bernie Sanders couldn't survive politically.

In terms of stark contrasts between Clinton and Sanders, you couldn't find a greater example of two candidates who epitomize opposing value systems. While Bernie Sanders has electrified millions of voters by simply focusing on progressive ideals, Hillary Clinton can't even disclose a speech transcript, or hold a fundraising event without static noise machines.

I explain why Clinton can't disclose Wall Street speech transcripts in the following YouTube segment. In addition, I urge all my critics within the Democratic establishment to subscribe to my YouTube channel for comedy relief, because the fun it just beginning. Imagine the laughter after the FBI formally interviews Clinton and her top aides, and finally discloses the evidence found during a year-long investigation.

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It's an honor to be viewed as Andy Kaufman by people who think Clinton is qualified to become president, in this bizarre world where glaring weaknesses are seen as strengths, and overt lies are viewed as simply smart politics. No doubt, when Clinton's national favorability rating soars from its current 56% to perhaps 70%, after the FBI formally discloses its findings (with or without indictments, the media firestorm will hurt favorability numbers), my thoughts might be viewed as less amusing by devout Hillary supporters.

The smartest people in the room, the same pragmatists who've completely forgotten about the horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan, are also saying Hillary Clinton is not only qualified to run this country, but also that the FBI isn't serious in their year-long investigation. The great Charles Pierce of Esquire calls it a "nothingburger," and although he's a wonderful writer, I doubt he'd be as nonchalant if he were the subject of a year-long FBI investigation. I just hope that the illustrious TBOGG from Raw Story, a person who relished in bending the truth regarding my writing (especially my supposed "love" for a certain Republican, something that isn't at all true), will write a piece correlating FBI investigations and presidential qualifications.

All these savvy and astute political pundits apparently know the meaning of pragmatism, yet they'd never vote for a Republican with Clinton's record on foreign policy, Wall Street ties, and inability to perform a speech or type an email without scandal. Of course, when you're more interested in money generated for "down-ticket Democrats" than being correct on Iraq, or opposing the TPP and Keystone XL, then allegiance to a political party overshadows principle.

When you hear pundits critiquing Bernie Sanders for not helping "down-ticket Democrats," simply watch my YouTube segment presenting the case for writing-in Bernie, if Clinton is the nominee. After two major wars, bailouts for banks that wrecked the economy, and racist campaign tactics (Clinton's 3 a. m. ad, for example), voters have far greater concerns than loyalty to a political party. Democrats owe allegiance to voters, not the other way around, and Bernie Sanders has single-handedly altered this dynamic.

Nevertheless, Clinton and her top aides are scheduled to be interviewed soon, according to The Los Angeles Times in a piece titled Clinton email probe enters new phase as FBI interviews loom:

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Feral prosecutors investigating the possible mishandling of classified materials on Hillary Clinton's private email server have begun the process of setting up formal interviews with some of her longtime and closest aides, according to two people familiar with the probe, an indication that the inquiry is moving into its final phases... No dates have been set for questioning the advisors, but a federal prosecutor in recent weeks has called their lawyers to alert them that he would soon be doing so, the sources said. Prosecutors also are expected to seek an interview with Clinton herself, though the timing remains unclear... The meetings also are an indication that much of the investigators' background work - recovering deleted emails, understanding how the server operated and determining whether it was breached - is nearing completion. "The interviews are critical to understand the volume of information they have accumulated," said James McJunkin, former head of the FBI's Washington field office.

If any other politician in American history were interviewed by the FBI, before an election, would you vote for this person?

This FBI email investigation is serious, it's not a joke, and I explain in this YouTube segment why the FBI's reputation is at stake, and in this YouTube segment how Clinton views the FBI. It will likely derail Hillary Clinton's campaign, and ensure that humble pie and other less appetizing fare be served alongside the "nothingburger" establishment Democrats have consumed thus far.

Bernie Sanders currently defeats Republican challengers by a wider margin than Hillary Clinton. New York and the remaining primaries will help usher Bernie into the White House, but Clinton's FBI email investigation will force the DNC to rally behind Sanders. The establishment will concede, since Bernie Sanders is the only hope for Democrats after the FBI either recommends indictment, or highlights Clinton's "carelessness."

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As a testament to the new definitions of "qualification" and "pragmatism," President Obama is quoted by CBS News addressing Clinton's "carelessness":

But, he added, "what I've also said is that -- and she has acknowledged -- that there's a carelessness, in terms of managing e-mails, that she has owned, and she recognizes." The use of a private email server by the former secretary of state is currently under investigation by the FBI. Earlier this year, the State Department said it had found 22 emails on Clinton's homebrewed server that had to be upgraded to "Top Secret," the highest level of classification. Those top secret documents were withheld from being publicly released along with the rest of her emails.

With 22 Top Secret emails on a private server, in the basement of a private residence, "carelessness" is perhaps the best word to describe this fiasco.

Hillary Clinton is now only 1.4 points ahead of Bernie Sanders according to Real Clear Politics national Democratic Primary polls, and I predicted this in a polling trajectory article last September. With 1,045 delegates won, I also foreshadowed in numerous articles that Bernie would be battling this far into the primary. Nobody gave Sanders a chance, and while H. A. Goodman might have been overzealous in some predictions, be sure to read those articles. They contain information on why such predictions were made, and I've been right on more things than most other observers.

Last year, Clinton stated "I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two." If you think the FBI will believe this excuse, then thing again. Ultimately, the FBI's year-long investigation into Clinton's emails will hand Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination and White House, and I'm one of the few progressives today stating this glaring reality.
I am a proud Cuban. I am a Cuban who was born and raised on the island. I was still under the spell of my college dream and fantasy years when I arrived to the United States and asked for political asylum.

The American government granted a visa to me that did not allow me to apply for the Cuban Adjustment Law, a program that enables Cuban immigrants to qualify and obtain welfare benefits and apply for a permanent resident status a year after arrival to the U.S.

Therefore, my immigration process was tedious and long.

I still remember how the immigration judge asked me persistently why he should grant me special refugee status. At that time, I was too young and politically naive to navigate political battles. I do not know how I was able to convince him, but I became a political refugee in 1995.

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Because of my immigration status, I could not return home and was repeatedly denied a visa. My grandparents passed away in Cuba and my only comfort was saying goodbye through my memories. Spain became the new place for short family reunions as my parents decided to return to my grandparent's homeland.

Having lived now more than 20 years in U.S., I have been able to see how the Cuban Adjustment Act has been the hope and light for a better future for Cubans fleeing repression and seeking freedom of expression, but I have witnessed as well how others have abused the program's benefits.

The Cuban Adjustment Act is a privilege. No other immigrant groups receive this unique red carpet treatment as soon as they arrive to this country. This program is an aid that should be short-term help for Cubans to resettle, not a burden cost to U.S. taxpayers.

How can one justify the receipt of refugee status based on political persecution and then travel to Cuba as soon as the green card is granted?

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How can one justify that they should qualify for welfare benefits when they have never worked in the U.S., and then use a portion of that money to travel to Cuba or send it to relatives abroad?

Did you have think twice before finding the answers?

Senator Marco Rubio, R-FLA, has urged Congress to end this decades-old program. Other Cuban-American legislators have as well, but to correct this legislation will require more battles.

"This current policy is not just being abused, it's hurting the American taxpayer", pointed out Marco Rubio, a son of Cuban immigrants.

There are reports that indicate that financial support for Cuban immigrants exceeded $680 million in 2014 and those numbers, by the way have quite frankly gone up since then, according to the Sun Sentinel, a Florida newspaper.

Many Cubans are humanely entitled to obtain protection when they claim and prove political oppression and torture. Without inquiring, they should receiving the kindness of the law. However, those coming for other reasons and not alleging political persecution should be fairly rejected.

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Times are relentless. Obama has launched a new chapter. The "normalization" process between Cuba and the U.S. has begun, and will require new mentalities, attitudes and measures. Some of these will be impacting the last of great benefits granted for decades.
I found out I was HIV positive right before my 21st birthday. I thought I was going to enter the world as an adult, but at that moment, I became a product of the narrative that others had created for me.



Stigmatized, marginalized, bullied -- and my crime was merely being born.

I had been so afraid of my identity as a woman and I let society break me down. I was depressed because I wasn't gay; I was a woman trapped in a man's body. I was suppressing my identity and my HIV status all because of stigma. Let me tell you that no one goes through this life of constant persecution for kicks. It is not for the weak of heart.



For years, I had looked in the mirror and never once saw a beautiful person. Years of silently enduring physical and sexual abuse held me back. But I became tired of being afraid, of carrying the scars of low self-esteem and self-loathing.



It was then, at the age of 35, that I decided to live in my truth full time. I learned to stop caring about what people thought. It was liberating. From the first moment I said "I am trans," my heart felt a thousand times lighter, though new obstacles came my way. I had been a paralegal with years of experience, but once I stripped off the man, freed myself and became Jada, I found myself unemployed -- and unemployable.



I managed to draw strength from my experience, taking what I saw as three negatives (being an immigrant, transgender and living with HIV) and turning them around. Today, I'm an example of how my community has reached out and helped a person of my status. HIV gave me access to mental health services. The Louisiana Office of Public Health employs me as a prevention assistant in the HIV/STD prevention department. I am so blessed. Many girls can't find work and are forced to be on the street to survive, increasing their risk of HIV infection.





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I'm opening a community center called Transitions, to empower those that are marginalized, especially the Latinx population and young LGBTQ people -- they are criminalized, profiled and marginalized. I want to facilitate the empowerment of a new generation. I want to help them with their individual needs as they go through whatever transitions they are facing, small or large. I believe that bringing the downtrodden together will create an unimaginable force. I need people to know that we exist. I am here to fight for the long haul. I am going to beat the stereotypes and outlast the stigma. Today, I am Jada Mercedes Cardona, Freedom Fighter.



I believe that in order to create positive change, we need everyone. We need the family and friends of the trans community to be active allies in addressing stigma.



And when it comes to HIV, we all need to go get checked -- no one is exempt. De-stigmatizing HIV will positively impact both the trans community and society at large.



And for those that fear getting tested and what the results may bring: look in the mirror and find what you love about yourself. That part of you will still be there if you test positive. If you get tested regularly, you can find out before it becomes a problem. There are ways to control it and live a healthy life.



Today is National Transgender HIV Testing Day. Spread the word using #TransHIV, #StopHIVStigma and #StopHIVTogether.
Now that the springtime is here in the Northern Hemisphere, it feels a bit like everyone has came out of their hibernation and started moving at full speed! This past week was a particularly busy one for me and my staff at the Flawless Foundation; while it was a rewarding and productive time with four events on two coasts in four days -- "relaxing" certainly isn't a word I'd use to describe it.

However, when the weekend was done and I fell into my bed for a much needed rest one particular thing came strongly to mind. On April 9, we were one of the sponsors of the 6th Annual Oregon Children's Mental Health Conference, a gathering of leaders in the field of pediatric psychiatry coming together to discuss innovations in research around psychopharmocology. Every one of the presentations was educational and the keynote, Dr. John Walkup of Weill Cornell Medical's contributions to the day were very important. The one that came to mind while I readied myself for bed, though, was Dr. Kyle Johnson of OHSU Doernbecher Children's Hospital's presentation on the effects and treatment of pediatric sleep disorders.

Dr. Johnson emphasized that, while pharmaceutical interventions can be helpful, many children and adults would benefit greatly from an increased mindfulness of sleep hygiene; many of our habits, even those that occur early in the morning, can contribute greatly to the night's sleep we'll get at the end of the day. For example, nearly 75 percent of teenagers consume at least one caffeinated beverage during the day, and 31 percent consume two or more. Consuming two or more caffeinated beverages is directly implicated in causing those teenagers a later bedtime, an increased sleep onset latency, difficulty staying asleep, and shorter sleep duration. Those teens then demonstrate a greater level of daytime sleepiness that can manifest in falling asleep in class or during homework time, irritability, behavioral issues, and even higher levels of depression!

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Furthermore, our devices can directly contribute to poor sleep hygiene too. The phones and e-readers that we keep by our beds and check "one last time" before we go to bed -- or that we get subtly woken up by each time that we receive a late-night message -- cause melatonin suppression as well as a delay in circadian phase. To phrase it another way, the light emitted by the devices themselves trick our bodies into thinking it's not time to sleep, resulting in sleep disturbances and subsequently further daytime sleepiness.

It's incredibly important and timely that sleep hygiene is now part of the mainstream conversations about wellness. Arianna Huffington, recently made waves with her data-heavy and compelling manifesto The Sleep Revolution. In particular, Arianna highlights that the value of sleep is finally manifesting in the corporate realm: "We are now in this amazing transition period," she told NPR, "where more and more companies are beginning to realize that living [sleep-deprived] and working [sleep-deprived] has actually terrible consequences -- not just on the health and productivity of their employees but also on their bottom line."

Even beyond the empirically-proven benefits, sleep has factored strongly in teachings on mindfulness from numerous cultures. Sharon Gannon, one of the founders of New York's celebrated studio Jivamukti Yoga, has a beautiful teaching on the role that sleep can play in waking up to our interconnectedness and contributing to our holistic health.

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Dr. Johnson, Arianna Huffington, and Sharon Gannon all make compelling arguments as to the benefits of getting a good night's sleep. All of them came to mind while I laid in my bed, thinking of the caffeine I had earlier in the day and looking at the phone and Kindle on my nightstand.
Supporters cheer as Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a campaign rally in Prospect Park, Sunday, April 17, 2016, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

I doubt many would question my liberal credentials, probably best defined by epithets from those right of center who object to my writings and background. To them I am a liberal elitist, left-wing extremist, godless sinner and, one of my favorites, "nothing but an immoral pointy head atheist" who "hates America" among other transgressions. Fan mail at its best. A common technique to express disdain in letters to me is to put in quotes my qualifications as a "neurobiologist" and "senior White House Policy advisor" in the Clinton administration.

I wear with great pride this scorn from the right and consider the label of liberal a badge of honor. But during this election cycle, I find myself becoming increasingly annoyed with my left-leaning colleagues and friends. Many seem to have forgotten or wish to deny the deep truth that idealism is not a foundation for governance. This growing disconnect from reality manifests itself in expressing "disappointment" in President Obama and self-destructive vows to deny support to the Democratic nominee should it be Hillary for those feeling the Bern, or to a lesser extent should it be Bernie for Clinton supporters. For my fellow liberals still willing to read on, let's look at why we need to gain a little perspective.

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President Obama

In spite of early impatience in the LGBT community, Obama has done more to protect LGBT rights than any other president by repealing Don't Ask , Don't Tell, ending the legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), signing historic hate crime legislation, ensuring hospital visitation rights for LGBT patients and partners, expanding access to health care without worries of pre-existing conditions, ensuring equality for LGBT federal government employees, and taking steps to ensure LGBT equality in housing and crime prevention.

On foreign policy, the Nation rightly concludes that "Barak Obama is a Foreign Policy Grandmaster." He withdrew troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, decimated al-Qaeda, thwarted Iran's nuclear program, removed chemical weapons from Syria, toppled Gadhafi, halved the number of Russian and American nuclear missile launchers, redirected relationships with Cuba, improved ties with India, and signed a climate deal in which China for the first time agreed to participate meaningfully. Yes the world remains a dangerous place, ISIS coming to mind, and any foreign policy is open to legitimate criticism. Any decision on the world stage will have undesirable impacts, and these are naturally the focus of critics. But even the conservative Wall Street Journal says of Obama's foreign policy successes, "Give the president his due here." They add that "Mr. Obama has largely succeeded in what he set out to do." That conclusion is from a publication that is no friend to Obama.

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What makes these accomplishments all the more remarkable is that Obama was working against an opposition openly committed to his failure, which is more or less unprecedented in its brazenness. Mitch McConnell said on October 23, 2010 that "my number one priority is making sure Obama's a one-term president." Not making America great, or preventing terrorist attacks, or helping the middle-class, or bringing home our troops - no, the Republican leader has one top goal - to deny Obama any success, at any cost to America. GOP leaders wish for Obama to fail more than they hope America will succeed. They are not alone, having plenty of rank and file support for this treasonous idea. Rush Limbaugh said simply, "I hope he fails." Rep. Michelle Bachmann said, "We're hoping that President Obama's policies don't succeed."

In evaluating Obama's tenure forget not either that the right has painted all that is bad as Obama's fault and denied him credit for anything good. Two glaring examples prove he faces a degree of hypocrisy and cynicism that have taken our national politics into uncharted waters of hatefulness.

Gas Prices

When gas prices were rising rapidly, the right was quick to point fingers at Obama, placing blame for the high costs squarely at his door. Rick Santorum said that Democrats "want higher energy prices." On that basis he opined that, "We need a president who is on the side of affordable energy." Hmmm; wouldn't that be Obama? Paul Ryan said, "What's frustrating about the Obama administration's policies are they've gone to great lengths to make oil and gas more expensive." Similar statements were made by Mitt Romney, John Boehner, and a number of Representatives and Senators. Right wing media amplified this echo chamber with Rush Limbaugh asking, "Will the media ignoring the rise in gas prices be able to keep that from becoming a major factor in people's minds over the economy and Obama's role in it?" Isn't he the media? And what major newspaper did not talk about high gas prices? The National Review piped in with the conclusion that "Obama Policies to Blame for High Energy Prices."

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None of the above has issued an apology, noting that energy prices have declined under Obama. Remember the accusation was that Obama sought higher prices as a deliberate policy. But we have seen no retraction of that absurd claim: now that we have low prices, Obama's policies are not responsible and nobody mentions his policy of seeking higher prices; no, low prices are due to "oil industry ingenuity." Obama to blame for high prices; Obama has nothing to do with low prices. Costs up, Obama bad; prices down, oil industry smart, with past accusations conveniently forgotten. I wonder how these people sleep at night.

Stock Market

The GOP take on the stock market is even more remarkable than with gas prices, taking hypocrisy to truly new extremes. The DJIA was at 3310 on Bill Clinton's first inaugural day. The market was 6813 when he was next inaugurated. At the end of Clinton's second term, on the day Bush took office, the DJIA was at 10,578; that is the market Bush inherited from Clinton. When Bush left the Oval Office on January 20, 2009, the Dow was at 7,949, a decline of 25% over the eight years Bush was president. By March the DJIA had completed its tumble to bottom out with a 12-year low at just over 6500. Republicans blamed Obama for the continuing decline from 7,900 to 6,500 during his first month in office, but not Bush for the loss from 10,600 to 7,900 in eight years as president. Here is just one example:

Wall Street Journal (March 6): "Obama's Radicalism is Killing the Dow." Author Michael Boskin prognosticated that, "It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis."

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Perhaps most astonishing of all, John Tanny of Real Clear Markets, wrote on November 25, 2008, an article entitled, "This Is Obama's Market, Good and Bad." Obama was not yet president! That did not stop Tanny from writing that, "Lacking clarity, investors can only guess about what's ahead based on Obama's decidedly anti-business rhetoric used during the campaign. Whatever direction he takes, it should be clear that today's stock market is the Obama stock market, so it's up to him to decide its basic direction." Even though Obama was not yet president. So a declining market was Obama's fault even before he took office; but after nearly 8 years in office, we hear...nothing. Where is the talk about Obama's radicalism killing the Dow because he was re-engineering our economy? When the DJIA hit 17,000, did you hear conservatives say "this is Obama's market"? Nothing? Cat got their tongue?

We see this same extraordinary double standard and outrageous hypocrisy with Obamacare, unemployment, national security, and in fact in every area where Obama has had success. When unemployment was 10%, Obama's fault; when 5%, the number is meaningless.

I ask my liberal colleagues to think about this sick, irrational and polarized environment in which Obama must operate when evaluating his amazing accomplishments before becoming "disappointed" with him. He should be evaluated against the possible, not the unachievable ideal. In a perfect world, of course we would like him to have done more. Climate change is a good example. He made extraordinary and unprecedented progress on climate change, but only relative to the limits of international recalcitrance and a wall of opposition in the House and Senate at home. I wish he had done more; but also recognize real world constraints. I just wish my fellow liberals would do the same. We have no reasonable justification to be disappointed with Obama; but plenty of reasons to rejoice in his extraordinary accomplishments. Leave the negative hand-wringing to right wing extremists who simply cannot admit that Obama has been successful.

Bernie and Hillary

Nothing saddens me more than the rift within our liberal ranks caused by passionate support for one of these two great candidates. Let's have the debate; let's have the candidates give us their best. Let us each vigorously support the candidate of our choice. But once the nominee has been selected it is insane to withdraw support if the choice is not your man or woman. Too much is at stake for you to take your marbles and go home because you did not get all you wanted. Once the Democrats have chosen the Party candidate, your choice is no longer between Hillary and Bernie; but between one of those and Cruz or Trump (or whoever the GOP freak show eventually selects). Nobody other than a patient in a padded cell and helmet could possibly say that there is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Ralph Nader once made that claim and gave us the nightmare of George Bush. Even with Gore's anemic campaign and loss of his home state, Gore would have been the clear winner absent Nader's siphoning; let us not repeat that historic mistake. The distinction between left and right has never been greater, never starker, never more important.
The Sunday New York Times had an important and I think ominous article by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger discussing the race for the latest class of nuclear weaponry between Russia, China and the United States which the authors suggest threatens a new Cold War.



American officials have largely blamed escalating tensions on Russian president Vladimir Putin and the Chinese for their apparent aggressive drives in the South-China seas, though the authors contend that these two "adversaries look at what the United States expects to spend on nuclear revitalization - estimated up to three trillion over three decades - and use it to lobby for their own sophisticated weaponry."

When asked whether nuclear warhead miniaturization which the U.S. is currently undertaking and other upgrades to the U.S. nuclear and long-range missile arsenal could undermine his own record of progress on arms control, President Obama acknowledged that this was a legitimate question and source of concern.

Christopher Twomey, a national security expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey California, testified before the U.S.-China economic and security review commission that Beijing felt increasingly encircled. It sees Washington's testing of a hypersonic glider, which can fly into space on a long-range missile, as a way to attack China without crossing the nuclear threshold, and feels trepidation at Washington's nuclear modernization and the growing numbers of antimissile interceptors on American warships, along with plans for new guided bombs and advanced cruise missiles.

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The Chinese have in turn responded by developing their own high-tech weapons systems, including missiles which could sink U.S. ships and space weapons that could knock out American military satellites at the beginning of a nuclear war.

In the face of a perceived American threat, Putin has at the same time begun deploying a new generation of long-range missiles with miniaturized warheads, and according to former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, may soon withdraw from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996 (which the U.S. has abided by according to the Times though the Senate never ratified).

The Obama administration came to office with great fanfare in promoting nuclear disarmament and arms control. It has not followed through, however, in part as Sally Denton details in her book The Profiteers, because of vociferous lobbying by Bechtel Corporation, which pushed a bill guaranteeing $85 million over ten years to modernize the nation's nuclear weapons after it had been given management of privatized nuclear weapons laboratories.

Pressured from the right, Obama has meanwhile goaded the Russians through the advancement of NATO towards it borders and covert intervention in Ukraine while undertaking a "pivot to Asia" policy designed to check Chinese expansion and reassert American hegemony in Southeast Asia, a region rich in mineral resources and business opportunities that strategic planners have long coveted.

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If history is any guide, the Obama administration is pursuing a reckless course and should be opposed by the progressive movements' emergent in this country.

Mikhail Gorbachev once aptly commented that the original Cold War, lasting from 1917 or 1946 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 "made losers of us all."



National priorities in the United States, China and Soviet Union were warped by the competition to build the most lethal nuclear weapons and bombs which put humanity on the brink of destruction. The Soviet economy collapsed, China disintegrated into fanatical Maoism closed off for a period from the West and the United States saw the growth of a massive centralized bureaucracy devoted to national security reminiscent of totalitarian states which lay the groundwork for post 9/11 developments.

From 1946-1967, as Sidney Lens reported in The Military-Industrial Complex quoting from Senator J. William Fullbright (D-Ark), the U.S. government spent an estimated $904 billion or 57 percent of its budget for military power and only $96 billion or 6% on social functions such as education, health, labor and welfare programs; totals which grew worse following the breakdown of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Congress rubber-stamped an arsenal of horror that included multi-megaton hydrogen bombs, intercontinental bombers with unmanned missiles and chemical and biological weapons while considerable portions of the population lacked access to decent schooling or health care and lived in impoverished ghettos.



Though the threat of mutually assured destruction blocked the outbreak of direct war between the major superpowers, the United States, Russians and Chinese waged proxy wars across the Third World which enmeshed the United States in endless quagmires like Vietnam, and had horrible human costs. Donald Kingsley, head of the UN reconstruction agency, called Korea in 1953 "the most devastated land and its people the most destitute in the history of modern warfare."



Odd Arne Westad's prize winning book The Global Cold War: Third World Intervention and the Making of Our Time, emphasizes how the waging of proxy wars across the Third World helped engender the rise of Islamic and other forms of political extremism and produced an assortment of failed states which have become a breeding ground for terrorism and other human pathologies.



The current escalation of tensions between the United States, Russia and China should thus be considered an ominous trend, particularly at a time of economic hardship when instead of investing in fancy high tech weapons systems we need to be addressing the social needs of our communities and assisting poorer countries with their economic development. Furthermore, in the face of runaway climate change, cooperation among the major powers rather than renewed confrontation is absolutely vital.

Jeremy Kuzmarov is author of Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Massachusetts, 2009).
This week people around the country will participate in Earth Day activities. Kids will come home with a tree sapling to plant in their yards. City classrooms will head out on their sidewalk and pick up trash. People will compost and recycle the waste that has gathered. Some of us may gather at rallies celebrating our responsibility in earth care. Others of us will head to lectures where we will hear that "Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver." We are responsible. What do we do?

Our water is changing. Ice caps are melting. Severe El Nino years result in the radical changing of our ecosystem like less prey for the Galapagos Penguin whose population has halved since the 1970s. Halved in about fifty years! Global climate change is expected to make El Ninos more frequent. With the increase of El Ninos, what will happen in the next fifty years?

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Science continues to have a collective voice. The earth is changing and not for the better. These changes are partly due to the way we have not cared for the earth. As one study found

Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journalsshow that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.

Since the 1960s, there has been a growing moving to respond to this ecological crisis. Earth Day was founded in 1970 "as a day of education about environmental issues, Earth Day is now a globally celebrated holiday that is sometimes extended into Earth Week, a full seven days of events focused on green awareness." Under Senator Gaylord Nelson's leadership, Earth Day was formed and celebrated on April 22 as a national environmental teach-in for ecological care. Since then, the green movement continues to inspire people more than just Earth Day. We need to learn how to green our faith. We need to learn how to green our theologies. How we treat the earth is a faith concern.

Have you ever read Scripture from an agrarian perspective? We tend to read Scripture with an anthropocentric perspective, but what if we read it with the land and animals in mind first? In her book An Agrarian Approach to Scripture, Ellen Davis invites us to consider reading Scripture with the land and animals at the forefront.

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Instead of reading Acts 11 with the humans in mind, try reading it with the land in mind. The first thing we notice is that when Peter goes to Jerusalem he goes up. The land is inclined. While in Jerusalem he gives an account of the vision he had in Joppa. The vision includes four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. This reminds me of Psalm 148 when the Psalmist says "Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds...let them praise the name of the Lord." Later Peter mentions baptism through water. The land, animals, and water are all mentioned in this passage. The animals are considered clean and must not be called profane. The land works together in synergy with the humans.

Reading Scripture with an agrarian approach is one way for us to recover from the global climate crisis. When we recognize the care and prominence of land in Scripture we will begin to see a God who cares about the Galapagos Penguin, which then should be what we care about. Our faith needs to be green.

In Mary Oliver's iconic poem "Wild Geese" she says "Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things."This Earth Day let us recover our place in the family of things; a family of Galapagos penguins, ice caps, rivers, and mountainous land. We humans must do better at caring for our fellow creation.

As the Psalmist says "The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it" Psalm 24.1. Humans are one part in the family of things. Recovering our place as intimately connected to the land and animals will help us begin to correct the harm we have done to the earth. It will take our personal and collective voices to stand up for earth justice. It will take organized efforts. God cares about the earth and it is our joyful response to also care for the earth with reverence and respect.

Bible Study Questions:

1. Read Psalm 148 and Genesis 1. What animals are listed and what does it look like for the natural world to praise God?

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2. Think of Gospel stories where Jesus interacts with animals. What is his relationship to animals?

3. Take time today to observe the natural world. What animals and landscapes do you notice? How does God connect with these things?

For Further Reading:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

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A protester holds her sign up as immigrants and community leaders rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to mark the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama's executive orders on immigration in Washington, November 20, 2015. The Obama administration on Friday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to revive President Barack Obama's executive action to protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation, saying Republican-led states had no legal basis to challenge it. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

The oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on President Obama's executive order on immigration were made Monday, and afterwards most observers agreed it's not clear how the Court will decide the case. It is a culmination of years of divisiveness about the eleven million unauthorized immigrants in America. But however important the case, it puts on hold a genuine solution to the status of these mostly Latino immigrants.

The case stems from Obama's granting "deferred action" to certain types of immigrants -- namely, the so-called Dreamers, those who were brought into the country illegally when they were very young, and those who are parents of legal residents, have been in the United States working and without a criminal record at least since 2010. The first group was granted deferred action in 2012; the second group, in 2014.

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The executive action stems from two facts: that Congress has failed to act to deal with the eleven million, and that the president has "prosecutorial discretion" to defer deportation. The last is crucial, because it's a legal argument. The solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, noted that the federal government does not have the resources to deport 11 million people, and indeed has been able to deport only a fraction -- about 400,000 -- in recent years. (Even that number was an historic high.) The president is, as a result, exercising discretion all the time; the executive order provides guidance on who is low priority for deportation as well as some benefits, particularly the right to work legally.

The executive orders caused a firestorm from the anti-immigrant right wing, of course. For years, polls have shown the American public favors these programs and a path to legal status for unauthorized immigrants. Typically, these actions are approved by two-thirds or more of those polled. But the Republican base has been in an uproar about Obama's "usurpation" and the immigrants themselves gaining some legal foothold.

The legal action was brought by the state of Texas and 25 other attorneys general. They sought to end deferred action altogether, and made the argument that it would place an undue burden on the states -- to issue drivers' licenses, for example, to these immigrants. They further argued the executive orders exceeded the president's authority. Lower courts agreed there was injury (the added costs to states), and now the case will be decided by an eight-member Supreme Court that, if it splits 4-4, will uphold the lower courts and place all unauthorized immigrants under a deportation cloud.

The case can only be understood, however, in the context of politics, not law. It is part of a strategy of obstruction against Obama on one of the right's signal issues. That Texas is the lead litigant is unsurprising. The extremist governor, Greg Abbott, has gone so far as to deny birth certificates to children born in Texas whose parents were not lawfully in the country, a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

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Texas' claim that the federal order places an unfair burden on the state -- the entire basis of their claimed right to take legal action in federal court -- is disingenuous. Undocumented workers contribute gainfully to the U.S. economy, especially in a fast-growing state like Texas. Illegal immigration has been a net plus for Texas economically, driven mainly by the added workforce and consumer base. The state collects sales taxes from all residents, meaning unauthorized immigrants pay the same rate as other Texans, up to 8.25 percent. So the "burden" of issuing a driver's license is largely a fiction.

More broadly, the executive orders of the president touched a raw nerve in right-wing political culture. Illegal immigration (it is, by the way, not a criminal offense to enter the country without authorization, but a civil infraction called "entry without inspection") stands alongside gay marriage, women's empowerment, and the increasingly diverse United States as cultural sore points to the aging white culture of conservatives. The use of Spanish and the prospect of "illegals" gaining citizenship are the most explosive issues. The economic arguments have long been scuttled by economic research. It's all about preserving a mythical, dominant white culture that many -- about 30 percent of the population -- feel slipping away.

This also explains the bizarre period early in the Obama administration of the right wing, led by Donald Trump, accusing the president of not being born in the United States. The "legitimacy" of the son of a black Kenyan had to be spiked. Still, astonishing numbers of Republicans, and especially Trump supporters, believe Obama was not born in the U.S., and nearly a majority of Republicans believe he is Muslim.

It is this legitimacy issue that shapes the politics of immigration. In the eyes of the right wing, the president himself has little or no legitimacy, and his executive orders on the sensitive matter of elevating the legal status of unauthorized immigrants are also illegitimate. Hence, the legal challenge. Hence the crazy politics of building a wall, deporting all the unauthorized, blocking Muslims, and so on. This is a red meat to the floundering, poorly educated white middle and lower classes, mainly from the old Confederacy, who have once again made illegal immigration one of their top concerns.

So the Supreme Court decision, while consequential, is not being litigated on the sentiments and norms that Texas Republicans and the other petitioners hold dear. And its effect will be relatively short-lived. Immigration reform will be a high priority of the new Democratic president come January. If the 4-4 split comes in June, and the Dreamers and 4-5 million others lose protection, they will await a new Supreme Court justice, a new president, and a new will to resolve the quagmire of legal, political, and moral issues that immigration raises. As we've seen with so many social and cultural issues, time is on our side.

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The Western image of Russia and Putin in recent years has been very negative. President Obama has publicly called Vladimir Putin a "schoolboy who slouches in his chair in the back of the room" and derided his country as a mere "regional power."

This begs the question: how Russia could again become a major power after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991? How could Putin do this without an agrarian or consumer revolution and with the massive drop in the price of oil? If Putin is a terrible leader, then how can you explain successful interventions in Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), Ukraine (2014-2016) and Syria (2015-2016)?

Putin, however, is actually a very shrewd leader with a brilliant Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, who relies on a capable Foreign Ministry. Putin has rebuilt Russia's military capability by spending $49B a year on security. Russia retains 1,790 strategic nuclear weapons. With over 140 million people and 13 million college graduates, Russia has nearly a million first-class scientists, engineers and technicians, most of whom work for the military.

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Many former great powers are now no longer major powers. Japan, which smashed the Russian army in the 1904 Sino-Japanese War, occupied much of China from 1937-1945 and has a four trillion dollar economy is no longer a great power. After its defeat in World War II capped by the American dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and American post-war occupation, Japan has sworn off further intervention in the world and refused to acquire nuclear weapons.

Europe, which once teemed with great powers such as Germany, France, England and Austro-Hungary, now has gone in another direction. Germany soundly beat the Russians in every World War I battle and came close to doing the same in 1941 and 1942. Today with weak power projection the three main powers have less than 1,000 mainline battle tanks and few aircraft carriers. Weak economic growth (1.5%/year), disputes among its 28 members, migration from the Middle East, serious problems with weaker members such as Greece, promote domestic over international issues.

China, with its ten trillion dollar GDP, over two trillion dollars of exports, over three trillion dollars in its reserve fund, 1.35 billion people and 3.7 million square miles of territory, is a future great power. It has made huge economic progress since Deng Xiaopong launched the Four Modernizations in 1978.

Yet, its remaining problems are staggering: enormous air pollution, 675 million peasants, huge governmental corruption, authoritarian one party dictatorship, lack of rule of law, rapidly aging population, hundreds of thousands of children raising themselves and only $7,500 GDP/capita. Its military, while boosted by 150 billion dollars of spending, still needs another decade to become a truly modern force.

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India has 20 percent illiteracy, 300 million people without electricity and a $1,300 GDP/capita that is less than three percent of the United States. It faces Pakistan soon with 200 atomic bombs. India, with over a billion people, will be a major power but not for several decades.

Then there is the United States, the sole global superpower since victory in the Cold War and one of two superpowers in the world since 1945. Its 18 trillion dollar economy, 17 of the world's top 20 universities, world leadership in high technology, over 550 billion dollars in military spending and 330 million people give it serious advantages over Russia. But, with the rise of popular neo-isolationist Presidential candidates, the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression, decline in its manufacturing sector, administration talk of reducing the size of the American military to the 1940 level, and the Obama semi-withdrawal from the Middle East, the door that had been shut to Russia has been open.
Two closed restroom doors with gender symbol signs designating male and female public toilets.

North Carolina has garnered national attention by passing HB2 (informally known as the "bathroom bill"), which essentially states that individuals must use gendered facilities that match the sex on their birth certificate rather than their gender identity. Those against the bill contend that this type of legislation unfairly targets and endangers transgender individuals. Those in favor of the measure argue that, as more LGBT anti-discrimination bills are signed into law, male predators will create a loophole to gain access to women's facilities by claiming that they are transgender (even though they are not). Other conservative states are considering passing their own versions of the "bathroom bill."

The Republican National Committee has formally endorsed these "bathroom bills" in spite of the fact that there is no real way to enforce them. Unless there is a plan to create a "bathroom police force," the only enforcement of this law will be through haphazard vigilantism. There is also no evidence suggesting that this type of legislation actually hinders predatory behavior.

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It seems odd that the RNC would actively endorse such an empty piece of legislation. However, based on some of the Republican party's past political tactics, this endorsement fits a clear pattern.

The GOP has a history of inciting their constituents by tapping into their fear against a minority community while, at the same time, making it not look like prejudice.

Many people credit Lee Atwater, former chairman of the RNC, for developing this tactic known as the "Southern strategy." During an interview in 1981, Atwater pointed out that overt racism was no longer acceptable in the political world as it once was: "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.' By 1968 you can't say 'n*gger' - that hurts you." He goes on to explain that by making certain political issues seem more abstract, you can still appeal to racists without appearing racist.

During the 1988 presidential election, when Atwater was serving as George H.W. Bush's campaign manager, there was a famous attack ad against then-Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis featuring a convicted felon named Willie Horton, who, while serving a life sentence for murder, had committed a series of heinous crimes, including rape, during one of his weekend furloughs. During his time as governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had vetoed a bill that would have banned furloughs for first-degree murderers.

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Credit: Associated Press



Dukakis' campaign manager Susan Estrich commented on the ad: "The symbolism was very powerful [...] you can't find a stronger metaphor, intended or not, for racial hatred in this country than a black man raping a white woman."

Atwater's tactic was executed perfectly: it played to his constituents' fear of the stereotypical "angry, black man" without making the campaign seem undeniably racist; they were able to say that the issue wasn't about black people, but about criminals. This is very similar to the rhetoric around the current "bathroom bills": it's not about transgender people, but about predators.

It is no secret that the Republican party is deeply fractured. The radicalized Tea Party is incredibly frustrated with the moderate GOP establishment for not being more aggressive when it comes to passing conservative legislation. It has also become apparent during this presidential election that the Republican establishment has not been paying close enough attention to the needs of their suffering constituents, which is how an outsider like businessman Donald Trump became the strong frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.

The current presidential campaign has only intensified the divisions in the Republican party. Trump is deeply resented by the GOP establishment, even though he has won the most votes for the Republican presidential nomination. Senator Ted Cruz, who has won the second most delegates, is only slightly less disliked by the establishment than Trump. Governor John Kasich, the only Republican candidate currently running that remotely reflects the establishment's values, is mathematically eliminated from winning the nomination before the convention.

The GOP establishment has been working diligently to unify the party to no avail. The advocation for the "bathroom bills" appears to be an attempt to create a cause that would obligate their constituents to remain loyal to the party in spite of their resentments.

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Although the "bathroom bills" have successfully enraged Republican voters, it is unlikely that they will restore party unity. After all, the GOP will still have to face reckoning day: electing a presidential nominee.

Either Donald Trump will win the nomination (by winning enough delegates or at the convention) and inadvertently change the Republican party as we know it, or the GOP establishment will nominate a different candidate at a contested convention, effectively disempowering their already disenfranchised voters, which will only deepen their constituents' resentment towards the party. There is no avoiding this predicament as it is very unlikely an alternative scenario will appear this late in the primary.
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 11: Loyola University Chicago students demonstrating for human dignity are joined by people protesting against the military prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on the north side of the White House March 11, 2016 in Washington, DC. Marking the 14th anniversary of detainees arriving at Guantanamo, the protesters again called on President Barack Obama to close the military prison in Cuba. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

What Really Stands in the Way of Closing Guantanamo

Can you believe it? Were in the last year of the presidency of the man who, on his first day in the Oval Office, swore that he would close Guantanamo, and yet it and everything it represents remains part of our all-American world. So many years later, you can still read news reports on the ongoing nightmares of that grim prison, ranging from detention without charge to hunger strikes and force feeding. Its name still echoes through the halls of Congress in bitter debate over what should or shouldnt be done with it. It remains a global symbol of the worst America has to offer.

In case, despite the odds, it should be closed in this presidency, Donald Trump has already sworn to reopen it and load it up with bad dudes, while Ted Cruz has warned against returning the naval base on which its located to the Cubans. In short, that prison continues to haunt us like an evil spirit. While President Obama remains intent on closing it, he continues to make the most modest and belated headway in reducing its prisoner population, while a Republican Congress remains no less determined to keep it open. With nine months left until a new president is inaugurated, the question is: Can this countrys signature War on Terror prison ever be closed?

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The Forever Detainees

Here then is a little dismal history of a place most Americans would prefer not even to think about.

In January 2002, President George W. Bush opened the Guantanamo Bay Detention facility. It was to hold, in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfelds phrase, the worst of the worst in the War on Terror. Over time, its population rose to nearly 800 prisoners from 44 countries, some captured in Afghanistan, some traded for bounty payments by vindictive neighbors or hostile tribesmen, and some seized by CIA operatives in countries far from Taliban territory. The prison then held more al-Qaeda and Taliban followers than leaders, but many prisoners were neither: they had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Recognizing this, within a few years the Bush administration sent more than 500 of the detainees back to their countries of origin or to other countries willing to accept them.

Then, in 2006, Bush made the lie of Guantanamo a reality. His administration finally transferred the worst of the worst to the by-then-notorious island prison. Those 16 individuals included five who stood accused of participating in the 9/11 conspiracy, and others who were believed responsible for devastatingly lethal attacks against American targets in the 1990s, including the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000. All had been held for years in CIA custody in black sites in countries around the world. All had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, which was, of course, the administration's (and, in those years, the media's) euphemism for some of the oldest torture practices known.

That move would prove a game changer. Instead of Guantanamos population shrinking into irrelevance and dwindling into obscurity, as it should have, the prison for the first time became exactly what Rumsfeld had promised it would be: a place for the most notorious al-Qaeda high value detainees (HVDs) that the U.S. held. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, and four others allegedly involved in planning or carrying out the attacks on New York and Washington were among them.

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That same fall, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act aimed at assuring that Guantanamo would be a site not only for offshore detention, but for offshore justice as well. At some future point, Mohammed and the others were to be tried by the U.S. military in Cuba, not in American civilian courts in the U.S. For the first time, the military commissions, like the high value detainees, seemed to give Guantanamo definition (other than simply as a site of abuse, mistreatment, and injustice) and the possibility, in the context of the war on terror, of forward momentum. Those not released could now be tried. And yet by the end of the Bush years, only three prisoners, none of them HVDs, had been successfully convicted -- fewer, in other words, than the five who died in custody there in those years.

That should have been revealing enough for conclusions to be drawn. It turned out that even a secretive, militarized, legally compromised system of justice couldnt successfully bring to trial individuals involved in the crime that launched the new century, when the major evidence against them often came from brutal forms of torture. As a result, most of the Guantanamo detainees had settled into a familiar state of limbo by the time Barack Obama took office in January 2009. At the time, 242 detainees were still in custody there and those military trials were going nowhere fast. The new president arrived on a white horse, full of promises about ending the stasis at Guantanamo and ready to make sense of things. He promptly promised to close the prison for good and suspended the military commissions.

That left the problem of somehow resolving the unsettled status of the various detainees then in custody at Gitmo, individuals who essentially fell into three categories: those deemed not to pose a danger to the U.S. who were to be released; those considered too dangerous for release but -- thanks to tortured testimony -- not prosecutable even in military courts and were to be kept in indefinite detention (a group Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg aptly termed forever prisoners); and those who would someday be tried by some version of the suspended military commissions.

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By the summer of his first year in office, Obama had announced that he would accept the distinctly un-American reality of indefinite detention and the military commissions as well, although in a new form still to be legislated by Congress. From then on, his presidency would remain eerily locked in the embrace of the Bush administration on Guantanamo and, promises or no, one thing was quickly clear: the president was not about to go out on a limb for the Gitmo detainees; he had other things to tend to (like a health-care proposal). Meanwhile, a task force appointed by the president determined that 48 detainees should indeed be kept in indefinite detention, 36 prosecuted, and the rest released via transfers to other countries.

Shrinking Gitmo

Given his promises, it was not exactly a record to feel proud of, but in his seven years in office, President Obama has at least made some headway in terms of the sheer size of the Gitmo population. Admittedly, the pace of releases has been abysmally slow. Dozens of prisoners have been declared no longer dangerous and yet left to languish in their cells. Meanwhile, diplomatic negotiations for their resettlement in countries neither so fragile that terrorism is a daily reality, nor likely to abuse them further dragged on (while congressional Republicans continue to fight on tooth and nail to keep them in place). Still, today there are only 80 remaining detainees, a third of the population in January 2009. Twenty-six of those have been cleared for release but are still awaiting transfer years later, while 44 continue to be held without charges in indefinite detention. Nine face actual charges before the military commissions.

Whatever the reduction in numbers, however, the camp stands essentially as it did under Bush, a monument to bad memories. It still has dozens of individuals locked away in a grim state of hopelessness, some cleared for release but doubting their transfers will ever occur, others having given up entirely and on hunger strikes -- essentially trying to commit suicide.

Theoretically, the pace of resettlement for those already cleared for release could be speeded up and the Periodic Review Board, charged with deciding if an individual no longer poses a danger to this country, could meet more frequently to agree on releases among the relatively small number of detainees whose futures are still undetermined. Were that to happen (and it might), within months the population of Gitmo could be reduced to a relatively few detainees.

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Its worth noting that U.S. taxpayers continue to ante up a pretty penny to maintain Gitmo and its shrinking group of inmates in its present state. The cost to keep a detainee there in 2015 is estimated at between $3.7 million and $4.2 million a year. Were that population to be reduced significantly, those millions of dollars per detainee would only skyrocket up. The smaller the number remaining there and the higher the cost per head, the more likely that even a reluctant Congress might eventually agree to move them to the U.S., although closing Guantanamo will then mean bringing Gitmo practices -- indefinite detention without charges, the most fundamental violation of due process imaginable -- to the mainland.

Regressive Justice

That would leave one thing and one thing alone standing in the way of Guantanamos official end: the military commissions, and that would indeed be ironic. After all, unlike indefinite detention or torture, those commissions are a recognizable, if flawed, part of the American legal tradition, used during both the Civil War and the Second World War.

They have been marked by failure from the outset. The commissions were not initially on the minds of the Bush administration lawyers and officials who organized the war on terror, set up that Cuban outpost, and enhanced those classic torture techniques. In fact, offshore detention was meant to skirt the U.S. justice system almost entirely and get information from the captured men by any means necessary. The goal was clear enough: to fill in for the unfortunate lack of knowledge American intelligence services had about Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda network, their hideouts and training camps.

To give themselves leeway in terms of prisoner interrogation and treatment, the administration refused to consider those held there as prisoners of war (POWs), for fear that methods of interrogation would be restricted by the Geneva Conventions. Instead, they coined a term, enemy combatants, to create a category beyond the bounds of legality. To this day, U.S. officials speak of the remaining detainees at Gitmo as neither prisoners nor POWs.

Soon after the prison was set up, the Bush administration referred 24 of those enemy combatants to an ad hoc process which they began to call military commissions -- until, in June 2006, the Supreme Court declared them invalid unless authorized by Congress (which then dutifully and hastily passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006).

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All these years later, only eight prisoners have been convicted under the commissions that were suspended and then revived by Obama. Three of them, convicted before he took office, have since had their charges vacated or overturned. Put another way, you could say that the commissions are regressing in their goal to clear Gitmos cases. Once able to claim eight convictions, they can now count only five, and in the months to come, depending on a future decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, that number may be reduced further. In sum, the commissions have shown not the slightest progress when it comes to the mission of closing Gitmo.

There are, of course, federal courts in the U.S. with much experience in trying terror cases and a 100% conviction rate when it comes to major ones. To give Obama administration officials some credit, they did initially want to dump the military commissions for trials on the mainland and even moved one high value detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, to the federal courthouse in New York City. While his trial did result in a jury conviction on a single charge and a sentence of life without parole, the trial itself was seen by those who prefer to keep Gitmo open as proof that terrorists do stand a chance of going free in federal courts. Much of the evidence against Ghailani, tainted by torture, was excluded from the trial. While the jury knew neither about his torture nor the fact that he had been held at Guantanamo, Ghailani was acquitted on 283 of 284 counts. In a situation in which the phrase courage of your convictions would never be brought to bear, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder backed down amid a torrent of criticism, and the military commissions continued at Guantanamo.

And yet for anyone hoping to see that prison closed in our lifetimes, sooner or later the idea of transferring those formally charged with terrorism to the federal courts will have to be revived. The place of choice, were this to happen, should probably be a courthouse relatively close to the White House: the Eastern District Court of Virginia (EDVA). It has, since 9/11, overseen a variety of high-profile terror cases, including those of Zacarias Moussaoui, John Walker Lindh, and Abu Ali.

It is also an inside-the-Beltway courthouse; its judges and prosecutors are familiar with using intelligence-related classified information. It is near the Department of Justice and can call on the expertise of officials at the FBI, CIA, and elsewhere who have been working on these cases for years. Finally, it has earned a reputation as the rocket docket, a fast-paced venue that tries such cases with speed -- and given how long these trials have been postponed, speed is an important consideration.

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Closing Gitmo?

There are a variety of ways that the EDVA could receive cases from the military commissions, ranging from a presidential act in defiance of a Congressional ban on transferring any Gitmo prisoners to the U.S. to actual congressional authorization. There is, however, one man who could make all of this far more likely and thats Brigadier General Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor of the Office of Military Commissions since 2011. With soldierly loyalty, a sharp legal mind, and a charismatic public demeanor, Martins has for six long years defended the ability of the Guantanamo commissions to succeed as constitutionally and legally valid courts with built-in protections and procedures that approach those of federal criminal courts. He has the power to declare the commissions no longer viable, leaving the administration with little choice but to close them. Were he to do so, it would be a game-changer.

A former adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq and Afghanistan and co-chair of the task force that revived the commissions after Obama came into office, he has suffered one setback after another. In these years, he has been blindsided by the CIAs attempts to spy on the commissions Gitmo courtroom, as well as on the rooms where attorneys meet the defendants they represent. Hes been stopped in his tracks by federal courts that declared the main charges against the detainees he was trying unlawful; embarrassed by the mysterious transfer of defense counsel materials to the prosecutions computers; and humiliated, month after month, by the failure to deliver on the promise he made that the commissions procedures in their fundamental guarantees of a fair and just trial would be comparable to trials in federal courts." Those procedures have instead proven to be a farce.

Were General Martins to finally accept the reality of Gitmo -- that, given its history, nothing there can truly resemble justice -- he might be able to lead even a recalcitrant Republican Congress, the administration in its last days, and the American public to the only realistic conclusion: that the military commissions will never work and its finally time to shut Gitmo down. After all, it is hard to imagine any system that would do worse than the one that, for a decade, has failed even to begin the trials of the men charged as perpetrators of 9/11.

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Those attacks left an open wound that will not heal, not without actual justice. For the sake of the victims families, for the ability of the country to move on, for the very confidence of the nation in its judicial system, those defendants need to be tried and Guantanamo has proven itself incapable of doing so.

Still, all of us have to face another possibility: that the prison will not be closed in whats left of the Obama years or in the presidency to follow; that this country will instead be left in the twilight zone of Gitmo and in a world where its values are the ones eternally associated with America; and that we will continue to be known as a nation willing to avoid justice, if not deny it outright. Even at this late date, closing Gitmo and moving the military commission trials back to federal court would help heal the wound that the war on terror inflicted on the countrys deepest identity -- as a nation of justice for all.
US President Barack Obama walks across the South Lawn after arriving on Marine One at the White House in Washington, DC, March 29, 2016, following a trip to Atlanta to speak about drug addiction. / AFP / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

The "War on Drugs" has been lost. Not only has it failed to reduce problematic drug use, it has cost more than a trillion dollars over the past few decades, and produced horrific unintended consequences. It has left in its wake a trail of violence, human rights abuse, and infectious disease.

The United States is at the forefront of countries that bear responsibility for this state of affairs. For more than 50 years, its leaders, both Democrats and Republicans, have pursued harsh and often abusive drug control policies domestically, an approach they then sought to have adopted by the rest of the world.

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World leaders meet from April 19 to 21 in a rare special session of the UN General Assembly -- the first since 1998 -- to discuss the global response to drugs. The meeting was instigated by the leaders of Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico, who, citing the terrible consequences of the War on Drugs for their countries, said that "revising the approach on drugs...can no longer be postponed."

As the chief architect of the global approach to drugs, the United States has a unique opportunity to acknowledge the disastrous legacy of the policies it advocated and to provide leadership in trying to come up with a new approach to drugs. Such an approach should reduce the harm drugs can cause without perpetrating widespread human rights abuse and violence.

The U.S. government has so far failed to seize that opportunity. At a time when all options should be on the table to resolve an urgent crisis, the U.S. has opted to think small. In the negotiations preceding this week's meeting, it has pursued what U.S. chief negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield, has called a "pragmatic reform agenda" -- code for seeking uncontroversial middle ground in a polarized debate.

In line with this low-ambition agenda, neither President Barack Obama nor Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to attend the meeting. To be sure, the new reform agenda represents progress over past administrations' policies but still falls far short given the urgent need for major reform.

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To its credit, the Obama administration has allowed experimentation domestically with new drug control models -- most notably regulation of cannabis in Colorado, Washington and other states. But the administration has resisted encouraging similar experiments outside the United States. The U.S. initially proposed a "Brownfield Doctrine" that emphasized a flexible interpretation of the UN drug control conventions -- and seemed to suggest U.S. openness to countries experimenting with alternatives to criminalization. But Brownfield then disingenuously mischaracterized the agenda of drug policy reformers, saying they "espouse complete legalization, arguing that if only we would legalize the product, all of these problems would immediately disappear."



At a time when all options should be on the table to resolve an urgent crisis, the U.S. has opted to think small.



The administration has made some positive contributions to the negotiations, notably by advocating greater emphasis on health-centered drug policies and alternatives to incarceration for people who use drugs. But the urgency of today's situation calls for bolder steps than just tinkering with the margins of the "War on Drugs."

World leaders at this UN special session are expected to adopt a pre-negotiated outcome document that mirrors the U.S. ambition level and that lacks any sense of urgency for reform. It represents little more than a continuation of the current failed approach. While there are some positive changes in tone and substance compared with similar documents from years past, it recommits countries to achieving the patently unachievable goal of "eliminating or significantly reducing" illicit drugs by 2019. Disturbingly, the document refrains from even mentioning the grave harm to health, human rights and security current drug policies cause and from urging any action to address this harm.

Repeating the mistakes of the past will not improve the future. A new global approach is urgently needed, one that reduces both the harm caused by of drugs and the harm caused by current drug control policies. We need to decriminalize drug use and possession and ensure that people who use drugs have access to good health services. We need to encourage different models for regulating cannabis. And we need, more broadly, to reduce the role of criminalization and criminal justice to the extent truly required to protect health and safety.

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The Obama administration has made significant progress these past two years in reforming drug policies at home. It should do the same internationally as well.
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A source close to the case who requested anonymity due to safety concerns informed me that when Junaid's current lawyer Mr. Shahbaz Gurmani first approached him to offer his services Junaid pleaded with him not to get involved in the case. The death of Mr. Rehman Khan had profoundly affected him and he was terrified of anyone else risking harm on his behalf. He had also lost all hope of receiving justice. When Mr. Gurmani made it clear that he was determined to take the case and refused to take no for an answer, Junaid proceeded to say a somber prayer for him before accepting his services. According to the source Junaid has since been more positive and has engaged earnestly in helping his lawyer with preparing his defense.

Mr. Gurmani has also received multiple death threats for taking on the case and on one occasion in 2014 gun shots were fired outside his residence in Multan. A social activist and philanthropist since the age of 18 Mr. Gurmani has since, despite the attempts at coercion, taken on two more blasphemy cases and formed an organization called New Vision Foundation that litigates and lobbies for women and children's rights. Mr. Gurmani and the late Mr. Rehman are the sort of individuals that make it impossible to lose faith in humanity and who illustrate the fact that there is no greater beauty in the world than moral beauty.

Junaid Hafeez chose to forego greener pastures to return to his alma mater and his roots in Southern Punjab. He brought literature, drama and political activism to the young men and women he believed deserved the same education and opportunities he had received. He wished to inspire his students to be freethinkers, the progressives that would change the fortune of the nation he loved. For this he has been repaid with a jail cell in Multan.

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Pakistan's blasphemy laws originated under British rule; in 1927 insulting any religion became a punishable offence in India. Punishment consisted mostly of fines and brief imprisonment. After the creation of Pakistan in 1947 this law was retained in the nation's penal code. Under the administration of General Zia-ul-Haq the punishment for blasphemy was first changed to life imprisonment and finally in 1986, to death by hanging. Blasphemy laws are not merely a draconian enterprise that is abused by individuals and governments to settle personal scores; they are the specter looming over anyone who dares to debate the clergy on religion. They are the insurmountable barrier to the progressive exegeses of faith that could counter the extremist narrative. Suffice it to say that Pakistan's blasphemy laws are the Moloch that devours free speech in its pale maw.

A brilliant young man who strove to serve his country is languishing behind bars and facing charges that carry the death penalty. A selfless champion of human rights has been killed for trying to defend him in court. Out of fear, the Pakistani media remains muted on this unconscionable injustice. For those of us who can speak out though, silence at this point is unforgivable.
In my experience, good public policy is best shaped by the dispassionate analysis of what in practice has worked, or not. Policy based on common assumptions and popular sentiments can become a recipe for mistaken prescriptions and misguided interventions.

Nowhere is this divorce between rhetoric and reality more evident than in the formulation of global drug policies, where too often emotions and ideology rather than evidence have prevailed.

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Take the case of the medical use of cannabis. By looking carefully at the evidence from the United States, we now know that legalizing the use of cannabis for medical purposes has not, as opponents argued, led to an increase in its use by teenagers. By contrast, there has been a near tripling of American deaths from heroin overdoses between 2010 and 2013, even though the law and its severe punishments remain unchanged.

This year, between April 19 and 21, the United Nations General Assembly will hold a special session on drugs and the world will have a chance to change course. As we approach that event, we need to ask ourselves if we are on the right policy path. More specifically, how do we deal with what the United

Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has called the "unintended consequences" of the policies of the last 50 years, which have helped, among other things, to create a vast, international criminal market in drugs that fuels violence, corruption and instability? Just think of the 16,000 murders in Mexico in 2013, many of which are directly linked to drug trafficking.

A War on the People

Globally, the "war on drugs" has not succeeded. Some estimate that enforcing global prohibition costs at least $100 billion (90.7 billion) a year, but as many as 300 million people now use drugs worldwide, contributing to a global illicit market with a turnover of $330 billion a year, one of the largest commodity markets in the world.

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Prohibition has had little impact on the supply of or demand for drugs. When law enforcement succeeds in one area, drug production simply moves to another region or country, drug trafficking moves to another route and drug users switch to a different drug. Nor has prohibition significantly reduced use. Studies have consistently failed to establish the existence of a link between the harshness of a country's drug laws and its levels of drug use. The widespread criminalization and punishment of people who use drugs, the overcrowded prisons, mean that the war on drugs is, to a significant degree, a war on drug users a war on people.

Africa is sadly an example of these problems. The West Africa Commission on Drugs, which my foundation convened, reported last year that the region has now become not only a major transit point between producers in Latin America and consumers in Europe, but an area where consumption is increasing. Drug money, and the criminality associated with it, is fostering corruption and violence. The stability of countries and the region as a whole is under threat.

I believe that drugs have destroyed many lives, but wrong government policies have destroyed many more. We all want to protect our families from the potential harm of drugs. But if our children do develop a drug problem, surely we will want them cared for as patients in need of treatment and not branded as criminals.

Stop Stigmatizing and Start Helping

The tendency in many parts of the world to stigmatize and incarcerate drug users has prevented many from seeking medical treatment. In what other areas of public health do we criminalize patients in need of help? Punitive measures have sent many people to prison, where their drug use has worsened.

A criminal record for a young person for a minor drug offense can be a far greater threat to their wellbeing than occasional drug use. The original intent of drug policy, according to the UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs, was to protect the "health and welfare of mankind." We need to refocus international and national policy on this key objective.

This requires us to take four critical steps.

First, we must decriminalize personal drug use. The use of drugs is harmful and reducing those harms is a task for the public health system, not the courts. This must be coupled with the strengthening of treatment services, especially in middle and low income countries.

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Second, we need to accept that a drug-free world is an illusion. We must focus instead on ensuring that drugs cause the least possible harm. Harm reduction measures, such as needle exchange programs, can make a real difference. Germany adopted such measures early on and the level of HIV infections among injecting drug users is close to 5 percent, compared to over 40 percent in some countries which resist this pragmatic approach.

Third, we have to look at regulation and public education rather than the total suppression of drugs, which we know will not work. The steps taken successfully to reduce tobacco consumption (a very powerful and damaging addiction) show what can be achieved. It is regulation and education, not the threat of prison, which has cut the number of smokers in many countries. Higher taxes, restrictions on sale and effective anti-smoking campaigns have delivered the right results.

The legal sale of cannabis is a reality that started with California legalizing the sale of cannabis for medical use in 1996. Since then, 22 U.S. states and some European countries have followed suit. Others have gone further still. A voter initiative which gained a majority at the ballot box has caused Colorado to legalize the sale of cannabis for recreational use. Last year, Colorado collected around $135 million in taxes and license fees related to legal cannabis sales. Others have taken less commercial routes. Users of Spain's cannabis social clubs can grow and buy cannabis through small noncommercial organizations. And Canada looks likely to become the first G7 country to regulate the sale of cannabis next year.

Legal Regulation Protects Health

Initial trends show us that where cannabis has been legalized, there has been no explosion in drug use or drug related crime. The size of the black market has been reduced and thousands of young people have been spared criminal records. But a regulated market is not a free market. We need to carefully think through what needs regulating, and what does not. While most cannabis use is occasional, moderate and not associated with significant problems, it is nonetheless precisely because of its potential risks that it needs to be regulated.

And therefore, the fourth and final step is to recognize that drugs must be regulated precisely because they are risky. It is time to acknowledge that drugs are infinitely more dangerous if they are left solely in the hands of criminals who have no concerns about health and safety. Legal regulation protects health. Consumers need to be aware of what they are taking and have clear information on health risks and how to minimize them. Governments need to be able to regulate vendors and outlets according to how much harm a drug can cause. The most risky drugs should never be available "over the counter" but only via medical prescription for people registered as dependent users, as is already happening in Switzerland.

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Although I got my Huffington Post blogger credentials in February, I didn't know what topic I should write about. I knew that I wanted to use the blog to write about Nepal and how the citizens of the country are working hard to bounce back from the Gorkha Earthquake (April 25, 2015), but whenever I sat down to write something I drew a blank.

While having brunch with one of my friends last weekend, I was sharing stories from my recently completed trek to the Annapurna Base Camp (ABC). I told him that ABC was probably one of the best hikes I had ever done and that it was sad to see that very few foreign trekkers were on the route this year because of the Gorkha Earthquake. The villagers along the ABC trek rely heavily from tourist traffic for their income and Nepal's GDP heavily relies on the tourism industry.

My friend suggested that I post some of my photos from the trek so that viewers of the Huffington Post can not only have an opportunity to see the beauty of Nepal but also promote Nepal and the ABC trek via their social media channels.

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Acting on my friend suggestion I have made a slideshow of some of my favorite photos from the ABC trek. I hope the readers of the blogs not only enjoy looking at the photos but try to make Nepal a place to visit soon. Most of Nepal's hiking trails and tourist attraction were unaffected by the earthquake and Nepal is completely safe and open for tourism.

I hope that some of the pictures I have posted will inspire you to visit Nepal. We are looking forward to welcoming you all to Nepal in the near future!


Tonight, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders will be debating issues in Brooklyn, five days before the New York primary, the biggest single contest to date.

Brooklyn - and New York - are home to a large, diverse, and active Haitian community. In other states, such as Florida, Senator Sanders was on the hot seat for his support for Cuba. Haiti didn't come up in the debate, a reflection of the political muscle the Cuban American community has there. In 2012, Cokie Roberts, justifying the Electoral College, actually made nod to Haiti being a national issue as a result of Florida's pivotal role.

Former Secretary of State Clinton's and my home state also had a primary on March 15, the same day as Florida. Considered a "blue state," Illinois is less visible in a presidential contest. Indeed, the 2000 election hung on the balance of dimpled chads, 537 votes in Florida.

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As Secretary of State, Clinton oversaw the U.S. response to Haiti's earthquake. Her husband, former president Bill Clinton, was the United Nations Special Envoy, also director of the Clinton-Bush Fund, the Clinton Foundation, and co-chair of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission. To say that the lines were blurred is kind.

Emails released following the scandal reveal a Secretary of State that from the beginning was concerned about perception and critique, while laying the groundwork for U.S. companies. In a January 19, 2010, email, a week after the earthquake, Secretary Clinton writes: "We need to monitor media and rebut inaccuracies and outright misstatements. Judith McHale caught Al Jazeera reporting that what we were doing in Haiti was like what we did in Baghdad. I will talk with her and PJ to set up such a monitoring system."

In the same email, following deleted text, she continues, "Ron Kirk called to report that he was working on getting commitments from retailers like the Gap to start textile factories as soon as feasible."

An email dated February 13, 2010, a month after the earthquake, highlights Secretary Clinton's efforts at selling this positive story, demonstrating the level of detail in "getting the story right" - and specific diplomatic efforts to make sure this story got right.

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Why was Haiti so important to Clinton?

Journalist Jonathan Katz details just how much the world's pre-eminent power couple were involved in Haiti, making an evaluation difficult.

As the years wore on with only limited progress, questions arise. The U.S. Red Cross was called to account for their half a billion in aid in an NPR/ProPublica expose.

The story is indeed complicated; I published a book trying to sort out the lessons of the humanitarian response Haitian people have learned.

Secretary Clinton supervised the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the leading donors in the $16 billion effort, referred to as a "gold rush" by Ambassador Kenneth Merten.

Highlighting the proximity to the power couple, many who benefited from this gold rush were Clinton contributors. Isabeau Doucet and Isabel Macdonald uncovered the role played by Warren Buffet's Hathaway in building trailers that had formaldehyde, the same trailers that caused people to be sick when FEMA rolled them out following Hurricane Katrina.

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As foretold by the January 19 email, the Clintons' signature project was an industrial park in Caracol. The $224 million project, which took valuable agricultural land offline, evicting 366 farmers, was to generate 60,000 jobs. As of the end of 2013, the project created 2,590. ADaily Beast article published yesterday reported 5,000 as of late 2015.

This plan didn't work out so well. According to an October 2013 Worker Rights Consortium report, all 24 garment factories studied cheated workers out of legally-entitled minimum wages. Housing outside of the project was inadequate and way over budget, prompting criticism from the Government Accountability Office in a June 2013 report. They were so badly built they were in need of repair.

While "Benghazi" dominates conversation about Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, she made a stop to Haiti on her way to North Africa during the so-called "Arab Spring." Organization of American States (OAS) special representative Ricardo Seitenfus recently published an article detailing her role in orchestrating the reversal of Haiti's elections held in 2010, which led to the election of Michel Martelly. Raoul Peck's Fatal Assistance shows the pivotal scene.

Obviously Haitian people must hold their government accountable, and are, but one must pause to ask why Clinton intervened in this election. And why the so-called international community looked the other way while four years of elections did not occur. And why the U.S. government pre-empted Haiti's independent electoral commission investigating massive fraud.

One reason? Another gold rush, this time underground. Prospectors estimate that Haiti's gold reserves are worth over $20 billion. But, mining has its costs: environment, health, safety, and profit sharing, as a report from NYU School of Law details.

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One such recipient of a multi-million dollar contract - one of only two granted in 2012 - was Tony Rodham, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton's brother.

Unquestionably, Secretary Clinton has more foreign policy experience than Senator Sanders. And experience matters.

Clinton's role in Haiti raises serious doubts about the primary beneficiaries of this experience.

I hope Haiti is not passed over again tonight.
I have been campaigning for my father's freedom for over 600 days. For over 600 days our family, human rights groups and the United Nations have been stressing that Salim Alaradi is innocent, a political prisoner, and a victim of regional politics. Today it could not be more obvious and the world is convinced and awaiting his freedom on May 30th.

My father, a Canadian of Libyan-origin, has been the victim of gross human rights violations and the centre of a Supreme Court case that has been tainted by a lack of due process.

My family and I vowed to win my father's justice after realizing that waiting around for the UAE government wasn't going to cut it. My initial focus was singular: to get my father out of the UAE prison and back home. But it didn't take long for us to see that my father's case had much wider implications, particularly for the global fight against human rights violations in the UAE. At first, I reached out to human rights experts like Amnesty International's Alex Neve for advice on how to get started. With help from him and many others, our campaign to free my father, Salim Alaradi, has garnered world-wide support and attention.

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We've worked tirelessly to document my father's case. The effect of this work eventually started to snowball and international advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch have taken very strong stances to support our cause. The UN's working Group on Arbitrary Detention also investigated my father's case along with 51 other cases, out of 1500 submitted last year, to produce a highly detailed report on the issue. Many experts have spoken out on the legal and political implications of the UAE State Security Agency's (SSA) tactics. Even the US State Department's latest 2015 Country Report on Human Rights Practices leverages the documentation of my father's plight by referring to the conclusions in the UN and HRW reports on the case in their UAE section.

Still, even though we've succeeded in generating a significant amount of international attention for my father and the larger issue of human rights violations in the UAE, getting the attention of the UAE government itself has always proven to be difficult. So it was to our surprise when we realized recently that, for the first time in a long time, the UAE's civil society was beginning to become active on the issue. A prominent UAE figure who is believed to be a close advisor to the Crown Prince, Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, tweeted that the evidence in the case of my father and the two Americans is weak. This surprised a lot of experts who'd long written off the country's highly regulated civil sphere. Their involvement means that my father's case hasn't just brought international attention to important human rights issues, but that it also has the potential to spark actual systemic reforms in the UAE itself, which is badly needed.

Since my father's last hearing in March, we noticed that the UAE press, along with media from the wider Gulf region, began printing stories about the case. To our delight, they didn't refer to him as a "terrorist," but as a "hero" who actively supported the people of Libya through philanthropy during the Arab Spring days. The media asked out loud why the UAE's Security Service remains so stubborn even after Libyan officials themselves have said that my father never committed a crime.

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It's obvious to the world by now that the UAE's case against my father is a political one; the country's SSA doesn't want to lose face. These facts have now made it into the UAE's public sphere, and prominent Emirati academics have shown their support for us, many by tweeting about my campaign. This momentum of support precedes my father's next court date on May 30th, where he, along with the rest of us, will be awaiting his freedom and his return home soon after - if justice is served.

We're hopeful, but not deluded. The Emirati SSA is known for getting its way. Nonetheless, the UAE is also a country that cares a lot about its global reputation and relationships. My father's case has become an outlet for frustrated voices both inside and outside of the country. Criticisms of the SSA are being amplified, and there's no doubt that the country's highest level of governance is trying to figure out how to respond. For decades the UAE has been introducing judicial, political, and economic reforms; maybe my family's tragedy, our 600-day campaign and my father's freedom will be a catalyst for human rights reforms, SSA reforms and for the UAE government to do the right thing.
The world is failing to protect the health and human rights of people who use drugs.

As a result, people who use drugs, especially people who inject drugs, have been isolated and denied the means to protect themselves from HIV, hepatitis C, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

Among the estimated 12 million people who inject drugs globally, one in 10 is living with HIV. From 2010 to 2014, there was no decline in the annual number of new HIV infections among people who inject drugs, in contrast to the global trend of declining new HIV infections.

The evidence is overwhelming. The world needs a fresh approach towards people who use drugs that is people-, rights- and health-centered.

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In a new report, Do no harm: health, human rights and people who use drugs, UNAIDS presents the evidence for what works to reduce the impact of HIV and other harms associated with drug use. Countries that have shifted their focus away from laws and policies that are harmful to people who use drugs and that have increased investment in harm reduction programs have reduced new HIV infections and improved health outcomes.

For example, investment in needle-syringe distribution and opioid substitution therapy has proved effective at reducing the impact of the AIDS epidemic among people who inject drugs in several countries, including China, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Moldova.

China's free voluntary methadone program piloted in the early 2000s now serves more than 180 000 people. People who inject drugs represented less than 8% of people newly diagnosed with HIV in the country in 2013, compared with 43.9% in 2003. In prisons in the Islamic Republic of Iran, health clinics provide integrated services for the treatment and prevention of sexually transmitted infections and for injecting drug use and HIV, and new HIV cases among people who inject drugs fell from a peak of 1897 in 2005 to 684 in 2013. In the Republic of Moldova, the proportion of prisoners living with HIV having access to antiretroviral medicines has increased from 2% in 2005 to 62% in 2013.

Some countries, such as Australia, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland, have de-penalized the possession and use of small quantities of drugs for personal use, encouraging people who inject drugs to access strengthened harm reduction programs.

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UNAIDS would like to see a global adoption of a people-centered, public health and human rights based approach to drug use.

The world cannot continue to ignore what works.

In the coming weeks, the United Nations General Assembly will have two opportunities to consider the weight of evidence supporting a change in approach. This week's United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem provides an opportunity to refocus international drug policies on their original goal--the health and well-being of humankind. A few weeks later, from 8 to 10 June, the General Assembly will meet again for the High-Level Meeting on Ending AIDS, which must translate commitments to leave no one behind in the AIDS response into measurable progress for people who inject drugs.
On April 18, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in U.S. v. Texas, a case that will determine the fate of Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) and the expansions to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA+), the Executive Actions announced by President Obama in 2014. DAPA and DACA+ would provide relief to an estimated five million undocumented people over whom antiquated immigration laws have cast shadows of illegitimacy and exclusion.



Centro Legal de la Raza was present at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. to represent Centro Legal in joining our voices with those of immigrants and allies from across the country, calling on the eight Justices to get on the right side of history. But also to reaffirm our commitment to fighting for reform from the bottom-up -- from every corner of our powerful work in Oakland, California.



Argued today were issues of standing and the grant of lawful presence and work permits to those eligible through the President's Deferred Action policies. The Justices asked probing questions that brought to light several points that support the constitutionality of the President's Executive Actions. Centro Legal is hopeful that today's oral arguments will result in long-anticipated reprieve for our communities. In the mean time, we will continue our active pursuit of freedom for the families that we serve daily.



Centro Legal knows that injustice in immigrant communities exists beyond the injunction on DAPA and DACA+. Today, anti-immigrant bigotry lives in local agreements that create fast-tracked pipelines to deportation and in ICE's cruel Christmas Eve rumors of raids on refugee families. It thrives in the prolonged detention of displaced asylum seekers in prison-like facilities. We are reminded of how pervasive it is when viable Oval Office hopefuls advocate for the murder of Mexicans at worse and the construction of impenetrable border walls at best.



While we continue to prepare and push for the implementation of DAPA and DACA+, we will also continue advocating for humane local, statewide, and federal legislation. We will continue to work day in and day out to release individuals from detention, to defend against deportations in court, and to reject local policies that criminalize our communities in our continue demand for freedom for our families.



Centro Legal was present at the U.S. Supreme Court during today's oral arguments to bear witness as we continue to cultivate, in the courts and in the community, the many paths towards the liberation of our immigrant brothers and sisters.
President Barack Obama, right, meets with King Salman of Saudi Arabia in the Oval Office of the White House, on Friday, Sept. 4, 2015, in Washington. The meeting comes as Saudi Arabia seeks assurances from the U.S. that the Iran nuclear deal comes with the necessary resources to help check Iranas regional ambitions. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

On Thursday, President Obama will visit Saudi Arabia to attend a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC. Obama's purpose is "to review progress in strengthening US-GCC security cooperation since the productive Camp David Summit hosted by President Obama in May 2015," according to a White House statement.

In addition to reviewing "progress," though, President Obama should also point out the lack of progress in an important area that has critical global security implications: the complete failure of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, like Bahrain, to respect basic human rights.

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As the U.S. State Department human rights report released just last week highlights, the "most important human rights problems" in Saudi Arabia include "citizens' lack of the ability and legal means to choose their government; restrictions on universal rights, such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and the freedoms of assembly, association, movement, and religion; and pervasive gender discrimination and lack of equal rights that affected all aspects of women's lives." Additional human rights problems include the use of torture in prisons and new calls for expanding the use of the death penalty for same-sex sexual behavior.

In 2014, President Obama announced a new U.S. initiative to support civil society around the world and "oppose efforts by foreign governments to restrict freedoms of peaceful assembly and association and expression." Support for civil society "is a matter of national security," he said, adding at a White House Summit in February 2015: "When people are oppressed, and human rights are denied -- particularly along sectarian lines or ethnic lines -- when dissent is silenced, it feeds violent extremism. It creates an environment that is ripe for terrorists to exploit."

Sadly, that is exactly what we've seen happen in Saudi Arabia. Although U.S. officials have traveled the world making the case that governments must permit independent civil society organizations, including human rights organizations, to function free from interference and obstruction as part of a comprehensive strategy to counter violent extremism--a principle Saudi Arabia seemed to accept as part of that global CVE coalition--the Saudi Kingdom's performance in this area has been dismal, and the United States has repeatedly failed to say or do anything about it.

In recent years the Saudi government has clamped down on peaceful independent civil society activists, targeting those who have spoken up for political reform, religious tolerance, women's rights and an end to discrimination and religious sectarianism. Dozens of human rights activists and other non-violent government critics are now serving prison sentences.

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They include:

Raif Badawi, jailed in 2012 for hosting a website devoted to open discussion of religious and political issues, which pushed back against extreme interpretations of religion. He was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes.

Waleed Abu al-Khair, a prominent human rights lawyer and NGO leader jailed in 2013 and currently serving a 15 year prison sentence for his human rights advocacy

Ashraf Fayadh, an internationally recognized artist and poet, sentenced to death for apostasy, now serving a jail term

This will likely be President Obama's last trip to Saudi Arabia as president. Now is the time to emphasize the importance of respecting human rights and civil society as part of any sort of effective counterterrorism campaign. To do that, he should call for the release of these imprisoned activists, who should be essential partners in U.S.-led multilateral efforts to counter violent extremism. And in keeping with his directive that U.S. officials should regularly consult and partner with civil society organizations, he should make time to meet directly with independent civil society activists, including those working in areas the Saudi government may consider sensitive. This would not only send a strong message to his Saudi partners, but would communicate to the Saudi people that the U.S. is committed to championing freedom.
U.S. President Barack Obama shakes hands with the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tameem bin Hamad Al Thani while hosting the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) at Camp David in Maryland May 14, 2015. From left are UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Bahrain Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, Oman Deputy Prime Minister Sayyid Fahd bin Mahmoud Al Said, the Emir of Kuwait Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmed Al-Jaber Al-Sabah. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

President Obama might be in for a frosty reception when he heads to Riyadh on April 21 for a Gulf Cooperation Council summit meeting, after his widely quoted characterization of "a number of Gulf states" as "free-riders."

This isn't the first time Obama has offered up frank criticism in advance of meeting with the Gulf monarchs. In an interview before the May 2015 summit, he urged Gulf rulers to be "more responsive to their people" and to distinguish "genuine activity that threatens national security from dissatisfaction." Obama assured the rulers of the US commitment to their national security, but added a crucial caveat. "How we engage in the counterterrorism cooperation ... without automatically legitimizing or validating whatever repressive tactics they may employ .... I think that's a tough conversation to have, but it's one that we have to have."

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"Yes we can" was Obama's rallying call, but "no you can't" has been the barked response of the Gulf monarchs to their people, and they have enforced harsh red lines on dissent with draconian laws that jail tweeters as terrorists.

Despite Obama's disapproval a year ago, grinding repression has continued unabated in most Gulf states. Take the imprisonment of the Bahraini political activist Ebrahim Sherif in June 2015 for criticizing the government, just weeks after the US lifted arms restrictions put in place in 2011 over the government's bloody response to peaceful protests. Or the incommunicado detention of the Emirati scholar Nasser bin Ghaith after he criticized Egypt on social media, and Saudi Arabia's January 2016 execution of the Shia cleric and government critic Nimr al-Nimr.

Since the 2015 Gulf summit, Obama has certainly been "there for our friends [in the Gulf]," approving billions of dollars in arms sales, and facilitating Saudi and Emirati airstrikes in Yemen with aerial refuelling and unspecified "targeting assistance." Human Rights Watch has documented 36 unlawful airstrikes there - some of which may amount to war crimes - that have killed at least 550 civilians, as well as 15 attacks involving internationally banned cluster munitions.

The success so far of the Iran nuclear deal has given way to Gulf concerns that the Obama administration may be shifting its focus -- and its partners -- within the region, leading to accusations from some in the US foreign policy establishment that the U.S. has abandoned its "traditional" allies. These accusations must strike the people of Yemen and the Gulf's dissidents and activists as tragically off the mark.

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I love the city of Memphis and the state of Tennessee. Even though I currently live in San Francisco, I will always support my hometown Grizzlies versus the Golden State Warriors. And I will always defend the primacy of Memphis barbecue til the day I die. However, despite my undying allegiance for the city and its rich culture, I will not be moving back any time soon.

Last week, the Tennessee state legislature passed a bill that threatens access to basic mental health services for the LGBT population. I am both saddened and terrified by the prospect of such a law.

I graduated at the top of my class at Briarcrest, a high school in Memphis, and was lucky enough to earn degrees in economics and government from Yale and Oxford. I have long dreamed about using my talents to make my hometown even better; I know that most of those I grew up with feel a similar responsibility to Memphis.

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They, like me, yearn to use their talents to give back to the city that has given us so much and would move back in a heartbeat. Yet they, like me, cannot countenance living in a state where friends or family can be turned away from routine medical services because of who they love.

The reason I hold such a deep-seated passion for returning to Memphis is because of the potential -- economic, intellectual, cultural -- of our community there. Unlocking that potential, however, rests on enabling the talents of the city's most vulnerable populations. Indeed the moral fiber of the city -- the very fiber that unites the Civil Rights Museum to the beautiful blues of Beale Street, the soaring gospel choirs of Poplar Avenue to the emergency rooms of UT Health Science Center -- consists of caring for those most in need.

This bill, SB 1556, does just the opposite of that. It allows (even emboldens!) a therapist to turn away youth, already bullied at above average rates in classrooms, because they're gay. Refusing to make cakes for gay weddings is one matter. Refusing to provide crucial counseling when a depressed teenager is contemplating suicide is simply wrong.

We -- my generation, my classmates and neighbors and siblings and friends that grew up in Memphis -- may be idealistic. But we also have choices of where to live and pursue our careers. And if our home state decides to pass discriminatory laws, then we'll choose to settle in places where our diversity is celebrated, not disparaged. We may just have to cheer on our Grizzlies and defend our barbecue from afar.

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This past weekend, Vice reporter Isobel Yeung made headlines with a documentary, chronicling the abuse of women in Afghanistan, punctuated by a disturbing exchange with Afghan theologian and lawmaker Qazi Hanafi, telling his guests with a smile, "To ra ba dast-e yak javaan-e Afghan bedem ke az beeneet beroon kona."

Vice translated the statement as: "Maybe I should give you to a man to take your nose off."

But native Farsi speakers, like me, know what the cleric really said.

He said: "Let's give you to a young Afghan man to take it out of your nose."

It referred to a penis. To all native speakers it was clear that the theologian was talking about something like face rape.

In Farsi, To ra ba dast-e yak javaan-e Afghan bedem means "let's give you to a young Afghan man." Ke az beeneet beroon kona means "so he takes out of your nose."

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Many Afghans watching wondered: Why the mistranslation? They speculated that the translator might have been embarrassed or feared Hanafi's reaction.

Later, the reporter said on Twitter that she is "sad at how quickly religion is used as a scapegoat."

The exchange, along with the resulting conversation by the reporter, reveals how so much gets lost in translation in the West--just like in Muslim communities--when we try to critically engage with questions related to Islam. In both parts of the world, the subject has become a powerful taboo. This was evidenced in the recent Women in the World Summit debate with author Ayaan Hirsi Ali week when the moderator asked her very oddly why Ali was "picking on Islam."

In the case of the Vice video, in the sequence with the Muslim theologian, Yeung asks Hanafi about his views on marital rape. Hanafi first feigns ignorance, "What is rape?"

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Next, he draws on the philosophy of cultural relatively, pointing out that, "You have your rape. We have this other thing in Islam."

Then, visibly irritated, he asks Yeung to "stop it."

As if denial, followed by justification based on cultural relativism and then, plain censorship were not bad enough, Hanafi then resorted to the comment threatening the reporter with sexual violence.

The plight of Afghan women was summed up in that brief instance when religious authority was revealed as a key source of violent misogyny. After all, Qazi Hanafi's religious credentials are plain in his title, "qazi," which means a scholar of sharia, or Islamic law. In addition, Hanafi is a former jihadi who fought alongside the Afghan warlord Ismael Khan.

It was the warlord's patronage that enabled Hanafi to become a parliamentarian. With Hanafi we see that in the struggle of Afghan women for humane treatment, women are up against the twin branches of religion and the jihadi warrior culture, which gives men the legitimacy to rule and the theology that further cements their power. In the words of one commentator, "The funny thing about him answering anything was he knew he would get away with it and there was nothing people could do about it. The true face of terror."

Yeung's response, both in a debrief video and on Twitter, saying she was "sad" that religion had become a "scapegoat" and that it was not responsible for abuse of women was disappointing. Religion is not a "scapegoat." Islam is a source of authority that is used to sanction violence against women. We are best served confronting the problem with honesty and demanding Islamic interpretations that embody human rights, not denying it and most certainly not protecting it.

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While Yeung was protecting the so-called honor of Islam, Afghan conspiracy theories declaring her an agent with a hate agenda appeared on Facebook. Comments appeared on social media, suggesting the video was fake. "If you pay close attention, you see there's one screenshot where he speaks to her and there's a separate shot where he speaks to religious scholars." Someone else wrote, "What if this girl came to spread hatred among us Muslims?"

When approached by Radio Liberty's Afghan service, Hanafi joined the conspiracy contingent by denying any such interview had ever taken place.

He said the video was fake. If Yeung's intention was to not offend believers, she failed to impress them. They are thanking her by smearing her reputation. The common trait in all these reactions was denial in the face of hard facts.

While Afghans, more interested in saving face than confronting tough realities, quite literally to cut off the nose of a woman to save face, there many others who saw the video for what it is, evidence that theology gives men power to abuse women and get away with it. Given Yeung's denial of this connection, Westerner liberals unfortunately side with those who betray Afghan women by seeking to protect theology rather than scrutinize it.

Yeung's interview was a rare moment of insight into the connection between religion and misogyny. While, in their struggle for humane treatment, Afghan women are up against the twin power of jihad and theology, men in positions of power deny the truth of violence against women. They use the postmodern theory of cultural relativity to justify violence. They censor and they threaten with rape.

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Here was a valuable lesson based on undeniable evidence. But instead of using this piece of proof as a starting point for an honest and serious debate, the opposite happened. Yeung launched a defense of religion. Hanafi thanked her by denying he had ever met her while other commentators accused Yeung of being an agent of hatred.



These reactions were insightful. They revealed that something strange has happened to us all. They showed that even in the face of hard evidence, we go out of our way to protect religion against the women theology oppresses. They showed that Muslims and their liberal friends resort to the same psychological mechanisms of denial and disbelief when faced with hard evidence.
I push the simmering sauce around in the pan. Tuna, oil, a few anchovy filets, and perfectly browned sauteed onions emit a rich smell that fills the apartment. I've sliced the cherry tomatoes; I admire their deep red and the beauty of the symmetry in the small heart-shaped fleshy center encased by the slightly green seeds. Like so many simple Italian dishes, the success of this fusilli al tonno is dependent upon the quality of the ingredients. But all of the produce for tonight's meal is from the local Moroccan souk. I have no doubt about the robustness of its flavor.

Correctly salting the pasta water is key, and -- in my experience -- friends without Italian family fail to add adequate salt. I call Aisha over who accepts my tutelage and we throw in the pasta. I step out onto the balcony, scanning the long strip of beach, which is dotted with a combination of jeans, sneakers and hijab, the traditional loose fitting Moroccan robe -- djellaba -- plus a few bikinis, all of which are sitting in the sand or splashing about in the water.

I return inside to taste the pasta, perfectly resistant to my teeth: al dente. There is no other option. I call Aisha over, -- "It's ready!" -- toss the colander into the sink, and start to pour in the pasta. I hear a scream.

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"Stop it! Stop now!" Her shriek is terrifying.

A mess of words escape helplessly from my mouth as Aisha runs toward me, and -- to my surprise -- reaches over the sink to frantically jerk the handle of the faucet upwards. Cold water pours out onto the steaming hot pasta in the colander. I stand, aghast and befuddled, holding the pasta pot -- still half filled with pasta -- tilted over the sink, two towels wrapped around my hands as potholders. Aisha and I look at each other for a moment as the cold water continues to flow from the tap onto my once-steaming fusilli.

"Go ahead, pour the rest in", she instructs.

I hesitate. "You sure?"

"Yes."

I pour the rest of the pasta and boiling water into the colander and Aisha reaches over and turns the cold water off.

"What did I do?..." I ask tentatively.

"Well, it's more of a habit, really." She trails off. I continue to look at her questioningly.

"I never pour hot water into the sink without running the cold."

I have made so much pasta at this point in my life and not once have I run cold water over it while pouring in the hot... I am perplexed; Aisha clearly recognizes this and starts to explain.

"...It's just the way we do it here.... Here in Morocco, you won't find anyone pouring hot water into the sink without also running cold water."

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"Why?"

"Well..." Aisha pauses for a moment. "Because of the spirits. Evil spirits can live in the sink and they're more likely to emerge and harm you if you don't try to prevent it by letting the cold water run when you pour the hot in."

I was shocked.

These evil spirits are called Jinn, and they are referenced in Koranic texts. At this point during my stay in Morocco, discussion of jinn was uncharted territory for me. Little did I know, I would have hundreds of conversations within the next few months about jinn as they relate to classic symptoms of stroke.

....Stroke?

I was in Morocco working on grant funded research that investigated perceptions of stroke symptoms, risk factors, and subsequent treatment-seeking behavior in different communities. For many of the Moroccans I spoke to, the jinn that can live in the sink and harm you during the pasta-making process can also cause stroke-like symptoms. Symptoms classic of stroke include paralysis or numbness -- especially on one side of the body -- likely of the face, arm or leg, difficulty in understanding or producing speech, a splitting headache often accompanied by dizziness or nausea. I soon discovered how intertwined the perception of stroke symptoms were with cultural stigmas, taboos, and accepted norms.

Stroke is a disease of global proportion, a leading cause of death and disability worldwide, and its incidence is increasing. Many countries, Morocco included, do not have the resources for ubiquitous neurosurgical stroke treatment, so prevention is paramount to reduce stroke burden.

Prevention is coupled with awareness. With an understanding of stroke symptoms so entrenched in religious beliefs and day-to-day practices as basic as draining pasta water, how can you "educate" about stroke without fundamentally disrupting the cultural milieu in which that belief exists? How do you appreciate interconnected, complex patterns of behaviors and understanding that involves spirits -- both conscious and unconscious -- and appropriately introduce the biomedical perspective? Initially I thought it would be feasible to isolate stroke as a case not caused by evil spirits, but by an anatomical, physiological issue... Moments like my pasta experience forced me to question this assumption.

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Aisha had grown up in Morocco with a pharmacist father, went to an English-speaking school, and attended an elite college in the United States. Her reaction to her own "jinn reflex" elicited confusion and perhaps even embarrassment. She may question whether she truly believes in these spirits, but the superstitious practices accompanying this cultural belief are ingrained to the point of instinct. I was not expecting to see the tension between "biomedical modernity" and "cultural history" manifest in this manner. I wanted to teach Aisha how to make Italian pasta, but my pasta methods were inappropriate in her cultural context; Aisha's stress-reaction triggered by my lack of awareness of jinn was not such a big deal in the situation of two friends cooking pasta. But, what about a western doctor who is completely unaware of jinn and who is charged with treating and counseling a Moroccan community about stroke? What are the ramifications of that cultural impasse?
Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy is a celebrated Pakistani film director who has made two Oscar winning documentaries. Both her documentaries are focused on gender issues in Pakistan. First documentary ( which won Oscar in 2012) titled as "Saving Face" highlighted the issue of acid attacks on women while the most recent one titled as "A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness" threw light on the menace of honor killing.

Considering the fact, that most of the time Pakistan is in the news for very wrong reasons, her latest Oscar, which she won on 28th February 2016 should have brought delight and sense of national pride to the ordinary Pakistanis.

However, immediately after her win, the reaction on social media hardly showed any sense of pride. While some celebrities did congratulate her, many of the Pakistanis were actually cursing her for "maligning" Pakistan's image in the international arena. Some accused her of trying to score brownie points from the West by deliberately painting a negative and "wrong" image of Pakistan.

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The negative reaction which she has faced though disturbing is still dwarfed by what Pakistan's Nobel laureate, Malala Yousaf Zai, has so far received. Many ordinary Pakistanis hate Malala despite the fact that she nearly lost her life. She has been called a conspiracy of the West against Pakistan with the intent of defaming it.

What is wrong with Pakistanis here? Some think that hatred for Malala and Sharmeen is due to overwhelming misogyny which permeates the society. I agree that misogyny is one of the reasons but I do not think this is the sole reason or even the major one. I have seen similar reactions from some even highly educated Pakistani women.

The major reason is pretty obvious: Pakistanis are desperate for positive image in the international arena and they think that people like Malala and Sharmeen are not presenting "true" image of Pakistan. The fact that they get a lot of coverage from the western media accentuates the negative image problem.

To some extent their concerns are natural. With the rise of the nation state, our collective self-identity also has a strong component of nationalism and due to power of international media positive image increasingly matters a lot.

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While their yearning for projection of a positive image of Pakistan is understandable, they are sadly mistaken in their assumption that people like Malala and Sharmeen are responsible for the current negative image in the global arena. Pakistan's negative image is not because Sharmeen has made movies highlighting the plight of women in Pakistan , but because of the way women are treated here.

Sharmeen's work is mostly about gender and the reality is that Pakistan fares extremely poor in global gender indicators. In 2015, Pakistan ranked as second last in Global Gender Gap Index well below several countries with similar level of economic development. Her work is merely highlighting a grave issue, she is not creating it. In fact if anything she is making the world realize that there are people in Pakistan who instead of being in denial are candid enough to not only acknowledge such problems but also take concrete steps towards addressing them.

Likewise, Malala is a little girl who nearly died at the hands of monsters. She is in fact a symbol of ultimate bravery. The attempt on her life highlighted the depth of Taliban's reach and ruthlessness. Her sole "fault" is that her story got too much attention from the western media.

Many Pakistanis simply saw the media coverage as kind of a ploy to insult their country. Ironically, in the beginning, there was a wave of sympathy for her and revulsion for the act of TTP. However, the moment Western media started its glorification of Malala, some who had initially praised her quickly changed their opinion.

A large number of Pakistanis became defensive and started to accuse Malala for bringing a "bad name" to their country. The conspiracy theory mindset which has always tried to shift the blame to the external world went into overdrive calling the entire episode a "conspiracy"' against Pakistan. With every minute of increasing fame, the opponents retaliated with charges of Western hypocrisy of highlighting just Islamic extremism while glossing over its own wrongdoings.

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Needless to say all these haters never bothered to look towards the real reason which was that she was shot by extremists. It is ironical that rather than hating the extremists who were guilty of that and countless other inhuman acts, many Pakistanis have ended up hating the victim. The reason Pakistan got bad coverage was not because of Malala but due to those monsters that shot her. If anything by showing such reaction, we as a nation are showing our own shallowness.
Over 30,000 people rallied and marched in Melbourne on Sunday 21 September 2014 as part of the global Peoplesclimate protest for action on climate change. It was one of over 2500 protests in 150 countries around the world.

Two experts in refugee studies - Frank Biermann, a Global Sustainability Governance Professor from Utrecht University, and Dawn Chatty, the former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford - discuss what governments have learned from the current refugee crisis, and why it's so difficult to develop a global strategy for climate change refugees.



We are currently dealing with a humanitarian crisis, with millions of refugees moving through Europe. Was this crisis adequately prepared for? If not, how could governments or institutes have better prepared?

Dawn Chatty: The humanitarian crisis that Europe is dealing with right now is one that those who work with refugees could foresee coming for quite some time. From 2014, many of us were discussing how the situation in the Middle East was becoming unsustainable - that Jordan, Lebanon, and even Turkey, were not going to be able to handle the numbers of refugees from Syria for much longer, because they were simply unable to offer the most basic survival requirements. It was very clear that once people ran out of their savings they would move on to places where they thought they could find asylum or work. This did happen, and I have to say I am fully behind Merkel and the refugee policy in Germany. If the other European countries had followed suit, we wouldn't be seeing this current crisis.

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There should have been a comprehensive plan of action to handle these temporary migrants - temporary, as I would say the majority of Syrians would like to return home once conditions permit. Even if this means returning to the government of Al-Assad.

"There is strong vested bureaucratic interest from the International Organization for Migration and other agencies to not use the term climate change refugees."

Is there a link between the current refugee crisis and climate change?

Chatty: There is a link - between 2006-2011, there was a massive drought in Syria, the north eastern part of the country with huge numbers of herders. These herders started coming into the cities as their lifestyle had become unsustainable, but for some reason the al-Assad government did not ask for help, they did not recognize the seriousness of the drought. This has been argued to have exacerbated the 2011 uprisings, as the displaced people were already very angry and therefore contributed to the rapid rise of violent demonstrations.

Frank Biermann: That's correct. In the case of climate change refugees, the first question is to what extent people are already facing climate change pressure, the other question is what will happen in the future. So we now have a temperature that has risen by 0.8 degrees since 1880, and, with the current commitments, we are shooting for up to three degrees warmer. Nobody knows yet exactly what this means, but it will likely lead to sea level rises, water shortages, and this could happen within this century. Most of the rich countries are already starting adaptation programs to deal with these issues.

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But the international system isn't really prepared - so far, climate change refugees do not fall under the definition put forward in the Geneva Convention. There is strong vested bureaucratic interest from the International Organization for Migration and other agencies to not use the term climate change refugees, because the term has all kind of legal implications, which are good for these people but not for tax payers in other countries.

"People from these small island states don't want to be recognized as refugees as they want the problem to be fixed - they feel accepting climate refugee titles means accepting the lack of policy action from industrialized countries."



Do you see major flaws in the refugee conventions we currently have in place?



Chatty: I'm not trying to undermine the architecture we currently have for refugees, however, especially in international politics, we generally fix the war we just finished, we don't think about the future. The 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees is based on the concept of refugees from WWII. This is problematic when considering the current crisis as many Syrians are leaving their country and asking for asylum, but don't want to be considered refugees as they themselves don't want to be categorized as refugees, because in their minds this means never going back.

So we have serious complications in the way we deal with humanitarian conflict, regardless whether this is caused by armed conflict, or severe environmental issues.

Biermann: I totally agree. My original idea was to have a protocol under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but political interests are just too truncated. Similarly to the Syrians, some of the people from these small island states don't want to be recognized as refugees as they want the problem to be fixed - they feel accepting climate refugee titles means accepting the lack of policy action from industrialized countries. Of course, these countries do not have a lot of power - they are few people and have small GDPs, but they do have a moral power. The question is, how far does this go? It isn't an easy situation.

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Chatty: No it isn't. And the small islands probably have more resources at hand - most of the populations of the world who are going to lose their livelihoods are your simpler agriculturalists. I don't think many people are interested in fighting for those rights. These people are silent and we tend to think of them as unskilled, unprofessional, and so even their own governments often don't consider the contribution they make to the GDP.

On the other hand, just as armed conflict will end one day in those regions currently affected, there are many who consider that it is possible to reverse the changes in the climate, if we can just figure out how. Do you go with that argument, Frank?

Biermann: This is a catastrophe that is mainly foretold, but has not yet happened. So there are programs to reduce our emissions, and then there are researchers who are thinking of geo-engineering, or climate engineering. There is no convention against these technologies, there is nothing that says you are not allowed to put sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere, as no one has ever had this idea. It might not even be dangerous. Sulfur emissions block the sunlight and mimic a volcano explosion. But I do have a hesitation about putting all kinds of aerosols in the atmosphere and then finding out that they have even worse side effects.



"One of the big problems with climate change is that there are still climate skeptics around, and they influence their politicians."

Chatty: I did my graduate studies at UCLA in Los Angeles at the time when we had the most horrible smog alerts and were told to stay indoors. And yet over the years that has been controlled. So you can find examples where governments have dealt with serious negative impacts to the environment. But one of the big problems with climate change is that there are still climate skeptics around, and they influence their politicians.

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It seems there needs to be a major fright before people push their governments to do something. The idea of a two, three, four-degree temperature rise, for a lot of people, this doesn't frighten them, as it is too far in the future. Climate change is so complicated, and so different in diverse areas of the world, which makes it very difficult to have a single UN convention. With people fleeing armed conflict, it's something you see immediately, and therefore can respond to with aid packages and assistance. With climate change, you don't see it as clearly.

Has there been a case of someone claiming refugee status due to climate change?



Chatty: The refugee convention is very clear on what it says allows you to be admitted. It really has to be a fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, political positioning, and so on.

The convention is based on our nation-state system. The world cannot tolerate people who have no state. With climate change, we're talking about entire regions or islands - we don't have a convention that deals with that kind of displacement.

Biermann: The governments of these countries are also on the same side as the refugees as far as migration is concerned, so that's also very different.

Also, the environment has always been a driver of migration, with people moving from the country to cities because their lifestyle is no longer sustainable, which leads to urbanization. Then, if they leave the cities and seek asylum in other countries, they are no longer seen as climate refugees, because often they have been in the cities for 5-10 years. So the climate change element is now hidden.

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How do you compare current threats that contribute to refugee movements to climate change?



Biermann: Climate change is one of the most important issues we currently face. ISIS or security problems may be very important for the next ten years, but climate change is the main issue for at least the next 100.
With tax day here, there have been a lot of calls by politicians for reform and simplification of the tax structure. Following strict constructionists who stress looking at the original document to guide our current path, the introduction of the income tax provides ideas for how to proceed today.

This came about with the 16th Amendment, passed by Congress on July 2, 1909, and ratified February 3, 1913. As background, the principal idea generating this measure was the widespread belief, as John Buenker, author of the leading article on passage of this amendment put it, "a growing conviction among people from all walks of life that the existing tax system failed to reach the great fortunes that had been amassed as a result of industrialization." At this time, the top 4 percent of income receivers took in about one-third of national income, while the highest 1 percent received nearly 15 percent.

The sentiment was expressed in many quarters, but especially the South and West, regions which felt the country was dominated by an East Coast elite, just as activists do now. The South, for example, had one-fifth of the nation's land and population, but received just 10% of its income; only 214 persons in that entire region made $100,000 or more in a year. Kansas Populist Senator William Peffer rallied voters with the appeal "we are going to make you men of the East bear your burden of taxation." The major opposition to the income tax came from the nation's industrial, commercial, and financial leaders, with strenuous disapproval from such organs as the Wall Street Journal, Financial Age, and the Proceedings of the National Association of Manufacturers.

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In addition, Congress clearly meant this to apply to a very small segment of the population. According to the 1910 Census the average wage of workers in industry was $574 a year. Public school teachers, on average, made $492 for twelve months work. Medical and health services workers brought in $338. Even professionals remained untouched: only the top 19% of the country's lawyers earned sufficient incomes to pay any tax at all in 1913, as did but 11 percent of engineers, 21 percent of bankers, 18 percent of mine owners, 10 percent of manufacturers, and about 5 percent of real estate operators and merchants.
When it comes to power generation, Bangladesh faces a tough choice. On one hand the country has a burgeoning population with millions still without electricity coverage and coal reserves available to meet that need; on the other hand, it is one of the most climate vulnerable nations, and burning more fossil fuels might provide a short term fix for electricity, but will steer it on a self-destructive trajectory.

"Coal highlights the worst ills of the fossil fuel industry. It pollutes our water and air, and its climate impact is very high," says Payal Prayekh, Program Director of 350.org. "We are burning these dirty fuels so that we can have modern energy, but we are destroying our health and environment. In a way we are shooting ourselves in the foot."

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The government of Bangladesh has chosen to pull that trigger - as evidenced by its decision to build many new coal fired power plants in its march towards reaching middle income status by 2021. As per the country's national power policy, by 2030, 50% of Bangladesh's total energy capacity will be generated from coal.

The project that has been gathering the most attention lately is the proposed Rampal plant - a joint venture between the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) of India and the Power Development Board (PDB) of Bangladesh, named Bangladesh India Friendship Power Company (BIFPC), and funded by Indian Exim Bank. The plant will be built very close to the Sundarbans, which consists of a Ramsar bird conservation area, three wildlife sanctuaries and a World Heritage Site.

The Sundarbans is not only the home of the endangered Royal Bengal Tiger, but is also rich in biodiversity with close to 700 animal species and 340 plant species. Its trees act as the first line of defense against natural disasters such as cyclones and hurricanes. Building a coal plant will threaten the mangrove's ecosystem and the livelihoods of thousands of people dependent on this forest.

Running the Rampal plant would require Bangladesh to import close to 5 million tons of coal each year, transported by massive ships through the Sundarbans, which could scatter large quantities of fly ash, coal dust, Sulphur and other toxic materials into Sundarban's Pasur River - the habitat of the only two remaining species of freshwater dolphins in Asia.

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"There are many alternatives for power generation, but there is no alternative for the Sundarbans," is the slogan for many protestors making a stand against Rampal. Environmentalists and activists are strongly advocating for relocating the project, but the government continues to reject these allegations and steamroll ahead with the plan.

Alarming as it is, Bangladesh is not the only country pursuing coal expansion. Right after the international climate conference COP 21 last year where world leaders pledged to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Climate Action Tracker estimate showed that 2,440 new coal-based power plants are planned to be built around the world within the next 15 years.

"The future of energy is not in the ground; it is in the air and all around us," young environmental activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez said at COP 21, driving home the point that fossils are the fuel of the past. The Paris agreement has laid the groundwork for developing nations to make smart, enduring development plans that skip the mistakes richer countries made in their development trajectory. This would entail gradually phasing out fossil fuels and transitioning to renewable energy.


Stefanie Payne stands beneath a massive stalagmite at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Photo credit: Jonathan Irish

As our adventures march on this year, they are, as a collection, becoming more and more surreal. One day we're standing on the rooftop of Texas, and the very next we are standing inside of our home planet, 750 feet underground beneath the Earth's surface in New Mexico.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park can most adequately be described as living artwork. The stalactites hang from the ceiling like delicate chandeliers, the stalagmites rise up from the ground like a forest of trees, and holding it all together is a limestone container--it's a little like being inside of a geological cantaloupe.

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As we wandered the caverns, I got to thinking about an incredible series of artwork created by NASA titled "Earth as Art." It is a collection of images captured by Earth-observing satellites that have provided invaluable information for decades about Earth and how it is changing from the vantage point of space. These photographs show amazingly brilliant, colorful, intricately designed landscapes measured outside of the visible range of light, so you can see more than what is visible to the naked eye. You can feel their movement; they look like beautiful abstract paintings. The chambers of Carlsbad Caverns are like that.



Ornate walls encapsulate The Big Room at Carlsbad Caverns. Photo credit: Jonathan Irish

This experience was quite different than our first cave visit this year (Kentucky's Mammoth Cave in February.) Mammoth feels much more primitive whereas Carlsbad feels well-maintained and controlled. Mammoth has the vastness of the Rocky Mountains; Carlsbad has the opulence of Oregon's Crater Lake. To compare the two caves would do a disservice to them both. They're so different. In fact, when we walked into Carlsbad, the dissimilarities of the two caves was what first struck us both. Then, the massive size of the chamber beckoned us down a hypnotizing corridor into Earth...

The 1 mile Natural Entrance trail descends down 750 feet leading into what feels like a great showroom--"welcome to the museum of wonder!" it shouts. While there are definite standouts (the 200,000-ton fallen boulder called Iceberg Rock comes to mind,) it is our opinion that this room is less about one main site and more about grand first impressions and a perspective of scale. This is the jaw-dropping, "whoa..."portion of the hike.

Where the steep path levels out is where one trail ends and another begins... enter the unmistakable Big Room, the largest single chamber in North America and the undisputed star of this park. The variety and quantity of sculptures of tubes, spires, ribbons, drapes, curtains, stalagmites, stalactites, totem poles, soda straws, and other fantastic sounding organic shapes inside the 8-acre room forms a grand gallery of art. If you look long enough, your visual understanding of it evolves. A visit is like attending an unveiling of a master work by the greatest artist on Earth--Nature.

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Super-Wally the Airstream winds through the Guadalupe Mountain range en route to Carlsbad Caverns. Photo credit: Stefanie Payne



Hiking stick medallions from Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Photo credit: Stefanie Payne
Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton listens as she is introduced by the Reverend Al Sharpton before her address to the National Action Network's 25th Annual Convention in New York City, April 13, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar

The April 19 primary in New York looks like it will play a familiar role in this latest Clinton presidential campaign.

Bernie Sanders is hoping his Brooklyn roots and left-wing stands will propel him to victory there, finally altering the dynamic of the race in his favor.

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More likely, however, is that the New York primary will do for Hillary Clinton in 2016 what it did for Bill Clinton in 1992, which is to close the door to a left-wing populist challenger.

Instead of Sanders, Brown

The similarities between the 1992 contest and this year's in New York are striking.

In 1992, Bill Clinton's campaign lost momentum after early strong showings in the South, which encouraged then-former California Governor Jerry Brown, Clinton's one major remaining rival that year, to seek a decisive win in New York.

Brown in 1992 was the anti-establishment champion of the Democratic Party's left wing.

He attacked the existing system of funding presidential campaigns as corrupt, refused contributions over US$100, and created what was then the brand new idea of a toll-free donor hotline.

Brown criticized Bill Clinton as a "bought and paid for" participant in a corrupt system. He even pilloried the Arkansas governor's wife, Hillary, claiming in a public debate that

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He is funneling money to his wife's law firm for state business...It's the kind of conflict of interest that's incompatible with the kind of public servant we expect.





Brown's ideas and phrases were strikingly similar to the ones Bernie Sanders has deployed this time against Hillary. "It's not about me," Brown said, "it's about a process that hasn't been working."

After Brown won an upset victory in the Connecticut presidential primary two weeks before New York's, the chance of another upset in New York became real.

The Cuomo endorsement

For the next 14 days, the Democratic presidential nominating process looked as though it might go off the rails, leaving the party with no candidate sufficiently strong as to seem a legitimate nominee.

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The Clinton campaign responded with two weeks of intense campaigning by the candidate, a barrage of television ads and an 11th-hour de facto endorsement by the governor of New York, Mario Cuomo.









USAF





This last, it appears, was significant. Cuomo was popular with Democrats. He had been the party's favorite choice for presidential candidate until he took himself out of the running at the very last minute. He had been previously openly critical of Bill Clinton's record as governor of Arkansas.

"As a package," Cuomo said four days before the primary, "Bill Clinton would make in my opinion a superb president."

On April 7, Clinton won what The New York Times described as a "bitterly contested primary" with 41 percent of the vote.

With that triumph, Bill Clinton's campaign closed the door to the Brown challenge, essentially ending the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination battle.

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Fast forward to 2016

The parallels to 2016 are plain to see.

Hillary Clinton's campaign has lost some momentum since her sweep of the major contests on March 15. As Bernie Sanders has racked up several primary and caucus victories in a row, the importance of the New York primary has grown.

Once again, New York Democrats have the chance to play king- or queenmakers. And Hillary, like Bill, is responding with energetic campaigning, lots of television ads and the support of surrogates, most notably New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York Senator Chuck Schumer and Mario's son, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Hillary and Bill Clinton have close connections to all of three of these leading New York Democrats.

Bill de Blasio managed Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Senate in 2000, and she served with Chuck Schumer after winning her Senate seat that year. Andrew Cuomo worked for his father as a kind of personal emissary, and was part of the process of negotiating with the Clinton campaign back in 1992.









Mike Segar/Reuters





If Hillary Clinton succeeds on April 19 in replicating Bill's victory in New York, the likely consequence is that - to party insiders, at least - the nomination battle will be over.

Sanders, like Jerry Brown in 1992, would likely stay in the race to continue his crusade, but without any further big chances to turn things around.

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The parallels between 1992 and 2016 in New York remind us that the Clintons are a team, and an extraordinarily experienced one in terms of electoral politics.

Although that has been a mixed blessing this year given the unhappiness among voters with the status quo, the Clintons' experience has also been a source of real strength.

The New York primary may well reveal whether, in the end, that asset has mattered most in the Democratic presidential nomination contest.





David Stebenne, Professor of History and Law Faculty, The Ohio State University
It wasn't long ago that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa raged out of control, reached U.S. cities, and prompted the United Nations Security Council to declare Ebola a threat to global security. It was a frightening period. It was only the second time - HIV was the first in 2000 - that an epidemic had been labeled by the United Nations in such terms.

The Ebola crisis is not over; there has been a resurgence of cases in West Africa in recent weeks. But the White House has been forced to use Ebola funds to fight a new threat - the Zika virus now spreading rapidly across the Americas. Congress has yet to vote on funding to fight Zika - its members left for spring break without a vote - forcing the Administration to transfer $500 million in remaining Ebola funds to the Zika response. It is a gamble the White House should not have to make.

Two months ago, the President made an emergency request for roughly $1.9 billion to respond to the Zika virus epidemic, which is now spreading dangerously. The World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency. It reports that Zika virus is now being spread in 33 countries in the Americas. Cases of microcephaly - abnormally small brains - in newborn babies in Brazil now exceed 1,000. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has confirmed that the Zika virus causes microcephaly at birth (see graphic), as well as other serious paralytic diseases in adults. The mosquitoes that transmit Zika virus to humans are now thought by the CDC to be present in 33 states in the mainland U.S. instead of just 12 as originally thought. As warmer weather approaches, we are facing a potential disaster if evidence-based action on a sufficient scale is not taken.

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The President and the Congress did the right thing in authorizing an emergency supplemental request for $5.4 billion to combat Ebola in December 2014. The appropriation funded research on Ebola diagnostic tests, vaccines and therapeutics through the National Institutes of Health. The funds also supported an eventually successful public health response in the U.S and, most importantly, in West Africa where the epidemic raged, led by the CDC in close partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). To protect Americans, the CDC was ordered to deploy thousands of public health professionals around the U.S. and the world, including in West Africa, where each day for more than two years they put their lives on the line for us. Just as importantly, the remaining supplemental funding was now going to be used to leave behind a lasting capacity through training and support for West African countries to better prevent, detect, and respond to Ebola and other emergencies.

Ebola researchers further demonstrated that when there are many thousands of cases of Ebola, even rare events become more common. Ebola had been known for more than 40 years, but the epidemic showed for the first time that it could be transmitted sexually and that survivors were left with residual health problems that have not been fully researched. The World Bank estimates the economic damage from Ebola in West Africa at $2.2 billion. It will take years to recover.

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Diverting resources from Ebola makes little sense -- in fact it would be like redirecting firefighters to a new house when the fire they were fighting isn't really out yet. It only takes a puff of wind for the original fire to ignite again.


Local Handler in front of the Pohynsa Temple in North Korea

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

INTRODUCTION

You just know some things are wrong. Being shaken down by a Buddhist monk at a thousand-plus-year-old temple is one of those things.

It was my second-to-last day in NoKo. How anything could still surprise me by that point in my trip, I have no idea. Yet somehow, it did.

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Fresh Handler, Local Handler, and I were touring the Pohynsa Temple (Older Handler had decided to sit this one out and wait with Driver near the car), an eleventh-century temple complex that Local Handler was quick to point out "had suffered extensive damage from American Imperialists during the Korean War."

After we climbed a short set of concrete stairs to the main pagoda and went inside, I put a donation in the wooden box, lit a candle, stood in front of Buddha, and said a silent prayer. I prayed for Fresh Handler's well-being and happiness, hoping against all hope that she would be okay, and I prayed for Older Handler and Driver, since by then I'd grown fond of both of them, too. Then I prayed for all North Korean people, because let's face it, there but for the grace of God go I. It's a stroke of luck, this life we lead: where we're born, how we die. And finally I said a prayer for the Buddhist monk I'd seen standing outside. In a country that "actively discourages" all religion, I couldn't imagine he was having a great time.

When we exited the pagoda, the monk stood waiting. I naively thought to say hello. But no, this was North Korea (silly Wendy). He wanted money for my sins:

LOCAL HANDLER, FRESH HANDLER translating:

The monk says the last time an American Imperialist visited this temple, he felt so ashamed of himself for the damage his American Imperialist bombs caused to the temple in the war, that he gave lots money to feel better.

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ME, to myself, feeling an improbable mix of apoplexy and apathy: Are you frricking kidding me? (Then out loud.) Please let the monk know that I'm an American, not an American Imperialist, and that wasn't my war. I wasn't even alive. I don't advocate violence of a kind. I don't even kill bugs! And in all my years of traveling to dozens of Buddhist temples around the world, never has a monk tried extort money from me. Oh, and please let the monk know I said prayer for him inside.

Put a fork in me. I was done.
ASSOCIATED PRESS Director Anurag Kashyap poses for a portrait to promote the film

Anurag Kashyap, who's quite a Cannes favourite with multiple films of his having premiered there, will be headed to the French Riviera once again this summer.

Kashyap's Raman Raghav 2.0 a psychological-thriller staring Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the notorious serial-killer Raghav Raman, will premiere in the prestigious Director's Fortnight segment of this year's Cannes film festival, which is slated to take place from May 11 till May 22. The film also features Vicky Kaushal in the role of a cop.

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The director took to Twitter to make the announcement.

Raman Raghav 2.0 to premiere at Cannes Directors Fortnight.. Congratulations team  Anurag Kashyap (@anuragkashyap72) April 19, 2016

Previously, it was Ugly that was showcased in the same section at Cannes, and before that Bombay Talkies also opened at the festival. Both the films got quite a rousing response from the audience as did his two-part Gangs of Wasseypur.

This year, the Cannes film festival will see an eclectic line-up of films with some of the world's most-notable art-house directors showcasing their most-recent work. While Woody Allen's Cafe Society is set to open the fest, the following days will see the premiere of films by Pedro Almodovar, Ken Loach, Xavier Dolan, Nicholas Winding Refn alongside titles by more mainstream names like Steven Spielbergh and Paul Verhoeven.

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ANI

The government on Tuesday lifted the restrictions on Provident Fund (PF) withdrawal with immediate effect after 62 people, including 24 policemen, were injured in Bengaluru. Police had opened fire after a protest by garment workers against the government norms turned violent and spread across the city.

As protesters set vehicles parked inside the Hebbagodi police station on Hosur Road ablaze, the police opened fire. A Garvebhavipalya resident, who was not part of the protest, is said to have injured in the crossfire while an 18-year-old college student, Preethi, was hit by a bullet in her thighs.

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Bengaluru:Garment factory workers protest against Govt's decision of withdrawal of provident fund, clash with Police pic.twitter.com/XxONfvzDca  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

A 49-year-old garment worker, Manjunath has suffered broken ribs, a collapsed lung and is currently on artificial ventilation and will undergo an operation soon. However, the hospital authorities are yet to ascertain whether he got injured by a stray bullet or not.

People were protesting against the curbs imposed by the government on withdrawal of employer's contribution of PF up to the age of 58. The government had put the tighter rules for withdrawal of PF money on hold till July-end, initially. In February, the government had said PF subscribers would not be allowed to withdraw their fund after attaining the age of 54 years, but will have to wait till they are 58 years old.

The protest that started on Monday was confined to the highway at Hosur Road but on Tuesday it spread to all major highways including the Mysore Road, Bannerghatta Road and Tumkur Road. Traffic came to a standstill on all these roads as protestors blocked vehicles.

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WATCH: Police use tear gas shells as protest by garment factory workers in Bengaluru turns violenthttps://t.co/mvTMWG5IyX  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

The police had to call in large forces to manage the protestors at major junctions of Hosur Road.

As the protestors started pelting stones at the police at Begur cross and Parappana Agrahara central jail junction, the cops had to resort to caning in which many protesters were injured. Companies were not spared by the protestors and they pelted stones at vehicles parked on Biocon campus.

Bengaluru:Garment factory workers protest against Govt's decision of withdrawal of provident fund, clash with Police pic.twitter.com/XxONfvzDca  ANI (@ANI_news) April 19, 2016

The situation was initially brought under control following prompt police action but in the afternoon mobs gathered near Hebbagodi, about 20 kilometres away from the city, started torching vehicles, forcing the police to open fire.

City police commissioner NS Megharikh said that additional forces have been deployed and the situation in the city was under control.

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Stringer India / Reuters India's Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar addresses the media in New Delhi, India, September 5, 2015. The Indian government approved a long-awaited programme to equalise pension payments for retired military personnel despite it being a

CHINA -- China is "positive" towards proposals to establish a military hotline with India and to deal with issues along their disputed border, Defence Minister Chang Wanquan told his Indian counterpart during a meeting in Beijing, state media reported.

The two nuclear-armed neighbours have been moving to gradually ease long-existing tensions between them.

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Leaders of Asia's two giants pledged last May to cool a festering border dispute, which dates back to a brief border war in 1962, though a messy territorial disagreement remains.

Chang "reacted positively towards setting up a military hotline with India on border security", state news agency Xinhua reported late on Monday, after Chang's meeting with Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar.

Chang "also suggested the two sides strengthen defence exchanges and jointly safeguard peace and tranquillity of the border area", the report added.

Xinhua cited Parrikar as saying India is ready to work with China to maintain the stability of the border.

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China lays claim to more than 90,000 sq km (35,000 sq miles) ruled by New Delhi in the eastern sector of the Himalayas. India says China occupies 38,000 sq km (14,600 sq miles) of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau in the west.

India is also suspicious of China's support for its arch-rival, Pakistan.

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ASSOCIATED PRESS A woman holds a placard as messages written by people are seen in the background at the Delhi

A 22-year-old student in Kolkata has alleged that she was manhandled, abused and assaulted on Friday by a group of men.

Her crime? "The girl was wearing a half-pant and was smoking openly...can you imagine?," That was the defence of a man who led the assault on the student.

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According to reports, the 22-year-old was on her way home with her college classmate on Friday night when they stopped for a smoke in south Kolkata's Netaji Nagar. The men allegedly shouted abuses at her and attacked her friend.

Before attacking the girl, the men had reportedly gathered at a campaign meeting of the ruling Trinamool Congress.

"They told us you cannot wear these clothes and roam around and smoke here. They said you are ruining our culture. They told us that 'you can do this in Mumbai or Delhi but not in Kolkata'..." the girl told NDTV.

The harassers allegedly included 37-year-old Shouvik Ganguly and his 70-year-old father Kamal Ganguly. Both are known Trinamul Congress activists in the area.

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When The Telegraph called Shouvik and asked him if he harassed the girl, this was his response: "The girl was wearing a half-pant and was smoking openly. How could she do that? My father got angry and asked her to throw away the cigarette but she began arguing with him.

But it wasn't easy for the girls to file a complaint either.

First, when she went to file the complaint at the nearest police station, she was taken to the spot in Pallisree where she was allegedly attacked while the cops stood there for an hour trying to figure out whether the area was under the jurisdiction of Jadavpur or Netaji Nagar police station.

Then the complainant reached Netaji Nagar police station around 12.15am on Saturday, only to find that lodging an FIR isn't the easiest task to do.

Each time she finished writing, the police would find a mistake, reports The Telegraph. Sometimes her language was apparently not clear, and sometimes apparently she couldn't describe the exact act of the accused.

Not once did they try and help me write down the complaint. They finally accepted my third draft, the woman told Metro on Sunday.

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She reached home at 2:30 am, but within an hour a police team arrived at her doorstep to verify her personal information. Half an hour later, an officer reportedly called to say that the colour of the ink she had used to add the date to the complaint didnt match the rest of the document.

One would think the accused would have been booked by now, since it has been more than two days after the woman lodged her complaint. However, police say they were yet to identify the suspects.

The family of the two main accused have confirmed that there had been no phone call or visitor from Netaji Nagar police station to their home in the 40 hours since the incident was reported.

"You are the first one to tell me that the girl has lodged a police complaint," one of the harassers told The Telegraph.

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Hindustan Times via Getty Images LATUR, INDIA - APRIL 11: Dried and cracked storage area of the Manjara Dam Project, Dhanegaon which comes under Beed and Usmanabad and supplies 9 nearby regions, from where Latur gets its water supply on April 11, 2016 in Latur, India. Consecutive drought years resulted in acute water scarcity and the agrarian crisis and have its epicentre in three districts of the Marathwada region Latur, Osmanabad and Beed. (Photo by Anshuman Poyrekar/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

NEW DELHI -- With a humanitarian crisis on its hands, the Maharashtra government has finally acted on the advice of experts and activists to curb the setting up of sugar mills in a semiarid region of the state which is prone to drought.

Today, The Indian Express reported that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government of Maharashtra has decided to ban new sugar mills in the drought ravaged region of Marathwada for the next five years.

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For decades now, experts have cried themselves hoarse over the danger of allowing the unrestricted production of sugarcane, a water guzzling crop, in drought prone areas such as Marathwada and Vidarbha. But successive governments have submitted to lobbying by sugarcane farmers and mill owners, several of whom are politicians belonging to different parties.

"There is elitism within the rural community. Politicians benefit because they are running the sugar mills," said N.C. Saxena, former secretary in the Ministry of Rural Development, recalling that he had warned against the mushrooming of sugar mills as far back as 1997.

Banning sugar mills should come with a other actions such as regulating cropping patterns and water management, Saxena added.

Maharashtra is presently dealing with a humanitarian crisis, induced by drought and severe water shortages, which is claiming lives almost every day.

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Activists are asking why farmers in Maharashtra are so dependent on rainfall when the state has the highest number of dams in India, and why they don't have alternative ways of irrigating their lands. Press Trust of India reported today that only three percent of water is left in the dams of Marathwada.

When the rains fails for a fews years in a row, there is tremendous strain on groundwater. Experts have warned that sugarcane production takes a huge toll on the groundwater, aggravating the water crisis which rears its head over and over again, with varying intensity.

Writing in The Indian Express, Girish Kuber, the editor of LokSatta, pointed out that only four percent of farmed land in the state is under sugarcane cultivation, but this consumes as much as 71.5 per cent of irrigated water, including that from wells.

Out of the 202 sugar mills in Maharashtra, 40 percent are in Marathwada region.

Experts warned that banning sugar mills is not going to go down well with farmers whose livelihood depends on the cash crop, which also gives them fodder for their livestock.

Bhaskar Kolekar, an agriculture scientist based in Beed, one of worst drought-affected districts in Marathwada, said that instead of banning sugar mills, the government should focus on expanding drip-irrigation.

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Drip-irrigation, which uses a special device for water to fall close to the root of the plant, is designed to save water, but it is also expensive.

The Indian Express reported that the Maharashtra government is planning to make drip-irrigation mandatory for all sugar mills across the state, and it will also seek advice from Israel's government on how to make this less expensive for farmers.

If farmers are to be gradually weaned away from sugarcane production then the government would also have to teach them about alternatives crops, said Kolekar.

Banning sugar mills and regulating sugarcane production was a key demand of Swaraj Abhiyan, a non-profit organization founded by former Aam Aadmi Party leader Yogendra Yadav, which has filed a petition before the Supreme Court, seeking relief for those hit by the drought in at least 10 states.

While welcoming the decision to ban new sugar mills, Swaraj Abhiyan's spokesperson Anupam Singh said that it was "unfortunate" that it had taken the Maharashtra government so long to make the painfully obvious move.

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"We are not able to generate enough pressure on governments. It is not a priority," said Singh. "If there is a water crisis in Delhi for a single day then it is national news. But not when it comes to farmers all over the country. Now, that this is in the news, the media is covering it, they are forced to act."

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Hindustan Times via Getty Images NEW DELHI, INDIA - SEPTEMBER 20: Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar poses for a profile shoot on September 20, 2015 in New Delhi, India. (Photo by Manoj Verma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Several states in India are going through drought-like conditions. And Maharashtra being one of them is facing one of the worst droughts in recent years.

Out of the 43,000 villages in the state, 27,723 villages have been declared drought-hit and 54 out of the 75 medium dams have been declared dry. Following the extreme conditions and the drastic rise in the number of farmer suicides, a few Bollywood celebs have extended their support to ease the situation.

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Among them is actor Akshay Kumar, who has stepped in to lend his support for the cause.

The Khiladi (1992) actor has donated Rs. 50 lakh towards the Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyaan, an initiate by the Maharashtra government, which aims at making villages drought-proof by developing water harvesting techniques like construction of ponds.

This is not the first time the actor has come forward to help the distressed people of the state. The Airlift star has previously donated Rs 90 lakh to the families of 180 farmers who had committed suicide.

Three days ago Lagaan (2001) actor, Aamir Khan visited villages in Beed, Maharashtra, along with his NGO Paani Foundation. He has adopted two parched villages.

Actor Nana Patekar, who has been spearheading the cause, distributed cheques to widows of farmers who committed suicide in drought-hit regions of the state.

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Babu Babu / Reuters A woman walks past a portrait of J. Jayalalithaa, Chief Minister of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, in Chennai March 13, 2012. REUTERS/Babu (INDIA - Tags: POLITICS SOCIETY)

J Jayalalithaa, clad in a plain green saree, unadorned but for gold earrings, shrilly proclaims to her enamoured audience  "You all know that I will do what I say. I will also do what I sometimes dont say. I am your mother. Only a mother knows what is best for her children. The crowd erupts in applause and catcalls, egging on the charismatic south Indian politician.

Welcome to Tamil Nadu.

The days of cut-outs of leaders like Jayalalithaa, 30 feet tall, larger than life, smiling down benevolently upon the milling masses, may be gone, banished forever by the Madras High Courts 2008 directive. But her loyal partymen of the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) have ensured that the cult goddess-like image of their leader and cine star-turned-politician has remained intact.

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Jayalalithaa, say analysts, has modelled herself on her political mentor, former Chief Minister MG Ramachandran and founder of the party which she now leads. Running the party with an iron hand, Jaya carefully constructs her image of being the supreme leader, a benevolent authoritarian who can lavish her partymen and the people with largesse, but can strike them down ruthlessly too if they cross the line.

Jaya carefully constructs her image of being the supreme leader, a benevolent authoritarian who can lavish her partymen and the people with largesse, but can strike them down ruthlessly too if they cross the line.

She wants to play the mother sentiment which has always been very successful with Tamils, said Vaasanthi, author and political analyst. I dont know whether in contemporary Tamil Nadu that sentiment will sell. I think she is overplaying the mother role. It might appeal to her cadres but one remarkable thing about her is that she has kept her party and votebank intact, she said.

In 2014, Jaya revealed an astonishing line-up of political greenhorns as candidates for the Lok Sabha polls. Bar two, none of the other 37 had ever contested an election before. Her calculation worked  37 out of 39 seats were swept by her party. Jaya demolished a perceived Modi wave with a bunch of newbies, a signature of the charismatic and some say, autocratic, current Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.

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Jaya has had her share of troubles. Her first stint as Chief Minister from 1991 to 1996 earned her notoriety in the wake of the lavish wedding of her foster son VN Sudhakaran, nephew of Jayas close aide Sasikala. She lost to rival Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) chief M Karunanidhi in 1996, only to come back to power in 2001. She stumbled once again in 2003  by invoking the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA) against lakhs of striking government employees, incurring their wrath. In 2003, she also put one more foot wrong  banning animal sacrifice in temples, thereby causing such a furore in the state that she was forced to revoke the Act. In 2006, she lost once again to the DMK.

Jaya demolished a perceived Modi wave with a bunch of newbies, a signature of the charismatic and some say, autocratic, current Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.

In 2011 though, Jayalalithaa was installed in the Chief Ministers seat with a massive mandate  150 seats out of 160 contested by the party. The alliance won a massive 203 seats out of 234, not only forming government but also taking the position of Opposition. The DMK was relegated to the background with a mere 23 seats.

In 2014, an 18-year-old case came back to bite Jayalalithaa. She was convicted of corruption by a trial court in Bangalore in a Rs 66 crore disproportionate assets case and sentenced to four years in jail. Self immolations of anguished cadre followed, reaffirming the cult of the goddess. Having spent 21 days in a Bangalore jail, Jaya was released on bail and appealed against the verdict. In 2015, she was acquitted by the Bangalore High Court. An appeal against her acquittal is now pending in the Supreme Court.

DYNASTY

Jayalalithaa though is not the only cult politician in the state. Her arch rival Muthuvel Karunanidhi of the DMK lays equal claim to that fame. 92 years old and putting younger politicians to shame with his campaigns, Karunanidhi is a crafty leader whose family has played a large part in destroying goodwill for him.

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A former scriptwriter in the cine world, Karunanidhi rose to dazzling heights, thanks to his pen and the power over Tamil. When popular film star MGR mouthed politically-loaded dialogues at the height of the Dravidian movement, the words were Karunanidhis. It was also Karunanidhis pen that catapulted another cine star, Sivaji Ganesan, to fame with searing dialogues, such as in the blockbuster hit Parasakthi in 1952. Karunanidhi is said to be behind Sivaji Ganesans exit from the DMK, despite him being one of the founding members of the party. In 1955, when Sivaji paid a visit to the Tirupati Balaji temple, DMK workers, allegedly on Karunanidhis instigation put up posters on his return, deriding him for going against the Dravidian movements professed atheism. The mocking Tirupati Ganesha slogan on posters so wounded the actor, that he quit from the party altogether.

Karunanidhi played a key role in the ouster of MGR from the party. Next came the ouster of firebrand leader Vaiko, whose rising popularity proved to be a threat to Karunas son MK Stalin. Vaiko remains bitter to date, often referring to Karunas poorly concealed reason to give him the boot  an allegation that Vaiko was trying to kill him.

Karunas elder and younger sons MK Alagiri and MK Stalin have been at loggerheads, clashing in public, each refusing to toe the line of the other. Karunas daughter Kanimozhi, a Rajya Sabha MP, is embroiled in the Rs 200 crore Kalaignar TV scam and spent over 6 months in jail before getting bail. This case is currently being tried in a special court in Delhi along with the other 2G related cases. The alleged Rs 1.76 lakh crore 2G scam dented the partys image, and Karunas along with it, as he chose to support the prime accused A Raja, claiming that no illegality had taken place.

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In-fighting too has taken its toll on the party. In the DMK there will be rebellion, there are people who are against Stalin too, said author Vaasanthi. There are foibles within the DMK. On the other hand, the AIADMK is like an Iron Curtain  you cant penetrate through the ranks, she said.

There are foibles within the DMK. On the other hand, the AIADMK is like an Iron Curtain  you cant penetrate through the ranks.

A wheelchair bound Karunanidhi is now seeking to get reelected for his sixth term as Chief Minister of the state. His son MK Stalin, now 63 years old, continues to wait in the wings for his time in the sun.

CASTE

With the rise of the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) and its leader S Ramadoss vitriolic attacks against the Dalit community in the late 1980s, came a fresh wave of enlightenment to both the DMK and the AIADMK. Woo the consolidated OBCs (Other Backward Classes), was the mantra. What this new strategy resulted in was to ensure that party leaders and candidates in any given constituency were invariably of the dominant caste in that area. In response, in the 1990s began a wave of Dalit reassertion in the southern districts of the state. As both communities clashed violently, blood of innocents was shed copiously.

In 2012, Ramadoss made his next move, calling for an umbrella alliance of all OBC caste groups to come together to fight the Dalit menace. They (Dalit boys) wear sunglasses and jeans, ride bikes and lure our girls away in order to extort money from the parents, stated Ramadoss at the time. Violence and honour killings are on the rise in recent times in Tamil Nadu. Polarisation along caste lines, political observers say, has become vicious on ground.

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All parties across the political spectrum, however, maintain a complicit silence in such issues, especially when elections are round the corner, so as not to offend or anger the dominant caste groups. Following the recent daylight hacking of Sankar, a young Dalit boy who married an OBC girl, neither Karunanidhi, nor Jayalalithaa condemned what was clearly an honour killing. Ramadoss lost his temper at reporters who questioned him on that issue.

CASH

After caste comes the cash. Tamil Nadu is dubbed by the Election Commission as being one of the most sensitive states in terms of cash distribution. As on April 14, Tamil Nadu has seen the highest haul of unaccounted cash and gifts seizure by the ECI  a total of over Rs 24 crore in cash and goods seized, more money than all the states put together.

The only challenger to the two Dravidian parties though appears to be a hastily knit Third Front. Led by another cine star turned politician Vijaykanth of the DMDK, this alliance also comprises Vaikos MDMK (Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), Dalit leader Thol Thirumavalavans VCK (Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi), both Left parties as well as former Union Cabinet Minister GK Vasans newly minted TMC (Tamil Maanila Congress). While analysts feel that the alliance may not be strong enough to wrest power from the two Dravidian parties this year, the votes they split could end up making the Third Front kingmakers.

It is not very clear how the Third Front will take shape, said Aazhi Senthilnathan, political critic. They have made a lot of wrong moves already and lost important cadres. The battle in 2016 is largely between Jaya and Karuna, as always, he stated.

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This poll will be too close to call. Political analysts are even bracing for a hung Assembly this time. With the demand for Prohibition being acceded to by all parties, hardly any major poll issues remain in the state. In an election like this, the numbers could well go right down to the bone.

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Maharashtra's Minister for Rural Development and Water Conservation, Pankaja Munde, has been accused of "gross insensitivity" after she posted a series of selfies on Twitter clicked in Latur, reeling under drought, during a weekend tour. Munde is seen smiling at the camera against a backdrop of acres of soil being turned by earth moving machines.

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Colonel Nizammudin, a close aide of late freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose, opened a bank account this week  at the age of 116. Nizammudin who is a resident of Mubarakpur in Uttar Pradesh, was Netaji's driver from 1943 to 1945. He opened a joint bank account with his 107-year-old wife.

Leaders of the AAP, including Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal himself, had a field day on Twitter on Monday; pointing out that Rahul Gandhi had refused to name Captain Amarinder Singh as the partys chief ministerial candidate for the Punjab assembly elections. Gandhi added that while the Singh was the face of the state campaign by virtue of being the state Congress chief, the chief minister would be elected by the MLAs after the election.

A day after Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal warned of 'strict action' against two leading app-based cab service providers  Uber and Ola  for hiking prices when demand is high, Uber announced that it was "suspending surge with immediate effect" in the national capital.

The Government on Monday told the Supreme Court that India shouldn't stake a claim to the famed Kohinoor diamond as 'it was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away'. Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, said that this was the stand of the Union Ministry of Culture.

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Main News

A new RTI response in the Ishrat Jahan controversy shed light upon to the fact that former home minister P Chidambaram had signed the original affidavit describing the Mumbra teen as part of a Lashkar module. Initially, the CBI had accused Ahmedabad Police Crime Branch officers and members of the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau (SIB) of Ahmedabad of jointly having carried out a staged "encounter killing" when shooting dead four people on 15 June 2004.

India and China are close to a establishing a hotline between the two military headquarters as part of an effort to improve border management through a new round of confidence building measures (CBM). The two countries focused on CBMs through various means including establishing a hotline and increasing the local border meeting points, in addition to the five which have been already activated. Further interactions to finalise the details are also on the cards.

The Indian government is allegedly wary of signing Amitabh Bachchan as the brand ambassador for the 'Incredible India' campaign due to his name appearing in the Panama papers controversy. Bachchan and actress Priyanka Chopra had been chosen a few months ago to be part of the high-profile campaign to market the country to the tourists abroad. The brand ambassador of Gujarat Tourism, Bachchan's name was reportedly suggested by the PMO.

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In an initiative to ensure that no male from the Patidar or the Patel community from Gujarat remains unmarried, the leaders from the society have forbidden its girls from marrying anybody outside their caste. The Patidars, who are fighiting against the government for quotas in jobs and education, have embarked on a drive to prevent 'their' girls from marrying outside the community. With a skewed sex ratio, Patidar men have been reduced to searching for brides in other states  going beyond caste, socio-financial status and even lingual differences in the process.

Ajay Devgn shared some thrilling footage of his action sequences from his upcoming film Shivaay. In the sequence shared on Twitter Devgn is seen battling it out in extreme weather as a chopper hovers above him, leading to an explosive snowstorm. The crew is filming at Vihren, which stands at 2,914 meters above sea-level, and is the highest peak in Bulgaria.

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Veteran Bollywood actress Asha Parekh visited ailing star Dilip Kumar in the Mumbai hospital. As rumours of his 'passing away' were making rounds on Monday evening, Parekh confirmed that Kumar is in good shape and that he even went for a little walk inside the hospital. The doctors confirmed that Kumar was 'not on the ventilator and not in an ICU'. He will reportedly be discharged from the hospital in a couple of days.

Pune-based Ganpati mandals have taken it upon themselves to lend a helping hand to the drought-hit areas in Maharashtra. The mandals have taken up the task of setting up online medical assistance centres, facilitating daily water supply and are also helping villagers to dig up wells to address the water issue permanently.

Opinion

In Maharashtra, where the sugar industry and politics are twined, drought is a manmade disaster, says Girish Kuber in The Indian Express. "Government after government in the state has been run by those engaged in the gross misuse of water. In Maharashtra, they are called sugar barons  and they are large in number... In an era where the entire world is anxious and worried about climatic changes, Maharashtra is totally oblivious to the reality. It is yet to bring in concepts like water governance. Though for a while it mulled making drip irrigation mandatory for sugarcane cultivation, it is yet to enforce it. Till then, it continues to use a rudimentary technique for supplying water  flood irrigation  where an entire farm is flooded with water. One doesnt have to be a rocket scientist to be able to see that this results in extreme wastage of water," he writes.

The suspension of Vijay Mallyas diplomatic passport by the Ministry of External Affairs, within a week of his failing for the third time to heed an Enforcement Directorate summons to appear in connection with a money laundering probe, is a prompt and appropriate step, says an editorial in The Hindu. "Mallya has challenged the determination by banks that he is a wilful defaulter by arguing that he is personally not a borrower, and only gave a personal guarantee for corporate loans. Any credibility that one could attach to his defence will have to flow from his own conduct and submission to due process in this country, something that the Supreme Court has underscored by asking him for a possible date for his appearance and an authentic statement of his assets. The Central government must not ease the pressure on him, and must take recourse to all diplomatic and legal means to achieve the objective of bringing him back," it says.

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There is no transition to a consumption-led economy; loan growth to the property sector is driving economic growth in China, writes V Anantha Nageswaran in his column in Mint. "Maintaining economic and social stability in China will continue to remain a challenge. For the world economy, China remains a time-bomb that could explode anytime. That will be the excuse for central banks in the US and in Europe to keep up their monetary expansion in many ways. Asset bubbles will keep getting bigger. The world is keeping up with its steady march towards the edge of the cliff," he writes.

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Twitter

BEIJING - Chinese Twitter users have expressed concerns over the company's appointment of a China regional executive who has a background working with the country's military and state security apparatus.

Since last week, when Kathy Chen was appointed Twitter's first managing director for China, Chinese users of the U.S. microblogging site have raised concerns over Chen's past links to the Chinese government and wondered if their freedom of speech on the platform would be compromised.

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Although blocked in China, Twitter is a popular platform for Chinese - especially those living overseas - to freely express themselves in their native language. While China has produced homegrown equivalents such as Weibo, the government exerts strict controls over what can be said on them and by whom.

"Twitter has vast amounts of users' data. Given that U.S. tech firms have in the past kowtowed to China, and given the military background of Kathy Chen, it's only reasonable for the Chinese users of Twitter to be worried about the future," He Qinglian, a prominent overseas-based Chinese political activist, wrote on her blog. She urged the U.S. Congress to conduct a hearing on Chen's appointment.

Wen Yunchao, a U.S.-based political dissident, noted on his Twitter account that Chen had worked for the People's Liberation Army for seven years and later headed an anti-virus software company in a joint venture with connections to the Ministry of Public Security.

"It's only reasonable to question the direction of a company by its personnel decisions," Wen wrote.

Chen began working as a technical engineer for a military research institute in 1987 after graduating with a computer science degree from North Jiaotong University, according to Chinese media reports.

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She went on to work for DEC, Compaq and 123COM before leading the anti-virus software company Jinchen, a joint venture whose local partner was owned indirectly by the Ministry of Public Security.

In an emailed statement, Twitter said it was usual for the Chinese government to assign graduates to jobs in the 1980s. Chen's computer science degree made her a prime candidate for a job as a junior engineer in the People's Liberation Army, the company said.

"When the Chinese economy further opened up with reform in the early 1990s, Kathy chose to pursue her passion for a technology career by switching to the private sector in 1994," the statement said.

It also said that her role with Jinchen was to represent the interests of majority shareholder Computer Associates, a U.S. tech firm, and that she "never worked for the Ministry of Public Security."

Chen, who will be based in Hong Kong, was most recently an executive with Microsoft Asia-Pacific Research and Development Group before being hired by Twitter.

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"I am really excited to find more ways to create value for our advertisers, enterprises, creators, influencers and our developers, and partners as well," Chen said in a video posted on Twitter.

She has not publicly responded to Twitter user concerns.

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Bloomberg via Getty Images People are seen as silhouettes as they check mobile devices whilst standing against an illuminated wall bearing WhatsApp Inc's logo in this arranged photograph in London, U.K., on Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2016. WhatsApp Inc. offers a cross-platform mobile messaging application that allows users to exchange messages. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The government of Jammu & Kashmir has issued a notice saying that if you want to create a WhatsApp group in the state you will need to register and get a license.

The notice from the office of the district magistrate of Kupwara says that all the group admins of the existing WhatsApp news groups in the district have to register themselves in the office within 10 days. The notice declares that this move will help stem the spreading of rumours in the area.

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Thats not all, the administration has made clear its intentions to keep an eye on WhatsApp groups and that admins will be held responsible for all goings-on. Government employees have been instructed to refrain from questioning or commenting on the new diktats.

The notice also said that the police will take action against those who post incendiary messages on WhatsApp.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is visiting Kashmir today amidst a protest against civilians being shot in Handwara.

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"There is a mini India in Jammu and Kashmir. Dream to do something and not to become someone. India will lead the 21st century because the energy required for it is with us. India has 800 million youth power which is below 35 years. Dream of every youth can become a progress story for the country," Modi said during his visit.

"Monitoring the groups is very hard. And it is absurd to hold the Admin responsible for everything on the group. Admins can add or remove people, they can't control the content people post on the group. The government should understand that WhatsApp is not the only medium to communicate. There are many apps which allow making groups. They should use social media for monitor the activites in a manner that doesn't throttle freedom of speech," said Prasanth Sugathan, counsel at SFLC.in (Software Freedom Law Centre, India)

Recently, WhatsApp enabled end-to-end encryption few days ago, much to the chagrin of governments who felt this move would create roadblocks in surveillance.

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Rupak De Chowdhuri / Reuters Supporters of the Chief Minister of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal and Trinamool Congress (TMC) Chief, Mamata Banerjee, attend a party's campaign rally ahead of Lok Sabha elections in Kolkata January 30, 2014. REUTERS/Rupak De Chowdhuri (INDIA - Tags: POLITICS)

Rahul Gandhi has promised at a rally in Murshidabad that if the Congress-Left combine comes to power in Bengal it will end the syndicate raj.

Gandhi sidesteps the inconvenient truth that the syndicate is not a Trinmool invention. The very same Left that the Congress is now allied with, presided over the birth of the syndicate in Bengal. That under Trinamool it has grown, prospered and become institutionalized, is a different story.

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CPM politburo member Mohammad Salim says, "We have learnt from the past. There is a nexus between crime, politics and administration behind these syndicates. If we come to power, we will break this nexus."

But the Communists cannot wash their hands off it that easily. As has been noted by the Indian Express, syndicates started around 1995 when the building boom in Rajarhat suburb of Kolkata began. An estimated 2,50,000 families were affected by the land acquisition. The CPM government encouraged these people, who were without jobs and skills, to supply construction material.

Even Rahul Gandhi inadvertently acknowledged that in his speech.

Paanch saal pehle jab humne Mamataji ko samarthan diya tha tab humne kaha tha ke syndicate raj aur goonda raj ko khatam karna hoga (Five years ago when we supported Mamataji we said that syndicate raj and goonda raj had to be ended) Rahul told the rally.

What he did not mention was that five years ago, the CPM was the one in power. Thus the syndicate raj and goonda raj that Rahul is talking about was in its fiefdom. Now the CPM is trying to wriggle away from their role in it by trying to make it a story of employment vs extortion. Their syndicate offered employment, the Trinamool syndicates have turned to extortion. CPM leader Gautam Deb, tells The Telegraph, It has become coercion and extortion  We have to remove this evil and it requires political will and we have it.

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Deb ironically is the godfather of the syndicates. When the Rajarhat building boom started he was the one who began a cooperative of 2,000 people to supply construction material like sand and stone chips. Deb called the creature he created a cooperative. But it was a cooperative that provided election muscle and election money. Now its taken off that mask and become a syndicate.

A CPM syndicate member tries to finesse the difference in an interview with Scroll.in. We spoke nicely to people. We said please. Trinamool people you know how they behave. They threaten you, Will you buy from us or not?

What is true is that in over three decades in power the Left had a system in place even when it came to corruption and coercion. A small businessman in Bengal remembers walking into a corporate office in Haldia and finding a slew of tough looking men sitting in the front room. The officer said ruefully that in the heyday of local CPM supremo Lakshman Seth, he would just pay his dues to Seth and no one else bothered him. Trinamool is a multi-headed hydra operation riven by factional rivalries and his front office was filled with competing dadas all of whom were demanding favours and contracts and claiming to be THE Trinamool player in the area. A building promoter in Kolkata said that during the days the CPM controlled the municipal corporation he could factor in how much he would need to pay to whom to get his permits and the work would get done. Under Trinamool, he said he would pay off one person, only to find another claimant showing up at his door.

Now the CPM is trying to wriggle away from their role in it by trying to make it a story of employment vs extortion. Their syndicate offered employment, the Trinamool syndicates have turned to extortion.

That internal syndicate civil war sometimes spills out in the open with rival groups, both affiliated to the Trinamool fighting each other with guns in broad daylight. In 2014, for example, just days after the party leadership issued a diktat against its leaders being involved in syndicates, two groups, one allegedly close to a Trinamool MP and one close to a Trinamool MLA clashed with bombs and bullets in New Town, just outside Kolkata. We are all members of Trinamool but evidently some of us are less equal than others, said the wife of a Trinamool panchayat leader who was wounded in the fight.

When Mamata Banerjee warned her party members not to do syndicates what she was really warning against was this unseemly Trinamool vs Trinamool public bloodletting. The opposition can call syndicates a Trinamool creation but theres nothing ideological here. Trinamool currently controls the levers of power and thus the muscle and money of the syndicate has moved to it. If alleged syndicate kingpin Bhajai Sardar is close to Trinamool now, once he was close to the Gour Mandal and Louis Mandal land mafia dons of New Town who enjoyed the blessings of the CPM writes Indian Express. Sardar was on stage with the current Bidhannagar mayor Sabyasachi Dutta who said he is a leader who is loved and respected and his son is doing M. Tech. We are all proud of him.

The syndicate is the buzzword of this election. Rahul told his rally One man from Mamatas party got the contract. Materials of bad quality were used and the bridge came crashing down. Rahul is conveniently joining the dots to serve his own ends. There is no evidence yet that even if there were bad quality materials they came from a Trinamool subcontractor. As the Scroll.in article shows many engineers and architects here say the quality of materials is not the problem, the syndicates make their money by inflating the measurements. And the bigger headache can be the labour syndicate that forces builders to pay for syndicate-sanctioned labourers instead of their own as opposed to the construction material supply syndicate.

The Opposition clearly thinks the syndicate raj will be the Achilles heel of the Trinamool the way they hoped the Saradha chit fund scam would be the last time around. Look at the people in the Saradha scam. You will find the same people are caught in the Narada sting. And again these very people are linked to the flyover collapse, said Narendra Modi in a speech in Bengal.

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Modi and Rahul can promised an end to a syndicate raj but the most they can realistically deliver is a syndicate with somewhat better manners.

No one in Bengal believes a chastened Left or new-kid-on-the-block BJP can actually get rid of syndicates. As Trinamool leader Sabyasachi Dutta admitted in a Times Now sting syndicates are the main source of employment for a huge swathe of people and elections cost money. I cannot provide livelihood to them. If 20,000 people die of starvation, the government will fall. If I tell 20,000 people you have to die, even if 2,000 goons die, it would be a major crisis.

Neither Modi nor Rahul is offering a plan B for those 20,000 people. And when push comes to shove no party wants to take on the crisis. The syndicate has turned into Frankensteins monster. Modi and Rahul can promised an end to a syndicate raj but the most they can realistically deliver is a syndicate with somewhat better manners.

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Reno County sees a spike in drug and alcohol overdoses during October

The 27 overdoses through Oct. 21 is an average of more than one a day, the highet average since officials began tracking the data real time.
A plan by Thailands third largest lender could create a new opportunity for North American insurers. Siam Commercial Bank is considering selling a stake in its SCB Life Assurance unit, which has an estimated value of at least $3 billion.Bloomberg says that the bank could look to a foreign insurance company to take on the business unit in a deal which could include access to Siams network of branches.The banks insurance business has previously included foreign shareholders including New York Life Insurance Co. It bought those shares back and now owns 100 per cent of the unit.The market is seen as attractive to western insurers as wealth in the region grows, driving demand for insurance coverage.Canadians lack trust in driverless cars according to a new poll. Almost two-thirds (63 per cent) say they would not trust a vehicle they were in to drive itself. They also highlighted concerns including hacking, theft of data generated by the vehicle and accountability in the event of an accident.A conference in Toronto will investigate issues surrounding driverless cars this week. Automated Vehicles: Planning the Next Disruptive Technology will include a panel discussing privacy concerns of driverless cars.However, the Canadian Automobile Association survey found that 57 per cent expect technology to have advanced to the point where they do trust driverless cars within 10 years."Canadians clearly see the potential. We are just not there yet. Conferences like this one will help advance the dialogue around the pros and cons of this new technology," says Jeff Walker, Vice-President of Public Affairs for CAA National. "Wherever the debate leads, CAA will be there to make sure the views of the driving public are well represented."The hard sell is becoming rarer as brands seek instead to tap into emotions through story telling. American Family Insurance is embracing this new age of advertising with its latest commercial which features that most powerful marketing tool  kids. The spots and accompanying website uses 5 and 6 year olds taking about overcoming obstacles and achieving dreams.The insurance message is subtly included in a narrative of a little girl dreaming of becoming an astronaut as the voiceover says: Remember when we were children and we believed any dream was possible? Was it because there was always someone there protecting us? before saying that American Family would like to be there protecting us.
Across the country, the largest and best-known personal lines insurance carriers are doing battle with regulators to gain approval for large premium jumps in auto and home insurance.Most recently, consumer groups in California have urged the Department of Insurance to reduce its rates by at least 9.26%. According to Consumer Watchdog, the homeowners insurer  the largest in the state  has overcharged its customers by roughly $78 million, or $285,000 per day, since at least July 2015. State Farm is in the process of requesting rate increases through the department that would see homeowners charged $94 million in the coming year than they do under current rates. Consumer Watchdog, however, says this would mean the insurer would be charging $198 million more a year than is legal.An analysis of State Farms financial operations under Californias insurance rules, supported by evidence introduced at the trial, confirms that the companys current rates are excessive and illegal, and that a rate decrease of 9.26% is required, which would save policyholders $104 million annually, the group said in a recent press release.State Farm, meanwhile, alleges that it cannot afford to reduce its rates and that forcing such a reduction would be a violation of constitution rights.The news comes weeks after a similar report affecting Allstate across the country.In Georgia, the insurer has filed a statewide automobile rate increase of 25% that would be implemented May 22. State Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens has warned policyholders of the request, stressing that the 25% hike is just an average. Many policyholders may see a rate change as high as 58.3%.Hudgens directed the Georgia Department Staff to initiate an examination of the carriers filing to determine if it acceptable under state law. If the results show the increase is not justified, Hudgens says he will work to protect policyholders.Im the insurance commissioner and my job is to protect the consumer, the policyholder, Hudgens told local station WRBL. Im not there to protect the insurance company. Im there to protect the Georgia citizens.Losses in the personal lines sectors have indeed been high, as storms ravage the country and low gas prices have prompted an increase in auto accidents.Yet insurance agents say the rate increases requested by the nations carriers are unlike anything they have seen.Most companies dont do it all at one time, said Terry Wiggins, owner of Wiggins Insurance Agency in Georgia. Theyll do three, four, five percent a year until they get to the point where the ratios are back in line.
The School Committee weighed in on the budget proposal on Wednesday.

Tyer Looking To Pare Down Schools Budget Proposal



Superintendent Jason McCandless is proposing a 3.7 percent increase to the budget. PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Mayor Linda Tyer is asking the School Department to pare down its budget request even further.

The current proposal calls for a $2.157 million increase from city coffers, which represents a 3.7 percent hike over this year.

Tyer told the School Committee on Wednesday night that she wants "find a balance" between the requested $3.7 percent increase and the number of cuts it would take to get down to a 2.5 percent increase.

"The next round of reductions proposed was a reduction to 2.5 percent, which is not possible for us to cut that deeply and provide a public education system that we all believe we need to deliver. But, is there something between 3.7 percent and 2.5 percent that the School Committee can feel comfortable with and responsive to the teachers, principals, and the families we educate?" Tyer said.

"I'm hoping over the next couple weeks we can find a balance."

Administrators had proposed a budget that called for some increases to respond to specific requests from principals. Those include a dean of students for Allendale, summer school program increase, extended hours for elementary school secretaries, an English Language Learners teacher at Crosby, permanent substitute teachers, and career counselors for the two high schools.

Since then the ELL teacher, extra school secretary hours, and permanent substitutes were pulled from the budget  for a $133,000 decrease. The other additions add up to less than $150,000 of the total increase. The $2.157 million is mostly comprised of $1.68 million in contractual agreements. The city has contracts in place with the United Educators of Pittsfield, the Educational Administrators Association, and the bus drivers and attendants. The School Committee is in negotiations with the paraprofessionals, clerical, custodians, and cafeteria. Those contracts call for increases in salaries.

Another $440,000 is added for special education tuition increases and another $228,000 for community coordinator positions, which had previously been grant funded. The district also lost $187,000 in revenue reductions from federal and state sources.

The district is seeing decreases in utilities costs to the tune of $460,000 and three staff positions were reduced, cutting another additional $140,000.

"We don't put money into silly things. We put money into serious things that will help students and teachers learn," Superintendent Jason McCandless said.

The 2.5 percent cuts, according to McCandless, would include cutting 25 or so positions. Below that, to get to a 2 percent increase, McCandless said there'd have to be dramatic considerations such as the possibility of closing a school  a move the School Committee believes would lead to more students choosing out to other districts.

McCandless focused on three population sectors  English language learners, students with special needs, and "economically disadvantaged"  to argue that while enrollment in declining, the cost to educate the students is rising.

"Our high needs enrollment has gone up and has gone up in some dramatic ways," McCandless said.

In 2002, the number of students "economically disadvantaged" was 32.7 percent and that has grown to 44.4 percent. McCandless said recently the state changed that classification and under the old classification, the city would now have close to 60 percent. The special education population has risen from 14.5 percent to 20.3 percent and ELL students rose from .6 percent to 4.6 percent.

"Student enrollment drops are not distributed evenly," McCandless said, refuting the idea that an elementary school could be closed because of few students. He said the city hasn't lost the "critical mass" needed for a school closing to make sense.

School Committee member Pamela Farron said, "the population is changing. It is not the schools of yesterday, or 10 years ago, or 20 years ago."

The school budget rose by about $2 million last year, but with obligations McCandless said that ultimately led to $2 million in other programs being cut. This year's $60.6 million doesn't restore any of those programs.

"Things have been left on the cutting room floor already," School Committee member Cynthia Taylor said.

School Committee member Anthony Riello said any further cuts would be to programs, teachers, and items the districts "needs" not wants.

"We're through the nice to haves and now we're cutting the need to haves," he said. "The nice to haves have been gone for a while."

During the public hearing, only local gadfly Craig Gaetani spoke, advocating for more reductions to school spending. The School Committee and McCandless both said any further cuts would jeopardize the quality of service provided.

"No one likes their taxes to go up but you get what you pay for," said Daniel Elias. "It comes down to the level of service we expect as a community."

The same argument can be said from other departments and the mayor specifically cited growing needs in the Police Department. Tyer said she is looking to reallocate city spending to focus on her administration's priorities.

"I'm a strong supporter of education but I'm also representing the entire municipal budget and taking into consideration all of the priorities," Tyer said.

The mayor and the superintendent said they'd be discussing the proposal further before the April 27 vote of the School Committee.

RELATED STORIES:

The School Department's early budget calls for a $60.7 million city appropriation for the fiscal year 2017 budget.

McCandless Rebuts Critics To Start Budget Process

Superintendent Jason McCandless is kicking off the budget season by addressing three of the most criticized items: school choice, per-pupil expenditures, and teacher salaries. Superintendent Jason McCandless is kicking off the budget season by addressing three of the most criticized items: school choice, per-pupil expenditures, and teacher salaries.
The two new ambulances are identical in design and are designed specific to state and federal specifications. The new Medic 1 replaces a 10-year-old Expedition. Medic 1 is the department's medic supervisor vehicle, but is also utilized for off-road operations and to transport the rehab unit. PreviousNext

North Adams Ambulance Replaces Aging Fleet

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  The North Adams Ambulance Service recently took possession of two 2016 McCoy Miller Type III Ambulances and a 2016 Ford Expedition Supervisor Medic Intercept vehicle.



The ambulances were purchased from Yankee Fire & Rescue Inc. in Palmer and Medic 1 was purchased from MHQ in Marlborough, completing all graphic, lighting and radio installations.



Officials say the new acquisitions are part of the emergency medical services' commitment to provide safe, compliant transportation for individuals in the large geographic area it serves.



"With the increased transport distances our trucks are seeing rapid increases in miles and maintenance costs and the two trucks replaced had 200,000 plus miles on them and were seven years old" said general manager and Chief John P. Meaney Jr.



"My goal is to put our employees in the best situation possible to do their jobs so they can continue to effectively serve the patients we care for, this means providing modern equipment that will allow us to continue building a state-of-the-art, progressive EMS agency committed to the transportation safety".



The purchase of Medic 1, the Ford Expedition, was made possible by generous donations from Iberdrola Renewables and MountainOne Bank, and through the North Adams Ambulance Service subscription drive.
We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector

We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector

We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector

We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector
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Press Release: International Organizations Take Major Step to Boost Global Cooperation in Tax Matters

Press Release No.16/176

April 19, 2016

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank Group (WBG) announced today the details of their joint effort to intensify their cooperation on tax issues: the Platform for Collaboration on Tax. The Platform will not only formalize regular discussions between the four international organizations on the design and implementation of standards for international tax matters, it will strengthen their capacity-building support, deliver jointly developed guidance, and information-sharing on operational and knowledge activities.

This effort comes at a time of great momentum around international tax issues, and was welcomed by the G20 finance ministers at their February meeting in Shanghai. Amid the growing importance of taxation in the debate to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a major aim of the Platform is to better frame technical advice to developing countries as they seek both more capacity support and greater influence in designing international rules.

Among the Platforms first tasks will be to deliver a number of toolkits designed to help developing countries implement the measures developed under the G20/OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Project and on other international tax issues. The first of these toolkits, focusing on tax incentives, was delivered in November. There will be an important link to the new BEPS implementation framework. Platform members will hold regular meetings with representatives of developing countries, regional tax organizations, banks and donors. Consultations with business and civil society will be organized as needed.

More information about the Platform for Collaboration on Tax is provided in the Concept Note, jointly developed by the four international organizations.

Queries should be directed to:

IMF: Wiktor Krzyzanowski, wkrzyzanowski@imf.org

OECD: Pascal Saint-Amans, Pascal.Saint-Amans@oecd.org

UN: Alexander Trepelkov, trepelkov@un.org

World Bank Group: Marijn Verhoeven, mverhoeven@worldbank.org
Press Release: IMF's Regional Technical Assistance Center for Central America, Panama and the Dominican Republic (CAPTAC-DR) Meet for General Assembly

Press Release No. 16/177

April 19, 2016

The Steering Committee of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)s Regional Technical Assistance Center for Central America, Panama and the Dominican Republic (CAPTAC-DR) met in Washington, D.C., USA, on April 13, 2016 to assess the activities of the Center over the period from May 2015 to date, discuss the program of operations for 20172019 and review the work plan for fiscal year 2017. High level authorities from all seven member countries attended, together with representatives of donor partners (EU, Canada, Mexico, Luxembourg) and observers (Spain, The World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Central American Bank for Economic Integration), Executive Secretaries of the Regional Councils, and IMF staff.

In his opening remarks, Mr.Gerd Schwartz, Deputy Director of ICD, congratulated member countries and donors for their commitment to capacity development. Ownership and engagement of member countries is demonstrated in the remarkable accomplishments during the last year in the areas of regional harmonization of the member countries external sector statistics, strengthening of the revenue basis in customs administration, and the macro-prudential frameworks developed both at the country and regional levels. Support from partners has been forthcoming, including through the disbursement of 10 million Canadian dollars from Canada and an additional 1.5 million US dollars from Luxembourg. The Steering Committee applauded the strong support provided by donor partners since the launch of the Center.

Steering Committee members endorsed the strategy underlying the work plan of fiscal year 2017. They welcomed the progress made on the implementation of the 2013 mid-term external evaluation recommendations and the sounder financial ground for the Centers Phase II.

In his closing remarks, Mr. Ovidio Reyes, president of the Central Bank of Nicaragua, and pro tempore President of the Central American Monetary Council and CAPTAC-DR Steering Committee, expressed strong satisfaction for the economic successes achieved with the Centers support in his country and in the region. For Mr. Reyes, the work of the Center has effectively supported national efforts that have contributed to the remarkable achievements in macro-economic and financial stability recorded in the region .

Background

Established in 2009, CAPTAC-DR provides technical assistance to Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. Its first five-year budget amounted to $35.6 million. Phase II started in July 2014 with a program document budget of $39.2 million. To date, formal pledges amount to $29.3 million thanks to the support of the EU, Canada, Mexico, Luxembourg, the Inter-American Development Bank, the seven member countries and the IMF.
Imperial Valley News Center

Navy Memorial Hosts the 25th Annual Blessing of the Fleets Ceremony

Washington, DC - The United States Navy Memorial hosted the 25th annual Blessing of the Fleet ceremony at the Navy Memorial in Washington Saturday.

The ceremony followed the Washington, D.C., annual Cherry Blossom Festival Parade and featured the United States Marine Corps Band and Ceremonial Guard.



Chaplain of the Marine Corps and Deputy Chief of Navy Chaplains, Rear Adm. Brent W. Scott, gave the invocation and blessing to the centuries-old tradition.



"The Blessing of the Fleets began really when mariners gone to sea, to include fisherman, so that any time a flotilla of ships or boats would go out to sea, to encounter the perils of the sea in the dangers of the water, there would always be a blessing of the boat and a blessing of the crew," said Scott.



The Blessing of the Fleets ritual is intended to safeguard crews and ships from the danger of the seas.



During the Navy Memorial's ceremony, Sailors from the U.S. Navy's Ceremonial Guard and Marines from the U.S. Marine Barracks in Washington, D.C. poured water from the Seven Seas and Great Lakes into surrounding fountains, "charging" them to life and ushering in the spring season.



"Today we blessed the fleet in the sense of the Marine Corps and the Navy team whose spend their life operating at sea, blessing them and the mission that they have," said Scott.



For Scott, the ceremony was an opportunity to show the public the value of the Marine Corps and the Navy.



"I think so often people in our society don't envision the hardships, and the dangers and the perils of a Navy that goes to sea," said Scott. "This is a great place where the public comes and see what this event is and I think it reminds the people of how important our Marine Corps and Navy team are."



Following the ceremony, guests were invited to enjoy a bowl of Navy bean soup served by Navy culinary specialists from the White House Mess, a free concert of traditional maritime music by the Washington Revel's Maritime Voices in the Burke Theater as well as the unveiling of the Memorial's Year of the Marine Corps exhibit.



The new exhibit honors the Marine Corps' proud history as well as its current mission and goals for the future. The exhibit features rare historical artifacts and artwork and will be on view until March 2017.
Imperial Valley News Center

President Obamas Call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia

Washington, DC - President Barack Obama spoke today by phone with President Vladimir Putin of Russia to share his concern over the status of the Cessation of Hostilities in Syria between the Syrian regime and its allies on the one hand and the armed opposition on the other. President Obama stressed the importance of pressing the Syrian regime to halt its offensive attacks against the opposition.

The two leaders committed to intensify their efforts to shore up the Cessation of Hostilities and affirmed the need to end attacks by all parties and ensure humanitarian access to all besieged areas. President Obama also stressed that progress on these issues needed to be made in parallel to progress on political transition to end the conflict in Syria.

On Ukraine, President Obama urged President Putin to take steps to end the significant uptick in fighting in eastern Ukraine and stressed the urgent importance of moving forward with full implementation of the Minsk agreements.
On the Occasion of the Republic of Zimbabwe's National Day

Washington, DC - Secretary of State John Kerry: "On behalf of President Obama and the people of the United States, I send best wishes to the people of Zimbabwe as you mark 36 years of independence on April 18.

"The United States upholds the same vision for Zimbabwe as its peoplea Zimbabwe that is democratic, prosperous, and provides for its people. Over the coming year, we will continue to stand with Zimbabweans in pursuit of our shared goals."
Assistant Secretary Nuland Travel to Cyprus and France

Washington, DC - Today, Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland will travel to Nicosia, Cyprus, where she will meet with officials of the Cypriot Government to discuss further advancing U.S.-Cypriot relations, as well as regional issues. She will also meet with Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders to convey continued U.S. support for a fair and lasting settlement of the Cyprus problem through the process facilitated by the UN Secretary-Generals Good Offices Mission. In addition, the Assistant Secretary will meet with UN Special Advisor Espen Barth Eide.

Assistant Secretary Nuland will then travel to Paris, France, April 20-21, to discuss a range of regional and global issues with senior government officials.
President Obamas Travel to the United Kingdom

Washington, DC - As part of the Presidents upcoming travel to the United Kingdom, First Lady Michelle Obama will join President Obama for a private lunch hosted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh at Windsor Castle on April 22. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry will host the President and First Lady for a private dinner at Kensington Palace that evening.

As previously announced, the Presidents visit will also include a bilateral meeting and joint press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron at Number 10 Downing Street. The visit will allow the President to coordinate on todays most pressing international challenges with one of our closest allies and to offer his gratitude to the British Government and people for their stalwart partnership with his Administration and the American people throughout his Presidency.
'We Got Robbed': Pakistani Twitter Had a Meltdown Over 'Controversial' No Ball to Virat Kohli
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Italian Police have recovered three 15th century paintings stolen by Nazi soldiers more than 70 years ago.

Italys art crime department has accused two people of receiving the stolen goods, which were taken from a Tuscan villa in 1944.

The pieces, found in two private homes in Milan in July last year, are of immense interest because of their unique character, and because they are from artists considered rare on the market," according to art historian Paolo Strada.

For the time being, there are no parameters we can use to quantify how much they are worth."

The works, which feature religious themes, include Trinity by Alessio Baldovinetti, a scholar of Renaissance painter Beato Angelico, and the Presentation of Jesus to the Temple, by famous Verona-based miniaturist artist Girolamo Dai Libri.

They were taken by German troops from a villa in the Tuscan town of Camaiore, where Prince Felix, consort of the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, once lived.

The pieces were part of the vast art collection of the House of Bourbon-Parma, which also included works that were returned to Luxembourg at the end of the war after being found in the villa of a high-ranking SS officer.

However, there are still nearly 40 pieces missing.

According to police, the three recovered pieces will not have to be returned to Luxembourg as they have already been paid compensation for the loss.

Instead the paintings have been held in Milan's Pinacoteca di Brera art museum since July

In pictures: Unknown works by Marc Chagall and Otto Dix among the trove of Nazi-looted art seized from a Munich flat Show all 6 1 /6 In pictures: Unknown works by Marc Chagall and Otto Dix among the trove of Nazi-looted art seized from a Munich flat In pictures: Unknown works by Marc Chagall and Otto Dix among the trove of Nazi-looted art seized from a Munich flat Unknown-Marc-Chagall.jpg Reuters In pictures: Unknown works by Marc Chagall and Otto Dix among the trove of Nazi-looted art seized from a Munich flat 3-Degenerate-art-EPA.jpg EPA In pictures: Unknown works by Marc Chagall and Otto Dix among the trove of Nazi-looted art seized from a Munich flat Henri-Matisse-Sitting-Pretty.jpg Reuters In pictures: Unknown works by Marc Chagall and Otto Dix among the trove of Nazi-looted art seized from a Munich flat Antonio-Canaletto.jpg Reuters In pictures: Unknown works by Marc Chagall and Otto Dix among the trove of Nazi-looted art seized from a Munich flat Otto-Dix.jpg Reuters In pictures: Unknown works by Marc Chagall and Otto Dix among the trove of Nazi-looted art seized from a Munich flat Ernst-Ludwig-Kirchner-Melancholic-Girl.jpg Reuters

Antonella Ranaldi, superintendent for the arts at the culture ministry, said the paintings will need to be restored as their state of conservation is not great.

Police based in the northern Italian town of Monza began investigating the whereabouts of the three pieces in 2014, drawing on analysis of old documents.

They previously recovered three other pieces in 2009 and 2015, which belonged to the Mason Perkins and the Loeser Calnan collections.

Although most of the art work stolen by Nazi agents during the Second World War was subsequently recovered, much remains missing.

It is believed the pieces are part of a huge illegal multi-billion dollar global art trade, the third largest behind drugs and arms trafficking.
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Hollywood's Ghost in the Shell remake is snowballing in its controversy; with the film submerging in the hot waters of its casting decisions.

Fans had already expressed their dismay at the news Scarlett Johansson would be cast in the lead role of (the clearly Japanese) Motoko Kusanagi; yet, the first image of the actor in the role seemed only to solidify the dissonance of her casting. A defining voice in the backlash was Ming Na-Wen, the voice of Disney's Mulan and current star of Marvel television series Agents of Shield.

It seemed as if Ghost in the Shell is doomed to be another disappointment in a long line of whitewashed movies, joining the likes of Pan or Gods of Egypt; yet, the issue goes even deeper here. As comic writer Jon Tsuei explains, Ghost in the Shell actually ties into something deeply rooted within Japanese identity; to whitewash its story is to strip it of its weight, power, and relevance.



It's obvious why Johansson was cast in the role; her work with Marvel and 2014's Lucy has essentially made her the biggest female action star in Hollywood. Her involvement here speaks to a vehicle afraid it won't have relevancy or blockbuster weight without the addition of an A-list name in the credits; but this begs two important questions.

Why does Hollywood need a Ghost in the Shell film if there's not enough confidence its name alone can bring an audience? Furthermore, why aren't we looking at the systems of prejudice in place which have resulted in such a lack of A-list Asian actors? Rinko Kikuchi proved her action chops in 2013's Pacific Rim; where are her leading roles in major blockbusters?

Incidentally, Tsuei ends his thoughts with a perfectly photoshopped image of what Kikuchi would like in the role. The verdict? Much improved.

Ghost in the Shell hits UK cinemas on 31 March 2017.
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Jurassic World's reinvention of Steven Spielberg's classic franchise seems very much focused on reinvention; and its upcoming sequel won't be doing things any differently.

It all started with the hiring of Colin Trevorrow for its first instalment; a director with only one feature film previously under his belt, 2012's indie sci-fi Safety Not Guaranteed. Jurassic World 2 looks to be doing something very similar; with news J.A. Bayona would be helming the next dino-blockbuster.

Arguably, Bayona's a little more established within cinema; with the Spanish director first coming to notice with his critically acclaimed (and positively terrifying) 2007 horror film The Orphanage. He also helmed 2012's disaster drama The Impossible, which landed star Naomi Watts an Academy Award nomination, and is behind this year's A Monster Calls; a dark fantasy drama which sees Liam Neeson voice a monstrous tree who befriends a grieving boy.

Terror certainly seems to be Bayona's strong suit; having previously been attached to World War Z 2, and having directed several episodes of Gothic series Penny Dreadful, it's easy to imagine his appeal to Jurassic World producers. For example, the infamously frightening "Knock, Knock, Knock" scene from The Orphanage delivers a tension could definitely envy Jurassic Park's velociraptor/kitchen sequence.



Colin Trevorrow, producer Frank Marshall, and J.A. Bayona himself all took to Twitter to announce the news.



Jurassic World clearly fared Trevorrow very well; the film was a mammoth hit, and the director was swiftly hired by Disney to helm Star Wars: Episode IX. If Bayona pulls the same trick, it's guaranteed he'll automatically be introduced into Hollywood's directorial elite.

Jurassic World 2 sees Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard return to their roles, though the latter previously promised her character won't be wearing heels. Jeff Goldblum also revealed he was, ahem, open like a "chicken piccata" on the prospect of returning to the role of Dr. Ian Malcom for the sequel.
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Outspoken filmmaker Kevin Smith is targeting American censors following their decision to slap his new film with an R-rating.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) handed Smith's upcoming horror comedy the rating - which is equivalent to a 15-certificate in the UK - due to one shot that features a cartoon pair of testicles.

Smith expressed his anger via an Instagram page where he uploaded the offending image in an effort to prove to his many followers that the image is, it turns out, not that offensive.

Naturally, the Clerks filmmaker will challenge the decision.

The MPAA gave my kids movie Yoga Hosers an R rating for a cartoony drawing of testicles on a book cover, he wrote matter-of-factly.

So now, for the fourth time in my 22 year career, we will hold an appeal screening with the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board and try to get the R overturned for a less severe (and far more appropriate) PG-13.

He continued: The core audience for the flick is tween girls (it's Clueless meets Gremlins!), so I refrained from salty language to make a totally kid-friendly movie."

A photo posted by Kevin Smith (@thatkevinsmith) on Apr 18, 2016 at 12:12pm PDT



"Even so, next week I'll screen the flick for the MPAA appeals audience and, lawyer-like, plead my case for why the film is really PG-13 - all so that I can keep the graffiti drawing of nuts on a fictional library book in my goofy girl-power monster movie. Weird life."

Even if you're not the biggest Kevin Smith fan, it's hard to deny his point.

Yoga Hosers stars Smith's own daughter Harley Quinn Smith as well as Lily-Rose Depp - daughter of actor Johnny who himself stars in the film; in fact, Depp is the one holding the controversial drawing in the above shot.

The film, due for release this coming August, was shown at Sundance Film Festival back in January where it received a crop of negative reviews.

Smith has previously challenged the MPAA's decision following the ratings of his films Clerks (1994), Jersey Girl (2004) and Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008).
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It's unsurprising that practically nothing is known about Star Wars: Episode VIII other than its director, cast and the fact it will pick up where The Force Awakens left us dangling back in December.

One of the series' returning cast members, Oscar Isaac - who plays fighter pilot Poe Dameron - has assured fans that the next instalment will be something altogether different to its predecessors.

Rian is definitely going to places and investigating things that havent really been done in the Star Wars universe, the actor said in an interview with the LA Times.

For me, its so fun getting to explore different things that I wouldnt have expected in this universe.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Show all 45 1 /45 Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art Star Wars: The Force Awakens ILM concept art

The Inside Llewyn Davis actor continued: In some ways it feels like were making an independent film. Certain things we get to play with - this kind of intimacy that we get to find - its special.

Director JJ Abrams recently revealed that Isaac was so fed up of his characters dying in films that he made him re-write the film's original script which saw Dameron killed off.

The as-of-yet untitled Episode VIII will be released December 2017, a year after spin-off prequel Rogue One hits cinemas.
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Netflix's announcement in January that it would be increasing its efforts to block users from circumventing region blockades turned out not to be an empty threat, with hosts of popular VPN services being rendered useless for this purpose overnight.

There was uproar from customers, some of which simply use VPNs to protect their privacy, with a petition calling for the ban to be lifted attracting over 40,000 signatures.

But it seems Netflix, which generally cherishes its user experience, doesnt seem fussed by this uprising.

Its a very small but quite vocal minority, CEO Reed Hastings said during this weeks earnings call. So its really inconsequential to us, as you could see in the Q1 results.

Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Show all 14 1 /14 Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 House of Cards - Season Four - 4 March Last time we were in Frank Underwoods White House things werent looking to great for the President, his first Lady having just walked out on him. What will happen next in the critically acclaimed show is anyones guess. Netflix Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Daredevil - Season Two - 18 March Back in Hells Kitchen things were seemingly getting better. Kingpin is in prison and the crime syndicates should have dispersed - for the meantime at least. Unfortunately for Matt Murdoch, theres a new anti-hero in town: The Punisher. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Flaked - 11 March According to Netflix, Flaked is set in the insular world of Venice, California. It follows the serio-comic story of a self-appointed 'guru' who falls for the object of his best friends fascination. Soon the tangled web of half-truths and semi-b******* that underpins his all-important image and sobriety begins to unravel. Arnett plays Chip, a man doing his honest best to stay one step ahead of his own lies. Netflix Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - Season Two - 15 April Following the story of 29-year-old Kimmy Schmidt on her journey through New York, season two is set to start right where the last left us. The Tina Fey created sitcom has already been renewed for a third season, so you know this one has to be good. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 The Ranch - 1 April A comedy starring Ashton Kutcher. Based on a failed semi-pro footballer who returns home to a Colorado ranch. It also has some of the producers from Two and a Half Men behind it, which just happens to be one of the most successful shows of all time. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Marseille - 5 May Netflixs first French language original is a tale of power, corruption and redemption. Sounding like it could very well be the next Narcos. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Grace and Frankie - Season Two - 6 May The tale of a retired cosmetics mogul and a hippie art teacher living together was a hit across the world, especially in the US. Starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, the show has already been renewed for a third season. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Orange is the New Black - Season Four - 17 June Another Netflix powerhouse, Orange is the New Black will see us returning to Litchfield Penitentiary. Prepare for more Piper, Alex and Red come June. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Stranger Things - 15 July Eight-episode series starring Winona Ryder that follows a small community as they look for a young boy who has seemingly vanished. It all sounds quite scary. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 The Get Down - August 12th "Told through the lives and music of a ragtag crew of South Bronx teens, The Get Down is a mythic saga of the transformation of 1970s New York City. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, this is sure to be as stylish as anything hes done before. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 The Crown - Spring Starring Doctor Who actor Matt Smith, the period drama reveals the political rivalries and romance behind Queen Elizabeth II's reign and the events that shaped the 2nd half of the 20th century." Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Luke Cage - Fall 2016 First appearing alongside Jessica Jones in her Netflix series, Luke Cage will pic up the pieces, seeing Cage come to terms with his super-strength and impenetrable skin. It is unknown whether Kathryn. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Narcos - Season 2 - Fall 2016 Its back. The Netflix series hyped to match Breaking Bad was an astounding success around the world, apparently watched more than Game of Thrones. Well find out what happens to Pablo Escabar now he doesnt have the protection of all his men. Netflix Inc. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 A Series of Unfortunate Events - Fall 2016 Netflix is set to revisit the much-loved childrens novel, putting Neil Patrick Harris as Count Olaf in a show that looks so much creepier than the 2004 film. Not much else is known - i.e. casting - but Lemony Snicket is on board as executive producer, so get excited.

Discussing the streaming services crackdown, a VPN operator told TorrentFreak: They are now coming from a few hundred different possible subdomains.

This makes it much more expensive for us to circumvent because we would basically need to forward all Netflix traffic through our servers instead of just the packets that do the geolocation.

While Netflix isnt willing to turn a blind eye to/is under pressure not to allow VPN use, it does understand the urgent need for borderless content.

After Netflix announced on Twitter recently that it was now everywhere, a follower replied: and same content everywhere?

Still prisoners of territorial licensing, Netflix responded, moving quickly to have global availability of all content on Netflix.

Access unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up

Hastings previously expressed the same sentiment, saying: The basic solution is for Netflix to get global and have its content be the same all around the world so theres no incentive to [use a VPN].

"The VPN thing is a small little asterisk compared to piracy. [It] is really the problem around the world.

"The key thing about piracy is that some fraction of it is because [users] couldnt get the content. That part we can fix.

"Some part of piracy however is because they just dont want to pay. Thats a harder part. As an industry, we need to fix global content."
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No longer silent, fusty and reserved for solitary study, libraries are now bright and buzzing spaces where people can also engage with their local community and new technologies. And the seven winners of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) 2016 Library Building Awards are a perfect showcase of this. Comprised of new and renovated buildings from both small towns and major cities, the winners were chosen by a panel of industry professionals. What unites them, aside from being striking buildings, is how they demonstrate the powerful effect that architecture, through elements like space, light, geometry and materials, can have on our mood.

The celebrated projects include Renton public library in Washington, an ethereal glass and raw aluminium building straddling the banks of the Cedar river; and the Lawrence public library in Kansas, a geometric structure of harsh lines clad in terracotta panels

It may seem obvious, but even the most beautiful building is largely useless if it doesnt fulfil its function. What use are stunning aesthetics if a person inside is stifled by heat from a badly placed window, or unable to arrange furniture neatly inside?

Renton public library, Washington, by the Miller Hull Partnership (Lara Swimmer)

Buildings and urban spaces should be designed first and foremost around their occupants, says Dr Sergio Altomonte, architect and associate professor in the department of architecture and built environment at the Nottingham university. The importance of architecture as a trigger to physical, physiological and psychological wellbeing is nowadays becoming a topic of significant relevance.

Architect Lynn Grossman, AIA chair and Library Awards jury member, believes that the award-winning libraries were built with this in mind

The libraries all are exciting, engaging and comfortable places to spend a morning, an afternoon or an evening, she says. With abundant views and natural light, people using them can observe the activity and the natural world outside, and those outside have a glimpse of whats happening inside. They are separated yet connected, and they help to connect their communities together.

Numerous studies show that buildings can impact a persons health, and as citizens of modern societies spend 90 per cent of their time indoors, this is more important than ever.

American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures Show all 14 1 /14 American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures Billings Public Library, Montana by Will Bruder + Partners Ltd with O2 Architects. Bill Timmerman American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures The jury called this design "innovative and responsive". Bill Timmerman American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures Chicago Public Library, Chinatown Branch. Hederich Blessing American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures Judges said: "Balancing aesthetics, pragmatic programming, and sustainable design, the 16,000-square-foot Chinatown Branch Library serves as an educational and social hub for Chicagos historic Chinatown neighborhood." Jon Miller American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures Renton Public Library, Washington, by The Miller Hull Partnership Lara Swimmer American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures The jury praised libraries that offered engaging, comfortable spaces Lara Swimmer American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures Hennepin County Walker Library, Minnesota by VJAA Paul Crosby American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures The judges said: "The new building, clad in stainless steel and glass, is a simple figural mass with a civic character." Paul Crosby American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures Ryerson university student learning centre, Toronto, by Snhetta with Zeidler Partnership Architects Lorne Bridgman American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures Judges said: "The design develops natural conditions for groups of people to interact while also offering areas for controlled and introspective study. Most importantly, it encourages students to make the space their own." Lorne Bridgman American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures Lawrence public library, Kansas, by Gould Evans Tim Griffith American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures "The design solution wrapped all sides of the existing library with a continuous reading room, emphasising places of spontaneous gathering, reflection and learning," said the judges. Tim Griffith American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures Sawyer Library, Massachusetts by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson Peter Aaron American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards: In pictures The result of a 12-year project, the judges said: "The results fuse new and old, intertwining the colleges historic roots with the forward-looking views of its scholarly community." Peter Aaron

Recognising this impact, the AIA has compiled six key areas for architects to pay particular attention to when designing a space, explains AIA spokesman Scott Frank. Among these are safety, promoting social connectedness, ease of movement, and sensory stimulation.

Natural light, for example, can help hospital patients to recover and school pupils perform better. Light certainly has a physiological impact on people, says Dr Alan Lewis, a lecturer in architecture at Manchester university. Research has shown that visible light helps the human body to regulate the production of the hormone melatonin, which in turn helps to regulate our body clock, affecting sleep patterns and digestion. Visible light also helps to stimulate the body's production of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which can reduce the symptoms of depression.

But a well-designed space, particularly a modern library, must also be versatile yet appropriate for its main use. Good designs are where it is not dictated to the individual how they should perceive, operate or feel in the building, but have the flexibility to explore and experience it for themselves, says Dr Marialena Nikolopoulou, from the school of architecture at the university of Kent .

Dr Birgitta Gatersleben, senior lecturer in environmental psychology at Surrey university, agrees. People perform a range of different tasks and have different needs: sometimes to be alone, sometimes to be with others. A range of spaces that offer different things works best. It all comes down to the people-environment fit. Some of the featured libraries in the AIA awards clearly have a wide variety of flexible spaces in abundance, she says.

But the truth is that creating the perfect space is an impossible, and subjective, balancing act between form and function. This is made harder by the fact that architects do not have the luxury of creating a prototype outside of computer or physical models, and are restricted by laws and often tight budgets. Negative spaces are never deliberately constructed, says Dr Raymond Lucas, head of architecture at the Manchester university, adding: Building design is complex, and it is impossible to predict everything about a space before it is built.

Essentially, the power a building has over a person is limited. It cannot change their personal needs or circumstances, and its uses are always changing.

According to Dr Lucas: Buildings are never truly finished. They require constant maintenance and occupation in order to function well.

The impact architecture has on a persons mood is huge. Arguably these are the fundamentals of architecture: not how it looks, but how we feel it, through the way it allows us to act, behave, think and reflect, says Dr Melanie Dodd, programme director of spatial practices at the Central St Martins art school. But its not necessarily causative  meaning architecture may not have a direct relationship with our mood that is measurable. It may be complex, subjective and happen over time and with use.

Adrian Lahoud, dean of the school of architecture at the Royal College of Art, has perhaps the most frank assessment of the impact spaces have on the individuals using them. Does architecture matter? Absolutely. Can it insulate people from the political circumstances around them? No.

Encapsulating the architects unenviably difficult tasks, he adds: To be a good architect, you need to have a deep appreciation of human character and its capacity for transformation.
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Google could be about to face legal action from the EU, over concerns that it gives an unfair advantage to its own software on smartphones running its Android operating system.

Citing four sources familiar with the processes, Reuters reports the competition commission is concerned that the internet giant gives more prominence on Android devices to its own apps, over similar services developed by other companies.

According to EU competition boss Margrethe Vestager, the commission is not too worried about Google's demands that phone manufacturers bundle a complete set of Google apps into handsets, since some, like the Play Store, are vital to the Android operating system.

Their issue is more with the company's alleged use of exclusive contracts which put these bundles in place.

Our concern is that by requiring phone makers and operators to pre-load a set of Google apps, rather than letting them decide for themselves which apps to load, Google might have cut off one of the main ways that new apps can reach customers, Vestager told an audience in Amsterdam this week.

If the EU found Google guilty of anti-competitive (antitrust) practices, the company could face a fine of 10 per cent of its 2015 revenue - equivalent to around 5.1 billion. Google would also have to change the way it operates in the future.

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

Some of the rumours of an imminent case come from the complainants against Google. Since February, the EU has been asking them to remove sensitive details from the evidence they have provided to the commission, since these documents are given to Google for its defence.

However, some of the companies concerned say they have been given a 24-hour deadline to do so - suggesting a charge may be brought within days.

Speaking to Reuters, Google denied that it forces phone companies into exclusive contracts, with spokesman Mark Jansen saying: Anyone can use Android with or without Google applications. Hardware manufacturers and carriers can decide how to use Android and consumers have the last word about which apps they want to use.

Google has faced antitrust accusations from the EU before, but people close to this case say it may be easier to prove, since it rests on a set of specific contracts which the EU will be able to point to when making accusations of illegal behaviour.

The EU competition commission declined to comment on whether charges involving Android were in the pipeline.
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Netflix could be about to let people download shows in a shock move.

The company had always committed only to ever let people stream, rather than download. It would wait for Wi-Fi and phone networks to catch up to the required speeds, representatives said, rather than wasting time making its service adapt to old technology.

But the company now appears to have signalled that it is changing its mind on that strongly- and often-voiced position, potentially moving towards letting people download content so that they can watch it in places without internet connections.

Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Show all 14 1 /14 Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 House of Cards - Season Four - 4 March Last time we were in Frank Underwoods White House things werent looking to great for the President, his first Lady having just walked out on him. What will happen next in the critically acclaimed show is anyones guess. Netflix Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Daredevil - Season Two - 18 March Back in Hells Kitchen things were seemingly getting better. Kingpin is in prison and the crime syndicates should have dispersed - for the meantime at least. Unfortunately for Matt Murdoch, theres a new anti-hero in town: The Punisher. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Flaked - 11 March According to Netflix, Flaked is set in the insular world of Venice, California. It follows the serio-comic story of a self-appointed 'guru' who falls for the object of his best friends fascination. Soon the tangled web of half-truths and semi-b******* that underpins his all-important image and sobriety begins to unravel. Arnett plays Chip, a man doing his honest best to stay one step ahead of his own lies. Netflix Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - Season Two - 15 April Following the story of 29-year-old Kimmy Schmidt on her journey through New York, season two is set to start right where the last left us. The Tina Fey created sitcom has already been renewed for a third season, so you know this one has to be good. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 The Ranch - 1 April A comedy starring Ashton Kutcher. Based on a failed semi-pro footballer who returns home to a Colorado ranch. It also has some of the producers from Two and a Half Men behind it, which just happens to be one of the most successful shows of all time. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Marseille - 5 May Netflixs first French language original is a tale of power, corruption and redemption. Sounding like it could very well be the next Narcos. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Grace and Frankie - Season Two - 6 May The tale of a retired cosmetics mogul and a hippie art teacher living together was a hit across the world, especially in the US. Starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, the show has already been renewed for a third season. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Orange is the New Black - Season Four - 17 June Another Netflix powerhouse, Orange is the New Black will see us returning to Litchfield Penitentiary. Prepare for more Piper, Alex and Red come June. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Stranger Things - 15 July Eight-episode series starring Winona Ryder that follows a small community as they look for a young boy who has seemingly vanished. It all sounds quite scary. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 The Get Down - August 12th "Told through the lives and music of a ragtag crew of South Bronx teens, The Get Down is a mythic saga of the transformation of 1970s New York City. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, this is sure to be as stylish as anything hes done before. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 The Crown - Spring Starring Doctor Who actor Matt Smith, the period drama reveals the political rivalries and romance behind Queen Elizabeth II's reign and the events that shaped the 2nd half of the 20th century." Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Luke Cage - Fall 2016 First appearing alongside Jessica Jones in her Netflix series, Luke Cage will pic up the pieces, seeing Cage come to terms with his super-strength and impenetrable skin. It is unknown whether Kathryn. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 Narcos - Season 2 - Fall 2016 Its back. The Netflix series hyped to match Breaking Bad was an astounding success around the world, apparently watched more than Game of Thrones. Well find out what happens to Pablo Escabar now he doesnt have the protection of all his men. Netflix Inc. Netflix originals to look forward to in 2016 A Series of Unfortunate Events - Fall 2016 Netflix is set to revisit the much-loved childrens novel, putting Neil Patrick Harris as Count Olaf in a show that looks so much creepier than the 2004 film. Not much else is known - i.e. casting - but Lemony Snicket is on board as executive producer, so get excited.

We should keep an open mind on this, said CEO Reed Hastings during an earnings call. We have been focusing on the click and watch, and the beauty and simplicity of streaming.

But as we expand around the world where we see an uneven set of networks, its something we should keep an open mind about.

Jail ditches orange jumpsuits because of Neflix show

Netflix has been gradually moving into new and developing markets in recent years, many of which have much slower connections than the US and other core regions.

Recommended Read more Netflix responds to VPN ban backlash

But the company might also have made the decision because the feature is already offered by Amazon Prime Video. Mr Hastings announcement came during a conference call that included much discussion of its rival, which added offline viewing last year, and fears that it could overtake Netflix.

Amazon has been adding new features to its streaming video service such as letting people pay monthly, apparently in an attempt to take on Netflix for streaming video customers.
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Stories of love against all odds are the basis for some of the greatest works of art and literature. But tales of infatuation between close relatives - be they siblings or parent and children - are generally met with churning stomachs rather than misty eyes. That was certainly the reaction when mother and son Kim West, 51, and Ben Ford, 32, both from Michigan, revealed their story earlier this month.

West put her son up for adoption a week after she gave birth to him. Decades later, in 2013, Ford did as many adopted children do and made contact with his biological mother. The pair then formed a highly unusual bond. In an interview, West admitted that she started to have sexual dreams about her son, while Ford scoured the internet for reassurance that he was not alone in having sexual feelings towards his mother.

The pair later met at a hotel, and with their inhibitions loosened by alcohol, shared their first kiss and started a sexual relationship that West described as mind-blowing. Three days after the meeting, Ford left his wife for his mother.

Since revealing their story to the press, the couple have gone into hiding over fears that they could each be hit with a 15-year prison sentence and forced to sign the sex offenders register. But perhaps they could claim some mitigation at an evolutionary level. As Dr Tamsin Saxton, a senior lecturer in Psychology at Northumbria University, explains, attraction is all about the impression of someone that you construct, which can depend to some extent on their value to you as a potential partner.

Now hold that thought, and consider this: although you might find falling for a relative incomprehensible, youre probably not too surprised to learn that evidence suggests heterosexual men are more likely to find a partner who resembles their mother attractive, and women a partner who resembles their father. This is known as positive imprinting, and a 2008 study by Icelandic scientists suggests that it occurs because a couple with a distant familial relationship may have a better chance of producing a large number of healthy children.

Meanwhile, negative imprinting, or the Westermarck Effect, describes the process whereby individuals reject any sexual attraction that they feel for those with whom they have lived closely in their infancy, including parents and siblings. So could the combination of positive imprinting and a lack of the negative version account for the behaviour of Ben Ford (if not his mother)?

A history of love Show all 13 1 /13 A history of love A history of love Plato's Symposium One of the Platos most famous works, this dialogue between Greek philosophers that takes place over dinner, explores the very nature of love, what it means to be in love, and has shaped the modern definition of platonic love. Getty Images A history of love Romeo and Juliet Shakepeare's tale of two young star-crossed lovers has stood the test of time and continues to be adapted for film, stage and even opera. Getty Images A history of love Troilus and Criseyde Considered one of Chaucers finest works the poem written in Middle-English brought about the term all good things come to an end as Criseydes lover dies a tragic death in the Siege of Troy. A history of love Pride and Prejudice Having sold over 20 million copies, Jane Austens novel based on the themes of manners, upbringing, morality and marriage continues to make women worldwide swoon at the thought of finding their very own Mr. Darcy. A history of love Sigmund Freud Freud thought that not only a couples love for one another, but the parents love for the child and the childs for the parent were basically of the same kind. A history of love Wuthering Heights Emily Brontes eerie tale of jealousy and vengefulness still haunts readers today and even inspired Kate Bushs 1978 hit. Getty Images A history of love Orpheus & Eurydice Perhaps the ultimate tragic love story, this Greek myth explores love at first sight and Orpheuss doomed journey to the Underworld to be reunited with his wife. Getty Images A history of love Song of Songs in the Bible A celebration of sexual love, The Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon is widely considered one of the most beautiful expressions of love and harmony. A history of love The Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal A story of love so epic that it led to the creation of one of the Wonders of the World, The Taj Mahal, this is a grief stricken Mughal Emperors exquisite manifestation of love for his favourite wife who died in childbirth. Getty Images A history of love Madame Bovary, Flaubert Flauberts 19th century realist novel follows narcissist Emma Bovary and her descent into adultery and despair as the boredom of bourgeois life consumes her. A history of love Anna Karenina, Tolstoy Tolstoys exploration of love as a kind of fate which can be a blessing but also a curse that leads to destruction is deeply embedded in modern culture. A history of love Doctor Zhivago Set during a war, the classic love triangle of a man who has fallen for two women is a tale of broken hearts and twists of fate. A history of love Layla and Majnun Persian poet, Nizami Ganjavi, narrates a story of young love which can only be united in death as the legendary lovers are buried side by side, to be reunited in the afterlife.

Some people who havent had the right experience in childhood can struggle to separate a sense of physical comfort or emotional comfort from sexual touch or attraction, suggests psychologist Judith Wenban-Smith. However, she says, they still can exercise free will: Its not inevitable, its not a disease or an illness. Its the way people interpret and react to the feelings they have when theyre reunited with a blood relative, from whom they have been separated and about whom they would have fantasised.

Unfortunately, the psychological implications of such a relationship built on powerful emotions misfiring can be doubly devastating. Couples will not only face rejection from society, but also destroy any chance of sharing a familial love.
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Glastonbury is doing its bit to help the beleaguered UK steel industry at this year's festival.

Organisers have ordered over 200,000 reusable cups made from Sheffield stainless steel and manufactured at APS in Birmingham, which used to make Land Rover parts.

Michael Eavis, the founder of Glastonbury, has said he was motivated by a desire to help the UK steel industry at a time when jobs were being put at risk.

Recommended Read more Four charts that show why the UK steel industry is in crisis

"The single most important thing was being able to source British stainless steel for the cups from the place where it was invented  Sheffield, and then to take it on to the home of manufacture  Birmingham," Eavis said.

Week after week, theres a story in the national press about jobs in the UK steel industry being put at risk. Theres seemingly no end to the negative slide of this critical industry, and if the jobs, skills and infrastructure are lost they wont be replaced. Weve worked on this project over the last three years, which will hopefully encourage other UK businesses to think about how they can support our steel industry during these very challenging times.

The cups will be available at Glastonbury for a 5 deposit. When festival-goers need a refill, they will be able to swap their cup for a fresh one.

Lucy Smith, Glastonbury's green initiatives and sustainability co-ordinator, compared the scheme to 5p plastic bags.

Business news: In pictures Show all 13 1 /13 Business news: In pictures Business news: In pictures Flybe collapses Airline Flybe has collapsed. All future flights on the Exeter-based airline have been cancelled  leaving more than 2,300 staff facing an uncertain future, and wrecking the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of passengers. The chief executive, Mark Anderson, said: Europes largest independent regional airline has been unable to overcome significant funding challenges to its business. AFP via Getty Business news: In pictures Future product placement will be 'tailored to individual viewers' Marketing executives say that product placement in films and televison shows on streaming services such as Netflix may be tailored to individuals in future. For instance, if data shows that a viewer is a fan of pepsi, a billboard in the background of a shot would host an advert for pepsi, while for a viewer known to have different tastes it could be for Coca-Cola Paramount Business news: In pictures Corbyn wishes Amazon a happy birthday In a card sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the company's 25th birthday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn writes: "You owe the British people millions in taxes that pay for the public services that we all rely on. Please pay your fair share" Business news: In pictures No deal, no tariffs The government has announced that it would slash almost all tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Notable exceptions include cars and meat, which will see tariffs in place to protect British farmers Getty Business news: In pictures Fingerprint payment NatWest is trialling a new bank card that will allow people to touch their hand to the card when paying rather than typing in a PIN number. The card will work by recognising the user's fingerprint NatWest/PA Wire Business news: In pictures Mahabis bust High-end slipper retailer Mahabis has gone into administration. 2 Jan 2019 Mahabis Business news: In pictures Costa Cola Coca-Cola has paid 3.9bn for Costa Coffee. A cafe chain is a new venture for the global soft drinks giant PA Business news: In pictures RIP Payday Loans A funeral procession for payday loans was held in London on September 2. The future of pay day lenders is in doubt after Wonga, Britain's biggest, went into administration on August 30 PA Business news: In pictures Musk irks investors and directors Elon Musk has concluded that Tesla will remain public. Investors and company directors were angry at Musk for tweeting unexpectedly that he was considering taking Tesla private and share prices had taken a tumble in the following weeks Getty Business news: In pictures Jaguar warning Iconic British car maker Jaguar Land Rover warned on July 5, 2018 that a "bad" Brexit deal could jeopardise planned investment of more than $100 billion, upping corporate pressure as the government heads into crucial talks AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures Spotif-IPO Spotify traded publically for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday. However, the company isn't issuing shares, but rather, shares held by Spotify's private investors will be sold AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures French blue passports The deadline to award a contract to make blue British passports after Brexit has been extended by two weeks following a request by bidder De La Rue. The move comes after anger at the announcement British passports would be produced by Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto when De La Rues contract ends in July. The British firm said Gemalto was chosen only because it undercut the competition, but the UK company also admitted that it was not the cheapest choice in the tendering process. Business news: In pictures Beast from the east economic impact The Beast from the East wiped 4m off of Flybes revenues due to flight cancellations, airport closures and delays, according to the budget airlines estimates. Flybe said it cancelled 994 flights in the three months to 31 March, compared to 372 in the same period last year.

"For us, its part of the reusable revolution. Its very similar to paying 5p for a carrier bag. We think people will take to it," she said.

One in six jobs in the UK steel industry is under threat because of a global oversupply caused by overproduction from China.

China is producing so much steel that some Chinese companies are selling their steel abroad at a loss, because there isnt enough demand in China. UK companies cannot compete with these prices and jobs are being lost as a result.
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Unilever, the owner of Ben & Jerrys and Lipton, has claimed the top spot in Oxfams Behind the Brands campaign, which ranks 10 global brands according to their social and environmental policies, in a report which showed a significant improvement across the industry.

Since 2013, Oxfam has tracked 10 leading global brands and ranked their performance on seven key issues: climate change, water, women, workers, smallholder farmers, land and transparency.

Unilever ousted Nestle from the top spot thanks to its stronger approach to climate change, its support for small-scale farmers and workers right.

Nestle ranked second and was praised for updating its action plans to support women in cocoas supply chains.

Coca-Cola finished third leading the way on respecting land rights and in supporting women but was left trailing the top companies due to poor performance on support for farmers.

Kelloggs, up 30 per cent on its rating three years ago, has made the most progress across all areas. While Associated British Foods (ABF) is one the two poorer performer, let down by its weak commitment to improve its policies on climate change and the plight of women among others issues.

It shares the last spot with Danone, still lagging behind other companies despite its significant commitment on climate together.

The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 Show all 20 1 /20 The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 1. British Airways British Airways has come top of a list of the best British brands for third year in the row. The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 2. Rolex Rolex retained second position, also for the third year running, but faced increasing competition from third placed LEGO The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 3. Lego LEGO jumped up eight places in 2016 The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 4. Dyson Dyson, the electronic goods specialist, climbed ten places to fourth, its highest ever position in the survey, following a high profile advertising campaign fronted by eponymous entrepreneur James Dyson The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 5. Gillette The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 6. Mercedes-Benz Mercedes Benz only sent 55 C55 AMG estates to the UK in right-hand drive The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 7. Apple Core values: Apple was ordered to pay $625.6m by a court in East Texas The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 8. Jaguar The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 9. Kellog's The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 10. Andrex Andrex puppy: Soft, strong and very long... no wait, thats the product, not the pup. Very sweet, though The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 11. Nike The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 12. Heinz Heinz, Jaguar and Marks & Spencer all re-entered the top 20, replacing Boots, BMW and Fairy. The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 13. Coca-Cola The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 14. John Lewis John Lewis' festive advert features a girl, Lily, who connects by telescope with an old man alone on the Moon The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 15. Haagen-Dazs 5. Haagen-Dazs chocolate fondant 3.29 for 200ml, tesco.com Overwhelmingly chocolatey  with both chocolate ice cream, sauce and brownies in the mix. Just don't eat more than one. The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 16. Google Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 17. Virgin Atlantic Winging it: behind-the-scenes documentary 'Virgin Atlantic: Up in the Air' ITV The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 18. Marks & Spencer Getty The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 19. Amazon.co.uk AFP The 20 best-loved British brands in 2016 20. Microsoft The biggest faller within the Top 20 was US tech giant Microsoft, which dropped 16 places. Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

"As Oxfam knows, we do not have the same business model as most of the other companies featured on the scorecard.So sadly the survey can never reflect the breadth and depth of our work. We have pointed this out to Oxfam many times," a spokesperson for ABF told the Independent.

"By allowing our individual businesses to make decisions and trusting our people to make the right choices, we dont present the outside world with the same kind of policy and target-driven culture that many other companies adopt. We believe this enables us to run a more ethical business that positively contributes to the communities in which we operate. However, we also recognise that we can always do better and we continue to develop plans to further improve our activities," ABF added.

Danone said Oxfam's ranking does not acknowledge many of the sustainability project the brand is collaborating on with their partners and stakeholders, as their assessment is based on publicly available information only.

"At Danone, our primary aim is to act in the field. Our social and environmental sustainability work prioritizes those areas where we believe we can make the most practical impact. We leverage lessons learnt and experience gained in collaboration with, for example, local food producers and communities. We prefer to experiment and assess the impact of our actions before publishing policies. We recognize that tracking progress in these areas is not an easy task. For this reason we will be launching our first Integrated Report before the end of this month," a spokesperson for Danone told the Independent.

Nine of the 10 brands have improved their rating by at least 10 per cent since the campaign launch three years ago in a significant new commitment to improve their ethical policies.

But Erin Sahan, Oxfams acting Head of Private sector said that more remains to be done.

The 'Big 10' must now substantially change their business models in order to deliver on their promises and ensure that workers and small-scale producers get a living wage throughout their supply chains.This could make a huge impact in helping fight poverty, Sahan said.

1. Unilever - 74 %

Union leaders are concerned that workers will reap a Kraft-style whirlwind despite the latters retreat back across the Atlantic

2. Nestle  69%

Nestle opened an investigation after reports by non-governmental organisations on its unregulated working conditions (Getty)

3. Coca -Cola  57%

The suit claims Coca-Cola purposefully misled customers on the health risks of drinking fizzy drinks by funding research that downplays the dangers of sugary beverages (Getty)

4. Kelloggs  53 %

Boxes of Kellog's Cereal (Flickr; Mike Mozart)

5. Mars  49 %

The Mars company, which owns Snickers, has announced a recall of chocolate products in 55 countries following the discovery of bits of plastic in a chocolate bar produced in one of the company's plants in Holland. (Getty)

5. PepsiCo  49 %

Sales of Pepsi and other fizzy drinks brands have been in decline for over ten years (Getty)

7. Mondelez  41%

Cadbury's Creme Eggs (Picture: PA) (PA)

8. General Mills  40 %

General Mills to stop using using genetically-modified ingredients in Cheerios (GETTY IMAGES)

9. Associated British Foods  36%

9. Danone  36 %
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Police arrested the co-founders of Ben & Jerrys ice cream after they took part in a protest against the influence of money in politics.

Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen, who are outspoken Bernie Sanders supporters, were participating in the Washington DC-based Democracy Springs protests.

The two-week protests at Capitol Hill began on 11 April.

More than 1,200 people have been arrested, with 300 arrests on Monday alone, for crowding, obstructing or incommoding. Around 12 people handcuffed themselves to scaffolding of the buildings rotunda.

Among the arrests were the two 65-year-old businessmen from New York who were happy to advertise their near-incarceration - those arrested were processed on the scene and released.

They said their fight was about getting all levels of government to commit to fight for reform to save our democracy and ensure political equality.

In a press release from the Vermont-based ice cream company, they listed other campaigns for social justice that the co-founders have participated in, like calling their chocolate chip cookie dough flavour I Dough, I Dough in honour of legalizing same-sex marriage.

There are two trends that everyone from Greenpeace to the NAACP has realized are making it impossible for much good work to get done, they said. The first is the flood of unregulated cash flowing into campaigns and elections. And the second is the wave of attacks in many states on citizens right to vote.

People news in pictures Show all 18 1 /18 People news in pictures People news in pictures 7 October 2015 Russian President Vladimir Putin takes part in an ice hockey match between former NHL stars and officials at the Shayba Arena in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Vladimir Putin spent his 63rd birthday on the ice, playing hockey with NHL stars against Russian officials and tycoons EPA People news in pictures 6 October 2015 German designer Karl Lagerfeld (R) and model Cara Delevingne (C) appear at the end of his Spring/Summer 2016 women's ready-to-wear collection for fashion house Chanel at the Grand Palais which is transformed into a Chanel airport during the Fashion Week in Paris, France Reuters People news in pictures 5 October 2015 Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne addresses the Conservative party conference in Manchester. The Chancellor argued that reducing the payments to people in low paid jobs would give them economic security by reducing the Governments spending deficit Getty Images People news in pictures 4 October 2015 Cowboys captain Johnathan Thurston takes a moment in the centre of the field with his daughter Frankie Thurston, holding dark-skinned doll, after winning the 2015 NRL Grand Final match between the Brisbane Broncos and the North Queensland Cowboys at ANZ Stadium in Sydney. The image quickly became the talking point of Australias National Rugby League Final and provoked a strong reaction on social media, with many praising Thurston for giving his child a toy that promotes inclusiveness and diversity Getty Images People news in pictures 3 October 2015 Pope Francis gives a thumbs-up as he greets people at the end of an audience to the participants of a meeting organized by the "Food Bank" at the Paul VI audience hall in Vatican Getty Images People news in pictures 2 October 2015 Britain's Finance Minister George Osborne (L) throws an American football as he meets with former American football players Dan Marino (2nd R) and Curtis Martin (not pictured) at 11 Downing Street in London, ahead of the New York Jets playing against the Miami Dolphins at London's Wembley Stadium on 4 October Getty Images People news in pictures 1 October 2015 An honor guard opens the door as Russian President Vladimir Putin enters a hall to attend a meeting with members of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia People news in pictures 30 September 2015 Former Mrs America Lisa Christie, who alleges misconduct by Bill Cosby, holds up photos of her younger self during a news conference at the law office of attorney Gloria Allred in Los Angeles People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Matt Damon has defended himself against claims that he instructed gay actors to remain in the closet. He had said I think youre a better actor the less people know about you and sexuality is a huge part of that. Whether youre straight or gay, people shouldnt know anything about your sexuality but an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show said, I was just trying to say actors are more effective when theyre a mystery. Right? Getty People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Actor Marion Cotillard has said that there is no place for feminism in Hollywood. Speaking to Porter magazine, she saidFilm-making is not about gender/ You cannot ask a president in a festival like Cannes to have, like, five movies directed by women and five by men. For me it doesnt create equality, it creates separation. I mean, I dont qualify myself as a feminist." Getty People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Actor Paul Walkers daughter, Meadow, is suing Porsche over her fathers death in a lawsuit that claims he was trapped in the burning car because of design flaws and the seat belt. The Fast and Furious star was killed when the Porsche Carrera GT he was a passenger in hit a pole in California in 2013. The driver, his friend Roger Rodas, also died when the vehicle burst into flames. AP People news in pictures 28 September 2015 Robert Mugabe waits to address the United Nations General Assembly. The leader of Zimbabwe reportedly exclaimed 'We are not gay!' as he criticised Western nation's "double standards and attempts to prescribe new rights that are contrary to our values, norms, traditions and beliefs. In 2013 he described homosexuals as worse than pigs, goats and birds. Reuters People news in pictures 28 September 2015 South African comedian Trevor Noah hosts the first 'Daily Show' since taking over from Jon Stewart as host. Stewart had presented the US satirical news show since 1999 and was described by Noah during the show as a 'Political father' 2015 Getty Images People news in pictures 25 September 2015 Sir Elton John may have received a phone call from the real Vladimir Putin. Mr Putin's spokesman announced he had made contact weeks after the singer was duped by pranksters pretending to be the Russian President. Getty People news in pictures 25 September 2015 Actor Leonardo DiCaprio was mistakenly declared as the artist who produced the Mona Lisa by Fox News anchor Shepard Smith. It was in fact Leonardo da Vinci. People news in pictures 24 September 2015 A new biography claims Donald Trump expected to be dead by 40 and never marry. The Guardian says the a new book also claims that in 1980, Mr Trump manufactured a fake vice-president of his real estate conglomerate, whom he called John Baron. People news in pictures 24 September 2015 The Dalai Lama has said that Britain's policy towards China is just about 'Money, money, money.' And asked 'Where is morality?' People news in pictures 24 September 2015 Puff Daddy secured the number-one spot on the Forbes Hip Hop Cash Kings list, with the publication calculating he made an estimated $60million (39m) between June 2014 and June 2015.

The protests happened as Vermont Senator Sanders was calling the campaign finance system rigged, broken and corrupt, although the protests were not affiliated to any particular candidate.

In January the company created its own limited edition flavour for Bernie Sanders, called Bernies Yearning, with solid chocolate on top and plain mint ice cream underneath.

The chocolate disk at the top of the tub represented the small percentage of people in the US who hold the nation's power and wealth.
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Bernie Ecclestone has called for Britain to leave the European Union and suggested Vladimir Putin should run Europe.

The pro-Brexit Formula One boss suggested Europe "should get rid of Brussels and instead let the Russian president run Europe.

Eccelstone was speaking with WPP CEO Martin Sorrell during an Advertising Week Europe event when he praised Putin's approach to leading Russia, according to a report by Business Insider UK.

He does what he says he's gonna do, he gets the job done. I mean people dont understand exactly what he wants to do ... First he wants to put Russia back to what it was, that's basically the most important thing for him, said Ecclestone.

People news in pictures Show all 18 1 /18 People news in pictures People news in pictures 7 October 2015 Russian President Vladimir Putin takes part in an ice hockey match between former NHL stars and officials at the Shayba Arena in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Vladimir Putin spent his 63rd birthday on the ice, playing hockey with NHL stars against Russian officials and tycoons EPA People news in pictures 6 October 2015 German designer Karl Lagerfeld (R) and model Cara Delevingne (C) appear at the end of his Spring/Summer 2016 women's ready-to-wear collection for fashion house Chanel at the Grand Palais which is transformed into a Chanel airport during the Fashion Week in Paris, France Reuters People news in pictures 5 October 2015 Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne addresses the Conservative party conference in Manchester. The Chancellor argued that reducing the payments to people in low paid jobs would give them economic security by reducing the Governments spending deficit Getty Images People news in pictures 4 October 2015 Cowboys captain Johnathan Thurston takes a moment in the centre of the field with his daughter Frankie Thurston, holding dark-skinned doll, after winning the 2015 NRL Grand Final match between the Brisbane Broncos and the North Queensland Cowboys at ANZ Stadium in Sydney. The image quickly became the talking point of Australias National Rugby League Final and provoked a strong reaction on social media, with many praising Thurston for giving his child a toy that promotes inclusiveness and diversity Getty Images People news in pictures 3 October 2015 Pope Francis gives a thumbs-up as he greets people at the end of an audience to the participants of a meeting organized by the "Food Bank" at the Paul VI audience hall in Vatican Getty Images People news in pictures 2 October 2015 Britain's Finance Minister George Osborne (L) throws an American football as he meets with former American football players Dan Marino (2nd R) and Curtis Martin (not pictured) at 11 Downing Street in London, ahead of the New York Jets playing against the Miami Dolphins at London's Wembley Stadium on 4 October Getty Images People news in pictures 1 October 2015 An honor guard opens the door as Russian President Vladimir Putin enters a hall to attend a meeting with members of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia People news in pictures 30 September 2015 Former Mrs America Lisa Christie, who alleges misconduct by Bill Cosby, holds up photos of her younger self during a news conference at the law office of attorney Gloria Allred in Los Angeles People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Matt Damon has defended himself against claims that he instructed gay actors to remain in the closet. He had said I think youre a better actor the less people know about you and sexuality is a huge part of that. Whether youre straight or gay, people shouldnt know anything about your sexuality but an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show said, I was just trying to say actors are more effective when theyre a mystery. Right? Getty People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Actor Marion Cotillard has said that there is no place for feminism in Hollywood. Speaking to Porter magazine, she saidFilm-making is not about gender/ You cannot ask a president in a festival like Cannes to have, like, five movies directed by women and five by men. For me it doesnt create equality, it creates separation. I mean, I dont qualify myself as a feminist." Getty People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Actor Paul Walkers daughter, Meadow, is suing Porsche over her fathers death in a lawsuit that claims he was trapped in the burning car because of design flaws and the seat belt. The Fast and Furious star was killed when the Porsche Carrera GT he was a passenger in hit a pole in California in 2013. The driver, his friend Roger Rodas, also died when the vehicle burst into flames. AP People news in pictures 28 September 2015 Robert Mugabe waits to address the United Nations General Assembly. The leader of Zimbabwe reportedly exclaimed 'We are not gay!' as he criticised Western nation's "double standards and attempts to prescribe new rights that are contrary to our values, norms, traditions and beliefs. In 2013 he described homosexuals as worse than pigs, goats and birds. Reuters People news in pictures 28 September 2015 South African comedian Trevor Noah hosts the first 'Daily Show' since taking over from Jon Stewart as host. Stewart had presented the US satirical news show since 1999 and was described by Noah during the show as a 'Political father' 2015 Getty Images People news in pictures 25 September 2015 Sir Elton John may have received a phone call from the real Vladimir Putin. Mr Putin's spokesman announced he had made contact weeks after the singer was duped by pranksters pretending to be the Russian President. Getty People news in pictures 25 September 2015 Actor Leonardo DiCaprio was mistakenly declared as the artist who produced the Mona Lisa by Fox News anchor Shepard Smith. It was in fact Leonardo da Vinci. People news in pictures 24 September 2015 A new biography claims Donald Trump expected to be dead by 40 and never marry. The Guardian says the a new book also claims that in 1980, Mr Trump manufactured a fake vice-president of his real estate conglomerate, whom he called John Baron. People news in pictures 24 September 2015 The Dalai Lama has said that Britain's policy towards China is just about 'Money, money, money.' And asked 'Where is morality?' People news in pictures 24 September 2015 Puff Daddy secured the number-one spot on the Forbes Hip Hop Cash Kings list, with the publication calculating he made an estimated $60million (39m) between June 2014 and June 2015.

But while Ecclestone supports an EU exit, he said he probably won't vote in the forthcoming referendum in June.

The billionaire also praised Putin in an interview with The Daily Mail in February, saying he should be in charge of Europe.

He's the guy who should run Europe. He will sort out this other business that is going on in Syria. The good thing is that he does what he believes to be right and he stands by it. It's hard to talk him out of anything, said Ecclestone.
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Judges will allow a celebrity who wants to keep an injunction preventing a tabloid newspaper story being published to have his claim analysed by Supreme Court justices later this week.

The Sun on Sunday was hit by an injunction banning it from reporting on the celebrity's alleged extra-marital activities in January. The paper mounted a legal challenge against the decision and asked for the order to be overturned because the man and his spouse have already been named by publications in the US and Scotland and a political blogger. Judges at the Court of Appeal ruled in the newspapers favour on Monday.

The man, named in court documents as PJS, asked for permission to take his case to the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

PJSs case will be heard by justices in the Supreme Court on Thursday, where they will decide whether he can launch a legal challenge, a spokesperson for the Court told the Press Association. The injunction barring the media from naming the individual will remain in place until then.

In January, Court of Appeal judges said identifying PJS and publishing the story would be devastating for him and would generate a media storm that would make their young children the subject of increased press attention.

People news in pictures Show all 18 1 /18 People news in pictures People news in pictures 7 October 2015 Russian President Vladimir Putin takes part in an ice hockey match between former NHL stars and officials at the Shayba Arena in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Vladimir Putin spent his 63rd birthday on the ice, playing hockey with NHL stars against Russian officials and tycoons EPA People news in pictures 6 October 2015 German designer Karl Lagerfeld (R) and model Cara Delevingne (C) appear at the end of his Spring/Summer 2016 women's ready-to-wear collection for fashion house Chanel at the Grand Palais which is transformed into a Chanel airport during the Fashion Week in Paris, France Reuters People news in pictures 5 October 2015 Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne addresses the Conservative party conference in Manchester. The Chancellor argued that reducing the payments to people in low paid jobs would give them economic security by reducing the Governments spending deficit Getty Images People news in pictures 4 October 2015 Cowboys captain Johnathan Thurston takes a moment in the centre of the field with his daughter Frankie Thurston, holding dark-skinned doll, after winning the 2015 NRL Grand Final match between the Brisbane Broncos and the North Queensland Cowboys at ANZ Stadium in Sydney. The image quickly became the talking point of Australias National Rugby League Final and provoked a strong reaction on social media, with many praising Thurston for giving his child a toy that promotes inclusiveness and diversity Getty Images People news in pictures 3 October 2015 Pope Francis gives a thumbs-up as he greets people at the end of an audience to the participants of a meeting organized by the "Food Bank" at the Paul VI audience hall in Vatican Getty Images People news in pictures 2 October 2015 Britain's Finance Minister George Osborne (L) throws an American football as he meets with former American football players Dan Marino (2nd R) and Curtis Martin (not pictured) at 11 Downing Street in London, ahead of the New York Jets playing against the Miami Dolphins at London's Wembley Stadium on 4 October Getty Images People news in pictures 1 October 2015 An honor guard opens the door as Russian President Vladimir Putin enters a hall to attend a meeting with members of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia People news in pictures 30 September 2015 Former Mrs America Lisa Christie, who alleges misconduct by Bill Cosby, holds up photos of her younger self during a news conference at the law office of attorney Gloria Allred in Los Angeles People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Matt Damon has defended himself against claims that he instructed gay actors to remain in the closet. He had said I think youre a better actor the less people know about you and sexuality is a huge part of that. Whether youre straight or gay, people shouldnt know anything about your sexuality but an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show said, I was just trying to say actors are more effective when theyre a mystery. Right? Getty People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Actor Marion Cotillard has said that there is no place for feminism in Hollywood. Speaking to Porter magazine, she saidFilm-making is not about gender/ You cannot ask a president in a festival like Cannes to have, like, five movies directed by women and five by men. For me it doesnt create equality, it creates separation. I mean, I dont qualify myself as a feminist." Getty People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Actor Paul Walkers daughter, Meadow, is suing Porsche over her fathers death in a lawsuit that claims he was trapped in the burning car because of design flaws and the seat belt. The Fast and Furious star was killed when the Porsche Carrera GT he was a passenger in hit a pole in California in 2013. The driver, his friend Roger Rodas, also died when the vehicle burst into flames. AP People news in pictures 28 September 2015 Robert Mugabe waits to address the United Nations General Assembly. The leader of Zimbabwe reportedly exclaimed 'We are not gay!' as he criticised Western nation's "double standards and attempts to prescribe new rights that are contrary to our values, norms, traditions and beliefs. In 2013 he described homosexuals as worse than pigs, goats and birds. Reuters People news in pictures 28 September 2015 South African comedian Trevor Noah hosts the first 'Daily Show' since taking over from Jon Stewart as host. Stewart had presented the US satirical news show since 1999 and was described by Noah during the show as a 'Political father' 2015 Getty Images People news in pictures 25 September 2015 Sir Elton John may have received a phone call from the real Vladimir Putin. Mr Putin's spokesman announced he had made contact weeks after the singer was duped by pranksters pretending to be the Russian President. Getty People news in pictures 25 September 2015 Actor Leonardo DiCaprio was mistakenly declared as the artist who produced the Mona Lisa by Fox News anchor Shepard Smith. It was in fact Leonardo da Vinci. People news in pictures 24 September 2015 A new biography claims Donald Trump expected to be dead by 40 and never marry. The Guardian says the a new book also claims that in 1980, Mr Trump manufactured a fake vice-president of his real estate conglomerate, whom he called John Baron. People news in pictures 24 September 2015 The Dalai Lama has said that Britain's policy towards China is just about 'Money, money, money.' And asked 'Where is morality?' People news in pictures 24 September 2015 Puff Daddy secured the number-one spot on the Forbes Hip Hop Cash Kings list, with the publication calculating he made an estimated $60million (39m) between June 2014 and June 2015.

But after ruling in the Sun on Sundays favour, Lord Justice Jackson said knowledge of the relevant matters is now so widespread that confidentiality has probably been lost, and the harm the injunction was designed to counter had already likely taken place.
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Dinosaurs had already been in decline for around 50 million years by the time they were wiped out by a giant asteroid strike, scientists have discovered.

Until now, most experts believed the creatures were thriving until an asteroid hit the Earth off the coast of Mexico 66 million years ago, changing the planets climate dramatically.

But new research from scientists at Reading University suggests dinosaurs had been declining for tens of millions of years prior to this impact, and were going extinct faster than they could replace themselves", palaeontologist Manabu Sakamoto said.

Dr Sakamoto and his team used sophisticated statistical analysis and fossil evidence to look at three large dinosaur family trees, searching for evidence of when extinctions began to outnumber the appearances of new species.

Giant long-necked plant-eaters known as Sauropods, such as the Diplodocus, were lost at the fastest rate, while two-legged meat-eating relatives Tyrannosaurus Rex were in a more gradual decline. Another group was on the rise however, the triceratops, while one group in decline still lives on in its descendants  todays birds.

Dr Sakemoto said: "While the asteroid impact is still the prime candidate for the dinosaurs final disappearance, it is clear that they were already past their prime in an evolutionary sense."

"While a sudden apocalypse may have been the final nail in the coffin, something else had already been preventing dinosaurs from evolving new species as fast as old species were dying out.

"This suggests that for tens of millions of years before their ultimate demise, dinosaurs were beginning to lose their edge as the dominant species on Earth."

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, suggests that as a result of this evolutionary decline, the dinosaurs were unable to recover from the environmental crisis caused by the meteor strike, which blacked out the sun with millions of tonnes of dust and cooled the global climate, causing widespread vegetation loss.

David Fastovsky, chair of the geosciences department at the University of Rhode Island, said the discovery that dinosaurs began declining so early on was unexpected.

But Dr Chris Venditti, who co-authored the Reading University research, said the decline of the dinosaurs would have left plenty of room for mammals, the group of species which humans are a member of, to flourish before the impact, priming them to replace dinosaurs as the dominant animals on Earth".

Additional reporting by agencies
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Your genes may play a role in determining when you lose your virginity, a new study from Cambridge University has suggested.

The study, which involved over 380,000 participants, has successfully identified specific gene differences which can effect what age we hit puberty, first give birth, and lose our virginity.

Naturally, the age at which someone loses their virginity is hugely influenced by social factors like family history and peer pressure - however, according to Dr John Perry, a lead author of the study, the work has shown "that age at first sexual intercourse is also influenced by genes."

To identify these genetic differences, sceintists at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge analysed the gene records of 59,357 men and 66,310 women aged between 40 and 69 years old, which were recorded in UK Biobank, a national health study.

In total, the team identified 38 gene variants which are associated with age at first sexual intercouse, some of which were linked to other genes already known to be involved in brain development.

It isn't so much that certain genes determine exactly when a person loses their virginity, but that gene-based traits such as impulsivity can have major effects on sexual behaviour.

Science news in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Science news in pictures Science news in pictures Pluto has 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen Pluto has a 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen that is doing strange things to its surface, Nasa has found. The mysterious core seems to be the cause of features on its surface that have fascinated scientists since they were spotted by Nasa's New Horizons mission. "Before New Horizons, everyone thought Pluto was going to be a netball - completely flat, almost no diversity," said Tanguy Bertrand, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and the lead author on the new study. "But it's completely different. It has a lot of different landscapes and we are trying to understand what's going on there." Getty Science news in pictures Over 400 species discovered this year by Natural History Museum The ancient invertabrate worm-like species rhenopyrgus viviani (pictured) is one of over 400 species previously unknown to science that were discovered by experts at the Natural History Museum this year PA Science news in pictures Jackdaws can identify 'dangerous' humans Jackdaws can identify dangerous humans from listening to each others warning calls, scientists say. The highly social birds will also remember that person if they come near their nests again, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. In the study, a person unknown to the wild jackdaws approached their nest. At the same time scientists played a recording of a warning call (threatening) or contact calls (non-threatening). The next time jackdaws saw this same person, the birds that had previously heard the warning call were defensive and returned to their nests more than twice as quickly on average. Getty Science news in pictures Turtle embryos influence sex by shaking The sex of the turtle is determined by the temperatures at which they are incubated. Warm temperatures favour females. But by wiggling around the egg, embryos can find the Goldilocks Zone which means they are able to shield themselves against extreme thermal conditions and produce a balanced sex ratio, according to the new study published in Current Biology journal Ye et al/Current Biology Science news in pictures Elephant poaching rates drop in Africa African elephant poaching rates have dropped by 60 per cent in six years, an international study has found. It is thought the decline could be associated with the ivory trade ban introduced in China in 2017. Reuters Science news in pictures Ancient four-legged whale discovered in Peru Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planets oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago A. Gennari Science news in pictures Animal with transient anus discovered A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a transient anus that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste Steven G Johnson Science news in pictures Giant bee spotted Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. An international team of conservationists spotted the bee, that is four times the size of a typical honeybee, on an expedition to a group of Indonesian Islands Clay Bolt Science news in pictures New mammal species found inside crocodile Fossilised bones digested by crocodiles have revealed the existence of three new mammal species that roamed the Cayman Islands 300 years ago. The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal New Mexico Museum of Natural History Science news in pictures Fabric that changes according to temperature created Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold Faye Levine, University of Maryland Science news in pictures Baby mice tears could be used in pest control A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males Getty Science news in pictures Final warning to limit "climate catastrophe" The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase Getty Science news in pictures Nobel prize for evolution chemists The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies Getty/AFP Science news in pictures Nobel prize for laser physicists The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers Reuters/AP Science news in pictures Discovery of a new species of dinosaur The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn" Viktor Radermacher / SWNS Science news in pictures Birth of a planet Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star. ESO/A. Muller et al Science news in pictures New human organ discovered that was previously missed by scientists Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the interstitium. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins Getty Science news in pictures Previously unknown society lived in Amazon rainforest before Europeans arrived, say archaeologists Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs Jose Iriarte Science news in pictures One in 10 people have traces of cocaine or heroin on fingerprints, study finds More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test. Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly. Getty Science news in pictures Nasa releases stunning images of Jupiter's great red spot The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary

For example, one of the variants in the CADM2 gene was found to be associated with a higher chance of having a risk-taking personality - which itself led to a correlation with earlier age at first sexual intercourse, and a greater number of children over a lifetime.

Earlier studies from the same team have found that an earlier onset of puberty can be linked to increased long-term risks for illnesses like diabetes and cancer. Now, according to study author Dr. Ken Ong, it has been determined that these same factors can have an impact at a much younger age.

The team hopes that their study, published recently in the high-profile Nature Genetics journal, will lead to better promotion of healthy sexual behaviours, as educators begin to take into account individuals' personality types and ages of puberty onset.

A similar study was conducted at California State University in 2009. Although it had a smaller sample size, it also found a genetic link to the ages at which subjects lost their virginity.

According to the Family Planning Association (FPA), the average heterosexual Briton, whether male or female, loses their virginity at the age of 16 - a significant drop since the 1950s, when the average age was around 21. The global average is believed to be around 17.3.
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A 70-year-old shopkeeper was stabbed as he fought off three knife-wielding thieves in dramatic CCTV footage that has been released by police.

One of the trio stabbed the pensioner, who was brandishing a shop sign as he tried to defend himself during the attempted robbery in Walthamstow, east London.

A customer can also be seen in the entrance to the shop, using a stool to protect themselves against the hooded and masked attackers.

Another customer and the shopkeeper's wife were also in the store at the time.

The victim, who suffered a number of knife injuries, is in hospital in a serious but stable condition, Scotland Yard said.

Police are appealing for information after the attempted raid on the shop in Carr Road, Walthamstow, on Sunday.

(Metropolitan Police)

Officers were called at around 9.10pm by the London Ambulance Service.

The suspects are three white men in their 20s who were wearing dark tracksuit bottoms and dark jackets with hoods. One man had a grey hooded top underneath a black puffa jacket.

CCTV images show terrifying near miss Show all 9 1 /9 CCTV images show terrifying near miss CCTV images show terrifying near miss Buggy near miss The man and woman who police want to speak to to check those involved are safe CCTV images show terrifying near miss Buggy near miss A man leaves the buggy in place - with its wheels facing away from the platform - as he goes to help other members of the family CCTV images show terrifying near miss Buggy near miss The gust of wind as the train left the platform was enough to turn the buggy's wheels and send it towards the tracks CCTV images show terrifying near miss Buggy near miss The buggy after it has been left at the bottom of the stairs CCTV images show terrifying near miss Buggy near miss CCTV shows the buggy head the short distance from the bottom of the stairs towards the tracks CCTV images show terrifying near miss Buggy near miss The buggy rolls towards the platform edge - unnoticed by a passer-by CCTV images show terrifying near miss Buggy near miss The buggy tips over onto the platform - with the first train still visible as it leaves the station CCTV images show terrifying near miss Buggy near miss The woman rushes towards the platform edge CCTV images show terrifying near miss Buggy near miss The buggy and the child's mother on the tracks - in the short gap between one train leaving and another arriving British Transport Police

Detective Sergeant Ben Voss, of Waltham Forest CID, said: "This was a violent attack on a pensioner who was trying to run his shop.

"The assailants used an extreme level of violence against elderly man who was trying to defend himself, his wife, customers and business.

"The attack could have resulted in tragic consequences but luckily the victim is now recovering in hospital.

"I would appeal to anyone who has any information on who was responsible to contact police as soon as possible."

Additional reporting by Press Association
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A pensioner tried to kill a woman wearing a hijab by pushing her in front of a London Tube train, a court has heard.

CCTV footage captured the moment Yoshiyuki Shinohara deliberately shoved the woman into the side of the Bakerloo line train as it arrived at Piccadilly Circus station in November last year.

She was then flung backwards onto the platform by the force of the impact before being helped by other commuters on the platform.

Ms Kerai was later taken to hospital with minor injuries.

Shinohara was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after police were called to the scene just before 4:10pm on 10 November.

A jury at Blackfriars Crown Court took just 18 minutes to find that the 82-year-old deliberately pushed Ms Kerai, but he has been found unfit to plead to a charge of attempted murder, the Daily Mirror reports.

Witness David Wright said he saw Shinohara step forward with both hands up, palms outstretched, and push the female strongly in the back.

"At this point the train was just entering the platform and I genuinely thought she was going to go in front of the train and be hit by it.

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"The push, in my view, was deliberate."

He said the pensioner then stood with his back to the wall and his fists raised as if he wanted to be arrested.

Judge John Hillen ordered that Shinohara be taken to a psychiatric hospital in Northampton.

The trial will resume on 27 May.
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Muslim prison chaplains have routinely distributed Islamist literature, according to a leaked report.

A review which started in September, commissioned by Justice Secretary Michael Gove, found extremist pamphlets and CDs in more than 10 jails in November.

The material included homophobic and misogynistic sentiments and encouraged the murder of apostates - Muslims who leave or reject the religion, according to the Times.

The report on what was found has not yet been cleared for publication.

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Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA UK news in pictures 27 September 2022 David White, Garter King of Arms, poses with an envelope franked with the new cypher of King Charles III 'CIIIR', after it was printed in the Court Post Office at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 26 September 2022 A gallery staff member poses next to a painting by Lucian Freud - Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956 - on show at a photocall for the Credit Suisse exhibition - Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery in London PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2022 Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool before the start of the Labour Party annual Conference which he opened with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and sang the national anthem PA UK news in pictures 24 September 2022 Handout photo issued by Buckingham Palace of the ledger stone at the King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2022 A climate change activist protests against UK private jets while lighting his right arm on fire during the Laver Cup tennis tournament at the O2 Arena in London EPA UK news in pictures 22 September 2022 Woody Woodmansey, Lee Bennett, Kevin Armstrong, Nick Moran and Clifford Slapper attend the unveiling of a stone for David Bowie on the Music Walk of Fame at Camden, north London PA UK news in pictures 21 September 2022 A flock of birds in the sky as the sun rises over Dungeness in Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2022 Flowers which were laid by members of the public in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland are collected by the Hillsborough Gardening Team and volunteers to be replanted for those that can be saved or composted PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2022 The ceremonial procession of the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II travels down the long walk as it arrives at Windsor Castle for the committal service at St Georges Chapel AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 18 September 2022 A man stands among campers on The Mall ahead of the Queens funeral Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2022 Wolverhampton Wanderers Nathan Collins fouls Manchester Citys Jack Grealish leading to a red card. 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It is said to have concluded that many Muslim prison chaplains were under-equipped for counter-radicalisation work, "sometimes because they lacked the capability but often because they didn't have the will".

Prisoners at more than one jail were encouraged by chaplains to fund-raise for Islamic charities that had links to terrorism, according to the report, which warned that lax controls and senior level failings had allowed the problems to occur.

The Times reported that jails in England and Wales held 12,328 Muslim inmates at the start of 2016.

Convicted terrorists numbered 131 and a further 1,000 were deemed vulnerable to radicalisation.

Muslims make up 4.8% of the population but 14.5% of prisoners.

About 100 Muslim chaplains are employed full time in jails on salaries of up to 40,000.

PA
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A message in a bottle was dropped into the sea in 1908 and has been confirmed the world's oldest after it was recovered 108 years later.

The postcard inside asked for it to be sent to the Marine Biological Association of the UK - promising the sender a shilling if they returned the bottle.

The association in Plymouth said the bottle was one of over 1,000 released as part of marine research carried out by expert George Parker Bidder.

Retired German postal worker Marianne Winkler found the bottle in April last year after 108 years, four months and 18 days.

She found it during her holiday on the Frisian Islands in the North Sea, about 310 miles (500km) from the UK.

Ms Winkler sent it back to the UK and received an old English shilling (5p) in return.

Guinness World Records has confirmed the message in a bottle as the world's oldest.

The postcard found inside the 108-year-old bottle (PA)

Guy Baker, from the Marine Biological Association, said: "The postcard asked the finder to fill out information about where the bottle was found, if it was trawled up, what the boat's name was, and asked once the postcard was completed for it to be returned to a George Parker Bidder in Plymouth for a reward of one shilling.

"Mr Bidder was a president at the Marine Biological Association from 1939 to 1945, so our receptionist was somewhat confused.

Bidder had released 1,020 bottles between 1904 and 1906 which he found that the bottles were picked up by the fishermen at the rate of 55 per cent each year.

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Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA UK news in pictures 27 September 2022 David White, Garter King of Arms, poses with an envelope franked with the new cypher of King Charles III 'CIIIR', after it was printed in the Court Post Office at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 26 September 2022 A gallery staff member poses next to a painting by Lucian Freud - Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956 - on show at a photocall for the Credit Suisse exhibition - Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery in London PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2022 Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool before the start of the Labour Party annual Conference which he opened with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and sang the national anthem PA UK news in pictures 24 September 2022 Handout photo issued by Buckingham Palace of the ledger stone at the King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2022 A climate change activist protests against UK private jets while lighting his right arm on fire during the Laver Cup tennis tournament at the O2 Arena in London EPA UK news in pictures 22 September 2022 Woody Woodmansey, Lee Bennett, Kevin Armstrong, Nick Moran and Clifford Slapper attend the unveiling of a stone for David Bowie on the Music Walk of Fame at Camden, north London PA UK news in pictures 21 September 2022 A flock of birds in the sky as the sun rises over Dungeness in Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2022 Flowers which were laid by members of the public in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland are collected by the Hillsborough Gardening Team and volunteers to be replanted for those that can be saved or composted PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2022 The ceremonial procession of the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II travels down the long walk as it arrives at Windsor Castle for the committal service at St Georges Chapel AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 18 September 2022 A man stands among campers on The Mall ahead of the Queens funeral Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2022 Wolverhampton Wanderers Nathan Collins fouls Manchester Citys Jack Grealish leading to a red card. City went on to win the match at Molineux Stadium three goals to nil. Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 16 September 2022 Members of the public stand in the queue near Tower Bridge, and opposite the Tower of London, as they wait in line to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II, in London AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 15 September 2022 Members of the public in the queue on in Potters Fields Park, central London, as they wait to view Queen Elizabeth II lying in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 14 September 2022 The first members of the public pay their respects as the vigil begins around the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Hall, London, where it will lie in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2022 Crowds cheer as King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort arrive for a visit to Hillsborough Castle Getty UK news in pictures 12 September 2022 Crowds line the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, as King Charles III joins a procession from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to St Giles Cathedral following the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II Katielee Arrowsmith/SWNS UK news in pictures 11 September 2022 Members of the Public pay their respects as the hearse carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II, draped in the Royal Standard of Scotland, is driven through Ballater AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 10 September 2022 Britain's Prince William, Prince of Wales, Britain's Catherine, Princess of Wales, Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, wave at well-wishers on the Long walk at Windsor Castle AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 9 September 2022 King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort wave after viewing floral tributes to the late Queen Elizabeth II outside Buckingham Palace Getty UK news in pictures 8 September 2022 A screen commemorating Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in Piccadilly Circus, London Britain EPA UK news in pictures 7 September 2022 Police officers stand guard after Animal Rebellion activists threw paint on the walls and road outside the Houses of Parliament in protest, in London, Britain Reuters UK news in pictures 6 September 2022 Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Liz Truss during an audience at Balmoral, Scotland, where she invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2022 Visitors at the PoliNations garden in Victoria Square, Birmingham, which is made up of five 40ft high tree installations and over 6,000 plants. The PoliNations programme aims to explore how migration and cross-pollination have shaped the UKs gardens and culture PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2022 Undergraduates at the University of St Andrews take part in the traditional Pier Walk along the harbour walls of St Andrews before the start of the new academic year PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2022 The Massed Pipes and Drums parade during the Braemar Highland Gathering at the Princess Royal and Duke of Fife Memorial Park PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2022 Number 12 Company Irish Guards at Wellington Barracks, central London, before commencing their first Guard Mount at Buckingham Palace PA

Mr Baker added: "Some bottles were never returned, assumed to be lost in the open ocean forever."

The previous record for a message in a bottle was 99 years and 43 days. It was found west of the Shetland Islands in July 2013.
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Junior doctors in Leeds have begun an indefinite rolling protest outside the towns Department of Health offices calling for the Government to re-enter negotiations over new contracts.

Inspired by two other doctors who began their own 'permanent' demonstration outside London's DoH headquarters, two local medics will take turns on their days off to be seated outside Leeds Quarry House.

They say they want to renew meaningful engagement with the Department, led by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, ahead of the planned all-out junior doctors strike on 26 and 27 April.

Recommended Read more Junior doctors begin permanent protest outside Department of Health

The British Medical Association (BMA) had said junior doctors were willing to cancel the total strike if Mr Hunt re-entered negotiations which focused on the points the BMA wished to address.

Were not deliberately difficult people, we desperately want a contract thats safe for patients, said ophthalmology registrar Dr Polly Dickerson, who launched the Leeds protest along with Dr Chris Marshall, to The Independent.

But Jeremy Hunt doesnt seem to want to talk to us. Were here to send a message that, wherever he goes, we are willing to talk.

The DoH subsequently issued a statement rejecting the offer to hold new talks.

Junior doctors fear the new contract imposed by the government will result in staff being extremely overstretched in hospitals, puttin patients at risk.

The reason were scared and so upset about this contract and worried about being spread thinly is because the seven day service is not just a junior doctor issue, we are a small cog in a massive machine, said Dr Dickerson.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. 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We will need the same number of support staff to be there at weekends as we do during the week: more nurses, radiographers, porters, clerks, secretaries, out of hospital staff.

We routinely work over our hours. The system is already run on goodwill. You wouldnt have to take too many people away for it to fall over and we are really frightened thats going to happen.

Dr Dickerson claimed junior doctors were happy to work weekends, but with proper support and investment.

If they said they were going to fully fund and staff a seven-day NHS, the junior doctors would jump at it," she said.

Theres been all this rhetoric from the government about how this is about spoilt junior doctors not wanting to work on Saturday, but we already do. Its not about that.

Were not worried about Saturday pay per se, were saying spreading junior doctors thinner isnt along going to give you a safe seven day service but might reflect current Monday to Friday provision and thats not safe.

The prospect of contract imposition has left Dr Dickerson so troubled that she, along with many others, said she was reconsidering her future in the NHS.

Ive got to the point where Im so exhausted and demoralised by the whole thing that I dont know if I want to carry on and Im two years away from being a consultant, she said.

Ive got 30 years of operating service to give to the NHS and Ive always wanted to do that. But Im wondering if its going to be sustainable in its current form.

It makes you doubt everything youve ever worked for and ever believed in.

The Government decided to resort to contract imposition in February, after Jeremy Hunts chief negotiator, NHS hospital chief executive Sir David Dalton, said there was no realistic prospect of a negotiated outcome.
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India could be set to abandon its claim to the most famous diamond in the Crown Jewels after its government said the huge gem was given as a gift to Britain rather than stolen.

Campaigners have for decades been calling for the 105-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond to be given back to India as partial reparation for Britains colonial past.

The diamond forms part of the crown worn by the late Queen Mother, and is described on the website of the royal palaces as the spoils of Empire with a long and bloody history.

In a Supreme Court hearing on Monday over the latest case demanding the jewel be returned to India, the government of prime minister Narendra Modi said the claim should be relinquished because it was given voluntarily as a gift for Queen Victoria by an Indian king, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, in 1851.

Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Show all 32 1 /32 Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, paint an elephant statue at Kaziranga Discovery Park in Panbari village, in Kaziranga, some 250 km from Guwahati, the capital of the north-eastern state of Assam Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Britain's Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, feeds a baby elephant at the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC) at Panbari reserve forest in Kaziranga in the northeastern state of Assam, during the royal visit in India Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Duchess of Cambridge, meet a rhino calf at the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC) at Panbari reserve forest in Kaziranga in the northeastern state of Assam Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Catherine and Prince William take a Game drive at Kaziranga National Park at Kaziranga National Park in Guwahati Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William visit a contact centre run by the charity Salaam Baalak, which provides emergency help and long term support to homeless children at New Delhi railway station Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge meet a young dancer as they watch dancing by the fireside during a Bihu Festival Celebration at Diphlu River Lodge Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge meet Prime Minister of India Narenda Mod in New Delhi's Hyderabad House during day three of the royal tour to India and Bhutan Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Catherine and William visited the Banganga Water Tank. They were given a traditional welcome at Bangana Water Tank and met representatives from SMILE, an organisation working in an economically deprived urban area to support local enterprise Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Duchess Of Cambridge enjoys a game of cricket during a visit to meet children from Magic Bus, Childline and Doorstep, at Mumbai's iconic recreation ground, the Oval Maidan Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Catherine Duchess of Cambridge at India Gate in New Delhi Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and his wife Catherine take part in an event at the Gandhi Smriti, a museum dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, in New Delhi Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Duchess of Cambridge meet young entrepreneurs during a visit to Mumbai Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge prepare to lay a wreath at the Inida Gate in New Delhi Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge remove their shoes at Gandhi Smriti in New Dehli, India before paying their respects at the Mahatma Gandhi memorial Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India The Duke and Duchess toured the museum housed in the Old Birla House and paid their respects at the place where Mahatma Gandhi's life ended on 30 January 1948 Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William pose for a picture at India Gate Memorial Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Catherine pay their respects at the place where Mahatma Gandhi's life ended on 30 January 1948, at Gandhi Smriti, the Old Birla House museum Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge poses with local school children as they tour Old Birla Hous in Gandhi Smriti in New Dehli Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India The Duke Duchess of Cambridge meet children from local charities Magic Bus, Childline and Doorstep, and join game of cricketwith boys from the Dilip Vengsarkar Academyat the Oval Maidan recreation ground Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are garlanded as they arrive at the Banganga Water Tank in Mumbai Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Catherine, Duchess Of Cambridge plays football during a visit to meet children from Magic Bus, Childline and Doorstep Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge react after playing football during a visit to the Banganga Water Tank in Mumbai Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William play football games during a visit to the Banganga Water tank, where they met representatives of SMILE Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrive at a Bollywood Charity Gala hosted by the British High Commission and the British Asian Trust at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge arrives for a Bollywood Inspired Charity Gala at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India Prince William and Duchess of Cambridge speak with Boman Kohinoor during a meeting in Mumbai Prince William and Kate Middletons visit to India The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge stand after laying a wreath on the martyrs memorial at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai

It was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away, solicitor general Ranjit Kumar said.

The declaration comes less than a week after the Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge visited Mr Modi as part of a stay in India.

 Five of the worst atrocities carried out by the British Empire

The crown in which the Koh-i-Noor is set will be passed to the Duchess to be used for official occasions when William takes to the throne and she becomes queen consort.

The governments declaration is unlikely to deter all Indian campaigners, however, who rank the diamond as just one of many artefacts taken from the country during British rule.

Nafis Ahmad Sidd told the Reuters news agency: The British rulers looted India and the government is making a mistake by not supporting our claims.

David Cameron was last asked about the diamond during a visit to India in 2010, when he said the jewel was unlikely to be leaving Britain.

He said: What tends to happen with these questions is that if you say yes to one, then you would suddenly find the British Museum empty.
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A devout Muslim has failed to persuade a High Court judge to rule that his sons should be circumcised.

The man, who was born in Algeria but lives in England, argued that circumcision would be in accordance with his "Muslim practice and religious beliefs" - and in the youngsters' best interests.

But the boys' mother, who grew up in Devon and is separated from their father, disagreed.

Mrs Justice Roberts has refused to make a circumcision order after analysing argument at a family court hearing in Exeter, Devon.

She said it was better to defer a decision until the boys - aged six and four - reached a stage where they could make "individual choices".

The man had argued it would be "in the children's best interests to allow them to be circumcised" in accordance with his "Muslim practice and religious beliefs".

His former partner "opposes that course until such time as the children have reached an age where they are competent to give consent to such a procedure", the judge added.

"He is a devout Muslim and ... is committed to the principle of ensuring that, as part of their dual heritage, his two sons grow up as Muslims observing all the tenets and practices of that religion," said Mrs Justice Roberts.

"Just as the father is passionate in his cause and the reasons for circumcision, the mother is resolutely opposed to it at this point in time."

The judge said she had reached a "clear conclusion".

"First and foremost, this is a once and for all, irreversible procedure," she said.

"There is no guarantee that these boys will wish to continue to observe the Muslim faith with the devotion demonstrated by their father, although that may very well be their choice.

"They are still very young and there is no way of anticipating at this stage how the different influences in their respective parental homes will shape and guide their development over the coming years.

"I am deferring the decision to the point where each of the boys themselves will make their individual choices once they have the maturity and insight to appreciate the consequences and longer-term effects of the decisions which they reach.

"Part of that consideration will be any increase in the risks of surgery by the time they have reached puberty."

Historically, circumcision was promoted as a way of suppressing masturbation in young boys. It has also been claimed that it reduces penile cancer prevalence rates and chance of penile infections. For many Jewish and Muslim communities, the procedure is a fundamental part of their faith.

The procedure was common in the UK with 1 in 3 men undergoing the procedure prior to the establishment of the NHS in 1948. However, under the NHS, circumcision was deemed not medically necessary and therefore operation costs were not covered for patients. As a result, rates dropped dramatically and it is currently estimated that around 8.5 per cent of British men are circumcised.

Other countries have considerably higher rates, including the US where 75.5 per cent of adult males have been circumcised

PA
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The UK has approved 122 military licences to the value of 2.8bn to Saudi Arabia since the regime started its widely condemned bombing campaign in Yemen last March, it has been revealed.

Saudi Arabia is the biggest recipient of UK arms by a significant margin, and since 2010 has received military equipment worth 6.7bn, according to official government figures collated by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT).

The report says the Saudi-led civil conflict in Yemen had resulted in the deaths of 6,400 people  half of them civilians - and displaced millions of others.

The House of Commons International Development Committee and the European Parliament have both called for an arms embargo to be placed on the Kingdom, but the UK Government has continued to support the autocratic state.

Andrew Smith, of CAAT, said: Almost 6000 people have been killed in the Saudi-led bombardment of Yemen. UK-supplied combat aircraft and bombs have been central to the destruction and yet the arms sales have continued, and so has the governments uncritical support of the Saudi regime.

A breakdown of the 2.8 billion worth of arms exported to Saudi Arabia from the UK includes 430,000 of licences for armoured vehicles and tanks, 1.1bn for grenades, bombs, missiles and countermeasures, and 1.7bn for aircrafts, helicopters and drones.

The exports continue despite Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders all accusing Saudi Arabia of violating international humanitarian law with their continued air strikes.

David Wearing, a researcher on UK-Saudi-Gulf relations and the author of the CAAT report, said: Successive governments of all political colours have prioritised arms sales over human rights.

The toxic UK-Saudi alliance has boosted the Saudi regime and lined the pockets of arms companies, but has had devastating consequences for the people of Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

For the sake of those people, the UK government must finally stop arming and empowering the brutal Saudi monarchy, he said.

The report comes as efforts to broker peace talks between the Iran-allied Houthis and the Saudi-backed Hadi forces near collapse.

The Houthis have accused the Hadis of trying to exploit a shaky truce between the two to gain ground in several provinces, and of violating the agreed ceasefire. Should the truce collapse it is feared the conflict in the region will intensify.

Both al Qaeda and Isis have also been trying to exploit the situation by using the conflict as an opportunity to widen their influence and gain supporters in the region.
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Sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools is to be investigated by MPs for the first time - amid reports sexualised behaviour has become a social norm, with incidents being brushed off by teachers.

Pupils who took part in preliminary research for the Women and Equalities Committee expressed concern over the existence of lad culture within the learning environment, many suggesting boys have a sense of entitlement to girls, pressuring them to have sex or face being bullied for being a virgin.

The research was undertaken through a series of workshops with 300 school and college students aged between 16 and 25 as part of a wider investigation to establish the scale and impact of sexual harassment and violence within schools.

Exposure to sex in the media 24 hours a day was suggested by students as a contributing factor towards the problem, while schools were accused of having too simplistic an approach towards sex education.

The inquiry comes after a BBC investigation last year revealed 5,500 incidents of sexual harassment, including 600 rapes, had been reported in UK schools across a three-year period.

The committee chairwoman, Conservative MP Maria Miller, said: Its clear from the young people weve heard from that sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools is having a profound impact on their day-to-day lives.

We need to address this issue now, and stop it from blighting the lives of another generation of young people  both male and female.

The report highlights the prevalence of 'sexting' among young people, with one in four admitting feeling pressured into sending text messages of a sexual nature and sexual activity in and around school.

Lad culture is a big issue, said Gemma, an 18-year-old who took part in the workshops.

In my school lads would come up to girls and grab them, try and push them into the changing rooms and then say dont get upset, its just banter.

Some 18 per cent of young people reported being sexually harassed once or more than once and 34 per cent said they did not feel safe walking to and from school.

In 2015, Girlguiding UK found 75 per cent of girls and young women surveyed said anxiety about even potentially experiencing sexual harassment affected their lives in some way.

Responding to the report by the Women and Equalities Committee, Christine Blower, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, called for mandatory sex education in schools.

Young people are subjected to ever-increasing pressure from the media and social media to conform to certain behaviour in relation to sexual activity, often in ways they find disturbing or unacceptable," she said.

Teachers are aware of the struggle many students go through as a result of this pressure, but much is unreported. Schools do what they can to ensure that students feel both emotionally and physically safe but pressure in relation to these behaviours cannot be ignored.

As todays report highlights, the pressures young people face are not going away. It is therefore vital that PSHE and age-appropriate SRE [sex and relationships education] becomes mandatory in schools.

Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, also welcomed the inquiry, saying that there was a widespread difficulty in reporting sexual violence.

There were cases in schools of young women being pressurised into sexual acts or sexting and being punished by the school as well as their perpetrator, she said.

We do also hear from girls who report this type of harassment or even unwanted sexual touching to teachers, only to be told, 'Boys will be boys,' or, 'He probably just likes you.

The Women and Equalities Committee said it called for teachers, students, parents and youth organisations to share their experiences.

Well use this evidence to find the most effective measures to reduce levels of sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools, Ms Miller said
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The head of the UK prison service has praised the conservative Islamic Deobandi sect despite its Muslim chaplains reportedly distributing Islamist propaganda to inmates.

A leaked Ministry of Justice report discovered extremist pamphlets and CDs in more than 10 British prisons, according to the Times.

The majority of Imams appointed by the prison service belong to the Deobandi sect, which was formed in the 19th century in opposition to British rule in Southern India.

UK prison chief Michael Spurr defended the sect in a letter to prison governors highlighting Ofsted's view of the Deodandi's most influential seminary, saying it promoted "fundamental British values such as democracy, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths".

The minority of Muslim chaplains from other denominations have reported feeling "marginalised, bullied and intimidated" by the pre-eminence of Deobandi teaching.

Commissioned by Justice Minister Michael Gove, the report has not yet been cleared for publication. It allegedly instigated an internal departmental alert warning of "severe reputational damage."

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA UK news in pictures 27 September 2022 David White, Garter King of Arms, poses with an envelope franked with the new cypher of King Charles III 'CIIIR', after it was printed in the Court Post Office at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 26 September 2022 A gallery staff member poses next to a painting by Lucian Freud - Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956 - on show at a photocall for the Credit Suisse exhibition - Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery in London PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2022 Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool before the start of the Labour Party annual Conference which he opened with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and sang the national anthem PA UK news in pictures 24 September 2022 Handout photo issued by Buckingham Palace of the ledger stone at the King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2022 A climate change activist protests against UK private jets while lighting his right arm on fire during the Laver Cup tennis tournament at the O2 Arena in London EPA UK news in pictures 22 September 2022 Woody Woodmansey, Lee Bennett, Kevin Armstrong, Nick Moran and Clifford Slapper attend the unveiling of a stone for David Bowie on the Music Walk of Fame at Camden, north London PA UK news in pictures 21 September 2022 A flock of birds in the sky as the sun rises over Dungeness in Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2022 Flowers which were laid by members of the public in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland are collected by the Hillsborough Gardening Team and volunteers to be replanted for those that can be saved or composted PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2022 The ceremonial procession of the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II travels down the long walk as it arrives at Windsor Castle for the committal service at St Georges Chapel AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 18 September 2022 A man stands among campers on The Mall ahead of the Queens funeral Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2022 Wolverhampton Wanderers Nathan Collins fouls Manchester Citys Jack Grealish leading to a red card. City went on to win the match at Molineux Stadium three goals to nil. 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Leaflets were reportedly found on bookshelves in prison chaplaincy rooms that encouraged the murder of apostates, homophobic views and even described Jewish, Christian and other non-Muslim women as "repulsive".

Inmates at more than one prison were reportedly encouraged by chaplains to donate money to charities linked to terrorist groups.

Muslim prison chaplains were found by the report to be ill-informed and under-equipped to counter extremism, "sometimes because they lacked the capability but often because they didn't have the will".

The Ministry of Justice has declined to comment.
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A 1,800-year-old triumphal arch destroyed by Isis in the Syrian city of Palmyra last year is rising again in London.

The recreation of Palmyras Arch of Triumph will stand for four days in Trafalgar Square after being made by carving stone to the exact shape of the original, working from a database of 3D photographs collected by the Institute of Digital Archaeology (IDA).

After its stay in London  which has been timed to coincide with World Heritage Week - the recreated arch will be taken around the world, visiting New Yorks Times Square and Dubai, before being taken to Syria.

Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syrias director-general of antiquities and museums, who was in London to watch the 100,000, 12-ton, scale model being installed, said: It is a message of raising awareness in the world. We have common heritage. Our heritage is universal - it is not just for Syrian people."

The world was appalled in May last year when Isis captured Palmyra and set about using dynamite, bulldozers and pickaxes to destroy monuments at the Unesco World Heritage site.

Recommended Read more New Palmyra photos show devastation of artefacts ruined by Isis

At least 280 people were executed during the occupation, which only ended in March. Among them was Khaled al-Asaad, an 82-year-old archaeologist who had devoted his life to Palmyra. He was reportedly tortured by Isis for a month and then beheaded, having refused to reveal where some of the ancient citys most valuable artefacts had been hidden.

In October Isis destroyed the 20ft Arch of Triumph, which had been described as the jewel in the collection at the Palmyra site.

Palmyra's Arch of Triumph recreated in Trafalgar Square Show all 5 1 /5 Palmyra's Arch of Triumph recreated in Trafalgar Square Palmyra's Arch of Triumph recreated in Trafalgar Square A replica of Palmyra's Arch of Triumph is erected in Trafalgar Square Palmyra's Arch of Triumph recreated in Trafalgar Square The original arch was destroyed by the Isis and the replica has been crafted using the latest 3D printing and carving technologies by the Institute for Digital Archaeology Palmyra's Arch of Triumph recreated in Trafalgar Square A replica of Palmyra's 2,000-year-old 'Arch of Triumph' is constructed in Trafalgar Square Getty Images Palmyra's Arch of Triumph recreated in Trafalgar Square Experts from Oxford and Harvard universities and the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) built the replica arch using 3D imaging produced from photographs of the monument, which was blown up by Isis in October 2015 Getty Images Palmyra's Arch of Triumph recreated in Trafalgar Square A replica of the Palmyra's 2,000-year-old 'Arch of Triumph' in Trafalgar Square Getty Images

Standing at the head of a grand colonnade leading to Palmyras temple to the Mesopotamian god Bel, the arch had been built between 193 and 211 AD, in honour of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, who had visited the city which at the time had been one of Romes wealthiest colonies.

The archs destruction was described by Mr Abdulkarim as a crime in every sense of the word.

The creation of the 5.5m (18ft) high scale model began when Roger Michel, the IDAs executive director realised the Institutes Million Images Database of 3D photographs taken by volunteers could be used to provide a blueprint for a replica arch.

"It is extraordinary to have a vision about something and see it come together in such a palpable way," Mr Michel told the BBC.

He explained he wanted London to be the first stop on the archs itinerary because the city had itself been reconstructed after the Blitz of the Second World War.

He hoped, he said, that "anybody who appreciates free speech" would understand the importance of recreating the Arch. Recognising the economic importance to Syria of Palmyra, a site which used to be visited by 150,000 tourists a year, Mr Michel added: "It doesn't mean because you mourn the loss of life that you should leave your country in ruins. No one can bring back the dead, but you can improve the lives of the living."

Mr Abdulkarim, who visited Palmyra a week after its liberation from Isis, admitted: We can never have the same image as before Isis. "We are trying to be realistic.

"But what we want to do is respect the scientific method and the identity of Palmyra as a historic site."
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Renewed Western military intervention in Libya has inched closer after the Government said it would be ready to consider any request from the new government in Tripoli for naval or air support to help dislodge Isis from its stronghold in the country.

Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, who this week travelled to Libya to meet leaders of the UN-backed government of national accord (GNA), said that it was quite possible such a request would be made in relation to the coastal city of Sirte, which fell to Isis a year ago.

Recommended Read more Philip Hammond visits Libya to support new unity government

While ruling out UK ground troops being deployed to the country in a combat role, Mr Hammond confirmed that the UK would be ready to contribute to an international force to train fledgling Libyan administrations army and police force.

Libya has been embroiled in political chaos since the fall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi during a Western-backed rebellion in 2011. The GNA was formed in January and established itself in Tripoli last month. Western powers are hopeful it can unite Libyans, combat Isis and restore order to the country, which Mr Hammond said was currently divided between around 120 competing groups.

Speaking to MPs in the House of Commons on his return from Tripoli, Mr Hammond said Isis was currently thin on the ground in Libya, with around 3,000 fighters. There are many pointers that now is the time to move against them.

However, he said that no request had yet been received, and that if Britain were to take military action, it would require the approval of MPs.

I can envisage Prime Minister Sarraj, if his government is successful, being able to muster enough ground forces to mount an attack on the Daesh (Isis) stronghold around Sirte, he said.

It is certainly the case that the Libyans will not be able to develop either naval or air assets in any reasonable period of time to support such an operation and indeed it is quite possible that from a military point of view they would seek assistance from outsideThere has been no such request, no discussion of such a request but if it comes we will consider it and if we think the UK should participate in such an action we will come to the House and seek a vote.

Mr Hammond said that the numbers of troops that would be sent in the event of the Libyan government requesting a military training force would be in the tens or hundreds, and would be part of wider international UN-backed efforts.

But the Government faced warnings that troops on the ground in Libya in any capacity would be a risk.

Crispin Blunt, the Conservative chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, warned the Foreign Secretary that he was dancing on pretty thin ice in trying to differentiate between a training mission and a combat mission in a country as unstable as Libya.

Mr Blunt has previously warned that even a training mission would inevitably be seen as Western intervention in Libya and would risk British troops coming under attack from various militia and Islamic State. Mr Hammond said that there was a big difference between training and advising troops and engaging in combat activities, pointing to the UKs existing role in training military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Isis captured the coastal city of Sirte last year. The city, near the birthplace of Colonel Gaddafi, became a key battleground during the countrys civil war and was also the site of the dictators eventual capture and execution.

Members of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya met in Tunisia last week to discuss ways in which the international community could support the new Libyan government.

Asked whether the UK had discussed military options in Libya with international allies, the Prime Ministers spokesperson said: There have been discussions between international partners on what the international community can do to support the Libyan government on a whole range of issues including technical assistance, what support we can offer on the security side.

We were involved in driving forward some of those discussions in a meeting that took place in Tunis last week, on broader support of the new national government of Libya.
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British troops could be deployed to Libya without a vote in Parliament amid warnings that even a UK training mission would be seen as Western intervention.

On a visit to Tripoli, the Foreign Secretary, Phillip Hammond, said that because troops would only be acting to train Libyan forces, rather than operating a combat mission, MPs would not be given a vote as they were ahead of recent military action in Iraq and Syria.

Mr Hammond has travelled to Libya to offer his support to the fledgling Government of National Accord, led by prime minister Fayez Sarraj.

The new UN-backed government is attempting to restore order to a country that has been fought over by a number of armed groups, including ISIS fighters, since the fall of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011.

Mr Hammond said it would be for the Libyan people to recapture their country from the Daesh [ISIS] invaders.

He said he hoped other militias would come inside the tent of the national government, allowing the UK and allies to support a military training programme.

But such a non-combat mission for UK troops would not require a House of Commons vote he said.

It has been reported, but not officially confirmed by the Government, that special forces troops are already operating in Libya.

Senior Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, has warned that even a training mission would inevitably be seen as Western intervention in Libya and would risk British troops coming under attack from various militia and Islamic State.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4s Today programme, a former British diplomat in Libya also warned that any kind of military intervention by the West risked adding fuel to the fire of the countrys internal conflict.

Joe Walker-Cousins, former head of the British Embassy Office in Benghazi said: The country is weaponised to an extent that has never been seen before and were trying to push some sort of representative government in an environment where any group, if they dont like whats happening, will be able to pick up arms and use them to effect.
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Britain will have the same relationship with the European Union as Bosnia, Albania and Ukraine if the country votes for Brexit, Michael Gove suggested yesterday.

Unveiling his vision for the UKs future outside the European Union Mr Gove said joining countries that traded freely with the EU but were not bound by its rules would be the core of our new arrangement with the EU.

But critics pointed out that although countries such as Albania enjoyed liberalised trade in goods with the EU, the trade in services, where Britain is strong, were not covered by such an arrangement.

Senior Government officials also believe that other European leaders would not be prepared to offer the UK any kind of preferential treatment in the event of a leave vote for fear it could stoke anti-EU sentiment in other member states.

But speaking in London the Justice Secretary suggested that other EU countries would eventually allow Britain preferential status.

There is a free-trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey that all European nations have access to, regardless of whether they are in our out of the euro or EU, he said.

After we vote to leave we will remain in the zone. The suggestion that Bosnia, Serbia, Albania and Ukraine would remain part of this free-trade area  and Britain would be on the outside with just Belarus  is as credible as Jean-Claude Juncker joining Ukip.

The idea that the German government would damage its car manufacturers - and impoverish workers in those factories - to make a political point about Britain's choices; or the French government would ignore its farmers - and damage their welfare - to strike a pose; or the Italian government would undermine its struggling industries just to please Brussels... well, that is ridiculous.

Mr Goves aides accepted that Britain would not seek to remain part of the EUs single market, saying that the UK could not accept the principal conditions for entry.

Under Vote Leave's plans, the UK would secure a unique deal after Brexit, enjoying a tariff-free trade agreement but without accepting free movement of EU citizens, paying into the Brussels budget or being bound by the European Court of Justice.

Setting out his plan at Vote Leave's headquarters in London, Mr Gove said: An independent Britain could choose to strike free trade agreements with emerging economies and lower tariffs, extending new opportunities to developing nations and in the process allowing prices in Britain to become cheaper.

Post-Brexit, the UK would keep the money it currently sends to Brussels - about 350 million each and every week - but if it voted to Remain in the EU that sum could rise, with open season declared on the British rebate, Mr Gove warned.

The UK would also be free to adopt an Australian-style points-based immigration system outside the EU's free movement rules.

As long as we are in the EU we cannot control our borders and cannot develop an immigration policy which is both truly humane and in our long-term economic interest, he said.

But in a speech to the London Stock Exchange, pro-Remain minister Anna Soubry urged businesses to speak out ahead of the referendum.

The business minister said: It's right for us to belong to a group of countries with whom we have so much in common, whether it's the values of human rights, democracy or how we do business.

That's why it's imperative we hear loud and clear the voices of all businesses so that the British people have all the facts and hear all the arguments before they cast their vote on June 23.

The Justice Secretary mocked the tactics used by the Remain camp - dubbed Project Fear by critics - which treats people like children, unfit to be trusted and easily scared by ghost stories.

Instead, he said, it was a vote to Remain which carried risks for the UK.

It is clear that if we vote to stay we are giving away more power and control to unaccountable EU institutions this year and every year, he said.

The EU had plans for greater power over tax and the financial system and the European Court of Justice could erode even more of our independence in future.

If we vote to stay we are not settling for the status quo - we are voting to be a hostage, locked in the boot of a car driven by others to a place and at a pace that we have no control over, he said.

But the former home secretary, and chairman of the Labour In for Britain campaign, Alan Johnson, claimed the Leave campaign were also engaged in project fear.

I'll tell you what Project Fear is, we heard it from Boris Johnson, he actually said over 70 million Turks will be coming here - if that's not Project Fear, what is? the ex-Cabinet minister told BBC Radio 4's World At One.

Mr Johnson also insisted the Justice Secretary was wrong about Britain having lax border controls, as he stressed the economic benefits of staying in the EU.

Michael Gove wants to wish away reality, but the truth is every credible independent forecaster says Brexit will hurt our economy.

Reports from the IMF, the LSE, Oxford Economics the CBI and others all show how important it is to jobs and our economy to remain in the EU.

But it's vital for workers' rights, protecting our environment and keeping our social protections too - all issues that the Leave campaign have no credibility on and no interest in, Mr Johnson said.
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Support for a Remain vote in the referendum on the European Union is nearly 10 points ahead of Brexit, according to a new poll.

The ORB survey for the Telegraph found that if the referendum was held now some 52 per cent of respondents would back remaining a member of the EU, with 43 per cent for leave, down five points on the previous poll.

It appears that Remain voters are catching up with Leave supporters in terms of turnout. Some 70 per cent of Brexit supporters told pollsters they planned to vote, the same level as before, but the Remain turnout was up from 61 to 65 per cent. The overall turnout was up three points to 67 per cent.

 The Treasury's analysis of a potential Brexit explained

ORB also found that Leave supporters were slightly more likely to switch to the other side. Some 17 per cent of the campaign's supporters were described as "soft", compared to 14 per cent of those currently planning to vote to Remain.

Sir Lynton Crosby, the election strategist credited with helping the Conservatives win a majority at the last election, wrote in the Telegraph: "This presents a challenging set of circumstances for the Leave campaign. Not only have they lost some of the advantage from more Outers being motivated to turnout that was benefiting them, but the overall proportion of the British public who support the Leave case has also fallen.

What has the EU ever done for us? Show all 7 1 /7 What has the EU ever done for us? What has the EU ever done for us? 1. It gives you freedom to live, work and retire anywhere in Europe As a member of the EU, UK citizens benefit from freedom of movement across the continent. Considered one of the so-called four pillars of the European Union, this freedom allows all EU citizens to live, work and travel in other member states. What has the EU ever done for us? 2. It sustains millions of jobs A report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, released in October 2015, suggested 3.1 million British jobs were linked to the UKs exports to the EU. What has the EU ever done for us? 3. Your holiday is much easier - and safer Freedom to travel is one of the most exercised benefits of EU membership, with Britons having made 31 million visits to the EU in 2014 alone. But a lot of the benefits of being an EU citizen are either taken for granted or go unnoticed. What has the EU ever done for us? 4. It means you're less likely to get ripped off Consumer protection is a key benefit of the EUs single market, and ensures members of the British public receive equal consumer rights when shopping anywhere in Europe. What has the EU ever done for us? 5. It offers greater protection from terrorists, paedophiles, people traffickers and cyber-crime Another example of a lesser-known advantage of EU membership is the benefit of cross-country coordination and cooperation in the fight against crime. What has the EU ever done for us? 6. Our businesses depend on it According to 71% of all members of the Confederation of British Influence (CBI), and 67 per cent of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the EU has had an overall positive impact on their business. What has the EU ever done for us? 7. We have greater influence Robin Niblett, Director of think-tank Chatham House, stated in a report published last year: For a mid-sized country like the UK, which will never again be economically dominant either globally or regionally, and whose diplomatic and military resources are declining in relative terms, being a major player in a strong regional institution can offer a critical lever for international influence.

"As identified in recent ORB polls, British voters see the economic case as a strong argument for staying in the EU, but they also see the changes to the immigration system as a benefit of leaving. This remains the case in this poll.

"But what this latest poll also shows is that while the Remain campaign are maximising the potential of the economic arguments, the same cannot be said of the Leave campaign and the immigration case. This is simple to see."
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Ministers have been forced into an embarrassing climbdown over controversial plans that would have gagged academics and scientists from lobbying the Government on matters of public interest.

Under proposals put forward by the Cabinet Office, organisations in receipt of Government funds were to be banned from promoting changes to laws or regulations from next month.

But Universities and research organisations warned the move would have had a chilling effect on scientific research and prevent academics from participating fully in public debate.

Such a ban, they argued, would prevent doctors from advocating a sugar tax or climate scientists from arguing for a more robust Government response to global warming.

A petition, calling for academics to be exempt from the ban, received nearly 20,000 signatories while astronomer royal Sir Martin Rees said it would be far too damaging to allow this clause to proceed.

Science Minister Jo Johnson announced on Monday that the Government was preparing to climb down and would exempt academic researchers from the ban  which was designed to prevent charities using public money to lobby for changes in public policy.

The new clause in government grants is about ensuring that taxpayers money is properly spent on what was intended in the grant agreements, Mr Johnson said.

I am very aware of questions that have been raised about what this could mean for our research base and the principle of academic autonomy that is such a critical part of its strength.

I am happy to confirm that it is not our intention for the Research Councils, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) or the National Academies to be covered by the clause. We are continuing to talk to the research community and will outline more detail by 1 May, when this clause takes effect.

Bob Ward, Policy Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said he was glad the Cabinet Office was going to do the right thing.

I hope that the exemption will apply not just to grants from the higher education funding councils and research councils, but also to grants from Government Departments for research, he said.

Without the exemption, the clause would forbid researchers from using Government grants to attempt to influence policy-making. Such a restriction would be bad for policy-making, bad for the public interest and bad for democracy.

Dr Sarah Main, Director of the Campaign for Science & Engineering, added: "This is great news and a huge step in the right direction. Scientists felt wrongly embroiled in a debate about lobbying which didn't apply to them. The Science Minister, Jo Johnson, and many across government have done a huge amount to make the case that it does not. The message is loud and clear that science is a welcome and necessary part of Parliamentary debate and policy-making. We trust that all ministers will take Jo Johnson's lead to ensure that researchers funded by any department can freely engage with Parliament."

"We now need to see the details to ensure that this solution works for all of government and all of science."
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Jeremy Hunt has rejected the British Medical Association's (BMA) offer to cancel next weeks all-out junior doctor strike in exchange for him halting the imposition of the controversial new contract.

In a letter to the Health Secretary, the BMA said no junior doctors wanted to take further industrial action, but that medics would not accept a contract being forced on them.

Their appeal urged the Government to get back around the table and offer direct talks between the BMAs junior doctor committee chair Dr Johann Malawana and Mr Hunt at any time between now and the start of next weeks industrial action.

But a Department of Health spokesperson said: "We have today written to the BMA to make clear that it is not credible to call for imposition to be lifted when they refused to negotiate on the one remaining issue of Saturday pay that separates the two sides.

Recommended Read more Junior doctors begin second indefinite protest in Leeds

More than 500 doctors have already signed up to a new contract that was 90 per cent agreed with the BMA, following 75 meetings and 73 concessions made by the Government.

In a letter to Dr Malawana, Mr Hunt said: We must be clear that anyone deciding  at your urging  to withdraw potentially lifesaving care for patients is making a choice to do so. Many will find this disproportionate given the matter still in dispute is Saturday pay rates.

Junior doctors say that the dispute is about more than pay, and have warned that a new contract not backed up by additional funding to pay for a big boost in the medical workforce will spread the profession too thin, leading to dangerously under-staffed wards.

The last-ditch letter from the BMA came as the medical regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC), issued guidance warning that some hospitals may struggle to cope during next weeks strikes, which will be the first to see junior doctors walk out from all types of care, including A&E departments and other emergency services.

In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Show all 10 1 /10 In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK 20,000 Junior Doctors marched through central London in protest at the new contract changes the government is trying to impose which they say will be unfair and unsafe In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Junior doctors protest in London In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK 4 year old Cassius takes part in a demonstration in Westminster, in support of junior doctors over changes to NHS contracts, London In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Protest over proposed changes to junior doctors' contracts, Leeds In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Junior doctors and NHS staff protesting against the health service cuts and the proposed contract changes offered by the government outside Parliament In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Junior doctors and NHS staff protesting against the health service cuts and the proposed contract changes offered by the government outside Parliament In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Over 5000 junior doctors rallied in Waterloo place, before marching through Whitehall and onto Parliament Square, in opposition to Jeremy Hunt's new working conditions for doctors In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Demonstrators listen to speeches in Waterloo Place during the 'Let's Save the NHS' rally and protest march by junior doctors In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK Junior doctors marched in London to highlight their plight In pictures: Junior doctors protests in UK A protester at a demonstration in support of junior doctors in London

The escalation has prompted stark warnings over patient safety from senior doctors including the NHS medical director Professor Sir Bruce Keogh and the chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies.

Dr Malawana himself sought unsuccessfully to convince union colleagues before the announcement was made that paediatric emergency services should be excluded from the strike, according to internal emails seen by the Health Service Journal last week.

GMC chief executive Niall Dickson called on every doctor contemplating further and escalated industrial action to pause and consider again the possible implications for patients and said that the right option for some may be not to strike.

The GMC cannot second guess the situation facing each doctor in training in England  that must be a matter for individual judgement. But given the scale and repeated nature of what is proposed, we believe that, despite everyones best efforts, some hospitals may struggle to cope. In these cases where local circumstances are particularly acute, the right option may be not to take action that results in the withdrawal of services for patients, he said.

In his letter to Mr Hunt, Dr Malawana wrote: With a week to go to the start of the first full walkout of doctors in this country, I am writing to make a clear offer in a bid to avert industrial action.

"Simply put, if the Government will lift the imposition, junior doctors will call off next weeks strike action on 26 and 27 April.

The imposition of this contract is tremendously damaging to the morale of junior doctors and medical students and has resulted in a complete breakdown of trust between doctors and the Government. It is this decision which has led to the current, lamentable situation, the resolution to which is now squarely in your hands.

As you know, no junior doctor wants to have to take industrial action, but they have been left without further recourse. Junior doctors who I meet up and down the country are saying they will not accept a contract being forced on them, a contract which the Governments own equality impact assessment acknowledges to be discriminatory to women."

The decision to impose the contract came in February, after Mr Hunt was advised by his chief negotiator, NHS hospital chief executive Sir David Dalton, that there was no realistic prospect of a negotiated outcome.

Imposition means NHS trusts will be forced to offer the new terms to junior doctors beginning new contracts from August. NHS foundation trusts, which have more autonomy, can in theory set their own terms and conditions but the Department of Health has said it expects the contract to be rolled out nationally.

 Junior doctors' plea to David Cameron

The contract will require junior doctors to work more weekends for less pay on Saturdays. Basic pay will increase by 13.5 per cent to compensate. However, there is no additional funding being offered, so junior doctors fear the current workforce will be spread too thinly and rotas will be understaffed more often during the week, endangering patients.

There are also concerns over plans to drop automatic annual pay increases, which the Governments own impact assessment said would disproportionately impact on women doctors who take time off for maternity leave.

Calls are growing for doctors professional bodies, the medical royal colleges, to intervene and act as an intermediary between the Government and the BMA to prevent the dispute from escalating any further.

In a strongly worded statement, the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Professor Sir Simon Wessely, said the dispute had become a matter of deep concern and genuine alarm.

Both sides have a duty to do all they can to minimise harm to patient care. Even at this late hour there is time to step back from the brink, he said. History and the public will not be kind to any party who is not seen to have gone the extra mile to try and resolve this dispute, not least because as was seen earlier, the difference between the two sides is no longer vast. It is time to put aside pride, or short term political calculations.
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David Cameron and George Osborne will be accused by one of their closest political allies of treating the British public like children who need to be frightened into obedience as Conservative Party tensions escalated into open warfare.

The Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, will launch an attack on tactics used by the Prime Minister and Chancellor to persuade people to back a remain vote.

But the nature of the broadside, from a man who described Mr Cameron as an outstanding Prime Minister at the start of the campaign, will dismay senior Tory colleagues and make it harder for the party to re-unite regardless of the referendum result.

Mr Goves intervention comes after Mr Osborne unveiled an official Treasury analysis suggesting every household in Britain would be 4,300 worse off in the event of a leave vote.

 The Treasury's analysis of a potential Brexit explained

Mr Osborne said the government would lose 36bn in net tax receipts, equivalent to 8p on the basic rate of income tax or 7p on VAT.

Wed trade less, do less business and receive less investment, and the price would be paid by British families, he said.

Wages would be lower and prices would be higher. Britain would be poorer by 4,300 per household. That is 4,300 worse off every year, a bill paid year after year by the working people of Britain.

But in response Mr Gove will use a major speech to dismiss in personal terms what the Leave campaign have dubbed Project Fear.

The Remain campaign treats people like mere children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night, Mr Gove will say.

They want us to believe that Britain is beaten and broken.

In contrast he will warn a vote to stay in the EU would be the real danger.

If we vote to remain, the EUs bosses and bureaucrats will take that as carte blanche to continue taking more power and money away from Britain, he will say.

Well be told by Brussels to shut up and suck it up. Well have no influence and will be outvoted. The eurozone countries have a permanent and unstoppable majority allowing them to set the agenda and overrule British interests.

Mr Gove will also implicitly attack the Home Secretary, Theresa May, who is backing a remain vote, by suggesting that staying in the EU could compromise Britains attempts to fight terrorism.

Ms May, who has had little involvement in the in campaign so far, is expected to make a speech in the coming days making the case of Britains continued membership on security grounds.

But Mr Gove will say that EU court rulings could put that in jeopardy.

The ECJ [European Court of Justice] has recently used the Charter to make clear that it can determine how our intelligence services monitor suspected terrorists, he will say.

How long before the ECJ starts undermining the Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreements that have been a foundation of British security since 1945 and which are the source of jealousy and suspicion in Brussels?

Until now Mr Gove has steered clear of attacks on other Conservatives on the other side of the referendum debate.

But in a sign that the Leave campaign worries that Project Fear is gaining traction, both he and Boris Johnson are now attacking Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne directly.

What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Show all 5 1 /5 What's the European Parliament ever done for us? What's the European Parliament ever done for us? A cap on the amount of hours an employer can make you work The Working Time directive provides legal standards to ensure the health and safety of employees in Europe. Among the many rules are a working week of a maximum 48 hours, including overtime, a daily rest period of 11 hours in every 24, a break if a person works for six hours or more, and one day off in every seven. It also includes provisions for paid annual leave of at least four weeks every year Getty Images What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Helping the people of Britain to avoid smoking In 2014 MEPs passed the Tobacco Products Directive strengthening existing rules on the manufacture, production and presentation of tobacco products. This includes things like reduced branding, restrictions on products containing flavoured tobacco, health warnings on cigarette packets and provisions for e-cigarettes to ensure they are safe What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Helping you to make the right choices with your food Thanks to the European Parliament, UK consumers have access to more information than ever about their food and drink. This includes amount of fat, and how much of it is saturated, carbohydrates, sugars, protein and so on. It also includes portion sizes and guideline daily amount information so people can make informed choices about their diet. All facts must be clear and easy to understand What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Two year guarantees and 14-day returns policy for all products Consumers across the EU have access to a number of rights, from things which are potentially very useful, to things which used to be annoying. For example, shoppers in the UK receive a two-year guarantee on all products, and a 14-day period to change their minds and return a purchase, these things are useful www.PeopleImages.com-licence restrictions apply What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Keeping your air nice and fresh (and safe) Believe it or not, although the situation is improving, some areas of the UK have appalling air quality. A report by the Royal College of Physicians released on 23 February says 40,000 deaths are caused by outdoor air pollution in the UK every year. Air pollution is linked to a number of illnesses and conditions, from Asthma to diabetes and dementia. The report estimates the costs to British business and the health service add up to 20 billion every year

But Remain strategists believe that warnings over the UKs future outside of the EU are still their strongest card to persuade voters to back an in vote.

This was reinforced by the 200-page Treasury document, which examined three potential options for the UK if it left the EU - the status currently enjoyed by Norway, which makes payments to the EU and accepts free movement in return for access to the single market; a bilateral free trade deal of the kind obtained by Canada; or a relationship under the rules of the World Trade Organisation.

The analysis suggests that a Norwegian-style European Economic Area membership would result in 20 billion lower public sector net receipts; the Canadian approach would leave the public sector 36 billion worse off; and the WTO route could mean 45 billion less for services.

The Chancellor focused his assessment on the Canada-style model, which has previously been championed by Mr Johnson.

Under the terms of a Canadian-style bilateral trade deal with Brussels, the economy would be 6.2 per cent smaller by 2030, the equivalent of 4,300 per household, the analysis suggested.

Mr Osborne said: "Under any alternative, we'd trade less, do less business and receive less investment.

"And the price would be paid by British families. Wages would be lower and prices would be higher."

"We'd lose tens of billions of pounds in money for our public services, because our economy would be smaller and our families poorer.

"The most likely bill our public services would pay for leaving the EU is 36 billion. That's the equivalent of 8p on the basic rate of income tax."

 Osborne: Britain "poorer outside EU"

If there was no deal with the EU, and the UK fell back on WTO rules, the economy would suffer by between 5.4 per cent and 9.5 per cent, with a central estimate of a 7.5 per cent fall - hitting each household by 5,200.

But the former chancellor, Lord Lamont of Lerwick, dismissed the report's projections.

"They say economists put a decimal point in their forecasts to show that they have a sense of humour," he said.

The Chancellor has endorsed a forecast which looks 14 years ahead and predicts a fall in GDP of less than 0.5 per cent a year  well within the margin of error. Few forecasts are right for 14 months, let alone 14 years. Such precision is spurious, and entirely unbelievable."

The pro-Brexit minister Andrea Leadsom, who has served in the Treasury under Mr Osborne, claimed the document was "extraordinarily biased" because it failed to consider the impact of continued high migration.

"A much fairer way to present this argument would be to also look at the impact if we remain in on further migration, further pressure on public services, the impact on security and so on," she said. "You have got to present a balanced view."

The Energy Minister mocked the report's long-term prediction, telling BBC Radio 4's World at One: "It's extraordinary to have such an accurate central figure and it implies a clarity of crystal-ball gazing that even I, as a fully paid up witch, couldn't possibly presume."
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It was, arguably, the biggest night in the history of the Victoria Hall in Hanley, at least until the Black Dyke Band  The Very Best in Brass  pitch up next week.

A member of the cabinet, sharing a platform with Nigel Farage, at a music hall in Stoke. These are the things that count as history in an EU referendum regularly rendering bedfellows more unusual than anything that has yet been known to have entered the 1,014 taxypayer-funded four-poster in John Whittingdales London flat.

Its true in theory, that a member of the cabinet was there, at a Grassroots Out rally at which, were it not for the perma-sneering presence of Tom Pursglove, who was elected in 2015 as MP for the three-yard radius around Peter Bone, the average age may not have dropped into double digits. But it was only Chris Grayling. And Chris Grayling is a member of the cabinet in much the same way that a percussionist called Alan White was a member of Oasis, an analogy that admittedly is not perfect, given Alan White is capable of holding a drumstick and using it to strike a drum.

Recommended Read more Chris Grayling to share Vote Leave platform with Nigel Farage

One of the more curious truths that will be borne out by this referendum campaign is that the more neglected the place, the more it has been left to rot by government after government, the more unshakeably patriotic it is bound to be. A woman in the front row wearing a giant Union Jack jumper could barely sit still all night. She and the rest joined in with Farages call-and-response, pseudo-self help chanting with the same fervour as any other deluded audience seduced by some snake oil TV evangelist. They booed the name of Peter Mandelson. They booed Tony Blair. They booed David Cameron. The boo for Nick Clegg wasnt loud enough so Farage made them do it again. We want our country back! We want our country back! they chanted, absolutely certain of the truth that a new dawn might finally break tomorrow if only Grayling, Farage, Bone and Pursglove could be put in charge.

Pursglove, 27 years old, a backbench MP for a Northamptonshire mining town, bravely took the fight to Barack Obama. I dont know what Obama thinks hes doing, coming over here, sticking his nose in our referendum, he wailed (they clapped like mad). You wouldnt find any politician in this country, going to America and saying Your laws are going to be made in Toronto, by politicians from Mexico and Guatemala. I think theyd find that quite objectionable.

Just the mention of the word Guatemala felt like it might be sufficient to cause a fit of collective vomiting. That the U and the S in USA stand for United and States, the great shining example of what can be achieved through the pooling of sovereignty and a single currency is almost too tiresome to point out. Pursgloves brave peroration is bound to form part of Obamas morning briefing from the intelligence services. Whether he will see fit to cancel his visit we will find out soon enough.

Its unfortunate that Grayling, being the Cabinet Minister, had to speak last. Its always an immense challenge to follow Nigel Farage, he said. Its true. It is. But it would also be an immense challenge for Grayling to follow a recipe for beans on toast.

The Out Campaign, he explained, has two things going for it. The first is a series of specious arguments. That Germany will definitely carry on selling cars to Britain, as will the French with their cheeses. But in the meantime, we must take control of its borders". That there is no one alive who doesnt think free movement of people will be the price that must be paid for access to the single market was a problem for another day.

The second, apparently, is their grassroots movement. Theres no hall down the road in Stoke or anywhere else, full of people saying we want to stay in the European Union! he professed. And that much at least is true. While the polls are not definitely to be trusted, the indications are that many people have sussed out that they dont need a rally  however history making. A cross in a box will do. Save your energy for the Black Dyke Band.
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Donald Trump claimed that he helped in the clearing of rubble in the wake of the 11 September attacks that tore a hole in the New York skyline.

Going on the offensive against his main rival, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, in Buffalo, New York, he launched on a tangent about the aftermath of the terrorist attack, and how the hard work of the rescue workers reflect true New York values.

Everyone who helped clear the rubble - and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit - but I want to tell you: Those people were amazing, said Mr Trump. Clearing the rubble. Trying to find additional lives. You didnt know what was going to come down on all of us - and they handled it.

Recommended Read more Muslims react to news Donald Trump wants to ban them from US

Mr Trump did not explain how precisely he helped, however.

The comment occurred during shortly after the native-New Yorker mistakenly referred to 9/11 as 7/11 - a popular American convenience store chain.

I was down there and I watch our police and our firemen down at 7/11, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down. And I saw the greatest people Ive ever seen in action.

The Washington Post published a video of Mr Trump speaking with German media in the immediate aftermath of the attacks where he said he would be involved in reconstruction in some way.

Well, I have a lot of men down here right now, Mr Trump said. We have over 100 and we have about 125 coming. So we'll have a couple of hundred people down here. ... We will be involved in some form in helping to reconstruct."

The 11 September attacks have come up numerous times throughout Mr Trumps campaign. Most notably, Mr Trump - who has campaigned on a hardline immigration idea that would block Muslim immigration to the US - claimed he saw a group of Muslims celebrating the collapse of the two World Trade Center towers.

I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering, as that building was coming down, he said when calling for surveillance and databases of Muslims.

The claim has been widely debunked by fact checkers.
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Michigan Governor Rick Snyder said he will drink Flint tap water for the next 30 days to show that the water - which had been poisoned with lead - is safe for daily consumption.

Mr Snyder accepted a challenge put forth by Flint residents after he encouraged them to start drinking from the tap instead of bottled water. But the Flint residents did not trust taps and would only drink it if the governor tried it himself, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Recommended Read more Flint mother invites politicians to bathe in her poisoned green water

I completely understand why some Flint residents are hesitant to drink the water and I am hopeful I can alleviate some of the skepticism and mistrust by putting words to action, Mr Snyder said in a statement.

To compensate for the two years of neglect that lead to the poisonous water, the state of Michigan has been treating the pipes with higher levels of phosphates, the Free Press reports, and the governor believes many Flint residents can go back to drinking from their taps.

The filters work, Mr Snyder said at a 15 April press conference. He added that filtration is a step forward from bottled water.

Members of Congress have called for Mr Snyders resignation, alleging that he knew about the lead-contaminated water for at least a year before the news went public. But during a congressional hearing in March, Mr Snyder laid blame to the folly of government bureaucracy, not his own negligence or complicity.

Ive had about enough of your false contrition and your phony apologies, said Pennsylvania representative Matt Cartwright. Governor Snyder, plausible deniability only works when its plausible, and Im not buying that you didnt know about any of this until October 2015. You were not in a medically induced coma for a year.

Flints 100,000 residents were first exposed to the toxic water in April 2014, when an unelected emergency manager switched the citys water supply to save money.

Approximately 40 per cent of Flint residents are living in poverty, making it one of the poorest cities in the US.
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Bernie Sanders has backed legislation that would let Americans sue Saudi Arabia over the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The bill is opposed by the Obama administration, but it is important to victims' families, some of whom believe Saudi officials played some part in the attacks.

The Democratic presidential candidate spoke in favour of the legislation on NBC's "Today Show" ahead of the New York presidential primary.

He said it was important to have a full understanding of the "the possible role of the Saudi government in 9/11."

 'Now We Are Winning' - Sanders Marks Pivotal Moment in Campaign

US inquiries have not reported a link between the Saudi government or its senior officials and the attacks, but Sanders notes that some conclusions remain classified.

He said Saudi Arabia promotes an extreme and "very destructive" version of Islam.

Hillary Clinton has also come out in support of the bill. Obviously, weve got to make anyone who participates in or supports terrorism pay a price, and we also have to be aware of any consequences that might affect Americans, either military or civilian or our nation, she told ABCs This Week.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers in the September 2001 attacks, which destroyed the World Trade Center and killed thousands, were citizens of Saudi Arabia.

10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Show all 10 1 /10 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In October 2014, three lawyers, Dr Abdulrahman al-Subaihi, Bander al-Nogaithan and Abdulrahman al-Rumaih , were sentenced to up to eight years in prison for using Twitter to criticize the Ministry of Justice. AFP/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2015, Yemens Sunni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was forced into exile after a Shia-led insurgency. A Saudi Arabia-led coalition has responded with air strikes in order to reinstate Mr Hadi. It has since been accused of committing war crimes in the country. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Women who supported the Women2Drive campaign, launched in 2011 to challenge the ban on women driving vehicles, faced harassment and intimidation by the authorities. The government warned that women drivers would face arrest. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Members of the Kingdoms Shia minority, most of whom live in the oil-rich Eastern Province, continue to face discrimination that limits their access to government services and employment. Activists have received death sentences or long prison terms for their alleged participation in protests in 2011 and 2012. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses All public gatherings are prohibited under an order issued by the Interior Ministry in 2011. Those defy the ban face arrest, prosecution and imprisonment on charges such as inciting people against the authorities. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2014, the Interior Ministry stated that authorities had deported over 370,000 foreign migrants and that 18,000 others were in detention. Thousands of workers were returned to Somalia and other states where they were at risk of human rights abuses, with large numbers also returned to Yemen, in order to open more jobs to Saudi Arabians. Many migrants reported that prior to their deportation they had been packed into overcrowded makeshift detention facilities where they received little food and water and were abused by guards. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses The Saudi Arabian authorities continue to deny access to independent human rights organisations like Amnesty International, and they have been known to take punitive action, including through the courts, against activists and family members of victims who contact Amnesty. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison for using his liberal blog to criticise Saudi Arabias clerics. He has already received 50 lashes, which have reportedly left him in poor health. Carsten Koall/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Dawood al-Marhoon was arrested aged 17 for participating in an anti-government protest. After refusing to spy on his fellow protestors, he was tortured and forced to sign a blank document that would later contain his confession. At Dawoods trial, the prosecution requested death by crucifixion while refusing him a lawyer. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 aged either 16 or 17 for participating in protests during the Arab spring. His sentence includes beheading and crucifixion. The international community has spoken out against the punishment and has called on Saudi Arabia to stop. He is the nephew of a prominent government dissident. Getty

The stakes in New York for both Mr Sanders and Ms Clinton are higher than ever. After taking eight of the last nine nominating contests, Mr Sanders arguably has the better wind behind him.

Were he to win New York and take the largest share of its trove of 247 delegates, the effect would be electrifying. Which is precisely why Ms Clinton cannot let that happen.

The state should be Ms Clintons to lose. Unlike Mr Sanders who cut his electoral teeth in the relatively genteel climes of Vermont, she has lots of experience of New Yorks especially rough brand of politics. She won the New York primary competing with Barack Obama for the nomination in 2008 and was sent by the state to the US Senate not once but twice.
A man votes in New York on April 19. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

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Donald Trumps children may not be able to vote, but other New Yorkers who registered before the March 25 deadline will headed to the polls today and handed Mr Trump a victory in his home state. Hillary Clinton also won big in her adopted home state.

The real estate mogul was projected as the winner as soon as the polls closed, while the Democratic race took slightly longer.

Polls show that Trump, has double-digit leads over both Texas Senator Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich.

As the Republicans squabble over 95 delegates  Trumps campaign has recently called for voting system reform  and Democrats get a much larger sweep of 247 delegates, the victory in New York will be very important before the parties conventions this summer.

It is not a winner-takes-all result like in some other states, and delegates will be divided up according to the ballots cast.
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In his latest New York rally featuring acclaimed indie musicians, Bernie Sanders hosted TV on the Radio during a rally in Long Island City on Monday night.

The band played a short set in Hunter's Point performing "Wolf Like Me," "Could You" and "Ambulance."

"New York. It's one hell of a town," band members wrote on Instagram. "Thanks Bernie Sanders! NY. VOTE. Tomorrow. Get it! Feel the Bern."



This was the second Sanders event guitarist Kyp Malone has performed at. He played a brief set in Gowanus back in March, Brooklyn Vegan reports.

On Sunday, Sanders held a rally in Brooklyn's Prospect Park that featured Grizzly Bear, EPMD and Tanya Stephens. You can watch full performance from TV on the Radio below.
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A four-month-old baby has died on a flight from London Heathrow to Hong Kong, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing.

The baby girl fell unconscious mid way through the Cathay Pacific plane's journey, forcing the pilot to land at Almaty airport in Kazakhstan to seek medical help.

A passenger who was a nurse gave first aid to the child before the plane landed in the Central Asian country, Apple Daily reports.

But despite efforts made by Kazakh doctors, the baby was declared dead.

The child's parents are reported to have French-Chinese nationality and had been on their way to visit relatives on the Chinese mainland.

Her parents made the decision to continue their flight to Hong Kong with their dead infant onboard.

It is not yet known how the baby died, but local media reported she may have suffered from a gastro-intestinal disorder before flying.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Cathay Pacific said in a statement: "Cathay Pacific confirms that an infant who travelled from London to Hong Kong on CX256 on 16 April 2016 was found unconscious during the flight and sadly passed away despite emergency medical treatment.

"Medlink services were consulted and as advised, the flight was diverted to Almaty Airport in Kazakhstan so that immediate medical attention could be provided.

"Upon landing, the infant was diagnosed by the local medical officers. The family continued their journey to Hong Kong with the infant on CX256.

"Due to privacy concerns and out of respect to the family, we are unable to provide details of the incident. We are saddened by the incident and offer our sincere condolences to the family."
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At least 28 people have been killed and more than 300 wounded in a suicide bombing and gun attack in Kabul.

Civilians and members of the Afghan security forces were among those caught in the assault, which was claimed by the Taliban.

The bombing, during Tuesday mornings rush hour, targeted the headquarters of a security agency in central Kabul, near the ministry of defence and embassies.

Afghan security forces carry an injured security personnel after a suicide car bomb attack in Kabul, Afghanistan April 19, 2016. (Reuters)

There were also reports of gunfire amid claims that Taliban militants had fought their way into the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Afghanistans main intelligence agency.

Afghanistan's health ministry said that casualty estimates were expected to rise as recovery work continued.

A propaganda statement issued by the Taliban said the attack targeted Department 10, a unit protecting government ministers and MPs, as part of its previously announced spring offensive.

It claimed a car bomb was detonated at the gates of an NDS compound at 9am local time (5.30am BST) before gunmen rushed inside.

A man stands inside his damaged shop near the scene of a bomb blast in Kabul, Afghanistan, 19 April 2016 (EPA)

The area was closed off by security forces as fighting continued and dozens of ambulances were seen at the scene.

Witnesses described chaotic scenes after the blast as hundreds of Afghans rushed to donate blood for the victims.

I was here when a huge explosion happened, said Amir, who works in a nearby restaurant. I saw three boys with severe head injuries. My uncle was injured and my brother is missing, I don't know what happened to him.

It was the worst single militant strike in Kabul since 2011, when about 60 people died in a suicide blast outside a mosque, and will reinforce concerns in Afghanistan and the West that the country is being dragged into a worsening spiral of violence.

Mr Rahimi said one attacker had tried to slip into the NDS building through a destroyed wall after the blast, but he was discovered and killed.

The health ministry said 327 injured victims, including women and children, had been taken to local hospitals.

War artists in Afghanistan Show all 6 1 /6 War artists in Afghanistan War artists in Afghanistan Work by Matthew Cook Matthew Cook War artists in Afghanistan War artists in Afghanistan Work by Jules George Jules George War artists in Afghanistan Embedded: Jules George War artists in Afghanistan Work by Jules George Jules George War artists in Afghanistan Trooping the colours: Jules George was inspired by his father and grandfather to witness and document war, if not to wage it Jules George

A spokesperson at the presidential palace, just a few hundred metres from the blast, condemned the attack.

Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism, he added.

A tweet from President Ashraf Ghani said the assault clearly shows the enemys defeat in face-to-face battle with government forces.

Philip Hammond also tweeted his support, writing: "I condemn the bomb attack in Kabul, thoughts are with families. The Taliban continues senseless attacks against civilians. The UK stands with Afghanistan."

The American embassy in Kabul released a statement calling for continued efforts in the government's peace process.

An relative of one of the victims who was killed in a suicide bomb blast in Kabul, Afghanistan, 19 April 2016. (EPA)

"Afghanistan deserves peace and security, not attacks that victimise parents taking their children to school, workers on their morning commute, and people who have stepped forward to help defend their fellow citizens," a spokesperson said.

The Taliban controls swathes of Afghanistan, where Isis is also trying to expand its presence amid deteriorating security.

Islamists have been gathering strength since the bulk of British, American and Nato forces withdrew in 2014, sparking an exodus by hundreds of thousands of refugees and pleas by local officials for help to combat insurgents.

Afghanistans defence minister, Masoom Stanikzai, warned last week that al-Qaeda is also gathering strength in the country and preparing themselves for bigger attacks.

Additional reporting by agencies
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I was angry because she was raped, thats one thing. But she was so beautiful, the mayor should have been first. What a waste. The mayor to whom he was referring, by the way, is himself, Rodrigo Digong Duterte, mayor of Davao City on the southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines.

Thats the kind of dark, cruel joke most people would be embarrassed to tell (or even hear) in the privacy of their own homes, yet its one that Duterte, a front-running candidate for president of the Philippines, told publicly.

A YouTube video showing the mayor making these statements recently surfaced and is causing an uproar even in a country accustomed to some raunchy politics. While commentators have started referring to him as another Donald Trump, this guy makes Trump look like Mr. Rogers. Among the previous nicknames for Duterte are the punisher and Duterte Harry, after the Clint Eastwood character Dirty Harry.

The video was shot during a campaign rally in Quezon City on April 12, CNN Philippines reported.

He was referring to an incident that took place during his first term as mayor, in August 1989, at the Davao jail.

Inmates of the jail overpowered their guards and grabbed their weapons, taking 15 people, including 36-year-old Australian lay minister Jacqueline Hamill, hostage in 1989.

Hamill told the Rev. Fred Castillo, another hostage who would later escape, that she was raped by her captors.

They also slashed her throat.

As troops stormed the prison, killing 15 captors in a hail of gunfire, Hamill was shot in the neck and died.

I looked at her face, son of a b-. She looks like a beautiful American actress  what a waste, the presidential candidate said, before making the aforementioned remarks about how he should have been first.

Heres the full text, translated by Rappler:

"All the women were raped so during the first assault, because they retreated, the bodies they used as a cover, one of them was the corpse of the Australian woman layminister. Tsk, this is a problem. When the bodies were brought out, they were wrapped. I looked at her face, son of a bitch, she looks like a beautiful American actress. Son of a bitch, what a waste. What came to mind was, they raped her, they lined up. I was angry because she was raped, thats one thing. But she was so beautiful, the mayor should have been first. What a waste. "

In a Facebook post Monday, the Australian Embassy in the Philippines wrote, Rape and murder should never be joked about or trivialised. Violence against women and girls is unacceptable anytime, anywhere.

The Australians were not the only ones with strong words for Duterte.

In response, one of the opposing presidential candidates in the May 9 election, Manuel Mar Roxas II, said, Anyone who laughs at the ultimate assault on the dignity of women should not be allowed to wield power, CNN Philippines reported.

Sen. Grace Poe, another candidate quoted by CNN Philippines, said: It is distasteful and unacceptable, and reflects his disrespect for women. No one, whoever she is and whatever her looks may be, deserves to be raped and abused. Rape is a crime and no laughing matter. We should all be outraged at abuses against women.

Robin Haines Merrill, who worked with Hamill in the country as a missionary, posted a statement on Facebook:

ON BEHALF OF MY SISTER IN CHRIST, MISSIONARY JACQUELINE HAMILL, I PUBLICALLY DENOUNCE THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDACY OF DUTERTE, IN THE PHILIPPINES. Jacqueline was raped and had her throat slit while ministering in the jails in southern Philippines in a 1989 hostage taking. Duterte was recorded this week saying in his political rally that while he ordered the killing of the hostage takers while he was mayor, he wished he could have raped her first, since she was so beautiful. Looking back on this photo, I realize ministering in jails as a woman is very risky and looks outright naive, like the you got what was coming to you mentality that is prevalent today. But all ministry and everyday LIFE is a big risk, and we must be obedient to the voice of the spirit of God, even if it leads us to death.

Philippine Vice President Jejomar Binay took to Twitter to unabashedly state his discontent with Duterte.

Many users have tweeted about the mayor, tagging their tweets with #RapeIsNotAJoke. One user tweeted, When we make light of rape, were empowering rapists and imply to victims that their situation shouldnt be taken seriously. Another tweeted, I want a candidate who understands the responsibilities and accountabilities of the public office he/she is running for.

Though the video shows the crowd laughing when he says this, Duterte denies allegations that it was said in jest. Instead, he admitted to having said it in 1989 and claims he was merely retelling the story at the rally.

It was not a joke, he said, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. I said it in a narrative. I wasnt smiling.

I said it in the heat of anger, Duterte said. Im sorry in general. Im sorry to the Filipino people, its my style, its my mouth, I said it in anger  listen to the story behind it.

He once made a tourist swallow a cigarette butt for refusing to follow the citys smoking ban, Rappler reported. He has described himself unapologetically as a womanizer, admitting to currently having three girlfriends and a common-law wife, according to CNN Philippines. He has pledged to execute 100,000 criminals and feed them to the fish in the Manila Bay, Kicker Daily News reported.

 Philippines presidential hopeful vows to take on China

Still, hes a front-runner.

Duterte poses a grave challenge to the countrys fragile democratic institutions, said two scholars writing earlier this month in the East Asia Forum. He has promised to clean up the country within six months and has threatened to abolish Congress or tame the courts if they try to stand in his way. The rapid rise of voter support for Duterte, despite his late entry into the race, highlights the pent-up anger among the lower-middle class at the deterioration of public order and concerns about growing drug abuse.

Dutertes neo-authoritarian style, alongside anti-Imperial Manila sentiments, has fueled his popularity, particularly in his birthplace of southern Mindanao. Duterte does not deny his poor human rights record  instead he brags about extrajudicial killings that he claims were necessary to pacify Davao, the scholars, Julio C. Teehankee of De La Salle University and Mark R. Thompson, of the City University of Hong Kong, wrote. Along with his bombastic style and rough language  which is typical of a many local politicians but unusual in national politics  this cavalier attitude makes him a kind of Philippine version of Donald Trump.

He projects the look of somebody who could actually deliver on what people need, has that ability to connect with a certain group of the electorate, Jeremy Gatdula, a professor at the University of Asia and the Pacifics School of Law and Governance, told ABS-CBN News.

Whether that will be enough to elect him on May 9 remains uncertain, but his joke has stirred the ire of many Twitter users.

Copyright: Washington Post
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Two pieces of plane debris found on the coast of Mozambique are "almost certainly" from missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370, investigators have said.

The two pieces of wreckage, one found on 27 December 2015 and the other found 135 miles away on 27 February this year, were confirmed to have come from the missing plane after a long investigation from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB).

An ATSB report said: "Part No. 1 was a flap track fairing segment, almost certainly from the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft, registered 9M-MRO."

One of the pieces of debris found on a beach in Mozambique (ATSB/BLAINE GIBSON/EPA)

Investigators were similarly sure the second part was a "horizontal stabiliser panel segment" from the missing plane.

Recommended Read more New piece of possible MH370 debris found on Mauritius to be examined

Two more pieces of debris, including a suspected engine part and piece of cabin, have arrived in Canberra for further testing.

There is only one missing Boeing 777 in the world, so if a piece of wreckage is found which comes from this type of aircraft, investigators can be confident it is a piece of MH370.

However, the ATSB was also able to match serial numbers found on the wreckage with parts known to have belonged to the plane.

MH370 debris - in pictures Show all 7 1 /7 MH370 debris - in pictures MH370 debris - in pictures MH370 debris French police officers carry a piece of debris from a plane in Saint-Andre, Reunion Island. AP MH370 debris - in pictures MH370 debris Police carry a piece of debris from an unidentified aircraft found in the coastal area of Saint-Andre de la Reunion, in the east of the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion AFP PHOTO / YANNICK PITOUYANNICK PITOU/AFP/Getty Images MH370 debris - in pictures MH370 debris The plane part is being taken to France for further investigation Reuters MH370 debris - in pictures MH370 debris French gendarmes and police inspect a large piece of plane debris which was found on the beach in Saint-Andre, on the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion Reuters MH370 debris - in pictures MH370 debris French gendarmes and police inspect a large piece of plane debris which was found on the beach in Saint-Andre, on the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion Reuters MH370 debris - in pictures MH370 debris Johnny Begue, a member of a local shore cleaning association, in Saint-Andre, French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion, holds the remain of a suitcase found the day before on the same site Getty Images MH370 debris - in pictures MH370 debris Searches continued on Friday for other possible MH370 debris along beaches on the island of Reunion AP

The discovery of these remnants, made by a South African holidaymaker and an American blogger, came after a flaperon from the missing plane's wing was found on the shores of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean.

The wreckage appeared to have ended up on the island after floating thousands of miles through the ocean from the plane's suspected crash site.

227 passengers and 12 crew members are presumed to have died following the plane's disappearance on 8 March 2014.

The incident sparked a huge multinational search effort, but nothing was found until the flaperon washed up on Reunion five months later.

Searches and investigations of debris are still ongoing. The plane's transponder, which communicates with ground control, was switched off before it veered off course, but the true reasons for the disappearance are still not known.
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Isis and Italys mafia have been working together to smuggle cannabis from North Africa into Europe, Italys anti-terrorism chief has said.

Franco Roberti, Italys national anti-mafia and anti-terrorism head said police had found evidence that Italian organised crime and suspected terrorists were trafficking hashish together, the compressed form of cannabis resin, according to ongoing investigations.

Mr Roberti, 68, said the route for smuggling the hash runs from Casablanca and Morocco through Algeria, and Tunisia to Trobuck in eastern Libya.

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Speaking to Reuters, Mr Roberti said Isis controlled the trafficking route involving Libya, and also controlled the coast along the Gulf of Sirte, an area which holds a Mediterranean seaside city that is currently Isiss strongest base outside of Syria and Iraq.

Despite cannabis use being against Sharia Law, Isis reportedly makes million from the deal. A report by IHS published on Monday suggests that just under seven per cent of Isiss overall funding comes from the narcotics trade. For the mafia, the illegal drugs trade earns more than 32bn a year, according to the United Nations Office on Narcotics and Crime.

Inside Isis secret tunnels Show all 7 1 /7 Inside Isis secret tunnels Inside Isis secret tunnels Network of underground tunnels was discovered by Kurdish forces after they regained the town of Sinjar in Iraq Inside Isis secret tunnels A member of the Peshmerga forces inspects a tunnel used by Isis militants in the town of Sinjar, Iraq Reuters Inside Isis secret tunnels An entrance to the tunnel used by Islamic State militants is seen in the town of Sinjar, Iraq Inside Isis secret tunnels The secret tunnels allowed militants to freely move underground Inside Isis secret tunnels The tunnels appear to be wired with electricity Inside Isis secret tunnels Some of the tunnels are 30 feet deep Inside Isis secret tunnels Concerns remain that parts of the tunnels are rigged with explosives

He said Isis and traditional mafias, such as the Cosa Nostra from Sicily, commit similar crimes: International terrorism finances itself with criminal activities that are typical of the mafia, like drug trafficking, smuggling commercial goods, smuggling oil, smuggling archaeological relics and art, kidnapping for ransom, and extortion.

But the anti-terrorism chief, whose book The Opposite of Fear outlines the similarities between Isis and the mafia, believes decriminalising cannabis would be a strong weapon against the traffickers and terrorists.

Decriminalisation or even legalisation would definitely be a weapon against traffickers, among whom there could be terrorists who make money off it, he said.

Additional reporting by Reuters
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Isis is plotting to carry out biological and nuclear attacks on Europe, EU and Nato chiefs have warned.

There is a "justified concern" that the terror group are trying to obtain substances that could be used to make biological, chemical and radiological (CBRN) weapons.

Speaking at the Security and Counter Terror Expo in London, the deputy head of counter terrorism for the European Commission, Jorge Berto Silva, said Isis had shown an interest in obtaining the materials.

In pictures: The rise of Isis Show all 74 1 /74 In pictures: The rise of Isis In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Fighters of the Islamic State wave the group's flag from a damaged display of a government fighter jet following the battle for the Tabqa air base, in Raqqa, Syria AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Fighters from Islamic State group sit on their tank during a parade in Raqqa, Syria AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Fighters from the Islamic State group pray at the Tabqa air base after capturing it from the Syrian government in Raqqa, Syria AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Fighters from extremist Islamic State group parade in Raqqa, Syria AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis kidnapping A video uploaded to social networks shows men in underwear being marched barefoot along a desert road before being allegedly executed by Isis Getty Images In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis kidnapping Haruna Yukawa after his capture by Isis In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis kidnapping Khalinda Sharaf Ajour, a Yazidi, says two of her daughters were captured by Isis militants Washington Post In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Spokesperson for Isis Vice News via Youtube In pictures: The rise of Isis A pro-Isis leaflet A pro-Isis leaflet handed out on Oxford Street In London Ghaffar Hussain In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Isis Jihadists burn their passports In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis controls Syrian Aid A man collecting aid administered by Isis in Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis controls Syrian Aid A woman collecting aid administered by Isis in Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis controls Syrian Aid Local civilians queue for aid administered by Isis. Since it declared a caliphate the group has increasingly been delivering services such as healthcare, and distributing aid and free fuel In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces detain men suspected of being militants of the Isis group in Diyala province In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Mourners carry the coffin of a Shi'ite volunteer from the brigades of peace, who joined the Iraqi army and was killed during clashes with militants of the Isis group in Samarra, during his funeral in Najaf In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees An Iraqi Shiite Turkmen family fleeing the violence in the Iraqi city of Tal Afar, west of Mosul, arrives at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Arbil, in Iraq's Kurdistan region In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi A photograph made from a video by the jihadist affiliated group Furqan Media via their twitter account allegedly showing Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivering a sermon during Friday prayers at a mosque in Mosul. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared an Islamist caliphate in the territory under the group's control in Iraq and Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Islamic extremists destroying mosques in Iraq Shiite's Al-Qubba Husseiniya mosque explodes in Mosul In pictures: The rise of Isis Islamic extremists destroying mosques in Iraq Smoke and debris go up in the air as Shiite's Al-Qubba Husseiniya mosque explodes in Mosul. Images posted online show that Islamic extremists have destroyed at least 10 ancient shrines and Shiite mosques in territory - the city of Mosul and the town of Tal Afar - they have seized in northern Iraq in recent weeks In pictures: The rise of Isis Islamic extremists destroying mosques in Iraq A bulldozer destroys Sunni's Ahmed al-Rifai shrine and tomb in Mahlabiya district outside of Tal Afar In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces celebrate after clashes with followers of Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi, in front of his home in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces arrest a follower of Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi after clashes with his followers in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces arrest a follower of Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi at his home after clashes with his followers in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces arrest a follower of Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi after clashes with his followers in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis A vehicle burns in front of a home of a follower of Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi after clashes with his followers in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees An Iraqi woman holds her exhausted son as over 1000 Iraqis who have fled fighting in and around the city of Mosul and Tal Afar wait at a Kurdish checkpoint in the hopes of entering a temporary displacement camp in Khazair In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees Displaced Iraqi women hold pots as they queue to receive food during the first day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, at an encampment for displaced Iraqis who fled from Mosul and other towns, in the Khazer area outside Irbil, north Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria A militant Islamist fighter waving a flag, cheers as he takes part in a military parade along the streets of Syria's northern Raqqa. The fighters held the parade to celebrate their declaration of an Islamic "caliphate" after the group captured territory in neighbouring Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Isis fighters wave flags as they take part in a military parade along the streets of Syria's northern Raqqa province Reuters In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Isis fighters travel in a vehicle as they take part in a military parade along the streets of Syria's northern Raqqa province In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Fighters from the Isis group during a parade with a missile in Raqqa, Syria. Militants from an al-Qaida splinter group held a military parade in their stronghold in northeastern Syria, displaying U.S.-made Humvees, heavy machine guns, and missiles captured from the Iraqi army for the first time since taking over large parts of the Iraq-Syria border In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Isis fighters during a parade in Raqqa, Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Fighters from the Isis group during a parade in Raqqa, Syria. Militants from the splinter group held a military parade in their stronghold in northeastern Syria, displaying U.S.-made Humvees, heavy machine guns, and missiles captured from the Iraqi army for the first time since taking over large parts of the Iraq-Syria border In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Isis fighters hold a military parade in their stronghold in northeastern Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Isis fighters during a parade in Raqqa, Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria A member loyal to the Isis waves an Isis flag in Raqqa In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi anti-government gunmen from Sunni tribes in the western Anbar province march during a protest in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The United Nations warned that Iraq is at a "crossroads" and appealed for restraint, as a bloody four-day wave of violence killed 195 people. The violence is the deadliest so far linked to demonstrations that broke out in Sunni areas of the Shiite-majority country more than four months ago, raising fears of a return to all-out sectarian conflict In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces hold up a flag of the Isis group they captured during an operation to regain control of Dallah Abbas north of Baqouba, the capital of Iraq's Diyala province, 35 miles (60 kilometers) northeast of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Iraq Isis fighters parade in the northern city of Mosul In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Volunteers, who have joined the Iraqi army to fight against the predominantly Sunni militants from the radical Isis group, demonstrate their skills during a graduation ceremony after completing their field training in Najaf In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Kurdish Peshmerga troops fire a cannon during clashes with militants of the Isis group in Jalawla, Diyala province In pictures: The rise of Isis Lieutenant General Qassem Atta speaks during a press conference Iraqi Prime Minister's security spokesman, Lieutenant General Qassem Atta speaks during a press conference about the latest military development in Iraq, in the capital Baghdad. Iraqi forces pressed a campaign to retake militant-held Tikrit, clashing with jihadist-led Sunni militants nearby and pounding positions inside the city with air strikes in their biggest counter-offensive so far In pictures: The rise of Isis A police station building destroyed by Isis fighters An exterior view of a police station building destroyed by gunmen in Mosul city, northern Iraq. Iraq's new parliament is expected to convene to start the process of setting up a new government, despite deepening political rifts and an ongoing Islamist-led insurgency. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani issued a decree inviting the new House of Representatives to meet and form a new government In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Iraq Smoke billows from an area controlled by the Isis between the Iraqi towns of Naojul and Tuz Khurmatu, both located north of the capital Baghdad, as Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces take part in an operation to repel the Sunni militants In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees An elderly Iraqi woman is helped into a temporary displacement camp for Iraqis caught-up in the fighting in and around the city of Mosul in Khazair In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees An Iraqi Christian woman fleeing the violence in the village of Qaraqush, about 30 kms east of the northern province of Nineveh, cries upon her arrival at a community center in the Kurdish city of Arbil in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees An Iraqi woman, who fled with her family from the northern city of Mosul, prays with a copy of the Quran AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Iraq The body of an Isis militant killed during clashes with Iraqi security forces on the outskirts of the city of Samarra Reuters In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi civilians inspect the damage at a market after an air strike by the Iraqi army in central Mosul EPA In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Members of the Al-Abbas brigades, who volunteered to protect the Shiite Muslim holy sites in Karbala against Sunni militants fighting the Baghdad government, parade in the streets of the city AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Shia tribesmen gather in Baghdad to take up arms against Sunni insurgents marching on the capital. Thousands have volunteered to bolster defences AFP/Getty In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis A van carrying volunteers joining Iraqi security forces against Jihadist militants. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced the Iraqi government would arm and equip civilians who volunteered to fight AFP/Getty In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Fighters of the Isis group parade in a commandeered Iraqi security forces armored vehicle down a main road at the northern city of Mosul In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq An Islamist fighter, identified as Abu Muthanna al-Yemeni from Britain (R), speaks in this still image taken undated video shot at an unknown location and uploaded to a social media website. Five Islamist fighters identified as Australian and British nationals have called on Muslims to join the wars in Syria and Iraq, in the new video released by the Isis In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Al-Qaida inspired militants stand with captured Iraqi Army Humvee at a checkpoint belonging to Iraqi Army outside Beiji refinery some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Baghdad. The fighting at Beiji comes as Iraq has asked the U.S. for airstrikes targeting the militants from the Isis group. While U.S. President Barack Obama has not fully ruled out the possibility of launching airstrikes, such action is not imminent in part because intelligence agencies have been unable to identify clear targets on the ground, officials said In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants attacked Iraq's main oil refinein Baiji as they pressed an offensive that has seen them capture swathes of territory, a manager and a refinery employee said In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants from the Isis group parading with their weapons in the northern city of Baiji in the in Salaheddin province In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq A smoke rises after an attack by Isis militants on the country's largest oil refinery in Beiji, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of the capital, Baghdad. Iraqi security forces battled insurgents targeting the country's main oil refinery and said they regained partial control of a city near the Syrian border, trying to blunt an offensive by Sunni militants who diplomats fear may have also seized some 100 foreign workers In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants of the Isis group stand next to captured vehicles left behind by Iraqi security forces at an unknown location in the Salaheddin province. For militant groups, the fight over public perception can be even more important than actual combat, turning military losses into propaganda victories and battlefield successes into powerful tools to build support for the cause In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq An injured fighter (C) from the Isis group after a battle with Iraqi soldiers at an undisclosed location near the border between Syria and Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Fighters from the Isis aiming at advancing Iraqi troops at an undisclosed location near the border between Syria and Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Fighters from the Isis group taking position at an undisclosed location near the border between Syria and Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Fighters from the Isis group inspecting vehicles of the Iraqi army after they were seized at an undisclosed location near the border between Syria and Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq One Iraqi captive, a corporal, is reluctant to say the slogan, and has to be shouted at repeatedly before he obeys Sky News In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Iraqi captives held by the extremists Sky News In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Iraqi captives held by the extremists Sky News In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants of the Isis group force captured Iraqi security forces members to the transport In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants of the Isis group transporting dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members to an unknown location in the Salaheddin province ahead of executing them In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq A major offensive spearheaded by Isis but also involving supporters of executed dictator Saddam Hussein has overrun all of one province and chunks of three others In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants of the Isis group executing dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members at an unknown location in the Salaheddin province In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Isis militants taking position at a Iraqi border post on the Syrian-Iraqi border between the Iraqi Nineveh province and the Syrian town of Al-Hasakah In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Isis rebels show their flag after seizing an army post AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Isis militants waving an Islamist flag after the seizure of an Iraqi army checkpoint in Salahuddin Getty Images In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Demonstrators chant slogans as they carry al-Qaida flags in front of the provincial government headquarters in Mosul, 225 miles (360 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad. In the week since it captured Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, a Muslim extremist group has tried to win over residents and has stopped short of widely enforcing its strict brand of Islamic law, residents say. Churches remain unharmed and street cleaners are back at work

He said: "With CBRN, there is a justified concern".

Dr Jamie Shea, deputy assistant secretary general for emerging security threats at Nato, added: "We know terrorists are trying to acquire these substances".

He also warned that Isis may be splintering into two factions - one that was concerned with protecting the so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria and the other which is focused on setting up terror cells to attack Europe.

He said the threat was likely to get worse before it gets better, the Telegraph reported.

It comes after Belgian authorities said they believe more Isis militants have been sent to Europe following the Brussels attacks last month.

A spokesman for the country's crisis centre told Sky News: "There are indications that Islamic State (Isis) has sent fighters to Europe and Belgium, the threat level which is currently at three will not go down."

That threat level means an attack is possible and likely.

Following the Brussels attacks, Isis asked its supporters what colours it should 'light up the Eiffel Tower with' next (AP)

German newspaper, Bild, said that Italian intelligence agencies had discovered Isis terrorists were planning to target European beach resorts in a similar fashion to the gun attack on Sousse in Tunisia last June which killed 38 people.

On Tuesday, Spanish police announced they had arrested a Moroccan man on the island resort of Palma de Mallorca on suspicion of recruiting fighters for Isis.

London's ability to cope with a major terror attack has also been called into question by the Labour candidate for London Mayor, Sadiq Khan.

At a BBC hustings on Monday, he said he needed to be "reassured" that the emergency and security services were ready to cope with a "Mumbai-style" attack on the city's streets.

In 2008, 160 people were killed over the course of four days in Mumbai by a members of a Pakistani militant group.

Following the attacks on Brussels last month, Isis celebrated by launching an online poll about which country's colours they should "light up the Eiffel tower with" next - and the UK came top of the list.
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A suspected Isis recruiter accused of inciting terror attacks in Europe has been arrested in Mallorca.

The 26-year-old Moroccan man was arrested in a counter-terror operation on the Spanish island, which is popular with British holidaymakers.

Police said the suspect was arrested on Tuesday at his home in the city of Palma de Mallorca.

A policeman with a resident in the district in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 19 April 2016, where a man was detained (EPA)

A spokesperson for the Spanish interior ministry said the detainee posed a clear threat to national security and had used the internet to target young potential Isis recruits online, help send fighters abroad and encourage attacks in Spain and elsewhere in Europe.

He was allegedly in contact with militants living in the so-called Islamic State in Syria, who facilitated the possible arrival of new fighters and provided instruction on terror attacks.

Neighbours insulted the man as he was led away by police in the Son Gotleu district, with some shouting at him to show your face as he covered it with a jumper, the Diario de Mallorca newspaper reported.

Spain has detained 19 people with reported connections to Islamist militants since the start of the year, local media reported.

Timeline: The emergence of Isis Show all 40 1 /40 Timeline: The emergence of Isis Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2000 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (pictured here) forms an al-Qaeda splinter group in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Iraq. Its brutality from the beginning alienates Iraqis and many al-Qaeda leaders. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2006 Al-Zarqawi is killed in a U.S. strike. Al-Zarqawis successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, announces the creation of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI). Reuters Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2009 Still al-Qaeda-linked ISI claims responsibility for suicide bombings that killed 155 in Baghdad, as well as attacks in August and October killing 240, as President Obama announces troop withdrawal from Iraq in March. Getty Images Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2010 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi becomes head of ISI, at lowest ebb of Islamist militancy in Iraq, which sees last U.S. combat brigade depart. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2012 In Syria, protests (pictured here starting in Daree) have morphed into what president Assad labelled a real war with emergence of a coalition of forces opposed to Assads regime. Syria group Jabhat al-Nusra are among rebel groups who refuse to join, denouncing it as a conspiracy. Bombings targeting Shia areas, killing more than 500 people, spark fears of new sectarian conflict. Sunni Muslims stage protests across country against what they see as increasingly marginalisation by Shia-led government. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2013 Al-Baghdadi renames ISI as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or Isis, as the group absorbs Syrian al-Nusra, gaining a foothold in Syria. In response, al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri (Bin Ladens successor) concerned about Isis expansion orders that Isis be dissolved and ISI operations should be confined to Iraq. This order is rejected by al-Baghdadi. AFP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - January Isis fighters capture the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, giving them base to launch slew of attacks further south. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - June Isis declares itself the Caliphate, calling itself Islamic State (IS). The group captures Mosul, Iraqs second largest city; Tal Afar, just 93 miles from Syrian border; and the central Iraqi city of Tikrit. These advances sent shockwaves around the world. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - June Around the same time Isis releases a video calling for western Muslims to join the Caliphate and fight, prompting new evaluations of extremists groups social media understanding. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - June Isis take Baiji oil fields in Iraq - giving them access to huge amounts of possible revenue. EPA Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - August James Foley is executed by the group as concerns grow for second American prisoner, fellow reporter Steven Sotloff. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - August Obama authorises U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, helping to stall Isis along with action by Kurdish forces following the deaths of hundreds of Yazidi people on Mount Sinjar. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - September Isis release video showing Steven Sotloffs murder prompting Western speculation his executioner is same man who killed Mr Foley. EPA Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - September Obama tells us that America will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country EPA Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - September Isis release a video appearing to show David Haines, who was captured by militants in Syria in 2013, wearing an orange jumpsuit and kneeling in the desert while he reads a pre-prepared script. It later shows what appears to be the aid worker's body. Rex Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - September Peshmerga fighters scrabble to hold positions in the Diyala province (a gateway to Baghdad) as Isis fighters continue to advance on Iraqi capital. AFP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - October Aid worker Alan Henning is killed. Self-imposed media blackout refuses to show images of him in final moments, instead focuses upon humanitarian care. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - October Isis raise their flag in Kobani, which had been strongly defended by Kurdish troops. The victory goes against hopeful western analysis Isis had overextended itself, while alienating much of the Muslim population through the murder of Henning. Victory causes fresh waves of Kurdish refugees arriving in Turkey. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - November American hostage, who embarced values of Islam, Peter Kassig and 14 Syrian soldiers are shown meeting the same fate as other captives. But intelligence agencies will be poring over the apparently significant discrepancies between this and previous films. Seramedig.org.uk Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - February Isis has released a video revealing the murder by burning to death of a Jordanian pilot held by the group since the end of December 2014. Reuters Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - February Isis militants have released videos which appear to show the beheading of Japanese hostages Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - February American aid worker, Kayla Mueller was the last American hostage known to be held by Isis. She died, according to her captors, in an airstrike by the Jordanian air force on the city of Raqqa in Syria, though US authorities disputed this. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - February Isis militants have posted a gruesome video online in which they force 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian hostages to kneel on a beach in Libya before beheading them. Egypt vowed to avenge the beheading and launched air strikes on Isis positions. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - February The British Isis militant suspected of appearing in videos showing the beheading of Western hostages has been named in reports as Mohammed Emwazi from London. Rex Features Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - March Isis triple suicide attack has killed more than 100 worshippers and hundreds of others were injured after the group members targeted two mosques in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - April Iraqi forces have claimed victory over Isis in battle for Tikrit and raised the flag in the city. EPA/STR Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - April Isis has claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan that killed at least 35 people queuing to collect their wages and injured 100 more. EPA Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - April Isis media arm released a 29-minute video purporting to show militants executing Ethiopian Christians captives. The footage bore the extremist groups al-Furqan media logo and showed the destruction of churches and desecration of religious symbols. A masked fighter made a statement threatening Christians who did not convert to Islam or pay a special tax. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Isis has been "incapacitated" by a spinal injuries sustained in a US air strike in Iraq. He is being treated in a hideout by two doctors from Isis stronghold of Mosul who are said to be "strong ideological supporters of the group". Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Isis has also claimed responsibility for killing 300 of Yazidi captives, including women, children and elderly people in Iraq AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Isis attack on Prophet Mohamed cartoon contest in Texas was its first action on US soil. Two gunmen were shot and killed after launching the attack at the exhibition. Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi have been named as the attackers at the Curtis Culwell Centre arena in Garland. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Isiss deputy leader, Abu Alaa Afri, a former physics teacher who was thought to have taken charge of the deadly terrorist group, has been killed in a US-led coalition airstrike. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May US special forces have killed a senior Isis leader named as Abu Sayyaf in an operation aiming to capture him and his wife in Syria. Getty Images Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Iran-backed militias are sent to Ramadi by the Iraqi government to fight Isis militants who completed their capture of the city. Government soldiers and civilians were reportedly massacred by extremists as they took control and the army fled. Charred bodies were left littering the city streets as troops clung on to trucks speeding away from the city. Ramadi is the latest government stronghold to fall to the so-called Islamic State, despite air strikes by a US-led international coalition aiming to stop its advance in Iraq and Syria. AFP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Isis rounded up civilians trapped in Palmyra and forced them to watch 20 people being executed in the historic citys ancient amphitheatre. The Unesco World Heritage site was overrun by militants, threatening the future of 2,000 year-old monuments and ruins. Thousands of Palmyras residents fled but many are still living within the city walls, while the UN human rights office in Geneva said it had received reports of Syrian government forces preventing people from leaving until they retreated from the city. Getty Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May A group of Isis-affiliated fighters have captured a key airport in central Libya. The militants took control of the al-Qardabiya airbase in Sirte after a local militia tasked with defending the facility withdrew from their positions. Affiliates of Isis, already control large parts of Sirte, the birthplace of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and a former stronghold of his supporters. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - June The US Air Force has destroyed an Isis stronghold after an extremist let slip their location on social media. According the Air Force Times, General Herbert "Hawk" Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command, said that Airmen at Hulburt Field, Florida, used images shared by jihadists to track the location of their headquarters before destroying it in an airstrike. Reuters Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - June Kurdish forces captured a key military base in a significant victory in Raqqa as well as town of Tell Abyad. YPG fighters, backed by US-led airstrikes and other rebels, consolidated their gains, when they seized the key town on the Syria-Turkey border. They are now just 30 miles to the north of Raqqa and have cut off a major supply route deep inside Isis-held territory. Ahmet Silk/Getty Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - June Isis has released gruesome footage claiming to show the murder of more than a dozen men by drowning, decapitation and using a rocket-propelled grenade as it seeks to boost morale among its fanatical supporters. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - June Isis has begun carrying out its threat to destroy structures in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, blowing up at least two monuments at the Unesco-protected site as Syrian government troops made advances on the Islamists positions. AFP

The operation came amid reports that European beaches could be targeted by Isis in terror attacks similar to the hotel massacre in Sousse, Tunisia, last year.

Bild reported that Italian intelligence agencies had warned their German counterparts that militants posing as vendors could carry out atrocities using machine guns and bombs buried in the sand.

The report could not be independently verified.

Travel advice by the UKs Foreign and Commonwealth Office states that there is a heightened threat of terrorist attack globally against UK interests and British nationals, from groups or individuals motivated by the conflict in Iraq and Syria.

Additional reporting by AP
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Omaima Hoshan first became concerned when her classmates were started leaving school as young as 12-years-old.

I started hearing about girls as young as 12 or 13 getting married. They would come to the school to say goodbye. I remember thinking they were making a big mistake, even before I knew the facts, she recalls.

Omaima, a refugee herself at Jordans Zaatari camp after fleeing Syria in 2012, felt compelled to take action when one of those girls was her best friend.

We were always together, and she was one of the best students in our class. She didnt want to get married, but her parents thought it was the best option for her. Omaima would never see her again.

Since that day the 15-year-old refugee has been campaigning against child marriage, encouraging her friends and classmates to share the risks of the practice with their parents.

As an outreach volunteer, she also hosts drawing and acting workshops in the hopes of communicating better with those who may intend to marry while underage. Several have already abandoned their plans to marry young.

The number of marriages involving someone below the age of 18 in Syria stood at 13% before the war. This figure has risen to 32% among Syrian refugees living in Jordan.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees suggests the cause of this rise lies in families struggle to cope with the challenges of life inside refugee camps.

Refugee crisis - in pictures Show all 27 1 /27 Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugee crisis - in pictures A child looks through the fence at the Moria detention camp for migrants and refugees at the island of Lesbos on May 24, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Ahmad Zarour, 32, from Syria, reacts after his rescue by MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station) while attempting to reach the Greek island of Agathonisi, Dodecanese, southeastern Agean Sea Refugee crisis - in pictures Syrian migrants holding life vests gather onto a pebble beach in the Yesil liman district of Canakkale, northwestern Turkey, after being stopped by Turkish police in their attempt to reach the Greek island of Lesbos on 29 January 2016. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees flash the 'V for victory' sign during a demonstration as they block the Greek-Macedonian border Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants have been braving sub zero temperatures as they cross the border from Macedonia into Serbia. Refugee crisis - in pictures A sinking boat is seen behind a Turkish gendarme off the coast of Canakkale's Bademli district on January 30, 2016. At least 33 migrants drowned on January 30 when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A general view of a shelter for migrants inside a hangar of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Germany Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees protest behind a fence against restrictions limiting passage at the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Since last week, Macedonia has restricted passage to northern Europe to only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities are deemed economic migrants and told to turn back. Macedonia has finished building a fence on its frontier with Greece becoming the latest country in Europe to build a border barrier aimed at checking the flow of refugees Refugee crisis - in pictures A father and his child wait after being caught by Turkish gendarme on 27 January 2016 at Canakkale's Kucukkuyu district Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants make hand signals as they arrive into the southern Spanish port of Malaga on 27 January, 2016 after an inflatable boat carrying 55 Africans, seven of them women and six chidren, was rescued by the Spanish coast guard off the Spanish coast. Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee holds two children as dozens arrive on an overcrowded boat on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures A child, covered by emergency blankets, reacts as she arrives, with other refugees and migrants, on the Greek island of Lesbos, At least five migrants including three children, died after four boats sank between Turkey and Greece, as rescue workers searched the sea for dozens more, the Greek coastguard said Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants wait under outside the Moria registration camp on the Lesbos. Over 400,000 people have landed on Greek islands from neighbouring Turkey since the beginning of the year Refugee crisis - in pictures The bodies of Christian refugees are buried separately from Muslim refugees at the Agios Panteleimonas cemetery in Mytilene, Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures Macedonian police officers control a crowd of refugees as they prepare to enter a camp after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee tries to force the entry to a camp as Macedonian police officers control a crowd after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees are seen aboard a Turkish fishing boat as they arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing a part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast to Lesbos Reuters Refugee crisis - in pictures An elderly woman sings a lullaby to baby on a beach after arriving with other refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A man collapses as refugees make land from an overloaded rubber dinghy after crossing the Aegean see from Turkey, at the island of Lesbos EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures A girl reacts as refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees make a show of hands as they queue after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures People help a wheelchair user board a train with others, heading towards Serbia, at the transit camp for refugees near the southern Macedonian town of Gevgelija AP Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees board a train, after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Macedonia is a key transit country in the Balkans migration route into the EU, with thousands of asylum seekers - many of them from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia - entering the country every day Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures An aerial picture shows the "New Jungle" refugee camp where some 3,500 people live while they attempt to enter Britain, near the port of Calais, northern France Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A Syrian girl reacts as she helped by a volunteer upon her arrival from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, after having crossed the Aegean Sea EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Beds ready for use for migrants and refugees are prepared at a processing center on January 27, 2016 in Passau, Germany. The flow of migrants arriving in Passau has dropped to between 500 and 1,000 per day, down significantly from last November, when in the same region up to 6,000 migrants were arriving daily.

While there is a cultural tradition of early marriage in some parts of Syria, including rural areas of Daraa province, where the majority of refugees in Zaatari are from, various factors have led to its increased prevalence among Syrian refugees in Jordan.

These include the more challenging living conditions, and the precarious economic situation of some families, which encourage them to marry off their daughters to ease their financial responsibilities.

In Jordan it is illegal to marry under the age of 18, however Sharia judges can validate marriages for girls from the age of 15, provided the childs best interests are taken into account according to the UNHCR. Illegal marriages conducted by local sheikhs also take place however, involving girls aged 14 or even younger.

Omaima still hopes to marry in the future. But only on my terms, she says. After Ive finished my education and been to university.
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A man has been convicted of burning a Palestinian teenager to death after his plea of insanity was thrown out by an Israeli court.

Yosef Haim Ben David faces life in prison for murdering 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July 2014.

A Jerusalem district court ruled that he and two teenagers, who were previously convicted for the killing, kidnapped Abu Khdeir and set him alight in revenge for the murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank.

Mohammed Abu Khdeir was mudered in revenge for the killing of three Israeli teenagers (AFP)

Their deaths and the ensuing violence set off the chain of events leading to that summers 50-day Gaza War.

Ben Davids lawyers had launched a last-minute insanity plea but the court found the 30-year-old was responsible for his actions on Tuesday.

Judges determined that he murdered Abu Khdeir for nationalistic motives  a term often used to describe hate crimes committed against Palestinians  the Times of Israel reported.

The court has found that at the time he committed the offence, the accused was not psychotic, fully understood the facts, was responsible for his actions, had no difficulty in understanding reality and had the capacity to prevent the crime, a spokesperson for Israels ministry of justice said, alleging that Ben David had also attempted to kidnap an eight-year-old Palestinian boy on a separate occasion.

Ben David, who called himself the messiah at one court hearing, is to be sentenced next month and could face life in prison.

Video: CCTV footage of the suspects

Abu Khdeir's father, Hussein Abu Khdeir, called for life imprisonment and argued that Israeli authorities should destroy the murderers house like they do for all other terrorists.

Two teenagers involved in the killing were sentenced in February in Jerusalem District Court but cannot be named because of reporting restrictions.

A 17-year-old boy was jailed for life and a 16-year-old received a 21-year sentence.

Abu Khdeir was waiting for friends outside a mosque during morning prayers in Shuafat, East Jerusalem, when he was abducted on 2 July 2014.

Surveillance footage showed him being dragged into a car that drove into Jerusalem Forest, where his burned body was discovered just an hour later.

Gaza one year on: The aftermath of a tragedy Show all 7 1 /7 Gaza one year on: The aftermath of a tragedy Gaza one year on: The aftermath of a tragedy 273877.bin EPA Gaza one year on: The aftermath of a tragedy 273878.bin HEIDI LEVINE Gaza one year on: The aftermath of a tragedy 273879.bin HEIDI LEVINE Gaza one year on: The aftermath of a tragedy 273880.bin Amal Samouni, aged 10, holds photos of her father and brother, both killed by Israeli troops HEIDI LEVINE Gaza one year on: The aftermath of a tragedy 273881.bin Zeinat Samouni leans against a wall decorated with pictures of her husband Atiya and four-year-old son Ahmad, killed when Israeli troops stormed their home HEIDI LEVINE Gaza one year on: The aftermath of a tragedy 273882.bin HEIDI LEVINE Gaza one year on: The aftermath of a tragedy 273883.bin HEIDI LEVINE

An autopsy showed he had soot in his lungs, indicating he had been burned alive after being beaten and forced to swallow petrol by his attackers.

The defendants confessed to carrying out the murder as a brutal act of revenge for the killing of three Jewish teenagers in the West Bank, who had been buried the previous day.

Ben David called out the names of murdered Israelis, including Eyal Yifrah and Naftali Fraenkel as the boys beat Abu Khdeir and hit him in the head with a metal bar, the court heard.

The Israeli Defence Ministry recognized Abu Khdeir as a victim of hostile action, granting his family the same compensation rights as the victims of Palestinian attacks, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the murder despicable.

Additional reporting by AP
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A Government website has been forced to remove a set of graduate job vacancies which did not meet its own recent National Living Wage (NLW) requirements.

Careers advice site, Graduate Fog, reports that Graduate Talent Pool pulled the ads after it questioned the legality of the salaries offered.

The news has come just two weeks after the NLW was introduced for all workers aged 25 and over, having been set at 7.20 per hour. However, the changes were announced nine months prior to this which should have given the site time to set wages accordingly, reports Graduate Fog.

Recommended Read more George Osborne accused of stealing the living wage by money expert

One of the vacancies which was on the site before being deleted was for a digital/content marketing internship with a London-based agency. Graduate Fog reports it advertised an hourly wage of just 6.94.

A further two - for a graduate analyst internship and a graduate marketing and research internship with a recruitment agency - stated monthly pay of 1,100.

Although the number of hours was not specified for either for these two, granting they were the standard industry 37 hours a week, the hourly wage would have been just 6.84 per hour, again, below the legal NLW for those over 25.

Founder of Graduate Fog, Tanya de Grunwald, described how the Government's initiative appears to be in a state of confusion, and said this may have come about because the UK now has four minimum pay brackets that are tiered according to age.

If including the Apprentice Wage, the Living Wage (London), and the Living Wage (outside London), the total comes to seven, with many set to change again in October.

Questioning why it was left to the graduate careers site to point out such an obvious problem, the founder said: The fact that nobody at the Graduate Talent Pool was on it suggests a serious disconnect from the young people they are responsible for serving.

Weve already questioned the ethics of a tiered minimum wage system based on age - now weve shown there are serious practical problems with it too.

The Government must clarify what is and is not acceptable when UK employers advertise roles likely to be taken by young workers.

Graduate Talent Pool was launched by the Government in July 2009 to help new and recent graduates gain real work experience.

 Osborne 'stole the living wage'

A spokesperson for the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) - which is behind the Graduate Talent Pool initiative - told the Independent: As soon as we became aware of these adverts, they were taken down, and appropriate checks have now been put in place to ensure this does not happen again.

However, speaking to Graduate Fog, a spokesperson for the job site confirmed the vacancies had been taken down, amongst others.

The spokesperson added: We are currently re-evaluating any vacancies which might be affected by the Living Wage by taking down the adverts temporarily, contacting the original employers, finding out whether or not they are aware of the change in legislation and whether their pay brackets have been changed accordingly.

Just last month, the NLW was criticised by campaigners for penalising the youngest workers in society.

When comparing two people - one aged 24 and the other 25 - director of the Social Market Foundation, Emran Mian, said both are likely to have some work experience.

However, he added: The person aged 24 could be paid less under the new rules and it may be tempting for some employers to hire them for that reason.
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The National Union of Students (NUS) National Conference in Brighton has opened with keynote speakers declaring their support for the UK to remain in the EU.

In her opening remarks, NUS national president, Megan Dunn, said students must stand together for a progressive Europe, and added that the NUS would be campaigning for the union to remain over the coming months.

Ms Dunn described Brighton as a forward-thinking city that looks out to the continent, and said it was the perfect setting for the conference as the UK comes closer to the referendum in June.

She continued: The student voice is too powerful to be ignored in this referendum. We travel, work, and study abroad to a greater degree than previous generations, while, politically, we are involved in pushing for innovation in climate change, international development, and global justice.

The EU advances and protects the values that Britains young people believe in, and is a force for tolerance and respect.

The presidents comments have come just a day after the NUS published new research which showed students overwhelmingly (76 per cent) back the campaign to keep the UK in the EU.

Having polled 1,000 students, the NUS said other key findings showed how 14 per cent of students said they would vote to leave, with a further ten per cent remaining undecided.

Frances OGrady, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), described how Britains students are facing huge debts, expensive housing, and an uncertain future in an insecure labour market.

She told attendees: Its crucial they make their voices heard during the EU referendum, when jobs, growth, and rights at work will be at stake.

The latter may not matter much to the likes of Nigel Farage but, if youre working in a bar or supermarket on low pay while youre studying, those rights are worth voting for.

The three-day long conference has been hailed by Ms Dunn as being the worlds largest democratic student gathering.

The meeting will see more than 1,000 people - including some 800 delegates from the UKs students unions - come together to discuss, debate, and vote on motions and set NUS policy for the upcoming academic year.

 Young man on Question Time doesn't know how to vote in EU referendum

Attendees will also elect the political leadership of the organisation, including national president and vice presidents.

The national campaigner - which represents around seven million students from across the nation - said it would be launching its own We Want IN campaign.

The drive will aim to provide support for students unions across the country to campaign on the referendum, as well as provide policy briefings on why remaining in the EU matters to higher and further education.
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Q My wife and I have booked to go to Bruges on the Eurostar via Brussels for three nights later this month. What would your advice be considering the present situation? An alternative plan we have considered is leaving the train at Lille and travelling to Amiens instead - what would you advise?

Barry Piggott, Enfield

A Following the suicide bombings at Brussels airport and on the citys Metro four weeks ago today, in which 32 people were murdered, the Foreign Office warns: There is a high threat from terrorism. Attacks could be indiscriminate, including on public transport and transport hubs and in other places visited by foreigners.

While I understand the concerns of anyone booked to travel to Belgium, I urge you to continue with your plans. I believe the risks of harm to British tourists are extremely low, while the rewards of a trip to Bruges are high. This miraculously preserved medieval city is at its sparkling best in April and May, while the food and drink is as delicious as ever.

In terms of the practicalities of your journey: the bombings have led to vastly increased security and random searches, particularly at transport terminals. Brussels Midi station, where you change trains for Bruges, is the biggest rail hub in Belgium and has a heavy police presence. You wont need to hang around here: trains run every 15 minutes to Bruges, taking an hour or less.

However, if you prefer to avoid the capital entirely, then you can take a train from Lille to Bruges. From the Eurostar station, follow the signs for the 10-minute walk to Lille Flandres station. You will probably need to change trains at Kortrijk en route to Bruges. The journey takes about 90 minutes, so there is little time difference overall compared with the trip via Brussels. The extra ticket would be at your own expense.

Finally: while Amiens, as the home of Jules Verne, has a special place in the hearts of many travellers, I would certainly choose Bruges.

Every day, our travel correspondent Simon Calder tackles readers questions. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder
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Gathered on a rooftop, overlooking the small port of Malindi in Zanzibar, Tanzania, a group of Chinese businessmen observe the loading of a container onto a cargo ship. Watching through binoculars, the men clutch plane tickets to China for a rapid escape should the container be searched.

There is no search. Port staff are bribed, the contents are listed as sea shells and yet another cache of illegal ivory begins its long journey to the markets of Asia.

Read more about the upcoming Giants Club elephant summit

This scene was described to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) by an insider with links to a major ivory-smuggling syndicate operating out of Zanzibar. He claimed that in 2013 alone, 20 containers were sent to China, each containing between two and three tonnes of illegally poached ivory.

In recent years, Tanzania has lost more elephants to poaching than anywhere else in Africa. In 2009, the countrys elephant population was 110,000. By 2014, it was 43,500. Hardest hit have been the herds in the wilderness areas of the Selous Reserve in the south of the country, where populations collapsed from 70,000 in 2006 to just 13,000 by 2014.

Having investigated the ivory trade since the late 1980s, the EIA has built a detailed picture of the gangs involved. Supply chains are dominated by a relatively small group of criminal syndicates, numbering tens rather than hundreds. Raw ivory shipments typically weigh between one and four tonnes and travel concealed among legal goods in shipping containers.

Gang leaders usually hail from Asia, says Mary Rice, EIAs executive director. They operate through a series of agents at every stage of the chain, avoiding any physical contact with ivory. Shipment is arranged through proxies, so when seizures are made, underlings usually take the fall.

In late 2013, a surveillance operation led police to a house in the upmarket area of Mikocheni in the commercial capital of Dar es Salaam. They discovered three Chinese nationals packing ivory into sacks topped with seashells and garlic. The raid netted 706 tusks, weighing 1.8 tonnes, and large amounts of cash.

A short timeline of elephant poaching Show all 10 1 /10 A short timeline of elephant poaching A short timeline of elephant poaching 1880s.jpg Robert H. Milligan, New York Public Library A short timeline of elephant poaching 1910.jpg Creative commons A short timeline of elephant poaching 1979.jpg Surreal Name Given, Flickr A short timeline of elephant poaching 1980s.jpg Scotch Macaskill A short timeline of elephant poaching actual elephant forensic.jpg Space for Giants A short timeline of elephant poaching 1990s.jpg Space for Giants A short timeline of elephant poaching 1999.jpg Vidhi Doshi A short timeline of elephant poaching Ivory elephants.jpeg Space for Giants A short timeline of elephant poaching elephantfence.jpg Space for Giants A short timeline of elephant poaching Elephant dust (1)_1.jpeg Space for Giants

A company importing garlic and food additives from mainland China functioned as a front for the ivory-smuggling operation. Shipping documents at the property indicated previous suspicious shipments to China and revealed another consignment was about to leave the country. The suspect container was tracked down to the port of Zanzibar, where it was about to be loaded onto a vessel bound for the Far East. Inside officials discovered 1,023 raw tusks weighing 2.9 tonnes concealed in sacks of seashells.

Two of the three men arrested at the Mikocheni house received 35-year jail sentences, but they were only hired labourers. The suspected ringleaders, Chinese nationals Deng Jiyun and Zhang Mingzhi, left on a flight bound for southern China as soon as the container was seized. Interpol issued Red Notices for their arrest but pair remain at large.

Even after major seizures, authorities often fail to shut down syndicates. Criminals use legitimate banking systems to shift money, and its difficult for under-resourced legal systems to secure convictions for financial crimes like money laundering. In the Mikocheni house case, accounts in Tanzania and China linked to the main suspects recorded two transactions totalling $500,000 on a single day, yet an investigation never materialised.

Another stumbling block is cross-border co-operation, says Rice. While ivory smuggling gangs operate globally, using communications technology, finance and transport systems to move ivory halfway around the world, government agencies are still hindered by national boundaries.

Cross-border syndicates constantly probe for weak spots in the system. In April 2015, customs authorities in Bangkok seized 3.1 tonnes of tusks in a tea shipment originating from Mombasa, Kenya. The ivory was sourced from neighbouring Tanzania and smuggled across the land border under fruit. The use of tea was no accident; at that time all exports of tea leaves from Mombasa were exempt from scanning.

The cost of non-intervention is high. As long as conviction rates remain low, and profits remain high, there is little to deter kingpins from making a killing. Only when those at the top of the trade are prosecuted as vigorously as those at the bottom will we begin to get a grip on the poaching crisis decimating Africas elephants.
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The Leave campaign complains that the Prime Minister and Chancellor are scaremongering about the consequences of British withdrawal from the European Union. So surely it is incumbent upon those who argue for Brexit to explain to voters why they are not proposing a frightening leap into the unknown.

Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary and Co-Convenor of Vote Leave, tried to discharge that obligation in a speech yesterday. It was a delightful speech, but it was hardly a persuasive and clear account of what life outside the EU would be like.

Mr Gove had sport with the idea that the UK would become "some sort of hermit kingdom, a North Atlantic North Korea only without that countrys fund of international good will", but that is, of course, a wild exaggeration of a mild exaggeration, and it does nothing to rebut the Chancellor's industrial-strength economics the day before.

George Osborne deployed the full weight of the Treasury to warn against a loss of 4,300 per household by 2030 if we left the EU. That may be a high and arbitrary figure, but most economists agree that there is likely to be some economic loss from excluding ourselves from full participation in the Single Market.

It is no use Mr Gove or Boris Johnson complaining about project fear: they need to explain to the voters either why most economists are wrong  a large undertaking of advanced macro-economics  or why it does not matter. As in the Scottish referendum, the most convincing and honest position for those arguing against "the union" is: "poorer, yes, but free". Mr Gove and Mr Johnson seem just as reluctant as Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon were to make that case. On 23 June, we hope the voters will draw the appropriate conclusion.
As the last century drew to a close, and the West continued to congratulate itself on reaching the End of History and the sunny triumph of liberal democracy, the United Nations announced a bold ambition  to secure a drug-free world. With communism having been overcome, the cycle of economic boom and bust seemingly broken, declaring war on an illegal, global trade must have felt to some like the next step towards social nirvana.

Eighteen years later the world feels like a very different place on many counts. As for the much-vaunted war on drugs, few can doubt it has been roundly lost. An estimated $100billion a year is spent on anti-drug law enforcement activities and yet the trade in illegal narcotics only continues to grow  it is thought to be worth up to $500billion annually. The criminal gangs which increasingly dominate the global drugs scene are prepared to do whatever it takes to maintain the upper hand.

With this in mind, the United Nations General Assembly meets this week in special session in New York to reconsider the treaties which have steered the hardline strategies of national policymakers. It is a crucial moment, although debates are likely to be heated. For all the evidence against maintaining the status quo, some countries  notably Russia and China  still regard drugs as primarily a law enforcement issue. Those who would recast it as a matter of public health, or perhaps reframe it both on an individual and societal level within the context of reducing harm, face a battle of their own.

Indeed, it is clear that there are already cracks in the charade of global drug-fighting unity. The United States, for so long the bastion of prohibitionism when it came to narcotics, has nudged to the forefront of cannabis legalisation. Medicinal use is permitted in 23 states; four of those allow recreational use too. Just over fifty per cent of Americans support decriminalisation of marijuana. Polls in the UK have found a similar proportion of the public here share that view. In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won an election having pledged to legalise cannabis.

Attitudes towards more potent drugs may be less tolerant but there is a growing recognition that approaches towards serious addictions to substances including heroin have misfired. Several countries already operate drug consumption rooms, where serious addicts can obtain and take heroin in a safe environment without fear of arrest. This reduces health problems associated with the use of dirty needles and obviates the need for addicts to engage in criminality so they can pay for their hits.

It is not just in developed nations that the facts on the ground are prompting a rethink. In Central and South America, governments have expended vast resources in a bloody and futile fight against the drug cartels. In Mexico alone, there were 165,000 documented homicides in the seven years to 2014  many of them (over half by some estimates) connected to the drugs trade in one way or another. This weeks meeting of the UN General Assembly was prompted as much by despairing pleas from Latin American governments as by the desire of Western liberals to smoke pot in peace.

Nobody would claim that the drugs issue is straightforward. Many illegal substances cause horrible damage to users health and the idea that the world should take anything other than a zero tolerance approach to narcotics will horrify some. But we need to have a more sensible debate: complex problems are not resolved by the use of blunt instruments and the UN would do well to adopt a more nuanced position. The dogmatic notion that a drug-free world is achievable ought to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
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There is no doubt in my mind that when people are stressed and worked to the bone, they are less productive its common sense. The latest study into productivity at work (in yesterdays edition) took into consideration those over the age of 40  and my feeling is that the same could be said for all workers regardless of age a three-day working week is optimal and part-time employment is king. This study aligns itself with the on-going crusade for flexible working hours, but that is something we should all be taking seriously and reports like this dont fully address the real story that needs to be told.

A frightening recent study published in Science Alert reported that individuals working 55 hours or more per week had a 33 per cent greater risk of stroke and a 13 per cent increased risk of developing coronary heart disease. Companies promote wellness programmes, that include flexible working, based on the idea that your health affects your work, but ignore the fact that the reverse can also be true. It shouldn't be about packing as much into your day as possible so that you pass out as soon as you hit your pillow, but about using your time to unwind and do the things that help you keep your head above water. If employers supported their employees by promoting wellness and mindfulness, and offering flexible working, they too would benefit from happier, more productive teams. It doesn't matter what age they are or how many hours they work a week... Without your health, you have nothing.

Richard Walton

Cape Town, South Africa

Brexit

In Michael Goves speech urging Britain to leave the EU, he compared the organisation to a highly selective list of previously failed empires. He envisions Brexit leading to the democratic liberation of a whole Continent from the evil bureaucratic EU Empire. This is ironic because the heart of the right wing Vote Leave campaign is a yearning for Britains previous place in the world, as an imperial power on which the sun never sets. Vote Leave has even published a letter on their website from a host of British people of apparent Commonwealth backgrounds to urge Britain rediscover Britains global vocation by engaging directly with the Commonwealth. In this rewriting on colonial history Britain shares a historical and cultural friendship with the Commonwealth, that can be the basis for success post-Brexit.

The audacity of Gove and the Vote Leave evoking empire, democracy and the Commonwealth really is astounding. The British Empire was a brutal force that enslaved, colonised and murdered millions across the globe in order to build its powerbase.

Thankfully, the British Empire was defeated after decades of resistance and is no longer propped up by its colonies. This is a reality that has failed to sink in with Gove and his allies, as they look back in teary eyed reminiscence to Empires former glory. Britannia no longer rules the waves and is a relatively small country with little productive output or influence on the world stage. Its time to stop the delusions and realise that Britain needs the EU, because the days of Empire are long gone.

Dr Kehinde Andrews

Associate Professor in Sociology

School of Social Sciences, Birmingham City University

Birmingham

Apparently Michael Gove has a problem with the EU Remain campaign treating the public like children who can be frightened into obedience and conjuring up bogeymen. Of course as part of Better Together, he found those very tactics perfectly acceptable when the public in question were the Scottish electorate during the 2014 Independence referendum. I need hardly add the word hypocrite here.

Girdwood Anderson

Aberdeen

So Mr Gove attacks Mr Cameron for trying to frighten us with bogeymen.

And in the same breath tries to frighten us with the bogeyman of a weakened ability to counter terrorism if we stay in the EU. Come on, Mr Gove: we're not children.

Martin Smith

Oxford

One of the main arguments put forward by the Brexit campaign is that the UK, as the fifth largest economic in the world, would easily be able to set up favourable trade agreements with the likes of India, China, Brazil etc. As far as I am aware there is nothing in the terms of our EU membership that prevents us from creating such trade agreements while still a member. Surely the prudent thing would be to put such agreements in place before deciding to leave the EU rather than burning our bridges in the hope that we will be able to create new markets? Once out of the EU it will be very difficult to re-enter the EU on our current preferential terms whereas, having created new world markets, it would be easier to leave if we so wished.

Chris Elshaw

Hampshire

Junior doctors contract

One reason that junior doctors are continuing to fight imposition of this unsafe and unfair contract is that we know it will dangerously overstretch services, which we fear is a tactic designed to cause NHS services to fail. Only last week an A&E unit was forced to close because of understaffing. Having already carved up NHS services and sanctioned private companies to provide NHS contracts all we need is the proverbial straw to break this amazing institution's back, after which the government will be able to start a mass sell off and complete healthcare privatisation. The fallout from this contract could be that straw. The NHS failing seems to be exactly what this government want. Failure means privatisation, which fits with their policies of small government and no state handouts. If we want to save the NHS, we must keep fighting this contract!

Dr Jonathan Barnes

London
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My main problem with Michael Gove is that I cannot stay cross with him for long. There is something about that face, when the top lip is rigid with rage and the bottom one trembles on the verge of tears, that melts the heart.

This week, in the midst of his worst temper tantrum ever, you know you ought to be having a stern word. Yet one glance at that cute face and all I want to do is give him a cuddle.

The source of Goveys bate is his disdain for something that would never happen to him here. He thinks he is being treated like a child - and not just he, but the entire public - by the pro-EU gang. He says that to scaremonger - as he accuses George Osborne of doing with the warnings of comparatively poor post-Brexit economic growth and a 36bn black hole - is to treat voters as mere children.

Recommended Read more These are the psychological tricks used by Vote Leave and Remain

Since Michael is such an endearing chap, lets try to coax him out of his strop by finding common ground. And one thing about which we can all agree is this: infantilising the public by treating them as easily scared kids before a referendum of historic importance is no way for any grown-up politician to behave.

Take another Conservative cabinet minister who, by spookiest coincidence, is also called Michael Gove. A Scot himself, and a fervent fan of our Union, this Bizzaro World Gove did what the other so despises. Before Scotlands independence vote in 2012, he treated the voting public as mere children by trying to scare them in a most ridiculous way.

Scotland leaving the UK, said this Gove, would destablise not only Europe but the entire planet by empowering the Russian president.

Think globally, he advised. Think what would happen if Scotland and England broke up. Do we think that Vladimir Putin would think, Oh that's a pity? Or would he think, Ah look, the second principal beacon of liberty in the world is a little more unstable. That plinth has been broken. I'm in a stronger position to do what I want?

Im not sure exactly how old someone had to be to buy this vision of Kremlin strategists plotting to recreate the Soviet empire on the basis that the people of Ecclefechan decided to tell the English to ecclefech off. But somewere between cutting a first tooth and starting at primary school seems in the ball park there.

Returning to our original Gove, that sworn foe of scaremongering, he currently plays the Boy Wonder of Brexit to Boris Johnsons Caped Crusader. And, if anything, Batman Boris is an even more resolute enemy of scaremongering, comparing dire post-Brexit economic projections to the deranged hysteria about the Millennium Bug, and writing a Telegraph column headlined: Dont Be Taken In By Project Fear.

What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Show all 5 1 /5 What's the European Parliament ever done for us? What's the European Parliament ever done for us? A cap on the amount of hours an employer can make you work The Working Time directive provides legal standards to ensure the health and safety of employees in Europe. Among the many rules are a working week of a maximum 48 hours, including overtime, a daily rest period of 11 hours in every 24, a break if a person works for six hours or more, and one day off in every seven. It also includes provisions for paid annual leave of at least four weeks every year Getty Images What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Helping the people of Britain to avoid smoking In 2014 MEPs passed the Tobacco Products Directive strengthening existing rules on the manufacture, production and presentation of tobacco products. This includes things like reduced branding, restrictions on products containing flavoured tobacco, health warnings on cigarette packets and provisions for e-cigarettes to ensure they are safe What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Helping you to make the right choices with your food Thanks to the European Parliament, UK consumers have access to more information than ever about their food and drink. This includes amount of fat, and how much of it is saturated, carbohydrates, sugars, protein and so on. It also includes portion sizes and guideline daily amount information so people can make informed choices about their diet. All facts must be clear and easy to understand What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Two year guarantees and 14-day returns policy for all products Consumers across the EU have access to a number of rights, from things which are potentially very useful, to things which used to be annoying. For example, shoppers in the UK receive a two-year guarantee on all products, and a 14-day period to change their minds and return a purchase, these things are useful www.PeopleImages.com-licence restrictions apply What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Keeping your air nice and fresh (and safe) Believe it or not, although the situation is improving, some areas of the UK have appalling air quality. A report by the Royal College of Physicians released on 23 February says 40,000 deaths are caused by outdoor air pollution in the UK every year. Air pollution is linked to a number of illnesses and conditions, from Asthma to diabetes and dementia. The report estimates the costs to British business and the health service add up to 20 billion every year

Almost unbelievably, there are not only two Goves but two Borises - the one who will not brook fearmongering, and the other who wrote this in September 2014: If these polls are right, then we are on the verge of an utter catastrophe for this country. In just 10 days time  a fundamental part of our identity will have been killed. We will all have lost a way of  explaining ourselves to the world. We are on the verge of trashing our global name and brand in an act of self-mutilation  And so on, and so forth, until this heartrending conclusion: I am praying that we will wake from this sleepwalk to tragedy; and that the Scots vote no to divorce, and yes to Britain, the greatest political union ever.

Now how do you imagine the Scots will react if they vote to remain in the EU by a wide margin, as seems inevitable, but the UK as a whole votes to leave? How long would it be before the next independence referendum, this one certain to go Nicola Sturgeons way, freed them to begin petitioning Brussels for EU membership as the sovereign state of Scotland? A year? Two years? Three or four, at the outside?

However long it took, a Brexit win on June 23rd would create the deepest possible divide between the Scots and the English, thereby killing the Union - our union - stone dead the second the result was announced.

 Gove ridicules Remain campaign

So what one of the Gove-Johnson teams are fighting so valiantly for is the very thing that the other is certain would - by empowering Putin to start World War 3, and by destroying all sense of national identity - be a cataclysm for this country.

There is a chance that I have been bamboozled by the clashing quotes above, and in fact there is only one set of each. But if that really is the case. why in the name of sanity are Gove and Johnson working to ignite the Scottish independence inferno which both of them foresaw, not two years ago, engulfing us all?

If either believes that this makes him any kind of messiah, we know otherwise. And the last thing you ever do with a very naughty boy is let him play with fire.
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Two years might seem but the twinkling of an eye in the great scheme of world affairs. In an age of instant communications, 24-hour news and an international default position that favours dialogue, however, two years is a very long time for the West and Russia not to have been talking. And this has been the formal position since June 2014, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation announced that the working of the Nato-Russia Council was to be suspended in response to Russias seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.

This week, though, came the first signs that the atmosphere, if not yet the substance, of what we used to call East-West relations could be warming. This week, Nato ambassadors are scheduled to sit down with their Russian counterpart, Alexander Grushko, at Nato headquarters outside Brussels to discuss an agenda that includes all the troubled areas that East and West should be talking about: Ukraine, Syria, the greater Middle East, Afghanistan, perhaps also Iran.

The good news is that such an agenda suggests a reversion to something like an East-West normal. Desirable though that would be, however, there is also a need for clarity. That this meeting is happening at all marks a significant climb-down - and not by Russia. It is taking place only because the Western side, i.e. Nato, has decided that some talking is better than none. And this is quite a turnaround.

The wording of the Nato announcement was indicative. Highly defensive, it was designed to minimise the significance of this gathering, to suggest that Nato-Russia relations had continued at one level or another without a break, and that there could be no question of normalisation so long as Russia held on to Crimea.

This was true up to a point. Cooperation had continued on Afghanistan and Iran, and to an extent, discreetly, over Syria. But the particular initiative, the attitudinal change, that revived the Nato-Russia Council came from the Western side. It was the West that had blocked pretty much all channels of communications in the wake of Crimea, and it was the West that was now trying to re-establish them.

No new opening could be happening, of course, without the acquiescence of Russia, and the Kremlin has played its part - in not rejecting a series of deliberately understated Western initiatives. In February, Russias ambassador to Nato, Grushko, addressed a London military think-tank, the Royal United Services Institute, in unusually conciliatory terms. And last month, a former Russian foreign minister turned think-tanker, Igor Ivanov - who tries to keep channels open to the West - delivered a similar message at a Chatham House security conference also in London.

Asked whether Russia was prepared to re-enter dialogue with Nato, he answered rhetorically, Why not? It was Nato, he pointed out, not Russia, that had suspended the Nato-Russia Council in the first place. And it was Nato that would have to mend the broken connections.

To this extent, this weeks Nato-Russia Council meeting represents a big diplomatic victory for Russia. More significantly, however, it constitutes a victory for realism in foreign policy, on the part of East and West.

In recent years, the running in east-west relations has been made by the ideologues and the idealists (not always the same thing). Ukraine tended to be seen as the next ideological battlefield, the next place where Western values were destined, in the end, to prevail.

What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? Show all 21 1 /21 What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26393010Mandatory-Credit-.jpg Reuters What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN10971804Russian-Prime-Min.jpg AFP/Getty Images What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26393862Russian-Prime-Min.jpg AFP/Getty Images What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26393780A-member-of-the-p.jpg AFP/Getty Images What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26393023Mandatory-Credit-.jpg Rex Features What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26352565Members-of-Moloda.jpg Reuters What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN23195218People-walk-past-.jpg Reuters What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN22525237Russian-President.jpg AP What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26392966Russian-Prime-Min.jpg Reuters What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN20542740In-this-Friday-De.jpg AP What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? GD103259Vladimir-Putin-teen.jpg What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26392993Members-of-the-pr.jpg AFP/Getty Images What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26392965Russian-Prime-Min.jpg AFP/Getty Images What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN2393242Russias-President-.jpg Reuters What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26323854Russian-police-of.jpg AP What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? GL960877President-Boris-Yel.jpg What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? CD14165964President-Vladimi.jpg AP What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26393000Russian-Prime-Min.jpg AFP/Getty Images What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26393003Mandatory-Credit-.jpg Rex Features What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? IN26393032Mandatory-Credit-.jpg Getty Images What does Russia really think about Vladimir Putin? CD8606248epa00153801-Russia.jpg EPA

This weeks meeting of the Nato-Russia Council is an acknowledgement by the Western side of two realities. First, that Ukraine is still contested territory, if you think in terms of East v. West. Second, that cutting off hard-won institutional channels of communications is not a sensible course.

The Nato-Russia Council was set up in 2002 as a consultative forum where tensions, real and potential, could be discussed. It was suspended - first in 2008 after the brief military confrontation on in Georgia, and second, in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea as fighting broke out in Ukraine. In both instances, it was ruled out of account at the very time when it should have been most useful.

Over the past two years there have been those - prominent among them the former Nato Secretary General, Lord Robertson - who have warned that the lack of any formal - or even informal - communications channels made the situation in Europe post-Ukraine potentially more unstable than during the whole of the Cold War.

There have also been think-tanks - such as the UK-based European Leadership Network, and others - advising that dialogue, whether official or through back-channels, was almost always preferable to its absence. Such voices were rarely heeded at government level, however, where being seen to rebuff Russian aggression was paramount. Few stopped to consider whether that aggression was action or - perhaps - reaction.

 After Ukraine, Is Putin s Eye On The Baltic States?

One of the many flaws in this approach was the failure to provide for the inevitable rapprochement. Russia was told to end its involvement in eastern Ukraine and comply with the terms of the Minsk 2 agreement - which it has been doing - then told that there could be no improvement in relations until it handed back Crimea (which not even the Kiev government seriously expects Moscow to do).

This weeks meeting of the Nato-Russia Council offers the first hint that the realists may finally be gaining ground in the contest for Western Russia policy, the first acknowledgement by the West that in Ukraine it might have overplayed its hand, and the first evidence that - in the diplomatic jargon - Nato is trying to build an off-ramp.

It is just regrettable that it took two years and the suspension of the very forum set up to avert these sorts of post-Cold War risks before dialogue was allowed to make a comeback. Now is the time for both sides to take a deep breath and start again.
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This week, it was revealed the UK Government has deported three times as many teenagers to war-torn countries than previously admitted. Other headlines told a fresh tragedy  more than 400 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean after their boats capsized on the way from East Africa to Europe. Meanwhile, the right grows apoplectic in their abhorrence of the refugee crisis.

It is not news that refugees are dying and suffering in their thousands as they risk their lives to travel to or stay in the safety of the West. However, we sit divided on how to respond. On one side, we have a compassionate and emotional response to refugees and on the other, a predominantly logical (if cold) response to taking more migrants.

But logic can support humanity towards refugees when we consider them a key component of countering extremist narratives and recruitment.

Security implications play a regular trump card: Do you want another Paris? Who are we letting in? If we keep them, theyll be cannon fodder for radicalisation and recruitment.

Are these legitimate concerns? Yes. But we also must consider that these refugees and families represent one of the most powerful, strategic forces in our counter-terrorism arsenal.

Officials try to justify the deportations and inaction we have seen in some quarters with cold logic, but these arguments miss key components of the impact of refugees on security. Emotion, ethics and notions of global citizenship aside, a calculated, logical response should consider the strategic importance of refugees and families in our efforts to counter violent extremism.

One of the most devastating aspects of Isis and similar groups has been a powerful and aggressive propaganda strategy and narrative. The core narrative which has proven most alluring to western recruits is the idea that Isis is a functioning, popular, utopian caliphate or state.

Analysing the output of Isis media negates beheadings and violence as the primary narrative. In fact, Isiss primary communications strategy is the depiction of a state populated with happy citizens.

Defeating Isis is as much about military domination as about ideas and narratives  so why are we not highlighting, championing and harbouring people who have fled the so-called Islamic State? If the caliphate is so great, Isis, then why is everyone leaving?

The stories of refugees are a golden opportunity for countering extremists narratives. Yet we continue to ignore it. Instead, we feed a narrative that the West does not care, as more dead bodies wash up onto beaches, and youth are torn from their families and sent back to war zones. This is a huge mistake, both ethically and strategically. It supports what Isis are saying.

Refugees settle in Germany Show all 12 1 /12 Refugees settle in Germany Refugees settle in Germany Germany Mohamed Zayat, a refugee from Syria, plays with his daughter Ranim, who is nearly 3, in the one room they and Mohamed's wife Laloosh call home at an asylum-seekers' shelter in Vossberg village on October 9, 2015 in Letschin, Germany. The Zayats arrived approximately two months ago after trekking through Turkey, Greece and the Balkans and are now waiting for local authorities to process their asylum application, after which they will be allowed to live independently and settle elsewhere in Germany. Approximately 60 asylum-seekers, mostly from Syria, Chechnya and Somalia, live at the Vossberg shelter, which is run by the Arbeiter-Samariter Bund (ASB) charity 2015 Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany A refugee child Amnat Musayeva points to a star with her photo and name that decorates the door to her classroom as teacher Martina Fischer looks on at the local kindergarten Amnat and her siblings attend on October 9, 2015 in Letschin, Germany. The children live with their family at an asylum-seekers' shelter in nearby Vossberg village and are waiting for local authorities to process their asylum applications. Approximately 60 asylum-seekers, mostly from Syria, Chechnya and Somalia, live at the Vossberg shelter, which is run by the Arbeiter-Samariter Bund (ASB) charity Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Kurdish Syrian asylum-applicant Mohamed Ali Hussein (R), 19, and fellow applicant Autur, from Latvia, load benches onto a truckbed while performing community service, for which they receive a small allowance, in Wilhelmsaue village on October 9, 2015 near Letschin, Germany. Mohamed and Autur live at an asylum-applicants' shelter in nearby Vossberg village. Approximately 60 asylum-seekers, mostly from Syria, Chechnya and Somalia, live at the Vossberg shelter, which is run by the Arbeiter-Samariter Bund (ASB) charity Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Mohamed Ali Hussein ((L), 19, and his cousin Sinjar Hussein, 34, sweep leaves at a cemetery in Gieshof village, for which they receive a small allowance, near Letschin Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Mohamed Zayat, a refugee from Syria, looks among donated clothing in the basement of the asylum-seekers' shelter that is home to Mohamed, his wife Laloosh and their daughter Ranim as residents' laundry dries behind in Vossberg village on October 9, 2015 in Letschin, Germany. The Zayats arrived approximately two months ago after trekking through Turkey, Greece and the Balkans and are now waiting for local authorities to process their asylum application, after which they will be allowed to live independently and settle elsewhere in Germany Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Asya Sugaipova (L), Mohza Mukayeva and Khadra Zhukova prepare food in the communal kitchen at the asylum-seekers' shelter that is their home in Vossberg village in Letschin Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Efrah Abdullahi Ahmed looks down from the communal kitchen window at her daughter Sumaya, 10, who had just returned from school, at the asylum-seekers' shelter that is their home in Vossberg Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Asylum-applicants, including Syrians Mohamed Ali Hussein (C-R, in black jacket) and Fadi Almasalmeh (C), return from grocery shopping with other refugees to the asylum-applicants' shelter that is their home in Vossberg village in Letschin Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Mohamed Zayat (2nd from L), a refugee from Syria, smokes a cigarette after shopping for groceries with his daughter Ranim, who is nearly 3, and fellow-Syrian refugees Mohamed Ali Hussein (C) and Fadi Almasalmeh (L) at a local supermarket on October 9, 2015 in Letschin, Germany. All of them live at an asylum-seekers' shelter in nearby Vossberg village and are waiting for local authorities to process their asylum applications, after which they will be allowed to live independently and settle elsewhere in Germany 2015 Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Kurdish Syrian refugees Leila, 9, carries her sister Avin, 1, in the backyard at the asylum-seekers' shelter that is home to them and their family in Vossberg village in Letschin Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Somali refugees and husband and wife Said Ahmed Gure (R) and Ayaan Gure pose with their infant son Muzammili, who was born in Germany, in the room they share at an asylum-seekers' shelter in Vossberg village on October 9, 2015 in Letschin, Germany. Approximately 60 asylum-seekers, mostly from Syria, Chechnya and Somalia, live at the Vossberg shelter, which is run by the Arbeiter-Samariter Bund (ASB) charity, and are waiting for authorities to process their application for asylum 2015 Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany German Chancellor Angela Merkel pauses for a selfie with a refugee after she visited the AWO Refugium Askanierring shelter for refugees in Berlin Getty Images

The more we can unpick the pernicious propaganda of Isis and dismantle the idea of a utopian caliphate, the sooner we will decrease the flow of foreign fighters and slow the slew of attacks.

11m Syrians have fled that state. If supported and protected, families, defectors and refugees can offer powerful, personal testimonies against the violence of Isis. In the most networked, digital and connected generation in human history, credible voices, messengers and real stories are vital in shaping ideas.

Refugees and families are an untapped source of immense emotional power and a generation that, if harboured, respected and well-treated, will be an organic resilient mass to extremist ideologies.

Families can play a decisive role across Europe in preventing further tragedy. The Quilliam Foundation has partnered up with grassroots organisations, families and individuals to create Families Against Terrorism and Extremism (FATE), an online communications campaign, hub and network to support families in countering violent extremism and share the stories of mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters who have faced terrorism and extremism and sit on the frontline in the battle against it.

 Refugees welcome Pope Francis

The Brussels bombers slipped through a hardcore security web consisting of thousands of troops, hundreds of signals interceptors, drones, helicopters, and surveillance measures in both electronic and human form, as well as the support of security power houses such as the United States, Britain, France and Germany. The bombs still went off.

Like it or not, we cannot rely solely on governments to defeat terrorism and extremism. We must invest in the grassroots, tap into the views and experiences of refugee communities and listen to them.

The West has suffered from an appalling perception deficit for the last decade. Continuing to turn our backs and hardening our stance to the plight of the in need and miserable and the dying will have long term repercussions for terrorism in Europe.

Jonathan Russell is head of policy at Quilliam. You can learn more about the work of FATE here
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Imagine youre lucky. Imagine you receive 50 from a benefactor. But, oh dear, theres a problem with the gift. It turns out too much was paid out. There has to be a financial correction. So youre faced with a choice.

So would you rather keep 20? Or lose 30? Think very quickly. Did you initially lean towards keeping 20? Many people do. But of course they amount to the same thing. Youd still have 20 whichever option you picked.

So whats going on? Why did 20 look more appealing? Thats the brains system one at work, according to psychologists. Studies show that the reactive human mind sees the keep flashing in red lights before theres any mental arithmetic (even before trivial calculations such as subtracting 30 from 50). And the word loss is also deeply off-putting to the minds system one. A quick decision framed as a straight choice between keep and lose will usually see lose rejected.

The mental arithmetic is system two and it takes much longer to be activated in most of us than system one. Sadly, many of us dont even bother activating system two before making decisions at all.

Advertisers are aware of this bias. Thats why they often frame propositions in terms of how much money people can keep rather than how much theyve lost in the past. Keep more of your savings income by opening an ISA, Keep more of your money when you shop with us, and so on.

Political advertisers are on to it too. Thats why the Leave campaign ahead of Junes European Union referendum have been emphasising so heavily the prize of keeping the UKs 13bn annual contribution to the EU Budget. They emphasise what we can keep by voting to leave. Yet the Remain campaign is familiar with this tactic too. Thats why they emphasise the 3m UK jobs linked to trade with the rest of Europe. We naturally want to keep all those jobs, dont we?

Both claims are actually tendentious. The 13bn is the gross contribution of the UK to Brussels  it doesnt account for the money the UK receives back. And its silly to imply that 3m jobs would disappear overnight in the event of a Brexit. That would only happen if all trade between Britain and the Continent came to a sudden halt  something no one seriously expects. But the campaigners are not really trying to impart useful information with their soundbites  theyre aiming at the system one part of your brain.

Thats by no means the only psychological bias battleground in this referendum campaign. Psychologists talk of the power of framing. Which sounds more appealing: 90 per cent fat-free or 10 per cent fat? Advertisers know the answer, which is why one never sees the latter formulation even though they describe the same product.

Now consider which sounds like a more compelling argument in the context of an EU membership vote. Almost half of everything we sell to the rest of the world we sell to Europe, says the Stronger in Europe campaign. British reliance on trade with the EU has fallen to an all-time low, proclaim the Outers. The fact that both sound compelling - and both describe the same statistics - shows that the two campaigns grasp the importance of framing.

What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Show all 5 1 /5 What's the European Parliament ever done for us? What's the European Parliament ever done for us? A cap on the amount of hours an employer can make you work The Working Time directive provides legal standards to ensure the health and safety of employees in Europe. Among the many rules are a working week of a maximum 48 hours, including overtime, a daily rest period of 11 hours in every 24, a break if a person works for six hours or more, and one day off in every seven. It also includes provisions for paid annual leave of at least four weeks every year Getty Images What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Helping the people of Britain to avoid smoking In 2014 MEPs passed the Tobacco Products Directive strengthening existing rules on the manufacture, production and presentation of tobacco products. This includes things like reduced branding, restrictions on products containing flavoured tobacco, health warnings on cigarette packets and provisions for e-cigarettes to ensure they are safe What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Helping you to make the right choices with your food Thanks to the European Parliament, UK consumers have access to more information than ever about their food and drink. This includes amount of fat, and how much of it is saturated, carbohydrates, sugars, protein and so on. It also includes portion sizes and guideline daily amount information so people can make informed choices about their diet. All facts must be clear and easy to understand What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Two year guarantees and 14-day returns policy for all products Consumers across the EU have access to a number of rights, from things which are potentially very useful, to things which used to be annoying. For example, shoppers in the UK receive a two-year guarantee on all products, and a 14-day period to change their minds and return a purchase, these things are useful www.PeopleImages.com-licence restrictions apply What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Keeping your air nice and fresh (and safe) Believe it or not, although the situation is improving, some areas of the UK have appalling air quality. A report by the Royal College of Physicians released on 23 February says 40,000 deaths are caused by outdoor air pollution in the UK every year. Air pollution is linked to a number of illnesses and conditions, from Asthma to diabetes and dementia. The report estimates the costs to British business and the health service add up to 20 billion every year

Theres more. What sounds worse: a shortfall of 6 per cent of GDP resulting from Brexit, or a loss of 4,300 per household? For many people it will be the latter figure, heavily highlighted by George Osborne yesterday. But, again, they amount to the same thing. 4,300 is merely the 6 per cent of GDP translated into cash terms and divided by all the 26m households in the country.

So why does 4,300 sound more off-putting to most people? Here we have the ratio bias at work. In any ratio there is the numerator and the denominator. In the two statistics above 6 and 4,400 are the numerators. And GDP and per household are the denominators. Studies show that the system one part of our brain is more sensitive to big numbers in the numerator of ratios, and often neglects the denominators. So 4,300 sets off larger movements in many brains because, quite simply, its a bigger sounding figure than 6.

Consider another example. Which is the more compelling fact: 200,000 UK businesses trade with the EU or: Only 6 per cent of UK firms export to the EU? The first is from the Stronger in Europe website. The second is from Vote Leave. Here the Outers are trying to use the ratio bias to minimise the sense of importance of the EU as a trading partner for British firms - and the Inners are doing precisely the opposite.

 Young man on Question Time doesn't know how to vote in EU referendum

We are profoundly influenced by the framing of statistics. Quite understandably, politicians and campaigners seek to manipulate your system one brain. I just feel I dont know who to trust and I need a voice I can trust, said a member of a panel of undecided referendum voters on the BBCs Newsnight last night. But that benign and trustworthy figure does not exist. The way the facts are laid out will depend on the way the person wants the facts to be framed. Asking for someone to do the job for you - and placing your trust in them - essentially means asking that person to steer you in one way or the other.

If people genuinely want to make up their minds without bias, they are on their own. And their only trustworthy guide is their own brains system two.
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Today was Michael Gove day. The Justice Secretary, and in effect deputy leader of the Leave campaign, delivered a thoughtful and witty speech that sought to respond to yesterday, which was George Osborne day. Osborne, deputy leader of the Remain campaign, deployed the Treasury's supergun, claiming that withdrawal from the EU would cost the average British household 4,300 a year by 2030.

No one thought the number was remotely credible, but the Chancellor blew two large holes in Leave's defences. One is that, regardless of the amount of money per household, almost all economists agree that Brexit would cause some loss to the British economy. The other was the impression that the Remain campaign was the same organised force that won the election: David Cameron, Osborne and the Conservative Government machine. They know what they are doing and they are doing it ruthlessly: frightening people, justifiably enough, with the fear of the unknown.

The Leave campaign, on the other hand, looks like a loose rabble of individualists who give slightly different answers when asked how Brexit would work. And the de facto leader of the Leave campaign and alternative prime minister, Boris Johnson, seems to give different answers each time he is asked the question.

That was the challenge to which Gove rose today. His mockery of the Prime Minister and Chancellor's scaremongering was entertaining:

The City of London would become a ghost town, our manufacturing industries would be sanctioned more punitively than even communist North Korea, decades would pass before a single British Land Rover or Mr Kipling cake could ever again be sold in France and in the meantime our farmers would have been driven from the land by poverty worse than the Potato Famine. To cap it all, an alliance of Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, emboldened by our weakness, would, like some geopolitical equivalent of the Penguin, Catwoman and the Joker, be liberated to spread chaos worldwide and subvert our democracy.

And his presentation of himself as a warrior against "the Brussels elite" showed some cheek.

He was good at making the democratic case for self-government: "Yes, there will be a contagion... But what will be catching is democracy," he said, just before the text of his speech inserted footnote 54. But that is the easy bit. The hard part is explaining why people won't be worse off if Britain leaves.

In answer to questions afterwards, Gove said the Leave campaign has a full spectrum argument, covering all subjects. He said leaving wouldn't cause an economic shock: life would broadly carry on as before, but better.

However, he didn't have a good answer to the question Osborne posed yesterday and repeated at Treasury Questions in the House of Commons today. Why would Germany and France give the UK access to the Single Market without insisting that it should be part of the free movement of EU workers? We could have free trade with the EU, like Canada, Gove said. When it was pointed out that Canada pays tariffs on many EU imports he back-tracked: "There is no single model we would have to accept."

Recommended Read more These are the psychological tricks used by Vote Leave and Remain

So what would it look like? The UK would be part of a European free trade area, said Gove, with its own seat on the World Trade Organisation, instead of being represented by "a former sociology lecturer from Sweden" (Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU trade commissioner).

Good knockabout, but it took Dominic Cummings, Vote Leave Campaign Director and Gove's former special adviser at the Department for Education, to make sense of what Gove had said. Cummings said he had had conversations with "umpteen ambassadors" of EU countries who say privately they would do a deal with the UK but would deny in publicly. He insisted that German car makers would not allow their government to impose tariffs on imports from Britain, which is one of their biggest markets.

And he said that Britain would exclude itself from free movement of EU workers, running a points-based immigration policy that would treat applicants from all countries, EU and non-EU, equally. You might agree with it or not, or you might think Germany and France may not react rationally if insulted by Britain's departure, but at least Cummings's position was clear. If Boris Johnson could drop the bumbling and blustering and achieve similar clarity, the Remain campaign might worry.
Cerberus Capital Management and CarVal Investors are among funds circling two portfolios with a combined par value of 4.7bn worth of property loans being sold by Nama.

Lone Star Funds is also interested in the loan portfolios, known as Project Ruby and Emerald.

First-round bids are due on April 20.

While the loans have a par value of 4.7bn, they will be sold for significantly less than that. Project Ruby and Project Emerald, as the portfolios are known, contain loans tied to apartments, as well as commercial property, development land and hotels.

Project Emerald is made up of loans with a par value of 2.5bn from 16 borrowers. Those loans are secured against 236 properties.

While most of the loans in Project Emerald are related to commercial property, more than a fifth of the underlying properties are residential.

By value, just over a fifth of the properties are in Dublin, while about half are in the rest of Ireland. The remainder are located in Europe.

Project Ruby, meanwhile, involves loans that have a face value of 2.2bn tied to 15 borrowers. The debts are secured against 253 properties.

Just over 11pc of the portfolio is residential, with the vast majority of the portfolio being made up of commercial properties. More than 97pc of the properties are in Ireland.

Many of the US funds bought property and loans at the bottom of the market and are sitting on profits of tens of millions of euro. Cushman and Wakefield is managing the sale.

Cerberus and CarVal declined to comment; Lone Star didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Nama, headed by Brendan McDonagh, also declined to comment.

Nama is quickly selling off its remaining assets.

Specialist bank Investec has said it believes that Nama's forecast of 2bn surplus is "conservative" and said it will likely exceed 3bn.

Nama has said it will meet its target of redeeming 80pc of its senior debt nine months ahead of target. (Additional reporting by Bloomberg)
THE RACE to become the next president of the Irish Farmers' Association is heating up, with Galway dairy farmer Joe Healy firmly in the lead with over 10,000 votes.

The three farmers bidding to be the 15th president of the farming body following a pay controversy have pledged changes to the organisation during the countrywide hustings debates.

Mr Healy, who was seen as an outsider to the IFA farm centre as he was not on the national executive, had said the IFA presidency needed a fresh voice to restore the faith of farmers.

Members had been left angered over pay within the organisation that saw former general secretary Pat Smith leave the organisation after it emerged his pay package amounted to almost 1m over two years.

The election is underway to fill the seat of former president Eddie Downey, who attended yesterday's count, and stepped down after the pay controversy erupted late last year.

Mr Healy, a dairy and cattle farmer from Athenry, has established a firm lead on 10,063 votes with, 79pc of the votes counted or 745 branches.

Laois farmer Henry Burns, the livestock chairman of the IFA, made up ground as the midlands boxes were opened to secure 6,065 votes.

Kerrys Flor McCarthy, the IFAs rural development chairman, was behind him on 5,308.

Louth was the first county completed with Mr Healy declared the winner with 131 of 266 votes case, with Mr Burns taking 115 and Mr McCarthy taking 20 votes.

Mr McCarthys stronghold of Munster saw him secure Cork West with 483 of the 850 votes, while Mr Healy dominated in a number of counties including Waterford, Clare, Cork Central and Cork North, Limerick, Tipperary and Mayo.

Mr Burns took Wicklow with 221 of the 291 votes, and also Kildare and Offaly.

A result in the count is expected later this afternoon with over 947 envelopes of votes to be opened from branches around the country.

It is run similar to a general election with members casting first preference votes for candidates and if the number of votes a candidate receives is equal to the quota then they are deemed elected. Otherwise the candidate with the least number of first preference votes will be excluded and the second preferences will be distributed.

The vote is expected to be down on the numbers that cast their ballot at the last election in 2013, with some branches reporting apathy among members and a large spring workload hampering voting.

Early tallies from officers nationwide estimated the number of farmers casting their ballot slumped to around 25,000 of the 75,501 voting members.

Members were also voting for a deputy president with Limerick's Richard Kennedy, Monaghan's Nigel Reneghan and Kildare's Pat Farrell all in the running. Mr Kennedy, who is also not on the IFAs executive council, is establishing a firm lead, with over 10,000 votes with 79pc of the branches counted.

A regional chairman is also being elected in Munster with John Coughlan from Buttevant, north Cork and John O'Brien from Barryroe in Cork central in the running.
Less than one in three members of the Irish Farmers' Association are estimated to have voted in the association's presidential elections.

Early tallies from senior officers nationwide estimate the number of farmers casting their ballot has slumped significantly to approximately 25,000 of the 75,501 voting members.

The outcome of the election has been described as "too close to call" by veteran IFA officials ahead of the final count today.

Apathy and complacency among the membership are being cited by branch officers as some of the reasons for the low turnout in the elections prompted by the crisis that saw former general secretary Pat Smith leave the organisation after it emerged his pay package amounted to almost 1m over two years.

Former President Eddie Downey also stepped down after the pay controversy erupted late last year.

Some branches told the Farming Independent their members were "fed up" with the revelations about the IFA, while others said the busy spring period was a factor in the low turnout.

Factors

IFA national chairman Jer Bergin said there were a number of factors affecting the turnout - including the spring workload.

Turnout throughout the country has varied widely, ranging from lows of 20-25pc in some areas to almost 100pc in others.

Estimates for the overall turnout at around 24-25,0000 compare poorly with the 31,730 who voted in the last presidential election in 2013.

The highest turnouts were recorded in the candidates' home counties.

The numbers who voted in Munster were estimated to reach 45pc. It is the only region to have had an election for regional chairman and this added to the pressure to get voters out.

Some observers felt this could benefit Kerry's Flor McCarthy who has been seen as the outsider of the three candidates since the campaign began. It is understood voting is tight between the frontrunners, Galway's Joe Healy and Laois farmer Henry Burns.
A farmer from the West of Ireland has won the race to be the 15th president of the Irish Farmers' Association for the first time in 20 years.

Galway dairy and cattle farmer Joe Healy will be tasked with rebuilding the organisation following a pay controversy that caused ripples throughout the farming community.

Mr Healy (49), who was seen as an outsider to the IFA farm centre as he was not on the national executive, secured over 50pc to be elected on the first count.

A chorus of the Fields of Athenry rang out at the Castleknock Hotel in Dublin 15 after he surpassed the quota of 14,047 with 14,122 votes, ahead of the other candidates Laois man Henry Burns on 8,540 and Kerry's Flor McCarthy on 5,431.

"The first thing on the agenda and the priority always for the IFA is farm incomes and a margin there for farm families, as at the moment almost all commodities are selling below the cost of production," said Mr Healy, a former Macra na Feirme president and marts columnist with the Farming Independent.

"I wouldn't underestimate the challenge that it is. It is enormous the challenge because there is a challenge within the organisation there is a lot of sorting out to be done within the organisation. There is a lot of credibility to be restored and trust to be rebuilt."

Mr Healy said he believes the farmers have "spoken quite clearly" with their vote and sent out a clear message.

He pointed out that he had talked about the need for "transparency" throughout the hustings and he sees an "awful lot of good in the organisation".

Mr Healy, who will fly out to Brussels on Thursday in his new role, warned that farming must be not be a "sacrificial lamb" in new trade deals being discussed at EU level such as the Mercosur deal that would see an influx of beef from South America.

The father-of-three said he had enjoyed the 29 hustings and campaigning around the country, as he praised his team including manager Ann Mitchell who had travelled the country with him.

Mr Healy described it as an 'All-Ireland' for Galway, as he thanked everyone who had taken part in the campaign.

"The organisation needs us to put the shoulder to the wheel and work together," he said.

"We've been through a tough period," he said, adding they would come out "stronger".

"We see a case of almost all commodities being sold below the cost of production," he said, pointing to all the farmers that are suffering.

He said it was only through a "united organisation" that they would achieve a viable cost of living for farmers.

"There is a huge job of work there for us all," he said, adding they needed the support of the government and Brussels to safeguard the future of agriculture.

Mr Healy said on a personal level he would like to thank his family, neighbours and friends and stated that he felt both Mr Burns and Mr McCarthy would be a great help to him in the future.

He also acknowledged the former president Mr Downey who was in the audience and the amount of work he had put in.

Mr Burns said he could not bring himself to criticise the organisation during the campaign with the honest work and endeavour that had gone throughout the years.

Mr McCarthy wished the new president well and described "good banter" between the three candidates. He said Mr Healy had his "100pc" support and he believed in the IFA

as an organisation that worked for farmers.

He said they were treated with the "utmost respect" for those on the ground.

Members had been left angered over pay within the organisation that saw former general secretary Pat Smith leave the organisation after it emerged his pay package amounted to almost 1m over two years.

The election is underway to fill the seat of former president Eddie Downey, who attended yesterday's count, and stepped down after the pay controversy erupted late last year.

Members were also voting for a deputy president with Limerick's Richard Kennedy, Monaghan's Nigel Reneghan and Kildare's Pat Farrell all in the running.

Mr Reneghan was eliminated on the first count with his votes of 7,924 votes to be distributed.
Peter Kingston racked up debts outside of the 2.5m loan that remains outstanding to ACC. Documents from the Cork County Sheriff's office show that he owes over 50,000 to Lisavaird Co-op, 7,700 to McDonell Bros, 4,900 to Heide Roche, and 4,300 to the Revenue.

In addition, there were outstanding bills of over 33,000 to Bandon Co-op, with the Kingstons' supporter and debt campaigner Jerry Beades estimating that local creditors are owed up to 800,000 by the family.

While Mr Kingston insists that he offered to pay back the loan in full on four separate occasions, he admitted that he still owed large sums of money to various parties.

"I'm not disputing that I owe the money," he said.

The widespread indebtedness explains why the Sheriff's affidavit in the High Court last week stated that "there was no working tractor, no working feeder and not even a sweeping brush on site when we arrived." It stated they were advised debtors had taken machinery including tractors before they arrived over alleged debts.

It continued with a raft of problems encountered by the management parachuted in by the Sheriff Sinead McNamara.

"Stones were placed in motor vehicles to prevent them from working. One of the key wells in the farmyard was turned off without our knowledge. Mr Kingston denied knowledge of this second wellI believe that 50pc of the milking machines were not working on my arrival."

The auctioneer acting for the Sheriff, Mr Barrett, alleged in the same affidavit the herd had previously lost all value as elite animals because the Kingstons had stopped recording or registering and classifying animals.
In the past we've seen companies make their money by selling literal air.....and soil.

While this might not be to the same extremity, it is indeed unlikely.

The Irish Rainwater Company makes its money from, that's right you guessed it, Irish rainwater.

The firm sells 25ml vials of rainwater for 10 (12.60) a go. Slap on 5 for delivery and boom you've got a business.

On its website the Irish Rainwater Company, which is based in Belfast, describes it as "the perfect gift" that is bound to make your friends and family smile.

The company went live this week and it said it was "blown away" by the response.
Ardagh Group is the lead bidder for assets that US based Ball Corp and Rexam are selling as part of their merger, people familiar with the matter said.

A decision on exclusivity could come as soon as this week, the people said, asking not to be named because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and talks may still fall apart.

Apollo Global Management, Blackstone Group and Madison Dearborn Partners were also among bidders for the assets, which could fetch about $4bn (3.5bn), people familiar with the matter said in March.

Ball and Rexam must sell 12 plants in order for their proposed merger to get comptetion authority approval, and Ardagh Group indicated previously that it would bid for the assets.

Ball, Rexam and Ardagh declined to comment.

Ardagh Group is controlled by Dublin financier Paul Coulson.

Its customers include globally-recognised household names such as Heineken, L'Oreal, Danone and Heinz.

Last month the Ardagh chairman and biggest shareholder told analysts that there is "nothing going on" in terms of current plans for a 2bn stock market flotation of part of the business.

The plan for an initial public offer (IPO) of shares in Ardagh's Oressa metals division in the US were shelved late last year, with the company blaming then volatile market conditions.

Those IPO plans could be revived as US markets recover, or alternatively Ardagh could potentially look to sell Oressa.
Ireland's tax treaties with poorer countries are some of the most restrictive in the world, limiting the taxing rights of those countries, an international NGO has claimed.

Action Aid said that globally, tax treaties cost developing countries billions every year.

In a report released yesterday, the body said it has ranked more than 500 treaties signed by lower income and lower to middle income countries, ranking them in terms of how restrictive they are to the poorer country's taxing rights.

"Alarmingly, Ireland's tax treaties with lower-income and lower-middle income countries rank as the joint most restrictive in the world, with two of the three treaties inforce considered very restrictive, and five of the six treaties Ireland has signed with developing countries ranked as very restrictive," the report said.

Ireland has double taxation agreements in place with 72 countries. These are designed to ensure that that income that has been taxed in one treaty country isn't taxed again in Ireland.

It said there were two model templates for negotiating tax treaties - the UN and OECD templates, with Action Aid favouring the former because, the body claims, it gives more rights to developing countries.

The report said that Ireland's most recent treaties signed with developing countries, which have not yet entered force, are considered very restrictive for those poorer countries.

"ActionAid is concerned that Ireland continues to negotiate provisions that give poorer countries a smaller slice of the tax pie than that suggested by the UN model, undermining developing countries ability to keep a fair share of tax," the report said.

"ActionAid is very concerned that Ireland's treaty with Ethiopia, which was only signed in 2014 ranks as a very restrictive treaty."

The report alleges that one company in Zambia was able to reduce its tax bill by an estimated $10.4 million between 2007 and 2012 as a result of Ireland's tax treaty with the country, and the establishment of what it described as a "letterbox" company in Ireland.

It said that since this happened, Ireland has changed its tax treaty with the country.

Tax treaties generally, the report said, rather than simply preventing double-taxation, may actually be facilitating double non-taxation.

The Department of Finance said positive efforts have been made by Ireland in recent years in the area of tax treaties, including a spillover analysis published in October. It said the analysis was broadly positive in respect of Ireland's treaty network.
Here are the main business stories from this morning's papers:

Irish Independent

* Drones are becoming a growing threat to airport safety in Ireland and have already caused two serious incidents, according to new figures from the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA).

A day after a British Airways plane carrying 132 people was struck by a drone as it approached Heathrow Airport, the Irish air industry regulator revealed two safety incidents recently where drones affected aircraft or airport safety, as well as a further 13 unidentified runway incursions.

Irish pilots are now warning that the rise of drone use here is creating a "grey space" in aviation training where lives could be at risk.

* Ireland's tax treaties with poorer countries are some of the most restrictive in the world, limiting the taxing rights of those countries, an international NGO has claimed.

Action Aid said that globally, tax treaties cost developing countries billions every year.

In a report released yesterday, the body said it has ranked more than 500 treaties signed by lower income and lower to middle income countries, ranking them in terms of how restrictive they are to the poorer country's taxing rights.

* Cairn Homes expects to start construction work at its Adamstown site in west Dublin before the end of this year.

The home builder has bought up swathes of land banks around the capital over the past 18 months, but company chief executive Michael Stanley believes the company has effectively completed its buying for now.

"It's been a nine months with heavy activity with shareholders on fund raises and so on.

The Irish Times

* It may be impossible for Ireland to negotiate a special trade deal with Britain should it chose to leave the European Union.

The UK is one of Ireland's most important trade partners and work and pensions secretary Stephen Crabb said the UK may be unable to grant a special tariff to Ireland in the case of a Brexit.

Mr Crabb argues that if the UK wanted to offer a special rate to Ireland they would have to do so for all the other 160 countries in the World Trade Organisation.

* Oil prices dipped lower yesterday after a meeting between major exporters came to close without an agreement to freeze production.

Saudi Arabia changed its stance in Doha on Sunday night, insisting that Iran be part of any agreement as exporters looked to reach a global oil agreement for the first time in 15 years.

Traders and analysts said that despite failing to reach an agreement the oil market was in the process of re-balancing itself as low prices begin to cull high-cost production.

* Former Paddy Power chief executive Andy McCue was paid over 3.7m in salary, benefits and shares last year.

According to Paddy Power's annual results for 2015 Mr McCue was paid a salary of 700,000 as well as a bonus of 536,000.

Mr McCue became chief executive of Paddy Power last year before becoming chief operating officer of the newly merged Paddy Power Betfair.

Irish Examiner

* Irish firms are losing an average of 1.7m a year through fraud according to new research.

Businesses are increasingly being hit by both emerging fraud threats as well as traditional ones with some instances resulting in multi-million euro losses.

Theft of company assets remains the most common crime reported by Irish businesses amounting to over 50pc of all fraudulent reports by Irish businesses last year.

* Pre-tax profits at the uniform supply firm that counts the Gardai and the Irish Prison Service among its major customers declined by 34pc to 545,826 in 2014.

Figures lodged by James Boylan Safety (JBS) Ltd with the Companies Office show that the firm's pre-tax profits declined by 278,198 to 545,826 in spite of its gross profit increasing by 41pc going from 3.4m to 4.79m in the 12 months to the end of December 31 2014.

Established in 1944, the JBS Group is a market leader in the supply of safety, uniform, hygiene and specialist products and services to 300 companies in both the public and private sector in Ireland.

* Dublin-founded tech firm Movidius has announced its third major deal in 2015, this time with thermal imaging company, FLIR Systems.

Movidius is teaming with FLIR to develop intelligent thermal imaging solutions and may see artificial intelligence coalesce with thermal imaging.

Oregon-based FLIR is the largest commercial maker of thermal imaging cameras in the world.
Streaming video service Netflix forecast US and international subscriptions would grow at a slower pace than Wall Street expected this quarter, sending its shares tumbling 8pc in after-hours trading on Monday.

Netflix said it expected to add about 500,000 customers in the United States in the second quarter that ends in June, compared with Wall Street targets of 586,000, according to FactSet StreetAccount. The forecast includes a "modest impact" from the beginning of a price increase for its monthly movie and TV subscription service, the company said.

The company known for its original shows including "Orange is the New Black" and "House of Cards" said it expected to add about 2 million subscribers in markets outside the United States, versus analyst expectations of 3.5 million, according to FactSet. It also reported results for the first quarter, when subscriptions outpaced its own target.

Netflix is prone to large stock price swings as investors bet on the possible success of its mission to redefine television viewing around the world.

The company's long-term results depend in large part on how fast and profitably it expands. Netflix has launched in almost every country in the world, at a substantial cost, and now faces the task of adapting the service to different markets and cultures as competitors also rush in.

In January, Netflix went live in more than 130 countries, a huge global push by chief executive Reed Hastings to counter slowing growth in the United States.

Initial sign-ups were limited in some countries because the service at this point offers only English-language content and does not accept all of the local payment options, Hastings said on Monday.

"Over the next couple years as we further localize, we'll be able to see more opportunity," Hastings told analysts on a conference call. Netflix has not yet launched in China, where it has been exploring an entry for some time. It said on Monday it was "continuing discussions" and that "whatever we do," the Chinese market would have only a modest financial effect near-term.

The company previously promised "material" global profit in 2017 as it begins to reap the benefits of its costly expansion. A spokeswoman said Netflix is sticking with that forecast.

"I think that people who relied on unbridled international growth are beginning to have second thoughts, and the company now faces domestic competition that may limit its ability to grow domestic profitability," said Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who has an "underperform" rating on the stock.

Amazon.com Inc announced it would offer its video streaming service as a standalone monthly subscription as it looks to drive membership in its Prime subscription service.

Netflix said its forecast for fewer international additions than the prior year was due to tough comparisons with the year-ago period when it had launched in Australia and New Zealand.

The company will start boosting rates for more than half of its US members from May.

"We are rolling this out slowly over the year, rather than mostly in May, so we can learn as we go," the company said in a statement.

Netflix also said it expected to increase its spending on movie and TV content from about $5bn in 2016 to more than $6bn in 2017.

From January through March, Netflix added 6.7 million subscribers, bringing its worldwide total to 81.5 million.

Net income for the quarter was $28m. Earnings per share came in at 6 cents, beating the forecast of 5 cents from analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

Over the past year, Netflix stock had risen more than 60pc, making it the number three performer on the S&P 500.

The company's shares were down 8pc at $99.70 in after-hours trading on Monday.
Google is rolling out its Expeditions initiatives to schools in Ireland, which enables students to see the world without leaving the classroom.

Google has rolled out its Expeditions initiative to Irish schools, which lets students see the world in virtual reality.

The kit is made up of Google Cardboard VR headsets and compatible smartphones, a tablet, a wireless router, and a designated app. These in tandem enable teachers to bring up to 50 students at a time to see sights like the Great Barrier Reef and the Taj Mahal, or experience things landing on the Moon.

With Expeditions, Google aims to help students explore the whole world right from the comfort of their classroom desks company spokesman Patrick Lenihan said. The Pioneer Program brings Google Expeditions right to students and teachers so they can take trips anywhere from the Great Barrier Reef to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

The app comes preloaded with panoramic images from 220 locations. The teacher controls what the students see using the tablet, which is wirelessly connected to the smartphones held by the Google Cardboard viewer.

Google Expeditions is in a pilot phase and has been rolled out in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Sweden. Ireland has become the latest country for the programme to be rolled out in.

Google Expedition programme demonstrators will be visiting schools in Dublin and Belfast over the next two weeks to train teachers in how to use the kit and to show off its capabilities.
For most of us, losing our job can be a traumatic event. No matter what we may say, nobody likes to be told they're no longer wanted by their employer, and losing our jobs can have serious and immediate ramifications for our living arrangements.

For Andy McCue though, who is out of a job barely 18 months after taking over as the chief executive of Paddy Power, The Punt feels things might be okay.

According to the annual report of Paddy Power Betfair, which was published yesterday, Mr McCue earned 3.7m last year - his only full year as chief executive of the bookie before it merged with Betfair.

That was an increase of over 1m from 2014 when his total remuneration was a mere 2.6m. In fairness, Mr McCue was only chief operating officer then so it was natural for him to get a significant bump when he moved to the top job.

He didn't last long in the top job however. After the merger with Betfair he was shunted down to COO, with Betfair chief Breon Corcoran in charge of the enlarged group. Now Mr McCue has left that job as well, and will leave the company's board at the end of this month.

As for Mr Corcoran, the Mullingar native is on a base salary of 700,000 (882,000) this year but he will hardly be in the poor house with that wage. If he hits his targets in his 2016 long term incentive plan, he can look forward to a bonus of up to 300pc of his salary.

Fahy's Shannon goes unlimited

Perhaps Frank Fahy (63) has decided he's had enough of prying eyes.

Filings for the main company within his Shannon construction group, Shannon Homes Dublin, show that it has just been changed to an unlimited business. That means that it will no longer have to file publicly available accounts with the Company Registration Office.

The change became effective earlier this month.

Shannon Homes was one of the few big building companies to avoid being sucked into the Nama vortex. It maintains a strong balance sheet. The most recent publicly available accounts, for the 12 months to March 2015, show that it had 158.4m in shareholder funds at the end of that month. That was about 4m higher than the previous year.

Included in its current assets was 46.8m in cash, which was down from the 58.5m it had to hand at the end of March 2014. Its property-related assets were valued at 44.4m last year, but the company noted that due to the state of the market it was still difficult to establish meaningful valuations.

The Fastway to success

A business established in New Zealand has zoomed into top place as Ireland's Courier Company of the Year.

The annual awards took place at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Dublin and was attended by 500 industry professionals.

The accolade is a first for Fastway Couriers and marks a major milestone for the business, which has now grown its presence since establishing itself in Ireland in 2002 into a national brand, providing a pre-paid, next-day parcel collection and delivery service to over 20,000 businesses throughout Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Bobby O'Keeffe, Fastway chief executive, said it was a massive achievement for the company.

Fastway Couriers achieved business growth of over 20pc last year and is now benefiting directly from the rapid rise of online shopping. It counts many of the leading online e-commerce businesses such as ASOS, Littlewoods Ireland, Zara, Oxendales, Boohoo.com, MissGuided and Amazon among its customers.

Fastway, which was first established in New Zealand in 1983, is a franchise organisation operating three international sorting hubs in Portarlington, Dublin and Antrim.
A refugee girl holding a tooth brush stands in front of a tent at the transit centre for refugees, near the southern Macedonian town of Gevgelija, near the border with Greece. Photo: AP

The reintroduction of border controls in Schengen countries would cut up to 65.8bn from EU member states' combined gross domestic product, a new report has claimed.

Germany's respected Ifo Institute for international economic research, has examined the likely financial consequences border controls being re-erected across Europe.

It said that if such controls return across the Schengen area, then between 0.19pc and 0.47pc could be cut from the EU member states' GDP.

Ireland and the United Kingdom aren't among the Schengen countries which abolished passport control at their borders.

The agreement was implemented in 1995, initially in seven countries, before being extended.

Among the other countries that aren't included in it are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus and Romania. Non-EU states including Iceland and Norway are also members.

But the migrant crisis has brought the open border system into focus, particularly in Greece.

Within two weeks, the European Commission wants Greece to fine-tune a plan for improving its external border controls.

If such a plan isn't completed satisfactorily, the EU could extend border controls on travellers from Greece to the EU until later this year, in an effort to prevent migrants from leaving Greece to go to other member states.

With other Schengen countries including Germany and Austria having introduced border controls.

Those controls can't be extended unless the European Commission determines that one Schengen country does not have sufficient controls on its external border.

Gabriel Felbermayr, a director of the Munich-based Ifo Centre said that, at the higher end, the reintroduction of the border controls in Schengen area would result in up to 130.28 per capita being cut from the EU's gross domestic product.

At the lower end of calculations, it would be 52.74, or a total of 26.6bn.

"These costs account for only a small part of those sums that could arise through uncontrolled mass migration," he said.

But Mr Felbermayr said he does not believe the Schengen area will collapse completely.

He said it's far more likely that controls will only be introduced at borders that are on refugee routes.

He added that based on that level of border control, GDP across the region would be cut by between 0.06pc and 0.11pc, or between 9bn and 15.4bn.

The Ifo Institute said that person controls at borders act like a customs duty of 0.5pc on goods trade and of 0.8pc on trade in services.

Experiences at the US borders with Canada and Mexico show that trucks have a 20-minute wait on average, the institute added.

Last week, the European Commission gave Greece until April 26 to clarify elements of an action plan the country's government has drafted for dealing with the migrant crisis.

The action plan already provided to the Commission details how Greece will provide reinforced staff numbers for registration procedures, an expansion of reception facilities, an upgrading of IT systems, and the establishment of an effective coastal surveillance system.

But the Commission said that particular concerns remain regarding the action plan in relation to the lack of detailed timeframes for the actions to be completed, and a lack of information about the authorities responsible for implementing them.

"I welcome the continued efforts of the Greek authorities to improve the situation, which we support," said Commissioner for Migration and Home Affairs Dimitris Avramopoulos last week.

"However, I also need to underline that all of the Council and Commission recommendations need to be met to face the unprecedented pressure at Europe's external borders," he said.
Morgan Stanley joined the parade of Wall Street banks that beat profit estimates by cutting costs to counter a drop in revenue from fixed-income and equities trading.

First-quarter net income fell 53pc to $1.13bn, or 55 cents a share, the New York-based company said Monday in a statement.

Profit surpassed the 47-cent average estimate analysts.

While chief executive James Gorman has been shrinking the fixed-income trading division to emphasize the less-volatile wealth-management business, Morgan Stanley is still exposed to slumping markets that hurt results across Wall Street. The firm follows JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup in lowering expenses to compensate for falling revenue. Goldman Sachs, which reports results today, is embarking on its biggest cost-cutting push in years.

"If these markets were to continue as is, our goals will be extremely difficult to achieve, and we would therefore take additional appropriate actions," Mr Gorman said. The company is reviewing every product and business to "convince ourselves that we need our footprint as it's currently configured," he said.

Morgan Stanley dipped 0.3pc in New York. The stock has dropped 19pc this year, the worst performance in the 90-company Standard & Poor's 500 Financials Index.

Revenue fell 21pc to $7.79bn, compared with the $7.76bn consensus analyst forecast. Non-interest expenses slid 14pc to $6.05bn, below the $6.42bn estimate.

"The biggest surprise in the quarter was compensation," said Keith Horowitz, a Citigroup analyst, in a note to investors.

The bank generated $873m in first-quarter fixed- income revenue, 54pc less than a year earlier and the weakest start to a year since Gorman took over in 2010.

Equities-trading revenue declined 9.3pc to $2.06bn from $2.27bn. (Bloomberg)
Oil sector employees sit in a hall during an official strike called by the Oil and Petrochemical Industries Workers Union over public sector pay reforms, in Ahmadi, Kuwait

Oil prices steadied yesterday after a Kuwaiti workers' strike slashed the country's oil output by more than half, offsetting worries about a scuttled plan by major oil producers to freeze production.

The strike - the first of its kind in 20 years - cut more than 60pc Kuwait's crude output, lending support to price benchmarks such as Brent and Dubai. Supply of refined oil product from the country also tightened due to scaled-back refinery runs and lower fuel exports.

Brent tumbled as much as 7pc earlier in the day after oil majors from the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and non-OPEC Russia failed to reach agreement on a plan to freeze output.

The producers had gathered in Qatar, Doha at the weekend for what was expected to be the rubber-stamping of a deal to stabilize output at January levels until October. The deal crumbled when OPEC heavyweight Saudi Arabia demanded Iran join the plan, despite Tehran's repeated assertions it would not.

"The material loss in production from the Kuwait strike has helped the oil market forget about the farce from Doha," said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at the New York-headquartered Clipperdata.

Brent was up 20 cents, or 0.4pc, at $43.30 a barrel by the end of trading. It had fallen $3 earlier in the session.

US crude's West Texas Intermediate (WTI) benchmark was off 31 cents, or 0.8pc, at $40.05 a barrel, after sliding to $37.61 at the day's low.

Brent's premium versus WTI was at its widest in nearly two months.

While fallout from the Doha plan could weigh on a nascent recovery in oil prices, the market may not tumble as much as it did earlier this year, when Brent hit 12-year lows of around $27 in late January, some analysts said.

"Gradually declining non-OPEC production as well as planned maintenance in the face of resilient oil demand in Q1 have recently pointed to improving oil fundamentals," analysts at Goldman Sachs said in a note, referring to the first quarter.

A weakening US dollar and the mostly steady climb in global equities since February was supportive to oil too, traders said.

"While a few forecasters may be dusting off some old $20 WTI expectations as a result of the Doha outcome, we expect solid support in nearby WTI at the $35 mark," Jim Ritterbusch at Chicago oil consultancy Ritterbusch & Associates said.

However the others believe the Kuwati workers strike will only serve to provide short term relief to oil explorers which had been banking on a deal to freeze production to come out of the Doha talks.

"The weekend talks are a demonstration that the Saudi government, as the deputy crown prince has clearly stated, doesn't want to cede market share," said Ed Morse, head of global commodity research at Citigroup. "If they cede market share it is very difficult to get it back."

WTI traded off Monday's lows after data from market intelligence firm Genscape showed crude inventories at the Cushing, Oklahoma delivery point for US crude futures falling by nearly 860,000 barrels during the week to April 15, traders who saw the data said. (Reuters)
Everybody Loves Raymond star Doris Roberts has passed away at 90.

Doris Roberts, who played the tart-tongued, endlessly meddling mother on TV sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, has died.

The 90-year-old Emmy-winning actress died overnight in her sleep, said family spokeswoman Janet Daily, who was told of the death by Roberts' son, Michael Cannata.

The cause of death was not immediately known, but Roberts had been healthy and active, Ms Daily said.

In the last two weeks she had attended a discussion on Hollywood and gender held by the SAG-AFTRA actors' guild.

Roberts won four Emmy awards for her portrayal of Marie Barone on CBS' Everybody Loves Raymond and received a total of seven nominations as best supporting actress for the show.

"We loved our mom, the great DorisRoberts. A wonderful, funny, indelible actress and friend," Phil Rosenthal, the show's producer, said on Twitter.

The sitcom, which ran from 1996 to 2005, also starred Ray Romano, Brad Garrett and Patricia Heaton. Peter Boyle, who played husband Frank to Roberts' Marie, died in 2006.

Born in St Louis and raised in New York, Roberts was also known for her role in the TV detective series Remington Steele and her work on stage and in movies.

Besides her son, she is survived by her daughter-in-law Jane and three grandchildren, Kelsey, Andrew, and Devon Cannata.

Everybody Loves Raymond co-star Patricia Heaton said on Twitter: "She was funny and tough and loved life, living it to the fullest. Nothing gave her greater joy than her three wonderful grandchildren, of whom she was so proud. It was truly a privilege Doris. I love you and miss you."

Actor Josh Gad, the voice of Olaf in Frozen, described her as "an amazing talent and amazing person".

Roberts began her stage career on Broadway in the 1950s, amassing credits that eventually included Neil Simon's The Last of the Red Hot Lovers and Terrence McNally's Bad Habits.

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In early TV appearances she was seen in episodes of Studio One, The Naked City and The Defenders.

An enthusiastic cook, she co-wrote Are You Hungry, Dear? Life, Laughs, And Lasagna - a memoir with recipes - in 2005.
She recently wrapped filming for the latest series of Once Upon A Time.

But Dublin actress Victoria Smurfit was delighted to step back into her role as Cruella De Vil for a spin-off of the ABC drama.

The former Ballykissangel star has been enjoying television success in the US after landing the role and last week was busy filming a DVD special.

The Dubliner made her debut in the fairy-tale-inspired series in season 4, alongside The Little Mermaid's Ursula and Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent.

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"The writer, Jane Espenson, has written a two-hander with me and another actor," Victoria told the Diary.

"So that happened, even though we have wrapped on the show. It's a little extra bit, which will be fun. And what's next, I never know."

While Cruella was killed off last season, the popular fantasy series is known for bringing characters back from the dead.

Dating Despite her career flying across the water, Victoria said she is very open to coming home for work in the future.

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"I would love to come home and do a job," she told the Diary.

The LA-based actress was back in the capital earlier this month to attend the IFTAs at The Mansion House.

The 40-year-old is loved-up with the new man in her life, filmmaker Alistair Ramsden, who she has been dating since last year.

The blonde beauty met her new beau on the set of Bait, a film which she produced.

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They went public with their romance last October and regularly share loved-up snaps of each other on Instagram.

Victoria confirmed in February 2015 that she and husband of 15 years, Doug Baxter, had split up. The pair moved to LA in 2014 and have three children together.
The scene of the fire at the ESB substation in Bluebell in south Dublin. Photo: Steve Humphreys

Thieves trying to steal copper wire from an ESB substation sparked a massive 10m fire.

In a statement released last night by Crimestoppers, the electricity supplier said that the damage was caused by "third-party interference".

ESB Networks said that 120,000 customers were left without power when the 220KV substation in Bluebell, south Dublin, was targeted on Sunday night.

It has since been established that thieves who were attempting to steal copper from the site caused the inferno.

Since 2012, over 150km of copper valued at 3m has been stolen, with a replacement cost to ESB Networks of 28m.

A spokesman for Crimestoppers has confirmed that there will be a reward for information that leads to a prosecution in this case.
A local authority has launched a legal action against a couple it claims have moved into a vacant council house without permission.

Longford County Council wants High Court orders against John Paul and Frances Doyle who allegedly moved into the house at Casey Court, Kenagh, Co Longford, some days ago.

The council wants them to hand over possession of the property as well as an order restraining them from entering or re-entering without lawful authority.

Mr Justice Paul Gilligan granted the council permission to serve short notice of the injunction proceedings on the Doyles.

The application was made ex-parte, meaning only one side was represented in court.

The judge adjourned the matter for a week.

The couple are on the local authority's housing waiting list, the court heard.

The judge was told there was some urgency to the matter because the council have offered the property to another family on the list,

The house had been vacant for a time before the Doyles moved in.
The farmer at the centre of a massive repossession controversy in Cork has slated a damning report on the state of animal welfare at his Cradenhill farm near Kinsale.

The report, completed by Fermoy vet Sean O'Sullivan, claims that the 1,000-head herd, which was sold following a High Court ruling on an unpaid 2.4m debt to ACC, was in dire need of emergency care.

Mr O'Sullivan, who documented the actions taken to save the herd during the four-month period in the run-up to last week's auction, stated that many calves had already died this year due to the absence of basic vaccination and healthcare requirements.

However, the former herd-owner, Peter Kingston, has dismissed the report and labelled the litany of issues "baloney" and "ludicrous".

"That vet stood in my yard (last December) and told me there was no sign of any welfare issues," said Mr Kingston, adding that his son was witness to the exchange.

"We only lost about 10 to 12 animals during the previous four months. We were going really well up to that point," he added, claiming that the Dutch management team employed on the farm by the County Sheriff last December had lost many multiples of this.

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'Shocked'

However, an affidavit lodged by Cork County Sheriff Sinead McNamara, stated that both she and Mr O'Sullivan were "shocked" by the condition of the herd and the farm in general.

"No feed had been provided for the herd, Mr Kingston stated that he had ordered feed but that it hadn't arrived. There was no feed for the calves," it continued.

Mr O'Sullivan's report states that "the majority of animals on the farm were unacceptably thin, with low body condition score averaging two" last December.

It continues: "Calf health was further compromised as the previous keeper of the herd, Mr Kingston, informed me that no vaccination programmes were in place to prevent common cow and calf diseases, including viral diarrhoea, viral and bacterial pneumonia and BVD,

Many of the cows that were sold last week averaged 700 a head, despite being descended from some of the most sought-after bloodlines within the breed, which would have been expected to fetch more.

The herd was restricted on disease-control grounds due to a failed TB test before the new management took over.

Despite a clear TB test, it remained restricted by the Department of Agriculture until late March, which further contributed to overstocking and increased disease, the veterinary report states.

The new workers, along with a team of vets, tried to prevent a major disease outbreak in calves during the spring, which cost the lives of "many" animals.

The animal-welfare issues contributed significantly to the estimated 1m invested by Cork County Sheriff Ms McNamara into the farm since its repossession, according to the veterinary report.

After Ms McNamara had said she was shocked by the condition of the herd and property when she took possession, Mr Kingston's wife, Tracey, said it was "very upsetting to hear people saying those things".

She continued: "The welfare of the animals would be the number one priority on this farm and it always has been."

The Kingstons, who had featured on and won RTE's programme 'Ireland's Fittest Families', also rejected claims that the farm was over-stocked to the point that there were not enough drinking points available for stock. The vet's report states that water supplies were also contaminated with faeces, resulting in a new well being drilled.

"We had enough water. The (Sheriff's employees) were washing down the yard every day with a high-volume hose, which was emptying all the water out of the system," said Mr Kingston.

The report also claimed that cows were being put at risk of colic and death due to plastic being mixed with silage, while large parts of the two-acre shed were unusable due to flooding and new-born calves were left standing in "inches of water".

In addition, slurry pits were exposed, with no safety fencing to keep either animals or humans from falling in; there were no working cattle crush on the farm, a vital facility on a farm for putting cattle in to safely handle them for testing or vaccinations; and calf-housing had no wind breaks.

A "substantial segment" of the 64-unit rotary milking machine was also not working.

After the auction, Mr Kingston said farmers with bank debt now faced "a colonial-type situation" and that the family had vowed to stick together and keep going.

Five similar auctions are now understood to be in planning in south Munster, involving other farmers who are in serious arrears with bank debts.

Mr Kingston said: "We made five different offers to try and get this settled. We had outside investors lined up.

"They would have got their money back. We offered to pay back up to 3.4m on four separate occasions to ACC. It is just heartbreaking."

The Kingston's Cradenhill Farm was purchased by George Kingston in 1972 with the proceeds of profits from his Cork beehive operation and his son Peter became involved in 1983.

From 2007, they expanded the dairy operation with the construction of a new milking parlour capable of handling 600 cows and then sheds, including one with almost one hectare under cover. Debt became a critical problem for the operation from 2013 and in June 2015 ACC secured a judgement on foot of the 2.4m that it was owed.
Disgraced former politician Ivor Callely is facing another term in jail for breaking a court order forcing him to pay a debt to an accountancy firm.

The ex-Fianna Fail politician and Minster of State was jailed for five months in 2014 for using false invoices to claim expenses 4,207.45 at Leinster House, Kildare Street between November 2007 and December 2009 while he was a member of the Seanad.

However, today Callely (57) of St Lawrence, Clontarf, had to appear before Judge Michael Coghlan at Dublin District Court.

This set of proceedings results from his failure to comply with terms of a 2013 district court judgement compelling him to pay a 1,755 debt to Galway based accountants Gallagher & Company who have asked the judge or issue a committal order.

Callely, who claims he has needs a 2,500 a month for a reasonable living, said he had done his best to contact the creditor but Judge Michael Coghlan told him he was in contempt of court orders.

Threatening to jail him, the judge said he was not impressed with his evidence and wanted to see proof of his income and expenditure. Judge Coghlan said he would not proceed with a committal order on Tuesday but he adjourned the case for four weeks.

He gave the former TD and senator a formal warning that he would issue the committal order if Callely does does not provide the court and the creditor with adequate information in advance of the next hearing.

Solicitor Paula McHugh acting for Gallagher & Company's told the court that 1,755 was owed by Callely to the firm. There was also an additional application to increase the amount outstanding by another 150.

She furnished the court with an invoice and explained that the extra amount was a result of expenses from hiring a private investigator to establish the whereabouts of Callely who also spends time in Northern Ireland. She also said he had not notified them of a change of address.

She said he never kept in touch with her clients after the original judgement was given in the district court in June 2013. The ruling included an instalment order stating Callely had to pay 100 a month to clear his debt.

The former politician gave evidence and provided a statement of his means which he said had been vouched by an assets management agency. However lawyers for Gallagher & Company said they had not been furnished with Callely's income and expenditure documents.

In evidence he said that he has an income of 7,683 a month most. He pays 4,800 a month on a lease for a commercial property in Dublin which he lets out but he explained it was difficult to find tenants able to afford the rent.

At present a hardware owner is paying him 5,200 a month to use the premises. He said the rent on the property is higher than that on others in the same area and over recent years three Chinese restaurants operated out of the premises but he added the rent was too heavy for them and they could not make ends meet.

He agreed that two of his monthly payments had bounced back to him and he contacted the owner's solicitor and learned the owner had died.

Ms McHugh put it to him that he did not afford the same respect to her clients and he replied that she was presenting it in in a smart fashion adding I tried to find out what happened.

Judge Coghlan said Callely's vouched statement of means did not stand up to scrutiny and that the court needed to see the lease agreement.

Explaining why he has not paid the debt he said that his lawyers were also looking for a payment of 6,200 in legal fees arising out of his criminal charges and other proceedings which he was not in a position to pay.

The court heard he owes approximately 250,000 to the legal firm.

He also aid that he owes 5m to AIB and 11m to another creditor, the court heard.

Ms McHugh put it to him that in the three years since the district court judgement was made he never picked up the phone to contact her clients. They had to make the court application, she said.

I try to be reasonable with everyone, said Mr Callely but Ms McHugh said that was not he experience of her client. He claimed he left numerous telephone messages but the court heard that the solicitors for the accountancy firm only received one message.

Judge Coghlan noted from his statement of means that Callely has 2,500 in living expenses. The former politician said it was 800 a week, which he claimed was an amount set out by an insolvency advisor for reasonable living.

Judge Coghlan was not satisfied with the documentation furnished by the ex-politician and told him that he was not interested in third party information which described as estimates. He said he was interested in forensic evidence.

I am not a bit impressed by this performance Mr Callely, said Judge Coghlan, adding, this is a very serious point, this is coming to the end of the rope. He told him that an instalment order is in place and he has failed to make any repayments and this was nothing short of a contempt of at least two court orders, the judgement and the instalment order.

He said he was giving him a month to produce full explanations for every penny of his income. He said he was giving him a formal warning that he will require a full root and branch vouched statement of means setting out his income and a schedule of his expenditure.
A detective garda has denied giving a false statement to the Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) during an investigation into claims that one of his colleagues was sent a bullet and womens underwear in the post.

Det Gda David OBrien told investigators he was not in contact with the woman who allegedly mailed the package, which also contained a Valentines card with an unsavoury verse, Dublin District Court heard.

Prosecutors maintain that phone records show the two were in touch at the time.

Intimidated

The package was posted to the workplace of Det Sgt Michael Buckley, of the cold case Serious Crime Review Team at the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation at Harcourt Square.

The complaint was made by his wife, Briege, who claimed Det Sgt Buckley was being bullied and intimidated and she felt the bullet was a threat to her and her two sons.

Mr OBrien has pleaded not guilty to giving false or misleading information on September 10, 2012.

Tony McGillicuddy, prosecuting, said the accused in his statement said he had not been in contact with the woman for around 15 years.

The prosecutions case was that there was contact on phones attributable to Mr OBrien and the woman between February and March 2011.

Mrs Buckley told the court that her husband received the package on February 21, 2011.

He later located the woman who sent it, she said.

She felt she and her twin sons, aged 18, were under threat.

She said there was a garda investigation, but when she heard there was no case to answer, she complained to GSOC, alleging involvement by Mr OBrien and another named garda.

She believed the intimidation originated because her husband made a complaint about media leaks and financial irregularities.

She feared that she might be shot.

The court heard Det Sgt Buckley had not made any complaint against the accused.

When interviewed by GSOC, Mr OBrien denied any involvement in sending the envelope.

He said he knew the alleged sender through her father and had not spoken to her since the 1990s.

Around January 2011, he met her father and told him he was working with a p***k  Det Sgt Buckley  who was making my working conditions unbearable.

He did not ask the man to do anything and did not know his daughter was going to send the card.

motivation

He said he had never threatened Det Sgt Buckley or his family but had made two bullying complaints about him and believed this was the motivation behind the GSOC complaint.

In his statement, Mr OBrien said he had been in the force for 29 years and had an exemplary record.

Defence barrister Kathleen Leader argued that if there was any threat it was to Det Sgt Buckley, not his wife.

The court heard members of the force could not make complaints to GSOC.

Ms Leader pointed out that the envelope had been sent to Harcourt Square and Ms Buckley only saw it when her husband brought it home.

The trial continues.
Raymond Dowdall, of Galtymore Road, Drimnagh, Dublin pictured leaving the Bridewell District Court in Dublin after he appeared before the Dublin District Court.Pic: Collins Courts

A DUBLIN man who was jailed for a notorious joyriding crash that killed two gardai has been given a suspended sentence for new motoring offences.

Raymond Dowdall (30), who was given an eight-year sentence and a 30-year road ban in 2003, is now working for a security company, a court heard today.

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Dowdall of Galtymore Road, Drimnagh, was the driver of a stolen Mazda MX5 when it smashed into a patrol car containing Garda Anthony Tighe (53) and Garda Michael Padden (27) on the Stillorgan dual carriageway in the early hours of April 14, 2002. He was aged 16 at the time and already had a litany of prior criminal convictions.

The father-of-one, who now works for a security firm, appeared at Dublin District Court yesterday. He entered guilty pleas via his barrister to two motoring offences: driving without insurance and a licence, on July 13 last year at Galtymore Road.

He turned up late for his hearing and a bench warrant was issued but Judge Hugh O'Donnell cancelled it when Dowdall's barrister explained that he had arrived and that there was a guilty plea.

Garda Marcus Regan, of Sundrive Road station, told Judge O'Donnell that Dowdall has 51 prior criminal convictions. They included two counts of dangerous driving causing death of gardai for which Dowdall received an eight year sentence and a 30-year road ban, said Gda Regan. He also said the man had four previous convictions for driving without insurance.

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Judge O'Donnell noted the accused had been driving while disqualified he committed his latest offence.

Gda Regan agreed with the defence barrister that Dowdall, who did not address the court, had been co-operative and had not been driving dangerously.

In pleas for leniency, Judge O'Donnell was told that Dowdall had gone to his partner's house and took her car after a row.

He has a young child to care for and is apologetic. The court heard that he is now working for a security firm and would do anything to avoid going in to custody. He was willing to do community service, counsel also said.

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Judge O'Donnell noted that he has already served an eight-year sentence but added it does not seem to have worked.

He imposed a five-month jail sentence but suspended it on condition Dowdall does not re-offend for the next two years. Fines totalling 750 were also imposed but Judge O'Donnell said there would be no point imposing another road ban because Dowdall is already suspended from driving.

It was the early hours of Sunday, April 14, 2002 and Garda Michael Padden (27) and Garda Tony Tighe (53) were just 45 minutes into their early morning shift when the previous incident involving Dowdall occurred.

At around 6.45am a stolen Mazda MX-5 shot past the White's Cross junction near Leopardstown in Dublin at maximum speed heading for the city centre. It tore the wing mirror off a car sitting at traffic lights.

Garda Padden and Garda Tighe were trying to clear cars from the path of the stolen car when it hit their stationary squad car at a speed of up to 120mph.

The two gardai died instantly and their efforts and lives were obliterated at a junction of the Stillorgan dual carriageway on Dublin's southside.
The brother of murdered journalist Veronica Guerin has said he is happy that he will never have to lay eyes on her murderer again after the Court of Appeal dismissed Brian Meehan's bid to have his conviction overturned.

Speaking outside court, a relieved Jimmy Guerin said it was a "great result" for the family and for the gardai.

He continued: "I think that's the end of it now. We'll have no more cases. It's not easy (coming into court) but it's important to do it. I don't think I'll be laying eyes on (Meehan) again. He's gone back now to where he's supposed to be and I'm happy with that. I think he will serve a life sentence."

The court dismissed as an "abuse of process" Meehan's attempt to have his murder conviction declared a miscarriage of justice. 'Sunday Independent' reporter Ms Guerin was murdered on Dublin's Naas Road on June 26, 1996, while stopped at traffic lights.

A motorcycle pulled up alongside her and the pillion passenger fired several shots into her car. Meehan (47), from Crumlin in Dublin, is serving a life sentence in Portlaoise Prison for her murder, having been convicted by the non-jury Special Criminal Court in July 1999 following a 31-day-trial.

It was the prosecution's case that he drove the motorcycle.

Meehan had applied to quash his 1999 murder conviction on the basis of alleged new or newly discovered facts, following an unsuccessful appeal against his conviction in 2006.

The alleged new evidence concerned matters which emerged in the course of the 2001 Special Criminal Court trial of John Gilligan, at the close of which Mr Gilligan was acquitted of Ms Guerin's murder.

Dismissing Meehan's application under section 2 of the Criminal Procedure Act yesterday, Mr Justice George Birmingham said it was "entirely clear" that "no new fact or newly discovered fact" had been established.

It was abundantly clear, the judge continued, that all of the material on which Meehan was seeking to rely now was available, at the latest, from the time of the Gilligan trial in 2001 and that the arguments he now presented had been formulated in detail by 2003.

Meehan decided not to present those arguments before the Court of Criminal Appeal and the choices he made had "consequences", the judge said.

To formulate grounds and arguments, not proceed with them and then seek to resurrect the same grounds and arguments years later as new facts was "quite unacceptable and indeed, in the view of the court, amounts to an abuse of process".

Mr Justice Birmingham, who sat with Mr Justice Alan Mahon and Mr Justice John Edwards, said the court was satisfied "not only that all of the material pointed to" by Meehan was "properly disclosed to him and his legal team but also that its significance was fully appreciated by them, at the very least by the time of his appeal against conviction" in 2003.

Accordingly, the court refused the application. Meehan was led away to continue serving the rest of his life sentence.
A good samaritan who was assaulted after he tried to help a garda make an arrest has said he would think twice about helping again, a Dublin court has heard.

Ian Brady (31) formerly of Beaver Street, Dublin 1, but now living in hostel accommodation, was given a three year suspended sentence by Judge Elma Sheahan at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.

He had pleaded guilty to assault causing harm to Gerard O'Toole on Beaver St, Dublin 1 on June 17, 2014. He has 38 previous convictions.

The court heard Garda Shona Moran approached Brady and another man on the street after she suspected a drug deal was taking place. Brady's companion fled the scene and was followed by the garda.

Gerard O'Toole, a 51-year-old GPO worker who was on the way to his mother's house, saw the man running away from Gda Moran and put out a hand to stop him. He didn't make contact, but was immediately approached by Brady who then punched him in the forehead.

The incident was captured on CCTV.

Mr O'Toole suffered a severe laceration and was left with a scar on his forehead.

I have a permanent scar because I helped a garda, he said in a victim impact report handed in to court. I'd think twice about doing that again.

Defence barrister, Luigi Rea BL, said Brady was the white sheep of his family, who came from a deprived background but managed to hold down a job as a car valet for a few years.

He lost his job during the recession, became depressed and turned to drugs, the court heard.

He was remorseful for his actions and had not come before garda attention since, the court heard.
An Irishman has picked up a conviction after he broke a bed and let off a fire extinguisher during a big night out in Australia.

The Daily Liberal is reporting that Thomas Bailey (22) pleaded guilty to two counts of damaging property.

The court heard that Bailey jumped on, and broke, the wooden slats of a bed and let off a fire extinguisher after drinking seven Vodka Redbull mixed drinks and three or four beers.

The incident happened while he was staying at at the Amaroo Hotel, in Dubbo, New South Wales

Local magistrate Philip Stewart convicted Bailey and ordered him to pay $300 (206) fine for each offence, as well as compensation to the hotel.

The Irishman booked into the hotel on April 2 - the date the offences occurred.

Court documents show that when he let off the fire extinguisher he sprayed the fire retardant on to the carpet in the room, along with the bathroom area and hallways.

Reports said police arrived about 3.15am and he made admissions to spraying the fire retardant.

He was arrested and told police he had consumed seven Vodka Redbull mixed drinks and three or four beers.

The Irishman, who is on a working Visa in Australia, represented himself in court.

When the magistrate asked him what happened and if he had had too much alcohol, Bailey said yes.

"Mr Bailey, this is certainly not your best behaviour," Mr Stewart said.

"(You're here) on a working visa from Ireland. According to the facts you had way too much alcohol."
A Co Dublin businessman told a judge today that long queues in his local AIB branch was creating difficulties for him in paying off an 84,000 arrears debt on his mortgage.

Martin Ryan, of 40 Carrickbrack Road, Baily, Howth, Co Dublin, told Judge Jacqueline Linnane that when he dropped in to his Sutton branch he was met with long queues.

They are always very busy and you have to queue for an hour to make a payment, Ryan told the Circuit Civil Court.

Ryan, who represented himself in court, said he put his 250-a-week mortgage and arrears repayments into the banks Automated Teller Machine (ATM) but the bank refused to accept payment by this method.

I have been making weekly payments of 250 per week but AIB refuses to take my payments, he said.

Barrister Keith Rooney, who appeared with Joynt and Crawford solicitors for the bank, said AIB was unable to accept payments via its ATM and Mr Ryan had been told this. He said the bank was seeking an adjournment to allow it to clarify some matters.

Ryan and his wife, Mary, are being sued by the bank for possession of their Baily property on foot of loans of 20,000, 65,000 and 120,000 taken out against their home. Repayment arrears now stood at 84,000, the court heard.

Warning him to continue making lodgements against his mortgage, Judge Linnane told him: All of us have to queue and if you have to queue you have to queue. Dont come back to me blaming the bank for something that is not the banks fault.

The judge said it was clear from a letter the bank had sent him on 9th December last year that Mr Ryan could not make payments on his mortgage account through an ATM.

Adjourning the proceedings, Judge Linnane said 250 a week was not going to make a big dent on arrears of 84,000 but he should continue lodging the money.

The court heard the Ryans had failed to make payments due to the bank and a written demand for possession of the property had been made on April 9, 2014.
There are fears within Labour that re-entering coalition with Fine Gael will result in Ms Burton holding on to the leadership. Photo: Steve Humphreys

Labour leader Joan Burton may be asked to step down if she pushes ahead with plans to return the party to government alongside Fine Gael.

There are fears within Labour that re-entering coalition with Fine Gael will result in Ms Burton holding on to the leadership. Labour rules mean that despite the disastrous election result, she would not be forced into a leadership contest if the party returned to government.

Yesterday, a senior Labour figure told the Irish Independent they believed that Ms Burton was seeking to remain in power. The parliamentary party source said that if Labour went into government the party would be "further damaged" by the current leadership.

"She is playing to put us back into government and playing to remain leader," the source said.

"I would find it very difficult to support a scenario that would see us go back into government short of a change of leadership.

"There would have to be a complete different composition of leadership."

After the party won just seven seats at the General Election, Ms Burton said she would not go into government, preferring to rebuild in opposition.

This has now changed following approaches from Fine Gael, which is anxious to have the support of Labour in the next government.

However, Taoiseach Enda Kenny is expected to put pressure on Ms Burton to reach a decision in the coming days.

Senior Fine Gael figures said they were not prepared to "wait weeks" for Labour to make a decision on entering government again.

However, any move towards entering government will have to be put to the Labour membership and there are doubts within the party over whether members would pass a motion aimed at returning to power with Fine Gael.

Split

There is also a split emerging among former and current Labour TDs after it emerged the party opened talks with Fine Gael. Longford Westmeath TD Willie Penrose said that it was too early to discuss Labour's position when Fianna Fail and Fine Gael had not agreed on how a minority government would work.

"It is presumptuous to ask questions before a Fine Gael/Fianna Fail agreement," he said.

Mr Penrose said if Labour was to support Fine Gael, even from opposition, it would need a number of commitments, including a referendum on the privatisation of Irish Water.

Labour Seanad candidate Kevin Humphreys also said he wanted to see the agreement by the two biggest parties before he would make a decision.

But Kildare South TD Jack Wall said there should be "just reward for those who stuck with government". He added: "I was in opposition for a long time.

"We can't afford to be acting the mick around the place. There are major things happening concerning hospitals."

Ousted Dublin South-Central TD Michael Conaghan said he would prefer to stay out of government but could see why others wanted to go in.

"The party has been damaged, hopes have been damaged and aspirations have been damaged," he said.
The Wild Atlantic Way is one example of a success story that can be used as a template for the idea of rural-proofing. Photo: Getty Images/National Geographic

During the General Election, and in the weeks that have passed since, there has been a great deal of debate around the issue of rural Ireland. Was poor communication from Government about its achievements in rural areas in part to blame for this? Its developments and its investment in projects, services and organisations seem to have been lost in the noise, and it is paramount that we get the message out that rural Ireland has always been, and continues to remain, a priority and focus for this Government.

I believe that it is an extremely facile argument to simply say that a new Department of Rural Affairs will sort out rural Ireland. As if one size fits all.

I believe the challenge requires a more unique approach: a rural-proofing policy, so that when decisions are being made, the impact on rural areas is a priority before policy is changed or implemented. For example, the pupil-teacher ratio is the same for the islands as it is for the mainland, despite the different challenges facing their schools and teachers. To avoid such discrepancies in future, logical thinking needs to happen at a decision-making level.

Any success from this new approach will be closely linked to increased resources. You cannot achieve what is needed in this area without a robust budget.

In my own Department of the Gaeltacht, the capital budget in 2008 was 26m - in Budget 2015 it was reduced to 6m. Yet against this backdrop, recruitment has been happening. The predominantly rural Gaeltacht saw 533 jobs created in 2015 and the lowest level of job losses on record.

There is also the potential for this new rural-proofing role to act as a 'watchdog' in terms of rural policy - for example, taking into consideration the concerns of small inshore and islands fishermen.

There is a need for more resourcing for EU Leader programmes, Tus schemes, Rural Social Schemes, Udarus and CE schemes. These organisations already do vital work in their areas and, rather than reinventing the wheel, we need to support them more with additional funding and consideration at a policy level.

Broadband is another crucial area in this debate, and is one of the biggest challenges facing rural areas throughout Ireland.

The National Broadband Plan is an absolute priority. While there has been some criticism over the length of time it has taken to implement it, it is worth noting that approval had to be sought from the EU for the plan, as this will be a Government intervention in an existing market place.

As a consequence, the new plan will cover 30pc of rural areas that will not be covered by commercial interests.

The Wild Atlantic Way is one example of a success story that can be used as a template for the idea of rural-proofing.

This initiative achieved its goal of increasing tourism to regional areas, both from Ireland and abroad. It has been a phenomenal success story, receiving attention from all over the world.

The next phase of the project is to include locations previously excluded from the plans, so even more areas can benefit from its success.

There are positive stories in rural Ireland. Last October I got on a plane with an official from Udaras na Gaeltachta to meet representatives of company in Manchester. I am happy to say that, later today, that same company will be creating 125 jobs in Gaoth Dobhair in North West Donegal.

We can make things happen as politicians if we trust in the mandate that we are given. Unfortunately, too many elected representatives have adopted the narrative of fear through an abdication of responsibility and a negative outlook for the future.

Joe McHugh is TD for Donegal and is acting Minister of State for Gaeltacht Affairs
Sources within Fine Gael say the acting Taoiseach was 'very fond' of the idea of another Labour coalition because, despite his sometimes awkward relationship with Joan Burton, she has proven herself to be loyal

'In Ireland, the inevitable never happens and the unexpected constantly occurs." Those are the potentially prophetic words of John Pentland Mahaffy, who is now 'overseeing' the talks between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.

A snob with a good heart, who was the High Sherriff of Monaghan and one of Dublin's greatest wits, Mahaffy may prove an unexpected inspiration for the parties.

Oscar Wilde considered him his first and greatest teacher, while Oliver St John Gogarty was another of his proteges. It would be interesting to know what he makes of Leo Varadkar and Barry Cowen as they sit below his grand portrait in the Provost's House at Trinity College.

The negotiating teams from the two big parties decamped from Government Buildings yesterday to No. 1, Grafton Street, where they hope to avoid the prying eyes of the media and - perhaps more significantly - their fellow TDs.

Getting work done in Leinster House can sometimes be a hazardous task - especially when you are at the centre of the latest news cycle.

A simple trip to the bathroom can result in several lengthy conversations with journalists and other politicians who lurk in the corridors.

So in these days of media blackouts and "trust-building" negotiations, it's no surprise that a new venue was found.

The two teams have been given the Provost's private library, which has a table for 16 and plenty of room for advisors. Two separate breakout rooms have been assigned and the food is being ordered in.

Sources last night suggested that the change of scenery has given the talks a new sense of vigour.

And while that might be true, it doesn't change the fact that the machinations on the outside are still troublesome.

The Independents continue to wrestle with their consciences and, more bizarrely, the Labour Party stepped briefly onto the pitch before quickly appearing to feign an injury.

Sources within Fine Gael say the acting Taoiseach was "very fond" of the idea of another Labour coalition because, despite his sometimes awkward relationship with Joan Burton, she has proven herself to be loyal.

Instead, Mr Kenny is going back to an angry bunch of Independents who are starting to feel disrespected.

They dispute claims by Fine Gael sources that they arrived into Government Buildings with shopping lists that would cost billions.

Tensions are still high and the final deal that will see a new Cabinet appointed is far from done - but we are getting there slowly.

Mahaffy, who was Provost of Trinity during the 1916 Rising, wrote in his book 'The Principles of the Art of Conversation' that of all "prized accomplishments in society, that of being agreeable in conversation is the very first".

Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are finally reaching that point, but nothing is inevitable.
President Higgins has publicly stated that he is 'very, very well aware' of Article 13 of the constitution which gives him the 'absolute power' to decide whether the Dail should be dissolved if the Taoiseach tells him a government cant be formed Photo: Caroline Quinn

President Michael D Higgins has warned political parties that he is watching developments and is fully aware of his constitutional influence.

The president made his first comments on the post-election stalemate yesterday as Fine Gael and Fianna Fail moved closer to agreeing a deal on a minority government.

The Irish Independent has learned that Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin attended a secret meeting with Enda Kenny in Government Buildings yesterday, while negotiating teams from the two parties moved their talks to Trinity College.

Fine Gael sources were last night "very hopeful" that a deal can be agreed this week, clearing the way for individual talks with Independents.

"At this stage the target is to get around eight of the 14 Independents on board," the source said, adding that the Labour Party is no longer seen as a viable option.

Acting Taoiseach Enda Kenny was hopeful that Joan Burton would get her six TDs on side for a new coalition but senior members of both parties last night accepted that is now extremely unlikely.

It comes as Mr Higgins' intervened to publicly state that he is "very, very well aware" of Article 13 of the constitution which gives him the "absolute power" to decide whether the Dail should be dissolved if the Taoiseach tells him a government can't be formed.

"I'm aware of both the responsibilities that I have that are precise and the capacities I have that may be imprecise - so I remain fully aware and watching what will unfold," he said in reply to a question at an event in Dublin yesterday.

"My hope is that whatever happens will be to the benefit of the Irish people."

The two negotiating teams have now agreed on a basic framework for how a Fine Gael-led minority government will be "facilitated" by Fianna Fail.

It is understood that there will be a written agreement between the parties which outlines the level of support Fianna Fail will be expected to give.

However, sources said the "confidence and supply" arrangement will also note that Fianna Fail reserves the right to act as the main opposition party in the 32nd Dail and to oppose legislation that is not related to financial issues.

Last night, the parties exchanged policy papers on issues such as Irish Water and health and sources expressed confidence that a deal is in the offing.

However, spokesmen for both parties were refusing to "confirm or deny" that Mr Martin attended a side meeting in Government Buildings.

Members of the Independent Alliance also held a meeting in Dublin yesterday amid claims that TDs involved in the talks had submitted requests totalling 13bn.

A source within the Department of Finance last night confirmed to the Irish Independent that costings on a number of projects had been compiled for Michael Noonan and this figure was conservative.

However, separately, a Fine Gael strategist accepted that the Independents were not looking for everything on the list of requests submitted but had sought "to see what was feasible".

Roscommon TD Michael Fitzmaurice told Galway FM the 13bn was being "twisted" and that Independents did "absolutely not" go in with an unreasonable shopping list.

He argued that much of what was proposed was already budgeted for. "If we are talking about getting the west of Ireland up and running, obviously it will cost a few pound, but it will cost nothing like what they were on about," he said.
Labour Party leader Joan Burton has instructed her officials to prepare for a second election, Independent.ie can reveal.

In an email to Labour members, Ms Burton said the current uncertainty around government talks mean another election cannot be ruled out.

Accordingly, our general secretary is making provision for that, and has been in touch with candidates in recent days. We will be ready should another election occur, Ms Burton said.

Ms Burton described discussions last week with Fine Gael on the formation of the next government as a listening exercise on Labours part.

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At the moment Fianna Fail appear unwilling to participate in government, Sinn Fein are determined to be destructive in opposition and Fine Gael have thus far failed to reach any agreement on a minority administration with the Independents. It was therefore unsurprising that Fine Gael turned to us in recent days, she said.

She insisted the party has responsibility to at least consider the possibility of returning to government but said any decision would be put to a special delegates conference.

However, the acting Tanaiste said her preferred option for the future of the party is to form a progressive alliance in the opposition benches with the Social Democrats and the Green Party.

The purpose of such a progressive alliance would be to ensure a strong grouping in opposition to fight for progressive causes and ensure policies are promoted that improve peoples lives, she said.

Ms Burton said members have been overwhelmingly supportive of the idea with 90pc of those responding to her saying they support the establishment of a progressive alliance.
Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams is the only other political leader who is willing to release his tax returns. Picture credit; Damien Eagers

Green Party Leader Eamon Ryan has promised to publish his tax returns in the wake of the 'Panama Papers' scandal.

The move will put pressure on all party leaders to release their tax details after details of the off-shore bank account arrangements were made public.

A Green Party spokesman said Mr Ryan is happy to follow the example set by British leaders and publish his tax returns.

"In the documents available to hand, however, both his and his wife's taxes are displayed. He will seek his own returns to publish," he said.

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams is the only other political leader who is willing to release his tax returns.

Mr Adams' commitment follows the publication of Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness's tax returns.

In Britain, there have been calls for more transparency on tax paid by politicians after Prime Minister David Cameron's father's name emerged in the leak of documents from an off-shore legal firm.

A spokesman for acting Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who received the backing of Mr Cameron before the General Election, said the Fine Gael leader has no additional income beyond his salary and has no reason to make a tax return.

He also said Mr Kenny made a statutory declaration to the Standards in Public Office Commission (Sipo) declaring he is tax compliant.

The three Social Democrat leaders, Stephen Donnelly, Catherine Murphy and Roisin Shortall, who campaign for transparency in public office, also refused to release tax returns. A spokeswoman said tax declarations the three submitted with Sipo should "suffice" the public.

Labour leader Joan Burton and Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin did not respond to requests for comment.

Transparency International Ireland chief executive John Devitt welcomed the publication of any financial details but said a tax declaration on its own will not address all conflicts of interest. He said politicians should register details of all financial liabilities and mortgages.
Paramedics tried to resuscitate a man who was pulled from the River Liffey near the East Link bridge in Dublin last night.

The man, believed to be in his late 20s, was spotted in the river by a passerby, around 9:30pm.

Several units of the Dublin Fire Brigade from the North Strand and Tara Street stations attended the scene.

A team of paramedics performed CPR on the man who was unconscious when he was pulled from the river.

He was taken to the nearby Mater Hospital. His condition was not known last night.
A Dublin family is having to use two different GPs - because their local doctor did not take on the free GP care for children under six scheme.

Catherine Spillane from Cabinteely has been using her local GP for years, along with her son Jesse (2), but has since had to take him to a different doctor in Deansgrange.

While the distance is of little issue to Ms Spillane, the process of getting accepted at a GP practice proved to be an ordeal - during which her online applications were rejected six times by separate GP practices, as many who had entered the scheme did not want to take on new patients.

The mother contacted the HSE, which then offered to intervene and said it would find a GP within a 15km radius.

However, she said she was lucky that a doctor's practice accepted her before they were placed somewhere too inconvenient.

Ms Spillane said that while she was very happy with her child's new GP, her son had already settled in in the family practice. "It's not too far away, but definitely not as convenient as the one I use.

"It's a complete inconvenience because I still go to the same GP, but my son obviously doesn't, so if we have a bug or something, or if we've both got to see a doctor for the same reason, then we have to go to separate GPs," she added.

Laura Haugh from parenting website MummyPages said that situations such as this were commonplace for families since the introduction of the scheme.

"Unfortunately it now seems that many families are unable to benefit from free local GP care with surgeries closing the door to new patients," Ms Haugh said. "It is disappointing to see that the free GP care scheme for children under six years has not been accepted by all family doctors."
Sally and Andrew Lydon: I had to plead for his life

A tearful mother has told how she had to plead for a critical operation for her terminally ill husband - because surgeons didn't want him to block a bed that could help save somebody's life.

Sally Lydon had to sign a document agreeing to bring her seriously ill husband Andrew, who has Motor Neuron Disease, home from University Hospital Galway today before surgeons agreed to carry out the operation at the weekend.

"He was struggling to breathe and wouldn't have survived without the surgery," said Ms Lydon.

"But one doctor told us he wasn't happy doing the operation as Andrew was taking up a bed that could save somebody's life.

"I asked him was Andrew's life not worth saving and he just said: 'He's got a terminal disease.'

"I had to plead for his life. I signed a document saying that I would take him out of hospital by Tuesday, which would have seen him go straight from ICU to home," said Ms Lydon.

But the father-of-two, whose family feared was simply being "sent home to die", received a last-minute reprieve after University Hospital Galway officials finally agreed at the last minute to continue to care for him in hospital.

His family say they feared the HSE was reneging on an agreement to fund after-care.

Mr Lydon's family have raised over 170,000 towards the cost of the care, which they were told could be 300,000 a year.

Last year the family were informed the care would be provided.

However, two weeks ago they received a letter from the HSE claiming the figure could be 700,000 a year - which it said would not be covered.

The vital tracheotomy surgery was only carried out after Ms Lydon signed the undertaking to bring her husband home from the ICU within days.

Over the weekend, the family desperately tried to arrange adequate home cover to provide Mr Lydon with the necessary 24-hour care, amid fears that he was in a weakened state after the operation.

They also feared that his carers would have had no opportunity to practise changing his tube in a home setting.

However, following a meeting with medical staff yesterday afternoon, the family was given a reprieve. Mr Lydon is now set to remain in University Hospital Galway for a further week before being transferred for two weeks' respite care in Merlin Park Hospital.

"We are absolutely delighted it has worked out but we went through desperate, needless worry over this on top of everything else we're going through," said Ms Lydon.

"Andrew can now rest easy and concentrate on recuperating," she added.

A spokesperson for the Saolta University Health Care Group said: "In the interests of patient confidentiality, we cannot discuss the detail of individual patient cases with the media.

"We can confirm that Saolta University Health Care Group is liaising closely with the Community Healthcare Organisation in relation to this case."
Many parents who want to avail of the free GP care for children under-six scheme are facing "a postcode lottery" with hundreds of doctors still refusing to sign up to the service.

New figures show nearly half the GPs in Dun Laoghaire, in Dublin, are not participating in the scheme, which was introduced last July to give all under-sixes free doctor visits.

Nationally, 2,283 GPs are providing the service to 367,000 eligible children and growing numbers of surgeries warn they are struggling to cope, having experienced a "tsunami" of visits over the winter months.

Often the child has a very minor complaint. One GP said: "Every minor snotty nose is now brought to the doctor to collect a prescription for antibiotics."

Around 495 doctors, many of whom insisted they could not safely handle more patient demands, are still charging parents fees of around 50 a consultation.

It means that parents are having to switch family doctors to find one who will provide the service or else pay the private fee.

Nationally, around 82pc of GPs are signed up, according to the information obtained in a parliamentary reply by Fianna Fail Dublin West TD Jack Chambers. "The scheme was introduced in good faith. But it was driven through without a proper analysis of how GPs could cope with the additional workload," Mr Chambers said. "The HSE figures show the number of doctors in the scheme has stagnated.

"I know from talking to GPs that a lot of their concern about workload have come to fruition and that waiting times at surgeries have increased.

"They cannot cope and it is one of the reasons why patients are ending up going to hospital emergency departments.

"Pushing out a GP appointment for a few days opens the risk of a condition worsening. It is essential in this reformed Dail that we all work constructively to target more spending at primary care. This scheme needs to be realistically deliverable."

The figures given to Mr Chambers by Brian Murphy, the HSE's National Director of Primary Care, show that the lowest participation rates are in parts of Dublin and are at just 60pc in the south city area.

Appalling

Only 62pc of GPs in Dublin north central are in the scheme, while in Limerick it still stands at 79pc. It is highest in Roscommon at 97pc. And almost all GPs in counties Clare, Sligo, Leitrim and Wicklow are taking part in the service.

Dr Stephen Murphy, a GP in Cabinteely in south Dublin, said he did not sign up and has lost hundreds of patients as a result.

"I did not sign and have no intention of signing. I regard it as an appalling contract. We have stuck to our principles at a personal cost," he said. "But some patients are coming back. They are finding that they were attending practices that could not cope with the workload.

"I have had a lot of difficult conversations with people who have been patients of mine for many years. But a number of parents have joined us because we have not signed and many existing patients chose not to apply for the card.

"Our practice would have to find another 15 to 20 consultation slots a day to cope. As it is we are fully booked the whole time. I did a co-op out of hours evening session recently. It was two-and-a-half hours before I saw a single child with a temperature. They were coming in with runny noses and they were a bit off. I saw about 10 kids with nothing wrong with them."

A recent survey of the scheme's impact on around 200 GPs generated mostly negative comments. One said: "Too busy, less time with sick patients."

Another said the waiting room was a "creche", according to the Gorilla survey conducted by doctors to measure medical opinion.

A GP said it was "horrific from December to March".

A doctor dubbed it the "after-six card" because so many working parents bring a child to after-hours co-ops.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said GPs were getting about 500m under the overall General Medical Services scheme.
Luas passengers will be able to use the tram service this weekend after drivers cancelled a 48-hour strike as a gesture of "goodwill".

Transdev's 172 drivers have called off work stoppages on Saturday and Sunday "to try and create space for talks" with the company.

Their colleagues, ticket inspectors, their supervisors and control room staff, will meet with the company today to discuss a new pay proposal. However, the drivers have still not agreed to enter talks on a revised pay package.

The pay deal would mean all staff get a wage hike of 10pc over 33 months.

The drivers have sought a meeting with the acting Transport Minister, Paschal Donohoe. Their colleagues asked Transdev for a meeting to seek clarification on its pay proposal after it put them on protective notice. It threatened to start taking them off the payroll by a deadline next Monday if they refused to carry out their full duties.

The tram operator also warned that it might begin to recoup its losses due to industrial action by cutting their wages.

The threats came after the company received notice of further strikes and work-to-rule action. Drivers restarted a campaign of non-cooperation last weekend. It involves a ban on overtime and a refusal to swap shifts, carry out inter-depot transfers, and strict adherence to rosters, finish and break times.

In addition, drivers will not answer their employer's phone calls and texts outside their working hours.

"Drivers have unconditionally agreed to cancel this weekend's strikes to demonstrate their goodwill and bona fides in trying to resolve the dispute," said Siptu official Owen Reidy.

When asked why they refused to do this during the 1916 commemoration weekend, he said that was "in the past". "It's about trying to reach an agreement in the time ahead," he said.

The decision to call off the strike will be good news for people planning to attend the GAA's 1916 commemoration event in Croke Park on Sunday.

Transdev extended a deadline for its pay offer, which was due to be taken off the table last Sunday, to enable discussions to take place after being contacted by the ticket inspectors and control room staff.

Its proposal for a 10pc pay rise is worse than a Workplace Relations Commission package for pay rises up to 18pc, which staff rejected by almost 100pc.

It does not include a long service increment worth over 7pc and arbitration on a bonus that was due this year.

Transdev welcomed the cancellation of the strikes and said it would write to Siptu to see if there was a basis for renewed talks with the drivers. It confirmed that it would meet with the other three grades to discuss its 10pc pay rise proposal today, and "ways to find a lasting resolution to this ongoing dispute".

In a letter to Mr Donohoe, sent yesterday, Mr Reidy said the drivers were not asking him to intervene in the dispute or discuss their claims. "We are, however, seeking a meeting with you so that you can better understand our concerns surrounding the dispute," he said.

Siptu will hold a meeting with staff in Liberty Hall tomorrow and Thursday to discuss the revised pay proposal. Further strikes are still planned for later this month and next month.

Meanwhile, Irish Rail has threatened the National Bus and Rail Workers' Union (NBRU) and Siptu with legal action, after DART drivers with the unions refused to train new staff.

The company's director of human resources Ciaran Masterson warned the NBRU that failure to halt the action could result in High Court legal proceedings. In response, General secretary of the NBRU, Dermot O'Leary, said the Irish Rail had "reached a new low".
The more regular service had been due to start on April 10

A row over a new 10 minute DART service has ramped up after Irish Rail threatened staff with High Court action for refusing to train in new drivers.

An Irish Rail spokesman said the threat was made because unofficial industrial action is taking place.

Passengers are facing the prospect of disruption on the electric rail system that runs between Greystones and Howth as the National Bus and Railworkers Union and Siptu have voted in favour of industrial actio, up to strike action, if the company imposes the more frequent service without agreement.

An Irish Rail spokesman said the company "needs to be able to progress this service". "There are options open to us including legal options, he said.

The new service that would increase the frequency of trains from the every 15 minutes was due to begin on April 10. It was put on hold after the unions refused to attend talks until the company deals with a pay claim they lodged.

The Nbru denied it has had any role in coordinating unofficial action and said drivers were not obliged to train in new drivers under their contracts.

In a letter to the union, Irish Rail said a number of drivers refused en bloc to allow the new recruits into their cabs to get used to operating the trains.

It claimed their refusal to undertake their duties by training new drivers is a breach of their contract of employment and unofficial industrial action, which breaches legislation.

I now require you to immediately inform your members to cease this unlawful activity, said the letter from Director of Human Resources, Ciaran Masterson. Failure to do so will result in action being taken against Siptu and the Nbru.

It said it would initiate High Court proceedings that would include an application for an injunction to prohibit the unlawful action.

In a response on behalf of the Nbru, legal firm Philip Lee said it was outrageous for Irish Rail to threaten its client as it was patently the case that it has no grounds for such a threat.

It said the suggestion that the union had coordinated industrial action was utterly false, and it was up to its members to decide if they wanted to volunteer to provide training.

It said the participation of drivers in the training regime was entirely voluntary and they could not be compelled to do so as there was no contractual obligation on them.

The letter referred to a letter from Irish Rail on June 25 last year, in which it said: it is accepted that the current mentoring system is voluntarist in nature and as such drivers can elect to mentor as appropriate.

The National Bus and Railworkers Union said it would vigorously defend its integrity as a trade union and said any industrial action it undertakes only begins after it gets a mandate from members.

It accused Irish Rail of skulduggery by making the court threat.

"Irish Rail has reached a new low by threatening staff and trade unions with High Court action over what is clearly a matter of individual choice for drivers, said General Secretary Dermot OLeary.

He said this aggressive Thatcherite type reaction showed how "devoid of ideas" those who run the company are. It is nothing short of appalling that a state owned organisation would resort to such skulduggery, he added.

He said the Tory style attack, and Luas operator Transdevs recent disgraceful intimidatory tactics took obvious advantage of the political vacuum.  Transdev has put its employees on protective notice after they served notice of numerous strikes.

Previously, Irish Rail warned unions it will seek cuts worth 1.4m if it fails to introduce the new service.
A Cork man was rushed to hospital after a rat bit him on the backside while he sat on the toilet.

Now a councillor is now warning others to be careful of rodents - especially at flood times.

The Evening Echo is reporting that Councillor Noel Collins reported the incident to Cork County Council during a Southern Area Meeting.

He had earlier asked them to investigate the possibility of flushing rat poison through the sewer system.

The flooding resulted in another problem for residents, that of rat infestation, which really upset many families, mentally and physically, and indeed, one elderly gentleman suffered a rat bite to his posterior while using his toilet, and had to receive immediate medical attention, he said.

He said a plumber found a broken sewer pipe nearby, which is believed to have allowed the rat to enter the system.

At the meeting the council warned that flushing poison through the water system could lead to contamination of other sources.

It was explained that Irish Water are responsible for vermin control within the system.

Cllr Collins added: I would advise homeowners to keep their toilet seats down when not in use, and to watch their posteriors.

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Trevor Hayden, a pest controller who also works with CRRU, told The Last Word with Matt Cooper on TodayFm: "When they do get into the bowl they can't actually get out. They can't get purchase because it is so slippy and slidy in there that they are stuck in there."

He explained that one of his workers actually found a rat in a toilet bowl on one occasion.

"There's a lot of rats down the drains and with flooding it doesn't help. If you put a camera down there you will see plenty of them."

Mr Hayden said he had heard of two previous cases identical to the one mentioned in Cork County Council.
Rank and file gardai have demanded faster recruitment after it emerged that over one in ten officers can retire by the end of the year.

The new figures, obtained by Independent.ie from the Garda Human Resource Management (HRM) section, reveal that 1,491 of the force's most experienced members qualify to leave the force before December 31.

While some may opt to stay in An Garda Siochana beyond their 30 years of service, the Garda Representative Association (GRA) have revealed that over 800 of these must step down in the next 12 months as they will have reached the statutory retirement age of 60.

The figures have emerged days after private documents showed how every garda unit, including all uniformed, detective and specialist units, are currently operating at an average of 20pc below strength.

Last week the Irish Independent revealed how the National Surveillance Unit (NSU), which secretly monitors the movements of gangland and terrorist suspects, is "dangerously" understaffed.

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GRA Vice President Ciaran O'Neill claimed years of a government enforced moratorium on recruitment has led to this situation.

He said: "Its our belief that of that 1,500, 800 must go by June 2017."

He continued: "The effect of that is that recruitment is not keeping up with retirements and promotions. So we are going to be down frontline members.

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"This is the effect of several years of a moratorium on recruitment by successive governments."

Garda HRM confirmed that there were 12,798 garda members at the end of January this year.

A total of 196 members were availing of career breaks; 17 members of An Garda Siochana are currently on secondment to the Department of Social Protection; and a further 134 members were availing of paid maternity leave as of January 31, 2016.

The total number of members who qualify for retirement between now and New Year's day is 1491.

Mr O'Neill called for accelerated recruitment: "Everyday policing will be affected."

He added that there will be a brain drain within the force as they lose some of their most experienced and qualified members.

"These are people who have given 30 years service to their country. There is a massive loss of experience and we dont have the recruits there to replace them."

Last month it emerged that three of the new gardai, who joined the force since the recruitment freeze, had left the force due to pay conditions.

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Garda HRM have revealed that the number has now jumped to four.

Mr O'Neill claimed that more are likely to follow if the starting wage for a garda is not increased.

"We are going to find it hard to replace these members because the wages are so low for new recruits."

New gardai have a starting wage of 23,171 - significantly less than their colleagues who qualified before the recruitment freeze.

Dublin North West TD Noel Rock (FG) has urged the new Justice Minister to accelerate recruitment: "We are running to stand still: Garda recruitment is happening but it's coinciding with a period where a large number of Gardai can also retire.

"We need to make sure that Templemore is running to full capacity, that we are training new Gardai to full capability, and that we are not losing any more new recruits.

"Where possible, we need to work to convince those who can retire, but are not obliged to retire, stay on until we can get as many new recruits as possible out on our streets."
A man critically wounded in what police have described as a barbaric shooting on Monday night was due to appear in court on drugs offences.

Defence barrister Mark Reel told Judge Philip Babington that the victim, 25-year-old Harry Boyle from Lawrence Hill, Derry City had yet to regain consciousness since he was shot in the leg outside house at Magowan Park shortly before 9pm on Monday.

The victim is alleged to have committed a number of Class A, B and C drugs offences in January, February and March of 2014.

Mr Reel told the court that the defendant's case had been listed for a mention on Tuesday.

"Unfortunately I have to apply to have the case adjourned and I also apply to adjourn the fixing of a date for a trial", he told Judge Babington.

"Those who would replace our system of justice with one based on terror, violence and fear have taken it upon themselves to shoot Mr Boyle who was shot last night.

"He has been transferred to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast and I do not believe he has regained consciousness. The nature of the charges he faced were not comparable to the violence meted out to him.

"This is not a matter in relation to a man who had sought anonymity because there was no specific threat in relation to him, but sadly it would seem to appear in this case that the individuals involved had not flagged up their intentions," he said.

Judge Babington said he was very sorry to hear that Mr Boyle had been shot because he was aware that "the issues in this case were very much reduced".

Meanwhile, a senior police officer in Derry described the shooting of Mr Boyle as an act of barbarity.

Superintendent Mark McEwan said while a number of lines of enquiry were continuing, the focus was very much on dissident republican involvement.

"These organisations seem to feel they have some sort of right to carry out or administer these type of attacks. It is utterly reprehensible to think that society would tolerate these brutal attacks.

"They have no right to carry out such acts of barbarity on members of our community. These organisations thrive on the fear they can create in the community. Victims and members of the public are at times reticent to come forward but I appeal for help from the community in bringing those responsible to justice", he said.

Fr Joseph Gormley, parish priest of St Mary's parish in the Creggan estate, said the shooting of Mr Boyle "is the type of terror carried out by the likes of ISIS. They have evil in their hearts and evil in their minds".

"I was there last night and I saw many people including young children at the scene. The people responsible must realise they are harming their own community," he said.
An Irishwoman died after being attacked by a cow while out on a walk with her family.

Marian Clode was born and raised in the Rosemount area of Derry City before moving to the Greater Manchester area in England a number of years ago.

She was on a holiday with her family in Belford, Northumberland on April 3 when she was charged at by a herd of cattle, which included several calves.

The 61-year-old had been walking along a public bridlepath with her husband Christopher (63), daughter Lucy Rowe, son-in-law Kevin and her two grandchildren Oliver and Charlotte.

When suddenly one of the herd became aggressive, approaching Mrs Clode and repeatedly head-butted her.

An ambulance was called and both the family and paramedics attempted resuscitation before Mrs Clode was airlifted to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle but died two days later.

Her daughter Lucy told Sky News her mum was "flipped like a rag doll over the fence".

"The consultant said the injuries that my mum sustained were the worst they had ever seen, equivalent to those of a high-speed crash.

"She did not stand a chance against that animal. My mum went blue when I looked, the cows were staring at me, her lips went blue. I was screaming her name."

SDLP Councillor John Boyle said the woman still had family who lived in Derry including her elderly mother.

He told the Belfast Telegraph: "I'm a councillor for the area that she originally came from and where her mother still lives. It's a dreadful tragedy to the woman and all who knew her.

"It has come as a shock to many. She was born and reared in the Rosemount area which is a very close knit community where near enough everybody knows everybody.

"It has come as a shock to many that she has died in such terrible circumstances, by all accounts what seems to have been a freak accident.

"Thoughts of the community are with the wider family and I certainly share those thoughts and concerns."

The family have engaged Gordon Cartwright of JMW Solicitors to help guide them through the legal process to come, which will involve an inquest - a hearing likely to involve both Northumbria Police and the British Health and Safety Executive.

Mr Cartwright said: The familys main reason for sharing their story at this terribly distressing time is that they want to prevent other families going through such a traumatic experience.

The family are also aware that there is likely to be an inquest in the coming months and have asked that we help guide them though that process.

"The strength and dignity they have shown in the face of this tragedy is admirable and I am proud to support them at this difficult time."
People cheer as Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders walks on stage at a campaign rally on the eve of the New York primary, April 18, 2016 in the Queens borough of New York City

Rescuers are in a race against the clock to find survivors from a powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake as the death toll from Ecuador's strongest eruption in decades rose above 400.

Teams from Ecuador and neighbouring countries fanned out across the country's Pacific coastline to look for the dozens of people still missing.

In the port city of Manta, a group of about 50 rescuers working with sniffer dogs, hydraulic jacks and a drill managed to free eight people trapped for more than 32 hours in the rubble of a shopping centre flattened by Saturday night's quake.

The first rescue took place before dawn, when a woman was pulled head first from a nearly two and a half-foot hole cut through concrete and steel. Firefighters applauded as she emerged from the debris, disoriented, caked in dust and complaining of pain, but otherwise in good health.

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A senior Australian politician has mocked a video recorded by actor Johnny Depp and his wife Amber Heard over their infamous dog smuggling spat with quarantine officials.

Agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce said he could have directed the film better himself and it looked like Pirates Of The Caribbean star Depp was auditioning for The Godfather.

Depp and Heard's 40-second videotaped apology was submitted during a hearing in an Australian court on Monday.

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Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has made an embarrassing slip-up at his final rally before the big-prize primary contest in New York.

The brash billionaire businessman was about to deliver prepared remarks lauding New York values when he mistakenly mentioned the name of convenience store chain 7-Eleven instead of 9/11 - the September 11 2001 terror attacks.

Campaigning in Buffalo, he said: "It's very close to my heart because I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7/11, down at the World Trade Centre right after it came down, and I saw the greatest people I've ever seen in action."

Mr Trump has repeatedly invoked the September 11 attacks as he has campaigned across his home state. He paid his first visit to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum earlier this month.

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The front of today's Irish Independent features a story about free GP care for children. Parents are facing a 'postcode lottery' as they try to avail of free GP care for children aged under six - with as many as one in five family doctors refusing to sign up to the service.

The front page of the Herald focuses on a crime story with reports that a senior Kinahan cartel gangster has a 500k war chest to murder five rivals in the Hutch gang, The crime figure - a close associate of the Regebncy Hotel murder victim David Byrne - is determined to wipe out the criminals he blames for the fake gardai hit last February.

The Examiner leads with a story about the dangers of the public being exposed to therapists who don't have enough training. The story reports that people with little training beyond an online course bought online are advertising themselves as counsellors to the depressed and even suicidal - as there is no law stopping them.

The Irish Daily Mirror reports that police in the UK have not given up hope finding Madeline McCann alive

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Mick Duthie gave fresh hope to the parents to Kate and Gerry when he vowed not to give up the search.

The Irish Sun leads with the story of tragic num Sister Clare Theresa Crockett who died in the Ecuador earthquake was trying to lead school children to safety.

The Irish Daily Mal's headline story asks 'where is the justice' as it reveals that a motorist previously jailed for killing two gardai while joyriding in a stolen car has escaped prison for his latest driving offence.

The Irish Times reveals that almost 2,000 drivers have availed of the poor box to avoid penalty points for speeding. The story reveals that more than a third of drivers before the District Court have had their cases struck out.
Politicians in Leinster House will hope they can end the deadlock and elect a Taoiseach on their fourth attempt this Thursday.

However, reaching that deadline might prove tricky as beforehand Fine Gael - the party best placed to lead a minority government - must finish talks with Fianna Fail.

Not to forget the partys other task to win support from Independents and others.

As Irelands longest period without a Government looks set to get longer Independent.ie takes a look at the five things we know about Government talks.

Theyve found a nice new location

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Fine Gael and Fianna Fail negotiators have retreated to Trinity College and away from the prying eyes of journalists and fellow TDs.

The Provosts House is a refuge from Leinster House where a simple trip to the toilet can lead to several conversations with politicians and journalists hungry for information.

2. They are cordial

The only word anyone will officially use to describe the mood in the room as both parties fear saying anything more might jeopardise any deal.

However, sources say they are moving quickly and making progress on an agreement.

3. Labour Party is back on the scrap heap.

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After flirting with the idea of returning to Government with Fine Gael they have back tracked completely.

Perhaps it was fanciful as Labour would face an uphill battle to get back into power, having to seek members support at a special conference after suffering a hammering at the polls.

4. Fine Gael trying to smoke out the Independents

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Independent TDs were not happy about Fine Gael leaks revealing their demands for parish pump deals would cost 13bn as a price for supporting the party.

Michael Healy-Rae called it outrageous and factually inaccurate even though Finance Department sources later said the figure was conservative.

Independents are likely to have taken a dim view of Fine Gaels failed attempt to re-ignite its old relationship with Labour.

5. Can Kenny be re-elected Taoiseach on Thursday?

Fine Gael are talking up the prospect but they still have to discuss Irish Water with Fianna Fail  something both parties disagree on.

After reaching an agreement the party may have to return cap-in-hand to the Independents and strike a deal within 48 hours.

A betting man might say no.
Sister Clare Theresa Crockett with a student at the school in Ecuador. Photo: PA/Home of the Mother order

Limerick nun Sr Therese Ryan survived the deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Ecuador as her colleague, Sr Clare Theresa Crockett from Derry, lost her life trying to save several children. Sr Crockett (33) has been described as a superstar, loved by everybody by her devastated family

The Home of the Mother order of a school in Playa Prieta, Ecuador. Photo: PA/Home of the Mother order

Sister Clare Theresa Crockett with a pupil at the Home of the Mother order school in Ecuador. Photo: Home of the Mother order/PA

An Irish "superstar" nun died "in the line of duty" in an earthquake, friends and family members have said.

Sister Clare Theresa Crockett (33), from the Brandywell area of Derry city, was among more than 350 people who died when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck in Ecuador at the weekend.

A second Irish nun, Sr Therese Ryan (36), who was born in Limerick but lived in Monaghan, was the first pulled from the rubble in their building in Playa Prieta with a fractured ankle.

Sr Clare had been with her order for the past 15 years, entering religious life when she was just 18, after giving up plans to be an actress. She had appeared as an extra alongside actor Jimmy Nesbitt in the Paul Greengrass-directed film 'Bloody Sunday'.

She gave guitar lessons to children who attended a school run by the nuns and was known for her love of music.

"She was a superstar. Everybody loved her," said her cousin Emmet Doyle.

"She died as she lived, helping others."

Her spiritual director and personal friend, Derry priest Fr Roland Coulhoun, said her death had devastated all who knew her.

He said she joined the order in Spain, had gone to the US and returned to Ecuador a couple of years ago for a second time.

"The terrible news has devastated everyone who knew her," he said.

"This is a young girl who gave her life to God and died for the Gospel. She literally died in the line of duty. She was a joyful girl, I've known her since she was a teenager. She was a beautiful person.

"I'll remember the joy that she brought to her youth group and the enthusiasm she showed for her vocation to religious life.

"It's counter-cultural to join a religious order for a young girl and she embraced it. We'll remember her with such affection. She was 33 but had the vitality of a teenager to the end.

"We're devastated she has lost her life in such a tragic way."

Sr Clare joined the order almost by accident after going to Spain for what she thought was a holiday when she was 18 and it turned out to be a pilgrimage.

"I liked to party a lot. My weekends, since I was 16/17, consisted of getting drunk with my friends. I wasted all my money on alcohol and cigarettes," she wrote later. "I tried to get out of it, but my name was already on the ticket, so I had to go.

"I now see that it was Our Lady's way of bringing me back home, back to Her and Her Son," she added.

Sr Theresa, the head of the Order, based in Cantabria in northern Spain, said last night: "Sr Clare had spent nearly 15 years of her life in consecration to the Lord.

"She was a generous sister with a special gift for reaching out to children and young people."

She said the nuns had been working on helping flood victims in recent weeks.

Sr Clare became a nun in 2010 after eight years' study. Her friend, Sr Kristin Tenreiro, said: "When she was asked to work in Ecuador, she knew that there were dangers, but, despite that, she saw it as God's will. She gave herself to God and to the poor and the needy. I will remember her with a huge smile on her face, singing, writing songs and I will remember her jokes.

"She was a very funny sister and wherever she was, the entire group was laughing."

Five postulates - or trainee nuns - also died when the building collapsed during Saturday's powerful earthquake. They were named as Sisters Jazmina, Mayra, Maria Augusta, Valeria and Catalina. Two other nuns were rescued.

An order spokeswoman last night said Sr Therese suffered a broken ankle but had been released from hospital and was "recovering well".
Madeline Stuart is a 19-year-old aspiring model - who happens to have Down Syndrome. Determined not to let her condition stand in the way of her life, the Australian teenager is set to make history when she becomes the first model with an intellectual disability to walk the catwalk in Russia as she takes part in Caspian Fashion Week (April 21 to 24).

There are approximately 7,000 people living with the condition in Ireland and while not many are likely to follow in Madeline's footsteps, most can and will lead fulfilling lives.

In order to help this happen, the Down Syndrome Centre (DSC) in Dublin recently ran Mission 21 - a campaign to raise awareness and funds to help keep the centre up and running and providing much-needed supports for people living with Down Syndrome.

Lorraine O'Brien has two children - Harrison (3) and Lilah (1). She lives in Rathcoole, Co Dublin with her partner Brendan Ward and is a regular visitor to the DSC after their daughter was diagnosed with the condition last year.

"My pregnancy with Lilah was a nice surprise, which was going really well until my 20-week scan when the midwife said there was an issue with the measurements of her femur and humerus bones," she says.

Lorraine went back for a second scan in December 2014 and was informed that she had a one-in-2000 chance of having a baby with Down Syndrome.

"We welcomed our beautiful little girl into the world by C-section on March 13 2015," recalls Lorraine. "I immediately asked if she was okay and was told she was fine. The midwife came over and said they would need a paediatrician to check her out as they were concerned with her features.

"I can honestly say that at that moment, my heart broke." Brendan however stood by her side until the doctor came and confirmed that Down Syndrome (DS) was suspected but that Lilah was otherwise fine with no need for any oxygen or a stay in the NICU.

"We were told we could hold her and take her with us back to the recovery ward, so that's what her daddy did, he held her and minded her because no diagnosis was going to change his love for his little girl."

But the new mum felt less able to cope and became increasingly worried about her tiny daughter's future.

"I didn't feel the same as Brendan initially," she admits. "I was totally devastated even though this had been my fear throughout the pregnancy and now it had become my reality. I worried about how we were going to cope, how would it affect our lives, our family, her big brother Harrison, and would I even be able to love her?

"But I soon realised that of course I loved her and this was the reason I was so sad in the first place - I didn't want her to be different and didn't want her to struggle with the things other people take for granted.

"I discovered that my view on DS was outdated and uneducated and I was wrong to think like this.

"Also, right from the start we received so much support from family and friends that it made me realise how lucky we are."

Despite all the support, the 33-year-old found things very hard in the beginning as her baby struggled with several complications.

"The first four months of Lilah's life were tough," says Lorraine. "At six-days-old she was diagnosed with a heart defect which would require open-heart surgery in the coming months. This, combined with tube feeding and hospital visits, was a lot to deal with, but we did it and like the fighter she is, Lilah got through it so when we brought her home at four months, she began to thrive.

"As each day passed, the DS began to fade and she was just Lilah. She was so beautiful and so easy. In her short little life she had already brought so much good into our lives and it didn't take long for us to be completely smitten - we didn't care about a diagnosis - she was ours and no matter what her potential was or what her achievements were in life, it didn't matter because we would love her regardless.

"Shortly after that I discovered that the DSC was running a baby massage course and felt it was the perfect opportunity to meet other mammies in the same situation. So Lilah and I went along and had such a good time.

"It was more than baby massage class, to us this was a place full of support with a warm and friendly environment where people understood us - as a new parent of a baby with DS; it was just what I needed - to know we weren't alone. Lilah has just turned one and has already developed a distinct personality. She loves music, is a real daddy's girl, and loves playing with her big brother. Lorraine has the same aspirations for her daughter as for her son and says that people should not be defined by a condition.

"Inclusion is extremely important in the acceptance of people with disabilities in today's society, and we will do whatever we can to help Lilah meet her full potential," she says.

"Last year after Lilah was born, I felt that I could see DS everywhere I looked - but I didn't see the people, just their diagnosis. However now I realise that this is only a small part of anyone and to judge someone based on this is to miss out on the person, the personality and the individual.

"This year we are so thankful for our baby girl and the new outlook she has given us on life - and also for the wonderful families, new friends and amazing children we have been lucky to meet.

"We hope the public help keep the doors of the DSC open so our children can be given the opportunity to reach their full potential. It's a fantastic cause and deserves all the support it can get."

About Down Syndrome

 About 7,000 people living in Ireland have Down Syndrome, 110 babies with Down Syndrome are born in Ireland every year

 The Mission 21 campaign raised over its goal of 21,000 but funds are still needed to support children like Lilah and their families

 For more information see downsyndromecentre.ie
Chicago, where Ireland will play the All Blacks in November.

Growing security measures and a punishing exchange rate haven't dimmed our US love affair, says Pol O Conghaile.

Two years ago, a euro would have bought you $1.37.

In recent months, it's been as little as $1.06. Throw in tips, ATM fees and the cost of transatlantic flights, and the reality is clear.

It's impossible to do the US on the cheap.

But here's the thing... we're doing it anyway. This summer, Dublin Airport will host some 290 direct flights a week between Ireland and the US, including new Aer Lingus routes to LA, Newark and Connecticut.

As well as city breaks, bookings are strong for twin-centre trips, fly/drives, rail holidays and escorted tours. Ireland play the All Blacks in Chicago on November 5 (therugbyweekend.com), and visitors are starting to look beyond the big hits to places like Brooklyn, Downtown LA and Kissimmee on their trips.

Irish travellers simply love the States.

Of course, getting into the US can be frustrating - the latest rule change obliges Irish passport-holders travelling on the Visa Waiver Programme to have an e-passport (see dublin.usembassy.gov for full details).

Despite the endless security tweaks and brash threats from Donald Trump, however, President Obama and Brand USA have improved the welcome experience in recent years.

US Customs and Border Protection has brushed up on its customer service, automated passport control kiosks are available at 30 airports, and trusted traveller programmes are a useful option for frequent travellers.

The aim is to welcome 100m visitors a year by 2021... hopefully, with a smile.

What's on your bucket list?

OUR READERS SHARE THEIR TIPS

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North America is Ireland's favourite long-haul destination by a country mile, with some 417,000 trips last year according to CSO figures. We asked our readers for holiday suggestions on Facebook. Here are a few of our faves...

Corrina Stone: 'We drove Route 66 and it's honestly the best holiday we've ever had. If you do it right, with a bit of planning & preparation you really can do it on shoestring and experience everything along the way... We'd do it again in a heartbeat!'

Jana Lunden-Sadler: 'You can't visit the USA without a trip to New England in the autumn - the coast of Maine where the mountains meet the sea, fresh maple syrup from the tapped trees, trees with their electric foliage. Bliss!'

Joules Bennett: 'If you want to see something really different or unconventional you can't beat Texas! From the signs to the people, the country music and the deep-fried food, Texas is really special... I would say doing a ranch tour would be top of my list... Be a cowboy for the day!'

Deals of the week...

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BLACK FRIDAY IN BOSTON

Fancy some shopping in the States? ITAA member Dawson Travel (dawsontravel.ie) has flights plus seven nights in a three-star hotel in Boston from 818pp, departing November 24. A similar deal to New York costs 784pp. For more, see itaa.ie/offers.

BIG APPLE IN BUSINESS

Fancy Christmas in New York? Trailfinders (trailfinders.ie) has a business class package including direct flights, four nights at the five-star Ritz Carlton in Battery Park and Top of the Rock Observation Deck tickets from 2,149pp, departing December 23. 5 Star Villa Holidays (5starvillaholidays.com) is now doing Manhattan apartments, too.

FAMILIES IN FLORIDA

Blackpool Travel (blackpooltravel.ie) has a 14-night family offer in Florida from 685pp, including flights, taxes, bags and a one-bed suite in the Ramada Plaza Resort. Meanwhile, Sunway (sunway.ie) has a twin-centre trip including five nights in each of Orlando and St Pete's Beach including flights and car hire from 929pp for a family of four sharing.

NB: All prices subject to availability.
Premium

Colette Browne Opinion Every effort must be made to retrieve oral histories of mother and baby home survivors

With three days to go until the Mother and Baby Homes Commission ceases to exist as a legal entity, we are being told that audio recordings of hundreds of witnesses which were deleted may not actually be gone forever. It is another usual twist in a most emotional saga. For decades, survivors of mother and baby homes have been denied a voice and denied autonomy. When they fell pregnant, many through rape and abuse, they were marched to the doors of religious institutions.
'The great intractable problem of Irish politics over the past 25 years has been the health service. And its hard to be confident that anybody in the current Dail has the answers.' Photo: Getty (stock photo)

Today marks the 54th day without a government. A day for every card in a full deck, with the jokers included - the past eight weeks have demonstrated no shortage of jokers.

To be fair, with no party with more than 50 seats and 10 different groupings in the 32nd Dail, it was never going to be straightforward or quick. But enough is enough.

We need a government and it's time for Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, Labour, the Greens and, particularly, the Independents - whose indecision appears to be final - to get the finger out.

Yes, it's challenging. But the people have spoken with the make-up of the new(ish) Dail and it's time our elected representatives do their business or get off the pot.

However, there's also a worry everyone - particularly Enda Kenny - will be so happy to finally get a government, that thoughts about its actual effectiveness will be secondary.

Because we don't just need a government, we need a good government.

To that end, the involvement of Labour and the Greens (and, if they came down from their Ivory Tower, the Social Democrats as well) would be preferable.

There would still be a need for outside support from Fianna Fail. But, with at least 61 guaranteed votes, it would allow Fine Gael to do business only with those Independents with a genuine interest in national, as opposed to parish pump, politics.

Labour needs to quickly decide what it's going to do.

Sorry, guys, but the country can't hang around for you all to engage in the kind of public soul-searching that you suddenly seem to be intent on engaging in for the next few weeks. That's what the last 54 days were for.

However, even if Labour and, by consequence, the Greens do agree to join with five or six Independents, Kenny should go even further in thinking outside the box.

The great intractable problem of Irish politics over the past 25 years has been the health service.

And it's hard to be confident that anybody in the current Dail has the answers. Many fine politicians - Harney, Varadkar, Howlin, Noonan and Martin - have tried and ended up against a brick wall.

But what if Kenny opted to go outside the bubble to ring the changes in health? He could do so via a Seanad nomination - as happened in 1981 when Garret FitzGerald made James Dooge both a senator and Minister for Foreign Affairs.

There has been some suggestion that Kenny might pick a junior housing minister from his Seanad nominees. But a junior minister doesn't have the clout to get things done.

And although the housing crisis undoubtedly needs to be addressed, it doesn't require an external expert plucked from outside Leinster House.

Health, on the other hand, might. The reality is that it is impossible to bring the necessary improvements to the health service without standing on a lot of toes - particularly the toes of those working in our hospitals.

Somebody from outside the political arena would have a better chance of selling these reforms, some of which will be initially hugely unpopular.

It's guaranteed that any plan involving change would be resisted, ending up in industrial action if persevered with. In that context, the ability to convince the general public of the overall merits of the plan would be hugely important.

And there is a greater chance of somebody free of political baggage, or perceived electoral motivations, doing so than an elected TD - particularly given the low level of trust in politicians right now. Look for example at the key role played by Professor Tom Keane in getting acceptance for the radical, but not universally popular, Cancer Services re-organisation a few years back.

In this scenario, the new minister wouldn't have to worry about being re-elected. This would be a one-term mission to do whatever had to be done to reform the health service. It wouldn't be easy or straightforward - far from it.

And it might be difficult trying to find somebody with the necessary skills and willingness to take on the challenge. Michael O'Leary is a business genius, but he probably wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. And, even if he did, he would be seen as coming with a particular agenda. It wouldn't work.

Donegal-born Gerry Robinson - who ran hugely successful businesses in the UK for many years - could be ideal.

Almost a decade ago, his three-part BBC series 'Can Gerry Robinson Fix the NHS?' was a fascinating insight into the problems faced by one Yorkshire hospital.

The parallels with Irish hospitals were unmistakable. Robinson took on the vested interests and brought them around: the combination of his business acumen, interpersonal skills and political nous could be ideal for the job.

And what a statement of intent it would be from Enda Kenny. A message that the old, jaded way of doing things was over; that radical reform and progress has taken precedent over jobs for the boys and (ballot) box-ticking.

Why not? If we're going to have so-called new politics, let's really have new politics. Who knows, it might just work.

Shane Coleman presents the Sunday Show on Newstalk.com at 10am
When I was five years old we were living on the 'wrong side of the tracks' in a rented house in Rialto, in Dublin 8. Late one afternoon, our home burnt down and we were homeless.

If that had happened today, we would be forced to live in a bed and breakfast - or even in a car - and our family might never have recovered.

But we were lucky. We were housed by Dublin Corporation because in the 1970s the State saw the provision of social housing as its job. It understood that without the fundamentals of housing and social supports, its citizens simply would not survive.

But that caring as a society has become less apparent, as caring for the economy took over in recent years.

We are currently commemorating the landmark 100-year anniversary of the proclamation of the Irish Republic.

But this week, there are 5,715 people in emergency homeless accommodation; 1,830 of these are children.

This week, numerous distressed young children are still waiting for months to get the psychological help they need.

This evening, patients will die in busy and overcrowded hospital wards, their sons and daughters unable to find space or chairs to sit together around the bed where their parent lies.

These are everyday situations that are affected directly by the political choices we make.

The policy decisions we make have an absolutely direct impact on people's lives in this country.

I know this because I have been on the wrong side of the tracks several times in my own life and directly experienced the impact of policy and legislation.

And through my work over the years I have seen how people suffer without the policies, the services and the compassion they need.

I have been working at the coalface of the health and education sectors for 20 years as a psychologist, educator and equality campaigner.

My aim has always been a society where the most vulnerable are given equal opportunities, and people are cared for with dignity.

Growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Dublin's south inner city, I have seen how the lack of access to education has crippled generations of people in disadvantaged communities.

I was the first person in my extended family to go to university. That opportunity should not be the exception, it should be available to everyone.

I was on the 'wrong side' of the tracks growing up gay in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. Fortunately, Ireland is now a different place for gay people, but there are still many other inequalities to be tackled and overcome.

There is also an extensive body of research that confirms the relationship between social inequalities, general health and poor mental health.

Politicians have not delivered the society so many of us want.

And that is why I have decided to run as an Independent candidate in the forthcoming Seanad elections on the National University of Ireland panel.

I want to contribute to creating a just society in which all citizens are at the heart of policy-making.

I am running for the Seanad because our political choices can increase or reduce inequalities in our society - our political choices can transform lives.

Most of us realise that we live in a society and not just an economy. After the upheavals of recent years, we are asking ourselves what kind of society that should be.

This is not an abstract ideological process or a political auction house of competing bids.

It is lived out in very real everyday situations.

I want to see a society in which everyone - adults and children, families and single people - has the security of a home. A society that gives each child the opportunity to reach their potential regardless of their parents' income.

A society where teenagers struggling with anxiety or depression can get help without having to battle for it, where access to vital cancer services does not depend on your postcode and where the last months and days of life can be spent in dignity.

Lives on the wrong sides of the track can be transformed by the policies we adopt in health, housing and education.

My life on the wrong side of tracks was saved by government policy on social housing in the 1970s when our rented house in Rialto burned down.

My life was transformed by policies that supported people returning to education.

My life was further transformed by the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the result of the marriage equality referendum last year.

The detail of that legislation and the policies it reflects can make all the difference.

But legislation has to be backed up by resources - the choices each government makes on where the money goes.

As an Independent senator, I will fight hard to influence and to question those decisions.

I will do everything in my power to change our services, our legislation and the allocation of our resources in favour of equality and compassion in our society.

Social growth and economic growth are two sides of the same coin and a sustainable, flourishing economy can only be built on a flourishing community.

When you've lived on the wrong side of the tracks you know that policy matters - and policy can transform lives.

Paul D'Alton is head of the Department of Psycho-oncology at St Vincent's University Hospital, Dublin, and is an Independent candidate on the NUI Seanad panel
A Syrian refugee kisses his daughter as he walks through a rainstorm towards Greece's border with Macedonia, near the Greek village of Idomeni in September. President Higgins has criticised the response of Europe to the refugee crisis, describing it as being characterised by 'ruinously narrow self-interest'. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

It's not possible to walk across a watery grave, but yesterday, when reports of hundreds of more deaths in the Mediterranean came through, it felt like someone had done precisely that. For, almost to the day, 800 people were drowned last year trying to make the crossing from Africa to Europe. It is still unclear how many died yesterday, but that there should have been any deaths at all raises searching questions.

Yesterday, President Higgins criticised the response of Europe to the refugee crisis, describing it as being characterised by "ruinously narrow self-interest".

He felt we ought to be able to rise beyond tear gas, razor wire and rubber bullets. He wondered how one of the wealthiest parts of the world should feel so threatened by the need of others. Another Irishman, Peter Sutherland, the UN Secretary General's Special Representative for Migration, has also questioned the legality of the new EU deal that repatriates migrants. He pointed out that deporting people without considering their asylum applications would break international treaties. One would hope that it was within the power of a bloc of more than 500 million people to offer the marginalised something more than further marginalisation.

Italy's foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, commenting on the drownings, said: "This is another strong reason for Europe to commit itself not to build walls."

The concept of universal rights dictates that they must apply to all or to none if they are to have meaning. If they become selective, they will be bartered away by governments.

That is why the challenge laid down by President Higgins for Europe to collectively examine its response to the migrant and refugee crisis is apposite. The European Union is currently enduring something of a torturous night of the soul.

Mr Higgins's call on its people to breathe new life into the EU project is timely.

The union faces many daunting questions. But not every problem is a fiscal one - moral and humane factors must be weighed; people are not commodities and profits were never meant to be the sole purpose for keeping the EU together. The lack of political debate and the absence of a wider European ideal could come at a considerable price. President Higgins is right to ventilate such concerns.

Road to GP hell is paved with good intentions

It is remarkable what happens when the laws of unintended consequence collide with good intentions.

Today, we reveal how GPs are attempting to cope with what has been described as a "tsunami" of under-sixes, who, we are being told, are clogging up their surgeries.

But considering that nationally there are only 2,283 GPs to cope with some 367,000 eligible children, the consequences of free GP care for under-sixes should have been foreseen.

According to Fianna Fail TD Jack Chambers: "The scheme was introduced in good faith. But it was driven through without a proper analysis of how GPs could cope with the additional workload."

One doctor described how their waiting room had become a creche and several others have complained that they do not have the capacity to deal with the pressure.

This is but another example of how a short-term populist initiative intended to garner political favour can do damage.

Talk about "new politics" is very much in vogue, but given the reluctance to even form a government, our leaders are running before they can crawl.

Forget about "new politics", we would happily settle for anything that isn't "boomerang politics".
It's been said that the country that forgets its history is doomed to repeat it. I hope the State will consider that advice when deciding whether to acquire the former Magdalene Laundry at Donnybrook, Dublin. I have just signed an online petition initiated by playwright/politician Mannix Flynn, who experienced first-hand the savagery of our industrial school system, calling on the State to intervene and rescue this grotesque but uniquely historic edifice from oblivion.

It's more than just a building. It's a surviving example of one of the camps where thousands of women were incarcerated in that "Other Ireland" - the one to which Taoiseach Enda Kenny alluded when he apologised to the women who were wrongly detained, exploited, brutalised and stigmatised in those Hibernian Gulags.

The building was sold by the order of nuns who once managed it, but the buyers have yet to decide its ultimate fate. This is where the State can do itself some service. It can, on behalf of all of us, and to atone for its role in the horrific injustice inflicted on the Magdalenes, secure the building and preserve it as a permanent memorial to an era that we cannot afford to forgetlest it return to haunt us in the future.

Many of those terrible places have been quietly demolished, airbrushed out of our lives, out of sight and mind and replaced with modern buildings, most recently the Magdalene Laundry at New Ross in Co Wexford which was bulldozed into rubble.

The significance of the Donnybrook building is that it has been, up to now, preserved virtually intact with all of the grim paraphernalia linked to those theocratic punishment centresthe bleak dormitories where women cried themselves to sleep or dreamt of freedom; the cumbersome steam irons that the inmates pressed onto the laundry from morning till night; the giant back-breaking baskets they carried clothes in; the sinks they washed and slaved at; the small high windows they struggled to look out of to catch a glimpse of the sky; and the assortment of sacred religious statues and carvings they were forced to kneel before and pray to every day and night of their undeserved incarceration.

The building would serve as a precious educational resource to inform future generations.

John Fitzgerald

Callan, Co Kilkenny

Pope tackling complex issues

Though less informed on the Pope's latest document - 'Amoris Laetitia' (The Joy of Love), I agree with David Quinn's interpretation - "Francis seeks to avoid the errors of both 'liberals' and 'conservatives" (Irish Independent (15/04/16).

Within the past days I heard a 'run of the mill' practising Catholic comment: "This Pope is very liberal". Far from it, I would think. His intention is to brighten up the Church's teaching, by presenting it in a more compassionate, humane and realistic perspective; still aware the word of God never changes.

Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin in his analysis of the document agrees there is no straight line between black and white. How correct he is! It's a very wobbly line, indeed - a true symbol of the frailties and struggles of human nature.

Pope Francis is clarifying that hitherto this line was believed 'straight' and any slip was sinful or shameful, carrying penalties; with less assurance of redemption. More emphasis is now on being non-judgemental and allowing the 'sinner' get back on the right path; difficult though it may seem, it is always possible.

The Pontiff likes to remind the faithful that "Communion is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak", who may wish to return. The new document is full of optimistic jerks, with little fundamental change. In summing it up, the two Archbishop Martins, Eamon of Armagh and Diarmuid of Dublin, possibly, give the proper assessment, in both agreeing that "people looking for a simple 'Yes' or 'No' from Pope Francis on complex issues will be disappointed".

James Gleeson,

Thurles, Co Tipperary

A tax for non-voters

A total of 1,147,534 persons, entitled to vote in General Election 2016, lacked the incentive to go to their local polling station. That's nearly one-third of the electorate.

I suggest that the two major parties abandon fruitless talking and take a rest until tomorrow morning. Then both parties, forgetting their differences, do their honourable duty, unite - elect a Taoiseach without further delay - form a two-party majority government and then immediately set themselves the task of enacting the necessary legislation to place a tax of at least 50 on those persons who fail to bother themselves with voting in either general or local elections without a good reason. This tax, which can be legitimately avoided, can be deducted at source from income and social welfare payments. The tax will easily cover more than the cost of the next general election - providing the same lethargic non-voters remain at home watching TV. Otherwise there will be a better turnout and the State bears the cost.

On satisfactory completion of this sole act of legislation, the Dail should be dissolved instantly and the date of the next general election declared. Perhaps then the electorate will deliver a more decisive mandate so that a stable government can be formed that will work for the greater good of all.

Patrick Murray

Dundrum, Dublin 14

Something rotten in comparison

During the current political impasse, much has been heard about how Denmark has functioned with a minority government.

What the advocates have failed to mention is that, in the 2011 election in Denmark, not one Independent was elected to parliament. It is also worth noting that the total votes for Independents was slightly over 3,000 from a valid poll of over 3.5 million.

So where does that leave Ireland as regards a valid comparison, since it appears that there are no parish-pump menus in Denmark that parties who make up government are forced to choose from?

Paul Connolly

Co Kildare

Watered-down government

Seeing as Fianna Fail has failed the electorate once again by deciding to play hopscotch, and preferring to walk the walk instead of talking the talk, what now with water charges? We will soon have a watered-down government in the form of a bit of this, and a bit of that.

Do we pay the latest water bill or not? As Enda Kenny might say: "Paddy wants to know what the story is."

Anthony Woods

Ennis, Co Clare
Scottish actor Martin Compston has told how shooting the intense interview scenes in Line Of Duty can be so exhausting that his accent slips.

The actor speaks in an English accent when he is playing Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott in the BBC Two crime drama - and even keeps up Arnott's tones off-set.

He told Radio Times of shooting the interviews in the glass office: "It's a draining couple of days' filming. You do maybe 20 takes of up to 25 pages of script on the first day.

"Making series two, it was the height of the summer - it was very, very hot and the lights made things worse. People were drifting off - it was hard to keep concentrating.

"Fortunately the new boxes for series three are bigger and better ventilated. You still sweat, though, and you get so tired. Sometimes I hear my accent slipping and the Scots burr leap in."

Compston, 31, said in series one they considered shooting the scene in different takes, but Lennie James (who played DCI Tony Gates) wanted to run the full scene.

"He was right - it changes the scene completely when you do it through in one take," he said.

:: This week's Radio Times is on sale from Tuesday April 19.
Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge take a Game drive at Kaziranga National Park at Kaziranga National Park on April 13, 2016 in Guwahati, India. (Photo by Heathcliff O'Malley - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge attend the Rugby World Cup 2015 match between England v Fiji at Twickenham Stadium on September 18, 2015 in London, England. (Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage)

Prince William and Kate Middleton's Royal India Tour Day Six: Kate went casual once again in a white blouse from Jaeger, waistcoat from Really Wild Company and the same pair of riding boots by Penelope Chilvers she's been sporting for the last 10 years.

Britain's Prince William, left, and Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, arrive at the National Indigenous Training Academy at Yulara, near Uluru, Australia, Tuesday, April 22, 2014. (AP Photo/Rob Griffith)

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridgeduring their trek to the Tiger's Nest Monastery during a visit to Bhutan on the 15th April 2016 in Thimphu, Bhutan. The Royal couple are visiting Bhutan as part of a week long visit to India and Bhutan that has taken in cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Kaziranga, Bhutan and Agra. (Photo by Joe Giddens - Pool/Getty Images)

Prince William and Kate Middleton's Royal India Tour Day One: Kate made a splash in a paisley print red and white dress with peplum detail by Alexander McQueen and tan clutch by Russell & Bromley for her first day.

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine; Duchess of Cambridge attend the England v Wales match during the Rugby World Cup 2015 on September 26, 2015 at Twickenham Stadium, London, United Kingdom. (Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage)

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on day one of the royal tour to India and Bhutan

Prince William and Kate Middleton's Royal India Tour Day Seven: The Duchess opted for an old Alexander McQueen skirt and top and a necklace she was gifted by the Queen of Bhutan.

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Britain's Prince William,Duke of Cambridge walk up the trail to a Buddhist monastery referred to as "Tiger's Nest"

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge watch dancing by the fireside during a Bihu Festival Celebration at Diphlu River Lodge on day 3 of the royal visit to India and Bhutan on April 12, 2016 in Kaziranga, India. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are on a week-long tour of India and Bhutan taking in Mumbai, Delhi, Assam, Bhutan and Agra. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge stand in front of the Uluru in the Northern Territory of Australia

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge walk in front of the Taj Mahal on April 16, 2016 in Agra, India. This is the last engagement of the Royal couple after a week long visit to India and Bhutan that has taken them in cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Kaziranga, Bhutan and Agra. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge pose next to a prayer wheel on the trek up to Tiger's Nest during a visit to Bhutan on the 15th April 2016 in Thimphu, Bhutan. The Royal couple are visiting Bhutan as part of a week long visit to India and Bhutan that has taken in cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Kaziranga, Bhutan and Agra. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Prince William and Kate Middleton's Royal India Tour Day Seven: for her iconic shot at the Taj Mahal, Kate wore a dress by Naeem Khan and a pair of earrings she purchased at a market in Bhutan for less than 10.

There's a reason why Prince William and Kate Middleton avoid PDAs during public engagements.

Fresh from their seven-day tour of India and Bhutan, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge may have let their hair down a bit placing their arms around one another and during a trek up to Tiger's Next and trying their hand at archery in Thimphu - but royal decorum states they should avoid hand holding in public.

In 2014, during their royal tour of Australia, the couple posed so far apart that William was seen asking his wife, "So, what shall we talk about?"

Royal etiquette pro Myka Meier told PEOPLE the reason to avoid public displays of affection is simply their need to act professional.

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"There is no actual etiquette or royal protocol that says the couple must refrain from PDA," she explained to the mag.

"The likely reasoning is more that while traveling on a tour such as the India trip, technically the couple are working representatives of British Monarchy. The couple are likely to show very little PDA, if any, to remain professional during their designated roles abroad."

The royal couple returned to London on Saturday and will host US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle at Kensington Palace on Friday night. Prince Harry will also be joining them.

Expand Close Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Britain's Prince William,Duke of Cambridge walk up the trail to a Buddhist monastery referred to as "Tiger's Nest" / Facebook

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The Obamas will dine with Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle for lunch earlier in the day, the day after her 90th birthday celebrations.

Meanwhile, Kate's extensive wardrobe for her latest tour, costing an estimate $40,000 is still hitting headlines around the world as fashionistas clamour to get any of her sell-out styles.

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Mark Hamill and director Rian Johnson and were among those to pose with the royals during the tour

The Duke of Cambridge hugs Chewbacca as actor John Boyega looks on

Prince Harry sits in an A-wing fighter as he talks with actor Mark Hamill, who plays Luke Skywalker

Prince Harry and the Duke of Cambridge try out lightsabers during a tour of the Star Wars sets at Pinewood studios

The Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry could not resist the lure of the lightsaber when they met the heroes of the latest Star Wars movie - as well as the creative technicians bringing the latest instalment to the silver screen.

William and Harry had a brief duel in the props department at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, where Star Wars: Episode VIII is currently in production - and loved every minute of it.

Guided by British actress Daisy Ridley, who played Rey in last year's The Force Awakens, the royal brothers were shown Chewbacca's head - before getting a hug from the full-size 7ft 6in version - as well as robotic stars R2D2 and the BB8 droid from the latest instalment of the sci-fi saga.

The royal brothers both confessed to being big fans of the movies, which began in 1977 and starred Mark Hamill as the hero Luke Skywalker - who also chatted to the duke and his sibling at the end of their tour.

But when the royal brothers came across Ridley's lightsaber, William picked it up, while Harry wielded the weapon belonging to the villainous character Kylo Ren.

The props' effects were remotely controlled by a technician who turned on their internal glowing lights.

The Duke joked with his brother, asking "are you scared?" before their sabers clashed, following some tentative moves from both of them.

Ever the joker, Harry aimed at his brother below the waist, but the duke was too quick and stepped back.

A few moments later, the prince asked everyone in the workshop to mimic the lightsaber's famous sound effect, before joining in as their weapons clashed.

After their moment fencing with lightsabers, Harry jokingly mimed sliding the weapon into his belt and told William: "Your son would love this."

Ridley later joked about their mock battle: "When you see someone with a lightsaber you're like: 'You're just one of us'."

Hamill said even establishment figures regress to being children when they come into contact with Star Wars.

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He quipped: "It's unsettling when you see grown men, policemen or any figure of authority melt and turn into an eight-year-old boy.

"They're doing their job, then all of a sudden it's like: 'What's it like working with a Wookiee?'"

During the tour Maria Cork, supervisor of hair and creature effects, was working on the head of Han Solo's best friend Chewbacca - usually played by Briton Peter Mayhew - when the royal brothers stopped for a brief chat in the creatures department.

They were a little shocked by the life-like model head of Ridley, used by her stunt double in the film, but William could not resist touching Chewie's head.

Ms Cork said about working on the character dubbed the "walking carpet" by Star Wars character Princess Leia: "It's lovely being on set, everybody wants to hug him, when you see an iconic character that's been around since the 1970s, it's amazing."

Commenting on the work of the department, William said: "It's a combination of good special effects and putting people inside (the creatures)."

The props department had an array of weapons on display for the royal visit, and Harry could not resist trying one unusual item: a First Order taser that spun around a handle. But the Prince put it down when he though he had damaged it.

When he was offered a pistol, as a former frontline Army officer he instinctively pointed it at the ground. When he pulled the trigger and it failed to fire, Harry made those around him laugh when he shrugged his shoulders and said: "See, look, why does everything I touch end up breaking?"

Mark Rocca, head of props, highlighted how much his department's work was under scrutiny by Star Wars fans across the globe: "There are people out there who know every single nut and bolt, so we have to get it right and we have to make it last because they are well-used.

"It's been an honour to work on films that we've grown up with, and to work in an industry where you can go on set and see stormtroopers running around is great, but there's a lot of hard work."

Britain's contribution to making Lucas's vision of Luke Skywalker's fight against the Empire a reality has been significant over the years.

From actor Alec Guinness, who famously played Obi-Wan Kenobi, to the creative teams making props and weapons like the original lightsaber, designed by British set decorator Roger Christian.

The Force Awakens - the seventh instalment of the series - saw the return of original cast members Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill and was the highest grossing film of all time in the UK.

The royal engagement was aimed at recognising the wealth of British creative talent involved in the production of the Star Wars films, Kensington Palace said.

The end of the visit brought the royal brothers to a huge film set with a green backdrop where various X-wing and A-wing spacecraft were on display.

As an ex-Apache helicopter pilot Harry did not hesitate when asked if he wanted to get into the cockpit of one of the impressive life-size A-wing craft and he chatted to Hamill as he slid into the seat.

The Luke Skywalker actor said later: "To see Harry jumping into the cockpit like that, I was asking him how does that compare to the real thing and he said it was luxury with the leg room - as in the real thing your knees are up by your chin, and I asked what about the controls and he said 'that's complete fantasy'."

He said about William and Harry's obvious love of the Star Wars films: "They're roughly my sons' ages, so if they're anything like mine I have a real fanatic and I have one kid who likes them but (is not too bothered)."

Hamill said filming in the UK was like a homecoming but he remained tight-lipped about what his character would be doing in the latest instalment of the Star Wars saga.

William and Harry had each got a hug from Chewbacca when they first arrived on the studio set and before they left the Prince had a chat with the actor inside the costume, Joonas Suotamo.

The Duke, who is president of Bafta, looked across at the pair talking and said: "Something quite surreal about watching this conversation."
Donald Trump's nuclear policy has been mocked as "totally absurd and illogical" by an official from North Korea.

Mr Trump has suggested that Japan and South Korea should have nuclear weapons to protect themselves from the rogue state.

"You have so many countries already - China, Pakistan, you have so many countries, Russia - you have so many countries right now that have them," he said during a town hall event in Wisconsin.

"Now, wouldn't you rather, in a certain sense, have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons?"

American policy for years has been to prevent Japan obtaining nuclear weapons, and Japan responded by saying they had no desire to get hold of them. The White House called Mr Trump's idea "catastrophic".

And Ri Jong Ryul, deputy-director general of the Institute of International Studies in Pyongyang, told CNN that the Republican presidential front-runner's remarks and policies would only escalate North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Attack

"The US tells us to give up our nuclear programme, is preparing a nuclear attack against us, and on the other hand would tell its allies to have nuclear weapon," he said. "Isn't this a double standard?"

He said that Mr Trump's rhetoric was dangerous.

"Trump's remarks give us a deeper look at America's hostile policy against my country," he said. "Simply put, America's hostile acts against us are making the situation on the Korean peninsula worse."

Pyongyang has not officially responded to Trump's remarks.

Kim Jong-un's nation is believed to be about to conduct its fifth nuclear test - possibly before its party congress in early May.

Mr Trump has previously praised Mr Kim for his strong leadership and "not playing games."

"You've got to give him credit. How many young guys - he was like 26 or 25 when his father died - take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden... he goes in, he takes over, he's the boss," he said in January. ( Daily Telegraph London)
An argument between construction workers escalated into a demolition derby-style clash of heavy machinery that left at least two bulldozers flipped over in a street, police in northern China said.

In online video, several bulldozers are seen ramming each other while passenger cars scurry away from the cloud of dust. The video shows one driver running unhurt out of his toppled bulldozer, a fast-moving type also known as a wheel loader, while a friendly bulldozer tries to lift it back up.

The construction workers were from two companies competing for business, Xu Feng, a local government spokesman in Hebei province's Xingtang county, said. China's construction sector has fallen on hard times, with growth down by two-thirds from its peak a decade ago.
Migrants sit in a rubber dinghy during a rescue operation by the SOS Mediterranee ship Aquarius off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa yesterday. Photo: Reuters

Exactly one year after a fishing boat crowded with smuggled migrants capsized, sinking to the Mediterranean Sea floor with some 800 people trapped inside, Italy is launching efforts to raise up the ship and bring it to a Sicilian port.

Italian naval ships were setting sail yesterday evening from Sicily for the shipwreck site.

There, they will determine how best to lift the wreck, which still contains bodies, from a depth of 360 metres (nearly 1,200 feet).

It will then be towed to the Sicilian port of Augusta in an operation expected to take the rest of the month.

The Italian navy has already recovered 169 bodies found near the wreck, after Italy's premier vowed to recover the corpses out of respect for the dead.

Absurd

A memorial service was held for the victims in Catania, Sicily, at a cemetery where a monument to the victims was erected last year.

Officials expressed indignation at reports, still unconfirmed, of yet another shipwreck in the Mediterranean with possibly hundreds of victims trying to reach Italy from northern Africa.

"Exactly one year after the biggest disaster in the history of migration in the Mediterranean in the new millennium, we are experiencing an absurd replay," Catania Mayor Enzo Bianco said.

"Europe and the world should not be distracted from yet another terrible tragedy."

Two suspected smugglers, a Syrian and a Tunisian, are on trial in Sicily for the April 18, 2015 wreck, facing multiple counts of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and aiding illegal immigration.

Catania prosecutors said systems put in place after another set of tragedies - two deadly shipwrecks off the coast of Lampedusa in October 2013 - enabled the speedy identification and prosecution of the suspects.

Meanwhile, there were unconfirmed reports that many people are feared to have drowned after the boat they were being transferred to by traffickers capsized in the Mediterranean.

The 41 survivors, migrants mainly from East Africa, spoke to the BBC from the southern Greek city of Kalamata, where they are being held after their rescue.

They said up to 500 people had died, though there has been no official confirmation of the incident.

Earlier, six bodies were found after a separate incident off the Libyan coast.

Neither the Italian nor Greek coast guards have confirmed what would be one of the deadliest migrant boat disasters in recent years.

The groups of Ethiopians, Somalis, Sudanese and Egyptians were rescued by a cargo ship.

The crew told the BBC that the migrants initially refused to be handed over to the Greek coastguard as they were determined to get to Italy.

A Somali woman living in Egypt told the BBC Somali service that three of her relatives, whom she had not heard from since they set out for Europe last Thursday, had died.

The presidents of both Somalia and the self-declared Republic of Somaliland offered their condolences following the reports.

But the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has cast doubt, tweeting that the information hundreds had died appeared "inaccurate".

The fact that the boat capsized at night in open sea may well have contributed to the lack of clear information available, correspondents say.
An Afghan migrant jumps off an overcrowded raft onto a beach at the Greek island of Lesbos. File picture

Somalia's government said on Monday about 200 or more Somalis may have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to cross illegally to Europe, many of them teenagers, when the boat they were on capsized after leaving the Egyptian shore.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella had said earlier on Monday that several hundred people appeared to have died in a new tragedy in the Mediterranean, after unconfirmed reports spoke of up to 400 victims of capsizing near Egypt's coast.

More than 1.2 million African, Arab and Asian migrants have arrived in the European Union since the start of last year, many of them setting off from North Africa in rickety boats that are packed full of people and which struggle in choppy seas.

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"We have no fixed number but it is between 200 and 300 Somalis," Mohamed Abdi Hayir, Somali information minister, told Reuters by telephone when asked about possible Somali deaths in the latest incident.

Another Somali government statement, which offered condolences, put the number at "nearly 200", saying they were mostly teenagers. It said the boat they were on had capsized after leaving Egypt.

"There is no clear number since they are not travelling legally," the minister said, adding that he understood the boat might have been carrying about 500 people, of which 200 to 300 were Somalis "and most of them had died".

He did not give a precise timing for the incident.

One year ago, an estimated 800 migrants drowned off the Libyan coast when the fishing boat they were travelling in collided with a vessel that was attempting to rescue them - the most deadly Mediterranean shipwreck in decades.

Egyptian, Italian and Greek officials had earlier been unable to confirm the report of a new sinking.

A UN refugee agency official told Swiss broadcaster SRF he knew of 40 survivors from what appeared to be the same incident.

"We know there are 40 survivors and that as many as 460 people may have been on the boat who sailed from Egypt," the UNHCR's Beat Schuler told the broadcaster in what it said was a report from Malta.

In an article on the Somali National News Agency website, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud on Monday "sent his heartfelt condolence on his behalf and on behalf of the citizens of Somalia to the families who lost their loved ones".

The president urged Somalis to stand together in helping "stop such hazardous trips to overseas".

Somalia has a large diaspora, with many Somalis in Europe and the United States, after fleeing two decades of conflict. The Western-backed government is seeking to rebuild the Horn of Africa nation but is still battling an Islamist insurgency.

Islamist al Shabaab rebels often carry out gun and bomb attacks, particularly in the capital Mogadishu, where some hardy Somalis business people are returning to from abroad to invest.
At least five people have died in Houston, Texas, after more than a foot of rain deluged America's fourth-largest city.

Heavy flooding has become nearly an annual rite of passage in the practically sea-level city, where experts have long warned of the potential for catastrophe.

"I regret anyone whose home is flooded again," said city mayor Sylvester Turner.

"There's nothing I can say that's going to ease your frustration. We certainly can't control the weather," he said.

"A lot of rain coming in a very short period of time, there's nothing you can do," he added.

Flash flooding and more rain is possible a day after some areas saw water levels approaching 20in.

Scores of subdivisions flooded, schools were closed and power was knocked out to thousands of residents who were urged to shelter in place.

In addition to its location, Houston's "gumbo" soft soil, fast-growing population and building boom that has turned empty pastures into housing developments all over the city's suburbs make it vulnerable to high waters, experts say.

Harris County, where Houston and many of its suburbs are located, has seen a 30% jump in population since 2000. Its surrounding counties have almost grown more than 10% since 2000, according to the Greater Houston Partnership, a business group.

Some of the resulting developments include adequate green space for water runoff, but not all of them do, said Philip Bedient, an engineering professor at Rice University.

"Could we have engineered our way out of this? Only if we started talking about alterations 35 or 40 years ago," Mr Bedient said.

Samuel Brody, director of the environmental planning and sustainability research unit at Texas A&M University, last year called Houston "the number one city in America to be injured and die in a flood".

Rainstorms last May caused major flooding that required authorities to rescue 20 people, most of them drivers, from high water. Drivers abandoned at least 2,500 vehicles, and more than 1,000 homes were damaged in the rain.

The year before, flash flooding in Houston and suburban counties left cars trapped on major highways.

Those storms still pale in comparison to the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. Allison left behind five billion dollars (3.4 billion) in damages and flooded parts of the city centre and the Texas Medical Centre, which sits near the Brays Bayou, a key watershed.

Mr Bedient has worked with the Texas Medical Centre on better preparing its facilities for massive rainfall, including the use of a sophisticated weather alert system that gives the centre extra time to activate gates and doors that block excess rainwater.

Improving the monitoring of specific watersheds and flood-prone areas might give affected residents the extra bit of time they need to save lives and take protective measures, he said.

"We can't solve this flood problem in Houston," Mr Bedient said. "All we can do is a better job warning (people)."
US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter talks to airmen during a tour of US Air Force assets at Al-Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates

The US has agreed to deploy more than 200 extra troops to Iraq and to send eight Apache helicopters for the first time into the fight against Isil in Iraq, the first major increase in US forces in nearly a year, defence officials said.

The uptick in American fighting forces - and the decision to put them closer to the front lines - is designed to help Iraqi forces as they move to retake the key northern city of Mosul.

Speaking to reporters yesterday in Baghdad, US Defence Secretary Ash Carter said the decision to move US advisers to the Iraqi brigade and battalion level would put them "closer to the action", but he said they would have security forces with them and the US would do what was needed to reduce the risks.

A senior US official said that there would be eight Apache helicopters authorised to help the Iraqi forces when Iraq leaders determine they needed them. The official was not authorised to discuss the numbers publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Last June, the Obama administration announced that hundreds of troops would be deployed to help the Iraqis retake Ramadi - a goal they accomplished at the end of the year.

Of the additional troops announced yesterday, most would be special forces, who have been used throughout the anti-Isil campaign to advise and assist the Iraqis. The remainder would include some trainers, security forces for the advisers, and maintenance teams for the Apaches.

The decisions reflect weeks of discussions with commanders and Iraqi leaders, and a decision by President Barack Obama to increase the authorised troop level in Iraq by 217 forces - or from 3,870 to 4,087. The advise-and-assist teams - made up of about a dozen troops each - would embed with Iraqi brigades and battalions, likely putting them closer to the front lines and at greater risk from mortars and rocket fire.

The US, said Mr Carter, was "on the same page with the Iraqi government" in how to intensify the fight against the Isil.

The proximity to the battlefront will allow the US teams to provide more tactical combat advice as the Iraqi units move toward Mosul, the country's second-largest city, still under Isil control. Until now, US advisers have worked with the Iraqis at the headquarters level, well back from the front lines.

Mr Carter called the addition of the Apache helicopters significant, because they can "respond so quickly and so dynamically to an evolving tactical situation".

He said he discussed the Apaches with Iraq Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, and "he understood that it would be necessary for just these cases and agreed with me that we would provide it".

Last December, US officials were trying to carefully negotiate new American assistance with Iraqi leaders who often have a different idea of how to wage war. At that time, the Iraqis refused Apache helicopters for the battle to retake Ramadi, saying they didn't think they were needed.

Mr Carter also said that the US would send an additional long-range, rocket-assisted artillery system to Iraq.

US officials have also said that the number of special operations forces in Syria would be increased at some point.
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By Nikie Mayo of the Independent Mail

The Salvation Army has a goal of starting a Boys and Girls Club for children in Homeland Park.

Capt. Jason Hughes, who helps run the Anderson chapter of The Salvation Army, described the club Tuesday "as one of the most immediate ways to positively impact a community."

It may take a while for the club to become a reality, but Anderson County government officials are already looking for ways to help. The county has a Forfeited Land Commission, which can take control of properties with delinquent tax bills if certain conditions are met. One of those parcels already controlled by the commission might work for The Salvation Army, County Administrator Rusty Burns said.

"We are going see if we have a property that meets their needs," Burns said.

This project is one of the first things under discussion by the newly formed Homeland Park Strike Force  a group aimed at striking down community problems and replacing them with solutions.

The group was the idea of Anderson County Council Chairman Tommy Dunn, whose district includes part of Homeland Park. Councilwoman Gracie Floyd and councilman J. Mitchell Cole also have Homeland Park as part of their respective districts. "I get more calls about troubles in Homeland Park than I do for all the rest of my district combined," Dunn said recently. "There are good, honest, hardworking folks there and they deserve better than to have to worry about thieving and blight and going to sleep hungry. If we can do something about it, we need to."

Statistics from Anderson School District 5 support the idea that helping Homeland Park's children is the place to start.

Homeland Park Primary School houses students in pre-kindergarten through second grades. Nearly 94 percent of those children live in poverty, according to the latest education reports available from the school district. That is actually an improvement over the numbers from 2013-14, when 99 percent of the children either came from Medicaid-eligible families or qualified for free or reduced-price lunch.

The primary school is a feeder school for Varennes Elementary School, where 95 percent of the children live in poverty.

"We have a lot of families we help, a lot of social services we help provide to families in Homeland Park," Hughes said. "Those are all part of our pound of cure to help a community that needs help. But a Boys and Girls Club  that's the ounce of prevention that shows you are interested in a community being strong, being healthy."

Sheriff John Skipper said his deputies deal with a lot of crime in Homeland Park, which e attributes, in part, to the loss of South Carolina's textile mills.

"Back in the mill days, this was a thriving place to be," he said. "When the mills shut down, the younger generations began to move away while their parents stayed here. Then, when those parents died, the houses that had been in their family for years suddenly became someone's rental property. Now, there is an abundance of rental property in Homeland Park run by slumlords who don't even live here.

"That leads to areas that aren't taken care of, and to transient people who are only here for a while," Skipper said. "It's a cycle that can breed crime and cause problems for long-term residents who want to see their neighborhoods safe."

Dunn said the new community group also will make suggestions for strengthening existing county regulations to help Homeland Park. Those regulations need to be better to reduce things like abandoned houses, trash in yards and overgrown grass, he said.

The Rev. James Strickland of Homeland Park Baptist Church said he is excited about the formation of the new community group and any efforts that come out of it.

"There's definitely a stigma, a black eye that people assign to Homeland Park because it has crime and drugs," Strickland said Tuesday. "But what area doesn't have those things? There are plenty of people here who want to live here safely and happily. We need help to bring this community back."

The new group's next meeting will be April 28 at 11:30 a.m.

Follow Nikie Mayo on Twitter @NikieMayo
By Mike Eads of the Independent Mail

Sikes sit-in organizers finally got the sit down they wanted with Clemson President Jim Clements on Monday, but they reported no progress and Clements sounds ready to take the administration's case to the wider campus.

Khayla Williams, A.D. Carson and Rae-Neesha White  three of the Clemson Five arrested last Thursday for failing to clear the Sikes Hall lobby  led the student negotiators, who appeared frustrated with the lack of progress.

"What they gave us in that room is not what we asked for," Williams said.

Williams, Carson and White didn't go into specifics when briefing 200 supporters who crowded onto the Sikes Hall steps afterward, other than to indicate there were no specific proposals made to address the protesters concerns about campus diversity and inclusion. They said Clements pitched more meetings for Tuesday and Wednesday.

"They are prepared for us to be on the steps until Thursday," said White.

Clements' Chief of Staff, Max Allen, recounted the meeting differently than the sit-in organizers.

"It was a cordial and honest discussion, and we appreciated the students' willingness to work with us," said Allen, who has been Clements' lead negotiator with the students. "We offered a framework and we really want to look at some deliverables and the things they've been asking for."

Allen said the Tuesday and Wednesday meetings would be public "action forums" to address the situation  at sites to be determined. He added that the Sikes protesters have not been given a deadline for ending the sit in.

Monday was Day Six of the sit-in, which began with a march last Wednesday to demand action after a bunch of bananas was hung next to a campus African American history banner. Students moved into the Sikes lobby after the march, where they remained until Thursday's arrests. The protesters re-entered Sikes Friday, but moved out onto the front porch when the building closed for the weekend.

White said the protesters still want progress and accountability with regard to the initiatives Clements touted to them last week, including improved recruitment of minority students and faculty, a more robust Gantt Multicultural Center and stepped up diversity training for all university employees and students.

Saturday and Sunday were fairly calm. The students and their supporters stayed in front of Sikes in what they have dubbed "Clemson University's new Political and Multicultural Center" and slept in tents provided by the campus recreation office. They also hosted other student groups that stopped by to support the effort.

"The weekend went really well," said D.J. Smith, another member of the Clemson Five. "We focused on community building."

Clements and his Chief of Staff Max Allen called the protesters Sunday morning, but neither would comment on what they discussed.

Smith hopes for progress this week.

"I'm an optimist at heart," Smith said.

Follow Michael Eads on Twitter @MikeEads_AIM.
Indias Fuel Demand Grows in 2015-2016

Data released by the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas shows Indias fuel consumption rose by 10.9 percent, from 165.5 million tons to 183.5 million tons, in the 2015-2016 financial year ending March 31. Breaking down the data, diesel consumption jumped 7.5 percent to reach 74.6 million tons and petrol sales increased by 14.5 percent to 21.8 million tons. Projections for 2016-2017 remain equally robust.

According to A K Sharma, Finance Director, Indian Oil Corporation, petrol demand in the new financial year will rise by 11 percent and diesel around four percent. Kerosene demand has fallen as the government has favored the replacement of the heavily subsidized fuel with LPG, whose sales were up 8.6 percent to reach 19.5 million tons. Naptha, a hydrocarbon mixture, also saw a big jump in domestic consumption by 20.9 percent to 13.4 million tons, leading to the decline in its exports. Finally, jet fuel (ATF) consumption rose by 8.7 percent to 6.22 million tons.

The soaring fuel demand in India is a clear indication of Indias expanding economy, with robust activity registered in the manufacturing, agriculture, and airline sectors. Unprecedented rise in consumption levels is also attributed to the fastest pace of growth in automobile sales in the last five years. This also favored the petrol vehicle category due to the narrowing diesel-petrol price differential.

Solar Power Policy in the Works to Promote Domestic Solar Manufacturing

A new solar power policy is being formulated by the Niti Aayog, based on recommendations of a high-level inter-ministerial committee set up by the Department of Industrial Policy and Planning (DIPP). The policy will be in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modis governments ambitious solar energy plan to establish a generation capacity of 100 GW by 2022. As of now, the domestic generating capacity stands at only about 6000 MW. This has spurred demand for imported final equipment as well as components from China and Taiwan, challenging Indian solar manufacturers.

The proposed solar policy thus aims to create an enabling environment to expand both Indias solar generation capacity and promote domestic manufacturing of equipment. The policy could include off-take guarantees, 100 percent payment guarantees, an institutional hedging mechanism for foreign investments, and a stringent offset. In terms of funding, it has been suggested that the National Clean Energy Fund could finance targeted capital subsidies for domestic manufacturers, technological upgradation, and hedging support, among others.

Earlier, in a stop-gap measure, the Indian government had introduced the provision of mandatory sourcing of locally made components in the solar sector. This led the U.S. to file a case with the World Trade Organization (WTO), which it subsequently won. While the Indian government has challenged the WTO decision, it is also seeking to encourage foreign companies to set up manufacturing facilities in India via the Make in India program.

E-Trading Platform Launched to Aid Farmers, Agricultural Producers

The government will link 21 regulated agricultural produce markets (mandis) from eight states via an electronic trading platform called the National Agriculture Market (NAM). The authorities have so far approved 365 mandis from 12 states to join the platform, and 200 more mandis are expected to join by March 2017. Initially, to assess the systems functionality, 12 commodities will be traded on the online platform and not in the physical market  castor seed, paddy, and wheat. Successful implementation of NAM will also require intra-state trade laws to be streamlined. Punjab is opposed to this and has been reluctant to join NAM.

Launched by the government in honor of B R Ambedkar, the economist and social reformer, the move is aptly timed. Several areas of Maharashtra state are currently reeling from severe drought and poor growing conditions. Moreover, producers and farmers incomes have constantly suffered due to the prevailing structure of the commodity market. Presently, the agriculture market sees big traders form cartels in order to impose artificially raised prices on farmers or engage in hoarding. Further, produce such as onions and potatoes are sold at different rates in different states.

NAM seeks to tackle this corruption and inefficiency by creating a unified market where farmers avail more competitive prices, and consumers are provided with more options and a steady food supply. An online market will also reduce transaction costs, and provide a singular window for quality testing and licensing.



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Managing Your Accounting and Bookkeeping in India

In this issue of India Briefing Magazine, we spotlight three issues that financial management teams for India should monitor. Firstly, we examine the new Indian Accounting Standards (Ind-AS) system, which is expected to be a boon for foreign companies in India. We then highlight common filing dates for most companies with operations in India, and lastly examine procedures and regulations for remitting profits from India.

Taking Advantage of Indias FDI Reforms

In this edition of India Briefing Magazine, we explore important amendments to Indias foreign investment policy and outline various options for business establishment, including the creation of wholly owned subsidiaries in sectors that permit 100 percent foreign direct investment. We additionally explore several taxes that apply to wholly owned subsidiary companies, and provide an outlook for what investors can expect to see in India this year.

An Introduction to Doing Business in India 2015 (Second Edition)

Doing Business in India 2015 is designed to introduce the fundamentals of investing in India. As such, this comprehensive guide is ideal not only for businesses looking to enter the Indian market, but also for companies who already have a presence here and want to keep up-to-date with the most recent and relevant policy changes. We discuss a range of pertinent issues for foreign businesses, including Indias most recent FDI caps and restrictions, the key taxes applicable to foreign companies, how to conduct a successful audit, and the procedures for obtaining an employment visa.
Rought and tough actor Ajay Devgn is currently in Bulgaria shooting for his next directorial venture 'Shivaay'. It was just recently that, the actor shot for an extremely difficult scene at the top of Pirin Mountains and seems like he has managed to pull it off quite well. Ajay also shared the video of his shoot on Twitter, wherein he is seen standing on the top of a mountain with a helicopter flying around him. WOW!!! He is truly one great actor who is strong willed to stand and give the best shot.

On sharing the video he wrote, "When the going gets tough, tough get going! Heartfelt thanks to fantastic TeamShivaay for an Extreme Bulgaria shoot." In the video you can see, as soon as Ajay completes the shoot, the crew helped him wear a jacket and took him to his hotel room. Currently, Ajay and his team are shooting at the highest peak of Bulgaria's Pirin Mountain`s at VIHREN peak in Bansko. Due to the bad weather condition, Ajay suddenly got hypothermia.

When the going gets tough, tough get going! Heartfelt thanks to fantastic TeamShivaay for an Extreme Bulgaria shoot.https://t.co/8W7D1n7RKo  Ajay Devgn (@ajaydevgn) April 18, 2016

Sources say that, the Doctor at the hotel advised him at least 2 days of rest but Ajay was back in 30mins. It was -19 degrees Celsius and there was heavy snowfall the night before so the temperature was running record low. The team and crew were exhausted but prepped for the cold, but Ajay was only clad in a T shirt and a jacket. Reports also suggest that, the level of altitude mixed with the chopper hovering over his head blew a lot of snow and ice around the area where Ajay was standing for the shot. But finally, Ajay pulled completed the shot at the Vihren Peak while all the crew waited on a safe point below. WOW!!! So proud of you Ajay Sir.. So fans you have to wait for some real action.

The movie 'Shivaay' will be Ajay's second directorial venture after 'U,Me Aur Hum'. This movie will release by the end of this year.


Adani reportedly said its 21.7 billion dollar coal mine project in Australia has received authorisation by traditional land owners, according to reports.

Report says that "W&J (Wangan and Jagalingou) community voted overwhelmingly today at a properly convened, independently-chaired meeting in accordance with established statutory process.

The anti-Adani group of W&J representatives slammed "sham meeting" and stated it was funded by Adani, says report.
Air India is expected to report an operating profit of INR 8-10 crore in FY16 - the first such instance since the erstwhile Indian Airlines was merged with it in 2007, reports a financial newspaper.

A senior executive told the paper that the national carrier's loss would be limited to ~Rs. 2,600-2,800 crore, significantly lower than in FY15 when it stood at Rs. 5,574.47 crore.

Air Indias revenues for FY16 are expected to remain flat since yields on both domestic and international routes have dropped following lower ticket prices, the official cited above said.

In FY15, Air India had reported revenues of INR 19,781 crore and an operating loss of Rs. 2,171.40 crore.

The airline is looking to add flights both on international and domestic routes, the official added.

FY17 could see an increase in revenues by 10 per cent due to additional capacity.

Air India hopes to bring down its net losses to less than INR 2,000 crore in FY17, enabling the carrier to turn cash positive in FY18, reports the paper.
Gold imports into India sank by 80.48 per cent to US$973 million in March from US$4.98 billion during the corresponding month of last year, data released on Monday showed. into India sank by 80.48 per cent to US$973 million in March from US$4.98 billion during the corresponding month of last year, data released on Monday showed.

Weak prices of the yellow metal in both global and domestic markets, coupled with the nationwide jewellers strike hurt gold demand last month.

The sharp contraction in gold imports helped narrow India's trade deficit to a five-year low of US$5.07 billion last month. The trade gap stood at US$11.39 billion in March 2015.

India's gold imports in FY16 dropped 16 per cent from last year to 926 tonnes on the back of higher prices and the nationwide jewellers' strike, according to reports.

Gold imports in March slumped to 18 tonnes from 125 tonnes in the same month of last year, according to provisional data provided by a Finance Ministry official.

Indian jewellers went on an indefinite strike from March to protest the proposed imposition of excise duty on gold jewellery.
ICICI Bank announced the winners of ICICI Appathon, the countrys largest virtual mobile app development challenge by an Indian bank. The Grand Finale, held at the banks headquarters in Mumbai, saw Mohit Talwadiya from Bengaluru, Yethapu Parthasaradhi Reddy from Singapore and Samyag S. Shah from Pune take home the top honours for developing next generation mobile applications. The eminent jury chose the top three winners from over 2,000 participants including a large number of entries from international developers and startups. The bank will incorporate the winning mobile innovations into its digital road map. announced the winners of ICICI Appathon, the countrys largest virtual mobile app development challenge by an Indian bank. The Grand Finale, held at the banks headquarters in Mumbai, saw Mohit Talwadiya from Bengaluru, Yethapu Parthasaradhi Reddy from Singapore and Samyag S. Shah from Pune take home the top honours for developing next generation mobile applications. The eminent jury chose the top three winners from over 2,000 participants including a large number of entries from international developers and startups. The bank will incorporate the winning mobile innovations into its digital road map.

The first winning application focused on conversational banking based on artificial intelligence and natural language processing. The other winning applications emphasized on enabling payments using digital keyboards and a chat messenger based banking app that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to simplify information, respectively.

The jury comprised Mr. Rajiv Sabharwal, Executive Director, ICICI Bank; Mr. Anup Gupta, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners; Mr. Ashish Kumar, Vice President - Cloud, IBM Asia Pacific; and Mr. T.R. Ramachandran, Group Country Manager-India & South Asia, VISA.

Rajiv Sabharwal, Executive Director, ICICI Bank said, It is encouraging to see the response that ICICI Appathon has received. With India becoming the second largest market globally in terms of mobile subscribers as well as smartphones, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in consumer preference towards doing everything on-the-go, on the mobile phone. We introduced ICICI Appathon to tap into the exceptional talent in developers, technopreneurs and technology startups in our country and across the globe. We are delighted to have got interesting ideas which we believe will enable development of breakthrough solutions, making mobile banking simpler than ever before. We believe that such programmes will further provide impetus to many more young developers to think out-of-the-box and strengthen the Government's 'Digital India' mission.

Added, jury member, Mr. Anup Gupta, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, It is indeed a pleasure to be part of this program and I congratulate ICICI Bank for this initiative. The Grand Finale had a good mix of diverse ideas across themes like payments, rural banking, SMEs and insurance among others. Technology is playing a central role in increasing reach and improving efficiency across financial services; and initiatives like these will go a long way in encouraging talent and innovation in the ecosystem.

Said jury member, Mr. Ashish Kumar, Vice President - Cloud, IBM Asia Pacific, The cloud is opening up new opportunities for app development by making it easier for developers to scale and incorporate data in ways that was never possible before. Together on an innovation journey, we partnered with ICICI to deliver unique experiences to its clients. The partnership embraces the contribution from developers, students and technology enthusiast to create next generation banking applications. Bringing together the best of IBM technology and depth of expertise, we will support the bank in its mission to develop innovative applications for its customers and propel it into the digital era.

Added, jury member, Mr. TR Ramachandran, Group Country Manager, India and South Asia, Visa, Visa sees opening-up access to our global network as an opportunity to foster innovation in payments and global commerce. With Visas rich set of APIs we are excited how the open platforms can support our clients, industry partners and the developer community to fuel payment innovation. ICICI Appathon saw large participation from the start-up and student communities and it was very encouraging to hear some of the ideas that will help move the industry forward.

All participants were judged on five criteria - uniqueness of the proposition, functionality, business potential, user experience and scalability. The top three winners won a total prize money of over Rs 20 lakh along with a potential engagement opportunity with ICICI Bank. They will also be mentored by ICICI Bank and the partners of the programme, IBM and VISA. Additionally, winners of ICICI Appathon will get fast-tracked entry into the '10,000 Startups' of NASSCOM, if they choose to apply for it. Moreover, two members of each winning team will also have access to 91springboard, a community of freelancers, startups and established businesses.

As ICICI Appathon was available virtually on the cloud to a developer anywhere, participants from across the world took part in it. In India, over 40% of the entries came from non-metro cities like Nagpur, Coimbatore, Bhubaneswar, Jalandhar, Udaipur and Hubli among others. Further, it has also witnessed significant participation from women developers with close to one  sixth of entries from them.

Hosted on the IBM Bluemix cloud based platform, ICICI Appathon offered a diverse set of over 50 APIs (Application Programme Interface), the largest set of Banking and Financial sector APIs in any Indian software development event. The APIs were from ICICI Bank and its group companies namely ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, ICICI Lombard General Insurance and ICICI Securities. As a first, payment APIs from 'Visa' and the 'Unified Payment Interface' API from NPCI were also available for the app development challenge. Participants had to create innovative working prototypes of mobile applications using these APIs.
The Maharashtra government is considering a proposal to stop supply of water to breweries and distilleries in the Aurangabad district due to severe drought in the state, a senior official at the Water Works Department has been quoted as saying by a business daily.The Water Works Department has asked the Aurangabad divisional commissioner to submit a report this week on allocation of water to each category of consumers, including the breweries.The Congress party and ruling alliance partner Shiv Sena have urged the state government to stop supply to the beer and liquor industry in Aurangabad.On 17th April, the Water Works Department decided to cut water supply to industrial units in Marathwada by 10% and to the breweries & distilleries by 20% till 30th April, says the financial newspaper.Aurangabad district collector Nidhi Pandey told a domestic news agency that the state government would review the situation on 30th April.Aurangabad has 16 breweries and distilleries, including foreign brands like Carlsberg and SABMiller, and Indian brand United Breweries (UB).
Minister of State for Petroleum & Natural Gas, Dharmendra Pradhan, is on a three day visit to Bangladesh from 17th to 19th of April, 2016. The visit is to take stock of the ambitious agenda set for the India-Bangladesh Hydrocarbon Sector during the visit of Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi to Bangladesh in June 2015. , is on a three day visit to Bangladesh from 17th to 19th of April, 2016. The visit is to take stock of the ambitious agenda set for the India-Bangladesh Hydrocarbon Sector during the visit of Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi to Bangladesh in June 2015.

Pradhan met Dr Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury, Adviser on Energy, Power and Mineral Resources to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh and Mr Nasrul Hamid, Minister of State for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources of Bangladesh. During the meetings, Pradhan discussed issues in the bilateral Hydrocarbon Sector between the two countries. He also discussed modalities for sustainable supply of High Speed Diesel from Siliguri Marketing Terminal of Numaligarh Refinery Ltd (NRL) to Parbatipur Depot of Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC). Status of Indian proposals that have been shared with the Bangladeshi side, including on setting up of hydrocarbon related infrastructure project in Bangladesh, setting up of LPG import terminal at Chittagong by IOCL and the Indo-Bangla Friendship Pipeline were also discussed.

Pradhan expressed confidence that early implementation of these projects will create win-win situation for both countries. He briefed his interlocutors on the status of seismic survey being carried out by ONGC Videsh Ltd in offshore blocks allocated to it by Bangladesh. MoU between IOCL and BPC on broad aspects of cooperation in downstream oil and gas sector opportunities in Bangladesh was signed in his presence. The MoU paves the way for discussion on setting up LPG import terminal at coastal belt of Chittagong district, marketing of LPG and developing related infrastructure in Bangladesh, transportation LPG from Chittagong to Tripura and any other form of Hydrocarbon sector related cooperation of common interest as may be agreed by IOCL and BPC. IOCL would also be conducting a feasibility study for construction of LPG import terminal and pipeline from Chittagong to Tripura.

On 19th April, 2016, Shri Pradhan will travel to Chittagong for a day visit where he is scheduled to witness the award of contract by Eastern Refineries Ltd to Engineers India Ltd for its expansion of its refinery by 3 MMTPA.
Zurich Airport has signed an agreement to sell its 5 per cent minority shareholding in Bengaluru International Airport Ltd (BIAL) to the Prem Watsa-backed Fairfax Holdings for US$48.9 million. has signed an agreement to sell its 5 per cent minority shareholding in Bengaluru International Airport Ltd (BIAL) to the Prem Watsa-backed Fairfax Holdings for US$48.9 million.

Subject to customary regulatory approvals, the deal is expected to be completed within the third quarter of 2016.

BIAL owns and operates Kempegowda International Airport Bengaluru (KIAB) under a 30-year concession agreement from the Indian Government, with an option for a further 30-year extension.

KIAB, which began operations in 2008, is among the first greenfield airports in India built under a public-private partnership (PPP) mode. It is now Indias third largest airport.

Since the start of construction in 2005, Zurich Airport has transferred its operational expertise to BIAL through an Operations, Management & Services Agreement.

With the conclusion of the maintenance contract in 2015, Zurich Airports role has been reduced to a minority shareholder.

In 2009, Zurich Airport had sold 12 per cent of its shareholding in BIAL to GVK Power & Infrastructure Ltd.

The GVK Group had acquired a 29 per cent stake in BIAL from L&T and Zurich Airport, and another 14 per cent from Siemens Project Ventures in the past.

GVK recently divested its 33 per cent stake in BIAL to Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd for INR 2,149 crore, to cut debt.

GVKs stake in BIAL is now 10 per cent, while Fairfax is the largest shareholder with a 38 per cent stake (including the Zurich Airport stake).

Siemens has a 26 per cent stake, while the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and the Karnataka government hold 13 per cent each.
How US Covered Up Saudi Role in 9/11 By Paul Sperry April 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " NYP "- In its report on the still-censored 28 pages implicating the Saudi government in 9/11, 60 Minutes last weekend said the Saudi role in the attacks has been soft-pedaled to protect Americas delicate alliance with the oil-rich kingdom. Thats quite an understatement. Actually, the kingdoms involvement was deliberately covered up at the highest levels of our government. And the coverup goes beyond locking up 28 pages of the Saudi report in a vault in the US Capitol basement. Investigations were throttled. Co-conspirators were let off the hook. Case agents Ive interviewed at the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in Washington and San Diego, the forward operating base for some of the Saudi hijackers, as well as detectives at the Fairfax County (Va.) Police Department who also investigated several 9/11 leads, say virtually every road led back to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles. Yet time and time again, they were called off from pursuing leads. A common excuse was diplomatic immunity. Those sources say the pages missing from the 9/11 congressional inquiry report  which comprise the entire final chapter dealing with foreign support for the September 11 hijackers  details incontrovertible evidence gathered from both CIA and FBI case files of official Saudi assistance for at least two of the Saudi hijackers who settled in San Diego. Some information has leaked from the redacted section, including a flurry of pre-9/11 phone calls between one of the hijackers Saudi handlers in San Diego and the Saudi Embassy, and the transfer of some $130,000 from then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandars family checking account to yet another of the hijackers Saudi handlers in San Diego. An investigator who worked with the JTTF in Washington complained that instead of investigating Bandar, the US government protected him  literally. He said the State Department assigned a security detail to help guard Bandar not only at the embassy, but also at his McLean, Va., mansion. The source added that the task force wanted to jail a number of embassy employees, but the embassy complained to the US attorney and their diplomatic visas were revoked as a compromise. Former FBI agent John Guandolo, who worked 9/11 and related al Qaeda cases out of the bureaus Washington field office, says Bandar should have been a key suspect in the 9/11 probe. The Saudi ambassador funded two of the 9/11 hijackers through a third party, Guandolo said. He should be treated as a terrorist suspect, as should other members of the Saudi elite class who the US government knows are currently funding the global jihad. But Bandar held sway over the FBI. After he met on Sept. 13, 2001, with President Bush in the White House, where the two old family friends shared cigars on the Truman Balcony, the FBI evacuated dozens of Saudi officials from multiple cities, including at least one Osama bin Laden family member on the terror watch list. Instead of interrogating the Saudis, FBI agents acted as security escorts for them, even though it was known at the time that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. The FBI was thwarted from interviewing the Saudis we wanted to interview by the White House, said former FBI agent Mark Rossini, who was involved in the investigation of al Qaeda and the hijackers. The White House let them off the hook. Whats more, Rossini said the bureau was told no subpoenas could be served to produce evidence tying departing Saudi suspects to 9/11. The FBI, in turn, iced local investigations that led back to the Saudis. The FBI covered their ears every time we mentioned the Saudis, said former Fairfax County Police Lt. Roger Kelly. It was too political to touch. Added Kelly, who headed the National Capital Regional Intelligence Center: You could investigate the Saudis alone, but the Saudis were hands-off.  Even Anwar al-Awlaki, the hijackers spiritual adviser, escaped our grasp. In 2002, the Saudi-sponsored cleric was detained at JFK on passport fraud charges only to be released into the custody of a Saudi representative. It wasnt until 2011 that Awlaki was brought to justice  by way of a CIA drone strike. Strangely, The 9/11 Commission Report, which followed the congressional inquiry, never cites the catch-and-release of Awlaki, and it mentions Bandar only in passing, his named buried in footnotes. Two commission lawyers investigating the Saudi support network for the hijackers complained their boss, executive director Philip Zelikow, blocked them from issuing subpoenas and conducting interviews of Saudi suspects. 9/11 Commission member John Lehman was interested in the hijackers connections to Bandar, his wife and the Islamic affairs office at the embassy. But every time he tried to get information on that front, he was stonewalled by the White House. They were refusing to declassify anything having to do with Saudi Arabia, Lehman was quoted as saying in the book, The Commission. Did the US scuttle the investigation into foreign sponsorship of 9/11 to protect Bandar and other Saudi elite? Things that should have been done at the time were not done, said Rep. Walter Jones, the North Carolina Republican whos introduced a bill demanding President Obama release the 28 pages. Im trying to give you an answer without being too explicit. A Saudi reformer with direct knowledge of embassy involvement is more forthcoming. We made an ally of a regime that helped sponsor the attacks, said Ali al-Ahmed of the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs. I mean, lets face it. Paul Sperry is a former Hoover Institution media fellow and author of Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington. 9/11, The 28 Pages, The CIA & The Art of the Hangout
Is Hillary Clinton Above the Law? By Ray McGovern April 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Consortium News "- Enough of the emails, said Sen. Bernie Sanders in Brooklyn-ese, while turning to Secretary Hillary Clinton during their first debate on Oct. 13, 2015. Sanders won loud applause for what seemed a gentlemanly gesture in withholding criticism for her use of a private email server for classified information. But when Sanders said The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails, I had a flashback to a House hearing three decades ago on large liberties taken with the law during the Iran-Contra affair under President Ronald Reagan. Beginning his testimony, then-Secretary of State George Shultz made the mistake of saying, in effect, who cares about laws being violated: The American people are tired of hearing about Iran-Contra. Rep. David Obey, D-Wisconsin, was quick to respond: Mr. Secretary, I did not take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States until I got tired. Well, we intelligence professionals also took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. There was no until we got tired  or even until we retired in that oath. It has no expiration date. Congressman Obeys persistence and tenacity offer a model for patriots. It has been six months since Sanderss magnanimous gesture let Clinton off the hook for playing fast and loose with laws passed to protect classified information. During subsequent debates, everything but the kitchen sink has been hurled at the candidates, but there has been little appetite for asking Secretary Clinton what she thought she was doing, and why she decided to ignore security safeguards. (The reason often given  because she liked her Blackberry so much  does not withstand close scrutiny.) While mainstream media have largely avoided the issue, it did get mentioned during the March 9 debate in Miami. Longtime news anchor for Noticiero Univision, Jorge Ramos, asked Secretary Clinton whether she would quit the presidential race if she were indicted for putting classified information on her private email server. She replied: Oh, for goodness sake, its not going to happen. Im not even answering that question. But this is too important an issue to sweep under the rug. It is not only we veteran intelligence professionals who are alarmed at what appears, at best, to be Clintons carelessness and, at worst, her deliberate attempt to conduct her affairs in complete secrecy, avoiding the strictures of, for example, the Freedom of Information Act, which can give the people and historians access to public records in the future so they can understand how government decisions were made. So researchers who care about democracy care. It is also the FBI that cares, and the National Security Agency, which is responsible for ensuring secure communications, cares. And so do all who may have sent a sensitive piece of intelligence to her that she, in turn, might have put on her unclassified system. If Americans at large were briefed on the potential national security implications, they too would care. One of the distinct advantages of the collegial way we operate in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is that when, as now, one of us needs input from tried and trusted specialists, it is immediately at hand. So, I consulted several of my colleagues with special knowledge of these matters. A Severe Compromise For technical commentary on this issue, I turned to a specialist VIPs colleague named William Binney, who worked for NSA for 36 years. Binney co-founded NSAs SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) Automation Research Center, and retired from NSA as Technical Director. He said he shares my very strong feelings on the issue. He told me the following: The email issue with Secretary Clinton is one of the most severe compromises of security I have ever known. After all, if the Chinese, Russians and other hackers can penetrate the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) servers and take the records of over 21 million U.S. citizens that over the years have applied for security clearances, then penetrating Hillary Clintons private server would be a piece of cake. Such penetration would yield insight into decision making at the highest level of the US government, including what might be revealed in emails with the President. This is worse that the compromise of predominantly lower-level data by Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and gives insight into planning at the highest levels in Washington  something that even all the torrent of data exposed by Edward Snowden could not provide. Reports that Clinton instructed subordinates to delete the security classification line on sensitive reports and email them to her, suggests a total disregard for the need to protect classified information and arrogance in deeming herself above lawful regulations governing the handling such data. We might as well have had an in-place mole at the highest level of our government. The FBI/Department of Justice would have already indicted lesser officials for less. Certainly, Clinton is receiving special treatment. It is a safe guess that FBI investigators are seething over their inability, so far, to pursue the case against Hillary with the vigor it merits. The case of Gen. David Petraeus comes immediately to mind. There was mucho seething at the FBI, when Petraeus gave his mistress classified documents of extreme sensitivity, lied about it to FBI investigators, and was let off with a slap on the wrist. [See Consortiumnews.coms  Gen. Petraeus: Too Big to Jail. ] Operational Perspective With the aim of getting expert commentary from an operational perspective, I turned to Scott Ritter, who served on Gen. Norman Schwarzkopfs staff during the first Gulf war, before he became chief U.N. weapons inspector for Iraq. Heres what Ritter had to say: I can say that NSA/JSOC (and even UN teams such as the one I was running in Iraq) would LOVE for a foreign official at the secretary-of-state level to use a private server for official communications. One need simply to mimic a cell tower (the Stingray technology in vogue today would suffice) and you instantly have access to everything such an official does/says/types on a cell phone. That senior official would no longer have the unique identifiers and encryption that an official server would provide. By the way, it is no longer a secret that we targeted the unencrypted communications that Saddam Hussein and his closest advisers sent out, not just the encrypted ones. Any communications traffic analyst will tell you that simply reading the unclassified traffic provides a plethora of actionable intelligence  particularly since the communications intercepted are in real time. In the Field So what can happen in the field  in combat areas and in places like Kabul  when regulations governing the handling of classified information are disregarded? For perspective on this, I turned to Matthew Hoh, Marine Captain in Iraq and later a senior State Department official in Afghanistan. He answered: Ordinary Americans need to know how serious this is. Just last week we witnessed one example of what could have happened when Secretary of State John Kerry was visiting Kabul and the Taliban tried to attack him with rockets. Whenever the President, Vice President, Secretary of State or Defense, Joint Chiefs Chairman, or a congressional delegation visits Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq, the planning and arrangements are secret. But this is the type of information that could be sent over Clintons personal email, hacked, and gotten a senior American official killed. Another example would be Clinton discussing information relating to intercepts of foreign leaders. Its possible in her correspondence she could mention something regarding Putin, Cameron, Modi, et al. that we capture via SIGINT. That would not only be an embarrassment; it would blow that capability for such access (and squander the millions of dollars spent in creating it). Fortunately for the other world leaders, they dont seem to have been as arrogant or dumb (or both of the above) in insisting on using non-secure communications. Was it not amazing that Clinton protege, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, plotted the Feb. 22 coup in Ukraine with the US Ambassador in Kiev on an insecure telephone! Wonder where Nuland got the idea that was all right. Only transmitting and sharing classified information via email through the secure email and Internet system used by the US government also prevents accidental transmission of secret information to people who should not receive secret information. Its a closed system. Only those with the approved clearance and an authorized email account can receive the email. So you cant accidentally type in the wrong name of a contact who is not trusted, is not a US citizen, does not have a security clearance, etc. and send them an email with classified information. Weve all done that with our email, type in the wrong name and send someone an email by accident. Or weve forwarded an email string with a chain of information somewhere down the body of the message that you didnt want the recipient to see. By transmitting classified information via her personal email account Hillary Clinton could have very easily sent classified information to someone by accident. Of course, as everyone who uses email knows, once you send a message you have no control over where that message gets sent after you hit send. So, once she forwarded an email with classified information that information could be sent to anyone, anywhere in the world whether on purpose or on accident. Thats why you dont transmit classified information outside the secure system. Another question: What information regarding her dealings outside of her official capacities may have been targeted? What I mean is besides US government secrets that she possibly exposed were Clintons own secrets  perhaps a quid pro quo or two regarding foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation. Such information could be used against her as political blackmail. What information could have been captured by a foreign power that could be used if/when Hillary Clinton came to office as President to gain leverage over her? Undoubtedly, if she wins election, her first priority will be re-election. So, my concern is not just for information that she could have compromised as Secretary of State that would have harmed the U.S. from 2009-2013, but what information has been compromised that could be used against her as blackmail if she is in the Oval Office? Clintons Judgment So whether Sen. Sanders is right or not  that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails  Hillary Clintons carelessness and entitlement in brushing aside the lawful security rules that apply to other government officials is an issue that bears on whether she has the character and judgment to be President. In December 2011, when then-Secretary of State Clinton was busy denouncing Pvt. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning for leaking evidence of US government wrongdoing, Clinton declared: I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have to be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so. For leaking mostly low-level classified information to the public so the people could know about illegal or questionable acts by the government  none of the data top secret, the level that some Clinton emails have now been stamped  Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison. But it seems that the applicable legal standard  or double standard  is that the more sensitive the security breach and the higher the status of the offender the lighter the punishment. For instance, Gen. David Petraeus divulged top-secret/code-word information to his biographer/mistress and lied to the FBI about it, but received only a misdemeanor citation (a fine and probation but no jail time) for mishandling classified material. If that pattern is followed  and since Secretary of State Clinton outranked Gen. Petraeus  she might well expect even more lenient treatment, but her behavior might be something that the American voters would want to consider before giving her a promotion to US President. Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He is a 30-year veteran of the CIA and Army intelligence and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). McGovern served for considerable periods in all four of CIAs main directorates.
Saudi Arabia Coerces US Over 9/11



Saudi Arabia is threatening to financially punish the U.S. if it holds the kingdom to account for its 9/11 role, coercion that hovers over President Obamas new visit to the Saudi allies and that 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser condemns.



By Kristen Breitweiser April 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Consortium News "- On Saturday, Mark Mazzetti wrote an article that appears on the front page of the New York Times called, Saudis Tell U.S. To Back Off Bill On 9/11 Lawsuits. The shocking title alone should make American citizens sit up and take notice. When did the U.S. government start taking orders from foreign nations? Did I miss something? Have we become a foreign territory of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Did Saudi Arabia somehow become a branch of the U.S. government with sway over the President, Congress, and the Judiciary? Mazzetti documents disturbing details that reveal a U.S. government not just taking and carrying out Saudi orders, but a U.S. President being brought to his knees by Saudi extortion. Mazzetti also summarizes the Obama Administrations decision to support the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over the 9/11 families right for justice and accountability for the 9/11 attacks. The Saudis get such royal, preferential treatment because theyve stomped their feet, threatened to pull all their money out of the U.S. economy and bankrupt the world if not given their way. As ridiculous as that threat sounds, the Obama administration is apparently very scared by it. Currently, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been dismissed from the 9/11 families lawsuit via their Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) protections. As a result, the court has yet to have the opportunity to see the evidence against the Kingdom with regard to their alleged role of financing the 9/11 attacks. This sets a dangerous precedent since it means that as long as a foreign nation is not listed as a known state sponsor of terrorism, they are completely immune from being held accountable for any bad behavior or illegal acts they perpetrate inside the U.S.  yes, even the mass murder of 3,000 people on 9/11. Suffice it to say, this isnt your typical young Saudi prince getting a parking ticket for his gold Lamborghini. This is the Saudis getting a pass for funding mass murder  with the blessings of the U.S Government. At a time when most cant get Washington to agree on much of anything, the 9/11 families have been able to gather Members of Congress  both Democrats and Republicans, and as polar opposite as Al Franken and Ted Cruz  to work together on a vital piece of legislation called Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism (JASTA) . Quite a feat. But then again, 9/11 has the unique ability to unite almost everyone together under that one broad undeniable theme: being a true American. JASTA removes the protection of the FSIA from any nation (regardless of their status as an ally or named state sponsor of terrorism) that participates in a terrorist attack when the terrorist attack is perpetrated on U.S. soil. JASTA makes clear that U.S. citizens remain the priority not foreign nations that fund terror. Specifically, JASTA removes the Saudis use of the FSIA as a shield of immunity  allowing them to be brought to court to finally answer charges for their alleged role in the 9/11 attacks. Clearly, the Saudis are deeply concerned about JASTA since it would mean all the incriminating evidence gathered against them and their alleged role in the 9/11 attacks would finally be revealed and presented in an open court of law  nearly 15 years after the crime was committed. Indeed, many who have seen this evidence have commented that Americans will find the information shocking and that the revelations will require a complete re-appraisal of the U.S./Saudi relationship. Why should this vital information be kept from the 9/11 families and the American public by President Obama? Why should evidence of the mass murder of 3,000 people be kept out of a court of law? Why does the Obama White House oppose holding the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia accountable for their funding of terrorist acts, including the terrorist attacks of 9/11? Why isnt the U.S. government protecting the rights of the U.S. victims of terrorist attacks? It is bad enough that Wall Street tycoons got off the hook in 2008 because they were too big to fail. But, to re-victimize the 9/11 families in order to protect the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia because they are too invested in the U.S. economy to be held accountable is appalling. It is extortion  plain and simple. We struggle to understand why the U.S. government led by President Obama would so willingly drop to its knees and bare its neck to the shiny sword of Saudi extortion. What has become of our country? America needs elected officials and leaders who recognize that U.S. citizens are their constituents  not oil-rich nations that bankroll terrorists. America needs to send a clarion message to the world  if you murder our citizens, you will answer for it. And America should never succumb to extortion by terrorists. Are we to do away and dispense with all laws and accountability everywhere leaving us with a sort of Wild West environment where murder by the wealthy is OK, and rule of law is secondary to greed and power? We call upon every member of Congress and all presidential candidates to endorse JASTA and to publicly rebuke such Saudi extortion. And we ask President Obama, to ignore the Kingdom of Saudi Arabias undue influence and extortion attempts by passing JASTA now. Kristen Breitweiser is a 9/11 widow and activist who  working with other 9/11 widows known collectively as the Jersey Girls  pressured the U.S. government to conduct a formal investigation into the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Follow Kristen Breitweiser on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kdbreitweiser . [This article originally appeared as a blog post at HuffingtonPost.]
Why Bill Clinton is Full of Shit



By Rob Urie April 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Counterpunch "- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has been making the rounds to defend his policies while in office to support his wifes run for President. The close working relationship that he and Hillary Clinton have infers a symbiosis that other First Couples wouldnt be jointly held accountable for. And in contrast to the oft offered argument that Mrs. Clinton isnt responsible for her husbands policies, she has taken responsibility (links below) for her role in developing, promoting and implementing the omnibus crime bill of 1994 that led to the massive buildout of the carceral state (mass incarceration) and for her use of the term super-predator as racist slander against Black children. When Bill Clinton was recently confronted by Black Lives Matter protestors he reiterated the talking points that he (and Hillary) used in 1994, that drug gang violence was real, that his (and Hillarys) interest was humanitarian, that many Blacks supported the crime bill and that the growth in incarceration rates for people of color was an unintended consequence. Left unsaid was that the crime bill was but one part of the Clintons opportunistic dog-whistle strategy, that the policies tied to more than three centuries of racial repression in the U.S. and that regardless of whether the Clintons fully thought through the implications, they were willing to gamble with the lives of millions of Black and Brown youth for political gain. Contemporary political rhetoric works, to the extent that it does, by erecting walls between ideas, acts and policies that might otherwise be plausibly related. Basic physical security, as in freedom from violence for ones person, family, neighbors and community, is a human right in a most basic sense. It is also the human right that has been most tightly circumscribed throughout American history. The American story, as in the history written by the dominant culture, has been of White America under attack from hostile indigenous peoples and inner-city criminals whereas the overwhelming preponderance of actual violence has been committed against the indigenous population, kidnapped Africans held in slavery and their descendants. This same disjoint history is true of American military adventures overseas, always undertaken in official explanations to benefit those being bombed, sanctioned, starved, imprisoned and forced to migrate. Bill Clinton spent most of his two terms in office bombing and sanctioning Iraq to contain former CIA asset Saddam Hussein as Mr. Hussein continued to eat well and sleep comfortably at night. It was the Iraqis who were least able to defend themselves who were bombed, starved, and from whom life-saving medicines and medical care were withheld. Somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 innocent Iraqis mostly women and children, were killed by Mr. Clintons bombs and sanctions. This context is necessary because when Bill Clinton chose to defend his and Hillary Clintons omnibus crime bill and its social consequences he framed it, once again, as a domestic humanitarian intervention. The localized truth that Mr. Clinton used to do so that freedom from violence is a basic right that even the communities subsequently targeted with repressive policing, racially biased drug laws and mass incarceration deserved, removes the broader context of American racial history. Alternatively, without an antique-progressive racial or genetic theory of crime, why would liberal Democrats choose police repression and creation of a carceral state before first resolving the political and economic exclusion that correlate 100% with the communities suffering from internal violence? In history, the first professional police department in the U.S. was created in Charleston, S.C. from mercenary slave patrols. Following the Civil War Black laws (codes) were used to maintain civil control over nominally freed slaves for purposes of creating neo-chattel conditions of expropriated labor and social control. Jim Crow used racially targeted laws, policing and carceral policies as tools of civil enforcement of racial repression. Ronald Reagan began his 1979 campaign for President in Philadelphia, MS, where in 1964 three civil rights activists were brutally murdered by local police working with the Ku Klux Klan. It was in this historical context that in 1994 Hillary Clinton used the term super-predator as racist code for poor black youth to sell the omnibus crime bill. In fact, the Clintons spent most of Bill Clintons two terms using coded racist themesdog-whistle politics, to benefit politically through raising racial animosity and repression. Mr. Clintons welfare reform, framed as ending welfare as we know it, followed directly from Ronald Reagans racist caricature of the welfare queen living high on the public dime. Mrs. Clintons super-predators likewise had implied race and class that tied to racist themes of Black supermen all hopped up and impervious to pain, bullets and normal human emotions. That the overwhelming preponderance of American racial violence has been perpetrated against Blacks and the indigenous population seems a murderous flaw in the dominant culture id complete reversal of factual history into misdirected fear. Put forward as support for the Clintons policies is that many Blacks buy-into dominant culture stereotypes much the same as White people do. In areas where drug violence persists, Blacks are often featured on the local news thanking the police for arresting the kids who have been shooting up neighborhoods and killing one another. To state the obvious: these circumstances are tragic and require social resolution. However, the argument that repressive policing, racist drug laws and mass incarceration are socially constructive solutions in no way follows from the tragedy of the circumstances. The Clintons market-based solutions to poverty ultimately destroyed the near totality of Black wealth and many inner city neighborhoods in the housing bust. Most adult Americans live no more than a ten minute walk or drive from a place where, for less than twenty dollars, they can buy a lethal dose of a debilitating and violence inducing drug. Eighty-eight thousand people drink themselves to death every year in the U.S. Two hundred and ten thousand people die each year from preventable medical errors. The worst case scenario under the racist hysterics of super-predator theories was that 6,000 people per year would die. In other words, Americans are 35X more likely to die from an accident at the doctors office than they were in 1994 to die from gang violence. The Clintons knew exactly what they were doing when they used coded racist appeals to peel away White suburban voters from national Republicans. The strategy worked politically for them at the time, never mind the body-count of destroyed lives they left behind. Drug (alcohol) Prohibition in the 1920s produced a violent culture of (White) alcohol distributors that used gun violence against one another, the police and occasionally innocent bystanders. No racialized pseudo-science was created in response around a White predisposition toward wanton murder. The social choice of which drugs are legal or illegal has always been a proxy for racial and cultural politics. As Dan Baum wrote recently in Harpers, Richard Nixons rationale for launching the war on drugs was to provide the Federal government with plausible cover to spy on, disrupt, arrest and otherwise impede Black communities and the anti-war Left for political gain. From its inception the war on drugs has been a racialized tactic of political repression waged by the authoritarian Right, often with the help of progressive science. Many commentators have pointed the sudden compassion that White Americans found for the drug-addicted as heroin has once again become a major cause of death among Whites. Portugal decriminalized all drugs (heroin, methamphetamine, etc.) fifteen years ago, at about the same time that the Clintons were leaving office. Since then drug usage in that country has declined substantially (link above). Canadian physician Gabor Mate has been (plausibly) arguing for several decades now that drug addiction is a symptom, not a cause, of social dysfunction. Were the Clintons intention other than political gain through racial division and racist repression their lack of political imagination might have only been depressing, rather than socially catastrophic. The broader frame of the American carceral response to social problems is inextricably tied to three centuries of racial repression. Bill Clinton slaughtered 300,000+ innocent (Brown) women and children in Iraq and social circumscription places those deaths in the category of acceptable behavior. But when Black children tossed onto the social garbage heap express a tiny fraction of the social pathos hurled at them they are suddenly too dangerous to be left un-imprisoned. To reiterate, in the context of broader threats to life and livelihood, the threats to the children the Clintons imprisoned far outweighed any plausible threats from them. Had Bill and Hillary Clinton given the slightest crap about these children they would have been increasing funding to their communities, not cutting it as they were. In an interview that followed Bill Clintons derision of Black Lives Matter protestors in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton demonstrated that she understands that their use of dog-whistle politics in the 1990s is a political problem for her in 2016. And therein lies part of the problem. The lives that the Clintons destroyed in Iraq, Kosovo and in the American carceral system are just so much detritus, a political problem to be overcome, rather than human catastrophes to weep over and try to make right. Hillary Clinton wants to tweak the carceral state (link above) without revisiting the base premise that if punishing socially destructive acts is the legitimate function of incarceration she, her husband and some fair portion of their moneyed supporters belong in prison for the remainder of their natural lives. This isnt a gratuitous slam what the Clintons use of racialized politics demonstrates is that it is the entire American system of governance that needs to be reworked. The distinctions between the innocent and the guilty used to legitimate the carceral state have nothing to do with justice and everything to do with the maintenance of social privilege and power for the Clintons and the cohort of plutocrats and power brokers that they represent. The thirteen year old boy that Bill Clinton uses to convey moral outrage at Black-on-Black violence deserves more than to be used as a prop in his racist ploy to win votes. Mr. Clinton need not even be insincere in his outrage some of the most effective demagogues are those that sincerely believe their destructive rhetoric. The starting point to address social violence is creation of a state of social justice for all people. This includes a right to work for decent wages, adequate housing, quality public education, public health care from cradle to grave, adequate pensions and the right of political participation. Hillary Clinton and her liberal apparatchiks have argued convincingly that Hillary Clinton has no concept of how to affect such an outcome. In fact, in their view no such outcome is possible. In defending his own programs, what Bill Clinton confirms is that Hillary Clinton was an active participant in their development and implementation. The public record substantiates Mrs. Clintons active role in the Clintons dog whistle politics. And in fact, her experience in public life is the central selling point that Mrs. Clinton claims for herself. As Bernie Sanders readies his capitulation and asks that followers of his revolution get in line behind Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment the question needs to be asked: if the Clintons are the best that the Democrats have to offer, why would anyone in their right mind vote for Democrats? How what the Clintons did in the 1990s comes across in 2016 is absolutely the point their policies and politics were cynical bullshit then and that is exactly how they appear now. The only guarantee in the present is that whichever establishment candidate becomes President, it is the overwhelming preponderance of the worlds citizens who will suffer the consequences. Revolution is the only solution. Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics will be published by CounterPunch later this month.
April 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - A study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the U.S. is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy, meaning profoundly corrupt, so that the answer to the studys opening question, "Who governs? Who really rules?" in this country, is:

"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But, ..." and then they go on to say, it's not true, and that, "America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened" by the findings in this, the first-ever comprehensive scientific study of the subject, which shows that there is instead "the nearly total failure of 'median voter' and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories [of America]. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

To put it short: The United States is no democracy, but actually an oligarchy.

The authors of this historically important study are Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, and their article is titled "Testing Theories of American Politics." The authors clarify that the data available are probably under-representing the actual extent of control of the U.S. by the super-rich:

Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis, even though our findings probably understate the political influence of elites. Our measure of the preferences of wealthy or elite Americans  though useful, and the best we could generate for a large set of policy cases  is probably less consistent with the relevant preferences than are our measures of the views of ordinary citizens or the alignments of engaged interest groups. Yet we found substantial estimated effects even when using this imperfect measure. The real-world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater.

Nonetheless, this is the first-ever scientific study of the question of whether the U.S. is a democracy. "Until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions [that U.S. policymaking operates as a democracy, versus as an oligarchy, versus as some mixture of the two] against each other within a single statistical model. This paper reports on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues." Thats an enormous number of policy-issues studied.
Live from Damascus: The Syrian Election Results By Ken Stone Syrias ruling Baath Party and its allies have won the majority of the votes in the recent parliamentary elections in the country, official results show. The Syrian electoral commission announced late Saturday that the National Unity coalition, comprising the ruling party and its allies, had won 200 of the 250 seats at the Peoples Assembly (Majlis al-Shaab). ~ Press TV April 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " 21st Century Wire "- Tuesdays Syrian election was a vote of confidence by the Syrian people in their government. 5,085,444 voters cast their ballots out of a possible 8,834,994 eligible voters. The overall participation rate of 58% (virtually identical to Canadas last federal election) exceeded the governments expectations in most places but was low in others. For example, it was over 80% in Homs but only 52% in Tartous. What might explain the uneven results is the history of the war. People who suffered the most from the war, for example in Homs, were probably more grateful for their liberation and more motivated to exercise their political rights than people in Tartous who saw no fighting at all (though they lost thousands upon thousands of sons and grandsons in the war). Also significant was the fact that over 140,000 refugees returned across the Lebanese border in just one day in order to vote. And the polling hours in Damascus, which suffered a lot from the fighting, had to be extended until 11 pm to accommodate all the voters. There were even polling stations set up by the government in recently liberated Palmyra and Al-Qaryaten, though those polls were largely symbolic because the inhabitants of those towns have not yet been able to return to their homes due to widespread destruction, prior to liberation by the Syrian Arab Army. The voter participation rate is key to this election, more important than the individual candidates who were elected. Heres why: you need to understand elections in a constitutionally-created state, in which one party dominates, in terms of a strike vote in a trade union. It demonstrates continuing confidence in the leadership at a turning point in the struggle. A union would not be satisfied with a strike vote of 58%, going into a strike. And probably the Syrian government would have wished for a higher rate going into the negotiations at Geneva. But it knew from the start that holding the elections under the conditions of war and occupation was a gamble, because there are a lot of eligible voters living outside of Syria right now, living in places besieged by the terrorists, and who have died but not yet been accounted for. Taking into account these factors, the participation rate would probably have been much higher. Among our solidarity delegation, we have been pleased that the Syrian authorities did not try to inflate the figures to make the election results appear better than they actually were: It reinforces our contention that the Syrian government is a credible force in the serious negotiations ahead. As mentioned, the turning point for Syria is the current round of negotiations taking place right now in Geneva to find a lasting political solution to the crisis. Today, the Syrian delegation took their seats with a mandate from the Syrian people, whereas the opposition delegation of head-choppers cobbled together at the last minute by the USA and Saudi Arabia have no mandate at all from the unfortunate Syrians who suffer under military occupation in rebel-held areas. No elections were held there. Western governments, such as the USA, have dismissed the Syrian election out of hand, though the participation rate in the last US election was only 48%. But thats not to say there werent any interesting candidates elected. The sister of a Syrian soldier, Noor Al-Shogri, stood for election as an independent in parliament. Her brother, Yahya Al-Shoghri, was filmed as he was being executed by ISIS terrorists in 2014 in Raqqa. (If you can stomach the summary execution in cold blood of a prisoner of war, you will find the video brazenly posted by the terrorists on Youtube.) The barbarians demanded that he say, as his dying words, Long live the caliphate! He famously refused and declared instead that It will be erased! His last words then became a rallying cry in the national resistance against the foreign aggression. Noor Al-Shogri easily won her seat. I met an independent candidate in the Old City of Damascus, Nora Arissian, a small Armenian woman with flaming red hair. She came up to me in the Greek Melkite Patriarchs procession to the polling station and thanked me for Canada taking in 25000 Syrian refugees and then she pointedly added, We want them all eventually to come home! She too won her seat. The election results were delayed by a couple of days because the Syrian election commission was unsatisfied with the preparedness of eight polling stations in partially-occupied Aleppo. As I understand it, the elections in Aleppo had to be continued on the day following election day. Some people have asked what is the role of Palestinian refugees in this election. The answer is that Palestinians, ethnically-cleansed in 1948 and after, do not vote in Syrian elections. The political and social status of Palestinians in Syria is the highest of any Arab country but the Syrian government doesnt grant them citizenship or let them vote because it doesnt want to dilute their right under international law, reaffirmed by numerous resolutions of the United Nations, to return to their homes and farms in Palestine. The fact that the Syrian government has been so adamant about this principle, is one of the main causes of the foreign aggression against the country (and in support of the State of Israel.) So the Syrian government pays a heavy price for its strong support of the Palestinian people. In turn, the vast majority of Palestinian refugees in Syria strongly support their government, even though many have been made refugees a second time by the invasion into their neighbourhoods of the terrorist mercenaries from over 80 countries. For example, a fierce struggle is taking place in Yarmouk right now just a few kilometres from where I write, among Isis, Al Nusra, and other terrorist gangs, over control of this former Palestinian neighbourhood/camp, which used to hold a quarter of a million people but is now a devastated ghost town with only a few thousand souls. It bears repeating that these parliamentary elections were defiantly called by the Syrian government as an exercise in national sovereignty. The point was to show the world, especially those western and Gulf states, who have waged the five-year long war of aggression against Syria, that Syrians are united in the belief that Syrians, and only Syrians, will decide the fate of Syria. It appears that the gamble paid off. *** Ken Stone is a veteran anti-war and peace activist.
How The American Neoconservatives Destroyed Mankinds Hopes For Peace By Paul Craig Roberts April 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - When Ronald Reagan turned his back on the neoconservatives, fired them, and had some of them prosecuted, his administration was free of their evil influence, and President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The military/security complex, the CIA, and the neocons were very much against ending the Cold War as their budgets, power, and ideology were threatened by the prospect of peace between the two nuclear superpowers. I know about this, because I was part of it. I helped Reagan create the economic base for bringing the threat of a new arms race to a failing Soviet economy in order to pressure the Soviets into agreement to end the Cold War, and I was appointed to a secret presidential committee with subpeona power over the CIA. The secret committee was authorized by President Reagan to evaluate the CIAs claim that the Soviets would prevail in an arms race. The secret committee concluded that this was the CIAs way of perpetuting the Cold War and the CIAs importance. The George H. W. Bush administration and its Secretary of State James Baker kept Reagans promises to Gorbachev and achieved the reunification of Germany with promises that NATO would not move one inch to the East. The corrupt Clintons, for whom the accumulation of riches seems to be their main purpose in life, violated the assurances given by the United States that had ended the Cold War. The two puppet presidentsGeorge W. Bush and Obamawho followed the Clintons lost control of the US government to the neocons, who promptly restarted the Cold War, believing in their hubris and arrogance that History has chosen the US to exercise hegemony over the world. Thus was mankinds chance for peace lost along with Americas leadership of the world. Under neocon influence, the United States government threw away its soft power and its ability to lead the world into a harmonious existance over which American influence would have prevailed. Instead the neocons threatened the world with coercion and violence, attacking eight countries and fomenting color revolutions in former Soviet republics. The consequence of this crazed insanity was to create an economic and military strategic alliance between Russia and China. Without the neocons arrogant policy, this alliance would not exist. It was a decade ago that I began writing about the strategic alliance between Russia and China that is a response to the neocon claim of US world hegemony. http://www.rense.com/general77/tus.htm The strategic alliance between Russia and China is militarily and economically too strong for Washington. China controls the production of the products of many of Americas leading corporations, such as Apple. China has the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world. China can, if the government wishes, cause a massive increase in the American money supply by dumping its trillions of dollars of US financial assets. To prevent a collapse of US Treasury prices, the Federal Reserve would have to create trillions of new dollars in order to purchase the dumped financial instruments. The rest of the world would see another expansion of dollars without an expansion of real US output and become skepical of the US dollar. If the world abandoned the US dollar, the US government could no longer pay its bills. Europe is dependent on Russian energy. Russia can cut off this energy. There are no alternatives in the short-run, and perhaps not in the long run. If Russia shuts off the energy, Germany industry shuts down. Europeans freeze to death in the winter. Despite these facts, the neocons have forced Europe to impose economic sanctions on Russia. What if Russia responded in kind? NATO, as US military authorities admit, has no chance of invading Russia or withstanding a Russian attack on NATO. NATO is a cover for Washingtons war crimes. It can provide no other service. Thanks to the greed of US corporations that boosted their profits by offshoring their production to China, China is moderinized many decades before the neocons thought possible. Chinas military forces are moderized with Russian weapons technology. New Chinese missiles make the vaunted US Navy and its aircraft carriers obsolete. The neocons boast how they have surrounded Russia, but it is America that is surrounded by Russia and China, thanks to the incompetent leadership that the US has had beginning with the Clintons. Judging from Killarys support in the current presidential primaries, many voters seem determined to perpetuate incompetent leadership. Despite being surrounded, the neocons are pressing for war with Russia which means also with China. If Killary Clinton makes it to the White House, we could get the neocons war. The neocons have flocked to the support of Killary. She is their person. Watch the feminized women of America put Killary in office. Keep in mind that Congress gave its power to start wars to the president. The United States does not have a highly intelligent or well informed population. The US owes its 20th century dominance to World War I and World War II which destroyed more capable countries and peoples. America became a superpower because of the self-destruction of other countries. Despite neocon denials that their hubris has created a powerful alliance against the US, a professor at the US Navy War College stresses the reality of the Russian-Chinese strategic alliance. http://sputniknews.com/world/20160414/1037981155/russia-china-cooperation.html

Last August a joint Russian-Chinese sea and air exercise took place in the Sea of Japan, making it clear to Americas Japanese vassal that it was defenceless if Russia and China so decided. The Russian defense minister Sergey Shoigu said that the joint exercise illustrates the partnership between the two powers and its stabilizing effect on that part of the world. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Russian-Chinese relations are able to resist any international crises. The only achievements of the American neoconservatives are to destroy in war crimes millions of peoples in eight countries and to send the remnant populations fleeing into Europe as refugees, thus undermining the American puppet governments there, and to set back the chances of world peace and American leadership by creating a powerful strategic alliance between Russia and China. This boils down to extraordinary failure. It is time to hold the neoconservatives accountable, not elect another puppet for them to manipulate . Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order .
Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State yesterday described the reported zoning of the vice presidential slot to the South-East geo-political zone by the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, come 2019 as mockery of Ndigbo.

Okorochas position was contained in a press statement signed by his Chief Press Secretary, CPS, Mr. Sam Onwuemeodo, and made available to reporters in Owerri, the state capital.

The statement said: My first reaction is that the whole thing is a mockery of the South-East zone and her people, especially when one remembers that the PDP has suddenly felt that the South-East could occupy the Vice-President position for the 2019 election. This is also coming one year after it had lost power, and it does not have the slightest chance of winning the 2019 poll. Indeed, the PDP is just making mockery of the South-East.

Noting that the PDP was in power for 16 years during which time it never considered the South-East, a major bloc in the country, for either the office of the Vice President or any of the sensitive positions in the country, the governor faulted the sudden remembrance of the zone for the number two position in 2019.

They are just waking up from their slumber after being out of power, Okorocha said. The PDP never allowed the South-East to have the president, the Vice-President, the Senate President, the speaker of House of Representatives, and so on. The South-East totally lost out in the PDP government.

Addressing the issue of federal government projects, Governor Okorocha argued that the South-East had a very rough experience under the PDP.

All the federal roads in the zone were death traps until the party was voted out of power. The second Niger Bridge became endless pit for the PDP. Some oil locations belonging to some states in the zone were taken away and given to other states outside the zone. It was a hopeless situation for the zone in PDP, Okorocha lamented.
The Governor of Ekiti State, Mr. Ayodele Fayoses letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping urging him to deny a purported $2 billion loan request by the Nigerian government, has been described as a seditious conduct that must not be allowed to go unchallenged.

The Ekiti State chapter of the All Progressives Congress, APC, which faulted the governor over the letter, lamented that while Fayose got himself busy spending state fund on frivolities, workers salaries remained unpaid for four months.

The partys position was contained in a statement on Monday by its Publicity Secretary, Taiwo Olatunbosun.

Olatunbosun called on security agencies to check Fayoses treasonable and seditious activities.

The APC spokesman said: Even though he has the right to entertain himself being a jester as he has always been, this should not be taken to the extent of constituting a security risk to the Federal Government.

Other PDP governors, notably Cross River State Governor Ben Ayade, are always in Aso Rock to build a relationship with the Federal Government for the development of their states, Fayose has made himself a lone enemy, a self-appointed opposition leader to discredit Buharis development initiatives.

The Ekiti APC spokesman wondered why a governor who is borrowing money for capital projects with the backing and approval of the Federal Government, opposed the same Federal Government.

All countries borrow to finance their development goals, the US, UK, Japan, Germany and China are no exceptions.

With the position of China as the second biggest economy in the world, no country can ignore that Asian giant, and so it is in the interest of Nigeria to work with China for development and technological issues that go with adequate funding.

Unfortunately, Fayose sees nothing good in this initiative that has the potential to grow our economy for the benefit of all Nigerians but prefers pursuing motives to amass wealth through misapplication of the states funds, he said.
A chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Chief Ighoyota Amori, has urged the All Progressives Congress, APC, to focus on delivering dividends of democracy to Nigerians instead of pursuing the trial of Senate President Bukola Saraki at the Code of Conduct Tribunal.

Mr. Saraki is standing trial before the CCT on 13 count charges bordering on alleged false assets declaration and money laundering while he was Kwara State Governor from 2003-2011.

But Amori, who is Special Adviser, Reconciliation and Conflict Management to the National Chairman of the PDP, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff, alleged that There are forces within the APC that are behind the plot to unseat Saraki as Senate President at all cost.

The persecution of Saraki is based on his emergence as Senate President against the expectation and plan of a cabal in the APC. But majority of senators are committed and united to jettison the old order where the executive dictates to the leadership of the Senate, the PDP chieftain told newsmen in Abuja yesterday.

Wondering why the APC, which had clamoured for change in the polity would be interested in having a rubber stamp leadership in the National Assembly, he told the party to desist from further actions that were capable of creating an unhealthy relationship between the executive and legislative arms of government at the centre.

He said: Saraki has charted a new direction for the Senate and the National Assembly, which is accounting for the immense support he has continued to enjoy across party lines despite his present travail.

Any attempt to remove Saraki as Senate President will spell doom in the Senate with its attendant consequences on the political landscape of the nation. The APC should allow the current stability in the Senate to continue to reign while it takes measures to rescue Nigerians from the present harsh economic situation.

Amori, therefore, advised the APC to learn lessons from the PDP, which rallied round Aminu Tambuwal, who emerged Speaker of the House of Representatives under the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan, against the wish of the party.
Thirty-six herdsmen, who were intercepted on Sunday by troops of the 117 Guards Battalion Keffi, along the Abuja-Keffi road, were yesterday paraded by the Guards Brigade of the Nigerian Army.

This is just as another group of 56 herdsmen were arrested at the Dantata check point between Kuje and the Abuja airport.

The spokesman of the brigade, Bashir Jajira, told journalists that the 36 herdsmen were arrested by troops at the Keffi check point at about 4:30 pm Sunday in a Diana Truck and a Toyota Camry Salon car.

He said during interrogation by troops at the check point, the herdsmen said they were going to Nasarawa LGA of Nasarawa State.

Jajira, a captain, said after a thorough check of the vehicles, the troops discovered one pump action gun, 19 cartridges of dane guns, 118 cartridges of ammo, 28 cutlasses, three jack-knives, 14 sticks, seven torches, assorted charms and hard drugs.

He also said the other group of 56 herdsmen were arrested at the Dantata check point between Kuje and the Abuja Airport in the Gwagwalada area of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

The Brigade spokesman said items recovered from the herdsmen include 26 cartridges, dane guns and 49 cutlasses and knives.

Mr. Jajira said the suspects upon interrogation, claimed to be on the lookout for cattle rustlers who stole their cows.

He said the suspects would be handed over to the police for further investigation.

The Commander, Guards Brigade, Brigadier General Musa Yusuf, told newsmen that the arrests reaffirmed the resolve of the brigade to rid the nations capital of any criminal activity.
Lol, so many trouble makers in America. A Los Angeles artist might be sued for Painting a nude Donald Trump. The creative mind behind the infamous painting of Trump in the buff and with a tiny p3nis says Trumps legal team has threatened a lawsuit over her dismaying depiction of GOP presidential front-runner.

I dont believe I did anything wrong, artist Illma Gore said.

Its my work and Ill stand by it no matter what.

Gore, who lives in Los Angeles, painted the birthday suit Trump in February  before Trump even felt the need to publicly defend the size of his manhood. She titled it Make America Great Again.

She wrote this artists statement for it: Because no matter what is in your [email protected], you can still be a big pr!ck.

The work became an instant viral sensation, and according to The Guardian, it attracted bids over $141,770 (100,000) after it went on display in the Maddox Gallery in Mayfair, London this month.

But Gore said Trumps legal team has tried stripping away her artistic freedom. She said his lawyers have called her twice threatening lawsuits over the hateful hucksters right of publicity.

She said Facebook, too, has warned of legal action under for copyright violation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Gore also accused the site, as well as eBay and Twitter, of censoring some posts of the painting.

Besides legal wrangling, Gore said the painting has also brought her threats of [email protected], detailed death threats and stalkers at her home.

But the blowback hasnt silenced her  she said she has another painting inspired by the presidential campaign arriving next week, though shes keeping the dirty details under wraps.

Source:Ladun Liadi
Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, on Tuesday called for the establishment of Special Anti-Corruption Courts to reduce the burden on regular courts.

He also said the establishment of Special Anti-Corruption Courts would assist to fast-track trial of corruption cases in the country.

Ekweremadu made the call in his office, while playing host to a team from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, (EFCC), led by its National Assembly Liason Officer, Suleiman Bakari.

Ekweremadu who was also decorated by the EFCC on the occasion, as Anti-Corruption Ambassador said setting up special courts, was one of the surest ways to help the fight against corruption, as it would ensure speedy adjudication of corruption cases.

I have been an advocate of special courts for the trial of corruption cases and I believe that other countries, who have enacted laws establishing such, are not fools because there are benefits to be derived there from. The idea is to expedite trial to make sure that those who are involved in corruption matters will have their day in court, a statement issued by the Special Adviser, Media to Deputy Senate President, Uche Anichukw, quoted him to have said.

When we have special courts, just as we have the National Industrial Court, such courts will do better than they are doing now.

The establishment of special courts is not just something that will be done by an Act of the National Assembly. We have to amend the constitution to bring it about under section 6, for the purpose of trying corruption cases.
President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered the deployment of troops to put an end to the incessant bloody clashes in states between Fulani herdsmen and farmers.

The troops, however, have only been deployed for a start, in Agatu local government of Benue State.

Clashes between Fulani herdsmen and farmers have been a recurring decimal over the years but the recent one in Agatu, which saw some communities completely wiped out while others, who managed to escape and now living in Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps, has been described as one too many.

Speaking when he appeared as a guest on Channels Televisions breakfast programme, Sunrise Daily on Monday, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said the deployment was part of measures to end conflicts that had claimed several lives as well as affected farming activities in the states.

According to Shehu, there is a plan to map out grazing areas which had been presented to the governors of the states.

The president took the matter to the National Council of State where the governors sit with the Vice President to solve problems of security.

Their decision was that they will go back to all the ideas that had been there before, which is to carve out grazing reserves for cattle rearers.

With that, there will be a clear difference between farmlands and grazing land. Because, it is when cattle are driven into farmlands that cause the trouble.

The president has also ordered for military presence in those places in order that this kind of hostilities do not continue.

As a long-term policy, ranching will be there but do not forget that ranching also has its challenges in so many ways.

I know that the president has ordered for the deployment of Army to those places.

The communities are also involved in discussion.

The deployment, said the presidential spokesman, had been done.

Mr. Shehu said based on reports from the Defence Headquarters, the troops have been deployed and their presence already making the expected difference in the affected communities.
A witness, Michael Wetkas, on Monday, told the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) that Senate President Bukola Saraki used different bank drafts to buy properties in Ikoyi, Lagos.

Mr. Saraki is facing a 13-count charge bordering on allegations of false asset declaration and money laundering.

He had earlier pleaded not guilty to the charges.

At the resumed hearing of the case, the witness, an official of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, who was led in evidence by prosecution counsel, Rotimi Jacobs (SAN), said Mr. Saraki bought the properties through his companies.

He said investigation revealed that House No. 15, Macdonald Street, Ikoyi, Lagos and Block 15, Flat 1 to 4 of the same street belonged to Mr. Saraki.

According to him, the Senate president bought the properties from the Presidential Committee on Sale of Federal Government Landed Properties in Lagos through his companies.

He added that the defendant made a bank draft in the name of TYNITY Company limited, which he declared in the Asset declaration form.

He noted that when the EFCC investigation team wrote to the presidential committee seeking clarification, the committee said that from their records, the only property sold to the company was No. 15, Macdonald Street, Ikoyi.

Mr. Wetkas said 75 per cent, which amounted to N123.7million was paid for House No. 15, Macdonald Street, Ikoyi, through a bank draft from the account of one of Mr. Sarakis company called Skyview Properties Limited in Access Bank.

He also said that investigation revealed that the defendant made a bank draft through his company TYNITY and paid for House No. 17, Macdonald Street in Ikoyi, Lagos in the sum of N256.3million.

My lord, there was a draft of N12.8 million and another draft of N20 million from Zenith Bank, as well as a draft of N4 million from GTBank as part of payment for the purchase of House No. 17, Macdonald Street.

The N20 million draft came from Carlys Properties and Investment Limited and a draft of 136.1 million was made on Jan. 13, 2007 for the purchase of same property.

Another draft of N180.6 million was made through Mr. Saraki`s personal bank account in GTB.

The prosecution tendered a total of 43 exhibits, which were admitted in evidence.

Earlier, the Chairman of the tribunal, Justice Umar Danladi, had ordered that trial would be on a day-to-day basis from Tuesday between the hours of 10am and 6pm while a break would be observed from 1pm-4pm.

Mr. Sarakis lawyer, Kanu Agabi (SAN) had urged the tribunal to exclude days the Senate would be having plenary from the trial but Justice Danladi overruled his submission, saying it was the defendant that was facing trial and not the Senate.

Mr. Danladi also turned down a request for daily records of proceedings of the court by Mr. Agabi.

In his explanation, Danladi said the request would not be possible because it would overburden the registry of the court and that the law required defence to apply within a specific time and not daily.

(NAN)
The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has alleged that a 16-year-old daughter of President Muhammadu Buhari, whose name it gave as Hanan, flew first class on Monday from Abuja to London.

The opposition party said the presidents daughter flying first class smacked of hypocrisy considering the fact that there is a directive banning all cabinet ministers and certain categories of federal government officials from traveling first class.

The PDP made the claim in a series of tweets via its official Twitter handle @PdpNigeria.

FLASH: Hanan (Aisha) Buhari- 16yr old daughter of our president flew first class on BA flight 083 to London from Abuja today.  #VoteAndStay (@voteandstay) April 19, 2016

Her seat number was 2k. She is a Secondary School Student. So much about the people's president. #BuhariAndCorruption  #VoteAndStay (@voteandstay) April 19, 2016
The Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Allied Offences Commission (ICPC), Mr. Ekpo Nta, has revealed that the commission was investigating a state governor for alleged diversion of bailout funds meant for the payment of workers salaries.

Last year, 27 states got bailout funds from the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN. We decided to go into collaboration with the Nigerian Labour Congress, NLC, to monitor the movement of the funds from the Central Bank of Nigeria to the final destination, Nta disclosed this when he received students of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, NIPSS, who were on a study tour to the commission in Abuja.

One state, where bailout funds were moved to three different accounts, is being investigated and we will soon publish the outcome of our investigations.

The ICPC boss explained that the commission relied on petitions from members of the public to investigate allegations of corruption, because it did not have access to early financial intelligence that would have given it an edge in identifying early cases of corrupt practices.

We have done a lot of seizures. We seized 61 houses from a staff of one organisation, whose income could not justify such massive accumulation, Nta said.
Former Senior Special Assistant to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan on Domestic Matters, Waripamowei Dudafa, has been arrested by operatives of the Department of State Services, DSS.

Dudafa, who went underground when he was implicated in investigations into the financial misappropriations in the office of the former National Security Adviser, NSA, Sambo Dasuki, was arrested on Monday at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos when he attempted to flee the country.

He was said to have collected N10bn from the office of the former NSA, which he converted to about $47m and shared to delegates during the 2014 presidential primaries of the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Investigators at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, believe the fund was part of the alleged $2.1 billion meant for the purchase of arms and ammunition for the Nigerian military but which was shared as slush funds to politicians through the Office of the NSA to prosecute last years general elections.

It was learnt that after he was interrogated by the DSS, Mr. Dudafa was handed over to the EFCC in Lagos from where he would be transferred to the head office of the agency in Abuja for further questioning and possible prosecution.
The new Director General of the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, Brig.-Gen. Sule Zakari Kazaure yesterday formally assumed office with a promise to prioritise the welfare of corps members and workers. Mr. Kazaure is the 17th director-general of the NYSC.

Speaking at the handing over ceremony in Abuja, the new NYSC boss pledged to give corps and staff welfare priority, and called on them to support him to make the scheme achieve more success.

I know that the tasks ahead are enormous and the road is rough, but with unity of purpose, we will make progress.Kazaure also enjoined the staff to be more proactive to enable the NYSC achieve the desired success in line with the vision of the present administration.

The outgone DG of NYSC, Brig-Gen. Johnson Olawumi, who will move to the Nigerian Army School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering (NASEME), Auchi, Edo State as acting commandant, said the agitation to have the monthly allowance of corps members increased would soon yield result. Olawumi also urged the Federal Government to expedite action on the process.

You may not be aware that letters have been written, with a follow-up to the appropriate authorities on the need for the proper funding of the scheme, especially now that the corps population is over 260,000.

We have also brought to government attention the urgent need to increase some allowances due to members and recent response suggests a strong ray of light at the end of the tunnel.

He noted that the scheme secured a N150 million sponsorship deal with telecommunications giant, GLOBACOM.The Community Development Services and Special Projects (CDS & SP) department is working with the company to enable the two organisations sign an MoU for the scheme to access the fund, the former NYSC boss said.

Olawumi, who assumed duty as the 16th DG of the NYSC on January 6, 2014 urged workers to extend the cooperation he enjoyed during his stay to his successor in order to achieve the desired result.

I could not have achieved much if I did not get the loyalty and support of the staff; whether I fulfilled in my duties or not, I leave it for you staff to judge me.

I urge you staff of the scheme to continue to support the new head of the scheme to enable him consolidate on the successes and achievements so far recorded.

Your role in the sustenance of the scheme cannot be over-emphasized as this has over the years contributed to the development and progress of the country, he said.
Punch

The scarcity of Premium Motor Spirit (petrol) on Monday continued to take a toll on motorists who had to stay in queues for hours at the few filling stations selling the product in Lagos and Ogun states.

Vanguard

Following Mondays attack on troops of the 113 Battalion of the Nigerian Army in Borno, which were successfully repelled, military sources have told Vanguard that over 30 Boko Haram terrorists were killed while scores escaped with gunshot injuries.

Thisday

After gorging itself for decades on petrodollars, the Nigerian state has been forced by tumbling oil prices to turn to a new source of cash: the taxman.

The Sun

The battle line has been drawn between the Edo State governor, Adams Oshiohmole and his political adversaries in the state, especially within his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Daily Times

National Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Professor Wale Oladipo, on Monday, said that he did not receive any money from the embattled former National Security Adviser (NSA), Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd). Prof Oladipo said this in a statement personally signed by him in Abuja.

Guardian

Some indigenes of Zaria, under the umbrella of Zazzau Emirate Development Association (ZEDA) yesterday testified against the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), otherwise known as the Shiite sect, at the judicial commission of inquiry headed by Justice Mohammad Lawal Garba investigating the clash between soldiers and the group.

Daily Trust

APCs harvest in South-east ahead of 2019 Earth-shaking rounds of cannons were fired as the event eventually climaxed with the handing over of the partys symbol-a broom and the flag by the Deputy National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Engr. Olusegun Oni, to Chief Gbazuagu Nweke Gbazuagu, who had spent the last 26 years in opposition.

Leadership

The Guards Brigade, Nigeria Army yesterday intercepted a group of 92 herdsmen while attempting to invade the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) with arms and ammunition from different entry points, an officials statement said.

Tribune

SENATE President, Dr Bukola Saraki, said on Monday, that his ongoing trial at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) will not disturb the activities of the Senate.

The Nation

The former Senior Special Assistant ( Domestic Affairs) to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan is to be interrogated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in connection with the investigation into the $2.1billion arms deals.
Last October, Nigerias biggest indigenous oil and gas company, Oando Plc, made history for the wrong reason when it announced a loss of N184 billion in the 2014 financial year. The loss was the biggest ever recorded by any Nigerian company.

While its shareholders bore the brunt of the bleak financial year, the companys group chief executive, Wale Tinubu and his deputy, Omamofe Boyo, might be doing just fine as they had for years incorporated and operated a cluster of shell companies in notorious offshore jurisdictions.

Mr. Tinubu seems to be making so good a return from his shell companies that in 2008 he agreed to pay a front as much as $20,000 monthly to manage all of his offshore transactions.

Details of the offshore assets of the two top bosses at Oando Plc were among the revelations contained in the leaked massive internal data belonging to Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca.

The revelations are products of an investigation, spanning over a year by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other global news organizations across the world.

PREMIUM TIMES is the only Nigerian media organisation involved in the investigation.

Documents obtained by PREMIUM TIMES from the huge database linked Mr. Tinubu to at least 12 shell companies.

Mr. Tinubu, documents show, secured the services of Mossack Fonseca to help him incorporate the companies in Seychelles, one of the fastest growing offshore jurisdictions in the world and notorious tax haven, the British Virgin Islands (BVI).

The documents also reveal that Mossack Fonseca coordinated the operation through its offices in Geneva, the British Virgin Islands and Panama.

The documents show that Mr. Tinubu is director in the following companies incorporated in Seychelles and the BVI.

Sigma Technology Inc.

Techventure Inc.

Anglesey Management SA

Caine Trading Corp

Keligh Engineering Corp

Hud Trading Corps

Meridian Procurement International Services Ltd

Lynx Shipping Ltd

Equinox Shipping Ltd

Everglade Oil Inc.

Framlingham Ltd

Triton Trading Ltd

Investigation reveal that Mr. Tinubu is either sole director of most of the companies or has unlimited powers to make decisions.

For Instance, files from the data revealed that on November 26, 2009, after a meeting of the board of directors of one of his shell companies, Keligh Engineering Corp, Mr. Tinubu was granted a general power of attorney as the sole signatory of the company.

The board meeting where this decision was made was attended by three nominee directors,  Yvette Rogers (Chairman), Jaqueline Alexander(secretary), Verna de Nelson, who are actually employees of Mossack Fonseca.

Nominee directors are appointees used in offshore tax havens to hide true owners of shell companies.

Mrs. Rogers had also served as nominee director in Stanhope Investment Ltd, Seychelles, one of the shell companies used by the imprisoned former governor of Delta State, James Ibori, to steal the resources of his oil-rich state.

As part of its #PanamaPapers series, PREMIUM TIMES had revealed how Mossack Fonseca helped Mr Ibori, who is serving a 13-year jail term in the United Kingdom for money laundering, hide funds stolen from Delta State treasury through a web of offshore companies.

In May 2007, Just like Mr. Ibori, the Oando boss also secured the services of Swiss asset management firm, Clamorgan SA, to help him incorporate Techventure Inc., Anglesey Management SA, Caine Trading Corp and Keligh Engineering in Seychelles while appointing Mossack Fonseca Geneva as registered agent and administrator for the shell companies.

On May 2, 2007, Sebastien Thierry of Clamorgan S.A, who had acted as signatory for one of Mr. Iboris shell companies, wrote a letter to Sonia Scampa of Mossack Fonseca, thanking her for verifying and assisting in registering the companies, as well as granting Mr. Tinubu the power of attorney.

Following my mail yesterday and our conversation today, I reiterated the confirmation sent yesterday morning taken the following companies  Anglesey Management SA, Caine Trading Corp., KLeigh Engineering Corp. Thank you for making a power of attorney for Mr. Wale Tinubu for three companies, he wrote in French.

It remains unclear why Mr. Tinubu hired the same offshore consultants used by Mr. Ibori to run his offshore companies. But in September 2013, British prosecutors told a court that Mr. Ibori confessed to owning significant shares in Oando Plc.

According to crown prosecutor, Sasha Wass, a Queens Counsel, while opening an account at Swiss bank, PKB, through a shell company called Stanhope Investment, Mr. Ibori told the bank he owned 30 per cent of Oando.

Oando had denied that Mr. Iboris wealth was hidden in the company. The company at the time circulated a statement claiming that Mr. Ibori only had 443 shares of the companys 6.8 billion ordinary shares.

The documents also revealed that apart from relying on nominee directors appointed by Mossack Fonseca to hide his ownership of shell companies in tax havens, Mr. Tinubu also hired a paid front who acted on his behalf in some of the offshore companies.

In a December 10, 2008 email to Marie-Ange (an employee of Mossack Fonseca in Geneva) Sebastien Clamorgan of Clamorgan SA revealed that Mr. Tinubu hired a front, Patrick Bastin, to act on his behalf in his offshore companies.

According to the email, Mr. Bastin was handsomely rewarded for this role. He was paid a salary of $10,000 monthly and given a corporate visa card which allowed him to spend up to $10,000 monthly.

Mr. Bastin was paid from Everglade Oil Incs account with a private bank in Beirut, Lebanon.

It is agreed that M. Patrick Bastin will be acting as director for certain of Mr J.A. Tinubu companies and in this capacity will be managing all upcoming administrative commercial and nancial tasks, inclusive the relationship with the several banks the companies may have bank accounts with, the email reads.

For this task M. Patrick Bastin will be compensated by a monthly payment of US $10 000,00 (ten thousand US $) to be paid to the bank account he will indicate.

The account of EVERGLADE OIL INC No 239783 with Audi Saradar Private Bank seal in Beirut Lebanon will be responsible to set up a standing instruction for those payments to start on November 1 -2008.

In addition, M. Patrick Bastin will be entitled to a Corporate Visa card from EVERGLADE OIL INC for expenses up to SS 10,000 per month to be justified after to M. J A Tinubu.

This agreement can be terminated at any moment by M. JA. Tinubu with one month notice.

The documents also showed that some staffers of Oando Plc were in on some of Mr. Tinubus incorporation of shell companies.

After the resignation of one Kirk Thompson, who is believed to be the original nominee director for Mr. Tinubu in Everglade Oil Inc., on December 14, 2007, Daniel Boyo (it is not clear whether he is a relative of Omamofe Boyo), a London-based business development consultant with Oando Trading Limited, a subsidiary of Oando Plc, sent an email on January 11, 2008 to Mr Thierry instructing him to contact Everglade Oil agents in Seychelles to draft a new certificate of incumbency for the company, mentioning Terry Cunningham as its new single director.

Documents show that Seychelles is particularly an attractive offshore destination for several top Nigerian businessmen.

Several shell companies owned by Nigerians in tax havens were incorporated in the small Indian Ocean country, with a population of just under 90,000 people. They were registered as International Business Companies (IBC).

Seychelles IBCs are among the most popular IBCs in the secretive world of offshore jurisdictions. IBCs incorporated in the Seychelles are prohibited from doing businesses within the country or owning real estate. They are not required to pay taxes, submit financial details or carry out audits on their finances.

An email sent from Mossack Fonsecas office in Seychelles to Saria Rahme Kali of Afrex and Mr Clamorgan requesting details of the bearers of the shares of a cluster of IBCs domiciled in Seychelles revealed the extensive involvement of Nigerians in offshore tax havens.

The document revealed that Sayyu Dantata, the half-brother of Africas wealthiest man, Aliko Dangote, is linked to seven IBC  Appelby Holding Ltd, Juno Equities Incorporated, MRS Holding Ltd, MRS Oil and Gas, Nisco Holding Ltd (60 per cent), and Oval Refining S.A, Ovlas S.A (50 per cent).

Similarly, Adetokunbo Sijuwade, the son of the late Ooni of Ife, Okunade Sijuwade, is the director of Mandhari Water Investment Inc. and Izwelethu Aluminium and Steel Inc.

Mr Tinubus deputy, Boyo, was listed as director in three IBCs- Everglade Oil Inc, Meridian Procurement International Services, and QVS Ltd.

Nigerians Abiose Eldred Ogan-Cole and Mojisole Adeniran both own 50 per cent share each in Qaisar.

Messrs. Wale and Boyo are yet to respond to an email sent by PREMIUM TIMES through the corporate communication manager of Oando, Alero

Ms. Balogun and the companys head of corporate communications, Ainojie Irune, had promised that responses would be provided to our questions. But several days later, no response has come from the officials.

Source: Premium Times
A former Minister of Mines and Steel, Alhaji Sarafa Tunji Ishola, has said the All Progressives Congress, APC, is only good at criticizing but dont know how to perform.

This is just as he claimed that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is still in charge of politics in Nigeria despite having the APC at the helm of affairs.

Mr. Ishola disclosed that it took a lot of support from PDP members for APC to win the 2015 general election, adding that the governing party is still a political movement and not yet a party.

According to him, without the collaborating efforts of some aggrieved PDP members, who formed the new PDP and later joined forces with the APC, the victory of the latter last year would have been near impossible.

The former minister, who further described the APC as Jonathan Must-Go political movement which joined forces with aggrieved PDP members to send out the then president, said the current internal crisis rocking the governing party was because it was not yet a political party and members did not have the same political ideology.

Explaining the situation further, Ishola said the four legacy political parties which joined forces with the defunct new PDP were only in charge of nine states while the former were in charge of five states out of the 36 states in the country.

He argued that if a party was in 22 states out of the 36 states before the 2015 election and today they have accomplished the purpose for which they joined forces, for them to continue to stay together when they dont have the same agenda any more, will be difficult.

He said: Their secret has now come into the open, and the future of APC will be determined by their ability or inability to manage their stay together, he said.

The former minister stated that since the current deputy Senate president is a PDP member and the Senate president, was once a PDP member, the party is more or less in charge of the Senate.

He also spoke of the civil service, which he said is full of people employed by the PDP for many years, strengthening his argument that the party is still great and wields influence in all facets of the nations landscape.

Mr. Ishola also stressed that the APC thought governance would be easy but it knows better now that it is in the corridor of power.

Now that they are there they have realised that the passengers view always change when they leave back seat and come to the drivers seat.

They said they will hit the ground running but they are now grounded instead of running because APC knows how to criticise but dont know how to perform, he said
The Kwara State chapter of Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has alleged that embattled Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, is desperately seeking avenues to return to his former party under whose platform he was elected governor for eight years and first four years of his term in the Senate.

Mr. Saraki was one of the prominent chieftains of the PDP who defected to the All Progressives Congress in 2014 and played a major role in the latters electoral victory last year.

However, since going against his partys wish to contest and win the Senate president seat with the active support of PDP senators last June, Mr. Sarakis fighting a battle for political survival at the Code of Conduct Tribunal.

The Kwara PDP Chairman, Iyiola Oyedepo, who spoke when he received some party leaders from the 16 local government areas of the state in Ilorin, the state capital on Monday said the APC was out to render the Senate president politically Unclad.

The Senate president is about to be made unclad by the APC. APC is in disarray and he is about to be made politically unclad, Oyedepo said.

He claimed that Mr. Saraki is looking for political shelter under the umbrella, which symbolizes the PDP incase the broom [the APC symbol] sweeps him away.

Mr. Oyedepo, however, said the mistake of 2003 must not be allowed to repeat itself in 2016.

The reference to 2003 was when the young Mr. Saraki, a London-trained medical doctor, rode on the back of his father and strongman of Kwara politics, late Dr. Olusola Saraki, to emerge governor for the first time on the platform of PDP, defeating the incumbent, Governor Mohammed Lawal, now deceased.

The PDP chair further stated that the party lost the 2015 governorship election in the state because candidates and party leaders never did things right.

All the candidates of the party ran their elections the way they wanted with very scanty reference to the party executives at all levels.

We did not handle campaign funds of the candidates and we were not involved in the logistical operations of the campaign.

Where did we go wrong on the issue of our failure in the elections? After the primaries, some aspirants walked away, some betrayed the partys candidates by working for our main opposition.

Let anybody name any member of this executive that did just that. Even those that embezzled campaign or election funds are the loudest about dissolution of the executive.

We have put together the state executive that was then divided by individual commitment to aspirants; the executive is now properly united and focused, he said.
The Judicial Commission of Inquiry set up by the Kaduna State Government into the December 12 clash in between members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria, IMN, and soldiers of the Nigerian Army yesterday heard how members of the movement had been making life unbearable for residents of Zaria.

The Zazzau Emirate Development Association, ZEDA, which gave the testimony at the continuation of the Commissions sitting in Kaduna on Monday, said the IMN, led by Sheik Ibraheem El-Zakzaky, who is currently in detention, through its activities, made other residents of the emirate live in perpetual fear.

The associations spokesman, Mohammed Balarabe, told the panel that IMN took the law into its hands and shut roads while holding its processions.

Balarabe said whenever the movement had outings, they (people of Zaria emirate) were forced to stay indoors.

According to the ZEDA spokesman, the latest clash between the movement and the Army was not the first, noting that the group is violent.

He cited specific instances when the IMN had encounters with the Emir of Zazzau, Alhaji Shehu Idris and ex-Governor Mukhtar Ramalan Yero.

He also recalled that the movement had encounters with previous administrations in the state.

Balarabe said Sheikh El-Zakzaky and his followers were not members of ZEDA, adding that they refused to register with the association.

We are familiar with the movements actions in the 20 years of its existence. As someone who attended the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, we know where the shoe pinches.

Whenever we heard they had outings, we stayed away because it would bring hardship. They shut roads, he said.
At least 28 people were killed and 208 wounded when a suicide bomber blew up a bus full of explosives near a government security agency building in the heart of Kabul. After the intial blast, which was described as huge by witnesses, armed men and more suicide bombers stormed the heavily-guarded compound, police said.

Al Jazeeras Qais Azimy, reporting from Kabul, said Tuesdays attack, which was quickly claimed by the Taliban, was likely the biggest such incident to hit the capital since 2001. The number of deaths was likely to increase, according to police. Our sources are telling us that at the time of explosion there was a graduation ceremony going on for new recruits when the suicide bomber detonated himself, Azimy said.

The security agency attacked is responsible for protecting government ministers and VIPs. A police spokesman, Basir Mujahid, told Al Jazeera that the gunfight was ongoing, as Afghan special forces rushed to the scene. The Taliban are still fighting with the security forces, Mujahid said.

In a statement, the Presidential Palace condemned the attack in the strongest possible terms. The explosion has caused a lot of damage to the government, Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, told Al Jazeera. The US embassy said it was not affected by the blast. The NATO military coalition also said it was unaffected. The Taliban last week announced the start of their spring offensive even as the government in Kabul tried to talk them back to the negotiating table in a bid to end the countrys drawn-out conflict.
This past February, Marina Lonina, 18, allegedly watched as another teenager was raped by Raymond Gates, 29, a man that they had met the previous day while hanging out at the mall. Rather than trying to stop the attack or call for help, police say Ohio teenager pulled out her phone, launched the Periscope application, and began to livestream the entire ordeal.

According to police, it wasnt until another of Loninas friends got a notification of her livestream and began to watch what was happening that the authorities were notified of the rape. Both Lonina and Gates were soon arrested by police and charged with the rape, sexual battery, and kidnapping of a minor. On Friday, they both pled not guilty in a Franklin County, Ohio, court. You dont want to lose track of the fact that shes a high school student and she and her friend were clearly taken advantage of, Loninas attorney Sam Shamansky argued in court. She was swept up by the gravity of the situation and as she immediately told the police, she was filming in order to preserve, not to embarrass or to shame or to titillate anybody.

Franklin County prosecutor Ron OBrien echoed Shamanskys assertion that Lonina aired the rape in an attempt to draw attention what was happening, but things took a dark turn when Lonina got caught up in the likes. When a person begins to stream something using Periscope, all of their followers are immediately notified about the new broadcast and encouraged to tune in. While viewing the livestream, people can then like what they see by hitting a button. Unlike Facebook, which recently rolled out a broader range of reactions conveying different emotions, Periscope users are limited to liking a stream with hearts.

Loninas lawyer told The New York Times that his client recorded the rape in an attempt to collect video evidence of what happened and that she did, in fact, try to stop Gates. When pressed about what specifically Lonina tried to do Shamansky did not provide a clear answer, but said that his client was also a victim of Gates. Both Lonina and Gates face at least four decades in prison if convicted. While Shamansky said that his client was also a victim of Gates, OBrien insisted Loninas refusal to call the police and her supposed reluctance to help her friend tell a different story. For the most part, OBrien described. [Lonina] is just streaming it on the Periscope app and giggling and laughing.

Fusion.net
A 29 year old Texas youth pastor named Willie Bell was arrested and charged with child molestation after he was caught sexually assaulting a 6 year old boy behind an apartment building in Texas. He was caught by a member of the congregation of his church who raised alarm to attract other church goers, who punched and kicked him, but did not seriously injure him



If it wasnt for them, he probably would have done more to my child, the childs mother told the local news Fox 4. Its painful. Its devastating. Its a nightmare.

After police arrested Bell, they learned that he had allegedly molested three other boys at the church. He is now facing charges.

Source:LIB
On this day in 2003: Former President Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler turned civilian statesman. He sought a second term against some twenty (20) other candidates. Obasanjo won 62% of 42 million votes. Opponents denounced the elections as fraudulent and claimed serious rigging in 16 of 36 states.

Also on this day in 2006: Militants killed two people in a car bomb attack on an army barracks in the city of Port Harcourt.

Equally, on this day in 2001; South Africa Aids Drugs Profit Before The Lives Of Millions 2001 : The worlds biggest pharmaceutical companies took up legal action to fight legislation which would allow generic versions of their patented drugs being made in or imported to South Africa. Following uproar around the world and the pharmaceutical industry was accused of putting profit before the lives of millions of people in the developing world. They have backed out of the court battle over cheap, non-branded anti-Aids drugs and also after dropping the case, agree to sell Aids drugs at cost price in developing countries  a discount of up to 90%.
Apple has had a string of promising technologies lately that have been slow to get real-world takeup. CarPlay, announced in 2012 as iOS in the Car, is only this year seriously showing up in cars' infotainment systems. Handoff, which debuted in 2014, has gained very little third-party developer adoption and has seen little use even by Apple outside of handling texts and calls across devices. Maybe Microsoft's new take on Handoff will fare better.

Then there's the iBeacons protocol that lets a smartphone app get local information on demand by reading the ID of devices called beacons. Each beacon has a unique ID, which an app maps to a database that tells it the beacon's location or other information specific to it.

[ Android is now ready for real usage in the enterprise. Read InfoWorld's in-depth guide on how to make Android a serious part of your business. | Get the best office apps for your Android device. ]

iBeacons was supposed to revolutionize retailing, by letting customers get more product details and order the displayed items in their sizes or preferences, as well as allowing retailers to track and engage with customers as they moved about a store. Beacons' uses transcend retail, of course -- beacons could also provide info on museum artifacts, transit options, where vegetables in a store bin were grown, and so on when engaging the real world.

Apple didn't invent beacons, but its iBeacons protocol opened up a common technology that app developers and those deploying beacons could use. Before iBeacons, a particular vendor's beacons worked with only that vendor's software. With iBeacons, manufacturers quickly adopted the Apple standard, even if they also offered their own "enhanced" protocol.

Retail is where the action -- and money -- was supposed to be for beacons. But it's not.

Deploying a few beacons is easy, deploying many beacons is hard

Beacons vendors have struggled to gain adoption. That's partly because beacons are hard to deploy. Managing a standard beacon, whether to replace their batteries or to do security updates, is a manual affair that requires someone go to each beacon in person and use a Bluetooth connection for each update.

The methods that various beacons vendors have used to get around that highly manual management -- including the use of hard-wired Wi-Fi units and various mesh networking technologies -- are costly and complex to implement.

You can spend big money on human labor to manage beacons, or you can spend big money installing devices and running management software whose complexity is akin to that of a network or manufacturing management system.

That makes beacons a very expensive proposition to consider -- and ultimately, for what benefit? Store maps, kiosks, and in some cases GPS geolocation within a smartphone can provide the location information on which beacons' services depend.

Plus, retailers have seen a much simpler technology that can provide similar location data to get relevant information -- QR codes -- come and go quickly. Remember when they were everywhere? Then they were gone.

Beacons are basically expensive programmable QR codes with batteries. The investment is too high for what could be a low-value fad.

A big hurdle for customers to adopt

After all, a beacon does nothing unless the customer has a compatible device, and the iBeacons technology does nothing unless the customer has an iPhone, is running the retailer's app, and has enabled iBeacons for it. Getting people to adopt such apps at scale is hard.

On the plus side, it tends to be the most loyal shoppers who would do so, and they tend to spend a lot. On the other hand, they know the stores and probably don't need beacons' assistance in the first place.

Ironically, Apple's commitment to user privacy means that retailers making the investment won't get much data from people with iPhones.

Apple faced the same resistance with Apple Pay, since retailers wanted customer data that Apple refused to provide. But the failure of the retailers' own CurrectC technology, coupled with the poor rollout of chip cards in the United States, overcame that -- chip cards are so slow that retailers have often chosen to keep using insecure swipes or to finally adopt Apple Pay even without that access to that user data. Because it's fast and easy, the checkout lines keep moving. But I don't see an equivalent outside force that would overcome iBeacons resistance.

The Eddystone factor isn't much of a factor

Google has a competing beacons protocol for Android called Eddystone that doesn't require users to have a compatible app for the store they're in. (Eddystone also works with iOS apps.)

Eddystone can run on Android as a system service, in a sort of broadcast mode, so Eddystone-compatible beacons can be used to track any Android user. (Google needs to invade your privacy to make its money, let's not forget.) A new extension to Eddystone allows for some data privacy, such as for apps that track your key fobs or other individual assets.

In the United States, only half of the smartphone-carrying populace uses Android, and iOS users tend to be richer, so retailers who want to use beacons can't simply ignore iBeacons in favor of Eddystone. The car makers have seen what happens when you offer one broadly available platform technology but not the other (Android Auto, but not CarPlay, in this case): Customers get very upset and don't buy.

Instead, it's becoming clear that retailers are ignoring the beacons notion altogether. Maybe that'll change if Apple and its partners can figure out how to ease beacons deployments and management or if retailers discover a valuable new benefit that they can't otherwise get.

Don't hold your breath.
News Corp. is fighting Google at the European Commission over what it calls improper scraping of content for use in search results, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The owner of the Times of London, the New York Post, the Journal and many other media properties around the world has filed a formal complaint with the Commission, the European Union's executive body, the report said. The story cited an unnamed source familiar with the allegations.

[ Read 'em and weep: 5 ways your ISP is screwing you | Cut to the key news in technology trends and IT breakthroughs with the InfoWorld Daily newsletter, our summary of the top tech happenings. ]

News Corp. charged that Google takes news from its sites and makes it available within Google search results. If a company wants to keep that scraped content out of Google's results, it has to give up on having even links to its stories show up in Google searches, News Corp. alleges, according to the report. The complaint said that's an abuse of Google's dominance in search.

When the content of articles shows up in search results, readers can consume it there without visiting the creator's website, sometimes hurting those companies' businesses, critics say. Web companies such as TripAdvisor and Yelp have attacked the practice.

Content scraping by Google has been the subject of complaints in the past. It was part of a European Commission antitrust investigation begun in 2010 over allegations that Google gave its own search business unfair advantages. The company pledged to stop that practice.

Also on Monday, European Competition Commissioner Margarethe Vestager said the Commission is still investigating antitrust allegations concerning Googles Android mobile OS and Amazons contracts with e-book publishers.

News Corp. and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Lean Hogs Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:11PM CDT The uptrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading above support level 89.150, which will be followed by reaching resistance level 93.025.

Feeder Cattle Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:10PM CDT The uptrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading above support level 178.550, which will be followed by reaching resistance level 183.550 and 188.250.

Live Cattle Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:09PM CDT The uptrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading above support level 151.775, which will be followed by reaching resistance level 156.475.

Soybean Oil Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:08PM CDT The downtrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading below resistance level 73.75, which will be followed by reaching support level 68.16 and if it keeps on moving down below that level,...

Soybean Meal Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:07PM CDT The downtrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading below resistance level 419.1, which will be followed by reaching support level 398.8.

Soybean Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:06PM CDT An downtrend will start as soon, as the market drops below support level 1356, which will be followed by moving down to support level 1315.6.

Corn Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:05PM CDT The uptrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading above support level 680, which will be followed by reaching resistance level 698.6 and if it keeps on moving up above that level, we may...

Wheat Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:04PM CDT The downtrend may be expected to continue in case the market drops below support level 832.6, which will be followed by reaching support level 791.2.

Natural gas Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:03PM CDT The downtrend may be expected to continue in case the market drops below support level 4.980, which will be followed by reaching support level 4.459 and 3.876
Yeshiva University (YU) in New York traces its roots to Yeshiva Eitz Chaim, an all-day boys school organized at Mariampol Synagogue in the late 1800s on the Lower East Side. The institution has grown to become the oldest and "most comprehensive educational institution under Jewish auspices in America." The 89-year-old billionaire David Gottesman and family are among YU's biggest patrons. Last decade, Gottesman and his wife Ruth gave a $25 million gift to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University to establish the Ruth L. and David S. Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.

Gottesman was an early investor in Berkshire Hathaway and founded his own investment firm, First Manhattan Co. in 1964. His son Robert now runs the company. This family moves their charitable contributions through the Gottesman Fund, which held nearly $350 million in assets and gave away around $20 million in a recent fiscal year. That's a substantial stream of giving, especially for a funder that generally flies beneath the radar.

Besides Yeshiva University, the Gottesmans have supported many other Jewish organizations that work in the United States and Israel.

The family has funded Jewish schools like Abraham Joshua Heschel School, SAR Academy in Riverdale, New York, Golda Och Academy, Solomon Schechter School of Westchester, and Ramaz School in Manhattan, which recently received a grant of nearly $1 million. The Gottesmans are involved with PEF Israel Endowment Funds, an outfit founded in 1922 to enable the direct distribution of funds to selected and approved charitable organizations in Israel. The family, via their fund, directed some $14 million to PEF in the two most recent fiscal years available alone.

The Gottesmans' daughter Alice has served on the board of Jewish Community Center (JCC) for some two decades and currently chairs the board of directors of JCC Manhattan, which has received steady support from the family. Other grantees include Birthright Israel; Beth Din of America, a "rabbinical court which serves affiliated and unaffiliated Jews"; Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education; Drisha Institute for Jewish Education; Foundation For Jewish Camp; Friends Of The Israel Defense Forces; and UJA-Federation of New York.

Apart from Jewish organizations, the family also supports colleges and universities like Barnard College and Teachers College. Ruth has a master's degree in developmental education and a Ed.D. in human cognition and learning, both from Teachers College. Ruth has funded a scholarship fund at Teachers College, and last decade, the couple funded the Gottesman Libraries at the school. Human services, the arts and health are other interests. For an overview of this funder's work, read our profile of David Gottesman linked below.

Related:David Gottesman

See more articles by Ade Adjeni.
We cover a lot of philanthropic efforts to expand the number of low-income kids of color who go to college and, as importantly, complete their degrees. Some of these initiatives are national in scope, but others are focused regionally or locally as funders look to postsecondary success to ensure social mobility and economic growth amid large-scale demographic changes. Because Latinos are the fastest-growing group in the U.S., it's no suprise that some funders are laser-focused on improving college access for young people from this population.

What's happening in Arizona is a good example.

According to the Helios Education Foundation, only about 37 percent of adults in Arizona have at least an associates degree, but for the states Latino population, that figure is more like 19 percent. Those figures are simply unacceptable for many funders in the Southwest, and Helios has launched a new $5.1 million initiative to tackle the issue.

This is not new terrain for Helios. As we've reported, this funder has previously made substantial grants in this area, both in Arizona and in Florida.

Related:One Funder's Strategy to Boost College Completion Rates in Two Fast-GrowingStates

Helios solution is a new career and college readiness program called the College Knowing & Going initiative. Its currently targeted at 83 Arizona high schools within 18 school districts in the state, and the bulk of these serve low-income and Latino populations. The target schools are located in the following counties: Maricopa, Santa Cruz, Coconino, Navajo, Apache, Gila, Mohave, Pima, Pinal and Yuma.

The big goal, here, is to increase the number of students who enter and complete college, which it's doing by assisting with college applications, making ACT costs free, and helping students complete FAFSA forms.

Helios Education Foundations president and CEO, Paul Luna, said in a press release that the initiative will impact 145,000 students over the next five years, which is a lot of students. He also said that the "partnership is helping create a college-going culture across the school districts, increasing the likelihood that these students will succeed in college and career and propel our states economy forward."

Preparing kids for college is a big deal all across America, but especially in a state like Arizona. Studies indicate that at least 68 percent of all jobs in the state will require a college degree in the next four years. Meanwhile, a majority of Arizonas youth are kids of color, with Latinos making up the biggest share of that population. Many of these young people are growing up in low-income immigrant households. Ensuring that those kids are able to access opportunity and build skills is critical to Arizona's future.

Helios initiative is a five-year effort. Unlike some other college prep efforts in the area, this is a highly practical approach thats all about key infrastructure and resources. Check out the foundations College and Career Readiness Theory of Change, which was updated last summer, to get a better sense of how this approach falls in line with its overall goals of shaping the formative years according to its ideals.

Related:

See more articles by Alyssa Ochs.
Cincinnati-based real estate development firm Dov Limited intends to convert the former Thriftway grocery store in the DelFair Shopping Center in Delhi Township, Ohio, to self-storage. The company acquired the 10-acre retail center last fall for $1.19 million. The grocery store has been vacant for more than 10 years. The self-storage facility will be called Bearcat Storage and is expected to open in mid-June, according to the source.

Two vacant storefronts adjacent to the self-storage space will be reserved for future expansion. From the outside it will look like a retail center, with the storage units located inside, Douglas Messer, a company principal, told the source. It will take a big block of vacancy off the market, which only helps other businesses in the area.

The developer has had success with other self-storage facilities it owns, Messer said. After conducting a market study, the group determined there was additional storage demand in the Delhi area, the source reported.

In addition to the grocery-store conversion, Dov is also making improvements to the retail center. Plans include new fencing at the rear of the property as well as new paint, roofing and stonework accents at the front of the center. Plans also call for new landscaping, parking-lot repaving and replacement signage.

We want to give life back to the property, Messer told the source. The roof replacement is underway, while the parking lot should be complete by June, he said.

The property at the corner of Delhi Pike and Anderson Ferry Road was identified as a catalytic site for redevelopment in the towns Delhi Pike revitalization plan. Were very happy with the improvements they are planning for the site and hope it helps them accommodate good tenants, Cheryl Sieve, president of the township board of trustees, told the source.

As soon as we renovate the property, well make a big push to lease the other vacant spaces, Messer said.

Dove Limited is a full-service real estate company specializing in development, investing and management of industrial, office, residential and retail properties, according to its website.
A woman was arrested on charges of animal cruelty on Thursday after the manager of Cherry Road Self Storage in Rock Hill, S.C., heard barking coming from inside a unit and called police. Investigators found a puppy, believed to be less than a year old, in a dog crate in a unit at 1022 Hearn St. The animal was without food or water, according to the source.

"The dog was malnourished. The food was gone and the water was empty," said Rock Hill Police Officer Paul Myers.

The dogs owner, Britney Biegel, was arrested and charged with one count of animal cruelty. Biegel told police the animal had only been in the unit for one night and that she had planned it pick it up on Thursday morning when she moved into a new apartment. Police believe the dog was likely in the unit for at least two days.

The puppy was turned over to York County Animal Control and is expected to recover, the source reported.

Biegel was released on a $2,000 bond.

Cherry Road Self Storage is a part of Storage and Supplies, a Griffin Storage Co. In addition to self-storage, the facility offers boat and RV storage, U-Haul truck rental, and a retail center that offers moving and packing supplies. Storage and Supplies operates six facilities in the Carolinas.
The Eastern European country is trying to get its economic footing with help from anyone but Russia.

Ukraine is dangling precariously between a Western-oriented, idealist future and its Soviet past. The next year is likely to prove pivotal in determining which way the country swings.

When president Viktor Yanukovych, at Moscows behest, pulled the plug on an Association Agreement with the EU in November 2013, protesters who regard Europe as vital to the countrys safety and prosperity took to the streets by the tens of thousands. The so-called Maidan Revolution forced the president to flee three months later. His successor, Petro Poroshenko, revived the EU agreement but has yet to deliver the kind of economic and political reforms that the uprisings backers had envisaged. The collapse in early April of the reform-minded government of prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk cast a fresh cloud over the reform outlook.

Endemic corruption continues to plague Ukraine. In February, Aivaras Abromavicius resigned as minister of Economy and Trade, saying he had no desire to provide cover for covert corruption by people who are trying to exercise control over the flow of public funds. The subsequent disclosure in the Panama Papers leak that Poroshenko had set up an offshore holding company for his candy business drew criticism from opposition parties and fanned concerns about the governments commitment to reform. After months of rising tensions, Yatsenyuk and his high-profile Finance minister, U.S.-born Natalie Jaresko, resigned in early April. Parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Groysman quickly took over as prime minister, but he will have to work quickly to reassure foreign creditors. It will be very difficult to form an economic team as respected and as committed to reform as the one that worked under Minister Jaresko, says Nicolas Jaquier, emerging-markets economist at Standard Life Investments in London.

The top priority will be to persuade the International Monetary Fund to resume disbursements under its $17.5 billion loan package. That deal, agreed upon last year, helped stabilize finances and enabled the government to restructure $15 billion in foreign debt. But the IMF has put a hold on the next planned disbursement, of $1.7 billion, because of slow progress in improving governance and fighting corruption, and reducing the influence of vested interests in policymaking, managing director Christine Lagarde said in a statement in February. Despite the delay, investors remain confident that funding will resume with the new government, so that bond prices have not reacted overly negatively to the governability crisis, says Jaquier.

Meanwhile, the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine has sapped government resources and deterred investment, notwithstanding a cease-fire agreed to last September. There were more recorded cease-fire violations in the first week of March than at any time since August 2015, Victoria Nuland, head of the U.S. State Departments Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March.

Earlier this year Ukraine and the EU provisionally put into effect a free-trade deal under the Association Agreement, only to see Russia suspend its own free-trade treaty with Kiev. Ukraine also faces resistance in the West. In early April nearly two thirds of Dutch voters rejected the Association Agreement with Ukraine. Poroshenko and EU leaders vowed to deepen their relationship despite the nonbinding referendum, but the vote is likely to at least slow implementation of the deal.

Amid all the problems there are some early signs of recovery. The IMF projects the economy will grow by 1.5 percent this year compared with a decline of nearly 10 percent in 2015. Inflation, which hit a peak of 60 percent last year, dropped to 20.9 percent in March. The hryvnia, which lost about one third of its value against the dollar in 2015, has recovered 6 percent since early March, benefiting from the recent rally in emerging-markets assets.

To sustain the nascent recovery, the new government will need to reassure Western governments and investors of its commitment to a reformed, Euro-friendly government.
Villa has boosted internal oversight of assets at the State of Wisconsin Investment Board from 20 percent to 64 percent of the portfolio.

In 2006, David Villa didnt need much convincing to leave sunny Tallahassee and his CIO post at the Florida State Board of Administration (FSBA) for the less balmy climes of Madison, Wisconsin. The State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB) made him an offer he couldnt refuse: Besides chairing its investment committee and serving as CIO of one of the biggest U.S. public pension funds, he would bring asset management back in-house.

Seeking relief from the rising costs of using outside managers, SWIBs nine-member board of trustees hired the right person for the job. Today Villa, 62, oversees a $93.3 billion portfolio, 64 percent of which is invested in-house, versus 20 percent when he started.

Before joining the FSBA in 2004, the Albuquerque, New Mexico, native, who holds a masters in economics and Latin American studies from Stanford University and an MBA from Northwestern University, worked in auditing at Arthur Andersens Chicago office and in global operations management, asset allocation and client relationship management at Chicago-based investment firm Brinson Partners, which was rebranded as part of UBS Global Asset Management in 2002.

Each year SWIB trustees must justify to the Wisconsin state legislature the relatively high salaries of investment professionals that come with building an internal asset management operation, a feat that has proven difficult for other U.S. public pension plans and even for universities like Harvard. Thirty years ago the entire SWIB defined benefit portfolio was managed in-house, with most assets in fixed income and about a third in listed equity. But as the fund enlisted more outside managers over the years, internal management waned.

During his ten years at SWIB, the U.S.s ninth-largest public pension fund, Villa has overseen a return that is 0.19 percent below the median for its peers with more than $5 billion in assets, according to the Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service: 5.8 percent versus 5.99 percent. Balancing these results are SWIBs lower costs: 0.23 percent less than for its peer group of 57 large U.S. public pension funds, Toronto-based research firm CEM Benchmarking reports.

Senior Writer Frances Denmark recently spoke with Villa about his decade building an internal asset management program.

What is the biggest challenge to creating an investment management company within a government institution?

Competing for and retaining talent is the first challenge. I emphasize to the board that their strategy involves taking on and accepting the war for talent. We dont want to hire our fourth or fifth choice; we want to hire our first or second. And you dont want to become a recruiting and training ground for Wall Street.

The second challenge is to structure the organization and create incentives that encourage collaboration across teams. There can be a tendency for investment professionals to maintain intense focus on a narrow research agenda and miss opportunities to collaborate with others who have different points of view and different talents and approaches to analysis. For example, analysts in equity, fixed income and private equity could all be working in the energy space, so there should be lively discussion and debate about the critical issues.

What have you done to boost internal management?

We have created an environment where investment professionals want to stay and work. We promote the values of being research- and analyst-driven and dedication to a life of learning. Investment staff are expected to keep up with the frontiers of knowledge. Their incentives are tied to portfolio outcomes as well as original research that they must perform to advance in their careers. It is extremely important for the investment professionals to feel that their ideas are reflected in the portfolios and that their compensation is based on their contribution.

Over the past ten years, we have tried to make SWIB an analyst-driven organization. To exemplify the importance of high-quality research, we host visiting professors from the nearby University of Wisconsin to help drive new ideas on a broad range of financial, economic and other subjects.

Which asset classes have external managers, and why?

We utilize external managers in all areas of the investment structure. However, the primary use of external managers is in hedge funds, emerging markets, high-yield bonds and private equity. We are attracted to external managers that have persistent value added and that allow SWIB to retain the majority of the true value added.

We define true value added as the excess return after subtracting the embedded market returns and adjusting for leverage. We believe that many external managers have skill. The problem is that most of the true value added is paid away in fees to the external manager, and therefore the investors receive a small fraction of it.

How have you structured SWIBs investment office?

We took down the departmental silos and continue to emphasize the importance of working across all the asset classes within the investment platform. One example is the way we think about oil. Oil is important to investors in public equity, high-grade and high-yield fixed income and currencies, and has implications for inflation or deflation expectations. We have professionals throughout the organization who are interested in oil, so they collaborate outside of their own portfolio teams. The same philosophy applies to the high-yield market, where we watch issuance and defaults very closely across the investment platform.

In the case of oil, we have been tracking the issuance of speculative debt in the industry for three years. We are not surprised by the increase in defaults based on the developments in the credit markets as far back as 2013. Similarly, we are skeptical that energy companies can actually operate without stress at prices below $60 per barrel, because we have deep insights into the industry through our private equity relationships. If the organization operates in silos, the insights are lost.

What are your plans for the future?

We have three major strategic initiatives. First, we are a little over halfway through a technology conversion from an accounting to an investment book of record that is more in line with the way we manage risk and allows us to take advantage of state-of-the-art investment technology. New technology is essential to our second project, building an alpha-beta overlay, or synthetic market exposure, that will work in conjunction with our portfolio of 25 low-volatility hedge funds. Finally, in January we launched a multiasset capability after a four-year incubation period. It allows us to manage both market and active risk across all asset classes and strategies. In ten years it is the furthest away weve been able to come from managing assets in silos.
When DuPont made a white knight bid for Conoco in 1981, it found itself mired in the realities of the new M&A. The company was never the same.

E.I. du Pont de Nemours was hardly the sort of corporation, and Edward Jefferson was hardly the kind of chief executive, one would expect to find in one of the messiest takeover brawls in U.S. history. DuPont is the oldest major corporation in America, founded in 1802 to manufacture gunpowder along Brandywine Creek outside Wilmington, Delaware. The family-owned and -managed company had, through war and peace, crisis and prosperity, become one of Americas preeminent R&D-driven companies. In 1902 Pierre du Pont and his two cousins, all MIT-trained, had acquired the thenmunitions maker from family members, undertook acquisitions and transformed management with innovative techniques and investments in science-based product development. In 1914, Pierre acquired a stake in then-foundering General Motors, joined its board, became its president and DuPont eventually took control. DuPont also designed, built and operated the Hanford works in Washington State that produced plutonium for atomic weaponry. Its munitions business, however, was increasingly troublesome, profitable but hazardous and controversial.

The 70s had been hard on DuPont. Raw material costs, notably oil, spiked, and competition, mostly in textiles, mounted. The stock sank. The government had awakened to environmental degradation and hit chemical makers. DuPonts old nemesis, antitrust, loomed. In 1971 the last du Pont CEO and chairman, Lammot (Mots) du Pont Copeland, retired. After a two-year interregnum by a family retainer, the board  dominated by the family  handed the reins over to a lawyer named Irving Shapiro, the son of a Jewish Lithuanian immigrant tailor and dry cleaner, and a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School, who had made his name, and won the familys trust, during DuPonts antitrust struggle over GM and the forced sale of the stake in 1962. Shapiro made cuts to the all-but-sacrosanct research budget and took the first steps to reduce dependence on textiles. He retired in 1981, at 64, and accepted a partnership with an aggressive New York law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, run by a corporate attorney named Joe Flom, and opened an office in Wilmington, where the nations preeminent state corporate-law courts operated.

Jefferson, 59, succeeded Shapiro. The lanky Jefferson was not a du Pont, although his ascension returned DuPont to the tradition of placing a technical man in charge. Jefferson was British, raised in London. His father had been a director of Hawker Siddely, which made fighter planes, and he served in the Royal Artillery during the war. DuPont recruited him after he won a first-class degree in chemistry at Kings College, University of London. Eventually, he ran all of DuPonts Central Research, one of the summits of industrial science. When he was named Shapiros successor in May 1981, he was already talking about the need for DuPont to move in a radical new direction from maturing chemicals to youthful life sciences. Jefferson recognized the potential of what he called living polymers, as if proteins were plastics.

And yet for all the talk of life sciences, Jefferson made a move weeks after assuming leadership that drove DuPont in a radically different direction. On June 7, he announced an offer for Conoco, Americas ninth-largest corporation. Oil producer Conoco provided a solution to DuPonts thirst for oil  a need that looked back to the crises of the 70s, not forward to life sciences. The plan emerged from DuPonts strategic planning bureaucracy, and decisively shaped Jeffersons tenure. It also represented, at $7.57 billion in cash and stock, the largest M&A transaction yet.

Jefferson may not have fully comprehended the maelstrom he was entering. DuPont proudly believed its achievements insulated it from a rapidly changing corporate world, though the 70s had breached some outer walls. Shapiro, a lawyer, a Jew, an outsider for all his years of loyal service, had sensed the magnitude of change. Takeover battles, like the one for Conoco, featured unrestrained financial forces, legalism gone mad, a profound market relativism and an ethos of victory at all costs. Corporations were losing control over their destinies; CEOs were potentates dragged into a democratic marketplace. Attitudes toward shareholders, workers, customers and pay were now under vise-like pressures. Outsiders were re-imagining the very governance of the corporation  the legal and ethical code that structured its mechanisms of control and participation.

DuPont had bid for Conoco as a so-called white knight, which fit its self-image. Despite its size, Conoco was under siege by Seagram, the New Yorkbased liquor giant run by the scion of the founding Bronfman family, Edgar Bronfman Sr., who had sold some oil and gas properties and chose not to reinvest the money into booze. He wanted Conoco, and he went hostile when he was rebuffed. He wasnt alone. Canadian oil producer Dome Petroleum craved Conocos stake in another Canadian oil company, Hudsons Bay Oil & Gas, and stalked it. Conoco, in turn, had engaged in talks with another U.S. oil company, Cities Service, which was under attack by a third Canadian company, NuWest Group. And there was talk of other bidders, including Mobil Oil.

In making the decision to bid for Conoco, Jefferson and DuPont found themselves mired in the surreal counter-reality of a takeover struggle. The company was engaged not only in a multiparty bidding contest that escalated rapidly, but was besieged by Wall Street advisers who spoke a violent, opaque language of struggle, coercion and control. They played M&A as if it were a bloodsport. The two lawyers who had all but invented modern takeovers, Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katzs Martin Lipton and Skaddens Flom, appeared on the scene: Lipton counseling Conoco, Flom DuPont. DuPont also hired its traditional adviser, Morgan Stanley, whose M&A advisery unit was run by Robert Greenhill, and First Boston, whose team was headed by Joseph Perella and his larger-than-life partner, the already notorious savant of takeover tactics, Bruce Wasserstein. The deal quickly got so complicated that Perella and Wasserstein dubbed it the double-barreled two-step or, more colloquially, Big Rube, like a Rube Goldberg mechanism.

After a summer of struggle, DuPont emerged victorious  on a technicality: With Cities Service and Seagram tapped out, the last rival bidder, Mobil, got snarled in a government request for antitrust data and had to delay its bid. (Mobil bid $120 a share, well over DuPonts $98.) That left DuPont, which convinced enough shareholders to tender  that is to sell their shares to the company rather than risk waiting for Mobil to get clear. Seagram won a consolation prize: Its Conoco stake translated into 24.3 percent of DuPont once the deal closed. Bronfman became DuPonts largest shareholder, surpassing du Pont family interests, and Seagram took two seats on the board. All this posed challenges to Jefferson. The oil crisis was over, but a recession had begun, and DuPont bought Conoco just as markets were recognizing the presence of an oil glut, not a shortage. Meanwhile, the move into life sciences was constrained by the need to pay down debt and by the time and attention required to integrate Conoco.

Jefferson did form a joint venture with drugmaker Merck & Co., but while the effort generated some products, life sciences demanded reserves of patience, capital and technical skills that tested DuPont. The market demanded results. Jefferson already sounded defensive in the New York Times in 1984: DuPonts long experience in launching not just new products but new ventures and new areas has given it a grasp of the things that lead to success. He retired four years later. A decade later, Merck sold its stake back to DuPont. Around that time, DuPont spun off Conoco; Wall Street had been calling for that move for years. Three years later DuPont unloaded the pharma venture to Bristol-Myers Squibb. By then the Bronfmans were long gone.

Takeovers, as DuPont discovered, represented enormous risk, experiments that unfolded unpredictably. Even the common rationale for takeovers, shareholders getting a premium, was problematic. Takeovers are among the most disruptive activities a corporation can engage in. But takeovers had not been a major feature of corporate life since the 20s. Companies were bought and sold but until conglomerates emerged in the late 60s, M&A activity had been desultory, hostile deals rare and large companies impregnable. Conglomerates were experiments in portfolio diversification applied to the corporation, and were first celebrated, then condemned as failures.

Many viewed the takeover wave that began in the mid-70s as unprecedented, sinister, a sign of disordered times. By later measures, the volume and number of deals were tiny, but the hostility was novel. The hostile takeover undermined the prevailing corporate order. Managers and boards resisted the notion that just anyone, a raider or another large company, could simply demand that you surrender your business without a fight. Who were these people? They were strangers, outsiders, who did not understand (or care) how their companies worked or their responsibilities. These interlopers did not see how deeply the corporation was tied into the real economy. Acquisitions were expensive and risky. Takeovers led to layoffs, broken contracts, shuttered factories, dislocated lives.

Under the zero-sum pressure of a takeover attack, judgment quickly became poisoned by self-interest. These managers, went the charge, did not care about anyone but themselves. The age of hostile takeovers can be seen as one long sermon on the stain of self-interest, of amour propre, in the governance of corporations. Stakes were high. Doubt was contagious. The duties of fiduciaries were open to question. Raising self-interest, or conflict, or agency costs, about managers led to similar suspicions of shareholders, workers, bankers, lawyers, the media, politicians  nearly everyone in the game.

These charges, often formulated as shareholders versus managers, were brought to life by new ideas that attacked the self-image of corporations as patriarchal and organic entities that conducted their affairs through reciprocal relationships, which were interwoven with the national fabric: the stakeholder model. The turmoil of the 60s, the crises of the 70s, the rise of institutional investors, the deregulation of Wall Street and globalization effectively undermined the stakeholder model, and in its place arose a new way of looking at corporations and their governance. This involved a more abstract and narrow version of governance. Companies may appear impressively tangible, but that was an illusion. Companies could be deconstructed. Most relationships could be redefined as legal contracts, thus allowing stakeholders to be erased from the governance equation. Only one relationship mattered: the companys relationship with its shareholders, which boards and managers had the responsibility to serve. This set of ideas swept away long-held stakeholder views.

Many believed in 2008 that the modern era of M&A had ended with the financial crisis. Banks were not lending, markets were stunned, and the corporate triad of managers, boards and shareholders, hit by credit crises, illiquidity, panic and recession, rejected M&A. Instead, boards, often urged on by activists, took their free cash flow and bought back their own shares, often borrowing to take advantage of low interest rates. Companies insisted there was no better use of corporate cash  not spending for expansion, modernization, R&D or even acquisition  that was safer or more rewarding than buying back your own stock. True, the rank and file had to sacrifice. Wages were frozen; budgets were cut; layoffs were necessary. Buybacks contributed little to future growth. But they are a logical extension of the shareholder model.

And then, in 2014, just as many capitulated to the conventional wisdom of M&As demise, takeovers began ticking up again. By 2015 new records were being set and cyclical processes were turning like a watch mechanism on a time bomb: rising prices, larger premiums, greater size, a heightening of euphoria, with share prices dancing on each announcement.

As for governance, there are more activists and buybacks, institutional shareholders can now farm out monitoring of companies to proxy advisers, and the hostility of the 80s has not reappeared. M&A had been routinized. M&A innovation, in fact, appears exhausted, as if all the permutations have been run. The dominant reflex of governance continued to be, despite recent disasters, to align interests of top managers, boards and shareholders: a narrowing oligarchy. For all the surveys, consultants, studies, conferences and think tanks, governance is as rudimentary as squaring a board: align the interests.

But corporate governance sits uneasily within a larger politics. Regular episodes of public outrage against Wall Street, finance, executives or corporations threaten to engulf corporations, or at least encrust them with new rules, which regulators cannot police and companies can never fully comply with. Arguably, its the worst of both worlds, inefficient and risky. Today we live with a governance and M&A regime resembling the early 60s: seemingly inevitable, but not underpinned by deep and coherent belief. Regulatory oversight is derided; Congress is feared, but not respected; voters are viewed as dangerously ignorant. Key concepts like efficient markets or rational expectations, and the tendency to define success and efficiency in available, if straitjacket, terms  to a stock price on a given day  have been battered, and little has emerged to take their place.

As for DuPont, the company bought and sold, strategized and restructured after Conoco, still proud of its past and its stakeholder instincts. Investors, however, grew agitated. Under CEO Ellen Kullman, DuPont still talked about transformation fueled by seeds and agricultural chemicals. But in May 2015 Kullman found herself in a proxy battle with activist Nelson Peltz. She won  barely. And by October she announced her retirement. The denouement came quickly. In December Dow Chemical and DuPont announced $130 billion merger, followed by cost cutting and layoffs and the eventual breakup of DowDuPont into three tax-free spin-offs.

In these final days for DuPont, the Conoco deal still hangs as a what-if. What if Jefferson had never acquired Conoco and focused on the life sciences? Might DuPont have swept past its former second-tier chemical rival, Monsanto, which has aggressively remade itself into an agricultural biotech powerhouse? The reality of the what-if counterfactual, and a defining aspect of M&A, is that we will never know. 

This article is adapted from Bloodsport: When Ruthless Dealmakers, Shrewd Ideologues, and Brawling Lawyers Toppled the Corporate Establishment. Reprinted with permission from PublicAffairs. All rights reserved.
The Standard & Poors 500 reached a year-to-date high close yesterday as investors continue to find more good than bad in corporate earnings announcements. With more than 40 percent of the component companies of the S&P 500 reporting so far, more than 75 percent have exceeded consensus analyst estimates. With both guidance and analysts projections so low prior to the start of the reporting cycle, the key message appears to be that investors see a silver lining if profits beat expectations  even if those expectations have been reduced. A series of key announcements are on deck today, including health care giant Johnson & Johnson, which exceeded analyst forecasts on pharmaceutical sales by posting a profit of $1.68 per share versus consensus estimates of $1.65, as well as tobacco king Philip Morris International, which today guided full-year earnings higher on a slowdown in the U.S. dollars rise.

Goldman Sachs profits decline by 60 percent but still beat estimates. Results for the first quarter released today by Goldman Sachs Group included a sharp year-over-year plunge in both revenues and profits as pressures on fixed-income trading weighed heavily on Wall Street. At $2.68 per share, the New York bank beat consensus analyst estimates of $2.48 despite total revenues falling below expectations. The outperformance in earnings margin was the result of aggressive cost cutting. Goldman is the last major Wall Street bank to announce this earnings cycle.

Chinese consumer appetite drives consolidation. Bloomberg today reported that a group of investors headed by Chinas sovereign wealth fund has approached Louisville, Kentuckys Yum! Brands in a bid to acquire that companys mainland operation, which includes more than 7,000 Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. Other investors reportedly taking part in the proposed buyout, which could exceed $7 billion in total cost, include alternative-asset giant KKR & Co. A group led by Shanghai Pengxin Group announced today that it had agreed to acquire Australias S. Kidman & Co. Valued at more than $250 million, the acquisition will provide the Chinese firm with ranch lands amounting to more than 1 percent of Australias total land mass as it seeks to capitalize on expanding demand for beef at home.

Japanese Seven-Eleven operator appeases activists. Today Seven & i Holdings Co., the Tokyo-based company that operates Seven-Eleven stores throughout Japan, announced that Ryuichi Isaka, who had been running the popular retail chain in Japan, would be promoted to president of the parent company. The move is a victory for a group of U.S. activist investors led by Third Point CEO Daniel Loeb, who has argued that a shake-up in management at the retailer will boost shareholder value.

German investors turn bullish. The ZEW Center for European Economic Research announced today that there has a been a sharp rise in confidence among German investors with the organizations headline sentiment index rising to 11.2 for April versus a prior 4.3. Analysts cite signals of recovering demand from China and the European Central Banks quantitative-easing program as primary drivers for the upbeat reading.

Roche positive on approval for cancer treatment. Basel, Switzerland-based Roche Holding on Tuesday announced that it is confident that atezolizumab, a new drug the company has developed to assist the immune system fight cancer, will receive regulatory approval in the U.S. within the year. The drug is specifically targeted against bladder cancer, which accounts for roughly 5 percent of all new cancer diagnoses among Americans each year, according to the American Cancer Society.
Andrew Bednar admits that it would be tough to enjoy his work if he didnt like his clients. Bednar, who joined Perella Weinberg Partners as a founding partner a decade ago, has spent the past six years advising the worlds biggest stock exchanges on an unprecedented wave of consolidation that culminated in March, when he served as lead banker to Deutsche Borse Group on its planned $30 billion tie-up with the London Stock Exchange. My clients become my friends, New Yorkbased Bednar says. They have to be; otherwise it would be hard to make the kind of sacrifices required to get deals done.

Perella Weinberg ranked seventh worldwide among boutique advisers last year, according to Dealogic, working on 27 deals with a collective value of $81.4 billion, down from first place in 2014, when it advised on 24 transactions worth a combined $79.6 billion.

Bednar didnt take the traditional route to investment banking. Born in New Jersey, he earned a BS in biology and an MBA from Cornell University and a doctor of law degree from Columbia University. While he was in business school, a professor helped him to find a summer internship at the National Bank of Hungarys Budapest office in 1990, just after the Berlin Wall had come down. For Bednar, who is of Hungarian ancestry, that trip resulted in the launch of a business with two friends: For the next few years, he co-ran the New York Bagel Co., selling sandwiches with names like the Harley Bagelson to Budapest residents.

In 1994, Bednar, who calls that venture a colossal economic failure but a priceless experience, signed on as an attorney at law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York. One of his clients was Salomon Brothers, where he took a job as a vice president in the mergers and acquisitions department in 1996. Two years later he moved to Goldman Sachs Group in the same role after getting to know the team on a transaction.

It was never part of a grand plan to become a banker, recalls Bednar, 48. I enjoyed meeting people, and opportunities arose from that. I joined just as a big M&A cycle was starting.

He earned a promotion to managing director at Goldman in 2002 after advising Phillips Petroleum Co. on its $15 billion merger with Conoco the previous year and U.S. oil and gas producer Atlantic Richfield Co. (ARCO) on its $26.8 billion sale to BP Amoco in 1999.

In 2005, Banc of America Securities approached him to head its U.S. M&A division. He jumped at the chance, but soon another opportunity came along. At Goldman, Bednar had worked closely with one of the firms best-known partners, Peter Weinberg, whom he regarded as a role model and mentor. In early 2006, Weinberg called Bednar with a proposal: With Joseph Perella and Terry Meguid, former Morgan Stanley bankers, he was planning to launch an independent M&A, restructuring advisory and asset management firm. I wasnt looking to leave at the time, but it appealed to my entrepreneurial side, Bednar says.

Perella Weinberg launched in 2006 with offices in London and New York. When the global financial crisis hit two years later, the firm benefited as companies turned to independent firms for counsel. We didnt anticipate the crack that emerged in the system, but as advisory-only bankers wed noted the rise of conflicts and the need for independent advice alongside the services that big banks provide, explains Bednar, a father of three who likes to recharge by spending time with his family and close friends, skiing, fishing and eating. The crisis accelerated client demand.

Bednars work with Frankfurt-based Deutsche Borse has helped Perella Weinberg off to a strong start in 2016, and he knows the exchange and the sector well. In 2011 he advised longtime client NYSE Euronext on its $17 billion attempted merger with Deutsche Borse; after the European Commission blocked the deal on the grounds that it would create a quasimonopoly in the regions derivatives trade, he represented NYSE Euronext on its $11 billion sale to Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange in 2012.

"As a trusted adviser and partner for my entire tenure at the NYSE, Andrew sought to understand where we were as a company and what we were trying to achieve, which positioned him to help us co-author the optimal strategy to pursue, says Duncan Niederauer, who served as CEO of NYSE Euronext from 2007 until 2014. As we worked our way through small deals, a failed deal and, ultimately, a successful merger, Andrews commitment never wavered.

Besides counseling Deutsche Borse on the planned union with LSE, in March he advised it on the sale of International Securities Exchange, a New Yorkheadquartered operator of three electronic options exchanges, to the Nasdaq Stock Market for $1.1 billion.

The exchange sector has been transformed over the past decade as technology and data have become crucial and the business of exchanges has moved far beyond matching buyers and sellers, says Bednar, who believes core-exchange mergers have peaked. The market infrastructure players will continue to acquire more data companies, but the big regional consolidation plays have largely been done. 
Insurance industry veteran Damien Sullivan is retiring from his position as Asia Pacific Chairman after a long and illustrious career which included senior underwriting and general management positions in Europe and Asia Pacific.Sullivan has held the Asia Pacific Chairman position since 2013, a role which saw him assume responsibility for governance, strategic planning and senior customer relationships across the region, which includes 12 countries.In 2015, he was appointed a member of the Office of the Chairman with executive responsibilities for the integration and planning of ACE and Chubb outside of North America.Prior to his current assignment, he was Regional President, Asia Pacific, responsible for leading the companys property and casualty (P&C), accident and health (A&H) and personal and business insurance (PBI) operations.Sullivan will now serve as Advisor to Chubbs Overseas General Insurance business, working closely with John Keogh, Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer, Chubb Limited.
New Jersey authorities say a chiropractor whose license was revoked more than a decade ago played a role in a medical fraud ring that allegedly stole nearly $4 million from insurance companies.

Philip Potacco faces numerous counts, including conspiracy and money laundering, in an indictment made public on April 15. The 62-year-old Kinnelon, New Jersey, resident would face several decades in prison if convicted on all counts, but his attorney says he plans to plead not guilty.

Authorities say Potacco used a medical consulting group to recruit accident victims and people who staged car crashes so he could submit bogus insurance claims. He also allegedly hired a licensed chiropractor to serve as a front man of a practice Potacco himself ran for five years.

The states Chiropractic Examiners Board revoked Potaccos license for misconduct in 2002.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Fraud New Jersey
TigerRisk Partners LLC, a reinsurance broker and risk/capital management advisory firm, has hired Philipp Kusche as partner and global head of Insurance-Linked Securities(ILS) and Capital Solutions.

Based in TigerRisks New York City office, Kusche will develop next-generation ILS and other insurance risk-to-capital products. He will report to Tony Ursano, president of TigerRisk.

Kusche comes to TigerRisk from Swiss Re Capital Markets in New York where he was head of ILS Structuring and Origination, responsible for creating and executing cat bonds, sidecars, contingent capital structures and other alternative capital products. In addition to such sell-side activities, he structured, priced and executed a large number of cat derivatives.

Headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, TigerRisk has offices in New York, Bermuda, London, Hong Kong, Minneapolis, Chicago, Raleigh and Dallas.

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions New York Swiss Re
XL Catlins insurance segment has appointed David Guest as country manager for Singapore. In this role, he is responsible for the development and growth of XL Catlins insurance business in Singapore, in addition to his current role as regional leader for crisis management insurance in Asia Pacific.

Guest started his insurance career in 1995. Prior to joining the company in 2013, he spent 15 years with Hiscoxs London operations where he worked on a range of marine and specialty lines, including the position of global product head, war, terrorism and political violence.

In his role as XL Catlins regional leader for crisis management insurance for Asia Pacific, he leads a team that covers war, terrorism & political violence, product recall, kidnap & ransom, political risks, trade credit and contingency.

Guest was a longstanding member of the Lloyds Market Associations Terrorism and Political Violence Panel on which he has served as deputy chairman. In the 2012 Gracechurch Londons Leading Underwriter Survey, he was ranked as #1 by brokers in the war and geopolitical risk market.

Davids extensive experience and technical expertise ideally positions him to lead our insurance operations in Singapore, where we have a strong team that offers a broad range of products and services in this important market, commented Craig Langham, chief executive, Asia Pacific, for XL Catlins insurance business.

David has played a key role in developing the crisis management book in the region. His appointment highlights the talent we have here at XL Catlin and demonstrates our commitment to the region, he added.

The Singapore operation was established in 1999 and can write more than 30 lines of business, across a broad range of property and casualty, professional and specialty lines.

Source: XL Catlin

Topics AXA XL
AXA is targeting the rapidly expanding market for African specialty insurance by partnering with Chaucer, a Lloyds specialty insurance group.

The new venture, called AXA Africa Specialty Risks, will be dedicated to covering specialty insurance lines in Africa, with a focus on business such as political risks, energy and infrastructure.

AXA said the two partners have complementary skills. Chaucer focuses on specialty insurance, has strong Lloyds underwriting expertise, extensive partnership management experience and established relationships with corporate clients, banks and business producers.

On the other hand, AXA brings to the partnership its marketing capabilities and a strong distribution network. AXA is already present in eight African countries: Algeria (#11 in P&C; #3 in life), Cameroon (#4 in P&C), Egypt (#4 in life), Gabon (#5 in P&C), Ivory Coast (#4 in P&C), Morocco (#3 in P&C; #5 in life), Nigeria (#3 in P&C; #6 in life), as well as in Senegal (#1 in P&C).

Chaucer said the partnership with AXAs African distribution network will help it extend its specialty underwriting reach and access more specialty business in this rapidly growing market.

Chaucer currently has a 12 percent share of Lloyds premiums written in the region and is a market leader in African specialty insurance business. Chaucer established Syndicate 1084 will share the specialty business with AXA through the formation of a Special Purpose Syndicate 6130.

AXA said it will work with Chaucer to establish its own Lloyds business in the future.

Partnering with Chaucer and the Lloyds market gives us a great opportunity to develop the growing and profitable specialty lines business in Africa by setting up a pan-African specialty insurance entity that will complement our African footprint and our presence in commercial lines, said Denis Duverne, director, deputy chief executive officer of AXA, who is in charge of finance, strategy and operations.

Johan Slabbert, chief executive officer of Chaucer, said: This partnership highlights the growth opportunities that this region provides, as well as demonstrates our capabilities in emerging markets and our talent for working creatively with industry partners. Our strategic alliance with AXA will deepen our access to the African marketplace, which will produce significant advantages for Chaucer in the years ahead.

AXA said this new venture is a further step in the development of AXAs strategy of acquisitions and partnerships in Africa, which include:

The 2014 acquisition of 77 percent of the composite insurance company AXA Mansard plc in Nigeria.

The 2015 partnership with the IFC-World Bank to develop parametric insurance.

The acquisition in March 2015 of a 7.15 percent stake in African Reinsurance Corp., the leading African reinsurer.

The acquisition in September 2015 of an 18.6 percent stake in Eranove, a leading West African utility company.

An exclusive 10-year life & savings bancassurance agreement formed in July 2015 with Commercial International Bank, the number one private-sector bank in Egypt.

The acquisition of Commercial International Life Insurance Co., also in July 2015.

A partnership formed in February 2016 with Africa Internet Group (AIG), a leading e-commerce group, where AXA will become the exclusive provider of insurance products and services through Jumia and other AIG online and mobile platforms. At the same time, AXA announced a 75 million ($84.8 million) investment in AIG, taking approximately an 8 percent stake in the company.

Source: AXA and Chaucer

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Excess Surplus Property Casualty Lloyd's AXA XL
The Kansas Forest Service has faced budget constraints as it works to deal with wildfires, including the largest in state history that scorched hundreds of square miles of land last month.

Larry Biles, director of the Kansas Forest Service, told The Wichita Eagle the Kansas Forest Service has a budget of around $3 million, but only about 10 percent has come from the state of Kansas. It also gets funding from the federal government, grants and fees.

Biles has been asking the state to provide at least $1 million in matching funds. Instead, he said, as the biggest fire in state history was raging in March, he was required to send back more than $15,000 as part of statewide budget cuts. The small budget also means the Kansas Forest Service has been able to hire only four staffers whose primary responsibility is fire. Just one of those is specifically tasked with direct fire prevention.

One problem the service has had to deal with is the proliferation of red cedars in the state. In Barber County, which had the most damage from the March wildfire, there were tens of thousands more red cedar trees than there were a couple decades ago. The cedars are unwanted fire fuel in part because they soak up water and can survive in dry conditions.

Between 2005 and 2015, the number of red cedars, sometimes called junipers, on Kansas forestland increased from an estimated 55 million to 85 million trees, according to the Kansas Forest Services most recent survey. Between 2007 and 2012, cedars encroached on about 50,000 additional acres.

Some would like to see more prescribed burns to keep the cedars at bay in southern Kansas, like those done in eastern Kansas Flint Hills region where ranchers burn nearly 2.5 million of their 5 million acres of pasture every year, according to Walter Fick, a professor at Kansas State University who studies range management. But he said ranchers elsewhere may not have the time or expertise for controlled burns like those in the Flint Hills.

This fire season has been so intense the Forest Service hasnt yet been able to reassess the heightened risks suggested by the red cedar trees and the historic March wildfire, according to Jason Hartman, who has been trying to promote prescribed burns in his role at the forest service.

Its such a small staff and budget, Hartman said, we just havent been able to keep up.

Topics Wildfire Kansas
The Oklahoma Senate has approved legislation that requires health insurers to cover the treatment of children with autism.

The Senate voted 36-5 for House Bill 2962 and returned it to the House for consideration of Senate amendments.

The legislation requires coverage for the screening, diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorder in individuals younger than 9 years old. Under the measure, children would have access to applied behavior analysis for up to 25 hours a week, with a limit of $25,000 a year.

Autism spectrum disorder affects how a person processes sensory information and their ability to interact and relate to others. Oklahoma is one of only seven states in the nation that does not require insurance companies to provide coverage to autistic children.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Oklahoma Politics
Fine art specialist Sarah Johnson Court has joined Alliant Insurance Services as vice president servicing a diverse portfolio of high-net-worth clients around the world while playing a key role in expanding Alliants reach within the fine art sector. She is based in Miami.

Johnson Court handles has experience handling the risk associated with fine art collections and working with high-net-worth individuals, celebrities, and athletes to insure homes, yachts, wine collections, private planes, and other high-value items. She also offers consulting and expertise in life insurance, kidnap and ransom, event cancelation, and other related areas.

Prior to joining Alliant, Johnson Court was director of the Global Fine Art Practice of an international insurance brokerage firm advising on corporate and private collections around world. She also spent six years in London working with several private and commercial collections, where she was a Lloyds of London Broker.

Headquartered in Newport Beach, Calif., Alliant Insurance Services, Inc. provides property and casualty, workers compensation, employee benefits, surety, and financial products and services to more than 26,000 clients nationwide, including public entities, tribal nations, healthcare, energy, law firms, real estate, construction, and other industry groups.

Topics Alliant
Farmers Insurance has introduced new rideshare insurance coverage for drivers in Georgia.

According to Mariel Devesa, head of product innovation for Farmers Insurance, the coverage is available to ridesharing drivers as part of their Farmers personal auto insurance policies.

Farmers worked with representatives of the Georgia Office of Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner, legislators and leaders of Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) to develop a product specifically designed for ridesharing drivers and make available a type of insurance coverage specified in Georgias ridesharing law, passed in 2015.

Farmers is now offering ridesharing coverage in 18 states.

Under the new Georgia law, ridesharing drivers will be required to have insurance coverage from the moment they turn on their rideshare app. Since personal automobile insurance policies generally were not designed to provide ridesharing drivers with coverage while they are working, the introduction of this new coverage will fill a potential gap in coverage.

Farmers Rideshare Insurance Coverage can provide Farmers customers coverage when a driver turns on the ridesharing application and during the time the driver is awaiting a match. The Farmers Rideshare Insurance Coverage will extend a drivers Farmers auto insurance coverage until they accept a ride, at which point their TNC affiliates commercial insurance coverage would apply.

Farmers Rideshare Insurance Coverage enables a driver to select the coverage that fits their needs; including comprehensive and collision coverage that can pay for damages to their own vehicle, uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage (in case they are hit by a driver who isnt insured or is underinsured), and medical payments coverage.

Topics Agribusiness Georgia New Markets
The Alabama Department of Mental Health decertified the owner of nine group homes in northern Alabama.

State officials delivered the notice to K&D Group Home executive director Katie M. Smith that the state was immediately revoking her license, the Decatur Daily reported. Smith was licensed to operate group homes in Decatur that serve patients with intellectual disabilities.

I find it necessary to immediately revoke your department certification because the deficiencies cited pose a serious threat to the safety and welfare of the consumers, Mental Health Commissioner James V. Perdue wrote in a letter dated April 14 to Smith.

Perdue said the state made visits on March 1 and March 31. Smith had 15 working days in which to appeal the decision, according to Perdues letter.

The letter did detail the deficiencies, but Sabrina Gibson, who serves as facility director, said there were some issues with paperwork during the two visits. She said a disgruntled employee went to the state, but no issues were related to the health and welfare of clients.

Smith could not be reached for comment.

Some parents said they need more information, and opted to take their children home.

I think all the parents just want a little more information from the state, said Maletha Pointer, who moved her 26-year-old autistic son to another group home. My son had some behavior problems, but since hes been with them (K&D), he has gotten a lot better.

Decatur police and state officials converged at her group homes looking for the 16 patients in Smiths care.

Department of Mental Health spokesman Terry Mitchell said patients in the group homes will be relocated, but the state declined to say where. There are 84 homes for people with intellectual disabilities in Decatur.

The Department of Mental Healths website does not list the 2016 visits, but it references inspections of Smiths nine group homes on March 15, 2015. They all received scores of 84, which falls in the one-year certification category.

State officials have said the need for group homes like this in the Decatur area increased significantly after the state closed Lurleen B. Wallace Developmental Center on U.S. 31 in 2003.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Homeowners Alabama
Fire chiefs in rural Cache Valley say when someone calls 911, they always manage to send a team to help, but the harsh reality is they dont have enough volunteers to handle daytime calls.

Its a tough time to scare up volunteers, Mendon Fire Chief Ray Olsen said. Were all out doing what we do to make money to take care of our families.

Olsen is self-employed, working as a contractor in the construction industry. It gives him the flexibility he needs to serve as a volunteer firefighter, a field he has given his time to for more than 40 years, the Herald Journal reported.

There are currently 19 volunteers on his roster, and in an ideal world, Olsen would like to have 40 to 50 people on that list. But everyone who is trained has to be outfitted with the proper, very costly fire gear, so he would settle for about 25.

Therein lies two of the most noted challenges faced by small, rural fire departments in Cache Valley, as identified by the chiefs in charge of them. Their most valuable resources  people and money  are limited. It can be difficult, dirty work that takes them away from their families, without compensation.

Being a volunteer firefighter requires commitment, time and effort and those involved need to be willing to attend training, and learn the skills to do the job safely, said Newton Fire Chief Greg Jorgensen.

The need to have people willing to serve is great, he said. Unfortunately, in todays world it seems that people are just too busy.

Even so, there are many who happily make the choice to serve.

While 19 firefighters sounds like a healthy number for a town the size of Mendon, the reality is that most of them work outside of the small bedroom community. So, there might only be one or two people available for daytime calls.

While Richmond is roughly twice the size of Mendon by population, its fire department faces the same struggle.

Fire Chief Dennis Wood said there are 14 on his roster. One of those people is available for day calls. Another firefighter works rotating shifts out of town and is available periodically.

I think that past generations had a greater sense of the importance of serving on the fire department, said Jorgensen, of Newton. Being a member of the fire department is a big commitment, it is a serious business; peoples lives and property are at times on the line.

Fortunately, all of the fire departments in Cache Valley participate in a mutual aid agreement that sends not only the local fire department to an emergency, but also equipment and manpower from other neighboring departments.

One example of this was a structure fire March 18 in Lewiston. When the 911 call was made, dispatchers paged firefighters from Smithfield and North Logan in addition to those in Lewiston.

When it appeared that would not provide enough manpower to fight the fire inside the home, a second page went out, requesting reinforcement from Newton, even Franklin, Idaho.

This problem is not unique to Cache Valley. According to the National Fire Volunteer Council, 69 percent of fire departments across the country are staffed by volunteers.

The number of volunteer firefighters in the United States has declined by about 12 percent since 1984, the organization reports on its website. Four major factors contributing to the decline include increased time demands, more rigorous training requirements and the proliferation of two-income families whose members do not have time to volunteer.

Locally, there are more than 200 volunteer firefighters in Cache Valley, but only a fraction of those are available for daytime response.

Lewiston and Richmond have both taken innovative approaches to increasing the number of firefighters available during the daytime when their counterparts are at work.

In Richmond, Wood said he will be approaching some of the local schools and businesses to see if they would be willing to allow their employees to become certified firefighters and emergency medical technicians, regardless of where they live.

Right now, there is one employee at North Cache 8-9 Center who is certified and available. It works out nicely because many of the roughly 100 calls for service per year are at that school, Wood said.

Wood also said Lewiston requires its city employees to be certified as well, which boosts the number of people available to respond during the day.

However, those solutions might not work for every municipality. A town like Mendon doesnt have businesses to solicit from, and city employees might come and go.

Funding and other challenges

While people are the heart of any fire department, it still takes money  and lots of it  to maintain a fire department. Each of the local fire departments around the valley are funded by the city they serve. Wood said Richmond city taxpayers provide $60,000 per year for fire and emergency medical services, with a little over 20 percent of that skimmed right off the top for insurance and bonds. It costs $15,000 every time a new firefighter is trained just for his protective clothing, a helmet and air pack.

Olsen, whose budget is about $40,000 per year, said his department is looking into the purchase of a new truck for Mendon, and even a small truck with no pump could cost as much as $125,000.

The bids that are coming in are starting to scare me to death, he said.

Grants are available to cover some of these expenses, but the competition is fierce, with fire departments all over the country all looking for a piece of the pie.

It is just like a job interview, Wood said. You have to be able to sell your department and explain why you should receive that money.

Olsen said the only thing that makes a volunteer department less expensive than a career department is the cost of labor.

Still, a volunteer firefighter is entitled to the same good working conditions, protective equipment and safe and reliable apparatus. We have done so much for so little it now seems to be the norm, he said.

Difficult as it might be, the money is there for equipment, but one place it is lacking is in medical benefits for longtime volunteers, Wellsville Fire Chief Clint Kerr said.

As he grows older and his years of service topped 25 years, Kerr said health has become a concern to him.

There is nothing out there that takes care of us after we retire, he said.

And with the growing number of firefighters approaching the 50 and older age bracket, it is something that weighs on him more and more.

The State of Utah only recently approved workers compensation coverage for paid or volunteer firefighters, but it is limited to four types of cancer known to afflict firefighters.

Kerr pointed out that firefighters give up a great deal of time with their families and they see and experience things that never leave their minds. He acknowledged the first few years were fun, but over time, it becomes simply an act of service.

Its all about trying to help someone else, he said.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
In Italia, oggi, il numero dei contagi registrati e pari a 19.143. Gli attualmente positivi sono 186.002 (16.700 in piu nelle ultime 24h). Il numero delle vittime e in totale 37.059 (91 in piu rispetto a ieri). I casi totali sono 484.869. Il totale dei dimessi guariti e 261.808 (+ 2.352). I ricoverati in terapia intensiva sono 1.049 (+ 57 rispetto a ieri). Le persone in isolamento domiciliare sono 174.404 (+15.788). I pazienti ricoverati con sintomi ammontano a 10.549 (+ 855 rispetto a giovedi). Il totale dei casi testati e pari a 8.679.107. I tamponi effettuati oggi sono 182.032, per un totale di 14.314.453.

La situazione regionale

La regione in testa alla classifica per maggior numero di positivi registrati e la Lombardia con 4.916 casi. Seguono la Campania 2.280 il Piemonte 2.032, il Veneto con 1.550, il Lazio con 1.389 e la Toscana con 1.290. La Regione Molise registra 56 positivi al covid-19.
Nel 2016 la lotta allevasione fiscale ha consentito allAgenzia delle Entrate di recuperare 19 miliardi. Un risultato record, sottolineato da Pier Carlo Padoan nel presentare al Tesoro il report del lavoro svolto dallAgenzia guidata da Rossella Orlandi.

Lo scorso anno, ha spiegato il ministro dellEconomia, si registrato un gettito record per lerario. Oltre 450 miliardi secondo le prime stime, rispetto ai 436 miliardi del 2015 e ai 419 del 2014.

Lesecutivo non strizza locchio agli evasori ma alle aziende e ai contribuenti onesti, aiuta ad adempiere, a non sbagliare e a correggere gli errori, senza approcci inutilmente punitivi, ha affermato Padoan, evidenziando che una buona amministrazione fiscale non serve solo ad assicurare il gettito ma anche la giustizia sociale, perche il mancato adempimento crea disuguaglianze e distorce la concorrenza.

Levasione delle multinazionali, ha proseguito Padoan, nella maggior parte dei casi e elusione, cioe comportamenti che rispettano la lettera ma non lo spirito della legge e sfruttano le asimmetrie. Questi preoccupano tanto quanto levasione fiscale vera e propria. Il ministro, definendo odiosa levasione internazionale dellAgenzia delle Entrate, ha ricordato che Italia, ha fatto molto negli ultimi anni ed e stata capofila dei progressi globali che si sono registrati, che hanno portato allo scambio automatico di informazioni tra i Paesi secondo il protocollo Beps, che spiegano anche il successo della voluntary disclosure.

Al G7 dei ministri delle Finanze di meta maggio a Bari, ha poi annunciato, si discutera della tassazione delle nuove forme di impresa delleconomia digitale, vedremo quali sono le forme possibili e concrete di cooperazione internazionale.

Rosella Orlandi e poi entrata nel dettaglio. Nel 2016 sono stati fatti controlli sul 40% dei grandi contribuenti, che sono 3.114, portando alle casse dello Stato 1,6 miliardi di gettito. Dati, ha sottolineato che dimostrano che lamministrazione non si accanisce sui piccoli contribuenti.

Soddisfatta dei risultati la sottosegretaria alla presidenza Maria Elena Boschi che su Twitter ha commentato: Lotta a evasione. Il risultato del 2016 supera tutti i record: 19 miliardi. Orgogliosa dellazione del Governo.
Every year, thousands of new companies pin their hopes on becoming the next big success story. Most will not achieve the lofty heights of, say, Google or Facebook, but a few will certainly blossom into industry leaders. With innovative products, efficient operations, and strong leadership, they are the companies that will help shape the future.

Here are 10 startups on the radar for 2017.

1. CastBox

CastBox wants to become the YouTube of audio. The company makes a podcast player that also helps users discover new podcasts. Founder Xiaoyu Wang says her goal is to make finding key sections of audio on the web as easy as finding key pieces of text. So far, CastBox has raised $16 million in funding as it plans to launch an audio search feature that processes natural language.

2. Slack

An internal messaging platform, Slack has more than 6 million users. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield launched the company in 2013, and it was recently valued at $5 billion. Slack allows company employees to communicate in one place, whether they are working from their office computers or tablets while on the road.

3. DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a cloud-based host that was founded in 2011 by Ben and Moisey Uretsky. The company has undergone an incredible amount of growth over the past six years. DigitalOcean was named to the Forbes 2017 Cloud 100 list, which are the top 100 private cloud companies in the world. It now serves more than 50,000 companies.

Not all startups are successful, but these companies all have great ideas and experienced leadership, with significant investments for their futures.

4. eShares

eShares aims to be a platform that provides privately held companies with their equity needs. Its business serves firms like Slack, Funding Circle, and Flexport by helping them keep track of their shares with its management software. Founded in 2014, eShares recently raised $42 million in Series C funding. With a subscription business model, it works with about 6,000 companies. Its next step is to work with companies in their initial public offering processes.

5. Mixpanel

Mixpanel helps companies understand how their customers behave while on their websites or mobile apps by providing A/B testing tools. The startup wants to give clients the ability to look deeper than just page views and instead see the entire path of their customers. Founded in 2009, Mixpanel is now approaching a billion-dollar valuation.

6. Acorns

Acorns want to make saving and investing as simple as possible for the average consumer. After connecting users' debit and credit cards, the app gives them the ability to round up all purchases to the nearest dollar. The extra amount is then swept into a diversified investment portfolio. The company was founded in 2012 and is valued at more than $1 billion. It has some 1 million micro-accounts.

7. Shyp

Shyp, which was founded in 2013 by Jack Smith, Joshua Scott, and Kevin Gibbon, is attempting to take all the stress out of shipping packages. The company will pick up a customer's items wherever they want, pack them for them, and then ship them for the cheapest price possible. Shyp is currently operational in San Francisco. The company said it wants to prove its business model there before expanding.

8. Petuum

Petuum aims to help remedy the shortage of machine learning operators with software to facilitate machine learning development. Founded in 2016, the company recently raised $93 million in Series B funding. Petuum says that capital infusion makes it one of the highest-funded early stage startups working in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

9. ClassDojo

ClassDojo is a communication platform that helps connect teachers, students, and parents. Its platform allows teachers to encourage students while engaging with parents about their children's progress in the classroom. ClassDojo is currently being used in 90 percent of the classrooms in the U.S. Founded in 2011 by Liam Don and Sam Chaudhary, the company has expanded to more than 180 countries.

10. Instacart

Instacart, founded in 2012, is a same-day grocery delivery service. Customers can place an order either online or from their smartphones, and then have it delivered within an hour. The company raised $400 million in funding earlier this year and is now valued at about $3.4 billion.
Altria Group Inc. (MO) is a holding company that, through its subsidiaries, manufactures and sells cigarettes, machine-made large cigars and pipe tobacco, as well as moist smokeless tobacco products. The company also owns a winemaker, maintains a portfolio of finance assets primarily comprised of leveraged leases, and sells oral nicotine pouches. Popular brands owned by Altria include Marlboro, Parliament, Copenhagen, and IQOS.

Altria operates in a highly competitive market where brand recognition and loyalty are decisive factors motivating consumer decisions. Product quality, taste, price, and other factors also play significant roles in attracting and retaining customers. Major competitors include U.K.-based Imperial Brands PLC (IMB) and British American Tobacco PLC (BATS), Philip Morris International Inc. (PM), Vector Group Ltd. (VGR), and Japan-based Japan Tobacco Inc. (2914).

Key Takeaways Altria produces cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, smokeless tobacco, oral nicotine pouches, and wine. It also maintains a portfolio of finance assets.

The company's smokeable products segment generates the most revenue and profit.

Altria's 10-year vision includes transitioning consumers to its growing portfolio of FDA-authorized, non-combustible products.

Kathryn B. McQuade was recently elected as the company's chair of the board of directors.

Altria in late April acquired the remaining 20% global interest that it did not own in the on! nicotine pouch business, giving it full ownership.

Altria's Financials

Altria announced in late April financial results for Q1 of its 2021 fiscal year (FY), the three-month period ended March 31, 2021. The company reported net income of $1.4 billion, a year-over-year (YOY) decline of 8.3%. Quarterly revenue declined 5.1% compared to the year-ago quarter, falling to $6.0 billion.

The declines were a deviation from Altria's results in recent past quarters, as the company saw revenue rise 4.9% in Q4 FY 2020 and 3.9% in Q3 FY 2020. The company posted positive net earnings in the fourth quarter compared to a net loss in the fourth quarter a year ago, and its net loss in Q3 narrowed significantly from the net loss reported in Q3 FY 2019.

Altria's operating income, however, rose to $2.7 billion in Q1 FY 2021, up 15.2% compared to the same three-month period a year ago. That rise was primarily driven by lower cost of sales, which were down 26.0% YOY. The Q1 pace of growth in operating income outpaced the 6.3% and 7.3% rates of growth in Q4 and Q3 of FY 2020, respectively.

Altria's Business Segments

Altria operates its business through the following reportable segments: smokeable products; oral tobacco products; wine; and an "all other" category that includes financial services and the company's innovative products businesses. The company provides a breakdown of operating income and revenue for each of these segments. A deduction for amortization of intangibles and general corporate expenses needs to be made in order to reconcile the individual segment amounts for operating income with Altria's consolidated operating income.

Smokeable Products

Altria's smokeable products consist of combustible cigarettes, machine-made large cigars, and pipe tobacco. Philip Morris USA Inc. and John Middleton Co. are the main subsidiaries that comprise the smokeable product segment. Revenue for the segment fell 6.4% to $5.3 billion in Q1 FY 2021, comprising nearly 87% of companywide revenue. Operating income for the quarter was $2.4 billion, exhibiting no growth compared to the year-ago quarter. Operating income comprises about 85% of the total for the company.

Oral Tobacco Products

Altria's oral tobacco products consist of snus and other moist smokeless tobacco products made by U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co. LLC, as well as oral nicotine pouches made by Helix Innovations LLC. The oral tobacco products segment generated $626 million in revenue in the first quarter, up 4.2% from the year-ago quarter. The segment accounts for about 10% of total revenue. Operating income fell 5.3% YOY to $392 million, comprising 14% of companywide operating income.

Wine

Altria's wine segment consists of wine produced and distributed by Ste. Michelle Wine Estates Ltd. Revenue for the segment rose 2.7% to $150 million in Q1 FY 2021, comprising more than 2% of companywide revenue. The segment posted operating income of $18 million, a significant turnaround from the operating loss of $379 million in the year-ago quarter. Operating income accounts for about 1% of the total.

All other

Altria's all other category is comprised of its financial services and innovative tobacco products businesses. It includes the company's heated tobacco business and the international, or rest-of-world, segment of Helix. The financial services business is run by Philip Morris Capital Corp., which maintains a portfolio of assets, most of which are leveraged leases. Altria said it expects to wind down its financial services business by the end of 2022. Revenue for the all other category rose 66.7% to $10 million in Q1 FY 2021, comprising a small fraction of total company revenue. The operating loss for the category widened to $14 million from $5 million in the year-ago quarter.

Altria's Recent Developments

On May 11, 2021, Altria announced that Kathryn B. McQuade had been elected as independent chair of the board of directors. McQuade has served as senior advisor, executive vice president, and chief financial officer (CFO) of Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. (CP), and as executive vice president of planning and chief information officer (CIO) at Norfolk Southern Corp. (NSC). She replaces Thomas F. Farrell II, who passed away in April 2021.

On April 29, 2021, the company announced in its first quarter earnings press release that it had recently closed transactions to acquire the remaining 20% global interest in on! oral nicotine pouches, which are manufactured by Helix. Total transaction costs to acquire the remaining stake amounted to approximately $250 million. The retail share of on! in Altria's oral tobacco products segment during Q1 FY 2021 was 1.7%.
Coca-Cola (KO) is a global leader in the nonalcoholic drinks industry. In fact, the company is the largest beverage company in the world. It offers hundreds of soft drinks, fruit juices, sports drinks, and other beverages. You'll probably know the company from its most known brands like Coke, Diet Coke, Fanta, Sprite, Powerade, and Dasani.

Given its status, it's no surprise that the company is a major powerhouse in the global economy and is one of the corporations on the S&P 500. So it's only natural that the amount of ad dollars Coca-Cola spends is higha vital strategy if it wants to keep its stellar reputation. This article highlights Coca-Cola's history and commitment to advertising. Keep reading to learn more.

Key Takeaways Coca-Cola is a globally recognized brand and household name.

The company still competes against other beverage makers and brands.

Coca-Cola spends the most on global advertising and marketing than any other soft drink producer.

The company averaged about $4 billion each year on advertising between 2015 and 2020.

Coke: A Brief History

Coca-Cola was founded in 1886 in Atlanta, Georgia, by pharmacist John Pemberton. The company's initial success came with the soft drink that made it a household namea combination of cocoa, the kola nut, and carbonated water to make a soda fountain drink. Even then, branding was on the forefront of Pemberton's mind. His bookkeeper and partner, Frank Robinson, perceived that two Cs would be better for branding, leading to the birth of the Coca-Cola name.

The company owns and licenses more than 500 different brands of nonalcoholic beverages which are sold in more than 200 countries. It partners with a series of bottling partners, distributors, retailers, and wholesalers who help bring the company's products to consumers.

The company's stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and had a market capitalization of $244.54 billion as of August 10, 2021. Coca-Cola reported revenue of $33 billion for the 2020 fiscal year, a decrease of 11.5% from the previous year.

Because of the highly competitive nature of the beverage industry, large brands like Coca-Cola must spend on multi-channel marketing campaigns. This means that if Coca-Cola does not advertise consistently, it will lose market share to other large competitors like PepsiCo (PEP). This is even more important as consumers turn away from sugary drinks due to health concerns, leaving soft drink brands to amplify their creativity to stay in front of consumers.

Large brands like Coca-Cola must spend on multi-channel marketing campaigns in order to boost sales which results in shareholder value.

Coca-Cola's Commitment to Advertising

The so-called cola wars can spur an advertising arms race of sorts. Remember the Pepsi Challenge? Coke's rival launched the campaign in 1975, asking people to undergo a blind taste test between Pepsi and Coke to choose the one they prefer. It was a great gimmickone that helped put Pepsi on the map. It's just one example of how large brands in the beverage industry try to outspend each other in an attempt to solidify and gain market share.

Coca-Cola has made a yearly commitment to large ad spends. Its commitment to advertising has been fairly consistent between 2015 and 2019, spending an average of $4 billion each year to market its drinks to consumers around the world. The company spent roughly $4.24 billion on global advertising in the 2019 fiscal yeara big chunk of which went to market Coke.

This large budget allows Coca-Cola to gain a competitive advantage in several key areas. Its spending and strategy help it successfully introduce new products into the marketplace, increase brand awareness and brand equity among consumers, increase the knowledge and education of consumers, and increase overall sales.

Comparison With Competitors

Coca-Cola's brand value is estimated to be roughly over $80 billion for the full 2020 fiscal year. Its market share, at least in the U.S. is almost 44%. This is due to the company's advertising budget. But how does the competition stack up?

Let's look at Pepsi, the company's primary rival, which had a market cap of $233 billion as of August 10, 2021. Pepsi has spent roughly the same amount of money on advertising as Coca-Cola since 2015about $4 billion each year. But keep in mind that Pepsi is much more diversified and owns a number of different food brands as well, including Doritos, Fritos, Sabra, and Ruffles. In April 2020, the company announced it would reshift its advertising focus and reduce what it called nonessential advertising.

Advertising in Alcohol Companies

Leading alcoholic beverage companies also found a direct correlation with advertising spend and market share, namely breweries such as Anheuser-Busch. In 2019, Anheuser-Busch spent $1.5 billion on global adsthe most recent statistics available. Although ad spending has a direct correlation to market share, it actually doesn't increase the size of the overall market.

For example, if a consumer already decides to purchase beer, their brand preference can be influenced by advertising. Ad spending in the alcohol industry does not induce consumers to purchase a beer if they had not already wanted to purchase one.

This supports the importance of ad spending in the beverage industry, where brands need to outspend competitors' brands so that consumers who already are looking for a soda are induced to purchase a Coke over a Pepsi. Ad spending in both the alcohol industry and the beverage industry does not influence the purchasing decisions of consumers who aren't already participants in those industries.
The title of world's richest person can change on any given day, depending on corporate share pricesbut as of late, that title has been held by Elon Musk. Famous for his business prowess, communication style, and role as a tech visionary, Musk has often been hailed as a genius.

Musk is the CEO and co-founder of Tesla (TSLA), the electric vehicle company, and the CEO and lead designer of the aerospace company SpaceX. Elon Musk has generated his wealth primarily through companies that he founded, but part of his fortune also comes from passive investments. Keep reading to learn which of Musk's investments make it into the top five.



Key Takeaways Musks best investments include PayPal, SpaceX, DeepMind Technologies, Tesla, and The Boring Company.

Elon Musk is an engineer, industrial designer, and technology entrepreneur known for disrupting multiple industries.

Musk often holds the distinction of being the world's richest person.



Investopedia / Bailey Mariner

1. PayPal

In 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and email payment company. A year later, X.com merged with Confinity, which in 2001 was renamed PayPal (PYPL).

On Oct. 3, 2002, PayPal was purchased by eBay (EBAY) for $1.5 billion. At the time of the sale, Musk owned 7,109,989 shares of PayPal, which made him the largest shareholder with a stake of 11.7%.

Musk no longer holds a stake in PayPal. He exited his position after the sale of the company and used his proceeds from the sale to fund investments such as SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity.

2. SpaceX

In 2002, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly known as SpaceX. The company's founding mission is to revolutionize space technology, including by developing spacecraft that carries humans to Mars and other places in the solar system.

NASA awarded SpaceX a lucrative contract in 2006. In 2008, SpaceX launched Falcon 1, the first private liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit. In 2010, SpaceXs Dragon spacecraft reached the International Space Station (ISS). In 2012, granted SpaceX a second contract to help shuttle crew members between the ISS and Earth.

Another contract with NASA was inked in 2021 for $2.9 billion, to transport astronauts aboard its Starship vehicles from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon.



3. DeepMind Technologies

The artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepMind Technologies was launched in late 2010, with Musk as one of its key angel investors. In January 2014, Google announced that it had acquired the company for an undisclosed amount.

$216 billion Elon Musks reported net worth, as of March 6, 2022

Musk is famously worried about AI overtaking humans and is reported to have invested in DeepMind not to make money but to stay abreast of how rapidly the technology behind AI is developing.

DeepMind has focused much of its research on deep reinforcement learning, which is an AI technique that combines deep learningwhich is primarily for recognizing patternswith reinforcement learning. DeepMind developed this type of learning based on reward signals, such as a score in a game, and gave the technique its name in a 2013 white paper.

Though developing deep reinforcement learning represented a breakthrough in AI, DeepMind hasnt yet found many successful commercial applications. Alphabet, Google's parent company, has applied the technique internally to reduce the power costs associated with cooling Googles servers at data centers.

4. Tesla Motors

Musk was not a founding member of Tesla but led an early round of financing in 2004. In 2008, Musk went from being a board member of Tesla to its CEO, even while still serving as the CEO of SpaceX. On June 28, 2010, Tesla launched its initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq with shares of common stock initially available to the public at $17 per share. As of March 7 2022, shares of Tesla traded for more than $800.

Teslas mission is to accelerate sustainable transportation by introducing mass-market electric cars to the public. In November 2017, Tesla announced the creation of fully electric tractor-trailer trucks, which were preordered by companies such as United Parcel Service (UPS) and PepsiCo. The companys electric vehicles include the Model S, the Model X, the Model 3, and the high-end Roadster supercar.

As of Dec. 28, 2021, Elon Musk owned 177 million shares of Tesla, worth approximately $142.3 billion. Elon Musk remains the company's largest individual shareholder and has significant control over the company's long-term plan and operational goals.

5. The Boring Company

Musk founded the infrastructure and tunnel construction company known as The Boring Company in 2017. The company was founded on the premise that traffic is awful but traveling above ground isnt necessarytraffic woes could be "solved" by using the miles and miles of earth beneath roadways. The companys goal is to reduce the cost of tunneling while also making production more efficient.

In March 2019, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority approved a $48.6 million proposal from The Boring Company to build an underground tunnel, called the LVCC Loop, that would travel underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center and feature three stations and a pedestrian tunnel. In April 2021, The Boring Company officially opened the LVCC Loop. As of 2022, The Boring Company has completed additional projects in Hawthorne, Calif., and currently has another project underway in Las Vegas.

Should You Invest Like Elon Musk? As the worlds richest person and founder of more than one company that has disrupted its respective industry, people around the world are interested in Elon Musk and how hes accumulated such a fortune. Few would deny that Musk is a talented entrepreneur, given the track record of his investments. Though you can choose to invest in one or more of Musk's companies, your investment and business decisions are personal choices that you should customize.

What Companies Does Elon Musk Own? Musk is primarily known for his leadership of the electric vehicle company Tesla, although he co-founded and leads Tesla, SpaceX, the neurotechnology company Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
India is currently one of the fastest-growing economies in the world since 2000. It is also the worlds fifth-largest economy in nominal GDP terms.

Overall, in 2019, the economy of India grew at a rate of 5%. This growth was primarily due to strong demand for the country's goods and services, in addition to a high level of industrial activity. The country, once a supplier of British tea and cotton, now has a diversified economy with the majority of activity and growth coming from the service industry. India is now considered a "global player" in the world of international economics.

In 2020-2021, India's economy has been hard hit by the reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. During 2020 India's GDP for the second quarter came nearly 24% below the second quarter of 2019, as COVID-19 motivated restrictions on all non-essential businesses sharply curtailed economic activity.

Key Takeaways India is currently one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

Agriculture, once Indias main source of revenue and income, has since fallen to approximately 18.32% of the countrys GDP, as of 2020.

Over the past 60 years, the service industry in India has increased from a fraction of the GDP to approximately 55% between 2018 and 2019.

In 2019, almost 10 million foreign tourists visited India; the World Travel and Tourism Council calculated that tourism generated 9.2% of India's GDP in 2018.

Historical Development of India's Economy

In 1947, after gaining independence from Britain, India formed a centrally-planned economy (also known as a command economy). With a centrally planned economy, the government makes the majority of economic decisions regarding the manufacturing and the distribution of products.

The government focused on developing its heavy industry sector, but this emphasis was eventually deemed unsustainable. In 1991, India began to loosen its economic restrictions and an increased level of liberalization led to growth in the country's private sector. Today, India is considered a mixed economy: the private and public sectors co-exist and the country leverages international trade.

Citizens can choose their own occupations and start their own private enterprises. However, in certain areas of the economy, such as defense, power, banking, and other industries, the government maintains a monopoly. The countrys economy has grown exponentiallyfrom $288 billion in 1992 to $2.66 trillion in 2020.

Agricultural Sector

Agriculture, once Indias main source of revenue and income, has since fallen to approximately 18.32% of the countrys GDP, as of 2020. However, analysts have pointed out that this fall should not be equated with a decrease in production. Rather, it reflects the large increases in Indias industrial and service outputs.

The agricultural industry in India currently faces some problems. First, the industry is not as efficient as it could be: millions of small farmers rely on monsoons for the water necessary for their crop production. Agricultural infrastructure is not well developed, so irrigation is sparse and agricultural product is at risk of spoilage because of a lack of adequate storage facilities and distribution channels.

Today, India is the world's second-largest producer of fruit, and the global leading producer of lemons, bananas, mangoes, papayas, and limes. While forestry is a relatively small contributor to the country's GDP, it is a growing sector and is responsible for producing fuel, wood-based panels, pulp for paper, paper, and paperboard. An additional small percentage of Indias economy comes from fishing and aquaculture, with shrimp, sardines, mackerel, and carp being bred and caught.

Industrial Production

Chemicals are big business in India; The petrochemical industry, which first entered the Indian industrial scene in the 1970s, experienced rapid growth in the 1980s and 1990s.

In addition to chemicals, India produces a large supply of the worlds pharmaceuticals as well as billions of dollars worth of cars, motorcycles, tools, tractors, machinery, and forged steel.

India also mines a large number of gems and common minerals including iron ore, bauxite, and gold along with asbestos, uranium, limestone, and marble. From 2019 to 2020, for example, India mined 729 million tons of coal (which, surprisingly, was not enough to meet the countrys coal needs). Oil and gas were extracted at a rate of 34.2 million metric tons and 32.9 billion cubic meters, respectively, in the 2018 to 2019 year.

Information Technology (IT) and Business Services Outsourcing

Over the past 60 years, the service industry in India has increased from a fraction of the GDP to approximately 55% between 2019 and 2020. Indiawith its high population of skilled, English-speaking, and educated peopleis a great place for doing business.

Among the leading services industries in the country are telecommunications, IT, and software, and the workers are employed by both domestic and international companies including Intel (INTC), Texas Instruments (TXN), Yahoo (YHOO), Meta (META)formerly Facebook, Google (GOOG), and Microsoft (MSFT).

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a less significant but more well-known industry in India and is led by companies like American Express (AXP), IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard, (HPQ), and Dell. BPO is the fastest-growing segment of the ITES (Information Technology Enabled Services) industry in India thanks to economies of scale, cost advantages, risk mitigation, and competency. BPO in India, which started around the mid-90s, has grown by leaps and bounds.

Retail Services

The retail sector in India is huge. But it's not just apparel, electronics, or traditional consumer retail that is booming; agricultural retail, which is important in an inflation-conscious country like India, is also significant.However, in recent years, the issue of agricultural wastage has come to the forefront. It is estimated that from 2018-2021, over 400,000 tons of wheat and rice were wasted due to storage and transportation issues. This is enough to feed over 80 million people within the country. Reports suggest there is little storage for Indian agricultural products, and experts believe that the solution to the massive waste issue is a combination of government policy, technology, and infrastructure. The Indian government is purported to be exploring a range of options.

Other Services

Other parts of Indias service industry include electricity production and tourism. The country is largely dependent on fossil fuels oil, gas, and coal but it is increasingly adding capacity to produce hydroelectricity, wind, solar, and nuclear power.

In 2018, over 10 million foreign tourists visited India. In 2018, the estimated foreign exchange earnings from tourism in India was $28.585 billion. The World Travel and Tourism Council calculated that tourism generated 10.3% of India's GDP in 2019.

Medical tourism to India is also a growing sector. India's market for medical tourism is expected to touch the $9 billion mark by 2020, according to a report released by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and Ernst & Young. Medical tourism is popular in India because of its low-cost healthcare and international standards compliance. Customers come from all over the world for heart, hip, and plastic surgery procedures, and a small number of people take advantage of Indias commercial surrogate facilities.

The Bottom Line

India has become a rising economic power in the 21st century. Between the years 2011 and 2015, more than 90 million people in India rose out of extreme poverty, thanks in part to robust economic growth that has improved the overall standards of living in the country. According to the World Bank, growth in India is projected to be 6% this fiscal year; it is expected to rise to 6.9% between 2020 and 2021 and to 7.2% in the following year. Among the major emerging economies, India is one of the fastest-growing. It has also become a focus of investors across the globe.
Renting a Home vs. Owning a Home: An Overview

Buying a home is a huge part of the American Dream. Choosing to buy or rent, though, is a major decision that affects your financial health, lifestyle, and personal goals. Whichever option you choose depends entirely on your lifestyle and financial situation. Both require a regular income (so you can afford the payments and associated costs) and may also require a certain degree of effort to maintain.

But there are several differences that make renting and owning property distinctly different. Renting a property doesn't come with all the responsibilities associated with homeownership and you have more flexibility, as you aren't necessarily tied down to your property. Owning your home gives you a sizeable investment, but it does come at a big costboth upfront and over the long run.

Owning a home isnt always better than renting, and renting is not always as simple as it seems. Here, we highlight some of the key differences between renting and buying.

Key Takeaways Whether you choose to rent or buy your home depends on your financial situation, lifestyle, and personal goals.

Both provide you with a place to live and require regular income in order to make the payments.

Renting offers flexibility, predictable monthly expenses, and someone to handle repairs.

Homeownership brings intangible benefits, such as a sense of stability and pride of ownership, along with the tangible ones of tax deductions and equity.

Renting doesn't mean youre throwing away money every month, and owning doesn't always help you build wealth in the long run.

1:39 Click Play to Learn the Differences Between Renting and Owning a Home

Investopedia / Alex Dos Diaz

Renting a Home

The biggest myth about renting is that you're throwing away money every month. This is not true. After all, you need a place to live, and that always costs money in one way or another. While it's true that you aren't building equity with monthly rent payments, not all of the costs of homeownership always go toward building equity.

When you rent, you know exactly your housing costs each month. This amount is indicated on your lease so you can plan accordingly. In some cases, your landlord may also include other costs within that amount, such as utilities, storage, and homeowner association (HOA) fees if you live in a condominium.

As a renter, you may face rent increases each time your lease is up for renewal. These rent increases can be even steeper if you live in certain parts of town. This may not be the case if you live in an area with rent ceilings and rent control, which limit how much a landlord can increase the rent, if at all.

Renting means you're able to move whenever your lease ends. However, it also means you could have to move suddenly if your landlord decides to sell the property or turn your apartment complex into condos. Less dramatically, they could just bump up the rent to more than you can afford.



Although not as universal as homeowners' insurance, renters' insurance is often recommended (and sometimes required by landlords) for those leasing homes or apartments.

Owning a Home

Homeownership brings both tangible and intangible benefits. Not only do you have your own home, you can make decisions about the look and design of the space, but you also get a sense of stability and pride of ownership.

Keep in mind, though, that changing your mind about where you're living can be very expensive since real estate is an illiquid asset. You may not be able to sell when you want. And even if you do, you may not get it at the price you want, especially if the housing market is down. Even if its up, there are significant transaction costs associated with selling your property.

The overall cost of homeownership tends to be higher than renting even if your mortgage payment is lower than the rent. Here are some expenses youll be spending money on as a homeowner that you generally do not have to pay as a renter:

Property taxes

Trash pickup (some landlords require renters to pay this)

Water and sewer service (some landlords require renters to pay this)

Pest control

Tree trimming

Homeowners insurance

Pool cleaning (if you have one)

Lender-required flood insurance (in some areas)

Earthquake insurance (in some areas)

Mortgage interest can make up nearly all of your monthly payments in the early years of a long-term mortgage. It can take as many as 13 years before more of your payment goes toward the principal balance in a 30-year home loan. You'll spend about $72,000 in interest for a $100,000 loan at 4% for 30-years. Admittedly, you'll recoup some of that in tax deductions if you can itemize.

And let's not forget repairs and maintenance, which can be very costly. You may find yourself with an unexpected leak in the roof. Replacing your roof could cost an additional $12,000, which may not be covered under your home insurance policy.



Mortgage lending discrimination is illegal. If you think you've been discriminated against based on race, religion, sex, marital status, use of public assistance, national origin, disability, or age, there are steps you can take. One such step is to file a report to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Key Differences

Property Values

As noted above, homeownership is often touted as a way to build wealth. But like any other investment, certain factors can positively or negatively affect the value of your home, including:

Economic issues

Maintenance

Environmental concerns, such as nearby landfills and hazardous waste sites

Outdated interiors

Exterior conditions (your unruly neighbor's front yard littered with pink flamingos can impact your home value, too)

Housing surpluses

These factors can, of course, affect you as a renter, too. For instance, negative factors may help lower your rental costs. After all, the landlord may be desperate for income and may end up slashing the monthly price.

Tax Benefits

Homeowners may benefit from certain tax benefits. The home mortgage interest deduction reduces any out-of-pocket expenses during the early life of the loan, as long as deductions are itemized.

Of course, if you rent, you get no mortgage tax deduction at all. Keep in mind, that you can still take the standard deduction that's available to all taxpayers. The same is true for homeowners who don't have enough deductions to itemize individually

Repairs and Maintenance

As noted above, being a homeowner means you're responsible for maintenance and regular upkeep. This can be very costly. And renovation projects don't often increase your home's value by more than what you spend on them. According to Remodeling magazine, project costs continue to outweigh values, with an estimated 60 cents recouped for every dollar spent on repairs and renovations.

If you live in a community with an HOA, it may take some homeownership chores off your plate. That will usually cost a few hundred dollars a month. But beware of the headaches that association membership can entail. If you rent, your landlord will take care of all the repairs and maintenance, though of course they may not be done as quickly or as well as you would like.

The projects that recoup the most are not glamorous things youll be excited about doing. The best return (and the only one on Remodeling's list that comes close to recouping its entire cost) comes from replacing a garage door.

Time Commitment

If you like having your evenings and weekends to use as you please, if you work long hours, or if you travel frequently, then the time commitment that comes with homeownership may be more than you want to take on. There are always projects that you will need or want to take care of, from finding a plumber to replacing a rusted-out pipe and repainting the bedroom to mowing the lawn.



After factoring in the costs of homeownership, you may find that renting may make more financial sense, allowing you to invest the money you would have put into a home into a retirement account.

Special Considerations

The decision to rent or own depends on your financial situation. But it's also about your comfort and vision for your future. Ignore people who tell you that owning always makes more sense in the long run or that renting is throwing away money. Disregard anyone who says that buying makes more sense if your monthly mortgage payment is more cost-efficient than your monthly rent payment. Housing markets and life circumstances are too varied to make blanket statements like these.

People were often prevented from owning land because of their race, ethnic background, beliefs, or marital status in the past. This is illegal. Although practices like redlining (where people are denied services because of their race or ethnicity) continue to deter members of minority groups from seeking to own a home, they shouldn't. The borrower's ability to make payments is the only factor that mortgage lenders should consider.

Before you do anything, be sure to weigh the risks involved, especially with buying a home. Getting a mortgage often requires using a large amount of financial leverage. If housing prices go up, people with mortgages can make extraordinary gains. But you also stand to lose if prices plummet. During the subprime meltdown, an unprecedented number of Americans ended up with underwater mortgages. The key is to pay attention to housing prices by looking at the Case-Shiller Index. If prices seem too high, renting for a few years may make more sense.

Still, despite the risk, added expense, and extra chores associated with owning a home, many people choose it over renting. It provides a more permanent place to raise children. It is also frequently the only way to have, or create, the sort of residence people want. Ultimately, the decision to rent or to own is not just financial. It is also emotional.

Is It Better to Rent or Own a Home? There is no definitive answer as to whether renting or owning a home is better. The answer depends on your own personal situationyour finances, lifestyle, and personal goals. You need to weigh out the benefits and the costs of each based on your income, savings, and how you live.

Is Renting Cheaper Than Owning a Home? Renting can be a very predictable expense. You know what your costs are upfront and can plan accordingly. On the other hand, if you enjoy a lavish lifestyle, you may find renting to be more expensive than owning a home, even if there are repairs and regular maintenance you have to make with purchasing real estate.
Envision a pilot in the cockpit making his welcome-aboard announcement to the passengers saying, The flight time today is five hours in first-class and 12 hours in coach. Of course, there are no differences in flight times between business and first-class, but passengers who sit "upfront" often remark that their flight felt faster, thanks to the added comfort.

Even flight attendants prefer to travel first class. Wendy Sue Knecht, a former Pan Am flight attendant who wrote a memoir about her experiences, said she has always preferred to work upfront...More time to schmooze and I loved surrounding myself with elegance.

Key Takeaways Differences between business class and first class exist, but they're not as pronounced as those between economy and first class.

In Asia, first-class lounges are on a different level, but in most airports, the wait is fairly similar for business or first-class lounges.

First-class passengers might have a seat that turns into a bed or even their own private apartment.

Business-class might offer more legroom but doesn't offer a private space.

The food and drink in business class are typically at a restaurant level.

However, first-class dining might be at another level with an award-winning chef setting the menu.

More Money, More Amenities

Although the differences between first class and business class are not as significant as those between economy and first or business, there are still some variables to consider when making your travel choice. In general, first-class costs about twice as much as business class. But that can vary significantly by route and airline.

Ben Schlappig, a consultant and travel blogger who flies an average of 400,000 miles a year, said he almost exclusively sits in first and business class and has noticed the business class section improving dramatically.

Overall were seeing more airlines eliminating first class and instead, installing great business-class service, given that the market for first-class is pretty limited," Schlappig said. "Nowadays business-class seats are better than first-class seats used to be. Meanwhile some of the first-class seats we see nowadays have out-of-this-world products like double beds, showers, or even apartments in the sky.

Waiting Times

You might expect that some of the perks of business- or first-class travel would kick in on the groundin the pre-boarding lounge. For the most part, youd be mistaken. The lounges, both in first class and business, vary from country to country.

"The best lounges are in Asia, followed by Europe and Australia," Schalppig said. "Some first-class lounges in the U.S. are getting better, especially the ones operated by foreign airlines. For example, theres a fantastic Qantas first-class lounge at LAX."

Lufthansa in Frankfurt offers an exclusive lounge for first-class passengers, who can skip the main terminal for their own terminal. Those passengers are then driven to their plane in a Porsche or Mercedes. In contrast, business-class lounges simply provide a quiet space to work and relax, with fast Wi-Fi, comfortable chairs, and snacks, but no other extras.

The major differences between first class and business class are the seats and the service, but differences vary among airlines, routes, and airplane models.

Comfort Levels

Business- and first-class services offer a range of improvements and luxuries to help you get a good night's sleep and privacy. The best source of information on the configurations for any flight you are considering is seatguru.com. To decide between business- and first-class, consider the following before you buy your ticket: Will your seat turn into a bed? Whats the configuration of the cabin? How close will you be to other passengers? Will you have a double bed, your own apartment," or a seat and a bed combined?

Airline pilot and Ask the Pilot blogger Patrick Smith said many carriers outfit their planes according to market demand. An airline may have three or four different configurations in its 777 or A330 fleets, with specific planes dedicated to specific markets, he said. Take Emirates as an example. First-class on Emirates doesn't differ much from plane to plane. Business-class does.

First-class amenities generally supersede business-class amenities on international flights, rather than domestic ones, but research first to make sure that's the case.

Food and Drink

This is one of the two categories where business class and first class differ the most. Business-class food is restaurant quality, but dining in business class is rarely an experience, Schlappig said.

In the first class, customers often have food prepared under the auspices of a famous chef. For example, Air Francerated No.1 for in-flight food by the Robb Reportoffers menus designed by Michelin-starred chefs.

When it comes to a drink with dinner, on Singapore Airlines, according to the UK-based Telegraph website, there are geniuses who specialise in knowing which wine goes well with each dish on the in-flight menu served to you while youre above the clouds. Business-class on Emirates, and Korean Air have onboard bars where you can chat with your fellow passengers.
Press Release

IPU welcomes progress on human rights cases in DRC and Iraq

Geneva, 19 April 2016

Pierre Jacques Chalupa was elected to parliament in 2006, but was among a number of MPs stripped of their mandate soon afterwards. Photo courtesy of Mr Chalupa

The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) has welcomed several positive developments on three cases involving the abuses of the human rights of MPs in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Iraq. IPUs Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians has been working on the cases to seek redress and protection of the MPs.

In the DRC, IPU has greeted a decision by authorities that enables former MP Pierre Jacques Chalupa to travel abroad for urgently-needed medical attention and then return to the country. IPU had made a fresh appeal for travel documents to be granted to Chalupa in a resolution adopted recently at its Assembly in Lusaka, Zambia.

Chalupa received his passport after the intervention of the Speaker of the National Assembly Aubin Minaku, following the IPU call for action in Lusaka. The former MP had in effect been left stateless after being found guilty of forgery and use of falsified documents. IPU, which has been examining Chalupas case for four years, believes the 2012 trial was characterized by serious irregularities.

IPU is particularly pleased by the positive role parliamentary authorities, including the Speaker of the National Assembly, have played in the positive outcome.

We sincerely hope that the granting of a passport signals that the issue of Mr. Chalupas statehood has been resolved, and his Congolese nationality has been formally recognized, says IPU Secretary General Martin Chungong.

The reported release from prison of former Iraqi MP Mohamed Al-Dainy and the granting of prison visits to family and lawyers of MP Ahmed Al-Alwani, have also been applauded by IPU.

IPU continues to call for the lifting of the death sentence against Al-Alwani. The MP was convicted of terrorism for killing two soldiers during a raid on his home in 2013 to arrest him. He has strongly denied the charges and was allegedly tortured in detention before his trial.

IPU hopes the release of former MP Mohamed Al-Dainy following a presidential pardon last month will also mark the end of all outstanding proceedings against him. Al-Dainy, who had actively investigated the existence of secret detention facilities and detention conditions in Iraq as a member of the Iraqi Parliaments human rights committee, had had his parliamentary immunity lifted following accusations that he masterminded a suicide bombing of parliament in 2007. He was subsequently convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to death in 2010 in a trial which IPU had declared a travesty of justice.

The Iraqi Parliament reached similar conclusions after establishing a parliamentary commission of inquiry. In 2012, it recommended that his case be reviewed by the High Judicial Council. A retrial last year found Al-Dainy innocent. However, he had been kept in detention while other charges and investigations were still pending against him.

IPUs Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians, which works to protect or seek redress for MPs whose rights have been abused, is currently investigating more than 280 cases around the world.

The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) is the global organization of national parliaments. It works to safeguard peace and drives positive democratic change through political dialogue and concrete action.
The Clintons came home last night to the Democratic Party Irish American community who have long been among their biggest supporters.

It felt like a homecoming as Bill and Hillary basked in the adulation on the eve of the New York primary they are very confident of winning and greeted old friends with hugs and handshakes.

It was fitting this was their last stop on a long and arduous trail which had taken them to the four corners of the state and had sent them at breakneck speed hurtling through neighborhoods, attending rallies, doing town hall meetings.

Fag an Bhealach was the old Union Army Irish battle cry, Clear the Way, and the Clintons have done that in New York. If they win here they will effectively have put Sanders away.

In the end it was the Irish who awaited the exhausted couple, ready to cheer them home. The young crowd were mostly kids when the Irish peace process became a reality, but it hardly mattered as they cheered and cheered again as the Clintons appeared in a rare joint engagement.

You could almost see the worry dissolve from their faces and the tiredness evaporate with the warmth of the welcome. Running for president ain't beanbag and it is a case of the old dogs for the hard road as the Clintons showed their mastery of the process again this year.

FitzPatricks Hotel on Lexington Avenue near Grand Central Station was the location and a beautiful outdoor area kitted out with Irish and American flags, a podium and two bars was the perfect place for a homecoming. It looked like a Hollywood set, the brainchild of John FitzPatrick who spared no effort to make the venue sparkle.

Fitzpatrick and John McCarthy, two of the Irish Americans for Clinton leaders, were leaders of this wonderful event held on a warm evening in Manhattan as the sun went down.

Other members of the committee, myself, Kieran McLoughlin, Brian ODwyer and Stella OLeary were once again hosting the first couple, the third time in two weeks the Irish have  a clear sign how important they are to the Clintons.

It felt like a movie set when the Clintons entered, the best-known woman in the world on her historic quest to be the first female president and her husband who will go down in history as the savior of the Irish peace process among other massive achievements.

In the holding room Hillary embraced each member of the committee and remembered that some of us have known them since the first Irish Americans for Clinton meeting in the 57th Street FitzPatrick's hotel 25 years ago in 1991. I am lucky to be among those.

It is an amazing experience to walk out with the Clintons to the podium to see every camera and every face in the room swivel and then the shrieks and clapping and cries of support. They take it all in stride like the pros they are.

It has been a wild ride, the drive back in 1991 at the first meeting was for peace in Ireland and a dream that a visa for Gerry Adams leader of Sinn Fein would come about. Amazingly, both happened because of that decision to back Clinton and to push for the visa by Irish America.

Hillary Clinton made it clear that Irish lives matter in her brief remarks, talking about her work for peace and vowing that Northern Ireland would never be allowed slip back into violence.

Bill Clinton quoted the Irish proclamation, which has became part of his speeches in recent weeks, and spoke about the need to seek a center that can hold not just in Ireland but anywhere in the world that there is conflict.

Greg Harrington finished off the evening with two beautiful violin solos and, as the music echoed sweetly in the air, the Clintons said goodbye to the New York primary 2016. They know a victory tonight means they can make it anywhere. Now its up to you New Yorkers.

Its good to finish with a home game, said President Clinton smiling broadly as he left the stage.We knew the Irish would give us that.
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A man is critically ill after being shot twice in the leg in Derry.

The paramilitary-style attack happened in Magowan Park in the Creggan area of Derry.
Oil exporting nations, including non-Opec Russia, had gathered in the Qatari capital of Doha for what was expected to be the rubber-stamping of a deal to stabilise output at January levels until October.

But the deal crumbled when Opec heavyweight Saudi Arabia demanded that Iran join in despite its repeated assertions it would not do so until it had reached pre-sanctions levels of output.

Saudi Arabia intentionally torpedoed the agreement and was willing to accept its failure, Commerzbank said in a note.

This has severely damaged the credibility of oil producers in general and of Opec in particular.

Brent crude futures yesterday fell almost 7% in early trading before bouncing back to $41.70 a barrel, down 3.3% since their last settlement.

Traders said an oil worker strike in Kuwait that cut the countrys crude output by some 60% prevented Brent from tumbling below $40 per barrel.

A cut in US drilling down to 2009 levels had prevented steeper falls there. Benchmark US crude futures were down by 3.6% at $38.90 a barrel after falling as low as $37.61 earlier in the day.

On Monday, Iran urged other oil producers to continue efforts to prop up prices, but insisted it was justified in not yet freezing its own output following the lifting of sanctions in January.

The deals collapse revived some fears that government-controlled producers will ramp up their battle for market share by offering ever-steeper discounts.

Morgan Stanley said the failure sparked a growing risk of higher Opec supply, especially as Saudi Arabia threatened it could hike output following the failed deal.

Still, supply disruptions elsewhere, such as in Opec member Nigeria, helped underpin prices.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs said gradually declining non-Opec production as well as planned maintenance in the face of resilient oil demand in the first quarter have recently pointed to improving oil fundamentals.

Additionally, analysts said Opecs failure to act, and the subsequently lower oil prices, would simply shift rebalancing away from the cartel and towards higher-cost producers.

Once again the Saudis have delivered a hammer blow to fellow producers, said David Hufton, managing director of broker PVM.

It promises to be the final nail in the coffin for those shale producers and their lenders hanging on for a short-term price reprieve.

Some 18 oil nations, including Opecs leader Saudi Arabia and top non-Opec producer Russia, had been expected to rubber-stamp a deal  in the making since February - to stabilise output at January levels until October 2016.

The talks failed because Iran argued it could not join the freeze because it needs to regain production levels after the lifting of sanctions.

Saudi Arabia, which had signaled it was willing to sign the deal without Iran, surprised participants last week by asking that Irans invitation to the Doha talks be cancelled.

Iran responded by saying it was happy not to attend.
Sterling fell to 79.69 pence against the euro at one stage yesterday, having touched 79.94 earlier, the weakest level since April 12.

The falls for sterling  which is down 14% since late last year  have dented price margins for many Irish firms exporting into Britain.

In a move likely to grab the attention of many UK voters, who remain split on whether to stay in the bloc, Mr Osborne pointed to his own UK Treasury figures which said breaking away could cost each household 4,300 (5,409) a year by 2030.

Three days after official campaigning began for the EU membership referendum on June 23, Mr Osborne said all alternatives to staying in the union would leave Britains economy smaller than if it stayed in the worlds biggest trading bloc.

Anti-EU campaigners dismissed the Treasurys estimates as worthless, but Osborne sought to hammer home his message that a Brexit would be felt by ordinary people.

Britain would be permanently poorer if it left the European Union, said Mr Osborne in a speech at a research centre specialising in the aerospace industry which has deep EU ties. Under any alternative, wed trade less, do less business and receive less investment.

And the price would be paid by British families. Wages would be lower and prices would be higher.

Most opinion polls show the rival campaigns running neck and neck, although one published yesterday showed the Remain campaign had kept a seven percentage-point lead.

Another poll last week showed just how sensitive voters are to what a Brexit meant for their own finances.

Pollster YouGov said respondents who were evenly split shifted to 45-36 split in favour of staying in the EU if they were told that the cost of a Brexit for them would be 100 a year.

Brexit supporters accuse the British government of running a scare campaign.

They say a post-EU Britain would flourish as it pursued its own trade deals and dropped rules and regulations.

Mr Osborne tried to dismantle those arguments yesterday, saying that even the least disruptive Brexit option for Britain studied by his ministry  a deal with the EU similar to Norways access to the single market  would mean the economy would be nearly 4% smaller by 2030 than if it stayed in.

One of the leading Out campaigners, London ,ayor Boris Johnson, has sketched out a different future for Britain, citing the trade deal reached by Canada with the bloc which could free Britain from contributing to the EU budget and end its obligation to keep its borders open to all EU workers.

Mr Osborne, a rival of Mr Johnsons for the future leadership of the Tory Party, said such a deal would not cover Britains services industry and would leave the economy 6% smaller by 2030, or 4,300 per household.

That would cut government tax revenues by 36bn a year, or the same as its security and justice budgets combined, he said.

Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who has said Britains economy has benefited from being in the EU, is due to speak in the British parliament today.
The frequency and cost of crime is on the rise with Irish firms under attack from threats new and old  neither of which they are particularly well equipped to handle. The average cost of fraud alone has more than trebled to 1.7m in two years.

The incidence of cyber attacks has risen rapidly as well. It has almost doubled in the past four years, with more than four in 10 Irish companies falling victim to tech-savvy criminals in the past year.

Companies are being hit for larger sums ranging from 92,000 to 4.6m more often than their peers across the world too, according to a report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Cybercrime is also perceived to be the highest economic crime risk going forward for Irish businesses.

Looking to the future, cybercrime is forecasted to be the most frequent type of economic crime, said the companys leader for cybercrime, Pat Moran.

While the new and evolving threat posed by cyber attacks is perceived to be the greatest threat to Irish businesses, it is certainly not the only risk factor that needs to be considered.

The report also shows businesses struggling to counter traditional sources of criminality such as theft and fraud.

A third of Irish firms surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers reported economic crime in the last two years.

This represents a marked increase in since 2014 when 26% of firms reported being the victim of crime. The most prevalent offence businesses are falling victim to is asset misappropriation, or the theft of company assets.

This includes theft of assets, cash, supplies and equipment by anyone within the organisation including directors and employees.

More than half of those affected by crime in the past two years fell victim to theft of this sort. Cybercrime, accounting fraud and money laundering were the next most common offences.

Garda commissioner Noirin OSullivan said the research highlighted the need for vigilance on the part of companies and individuals and for firms to look for outside support and advice.

Rather than being overly perturbed by the increase in crime affecting their businesses, the report, which surveyed 101 Irish companies and more than 6,300 globally across 115 countries, suggests companies are less effective in detecting fraud than they were two years ago and that boards are not paying enough attention to protecting themselves from cybercrime.
The Dublin-founded chipmaker has teamed up with leading US thermal imaging technology company FLIR Systems to help create the worlds most intelligent thermal imaging solution.

The collaboration will bring FLIRs existing technology together with Movidius virtual processing unit and marry artificial intelligence with thermal imaging products for the first time ever.

Based in Oregon, FLIR Systems is the largest commercial maker of thermal imaging cameras and imaging sensors in the world.

Its technology helped police capture Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev during a city-wide manhunt in 2013.

The tie-up with Movidius will further improve FLIRs technology across a range of uses in the security and aviation sectors as well as personal uses, said Movidius CEO Remi El-Ouazzane.

The state-of-the-art in-computer vision has come a tremendous way in the last few years, said Mr El-Ouazzane. FLIR has developed the first-ever integrated solution that now allows customers to take advantage of these new advancements while continuing to leverage FLIRs unique thermal imaging technology and support ecosystem.

The tiny chips Movidius makes  which are three times more powerful, five times more battery-efficient, and 10 times smaller than competitors  help cameras recognise objects and people.

The announcement marks Movidius third significant deal of the year after collaborations with drone and camera tech manufacturer DJI and a bumper deal with search giant Google.

As part of the Google partnership, the Dublin-founded company, now headquartered in Silicon Valley, will power Googles new virtual reality headset with its chips.

The company was established in Dublin a decade ago by David Moloney and Sean Mitchell.

It subsequently opened its offices in San Mateo, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley and last year established its first dedicated Chinese office in Shanghai.

Movidius also closed a Series E funding round in 2015 which saw it raise $40m.
The receivers of Point Village Development Ltd, PVDL, have gone to court in a bid to get Dunnes Stores to release 15m it says is due under a settlement agreement.

Mr Justice Brian McGovern yesterday entered the case into the Commercial Court list, the big business division of the High Court.

The receivers, Stephen Tennant and Paul McCann of Grant Thornton, have claimed there is an urgent need for the dispute to be determined.

Mr Tennant, in an affidavit, said that the receivers are involved in ongoing operations to complete the development of the Point Village Centre not only for the benefit of Dunnes, which owns a significant unit in the centre, but also as part of a broader scheme to regenerate the north docklands, and to realise the assets in the receivership for the best possible value for the reduction of the indebtedness of Harry Crosbie and PVDL.

He said the development and settlement agreements contemplated that consideration would be released to the developer on a phased basis as certain milestones were achieved in order to ensure that the developers had sufficient cash flow to move on to the next stage of development.

Mr Tennant said that, by allegedly refusing to release the funds, Dunnes is frustrating the receivers ability to fund the continuing works at the Point Village Centre.

He said that the settlement agreement provided that the monies be released once binding agreements for leases were exchanged in relation to seven units in the centre and that the tenant mix would also be discussed with Dunnes.

He said lease agreements have been exchanged in respect of nine of the centre units and PVDL engaged in prior discussions with Dunnes about the tenant mix in 2014.

Mr Tennant added that the dispute with Dunnes is having a serious impact on the ability of the receivers to maximise value from the assets as, without an anchor tenant, it is difficult to attract other tenants to the shopping centre.

The case will come back before the court on May 30.
Tourism Ireland said its marketing trip early next month will sell Ireland to travel agents and tour operators in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen on the mainland, and in Hong Kong.

Our sales mission is a key element of our promotional programme in China, to win a greater share of the four million Chinese visitors who travel to Europe each year, said Tourism Ireland CEO Niall Gibbons.
The number of homes sold prior to completion in the UK capital fell to 5,947 from a record high of 8,927 a year earlier, according to data compiled by Molior London that was seen by Bloomberg News.

Molior has declined to comment.

Affordability is still a huge issue for domestic buyers, said Faisal Durrani, head of research at broker Cluttons.

New builds in the higher price echelons normally appeal to international investors, but lots of uncertainties in their own economies  such as currency issues and the drop in oil prices  have led to a slowdown in purchases from a year ago, said Mr Durrani.

Demand has fallen for new homes in London following the British governments decision to raise UK sales taxes, to introduce a capital gains levy for overseas buyers and said it plans to cut tax breaks for the wealthiest landlords.

Developers in central London are offering institutional investors discounts of as much as 20% on bulk purchases as the tax changes limit demand from private individuals.

There have been very few higher-end expensive sold in the central areas this year, said Matthew Jackson, an associate director at real estate broker Chestertons.

Some of the volume has been taken up in the lower price ranges, where we have got investors who are looking well beyond the centre.

About 6,379 new homes were started in London in the first three months of the year.

That is 39% less than a year earlier and the lowest number for seven quarters, the Molior data shows.
Alliance members met yesterday to discuss and pick through Fine Gaels document for a minority government. The members were angry after weekend reports claimed Independent TDs were demanding a 13bn projects wishlist in exchange for support.

The groups ultimatum comes with the negotiating teams of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail locked in talks about how to agree a minority government under Enda Kenny.

Fianna Fail insists its support will only be secure if Mr Kenny can get the votes of at least six more TDs.

Mr Kenny last week secured the votes of two Independents. Guaranteed support from the six-member alliance would bring him over the line and above 58  the number required to win the vote for taoiseach if and when Fianna Fail abstains in the next Dail vote.

Alliance member and Longford-Westmeath TD Kevin Boxer Moran, speaking to the Irish Examiner, said his group was still waiting for a document agreed between the bigger parties.

We want to see the terms and conditions, then well talk, he said. Wed like if it was as binding as it can be. We want both parties to adhere to it. 

Mr Moran rejected claims that Independents were trying to hold the next government to ransom with demands for up to 13bn in projects.

Not one part of what we are proposing is pork barrel politics, as has been claimed. We deserve more respect. Our desires are for things like broadband, roads, and turbines. Some of these are about policy changes, not billions of euro, he said.

There are mixed views within the alliance about joining a Fine Gael government that would include Labour. There are suggestions the outgoing junior coalition partner is in talks about attempting a return to power with Fine Gael.

Waterford TD John Halligan said the Independent Alliance is divided on the issue.

There are mixed views on it, in the sense that wed be telling Fine Gael who to speak to, he said.

I mean, theyre entitled to speak to who they want to speak to and theyre already speaking to other independents.

So my view would be it wouldnt matter to me whos in government, or who they want to speak to, its their prerogative to do that, if they want to.
Ms Guerin was murdered on the Naas Road, Dublin, on June 26, 1996 while stopped at traffic lights. A motorcycle pulled up beside her and the pillion passenger discharged shots into her car.

Meehan, 47, from Crumlin in Dublin, is serving a life sentence in Portlaoise prison for her murder having being convicted by the non-jury Special Criminal Court in July 1999 after a 31-day-trial. It was the prosecutions case that he drove the motorcycle.

Meehan had applied to quash his 1999 murder conviction on the basis of alleged new or newly discovered facts following an unsuccessful appeal against conviction in 2006. The alleged new evidence concerned matters which emerged during the 2001 Special Criminal Court trial of John Gilligan at the close of which Mr Gilligan was ultimately acquitted of Ms Guerins murder.

Dismissing Meehans application under Section 2 of the Criminal Procedure Act yesterday, Mr Justice George Birmingham said it was entirely clear that no new fact or newly discovered fact had been established.

Mr Justice Birmingham said it was clear all of the material Meehan was seeking to rely upon now was available, at the latest, from the time of the Gilligan trial in 2001 and that the arguments he now presented had been formulated in detail by 2003. He chose not to present those arguments before the Court of Criminal Appeal and the choices he made had consequences, the judge said.

To formulate grounds and arguments, not proceed with them and then seek to resurrect the same grounds and arguments years later as new facts is quite unacceptable and indeed in the view of the court amounts to an abuse of process. Mr Justice Birmingham said the application had morphed from one based on alleged nondisclosure to one that was critical of his previous lawyers.

He said Meehans position toward his Court of Criminal Appeal legal team was even more extreme.

In effect, Meehan said the decision not to proceed with the motion to admit new evidence from the Gilligan and Ward trial transcripts was contrary to his instructions.

He said he never wished to drop his motion to adduce additional evidence but his then lawyers told him he had to although no affidavit was provided by the solicitor who acted for him in the appeal.

Mr Justice Birmingham, who sat with Mr Justice Alan Mahon and Mr Justice John Edwards, said the court was satisfied not only all of the material pointed to by Meehan was properly disclosed to him and his legal team but also that its significance was fully appreciated by them, at the very least by the time of his appeal against conviction in 2003.

Accordingly, the court refused the application.
John Leslie, a cousin of Winston Churchill and whose family seat was Castle Leslie in Co Monaghan, died at home with family at his side.

The Leslie Family are sad to announce that Sir Jack Leslie passed away peacefully in his sleep this morning surrounded by his family, they said.

They described him as an active Knight of Malta, art connoisseur, water colourist, ecologist, disco-dancer, and restorer of historic buildings.

Last November, he was awarded Frances highest honour for his role in the countrys liberation.

He toasted the Legion dHonneur with a glass of champagne in the French embassy in Dublin and dedicated it to all soldiers from the island of Ireland who fought and died between the two great wars.

Mr Leslie became an international news sensation in 2002 as his castle hosted Paul McCartneys wedding to Heather Mills. With the global media gathered at the gates of the estate near Glaslough he announced the superstars nuptials were taking place behind the gates but that it was a secret.

Known for his love of house music in his later years, he celebrated his 85th birthday in 2001 by travelling to Ibiza to party at Privilege, then the worlds biggest nightclub.

The family said this taste in music was perhaps one of the most endearing of Uncle Jacks hobbies.

Each week he would visit the local nightclub to dance to the boom boom music, the family said. He quickly gained respect in the clubbing community to the extent there is a nightclub named after him in Clones, Co Monaghan.

Mr Leslie enlisted in the Second Battalion of the Irish Guards in August 1937, at the age of 21. Three years later he was part of the British Expeditionary Force, landing in France in May 1940.

Commanding a section that battled for two hours to defend Boulogne-sur-Mer against advancing Germans, he was captured and spent the next five years as a prisoner of war. It was believed for a time that he had been killed in action.

During his captivity, he risked his life to spirit out a postcard to his cousin Churchill pleading for a prisoner of war exchange to allow some of his comrades in the camp who had taken ill to be freed. The missive hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London.

In 2009, Mr Leslie published his memoirs, Never A Dull Moment.
The former Irish and Munster player spoke out as residents in the Cork suburb of Bishopstown ramp up their campaign to secure the facility which has been stalled for almost a decade.

The Unicef sporting ambassador, who also presented a TV series to encourage childrens interest in sport and physical activity, said he loves taking his own children to their local playground in Ballinlough.

Its an opportunity for the whole family to get outside  to play, exercise, interact with local families and above all have fun, he said.

It is extremely disappointing, having grown up in Bishopstown, that still to this day local families have to travel to Ballincollig or Fitzgeralds Park to use a playground.

Bishopstown is a unique place, a place I am extremely proud to have grown up in, with unique values and people. But its sadly unique in not having a playground facility.

I fully support the need for a playground facility here and would urge local authorities to finally make this a reality.

His intervention is set to increase pressure on city officials who have blamed a lack of funding for the delay.

Plans for a playground on a site in Murphys Farm were drawn up in 2008 but never materialised.

Frustrated with the delays, local residents last year offered to help fundraise but the council said it wasnt necessary, despite citing lack of funds for the delays.

The issue was discussed at city council late last year when provision was made for the appointment of a consultant to oversee the design process, and advance the project further, subject to finance. But it could be next year before building work starts, they said.

Residents are set to meet senior city officials next Monday in a renewed bid to secure funding.

Playground campaign spokesperson, Aoife OSullivan, said the number of young families in Bishopstown is increasing: We want to put the pressure on to get the budget sooner rather than later.

We have had some really generous offers of help from local business people and professionals and will organise a public meeting to discuss what we can all do next once we know where we stand with City Hall.
The news comes as the Labour Party appeared to rule out re-entering government, despite a weekend of heavy speculation that it was on the verge of striking a deal. The U-turn has been forced by a strong internal backlash within the party.

The likelihood of a vote for Taoiseach tomorrow remains in the balance, but there was a noticeable increase in the intensity of talks yesterday between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.

There was some suggestion last night the vote for Taoiseach could take place on Thursday, should talks conclude successfully.

Mr Kennys position as leader of Fine Gael and as the prospective Taoiseach has been an impediment to progress in talks with Independents, but senior sources have confirmed Mr Kenny will not lead his party into another election.

Given the considerable political uncertainty and speculation that an election is very likely within 12 months, plans are being progressed which would see Mr Kenny lead in an orderly fashion, without de-stabilising any new government.

Sources told the Irish Examiner that the timing of Mr Kennys departure will be his to decide, but he realises the meaning of the general election result, which saw Labour and Fine Gael lose 56 seats between them.

There is a realisation that he will not lead the party into the next election and that clearly brings forward the timeline of his departure, said the source.

There is a desire to ensure the transition is orderly and does not undermine whatever new government is in place, and there is little desire to repeat the events of 2010.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fail held fresh talks in the Provosts House in Trinity College Dublin last night about how a minority government arrangement would work.

Sources close to the talks said agreement on the mechanics of the arrangement were near completion, but detailed discussions on policy were at an early stage.

These talks agreed a mechanism whereby Fianna Fail spokespeople will receive ongoing briefings from government departments, a separate protocol for budgets, and improved interactions in the Dail. While the talks were described as being cordial and productive, it is understood that Fine Gael is looking Fianna Fail support for at least three budgets.

In relation to policy, Irish Water remains the main issue of contention and the sides remain very far apart but there is hope discussions could conclude as early as today.

It is understood that the Provosts House is being made available again today and tomorrow if required.

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Mr Kenny will not lead Fine Gael into the next election and there is an increasing realisation that his tenure has been significantly shortened given his partys general election result.

Plans are afoot to ensure Mr Kenny steps down in a dignified manner which avoids the internal bitterness of a heave, as exhibited in 2010.

At the same time, Fine Gael is aware of its disappointing election result and of the animosity among Independents towards Mr Kenny.

The news that Mr Kennys time at the helm is coming to an end will likely ease the decision of some Independents on whether to come on board in a minority government deal, sources have said.

It will be a timing of his choosing but he is aware that he will not be leading Fine Gael into the next election and we have to prepare for that election being sooner rather than later, said one source.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have made significant progress in their talks about forming a minority government, with a paper detailing how it would work said to be near completion, according to sources.

Following a request from Fianna Fail to move the talks to a neutral venue, Fine Gael reached out to Trinity College Dublin, and the talks convened in Provosts House, built in the 1760s.

The two sides convened in the Provosts Library yesterday, with the venue booked for today and tomorrow morning, according to sources.

Sources indicated that discussions have been cordial and productive, but that key matters of policy have not yet been dealt with and agreed.

It will be a case of nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, said one senior source, who sounded a positive note last night.

Fine Gael is eager to conclude talks with Fianna Fail and a sufficient number of Independent TDs so to allow Mr Kenny be re-elected taoiseach.

Arrangements for Fianna Fail facilitating the government from the opposition benches would have to be viewed alongside a policy framework document, work on which began last night, sources told the Irish Examiner.

Amid the uncertainty, President Michael D Higgins, who celebrated his 75th birthday yesterday, said he was well aware of his responsibilities and capabilities in this situation.

The President, under the terms of the Constitution, can refuse a request to dissolve the Dail and can call a joint session of the Oireachtas and address it, should he feel compelled to do so.

Speaking at a conference in Dublin, Mr Higgins said he hoped whatever happened would be to the benefit of the Irish people.

Meanwhile, Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy has denied reports that her party was involved in talks with Labour or the Green Party about playing a role in government.

A swathe of politicians, past and present, played down the chances of Labour forming a part in the new administration.

Independent TD Michael Healy-Rae said the people of Ireland spoke during the election and rejected the option of Fine Gael and Labour in government.

He said he believed people would be upset by reports that Labour might form part of the next government.

Former Labour leader Pat Rabbitte said he believed party members would be opposed to such a move.
Research shows an increasing number of Irish businesses falling victim to criminals with emerging and traditional threats proving equally difficult to counteract and in some cases resulting in multi-million euro losses.

The most common crime reported by Irish businesses is theft of company assets such as cash and supplies.

More than half of the offences reported by Irish firms in the past two years were related to theft of this sort.

The cost of fraud to businesses has also spiralled out of control since 2014 with companies being landed with an average bill of 1.7m, compared to just shy of 500,000 two years ago.

Garda Commissioner Noirin OSullivan said the report, compiled by Irelands largest professional services firm, PwC, is cause for concern.

The research highlights the need for vigilance on the part of companies and individuals in their commercial dealings, Ms OSullivan said.

Companies are also being left to carry the can for attacks by cyber criminals which have become more prevalent recently.

Cybercrime ranks as the second most common reported crime by businesses in Ireland.

The number of attacks has almost doubled in the past two years with close to half of businesses affected by crime falling victim to such attacks.

The cost of these attacks can be even greater than other crimes with many resulting in bills of up to 4.5m.
Legal argument will apply mainly to Section 4 of the Occupiers Liability Act 1995 and in particular whether, under the section, there was a failure on the part of the National Parks and Wildlife Service to take reasonable care to maintain a boardwalk in a safe condition.

Ms Wall, a 59-year-old from Rathingle Cottages, Swords, Co Dublin, injured her knee when she fell on a boardwalk of partially rotten railway sleepers on August 6, 2013. She claimed she had been directed by signs to walk on the sleepers.

Her barrister, David McParland, argued that the boardwalk constituted a structure under the act, which imposed a far higher duty of care in the maintenance and management of it. The act provided that, in respect of a danger existing on a premises, the occupier owed a recreational user or trespasser a duty not to intentionally injure them or damage their property and not act with reckless disregard for the person or their property.

Yesterday, Kerry county councillors and a farmers representative body added to criticism of the ruling.

Elected representatives attending yesterdays meeting of Kerry County Council said the decision would have disastrous consequences for Kerry, where tourism accounted for one in five jobs and where hillwalking was a huge activity.

Sleepers currently aid walkers on Torc Mountain near Killarney, which is under the remit of the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Work is also under way on providing stone paths on Carrauntoohil, Irelands highest mountain, which is privately owned.

This ruling, if allowed stand, will affect Kerry more than any other county because of its built structures like the sleepers on Torc. You cant describe the result of what effect it would have, said Fianna Fail councillor John Joe Culloty, himself a keen hillwalker.

Killarney-based councillor Michael Gleeson said he had deep concerns about the ruling. If we are going to go down that track, it would be a disaster, he said.

Meanwhile, Seamus Sherlock, rural development chairman with the Irish Cattle & Sheep Farmers Association, said: This sends out a clear message to farmers and landowners that hill walkers can claim successfully for injuries sustained when walking. While the claim related to a structure put in place by the NPWS, there will now be a growing fear that this will embolden others to try their luck in the courts.

Hill walking, by its nature, involves a small degree of risk and those who participate in this activity should be prepared to accept that risk themselves. It is totally unacceptable that a farmer or landowner would be at risk of finding themselves facing a lawsuit through no fault of their own.
Judge Sean O Donnabhain imposed a one-year consecutive sentence on Stephen Hogan, aged 43, of 61 Ashbrook Heights, Togher, Cork, at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.

Hogan has been serving four years, with the last two years suspended, since February for entering the house at Maryborough, Douglas, Cork, as a trespasser to commit a theft on September 19, 2015.

The offences to which he pleaded yesterday were for handling a stolen bank card and using it at various locations throughout Cork to steal over 1,000.

This was an extremely mean type of crime stealing from this elderly lady. At her age she was probably overly trusting. She was a very vulnerable person, Judge O Donnabhain said.

Detective Garda Aonghus Cotter testified that a person  unidentified by the injured party  got into the home of the 84-year-old woman on the pretext that he was carrying out work and he stole her handbag.

Hogan was not charged with entering the house or stealing the card. He pleaded guilty to handling the stolen card and using it in Cork at various locations and in various ATM transactions to cause her a loss of over 1,000.

To make matters worse, another person who was not before the court, used the card throughout Kildare and Dublin in August 2015 and clocked up thefts of over 8,000.

Det Gda Cotter said the bank reimbursed the woman in full for over 9,000 stolen from her. The detective said the womans family were concerned about people calling to her home when she was alone and taking advantage of her.

Hogan was on bail for the other crime when he took part in this one. For that reason the sentence was made consecutive.

Sinead Behan, defence barrister, said, the accused had spent several months on a programme of addiction rehabilitation and was taking up educational opportunities in prison.

The judge said mitigating factors included the plea of guilty because that spared the distress that would have been caused to the elderly victim if she had to come to court to give evidence.
Poverty is more likely to occur in rural areas than urban areas, said SJI director Sean Healy at the launch yesterday of Choices for Equity and Sustainability, the organisations socio-economic review for 2016.

The poverty rate in rural Ireland is 4.5 percentage points higher than in urban Ireland. The border, midlands, and western region has the highest poverty rate and the lowest median income in the State.

Worryingly, [this] region has also seen one of the greatest reductions in full-time employment since 2008 and has one of the lowest levels of IDA-supported employment.

Mr Healy said there is a mismatch between a government policy aimed at attracting foreign direct investment and rural areas which are dominated by micro-businesses and small and medium enterprises.

Government should design policies that will support investment in micro enterprise and small and medium businesses, he said.

Michelle Murphy, SJIs research and policy analyst, said: Latest figures show the trend of falling agency-assisted employment in rural areas continuing, albeit at a slower pace in the south-west, mid-west, and west. Of considerable concern is the continued fall of full-time employment in the border, midlands, and western region, and the southern and eastern region between 2008 and 2015.

Speaking at the launch, Ms Murphy said the figures point to the barriers that a lack of broadband and services such as childcare and public transport present in terms of generating sustainable employment in rural areas.

Rural Ireland urgently needs investment in the provision of public services such as transport, training, and childcare, she said.

The provision of quality broadband to all rural households and businesses must be a priority. State intervention in this area must be prioritised in order to prevent the two tier digital divide growing any wider.

Ms Murphy said this would require a substantial increase in the level of investment but would boost job creation, stimulate domestic consumption, and improve productivity of the economy.
Mr Higgins said some member states took a ruinously and narrowly self-interested response to the crisis of more than 1m refugees fleeing war and persecution.

In a speech on the future of the EU, the President asked why a continent of 500m people felt so threatened by those in need.

He told the Irish Association of Contemporary European Studies in Dublin that Greece, Italy, and Malta have been left to rely largely on their own limited resources after an EU quota system for migrants was rejected.

European media have tended to conflate the image of Europe with that of the small Greek island of Lesbos; they have presented to us a vision of Europe as a frail isolated rock overwhelmed by a tsunami of uprooted people, he said.

When one considers the prosperity and the rich diversity of so much of Europe  where so many people from all regions of the globe have settled peacefully and successfully over so many decades  confidence, not apprehension, should guide our response to the arrival of new migrants.

The President called on people to breathe new life into the EU vision.

He said: Can we leave millions of mothers and fathers, teenagers, children, and babies, to wait in uncertainty, hopeless poverty, and squalor?

Can we avert our gaze from the even larger numbers of those who are trapped in precarious camps in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan? Is our response to be defined by barbed wire, tear gas, and rubber bullets?

President Higgins outlined other areas of difficulty facing the EU, which he said were daunting. He highlighted enduring economic and financial difficulties and youth unemployment, the terror threat in the wake of the Paris and Brussels attacks, xenophobic populism, and political strategies that put at risk genuine democratic pluralism in several member states.

The combined effects of such difficulties are deeply corrosive of our citizens confidence in both their national and European institutions, he said. Alarmingly, those various crises only fuel and amplify one another.

The President said European leaders are trying harder to curb the numbers of refugees at all costs.

He said they are doing this out of fear exacerbated by the threat of terrorism and to reassure public opinion which tends to view a security crisis and refugee crisis through the same lens.

Mr Higgins

said the controversial Turkey-EU deal to curb the smuggling of migrants and refugees to Europe was an important step.

But he added: I strongly believe we should be wary of bending European and international human rights legislation to breaking point.

President Higgins asked if a politically convenient response today could jeopardise the European Union in the future.

He said the EU has a duty under the Geneva Convention to help refugees.

To give protection, food, and shelter to those who are fleeing war, oppression, or starvation is a matter of fundamental, universal human solidarity. It is also a matter of legal responsibility, he said. There can be no cap on this fundamental responsibility, no limit set on the number of those eligible to request asylum.
Declan McEvoy, aged 50, was principal at the criminal law firm William Early Solicitors in Carlow town, when his fathers firm, JM McEvoy in Gorey, was being investigated. His father had also previously been State solicitor in the Wexford town.

The Law Society allowed Mr McEvoy Sr to retire from the firm on the condition that his son took it over. Declan McEvoy later used the 297,000 he fraudulently obtained from AIB in order to clear debts in his fathers firm.

Felix McEnroy, defending, told Judge Melanie Greally that a series of skeletons started coming out of the cupboard of the Gorey practice and McEvoy obtained a mortgage fraudulently to mop it up and maintain both firms.

He made a very serious error in judgment Mr McEnroy said and he tried to solve problems that in many respects had not been his creation.

McEvoy, who now has an address, in Melbourne, Australia, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to dishonestly obtaining a mortgage with AIB for 297,000 on dates between May 5, 2009, and July 20, 2009. He has no previous convictions.

Detective Sergeant Martin Griffin told Ronan Kennedy, prosecuting, that when McEvoy accepted the offer from AIB, it was on the condition he was the registered owner of the property in Castleknock, Dublin, for which he was taking out the mortgage. It later transpired his sister was the owner of the house and McEvoy had acted as her solicitor when she later sold it for 310,000 in December 2009.

The buyer had put down a deposit on the property in August 2009, a month after McEvoy drew down his mortgage for the house.

Det Sgt Griffin said McEvoy made the monthly mortgage repayments until the High Court seized all his assets and froze his bank accounts in September 2011.

Another Carlow law firm, OGorman and Begley Solicitors, who signed the undertaking for McEvoys mortgage, was ultimately sued when the fraud was discovered and McEvoy wasnt able to keep up with the repayments. Their insurance company later paid AIB 245,000, the balance remaining on the mortgage. AIB then reported the case to the Garda fraud squad.

McEvoy had been living in Australia since 2012 with his wife and teenage sons. He returned to Ireland last January, surrendered his passport, and pleaded guilty.

Judge Greally said she needed time to consider the case and adjourned sentencing until April 27. She remanded McEvoy on bail.
Safe Ireland says the statistics not only exclude the 4,000 mothers and children in emergency refuge accommodation each year, but also those who flee local authority homes because of violence but are not classed as homeless.

Those numbers are unclear but the fact that almost 5,000 requests for refuge had to be turned down last year suggest there are many more women who are effectively homeless because it is not safe to return to their home.

Sharon Halloran, chief executive of Safe Ireland, said women and children leaving violent homes were caught in the crossfire of the national housing crisis.

She said the 37 frontline domestic violence services surveyed for the organisations latest research reported that they had never before seen things so bad for victims.

Domestic violence is simply not on the homeless agenda, she said.

According to local authority practice, women leaving violent homes are not being considered homeless. Consequently they are being further neglected and rendered invisible in the current housing responses.

Ms Halloran will today publish a new report, The State We Are In, the second in Safe Irelands biennial safety audits, which draws on interviews with service providers and service users.

Two thirds of the victims said they suffered physical abuse at least once a week, while one third suffered physical, emotional or psychological abuse every day.

Contrary to popular belief, the violence did not always escalate gradually  half the women reported that the very first incident involved a serious risk to their lives such as attempted strangulation, assault while pregnant, or threats to kill the victim or her children.

Ms OHalloran said that the shortage of refuge places, lack of social housing, scarcity of private rented accommodation, and spiralling rents were compounded by the dismal response of the justice system to their plight.

Our most recent legal research now tells us that it is highly improbable that a domestic violence case will actually form the basis of a criminal prosecution.

Domestic violence is not a crime under Irish law and so it continues to be dealt with, not as a serious offence, but as a lesser matter even though our research tells us that women are being threatened with their lives daily.

In January, Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald published a new national strategy on domestic, sexual, and gender-based violence which aims to overhaul the way gardai and the criminal justice system approach domestic violence cases and protect victims.

At the time, Ms Fitzgerald said: Domestic violence and sexual violence are pernicious evils and a blight on any civilised society.

Ms OHalloran acknowledged there had been significant commitments and policy changes with a view to reforming the policing of domestic violence but she said it was essential the work be supported by whatever new government is formed.

We are asking all political parties to face up to domestic violence, to commit to making domestic violence a defining issue in a government programme.
Cork City Council has given the green light for the demolition of the former Coca-Cola bottling site on the Carrigrohane Road, just west of County Hall, and for the construction of 92 student apartments  a mix of three to six-bedroom apartments  in buildings ranging in height from four to seven storeys.

The application also includes plans to build a student gym, games room, meeting/study rooms, laundry facilities, and to provide basement parking for cars and bikes.

The decision came after the developers, Gainstar Ltd Partnership, answered a request for further information about the adequacy of the projects foul and storm drainage proposals, and following some minor changes to its pedestrian and vehicular access points.

Hundreds of construction jobs will be created when building work starts.

Gainstar says the project will also help ease the citys chronic student accommodation shortage  estimated to be in the region of 1,000 beds.

Engineering documents lodged with the planning application examined the flood history of the site and found that it escaped flooding in August 1986 and February 1990, when the River Lee overflowed the Lee Fields and flooded the Carrigrohane Road.

However, the site, sold by Coca-Cola in 2005, flooded to a depth of up to half a metre in November 2009 after the ESB released vast quantities of water from the Inniscarra dam, some 14km upstream.

The resulting deluge flooded County Hall on the neighbouring site, and the Kingsley Hotel across the road, along with UCCs nearby Gateway building.

They were among several large buildings which suffered extensive damage, resulting in a High Court case taken by UCC against the ESB.

The developers prepared a comprehensive flood risk assessment report which recommended the building levels be raised above potential flood levels, the implementation of a flood emergency plan, and its linking in with the citys early flood warning system.

The flood report also recommended robust mitigation measures, including flood barriers and specially designed ramps to its basement car park.

And it pointed out that the citys 60m flood defence plan, which includes proposed defences such as raised embankments along the Lee Fields, should reduce flood risk in the area in future.
Sister Clare Theresa Crockett, 33, was the last to be dug out of the rubble after a stairwell collapsed in the school where she taught in Playa Prieta in the western province of Manabi.

Sr Clare, from the Brandywell area of Derry City, was a nun with the Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother and taught 400 children in the Colegio Sagrada Familia school, including how to play the guitar.

She was with six Ecuadorian postulants, in the early stages of joining the order, when the disaster struck.

She was a superstar. Everybody loved her, said her cousin Emmet Doyle.

He said Sr Clare had been teaching music before the earthquake hit, measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale.

More than 260 people died and 2,500 others were injured with the epicentre 26km from Muisne in a sparsely populated area of fishing ports popular with tourists.

She was the last sister found, said Mr Doyle.

She was trying to get them down the stairs and the staircase collapsed. We knew she was trapped but information has been slow to come out. She died as she lived, helping others.

The US Geological Survey said it was a shallow quake and it was the strongest to hit the country since 1979.

A state of emergency was declared in six of Ecuadors 24 provinces  with 10,000 armed forces deployed and 4,600 national police sent to the towns near the epicentre. Four nuns had been in one of the school buildings, where they lived on the third floor, when the quake hit.

Another Irish nun, Sr Therese Ryan, 36, was the first pulled free with a fractured ankle and several bruises. Two others were rescued, Sr Estela Morales, 40, the superior from Spain, and Sr Merly Alcybar, 34, from Ecuador, who survived a wall falling on her.

The five dead postulants were named by the order as Jazmina, Mayra, Maria Augusta, Valeria, and Catalina. Two others were pulled from the rubble after their voices were heard.

Sr Clare had spent nearly 15 years of her life in consecration to the Lord, Sr Teresa of the Order in Cantabria, Spain said.

She was a generous sister with a special gift for reaching out to children and young people.

Sr Clares family appealed for privacy and said: We lost our daughter, sister and aunt Sr Clare Theresa Crockett as a result of the earthquake in Ecuador.

The nuns, including Sr Clare, were working in recent days on flood relief efforts after the region was devastated by heavy rains before the quake hit.

The order said: The flooding left countless families stranded, without homes.
The research asserts to be the first of its type. It found the effect is strongest for those countries that have liberalised cannabis laws for more than five years.

The study has been criticised by decriminalisation campaigners, who said the results were skewed and said prohibition wasted scarce resources arresting teenagers.

The report used data from the WHO Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children survey in 38 European and North American countries.

It took information on the control policies of countries from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

Our study showed the liberalisation policy in general was associated with higher levels of cannabis use, and depenalisation and partial prohibition policies were particularly correlated with regular use, said the report.

The report said there had been surprisingly limited examination of the effects of liberalisation.

It said there were considerable concerns about increased usage being induced by greater access, favourable social norms and reduced penalties.

Despite its limitations, this study for the first time examined the associations between country-level cannabis control policies and cannabis use from a global perspective in the adolescent population, said the report

It broke down cannabis control policies to four types: Criminal prohibition; depenalisation (or prohibition with cautioning or diversion); decriminalisation; and partial prohibition (including effective legalisation).

It said that, of 38 countries in North America and Europe, 20 countries had liberalised cannabis to some extent during the study period. Of these 20, four had adopted depenalisation, 11 had decriminalised cannabis use, and seven had implemented partial prohibition.

Adolescents were more likely to ever use cannabis, use in the past year and use regularly if they lived in countries that had liberalised cannabis use, the research said.

It said that while cannabis use was higher among boys, the relationship between liberalisation and consumption among boys was smaller in boys that in girls.

Cannabis liberalisation was significantly correlated with a higher odds of using cannabis regularly after the policy had been introduced for 5-10 years and more than 10 years, whereas the correlation was not significant within five years of policy implementation, the report said.

The research, entitled Cannabis liberalization and adolescent cannabis use: a cross-national study in 38 countries, was published in Public Library of Science journal PLos ONE and made available in Ireland through the Health Research Board.

However, Graham de Barra of Help Not Harm, which is lobbying for a move away from criminalising drug use, said the research had made a categorical blunder by wrongfully defining the USA as a country that had liberalised cannabis policy, saying only two of its states had at the time.

Cannabis use is high in the USA and, compared to some liberalised countries in Europe, the rate of use is much higher, he said. So, by wrongfully placing it in the category of a country with a liberalised policy, the results are skewed and deemed inconclusive due to statistical manipulation.

Mr de Barra said the annual rate of drug overdose in Portugal, which had decriminalised drug possession, was three per million, compared to 45 per million in Ireland. He said Irish policy should prioritise harm reduction, treatment, and education to reduce overdoses and harmful use.

The current approach wastes scarce resources arresting teenagers with small amounts of cannabis, which is making drug use more harmful and restricts employment and opportunities for young people, he said.

http://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/25303/

Rise in potency of cannabis

Earlier this month, the European drugs agency reported that the THC strength of herbal cannabis that is being produced in domestic factories or grow houses was two to three times greater than that of naturally grown imported herbal cannabis.

THC is one of the two active constituents of cannabis, along with CBD. The type of cannabis herb produced in grow houses in Ireland and the rest of Europe also contain low levels of CBD, which is known for anti-psychotic properties. This means users are getting the double whammy of higher THC and lower protective CBD.

The EMCDDA said average purity of cannabis herb in the EU rose from 7%-9.7% in 2010 to 8%-12% in 2014. The strength of imported resin also rose, partly in response to the demand for herb, from 6%-11.6% in 2010 to 11.7%-18.7% in 2014. Resin also tends to have higher amounts of CBD.

Strengths of drugs are not regularly tested in Ireland. The last study on cannabis, published in November 2011, found that the strength of cannabis herb seized between September and November 2010 was between 4% and 16%, while resin ranged from 1% to 5%. Among herbal seizures, those from grow houses were between 11% and 16%, while imported herb was between 4% and 9%.

Cormac OKeeffe
The climbdown follows a weekend of speculation the party was on the verge of finalising a deal, but senior party sources last night said Labour was unlikely to enter government.

Party leader and Tanaiste Joan Burton along with deputy leader Alan Kelly and Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin last week met Taoiseach Enda Kenny.

Speculation had been rife about a new deal with Fine Gael, despite the parties losing 56 seats between them.

A senior party source last night told the Irish Examiner there was significant scepticism to the idea of re-entering government, but suggested some arrangement could be possible which would see it supporting a government from the opposition benches.

However, the depth of feeling against doing a deal with Fine Gael surfaced with several leading party members venting their fury.

One prominent Labour TD stated his strong opposition to re-entering government with Fine Gael.

Cork East TD and acting junior minister Sean Sherlock said his party had no mandate from the people to go back into government.

Speaking on Cork 103 FM, he was asked about his previous comments about Labour staying out of power being the best course for the party.

That remains my position, we did not receive a mandate to go into government.

To the question are we in discussions, the answer is no, he said.

He confirmed Fine Gael has been wooing Labour in a bid to securing a deal.

Has there been overtures from Fine Gael to individual members at the highest levels? The answer to that is: absolutely yes, there has. Does Fine Gael want us as part of a minority government? The answer to that is yes, he said.

Mr Sherlock said he was due to meet his own party supporters tonight but was aware of the strong opposition to re-entering power.

There is a school of thought within Labour that, to remain relevant, you have to remain part of a new government.

I dont subscribe to that school of thought. We didnt receive a mandate to go into government.

Well, there is an element of that [being lost in opposition] but you have to go into power with a mandate.

Speaking about what happens if Labour were to go into power, Mr Sherlock confirmed there would be no need to change leader.

However, he said that his strong view is that the leader should resign and that there is a mood for change.

If we transition into government there is no need to change leader, but if we go into Opposition a leadership race must happen.

I am giving Joan some latitude, she said she would consider her position once a government is formed. I am happy to allow her that time, but I do believe there will have to be a leadership contest.

I am not sure if going into government is in the best interests of the party  supporters are not in the mood for going into power, he said.
Union of Students in Ireland (USI) president Kevin Donoghues comments come following revelations in yesterdays Irish Examiner that employers were accused of assaulting and bullying interns, as well as making them work unfair hours and using them to replace paid employees.

Mr Donoghue said the details contained within internal documents released to this newspaper came as no surprise to the USI, which had experienced general frustration with the scheme.

Individually there have been some success stories, but only a handful in reality, Mr Donoghue said of JobBridge.

Yet politicians use those individual cases, small as they may be, as vindication of the scheme.

In my opinion, JobBridge is one of the worst things to happen to young people in Ireland for decades, because it proliferates a negative working environment for many.

Mr Donoghue said while there are thousands of good employers out there, the scheme allows unscrupulous businesses to abuse it. He said it is now time for JobBridge to be abolished by the incoming government.

The choice is simple for the new government: Allow JobBridge to continue to exist or work on behalf of young people, he said.

The outgoing USI president was critical of the six-month bans handed down to two businesses which were accused of bullying interns.

The fact that so many companies violated and exploited JobBridge and are now back on the scheme is indicative that it is more concerned with the numbers than with the welfare of interns, said Mr Donoghue.

It is also hugely concerning, considering some were found to have bullied interns, that some businesses werent off the list full stop.

There shouldnt be just a slap on the wrist. To turn around to two employers who bullied staff and say wait six months and have a go at it again is outrageous, he said.

One of the reports seen by this newspaper revealed an interns relief at being released from working with the host business, which had given her no training or mentoring through her internship.

Intern is relieved to be given an easy way out of getting out of this internship. States that she was afraid to leave of her own accord and suspects that her reputation in this particular industry would be seriously damaged if she attempted to do so, wrote the inspector.

Mr Donoghue said the fear experienced by this intern is indicative of wider concerns among young people.

There is a chronic fear among young people in some industries who think if Im not willing to work for six or nine months for nothing, will I get a job? he said.

Meanwhile, the Anti Austerity Alliance has called for the businesses who received suspensions under the scheme to be named and shamed.

We warned that incidents like these would happen but were told ad nauseam by the previous government that there were strict enforcement rules, said TD Paul Murphy.

However, now it has come to light that all the companies who were banned have had their suspensions lifted. So there has been no punishment for the companies while the interns have been abused. If an employee brought an employer to the Workplace Relations Commission the company would be named, the same should apply here, and all banned companies should be named and shamed.
In a way, Frugalisto, Luka Blooms latest album, has been 45 years in the making.

Its closing track, Wave Up To The Shore, recorded by his brother Christy Moore on his 1976 self-titled Black Album, was the first track Bloom wrote, in 1971, that he decided wasnt shit.

It was inspired by his English teacher at Newbridge College, Pat Colgan, and his now wife, Margaret, who had encouraged him to be creative and write.

Yet every time I've recorded an album since I wrote it, I've attempted to record it but it never seems to come together. As a result of that I worried I'd never get to record it, says Bloom, declaring he is grateful to Christy for recording it because otherwise it might have been forgotten forever.

But it's been like a beacon of light in the background of my life for many, many years. When I was in Lettercollum House it emerged again and I got to sing it with my nephew, Gavin, who lives in Timoleague. I'm just so happy that that song made it onto a record, for me it's a perfect ending to the record.

Bloom says Gavin Moore helped reinvigorate the song - and that theme of rejuvenation runs right through Frugalisto. Bloom moved to Doolin, Co Clare, in 2012.

I just kept feeling this pull to the west, and in the end it became irresistible, he says. I just wanted to immerse myself in that world and I've done so.

The Moy Hill Community Garden, near Lahinch, has inspired him, as has its head honcho, former Irish surf champion, Fergal Smith.

It's a beautiful thing to be inspired by people who are less than half my age. They're just a remarkable group of young people, he says, adding that the title track, indeed the word frugalisto, was inspired by Smiths lifestyle.

Has Bloom himself become more of an environmentalist since his move to Clare?

I definitely think my life has become enriched by owning and buying less, and by placing less emphasis on what I accumulate and more emphasis on what I do and what I contribute.

Though Frugalisto was inspired by a new life in Clare, it came alive in West Cork.

Recorded by John Fitzgerald (a remarkable man)in Lettercollum House in Timoleague, it features a host of local legends, like the aforementioned Gavin Moore, Bill Shanley, Jimmy Higgins, and Paula K OBrien.

In the press release, Bloom calls it the best recording experience of his life. How so, I ask.

I am prone to a tiny bit of exaggeration from time to time, he says, laughing, but it was certainly up there.

"But obviously when I recorded Riverside in America 26 years ago, that was a pretty spectacular experience that literally changed my life. But in terms of pure enjoyment of time spent in a studio in a beautiful part of Ireland with amazing people, I think it's very hard to beat the experience I had last year in Lettercollum House.

Bloom says he had been in another studio earlier last year trying to record the album, but it wasnt a good experience, and he became worried that things might not work out for Frugalisto.

Doubt is the part of the lot of the person who chooses this road. You kinda hope that everything is going to go smoothly and especially these days when people like myself are functioning without record contracts, which means that every day spent in a studio is financed by me, not by a record company.

"And then you wonder, in the age of streaming, you're going to embark on this road of making a record, you're wondering will anyone bother buying it because they can get it on Spotify or something. So it's nerve-wrecking.

If something goes wrong early in the process, you can be forgiven for thinking, 'Hmmm I wonder am I doing the right thing here?' Particularly in my case where I've made 20 albums, prior to making Frugalisto. So there was that anxiety, but the moment I arrived in Lettercollum House, the welcome I got from from John Fitzgerald and the people in Lettercollum, I just knew that this was a place I and my songs would feel completely at home.

"And I also knew something which is a very magical experience to have, which is that sometimes you go to studios and the attitude in the studio is you're privileged to be working in their studio, I mean you wouldn't believe some of the attitudes people can encounter going to studios.

"But it's the exact opposite in Lettercollum, where you weren't just made feel welcome, you were given a sense that these people were privileged that you were choosing to work there.

"It turns the whole thing on its head and just makes you realise that, 'If I just relax and trust and collaborate with these people, all they really want to do is help me.' That's just amazing.

From the gorgeous tones of the lovelorn Australia, through the ridiculous fun of Give It a Go (which sees a middle-aged man who may or may not be Bloom decide to pick up a surfboard because the waves are calling me) and Warrior, which one can read as a continuation of the title track or, as Bloom confides, an antidote to mixed martial arts - I just can't see any way that any of this could be in any way good for any part of society, Frugalisto is an affecting listen.

Just home from six weeks in Australia, and with Dutch dates and a German tour to come this year, it is De Barras in Clonakilty that hosts Bloom next, on Thursday.

It's possibly the only gig I'll get to do with a lot of the musicians who actually played on the record, says Bloom.

The group of people assembling for this evening in Clonakility have never all played together before and they're only assembling because they happen to be present on Frugalisto.

"It's just going to be a special Clonakilty evening. De Barra's in Clonakilty is a unique and special room in the eyes of a lot of singers and musicians.

"I've been going there for maybe 25 years now and it's always magical, it's always special, and sometimes it's absolutely packed and sometimes it's not, but it's always special, I'm always up for it, it's always different, but I think this one is going to be a special night because of the album.

Luka Bloom launches Frugalisto at De Barras on Thursday. Tickets (15) available at the venue and Debarra.ie
LEAVING Cert students around the country are currently in the middle of the oral and practical exams that precede the main event in June. With so much attention on these, it would be easy to let paperwork slide. But any families hoping to avail of grant assistance for third-level education next year should know that the Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI) application service is open, and the sooner they apply the better.

Susi provides assistance for approved full-time studies in further education (Post Leaving Certificate courses), higher education and postgraduate courses. In some circumstances help is also provided for students who wish to study outside of the State.

The amount students are eligible for depends on the family income  a household income of below 22,703 entitles the student to the maximum assistance. But depending on family size, reducing grants are available for families with incomes up to 64,700. Extra allowance is also made where families have more than one child in college.

I spoke to head of communications with Susi, Graham Doyle, and asked if students and their parents really need to prioritise grant applications, so many months away from college.

Definitely, was the answer.

Last year, they received 108,000 applications, awarding approximately 83,000 student grants.

The system is set up to be as straightforward as possible but, depending on your familys situation, there could be a sizeable amount of paperwork involved.

Doyle was particularly keen to emphasise early action for parents who are self-employed, farming or in receipt of rental income.

In these cases students or their families will be required to submit a full set of trading accounts for 2015 as well as confirmation that the tax returns for 2015 income have been made, he explained.

Many of us delay tax returns but the Susi system will only look at the previous years finances so it is vital to get these sorted as soon as possible they will look for 2015 accounts.

Being organised is key to getting a quick decision on your application.

In cases of students from whom we require no documentation (because we have been able to verify all their information through our direct links with other bodies) we will be awarding and refusing straight away, Doyle said.

However, there are many applications where we must request documentation and we will be relying on students submitted requested documentation as soon as possible to allow us fully process such applications.

I asked what were the most common mistakes and omissions the service encounters. The key one is that students often leave it very late to apply. For new applications, our priority processing deadline is July 8.

Last year we received more than 16,500 applications after the priority processing deadlines. Students do not need to wait to complete their Leaving Certificate or receive their results.

They should apply and indicate their first choice course on their application.

Students who plan on applying for a grant need to mention that in their CAO application. There is a box to be ticked to say they plan to apply and this enables Susi to get information directly from the CAO later in the application process.

Doyle added: When making an account, a student is required to create a username, password and PIN number. These details should be remembered as they will be required by the student throughout the year to access his/her online Susi account.

The Susi system also caters for people who are applying in their own right rather than based on parents income.

I would advise students in that situation to visit our website www.susi.ie and to review the eligibility criteria, Doyle said.

They should pay particular attention to the income section and to make sure that they are applying as the correct class of applicant, ie dependent or independent. There are a number of factors to be considered when deciding what class of applicant a student is.

Already in receipt of a grant? Dont forget about your renewal application.

Students who wish to renew their grants should access their online accounts to do so. The majority of students will be asked a small number of questions to ascertain whether there has been any change in circumstances that would impact on the grant that they had previously received.

We do also randomly select a small proportion of renewal students for a full re-assessment. The priority processing deadline for renewal students is June 6. We will be writing out to all renewal students over the coming days.

DEAL OF THE WEEK

Do you fancy a new smartphone?

For the month of April, Three are having an online sale. They are offering up to 50 off a range of phones  with both bill pay and prepay options.

Bill pay offers include the iPhone 6S  the 4G enabled model, with 16gb of memory, is available for 199.

For customers who are looking to avoid any upfront cost, the Samsung Galaxy A3 is free once you commit to a monthly contract.

Bill pay offers are subject to 24-month minimum term on one of Threes monthly contracts.

Meanwhile, prepay customers can get the Huawei G7 for 169.99. Like the iPhone 6S, this model is 4g enabled and comes with 16GB of memory. It also has a sizeable 5.5 screen  perfect for those who want to watch TV and videos on the go.

These deals are not available in-store, so youd need to go to three.ie before April 30 to avail of the offers.
THE explosive prospect of a contested convention is drawing closer for Republicans in the US presidential race as the party manoeuvres to block frontrunner Donald Trump from winning the nomination.

Such a convention has been dubbed the nuclear option for a good reason. Its tough to pull off and extremely divisive, so much so that its almost 70 years since the party saw its last one.

Trump sees it as tantamount to a declaration of war and has forecast rioting by his supporters if it happens.

He has notched up huge victories in nominating primaries around the country and he is not about to allow the prize to be snatched from him by the party hierarchy who see him as a demagogue and political neophyte who will destroy the party and sink its chances of winning the White House against presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

They would prefer a more orthodox standard bearer in the November election and have had their eye on drafting in House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, who was Mitt Romneys vice-presidential running mate in their 2012 unsuccessful race against President Barack Obama.

Ryan has been insisting for some time that he has no interest in such a scenario and repeated this assertion last week.

Bernie Sanders supports allowing 9/11victims' families sue Saudi Arabia https://t.co/ZVEwJtjQjP pic.twitter.com/5Qbw7DhSoK  Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) April 18, 2016

Then again he also denied he was interested in becoming House Speaker last October, but subsequently took the post when his party urged him to do so.

Regardless of where Ryan stands on the issue, however, the party establishment has been exploring the likelihood of a contested convention for some time as a last-ditch effort to block Trump from securing the nomination in July if he arrives at the convention without having secured the required 1,237 delegates.

Foreseeing this, Trump has upped the ante and predicted rioting by his supporters if he arrives with the most delegates and doesnt win the nomination.

While at present he certainly has the most delegates  743 to 545 for Ted Cruz and 143 for John Kasich  he has not yet reached the required magic number and Cruz is edging closer to him.

A contested convention, also known as a brokered convention, becomes almost inevitable when no candidate has amassed the 1,237 delegate votes needed to win the nomination in advance of the convention.

A candidate still might gather enough delegates by the time balloting begins, in which case the nomination is settled on the first ballot.

But if there is no winner after the first vote, new rounds of voting begin and the rules allow delegates to switch teams and vote for whomever they wish.

The chances of this happening are increasing rather than receding and the billionaire businessmans successes have failed to dampen down the dump Trump movement within the party.

If anything, it has become more emboldened and, having failed to halt Trumps march with million-dollar ad campaigns against him, these establishment Republicans now see the convention as their last stand.

Certainly, their battle will be as tough as it will be ugly. For a start, its a battle they will have to fight on a number of fronts.

Firstly, they must somehow find ways to overcome Trumps delegate strength. Then they must decide whether to rally behind Cruz or sideline the Texas senator because they tend to loathe him almost as much as Trump, though for now they are content to use him to slow down Trump in the primaries.

But on convention day if they decide to somehow sideline Cruz they then have to plot the third, even tougher, battle  drafting in an establishment candidate of the calibre of House Speaker Ryan.

Battle for New York between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders heats up https://t.co/mteLWu4fIK (GM) pic.twitter.com/4lTzpQSK5E  Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) April 16, 2016

All bets would be off. The haggling and deal making would intensify and the convention would become a pitched battle for votes.

But, amid the turmoil, Trump is unlikely to stand by meekly, watching such a scenario unfolding before him.

He would undoubtedly put up a fierce fight and rally his supporters inside and outside the convention. And if he fails to get the nomination in the first round of voting, he would very likely fulfill his threat of running as an independent, taking millions of voters with him. It would be the death-knell for the party and doom its White House chances.

Its not surprising, therefore, that its almost 70 years since the last contested convention happened for Republicans and over 60 years since the Democrats faced one.

The last truly brokered convention for Republicans was in 1948 when they nominated Thomas Dewey, and in 1952 for the Democrats when they picked Adlai Stevenson.

However, both brokered candidates went on to lose their respective elections  Harry Truman defeated Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower defeated Stevenson.

Indeed, one has to go back over 80 years to find the last winning US presidential nominee produced by a brokered convention, namely Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt in 1932.

Thus, messy conventions tend not to bode well for either party. The last time a Republican convention opened without a nominee decided in the primaries was in 1976. Gerald Ford had a small lead in the popular vote and delegate count over California governor Ronald Reagan.

Haggling ensued, but on the first ballot enough delegates switched to Fords camp to secure him the nomination. He subsequently lost in the general election to Jimmy Carter.

The last time a leading Democratic candidate came to the partys convention without a majority of delegates was in 1984, when Walter Mondale was a few dozen short.

Despite a last-ditch effort to persuade some delegates to deprive Mondale of a first-ballot victory, he went on to win the nomination but subsequently lost the election to Ronald Reagan.

Mindful of this history of contested or chaotic convention, leaders of both parties have sought in more recent years to avoid conflict and use conventions to present a united front to the nation and rally it behind their chosen candidate.

Thus, Republicans may yet decide the nuclear option would be a step too far for the party. Instead, they may choose to ignore their condemnations of Trumps demagogic rhetoric and row in behind him rather than detonate the party.

Indeed, its quite conceivable that enough Republicans will come together to work on a makeover of the candidate  and it wont be about his hair, either.

He may be harsh and demagogic but some Republicans believe he is more malleable than Cruz. He may have few discernible policies, apart from exploiting his supporters rage and hurling invective at vulnerable minorities, but once the Republican machine cranks up it could succeed in taming him sufficiently  or at least training him not bite as much.

Already Republicans are beginning to come on board the Trump bandwagon, following the high-profile example of New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and a survey by the Washington Post found 31 of 54 senators were ready to support the Republican nominee if its Trump.

But some Republicans who cannot stomach Trump call his backers Vichy Republicans, a reference to elements of the French government seen as collaborators with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The leading conservative George Will said these Vichy Republicans are collaborators with the takeover of their party.

Other Republicans have vowed to sit out the election if Trump gets the nomination, while still others say they will back a third-party candidate, fearing major losses in the Senate and House of Representatives in the general election with Trump or at the top of the ticket.

So even if the convention doesnt go as far as the nuclear option and decides to stick with Trump, the party would still be riven by chaos and would remain bitterly divided, possibly for decades. Uniting behind Trump or dumping him could thus spell disaster in almost equal measure for the party.

Several former contestants of 'The Apprentice' have spoken out against Donald Trump https://t.co/7EjjNdXes8 pic.twitter.com/gvt5uMBr5L  Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) April 16, 2016

Meanwhile, the Democratic partys worries are not over yet either. Hillary Clinton may have all but secured the magic number of delegates to defeat her rival Senator Bernie Sanders for the nomination but she now faces the task of uniting her party for the general election campaign and healing the wounds opened in the battle with Sanders.

While the challenges facing the party at its convention, also in July, fade by comparison to those facing Republicans, they are still formidable. Their convention wont be contested but it will pose some headaches for the party.

Sanders has fought a strong and spirited battle against Clinton and deprived her of a number of primary victories and can still notch up more delegates in the remaining contests until June.

But, at this point, it is almost impossible for him to catch up on her because most of the remaining state contests are based on proportional representation. So unless he has huge victories his delegate number will continue to fall short.

Of the 2,383 delegate votes needed for the Democratic nomination, she has 1,758 (including 469 super delegates) to Sanders 1,069 (including 31 super delegates)  super delegates are mainly party leaders and elected party officials and are free to support any candidate regardless of the popular vote.

So while Democrats may not be heading into a nightmare scenario at their convention, Republicans will be likely facing into a bruising political civil war.
Dear Enda, First of all, you know I have no axe to grind (well, maybe one, but Ill come back to that in a minute).

Ive never been a supporter of Fine Gael and you know Im not a member. Where I could, I supported the work of the last government, and I strongly wanted to see it re-elected.

That government made mistakes and some bad choices, and I was critical of them when I had to be. But Ive argued before that history would be kind to the last government.

It looks like you have a chance to be elected head of a minority government, one that will struggle to keep on top of the numbers in the Dail.

Therell be many who will argue that youre only serving at the will and pleasure of Fianna Fail and that theyll be looking for opportunities to pull you down whenever it suits them.

Heres what you need to do. Go for it. Just go for it. Decide right now that youre going to be the best leader you can be of the best government you can put together.

You have a golden opportunity to once and for all establish your reputation as the most successful leader your party has ever had, and to do another considerable service for your country.

Look at where youve come from. Youve been written off throughout your career. You were written off when you took over the leadership of your party  a lightweight, everyone said  and it was confidently predicted that you didnt have what it takes to beat Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen.

But you did all that, and kept a government going through some of the toughest years and hardest decisions imaginable. Now, theres a real prospect of economic growth, a real chance of a balanced budget once again, and a real opportunity to fix some of the things that desperately need fixing.

One caveat before I go on. Like many others I suspect, I will oppose in any democratic way I can any attempt by the Labour Party to re-enter government.

I have no objection to the party playing a constructive role, based on values and policies, in supporting the new government from the opposition benches where it can  and opposing the government when it must.

But Labour was soundly rejected by the people in the election. It failed completely to communicate its purpose and intent throughout its time in government, and it quite simply has no mandate to enter government now.

Were it to do so it would split the party irreparably. Labour does have a responsibility  the responsibility to seek to rebuild support for its values and character. It can only do that by refreshing itself  not by further exhausting itself in government.

You do have a mandate. Yes, its a diminished one, but youre still the leader of the largest party in the government.

You have three simple tasks. The first is to present a fresh and invigorated government to the people.

You will have fresh faces in your cabinet anyway I assume, with the arrival of a number of independent TDs. Dont give them token jobs, give them real, tough jobs. Be prepared to make the same demands of them that you would of your own.

And within your own party, find the fresh faces. There are people who have served you very well, both from the backbenches and from some of the more thankless jobs at junior minister level  people like Paul Kehoe, Regina Doherty, Damien English. It is time for you to ask some of the more senior people, who have looked increasingly tired in the last year or so, to take a rest.

I dont know how people like Heather Humphreys, Michael Noonan and Richard Bruton would react to being returned to the bench, but its a bullet you have to bite if you want your new government to look and feel re-invigorated.

The first way to send out a message that you are determined to make this government work and last is to inject new energy into your team, as hard as that is. The second is to re-design the portfolios to reflect the real priorities that face us now.

Thats always a bit of a headache. If the senior civil servants dont like what you have in mind, they have ways, as you know, of slowing things down. But it has to be done. The crisis in homelessness and the acute shortage of housing requires both an ideological shift and a real driver. It will need carrot and stick, and it will need to be led by someone whose sole focus is on making every available agency work as hard as it can.

Thats only one example. But how you design your government, and the people you choose, are a real statement of intent. And those choices will also heavily influence some mildly important stuff, like media reaction.

Its been a long time in Ireland since a government was given a honeymoon, and your next government wont have high expectations attached to it. A government that looks fresh and different  and tough and focused  will help to change that.

But the real defining issue is the set of priorities you establish on day one. This cannot be a government like any other. It must be one that starts with an open and frank acknowledgement that the people of Ireland, for the first time in our history, rejected simplistic tax cuts at the last election.

Thats not to say that people arent feeling burdened by taxes, its simply an assertion that people recognised that there are things wrong in Ireland, and they must be the priority.

Homelessness, especially family homelessness, is top of the agenda. But so is childcare, real high quality childcare, operating to decent standards and not driven by a search for high margins and profits.

So is child protection  we all thought we had resolved that these endless scandals would never happen again, but until you adequately resource our child protection systems were never going to be able to say that weve done everything we can to keep our children safe.

Rural Ireland is a major priority, and youre also going to have to accept that water has become a public policy joke. The mess of Irish Water is not something you can blame on anyone else  it happened on your watch, and you probably need to accept that a fresh start is needed.

The waiting lists in our health and disability services got worse on your watch too, and they must be seen as problems that deserve new solutions from a government focused on social justice.

Youll get opposition and challenge  but also help  from a reformed political system if you set out to achieve that. You have no choice but to govern step by step, and to rebuild a divided community brick by brick. Youll have to do it more transparently than any government weve ever had.

But none of that is anything to be afraid of. Relish it. Go for it. Be the best leader you can be.
The incident occurred near Moloko, northern Cameroon, where Ms Power and her team were headed to meet refugees displaced by Islamist group Boko Haram.

Ms Power said she learned of the death with great sorrow and met the boys family to offer our profound condolences and our grief and heartbreak.

Ms Power returned to the scene several hours after the accident to see the seven-year-old boys parents.

Her motorcade had been moving at speeds up to 95kph as locals lined the roads to greet them.

The boy was hit as he ran across two lanes of traffic.

A man was seen running after him, trying to get him to stop.

The vehicle that hit the boy initially stopped, but was ordered by security forces to continue travelling through what was reportedly an unsafe area. An ambulance immediately attended to him instead.

The boy was rushed to a hospital, even though he was fatally injured, said people familiar with the incident, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Several US officials were visibly upset by the death, with one of Ms Powers party breaking down as Ms Power met refugee children shortly afterward.

Dublin-born Ms Power joined US president Barack Obamas election campaign team in 2008, and his staff in 2009, serving on the National Security Council.

In 2013, Mr Obama nominated her as the as the new US ambassador to the United Nations.
The chancellor warned that British families would pay a heavy economic price if the country votes to break from Brussels on June 23, with the UK left permanently poorer.

The 200-page analysis produced by officials in Mr Osbornes department was mocked by Brexit campaigners and branded dodgy, but the chancellor insisted it was a serious and sober analysis.

Mr Osborne also faced questions over the assumption used in the document that net migration would fall to 185,000 a year from 2021 onwards  far in excess of the British governments goal of reducing it to the tens of thousands  with Leave supporters arguing that the Treasury had failed to take into account the costs of coping with an ever-growing population.

The Treasury analysis examined three potential options for the UK if it left the EU  the status currently enjoyed by Norway, which makes payments to the EU and accepts free movement in return for access to the single market, a bilateral free trade deal of the kind obtained by Canada, or a relationship under the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The chancellor focused his assessment on the Canada-style model, which has been championed by London mayor Boris Johnson.

Under the terms of a Canadian-style bilateral trade deal with Brussels, the economy would be 6.2% smaller by 2030, the equivalent of 4,300 per household, the analysis suggested.

Mr Osborne said:

Wed lose tens of billions of pounds in money for our public services, because our economy would be smaller and our families poorer. The most likely bill our public services would pay for leaving the EU is 36 bn. Thats the equivalent of 8p on the basic rate of income tax.

The Treasury document suggests that the Norway-style approach would see GDP fall by a central estimate of 3.8% in 2015 terms, the equivalent of 2,600 per household.

If there was no deal with the EU, and the UK fell back on WTO rules, the economy would suffer by between 5.4% and 9.5%, with a central estimate of a 7.5% fall  hitting each household by 5,200.
Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte was speaking about the killings of 36-year-old Australian Jacqueline Hamill and four other missionaries during a hostage situation at a prison in his city.

Soldiers stormed the prison after learning that a male hostage had been killed and female hostages were raped.
Somalias state radio quoted the Somali embassy in Egypt in reporting the incident.

In a joint statement from the president, prime minister, and speaker of parliament in Somalia, they said 400 migrants had drowned in the capsizing.

However, later the Somali information minister said there was confusion over the number of casualties, which could be 200.

A Somali news website, Goobjoog News, carried an interview with Awale Warsame, who it said survived the incident.

There were 500 passengers, mostly Somalis on the boat, but only 23 people survived, he said.

Survivors, including me, had to use broken wood pieces from the capsized boat to float over waters before we were rescued.

We had travelled from Egypt, especially Alexandria, on April 7th and the boat capsized on April 12 but we were rescued by a Filipino ship off a Greek island five days later.

Meanwhile, EU policymakers have been accused of killing by neglect by cutting rescue missions in the Mediterranean  potentially costing the lives of more than 1,500 migrants, according to a report.

The Italy-led search and rescue mission, Mare Nostrum, ended in October 2014 and was replaced by Triton, which deployed fewer ships and prioritised deterring migrants over rescue operations, the report says.

Charities and UN officials warned the move could have a disastrous impact and lead to far more deaths at sea.

Documents unearthed by British universities showed the European border force Frontex pushed ahead with the change despite an internal assessment warning that if it was not properly planned it would likely result in a higher number of fatalities.

The subsequent scaling back of search and rescue operations during the growing migrant crisis created the conditions that led to massive loss of life, the damning report states.

Over 1,500 migrants died trying to cross the sea in the months after the change was implemented, according to the report, Death By Rescue: The Lethal Effects Of The EUs Policies Of Non-assistance At Sea.

The report found European policymakers came to regard Mare Nostrum as a pull factor which encouraged migrants to make the perilous crossing as they knew they would be rescued if they got into difficulty.

It was scrapped in October 2014 and replaced by Triton, which deployed fewer vessels, patrolled an area further away from the Libyan coast, and did not have rescue as its priority.

The number of migrants crossing the Med in the first four months of 2014 and 2015 stayed the same at 26,000, but death rates have soared.

Sixty died in the first four months in 2014, but 1,687 died in the same four months in 2015, meaning the chances of dying at sea rose 30-fold.
The little girl went missing from a holiday apartment in Portugal in 2007 when she was three, and despite efforts by police there and a British investigation launched in 2011, no progress has been made in finding her.

However, Detective Chief Superintendent Mick Duthie told the Evening Standard that Scotland Yards probe is ongoing and officers hope to find her alive.

In April, Britains Home Office granted the investigation, called Operation Grange, 95,000 (119.5m) to cover another six months of the inquiry.

This came after the number of officers working on the operation was scaled down from 29 to four in October 2015.

Mr Duthie, who is head of Scotland Yards Homicide and Major Crime Command, said: There is ongoing work. There is always a possibility that we will find Madeleine and we hope that we will find her alive.

Thats what we want and thats what the family and the public want and that is why the Home Office continue to fund it. There is work that needs to be done still.

He told the newspaper that the team will go to the Home Office and ask for more money if they have not finished their inquiries within six months.

Mr Duthie said: There is a missing girl and if she has been murdered and if we think we have got justifiable and reasonable lines of inquiry to pursue then they should be dealt with.

On May 3, it will be nine years since Madeleine went missing.
CHINA: An argument between construction workers escalated into a demolition derby-style clash of heavy machinery that left at least two bulldozers flipped over in a street, police in northern China said.

In online video, several bulldozers are seen ramming each other while passenger cars scurry away from the cloud of dust. The video shows one driver running unhurt out of his toppled bulldozer, a fast-moving type also known as a wheel loader, while a friendly bulldozer tries to lift it back up.

The construction workers were from two companies competing for business, Xu Feng, said a local government spokesman in Hebei provinces Xingtang county. Chinas construction sector has fallen on hard times, with growth down by two thirds from its peak a decade ago.

A Titanic auction

NORTHERN IRELAND:

A ticket stub from the VIP enclosure of the launch of the Titanic is to be sold at auction this month.

The ticket stub belonged to Harland & Wolff secretary Charlotte Irwin, who was just 20 and worked in the drafting office at the Belfast firms shipyard when the Titanic was being built.

When the ocean liner was launched on May 31, 1911, Ms Irwin was in an executive box set aside for specially invited White Star Line and Harland & Wolff staff  giving her a great view of the Titanic sliding down the ways into the water. Ms Irwin kept the ticket, No 116, as a souvenir of a memorable day.

Shakespeare on the money

ENGLAND:

A set of 2 commemorative coins marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeares death has been released into circulation.

Launched by Paapa Essiedu, currently starring as Hamlet in the Royal Shakespeare Companys (RSC) summer season, the special edition pieces feature three designs, representing the playwrights comedies, histories, and tragedies.

Produced by the Royal Mint in collaboration with the RSC, the collection is the first of its kind, dedicated to the accomplishments of a single artist.

Inspired by RSC props, and designed by acclaimed sculptor John Bergdahl, the comedies are represented by a jesters hat and staff, the histories by a crown and a dagger, and the tragedies by a skull and a rose.

Lesson for university

USA:

More than 5,000 prospective students have mistakenly been notified by email that they have been accepted into a university in New York state.

University at Buffalo spokesman John DellaContrada said the mistaken email was sent to students whose applications had not been fully reviewed. The university sent a second email about three to four hours later notifying the students of the gaffe and apologising for it, he said.

The university posted a statement on its website saying the miscommunication occurred when an incorrect email list was generated from an applicant database.

The statement said it is important to note the students who received the mistaken email are still being considered for acceptance by the university. The University at Buffalo has about 30,000 students.

Bedbugs vs jailbirds

USA:

The Oklahoma County Sheriffs Office says dozens of inmates have been moved out of three pods at the county jail due to a month-long bedbug infestation.

Spokesman Mark Opgrande said the infestation was first noticed about a month ago, and a local business that contracts with the jail tried to eradicate the bedbugs but was unsuccessful.

Opgrande said two of the pods were heavily populated at the time, housing about 50 inmates each.

A Dallas-based business that specialises in bedbug extermination was called in to give the jail a quote. Opgrande said other pest control businesses will also give the jail quotes in the coming days.

No turtle power

USA:

Some turtles having a tough time crawling out of an updated Texas pond can now use special exit ramps.

The small lake at Boys Ranch Park in Bedford was lined with concrete and has steeper embankments. The reptiles were having trouble getting in and out of the water.

City workers have installed three exit ramps made of rocks to make navigation easier for the turtles and other animals, including ducks.

City spokeswoman Natalie Foster says the plan originally called for one ramp for turtles, then workers realised that wasnt enough.

The small turtle ramps measure about 1.5m long and 60cm wide.

Students lion around

USA:

Students and teachers at a Los Angeles high school missed their lunch break after a mountain lion strolled onto campus and tried to join them.

The big cat was spotted walking across the quad at John F Kennedy High School shortly after noon. Instead of sitting down to eat, students and teachers quickly secured themselves in classrooms and called authorities.

Police sealed off the area until a game warden could arrive and knock the animal out with tranquiliser darts
The entertainer died last month aged 85 having been diagnosed with a suspected form of motor neurone disease.

A service attended by family and friends was held at the St John the Evangelist Church near his home in Shirley, Croydon, south London.

The candle display referenced one of Corbetts most popular sketches as part of The Two Ronnies alongside Ronnie Barker, known as Four Candles  or Fork Handles.

British stars including Barry Cryer, Michael Parkinson, Harry Hill, Jimmy Tarbuck, Rob Brydon, and David Walliams were among the mourners.

After the ceremony, Parkinson said the service hit exactly the right note, adding: It was the least showbizzy funeral Ive been to.

He said: He wasnt a very showbiz person in that sense. He was unaffected by fame and recognition. It didnt bother him.

Parkinson said Corbett was a serious man, he was an intelligent man, adding that he was a stickler for manners.

The former chat show host said that when comedians die all that remains is the echoes of forgotten laughter.

Before the service, Tarbuck said Corbett was a great guy and added that the atmosphere would be very sad for the family and for all his friends.

He went on: He was much loved. Very correct guy, very funny fellow. Disciplinarian  I think that was because he was an officer in the RAF. But he was great company.

I mean, he was a terrific laugh. Dreadful giggler. He used to get me at it when we worked together.

Prompting cheers from mourners nearby, Tarbuck said: Much loved, and should have been knighted. Thats definitely my opinion.

Corbetts coffin was adorned with white flowers, and the service ended with a recording of him singing Ups The Only Way To Go.

His final words in the song are: God bless. Goodnight.

Bruce Forsyths wife was among the mourners but he was absent.

It is understood he was too ill to attend as he recovers from surgery.
The rise in American fighting forces  and the decision to put them closer to the front lines  is designed to help Iraqi forces as they move to retake the key northern city of Mosul.

Speaking to reporters in Baghdad, Defence Secretary Ash Carter said the decision to move US advisers to the Iraqi brigade and battalion level will put them closer to the action, but he said they will have security forces with them and the US will try to reduce the risks.
At the opposite end of New York state, Republican front-runner Donald Trump held a rally in Buffalo, a city recovering from economic decline.

By the end of last night  the last official day of campaigning before voting in the states Democratic and Republican primary elections begins  thousands of New Yorkers will have heard the candidates closing pitches.

New Yorks primary is set to be the most decisive such election in the state in decades in terms of picking the nominees for Novembers general election.

The date for the contests was shifted back this year so they are no longer crowded out by the raft of other states that voted on so-called Super Tuesday last month.

Barring an upset on the Republican side, Mr Trump, whose name in giant letters adorns condominiums and hotels across New York City, is expected to win handily in his native state.

Youre going to look back and say that was the greatest vote Ive ever cast, ever, ever, ever, he promised cheering supporters at a campaign event on Staten Island, one of New York Citys five boroughs and its most solidly Republican one.

The question is whether Mr Trump will make a clean sweep of all 95 Republican delegates at stake by earning the majority of votes in all 27 congressional districts in the state.

Total victory in New York may help Mr Trump avoid the prospect of seeing the nomination wrested from him at the partys July 18-21 convention in Cleveland if he arrives without a clear majority of at least 1,237 delegates.

In that scenario, another candidate could win on a second or subsequent convention ballot.

Mr Trumps Republican rivals, Ted Cruz, a US senator from Texas, and Ohio governor John Kasich, have no strong ties to New York, though they have gamely showed up at campaign events to be seen relishing local delicacies: Pizza, pickles, matzo (unleavened flatbread).

Mr Cruz, Mr Trumps closest rival, has been given a particularly hard time by some voters for speaking disdainfully of New York values earlier this year in an attempt to discredit Mr Trump.

While Mr Trump held his rally in Buffalo, Cruz campaigned in New York City.

On the Democratic side, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who represented New York for eight years in the US Senate and whose main home is just north of New York City, remains the favourite to win her partys nomination.

Still, recent polls have shown Mr Sanders, a senator from Vermont whose distinctive accent is that of a native Brooklynite, cutting her earlier 30 percentage-point lead by about two-thirds.
Prosecutors dropped two more serious charges that Heard, who is married to actor Johnny Depp, illegally imported the Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, into the country last year, when Depp was filming the fifth movie in the Pirates of the Caribbean series.

A conviction on the illegal importation counts could have sent the actress to prison for up to 10 years.

The false documents charge carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a fine of more than A$10,000 (6,800), but magistrate Bernadette Callaghan sentenced Heard instead to a one-month good behaviour bond.

The condition means she will have to pay a A$1,000 fine if she commits any offences in Australia over the next month.

Depp and Heard said little to the waiting throng of reporters and fans outside the Southport Magistrates Court on Queensland states Gold Coast, but did submit a videotaped apology to the court that was played during the hearing.

When you disrespect Australian law, a grim-looking Depp says in the video, they will tell you firmly.

The drama over the dogs began last May, when agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce accused Depp of smuggling the tiny terriers aboard his private jet when he returned to Australia to resume filming the movie.

Australia has strict quarantine regulations to prevent diseases such as rabies from spreading to its shores.

Bringing pets into the country involves applying for a permit and quarantine on arrival of at least 10 days.

If we start letting movie stars  even though theyve been the sexiest man alive twice  to come into our nation [with pets], then why dont we just break the laws for everybody? Mr Joyce said at the time.

Its time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States.

Depp and Heard were given 72 hours to send Pistol and Boo back to the US, with officials warning the dogs would otherwise be euthanised. The pooches boarded a flight home just hours before the deadline ran out.

The comments by Mr Joyce, who is now deputy prime minister of Australia, elevated what might otherwise have been a local spat into a global delight for comedians and broadcasters.

One newspaper ran a doggie death countdown ticker on its website that marked the hours remaining before the dogs had to flee the country, and comedian John Oliver dedicated a more than six-minute segment to lampooning the ordeal.

Depp himself poked fun at the drama during a press conference in Venice last year where he was asked if he planned to take the dogs for a gondola ride.

No, he replied. I killed my dogs and ate them, under direct orders from some kind of, I dont know, sweaty, big-gutted man from Australia.

Mr Joyce posted a link to the couples apology video on his Facebook page, and told reporters he doubted it was something the pair would have willingly wanted to do.

Still, he gave them credit for acknowledging they made a mistake.

I am happy Ms Heard has admitted she was wrong and, as such, that clearly shows that our position in pursuit of this was correct, he told journalists.

Every nation has something that theyre red hot about, and were red hot about our biosecurity requirements in this nation.
Asia Indonesia Takes Step Toward Reckoning with 65-66 Atrocities

Indonesia convenes an unprecedented discussion of anti-communist massacres in 1965-66 that brings together survivors and orchestraters of the atrocities.

JAKARTA  Indonesia on Monday convened an unprecedented discussion of anti-communist massacres in 1965-66 that brought together survivors and representatives of the military that orchestrated the atrocities.

Protesters who say the two-day conference will help revive communism scuffled with police outside the tightly guarded venue, in a sign of the deep divisions within Indonesia over what rights groups say was one of the worst atrocities of the last century.

Researchers estimate that the military and religious groups killed half a million people in the attacks on communists and sympathizers that ushered in the 32-year rule of the dictator Suharto.

Conference organizer Agus Widjojo, a retired general, said at the meeting that Indonesia is torn apart by the massacres and called for the government to establish a commission for truth and reconciliation.

Within Indonesia, widely accepted accounts of the era gloss over the deaths, and descendants of Communist Party members are stigmatized and face legal discrimination that prevents them from holding government jobs.

But the conference, being held at a hotel in Jakarta, the capital, has the backing of government figures and was opened by the Cabinet minister in charge of security and political affairs, Luhut Pandjaitan. Indonesias attorney general, police chief and justice minister also attended.

The killings began in October 1965, shortly after an apparent abortive coup in which six right-wing generals were killed. Suharto, an unknown major general at the time, filled the power vacuum and blamed the assassinations on Indonesias Communist Party, which was then the largest outside the Soviet Union and China, with 3 million members.

Lets open this history together so we can all find out what has been wrong in our national system, why this nation could have the ability to commit mass killings, said Widjojo, whose father was one of the generals killed.

Abdul Rashid, 71, was one of the thousands who escaped death but suffered years of imprisonment without trial or exile in remote corners of Indonesia because of a tenuous connection to the Communist Party.

Rashids crime was joining a youth group in South Sulawesi province that didnt advertise its links to communists. Four years later, when he was 21, he was seized by troops while teaching an elementary school class, and lost more than a decade of his life to detention and exile.

I still remember how a dozen military troops pushed into my class, he said in an interview. They pushed in and pointed their rifles at me in front of my students.

After being freed, a special stamp in his identity card made life difficult, stigmatizing Rashid and his family and making it hard to find work.

This stigma is a too heavy burden, he said. There are so many innocent people who became victims of a black history. I want this stigma to be ended.

Despite government backing for the conference, Pandjaitan, the security minister, said there would be no government apology to victims and also questioned whether estimates of the death toll were accurate.

I believe that this meeting will produce positive results to build our nation in the future, he said. We must be able to create peace with our past. But dont ever think that the government will offer any apology.

Andreas Harsono, Indonesia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the two-day symposium by itself is not sufficient to come to terms with a buried past.

At the least, what the government can do is stop discrimination against the victimsthe survivors and their children and their grandchildren, he said. Millions of people are affected by a 1981 presidential decree barring communists and their descendants from serving in the police, military or civil service.

Before the conference, rights groups urged the United States to release all of its secret files on the massacres, which could help reveal facts about the period.

Declassified documents held at the National Security Archive of George Washington University show that the US Embassy in Jakarta was aware of extensive killings in Java and other parts of Indonesia and passed lists of communists it had compiled to Indonesias military. It also organized the supply of radios to the military and secretly gave money to a military-linked group involved in the repression.

At the time, the US viewed Indonesia as a bulwark in its efforts to thwart the influence of the Soviet Union and China in Southeast Asia.

An embassy communication to the Department of State on April 15, 1966, about the number of deaths said: We frankly do not know whether the real figure is closer to 100,000 or 1,000,000 but believe it wiser to err on the side of the lower estimates, especially when questioned by the press.
Asia Thailand Says Songkran Holiday Road Deaths Rose 21 Percent

Over 440 people died in traffic accidents during the Thai New Yeara 21 percent rise over the same period last year despite increased safety efforts.

BANGKOK  Authorities in Thailand said Monday that 442 people died in traffic accidents during the just concluded traditional New Year holidaya 21 percent rise over the same period last year despite stern efforts to curb drunken and unsafe driving.

It was the highest number of Songkran holiday deaths since 476 were reported in 2006. The weeklong holiday has been dubbed the Seven Days of Death, though Thailand has the second-worst record in the world for annual traffic fatalities.

There were 3,337 accidents during the week ending Sunday, with motorcycles accounting for more than 81 percent of the total, followed by pickup trucks, the Road Safety Directing Centre announced. Drunken driving was blamed for just over one-third of the accidents, and speeding for just under another third. Road injuries for the week totaled 3,656.

The government had sought to curb accidents during the holiday by deploying 20,000 officials to checkpoints and ordering drunken drivers vehicles to be impounded and their licenses revoked. Rewards were also offered to police making the most number of drunken-driving arrests.

Deputy Government Spokesman Weerachon Sukondhapatipak blamed the high accident rate on unsafe road design and lack of discipline among Thai drivers.

Not only villagers, but educated people, who have been to developed countries, they obey laws in those countries but they dont do it here no matter how strict the laws are, how many officers were patrolling or doing their jobs at checkpoints, he said.
Burma Arakan Army: Clashes With Govt Forces Threaten Peace Prospects

The Arakan Army reports two ambush attacks by the Burma Army in northern Arakan State during the annual New Year water festival.

RANGOON  The Burma Army engaged in two ambush attacks against the Arakan Army (AA) during the countrys New Year water festival on April 16 in northern Arakan State, according to AA communications officer Khine Thukha.

The clashes reportedly occurred in Ponnagyun and Rathedaung townships. Khine Thukha claimed that at least 30 government soldiers were killed or injured in the fighting, but denied that AA had suffered any casualties.

The Irrawaddy made contact by phone with residents in Rathedaung Township on April 18, who said that the situation had calmed, but locals in nearby Kyauktaw Township reported the reinforcement of government troops in the area since the clashes.

Arakan State residents told The Irrawaddy that they sensed growing tension between ethnic Burmese and Arakanese communities due to what they describe as hate speech on social media, including inflammatory written posts and unverified photos depicting violent acts.

Burmas Ministry of Information (MOI) stated on April 18 that government troops would try to remove AA insurgencies from Arakan States Kyauktaw Township; military officials also acknowledged in state media that the army had suffered casualties in recent armed clashes with the AA.

The AA commemorated its seventh anniversary on April 10 with the armed groups commander-in-chief Tun Myat Naing stating hopes of restarting a political dialogue with Burmas new National League for Democracy-led (NLD) government, which took power at the beginning of April.

Under the previous administration of President Thein Sein, the AAalong with ethnic Palaung (Taang), Wa and Kokang armieswas excluded from signing Burmas so-called nationwide ceasefire agreement (NCA) in October 2015. Eight armed organizationsout of more than 20inked the accord, but some larger groups, like the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), withheld their signatures.

Khine Thukha described the NCA as a failed agreement. If the new government continues in the same way as Thein Sein, [the outcome] will be the same, he said in reference to the previous administrations approach to the peace process, which has yet to bring an end to armed conflict in Burmas six decades of civil war.

He added that the AA would participate in talks with the government only if the other excluded groups were also invited.

Ponnagyun constituencys Arakan National Party (ANP) lawmaker in the Lower House, Tun Maung, urged the NLD government to bring the AA into a political dialogue when they re-start the national peace process.

I believe that the NLD will carry out that matter for national reconciliation, he said.

Correction: The article originally stated that the MOIs statement was issued on April 13. It has now been changed to reflect the correct date of the statements publication: April 18 at 9:15 pm.
Burma Avian Flu Strikes Poultry Farms in Sagaing Division

Surveillance of the poultry trade in Sagaing Divisions Monywa Township has been ramped up after an avian flu outbreak over the past several weeks.

MANDALAY  Surveillance of the poultry trade in Sagaing Divisions Monywa Township has been ramped up after an avian flu outbreak over the past several weeks.

Some 500 chickens from Monywa poultry farms have died since March 31, after being infected with the H9N2 strain of avian flu. Local authorities have since killed over 20,000 chickens and restricted poultry trade from farms in the area.

With the help of the police and fire brigades, we have been able to control the avian flu [outbreak in Monywa] and have killed the infected animals and restricted poultry trade, said Myint Naing, chief minister of Sagaing Division.

There are 250 poultry farms in Monywas livestock farming zone, about six of which have reported cases of avian flu since the end of March. The Ministry of Health said in a statement on Saturday that there have been no reports of humans having contracted avian flu in the area.

We cant control the entire poultry market in the division, but we plan to investigate nearby villages and towns and will prohibit trade with poultry farms in Monywa, Myint Naing said.

Though H9N2 is not as severe as H5N1, and there have been no reports of human infection, it is important to take precautions. I ask poultry farmers and traders to inform the authorities of any chicken deaths without delay.

In particular, the chief minister urged poultry farmers not to hide the deaths of potentially infected animals for fear of losing their farm.

Once a chicken is infected, it is necessary to destroy almost every animal from that farm, since we have no vaccine here to prevent the spread of the [avian] flu, he said.

The divisional government is taking data on farmers losses and will work with the central government for possible compensation for loss due to avian flu, Myint Naing added.

Poultry farms in the same livestock farming zone in Monywa were also struck by an avian flu outbreak in early 2015, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of chickens.
Burma Burma Celebrates First Pulitzer Prize-Winning Female Journalist

Esther Htusan belongs to an Associated Press team awarded a Pulitzer Prize for an investigation into labor abuses within Southeast Asias fishing industry.

RANGOON  An ethnic Kachin journalist from the Associated Press (AP) is the first woman from Burma to be among those awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for her reporting.

Esther Htusan, 29, is one of four AP journalists who worked on an investigation into severe labor abuses within the Southeast Asian fishing industry, a sector which supplies seafood to supermarkets and restaurants abroad. The teams reporting contributed to the freeing of approximately 2,000 slaves; their work also brought perpetrators of trafficking and enslavement to justice and inspired reforms in the industry.

From March until December of 2015, Esther Htusan, Margie Mason, Robin McDowell and Martha Mendoza broke the story of fishing industry atrocities in nine installments. On Monday, it was announced that the series had earned the AP team the award for excellence in journalism in the category of Public Service.

Aye Aye Win, a former AP reporter from Burma, said she was very proud of the AP journalists for their service to those who would have otherwise remained trapped at sea.

Their reporting saved fishermen stuck abroad. Their efforts deserve the prize, she said. This is one case, she continued, where reporting has given not only information, but also liberation.

Myint Kyaw, a member of the Myanmar Press Council, said Esther Htusans involvement in the investigation had an impact on the whole country.

Consequently, those who were forced to work in slave-like conditions were saved, and Burmese citizens also got rescued, he said. The AP teams success is also beneficial to Myanmar, he added.
Burma Suu Kyi Vows to Amend Junta-Era Constitution

Aung San Suu Kyi vows to push for constitutional amendments to build a true democracy in Burma as it emerges from military control.

RANGOON  Burmas de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi vowed Monday to push for constitutional amendments to build a true democracy in the Southeast Asian country as it emerges from decades of military control.

Suu Kyi made the comments in a nationally televised address to mark the start of the Buddhist new year, highlighting her hopes for the future and also the difficult tasks ahead for her new government.

Our policies and principles are to ensure national reconciliation, internal peace, the rule of law, amendments to the constitution and keeping the democratic system dynamic, she said.

The constitution needs to be one that will give birth to a genuine democratic union, she said. We need constitutional amendments.

Suu Kyis power to change the constitution remains hamstrung by the military, which still retains considerable power in government and parliament. But she has repeatedly said the current constitutionwritten during the era of military rulemust be revised so the country can move forward.

The constitution reserves key ministerial posts in the Cabinet for the military, which heads the Home Ministry, the Defense Ministry and the Border Affairs Ministry.

It also allots 25 percent of the seats in parliament for military officers, ensuring that no government can amend the constitution without the armys approval. Suu Kyi has been working to build alliances with the military but has reportedly angered the military with her governments initial acts since taking power two weeks ago.

Suu Kyis party, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory in November elections, ushering in the countrys first civilian government after 54 years of direct and indirect military rule.

Suu Kyi is the countrys most popular political figure but was unable to become president because of a clause in the constitution that bars anyone with a foreign spouse or child from holding the job. Her two sons are British, as was her late husband.

To get around that clause, Suu Kyi selected her longtime confidant, Htin Kyaw, to become president. One of his governments first acts after taking power at the end of March was to give Suu Kyi a newly created position called state counselor which is akin to that of prime minister.

Htin Kyaws government has made it a priority to release political prisoners detained during military rule. Prior to the New Year, his administration freed more than 100 political detainees and on Sunday granted amnesty to another 83.

We will continue to try to release political prisoners, political activists, and students facing trials related to politics, he said in televised comments Sunday to mark the new year.
Burma Thingyan Deaths Double in 2016

The number of deaths during Burmas five-day water festival, Thingyan, has more than doubled since last year, according to the Myanmar Police Force.

RANGOON  The number of deaths during Burmas five-day water festival, Thingyan, has more than doubled since last year, according to the Myanmar Police Force.

The announcement on Monday said that a total of 35 people died and another 316 were injured between April 12 and 16, when millions of people across the country welcomed the Burmese New Year with wild street parties, ceremonies and water-throwing.

Last year, a total of 16 people died and 356 others were injured because of traffic accidents and crimes that occurred during the Thingyan festivities.

Fourteen of the reported deaths in 2016 were due to traffic accidents, while three were victims of murder. The other 18 deaths during the celebratory period were due to various other unnamed causes. Of the 235 people injured in traffic accidents, 73 were considered serious injuries.

In Rangoon, however, statistics revealed lower numbers than 2015. There was one death in the commercial capital this yearthe result of a murderand 24 reported injuries, compared to three deaths and 69 injuries last year, Police Major Pyae Zone told The Irrawaddy.

He added that the decrease in deaths and injuries this year was mainly because of fewer traffic accidents in Rangoon compared to 2015.
6 Devices Poised to Disrupt Your Network in 2016

Earlier this month, I wrote about John Hornick and his passion about the potential of 3D printing technology. As a huge proponent of the technology, Hornick is fond of articulating the benefits of its disruptive nature. Yet hes equally quick to point out that inherent in this disruption are difficult issues that need to be resolved in order for 3D printing to become mainstream.

Hornick, author of the book, 3D Printing Will Rock the World, is an intellectual property counselor and litigator with Finnegan, a global IP law firm based in Washington, D.C. Hes therefore highly focused on one of those difficult ramifications in particular: the IP issues associated with the technology. Hes gone so far as to refer to the demise of IP in this regard, so I began this portion of my interview with Hornick by asking him to encapsulate his thinking there:

Ive pioneered this concept that I call, away from control, which means the ability to make something without anybody knowing about it, and without anybody being able to do anything about it. This is the idea that Cody Wilson was experimenting with when he 3D-printed a gun a few years ago. He said it was an accident that his gun wasnt detectable by a metal detector, that thats not what he was going for. Hes a little difficult to understand, but I think what he was experimenting with was, what would the implications and ramifications be if anyone could 3D print a gun without anyone knowing about it and without anyone being able to control it? Thats away from control.

Hornick went on to apply the away from control concept to parts and products that are protected by patents:

The way things work now, where everything is kind of within control, a manufacturer makes a part, and sells the part to a customer. Its protected by a patent, and if somebody copies that part and starts selling it, theyre going to be sued for patent infringement, and theyll likely lose, and theyll be stopped from making that infringing part. But if you can make that part away from controlno one knows about it, no one can do anything about itthen interesting things start to happen. You start to have an increased amount of infringement, because anyone can make the part, and nobody knows about it. If you have an increased amount of infringement, but its away from control, then its difficult to identify it. If you cant identify it, its impossible to enforce those IP rights. At that point, those IP rights become irrelevant because they cant be enforced. So I dont expect that 3D printing will destroy intellectual property, but I think it will definitely put pressure on the whole system, just like the easy exchange of digital music over the Internet has put a lot of pressure on the copyright system in the music industry.

I asked Hornick if theres a solution to the problem, and he said by definition, if things are being made away from control, theres no solution:

But I still always advocate to clients to build the strongest intellectual property portfolio that you can. There will be calls for legislation to try to deal with the problem. There will be lawsuits, and there will be efforts made to try to lock up the information thats in those digital blueprintsits commonly called digital rights management. All of those things will be successful to varying degrees. But if its ever possible, and I believe it will be, to make many of the things we need in our homes with our own machines, then intellectual property that covers those things will be essentially irrelevant, because no one will know were making these things. No one will be able to control it.

Hornick referred to an article he had written several months ago about how these IP issues could really be considered IT issues:

Were seeing an increased amount of hacking of all types around the world. When you have the digital blueprint for a 3D-printable part, thats going to be something that some people might want to steal. So companies, from an IT perspective, have got to control the blueprints themselves; control the use of the machines; and keep it all secure.

I asked Hornick what country is currently leading the world in the adoption of 3D printing technology. He said the United States is certainly leading the world in the filing of patent applications, which is usually an indication of adoption, as well:

The U.S. files about 60 percent of the patent applications that lead to patents in this area. We have several companies based here in the United States that make the machines. Germany is also a leader; Sweden is a leader; Israel is a leader in certain areas of 3D printing. And China is making a big efforttheyre spending a lot of money to try to be an important player in this space. Whats interesting is that Japan really is not a leader. Theyve been an industrial manufacturing leader in many areas for yearsthey were actually in this space in the 1990s, but then kind of got out of it. There are some companies there that are involved, but its really not a big part of their industry like you would expect it to be.

Hornick contends that one of the things that makes 3D printing such a disruptive technology is the potential to repatriate manufacturing jobs that have moved offshore. He explained that potential this way:

The way that things are made traditionally is that you have a factory full of machines, and to make a particular part, you might need 10 or 15 different machines to be involved in making that part. Theres an assembly line that goes from machine to machineall those machines have operators, and all those operators have labor costs associated with them. With a 3D printer, you have a machine that has the capability of making an entire part or product in one build. So instead of 10 or 15 machines, you have one machine, and you may have one operator who operates a whole room full of 3D printers. So you have much lower labor costs involved, which means you can make things in countries that have high labor costs, like the United States, or the UK, or even Japan. Thats the reason why manufacturing can be brought back. You can make things closer to where theyre needed, rather than in some far-off land, and then shipping them across the world.

Finally, I asked Hornick to elaborate on what he has called the dark side of 3D printing:

There is definitely a dark side, and one aspect of that would be the ability to 3D-print guns that are away from control. Maybe theyre plastic, in which case theyre undetectable, which really scares people. Or maybe theyre made of metal, and its just that theres no controlanyone can print them. Felons are not allowed to own guns or have guns, but if they could 3D-print one, or if there was a facility that 3D-prints guns for felonsthat could be a business model one might pursuethat would be the dark side. Beyond that, there have been some enterprising criminals who use 3D printers to make fake facades for bank machines that are actually skimmers that collect information from cards. There have been raids by law enforcement officials around the world, where they find drugs and guns, and sometimes 3D printers. Its a great machine for counterfeiting. There are all kinds of things it can be used for that are illegal, but I think the benefits of the technology far outweigh the negative uses.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.
The 5 Essential Traits of Digital Innovators

It has been interesting to watch Dell and HP compete, with each going down nearly opposite paths. Dell has been doubling down on PCs for the last several years and its big move was going private to eliminate distractions and better focus on customers. HP has been a bit of a CEO revolving door, from Carly Fiorina, who bought leadership into the PC market by merging with Compaq and recognizing the power of a consumer product, to Meg Whitman, who basically reversed Fiorinas moves, turning HP into two companies: one focused on the enterprise business and the other focused on PCs and printers.

Strategy is measured by results; the IDC and Gartner numbers are out and theyre pretty telling.

Before we get to that, though, lets look at the background.

Dell vs. HP

Both Dell and HP had difficulties last decade with CEO choices. Michael Dell attempted to retire from his CEO duties only to find, like many founders do, that his handpicked replacement just wasnt up to the task of running his company. We saw the same thing at Microsoft over a longer period with Steve Ballmer. The clear lesson was that you really need someone who understands deeply both the industry and the underlying technology to be successful as a tech CEO. At Microsoft, they replaced Ballmer with subject matter expert Satya Nadella, and the result is almost a different company, one more like the firm during the 90s when it was more successful. Michael Dell, who was certainly still young enough, instead decided to return to the role, but like a lot of CEOs, what he hated about the job was the public side. The combination of compliance requirements and excessive focus on quarterly returns seemed to be at the core of the failure, so he took the firm private to eliminate those problems.

As a side note, he had already demonstrated a strong ability to solve problems because when he saw that most mergers and acquisitions fail, he went searching for the best process in the industry, emulated it, and now Dell is considered the best in technology at doing mergers.

HPs founders are long gone and the company had become bound by process and history, causing it to lose its agility. It then began to go through boards and CEOs very rapidly, eventually finding Mark Hurd, a subject matter expert, who actually appeared to be making excellent progress, although he faced what almost seemed like outright hatred from HP employees. When Hurd screwed up and had to be fired, he was replaced by a software company ex-CEO who had been unsuccessful and subsequently failed faster than Hurds predecessor. He was then rapidly replaced in a coup by Whitman, who had failed at running for California Governor but had been successful at eBay during the early years, although shed been replaced when the company outgrew her.

Having learned during her run for Governor the importance of being loyal to her employees (her cavalier firing of her long-time, but unfortunately illegal housekeeper, affected her in the election), and from IBM the critical importance of having PCs to support a large x86 server business, she should have had what she needed to be successful. (After IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo, the consequential damage to its x86 servers business was too great to sustain and it had to eventually sell it as well, ironically proving HPs earlier CEOs right.) But ignoring both lessons, she has aggressively replaced her executive staff, and spun out HPs PC business. But even though it mirrored Dells process of ensuring successful acquisitions, HP is known for some of the most disastrous in the market, e.g., Palm, Autonomy. So youd have to expect that comparing the two firms results would be dramatically different.

PC Sales Results

IDC and Gartner results are in. In an ugly worldwide market, Dell was basically flat year over year with HP dropping nearly 10 percent according to Gartner, which is basically in line with the overall market. IDC measures things a bit differently. According to them, Dell dropped 2 percent but HP dropped over 10 percent, also in line with the market. Interestingly, both Dell and Apple massively outperformed the worldwide market.

The U.S. market was far stronger and perhaps even more telling because Lenovo, which took over the worldwide lead from HP some time ago, is relatively weak in the U.S. This is likely a better indicator of HP vs. Dell performance. Here, Dell grow 3 percent in a market that lost 6 percent year over year and HP lost a whopping 17 percent, according to Gartner. Once again, IDCs numbers are different and they have Dell growing at 4.2 percent and HP dropping by 14 percent (or twice the speed of the overall market), allowing Dell to pass HP in both cases for the number-one spot in the market.

I should add that Lenovo, which is also executing a similar strategy to Dells but with an even greater focus on the consumer side of the business, grew at 21 percent, according to IDC (albeit from a much smaller base). If these rates sustain, Lenovo will pass HP in the U.S. in 2019 and Dell will pass HP in the worldwide market a year earlier. I should also point out that Lenovo roundly beat Apple in the U.S. PC market starting from a similar base, likely showcasing that Tim Cooks Apple and Steve Jobs Apple are very, very different. Lenovo and Apple are the only firms that aggressively do tablets, smartphones and smart watches, and Lenovo is the only firm that is trying to recreate Jobs unique ability to pitch products using Ashton Kutcher (which is interesting all by itself).

Wrapping Up

I think all this really speaks to the importance of both having a subject matter expert as a CEO of a tech company and a CEO that learns from mistakes (either their own or from others). The latter has been an endemic issue for tech companies in general because they seem to focus more on assigning blame than on doing root cause analysis and documenting what was learned to avoid future mistakes. Ironically, tech firms often fire the one executive who actually learned the lesson.

The lesson for any upcoming manager is to own and learn from your mistakes because, eventually, a practice of merely finding scapegoats is a losing one.

Rob Enderle is President and Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group, a forward-looking emerging technology advisory firm. With over 30 years experience in emerging technologies, he has provided regional and global companies with guidance in how to better target customer needs; create new business opportunities; anticipate technology changes; select vendors and products; and present their products in the best possible light. Rob covers the technology industry broadly. Before founding the Enderle Group, Rob was the Senior Research Fellow for Forrester Research and the Giga Information Group, and held senior positions at IBM and ROLM. Follow Rob on Twitter @enderle, on Facebook and on Google+.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has created a cluster-jam for the business world, and virtual mobile infrastructure (VMI) is the latest technology to confront this challenge. The struggle is more cultural than technological  against VMI, commentators have spun a web of myths. Israel Lifshitz, founder and CEO of Nubo, has taken on the mission to set the record straight.

According to Lifshitz, we need to reexamine VMI because conventional enterprise mobility has failed. Mobile device management (MDM), enterprise mobility management (EMM) and mobile application management (MAM) have all sputtered. IT professionals complain of poor user experiences, low adoption, high costs and insufficient security. It often feels like vendors are trying to band-aid device-based BYOD with a new acronym per year. That wont work.

Knowing that enterprise mobility users are overwhelmingly dissatisfied, Lifshitz examines the myths that might deter organizations from trying VMI.

Debunking VMI Myths

Click through for a different perspective on 10 myths that have developed around virtual mobile infrastructure (VMI), as identified by Israel Lifshitz, founder and CEO of Nubo.

Poor Coverage

Myth #1: Cellular coverage is not good enough for VMI.

With VMI, all applications live in a private data center or the cloud. Employees access these apps via a remote client app that runs on multiple mobile operating systems. Thus, you need a cellular connection or Wi-Fi to use VMI. Detractors claim that cellular coverage isnt widespread enough to make VMI practical.

That might have been true 10 years ago. Today, high-speed cellular coverage is ubiquitous in developed countries. Go to OpenSignal and look at the availability of 3G and 4G coverage in your area. Are there dead zones? Of course! But if you have employees working in the Wyoming wilderness or boonies of Belarus, Lifshitz wagers, that BYOD is the least of their concerns.

Offline Access

Myth #2: People need the ability to work offline.

Even if your employees have applications installed locally on their devices, most apps still require an Internet connection to function properly. Facebook, the worlds most popular app, will do nothing at all without connectivity. YouTube and Google Search are useless without bars.

No one complains about those apps. And no, mobile devices dont have the capacity to store a CRM or ERP database locally. The storage requirements are immense and the security concerns are even bigger. Offline access isnt an advantage any more than offline access is a disadvantage.

Poor Signal Performance

Myth #3: Without 4G LTE, VMI user experiences will be awful.

Some IT commentators assume that VMI remote clients must gorge on data the way a Hummer guzzles gasoline. This is false. VMI can work on 3G and 4G networks. Indeed, it can function without latency on networks with 250 KB per second download speeds. Even on crowded networks or in locations with a weak signal, VMI clients can maintain good performance.

Native User Experience

Myth #4: VMI doesnt provide a native user experience.

VMI skeptics worry that the user experiences wont feel native, meaning virtual apps wont operate as fast or responsively as local ones. In the past, this was an issue. Today, communication protocols are good enough to make finger scrolling, swipes and taps feel native. Test it for yourself.

Expensive Infrastructure

Myth #5: VMI data centers and infrastructure costs are too expensive.

IT leaders often assume that VMI solutions will cost more than MDM, EMM and MAM. If you look strictly at installation costs, yes, VMI is pricier upfront. However, EMM solutions run up a giant tab over time.

With device-based BYOD solutions, IT must deal with lost and stolen devices, OS and app upgrades, patches, maintenance and end-user support, not to mention app development and deployment. When you factor in the required staff and labor, conventional mobility solutions become extravagantly expensive.

With VMI, those headaches are non-issues. You dont need to manage a network of devices, nor must you continuously vet, approve and containerize apps.

High Data Plan Costs

Myth #6: The network costs of VMI will be more expensive than local solutions.

If users rely on VMI, wont your company have to pay a ton for data plans? No. In fact, local apps consume far more data than remote apps, which only consume data when employees use them. In testing, Lifshitz team at Nubo compared a scenario where 30 emails were downloaded, three emails were sent and another three were read. Nubo used about 50 percent of the data used by the local email app.

Think about it: a local email app downloads messages and data 24/7. When someone sends a companywide email with a 40-megabyte attachment (e.g., a longwinded PowerPoint presentation), that will be downloaded to thousands of devices in the organization.

Dependability

Myth #7: VMI is too new and untested.

Though its new compared to MDM and EMM, VMI is far from unproven. Industries with extreme security concerns have adopted VMI. Youll see it used in defense and public safety, government, health care, banking and finance.

These sectors struggled to ensure compliance and data privacy with conventional enterprise mobility solutions. EMM and MDM notoriously motivate shadow IT by restricting which applications employees may use. VMI, on the other hand, takes security out of the end users control and puts it in ITs hands.

Limited Use Cases

Myth #8: VMI only works for certain, specific use cases, not common use cases.

Commentators have pegged VMI as a niche technology, and they couldnt be more wrong. VMI is designed to replace any enterprise mobility solution.

The standard BYOD use case involves four tools: email, calendar, contacts and documents. That use case is less expensive, more secure and equally user-friendly on VMI.

There are also common use cases that work with VMI but not with MDM. For instance, if you contract out to external developers and researchers, you cant install MDM on their devices. They cant give you administrative rights to their device. VMI, on the other hand, would enable them to access specific apps and data without giving up administrative permissions.

Lack of Security

Myth #9: VMI isnt more secure than the alternatives.

Skeptics argue that running apps virtually doesnt elevate security. A hacker could breach the passcode on the remote client app and wreak havoc. That risk is easier to address than the risk of enterprise data stored locally on thousands of personal devices.

By leaving no data on employee devices, VMI removes the weakest link in enterprise security. Whereas IT can fortify data infrastructure against attacks, it cannot do likewise on employee devices. Who would you trust to handle company cybersecurity  your IT department or thousands of employees with various levels of tech savviness?

Lack iOS Support

Myth #10: VMI is not supported on Apple.

This is the most misleading myth. Yes, VMI usually relies on Android applications hosted in a data center. Consequently, people assume that these apps must not operate properly when accessed by iOS devices. Thats false.

VMI doesnt give you an Android user experience or Apple user experience. Remote client apps provide an equally strong user experience on Android or iOS. Remember, VMI apps run in the data center. Therefore, UX depends on that data infrastructure and the app design, not the OS or device from which those apps are accessed.
Apple iPhone SE, the Special Edition iPhone, is one of the company's best despite its small size.

With the launch of the iPhone SE, Apple has chosen to go smaller, while many smartphone makers prefer to focus on super-sized phablets. The iPhone SE was designed as a younger sibling to the Apple flagship iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.

But despite the smaller size comparing with other Apple mobile devices, the iPhone SE is a powerful gadget. On the inside it's all iPhone 6, while on the outside it looks inspired from the iPhone 5s.

The iPhone SE comes with a retro looks, and a boxier iPhone 5 aesthetic. But even if it doesn't look like the latest line of Apple iPhones, the SE still has a premium feel. While it looks like a 5s, the iPhone SE features the same matte aluminum finish as the Apple Watch and the iPhones 6/6s.

According to NetGuide, Apple's smaller iPhone SE is aimed at users who prefer a smaller and cheaper phone. Its smaller body comes with a key benefit. The phone can be easily used with just one hand and it is very practical. Another advantage of the iPhone SE is that the device is also lighter that the 6s.

Aside their different exterior design, the differences between Apple's iPhone 6s and iPhone SE are minor. They consist of a slower Touch ID sensor and a lack of 3D Touch. For many users this isn't really a big deal.

The iPhone SE can capture 4K video, having the same rear 12 MP camera as the iPhone 6s. Its front camera is also similar to the iPhone 6s, except it doesn't provide Auto HDR. The iPhone SE features 1080p at 120fps slow-mo, Live Photo, support for LTE Advanced as well as fast MIMO Wi-Fi. The phone comes with the same A9 CPU as iPhone 6s but only in 16GB or 64GB versions.

According to Business Today, thanks to the low-resolution display and the smaller form factor in comparison to the iPhone 6s, another advantage of the iPhone SE is its longer battery life. A fully charged SE can last a full day even with some pretty heavy use. Compact sized yet power packed, the iPhone SE is definitely one of Apple's best.
China's scientists have designed Jia Jia, a realistic robot that can pose for pictures and chat with real humans. This year, at two high-profile national events on artificial intelligence, the 1.6-meter-tall robot had already acted as a hostess.

Engadget reports that a team of researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China has unveiled recently the realistic robot that looks almost human-like. Jia Jia can make some facial expressions, can interact and talk with real humans.

The team of Chinese scientists spent three years designing Jia Jia, ensuring that her eyes glance around the room naturally and her mouth moves when she speaks. But their realistic robot can't yet cry or laugh and those features might come with a version two of the robot.

The Chinese scientists were quoted as saying that they wanted to emphasize in their design the diligence, compassion and intelligence of the machine. Despite having no plans to mass produce Jia Jia, the researchers intend to continue working on improving the robot.

According to South China Morning Post, Chen told the newspaper that his research team plans to make Jia Jia more sophisticated. Team leader Chen Xiaoping explained that the researchers intend to give Jia Jia facial recognition and deep learning capabilities in the future.

The realistic robot will be able in the future versions to interact with its environment even without prior programming. As for now, Jia Jia is able to display emotion through facial expressions, chat and move its body.

More interesting is its capacity to sense where it is placed. For instance, according to reports, the robot was even able to tell the photographers to not get too close when it felt they were taking an unflattering picture of it.

The "robot goddess" Jia Jia borrowed its beautiful features from five women from the university in Beijing. The android was modeled after the looks of real women used as "image models" in order to ensure that it looks "attractive."
The British physicist Stephen Hawking and the American founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg have teamed up with the Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner to support a project aimed to search for life in the Universe.

As reported by Voice of America, an international team of businessmen and scientists launched last week a project they hope can answer the question whether life exists outside our planet. The team announced plans for a very ambitious space exploration program with the goal to find alien life.

Their project called Breakthrough Starshot will design and build thousands of robotic space exploration vehicles. The first goal of the project is to explore Alpha Centauri, our nearest star located at around 4.37 light years away from Earth. A spaceship part of the Starshot project will travel 20 years to get to Alpha Centauri.

The technology envisioned as part of the Breakthrough Starshot project is like something from a science fiction movie. Extremely small vehicles will be powered through space by crews on Earth using powerful laser beams. These laser powered spacecrafts would travel much farther than anything built to date.

The Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner announced that he is funding the project with $100 million to get started. Estimates say the total cost of the Breakthrough Starshot project will be in the range from $5- to 10-billion.

Milner even showed to reporters in New York a model of the spacecraft. The so-called "nanocraft" will be composed of a "starchip" and a sail. The starchip is actually a computer chip containing photon thrusters, cameras, communication and navigation equipment and power supply. Its size is no bigger than a large postage stamp and it will cost e around the same as an iPhone.

A "mothership" would be launched on Earth's orbit to release thousands of the nanocrafts. The crews on Earth would fire laser beams on the nanocrafts' light sails, pushing them to travel at around 20 percent of light speed.

According to Forbes, this new propulsion technology is cheap and innovative. The idea was presented by a team of scientists last year, in a white paper . The solar sail concept could combine with an advanced laser array to create a "laser sail"-based spacecraft.
Microsoft has finally launched the update for its Outlook app that gives the app support for Android wear.

When Outlook was first launched in August for the Apple Watch, it almost instantly became the most preferred personal email app on IOS. According to Design & Trend, the reason Apple Watch users loved it because it gave them the convenience of being able to read full emails, archive, delete, flag, schedule messages and much more on from the wristwatch. This left Android Wear users wondering when they could experience the same type of email handling convenience.

Moving on, with the success of Outlook for Apple Watch, the Office Team decided to make the app available to Android Wear. The availability for Android was deployed with the update that launches Microsoft Outlook version 2.1.0 so now, Android Watch users can install Outlook in their wristwatches.

Speaking of this new development, Microsoft told Android Central, "This week, we're bringing the best of Outlook to Android Wear. Stop reaching out for your phone, everything is now happening on your watch."

Microsoft continued, "Check your Outlook notifications, read your new emails and reply with pre-set messages or voice dictation right from your wrist. It's never been that easy to manage your inbox."

That sounds good, isn't it? However, it should be noted that it is still currently being rolled out on Google Play so it may not be available to some users just yet. For those in a hurry, that is absolutely understandable, given the amazing features of the Outlook app. So for users who really cannot wait, the other workaround is to download the APK and manually install the app but that is not a very good option for those not so "techie."

Nevertheless, it will be available soon and it's only a matter of time and it seems like it is really worth the wait.
Business / Economy

by PDP

In our policy blueprint, HOPE, we recognise sustainable water management as one of the key economic enablers.There is no doubt that water plays a vital role in the social and economic development of any society. Increasing demand and competition for water and increasing scarcity due to climatic changes are some serious challenges that we must address as a country if we are to create sustainable development. It is clear to us that ZANU (PF) has failed to address these critical issues with the urgency they deserve. As a result Zimbabwe is currently facing widespread poverty and hunger.The integrated management of water and land resources now recognizes that the economic value of water, equitable allocation of water, and sustainable utilization of the resource are critical issues that need urgent attention by any government.As PDP we believe that effective management of water resources demands a holistic approach. It must link social and economic development processes with the protection of natural ecosystems. We will therefore promote a shift in water resource management from a supply to a demand-oriented focus. This will include the need to reduce the size and costs of government, decentralizing management authority, encouraging stakeholder participation in resource management and conservation, cost recovery, and promoting greater social equity in access to water.In our view, water development and management should be based on a participatory approach involving users, planners, and policy-makers at all levels. Women must also play a central role in providing, managing and safeguarding water, especially in rural areas where 70% of our population resides.We have to promote equitable access to water for all citizens because the right to water is guaranteed by our constitution which states that every person has the right to safe potable water and the State must take reasonable legislative and other measures within the limits of the resources available to it, to achieve progressive realization of this right.Critical issues which need our attention include first, the impact of widespread informal mining, industry, the haphazard occupation of large scale agriculture land, and somewhat lax and unenforced pollution laws, which have resulted in catastrophic environmental degradation yet there seems no urgency on the part of the ZANU (PF) led government to deal with it decisively.Second it is fact that Zimbabwe has one of the highest fresh water to land ratios in Africa. Unfortunately the ZANU (PF) instigated fast track land reform project of 2000 has decimated agriculture production and water infrastructure and as a result, Zimbabwe's dams are in dire need of rehabilitation. However, we will have to address land tenure issues first as a matter of urgency so that we can rehabilitate our agricultural water resources.The massive urban migration due to the collapse of the agricultural sector since 2000 has resulted in a population explosion in the urban areas particularly Harare. This has resulted in high demand and inadequate infrastructure. Our approach must therefore focus on implementing effective water management in both urban and rural sectors.With regard to urban water management, we have to rehabilitate and develop our infrastructure and reduce overcrowding. Most of the water challenges which have been faced in urban areas are a consequence of mismanagement and reluctance by the Ministry of Local Governance to let the city council independently run water supply and sewer reticulation management.The decentralization of local authorities with minimum government interference will therefore be critical. As PDP we will ensure that local authorities have autonomy in making independent decisions and policies towards addressing this water crisis including the development of the necessary infrastructure.With regard to rural water management, the livelihoods of people in rural areas remain closely linked to availability, accessibility and management of natural resources such as water for both subsistence and income generation.Unfortunately rural Zimbabweans still predominantly rely on wells and boreholes that tap into Zimbabwe's groundwater supply. To this date our rural communities remain exposed to lack of safe drinking water that is easily accessible while sanitation systems are non-existent.According to UNICEF (2012) over 60% of the rural water supply infrastructure in Zimbabwe is in a state of disrepair, and as a result, many boreholes and wells contain non potable water and are in need of decontamination.As PDP we intend to address this through several initiatives which include; the improvement water supply access through drill, repair and/or the rehabilitation of boreholes including the encouragement of individually owned deep wells, implementing awareness programs for rural communities on issues that relate to treatment of water fetched from unprotected sources, the provision of materials for the construction of sanitary facilities and the improvement of sanitation through the conducting of participatory health and hygiene education workshops to change hygiene behaviours.According to the African Development Bank report of 2010, Zimbabwe will need an estimated $3,7bn for water supply and sanitation developments.As PDP we believe that it is indeed possible to meet the constitutional rights to potable water for every citizen and all we need is a government that recognises this responsibility and empowers our communities and local authorities to participate and be part of the solution. We will therefore implement water reforms which will include the promotion of more efficient and sustainable utilization of water through stakeholder involvement.We will also reduce political interference, improve planning capabilities, deal with mismanagement and corruption of city and rural district councils, improve the management and allocation financial resources and ensure we have the necessary skills to develop and maintain water infrastructure both in urban and rural sectors.Zimbabwe's Water Act (1976) was amended several times, and subsequently replaced with the Water Act (1998) which conforms to global trends in addressing pressing national issues. The only thing missing has been effective implementation and management. PDP intends to do just that.Another Zimbabwe is possible!
I am a guest, along with journalists from 14 other countries, at the SAS media day held at its Carey, North Carolina Headquarters, and at its user conference following in Las Vegas.

As a journalist, I have been attempting to follow Big Data' for some time, and I could not pass up this opportunity to get to the heart of it  despite nearly a day and a half in transit each way! This first article sets the scene  as much for me, as for you, to help understand Big Data and its impact on us.

First to SAS (Statistical Analysis System) is a software suite developed by SAS Institute for advanced analytics, multivariate analyses, business intelligence, data management, and predictive analytics. It was initially developed at North Carolina State University from 1966 until 1976 when the still, privately owned, SAS Institute was formed.

At its core, it is a software suite that can mine, alter, manage and retrieve data from a variety of sources and perform statistical analysis on it. SAS provides a graphical point-and-click user interface for non-technical users and more advanced options through the SAS APIs and programming language. To use SAS, data from disparate databases is combined  from CRMs, from metadata, and even from Excel spreadsheets.

Sounds pretty dry!

But what does Big Data mean?

According to Wikipedia, Big Data is a term for datasets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. Challenges include capture, data curation, cleansing, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, querying, analysis, and information privacy.

Big Data in a practical sense is about the massive amount of data collected by an equally massive amount of devices and processes. If you have any digital involvement  web search; email; use a smartphone; walk through the mall; use a credit card to buy something; security camera surveillance; contact a call centre; be a ratepayer in a city with a smart city grid, and much more, - then you create a digital footprint. That is your own granular data  that when combined becomes Big Data.

Have no doubt that granular data is combined. Data brokers sell it; some is traded in return for incorporating it other data lakes, but ultimately it ends up in a cleansed format that allows analytics to be performed, and actions taken.

Big Data is pervasive, rather than invasive. It is used benignly at the highest levels by governments planning for things like an ageing population. It is used by states and cities to plan future infrastructure. It is used by corporations to provide more and better services or be more effective marketers. And it is probably used by your local florist to understand what flowers to order and when!

By definition Big Data should not be personally identifiable  beyond segments or as SAS calls them Lookalikes where people share similar criteria e.g. age-groups, customs, preferences, etc.

The real emerging issue today is a moral one. How much granular data do you as a consumer give up to receive a service? Do you like the fact that Fly-Buys tracks what you buy and advises you when these items are on sale? Do you appreciate it when your utility company proactively advises you that a different usage plan may better suit you? Do you object to emails or SMS offers that are relevant to you where and when you shop? These are the tip of the iceberg.

Enter the age of the customer  where smart companies ensure that it is all about you.

But that data is used in far more important ways. In the Fly-buys example it helps Coles predict what and how much to stock, manufacturers how much to make, and even down to what will sell better.

But could that data be used to change your buying habits? The answer is yes. Big Data is the driver for new goods, services, and innovation. Those companies that harness it get stronger.

Not moralising here  Big Data is here to stay and will only get more pervasive as it combined with data from the Internet of Things, web interactions, social media, customer relationship management, smart grids, and so on.

What I have learned from todays session is that Big Data is huge, and I hope to impart a few actionable insights to iTWire readers over the next few days.
What do you do when the US Department of Homeland Security warns Windows users to remove QuickTime  you do it.

Trend Micro warned last week that Apples QuickTime for Windows had critical bugs and that Apple would no longer be providing security updates as the product lifecycle had expired. These bugs do not affect OS X users.

"We're not aware of any active attacks against these vulnerabilities currently," Christopher Budd from Trend Micro wrote in the blog post. "But the only way to protect your Windows systems from potential attacks against these or other vulnerabilities in Apple QuickTime now is to uninstall it."

So why did the US Department of Homeland Security get involved?

It states, Computers running QuickTime for Windows will continue to work after support ends. However, using unsupported software may increase the risks from viruses and other security threats. Potential negative consequences include loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability of data, as well as damage to system resources or business assets. The only mitigation available is to uninstall QuickTime for Windows.

A great many government computers have QuickTime running to support iPhones and iTunes. Without making a definite must remove statement government computers would be at risk.

Trend Micro agrees that this is an urgent, uninstall today, call to action. Zero Day Initiative has just released two advisories ZDI-16-241 and ZDI-16-242 detailing two new, critical vulnerabilities affecting QuickTime for Windows. These advisories are have been released in accordance with the Zero Day Initiatives Disclosure Policy for when a vendor does not issue a security patch for a disclosed vulnerability. And because Apple is no longer providing security updates for QuickTime on Windows, these vulnerabilities are never going to be patched.

Users are advised not to use QuickTime Lite or any player based on QuickTime code.


We are pleased to announce another agreement, this time with PNG DataCo. This contract further proves the benefits of our telecom specific orientation and our wide experience. Our aim in this engagement is to deliver meaningful improvements in telecom product development and delivery of market competitive products while increasing staff productivity and skills for PNG DataCo, said Igor Glavanic, Managing Director of Parcus Group.



Currently a large number of countries around the world are undertaking fibre-based national network deployments and PNG is one of them. These projects bring a very unique set of challenges during construction, but in the long run, one of their main effects is increased reliance of customers on telecom services in their everyday lives.



As such, carriers have to step-up in terms of their understanding of customers needs and develop products with customers service usability expectations front of mind. Our telecom product management software platform and all our consulting and training services are based on this premise of customer first and deliver concrete time-to-market and return on capital improvements to our telecom customers, added Mr Glavanic.



PNG DataCo (DataCo) has been established by the PNG National Executive Council (NEC) as a part of the PNG Governments plan to restructure the Telecommunication Industry and is tasked with building the National Transmission Network (NTN) that will provide wholesale non-discriminatory telecommunications transmission services. This important undertaking aims to facilitate, stimulate and foster social and economic development in PNG through increased availability at affordable prices of essential broadband communications services, said Mr. Daniel Leki, General Manager of Corporate Services at DataCo.



DataCo is pleased to be working with Parcus Group who have demonstrated a solid record of positive contribution to telecom businesses around the world and are able to bring the framework, methodology, skills and tools to improve the performance of our teams and products. added Mr Leki.



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About Parcus Group



Founded in 2004, Parcus Group provides product development, service creation and product management software, training and consulting services for telecommunications and ICT businesses, to improve time-to-market delivery of new products and services, increase staff productivity and enhance competitiveness. Company serves customers globally across 6 continents. For more see: https://parcusgroup.com/product-management-training



About PNG Data Co



DataCo is the builder of the PNG National Transmission Network, and provider of wholesale non-discriminatory telecommunications network transmission services using Government owned assets and new capital projects. DataCos service offers include transmission and backhaul, IP transmission, customised offerings and international private leased circuits. DataCo had been in operation since February 2014.
60 Minutes Sharyn Alfonsi found Berlin-based Security Research Labs led by Karsten Nohl, who has a doctorate in computer engineering from the University of Virginia.

Alfonsi challenged the team to break into an off-the-shelf iPhone from New York that was given to U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., a member of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Information Technology. Lieu agreed to the experiment knowing the phone would likely be hacked.

All the team needed was the phone number to the iPhone. They were easily able to hear and record phone calls, see Lieus contacts, and know his whereabouts. They were even able to get the phone number of every incoming and outgoing call to and from his borrowed iPhone.

Even though Lieu knew beforehand the phone would be hacked, the reality of it was more startling. When a recording of one particular conversation was played back to him, he said, First, its really creepy. And second, it makes me angry.

This was possible from a security flaw in Signaling System 7 (SS7), a little-known global network that connects all the phone carriers around the world - the heart of the phone system. Even if a user turns location services off, hackers can still see the phones location via the network.

Unfortunately, no single entity governs the SS7 networks around the world, so its up to each carrier to make its own network secure. Nohl did say that some networks are harder to crack than others, but they all appear to be hackable.

The team also created a ghost network that appeared to be a hotel Wi-Fi. Once Alfonsi connected to this ghost network (thinking it was a legit hotel network), the team was able to get her email address, her account ID, and all the credit cards associated with it. Hering also showed how he could spy on Alfonsi using the front facing camera on her phone.

As disturbing as Herings attack is, this type of breach is more complicated in that the number of victims are limited to those that are on the fake network or who received a file with malicious code through a text message.

The theory is that the SS7 flaw is well known within the government, but its a hole that security agencies might not want plugged since it provides access to everyones phone. Lieu said that anyone who knows about this flaw and didnt actively try to remedy it should be fired. We cant have 300 some million Americans, and really the global citizenry, be at risk of having their phone conversations intercepted with a known flaw simply because some intelligence agencies might get some data, he said. That is not acceptable.
Palo Alto Networks is on board with industry-wide efforts to share threat intelligence and disseminate it so the collective knowledge businesses gather about threats can be quickly turned into defenses against new types of attacks.

Its efforts include support for the new federal Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act that lifts some of the liability businesses are exposed to if they share data about security incidents. If the data inadvertently reveals personal information but was submitted in accordance with the law, the contributor would not be legally liable.

The company is also hammering out the details of the Cyber Threat Alliance it formed last year to gather threat information from security vendors and researchers that can rapidly and thoroughly unmask current threats. The goal is to shorten the useful lives of attacks and put a heavier burden on attackers who want to stay in business.

Palo Alto Networks Palo Alto CSO Rick Howard

Recently Network World spoke about this with Palo Altos CSO Rick Howard. Here is an edited version of that conversation.

What impact has the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act had on your efforts?

The law basically gives [businesses that share intelligence] some relief in case somebody makes a mistake in intelligence sharing. So its too early to tell what sort of an impact thats going to be.

Are you saying its going to take somebody to actually be challenged in court and have a ruling before CISA will be widely used?

Right. Until someone gets challenged on it, I dont know how impactful the law will be.

What value, if any, will this type of information sharing have for you and your customers?

This is a fundamental thing that we have to get right. Palo Alto Networks believes it, I believe it, that we need to scale intelligence sharing massively in order to get ahead of the adversaries so yes, I encourage anything that will help us share intelligence better with our peers, with our competitors, with our friends - anybody.

We need to scale intelligence sharing massively in order to get ahead of the adversaries...

What are the advantages, specifically?

Let me talk about the initiative that weve been working on here. Its called the Cyber Threat Alliance. My boss got three other CEOs of security vendors [Fortinet, Intel and Symantec] to group up and decide to share threat intelligence with each other. What we are pushing on is not just sharing malicious code with each other, although thats what were doing right now. What wed really like to do is share adversary playbook information down the kill chain, indicators of compromise, how the adversary thinks his or her way through their victims networks. Our experience is that the list of indicators of compromise in that playbook could be as small as 100 and as big as over 3,000 to 4,000 things that they do. What we want to be able to do is share that information with as many people that can consume it and push prevention controls out as automatically as we can.

How might that effort be helped if individual corporations start contributing to threat intelligence that they gathered?

If everybody is doing this, if vendors do it, white hat researchers do it, corporations do it big and small, just think if we could crowd-source all of that intelligence and stick it into prevention vehicles that we all have deployed. Thats the value of it.

So if youre really after the indicators of compromise, would every contributor have to analyze things they detect and come up with a list of IOCs or would that be done by somebody else? Im thinking of a business that might not have huge resources.

Maybe those guys might belong to other kinds of sharing organizations, like [information sharing and analysis centers] and maybe the alliance collects that from those organizations. They would be sort of a gathering point of all that stuff. Its yet to be seen.

And the growth of the alliance, how has that been over the year? It started with four.

Weve added four contributing members since then. The contributing members are Reversing Labs, Barracuda, Zscaler and Eleven Paths. We sort of put a cap on it last year while we got our act together. We had to learn how to trust each other and we had to build some infrastructure to allow efficient sharing.

Would you say youre up to speed?

No. We had to solve a pretty big problem. I go in with my counterpart from the Alliance and brief the CEOs every quarter about the status of the Cyber Threat Alliance. They called us in June and said, 'What are we going to do with this thing? Can you guys just do a proof of concept? Can you do one adversary group? Can you just do one? Well give you 90 days to do it.'

We put our best analysts on it and we went after CryptoWall 3 over last summer. At the end of it we published a whitepaper and when we published the whitepaper, the adversaries behind CryptoWall 3 moved to CryptoWall 4 the next day. Now we didnt make them move, they were ready to move but we bumped them and thats the whole idea. They probably werent ready to go when we did, but they used that as an excuse to go to the next version and if we can do that in real time every day then we are making [adversaries] spend resources that they probably dont want to spend.

What other hurdles do you face?

One of the bigger ones is how do you measure the quality of intelligence if the pool of intelligence people providing intelligence to everybody else is large? Right now we make everybody share 1,000 pieces of malicious code a day. At Palo Alto Networks we collect 20 million samples of malicious code a week so sharing 1,000 a day with eight other vendors is not going to move the needle. If we want to share indicators of compromise for every adversary group out there, that takes a significant upgrade in capability.

What else?

How do you measure the quality [of contributions]? Because right now with our current stipulation, that you have to share a thousand pieces every day, kind of eliminates the smaller players. So we are talking about how to solve that problem right now and were working on a proof of concept that should be done by the summertime.

Security vendors like us and Symantec and Intel, we all collect malicious code all the time. Collecting and sharing 1,000 pieces every day is not that big of a deal for us but there are niche intel players and one-person teams that are also doing pretty good intelligence but have no way to meet that high bar so were trying to figure out how to get those guys into the club.

Are you concerned that members will glean all the intelligence provided by others without contributing very much?

Yes. If you belong to the alliance, everybody has to contribute. We want to measure that with some accuracy and not all intelligence is of the same quality as others. I may come in with a piece of malicious code that everybody has seen already so thats not much value but a smaller player might come in and give the one indicator that attributes the entire playbook to a specific adversary. We want to be able to measure that and take credit for that and give that person who shares it the credit that they deserve. What were talking is building an intelligence marketplace, a way to evaluate all the intelligence thats coming in, giving it a score and therefore everybody in the marketplace knows who the good intelligence people are, who the bad ones are.

So, its not a one-way street where members gain the benefits but dont contribute.

Right. Were trying to protect against the not so great intelligence outfits that just come in and grab all the great intelligence and dont ever give anything.

With the proof of concept, how do you overcome the problem?

Were building it now and testing it now. Weve got some ideas about how to build the thing. Well see what shakes out by the summertime.

And that should theoretically improve the effectiveness of the whole alliance?

I think so. It gives everybody a chance to play regardless of what size they are and regardless of the amount... No longer will we grade it on volume of intelligence shared. It will be on quality of intelligence shared.

This story, "Palo Alto Networks working to share threat intelligence" was originally published by Network World .
Viber, a popular instant messaging and Voice-over-IP service provider with more than 700 million users, has implemented end-to-end encryption to protect its customers' communications against snooping.

The move comes after Facebook-owned WhatsApp turned on full end-to-end encryption earlier this month, bringing secure and private instant messaging into the mainstream.

The majority of IM apps have long encrypted the communications between users' devices and their own servers. However, in such a configuration, the service providers themselves can still read communications as they pass through their servers to get routed to the intended recipients.

End-to-end encryption systems like those implemented by WhatsApp and now Viber allow user devices to establish a secure communications channel directly, making it impossible for anyone else to see the unencrypted data.

This means that even if a provider's servers are breached by hackers, they won't be able to view unencrypted user communications. It also means that companies like WhatsApp and Viber Media will be unable to comply with law enforcement requests for the content of their customers' chats or audio calls.

Viber's end-to-end encryption feature is available in the application's latest version -- 6.0 -- for Android, iOS, PCs and Macs. It provides strong privacy and security for voice or video calls, text messages and videos and photos exchanged by users in both group and one-to-one conversations.

When end-to-end encryption is used Viber users will see a grey padlock in their chats and calls. When they verify the identity of their contacts and mark them as trusted, a green padlock will appear.

The authentication keys for the trusted contacts will be monitored and if they change at some point in the future, the padlock for those conversations will turn to red. This indicates either a possible impersonation attempt by a man-in-the-middle attacker or the fact that the contact has changed their primary phone.

The new Viber version also includes a "Hidden Chats" feature. This will allow users to hide specific conversations in their Viber apps and to protect them with a PIN or a fingerprint, in the case of iOS devices that have fingerprint sensors.

While Viber and WhatsApp are not the first messaging services to implement end-to-end encryption, they are certainly some of the largest ones. Until now, to benefit from this level of secure messaging on some platforms users had to install specialized IM apps and then convince their friends to use them as well.

With the barrier to end-to-end encryption lowered and the feature becoming a default in popular messaging apps a larger percentage of Internet communications will become inaccessible to law enforcement who are already complaining about the widespread use of encryption.
News / Africa

by Staff Reporter

LUSAKA - Attacks on foreign owned shops in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, have spread to other parts of the city with more shops attacked, local media reported late on Monday.The attacks started in the morning in two sprawling shanty compounds over rumours that foreigners were behind a spate of suspected ritual killings that have occurred in recent weeks.Four shops were initially looted in the two shanty compounds before the police moved in and took control of the situation.The attacks have spread to other shanty compounds in the city, forcing other Rwandan traders in the city to close their shops, according to several local online media.Pictures posted on social media showed residents with goods looted from the shops while police in riot gear patrolled the areas.Zambia Police Spokesperson Charity Munganga Chanda confirmed the looting of the shops.The shops belonging to foreigners of Rwandan origin were looted by residents after owners were accused of being behind ritual killings that have rocked the city.Suspected ritual killings have rocked the Zambian capital in recent weeks with seven people killed so far.The victims were found with their ears, genitals and hearts removed.On Sunday, Zambian President Edgar Lungu revealed that four people had been arrested in connection with the brutal ritual killings.Lungu said the four suspects were found with suspected body parts which the police had sent for forensic investigations.
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Hendon 2 Carshalton 0

Ryman League Premier Division

Hendon rebounded from the disappointment of Saturday's awful second half against now relegated Walton & Hersham with a match-winning second period against troubled Carshalton Athletic at LOOT Stadium on Monday.

Manager Frank Murphy rang the changes, Matt Howard, Matt Bartholomew and Bontcho Guentchev replacing Gary Fitzgerald, Curtis Warmington and Marvyn Watson.

Carshalton had the breeze at their backs and keeper Paul Smith's long clearances gave Paul Towler, Bartholomew, and Warren Kelly some difficulty. However, the Robins lacked the confidence and the nous to unlock Hendon's defence. All too often deep crosses were too close to Iga, whose handling was exemplary. Also exemplary was the performance of referee Mr R Evans, who booked three players.

Hendon's best player going forward was Davis Haule. His fine close control and gangling gait make him a difficult man to dispossess and his confidence has grown in recent weeks as he has nailed down a regular place in the team.

The second half was much better than the first. In the 52nd minute, a 35-yard free kick from Freddie Hyatt was arrowing just inside the near post before keeper Paul Smith flung himself across goal to make a fine save.

It only delayed the inevitable for a few minutes as Hendon exerted greater control. In the 61st minute, Haule attacked down the right side of the penalty area.Chris Currie made an ill-judged and ill-timed challenge which sent the him to the floor. The assistant referee immediately flagged for a penalty and Mr Evans pointed to the spot. Hyatt, remembering his spot-kick winner two weeks previously, decided to go the other way with this strike and Smith guessed wrongly.

Hendon were playing with plenty of confidence and the passing was much better, Bontcho Guentchev taking a more dominant role.

In the 68th minute, another careless challenge, this time by Sean Daly on Haule, led a free-kick just outside the penalty area. Hyatt turned provider delivering a super free-kick, which Towler converted with a blistering header from 10 yards.

'I've been telling Freddie for weeks to put the ball there,' said a smiling Towler after the game.

Substitute Dominic Gentle was denied his 22nd goal of the season by a brilliant block from Smith.

HENDON: Iga, Clarke, Howard, Daly, Kelly, Towler, Haule (Edwards, 85), Hyatt, Whitmarsh (Gentle, 80), Bartholomew, Guentchev (Watson, 75).
News / Local

by Stephen Jakes

Zimbabwe has been urged to give one man one vote chance as the country celebrate its 36 years of independence.The Election Resource Centre (ERC) said it was joining fellow Zimbabweans in celebrating 36 years of Independence from colonial rule."The think-tank and advocacy institution on elections and democracy congratulates Zimbabweans for maintaining peace and stability and implores upon government and Zimbabweans in general to ensure such an environment of peace is maintained," reads its statement."Zimbabweans went to war to attain one man one vote in a democratic society were people vote freely thus one cannot talk of the values of the liberation struggle without mentioning the issue of the right to vote for every citizen as enshrined in the Constitution of Zimbabwe, Section 67(3) (a). It is sad to note that despite attaining 36 years of black majority rule, the country is still far from having free, fair and credible elections although it was one of the main reasons for the liberation struggle."The organisation said Government continues to disenfranchise millions of Zimbabweans in the diaspora, hospitals and prisons, a violation of the right to vote which is guaranteed in the Constitution."Our fallen heroes would turn in their graves if they were to realise that 36 years after Zimbabwe attained independence, there are still squabbles over electoral reform in particular voter registration and the voters' roll, independence of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), the right to vote, political environment among others, the very things they went to war to liberate Zimbabweans from to ensure a level playing field for free, fair and credible elections," said the organisation."The July 31 2013 harmonised elections basing on the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AUs) observations were characterised by limited resources, inadequate voter education, limited time frame for voter registration, polarised media coverage, unavailability of the voters roll to contesting parties and candidates, chaotic special voting, hate speech, among other irregularities."The organization said during the run up to various by-elections, it noted intimidation, hate speech and biased media coverage, also noted by observers in 2013."This shows continued disregard for fundamental freedoms and values of the liberation struggle as enshrined in the Constitution of Zimbabwe. In an effort to prevent future electoral irregularities, a constitutional making process preceded the 2013 election, however, three years on, Electoral Laws have not yet fully been aligned with the "new" Constitution," said ERC."The Constitution of Zimbabwe that was enacted into law in May 2013, is a big step towards electoral democracy but it is all on paper. In the spirit of total enjoyment of independence, the ERC calls upon the government and Parliament to expedite the process of aligning Electoral Laws with the Constitution of Zimbabwe ahead of the 2018 General Elections which are only two years away. The Constitution must be implemented in letter and spirit, if Zimbabwe is to ever hold undisputed elections."The fruits of independence can only be realised through an electoral regime or framework that aspires to give meaning to the concept of the one man one vote which was fermented by the blood, tears and sweat of thousands of women and men who fought for the liberation of Zimbabwe. We should all hang our heads in collective shame that 36 years after independence, we are still to achieve one man one vote.ERC said as the nation begin the 37th year of Independence and also bearing in mind the upcoming 2018 Harmonised Elections, ERC recommends that Section 133J of the Electoral Act must be enforced to ensure a peaceful electoral environment, polling specific voter registration must become national and continuous, voter education must not be restrictive and must be continuous and traditional leaders must not have a role to play in elections."In the absence of these above noted recommendations, "36 years celebrating our Independence and Democracy" is a fallacy," ERC said.
A preliminary report was released Monday by the National Transportation Safety Board (NSTB) regarding the circumstances that led to the deadly Amtrak crash in Chester, Pennsylvania that killed at least two workers and injured another 80.

The report indicated that the agency's investigators are still determining the types of worker protections that were in place, if there are any, when the crash occurred on April 3 that involved 89 workers and a backhoe.

A report from the Wall Street Journal mentioned about a one-sentence caveat that figures at the center of labor disputes early this month. It refers to the fact that Amtrak is at odds with its workers about safety procedures.

According to the preliminary report of the NSTB, the train coming from New York City going to Savannah, Georgia with 341 passengers was travelling at 106 miles per hour when it struck two workers on the track. The train has a speed limit of 110 mph.

The two workers operating a backhoe at the crash scene who were killed were Joseph Carter Jr., 61 of Wilmington, Delaware and Peter John Adamovich, 59 of Lincoln University, Pennsylvania.

A separate report also revealed that the backhoe operator has a right to be on the tracks periodically during the weekend, said federal crash investigators on Monday.

In its latest report about the accident, the National Transportation Safety Board said the track where the accident happened was shut down at times during a 55-hour maintenance window.

It was not clear if trains were not permitted on these particular tracks when the crash occurred.

"NTSB investigators are confirming what roadway worker protections were in place at the time of the accident," said the agency.

The impact of the crash derailed the train's lead engine which carried 341 passengers and at least seven crew members. Over 40 people were hospitalized due to the crash; most of them sustained minor injuries such as bruises and scrapes.
What inspires entrepreneurs and career professionals to work hard and keep on going? It could be their goal, their passion or maybe the music. Sometimes, these hard-working business people need a boost in their system or a soothing tune after a long day at work. For them, the trick is getting the right playlist. Which is why Business News has asked various entrepreneurs to share their favorite and inspirational songs, from classical to country to rap to rock.

1. "I Don't Get Tired" by Kevin Gates - For Jordan Sizelove, the CEO and founder of Conquer Your Now, the song inspires him because it talks about never giving up no matter how many times you fail.

2. "My Way" by Frank Sinatra - Julia Busha, CEo of Slawsa connects to this song. For her, there's nothing more entrepreneur-spirited than doing it her own way.

3. "Lose Yourself" by Eminem is a pumped up song for Crystal Ponti of Forewordz. For her, it should be on every entrepreneur's playlist because everybody has just one shot.

4. "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong - Arianna DiMatteo of Aria Bella Candles gets positive when hearing this song. For her, the world is a beautiful place.

5. "Drive" by Incubus - Francesca Montillo, owner of Lazy Italian, says the lyrics of the song are about independence and doing what you're meant to do and she listens to it and gets inspired.

6. "Happy" by Pharell is Tara Tiger Brown's happy pill. The co-founder of KitHub says "We are moving really fast, stressing out, always looking ahead, and this song reminds me that we need to be present and take stock of the goodness in our life."

7. "Going the Distance" by Cake - Tadd Spering, founder of Stylinity, identifies with the song because entrepreneurs need to go the distance.

What are your favorite go-to tracks in your playlist? Tell us in the comments section!
Virgin America and Alaska Air Group Inc have submitted paperwork on Friday describing their transaction to the government. This came eleven days after Alaska announced that it would acquire Virgin for $2.6 billion. The paperwork is required by the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvement Act.

This law enables the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Justice Department to examine the proposed contract between the two merging parties ahead of time.

This will enable the three agencies to assess whether the contract is anticompetitive to other businesses.

When it comes to airline business, the Justice Department is the agency that takes the lead. The confirmation about the paperwork filing was confirmed by the Seattle-based parent company of Virgin America and Alaska Air.

This partnership, according to some experts, will give west coast liners an advantage with regards to air travel options.

Seattle has been the base of Alaska Air and it also operates in Alaska and the Northwest. Meanwhile, Virgin is based in San Francisco and provides many flights in and out of California.

"They're going to have a lot more flight options and travelers in the Northwest love Alaska because they have a lucrative mileage program, so they'll be able to use it more to even greater destinations," Nancy Parrott said. She is the Vice President and General Manager of CI Azumano Travel.

It will take the Feds about 30 days to review the contract between the two airlines after which they can close their deal. But they can also request for additional information in what is called a second request.

If so, the 30 day waiting period will be extended after the contracting companies have supplied the requested additional materials. Should the regulators deem that the contract violates antitrust laws, they can call for an injunction in a federal court so that the two parties cannot consummate their transaction.
It was in the year 1910 when The Jungle Book's author Rudyard Kipling campaigned against the name change for one of Alberta's cities and saved it from becoming an economic joke.

The British author convinced the authorities in the city to stick with the name Medicine Hat rather than change it to Gasburg.

Yes, the city was on its way to becoming renamed Gasburg due to the newfound natural gas industry in the city. Thankfully, British author Kipling wrote a convincing letter to the local newspaper - Medicine Hat News - and got attention. The rest, they say, is history.

According to CBC, Philip Pype, an archivist from Esplanade Archives of Medicine Hat, the people in the city were "horrified" at the possibility of the name change. Gasburg could become the target of fart jokes in the future (referring to now) if it was approved. It would become a laughing stock when cities would gather for economic and business forums.

"He basically said that if such a place as Medicine Hat were to rename itself and turn its back on its own heritage and on its own values, it might as well rename it Judasville," Pype said.

Why did The Jungle Book author like Medicine Hat, anyway? "He was actually intrigued by the name itself and received an invitation during his trip across North America. So, he came here by train, he and his wife, and took a tour of our city and became a big fan of Medicine Hat," said Pype.

Pype further said that the author was treated as a celebrity and showed him the beauty of the city and the richness of the natural gas industry by throwing a match on a gas well, which is one of the traditions in the city.

"And certainly health and safety regulations were not what they are today. They would turn on a gas pipe at full blast, light it on fire and it would flare up several hundred feet in the air," Pype said.

The locals were trying to impress the author. Unfortunately, none of these were documented.
Royal Dutch Shell is planning to move 95 or around five percent jobs from New Orleans to Houston. This announcement comes amidst the company's aim to cut its worldwide workforce by at least 10,000 jobs.

The company earlier announced its plans to let go of 2800 positions globally this year as part and parcel its merger with British rival BG Group. The ultimate goal is to end up with 7,500 positions amid slumping oil prices.

According to The Advocate, the 95 jobs that will be cut will bring down the employees from 1900 this month to at least 1800. The workforce was at 2300 last year. However, the also revealed that they plan to keep their presence in New Orleans over the long term.

"Our New Orleans office continues to be our operations center of expertise for Deep Water, including engineering, operations support and three offshore technology centers," Kimberly Windon, Shell spokeswoman, said. "Shell values our position and presence in the Greater New Orleans area - for our ongoing business, offshore training needs and long-standing relationships in the community," she added.

It was in early 2015 when Shell announced its workforce reduction.

NOLA also reported that the oil and gas company has announced the relocation of certain jobs from its global deepwater exploration and production division to its U.S. headquarters located in Houston. Furthermore, the company's plans in New Orleans looks like it is planning to target jobs that provide support to the company's oil and gas developments in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. The said project is considered to be one of the of the most expensive and long-term projects of the company.

It was early this year when Shell completely took over of Britain's BG Group. The merging brought about plans that streamline and would possibly shed around $30 billion in assets over the next three years.
News / Local

by Bianca Mlilo

THE Bulawayo Thermal Power Station resumed operations yesterday afternoon after a weeklong shut down due to equipment breakdown.The station was shutdown last Wednesday following a suspected tube leak on boiler 8.The Zimbabwe Power Company (ZPC) had said most of the boilers were out of service and were taken for repair."Boiler 5 is on statutory inspection. Boiler 6 was taken out of service on April 12, 2016 at 1005hrs for grate repairs. Boiler 7 is on grate repairs and external cleaning."Boiler 9 is on grate repairs. Boiler 10 was taken out of service on April 13, 2016 at 0720hrs for refractory repairs," said ZPC."Generator 3 exciter brush gear repairs have been completed, now awaiting test run. Generator 5 refurbishment works to be carried out during the repowering project."In its daily generation update yesterday, ZPC indicated that power generation at the station was at 23MW against installed capacity of 90MW.The country's largest coal fired power station in Hwange was down at 269MW against 920MW installed capacity.Kariba Hydro-Power Station was the largest producer at 478MW compared to 750MW capacity while Munyati stood at 16MW with Harare at 30MW.In total the country is producing an average 816MW compared to an average domestic demand of 2,200MW.The gap is covered by imports from regional producers.The Bulawayo Power Station is connected to the national grid through 11kV and 33kV systems. It was commissioned between 1947 and 1957 as an undertaking by the Municipality of Bulawayo. It joined the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority in 1987 after the amalgamation of all the Local Authority Electricity Undertakings, the Electricity Supply Commission power station at Munyati and Hwange, and the Central African Power Corporation station at Kariba.Unbundling of business units has resulted in the plant joining Zimbabwe Power Company.While Bulawayo Power Station initially had an installed capacity of 120MW, a refurbishment exercise in 1999 on the ageing plant gave it a new lease of life.The station capacity is now 90MW. The main materials needed for the generation of electricity are coal, water, chemicals, oil, greases and spare parts for maintenance.The station currently generates an average of 30MW.Last year, Bulawayo Thermal Power Station received a loan of $87 million from the Export-Import Bank of India for retooling purposes.The actual retooling is expected to commence during the first half of this year.The loan facility came at a time when Zimbabwe and many southern African countries are facing serious electricity shortages because of a growing demand which is triggered by expanding industries in the region.The upgrading of the power station is expected to be conducted over a three-year period and will breathe life into the facility that was built in 1947 with a 120 mega watt (MW) capacity but had reduced electricity generation to a maximum 30MW owing to obsolete equipment.
There are speculations that the Galaxy Note 6 release date may happen this August. It is believed that the device may be available this summer.

PC Advisor reported that Samsung's Note series is set to return in the U.K. this August with the Galaxy Note 6 release date. The phablet may be priced at 630, about $900.

The Galaxy Note 6 specs will reportedly feature a new waterproof design and iris scanner. The device is also believed to have 6 GB of RAM and will run on Android N.

"Samsung tends to hold an Unpacked event in which it unveils the new Note around the middle of August," the publication wrote for its Galaxy Note 6 release date news. "The latest we've seen a new Note launch is immediately preceding IFA, which this year runs 2-7 September, making a 1 September launch possible."

A source told Tech Radar that Samsung will not be launching the Galaxy S7 Edge+ in the U.K. The company did not release the Note 5 in Europe.

"I got the impression that it had been a bit of a disappointment sales-wise and that the decision to keep the Note 5 out of Europe is now considered a mistake," the insider said. " So our information is that the Note 6 will launch in the UK in August and that there will be no S7 Edge+."

Neurogadget noted that a Samsung employee confirmed that the Galaxy Note 6 release date will be this August. Moreover, Android N will reportedly be finished this summer.

It was previously reported that the Galaxy Note 6 release date may come earlier due to S7's success in the market. It was noted that Samsung may be developing the habit of releasing their devices sooner and with a cheaper price.

The company's sales are expected to triple the profits gained by the S6 models at this time last year. This year's lineup is believed to reach 9 million units during their first month on the market.
News / Local

by Noleen Makhurane

A FEMALE herbalist from Bulawayo is set to stand trial for giving a city woman herbs to terminate her pregnancy.The two women yesterday appeared at the Western Commonage Court facing a charge of unlawful termination of pregnancy.Gugulethu Ndlovu, 18, who aborted, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a suspended 12 months in prison by Magistrate Themba Chimiso.Three months were suspended on condition that she does not commit a similar offence and the remaining nine months were suspended on condition she completes 315 hours of community service at the Western Commonage Court.Her accomplice, Theresa Kundika, 45, pleaded not guilty.Kundika told the court that she was a herbalist and had only given Ndlovu a potion to help her avoid a miscarriage.She was granted $100 bail and her trial will commence on April 27."Ndlovu came to my homestead and asked me to assist her with a herbal potion that would prevent her having complications or a miscarriage," she said.Prosecuting, Mufara Mageza said that sometime in February this year, Ndlovu approached Kundika seeking to carry out an abortion.The court heard Ndlovu was given a traditional concotion.The abortion bid was unsuccessful and she allegedly returned to Kundika the following month and the second dose resulted in the successful termination of the pregnancy."Ndlovu wrapped the foetus with her waist cloth and dumped it in a drainage sewer at her house. The foetus caused the sewer to burst and Ndlovu was arrested after the waist cloth wrapping the foetus was positively identified as belonging to her leading to her arrest," said Mageza.Ndlovu, in her defence, said she resorted to abortion after her boyfriend deserted her.
Leaders with Democracy North Carolina want the Forsyth County Board of Elections to reconsider more than 100 provisional ballots that were not counted in the March 15 primary because the paperwork for them lacked signatures.

Based on Democracy NCs review of provisional ballot records, the county elections board threw out about 130 provisional ballots because they had no signature, said Bob Hall, the executive director of the advocacy group.

Voters are supposed to sign a document when casting a provisional ballot. The printers that the county has been using on Election Day print out slips of paper  like a ticket or receipt  that do not include a signature line.

Tim Tsujii, Forsyth Countys elections director, said poll workers were trained to ask voters to sign the bottom of the slip.

But in some cases, poll workers apparently did not ask them.

Tsujii said 167 provisional ballots were not approved that would have at least partially counted if the voter had signed the slips. Most were out-of-precinct voters or precinct transfers, so at minimum their votes on state bonds would have counted.

The voters did everything they were told to do, Hall said in a statement. Their voice is being silenced through no fault of their own.

Hall said the voters right to vote and due process is at stake.

He said that the State Board of Elections has not held its state canvass of results yet and that the state is ordering some counties to re-canvass or re-evaluate their rejection of some ballots. He thinks that should happen in Forsyth County.

Decision up to state

Tsujii said it would be up to state officials to determine whether Forsyth County should go back and count the ballots. He said local board members made their determinations on those ballots based on state law.

Jackie Hyland, a spokeswoman for the State Board of Elections, responded to an email Tuesday afternoon: The State Board of Elections must certify the accuracy of election results. In past weeks our agency has actively reviewed all county results to ensure accuracy. We are giving counties appropriate direction which can include canvassing. We are aware of the issue in Forsyth County and we are in communication with the County Board of Elections.

Provisional ballots are issued to voters when there is a question about eligibility or in other special situations. The Forsyth County Board of Elections reviewed 961 provisional ballots when certifying local results for the March 15 election, and 592 were not approved for various reasons.

In addition to the 167 provisional ballots in question, another 194 did not have signatures, but the 194 would not have counted anyway since the people were not registered to vote, Tsujii said.

On Tuesday morning, Hall, Democracy NCs central Piedmont organizer Linda Sutton, and other staffers and local volunteers met with Tsujii and Lamar Joyner, Forsyth Countys deputy elections director, to discuss their concerns about the signature issue and to call for better poll worker training and equipment.

Hall said other counties in the state did not have this large of a signature issue. Also, he said African American and Latino voters account for 30 percent of the countys registered voters but they made up 61 percent of the 130 voters he listed.

Planning procedural changes

Tsujii and Joyner listened and responded to questions.

They said the county has used the same software for provisional forms in the past, but there was a higher volume of provisional ballots this election and many new poll workers. Also, a lot of emphasis was put on the new voter identification requirement this year.

Tsujii, who started working for the county on Feb. 29, is planning procedural changes to prevent the signature issue in future elections.

In upcoming elections, the county will fill out paper forms for provisional ballot applications instead of printing out slips. Also, Tsujii plans to offer more training options for poll workers.

Hall said afterward, I thought it was a positive meeting, and I appreciate the leadership at the staff level.

Earlier this month, the State Board of Elections ordered a new election to be held June 7 in the Democratic race for the South Ward seat on the Winston-Salem City Council. Carolyn Highsmith edged out John Larson by six votes in the March 15 election, but Larson protested the election. More than 30 voters in South Ward precincts were given the wrong ballot style.
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai spokesman Luke Tamborinyoka has accused the ZBC for propagating lies about the demonstrations which was conducted by the party on April 14 saying the national broadcaster only focused its cameras to where there were no people and interviewed people who had nothing to do with the protest who just said negative things.The MDC-T demonstration was massively attended by supporters which showed that Tsvangirai is still having support despite critiques who claimed he has crumbled.Tamborinyoka said cheap, cheap propaganda, the ZBC dismally failed to cope with the MDC demo. It was in sixes and sevens on how to cover the people's loud expression," he said. "Finally, they settled for reporting, not on the demo itself but on comments by the usual political analysts who talked about this non-significant" demonstration."He said then they show people a fleet of pictures, making sure that there were never more than four people in each other."This was the picture of the people who turned up at the "poorly attended" MDC demonstration. And then they resort to quoting police spokesperson Charity Charamba, who spoke about about how MDC activists had "run amok" and disturbed the flow of traffic," he said. "And then you say to yourself, so those four people shown to me in this very same news clip as having been the demonstrators are the ones who disturbed human and vehicular traffic in Harare's CBD? Its called denial. No amount of media whitewash will blind people from the true numbers that expressed themselves in Harare."
Land and Space Journal Sentinel business reporter Tom Daykin talks about commercial real estate and development. SHARE Click to enlarge

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A vacant two-story commercial building on Milwaukee's near west side is being sold to a nonprofit neighborhood group that will redevelop it.

The Common Council on Friday approved the sale of the 3,200-square-foot building, 964 N. 35th St., for $15,000 to Near West Side Partners.

The group plans to spend over $250,000 on renovating the building, which the city acquired in 2013 through property tax foreclosure, according to a Department of City Development report.

The partnership "will work to find tenants that will have a positive impact on the neighborhood," the report said.

The building has upper-level residential space. Its street-level commercial space was once used as a George Webb restaurant before it closed several years ago.

The project will be financed through the group's Near West Side Economic Development Challenge Fund.

The partnership has launched a three-year campaign to raise $5 million to help the fund finance development projects. The fund has already raised $1.2 million in private cash from Milwaukee Urban Strategic Investment Corp. and the Harley-Davidson Foundation, and an $800,000 grant from Milwaukee County.

Near West Side Partners was formed in 2015 by Marquette University, Harley-Davidson Inc., Aurora Health Care Inc., MillerCoors LLC and Potawatomi Business Development Corp.  all major neighborhood employers.

The partnership is funded in part through a business improvement district.

The district collects annual special assessments from commercial property owners in the area bordered by I-43 on the east, Highway 175 on the west, I-94 on the south and W. Vliet St., west of N. 27th St. and W. Highland Blvd., east of N. 27th St., on the north.

Those funds are used for facade improvements, increased security, marketing and other area activities.
2017 farmers markets in Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin

Show Caption Hide Caption Healthy eating at our Farmer's Markets Vegetables provide many benefits. Farmers markets offer a variety fruits and vegetables. Lori Nickel/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Bookmark our interactive map of local markets, which pinpoints locations and lists them by day of the week.

Many markets also have their own websites and/or Facebook pages, though some might not yet be updated for the coming season.

This list includes one new Milwaukee market (Groundworks Young Farmers), and the Greendale market is now scheduled every Saturday. A number of markets have closed: Cudahy, St. Francis, Harambee, Westosha, Muskego, the midweek market in Oconomowoc and the downtown Racine market (both Wednesday and Sunday markets are now in West Racine).

Look for new locations for the Grafton, Cedarburg, Pewaukee, Dousman, Sussex and Oconomowoc markets; new hours for various markets. For shoppers looking ahead, Oak Creek is looking to start a market in 2018.

For a broader listing that includes farms and food-related businesses in nine counties that sell goods directly to the public, look for the Farm Fresh Atlas of Southeastern Wisconsin online.

If you know of a market thats not listed here, or if there are changes to market dates or hours, please send the information to nstohs@journalsentinel.com; please type FARMERS MARKET in the subject field. Or mail to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Food, P.O. Box 371, Milwaukee, WI 53201.

MILWAUKEE COUNTY

Brown Deer Farmers Market: 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesdays, June 14-Oct. 25. Marketplace Shopping Center, 9078 N. Green Bay Road (in front of Burlington Coat Factory). Becky Nelson, (414) 354-4117, becky@bdtaxman.com.

Cathedral Square Market: 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturdays, June 3-Oct. 7 (no market July 15 and Aug. 12). Cathedral Square Park, 520 E. Wells St. East Town Association, Emily McElwee, (414) 271-1416, emcelwee@easttown.com.

CORE/El Centro Rooftop Farmers Market: 3-7 p.m. Thursdays June 8-Oct. 19. 130 W. Bruce St. Stephanie Calloway, (414) 225-4267, stephaniec@core-elcentro.org.

Enderis Park Farmers Market: 9:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Sundays, June 11-Sept. 24. Enderis Park, between Chambers and Locust and 70th and 72nd streets. Heather Sullivan, enderisparkfarmersmarket@gmail.com.

Fondy Farmers Market: May 13-June 10, Saturdays only, 9 a.m.-noon; June 17-Oct. 29, market open 4 days/week: Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9 a.m.-3 p.m.; and Saturdays, 7 a.m.-3 p.m. Open thereafter Saturdays only (Nov. 4, 11 and 18). 2200 W. Fond du Lac Ave. Katie Hassemer, (414) 933-8121, khassemer@fondymarket.org.

Fondy Market at Schlitz Park: 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Tuesdays, July 11-Oct. 3. 1555 N. Rivercenter Drive. Katie Hassemer, (414) 939-8840, khassemer@fondymarket.org.

Fox Point Farmers Market : 8 a.m.-noon Saturdays, June 17-Oct. 14. In the west parking lot of Stormonth School, 7300 N. Lombardy Road. Mary LaCharite, (414) 352-0555, fpfm2003@wi.rr.com

Garden District Farmers Market: 1-5 p.m. Saturdays, June 10-Oct. 14. Adjacent to the Garden Districts community gardens at S. 6th St. and Howard Ave. Jenn Turner, (414) 212-5215, market@milwaukeegdna.com.

Greendale Open Market: 8 a.m.-noon Saturdays, June 17 through Oct. 7. Broad Street-Village Center, between Northway and Schoolway. Jackie Schweitzer, (414) 423-2790, park.rec@greendale.k12.wi.us.

Greenfield Farmers Market: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Sundays, May 7-Oct. 29 (except May 28). Konkel Park, 5151 W. Layton Ave. (414) 329-5275, farmersmarket@greenfield.wi.us.

Groundworks Young Farmers  Farm Stand: 4:30-6 p.m. Wednesdays, July 5-Sept. 27. 2813 W. Wright St. nick@groundworkmke.org

Hartung Park Farmers Market: 4-7 p.m. Wednesdays, June 21-Sept. 27. Hartung Park near intersection of Menomonee River Parkway and Keefe Ave., Wauwatosa/Milwaukee. Lynne Woehrle, Mary Richter, (262) 825-4049, hartungparkfarmersmarket@gmail.com.

Jackson Park Farmers Market: 3:30-7 p.m. Thursdays, June 8-Sept. 28. Jackson Park, 3500 W. Forest Home Ave., adjacent to the boat house, just north of the pond. (414) 687-0938, jpfarmersmarket@yahoo.com.

Near West Side Farners Market: 4-7 p.m. Thursdays, Aug. 3-Sept. 14. 20th St. and Kilbourn Ave., in the MCFI parking lot.

Outdoor Urban Market of the Milwaukee Public Market : 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturdays, June 3-Sept. 30. E. St. Paul Ave. and Broadway. Free 1-hour parking in Public Market lot with validation of a purchase. (414) 336-1111.

Riverwest Gardeners Market : 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sundays, June 4-Oct. 22 (no market June 11). Garden Park, 821 E. Locust St. Emma DeBord, (414) 367-9389, info@riverwestmarket.com.

Shorewood Farmers Market: 9:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Sundays, June 18-Oct. 29. Lake Bluff Elementary School, 1600 E. Lake Bluff Blvd. Tia Torhorst, (414) 502-7164, shorewoodfarmersmarket@gmail.com.

South Milwaukee Downtown Market: 3-7 p.m. Thursdays, June 1-Oct. 12. S. 11th Ave. and Milwaukee Ave. Tony Bloom, (414) 499-1568, candyman53172@gmail.com.

South Shore Farmers Market: 8 a.m.-noon Saturdays, June 17-Oct. 14 (excluding weekend of South Shore Frolic, July 15). South Shore Park, 2900 S. Shore Drive.

Tosa Farmers Market: 8 a.m.-noon Saturdays, June 3-Oct. 14. City parking lot near Little Red Store, 7720 Harwood Ave. Bekah Johnson, (414) 301-2526, tosamarket@gmail.com.

Walker Square Farmers Market: 7 a.m.-3 p.m. Sundays and Thursdays, June 4-Oct. 29 (dependent on produce availability). Walker Square Park, S. 9th and W. Washington streets. (414) 276-3345.

West Allis Farmers Market: Noon-6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1-6 p.m. Saturdays, May 6-Nov. 25. 6501 W. National Ave. (414) 302-8600.

Westown Farmers Market: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Wednesdays, June 7-Oct. 25. Zeidler Union Square, 301 W. Michigan St. Westown Association, (414) 276-6696, Katelyn Kluft, katelyn@westown.org.

Whitefish Bay Farmers Market : 8 a.m.-noon Saturdays, July 8-Oct. 7. E. Silver Spring Drive and N. Berkeley Blvd. (414) 964-1400, marketing@shopwhitefishbay.com.

OZAUKEE COUNTY

Cedarburg Farmers Market: 3-7 p.m. Wednesdays, June 21-Oct. 25 (except July 5 or Aug. 2). Firemen's Park, N65 W796 Washington Ave. (262) 377-5856.

Cedarburg Makers & Growers Market: 9 a.m. - 2 p.m. Fridays, June 16-Oct. 27. Cedarburg Cultural Center parking lot on the corner of Mill St. and Washington Ave. Kristen at katbeads9@hotmail.com.

Village of Fredonia Farmers Market: 2-6 p.m. Wednesdays, June 14-Nov. 8. Fredonia Government Center, 242 Fredonia Ave. Lisa Dohrwardt, (262) 692-9650.

Grafton Farmers Market: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Thursdays, July 6-Sept. (end date depends on weather). Veterans Memorial Park, Highway 60 and 13th Ave., Grafton, (262) 377-1650, lisa@grafton-wi.org

Port Washington Farmers Market : 8 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Saturdays, June 3-Oct. 28 (except July 15). 100 block of E. Main St. (262) 268-1132.

Saukville Farmers Market: 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Sundays, June 25-Oct. 29 (except Sept. 3). Veterans Park, Highway 33, S. Mill St. and S. Main St. (262) 284-9423.

Thiensville Village Farmers Market: 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Tuesdays, June 13-Oct. 24. Village Park, 250 Elm St. (414) 241-1013, ThiensvilleFM@gmail.com

RACINE/KENOSHA/WALWORTH COUNTIES

Burlington Farmers Market : 3-7 p.m. Thursdays, May 4-Oct. 26. Wehmhoff Square, corner of Washington St. and Perkins Blvd. Carol Reed, (262) 210-6360, burlingtonmarket@yahoo.com.

East Troy Farmers Market : 2-6 p.m. Fridays, May 19-Oct. 6. East Troy Village Square Park, 2881 Main St. Vanessa Lenz, (262) 642-3770, vanessa@easttroy.org.

Elkhorn Farmers Market: 8 a.m.-12:30 p.m., Saturdays, June 10-Oct. 14. Courthouse Square, Elkhorn. Christy Harteau, (262) 723-7733, elkhornfarmmarket@gmail.com.

Kenosha HarborMarket : 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturdays, May 13-Oct. 14. Rhode Center for the Arts, 514 56th St. Ray Forgianni, (262) 914-1252, ray@kenoshacommonmarkets.com.

Lake Geneva Farmers Market : 8 a.m.-1 p.m. Thursdays, May 4-Oct. 26. Horticultural Hall, 330 Broad St. (262) 248-4382, market@horticulturalhall.com.

Milaegers Great Lakes Farmers Market: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Sundays year-round (except Easter and other major holidays). 4838 Douglas Ave., Racine. Carol Reed, (262) 210-6360, farmersmarket@milaegers.com.

Sturtevant Farmers Market : 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Mondays, June 5, 12, 19 and 26; 9 a.m.-1 p.m. July 3-Oct. 30 (end date depends on weather). Fountain Banquet Hall, 8505 Durand Ave. (262) 583-1696, RS082496@yahoo.com

Racine Farmers Market: 8 a.m.-noon Saturdays, May 13-Oct. 28; also 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesdays, May 17-Oct. 25. Southwest corner of Washington Ave. and West Blvd. Dan Braun, (262) 886-3091.

Whitewater City Market: 3:30-7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, May 2-Oct. 31. Near the Historic Train Depot, 301 W. Whitewater St.

WAUKESHA COUNTY

Brookfield Farmers Market: 7:30 a.m.-noon Saturdays, May 6-Oct. 28. Civic Plaza, 2000 N. Calhoun Road. Bobbi Harvey, (262) 784-7804, info@brookfieldfarmersmarket.com.

Brookfield Village Farmers Market: 3-7 p.m. Thursdays, June 1-Oct. 5. One block east of Brookfield Road in the Hoffman Ave. parking lot. Dawn Farina Condon, (262) 327-1020, brookfieldvillagemarket@gmail.com.

Butler Farmers Market: Noon-6 p.m. Mondays, May 1-Oct. 30 (no market July 4 or Labor Day). 12700 W. Hampton Ave., Don Dussault, (414) 541-0089, dussaultdon33@yahoo.com.

Delafield Farmers Market : 8 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturdays, May 13-Oct. 14. In city parking lot on Main St., one block west of Genesee St. (Highway C). (262) 719-3848, info@delafieldfarmersmarket.com.

Dousman Farmers Market: 2-6 p.m. Wednesdays, May 3-Oct. 18; open until 7 p.m. June 14-Aug. 30. Dousman Village Hall parking lot, 118 S. Main St. (across from the fire station near the ball diamond). Judy Engel, (262) 968-4566, dousmanmarket@gmail.com.

Elm Grove Village Market Night: 5-8 p.m. Wednesdays, July 5-Sept. 27. 13230 Watertown Plank Road, Elm Grove (parking lot of Rays Auto Service). Beth Sadowski, wildsidesalonspa@gmail.com, (262) 784-9453.

Menomonee Falls Farmers Market: 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Wednesdays, May 3-Oct. 25; 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Sundays, Aug. 6-Oct. 29. Main St., one block west of Appleton Ave. Barb Watters, (262) 251-8797, info@menomoneefallsdowntown.com

Mukwonago Area Farmers Market: 2-6 p.m. Wednesdays, May 17-Oct. 11. Field Park on corner of Hwy. 83 & NN. (262) 363-7758, mukwonagofarmersmarket@gmail.com.

New Berlin Farmers Market: 8 a.m.-noon Saturdays, May 6-Oct. 28. 16300 W. National Ave. Michael Skupien, (262) 786-5280, nbfarmersmkt@gmail.com.

Oconomowoc Farmers Market: 8 a.m.-noon Saturdays, May 6-Oct. 28 (except Aug. 12). Campus Parking Lot at First Bank Financial Centre, 155 W. Wisconsin Ave. (262) 567-2666,joellen@oconomowoc.org.

Pewaukee Farmers Market: 3:30-7 p.m. Wednesdays, June 14-Sept. 27. Christ Lutheran Church, W240 N3103 Pewaukee Road. info@pewaukeechamber.org.

Sussex Farmers Market: 9:30 a.m-1 p.m. Sundays, June 4-Oct. 15. Sussex Civic Center Campus, N64 W23760 Main St. (262) 246-5200, sussexfarmersmarket@gmail.com.

Waukesha Farmers Market: 8 a.m.-noon Saturdays, May 6-Oct. 28. On the corner of St. Paul Ave. and Madison St., along the north side of the Fox River. (262) 547-2354, info@waukeshafarmersmarket.com.

WASHINGTON COUNTY

Downtown West Bend Farmers Market: 7:30-11 a.m. Saturdays, May 20-Oct. 28. Old Settlers Park on Main St. Downtown, (262) 338-3909, Anna Jensen, anna@downtownwestbend.com.

Germantown Farmers Market : 8 a.m.-noon Saturdays, May 6-Oct. 28. Germantown Village Hall parking lot, N112 W17001 Mequon Road. Mark Schroeder, (262) 250-4710, parkrec@village.germantown.wi.us.

Hartford Farmers Market : 7 a.m.-noon Saturdays, May 20-Nov. 4, (except Oct. 7). Parking lot across from Schauer Arts Center, 147 N. Rural St. Greta Swigert, (262) 673-7193, hartfordwibid@gmail.com.

DANE COUNTY

Dane County Farmers Market: Saturday market: 6:15 a.m.-1:45 p.m., April 15-Nov. 11, (except July 8), on Capitol Square in Madison; Wednesday market: 8:30 a.m.-1:45 p.m. April 19- Nov. 1, in the 200 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. near Monona Terrace, which is also near where the Saturday market will be held on July 8 (during Art Fair on the Square). (608) 455-1999, info@dcfm.org, sarah.elliott@dcfm.org.
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A man shot to death outside a Madison bar early Tuesday was identified by police as Martez Moore, 30, of Madison.

The shooting occurred during a disturbance involving a large group of men outside Martin O'Grady's Irish Pub.

A second man was injured in the incident around 1 a.m., police said in a news release that described the incident at 7436 Mineral Point Road on the city's west side as a "murder/homicide."

The incident began when the group of men entered the bar and restaurant overnight. Some left a short time later, leading to the disturbance outside involving multiple shots fired.

The man killed is in his 30s and from Madison, police said. The second man suffered a minor wound to the head and was treated and released.

No suspects have been identified.

"The MPD believes there are many who have information about what transpired who have not yet cooperated with the investigation," police said in the news release. They are asking anyone with information about the shooting to call Madison Area CrimeStoppers at (608)266-6014.

A Wisconsin State Journal reporter on the scene tweeted photos showing yellow police tape surrounding the restaurant Tuesday morning.

"Evidence markers litter parking lot and large area cordoned off," the reporter, Barry Adams, tweeted, and police were checking vehicles parked outside the restaurant.

The State Journal reported that up to 20 men were involved in the incident.
Leonard O. Moore Credit: Milwaukee County Jail

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A Milwaukee man has been charged with stealing a construction worker's tools and then hitting the victim with his car as the construction worker chased after him.

Leonard O. Moore, 47, has been charged with a hit-and-run crash involving great bodily harm, as well as felony driving with a suspended license and misdemeanor theft.

Moore is suspected of taking tools from the construction worker's van in the 600 block of S. Second St. on Feb. 1. That sparked a brief car chase in which the worker pulled in front of the suspect's 2013 Nissan Altima in the 700 block of S. Ninth St. and got out. The suspect drove the Altima into the man, causing him to fly into the air and land on the ground, the criminal complaint released Tuesday says.

The victim was treated for bleeding on the brain and told police last week that he still suffers from memory loss and other complications from the crash.

Police were able to track down Moore thanks to an anonymous tip that identified the auto repair shop that replaced the Altima's smashed windshield. The auto shop provided a first name, and investigators used license plate info taken from a surveillance video to narrow down the suspects to Moore, the complaint says.

When contacted, Moore said the windshield had been damaged by a rock or brick thrown by a child, and he denied being anywhere near the scene of the crash on Feb. 1, the complaint says. But police say they used cell tower data to determine Moore's phone was in the area of the crash at the time.

The complaint also says Moore was convicted of theft in a similar misdemeanor case from 2013, in which he had removed power tools from a work van.

The arrest and charges come more than two months after Milwaukee police released surveillance video of the Altima speeding away just before hitting the man.

Thief steals this man's tools, then drives into him while trying to get away. https://t.co/1PQTDecY6J Brutal. pic.twitter.com/WEFStI8Q0A  David Paulsen (@thisispaulsen) February 4, 2016
Chancellor Mark Mone details upcoming budget cuts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Credit: Journal Sentinel files

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University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone raised the possibility Monday that the UW System may ask for a "modest" tuition increase in the next biennial budget following a four-year freeze to resident undergrad tuition.

Mone made that statement during a forum on the UWM campus to discuss the progress of budget cuts being made for the 2015-'17 biennium, totaling roughly $40 million.

"The question going forward is: will we see any relief?" Mone told faculty, staff and students. "The question for the next biennium is will we receive the flexibility to have a modest tuition increase?"

Mone said he's on the UW System's Tuition Task Force, which is working on policy for the UW System Board of Regents to consider as a guide for future tuition requests.

"We're operating with the assumption that we will be able to work with the Legislature and the governor to have some type of modest tuition increase," Mone said. "I have to tell you it seems very politically popular to keep a tuition freeze in place."

It's realistic to believe that the UW System will not be allowed to raise in-state undergraduate tuition, Mone said, "but we have to continue to plan, continue to communicate the importance of this."

"... It's an artificial constraint after four years to have maintained basically a price freeze, a budgetary freeze and a decline when your costs realistically go up every year," Mone said.

Last year, UW System's payroll stayed the same or increased slightly, despite having 763 fewer positions than the previous year across all campuses, Mone said. Health care costs, utility costs, deferred maintenance and technology costs all are going up, he said.

Mone said he also was committed to increasing faculty and staff compensation so that UWM could retain its best faculty and the top-tier research classification it recently received from the Carnegie Foundation.

If another cut the magnitude of the 2015-'17 cut of $250 million happens to the UW System in the 2017-'19 budget cycle, Mone speculated it would be "a tipping point" requiring four-year campuses to consolidate or regionalize.

That already has happened with the 13 two-year campuses, which are now divided into four regions with four deans, rather than a dean for each campus, Mone said.

"That's just my speculation on how close we are to that," the chancellor said.

Mone was asked during the forum about whether there had been a concerted effort to reduce academic program duplication across campuses.

"The question of duplication becomes quickly political," Mone said. "Every school  every university within UW System  often is the largest employer and has major impact within their areas."

While it's true that eliminating a major on a campus to reduce duplication could save money, it couldn't happen quickly because students in those programs must be allowed to complete degrees already in progress, Mone said.

The UWM chancellor said that before he became chancellor, he often said "wouldn't it be better for the UW System  us  to collaboratively figure that out as opposed to that being done legislatively or politically from different views, which is to some extent, what could happen?"
Reggie Jackson, a teacher at Universal Academy for the College Bound, has a display in his classroom dedicated to young African-Americans who lost their lives to gun violence in the past year. Credit: Michael Sears

By ,

Walking down the hallway of Universal Academy for the College Bound may feel like an average middle school  with the expected sounds of students chatting, the smell of pizza for lunch and the handwritten posters hanging about  but then there's the alarming, bright green wall in front of Reggie Jackson's classroom.

In all capital letters it reads, "ALL BLACK LIVES MATTER! 152 MURDER VICTIMS, 84% BLACK." Next to the lettering, five pictures appear of the same smiling child in a collared uniform shirt, labeled "Rasheed Chiles."

Rasheed, who was a student at Universal Academy, was accidentally shot and killed by his uncle last year.

Jackson hung the photos alongside other images of young people who were shot and killed in Milwaukee in 2015 to spark conversations among the middle school students.

In addition to being a special-education teacher at Universal Academy, Jackson also is the head "griot"  a West African word meaning historian and storyteller  at America's Black Holocaust Museum. He uses things like the wall display to tie his knowledge of African-American history to his passion for teaching young people and fostering healing.

"I'm trying to bring them into those conversations and talk about things that are relevant to them, things that are happening around them that maybe people aren't having conversations with them about, or not having the types of conversations where they can analyze these issues and analyze why these issues impact them on a daily basis," Jackson said, referring to Milwaukee's spike in gun violence in 2015 that, again, disproportionately affected young, low-income African-American males.

Rasheed's killing personally affected many in the school, he said. Many of the students knew of someone in their families or neighborhoods who had been killed. Universal Academy, a charter school in Milwaukee Public Schools, is 90% students of color and 88% economically disadvantaged.

Jackson, who teaches at Universal's campus on the northwest side, speaks with a gentle voice and a strong message. In both his job at the museum and when teaching lessons to his class or others around the school, he focuses on patterns in history, specifically those he describes as devaluing black life, that have led to current issues in society such as strained race relations and poverty.

"When you look back on the history of how Milwaukee has become Milwaukee, a lot of it has to do with race," he said, alluding to dynamics of segregation, economic inequalities and police-community relations.

Like his striking wall display, America's Black Holocaust Museum seeks to start conversations that confront tough realities of systemic racism and work toward healing and ultimately reconciliation.

"The museum was designed to tell about our history in an honest way," Jackson said. "We aim to tell some of those stories that aren't very pleasant to hear about, not just for the sake of telling the stories, but to lay out an understanding of how our country got to be the way it is."

America's Black Holocaust Museum became a virtual museum in 2012 after it closed for financial reasons in 2008. The museum focuses on four themes of remembrance, resistance, redemption and reconciliation.

James Cameron, the only known survivor of a lynching, started the museum, and now a nonprofit called the Dr. James Cameron Legacy Foundation operates the museum and its related functions.

From his first day as a volunteer at the then-brick and mortar America's Black Holocaust Museum, Jackson said he fell in love with the job. He said he appreciated having the ability to share a history that he cared about and to "delve deeply into the questions that people asked."

Tough questions

Through his thought-provoking initiatives at school, he is able to bring about an opportunity for young people to ask challenging questions, too.

"Students know that I put this wall up, and they ask me about it all the time," Jackson said. "I had students ask, 'What is this?' ... Why did you do it?' And conversations just grew from there."

Jackson said he hopes that through this dialogue, students at his school will realize that young people like them can be affected by these kinds of issues, but they can also play a role in changing the way things are. He tells them about the young students who were involved in the civil rights movement and who are involved in the Black Lives Matter movement now.

"The first step to changing is educating," Jackson said, explaining that ending racism will require changes in institutions such as the criminal justice system and the education system.

"The most important part of changing these institutions is understanding the impact that these institutions have had on people of color in this city," he said as to why he believes in talking about the history he is so passionate about with his students.

Creating safe spaces for students to engage with the past and present conditions of their city is both a way to honor Rasheed and also to equip his students to be agents of change and reconciliation, Jackson said.

More from Precious Lives

You can listen to the weekly radio stories on Tuesdays, at about 10:45 a.m. on WUWM-FM (89.7), and Wednesdays, at about 7:50 a.m. on WNOV-AM (860).
George Clooney: a prince of political buffoonery. Credit: Axel Schmidt

Hot off the presses, the reviews are in for George Clooney's appearance on last Sunday's "Meet the Press!"

"A blockbuster of banality!"

"A victory for vapidity!"

"A feast of fatuity!"

Clooney, whose primary skills involve not eating a lot and getting great haircuts, was given the first 12 minutes of America's cornerstone Sunday morning political show to hold court on a variety of political matters. During an interview with moderator Chuck Todd, Clooney forcefully decried the "obscene" amount of money in politics, just hours after holding a fund-raiser at his home that charged $353,000 per person to dine with Hillary Clinton.

If only there were something Clooney could do to keep money out of politics  like, maybe not raising a tsunami of dollars for candidates. As conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg put it on Twitter, "stop me before I fund-raise again!"

Yet Clooney's vacuity was just pulling out of the garage. He decried Citizens United as "one of the worst laws passed since I've been around." Of course, Citizens United was a Supreme Court decision, not a "law passed." A Democratic Congress and president didn't pass and sign the "Citizens United law of 2010."

In fact, the actual Citizens United decision centered on something Clooney probably can understand  an actual movie. In its decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law that would have barred a film critical of Hillary Clinton from being released in the months before the 2008 presidential election.

Perhaps Clooney might feel differently if one of his corporate-funded political thrillers  "The Ides of March," for instance  were banned by the government for framing Republicans in a negative light. One would think he'd have a different perspective, provided he actually knew what the decision meant.

Instead, Clooney just dished up empty bromides about "corporations" buying influence  you know, those same corporations that pay him millions of dollars so he could spend his single years changing supermodels about as often as most men change their socks. In fact, later in the interview, Clooney actually praised corporations for opposing the new North Carolina transgender bathroom law. So if you're keeping score at home  corporations influencing politics is good, as long as George Clooney agrees with the issue. Perhaps President Hillary Clinton will create the Clooney Free Speech Panel to decide who gets to exercise First Amendment rights and who doesn't.

Of course, celebrities talking about politics as if they just caught five minutes of John Oliver's latest show isn't anything new, nor is our fascination with their boobish observations. But in this election cycle, such dimwittery has been weaponized, as a reality television show star with only a tangential knowledge of fundamental political issues currently leads the Republican presidential contest.

Like Clooney, Donald Trump has been critical of Citizens United, and has even threatened to sue groups that have run unflattering television advertisements against him. And if that wasn't enough to convince Americans that Trump's relationship with the First Amendment is completely self-serving, last week Trump actually threatened to sue an artist who painted a nude picture of The Donald that suggested  uh, how to put this  that Trump Tower may be more of a duplex?

Recently, Clooney referred to Trump as a "xenophobic fascist," further accusing him of political "opportunism." But as one of Clooney's film protagonists might say of his enemy, "we're not unalike, you and me." They are both rich liberals pitching half-baked politics on a willing electorate, hoping their wealth and fame lends them gravitas. In the end, both Clooney and Trump are the same side of the same coin.

And they are willing to spend a lot of those coins to dupe the American people.

Christian Schneider is a Journal Sentinel columnist and blogger. Email cschneider@jrn.com. Twitter: @Schneider_CM
News / National

by Sports Reporter

CAPS United players Method Mwanjali and Archford Gutu, who were arrested at the weekend following a stabbing incident, are scheduled to appear before the courts today where they are expected to plead not guilty.The duo was taken into police custody in the early hours of Sunday morning after they were involved in a brawl which left one man admitted at Parirenyatwa after he was wounded by a knife.The club said they will let the law take its course, but a source within the structures, who has been in touch with the players, yesterday said the duo is denying having used a knife during the fracas and have also disowned the weapon.Makepekepe skipper Mwanjali is accused of assaulting the man with the weapon, but he has indicated to his superiors at the club that a lot of people joined in the fight and could not establish who had a knife in the melee.The official said they will plead not guilty to the stabbing, but acknowledged that they broke the windscreen of the victim's car.However, CAPS United board member Alois Bunjira yesterday said the club's official stance remained that they will not comment on the finer details of what transpired in the early hours of Sunday morning and will let the law to take its course."There has been media and social media speculation and conjecture regarding the incident at Longcheng Plaza involving our players, captain Method Mwanjali and Archford Gutu."We have heard various versions of the incident. We can neither confirm nor deny any version of the incident. We confirm, however, that the duo are assisting the police with investigations."Until the due process of the law is complete, we cannot comment on what may, or may not have happened. We urge extreme caution and patience as the law takes its course and avoid the trial of the duo in the court of public opinion."We must be categorical that the incident is regrettable; that we do not condone any form of reckless and/or violent behaviour regardless of the circumstances."We wish the injured persons a speedy recovery. We, at CAPS United, value life and lawful conduct in the resolution of disputes. We stand guided by the due process of the law," said Bunjira.According to police, it is alleged that between 3:30am and 4:30am Sunday morning, a man driving a Toyota Altezza was coming out of the Longcheng Plaza shopping complex, but was using the wrong lane.He blocked a Nissan Elgrand that was driven by Gutu in the process and it is alleged that the former Zimbabwe youth international came out of his car and smashed the windscreen of the Altezza.An argument ensued and that is when Mwanjali joined in and went back to their car, where he grabbed a knife before stabbing the complainant twice in the stomach.The complainant's colleagues managed to overpower Mwanjali and took the knife, but the CAPS United duo fled leaving their car behind. The injured man, who was taken to Parirenyatwa where he had surgery, is now reported to be out of danger and could be called to give evidence at the courts.
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Voter ID debate isn't over

Christian Schneider should be classified as a professional right-wing shill. He either is owned by the wealthy right-wing or he has no capacity to admit the truth. His comments April 17 on the voter ID law fall under the category of fantasy ("The voter ID debate is now over," Crossroads, April 17).

However, the Journal Sentinel feels it necessary to place his extremely biased columns at the top of the page in the Sunday Crossroads section.

The reason for a large turnout in the Wisconsin primary was not because the voter ID law doesn't suppress the vote. In recent years, the Wisconsin primary usually has been almost meaningless. Other states have moved primaries and caucuses to an earlier date, making Wisconsin's rather late primary much less meaningful than it was 50 to 60 years ago.

Recently, either one or both political parties had their nominees all but decided by the time of the Wisconsin primary. There were few candidates who drew anything near the attention of a Donald Trump, a Bernie Sanders, etc.

Even some Republican strategists and politicians have admitted voter ID laws are designed, partially, to make it more difficult to vote and to make it more likely Republicans will win. Everyone knows this  well, except for the professional shills such as Schneider.

David Rupnow

Oconomowoc



Schneider hoodwinked

I think Christian Schneider has been hoodwinked. He believes there was a problem with voter fraud. Now, he believes no voters were disenfranchised ("The voter ID debate is now over," Crossroads, April 17).

Statistics have shown there is and never was any problem with voter fraud. As far as no voters being unable to vote, we don't know. I suspect there may have been voters who found it too much hassle to get an ID, especially the poor who have to travel to a Department of Motor Vehicles office or to a county or state records office. And especially for people working two or more jobs, single parents or those with a disability.

The state Republicans have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to pass and implement a voter ID law to solve a problem that never existed. They must feel it is money well-spent to reduce voting for minorities, people with disabilities and senior citizens  those who tend to vote Democratic.

R. Bowen

Brookfield



Voter ID and ballots

One of Robert Van Eerden's posits in "Voter ID worked perfectly" is: "What it does ensure is that every single voter's vote is counted accurately so that an honest tally will be recorded to fairly determine the proper winner" (Letters, April 13).

Maybe he could have gone a little further to explain what voter ID has to do with accurately counting ballots.

Keep sipping the Kool-Aid, Robert.

Ken Winnicki

Rhinelander



What has happened to America?

Wow, I didn't realize how tough life is in Sussex until I read Jim Stein's letter to the editor ("What's happened to America," Crossroads, April 17).

He should move five miles north to Colgate. Here we can say "God," burn books we don't like, build fences around our yard to keep people out, choose to be conservative, put up Nativity scenes in our yards at Christmas, decline any medical procedures advanced by stem cell research, vote for politicians who promise to keep taxes in check and parent our children in our own likeness.

And as far as not being politically correct, well, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel already gave Stein a platform to do just that.

So, to answer his last line  "What's happened to the land of the free and the home of the brave?"  you're welcome to come on up, Jim. Here, our citizens are so brave we don't fear abstract indignations. But we are a bit touchy about someone taking away our freedom to live our lives as we like.

Al Fischer

Colgate

Please email your letters to jsedit@jrn.com, or mail them to Letters to the editor, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, P.O. Box 371, Milwaukee, Wis. 53201-0371. Letters are generally limited to 200 words and are subject to editing.
Donald Trump spoke at the Milwaukee Theatre ahead of Wisconsins primary earlier this month. Credit: Rick Wood

By of the

Donald Trump won Wisconsin's 3rd Congressional District on April 5.

But when the names of the GOP convention delegates from that district were announced Monday, the list included no open Trump supporters.

Wisconsin is another example of a state where the Trump campaign made little organized push to get its own backers elected as delegates to the July convention in Cleveland.

Trump won two of eight congressional districts in the Wisconsin primary, which entitles him to six pledged delegates (and six alternates).

But most of those slots have gone to party regulars and longtime GOP volunteers, because they were eligible to run, applied in time and vied for the post at district caucuses this month, said party officials.

"I didn't vote for Trump. I am not a Trump supporter, and near as I can tell none of us are," 3rd District GOP chair Brian Westrate said of the three delegates and three alternates elected recently from his western Wisconsin district.

In many states, that lack of organization and rank-and-file support could come back to haunt Trump in the event of a contested, multiballot convention in Cleveland.

After the first ballot, "those delegates become unbound in a great number of states. They're going to move elsewhere, and there's nothing Trump can really do about that," said Josh Putnam, a political scientist at the University of Georgia who tracks the nominating process.

But in the case of Wisconsin, the impact is muted because its delegates are more strictly bound, he said. Republican delegates are pledged to the candidate who won their district until that candidate releases them or wins less than a third of the vote on any convention ballot.

"We are very, very locked in," said Westrate, who has been a vocal Trump critic.

"The people of the 3rd District voted (for Trump). We are pledged to follow the will of the people. ... That is the essence of representative government, subjecting your own will to the desires of those you represent," he said.

"There is no wiggle room," state GOP chair Brad Courtney said of the pledge. If a delegate tries to violate it, that delegate will be removed from the convention and their vote will be recorded as pledged, he said.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz won 36 of Wisconsin's 42 delegates on April 5  18 for his statewide victory and three for each of the six congressional districts he won.

Trump won two districts, the 3rd and the 7th in northern Wisconsin. As in the 3rd, most of the 7th District's delegate and alternate slots went to longtime volunteers and activists, said district GOP chair Jim Miller.

Applicants had to be members of their county parties, with the desire to go to Cleveland and the commitment to participate in the caucuses.

"We gave no campaign special treatment," said Courtney.

"It's a relatively expensive process," Westrate said of attending a convention. "It's not like there are people chomping at the bit."

Westrate said there were only eight applicants running for the six delegate and alternate slots in his district. Miller said the same number ran in the 7th District. Only six of the eight actually attended the 7th District caucus, and those six were selected, he said.

Miller said he wondered whether Trump would bring "new people in and they would lobby to be delegates, but we really didn't have that. The people that put in their (delegate) application are party veterans."

Under state GOP rules, the list of applicants for delegate slots is forwarded ahead of time to the presidential candidate who won that congressional district. The candidate gets to say which names he or she prefers. Those recommendations are given "due consideration" at the district caucuses but aren't binding.

Both Westrate and Miller said most of Trump's preferred names ended up as either delegates or alternates. But the Trump campaign didn't have a lot of choice.

Westrate said he was on the Trump list of recommended names, even though he had publicly criticized Trump.

"They appeared to do no actual due diligence on us," said Westrate.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the Wisconsin delegate process.

"As far as I know, none of the eight candidates were Trump supporters," Westrate said, referring to the 3rd District.

Of the six selected as delegates or alternates, he said four had voted for Cruz, one had voted for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and one didn't reveal his vote.

Miller said most of the candidates for delegate at the 7th District caucus did not disclose whom they had voted for in the primary.

The caucus participants basically "went with people that we know," he said.

But Miller said one person elected as an alternate from his district had announced himself as a Trump supporter. And Miller said that while he tried to remain publicly neutral during the primary, he did vote for Trump, so "I am certainly comfortable casting that vote for him" at the convention.
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By of the

The state Public Records Board used contradictory messages to describe its decision last summer to expand what kinds of records could be destroyed immediately.

To the public and news organizations, the message was: The board made a routine clarification that was not "substantive." That was the explanation given by Matthew Blessing, the board's chairman, in downplaying why the board did not even give advance public notice by putting the matter on its Aug. 24 agenda.

But to state employees, the message was: The board made "significant changes" to which records are considered to have only temporary usefulness and can be destroyed. That was the update issued by Georgia Thompson, the board's executive secretary, to alert state records officers that the definition of so-called "transitory records" had been expanded.

Thompson's email was among hundreds of pages of documents released to the Journal Sentinel in response to a request under the state's open records law. In her email, sent Sept. 28, Thompson also urged records officers to share the update with other employees and agencies throughout state government.

The action by the Public Records Board could have limited the access of citizens and media outlets to information from texts, emails, Facebook messages and other methods that public employees might use to communicate about official actions. Amid widespread indignation that the action was another effort to hinder public accountability and transparency, the action was rescinded early this year.

Christa Westerberg, an attorney who also serves as co-vice president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said Thompson's email confirms the importance of the changes.

"I think that allowing records custodians or people who work in the agency to destroy records without further review by the agency or the Public Records Board is certainly not routine," Westerberg said. "And the fact that she flagged it as a significant issue confirms that interpretation."

But Blessing again said Monday that the changes were not out of the ordinary.

"The Public Records Board routinely reviews revisions and clarifications of record schedules," he said in an email. "The effort to eliminate non-technical language and provide actual examples was routine."

Westerberg said that interpretation was alarming.

"If this is something that the board considers routine, then I think further scrutiny of the board is warranted," she said. "And the response that the public gave to the board's action was appropriate."

The newly released documents show the changes to the definition of transitory records were considered for months.

An email sent by Thompson to records officers in May noted that there had been talk of revising retention policies  how long records are kept  to include transitory records beyond just "correspondence and related records."

Follow-up emails showed staffers mulling the definition of transitory records, with one employee  Dawn Bluma of the state Department of Workforce Development  raising concerns that the language wasn't clear enough.

"The description still sounds a bit vague to me, and the examples too much like 'email' if this is designed to cover 'other' short-term records," Bluma wrote in a June 10 email.

String of access issues

The state Public Records Board voted unanimously on Jan. 11 to revoke its August decision. The reversal came after nearly 1,900 emails and letters criticizing its action were sent to the board and posted to a state website. The change drew criticism from conservative and liberal groups alike, including the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, and One Wisconsin Now.

Before the board's August vote, transitory records were described as "correspondence and other related records of short-term interest which have no documentary or evidentiary value." The new definition expanded that description to include "emails to schedule or confirm meetings or events, committee agendas and minutes received by members on a distribution list, interim files, tracking and control files, recordings used for training purposes and ad hoc reports for individual use."

The recent battle over open records in Wisconsin is just the latest fight to erupt around the country over public access to government officials' texts and other electronic messages.

It's also the latest in a string of actions taken in Wisconsin over the past year that could be used to limit access to open records.

In July, just before Independence Day weekend, Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee unexpectedly amended the state budget to put sweeping limits on open records. Under withering criticism from both Democrats and other Republicans, GOP leaders quickly retreated, saying they would instead appoint a study committee to consider how to treat the matter.

Further, the governor's office has withheld some records that include internal deliberations, saying that releasing them could inhibit the free exchange of ideas within his administration. State law doesn't specifically recognize that as a reason for withholding records.

And the Journal Sentinel reported in February that the state Department of Natural Resources previously kept a "do not respond" list for a group of 16 citizens and activists with complaints about how the agency managed wildlife and administered clean water and other rules. The agency has dropped the list, which dealt with ordinary requests for information, not open records requests.

Attorney General Brad Schimel has called for stronger guidance to public employees about what records they need to retain. And he said he would like to see the open records law updated to account for changes in technology, noting government business is now sometimes conducted by text messages and instant messages.

State officials say they're now working to expand access to records.

In March, Walker issued an executive order requiring state agencies to promptly handle public records requests, better track them and give clearer guidelines on how much they should cost and how long they should take to fulfill. The executive order requires all agencies to put in place a common set of standards that citizens, journalists and others can use to measure the state's work in responding to open records requests.
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By of the

A driver was seriously injured Sunday night when he crashed into a tree after speeding down W. Good Hope Road under the influence of alcohol, Milwaukee police said in a news release.

The crash happened just before 11 p.m. in the 5600 block of W. Good Hope Road, where the driver, a 29-year-old man, lost control of his 1995 Chevy Caprice and hit the tree.

The man was taken to a hospital for treatment of "very serious injuries," police said early Monday.
Packers on life support after another poor offensive performance

Green Bay's inability to convert on third and fourth downs all day lead to questions about the direction of a stalling offense.
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

Some Zimbabweans have said majority of people in the country are still not free as only the elite enjoys the fruits of independence while many people are struggling to make ends meet.Munya Midzi said, "We are not independent until our people start thinking like free people, until our leaders act like leaders, instead of rulers...untill our people can honestly say they truly inherit this Zimbabwe, as a land of equal opportunity for all, a nation that rewards hard work, and respects all men regardless...we are chained.. we are chained in the peels of this banana republic..in the same breath I pray you ask because you are genuine."Newton Zvoushe said only a few are free and the rest are still under oppression."In our so called independent country there is no freedom if you say President Robert Mugabe is old you have to be arrested and you are accused of rebelling," he said.
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By of the

A De Pere businessman was indicted Tuesday on bank fraud charges, less than a year after revelations that the man had received $1.2 million in separate but also questionable loans from state taxpayers.

Ronald Van Den Heuvel, 62, was indicted by a grand jury in federal court in the Eastern District of Wisconsin along with his 52-year-old wife and a bank employee, U.S. Attorney Gregory Haanstad said in a statement.

Van Den Heuvel, his spouse, Kelly Van Den Heuvel, and Paul Piikkila, a 53 year-old loan officer at Horicon Bank, were indicted on charges of defrauding the bank through loans made in 2008 and 2009.

A longtime contributor to state politicians, Van Den Heuvel has sought help for his businesses both in Wisconsin and in other states and received public assistance under the administrations of at least three governors, including Scott Walker.

The alleged bank fraud was separate from business deals in which Wisconsin's flagship jobs agency failed to run adequate checks on Van Den Heuvel's troubled businesses and in 2011 and 2012 gave him $1.2 million in loans. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in July that Van Den Heuvel had not disclosed his financial problems to the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. while seeking the loans.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mel Johnson said he was unable to comment on whether Van Den Heuvel's conduct with WEDC was also the focus of an ongoing federal investigation.

The businessman's offices were also raided in the summer of 2015 by Brown County sheriff's deputies.

According to the indictment, Piikkila approved more than $1 million in loans to corporations and individuals that were fronts for the Van Den Heuvels, despite the fact that Horicon Bank had told Piikkila not to loan money to Van Den Heuvel. The loans were not used for their intended purpose and weren't backed with enough collateral, the court documents allege.

The loans were used to pay Van Den Heuvel's employees and other debts, including payments on other fraudulent loans, and the bank's losses exceeded $700,000.

The bank's business lending committee had refused to offer Van Den Heuvel a $7.1 million loan in March 2008. Piikkila, an employee at the bank's Appleton branch, was able to make a series of smaller loans without detection because he could lend up to $250,000 on his own authority.

Van Den Heuvel and his attorney did not respond to messages.

The 13 counts

The indictment had 13 counts:

One count charges all three defendants with conspiracy and carries penalties if convicted of up to five years in prison and three years on supervised release and fines of up to $250,000.

Seven counts charge Van Den Heuvel with bank fraud and one of those also includes his wife. Under each count, a convicted defendant would face up to 30 years in prison and five years on supervised release and up to $1 million fines.

Five counts charge Van Den Heuvel with making false statements to influence a federally insured bank and one of those also includes his wife. Each conviction would carry the same penalties as each of the bank fraud counts.

The defendants are scheduled to appear in federal court in Green Bay on May 6.

Piikkila's attorney, Dan Sanders, stopped short of saying his client would take a plea bargain but said Piikkila was cooperating with investigators.

"He has been contacted by the government on different occasions and provided information each time and will continue to do that if called upon," Sanders said.

WEDC kept working with Van Den Heuvel and his clean energy company, Green Box, into 2014 despite the fact that he had omitted his financial troubles while seeking the state loans in 2011 and 2012.

WEDC and two other creditors sued Van Den Heuvel and Green Box in Brown County Circuit Court in May 2015, alleging that he gave them false information, and the company was placed in receivership. Circuit Judge John Zakowski on March 18 found Van Den Heuvel in contempt because he transferred machinery pledged as collateral to a creditor and ordered Van Den Heuvel to return it, post a $650,000 bond or face jail time.

A spokesman for WEDC said the agency has improved its lending practices and continues to seek repayment of the Green Box loans for taxpayers.

Van Den Heuvel has donated money to politicians such as former Gov. Scott McCallum and former U.S. Rep. Mark Green.

One of Van Den Heuvel's companies, PCDI Oconto Falls Tissue Corp., received $24 million in tax-free bonding after he and his wife gave $10,000 to the campaign of former Gov. Tommy Thompson, who later returned the money after being asked about the donations by reporters.

Another Van Den Heuvel business received $600,000 in state incentives in 2007 under then-Gov. Jim Doyle's administration.
Federal officials have taken the lead role in the investigation of abuse allegations the Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, state run juvenile detention facilities that share a campus north of Wausau. Credit: Mark Hoffman

By of the

Madison  The state John Doe probe of Wisconsin's juvenile prison ended Monday under a law Gov. Scott Walker signed last year limiting how such investigations can be conducted.

The probe continues under the authority of federal agencies, which took the lead of the investigation in early 2016. Prosecutors for more than a year have been looking into claims of child neglect, prisoner abuse, sexual assault and record destruction at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls.

The facilities share a campus in Irma, 30 miles north of Wausau.

The state Department of Justice began its investigation in January 2015. In October, it expanded it as a John Doe probe before Lincoln County Circuit Judge Robert Russell. Under the John Doe law, prosecutors can compel people to testify and produce documents.

They opened that John Doe investigation a day before Walker signed a bill tightly limiting how such probes can be conducted. The change to the John Doe law was a response to an investigation of the Republican governor's campaign by Democratic District Attorney John Chisholm of Milwaukee County.

Chisholm had been looking into whether Walker's campaign had illegally worked with conservative groups in recall elections in 2011 and 2012. The state Supreme Court last year shut down that investigation, finding nothing illegal had occurred and ruling candidates and outside groups can work together closely.

The limits on John Doe probes approved in October included a provision that made them automatically shut down after six months unless an extension was approved by a panel of 10 judges.

The John Doe probe of Lincoln Hills would hit the six-month mark on Friday. Attorney General Brad Schimel and Lincoln County District Attorney Don Dunphy did not seek an extension, and Russell closed the John Doe probe on Monday, saying the state had asked to end it.

Russell also partially lifted a secrecy order over the probe so state officials could share information with federal officials. While the federal government is now in charge of the investigation, Russell left open the possibility in his order that charges could eventually be brought in state court.

Schimel spokesman Johnny Koremenos said there was no need to keep the John Doe probe going because federal agencies are now in charge of the investigation.

Dunphy said he had not been involved in the probe for several months.
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

After his critical comments in an interview in The Atlantic last month, Barack Obamas visit to Saudi Arabia is going to be awkward, as DPA rightly says. The president accused the Gulf states of always trying to push the US into war for the accomplishment of their purposes but then acting like free riders thereafter. (This comment likely refers to Libya, where Obama felt as though the Arab League and Western Europe just sloughed off after the US did the heavy lifting). He advised the Saudis and their close allies to get over themselves and come to a cold peace with Iran. He said his decision not to bomb Syria in fall of 2013 was a declaration of independence from Riyadh.

He has also blamed Saudi Arabia for spreading around its intolerant, Wahhabi version of Islam, a very minority version of the religion that is puritanical and dislikes outsiders. (Probably only 40% of Saudis are Wahhabis, hence maybe 9 million of the kingdoms 22 million citizens. There arent really any Wahhabis elsewhere outside Qatar and Sharjah, though millions of people have become Salafis, i.e. Sunnis who come close to Wahhabism but dont want to leave their Sunni traditions entirely. So there are 1.5 billion Muslims, and most of them are not Puritanical or xenophobic and most of them are fine with women driving and disapprove of the full face veil (a lot of Muslim women dont cover their heads at all). But it should also be noted that there is no statistical relationship between Wahhabism and extremism (most Wahhabis are not extremists any more than most Shiites or Sunnis are).

Obamas annoyance with Riyadh has some justification, given the muscular Wahhabism it has been flexing in recent years. Here are the top 5 policies Saudi Arabia should rethink if it wants a less turbulent neighborhood:

1. Saudi Arabia should wind down its air war on Yemen. It was launched to punish the Houthi rebels for taking over Sanaa, the capital. Houthis are Zaidi Shiites and have a feud with Wahhabi Saudi Arabia because they resent being proselytized by the latter. Some of the feud is also tribal. Saudi Arabia sees the Houthis as nothing more than Iranian puppets, but that is daft. They may have received minor amounts of Iranian aid. But they arent the Iranian kind of Shiites (they dont have ayatollahs and they respect the Sunni caliphs). What is going on in Yemen has almost nothing to do with Iran. It is about the discontents of the tribes of Saadeh in the north at having been marginalized and having been subjected to a Wahhabi conversion campaign. The Houthis over reached in launching their rebellion, and they have thrown the country into turmoil and derailed the constitutional process. But they cant be defeated from the air, and indiscriminate Saudi bombing is doing more harm than good. By the way, Saudi Arabia dragged the US into this struggle, with the US military helping choose bombing targets and offering logistical support.

2. Saudi Arabia should rethink its intervention in Syria. It is delivering medium weapons such as t.o.w. anti-tank weapons (courtesy the CIA) and maybe manpad anti-aircraft weapons to the most hard line Salafi groups in Syria aside from the al-Qaeda offshoots. A group like Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam) or Ahrar al-Sham (Freemen of Syria) can never hope to attract the allegiance of most Syrians (most are secular-minded and a good 40% belong to religious and ethnic minorities who would be massacred by the hard line Salafis.) Syria is too multi-cultural for the Saudi model to do more than cause enormous trouble there. Riyadh in the past has been pragmatic and willing to back secular liberals, and it should do that in Syria. Some of its Syrian allies, like the Freemen of Syria, are openly allied with al-Qaeda, which is not a good look for the kingdom. A Salafi Syria will just go on generating violence, given that the minorities would never accept it, nor would the majority of Sunnis. And now that Russia has so forcefully intervened, the hopes for a Salafi Syria have anyway receded to the realm of the almost impossible. All Saudi Arabia can do now play spoiler and keep the pot boiling to disrupt the pax Russica with ongoing mindless violence. The Freemen of Syria and the Army of Islam have broken the ceasefire repeatedly and the former has taken towns back from the regime during the cessation of hostilities in open alliance with al-Qaeda (the Nusra Front). Obama should read the Saudis the riot act over all this.

And why is he letting them give out the CIA-provided T.O.W. tank-killers? Isnt it obvious that weaponry will go to the hard line Salafis?

3. Obama should encourage the Saudis to go further in the direction of rethinking their campaign to have the Muslim Brotherhood declared terrorists and destroyed. First, it is an impractical plan. Second, it has undone all the progress that was made after 2011 in reconciling the secular-minded with the fundamentalists, such that both were willing to contest elections together and serve in government together. Now, with Saudi encouragement, Egypt has cracked down hard on the Brotherhood, disenfranchising millions of Egyptians. Ironically, many of the small guerrilla bands the Saudis support in Syria have their origins in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

4. Saudi Arabia needs to come into the 21st century and stop its frenetic rate of executions and its punishing of online dissent with life-crushing lashes. The Saudi government isnt going to fall because some blogger has doubts about God. And if that is all it would take to cause the government to fall, then it deserves to.

5. Riyadh, as President Obama advised, needs to reconcile itself with the Iran deal made by the UN Security Council, and with Irans reemergence as a country with which the region and the world does business. King Abdullah used to have the Iranian politicians, even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, over to Riyadh, and the two countries consulted one another frankly despite differences. King Salman and his crew seem to want a fight, whether proxy or direct. It is not a fight they will win, and negotiating with Iran would be a more successful strategy.

6. Saudi Arabia has to be more transparent about its governments relationship to the Salafi Jihadis who pulled off 9/11. The Saudi government was not behind 9/11 or in the know about it. Saudi Arabia has enormous investments in US stocks and other financial instruments, and it was obvious that something like an attack on the World Trade Center would tank the stock market and wipe out the value of their holdings. Only transparency about any contacts the kingdom had with al-Qaeda (especially if those were innocuous) can lift the building cloud. President Obama will veto a congressional attempt to lift Saudi Arabias immunity from civil lawsuits by ordinary Americans. But the next president may not block a future such measure. In the Middle East you stay out of trouble by keeping your head down. In the US you are a sitting duck if you do keep your head down it is loudness and activity that protects you politically.

-

Related video:

Wochit: Anticipating Obama Visit, Saudis Try To Clean Up Image
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By Baher Kamal | (Inter Press Service) |  

CAIRO (IPS)  This is not about any alarming headerit is the dramatic conclusion of several scientific studies about the on-going climate change impact on the Middle East region, particularly in the Gulf area. The examples are stark.



Within this century, parts of the Persian Gulf region could be hit with unprecedented events of deadly heat as a result of climate change, according to a study of high-resolution climate models, a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research warned.

The researchtitled Persian Gulf could experience deadly heat, reveals details of a business-as-usual scenario for greenhouse gas emissions, but also shows that curbing emissions could forestall these deadly temperature extremes.



Middle East map of Koppen climate classification; h/t Wikipedia

The study, which was published in detail ahead of the Paris climate summit in the journal Nature Climate Change, was conducted by Elfatih Eltahir, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and Jeremy Pal PhD 01 at Loyola Marymount University.

The authors conclude that conditions in the Persian Gulf region, including its shallow water and intense sun, make it a specific regional hotspot where climate change, in absence of significant mitigation, is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future.

Running high-resolution versions of standard climate models, Eltahir and Pal found that many major cities in the region could exceed a tipping point for human survival, even in shaded and well-ventilated spaces. Eltahir says this threshold has, as far as we know  never been reported for any location on Earth.

MIT, which was founded in 1861 with the stated mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century, alerts that detailed climate simulation shows a threshold of survivability could be crossed without mitigation measures.

The research, which was supported by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science, reveals that the tipping point involves a measurement called the wet-bulb temperature that combines temperature and humidity, reflecting conditions the human body could maintain without artificial cooling, the say.

That threshold for survival for more than six unprotected hours is 35 degrees Celsius, or about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the recently published research.

The severe danger to human health and life occurs when such temperatures are sustained for several hours, Eltahir says  which the models show would occur several times in a 30-year period toward the end of the century under the business-as-usual scenario used as a benchmark by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

An Even Hotter and Drier Middle East

For its part, the IPCC  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change latest assessment warns that the climate is predicted to become even hotter and drier in most of the Middle East and North of Africa (MENA) region.

Higher temperatures and reduced precipitation will increase the occurrence of droughts, an effect that is already materializing in the Maghreb, says the World Bank while citing the IPCC assessment.

It is further estimated that an additional 80100 million people will be exposed by 2025 to water stress, which is likely to result in increased pressure on groundwater resources, which are currently being extracted in most areas beyond the aquifers recharge potential.

In addition, agriculture yields, especially in rain fed areas, are expected to fluctuate more widely, ultimately falling to a significantly lower long-term average.

In urban areas in North Africa, a temperature increase of 1-3 degrees could expose 625 million people to coastal flooding. In addition, heat waves, an increased heat island effect, water scarcity, decreasing water quality, worsening air quality, and ground ozone formation are likely to affect public health, and more generally lead to challenging living conditions.

The World Bank report Adaptation to Climate Change in the Middle East and North Africa Region warns that the Middle East and North Africa region is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

It is one of the worlds most water-scarce and dry regions; with a high dependency on climate-sensitive agriculture and a large share of its population and economic activity in flood-prone urban coastal zones.

On the other hand, the report adds, societies of this region have been under pressure to adapt to water scarcity and heat for thousands of years, and have developed various technical solutions and institutional mechanisms to deal with these environmental constraints.

While global models predict sea levels rising from about 0.1 to 0.3 meters by the year 2050, and from about 0.1 to 0.9 meters by 2100, the World Bank says, for MENA, the social, economic, and ecological impacts are expected to be relatively higher compared to the rest of the world. Low-lying coastal areas in Tunisia, Qatar, Libya, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and specially Egypt are at particular risk.

Climate change also poses many challenges to the regions cities, which represent hubs for economic, social, cultural and political activities. Rising sea level could affect 43 port cities24 in the Middle East and 19 in North Africa, according to the World Bank study.

In the case of Alexandria, Egypt, a 0.5 meter rise would leave more than 2 million people displaced, with 35 billion dollars in losses in land, property, and infrastructure, as well as incalculable losses of historic and cultural assets.

Licensed from Inter Press Service



Related video added by Juan Cole:

CBC News: Middle East unprepared for climate change




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - Strongbow Exploration Inc. (TSX VENTURE:SBW) reports that it has received a Mineral Resource Estimate for the South Crofty tin ("Sn") project, located in Cornwall, UK, prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. The updated Mineral Resource Estimate was calculated by P&E Mining Consultants Inc. of Brampton, Ontario. The lead author of the report is Mr. Eugene Puritch, P. Eng.

Richard Williams, P.Geo., President & CEO of Strongbow stated; "We are very pleased with this new resource estimate and the independent assessment that the South Crofty project has the potential to host a significant amount of additional Mineral Resources."

Summary

Lower Mine Mineral Resource Estimate at 0.60% Sn Cut-Off Tonnes ('000s) Sn Grade Contained Sn (tonnes) Indicated Resource 1,660 1.81% 30,000 Inferred Resource 738 1.91% 14,100 Upper Mine Mineral Resource Estimate at 0.60% SnEq Cut-Off* Tonnes ('000s) SnEq Grade Contained SnEq (tonnes) Indicated Resource 257 0.99% 2,500 Inferred Resource 464 0.91% 4,200

* Sn equivalent (SnEq) grade is calculated using the formula: SnEq%= Sn% + (Cu% x 0.311) + (Zn% x 0.084).

(1) Mineral resources which are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. The estimate of mineral resources may be materially affected by environmental, permitting, legal, title, taxation, sociopolitical, marketing, or other relevant issues. It is noted that no specific issues have been identified as yet.

(2) The quantity and grade of reported Inferred resources in this estimation are uncertain in nature and there has been insufficient exploration to define these Inferred resources as an Indicated or Measured mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in upgrading them to an Indicated or Measured mineral resource category.

(3) The mineral resources in this report were estimated using the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM), CIM Standards on Mineral Resources and Reserves, Definitions and Guidelines prepared by the CIM Standing Committee on Reserve Definitions and adopted by the CIM Council.

(4) The 0.60% Sn/SnEq resource cut-off grade was derived from the approximate March 31, 2016 two year trailing average Sn price of US$8.50/lb, Cu price of US$2.75/lb, and Zn price of US$0.90/lb, 88.5%, 85% and 70% respective process recoveries, smelter payable of 95% and refining charges of US$0.25.lb. Operating costs used were US$55/t mining, US$27/t processing and US$9/t G&A.

The Lower Mine Mineral Resource contains Sn only, and the Upper Mine Resource is a Sn equivalent Mineral Resource based on the presence of tin (Sn), copper (Cu) and zinc (Zn) mineralization.

The exploration drill hole database for the South Crofty Project contains 157 recent diamond drill holes totalling 30,931.82 m, 3,362 historic diamond drill holes for 90,732.81 m and 14,893 historic channels over 29,439.75 m.

Fifty-nine (59) mineral wireframes for twenty-four (24) lodes were constructed from mineralization intercepts in channels and drill holes at a cut-off grade of 0.60% SnEq over a minimum true width of 1.2m.

Assay grades were capped at 6% for Sn, 4% for Cu and 20% for Zn for the Upper Mine and 20% Sn for the Lower Mine.

The project has multiple targets with potential to materially increase the resource size.

Highlights

South Crofty has an active mine permit valid until 2071, subject to certain planning conditions being addressed.

The mine permission area includes 26 former producing mines.

Some of the Sn lodes have been mined over a strike length of approximately 4km, and from surface to a depth of 1km. The lodes remain open along strike and to depth.

Existing mine infrastructure that is potentially useable includes 4 vertical shafts with a combined depth of 2,940m.

An area has been set aside for construction of a new process plant.

Background

Western United Mines Ltd. (currently in Administration) and Cornish Minerals Limited (Bermuda) (collectively the "Companies") hold the rights to the South Crofty underground mine permission area, plus additional mineral rights over a further 7,500 Ha located in various parts of Cornwall, UK. The Companies were placed into administration in 2013 to protect the assets.

An agreement has been signed between Strongbow, Galena Special Situations Fund (the only secured creditor) ("Galena"), and Tin Shield Production Ltd. (a private company that will forego its option with Galena to acquire the project) ("Tin Shield") whereby Strongbow has the right to secure a 100% interest in Western United Mines Ltd and Cornish Minerals Limited (Bermuda) by funding the exit of the assets from administration, a process anticipated to cost approximately CDN$350,000. The material terms of the agreement, which outlines milestone payments to Galena and Tin Shield, were set out in the Company's news release dated March 17, 2016.

Readers are cautioned that Strongbow's ownership of the South Crofty project is subject to a number of conditions, including successful exit of administration and receipt of final approval for the transaction from the TSX Venture Exchange.

Details of the NI 43-101 Technical Report

Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resources have been estimated for Sn in the Lower Mine and Sn, Cu and Zn in the Upper Mine. This resource estimate is based on diamond drilling, core sampling and assaying as well as underground back and face channel sampling and chip sample assaying. Sampling during past mine operations in the Lower Mine was predominantly historic channel sampling and short hole wall drilling in drives with historic exploration drilling on strike and down dip of the workings. Recent drilling from 2008 to 2013 has tested the Upper Mine Dolcoath lodes.

The exploration drillhole database for the South Crofty Project contains 157 recent diamond drillholes totalling 30,932 m, 3,362 historic diamond drillholes for 90,733 m and 14,893 historic channels for 29,439 m.

Metal prices used for the resource estimate are US$8.50/lb Sn, US$2.75/lb Cu and US$0.90/lb Zn based on approximate LME two-year trailing averages at March 31, 2016. Process recovery assumptions are 88.5% for Sn, 85% for Cu and 70% for Zn. Given the polymetallic nature of the Upper Mine lodes, mineral wireframe modelling and resource reporting is based on tin equivalent (SnEq) grade. The SnEq calculation includes metal price and recovery: %SnEq = Sn% + (0.311 x Cu%) + (0.084 x Zn%). For the Lower Mine lodes, only tin analyses are available, therefore %SnEq is essentially Sn%.

Fifty-nine (59) mineral wireframes for twenty-four (24) lodes were constructed from mineralization intercepts in channels and drill holes at a cut-off grade of 0.60% SnEq over a minimum true width of 1.2 m. The Lower Mine lodes were modelled mostly on level plans using varying horizontal widths depending on lode dip. Minimum length of Sn mineralization along strike on the levels for inclusion in resources was 15 m. Lode widths commonly are narrower than minimum mining width and were "bulked out" to at least minimum width using adjacent assays when available and practical or to minimum width at zero grade where only the lode was sampled. In the latter case, preference was given to bulking out on the lode footwall in keeping with past mining convention at South Crofty. Upper Mine lodes, estimated predominantly from recent drilling, were modelled on vertical cross sections.

Assay grades were capped at 6% for Sn, 4% for Cu and 20% for Zn for the Upper Mine and 20% Sn for the Lower Mine. Assay composites were generated for the vein intercepts from the assays captured by GEMS software in the mineral wireframes. Channel samples from predominantly the Lower Mine, were composited at a length is 1.2 m dynamically adjusted in order that all composites in the intercept have the same length. This method ensures that the grade weighting is correctly applied for bulked out lode widths but results in variable composite lengths. Compositing for drill holes was done down hole at 1.5 m consistent lengths with review of discarded residual fragments for bias.

Four block models and several partial models were created to encompass the various lode areas: Dolcoath, Roskear, No.4-No.8-No.2-Providence; and Pryces-Tincroft. The resource block models' X axes are rotated to 60 azimuth. Block sizes are 5m x 5m x 2m vertical. Inverse distance cubed (ID3) and (ID4) interpolation was carried out using multiple search distances and search ellipses oriented to lode strikes and dips.

Historic bulk density for mining granite-hosted lodes was 2.77 t/m3 (Owen et al. 1998). Water immersion bulk density testing was carried out on-site for 119 core samples from 2010 to 2011 drill holes. Samples were obtained from the Dolcoath lodes and averaged 3.09 t/m3. To convert block model volumes to tonnes, P&E used a 2.77 t/m3 bulk density for the deep, granite-hosted lodes and 3.0 t/m3 for the killas-hosted Sn-Cu-Zn bearing lodes at Dolcoath.

Mineral Resources were classified as Indicated and Inferred based on completeness of channel sampling (levels above/below, raises), the drill hole spacing, confidence in the assaying for drilling, and geologic confidence in grade continuity.

The South Crofty Mineral Resource Estimates for the various lodes are presented in the following table:

South Crofty Mineral Resources at 0.60% Sn/SnEq Cut-off Lode/Mine Indicated Inferred Tonnes (k) Sn/SnEq% Tonnes (k) Sn/SnEq% Lower Mine Lodes Sn% No. 4 452 2.04 225 2.19 No. 2 180 1.63 13 1.12 No. 8 127 1.72 34 2.33 No.2-NCK 53 2.18 - - Providence - - 28 2.37 Roskear A 28 2.15 50 2.15 Roskear B 90 1.93 70 1.85 Roskear BHW 24 1.77 - - Pryces/Tincroft 298 1.67 74 2.24 Dolcoath South 226 1.67 108 1.50 Dolcoath South Branch 38 1.56 5 2.07 Dolcoath North 144 1.55 47 1.57 Dolcoath North HW - - 14 0.88 Dolcoath North FW - - 70 1.36 SUBTOTAL LOWER MINE 1,660 1.81 738 1.91 Upper Mine Lodes SnEq%* Dolcoath Middle 89 1.01 22 0.77 Dolcoath Middle Branch 36 1.00 - - Dolcoath Upper Main - - 274 0.81 Dolcoath Upper South Branch - - 86 .86 Dolcoath NVC - - 35 1.11 Dolcoath Little NW 11 0.82 - - Dolcoath Little NW FW - - 1 0.86 Dolcoath Little NE - - 46 1.44 Dolcoath S. Entral 121 0.98 - - SUBTOTAL UPPER MINE 257 0.99 464 0.91 GRAND TOTAL LOWER & UPPER MINE 1,917 1.70 1,202 1.52

* Sn equivalent (SnEq) grade is calculated using the formula: SnEq% = Sn% + (Cu% x 0.311) + (Zn% x 0.084)

Mineral Resource Estimate Sensitivity to Sn/SnEq Cut-Off

Lower Mine

Sn Cut-Off Indicated

Tonnes (k) Sn% Inferred

Tonnes (k) Sn% 0.70% 1,545 1.89 699 1.98 0.65% 1,601 1.85 719 1.94 0.60% 1,660 1.81 738 1.91 0.55% 1,714 1.77 759 1.87 0.50% 1,763 1.73 778 1.84 Upper Mine

Sn/SnEq Cut-Off Indicated

Tonnes (k) SnEq% Inferred

Tonnes (k) SnEq% 0.70% 200 1.09 341 1.01 0.65% 227 1.04 396 0.96 0.60% 257 0.99 464 0.91 0.55% 293 0.94 536 0.87 0.50% 328 0.90 631 0.82

About South Crofty

The South Crofty tin project is located in the towns of Pool, Camborne, and Redruth in the county of Cornwall, SW England, approximately 465km drive west of London.

There has been tin mining in Cornwall since at least 2,300 BC. The South Crofty commenced large scale production in the mid-17th century. The mine managed to continue operations until it shut down in 1998 following the tin price collapse of 1984.

Several companies attempted to revive the mine between 2001 and 2013. Significant advances were made, primarily the agreement to secure a site for future mill construction, and the grant of a mining permit which is valid until 2071, subject to certain planning conditions being met. Unfortunately, the timing of the mine permit grant coincided with the current poor market conditions in the resource sector and the assets were put into administration in 2013.

The South Crofty mine has seen production from near-surface copper mineralization and deeper tin-only mineralization. The focus for Strongbow will be to evaluate the deeper tin-only (Lower Mine) mineralization that occurs primarily below a depth of 400m beneath the surface.

Qualified Person

Mr. Eugene Puritch, P. Eng., lead author of the NI 43-101 Technical Report and a "Qualified Person" as defined in NI-43-101 has reviewed and approved the contents of this news release.

The Company will publish a Technical Report, prepared in accordance with NI 43-101 guidelines, within 45 days of this news release. For additional information, contact Richard Williams at 604-638-8005 or by e-mail at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Richard D. Williams, P.Geo.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" including but not limited to statements with respect to Strongbow's plans to acquire the South Crofty tin project, Strongbow's ability to reach agreement for the settlement of secured and unsecured creditor claims which are a condition to the Companies exiting administration, the timing to complete an updated NI 43-101 technical report for the project, Strongbow's ability to obtain an increase to the water discharge permit for the South Crofty tin project, the potential to increase the Mineral Resource Estimate, its ability to deliver a positive feasibility study on the project, the commencement of commercial production from the South Crofty tin project and the estimated future net present value of the South Crofty tin project, the availability of financing for future cash payments, ongoing maintenance costs and future development work at the South Crofty tin project, in addition to the estimation of a mineral resource and the success of exploration activities.

The mineral resource figures referred to in this press release are estimates and are therefore insufficient to allow meaningful application of the technical and economic parameters to enable an evaluation of the technical or economic viability and no assurances can be given that mining of the South Crofty project will be technically viable or that the indicated levels of tin will be produced. Such estimates are expressions of judgment based on knowledge, mining experience, analysis of drilling results and industry practises. Valid estimates made at any given time may significantly change when new information becomes available. While the Company believes that the resource estimates included in this press release are well established, by their very nature, resource estimates are imprecise and depend, to a certain extent, upon statistical inferences which may ultimately prove unreliable. If such estimates are inaccurate or are reduced in the future, this could have a material adverse impact on the Company.

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 receipt of regulatory approvals, the successful integration of acquisitions; risks related to general economic and market conditions; risks related to the availability 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 Strongbow 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. Strongbow undertakes no obligation or responsibility to update forward-looking statements, except as required by law.
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

Zimbabweans in the United Kingdom staged a President Robert Mugabe's misrule of Zimbabwe drama with one member of the vigil acting as the veteran leader who tried to defend his misuse of funds in various trips.ROHR Zimbabwe (Restoration of Human Rights) said as the diasporans marked Zimbabwe's 36th independence anniversary, exiles in the UK were joined by Mugabe himself at Saturday's Vigil outside the London Embassy."His Excellency, in the form of Fungayi Mabhunu in our Mugabe mask and carrying a poster reading '36 years of me. What else can I destroy?', answered some of our questions," said ROHR."The first was how he justified spending $20 million on foreign trips so far this year at a time when the economy is alleged not to be booming. Well, this trip to London is costing nothing', he said. As you may know I have recently had to make one or three essential visits to the Far East so I have collected lots of air miles."The organisation said another questioned posed to the Mugabe character was about his well-travelled Excellency's 300 cattle that he announced he had donated to the African Union last year to reduce the AU's dependence on Western aid."It just struck me that no one had ever thought of a gift by way of cattle to the AU', he said, brushing aside reports that none of the beasts had been sent," said ROHR."Mugabe was then asked about Zanu PF's rejection of genetically modified food - a move condemned by Zimbabwean farmer Nyasha Mudukuti in an article in the Wall Street Journal: So my country  a country that can't feed itself  will refuse what millions around the world eat safely every day . . . we're apparently better dead than fed."The organisation said the nonagarian went on: What some people don't realise is the effect of illegal sanctions. As well as inflicting aids on Africa and causing our drought the West is now determined to exterminate us with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) so that they can control us like they do the troublemakers who caused chaos in Harare on Thursday in an attempt at regime change'."The Vigil is pleased to see that our sister organisation the Restoration of Human Rights in Zimbabwe was prominent among those who took part in the MDC-T demonstration on Thursday. ROHR in the UK followed it up by gathering outside the Zimbabwe Embassy on Friday carrying posters such as Old Clueless Mugabe must go'. As usual, the Embassy was closed," said the organisation.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA and JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - Platinum Group Metals Ltd. (TSX:PTM)(NYSE MKT:PLG) ("Platinum Group" or the "Company") reports increased grade and a significant increase in indicated ounces in an updated independent resource estimate for platinum, palladium, rhodium and gold ("4E") on the 58.65% owned Waterberg Joint Venture, located on the North Limb of the Bushveld Complex.

Mineral resources in the "T" and "F" zones at Waterberg (100% project basis) have increased to an estimated 23.894 million ounces 4E in the indicated category plus 11.710 million ounces 4E in the inferred category:

Indicated 209.559 million tonnes grading 3.55 g/t 4E (1.07 g/t Pt, 2.19 g/t Pd, 0.26 g/t Au, 0.03 g/t Rh, 2.5 g/t cut-off)





Inferred 105.918 million tonnes grading 3.44 g/t 4E (1.04 g/t Pt, 2.09 g/t Pd, 0.28 g/t Au, 0.03 g/t Rh, 2.5 g/t cut-off)





R. Michael Jones, P.Eng., President, CEO and co-founder of Platinum Group Metals said "We have been very successful in almost doubling indicated resources to 24 million ounces. Waterberg is an extraordinary deposit that we have not yet found the limits to. Starting at 140 meters from surface, with zones 3 to 70 meters thick and an overall proven strike length of 13 km so far, Waterberg stands apart from conventional platinum mines in South Africa. The increased F zone grade combined with improved deposit definition allows for the targeting of best grade thickness in early mine scheduling, which is changing the project significantly from our earlier engineering work. We are looking at a series of adjacent mine plans, each at the scale of a typical stand-alone mine, to be prioritized and processed at a single central plant."

The resource estimate includes sampling and data from 294 diamond drill boreholes with 459 deflections for a total of 584 intersections into the deposit from a total of approximately 293,538 meters of core drilling. The deposit model is a kriged estimate from Data Mine geological wireframes.

The deposit is 13 km long, open along strike and begins from 140 meters deep. The deposit is known to continue down dip below the arbitrary 1,250 meter cut off depth applied to the deposit for resource estimation purposes. Minimum mineralized thickness is 3 meters and the maximum is 70 meters. Drilling is continuing at Waterberg and the deposit is still open for expansion. Assays for shallow Super F zones at 180 meters to 300 meters from surface are outstanding. Deeper "Super T" targets are being drilled now. The most recent intercept in the "Super T" zone is 7.76 meters grading 6.14 g/t 4E and the deposit in the area of this hole is open for expansion.

Pre-Feasibility Update

The Pre-Feasibility Study is on track with this resource update to be completed at the end of July 2016. The engineering work is being completed by project teams from Worley Parsons (Advisian) and DRA. Both firms are experienced global, independent, mining engineering firms. Optimization of mine plans in five target zones (3 on the Super F zone and 2 on the T and Super T zones) is underway. Metallurgical test work and concentrate marketing discussions are in progress. Indications from metallurgical test work are that a good grade concentrate with similar base metals content to desirable Merensky concentrate, with no penalty chrome, can be produced. Site infrastructure work for power and water designs and costing are also well advanced.

JOGMEC Agreement and Funding

Drilling and engineering work is being funded 100% at this time by the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation ("JOGMEC") under a US$ 20 million firm commitment to the Joint Venture. A budget for US$ 6 million for April 1, 2016 to March 31, 2017 set out under the JOGMEC agreement commitment is in progress. The Company may accelerate expenditure levels at Waterberg if it has sufficient working capital on hand to do so. JOGMEC continues to be an excellent active technical partner with its geological and metallurgical in house expertise.

Mineral Resource Details

F Zone Cut-off Tonnage Grade Metal 3PGE+Au Pt Pd Au Rh 3PGE+Au 3PGE +Au g/t Mt g/t g/t g/t g/t g/t Kg Moz Indicated 2.00 281.184 0.91 1.94 0.15 0.03 3.03 851 988 27.392 2.50 179.325 1.05 2.23 0.18 0.03 3.49 625 844 20.121 3.00 110.863 1.19 2.52 0.20 0.04 3.95 437 909 14.079 Inferred 2.00 177.961 0.83 1.77 0.13 0.03 2.76 491 183 15.792 2.50 84.722 1.01 2.14 0.17 0.03 3.35 283 819 9.125 3.00 43.153 1.19 2.53 0.20 0.04 3.96 170 886 5.494 T Zone Cut-off Tonnage Grade Metal 2PGE+Au Pt Pd Au Rh 2PGE+Au 2PGE +Au g/t Mt g/t g/t g/t g/t g/t Kg Moz Indicated 2.00 36.308 1.08 1.81 0.72 - 3.61 131 162 4.217 2.50 30.234 1.16 1.94 0.78 - 3.88 117 363 3.773 3.00 22.330 1.28 2.14 0.86 - 4.28 95 640 3.075 Inferred 2.00 23.314 1.10 1.83 0.73 - 3.66 85 240 2.741 2.50 21.196 1.14 1.90 0.76 - 3.79 80 394 2.585 3.00 14.497 1.28 2.14 0.86 - 4.28 62082 1.996 Waterberg Total Cut-off Tonnage Grade Metal 3PGE+Au Pt Pd Au Rh 3PGE+Au 3PGE +Au g/t Mt g/t g/t g/t g/t g/t Kg Moz Indicated 2.00 317.492 0.93 1.92 0.22 0.03 3.10 983 150 31.609 2.50 209.559 1.07 2.19 0.26 0.03 3.55 743 207 23.894 3.00 133.193 1.21 2.46 0.31 0.03 4.01 533 549 17.154 Inferred 2.00 201.275 0.85 1.77 0.21 0.03 2.86 576 423 18.533 2.50 105.918 1.04 2.09 0.28 0.03 3.44 364 213 11.710 3.00 57.650 1.21 2.43 0.37 0.03 4.04 232 968 7.490

1. Mineral resources are classified in accordance with the SAMREC standards. There are certain differences with the "CIM Standards on Mineral Resources and Reserves"; however, in this case the Company and the QP believe the differences are not material and the standards may be considered the same. Mineral resources do not have demonstrated economic viability and inferred resources have a high degree of uncertainty. Mineral resources might never be upgraded or converted to reserves.

2. Mineral resources are provided on a 100% project basis. Inferred and indicated categories are separate. The estimates have an effective date of April 18th 2016. Tables may not add perfectly due to rounding.

3. A cut-off grade of 2.5 g/t 3E (platinum, palladium and gold) for the T zone and 2.5 g/t 4E for the F zone is applied to the selected base case mineral resources. Prior to July 20, 2015, a 2 g/t cut-off was applied to resource estimates. For comparison with earlier resources a 2 g/t cut-off on the updated resource model is presented above. Cut-off grades of 3.0 g/t 4E are also presented as certain mining plans in early years may apply higher cut-offs for the Pre-Feasibility Study.

4. Cut off for the T and the F zones considered costs, smelter discounts, concentrator recoveries from the previous and ongoing engineering work completed on the property by the Company and its independent engineers. Spot and three year trailing average prices and exchange rates are considered for the cut-off considerations. Metallurgical work indicates that an economically attractive concentrate can be produced from standard flotation methods.

5. Mineral resources were completed by Charles Muller of CJM Consulting and a NI 43-101 technical report for the mineral resources reported herein, effective April 18, 2016, will be filed on SEDAR within 45 days of today's date.

6. Mineral resources were estimated using Kriging methods for geological domains created in Datamine Studio3 from 262 mother holes and 322 deflections in mineralization. A process of geological modelling and creation of grade shells using indicating kriging was completed in the estimation process.

7. The estimation of mineral resources have taken into account environmental, permitting, legal, title, taxation, socio-economic, marketing and political factors. The mineral resources may be materially affected by metals prices, exchange rates, labour costs, electricity supply issues or many other factors detailed in the Company's Annual Information Form.

8. The following prices based on an approximate recent 3 year trailing average in accordance with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") guidance was used for the assessment of Resources; USD Pt 1,243/oz, Pd 720/oz, Au 1,238/oz, Rh 1,015/oz - see Cautionary Note.

9. Estimated grades and quantities for by-products will be included in recoverable metals and estimates in the on-going pre-feasibility work. Copper and Nickel are the main value by-products recoverable by flotation and for indicated resources are estimated at 0.18% copper and 0.10% nickel in the T zone 0.07% copper and 0.16% nickel in the F zone.

CIM guideline on resource classification:

An Inferred Mineral Resource is that part of a mineral resource for which quantity and grade or quality are estimated on the basis of limited geological evidence and sampling. Geological evidence is sufficient to imply but not verify geological and grade or quality continuity.

An Inferred Mineral Resource has a lower level of confidence than that applying to an Indicated Mineral Resource and must not be converted to a Mineral Reserve. It is reasonably expected that the majority of Inferred Mineral Resources could be upgraded to Indicated Mineral Resources with continued exploration.

An Indicated Mineral Resource is that part of a mineral resource for which quantity, grade or quality, densities, shape and physical characteristics are estimated with sufficient confidence to allow the application of Modifying Factors in sufficient detail to support mine planning and evaluation of the economic viability of the deposit.

Geological evidence is derived from adequately detailed and reliable exploration, sampling and testing and is sufficient to assume geological and grade or quality continuity between points of observation.

An Indicated Mineral Resource has a lower level of confidence than that applying to a Measured Resource.

Qualified Person Data Verification and Quality Control and Assurance

Scientific and Technical Information in this Press Release related to mineral resources has been reviewed and approved by Charles J Muller, (BScHons) Pr Sci Nat (Reg. No 400201/04), an independent consulting geologist and resource estimator of CJM Consulting, an independent qualified person as defined in National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("N1 43-101"). He has verified the data by reviewing the detailed assay and geological information and metallurgical work on the Waterberg deposit and he visited the property in July 2015. He is satisfied that the data is appropriate for the resource estimate by reviewing the core, assay certificates and quality control information as well as reviewing the procedures on sampling, chain of custody and data base records of the Platinum Group exploration team.

Base metals and other major elements were determined by multi acid digestion with Inductively Coupled Plasma ("ICP") finish and PGEs were determined by conventional fire assay and ICP finish. Setpoint Laboratories is an experienced ISO 17025 SANAS accredited laboratory in assaying and have utilized a standard quality control system including the use of standards. Platinum Group utilized a well-documented system of inserting blanks and standards into the assay stream and has a strict chain of custody and independent lab re-check system for quality control.

This press release has been reviewed and approved by R. Michael Jones, P.Eng., a non-independent Qualified Person and the CEO of the Company.

A report with respect to the technical information contained here is planned to be filed on www.sedar.com within 45 days.

On behalf of the Board of Platinum Group Metals Ltd.

R. Michael Jones, CEO and Co-founder

Disclosure

The Toronto Stock Exchange and the NYSE MKT LLC have not reviewed and do not accept responsibility for the accuracy or adequacy of this news release, which has been prepared by management.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities laws and forward-looking statements within the meaning of U.S. securities laws ("forward-looking statements"). Forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as: believe, expect, anticipate, intend, estimate, plans, postulate and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. All statements that are not statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this press release include, without limitation, statements regarding all technical details of the updated mineral resources. A shortage of working capital may materially affect the Company ability to complete its plans. Although the Company believes the forward-looking statements in this press release are reasonable, it can give no assurance that the expectations and assumptions in such statements will prove to be correct. The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements by the Company are not guarantees of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward looking statements as a result of various factors, including, but not limited to, variations in market conditions; the nature, quality and quantity of any mineral deposits that may be located; metal prices; other prices and costs; currency exchange rates; the Company's ability to obtain any necessary permits, consents or authorizations required for its activities; the Company's ability to access further funding and produce minerals from its properties successfully or profitably, to continue its projected growth, or to be fully able to implement its business strategies and other risk factors described in the Company's Form 40-F annual report, annual information form and other filings with the SEC and Canadian securities regulators, which may be viewed at www.sec.gov and www.sedar.com, respectively.

Cautionary Note to U.S. and other Investors

Estimates of mineralization and other technical information included or referenced in this press release have been prepared in accordance with NI 43-101. The definitions of proven and probable reserves used in NI 43-101 differ from the definitions in SEC Industry Guide 7. Under SEC Industry Guide 7 standards, a "final" or "bankable" feasibility study is required to report reserves, the three-year historical average price is used in any reserve or cash flow analysis to designate reserves and the primary environmental analysis or report must be filed with the appropriate governmental authority. As a result, the reserves reported by the Company in accordance with NI 43-101 may not qualify as "reserves" under SEC standards. In addition, the terms "mineral resource", "measured mineral resource", "indicated mineral resource" and "inferred mineral resource" are defined in and required to be disclosed by NI 43-101; however, these terms are not defined terms under SEC Industry Guide 7 and normally are not permitted to be used in reports and registration statements filed with the SEC. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. Investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of the mineral deposits in these categories will ever be converted into reserves. "inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence, and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian securities laws, estimates of inferred mineral resources may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies, except in rare cases. Additionally, disclosure of "contained ounces" in a resource is permitted disclosure under Canadian securities laws; however, the SEC normally only permits issuers to report mineralization that does not constitute "reserves" by SEC standards as in place tonnage and grade without reference to unit measurements. Accordingly, information contained or referenced in this press release containing descriptions of the Company's mineral deposits may not be comparable to similar information made public by U.S. companies subject to the reporting and disclosure requirements of United States federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder.
RENO, NEVADA--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - NuLegacy Gold Corporation (TSX VENTURE:NUG)(OTCQX:NULGF) reports awarding a 10,000-meter (33,000 ft.) drilling contract for the 2016 Iceberg deposit exploration program to Major Drilling of Salt Lake City, Utah.

Starting in early May the majority of the multiphase program will focus on expanding the extent of the high-grade zones in the Iceberg deposit, with a sizable portion directed towards exploring other prospective Carlin-type gold systems on the property, principally the Avocado, VIO and Jasperoid Basin gold anomalies. The circa 40-hole program is scheduled for completion late August/early September.

The Iceberg is classic Carlin-type oxidized gold deposit extending along a 3,000-meter structural corridor of gold mineralization with an established exploration target of 90-110 million tonnes of 0.9 to 1.1 grams of gold per tonnei. Located in the Cortez gold-trend of Nevada, the Iceberg is on trendii with three of Barrick Gold's multi-million ounce gold deposits that are amongst its largest, lowest cost and politically safest mines in the world.iii

ON BEHALF OF NULEGACY GOLD CORPORATION

James E Anderson, Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Roger Steininger, NuLegacy's chief operating officer is a Certified Professional Geologist (CPG 7417) and the qualified person as defined by NI 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects responsible for preparing and reviewing the scientific and technical information contained in this news release

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

This news release contains forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company. These forward-looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ materially from those expected. There are no known resources or reserves in the Iceberg deposit and the proposed exploration programs are exploratory searches for commercial bodies of ore. In addition, the presence of gold deposits on properties adjacent or in close proximity to the Iceberg Deposit is not necessarily indicative of the gold mineralization on the Iceberg Deposit. The forward-looking statements made in this news release are qualified by these cautionary statements and those in our continuous disclosure filings available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com including our annual management's discussion and analysis dated July 28, 2015 for the year ended March 31, 2015. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances save as required under applicable securities legislation.

i These figures are conceptual in nature and derived from a compilation of 149 historic and 34 NuLegacy drill holes in and around the Iceberg deposit. To date, there has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target delineating as a mineral resource.

ii The similarity and close proximity of these deposits in the Cortez Trend is not necessarily indicative of the gold mineralization in the Iceberg deposit.

iii As extracted from Barrick's Q4-2013 and Q1-2014 reports.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - April 19, 2016) - HUDSON RESOURCES INC. (the "Company") - (TSX VENTURE:HUD)(OTCQX:HUDRF) is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement with the European Investment Bank ("EIB") to appraise Hudson's White Mountain Anorthosite Project in Greenland. The EIB is the largest multilateral lender in the European Union (EU).

Hudsons' 100% owned Greenland subsidiary, Hudson Greenland A/S, and the EIB have executed a mandate letter setting out the terms for the project appraisal and indicative financing terms. The status of the loan can be found at http://www.eib.org/projects/pipeline/2016/20160116. The EIB is considering offering Hudson a loan of up to 14M Euros, not exceeding 50% of the project costs. In total, project capital costs, including working capital, are not expected to exceed CDN$40M, equivalent to 27M Euros. Specific terms and conditions of the loan are confidential at this time. The potential financing being considered is still subject to a number of institutional approvals following appraisal as well as contract negotiations.

James Tuer, Hudson's President, stated, "We are very pleased that the European Investment Bank is prepared to invest in our project and recognizes its long term positive impacts for Greenland. Their involvement represents a significant vote of confidence in our plan to build and operate the mine in Greenland for the purpose of supplying the fiberglass, paints and polymer industries. For current and potential new shareholders of Hudson, this represents an important step in completing the project financing while limiting shareholder dilution."

Hudson is in advanced discussions with a number of groups with regard to the remaining portion of the financing and will provide updates as they become available.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

James Tuer, President

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release includes certain forward-looking statements or information. All statements other than statements of historical fact included in this news release, including, without limitation, statements regarding the use of proceeds from the private placement, and other future plans and objectives of the Company are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's plans or expectations include market prices, general economic, market or business conditions, regulatory changes, timeliness of government or regulatory approvals and other risks detailed herein and from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators. The Company expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation.

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.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] reported [press release] Tuesday that Russias Constitutional Court has rejected a binding decision of an international human rights body as non-executable. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled [judgment] in 2013 that Russia must reform an absolute ban on voting rights for prisoners. The ECHR had decided that Russias absolute ban on prisoners voting pursuant to Article 32  3 of that countrys constitution was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The Russian Constitutional Court said [Meduza report] that the ECHR has no right to demand changes to the Russian constitution and that the earlier ruling by the ECHR may be partially satisfied [RAPSI report] in Russia. The court stated that the ECHR ruling could be satisfied in terms of general actions aimed to ensure justice, proportionality and differentiation in restriction of inmates voting rights and that the legislature could change certain regimes of confinement [and through] alternative punishment which does not lead to restriction of voting rights. However, the court rejected the ECHR ruling demanding voting rights be returned to the Russian nationals that served as the parties involved in the earlier ECHR case that serves as the origin of the current controversy. Russia passed [HRW dispatch] a law in 2015 that permits the Constitutional Court to reject rulings of international human rights bodies if the court find that the ruling contradicts the Russian Constitution.

The ECHR issued a similar ruling in 2014, finding that the UKs ban on prisoners voting violated their human rights [JURIST report]. In October 2013 the Supreme Court of the UK had upheld [JURIST report] the law that banned inmates from voting.
News / National

by Elita Chikwati

Russia and the United States have sent congratulatory messages to Zimbabwe on attaining 36 years of independence.Russian President Vladimir Putin and US president Barack Obama yesterday joined Zimbabwe in celebrating its independence.In his congratulatory letter yesterday, President Putin said he was confident relations between his country and Zimbabwe would continue.He said the relationship met the interests of the people of both countries and was in line with promoting stability and security on the African continent.President Putin wished President Mugabe good health and success and prosperity to the people of Zimbabwe."Russia and Zimbabwe have a long history of friendship and cooperation. During the World War II, when Soviet Union struggled against Fascism and Nazism, military units from Africa also took part in that struggle. Thus the victory was our shared victory," said President Putin."When the Zimbabwean people fought against British imperialism and the apartheid system in South Africa, they received support from the Soviet Union  and it made a big contribution to helping Zimbabwe achieve its liberation," he said.President Putin said although the Soviet Union had broken up, Russia still stood firm against pressure from the United States and Europe.In May 2015, President Putin invited President Mugabe to Moscow to attend celebrations the 70th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War.During the meeting President Putin said Russia was ready to 'thwart' any Western hostility against Zimbabwe.In 2008, Russia and China vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution sponsored by Britain and the United States seeking to impose punitive sanctions on Zimbabwe."Currently our countries are both fighting sanctions and for this reason, we must work together."The history teaches us that victory can be achieved only through united struggle for the right cause," said President Putin.Russian investors are financing a $4 billion platinum mine in the Great Dyke and will carry out exploration for other minerals, with the possibility of raising their investment.The investors, who will channel funds through a new company, Great Dyke Investments, a joint venture with the Zimbabwe Government, say they are on course to meet timelines set out in a "roadmap" agreed in September last year, during a high-profile visit by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.Under that roadmap, the mine in Darwendale will be developed in three phases, with the first phase running from 2014 to 2017 entailing exploration, infrastructure development and commissioning of mining facilities.The second phase, from 2018 to 2021, will see the establishment of a new mine and expansion of concentration capacity to produce 530 000 ounces of platinum per year.The third and full development phase will run from 2022 to 2024 and will see the expansion of platinum production to 800 000 ounces per year.US president Mr Obama, in his congratulatory message to Zimbabwe, said:"The American people join me in sending congratulations to the people of Zimbabwe as you celebrate the 36th anniversary of Zimbabwe's independence on April 18."The United States will continue to support Zimbabwean efforts to strengthen institutions, expand economic opportunities, and promote a democratic society and government that serves the needs of all Zimbabweans."
News / National

by Thobekile Zhou

President Robert Mugabe on Monday told the nation that the economy is on a rapid turn around.He said closed firms are reopening and new one's formed, creating employment."My government is determined to translate political independence into meaningfulness, by attending to the socio-economic needs of our people," he said.In his 25 minute speech, the 92 year old Mugabe said the mining sector is on a recovery path."This has started showing improved results, with gold output now 20,2 tonnes, rising expectedly to 25,5 tonnes by the year end".
News / National

by Staff reporter

As Zimbabwe marks 36 years of independence from Britain today, former Vice President Joice Mujuru has described President Robert Mugabe's warring Zanu-PF as "a dying regime that shall never again win a national democratic election" because it had "devoured" the dreams of long-suffering citizens.In a hard-hitting statement yesterday to mark Independence Day, Mujuru let rip at Mugabe and Zanu-PF - declaring boldly that come the eagerly-anticipated 2018 national elections, new kid on the political block - her Zimbabwe People First (ZPF) - would form the next government."There is now an implosion within the once seemingly invincible and unstoppable Zanu-PF machine. The ruthless monster has run out of ideas and is now devouring its own children."These are tell-tale signs of a dying regime that shall never again win a national democratic election," Mujuru - who was hounded out of Zanu-PF in late 2014 together with her close party allies on trumped up charges of plotting to oust and assassinate Mugabe - said.Pointing to the country's dying economy, the widow of the late liberation struggle icon, General Solomon Mujuru, said it was disheartening that a country that was once described as a "jewel of Africa" was now a derided basket case - infamous for its leaders' misrule and corruption.Mujuru also took issue with Zanu-PF youths' planned and factional one-million man march in alleged support of Mugabe, saying this was a complete waste of time as the most pressing issue facing the country was the dying economy, as well as the ruling party's well-documented misrule and failures.She said it was a shame that Zanu-PF's youths had been "turned into political killing machines that are used to prop up a regime that has become unpopular and lost touch with reality".Echoing what opposition leader and former prime minister in the government of national unity, Morgan Tsvangirai, has repeatedly complained about, Mujuru said Zanu-PF subsisted on a "culture of political intolerance and State-sponsored violence".Her sentiments came in the wake of reports that several ZPF leaders - almost all of whom are former Zanu-PF bigwigs - were being threatened with eviction from their farms as the "vindictive" ruling party sought to punish them for stampeding to Mujuru's party."Any opposition party that mounts a credible challenge . . . to Zanu-PF does so at the risk of exposing its members to intimidation and victimisation,"she observed ruefully.And in yet another pointed jibe at Zanu-PF, Mujuru said the ruling party - which has in turn dismissed ZPF as a fly-by-night organisation that will soon disintegrate - had lost its mojo."36 years after independence, we celebrate a revolution that has lost its glow and direction," she said, adding that the dreams and hopes that had driven many young people to join the liberation struggle in the 1970s had been deferred.She said this as more than three million people face hunger and starvation, as the cash-strapped Zanu-PF government struggles to mobilise enough resources to feed the masses.Mujuru said what was especially galling to many was that Zanu-PF had crassly destroyed the once vibrant "agriculture sector", with many ruling party bigwigs owning several farms - almost all of them lying idle."Bad policies and corruption have devastated this important sector. Some bigwigs own huge multiple farms when many of our people remain landless. Most of these farms lie idle or are badly administered."Of late, youth leaders talk of repossessing the farms of all those who do not support Zanu-PF and use them to reward those who prop up the regime by violent means."The proponents of these strategies have a myopic view of politics. They take people for granted and are self-deceiving," the former long-serving number two to Mugabe thundered.The only hope, she observed, was that most Zimbabweans were now completely fed up of Mugabe's tyrannical quest to remain "in power at all cost"."Service delivery in Zimbabwe is pathetic to say the least. Our hospitals are understaffed and without drugs. The general image of our civil servants, not forgetting our uniformed forces, has been badly tarnished."What boggles the mind is that instead of marching in protest against the government, whose policies have impoverished our country, the youths are instead mobilising a march in support of the leadership that has failed the nation. We urge all Zimbabweans to shun this ill-conceived initiative," she said.Turning to war veterans, who are now divided along Zanu-PF's seemingly unstoppable factional and succession lines, Mujuru said the former freedom fighters did not deserve to be treated in the manner that they were being "mistreated"."Please, accept that our revolution has gone astray and you should not allow yourself to be used and be abused (like this)," she implored the disaffected ex-combatants.
News / National

by Staff reporter

Zapu leader Dumiso Dabengwa says he does not feel sorry for disgruntled war veterans - many of whom he says have hands "dripping with the blood" of many innocent people.Speaking in an interview with the Daily News on Sunday last week, the fired-up former Zanu-PF bigwig and Home Affairs minister also accused the disaffected former liberation struggle fighters of having willingly operated as President Robert Mugabe's and Zanu-PF's "storm-troopers" for many years, waging a violent war against those opposed to the nonagenarian and the governing party.He also charged that the ex-combatants had allegedly connived with the British government to rig the fiercely-contested 1980 elections in favour of Mugabe and the ruling party.Dabengwa spoke in the wake of a widening chasm between Mugabe and war veterans - particularly those rallying behind embattled Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa's mooted presidential aspirations - as Zanu-PF's deadly factional and succession wars continue to escalate.met with Mugabe in Harare in a desperate bid to mend fences at a much-hyped get-together that Zanu-PF insiders have since said achieved "very little" by way of mitigating the former liberation movement's seemingly unstoppable bloodletting.Dabengwa said emphatically that he did not have much sympathy for his erstwhile comrades as they were allegedly only "squealing now" because their own interests and welfare continued to be neglected by Mugabe and Zanu-PF.In addition, he said, the UK's Conservative party, had allegedly connived with local whites to award the 1980 poll to Zanu-PF in a misguided strategy to "reward and look after a party" that they thought would safeguard their interests best - with Zanla war veterans allegedly actively taking part in the rigging, and continuing to do so in subsequent elections.Zapu won 20 seats against Zanu-PF's 57 in that maiden election that was mid-wifed and supervised by the British government.Dabengwa made the comments while responding to questions about his views on the recently published book In Pursuit Of Freedom and Justice that was penned by retired and much-respected Zanu-PF elder Cephas Msipa."It's a book that I would like to recommend to all the people who would like to know more about the history of our politics in Zimbabwe," he said without any equivocation, adding that Msipa was very "knowledgeable" about the country's troubled history."Msipa relates what happened during the elections and clearly spells out what happened when Zanla created no-go areas in the eastern districts of the country and made sure that no other political party was allowed to campaign during the elections."That is what gave Mugabe a victory that Zanu got during the 1980 elections and this is why the war veterans even at the recent meeting which they had with the president were able to tell him clearly that they were the vanguard of the party because it is them who put Zanu into power," Dabengwa added."Those guaranteed votes in those eastern districts where Zanu-PF was completely uncontested gave Zanu the victory and this is why they (war veterans) say it is them who gave victory to Mugabe".Dabengwa also said Mugabe's recent rants that securocrats and war veterans should not interfere with the ruling party's political processes were hypocritical and self-serving, considering that war veterans had been "at the forefront of campaigning for him and Zanu-PF, often violently, all these years"."I don't feel sorry for the war vets now that they have stated their case. They have stated that they are the people that made him (Mugabe) what he is today and they can't understand why he is doing what he is doing to them."They are saying (to Mugabe) you are telling us not to interfere in the affairs of the party, yet it is us who are the kingmakers. It is us who decide and who have been deciding whether you win an election or not all along. So, who are the good guys here?" he asked rhetorically.Dabengwa - who was for a long time a senior Zanu-PF official following the since disbanded merger of Zanu and Zapu in 1987 - also corroborated the recent assertions by Msipa that Zanu-PF was a very violent party."Since 1980 they (Zanu-PF) have been using the same tactic. They will do everything possible to destroy their opponents. They use all sorts of dirty tactics violence and intimidation.They think to win an election they need to use force," Msipa told the Daily News on Sunday's sister paper, the Daily News recently."From that time (1980), Zanu-PF got the impression which they have used all along that violence and intimidation pay dividends. Zanu-PF learnt a lesson that this is the way to win an election. They have used that method since that time until 2013 when it then acquired a new tactic of using voter-rigging."All those years up to 2013, it is the war veterans in Zanla who have been responsible for Zanu's pyrrhic victory in elections," Dabengwa chipped in.He also disputed very strongly reported claims by the British in 1980 that Zimbabweans had voted along ethnic lines in that year's plebiscite."People did not vote tribally in 1980 as the British wanted to conclude. People voted because they were intimidated and they were told that anyone who did not vote for Zanu-PF would be dealt with severely and all the things which had happened during the war will happen to them."The whole issue was raised with Lord Soames who was governor then, who even said I am sorry to (then Zapu leader Joshua) Nkomo, and revealed that while he had made it a point as previously agreed that the votes from those districts would not be counted, he said was over-ruled by Westminster powers who ordered that all the votes be counted," Dabengwa asserted.He reiterated that the British had allegedly been "in charge of rigging while the war veterans were in charge of making sure that certain parts of the country were no go areas for Mugabe's opponents"."The British rigged the elections. They were the ones who were in charge. The war veterans made certain that in the eastern districts, no other party was allowed to go and contest," he said.
News / National

by Staff Reporter

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) on Monday celebrated Zimbabwe's 36th Independence Day by announcing their plan to conquer Africa and start political parties in neighboring countries starting with Zimbabwe.The EFF took the opportunity as Zimbabwe celebrates 36 years of independence and launched the Zimbabwe Economic Freedom Fighters (ZEFF)."The EFF is inspired by the Zimbabweans and their historical lesson shall inform how we engage in our own struggle to return the land to its rightful owners for the total emancipation of our people" the party's Mbuyiseni Ndlozi said.Ndlozi said despite "all its weaknesses Zimbabwe stood the test of time regardless of being isolated by world big forces (through sanctions) for its insistence on returning the land to its native populations"."Today we have decided to join the Zimbabwean people in their struggle and with the launch of ZEFF, we foresee a bright future for everyone in Zimbabwe and Africa as a whole."The EFF said after Zimbabwe, they plan to launch political parties in Mozambique (MEFF) , Botswana (BEFF) and Tanzania (TEFF)."Zimbabwe remains an inspiration to the South African liberation struggle in particular the lesson that without the land decolonization is incomplete and a social time bomb", a statement read.However, it was not ascertained as to who will lead the ZEFF but a mole said one popular Zimbabwean facebook socialite who goes by the name Thomas Chizhanje was head hunted after EFF noticed his active participation on social media and he already commands a huge following.EFF leader Julius Malema was not available to comment.
News / National

by Leonard Makombe

Harare - The European Union and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have signed a new agreement aimed at improving food and livelihoods security and resilience of smallholder livestock farmers in Zimbabwe.This agreement comes at a time when crop and animal production prospects in Zimbabwe have been dampened by the El Nino weather phenomenon that has been characterized by low and poorly distributed rainfall and increased temperatures. The expected reduced agricultural output in 2016 follows on last year's disappointing season, which has already contributed to higher food prices and left almost a third of the population food insecure.The EUR 650 000 project directly responds to the drought situation in most parts of Zimbabwe and is set to benefit 300 000 individuals in the country's southern districts of Masvingo and Mwenezi - known for their dependence on livestock production."With the ongoing El Nino phenomenon gravely affecting tens of thousands of people in Southern Africa, and projections for 2016 showing that the worst is not over yet, the EU is committed to responding to the emergency needs of the people in affected countries. We are pleased to partner with FAO in this project which will directly benefit thousands of people and help them to deal with the effects of the harsh weather conditions, and protect their livestock," said Jean-Louis de Brouwer, Director of Operations at the European Commission's Humanitarian and Civil Protection department (ECHO).FAO Subregional Coordinator for Southern Africa and Representative in Zimbabwe, David Phiri lauded the partnership. "Globally, the EU is FAO's largest resource partner. In Zimbabwe, we are already partnering on various other initiatives, and this new timely action, in direct support to the FAO's Drought Mitigation Programme, itself a response to the Government's call for emergency support, further demonstrates a commitment to expand this collaboration for the benefit of Zimbabwe's smallholder farmers".In particular, the project aims to control the spread of foot and mouth disease (FMD) and Anthrax through vaccinations and treatment.This EU  FAO partnership is part of a larger initiative for the greater Southern Africa region, in which the EU allocated about 12 million (including 4.1 million for Zimbabwe alone) to respond to El Nino.Timely intervention crucialAnthrax is an ancient animal disease that is particularly dangerous because of its ability to pass from livestock to humans. It spreads rapidly, and it kills the widest possible range of animal species. Death comes quickly once animals are infected: sometimes within just hours, animals die of internal swelling, bleeding and tissue death.Although FMD is not a direct threat to humans, it is an economically important disease because of the sheer volume of losses it inflicts on milk and meat production of the farmers. Animals are also severely weakened and are unable to be utilized for draught power in farms. The disease is also quite notably a major constraint to international trade in livestock products.Zimbabwe is current experiencing an incessant FMD outbreak with the disease now having spread into six of the country's eight provinces. This has affected the movement of livestock for relief grazing, as movement of cattle poses an increased risk of disease spread. The shortage of grazing due to the drought results in animals grazing too close to the ground thereby picking up disease spores leading to outbreaks.The project complements a number of food security programmes FAO is currently implementing in the southern districts of the country. FAO is also currently providing support to the Government of Zimbabwe in the formulation of a Livestock Policy and FMD control strategy. The project will hence be implemented in close coordination with other on-going projects.
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

The Zapu Bulawayo province and the city residents have expressed anger over the article in the Chronicle of the 19th April 2016 in which the Army Commander General Chiwenga threatens politicians who are opposed to Zanu PF.The party said it knows what this means as it has experienced the brutality of the army on unarmed civilians to support a political party."Chiwenga confirms that he leads armed supporters of a political party and not men and women who must not only guarantee every citizen's security but also the right to choose a political path and destiny of his/her own," said the party in a statement."The Bulawayo province of Zapu deplores the army's mingling in politics to protect a political party that has administered the collapse of our industry. We refuse to be intimidated by the military that is protecting individuals who are looting the resources to enrich themselves. We have no respect of an army that threatens the entire population to safeguard individual greed. We are tired of living under fear as not so long ago we witnessed Chiwenga's men the Gukurahundi committing genocide in the interest of a political party."Zapu said it is indeed shocking that the general has no feeling for thousands of young people who have been forced to leave the country because they are desperate."They see no future at all in their own country. Despite the peace that prevails with not a single political party plotting any form of violence Chiwenga threatens militarily political opposition. This is to instill fear in the minds of the electorate. The people will not be brutalised for ever. God forbid," Zapu said.
Bass Pro Shops and the private equity branch at Goldman Sachs have teamed up to make a bid for Nebraska-based Cabela's, Reuters News Service reported Tuesday morning, citing unnamed sources.

Springfield, Missouri-based Bass Pro already has been reportedly eyeing Cabela's, one of its largest competitors. The partnership with Goldman would give the privately held outdoors retailer the financing needed to make a deal more likely, Reuters' sources said.

That outcome could be disastrous for Sidney, Nebraska, where about 2,000 of the 6,000 residents are employed by Cabela's. Experts have said if a competitor like Bass Pro were to buy Cabela's, there would be no need for two separate headquarters.

But Goldman and Bass Pro aren't the only ones interested: Reuters' sources said the two face competition from other firms, and the sale process is still in the early stages.

Cabela's announced a strategic review in December, which usually leads to a sale of the business or parts of it.

That followed a disclosure from activist investor Elliott Management that the hedge fund had amassed an 11 percent stake in the company by late last year. Elliott at the time said it would press for changes, including a sale of the entire business, or parts of it, including Cabela's valuable credit card business.

Reuters said Tuesday that splitting the company up was still an option, according to sources who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are confidential. Cabela's has been exploring a sale of its credit card business and has received interest from other potential buyers, they said.
News / National

by Lovemore Chikova and Zvamaida Murwira

THE government has secured a multi-billion dollar investment from China for the construction of more than 32,000 housing units countrywide in line with the economic blueprint Zim-Asset.The investment deal also includes the expansion of existing towns and construction of new ones under different frameworks that include Build Operate and Transfer (BOT), loan facilities and special economic zones.China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) general manager in the Sadc region George Guan told our Harare Bureau in Beijing that discussions on financing of Phase 1 of the project were already underway.This comes as another Chinese firm is on the verge of starting work on a housing project known as Magamba 2015 Housing in Harare South worth nearly $2 billion after completing feasibility studies and conducting an environmental impact assessment.The projects are in line with deals signed between China and Zimbabwe during President Robert Mugabe's visit to the former in August 2014 which was reciprocated by his counterpart, Xi Jinping in December last year.Chairperson of Hubei province, Zhang Chang'er is in the country leading a delegation of businesspersons, government officials and technocrats to explore ways to implement the projects.Briefing journalists after meeting the Chinese delegation yesterday, Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister Saviour Kasukuwere said the projects showed practical implementation of Zim-Asset and the 10 Point Plan enunciated by President Mugabe in September last year."We're happy that we're starting on a positive note. Now we're moving to the specifics to get the projects running, in housing, construction, sewer," said Minister Kasukuwere.He said the projects would be implemented under BOT, loan facility and special economic zones."We need high rise buildings that don't eat into our land and our discussion centred on issues like skills transfer," said Minister Kasukuwere.He explained the government's investment policy, particularly President Mugabe's clarification on indigenisation laws. He said the bulk of housing units would be constructed in Harare and Bulawayo with other towns earmarked for their share.During the meeting, Zhang invited Zimbabwe to a business meeting to be held in China in June to further explore how the deals could be implemented."You can also bring your investment framework to the forum in June so that we hold further discussions and I'm hopeful that we can fall in love. We can engage further and get married to each other," said Zhang.China is also expected to construct a state-of-the-art Parliament in Mount Hampden and Zhang is today expected to meet Speaker of National Assembly, Advocate Jacob Mudenda and Senate President Edna Madzongwe.On the construction of housing units in the Harare South district, funding is being discussed between Chinese financial institutions and the Zimbabwean government, while CCECC, a subsidiary of China Railway Construction Corporation, will undertake the project."After signature of the commercial contract of Magamba 2015 Housing Project and with the constructive co-operation of the Ministry of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing, CCECC has accomplished the feasibility study and Environment Impact Evaluation for Phase I of the project," said Guan."The EIA has been submitted to governmental organisations for approval. And financing for Phase I of the project is under discussion among Chinese financial institutions and the Zimbabwean government."Guan said his company would not take long before construction starts once the financial issues were put to closure. "Once the financing for the Phase I is closed, CCECC shall commence the construction of the project with due diligence and without delay," he said."CCECC shall, as we always have, engage qualified Zimbabwean sub-contractors and source construction materials from locally available suppliers to create job opportunities and contribute to the development of the Zimbabwean economy."The housing project will enter into phased construction contracts separately, according to progress of the financing.In an announcement to the Shanghai Stock Exchange last year, CCECC said the value of the contract for the Magamba 2015 Housing Project represented nearly two percent of its operating revenue.The project, expected to benefit thousands of Zimbabweans, will go a long way in easing the country's more than one million housing backlog.CCECC specialises in construction of railway, light rail, expressways, bridges, housing and buildings and municipal works in Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe and the Oceania.The government has since launched the National Housing Delivery Programme under Zim-Asset that will see more than 300,000 housing units being built throughout the country in the five years up to 2018.Under Zim-Asset provisions, Harare province is expected to deliver 105,935 houses by 2018, the Midlands (56,760), Matabeleland North (28,772), Mashonaland West (23,819), Manicaland (21,830), Masvingo (20,269), Mashonaland Central (16,607), Bulawayo (15,100), Matabeleland South (12,500) and 11,776 in Mashonaland East.
News / News

by Stephen Jakes

The United State of America President Barack Obama has congratulated Zimbabwe for attaining 36 years of independence from the colonial rule and promised to support the country to expand economical.Obama through the U.S. Embassy in Harare the American people join him in sending congratulations to the people of Zimbabwe as they celebrate the 36th anniversary of Zimbabwe's independence on April 18."The United States will continue to support Zimbabwean efforts to strengthen institutions, expand economic opportunities, and promote a democratic society and government that serves the needs of all Zimbabweans," he said.
News / Regional

by Richard Muponde

Pretoria Portland Cement (PPC) has taken 22 of its tenants in Colleen Bawn to the Civil Court seeking their eviction after they failed to settle rentals.The 22 are part of people who are not PPC employees and are leasing properties at the company's Khayalitsha Compound. Last year the tenants resisted attempts to evict them in the absence of a court order, forcing PPC to approach the Civil Court.In summons filed at the Gwanda Civil Court, the cement company is seeking an order terminating lease agreements with the occupants of its properties. PPC also wants the court to direct the Messenger of Court to evict the tenants in the event that they do not vacate the premises on their own.The company is also demanding varying amounts of monies from the 22 tenants for rentals, water and electricity charges.An application against Spiwe Madzine and Jethro Mutsvanga, two of the affected tenants reads: "Payment of the sum of $123.68 by the defendant jointly and severally being the amount of hold over damages at the rate of $70 per month or $2.33 per day with effect from 1 January 2016 and by way of holding over damages to the date defendants vacate therefrom as the case might be. Payment of a further sum of $68.71 being accumulated arrear charges. Payment of a further sum of $38.93 being accumulated arrear electricity charges. Payment of a further sum of $89.32 being accumulated water charges."The company says it wants to hand over the houses to its employees who have no accommodation.
News / Regional

by Whinsley Masara

A 44-YEAR-OLD man was attacked and killed by an elephant at Mlageni grazing area in Tsholotsho on Monday.Jinja Moyo from Tshayani Line in Ward 10 was trampled by the jumbo after taking his cattle for grazing with his friend.Jinja's friend managed to escape when the elephant charged at them at around 4AM.Tsholotsho Rural District Council Chief executive Officer, Themba Moyo, confirmed the incident.He said Jinja was killed in an area that was out of bounds for people at this time of the year due to the threat of wild animals.Moyo said the local authority, Campfire and the District Administrator's office were assisting the bereaved family with burial expenses."We always help out at such times of humanitarian disasters due to wildlife attacks," he said.Ward 8 Councillor, Elmon Ncube, said the area was prohibited at this time of the year because it was supposed to be conserved for later use in dry periods."These two men were risking their lives by being found in that place at this time of the year. At around 4 AM, they came across an elephant and the one who saw it first ran away while Moyo squatted next to a small shrub thinking the elephant wouldn't see him. It went straight for him and left him dead," said Ncube.He said council continues to warn people to desist from trespassing in prohibited areas.
Opinion / Columnist

IN Zimbabwe's august House some (dis) honourable members flex their necks or move around with an articulated swagger to show off to an assembly of other respected MPs the stuff of which they are made.They are probably even more vocal in criticising the performances of colleagues, or remain mum for almost an eternity as they ponder on whether the lid on the can of worms - cloak-and-dagger activities - in their constituencies will remain intact for as long as they themselves remain in parliament.But unfortunately for them, the worms' can has now been prised open to expose these wriggling creatures that must be unmasked to show their ugly faces beneath the plastic facade they were before their more respected colleagues in the House.These are the parliamentarians accused of preventing audits of Constituency Development Funds allocated by the government for the development of their constituencies.Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Secretary Virginia Mabhiza made the shocking disclosures recently when appearing before a parliamentary portfolio committee to explain irregularities discovered in her ministry by Auditor General Mildred Chiri.In a story that appeared in the public media last week, Mabhiza revealed that some legislators had threatened government officials auditing the CDF and, as a result, 53 constituencies had remained unaudited.The secretary said she also needed protection herself as it was not easy to disclose some of the occurrences that the auditors encountered in the constituencies.The country faces a really serious situation in light of the threats of violence that have prevented government auditors from finding out how constituency development funds disbursed were used to benefit those who elected the MPs whose ill-repute must now surely be stalking the aching hearts of the voters who gave these leaders the thumbs-up.For instance, was the threat of violence used as a cover up by those MPs that remain unnamed for the misdirection or embezzlement of CDF cash which remains unaccounted for in the absence of government audits?As it is, the state of development or under development of the constituencies affected remains unknown to the government in the absence of statistics showing projects on which CDF money was spent.Is it also not possible that the MPs who reportedly prevented audits of their constituencies may also have threatened those who elected them to parliament never to utter a syllable to the government about the social and economic challenges that they undoubtedly continue to face?And, anyway why have the violent-prone MPs not been thrown the book to face the wrath of the law for behaving as though they were a law unto themselves?Or are these people so powerful that the police have not hurled them before courts because they as well as Mabhiza are afraid of the MPs who apparently appear to regard their constituencies as though they were their own village courtyards?Surely these MP's are supposed, like their colleagues, to use every developmental means, such as money from the State, to improve the welfare of their electors and in that way guarantee themselves continued tenure in parliament as the people's representatives?The question that many responsible citizens must now be asking is for how long will these untouchable bullies remain protected by anonymity while their constituents seek redress for social and economic trials and tribulations that must no doubt be prevalent in their areas as a result of obvious neglect by their parliamentary leaders?When MPs who make and are supposed for that reason to be guardians of the country's laws appear flagrantly to violate the laws of the land by standing in the way of genuine efforts to verify the expenditure of money, not their own money, but the taxpayer's money provided for the betterment of the lives of the poor, then their rebellious conduct casts a very dark shadow not only on the institutions where they ply their political trade but also on Zimbabwe's image in the eyes of the outside world.These people deserve to be chucked out of the August House and out of the hearts of those who voted for them so that they may languish in a political wilderness in which only their kind are fit to dwell.
Opinion / Columnist

Bakalanga bhe Budeti are spread all over Boteti sub district in Botswana, starting from the extreme north western village of Makalamabedi up to Mosu in the eastern part of the sub district. They are predominant in the villages of Tsienyane, Mmadikola, Xhumo, Mopipi, Letlhakane and Mosu.Their arrival in Boteti is said to have been in the early 1900s when they came in dribs and drabs from the Wankie/Hwange area of present day Zimbabwe. According to F. S. Zufferey in his 1983 study of local institutions in Mopipi and surrounding areas, notable leaders of the different Bakalanga groups that came to Boteti included among others Ntewane, Malisa, Nkosho and Sekeletu.Over time they spread all over along the Boteti River, interacting with other ethnic groups such as Bayei, Badeti, Bakhurutshe, Shuakhwe, Gganakhwe, Badanisana, Banandzwa, Bekuhane, Ovaherero and Ovambaderu.The interaction between different ethnic groups of Boteti, naturally led to a lot of mutual cultural borrowings that define the present languages, customs and traditions found in the area. Bakalanga bhe Budeti, for example, use a few clicking' words probably borrowed from the Khwe such as Xhoro which means a stony area where the river is shallow. Nonetheless, there are certain customs and traditions that still remain unique to each ethnic group such as the marriage practices.When a man wants to marry a Nkalanga woman from Budeti, there are essential steps that must be followed unfailingly. Failure to follow such steps may lead to charges being preferred against the bridegroom's party or even delays in the marriage process itself. The charges however, are never stiff but just token penalties meant to remind the groom's party about the importance of following due practice.For a man to marry a Nkalanga lady from Budeti, first he must find her, propose and the two of them agree about their intentions to get married. The next step would then be for the marriage proposal to be made to the lady's family which calls for a Dombo.Dombo is a go-between and a pathfinder known in other circles as Rraditsela or Mmaditsela depending on gender. This is a person who should necessarily be competent in the cultural intricacies and nuances of delivering the messages from the man's parents to the women's parents. An incompetent dombo may lead to some extra charges to be meted against the bridegroom's people.For the Bakalanga of Budeti, a woman's hand in marriage is officially asked from one of her paternal uncles. This can either be batetenini, a younger brother of the woman's father or batenkulu an elder brother of the woman's father.In making the first contact the dombo is required to arrive at the home of either the woman's batetenini or batenkulu well before sunrise and sit at the gate until invited to enter. If the dombo is a man, he should wait in a crouching position (Ku dundubala) and if a woman she should sit with her legs either crossed (Ku fhunya) or straightened in front of her (Ku tandabala).The dombo on being invited to enter, and after preliminary greetings delivers the message from the people who have sent him or her and the name of the woman that they are interested in. If the uncle knows the mentioned woman, he would simply reply that the message has been received and that he would revert to the dombo in due course.The next step would be for the uncle to call a meeting to be attended by both the paternal and maternal relatives of the sought woman. At the meeting, after the uncle has delivered the message, the paternal aunts (Bo Mmadzi) and the spouses of the maternal uncles (Bakadzi ba BoBasekulu) would be tasked with confirming with the sought woman whether she knows the suitor.If the woman confirms that indeed she knows the suitor and agrees to the marriage proposal, the family then sets the dowry price (dzwilipo) to be communicated to the dombo. Normally dzwilipo are set in terms of livestock, specifically cattle and goats. These however can be translated into money with a cow ranging at around P1500.00 and a goat at about P500.00.In addition to dzwilipo, an extra cow called thagela/ku tsama jarata/ku thaga likuta may be charged if the suitor has a child with the wife to be. Also this cow may be charged if the suitor at one time had been caught on a clandestine visit to the woman at her parents' home. This serves to punish' the suitor for having figuratively eaten the cake before being officially served.When an agreement is reached in the dzwilipo to be levied against the suitor's family, it is then up to the paternal uncle to meet with the dombo and deliver the reply. The ball would then be on the other family's court to prepare and propose a date when they would bring the dzwilipo.On the day of dzwilipo, the bride's family would have slaughtered a cow or cows as well as goats for a big feast. Traditional beer (mokuru/mberere) would have been brewed in abundance and the yard would be a hive of activities for the marriage (ndobolo). However, before the acceptance of dzwilipo, ululations (mpululu) would be on hold.The suitor's entourage, led by the dombo is expected to arrive before sunrise and sit a respectable distance away from the yard. The dombo accompanied by two or three relatives of the suitor would then proceed to the gate where they would wait until invited in.When the woman's family is ready, it is then that the dombo together with those accompanying him or her are invited to enter. Normally the woman's family would be waiting in an artistically decorated mud lapana. After brief preliminary niceties, the floor would be given to the dombo to state what they have brought.Dzwilipo are never a negotiable matter and have to be brought as required, but if the shortfall is small, a plea from a shrewd dombo on behalf of the man's family may be accepted. When dzwilipo are finally accepted, the air would be punctuated with mpululu thus announcing to all and sundry that a marriage has been officialised. The rest of the suitor's party is then invited with ululations to enter the yard in a solemn procession with heads bowed.The receipt of dzwilipo symbolizes that a marriage that is recognized and blessed by all members of the family has taken place. From that moment, the man and woman are husband (nlume) and wife (nkadzi). A new relationship is instantly created and the husband's family become bakwasha while that of the nkadzi become bakalabgwa. To strengthen this relationship and for the two families to get to know each other better, they spend the day together feasting, merry making and generally dialoging until evening.In the evening before the husband's family leaves, the new bride is brought before married members of the two families where members of her family give her final advice on how to conduct herself as a married Nkalanga woman. A date is then set when the woman will be brought to her husband's home.Sending the woman to her husband's home which is known as ku kotosa has to be done in a specific way starting with the walk-stop-sit-up-walk-stop-sit' custom or tshetshetshe and the requirement for the wife and her mother to stay incommunicado until certain rites are performed (ku kashika). However this will be a subject for another day.
Enterprising young teenagers from County Kilkenny are getting ready to showcase their inventions and real-life businesses at the Student Enterprise Awards National Finals, co-ordinated by Local Enterprise Office Kilkenny.

From the 22,000 secondary school students from 620 schools that took part this year, teens from 76 student enterprises have won a place at this years National Final in Croke Park on Wednesday April 20th and students from every county across Ireland will be demonstrating their businesses and inventions for the judging panels on the day.

There are three student enterprises representing all schools in the region at the National Final on April 20th. In the Senior Category of the competition, Kilkenny will be represented at the National Finals on April 20th in Croke Park by Steven Cahill and Cian Dunne from Duiske College, Graignamanagh with their business www.fiveasidefinder.com Lorcan Doyle with his business Paracrafts from Colaiste Pobail Osrai, Kilkenny will be representing the county in the Intermediate Category, while in the Junior Category, the students representing Kilkenny at the National Finals are: Aaron Denny, Conor Denny and Liam Cleere from All Time Treats at Colaiste Eamann Ris, Callan.

The Student Enterprise Awards Programme is in its 14th year and brings the world of business into the classroom, helping students develop enterprise and management skills. With the support of their schools and the Local Enterprise Offices in the Local Authorities Network, students research, set-up and run their own real-life businesses.

Congratulating the local students and their schools on winning a place at the National Final, Fiona Deegan, the Head of Enterprise with Local Enterprise Office Kilkenny said: We run a very successful and popular Student Enterprise Programme here locally, thanks to the support of many Schools and Teachers in the area. The Student Enterprise Awards give local teenagers a taste of what its like to run their own business and to be their own boss. Along the way, the programme helps them develop important entrepreneurship skills, learning about sales, innovation, managing finances and finding new markets. Learning the fundamentals of running a business now, will help them throughout their studies and career. 

The Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton T.D. said: As I have said many times before, we have great entrepreneurs in Ireland but we just dont have enough of them. That is why at the heart of our jobs plans are measures to encourage more young people to consider starting their own business as a career choice. The Student Enterprise Awards are central to this effort, and is an opportunity to witness the amazing quality of the businesses being established by our students and to celebrate their achievements. These young people are the innovators and the job-creators of tomorrow, and Id like to wish everyone competing in this years competition every success with their business.

Local students from Kilkenny have been successful in recent years at the National Finals. Last year, Kilkenny entrant Mya Russell from Colaiste Pobail Osrai, were awarded an Intellectual Property Award at the National Final, while the year previous 3T Tairgi also from Colaiste Pobal Osrai, Co. Kilkenny scooped the social media award. Stephen Agar from Kilkenny College was presented with a special merit award in 2013 and in 2012 the overall Intermediate award was won by twin brothers James and Sean Power from Colaiste Eamann Ris in Callan.

Further information around the Student Enterprise Awards, which is run by the Local Enterprise Offices, is available from www.studententerprise.ie and by searching #studententerprise on social media.
Two local teenagers will be putting their talents to the test this weekend at the No Name Club National Youth Awards.

Joe Breen and Muireann O' Connell will take to the stage as part of the the event, which takes place on Saturday in the convention centre of Kilkenny's Lyrath Estate Hotel. Over 1,000 teenagers and adult leaders will be in attendance.

The black-tie affair will involve a four-course meal, followed by a ceremony which will see the No Name Club Host and Hostess of the Year named.

The finalists have been selected from No Name Club host and hostesses across the country and will be honoured for the work they have carried out within their club, the wider community, and for the talents they bring to society. Eight teenagers from across the country have made it to the final of the national competition, after being chosen at the regional finals of the competition.

Joe Breen

Joe attends St Kierans College in Kilkenny where he is currently in Transition Year. He has a great interest in music and has several awards achieved in this field including Honours in the Royal Irish Academy.

Joe has a strong interest in Karate where he has achieved a Brown Belt and has several gold and silver medals won in competitions. He is also an aspiring artist and successfully competes regularly.

Joe enjoys being part of Kilkenny No Name Club and is very involved in his local club; he attended the recent Conference in Croke Park and enjoyed meeting new friends from both Thomastown and Hollywood at their weekend in Kippure.

He participated in the Thomas Hayes Trust Candle Light Walk which promotes suicide awareness and also was on hand to help out with the Syrian Refugee Clothes Collection in Kilkenny recently.

Muireann O' Connell

Muireann attends Loreto Secondary School. She loves music and is currently a member of the Thomastown Folk Choir. Muireann is a percussionist in the Kilkenny Youth Orchestra and was a winner in the Feis Cheoil competition in 2014. She won an award this year in the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition and organised a trip for her school to the Web Summit recently held in the RDS.

She volunteers for numerous charities including ISPCC, Special Olympics and St Vincent de Paul.

Muireann is very involved in her local Club; she attended the recent conference in Croke Park and enjoyed their weekend in Kippure. She participated in the Thomas Hayes Trust Candle Light Walk which promotes suicide awareness.

Muireann likes reading and listening to music and has recently taken up rugby. Muireann is looking forward to a wonderful occasion and proud to be representing her club at this prestigious event.
Lets take a deep look into COMEX in this article that describes COMEX today.

All of us follow COMEX in New York and assess the net speculative long position there, so as to see the actual weight of opinion on the gold price. It gives us a clear market opinion, after all. But many of you out there may believe that COMEX is a very large factor in the gold price. Should it be?

It would be easy of us or any other commentator to give their opinion on the matter, but would that be enough to be absolutely right? So as to not give an opinion, we felt it important to go direct to COMEX to get the proper story. We spoke to the Director of Metals Products in the COMEX Marketing Dept. This is what COMEX says;

What you may have thought about COMEX

It may seem reasonable to you to assume that the net position on COMEX would be covered by COMEX actually ensuring that this amount of gold or silver is held in one of their four COMEX approved depositories that are all located in New York city. After all, delivery of the gold and silver is effected via electronic warrant.

This would reassure us that COMEX dealings did affect the gold or silver price, would it not? After all, supposing someone went short and could not deliver, who would supply the metals? The implications are that COMEX is constantly adjusting their gold & silver holdings to make sure that no-one would be left without the metal they bought there. Not so !

What really happens?

Does COMEX hold gold or silver to cover the net position to ensure market players will get their metal? - COMEX does not ensure the net long positions are covered by gold or silver . But, COMEX does perform oversight and regulatory due diligence, to ensure that no adverse events disrupt the marketplace to ensure that all market participants meet their contractual obligations. Yes, holders of COMEX approved depository electronic warrants can withdraw gold and silver from the depositories. So where do the sellers of gold or silver come from? - The Exchange takes all short notices tendered and matches them to the appropriate long positions per an Exchange system algorithm. COMEX DOES NOT supply the gold. The Seller supplies the gold as part of the contract rules. The deliverable gold resides in four (4) COMEX approved depositories that are all located in New York City and the delivery of the gold is effected via electronic warrant. Find our warehouse stocks on a daily basis on our website: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/nymex-daily-reports.html So if a seller doesnt have the gold to supply to the buyer, what happens? - COMEX positions in spot (current) month Gold are settled by trading out (rolling) of the position or engaging in the Exchange delivery process. When someone wants to take delivery, they will establish a Long (buy) futures position and wait until a Short (seller) tenders a notice to delivery. Where does the gold come from, thats held in approved depositories? - Should you hold to delivery, you will get your gold! We match buyer and seller....one cannot exist without the other. The majority of positions are settled via trading as opposed to delivery. I cannot comment on where participants buy physical gold. So how is physical delivery made? - The gold contract is physically settled, meaning if you stay to delivery you must deliver gold or you receive gold. If you trade out of your position or roll into other month you are paid or must pay the difference. You must know that less than 1% of the trades actually go to delivery. What if a seller [Short] does not have the gold to deliver [naked short]? - If a short does not have Gold to deliver he must liquidate his position by the last trading day. A short which goes to delivery must have the Gold in an approved depository. This is represented by the holding of electronic depository warrants. What percentage of sellers are naked shorts - Dont know what percentage of shorts do not have physical gold and am not aware that any such statistics are kept. I imagine you could get some idea by looking at open interest and comparing that to registered stocks [gold] in the depositories. [Go to the above website and check the totals against the Commitment of Traders report on Fridays and look at Open Interst to get that number.] Does the COMEX gold market directly affect the gold price? - Our markets are used primarily for price risk management or financial reasons..although we can be a source of physical metal we are not used for that reason. The Exchange does not set the price  the market does. The gold price is created by the buyers and sellers.

The exchange in no way determines the price....we only report it.

Conclusion on COMEX

The long and short of it is that COMEX is simply a cash market that does not deal in gold or silver or other items at all. They simply provide a cash market where risks are laid off. Yes, physical dealers in gold and silver may well use the market to hedge opposing real physical positions so that they dont face a price risk and yes, traders [or gamblers] use the market to take leveraged, speculative positions that are in no way backed by the physical possession of the metals.

To see how a true Hedger uses COMEX see the experience below of one trader protecting himself and profiting by the sound use of COMEX

Gold Forecaster gives the Fundamental and Technical reasons behind the gold price in their weekly newsletter. Subscribe through www.GoldForecaster.com

How a true Hedger acts

Many investors are puzzled by the importance of the COMEX Options & Futures markets on the price of gold.

Take a look at the Diagram here [to enlarge it put your cursor on the corner and pull it diagonally] and you see that 86% of trading in gold Futures and Options takes place in London and New York.

Many may well believe that this translates into 86% of trading in gold [physical gold] takes place in these two centers. But this is not correct. The best way to illustrate this is to give you an example of a company that manufactures gold jewelry, as its main business.

This company needs to take delivery of a tonne of gold for the manufacture of jewelry between September and the November and then deliver it to retail jewelers. Its business is manufacturing only, but it finds itself at the mercy of a constantly moving gold price. These moves can be large enough to destroy profit margins.

The company cannot afford to suffer the risks on the gold price.

It is at this point that they need to turn to the COMEX Futures & Options to lose the risk of the gold price.

The head of the jewelry manufacturing company decides on when they enter the contract to buy the needed 1 tonne of physical gold. This may be at a time well ahead of September, the delivery date. He may believe that the price he can buy for is the lowest price he will see before September. So he goes long of one tonne of physical gold just as he needs to be, so he can take delivery in September to get on with the business he is in. He does this by buying it on a bullion market, or from a refinery, or a bullion dealer.

But can he afford to take such a risk with such a changing price in gold? The price may drop before then and he is left with a cost that may prove too much for his business.

So he hedges by selling a tonne of paper gold on the Futures market. Now he hasnt zero positions, but one physical long and one short hedge position, but zero risk, as any losses he makes on one position will be covered by profits on the other position.

Now the price drops horribly. He then believes it has gone far too low, so he buys another tonne of paper gold on the Futures market and makes a profit [technical] from his short position. Now he is left with his original physical long physical position, a hedged short position and a new long position. The effect of his profits on his short position has left him, in effect, with a much lower price on his physical long position.

But he has a risk position, nevertheless, as the net position is; two long and one short. But netting out these is what he started with. So now the manufacturer still wants to cover his risk, although his net price is lower than the price he originally paid.

He is willing to open another short position to remove all risks if the price rises again. The price then rises again so he does open a new short position. Now he has four positions, three of which are in the Futures market. Each time he makes a profit on matching positions, in effect he lowers his entry price.

He is not speculating, in the modern sense of the word, as the only risk he really takes is on the original physical position.

It is not uncommon for such a hedger to have 50 plus positions against the original exposure. He doesnt need a large change in price to continue increasing his positions. The reason it is not so speculative is that his original position needed hedging and subsequent actions are only undertaken when a profit is sure .

A speculator takes a view on the price itself with no underlying motive except price direction. He usually exposes himself to high risk that remains uncovered. Frequently, such traders take losses. We questioned one trading house, who informed us that even amongst professional speculators the success rate was only 52% at best amongst amateurs.

This example helps one to understand that COMEX is not about gold supply and demand, simply about price. It is a money market separate from the gold market or the pork belly market.

It serves a vital function, but should not lead the gold price but follow it.

Now look at the diagram we featured here once more.

By Jullian D. W. Phillips
(Kitco News) - Chinas push for more control in the gold market was seen further with the launch of its yuan-denominated gold price benchmark Tuesday.

However, until the countrys currency gains international reserve status, the Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price should not have much of an impact on the gold market, say analysts.

Id see this as a minor technical change for the convenience of the local market rather than anything with global implications, Julian Jessop, chief commodities economist for U.K.-based Capital Economics, told Kitco News in an email response.

Some domestic players may prefer to be able to price (and hedge) in renminbi terms. But this will not materially affect the balance of supply and demand in the market, he added.

Jeffrey Christian, managing partner of research firm CPM Group, said that although this is a significant development, it is "old news."

I see it is easy for commentators to read too much into it, saying this boosts the yuans stature in international markets (it does not) and may reflect the government's desire to make gold part of a currency system (it is not and the government does not want that anyway)," he said.

He added, the Shanghai Gold Exchange benchmark price simply shows a move toward shifting golds price-making center away from London towards Asia.

However, Ruth Crowell, chief of the London Bullion Market Association, doesnt seem too concerned, noting that the LBMA is always supportive of initiatives to increase transparency and price discovery in the bullion markets.

George Gero, managing director with RBC Wealth Management, mirrored Crowells comments in that he welcomed the change in the gold market.

Competition is healthy for price discovery and arbitrage increases Comex volume and Globex volume in gold and longer term swap trades, he said.

However, one analyst does see the Chinese gold fix having more of an impact than perceived.

Ken Hoffman, head of metals and mining research for Bloomberg Intelligence, told Kitco News that the benchmark shows Chinas commitment to gold and could see this impacting the Chinese monetary system and the gold market.

It will be key as to how this develops and if China further integrates gold into their monetary system. With its debt and currency issues. Gold may have a bigger role to play, he said.

The Chinese benchmark price is fixed twice daily by looking at trading from 18 members on the Shanghai Gold Exchange. On Tuesday, the afternoon price was set at 257.29 yuan ($39.795) per gram.

Related Stories:

By Sarah Benali of Kitco News; sbenali@kitco.com

Follow @SdBenali
Opinion / Columnist

Yesterday was Independence Day in Zimbabwe.After my scary ordeal last week I have limited myself to spending as much time as I can indoors. As a result I was able to follow discussions with so many varied perceptions on our independence.I even managed to follow the National Celebrations live on our national broadcaster something I hardly do spending a day watching ZBC TV.A huge majority of Zimbabweans claim that there is no Independence in Zimbabwe. Varied reasons for that are brought through, though almost all of them are flooded in emotions and some rightfully so.Without going into the obvious reasons given, I would like to add my own perception to the Zimbabwean Independence saga.If there is one thing that really hurts me about our country is the direct and deliberate distortion of our history because of and by people who want to build political mileage by twisting the history. An example of one shocking such distortion was by one activist who wrote a very long tale yesterday saying that Zimbabwe didn't get it's independence 36 years ago but 51 years ago when Smith made the Uniliteral Declaration of Independence.Several of my other friends and colleagues also spent the day going over mountains insisting that in fact Zimbabwe has not gained its independence at all. On the other hand those aligned to the ruling ZANU PF party also spent the day showering praises for independence and talking as if Zimbabwe is outrightly the best run country in the world and probably the most peaceful and most developed since it's independence.For the sake of our children and future generations, it is fact and a never will change fact that Zimbabwe attained it's independence 36 years ago on the 18th of April following a very bitter liberation struggle against the colonial forces.Even if Tsvangirai or Biti, or Ncube or Mujuru were to wake up running government tomorrow that date will never change and shall remain independence day. Any attempted to the contrary will reveal the true patriotism of that government.Thousands were killed in the process of attaining our hard won independence. Great heroes and heroines who selflessly gave themselves to the struggle of our independence emerged through the struggle years.It is therefore not only wrong but also unfair to our liberators that today 36 years later we stand up and not appreciate the commitment and efforts they gave to the struggle and say Zimbabwe has not yet attained it's independence.A fortnight ago, I attended a lecture on the life of General Lookout Masuku presented by liberation war stalwart and ZIPRA intelligence guru, Dumiso Dabengwa. He told extremely touching and quite revealing events and facts of our liberation struggle. I not alone but others too who attended the lecture had moments where eyes would glow with tears of emotions as he narrated the ordeals they went through to force the settler regime to surrender to our independence.As a country we can only forever be thankful to those gallant Zimbabwean sons and daughters who went out to fight for the country and never at any stage belittle their efforts of that time. They players their role to the fullest and delivered to the nation. The onus was on those taking over to build on from where they left off.The failures, marginalisation and brutalities of the ZANU PF government that took over the governance of our independent country must never be confused to render our independence valueless.We got our independence but ZANU PF failed to deliver to us as citizens the fruits and gains that should have come with our independence.It is like a family of an irresponsible family man who gets his wage and blows all of it before getting home and the family blames the employer for not paying the man his wage.Blame for our current woes must be put in their proper perspective. ZANU PF simply failed to deliver to us the gains of our independence. What were our expectations when we got our independence:1) Peace, Reconciliation and Democracy:Coming from a long and bloody liberation struggle the first thing that ZANU should have delivered to Zimbabweans was peace and reconciliation in the country and facilitate for an open democracy.But what did ZANU do?In the very first election to our independence, ZANU deliberately destroyed democracy by not allowing other contesting parties and even election monitors into areas they declared no go areas using a group of their own militia which they had not demobilised.Hardly three years into independence they unleashed Gukurahundi into the Matabeleland regions who they perceived to be a threat to their desired undemocratic one party state. The composition of the Gukurahundi army on its own declared an unwillingness to foster for national unity as the soldiers used predominantly spoke Shona and spoke ill of Ndebele people in their acts with deliberate threats of willingness to eliminate the Ndebele people.The very first expectation of our independence that is democracy, peace and unity was therefore immediately destroyed by the government.2) Economic prosperity and development:As soon as a country attains it's independence it is expected that the new majority government will put it's focus on economic development. With ZANU, hardly five years into adopting "a jewel in Africa" the economy was already on a downward scale.Today 36 years later a local currency that was amongst the top three in the world at their assumption of the country has gone extinct.Our agriculture which not only fed Southern Africa but even complimented Europe can no longer even sustain half the country's population.Yes we needed the land but certainly didn't want the haphazard distribution of the land that was done belatedly as a political tool to win back the confidence of the people more so the war veterans.Nearly a third of Zimbabweans are currently living outside the country all over the world as economic refugees because of our failed economy. Those who remained in the country are faced with a 90% unemployment level that has turned everyone into a hassler for survival.3) Freedom:The most basic fruit of our independence which we expected was our freedom. Freedom of association, freedom of speech and all basic human rights not only declared by organisations outside us but by our very own constitution.Zimbabweans are generally a timid population, people who are scared of their very own government and can't even stand for their rights in fear of victimisation and other dreadful consequences such as arbitrary detention, abductions, torture and even killings. No wonder we have people declaring not to be independent as they lack freedom far much more than during the settler regime.4) Good governance:It's extremely sad when in the process of discussing our independence you hear statements in the direction that the colonial Smith regime was better than our post independence government.On attaining independence we all expected a government that will be accountable to the people and for the people. But it is shocking that 36 years into independence the country moved from being amongst the least corrupt in the world to amongst the most corrupt.Everyone fights to be in political leadership particularly of the ruling party not because of the zeal to serve the people but for personal enrichment because that is where all the state resources are looted.How do we answer the scenario that at one moment we are declared to be having 25% of the world's diamond and in an instant the diamond is nearly wiped off and we are still the poorest and nothing to show for it except huge estates for our political leaders a and a missing $15 billion dollars diamonds revenue.5) Service delivery:Not even a single government institution is able to deliver services to the citizens. Infrastructure and institutional development is on a negative. What we had at independence is collapsing faster than what we are setting up ourselves.Government is battling to raise income to sustain the country and is resorting to literally scratch for cash (khiya khiya) in any small corner possible. It can't even settle it's own wage bill a thing that was never expected from government.6) Discrimination:ZANU mastered the divide and rule tactic to keep its government afloat. Today we live in a country where tribal hatred is the key component of our country. Ndebele and Shona speaking people are near sworn enemies all because of the terrible ZANU influence of discriminating and marginalising the Matabeleland areas and influencing Shona dominance over all other tribes in the country.A few years into independence emerged a document known as the Grand Plan of 1979 which is directly attributed to the ZANU PF desk. Through the years, ZANU has failed to clear itself from the document nor explain how some aspects of their governance coincidentally fit in 100% to the prophesies in the Grand Plan.As things stand we have a completely divided nation to an extent that a section of the country is demanding total cessation from the greater part of Zimbabwe because ZANU continues to fail to answer to the issues raised by the region and the coincidence of their governance system to the Grand Plan.We may therefore as a nation urgently need to get to a stage where we unequivocally tell ZANU PF that what they are giving us is certainly not what we fought for.We have our independence and very appreciative of its coming but just have never enjoyed the fruits of the independence because of the ZANU PF failures.If they care as much as they claim to do about the values of independence and the liberation struggle, perhaps it's time ZANU PF comes clean and say that their was liberation and note pave way to those capable of delivering on their sacrifices.Bekezela Maduma Fuzwayo is an independent political and social analyst based in Gwanda. This article has been extracted from his personal Facebook page. he can be contacted on bekezelamaduma@yahoo.co.uk
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By Tarra Simmons

My son's first year in middle school has proved to be a trying time. Middle school is trying for most kids, given how challenging it is for adolescents to develop their identities. But, in part due to a history of family problems, poverty and disability, my son has had it harder than most and has had difficulty controlling his comments.

Because of this, he has been repeatedly punished at school and even suspended. I understand his comments are inappropriate and offensive to others, and agree that there should be consequences for his actions. But is suspension really the answer? Or is suspending my child simply putting him into the school to prison pipeline, on track to be pushed out of school and into the criminal system?

The term "school-to-prison pipeline" has become a popular way to describe what is happening to many youth today. I've known what it means personally for much longer. Starting at a young age I was constantly told that I was a bad kid. My attitude, my need to control my surroundings, and my inappropriate comments were not welcome at school. My mother was on her third marriage and suffering with addiction. I was a struggling kid, desperate to find acceptance somewhere. At 13, I looked to gang membership for a place to fit in. Within two months of starting junior high, I was expelled. The expulsion led to more unstructured time at home. By age 14, I was pregnant and homeless. Despite my best efforts, eventually, I also suffered with addiction and incarceration.

Is there an alternative path for kids struggling in middle school and high school, or are we going to keep setting this trajectory for our youth?

When kids act out, that doesn't mean they are inherently bad or beyond our help. Some students act out because they are coping with the stress of family problems like unemployment, poverty, addiction and mental health issues. Some students act out because "misbehavior" is part of ordinary child development. During adolescence, a child's brain is unable to access the executive functioning portion that helps in self-regulation, making them more likely to act impulsively. Testing boundaries, finding out what gets attention and how to assert an identity are normal activities for adolescents.

Unfortunately, our schools have few resources for struggling kids. Kids under stress and seeking to find themselves need safe space to discuss their problems. They can benefit from positive behavioral support systems and restorative justices policies that focus on learning and changing rather than punishment and exclusion from school.

Unfortunately, districts have adopted quick, easy, punitive approaches to remove a child from school if the child is deemed "disruptive." This is damaging to kids. The No. 1 way to prevent a prison sentence is to help kids earn a high school diploma. The No. 1 way to prevent a child from entering the juvenile justice system is to keep them engaged in education. Each day a child is suspended puts them at a higher risk of being pushed out of school, or dropping out of school

We all want kids to succeed. Unfortunately, we are failing. In the Central Kitsap School District, where my children attend, 89 percent of children are graduating high school. But only 68 percent of African American children are graduating. Research shows that African American students are targeted for punishment in schools, receiving more punishment than white students for the same behaviors. In addition, children with disabilities are twice as likely to be disciplined than children without disabilities. Why are we backing school district policies that reinforce this school-to-prison pipeline and disproportionately impact marginalized students?

My heart breaks as I watch my son struggle with school policies that don't help him shift his behavior and thrive, but only stigmatize him and banish him from school. I call on our school districts to drop a failing, punishment-centered approach that is hurting so many children and especially endangers kids of color and kids with disabilities.

Because pushing kids out of school to later incarcerate them by the masses is not a value we share in our country, our state, and surely, our community.

Tarra Simmons of Bremerton is a second-year law student at Seattle University. She is also a community activisit working to reform the criminal legal system through the nonprofit group Civil Survival, and was profiled recently in the Kitsap Sun. She can be reached at simmons9@seattleu.edu.
Stuff reports:

Auckland doctor Robyn Toomath spent years telling her diabetes patients to lose weight only to have them fail despite their best intentions. Eventually she stopped altogether and her book, Fat Science, explains why. Radical as it might sound Toomath says individuals shouldnt be held responsible for becoming fat, or obese. Its not appropriate to consider body size as being within our personal control when genetics and the environment in which we live has such a powerful effect. Toomath says some people are genetically pre-disposed to weight gain and in an environment packed with fatty, sugar-soaked food, it is inevitable they will lose any battle of the bulge.

I totally disagree. Yes there are genetic and environmental factors but they are far less powerful than the power of individual choice.

I got massively overweight because I ate too much food.

I lost the weight because I stopped eating so much food, and did more exercise.

My problem wasnt the type of food, the advertising, the taste. It was simply I ate too much. And that is the case for most people who are overweight (not all).

Toomath blames almost everything on evil big business, and discounts any significant role for individual choice.

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Shenandoah, IA (51601)

Today

Partly cloudy and windy with isolated thunderstorms possible. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 57F. Winds S at 20 to 30 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy and windy with isolated thunderstorms possible. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 57F. Winds S at 20 to 30 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
Opinion / Speeches

Address by his excellency the President of the republic of Zimbabwe, Comrade RG Mugabe on the occasion of Zimbabwe's 36th Independence Day celebrations, harare, yesterday.Honourable Vice President, Comrade Emmerson Mnangagwa and Mrs Mnangagwa,Honourable Vice President, Comrade Phelekezela Mphoko and Mrs Mphoko,Honourable President of the Senate, Mai Edna Madzongwe,Honourable Speaker of the National Assembly, Advocate Jacob Mudenda,The Chief Justice, Honourable Godfrey Chidyausiku,Honourable Ministers,Honourable Members of Parliament,Service Chiefs,Families of Heroes of the Zimbabwe Liberation Struggle,War Veterans, War Collaborators, Ex-Detainees and Restrictees,Your Excellencies Members of the Diplomatic Corps,Esteemed Foreign Guests and Visitors,Ladies and Gentlemen,Comrades and Friends.May I welcome you all to the National Celebrations of 36 years of our hard won freedom and sovereignty. Celebrations are indeed taking place throughout the country, signifying that we are now a people fully enjoying the right of self-determination and self-actualisation. We should, however, always remember that our Independence did not come on a silver platter, for many lives were lost and many were maimed or scarred for life during the bitter liberation struggle.As we continue to recognise the importance and crucial role played by the war veterans in the bitter struggle for freedom, the government has now established a full Cabinet ministry to oversee and manage the provision of their welfare, including that of former political detainees and restrictees.As you are aware, only 11 days ago I had the pleasure of meeting about 10,000 of them to hear and discuss their concerns and assure them of the government welfare assistance to alleviate their social situation.Ladies and Gentleman, Comrades and Friends,While our economy has been showing signs of growth and recovery, the country has been sadly hit by the El Nino climatic phenomenon which has unleashed on us one of the worst droughts in living memory. As a result, we expect poor harvest of food crops.But the government has taken precautions to prevent starvation amongst our people through effective grain import arrangements. At the same time, the government is also accelerating its implementation of ZimAsset, the Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation, with the objective of achieving growth, sustainable development and social equality over the medium term. Government has evolved a 10 Point Plan as its implementation mechanism.The 10 points will include a rapid results framework, revitalisation of agriculture and mining and value addition and beneficiation, financial inclusion and infrastructure development, as well as tourism promotion. There will be an exercise of debt clearance as we re-engage with the international community.Fellow Zimbabweans, in order to sustain the success of our Land Reform Programme, the government is working with our financial institutions so as to conclude the bankability of the 99-year leases. Such a development will guarantee our farmers security of tenure, for both A1 and A2 farmers.Our re-organisation of the mining sector, which includes the consolidated State ownership of the diamond mines, and the strategic management of gold mining and gold product, has started showing improved results with gold output now 20,2 tonnes, rising expectedly to 25,5 tonnes by the year end.With respect to the manufacturing sector, I am glad to inform you that there has been a very commendable resuscitation of companies that had closed or were on the brink of closure. In addition, there has been the formation of completely new companies within the economy during the past few years.The resuscitated companies include Lobels Bread, Cairns Holdings, Rio Zim, Blue Ribbon Foods, Delta Corporation, Arenel, Olivine Industries, Border Timbers, Cotton Company of Zimbabwe (COTTCO) and CAPS Pharmaceuticals, among others. New entrants and those that have expanded their operations in the domestic economy include: Pure Oil, Surface Investments, Grafax Holdings, Feed Mix, Novatex, Profeeds, Divipel, Nibble, Ninjanux, Kefalos, just to mention a few.The resuscitation, formation and expansion of these and other companies has greatly assisted us in preserving employment, creating new jobs, saving foreign currency, enhancing fiscal space and in increasing production.With regards to the State highways and other tarred roads, I note with satisfaction that the Harare International Airport Road dualisation project and the Plumtree-Bulawayo-Harare-Mutare Highway upgrade and rehabilitation were successfully completed. In addition, several other roads have been widened. Government has found a financier and contractor for the Beitbridge-Harare-Chirundu Road which will be constructed at an estimated cost of US$2 billion. On the other hand, it is pleasing to note that Air Zimbabwe, the National Railways of Zimbabwe are now steadily on the way to resuscitation.Fellow Zimbabweans, the power situation in the country has improved significantly this year. Government has managed to drastically reduce load shedding by increasing the output at Hwange Power Station and by importing additional power from regional power utilities in the Southern African Power Pool.In the medium term, we expect to benefit from the Kariba Power Station expansion, presently at 41 percent completion stage, and Hwange Power Station, for which we have signed a loan with China Exim Bank. We also have active plans to repower Harare, Munyati and Bulawayo Power Stations.In line with the promotion of renewable energies, Government has embarked on a massive solar water heating programme. We are encouraging all new houses to have solar water heaters instead of electric geysers. Existing homes are also encouraged to replace the electric geysers with solar water heaters. This programme, launched in September 2015, will have first installations done this year. It should be noted that all the solar geysers for the programme are to be manufactured locally.Let me acknowledge that the African Development Bank has given us much needed financial support. Recently they availed a grant in support of our beef and leather value chain project that will surely drive growth in the Matabeleland North and South provinces by ensuring competitiveness of both local and export markets.Government is also working to buttress the competitive agenda through the "Doing Business Reforms Programme" which seeks to improve the "Doing Business in Zimbabwe", hence the current review of procedure manuals and some legislation, which have been hindering a speedy registration of enterprises.In an effort to facilitate trade, the government has adopted the Border Efficiency Management System whose aim is to promote trade facilitation and reduce congestion at the country's borders. Following the establishment and operationalisation of the Chirundu One Stop Border Post in 2009, efforts are now at an advanced stage to transform the Beitbridge Border Post into a One Stop Border Post.To increase international trade, Zimbabwe has also been making parallel efforts to boost exports by consolidating and expanding existing markets whilst also exploring new markets with the strategic focus on the regional markets. In the context of deeper regional integration, we are pursuing trade development through the Southern African Development Community.Fellow Zimbabweans, Comrades and Friends,In the sphere of Foreign Policy, Zimbabwe successfully chaired the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AU). This historic feat accorded the country the rare opportunity to serve the people of Southern Africa, and Africa at large, in pushing forward the sub-region's and the continent's priorities. Our leadership of these two organisations greatly enhanced Zimbabwe's image and influence in Africa and beyond. The country's Look East Policy also received a major boost with the State visit of the President of the People's Republic of China, His Excellency Xi Jinping, in December 2015.Ladies and Gentlemen, Comrades and Friends,My government is determined to translate political independence into meaningfulness, by attending to the socio-economic needs of our people. Progress has also been made in the development of social infrastructure in health, education and housing. This also includes the capacitating of our education sector with ICT as well as the implementation of e-Government in order to enhance efficiency and quality of service delivery to the public.In the Health sector, the government continues to prioritise attention to communicable diseases such as HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. To this end, various strategies are being implemented, aimed at strengthening the health sector in order to improve service delivery.The development of our rural communities, where the majority of our people reside, remains under constant focus and indeed a "raison d'etre" of government.To this end, the government now has the Ministry of Rural Development, Preservation and Promotion of Natural Heritage. This re-arrangement of government functions resulted in the creation of the Ministry of Sport and Recreation which will, on its part, concentrate on the development of sporting and recreational activities in the country.The government will also continue to find ways of improving the welfare of civil servants. It is the desire of the government that salaries progressively match the Poverty Datum Line. The government apologises for the late disbursement of salaries, bonuses and monthly payments to pensioners but, be rest assured, the government is working flat out to improve the situation. Now that the workers have begun contributing towards the pension fund, payment of pensioners will be more predictable and on time.Ladies and Gentlemen, Comrades and Friends,Our security and defence forces have remained resolute in defending our sovereignty and peace within our borders. On the international scene, they continue to make us proud. Currently, our security forces have officers deployed on peace support operations in the Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Cote d' Ivoire.Today, as we celebrate our 36th Independence Day Anniversary, let us re-dedicate ourselves to serve Zimbabwe at all times, always striving for peace, respect, tolerance and goodwill towards others and to tirelessly work for the unity and development of our beloved country, Zimbabwe. One of the greatest tributes we can pay to Zimbabwe is to shun corruption, regionalism and nepotism. We should always remember that we are one people, united by the bond of Independence.Once again, I sayHappy Birthday ZimbabweHappy 36th Independence Day Anniversary,Long Live Zimbabwe,Long Live our Independence,Makorokoto,Amhlophe,Congratulations,I thank you.
This article originally ran in the April 2016 issue of AVN magazine. Click here to see the online edition.

Little did Jake Jaxson know at the time, but the future of CockyBoys was being written by anther industry legend during a seemingly unrelated interview for Billboard magazine. The idea for One Erectionthe studios mockumentary (aka The Un-Making of a Boy Band)was inspired by an interview that Chi Chi LaRue gave to the magazine upon the release of RuPauls album Realness, in which LaRue performed on one of the tracks.

She was asked to address the fact that many porn stars now seem to look and act like pop stars, and she replied, Well, Levi Karter, Liam Rileyall the CockyBoys guys are, like, Teen Beat, down, honey! There could be Tiger Beat: The CockyBoys edition, says Jaxson. Billboard asks LaRue why CockyBoys hasnt done a boy band-inspired video: Right?! Okay, thats going to be something Im working on right now, girl. Im filming something with them when I go to New York. So I will bring that up. Jake Jaxson and I are kindred spirits. We could definitely do something that would be amazing. And she didshe sent me that quote directly, and literally the next day we started working on making One Erection a reality. And its been an amazingly fun collaboration. She directed and brought her classic Chi Chi to some really fun sex scenes, and Im writing and directing the (non-sex) story.

Jaxson met LaRue via Karter three years ago. The performer wanted to work with the legendary director, and introduced the two to get the ball rolling.

From our first conversation, we hit it off. I mean, we started talking to each other like we had been friends for years, and Im a pretty reserved person, but Chi Chi was just so upfront and honest with me and I really welcomed that energy. We really flirted about working on something for a few years, and last year at the Grabby Awards, she sat me down and said, Im ready. Lets stop flirting and just do it! I mean, how could I refuse that proposal? And I have not regretted one moment working together, recalls Jaxson.

[Chi Chi] inspires me. Period. Before working with him, I had heard a lot peoples opinions and some stories. But they were all from the past. And for me, I can really only judge and relate to people in the now. And he had always been respectful and upfront with me. That is the most important part of any relationship for me. I have to say, I was really nervous at first because he is (rightly so) a legend in our industry. I grew up watching his films. But soon, my nervousness turned into something more. I remember pitching him an idea on how I wanted to shoot him in One Erection, or how I thought a scene should go, and I was being respectfully diplomatic about how I was communicating, and he put his hand on my arm and said, Honey, just tell me what you want, dont sugarcoat it. Im here to work and make something great. No ego. No attitude. No competition. Just honest, direct communication. And I cant tell you how much I respect that.

So far, One Erection has five episodes. But Jaxson is still shooting it, so there may be more. An eventual DVD release will hopefully be joined by a soundtrack album. The project attracted the interest of another industry icon: Trenton Ducati, who makes an appearance.

I think Trenton has been trying to work with CockyBoys from day one. He loves our pups. He really was a fan first. And for years, hes always been so friendly, respectful and playful with our guys. And every year, we would see each other at events, talk about doing something, but I never could find the right creative project. One Erection, however, finally was the perfect project. And let me just say...he is so fucking funny in this film. He really let me take the piss out of him, and he let me put him in situations he was definitely not used to, and the results were brilliant. I can honestly say working with him was a highlight, Jaxson says.

The diehard Cocky fans are loving it, mostly because Chi Chi and Trenton both also have positive and authentic attitudes. They both have fun-loving personalities and dont take themselves too seriously, which for most of our fans is an important part of our cocky community.

2016 has already been a busy one for the CEO: A highlight for me personally was giving the keynote address at the GayVN/Flirt4Free brunch at Internext. I was truly overwhelmed to see so many people there, especially so many friends. That event allowed me to really think and connect to what my purpose is and how to move forward.

This year, CockyBoys will also be releasing the rest of the docu-series Meet the Morecocks, which covers the last three years from Max Ryder and Jake Bass to Riley and Karter. The series also opens the door on Jaxson and his partners (in business and life), Benny Morecock and RJ Sebastian. The series will have six episodes, with two bonus non-sex episodes. The studio is also working on a deal to bring Meet the Morecocks to a very cool safe for work mainstream platform, as well as more film festivals.

It was very challengingits not a natural place for us, mostly because we are all three kind of shy. But over the years, much of the CockyBoys story has also been about us and told by us. We first did that as a way of showing our customers that we were proud of our work and, more importantly, proud of our performers, Jaxson said. We did not want to hide behind the camera and be anonymous. And from that approach and over time, we built an amazing relationship with our members and fans.

Jaxson was excited that Ryder came back and shot for Meet the Morecocks, even after he retired: Both he and Jake Bass were our first big personalities, and I was happy he came back home if only for a visit. And today, we are so lucky to keep working with some of the best guys in the businessfrom Tayte Hanson to Liam Riley and, a personal muse for me, Colby Keller.

Keller also appears along with Karter and Will Wikle in the upcoming feature The Stillest Hour, a kind of psychosexual thriller that Jaxson notes has been one of the hardest films for me to makeonly because its touching some raw nerves and past memories for me. But its also why I have loved making it.

Jaxson is also starting two new projects, a (for now) top secret one and a film he has been writing and prepping for the last few years, All Saintsset in his hometown of New Orleans.

Ill continue to explore some of the mythology created in Answered Prayers, but mostly Ill be following a new set of characters. New Orleans has no shortage of local color. It was inspired from one of my favorite local holidays, All Saints Daythe day after Halloweenand in New Orleans, it is the day we celebrated the dead. It was never macabre, but more of a reminder for us to live life in the now.

Pictured: Jake Jaxson and Chi Chi LaRue
photos by AMY SMOTHERMAN BURGESS/NEWS SENTINEL Ron Moles, a salesman with Premier Truck Group, points out the Cascadia and FL 112 Freightliner straight truck models available on the market.

SHARE A 2008 Sterling 9500 Freightliner straight truck model is shown on display at Premier Truck Group on April 14.

By Ed Marcum of the Knoxville News Sentinel

Logistics is growing in importance to businesses these days, and that has been good news for the niche industry of expedited trucking, said Lawrence McCord, CEO of ExpeditorsOnline.com.

Rather than stock large inventories of parts or products, companies have found it more cost effective to order these things only as needed, spurring growth of the need for "just-in-time" delivery. Expedited delivery services -- many of them operated by husband-and-wife teams or people seeking second careers -- have emerged to fill the need, McCord said.

"This is the fastest growing segment in the trucking industry," he said.

ExpeditorsOnline provides news, information and a forum for the expedited trucking operators, plus organizes gatherings, and it is planning one in Knoxville event for Thursday.

During that event, at 5 p.m. at the Holilday Inn Select, 304 Cedar Bluff Road, ExpeditorsOnline will hold a truckling workshop.

FedEx Custom Critical and Panther Expedite will be there looking for drivers, owner-operators and husband-and-wife teams to haul freight in Sprinter vans, straight trucks and tractor trailers. Other companies will be there to talk to potential drivers about buying trucks.

The event will start with a workshop on how to get started in the business. Appetizers and door prizes will be included.

Expedited delivery has a lot of potential for growth in Knoxville and East Tennessee, McCord said.

"The mid-South and northern Michigan are some of the areas of highest demand for expedited delivery," he said.

Knoxville is positioned at the crossroads of Interstates 75 and 40, and is near many auto suppliers that have a need for just-in-time service, McCord said.

Also, Knoxville is home to one of the innovators in providing trucks for expedited freight, he said.

"Freightliner of Knoxville was one of the early adopters of selling specialized trucks for expedited delivery," McCord said.

In particular, the company introduced models of straight trucks and its Sprinter cargo vans that caught on.

"They brought it to the industry and it is the standard now," he said.

Ron Moles, sales and expedited-delivery expert for Freightliner of Knoxville, said expedited delivery is a very small percentage of the overall freight market, but it is growing.

"There has been a giant increase in the refrigerated-truck demand with FedEx, pharmaceutical companies and other companies sending specialized items that have to be there on time," he said.

Moles said that service requires self-contained trucks with temperature-controlled bodies.

Those operators might find themselves transporting things such as art work, precious jewelry, medical specimens, or items for the military, he said.

The ability to operate with vehicles smaller than 18-wheelers appeals to a lot of people entering the field, McCord said. And because of the demand to deliver within a tight time frame, the pay is better. An operator might face a 60-minute window for delivery, McCord said.

It is generally not a nine-to-five job, but drivers have the option to turn down the chance to make a delivery, if they wish, he said. It is not a job for everybody, but McCord said it is ideal for some.

"One of our greatest success stories is the second-career people and empty nesters who want to see the country and get paid to do it," he said.
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By Chambers Williams of the Knoxville News Sentinel

The East Tennessee cities of Morristown, Bristol and Cleveland are among six communities statewide that will each receive a $50,000 Tennessee Main Street Entrepreneur Grant to encourage business growth in established downtown commercial districts.

The grants, which were announced Tuesday by Randy Boyd, commissioner of the state's Department of Economic and Community Development.

Also receiving grants will be Columbia, in Middle Tennessee, and Jackson and Savannah, in West Tennessee.

The grants will be used to provide startup space and training for entrepreneurs the downtown areas. According to the state's announcement:

Morristown's Crossroads Downtown Partnership will create three co-working spaces in partnership with the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center, Carson-Newman University, Walters State Community College, Morristown Chamber of Commerce and city of Morristown.

MainStreet Cleveland will restore a 1902 building recently purchased by the city of Cleveland to create a mixed-use, multitenant business incubator for startups.

Believe in Bristol will provide a nine-week CO. STARTERS course for entrepreneurs investing in downtown Bristol, host a business pitch day, including community investors and developers, and make improvements to the city's existing co-working office, IdeaSpace.

The grants were offered to accredited Tennessee Main Street communities.
TVA's Bull Run Fossil Plant, near Oak Ridge, is shown here on July 23, 2014. (MICHAEL PATRICK/NEWS SENTINEL)

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By Ed Marcum Ed.Marcum@Knoxvillebiz.Com 865-342-6267

As TVA gets its power plants ready to meet the coming electricity demands of summer, its Inspector General has released reports that gave mixed reviews to the performance and culture at the Bull Run and Kingston fossil plants.

The TVA Office of the Inspector General, which is an independent arm of TVA that seeks to uncover fraud or waste affecting the federal utility, found issues with the condition of equipment, staffing levels, morale and relations between workers and management at both plants.

On the other hand, investigators reported that workers at both plants generally trusted their first-line supervisors and displayed good teamwork.

TVA management filed responses to the reports, mostly agreeing with them and outlining steps that will be taken to address the matters.

The Bull Run plant is currently out of operation due to planned maintenance, said TVA spokesman Scott Brooks. In May 2014, TVA shifted Bull Run from year-round operation to stopping and starting based on demand need.

From 2014 to 2015, the number of forced outages doubled at the plant, making Bull Run the worst-performing plant in the TVA system, according to the report. Equipment failures were largely to blame, and workers expressed frustration at temporary fixes and patches.

Kingston also missed many TVA goals, the report noted. TVA is phasing out much of its coal generation, and the report said Kingston workers are frustrated at working overtime to cover vacancies.

In a letter to Inspector General Richard Moore, TVA Vice President of Human Resources Megan T. Flynn said the agency is taking steps to address the issues, but the situations must be taken in context as TVA switches to cleaner energy sources.

"This transition involves the closure of several coal-fired plants," she wrote. "TVA strives to ensure consistent, timely and transparent communication about future changes. However, some uncertainties remain, creating anxiety for employees."
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By Bob Fowler of the Knoxville News Sentinel

KINGSTON  A former employee of the Roane County Office of Emergency Services who worked as a captain in the OES's fire division has pleaded guilty to theft of county gear  including chain saws, generators and a "Jaws of Life" pump used to extricate wreck victims.

John Roy "Shorty" Rayburn, 42, of Kingston received a three-year sentence during his court appearance before Criminal Court Judge Jeff Wicks and was ordered to repay $14,000 to Roane County.

As a first offender, Rayburn was approved for judicial diversion, according to a news release from 9th Judicial District Attorney General Russell Johnson.

"His sentence was suspended to probation and he will be closely supervised to ensure that he does not commit any further criminal acts, that he repays Roane County, and that he pays his fines and court costs," according to the news release.

Some of the stolen items were recovered when questioned by Roane County Sheriff's deputies. Other items were pawned at pawn shops in Harriman and Rockwood.

Rayburn was indicted in October by the Roane County grand jury, and the indictment stated he obtained control over the county property on or about Jan. 1, 2014. Also stolen were a trailer, infrared heater, radio, concrete saw and an industrial lantern.

Rayburn was hired in 2009 and oversaw the fire division, which provides support for the county's five volunteer fire departments. That division last year had only two other paid employees and two volunteers.
By Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel

In the first ruling of its kind in East Tennessee, a federal judge is ordering the return to Mexico of a 5-year-old boy at the center of an international custody battle.

Chief U.S. District Judge Tom Varlan is siding with Mexican father Eugenio Garduno Guevara in a rare case brought under The Hague Convention of 1980 International Child Abduction Remedies Act in a fight over the boy Guevara fathered out of wedlock with Mexican mother Alma Soto Soto.

PDF: Judge's ruling in custody case

Soto spirited the boy away from Mexico and into the U.S. illegally in 2013 after the couple, who had been living together and sharing custody, split up. Guevara spent two years tracking down mother and child, using the Mexican police, The Hague Convention treaty, the U.S. State Department and Facebook, before finding the pair living in Knoxville.

The case ultimately landed in front of Varlan, the first time the federal court system here had been tapped to decide under the treaty which country  Mexico or the U.S.  had authority to decide custody.

In his ruling, Varlan noted the treaty did not authorize him to decide which of the two parents was the fittest but rather was designed to prevent parents from court-shopping among foreign nations.

"One of the main purposes of the ICARA is to prevent parents from removing children from the country of their habitual residence to a more sympathetic court in order to have a 'home court advantage' in custody determinations," Varlan wrote.

It will be up to a Mexican court now to decide the boy's custodial fate.

Guevara and Soto had the boy out of wedlock in Mexico in 2010 but lived together with him until March 2013 when Guevara moved out. A month later, the boy and his mother disappeared. Guevara eventually found mother and son via a photograph posted on Facebook, showing Soto and the boy at the Wichita Falls Park in Wichita Falls, Texas. But she disappeared with the boy again. The pair resurfaced in late May 2015 in Knoxville when she sought custody through Knox County Juvenile Court.

Although Varlan did not weigh in on which of the two was most worthy of custody, the nature of the case did require him to consider allegations typically aired in a domestic courtroom. He first had to decide if Guevara had visited and supported his son after he and Soto split.

"In the three-week period of separation when the child was in Mexico, (the father) visited with the child on four occasions, including one overnight visit," Varlan wrote. "(He) also provided (Soto) and the child with some degree of money and food support."

Varlan also had to sort out conflicting claims between the pair. Soto, via attorney Scott Saidak, claimed Guevara was a mean drunk, and the boy would not be safe in Mexico. He denied that.

Varlan didn't buy it.

"While (Soto) submits that (Guevara) had an alcohol problem and abused her in the past, she does not allege that (the father) abused the child," Varlan wrote. "(She) also allowed (him) to visit with the child multiple times when they were separated, and testified that (he) supported the child with food and money during the period of separation, both of which tend to show that plaintiff would not subject the child to serious abuse or neglect if the child were returned to Mexico."

A second case under the treaty is now pending in U.S. District Court. That one involves a father living in London and a Bangladeshi mother living in Knoxville with the couple's twin babies.
Howard H. Baker Jr. Federal Courthouse Tuesday, Jun. 17, 2014. (MICHAEL PATRICK/NEWS SENTINEL)

By Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel

A federal court in Knoxville is once again the scene of an international custody battle.

For the second time in six months, a petition invoking The Hague Convention of 1980 treaty on international child abduction has been filed in U.S. District Court after efforts by the U.S. State Department failed to resolve a fight over the twin children of a citizen of the United Kingdom and his Bangladeshi wife.

Late last year, a Mexican father filed a similar action after he said his wife, also a Mexican citizen, spirited away their 5-year-old son to the U.S. In that case, Eugenio Garduno Guevara used Facebook to help track down his wife, Alma Soto Soto, and their son in Texas. The State Department then stepped in, notifying the mother of the father's invocation of the treaty. She then fled with the boy to Knoxville, but the father found the pair again and once again turned to the international child abduction treaty and its requirement of cooperation by the American government.

Chief U.S. District Judge Tom Varlan made a rare request for the fugitive-hunting U.S. Marshals Service to serve a restraining order on the mother. A hearing was later held. Varlan has not yet ruled.

In the newest case, father Faisal Ahmed contends the maternal grandfather of his twin children sneaked Ahmed's wife, Mardia Mohsin Ahmed, and the twin babies out of Bangladesh and set up house for them in Knoxville.

According to the petition, the father and mother wed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2009. The couple moved to London, where Faisal Ahmed is a citizen. His wife, a researcher studying to become an optometrist, was allowed into the country on a spousal visa.

PDF: Petition filed in Ahmed custody case

At some point not identified in the petition, Mardia Ahmed traveled to Knoxville on a student visa to attend the University of Tennessee. In May 2014, a pregnant Mardia Ahmed returned to Knoxville with her mother. The petition does not state why.

"Due to her high-risk pregnancy, however, the mother was unable to fly back to the United Kingdom," the petition stated. "The father and mother agreed that she should remain in Knoxville to give birth. The father flew to Knoxville on Oct. 9, 2014, to attend to her  While in Knoxville, the father was the primary caregiver for the children and the mother, who was convalescing from pregnancy complications and other health issues."

His visa ran out, so he returned to the United Kingdom in January 2015. The twins had "developmental challenges" and needed treatment, so mother and children stayed behind, the petition stated.

In May 2015, the twins were cleared for travel, and the family returned to London. In July, the mother and twins went to Bangladesh to attend the wedding of the mother's brother. She was supposed to return Aug. 5, but "canceled the return itinerary" and "refused to tell the father where they were going or when they were going there," according to the petition. The mother, the twins, her parents and her teenage sister flew to Knoxville, where the mother, the twins and her sister are now living in a home owned by her parents, the petition stated.

"On information and belief, the children have been sleeping in a single temporary crib while in Knoxville, using blankets as a mattress," the complaint stated. "The father maintains periodic telephone contact with the mother. On information and belief, the mother's family is exerting great pressure on the mother to remain in Knoxville to take care of her sister and allow her to remain enrolled in school in Knoxville."

The State Department has twice written the mother "and asked for the voluntary return of the children to the United Kingdom," but she hasn't responded, the petition stated.

"The mother has refused the father's repeated attempts to obtain the voluntary return of the children without judicial proceedings," attorney John T. Winemiller wrote.

Senior U.S. District Judge Thomas Phillips earlier this month issued a temporary restraining order barring the mother from removing the children from Knoxville pending a June 13 hearing.

Memphis attorney Suzanne Landers, whose firm specializes in immigration and international child custody issues and represents the Mexican father in the first case filed here, said The Hague Convention treaty is being increasingly used in federal courts in the U.S. by foreign parents. Knoxville, she said, is a hub for such activity because UT and the various government facilities in Oak Ridge draw foreign citizens here for educational, research and work opportunities.
Friends and family gathered at Danny Mayfield Park on Sunday, April 17, 2016 to attend a candlelight vigil for 12-year-old Jajuan Hubert Latham. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL)

SHARE JaJuan Hubert Latham (Facebook)

By News Sentinel Staff

KNOXVILLE  A woman who ran during a Saturday night drive-by shooting that killed a 12-year-old boy at a Mechanicsville block party lost her baby as the result of a fall, according to a Knoxville Police Department news release Tuesday.

She was seven months pregnant, police said.

Police also said officers, including Police Chief David Rausch, visited the home of a "person of concern" as part of the investigation. Police say they have recovered "potential evidence" and gained new leads in the ongoing investigation into The announcement comes after investigators detained several "persons of interest" for questioning Monday night. No arrest has been made, and police offered no further details.

Police asked that anyone with information on the shooting call 865-215-7212. Callers can remain anonymous.

PREVIOUS STORY:

Authorities are investigating whether a drive-by shooting that killed a 12-year-old boy at a Mechanicsville block party Saturday night was the latest in a series of gang-related retaliatory attacks since Knoxville police scaled back an anti-gang task force launched earlier this year.

Bearden Middle School sixth-grader JaJuan Hubert Latham was struck in the head while sitting in the back seat of his father's parked Chevy Tahoe as an exchange of gunfire erupted between two passing vehicles and someone in the crowd at Danny Mayfield Park, according to police.

The shooting was the third investigated by the Knoxville Police Department in less than a week, Police Chief David Rausch said Monday.

A pregnant woman was shot about 11 p.m. Tuesday, April 12, on Riverside Drive. The woman survived, but has refused to cooperate with investigators, the police chief said. A second incident followed shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday, when several shots were fired into a house near the corner of Moses Avenue and Dunbar Street  a block from Danny Mayfield Park. No injuries were reported.

Rausch said it's possible the three shootings are connected.

"That's the information we're hearing," the police chief said. "We don't know that to be a fact."

Police announced Monday night that several "persons of interest" had been detained in connection with the Saturday shooting that killed JaJuan.

No arrests had been announced as of Monday evening in any of the shootings.

SCALED BACK

The past week's violence follows Rausch's recent decision to scale back manpower since commissioning a 30-member task force in the wake of 15-year-old Zaevion Dobson's shooting death Dec. 17.

Zaevion, a Fulton High School sophomore and distant cousin of JaJuan, was killed while shielding two friends from a barrage of gunfire in Lonsdale.

Police have said the teen and his friends were mistakenly targeted in a retaliatory attack  one of four shootings that night amid a surge of local gun violence late last year, much of it deemed gang-related by police.

JaJuan's death is the first gang-related fatal shooting in Knoxville since the KPD task force began its work in January.

"We did scale back, personnel-wise," Rausch said. "This is a large community and I have limited resources. And things had calmed down.

"We didn't take our focus off the violence, but until this incident Saturday night, we hadn't seen any major incidents."

The chief pledged to renew the task force's work in "full force," although he declined to say how many officers will be recommitted to the unit.

"If you're a gang member, you need to be nervous," he said.

A GAME CHANGER

On Monday, Rausch publicly acknowledged for the first time the "strong possibility" that the fatal shooting of 23-year-old Brandon Perry  a suspect in Zaevion's death who was found dead several hours later  was an act of revenge.

Likewise, he voiced his concern that the latest child killing brings with it the potential for retaliation.

"I think it's a total game changer," Rausch said. "Not only does it increase that potential, it should increase the call to action for our community.

"While Zaevion's murder rang a bell, this one is deafening."

The community has yet to answer the call for more volunteers and more resources to local church affiliations and other nonprofit youth organizations that Rausch and other leaders say are essential to stemming the violence long-term.

"We need to stop talking and start acting," he said. "We need mentors, we need people to start providing resources for the youth organizations.  We still have the need. And that call was made when Zaevion was murdered."

Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero said the city will continue to support groups that work with inner-city youth and her own Save Our Sons initiative, aimed at reducing black-on-black crime by reaching out to young men before they make the wrong choices.

"I think JaJuan's death adds even more urgency to it," said Rogero. "And I hope it will awaken many more hearts  Now we have lost two young promising kids in a short time."

WITNESSES SOUGHT

Investigators do not believe Hubert Latham was targeted and described the father and his son as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

An estimated 150-200 people were among the crowd when the shooting began. Police said they're unsure which side shot first. No one else was struck and police declined to say how many shots were fired.

Only a few partygoers have come forward so far with limited information.

"We still have yet to get the call to say who was shooting," Rausch said Monday as he urged more witnesses to speak out. "If not, it's going to continue  and it could be your child next."

Witnesses can remain anonymous, he emphasized.

GANG ENHANCEMENT STATUTE

Knox County prosecutors will continue to use a gang enhancement sentencing law despite an appellate court ruling striking it down as unconstitutional, and at least one judge is willing to let them.

Deputy District Attorney General Kyle Hixson said last week that prosecutors will neither dismiss current charges seeking to apply the gang enhancement law nor stop filing them.

The decision came after the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals struck down the law, which boosts penalties for crimes committed by gang members, as unconstitutional last week, ruling the law was so poorly drafted it provided no connection between the crimes committed and the activities of a gang.

"I know there's controversy over the gang enhancement law, but I can tell you right now, we'll continue to use it," said Rausch at a news conference Sunday. "The DA has said we will continue to use it."

The law was designed to punish more severely violent crimes committed by gang members on behalf of a gang. But a three-judge panel of the appellate court ruled the law's definition of a gang member is so broad it could encompass even fraternity members and that the law allows boosted penalties for crimes unrelated to gang activity.

Hixson said District Attorney General Charme Allen believes her office should continue to apply the gang enhancement law until the issue is settled.

SERVICES

Visitation for JaJuan Latham will be from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday at Overcoming Believers Church, with the funeral service beginning at 7 p.m.

Interment will be at 10 a.m. Friday at New Grace Cemetery.
JaJuan Hubert Latham (Facebook)

By Hayes Hickman of the Knoxville News Sentinel

A 21-year-old pregnant woman shot in the back during a suspected gang attack last week says she's an innocent victim, as was 12-year-old JaJuan Hubert Latham, who was killed days later in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting at a Mechanicsville block party.

The two shootings, however, have nothing to do with one another, she said.

"I told them exactly who did this to me," said the woman, insisting she recognized three of the attackers as people she knows to be members of the "Crips" gang. "It ain't 'think'  I know."

The Knoxville Police Department continues to investigate the boy's Saturday night killing and its possible connections to the attack on the expectant mother and to a third shooting earlier the same week.

On April 12, the pregnant woman was shot on Riverside Drive, Police Chief David Rausch said. The next day, several shots were fired into a home near the corner of Moses Avenue and Dunbar Street in Mechanicsville, although no one was wounded.

JaJuan was shot in the head while sitting in the back seat of his father's parked Chevy Tahoe at Danny Mayfield Park when police say a gunfight erupted Saturday night between someone at the party and two passing vehicles.

Rausch said investigators have received unconfirmed reports that the three incidents could be among a series of gang-related retaliatory attacks.

"I feel bad for that little boy  but that didn't have anything to do with me," the pregnant woman told the News Sentinel on Tuesday. "I just want justice for me and my baby  and JaJuan. We didn't have anything to do with this."

The News Sentinel is not identifying the woman at this time out of concern for her safety.

She said she and her boyfriend had just arrived at a gathering of about 15 people at a residence on Riverside the night of April 12 when gunmen opened fire. The woman, who was sitting in a car in the driveway, was struck in the back, leaving the bullet lodged in her spine, she said.

The woman, who is five months pregnant, said she is partially paralyzed, but her baby was unharmed. Doctors expect her to walk again, she said.

She also disputed Rausch's earlier statement that she has refused to cooperate with investigators.

KPD spokesman Darrell DeBusk said Tuesday the woman has since talked to police.

"Originally the victim was reluctant to provide information," DeBusk said. "(Monday) she did come forward and provide some information we are now looking into.

"But at this moment, we still cannot determine if the incident on Riverside and the incident at Danny Mayfield Park are connected."

The woman said she doesn't know who the gunmen's intended target was, but she doesn't believe they were trying to kill her or her boyfriend  nor do they have any gang affiliations, she said.

"I'll never be part of that stuff, ever," the woman said.

According to court records, the woman was arrested in March after authorities executed a search warrant on the Knoxville home the couple share. Narcotics officers seized 4.5 ounces of suspected heroin, 50 grams of marijuana, ecstasy pills, digital scales, an unspecified amount of cash separated and bundled by denominations, two handguns, an "assault rifle" and numerous rounds of ammunition, according to arrest warrants.

Neither she nor her boyfriend were home during the raid, the warrants state.

The woman faces two charges of felony drug possession and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. She refused to comment on the charges.

Meanwhile, police say they continue to make progress in JaJuan's killing. Investigators detained several "persons of interest" for questioning and recovered "potential evidence," police said Tuesday. No arrest had been announced in JaJuan's killing as of Tuesday night.

DeBusk also said an attendee at the block party  an expectant mother seven months pregnant  fell while fleeing the gunfire, resulting in the loss of her child.

An estimated 150-200 people were in the park when the shooting began. DeBusk credited investigators' progress in the case to police legwork and tips from the community. He urged more witnesses to speak out.

"We've received roughly a couple dozen tips," DeBusk said. "But we're still asking the public to come forward. There's a lot of people who know exactly what happened, and we're asking them to do the right thing."

One witness said she did not see anyone shooting from passing vehicles, but she saw two men in the crowd open fire as the party was winding down shortly before 10 p.m.

The News Sentinel also is withholding her name in the interest of her safety.

"From what I heard, the shots came from on the field  in Danny Mayfield Park," the woman said, describing two distinct bursts of sustained gunfire. "Once you try to get up and run to your car, they started shooting again."

The witness said she saw two people among the crowd shooting, both of whom she recognized as Crips.

The woman said she was in the process of trying to contact a KPD detective Tuesday.

Another witness, David Dale Jr., 20, described the event as a birthday party with several children present. He disputed other accounts that it was a meeting of gang members, although he acknowledged that certain known gang members were present.

"It wasn't really a gang cookout," Dale said. "I'm not in no gang. I ain't bangin'."

Dale said he also heard two separate bursts of gunfire, which started with a single shot, but never saw any of the shooters.

It was what he didn't see that stood out, he said. Dale said he noticed KPD cruisers parked nearby as he walked to the party and saw more patrol cars driving around the park during the event.

"But as soon as the shots rang out, there was no cops to be found," Dale said. "As soon as the shots stopped firing, they showed up again. How can you not be around when the guns shoot?"

Later that night, Dale said he heard gunfire again within a couple of blocks of the park.

DeBusk said officers at the fatal shooting scene also later heard the nearby gunfire, but could not locate a second shooting scene. Likewise, officers responded to reported gunfire at nearby Ridgebrook Apartments, but found nothing.

As for the seemingly intermittent police presence during the party, DeBusk said patrol officers in Mechanicsville were trying to monitor the gathering in between answering other calls for service.
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By News Sentinel Staff

The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency is continuing to monitor and help several East Tennessee communities battle wildfires that are threatening lives and property.

On Sunday, the Cocke County Emergency Management Agency reported a large wildfire on Weavers Bend. It is the second large fire that county has faced this month  the first was the Halls Top fire on April 4 that burned more than 2,000 acres.

Officials said the Weavers Bend fire has burned about 400 acres. About 10 to 15 homes could be affected, though they are currently not in danger and have not been evacuated. About 100 firefighting personnel are on the scene.

In Sevier County, the fires included one on Bluff Mountain that began as a structure fire and has burned about 100 acres. Six homes have been affected and 30 homes that have been evacuated. That fire is said to be 100 percent contained.

The second fire was on Shell Mountain and about 15 acres was reported to also be 100 percent contained, while a small fire near Valley View Estates was burning and spreading on Monday.

TEAM said that rain isn't expected in East Tennessee until later in the week.
LOS ANGELESLauded by IndieWire as the Boogie Nights of gay porn, producer James Franco premiered his new independent film King Cobra Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Based on the tragic true story of the brutal murder of gay porn producer Bryan Kocis, the owner of Cobra Video in 2007, the drama covers the early rise of gay porn star Sean Paul Lockhart, aka Brent Corrigan, before his falling out with the producer who made him famous.

When Corrigan decides he'd be better off a free agent, a cash-strapped pair of rival producers aim to cash in by any means possible.

King Cobra stars Franco and Christian Slater as the rival producers, Molly Ringwald, Alicia Silverstone, Keegan Allen and Garrett Clayton as Corrigan.

It was directed by Justin Kelly, who told TheWrap the film is unapologetic in its graphic depiction of gay sex.

A Luzerne County, Pa., jury in 2009 convicted Harlow Cuadra with killing Bryan Kocis inside his Pennsylvania home, which he set fire to cover up the crime.

Cuadra and his partner, Joseph Kerekes, conspired to kill their rival Kocis, prosecutors said, so they could sign Corrigan. Authorities linked the two to Kocis' murder through e-mail, credit card receipts, photos, and comments made while they were under surveillance on a San Diego, Calif., nude beach.

Cuadra received a life sentence for first-degree murder, while Kerekes pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and also was sentenced to life in prison. Kocis had been stabbed 28 times before the killers set fire to his Dallas Township house.

Cobra Video gained traction in 2004 after Kocis cast then-twink model Brent Corrigan in Every Poolboy's Dream.

Corrigan has denounced the new indie film on Twitter, saying, Its made. And it's not about me. It's Hollywood's attempt at bastardizing my early years in porn, one man's murder, blah blah.

He added, Chuck woulda done some justice. But these filmmakers didn't care about anyone but their take on it all (and not getting sued).

Corrigan also tweeted, It doesnt matter what A list celebrity is involved. The screenplay & content didnt jive. I passed it up.

The star went on to say all will be revealed in his forthcoming book Incorrigible.
Knox County Sheriff Jimmy "J.J." Jones and other representatives from Knoxville attend the meeting Tuesday, April 19, 2016, of the regional system in Cleveland, Tenn. (DON JACOBS/NEWS SENTINEL)

SHARE Overall of the dispatch areas at the Knox County Emergency Communications Center Friday, Jan. 23, 2015. (MICHAEL PATRICK/NEWS SENTINEL)

By Don Jacobs of the Knoxville News Sentinel

CLEVELAND, Tenn.  Knox County is poised to become the most recent partner in the regional emergency digital radio system based in Chattanooga  at what proponents say would be a $400,000 savings.

But the Knox County E-911 Board of Directors and the executive commission of the Tennessee Valley Regional Communications System will have to race against the clock to finalize the relationship.

During the commission's Tuesday meeting at the Mountain View Inn in Cleveland, Knox County Director of Purchasing Hugh Holt said he has a June 30 deadline on the project. Holt said he negotiated "some aggressive pricing" with Motorola on replacing Knox County's 30-year-old radio system, and the figures expire after the deadline.

According to numbers provided by Holt, Motorola slashed costs to the point Knox County would save $400,000 over seven years as contrasted to the bid submitted in 2014 by Harris Corp.

Motorola opted to drop its annual $170,000 fee to maintain a master site over the seven-year contract, providing a savings of almost $1.2 million. With a fee of $42.80 paid annually for each radio on the system included, Holt puts the cost of a Motorola-equipped system joining the regional system at $9,963,710.

The Harris system, Holt said, would cost $10.3 million over seven years.

The Harris bid totaled $8.9 million over seven years. But Holt said that bid was for 95 percent radio coverage of Knox County, as were 2014 bids from Motorola and Tait Communications.

Under the regional system, Knox County would have 97 percent coverage because of extra radio towers provided by the regional partners in Anderson and Blount counties. To maintain "an apples to apples" comparison, Holt dug back into the original Harris bid and found the costs Harris had presented for 97 percent radio coverage.

"It's in the contract as an option, otherwise I wouldn't have access to those figures," Holt said. "I never spoke to Harris."

Holt is expected to share on Wednesday the anticipated costs of buying Motorola equipment at the Knox County E-911 board meeting. Holt had hoped the regional radio system would vote Tuesday on allowing Knox to join the system in advance of the Wednesday board meeting.

Those hopes were dashed at the beginning of the 37-minute commission meeting.

"We would like to see a proposal in writing," said commission chairman Don Allen, general services administrator with Hamilton County. "If at all possible, we want to make this happen."

Details have to be addressed because Knox County wants its own master site, which none of the other partners have requested. Knox County E-911 board members expressed concern about the loss of local control without the county's own master site.

A master site can cost as much as $2 million. Holt got Motorola to agree to just over $1 million for a master site. The master site controls which radios are active, can disable a lost or stolen radio and can group emergency providers at a scene so they can talk to each other.

"I'm in favor of it, but I think we need to have a working group to look at details," said Catoosa County Sheriff Gary Sisk of Georgia.

Sisk is one of the five members of the executive commission for the Tennessee Valley Regional Communications System. The executive commission sets policy and procedures for the regional system, which serves 12,000 radios in 13 counties in East Tennessee and northern Georgia.

Knox County Sheriff Jimmy "J.J." Jones and several of his staff attended the meeting.

"Speaking as a police officer for 33 years, and not as the sheriff, I think the regional system offers us a better option," Jones told the commission.

Knoxville Fire Department Capt. Mark Wilbanks explained Knox County's need for a master site.

"It does give us that ability to pull away if there was some disagreement with the valley system," Wilbanks said. "We still need to be able to control ourselves if we need to."

The commission agreed to have Pat Rollins, the director of the regional system, meet with Alan Bull, technical services manager at the Knox County E-911 Center, and representatives of emergency agencies in Knox County to address any master site issues. The meetings should yield a written proposal that the commission can vote on.

Members of the regional system said they want assurances a master site in Knox County won't compromise the radio operation's security.

Bull attended the meeting because he has been asked to serve as interim director of the Knox County E-911 Center after the resignation Monday of Bob Coker.

Julia Small, technical services supervisor for the Knoxville Police Department, said she was encouraged by Tuesday's reception. Small serves on the users committee that advises the Knox County E-911 board on the needs of emergency services providers.

"The users group really liked the interoperability this offers," Small said. "I think it's something Knox County needs and it will be a safety benefit to the citizens."

Interoperability is the ability of emergency workers from different agencies to communicate by radio. Holt said under the regional system, interoperability would be more seamless as opposed to Knox County buying a stand-alone digital system that would require more programming steps to provide the same communications.
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By News Sentinel Staff

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to reflect that only the driver was killed.

An elderly man from Ohio has been identified as the victim of a fatal single-vehicle crash overnight along Interstate 75 in Campbell County, according to a Tennessee Highway Patrol incident report.

Purce Daniel, 89, of Dayton, Ohio, was killed when the Chevy pickup he was driving struck a guardrail at the off-ramp near mile marker 160 about 3:30 a.m. Tuesday, the report states.

The truck went airborne and rolled several times before coming to rest in a ravine.

The passenger, J.D. Daniel, 84, also of Dayton, Ohio, survived with minor injuries.

Both occupants were wearing seat belts, according to the report. There was no sign of drug or alcohol use.

No further details were available.

More details as they develop online and in Wednesday's News Sentinel.
Zacchaeus Crawford speaks to the media Monday, April 18, 2016, about three of his children being arrested at their school on Friday. (Photo: HELEN COMER/DAILY NEWS JOURNAL)

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By Jessica Bliss, The Tennessean

Police handcuffed multiple students, ages 6 to 11, at a public elementary school in Murfreesboro on Friday, inspiring public outcry and adding fuel to already heightened tensions between law enforcement and communities of color nationwide.

The arrests at Hobgood Elementary School occurred after the students were accused of not stopping a fight that happened several days earlier off campus. A juvenile center later released the students, but local community members now call for action  police review of the incident and community conversation  and social justice experts across the country use words such as "startling" and "flabbergasted" in response to actions in the case.

Parents and community members sharply criticized the arrests of the students at a church meeting Sunday. The Murfreesboro police chief on Sunday cited the incident as a learning experience, a chance to "make things better so they don't happen again." The city manager said Sunday: "If something needs to be corrected, it will be."

Continue reading at The Tennessean.
While going through clippings in my files recently, I noticed several items ranging from statistics on church attendance here in 1890 to a drowning at the dedication of the Edward Cothren Pool in 1948. They also deal with an escape from the Camp Home, the arrival of air mail here and how President Theodore Roosevelt praised a local man.

The Knoxville Journal of Jan. 12, 1890, reported a total of 5,221 people were members of the city's 28 leading churches. First Presbyterian Church led the list with 513 members, Church Street Methodist had 421, Third Presbyterian had 410, Second Presbyterian had 355, St. John's Episcopal had 205 and Fourth Presbyterian had 132.

On Dec. 27, 1893, the Journal announced the final test of the Incline Railway across the Tennessee River: "The car runs from the top of the high bluff on the south side to a point on this side one thousand feet. The car is carried on two strong steel cables one and a quarter inches thick, with a capacity of sixty-three tons each. The car has a seating capacity of about twenty-five persons."

The Tribune of Nov. 27, 1908, noted that while Roosevelt was participating at the dedication of the black YMCA in Washington, D.C., he mentioned the organization of the black YMCA in Knoxville that had been dedicated two years earlier: "A colored man (C.F. Johnson) born a slave in Knoxville, Tenn. was so interested in the value of YMCA work among young white men, that he gave a piece of property costing $2,000 to the colored Young Men's Christian Association. He has the honor of having given the largest gift up to this time of any individual in the state of Tennessee, regardless of color, to the association."

On Jan. 5, 1915, the Tribune reported that for the first time a woman had been elected superintendent of public instruction for Blount County Schools. Nanie Broady was elected by five votes of the County Court. The salary for the position was lowered from about $1,300 to $1,000.

The Tribune of Jan. 25, 1920, said, "Knoxville may get air mail. The ships now being built for line, others bigger may follow." Knoxville was to be included in the daily air service between St. Louis and New York during the next 10 months.

According to the Journal of Dec. 17, 1928: "Five escape from the Camp Home for friendless women. They locked up (the) superintendent, and jumped from a window. They escaped Sunday morning by kicking out a window and screen to enable them to jump eight feet into the yard. The women made their dash for liberty after Mrs. Josephine Washington, superintendent, had been fastened in a small room of the building."

The Journal of June 10, 1948, while reporting the dedication of the city's first black swimming pool, reported a tragic event: "Dedication ceremonies of the Edward Cothren Negro Swimming Pool on Leslie Street were dampened yesterday by the drowning of Henry Hill, 18, Court D, Austin Homes. Witnesses told homicide officer Carl Bunch that the Negro Youth dived into the crowded pool with two companions and failed to come up. The three had dived in water 11 feet deep and there was no indication that he had hit his head on the bottom. Searle Henderson, pool lifeguard who found the body on the bottom, said it was in a cramped position when he found it."
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After more than two years of public and private machinations, the Knox County E-911 Center is poised to join a regional digital radio network instead of purchasing its own system.

The advisory and executive committees of the Tennessee Valley Regional Communications System, based in Chattanooga, are scheduled to vote today on whether to allow Knox County to install a master controller site for the network. If the vote is yes, the Knox County E-911 Center board of directors is expected to vote to join the network on Wednesday.

The master controller site approval is key to the board's decision. If Knox County had a master site, the E-911 Center could assert operational control of its portion of the system. Knox County's master site also could serve as a backup in the event of interference with the site in Chattanooga.

The regional system has been operational since 2010. It serves emergency providers in a dozen counties in East Tennessee and northern Georgia and has about 12,000 radios on its system. Current master sites for the regional system are in Chattanooga and Nashville.

The decision to join the regional network would run counter to the determination of the board's selection committee and consulting firm Blue Wing Services that an $8.9 million proposal by Harris Corp. would be more cost-effective than the Motorola-powered regional network. The board nevertheless voted down the Harris proposal last year.

Since January, Hugh Holt, Knox County's director of purchasing, has been gathering pricing information for equipment if Knox County opts to join the regional system. The county would have to spend millions of dollars to replace its 30-year-old Motorola system with digital equipment. After the installation of a new system, each emergency agency would have to pay an annual fee of $42.80 per radio to the regional system for each of the 6,000 radios in the Knox County system.

Knox County's current radio system has been in use for three decades, and spare parts no longer are available. Breakdowns in recent months have forced dispatchers to use hand-held radios to keep up communications, underscoring the need for a new system. The new system will be Program 25-compatible, which means responders from multiple agencies will be able to talk to each other during emergencies.

Manipulation of the process began early on. Some E-911 Center board members point to an early suggestion that Harris be awarded a "sole source" contract as the original sin that tainted Harris' subsequent selection. Motorola Solutions, which along with Tait Communications lost out to Harris, lodged a formal protest alleging bias. Violations of the state's Open Meetings Act undermined confidence in the board's decision making.

The political battle has claimed at least one casualty. Knox County E-911 Center Executive Director Bob Coker, who has commanded the center for 11 years, tendered his resignation on Monday.

The E-911 board has created a mess. Knox Countians would be well served if Tennessee Comptroller Justin P. Wilson reviewed the process to hold the E-911 board accountable for any possible improprieties in addressing this vital public safety need.


Lowering charter costs holds key to survival



By Lee Hyo-sik

Policymakers are struggling to keep debt-ridden Hyundai Merchant Marine (HMM) afloat to prevent its troubles from spreading to other industries.

The shipping company has become a major target for a government-led restructuring campaign. Other underperforming industries are expected to be named for drastic rationalization in the months to come.

Analysts agree that the country needs a broad, intensive corporate restructuring. But it is not easy for the government to come forward with effective remedies for troubled industries, given the complicated nature of the matter, they say.

While subjecting shipping firms to stringent restructuring, policymakers should extend necessary support to minimize the side effects of a state-led overhaul.

On Sunday, Strategy and Finance Minister Yoo Il-ho jumpstarted the lackluster government-initiated corporate restructuring campaign, saying he would accelerate the overhaul of domestic shippers and shipbuilders.

In particular, Korea's top economic policymaker singled out HMM, which has been reeling under debts of nearly 5 trillion won ($4.35 billion) amid sluggish global cross-border trading, as the first entity that would face state-led restructuring.

Following Yoo's remarks, financial regulators are scheduling a series of meetings with creditor banks of HMM, Hanjin Shipping and other struggling shipping firms, to discuss ways of dealing with the troubled industry.

In November, the government unveiled a blueprint to facilitate the restructuring of five ailing industries  shipbuilding, shipping, construction, petrochemicals and steel.

Since then, the construction, petrochemicals and steel industries have shown signs of a rebound amid improving business conditions.

But the shipping and shipbuilding sectors have continued to remain fragile.

Foreign ship owners hold key

"The government is reigniting its restructuring drive in the wake of the April 13 general election," said Lee Ji-yun, an analyst at Daishin Securities. "But the problem is there isn't much room for policymakers to maneuver, meaning that the government cannot do much for ailing shipping firms."

Lee said the government will likely force HMM and other struggling shippers to dispose of their profitable divisions to raise cash, adding the companies may be asked to merge with one another to create a larger entity.

"HMM, struggling under a debt of 4.8 trillion won, is negotiating with ship owners from Greece and Britain on lowering ship charter fees, but things don't seem to have proceeded well," she said. "If the company fails to iron out its differences with ship owners, it may become insolvent and be subject to court receivership as its creditors have refused to extend credit."

HMM, which has leased 84 cargo ships, is asking ship owners to cut charter costs, as the company signed the contracts when the industry was booming. But costs are now pressuring the company as demand for shipping is declining due to the global economic downturn.

Hanjin Shipping, the shipping unit of Hanjin Group, is also facing a similar problem as its creditors are pressing it to lower charter fees.

"I think even if HMM fails to reduce ship rent costs, the government would not likely let it become insolvent because that would spell much bigger problems," the analyst said. "If the company enters court receivership, this will certainly degrade its ties with ship owners and other business partners, which could tarnish Korea's reputation in the global business community. I don't think the government would allow that. So, the best scenario for HMM is to obtain consensus from ship owners and receive fresh capital from creditors."

HMM officials declined to comment on the latest government moves, stressing that they are doing everything they can to reach an agreement with ship owners in Greece and Britain.

"I am not in a position to comment on what the government does," an HMM spokesman said. "What I can say is that we will successfully complete the ongoing negotiations with our ship owners by June. We will then meet with our creditors in July and enter the creditor-managed workout program in return for fresh credit."

Shipbuilders struggling to survive

Korean shipbuilders have barely secured any new orders this year. They have also incurred huge losses over delays in their offshore plant projects.

The government needs to offer necessary support to enable them to ride out current difficulties on their own, analysts said.

Shipbuilders, which have taken drastic measures to downsize operations and secure cash, have been hit hard by the overall global industry slump.

In addition, Chinese shipbuilders have caught up with Korean manufacturers, making it tougher for local players to win orders abroad.

The companies, which incurred huge losses from offshore plant projects, expect to win new contracts only when global oil prices reach at least $80 a barrel. This suggests that their plants will likely remain idle for the foreseeable future as crude prices now hover below $30. In 2015, Daewoo posted a 2.9 trillion won operating loss, while Hyundai and Samsung each lost 1.36 trillion won and 1.5 trillion won.
SAN FRANCISCOIn her newest IR scene for TeensLoveBlackCocks.com, Ella Nova explains Client Relations.

In the scene, Nova is an interior designer who meets client Jovan Jordan for an initial consultation and explains her methods include getting to know each client on a personal level. When Jovan's wife is late to their appointment, Ella decides to seduce Jovan, proving just how intimate she likes to get.

In addition to the new scene, Nova can also be seen with Bella Rossi in an interview with Wired magazine, which recently visited the set of Kink.com to get a behind-the-scenes look at VR (Virtual Reality) Porn. Ella gives her thoughts about the advantages and challenges of the hottest innovation in the industry. She and Bella also decide to have some good-natured fun with their visitor and give him a first-hand look at the process of filming VR porn. The video can be viewed at behindkink.com.

Nova plans to increase her visibility in the industry once she moves to Los Angeles on May 1.

"I'm serious about my career and being where the action is, she said. I think L.A. will bring nothing but more incredibly hot content for my fans, and more bikini weather for me!"

Directors and producers can book Ella for BG, GG, anal, IR, DP and more through Skyn Talent.
Hyundai Motor Vice Chairman Chung Eui-sun, second from left, shakes hands with Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, third from left, in a conference room at Hyundai Motor's headquarters in Yangjae, southern Seoul, Tuesday.

/ Courtesy of Hyundai Motor



By Jhoo Dong-chan

Hyundai Motor plans to collaborate with Cisco on the development of connected car technology.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins discussed a roadmap for the two companies' collaboration with Hyundai Motor Vice Chairman Chung Eui-sun, Tuesday.

Robbins chose Korea for his first Asian destination after being appointed CEO of the leading IT and network security provider last July. This marks the first time in 12 years for a Cisco CEO to visit the country since former CEO John Chambers' 2004 visit.

In the meeting, Chung and Robbins agreed to cooperate on basic research to analyze the flow of data and verify new technologies for connected cars. They also visited a local startup developing a simulated environment for testing the connected car technology, and discussed how startups would contribute to the project.

"Future connected cars will open new innovations in quality, safety and security, as never before. By expanding time and space, more safety will be guaranteed for our customers. Hyundai Motor will provide new value that goes beyond our customers' expectations in safety, quality and security through cooperating with Cisco," said Chung.

"This collaboration will be a chance to bring closer the Hyundai Motor-led future of connected cars and shift paradigms of new mobility."

The world's fifth-largest automaker announced earlier this month its plan to develop a connected car equipped with Internet access and connected to a wireless local area network to provide additional features.

The technology will not only speed up data transmission but also allow each subsystem inside the vehicle to communicate more effectively. This is essential to enabling connected cars that incorporate the increasingly complex transfer of ever-growing amounts of data in real time, a Hyundai official said.

"This is truly an exciting time to collaborate with Hyundai Motor," said Robbins.

"Digital disruption into the automotive industry is being driven by technologies that are creating new user experiences, and our leadership in the areas of connected vehicles, security and large-scale communication technologies will be crucial to establishing an industry-leading platform. Cisco is honored to join efforts with Hyundai Motor on the connected car initiative and to play our part in the automotive industry's evolution."

Taking over the CEO post from his iconic predecessor John Chambers last year, Robbins has emphasized that future innovation will depend on "the application with the Internet of things."

Experts said the company is collaborating with the automaker to expand its business sectors into Internet networking between common objects including cars.

Founded in 1984, Cisco has focused on developing network-related technologies through mergers and acquisitions and collaboration with local startups since 1990. Last year, the company's sales reached 56 trillion won ($49.2 billion) with an operating profit of $9 billion.
By Nam Hyun-woo



The Korea Development Bank (KDB) will begin the selling process of its subsidiary KDB Capital as early as next month, the bank said Tuesday.



KDB Capital is KDB's investment and corporate loan subsidiary, of which the state-run bank is seeking to sell its 99.92 percent stake.



According to the bank, it will wrap up preliminary due diligence on shortlisted bidders and launch the bidding process by the end of May.



On March 29, KDB shortlisted three entities  domestic financial investor SK Securities Private Equity (PE), global private equity fund Carlyle and the accommodation company City of the Sun, led by the son of now-defunct Myungsung Group Chairman Kim Chul-ho.



KDB Capital's book price reached 597.3 billion won at the end of last year. Market watchers expect KDB won't let go of its 99.92 percent stake for less than 600 billion won and the price may go up to 700 billion won.



"KDB Capital rakes in 100 billion won in profit every year," an official at KDB said. "There is no reason for us to bear a loss by selling the company."



According to the Financial Supervisory Service, KDB Capital's operating profit was 130.6 billion won last year and its net profit reached 99.6 billion won.



Despite its sound profitability, the company was not attractive to investors.



KDB pushed for selling the subsidiary last year, but the effort failed in the preliminary stage, as only one entity  SK Securities PE  placed a preliminary bid.



Market watchers attribute the company's low popualarity to its growing loans classified as substandard or below (SBLs). In 2014, its SBLs stood at 4.86 billion won, but increased to 79.8 billion won nine months later.



Another reason is getting out of the so-called "KDB umbrella." On March 29, the Korea Investors Service (KIS), a local credit rating agency, said in a report that it would lower KDB Capital's credit rating if it is sold to a private equity fund.



"KIS gives an AA- rating to KDB Capital based on its market status, financial soundness and the possibility of KDB, the largest shareholder of KDB Capital, financing the subsidiary in case of an emergency," the report read. "However, benefits from those factors may decrease if the major shareholder is changed."



Despite the woes, the state-run bank is striving to sell KDB Capital in line with the government's policy of redesigning the governance of state-run financial firms



"Since the selling of KDB Capital has already failed once, KDB gave six weeks for preliminary due diligence so that bidders can be more prudent," the official said.



The relevant law stipulates that bidding by a sole competitor is invalid and KDB can choose a buyer if the bidding fails twice. Last year's effort was not counted because it could not make it to the official bidding phase.



"After reviewing whether those preliminary bidders' prices are unfounded or not, the bidding will be held at the end of May."




Yang Sung-won / Courtesy of Sejong Center for the Performing Arts



By Yun Suh-young

Renowned cellist Yang Sung-won will hold a series of chamber music concerts starting April 28 at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts.

The four-part concert series follows last year's well-received Sejong Chamber Series 2015, and will be held April 28, June 9 and 10, Aug. 25 and 26 and Nov. 6. Yang started the series to give audiences a chance to approach chamber music at ease and with depth.

This year's concert includes a lineup of star musicians such as pianists Lim Dong-hyek, Kim Jeong-won and Moon Ick-choo, and violinists Kwun Hyuk-joo, Kim Da-mi and Christel Lee, as well as groups such as Quartet K and Trio Owon.

In the first concert, Yang will perform three pieces by Hungarian composer Kodaly, including Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 4 and Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7. On June 9, as well as three pieces by Mendelssohn, including Piano Trio No. 1 in d minor Op.49. On June 10, poetic and lyrical pieces by Dohnani, Chausson and Brahms are on the set list.

On Aug. 25, Mozart, Beethoven and Schonberg will be introduced with Beethoven's String Quartet No. 6, Op. 18. On Aug. 26, four pieces by French composer Ravel, including Sonata for Violin and Cello in C major, will be performed in celebration of the 130th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and France.

For the last day on Nov. 6, Yang will perform with pianist Enrico Pace, winner of the International Franz Liszt Piano Competition in 1989. The program includes Chopin's Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor, Op. 65 and Rachmaninoff's Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor, Op. 19.

The Korean Cellist graduated from the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris and is currently a cello professor at Yonsei University's School of Music in Seoul, as well as a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music and artistic director of France's Festival Owon at Chateau de la Bourdaisiere. In 2009, he formed the Trio Owon with violinist Olivier Charlier and pianist Emmanuel Strosser, whom he met at the Paris conservatory. They were united in their passion for chamber music with the goal to share their integrated vision of music.

Tickets for Yang Sung-won's Chamber Story are priced at 40,000 won and 50,000 won. For more information, call (02) 399-1000 or visit www.sejongpac.or.kr.
Baek Jong-won(top) and Lee Yeon-bok / Screen capture from YouTube



By Ko Dong-hwan

Star chefs have joined the government's campaign against "no-shows", where people do not turn up for reservations or cancel at the last minute.

Chef-entertainers Baek Jong-won and Lee Yeon-bok, who run restaurants and regularly appear in TV variety shows, had their say in a 90-second video as part of the campaign.

"This is a shame and doesn't make sense," said Baek, CEO of 26 restaurant franchises nationwide. "We are the world's worst in practicing no-show the most. Some 5.6 million entrepreneurs fear the customers breaking their promises."

Lee, a popular Chinese food cook, said: "From the moment we receive a reservation, we prepare our best to welcome the customer. But what if the customer doesn't show up?"





The Fair Trade Commission and the Korea Consumer Agency are running the campaign. The video also features a medical expert, an employee from Korea Railroad Corporation and a hospital patient. They say the no-show practice not only irritates service providers but also customers, who are pushed back by the ill-mannered patrons and cannot use the service. Sometimes it can affect hospital patients in need of desperate treatment, according to a physician on the video from Gangnam Severance Hospital in Seoul.

The FTC and KCA will start distributing the video through websites, local governments and universities Wednesday, Chosun Ilbo said.

A survey the daily did in October showed that 15 percent of reservations at 100 places  restaurants, hair salons, hospitals, express bus terminals and theaters nationwide  were "no-shows."
/Yonhap



By Lee Jin-a

While the number of foreign tourists who receive medical treatment in Korea is increasing, patients have different reasons for it by country, figures show.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare said Monday the total number of foreigners who visited Korea for treatment was 266,501 in 2014. China was top with 79,481 people, followed by the U.S., Russia and Japan.

Most Chinese medical tourists, or 28 percent, came for plastic surgery.

Most patients from the U.S. and Russia - 26 percent and 33 percent, respectively - visited Korea for internal medical treatments. The largest number of Japanese tourists - 28 percent - headed to oriental medicine clinics.

"Many American tourists come to Korea to receive medical treatment because Korea provides a high-quality medical service with relatively low prices," said Han Dong-woo, the chief of the Medical Care Global Marketing Support Bureau at the Korea Health Industry Development Institute, according to the Korea Economic Daily.
By Kim Da-hee

Two Chinese were caught cheating on the test for those seeking to become a tour guide for foreign travelers, Jeju Dongbu Police Station said Monday.

The two, aged 38 and 28, were arrested on suspicion of using phones during the test at Jeju National University on Jeju Island on April 9.

Police said the two spoke with a broker through WeChat, a Chinese app for free messaging and calling, during the state-certificate test. Their cheating was discovered because of sound from their phones.

The suspects allegedly paid 2,500-5,000 yuan ($380-$770) to the broker after failing the test several times.
By Kim Da-hee

Fake luxury bags are being sold in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, where many high-end stores are located.

The tourist police force of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said Monday it booked a woman, surnamed Kim, 35, without detention for allegedly selling fake luxury bags to a foreign tourist.

Police said the Chinese tourist bought three bags for 960,000 won ($843) at Kim's store, which sells secondhand luxury goods in Gangnam-gu. The customer doubted the genuineness of the items because of their price. But the autographs of many celebrities displayed in the shop persuaded her to believe the goods were genuine.

When the tourist returned to China, she discovered the bags were fakes and reported this to Korean police.

Police checked Kim's shop and confiscated 120 million won ($105,042) worth of alleged fakes.

"Fake luxury items were sold secretly to foreign tourists in the Namdaemun and Dongdaemun area," police said. "Sales of counterfeits to foreign tourists have spread to Gangnam."

Police said they will crack down on the sale of fake products because it harms the tourism industry.
By Lee Han-soo

A woman has been fined 5 million won ($4,400) for sexually harassing males, according to the Chosun Ilbo.

Last August, the unidentified woman, 26, sexually harassed a boy, 16, at a subway station, the report said. She groped the boy's arms and shoulders, saying she likes "men with dark skin." The woman got bolder with the teenager, kissing him and touching his buttocks, the paper said.

Her harassment did not stop there. In the same month, she harassed a police officer in his 20s after asking him about his age.

Police arrested her and sent her for trial after she refused the Seoul Western District Court's order to appear.

"I thought all men liked it when a woman touched them," the woman told the court.

The court on Monday fined her 5 million won and ordered her to do 40 hours in a sexual violence program.
President Park Geun-hye on Tuesday renewed her calls for labor reform in her latest push to help create jobs and improve South Korea's economy.

Labor reform "could give a big boost to the economy as a whole, including people with disabilities," Park said in a luncheon meeting with more than a dozen medalists in last month's International Abilympics held in France.

South Korea finished in first place with 14 gold medals, eight silver medals and two bronze medals at the world's largest skills competition among people with disabilities. It marked the sixth straight year that South Korea has finished on top.

In September, labor, management and the government produced a landmark deal to ease labor restrictions. The deal would allow companies to dismiss workers who are either negligent or underperforming.

Still, parliament has yet to endorse the labor reform bills, despite repeated pleas by Park and the business community.

Park also vowed to raise a mandatory ratio for hiring people with disabilities and provide more assistance to companies, which hire people with disabilities.

Under the law, public companies are required to hire people with disabilities to make up at least 3 percent of their labor force. The mandatory ratio for private companies has been set at 2.7 percent since 2014, up from 2.5 percent in 2013, according to government data. (Yonhap)
By Kim Bo-eun



Imagine a film festival without film industry people.



A group of film-related associations has vowed to boycott this year's Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), citing the city government's interference in the organizing committee's operations.



The group of nine associations, including the Korean Film Producers Association, said Monday that it had polled its members regarding the boycott on social media and by phone during the first week of April.



More than half of the members responded and over 90 percent agreed with the move, according to the group.



"This is the first time in 10 years that those in the film industry put their voices together for a cause since the opposition against the reduction of the screen quota for domestic films in 2006," the group said.



"It is regrettable to make such an extreme decision with the festival only six months away. But we film industry people will not participate in this year's BIFF unless its independence and freedom of expression are guaranteed."



Accordingly, concerns are growing for this year's festival, scheduled for Oct. 6 to 15.



The dispute between the Busan Metropolitan Government (BMG) and festival organizers began after the BMG attempted to stop the 2014 screening of a film depicting the Sewol ferry tragedy.



The film titled "The Truth Shall Not Sink with the Sewol" criticizes the government's failed rescue efforts during the 2014 disaster, which resulted in over 300 deaths.



The city government demanded the organizers cancel the screening, citing that it "infringed on political neutrality," but the organizers refused.



It then filed a complaint against the then head of the executive committee Lee Yong-kwan, auditing him and then dismissing him.



However, Lee appointed 68 advisers with voting rights to the committee ahead of a regular general meeting in an attempt to change its internal rules, as this requires consent from two-thirds of its members.



The committee aimed at changing the rules to autonomously select the head of the organization to guarantee autonomy from the city government.



This prompted the BMG to file for a court injunction with the Busan District Court to annul the appointment of the new advisers. The court acknowledged this on April 11, halting the effectiveness of the appointments until a final ruling is made on the case.



The BMG is the festival's largest stockholder and sponsors the majority of its annual budget. It also provides financial and administrative support for the festival.



Busan Mayor Suh Byung-soo, who heads BIFF's organization, offered to resign from the post in February, but has yet to follow through. The group of film-related associations has continued their calls for him to step down.



BIFF was founded in 1996 as Korea's first international film festival.




NEW YORKHighlark Photography has completed an editorial shoot featuring Kaylani Lei. The exotic performer is showcased in Australian lingerie designer Teale Cocos intimates.

When Teale Coco sent me an outfit from her collection, I thought of Kaylani immediately, said photographer Sonic Highlark. She looked great in the all-black occult and fetish inspired lingerie; it shows skin in all the right parts.

To view Kaylani Lei in Highlarks The Shoot: Episode VI, visit Highlark.com.

Sonic Highlarks work may be followed at SonicHighlark.com, on Twitter and on Instagram.
Moon Jae-in, ex-chairman of the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK), pays tribute to the victims of the Sewol accident at Paengmok Harbor, Jindo, South Jeolla Province, Tuesday. / Yonhap Kim Chong-in, the interim leader of the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK), pays respects at the April 19th National Cemetery in Seoul, Tuesday, to mark the anniversary of the democratic uprising in 1960. / Yonhap



By Kim Hyo-jin

After achieving success in last week's general election, the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK) is facing a new challenge.

MPK ex-chairman Moon Jae-in and its interim leader Kim Chong-in are emerging as favorites for the party's new leader who will be tasked with steering it into next year's presidential race.

In the worst case scenario, Moon and Kim may collide over the party leadership, observers said Tuesday.

After the general election, Kim extended his interim leadership by forming an emergency planning committee with party members close to him. He also hinted at the possibility of retaining his position until the 2017 presidential election, saying "If the party wants it, I will stay."

This position brought a backlash from Moon loyalists. They have been disgruntled with Kim's potential abuse of power even during the election when he was recruited as temporary leader of the bewildered party by Moon.

Amid simmering conflicts, speculation is mounting that Moon, the de-facto leader of the party mainstreamers, and Kim, who gained power after a stellar performance in the election, can't avoid wrangling over who will take control of the party.

"The power game will heat up, as the party convention to elect a new chairman approaches," said Choi Chang-ryol, a professor at Yongin University.

"While Kim appears to have the intention to promote himself as party leader, Moon must be looking for one of his close aides to lead the party while he seeks a presidential bid; this will fuel conflict between the two."

He added a factional rift will be visible between the followers of each.

"Those loyal to the legacy of the late President Roh Moo-hyun have had a tighter grip on the party, but those nominated under Kim won quite a lot of seats in the elections, which will lead to an unavoidable collision over the party leadership between the two groups."

Hwang Tae-soon, a political analyst at the Wisdom Center, agreed, saying Kim will be challenged by Moon's confidants who are unsure whether he will support Moon's presidential bid.

"For about the past three months, the MPK has been led by Kim whose conservative ideological tendencies differ from that of the party," he said. "Roh or Moon followers must doubt if Kim will be a helpful partner for Moon in the remaining 22 months before the presidential election."

Kim dismissed the possibility of running to be the new chairman in the party convention slated for May but answered ambiguously whether he would run if the party specifically asked him too during a media interview, Sunday.

The remarks caused an immediate backlash, dividing the party into those who welcome Kim prolonging his chairmanship and those who are against it.

"The interim leadership of Kim helped the party to emerge triumphant in the election," said Kang Byung-won, an MPK lawmaker-elect who routed the ruling party's veteran lawmaker Lee Jae-oh. "The current leadership structure should continue and help unite the party to change the government in the upcoming presidential vote."

However, Jung Cheong-rae, a notable Roh loyalist and Moon's close confidant, denounced Kim, saying "putting forward a chairman without competition could be only possible in somewhere like North Korea."

"I don't think he was our savior. At the time when he joined the party, internal feuds had subsided after a mass exodus of disgruntled lawmakers," he said. "I believe our victory was possible even without his participation."

Kim Young-choon, another lawmaker-elect, defended Kim, saying that the intra-party conflict is being exacerbated by some hardliners.

"Kim's remark shouldn't be interpreted as him seeking party support for the position," he said. "If there are multiple candidates, the competition to elect a new leader will be inevitable anyway, according to party regulations."

Lee Hae-chan, a veteran lawmaker who won a seat in Sejong, submitted a document to rejoin the party Tuesday, heralding further factional conflict.

Lee, a representative Roh follower, ran as an independent candidate in the election after he was excluded from the nominations by Kim.
President Park Geun-hye attends a luncheon meeting with the team for the 9th International Abilympics at Cheong Wa Dae, Tuesday. / Joint press corps



By Kang Seung-woo

President Park Geun-hye needs to talk with the opposition leaders and listen to their opinions about state affairs to avoid political conflicts during the remainder of her term, analysts said Tuesday.

After the ruling Saenuri Party lost their majority in last week's general election, Park faces calls to seek support from opposition parties in pursuit of economic and social reforms.

However, she has yet to show any signs of moving to improve relations with the opposition, as evidenced in remarks she made Monday during a meeting with her senior secretaries.

During the meeting, Park only said that she humbly accepted the results of the elections as representative of the minds of the people and would closely cooperate with the new National Assembly without elaborating further.

"President Park's comments fell short of expectations. I think she has not read the minds of the people yet," said Choi Chang-ryul, a professor of political science at Yongin University.

"She failed to show any signs of introspection about the elections and what she will do to improve ties with the opposition."

Bae Jong-chan, the chief director at political pollster Research and Research, said the election indicates that Park should be open to meeting with the opposition in handling state affairs, suggesting that she benchmark her U.S. counterpart in dealing with the opposition.

"As U.S. President Barack Obama has made efforts to meet with the Republican Party and convince it to back his agenda, she should be prepared to hold discussions with opposition leaders to draw their support for the government's policies," Bae said.

Choi echoed Bae's view, saying that Park needs to change the way she pushes ahead with policies.

"While stressing the importance of economic and labor reforms, she is also required to carefully listen to what the opposition parties are taking issue with and persuade them to follow her direction rather than disregard their opinions," Choi said.

"She needs to avoid being self-righteous about disputed issues with the opposition."

Cho Jin-man, a professor of political science at Duksung Women's University, advised Park to give and take in negotiations with the opposition.

"Under the current situation, President Park needs to meet opposition leaders and make deals with them to advance her agenda," Cho said.

"When the President cannot do this directly, she should consider other available options, including using the senior presidential secretary for political affairs."

There is speculation that a meeting between Park and the opposition leaders will happen in the near future so they can weather difficulties early.

However, Cheong Wa Dae remains cautious over the possible meeting because should it end without any progress being made, it may be seen that Park is under pressure by the opposition, hastening the arrival of a lame-duck session for her.

Meanwhile, President Park paid her respects to those who were killed in the April 19 Revolution, the pro-democracy civil uprising that led to the ousting of Syngman Rhee, the nation's first president.

However, her visit took place two hours before the official ceremony, which Kim Chong-in, the interim leader of the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea, and Justice Party leader Sim Sang-jeung attended.

"It would have been better if the President had attended the ceremony and met with the opposition leaders, so that she could be seen as having made an effort to improve ties with the opposition," Bae said.
By Kim Rahn



Prosecutors at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office said Tuesday that they have started an investigation into Booyoung Group over the construction company's alleged tax evasion.

The probe comes after the National Tax Service (NTS) filed a complaint against the apartment builder and group Chairman Lee Joong-keun after conducting an audit.

According to the tax agency, the company allegedly evaded billions of won in taxes.

Prosecutors said they will summon related executives after reviewing data submitted by the NTS.

They will look into whether the group used overseas units to evade tax, as the NTS uncovered suspicious money transaction between the firm's Seoul headquarters and overseas branches. Booyoung has units in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and the United States.
Guests get together at the Haeundae Grand Hotel during last year's Spring Cherry Blossom Ball organized

by the Busan International Women's Association (BIWA). / Courtesy of BIWA

By John Redmond

The Busan International Women's Association (BIWA) will host the Spring Cherry Blossom Ball and Charity Fundraiser at Haeundae Grand Hotel in Busan, Saturday.

"This elegant and fun event will include welcome drinks, hors d'oeuvres, a five-course dinner with wine, a silent auction and dancing to live music," said BIWA President Marilza Novaes-Card.

The silent auction will offer items donated by artists, restaurants, stores, travel agencies, hotels, beauty salons and private sponsors from the Busan area, according to Novaes-Card.

BIWA was founded in 1965 and has 126 members from 22 countries.

Proceeds from past fundraisers have gone to organizations in Busan and South Gyeongsang Province, including soup kitchens, orphanages, study rooms, scholarships for students, and aid for the elderly and disabled people.

The Cherry Blossom Ball will be held at the Haeundae Grand Hotel, a BIWA sponsor, from 6:30 p.m. to midnight.

Tickets cost 110,000 won for members and 120,000 won for nonmembers.

The dress code is semiformal, black tie optional.

For more information and tickets, contact Lori Turner at loriannturner68@gmail.com or call 010-3686-5557.

For more information on BIWA, visit www.biwa-korea.com.
By John Redmond

The Australian Chamber of Commerce in Korea (AustCham Korea) and the New Zealand Chamber of Commerce (The Kiwi Chamber) will host a Spring BBQ at the residence of the Australian deputy head of mission, Ravi Kewalram, in Itaewon, Seoul, Saturday.

Kewalram began his posting in Seoul in September. He was previously posted to in London (2005-08) and Wellington (1995-99). He has undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in economics, law and international affairs.

AustCham Korea represents Australian and Korean business interests. The organization was formed over 20 years ago with over 250 members. AustCham aims to promote Australian businesses in Korea through providing information, connections and representation.

Launched in 2008, the Kiwi Chamber has some 250 members, with a mission to support New Zealand businesses in Korea and Korean businesses interested in commerce in New Zealand.

Tickets for the BBQ cost 50,000 won for members and 60,000 won for nonmembers and must be paid in advance. Children under 10 will be admitted free.

No parking is available at the venue.

The event will be from midday to 3 p.m.

For more information, e-mail admin@austchamkorea.org or call 02-2010-8832.
By John Redmond



Korean members of global networking site InterNations will meet for a night of Latin culture at SOMOS, a cafe near Hongik University in western Seoul, Saturday.

"This is Seoul's very unique and international place owned by two friends from Spain and Mexico," the organizers said. "There you can find a variety of authentic food and drink from Latin America and Spain."

Guests can enjoy delicious Peruvian delicacies including ceviche and learn how to dance to salsa music.

"Never been dancing or not sure about dancing? Not a problem. There will be live music session by a Latin-Jazz band called Cubanism," the organizers said.

Founded by Germans Malte Zeeck and Phillip von Plato in 2007, InterNations organizes activities in 390 cities around the world.

"In 2015 over 1.25 million members attended almost 40,000 of its events and activities, a growth of 25 percent compared with 2014," InterNations stated.

There will be a 10,000 won fee, which covers the dance lesson and the live band.

Group members will also get a 50 percent discount on dinner.
South Korea's science ministry said Tuesday it has signed an agreement with the military to make joint efforts against a possible electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack from North Korea.

The National Radio Research Agency inked the memorandum of understanding with the Army Engineer School, according to the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning.

It calls for the two sides to share EMP test equipment, develop preventive technologies together and exchange relevant specialists.

An EMP occurs when a nuclear device is detonated at a high altitude, potentially damaging the power grid and making most electronic devices useless.

Concern of a North Korean EMP attack has grown recently in the wake of its fourth nuclear test, which it claimed was hydrogen-based, in January. (Yonhap)
North Korea may hold its party congress in May without foreign guests as it faces toughened international sanctions, a source familiar with the isolated country said Tuesday.



"So far, there have been no noticeable signs that North Korea is engaged in 'invitation diplomacy' for the party congress," the source said.



It added that it is attributable to a fall in North Korea's clout under the sanctions regime following its fourth nuclear test in January.



The Workers' Party of Korea is preparing to hold the first party congress in more than three decades in early May, which will likely highlight Kim's one-man leadership.



The seventh party congress comes as the U.N. Security Council slapped the toughest sanctions to date punishing the North for its nuclear test and long-range rocket launch earlier this year.



A total of 177 delegates from 118 countries including China and Russia attended the sixth party congress held in 1980, according to Seoul's unification ministry. At the fifth congress in 1970, there were no foreign guests.



The upcoming congress will likely serve as a key event that will reveal the North Korean leader's policy direction in his fifth year in power. Kim inherited power following the sudden death of his father Kim Jong-il in late 2011.



The source said that North Korea is likely to present its vision for the future to help the leader consolidate his power.



"North Korea will likely trumpet what it would call a success of the congress, but there is a low chance that tangible accomplishments will come out under the sanctions regime," it added.



An official at the ministry said that the party congress will be held at least for two days with a chance that it would start on May 7. Pyongyang has yet to publicly announce the date for the event.



South Korea said that North Korea is expected to face squeezes in funding the party event as its dollar earnings have taken a hit under the tougher sanctions. (Yonhap)




North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su-yong arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, apparently en route on a rare trip to New York later this week.

Ri was seen arriving at the Beijing Capital International Airport and whisked away in a vehicle belonging to the North Korean ambassador to China, Ji Jae-ryong.

The U.N. plans to hold a high-level signing ceremony on Friday for the so-called Paris Agreement adopted in December to replace the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, and the North Korean foreign minister is scheduled to attend the ceremony, according to the U.N. spokesman's office.

The rare trip by Ri to New York comes amid signs that North Korea may conduct its fifth nuclear test ahead of the North's key party congress early next month.

North Korea has been slapped with tougher international sanctions since early last month over the January nuclear test and launch of a long-range rocket in February. (Yonhap)
A foreigner holds a Starbucks cup in front of a picture of former North Korean leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jung-il in Pyongyang. / Courtesy of Instagram (leehc0415)



By Lee Han-soo



A recent photo of a person holding a Starbucks cup in front of a picture of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has drawn international attention online.

According to the Joongang Ilbo, the picture was taken by a foreigner who recently visited the reclusive state with a Starbucks cup he or she bought in China. The daily said the person was able to bring the cup in without restriction from North Korean customs or police.

Aspects of Western culture seem to taking hold in the nation because European-style cafes  such as "Sunrise Cafe" and "Star Group Tea"  are booming in Pyongyang, according to the daily. But Starbucks has no outlets because of anti-American sentiment, although the daily speculated it will not be long before North Korea allows a franchise to do business.

Famous fashion brand stores such as Zara and H&M operate in government malls.
By Lee Han-soo

Sri Lankan customs officials detained two North Koreans and confiscated about $168,000 from them, according to Yonhap News Agency.

This is the first case of currency confiscation after U.N. Resolution 2270 took effect following North Korea's fourth nuclear test and long-range missile firing.

An anonymous source said the two North Koreans were arrested on March 14 while waiting at a Colombo airport to transfer to a flight to China.

The Sri Lankan government has fined the North Koreans 800,000 won ($700) for violating domestic customs laws.

The North Koreans claimed the money was wages they and their co-workers earned on a construction site in Oman.

Kye Chun Yong, the North Korean ambassador to India, has requested the release of the two and the money.

It is estimated that some 50,000 to 60,000 North Koreans work in 50 countries, including China and Russia and those in the Middle East, to earn foreign currency for Pyongyang.
By Lee Seong-hyon

The latest U.N. sanctions on North Korea, despite the alleged "toughest ever" severity, despite the Chinese "full" commitment, and despite the "high-profile" North Korean exodus episodes, still leave much uncertainty. It's because China sees that sanctioning North Korea eventually ends up sanctioning itself. It's an intrinsic dilemma China hasn't fully sorted out yet.

Although statistics vary, the latest government figures show that China takes 84 percent of North Korea's total international trade (both inbound and outbound combined). It is also estimated that over 70 percent of foreign currency that arrives in North Korea is serviced via Chinese banking networks. That's why experts believe China is the most important stakeholder when it comes to effectively sanctioning North Korea.

It should be fair to note that the much-touted "Chinese influence on North Korea" is an overused term media outlets uncritically use. For sure, China has economic influence over its neighbor, but not necessarily political influence. This distinction has often eluded attention.

The interesting part is that when China exercises its economic influence on North Korea, for example, by implementing tougher U.N. economic sanctions and thus pressuring North Korea, China's political influence on North Korea diminishes. It's an irony China has learned over the years. It's an irony outsiders still hard to appreciate.

Beijing doesn't regard Pyongyang as an enemy state. China fears that if it pressures North Korea too hard, the North will turn around and become explicitly hostile toward China. That's why Beijing has been always careful when it comes to deciding on sanctions. It doesn't want sanctions to become an eventual "shoot-one's-own-foot" exercise.

Actually, sanctioning North Korea will have a literal impact of sanctioning China, by hitting especially the economy of Chinese cities along the North Korean border. Take Dandong for instance. It's a city of 780,000 population in Liaoning Province. It is the prime Sino-North Korea trade gateway, singlehandedly siphoning 70 percent of the entire bilateral trade.

My preliminary research shows that anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of Dandong people's livelihoods, in one way or another, are tied to Sino-North Korean border trade. This includes natural resources, seafood, tourism, restaurants, North Korean herbs, financial transactions, and not to mention, smuggling. Many Chinese apparel companies that outsource their businesses to North Korea's cheap labor are based in Dandong too. For those individuals, the border trade is an important part of their business. For some of them, it is their main lifeline. It is understandable therefore that local people are not necessarily enthused about the U.N. sanctions. As one Dandong businessman put it: "Whatever [U.S. President] Obama does about North Korea at the U.N., it has nothing to do with me."

Moreover, Dandong is situated at the hub of China's Northeastern region, which is regarded as China's economic backwater. It is among the least economically developed areas. The Chinese government has been ambitiously pushing forward an economic upgrading project in the region, linking the other major cities of Changchun, Jilin and Tumen (often referred to as the "Chang-Ji-Tu" Project). As the area is bordered with North Korea, without the North's involvement, the project is unlikely to succeed. The U.N. sanctions would mean to economically disengage Pyongyang Korea. For Beijing, it would mean to undermine Chinese economic interests.

Furthermore, there is a well-established bureaucratic arm-wrestling in China between the central government and local provinces. Even if the central government sends out directives to them to strictly enforce the U.N. mandates, it's questionable whether the local governments, such as Dandong, will faithfully carry them out, when doing so would be directly hurting the local economy. The Chinese proverb "the heaven is high and the emperor is far away" indicates the limitations to the authority's reach to far away regions. Dandong is enough far away.

That's not all. The U.N. sanctions require countries to inspect all cargo entering or leaving North Korea. That's a call of duty hard to actualize in reality. At the Dandong customs office, it takes two to three hours to pack a truckload of containers. Koreans, regardless of being from the North or South, are known to display a talent to pack as many items as possible into a limited space, by binding items as tightly as possible. It is literally impossible for customs inspectors to thoroughly check over 100 trucks a day by rummaging through all the individual items to check banned goods. So they resort to sampling.

Analysts agree that for the sanctions to be effective, first, they need to be robustly implemented for at least six months; second, the price for the North Korean daily commodities should double from their current price level. Only then, will the North Korean regime feel pinched. However, when the people's livelihoods of China's major gateway city to North Korea is tied to trade, and when local officials' promotion criteria is significantly based on local GDP growth, and when Beijing itself sees limiting its neighbor's economic activities as undermining its own interests, the effectiveness of the U.N. sanctions stands to be undermined too.

Lee Seong-hyon is a research fellow at the Sejong Institute. He can be reached at sunnybbsfs@gmail.com.
By John J. Metzler

UNITED NATIONS  Calling for an end to "human trafficking and other forms of human slavery," British Cardinal Vincent Nichols presented a stunning testimony against the "resurgence of slavery" where up to 21 million people are affected by the scourge. As Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Nichols has led the fight against global human trafficking which, given the chaotic world situation, and especially displaced migrant flows, is actually now on the rise.

While there's no precise legal definition of the contemporary crime, modern slavery and trafficking generally refer to people who are held against their will, isolated, and regularly exploited with negligible compensation. While concerning people forced into sexual slavery, the definition also extends to some unpaid and exploited farm labor and some fishing fleet crews. Organized crime plays a strong but not exclusive role in the exploitation; there is equally a nexus with international terrorist groups, according to officials.

Sponsored by the Holy See Mission to the UN as well as the Santa Marta Group which is an alliance of international police chiefs and bishops from around the world, the conference focused on battling human trafficking and modern day slavery. The Santa Marta group grew from a partnership between the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales and the London Metropolitan police.

The group has the strong endorsement and commitment from Pope Francis who in a message to the conference, described human trafficking as "a scourge throughout the world today."

Significantly many of the victims will fear going directly to the police, but will nonetheless go to church parishes to seek help. According to Cardinal Nichols, many are "locked away" and are utterly isolated and cut off. He stated that a key element became pastoral care and building trust using the resources of the church as well as close coordination with law enforcement.

Cardinal Nichols stressed that human trafficking reduces victims to "the status of a commodity" and its victims pose a "deep shame to the human family." He called for "effective international cooperation" to fight the growing threat.

Kevin Hyland, Britain's Anti-Slavery Commissioner, advised that "the anti-slavery movement has so far failed," with illegal profits now reaching $150 billion which come on the back of "the untold suffering of millions globally." Commissioner Hyland focused on how terrorist groups such as Islamic State (ISIL) and Nigeria's Boko Haram have profited from human slavery as both a tool of intimidation as well a profit maker.

Boko Haram Islamic militants regularly kidnaps girls and gives them the grim choice of either enforced marriages or being sold into slavery. The Boko Haram method is equally used by ISIL terrorists who capture Yazadi girls and sell them into slavery.

Boko Haram is a Sunni Muslim group active in Nigeria who is most notorious for the mass kidnap of 276 girls from Chibok in 2014. The abducted children, 219 who are still in captivity, are yet to be found. Recently Islamic militants released a video showing some of the kidnapped girls.

Besides Boko Haram terrorists, other criminal gangs in Nigeria abduct girls primarily from the south and send them on to Europe often for prostitution.

According to Hyland, the issue goes beyond sexual slavery to also sometimes include farm labor which is used and abused against the will of the workers. Dealing with cases of forced labor, and human trafficking, he stressed, "there's no town in the United Kingdom where slave labor is not used."

Large numbers of sexually trafficked women come from Brazil, Ukraine and the Philippines, and Thailand.

Actress Mira Sorvino, a UN Goodwill Ambassador, made a passionate appeal for combating human trafficking. Nonetheless the real issue remains that modern slavery has a very wide, elastic, and broad brush definition. While Sorvino concedes, "there is no legal definition of human trafficking," she points to the need for an inclusive definition. This may make sense morally and politically, but failing a precise legal definition, can then fall short on the prosecution side.

Given the chaotic global situation and refugee flows, the conditions favoring abductions and oppression are on the rise. Without question the 21 million people enduring modern slavery is all the more stunning, given we live in 2016.
By Park Hee-kwon

International tourism has rapidly expanded over the past 60 years to become one of the fastest growing sectors of the world economy. The year 2015 was yet another record-breaking year for global tourism. The U.N. World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) reported that international tourist arrivals grew by 4.4 percent in 2015 to reach a whopping 1,184 million. The total impact of the tourism sector on the world economy in 2014 was approximately $7,580 billion, or 9.8 percent of world GDP. As the economic outlook for the near future remains bleak, the robust performance of the tourism sector provides the global economy with much-needed vitality and thus greatly contributes to worldwide economic growth and job creation.

Reflecting the worldwide trend, Korea's tourism industry has experienced a boom of its own in recent years. Between 2009 and 2014, the number of foreign visitors nearly doubled from 7.8 million to 14.2 million. The impact of the thriving tourism industry on the Korean economy is palpable. In 2015, the travel and tourism sector made up 5.1percent of national GDP and directly generated 561,000 jobs, or 2.2 percent of total employment.

In spite of the rapid rise of inbound tourists, Korea still lags far behind other Asia-Pacific countries. Compared to Korea's 14.2 million visitors (2014), Hong Kong drew 27.8 million arrivals while Thailand and Singapore registered 24.8 million and 15 million visitors each. As a whole, the Asia-Pacific region recorded a year-on-year increase of 13 million international tourists in 2015, reaching a total of 277 million visitors.

Worryingly, international visitors to Korea declined for the first time in 12 years in 2015. This slump was mostly due to the outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) _ the massive cancellations of flights and hotels in June and July of last year were a hard hit for tourism-related revenues. Although the sector has bounced back relatively fast, it is clear that the domestic tourism industry is vulnerable to external conditions such as the deteriorating global economic situation, the slowing of the Chinese economy, the spread of epidemics, and the increasingly fierce competition with other travel destinations in the region.

The growth potential for Korea's tourism sector is still very high, and there are many initiatives that could help put Korea more firmly on the map of international destinations. Creating a more diverse range of tourism programs, boosting Korea's advantage as a business and leisure travel destination, and promoting niche sectors such as medical tourism are some of the steps that might enhance Korea's competitiveness.

For one, the Korean tourism sector should make an effort to develop differentiated tourism products that attract repeat-visitors with diverse needs and expectations. A standard sightseeing program focusing on shopping and gastronomy in cosmopolitan Seoul? This will definitely be attractive for, say, a group of young female tourists in their 20s and 30s. But what about other types of travelers, such as senior citizens who prioritize rest, intrepid adventure travelers seeking new challenges, or families with children who would prefer a farm holiday close to nature? A well-focused effort on developing a wide range of tourism programs will strengthen the base of Korea's tourism industry. Additionally, it may help to attract more tourists in the low winter season, and encourage more visits to the heretofore rather than neglected provinces and small towns.

Another field of strategic growth potential is the meeting, incentives, conventions and exhibitions/events industry. Since the late 2000s, the Korean government has actively pursued a policy of promoting this industry by hosting a variety of international events and supporting the growth of the sector. In 2014, 636 international meetings were held in Korea, thus making it the fourth hosting country for these kinds of events according to the Union of International Associations. Korea's superb transport infrastructure, world-class readiness, and high-quality cultural resources all make it a very competitive destination for today's business travelers. Nowadays, a rising segment of business travelers have flexible schedules and thus look to add leisure days onto business trips. Offering this group just the right mix of business and leisure could considerably boost tourism revenues.

Recently, Korea has also experienced rapid growth in medical tourism, a fast-expanding sector with a continuous and significant growth potential. Ever-longer life expectancy, rising healthcare costs in developed countries, and globalization of modern medicine all contribute to the rise of patients willing to travel for healthcare. In the case of Korea, what initially started with cosmetic surgery driven by the K-wave boom has now expanded into a wide range of medical procedures. The potential for further growth is still high in Korea, given the world-class quality and price competitiveness of domestic medical care. The government can further boost the medical tourism market by promoting innovation in the medical industry, strengthening the legal framework for practices in medical tourism, and attracting more foreign investment in medical infrastructure.

Without a question, today's tourism industry is an economic powerhouse that acts as a major driving force for economic development. In these times of economic uncertainty and high unemployment, the Korean government should take the necessary steps to create a strong high value-added tourism industry by maximizing the country's cultural and natural resources and creating new resources by innovation. The implementation of a coherent long-term growth strategy for tourism, together with a strong drive to improve cultural contents such as K-pop, TV series and movies, will go a long way toward consolidating Korea's status as a global destination.

Park Hee-kwon is ambassador to the Kingdom of Spain and Permanent Representative to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO).
The prosecution summoned an executive of Oxy Reckitt Benckiser, the large producer of humidifier disinfectants, Tuesday, for questioning over deaths from the use of the disinfectants. Prosecutors reportedly plan to summon nearly 100 officials from manufacturers implicated in the "humidifier murder'' case.



On Monday, Lotte Mart, a disinfectant supplier, offered an official apology and vowed to provide due compensation to the victims and their families. Lotte Mart was the first company to apologize and announce a compensation plan among the manufacturers and sellers involved in the scandal since it emerged in August 2011.



The key point in this investigation is to prove the existence of intentionality on the part of the manufacturers. In other words, the probe will be focused on confirming if they had produced and distributed the disinfectants in question, even knowing they were harmful. The prosecution is expected to indict company officials on charges of accidental homicide if their intentionality is proven.



Health authorities shocked the nation in 2011 by announcing that polyhexamethylene guanidine (PHMG), a chemical contained in humidifier disinfectants, was responsible for severe lung illnesses that claimed the lives of more than 100 people. The (Korea) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged 530 victims, including 143 deaths, in 2014 after its own investigation, but civic groups claim that 1,281 people were victimized, including 225 deaths, mainly pregnant women and children.



Lotte Mart sold Wiselect, its private-brand sterilizer, between November 2006 and August 2011. Among those who used the Lotte product, 22 people died. Oxy was blamed for 103 deaths.



The debacle involving the humidifier sterilizer is attributed to the government's slow response and companies' shirking of responsibility.



The 2011 epidemiological investigation pinpointed disinfectants as the cause of the deaths, but the health authorities didn't do anything except ban their sales. Although victims filed a complaint in 2012, the prosecution halted its investigation just because the final epidemiological results had not come out.



Oxy, in particular, is suspected of trying to fabricate the results of a test it entrusted to a university lab to refute the government's investigation results. Circumstantial evidence points strongly to acts of bribery.



What is needed first is to let the victims and their families receive due compensation, although the apology was belated. That's the least the companies can do to lessen the pain inflicted on the victims.



Prosecutors should get to the bottom of the case to confirm whether Oxy and other companies sold the "murderous disinfectants'' despite knowing of their harmfulness, and then have them pay the rightful price.




Park needs healthier Cheong Wa Dae-Assembly relations



President Park Geun-hye's first post-election message Monday fell short of widespread expectations of an apology for her Saenuri Party's defeat. From the brief message, it was not hard to foresee that President Park will retain her unilateral governing style even after the election where her party was largely outnumbered and demoted to the second rank in the National Assembly.



In a cursory tone, she briefly said during a cabinet meeting that the election was an occasion to think about the people's sentiment and that she will work with the new legislature. It remains to be seen whether there is any sincerity in her reconciliatory gesture toward the Assembly, which she has openly blasted for neglecting her reform agenda.



The latest survey published Monday showed that Park's job approval rating has tumbled to the lowest level since she arrived at Cheong Wa Dae in 2013 as the country's first female president. Park's support stood at 31.5 percent, down 8.1 percentage points from the previous week.



The President should be mindful of the people's anger toward her administration as she comes to grips with the new environment of the incoming parliament. Retaining a hostile perception of the Assembly will not work in her favor in the opposition-dominated 20th National Assembly. The main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK) rejected Monday a request from the Saenuri Party to cooperate on passing heavily disputed economic and labor bills proposed by the Park administration.



If she is serious about "thinking about people's sentiment," Park needs to start implementing the fundamental changes that people expect of her during the remainder of her term which ends in February 2018. She has no more time to waste in blaming others for her own failure to help the country move forward.



Above all, the election results show that the people will no longer tolerate her heavy-handedness, best exemplified by her questionable choice of policy priorities such as state-authored history textbooks.



People want to see a healthier relationship between Cheong Wa Dae and the legislature. For this, the President needs to alter her outdated perception of the legislature and give the National Assembly the level of respect it deserves as a partner in governance. From now on, Park needs to use the language of compromise and cooperation, rather than that of confrontation and mistrust toward parliament.



The President should also be more forthcoming about more frequent interaction with the opposition. She should meet with the opposition leaders and engage in open and productive discussions with them about pressing issues, such as North Korea and the economy.



President Park and the National Assembly have one thing in common in that their ultimate responsibility is to advance the nation for the benefit of the people.



If she keeps up her hostile attitude toward the Assembly, she will further lose support from the people. Without the people's support, she will not be able to lead the country effectively. This is not a good situation either for her presidential legacy or for the country.




LG Electronics turbo freezing system



By Lee Min-hyung

LG Electronics said Tuesday it has won a cooling system contract in Saudi Arabia, expanding its global presence as a business-to-business (B2B) freezing system manufacturer.

Under the deal, the electronics giant will provide its turbo freezers to the country's government complex that is some 900,000 square meters in size. The company, however, did not disclose the exact terms of the contract.

The company will provide its LG Chiller, especially used for large spaces or for high-rise buildings such as factories or gymnasiums. Starting in June, the company said it will supply cold water and cooling systems for the country's public offices and ancillary buildings.

LG Electronics partnered with Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Finance to win the order, accelerating its bid to strengthen its footing in the region. Earlier, it started exporting its turbo freezers to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2009. The company aims to reach double-digit growth in the global cooling system market this year.

"We have achieved the recent feat in recognition of our energy-efficient and eco-friendly cooling systems," said Lee Jae-seong, senior vice president at LG Electronics' air solutions business division, in a statement. The LG Chiller air conditioning system has reduced energy consumption by double-compressing refrigerants, thereby significantly increasing air conditioning efficiency, according to LG Electronics.

The turbo coolers have received certification from North American authorities including the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute and the Electrical Testing Laboratory, according to the company.
KEPCO Chairman Cho Hwan-ik, left, poses with Samsung SDI CEO Cho Nam-seong after signing an agreement to jointly boost energy-related businesses at KEPCO's headquarters in Naju, South Jeolla Province, Tuesday.

/ Courtesy of Samsung SDI



By Kim Yoo-chul



Samsung SDI reached an agreement with Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) to jointly promote energy storage systems (ESS).



The battery affiliate of Samsung announced in a statement, Tuesday, it had signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the country's dominant electricity supplier.



The agreement calls for Samsung SDI to provide it batteries for overseas projects operated by KEPCO. The latter will also help the former to expand its ESS business by including the affiliate in biddings related to ESS.



The statement added the bilateral partnership will further be expanded into infrastructure-oriented businesses such as the development of smart homes, farms, factories and towns.



"Samsung SDI is eyeing countries in Southeast Asia and North America to export various ESS for use in frequency mediation and energy-intensive projects," said the statement.



The monetary value of the agreement is unknown.



Energy storage is playing a key role in development of a low-carbon electricity system supplying flexibility and balance to the grid and providing a backup for intermittent renewable energy.



Government agencies and private companies are increasing spending on ESS, as they improve the management of distribution networks, reduce costs and improve efficiency.



Batteries are a core component of ESS.



SDI signed an MOU with ABB of Switzerland in March last year to jointly develop and promote ESS for use in microgrid networks. It also struck a similar deal with Duke Energy, the largest power generator in North America.
The United States government would continue to assist Sri Lanka with their negotiations with the IMF and the debt restructuring

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The SLFP does not condone the continuation of the Emergency Regulations (The Public Security Ordinance) more than a day necessary

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PRESS RELEASE

China: We Are Prepared for Obamas War; We Can Draw a Red Line To Make This Clear to Washington

April 18, 2016 (EIRNS)The Chinese Communist Party paper Global Times today issued an op-ed titled: "Set red line for U.S. to avoid military clash in S. China Sea." The author, Wang Wenmen, points to U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carterss antics visiting aircraft carriers in the South China Sea, the U.S. military build-up, and constant deployment of military ships and planes "under the guise of maintaining the freedom of navigation." and Wang calls for China to

"set a red line for the U.S. and make clear to Washington, that if it continues to infringe on Chinas core interests by challenging Chinas territorial claims and not respecting its sovereign rights, it should be aware of a dangerous showdown with China."

The article calls for China to adopt "more active measures" to counter the provocations, and warns that,

"if the U.S. acts on its will to actually go to war with China, the Chinese military will not hesitate to take countermeasures."

It concludes:
PRESS RELEASE

Reps. Jones, Lynch, and Massie Urge Obama to Release 9/11 Papers Before His Trip to Saudi Arabia

April 18, 2016 (EIRNS)On April 15, Representatives Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Stephen Lynch (D-Massachusetts), and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) wrote to President Obama, saying that,

"[we] urge, in the strongest possible terms, that the 28 redacted pages of the Congressional Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 2001 be released to the American public before you depart to visit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia next week..."

Today, a press release was issued by the Congressmen, titled, "Jones, Lynch, and Massie Urge President Obama to Release 9/11 Papers," reiterating that Obama should release the 28 pages before going to Saudi Arabia this week. There are now 44 co-sponsors on House Resolution 14, initiated by these three Congressmen, calling for de-classification of the 28 pages.

Excerpts from todays press release:

"I have read these pages and can say that while their release will not harm national security, the contents are critical to our foreign policy moving forward. I think its important that President Obama release the 28 pageslike he promised the 9/11 families he would do on multiple occasions  before his trip to Saudi Arabia so that the American people can know the truth and his trip is as fruitful as possible," said Congressman Jones.

"We owe it to the families of the innocent victims and to the American people to provide a full accounting of the circumstances surrounding the September 11th terrorist attacks. Declassifying the 28 pages is an important step towards answering some of the questions that remain and it is a matter of justice and good governance to do so in 2016," said Congressman Lynch.

"President Obama should immediately declassify these pages. Before we involve ourselves in Syria, elected officials and their constituents need to know more about the events leading up to September 11. Understanding what enabled this tragedy to occur is fundamental to drafting a strategy for the Middle East," said Rep. Massie. "I also challenge my colleagues in Congress to read the pages on behalf of their constituents and immediately cosponsor H. Res 14."

Last year, Congressmen Jones, Lynch, and Massie introduced H. Res. 14, a resolution to call on President Obama to declassify the 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry that were initially classified by President George W. Bush and have remained classified under President Barack Obama. The resolution states that declassification of the pages is necessary to provide the American public with the full truth surrounding the tragic events of September 11, 2001, particularly relating to the involvement of foreign governments.

Link to the press release
PRESS RELEASE

Terry Strada Interview on CNN April 18: Massive Evidence of Saudi Support for 9/11 Terrorists and Jihadis Today

April 18, 2016 (EIRNS)On CNN today, Terry Strada, leader of the families demanding justice for the 9/11 victims, was interviewed on the refusal by the Bush and Obama executives to release the 28 pages still classified, of the 2002 report by the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11.

The interview started by referencing Saudi Arabias threat to pull all of their investments out of U.S. Treasuries, if the U.S. government allows attention and action against Saudi Arabia. The interviewer immediately referenced the 28 pages, which document the role of overseas governments in 9/11.

Strada attacked Secretary of State John Kerry, for opposing the passage of the Congressional JASTA bill (Justice Against State Sponsors of Terrorism Act) on false grounds. She emphasized that there is massive official Saudi support involved, including the money trail to the 9/11 terrorists. She said that all of the leads go back to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Strada was asked why Bush and Obama refused to release the 28 pages, and she said that she, herself, cannot interpret their subjective motives. She concluded by emphasizing that the release of the 28 pages will shed light on the continued Saudi support for jihadi terrorists, such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
PRESS RELEASE

Syria Peace Process Unraveling; Is Obamas Plan B Next?

April 18, 2016 (EIRNS)There are more and more reports in the Western media claiming that the Russia/U.S.-brokered truce in Syria is in the process of unravelling, and blame is most often laid at the feet of the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad and its Russian backers for allegedly violating the ceasefire and for refusing to accept the demand that Assad must leave before any political transition is agreed on. European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini was in Teheran over the weekend, calling on Iran to pressure Assad to accept "a political process that is successful." Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said that Tehran has no "red line" that would block Mr. Assads eventual departure. However,

"Everybody should get this message... They need to be serious. They need to try and end the conflict in Syria rather than to try and score geopolitical points... But it seems to us that Saudi Arabia has yet to understand the need and the imperative of peace and tranquility in this region. When they are ready, we will be ready too,"

he said.

The Saudi-backed opposition in Geneva seems to be on the verge of declaring the truce over and the talks at an end. In an internet message to fighters on the ground, Asaad al-Zoubi, chief negotiator for the Saudi-sponsored High Negotiations Committee, said there was a limit to how long he would negotiate if government advances continued and no progress developed on the opposition demand that Assad must go.

"We will not stay for long negotiating... In the event a missile targets them [rebels], they have to retaliate with ten missiles," said Zoubi. He added that rebels "must gain control of as many areas as possible, they must take advantage of the ceasefire as the regime has done."

Mohamed Alloouhs, a leader of the Saudi-backed Army of Islam and also a member of the HNC, called for rebel forces to "retaliate" against government forces that allegedly attack civilians, but, when questioned by Sputnik, backed away from any assertion that the truce should be ended.

The collapse of negotiations is exactly the condition mooted as necessary for Obamas "Plan B"arming the opposition with MANPADS, which could be used to shoot down Russian planes. Al Monitor, in its Week in Review column posted yesterday, warns that Plan B needs to be shelved, or better yet, shredded right away, for reasons including the fact that the so-called moderate groups to whom the CIA would be supplying more lethal weapons often run with Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al Nusra.

"The thought of advanced arms, including anti-aircraft weapons, falling into the possession of sectarian Salafi groups such as Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, which are fellow travelers with Jabhat al-Nusra, and are backed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, should be something to be avoided, not discussed,"

Al Monitor writes.
The Takata Corp. air bag recall has become so massive that vehicle owners might wait months for repairs, which leaves many struggling to figure out how to get around in the meantime.

Dealerships are paying for rental cars, but some need to be pushed into offering them, customers complain. And drivers under age 25 or with weak insurance coverage or credit say they are encountering snags when they get to the rental counter.

As the largest automotive recall in U.S. history, the Takata air bag problem is one that owners cant ignore. Takata air bag inflaters in 28.8 million cars can propel metal shrapnel into drivers and passengers. Ten people in the U.S. have died from such explosions and more than 100 have been injured.

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The recall may expand by 85 million cars, trucks and sport utility vehicles if Takata cant prove that the inflaters in those cars are safe, regulators said last week. Vehicles produced for model years 2000 through 2015 by 16 different automotive brands are among those affected by the initial recalls and the potential expansion.

San Fernando Valley writer Amanda Biers-Melcher contacted her Honda dealership after receiving a notice last month that her 2012 Fit was part of the Takata recall. Biers-Melcher said she briefly thought about borrowing her mothers seldom-used Saab until she found that it, too, had faulty Takata air bags.

Biers-Melcher said she was stunned when a dealership employee told her she could keep driving her car.

The letter I got said I could be killed driving it, so that wasnt happening, she said. Biers-Melcher said she called up some of her old New York City feistiness and eventually got a referral to a rental car agency, but the process left her upset.

The first letter about this problem arrived the Friday before Easter, she said. Why did it take so long to tell us? They should be pro-actively reaching out to customers and making this as easy as possible.

Its incumbent upon Honda to fix the problem and make sure that my son has a safe car to drive.  Steve Elster of Walnut Creek, who said he had trouble arranging a substitute car for his 16-year-old

Walnut Creek resident Steve Elster said his 16-year-old son, Eli, was denied a rental car even though the familys 2012 Honda Fit, which the son drives, was on the recall list. Rental car companies often wont rent to drivers under age 25, or do so with special surcharges.

Elster said he tried out several proposals, including a loaner for his son from the dealerships inventory, but got nowhere.

Its very frustrating, Elster said, we bought a car. We are entitled to a car without a defective air bag and its incumbent upon Honda to fix the problem and make sure that my son has a safe car to drive.

American Honda spokesman Chris Martin said the companys dealers are authorized to provide loaners cars to teen drivers, but only to the registered owners of the recalled vehicles. Elsters son wasnt the registered owner of the problem Fit.

After much negotiating, the Elsters were able to rent an SUV that only the parents are allowed to drive, and Eli will borrow his mothers beloved, non-recalled Rav4.

Still other drivers have complained that they are required by rental car companies to put down a security deposit, which comes directly out of their bank accounts if they use debit cards; people with low credit limits might run into difficulties with a chunk of that amount tied up by the rental car company.

Many owners also are griping about being pressured to pay for insurance if their own policies dont cover damage to rental cars.

Consumer advocates have watched the still-developing Takata recall with growing and widespread dissatisfaction.

Jamie Court, president of Santa Monica based Consumer Watchdog, said the recall is a disgrace for the automakers and for the U.S. government.

Car manufacturers and their dealers should absolutely adopt standards to make getting a loaner or a rental as easy as possible, Court said.

They offered me a Kia loaner. RU kidding me? I pay monthly for a BMW, not a Kia!  Tatianna Klein of Miami

Then there are drivers who have other complaints about the experience: Some luxury car owners are irate over getting more-pedestrian rental vehicles.

Tatianna Klein of Miami took to Twitter to vent about getting a Kia loaner car to fill in for her BMW while she waits for an air bag replacement.

They offered me a Kia loaner. RU kidding me? Klein tweeted. I pay monthly for a BMW, not a Kia!

The severity of the parts shortage depends on a drivers car and location.

Parts to repair your vehicle are not currently available, said one typical letter, this one from General Motors to a Saab owner. Federal regulators have set a schedule for completion of air bag replacements ranging from Dec. 31 of this year to Dec. 31, 2019.

Moreover, regulators have set up a complicated pecking order on who gets their air bags replaced first.

The four priority groups are based on the vehicles age, bag failure rate and the amount of time it has spent in areas of high absolute humidity. High humidity makes the air bags more likely to fail in a potentially deadly way.

That means a New Orleans resident driving a rusted 2003 Pontiac Vibe has a higher priority on the list than a late model BMW luxury car owner in Southern California.

Those at Priority 4, or the bottom end of the list, may have more reasons than most to be irked. Their air bags were supposedly already fixed, but with more defective parts. Those cars arent required to be fixed until the end of 2019.

Twitter: @RonWLATimes

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CVS Health will spread its curbside pickup service to drugstores nationwide this year, as traditional retailers continue to hone their reputations for convenience and fight fierce competition online.

The nations second largest drugstore chain has partnered with the Palo Alto, Calif.-based technology firm Curbside Inc. to create CVS Express, a program that lets shoppers buy products with an app and then pick them up about an hour later at a nearby store, where an employee will deliver them to the car.

CVS Health Corp. launched the free curbside pickup service in December at a dozen stores in San Francisco and has since expanded it to Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C. The company offers curbside pickup services at 361 stores but has room to grow with more 7,900 retail locations nationwide. It expects to roll out the program in a majority of those stores nationally by year end.

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The CVS partnership with Curbside marks an extension of a trend that began a few years ago with other retailers. Target, Wal-Mart and several grocery chains also have developed curbside pickup programs.

These companies are blending the edge in convenience that they gain from having many locations with online shopping to compete better with the likes of online retailers like Amazon.com, which is expanding a grocery delivery service in several markets. By converting their own stores into pickup locations, retailers avoid the extra costs of packing and shipping, and they can offer more flexibility for time-starved shoppers.

CVS and its major competitors Walgreens and Rite Aid all run thousands of stores with prescription drive-thrus. But CVS is the only one offering a curbside service for items purchased outside the pharmacy.

It developed CVS Express, which cannot be used for prescriptions, after testing a program in which the customer bought online and then had to enter the store to pick up the products. That wasnt as compelling for customers, said Executive Vice President Helena Foulkes.

We knew we could help the people who are in a rush, or with children or are just sick and cant get out of their car for whatever reason, so we felt like this was a bigger innovation for the consumer, Foulkes said.

After placing an order, the CVS customer will receive a text or email when it is ready. The app then notifies the store when the customer arrives to pick it up.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nations largest food retailer, announced last week it was adding eight new markets to its free curbside grocery pickup including Austin, Texas, and Charleston, S.C. Wal-Mart operates more than 4,500 namesake stores in the U.S. By the end of April, it will offer the service in roughly 200 stores in 30 markets.

Wal-Mart says 90% of its curbside customers are repeat users. One of the most popular times for customers to order groceries online is between 8 and 9 p.m., or after many parents have put their children to bed. The company said it also sees a healthy number of orders in the middle of the night.

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I absolutely love that were able to offer convenience and blend into our customers lives when they need us most, Chief Executive Doug McMillon told investors in a prerecorded transcript in February.

Target Corp., based in Minneapolis, has also teamed up with Curbside and is testing the service in five markets that cover 122 stores, says Eddie Baeb, a company spokesman. Those markets include Chicago, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles and the New York and New Jersey metro area.

These moves come as Amazon.com is expanding its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service in markets such as Seattle, Brooklyn, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Sears Holdings Corp., which operates stores under Sears and Kmart names, was one of the first to roll out the curbside service a few years ago. In 2014, it expanded the service to all 704 Sears stores. It also offers it at more than 100 Kmart locations.

These curbside services are still experimental for retailers and could be scaled back if they dont yield a profit or eventually break even, said Sucharita Mulpuru, a retail analyst for Forrester.

Even CVS Health said it hasnt figured out yet how it will make money by offering the service. Foulkes said the company hopes CVS Express will pay for itself by increasing the number of store visits.

Mulpuru said that retailers have to invest in concepts like curbside services that may dilute profitability but could help them keep their market share over the long term, as Amazon and other competitors vie for their business.

The competitive landscape is so wicked in retail, and there are so many other places a shopper could buy, we cant force our customers to do anything they dont want to do, she said.

Like get out of the car, for instance.

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It could be a long time before workers at the states largest tree-fruit processor get another chance to vote on whether the United Farm Workers can continue to represent them, after a state board nullified their 2013 election.

The Agricultural Labor Relations Board ruled Friday that Gerawan Farming Inc. of Fresno unlawfully assisted employees who were attempting to get rid of the UFW, which had won an election to represent the workers in 1990.

Owner Dan Gerawan and an attorney for the employee who started the decertification effort said they will ask the board to reconsider and will take the case to a state appeals court if necessary.

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The anticipated appeals are likely to add substantial delay to a case that has been closely watched by the industry and labor leaders.

The decertification campaign, begun in 2013, was the largest labor action in many years  an irony for the union founded by Cesar Chavez to achieve humane treatment of farm workers.

The labor board, which was the hallmark of Gov. Jerry Browns first tenure in Sacramento more than 40 years ago, now finds itself spending more time on anti-union campaigns than on unionization efforts.

The case also exposed rifts between the three-member board and its general counsel, Sylvia Torres Guillen, who was chided publicly by ALRB Chairman William B. Gould IV for misunderstanding her role in handling election-related labor complaints and taking litigation positions that conflicted with the boards responsibilities.

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Brown quietly moved Torres Guillen out of that office last year and put her on his advisory staff, amid allegations of pro-UFW bias and questionable court filings.

The Gerawan workers pick the peaches, nectarines and plums that the company packages under the Prima label.

Gerawan, the owner, said he was disappointed but not surprised by Fridays decision. His attorney, David Schwarz, of Irell & Manella in Los Angeles, said he will ask the board to reconsider and take the case to an appeals court if necessary.

I think the board ignored the facts, ignored the law and ignored the 20-year history of union abandonment of the workers, Schwarz said.

Its our intention to petition for reconsideration, said Anthony Raimondo, attorney for Gerawan Farms employee Sylvia Lopez, who started the campaign to oust the UFW. We dont think the employees should be punished for something the employer did wrong.

UFW national Vice President Armando Elenes said attorneys for Gerawan and Lopez were distracting from the facts behind the decision.

Gerawan violated the law and supported the decertification campaign by giving the petitioner a virtual sabbatical, he said. Theyre making all this noise to distract from the fact that they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

UFWs election was certified by the ag board in 1992, but the union and management could not reach a collective bargaining agreement over the next three years. The union shifted its tactics to Sacramento; it was absent from Gerawans fields for more than 15 years.

Bolstered by new state laws requiring mandatory mediation of collective bargaining impasses, the UFW re-asserted its right to represent Gerawan workers in 2012, presenting a contract proposal that Gerawan rejected.

The grower accused the union of abandoning workers and of subsequently running out the clock on bargaining so that it could obtain an imposed agreement through mandatory mediation. The union denies the allegations, saying it bargained in good faith and offered agreements several times from 1995 to 2012.

Angered at the prospect of paying 3% of her gross pay in union dues, Lopez collected enough signatures to schedule a decertification vote, held in November 2013. Ballots were impounded amid allegations from the UFW and ALRBs general counsel that Gerawan was unlawfully involved in the decertification effort and had committed other unfair labor practices.

Gerawan, meanwhile, sued the state over the mandatory mediation and conciliation law, and won a favorable decision last May from the Fifth District Court of Appeals in Fresno. That ruling, which threatens to overturn the mandatory mediation law, is under review by the state Supreme Court in Sacramento, where arguments are expected to begin in coming months.

The election case went to administrative law Judge Thomas Sobel, who heard testimony from more than 130 witnesses over nearly six months, amassing a docket that surpassed 20,000 pages.

In September, Sobel ruled that Gerawans involvement with the campaign made it impossible to judge whether the votes represented the true intentions of his workers. He recommended that the board invalidate the ballots. The board agreed late Friday.

In its decision issued Friday, the ALRB rejected contentions from both its general counsel and the UFW that Gerawan instigated the UFW ouster and hired Lopez to run it. The board nonetheless found that the company unlawfully inserted itself into the campaign.

Gerawan supported signature gathering by decertification campaigners while prohibiting UFW-related activities and granted Lopez a virtual sabbatical to run the campaign, the board ruled.

Gerawan also colluded with the California Fresh Fruit Assn., an industry trade group that paid for decertification campaigners to travel to Sacramento to rally support for counting the ballots, according to the board.

J. Antonio Barbosa, executive secretary of the board, said he was unsure how long the appeal process could take, but noted that a similar one took 17 months.

He said the board was precluded from commenting on whether a new decertification petition can be filed after an election has been rejected.

Twitter: @LATgeoffmohan

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Youd think phone and cable companies would be doing everything possible to help customers block annoying robocalls. Congresswoman Jackie Speier did.

But she got a taste of the telecom companies indifference recently while stuck at home trying to sleep off a nasty flu.

Every time I dozed off, the phone would ring, Speier told me. And it wasnt a friend calling. It was a robocall.

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Things got so aggravating, Speier canceled her AT&T landline. The more she thought about it, though, the more she realized that its the job of telecom companies, not consumers, to do something about this problem.

Its personal to me, and its personal to the 221 million people whove put their names on the do-not-call list and are tired of getting robocalls all day and all night, Speier said.

The Hillsborough Democrat last week introduced the Repeated Objectionable Bothering of Consumers on Phones Act, a.k.a. the Robocop Act. It would require telecom companies to offer customers free robocall-blocking technology.

Lets just point out the obvious: Its pathetic that it would take federal action to make phone and cable companies help consumers deal with a problem that everyone agrees is a royal pain in the you-know-what. The Federal Trade Commission received more than 3 million robocall-related complaints last year.

To date, however, most telecom-industry players have been reluctant to crack down on robocalls, presumably for no better reason than because they dont like anyone telling them how they should run their networks

Tim Marvin, who heads the End Robocalls campaign for Consumers Union, called the automated sales calls an epidemic and blasted phone companies for being slow to provide their frustrated customers with relief.

The do-not-call list was supposed to put a stop to unwanted telemarketing. Marketers who violate the list can be fined up to $16,000.

But thats only if you catch them.

Many telemarketers  and more than a few scammers  simply stepped up their game with so-called spoofing technology that either hides or misrepresents their identities, such as making it look like a call is from the local police department. This makes it difficult if not impossible for consumers to report them to the Federal Trade Commission.

Many marketers and con artists also moved abroad, beyond the reach of American authorities. Consumers Union estimates that overseas robocallers have racked up more than $1.2 billion in mostly unpaid fines from violating the do-not-call list.

Susan Grant, director of consumer protection and privacy for the Consumer Federation of America, said new safeguards are needed to prevent these fraudulent and abusive sales calls.

Speier said its technically possible for telecom companies to spot and block most robocalls. The firms know which numbers are causing trouble, she said.

Beyond that, she said telecom providers have a responsibility to allow customers to use free services such as Nomorobo, PrivacyStar and Truecaller. Each uses blacklists of banned numbers to stop robocalls from getting through.

These services arent perfect. Smart robocallers can still get around them. But they can put a big dent in the volume of calls now getting through.

Speiers bill would direct the Federal Communications Commission to make sure telecom customers have access to such services, if desired.

I asked AT&T and Verizon Communications to comment on the legislation and to explain why they deny customers access to call-blocking technology. Neither company responded.

On the other hand, props to Time Warner Cable, which has announced that its voice customers can now sign up for Nomorobo.

With robocalls being the largest category of complaints at the Federal Communications Commission, we want to do everything we can to empower our customers to take control over the calls that come into their home, said Jeff Lindsay, general manager of the cable giants phone service.

If other telecom companies arent ready to follow suit, Congress should rally behind Speiers bill to provide some much-needed regulatory arm twisting.

Frontier update

Judging from the volume of angry calls and emails I keep getting about Frontier Communications not-so-smooth takeover of Verizon Communications landline operations in California, Texas and Florida, Frontier still has some splaining to do.

I wrote last week about the bumpy transition. I quoted Frontiers regional president, Melinda White, as saying things were going relatively well and that only about 1,700 California customers had experienced service disruptions.

Its impossible for me to do a head count, but considering the responses Ive since received from Frontier customers, along with postings on Facebook and Twitter, it appeared that Whites 1,700 figure was a tad on the low side. The actual scope of disruptions  for phone, TV and Internet services  seemed much more widespread.

Among those I spoke with in recent days was Matthew C., who prefers that his last name not be used because he oversees the central office of Alcoholics Anonymous in Ventura County. He said his offices phone lines have been working only intermittently since Frontier took over.

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This is a big problem, Matthew said. These are 24-hour hotlines and we get calls from people who need to detox as well as people who are at their wits end.

He said hes spent hours on the phone (mostly on hold) trying to fix things. As of Monday, the phones were still unreliable.

So I spoke again with White. This time, she put the number of service disruptions at 2,500  worse than the previous estimate but maybe not as bad as many customers might think.

Im sorry that people feel this is worse than it is, she said.

If youre among those who feel that way, or if you want to pass along positive comments, you can reach White by email at LetMelindaKnow@FTR.com.

David Lazarus column runs Tuesdays and Fridays. he also can be seen daily on KTLA-TV Channel 5 and followed on Twitter @Davidlaz. Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com.

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UnitedHealth Group, the nations largest health insurer, announced Tuesday that it would stop selling health plans through the Affordable Care Act next year in most of the 34 of states where it operates.

The move, widely expected for months, will likely have relatively little effect on what most consumers pay for health coverage, as other insurers have out-competed UnitedHealth in the marketplaces created by the 2010 health law.

Nor will the decision seriously threaten UnitedHealth, as the marketplaces are a small fraction of the insurance giants overall business, which includes providing coverage to millions of people who get health benefits through an employer.

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But UnitedHealths exit may leave some of the roughly 12 million Americans who rely on the marketplaces with fewer insurance choices next year. The announcement also underscores how challenging implementation of the complex health law remains, even three years after the marketplaces debuted.

UnitedHealth warned in November that it was having trouble with its marketplace business, noting that its customers were sicker than expected, leading to higher medical claims.

The company already announced it was pulling out of several states, including Arkansas and Michigan.

Speaking on an otherwise upbeat call with investors Tuesday, CEO Stephen Hemsley said UnitedHealth would remain in only a handful of states in 2017, though he did not specify which.

Our own experience and performance have been unfavorable in these markets. The smaller overall market size, and shorter-term, higher-risk profile within this market segment continue to suggest we cannot broadly serve it on an effective and sustained basis, he explained.

Several other insurers, including state Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, have reported similar challenges in recent months.

And more than a dozen nonprofit insurance co-ops created through the law have shuttered, as they were overwhelmed by medical claims they couldnt afford.

But other insurers, including California-based Kaiser Permanente and Indiana-based Anthem, another major player in the California market, have been more bullish on the new marketplaces.

And in February, Covered California Executive Director Pete Lee blasted UnitedHealth for blaming the health law for its own missteps, noting in an interview with Kaiser Health News that the company had poorly designed and priced its health plans.

Ben Wakana, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, downplayed UnitedHealths move.

As with any new market, we expect changes and adjustments in the early years with issuers both entering and exiting states, he said. The marketplace is a reliable source of coverage for millions of Americans with a robust number of plan choices. We have full confidence, based on data, that the marketplaces will continue to thrive for years ahead.

Thus far, the law has helped some 20 million previously uninsured Americans get coverage, mostly through the marketplaces and through expansions to state Medicaid programs also made possible by the law. (Some of the people on marketplace plans were previously insured.)

How many people will ultimately be affected by UnitedHealths move remains unclear.

But a recent analysis by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that even if the company exited all 34 states  which it does not plan to do  nearly three-quarters of marketplace enrollees would still be able to choose from at least three insurers.

And foundation Senior Vice President Larry Levitt said that while some consumers will have fewer options, nationally, it will be a blip.

The law allows Americans who dont get health benefits at work to shop among plans on state-based marketplaces operated by the federal government or by the states themselves.

Consumers making less than four times the federal poverty level  about $47,000 for a single adult or $97,000 for a family of four  qualify for subsidies. Insurers must provide a basic set of benefits and cannot turn away consumers, even if they are sick.

Those who dont have coverage or qualify for an exemption face fines this year of $695 per adult and $347.50 per child, or 2.5% of family income, whichever is larger.

noam.levey@latimes.com

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Theranos Inc. is being investigated by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, another set of blows to the Silicon Valley blood-testing company as it faces increased scrutiny about the reliability and accuracy of its tests.

In a Monday memo to external partners including Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., Theranos said the investigations by the SEC and the U.S. attorneys office for the Northern District of California began after the publication of certain news articles and are focused on requesting documents.

These are inquiries for document requests that those agencies initiated in wake of the wave of negative press attention over the past six months, Theranos said in a statement. The company continues to work closely with regulators and is cooperating fully with all investigations.

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The Palo Alto-based company, founded in 2003, garnered attention for claiming that its technology could test for dozens of medical conditions with just a few drops of blood.

But after an investigation by the Wall Street Journal raised questions about the capabilities of Theranos Edison lab instrument, the business has been under increased scrutiny. Theranos told the Journal that it did not exaggerate its achievements.

The company is also under inspection by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Last week, the centers proposed revoking the federal license for Theranos Newark, Calif., laboratory and banning its two top executives  Chief Executive Elizabeth Holmes and President Sunny Balwani  from the blood-testing business for at least two years.

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Investigations by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the state departments of health in Arizona and Pennsylvania have been successfully closed out, the company said.

The FDA would neither confirm nor deny that an investigation was underway, but it did provide information about inspections it conducted in August and September at Theranos Newark location.

In several pages of redacted documents, the FDA detailed observations that it said could be considered violations of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, among other similar acts. This includes an instance in which complaints about a device potentially failing to meet specifications were not reviewed or investigated when they should have been, as well as a case of a device not being correctly classified and then shipped uncleared between states. The FDA said the violative products mentioned in these forms were removed from the market.

The FDA said it could not discuss the circumstances or causes of the inspections.

The Arizona Department of Health Services said it conducted a standard inspection in April 2015 of Theranos Scottsdale laboratory after that lab opened. Inspectors found four standard deficiencies, which are not unusual when labs are first getting started, department spokeswoman Holly Ward said. The department accepted the companys plan of correction, granting it a certificate of compliance in May 2015 that is good for two years.

A representative of the Pennsylvania health department was not available to comment.

Representatives of the SEC and Walgreens declined to comment. Abraham Simmons, spokesman for the U.S. attorneys office, said he could not confirm that an investigation was underway.

For more business news, follow @smasunaga.

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Homers The Odyssey looms large in Suzan-Lori Parks Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), her entrancingly intimate, anachronistically frolicsome Civil War drama that opened Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum.

Theres a character named Homer, a love interest named Penny (presumably short for Penelope) and even a dog named Odyssey. Whats more, theres a hero named Hero, who goes off to war and returns (bearing the name Ulysses) to find things have changed quite a bit while hes been away.

No need to brush up on your Homer, however, to appreciate the panoramic playwriting here. Parks cycles through genres with postmodern impunity, evoking classics not to make academic points but to set the stage for an epic journey  the journey of a black slave seeking his liberty as the Civil War ignites and history slowly pivots.

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This is the first installment of a vast work that Parks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Topdog/Underdog, originally intended as a nine-part trilogy but now believes may stretch even longer. Storytelling on this scale can be daunting, but Father Comes Homes From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) is divided into three episodes, each offering a close-up inspection of characters wrestling with harrowing choices.

Directed with majestic fluidity by Jo Bonney, the production stars a deeply affecting Sterling K. Brown (hot off his performance as Christopher Darden in FXs American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson). Brown plays Hero, the character confronting a wrenching decision in Part 1. His master has promised him his liberty if he accompanies him to battle. But how can he trust the Colonel (Michael McKean), who has reneged on his promises in the past?

Hero, who has become the subject of much speculation on this ragtag Texas plantation (his fellow slaves are taking bets on whether hell join the fight), feels sickened by the thought of joining the Confederacy. He told Penny (Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris) that he wont leave her. But the Oldest Old Man (Roger Robinson), his surrogate father, wishes him to put on the scraps of uniform the Colonel has given him and seek out a better fortune for himself than hell find picking cotton.

The plot of Part I is spare and singularly focused, but the rhythm of the telling is lyrical, meditative and cyclical. Parks creates a song out of the situation, circling back to themes and dilating on the hopes and fears of a fateful decision thats being made in the context not of freedom but of violent oppression.

The other slaves form a chorus around the central characters, commenting on the action like their ancient Greek forbears. The Leader (Russell G. Jones) sums up the first act in a characteristically perky Parks bulls-eye: There is a kind of sport to be had/ In the consideration of someone elses fate.

Steven Bargonetti, the Musician, plucks out on guitar the bluesy songs Parks intermittently stitched into her drama. He also offers occasional accompaniment, allowing the playwrights springy dialogue to play like recitative.

The next two parts of the drama nudge us ahead in time. The chronology is relatively unhurried (three seasons pass in a play that begins before the break of dawn and ends at sunset) as the plot keep thrusting choices upon Hero that have no easy answers  choices that divide him from himself.

Part 2, set in a wooded patch somewhere on a Southern battlefield, introduces us directly to the Colonel, a preening sadist who has captured a man he believes to be a white Union captain. Smith (Josh Wingate), likely to lose his leg thats been injured in war, is imprisoned in a makeshift cage, making him a literally captive audience for the Colonels self-dramatizing racist antics.

A bond develops between Hero and Smith, two men whose freedom the Colonel gleefully controls. Hero at first is mistrustful of this prisoner who keeps extending overtures of friendship, but he cant help feeling solidarity with a man who is even more constrained than himself.

In a scene full of subversive plot twists, Brown heartbreakingly captures the awakening of Heros empathy for Smith  a compassion that is at once self-compassion. McKean, meanwhile, makes the most of the Colonels flamboyant perversity, strutting like a vicious peacock while wearing a feather in his hat and thanking the good Lord he was born Southern and white.

Part 3 returns us to the plantation, where Penny has let Homer (Larry Powell), a runaway slave whose foot Hero was forced to cut off, into her bed though not her heart. She is waiting for Hero, her true love, to come back from war. Her dreams tell her hes alive, but reports from the Colonels wife are ripening her for tragedy.

This section is enlivened by the return of Heros dog, Odyssey (played with roving canine high-spiritedness by Patrena Murray in a kind of furry vest). This loyal and lovable pooch has a full report on Heros whereabouts but is easily distracted by the smells and sights of characters who are fiercely debating whether to make a break for it or wait around for a possible good ending to the Civil War.

A question Hero poses in Part 2 gets to the crux of Parks drama: How much you think were gonna be worth when Freedom comes? Hes dubious when he hears that he will belong to himself when slavery is abolished: Seems like the worth of a Colored man, once hes made Free, is less than his worth when hes a slave.

In a play that is as emotionally attuned to its characters as it is capacious, Parks presents freedom as both an existential puzzle and a historical wound. And both of these dimensions are fully realized in Browns sonorous performance.

Brown was part of the plays 2014 world premiere at the Public Theater in New York. The rest of the Taper cast is collectively strong, though Powells Homer and Wingates Smith arent as sharply characterized as they could be. Luqmaan-Harris is memorable in the moving role of Penny, though she underplays her climactic moment in Part 3.

The writing can admittedly feel prolonged in places. A ruthless edit will have to be imposed if and when Parks completes this mammoth project and realizes her dream of the plays being performed consecutively.

But Bonneys smooth staging facilitates a hypnotic storytelling flow. Unfolding on a minimal set by Neil Patel that is stunningly lighted by Lap Chi Chu and made even more picturesque by ESosas costumes, the production is as lovely to behold as it is to listen to.

Parks, aided by music director Bargonetti, turns drama into spoken music. The exquisite freedom of her style serves an American story that is as much about our present as it is about our past.

charles.mcnulty@latimes.com
Fissures within the famously fractured Sumner Redstone family widened Tuesday when his granddaughter asked to join the contentious court battle over whether the media mogul is mentally competent.

Keryn Redstone, the 34-year-old daughter of Sumner Redstones estranged son, Brent, is petitioning the court to allow her to join the lawsuit in support of Redstones former companion, Manuela Herzer.

Herzer contends that Sumner Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp., is no longer mentally competent.

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The move puts Keryn Redstone on the opposite side of the legal dispute from her 92-year-old grandfather, whom she calls Grumpy, and her aunt, Shari Redstone. Revelations contained in the new court papers included Keryn Redstones allegations that her aunt, Shari Redstone, had threatened her and acted insensitively toward Sumner Redstone.

In her 11-page declaration, Keryn Redstone described a tense 2014 hospital drama that included a shouting match between Sumner Redstone, whom she called Grumpy, and his daughter, Shari Redstone. The two argued about whether Sumner Redstone should have a feeding tube installed, which he did when he began having difficulty swallowing.

I clearly heard Shari state her beliefs as to what should happen to Grumpy. She said, If he gets sick, dont take him to the hospital. Let him die at home. Grumpy, being Grumpy, interjects -- I dont want to die, Keryn Redstone said.

A representative of Shari Redstone said that neither Shari nor anyone in her family, opposed the insertion of a feeding tube.

In a separate statement, Shari Redstone, who is vice chair of Viacom and CBS, blasted her nieces efforts to join the lawsuit as a petitioner alongside Herzer, the moguls former companion.

This is not the first time that Keryn has sued an elderly relative for her own financial gain, Shari Redstone said in the statement. I am sad and disappointed that Keryn has chosen to align herself with Herzer against my father. I will not dignify the absurdity of Keryns false claims with any further response.

Attorneys representing Sumner Redstone were not immediately available for comment.

Keryn Redstones allegations added further turmoil to a family with a long history of infighting and could have broader ramifications over the future of Viacom and CBS. The Redstone family controls nearly 80% of the voting shares of the two companies that boasts such properties as Paramount Pictures, CBS broadcast network, Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central.

The latest motion asks Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David J. Cowan to allow Herzer to amend her original complaint, filed in late November, which seeks to have the ailing media mogul declared mentally incompetent.

The lawyers asked the judge to allow Keryn Redstone to join the lawsuit as a petitioner alongside Herzer. Herzers attorneys described the Keryn Redstone declaration as a game changing event in this litigation.

They also asked the judge to authorize an examination of Redstone by another physician, hired by Herzers side.

Cowan is expected to rule this week on the motions.

Keryn Redstone, in her declaration, also described discovering five or six people operating a larger shredder in her grandfathers Beverly Park home when she visited in late October, after Herzer was forced from the picture. Keryn Redstone said she was told to stay out of the shredding room, and she said she didnt know what documents were being destroyed.

The latest court maneuver also seeks to invalidate legal documents signed this month that named Shari Redstone as the agent in charge of Redstones advance healthcare directive should the mogul become incapacitated.

Herzer and Keryn Redstone appear to be teaming up to try to prevent Shari Redstone from overseeing Redstones affairs. They asked the judge to invalidate action on April 4 in which Sumner Redstone named Shari Redstone as his healthcare proxy, replacing Viacom Chief Executive Philippe Dauman.

In her declaration, Keryn Redstone described what she called a close relationship with her grandfather. She said the two shared a love of film, art, dogs and tennis -- which we loved playing together.

Even as he aged, Grumpy would regularly beat me at tennis, Keryn Redstone wrote.

In recent years, she said that she has been a frequent visitor to her grandfathers Beverly Park mansion. She began spending more time in Los Angeles last fall after Redstones former girlfriend, Sydney Holland, was forced out of Redstones home.

Keryn Redstone said she has known Herzer, 51, for more than 15 years and that her grandfather cared for Herzer deeply. Herzer cared for Redstone and oversaw his household affairs until she was booted from Sumner Redstones home in mid-October.

Herzer filed the lawsuit in late November, contending that she was wrongly removed from Redstones life. She contends that Redstone no longer is able to make decisions for himself and that she should be restored to a position of authority.

Keryn Redstone also described her grandfathers decline.

She said last fall the aging mogul developed a fixation on another woman, whom he wanted to have sex with. Keryn Redstone, in the declaration, accused one of Redstones nurses, Jeremy Jagiello, of coordinating liaisons between Sumner Redstone and the other woman.

Keryn Redstone alleged that Jagiello exerted control over the elderly mogul because he became one of the few people who could translate for Sumner Redstone, who has great difficulty speaking intelligibly.

When I visited Grumpy again in December, there was a definite, perceptible change in the mood in Grumpys house, Keryn Redstone said. It began to feel like a prison.

The granddaughter also noted that she has not seen Sumner Redstone in two months.

During a visit in February, she said the family screened the movie, Deadpool, at Redstones house. He cried during the opening credits, she said.

Keryn Redstone said she has asked to see her grandfather, and that Redstones corporate secretary suggested that Keryn Redstone instead reach out to the moguls ex-wife, Paula Fortunato, who is said to be back in the picture.

I have not seen my Grumpy since February. I know his condition has continued to worsen and I want nothing more than to see him again, Keryn Redstone said.

Her father, Brent Redstone, parted ways with his father and sister a decade ago after Sumner Redstone appeared to favor his daughter in business dealings. Brent Redstone sued the family business, National Amusements Inc., and received a $250-million settlement. He relinquished his stake in the holding company.

Brent Redstones two daughters are among the five beneficiaries of the Sumner M. Redstone National Amusements Inc. Trust that holds the controlling shares of Viacom and CBS. The Redstone family owns nearly 80% of the voting shares of the two media entities.

Shari Redstones three children also are beneficiaries of the Sumner M. Redstone NAI Trust. Shari Redstone and her younger son, Tyler Korff, are among the trustees who will make decisions about the familys holdings in CBS and Viacom.

The Hollywood Reporter first reported on the filing regarding Keryn Redstone.

The injection of Keryn Redstone into the court case could put additional pressure on the Sumner Redstone camp to try to hammer out a settlement to avoid the trial that would delve into the familys fractured dynamics.

The two sides made progress toward a settlement but talks fell apart this month, and both sides geared up to prepare for the trial thats scheduled for May 6.

meg.james@latimes.com

Twitter: @MegJamesLAT

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Viacom Inc. and Dish Networks negotiations over a new carriage deal are going down to the wire, and could result in a blackout of Viacom channels, including Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, BET and TV Land, in nearly 14 million customer homes nationwide.

The deadline for a deal is Wednesday night. The previous carriage contract expired in late February, and the two sides agreed on an extension.

But the two companies appear to be making little progress in the talks.

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Viacom on Tuesday began running a message crawler on its channels, warning of the possible outage on Dishs television systems, including nearly 500,000 homes in the Los Angeles region.

We are extremely disappointed that Dish has not engaged in a serious way to reach an agreement for Viacoms No. 1 family of cable networks, Viacom said in a statement. This is par for the course for Dish, which has deliberately derailed 10 renewal negotiations since last year by engaging in unproductive discussions and contentious public battles.

Wall Street has been closely monitoring the situation because of the ramifications for both companies. Viacom has been struggling to lift its sagging stock price amid the underperformance of its Los Angeles movie studio, Paramount Pictures, and key channels, including Comedy Central.

The loss of affiliate fee revenue from Dish for the two dozen channels would sting Viacom at a particularly difficult time. Investors have been worried that Viacoms channels are not as vital to consumers as they were a few years ago.

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We suspect Viacoms statement means that Dish is playing hardball in negotiations, but that was to be expected, Doug Creutz, media analyst with Cowen & Co., said in a research report. We still believe the most likely outcome is a renewal, as neither player is in a competitively strong position and would run serious risks by walking away from a deal.

Dish has lost a substantial number of customers in the last two years.

The satellite TV company could ill afford to lose more subscribers, but the Colorado-based company, controlled by billionaire Charlie Ergen, also wants to keep a lid on escalating programming costs.

We regret that Viacom has chosen to involve customers in a business negotiation when time remains to reach an agreement, a Dish spokesman said Tuesday morning. Viacom is asking hundreds of millions of dollars in increases, despite the changing landscape that includes drastically reduced viewership of Viacom channels and wide availability of their content across multiple platforms, frustrating consumers who dont want to pay twice for the same content. Dish will continue to negotiate in good faith to reach an agreement that works for both sides.

Analysts, including Creutz, have predicted that the two sides eventually would agree to a new carriage contract. Dish has been ramping up its streaming service Sling TV, and some of Viacoms channels, including Spike, Nickelodeon and MTV, appeal to younger consumers and could make a good fit with that service.

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Plenty of other carriage negotiations among multiple content owners and distributors have extended up to and even past the terms of existing agreements, and channels have gone dark for brief periods of time on several occasions, Creutz said.

However, no major distributor has yet permanently blacked out a major content owner, he said. So far we dont see anything concrete to indicate this negotiation will end differently.

Viacom shares were hard hit by the news Tuesday, sliding about 8% to under $36 a share.

Twitter: @MegJamesLAT

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Doris Roberts, a five-time Emmy winner best known for her work as Marie Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond, died Sunday in Los Angeles, a family spokeswoman confirmed to The Times on Monday.

The actress died peacefully in her sleep of natural causes, the family said. She was 90.

Doris Roberts had an energy and a spirit that amazed me, costar Ray Romano said in a statement. She never stopped. Whether working professionally or with her many charities, or just nurturing and mentoring a young, green comic trying to make it as an actor, she did it all with such a grand love for life and people, and I will miss her dearly.

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Roberts was a part of the Raymond family from 1996 to 2005, but also counted an Emmy-winning turn on St. Elsewhere and credits on well-known 70s and 80s shows, including Remington Steele, Soap, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat and The Streets of San Francisco. She starred as Theresa Falco, mother to Donna Pescows title character on the show Angie, which ran for two seasons.

Everybody Loves Raymond co-star Patricia Heaton tweeted: My wonderful TV mother-in-law and ELR nemesis Doris Roberts was a consummate professional from whom I learned so much. She was funny and tough and loved life, living it to the fullest. Nothing gave her greater joy than her three wonderful grandchildren, of whom she was so proud. It truly was a privilege Doris. I love you and miss you.

Everyone Loves Raymond show creator Phil Rosenthal said that although Roberts had been waning in the last few months she still had her fierce spirit until the end. She was taking acting classes right up to the end, he told The Times. " And really cared about being an actress and being professional. She was very dedicated to the craft. She was the real thing. She wanted to always stay sharp.

Recently, Rosenthal accompanied her to see Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett perform at the Hollywood Bowl. Lady Gaga couldnt believe she was getting to meet Doris Roberts! he said. We had dinner in the box, we drank, we watched the show and loved it.

As for the footprint Roberts leaves behind, Rosenthal told The Times she will always be remembered as the rock of the show. She was fearless and fierce and strong, he said.

He added: I liked that she was a strong female character. Thats what people really responded to her. It was universal: that meddling mom.

Long before she became a sitcom icon as the ultimate Italian mamma, Roberts was a young actress trying to make a name for herself in New York in the 1950s.

I was a member of the Actors Studio, Roberts told The Times in a 2009 interview. Marilyn Monroe used to come to class. Martin Balsam was there. Anne Bancroft was there. Geraldine Page.

Roberts made her Broadway debut in a 1955 revival of William Saroyans The Time of Your Life, which closed after 15 performances. She played a hooker in a bar. Later that year, Roberts had a small role and understudied star Shirley Booth in the comedy hit The Desk Set.

She was nominated for 11 Emmys throughout her career. She won best supporting actress in a drama for St. Elsewhere in 1983 and four times for best supporting actress in a comedy for Everybody Loves Raymond. Among Roberts Emmy nods was one for her work on Remington Steele, and in 2003, she was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

After Raymond went off the air in 2005, she kept her status as a working actress, appearing in various TV series, plays and movies with credits running into 2016.

Desperate Housewives, The King of Queens, The Middle, Greys Anatomy and Law & Order: SVU were among her more recent TV credits.

In 2000, she told The Times, Im at the age now where I dont have to do anything. But I do have to see my grandchildren -- Kelsey, Andrew and Devon. She talked about taking them to amusement parks and to see The Lion King.

Sometimes what I do for fun with friends is go on a ramble, Roberts continued. Most of the time you have to plan for everything. My life is always planned. When you ramble, you choose north, south, east or west and you just go. And when you see something you like, you stop. It could be anything -- a flea market or restaurant. And if you find you dont like it, you can just leave. You come across extraordinary little villages in the middle of the mountains. Or you can go in another direction and youve got the ocean.

Truly the end of an era, Heaton said on Twitter, addressing her thoughts to her beloved Marie.

Roberts was born in St. Louis on Nov. 4, 1925, and grew up in New York. She was married to Michael Cannata from 1956 to 1962 and had one son, Michael Cannata Jr. William Goyen, a writer, was her husband from 1963 until his death in 1983.

She is survived by her son, Michael Cannata Jr., daughter-in-law, Jane, and three grandchildren, Kelsey, Andrew and Devon Cannata.

Follow Christie DZurilla on Twitter @theCDZ.

Times staff writer Brenda Rodriguez and special correspondents Susan King and Robin Rauzi contributed to this report.
Movies about life in Israel and the Palestinian territories have often been centered in places of extremes  the ultra-Orthodox area of Jerusalem that is the setting for Ushpizin, or the cauldron of the West Bank that was the locale of Paradise Now.

Can a director pull off a movie set in the more squishy spaces in between? Thats one of the challenges undertaken by Udi Aloni, the veteran Israeli director who tackles the subject of Israeli Arabs in Junction 48, his new narrative movie that made its U.S. premiere last weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Aloni, 56, is known both for his leftist politics and for pricking audiences  past movies include 2006s Forgiveness, about a Jewish mental hospital on the site of a massacre of Palestinians. (Hes also the son of the late provocateur politician Shulamit Aloni). In his new work, he follows Israeli Arabs living in the airport-adjacent town of Lod.

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(The movie counts the Love & Mercy screenwriter Oren Moverman among its writers and producers, and the U.S. film executive-turned-director James Schamus also has a producer credit.)

Not nearly as hard-up as places in the West Bank, Lod is also far from the comforts of more predominantly Jewish cities of Israel. As depicted here, residents grapple with hardscrabble economic conditions (a vast drug trade has sprung up); with harassment and far worse from the Israeli police; and with a general sense they are not welcome.

At the center of a group of affable young men is the Palestinian protest rapper Kareem, played by the real-life hip-hop star Tamer Nafar in what amounts to a version of himself. As Kareem and his bandmates begin to capture mainstream notice thanks to the help of a club in Tel Aviv, they would seem to find hope and a way out. But its complicated by the racism of some of the Jewish Israelis who are part of the Tel Aviv rap scene, as well as the fundamentalism of some of their more religious Muslim neighbors, including the zealous family of Kareems girlfriend, Manar (Samar Qupty).

The film wont be given extra points for political or ethnic nuance. It is notable, however, as a portrait of a place rarely captured even in deep-dive looks at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The goal, Aloni said, was to show the story from a Palestinian point of view and what he believes is the unambiguous nature of the debate.

You have here a story that deals with many types of violence, the director said after the screening. Of states versus citizens. Of one race against another. Men against women. This open ending is the reality we stand in now, he added. That this is a story set in an in-between place with ostensibly more freedom sharpens Junction 48s ideological point.

Alonis movie, which won the audience prize at the Berlin Film Festival in February, does not have distribution in the U.S. He said it will be distributed in Israel with the help of an Arab-specific marketing campaign in the hope of attracting Palestinian audiences.

Junction 48" is 15 years in the making, with Aloni frequently pushing Nafar to collaborate over the years. Whatever ones politics, one can relate to the music (the beats and rhymes are strong enough to make a viewer wish for more)  and to the difficulties faces by its crossover artist.

Ive been screaming on stage since 99, Nafar said at the screening. So when he was asked to cry, to show emotion as an actor, he found himself struggling.

Its hard, he added, for rappers to show emotion.

@ZeitchikLAT

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Brian Johnson, the longtime lead vocalist of AC/DC, has detailed the hearing loss that led him to withdraw from the remainder of the bands Rock or Bust world tour, but denied rumors that he is retiring, adding that he will continue to record in studios.

After consulting in March with physicians, I was advised that if I continued to perform at large venues, I risked total deafness, Johnson, 68, said in a statement released Tuesday. While he found the news horrifying, I had for a time become aware that my partial hearing loss was beginning to interfere with my performance on stage.

He called the diagnosis the darkest day of my professional life.

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Johnson continued: Our fans deserve my performance to be at the highest level, and if for any reason I cant deliver that level of performance I will not disappoint our fans or embarrass the other members of AC/DC.

The Australian band confirmed earlier this month that Axl Rose will join them for the remainder of the Rock or Bust world tour.

In March, AC/DC said it had been forced to reschedule 10 upcoming dates on the U.S. leg of the tour after Johnson was advised by doctors to stop touring immediately or risk total hearing loss.

The announcement led to a number of rumors, including one that Johnson was retiring after being kicked out of the group by band cofounder Angus Young.

But Tuesday, Johnson said in his statement that my doctors have told me that I can continue to record in studios and I intend to do that.

He said he is focused on medical treatment to improve my hearing... While the outcome is uncertain, my attitude is optimistic. Only time will tell.

Johnson, who is British and has been with AC/DC since 1980, said that he was personally crushed by the medical development.

The emotional experience I feel now is worse than anything I have ever in my life felt before, he said. The one thing for certain is that I will always be with AC/DC at every show in spirit, if not in person.

AC/DC is set to resume the tour in Europe next month. The rescheduled U.S. dates will be announced later, the band said on its official website.

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If you are a fine and famous British actor cast in a high-profile drama as twisty as it is deep, and you discover that Olivia Colman is one of your costars, you would do well to keep your wits about you.

Because while everyone is busy talking about how wonderful it is to see you in this fabulous project, in this amazing role, Colman will, scene by scene and with no apparent effort, steal the whole bloody show right out from under you.

She did it in Broadchurch and shes at it again in AMCs The Night Manager, in which not one but two A-list stars are the obvious main draw.

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Wandering through the luxe accommodations of several continents, David Farrs six-hour adaptation of John le Carre's contemporary tale The Night Manager pits a novice spy played by Tom Hiddleston against a lethally charming arms dealer played by Hugh Laurie.

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It is, as you can imagine, a power-couple pairing, with High Brit civility masking ones rage and the others depravity as the two men continually take each others measure in steely blue stare-downs and sleight-of-hand revelations.

A former soldier, Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston) has fled the conflict, and connection, of his former life to become the night manager of a posh hotel in Cairo, where the Arab Spring has prompted hope and violence. Sexier than a typical Le Carre hero, Pines enigmatic servility in the middle of the crisis soon attracts the attention of a beautiful guest who turns out to be the mistress of a local crime boss and, obviously, seven kinds of trouble.

She gives Pine information that she hopes will lead to the downfall of the worst man in the world, Richard Roper (Laurie). Publicly a philanthropic billionaire, Roper makes his money selling arms and gets his kicks by perpetuating political instability, which in turn creates a market for arms, and so on.

While trying to protect his new lover, Pine manages to get the intel to a friend in the British government. There is a leak, of course, and she is brutally killed, but not before the list she gave Pine makes its way to Angela Burr (Colman). An off-the-books British intelligence agent, she has been doggedly pursuing Roper for years, with little help, and more than occasional discouragement, from her superiors.

Without informing them or anyone, Burr recruits Pine to infiltrate Ropers inner circle.

This includes a bodyguard/assassin named Frisky (Michael Nardone), a consigliere called Corky (Tom Hollander, having a grand old time) and a lovely young girlfriend known as Jed (Elizabeth Debicki). That Pine and Jed will fall in love is as absurd as it is inevitable, ditto that ol Corky will be loudly but ineffectively suspicious of the newcomer.

But Roper likes Pine and this is the central suspension of disbelief required to enjoy The Night Manager. The idea that for all his gimlet-eyed acumen, Roper would take a mysterious and handsome young man, whose services he does not need, into his confidence makes absolutely no sense, at least on paper. Fortunately, this is a TV series, and one starring Laurie. Delightful, and clearly delighted, as a calmly menacing, it really wont do, old chap sort of villain, Laurie manages to make Roper seem in on the problem  he has no idea why hes fascinated with Pine either, except perhaps for the fun of seeing how it all plays out.

Which is exactly why viewers will watch The Night Manager. Unapologetically sleeker and more sentimental than any George Smiley tale, and streamlined to the point of simplicity when compared with the recent London Spy, it is tense but linear, clearly framed to take full advantage of its stars strengths and, it must be said, their cross-demographic fan base.

Which makes Colmans performance even more important, and remarkable.

When she was cast, Farr (Spooks, Hanna) not only had to switch the original characters gender, he had to accommodate Colmans pregnancy, which he does with revolutionary effect. In utter contrast to the far-flung, five-star world in which much of the action takes place, Burr is squirreled away, with her tiny staff, in a messy London office the size of a closet. Perpetually exhausted and well into her third trimester, Burr clearly dresses in whatever still fits; compared with Roper in his immaculate casual wear or her dismissive overlords in their Savile Row suits, she is a sweaty, graceless mess.

But like Frances McDormands Marge Gunderson (Fargo), she is also just as canny, powerful and resourceful as any of the people around her. More important, Angela Burr is the only character who sees the big picture and the small, the only character attempting to balance the need for faith with the acceptance of corruption. Pine is in it for revenge and maybe redemption, Roper for the thrill, but Burr understands that stopping the Richard Ropers of the world actually matters, and not just because thats what spies do.

So while the sight of Pine and Roper circling each other over a rising body and thread count is indeed a thing of beauty, the real thrill of The Night Manager is watching Colmans Burr heave herself, belly first, out of yet another chair to do whatever it takes to bring just a little bit of justice to an often unjust world.

Twitter: @marymacTV


Fans of The Walking Dead have seen it. Hundreds of blogs have been written about it.

What exactly is going on with Carol Peletier and Daryl Dixon, two of the band of survivors on AMCs hit drama about the zombie apocalypse that seem to have an electric chemistry? Is it a deep friendship? Is it something more?

Melissa McBride, who plays Carol on the show, smiled when asked the question during a recent visit to the Los Angeles Times to discuss the show, her role and her connection to co-star Norman Reedus, who plays Daryl.

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PODCAST: Listen to our full interview with Melissa McBride

Theres no denying theres chemistry there, McBride said. I love Norman. But I cant say because the writers havent given it to us. They are peers, I can say that.

She added that theres a sweetness between the two, and they have identified with each other during the apocalypse.

As far as the relationship, its just Daryl and Carol, McBride said, beaming.

For the full video, see below.

 Melissa McBride, who plays Carol Peletier on AMCs The Walking Dead, stopped by The Times to discuss the show, her character and, of course, the chemistry between Carol and Daryl.

WATCH MORE VIDEO CHATS WITH YOUR FAVORITE TV STARS >

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Ever had a box of Pocky  the chocolate-covered pretzel sticks packaged in slim red boxes, found at every Asian grocery story and some American ones too? This is the snack you spent your allowance money on after school if your parents didnt happen to put a box in your lunch. And if they did, you bought another one later anyway.

Ezaki Glico Co. Ltd., the Japanese brand behind the popular snack, is celebrating Pockys 50th anniversary with a truck. And yes, the truck will be red, just like the snacks signature red packaging.

On the truck, there will be boxes of Pocky, and they will all be free.

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Current Pocky flavors include original chocolate; strawberry (biscuit sticks dipped in strawberry-flavored cream); matcha green tea (biscuit sticks dipped in green tea cream); chocolate banana (biscuit sticks dipped in banana-flavored cream) and cookies and cream (chocolate-flavored cookie sticks dipped in sweet cream coated with specks of crunchy cookie bits).

The Pocky truck will be in Los Angeles on April 20 and eventually make its way to Chicago in June.

The truck will post its locations on Twitter @Pocky.

Original Pocky beats strawberry every time. Follow me on Twitter and Instagram @Jenn_Harris_

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About two years ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District unveiled its new student records system. The rollout was widely described as disastrous.

Students were assigned to the wrong classes or none at all for weeks, college applicants worried they wouldnt get accurate transcripts to schools in time and the district identified hundreds of technological problems.

Last week, the school board approved $40.3 million for what the technology division says will be the last of six large chunks of bond money needed to fix the problems. The money will be used to incorporate independent charter schools into the system, allow schools to customize their reports and give parents access.

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That brings the districts total spending on the program to $189 million since 2013.

My Integrated Student Information System, or MISIS, was supposed to solve L.A. Unifieds need for a districtwide records system, which a consent decree required following a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of special education students. It claimed that these students were sometimes harmed because the districts disorganized records system lost track of their needs.

The district initially approved $29.7 million for the project at a June 2013 board meeting -- it was one of 309 school facilities improvement projects greenlighted at the time.

But after the initial problems, the information technology department asked for an additional $15.7 million in 2014 and $88.1 million last year in bond funding. Theres been more in general fund allocations.

L.A. Unified adopted the code for the records system from Fresno Unified School Districts system. In late 2012, the districts Internet technology officer said that records system would be cheaper to maintain than the other integrated software system that the district had spent years and more than $100 million working on.

In 2013, the district anticipated it would complete the project by December 2014.

But Fresno is a much smaller district, and it has been extremely expensive to tailor the system to suit the needs of L.A. Unified, said Diane Pappas, who has overseen the records systems recovery project since October 2014.

Taking a system from Fresno and thinking you could scale it for L.A. Unified was a complete mistake, Pappas said. We inherited a system that was ... not designed to be scalable and weve been rebuilding it ever since.

By the start of this school year, the system was working much better than it had before  but it still didnt fully comply with the consent decree that required the district to incorporate all schools, including charters, into an integrated system.

This last push of bond funding will finish the project, Pappas said.

The spending isnt over yet. Itll cost the district about $12 million in general fund dollars to maintain the records system every year, from 2018 to 2019 onward, Pappas said. That expenditure would include a vendor to oversee the system, and its an estimate based on how much it costs to maintain a different district system, which is about the same size as My Integrated Student Information System.

During last weeks school board meeting, board member Monica Ratliff wondered aloud whether anyone had thought about where that $12 million was going to come from every year.

Its problematic in my view because $12 million is a lot of money, Ratliff said in an interview. She didnt realize that even after the fixes were completed, the records system would still require spending that much in maintenance every year.

Reach Sonali Kohli at Sonali.Kohli@latimes.com or on Twitter @Sonali_Kohli.
It was a milestone that had to come.

The city early Monday marked the 110th anniversary of the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake  but did so without any of the hearty souls who survived the disaster.

The two last known survivors of the quake died over the last year, adding special poignancy to the occasion.

Last summer, Ruth Newman  the oldest remaining survivor  died at age 113.

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Then, William Del Monte died in January, just shy of his 110th birthday. He last attended the memorial in 2011, reports at the time said.

In earlier years, many more survivors gamely ventured out in the middle of the night  every year on April 18  to gather on a traffic island on Market Street. There, at 5:12 a.m., they would remember the deadliest earthquake in U.S. history, which opened up the San Andreas fault for an astonishing 300 miles and rocked much of this city into ruin.

Some became local celebrities, at least in the passionate world of San Francisco history buffs.

But even the old-timers started tuning out in recent years, as age took its toll; Del Monte attended via Skype in 2012. There were murmurs that, maybe, these remembrances should end once all the survivors were finally gone.

Yet on Monday, when it almost appeared that few would come except for city workers, reporters and a handful of costumed characters in 1906 attire, about 200 people suddenly arrived.

See the most-read stories this hour >>

They squeezed in around the 19th century cast-iron Lottas Fountain  which in 1906 was virtually the only thing left standing in a devastated downtown  to hear of a time when San Francisco sank into desperation, watching block by block fall to ash, and survivors fled on ferries to Oakland.

To be honest with you, I didnt anticipate too many people, said Ron Ross, 79, president of the San Francisco History Assn. Still, he said, they came out.

And with that began a new focus  honoring the 3,000 who died in the famed earthquake and fire and warning todays San Franciscans how close they could be to another devastating temblor if little progress is made on improving earthquake safety.

On hand was San Franciscos chief resilience officer, Patrick Otellini, who told the crowd of new plans to house 95% of the citys residents in San Francisco after the next big quake.

William Del Monte, then 103, and Rose Cliver, 106, are welcomed at a 2009 ceremony marking the 103rd anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake and fire. All of the survivors of the disaster are now gone. (Laura Morton / Associated Press)

Part of that plan would mandate strengthening more types of earthquake-vulnerable buildings. Currently, wood apartments with five or more units need to be retrofitted; a report released Monday suggests requiring apartments with just three and four units also be strengthened. The plan also calls for the evaluation and retrofit of brittle buildings that could collapse in an earthquake.

Otellini also said the city was committed to strengthen the waterfront, which is in danger of suddenly lurching during a major temblor. At risk is the famed Embarcadero between Fishermans Wharf and AT&T Park, and the price tag is steep  $2 billion to $3 billion.

The focus on the future is important, said historian Joseph Amster, 60. Instead of commemorating the survivors or hearing the stories of survivors, the overall theme now is about making sure were prepared for the next one.

Interested in the stories shaping California? Sign up for the free Essential California newsletter >>

Without a significant earthquake here in a generation, it is easy to forget how the world can change when the San Andreas fault ruptures as it did in 1906, which was felt as far away as Oregon, Nevada and Los Angeles.

Back then, the magnitude 7.8 earthquake ruptured much of the length of the state, from Cape Mendocino to near San Juan Bautista. In San Francisco, the shaking lasted a full minute.

The first deaths came when low-rent tenements collapsed in the South of Market area, said Bob Sarlatte, who narrated. The fire chief was fatally injured when a hotels spire tower collapsed on his fire station home. Telephone and telegraph messages were cut.

Three hours after the first quake, a major aftershock brought down many of the damaged buildings that had been standing. Gas pipes ruptured, igniting fires, but so did water pipes. Workers at a temporary hospital at City Hall had to flee, and Union Square and Nob Hill were lost to the wind-whipped flames.

It was the biggest urban fire in the history of the United States. It was 500 square blocks, over 28,000 buildings, over 2,600 acres burned. Seventy-five percent of inhabited San Francisco, Amster said. You can fit the Chicago fire, the Boston fire and the Baltimore fire  the three other biggest urban fires in the history of the country  within the burn area of the San Francisco fire.

Mondays ceremony still had the cast of costumed characters who are a mainstay of the remembrance. Amster wore a Civil War-era Union junior officers frock coat and a top hat with feathers, dressed as Emperor Norton, a failed San Francisco rice merchant who became a civic celebrity when he declared himself as emperor of the United States and protector of Mexico to the San Francisco Bulletin in 1859.

Also portrayed were Lillie Hitchcock Coit, whose fortune was later used to build Coit Tower; Domingo Ghirardelli, who started the eponymous chocolate company; Lotta Crabtree, the popular entertainer who secured the fountain that became so crucial after the 1906 earthquake; and the notorious Lola Montez, Crabtrees mentor, famous for her spider dance. The fountain was one of the only structures left intact in the downtown area after the fire, and loved ones would place notes on it, Amster said.

Ross said it was a decade ago, on the quakes 100th anniversary, when there was talk about shutting down the remembrance. But the answer was, No, no, no, theres too much interest.

So we kept it going, even with the last survivor gone, he said. Theres a lot of new interest. The new generation is coming in.

ron.lin@latimes.com

Twitter: @ronlin

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The case against three people accused of operating the bogus Masonic Fraternal Police Department  a supposedly ancient force that claimed to work in 33 states and Mexico  partly collapsed on Monday when the charges against one defendant were dismissed and the organizations so-called chief suddenly died.

Hours after he appeared in a San Fernando courtroom, David Inkk Henry, the 47-year-old grandmaster, died of a pulmonary embolism at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital, attorney Gary Casselman said.

Earlier in the day, L. A. County Superior Court Judge Hayden Zacky had granted a motion to dismiss the charges against Brandon Kiel, a former community affairs staffer with the California Department of Justice whom authorities said had impersonated a police officer and misused his government-issued ID.

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The developments drastically altered a case that grabbed headlines when Henry, Kiel, and Tonette Hayes were arrested last spring  and left Casselman wondering why the charges had been brought to begin with.

Police could have told Mr. Henry and Ms. Hayes and Mr. Kiel, Listen, this is not a good idea. Someone might think you are impersonating a police officer, Casselman said. I think [police] are jealous of anyone who might be perceived as an interloper or, pardon the expression, a competitor.

Much of the notoriety derived from Kiels role within Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris administration, as well as the bogus police forces eccentric online presence, including a website in which its members claimed to descend from the Knights Templar. Social media accounts associated with Henry also referred to secret societies such as the Freemasons and Illuminati, adding to the intrigue.

Los Angeles County sheriffs officials said the trio walked into the Santa Clarita station last year  two of them wearing police uniforms  to announce their organization was setting up shop in the area.

It just raised my suspicion level, sheriffs Capt. Roosevelt Johnson said at the time.

The department launched an investigation and learned the group had sent letters to area law enforcement, including police departments in Torrance and Santa Monica.

Investigators staged an undercover operation last April in which they recorded the groups meeting with Santa Monica police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks. A sheriffs detective posed as Seabrooks assistant, according to testimony at a preliminary hearing.

Det. Amalia Hernandez testified that during the meeting, Kiel did much of the talking and said the group would not handle 911 emergency calls, only matters internal to the Masonic groups. Kiel also said the state Department of Justice was well aware and supportive of the Masonic Fraternal Police Department, according to Hernandezs testimony.

The trio initially were charged with misdemeanor counts of falsely representing themselves as police officers; Henry also was charged with three felony counts of perjury. Prosecutors later accused the three of perjury and conspiracy to commit perjury by procuring fee-exempt license plates from the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

But the charges against Kiel gradually were pared down. At a preliminary hearing in January, all but four counts against him were dismissed, but L.A. County Superior Court Judge Monica Bachner let stand the misdemeanor counts of perjury and conspiracy to commit perjury.

In arguing to have the remaining charges dismissed, Kiels lawyer said that detectives had conducted an improper search of his clients personal computer and that evidence found on it should be dropped.

Casselman contended that the search warrant used in the probe did not cover Kiels vehicle, a Ford Mustang issued by the state for use by Department of Justice employees, or his laptop, which was found in the car. The attorney said that even if the search of Kiels Mustang was valid, law enforcement could not search the computer since it violated the 4th Amendment.

There was no consent, Casselman said. They could have applied for a warrant. But they didnt do that.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Brian Chang disagreed, arguing in court papers that Kiel did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his state-issued vehicle. Chang did not respond to a message seeking comment after the judge dropped the charges.

Kiel had been placed on paid leave after he was arrested. A Department of Justice spokeswoman confirmed Monday that he was no longer employed there. His attorney said his client was hopeful to move on and is now pursuing graduate studies.

His life has been turned upside down, Casselman said. I dont know if hell get his job back, but hopefully he can clear his name.

matt.hamilton@latimes.com

Twitter: @MattHjourno

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It has been 14 years since Jahi Turner was last seen.

In the days that followed the 2-year-olds disappearance, scores of volunteers scoured neighborhoods around Balboa Park. Bulldozers moved thousands of tons of trash at a landfill, looking for clues that could give investigators, and the boys family, answers.

On Monday, San Diego authorities said that Jahis stepfather, Tieray Jones  the person who first reported him missing  had been arrested. Authorities will seek to have Jones returned to San Diego to face charges of murder and felony child abuse causing death.

Dist. Atty. Bonnie Dumanis, joined by San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman, prosecutors and investigators, called Jahis disappearance without a doubt one of the highest-profile unsolved cases in San Diego County.

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I wasnt sure this day was ever going to come, Dumanis said. This case has weighed heavily on all of us, and our hearts go out to the family.

Jones, 37, was arrested without incident in North Carolina and is expected to be arraigned on a fugitive complaint Tuesday.

When Jahi was reported missing April 25, 2002, Jones told police that he had taken his stepson to a playground near 28th and Cedar streets that day, leaving him alone for 15 minutes when he walked to get a soda from a vending machine 100 yards away.

He said the boy was gone when he returned.

We never gave up on finding justice for Jahi, Dumanis said.

The district attorney and police chief expressed sympathy for Jahis mother, Tameka Jones, who was 18 and deployed on a Navy ship when she learned he was missing.

I personally remember the day of Jahis disappearance vividly, said Zimmerman, who was then a watch commander. Zimmerman said the entire department mobilized and conducted an extensive search for the boy over several weeks. The departments homicide unit and the district attorneys office worked to develop leads, identify motivation and pursue multiple theories, but the leads ran cold.

The chief did not reveal what led to Jones arrest, but she said investigators began to piece together new leads in the case about two years ago.

From that first call, I never lost hope we would either find Jahi alive or bring his killer to justice, she said.

Authorities noted that Jones has a criminal record but did not disclose the details.

The San Diego Union-Tribune previously reported that Jones was jailed in Maryland in 2002 on suspicion of failing to appear in court on misdemeanor marijuana possession charges. He pleaded guilty to one of those charges in February 2003 in Frederick, Md., and later served time on a probation violation.

In 2004, Jones was charged with attempted murder and assault stemming from a shooting along a Frederick parkway. No one was wounded in the shooting, and Jones pleaded guilty to assault. He was sentenced to five years in prison, according to the Frederick News-Post.

At the time Jahi was reported missing, Jones said that he had searched near the playground for 15 minutes before calling police. When patrol officers arrived, they searched into the evening with the assistance of dogs, a helicopter and sheriffs search-and-rescue volunteers on horseback and on foot.

It wasnt long before police expressed doubt that they would find the child alive.

Five days later, police began sifting through the Miramar landfill but turned up nothing.

Private investigator Bill Garcia, who helped coordinate volunteer searches, commended the Police Department for arresting Jones. For some reason, this child who was only here [in San Diego] two days has just captured the hearts of San Diegans, Garcia said.

Jahi had been staying with his grandmother in Maryland before his mother and stepfather brought him to San Diego the weekend before he disappeared.

Among the hundreds who participated in the searches were people who were living on the streets as well as working professionals, Garcia said.

And they were out there a lot, he said.

dana.littlefield@sduniontribune.com

Littlefield writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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Federal agents in Calexico discovered a 140-foot-long tunnel across Californias border with Mexico, officials said this week.

An agent on patrol two miles east of the Calexico Port of Entry noticed a depression in the soil along the All-American Canal that runs parallel to the border, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said in a statement Friday.

The patch of soil collapsed as the agent approached, exposing a hole 18 inches wide. Lumber and wiring were visible inside.

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Investigators determined that the entire tunnel was about 3 feet wide and 142 feet long, or slightly shorter than an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The tunnel ended in Mexico, about 60 feet south of the border, in an area that is primarily open fields and farmland.

The Border Patrol did not specify what, if anything, had passed through the tunnel. But they noted that anything or anyone could potentially cross into the U.S.

Last month, agents discovered a smuggling tunnel that ran nearly a quarter of a mile underneath the border, from the El Sarape restaurant in Mexicali, Baja California, into the living room of a home in Calexico. The exit to the tunnel was covered with tile, officials said.

U.S. Homeland Security agents used wiretaps to track the construction of that house, which was finished in December at a cost of about $86,000. The investigation led to the arrests of four people and the confiscation of more than a ton of marijuana.

Last April, officials observed a man in a wetsuit emerge from the All-American Canal. Investigators later found a 230-foot tunnel beneath the border that had lighting and ventilation, as well as 25 sealed packages of methamphetamines with a street value of about $700,000.

laura.nelson@latimes.com

For more transportation news, follow @laura_nelson on Twitter.

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Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck denied Monday that he unfairly passed over a captain for promotions, telling jurors he selects officers for high-ranking positions based on who he thinks is the best person for the job.

Beck also rejected allegations that he was throwing a bone to Capt. Peter Whittingham when he upgraded the LAPD veteran after he sued the city in 2014.

I wouldnt do that, the chief said.

Beck spent nearly two and a half hours on the witness stand Monday, testifying in a highly watched civil trial involving Whittingham, who alleged he was wrongly kept from advancing in the LAPD after Beck became chief in 2009.

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Whittingham has alleged he was unfairly passed over for promotions after going against the chiefs wishes in a 2012 disciplinary hearing and after disagreeing with another captain over whether an officer should be demoted.

Whittinghams lawsuit contends that he and other command staff were told that when Beck sent officers to a three-person disciplinary panel -- known as a board of rights hearing -- the chief expected those officers to be fired.

In August 2012, the lawsuit said, Whittingham served on one such hearing and voted to suspend an officer instead of fire him. After that, Whittingham alleged, he was warned by Becks then-chief of staff that Beck considered a captains panel votes when deciding on promotions.

Beck denied the allegations on Monday, saying he had no clear recollection of any specific board that Peter sat on. The chief said he considers hundreds of points when deciding promotions.

At first, the chief appeared at ease on the stand, often turning toward jurors when explaining the structure of the 10,000-officer LAPD. But he later went back-and-forth with one of Whittinghams attorneys, Gregory W. Smith, who repeatedly asked the chief to keep his answers brief.

Listen to my question, chief, Smith said at one point.

I did, Beck replied.

The chief testified that although he had heard complaints against Whittingham -- one official described the captain to Beck as aloof and detached, another said Whittingham had a negative effect on morale -- he decided to advance Whittingham in 2014.

Whittingham now heads the LAPD Criminal Gang Homicide Division, which Beck described to Assistant City Atty. Wayne Song as a hugely important job. The chief said he believed Whittinghams experience, ability to work with residents and understanding of gang violence made him the best fit for the position.

I thought Peter was the right person, the chief said.

Follow @katemather for more LAPD news.

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Los Angeles workers would be able to earn at least six paid sick days annually  twice the state minimum  under a proposed law that the City Council backed Tuesday.

Labor and community activists had pushed for L.A. to increase the mandated amount of time off for local workers who fall ill or need to take care of a loved one, arguing that employees too often are forced to decide between their health and their jobs.

Under the new law, which must be drafted by city attorneys, no longer will workers have to make a choice between putting food on the table and getting well, said Rusty Hicks, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

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Some business groups argued that the new requirements would place another burden on employers who already are facing other costly new mandates  including a string of increases to the L.A. minimum wage that eventually will require businesses to pay at least $15 hourly. The California Restaurant Assn., for instance, warned that the new rules could jeopardize small restaurants.

More sick days will impose a big burden on our local businesses, said John Howland, government relations director of the Central City Assn.

The proposed law, however, would not go as far as rules already imposed on L.A.'s big hotels and city contractors, which must provide a dozen paid days off for sickness and other needs.

Business groups feared last year that the city would expand those requirements when City Councilman Curren Price said citywide rules should be consistent with earlier L.A. laws. Price told reporters Tuesday that city lawmakers had picked six days in an effort to compromise.

The City Council voted 13 to 1 to ask city lawyers to start drafting the new law, with Councilman Mitch Englander opposing it and Councilwoman Nury Martinez absent.

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If the law wins final approval, Los Angeles will join more than two dozen other cities and counties nationwide that have mandated a minimum number of paid sick days, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families.

Other California cities, including San Francisco and Santa Monica, have mandated that big employers allow workers to earn at least nine paid sick days annually.

The L.A. rules would go into effect for bigger businesses in July. Small businesses  those with 25 employees or fewer  would have an additional year before they would have to comply.

We need to give these small businesses some sort of reprieve, City Councilman Paul Krekorian said.

But council members balked at a move by Councilman David Ryu to completely exempt small businesses. Englander, who supported that exemption, later said that its failure was the reason he cast the sole vote against requiring more sick days.

Backers of the new law estimate that more than 650,000 L.A. workers could be affected by the city requirements, based on an earlier analysis by the Institute for Womens Policy Research that gauged how many workers had no access to paid sick leave before California passed its law in 2014.

Under the proposed law, Los Angeles workers would be able to accrue an hour of sick leave for every 30 hours they work  the same rate as under California state rules. But the L.A. proposal differs from California law because the state allows employers to limit workers to using three days annually.

Los Angeles employers also could offer the required sick days upfront, instead of having employees accrue them over time.

Workers in L.A. would not be paid for unused sick days, but accrued time could be carried over to the next year. Businesses could cap that accrued time at 72 hours, or set a higher cap or none at all.

Follow @latimesemily for whats happening at Los Angeles City Hall.

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When a Los Angeles police officer shot an unarmed man in the head last year along busy Los Feliz Boulevard, it immediately sparked questions about whether the use of force was justified.

The man had a gray towel around his hand, which his family said he typically carried when he walked through the neighborhood. A gruesome video taken after the shooting showed Walter William DeLeon, a father of two, bleeding from the head alongside the road.

Thats pretty bad, a man says on the recording.

But on Tuesday, the Police Commission unanimously determined that Officer Cairo Palacios was justified in shooting DeLeon, deciding he reasonably believed the 48-year-old held a gun under the towel.

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A report made public after the commissions finding revealed new details about the June 19 shooting. LAPD investigators found several witnesses who also thought DeLeon was pointing a gun at police, the report said. Minutes before he was shot, DeLeon told a witness to call 911 and report to the operator that he was carrying a gun, according to the document.

The shooting was the latest high-profile incident to go before the Police Commission, which last week decided an officer violated department policy when he shot and killed an unarmed man near the famed Venice boardwalk.

The decisions by the oversight board have drawn more attention in recent months amid increased national scrutiny of how and when police officers use force.

DeLeon, who was one of 36 people shot by on-duty officers last year, suffered catastrophic injuries, losing part of his brain, one of his eyes and the ability to walk, according to a lawsuit filed this month. The lawsuit disputes the LAPDs account, saying DeLeon was a substantial distance from the officers and posed no threat when he was shot.

His attorney blasted the commissions decision, saying his office had interviewed over two dozen witnesses whose accounts of the shooting differ from what the LAPD said. Attorney Mark Geragos rejected the idea that DeLeon told a witness to call 911, saying there was no basis for that.

We look forward to getting into a courtroom and showing exactly how not only this was not in policy, but also that criminal charges should have been brought, he said. There was absolutely no justification for the use of deadly force. None. He didnt have a gun.

A spokesman for the district attorneys office  which will decide whether to file criminal charges in connection with the shooting  said Tuesday that the LAPD had not yet presented its investigation to prosecutors.

According to the report that LAPD Chief Charlie Beck submitted to the commission, a witness called 911 a few minutes before officers saw DeLeon walking toward their patrol car, which was stopped in traffic along Los Feliz Boulevard.

The caller told a California Highway Patrol dispatcher that a man, later identified as DeLeon, just walked by me and said, Call 911. Let them know Im walking down the street and I have a gun in my hand,  the report said.

A pedestrian walks past the scene where an unarmed man was shot by police in Los Feliz in this June 2015 photo. The Los Angeles Police Commission found on Tuesday officers were justified in the shooting. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

The officers heard a loud moan or scream from their patrol car  the windows were rolled down  but initially didnt give the noise much attention, the report said. When they heard it again, the report said, they told investigators they looked over and saw DeLeon walking on a nearby sidewalk.

DeLeon then turned toward the patrol car, the report said. One of his hands was covered in a towel. Both of his arms were bent at a 90-degree angle, the report said, pointing at the officers.

I instantly thought, Hes pointing a gun at somebody,  one witness recalled.

I saw him and my first thought was, This man has a gun and hes going to shoot someone,  another witness told investigators. So I put my car in park and got down as low as I could.

One witness said DeLeon yelled, Cops, cops, cops, before he approached police.

The officers left their car and drew their guns. One officer said he saw something metallic in DeLeons hands and ordered him to drop the weapon, the report said.

I remember thinking to myself  Im going to get hit soon,  Palacios said, according to the report. Im going to get shot. Im going to die here. 

Palacios told investigators he opened fire as DeLeon continued to point his towel-covered hand at police. When the officers approached DeLeon, one yanked the towel from his hand, the report said. When it hit the ground and opened up, the officers partner told investigators, there was nothing in there.

But, Beck and the police commissioners concluded, based on the totality of the circumstances, Palacios reasonably believed DeLeons actions presented an imminent threat.

The names of the officers, as well as the witnesses, were redacted from the copy of Becks report that was made public Tuesday, but the LAPD previously identified Palacios as the officer who shot DeLeon.

Palacios graduated from the LAPDs academy in 2006 and worked as a sworn officer in the citys General Services Department, which patrolled parks, libraries and other city-owned properties. That department merged with the LAPD in 2013.

At the time of the shooting, Palacios was assigned to patrol Griffith Park as part of the LAPDs Security Services Division. He was removed from the field after the shooting and is now working administrative duties, an LAPD spokesman said Tuesday.

An attorney representing the officer said the shooting was unfortunate but that Palacios was reacting to DeLeons actions. Attorney Gary Fullerton said the case showed that investigations into shootings can reveal new details that can affect how they are viewed.

People get a tidbit of information and jump at it, he said. Until we know everything, its not fair to anybody  not just the officers, but the victim, the suspect, the public at large. You need a fair and thorough investigation.

Follow @katemather for more LAPD news.

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An independent lawyer assigned to represent Americans privacy interests before the nations top-secret spy court failed to persuade a judge to block FBI agents from searching intelligence databases to hunt for evidence of traditional crimes rather than restricting them to national security probes, according to a newly declassified court opinion.

The ruling released Tuesday provides one of the first glimpses into how a 2015 bipartisan law aiming at reining in government intelligence-gathering is being implemented at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees requests for surveillance warrants from law enforcement agencies involving suspects inside the U.S.

In the aftermath of domestic surveillance programs exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, Congress last year passed the USA Freedom Act, which allowed certain information-gathering practices to continue, but created a privacy advocate to represent the public interest.

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The newly released documents also reveal that the FBI is storing encrypted communications it has obtained in intelligence investigations until they can be decrypted and analyzed by specialists.

The Nov. 6 opinion by Thomas F. Hogan, the chief judge of the FISA court, reauthorized a long-standing government spying effort known as the 702 program, which targets electronic communications of those believed to be foreigners living abroad.

Hogan ruled that the nations spy agencies and the FBI were following proper procedures in how they selected targets for surveillance, gathered intelligence data and later mined it.

The communications data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ranges from phone numbers and email addresses to the content of calls and messages in the possession of U.S. telecommunications and Internet companies.

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FISA judges have approved the spying effort each time it has been submitted for review since 2008. But Hogans 80-page opinion was the first to rely on advice from an outside privacy advocate, known as an amicus curae, to help him determine the legality of the initiative.

The advocate was attorney Amy Jeffress, a former top national security prosecutor at the Justice Department who is now a defense attorney in Washington.

Giving judges the ability to tap such a lawyer for advice was a key element of the 2015 reform measure to address criticism that only the governments position was being heard in the ultra-secretive court.

It is only the second publicly disclosed instance in which the court has used an outside lawyer to examine an aspect of the governments spying programs.

Last September, the court asked attorney Preston Burton to examine whether the government could retain bulk telephone metadata that it had been told to destroy. Investigators wanted to keep the data for an extra few months so it could ensure the accuracy of information it would attain under the more targeted procedures enacted last year by Congress. Burton agreed that it was permissible to do so.

In August, Hogan asked Jeffress to address whether the spy agencies and FBI were setting proper boundaries in how they gathered intelligence, as well as how they retained and searched the data, according to the judges redacted opinion.

Jeffress generally agreed that the spy agencies and FBI were following proper procedures in targeting those they believed to be non-U.S. citizens living abroad.

However, she raised concerns about how the FBI queries the sensitive data in its hunt for those who may have committed crimes unrelated to national security matters. She felt the FBI was restricted by law from conducting such searches.

The FBIs procedures go far beyond the purpose for which the Section 702-acquired information is collected in permitting queries that are unrelated to national security, Jeffress argued, according to the judges opinion.

Hogan disagreed, however, writing that the law clearly permitted FBI agents to search databases for such purposes. He added that such searches rarely generate a link to criminal activity.

The risks that the results of such a query will be viewed or otherwise used in connection with an investigation that is unrelated to national security appears to be remote, if not entirely theoretical, Hogan wrote. The court is not prepared to find a constitutional deficiency based upon a hypothetical problem.

Even so, the judge ordered the government to report any instance in which FBI personnel receive and review intelligence information that the FBI identifies as concerning a United States person in response to a query that is not designed to find and extract foreign intelligence information.



The FBIs use of FISA-obtained data to help in criminal investigations is an issue that has long troubled civil liberties groups. They are particularly concerned that communications involving innocent Americans might be unintentionally swept up and stored in vast government databases only to be later linked to an alleged crime.

Its clear that the governments conversion of a spying program that is justified on terrorism and foreign intelligence grounds into a tool for investigating ordinary crimes is one that raises deep constitutional concerns, said Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the ACLU. This is what the slippery slope looks like. The government claims sweeping new surveillance authority in the name of fighting terrorism and then starts using it in routine criminal investigations.

Jeffress declined to comment, as did Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman.

Hogans opinion also disclosed that the FBI is grappling with breaking into encrypted communications, an issue that was brought to light recently when the government persuaded a federal judge to order Apple to unlock an iPhone used by one of the terrorists in the San Bernardino attacks.

The FBI ultimately dropped the case when it was approached by an unidentified third-party that was able to bypass Apples security on the phone, allowing the bureau to download its contents. A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said nothing of significance was found on the device.

In the opinion, Hogan noted that the FBI has been storing encrypted communications until government analysts can find a way to access and read them. Once the information is decrypted, Hogan wrote, the data will then become subject to the governments retention and deletion timetables.

Law enforcement officials say they need tech companies help to access encrypted devices and messages to investigate crimes and stop potential terrorist attacks. Privacy advocates and technology firms say creating backdoors into products would expose customers data to hackers and foreign governments.

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Former New York Police Officer Peter Liang will not serve time behind bars for killing an innocent, unarmed black man in 2014 in a case that drew passionate allegations of racial injustice from both African American and Asian American protesters.

A Brooklyn judge on Tuesday ordered Liang to serve five years probation and complete 800 hours of community service, saying the Chinese American rookie cop never intended to shoot, let alone kill, Akai Gurley while patrolling a dark stairwell in a Brooklyn housing project with his gun drawn.

Liang was convicted in February of manslaughter and official misconduct for firing a shot that ricocheted off a wall and struck Gurley, standing a floor below, in the heart.

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Liang faced up to 15 years in prison, but a Brooklyn prosecutor requested that the former officer receive no prison time, and on Tuesday, Judge Danny Chun called the shooting an accident.

Shooting that gun and killing someone was probably the last thing in his mind and probably never entered his mind at all, Chun said. This was not an intentional act.... Theres no evidence, either direct or circumstantial, that the defendant was aware of Akai Gurleys presence.

As Chun handed down the sentence, several members of the courtroom audience  particularly Gurleys friends and family  dabbed their eyes with tissue and clung tightly to one another, heads down.

Protesters in Brooklyn, N.Y., in February show support for former NYPD Officer Peter Liang. (Craig Ruttle / Associated Press)

Liang, who was fired by the Police Department after his conviction, gave a quiet and contrite address to the court, saying he was forever changed by the shooting.

After the shooting, I was in shock and could barely breathe, he said, his head bowed as he read a statement. I wish I could undo what happened.

Outside the courthouse, Gurleys family and friends were swept up by supporters who tried to shelter them from onlookers. Gurleys aunt Hertencia Petersen later told reporters, Theres no justice.

Gurleys death, as with other police shootings of unarmed black men, drew criticism from African Americans who have demanded greater accountability from a system they say doesnt value black lives.

But Liangs conviction  the first of an NYPD officer for an on-duty death since 2005  also launched the largest Asian American protests in recent memory as supporters around the U.S. accused prosecutors of scapegoating Liang because of his Chinese American heritage.

To many of those supporters, the Liang shooting was a tragic accident caused by difficult patrol conditions in a dark and poorly maintained public housing facility. They felt Liang was an easy target for prosecution because of his ethnicity, while white cops went free or were lightly punished for similar incidents.

Liang said he fired his gun because he was startled by a loud noise, and his attorneys on Tuesday requested the manslaughter charge be downgraded, saying prosecutors hadnt proved Liang intentionally created a risk. Chun agreed, reducing the charge to criminally negligent homicide.

Liangs victim was also remembered as a family man who deserved justice. Kimberly Ballinger, Gurleys partner, said the loss had been particularly difficult for her young daughter.

Everyday Akaila asks why her dad was killed by a police officer, she told the court.

Before the sentencing, opposing groups of protesters gathered outside the courthouse. Protesters who thought the shooting represented an unsettling trend of police targeting African Americans chanted for harsher punishment: Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell.

A small group of pro-Liang protesters, meanwhile, held signs that said selective justice and racist prosecution.

As news of Liangs relatively lenient sentence trickled through the crowd, both camps expressed a lingering sense of exhaustion and frustration.

Nobody wins, said Kevin Ni, 45, a Liang supporter. But at least we can clear the case.

For supporters of the Gurley family, the verdict was dispiriting but not surprising.

This case is unique because it involves two different minorities, said Pedro Valdez Rivera Jr., 24. Both of them are victims of the bureaucracy going on in the system.

It also hit uncomfortably close to home for some, like Carol Gray, whose son Kimani was shot in 2013 by New York police officers who never faced charges.

A life has been taken. Akai Gurley is gone, she said, expressing frustration that Liang didnt receive a harsher punishment when other defendants go to jail for smoking drugs, for shoplifting.

Even the younger members of the crowd expressed a deep sense of fatigue at what they saw as another systemic failure.

This is my first protest, said Imani Ecclesiasdes, 15. Im here because Im tired of seeing my people get gunned down and the system doing nothing about it.

Liang grew up in New Yorks Chinatown as the son of Chinese immigrants, and his conviction in February brought out 10,000 protesters in Brooklyn. Rallies were held in other cities across the U.S. as well, with several hundred protesting outside Los Angeles City Hall on Feb. 20.

Prosecutors accused Liang of deadly negligence. After shooting Gurley, Liang didnt call for an ambulance and didnt perform CPR  factors that seemed to count against him in court.

Gurleys supporters say that whatever unfairness there may be in Liangs conviction, it cant compare with the injustice of Gurleys death.

Akai had family that loved him just like Peter Liang, a mother just like Peter Liang, Peterson, Gurleys aunt, told The Times this month.

But Liangs mother can come visit him every day, she said. Akai Gurleys mom ... has to visit his grave.

matt.pearce@latimes.com

Special correspondent Hansen reported from New York and Times staff writer Pearce reported from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Frank Shyong contributed to this report.

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Three things are certain in life. Death and taxes are two of them.

The third is tax fraud.

With tax day come and gone, federal investigators now face another year of chasing some of Americas most colorful paper bandits through mountains of tax returns, bank statements and corporate documents.

Have you heard the one about the Alaska plastic surgeon whose wife filed for divorce? Michael D. Brandner, 67, didnt want her to get her share of the couples money, investigators said.

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So, prosecutors say, Brandner drove to Central America in 2007 in a 1971 Mercedes to stash $4.6 million in a Panama shell corporation and $350,000 in bank accounts in Costa Rica.

Brandner also stuffed a thousand ounces of gold worth almost $800,000 into a Costa Rican safe deposit box  leaving his ex-wife to apply for welfare and food stamps, according to court records.

Brandner was sentenced to four years in prison this month for wire fraud and tax evasion. One of the terms of his eventual probation is that he keep only a single checking account in his name  and that he files accurate tax returns when he gets out.

NEWSLETTER: Get the days top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >>

The recent leak of the so-called Panama Papers brought global scrutiny to the ways in which the wealthy have hidden their money from the public and from their own nations tax collectors.

But tax fraud and evasion are also problems in the U.S., with the Justice Department pursuing crooks big and small who have collectively made off with billions of dollars of the publics money through a discombobulating array of schemes.

The departments cases this past year have addressed a wide variety of tax crimes including: tax evasion; preparing and filing false and fraudulent tax returns; failing to file tax returns; evasion of payment and obstruction; failing to collect, account for and deposit employment tax; conspiring to defraud the IRS; and, illegally concealing offshore accounts, Acting Assistant Atty. Gen. Caroline D. Ciraolo of the Justice Departments tax division said in a statement.

Im extremely proud of the men and women who prosecute these cases and in doing so, send a clear message to honest taxpayers that those who engage in this criminal conduct will be held accountable, Ciraolo said.

The schemes are varied enough that each year the Internal Revenue Service puts together a dirty dozen list of tax scams. Some are banal, like padding deductions or falsely claiming tax credits.

Other schemes are more extravagant, such as crooks who pretend to be IRS agents. Theyll call and threaten to imprison or deport their victims for allegedly not paying their taxes, and then run off with the money.

IRS impersonators have scammed about 5,000 people out of $26.5 million since October 2013, the agency said.

Then theres stolen identity refund fraud, a big one. Thieves who have stolen Social Security numbers from hospitals, nursing homes and from lists of the dead have filed millions of fraudulent tax returns, making off with almost $6 billion in refunds in 2013 alone.

The criminals arent always identity thieves. Sometimes theyre the very people that the system needs to function, like lawyers and tax preparers.

One IRS agent posed as a New Jersey inmate to catch two tax preparers who filed bogus returns for prisoners so they could cash the refunds. Kamal J. James of Seaford, Del., and Crystal G. Hawkins of Laurel, Del., were convicted and sentenced last week to eight years and four years in prison, respectively. They also were ordered to pay $570,897 in restitution.

This month, U.S. marshals captured a former lawyer, Palle Bognaes, who had been sentenced to more than six years in prison in 2002 for his part in a scheme to help clients avoid paying taxes in Nevada. Bognaes never showed up to report to prison.

After 14 years on the run, investigators tracked him down in Phoenix. He claimed his name was Sam Smith. One tiny problem: Smith and Bognaes had the same fingerprints. On April 8, a judge ordered Bognaes to finally start serving his prison term.

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The IRS also has a dislike for tax protesters who use frivolous arguments to avoid paying taxes  such as claiming that theyre citizens of their state rather than of the United States and thus dont have to pay federal taxes.

This argument does not tend to play well in federal court.

And, of course, tax fraud can be as simple as refusing to file and pay taxes.

Alaska attorney Paul D. Stockler  a former prosecutor who was also licensed to practice law in California  has had trouble filing tax returns on time since 2000. In 2006, 2008 and 2009, Stockler didnt pay income taxes at all.

In a court filing, Stocklers attorney blamed procrastination, which increased with each deadline he missed.... Mr. Stockler fell victim to self-sabotage.

The government was also a victim of Stocklers self-sabotage  to the tune of $886,058 in unpaid taxes  and was less charmed by the defenses posture of haplessness.

During this same period the defendant did find the money to spend on other living expenses, including gambling, cars and property, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.

Stockler was sentenced to one year and two months in prison. Its usually hard to beat the taxman at his own game.

matt.pearce@latimes.com

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A storm that hit Houston this week caused the citys worst flooding in 15 years and left five people dead, officials said.

More than a thousand residents of apartment complexes in the northern Greenspoint area had to flee rising floodwaters that engulfed nearby streets, floating to safety with their children in rafts fashioned from storage containers and a refrigerator.

Traffic cameras showed that two of those killed in the storm drove around barricades blocking a flooded underpass, according to Michael Walter, a spokesman for the citys emergency operation center.

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Three others were found in cars on flooded roads since the storm began late Sunday, including one in nearby Waller County, according to the local sheriffs chief deputy, Brian Cantrell.

Houstons Harris County Judge Ed Emmett signed an emergency declaration that more than 1,000 homes had flooded. That number was expected to grow as area bayous swelled with runoff Tuesday.

This is the second most devastating rainfall event in this areas history after Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, Walter said, based on the amount of rain that fell and where it fell.

See the most-read stories this hour >>

Allison left 41 people dead, $5 billion in damages and about 40 inches of rain. This weeks storm dropped more than 17 inches in 24 hours in some areas.

We need to be vigilant and concerned about ongoing rising water, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said at a Monday afternoon briefing, declaring a state of disaster in the nine affected counties and warning residents to avoid flooded roads in coming days.

Scenes from 625 Seminar in @GreenspointTX. We picked up a few residents. @SylvesterTurner pic.twitter.com/WNbIVphI5I  Janice Evans (@Jevansdavis) April 18, 2016

Houston emergency crews made at least 700 high-water rescues, about double what they normally do, Walter said.

Weve had damage across the city, he said, from Greenspoint to the north, down to Acres Homes and Meyerland.

Meyerland, built along a bayou, was also among the hardest-hit areas flooded during a Memorial Day storm last year, and some residents had just finished rebuilding, Mayor Sylvester Turner noted after canceling his state of the city address, closing city courts and other offices.

Turner surveyed damage, visited a shelter and distributed water in Greenspoint, where those evacuated from three flooded apartment complexes stayed first at a nearby mall, then a shelter.

Were going to do everything we can on the cleanup and help them put their lives back together again, Turner said.

NEWSLETTER: Get the days top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >>

Many of the areas major highways skirt bayous that overflowed during the storm, and residents were still coping with high water Tuesday. Some schools remained closed.

Because the watershed in the northwest and north are so slow to drain, the creeks will stay up and the water in the roadways will stay high, said Kim Jackson, a spokeswoman for Harris County Flood Control District. We didnt expect the magnitude of storm that we received.

The National Weather Service has issued a flash flood watch for the area through Wednesday morning.

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

Twitter: @mollyhf

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New Yorkers are accustomed to being at the center of the universe, though typically not during presidential primaries. Such contests are usually settled by the time they arrive in this famously combative arena.

Not this year.

Empire State voters will have a New York-size influence over a pair of races dominated by a familiar cast of characters. They include a real estate magnate whose colorful personal life and business exploits have landed him on the cover of their tabloid newspapers for years; the states former U.S. senator; and an ex-Brooklynite whose resilience confirms that even decades in pastoral Vermont dont erase a New Yorkers street-fighting instincts.

Here are five things to watch in Tuesdays New York primary:

Can Donald Trump top 50%?

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The Republican front-runner is poised to win his home state primary. The only question  and it is important  is by how much. A candidate receiving a majority of the statewide vote will be awarded 14 at-large delegates. The same formula applies in each of New Yorks 27 congressional districts, for an additional 81 delegates. So his rivals, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, have been targeting selected districts where they believe they can keep Trump below 50% and pick off a delegate here or there.

It is no exaggeration to say each one matters as Trump strives for the 1,237 pledged delegates needed to avoid a fight at the Republican Partys national convention. A good night for Kasich would be winning 10 delegates and for Cruz, five, said David Wasserman, who is closely tracking the nominating contest for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Can Kasich change the campaign narrative?

Yes, the delegate hunt trumps all  pun intended. But perceptions still matter. Kasich has won nothing since his home state primary March 15. Meantime, Cruz picked up 36 delegates after walloping Trump in Wisconsins April 5 primary and has steadily added more at state- and district-level party conventions across the country.

A second-place finish could enhance Kasichs efforts to shoehorn himself back into the campaign conversation as a viable alternative to Trump or Cruz. The race moves next week to contests quite hospitable for him, including primaries in Pennsylvania  where Kasich was born  as well as Connecticut and Maryland. A decent New York finish could offer a modest boost. Third place would be disastrous for the governor.

As goes New York ?

Too big for a winner-take-all result, New York is a lot like California from a presidential primary perspective. So Tuesdays results may offer some hints of how the GOP race may shape up on June 7 in the Golden State.

California will offer 172 delegates, more than anywhere, under a system much like New Yorks. Cruz and Kasich are again likely to target selected congressional districts where they believe they may win a few delegates  and, oddly enough, where the relatively few Republicans in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco can have an outsize effect.

As John Weaver, Kasichs chief strategist, pointed out, You can get three delegates in a congressional district that might have 2,000 Republican votes, and they matter just as much as a congressional district that might have 200,000 Republican votes.

Will Kasichs performance in the Bronx telegraph his support in Berkeley? If Cruz sweeps Poughkeepsie, will that signal his strength in Pacoima? New York may be telling.

The battle for Brooklyn

Hillary Clinton is strongly favored to win the Democratic primary, but she hasnt had an easy time. The Democrats slugfest has been particularly brutal in Brooklyn, where the electorate in many ways embodies the coalition that propelled Barack Obama to victory. It is racially and ethnically diverse and teems with millennials and progressives.

Clinton, the states former senator, sought to establish a beachhead in Brooklyn by making it home to her national campaign headquarters. But the boroughs collection of hipster neighborhoods, with their young entrepreneurs, innovators and art students, has become a potent stronghold instead for the candidate with the thick native accent, Bernie Sanders. About 28,000 supporters crowded into Brooklyns Prospect Park on Sunday, the biggest turnout yet for his campaign.

Still, the borough represents a major test for Sanders, the democratic socialist senator from Vermont. He must show his message is starting to resonate more with blacks and Latinos if he is to have any hope of substantially diminishing the huge delegate lead Clinton has amassed.

Rust Belt referendum

Most of the states Democrats live in New York City and its suburbs, but Clinton and Sanders have spent considerable time battling upstate. Thats where New York continues to suffer most from the loss of manufacturing jobs.

Clinton highlighted work she did as a senator aimed at reviving industries that were decimated when jobs moved offshore. But Sanders message of economic populism has resonated in such communities in earlier primary states, particularly in Michigan, where his attacks on Clintons support for international trade treaties helped propel him to an upset victory.

Lately, he has hit Clinton hard for failing to support a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage, another potent theme in communities with mothballed factories. The next stop is Pennsylvania, where the fight is likely to be reprised.

evan.halper@latimes.com

mark.barabak@latimes.com

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At Bernie Sanders rally in Brooklyns Prospect Park, thousands of supporters, most of them young, gathered Sunday for what seemed more like a concert than a campaign stop. On Monday, Hillary Clinton brought her supporters together in a midtown Manhattan hotel where there was one distinct difference besides the absence of a band named Grizzly Bear: the age of many of those in attendance.

As the two Democrats seek their partys nomination, Sanders appeal is greatest to the young, particularly young men. Clintons support is strongest among older voters, both men and women. It has been true through the primary states so far, its true in polls leading up to Tuesdays contest in New York, and its true in polls of California, where the 2016 primary season will reach its climactic conclusion on June 7.

Angelica Collado, a Queens College student, was among the sea of Sanders supporters and curious Brooklynites who showed up at the park Sunday, like so many have before at other mass rallies for the Vermont senator. She likes Sanders for his support of free college tuition for state universities and colleges, she said.

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I really like his point of view, said Collado, 25. And I think hell continue what Obama has really started.

A day later in Manhattan, Dany Johnson was even more enthused about voting for Clinton.

I love her experience, her intellect, her energy, said Johnson, 58. And the fact that she can take so much crap and come back.

The schism between those views illustrated what has been perhaps the most persistent aspect of the Democratic presidential contest: most younger voters going to Sanders, in large part because they are drawn to his uncompromisingly liberal ideology, and most older voters going to Clinton because of her determination and deep experience in politics.

The age factor seems to trump everything, said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. Age is a big deal in all of this.

In an NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll of likely New York Democratic voters released Friday, Sanders won by 13 percentage points among those younger than 45, while Clinton won by 38 percentage points among those older than 45. The real Sanders edge came among voters younger than 30, who gave him a 53-point advantage.

The numbers were similar in a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll of California primary voters last month: Sanders led by 47 points among those younger than 30 and 15 points among those younger than 50; Clinton led by 33 points among those 50 and older.

Bernie Sanders campaigns in the Bronx. In a poll of likely New York Democratic voters released Friday, Sanders was ahead of Hillary Clinton by 13 percentage points among those younger than 45. (Mary Altaffer / Associated Press)

Nationally, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Monday showed Clinton and Sanders essentially tied, with 50% for the former U.S. senator and 48% for the Vermont senator. When the poll was divided by age, however, each could claim a giant victory. Among voters 50 and older, Clinton led by 27 points. Among those younger than 50, Sanders won by 31 points.

Sanders has been an unlikely recipient of the affections of the young. They have treated the rumpled veteran politician with a head of unruly white hair as the epitome of hip.

But politics are more than skin-deep, and his liberal political views dovetail nicely with the desires of younger voters.

Voters younger than 30 in California were almost twice as likely as those 65 and older to reside on the left end of the political spectrum. Two in five California voters younger than 30 described themselves as liberal. Only about a quarter of those 50 and older said they were liberal.

Among those 29 and younger in California who planned to vote in the Democratic primary, 71% sided with Sanders, compared with 24% for Clinton. Among Democratic primary voters older than 50, Clinton had a 33-point advantage.

The fact that age and ideology is driving a challenge to the establishment front-runner is not a new development for Democrats. Candidates on the left have fought repeatedly to pull the party in a more liberal direction. Among them were former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean in 2004, former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley in 2000 and California Gov. Jerry Brown in 1992. Their respective establishment candidates  John F. Kerry, Al Gore and Bill Clinton  persevered to become the nominees.

The timing of this election, amid a rocky recovery from an economic crisis that began on Wall Street, also plays a role. The younger generation of voters has come of age loaded with college debt and struggling to find jobs. They also have spent a lifetime listening to criticism of Clinton by Republicans. In 2008, they were firmly in the camp of Barack Obama, who defeated Clinton to win the Democratic nomination and, eventually, the White House.

Sanders castigation of Clinton as a partner in a corrupt political system and beholden to the Wall Street firms that contributed to a ruinous economy also feeds a discomfort with Clinton.

Some younger voters also just feel more affinity to Sanders.

Courtney Fowlkes, 34, described herself at the Prospect Park event as definitely voting for Sanders in the first New York primary in which shell take part.

Fowlkes called Sanders a candidate who is more committed to her politics.

I was torn. I did want to vote for the first woman, she said. But I didnt want to vote for a woman because she was a woman.

She watched the candidates debate and investigated their positions on a website that uses policy positions to tell voters which candidates most closely match their views. She found that she was 96% in line with Sanders and 80% aligned with Clinton.

The math showed which way to go, she said.

Clinton, with her vows of compromise and working within the system, may be a less compelling presence for many younger voters. But those traits  and her lengthy political resume  make supporting her a more satisfying choice for many older voters.

Brenda Berkman attended Clintons event Monday wearing a campaign cap that dated to the former New York senators 2008 bid.

In 1982, Berkman was the named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that forced the citys Fire Department to accept women for the first time. She retired in 2006 after 25 years of service. In Clinton, she sees a familiar persistence and willingness to fight for others.

Hillary, for her whole career, she has been out there in front, speaking out on a whole variety of civil rights issues, said Berkman, 64. She didnt just poof out of nowhere.

Berkman was in college during the Vietnam War, when the Democratic Party was roiled between establishment candidates and liberal challengers. And she has great sympathy for young Sanders voters who are loaded with college debt and face difficult job prospects  although, she noted, there are young Hillary supporters as well. Her problem is with Sanders.

Wheres Bernie been? she asked. Hes been nowhere.

Clinton has held a steady lead in New York, where her status from winning two Senate races and her power campaigning across the state in the last several weeks have solidified her vote. The age split, though notable, does not seems to be hugely troubling her campaign here.

In California, however, Clintons edge has been shrinking, and much of that is due to the influence of age.

Clinton has counted on securing her victory in California by holding on to her strong advantages among minority voters, as well as among women. But minorities are showing signs of splitting along the age demarcation.

Among Latino voters younger than 50, Sanders led by 9 points in April, for example; among Latinos older than 50, Clinton led by 50 points. In the seven weeks to go before California votes, voters on both sides of the divide will be in Sanders and Clintons sights.

cathleen.decker@latimes.com

Twitter: @cathleendecker

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Trump is poised to win New York, but by how much matters a lot to delegate-hungry Cruz and Kasich
Donald Trump roared to a huge victory Tuesday in New Yorks Republican primary, delivering a much-needed chance to reset his presidential campaign and retake the upper hand in the fight for the GOP nomination.

There had been little doubt Trump would carry his home state, where the real estate mogul is literally a household name: In giant letters and various forms, Trump adorns some of Manhattans most exclusive properties.

Live results from the New York primary

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The outcome was clear the instant that polls closed, with the front-runner leaping to an enormous lead that never wavered. With nearly all of the votes counted, Trump had 60% support, followed by Ohio Gov. John Kasich with 25% and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz with 15.

The key question was the size of Trumps victory and whether he would capture all of the delegates by winning 50% of the statewide vote and a majority in each of New Yorks 27 congressional districts. It appeared he would claim at least the overwhelmingly majority of the states 95 delegates, with Kasich taking a handful.

The allocation was more than a matter of vanity or political perceptions. The GOP contest has become a hand-to-hand battle for delegates to the partys July convention in Cleveland, where they alone will choose the nominee to carry the party standard into the fall campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

It takes a majority, 1,237 delegates, to be assured of the nomination before the GOP gathering, which appears to be Trumps best hope as opponents work to stop him short and throw the convention open to one or another of his rivals.

Trump entered the day with 756 delegates, followed by Cruz with 559 and Kasich with 144. Trumps substantial gain eases his quest for the nomination but still leaves the outcome far from certain.

The path forward is a high wire, said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford Universitys Hoover Institution and speechwriter for former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson of California. It is manageable, but there is no room for error on either side.

1 / 12 Hillary Clinton celebrates her New York victory with daughter Chelsea and husband Bill. (Kathy Willens / Associated Press) 2 / 12 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump after his landslide win in New Yorks primary. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 12 Donald Trump with his wife, Melania, after his victory in New York. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 12 Ted Cruz, who took third place in the GOP primary in New York, campaigns in Philadelphia. (Jessica Kourkounis / Getty Images) 5 / 12 Ted Cruz in Philadelphia. (Matt Rourke / Associated Press) 6 / 12 Bernie Sanders is mobbed at Penn State University. (Jeff Swensen / Getty Images) 7 / 12 Hillary Clinton greets supporters outside a polling station in Chappaqua, N.Y. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images) 8 / 12 Donald Trump in Manhattan after casting his ballot. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) 9 / 12 Residents line up to vote in Brooklyn. (Stephanie Keith / Getty Images) 10 / 12 Donald Trump votes at his New York City polling station. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) 11 / 12 Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Clinton, vote in Chappaqua, N.Y. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images) 12 / 12 John Kasich tries on a pair of boxing gloves during a campaign stop in Annapolis, Md. Maryland is among the five states voting next Tuesday. (Oliver Douliery / AFP-Getty Images)

Trump was blown out by Cruz in the last GOP contest, the April 5 primary in Wisconsin, and has been steadily losing ground to the senators better-organized campaign ever since, as Republicans seat their national delegates at state- and district-level conventions across the country.

Still, of the three candidates remaining, Trump is the only one with a realistic chance of winning the nomination on the first ballot in Cleveland.

In an effort to steady his campaign, Trump recently shook up its staff, bringing in some of the very Washington establishment figures he once criticized. Amid the upheaval, his campaign field director, a political neophyte, resigned as Trump sought to professionalize his delegate wrangling under Paul J. Manafort, a former lobbyist and longtime Beltway insider, who quickly moved to consolidate and extend his power.

In one sign of Manaforts apparent influence, Trump has grown uncharacteristically restrained in his public comments, in a seeming effort to project a more presidential image. His victory speech Tuesday night was notably brief and absent the insults and braggadocio that characterized previous celebrations.

Nothing, however, could do more to quell growing doubts about Trumps viability than seizing a big chunk of New York delegates, and his delight was evident as he walked through a crowd of supporters in the Trump Tower lobby with Frank Sinatra crooning, New York, New York.

Were really, really rocking, Trump told backers in his Manhattan high-rise.

Trump minimized the recent upheaval in his campaign  Its actually a team of unity  and renewed his criticism of the system that has allowed Cruz to gain convention delegates even in states he lost.

The people arent going to stand for it, said Trump, who has warned that riots could break out at the national convention if he is not victorious. Its a crooked system. Its a system thats rigged, and were going to go back to the old way. Its called you vote and you win.

New York was always going to be a difficult state for Cruz, whose religious conservatism was an ill fit for the states live-and-let-live ethos. He compounded his problems with an attack on Trump and his New York values, which may have resonated in Iowa and earlier contests but hit with a thud among voters here who took it as a personal slap.

By Monday, Cruz had abandoned New York and was campaigning in Maryland for that states primary next week.

On Tuesday night he was in Pennsylvania, which also votes next week, speaking to a small crowd gathered in the atrium of the National Constitution Center in downtown Philadelphia.

He dismissed Trumps victory as a politician winning his home state, then went on to give an unusually soaring speech invoking the moon landing, the dawn of computers and other American achievements, while promising to make good on the best of President Obamas rhetoric.

Not Yes we can, but now Yes, we will, he said, invoking the signature theme of Obamas 2008 campaign. We will restore our spirit. We will free our minds and imagination. We will create a new and better world.

Kasich was Trumps main challenger in New York, though the governor conceded from the start that he would not carry the state.

Rather, his strategy was to pick off scattered delegates in a handful of friendlier congressional districts, including those on either side of Central Park, where the relatively few Republicans in Democratic New York City tend toward greater moderation than the typical GOP primary voter.

Kasich, while conservative, has been seen as more centrist than either Trump or Cruz, and more measured in his persona as well.

Dee Ann Boyd, 54, who lives in Midtown Manhattan and directs a nonprofit organization, voted for Kasich because she considers Trump dangerous and believes Cruz lacks the respect of his colleagues.

I dont think my vote is going to matter today, said Boyd, noting that Kasich faced extremely long odds to win the nomination. But I voted my conscience.

Kasich held a town hall meeting Tuesday night in Annapolis, Md., concluding even before the New York polls had closed. He had no other election-night events.

From New York, the campaign heads to a batch of Eastern contests that includes Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island as well as Maryland and Pennsylvania. In all, 172 delegates will be chosen along a heavily urban corridor that seems to favor the citified Trump and his front-running campaign.

The political terrain is again less friendly to Cruz, and Kasich sees the contests as another chance to shoehorn himself into serious contention.

Follow @markzbarabak and @finneganLAT for national and California politics.

Times staff writer Chris Megerian in New York contributed to this report.

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Im Davan Maharaj, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times. Here are some story lines I dont want you to miss today.

TOP STORIES

Empire State of Mind

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Donald Trump canceled a trip to Rancho Palos Verdes last week to focus on his home state of New York. And as columnist Cathleen Decker writes, it figures: The reality is that California political events are not exactly up to snuff compared with those in other states. Agree or disagree? In any event, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton kept in a New York state of mind over the weekend, moving back to form after some testy exchanges.

The Man With the Golden Gums

Geoff Marshall-Hill travels the world. His clients are top secret. He carries an aluminum-clad suitcase that contains 29 cigar-sized cartridges, each marked with a scent component. The 57-year-old Brits mission: to identify flavors that will influence the global food and beverage market. Catch up with the principal flavorist for the Swiss company Givaudan as he samples the citrus at UC Riversides orchards.

WeHo: Lets Talk Less About Sex

Call it sex and the city. West Hollywood officials havent shown too many inhibitions about risque talk at council meetings or offering free condoms in the lobby of City Hall. But recently the city agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit against it and Councilman John Duran -- brought on behalf of a man Duran hired as his deputy after meeting him on Grindr. Thats why some are saying its time to tone it down.

Ghost Boats of North Korea

The boats float eerily out of a haze along the sleepy west coast of Japan. Most are empty, but at least 14 of them have had a grisly cargo: decomposing bodies. Where they came from is clear: North Korea. Everything else about them is mostly a mystery. Who were the people on board, and what happened to them?

Like a Good Book on a Rainy Day

They came. They read. They discussed. More than 500 authors joined us for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the USC campus for a weekend of lively discussions, awards and more. A bit of rain on Saturday didnt dampen spirits. Heres how it unfolded on our live blog.

Mumbai Puts the Car Before the Horse

For decades, horse-drawn carriages have been a symbol of Mumbai, evoking Bollywood and a colonial past. Soon, theyll fade into history, after a court ruled that they must be off the roads by June because the hazards to horses and humans are too great in a metropolis filled with cars. Thats welcome news for animal rights activists, whove long argued that the animals are overworked and underfed.

OUR MUST-READS FROM THE WEEKEND

-- Criminal hackers now target hospitals, police stations and schools.

-- Ted Cruz is outmaneuvering Donald Trump in behind-the-scenes battles for delegates.

-- We need an outsider like Trump, says this two-time Obama voter.

-- Some cry foul as state lawmakers collect public pension checks and legislator salaries.

-- Theres outrage after big labor crafts a law paying its members less than non-union workers.

-- Where are L.A.'s dirtiest streets? Take a look at this interactive map.

-- A transgender teenage ballplayer at a Santa Monica prep school spreads a message of hope and acceptance.

-- The oral history of Bridget Joness Diary from Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth and more.

CALIFORNIA

-- A disproportionate share of blacks and Latinos lose their drivers licenses because of unpaid tickets, according to a study.

-- A 15-story space shuttle fuel tank begins its trek to Los Angeles.

-- What you need to know about Californias new birth control law.

-- Has she smoked weed? What will happen with recreational pot? A conversation with Californias first marijuana czar.

NATION-WORLD

-- The Brussels terrorists were planning another attack on France, prosecutors say.

-- Former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert paid to hide sex abuse, then lied about it, a federal filing alleges.

-- Ukraines prime minister resigns as corruption scandals shake Europe.

-- President Obama says Hillary Clinton was careless with emails but didnt jeopardize national security.

-- Immigrant detention centers remind a 71-year-old therapist of her traumatic childhood in internment camps.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE ARTS

-- Guns N Roses roars back musically even as Axl Roses foot injury hobbles rocks former bad boy.

-- Ice Cube on N.W.A.'s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction: Hip-hop is here forever.

-- Ken Burns Jackie Robinson documentary goes beyond baseball.

-- TV review: The price of The Girlfriend Experience might be too high; it taxes ones dignity.

-- Falun Gong, banned in China, finds a loud protest voice in the U.S. through the Shen Yun dance troupe.

-- Inside the MTV Movie Awards.

-- Middle East Film & Comic Con proves the Force is strong in Dubai.

BUSINESS

-- Despite the hype for Teslas Model 3, electric car sales are far from robust.

-- How retail stores are using virtual reality to make shopping more fun.

SPORTS

-- Trying to play it safe, Jordan Spieth plays his way into a historic collapse at the Masters.

-- Manny Pacquiao says hes retiring after his victory over Timothy Bradley.

-- The Anaheim Ducks ended the regular season by snatching away the division title from the Los Angeles Kings.

OPINION

-- Drought is the new normal. We need less shaming and more incentivizing.

-- The old global consensus on the war on drugs is crumbling.

WHAT OUR EDITORS ARE READING

-- Trump says the Boston Globe is stupid after it publishes a satirical front page. (Boston Globe)

-- A surgeon recalls the night a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan was bombed. (Medium)

-- Inside Chinas underground churches. (The Economist)

-- Do you go online almost constantly? One in five Americans say they do. (Pew Research Center)

ONLY IN L.A.

After a sickly sea lion pup was found sleeping in a La Jolla restaurant earlier this year, it only makes sense that a goat would wander into a Starbucks. After police received calls of the animal wandering a strip mall in Rohnert Park, Millie was found in a coffee shop, chewing on a box and soon to become the latest social media sensation. Cue the jokes about her craving a maaa-chiato.

Please send comments and ideas to Davan Maharaj.
This year, it seems, Californias presidential primaries may finally matter. But many voters could lose their opportunity to participate if they dont act soon. Thats because the June 7 primaries are not open races, in which voters may simply show up and choose among all the possible candidates. Rather, these are party nominating contests, and it is the parties themselves that set the rules about who can participate. Only registered Republicans may cast ballots for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz or John Kasich. The Democratic Party restricts its primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to registered Democrats and to voters listed as no party preference.

With so much interest in this years primary, elections officials are concerned that many Californians wont be able to participate in the presidential primary of their choice because they dont know the rules, dont know their party status or have registered for the wrong party. A Times survey recently found, for instance, that three out of four people who had signed up as American Independents didnt realize they had registered for a real, right-wing political party. Many thought they were simply signing up as lower-case i independents (the unaffiliated voters California classifies as no party preference voters or, as they were formerly called, decline to state voters).

Intentional or not, American Independents will be given an AIP ballot on June 7 with a list of candidates most have never heard of, and theyll be barred from voting in the Democratic or Republican presidential primaries. And that at a time when California leaders have adopted laws designed to boost turnout and participation. Secretary of State Alex Padilla ought to revisit the voter registration form to eliminate that confusing element and any others that people encounter when they sign up to vote.

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California is one of many states where parties have chosen to hold so-called closed primaries. Such rules may be frustrating to unaffiliated voters and anti-establishment candidates. (Trumps children, for example, missed New Yorks deadline to change their party affiliation and wont be able to vote for their dad in the GOP primary.) But the primaries are held for the benefit of political parties and their members so they can choose the best possible nominee for general election. The parties set the rules. Its up to the candidates to follow them, voters to understand them and elections officials to implement them as efficiently as possible.

California has made it fairly easy. (registertovote.ca.gov) There is still time for voters to check their registration and, if they want to, change it to participate in their primary of choice. The deadline is May 23  two weeks before election day.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
Have you heard? Downtown Los Angeles is vibrant.

What was once a desolate swath of urban blight bordered by freeways and brutalist civic structures is now the hippest address in all of America. Since 1999, the population of the city proper has grown threefold from 18,700 to 57,797. The Downtown Center Business Improvement District reports that 700 restaurants, bars, retail, nightlife and amenities opened here between 2008 and 2014. Theyd also like you to know that 75% of DTLA residents are between the ages of 23 and 44 and the mean annual household income is above $98,000.

This portrayal of downtown as a real estate paradigm, an institutional solution to a municipal embarrassment and a cultural phenomenon has been craftily reduced down to one word: vibrancy.

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Vibrancy is a by-word for energy and vitality. It implies possibility, connectivity, malleability, prosperity and all the other sought-after intangibles that make the millennial city so appealing. It mixes exclusivity with inspiration and seduction.

But the high-status downtown of vibrancy is an illusion, a selective fiction  as is the talk of a new and pristine community where all are welcome if they can pay for it. Our city center obsesses over a sense of history but cant quite seem to grasp that downtown Los Angeles is historically a place of down and outs.

A man dressed as Santa Claus passed out in the middle of the day at 7th and Main. (Dan Johnson) (Test)

The idea of vibrancy exists to attract fashionable professionals with disposable income to a zone of tightly held real estate. Once stakeholders and planners have achieved a Lower Manhattan-esque coup, Los Angeles can march proudly into the 21st century, chest a-puff with the knowledge that it righted the urban policy wrongs of the mid-20th century  and made a killing doing so.

I dont begrudge the financial windfall inherent in building a new downtown. I do, however, resent this disingenuous, stale version we stand to inherit. If the recent spate of violence is any indication, the whitewashed rendition of downtown that boosters are pushing isnt just boringits out of touch.

I propose a rebranding. Lets call downtown what it is: visceral.

Downtown is passing notes of perfume and feces and wood-smoked cuisine wafting through the streets between piles of vomit left over from last nights bender. It is silence cut by sirens. It is 2 a.m. drunk shouts and 3 a.m. screams for help. It is smog-tinted sunsets framed by century- old buildings and draped with a parade of shabby tents. It is the maddening frustration of traffic jams born of closed streets and the ecstasy of jasmine in bloom by the cathedral on a warm spring night.

Vibrancy fails downtown. It neglects reality in favor of wishful thinking.

Ours isnt a perfect world. Its downtown -- a gilded toilet where people defecate in the streets, where untreated crazies run amok, where Business Improvement District dispatchers get stabbed in the back, where residents gleefully attend midnight arson, where cars pin people to walls, where tourists disintegrate in water tanks, where old men get beaten to death outside their apartments.

Increasingly, downtown boosters are subject to criticism precisely because the city has run out of cheap, effective or politically expedient solutions for the identity crisis that threatens to disfigure the dream of vibrancy. A new crop of residents, retail and restaurants are adding their I pay x amount to live/work here, I shouldnt have to deal with this! gripes to the mix.

Downtown is not some happy reprieve from the burdens of reality. Downtown is the razors edge tightrope walk by which we negotiate our intense journey as a city.

It is a multitude of sensations, common ground for people from diverse ethnic, philosophical, socioeconomic backgrounds  all searching for some sort of inspiration, luck, prosperity, meaning, salvation or buzz. It is a tinder box of tension, perched on the fault line where haves and have nots intermingle. It shakes with crime, poverty, insanity and desperation as much as wealth and celebration.

Downtown is a beautiful place. It earns top marks in my book precisely because it refuses to be domesticated or pigeonholed. In a world of Disney-fied approximations of life, rough and gruff downtown is an authentic city center, a true zocalo where the best and worst of this life are in constant dialogue.

Lets call downtown what it isas much heaven as hell, equal measures past and future, matched parts hope and horror, a split bill of destiny and doom.

Enjoy it.

Dan Johnson is a downtown resident and writer. Follow him on Twitter @YankeeJim213 or digest his collection of downtown photo gems on Instagram @beautyissuspect.

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IDOMENI, Greece  A tear-gas canister arced through the sky above a spring-green field on the Greek-Macedonian border. Get out of the way! came the shout in Arabic, as the canister scattered a crowd of young men, mostly Syrians, with bandannas pulled up over their noses. The bravest rushed toward the belching gas, smothering the canister with blankets issued by the United Nations refugee agency.

Another blast, and another canister. This time a young man picked it up, searing hot, and hurled it back at the Macedonian forces on the other side of the border fence. As the canister bounced off an armored personnel carrier, the crowd cheered. A small victory.

The bravest of the migrants picked up tear-gas canisters and lobbed them back at the Macedonian border troops. (Vladimir Cvetko)

The border patrol fired back: rubber bullets big enough to see as they cut the air. The migrants ducked and ran, then circled back, cursing, with middle fingers raised.

This is how it would go for most of the day: skirmish and standoff at the chain-link and razor-wire fence in Idomeni, where Greece meets Macedonia. More than 10,000 men, women and children have taken temporary refuge here since February, in a makeshift tent city with only the barest of services. They have made it this far from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan on the Balkan route to Europe. Now they wait, testing the resolve of the European Union, and the whole world, it seems.

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MUSTAFA ALHAMOUD, face coated in toothpaste, had pleaded with the Macedonians to open the border on April 10. (Vladimir Cvetko)

Initially the refugees had hoped  believed  the border would open April 10. That morning, a democratically nominated delegation of five representatives had been allowed to cross to the Macedonian side to plead their case. Mustafa Alhamoud, 32, from Syria and the youngest of the camp representatives, wanted me to understand the day had started peacefully: We are a peaceful people who want to peacefully cross to Europe. When the Greeks tell us we can cross to talk to the Macedonians, I say only if the press can come. I want the world to see we tried to be peaceful.

After three hours of talk, however, the border remained closed. That's when a frustrated group of about 300 men and boys stormed the fence and managed to tear through the reinforced chain link and razor wire in four places. The Macedonians moved swiftly, swinging batons, according to some reports, and using tear gas and rubber bullets to push the migrants off the fence.

About an hour after the initial assault, as grandparents, women and children retreated south, the men on the Greek side settled into a fitful tit-for-tat with the border troops. Whenever the migrants advanced, the Macedonians responded. They shot high, slapping hands when pellets hit a sign at a nearby railroad crossing and a ping rang out. Some of the migrants threw rocks. Others launched stones with homemade slingshots.

As the day wore on, the border patrol lowered its guns, leveling them at the crowds. One boy, who wasn't completely innocent  I saw him throw a gas canister back over the border fence  was knocked unconscious by a rubber bullet. As the Macedonians stepped up the gas barrage, the migrants quickly adapted. Word got out that toothpaste could keep the gas from burning sensitive skin around their eyes. They flushed away burning tears with water from a steady supply of refilled plastic bottles, passed back and forth through the crowd.

Macedonian reinforcements arrived by helicopter late in the day. They switched tactics, instead of firing at protesters they rained tear-gas canisters onto the closest line of tents. Families and aid workers scrambled to douse the fires. Greek police, who were otherwise kind and helpful, never challenged the Macedonian incursion.

It started to rain, and the fracas eased. The field began to clear. Camera crews packed up. The drama seemed to be over. But then the wind changed direction, blowing into the camp.

When the wind changed direction, tear gas spread deep into the densest parts of the Idomeni camp. (Vladimir Cvetko) (Vladimir Cvetko)

The Macedonians took full advantage of the shift, firing tear gas deep into Greek territory, over the Doctors Without Borders compound, over the food distribution center, over the U.N. tents, into the densest parts of the Idomeni camp. The acrid smoke was inescapable. Parents ran from the tents carrying wailing or unconscious children. Men and women slumped by the side of the roadways. Macedonia had finished the day by raising a middle finger back at the Idomeni refugees.

A migrant brandishes a tear-gas canister on April 10 at the Idomeni refugee camp, on the Greece-Macedonia border. (Vladimir Cvetko)

Europe claims to be overwhelmed by the generosity it has thus far extended to millions of migrants. The EU's citizens feel vulnerable and afraid. In a controversial deal cut in March, Greece has begun to deport some of the latest newcomers arriving on its shores. But as Europe considers its options, at least 50,000 migrants, refugees and asylum seekers remain in limbo in Greece alone.

I asked Mustafa Alhamoud if he had honestly believed the Idomeni delegation would succeed at opening the Macedonian border. He shrugged: We had to try.



I asked the young men who had faced down the troops if they understood what came after Macedonia more troops, more political resistance and between three and five more border crossings on the way to their preferred destination: Germany. They shrugged too. They were focused on the border at Idomeni. No matter how insignificant a step it might be in their journey, crossing would be cause for renewed hope.



Writer-photographer Vladimir Cvetko is on hiatus from his work as writer for the cable TV series Power and Kingdom.

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Much has been written about the ignorance, impracticality and offensiveness of many of the Republican front-runners policy proposals. Not nearly enough has been written about the ignorance, impracticality and inanity of the policy proposals emanating from the Democratic side, some of which, unlike Donald Trumps Mexican-financed wall and Muslim ban, could actually become law.

Sen. Bernie Sanders wants a national $15-per-hour minimum wage and Hillary Clinton supports a $12 national minimum, but thinks $15 is right for some areas.

In last weeks Democratic debate, Sanders denounced Clinton for her insufficient ardor in racing to $15. Clinton took umbrage and the shouting match that ensued led CNNs Wolf Blitzer to admonish them both: If youre both screaming at each other, the viewers wont be able to hear either of you.

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With the exception of some very cynical labor unions that support a higher minimum wage because it amounts to an indirect subsidy of their members earnings and some politicians who know it is bad economics, the Fight for 15 movement is entirely well-intentioned. But good intentions do not automatically translate into good policy.

Last week, this newspaper reported that Californias recent decision to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2022 is already having nasty consequences. I used to pay $5 to get this sewn, and now it costs $6.50, Felix Seo, the owner of L.A.-based Joompy told the Times, holding up a patterned dress. But my customer doesnt want to pay that, so I cant sell it anymore.

To stay in business, Joompy will probably have to start importing its clothes. It will be impossible to make clothes in Los Angeles, Seo said.

This is an old story. My grandmother was a seamstress in New Yorks garment district. Those jobs left for the South almost 100 years ago, as costs in New York became prohibitive. They started leaving the South for Asia shortly thereafter.

Simply put, a minimum wage is no different from a tax on firms that use low-wage and unskilled labor. And ... if you tax something you get less of it.

Businesses dont have to send their work to low-wage countries. They can also hire robots. Already, many restaurants facing mandated wage hikes are moving to replace human cooks and servers with machines and iPads.

The Times article had a great little infographic breaking down Who Gets a Raise by age and race. Latinos got the biggest share, with 54%. Unfortunately, there wasnt a companion chart showing how many of those Latinos will simply lose their jobs.

Ironically, one of the original arguments for the minimum wage was that it would push nonwhites  and women  out of the labor market. Stanford sociologist E.A. Ross defended the minimum wage on the grounds that the coolie [i.e. Chinese laborers], though he cannot outdo the American, can underlive him. Some argued that employers should be required to pay immigrants twice the wage of native Americans, that way no firm would hire them.

Simply put, a minimum wage is no different from a tax on firms that use low-wage and unskilled labor. And if theres anything that economists agree upon, its that if you tax something you get less of it.

Even California Gov. Jerry Brown understands this. He just doesnt care. When he signed the new minimum-wage law, he proclaimed, Economically, minimum wages may not make sense. But morally, socially and politically, they make every sense because it binds the community together to make sure parents can take care of their kids.

This amounts to grotesque cowardice. If Brown understands why his policy doesnt work economically, he understands that the social and political benefits will not materialize.

Assuming its in everyones interest to raise the wages of low-income workers, then the government can subsidize those wages without penalizing businesses that give jobs to those most in need of work and work experience. We could, for instance, boost the Earned Income Tax Credit or pay businesses to bump up their payrolls. These approaches have drawbacks too, but they stand a better chance of achieving the moral, social and political goals that Brown, Sanders and Clinton have in mind.

jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com

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To the editor: The loutish behavior of some supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) with access to the phone numbers of superdelegates committed to Hillary Clinton suggests that the apple doesnt fall far from the tree. (Sanders supporters are lashing out, but heres how they might be hurting his campaign, April 15)

Having viewed all nine Democratic debates of the campaign, I have watched as Sanders has transformed from a thoughtful, even-tempered candidate with a coherent message to an increasingly strident, petulant and self-righteous crank.

Since it appears highly unlikely that Sanders can overcome Clintons substantial lead to win the Democratic nomination, I hope that he and his enthusiastic backers will show Clinton the same magnanimity in 2016 that she showed Barack Obama in 2008.

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Harold N. Bass, Porter Ranch

..

To the editor: Im not voting for Donald Trump, but he has a point. Sanders has the same point: Our election system is in desperate need of an overhaul.

True democracy is one person, one vote. The political parties and their delegates are middlemen that interfere with true democracy. We dont know who the delegates are, and we certainly dont go to the ballot box thinking that we are voting for a delegate.

Get rid of delegates. Count the votes.

Regarding voting, it should be done online. If we can bank and file tax returns online, we should be able to vote online securely.

Andy Malone, San Clemente

..

To the editor: Paul Song, whose sister-in-law Laura Ling was released from North Korea as a result of Bill Clintons intervention, demonstrated that he is ungrateful by calling Hillary Clinton a corporate Democratic whore.

More important, it is very disturbing that Sanders supporters are trying to create a rift in the Democratic Party right when the Republicans are in such disarray that there is a clear path to victory in November. They are doing a disservice to the country by making a Republican victory possible.

Byron Gross, Beverly Hills

..

To the editor: As an old lefty woman who supports Sanders, I am very concerned about the Bernie bros and others who attack Clinton in a rude, name-calling fashion. I strongly feel that Sanders must publicly denounce all such behavior on his behalf.

Leave the insults to Trump.

Julie May, Los Angeles

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Donald Trump shows flashes of new discipline as his revamped team takes control

The first sign that Donald Trump realized his capture of the Republican presidential nomination was in danger was his hiring of Washington veteran Paul J. Manafort three weeks ago to whip his campaign into shape.

Trumps celebration after winning Tuesdays New York primary suggests that Manaforts presence might be making a difference.

Trump, the New York billionaire whose gushers of insults on Twitter have defied every rule of political etiquette, did not entirely suppress his trademark bravado.

Were going to end at a very high level and get a lot more delegates than anybody projected even in their wildest imagination, Trump told supporters gathered around an escalator in the lobby of Trump Tower, ignoring the distinct possibility that he wont win enough to even secure the nomination.

But Trump showed discipline in sticking to his message, stressing plans to save American jobs, build up the military and stop illegal immigration.

Illegal immigrants are taken care of in many cases better than our vets, he said. Thats not going to happen anymore.

Looking ahead to contests in coming weeks in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Maryland and Rhode Island, Trump vowed to preserve jobs in regions beset by hard times. Theyre in big trouble, he said of residents of those states.

But Trump also took on Republicans who have helped chief rival Ted Cruz rack up delegates in meetings of party insiders willing to disregard popular support in their states for Trump.

The people arent going to stand for it, said Trump, who has warned that riots could break out at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July if he is denied the nomination despite winning more votes than any opponent.

Trump laid ground  just as he has at nearly all of his public events over the last week  for challenging the legitimacy of any delegate vote to nominate Cruz at the convention in spite of Trumps all-but-inevitable finish with a bigger share of the popular vote.

Its a crooked system, he said, a remarkable denunciation of the GOP coming from the front-runner for its White House nomination. Its a system thats rigged, and were going to go back to the old way. Its called you vote and you win.

Trumps hiring of Manafort and other seasoned campaign operatives came after a string of delegate losses to Cruz at GOP gatherings in Colorado, Wyoming and other states where Trumps team was poorly organized.

Nobody can take an election away with the way theyre doing it in the Republican Party, Trump said.

But Trump can, in fact, still lose the nomination, and thats why Manafort and the other new advisors are steering him into a more disciplined and traditional campaign, even if it causes internal upheaval, like the resignation this week of Trumps field director.

My team has been amazing, he said. And, you know, its actually a team of unity. Its evolving, but people dont understand that.
Hillary Clinton decisively won New Yorks Democratic primary Tuesday over Sen. Bernie Sanders in what could prove to be a pivotal contest, scoring a double-digit victory that essentially foreclosed her rivals last, best opportunity to win the nomination.

Sanders had vowed to win the state and had outspent Clinton significantly here. In the end, however, she was the one who emerged with the win in the state she represented in the Senate for eight years. She will add heavily to her already formidable lead over her rival in delegates to this summers Democratic nominating convention.

We have won in every region of the country from the north to the south to the east to the west, but this ones personal, Clinton said to supporters in New York City. The race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch, and victory is in sight.

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Clinton made little mention of Sanders in the speech, other than to reach out to his backers following a particularly contentious period in the race during which the Vermont senator made an energetic, and at times bitter, effort to overtake the front-runner.

To all the people who supported Sen. Sanders, I believe there is much more that unites us than divides us, Clinton said.

Sanders was clearly deflated by the loss. As the votes were counted, he flew home to Vermont, avoiding reporters other than to declare at a short, impromptu news conference at the Burlington airport that he needed to take a day off to recharge.

Pro-Clinton operatives began stepping up pressure on Sanders to withdraw from the race before polling places had even closed. The Vermonters campaign aides, however, gave no indication of changing plans. Sanders himself said he was not planning to drop out.

Sanders had hoped New York would show he had made inroads with the nonwhite and women voters crucial to victory. But exit polls showed only 25% of blacks and 37% of Latinos supporting him, a crippling blow in a party that depends heavily on minority voters.

Over the last two weeks of intense campaigning here, New York lived up to its reputation for political brawling. The two candidates who, through much of the race, had worked to sidestep the personal insults and bitter attacks that have dominated the Republican contest showed little restraint in the Empire State. The stakes had become too high to risk taking the high road.

The Clinton campaign had grown increasingly anxious as voting approached. Sanders had racked up wins in smaller states recently, amassing victories in seven of the last eight that voted. Those victories gave Sanders a fundraising boost that supported his ability to outgun Clinton on the air here and unsettled the front-runner at a time she was looking to wrap up the nomination, as she put it at one campaign event.

Her campaigns attacks were unusually sharp, as she seized on a poor performance by Sanders early in the month in an interview with the New York Daily News editorial board to question whether he was ready to be president.

The implications angered Sanders, whose roots on the streets of working-class Brooklyn began to show as he energetically hit back  over and over. At large rallies, at news conferences and in television interviews he lashed out at his rival, suggesting her vote for the war in Iraq, her millions of dollars in speaking fees and campaign support from Wall Street, and her support of international trade deals should disqualify her from being the nominee.

The bitterness of the race did not seem to bother New York voters, many of whom have seen much worse. Asked in an exit poll if the campaign had energized or divided the Democratic Party, only about 3 in 10 primary voters said they thought the party had been divided while nearly 7 in 10 said it had been energized. The exit poll was conducted by Edison Research for the Associated Press and the major television networks.

1 / 12 Hillary Clinton celebrates her New York victory with daughter Chelsea and husband Bill. (Kathy Willens / Associated Press) 2 / 12 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump after his landslide win in New Yorks primary. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 12 Donald Trump with his wife, Melania, after his victory in New York. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 12 Ted Cruz, who took third place in the GOP primary in New York, campaigns in Philadelphia. (Jessica Kourkounis / Getty Images) 5 / 12 Ted Cruz in Philadelphia. (Matt Rourke / Associated Press) 6 / 12 Bernie Sanders is mobbed at Penn State University. (Jeff Swensen / Getty Images) 7 / 12 Hillary Clinton greets supporters outside a polling station in Chappaqua, N.Y. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images) 8 / 12 Donald Trump in Manhattan after casting his ballot. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) 9 / 12 Residents line up to vote in Brooklyn. (Stephanie Keith / Getty Images) 10 / 12 Donald Trump votes at his New York City polling station. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) 11 / 12 Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Clinton, vote in Chappaqua, N.Y. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images) 12 / 12 John Kasich tries on a pair of boxing gloves during a campaign stop in Annapolis, Md. Maryland is among the five states voting next Tuesday. (Oliver Douliery / AFP-Getty Images)

New York Republicans were far more pessimistic than Democrats, with 58% saying they thought the campaign had divided their party.

Most New York Democrats signaled they would support the nominee even if it is not the candidate they voted for Tuesday. Only 14% of Democrats in the exit poll said they would not support Clinton if she is on the ballot, and only 18% said they would not support Sanders. Eight years ago, when Clinton and then-Sen. Barack Obama ran against each other, exit polls in some states showed nearly 3 in 10 voters saying they would not vote for the Democratic nominee if their candidate lost. After the primary, that division healed quickly.

More than 7 in 10 Democratic voters, including a significant share of Sanders backers, said they expected Clinton would win the nomination.

Yet party unity was clearly not yet high on the agenda of the candidates while they battled over turf both considered home.

By the time the two met on stage at a massive debate hall at the Brooklyn Navy Yard last week, they did not even try to contain their disdain for each other. Sanders was caustic as he tore into the massive speaking fees Clinton has collected from Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions.

Clinton antagonized him by bringing up the Daily News again, suggesting he had revealed himself in his interview to be startlingly misinformed and unprepared on even the core issue of his campaign, financial industry regulation.

In between the mutual attacks, Clinton campaigned as energetically in New York as she has anywhere in this race. There were days when she and former President Bill Clinton each stopped at multiple block parties in minority neighborhoods, where local political leaders they have known for years helped them rally crowds, and, in least one case, dance to salsa music.

Yet Sanders, a relative newcomer to New York politics, had his own advantages among the youngest and most liberal parts of the states electorate. Throngs of supporters mobbed his rallies in the South Bronx and in Brooklyns Prospect Park. The Vermont senator with the thick New York accent had no trouble blending into the citys unique political scene.

Brooklyn, though, ultimately went big for Clinton. Even neighborhoods that are known hotbeds of hipsters and leftists that make up the core of Sanders base ended up favoring Clinton.

The Sanders campaign now must decide whether to prolong its acrimonious rivalry with the front-runner or shift its approach. A continuation of the hostilities risks antagonizing Clinton further and thus diminishing the influence Sanders might have in steering the direction of the party. The Clinton campaign is eager for a cease-fire, worried about the bruises continued sparring could leave.

By the time voters arrived at the polls on Tuesday, some resented all the hostility. But they had different ideas about who was to blame.

Hes getting nasty, Millie Margiotta, 86, said of Sanders, as she entered a polling station in Midtown Manhattan. Thats totally unnecessary. That makes me angry.

That is not how Phoebe Abramowitz, 31, a counselor, saw it. She went to cast her ballot for Sanders, inspired by the campaign the insurgent has run. She will vote for Clinton if she wins the nomination, she said, but not with gusto.

Ive always been, like, I hope I dont have to vote for Hillary, Abramowitz said.

Down in Manhattans West Village neighborhood, another thirtysomething voter who had been feeling the Bern ultimately cast a ballot for Clinton. Tim Petrella, a 31-year-old owner of a software company, had made up his mind Tuesday morning.

The thing that turned me was the Daily News interview he gave, Petrella said. It became pretty clear he was a little light on some of the details.

This being New York, it is not just the candidates who clashed often. The voters also did, especially in hotbeds of activism like the West Village.

Asked whom she was voting for, Deborah Soffel, a 59-year-old who works for a nonprofit focused on school nutrition, brought her voice to a whisper before acknowledging it was Clinton.

Its getting very contentious, so I tread lightly, Soffel said, with a smile.

evan.halper@latimes.com

chris.megerian @latimes.com

Times staff writers Mark Z. Barabak in New York and Kate Linthicum in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

For more on Campaign 2016, follow @evanhalper

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Are you an independent voter? You arent if you checked this box
Although Californians now register to vote in more places than ever, most still rely on something thats been around for generations and is increasingly seen as imperfect: the voter registration card.

I think that it is confusing and somewhat misleading, said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation.

Most of the card is straightforward -- name, address, date of birth -- but one key section requires both close inspection and careful interpretation. There, voters choose whether to join a political party, the equivalent of an electoral fingerprint used extensively by candidates and campaigns.

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The problem arises when someone who identifies as independent looks for a box to check. There isnt one.

A Times investigation found widespread confusion among California voters who choose the American Independent Party, an ultra-conservative organization thats been largely invisible from most campaigns. A poll of AIP voters found 73% mistakenly thought they were independent of all parties. Those voters should have chosen the no party preference option.

Though the AIP name alone may be confusing to some, the voter registration form doesnt offer much help.

When they use the word independent, I want to clarify it, said Cathy Darling Allen, Shasta Countys registrar of voters.

She and elections officials in other counties said voters routinely ask in-person questions about how to navigate the various choices. But for those who fill the cards out on their own, theres no help.

The Times analysis of registration records from American Independent Party members finds a higher percentage of forms that were mailed in rather than filled out at an elections office or other state office. That lack of one-on-one voter education could be telling.

Most voters who wish to be political free agents successfully navigate the choices. Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in an interview that elections officials are limited by what the law spells out, and they cannot assume a voter was misinformed in checking that box for the American Independent Party.

The question on the form asking about joining a political party has been reworded three times in the last nine years. Only one of those redesign efforts, in 2008, was done with an eye toward clarity.

Alexander, who served on the task force that revamped the language that year, said the change was designed to help the growing number of voters who now want to be unaffiliated with political parties.

We wanted to make sure voters understood their choices, she said. We agonized over every single change.

The result was a voter registration card that asked the question in plain language: Do you want to register with a political party?

A news release from then-Secretary of State Debra Bowen at the time specifically said the new language was crafted to correct the mistake of hopeful independent voters who had chosen the American Independent Party. Her statement called the new voter registration card intuitive.

It also turned out to be short-lived.

The simpler language was scrapped in the wake of Proposition 14, the 2010 voter-approved measure that created Californias top-two primary system. Placed on the ballot as part of a late-night budget deal in the Legislature, Prop. 14 required several changes to state election law. And in that batch of odds and ends were changes to the voter registration card.

No longer were voters asked if they wanted to register with a party. The question now reads: Do you want to disclose a party preference?

Elections officials believe the choices facing voters arent always clear. Those are not general use terms, said Michael Vu, San Diego Countys registrar of voters.

Alexander was more blunt. Nowhere else is this language used, she said.

AIP voters who only learned of their party registration by participating in the poll conducted for The Times generally expressed confusion over the terminology.

Shawn Vasquez, a Costa Mesa clothing designer who did not want to be a member of the American Independent Party, suggested the no party preference label was unfair.

It makes you seem like a disengaged voter, said Vasquez, 29. I clearly have strong beliefs and strong values. But I cant see myself identifying with one party.

Elections officials say mistakes with voter registration are best corrected with outreach programs, and the most comprehensive change may be through legislation.

I am interested in taking a look at that, said Assemblyman Kevin Mullin (D-South San Francisco), when asked about the voter registration form. The language, I would say, ought to be reviewed.

john.myers@latimes.com

Times staff writers Christine Mai-Duc and Ben Welsh contributed to this report.

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The streets near the state Capitol emptied Monday after a man barricaded himself in his parked car near the building for more than two hours, prompting fears of a possible bomb attack.

Sacramento police and the California Highway Patrol cordoned off several city blocks as SWAT officers and hostage negotiators attempted to make contact with the man, who had scrawled cops or criminals and I just want justice on his Mazda sedan and plastered the car windows with paper signs.

He voluntarily surrendered without incident just over two hours after police were called to the scene at 1:47 p.m. The Sacramento Bee identified the man as Edgar Napoles-Rodriguez, 27, of Sacramento, though the suspects name has not yet been released by officials.

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According to court records, the former roommate of Napoles-Rodriguez was granted a temporary restraining order against him last week. The roommate alleged in a legal filing with the Sacramento County Superior Court that Napoles-Rodriguez threatened her with a baseball bat and also threatened to burn down her house.

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FOR THE RECORD

April 20, 11 a.m.: An earlier version of this post referred to Edgar Napoles-Rodriguezs female former roommate as a man. It also misstated Napoles-Rodriguezs age as 28; he is 27.

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Law enforcement snipers were spotted on the roof of the Capitol during the standoff. A police robot was used when officers attempted to contact the suspect in his car, which was parked on L Street directly in front of the Capitol building. Before surrendering, the man exited the car and began shouting, Want to shoot me? Shoot me!

He may have not had the best of intentions or be the clearest of mind, said Officer Matthew McPhail, spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department.

The Capitol was not evacuated during the incident, but one entrance was closed.

The Assembly adjourned early Monday but was scheduled to vote on several big issues, including a ban on smoking on college campuses. It wrapped up the meeting abruptly before 3 p.m.

The Senate went through its full agenda as planned and wished Sen. Jerry Hill (D-San Rafael) a happy birthday before adjourning after 3 p.m. without any announcement of the security situation going on outside the building.

Asked about the situation, Claire Conlon, a spokeswoman for the Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon said, Its our policy not to discuss Capitol security details.

The state Capitols security has been ramped up considerably over the last decade.

The most significant incident came late on the night of Jan. 16, 2001, when a big-rig truck smashed into the south side of the historic building during a late-night legislative session on Californias energy crisis. The driver, a 37-year-old man with a history of prison time and mental health issues, slammed his tractor-trailer into the granite portico of the building, and it erupted in flames.

That, plus the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., that fall, sparked a slow but steady move toward increased security around the 142-year-old building.

Now, the perimeter is surrounded by barricades that rise up from the sidewalk, and all public visitors are routed through metal detectors and bag-scanning areas on the north and south sides of the building.

Times staff writers Liam Dillon and Patrick McGreevy contributed to this report.

phil.willon@latimes.com

Follow @philwillon on Twitter for the latest news on California politics

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Were there: Lt. Gov. Newsom says he has enough signatures for gun control initiative

Citing the failure of the state Legislature to act, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that he has collected 600,000 signatures of California voters to qualify a gun control initiative for the November ballot.

Were there. This is going to be on the November ballot, Newsom said Thursday. Over 600,000 registered voters want to take some bold action on gun safety.

Newsoms campaign plans to begin delivering signatures tomorrow to county clerks for verification. If at least 365,880 signatures are found to be valid, the measure will qualify for the ballot.

Newsom said most of the proposals in the initiative have one thing in common, that over the past number of years they have suffered the fate of either being watered down or rejected by the Legislature. Were hopeful and confident that the voters of California will overwhelmingly support the initiative.

The broad measure would require background checks for purchasers of ammunition; ban possession of ammunition magazine clips holding more than 10 rounds; provide a process for felons and other disqualified persons to relinquish firearms and require owners to report when their guns are lost or stolen.

The initiative would also address an issue caused by the previous adoption of Proposition 47, which made thefts of guns worth less than $1,000 a misdemeanor. The ballot measure would make all gun thefts a felony.

Last week, Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De Leon (D-Los Angeles) said key provisions of the initiative, including the ban on large-capacity magazines, are addressed by legislation this year, but that bills could be harmed by the initiative going forward.

A campaign committee including gun groups and law enforcement is being formed to defeat the initiative, according to one member, Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California. He noted that the measure has already been opposed by the California State Sheriffs Assn., which said it would put restrictions on law-abiding people without taking guns from criminals.

its an initiative that carries multiple proposals that were either killed by the Legislature as not workable or vetoed by the governor, Paredes said. Newsom has collected failed policy issues from the Legislature and put them up as an initiative. Its going to be a massive effort to defeat him.

Paredes said the initiative is a cynical attempt by Newsom to gain higher office.

We know hes doing this to pump himself up for his gubernatorial run, Paredes said.

Newsom said his campaign for governor is secondary to his effort to enact gun safety laws.

He said he has been active in the gun safety movement going back 15 years when he was mayor of San Francisco and a founding member of the group Mayors Against Guns. The National Rifle Assn. was so upset, they protested at his wedding in Montana, he said.

I expect a good challenge from them, Newsom said of the NRA. They have been very aggressive to date. But we are very enthusiastic to be getting to this next phase.

He cited internal polls indicating more than 70% of California voters support the initiative, and a Field poll that found greater support for provisions of the measure, including the ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines.
A Costa Mesa woman was killed when she fell under a stolen truck she had jumped out of as it was pursued by police in Las Vegas this month, according to authorities in Nevada.

The Clark County coroners office identified the woman as Maricel Param Menina, 34.

According to Las Vegas police, Menina was riding in a stolen 2007 Ford F-450 utility pickup the morning of April 8.

At 7:13 a.m., the trucks owner called police to say he was following the truck, authorities said. Police pulled up behind the truck as it stopped at a red light at Cheyenne Avenue at Nellis Boulevard in Las Vegas.

When the traffic signal turned green, the stolen Ford F-450 accelerated quickly across the intersection and started driving erratically, police said in a news release.

After the truck made a right turn, a man jumped out the passenger door, followed by a woman later identified as Menina, according to authorities.

The man rolled away from the moving truck and was unhurt, but the woman fell underneath it, police said.

Menina died at the scene from blunt-force trauma to her head and chest, according to the coroners office.

After a few moments, the driver also jumped from the still-moving truck, which jumped a curb and crashed into a wall, police said.

The driver tried to run but was apprehended, police said.

Authorities identified him as Joshua Cyran, 31, of Las Vegas. He was arrested on suspicion of grand theft auto, fatal driving under the influence and fatal hit-and-run.

--

jeremiah.dobruck2@latimes.com

Twitter: @jeremiahdobruck
More than 12% of Americans reside in California.

Its the most productive, inventive, governmentally efficient state in the union. Not only the most populous state (by a wide margin), California has more citizens than the least populated 22 states combined. You would think we Californians would be instrumental in the presidential nominations from both major parties. But in reality, when choosing our chief executive candidates, Iowas tiny electorate has a much bigger say.

Whats up with that? Iowa has 3 million inhabitants; less than 1% of U.S. residents. Yet because that state holds the first national primary, every single coffee shop, bowling alley or American Legion hall becomes preeminent. Every homeowners association, PTA, business group, Elks Club, Church congregation or League of Womens Voters is canvassed, coddled, cosseted and cooed over as if they were critical to the nations economic, cultural and political life support.

Meanwhile, Orange County, with just over 3 million residents, has a population equal to Iowa. In fact, we have a larger gross national product than those last 20 states put together. Iowa grows corn. Orange County grows the economy. We pioneered Biotech, built the lifestyle industry and are host to hundreds of corporate headquarters, as well as seven Fortune 500 companies. Did anybody ever ask us what we thought about the candidates or the issues?

California supplies more than half the nations fruits and vegetables, most of its technology and nearly all of its movies. We have led the world in computer science, aerospace, medical advances and environmental progress. Are Californias concerns ever considered by the political front runners?

Consider: Excluding Florida, the five most important primaries are Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and Colorado, which combined, include a whopping 3 1/2 % of the U.S. population. So with more than three times as many voters here in the Golden State than in all those primary states put together, we let Iowa (which Ive been told stands for Idiots Out Wandering Around) determine our presidential contenders.

The current system provides the opportunity for nearly every state to vote in primaries before California. By the time candidates are campaigning here the choices are already firmly set. The result is that the most populous, successful, efficient, entrepreneurial, innovative state in the nation is essentially shut out of the electoral process of choosing our presidential nominees.

Im not resentful that other states (with fewer people than Orange County) put their primaries at the front of the list. I dont even mind the sometimes-comical horse race that passes for a selection method. But, by George, as Jefferson used to say to Madison, the 38 million proud, successful Americans in California ought to somehow have their voices heard too.

JIM KEMPTON is an Orange County-based writer.
How much would you pay for a one-of-a-kind dinner party created by chefs Roy Yamaguchi of Roys Restaurants, Alan Wong and others?

If $250 is your price point, you may want to sign up for Easter Seals Hawaiis 70th Anniversary Gala in which Oahus top chefs call the culinary shots.

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And the setting couldnt be nicer. The gala will be held April 29 at the Hawaii State Art Museum in downtown Honolulu.

The roster of chefs includes such notables as:

 Chai Chaowasaree of Chef Chai and Chais Waikiki

 Vikram Garg of Halekulani

 Elmer Guzman of Chef Guzmans Island Cuisine and Poke Stop

 Yamaguchi of Roys Restaurants

 Wong of Alan Wongs and The Pineapple Room

The event gets underway at 5:30 p.m. with individual tickets priced at $250 (of which $100 is tax deductible).

Proceeds will benefit Easter Seals Hawaii, which provides support to people with disabilities and special needs.

Info: Easter Seals Hawaii, (808) 529-1708, Ext. 1162.

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Who says you have to rough it on your next visit to Bryce Canyon National Park?

To mark the centennial of the National Park Service this year, the luxurious Red Mountain Resort in southwestern Utah will take you there -- and throw in a pedicure too.

The Find Your Park Essential Retreat package takes you to two of Americas national parks during a six-day stay at the resort with plenty of creature comforts.

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Hike one day each in Bryce Canyon and Zion national parks, both in southern Utah. After your visit, indulge in a 50-minute pedicure, do a few laps in the swimming pool, take a yoga or tai chi class, or just chill in the surrounding red-rock beauty.

The idea is to hike by day (at the resort or at the parks), and relax by night with nutritious meals, cooking demonstrations and discussions about living a healthful lifestyle.

The all-inclusive package price starts at $315 per person, per night. (You can fly in to nearby St. George Municipal Airport or McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, which is about two hours away.)

The offer is good May 15 to Aug. 31.

Info: Red Mountain Resort, 1275 E. Red Mountain Circle, Ivins, Utah; (877) 246-4453

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The opening of the new 153-acre campus of the Changzhou Foreign Languages School last fall was supposed to mark a bright new era for the institutions 2,500 seventh-through-12th-graders, many of whom have ambitions of attending college abroad.

But soon after the buildings opened in September, some parents and students noticed strange smells that some likened to rotten eggs. Youngsters began complaining of health problems, including cramps and skin ailments.

Parents began to suspect the area may have been contaminated by chemical and pesticide factories that previously were located across the street from the private school, and urged administrators and the city to investigate. In January, classes were suspended for about two weeks while tests were conducted by provincial and city environmental authorities. Those checks found elevated levels of contaminants, though officials insisted the problem wasnt very serious.

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But this week, parents fears appeared to be confirmed by an expose aired on state-run China Central Television that found nearly 500 students had developed illnesses -- including cancer -- and quoted experts saying their ailments were likely linked to toxic substances in the soil and water, including chloroform and benzene.

The CCTV report, aired Sunday, has sparked national outrage. The Ministry of Education announced that it was sending an inspection team to the school and the Ministry of Environmental Protection said that it was working with the Jiangsu provincial government to investigate the case.

Environmental groups pounced on the report as yet another example of Chinas insufficient enforcement of ecological standards.

The tragedy that has occurred in Changzhou shows just how dangerously lax Chinas hazardous chemical management is, said Ada Kong, Greenpeace East Asia toxics campaign manager.

Although the CCTV report and the government response seemed to indicate a robust official reaction to an alarming scandal, the school has remained open. A woman in the admissions department who answered the phone Tuesday said the school was functioning as normal and all the students were well.

On its website, the school posted a message from the Changzhou Institute of Environmental Sciences saying that two companies had collected air, soil and groundwater samples at the school in late March and that both firms found the levels of toxic substances including formaldehyde, TVOC, benzene, Toluene and Xylene to be below national limits. The message said the soil and groundwater satisfy the school environment criteria.

The CCTV report said 641 students at the school had undergone physical examinations, with 493 diagnosed with illnesses including bronchitis, dermatitis, lymphoma and leukemia. However, the report did not detail how many cases of each disease were found.

Ex-employees of the chemical plants interviewed on camera by CCTV said they had buried toxic materials nearby and released untreated wastewater into waterways.

The CCTV segment indicated that the hazards were well known even before construction of the school began. A report after the factories were closed about six years ago found extreme amounts of toxic substances in the area around the proposed campus -- including chlorobenzene levels 78,899 times the permitted levels in soil and 94,799 times the permitted levels in groundwater, CCTV said. Carbon tectrachloride levels were found to be 22,699 times the national limits. That probe also found elevated levels of lead, cadmium and mercury.

Even so, local officials gave the school permission to relocate to the area. (After the chemical factories were moved, Changzhou authorities had also considered turning the area into an ecological park, CCTV reported.)

CCTV said that tests conducted for its own investigation had revealed alarming amounts of toxic substances in the soil and groundwater at the school. Pan Xiaochuan, a professor of public health at Peking University, told the channel that there were absolutely carcinogens on the campus and that long exposure to them could cause cancer.

Parents have staged protests outside local government offices, demanding answers and accountability. Some held signs reading, Get away from toxic land!

Greenpeace called on the government to investigate the precise origins of the incident and to establish a comprehensive hazardous chemicals management system to prevent a repeat of the situation in Changzhou.

Polluted School has become a hot topic on the Chinese Internet, with more than 45 million views on the Sina Weibo microblog platform. It almost took half a year to get this tragedy exposed. Theres so much hiding! Suppressing! Covering up! This is so serious! wrote one user.

But some students took to the Web to defend the school and play down the concerns.

Wrote one: As a student from Changzhou Foreign Languages School, I want to say thank you all for your concerns about us.  A lot of classmates and teachers left school. I dont know whether the experts were telling the truth, but Ive been drinking water here for more than half a year and Im fine. And I know there hasnt been any case of serious illness here.

Besides CCTV, other Chinese media have reported on contaminants near the school site. Students at Changzhou Trina International School, which is adjacent to the Changzhou Foreign Languages School, had complained of ailments back in 2014, according to Modern Express, a paper under the official New China News Agency. Caixin, a magazine, and the Paper, another Chinese news site, have also detailed concerns about environmental hazards in the area.

Yingzhi Yang and Nicole Liu in The Times Beijing bureau contributed to this report.
A Taliban-claimed suicide bombing in a high-traffic area of central Kabul killed at least 30 and injured 327 Tuesday morning, government officials said.

The blast occurred after an explosives-laden vehicle was detonated near the Afghan intelligence agency. Preliminary reports indicated that at least two of those killed and a vast majority of those injured were civilians, including children and women.

At an afternoon news conference, the Ministry of the Interior said the blast came from a load-bearing truck packed with explosive materials and stationed at a nearby parking lot.

According to a Taliban statement, the target was a directorate responsible for security of high-level officials.

A martyrdom-seeking unit of Islamic Emirate launched a heavy attack on 10th directorate intelligence building, the statement, published on the groups website, read.

The bombing is the first major attack by the Taliban since it announced the start of its annual spring offensive last week. In recent years, the group has made the nations urban centers, often seen as safer than more remote areas, a focus of its efforts.

The Ministry of the Interior confirmed the death toll, saying the majority of those killed were civilians, including women and children.

The initial 9 a.m. blast was heard for miles throughout the city. Residents said the sound of gunfire lasted for at least two hours following the explosion.

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Security officials said it appeared the deadly attack was carried out by three people, at least two of whom were killed.

The attack site, a highly trafficked road near the presidential palace compound, remained on lockdown throughout much of the morning.

An employee of the office of administrative affairs, near the presidential palace, told The Times no one was allowed in or out of the premises because of the fighting. Heavy gunfire could be heard.

Sediq Sediqqi, Ministry of the Interior spokesman, confirmed that one attacker had been gunned down by security forces.

The government worker, who could not be named because of security concerns, said the volume and intensity of the initial explosion were unprecedented.

I have never heard a blast so loud. Everyone around us was startled by the sheer volume of the explosion, the worker said.

The casualty toll is the highest from a bombing in the capital since August, when a late-night truck bombing in the Shah Shahid neighborhood left at least 240 people injured.

In the hours following the attack, groups of men and women lined up at several of the capitals hospitals to donate blood to the victims.

Both President Ashraf Ghani and his chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, condemned the attack.

Though many Afghans wondered how a car laden with such a large amount of explosives could make it past the Afghan capitals many security checks, Ghani said Tuesdays attack was, in fact, a sign of the Talibans weakness.

A post on the presidents Twitter account said the attack showed the enemys defeat in face-to-face battle with the Afghan National Security Forces.

Abdullah, who went to visit the attack site and victims at the hospital, said the blast showed the barbarity of the armed opposition.

Todays terrorist attack in Kabul is a clear sign of terrorists hostility and enmity against the Afghan people, Abdullah said in the hours after the attack.

The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan also condemned the attack, likening it to a war crime.

This attack shows the devastation caused by the use of explosive devices in urban areas and once more demonstrates complete disregard for the lives of Afghan civilians, said Tadamichi Yamamoto, the Secretary-Generals deputy special representative for Afghanistan. The use of high explosives in civilian populated areas, in circumstances almost certain to cause immense suffering to civilians, may amount to war crimes.

Abdullah said he would postpone his May visit to Pakistan based on initial evidence of todays suicide attack.

Though Pakistan is party to the four-nation group (along with Afghanistan, China and the United States) that is working toward peace with the Taliban, the Afghan people have long accused Islamabad of aiding and abetting the armed opposition, including the Taliban.

After last summers attack on the Shah Shahid neighborhood of Kabul, Ghani and Abdullah, who up until that point had been hopeful of Pakistans efforts toward peace in Afghanistan, accused Islamabad of not working in good faith toward a resolution to the current conflict.

Tuesdays blast comes only days after the United Nations released a report saying civilian casualties continue to reach record highs in Afghanistan.

Between Jan. 1 and March 31, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan documented 1,943 civilian casualties. While the number of deaths  600  fell by 13%, the 1,343 injuries marked an 11% increase over the same period last year.

The U.N. also cited a 24% increase in casualties from complex suicide attacks, much like the one carried out Tuesday.

Latifi is a special correspondent.

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As leaders from around the world gather in New York for what many are calling the most important summit on illegal drugs in two decades, one thing is clear: The world has a serious drug problem.

Worldwide, about 246 million people use illicit drugs, and 1 in 10 of these users suffer from disorders related to drug use. Of the estimated 12 million people who inject drugs, at least 1.6 million are also living with HIV, while slightly more than half suffer from hepatitis C. Each year, 200,000 people suffer drug-related deaths, such as overdoses.

And, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the U.S. is leading the way, followed by Australia, Canada, Spain, Israel and Uruguay. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse reports that 10% of Americans 12 and older said they had used an illicit drug in the last month.

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Americans are also the greatest consumers when it comes to prescription opioids and marijuana, which remains the most widely used drug in the world, according to the U.N. drug agency.

Around the world, there were an estimated 182 million cannabis users in 2013, more than all other drug users combined.

Around 8.5% of Americans over age 12 reported using marijuana as recently as 2014, according to National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse data. There has been a slight increase in marijuana usage, largely because of the increased acceptability of the drug, its legality in some states, and the perception that it causes a lower level of harm than other drugs, according to Linda Richter, the organizations director of policy research and analysis.

While pot remains the most widely used drug, it still falls behind opiates, cocaine, amphetamines and the drug Ecstasy in terms of substances that present the highest risk of harm, according to the agency. Afghanistan saw rampant use of opiates in 2009, the latest year for which such data are available. Use of amphetamines was most prevalent in the Philippines in 2008, while cocaine was most widely used in Spain in 2011, and Ecstasy dominated in New Zealand in 2007.

Yury Fedotov, the U.N. drug agencys executive director, said his agency has noticed certain trends in terms of the global use of illegal drugs. For example, while cocaine use is decreasing or stabilizing in Europe and North America, it has increased in some parts of South America, and in West and East Africa, as criminals seek to expand their markets into areas that were previously seen only as transit routes, Fedotov said in written comments to The Times. Heroin is also being seized in these regions, and methamphetamine labs have been found in West African countries, he added.

Meanwhile, the use of amphetamine-type stimulants, especially methamphetamine, is increasing in East and Southeast Asia and there has been an increase in the use of opiates in some countries where it was declining or had previously stabilized, such as the U.S., where there has been an increase in the supply of inexpensive heroin and a rise in heroin-related deaths, Fedotov said.

There has also been an upswing in the usage of the painkiller fentanyl, which U.S. drug agency officials say dealers use to spike heroin for greater potency at a cheaper cost or as a counterfeit for drugs such as Norco.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration an estimated 700 people died as a result of fentanyl and its analogs nationwide between late 2013 and late 2014, the latest years for which data are available.

In India, the use of opium  which is used to produce heroin  has become rampant in the northern state of Punjab, largely because of trafficking along the border with Pakistan, according to local healthcare specialists. But cannabis has also become popular, especially in urban areas, said Anand Nadkarni, director of the Institute for Psychological Health in Maharashtra and founder of a rehabilitation center in the western city of Pune.

Nadkarni said the increase in cannabis use was partly due to a myth perpetuated by those in the trade that cannabis is a soft drug and is legal in the U.S.

Hamid, 34, a resident of Mumbai, India, said he is recovering from a drug addiction that began when he used hashish.

Hashish was a gateway to this world and shortly I experimented with various other drugs, said Hamid, who did not want to use his last name because of the sensitive nature of his circumstances. My college education fell apart and my family became estranged.

He said he started stealing to support his habit and landed in jail for three years before accepting the opportunity to turn his life around.

Father Joe Pereira, who heads the anti-addiction Kripa Foundation in Mumbai, said that in his 35 years of working with drug addicts he has noticed the average age of the consumers dropping from between 45 and 55 years in the early 1980s to between the ages of 14 and 24 today.

Today the youngsters get jobs and start earning fairly early in life, Pereira said. Workplaces like call centers, especially where youngsters work, have been penetrated by drug consumption.

Times staff writer Joseph Serna in Los Angeles and special correspondent Parth M.N. in Mumbai, India, contributed to this report.

For more news on global sustainability, go to our Global Development Watch page.

And follow me on Twitter: @AMSimmons1
Ukraine and Russia have reached a deal to free a jailed Ukrainian pilot, President Petro Poroshenko said Tuesday, suggesting that she will be swapped for two Russian servicemen jailed in Ukraine this week.

Nadezhda Savchenko, who was captured by Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine in 2014, was sentenced to 22 years in prison in Russia last month for her alleged role in the deaths of two Russian journalists.

Her capture and trial became a rallying point for Ukrainians at home and abroad.

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I think we have agreed on a certain algorithm that would allow Nadezhdas release, Poroshenko said Tuesday, a day after he had a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Speaking at a televised news conference in Kiev with the Danish prime minister, he mentioned Mondays conviction of two Russian officers in Kiev, saying that the verdict gives opportunities to launch the mechanism of a swap.

In a sign that the swap could be imminent, an attorney for one of the men told the Interfax news agency that the two Russians would not lodge an appeal against the verdict.

Later Tuesday, Poroshenko tweeted that he had a telephone conversation with Savchenko, together with the pilots mother and sister, and had urged her to stop a hunger strike that she went on last month.

Savchenkos lawyer, Ilya Novikov, told the Associated Press that the pilot has agreed to start taking food.

It wasnt immediately clear how the call with Savchenko, who is kept in a detention facility in southern Russia, was arranged.

Savchenko, who is a professional pilot, enlisted in a volunteer Ukrainian battalion in the summer of 2014 to fight the separatist rebels in the Luhansk region. She was captured by the rebels and re-surfaced in Russian custody on the other side of the border. Moscow claimed Savchenko escaped from the separatists and was caught in Russia, while the Ukraine claims she was abducted and smuggled into Russia.

Poroshenko would not say when he expected Savchenko to be returned but added that he told Putin he was ready to send a presidential jet to Russia to take her home.

Putins spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters earlier Tuesday that the two presidents talked about Savchenko as well as the two Russian officers convicted Monday of terrorism for waging a war of aggression in Ukraine.

A Kiev court on Monday sentenced Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev to 14 years in prison. The two, who were captured last year, acknowledged being Russian officers, but the Russian defense ministry claimed they had resigned from active duty.

Peskov would not respond to Poroshenkos statement when contacted by the Interfax news agency, saying only that Savchenkos future was discussed during Mondays call.
As dawn broke Monday over this devastated city, Yandry Galarza stood vigil in front of what was left of the Super Exito clothing store, a once thriving retail hub now reduced to a silent pile of rubble. She said she was hoping against hope her sister Kenia, who was trapped inside, might still be alive.

As soon as the earthquake hit Saturday night, I ran over from the supermarket where I work to see my sister, but her building was already destroyed, Galarza said, eyeing the slanted ruins of the second floor where her sister sold shoes. The magnitude 7.8 earthquake caused the third floor to collapse on top of her.

Yandry knows the odds of finding Kenia alive are slim. In fact, she and her three siblings talked about how they were going to pay for their sisters funeral even as they watched rescuers pick carefully through the rubble in efforts to reach her.

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Insurance only covers $1,200 for the viewing and burial, said Yandry Galarza, who spoke as if in a daze. She had stayed up all of Saturday night and spent all of Sunday in front of the store. But first we have to determine where she is, whether she is alive or not.

Weve accounted for everyone in the family but her, she added.

Many in this city and others devastated by the quake are struggling with similar tragedies. Although the official death count from the earthquake was raised on Monday to 413 nationwide, with more than 2,500 injured, the toll is expected to go much higher as victims are pulled from the collapsed buildings.

Coastal Manabi, of which Portoviejo is the capital, was the worst-hit province, with at least 200 deaths, said Ricardo Penaherrera of Ecuadors national emergency management office, in comments to CNN. Manta and Pedernales, two other big Manabi cities, also suffered extensive damage.

Guayaquil, whose 3 million people make it the countrys most populous city, suffered extensive damage to roads, with several bridges and one tunnel closed.

Among the dead in Saturdays quake was at least one American, although the U.S. Embassy in Quito did not identify the victim. The northern coastal states that bore the brunt of the damage include beaches and surf spots that are popular with foreign tourists, as well as with Ecuadorean vacationers.

Several coastal cities, including Pedernales and Manta, were still without drinking water or electricity on Monday evening. The logistics of delivering aid was complicated by the closure of at least 10 roads because of damage from the quake, the most powerful to strike Ecuador since the 1970s.

Officials expressed fears that high temperatures in this tropical region could undermine sanitation as bodies buried under debris begin to decompose.

But rescuers were cheered by television images early Monday of three quake survivors being pulled from a ruined shopping center in Manta, the countrys second-largest port after Guayaquil, 32 hours after the quake struck, according to the Associated Press.

Ecuadors Congress published a list of needed items, including tents, mattresses, canned food and mosquito nets. Portoviejos largest stadium, the Sports Federation Coliseum, and several parks were converted into temporary shelters and storage and distribution centers for emergency supplies.

International aid agencies and neighboring countries, including Colombia, Venezuela, Chile and Peru, as well as Mexico, pledged to send resources and personnel to aid in rescue and recovery efforts. The European Union pledged about $1.1 million to an aid fund. Ecuadorean emigre communities in the United States, including Chicago, began organizing donation drives to send relief supplies.

President Rafael Correa toured some of the damaged areas, including Portoviejo, on Monday and later called on Ecuadoreans to unify behind recovery efforts. Reconstruction will cost billions of dollars and the negative economic effect of the disaster could be huge, Correa said.

Relatively dependent on crude oil exports, Ecuadors economy was expected to register barely any growth this year because of the drop in global oil prices.

Rescue efforts are proceeding slowly in Portoviejo, an administrative and fishing industry center, partly because the challenge is so enormous. Portoviejo police Sgt. Yandry Mero said half of the citys buildings have either collapsed or been heavily damaged.

Although the government began publishing lists of quake victims, there has been no official count yet of how many victims are, like Kenia, still missing.

Heavy equipment has to be used carefully to avoid endangering victims who still may be alive in the ruins, said Alexis Gutierrez, a Venezuelan firefighter who arrived in Portoviejo on Sunday to help with rescue operations. Several neighboring countries have offered rescue supplies and personnel.

A walk through Portoviejo underscores the depth of the challenge ahead. Ruins block many streets and power lines are down. Looting is widespread, with drugstores, supermarkets and hardware stores the primary targets.

With no running water or electricity, desperate residents rushed trucks loaded with relief supplies, including bottled water, canned tuna and biscuits.

After the jail partially collapsed, 100 prisoners escaped, and as of Monday afternoon, only 30 had turned themselves in. A Chevrolet dealer lost 20 cars when the force of the quake caused them to roll into the Portoviejo River.

At every corner, survivors told stories of personal tragedy similar to Yandry Galarzas. At the San Gregorio pharmacy, near the Super Exito, manager Patricio Domo told of how the earthquake dealt death in an instant to those in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A lady was asking me for a large can of powdered milk, I told her it would cost $35, and just as she was handing me the money, the earthquake hit, Domo recalled. I told her to run and tried to push her to protect her but it was too late. A wall collapsed right on top of her, crushing her head. She died.

Nearby, Gutierrez, the Venezuelan firefighter, was picking through ruins of the Mariner shoe store, once the ground floor of a three-story building now reduced to a pile of concrete and twisted steel.

At least six families lived here, Gutierrez said, referring to the upper floors. The building collapsed. This is all thats left. People are sleeping outside because they are afraid of aftershocks.

Many who survived have lost all their belongings. At 7 a.m. Monday, seamstress Fatima Cevallos stood outside the ruins of the house where her family had lived since 1965. All that was left standing were some columns that once supported a veranda. The houses outside walls had disappeared.

Beside Cevallos, her 98-year-old father was sound asleep, his head resting on a pillow on the bare sidewalk.

Where are we going to go? This is our only home. All we can do is sweep up the rubbish because there is no money to repair anything, Cevallos said.

As devastating as the Ecuadorean quake is proving, University of Michigan geophysicist Jeroen Ritsema said in a telephone interview that the impacts of the magnitude 7.8 quake were not unusual.

They happen once or maybe twice a year in that area. Ecuador is close to the boundary of two major colliding tectonic plates. The entire Pacific coast of South America is affected by this collision, Ritsema said, referring to similarly devastating quakes that have struck Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Mexico.

Is there anything people can do? Yes, those who live in places like Ecuador or Japan can prepare. Because it can happen without much warning.

Special correspondents Viteri and Kraul reported from Portoviejo and Bogota, Colombia, respectively.

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At what is being billed as the most significant high-level gathering on global drug policy in two decades, the stage will be set for world leaders to discuss what would have once been unthinkable  reversing course in the war on drugs.

The United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem, which begins Tuesday in New York, will bring together government, human rights and health leaders to discuss whether the hard-line tactics of combating drug trafficking and money laundering have failed.

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FOR THE RECORD

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April 22, 10:06 a.m.: This article quotes Yuri Fedotov, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, as saying the agency was changing course in the war on drugs and was examining the decriminalization of drug use, among other innovations. Though the U.N. was examining policy changes, that statement was based on a news release that was a hoax. Fedotovs other comments in the article are based on an email conversation he had with The Times. The article also quotes Kevin Campo, who is identified in the fake news release as a spokesman for the U.N. agency. He is not an agency spokesman.

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It will also provide a forum for reformists and government leaders who are pushing for turning the current drug policy on its head by halting drug-related incarcerations, treating drug abuse as a health issue rather than a crime and even legalizing drugs.

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The drug control regime that emerged during the last century has proven disastrous for global health, security and human rights, reads a statement to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that was signed last week by more than 1,000 world leaders, activists and celebrities. The letter urges a complete rethinking of the conventional war on drugs.

As the summit opened Tuesday, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime announced new international recommendations, including the decriminalization of marijuana, universal access to controlled medicines, criminal justice system reforms including elimination of mandatory minimum jail sentences and abolition of the death penalty and acknowledging marijuanas medical use.

The science increasingly supports decriminalization and harm reduction over proscriptive, fear-based approaches, UNODC Executive Director Yuri Fedotov said in a statement Tuesday. Its time to reverse the cycles of violence that occur wherever drug wars are undertaken, and to abandon policies that exacerbate suffering.

The UNODC also said it would reform its decision-making process to include a more diverse range of voices.

We can begin to dismantle just say no policies that result in millions needlessly killed and incarcerated  and that defy logic and science  and instead bring to the forefront humane solutions that are known to work, said Kevin Campo, a spokesman for the drugs agency.

In the United States, federal authorities remain opposed to the legalization of drugs, although some states allow the sale and use of marijuana.

In Canada, government leaders are calling for greater flexibility to control cannabis, by relaxing criminal sanctions and possibly legalizing, taxing and regulating marijuana. Mexico is already debating a bill to legalize pot and changes in its drug laws.

In Colombia, where drug wars have claimed thousands of lives and criminal bands compete to control the lucrative exports, government leaders have long complained that the current global drug policy puts the nation in a difficult position  obligated to crack down on the production of heroin, cocaine and marijuana, yet faced with the economic realities of rural areas where poor farmers have few options but to join the drug trade.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has complained that the laws put too much onus on producing countries to destroy supply and not enough on consuming nations to block demand.

What Colombians want is that the U.N. become cognizant of its other mandates, not just to control drugs but promote the well-being of the population, foment human development and protect human life, said Bruce Bagley, a drug-trafficking expert and international relations professor at the University of Miami who is participating in the U.N. special session this week.

Colombia is expected to ask the U.N. to liberalize its rules regarding drug use and help with economic alternatives to growing coca, poppies and marijuana. The country also might consider legalizing dispensaries where heroin addicts can take the narcotic under relatively hygienic conditions.

But not all nations favor relaxation of global drug control. Russia and China, for example, support more forceful drug suppression policies, while in Saudi Arabia and Singapore offenders can still face the death penalty for smoking pot.

We want a drug-free society, not a drug-tolerant one, Desmond Lee, a senior minister of state in Singapores Home Affairs and National Development ministries said at a preparatory session before this weeks summit.

Fedotov said the high-level gathering presents an opportunity to create the necessary cooperation to address the world drug problem. But he insisted it was not simply about policy.

It is about putting people first, Fedotov said in written responses to questions from The Times. This means supporting health and human rights, promoting the safety and security of all our societies, emphasizing the role of the international drug control conventions in promoting the health and welfare of humankind, and acknowledging that every country has a shared responsibility to confront this issue.

Drug reform advocates are not convinced that the policy as it stands serves the best interest of the worlds citizens.

Those who signed the letter to the U.N. secretary-general, including Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, charge that the system focuses so heavily on criminalization and punishment that it has created a vast illicit market that has enriched criminal organizations, corrupted governments, triggered explosive violence, distorted economic markets and undermined basic moral values.

Governments, they argue, have devoted disproportionate resources to repression at the expense of efforts to better the human condition.

In the U.S., for example, poor people and racial and ethnic minorities have faced mass incarceration for mostly low-level and nonviolent drug law violations. Problem drug use has spread along with infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, while access to harm reduction and other treatment options have been hampered because of outdated attitudes about such programs, activists say.

Theres been this obsession with eradicating drug use altogether but thats unlikely to ever actually happen said Diederik Lohman, an associate director with the health and human rights division of Human Rights Watch. We should be trying to minimize the use of drugs to protect public health.

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has faced criticism over her husbands three strikes crime bill that authorized life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes. The policy is widely believed to have contributed to prison overcrowding and the disproportionate jailing of minorities.

In other countries, the global drug policy has served as an excuse for unjust punishment and execution. Destruction of drug crops has also caused environmental harm and deepened poverty in some nations where farmers depend on the yields to survive. And despite the billions of dollars spent on pursuing, killing, prosecuting, extraditing and imprisoning kingpins, dealers and people who use drugs, illicit drugs are less expensive and more accessible today than ever before, according to Human Rights Watch.

Simply put, Lohman and others argue, the so-called war on drugs has been lost.

Times special correspondent Chris Kraul in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to this report.

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Four refugee children were killed when Islamic State militants shelled a Turkish city near the Syrian border this week. The extremist group has stepped up its attacks on the city of Kilis, which hosts a large number of Syrian refugees.

Islamic State militants fired five rockets at the city Monday, local authorities confirmed.

Three children were killed during the attack; a fourth on Tuesday succumbed to injuries. The rockets also killed a Syrian shepherd and wiped out much of his flock.

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Residents look at the damage after a rocket hit a house in Kilis on April 19. (AFP/Getty Images)

The four children had taken shelter in a building run by the Yavuz Sultan Selim Foundation, a local charity that provides support to the dependents of refugees who have been killed, Turkeys state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

Kilis lies six miles from the nearest border crossing with Syria. About 110,000 Syrian refugees have taken shelter there. It is the only Turkish city in which the Syrian population exceeds that of local Turks.

The Turkish government hopes to see Kilis, which had a prewar population of 85,000, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of its efforts in providing a haven for Syrians fleeing the conflict in their homeland.

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The Turkish military retaliated against the Islamic State attack, targeting positions in the farmlands of northern Syria. Our army officials are locating their coordinates and destroying them with artillery fire, Kilis Gov. Suleyman Tapsiz said, according to Reuters.

Residents flee as rockets fired from Syria land in Kilis on April 19. (AFP/Getty Images)

Islamic State has barraged the city with rockets several times this month, injuring about two dozen people and killing six. Three people were injured Tuesday as the extremists again targeted the city, according to the Anadolu Agency.

Angry residents took to the streets last week, gathering in front of the governors office to demand that the authorities provide better protection.

NEWSLETTER: Get the days top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >>

The attacks may be retribution for Turkeys increasing role in the U.S.-led coalitions fight against Islamic State and its support for a loose coalition of Syrian rebel factions fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army.

A man carries an injured child after four rockets fired from Syria slammed into Kilis on April 18. (AFP/Getty Images)

Those factions, buttressed by Turkmen militias and the hard-line group Ahrar al Sham, recently made dramatic advances against Islamic State in the countryside of northern Syria and took the Islamic State-controlled town of Rai, part of a broader push toward the groups stronghold in the city of Jarabulus.

Turkey supported the offensive with artillery bombardments.

Islamic State launched a potent counteroffensive last week, driving back the rebel groups and displacing tens of thousands of people. They also took control of at least two camps for internally displaced people.

The aid agency Doctors Without Borders alleged that as many as 100,000 people have been displaced during the latest bout of fighting and have sought shelter in areas along the border. It called on the European Union to assure the safety of the displaced.

Yet again we see tens of thousands of people forced to flee but with almost nowhere safe to go  trapped in this bloody, brutal conflict, Muskilda Zancada, the groups head of mission for Syria, said in a statement Monday. We are extremely worried about the protection of the population if the front lines keep approaching.

Turkey, struggling with what it says are 2.7 million refugees on its soil and under pressure to stem the flow of refugees into the European Union, has closed its borders to the displaced, repeatedly firing live ammunition at Syrians attempting to enter the country, and has granted entrance to only the most seriously injured.

Johnson is a special correspondent.

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All material is subject to strictly enforced copyright terms & conditions and cannot be repurposed or reproduced.  19882022 Latin American Financial Publications Inc.
Following the Super Tuesday primaries Donald Trump remains the frontrunner to win the Republican presidential nomination in the US. Nomination is not yet a sure thing. If successful the property tycoon-turned-politician will need to go on to confront a Democratic party opponent, most likely to be Hillary Clinton. Victory over Clinton is also far from assured. But a candidate notorious for his anti-Mexico views has now gone far enough and fast enough in the race to be considered a serious contender for the US presidency. That means Mexican political leaders are starting to imagine what a Trump presidency might be like.

Trumps views on Mexico have  as he intended  received headline coverage. A brief summary: if elected Trump intends to build a gigantic wall (which appears to get higher every time he mentions it) along the frontier to keep Mexican immigrants out. Mexico is to be forced to foot the cost of the wall, for which various numbers have been mentioned (the latest Trump estimate is US$8bn). In Trumps view Mexicans entering the US include rapists, murderers and drug runners. A Trump government will deport all Mexicans illegally in the US back to Mexico  an operation that could involve up to 11m people.

Opinion remains divided between those who believe Trump should be interpreted literally, and those who see his statements (such as the claim that all Muslims should be denied entry to the US) as more of a deliberately provocative and figurative appeal to a disgruntled middle America, deeply worried by immigration, crime, and terrorism, and eager to be offered simple solutions restoring the countrys perceived loss of global power and status.

Mexican reaction

Mexican responses to Trump appear to have evolved through various stages. An initial response was to condemn Trumps ideas but to treat him as something of a clown. Various Mexican leaders attempted to ignore him entirely. That began to change as the Trump factor showed itself to be resilient and to reflect a not insignificant cross-section of the US electorate. One sign of this was that the proposal to build a wall, along with other hard-line anti-immigrant positions have been adopted, with different variants, by Trumps Republican rivals. He has framed the debate to his advantage.

Another sign of the real impact of Trumps rhetoric has come from indications that after slowing over recent years, the flow of immigrants into the US has increased again (see sidebar), with many reasoning that the time to get in is now, ahead of whatever tougher regulations are introduced after a new occupant enters the White House in January 2017. There are reports that people traffickers are encouraging this notion as a way of boosting demand for their services.

While former Mexican presidents have compared Trump to Hitler (see sidebar), Mexican government officials have tried to keep out of the war of words, until now. This week Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu said the wall plan was impossible, as well as impractical, inefficient, wrong and franklynot an intelligent thing to do. President Enrique Pena Nietos chief of staff, Francisco Guzman, has said the government will use its consulates across the US to publicise the positive aspects of the two countries relationship. Pena Nieto, Guzman added, believes any leader elected to the US presidency would end up taking a softer and more pragmatic line once in office.

Trump wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), slapping higher tariffs on Mexican products. Opponents of Trump point out that bilateral trade has quintupled to US$530bn since Nafta was signed in 1994 and now arguably supports significant job creation in the US as well as in Mexico. Guzman noted, It would be difficult to reverse 20 years of integration.

A number of security experts believe that the Trump wall  as described by its main proponent  will never be built. They argue that the cost and technical challenges are prohibitive and that there are legal complications over ownership, right-of-way conflicts, eminent domain disputes, and environmental regulations. But it is feasible that a future US administration would further strengthen and tighten border patrol and deploy advanced technology, including drones and other devices, to make illegal entry significantly more difficult. Mass deportations in the other direction are also possible.

As the process would most probably be accompanied by a sharp cooling in bilateral relations, it is likely that it could be poorly managed and would have serious unintended consequences. One is that a less porous border with fewer illegal drug trafficking routes might intensify the struggle to control those routes between the drug trafficking organisations (DTOs). If Mexican criminals are deported from US prisons and simply dumped on the Mexican side of the border that too is going to increase, not reduce border tensions. US-Mexican security cooperation would most likely decrease sharply and the Merida initiative  a part US-funded joint security programme  might not survive. Poor security cooperation between the two countries might be seen as a great opportunity by the ever-resourceful DTOs.

Illegal immigration

According to US border patrol statistics a total of 150,304 immigrants were arrested when trying to enter the US illegally between October 2015 and February 2016, a 24% increase on the same year-earlier period.

Mexican presidents on Trump

President Vicente Fox (2000-2006) said he would not pay for that f****** wall, adding of Donald Trump that He reminds me of Hitlerhes going to use the executive power to do what hed like. Another former Mexican President, Felipe Calderon (2006-2012), pointed out that Trump is himself the son of immigrants but is talking about immigrants who have a different skin colour to him. Frankly its racist and exploits sensitivities, rather like Hitler did in his day.

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Despite the announcement by the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN), Colombias second-largest leftist guerrilla group, that it will soon engage in formal peace negotiations with the government, it has launched a military offensive in recent weeks, prompting a counter-offensive by the armed forces. The decision by Clan Usuga, the countrys largest emerging criminal organisation (Bacrim), to initiate a new campaign of violence in repudiation of the governments peace negotiations with the guerrillas [WR-16-13] is also a factor in the upsurge of violence in the country. All of this is sparking fears that the peace process being conducted by the Juan Manuel Santos administration could become seriously hindered.

Since announcing on 30 March that it had agreed a six-point formal peace talks agenda with the government, the ELN has launched a series of attacks in different parts of the country. On 6 April ELN guerrillas kidnapped two bus drivers after stopping them on a highway linking the north-western departments of Choco and Risaralda. The guerrillas set fire to their victims buses as well as six other private vehicles before making their escape. General Javier Diaz, the commander of the Titan military task force charged with combating criminal groups in the area, said that the bus drivers were presumably taken after refusing to pay an extortion fee demanded by the ELN.

General Diaz condemned the incident. He noted that while the government and the ELN had been clear that they would conduct the peace negotiations without declaring a bilateral ceasefire (as the Santos government agreed with the main guerrilla Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia [Farc]), one of the conditions set by Santos for engaging in peace talks with the ELN was for the latter to release all of its kidnap victims and refrain from targeting the civilian population.

In the wake of the Choco kidnapping, Colombias national congresss peace commissions called on the ELN to declare a ceasefire in support of the formal peace talks, as the Farc has done, in order to reduce the intensity of the armed conflict. But the ELN ignored this, launching instead a series of attacks targeting the armed forces. This after on 7 April Defence Minister Luis Carlos Villegas confirmed that ELN commander Alejandro had been killed during a 30 March navy operation in Jurado, Choco department. Alejandro was the third ELN commander killed by the armed forces in March after Zorillo, the leader of the Alfredo Gomez Quinones front, was killed in the north-eastern department of Bolivar and Danilo, the leader of the ELNs northern front, was killed in the northern La Guajira department. Villegas said that the operation that resulted in Alejandros death was part of the offensive ordered by President Santos against the ELN to expedite the peace negotiations. Villegas then demanded the release of the kidnapped bus drivers.

But the ELN opted to strike back. On 10 April ELN guerrillas ambushed an army patrol in the El Tambo municipality of the south-western Cauca department. One soldier was killed and another was wounded in the attack, which General Juan Vicente Trujillo, the commander of the Apolo task force, described as a violation of international humanitarian law and human rights. General Trujillo explained that at the time of the attack, the patrol was in a state of indefence and that their attackers were dressed as civilians.

Clan Usuga joins the fray

As the clashes between the armed forces and the ELN intensified, the guerrillas also began targeting the Clan Usuga which was set up by demobilised paramilitary groups and recently began calling itself the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (AGC). This led the Farc and the ELN to denounce it as new paramilitary threat and to call on the government to dismantle it so as to ensure the viability of the peace process. On 12 April Colombias ombudsmans office denounced that Clan Usuga members had been involved in armed clashes with ELN and Farc guerrillas the previous day in Antioquia department.

According to the ombudsmans report, the clashes took place when dozens of heavily armed members wearing Farc and ELN badges entered the municipality of El Bagre, with the aim of attacking members of Clan Usuga. Gun battles between the guerrillas and the criminals broke out, in which three civilians were injured. The report goes on to say that soon afterwards the armed forces arrived in the area, killed two members of the criminal organisations and wounded another two, without providing further details. The ombudsmans office said that the incident was a clear infringement of international humanitarian law, adding that it would monitor closely the situation in the area as the local community is concerned that this new conflict dynamic could lead to a recrudescence of violence in the area.

The incident at El Bagre came after six Colombian civil-society organisations formally denounced the emergence of a new phase of paramilitarism in Colombia led by the Clan Usuga before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The complaint, which was filed on 5 April, states that 28 people were killed in February-March in suspected paramilitary activity carried out by the Clan Usuga. According to the complaint, 13 of these people were social and human-rights activists, while the others were victims of a suspected social cleansing exercise designed to instil fear. The Santos government responded by condemning the deaths of all social and human-rights activists; promised to clear up the cases and punish all those responsible; and intensify its efforts to combat the Bacrims, especially the Clan Usuga (see sidebar). Amid the growing concerns about the resurgence of paramilitarism and its impact on the peace process, the government is under pressure to achieve these goals.

ELN moots May as possible start of peace negotiations

On 7 April Miguel Atalay, who has identified himself as a spokesperson for Colombias Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN) guerrillas, announced through Twitter that the ELN had agreed to hold the first formal peace negotiating rounds with Colombian government representatives in May. The ELN announces to Colombia and the international community that the first public [negotiating] table will be installed in Ecuador in May, Atalays tweet reads. The announcement has not been confirmed nor denied by the government or the ELN leadership.

Taking the fight to Clan Usuga

On 11 April President Santos announced that the government would redouble its efforts to combat the countrys Bacrims, in particular the Clan Usuga. We are going after the leaders of this Clan, including its maximum leader Otoniel [Dairo Antonio Usuga David]we are redoubling our efforts, Santos said before announcing that the reward for any information leading to Usuga Davids arrest had increased to Col$3bn (US$983,000) from the Col$1.5bn (US$492,00) offered last month. It is imperative to strengthen actions against all kinds of criminality, but especially criminal organisationssuccessors of paramilitarism, Santos added. A week earlier, on 7 April, Santos had announced the arrests of 39 Clan Usuga members as part of an operation targeting the Bacrims leaders.

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With the death toll from the 18 April earthquake in Ecuadors northern coast rising to over 400 and estimated damages running into billions of dollars, President Rafael Correa has announced that the government will draw down contingency funds from multilateral agencies including the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank (WB).

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The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation released its 2015 Crime in Tennessee report on Monday, revealing an overall decrease in reported instances of crime in the most recent reporting year.

The annual study compiles data reported from each law enforcement agency in the state through the Tennessee Incident Based Reporting System (TIBRS). The TBIs sophisticated crime reporting system, in place since 1997, provides an updated and comprehensive picture of the successes and challenges facing communities across Tennessee.

Among the findings in the 2015 report:



 The total number of reported Group A incidents decreased by 2.1% year-to-year.

 Reported homicides increased by 9.4%.

 The number of Forcible Rape cases reported by law enforcement agencies increased by 2.4%.

 The number of Drug/Narcotic, Prostitution, and Burglary offenses all decreased in 2015s study.

 Reported methamphetamine offenses increased from 4,362 in 2014 to 6,276 in 2015.

 Simple Assault accounted for 67.3% of all reported Domestic Violence offenses.

Were extremely thankful for our dedicated law enforcement partners, said TBI Director Mark Gwyn. Together, they helped us compile a thorough snapshot of crime in Tennessee. We now hope every department takes this information and works to further address the key crime issues facing their communities and our state.

DISCLAIMER: The TBI strongly discourages the ranking and comparison of jurisdictions and their crime rates by the data in the 2015 report. Demographic, socio-economic, and other factors out of the control of law enforcement contribute to the nature of the crimes committed. Crime varies from place to place and ranking the agencies solely on numbers would neither be fair to the agencies nor their communities.

The full report is available for review on the TBIs website: tn.gov/tbi.
Two months from now, when remaining presidential candidates prepare for the election season's final primaries, they will look back and realize Tuesday's New York primary set the tone.

Donald Trump is a lock for most Republican delegates, considering Ted Cruz and John Kasich are far behind in most national polls. Nearly every April poll has the real estate magnate with double-digit leads, in some cases surpassing 30 percentage points.

But public opinion for the real estate magnate wanes, as it has for Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton over the last month - the former New York senator continuously defends her trustworthiness on the campaign trail, though it didn't affected her standing with left-leaning voters until recently. Clinton's read to victory isn't lucid, and there is concern among surrogates that Bernie Sanders will take an eighth straight contest, dating back to March 22 Idaho caucuses.

Clinton and Trump may conducted victory speeches shortly after polling places close, but how they win and how delegates are distributed will resonate across state lines, into delegate-laden states of California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey awaiting their primary Election Day.

Clinton, Sanders Hit the Five Boroughs

Democratic delegates are distributed proportionally across each of New York's 27 congressional districts. All but 44 are chosen by primary results. These are considered "superdelegates;" state officials, governors, congressmen, and Democratic National Committee members unbound to a single candidate.

Sanders isn't dependent on superdelegates. The Vermont senator's once-fledgling campaign has never looked to politicians for support, instead depending grassroots outreach efforts based on vows to hold big banks accountable, raise the national minimum wage to $15-an-hour, and implement tuition-free college and university programs.

Tens of thousands of New Yorkers flocked to Sanders' rallies over the last week, one near the Brooklyn neighborhood where he was born and raised. To cut into Clinton's narrow lead, Sanders will need each one to cast ballots.

"Pundits told me that when we began this campaign there would be no change that we would go anywhere," Sanders said on NBC's TODAY show Monday morning. "We have a message that is resonating all over this country. We have enthusiasm, we have energy. People understand it's too late for establishment politics and economics. They want real change in this country."

An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey coinciding with the Empire State primary found Clinton maintains 50 percent support versus Sanders' 48 percent, down seven percentage points from her lead in the same poll a month ago.

The former secretary of state's leads among minorities and woman also shrank, which may have factored into her trek in the five boroughs. Clinton hopped on a Bronx-bound 4 train, and played dominoes in Harlem, like an incumbent mayor lobbying for her city's vote.

"I'm taking dominoes to the White House!" -- Hillary Clinton in East Harlem pic.twitter.com/pYwH6Tan1o  Monica Alba (@albamonica) April 15, 2016

Donald Trump Looking for Knockout Blow

In all, 291 Democratic and 95 GOP delegates are on the line.

Of the Republican share, 81 are given out by congressional districts who divvy up delegated depending on a candidate's margin of victory; two are given for a slim victory, three for lopsided decisions.

Trump is about 500 delegates short of winning the automatic GOP nomination. Getting at least 50 percent of these districts to vote in his favor would go a long way in staving off Cruz's recent surge.

And if that doesn't work, Trump can insinuate the primary voting process is corrupt, as he did following losses in Colorado and Wyoming.

"The system is rigged. It's not meant for a guy like me who's not taken any money from special interest," Trump told a standing-room only crowd in Buffalo Monday night. "It's a rigged system, just like so much else in government is rigged. I've never seen anything like it."

Lyin' Ted Cruz can't win with the voters so he has to sell himself to the bosses-I am millions of VOTES ahead! Hillary would destroy him & K  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2016

Trump, as he's wont to do this election season, is bringing about change in the delegation process by challenging the Republican National Committee. On Sunday, he implied Cruz is still in contention because Republican lawmakers are lobbying for him against the general public's wishes.

While RNC Rules Chairman Bruch Ash didn't completely agree with Trump, he cautioned against taking action "that can be interpreted as attempting to favor one candidate over another."

New Yorkers may not side with Cruz, the Texas senator whose "New York values" quip alienated undecided voters. They may not even support Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the third-string candidate still trailing Marco Rubio in the GOP delegate count.

Their goal is to reach the 20-percent threshold in each district; to get one delegate close to a contested Republican National Convention, even if they can't win the state outright.

Conversely, Trump could take advantage of the 50-percent threshold to make it a winner-take-all delegate scenario.

Nearly seven-in-10 registered voters in the NBC News/ Wall Street Journal survey couldn't see themselves supporting Trump, compared to 61 percent for Cruz and 47 percent for Kasich. If New Yorkers stick with Trump, it will leave conservatives a step closer to having no other choice.

New York Latinos Casting Ballots

More than 955,500 New York Latinos will vote in November's presidential election, according to projections released by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

Latino voter turnout grew by 12 percent between 2008 and 2012, and about 1.3 million can say they are registered, accounting for 11 percent of the state's population. Tuesday's primary will serve as a precursor to which way country's the fastest-growing demographic leans.

"As presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle attempt to shore up the number of delegates necessary to win their party's nomination, the race for the White House will continue to run through the Latino community," NALEO Education Fund Executive Director Arturo Vargas said in a press statement. "Candidates who choose to use the Latino community as a punching bag to score political points do so at their own peril."
Donald Trump is now hitting a record-high 40 percent support in his ongoing quest to secure the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll now finds Trump's numbers on the rise, though he remains locked in a tight race with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

With the GOP field now winnowed down to just three candidates, Trump leads Cruz by five points at 40 percent to 35 percent, with Ohio Gov. John Kasich bringing up at the rear at 24 percent.

Just last month, the same poll found Trump leading Cruz 30 percent to 27 percent, and back in February, when Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Ben Carson were all still in the race, Cruz topped Trump by a count of 28 percent to 26 percent.

Trump Popular With Men, Those Without College Degree

A deeper analysis of the numbers shows the bombastic New York City real estate mogul easily besting Cruz among voters without a college education at 45 percent to 38 percent. Trump also leads Cruz among male voters 42 percent to 35 percent.

Meanwhile, Cruz holds a commanding lead among voters who identify as "very conservative" at 52 percent to 40 percent. On the flip side, Kasich leads the trio among voters described as "moderate" or "liberal" with 44 percent, compared to 33 percent for Trump and 23 percent for Cruz.

GOP primary voters view both Cruz and Kasich as more broadly acceptable than Trump, with 63 percent of voters responding they could see themselves voting for Cruz and 61 percent saying the same of Kasich.

When it comes to Trump, the party's overall front-runner, 61 percent of voters respond they could ultimately see themselves supporting his candidacy.

Given the possibility that none of the three candidates will amass the 1,237 delegates needed to bag the GOP nomination outright, a majority of GOP voters insist Trump should still emerge as the official face of the party if he manages to collect the most votes during primary season.

Voters Believe Trump Should be Nominee if He Gets Most Votes

The poll found a little more than six in ten voters, or 62 percent insist that the winner of the Republican nomination should be the candidate who received the most votes, while 33 percent say the nominee should be the candidate whom the delegates at the upcoming convention believe gives the party the best chance of securing the White House.

A recent Field Poll shows Trump holding a solid lead in the upcoming California primary. Polls show Trump leading Cruz 39 percent to 32 percent with Kasich stuck at 18 percent.
Family members of those still reported missing, amid the ruins of the deadliest earthquake to hit Ecuador in nearly three decades, are growing more fearful that time for any rescue effort may be running out.

Even with the death count from the recent 7.8-magnitude quake now topping 400, rescuers remain diligent, desperately combing the streets of the shell-shocked region in hopes of pulling off more of the miracle like rescues witnessed over just the last several hours.

A man described as in his mid-30s was pulled from the mounds of rubble after he somehow managed to use his cellphone to phone his mom and alert her that he was still alive.

Injury Toll Also Growing

More than 2,500 people have also been reported injured in the catastrophe, with some of the hardest hits coming on the coastal island of Manabi Province where roughly 200 people were reported to have perished.

"It was something very ugly," said Ricardo Penaherrera, a spokesperson with Ecuador's national emergency management office. "We thought it was the end of the world."

The Ecuadorian government has now deployed 10,000 soldiers and nearly 5,000 officers to the region. Among their first order of business was setting up mobile hospitals and a fleet of temporary shelters.

Military members have also brought in search dogs to help find survivors and to retrieve the remains of those who have already perished.

Getting Help to Impacted Areas a Huge Challenge

Meanwhile, getting supplies and rescue workers to needed areas has proven to be among the greatest challenges.

"The lack of water and communication remains a big problem," said Penaherrera. "Many highways are in bad shape, especially in the mountainous area."

Still, aid has started to pour in from around the globe. Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela and Peru are among the countries that have sent rescuers and aid. The United Nations also announced it plans a "major aid airlift," joining the many private organizations that have also committed to assisting.

Ecuador President Rafael Correa arrived on the scene soon after word of the tragedy began to spread, cutting short a visit he had made to a Vatican conference.

"I have infinite gratitude to the spirit of the Ecuadorian people, of our firefighters, our soldiers, our policemen and all workers who haven't slept, haven't eaten as they work hard to save lives," he said.

In all, six of the country's provinces remain under a state of emergency. Pope Francis has joined the many dignitaries across the world in expressing sympathy for the victims and prayer for a full recovery.

"Last night a violent earthquake hit Ecuador, causing numerous victims and great damages," he said. "Let's pray for those populations, and for those of Japan, where as well there has been some earthquakes in the last days."

For those interested in helping a number of organizations are accepting donations, including:

The American Red Cross

UNICEF

Oxfam International

Global Shapers Quito
The Italian spyware company Hacking Team provided services to governments across Latin America, some of which were used to spy on political dissenters, journalists, and other non-criminal targets, according to a new report.

The report, published this week by the Latin American digital rights organization Derechos Digitales, is based on an in-depth investigation into documents leaked when Hacking Team, itself, was hacked last year.

Along with client lists, communications, and other information gleaned from a massive data dump leaked by hacker Phineas Fisher in 2015, the report illustrates several specific examples where Hacking Team's services were explicitly directed by Latin American governments against political opponents.

Derechos Digitales argues that even outside of specific cases of abuse, the use of Hacking Team's spyware in the region, in general, should be considered illegal -- and at times even contributed to human rights violations.

Outsourced Government Surveillance

Hacking Team did a lot of business in Latin America, according to the leaked information assembled and published in the Derechos Digitales report.

The report shows governments across Latin America contracted with Hacking Team -- including state and federal government organizations in Mexico and Panama and intelligence agencies and police forces in Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Chile, and Brazil -- along with how much each country paid for the company's main service, a hacking and spyware tool offered by Hacking Team called the Remote Control System (RCS).

Hacking Team's RCS systems offer, in some respects, many of the same digital spying capabilities that powerful U.S. government agencies like the National Security Agency and the FBI have been shown to have. For example, RCS systems allow for remote monitoring of digital devices and communications by the company's clients, including covert collection of emails, text messages, location data, phone call histories, audio from phone calls, and keystroke logs.

Politically Motivated Spying

The most egregious cases of Hacking Team working with Latin American governments include evidence of the company explicitly working with clients to spy on specific, political, targets.

For example, emails from April, 2014 between an Ecuadorian intelligence agent and support staff at Hacking Team show the company and client discussing how to hack the communications of Carlos Figueroa, a well-known opponent of Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, without getting caught.

Figueroa later told the Associated Press that he had noticed problems with a lot of his digital communications, including and going beyond email.

"I had four email accounts and problems with all of them," he told the AP in 2015. "I also had problems with Facebook. At one point, it seems like they attacked all my communications on social media."

While no Ecuadorian state agencies had publicly obtained a court order to eavesdrop on the activist and dissident, Figueroa noticed irregularities at the time that now correlate with the conversation leaked from the company. "We all just assume our telephones are permanently tapped," he said. Indeed, one of the screenshots sent from Ecuador's intelligence agency to the company included an illustration named "MobilFigueroa," or Figueroa's cellphone.

Mexico, however, was the top Latin American customer for Hacking Team's spying systems. Over 11 different clients, including the country's federal intelligence agency, the Federal Police, the State Attorney and five state governments, were among Hacking Team's Mexican malware market, which grossed the company about 5.8 million euros, the equivalent of over 6.5 million U.S. dollars through the years.

In Mexico too, Derechos Digitales found evidence of political abuse of Hacking Team's RCS systems, especially among local governments. The governor of Puebla, Mexico, for example, used RCS to conduct surveillance on a slew of political opponents including academics and journalists.

It's also worth noting that in Mexico, it is not legal for any local governments or officials to use Hacking Team's services. Only federal authorities can intercept communications, according to Mexico's constitution, and only after being granted permission from a judge.

Legality and 'Legitimate' Uses

Many Latin American governments using the RCS were simple cases of surveillance against drug traffickers, terrorists, and other criminal elements or security threats.

That doesn't necessarily mean those use of RCS were legal, as Derechos Digitales interprets it. In an interview with Vice's Motherboard, Gisela Perez de Acha -- a lawyer and public policy analyst with Derechos Digitales who wrote the report -- called into question any use of Hacking Team's spyware in Latin America.

"It's illegal in the whole region," she said to Motherboard. "And it's illegal because [the use of the spyware] is not explicitly authorized."

Even when conducted with the court order by only federal agents, Derechos Digitales argues the use of RCS was illegitimate, likely illegal, and dangerous for democracy.

"The main goal of criminal investigation and intelligence systems is to safeguard security, peace, and the principles of each country," wrote Perez de Acha in the report. "However, when you use methods like malware, these goals are reached via secret and potential illegal mechanisms -- with little public discussion -- when, given its democratic goal, they ought to be the object of citizen control and accountability."
Recent news spilled that The University of New Mexico's seal was dubbed racist. Simply put, some concerned students seemingly saw the need for changing such, with a protest from the Native Americans wanting to be heard thereof. As simple as the concern may be to some, those that see the symbolism unfitting are quite hasty for action.

According to Yahoo, the existing official seal of The University of New Mexico shows off two characters, one being a Spanish conquistador and a frontiersman, in which, some concerned Native American students somewhat see as careless racism. The said students in the Kiva Club, along with members of the advocacy group The Red Nation has labelled it offensive. On a more drastic note, the seal is in use for all the diplomas and is still presently seen in the school's events.

As per Fox News, Nick Estes, a UNM doctoral student and Oceti Sakowin tribe member, was rather quick on his designing of another version of the seal in an attempt to protest, having the conquistador and frontiersman stand on top a pile of bones. During an organizing meeting for students that alter the seal, he stated plainly that it depicts racism at the school, and even claimed to be insulted of having the seal in his diploma.

Furthermore, it was noted by Washington Post that University President Bob Frank got the point, and was quoted, "It's a seal I have always known. I certainly understand that people may have different points of view. If they want to talk about it, I am open to the conversation."

Jozi De Leon, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion, claimed that with the university's Diversity Council, they are taking measures to work with the concerned students. De Leon delivered that it is a place where such issues should be addressed and that the student's statements are to be further heard. A petition was started to oppose the seal, though no complain was ever filed.
Surpassing legal barriers, Russia and Iran have agreed on a State loan and entered into a preliminary pact on it. As per the preliminary accord, Russia will grant a $5-billion loan to Iran. Both the nations have successfully removed the legal barriers on intergovernmental loans to pave the way for easy disbursal of the State loan.

According to preliminary agreement, Moscow will extend loan to Tehran. Sergei Storchak, Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia has announced the $5-billion State loan would be granted to Iran. Russian President Vladimir Putin during his visit to Tehran in November 2015 assured Iran on the grant.

Sputnik International reports that Russia is planning to allot the first tranche of grant to the tune of $2.2 billion in 2016. This grant amount will be invested in projects electrification of Railway system in Iran. Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said that first round of grant would be released soon.



However, Storchak didn't give more details about original difference over the loans. What were the legal hurdles on loans and how they have been resolved not revealed to the media. He also further said that both the nations will soon take a decision on disbursal of State loan amount to Iran. "The subject is closed," RIA News agency quoted Storchak as saying "only procedural matters are left."

Reuters further adds that Russian grant of loan amount will be invested mostly in transport, geological exploration in those projects being implemented by Russian companies in Iran. However, the first round of loan amount is expected to go into infrastructure sector.



While explaining bout contradictions were legal barriers, Storchak said: "Contradictions in the intergovernmental loan have been removed. I saw my (Iranian) colleague here in Washington and he said that we're preparing clean texts. We'll sign them as soon as the decision is made by the authorities."

Russia Beyond The Headlines further adds that Russia's loan of $2.5 billion would be earmarked for infrastructure projects. Both the nations have yet to take a final decision and conclude terms and conditions on the State loan. Energy Minister Alexander Novaak held discussions with Mahmoud Vaezi, the co-Chairman of the Russian-Iranian intergovernmental Commission.



For investing the loan amount, the profile companies confirmed that they will sign new contracts pertaining to new projects. This will include construction of a thermal power plant and rail line electrification. However, profile companies are waiting for the final outcome so that they understand terms and conditions in a better way. The ongoing discussions are on a total of up to $2.5 billion for those two projects.
Daredevil actress Rosario Dawson was arrested by police on Friday for crowding, obstructing, or incommoding'. Dawson was not handcuffed but was fined $50 after participating in the nonviolent protest in Washington DC.

According to Metro, Dawson joined 400 others in the protest at the Democratic Spring rally that aims to fight against the corruption in US politics. Dawson said that there seemed to be reluctance in the part of the police to arrest her due to her celebrity status.

"I think there was maybe a desire to not particularly maybe have me arrested because they didn't want that to be put out there. So we got up when they walked away and we sat down and we were arrested", Dawson said.

"These are really important issues and the people really need them, and we're putting ourselves on the line for what a lot of people across America and across the planet really want to be able to see happen in America", Dawson further stated as reported by ET Online. "Which is one person, one vote and to take the money out of politics, so we can have fair elections with real progressives."

The actress was also vocal about the protest on social media as she posted updates via her Instagram account. Dawson also shared a message about the rally on her Twitter account. According to Inquistr, the group aims to "Save democracy" through their demand in Congress to take action about the legalized corruption in the government and ensure free and fair elections.

Democratic Spring's movement started in April 2 to 11 where thousands marched from Philadelphia to Washington, and continued in April 11 to 18 where they had a peaceful sit-in. Dawson's arrest on Friday was not the first instance that the actress stood by her political views publicly, as she also previously rallied against former President George W. Bush in 2004.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane's office decision has delayed $11 million settlement payment to thousands of people. Some natural gas producers have to pay royalties to leaseholders in Bradford County. Royalty agreements between natural gas producers and landowners allow deductions of certain costs, while State law keeps the royalty not less than 12.5 percent.

Chesapeake Energy Corp in Bradford County owns Marcellus shale gas well. Lawyers and landowners hold a view that a federal class-action settlement has been agreed among companies related to Chesapeake Energy. Lead plaintiff Demchak Partners wouldn't make them whole, but hurt them financially down as the settlement allows for continued deductions of fees from royalties.

TribLive reports that leaseholders part of the class-action have been waiting for royalties for years. Meanwhile, lawsuits over royalty payments are piling up against shale gas producers. This has created further confusion and lack of clarity. As a result, no remedy for the numerous complaints has surfaced. Many leaseholders complain that natural gas producers are improperly deducting fees from royalty payments on gas from wells or slashing excessive fees.



Jackie Root, President of the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Association of Royalty Owners, said "The folks I hear from are not unhappy that the settlement has not gone forward."

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane's decision is to run into a huge legal battle over royalties. This has delayed the payment of royalties by some natural gas producers to leaseholders. The delayed payment is expected to be an $11 million settlement for thousands of people. The delay was prompted by Kane's lawsuit in Bradford County. A filing in an ongoing federal case is also causing concerns for some, according to Sun Times.



Michelle O'Brien, lead attorney for the Demchak plaintiffs, who first reached a proposed settlement in 2013, said "We do hear from a lot of landowners who would like to see this move forward. They deserve to get the money due to them."

Several cases are different in nature of complaints. Kane's office, in December, filed a State court lawsuit opposing to the Federal Demchak settlement. This is raising several questions over who can benefit from which case and how.

Several drillers are sharing costs of processing and transportation of gas with landowners. This is significantly reducing royalty payment to landowners. Natural gas producers are deducting post production costs or gathering fees from the royalty payment. Landowners are raising voice against this and have started filing lawsuits in State count, according to StateImpact.



Michelle O'Brien, lead attorney for the Demchak plaintiffs who first reached a proposed settlement in 2013, said there's confusion over how a settlement or resolution of attorney general's complaint would affect the Demchak settlement and other several individual claims for settlement of royalties.



Natural gas companies have entered into agreements with landowners. State law fixes minimum royalty at 12.5 percent. The agreement also allows for deductions of certain costs that may reduce payment to zero level also. Individual leases might outline those deductions and costs.
To Officer Steve Meador, Your actions Saturday evening in saving a woman from jumping off the Market Street Bridge caught the attention of the staff at the Washington Post and this story is posted on their home page.

Good work.

Prentice Hicks

* * *

You could say that Officer Meador was just doing his job because that's what the police are supposed to do, and I would agree. However, like you Mr. Hicks, I'd say he was doing a really, really good job. I'm a known sap, but it brought a proud tear to my eye as I pondered the anarchy our CPD and HCPD men and women are dealing with lately.



I'd like to say that I would have done the same thing, but I'm pretty much convinced I'd have bumbled and missed her pants and likely would have pushed her to her death. Thank God I was in bed by then.



Meanwhile, way to go Officer Meador. You are a professional and a very good man.



Savage Glascock, Sr.
Renowned Journalist Shafik Rehman was recently arrested and charged in a court in Dhaka for Sedition according to reports. However, Rehman's family are stressing that the arrest was illegal and that they have no grounds to do so.

The Guardian reports that Rehman, the former editor Jai Jai Din and now the known opposition leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), has been charged for alleged conspiracy to murder the son of Prime minister Sheikh Hasina.

The arrest was believed to be unwarranted, as per The Daily Star. Rehman's family is claiming that Rehman was taken from their home by two investigators in plain clothes disguising themselves as reporters wanting to interview the veteran journalist.

"The most unfortunate part is that they entered our house posing as Boishakhi Television journalists," Taleya Rehman, the arrested journalist's wife said, as per the publication.

The arrest was believed to be directly because of Rehman's involvement with the BNP. Furthermore, the case, according to the news agency, involved Mohammad Ullah Mamun, the vice-president of BNP's cultural wing Jasas and other leaders of the group.

Allegedly, Rehman together with Mamun and the others were meeting in UK, the US and the Jasas office at the capital's Paltan and other parts of the country in Sept. 2012 to plan for the killing of the the Prime Minister's son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy.

After the arrest, Joy posted on Facebook, stressing that the arrest was just right as it is a threat against his life. "How often do you actually get someone trying to kill you? In my case, apparently more often than even I am aware of. It's not because I'm a criminal or even a bad guy. It just so happens that my mother is in politics in Bangladesh and I help her from time to time," Joy wrote.

"The evidence against "journalist" Shafik Rehman comes directly from this case. Note I put the word journalist in quotes because once you're involved in trying to kidnap and kill someone I believe you have changed your career path from journalist to criminal. The BNP runs a mid-career course for that sort of thing," he added.

Meanwhile, as the leader of the BNP, Khaleda Zia demanded Rehman's unconditional release, according to BBC. Authorities, however, denied to post bail. As of current, Rehman is still detained while the Metropolitan Magistrate Muhammad Mazharul Islam ordered for 7 days of interrogation towards Rehman, the Daily Star adds.
One named former firefighter was granted about $800,000 for harassment and discrimination by tragically, her own colleagues. Given that the job was stereotypically noticed as a male-oriented livelihood, the aforementioned firefighter spoke out her side after many years of being under the negative impression of the said co-workers.

According to Fox News, a noble former firefighter from Providence, Rhode Island claims to have suffered long years of sexual harassment and gender discrimination through the hands of her colleagues. Filing a case over four years ago, the named Lt. Lori Franchina was recently awarded more than $800,000.

Daily Mail noted that the retired Providence firefighter sued in federal court last 2012 under the accusation that her male colleagues were heavily harassing and discriminating against her for more than one occasion, mostly due to her being a woman; and a lesbian as well. Some past scenarios were brought about by Franchina in which the said mistreatment became apparent.

As per BG Daily News, Franchina's 19-page lawsuit stated that she had to file a restraining order against a certain firefighter that assaulted her. Moreover, it was back in 2009 when while she was treating a victim that was shot in the head, a fellow firefighter snapped his rubber glove near her face which splatter blood, brain matter and other fluids onto her face and mucus membranes. To go back further, in 2006, male firefighters refused to aid Franchina in saving a life.

Franchina concluded that the damages caused her to suffer and eventually develop post-traumatic stress disorder, and that coming to work became unbearably difficult. She also elaborated that her superiors failed to stop the said mistreatment.

The grant of $800,000 was rewarded to her two weeks after the trial period but in defense of the city, it was declared equally that Franchina was rather difficult to get along with and even failed to launch a complaint with its Equal Employment Opportunity officer.
Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate, said on Monday that he opposed the natural gas pipeline proposal connecting New York and Pennsylvania. The pipeline will carry fracked shale gas produced in Marcellus Share fields.

Reuters reported that Sanders also called New York officials to reject the proposal. In a statement, Sanders expressed his concern about a possible leak of gas and other issues.

"The possibility of methane leaks from the proposed Constitution Pipeline would be catastrophic to our air and our climate  and if this pipeline were approved, eminent domain would be used to seize land from farmers and homeowners," Sanders said.

In regards to his strong opposition, Politico New York said that the Vermont senator tried to close a double-digit gap in the polls with Hillary Clinton using environmental issue. Sanders also argued the pipeline could poison water supplies and create more reliance on natural gas, while New York state should be more focused on renewable energy supplies.

"Our job is to break our addiction to fossil fuels, not increase our dependence on energy sources that pollute our planet," his statement said.

In the same statement, Sanders presidential campaign also pointed other environmental issue related to Hudson River. Sanders asked General Electric to conduct further cleanup of the river, as GE had dumped more than 1 million pounds of PCBs over the years. In a deal with the Environmental Protection Agency, GE has paid more than $2 billion to clear the river, but a large amount of carcinogenic chemical still remains in the river.

Sanders presidential campaign also noted that chemical pollutants in Hudson river have threatened the river as a recreational resource and harmed the revitalization of riverfront communities. He made a promise to clean the river.

"We must do everything we can to clean up the Hudson River and hold GE accountable for its actions," Sanders' presidential campaign said. "As President, Senator Sanders will make sure the Hudson is fully restored as a source of healthy sustenance and as a recreational and economic resource for all. And Senator Sanders will work to ensure that GE pays to clean up the toxic mess that they created."

According to New York Times, the Constitution Pipeline is a 124-mile structure that would carry fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale fields of Pennsylvania to a compressor station in Wright, New York. Then the pipeline will connect the Iroquois and Tennessee pipelines to take the gas to New England, and potentially to Canada.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said on Monday that he opposed the natural gas pipeline proposal between New York and Pennsylvania. In an attempt to close the long gap with Hillary Clinton, he also called New York officials to reject the proposal.
A riot ensued in Zambia's capital, Lusaka, after suspicions that the immigrants in the area are involved in the suspected ritual killings that occurred in the city in the past four weeks. Police investigations are still ongoing regarding the killings.

Stones were thrown and shops foreign owners were broken into as they were suspected of being involved in the murders. As reported by Standard Digital News, police spokesperson Charity Munganga-Chanda said that four establishments were looted so far in the riots. The citizens involved in the riots shouted "We want peace!" as police were deployed to settle the chaos.

Six were found dead in the area in the past weeks with missing body parts. According to Lusaka Times, the deaths were linked to ritual killings. Four male suspects have been arrested by the police for possessing body parts that will be put in forensic examination to determine whether or not they are human flesh.

The police have been working on the case round the clock and are appealing to the residents to remain calm as well as cooperate with the authorities. President Edgar Lungu also expressed his grief on the matter and said that such killings are extraordinary as they are driven by something evil. He also said that the killings evoked to the people that they must reject such happenings in their communities.

In a separate report by the trade, the most recent victim was identified as the 30 year old George Compound resident, Anthony Mwaba who lived in house no. 376 off Twikantane Road. Mwaba's body was found 300 to 500 meters away from his house.

Like the previous victims, Mwaba was found with a missing heart, ears, and private parts. The killings have not been resolved yet, but police assured citizens that they will release the results to the general public as soon as possible.
A South Korean restaurant that uses the brand name of 'Louis Vitton' company is being fined by SK court. The fried chicken restaurant owner has to pay 14.5 million won ($12, 500) for not following the ban ordered by the court.

The fashion boutique company, Louis Vuitton, filed a suit in September against a small restaurant in Seoul, South Korea for illegally using their brand name. According to Yahoo News, the company was not too pleased with the owner's creativity in selling fried chicken, as it is damaging to the brand.

The owner, identified only by his surname Kim, had named his eatery 'LOUIS VUITTON DAK' - a play on the word "tongdak," which means whole chicken in Korean. Aside from name, the owner also uses the logo similar to that of French fashion boutique and had it printed on the napkins and fried chicken take-out boxes.

South Korean court agreed and in October ordered Mr. Kim to cease using the name. He was also threatened to pay 500,000 won if he will not comply with the court order.

In a report by The Star, the restaurant owner came up with another name "chaLouisvui tondak", which he insisted that it is already different and enough to comply with the court ruling.

However, Louis Vuitton does not too convince with the change. This week, the fashion company complained again. The court ordered Mr. Kim to pay 14.5 million won ($12, 500) for almost a month of displaying the altered name.

"Although he changed the name with different spacing, the two names sounded almost the same," the Korea Times quoted the judge as saying.

No statement has been made by Mr. Kim and it is yet to be known if could pay the fine for using the amended name. Louis Vuitton seems not too pleased hearing their brand name being used in selling fried chickens.
A 17-year-old was shot and killed Monday afternoon in a drive-by shooting.

Then a pregnant woman was shot Monday night as the unrestrained Chattanooga gang violence continued.

On the second shooting, a news crew from WDEF TV was nearby and ducked behind trees as more shots were heard in the neighborhood.

Two people were arrested in the second shooting.

In the fatal incident, Chattanooga Police responded to the 3100 block of 7th Avenue on the report of a shooting. Police located a juvenile victim suffering from a gunshot wound.

The victim was inside a single-family residence when the suspects drove past and shot multiple rounds into the house, striking the victim at least once.

Hamilton County EMS initiated first aid and transported the victim to a local hospital. The victim succumbed to his injures at the hospital.

The suspect is described as being in a tan compact four-door sedan. Chattanooga Violent Crimes Bureau investigators are following all leads.





The second shooting was shortly after 9 p.m. when Chattanooga Police responded to the 1500 block Arlington Avenue on the report of a shooting.

When they arrived police located one victim suffering from a gunshot wound to the leg. The victim, Sharia Reynolds, 24, was in a parked vehicle when she was struck by the gunfire. Ms. Reynolds' injuries have been described as non-life threatening. She was treated by HCEMS before being transported to a local hospital.



While on the scene at Arlington Avenue, officers received two possible suspect vehicle descriptions, a silver Jeep Liberty and a light-colored Chevrolet Impala. Approximately 7-10 minutes after the shooting, officers with the CPD's Street Crimes Response Team located both a silver Jeep Liberty and a Chevrolet Impala. The vehicles were stopped and two persons of interest were held and brought in for questioning, Jaumichael Hardy, 22, and Jacorey Owens, 20.

Both were interviewed by Investigators with CPD's Violent Crimes Bureau and were later arrested in connection with the crime.





Both were charged with attempted first-degree murder and reckless endangerment. Owens and Hardy were subsequently transported to the Hamilton County Jail for their warrants.

Chattanooga Violent Crimes Bureau Investigators continue to follow all leads and ask anyone with information regarding the crimes to call 423 698-2525.
West 7th Street between Chestnut Street and Broad Street will be closed on Saturday, in order to lift and install a HVAC unit on the roof of a building.

Work will be done from approximately 7:30 a.m. until 2 p.m. Detours will be posted.

In order to view a map of all of this closure, visit http://www.chattanooga. gov/transportation/traffic- engineering-a-operations/ special-events-a-street- closures






Lt. Emmit Tate looks on as shooters fire away from three yards out, the closest range - photo by Mitch Talley

Deputy Shawn Giles keeps tabs on some of the participants at the Old Timers Shoot - photo by Mitch Talley

Deputy Shawn Giles keeps tabs on some of the participants at the Old Timers Shoot - photo by Mitch Talley

Training Instructor Phillip Herren barks out instructions to the shooters. Hell be retiring later this year and plans to return to the shooting range in 2017 to get his own federal carry permit. - photo by Mitch Talley

Capt. Wesley Lynch of the Whitfield County Sheriffs Office tallies up the score for one of the shooters - photo by Mitch Talley

A retiree pulls his gun out of his holster, getting ready to fire - photo by Mitch Talley

Under the watchful eye of Lt. Emmit Tate (center) and Deputy Shawn Giles (right), participants fire away at the shooting range, which is located on Old Praters Mill Road and has been used by the Whitfield County Sheriffs Office for training purposes since 1982 - photo by Mitch Talley

Whitfield County Training Instructor Phillip Herren will be on the other side of the classroom next year.

After 15 years in that position at the Whitfield County Sheriffs Office, Herren will be retiring in a few months, but not before he supervised the annual Old Timers Shoot one last time on March 31.

Ill be sitting in the classroom with these guys next year instead of standing in front of them, Herren said with a smile, noting that once hes retired, he also plans to spend more time taking care of his 10 hives of honeybees.

About 30 to 35 retirees attended the annual Old Timers Shoot at the countys shooting range on Old Praters Mill Road to renew their federal concealed weapons carry permit.

Under the guidance of Herren and other active members of the Whitfield County Sheriffs Office, all the retirees qualified for their licenses after shooting several rounds at targets from several distances, including 25 yards, 15 yards, 7 yards, and 3 yards.

Ordinarily, the retirees attend a one-hour class on the use of deadly force, then head out to the shooting range to shoot a qualifying score on the Georgia Qualification Course with the type of weapon theyre going to carry. Because of the threat of rain, though, they reversed that order this year and shot first, then attended class, and closed the days activities with a grilled hamburger and hot dog lunch.

Other ranges often charge a fee for using their facility, but Sheriff Scott Chitwood believes that law enforcement officers who have served their communities for decades shouldnt have to pay.

Sheriff Chitwood said its going to be free, well feed you lunch, and were doing something new for the first time this year, Herren said. The retirees used to have to send in paperwork and pay $25 to the Police Officers Standards and Training to receive their permit card, but this year, they wont have to pay that because the sheriffs office is completing the process in-house for free.

Many agencies took part in this years Old Timers Shoot, including lawmen from the Department of Natural Resources, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Georgia State Patrol, Atlanta Police, Murray County, Walker County, Catoosa County and Gordon County sheriffs offices, and U.S. Marshals Office - pretty much the entire gamut of law enforcement, Herren said.

Its an exciting time for the shooting range, located for nearly 30 years on 10 acres owned by Marcus and Susan Boring.

The county has leased the land from the Borings for about a dollar a year for the past 27 years, Herren said. But because it wasnt our property, we couldnt expand the facility, so Mr. Boring said, Well, Ill tell you what, how about we just give you the 10 acres, make it county property, then you can do with it as you please. 

With the land now in the countys name, the sheriffs office is moving full steam ahead on construction of a 100x50-foot multi-purpose training room that will seat about 100 people. Utility poles in the way have already been relocated, and the building should be completed this summer on the site of the current parking lot. Once construction is done, a new parking area will be paved towards Old Praters Mill Road.

Thats not the only construction going on at the site, though.

Inmate work crews have been busy painting and renovating the old training room on the site, and Herren says another new building is in the works late this year or early next year.

Up here to the right of the shooting range, were going to build an open building that we can use as a picnic area or open-air classroom, Herren said, and then in the near future, were going to enclose it and make it into a simunitions house where we can change the configuration of the interior walls to create the different kinds of houses we might have to go into during a real incident.

Simunition was created in the late 1980s with the goal of providing more realistic training to military and law enforcement agencies. The projectiles are filled with colored water-soluble marking compound, similar to a paintball, and break upon impact, marking the target and allowing trainers to assess the accuracy and lethality of the hits.
green|spaces is challenging designers, office administration and teachers to consider how sustainable construction and curriculum can support a well balanced and healthy student at the upcoming Green School Summit on Saturday at UTC.



Educational sessions will be hosted for attendees on topics including Net Zero Energy Design, Energy Services, and Indoor Air Quality.

The event will also feature keynote speaker Lisa Kensler, associate professor and program coordinator for Educational Leadership with the College of Education Educational Foundations, Leadership, and Technology at Auburn University.

"From Reform to Restoration: The Promise and Potential of Green Schools" will explain how the green schools movement offers educators a high leverage school improvement strategy, addressing every aspect of education from school culture and climate to curriculum and facilities. "Ms. Kensler integrates her training and experience as an ecologist and educator to paint an inspiring picture of the promise and potential of whole school sustainability to restore vibrant, engaged learning within our schools and communities," organizers said.Students from Chattanooga Christian School, Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences, Normal Park Museum Magnet School, and East Lake Academy will be presenting their Green Sparks projects at an expo as well. The students took a semester-long design course to create an outdoor classroom for East Lake Park. A panel of judges will evaluate the designs and presentations and will award prizes to the top teams.Registration is free for the keynote speaker session and the Green Spark project expo, and includes lunch. Registration for the full day of workshops is $20 and $10 for a half day of workshops.For more information, visit www.greenspaceschattanooga.org/green-school-summit The event is sponsored by: City of Chattanooga Water Quality Department, Shaw Contract Group, Terracon, Techmer PM and presented in partnership with Bright Spark, Hamilton County Department of Education, USGBC Center for Green Schools, AIA Chattanooga, and Moms Clean Airforce.
Music at St. Pauls presents the award-winning early music ensemble Wayward Sisters (Beth Wenstrom, Baroque violin; Anne Timberlake, recorders; Anna Steinhoff, Baroque cello and viola da gamba; John Lenti, theorbo and guitar) in The Restless Heart: Music of Exiles, Emigrees, and Nomads.

The program features 17th and 18th century music by virtuoso composers with international appeal including Francesco Corbetta, Arcangelo Corelli, Francesco Geminiani, Biagio Marini, Nicola Matteis (Italy); Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Schmelzer, Johann Schop (Germany); and Matthew Locke (England).

The concert takes place on Friday at 7:30 p.m. at St. Pauls Episcopal Church, 305 W. Seventh at Pine Street in Chattanooga.

Tickets are $15 at the door; $5 for students. For reservations and more information, contact Music at St. Pauls at 423-266-8195.



Review of Wayward Sisters

Since 2009, Wayward Sisters has dazzled audiences across the United States, bringing distinctive freshness (Early Music Review) and intimacy to music from the 17th and 18th centuries. Wayward Sisters immediately impress with their evident rapport (Gramophone). The ensembles polished and spirited playing, and alert, stylish performances (Chicago Classical Review) have earned it appearances on concert series coast to coast. In 2011, Wayward Sisters won the Early Music America/Naxos competition, a nationwide search for new early music talent. The groups debut CD was released on the Naxos label in March 2014. Members of Wayward Sisters have studied historical performance at Oberlin Conservatory, Indiana University, and The Juilliard School. The name Wayward Sisters refers not only to Henry Purcells vivid conjuring of Shakespeares witches, but to the group members far-flung lives and continuing commitment to making music together.



Program:



Sonata a Tre: Op. 2, No. 12 Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713)

Lachrimae Pavan Johann Schop (1590-1667)

Sonata Seconda Biagio Marini (1594-1663)

Sonata Quarta Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (c. 1623-1680)

Passachaglia-Sinfonia-Sinfonia Francesco Corbetta (1615-1681)

From Airs made into Sonatas Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762)

Christ unser Herr zum Jordan Kamm Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Suite No. 5 in D Minor Matthew Locke (c. 1621-1677)

Trio Sonata in D Minor Bach (1685-1750)after BWV 527

Ayres for the Violin: Book 4 Nicola Matteis (fl.1670-1698)



For more information, contact Suzanne Ford 917-232-0334.
'Explosion of tree pollen' looms: What you can do to cope

A maple tree's leaves are far enough along Monday, April 18, 2016, to obscure the bugler atop the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Easton's Centre Square. Birch and oak trees are about to see a burst of pollen, experts say, which could make for some significant allergy issues. (Kurt Bresswein | For lehighvalleylive.com)

Allergy experts say tree pollen is going to be a significant issue for allergy-sufferers starting this week in the Lehigh Valley region.

The good news is those sensitive to the minuscule menace can find relief in over-the-counter medications, by following pollen counts to plan outdoor activities and, increasingly, with technology available on their mobile phone.

Dr. Eric Schenkel, an allergist who studies pollen from his Emrick Boulevard office in Bethlehem Township, said Monday he anticipates a "blast of pollen" from late-pollinating trees, followed in about two weeks by grass pollen that peaks around Memorial Day.

Expected to begin emerging this week, oak is the worst of the tree pollen in terms of symptoms ranging from eye and nasal issues on up to sinusitis, ear infections and asthma, Schenkel said. Birch pollen is also ready to burst onto the scene, said Dr. Leonard Bielory, a specialist in allergy and immunology at Rutgers Center and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.

"At this point in time in New Jersey and the Northeast and eastern Pennsylvania, as well, you are now going to have an explosion of tree pollen," Bielory said Monday. "People with an allergy to birch pollen are going to notice it tremendously in the next week to three weeks.

"This week is going to be one of the strongest openings of birch pollen season that we've seen in several years."

Pollen is dependent on the weather, the experts said. Dry, sunny weather when pollen emerges makes for misery, while cool, rainy days tend to tamp down the worst of it. Conditions throughout winter and early spring also determine how much goes airborne.

The Lehigh Valley saw higher-than-average precipitation in January, including the region's record snowfall, and February's 5.86 inches trounced the 2.70-inch normal value, according to the National Weather Service. March was dry, with 0.96 of an inch compared to the normal 3.39 inches, and April -- with a normal total of 3.56 inches -- was at 1.36 inches through Monday.

It's been enough for a healthy dose of pollen, which comprise the male end of trees' and other plants' reproductive system, said Bielory.

"The trees are really primed," he said. "They aren't lacking from any lack of water or nutrients. They're just ready to reproduce."

The experts offer the following tips on reducing suffering:

Tracking and timing

Track pollen counts online, not pollen indexes that are based on historical data. Counts are based on the previous 24 hours. In the Lehigh Valley, Schenkel said his Allergy Partners of the Lehigh Valley is the only certified pollen counting center between Philadelphia and New York, and the counts are posted at www.allergypartners.com/lehighvalley. Bielory directs his patients to www.nynjpollen.com.

Knowing when pollens are plentiful, sufferers can time outdoor activities for the afternoon and evening, when counts are lowest, Schenkel advises.

Bielory tells patients to check out the Asthma Ally app available for Apple and Android. The app's maker says it allows you to stay in touch with your physician, understand what conditions trigger asthma or allergy symptoms, track airborne irritants and capture other critical information.

In short, the app can forecast when symptoms are going to be the worst and when it's time to medicate.

Taking something

Over-the-counter medications can be effective at treating symptoms, though patients should watch for side effects, Schenkel said: Antihistamines are "tried and true," but some brands can cause drowsiness, so they're best to take in the evening or at night. They can also complicate other conditions, such as decreasing urine flow in men with prostate problems or aggravating glaucoma, he said.

Steroidal sprays like Nasacort, Flonase and Rhinocort are safe and effective, but must be taken every day -- not just during flareups, Schenkel said.

It's the little things

Allergy-sufferers should consider showering and changing and washing their clothes when coming in from outside on high-pollen days, Schenkel said. Those with pet-dander or dust allergies should take extra care in cleaning their homes during allergy season, to avoid compounding allergens.

See a specialist

Those with serious allergies are advised to see a board-certified allergy or immunology specialist, who can test for specific allergies to tailor treatment -- such as immunotherapy shots, Schenkel said. Bielory says the difference between medicating with over-the-counter products and getting more help is all in how you feel: If pollen counts are high and someone feels miserable, it's time to consider seeing a specialist.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A Northampton Borough man is accused of stalking and repeatedly following a Redner's Warehouse Market employee around the store as she worked.

Luis Vega Jr., 28, of the 100 block of Boro Vu Drive, on Friday entered the store, 101 Held Drive, and walked up to a female employee working. Northampton police said Vega asked the employee to "escort him to the river" to perform a sex act.

Court records indicate the pair did not know each other.

Vega then left the store. But once the employee's shift ended, police said Vega followed her home from work as she walked down Cherryville Road and Main Street. The victim then entered a back yard filled with people and called police.

Police were unable to locate Vega.

On Monday, Vega entered Redner's Warehouse again, searched for the victim who wasn't there and then, left the store, police said. He returned later that day, entered an area marked "Employees Only" and found the victim, according to police.

The victim ran out a back door of the store and called police. Police responded, found Vega in the parking lot and arrested him. Vega is charged with stalking, harassment and disorderly conduct.

He was arraigned before District Judge Roy Manwaring, who set bail at $5,000. In lieu of bail, Vega was sent to Northampton County Prison. The judge ordered Vega to stay away from the victim and Redner's Warehouse Market.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
UPDATE: Bicyclist hurt on Route 46 dies of injuries

A bicyclist was flown by medevac helicopter for treatment Monday night after a crash on Route 46 in Warren County, according to New Jersey State Police.

The crash was reported at 8:53 p.m. near West Titman Road in White Township, state police at Washington said.

The cyclist was involved in a collision with a Toyota passenger vehicle and was flown to St. Luke's University Hospital, Fountain Hill. Police could not immediately comment Monday night on the extent of the cyclist's injuries.

The driver of the Toyota stopped at the scene, police said. No one was reported injured in the vehicle.

Troopers were continuing to investigate the crash past 10 p.m. Route 46 was open to traffic in the area, police said.

Police were not immediately releasing the names of those involved.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Lee University has officially approved an American Sign Language (ASL) minor for its students.

While ASL classes have been offered for 20 years, a minor will be available for the first time beginning fall 2016.

Dr. La-Juan Bradford, director of academic support, has dreamed of creating the minor since she was a student at Lee.

The idea of the minor was approved three years ago, Bradford said. It took a couple years to build up faculty to teach the classes, then another year or so to develop the syllabus.

The new minor requires eight classes. Students will learn visually with vocab, online resources, and by watching the professors. ASL is unique in that it requires kinesthetic, or hands on, learning. While students use vocab and spelling, they are using their hands to create shapes that assist in communication.

For students interested in ASL but unsure about adding a minor, Bradford recommends trying one of the lecture classes such as Introduction to Deaf Studies, which covers everything related to deafness, including anatomy of the ear, hearing loss and the influence of deafness on the family.

If the minor is a success, it could potentially lead to further advancements in Lees ASL education.

In order for Lee to begin developing this minor into a major, we first have to show there is an interest in American Sign Language, Dr. Bradford said.

For more information about the ASL minor, contact Bradford at lbradford@leeuniversity.edu.
A 34-year-old dairy farmer has been elected chairman of Kildare Irish Farmers Association.

At the Association branchs annual general meeting in Newbridge, on Wednesday, March 30, Brian Rushe was elected for a four-year term.

While he was born in Wicklow to parents both from farming backgrounds, the Derrinturn, Carbury man went to school in Edenderry, at St Marys.

Mr Rushe succeeds Pat Farrell, who completed his term and is running for the deputy president position of IFA tomorrow night.

Brian Rushe converted from sucklers to milk in 2013 and supplies Lakeland Dairies.

He runs a family farm of around 200 acres with 140 cows.

His Roscommon born father, John, runs SuperValu in Naas, but Brian told the Leader he is not part of that particular operation. His mother is from Edenderry.

The family bought the Derrinturn farm in 1997 and Brian has been running it since he was about 21, having completed a business certificate and decided that farming was what he wanted to do.

He was in beef and tillage up to 2013 when he entered the milk business.

But like most business, there is uncertainty over the returns expected. It all depends on the milk prices, he said.

There is a big concern among farmers over the drop in prices this year. Last year the prices were not as bad as expected, for some anyway.

There is a lot of uncertainty, particularly where the price being paid is below the cost of production, he said.

Brian is married to Rebecca and they have two children, John (4) and Rhys (1).

Rebecca has been working as a nurse in Tullamore but is moving to a job at Clane Hospital.

That will make it easier for the couple to look after their children.

Brian has been busy. There have been times I was due to pick up my son from school but something came up and somebody else had to collect him, he said.

Brian is currently completing a Nuffield Scholarship. That is provided by the Nuffield Trust, which operates in six countries, including Canada, Holland and France.

In 2015, he was awarded one of six bursaries to do some study. His topic was the perception of agriculture by people not working in it.

It is an issue in some of these countries, he said.

He travelled to the USA and Australia and spent two weeks in China.

China was fascinating and a bit of an eye opener.

He visited farms which were run on a subsistence basis, including small rice farms, which produced just enough to feed the family on it. China has big food needs, said Brian. It has a fifth of the worlds population to feed but a tiny proportion of the arable land.

A lot of the better land is frozen.

There is a big gap in income between the wealthy living in the cities and these subsistence farmers.

He also visited Government collective farms. As chairman of Kildare IFA, Brian will be busy, but reckons that meetings held at the Irish Farm Centre on the Long Mile Road wont be as difficult for him to reach as for others.
Entrepreneur Jackie Lavin spoke from the heart when she launched bestselling writer Margaret Scotts new book The Fallout last Thursday March 31 in Barker & Jones, Naas.

In her rousing speech she spoke about the present political climate and her feelings on the Irish banking crisis.

The packed bookshop listened intently as Ms Lavin praised the new book set in a fictional German Bank, which focuses on the pressures that employees found themselves under in post-recession Dublin.

As Scott read from her novel to howls of laughter she assured everyone present that this really wasnt a funny book.

Scott, a former columnist with the Leinster Leader, has a way of drawing in the listener or reader to her story.

She has an unbelievable sense of humour and can make the most dismal situation seem funny.

As the queue for signed books snaked down the shop to the door, those in attendance including Noleen McCreevy, Kildare Arts Officer Lucina Russell, Bill Cullen and many more enjoyed a glass of wine, handmade chocolates and a chat with locals and visitors to Naas alike.

'The Fallout' is published by Poolbeg Press and is available from bookshops countrywide.

Award winning writer Liz Nugent wrote of the book - Scott brilliantly humanises the personalities of the banking trade's survivors in post-bust Ireland, the victims, the chancers and the eejits who reflect us all.
With the Brexit debate currently focusing on the question of trade, Brexiters are able to wrongly claim that the UK would enjoy better trade agreements outside the EU, sooner or later. This exercise in hand waving complacency is not available when it comes to our security.

This is not just about the European Arrest Warrant, responsible for the extradition of 7000 criminals out of the UK and 1000 brought to justice here including failed London bomber Hussein Osman.

There are over 100 measures in total, many of which the UK has chosen to withdraw from while remaining in the important ones. The European Investigation Order, for example makes it much easier to investigate crimes where some investigation is needed in another jurisdiction.

Perhaps the most significant is intelligence sharing, which led to arrests last week in the UK, in connection with the Paris and Brussels bombings. Terrorists clearly dont respect borders and for us to operate in national silos would make us much weaker. Brexit would delight Daesh.

These are all agreed measures for co-operation which we have opted into because they are in our interests to do so. Unlike the case with trade, where Single Market rules are the exclusive rules for doing business, there is nothing to stop us agreeing additional measures bilaterally with any other country in the world, inside or outside the EU. And we do. Any Brexiter who claimed we could replicate the EU measures better outside the EU would be trumped by the observation that there is nothing stopping us doing it already.

Now most Brexiters seem to be motivated by a desire to ditch any co-operation that comes with an EU label, but some will say at this point that surely the EU will let us remain within those measures we want to be in (which on the 2014 decision of the UK government is all of them that we are currently in) and they may be right in principle although Brexit will make it more difficult in practice, and they have their fellow Brexiters to fight.

But, like the Single Market rules, the co-operation measures on crime, policing, terror and intelligence are not cast in stone. They are an ongoing project of improvement  responding to new threats, fixing mistakes (if not always as quickly as we might like), closing loopholes etc.

We should not expect a renegotiation with the UK each time the rump EU amends one of its crime fighting measures. No, like the single market, if we stay in, while leaving the EU, we are in a democracy by fax where we will have chosen to have no influence.

We already have border controls, and we can keep out terrorist suspects that we  or our European friends  have identified. But Britain, along with France, Germany, Belgium the Netherlands and Sweden have far too many home-grown terrorists who will most likely, as with all terrorists, kill the people around them, but will make connections all over the world. We wont defeat them by giving up our connections.

* Joe Otten was the candidate for Sheffield Heeley in June 2017 and Doncaster North in December 2019 and is a councillor in Sheffield.
Kirsty Williams faces her ITV leaders debate on ITV Cymru tomorrow at 8pm.

Away from the formalities of the campaign, she has been cooking with ITV Cymrus political editor Adrian Masters. Hes been doing this with all the party leaders. I do hope he asked the men what their families thought of them being party leaders as well.

He helped Kirsty make Sloppy Joes.

Kirsty had a great story about being brought back to earth after meeting President Obama. If it had been me, Id have wanted to talk about nothing else for about a year. Her husband, Richard, had something else he needed to ask, though:

Meeting Barack Obama was particularly exciting, but I was very quickly brought back down to earth. I rang home and spoke to my husband and said I got to speak to Barack Obama and he was like, Yeah, great. I cant find the kids swimming costumes.

One thing Id never really considered is that she lives on a farm. Lambing and elections coincide, so she may well have to help with delivering lambs in the middle of the night as well as campaigning.

I also laughed when she took over from Masters, who didnt seem to have any idea what a sweet potato wedge was.

Her idea of the best political day is helping her constituents with their problems, skewering the First Minister at FMQs and then making progress on her more nurses Private Members Bill.

You can watch the whole thing here as long as you are able to enter a Welsh postcode when asked.

Back on the campaign trail, Kirsty has Tim Farron with her today and the focus is how the Welsh Lib Dems would help small businesses. Kirsty said:

The Welsh Liberal Democrats vision of an Opportunity Economy will tear down the barriers that stop Welsh businesses from fulfilling their ambitions. Well heavily invest in digital infrastructure to improve mobile phone and broadband coverage. Well help businesses grow through our Small Business Administration, bringing independent advice and finance together so businesses have the best chance of success. And we will more than double the number of apprenticeships, as we believe in investing in our future workforce. The Welsh Liberal Democrats are the party of fresh ideas to create an economy that works for you.

Tim added:

Wales should be known as the place where small and medium sized businesses thrive, it just needs a Government with the ambition to make it happen. Kirsty Williams and her team have the ideas to unleash Wales business potential. The Welsh Liberal Democrats are the natural home of the entrepreneur, the shopkeeper and the SME business owner. Labour continues to treat aspiration as a dirty word. Carwyn Jones and Jeremy Corbyn may not trust in the power of business to do good, but we do. We know that business can be a powerful engine for social mobility. The Tories interest in business ends at supporting hedge fund managers and cutting taxes for their richest donors. Supporting only those at the very top simply makes it harder for everyone else. The Welsh Liberal Democrats are unique as they can speak for all of Wales. No other party can deliver economic growth for the whole of Wales. Whether its North, South, Mid, rural or urban  the Welsh Liberal Democrats will create an economy that works for you.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
Rep. Susan Lynn on Monday decided not to pursue a vote on House Bill 2414, the so-called "bathroom bill."

David Fowler, Family Action Council of Tennessee president, said, "We were not able to speak with her before her decision, so we will not attempt to explain her reasons for doing so. We thank Senator Mike Bell for his hard work on the Senate side and agree with his decision not to push for a vote on the bill at this point since it could not pass on House side.

We are thankful that Rep. Lynn and Senator Bell brought the bill and we appreciate their efforts in past weeks in the face of consistent opposition from the governors office and others, but we join the thousands of parents across the state who are profoundly disappointed that at this point in the process Rep. Lynn has decided not to proceed with a bill that would have simply protected the privacy of the children they have entrusted to our public schools.

We are grateful for the legislators who said they would take the bill from Rep. Lynn this year and continue to push it forward; however, it was not to be. We trust that one of them will do so next year. If so, we stand ready to assist, even as we have tried to do on the legislation this year.

In the meantime, we would encourage citizens to monitor the policies of their local school systems and demand that their schools defend the privacy of students if threatened with lawsuits, as has already happened with one local school system.

"High school can be a difficult time for anyone, and transgender students who testified at the legislature said they were already afraid to go to any school restroom," Senate Democratic Caucus Chairman Jeff Yarbro said. "This bill was nothing more than a mean-spirited attack that would have written that fear and discrimination into state law. Its demise is a bright spot in a year that's been a dark stain on Tennessee's reputation as a hospitable, welcoming state."







"This bill brought together national civil rights organizations, more than 60 major companies and more than 75 clergy members, in addition to the many parents and transgender students who testified against this mean-spirited legislation," Senate Minority Leader Lee Harris said. "Jobs and education were at stake, people stood up for tolerance, and they prevailed. The message was loud and clear: Tennessee won't be another North Carolina."




The Immigration Bill returns to the House of Commons on Monday, April 25th. Some very important amendments will be coming from significant wins in the House of Lords, when it was debated there. ALL MPs need to be lobbied and told how important it is that these amendments are incorporated into what is a terrible Bill, to at least make a difference to many asylum seekers already in the UK, as well as the 3,000 unaccompanied children seeking refuge, already in Europe.

Please do take the time to write, meet, or otherwise lobby your own MP on these issues.

1. Right to Work. Asylum seekers should be given the right to work after they have been in the UK after 6 months. There is a briefing here/attached. Lord Roger Roberts has campaigned on this for 10 years now. His full speech is here, and the issue is in the Lib Dem manifesto for the 2015 elections. You are asking your MP to vote for the Lords Amendment 59. Please also tweet this widely, using the hashtags #immigrationbill and #letthemwork

2. The vote on ending indefinite detention for immigration purposes. The amendment about this was won by 17 votes. Much has been written and campaigned about this, and LD4SOS have campaigned for years. (This was a key manifesto commitment for the 2015 general election). You can read a further briefing from Detention Action here (pdf). Please ask your MP to support amendment 84.

3. The ending of detention for immigration purposes of pregnant women. Pregnant women should never be detained, and this is said in both the APPG report, chaired by Sarah Teather, and published last year, and the Government commissioned Shaw Report published earlier this year. There is more information in this report Expecting Change. Please ask your MP to vote to keep the absolute exclusion on the detention of pregnant women and vote for subclause (1) to Lords Amendment 85.

4. The UK Government to agree to take in 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children from Europe. This was agreed by the House of Lords on April 12th by a majority of 102. Tim Farron has led this campaign, working with organisations such as Save the Children Fund who have expertise on this issue. Bradley Hillier-Smith has done a great video on this, do look at it and distribute it. You can read more in this article, and download the blueprint for action here (pdf). Please ask your MP to support amendment 87.

If you need any further information on any of the above, please do get in touch. City of Sanctuary have done a briefing, which includes a suggested letter, with suggestions and information here too.

It is so very important that as many people as possible let their MP know how strongly you feel on these issues. If you have any personal experience, know people who have (for instance women who have been detained whilst pregnant, asylum seekers with skills needed that cannot work) or are part of an organisation that works with any groups affected, then it will be very effective to talk about this.

So get writing, meeting, facebooking and tweeting !

* Suzanne Fletcher was a councillor for nearly 30 years and a voluntary advice worker with the CAB for 40 years. Now retired, she is active as a campaigner in the community both as a Lib Dem and with local organisations.
The Chattanooga Airport is adding still more parking spaces after landing United Airlines, which plans direct flights to Chicago and to Newark.

After adding over 400 spaces in the past two years, the airport will put in 232 more spaces across from the Greyhound bus station.

Officials said the new parking lot will be fenced and lighted and have a continuous shuttle. The shuttle is expected to come by about every 6-7 minutes. The shuttle service is expected to cost between $200,000 and $300,000 per year.



It is hoped to have the new lot ready in several months - in time for the new United flights.

Officials said there is enough space for a total 745 parking spots at the new location, but a parking deck close to the airport is seen as the ultimate solution. A people mover from the new lot to the terminal would be cost prohibitive, it was stated.

The airport added 104 spots at the Intermediate lot in 2014 and 200 more at the Intermediate lot in 2015 along with 100 in Short Term.



A covered walkway from the Long Term lot to the terminal has been completed.

Terry Hart, airport president, said with the new United flights that the Chattanooga Airport will be served by three of the four remaining big carriers. He said flights from Chattanooga will go to six major hubs "where you can catch a flight anywhere in the world."

He said, "Not many communities our size with regional airports can say that."



Mr. Hart said securing the United service was four years in the making. He said each time he visited his son in Chicago, he would go by the United offices to lobby for the service.

He said a key factor was the airport's sharp rise in emplanements - almost up to 400,000 a year.

The Airport Board approved a new budget that projects revenues to rise to $18.1 million. Expenses are pegged at $12.2 million.

April Cameron, vice president of finance, said the excess will be put back into the airport..

Airport board members advised officials to get out the word about the new direct flights.

Farzana Mitchell said, "Now the biggest part is getting the planes full so they don't bow out in a year or two."


A man told police that he was punched and had his motorcycle club vest ripped off by rival motorcycle gang members.

Jeremy Spence said it happened at Club Utopia at 2110 Dodson Ave.

Ralph "Stang" Oliver, 38, 4318 Victory Lane, and Robert Lamont "Solo" Solomon, 43, of 460 Midland Pike, were charged with aggravated robbery.

Spence said he was punched in the left eye by Oliver. He said Oliver and Solomon then ripped off the vest.

He said Solomon displayed a pistol and began firing it in the air.

He said he fled the area "out of fear of further assault and being shot."

Police said Oliver and Solomon are members of the Sin City Disciples motorcycle gang.


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Christian J. Collier will be celebrating National Poetry Month by bringing his Speakeasy Revue to Star Line Books on Thursday, April 28 from 6-7 p.m. Other performers that will be sharing the stage with him include Alive de Poet, Britni Bridgeforth, and Moll King. In addition to commemorating the theme of the month, the goal of the reading is also to showcase some of the Scenic Citys best young writers.

The Speakeasy Revue is free to attend and attendees are encouraged to arrive early. Star Line Books is located at 1467 Market St #106 in Chattanooga.

Bio on Mr. Collier:

Christian J. Collier is an accomplished writer and musician who has performed with several members of HBOs Def Poetry, Minton Sparks, and legendary poet Ishmael Reed, to name a few. He is a 2015 recipient of The Loft Literary Centers Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship. In 2013, he released his debut EP Between Beauty & Bedlam and since 2009, he has sold close to 1,000 copies of his chapbook Ghosts & Echoes solely off the strength of his live performances. His work has also been featured on The Guardian, and, earlier this year, he was a speaker for Februarys TEDxCHATTANOOGA event.






Weird phrases sometimes sting me like a sweat bee, making themselves unforgettable and unavoidable.



So one day Im attempting to pray, as its not only part of my job description, but also has become like oxygen for me.



By habit Ive learned the Psalms are a favorable prayer cliff from which to jump. I employ these God-inspired words as a sturdy platform for leaping into Gods air, much like those insane folks down the street, more technically referred to as hang-glider pilots, use Lookout Mountain as their launching pad for flight.



I open to Psalm 109.



As Im warming up to prayer, I observe the Psalmist struggling to rouse the God who never sleeps, or at least, to compel Him to speak up, because his life has become flanked with treacherous back-stabbing.

-----

His moments all sprinkled in a betrayal stew to boil in a cast-iron cauldron of hatred.Consolation is no place near.In return for my friendship, they accuse me He cant catch a break. Even his closest confidants have joined in the alienating assault.But then, instead of stuffing his face with Funfetti Gooey Bars that he found from a recipe on Pinterest; in lieu of a long reassuring look into the national treasury (over which he presided); and rather than merely reminding himself of the good things in his life--- Things could certainly be worse. Im a king, after all. Ive won a ton of battles. Ive got 30 wives who support me and lots of lovely, marginally well-adjusted children.... he, instead, self-consoles with this bewilderingly weird phrase:Huh? Whats that got to do with anything? A man of prayer? Seriously?That weird phrase instructs me. It also emboldens me.It can, if we heed it, shake us from sleep-walking through the moments of our days. It can re-direct our earnest but wrong-headed obsession with forming our own identities and needing to self-define.He has come up with a life-label that pertains, neither to his biological urges, nor to his own wishes or accomplishments. Instead, like any conferred identity that a created man or woman received, his is rooted in relationship with Another, despite the deficits within himself and the defects in his environs.He identifies as one who lives off Gods intervention through asking. He is a man of prayer.Would it shock us if the POTUS, or the chief of staff at the hospital or the principal of your local elementary school decided that the deficit was so bad, employee morale so sour, test scores so gloomy and home-life so dilapidated that a prayer retreat was in order?Wouldnt their advisors chide, You cant do that you kook, theres actual work to be done. You cant be off gallivanting by the lake, prayin for Petes sake, not when therere national security issues, public health troubles, and were falling behind in STEM fields!Would you faint if a politician suggested in a CNN debate that before we can act wisely, we must pray expectantly? And if he elaborated, no wise leader should presume to serve as an agent of Christs providential rule on this sorrowful and magnificent planet apart from a vital life of communication with him in prayer?Such a wackadoo would instantly be neutralized, possibly arrested, and likely admitted to a lab at the National Institutes of Health to be carefully observed and examined; deemed an invader from another planet, sent to spew lamebrain, fanatical, and simpleton fiction in the face of such grown-up problems.And if you yourself decided, but I am a woman of prayer and then determined to act like it, would you expect to be untampered with corrosive inner indictments?Wouldnt you expect self-critical messages if you decided to take off early from your normal duties next Tuesday to be, for a couple of hours, a mother of prayer?My kids need me, theres too much wash to be done, supper to prepare, a budget presentation at work tomorrow...my peeps are depending on methis is the height of irresponsibility for me to be out here praying like this!Wed all be susceptible to such a reasonable internal backlash if we bothered to realize this ideal in the middle of demanding lives.But, the author of this Psalm, I have to remind myself, was the King of Israel. He wasnt just some doofus afflicted with dad-bod, poking around with nothing to do, little to trouble his vacuous head about, and therefore, clear-scheduled with plenty of time to play World of Warcraft while pounding seasonal, locally brewed IPAs on a couch in his mothers basement.He was Head of State!And Jesus too, the One we consider reigning King of the Universe and Savior of the entire planetwas censured by well-meaning cabinet members who couldnt find him while he was at prayer (cf. Mark 1)----they reprimanded his priorities, Everyone is looking for you!...AKA There are clumps of human need screaming for your attention and you arent on the job!But Jesus was off praying on a mountainside...in the sort of lonely place to which we are told the planets Redeemer often retired to labor in prayer.Curious isnt it?Ive not noticed many (including myself) who console themselves with the seemingly mad moniker man of prayer.But Im starting to think its a worthwhile consolation.What if we adored our distressed neighbors and troubled communities so ardently, and so despised the vandalization of indifference, the atmospheric toxins of disregard, and the viral imprisonment of many in the gloomy little dungeon of themselves, that wed refuse to be anything except men and women of prayer with intentions that our prayers would find feet?What if we learned King Davids resourceful mantra and applied it to the unwellness all around us:Ive lost my job, but I am a man of prayer!My anxiety is extreme, but I am a woman of prayer!They say its stage IV cancer, but we are a community of prayer!My husband doesnt love me anymore, but I am a wife of prayer!The violence is frightening and destructive but we are a neighborhood of prayer!I dont know the best way to nurture and guide my children, but we are parents of prayer!Were not sure where the money will come from, but we are people of prayer!The ailments are so severe, the issues so thorny and complex, but we are a city of prayer!Babies need rescue, foster children, relief, but we will be activated and empowered to act....as we are compassion seeking in prayer!The poverty is debilitating and the pornography immobilizing, but we are pleading for emancipation and glad-making revitalization in prayer!To be a person of prayer is simply an affirmation that there is reversing power and sustaining love the likes of which we easily forget to expect from the One whose listening is like a vacuum that sucks prayer out of us.And any person or community that leans into this identity as pray-er will soon detect that the material of our prayers frequently becomes the actions of our lives, especially as we plead for alignment of our wants with the wants of Jesus who has propped himself him against the ruin of the world.So give weirdness a chance. Risk being called a dingbat. Endeavor to embrace this kooky but consoling calling of prayer so that when you stumble upon but I am a man of prayer you can nod with King David in a knowing sort of relief.

Eric Youngblood is the senior pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org.




Every New Years Eve when I turn our TV on to watch the famous big ball drop in Times Square, I ponder how much that event means to the people of America - and across the world. It bodes well-being and a sense of satisfaction, hard to describe, but very real.

Many of us have visited Times Square in New York - a magnet for all tourists from around the world, and a place in which we can lose all our grudges and politics for at least a few moments. Our elation with that place stems from the lights, the color, and the glorious confusion of the masses of people who have gathered there to enjoy the same experience. We can thank all those nameless and hidden Display men who have assembled all the many parts so skilfully behind the scenes, putting them seamlessly together to create those senses for us.

The same is true for every city in the world, actually: London, Paris, Moscow, - and even Chattanooga! Such "Displays" are an integral part of all our international cultures, seeming to fulfill our collective needs for something beyond our everyday lives and "bring us together". Bright lights and color fulfill at least some of those needs. People tend to congregate in places where the best displays are, and you find yourself rating them, subconsciously, in your head, as to which is good, better, or best.

In Chattanooga, many years ago, before urban spread - when everything important was located downtown - there was a list everyone carried in their minds as to which Christmas display, for example, should be seen first. Many people headed for the drive up 6th Street from Market to view the Power Board windows which were always animated with numerous moving characters. You were lucky if you could get your car into that slow-moving queue. Those display windows were mesmerizing to the many, while demonstrating graphically what electricity could do.

The Coca Cola distributors' large property at 2nd Street and Broad, through to Chestnut, always featured a life-size display of the Three Wise Men on their camels, which added a religious note to the downtown grouping of Christmas displays. These figures, although not animated, were kept lighted at night, enclosed by an iron bar fence which protected the Coca Cola trucks all year, except for Christmas. Then the trucks suddenly all disappeared to parts unknown so the Wise Men could ride in for a few days' stay. I think there were appropriate Christmas carols to accompany this scene. This excellent annual display certainly appealed to many.

Millers and Lovemans department stores always had great windows at Christmas - but I was especially partial to Miller's as their windows were larger in all directions: left to right, top to bottom. No doubt these decorated windows have pulled many a shut-in person out of their homes for a quick look, and more people have probably gotten "in the Christmas spirit" by seeing these displays than through any other means. Once the Chattanooga Times reported that one of the main windows showed a very large Santa who did nothing but sit and laugh while his body shook in rhythm to his laughter. A rather large lady, the paper said, became so amused at this that she joined in the laugh-fest causing all the bystanders to start laughing at HER - as well as at Santa! It seems to have been a very funny scene.

Although very pleasing to the eye, these displays represented a LOT of sweat and hard work for many skilled people - all year 'round. I fortunately got to meet the gentleman behind the Power Board's highly successful windows. I regret that I cannot recall his name, and no longer have connections where I could find out at this late date. But he was good. Everyone liked his work, and he was totally devoted to it. When I met him it was already after-hours. He was sitting at a desk and I could only peep into his darkened work area and saw very little of it. But his Christmas windows were all he worked on year-round.

Probably our best display company was on Cherry Street between 8th and 9th Street (now MLK). The large shop was on the second floor, with a small, simple sign over the sidewalk which said "Bagby Display Company". You could pass it a thousand times without ever noticing it. Bill Farley, of Crisman Hardware's display department, introduced me to it.The rather grungy stairway up to the work area was wide and dark. A small monorail lift ran beside the stairs, indicating that heavy and unwieldy equipment needed to be moved either up or down. After walking up the dark steps, however, it was something like when Dorothy opened the black-and-white door and the colorful "Land of Oz" suddenly appeared! Fantastic colors from both old and new displays were everywhere. Fuschia glitter and brightly colored gauze ruled! The good smell of fresh paint and of special glues were in the air. Porters wearing long work aprons were moving large displays from one room to the next, and there was a smaller, but adequately spacious, work area for a show-card writer or film cutter for the silk-screen process. The latter were fortunate, as they got to sit near an open window which provided light and air. Mr. Earl Bagby, owner of all this, was a very helpful and friendly man who seemed glad to welcome visitors to his domain. He always wore a work apron, and frequently had an artist's brush in his hand. He would delight you with a preview of next Christmas's keynote display for Miller's, or a special display for a downtown furrier. A visit to Leonardo da Vinci's workshop would have not been much more thrilling than a visit to Mr. Bagby's place on Cherry Street!

I have understood that the big companies that make the displays for Times Square in New York have been in business for 100 years and longer. Only those companies have the expertise to design and execute the immense displays there which must cling securely to the sides of buildings, so as not to menace the crowds below. The designers of these huge displays must all have sensibilities as to what will be "right" for the public. The advertising agencies may create the concept, but only the display people can say whether the concept will work, and then make it successful.

Our display people in Chattanooga do not have the problems of a Times Square, but they must be able to create something new very fast to fit a fast-changing public mood or event - such as a sudden change of price. Check this: One November day in 1964 I was working for a poster company on Amnicola Highway. The radio was on in our art department relating all the drama and horror of the Kennedy assassination. Kennedy was not yet confirmed dead when I left work to keep an un-breakable appointment downtown. I drove hurriedly into town and parked the car in the first space available - several blocks away from the appointment, then was forced to walk to the James Building. When I hurried past Miller Brothers' corner window on Market Street at Seventh I was agape at what I saw. The good people of Millers' display department had very quickly cleared the existing display out of that window and replaced it with a large, framed portrait of Kennedy surrounded by tasteful and beautifully arranged black bunting. And there was an exquisitely hand-lettered quotation of some sort on a curving sheet of expensive white paper - perhaps with a small touch of red, white and blue - which complemented the severity of the picture frame and other elements. I will always regret that I never got back to study that marvelous creation, although the event remains one of my greatest memories ever. I remain amazed at how fast Miller's display staff created such a beautiful example of the Displayman's craft.

(Chester Martin is a native Chattanoogan who is a talented painter as well as local historian. He and his wife, Pat, live in Brainerd. Mr. Martin can be reached at cymppm@comcast.net )
Chattanooga Realtor and top Keller Williams producer, Bekah Cochran and the Bekah Cochran Team will be hosting a free first time homebuyers workshop  Home Buying 101 Workshop on Thursday, May 19, at 5:30 p.m. at Keller Williams Realty, 202 Manufacturers Road.

There is so much conflicting information floating around the internet about real estate today, from do-it-yourself blogs to market information that doesnt apply to YOUR market, said team leader Bekah Cochran, the Bekah Cochran Team thought it would be a great idea to help educate home buyers on what to expect when they make the plunge, from correct market analysis data to choosing a lender and beyond.

The Bekah Cochran Team workshop will feature a panel of industry pros in lending, title work, insurance, home inspection, termite inspection and real estate. The goal is to share advice and allow ample time for curious home buyers to ask questions and start putting together their plan for action, said Ms.

Cochran. The panelists will aim to answer questions about what comes first in buying a home, and where to start.

Panelists include: Dale Whaley of Platinum Financial Funding, Jen Lloyd of Foundation Title and Escrow, Kevin Edmunds with Liberty Mutual Insurance,Alexander Herrick with Professional Real Estate Inspection Services, Clay Cochran with Jody Millard Pest Control and Bekah Cochran Team members, Bekah Cochran, Lauren Topping, Amanda Garrison, Kacie Baker and Kim Love.

Thursday, May 19th at 5:30 p.m. at Keller Williams Realty, 202 Manufacturers Road (across from Whole Foods), Chattanooga, TN 37405. Parking in the Renaissance Park lot. Visit the Busy Bekah Facebook page for more information. The workshop is free, but space is limited so RSVP to reserve your spot at busybekahc@gmail.com or on the Busy Bekah Facebook Page.
Drawing of the old queen Arnegunde, with the dress she probably wore when she died.

The mystery of how a lung from ancient French royalty became mummified has been solved after decades of uncertainty, according to an international team of researchers.

In 1959, a preserved lung was uncovered by archaeologist Michel Fleury inside a stone sarcophagus in the Basilica of St Denis, Paris, the site where the kings of France have been buried for centuries. The lung was found with a skeleton, a strand of hair, jewelry and several fragments of textiles and leather.

On a gold ring, the inscription "Arnegundis" around a central monogram "Regine" revealed the remains belonged to the Merovingian Queen Arnegunde (about 515about 580), one of the six wives of King Clotaire I (511-561) and the mother of King Chilperic I (about 534-584).

Photos: Mummies' Faces, Hairdos, Revealed in 3D

Since the discovery, the fine preservation of the lung raised questions over whether her lung had naturally mummified or had been embalmed.

"From a macroscopic point of view, the lung appears nicely preserved, while the body is completely skeletonized," Raffaella Bianucci, a bio-anthropologist in the Legal Medicine Section at the University of Turin, told Discovery News.

It turns out an elaborate copper belt played a key role in the lung's mummification.

Photos: Signs of Incest in Famous Mummies

The international team led by Bianucci presented the results of their investigation at the International Conference of Comparative Mummy Studies in Hildesheim, Germany.

Scanning electron microscopy on the lung biopsies revealed a massive concentration of copper ion on the surface of the lung tissue. Other analysis turned up massive concentrations of a copper oxide throughout the lung biopsies.

Further biochemical analysis showed the presence of benzoic acid and related compounds in the lung, although at low levels.

Optical Illusion: Child Mummy Opens And Closes Her Eyes

"These substances are widespread in the plant kingdom and similar profiles have been already reported in the balms of Egyptian mummified bodies," Bianucci said.

According to the researchers, the findings support the theory that, as suggested by historians, Arnegunde might have undergone an oral injection of a fluid made of spices/aromatic plants.

"Since Arnegunde was wearing a copper alloy ... belt around her waist, we speculate the copper oxide in the lungs is from weathering of the belt," Bianucci said.

"The preserving properties of copper, combined with the spice embalming treatment, might have allowed the preservation of the lungs," she added.

Mystery Mummies: Who Are They? Photos

Historical accounts indicate that artificial mummification, based on the use of spices and aromatic plants, was used in sixth century France to treat the bodies of kings, queens, holymen and holywomen.

The Merovingians embalmed these elite individuals following a procedure they had learned from the Romans, which they, in turn, had adopted from Egypt.

"Clearly the Merovingian mummification was much less sophisticated," Bianucci said,

"It was essentially based on the use of oil and resin-soaked linen strips used with spices and aromatic plants such as thyme, nettles, myrrh and aloe," Bianucci said.

Ancient Egyptian Mummy Wearing Jewels Found

"Queen Arnegunde is a particularly complex case," Bianucci said. "Since she was exhumed in 1959, her remains underwent several displacements, disappearing in the 1960s to finally resurface in 2003."

Investigations on Arnegunde' skeletal remains revealed the queen was 5'1" tall and around 61 years old when she died of unknown causes.

The copper alloy belt worn by Arnegunde helped the lung preservation. (Image credit: Reunion des Muses Nationaux et Musee d'Archeologie Nationale)

Albert Zink, Head of the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, found the research to be similar to the case of a Coptic mummy, dating from about 600-1000 A.D.

"During the study of this mummy we discovered the body did not undergo organ and brain removal. Instead, it appears that an embalming solution was injected through the mouth," Zink told Discovery News.

"Just like in the case of the Merovingian queen, the liquid agglomerated in the lung, which is the only organ that is well preserved," Zink said.

Mummy Identification Still Uncertain Science

Queen Arnegunde represents one of the few specimens from the Early Middle Ages for whom researchers have both an historical account, human remains and artifacts. Moreover, Arnegunde belonged to Merovingian royalty.

Distinctive for their shoulder-length hair, these Frankish kings ruled in parts of France and Germany from the fifth to the eighth centuries, establishing the most successful post-Roman kingdom in western Europe.

More recently, the Merovingians became popular with the publishing of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code," which revived the story that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene had married and their bloodline survived in the Merovingian dynasty.

3,400-Year-Old Necropolis Found in Egypt

In 2006, DNA analysis of a sample from Arnegunde' skeletal remains was arranged and filmed in a documentary.

The aim was to check whether she had a Middle Eastern haplo type. She did not. A princess of Thuringia, daughter to King Baderic, Arnegunde had married into the dynasty and was not a direct descendant of the Merovingian line.

Bianucci and colleagues were not interested in conspiracy theories but rather focused on the mummified lung.

Originally published on Discovery News.
The dinosaurs  the so-called tyrants of the Mesozoic era  weren't exactly thriving during their last few million years on Earth, a new study finds.

The new analysis of the dinosaur family tree reveals that dinosaurs were disappearing even before the asteroid hit about 65.5 million years ago. Roughly 24 million years before that impact, dinosaur extinction rates passed speciation rates, meaning that the animals were losing the ability to replace extinct species with new ones, the researchers said.

The findings suggest that these striking extinction rates made the dinosaurs vulnerable to drastic environmental changes, such as the asteroid collision, the researchers said. [Wipe Out: History's Most Mysterious Extinctions]

"This implies that any group of animals that is under prolonged periods of high extinction rate can undergo mass extinction should there be a catastrophic event," said study lead researcher Manabu Sakamoto, a postdoctoral research assistant of biological sciences at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

The study isn't the first to suggest that dinosaurs were in a major decline before the asteroid event. In previous studies, scientists have recorded the number of species in each geological age and compared those levels to the subsequent ages (each age lasts for millions of years) to get a sense of how diverse the dinosaurs were, Sakamoto said.

But that method focuses on snapshots in time and doesn't take into account the extinction and speciation rate within each branch of the dinosaur family tree. So the researchers of the new study looked at the dinosaur fossil record and the family tree to get a robust picture of when new dinosaur species came onto the scene, Sakamoto said.

"Our study is the first to incorporate such phylogenetic [family tree] information when studying speciation and extinction in dinosaurs," Sakamoto told Live Science. "This is what has allowed us to build a more nuanced and certain picture of dinosaur speciation than has ever before been possible."

Dinosaur detectives

The researchers separately analyzed the three major groups of dinosaurs: the ornithischians (such as Stegosaurus), sauropodomorphs (the long-necked, long-tailed herbivores) and theropods (bipedal, mostly carnivorous dinosaurs, such as T. rex and Albertosaurus).

The sauropodomorphs had the most prominent downturn, the scientists found. The research showed spikes in new species of this type of dinosaur emerging during the Triassic and early Jurassic periods, until about 195 million years ago, when that speciation rate began to slow down. At 114 million years ago, during the early Cretaceous period, species of sauropodomorphs were going extinct faster than new species were emerging, the researchers found.

"The subsequent originations of [the] titanosaurian [group] were not nearly enough to compensate for the continuous loss of sauropods throughout the remainder of the Cretaceous," the scientists wrote in the study.

Duck-billed dinosaurs were one of the few dinosaur groups to thrive during the late Mesozoic period. (Image credit: Catmando Shutterstock.com)

Theropods had an "early burst" of speciation followed by a speciation slowdown from the late Triassic to the early Cretaceous (about 215 million years ago to about 120 million years ago), when extinction rate exceeded speciation rate, the researchers found.

Likewise, ornithischians show an early increase followed by a speciation slowdown at about 114 million years ago, when extinction rate surpassed speciation rate. But there were a few success stories within this group. The hadrosauriforms (duck-billed dinosaurs) and ceratopsids (the horned dinosaurs, such as Triceratops) did well, likely because they had developed jaws that helped them munch on new food, possibly flowering plants, the researchers said. [Dinosaur Detective: Find Out What You Really Know]

When the researchers considered the three dinosaur groups separately, "We found unequivocal evidence that dinosaurs were in decline up to 50 million years prior to the mass extinction event 66 million years ago," Sakamoto said.

Extinction lessons

It's unclear why the dinosaurs started going extinct so early, but there are clues as to why speciation increased during certain periods, the scientists said. One idea is that rising sea levels cut into the land, fragmenting dinosaur habitats and nudging the beasts to evolve separately into new species in different areas, the researchers said.

However, after dinosaur extinction rates began to rise, another group of animals started thriving: mammals.

"The decline of the dinosaurs would have left plenty of room for mammals, the group of species which humans are a member of, to flourish before the impact, priming them to replace dinosaurs as the dominant animals on Earth [after the impact]," study co-author Chris Venditti, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, said in a statement.

The new findings may help scientists understand the possible consequences of today's extinctions, the researchers added.

"We live in a time when species are undergoing unprecedented levels of extinctions," Sakamoto told Live Science. "This means that if some major catastrophe hits, then it is highly possible that whole groups of animals [will] be completely wiped out off the face of the Earth."

The study is an interesting one, said Alan Turner, an associate professor of anatomical sciences at Stony Brook School of Medicine in New York, who was not involved in the research.

"Through modeling of speciation dynamics, it appears that dinosaur diversity was declining well in advance of the end-Cretaceous extinction event that killed off all nonavian dinosaurs, as well as numerous other vertebrate groups," Turner told Live Science in an email.

The study was published online April 18 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.
Scientists have observed a bizarre phenomenon called time reversal in which light waves seem to travel backward in time.

Using a weird phenomenon in which particles of light seem to travel at faster-than-light speeds, scientists have shown that waves of light can seem to travel backward in time.

The new experiment also shows other bizarre effects of light, such as pairs of images forming and annihilating each other.

Taken together, the results finally prove a century-old prediction made by British scientist and polymath Lord Rayleigh. The phenomenon, called time reversal, could allow researchers to develop ultra-high-speed cameras that can peer around corners and see through walls. [In Images: The World's 11 Most Beautiful Equations]

Backtracking sound waves

Lord Rayleigh  the brilliant British physicist who discovered the noble gas argon and explained why the sky is blue  also made a bizarre prediction about sound waves nearly a century ago. Rayleigh reasoned that, because the speed of sound is fixed, an object traveling faster than that while spewing out sound would result in sound waves that would seem to travel in the opposite direction of the object and thus seem to be reversed in time orientation. For instance, a phonograph on a plane traveling at Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, would seem to play the music backward.

No scientists really doubted this notion, but there was no easy way to test it.

"Using sound, it's something that's really hard to verify and actually hear," said study co-author Daniele Faccio, a physicist at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland.

Sound travels at 761.2 mph (1,225 km/h), but that means that, to hear a 3-second clip of music going backward, a supersonic jet traveling at Mach 2 (or twice the speed of sound) would start replaying the music more than a mile from the listener's location. The scattering and absorption of the sound waves in the air would make the music completely inaudible by that time, Faccio said.

Light reversal

But Faccio and his colleagues realized that if Rayleigh's predictions held true, the same effect would occur in other types of waves, such as light waves. Light travels much, much faster than sound, at 670 million mph (1.1 billion km/h). And the wavelengths themselves are tiny, meaning the time reversal can be demonstrated in a normal-size room.

The researchers were also interested in studying this idea because they were developing ultra-high-speed cameras that could peer around corners, and the phenomenon could affect their algorithms.

There was just one problem with testing Rayleigh's prediction with light: Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

To create a faster-than-light source, the team used a strange phenomenon called illumination fronts, which had previously been described in a series of fascinating thought experiments.

The trick behind illumination fronts is that, while an image may be traveling faster than light, the photons themselves never exceed light speed.

Here's how Illumination fronts work. Imagine taking a laser pointer and flicking the point across a vast and distant wall. While the photons traveling from the laser pointer to the wall are moving at their ordinary speed, because the light hits the wall at an angle, the dot on the wall (the illumination front) always moves faster than that. [Science Fiction or Fact? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts]

Freezing photons in midair

Next, however, the team had to find some way to capture the speedy paths of images as they zoomed across a wall.

"The key piece of equipment was the camera that allows us to essentially freeze light in motion," Faccio told Live Science. [Video: How to Freeze Light]

To catch time reversal in the act, the team created an illumination front by projecting a single line of light on a screen and moving that line across the screen faster than the speed of light. At the same time, they captured the reflected light in motion using a super-high-speed camera. The camera snapped photos in a few picoseconds, or trillionths of a second, during which time photons travel just a few feet.

Sure enough, the camera captured the line on the wall moving in the opposite direction from the way they moved the line, as if it had traveled backward in time.

Self-annihilating twins

In a second experiment, the team verified an even more bizarre effect, called pair creation and annihilation. (Robert Nemiroff, a physicist at Michigan Technological University, predicted this effect for astronomical objects in a study posted online in May 2015 in the preprint journal arXiv.)

Faccio and his colleagues had an illumination front travel across a curved screen. As the speed of the projected lines exceeded light speed, a pair of lines was created, and the two lines moved away from each other. Using a different curvature, the pair of lines moved toward each other, merged and then annihilated each other, the researchers reported Friday (April 15) in the journal Science Advances.

The findings may have implications for the researchers' corner-peering cameras. This kind of "supersight" requires scientists to analyze the paths that light particles take as they bounce and scatter off various objects. Normally, light travels so fast that, to the human eye, the light coming from many different locations seems to appear instantaneously, making it impossible for the eye to resolve these different light paths and "see" behind corners.

But because high-speed cameras can capture the light in motion, researchers can reconstruct the shape of objects that might not be in the immediate line of sight. However, the mathematical calculation of these paths would need to account for the possibility that some of the light rays they see are time-reversed, because they are coming from an illumination front, Faccio said.

The new findings apply to any type of wave, Faccio said. For instance, there may be certain instances when a seismic wave bounces off a slanted piece of rock deep below Earth's surface, pointing to earthquake activity in one direction, when, in fact, the temblor occurred in the opposite direction, Faccio said.

The new paper also has some other interesting implications, said Nemiroff, who was not involved in the current study.

"I am not sure that either Lord Rayleigh nor [the paper's authors] were aware that sonic booms are the sound equivalent of illumination-front pair-creation events," Nemiroff told Live Science in an email. "With light, you first see a flash when a pair event is created, but with sound, you hear a boom."

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.
The State Senate passed legislation on Tuesday to combat prescription drug abuse in Tennessee, making the state among the leaders in the country in cracking down on pill mills. Senate Bill 1466, sponsored by Senator Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge), calls for pain management clinics to be licensed and inspected by the Department of Health. Opioid pain relievers such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, fentanyl and hydromorpone are responsible for three-fourths of all prescription drug overdose deaths according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

This legislation will professionalize the industry and allow patients to have more faith in the providers who treat them, said Senator McNally. We continue to rank among the worst in the nation in prescription opiate abuse and deaths despite significant efforts made by the General Assembly over the last several years curb it. This bill provides for the appropriate oversight to ensure that a clinic is operating legitimately and in accordance with Tennessee law to turn back this tide.



Under the bill, pain management clinics must obtain a license to operate by July 1, 2017 or face a class A misdemeanor offense for each day of operation. Currently, pain clinics only required to register with the Health Department which doesnt allow adequate oversight. The legislation prescribes that pain management clinics must be inspected prior to being licensed and at least once every two years thereafter. A key provision of the bill authorizes the Department of Health to conduct unannounced inspections that may include a review of business and medical records when there is reasonable suspicion a clinic is operating as an unlicensed pain management clinic. It also requires as part of the inspection process, the pain management clinic to produce evidence that the majority of its patient population is not receiving chronic non-malignant pain treatment.



If the Commissioner of Health believes that the clinic is detrimental to the health, safety or welfare of patients, the commissioner can suspend treatment of any new or existing patient to the clinic pending a prompt hearing. If the deficiency causing the revocation or suspension threatens serious harm to patients of the clinic, the commissioner may appoint a sufficient number of special monitors to observe the operation for a minimum of 20 hours per week.

The department will be responsible for promulgating rules to set fees for licensure and renewal associated with the legislation. Those rules will be reviewed by the legislature before implementation.

In 2015, the Tennessee Department of Health released some very sobering statistics on the impact of substance use in Tennessee, including the number of Tennesseans who die each year due to drug overdoses increased again in 2014. The total number of overdose deaths rose by nearly 100, from 1,166 in 2013 to a record-setting 1,263 in 2014, meaning more people died from drug overdoses in Tennessee last year than were killed in motor vehicle accidents.


Senator Bob Corker released the following statement Tuesday on passage of the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act of 2016, bipartisan legislation that supporters say will provide stable funding for aviation transportation and improve airport security.



I am pleased the Senate passed this bipartisan legislation to both strengthen airport security and put in place more passenger-friendly protections for the millions of Americans who use airlines to travel every day, said Senator Corker. By improving employee vetting and enhancing security measures at airports across the country and those with direct flights to the United States, this bill is an important step forward to ensure safe domestic and international travel.

Senator Lamar Alexander voted for the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act, and released the following statement:



I voted for this bipartisan bill because it makes it easier and safer for Americans to travel and provides the appropriate tools and additional resources to protect Americans against terrorism.



Senator Alexander continued, The aviation industry supports more than 172,000 Tennessee jobs. This legislation will require the FAA to recognize graduates of Middle Tennessee State Universitys Air Collegiate Training Initiative when these graduates apply for FAA air traffic controller jobs and preserves air traffic control services at Millington, Jackson and Smyrna airports.



On March 16, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee unanimously passed the bipartisan bill. Tuesday, the Senate passed the legislation by a vote of 95 to 3.


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Three people who appeared at last weeks sitting of Longford District Court charged under the Public Order Act were ordered to pay 1,000 to the Garda Social Fund by the end of May, following a hearing into the matter.

Eileen Keenan (50), Martin Keenan (28) and Thomas Keenan (25) all of 10 Barry Drive, Finglas West, Dublin 11 appeared before Judge Seamus Hughes charged with being intoxicated in a public place and committing violent disorder at Palace Crescent, Longford on August 27, 2015.

The court heard that the incident occurred after an engagement party took place in Strokestown earlier that day.

Basically a row broke out at the engagement party and it eventually made its way to Longford, Inspector Padraig Jones told the court.

In outlining the evidence in the case, Inspector Jones said that gardai were called to Palace Crescent on the date in question at approximately 2:30am.

He said that up to 20 people had gathered in the area and were acting in a disorderly manner.

They were aggressive and goading each other when the Gardai arrived; a risk was posed to the Gardai at that stage so they called for backup from Ballymahon, Granard and Castlerea, added the Inspector.

All this was in an effort to try and defuse the situation at Palace Crescent.

The court went on to hear that the two male defendants in the case then began to walk around the estate bare chested and that while they didnt actually physically attack anyone they were goading other people in the group.

Mrs Keenan - on the other hand - was regarded as an instigator in the situation, said Inspector Jones who then pointed out that she was extremely drunk at the time.

She was goading people and raising her fists to others and at one stage she approached a man and struck him across the head with a bottle.

The court was told that after backup arrived in the estate, there was close to 14 or 15 gardai endeavouring to deal with matters.

The barrister representing the Keenan family said in mitigation that his clients had attended the engagement party earlier that day in Strokestown and a lot of drink had been taken.

They drank a good few drinks at the party, he added.

And in fairness to them, they were never arrested - they voluntarily gave interviews to the Gardai.

Meanwhile, Judge Hughes asked about previous convictions and he was told that Martin Keenan had four previous convictions while the other two defendants had none.

During his deliberations on the matter, Judge Hughes said that the three defendants before him would go to prison if they didnt come up with 1,000.

The judge said the money should go to the  Garda Social Fund here in Longford.

These baloobas fuelled by drink moved from one county to another and because of their behaviour put pressure on garda resources - resources that are already under pressure.

I will not put up with this type of carry-on in my district, the Judge continued.

If you do not come up with 1,000 I am sending you all to prison.

The defendants then indicated they would furnish the court with the money, but would need time to gather it.

Judge Hughes subsequently adjourned proceedings to allow the defendants gather the 1,000. They will appear back before Longford District Court on May 24 next.
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Press Releases

By Allison Gayne Published: April 19 2016

Students with autism at Gersh Academy marked Autism Awareness Month by walking to raise money for orphaned children in Africa.

West Hempstead, NY- April 15, 2016 - Students with autism in elementary through high school at Gersh Academy in West Hempstead recently marched in solidarity in observance of Aprils National Autism Awareness Month while making a difference in the lives of orphaned children in Africa. Gersh Academys annual Walk featured over 125 students on the autism spectrum proudly walking laps inside the school with close to 70 teachers and staff members along with an approximate dozen parents. The Walk was held inside the school due to inclement weather.

While joining forces to observe Autism Awareness Month, the students worked to raise money during their walk with a bake sale and a jewelry sale to help orphaned children in Africa. The approximately $1,000 in funds raised will be given to the Caroline W. M. Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to rescue orphans and vulnerable children from poverty. Many of the students wore royal blue clothing in recognition of National Autism Awareness Month to heighten autism awareness while celebrating the uniqueness of individuals with autism.

Autism Awareness Month is a time to draw attention to autism, which is on the rise; it is also a time to showcase our students tremendous strength and potential in leading productive, meaningful lives. Events like this are important because the students learn about being empathetic and caring about others. Our Gersh Academy programs are specially designed to integrate social and learning activities into our students curriculums for this very purpose, said Gersh Academy Principal Celeste Gagliardi.

Gagliardi added, Our students amazing strength, empathy and compassion were transparent during our walk as they marched together to not only mark Autism Awareness Month but also accentuate their ability to make a difference in the lives of other children in need.

Gersh Academy offers educational programs for K-12 students with autism from across the New York Metropolitan area. There three Gersh Academy locations, on Long Island. Gersh Academys goal is to offer students with autism exceptional services and programs and, whenever possible, the opportunity to return to their home and school districts with the tools and skills they need for becoming successful and achieving their full potential.

In 1991 Kevin Gersh was inspired by a very unique autistic child who was enrolled in one of his educational programs. Mr. Gersh recognized that this one child and all children, with the right educational environment, appropriate instruction and highly trained dedicated staff, can learn and thrive despite their challenges. Mr. Gersh founded Gersh Academy based on this belief and philosophy. Today Gersh Academys successful and much needed programs for children K-12 focus their educational efforts on students on the autism spectrum. Currently, Gersh Academy has five locations, with three on Long Island and two in Puerto Rico. Gersh Academy in West Hempstead, Long Island, New York is led by veteran Principal Celeste Gagliardi and a team of dedicated professionals. The school provides K-12 educational services for students from across the New York Metropolitan area. It is the goal of Mr. Gersh as well as the schools teachers and staff to offer exceptional services and programs and, whenever possible, provide students the opportunity to return to their home and school districts with all of the tools, knowledge and skills needed for being successful and achieving their full potential.
Nature & Weather, Local News, Press Releases, Seasonal & Current Events

By Long Island News & PR Published: April 19 2016

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced that as part of Earth Week 2016, which takes place this week, numerous family-friendly events are being held to encourage New Yorkers to experience the great outdoors and learn ...

Volunteers at Connetquot River State Park Preserve from I Love My Park Day 2014. Earth Week events are being held statewide for families to enjoy nature and learn about environmental sustainability.

Albany, NY - April 18, 2016 - Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced that as part of Earth Week 2016, which takes place this week, numerous family-friendly events are being held to encourage New Yorkers to experience the great outdoors and learn more about environmental sustainability. In addition to outlining these events, the Governor is also highlighting the administrations ongoing commitment to protect and restore New Yorks water quality and natural resources, grow our clean energy economy, and aggressively combat climate change.



Our environment and its natural beauty are among New York's greatest assets  and we all share a collective responsibility to protect them for future generations, said Governor Cuomo. Our administration has taken bold steps over the past six years to build a cleaner and greener state, and I am proud to be continuing that legacy this year. As we observe Earth Week and continue to stand up for the environment, I encourage all New Yorkers to help us ensure cleaner and healthier communities for all.



The Governors administration is commemorating Earth Week in part by hosting dozens of events across the state. The public can connect to nature by partaking in hikes, observing natural wildlife, tree plantings and a variety of exhibits aimed at educating New Yorkers on the importance of sustaining the environment. Lists of family events can be found here from the Department of Environmental Conservation and here from the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.



Im proud to celebrate Earth Week by hosting these important events for all families and residents to learn about DECs comprehensive efforts to protect and restore our vital natural resources, said DEC Acting Commissioner Basil Seggos. Everyone can be a good environmental steward, and there are many simple choices we can make every day to live more sustainably. I encourage all New Yorkers to take part in our activities and help ensure our environment is clean and healthy for future generations to enjoy.



New York State Parks works to continue its mission of being responsible stewards of our valuable natural, historic and cultural resources, said State Parks Commissioner Rose Harvey. I invite New Yorkers of all ages to celebrate Earth Day by taking part in the volunteer opportunities and celebrations being offered by our state parks and historic sites, this week and throughout the year.



"Under Governor Cuomo's comprehensive clean energy plan, Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) and other major actions to combat climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, New York State is the model for other states and countries to follow," said Richard Kauffman, Chairman of Energy and Finance, New York State. "With nation-leading initiatives such as mandating 50 percent of electricity coming from renewable energy by 2030 and the $5 billion clean energy fund, New York has already created new clean energy jobs and seen nearly 600 percent growth in solar under the Governor. "



Key Energy and Environmental Accomplishments and New Initiatives

New York State is committed to protecting our environment, conserving open space, increasing access to the states vast and magnificent natural resources, launching numerous groundbreaking clean energy initiatives and preparing for the effects of climate change. Governor Cuomos key energy and environmental accomplishments include:
As established in prior filings, court proceedings, and sentencing memoranda, Mejia and two other MS-13 members, Adalberto Ariel Guzman and Juan Garcia, shot and killed 19-year-old Vanessa Argueta and her two-year-old son, Diego Torres, in Central Islip, New York, on February 5, 2010, after luring them to a secluded wooded area. Mejia and Garcia shot Argueta in the head and chest, respectively, and Guzman shot Torres twice in the head. Mejia and other MS-13 members, including MS-13 leader, Heriberto Martinez, Guzman, and Garcia had plotted to kill Argueta because they believed she had disrespected the MS-13 by sending rival gang members to attack Garcia.

After committing the murders, Mejia and his co-conspirators fled to El Salvador. Guzman and Mejia were arrested in May 2010 when they returned to the United States, but Garcia remained a fugitive for four years until March 2014, when, after being placed on the FBIs Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List, he surrendered to law enforcement authorities in Nicaragua, waived extradition, and was returned to the United States for prosecution. Mejia pled guilty on June 15, 2011.

The sentencing was announced by Robert L. Capers, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Diego Rodriguez, Assistant Director-in-Charge, FBI, New York Field Office, and Timothy Sini, Commissioner, Suffolk County Police Department.

Mejia and his fellow MS-13 members brutally and senselessly executed a young woman and her two-year-old child. While nothing can reverse this tragedy, we hope that todays sentence and the convictions and sentencings of Mejias co-conspirators have brought the victims families some measure of justice and comfort, stated United States Attorney. My Office and our law enforcement partners will continue to be vigilant and aggressively prosecute the MS-13 and other criminal organizations who unleash violence on our communities.



United States Attorney Capers expressed his sincere gratitude to the members of the FBIs Long Island Gang Task Force for their tenacious investigation and unwavering commitment to bring Mejia and his co-conspirators to justice for the Argueta and Torres murders.

As the last defendant is sentenced for the brutal murders of a young woman and her toddler son by MS-13 gang members, we hope the victims family can finally feel justice has been served. The FBI is committed to working with our partners to not only root-out gangs in our communities but also bring their crimes to justice no matter how long it takes, said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Rodriguez.

This prosecution exemplifies the ruthless and senseless violence committed at the hands of MS-13 gang members, which threatens the very fabric of our communities. The Suffolk County Police Department will continue to aggressively work with our law enforcement partners to bring these violent criminals to justice, stated Commissioner Sini.

Mejias three co-conspirators, Martinez, Guzman, and Garcia were also arrested and indicted in connection with the Argueta and Torres murders. Martinez was convicted in March 2013, following a six-week trial, in connection with the Argueta murder, as well as the March 6, 2010, murder of Nestor Moreno in Hempstead, New York, and the March 17, 2010 murder of Mario Alberto Canton Quijada in Far Rockaway, New York, and later sentenced to life in prison, plus 60 years. Guzman was convicted on charges relating to the Argueta and Torres murders in September 2013, following a three-week trial, and later sentenced to life in prison, plus 35 years. Garcia pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the Argueta and Torres murders.

The convictions of Mejia and his co-defendants are the latest in a series of federal prosecutions by the United States Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of New York targeting members of the MS-13, a violent international criminal organization. The MS-13s leadership is based in El Salvador and Honduras, but the gang has thousands of members across the United States, comprised primarily of immigrants from Central America.

With numerous branches, or cliques, the MS-13 is the largest and most violent street gang on Long Island. Since 2003, hundreds of MS-13 members, including dozens of clique leaders, have been convicted on federal felony charges in this district.

A majority of those MS-13 members have been convicted on federal racketeering charges for participating in murders, attempted murders, and assaults. Since 2010 alone, this Office has obtained indictments charging MS-13 members with carrying out more than 30 murders, and has convicted dozens of MS-13 leaders and members in connection with those murders.

These prosecutions are the product of investigations led by the FBIs Long Island Gang Task Force, comprising agents and officers of the FBI, Nassau County Police Department, Nassau County Sheriffs Department, Suffolk County Probation, Suffolk County Sheriffs Department, Rockville Centre Police Department, and Suffolk County Police Department.

The governments case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys John J. Durham and Raymond A. Tierney from the Offices Long Island Criminal Division.
Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: April 28 2016

The Missing Persons Squad is investigating a missing juvenile that occurred on Thursday, April 14, 2016 at 10:00am in Hempstead.

Kina Stanton, 15, of Hempsteadhas been missing since April 14, 2016. Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to call 516-573-7347 or call 911.

Update - April 28, 2016 - Missing Persons Squad reports taht the below Missing Juvenile has been located and is in good condition.

The original Missing Child Alert is below.

Hempstead, NY - April 19, 2016 - The Missing Persons Squad is investigating a missing juvenile that occurred on Thursday, April 14, 2016 at 10:00am in Hempstead.

According to Detectives, Kina Stanton, 15, was last seen leaving her residence in Hempstead at 10:00am on Thursday, April 14, 2016. Kina Stanton is described as a black Hispanic female, 54, 100 lbs., with black colored hair and eyes; she was last seen wearing a red Mickey Mouse hooded sweatshirt with black colored jeans and white colored Jordan sneakers. Her possible destination may be Roosevelt, NY.

Detectives request anyone with information regarding the above missing juvenile to contact the Nassau County Police Department  Missing Persons Squad at 516-573-7347 or call 911. All callers will remain anonymous.
American director and actress Natalie Portman said her new film "A Tale of Love and Darkness" is universal and will appeal to everyone, including Chinese audiences.

American director and actress Natalie Portman attends a forum in Beijing on April 17 as part of the 6th Beijing International Film Festival, which runs from April 16 to April 23, 2016. [Photo / China.org.cn]

Portman was in Beijing to attend the 6th Beijing International Film Festival, which runs from April 16 to April 23. "A Tale of Love and Darkness" had its Asian premiere at the China Film Archive's theater; all 600 tickets for the film were sold out in 10 seconds online.

The film is based on the memoir of Amos Oz, an Israeli writer and journalist. The plot is set during the British Mandate and the first days of the state of Israel, focusing on the relationship between young Oz and his mother and on his first steps as a writer.

The Academy Award winner said the story is about human nature and can be appreciated and enjoyed by everyone.

The project spent eight years in preparation and then went into actual filming and production for another two years. Throughout that time, the project was in constant flux and Portman repeatedly crafted the film script until it was ready. An Israeli immigrant to America, she felt a strong connection to the story, which made her remember her childhood and family, and thought the theme of the story, the issue of immigration, was universal.

Natalie Portman also revealed that she was learning Hebrew again for her role in the film.

The actress said the actress-to-director process was not easy for her, but she still found it interesting and enjoyed the learning process.

Portman added that she prefers to push herself rather than staying in the safe zone; she has decided to participate in "Jackie," a biopic of Jacqueline Kennedy, and turned down an offer from the makers of "Thor 3."
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Chinese teenage violinist He Ziyu has won the prestigious Menuhin prize in London.

The file photo shows He Ziyu in a contest. [Photo: chinanews.com]

As the only male finalist, the 16-year-old received the first prize of 10,000 pounds and a one-year loan of the Stradivarius Schneiderhan violin, which dates from 1715.

The prize for the junior group went to 12-year-old Yesong Sophie Lee from the US.

Both winners will perform with the Philharmonia Orchestra at a concert on Sunday.

He Ziyu began studying the violin in China when he was just five.

He then entered the University Mozarteum and Leopord Mozart Institute in Austria and won the Eurovision Young Musician contest.

The young player will now embark on a hectic round of appearances at major music festivals over the coming year, such as the Menuhin Homage in Berlin.

The biennial Menuhin Competition is an international contest for young players under 22. It was founded by virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin in 1983. This year marked the 100th anniversary of Menuhin's birth.
Silicon Valley-based online education provider Udacity announced its entry into China on Monday, hoping to tap into the rising demands for talent among the country's tech companies.

Udacity, which features training courses designed by tech giants like Google and Facebook, launched its Chinese-language website to make all of its 132 courses available to Chinese learners. It has also teamed up with Chinese tech firms, including video streaming provider Youku Tudou, ride-hailing app Didi, e-commerce giant JD.com and Sina Corp, which owns Chinese microblog Sina Weibo, to roll out localized vocational projects.

Udacity CEO Sabestian Thrun said the company built its initial success by catering to the "huge thirst for talent in Silicon Valley." Its platform features courses and projects designed by tech firms to teach skills much-needed in the tech circle, from building artificial intelligence to designing Android apps.

The company is eyeing the expanding market for tech startups in China. Despite millions of new college graduates every year in China, putting much pressures on the employment, Thrun said Chinese tech firms are still desperate to find employees that have mastered the latest technologies.

"There are many great universities teaching great things, but there are still huge needs that are unmet today," Thrun said, adding that traditional college education has limited capacity to accept more students and teach the latest technologies.

China's promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship has brought a startup boom, with the number of the country's new enterprises jumping 21.6 percent year on year to 4.4 million in 2015, or about 12,000 new companies opened every day.

"China has a much bigger market and a rapidly growing economy with enormous talents we'd like to reach and educate," Thrun said.

Udacity is the latest U.S. online education provider to enter into China's job training market, following a similar move by Coursera, a leading provider of massive open online courses (MOOC).

Last year, Coursera launched a project to invite Chinese companies to design projects for its students in a bid to develop MOOCs into a job recruitment channel. Coursera CEO Rick Levin said there had been an increasing demand for career-related online courses globally.

Udacity started in 2012 as a MOOC provider, but Thrun said the low completion rate of such courses had prompted them to swift to a more career-based education. He said many companies, eager to recruit tech talent, have happily endorsed their cause by joining in the design of courses and offering internships and positions to top performers.

"Udacity is giving the companies a chance to be in the driver seat of the education to shape education first-hand," Thrun said.
A jihadist media outfit has released a video and a statement allegedly documenting al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsulas (AQAP) attempts to debate Abu Bakr al Baghdadis men in Yemen.

The video, which is nearly 13 minutes long, was released via social media by the Hidayah Establishment for Media Production on Apr. 8. Hidayah is an al Qaeda and AQAP group that regularly releases anti-Islamic State productions and statements.

A man known as Abu al Abbas al Hadrami (seen above) discusses at length AQAPs attempts to engage the Islamic State. Hadrami, whose face is obscured as he talks, says that jihadist ideologues wanted to clarify matters for the youth after the dispute with the Islamic State began.

According to Hadrami, AQAPs Harith bin Ghazi al Nadhari and Ibrahim al Rubaish (an ex-Guantanamo detainee) were among the sheikhs who wanted to resolve the disagreements via a public debate. This exposed Nadhari and Rubaish to danger, but they supposedly pressed forward anyway, so that the people could distinguish truth from falsehood. Both Nadhari and Rubaish were killed in US drone strikes in 2015.

AQAP sent representatives to meet with the Islamic States arm in the Shabwah Province. The video includes footage of the two sides sitting together in a mosque and agreeing to a public debate. But the Islamic State was allegedly evasive, making excuses for delaying the verbal confrontation. Baghdadis followers eventually demanded a message from Nasir al Wuhayshi, an al Qaeda veteran who led AQAP until his demise in June 2015.

A document written by Wuhayshi is then displayed. A screen shot of the one-page missive can be seen on the right. Wuhayshi addressed our brothers in the Islamic State, saying the letter was his response to their request for a message concerning a debate over the disputed points. According to a translation obtained by The Long War Journal, Wuhayshi identified AQAPs delegate as Abu Abas al Muhajir and the mediator as Abu Ali al Awlaqi, who would arrange for the debate to take place.

The debate never took place. Hadrami says one reason is that, unlike AQAP, the Islamic State doesnt have recognizable sharia (Islamic law) scholars capable of engaging in the discourse. Hadrami claims the only officials who are known to speak for the group on such matters are Baghdadi and Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al Adnani. (The Islamic State does have other sharia officials, but most of them are not as widely known within jihadist circles as al Qaedas.)

Hadrami decries the division in the jihadists ranks, saying it is a gift to the Shiites and the Crusaders. He adds that a public debate is needed not only in Yemen, but also in Iraq and the Levant. Still, the Islamic State wont show up because its leaders supposedly fear embarrassment.

On Apr. 10, two days after Hadramis video was released, Hidayah posted a statement by another jihadist identified as Yaqub al Somali. His nom de guerre implies that he is from Somalia, but sometimes jihadists choose aliases for other reasons.

Somali elaborated on Hadramis claims, saying that the Islamic State does not dare expose the deficiency of its sharia officials. Baghdadis men have not responded to the books and other publications from al Qaedas branches that invalidate their caliphate.

According to a translation obtained by The Long War Journal, Somali claims that the Islamic State has failed to officially respond to Ayman al Zawahiris Islamic Spring video series, Harith al Nadharis work, the joint statement issued Ansar al Sharia (a front for AQAP) and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the books published by al Qaedas sharia officials in Syria, and other publications sanctioned by al Qaeda from around the world.

Baghdadis state has not provided a valid answer to Zawahiris invalidation of their caliphate, Somali says. Instead, the caliphate has resorted to disparaging al Qaedas emir Somali refers to Zawahiri as the wise man of the ummah, a common nickname used by al Qaeda operatives for their emir.

Somali says that the Islamic States global expansion has led to disastrous infighting everywhere from Libya to South Asia. The only exception, according to Somali, is in the Sinai.

The video starring Hadrami and the statement by Somali are propaganda, but they are an additional examples of al Qaedas ongoing campaign against the Islamic State. Since 2014, al Qaeda and allied groups have released anti-Islamic State messages targeting jihadists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, across Africa, as well as elsewhere. Baghdadis organization similarly produces anti-al Qaeda messages on a regular basis, including even in its English-language magazine Dabiq.

Hadramis testimony is similar to the videos released by Al Nusrah Front, al Qaedas official branch in Syria, shortly after al Qaedas senior leadership disowned the Islamic State in early 2014. Al Nusrah introduced veterans such as Abu Firas al Suri, Abu Hammam al Suri and Abu Sulayman al Muhajir, none of whom were known to be al Qaeda leaders until they were introduced as anti-Islamic State witnesses. (Abu Firas was killed in an airstrike earlier this month. Abu Hammam may have been as well, but his death hasnt been confirmed yet.)

Unlike the al Qaeda veterans promoted by Al Nusrah, neither Hadrami nor Somali is identified as a senior figure in the group. However, a number of signatures are included at the bottom of Wuhayshis letter, and some of these men are likely influential jihadists. AQAP has a deep bench of leaders from which it can draw. After losing several top officials last year, AQAP quickly introduced new public spokesmen.

According to several officials contacted by The Long War Journal, some in the US intelligence community argued in 2014 and 2015 that AQAP would defect to Baghdadis ranks if Wuhayshi was killed. The theory was not based on any actual evidence and was quickly disproved after Wuhayshi was killed in a US drone strike. Qasim al Raymi, Wuhayshis successor, reaffirmed his loyalty to Ayman al Zawahiri in short order. And Hidayahs latest video demonstrates that AQAP continues to resist the Islamic States expansion in Yemen.

Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.

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The Communist Party of China (CPC) has vowed to spot and punish malpractice in the current round of local elections.

More than 900 million Chinese will elect over 2.5 million lawmakers at county and township levels in the elections running into next year.

In a Monday statement, the CPC stressed a ban on forming factions, bribery, fraud and leaking confidential information, among other types of malpractice. It urged local Party committees, disciplinary organs and organizational departments to carefully oversee the elections.

"Disciplinary violations... must be punished on a case by case basis and publicized in a timely manner," the statement said.

In a massive electoral fraud case in Hengyang City of Hunan Province in 2013, 56 provincial legislators offered 110 million yuan (18 million U.S. dollars) in bribes to nearly 600 municipal lawmakers and members of staff.

A total of 467 people have been given Party or administrative punishment for their roles in the case, and 69 were transferred to judicial organs.

The CPC called for the establishment of specialist groups to investigate violations and supervise punishment.

"Supervisory officials will be pursued and punished for nonfeasance and jobbery," the statement added.

The public can report electoral malpractice to organizational departments at or above county level via the Internet, SMS, hotlines or personal visits.
The Taliban targeted a unit responsible for providing security for Afghan officials in a coordinated suicide assault in the Afghan capital today. The Taliban claimed credit for the deadly attack, which killed 64 people and wounded 347 more, according to reports on the ground.

The Taliban took responsibility for the attack on its official propaganda outlet, Voice of Jihad, and said it was part of Operation Omari, the 2016 spring offensive named after Mullah Omar, its founder and first emir. The Taliban reported a suicide bomber detonated a vehicle at the gate, which allowed armed fighters to breach the compound. This is a tactic that has been effectively employed by the Taliban and other jihadist groups throughout the world over the past decade.

Amid the ongoing Omari annual campaign at around 09:00 am local time this morning, a martyrdom seeking unit of Islamic Emirate launched a heavy attack on 10th directorate intelligence building located in PD1 of Kabul city, the statement said. The operation began when a martyrdom seeker detonated his explosives laden vehicle at the gate of the building, removing all barriers and killing the guards followed by a number of other martyrdom seekers rushing inside and engaging the remaining enemy targets.

The Talibans account was substantiated by press reporting from Afghanistan. According to TOLONews, the compound that was attacked belonged to a Secret Service Unit tasked with protecting VIPs. Afghan officials said the attack began when a suicide bomber detonated at the gate, and one or more Taliban fighters then penetrated the perimeter and began firing on the survivors inside the compound.

The commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan claimed that the attack was proof that the Taliban were unable to fight Afghan forces face to face on the battlefield.

Todays attack shows the insurgents are unable to meet Afghan forces on the battlefield and must resort to these terrorist attacks, General John Nicholson, the commander of Resolute Support, NATOs mission in Afghanistan, said in an email sent to The Long War Journal. We strongly condemn the actions of Afghanistans enemies and remain firmly committed to supporting our Afghan partners and the National Unity Government.

However, the Taliban are openly engaging Afghan forces on the battlefield on multiple fronts throughout Afghanistan. In the south, the Taliban controls nearly half of Helmand province and has pressured Afghan forces to retreat from key districts there. The provincial capital of Lashkar Gah is under siege. In the north, the Taliban launched a coordinated offensive in all seven districts of Kunduz just after announcing the commencement of Operation Omar last week. The Taliban are also fighting in the open in multiple provinces in the east and west.

The Long War Journal estimates that the Taliban controls or hotly contests more than 80 of Afghanistan 400 plus districts.

Todays attack in Kabul is the largest of its kind since Aug. 7-8, 2015, when the Taliban launched two suicide bombers and a suicide assault over the course of 24 hours. Forty-four people, including 20 Afghan police recruits, 15 Afghan civilians, eight US-contracted Afghan personnel, and a US Army Green Beret were killed when the Taliban targeted a police academy, a US Special Forces base, and a residential district. [See LWJ report, Taliban continues terror attacks in Afghan capital.]

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.

Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.
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A funeral for Liang Sili, one of China's top space scientists, was held at Beijing's Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery on Monday.

Liang Hong (center), daughter of Liang Sili, holds a portrait of her father at his funeral at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, the main resting place for highranking revolutionary heroes and government officials, in Beijing on April 18, 2016. Liang, 91, died on April 14 from an undisclosed illness. [Photo by Wang Zhuangfei/China Daily]

An academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the International Academy of Astronautics, Liang died from an illness on Thursday morning at age 91.

President Xi Jinping has offered condolences to Liang's family, saying that the scientist dedicated his life to China's space program and contributed greatly to making the country a strong space power. The president said Liang was respected for his patriotism, devotion and excellent work style.

With wide-ranging achievements in research on missile and rocket control systems, Liang was considered one of the founders of China's space industry.

Born in Beijing in August 1924, Liang was the youngest son of Liang Qichao, a leading reformist who lived during the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

After graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1949, Liang returned to China and joined the then Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.

He started a career in the space sector in 1956 when he was transferred to the then Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defense, the country's first missile, rocket and spacecraft research body.

Liang helped to develop various types of ballistic missiles and launch rockets and also played an important role in establishing several key space programs.

He was elected as an academic at the International Academy of Astronautics in 1987 and at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1993.
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Police in Shenzhen have cracked a cross-border drug trafficking case, confiscating 400 kilograms of cocaine and detaining seven suspects.

The photo taken on April 18, 2016, shows the cocaine seized by Shenzhen police. Seven suspects have been detained, five are from Hong Kong. [Photo: Chinanews.com]

Police received a tip-off a month ago and then tracked the two suspects down with the help of surveillance video.

They say that information from the two suspects, led them to catch other alleged gang members and the discovery of more cocaine at their residence.

The police say all the suspects including five from Hong Kong in the drug trafficking ring, have been caught and evidence gathering is now underway.

According to the suspects, the cocaine was smuggled from South America by sea and was eventually destined for Hong Kong.

The value of the cocaine seized has been estimated at 350 million yuan.
A top Apple lawyer and the FBIs top tech official agreed Tuesday that cooperation between law enforcement agencies and the tech giant could avoid stand-offs over how to access encrypted data as well as the need for law enforcement to hire its own hackers to decrypt information of criminals and terrorists.

But they disagreed on what the cooperation would look like.

Bruce Sewell, Apples general counsel, told a House commerce oversight subcommittee that the company already works with law enforcement regularly and would help develop the FBIs capability to decrypt technology itself, but wont open back doors to its iPhones due to the security risk that would pose to all users. The FBI had demanded that Apple write a new version of its iOS operating system to give access to the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook.

The FBI eventually paid third-party gray hat hackers in February to decrypt Farooks iPhone. Sewell criticized the move as increasing vulnerabilities of innocent users.

But Amy Hess, the FBIs science and technology chief, said the agency currently does not have the technology capability to access devices on its own, and isnt likely to have it in the future.

Hess said building the capability to crack encryption on its own would take a lot of highly skilled, specialized resources not available to us and that the federal government will need cooperation from the technology industry to develop those resources.

What the FBI wants, Hess said, is that when we present an order, signed by an independent federal judge, that (tech companies) comply with that order and provide us with the information in readable form. How they do that is up to them, she said, saying the FBI has moved away from asking for a government back door based on Apples insistence that it is unworkable. I dont think the FBI, or law enforcement in general, should be in the business of dictating to companies what those solutions should be, Hess told the subcommittee.

Working together

Both Hess and Sewell said the relationship between tech companies and law enforcement is, and should be, less adversarial than it looks like from the outside.

Sewell said the perception is Apple vs. the FBI, but in fact both want to balance protecting privacy while catching criminals who would use encryption to hide.

The difference, he said, is the fundamental disconnect in how they see the growth of technology in society. Law enforcement sees things going dark, or losing information, he said, while technologists see a data-rich world that seems to be full of information. Information that law enforcement can use to solveand preventcrimes.

As an example, he referenced photo DNA, where information embedded in photo files helps track those files across the Internet. Sewell said Apple has used this to help the FBI solve abductions, terrorism, and child pornography distribution, concerns raised by members of the law enforcement panel.

Sewell also addressed a rumor mentioned by another witness, Indiana State Police technology expert Charles Cohen, who noted Chinese news agency reports have suggested that Apple had given source code for the iOS to the Chinese government while refusing to work with the FBI.

We have not provided source code to the Chinese government, Sewell told the committee. When Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., the subcommittee chairman, pressed the issue, Sewell told him, We have been asked by the Chinese government, and we refused.
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A psychiatric evaluation has been ordered for a 20-year-old freshman at Sichuan Normal University who is accused of killing his roommate.

Teng Gang allegedly used a kitchen knife to stab fellow student Lu Haiqing, 20, more than 50 times before decapitating him in a dormitory of the university's Chenglong campus in the Longquanyi district of Chengdu, Sichuan province.

Teng, who is said to have a history of mental illness, was detained at around 11.50 pm on March 27.

According to a report in China Youth Daily, the pair had been arguing the day before Lu's death.

A statement released by Teng's parents said their son was known to self-harm and had recently expressed suicidal thoughts.

The results of the psychiatric evaluation are expected by early next month, according to the father Teng Zongwu, deputy chief of Baiyin Prison's finance section in Gansu.
Dinosaurs were already in a decline tens of millions of years before the asteroid impact that finally caused their extinction, a new research said Monday.

Some scientists have previously thought that dinosaurs were flourishing right up until they were wiped out by a massive asteroid impact 66 million years ago.

In the new study, British researchers found dinosaur species were actually going extinct at a faster pace than new ones were emerging from 50 million years before the asteroid hit what is now the Gulf of Mexico.

The findings, published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were based on a sophisticated statistical analysis and information from the fossil record.

"We were not expecting this result. While the asteroid impact is still the prime candidate for the dinosaurs' final disappearance, it is clear that they were already past their prime in an evolutionary sense," Manabu Sakamoto of the University of Reading, who led the research, said in a statement.

"This suggests that for tens of millions of years before their ultimate demise, dinosaurs were beginning to lose their edge as the dominant species on Earth."

The study also showed that while the long-necked giant sauropod dinosaurs were in the fastest decline, theropods, the group of dinosaurs that include the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex, were in a more gradual decline.

Factors that may possibly have influenced the decline of dinosaurs included the break-up of continental land masses, sustained volcanic activity and other ecological factors.

The researchers said the prolonged demise of dinosaurs likely favored the rise of mammals on Earth.

"The decline of the dinosaurs would have left plenty of room for mammals, the group of species which humans are a member of, to flourish before the impact, priming them to replace dinosaurs as the dominant animals on earth," said co-author Chris Venditti, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Reading.

The results also might provide insight into future biodiversity loss.

"Our study strongly indicates that if a group of animals is experiencing a fast pace of extinction more so than they can replace, then they are prone to annihilation once a major catastrophe occurs," said Sakamoto.

"This has huge implications for our current and future biodiversity, given the unprecedented speed at which species are going extinct owing to the ongoing human-caused climate change."
Bulgaria will develop its port infrastructure in cooperation with Qatar, reports Standartnews.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov held a meeting with Qatars Minister of Transport and Communications Jassim bin Saif Al Sulaiti in this regards.

The major topic of discussion was the Memorandum of Understanding between the Bulgarian Ports Infrastructure Company and the Qatar Ports Management Company.

The official visit of Al-Sulaiti in Bulgaria is at the invitation of the native transport minister Ivaylo Moskovski.

Prime Minister Boyko Borisov commented that the document set a good groundwork for bilateral cooperation in the development of port infrastructure and better cooperation among the port administrations.
The U.S. Coast Guard and Harris County Sheriff Department responders are searching for a missing man after he and four others were sent into the water when their tug flipped over in the San Jacinto river about a half mile south of Interstate 10 in Houston.

The missing man was described as being about 5-foot-10-inches tall, 325 pounds, wearing a red shirt, khaki pants and a buoyant work vest.

Kirby Inland Marine personnel notified the Coast Guard at 8:11 a.m., just after the tug, Ricky J Leboeuf, capsized at 7:44 a.m. Coast Guard Sector Houston-Galveston watchstanders launched an Air Station Houston MH-65 Dolphin helicopter, a Station Houston response boat, coordinated a Harris County Sheriff Department boat and requested a dive team to assist in the search.

The other four individuals were recovered shortly after entering the water.
Telecommunications firm Italtel has been selected to renew the communications network of British/American owned Italian cruise shipping company Costa Cruises. Under the contract, Italtel will implement a updated integrated communication system, based on IP protocol and capable of delivering new services.

Costa Cruises was previously equipped with a voice-based infrastructure on a different set of local exchanges directly connected to the traditional telephone network. Although these guaranteed basic telephone services, they did not allow the various systems used by different locations to be integrated and originated high costs both in terms of telephone company rates and maintenance and management.

In less than six months, Italtel migrated Costa Cruises system from TDM to VoIP, linking the companys headquarters in Genoa to its offices in Paris, Barcelona and Madrid. The new infrastructure allows employees to access additional messaging tools such as video calling, video conferencing, instant messaging and a centralized address book, improving individual productivity and saving time.

The new VoIP platform has been integrated into the existing call center, centralizing management of all telephone routes and allowing common access to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) both for the contact center, which is located in the headquarters, and the European offices. Italtel will now extend this renewed communication service to the remaining offices (Shanghai, Miami, San Paolo, Buenos Aires) and to the Costa fleet of ships.

Throughout the project, Italtel has ensured total continuity of service for all call center activities, including bookings addressed to Costa Cruises customers.

The implemented solution uses Cisco Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) architecture, based on Cisco Unified Communications Manager, which consists of two clusters. The first is devoted to managing phones in Costa Cruises European offices, while the second  with SME function (Session Manager Edition)  centralizes the routing and VoIP connectivity, including for the offices, call center, other group companies and, ultimately, all ships in the fleet.
PDMS Maritime is delighted to announce a significant new contract with the UK's Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) to provide a new integrated system to incorporate seafarer management and approved doctor records, delivering process efficiency improvements and enhanced customer services, in line with the MCA's Digital Strategy.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) is an executive agency of the UK Department for Transport. Its responsibilities include UK ship registration and seafarer certification and it is widely recognised for its operational and technical ability.

This investment in cutting edge digital technology is strategically aligned with the IMO's recent recommendations to reduce registry administrative burden through electronic record keeping.

PDMS Maritime will be delivering a modern platform which will incorporate all the business management processes for a Seafarer Records System (SRS) and Approved Doctors Information System (ADIS), provided as a new single integrated system.

The browser-based system will significantly streamline the MCA's processes to improve efficiency, greatly improve the management of information and business services, and further facilitate the delivery of exemplary levels of customer service.

Bruce McGregor, PDMS Maritime Director who spearheads MARIS, commented: "We are very much looking forward to working closely with such an important maritime organisation as the MCA - applying our technology expertise and partnership approach to help them achieve their strategic business objectives."

Bruce further added, "This is an exciting project for our MARIS team who will also be able to bring real benefits resulting from our existing experiences."

PDMS Maritime's new client, the MCA, marks another success for PDMS team. This is the second new MARIS related contract award this year alone - after PDMS Maritime also recently announced a new contract for MARIS with the Maritime Cook Islands (MCI).
Chinese lawmakers approved the country's economic and social development blueprint for the 2016-20 period at the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC) in March. He Wenping, a senior researcher at the Charhar Institute and senior research fellow of the Institute of West Asian and African Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that China's new five-year plan synergizes with Africa's development strategy.

China will maintain an annual economic growth of above 6.5 percent during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20), realize the goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and double its GDP and per-capita income from what they were in 2010.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said this while delivering the Government Work Report during the opening of the Fourth Session of the 12th National People's Congress in Beijing on March 5.

To ensure a good start to the 13th Five-Year Plan, Li proposed eight major tasks this year.

They include stepping up efforts to implement the Belt and Road Initiative, expanding international industrial cooperation, and supporting the export of Chinese equipment, technology, standards and services.

Opening up, innovation, as well as coordinated, green and shared development are to be highlighted in the new period. Supply-side structural reform and strategies to promote agriculture modernization and the Internet economy will give new vitality and bring new opportunities to China-Africa cooperation.

Allied to African development

China has made the Belt and Road Initiative part of its latest five-year plan to create a new opening-up pattern toward both the East and the West.

As a plan for international economic cooperation and mutual development, the Belt and Road Initiative aims at consolidating economic development in Asia, Europe and Africa.

The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road will connect the three by sea and then integrate with the Silk Road Economic Belt, which is an upgraded version of the ancient overland trade route connecting the three regions.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Tanzania, South Africa and the Republic of the Congo in 2013, several cooperation deals were signed. During his Africa visit in 2014, Li made commitments to help Africa build railway, expressway and airline networks.

Follow China.org.cn on Twitter and Facebook to join the conversation.
Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) Chairman Mario Cordero issued a statement regarding the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) Verified Gross Mass (VGM) amendments implementation, calling for negotiation between shippers and carriers.

"I applaud Chairman Hunter and Ranking Member Garamendi for including SOLAS VGM amendments implementation as a topic of yesterdays hearing held by the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard & Maritime Transportation.

"Although the FMC does not have a role in promulgating and implementing the SOLAS VGM amendment, it has been apparent from the moment this manifested itself as a policy issue that the only path to resolving disagreement between shippers and carriers is for those parties to negotiate an outcome that would be mutually agreeable.

"Accordingly, the FMC provided a forum on February 18 of this year for that process to begin when it hosted a meeting at our headquarters on behalf of the United States Coast Guard. We were pleased to welcome concerned individuals from all sides of this debate and provide them with the opportunity to voice their concerns and resolve differences in a neutral setting.

"Though the July 1 deadline is fast approaching, I remain optimistic that the Coast Guard, cargo owners and transportation providers can find a solution that addresses the concerns of all parties. I encourage people to redouble their efforts toward achieving an outcome that does not lead to export shipments becoming distressed.

"The Coast Guard is the lead and competent authority in the matter of VGM implementation and enforcement; as such, we properly defer to them on this issue. However, as the Chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission, I want to see if there is a way to enable discussions between some of the key parties with opposing views regarding what will happen on July 1 with an eye toward achieving a consensus.

"In the coming days and weeks, I will reach out to individuals with the authority to make decisions to determine if we can bridge differences on SOLAS VGM amendment implementation."
An explosion aboard a Korean-registered vessel Heung-A Pioneer killed one person and injured five others during its voyage down the the Tanjung Dawai coast, Malacca Strait, Malaysia near Kedah waters last night.

The explosion was preceded by a fire, which broke out in the middle of the ships deck.

The deceased has been identified as Myanmar national Tha Tun while the victims are aged between 28 and 58.

Penang Port received the ships mayday call and informed the relevant authorities, including the fire and rescue department and the police station, of the incident. Paramedics were deployed to the scene, but one seafarer died straight away after the explosion.

Once the vessel arrived at the port, the injured personnel were hospitalized for treatment.

The captain of the ship revealed that the fire started from the middle of the ships deck which in turn caused the explosion, a local official from Penang port said.

Acting chief executive officer of Penang Port Sdn Bhd (PPSB) Rosihan Adi Baharuddin said: As soon as we received the call, we alerted the relevant authorities, namely the Fire and Rescue Department, the Seberang Jaya Hospital, the Butterworth Police Station and the Civil Defence Department (JPAM) to assemble and be on standby to await the arrival of the ship which was still about 45 minutes away.

Rosihan said the cause of the fire is being investigated by the authorities and there were no disruptions on the ports operations.
1917 - The U.S. Naval Armed Guard crew on board SS Mongolia engages and damages a German U-boat, the first engagement against the enemy after declaration of war on April 6.



1920 - The first German submarine brought to the United States after World War I arrives at New York. During World War I, U 111 sank three Allied merchant vessels that included the British steamer Boscastle on April 7, 1918. The submarine surrendered later that year.



1945 - USS Buckley (DE 51) and USS Reuben James (DE 153) sink the German submarine U-879 southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia.



1955 - USS Albany (CA 123) and USS William Wood (DD 715) begin providing disaster relief to citizens of Volos, Greece, following a catastrophic earthquake.



1960 - The Grumman A2F-1 Intruder makes its first flight. The Intruder receives the designation of A-6A in 1962, and upon entering service in 1963, becomes the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps principle all weather/night attack aircraft.



1997 - USS The Sullivans (DDG 68) is commissioned at Staten Island, N.Y. The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer is the second Navy ship named after the five Sullivan brothers who died when USS Juneau (CL 52) was sunk during the Battle of Guadalcanal Nov. 13, 1942.





(Source: Naval History and Heritage Command, Communication and Outreach Division)
POSCO, a multinational company headquartered in Pohang, South Korea, and the fifth-largest steel producer in the world, has announced plans to build a wire rod processing center at the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville, creating up to 60 high-wage jobs by 2018. POSCO is South Korea's fourth largest company, behind Samsung Electronics, SK Holdings and Hyundai Motors, and is ranked No. 162 in Fortune's Global 500.



"Although we are located on different continents, South Korea and Indiana both share a reputation of excellence when it comes to advanced manufacturing," said Governor Mike Pence. "Having a globally-focused company like POSCO select Indiana to grow its business is a strong endorsement of our state's low-cost, low-tax business climate, robust transportation infrastructure and dynamic port system. This company could have established operations anywhere in the world, but has found exactly what it needed right here in Indiana. POSCO is a major supplier to the automotive industry which already supports more than 100,000 jobs in our state, and we look forward to the new jobs this state-of-the-art facility will create."



The $19 million project includes a 136,000-square-foot facility to be constructed on approximately 10 acres at the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville. POSCO plans to start construction this spring on the facility, which will be the company's second steel processing line and fourth production line in the U.S. POSCO's key drivers for locating at the port were the ability to ship steel into the Midwest by water, the close proximity to numerous steel and automotive-related companies and the attractive business environment in the Jeffersonville area.



"We are very excited about the opportunity to develop our first Midwestern U.S. plant at the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville," said POSCO AAPC Finance Director Kyu Tae Kim. "It is critical for our business to receive cargo by water and to be centrally located in the U.S. market. The Jeffersonville's port location will allow us to connect with global markets and supply our U.S. automotive customers with 'just-in-time' deliveries. We want to thank the State of Indiana, the City of Jeffersonville, the Ports of Indiana and One Southern Indiana for helping us to make this project a reality."



POSCO was established in South Korea in 1968 and was the first Korean firm to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994. It operates 312 facilities in 43 countries around the world. POSCO's Jeffersonville plant will process steel wire for fasteners, nuts and bolts used in the automotive industry and serve as a distribution center for other POSCO products. POSCO America, incorporated in 1984, maintains its U.S. headquarters in Fort Lee, N.J., with additional facilities in Houston, Texas, Troy, Mich., and McCalla, Ala. POSCO operates two integrated steel mills in South Korea and a joint venture facility with U.S. Steel, USS-POSCO Industries, located in California.



"POSCO's planned facility is a good fit for our port and its operations will create new business for other port companies," said Rich Cooper, CEO for the Ports of Indiana. "Steel processors at our port currently supply components for all six of the top U.S. automakers as well as to many Tier 1 suppliers and other participants in the automotive industry's supply chain. The port's multimodal transportation options, including year-round barge access to the Gulf of Mexico, offer significant logistics cost savings for POSCO."



The Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville is home to 28 businesses, including a "steel campus" of 12 metal-processing companies serving the Midwest auto and appliance industries. The port handled over one million tons of steel cargoes in 2015 and 2.8 million in total shipments.



The Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) offered POSCO up to $550,000 in conditional tax credits and up to $50,000 in training grants based on the company's job creation plans. These incentives are performance-based, meaning until Hoosiers are hired, the company is not eligible to claim incentives. Jeffersonville's city council approved additional incentives at the request of the Jeffersonville Redevelopment Commission.



"Having a global company of POSCO's caliber select Southern Indiana and, specifically, the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville, for this advanced manufacturing project, is certainly cause for celebration," said Jeffersonville Mayor Mike Moore. "The opening of two new interstate bridges over the Ohio River and the continued development of our port are key drivers for attracting world-class companies like POSCO and helping them grow in our community. We are grateful to our partners in economic development, One Southern Indiana and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, for their efforts to ensure that investing in Jeffersonville is a seamless process."






Indonesias President Joko Widodo on Tuesday addressed the International Maritime Organizations (IMO) Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) in London at the invitation of IMO Secretary-General Kitack Lim. The visit was part of Lims initiative to raise awareness of the Organization within the broader audience of global leadership.

Delegates from 107 Member States and 53 NGOs heard Widodo outline Indonesias strategy for national maritime development and confirm his support for IMO, the United Nations specialized agency with responsibility for ship safety, maritime security and prevention of pollution from ships, as the appropriate global forum for matters of maritime policy.

President Widodo said, Indonesia believes the future of global prosperity depends on how we manage the sea. And that future can be secured by taking care of the sea as our common heritage. We can do this through international cooperation, including at the IMO.

We realize the sustainable use of maritime resources must be done for the benefit of our people. We are aware it is our responsibility as a member of international society to ensure maritime sustainability. We also realize that as a power between two oceans we must take part in ensuring the safety of international navigation. In this context, Indonesia sees the IMO and our membership in the IMO as important, he said.

Indonesia would continue to play an active role at IMO, President Widodo said, noting the countrys ratification last year of the Ballast Water Management Convention.

Since taking office at the beginning of this year, Lim has stressed his commitment that IMO can, and should, be the catalyst for dialogue and communication across all areas of maritime policy and regulation, breaking down the tendency for governments, industry and other stakeholders to operate in silos.

By so doing, he believes, IMO can simultaneously serve the interests of the environment, of society and of the economy  which have been identified as the three pillars of sustainability. These will become increasingly important for the Organization and its members as we more fully embrace the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Commenting on Widodos visit, Lim said, I am most grateful to the President for taking time from his busy schedule to visit IMO and speak to our delegates. IMO has had clear and demonstrable success over many decades in making shipping safer, cleaner, more efficient and more secure and I hope to find ways to extend IMOs values and achievements more widely throughout the global supply chain.

This is something that can only be done by an active, engaging and outward-looking organization - which is why I am keen to raise IMOs visibility among officials, ministers and decision-makers beyond our regular community.

This year's World Maritime Day theme is Shipping: indispensable to the world. It was chosen to focus on the critical link between shipping and global society and to raise awareness of the relevance of the role of IMO as the global regulatory body for international shipping. The importance of shipping in supporting and sustaining today's global society gives IMO's work a significance that reaches far beyond the industry itself.
The Northwest Seaport Alliance of Seattle and Tacoma reported that auto imports and container volumes posted gains through the first quarter of 2016.

Building off last years record-breaking volumes, March marked the highest volume of auto imports in more than a decade. The 21,085 units beat the previous record from December 2002.

Meanwhile, international containers improved 4 percent through the first three months of the year, largely on the strength of January and February volumes. Full containerized exports were up 18 percent year to date to 233,102 TEUs (20-foot equivalent units), while imports were flat at 311,011 TEUs. Empty container volumes are down 4 percent year to date.

However, when compared to a particularly busy March 2015, March 2016s international container volumes were down nearly 22 percent. March 2015 volumes were particularly robust as the alliances harbors quickly cleared the backlog built up during labor contract negotiations after an agreement was reached in February 2015.

March container volumes were also impacted by Lunar New Year, when factories in Asia close for one to two weeks, the Northwest Seaport Alliance said.
Another Chinese lighthouse has become operational on Zhubi Reef, a reef in the disputed Spratly Islands of the South China Sea.



Chinas Ministry of Transport held ceremony on April 5, 2016 signaling the lighthouses completion and start of operation. Construction of the 55-meter-high lighthouse, which has a lantern of 4.5 meters in diameter on top and rotating lights inside, began in October, 2015.



The lighthouse is monitored via a remote control terminal, emitting white light in the nighttime, with a range of 22 nautical miles and a glow cycle of five seconds.



Zheng Heping, deputy head of the Maritime Safety Administration, said the automatic identification system and other equipment inside the lighthouse can provide efficient navigation services to ships, such as positioning reference, route guidance and navigation safety information.



The Zhubi lighthouse will further enhance the capability to ensure maritime security in the South China Sea, Zheng said.



In addition to the light house on Zhubi Reef, China has also built large, multifunctional lighthouses on Huayang Reef and Chigua Reef, both of which are already in use.



The Transport Ministry said the lighthouses are part of Chinas efforts to perform its responsibilities in maritime search and rescue, response to natural disasters and marine environmental protection.
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The U.S. Department of Transportations Maritime Administration (MARAD) today awarded $4.9 million in grants to support capital improvements at nine small shipyards located throughout the United States. Provided through the Small Shipyard Grant Program, the funding supports industrial modernizations that increase productivity, allowing our Nations small shipyards to compete more effectively in the global marketplace.

Small shipyard grants do more than just improve shipyard infrastructure and equipment or add to the bottom line, said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. They also create jobs and new opportunities, and they strengthen local economies.

Small shipyards play a significant role in the U.S.s shipbuilding and repair activity. The facilities vary in size, from family-owned businesses employing a few dozen workers, to multifaceted establishments with hundreds of employees. The grants, which were primarily available to U.S. shipyards with less than 600 production employees, will fund a variety of projects including infrastructure improvements and equipment upgrades to increase operational competitiveness and quality vessel construction.

U.S. shipyards produce what are unquestionably some of the best-built vessels in the world, said Maritime Administrator Paul Chip Jaenichen. The grants awarded today will help ensure that Built in America remains an international shipbuilding standard.

MARAD received 118 grant applications requesting $80 million in assistance, far exceeding the $4.9 million made available for the grants. Since 2009, the Obama administration has provided more than $167 million to help U.S. shipyards and their workers reap the benefits of increased production capabilities delivered by emerging technologies and highly skilled workers.

A complete list of shipyard grant recipients follows:
Iran faces a struggle to increase oil exports because many of its tankers are tied up storing crude, some are not seaworthy, and foreign shipowners remain reluctant to carry its cargoes.

Tehran is seeking to make up for lost trade to Europe following the lifting of EU sanctions imposed in 2011 and 2012, which deprived it of a market that accounted for over a third of its exports and left it relying completely on Asian buyers.

Iran has 55-60 oil tankers in its fleet, a senior Iranian government official told Reuters. He declined to say how many were being used to store unsold cargoes, but industry sources said 25-27 tankers were parked in sea lanes close to terminals including Assaluyeh and Kharg Island for this purpose.

Asked how many tankers were not seaworthy and needed to go to dry docks for refits to meet international shipping standards, the senior official said: "Around 20 large tankers ... need to be modernized."

A further 11 Iranian tankers from the fleet were carrying oil to Asian buyers on Tuesday, according to Reuters shipping data and a source who tracks tanker movements. That was broadly in line with the number consistently committed to Asian runs since sanctions were lifted in January, putting more strain on the remaining available fleet.

This means foreign ships are needed for a big export push to Europe and elsewhere, said the industry sources, as Iran looks to meet its target of reaching pre-sanctions sales levels this year. But many owners, who are not short of business in a booming tanker market, are unwilling to take Iranian cargoes.

The main reason is that some U.S. restrictions on Tehran remain in place and prohibit any trade in dollars or the involvement of U.S. firms including banks - a major hurdle for the oil and tanker trades, which are priced in dollars.

Eight foreign tankers, carrying a total of around 8 million barrels of oil, have shipped Iranian crude to European destinations since sanctions were lifted in January, according to data from the tanker-tracking source and ship brokers.

That equates to only around 10 days' worth of sales at the levels of pre-2012, when European buyers were purchasing as much as 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) from the OPEC producer.

So far no Iranian tankers have made deliveries to Europe, according to data from the tanker-tracking source.

'Plenty of Other Business'

Paddy Rodgers, chief executive of leading international oil tanker company Euronav (EUAV.BR), said at present there was "no great urgency to do business in Iran".

"There is not a premium to do business in Iran and there is plenty of other business - the markets are busy, rates are good. So there is no stress on wanting to do it," he told Reuters.

"I don't really want to set up a euro bank account in Dubai in order to trade with Iran - that would crazy."

Michele White, general counsel with INTERTANKO, an association which represents the majority of the world's tanker fleet, said: "We have witnessed a reluctance by our members generally to return to Iranian trade given the prohibition on use of the U.S. financial system  essentially no U.S. dollars."

The senior Iranian government official, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, acknowledged his country was finding it difficult to hire foreign tankers.

"We are working on the problems. There are various issues involved, financial, banking and even insurance. It has improved a little bit since the lifting of sanctions but we still face serious problems."

Asked if this and the need to modernize some of the domestic fleet was holding back exports, he said: "Of course it does."

The strain on Iran's fleet is partly because it has struggled to gain access to land storage sites around the world, as sanctions shut it out of the international financial network, making it more reliant on floating storage than many oil-producing rivals including Saudi Arabia.

The problem has been compounded by a global oversupply of oil, and the industry sources estimated Iranian tankers were storing 45-50 million barrels of unsold crude.





Political Risk

Two other sources with other leading oil tanker operators echoed the concerns of Rodgers and White, and said they were not doing Iran deals at the moment.

One of the two sources said with a new U.S. president to take office in January, tanker owners were unsure whether there could be any change to the nuclear deal Washington and other world powers agreed with Iran which led to the end of sanctions.

"It does not appeal to them to take on the risk and the uncertainty of the U.S. connection and future U.S. political policy that would come into play," said the source, who declined to be named, citing sensitivity over potential Iranian trade.

Gavin Simmonds, of the UK Chamber of Shipping trade association, said of the U.S. presidential timing and the global oil oversupply: "Iran is rejoining the market at the worst possible time."

Before 2012 Iran exported around 2 million bpd, with more than half going to Asia, mainly China, South Korea, India and Japan. Tehran has been banned from selling oil to the United States for decades.

The tanker industry has cited other problems posed by Iranian business. Ship insurers have plugged a shortfall in cover that had been caused by U.S. reinsurers being restrained by Washington's sanctions, although tanker owners say it comes with risks and it could also be withdrawn if, for instance, wider sanctions are reimposed.

"Shipping insurance is still a problem. We see many buyers in the market still avoid buying from Iran," Fereidun Fesharaki, founder of energy consultancy FGE, wrote in a note.

Tanker industry sources also pointed to reports that Iran's arch rival Saudi Arabia had banned Iranian-flagged ships from entering its waters with. Separate reports indicated Saudi ally Bahrain had imposed a ban on any vessels that visited Iran as one of its last three port calls.

"Any spread of the Bahrain-style ban on foreign ships that have recently called Iran can only fuel this hesitancy for owners who trade in the Middle East region," said INTERTANKO's White.





(By Jonathan Saul AND Parisa Hafezi; Additional reporting by Libby George; Editing by Pravin Char)
Taliban Fighters [Photo: outlookafghanistan.net]

The launch of "Operation Omari" by the Afghan Taliban was not out of the blue. Once they refused to become part of the talks proposed by the four-way Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG), comprising Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and the United States, it was evident that the militants would use violence to increase pressure on the Afghan government.

Efforts of the QCG received a massive shock when, despite its announcement in February to start talks, the group failed to bring the Taliban to the table. It was also an embarrassment for Pakistan, as the failure of talks left some members of the groups considering the amount of influence Pakistan was having over the insurgents.

The timing of the talks coincided with the start of the annual fighting season, also called the spring offensive. Better timing would have been at the start of winter when both sides, after exhaustion from fighting, could reflect on their weaknesses and show an eagerness for peace. But for whatever reason, the QCG was confident enough to time it when winter had ended and spring began. In the end, for the Taliban, the lure and legend of the spring offensive proved too strong to resist.

The offensive has been code-named "Omari" in "respect" of their founding chief Mullah Omar who died in 2013 but the death was not revealed until last year when a second round of peace talks between the rebels and Afghan officials was about to take place at the end of July in Pakistan.

The Omari operation is quite symbolic and shows the confidence of the new Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, who has slowly strengthened his hold on power by defeating dissidents and wining over the family of the late Mullah Omar.

As the Taliban is showing signs of unity and more aggression, the Afghan government has been marred by allegations of corruption and sharp differences between the groups led by President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah. The U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, recently landed in Kabul to persuade the two sides not to let their political differences weaken the government.

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Japan's advanced attack Soryu submarine carried out drills with Australia's navy on Tuesday as a German company launched a campaign to advertise its expertise - as a race for a A$50 billion contract to build Australia's next submarine fleet neared a climax.

Industry sources told Reuters the Australian government is speeding up its decision on the contract - France is the other major bidder - with a winner now expected to be announced by the end of the month.

Australia intends to buy 12 new submarines, a centrepiece of its defence strategy unveiled in February, which called for an increase in military spending of nearly A$30 billion over the next 10 years to protect strategic and trade interests in the Asia-Pacific.

Industry watchers had anticipated a decision for one of the world's most lucrative defence contracts to come later in the year, but Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's recent gamble on a July 2 election has sped up the process.

The contract is politically sensitive as it will likely have an impact on thousands of jobs in the shipbuilding industry in South Australia state. Retaining votes in key electorates in that state will be critical for the government.

Two industry sources in Asia who are involved in the bid process told Reuters they were expecting an announcement as early as April 29. They declined to be identified because they are not authorized to talk to media.

On Tuesday, the Japanese Soryu submarine, a variant of the submarine that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Kawasaki Heavy Industries are offering to build, began exercises in Sydney harbour with Australia's navy - the first of its kind since 1999.

Despite the presence of the Soryu submarine and a well-attended media tour, Japan's Chief of Staff Commander Fleet Escort Force insisted the exercise was not a sales pitch.

"We do not have an ulterior motive in having this media conference," Rear Admiral Ryo Sakai told reporters.

As Japan showcased its submarine, Germany's ThyssenKrupp AG's launched an advertising campaign to illustrate its commitment to build the 12 submarines in South Australia.

"The German industry, backed by the German government felt it would be appropriate to explain to the Australian public the nature of the proposal being made," said John White, chairman, ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems Australia.

ThyssenKrupp is proposing to scale up its 2,000-tonne Type 214 class submarine.

France's state-controlled naval contractor DCNS has proposed a diesel-electric version of its 5,000-tonne Barracuda nuclear-powered submarine.

America's Raytheon Co, which built the system for the Collins-class boats, is vying for a separate contract for a combat system for the submarine with Lockheed Martin Corp, which supplies combat systems to the U.S. Navy's submarine fleet.

(By Colin Packham and Tim Kelly; editing by Jane Wardell)
Nearly 25 Marines with 7th Engineer Support Battalion, I Marine Logistics Group, began a three-week construction project of a Bailey bridge at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California, April 4, 2016.



7th ESB provides mobility assets to I Marine Expeditionary Force and any adjacent or joint units. The bridge was built as an alternative route to the main road going through Camp Talega during times of extreme weather.



Its really critical because were the only asset capable of providing that tactical mobility and bridging support, said Capt. Jacob Krebs, bridge company commander, 7th ESB.



Combat engineers and heavy equipment operators constructed the bridge using their individual skill sets. Demolition, bridging, and creating mobility are some of the jobs of combat engineers while operating heavy equipment such as cranes, excavators, and bulldozers are the duties of heavy equipment operators.



Its a range of a lot of different things, said Cpl. Jonathan Harris, a combat engineer with 7th ESB. We do demolition, construction, and route clearance. Its pretty much a jack of all trades.



Although the goal of the project was to provide an alternate route for the community in the case of inclement weather, it also afforded 7th ESB an opportunity to learn skills for building bridges they are unfamiliar with.



This is really good for us to build our proficiency, to see another type of bridge, so if we ever come in contact with this type of bridge, we know exactly how to put it together, said Harris. It helps us get a better understanding of our military occupational specialty which, in turn, helps the Marine Corps.

This project was the first experience Marines of 7th ESB had with the installation of a Bailey bridge. The Bailey bridge was originally constructed during World War II and was one of the most critical engineering components of that time.



The Bailey bridge is the grandfather to modern line communication bridges, said Krebs. It still falls within something thats outside of our comfort zone and what were typically used to.



A generous amount of time was allotted for this project so the Marines could develop a thorough understanding of the construction process of a Bailey bridge.



The project offered the Marines experience with pin and panel bridges that are similar to bridges used by the Navy and the Army. This shared skill set allows a greater level of cohesion in a deployed environment, said Krebs.



The bridge not only provides the local community with a solution to poor weather, it gave the Marines a whole new skill set better enhancing their job proficiency.



Typically, when we erect bridges its for a training mission, said Krebs. It lasts for a couple days. We tear them down and it doesnt really have a lasting impact. But with this bridge, it will have a lasting impact for Camp Telega and the rest of Camp Pendleton.





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No one likes planning for their demise. Not you. Not us. And not banks, if the Fed and FDIC are to be believed. Last week these regulators told five big banks to go back to the drawing board and revamp their "living wills"-plans drafted annually to serve as a "how to" manual for unwinding a big bank if they fail. In letters to these banks, regulators said their living wills failed to credibly prove they could fail in a hypothetical crisis and be unwound without touching taxpayer money. As with anything even just tangentially related to bank failure and 2008, the media is making a big deal about this, echoed by politicians. They claim these banks "are large enough that any one of them could crash the economy again if they started to fail and were not bailed out , " "If these banks don't fix their problems over time, then regulators need to break them apart," and "I continue to think that the largest banks in the country are too big to fail." But whatever your thoughts about big banks posing a systemic financial risk, practically speaking, living wills are powerless. They are regulators' feckless attempt to make banks plan for an unknowable future that adds little-to-no clarity about the present.

The idea stems from 2008's financial crisis. Many believe failing big banks-and difficulties unwinding failed banks like Lehman-caused the crisis to intensify and cascade from one bank to another. Politicians concluded Chapter 11 filing alone was insufficient, surmising a law requiring the biggest banks to plan ahead for an orderly wind down in the event they fail will help prevent or mitigate another crisis, forestalling the "need" for government bailouts. Hence the requirement for the eight biggest banks to draft "living wills." These plans hinge on the current-day understanding of allegedly risky parts of that business. The Fed and FDIC then review and independently grade the plans for "credibility." If either of them deem the plan credible, the bank passes. If not, they must resubmit. If they fail again, they could face higher capital requirements, stricter leverage limits or even, in extreme cases, forced divestment of certain businesses.

This year, both the Fed and FDIC gave failing grades to five banks: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York and State Street. This forced them to sufficiently rework their living wills by October 1. So what specifically was insufficient about these five banks' resolution plans? Bloomberg's Matt Levine summarized:

But remember that the evidence for this is things like JPMorgan's lack of a detailed daily cash flow statement for its eighth day after bankruptcy. Or that Bank of America's plan to wind down its derivatives portfolios "lacked detailed portfolio information and specificity regarding implementation of the wind-down." Or the insufficiency of Goldman Sachs's "triggers designed to escalate information to senior management and its board through multiple phases as the condition of the firm worsens." Or Wells Fargo's lack of "legal entity rationalization criteria" -- that is, rules about not creating too many subsidiaries -- that "not only provide for the rationalization of current entities, but also provide for adequate controls for future strategic actions."

Now, there is a lot of jargon in those rationales, but there is one common thread: They are arbitrary and borderline silly. JPMorgan, for example, provided daily cash flow statements for seven days after bankruptcy. But not eight! Evidently that eighth day was the kicker. Never mind that neither banks nor regulators can possibly know today how many days of liquidity the bank will need in a hypothetical future failure to prevent systemic disruptions while the FDIC winds it down-or what exactly cash flows will look like in that window. Particularly since bankrupt banks tend to be, you know, illiquid. A bankruptcy liquidity plan wouldn't at all have helped Lehman or Bear Stearns, because they had no cash and no market access. The derivatives wind-down stuff is also mind-boggling. Like, if BofA has to specify that it will dump its derivatives on Bank of Main Street USA, what do you think that does to Bank of Main Street USA? As for Goldman's allegedly flawed elevation process, if Rome is burning, we daresay Caesar knows. And, shocker, if Wells Fargo hasn't quite finished restructuring, of course its living will might not fully account for what is still a work in progress.

That all highlights a point: Of course banks' living wills aren't credible, because the process isn't credible. Banks can't possibly know now what environment they will face whenever the next crisis occurs. As a bank's hypothetical failure will occur in an imaginary environment amid wholly unknown conditions, the liquidity they need to avoid problems rippling elsewhere is unknowable. Banks also can't determine how willing other financial institutions will be to buy their assets in a panic. Counterparties may avoid anything related to the panic's perceived cause-even things that seemed safe previously. Pre-2008, banks may have assumed they could unload widely coveted mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in the event of peril. But the specifics of the crisis (namely, FAS 157, the mark-to-market accounting rule) caused an MBS fire sale, making them appear "toxic."

Regulators' shifting the sand makes formulating a credible plan even more problematic. In 2014 regulators suggested banks can't include borrowing from the Fed's discount window-a lending facility to help alleviate banks' short-term liquidity squeezes-as part of their living wills. If banks can't count on the lender of last resort to do what it was principally designed to do over 100 years ago, how can they properly plan to avoid the next crisis?

Also, it's unclear what would actually trigger a living will, which further calls into question how effective they may be in limiting a panic. Living wills theoretically kick in after the Fed and FDIC deem it necessary to put a bank into receivership. But clarity is lacking on what would actually trigger that decision. The Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) is supposed to help banks cover a 30-day bank run, but using it as intended requires the bank to draw down its LCR below the minimum. Are they bankrupt once the LCR breaches the minimum, when it runs out, or something else? The Fed & FDIC's letters further confuse the issue, making it seem like living wills are supposed to help prevent banks from failing, which isn't the original intent. Regulators want to make sure banks have enough liquidity to avoid needing government money, but if they do are they really bankrupt? Knowing the answer to this helps banks develop good resolution plans in the first place. Without such clarity, they can't plan well, and this defeats the entire purpose of living wills. This lack of clarity is a negative for markets as well, as markets abhor uncertainty. While the messy aftermath of Lehman's demise may have contributed to volatility, this is more of a crisis footnote than a key driver. In our view, combined with FAS 157, the government's arbitrary determinations of who would be bailed out and who wouldn't were much more important. Regulators' arbitrary behavior isn't targeted by living wills, and the opaque and apparently ad hoc process only seems to codify it. "Keep 'em guessing!" isn't exactly a sensible credo for regulators.

Even if regulators provide clarity on this, and systemically important financial institutions present satisfactory living wills, the government may still decide to bail them out in the event of a crisis or panic. Maybe officials decide at the time a bailout is a better option than the resolution plan. If it seems like the entire financial system is on the brink (even if it isn't), politicians may think that justifies drastic action. Politicians may make such a decision based on politics, not financial circumstances (shocking, we know), which is why many Dodd-Frank provisions exist. Exhibit A: The Durbin Amendment. Exhibit B: The Fed's decision to force Lehman's bankruptcy and the subsequent panicky bailout of AIG, necessitated by its Lehman exposure. Regulators argue credible living wills would erase worries about counterparty risk, limiting the need for a bailout, but that's fantasy. For all the reasons above, markets would fairly quickly see through the documents' fecklessness and probably carry on panicking. Panics are, sort of obviously, not rational times. This is why they are called panics and not "the entirely orderly, measured unwinding of exposure to troubled institutions." The likelihood investors en masse pore over hypothetical plans drafted without the catalyst being known while markets are convulsing seems awfully low to us.

Given banks are very healthy these days, we are likely far away from the next crisis. However, if banks can't produce living wills regulators are comfortable with by October, they may be forced to raise capital, divest subsidiaries or otherwise limit growth. That regulators have been vague on how exactly they would sanction banks without credible living wills is itself another source of uncertainty banks and financial markets need to contend with. With just over five months to go, this is worth watching.
China Gold Bullion Yuan Trading To Boost Power In Gold and FX Markets  End Manipulation?

China launched yuan denominated gold bullion trading today in a move that will further boost its power in the global gold and fx markets. Critics of the existing pricing mechanisms hope that it will lead to increased transparency and may end price manipulation.

The Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE), the worlds largest physical gold exchange, launched a yuan-denominated benchmark price today in Shanghai, a measure that will benefit both Chinas domestic gold market and the global precious metals market.

The SGE set the price at 256.92 yuan a gram ($1,233.85/oz) at the 10:30 am session after members of the SGE submitted buy and sell orders for gold of 99.99 percent purity according to Bloomberg. Members include Chinese banks, jewelers, miners and the local units of Standard Chartered Plc and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., according to the bourse.

The SGE said in a press release that the launch of the Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price will be useful as it adequately reflects the gold supply and demand in China, and represents the price trend of Chinas gold market and China is now the largest producer and buyer of gold bullion in the world.

Shanghai Gold is gold bars or ingots with the standard weight of one kilogram and a fineness of no lower than 999.9, delivered in Shanghai, and traded via SGE price trading platform. It is quoted in yuan per gram, and settled via the SGE platform.

At present, Chinas gold derivatives market is lacking in an authoritative and equitable gold benchmark price which is denominated in renminbi. The launch of Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price will facilitate the development of Chinas gold derivatives market which will also have a big impact on the price of gold related financial products, wealth management products and derivatives, the release said.

Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price follows the principle which allows all orders executed on the SGE price trading platform. The benchmark price is determined when price and volume reach the balance during the auction period on the SGE price trading system.

Experts said the Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price will play a significant role in the global gold market.

According to David Marsh as quoted by the official China Daily, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIM), the yuan-denominated gold benchmark offered by SGE is a necessary addition to the international gold market and should make the pricing of physical gold more open to the play of actual market forces.

PBOC Says Potential Is Huge

The Shanghai gold benchmark will provide a fair and tradable yuan-denominated gold fix price  will help improve yuan pricing mechanism and promote internationalisation of the Chinese gold market, Pan Gongsheng, deputy governor of the Peoples Bank of China said at the launch in Shanghai.

The Chinese gold market has rare opportunities for development, Gongsheng said. The market capacity and potential are huge. Todays event will help enhance the impact of the renminbi on gold pricing, Pan said.

End of Manipulation?

(They) are aware it is a time consuming process. It is not going to happen in one day, one month or even one year, a source familiar with SGEs thinking said told Reuters.

China has to show to the world over a consistent period of time that the price is open, rational, reasonable and that there is no manipulation.

Transparency in the fixing process has come under scrutiny since a scandal broke out in 2012 over the rigging of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

The London gold fix, previously set via a teleconference among banks and facing allegations of manipulation, was replaced in 2015 by electronic auctions.

Gold Prices (LBMA)

19 April: USD 1,241.70, EUR 1,095.18 and GBP 867.01 per ounce

18 April: USD 1,237.70, EUR 1,095.02 and GBP 872.45 per ounce

15 April: USD 1,229.75, EUR 1,092.16 and GBP 867.46 per ounce

14 April: USD 1,240.30, EUR 1,101.04 and GBP 874.96 per ounce

13 April: USD 1,245.75, EUR 1,100.37 and GBP 875.33 per ounce

Silver Prices (LBMA)

19 April: USD 16.62, EUR 14.67 and GBP 11.57 per ounce

18 April: USD 16.20, EUR 14.33 and GBP 11.41 per ounce

15 April: USD 16.17, EUR 14.33 and GBP 11.40 per ounce

14 April: USD 16.13, EUR 14.32 and GBP 11.39 per ounce

13 April: USD 15.98, EUR 14.14 and GBP 11.21 per ounce

This update can be found on the GoldCore blog here.

Mark O'Byrne

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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L), Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (C) and Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj attend the 14th Meeting of the Foreign Ministers of China, Russia and India, in Moscow, capital of Russia, on April 18, 2016. [Xinhua/Bai Xueqi]

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday suggested that China, Russia and India expand cooperation so that the three-party mechanism will play a bigger role in global affairs.

Wang, who is visiting Moscow attending the 14th trilateral meeting of foreign ministers, made the remarks when he had a meeting with his Russian and Indian counterparts Monday.

The ever-changing global and regional circumstances have underlined the need for closer communication among the three countries and more contributions from them to the settlement of complicated hot-button issues, said Wang.

As the world's major emerging markets, Wang said, China, Russia and India established the cooperative mechanism not only out of the trend of multi-polarity, but also the need for common progress, which is helpful to create a more positive environment for the development of developing countries.

The Chinese foreign minister also said to put into full play their potential, the three nations should make more efforts to reform their economic structure, encourage innovation and transform industrial patterns, which will further promote their cooperation in all areas, from politics to economy and trade, and then to security and culture,

On global economic governance, Wang called for gaining more say for emerging markets through frameworks of the Group of 20 and BRICS, saying that China is ready to take the opportunity of this year's G20 summit to be held in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang province, to exchange views with Russia and India on new ways to speed up world economic recovery. BRICS groups Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Based on mutual understanding and trust, the three parties agreed to keep working together to fight against such evils as terrorism, piracy, and illegal drug smuggling, while facilitating the political solutions to regional hot-button issues, particularly the crises in Syria and Ukraine, as well as the peace process in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

The Chinese diplomat stressed that cooperation among Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi is an open mechanism, not targeting any third party and having no intention to ally to confront others.

The trilateral mechanism will continue to play a positive and constructive role in improving global stability and regional development, and to promote democracy of international relations, Wang said.
With his craft beer company being acquired by the worlds largest beer producer, Devils Backbone Brewing Co. co-founder Steve Crandall is relinquishing his position on the board of a trade group for craft beer makers.

It was a requirement, Crandall said Monday of his decision to resign from the board of directors of the Brewers Association, which represents craft beer companies across the nation. We are considered no longer independent, he said of Devils Backbone, the states largest craft beer maker by volume.

Devils Backbone, which opened in November 2008 and distributes its beer in five states, announced last week that it has agreed to be acquired by St. Louis-based global beer company Anheuser-Busch for an undisclosed sum.

Devils Backbone has a production facility in Rockbridge County and a brewpub in Nelson County. The company produced about 62,000 barrels of beer in 2015 and expects to produce 92,000 barrels this year.

The acquisition, scheduled to close by the end of June, would mean Devils Backbone no longer meets the Brewers Associations definition of a craft beer maker.

The association defines craft beer makers as those that produce less than 6 million barrels per year and are not more than 25 percent owned by another, noncraft beverage maker.

In comparison, Anheuser-Buschs Belgium-based parent company Anheuser Busch InBev produced about 457 million barrels of beer in 2015 throughout its global operations. The company has about 200 beer brands and posted revenue of $43.6 billion in 2015.

We can continue to be members of the Brewers Association, but we are not voting members anymore, Crandall said. I would have preferred to stay on [the board], but that wasnt in the cards.

Crandall has said he does not expect the companys beers to change as a result of the acquisition.

Our DNA is craft, he said. It will continue to be so. We love what we do in this segment of the beer business, and we have an amazing innovation pipeline in front of us.

It remains unclear what role Devils Backbone will have with the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild once the acquisition is done.

Devils Backbones Chief Operating Officer Hayes Humphreys is chairman of that state-level trade organization, which is affiliated with the Virginia Manufacturers Association.

Hayes and Crandall said the board of the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild is scheduled to meet in May and will discuss whether the company will continue to maintain a role in the group.
Ricky "Big Bird" Holcomb, whose annual motorcycle Toy Run raises money and collects toys for needy area children and their families at Christmastime, is being recognized by the General Assembly for his efforts.

State Sen. Bill Stanley presented Holcomb a framed copy of Senate Joint Resolution 13, approved by both the Senate and the House of Delegates in January, during a ceremony Monday afternoon at Hugos restaurant.

By approving such resolutions, lawmakers each year "recognize Virginians who go above and beyond the call of duty" to serve others, said Stanley, R-Franklin County.

The Toy Run is a parade of motorcycles and cars held on a Saturday each December. The route starts at Big Birds Big Twins motorcycle repair shop on U.S. 220 near Ridgeway and runs throughout Martinsville and Henry County. After about 90 minutes, the parade ends at Sportlanes bowling alley on Virginia Avenue in Collinsville.

Participants donate either $10 or a toy of equal value. The money and toys are provided to Christmas Cheer of Martinsville & Henry County, which distributes food and gifts to needy families during the holiday season.

At least 600 people, 340 motorcycles and 25 other vehicles  including classic cars and vintage trucks  took part in the 2014 Toy Run. Donations from the participants helped Christmas Cheer provide gifts to 563 kids and food to 847 households for Christmas that year, according to the joint resolution.

Holcomb, whose birthday is on Christmas Eve, serves as the parade marshal each year. Santa Claus also rides in the procession.

The Toy Run has become "a treasured holiday tradition" during the 23 years that it has been held, Stanley said.

"Some participants make the Toy Run a regular part of their holiday celebrations," the resolution reads, "citing Big Bird Holcombs generous heart and many kind actions as why they eagerly look forward to the Toy Run."

"The General Assembly hereby commends Ricky Holcomb for his work to support members of the Martinsville and Henry County communities by collecting toys and donations during the holiday season," the resolution adds.

Holcomb said he is "very honored and humbled" to receive the resolution.

He is thankful that "a lot of people come out and do it with me" each year, he said.

Stanley introduced the resolution. State Sen. Frank Ruff, R-Clarksville; Del. Danny Marshall, R-Danville; and Del. Les Adams, R-Chatham, also were patrons.

Last fall, Martinsville City Council recognized Holcombs efforts with a flag presentation and proclaimed Nov. 21 in honor of him. Mayor Danny Turner presented him a cap with the citys logo during Mondays ceremony.
A Bassett man has been charged with attempted first-degree murder and other charges in connection with an incident in Martinsville Sunday night.

Telvin OShea Hairston, 23, of 2153 Oak Level Road, was arrested on Northside Drive on Monday at 1:53 a.m., according to an arrest report at the Martinsville Police Department. He was charged with attempted first-degree murder, shoot a firearm from a vehicle, and shoot into an occupied building or dwelling, all felonies; and reckless handling of a firearm, discharge a firearm in the city and two counts of transporting a firearm while subject to a protective order, all misdemeanors, according to an arrest report, arrest warrants and a news release from the police department.

Hairston was being held without bond in the Martinsville City Jail.

Martinsville police responded at 9:36 p.m. Sunday to shots fired in the 100 block of East Market Street, according to the news release.

It added: "Once on scene, officers identified the adult male victim who indicated he was approached by two men in a vehicle and after a short conversation, the passenger in the vehicle pulled out a shotgun and began firing at him. Several pellets struck the victims clothing but the victim was not injured. The office building in the 200 block of Broad St. was struck by gunfire." (Police Lt. Robert A. Turner said in an email that the building that was struck is the Martinsville Bulletin.)

A criminal complaint alleges the following:

Asonti Hodge was walking home from his childrens mothers house on Virginia Avenue. Hodge went down Starling Avenue, turned onto Cleveland Avenue and then turned left onto Market Street. Once Hodge was on Market Street, he noticed a burgundy SUV pulling into a parking lot. A driver and a passenger were in the SUV.

Hodge said the passenger started talking to him. Hodge said he knew the man, so he walked over, and the passenger asked him for a light for his cigarette. He then asked Hodge if he wanted a ride, and Hodge declined. As Hodge walked away, the passenger got his attention and pointed a shotgun at him. The passenger then shot at Hodge, barely missing him but tearing through his clothing. Looking at two separate photo line-ups, Hodge identified the man who shot him as Telvin OShea Hairston.

Hairston is under two protective orders that expire in May and June of this year. (According to court records, those protective orders allege abuse or neglect.)

Four spent shotgun shells were found at the scene of the shooting.

Police declined to comment on the motive for the attempted murder because the investigation is ongoing.

According to the MPD news release, the police department is seeking the publics assistance in identifying the driver of the suspect vehicle who was described as a bald-headed, black male in his 20s, as well as any additional information that might be helpful in this matter.

Anyone with information about this is asked to contact Sgt. Richard Ratcliffe at 403-5300 or Crime Stoppers at 223-CRIME. Crime Stoppers is an anonymous tip line, and callers with information leading to arrest and conviction could be eligible for up to a $2,500 reward.
Following a public hearing on Monday, the Henry County Board of Supervisors did not propose any changes to the fiscal year 2016/2017 county budget.

Among those who spoke were Dr. Jody Hershey, Director of the West Piedmont Health District, and Tim Baker, Environmental Health Manager for the health district.

Hershey had provided the supervisors and the Martinsville Bulletin with a supplemental document prior to the meeting outlining the health districts request for additional funding.

According to Hershey, the West Piedmont Health District had requested $339,790 in funding for the fiscal year 2016-2017 budget. However, he said, the county included only $305,000 in the proposed budget.

Hershey said that the county reduced the amount of funding that the health district received in 2010 and 2011, and has provided level funding since then. Since 2010, he said, the health district has used a pool of funds from previous grant-generated revenues to supplement its budget, although those funds have since been exhausted.

The state has given the health district an additional $110,000 in general funds for the current fiscal year and will continue to do so each year as long as the localities can match their portions of the general fund award.

However, he said, because of the nature of the state/local match (which is a 60/40 match) the $34,790 local appropriation deficit will cost the health district $55,664 in matching state funds, for a total loss of $90,454.

The health district cannot cover that deficit, Hershey said, and the only service it is able to cut is its onsite sewer and wastewater program.

According to Baker, only licensed Virginia Department of Health staff or licensed private sector AOSEs (Authorized Onsite Soil Evaluator) can provide the technical service required in the onsite sewage and wastewater program. If the health department is removed from the program, the private sector will need to fill the void, he said.

This could have a variety of negative effects, including increased cost and time delays for sewage permits to citizens; increased overall cost to building and development; increased cost to contractors and delayed service to inspections; and a possible lack of private sector practitioners, among other issues.

Others who spoke at the public hearing included Dorothy Carter of the Henry County Education Association, school board members Francis Zehr and Betsy Mattox, Dr. Mark Crabtree of the Piedmont Virginia Dental Health Foundation, Blue Ridge Regional Library Director Rick Ward, Ricky Walker of the Anchor Commission and SPCA Director of Development Mary Compson.

All of those speakers thanked the board of supervisors on behalf of their respective organizations for fulfilling their complete funding requests in the proposed budget.
SPRINGFIELD - John Maybury, President of Maybury Material Handling will receive the 2016 Distinguished Citizen Award at an April 26 gala, sponsored by the Western Mass. Council, Boy Scouts of America. General L. Scott Rice, an Eagle Scout, the Adjutant General, Massachusetts National Guard, will be the guest speaker.



John Maybury is the President of Maybury Material Handling located in East Longmeadow, MA. John and his father, Tom Maybury, launched the Company in 1976 while John was attending college. Since then, John has been paving the way for the ongoing growth of one of Southern New England's largest suppliers of material handling solutions. This 80+ employee company now operates out of a state-of-the-art, 42,000 square foot facility in East Longmeadow.



Maybury's success can be attributed to John's visionary leadership, complemented by his hands-on approach to people and process management. John is recognized for his entrepreneurial spirit by his Maybury team and throughout the community. Among many other awards and honors, John was named the 2007 Top Entrepreneur by Business West and, more recently, Maybury Material Handling was recognized as 2013 Employer of Choice by the Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce.



John's past and current community involvement is extensive both regionally and nationally. Some of the more recent positions that he has held include, Safety Council of Western Massachusetts Board Member and President of the Material Handling Equipment Distributors Association (MHEDA). He has presented at many MHEDA conferences and other industry learning events on topics spanning from technology as a business accelerator to best practices for business excellence.



John has maintained a business partnership throughout the East Longmeadow Public School system and has served on the Town of East Longmeadow's Technology Committee. He was also Chairman of the East Longmeadow Board of Public Works where he remains on the Board. John was a member of East Longmeadow/Longmeadow Chamber of Commerce and later served as President of East of the River Chamber of Commerce.



John continues as a long standing member of the Young Presidents Organization and is currently the Chair of the Board of Directors of the West Mass Development Corp. John is also on the Board of Trustees of Baystate Health Systems and Immediate Past Chair of the Board for Baystate Health Foundation, a board committed to supporting Baystate Health's ability to improve the health of people in the community and transform the medical landscape in western MA.



John attended East Longmeadow schools and Western New England College. He and his wife Sandy reside in East Longmeadow, MA. They have two adult sons, Tom and William.





Major General L. Scott Rice is currently assigned as The Adjutant General, Massachusetts National Guard. He oversees the strategic direction, administration and operation of the Massachusetts National Guard with an annual budget of $450 million to ensure over 9000 joint soldiers, airmen and civilians are trained, equipped and mission-ready to support national security objectives overseas as well as protect life and property, and preserve peace, public order and safety as directed in times of natural disaster and civil emergency within Massachusetts.

General Rice was commissioned in 1980 through the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. Following graduate school, he attended pilot training at Reese Air Force Base, Texas, receiving his wings in 1982 and then served in England and Idaho where he flew the F-111 Aardvark.

General Rice joined the Massachusetts Air National Guard's 104th Fighter Wing in 1989 to fly the A-10 Thunderbolt II. He served as the Squadron, Operations Group, and Wing Commander, as well as State Air Guard Commander. From 1995 to 2006, he was mobilized and deployed to Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Oman, and Pakistan. General Rice currently serves as Chairman of the Air Guard Force Structure and Modernization committee of the Adjutants General Association of the United States. He also serves on the Reserve Forces Policy Board for the Department of Defense, and several General Officer Steering Committees for the National Guard. He is a member of the Massachusetts Military Asset and Security Strategy Task Force.

He has been nominated by the President for his third star in the rank of Lt General. And if confirmed by the US Senate, he will assume the position of Director of the Air National Guard




pretzel day

A promotional image for the giveaway.

(Facebook)

HOLYOKE -- There's no such thing as a free lunch but warm, soft pretzels will be given out later this month.

Pretzelmaker, a national chain with two locations in the Holyoke Mall at Ingleside, will give away pretzels on Tuesday, April 26 to celebrate National Pretzel Day.

In lieu of payment, the company asks customers "share a message of kindness" in online using the hashtag #warmthoughts. "Pretzelmaker team members will also gladly accept an in-person compliment instead," the company said in a press release.

One Pretzelmaker store in the Holyoke Mall is located near JCPenny's on the second floor, the other is on the second floor near Macy's.

Only one pretzel will be given out per person on the day of the promotion.

In addition to traditional soft pretzels, Pretzelmaker sells a pretzel dog - a hot dog inside a soft pretzel - pretzel bites and mozzarella stuffed bites.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard

In this image made from video released by the Australian Government Department of Agriculture and Water Resources on Monday, April 18, 2016, actor Johnny Depp and his wife, Amber Heard speak in a videotaped apology played during Monday's hearing at the Southport Magistrates Court on Queensland state's Gold Coast. Depp and Heard pleaded guilty Monday to providing a false immigration document amid allegations she smuggled the couple's dogs to Australia, but managed to avoid jail time over what was dubbed the "war on terrier" debacle. (Australian Government via AP Video) AUSTRALIA OUT

SYDNEY (AP) -- Actor Johnny Depp's wife Amber Heard pleaded guilty Monday to providing a false immigration document when the couple brought their two dogs into Australia last year, but she managed to avoid jail time over what was dubbed the "war on terrier" debacle.

Prosecutors dropped more serious charges that Heard illegally imported the Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, into the country while Depp was filming the fifth movie in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series. A conviction on the two illegal importation counts could have sent the actress to prison for up to 10 years.

Depp and Heard said little to the waiting throng of reporters and fans outside the Southport Magistrates Court on Queensland state's Gold Coast, but they did submit a videotaped apology to the court that was played during Monday's hearing.

It drew gibes online for the couple's grim, wooden appearance as Heard apologized and they both expressed support for protecting Australia's biodiversity, the aim of the strict quarantine regulations that were violated.

"When you disrespect Australian law," Depp says in the video, "they will tell you firmly."

The drama over the dogs began last May, when Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce accused Depp of smuggling the tiny terriers aboard his private jet when he returned to Australia to resume filming the "Pirates" movie.

Bringing pets into Australia involves applying for a permit and quarantine on arrival of at least 10 days to prevent the spread of diseases such as rabies.

"If we start letting movie stars -- even though they've been the sexiest man alive twice -- to come into our nation (with pets), then why don't we just break the laws for everybody?" Joyce said at the time. "It's time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States."

Depp and Heard were given 72 hours to send Pistol and Boo back to the U.S., with officials warning that the dogs would otherwise be euthanized. The pooches boarded a flight home just hours before the deadline expired.

The comments by Joyce, who is now the deputy prime minister of Australia, elevated what might otherwise have been a local spat into a global delight for comedians and broadcasters. One newspaper website ran a doggie death countdown ticker, and comedian John Oliver dedicated a more than 6-minute segment to lampooning the ordeal.

Depp himself poked fun at the drama during a press conference in Venice, Italy, last year where he was asked if he planned to take the dogs for a gondola ride. "No," he replied. "I killed my dogs and ate them, under direct orders from some kind of, I don't know, sweaty, big-gutted man from Australia."

Joyce posted a link to the couple's apology video on his Facebook page, and later told reporters he doubted it was something the pair would have "willingly wanted to do." Still, he gave them credit for acknowledging they had made a mistake.

"I am happy that Ms. Heard has admitted that she was wrong and as such, that clearly shows that our position in pursuit of this was correct," Joyce told journalists. "Every nation has something that they're red hot about, and we're red hot about our biosecurity requirements in this nation."

When asked why Depp wasn't charged as well, the prosecutor's office said that there had been a "lack of admissible evidence" against anyone except Heard.

The false documents charge carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a fine of more than 10,000 Australian dollars ($7,650), but Magistrate Bernadette Callaghan sentenced Heard instead to a one-month good behavior bond. The condition means she will have to pay a AU$1,000 fine if she commits any offenses in Australia over the next month.

Heard's lawyer, Jeremy Kirk, told the court that his client never meant to lie on her incoming passenger card by failing to declare she had animals with her. In truth, Kirk said, she was simply jetlagged and assumed her assistants had sorted out the paperwork.

"She has made a tired, terrible mistake," Kirk said.

Prosecutor Peter Callaghan said ignorance and fatigue were no excuse. "The laws apply to everyone," he said.
Just when I thought Michael Banks was the quintessential romantic, the 27-year-old Californian was alleged to be high in more ways than one.

Banks was rescued from a ledge by helicopter recently after scaling a steep cliff to propose to his girlfriend by cellphone video. If that brings a tear to your eye, you're probably imagining the wind lashing mercilessly against your face, as Banks might have felt when he sprang the big question.

Alas, this robust Romeo was later arrested on suspicion of possessing methamphetamine. Witnesses reported Banks was acting erratically, which sounds like an understatement, whether he was high on life and love or something else.

But it got me to thinking, which is something I try to do, at least every so often.

"Did I disappoint you?" I asked my wife the next day.

"You mean today?" she answered. "Not yet, but it's only noon.''

I told her I meant with my marriage proposal. Ours was not so much a golden moment as a mutual recognition of the inevitable.

No videos or physical evidence exist of the moment in 2000, beyond the existence of our daughter, who was born more than nine months after the wedding, in case you're wondering.

I've sometimes wondered if I should have done more. We were both in our 40s, and she'd been married before, but I'm told every girl likes a little romance.

"I could have serenaded you from below the balcony. I could have tucked the ring in your drink by candlelight,'' I said, torn by guilt.

"We had no balcony. We were renting. And I rarely drank, though if you keep up this nonsense, I may start,'' she said.

People read about bizarre proposals and even more bizarre weddings all the time. I confess I have never understood the psychology behind it, though I don't begrudge anyone their choice - unless it stupidly ties up vital rescue equipment that might be needed elsewhere, the way Banks' stunt did.

Creative proposals go in lockstep with garish weddings. The groom's party dresses up as Knights of the Round Table, or the justice of the peace wears a Captain Kirk outfit during the vows, and so on.

As a rule, religious people don't like this. When a friend got married in a traditional Catholic ceremony about 30 years ago, the priest made it a point to say that said a lot about the couple, as opposed to people who take their vows while jumping out of a plane or meeting at home plate.

That couple is still married. That says a lot more.

It's up to the individual, and to each their own. The Red Sox display marriage proposals on the centerfield video board during games.

We are told it's a total surprise to the bride-to-be, and I have yet to see any of them say no, though I'm still hoping.

But some of us prefer the boring, old-fashioned way. We spring the big question over a nice dinner, or on a moonlit night or for the more progressive set, after the pregnancy test results come in.

Or in my case, on a sofa in broad daylight. We planned the rest of our lives as casually as some people plan their cookouts.

The most dramatic moment came when I asked if the age-old line about "love, honor and obey" would be part of the wedding script. You can't blame a guy for trying.

Until I'd heard that Banks' bold proposal might have been artificially fueled, I didn't really blame him, either. The girlfriend said yes, and there is no report of her changing her mind, even as her Climbing Casanova was being hauled off the cliff by cables and later hauled off to jail by the cops.

"I'm sorry I didn't do anything special for you at that magic moment that made my life complete,'' I told my wife as she wrestled with the competing emotions of feeling deeply touched and rolling her eyes.

"You know, though, that you're the one,'' I said.

"Yes, I know,''' she said. "I appreciate the thought. But if you really want to show you love me, here's the electric bill and there's the trash.''
BOSTON - Fifty-four tax law professors and economists, including Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, on Tuesday said they're backing U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's bill aimed at simplifying tax filing for millions.

The bill would require the IRS to create a free tax preparation and filing service online. Taxpayers would not be required to use the software, though.

Calling the current U.S. system the "most confusing and expensive tax filing" set-up in the world, the professors and economists said in a letter of support that Americans spend "billions of dollars" annually in preparation fees, as well as "millions of hours" on record-keeping and filing.

The letter was released on April 19, the tax deadline for Massachusetts residents.

"Even taxpayers who seek help with their taxes must deal with the stress of finding the right preparer, choosing the best tax software, and saving slips of paper with confusing names, such as 1099-INT," the letter said.

"Faced with these difficulties, millions of lower- and middle-class Americans who have refunds coming simply don't file. Others file but fail to claim refunds and credits," the letter added.

The government already has nearly all of the information it's asking for, they said.

Goolsbee is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.

Others who signed onto the letter include Stanford Law School's Joe Bankman, who helped create a tax return for the state of California, available to low-income and middle-income people; Gonzaga University School of Law's Ann Murphy, who worked at the IRS for almost 15 years; and T. Keith Fogg, a professor at Harvard Law School who had worked for more than 30 years in the IRS's Office of Chief Counsel.

A copy of the letter is available at this link.


Kingston Jones

Second-grader Kingston Jones, of Monrovia, Calif., has a dream of visiting Thomas Land in Carver. His teacher is making that possible.

(GoFundMe page)

MONROVIA, Calif. - A California elementary school teacher and those who helped via social media are arranging for the trip of a lifetime for one lucky student.

KABC in Los Angeles is reporting that teacher second-grade teacher Ani Baker wanted to surprise student Kingston Jones with a trip to Thomas Land, a theme park based on the stories of Thomas the Tank Engine, as read in "The Railway Series" books and the popular PBS television show.

The challenge is, Thomas Land is in Carver, Mass., based in Edaville USA. So, Baker started a GoFundME campaign to help raise money for a surprise birthday trip for Kingston, his mother and brother.

Initially, Baker was seeking $3,500 to send Kingston, his mother and brother to Massachusetts, but the page has instead raised more than $7,600 from 128 donors in about one month.

Baker describes Kingston as "bright, brilliant, creative, funny, smart" and "angelic." "He makes my day better, every day. In fact, he brightens the day of every single person that he encounters," Baker wrote. "Whenever I need a mood boost, I sit next to him and ask him a question, any question, and then listen to how his extraordinary brain works."

Baker wrote that Kingston "loves Thomas The Tank Engine more than anything else in this life and he's been talking about how eager he is to go to Thomas Land, while smiling so big I think his cheeks are going to split. What he doesn't know is that it's in Boston, Massachusetts."

She then went on to write that "this child, and this child's family, deserve to go to Thomas Land for his birthday. I hope you'll trust me when I say that they do."

"Kingston will never forget a trip like this or take it for granted; his capacity for gratitude astounds me. He appreciates every single gesture, no matter how small," she wrote. "If I could pay for the trip myself, I'd do so in a second. But I'm a teacher, and I think you know what that means."

Kingston's birthday was in March, so Baker is planning the surprise as a summer trip. KABC reported the mother, Mia Brown, a single mother with multiple jobs, wept when she heard about Baker's campaign, telling the station she was overwhelmed.
SPRINGFIELD -- Former Ludlow doctor Fernando Jayma may be facing a total of 63 counts alleging illegal prescribing of opioids and filing false health care claims, but that won't stop him from dancing.

Jayma is free on his own recognizance and has handed over his license to practice medicine at the Board of Medicine's request. He gave up his passport and was ordered to stay in the state.

But last week Jayma successfully petitioned the court for a modification of the condition that he stay in the state.

He can now go to his dance class in Enfield, Connecticut, twice a week.

The motion for modification of bail conditions reads in part: "Due to his heart condition necessitating exercises, the Defendant request the ability to attend dance classes in Enfield, CT. also two times per month at a facility that he has used in the past."

Also approved by Hampden Superior Court Judge John Agostini were two other requests. One allows him to visit his grandson and daughter in Albany, New York, two times per month.

And Jayma got permission to go to Florida with his wife for two weeks "as his daughter has secured tickets for them to fly to Florida."

The motion said the requests were assented to by the state Attorney General's Office and said Jayma has previously endorsed a motion to waive extradition.

Jayma was back in Hampden Superior Court on Thursday denying 19 counts of filing a false health care claim, two counts of larceny under $250 and one count of larceny over $250 by a single scheme. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney James M. Forsyth from Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni's office.

Jayma has previously denied charges of illegally prescribing opioids in a separate case brought by the state Attorney General's office.

With the new case, to which Jayma pleaded not guilty, he now has two active cases in Superior Court.

In the newly indicted case, the two larceny under $250 counts list the victims as Blue Cross / Blue Shield and Aetna. The larceny by a single scheme counts lists the victim as Health New England.

The 22 charges in the newly indicted case list dates of the offense in July and August 2015.

In December, Jayma was indicted by a grand jury on 41 charges including illegally prescribing oxycodone and other drugs and making false Medicaid claims in a case being prosecuted by state Attorney General Maura Healey's office.

Jayma has denied the charges in that case.

Gulluni has said his office's case against Jayma is separate from Healey's case because it involves private insurance, not public insurance.

Gulluni said investigators some time ago were alerted by several insurance companies that Jayma was not only the second-highest prescriber of opioids in the state, but was prescribing opiates at 11 times the average rate. He said the arrest of Jayma is not insignificant in terms of the flow of prescription medications into the town of Ludlow as well as Hampden County at large.

In the case being prosecuted by the Attorney General's office, the counts alleging illegal prescribing said there was no legitimate medical purpose for the drug.

Of the 22 illegal prescribing charges in that case, eight are for oxycodone, three for morphine, four for fentanyl and seven for methadone. Jayma faces 17 counts of making a false Medicaid claim as a provider and two counts of making a false claim for office visits on days he was out of the country.

The dates of the alleged crimes go back as far as 2011 and are as recent as 2015, but many are for dates in 2013.
brenna.box.jpg

Holyoke City Clerk Brenna Murphy McGee

(FILE PHOTO)

HOLYOKE -- City Clerk Brenna Murphy McGee is pursuing a professional certification with the help of a $400 scholarship and a week at the New England Municipal Clerks Institute and Academy Training.

The residential training from July 9 to 15 at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire combined with online courses Murphy McGee has been taking since becoming clerk in January 2014 are scheduled to result in her becoming the first Holyoke city clerk to be certified by the International Institute of Municipal Clerks (IIMC).

"I am honored and grateful to receive the ... scholarship award. I believe that this is another positive step forward in my commitment to the voters of Holyoke to make improvements and increase efficiencies in the city clerk's office," Murphy McGee said in a press release last week.

The scholarship was awarded by the Municipal Clerks Education Foundation and will pay $400 of the $850 training at Plymouth State University, with Murphy McGee paying the rest on her own, she said.

The IIMC is a professional nonprofit association based in Rancho Cucamonga, California that has affiliates in Canada, England, Wales, Scotland, Portugal, Belgium, Israel, South Afrida, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Netherlands, its website said.

Municipal clerks are not required to obtain such certification. City clerk in Holyoke is an elected position, meaning the support of voters ultimately is the only condition for attaining the seat. But, Murphy McGee said, the 42 hours of classes in the upcoming training will instruct about government finance, media relations, municipal government procedures, creative thinking, time management, computer lab and introduction to law.

Courses she has taken online through Westfield State University, Simmons College, which is in Boston, and the IIMC have dealt with advanced archival records with a focus on electronic records, ethics, creating resolutions, ordinances, paperless agendas and the importance of government transparency, she said.

The late Susan M. Egan, longtime city clerk before Murphy McGee, urged her to pursue the certification because it would benefit her and the city as a whole, she said.

"I jumped right on it and have been taking courses for my entire time here," said Murphy McGee, a former city councilor at large.

Murphy McGee has used some of the $500 line item for education and training in the budget of the city clerk's office for the online courses and the rest of that cost she has paid on her own, she said.

The New England Municipal Clerks Institute and Academy Training said its training is designed to help clerks maintain a high level of skill necessary to operate " increasingly complex municipal governments."

"Population changes, increased municipal responsibilities and extensive social and legislative changes have increased both the difficulty and importance of the clerk's function," the organization said.

"With increased responsibility comes a need for professional education to aid the municipal clerk in acquiring the necessary new skills and knowledge, while developing and strengthening those already in use," the organization said.

Clerks from more than 500 cities and towns have taken the training, the organization said.
Ferguson Justice Department

FILE - In this March 15, 2016 file photo, people watch and hold signs as members of the Ferguson City Council meet in Ferguson, Mo. St. Louis-area residents were sounding off Tuesday, April 19, 2016 in the last public hearing on the U.S. Department of Justice's settlement that calls for sweeping changes in Ferguson, where 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer.

(AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)

ST. LOUIS -- A federal judge approved an agreement Tuesday between the city of Ferguson and the U.S. Justice Department that calls for sweeping changes in Ferguson, where 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer.

U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry issued her ruling after a public hearing of several hours in St. Louis, where more than two dozen people spoke, and many others had submitted written comments. Perry said the settlement is a "reasonable resolution" that avoids years of an extensive court battle.

"I think it's in everyone's best interest and I think it's in the interest of justice," she said.

The settlement calls for the hiring of a monitor; diversity training for police; purchase of software and hiring of staff to analyze records on arrests, use of force and other police matters; and outfitting all officers and jail workers with body cameras.

Mayor James Knowles III told Perry the city believes the agreement "is an important step in bringing this community together and moving us forward."

Ferguson has been under scrutiny since Brown, who was black and unarmed, was fatally shot by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in 2014, and Brown's death was a catalyst in the national Black Lives Matter movement. A grand jury and the Justice Department cleared Wilson, who resigned from the police force in November 2014, but the shooting led to a Justice Department investigation.

That inquiry found alarming patterns of racial bias in policing and a municipal court system that generated revenue largely on the backs of poor and minority residents. The Justice Department's critical report in March 2015 prompted the resignations of Ferguson's city manager, police chief and municipal judge. All three were white men who have since been replaced by black men.

Ferguson leaders and Justice Department officials spent months negotiating the settlement. But in February, after a series of public hearings, the City Council rejected it, mostly over concerns the cost could bankrupt the town. The Justice Department sued the next day. In March, after receiving some assurance that the cost wouldn't be as high as feared, the City Council approved the deal, expected to cost about $2.3 million over three years.

Christy Lopez of the Justice Department said the agreement isn't perfect, but it will help Ferguson residents.

"We want Ferguson to be known for how it responded to this crisis," Lopez said. "How it came back stronger than ever."

At the hearing, Felicia Pulliam, a black Ferguson resident, said city officials' continued denial of Ferguson's racial problem makes her wonder if they will take the agreement seriously. "They can't be trusted," Pulliam said. "They never, ever, tell the truth."

John Powell, a white Ferguson resident, told the judge that "stubborn and pervasive racism" exists in the St. Louis suburb.

But other speakers said the Justice Department investigation was biased in favor of protesters while overlooking reforms the city already made.

"I think the DOJ wanted to wipe Ferguson off the map," resident Jean Boettcher said. "This should be a warning to the rest of the United States."

Ferguson "is not a racist community," resident Billy Tucker said in written comments. "We are one of the most integrated, diverse communities in the Midwest."

Among the comments submitted to Perry, resident Keith Rose suggested changes to allow for more civilian oversight and greater transparency and accountability.

Debra Kennedy, who is black, said she doubted the settlement would do any good and wondered why police supervisors "who have been ignoring our community's complaints for decades are suddenly going to start abiding by their policy manuals simply because the Department of Justice says they will."

Others said the federal government shouldn't meddle in Ferguson's business. Kelly Schlereth, who has lived in Ferguson for more than two decades, wrote that the Justice Department is trying to make up for not finding cause to criminally charge Wilson.

"The DOJ has consistently been biased in their investigation into the practices of the Ferguson police department," Schlereth wrote.
UPDATE: After attorneys questioned potential jurors Tuesday afternoon, seven were chosen to sit on the jury. Jury selection will continue Wednesday as the court needs seven more jurors. (Twelve to deliberate and two alternates)

_____________

NORTHAMPTON -- Jury selection began in Hampshire Superior Court Tuesday in the trial of Alphonso S. Cintron, accused of raping a 15-year-old girl at a former residential program for troubled youth where he was employed in 2009.

Cintron, 34, is one of two Springfield men accused of raping the girl while she was at The Grove, a now-closed facility run by the Northeast Center for Youth and Families at 272 Grove St. in Northampton.

Cintron, who is being held on $50,000 bail, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of aggravated rape of a child under 16 and one count of failing to report abuse as a mandated reporter.

The alleged aggravating factors are that Cintron was at least 10 years older than the girl and that he was a mandated reporter. The last charge against him alleges that he knew that his coworker, Fabian Williams, had sex with the girl and did not report the alleged child abuse.

Williams, 28, has pleaded not guilty to four counts of aggravated rape and two counts of rape of a child under 16. His trial is scheduled for July 18.

In her summary of the case to prospective jurors, Judge Mary-Lou Rup said Cintron has been accused of having sex with the girl once at the facility that served mostly teenagers and some young adults up to 22 years old.

Assistant Northwestern District Attorney Caleb Weiner told Rup earlier Tuesday that the act occurred sometime between Aug. 1 and Sept. 30 of 2009 but the exact date is unknown.

Cintron, who was unshackled before potential jurors entered the courtroom, is represented by Springfield attorney Tracy E. Duncan.

In the early stages of jury selection, Rup asked the dozens of potential jurors if they had connections to Cintron, the woman, the Northeast Center for Youth and Families or any other people or groups involved in the trial.

She also asked them if they have been a victim of or accused of sexual assault or know someone who has and if they have prejudices against African-American people, since Cintron identifies as African-American.

According to court documents in Cintron's case, the parents of the 15-year-old girl sent her to the Brattleboro Retreat in Vermont in 2009 because of concerns about her alleged use of drugs and alcohol and her dangerous behavior. She then went to The Grove in the summer of 2009.

Fabian and Cintron are both accused of having sexual contact with the girl while they were working as overnight supervisors; Fabian multiple times and Cintron once.

The girl told a friend that they had given her cigarettes and she had kissed one of the men, but she later told a counselor that she had had sex with them, court documents show.

Many of the witnesses in the case are former staff members or young people who were in the program at The Grove, Weiner said.

Jury selection is expected to take more than one day, with the whole trial likely to last into the middle of next week.

By the lunch break at 1 p.m., 14 potential jurors remained and attorneys will be allowed to question them when jury selection resumes after 2 p.m.
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Jim Pistrang, chair of the Amherst Town Manager Screening Committee, Deborah Radway, Human Resources Director and Bernie Lynch consultant wait to present finalists to Amherst Select Board last week. The three finalists will be interviewed next week.

(Diane Lederman/The Republican)

AMHERST -- Maria E. Capriola, assistant town manager in Mansfield, Connecticut, will be the first town manager candidate interviewed by local officials next Monday.

William J. Fraser, city manager of Montpelier, Vermont, will visit April 26, and Massachusetts Municipal Association Director of Administration and Finance Paul Bockelman is slated for interviews April 27.

All three will be in town for the entire day and will follow the same schedule. The finalists were presented to the Select Board last week.

Candidates will get a tour of the town and meet with staff and officials throughout the day.

Residents will get the opportunity to meet with each candidate from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in Town Hall each of the three days.

Consultant Bernie Lynch of the Plymouth-based Community Paradigm Associates will facilitate the discussions.

The Select Board will hold formal interviews at 6 p.m.

Since Fraser was named a finalist, the Montpelier city council agreed to renew his contract, but Fraser in an email said he is still a candidate for the position here.

"My current contract and the renewed version both allow me to leave if I provide 3 months notice to the city," he wrote in an email.

"Nothing has changed in that regard from the time I applied for the Amherst position.

"The city council is aware of the Amherst process.

"The contract renewal and Amherst application are separate events independent from one another."

The Select Board hopes to make a decision May 5.

The town has been without a permanent manager since John Musante died in September.
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Springfield-Public health forum held at Community Music School of Springfield Tuesday April 19, 2016.

(Elizabeth Roman | The Republican)

SPRINGFIELD  During a press conference in 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane because it often results in physical death."

In 1998 President Bill Clinton said, "We cannot tolerate health disparities based on socioeconomics."

Nearly 20 years later, health officials across the country continue to meet to discuss the inequalities in health for minorities and those living in poverty.

"We have made progress, but there is much more progress we need to make," said Helen Caulton-Harris, commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services for the city of Springfield.

Caulton-Harris was one of several speakers at a community forum held Tuesday at the Community Music School of Springfield on State Street titled, "A more hopeful and equitable Springfield."

Organized by Read! Reading Success by 4th Grade, Baystate Health and Partners for a Healthier Community Inc., the forum addressed the critical relationship between social determinants of health and health equity, including the nation's best practices to ensure health equity.

Jessica Collins, executive director of Partners for a Healthier Community, the Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts, said studies conducted in Springfield over the past several years show some painful trends, as well as some positive things the city is doing to decrease health problems in children, increase access to healthy food and more.

Speaking to a group of health care providers, human services employees and others hoping to tackle the issues of health equity for the city's children and poorest families, Collins highlighted some of the positive things, from Springfield spending $75,000 last year in green cleaning products for most of its public facilities, to a study that showed 83 percent of eighth graders in the city have never tried to smoke a cigarette.

Still, Springfield has many hurdles to overcome, Collins said.

The eighth-grade study also revealed that 48 percent of students surveyed said they had not had a fresh fruit or vegetable the day before they answered the survey. Of that 48 percent, half of the students were Latino.

One study showed only 38 percent of residents in the city felt they had access to fresh, affordable produce.

Another study conducted by the agency found that 20 percent of Springfield children suffer from asthma, with the largest portion being Latino children between the ages of 0 and 14, followed by African-American children.

Talking about their struggles and successes with health equity at a national level were Ralph Smith, the managing director of the Campaign for Grade Level Reading and Dr. Dayna Long, the founder and co-medical director of the Family Information and Navigation Desk and a pediatrician at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland, California.

Long said she works with a diverse population of children and has observed many things about their ability to thrive.

"When kids are exposed to stress and adversity they shift their attention from learning how to pick up language to, 'How do I survive?'" Long said. "We see impulsivity and we see an inability to focus and concentrate because kids are trying to survive."

After more than 20 years as a physician, Long said the tools she learned in medical school to make kids better were not working in an urban setting.

Long launched a program called Too Small to Fail, which looked at how to make Oakland a "literate rich" city with children who were developmentally ready for school, she said.

Hospitals and doctors joined with community leaders, business owners and philanthropists to launch a campaign to make parents aware of the importance of talking, reading and singing to their child from birth. After the information was distributed through the community, Long and her team went back to parents to see what they had learned.

"We found that parents felt that by talking, singing and reading to their children it promoted resiliency and bonding....Their child was happier, they talked more, their vocabulary increased. Their child smiled more and they felt their child was more attached to them," she said. "Those are the intangible pieces that help to build resilience, so that in the face of significant adversity kids can remain strong."

For more information on the work being done locally to achieve health equity, visit Partners for a Healthier Community.
SPRINGFIELD -- Mayor Domenic Sarno expressed disappointment today about the sale of the Springfield Falcons, which was confirmed Tuesday after days of rumors and radio silence from the team's ownership.

Sarno, in an interview following an MGM Springfield press conference, said he had attended the Falcons' final game and was hopeful that the city could work with the AHL to find another team. The Falcons are expected to relocate following their sale to the Arizona Coyotes, the Republican reported this morning.

"It is bittersweet," Sarno said. "I was hoping and praying for a miracle, that the Falcons would stay here and continue the legacy of the Springfield Indians."

Sarno said he understood the reasons behind owners Charlie and Sarah Pompea's decision to sell the team and appreciated their decades of commitment to Springfield.

Watch the full interview above.
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The Hong Kong skyline.

(Flickr / vision chen)

NORTHAMPTON -- Smith College professor Daniel K. Gardner has been named a winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program, a prestigious fellowship for social science and humanities research.

Gardner, the D.W. Morrow professor of history at Smith, will be given up to $200,000 over two years to study China's campaign to build an environmentally sustainable society.

He is one of 33 scholars to be awarded the fellowship, according to an announcement from the college.

Daniel K. Gardner, the D.W. Morrow Professor of History at Smith College.

Gardner will explore China's infamous "pollute first, clean up later" approach to economic growth, the college said, as well challenges the country may face as it implements these major changes.

China's government is attempting to change its poor environmental legacy through what it is billing as an "ecological civilization." Proposals include establishing a national parks system; increasing protection of fertile land; creating stricter regulations for water resources; and establishing a "green" financing system, according to The Diplomat.

A nonprofit group called Berkeley Earth released a report in 2015 that said more than 80 percent of Chinese people are regularly exposed to pollution that far surpasses levels deemed safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The report found that air in Beijing is so polluted that breathing it does as much lung damage as smoking 40 cigarettes per day.

The professor -- who received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D from Harvard University -- is a "highly regarded scholar of Chinese intellectual history and the Chinese environment," the college said. He is a senior fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University's Earth Institute in the China Sustainability Project.

Gardner penned New York Times editorials on China's environmental awakening in 2014 and 2015.

For the Carnegie fellowship, Gardner will work with researchers at nonprofits, environmental research institutes, government officials and the agreen mediaa in China.

The fellows program was created last year by Carnegie Corporation of New York, which was established in 1911 by Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist who led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 1800s.
Montana State University will host a free, five-day summer camp for middle school students who are interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and who havent had the opportunity to attend a university program or STEM camp before.

The camp, which will be held June 26-July 1, introduces students to STEM careers and role models, as well as college life, through exciting classes and evening activities.

Full Story: http://www.montana.edu/news/16094/msu-to-host-free-stem-camp-to-introduce-middle-schoolers-to-college-life
Pravind Jugnauth a repondu a cinq questions lors de la seance parlementaire du 14 Mai 2019 a lAssemblee National alors du PMQT.

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MADISON  State attorneys formally asked a Madison judge on Monday to stay his ruling declaring Wisconsin's right-to-work law unconstitutional while they appeal the decision.

State Justice Department attorneys filed a motion requesting a stay with Dane County Circuit Judge William Foust as well as a notice of appeal with the 3rd District Court of Appeals. If Foust grants the stay, the law would remain in effect until the appeal is settled.

The DOJ attorneys argued in their motion that leaving right-to-work in place won't cause labor unions substantial harm and the law clearly benefits the public since 25 other states have such statutes. Without a stay, non-union members could be forced to pay dues, upsetting families that rely on weekly paychecks, they added.

"This (ruling) will have significant, immediate impacts on the State and its citizens," the motion said. "Due respect for the presumption of constitutionality and the public interest requires that the judgment should be stayed until the appellate courts can finally decide whether Wisconsin, alone among its sister States, is prohibited from enacting a right-to-work law."

Right-to-work laws prohibit businesses and unions from reaching agreements that require all workers, not just union members, to pay union dues. Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed Wisconsin's law last year and touted it during his brief presidential bid last summer.

The Wisconsin AFL-CIO, Machinists Local Lodge 1016 and United Steelworkers District 2 filed a lawsuit challenging the law, alleging it amounts to a taking of union services without just compensation since the unions must represent all employees in a workplace even if the workers don't pay dues. Foust sided with the unions earlier this month, handing down a ruling finding the law unconstitutional.

Fred Perillo, the lead attorney for the unions, said he hadn't been served with the motion yet and had no immediate comment.

Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, said in a statement that Walker and Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel shouldn't play politics with workers' freedom to stick together.

"If we want a strong economy," he said, "we should be strengthening unions so that workers can continue to collectively negotiate better workplaces for future generations."
WASHINGTON  As Donald Trump stumbles in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, one group has been sorely disappointed by his belated display of weakness: Democratic operatives, who had been hoping fondly to run against him in November.

Democrats delight at the prospect of a Trump candidacy is well-founded. Last weeks Washington Post-ABC News poll found that an impressive 67 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Trump and only 31 percent have a positive view  far worse than Ted Cruz (36 percent positive, 53 percent negative) or Hillary Clinton.

All signs suggest Trump would be an electoral disaster for Republicans, but I wont join those who for that reason want him to be the Republican nominee. The important thing is not whats best for Democrats but whats best for the country  and that means not having a race-baiting demagogue as the nominee of a major party.

Im no Cruz booster. Ive called him, at various points, a modern-day McCarthy and a prolific fabulist who isnt above using an anti-Semitic dog whistle when he condemns New York values. Many of Cruzs policies  on gay rights, health care and Social Security, for example  are more objectionable than Trumps.

But Trump isnt dangerous because hes conservative. Hes dangerous because he seems willing to govern outside our constitutional system, with his talk of torturing prisoners and targeting innocent civilians, with his winking at violence at his events and his plans to block entry to the United States on the basis of religion.

Clinton is well-positioned to beat either man, but even if Trump is easier to defeat, his nomination alone would be a blow to Americas global standing, which has already suffered from his success.

Cruz, in the Senate and in his campaigns, has embraced the most extreme conservative views. But I met Cruz 16 years ago (before his self-reinvention as a tea party guy) and Ive spoken with many friends and acquaintances from college and law school. This has all led to one conclusion: Cruz, though undoubtedly conservative, is above all ambitious. And in service of that overriding ambition, he is perfectly happy to be a phony.

Doubt his phoniness? In an interview last week with Hamodia, a Jewish newspaper, he declared that one seminal event that impacted me as a child was the Entebbe raid, in which Israeli commandos freed hostages of an airplane hijacking. What the Entebbe raid said to me was, if youre a terrorist, you may capture an Israeli. ... But you are going to die. That struck Cruz as a very Texan approach.

The raid that spurred such deep thoughts about the Jewish State and the Lone Star State was in 1976  when Cruz was 5 and not long after his family moved from Canada.

On the stump, Cruz talks about how Jimmy Carter supposedly endorsed Trump by saying Trump is malleable and Cruz is not malleable. But Cruz is malleable, in one way: He wont let ideology get in the way of his ambition. (His straddle on the Senate immigration bill was artful, positioning himself to say he was for it if it succeeded but against it if it didnt.)

If he were to become president, his all-consuming ambition would drive him to succeed, which would mean jettisoning unpopular proposals. Cruz believes in Cruz  not in the tea party agenda he opportunistically rode to power.

Finally, unlike Trump, Cruz is a creature of democratic institutions. We see this now in the way he has, through his mastery of convention rules and his outreach to party insiders, outmaneuvered Trump in lining up commitments from delegates. It was always thus, going back to his days running for student government at Princeton and as a midlevel staffer aggressively climbing his way through George W. Bushs presidential campaign.

Trump has talked blithely about ordering the military to do illegal things; his bravado suggests hes not inclined to let small things such as the separation of powers get in his way. He concurred with a supporters crude remark in calling Cruz insufficiently committed to torture. And Cruz hasnt joined Trumps lawless call for killing the noncombatant relatives of terrorists: Weve never targeted innocent civilians and were not going to start now.

This is why Cruz is less dangerous than Trump. Cruz is often dishonest and he takes extreme and sometimes appalling positions. But he has shown an inclination to play by the rules  and thats a safeguard Trump doesnt offer.
Popular as he is, Pope Francis cannot seem to win with some people. For conservative Catholics, he goes too far; for liberals, he does not go far enough.

The popes recent apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, wades into some of the most fraught issues in Catholicism and modern life  divorce and remarriage, the definition of marriage itself, and the status of gay people in the church.

For many conservatives, Francis attempts to reach out with mercy and flexibility to those living in morally complex and difficult situations seem likely to weaken the churchs moral authority.

Liberal Catholics are disappointed that the pope continues to reject same-sex unions and stops somewhat short of an open invitation to the Eucharist for divorced and remarried Catholics.

A close look at this lovely and personal papal reflection, however, reveals its radical nature, because it shows that Francis is in dialogue with these opposing wings of the Catholic Church. He rejects too-easy answers to difficult questions. He sees himself as a teacher in the truest sense of the word  not someone who dictates answers for memorization, but someone who leads a thoughtful community closer to the true and the good.

In practice, the pope argues that the churchs pastors need to realize that not all things are black and white when it comes to those whose situations in family and marriage do not align perfectly with Catholic teaching, asserting that such thinking may sometimes close off the way of grace and growth.

Rather than condemn as sinners all those who live in situations that do not conform to church law, Francis would encourage them to engage in a process of serious discernment that might help them participate in church life as fully and completely as their consciences allow. Francis writes that the reality of moral life in the family is often complicated and messy, and that discerning what is best in such situations is not simply an inflexible application of unbending law.

In short, Francis argues for a recovery of the Catholic teaching on conscience  that ones participation in the life of the church, including the sacraments, is guided by the state of ones own conscience. The rules are there to help and guide, but those who are trying in good conscience to find their way in difficult and complicated situations should be helped in discernment, not dictated to.

We are called to form consciences, not replace them, he writes.

Francis brings to this a gentle and human touch, deeply rooted in compassionate observations of human experience. Reflecting on the excitement of the first years of marriage, Francis writes, Young love must keep dancing toward the future with hope.

He worries about the speed with which we move from one relationship to another, in this age of social networks, connecting and disconnecting with each other at whim. Francis applies Christian compassion to the problems of the modern world, rather than simply condemning it.

Dialogue is essential for experiencing, expressing, and fostering love in marriage and family life, Francis writes.

This dialogue must account for generational and gender differences, and must take the time required to get to know the other, to truly listen, without always rushing to respond.

Francis notes the widespread pain in many marriages of not being heard, or feeling ignored. He calls upon married couples to value each other, even when they disagree:

We ought to be able to acknowledge the other persons truth, the value of his or her deepest concerns, and what it is that they are trying to communicate, however aggressively.

He argues that keeping an open mind is not merely listening, but also recognizing that the combination of two different ways of thinking can lead to a synthesis that enriches both.

In this season of political discontent, as many Americans feel unheard and undervalued, the popes words have significance beyond family life. We should show affection and concern for each other, Francis writes, even as we engage in difficult discussion, always remembering that those with whom we disagree are members of our family and community.

Pope Francis describes marriage as a kind of school, where we can learn to engage each other with mutual respect and care, and move closer to the truth together, helping each other along the way. We can hope that the conversation about Amoris Laetitia lives up to the description of dialogue found within the document.
Chicken will be the best-positioned protein due to its low price position in times of pressure on consumer spending power but rises in production costs and the long-term impact of COVID-19 threaten to disrupt the sector, according to Rabobank.
An injured veteran shows what we can learn from dogs in a film created by Pedigree as part of its Feed the Good campaign.

Mars Petcare created By My Side," featuring U.S. Marine Corps veteran Dan Lasko, who sustained injuries during his deployment that resulted in the amputation of his left leg from the knee down.

In the online video created by BBDO, Lasko details his struggles in adjusting to his new life including how Wally, his new canine best friend, has spurred on his recovery.

The film, which launched April 18, will be online only on the Pedigree YouTube page. It will be distributed on various video platforms as well as the Pedigree Facebook page, says Melodie Bolin, Pedigree brand manager.

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The Feed the Good campaign launched globally in spring 2015 and is based on the insight that dogs bring out the good in people, and Pedigree brings out the good in dogs, she says.

By nourishing that lovable innocence in every dog, Pedigree helps feed the good that they bring to the world, Bolin tells Marketing Daily. In short, this video is aimed at everyone. Whether someone is already a dog owner or not, everyone has the potential to adopt a dog in need, and that is just part of our call-to-action. Pedigree has worked tirelessly to help support the transformation of shelter dogs into pets with loving forever homes with both monetary and dog food donations.

Last years U.S. launch included a video with Lasko entitled Rescued. The video shows Lasko visiting an animal shelter where he met a dog named Maggie. He could tell that -- like himself -- Maggie had been through some tough times. After concluding the video shoot, Lasko decided to adopt Maggie. He says he felt that after all the good his therapy dog Wally brought to his life, he could return the favor by adopting Maggie and bringing good to her life.

We are so honored to be able to work with Dan Lasko and share his heartwarming story, Bolin says. We truly believe people will enjoy seeing how Wally helped his healing process with everything from keeping him comfortable in large crowds to teaching him patience and how to be himself again, and how Dan paid that forward by making Maggie a part of his family in return. His story perfectly encompasses what Feed the Good is all about.

The Feed the Good campaign spans the globe with assets distributed in countries including Australia, Brazil and New Zealand. Marketing elements and commercials focus on how dogs are unconditional in their love of people, and how that lack of prejudice can be spread to their human counterparts. For example, in the U.S., a 45-second commercial entitled The Walk was distributed, displaying an unlikely kind moment between two very different people, brought together by their dogs.
by Wayne Friedman , April 19, 2016

National advertising commercial loads fell slightly at three network groups during March -- as overall national TV ad loads remain stable.

Twentieth First Century Fox, Scripps Networks Interactive, Time Warner and Viacom witnessed slight overall declines to their networks in March versus the same month a year ago, according to Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at the Pivotal Research Group.

Fox was down to 9.6 minutes per hour from 9.7 minutes per hour. Fox's broadcast network ratings were down -- with cable channels FX and FXX showing stable viewership, says Wieser. Fox News nearly doubled its viewership, due to heightened interest this political season.

Scripps Networks went to 13.5 minutes from 13.6 minutes per hour. Wieser explains that ratings at HGTV were generally up, offsetting reduced ad loads leading to slightly total inventory gains. Food Network had softer ratings with slightly higher commercial loads.

Time Warner was down to 9.1 from 9.3 minutes per hour -- with ratings and ad loads at TBS down. Stable ratings were found at TNT and truTV with ad loads falling. CNN -- witnessing higher viewership from political interest -- had more commercial activity per hour.

Viacom went lower overall to 15.0 minutes per hour versus 15.1. Still, Viacom networks overall tallied the highest commercial glut of any TV network group.

Wieser says commercial loads -- and ratings -- were down slightly at MTV. TV Land and Spike were down more in ratings and commercial loads down as well. VH1 and Nick-at-Nite had a positive picture -- up in ratings and down in commercial loads.

Recently, both Viacom and Turner executives expressed a desire to cut back on advertising on some of its networks.

Overall national TV commercial ad loads were up 10.7 minutes per hour from 10.6 minutes. CBS was up to 13.0 minutes from 12.8; AMC Networks grew to 12.5 from 11.6; NBCUniversal, climbed 11.2 from 10.8; Discovery was up to 9.8 from 9.4; and Disney was higher to 7.8 from 7.7.
by Steve McClellan @mp_mcclellan, April 19, 2016

The strength of the U.S. dollar continued to suppress revenue growth at Omnicom Group in the first quarter: revenues worldwide were up just 0.9% to about $3.5 billion. The company said currency fluctuations in the first quarter cost it about $97 million in top line growth. Organic growth, which excludes the impact of currency fluctuations, acquisitions and asset sales, was better  up 3.8% globally and 4.5% in the North America market, which accounts for 61% of the companys business.

Net income at the firm  holding company for numerous advertising and marketing shops, including BBDO, DDB, OMD and PHD  was up 4.4% to $218.4 million. On a conference call with investors Tuesday, Omnicom executives said that so far the firm is on track to hit its profit, margin improvement and organic growth goals for the full year. The organic growth target is 3% to 3.5% while the company hopes to improve operating profit margin for 2016 by about 0.3% (that was achieved in the first quarter).

Omnicom Group CEO John Wren sounded a note of caution on the call, noting that there is quite a bit of hesitation in the marketplace due to worrisome economic signs in some regions as well as geopolitical turbulence. Generally speaking, he said, there is a cautious approach to spending by clients.

Media, advertising and healthcare operations were top drivers of growth in the first quarter, Wren said. The Latin America region was the worst performer, where organic growth was down nearly 8%, due largely to the troubled Brazilian economy. Troubles in the region were offset a bit by Mexicos positive double-digit performance.

The Asia-Pacific region was up 5.1%, with China showing signs of strength. Continental Europe was up 3% and the UK posted a 2.2% gain.

The company had a busy first quarter on the organizational front. It regrouped both its health care an PR operations under new umbrella units  Omnicom Health Care Group and Omnicom Public Relations Group respectively. The companys health care practice has been strong while the PR group has struggled in recent quarters. The objective in both cases is to have sets of managers at the umbrella organizations focused on strengthening service offerings, through acquisitions or organically.

The company also launched a new media agency, Hearts & Science, which is gearing up to serve its charter client Procter & Gamble. Omnicom won the bulk of the package goods giants $2.6 billion North America media assignment late last year and the full transition is expected to take nearly a year to complete. Wren noted that a benefit to creating a third media brand is that it will be able to pursue new business pitches that it has been previously excluded from due to conflicts.

The company is also busy trimming back-office costs. Company CFO Phil Angelastro said the firm has ruled out creating regional hub locations given the cost of abandoning real estate leases that are still in effect. Instead the company is aggressively renegotiating new leases at current locations as they come up for renewal. Efficiencies on the IT and tech fronts are also being pursued, he said.

Net new business for the quarter was about $1.25 billion and Angelastro said that at this point the company is expecting to generate roughly $4 billion in net new business for the year which he characterized as a relatively normal year in that context.

Executives said that trading desk Accuen grew by $25 million in the quarter.
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A Bakers cyst (or Baker cyst), also known as a popliteal cyst, is a swelling in the popliteal space, the space behind the knee. It causes stiffness and knee pain. The pain caused by the cyst typically worsens if the patient fully flexes or extends the knee, or moves around. The condition, which has nothing to do with baking, is named after the British surgeon who first described it, Dr. William Morrant Baker (1838-1896). Fast facts on Bakers cysts Here are some key points about Bakers cysts: A Bakers cyst is a swelling in the space behind the knee.

Bakers cysts most commonly affect women over the age of 40.

Symptoms of a Bakers cyst include joint locking, knee, and calf pain.

Bakers cyst often resolves without medication.

What is a Bakers cyst Share on Pinterest Most people with Bakers cysts have an underlying illness. A Bakers, or popliteal, cyst is a painful swelling that develops behind the knee. It is filled with fluid. It happens when inflammation and swelling affects the tissue behind the knee joint. It often results from gout or arthritis. Symptoms include pain and stiffness as well as popping, clicking, creaking, or locking in the knee joint.

Treatment A Bakers cyst will commonly resolve on its own, and no treatment is required. Home remedies Some self-care techniques may be effective, such as: Icepacks : This can be useful in reducing inflammation. Make sure there is no direct contact with ice on skin.

: This can be useful in reducing inflammation. Make sure there is no direct contact with ice on skin. Resting : The knee needs to rest; it must not be exposed to irritation. A doctor may advise how long the patient should rest, as well as suggesting alternative forms of exercise.

: The knee needs to rest; it must not be exposed to irritation. A doctor may advise how long the patient should rest, as well as suggesting alternative forms of exercise. Crutches : These take the weight off the knee joint and help the patient walk without pain.

: These take the weight off the knee joint and help the patient walk without pain. Compression bandages: These help support the knee. Compression bandages are available for purchase online. Medications NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs)  medications with analgesic (pain-reducing) and antipyretic (fever-reducing) effects can be useful in treating Bakers cysts. Ibuprofen, a common over the counter medication, is an NSAID. Further treatment In most cases, if there is an underlying cause, the doctor will treat the cause rather than the cyst itself. If the swelling is particularly large and painful, further treatment may be required: Corticosteroid injection : This reduces inflammation and relieves pain, but it does not reduce the risk of recurrence.

: This reduces inflammation and relieves pain, but it does not reduce the risk of recurrence. Physical therapy : A qualified physical therapist may recommend some gentle strengthening and range-of-motion exercise for the knee muscles. These exercises can help reduce symptoms as well as maintaining the function of the knee.

: A qualified physical therapist may recommend some gentle strengthening and range-of-motion exercise for the knee muscles. These exercises can help reduce symptoms as well as maintaining the function of the knee. Arthroscopy: Extensive knee joint damage, possibly due to a physical injury or some underlying condition, may mean that the cyst must be surgically removed and the joint repaired. The surgeon inspects and treats problems inside a joint using an arthroscope, a thin, flexible fiber-optic tube which is inserted into the joint through a small incision. Bakers cysts affect more women than men, probably because women develop rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis more often. Although people of any age may be affected, most patients are over 40 years.

Symptoms Some patients may have no pain and may not even notice the cyst is there. However, the signs and symptoms of a Bakers cyst can include: swelling or lump behind the knee that is more evident when standing and comparing one knee to the other. It may feel like a water-filled balloon

knee pain

calf pain

accumulation of fluid around the knee

clicking, locking, or buckling of the knee joint Anybody who experiences pain and swelling behind the knee should see a doctor. A bulge behind the knee may be a sign of a more serious condition, such as an aneurysm or a tumor.

Causes The knee is made of bone, tendons, and cartilage. The tendons and cartilage need lubrication, which they get from synovial fluid  it helps the legs move smoothly and reduces friction. There are various pouches, called bursae, in each knee, through which the synovial fluid circulates. Between the popliteal bursa  a pouch at the back of the knee  and the knee joint, there is a valve-like system that regulates the flow of synovial fluid. If the knee produces too much synovial fluid, there can be an accumulation of it in the popliteal bursa. This can be caused by an inflammation of the knee joint, usually due to an underlying condition, such as: Gout  levels of uric acid in the blood rise until the level becomes excessive (hyperuricemia), causing urate crystals to build up around the joints. This causes inflammation and severe pain.

 levels of uric acid in the blood rise until the level becomes excessive (hyperuricemia), causing urate crystals to build up around the joints. This causes inflammation and severe pain. Hemophilia  an inherited medical condition where the blood does not clot properly, leading to internal bleeding and joint damage.

 an inherited medical condition where the blood does not clot properly, leading to internal bleeding and joint damage. Lupus  an autoimmune disease where the bodys immune system attacks normal, healthy tissue.

 an autoimmune disease where the bodys immune system attacks normal, healthy tissue. Osteoarthritis  a form of arthritis caused by inflammation, breakdown, and the eventual loss of cartilage in the joints  the cartilage wears down over time.

 a form of arthritis caused by inflammation, breakdown, and the eventual loss of cartilage in the joints  the cartilage wears down over time. Psoriasis  some patients also experience pain and inflammation in their joints.

 some patients also experience pain and inflammation in their joints. Reactive arthritis  a chronic (long-term) type of arthritis with inflamed joints, inflammation of the eyes, and inflammation of the genital, urinary, or gastrointestinal system.

 a chronic (long-term) type of arthritis with inflamed joints, inflammation of the eyes, and inflammation of the genital, urinary, or gastrointestinal system. Rheumatoid arthritis  an inflammatory form of arthritis.

 an inflammatory form of arthritis. Septic arthritis  joint inflammation caused by a bacterial infection.

 joint inflammation caused by a bacterial infection. Injury  injury or trauma to the knee, such as a cartilage tear, can lead to a Bakers cyst; they are common among athletes.

Diagnosis Share on Pinterest A doctor can usually diagnose a Bakers cyst after carrying out a physical examination of the knee. A doctor can usually diagnose a Bakers cyst after interviewing the patient and carrying out a physical examination of the knee, especially if there is an underlying health condition. Sometimes, additional diagnostic tests may be ordered to rule out other conditions, such as an aneurysm or a tumor. The following non-invasive tests might be carried out: ultrasound scan

CT scan

MRI scan

Exercises Gentle exercise might help to extend or maintain the range of motion of the knee and to strengthen the muscles around the knee. These may also may help relieve symptoms and maintain knee function. A doctor or physical therapist can advise on suitable exercises.
Suicidal thoughts involve a person thinking about ending their own life. However, there is no universally accepted definition of the term suicidal ideation in the medical community. Some people say that suicidal ideation involves actively planning suicide, whereas suicidal thoughts do not necessarily indicate a person has the intention to end their life. However, others consider planning as a separate category and believe that suicidal thoughts and ideation are the same. Suicidal ideation is common. In 2020, 12.2 million people in the United States reported seriously thinking about suicide. Of these, around 10% attempted suicide. With support and treatment, though, suicide is preventable. This article discusses suicidal ideation, including the symptoms, causes, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. It also explains where to get help. Suicide prevention If you know someone at immediate risk of self-harm, suicide, or hurting another person: Ask the tough question: Are you considering suicide?

Listen to the person without judgment.

Call 911 or the local emergency number, or text TALK to 741741 to communicate with a trained crisis counselor.

Stay with the person until professional help arrives.

Try to remove any weapons, medications, or other potentially harmful objects. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, a prevention hotline can help. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day at 988. During a crisis, people who are hard of hearing can use their preferred relay service or dial 711 then 988. Click here for more links and local resources.

Symptoms of suicidal ideation Share on Pinterest FTiare/Getty Images A person who is thinking about or planning suicide may show changes in their speech, feelings, and behavior. They may talk about: their feelings of guilt or shame

being a burden to others

death The person may feel: unbearable emotional pain

extremely anxious and sad, full of rage, or agitated

trapped, hopeless, empty, or that there is no reason to live

severe fluctuations in mood or mood swings Their behavior may also change. A person contemplating suicide may: withdraw from friends or family

use alcohol or drugs more frequently

sleep or eat more or less

take dangerous risks

research ways to die

stockpile medications

make a plan for their suicide

purchase a gun

make a will

give away important possessions or money

say goodbye Not everyone who is thinking about suicide shows these warning signs. Sometimes, the signs may be subtle. Learn more about the warning signs of suicide.

Causes of suicidal ideation Suicidal ideation often does not have a single cause but occurs due to a combination of different life events, thoughts, and feelings. Risk factors include : depression or other mental health conditions

a history of suicide attempts

a family history of suicide, substance misuse, or mental disorders

chronic pain

recent release from prison

exposure to family violence, including sexual or physical abuse

direct or indirect exposure to others suicidal behavior

the presence of guns in the home

Suicide prevention Sometimes family members or friends may notice a person has signs of having suicidal thoughts. When this happens, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention advises: talking calmly with them in private and expressing care

taking what they say seriously and assuring them that their life matters

removing dangerous objects, such as guns and drugs, from their reach

calling for help and staying with them until help arrives

following up with them after the crisis is over

Diagnosis The diagnosis of suicidal thoughts or ideation can happen in a number of ways. If a person is feeling suicidal and makes an appointment to speak with a doctor or therapist, they will have a conversation to determine how severe the symptoms are and whether the person has suicidal intent. This refers to whether a person has an active plan to take their own life. An array of suicide screening and risk assessment tools are also available for doctors. However, these tools cannot always predict an imminent risk of suicide accurately. For this reason, a face-to-face interview is vital. A doctor or therapist may also spot signs of suicidal thoughts in other situations, such as in a routine appointment for chronic pain or depression. If a person is seriously unwell or may be a danger to themselves, diagnosis may take place in a mental health center.

Treatment for suicidal ideation Treatment for suicidal thoughts and actions involves addressing the underlying cause or causes. Safety planning Safety planning is a short-term intervention that reduces the likelihood that a person will try to end their life. This approach limits a persons access to lethal means of suicide by removing weapons, drugs, and poisonous substances from the home. Safety planning also provides people with contacts and support resources they can use if they are in a crisis. Psychotherapy Psychotherapy, or talk therapy, helps people understand how their thoughts, feelings, and experiences impact their mental health. It then helps people work through their emotions and find ways to move forward. There are many types of psychotherapy. Some popular options include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). CBT teaches people to identify and, over time, replace unhelpful thoughts that negatively affect their mood with more balanced, realistic alternatives. DBT helps individuals to recognize negative thoughts and learn skills that boost coping methods in unsettling situations. There are also some specialized versions of CBT for people who have experienced trauma or have other mental health conditions requiring special attention, such as eating disorders or addiction. Learn about 14 different types of therapy. Medication Many people who think about suicide may have a mental health condition, such as anxiety, depression, or a substance use disorder. Medications may help treat the symptoms of these conditions and regulate a persons mood. There are different medications a doctor could prescribe, depending on the situation and a persons circumstances. However, it is also worth noting that some of these drugs can also cause suicidal ideation as a side effect, particularly in adults under the age of 25 . A person should discuss any medications they already take with a doctor to determine whether adding another, or changing the dose, is likely to benefit them. Ongoing support People are less likely to take their own life if they receive ongoing support. This may involve easy access to effective mental health care, should a person need it again, as well as frequent follow-up calls from healthcare professionals. A persons family, friends, and community also play an important role in ensuring they stay connected with people. It can help people to focus on the things that give their life meaning and purpose, such as: looking after a pet, as they provide unconditional love

faith, as many religions promote the sanctity of life

things to look forward to, such as a wedding, graduation, or vacation

long-term plans or goals

Where to get help If a person is having thoughts of suicide, it is critically important to get help as soon as possible. Below are helplines and support services where a person can speak with a counselor or healthcare professional confidentially: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline : An individual may receive 24/7 phone support by calling 988. Alternatively, the older number 800-273-TALK (8255) is still available.

An individual may receive 24/7 phone support by calling 988. Alternatively, the older number 800-273-TALK (8255) is still available. Crisis Text Line: Texting HOME to 741741 connects people to a counselor 24/7.

Texting HOME to 741741 connects people to a counselor 24/7. Veterans Crisis Line: This provides a 24/7 online chat service for veterans, even if they do not receive benefits from the Veterans Administration. To contact, call 988 and press 1, or text 838255.

This provides a 24/7 online chat service for veterans, even if they do not receive benefits from the Veterans Administration. To contact, call 988 and press 1, or text 838255. The Trevor Project: This is a crisis line for teenagers and young adults who identify as LGBTQIA+. To contact, call 866-488-7386 or text START to 678678. The following websites offer information for people who want to learn more about suicide and its prevention: Suicide Prevention Resource Center: The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration offers information about programs, toolkits, and effective strategies.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration offers information about programs, toolkits, and effective strategies. National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention: This organization works with more than 250 national partners to promote suicide prevention.

This organization works with more than 250 national partners to promote suicide prevention. Zero Suicide: This organization believes it is possible to prevent deaths from suicide in people who receive care from behavioral health systems. It presents a framework for safer suicide care.

Statistics Suicide was the cause of 45,979 deaths in the U.S. in 2020. This is one death every 11 minutes. In the same year, approximately 12.2 million people in the country had suicidal thoughts, and 1.2 million attempted suicide.
For some people with asthma, current treatments fail to work. Now, researchers may have shed light on why this is, after uncovering an alternative cause for the respiratory condition that is not targeted with current medications.

Share on Pinterest The new research may offer hope to asthma patients who do not respond to current treatments.

Study co-author Reynold A. Panettieri  inaugural director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Rutgers University in New Jersey  and colleagues say their results may open the door to new treatments for asthma patients.

They publish their findings in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), around 25 million  or 1 in 12  people in the US have asthma, and this number continues to rise.

The majority of asthma patients are able to manage their condition and prevent asthma attacks by avoiding triggers for the disease  such as exposure to pollen  and using medication, such as inhaled corticosteroids.

However, some asthma medications may prove ineffective for some patients, though exactly why this is has been unclear.

Panettieri and colleagues believe their new study may offer a much-needed explanation.
Night shift working could affect womens ability to function more than mens, suggests a study that compared men and womens performance after experiencing 28-hour day schedules that delayed their sleep-wake cycle until it was out of sync with their internal 24-hour body clock.

Share on Pinterest The study is the first to show that shifted sleep-wake cycles affect men and womens ability to function differently.

The study  from the Surrey Sleep Research Centre (SSRC) at the University of Surrey, UK, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  is the first to show that shifted sleep-wake cycles affect men and womens ability to function differently, revealing key differences in cognitive performance and changes of mood.

First author Dr. Nayantara Santhi, a research fellow at the SSRC, says:

Extrapolation of these results would suggest that women may be more affected by night shift work than men.

The study could have significant implications for women who work night shifts in professions such as nursing and the police, suggest the authors.

Our body clock, or circadian rhythm, regulates the daily cycles of our bodies as we transition from day to night, and from wakefulness to sleep. A master clock in the brain coordinates the clocks of various different processes  for example, hormone production, metabolism and blood pressure  so they are in sync.

There is evidence that some circadian features  such as the frequency of the clock and the size of highs and lows in production of the sleep hormone melatonin  differ between men and women, but the authors note they are the first to see if these differences extend into mental function.
home World Thousands demand Norway return children to their Christian family

Thousands of people around the world are demanding the Norwegian government to return the children they seized from a Christian couple.

Christian Today reported that thousands of people marched on Saturday to show their disapproval of the way the Norwegian government acted toward the Bodnariu family. In Arizona alone, hundreds of people, including a group who call themselves the "Romanian-Americans for Reunification of Bodnariu Family Coalition" and other civic, religious, and business leaders, came in droves to the Superior Court building in Phoenix. The march was led by Arizona representative Trent Franks, an advocate of child welfare in the congress.

In November last year, the Barnevernet, Norway's child welfare services, took all five of Marius and Ruth Bodnariu's kids. The husband and wife were suspected of child abuse as well as indoctrinating the children of Christianity. Prior to the seizure of the three boys and two girls, one of the daughters reportedly told her school's headteachear that her parents spanked them for discipline. As corporal punishment is illegal in Norway, schools are required to report such incidents to the government. The school principal informed the authorities because she reportedly "had concerns about how the girls were disciplined at home because the parents were 'very Christian'."

According to the Home School Legal Defence Association, a non-profit organization in Canada, the kids were aged between 3 months and 9 years old when they were taken from their parents, with the youngest still being nursed at the time. They were placed in three foster homes about two to four hours from their own home, and it was only recently that the youngest, now 7 months, was returned to his parents.

"There is no doubt in my mind that this action was motivated in large part by the family's religious faith. The Bodnarius are God-fearing, church-going folkabut this is not as common in Norway today," said Houston-based lawyer Peter Costea who visited the family. "Is it child abuse to teach children the Bible? The Norwegian government seems to think that if children believe and act according to their faith taught to them by their parents, then they are too 'rigid' or 'strong-willed.'"

The organization said in their report that more than 50 rallies were organized for the April 16 worldwide event. A petition is also online, with the signatures currently at more than 62,000, well above the target of 50,000 signatures.
The Be Brave Ranch clinical results show improved outcomes for child sexual abuse survivors.

The University of Alberta and Little Warriors have announced the highly anticipated preliminary results of the clinical trials performed at the Little Warriors Be Brave Ranch, confirming that the four-week intervention program significantly reduces the psychological impacts of child sexual abuse. As the first intensive program to demonstrate such clinical impact, these results suggest a breakthrough for the lasting mental health of child sexual abuse survivors and for the far-reaching outcomes of this severe trauma.

The Be Brave Ranch, whose programming Little Warriors commissioned the University of Alberta's Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry to develop under Dr. Peter Silverstone and Dr. Jacqui Linder, is the first and only facility of its kind to offer intensive, dedicated and multi-modal treatment to child sexual abuse survivors (aged 8 to 12). The clinical trials evaluated this new treatment model, which provides child survivors with the unique opportunity to access individual and group therapies in a residential environment, alongside peers who have experienced similar trauma.

Results, published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Behaviour, confirm the program's success, measuring a highly significant reduction in symptoms. This includes a 25% reduction in child post-traumatic stress disorder scores (PTSD), a reduction in the number of children experiencing PTSD (14 children, down from 26) and a significant reduction in depression and anxiety. Forecasts also suggest reduced mental health related issues and enriched outcomes for these children in the future, potentially improving societal and economic outcomes.

"The Be Brave Ranch offers the caliber of comprehensive treatment that child sexual abuse survivors need and deserve," says Glori Meldrum, founder and chair of Little Warriors. "With peer support, various therapies to reach different personalities, and full program immersion, we have seen significant impacts and growth. Our clinical trial results confirm everything we have worked for, and we are excited to continue helping children grow into happy, healthy adults."

With child sexual abuse affecting millions of children across North America, and multiple long-term psychiatric and physical outcomes identified, the completion of this phase of the Be Brave Ranch clinical trials signifies a major milestone for children, families and our society as a whole.

"Successful programs can not only reduce the suffering of child survivors, but can also significantly lower future health care costs by changing the health trajectory of children," says Dr. Peter Silverstone, professor of Psychiatry with the University of Alberta's Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry. "These initial results demonstrate that the application of multiple, intensive treatment methods can impact the individual and overarching outcomes of child sexual abuse. In layman's terms, we have uncovered new hope for this horrific crime."

Following these results, Little Warriors and the University of Alberta plan to continue to help support and heal child sexual abuse survivors and their families at the Be Brave Ranch.
New method allows surgeons to identify brain tumors in real time.

When operating on cancer, surgeons want to remove tumors and not healthy tissue. This is especially important and challenging when dealing with brain tumors, which are often spread out and mixed in with the healthy tissue. Now, researchers have shown that a well-established optics technique can reveal exactly where brain tumors are, producing images in less than a minute -- unlike conventional methods that can take a whole day.

Share on Pinterest Tissue from a patient diagnosed with low-grade glioma. The green image is taken with the new method, while the pink uses conventional hematoxylin and eosin staining. Going from the upper left to the lower right, both images show increasing cell density due to more tumor tissue. The insets reveal the high density of tumor cells.

Credit: N.V. Kuzmin et al, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

"The special thing about our images is that we showed they contain so much information," said Marloes Groot of VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands. "When I showed these images to the pathologists that we work with, they were amazed." Groot and her colleagues describe their work in the journal Biomedical Optics Express, from The Optical Society.

Pathologists typically use staining methods, in which chemicals like hematoxylin and eosin turn different tissue components blue and red, revealing its structure and whether there are any tumor cells. But for a definitive diagnosis this process can take up to 24 hours, which means surgeons may not realize some cancerous tissue has escaped from their attention until after surgery -- requiring a second operation and more risk.

But with the new technique, the researchers don't use any labeling or staining at all. Instead, they fire short, 200-femtosecond-long laser pulses into the tissue, and when three photons converge at the same time and place, the photons interact with the nonlinear optical properties of the tissue. Through well-known phenomena in optics called second and third harmonic generation, these interactions produce a single photon.

The key is that the incoming and outgoing photons have different wavelengths. The incoming photons are at 1200 nanometers, long enough to penetrate deep into the tissue. The single photon that is produced, however, is at 600 or 400 nanometers, depending on if it's second or third harmonic generation. The shorter wavelengths mean the photon can scatter in the tissue. The scattered photon thus contains information about the tissue, and when it reaches a detector, in this case a high-sensitivity GaAsP photomultiplier tube, it reveals what the tissue looks like inside.

While other researchers have exploited this technique for other applications -- to make images of insects and fish embryos, for example -- this is the first time anyone has used it to analyze glial brain tumors. These tumors are particularly deadly because it's hard to get rid of tumor cells by surgery, irradiation, and chemotherapy without substantial collateral damage to the surrounding brain tissue.

The researchers tested their method on samples of glial brain tumors from humans, finding that the histological detail in these images was as good -- if not better -- than those made with conventional staining techniques. They were able to make most images in under a minute. The smaller ones took less than a second, while larger images of a few square millimeters took five minutes. "This makes it possible to do it in real time in the operating room," Groot said.

Now that they've shown their approach works, the researchers are developing a hand-held device that a surgeon can use to identify a tumor's border during surgery. The incoming laser pulses can only reach a depth of about 100 micrometers into the tissue. To reach farther, Groot envisions attaching a needle that can pierce the tissue and deliver photons deeper.

"With our technique it's potentially possible to diagnose not only during an operation but possibly before surgery," she said.
Ahead of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem, which will take place from 19 to 21 April in New York, United States of America, UNAIDS has released a new report entitled Do no harm: health, human rights and people who use drugs.

The report shows that the failure of many countries to adopt health- and rights-based approaches resulted in no reduction in the global number of new HIV infections among people who inject drugs between 2010 and 2014. The world has missed the United Nations General Assembly's target set in 2011 to reduce HIV transmission among people who inject drugs by 50% by 2015.

"Business as usual is clearly getting us nowhere," said Michel Sidibe, Executive Director of UNAIDS. "The world must learn the lessons of the past 15 years, following the example of countries that have reversed their HIV epidemics among people who inject drugs by adopting harm reduction approaches that prioritize people's health and human rights."

The UNAIDS report presents the evidence base for five policy recommendations and 10 operational recommendations that countries should apply to turn around their HIV epidemics among people who inject drugs. These recommendations include the implementation of harm reduction programmes to scale and the decriminalization of the consumption and possession of drugs for personal use.

Data demonstrate that countries implementing health- and rights-based approaches have reduced new HIV infections among people who inject drugs. In other countries, strategies based on criminalization and aggressive law enforcement have created barriers to harm reduction while having little or no impact on the number of people who use drugs. Imprisoning people for the consumption and possession of drugs for personal use also increases their vulnerability to HIV and other infectious diseases, such as hepatitis B, hepatitis C and tuberculosis, while incarcerated.

UNAIDS has developed the UNAIDS 2016-2021 Strategy to put the world on track to ending the AIDS epidemic as a public health threat by 2030 - a target within the Sustainable Development Goals. A critical target within this Fast-Track approach is the expansion of a combination of HIV prevention and harm reduction services to reach 90% of people who inject drugs by 2020.

Achieving this target would require annual investment in outreach, needle-syringe distribution and opioid substitution therapy in low- and middle-income countries to increase to US$ 1.5 billion by 2020 - a fraction of the estimated US$ 100 billion already spent each year to reduce the supply of and demand for narcotic drugs. In many middle-income countries with large populations of people who inject drugs, harm reduction is funded predominantly by international donors and private foundations.

The UNAIDS report provides many examples of countries that are delivering better outcomes for people who inject drugs by adopting a health-centred approach.

The free voluntary methadone programme piloted in China in the early 2000s now serves more than 180 000 people. People who inject drugs accounted for less than 8% of people newly diagnosed with HIV in the country in 2013, compared with 43.9% in 2003.

In prisons in the Islamic Republic of Iran, health clinics provide integrated services for the treatment and prevention of sexually transmitted infections and for injecting drug use and HIV, including the distribution of condoms, sterile injecting equipment and opioid substitution therapy. At the end of 2014, 81.5% of people who inject drugs surveyed reported the use of sterile injecting equipment the last time they injected. Newly reported HIV cases among people who inject drugs in the Islamic Republic of Iran fell from a peak of 1897 in 2005 to 684 in 2013.

A peer-to-peer outreach programme in five cities began in 2011 in Kenya encouraging people to use sterile equipment when injecting drugs. At the beginning of the pilot, 51.6% of people who inject drugs reported the use of a sterile syringe the last time they injected; this had risen to 90% by 2015.

In the Republic of Moldova, the prison system has gradually expanded a comprehensive harm reduction programme started in 1999 that includes needle, syringe and condom distribution as well as opioid substitution therapy. Coverage of antiretroviral therapy among prisoners living with HIV increased from 2% in 2005 to 62% in 2013.

In 2000, Portugal passed a law that downgraded the purchase, possession and consumption of small amounts of narcotic drugs from criminal to administrative offences while increasing investment in health-based programmes. In 2013, among a total of 1093 new HIV infections reported, just 78 were related to drug use; in 2000 there were 1497 new HIV infections among people who use drugs among a total of 2825 new HIV infections. A similar downward trend among drug users has been observed for new infections of hepatitis C and B.

As well as being humane and health-oriented, people-centred programmes are also cost-effective and deliver wider social benefits, such as lower levels of drug-related crime and reduced pressure on health-care systems. For example, each dollar spent on Australia's needle-syringe programme has an estimated lifetime return on investment of up to US$ 5.50 in averted health-care costs. Opioid substitution therapy has been shown to be cost-effective in its capacity to reduce HIV infections - its cost-effectiveness substantially increases when its wider health, economic, psychological and social benefits are taken into account.

"Health is a human right. Investment in people-centred policies and programmes for people who use drugs is the crucial foundation for a global drugs policy that not only saves lives but is also cost-effective," said Mr Sidibe.

The UNAIDS Fast-Track approach has a set of targets for 2020 that include reducing new HIV infections to fewer than 500 000. It also calls on countries to ensure that 90% of the more than 12 million people who inject drugs worldwide have access to combination HIV prevention services, including needle-syringe programmes, opioid substitution therapy, condoms and access to counselling, care, testing and treatment services for bloodborne viruses, such as HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis. Achieving these targets will be a significant step towards ending the AIDS epidemic as a public health threat by 2030.
A noninvasive colorectal cancer screening test detected the disease in patients who had previously avoided more invasive screening measures, according to research presented at the AACR Annual Meeting 2016, April 16-20. The study of nearly 400 patients revealed four patients with cancers and 21 with advanced adenoma, or polyps.

"Despite the availability of various colon cancer screening options, more than 40 percent of Americans are not getting screened," said Mark Prince, MD, MBA, a director of gastroenterology with USMD Physician Services, a health system based in Dallas, Texas. "This study highlights the opportunity to expand the screening population by offering new, patient-friendly methods."

In August 2014, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Cologuard, a multi-target stool DNA test (mt-sDNA) that detects the presence of red blood cells and DNA mutations that can be associated with colon cancer. In October 2014, Cologuard was approved for Medicare coverage.

A 10,000-patient, prospectively conducted clinical trial for Cologuard, which was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, showed that Cologuard is 92 percent sensitive for detecting colorectal cancer and 42 percent sensitive for precancer, with a specificity of 87 percent.

In this study, Prince and colleagues performed a retrospective medical records review of Medicare-eligible patients treated by physicians in the USMD Physician Services. The study focused on patients at average risk for colorectal cancer - those without symptoms, a personal or family history of colorectal cancer, or polyps - who were not previously compliant with recommended guidelines for screening.

"We were interested to see whether the 'real-life' experience with Cologuard in clinical practice would be similar to the results seen in the clinical trial," Prince said. The patients' clinicians offered Cologuard screening to patients who had not had a colonoscopy screening in 10 or more years, or a fecal occult blood test in a year or more. During the 12-month study period, from October 2014 to September 2015, USMD providers ordered 393 mt-sDNA studies, and 347 patients completed the test, achieving 88.3 percent compliance. Fifty-one patients, representing 14.7 percent of the total, tested positive by Cologuard and were referred for diagnostic colonoscopies.

According to Prince, 46 patients, or 90.2 percent of those referred, received the follow-up colonoscopies. Three patients refused the procedure and two patients did not respond to physicians' attempts to follow up.

Among the 46 patients who had follow-up colonoscopies, four were diagnosed with colon cancer. Twenty-one were diagnosed with advanced adenoma, or polyps; nine had non-advanced adenoma; and 12 tested negative.

Prince said the discovery of four cases of colon cancer and numerous polyps, which have the potential to develop into cancer, supported the findings of the clinical trial. He noted that none of the patients had reported any symptoms and all had previously refused colonoscopies.

"Colon cancer screening saves lives," Prince said. "Colonoscopy is the best form of colon cancer screening, but for patients who will not have a colonoscopy, a noninvasive screening test like Cologuard is needed."

Colorectal cancer is the second deadliest form of cancer in the United States. This year, nearly 135,000 Americans will be diagnosed with the disease and 50,000 Americans will die of it.

Prince said a limitation of the study is that it involved only patients who were eligible for Medicare. "It will be interesting to analyze the use in commercially insured patients when insurance coverage becomes more widespread," he said. Prince also cautioned that any positive results from noninvasive screening tests should be followed up by a colonoscopy.

Prince is a speaker for Exact Sciences Corp., the maker of Cologuard.
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"However, in light of consistent press attention in this area we want you to hear about them from us."The Wall Street Journal on Monday cited unnamed sources as saying that federal prosecutors are investigating whether Theranos misled investors and regulators about its technology and its operations."The company continues to work closely with regulators and is cooperating fully with all investigations," said a Theranos spokesperson.Investigations into Theranos by departments of health in the states of Pennsylvania and Arizona, as well as by the US Food and Drug Administration, have been successfully closed, the startup said in the memo."The investigations by the SEC and the US Attorney's Office, which began following the publication of certain news articles, are focused on requesting documents and ongoing," Theranos said.Elizabeth Holmes took the crown of youngest "self-made" woman billionaire thanks to revolutionary blood tests touted by the Silicon Valley startup.She has been on the defensive for months after news reports questioning whether Theranos has indeed delivered a revolutionary new way to test blood.Media outlets knocking her from her pedestal had previously praised the 31-year-old as a visionary along the lines of Apple's famed co-founder Steve Jobs.She was only 19 when she founded Theranos in 2003, launching it with money her parents had set aside for her education.Holmes and Theranos were a hit with investors, who valued the startup at some $9 billion during the last funding round in 2014.Late last year, however, the Wall Street Journal published articles questioning the reliability of Theranos technology and the veracity of the startup's claims.The newspaper accused Theranos of using widely available commercial equipment -- debunking the firm's claims of "revolutionary" testing.The company and its boss have publicly defended Theranos and stood by its innovations.Earlier this year, US regulators warned Theranos in a letter that Holmes could face a temporary ban from being in the blood-testing business due to potentially dangerous problems found at its lab in Northern California.Source: AFP
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https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2016/04/18/2016-08887/abbvie-inc-et-al-withdrawal-of-approval-of-indications-related-to-the-coadministration-with-statins Hassan M. HPS2-THRIVE, AIM-HIGH and dal-OUTCOMES: HDL-cholesterol under attack. Glob Cardiol Sci Pract. 2014; 2014(3): 235-240. http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/ucm278837.htm

Several drug companies were in the process of developing a combination of statin with delayed release fenofibrate or fenofibric acid, a fibrate, or extended-release niacin. However, the combination does not appear to have any additional benefit with respect to preventing heart disease over the use of statin alone. In fact the side effects associated with the combination ensure that the benefits of the combination do not outweigh the risks, thus making the combination irrational.An earlier communication from the FDA had alerted that fenofibrate did not reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke. This was based on inputs from theLipid trial conducted in diabetes patients, where patients who received a combination of the statin simvastatin and fenofibrate did not experience additional benefit in preventing a serious cardiac event over those who were administered only simvastatin.Based on another study that used niacin with or without simvastatin, thescientists concluded that the combination of niacin and a statin did not provide additional benefit and was in fact associated with additional side effects. The trial was prematurely terminated.Another trial,evaluated the use of niacin along with another drug laropiprant in patients taking simvastatin with or without ezetimibe. The lack of efficacy along with a higher incidence of complications were noted with the combination containing niacin.Thus, the use of these combinations containing delayed release fenofibrate or extended-release niacin with a statin is not warranted. Physicians should avoid using fenofibrate or niacin in patients already taking a statin to control their cholesterol levels. The manufacturing pharmaceutical companies have themselves advised the FDA regarding withdrawal of the approval and will not be applying for a hearing against the withdrawal.Source: Medindia
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This research is not yet ready to move into clinical practice, said Fred Hutch epidemiologist Dr. Ulrike "Riki" Peters, one of the study authors. But it's the first attempt at combining so many different areas of colorectal cancer risk into one convenient risk predictor.Current risk stratification methods for colorectal cancer screening recommendations are relatively crude, based on age and family history alone. No family history of the disease? Start colonoscopies at age 50. Have an immediate relative who had colorectal cancer? Screen at age 40.But these methods are likely missing many at risk, Peters said. Eighty percent of those with colorectal cancer have no known family history. And, unlike some, it's a cancer where screening and prevention are tightly linked - colonoscopies can catch premalignant lesions, and if those lesions are removed, the patient is spared from ever developing cancer."That is a unique aspect of colorectal cancer," Peters said.Even though the disease is highly preventable if caught in the precancerous stages, colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths (for men and women combined) in the U.S., topped only by lung cancer. So along with encouraging people to get the recommended colonoscopies, a better sieve to catch those at higher risk of the disease could have an impact both on cancer prevention and on sparing those at low risk of the disease unnecessary procedures."At the end, what we want to do is prevent disease given limited resources," said Dr. Jihyoun Jeon, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who presented the risk prediction model in a poster at the AACR meeting. "We want to save resources but also, prevent as much [disease] as possible."The improved risk prediction method was developed using data from more than 18,000 people, approximately 8,400 of whom had colorectal cancer. These data come from two large colorectal cancer studies that Peters leads, known as the Genetics and Epidemiology of Colorectal Cancer Consortium (GECCO) and the Colorectal Transdisciplinary study (CORECT).The model incorporates 19 known environmental and lifestyle risk factors for the disease, as well as 64 common genetic risk factors.Peters and her colleagues have been working for years to identify the genetics behind colorectal cancer. It was always her goal to use that information to improve risk predictions, she said, but it's only recently that the team has amassed enough links between genes and disease to be able to work on the precision prevention piece of the puzzle.Source: Newswise
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"This is the first study to catalog significant health impacts from our changing climate in the Pacific region," said lead author Eileen Natuzzi, a general surgeon and public health researcher at San Diego State University."The findings support the notion that this region is vulnerable not only to the well-documented rising sea levels associated with climate change, but also to more severe storms like this flood, which we witnessed as well as cyclones like Pam and Winston that have followed it."The floods were particularly dangerous to children. Twenty-one died in the floods -- most were children under 14 who were swept away -- and 10 more children died of diarrhea and related complications in the days to follow. The storm broke water and sewer lines, and three of Honiara's nine health clinics were flooded.One month after the storm, reports of infectious disease transmission reached a peak with 2,134 cases of flu-like illness and 3,876 cases of diarrhea, mostly among children under age five. Researchers still do not know what caused the disease outbreaks, because there was no detailed analysis of pathogens found in the drinking water in the weeks after the flood.The study also found that 75 percent of Honiara's healthcare infrastructure was located in areas considered "vulnerable to destruction by a future flood event." Furthermore, one in three people in Honiara live within 500 meters (yards) of a river or coastline."Our findings could help governments and those providing aid improve readiness and response in order to save lives," said Natuzzi. Some strategies could include moving housing and hospitals away from flood-prone areas. "We can't change the weather, but we can change the capacity of communities to cope with the aftermath of extreme weather events," Natuzzi said.Source: AFP
PCR or Polymerase Chain Reaction is a revolutionary method that is used to amplify specific segments of DNA or RNA. This method was developed by Kary Mullis in the 1980s. Kary Mullis received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993, for his work on PCR.

PCR aids in increasing copies of genetic material that can be used for further analysis. This procedure allows genetic analysis from small samples of blood and tissue.

PCR amplification of DNA is used routinely in laboratories across the world, as it is fast and inexpensive.

PCR amplification occurs through a series of steps using primers. Primers are laboratory synthesized nucleotide sequences that bind to the complementary strands of DNA. They are the starting points for synthesis and elongation. Primers are designed to include the regions of DNA that need to be amplified by the PCR technique.

Denaturation of DNA:

The sample DNA is heated to 94-960C for a few minutes to denature the DNA and to separate the two strands of DNA.

Anneal Primers:

The temperature is then cooled down instantly to 50-650C to facilitate the attachment of the DNA primers to the complementary strands of DNA.

Once the DNA primers are attached to the complementary strands of DNA from the sample, DNA strand elongation is ready to begin.

Strand Elongation:

In this stage, there is strand elongation which occurs at a temperature of 720C. The enzyme Taq polymerase mediates this process by attaching nucleotides to the DNA primers based on the nucleotides present in the DNA strand of the sample.

On completing this step, an identical copy of the original DNA strand will be obtained.

The steps from DNA denaturation till strand elongation are repeated to get multiple copies of the original DNA strand. The process repeats several times till a billion copies are generated within a few hours.

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DNA Copies in Each PCR Cycle

Cycles in a PCR No of targeted DNA copies 1 2 2 4 3 8 4 16 5 32 6 64 7 128 8 256 9 512 10 1024 11 32,768 12 1,048,576

What are Added to the Reaction Mixture to be Loaded into a PCR for DNA Amplification?

The following are added to the PCR reaction mixture for DNA amplification:

Template DNA

Primer mix

Taq polymerase

Nucleotides

Buffer

What are the Advances That Have Allowed DNA Amplification to be Automated Using a PCR Machine?

A. DNA polymerases that are thermostable: In Vivo enzymes are used to separate the complementary strands of DNA that are to be amplified. In a PCR, heat is used to denature complementary strands, Taq polymerase was isolated from Thermus aquaticus, an organism that can withstand high temperatures. This allowed DNA amplification using a PCR machine.

B. Altering temperature bath: Thermal cyclers that alternate between varying temperatures allow automation of DNA amplification.

What is the Plateau Effect in a PCR?

During the last stages of a PCR, when the concentration of the product is between 0.3nM to 1.0nM, there is an arrest in the exponential rate of DNA amplification. This could be due to:

Degradation of nucleotides

Depletion of reactants

Competition for reactants

The different types of PCR are:

Reverse Transcription (Rt) PCR: This type of PCR is called Rt-PCR as a complementary DNA strand is initially developed from a sample RNA using the enzyme reverse transcriptase (Rt). Rt- PCR is used to study the expression levels of a specific RNA.

This type of PCR is called Rt-PCR as a complementary DNA strand is initially developed from a sample RNA using the enzyme reverse transcriptase (Rt). Rt- PCR is used to study the expression levels of a specific RNA. Quantitative PCR (qPCR) or Real Time PCR: This PCR method is used to assess the relative amount of DNA present in a sample using proportions present after amplification.

This PCR method is used to assess the relative amount of DNA present in a sample using proportions present after amplification. Colony PCR: In this type of PCR, colonies of bacteria are added. The initial denaturation step is extended for a longer period to promote cell disruption.

In this type of PCR, colonies of bacteria are added. The initial denaturation step is extended for a longer period to promote cell disruption. Hot Start PCR: During room temperature, Taq polymerase may lead to annealing of non-specific primers that result in the elongation of non-specific products. To avoid this, an essential component of the reaction mixture like nucleotides or magnesium ions are added after the initial step, when the temperature is increased to 960C.

This may be carried out manually or by placing wax in between the reaction mixture and the specific component. As the temperature increases, the wax melts and the component is mixed with the reaction mixture.

Nested PCR: This method of PCR has been designed to reduce non-specific amplification of DNA strands. Initially, an outer primer is added that covers a larger length of the DNA strand. After amplification, an inner primer is added, that amplifies the shorter, more specific region.

Touchdown PCR: In this procedure, the initial denaturation temperature is just below the temperature at which the primer melts. Over subsequent cycles, the denaturation temperature is lowered. This method of PCR is used to avoid non-specific primer annealing.

In this procedure, the initial denaturation temperature is just below the temperature at which the primer melts. Over subsequent cycles, the denaturation temperature is lowered. This method of PCR is used to avoid non-specific primer annealing. In-Situ or Slide PCR: The sample is placed on a slide and the reaction mixture is placed over that. This is then covered using a cover slip and the slide placed in a PCR for elongation.

The sample is placed on a slide and the reaction mixture is placed over that. This is then covered using a cover slip and the slide placed in a PCR for elongation. Inverse PCR: The primers are oriented to elongate DNA sequence in the reverse direction when compared to the standard PCR.

The primers are oriented to elongate DNA sequence in the reverse direction when compared to the standard PCR. Multiplex PCR: Multiple primers are used to sequence multiple target DNAs in the same reaction mixture.

Multiple primers are used to sequence multiple target DNAs in the same reaction mixture. Assembly PCR: Small fragments of DNA are used to generate large DNA oligonucleotides. This procedure can be used to produce synthetic genes.

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What is the Difference Between DNA Replication In Vivo and Strand Amplification in a PCR?

DNA replication in vivo or within the living system is different from strand amplification in a PCR in some ways.

The separation of the complementary strands in preparation for strand elongation takes place using the enzyme DNA helicase invivo while in a PCR the strands are separated using heat denaturation.

while in a PCR the strands are separated using heat denaturation. The DNA replication fork (area where the replication of DNA takes place) and Okazaki fragments are not formed in PCR amplification of DNA and strand elongation is continuous.

The primer for DNA replication is RNA while for PCR amplification, it is DNA.

The uses of DNA amplified by PCR are:

Identification of infections : Amplification of the DNA of viruses, bacteria and other microbes aid in easier identification of pathogens. This in turn aids in providing the right medical treatment. A classic example of the use of PCR amplified DNA in identification of diseases was during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic.

: Amplification of the DNA of viruses, bacteria and other microbes aid in easier identification of pathogens. This in turn aids in providing the right medical treatment. A classic example of the use of PCR amplified DNA in identification of diseases was during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic. Early identification of cancers : Cancers are formed when there are small mutations in genes. Amplification of DNA can be used to detect cancer causing mutations, even before symptoms arise.

: Cancers are formed when there are small mutations in genes. Amplification of DNA can be used to detect cancer causing mutations, even before symptoms arise. Organ donation- tissue matching : Tissue matching is an integral part of arranging donors for organ donation and transplantation. Accurate matching aids in lowering risk of tissue rejection by the host.

: Tissue matching is an integral part of arranging donors for organ donation and transplantation. Accurate matching aids in lowering risk of tissue rejection by the host. Forensic medicine: DNA from a single hair or a small sample of blood can be amplified using a PCR and then used in DNA fingerprinting to identify the individual under study. PCR amplification of DNA is used in forensic medicine to identify victims or suspects and also for paternity testing.

Evolutionary studies: Since even very small quantities of DNA from fossils can be amplified, PCR is used in evolutionary studies to study the similarities and the differences in genes between organisms.

Some of the limitations of PCR in gene synthesis are as follows:
Therapeutic hypothermia is a deliberate reduction of the body temperature that may be administered to patients who do not regain consciousness even after circulation is resumed following a cardiac arrest.

Temperature maintained during therapeutic hypothermia: 320C - 350C

Regulation of Body Temperature:

The human body regulates body temperature to ensure optimum functioning of organs and metabolic processes. At lower temperatures, enzyme production is lowered, affecting the metabolic processes.

During hot weather, body temperature is maintained by:

Perspiration - Sweating aids in heat loss

Conduction/ Convection of heat is used to maintain body temperature

Radiation of heat

During cold weather, body temperature is maintained by:

Shivering, that promotes heat production by the muscles

Constriction of blood vessels to the skin to reduce the transfer of heat from within the body

Hypothermia is a condition where the body temperature is lowered to below 350C. This can be a gradual process or could be due to a sudden decrease like an accident that leaves an individual stranded in heavy snow.

As the temperature decreases, the symptoms of the condition become more severe, requiring immediate medical attention. There are three different stages of hypothermia, depending upon the temperature:

Mild Hypothermia: ( 32-35 0 C) In mild hypothermia, the patient begins to shiver rapidly, but shivering stops around 33 0 C. The person will seem quiet and withdrawn with slurred speech. The blood pressure of the patient is also lowered.

( 32-35 C) In mild hypothermia, the patient begins to shiver rapidly, but shivering stops around 33 C. The person will seem quiet and withdrawn with slurred speech. The blood pressure of the patient is also lowered. Moderate Hypothermia: (28-32 0 C) In moderate hypothermia, blood pressure and pulse of the patient is considerably lowered with no voluntary movements of the body. The person may turn unresponsive below 31 0 C.

(28-32 C) In moderate hypothermia, blood pressure and pulse of the patient is considerably lowered with no voluntary movements of the body. The person may turn unresponsive below 31 C. Severe Hypothermia: (<270C) The patient appears to be dead and is unresponsive.

What is Therapeutic Hypothermia?

Therapeutic hypothermia involves the lowering of body temperature to slow down metabolic process, especially those that affect the brain triggered by a cardiac arrest that occurs outside the safety of a hospital.

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Statistics show that nearly 300,000 people in America suffer from cardiac arrests outside the hospital, limiting their access to immediate medical care. Only about 40% of these patients receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation which results in lower number of cardiac arrest survivors.

In India, there is a considerable delay in bringing cardiac arrest patients to the hospital.

In North America, the time taken for a person who suffers a cardiac arrest to reach emergency unit in a hospital is between 110 and 140 minutes

In India, the time taken for a cardiac patient to reach the emergency unit in a hospital is between 180 and 330 minutes.

The delay in transfer is due to various reasons including:

Traffic snarls

Long distances to reach the hospitals

Only 5.4% of patients in India who suffer from cardiac arrest use an ambulance

Patients first visit primary/family doctor before reaching the emergency unit of a hospital

The prolonged time increases the risk for brain damage due to lack of oxygen to the brain.

How brain damage occurs after a cardiac arrest?

A cardiac arrest results in lowered oxygen to the brain due to lowered blood pressure/ activity of the heart.

The low oxygen level in the brain is called hypoxia and can lead to:

Absence of synaptic transmissions



Cerebral edema due to damage to the blood-brain barrier.

Prolonged hypoxia in the brain can lead to increased brain damage that can even lead to brain death. When cardiac resuscitation procedures are initiated shortly after a cardiac arrest, the brain is restored with blood supply.

When blood supply and thereby, oxygen supply is restored to the brain, there is further damage caused to the brain.

Increase in cerebral edema.

Inflammatory pathways are initiated leading to increased damage to brain tissue.

Initiation of chemical cascades that lead to the destruction of brain cells.

Therapeutic hypothermia is used to lower the body temperature so that

Chances of survival after a cardiac arrest are improved due to relatively lower damage to the brain.

Quality of life after a cardiac arrest is improved as the brain suffers less damage on recovery from cardiac arrest.

Brain damage after a cardiac arrest:

Part of the brain Function Effects of hypoxia after cardiac arrest Basal ganglia, caudate Control of motor function, learning, behaviour and memory Loss in attention, memory, dystonia and loss of motor functions Hippocampus Visual, memory, learning abilities Memory lapses, seizure and amnesia Basal cortex Learning, language ability, consciousness, cognition and speech. Coma, a vegetative state of the patient, seizures, impairment of speech and cortical blindness Cerebellum (most importantly, the Purkinje cells) Co-ordination, gait, cognition, balance Dysmetria or lack of co-ordinated movement, fine motor impairment

The first documented evidence was by Edwin Smith Papyrus, written more than 5,000 years ago.

Hippocrates used cold packing consisting of ice and snow to lower hemorrhage in the wounded patients and for patients suffering from tetanus.

Dr James Currie, in the late 1700 performed experiment of therapeutic hypothermia on patients to study the effect of cooling on the body, respiration and pulse.

Napoleans chief surgeon used cold packs to cool limbs before they were amputated, to lower pain.

Since 1803, Russians use therapeutic hypothermia to resuscitate patients by placing them in snow.

Sir William Osler, from Johns Hopkins University, studied the effect of therapeutic hypothermia on typhoid patients and noticed a decline in mortality from 24.2% to 7.1%.

Dr Temple Fay in 1938 reintroduced therapeutic hypothermia to medical care by cooling a patient with metastatic cancer and reducing pain symptoms. He was the first to discover cooling blankets, which are special insulated blankets that aid in lowering body temperature.

In 1950, Bigelow and colleagues demonstrated the benefit of resorting to therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest in animals.

In 1958, the first published use of therapeutic hypothermia for patients in coma after a cardiac arrest was reported. The temperature of hypothermia was maintained at 33 0 C and 6 out of the 12 patients survived.

C and 6 out of the 12 patients survived. In 1964 Dr Peter Safar advocated the use of therapeutic hypothermia if patients did not show any central nervous system activity even after 30 minutes of resumption of blood circulation.

The use of therapeutic hypothermia was not popularly used during this period, even though studies showed their benefit, because of the side effects produced. Earlier moderate hypothermia, which is maintenance of body temperature between 33-280C was advocated, but it resulted in:

Coagulopathy

Arrhythmias

Infections

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In the 1980s, there was a resurgence of therapeutic hypothermia, when mild hypothermia was also found to have far reaching benefits for patients after brain injury following traumatic accidents or after cardiac resuscitation.

Bernard et al in a study on comatose patients after cardiac arrest showed that patients who were treated with therapeutic hypothermia had a 49% chance of survival while non-treated patients had 26%.

Peberdy and colleagues studied the effect of therapeutic hypothermia on out of hospital cardiac arrest patients and found that:

Better neurological symptoms were exhibited by therapeutic hyperthermia treated patients (55%) than control patients (39%).

6 months mortality rate among the treated patients (41%) was lower than in the control patients (55%).

Acute Phase:

This phase of therapeutic hypothermia extends from minutes to hours and it has the following benefits on brain activity:

For every 1 0 C drop in temperature, cerebral metabolic rate is lowered by 6 to 7%.

C drop in temperature, cerebral metabolic rate is lowered by 6 to 7%. Reduction in the demand for oxygen.

Preservation of phosphates and energy.

Prevention of acidosis.

Improves the utilization of glucose in the brain.

Lowers the release of excitatory amino acids (which lead to neural injury).

Prevents synthesis of nitrous oxide mediated by glutamate.

Subacute Phase:

This phase of therapeutic hypothermia extends from hours to days. The brain may have undergone secondary injury mechanism that results in the formation of reactive oxygen species, inflammation and programmed cell death. Hypothermia will result in:

Oxidative stress markers are reduced.

50% reduction in hydrogen peroxide concentrations.

The neurons then retain viability.

Inflammatory responses after brain injury are the leading cause of damage to brain cells, post injury. Hypothermia lowers the expression of:

Inflammatory cytokines



Neutrophils



Endothelial molecules



Monocyte infiltration

Neural injury results in the death of cells, but hypothermia aids in release of factors that prevent death and the secretion of factors (p53) that promote repair.

Preserves the blood brain barrier.

Chronic Phase:

This phase of therapeutic hypothermia extends from weeks to months.

Hypothermia for 4 to 24 hours aids in post-ischemic neurogenesis and provides benefits that are not observed when conducted for 45 minutes or less.

Lowers reactive oxygen species production.

Restricts apoptosis (programmed cell death) and inflammation.

Aids in neuronal cell regeneration and neuronal circuit repair.

There are three phases involved in therapeutic hypothermia: induction or the cooling phase, maintenance and the re-warming phase.

Induction Phase:

The induction phase involves lowering of the core body temperature to the required temperature. This may be done through internal cooling or surface cooling method.

Internal cooling - In this method of cooling the body, a catheter is inserted into the femoral vein which is in the groin of the patient. This catheter is inserted till it is just below the heart in the inferior vena cava. As soon as the catheter is in position, cool fluid (40C) is injected through it to cool the blood that flows near it. The circulation of this cooled blood aids in lowering the core body temperature.

External or surface cooling method - Thigh pads and chest pads are fastened onto the patient and water tubes are attached to these pads. Cold fluid is circulated through these pads to lower temperature.

It normally takes 30 minutes to cool the body temperature by 2 to 2.50C. Sometimes, a combination of both the methods of cooling is adopted. Once the temperature is achieved, cooling blankets are placed over the patient.

Maintenance:

The temperature of the patient should be maintained between the induction phase and the re-warming phase by attaching cooling blankets placed over the patient to cooling machine.

The patients vitals like blood pressure, urine creatinine and electrolyte levels are monitored. Anesthesia is provided to an extent that allows neurological tests to be monitored. Shivering is controlled by providing neuromuscular blocking agents.

Rewarming:

The re-warming procedure is a gradual process and should take place over a period of 12 hours. The temperature of the cooling machine is increased slowly till the temperature is increased.

In the event of severe bleeding, active re-warming procedures are carried out which allows return to normal temperature within 8 hours.

Therapeutic hypothermia produces both positive and increases the risk for negative effects on the various organ systems.

Cardiovascular System:

Hypothermia aids in improving left ventricular filling.

Increases the risk for arrhythmias, which is more pronounced below 30 0 C.

C. Increases risk for cardiomyopathy.

Pulmonary Effects:

Increases risk for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).

Decreases oxygen consumption and carbon -di-oxide production.

Lowered inflammatory response due to hypothermia; leads to infections like pneumonia.

Patients with decontaminated digestive tract showed lower rate of infection.

Coagulation of Blood:

Platelet count is lowered.

Hemoglobin levels remain the same.

There is a low risk of bleeding in patients without a history of bleeding disorder. Patients with bleeding disorder should not be cooled lower than 350C.

Gastro-intestinal, Renal and Endocrine Effects:

Electrolyte disorders are common.

Potassium levels are lowered.

Lowers insulin sensitivity.

Delayed ileus and gastric emptying.

In patients receiving therapeutic hypothermia, there are marked changes in drug metabolism as there is a delay in drug clearance in the body. This could increase the potency of the drug as it is retained for longer periods in the body.
In his February 1, 2016 column in the Saudi London-based daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Egyptian intellectual Mamoun Fandy harshly criticized the Arab countries for failing to take responsibility for resolving the Syria crisis and for instead waiting for salvation from the West.

Fandy wrote that the Arab silence in light of the crisis, which he said "lies between Hitler's Nazism" and the atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda, is a mark of shame for them, and that they must learn from the European mobilization to resolve a similar crisis - the one in Yugoslavia. He also accused UN officials of seeking to prolong global crises, not solve them, and criticized Syrian society as well for not resolving the crisis.

The following are excerpts from Fandy's column:[1]





Mamoun Fandy (Image: aawsat.com)

"When we speak of the Syrian opposition's consent or refusal to attend the UN-sponsored Geneva talks, everyone - the regime, the opposition, and the international community - must keep in mind that Syria in its current situation is the greatest human tragedy since World War II. This is clear from the statistical data, particularly that published by the UN commissions on refugee affairs. Of Syria's 22 million residents, 45% have left the country and have become refugees [in foreign countries], or have been displaced within Syria, moving to locations that are less dangerousOC This has exposed many children to the dangers of violence and war. We do not know what Syria will look like when the violence stops, or what new Syrian figure will emerge from this war. The main point is not which cities are besieged by the regime and which are surrounded by the opposition, or which have fallen to extremists who humiliate their residents. The story of the Yazidis is only one of the shameful events that will haunt us Arabs in the future.

"What we see in Syria is an absolute violation of human dignity, and the world cannot evade making a decision on what it wants to do in light of this shame - and neither can we Arabs. What is happening in Syria lies between Hitler's Nazism and Holocaust, the mass graves in Srebrenica [in Bosnia] following the fall of Yugoslavia, or the atrocities in Rwanda... It is a mark of shame for the [Arab] Ummah, which, though it has long boasted of its morality, has failed its first testOC

"When we compare the Syrian crisis, from its onset through its five years, to the case of Bosnia, for example, we see that the Europeans, unlike the Arabs, took responsibility for Bosnia and together made a decision: There was no place for an ongoing civil war in central Europe; there was no room for a failed state in the heart of Europe that would attract the world's madmen; and there was no room for half measures. Therefore, they launched a military assault, and also carried out the Dayton Accords.[2]

"This [European] show of responsibility and seriousness in dealing with the problem of Bosnia and Herzegovina is what brought about the current stability in the former Yugoslav republics of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia. The Europeans took responsibility, because they do not want another mark of shame in their history, after the Jewish Holocaust. They do not want it said that today they burned the Muslims just as in the past they burned the Jews.

"[In contrast, in the Syria crisis,] although none of them are actually sitting at the negotiating table, the Arab countries are actively [exploiting] the differences [among the sides in the crisis] rather than forcing them to reach an agreement.

"Egypt, for example, with its substantial experience in diplomacy, has not presented a single idea for a framework for a solution... and has adopted the diplomacy of creative silence, interpreted by each as he sees fit - pro-regime or pro-revolution. But it is neither, because Egypt is preoccupied with its domestic situation, which is in itself very perilous.

"The Arabs are waiting for the Syria crisis to be resolved by non-Arab elements - Russia, which has the most force on Syrian soil, or the international community, which became convinced that the Syria crisis was a mark of shame for it only after refugees began arriving in Europe and impacting the EU.

"The UN, as it always does, holds summits and appoints special envoys who repeatedly postpone negotiations. This is because the UN is a refuge for retired diplomats whose countries pass the burden of their salaries and of supporting them and their families in luxury on to the UN. As far as these functionaries are concerned, solving crises means an end to their livelihood and life of ease, so they see prolonging any problem as a good thing in itself.

"The Syria crisis is a mark of shame for both the Arabs and the international community... [and] for the Arab countries and societies, particularly the Syrian society itself. Its culture has failed to present a concept that can save people from the humanitarian crisis, let alone the sectarian crisis. The Syrians must revive their humanity, and the first test of this is in Geneva. As for the Arabs, I believe we need a moral core that will save us from the useless talk on the TV screens - because policy is set behind closed doors, not on television."

Endnotes:
On April 18, 2016, a bomb went off on a No. 12 bus in Jerusalem, wounding 21 people. This attack follows a period of relative calm in terms of Palestinian attacks on Israel.

Thus far, Palestinian Authority officials have issued no condemnation of the attack. Moreover, reports that Palestinian presidency spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh had condemned the attack were denied by Fatah spokesman Osama Al-Qawasmi.

All the Palestinian factions have justified the attack: Fatah claimed that it was a natural response to Israel's actions, and Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other factions welcomed the attack and expressed enthusiastic support for it. Additionally, many gloating posters and cartoons were posted on social media.

Following is a review of reactions to the attack, in the Palestinian press and by Palestinian officials:

Fatah Spokesmen: Attack Is A "Natural Response" To Israel's Actions

Statements by Fatah spokesmen indicated that the movement is not condemning the attack, and is even justifying it.

Fatah Jerusalem spokesman Ra'fat 'Alian called the attack a "natural response" to Israel's actions. He said: "What happened today on the Israeli bus in occupied Jerusalem was a natural response to the killing, arrests, and siege carried out by Israel against the Palestinian people, as well as to its repeated incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque... If Israel is seeking a security solution, [it must know] that there can be no security solutions with the Palestinian people. The only solution is for Israel to implement the legitimate international resolutions."[1]

Fatah spokesman Osama Al-Qawasmi denied a claim by Hamas that Palestinian presidency spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh had condemned the attack, stating: "The Hamas media is expert at lies, falsifications, and forgeries. Several Hamas news agencies spread lies about an alleged statement by the fighter Nabil Abu Rudeineh condemning the blast in occupied Jerusalem." According to Al-Qawasmi, Abu Rudeineh said nothing about the Jerusalem attack, and added that statements by Palestinian officials are only issued by the official Wafa news agency. He called on Hamas to "cease these infantile methods and blatant falsehoods."[2]

Concurrently, the Facebook page of the 'Ain Al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon posted a flier bearing the Fatah logo and expressing enthusiastic support for the attack. It showed an image of the burning bus with the title: "Greetings from the Palestinian people on the occasion of the Jewish holiday of Passover."



Flier with Fatah logo on the 'Ain Al-Hilweh refugee camp's Facebook page (Facebook.com/AismatShatatAinAlHelwe, April 19, 2016)

Hamas, PIJ, Other Factions Praise "Heroic Action" That Proves That The Intifada Is Continuing

The bombing was widely covered in Hamas media, which, along with PIJ and other factions, expressed enthusiastic support for the attack, and even called it a turning point in the "Al-Quds Intifada."

In a press release posted on Hamas's website and Twitter account, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri stated: "Hamas praises the Al-Quds [Jerusalem] operation and sees it as a natural response to the Israeli crimes, specifically public executions, and to the fact that [Israel] is defiling the Al-Aqsa Mosque."[3]



Hamas's Twitter account tweeted Abu Zuhri's statement praising the attack (Twitter.com/hamasinfo, April 18, 2016)

On his Facebook page, Hamas official Musa Abu Marzouk praised the attack, linking it with Palestinian Prisoners Day, on April 17, and the recent anniversary of the 2004 assassination of Hamas official 'Abd Al-'Aziz Al-Rantisi and the 1998 assassination of Fatah official Khalil Al-Wazir. He wrote: "This is how our people marks the anniversary of its martyrs, the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Lion of Palestine, Dr. ['Abd Al-'Aziz] Al-Rantisi and of Abu Jihad, Khalil Al-Wazir. This is the most beautiful gift to our hero prisoners, and constitutes an unbreakable promise to release you, oh heroes who stand fast and disregard their pain. This is a message to the oppressors, the occupiers, and the settlers: You will not be safe until our people are safe. The oppression will not last forever. Truth will triumph, and the day of victory is at hand."[4]



Abu Marzouk's Facebook post (Facebook.com/Dr.Mousa.Abumarzook, April 18, 2016)

Hamas official Mushir Al-Masri said: "Starting today, Jerusalem will not be safe for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and his soldiers. The Al-Quds intifada will humiliate the leaders of the occupation as long as their crimes on this land persist... [The occupation] that bragged about exposing a small resistance tunnel to raise the morale of its soldiers was today humiliated by the heroic action on the bus."[5]

PIJ also praised the attack, in a statement that read: "The Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine praises the Jerusalem operation, and affirms that this is a powerful message that underlines the ongoing intifada and the importance of resistance as an option that is deeply rooted in the Palestinian logic and conscience."[6]

The attack was also supported by officials in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). PFLP Central Committee Member Hani Al-Thawabteh called the operation in "occupied Jerusalem" a "stabbing" that "breached" Israeli security, especially in light of Israel's preparation and security measures. He said: "We praise this heroic action. We support any operation that takes a heavy toll on the occupation. The occupation should realize that it is losing..." [7]

DFLP Central Committee Member Muhammad Khalaf said: "The operation is ringing slap in the face of the occupation and a natural response to the crimes and public executions against our people." He added that such "quality operations" will continue as long as the "occupation's crimes" continue, because the resistance has grown impatient and will be ready to respond "at any time and place that it can, and will carry out painful suicide operations against the occupation."[8]

It was also reported that the Popular Resistance Committees, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and the Al-Ahrar movement also praised the attack.[9]

Widespread Support On Social Media For Attacks

Social media accounts featured numerous images and cartoons expressing joy at the attack, with hashtags such as "No. 12 Bus" and "The Roof of the Bus Goes Flying" - the title of an intifada song recently published by Hamas.[10] It should be mentioned that following the attack, Hamas released a new version of the song.[11]

Following are several examples:



Terrified Jews atop the roof of the "Jerusalem-Hell" bus line, launched skyward by a bomb (Facebook.com/alresalahNet, April 18, 2016)



Cartoon by well-known Gaza cartoonist Omayya Joha shows a Palestinian woman distributing sweets following the attack, saying: "Blessed be the hands of the one who blew up the bus this afternoon... and what you have seen is only a drop in the ocean (ululating)" (Facebook.com/alresalahNet, April 18, 2016)



Palestinian watching news of attack on TV calls to the mother of the martyr to "ululate" joyfully because "the roof of the bus went flying." (Facebook.com/alresalahNet, April 18, 2016)



Image of the burned bus with the caption "This [Attack] Quenches The Thirst" (Facebook.com/642225705925329, April 18, 2016)

Other graphics depicted the bombing as a change in the nature of the intifada:



"The knife is no longer enough. Now the age of explosions will heal us" (Facebook.com/Tul.islamic, April 18, 2016)



Image of the burned bus with the caption "Message No. 1" (Facebook.com/FalestinNews, April 18, 2016)

Several images linked the attack to the work of "The Engineer," Yahya Ayyash, Hamas's chief bomb maker who masterminded a series of deadly bus bombings in Israel between 1992 and 1995, and who was assassinated by Israel in 1996.



"Ayyash was here!" (Facebook.com/alresalahNet, April 18, 2016)



"The days of Ayyash have returned" (Facebook.com/WestBank.Camps, April 18, 2016)

Others tied the attack to the anniversary of the assassination of Hamas official 'Abd Al-'Aziz Al-Rantisi.



"On the anniversary of Al-Rantisi's death, the roof of the bus went flying" (Facebook.com/262494854095870, April 18, 2016)

Endnotes:
Shuakhevi Hydro Power Plant to open in 2017

From summer 2017, the Shuakhevi Hydro Power Plant (HPP) will be fully operational, helping Georgia tap into its hydropower potential and achieve energy self-sufficiency.As of today, 75 percent of construction work has been completed. Works at the power station are due to be fully completed by autumn 2016, according to the press office of Georgias Prime Minister today.The Shuakhevi HPP is a run-of-the-river plant currently under construction in Georgias Adjara region. Construction on the project began in 2013.The HPP is expected to produce 450 gigawatt (GW) hours of power annually and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 200,000 tonnes per year.Last year several international financial institutions teamed up to help Georgia build the Shuakhevi HPP by investing $400 million USD in the construction and operation of the power plant.The last phase of construction was financed by Adjaristsqali Georgia  a joint venture between Indias Tata Power and Norway's Clean Energy Invest (40 percent each), and the remaining 20 percent by the International Finance Corporation (IFC).Adjaristsqali Georgia was a special purpose vehicle set up to develop hydropower resources on the Adjaristsqali River and its tributaries in Adjara, in south-western Georgia.The $250 million debt financing arranged by IFC represented the largest-ever private hydropower investment in Georgia, consisting of two $90 million long-term senior loans; one from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and $70 million from IFC.IFCs total investment in this project is $104 million, which includes a $34 million equity investment in the project company.The Shuakhevi HPP aimed to satisfy Georgias electricity demand during winter, reducing dependence on imported fuel and increase renewable energy output. It will also foster cross-border electricity trading at other times of the year by exporting electricity to Turkey through a transmission line financed by EBRD. The project was designed to benefit local communities by creating jobs, boosting municipal incomes and upgrading local roads.The Shuakhevi project is the first hydropower project in Georgia certified by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for carbon emission reductions.
The Alternate Foreign Minister for European Affairs, Nikos Xydakis, met at the Foreign Ministry today with the new Iranian Ambassador to Athens, Majid M. Shabestari,



During the meeting, which took place in a friendly climate, ways were considered to upgrade bilateral cooperation in the economic, political and education sectors, within the framework of the favorable state of affairs that has been created following the Prime Ministers recent visit to Iran and the conclusion of the international agreement on Irans nuclear program.
Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias is carrying out a two-day visit to Paris. On Tuesday, 19 April, he will have a one-on-one meeting, talks and a working dinner with the French Secretary of State for European Affairs, Harlem Desir.



On Wednesday, 20 April, he will meet at the French Foreign Ministry (Quai dOrsay) with French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. Following their talks, the two Ministers will make statements to the news media.



While in Paris, Mr. Kotzias will also meet with academics and members of think tanks.
The Service of Diplomatic and Historical Archives of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs is organizing an international Conference on the topic Digital and electronic records and archives at the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the European Union. The Conference will take place on Tuesday 19 April, at 17:30, in the Amphitheatre Y. Kranidiotis (Akadimias 1, Athens).



During the Conference, the Service of Diplomatic and Historical Archives will have the opportunity to present the, absolutely unique in Europe, project of digitization of the archival material of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the period 1821-1923, which can be freely accessed through the internet.



Speakers at the Conference, which will be held in English, will also be the Directors of the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Germany, the Netherlands and Latvia, who will present digitization and electronic archives and records projects in their Ministries.



A discussion with the audience will follow. Find attached an invitation and a programme of the Conference.

conference programme
The National Council on Foreign Policy (NCFP) will convene at the Foreign Ministry at 12:00 on Tuesday, 26 April, under the chairmanship of Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias.



The main subject of the meeting will be Greek-Turkish relations.
The Alternate Foreign Minister for European Affairs, Nikos Xydakis, represented the Greek government, as a keynote speaker, at the memorial ceremony marking the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Ravensbruck concentration camp. The ceremony included speeches from survivors or descendants of survivors of the concentration camp, the mayor of Ravensbruck and members of the local government. The memorial events were also participated in by representatives of many European countries, representatives of the Catholic Church and Judaism, anti-fascist associations, and representatives of political- and social-rights movements.



Mr. Xydakis visited the facilities of the former concentration camp, guided by Eleni Vinkel, a representative of the Association of Friends of Ravensbruck in Berlin. Shortly beforehand, the Greek delegation had carried out the unveiling of a commemorative plaque for the Greek women and men who were inmates of the camp, with the inscription Between 1943 and 1945 over 290 Greek men and women were imprisoned in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Brothers and sisters, we do not forget you.



During the unveiling ceremony, those in attendance read out the names of the Ravensbruck inmates, as compiled by the Greek Association of Friends of Ravensbruck, an initiative of the Greeks of Germany. The Greek-German choir Polyphonia then sang extracts from Mauthausen, by Mikis Theodorakis and Iacovos Kambanellis. The participants in the memorial event also deposited roses in the lake where the ashes of the victims of the concentration camps crematorium were thrown; a lake the existence of which was, according to witnesses, unknown to the prisoners of the concentration camp.



We are here today to remember the victims of this brutality. Symbolically, we will proceed to the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the more than 290 Greek women and men who were imprisoned here, before they were taken to Buchenwald and elsewhere for extermination. This symbolic action does not concern only specific persons. It is also for all of the other Greek patriots who were imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps in Germany, in occupied Poland, in Austria, as well as in the Gestapo hellholes in Greece, those executed in the villages and cities of our country. People who, whether because they resisted, or because they happened to be Jews, or even because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, found themselves enmeshed in the extermination machine of the Nazi concentration camps. In fact, in the case of the 290 Greek women and men who were imprisoned in Ravensbruck, perhaps we should consider them fortunate in that, instead of being sent directly for immediate extermination in the gas chambers, the were merely sent to do forced labour at the nearby facilities of Siemens and other companies. But neither do we forget those who bore the nearly total destruction brought upon Greece by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, those who survived the Nazi atrocities and the famine that leveled the country in the wake of the plundering of the Greek economy by the invaders, Mr. Xydakis noted in his speech.



But for all of the incredible crimes that took place in the concentration camps in Germany, Poland or Austria, there is the brutal reflection of the other heinous crime of the destruction of whole villages and local communities within the occupied countries. Mr. Xydakis continued. I believe that atrocities like these, which were perpetrated in numerous towns and communities in Greece, as well as in the other occupied countries, are the other side of the same coin. The Network of Martyred Towns and Communities in my country numbers over 95 Martyred Sites. I would like to invite all of you, but mainly the German youth, to come to our country to visit some of these Sites of Martyrdom, to understand the other side: that of a local community that was more or less wiped out on the pretext of combating rebels. On this pretext, infants and the aged alike, men and women of all ages, were murdered in cold blood. Such collective traumas leave open wounds for many generations.



So I wonder what constitutes vindication for the victims, as well as for those people  in the case where they managed to survive all of these inconceivable crimes  whose lives were marred indelibly. I wonder if the literature of memory suffices to vindicate their Golgotha.



I firmly believe that the vindication of all of these people can result only from a political stance on the part of persons, governments and institutions; a stance centered on the Person and not on profit, Mr. Xydakis highlighted.



In closing his speech, Mr. Xydakis stated that Only when citizens as well as members of governments fully respect human existence and we recognize for the foreigner the same rights we recognize for ourselves  and for ourselves the same responsibilities as those of others  then perhaps we will have taken a small step towards a more peaceful and just world.



The Ravensbruck unveiling brought to a close Mr. Xydakis three-day visit to Berlin.
At the urging of a mayoral aide who cited a new city program to monitor mentally ill people considered potentially violent, the man was involuntarily hospitalized for a week. A judge finally ordered his release, ruling that the man's commitment violated his civil rights and that bureaucrats had meddled in his medical treatment.

The case crystallizes the unease that has surrounded the NYC Safe program since Mayor Bill de Blasio launched it last summer after some high-profile attacks raised alarm about the mentally ill.

The program  apparently unique among American cities  keeps tabs on a roster of people with psychiatric problems and a history of violence, hoping to help them before they reach a breaking point.

So far, NYC Safe is monitoring more than 100 people, more than half of whom are in jail, prison or a locked hospital ward. City officials say administration policy is not to divulge who is on the list, though they say those on it are told.

Civil liberties and mental health advocates are concerned about the potential for infringements on liberty and privacy abuses as officials share sensitive information about people among various city agencies.

According to a city memo obtained by The Associated Press, homeless shelters refer people to the list based on standards as broad as escalating "aggressive and alarming" conduct. In other cases, mayoral aides simply pick cases from crime stories in newspapers. And there's not yet a mechanism for people to get off the list once they're on it.

"Politics is interjected into this difficult decision of who's a danger to themselves and others," said Norman Siegel, former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

City officials say they never should have interfered in clinical decisions. While they will continue tracking certain people, they now plan to expand their effort via data analysis, to spot patterns of when troubled people get to the edge of violence  perhaps within a certain amount of time after getting out of jail or a hospital.

"We're addressing an issue that's a very difficult problem at the center of civil liberties and public safety," said Elizabeth Glazer, director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. The goal, she said, is a program that's "respectful of privacy and provides a way for people to get help."

The 26-year-old man who sued over his commitment isn't identified in court records. His lawyers declined to comment.

He had a history of violence but showed no signs of serious mental illness when brought in September to Bellevue Hospital, which released him, according to the judge's decision. But then a mayor's office liaison recommended the hospital keep him because he was on the NYC Safe list.

To justify doing that, a doctor said the man was dangerous, citing episodes of troubling behavior at the hospital. But, the judge noted, hospital records showed the man began threatening violence only after learning he was being held indefinitely under the new program.

Glazer said her office's call for committing the man "shouldn't have happened."

The $22-million-a-year NYC Safe is similar to programs universities started after campus shootings to monitor students who may turn violent.

New York's began last year after a spate of attacks allegedly committed by mentally unstable people, including a mother accused of smothering her 20-month-old son in a burger joint bathroom, and a former homeless shelter resident charged with kidnapping and killing the shelter's director. The mayor speeded up the unveiling of NYC Safe after a homeless man abruptly punched a tourist, according to emails obtained by the AP.

The program is designed to enlist law enforcement, health services, homeless shelters and other agencies in looking for signals before someone spirals into violence.

NYC Safe staffers monitor subjects' criminal cases, asking prosecutors to keep them informed about court dates. They check that people on the list show up for treatment, and they sometimes send mental health workers to visit. They also work to connect people with housing, jobs or other services after they get out of jail or the hospital.

"The city is trying to do the right thing," said Mark Murphy of the advocacy group Disability Rights New York, "but it's not clear the people involved get a say in this."

While advocates worry that NYC Safe runs the risk of equating mental illness with violence, city officials have also faced questions of whether the program goes far enough.

It wasn't monitoring a man suspected of killing his homeless shelter roommate in January. The now-dead suspect had a record of psychiatric problems but not violence, officials said.

Glazer said she hopes that NYC Safe can "get better at noticing flags."
Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the new forces will largely be used to advise Iraqi forces closer to the front lines.

The announcement comes during a push to retake the key city of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest. The decision reflect weeks of discussions with commanders and Iraqi leaders, and a decision by President Barack Obama to increase the authorized troop level in Iraq by 217  or from 3,870 to 4,087.

Most of the additional troops would probably be Army special forces, who have been used to advise and assist the Iraqis. The remainder would include some trainers, security forces for the advisers, and more maintenance teams for the Apaches.

The advise-and-assist teams  made up of about a dozen troops each  would embed with Iraqi brigades and battalions, putting them closer to the fight, and at greater risk from mortars and rocket fire. They would have security forces with them.
In a few moments, there is only impenetrable darkness.

A woman screams.

The sound muffles through old floorboards. The encroaching darkness seems to trigger whatever is happening in the building's basement.

Down creaky stairs, at the end of a dusty, stone and concrete corridor, eight figures huddle in the infirmary kitchen near a waist-high wooden block once used as a base for chopping raw meat. The woman who screamed, Jamie Toney-Terharr, rejoins the group after a short retreat into an adjacent dining area.

"Something pulled the back of my shirt!" she yells. A few people in the kitchen laugh.

A man standing near the center of the group, Scott Felger, holds a device that crackles as it emits a multi-color light display, casting angular shadows against the frayed wallpaper of the kitchen as it cycles backward through radio frequencies. Occasionally, it sounds like someone is trying to speak through the device. They call it a spirit box.

The group grows silent as Felger asks the room a question.

"How did you hurt your head?"

They wait. No response.

"We want to know," Felger says more intently, "how did you hurt your head?"

Something appears to answer.

The sound of small objects smacking the linoleum floor reverberate from opposite corners in the kitchen. It's impossible to tell what source the noises are coming from in the dark. The sounds inspire another scream and a quick retreat from Jamie.

This is one of many encounters the two overnight tour groups have inside the infirmary. The investigation teams capture bizarre audio recordings known as EVPs. One group witnesses a plank of wood being tossed across the cavernous space of the building's attic. Some hear footsteps, some say they see "shadow people" trudging between doorways in the darkened basement hallway.

These are experiences Adam Kimmell, who purchased the building with Dan Allen and Chris Musgrove, was counting on when he and his fellow investors made what Kimmell calls the "super risky" decision to purchase the nearly 50,000-square-foot, 120-year-old structure from the county earlier this year.

"I realize when you buy a place like this and say you're going to make profit through ghost tourism people have a hard time believing you," Kimmell said.

So far, the risk has paid off.

The infirmary is the third vacant historic site, following a jail and former speakeasy in Hartford City, Kimmell acquired in Indiana. He said the infirmary has already become the most popular of the three allegedly haunted locations.

"You never realize how big the ghost-hunting community is," he said. "I knew the second I said this place was open for business people would flock in. It's a subculture of hardcore fanatics willing to travel all over the country to pursue their passion."

Kimmell, who is a veteran paranormal investigator himself and executive producer of the ghost-hunting show "Resident Undead," said the reason his target market is hard to measure could be because of the stigma attached to the ghost-hunting hobby.

"There are few people who will openly admit to being interested in this; some see it as taboo, that it's wrong to do these things," Kimmell said. "I think there's nothing wrong with the pursuit of trying to understand the world around us."

The perceived stigma is the reason participants in Kimmell's ghost tours are permitted to remain anonymous.

Getting the infirmary habitable required the cleaning and construction efforts of around 40 volunteers plus an additional $20,000 to $25,000 on top of the building's purchase price of around $369,000.

The original infirmary (alternatively known as the county home or poorhouse) was constructed in 1851 but was destroyed two years later in a fire. A second infirmary was constructed on the same spot in 1857 but was also closed two years later  this time demolished due to unsanitary living conditions. The third infirmary, built in 1899, is the structure that stands today on U.S. 27 south of Winchester, across the highway from the Randolph County 4-H Fairgrounds.

The Randolph County Infirmary provided housing and care for individuals who were unable to work, including the mentally and physically disabled, single mothers, the elderly and orphans. County homes were offered as a solution to local poverty before social welfare programs were created largely during the Great Depression.

The infirmary was officially closed in 2008 and spent its final years serving as a storage facility for the county.

Little was done to prevent the building's gradual dismantling by nature and vandalism since its closure.

Somewhat ironically, the historic site's reputation as a conduit for the dead is what allowed Kimmell and his team to resurrect the failing structure.

"In my experience hospitals, jails, asylums tend to be the most active locations," Kimmell said. "These are places where, for whatever reason, spirits are more open to communication."

Kimmell said the infirmary has already been booked by more than 60 film crews this year and has been reserved every weekend through 2017. People interested in taking ghost tours or performing their own investigations can still do so on weekdays.

"You would be surprised at the people who show up to a ghost hunt, from all corners of society," Kimmell said. "Police officers, lawyers, doctors . I think a lot of people want to validate what they believe about the afterlife."

Based on the volume of reported experiences, Kimmell said the site provides one of the more reliable means of coming in contact with the other side.

Kimmell, who said he isn't sure if supernatural experiences are evidence of the afterlife or simply a reality not currently understood, has had personal run-ins with whatever seems to occupy the infirmary.

"Once I was alone in the hospital and I hear three distinct footsteps coming up the stairs," Kimmell said. "Then the door handle in the room I was in started to turn and shake violently. . I'm a grown man and that was enough to make me want to run out of the building."

Kimmell is looking forward to two major events at the infirmary. A well-known television program he couldn't name due to a nondisclosure agreement is planning a filming session in the near future. Additionally, in what could add significantly to the building's existing notoriety, the "Resident Undead" team plans on using ground-penetrating radar to peer into what is believed to be a large section of unmarked graves at the back of the property. Kimmell hopes to film the gravesite project for a documentary.

To preserve the original, creepy aesthetic of the building and due to certain agreements Kimmell, Allen and Musgrove made with the county regarding upkeep, they have no plans to modernize the infirmary.

Kimmell said most of Winchester was excited about the prospect of the ghost tours bringing visitors to the town's local businesses. He said support he has received from the town and county commissioners has made the infirmary his favorite site.

"I love Winchester," Kimmell said. "The whole community has been amazing."

Kimmell's investment plan when it comes to local landmarks like the infirmary usually starts out with a town hall meeting to address possible concerns. Kimmell said, given how strange proposing re-purposing a historic site for paranormal investigations might seem, he expects some skepticism.

For Kimmell, however, chasing the unknown and intangible is as natural as any other endeavor.

"The world is much crazier than any of us think," Kimmell said.
When 20-year-old U.S. Navy hopeful Cameron Massengale lost his arm in a work accident, he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to march as a cadet at The Citadel again. But thanks to a custom prosthetic arm and his refusal to settle, Massengale has not only returned to the group but also became the first amputee to make the university's Summerall Guards, a silent precision drill platoon, in January. Massengale is the first amputee to make the platoon at The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, S.C.

"I'm still not completely sure how I'm doing it. It just kind of happens," Massengale told FoxNews.com. "I call it magic."

Massengale has four prosthetics, including one myoelectric prosthetic with a bionic hand and a drill prosthetic has a two-fingered hook so he can perform quick, open-and-close movements like picking up or setting down his rifle. Creating his drill arm took some trial and error, said Jon Nottingham, a certified prosthetist orthotist and area clinic manager at the Hanger Clinic in Greenville, South Carolina.

The length of his drill prosthetic was also shortened so The Citadel senior can look uniform with his platoon, and it has a specialized wrist that he can rotate or flex in three or four positions.

Unlike his myoelectric prosthetic, for which he uses a bionic hand, Massengale's drill prosthetic allows him to make fast open-and-close movements while wielding his rifle.

The hooks on the hand are held shut with a series of rubber bands that are stacked at the base of the hand to tighten or loosen the grip of the hook. Massengale simply flexes his shoulders to open the hook, and relaxes them to very softly or firmly grip whatever he's hoping to grab, depending on the number of rubber bands he's using.

"People say there's a ceiling -- that there are limits -- but [Cameron] doesn't believe there are limits or ceilings just because he's an amputee," Nottingham told FoxNews.com.

Col. Keith Brace, a battalion TAC officer at The Citadel who supervises Massengale, said he was "a little bit skeptical" when he learned Massengale was trying out for the Summerall Guards.

"It's a drill platoon that the best of the best compete for," Brace, a retired lieutenant colonel, told FoxNews.com. "The tryout process is very physically demanding and strenuous, and that's in addition to the rifle drill and the military precision, and the sharpness of their uniform and appearance."

To compete for the honor, Massengale completed 15 training days focused on physical fitness and drills. Each year, 61 cadets are accepted to the Summerall Guards. This year, Massengale's group started with 135 hopefuls.

Brace said he felt the primary hurdle Massengale would face was following the platoon's rifle manual with his prosthetic, but Massengale came up with his own manual instead.

"My roommate and I were doing the same training, and when he was practicing, I would watch him to see how he was moving his rifle," Massengale said. "I would attempt to mimic it, but I'd also try to modify him, and have him kind of watch it and see how I was doing it."

By practicing with his fellow cadets but also on his own "for hours on end for every day of the week," Massengale learned how to manipulate the rifle with his prosthetic without standing out. Simply learning the drills with his prosthetic was difficult, but Massengale said looking uniform among the platoon was most challenging.

"The first time I saw him," Brace said, "and this was the actual cut's day  when they determine who's gonna be in the platoon, I saw him go out there and execute the rifle manual with his prosthetic, and I was just in awe because it was just something I didn't think he was gonna be able to do, and he did it to such a high level."

"It was clear he had worked and figured out a way to get through it," Brace continued, "and no one else could teach him -- that that was something he had to learn through his own practice. It was inspiring to watch."

Massengale, whose uncle is a colonel in the National Guard and whose great-grandfather fought in the U.S. Army during World War II, had dreamed of flying helicopters in the Navy since he was a child. In high school, he was on the JROTC team and had planned on going to aviation school.

When Massengale's arm needed to be amputated after an accident with a meat grinder at a butcher's shop where he worked summer 2014, neither he nor his parents knew what to expect for his health, much less his career. Massengale underwent five reconstructive surgeries to salvage his arm and three of his fingers, but the limb eventually went septic -- a life-threatening infection -- and needed to be amputated. About a month after the amputation, he got his first prosthetic.

"At first, I thought my life was going to be over," Massengale said. "I thought I was going to be sitting on my couch for the rest of my life, and I said, 'Screw this.' My friends pushed me to come back  I don't think they gave me a choice."

Mike Massengale, Cameron's dad, 53, said he's not surprised by his son's achievements.

"He's always been this way," Mike, an artist and arts professor who lives in Greenville, S.C., with his wife and Cameron's mom, Stacey Massengale, told FoxNews.com. "My motto that I've shared with him is, 'What I don't have in talent, skill or knowledge, I make up for with hard work,' and that's what he does."

Last summer, Massengale attended Camp No Limits in Newry, Maine, where adults and college students help mentor children with upper-limb differences. Massengale no longer plans on entering the Navy to fly helicopters. Instead, he plans on helping other amputees like himself adapt to their limb differences.

"I think there's no limit to what a person can do as long as you put your heart and mind and soul into it," Massengale said.
The leading Democratic presidential candidates said they oppose rolling back the Post-9/11 GI Bill -- a move welcomed by the head of a veterans group leading the lobbying campaign against the proposed reductions.

"Two down and three to go," Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of American Chief Executive Officer Paul Rieckhoff told Military.com on Monday.

Following a rally by several veterans groups and half-dozen Democrat lawmakers opposing the cuts on Capitol Hill, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of New York and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont over the weekend made it known they don't support any cuts to the education benefit.

Sanders' campaign on Saturday tweeted, "Taking care of our veterans is a cost of war, and we must firmly reject the latest efforts to cut benefits for veterans. #DefendTheGIBill"

The same day, Clinton issued a statement saying the Post-9/11 GI Bill -- which allows recipients to transfer the benefit to their chidlren -- "should be a lasting part of this nation's social contract with those who serve."

Military.com hasn't received responses from the campaigns of Republicans Donald Trump of New York, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio or Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, a one-time Republican governor of New Mexico.

Take the poll: change GI Bill transfer benefits?

A proposed bill in the House of Representatives would cut in half the housing allowance to children attending college on a parent's GI Bill. The reduction would mean a loss of anywhere from several hundred dollars to $2,000 a month to the students.

The monthly housing allowances targeted in the bill are based on the military's Basic Allowance for Housing rates for an E-5 with dependents for the ZIP code of the school being attended.

In her statement, Clinton said it is "unconscionable that Congressional Republicans have been driving an effort to chip away at this benefit for the men and women who have dedicated their lives to serve us, and the families that support them."

Rieckhoff said he's still waiting to see if any of the Republican presidential hopefuls take a stand on the issue. The New York primary is scheduled for Tuesday.

"I think it's a great opportunity [for them] to show the voters of New York State that they can be leaders on national security and veterans issues," Rieckhoff said. "It's the Post-9/11 GI Bill and they're running in a state where 9/11 happened."

There are close to a million veterans in New York, he added, "and they're watching."

The money saved by the proposed reduction in the benefits will fund other veterans programs, including improvements to postnatal care for female veterans, expanded K-9 therapy for veterans suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder, the reauthorization of the VA work-study program and removal of the cap on VA home loan guarantees, according to the legislation.

Critics of the move acknowledge the importance of the new and expanded programs, but say the money should come from elsewhere -- not from the GI Bill.

Rieckhoff said he's at a loss to understand why the White House won't take a stand on the issue, calling it "a total head-scratcher."

The White House would not comment when asked about the proposed reductions by Military.com on Friday, and declined again on Monday, notwithstanding the positions taken by Clinton and Sanders.

"There's no reason the President wouldn't support [stopping the legislation], especially if every Democrat running for President is supporting it  If the President has reservations, put them on the table."

-- Bryant Jordan can be reached at bryant.jordan@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at @bryantjordan.
Retired Military Officials Are Finding High-Paying Jobs With the Saudi Government and Can Make up up to 7-Figure Salaries Working for Other Foreign Governments

Retired U.S. military personnel cannot receive consulting fees or jobs from foreign governments without expressed approval...
Kurdish peshmerga fighters will get $415 million from the U.S. to join the Mosul offensive that will be aided by 217 additional U.S. Special Operations troops working down to the battalion level as advisors with frontline Iraqi forces, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Monday.

On a brief visit to Baghdad, Carter also said that additional AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and another Lockheed Martin M142High Mobility Artillery Rocket System would be sent to Iraq to "accelerate" the campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

The Apaches flown by U.S. crews have thus far only been used to counter threats to American forces but Carter's announcement suggested that they could be sent to support Iraqi Security Forces now struggling to make headway against ISIS from a staging base at Makmour, about 60 miles southeast of Mosul.

Because of Iraq's internal politics, and pressure from Iran not to appear overly-reliant on U.S. support, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abad has in the past rejected the use of Apaches to back up Iraqi Security Forces in such actions as the retaking of Ramadi in Anbar province earlier this year.

HIMARS missile systems have already been positioned to defend U.S. troops at the Taqqadam airbase in Iraq's southern Anbar province, and another system in Jordan last month fired into Syria to support a U.S.-backed militia group against ISIS.

The 217 additional U.S. Special Operations troops will boost the official count of U.S. troops in Iraq to more than 4,000 for the first time since ISIS fighters swept out of Syria in June 2014 to occupy large swathes of Iraq.

The authorized level of U.S. troops had been 3,870, and the addition of the 217 would put the official count at 4,087. However, the actual number of U.S. troops in Iraq has routinely exceeded 5,000 for the last several months due to overlaps in troop rotations and the deployment of personnel on temporary assignments that do not count against the official total, according to U.S. military spokesmen.

In an interview with CBS' Charlie Rose, President Barack Obama said that the deployment of more U.S. advisers and additional weapons systems were part of the overall plan to back local forces in the fight against ISIS, but he essentially conceded that retaking Mosul won't happen before he leaves office.

"As we see the Iraqis willing to fight and gaining ground, let's make sure that we're providing them support," Obama said. The added support will "tighten the noose" on ISIS, he said, but he suggested that the retaking of Mosul would be left to his successor in the White House.

Carter last month said Obama continually asked him what could be done to retake Mosul this year. The president told CBS, "My expectations is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall."

In a visit with U.S. troops at Baghdad International airport, Carter said that the escalation of the campaign against ISIS and the deployment of the 217 Special Ops troops was intended "to make sure the defeat of [ISIS] is lasting.

"The Iraqis are still in the lead. That doesn't change," the secretary said in separate remarks to NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt. The additional troops and weapons systems "are capabilities that will continue the process of accelerating the defeat" of ISIS, he said, adding that "I'm very comfortable our operational approach is the right one."

However, "in the end, the Iraqi forces will have to do the defeating. We can help them, we cannot substitute for them," he said, even though "Americans are at risk today every single day here. As secretary of defense, I take that more seriously than anything else."

Carter suggested that Americans will be at more risk as the campaign accelerates in the effort the defeat ISIS. "We need to get that done as soon as possible and that means being more aggressive in the moves we make," he said.

Last month, Marine Staff Sgt. Louis Cardin was killed and eight other Marines were wounded by ISIS rocket fire that hit a fire base for 155mm howitzers set up by Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit near Makhmour.

Of the $415 million in U.S. funding for the Peshmerga, Carter said only that the money would go to support "selected peshmerga units." Kurdish officials, struggling with a financial crisis that has left the Peshmerga fighters unpaid for the last three months, were ecstatic over the announcement and took to Twitter to praise Carter's action.

Lahur Talabani, director of the Kurdish Regional Government's intelligence agency, tweeted, "We thank the U.S. government for their commitment & support to our brave peshmerga forces who have been fighting ISIS on the world's behalf."

"In response to a request from the Kurdistan Regional Government for economic assistance, the Department of Defense will provide these funds on a monthly basis to support selected Peshmerga units," Pentagon spokesman Matthew Allen told the Kurdish news agency Rudaw.

"These forces have been among the most effective in the fight against ISIL and will be critical in the retaking of Mosul," Allen said, using another name for ISIS.

In response to Carter's announcement, Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, renewed his criticism of the Obama administration's approach to the conflicts in both Iraq and Syria, saying that the deployment of the additional Special Ops troops was another example of "grudging incrementalism."

The deployment of the additional troops was welcome, McCain said, but the piecemeal dispatch of U.S. forces to conflict zones was a tactic that "rarely wins wars, but could certainly lose one.

"This deployment is also representative of the increasing operational demands imposed upon our military that are not funded in the President's already inadequate defense budget request," the senator said in a statement.

McCain said failing to devote more money to defense puts "the lives of our service members at increased risk."

--Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.

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Republicans on a key defense committee in the U.S. House of Representatives want the Air Force to study the cost of restarting production of the F-22 fighter jet.

The House Armed Services Committees Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, headed by Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican from Ohio, on Tuesday proposed legislation that would direct Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James "to conduct a comprehensive assessment and study of the costs associated with resuming production of F-22 aircraft," according to a copy of the bill posted online.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2009 had famously led the charge to stop production of the F-22 Raptor, a fifth-generation stealth fighter made by Lockheed Martin Corp., after 187 aircraft were produced at a cost of $67 billion. (The last aircraft was delivered in 2012.)

In his 2014 memoirs, "Duty," Gates noted that former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley and former Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne had repeatedly lobbied him to support funding for a new stealth bomber or more F-22s, even though at the time the U.S. was engaged in irregular warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Nearly every time Moseley and Air Force Secretary Mike Wynne came to see me, it was about a new bomber or more F-22s," he wrote. "Both were important capabilities for the future, but neither would play any part in the wars we were already in."

Lawmakers and Pentagon officials have since noted with alarm the improving air defenses of countries such as Russia and China.

Last fall, Gen. Frank Gorenc, the Air Forces commander in Europe, said Russias development of new surface-to-air missile systems and other air defenses has "closed the gap" between U.S. air superiority.

Russia in recent years has deployed an increasing number of higher quality air defense systems, particularly in and around Kaliningrad and Crimea to limit the ability of U.S. and NATO aircraft to enter its airspace, according to Air Force Gen. Frank Gorenc, the service's European commander.

"I don't think it's controversial to say that they've closed the gap in capability -- not just in Europe, everywhere," he said during a Sept. 15 speech at the Air and Space Conference, held near Washington, D.C., and organized by the Air Force Association.

The Russians have multiple surface-to-air missiles systems designed to target high-altitude aircraft, from the S-400, arguably the most advanced such system in the world, to the S-75A Dvina, which in 1960 was employed to shoot down an American-made U-2 spy plane as it traveled over Soviet airspace.

China, meanwhile, has recently deployed fighter jets -- reportedly 16 Shenyang J-11 advanced fighter aircraft -- and HQ-9 surface-to-air missile batteries to Woody Island in the South China Sea as part of an ongoing military buildup there.

"In light of growing threats to U.S. air superiority as a result of adversaries closing the technology gap and increasing demand from allies and partners for highperformance, multi-role aircraft to meet evolving and worsening global security threats, the committee believes that such proposals are worthy of further exploration," the House Republicans wrote in the proposed legislation.

The language also notes that Air Combat Command has a stated requirement for 381 F-22s and that the initial program objective called for producing a total of 749 aircraft.

The bill would require James to review anticipated future air superiority capacity and capability requirements, estimated costs to restart F-22 production, factors impacting such costs, historical lessons from past aircraft production restarts, and any other matters the secretary deems relevant, according to the proposal.

A report on the findings would be due to lawmakers by Jan. 1.

The proposal, part of the annual defense authorization legislation, is far from becoming reality. Senators on the counterpart panel would need to support the measure -- as would both chambers and the president -- before the secretary would be required to carry it out.

-- Brendan McGarry can be reached at brendan.mcgarry@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Brendan_McGarry.

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A Capitol Hill push to reinstate a Green Beret discharged after confronting an Afghan boys accused rapist has garnered high-profile celebrity support  from actor Harvey Keitel, just days before an expected decision on the case.

The star of such films as Mean Streets and Reservoir Dogs reached out to the office of Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., one of Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martlands most vocal advocates, to go on the record in support of the Green Beret.

A former Marine himself, Keitel said Martland and his team leader deserve a medal  not punishment  for their actions.

[W]hen I was a young Marine I understood we were present in order to help others who did not have the wherewithal to protect themselves, Keitel wrote, in an email to Hunter chief of staff Joe Kasper. Whomever owns the idea that decided to reprimand these two men instead of giving them a medal for their actions should be asked what the hell they wouldve done if it was their child in question 

The email was shared with FoxNews.com. Kasper said he also spoke by phone with Keitel who affirmed his support.

After a recent delay in consideration of the case, a decision on Martlands fate is now expected by May 1.

Martland, an 11-year Special Forces veteran, was stationed in Afghanistan in 2011 when he and team leader Capt. Daniel Quinn confronted  and, according to accounts of the incident, body-slammed  a local police commander who allegedly had raped a 12-year-old boy.

Martland has said he and Quinn confronted the commander after confirming the allegations with village elders and others. He claims Quinn got a "first-hand confession" but the confrontation turned physical after the commander laughed it off.

Because of their intervention, the Army had Quinn and Martland removed from the camp in Kunduz Province and eventually sent home from Afghanistan. Quinn has since left the Army, but Martland was ordered discharged, a decision he continues to fight. The incident is not officially the reason for the discharge, but was seen as contributing to his separation.

Martland has called the decision to discharge him morally wrong. Broadly speaking, military leaders have defended the response to abuse allegations in Afghanistan and say soldiers weren't instructed to look the other way amid reports of other such incidents.

But the Army has deliberated over Martlands case for months.

In his email lending support to the Green Beret, Keitel, 76, said U.S. values are on the line.

I am a citizen of the US, married, a father, actor and former Marine. American values are on the line here, and no person I know would not have taken the same actions SFC Martland and Capt. Daniel Quinn did to protect a child, period, he wrote. Thats an American value.

 Copyright 2016 Fox News. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Jason Heyward received a bit of a rough welcome back to St. Louis today, as he appeared there for the first time since leaving the Cardinals for the rival Cubs. But that didnt seem to bother him; as he told reporters, including MLB.coms Carrie Muskat (Twitter link): If somebody boos me here, that means they werent happy to see me leave. Im glad people werent happy to see me leave. Hes already covered his decision to move on to Chicago in some detail, of course, but the occasion offered a chance to revisit the winter market once again. As Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, Heyward ultimately spurned the Cards not out of any failure to see eye-to-eye on a contract, but because he had found another spot he preferred. It came down to Chicago was really where I would like to be at the time, Heyward said.  I feel like [the Cardinals] had every intention of keeping me here. They said that. And they followed that through with their actions. It didnt come down to contract. Whether it was the opt-out, whether it was the full no-trade (clause), or what have you  it came down to taking the opportunity to be where I wanted to be and for the first time in my life having the choice.

Here are a few more notes from the National League:
DETROIT, MI - The rapidly evolving technology surrounding all things "mobility" will get 120,000 square feet of space at the 2017 North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

Exhibits on autonomous driving, connected car technology, e-mobility, mobility services and urban mobility will fill the Cobo Center's atrium as part of the NAIAS' new AutoMobili-D display.

"AutoMobili-D will provide an international look at the ever-changing world of consumer mobility and the ecosystem of companies and innovations that are driving this exciting transformation," Sam Slaughter, 2017 NAIAS chairman, said in a release. "Being in the Motor City, NAIAS garners the largest industry concentration of any show in the world, bringing in nearly 40,000 executives, engineers, designers and thought leaders."

More than 100 companies are expected to participate in the AutoMobili-D display, including automakers, tier-one suppliers and tech startups.

The exhibit will open Jan. 8, 2017 - one day ahead of the press preview days of the 2017 NAIAS. It will then run alongside Detroit auto show's industry days.

Press preview days for the 2017 show are Jan. 9-10, industry days are Jan. 11-12.

"For the past year we've been working on this initiative and traveling the world meeting with automakers, suppliers and partners on this project and the feedback and interest has been phenomenal," Rod Alberts, NAIAS executive director, said in a release.

Alberts said the initiative is being supported from a wide array of automakers and leading suppliers and companies such as ZF, IBM and Schaeffler, as well as by the American Center for Mobility.

For the startup portion, NAIAS is partnering with Detroit-based Techstars Mobility for a curated roster of more than 50 startups.
WYOMING - City leaders are turning the closed cafe at the Wyoming branch of the Kent District Library into a community meeting room.

The City Council on Monday approved a $124,022 bid to remodel the Bookworm Cafe space at the library, at 3350 Michael Ave. SW, into room available for public rental. Grand Rapids-based McGraw Construction was the low bidder awarded the work.

Rebecca Rynbrandt, the city's director of community service, said the cafe, located west of the library's main entrance, had a problem with vendor turnover before closing two years ago.

With the 815-square-foot space vacant, officials decided it was best to put the area to use as a room for meetings and multi-purpose activities.

"The city of Wyoming is excited to be investing in the renovation of the former cafe into a multi-purpose room that will be available to the public for rental," she said. "We believe it will be the perfect space to hold business meetings, small group seminars and even birthday parties."

Rynbrandt said construction is expected to begin this spring, with completion set for the end of July. With engineering and other fees along with a contingency, the total budget for the work, funded by the library millage, is about $161,000.

Rynbrandt said the goal is to have the room available to rent by Dec. 1, the date each year the city opens its facilities to the public for reservations for the following calendar year. She said the room's capacity will be determined once construction is finished.
"I'm so honored, and I think it represents a platform to start addressing water quality and health at the global level," MSU Professor Joan Rose tells Kirk Heinze on Greening of the Great Lakes. "I'm part of a global community that is so passionate about people's health and how water quality affects that."

Rose was the recipient in March of the world's most prestigious water award, the Stockholm Water Prize. A global water science expert and Homer Nowlin Chair in Water Research at Michigan State University, Rose is recognized by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) for her research on microbial risk to human health in water, her successful translation of the science to policy makers, and for her leadership in developing the tools and guidelines required to give policy and regulatory life to the science.

The goal of the Global Water Pathogen Project, says Rose, is to make new information technology and knowledge more accessible for decision making.

"This is a group of 150 authors all around the world working with an IT firm to produce the most updated information about pathogens and sewage and how we control them with the new sanitation technologies that are becoming available."

Rose explains the distinction between quantity and quality issues related to water.

"They're obviously interlinked, but quantity is so easy to measure. But when it comes to quality, what does that mean? Quality is quite complex and it changes in space and time and with our knowledge. We always have to keep on top of quality, and quality is equal to health - not just the health of people - but of the biohealth of the planet."

Rose thinks the attention being paid to the Flint water crisis will benefit other communities around the United States.

"We're struggling to find financing to update and improve our infrastructure. One of the areas that we need to pay more attention to is the water microbiology of our pipes, our distribution systems, and premise plumbing."

Rose believes that monitoring and solid data can help enhance the political will to help make these infrastructure improvements a reality.

"I think information does help to move the political will, and monitoring can be expensive. And I'm not talking about traditional compliance monitoring that's part of our national requirements for safe drinking water. I'm talking about using some of the new diagnostic techniques. We need the data and the information to know where and when to implement strategies for protection of health."

Rose and her team have discovered freshwater contamination stemming from septic systems. The notion that septic tanks prevent fecal bacteria from seeping into rivers and lakes simply doesn't hold water, she says.

"When you buy a house, you need to understand that you're taking care of your own water supply, you own wastewater system and that you're responsible for how that affects the environment and potentially your neighbors."

From her own ad hoc surveys when speaking to groups, she says only about 30 percent of people know where their water comes from and whether it comes from surface water or ground water.

"We have to collectively take responsibility for our water supply. Once people start to learn about their watersheds and where their water comes from, people really do care about their water.

"We have a special connection to water, especially here in the Great Lakes. In many cases it's spiritual and it's recreational. It's not just that we're a blue planet and we need water to live, there are these other connections.

"So the more we know about water, the more likely we are to make decisions locally to protect that water. If we make good decisions now, that will protect systems for up to 50 to 100 years. That's the way we have to be thinking."

Click here to hear the Rose/Heinze conversation.



Greening of the Great Lakes airs every Sunday evening at 7:00 on News/Talk 760 WJR and around the state each weekend via the Michigan Talk Network.
Howard_Lazarus_041416_RJS_03.jpg

Howard Lazarus at a public reception at the Ann Arbor Justice Center on April 14, 2016.

(Ryan Stanton | The Ann Arbor News)

Update: Read the resolution the Ann Arbor City Council unanimously approved Monday night to offer the job to Howard Lazarus.

ANN ARBOR, MI -- The Ann Arbor City Council's administration committee met Monday afternoon to discuss four finalists for the city administrator position.

After more than an hour and a half of discussing the pros and cons of three of the candidates, the committee is recommending the City Council pass a resolution tonight offering the job to Howard Lazarus, the director of public works for Austin, Texas, contingent upon a background check and contract negotiations.

The committee also gave serious consideration to Christian Sigman, the county administrator for Hamilton County, Ohio; and Paul Fetherston, the assistant city manager for Asheville, North Carolina.

The committee did not discuss Tom Couch, the county manager for Bulloch County, Georgia.

Members of the administration committee, which is acting as the search committee for the city, include Mayor Christopher Taylor and Council Members Sabra Briere, Graydon Krapohl, Jane Lumm and Chuck Warpehoski.

Lazarus has been the director of public works in Austin since 2008. He also served as acting/interim assistant city manager for Austin for 10 months in 2010, and was the director of engineering for the city of Newark, New Jersey.

Lazarus earned a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and an undergraduate degree from the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.

Krapohl, who also has a military background, said he likes that Lazarus has a military background and could be a strong leader.

Lumm said she thinks Lazarus is certainly a qualified candidate and has a strong resume, but she thought his interview with council was mediocre.

Lumm described Lazarus as low energy, but she said he also has experience running a large organization seemingly effectively.

Taylor said it's reasonable to question whether Lazarus has the ability to meaningfully inspire people, though he said Lazarus was articulate in his interview and maybe his intellect is worth more than someone who's smiley.

Taylor said he particularly liked what Lazarus had to say about diversity in the workforce during his interview.

Briere said every candidate for the city administrator position did their homework on Ann Arbor, but she thinks Lazarus did the best speaking to Ann Arbor's issues, including housing, equity, transportation, infrastructure, pedestrian safety, flooding and groundwater pollution.

She said he talked about those issues both in the context of his current job as well as what Ann Arbor needs.

Briere said she spoke with a person who works in Austin city government who said it would be a loss for Austin if Lazarus goes to Ann Arbor.

She said she found it interesting Lazarus had turned around a public works department that was not functioning well, making it an award-winning one.

Lumm said she understands what Krapohl is saying about Lazarus' military background and how he's been groomed to be a leader from an early age. She said he also has a lighter side and seems to be a problem solver.

Taylor gave Lazarus credit for his intellect and understanding of how an organization runs and how to work with and motivate people.

Krapohl said Lazarus' focus on staff development and staff empowerment is critical and he thinks he'll motivate city employees to do better and take risks, and be more aggressive in presenting new ideas.

Briere said part of what she's looking for is a city administrator who can recognize a problem before she does and step forward and say, "Here's a problem and here are possible solutions." She said she likes that Lazarus seems to be a type of person who brings forward new ideas to solve problems.

Ryan Stanton covers the city beat for The Ann Arbor News. Reach him at ryanstanton@mlive.com.
ANN ARBOR, MI -- Less than a year ago, the Ann Arbor City Council made a commitment to replace a missing pedestrian bridge over Malletts Creek in the Lansdowne neighborhood.

It was a somewhat controversial 7-4 vote and some council members balked at the $450,000 estimate to design and construct a new bridge.

At Monday night's council meeting, the council backtracked and decided against moving forward with the project.

By a 6-5 vote, the council voted down a $37,549 contract for the engineering design work for a new bridge.

Both of the 4th Ward council members who represent the Lansdowne area expressed disappointment in that decision.

Council Member Jack Eaton, D-4th Ward, speaks in support of the Lansdowne bridge project at the City Council meeting on April 18, 2016.

"I'm really disappointed that this council has decided it can make excuses not to follow through on the commitments of prior councils," said Council Member Jack Eaton, D-4th Ward, who brought forward the proposal last year.

When the council voted 7-4 in favor of a $450,000 budget earmark for the project last May, Mayor Christopher Taylor and three of his allies -- Julie Grand, Kirk Westphal and Chuck Warpehoski -- were opposed.

Since then, Taylor and his allies, who remain opposed, have had two new allies join council, Zachary Ackerman and Chip Smith.

With their votes Monday night, the vote count switched from 7-4 in favor of the project to 6-5 against it.

The city closed the city-owned bridge that once crossed the flowing creek between Delaware Drive and Morehead Court in 2009 due to safety concerns related to structural deficiencies, and then removed it in 2010.

Now years later, orange construction barricades and signs warning "path closed" remain standing -- essentially right in neighbors' yards.

Some residents say it's an eyesore and an inconvenience, and some believe it's dangerous.

Eaton said even he agrees $450,000 is an excessively high number, and he wouldn't support a new bridge if it's really going to cost that much.

But he thinks it would end up costing much less, and he said going through with the design contract that the council voted down Monday night would have given the council a better idea of the potential cost.

He noted it was previously estimated the design work would cost about $150,000 and the construction would cost about $300,000, so the fact that the design contract was under $38,000 was a good sign.

"I think we owe it to this neighborhood to at least try to follow through on the years and years of promises we've made regarding our intention to replace the bridge we took out," he said. "And this $38,000 is not really huge money."

The city's staff confirmed Monday night the cost estimate was for a prefabricated bridge, and constructing a wooden bridge at a lower cost is an option.

"I think it's important for any governing body to live up to your commitments that you make to the community, and you don't step away from those," said Council Member Graydon Krapohl, D-4th Ward.

Council Member Graydon Krapohl, D-4th Ward, echoed many of Eaton's remarks, saying the council made a promise to the neighborhood and the community that it would replace the missing bridge.

"I think it's important for any governing body to live up to your commitments that you make to the community, and you don't step away from those," he said.

"As public officials, the most important thing we can do is to maintain public trust. First we have to earn it."

Grand, D-3rd Ward, said she read emails from neighbors and is sympathetic about the situation, but she still thinks the council's vote last year to fund the project was a mistake that needed to be reversed. She acknowledged that means going against the wishes of the neighborhood.

Westphal, D-2nd Ward, echoed Grand's remarks, agreeing it was a mistake to make a funding commitment for a new bridge.

"It's no fun to be a neighborhood that gets whipsawed by a back-and-forth decision," he acknowledged, expressing sympathy for neighbors.

Smith, D-5th Ward, argued the money from the bridge can go to something that has a broader community benefit, though he suggested the city should continue looking for alternate funding sources to replace the bridge, possibly working with the county water resources commissioner's office.

Ackerman, D-3rd Ward, said the city's commitment to replace the missing bridge is numerically ranked last among 32 alternative transportation projects in the city's Capital Improvements Plan in terms of community need, so he can't support it. The city's top priority on that list is building a new Amtrak train station, which is expected to cost tens of millions of dollars.

Other projects on the list include the Connector light rail project, which is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and various non-motorized projects, including new sidewalks and crosswalk repairs.

Ackerman said he can empathize with Lansdowne residents, but he suggested there are better uses of the city's discretionary money, such as repaving roads, replacing streetlights or furnishing Housing Commission apartments.

"This was a project that I thought was mistaken from the beginning, and I think it is mistaken still," argued Mayor Christopher Taylor.

Supporters of the Lansdowne bridge project argue a lone pedestrian bridge in a corner of the city is always going to score low when ranked against bigger projects and new initiatives, but the city still has an obligation to remedy the situation given that it was an existing city asset that fell into disrepair.

Krapohl argued the bridge is never going to be replaced if the council just bases its decision on a priority score in the Capital Improvements Plan.

"This is an orphaned project. Orphaned projects are never, ever going to be anywhere near the top of any CIP," he said.

"If we don't do it through general fund dollars, it's never going to get done. It's never going to happen."

Warpehoski, D-5th Ward, said creating new non-motorized connections from West Huron River Drive to North Main Street, under East Medical Center Drive along the south side of Fuller Road, and from Pontiac Trail to Bandemer Park are higher priorities for him when he looks at projects in the city's CIP.

Council Member Jane Lumm, an independent from the 2nd Ward, and Eaton said they wished other council members against the project would stop assuming the bridge is going to cost $450,000, which was an initial staff estimate.

They said they don't believe it's going to cost that much, and if it does, then even they wouldn't support proceeding with it.

Despite those arguments, council members who voted down the design contract Monday night continued to assume a new bridge would cost $450,000.

Lumm said neighbors who live near the missing bridge site were led to believe that if they paid for weir repairs, the city would install a new bridge, and the neighbors have done their part to the tune of $100,000.

"I have no idea if that was written down or not, but clearly it was the understanding of the neighbors," she said. "I mean, why else would 34 families contribute $100,000? ... we are not honoring that commitment.

"You just don't back away from a commitment, and in this case we're doing a complete 180 on something that's obviously very important to the neighborhood," Lumm added.

"It sure seems the neighbors held up their end of the bargain, and the city should as well."

Council Member Sabra Briere, D-1st Ward, also chalked it up as a failure by the City Council to live up to its commitments.

"It's an orphaned project we promised to rebuild, and I take that promise very seriously," Briere said.

Taylor said there are lots of compelling arguments for and against replacing the missing bridge, but he doesn't think it's a prudent use of the city's money.

"This was a project that I thought was mistaken from the beginning, and I think it is mistaken still," he said, adding he has seen pictures of the site and agrees it is a public area that doesn't meet anyone's aspirations.

He said he would be willing to support improving the area by removing the sidewalk, but not funding a new bridge given where it ranks as a priority.

"To overemphasize the ranking of this project with regard to other transportation infrastructure is misguided," Eaton argued. "As the neighborhood has communicated, this is more than just a pedestrian bridge. This is like a park space. This is open space that the community congregates in.

"This is not just a sidewalk or a bridge. It's a community asset, much like a park. There are parks in the 5th Ward or in the 1st Ward that I will never use, but I pay for the maintenance, I pay for establishing those parks."

Eaton made another comparison, saying there are cul-de-sacs most people will never drive on, but they're parts of the city's system that need to be maintained.

"This bridge is part of our whole system of sidewalks and bridges and transportation and parks," he said. "It's not something in isolation. It's not something that's going to cost $400,000. And it's really misleading to refer to the ranking of this as merely a transportation project."

Following the 6-5 vote against proceeding with the bridge design work, the council considered a resolution co-sponsored by Grand, Westphal and Warpehoski to cease work on the project.

Their resolution proposed redirecting the unspent monies to different priorities, including $288,000 for installing more flashing crosswalk beacons in the city and $150,000 for conducting a study in cooperation with Western Michigan University to look into how to affect driver behavior at pedestrian crosswalks with the goal of increasing driver yielding rates and improving safety.

Smith proposed an amendment to the resolution, hoping to have the city set aside $20,000 to remove the sidewalks and concrete steps at the site of the missing Lansdowne bridge and to remove the barricades and plant new grass to improve the aesthetics of the area, while still directing staff to work with the water resources commissioner's office and other agencies to investigate potential funding partnerships for a new bridge.

Eaton and Lumm argued that seemed contradictory. Lumm expressed a desire for more public input before the council takes any next steps.

"We need to give this neighborhood an opportunity to tell us what they really want," Lumm said.

The resolution ultimately was postponed to May 2.

Ryan Stanton covers the city beat for The Ann Arbor News. Reach him at ryanstanton@mlive.com.
Alison Davis-Blake.jpg

Alison Davis-Blake, who announced last May that she would not be seeking another term as dean, has been recommended to be appointed as the Leon Festinger Collegiate Professor of Management with Ross effective July 1, pending approval of the UM Board of Regents

(Courtesy UM Ross School)

Alison Davis-Blake will maintain a connection with the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business after her term as dean expires on June 30.

Davis-Blake, who announced last May that she would not seek another term as dean, has been recommended to be appointed as the Leon Festinger Collegiate Professor of Management with Ross effective July 1, pending approval of the UM Board of Regents on Thursday.

Davis-Blake, the school's first female dean, was appointed to her position in July 2011 for a five-year term by former President Mary Sue Coleman and former Provost Phil Hanlon. The professor of management position is a five-year renewable term effective through June 30,2021.

The Leon Festinger Collegiate Professorship in Management was established by the Regents in June 2011. A stipend funded from college resources accompanies the professorship.

Davis-Blake's time with Ross included the launch of a capital campaign that has raised $300 million; strengthened the faculty and doctoral program through hiring 30 percent of all current tenure-track faculty; and increasing the school's global footprint by quadrupling the number of Ross undergraduates who have a global experience as part of their education.

Davis-Blake was among UM's highest paid deans with a base salary of $616,621 in her last full year as dean in 2015.

Prior to joining Ross in 2011, Davis-Blake was the dean of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota from 2006 to 2011, where she was also the first female dean. From 1990 to 2006, she was a member of the faculty and senior associate dean at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas-Austin, and prior to that she was a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University's business school.

Davis-Blake got her B.S. and M.O.B. from Brigham Young University and her Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Artur Zawada

Uber driver Artur Zawada takes a call during an interview at Argieros Italian Restaurant on Tuesday, March 29, 2016. Melanie Maxwell | The Ann Arbor News

(Melanie Maxwell | The Ann Arbor News)

ANN ARBOR, MI - The Uber driver who took video of a University of Michigan student launching an anti-gay tirade at him is now part of a class action lawsuit to get tips and other benefits from Uber.

Artur Zawada, 50, is listed as one of two plaintiffs listed in the civil case filed on April 12 with the Eastern District of Michigan U.S. District Court for an alleged violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Adam Linkner, an attorney for the Ann Arbor-based law firm Hooper Hathaway, which is representing the plaintiffs, said Uber improperly classifies drivers as "independent contractors" when they are employees.

The move deprives drivers of benefits including itemized wage statements, minimum wages, overtime premium pay, health insurance, workers' compensation and paid time off, according to the complaint.

An Ann Arbor driver named Nashat Farha is also listed as a plaintiff in the case against Uber Technologies and Raiser LLC, but the case was filed on behalf of all former and current Uber drivers in Michigan, Linkner said.

In addition to the classification, Uber fails to remit tips and expenses for use and maintenance of vehicles to drivers, according to the complaint.

"One of Uber's key selling points is that passengers do not need to tip their drivers because gratuity is included in the fare," according to the complaint. "However, Uber drivers are not compensated for gratuities, and Uber specifically instructs its drivers via a training video to refuse a cash gratuity if offered."

The lawsuit also notes the company does not offer insurance to drivers and accuses the company of "engaging in unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices."

The plaintiffs seek damages - although an exact amount was not specified - and an injunction, according to the complaint.

Following the viral video, a representative for Uber said accounts for Zawada and the student involved in the tirade, Jake Croman, were suspended so the incident could be investigated. Croman released a statement accusing Zawada of making anti-Semitic comments prior to the footage.

At the time, Zawada said the company should pay him for his lost wages in the interim. He also expressed frustration with how the company was handling the video incident, and said Uber previously denied his requests to cover the costs of a camera to record incidents in his vehicle.

"Uber wants to do whatever they want - they will do whatever they want," he said.

Zawada declined to speak after the lawsuit was filed.

The complaint states that Zawada is not currently a driver for Uber, but Farha is.

Uber has not responded to request for comment on Zawada's status with the company or the pending lawsuit.

The ride-hailing company, embroiled in several legal battles, is set for trial in California on similar grounds.

In addition, Lyft, another ride-hailing service, recently attempted to settle a class action lawsuit for misclassification for $12.25 million, but the settlement has been denied.

Darcie Moran covers cops and courts for MLive and The Ann Arbor News. Email her at dmoran@mlive.com or follow her on Twitter @darciegmoran.
BAY CITY, MI -- There was applause inside the Commission Chambers of Bay City Hall after the unanimous approval of an anti-discrimination ordinance that includes protections for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, in addition to those with physical and mental handicaps.

There was minimal discussion on Monday, April 18, before the Bay City Commission voted 8-0 to approve the anti-discrimination ordinance, becoming the 43rd Michigan city to pass such legislation.

"I am very, very proud that we passed this," said Commissioner Kerice Basmadjian, 7th Ward. "I am just so proud of the city being so supportive of this. To see all of these residents stand up for such a cause is heartwarming."

Commissioner John Davidson, 6th Ward, was absent from Monday's meeting.

Over the past month, several members of the public have spoken in favor of the ordinance, although some members of the LGBT community wanted specific wording in the ordinance updated to reflect "better practices."

Sandra Rogers, a Bay City resident and founder of Bay City United for Change, an advocacy watchdog group that looks to bring awareness to certain societal issues, said she is proud of the commission for supporting the ordinance.

"We have, again, put our little city of Bay City on the map for being a welcoming city for all -- a city that doesn't discriminate and welcomes everybody," she said. "We are telling outsiders that this is a wonderful community to live in.

"It's a town without hate."

Bay County Commissioner Michael Lutz, D-7th District, who lives in Essexville, but owns property in the city, said he was concerned with a section of the ordinance that requires all city contractors to follow the city's recently passed ordinance.

"This is adding another layer for businesses to worry about," he said. "I don't have a problem with how the city is changing its internal policies when it comes to hiring and firing people or your internal labor relations, but I do have a problem that impacts how businesses do business with the city."

Deputy City Manager Dana Muscott said while the ordinance goes into effect on Friday, April 22, all open bids won't have to sign a form agreeing to the new ordinance. All future bids will require businesses sign a form agreeing to follow all of the city's ordinances, something they already do today, Muscott said.

Bay City resident Patrick Fairfield said the passing of such an ordinance can "change attitudes."

"I'm optimistic an ordinance such as this one is going to create a welcoming community," he said.
Robert "Bob" Billingsley

BAY CITY, MI -- The body of Bob Billingsley, the Bay County man who has been missing since last month, was found in the Saginaw River Monday afternoon.

Shortly after 5 p.m. Monday, April 18, search crews from the Bay County Sheriff's Marine Patrol discovered the body floating on the river's surface north of the docking site of the USS Edson, 1680 Martin St., said Bay County Undersheriff Troy Cunningham.

Cunningham said a pedestrian at the Golson Boat Launch, at the end of Johnson Street, initially spotted the body and called 911.

A two-man team from the sheriff's marine patrol ultimately recovered the body.

Once recovered, a wallet was found in Billingsley's pants pocket, identifying him. Family members of Billingsley also confirmed his identity at the scene.

Cunningham said the case remains open for investigation. An autopsy is expected to be done to determine the cause of death. Cunningham said it doesn't appear there was any foul play.

Billingsley, 59, of Linwood, was last seen March 14 after leaving his job at LJ's Kitchens of Bay City, 404 Washington Ave., where he worked as a salesman. Billingsley's son Scott said his father had been battling depression.

Several public searches took place in the past month, in addition to a few dive searches from authorities in the Bay County and Midland County sheriff's offices.

Billingsley's son and daughter launched a Facebook page that garnered more than 5,400 likes. In the past month, the siblings used the outlet to encourage members of the public to keep an eye on the river as the weather warmed up and "pray for a miracle."
BAY CITY, MI -- A Grand Rapids man police say killed his friend in a drunken-driving crash in rural Bay County is a step closer to trial.

Richard J. Scheil, 58, on Friday, April 15, waived his right to a preliminary examination in Bay County District Court. District Judge Mark E. Janer bound his case over to Circuit Court for further proceedings.

In the higher court, Scheil's options will be to enter a guilty or no-contest plea or face a trial.

Scheil is charged with one count of operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated causing death. The charge is a 15-year felony.

According to police reports contained in court records, a Bay County sheriff's deputy at 4:12 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 8, responded to a one-vehicle crash near the intersection of South Farley and East Kinney roads in rural Merritt Township. The deputy arrived to find a white 2010 Ford Taurus in a ditch on the south side of East Kinney Road.

The Taurus had been heading south on Farley, which ends in a T-intersection at Kinney. The Taurus apparently crossed the intersection and came to rest in the water-filled ditch, court records show.

Scheil was still in the driver's seat when the deputy arrived. Scheil was wearing only a pair of underwear and was not responding to the deputy's request to exit the vehicle, court records show.

Firefighters arrived shortly after and rescued Scheil and 51-year-old passenger Ray L. Embrich, who was breathing but unconscious. Both were taken by ambulance to St. Mary's of Michigan Medical Center in Saginaw.

Deputies obtained a warrant to draw Scheil's blood then went to the hospital. When they arrived, they learned Embrich had been pronounced dead at 6:18 a.m., court records show. Embrich's obituary said he lived most of his adult life in Nashville, Tenn., Ionia and Freeland.

Scheil underwent a CAT scan and had to be strapped down as he was combative with hospital staff, court records show.

Deputies tried interviewing Scheil after he completed the CAT scan. He was barely audible and mumbling, but told deputies he had three rum and Cokes and was coming from a party in Bay City. Regarding the crash, he told them, "someone cut me off," court records show.

Scheil described Embrich as a friend, court records show.

A sample of Scheil's blood was taken and submitted to the Michigan State Police Crime Lab for testing. The results indicate Scheil's blood alcohol level was at 0.16 percent. In Michigan, a person is legally intoxicated when his or her blood alcohol level is at 0.08 percent.

Scheil's next court dates are pending.
BAY CITY, MI - The pain of operating a business hasn't stopped Starr Henning, and her husband, Michael, owners of Tummy Ache Candy Store, as they celebrate their store's 15-year anniversary.

The candy shop, located at 1116 N. Johnson, was initially intended to be a Mexican restaurant but after a lack of funding Henning had to figure out another use for the building. "We had to get creative," she said.

Henning was driving her ice cream truck, Starshine, and always liked delivering treats to children in the neighborhood, so she decided to open a candy shop.

The candy shop is a brightly colored building with jars of candy stacked on shelves and pinatas hanging from the ceiling as music plays inside from noon to night.

"It's always a joy to watch the faces and hear the words when people come through the doors," said Henning.

Henning opened the business with her family, David, 33, and Sky, 23, were both raised inside the shop. Her husband, Michael, drives the ice cream truck around the neighborhood during the summer.

"Sometimes, running a business isn't about making money but the other end of it is receiving the love and the friendships," said Henning.

Tummy Ache Candy Store is open noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday - Saturday.
BAY CITY, MI -- A Bay City teen tried running over two men he blamed for getting him in trouble with the law, police allege.

At 1:16 p.m. Thursday, March 17, police responded to a complaint near 31st and Webster streets in the city's South End. A 17-year-old male said he was doing some yard work near the curb when a vehicle drove toward him. The vehicle swerved across the street at the teen, prompting him to leap onto a lawn extension to avoid being struck, he told police.

The teen told police he recognized the vehicle's driver as 18-year-old Sean P. McPeak and speculated he was upset with him for having called police on him in a prior incident. He added McPeak previously told him over the phone he was going to run him over, court records show.

A 16-year-old female at the scene gave police a similar account, court records show.

About a half hour later, police responded to another residence in the South End, this one in the 100 block of 32nd Street. Benjamin C. Link told police he was walking his dog when a vehicle driven by McPeak pulled into McPeak's brother's driveway. Link heard McPeak yelling and swearing about him, then put his vehicle in reverse and drove at him, he told police.

Link had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit, he told police.

Link told police that the previous June, he caught McPeak breaking into his house.

Police soon located McPeak, who denied any wrongdoing. He said the two alleged victims know each other and he theorized they made up their stories to get him in trouble, court records show.

An 18-year-old woman with McPeak said she was in the car with him and concurred with his version of events. She added that the first alleged victim attempted to goad McPeak into a fight, court records show.

Authorities issued a warrant for McPeak on April 4. He voluntarily appeared in Bay County District Court on April 13 for arraignment on two counts of assault with a dangerous weapon. The charge is punishable by up to four years in prison and a $2,000 fine.

McPeak was free on bond when the vehicular assaults allegedly occurred. On March 4, he pleaded guilty to one count of third-degree home invasion, a five-year felony, stemming from the June 24 break-in of Link's house.

In exchange for his plea, the prosecution agreed to dismiss a 20-year felony count of first-degree home invasion. The prosecution was also recommending McPeak be sentenced under the Holmes Youthful Trainee Act.

The act allows a judge to place a defendant between the ages of 17 and 24 in jail or on probation without a conviction. If the defendant successfully completes the terms of the judge's sentence, he or she avoids having a criminal record.

Link on June 24 called 911 and told officers he came home to see a red BMX bicycle in his yard and his house's back door open. He went inside and saw McPeak in his living room.

Link asked McPeak what he was doing there, and McPeak yelled to someone unseen that Link was home, according to court records. McPeak then punched Link in the face, and Link responded by grabbing his assailant's neck, he told police.

They fell to the floor and scuffled, but McPeak managed to get up and run outside. He tried jumping the fence's gate, but Link grabbed him and threw him to the ground, he told police. McPeak got up again and ran to the fence on another side of the yard, only to be yanked down by Link again, Link told police.

McPeak eventually got up yet again, finally jumped the fence and pedaled off on his bike, Link told police.

"He's lucky I didn't think about grabbing my shotgun when I came in," Link told police, according to their reports in court records. "I would have blown him in half."

Link told officers that McPeak's brother lives a few houses down and that he went there looking for McPeak, to no avail. He theorized McPeak was in his house to steal his medical marijuana crop. He added that he did not see another person in his house, court records show.

Police went to McPeak's brother's house. He told them McPeak wouldn't have stolen anything from Link, adding that Link came to his place waving a pipe and yelling for McPeak. Link went so far as to strike McPeak's brother's finger with the pipe, he alleged to police.

Police spoke with Link again, and he denied hitting McPeak's brother with a pipe, saying they only exchanged words. He also told them he had discovered a bottle of about 120 Vicodin pills was missing, court record show.

McPeak later called 911 to speak with police. He met with them and said he rode his bike to Link's house and walked into his house about a foot after finding its back door open. He said he was yelling for Link, thinking loud music might have kept Link from hearing him. The next thing he knew, Link came storming at him and grabbed him by his neck, McPeak told police.

"He had both of his hands around my neck," McPeak told officers. "I was scared and in self-defense I punched him in the face."

Circuit Judge Joseph K. Sheeran is to sentence McPeak on the home invasion charge at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, April 25. McPeak is to appear before District Judge Timothy J. Kelly for a preliminary examination on the new assault counts at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 27.
DETROIT, MI-- A shootout near the corner of West Grand Boulevard and Grand River Avenue in Detroit left the two shooters in critical condition and three bystanders with minor injuries.

Police told WXYZ's Simon Shaykhet the driver of a Honda Accord and a pedestrian exchanged gunfire and both were hit.

Three bystanders suffered non-life-threatening injuries when the car slammed into the bus stop, according to the report.

Police were at the scene investigating around 7 p.m.
[April 19, 2016] Physician's Computer Company and THINKMD Partner to Bring Advanced Clinical Assessment Technology to US Pediatricians

Physician's Computer Company (PCC) and THINKMD, two leading healthcare technology companies from Vermont, signed a memorandum of understanding to bring THINKMD's cutting-edge clinical assessment telemedicine platform to market. PCC pioneered the first pediatric office management and medical record system in 1983. THINKMD is an early-stage, healthcare-innovation company focused on creating novel solutions that expand access to healthcare for everyone, everywhere in the world. This memorandum of understanding formalizes a strategic partnership between the companies that was established shortly after THINKMD's inception in 2014. PCC's President, John Canning was captivated by THINKMD CEO Dr. Barry Finette's vision to create a novel, simple to use clinical assessment tool delivered on a mobile phone for unskilled users. Canning worked closely with Dr. Finette and a team of physicians from the University of Vermont Medical Center to develop the prototype and minimal viable product (MVP) of the software platform, called MEDSINC. To date, MEDSINC has been tested with world-class partners in the United States, Bangladesh, Peru, Ecuador, and Burkina Faso, with extremely positive reactions to the effectiveness and utility of the product. Our most recent testing was done in partnership with UNICEF. MEDSINC is an integrated medical intelligence platform that transforms a mobile device into a self-training, patient-centric clinical assessment tool that enables arents and untrained caregivers to gather critical patient information and share it with their physicians. MEDSINC helps simplify and streamline information flow between physicians and the families they serve, and offers remote clinical assessment that will improve care, save lives, and reduce unnecessary healthcare expenditures. THINKMD and PCC see strong demand for the platform's capabilities in the US healthcare market.



"When developing this platform with the THINKMD team, it became obvious that the healthcare issues we are attempting to solve in resource poor countries hadn't been solved in the US healthcare market," said John Canning, Founder and President of PCC. "MEDSINC presents an attractive telemedicine functionality to PCC's current electronic health record offering and we see demand for telemedicine solutions from our existing clients in the US." "THINKMD's mission is to develop truly global solutions for expanding access to quality healthcare for everyone, everywhere," said Dr. Barry Finette, Founder and CEO of THINKMD. "The ongoing partnership with PCC has not only supported THINKMD's technology development, but has offered customer and healthcare professional validation and a viable path to market for THINKMD's initial product in the US."

The memorandum of understanding outlines the strong partnership between the companies and defines a clear path to bring MEDSINC to market in the US. Implementation with patients and providers will begin this spring with a full-scale launch of the MEDSINC platform scheduled for the fall of 2016. About THINKMD

THINKMD is a global healthcare innovation company. We develop solutions that expand quality healthcare coverage for everyone, anywhere in the world. Founded by two pediatricians, our team includes broad expertise ranging from software, public health, international business, and data analytics. Every day we work to leverage evidence-based medicine and world-class technology to increase healthcare capacity, evolve healthcare delivery, and collect and analyze critical public health data that will improve clinical outcomes, surveillance, and healthcare management globally. THINKMD is a registered benefit corporation. Learn more at: www.thinkmd.org About PCC

PCC (Physician's Computer Company) is an independent software solutions firm exclusively working to meet the needs of independent pediatricians nationwide. Since 1983, we have built tools, provided consulting, and offered support to pediatric practices that seek to improve the health of their patients and improve their bottom lines. At PCC, the needs of our clients come first. We go above and beyond to do the right thing for all practices we work with - something that sets PCC apart in our industry and has earned us national recognition year after year. Our clients rely on our unfailing support and appreciate the truly unique experience of being part of the PCC family. PCC is a registered benefit corporation. Learn more at: www.pcc.com View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005810/en/

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[April 19, 2016] Technavio Announces Top Eight Vendors in the Global GaAs Devices Market from 2016 to 2020

Technavio has announced the top eight leading vendors in their recent global gallium arsenide (GaAs) devices market report. It includes vendors across all geographical regions and segments. The vendors are identified based on revenue and market dominance in terms of experience, product portfolio, geographical presence, financial condition, R&D, and customer base. Competitive vendor landscape The global GaAs devices market consists of players that are well-established in the semiconductor industry. To gain an edge over competitors in terms of market share, the vendors, ranging from global to regional players, are adopting new technologies. The market has many entry barriers, which restrict new players from entering the market. The market is dominated by Skyworks Solutions (News - Alert), Qorvo (RFMD and TriQuint Semiconductor), and Avago Technologies. Sunil Kumar Singh, a lead analyst at Technavio, specializing in research on embedded systems, says, "The competition in the market is intense, and the market is largely dominated by the mobile devices segment. Productivity, energy consumption, performance, reliability, and cost are critical competition factors in the market. In addition to the competition among existing vendors, there are other factors such as the high cost of production that affect the operations of vendors." Top eight GaAs devices market vendors Skyworks Solutions Skyworks Solutions was established in 2002 and is headquartered in Massachusetts, US. The company offers custom linear products for GPS, industrial, broadband, medical, automotive, energy management, military, wireless networking, smartphone, cellular infrastructure, and tablet applications. Its portfolio consists of amplifiers, attenuators, battery chargers, circulators, demodulators, detectors, diodes, directional couplers, front-end modules, hybrids, infrastructure RF subsystems, and isolators. The company also provides LED drivers, mixers, modulators, optocouplers, optoisolators, phase shifters, phase locked loops power dividers, combiners, power management devices, receivers, switches, voltage regulators, and technical ceramics. Qorvo Qorvo was formed by the merger of RFMD and TriQuint Semiconductor (News - Alert). Qorvo has gained a broad product portfolio and technology leadership as a result of the merger. The company plans to leverage its technological strengths toincrease its market share. It focuses on optimizing costs, increasing the customer base, and maintaining and developing additional collaborative customer and industrial relationships.



Avago Technologies Avago Technologies was established in 1961 and is headquartered in California, US. The company designs and develops analog semiconductor devices, with the main focus on compound III-V- based products.

The company's product portfolio comprises of more than 6,500 products that serve around 40,000 customers globally. The products are used in an extensive range of applications that include consumer appliances, cellular phones, data networking and telecommunications equipment, enterprise storage and servers, factory automation, displays, optical mice, and printers. Advanced Wireless Semiconductor Advanced Wireless Semiconductor offers GaAs HBT, pseudomorphic high electron mobility transfer (pHEMT) / integrated passive device (IPD), and GaAs / Ge concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) pure foundry services for smartphones and Wi-Fi applications in Taiwan. The company was founded in 1998 and is based in Tainan, Taiwan. ANADIGICS ANADIGICS designs and manufactures RF semiconductor solutions for cellular, Wi-Fi, wireless infrastructure, and cable television (CATV) applications. The company sells its products through direct sales as well as through representatives and distributors. The company was founded in 1984 and is headquartered in Warren, New Jersey, US. The company entered into a merger with the affiliates of GaAs Labs in November 2015. Hittite Microwave Hittite Microwave designs and develops ICs, modules, and subsystems for technically demanding RF, microwave, and millimeter-wave applications. It has operations in the US, China, Germany, South Korea, Sweden, and Britain. The company was founded in 1985 and is based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, US. M/A-COM Technology Solutions (News - Alert) M/A-COM Technology Solutions manufactures and sells semiconductors and modules that are used in wireless and wireline applications across the RF, microwave, and millimeter wave spectrum. The company sells its products and solutions through a direct sales force, applications engineering staff, independent sales representatives, and distributors mainly in the US, Asia, and Western Europe. The company is headquartered in Lowell, Massachusetts, US. Murata Manufacturing Murata Manufacturing, along with its subsidiaries, is involved in the R&D, production, and sale of electronic components and related products primarily in North America, Japan, other Asian countries, and European countries. The company was founded in 1944 and is headquartered in Nagaokakyo, Japan. Browse Related Reports: Global Arsenic Market 2016-2020

Global GaN Semiconductor Devices Market 2015-2019

Global Semiconductor Dielectric Etching Equipment Market 2016-2020 Purchase these three reports for the price of one by becoming a Technavio subscriber. Subscribing to Technavio's reports allows you to download any three reports per month for the price of one. Contact [email protected] with your requirements and a link to our subscription platform. About Technavio Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies. Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users. If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at [email protected]. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160419005118/en/

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Lord Kenya

19.04.2016 LISTEN

Former Ghanaian hiplife artiste turned evangelist, Evangelist Lord Kenya has said he rejected an offer from Ghana Music Right Organization (GHAMRO) as his royalty.

Lord Kenya in an interview with Anning Ogee Oscar on Bekwai-based Dess FM 90.3 last Saturday, told them he is not interested in any money from his past.

"Yesterday, I had a call from GHAMRO asking me to come for my royalty. So I asked myself that have these people not heard that I have said it a number of times that I am not interested in any money from my past? I have nothing to do with my past. My Lord didn't call me to disgrace me. I have something precious from my God, and that is peace. My reference is from Philippians 4:7."

Lord Kenya was one of the greatest hiplife musicians in Ghana before turning his back to the world to do the work of God about six years ago.

He won so many awards during his past days with the ultimate being the first hiplife musician to win the Artiste of the Year award in the year 2000 in the Ghana Music Awards.
Nana Aba Anamoah

19.04.2016 LISTEN

British High Commissioner to Ghana, Jon Benjamin, has chided TV and radio personality, Nana Aba Anamoah over grammatical error after the West Ham United and Leicester City on Sunday, April 17.

After the 2-2 draw game, Nana Aba, who is currently with EIB Network's Live FM and GH One TV, took to Twitter to share her views on the match but used Pidgin English.

Nana Aba Anamoah tweeted and immediately had response from Jon Benjamin, who is also one of the staunch West Ham United fans.

Jon quoted her tweet saying, "No @thenanaaba the only thing we're worried about is the spelling, syntax and grammar in some of your tweets!"
Burundi's President Pierre Nkurunziza standing at the President's office in Bujumbura as he made his first official appearance since an attempted coup against him this week on May 17, 2015. By Carl De Souza (AFP/File)

19.04.2016 LISTEN

Nairobi (AFP) - A US special envoy on Tuesday accused Burundi's government of playing a key role in the central African country's prolonged crisis.

"The government of Burundi is the driver, not the victim of this current crisis, whether it's on the political side or the economic side," Thomas Perriello, US special envoy for Africa's Great Lakes region, told a press conference in Bujumbura.
Sydney (AFP) - Investigators were on Tuesday examining two more pieces of debris for clues to the fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, along with marine life found on two other items which "almost certainly" came from the lost jet.

The latest two pieces -- one found in South Africa and another on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius -- were brought to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's laboratories for testing last week.

"Investigators from the ATSB and the Malaysian authorities are currently examining those two pieces for details which would serve to identify them as coming from a Boeing 777," the bureau said in a statement.

"And in particular for any details which might serve to link the debris as coming from MH370."

Two parts found on beaches in Mozambique along its Indian Ocean coast have already been identified as "almost certainly" from the missing plane.

Australia is leading the search in the remote southern Indian Ocean, believed to be the final resting place of the plane which disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014 carrying 239 passengers and crew.

Last year a wing part recovered from the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, which neighbours Mauritius, was confirmed as coming from the jet.

Since then two more items found about 220 kilometres (140 miles) apart from each other in Mozambique in December 2015 and February 2016 have been examined.

The ATSB confirmed Tuesday earlier statements that both pieces "almost certainly" came from the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft operating as MH370.

The first part, which had a number stencilled on it, was identified as a segment from a Boeing 777 flap track from the right wing, with the stencilling on it conforming to that used by Malaysia Airlines.

The second part, which had the words "No Step" on it, was identified as a segment of a Boeing 777 horizontal stabiliser panel. Its stencilling was also consistent with that used by the carrier, the ATSB said.

Both pieces were also examined for "marine ecology and remnants of biological material" which could provide clues to their sea journey.

"Visible marine ecology was present on both parts and these items were removed and preserved," the report said.

"At the time of writing, ongoing work was being conducted with respect to the marine ecology identification as well as testing of material samples.

"The results from these tests will be provided to the Malaysian investigation team once complete."

The ATSB said the pieces found in Mozambique would be returned to Malaysia this week.
President John Mahama on Monday chided some security agencies for procuring security boots from other countries, while abandoning those produced by the Kumasi Shoe Factory.

Although the Kumasi Shoe Factory is producing high quality boots for the security services, most of them are still importing from other countries, thereby disobeying my instructions, he said.

President Mahama, who was addressing a meeting of the Council of State in Accra, said as a result he had directed the Chief of Staff to meet the security commanders to reinforce the directive.

The Members of the Council of State were in a meeting to discuss issues of national concern and to strategise for the Government in the coming days.

President Mahama said the Kumasi Shoe Factory and the Komenda Sugar Factory were projects he was reviving to reduce the importation of their products and it was, therefore, discouraging for people to continue to import similar goods that were produced cheaply domestically.

On the 2016 general election, President Mahama gave the assurance that government would continue to play its role responsibly to ensure that the polls were conducted in a peaceful environment.

He said government would adequately resource the security agencies with equipment and logistics to ensure that the election was peacefully and effectively conducted.

He appealed to the Electoral Commission and leaders of various political parties to educate their followers against any act of violence that could undermine peace and unity before, during and after the general election.

I will do my best as the President of Ghana to calm the political temperature and hope the Council of State, National Peace Council and various religious groups will help in reducing the political temperature.

President Mahama gave the assurance that his administration would maintain financial discipline even though there was general election this year.

He said the Government deliberately went in for the International Monetary Fund programme to stabilise the economy and that a review conducted by the close of the year indicated that the economy was on track.

Madam Cecilia Johnson, the Chairperson of the Council of State, called on the security agencies to be extra vigilant, especially along the borders, to report suspicious characters to the authorities for action.

She commended President Mahama for the numerous infrastructural development projects dotted round the country and encouraged him to ensure that every Ghanaian enjoyed his or her share of the national cake.

Madam Johnson said their readiness to engage stakeholders where necessary to promote a congenial atmosphere for decent political activities and a positive outcome of the elections acceptable to all Ghanaians.
The Bureau of Public Safety, an NGO, has asked the Ghana Armed Forces to make public details of an inquiry that recently cleared 23 military officers in a fatal shooting incident last year.

Executive Director of the non-profit organisation, Nana Yaw Akwada, says making the report public would preempt possible social, political and economic consequences of the unfortunate incident that claimed one life.

Mr Akwada, whose Bureau of Public Safety works with Government agencies, Businesses and Civil Society Organizations towards improving the quality of public safety, said in other jurisdictions, the publication of the details of the inquiry would have been mandatory.

The military, he said, do not normaly interface with the citizenry, so normally when something of this nature happens, there is always a military inquiry but the report is made public so that the citizens will now know who and who constituted that committee [that probed the issue] and how far they went with their investigation and what formed the basis of their conclusion.

Nana Yaw Akwada was speaking Monday evening on PM Express that airs on the Joy News channel on Multi TV.

The discussion on the evening news analysis programme centred on the exoneration of some 23 military officers of any wrongdoing in a shooting incident at Kasoa-based Millenium City that claimed the life of one Michael Darko and injured two other persons in September of 2015.

According to an official statement by the Ghana Armed Forces, its investigation shows that the soldiers were only defending themselves when they fired shots during a demolition exercise by the 21st Century Construction Company.

It is not clear whether the military officers fired at the three men, but the Ghana Armed Forces holds that its men fired warning shots to disperse an angry mob out of fear of being lynched.

The demolition exercise on a land purportedly owned by the military became chaotic when persons who are also claiming ownership of the buildings that were being pulled down tried to stop the construction company from the demolition.

Head of Public Affairs at the Ghana Armed Forces, Colonel Eric Aggrey Quarshie, confirmed the armed military men were directed to the site to maintain order during the destruction.

He told Joy News the residents and others claiming ownership of part of the land were incited against the soldiers. The residents, however, deny any acts of violence.

Speaking via phone on PM Express, Nana Akwada said the death of Michael at the hands of the military was blot on the Ghana Armed Forces disciplined track record.

I think it is very unfortunate for a very disciplined army that Ghana has had in the time past to be engaged in this manner. Its very, very unfortunate, he said.

He admits it would be difficult for an accurate assessment of the violence that led to the invitation of the military men or the purported aggression of the residents said to have confronted them, but how the military conducts itself must be subject to investigation.

Although some commentators on the matter have argued that the police would have been the appropriate force to quell the purported aggression by the residents seeking to stop the demolition, Nana Akwada notes transparency in how the matter was probed should be the focus now.

"It is important in the interest of transparency, in the interest of the people who have lost their loved ones, in the interest of democracy and in the economic interest of Ghana that this report be made public for all of us to go through it to see what led to the invitation of the military in the first place, he stressed.

A brother of the deceased, Samuel Darko, who was the guest on the programme, told show host Nana Ansah Kwao IV that the exoneration of the military officers smacks in the face of justice and the rule of law.

I believe this thing has to be taken on. Because those people [military officers] have to be brought to book. They have to face the law. I believe they have to come from under the wings of the military and face the law otherwise justice will not be served in anyway, a sombre looking Samuel Darko said.

He is convinced if it had been the son or daughter of any of the military men who was killed like his brother, the story would have been different.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | George Nyavor | [email protected]
The members of the Security Council condemned the killing of a peacekeeper from the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) on 17 April 2016 in the town of Rafai in Mbomou prefecture.

The members of the Security Council condemned in the strongest terms all attacks and provocations against MINUSCA by armed groups. They reiterated that attacks against peacekeepers may constitute war crimes and reminded all parties of their obligations under international humanitarian law. They called on the Government of the Central African Republic to investigate this attack and hold the perpetrators to account. They stressed that those responsible for the attack should be held accountable. The members of the Security Council expressed their deepest condolences and sympathy to the family of the peacekeeper killed and to the Kingdom of Morocco, and to MINUSCA. The members of the Security Council reiterated their full support for MINUSCA to assist the newly-elected Government, which bears the primary responsibility to protect its population, and the people of the Central African Republic in their efforts to bring lasting peace and stability to their country, as mandated by the Security Council in resolution 2217 (2015). 18 April 2016
Deutsche Welle and Channels TV celebrate the launch of their coproduction [email protected] in Abuja, Nigeria. The new program offers an in-depth look at environmental innovations and best-practice guidelines in Africa and Europe and presents ideas on ecological protection from all over the world.

"[email protected] offers us a great opportunity to work with a relevant partner on a program that highlights the issues that affect us all," said DW's Director General Peter Limbourg at the official launch event in Abuja. "We are convinced that this approach to presenting environmental issues will strike a chord with viewers  not only in Nigeria, but around the world." Limbourg stressed that the German-African cooperation marked a "special moment in the history of Deutsche Welle."

"Channels TV is very pleased to be associated with Deutsche Welle in the production of [email protected]," said the Chairman of Channels TV John Momoh. "As we strive to help strengthen Africa's commitment on sound environmental management, it is our hope that the program will assist in providing direction on the continent's intended actions to address environmental issues affecting its people and the economy."

Environment Minister Amina Mohammed was full of praise for the coproduction: "This program could not have come at a better time. Nigeria is one of the most affected countries by climate change."

DW and Channels TV also used the event, which was broadcast in Nigerian at prime time, to pay tribute to "Eco Heroes." They help bring environmental issues to the forefront in Nigeria and include activists like Desmond Majekodunmi and Priscilla Achakpa, as well as Engr. Yahaya Ahmed, founder of the Development Association for Renewable Energies, and Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola, founder of WeCyclers. Peter Limbourg invited the winners to present their projects at this year's Global Media Forum taking place in Bonn in June.

[email protected] focuses on the preservation of biological diversity, the utilization of national resources, energy sources of tomorrow and the mobility of the future. In addition to its reporting, the program also features a segment called #doingyourbit, where users provide examples of the things that they are doing to make a difference. Like how a simple stove is helping save lives by reducing pollution from cooking on open fires.

[email protected] is broadcast every Saturday (06:30, 14:30 and 20:30 UTC) and Monday (10:30 UTC) on DW and every Sunday (20:00 UTC) on Channels TV.

In December Peter Limbourg and John Momoh agreed to deepen the cooperation between DW and Channels TV. They signed a Memorandum of Understanding at the global climate conference in Paris in the presence of Germany's Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks and her Nigerian counterpart, Amina Mohammed.

Channels TV has the largest audience of any private news station in Nigeria. Its flagship show 'News at Ten' is the most popular news program in the country. DW and Channels TV began their partnership in July 2015.

April 18, 2016

55e/16

Latest edition of [email protected]: dw.com/p/1IIr4

[email protected] homepage: dw.com/p/1IDL9

dw.com/doingyourbit

twitter.com/dw_eco  #doingyourbit

Global Media Forum 2016: dw.com/gmf
19.04.2016 LISTEN

Minister of Trade and Industry, Dr. Ekwow Spio Garbrah has directed Municipal and District Chief Executives to help empower youth for private sector entrepreneurship programmes.

He said, municipal and district assemblies should aim at enhancing access of rural MSEs to rural finance schemes to enable growth of local industries, which will in turn generate employment opportunities.

Dr. Spio Garbrah was speaking at a conference on Rural Enterprise Programme attended by Municipal, District Chief Executives, and Coordinating Directors at Sunyani in the Brong Ahafo region.

The minister charged Municipal, and District Chief Executives to make determined efforts to encourage youth to engage in rural enterprises. According to the Trade and Industry Minister, government has provided opportunities for young people to engage in productive businesses through the Rural Enterprises Programme (REP), which must be assessed to stimulate economic growth.

Dr. Spio Garbrah noted that although government has made huge investments in the Rural Enterprises Programme, the full potentials of the programme to generate employment and to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor micro and small-scale entrepreneurs are yet to be fully tapped.

The Minister therefore urged the 161 participating Municipal and District assemblies to use the Business Advisory Centers of REP to share information on several interventions that the Government of Ghana has introduced to support unemployed graduates to enter into the private sector for gainful employment.

He said the Youth Enterprise Scheme (YES), EIDAIF, National Board for Small Scale Industries and other public sector enterprises which government and its development partners are funding are providing financial support to individuals and organizations venturing into entrepreneurship.

He said it is incumbent on Municipal and District assemblies to encourage youth in their various assemblies to venture into micro, small, and medium enterprises to foster the diversification of the Ghanaian economy and employment creation. He mentioned such agro activities as oil palm extracting, cassava processing, poultry, snail, and beekeeping as examples. He said Municipal and District Chief executives should intermediate with traditional leaders to provide land to youth in the districts for cultivation and start-up businesses. The Minister assured district assemblies of the commitment of his Ministry to help assemblies facilitate vigorously, the growth of rural MSEs to increase profit, growth, and employment opportunities.

Dr. Spio Garbrah advised unemployed youth particularly graduates to register businesses and to develop project proposals in order to qualify for the many social intervention schemes available. The Minister expressed regrets that while many lives are changing through the Rural Enterprises Programme, graduates continue to be unconscious of the rich potentials of engaging into private enterprises.

The National Director of the Rural Enterprises Programme, Mr Kwasi Attah-Antwi, advised district assemblies and businesses to coordinate their set objectives to align with the statutory mandates of the programmes. He noted that this would eliminate conflicts on priorities to achieve the goal of improving the livelihoods and income of rural poor micro and small entrepreneurs.

The Deputy Brong Ahafo regional Minister, Mr. Justice Samuel Adjei in his remark appealed to beneficiaries of REP interventions to take ownership of the programmes to reduce rural- urban migration.

As part of his tour of the region, the Trade and Industry Minister paid working visits to Rural Technology Facility (RTF) centers and also small scale enterprises operating in the Brong Ahafo region. The field visit took Dr. Spio-Garbrah and his team to the oil palm and cassava processing in Bechem, Obiri Wood works and Nana Paul Chang Aquaculture in Duayaw Nkwanta, and the Berekum Bee Keeping Industry.

Others are the leather works at Techiman, poultry farming at Dwomo, Cassava processing at Wenchi, Kona cashew in Wenchi and to other SMEs in the Brong Ahafo region. He also held general meetings with cashew growers and buyers to address concerns in the cashew industry and met with the business community in the region.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) has welcomed several positive developments on three cases involving the abuses of the human rights of MPs in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Iraq. IPU's Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians has been working on the cases to seek redress and protection of the MPs.

In the DRC, IPU has greeted a decision by authorities that enables former MP Pierre Jacques Chalupa to travel abroad for urgently-needed medical attention and then return to the country. IPU had made a fresh appeal for travel documents to be granted to Chalupa in a resolution adopted recently at its Assembly in Lusaka, Zambia. Chalupa received his passport after the intervention of the Speaker of the National Assembly Aubin Minaku, following the IPU call for action in Lusaka. The former MP had in effect been left stateless after being found guilty of forgery and use of falsified documents. IPU, which has been examining Chalupa's case for four years, believes the 2012 trial was characterized by serious irregularities. IPU is particularly pleased by the positive role parliamentary authorities, including the Speaker of the National Assembly, have played in the positive outcome. We sincerely hope that the granting of a passport signals that the issue of Mr. Chalupa's statehood has been resolved, and his Congolese nationality has been formally recognized, says IPU Secretary General Martin Chungong. The reported release from prison of former Iraqi MP Mohamed Al-Dainy and the granting of prison visits to family and lawyers of MP Ahmed Al-Alwani, have also been applauded by IPU. IPU continues to call for the lifting of the death sentence against Al-Alwani. The MP was convicted of terrorism for killing two soldiers during a raid on his home in 2013 to arrest him. He has strongly denied the charges and was allegedly tortured in detention before his trial IPU hopes the release of former MP Mohamed Al-Dainy following a presidential pardon last month will also mark the end of all outstanding proceedings against him. Al-Dainy, who had actively investigated the existence of secret detention facilities and detention conditions in Iraq as a member of the Iraqi Parliament's human rights committee, had had his parliamentary immunity lifted following accusations that he masterminded a suicide bombing of parliament in 2007. He was subsequently convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to death in 2010 in a trial which IPU had declared a travesty of justice. The Iraqi Parliament reached similar conclusions after establishing a parliamentary commission of inquiry. In 2012, it recommended that his case be reviewed by the High Judicial Council. A retrial last year found Al-Dainy innocent. However, he had been kept in detention while other charges and investigations were still pending against him. IPU's Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians, which works to protect or seek redress for MPs whose rights have been abused, is currently investigating more than 280 cases around the world.
On 19April 2016, the Council approved the establishment of a military training mission in the Central African Republic (EUTM RCA) to contribute to the country's defence sector reform.

The mission will be based in Bangui and operate for an initial period of two years. Following up an EU military advisory mission (EUMAM RCA),it will work towards a modernised, effective, inclusive and democratically accountable Central African Armed Forces (FACA). It will provide strategic advice to the CAR's Ministry of Defence and the general staff, as well as education and training to the FACA.

EUTM RCA will operate in accordance with political and strategic objectives set out in the crisis management concept approved by the Council on 14 March 2016.

EUMAM RCA was established on 19 January 2015. In close cooperation with the United Nations multidimensional integrated stabilization mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA), EUMAM RCA advises the military authorities of the CAR on thereforms necessary to transform the country's armed forcesinto a professional, democratically controlled and ethnically representative army. Its mandate expires on 16 July 2016.
19.04.2016 LISTEN

I am of the view that cattle herding through our countryside, towns and cities is one of the adorably unique characteristics of the Nigerian landscape; one of the cute peculiarities that defines us. I think that it is a charming and endearing sight: the lonely herdsman amidst his languidly wandering cattle.

Sadly, Ive come to realise that time has passed by that quaint culture and practice. Moreover, I returned to Nigeria and found cattle herdsmen totting AK47s. Oh oh! That certainly took away from the idyllic nostalgia I had carried in my head.

It is clear that something went awry many years ago. Livestock (including cattle) farming accounts for one third of Nigerias total agricultural GDP. I suspect that the narratives weve heard and read so far on the menace of the marauding herdsmen have been largely one sided. I wonder whether the nomadic herdsmen are reacting to what they see as, or interpret to be hindrance and persecution...and that is where education and the use of modern technology and practices come in.

Climate change and draught has meant cattle herders continue to roam farther out in search of pasture. However, their search has brought a concomitant trail of misery and destruction for others, their farms and their livelihood.

In virtually the rest of the world, cattle farmers buy expansive ranches and acquire huge lands to afford their livestock enough space to roam all year round. The farmers also provide enough feeds and grass for their cattle. The same is done for horses, etc. I think it is called animal husbandry.

In Nigeria, it is pretty obvious that the vast majority of cattle herders are hired hands. Some big-time cattle farmers own those cows and sheep. Cows and sheep must eat and exercise, so people are hired to lead them on grazing expeditions to where food (grass) can be found. And that is when conflicts often happen.

After some inelegant hide and seek over a few months, this government has finally stepped in. But the government chose to step in kicking the doors off the barn! For starters, it appears Nigerian grass is not nutritious enough. So the government somehow found enough dollars to import Brazilian grass for our cattle farmers as our cattle finally joined the long list of imported food connoisseurs.

But that is not enough. The cattle must go to where the grass is; not the other way round, and the government is going to make sure of this. How? First, the government will provide direct funds for the provision of boreholes and water reservoirs for the exclusive use of nomadic cattle herders. Then it will forcefully acquire farmlands from private citizens and landowners in all 36 states of the country for cattle herdsmen to do their thing.

That is not all.

Once farms and lands have been forcefully acquired for cattle grazing, all other activities like hunting, tree felling and so forth by natives of the local community will be banned. To cap it all off, legal challenges to such acquisitions will be severely restrained  even enforcement of court judgements, if obtained, will have to be formally approved by the Attorney General of the Federation.

Hmmm...This is where we all take a deep breath.

You wonder why the government is not doing the simple and the obvious by encouraging cattle farmers to modernise and to enter into pastoral or grazing lease/agreement with landowners and local communities. Perhaps it is because in Nigeria, the big men always seem to win. As with petroleum, the government has chosen to subsidise the big-time cattle farmers. We all know who they are: President Buhari; Abdusalami Abubakar; Obasanjo; Murtala Nyako; Adamu; Alhaji Kure, a former governor of Niger state, etc, etc.

This is almost as good as it gets: It is government funding peoples personal religious pilgrimages all over again. In Nigeria now, all you have to do is find a little money, buy some cattle, and the government will fund the rest of the business for you.

Mine and your taxes will go to support big time cattle farmers private business. Then, mine and your land will be taken off us for their benefit and we will not even have legal recourse. The government has already imported grass for them free of charge. Now, cattle farmers will be financially and legally supported to graze and exercise their cattle throughout the length and breadth of the country. The government has no plans whatsoever to tax or ask them to modernise their trade.

This is not just conjecture. A bill to this effect has quietly and efficiently passed its second reading at the National Assembly. It is called, The Fulani National Grazing Reserve Bill. It is sponsored by Hajiya Kure, a former First Lady of Niger State.

After its imminent third reading, the bill will be passed on to Aso Rock for Buhari to append his signature and formally make it the law of the land.

Technology reigns supreme and life processes evolve all the time. Human efficiency improves as the world gets smaller and better. It is for this reason that every nation got on the information superhighway. But we shall show them all; well build our very own cattle grazing superhighway. Thats progress!

[email protected]

Twitter: demdemdem1
A sunset is one of those intangible things that make us upbeat in our connections. It is often associated with romance and in other instances with the end of something. It is a ray of hope, that todays worries are gone and a brighter tomorrow awaits us. For Mattie Stepanek, Sunset is still my favorite color, and rainbow is second.

Jovago.com , Africas leading online hotel booking website, assorts 5 beautiful sunsets in Africa (in no particular order) that will leave you in awe.

Cape Town, South Africa



Credit: SMCT

Imagine stumbling into this view on the shores of the beautiful Cape Town in South Africa. Chances are that the hypnotizing effect is likely to make you forget you were en route to some other place.

Kenya



Credit: all4desktop.com

Even the birds of the air enjoy this heavenly sunset that is a mixture of orange and red, giving it a sweltering look. What then would stop you from enjoying such a rare sight?

Bojo Beach, Ghana



Credit: Bell Africana Digest

After a days hard work, there is nothing more comforting for a fisherman in Bojo Beach, Ghana, than to row their boat under the reflection of a beautiful sunset. Then, they would forget their weariness and anticipate a relaxed evening, enjoying their hard earned meal.

Madagascar



Credit: pixabay.com

You probably have watched Madagascar; I am talking about the cartoon. The beautiful sunsets in this country are probably one of the many reasons this animation was shot in the island nation off the southeast coast of Africa. Combined with leisurely beaches and reefs, the feeling of infinity is what you will no doubt get here.

Zambia



Credit: www.ianplant.com

Indulge yourself in this breathtaking view of a sunset flowing into the blissful blue of Victoria Falls in Zambia. There is nothing better than watching this with your significant other; it will get you lost in the world of wild romance and adventure, leaving an unforgettable memory to cherish forever.
Sarkodie

19.04.2016 LISTEN

From Sir Article, a proud citizen of Sark Nation and a loyal Sarkoholic...

Sarkodie released another hit single, Take it Back, few days ago which has compelled me to eulogise him. Soaking up this superb piece of music reassured me that Sarkodie's expected collaboration with Kendrick Lamar is very likely to happen soon, and not a mirage. Folks, the Hiphop track was filled with thought-provoking lyrics delivered by Sarkodie in a forceful manner.

Indeed, Obidiponbidi proved that he has nearly perfected his craft, and thus competent to break through into the mainstream US music arena. And I, with all objectivity in heart and soul, believe that Sarkodie is arguably the African rap god. Yes, I know sceptics will certainly be bound by my intellectual arguments to agree that Sarkodie is probably the god of African rap music.

However, let us try to figure out what Sarkodie's earlier struggles during his humble beginning have been. The Rapperholic was very instrumental in effecting the Tema-led rap music revolution that transformed Ghana's music fraternity. Prior to his incredible rise to stardom, Sarkodie was nothing but the underdog in our music circles. He once revealed that, "I played many shows for many organisers and they always paid me with T-Shirts and toffees.

I still held on to the dream though at a point I nearly stopped rapping. I am not sure I would be here if I listened to people's opinions." Gosh, this guy actually had rare passion for rap music in the face of sickening hustles! In fact, he took calculated risks, made real sacrifices and defied the odds in his budding career barely a decade ago. Eventually, his hard work and persistence really paid off in a grand way.

Now he is Africa's leading, finest and biggest rapper on the world stage. Why? Sarkodie pursues excellence, discipline and hard work, and always measures his work with global standards; as Sangu Delle admonished. The BET Award winner has also proven beyond reasonable doubt that he is a true champion in his field of work. Okay, who is a champion? Donald J. Trump wrote in 'Think Like a Champion' that, "One definition of a champion is someone who shows marked superiority," emphasising that, "Ordinary wouldn't be enough for someone who has the mindset of a champion. Champions think big. Champions work in a big-time way. Champions are focused. Champions are disciplined." No wonder he has won tens of prestigious awards in just five years, which no other African rapper can boast of.

Moreover, South Africa's AKA and Nigeria's MI are all legendary African rappers deemed to be among the best. Yet Sarkodie is the god, not necessarily and more than the best. I mean, he is the supreme one in African rap music due to his extraordinaire style, unparalleled versatility and priceless lyricism; making him arguably the greatest African rapper ever. I therefore foresee that Sarkodie will get a nomination at the Grammy Awards one day, and possibly win it. And I shall rally support for his music career so that this seemingly unbelievable dream becomes a reality. For he knows that, "Whatever that you want to achieve in life, picture yourself as having achieved it and have faith in it that you have achieved it within the time frame you have set for yourself" (Asubonteng, 2006).

Hey, King Sark all the way. Wad else? Huuuh!

Source: sirarticle.blogspot.com
IOM Senegal, today (19/04) began construction of the first of five new border posts along its frontiers with Mauritania and Mali, with funding from the European Union. The border posts are designed to enhance Senegal's migration and border management capacities, while increasing security in the region.

The first post is being constructed in Dagana, a small village on the southern bank of the Senegal River, marking the boundary between Mauritania and Senegal. While thousands of travellers cross the river at the official border crossing a few kilometres downstream, others make the crossing in small dugout canoes, or pirogues, in areas that are not as well monitored. Given the border's porous nature, security officials struggle to control migration flows and keep illegal activity in check.

With the construction of a new border post in Dagana, Senegalese security officials will have greater capacity to monitor activities along the border and manage the flow of migration in the area.

The construction of the border post in Dagana is part of a EUR 2.5 million, 30-month project: Support for Border Management funded by the European Union and implemented by IOM in partnership with the Senegalese Ministry of Interior and in cooperation with the Ministry of Economy and Finance (Customs), Ministry of Health, Ministry of Defence (Gendarmerie) and other departments.

The project calls for the construction of at least four other border posts in remote areas along Senegal's northern border with Mauritania and Mali (Podor and Kidira), while other border posts in Rosso and Diama, will be renovated.

The border control posts will not only provide a place for border police and customs officials to operate, explained Massimo Ramanzin, project manager at IOM Senegal. They will also offer space for other Senegalese authorities, who need to be present at the post, including medical, phytosanitary or veterinary workers.

The new facilities will allow National Police, Customs, Gendarmerie and health officials to work together to help secure border regions.

Ramanzin added: We are helping build the capacity of Senegalese government institutions to improve border management and cross-border cooperation to better manage security and identify risks. With this project, we hope to facilitate the free movement of people and goods, while enhancing the security of border regions in Mali, Mauritania and Senegal.
Guwahati: A talk on the changing political scenario of Myanmar is organized at at Guwahati Press Club on Thursday (21 April 2016). Senior journalist from Assam, Bidhayak Das will participate in the program starting at 3 pm as a resource person.

Presently based in Yangon, the former capital of Myanmar, Das is expected to highlight the overall change taking place in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) after the general elections held last year that politically empowered National League for Democracy chief Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as her party won a landslide victory.

Indias neighboring country was ruled by military generals for decades and Ms Suu Kyi was also put under house arrest. But slowly the southeast Asian nation is opening up and adopted democracy. Lately a civilian President, a trusted comrade of Nobel laureate Suu Kyi has also been placed at NayPieTaw.

The Assamese journalist will also explore the possibility of benefits for the people of northeast India with more contacts with the Myanmarese populace, particularly the northern part of the poverty stricken country. Better connectivity between the two regions is also an important matter to be discussed at the meet.
19.04.2016 LISTEN

THEME: A YEAR ON, WHAT ARE THE GAINS AND SHORTFALLS OF THE IMF SUPPORTED EXTENDED CREDIT FACILITY ARRANGEMENT ON THE GHANAIAN ECONOMY?

CIVIL SOCIETY PLATFORM ON GHANAS IMF PROGRAMME

FIESTA ROYALE HOTEL, ACCRA

MARCH 29, 2016

FORUM COMMUNIQUE

On Tuesday March 29 2016, the Civil Society Platform on Ghanas IMF Programme with support from Oxfam organized the Third National Civil Society Forum On Ghanas IMF Programme, on the theme A year on, What are the Gains and Shortfalls of the IMF Supported Extended Credit Facility Arrangement on the Ghanaian Economy?at the Fiesta Royale hotel, Accra.The speakers and forum delegates shared research, analysis, on-the ground experience, viewpoints and ideas for policy consideration to enhance effective roll-out of the Fund programme.

The forum brought together 60 participants from Civil Society, Professional Associations, Government Agencies, Traditional Rulers,Political Parties, Media, Academia and other identifiable groups in Ghana. Most Rev. Prof. Emmanuel Asante, Chairperson of the National Peace Council chaired the forum while Ms. Natalia Koliadina, IMF Resident Representative delivered the keynote address. Prof. Godfred Bokpin, Head of Finance Department-University of Ghana Business School presentedthe main forum paper that reviewed the IMF Programme one year after implementation.

The Chairman of the Civil Society Platform on Ghanas IMF Programme, Mr. Joseph Winful in his welcome address noted that good governance and democracy for that matter goes beyond human rights, and voting during elections to include prudent economic management, accountability and transparency. He called on citizens at all levels and the political leadership to do the right things to turn the countrys fortunes around. Noting that Ghanaians should not stay aloof but speak out, share ideas and engage government.

The key, overarching themes that emerged across the Forum discussions are:

PROGRAMME PERFORMANCE

Fiscal consolidation appears to be on track with reduction in the primary and fiscal deficits from 3.4% to 0.2% and 10% to 7% respectively likewise developments in the current accountfrom 9.6% to 8.2%over 2014-2015. Inflationary pressures have heightened from 17% to 17.7% over 2014-2015. The programme has done very little to reverse the trend. The rising public debt and high servicing costs remain a challengeas debt levels reached 73% of GDP in 2015above the 70% of GDP recorded in 2014. The debt sustainability analyses by the IMF/World bank have flagged the debt service to revenue ratio to be unsustainable over the medium to long term. There seem to be some divergence in both the monetary policy rate and 91-day Treasury bill rate (the former on the rise while the latter on the decline). The Ghanaian economy has seen very little growth since 2014. The real sectors of the economy slumped; Agriculture declined to 0.04 percent in 2015 from a growth of 4.6 in 2014 on account of a -1.7% decline in the Crops sub-sector from the 5.7% growth recorded in 2014. Mining and Quarrying, and Manufacturing sub-sectors declined substantially from 3.2% to -3.8% and -0.8% to -2.0% respectively over 2014-2015. Although,Industry sectoras a whole grew at 9.1% in 2015 from about 0.8% in 2014 due mainly to growth in the Construction sub-sector. The aforementioned highlight the challenges in the real sectors of the economy which require attention. Participants observed the rather slow pace of structural reforms (most of which have been partially completed or in some cases not met). This needs to be improved upon in the second year of the programme. Some developments in the economy suggest the improved fiscal position may have excluded some costs; for instance, in spite of the net freeze on public sector hiring, some government agencies and institutions are hiring new staff and catering for them with internally generated funds (IGFs) and will request government to settle the accrued costs in 2018 when the hold is off. This among others may well suggest the wage bill and fiscal deficits for that matter could in fact be a little higher and possibly heighten beyond 2017.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PROGRAMMES SECOND YEAR

Macroeconomic Stability

Participants noted macroeconomic stability is not an end in itself but a means to an end. Hence the need to safe-guard and improve on the gains made and put in measures to deal with inflationary pressures, divergence of the monetary policy rate and treasury bill rates, exchange rate volatilities, rising public debt. Government must put in measures to grow the economy particularly the productive/real sectors (agriculture and manufacturing which have been on the decline). The country literally imports everything andexports very little. This huge import dependency obviously feeds into the exchange rate vulnerabilities. Participants therefore request the Fund to demand from government specific policy measures to revive the productive sectors of the economy in the short-medium term. Participants noted that the establishment of an EXIM bank is certainly not the only way out going forward.

Fiscal Transparency Evaluation

Participants indicated the need for strengthening fiscal surveillance to enhance effective fiscal management, policy-making and accountability. It is imperative for government to have an accurate picture of its finances when making economic decisions; costs and benefits associated with policy changes as well as possible risks to public finances.The IMF and government should conduct a Fiscal Transparency Evaluationin the second year of the programme in this regard.

Risk of Election Year Slippages

Participants fearrecurrence of election year slippages regardless of assurances by government just like in 2012. Participants agreed there is need for this risk to be managed and impressed on government to put the interest of the nation over political expediency. Participants further called on the IMF to help keep the tabs on government by not releasing the fourth tranche of funds due on October 15, 2016based on observance of the June 30, 2016 performance criteria should there be significant deviations in the fiscal outturn figures. Per the Fund programme, government agreed to submit fiscal and financial data to the IMF periodically and this would be a useful check. Participants called on the IMF to be firm on government should there be noteworthy breaches.

Fast track Structural Reforms

Government should fast track the implementation of the structural reforms. The slow pace of key structural reforms is cause for concern. For instance, the new PFM legislation due last December but has now been reviewed to March 2016 for Cabinet approval before submission to Parliament mid-year and possible passage by end of year is worrying. Participants feared the risk of the new draft PFM legislation not being passed this year.The structural reforms participants observed would correct some of the structural defects in the economy. The second year of the programme should see improvements in this regard.

New PFM Legislation

The IMF had given earlier assurances the new draftPFM legislation will have elements of fiscal responsibility and a sanctions regime. But there was silence on the sanctions regime in Governments Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies (MEFP 52) for 2016 likewise the new Bank of Ghana Act. Participants concurred that absence of a sanctions regime for officers who oversee violations of provisions thereinin the proposed legislations will not be deterrent enough to exact compliance. Besides, government should open up spaces for broader consultations on the draft PFM bill to include CSOs and professional bodies in order to enrich the new law. The improved disclosure of fiscal data by the Ministry of Finance i.e. publication of fiscal outturn figures and other administrative accountability measures enjoined under the programme should be codified in the new PFM legislation to prevent possible reversal beyond the programme in 2018.

New Bank of Ghana Act

Participants agreed the Programmes efforts to strengthen the functional autonomy of the Central Bank will be seriously undermined if the appointment of the Governor of the Bank of Ghana is done by the President per the existing Bank of Ghana Act. Participants propose that the New Bank of Ghana Act should open-up the appointment of the Governor and his deputies to a competitive process where interested candidates would apply and be vetted publicly. The suitable candidates should be selected on merit devoid of partisanship like is done with the African Development Bank.

Debt Management

The countrys current debt to GDP ratio and high servicing costs limit borrowing space and in fact constrain further debt build up. Hence government should ensure that the limited borrowing space is judiciously utilized by channeling new debt to projects which are purely viable and able to generate cash flow to retard the debt. Capital budgeting decisions should precede financing decisions. The government should conduct a public debt-stock analysis that reveals how borrowed funds were used in the past to identify which part of the debt were invested in self-financing projects and social projects to ascertain the net debt burden on the public. Also, we should be able to assess the value for money in all these projects. Our past should guide the future. Government should seek to service the countrys debt by growing the economy at a faster rate relative to the rate at which loans are being contracted. Reduction in budget deficits is a sure way to reduce domestic borrowing because the deficits reflect the borrowing requirements of government. This is necessary to free up funds for the private sector and also bring down domestic interest rates.

Right to Information Bill

Participants noted the Ghanaian Parliament takes too much time in passing important bills to law. The passage of the Right to Information billhas unduly delayed and there is need to fast track its passage to law before end of year in order for citizens to have this critical legislation to demand accountability from public officials for the use of public resources.

OTHER CONCERNSRAISED:

Enhance Revenue Mobilization

Participants bemoaned the very limited fiscal space (44% of tax revenues expended on public sector wages and salaries, 37.6% on debt service). The remaining 18.4% of tax revenues cannot suffice vital infrastructural projects needed to transform the economy. Hence the urgent need for government to be efficient in the use of public funds, check waste and ensure value for money of all government outlays in the run-up to the general elections and beyond. Participants wondered why government and the Ghana Revenue Authority for that matter cannot employ innovative strategies to widen the tax base. For instance, there is enormous demand for the Ghanaian passport on daily basis,that you have citizens across the country queue in the sun to renew or obtain a passport. Besides, most people pay middlemen huge sums of money that go into private pockets to avoid the bureaucracy that comes with it. Government should take advantage of the revenue opportunities with the huge passport demand by using ICT to streamline the process.There are best practices Ghana can learn from, same applies with the issuance of drivers license which is putting money meant for the state into private pockets too. The time and money costs involved in obtaining this documents require urgent attention and redress. Instead of the IMF pushing for tax increases, the IMF and Government should consider the great potential in the area of direct taxes (specifically property taxation as well as from mining companies) which have been grossly under-explored to broaden the tax base. For a country where our tax effort is very low (about 17percent relative to the about 25percent for lower middle income countries), the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) cannot be taken seriously if revenue targets are often exceeded by 15 to 20percent even with the many inherent leakages in our tax system. Hence the GRA and Ministry of Finance will have to re-examine its revenue forecasting regime based on empirical studies to reflect the economic status of the economy. The Ghana Cocoa Board should address the declining output levels in the Cocoa sub-sector by dealing with the challenges with inadequate extension services, insufficient and irregular supply of agro-chemicals and the smuggling of Cocoa to neighbouring countries due to price differentials as well as provision of incentives to farmers on the ground to boost the countrys export earnings.

Expenditure Rationalization

The Programme-Based Budgeting approach should be thoroughly integrated in the countrys budgeting process where expenditure items included in the budget should align with programme objectives and there should be justification for every expenditure item in addition to well defined measurable deliverables to ensure value for money.

Payroll

The government should fast track the process to wean off subvented agencies thatare able to generate enough Internally Generated Funds (IGFs) to sustain their operations. There are still more ghosts on the payroll in spite of the progress made and efforts would have to be intensified to clean-up the payroll.

Civil Service

The government should link productivity with pay in the civil service and also introduce fixed-term working contracts to both middle and high level civil service workers to promote performance management.

Natural Resource

Improve transparency in the mineral and petroleum contracting process. The need for government to independently determine the exact volumes of oil that is drilled at the countrys oil fields by installingfiscal metering devices on drilling machines at the fields. Government should take the initiative to establish a minerals laboratory to ascertain the value and worth of the countrys mineral products. The country may not be getting value for money by going all the way to South Africa to have this done.

Continued Protection of Social Spending

Government will have to ensure timely releases of funds to social protection allocations as some delays were observed over the last year. The Civil Society Platform should be partnered by the Fund/World Bank to independently monitor the social protection schemes to ensure that persons who actually need these support are the ones benefitting on the ground.

Electricity Supply

Participants noted the energy sector performed poorly in 2015 due to electricity supply shortages, attributed to defective planning in the power sector. There are delays in planning and implementation in the power sector and participants urged government to improve upon these challenges to ensure stable and uninterrupted electricity supply.

Dialogue Spaces with Government, IMF, World Bank, Civil Society, etc.

Participants agreed the forum was useful and there was need for more regular open engagements between key stakeholders; Government, IMF, World Bank and Civil Society on the Fund Programme to shape policy devoid of partisanship for the ultimate good of Ghana.

Comprehensive After-IMF Programme Plan

Participants agreed the need for the IMF to request an after Programme Comprehensive Plan from Government beyond the Programme in 2017 to ensure the gains made are not reversed.

ADOPTED THIS 29TH DAY OF MARCH 2016, FIESTA ROYALE HOTEL, ACCRA
Karpowership Ghana has sent home more than 60 workers on the ship. This includes ten engineers and more than 50 other workers with two contracted firms working on the ship.

The Turkish company, Kardeniz operates the Aysegul Sultan power barge. The barge arrived in the country last year as part of governments efforts to end the crippling power crisis amidst pump and pageantry. A second barge is expected to arrive in the country soon.

Since the beginning of April, the company has written to 10 Ghanaian engineers who have been working with it since the arrival of the barge in November last year, terminating their contracts.

We regret to inform you of managements decision to terminate the fixed term contract of employment between yourself and Karpowership Ghana Company Limited with effect from 7th April, a letter to some of the staff signed by CEO, Orhan Remzi Kardeniz reads.

In February, a new country manager from Turkey Erkut Ates took over from American Robert Kremer who brought the barge to Ghana.

In what the new management calls restructuring, it has ordered subcontractors on the ship to sack some workers. Eye-Con, an engineering firm which undertakes maintenance works on the ship has sacked 8 out of its 20 workers. Another firm, Blagodolph, undertakes cleaning services on the ship. It had a staff strength of about 80. About 45 of them have been sacked so far.

There are about 30 Ghanaian engineers working on the ship, and more are expected to go by the end of the month beyond the dismissed 10.

On the 4th, our HR met us and told us by the end of April, almost half of the Ghanaians would be out of the company because the new management is saying that there are too many people on the bargeso we knew that he was just trying to get rid of the Ghanaians on board, a dismissed engineer said.

The company says they dismissed engineers are not working up to expectation and is replacing them with new hands from Turkey. But the dismissed staff dispute the claim that they are underperforming.

I know that if contracts are terminated, it should be based on performance, now we dont know the basis on which our contracts were terminated, we dont know who did the assessment, we dont understand what is happening, a former staff with the mechanical maintenance team told Joy Business.

What baffles us the most is that as Ghanaians are being sacked from the barge, they are bringing in their Turkish nationals, and to me it is very bad, he added.

The workers suspect the senior engineering team members who are Turkish are finding it difficult working with them as a result of a language barrier, hence the decision.

The problem is, they cant speak the English language clearly, most of the times its sign language. But when they speak and you dont get them, they are pissed off. They try to throw off their hands. To the extent that one of them threw an object at a Ghanaian one time, another dismissed staff told Joy Business.

Some also claim they were not given adequate training to enable them work appropriately.

The whole noise about Karpower that we all heard before we resigned from our jobs and came here, not even a single one of them has been met. You employ me and you give me training three months later How? one of them quizzed.

Even that, the training coordinator told us after the training what he did was not enough so he informed our bosses to give us more training but they don't want to release funds for the training, he added.

The workers also accuse the senior officials of the Turkish company of discrimination.

It got to a point they even had a staircase for Turkish. One for Ghanaianswhen you walk on the stairs, they say this is for Turkish only, go and use the other staircase a dismissed engineer said.

Karpower Ghana has indicated it will issue a public statement on the issue soon.
It appears there are attempts to conceal the actual faces

behind the gruesome murder of the ebullient New Patriotic Party

(NPP) Member of Parliament (MP) for Abuakwa North in the Eastern

Region, Joseph Boakye Danquah-Adu aka JB.



According to the MP for Obuasi East, Edward Ennin, he suspects there is official cover-up of the real perpetrators of the heinous crime.

According to the vociferous MP, there is a video recording that appears to

show the moment assailants of the murdered MP left the crime scene at his Shiashie, East Legon, residence in Accra.

A close circuit Television (CCTV) appears to have captured that moment

when Mr Ennin said a white Nissan altima left the scene after the gruesome murder at the dawn of February 9, 2016.

The Obuasi East MP made the mind-blowing revelation on adom TV last week.

He said what he saw on the video clearly showed that the security agencies investigating the gruesome murder had not done enough to track down the perpetrators of the dastardly crime.

I am telling you that I have watched a CCTV video footage. The assailant

had dressed like someone ready to fight karate. He was in black attire. a resident in the area had his/her CCTV camera capturing the assailant.

There was a white car (altima K45) which is popular in town. What was

the car doing in the area at that material moment? he queried.

He insisted, I've watched the video and i can confirm what i am saying,

and even swore on the name of God Almighty that he had indeed watched the footage.

According to the Obuasi East MP, nobody should politicise the murder of his colleague because anybody could become a victim. If the person involved is NPP or NDC, he/she should face the full rigours of the law, otherwise we are all vulnerable to some of these wicked acts, he

charged.

He said that when the East legon police arrested the suspect, he gave a very interesting statement, adding, The moment he started mentioning names, the authorities quickly transferred the case to the Police Headquarters.

.

When you have a case and it is transferred to the Police Headquarters then be reminded that it will be the end of that case because the facts will change.

A whole MP has been stabbed to death in his own room and we can't find the killers? I have told JB's family never to let the case die. I have asked them what they are doing. Nobody should try to play politics in this. it is a murder case and we should find the killers.

The MP asked, When you go to the DVlA won't they tell you the owner of

that car?

A 20-year-old mobile phone dealer at Madina Zongo Junction, Accra,

Daniel Asiedu, has been arrested in connection with the murder.

Daniel Asiedu, aka sexy Don Don, has been charged at an accra central District Magistrate court, awaiting committal to the High court for allegedly killing the MP.

However, the people he named initially as his accomplices before the case

was transferred to the Police Headquarters, in the persons

of one avenger and Junior agoogo, have still not been arrested.

The murdered MP, who left behind a wife and two daughters, was laid to rest at Akyem Old Tafo at the weekend.



Family Curses

At the funeral ground, the family rained curses on the killers of the MP and

their collaborators and called on the gods to deal with those behind the gruesome act.

I pray that the Good Lord forgives those who put my brother in that state. But for me, i say that may they go mad and walk the streets of wherever they are and make them naked and helpless, depict the stance of the family of JB as conveyed by his brother, Frank Adu Jnr, when they bid him

farewell.

Pained by the callous murder of the MP, who has been described by many as a philanthropist par excellence, the family could not come to terms with the incident.

Sexy Don Don, the murder suspect, had told the police investigators in his

initial statement that he was contracted to kill JB for a fee of GH2,000 and that he used part of the money to buy shoes after leaving his slippers at the residence of the deceased.

He also claimed that the two other people who involved him in the assignment  Junior Agoogo and avenger  are all living at Pig farm, accra.

However, when the Bureau of National investigations (BNI) took over the case, the storyline changed.

The suspect is being kept in solitary confinement at the BNI cells.

By William Yaw Owusu


Edward Ennin, Member of Parliament for Obuasi East

19.04.2016 LISTEN

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament for Obuasi East, Edward Ennin is 'hot' over allegations that there are attempts to conceal the actual faces behind the gruesome murder of the late Abuakwa North MP, Joseph Boakye Danquah Adu in February this year.

Hon. Edward Ennin speaking on Adom TV about a week ago alleged that he suspects official cover-up over the murder of the former Children Affairs Deputy Minister in the erstwhile Kufuor administration.

Edward Ennin claimed to have seen a CCTV footage of a neighbour of the late MP which reveals the identities of the assailants of the MP.

The MP further alleged that the key suspect, Daniel Asiedu a.k.a sexy, 19, who is standing trail for the murder of the late MP, gave an interesting statement and started mentioning names but the authorities quickly referred the case to the National Headquarters which he claimed will be the end of the case because the facts will change.

However, the Public Relations Officer (PRO) for the Police Administration, Supt. Cephas Arthur has described the alleged statement by the legislator as unfortunate and uncalled for.

Speaking in an interview with Kwame Tutu onfrontline on Rainbow Radio, Supt. Cephas Arthur said he was sad that a legislator could make such scandalous statements over a high profile case involving the murder of a colleague MP.

Supt. Cephas Arthur posited that, the MP [Hon. Edward Ennin] lack understanding of how the police administration operates.

"It is unfortunate for a lawmaker to make these allegations against the police administration. This shows clearly that, he does not understand how the police operate. This is murder and not an ordinary crime; this is not stealing or an assault; this is a murder case. Murder investigation is a matter of seriousness, so we do not put out information any how as the MP did."

According to Supt. Cephas Arthur, comments by the MP in a way will incite the public against the police and their efforts in dealing with the case properly.

He revealed that the Police Service will invite the MP at the appropriate time to assist them with investigations if he [Hon. Edward Ennin] fails to come to the police with the information available to him.

According to Supt. Cephas Arthur, the MP should not have made the statements in the first place, but rather, should have alerted the police to aid them in their investigations.

"The police will take note of this issue and invite him at the appropriate time to assist with investigations if he fails to come to the police with the said information. We [police] have informed the general public to assist us with any vital information concerning the murder of the late MP. As a legislator, he should have known better than to make these unfortunate and unnecessary statements."

Hon. Joseph Boakye Danquah Adu was stabbed to death at his Shiashie residence in Accra on February 9, 2016.
Education Minister Prof. Jane Naana Opoku Agyeman

19.04.2016 LISTEN

News that Mr. Albert Joseph Quarms book titled Natural Science for Primary Schools  Pupils Book 1 has not been approved for the instruction of elementary school pupils by the Ministry of Education, ought to come as very refreshing to those of us on the lookout to having our children and grandchildren equipped with the best instructional materials that modern education has to offer.

Which means that our prayer is to have our younger generation educated reasonably well enough to be able to compete with their age-mates and classmates anywhere on the planet.

Telling impressionable pupils that the primary function of the human head is for porterage or carrying loads is decidedly untenable (See Prof. Quarms Textbook Not Approved for Schools  Edu. Ministry Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/4/16).

In another news report, however, Mr. Quarm claims that his patently non-starter of a natural science textbook has been approved by the Ministry of Education as a supplementary textbook. If his assertion has validity, and one hopes not, then the press statement by the Ministry of Education that it has not approved the Quarm book is as good as never made.

For a supplementary textbook has an equal potentiality of being accessed by our elementary pupils almost at the same rate as the officially approved textbook. A supplementary textbook simply means that the book in question is a fairly good alternative to those that have been officially approved.

The Ministry of Education has issued a statement to the salutary effect that the only textbook that has been officially approved for scientific instruction at the first-grade level is titled Natural Science for Primary Schools: Activity-Based Pupils Book 1, which is coauthored by Peter Asiedu, Henric Atta Baa-Yeboah and Ebenezer Domptey.

And in the latter book, quite aptly, the primary function of the human head is characterized as follows: Our head contains the brain which helps us to think. Now, what the Ministry of Education needs to do is come out with another press release or official statement categorically proscribing the supplemental validity of the Quarm book.

The Ministry already appears to have issued a statement to the preceding effect as follows: For the avoidance of doubt, the said book has not been taken through the approval processes of the Curriculum Research and Development Division of the Ghana Education Service. Nevertheless, emphatically banning the Quarm book from all public elementary schools would send a crystal clear message to the author that a free-market democratic culture does not permit him the license to peddle junk science in the country.

The Ministry may also need to publicly clarify precisely what criteria are involved in the approval of textbooks for supplementary use. If it turns out that, in fact, Mr. Quarms book has not been approved for supplementary use by the Ministry of Education then, clearly, the author of this junk-science textbook is in abject and criminal denial.

And if he persists in peddling his book, instead of having it thoroughly revised and re-submitted to the MoE or any other relevant accredited board or institution for approval, then he could be promptly charged with fraud and rigorously prosecuted.

Contrary to what some of his supporters would have the rest of Ghanaian society believe, what we have here has absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to do with censorship. Rather, it is about the intellectual security and integrity of our future leaders. And on the latter score, there ought to be no compromise, whatsoever.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
19.04.2016 LISTEN

The Ghanaian Times 21st June, 2011

After seven years at Asiakwa Presbyterian Primary and Middle Schools I left (at what was then Standard Four or later, Middle Form One) to seek greener pastures at Kyebi Government School.

Kyebi Government School had a fantastic reputation at Asiakwa. Our postal agent had attended it, and so had his

nephew who had succeeded him as our postal agent. Of course, we were not in a position to know whether they

had benefited much from their exposure to this particular school, for we didnt know whether they performed

the duties of a postal agent well or not  since we didnt have access to their books. Also, in assessing someone

elses knowledge, the assessor must know more than he does. We didnt possess that knowledge,

but because they had been to a Government School, we foolishly assumed they were both brilliant guys.

(The postal agent proved to me, at a later date, how dangerous it is to automatically assume that because someone had attended a certain school, he was necessarily brilliant. Invited to our home in Accra for dinner, he introduced himself

to my wife by telling her that he was her "mother-in-law" Kyebi Government School Standard Seven Certificate holder?

Yes. I was teased endlessly with it and whenever I said I was going to Asiakwa, she'd say snidely, "Don't forget to greet

my mother-in-law for me!")

.

It is our assumption that attending an institution necessarily makes people educated that has got our nation into so much trouble over the administrators to whom we entrust the governing of the country. The assumption makes a lot of people

think,, as soon as they hear of the institution at which someone studied, assume that he is either bright or dumb.

Entrance to an institution, however, is only one step in the direction of true erudition. This assumption that institutional excellence automatically rubs off on people, is responsible for the fact that our [mainly illiterate] villagers almost invariably vote for lawyers and other highly-educated people to go to Parliament. If they are educated  and thereby better than illiterate villagers  then they must know how to govern us well. Necessarily! In fact, once these educated people got into government, they made sure that the law that requires a prospective Member of Parliament must be able to read and write English, was retained (though this had been used by the British to keep out of government, people who might use the common sense and wisdom they had absorbed in their daily lives, instead of the "intelligence" conferred by paper certificates.)

Of course, it never occurs to us that educated people might go into government to improve their personal standards

of living and leave the rest of the populace in the lurch with no electricity, a proliferation of very bad roads, dirty, dangerous water and no decent places to go and attend to natures call. Indeed, as soon as we elect these people into Parliament, they acquire houses in Accra (if they didnt posses any before) on the grounds that their work obliges them staying in the capital. The real reason is, of course, that there are better amenities in Accra than in our villages.

Another attraction of Kyebi Government School to me was that it was in a different town. This meant that I would be a little more independent than I was at Asiakwa, where I was constantly under the thumb of my parents. Anyway, the fact that its name had the word government in it, made me assume that it would be a better school than ours. So, I built up

fantasies around it  there would be little caning (how could the government allow its pupils to be caned mercilessly, when it had made laws against assaults by members of the public against each other?

.

But above all, because the school was a government school, it would devote a lot more time to purely academic subjects and ignore the type of things that consumed so much time at Asiakwa Presbyterian, such as chewing hymns, Bible passages and Catechism, by heart, and being punished if one could not recite them flawlessly when called upon to do so.

My other mistake was in assuming that I would be independent. In fact, I was put into the hands, or given to a lorry driver friend of my fathers to stay with. This meant I was his unacknowledged or "glotified" servant, and I had to do all sorts of things I hadnt been doing at Asiakwa. His wife stopped going to the river to fetch water, and it was I who had to go and fetch water twice in the morning before going to school.

The river was about a mile and a half away, so going to fetch water from it was no picnic. Our house was at a point where you climbed a hill going to the river, and you again climbed a hill coming from the river. Oh, how tired I used to get  and this was before going to school, where I was supposed to present my teacher with a fresh, rested mind for him to pump new knowledge into it! Sometimes, I even dropped off in class, when the lessons were particularly boring. When I got back from school too, I had to engage in hard labour  this time, I had to pound fufu in the evening for five mouths.

In addition, I had to return to Asiakwa each weekend and go to my parents farm to collect foodstuffs, which I putt

into a cocoa-sack and take back to Kyebi onh Monday morning. Sometimes I got to school late on Monday mornings, when finding a lorry was not easy. Yet  as you will discover later  getting to school late was not something to be courted.

I was only able to endure these burdens for about a year and then, having planted my feet firmly at Kyebi, found somewhere to hire a room for five shillings a month. I then became my own boss. But my happiness was short-lived when I stupidly agreed to share the room with another boy from Asiakwa, KwAku Tawia, in consideration for his paying half the rent  two shillings and sixpence. It is not at all pleasant to be moving from house to house in a strange town, and when Kwaku told me about

the difficulties he was having, I melted and took him in.

I should have asked him why he was moving house so often. For unfortunately for me, he turned out to be a practised master-thief. He used to buy thesame padlock as I used on my chop box, and raid my box of any tinned stuff I had brought from my fathers shop at Asiakwa. He even purloined my pocket money from me which meant that he got back his share of

the "rent" he supposedly paid me!

I couldnt, of course. accuse him openly of anything, because I had no hard evidence. If someone had asked me,

But dont you have a padlock on your chop box? Has it been picked?) I would have had to admit that I did

have a padlock, and that it had not been broken. And even my suspicion was on weak grounds, for I couldnt prove

that the chap had a key that could open my padlock! It was so frustrating knowing the reality of what was going on and being unabke to do anything about it; I mean, in those days, manufacturers cheated us  they manufactured padlocks

whose keys could open other padlocks of the same make! Later on, when I left school and became prosperous, I detected that

a certain briefcase possession of which endowed one with the prestige of "having truly arrived" we5re also equipped with locks that could be opened with the keys of every similar briefcase. You bought the thing at a very high price in good faith, only to discover that a master-thief would just be laughing at you and commandeering your stuff to his selfish ends -- without having to pick the lock

.

Needless to say, Kwaku Tawia made my life a misery and as soon as the next term came round, I found another room elsewhere to hire and left the old one to him. All this moving house sort of thing wasnt earning me a good reputation

with my parents, who, of course, had no idea how wicked the world could be to a 14-year-old boy trying to make his way in a strange town. I couldnt tell them about my troubles, of course, for it was I who had decided, by myself to move to

another town, not they who had sent me away. They had supported me, but I would most certainly lose face with them

if I admitted that my wonderful idea to move to another town had not turned out to be so clever, after all.

Being precocious has its price, I tell you.

I also discovered that I had been wrong in assuming that there would be less caning at the new school merely because

it was a government school. Every teacher was allowed to whip kids in his charge, but there was one particular guy

on the staff who used the cane more profusely than anyone at Asiakwa! And whereas at Asiakwa, each teacher only caned pupils in his own class, at Kyebi, this particular teacher could cane any pupil. I think he was the unacknowledged

head-teacher, though his formal title might have been deputy head or something. In fact, at the government school, there

was no head-teacher as such, but a principal teacher who didnt teach a particular class (unless a teacher was absent or there was a temporary vacancy). Our principal teacher left much of the routine disciplinary matters to this cane-happy

teacher and occupied himself with wshatever took his interest, And these were many, ow which his best love was a subject called "Singing!".

We called the cane-lover Kwasi Kckcc (Kwasi The Red One) because he was fair-coloured. His usual invitation for caning us came when we engaged in bad behaviour  such as coming to school late (my forte on Monday mornings); not paying attention to him at assembly time; or tittering and giggling whilst he was taking assembly.

The practice we had of trying  unsuccessfully  to suppress our laughter when he was addressing us was what got

him more victims to cane than anything else. But why couldn't we hold our sides whilst he was taking assembly? You see, he did not know how to pronounce our names well, and yet he didnt know that he was doing anything odd when he

called one of us by name. So there was a constant, unrelenting provocation by him to us to laugh; but briefcase he didn't

know why we were laughing, he piled on more, and we also laughed the more. And the more we laughed, the more

angry he became.

For instance, to him, I was Dordu! So, whenever he called me, someone else who couldnt help himself laughed.

And Kwasi Kckcc would call the guy to the front of the assembly and order him: Touch your toes. Then Pah! Pah! would come the sound of the cane.

It went on for so long that I had to wonder why he attempted to call names he could never pronounce properly. I even

suspected that he might have done it purposely in order to get pupils to cane. But that seemed far-fetched. The prosaic

truth, though, was that, in this school as in many others, the teachers had no idea at all about what went on inside

their pupils heads. We just kaughed 0- and paid for it.

To him, Opoku became Opuku! (This, naturally, evoked lots of laughter).

Aboagye became Aborji (Laughter followed by Pah! Pah!)

Tenkorang became Otinkling; Frempomaa became Farimpoomah (Pah!Pah!Pah! Dont laugh when I am taking

assembly, idiots!)

Buabeng became Borbing; and Frempong became  well, he had such difficulty with this one that he stopped

pronouncing it altogether and rather used the boys village to designate him, and so Frempong became simply

that Apejor boy. Apejor, I shall let you into the secret, stood for Apedwa, a famous village about six miles from

Kyebi, moreb well-known for a sensational murder that occurred there in 1943, bbut also, for the tasty nsibire mushrooms that were sold at the junction which took one from the main Accra-Kumasi road to the village.

In fact, this guy Yaw Frempong was more unfortunate than most of us, because in addition to becoming a bad advertisement for his village, what with his name changed to that Apejor boy, he carried a very funnily-shaped head, and so he had a second nickname: the chap with the cinema-van head.

Now, cinema vans in those days  each boldly inscribed with the words, MOBILE CINEMA  were very funny vehicles  in our view. They had a narrow base like other Bedford three-ton trucks, but the top was raised high and the sides widened, to enable it to carry the cinema screen with which it showed (usually silent) movies to villagers. This caused the van

to look as if it was skewing across the road and would be rolling on its side at any moment. Its ko-soro-kobor [lopsided] movements thus amused us a great deal. And because Yaw Frempongs head amused us too, we added two to two and

got his head is like a cinema van. For someone whose head was like a cinema van to be also called that Apejor boy

turned him into a walking trap for us and there was never a time he was called to the front without Kwasi Kckcc getting

some rascals to whip. It never occurred to us that Yaw Frempong himself would be a miserable boy, having thus

been made the unwitting butt of our mockery, whilst getting whipped too, on top of that.

But Cinema-van-head was all right compared to three other guys. This gang of three were guaranteed late-comers,

for they had to walk to school every day on foot, from Adadientam (over three miles from Kyebi). And somehow, they all had names that were difficult to pronounce -- even for us, let alone Kwasi Kckcc. So, whenever Kwasi Kckcc was calling the names of late-comers for punishment, we would hold our sides and wait expectantly

.

Then out would pop from his mouth, Korakoo! (For: Kwa Ako, shortened from of Kwadwo Ako.)

The guy would answer Sah! and move to the front of the assembly.

(And we would burst out: Hahahahaha!)

Stop laughing! You, you, you Touch your toes! Pah! Pah! Pah!

Onimpadu (Onipadu)

Sah!

(Hahahahahaha!)

Who are the fools laughing? Come here you! Touch your toes! Pah! Pah! Pah!

Ohinprooproo!

This was admittedly a very difficult name: the original was Ohwenpoporoh. In fact, since I left school, I have

never come across anyone else called by the name, Owhenpoporoh. Nor, come to think of it, Onipadu, either. Who gave

them such strange names? How did they contrive to get their names together on the same late-comers list every single

day like that? Their names were like magnets, attracting victims for Kwasi Kckcc!

So: Ohinprooproo!

Sah!

Followed by Yieeeeeeeeeee!. Hahahahahahahah!

And Kwasi Kckccs angry riposte: Have I not told you a thousand times to behave at assembly time? You!.You! You! And you! Come here! Touch your toes. Pah! Pah! Pah!

Despite his penchant for whipping, Kwasi Kckcc was one of the most intelligent teachers I came across in the school. He

used to call one of my favourite class teachers, Mr Awuah Peasah, Akora. I didnt know it at the time but I later got to know that it meant they had been schoolmates at Achimota Teachers Training College. Mr Peasah later went to the University of Ghana and became a graduate. I think Kwasi Kckcc did the same, for I encountered him at Parliament House when I was working for the GBC. He was deputy editor of Hansard -- the daily report of Parliamentary Debates. I don't think he could have got that job without being a graduate -- no, not in those days of very high standards in the public service.

At assembly one day, after he had whipped us to his hearts content, Kwasi Kkckcc, out of nowhere, came out with the

idea, which he imparted to us, that the radio proves the existence of God!

Many of us thought that no-one could prove or disprove the existence of God, but we listened attentively. Kwasi Kckcc said: As you are standing here right now, you do not know that radio programmes are being broadcast in the air all around you

because you can neither see nor hear the sound waves.The air is as quiet as if there was no sound travelling through it. But

if you bring a wireless set here right now, and you have an aerial, and you switch the radio on, and you tune it to a

station that is broadcasting, you will hear a radio programme that only a moment ago, was non-existent to you.

"In the same way, God exists, but you have to tune in to Him before you know He is there. So science proves the

existence of God, and not the absence of God, as some scientists will have you believe.

I have never heard any convincing refutation of that argument since I heard it more than fifty years ago And the idea is the same as the one that takes account of the most abstruse explanation of the existence of the Universe, namely, the Big Bang. Granted that the Big Bang created the Universe and that the Universe is still expanding min space-time, which, according to Einstein, is curved. But where did the matter that originated the Big Bang come from, in the first place? If the Big Bang was self-causing, with matter having started off as a quark or some particle that was even smaller, then why can't God too be self-causing? And what about dark matter? Why can dark matter, which apparently fills about 90% of the Universe, exist without being seen, and yet God cannot exist without being seen? In order not to be maddened by such complex issues, one must retain an open mind, I think, and wonder and wonder and wonder. .

The funny thing is that the notion floated by Kwasi Kckcc was an even more powerful religious message than I had been subjected to at Asiakwa Presbyterian, where we had been taught to chew Biblical verses and hymns by heart, but not to

use our reason to think about God. One of my hopes had been that at government school would emancipate me from religion. Yet Kwasi Kckcc had used reason to make a very valid religious point to me.Wasnt that ironical?

It wasnt Kwasi Kckccc alone who administered the cane to us with great abandon. If we escaped his cane at assembly time, we would find the principal teacher Mr Dadzie, waiting for us when we went for Singing lessons at the end of the morning, just before breaking off for lunch. Teaching songs with cane in hand? Yes! How could music be taught with force? Mr Dadzie did it.

His singing lessons were very difficult to endure, for they occupied the last half an hour or so before the end of the morning session, and at that time, e end of the morning, we were all dying to go home and find something to eat. Most of us came to school without breakfast, so, by then, also, most of the pupils had developed bad breath! Gathering together the pupils of four classes (roughly 180 altogether) and bundling them into one classroom meant that a huge amount of smelly, hot air was inevitably exuded. And, of course, because our digestive systems were crying out for something to chew on, quite a few

pupils broke wind!

Now, many tried, with an almost superhuman effort, to repress the sound. What they could not do was to prevent

the smell from pouring out of that poured out of their rear-ends! There would be a ruckus, as the suspects were

jeered at by those in their immediate vicinity. That meant a lot of pupils were called to the front and whipped.

But it was worth it, I think. I get a peculiar feeling of fond nostalgia when some of the hymns taught to us by Mr Dadzie from the Methodist Hymn Book -- the works of the Wesley Brothers in particular -- are played on the radio. Songs like

My God how wonderful thou art;

The Lord's My Shepherd;

Now the day is over;

and Praise to the Lord the Almighty The King of Creation....

I am also entranced and get goose pimples all over whenever I hear Kwasi Kckcc's favourite prayer with which to send us home at the end of the day:

"Lighten our darkness

We beseech thee oh Lord,

And by thy great mercy,

Defend us from all dangers and perils

Of this night,

In the name of thy only Son,

Our Lord Jesus Christ.

AMEN!
By Dorothy Frances Ward, GNA

Kumasi, April 19, GNA - Political leaders have been asked to be discreet and avoid doing anything to excite religious passion in their desperate bid to win political power.

Alhaji Ali Musah Zingi, former Ashanti Regional Nasara Coordinator, warned that travelling that path could be perilous.

This comes in the wake of the alleged controversial claim by the Brong-Ahafo Regional Minister, Mr. Eric Opoku, that the running mate of the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) Presidential Candidate, Alhaji Dr. Mahmudu Bawumiah, and other Muslim supporters of that party were not true Muslims.

He was reported to have stated this at a meeting held with the chiefs and people of Acherensua.

Alhaji Zingi in a signed press statement in Kumasi, was uncharitable to the Minister, describing his alleged assertion as not only dangerous but insulting.

He counseled those, he said, were 'desecrating Quranic verses, to suit their political agenda to think twice'.

The Quran, he pointed out that, 'is a Holy Book of God' and must be held sacred - must neither be misrepresented nor be used for political mischief.

He went ahead to give the historical account and significant lessons of 'Surat Al-Fil, the Elephant'.

Among this is that 'A man intoxicated with power can prepare armies and material resources against Allah's Holy plan but such man's plan will be his own undoing; he cannot prevail against God'.

GNA
Washington (AFP) - The International Monetary Fund has suspended aid to Mozambique after discovering the country had hidden debt of more than $1 billion.

"The undisclosed borrowing exceeds $1 billion and significantly changes our assessment of Mozambique's macroeconomic outlook," said Antoinette Sayeh, head of the IMF's African Department, in a statement to AFP on Tuesday.

As a result, the global crisis lender has cancelled a staff mission to the African country this week that was part of its $283 million standby credit facility and a policy support program from the IMF.

That cancellation of the mission effectively puts on hold any disbursements from the facility. A first instalment of $117.9 million was made in December to help the country cope with lower commodity prices that have depressed revenues.

Aid has been suspended "pending a full disclosure and assessment of the facts," on the unreported borrowing, Sayeh said.

In December 2014, the IMF froze financial aid to another African country, Mali, for six months after discovering "lapses" in public financial management and the purchase of a new $40 million presidential airplane.
19.04.2016 LISTEN

Ms Rita Weidinge, Executive Director of African Cashew Initiative (ACI), has called on African governments to invest in the production and policy development of the cashew sector, to increase economic value and enhance private investment.

She noted that it is imperative for Africa to put in place consistent and coherent strategies in the value chain, by investing in research for the growth of the sector. Ms Weidinge made the call at the weekend in Accra at a consultation of African public and technical actors in cashew on the theme: Opportunities of the African cashew sector. The workshop brought together public officials from the ministries related to the cashew sector, public Pan-African actors, the African Union Commission, and Regional Economic Communities.

In attendance are financial institutions delegates and other technical partners, including the African Development Bank, Food and Agriculture Organisation, United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, United Nation Development Programme, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, and International Trade Centre.

She explained that investment in the sector is critical, because of the growing demand for the worlds favourite nut, adding that in the past 10 years, cashew consumption in India had doubled, while that of Europe had grown by 30 per cent. Ms Weidinge noted that if African governments would implement good agricultural practices and adopt improved planting materials, African cashew farmers have a great opportunity to increase yields and feed the new processing plants.

She said Africa accounts for 38 per cent of global cashew production, but only five per cent of global processing, and that through local processing, there is value addition potential of 2.8 billion dollars every year, and potential employment of 275,000 people in the processing plants. The Executive Director noted that the ACI envisages triple processing volumes by 2020, working with and supporting commercial investment and private capital.

It is important to invest in the sector because of a strong network, with the objective of increasing processing of cashews in Africa, improving competitiveness, sustainability, and growth in the industry, she added. ACI has introduced a Cashew Matching Fund, an effective instrument for private ownership that offers an opportunity for structured investment in the sector, scaling up on activities such as farmer linkages and market information systems.

She said about 400,000 farmers have been trained, with 22 per cent of women, to increase their income, as well as create job opportunities for the youth. To meet the demand for cashew, African production needs to grow on an average by eight per cent to 15 per cent per annum from now to 2018 and beyond. She said even though climate change is among the factors affecting the industry, the ACI has established a cashew master training programme to address some of the regional problems facing the sector.

Mr. Seth Osei Akoto, Deputy Director in charge of Cashew, Ministry of Food and Agriculture, said the cashew industry has real potential for developing value chains and creating job opportunities and fighting against poverty. Mr. Akoto called for concerted efforts to explore ideas and strategies in supporting the cashew value chain activities, even though 90 per cent of raw cashew nuts leave the shores of the country.

Mr. Christoph Rauh, German Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, said his outfit has supported the growth of agriculture in several African countries because of the potential of creating wealth and jobs for the countries. He urged the authorities to implement policies in agricultural development, by walking the talk, adding that for the sector to succeed, there is the need for partnership on a regional basis.

Source: GNA
19.04.2016 LISTEN

From Sebastian R. Freiku, Kumasi

Alhaji Bashiru Zakari, National First Vice chairman-UPP

The National First Vice chairman of the United People's Party (UPP), Alhaji Bashiru Zakari has called on Mr. Eric Opoku, the Brong Ahafo Regional Minister to render an unqualified apology to Moslem sympathizers of the New Patriotic Party(NPP) in particular and Moslems in general. The Minister is said to have remarked recently at a forum that Moslems in the NPP are fake, for the fact that the party's symbol  the elephant  was intended for the destruction of the Kaba in Mecca and that no true Moslem would follow the NPP for any reason.

Mr. Opoku also allegedly quoted chapter 105 of the Quran and said the elephant is cursed for the role in the said intended destruction. Alhaji Bashiru Zakari said the position of the minister is tantamount to insulting the intelligence of Moslems and called on the minister to apologise to the sect.

The UPP executive said the Minister should not play politics with religion or use politics to antagonize a section of the public, neither should he try to misinterpret the Quran to settle personal scores. The Minister is not a Moslem and should not misquote the Quran to misinform the public, he cautioned. He explained that the elephant is just a symbol of the NPP and that the elephant in the cited Quran could not be used to destroy verse.

Alhaji Zakari, however, debunked the claim that Moslems in the NPP are fake and educated the Regional Minister that NPP was the first political party in the history of Ghana to have used both the Bible and Quran at the same time to swear in their Presidents. He explained that swearing in President Kufuor and Vice President Aliu with the bible and Quran was the most beautiful spectacle to behold and, therefore, should not denigrate the
19th April 2016, Accra: Airtel Ghana, through its Evolve with STEM initiative, has collaborated with Microsoft Ghana for the maiden edition of the internationally acclaimed DigiGirlz Day in the country.

DigiGirlz is a Microsoft initiative that provides school girls an opportunity to learn about careers in technology and connect with mentors in the field to inspire them. During the one-day event, participants are also exposed to hands-on computer and technology workshops.

The inaugural event took place on Saturday April 16 at Ispace Hub, Labone under the theme Demystifying STEM involving 60 girls from public schools in Accra, 15 of the girls were selected from the Mataheko Cluster of schools under Airtels Evolve with STEM project.

Lucy Quist, Managing Director of Airtel Ghana and CIMG Marketing Woman of the year, who is spearheading the Evolve with STEM initiative was joined by key personalities such as media entrepreneur, TV & Radio host Anita Erskine, Founder of Nandi Mobile  Anne Amuzu and Founder of Levers in Heels  Larissa Bowen-Dodoo.

These sessions saw the mentors inspire the young girls to overcome their fears and challenges so as to venture into the technology industry. All mentors shared their personal experiences with the wider audience and later engaged in a one-on-one mentoring and career guidance session with participants.

Aside the mentoring session, the young participants were taken through the Hour of Code session where they were taught basic coding and computer programming in HTML.

Speaking after the session, Lucy Quist said Its been an exciting time spent with all the participants of DigiGirlz today. I am encouraged by their curiosity, passion and determination throughout the session. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is an enabler for creativity and problem solving in young people which is why we launched the Evolve with STEM initiative to inspire belief, empower and transform mindsets of young people towards STEM. Todays session included some of the brilliant students from schools within the Mataheko Circuit where we are currently piloting the Evolve with STEM initiative.

She continued we are proud to be associated with DigiGirlz, which aligns with Evolve with STEM. It is great to see organisations like Microsoft, a technology giant, support initiatives to empower young people through STEM.

Madam Bernice Ansah, a teacher of the Mataheko Roman Catholic School had this to say about the event, "The programme has brought a lot of enlightenment to the pupils, they were able to socialize and engage with their peers which helped to boost their confidence. They now have renewed belief in themselves, a belief that will grow if they are encouraged by their parents and teachers. I am personally grateful because I also learnt how to program during the very interesting hour of code session."

Derek Appiah, Country Manager of Microsoft Ghana said Microsoft is committed to encouraging more women to join the ICT industry and we are inviting Ghanaian high school girls to discover the opportunities that exist for them in our industry. We want to demystify any belief that STEM is for boys so as to ensure that they make the right education choices now for the bright future that they deserve.

DigiGirlz is a Microsoft YouthSpark program focused on giving Junior and senior high school girls the opportunity to learn about the professions in technology, networking opportunities with tech personalities and to also participate in practical computer and technology workshops.

Airtels Evolve with STEM initiative, since launch in December 2015 has impacted more than 1,000 pupils and inspired hundreds of individuals and companies into action to launch initiatives focused on STEM.

About Bharti Airtel

Bharti Airtel Limited is a leading global telecommunications company with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa. Headquartered in New Delhi, India, the company ranks amongst the top 3 mobile service providers globally in terms of subscribers. In India, the company's product offerings include 2G, 3G and 4G wireless services, mobile commerce, fixed line services, high speed DSL broadband, IPTV, DTH, enterprise services including national & international long distance services to carriers. In the rest of the geographies, it offers 2G, 3G and 4G wireless services and mobile commerce. Bharti Airtel had over 353 million customers across its operations at the end of January 2016. To know more please visit, www.airtel.com

About Airtel in Africa

Airtel is driven by the vision of providing affordable and innovative mobile services to all. Airtel has 17 operations in Africa: Burkina Faso, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Airtel International is a Bharti Airtel company. For more information, please visit www.airtel.com , or like the Airtel Ghana Facebook page via www.facebook.com/airtelgh or follow us on Twitter via the handle @airtelghana.
Persons seeking justice at the new court complex who intended to use toilet facilities in the edifice have been inconvenienced as all the washrooms have been closed due to a construction defect.

People have had to walk long distances in search of places of convenience to ease themselves.

Workers are currently working to correct the fault which was noticed on April 18th in the project which was commissioned in October last year by President John Dramani Mahama at a colourful event.

The seven-month-old edifice accommodates 42 High Courts, has banking facilities, cafeteria, 300- seater auditorium, library, a business centre and a media centre. It also has press briefing room, Executive office for the Attorney General and Police Prosecutor and a data centre among others.

The US$50 million project, which began in August 2011 was executed by Chinese Company, State Hualong Construction Limited, with funds from the Government of Ghana.

.

It is not immediately known when the repair works on the bathrooms will be completed and court authorities are yet to announce alternative avenues of convenience for justice seekers.

It would be recalled that in March this year, the Consumer Protection Agency (CPA) strongly opposed the commercialization of toilet facilities at the complex.

Its Chief Executive Officer, Kofi Kapaito, insisted that the practice where people are charged for using washrooms at the court is illegal and must not be countenanced.

Patrons of the facility are charged GHC 50p per every usage. The practice has seen business booming at the venue since hundreds of people attend the courts daily.

He threatened to sue the Judicial Service if the Practice was not stopped.

-kasapafmonline


19.04.2016 LISTEN

Security expert, Dr. Emmanuel Kwesi Aning says failure to adequately resource the Ghana Police Service (GPS) will create a credibility problem for the government.

President Mahama on his Accounting to the people tour confirmed government has received intelligence on a possible terror attack in the country after news of the possible attack broke out.

However, Dr. Aning said the absence of key logistics for the Service to do its work will cause Ghanaians to doubt the credibility of the intelligence government said it has received.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament at its sitting Tuesday, April 19 to cross-examine some public officials with regards to the Auditor-Generals report for 2011, 2012 and 2013, disclosed the Ghana Police Service has for some years been under-resourced.

Explaining the challenges the absence of resources have brought on the Police administration, the Inspector General of Police (IGP), John Kudalor, disclosed the Services capacity to combat crime has reduced as a result of that.

Deputy Interior Minister, James Agalga confirmed that the Service is under-resourced but added it was because of the challenges the economy is facing. He said the government will adequately resource the Police administration when the economy recovers.

But speaking on the Joy FMs Top Story, Dr. Aning said it is totally unacceptable for government to undercut their own very critical agency.

He explained after the Justice Archer Commission report in 1997 which led to governments conscious efforts to resource the Police administration, the Service has been under-resourced to date.

The Archer Committee was a presidential commission set up to look into the Ghana Police Force and disclosed logistical challenges the Service was facing and why it is important for it to be equipped.

How do you under-resource the institutions that are frontline institutions to be able to respond to the threats? Dr. Aning asked.

I am not taken aback, he said adding governments action reflects a rather unnuanced understanding and appreciation of the role of the Police Service in ensuring that we are safe.

He called on the Police administration to prioritize the logistics it considers key to the conduct of its work by doing a cost-benefit analysis.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Austin Brako-Powers | Email: [email protected]
19.04.2016 LISTEN

By Hafsa Obeng, GNA

Accra, April 19, GNA - The New York University (NYU) Africa House has honored Ghana's Minister of Tourism, Culture & Creative Arts, Mrs. Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare, for her leadership and dedication towards the promotion of sustainable tourism in Ghana at their inaugural Africa House Gala in New York.

The New York University Africa House-Partnership Award was held to reward partners of the NYU who had played diverse roles in their pursuit of sustainable tourism in Africa and the world.

The Gala brought together the academia, business leaders, opinion leaders, and politicians to celebrate the achievements of the NYU.

The accompanying citation to the Minister read: 'Your dedicated vision, leadership, and collaboration with Africa House over the years have been inspiring to NYU Faculty and students and the greater New York Community.

'We commend you for your significant service and achievements in developing and promoting sustainable tourism in Ghana, and hope our partnership will continue to grow in scope and have a long-lasting impact on the tourism sector and people of Ghana,'' he said.

Mrs. Ofosu-Adjare, receiving the award, expressed her appreciation to the NYU-Africa House for the recognition and dedicated the award to President John Mahama and the hard working staff of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture & Creative Arts.

She said the collaboration between Ghana and NYU - Africa House would go a long way to improve the lives of people who lived in the rural community.

She said the vision of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture & Creative Arts was to promote sustainable tourism for development.

Mrs Ofosu-Adjare paid tribute to Prof Nyarkoh, the Director of NYU - Africa and his team for the enormous work they were doing in Kumawu.

Mrs. Ofosu-Adjare said their work would help in the promotion of tourism in Ghana and the partnership between Ghana and NYU - Africa House would grow even much stronger.

Other recipients on the night included the Kumawu Community, whose award was received by the Queen mother Ms. Theresa Effia Atta.

GNA
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Use the IVA Calculator to check your eligibility Prepare your IVA proposal and apply for your IVA. When your IVA is accepted, your creditors can no longer contact you. Pay 60 low monthly payments. After 5 years, you are out of your IVA and completely debt free.

Will an IVA affect my employment?

In most occupations, your credit rating or credit scoring is not a factor and it may never have been checked in the past, it may also be likely that it is not checked in the future either.

There is no law to tell you that you must advise your employer that you have entered an IVA or that you owe money. They will not be notified by your insolvency practitioner. If you wanted to keep it a private matter, in most cases this would be absolutely fine. With some roles such as financial advisors, solicitors or bank workers it may make up part of your contract to advise them of changes like this. In these situations we would advise to inform your employers of your intentions before you enter into any arrangements. This way there will be no nasty surprises for you later down the line. More often than not, we find that your employer would not be concerned by your IVA and that it would not affect your employment status. An IVA is a formal solution and could affect some employments, such as if you were a solicitor or accountant for example. We would always recommend that you receive approval from your employers that your job isnt affected before you sign up for anything.

Will an IVA impact my partner?

There are certain situations where you may not want to involve your partner at all in your IVA proposal due to personal reasons. Insolvency Practitioners are very aware of these circumstances and can operate solely via telephone and email and at your convenience, so rest assured that your matters can be kept completely private.

If the debts which you are looking to place into your IVA are in joint names, then this would be different. Your IP would look to place all of your debts into an IVA, including joint debts therefore you would have to inform your partner of your plans.

If your debts are solely yours, then there would be no negative impact on your partner, their credit score would remain unaffected and they would not be entered onto any registers or be tainted in any way.

Will an IVA affect my credit score/credit file?

Whilst you are in your arrangement, you will not be able to get any credit. An IVA will stay on your credit file for 6 years, so 12 months after a typical IVA. When this time has passed and your monthly payments have ended, you will be able to rebuild your credit rating.

What proof will I need to apply for an IVA?

Proof of ID  Passport/driving license/birth certificate/utility bills/national insurance identification/credit agreement Bank statements  3 months bank statements with all transactions displayed Proof of income  3 months payslips/P60/proof of benefits

How long does it take to set up an IVA?

Your initial call will only last around 5-10 minutes. The IVA process will be explained to you and you will be told what further information you will need to provide to proceed with your IVA proposal. Once you have returned the required information, an IVA will usually take between 7-14 days to get into place. You will be protected from creditors within this time, your advisor will provide you with documentation via email.

How long does an IVA last?

Most IVAs will last for a length of five years. The i v a will remain on your credit file for a period of six years and is placed on the Insolvency Register for that period. You can work out what date it will be removed from your credit file, it will be six years from the start date of the IVA term. So if the IVA started on 1 January 2000, it should be removed from your credit file six years from that date, which would be 1 January 2006. When you apply for an individual voluntary arrangement your Insolvency Practitioner (IP) will tell you if you qualify for an IVA, how long it lasts, how much it costs and provide you with any other debt advice which you may need.

How much will debt advice cost for an Individual Voluntary Arrangement?

The advice cost for individual voluntary arrangements is free of charge. Your I.V.A company will tell you if you qualify for an IVA. They will talk to you about your different debts, provide you with free debt advice and check if your creditors are likely to approve your proposal for your IVA for debt.

How does an IVA affect your life?

By taking out an IVA you may affect your overall financial position. You will not be allowed to take out credit for 6 years. You will struggle to get a mortgage or remortgage your existing property. It also may affect any future increase in earnings or windfalls you may receive, as these will need to be paid to your insolvency practitioner. Your insolvency practitioner will take control of your debts for this period, they will deal with all of your creditors and this is legally binding. That means you will not be allowed to take out any more debts whilst in the IVA.

Once the plan is completed, any debts which you accrue will be managed by yourself. Your ability to take out further debts in the future will not be impacted once the IVA has completed.

What is the IVA protocol?

The I.V.A protocol is a voluntary set of guidelines which your Insolvency Practitioner (IP) can sign up for which improves the efficiency of Individual Voluntary Arrangements. When you apply for debt advice, it is important that you understand the steps of the debt solution, so you can decide whether or not the solution is the best one for your circumstances.

How do I know if creditors will accept my IVA?

Generally speaking, most creditors will approve voluntary arrangements for unsecured debt. But some debts can not be included within one formal debt solution. Your Insolvency Practitioner will tell you how likely it is that your creditors will be willing to accept your proposal, based on the voting creditors.

Can I pay in one lump sum?

There are occasions when you may be eligible for a debt solution which is payable in a one off lump sum as a final settlement to your creditors. This is usually when the money is being gifted from some one else, or you have received inheritance or a windfall for example. With a one-off lump sum payment, the advice is usually the same as when you normally apply for an IVA. You wouldnt have to make regular payments into the solution, your IP can provide you with more advice on one off lump sum solutions for your debts. Your IP will provide you with more advice on the debt IVA and explain what is IVA to you.

Who regulates the debt industry?

At present the debt industry is not regulated. Some Insolvency Practitioners offices choose to sign up to the Insolvency Practitioners Association (IPA) or register with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). You can contact the IPA using the contact details or email address on their website. Your creditors do not regulate the debt industry and your creditors will not be able to impact any decisions which the IPA or FCA make. In our experience, the regulators will take assertive action on any advisers or businesses which do not comply with their strict codes of practice. To check if a person is regulated by the FCA, enter their name into the search box in the FCA website.

Should I use a debt charity?

There are thousands of companies which provide debt help in the UK. You may be looking for an alternative to a private company. You should know that charities usually pass their fee charging products to sister companies which charge fees and disbursements, just like private companies. So what you initially thought was a good option, on further analysis could be different to what you originally thought. Charities do have their part to play though. They can help you if you have a problem with your bank accounts, maintenance arrears, living costs, credit reference agencies, child support arrears, bankruptcy, assets, accountancy issues, mortgages, creditor issues, insurance providers, mobiles, your bank account, rates arrears, PAYE contributions or if you want to work out your expenditure. They can make sure that you speak to an adviser or supervisor and look at proposals to offer your lender. A petition has started with the possibility of a debate in parliament about how charities represent themselves and their services.

Which charities help with debt?

You can contact Money Advice Service, National Debtline, Step Change, Shelter or a combination of the three. Charities are particular useful for a low debt level under 1,000. If the debt is high (such as a debt value of 10,000 or more) you would usually seek an assessment from a professional adviser. If you do decide to use a charity to guide you, make sure you check their charity number and the registration number on their website to make sure you are content that their team can answer your questions in the right ways. A lot of clients of charities have a minimum debt level which does not meet the basis for an IVA, so you could always chat to a charity that is happy to act on your behalf for low debt levels.

Although an I.V.A could be the answer to your debt problem, its important to understand the monthly payment so call us on our free phone number. Anyone customers can receive expert feedback on their rights from debt charities, if they cant help they will usually point you in the director of firms which help with IVAs.

We are homeowners, will lenders see my proposal differently?

In some cases yes. In the majority of cases, if you are a homeowner you will not need to remortgage or take out any additional finances that will effect your property. You will need to sign a additional restrictions which remove your ability to take out additional credit tied to your property, which is something that is restricted once you are in an i.v.a. There are exceptions to this, such as when you have a lot of equity in your property/properties. If you own half of a property and another party owns the other half, only your equity will be affected.

If you are landlord and you are in a position of equity, your IP may review your trading position or business to make sure the figures in question are in order. This is usually the case if you have two or more properties, as sometimes the equity can be used to form a repayment to your creditors. But this usually depends on the amount of value built up in your properties.

Banks and building societies will not change the terms of your mortgage as long as a contribution is still being made for the duration of your arrangement. Your mortgage payments will be added to your expenses and accounted for within your budget, as long as you can provide evidence that you can afford to continue to make payments into your mortgage for duration of the plan.

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